The Plantagenets: History of a Dynasty

by J. S. Hamilton

  Margaret of France, half-sister of Philip the Fair, was some 40 years younger than Edward I at the time of their marriage in 1299. The wedding was accompanied by 3 days of magnificent feasting, jousting and merry-making (made possible only by loans from the Florentine banking family of the Frescobaldi). She quickly bore the king two sons, Thomas of Brotherton in 1300 and Edmund of Woodstock in 1301, as well as another daughter, Eleanor, in 1306. If she did not accompany the king as Eleanor had done, some of this may be put down to her pregnancies and his absence in Scotland. He seems to have been very solicitous of her well-being, and Margaret played an important role as intercessor at court, particularly in reconciling the king with his eldest son and heir, Edward of Caernarfon, in 1305. She played a very unobtrusive role in the reign of her step-son, although her apparently lavish lifestyle led to considerable debts throughout her lifetime. She died on 14 February 1318, and was buried in Greyfriars’ church in London.

  Edward I had already indicated his concern with administrative efficiency and order in his activity in Gascony, and his concern with royal rights at his coronation. Now, having appointed his trusted servant Robert Burnell as chancellor, he set out to impose order on the kingdom he had inherited. Commissioners were appointed to discover what rights and lands the crown had lost during his father’s troubled reign, an undertaking on a massive scale that was reminiscent of the great Domesday Book of William the Conqueror. By March 1275, their findings had been collected in what are now known as the Hundred Rolls. Very likely, the material generated by this investigation served as a trigger for the creation of the many statutes that radiated out from the king in parliament over the course of the next decade and a half, beginning with the first Statute of Westminster in April 1275. However, along with the elimination of corruption and the insistence on the authority of the crown, Edward’s legislation also provided remedies for many of the longstanding grievances of the nobility and people.

  Edward I has long been known as the ‘English Justinian’, and this sobriquet derives from the substantial body of statute law that was produced during the first half of his reign. In some ways, this nickname is misleading, because neither the king nor his councillors set out to create a new body of law. The statutes of Edward I are not analogous to the vast compilation of Justinian, nor, perhaps more germane, to the famous Siete Partidas of his brother-in-law Alphonso X of Castile. The statutes, both collectively and even individually, were a series of responses to specific questions of law. The goal was to make the king’s courts efficient and equitable. Nevertheless, Edward’s reign did have an enormous lasting impact on the direction of English law. The concept that no new writs could be sealed without the consent of the king and his council had been emphatically stated in the Provisions of Oxford. Beginning, albeit tentatively, in the reign of Edward I, changes in the law could only be made by the king in parliament. A shift from ‘judge-made’ law to enacted law had several consequences. For better or worse, English lawyers hereafter largely ceased to study Roman law until the sixteenth century, leading almost at once to a predominantly lay body of justices.

  Arguably, but certainly with a good deal of qualification, in avoiding the absolutist tendency embodied in Roman law maxims, and embracing the common law’s emphasis, initially established in the Magna Carta, that the king himself must rule by law, late medieval England was guided along a constitutionalist path.

  However that may be, in the immediate future Edward’s outlook and the resultant legislation led to the creation of a powerful legal profession that rapidly grew in prominence as it gained the necessary mastery in case law that now became a central element of the legal system.

  Virtually all his major legislation was generated in a 15-year period, beginning in 1275 with the Statute of Westminster, a broad compendium of concerns containing some 51 separate clauses. Land tenure was a central concern of medieval elites, and questions of land tenure recur throughout the statutes. On the one hand, the Statute of Gloucester (1278), also known as Quo Warranto, was a natural outgrowth of the inquests that had culminated in the Hundred Rolls.

  By its terms, all franchises were to be proved, either by writ or assize. Edward’s longtime associate John de Warenne, earl of Surrey, famously replied to the challenge of this statute by waving a rusty sword in the air and proclaiming:

  ‘Here my lords, here is my warrant! My ancestors came with William the Bastard and conquered their lands with the sword, and I shall defend them with the sword against anyone who tries to occupy them. The king did not conquer and subject the land by himself, but our forefathers were partners with him and assisted in this. ’10

  On the other hand, the first clause of the second Statute of Westminster, De Donis Conditionalibus (1285), enforced the wishes of grantors of lands, while the Statute Quia Emptores (1290) forbade sub infeudation, thereby protecting the interests of the very same feudal lords who were threatened by Quo Warranto. Even the Statute of Mortmain (1280), which forbade the alienation of feudal lands to the church without prior royal assent and was viewed by the church as an attack upon its liberties, was not designed to prevent such gifts, but rather to protect the interests of both the nobility and the king in their making. Another concern, more to do with the merchants than the nobility, relates to the enforcement of debts.

  Both the Statute of Acton Burnell (1283) and the later Statute of Merchants (1285) were designed to provide merchants with security by allowing them access to royal justice. Security, more broadly, was addressed in the Statute of Winchester (1285). Overall, the legislation of Edward I, like his administrative reforms and initiatives, demonstrates a concern with order and process, and the period to 1290 is remarkable for its sustained energy and comprehensive concerns.

  Despite Edward’s best efforts to create a climate of justice in England, however, his return from an absence of 3 years while in Gascony between 1286 and 1289 exposed corruption among his local officials and within the bench. Over the next 4 years, dozens of royal officers, including the escheator south of Trent, were removed from office or punished with heavy fines. But the greatest purge involved the bench. Four of the five justices of the bench were dismissed, with the chief justice, Thomas Weyland, being forced to abjure the realm and go into exile in France in dramatic fashion. Furthermore, all three judges of the King’s Bench were dismissed, as were several of the judges of both the northern and southern eyre circuits. Much of this, however, is misleading. Thomas Weyland, it turns out, was not dismissed for misconduct in his judicial capacity, but rather for harbouring a pair of servants who were guilty of murder. And his fellow justices, such as Ralph Hengham, seem to have been fined more because they were capable of paying than for any particular malfeasance – the king probably netted some £10,000 out of these judicial fines. The conflict between the so-called ‘war state’ and the ‘peace state’ has been a subject of considerable interest to historians in recent years, but the purging of the justices proves to be a misleading example of their opposition. Although it is true that Edward’s realm seldom knew peace, his consistent interest in the efficient administration of government in all its aspects, meant that to a very great extent the war state and peace state coexisted throughout his reign.

  Equally as important to Edward as restoring royal authority over lay society was his concern for relations with the Church. In 1278, Archbishop Kilwardby had been named Cardinal bishop of Porto, and despite Edward’s efforts to obtain the see for his chancellor Burnell, Pope Nicholas III appointed the Franciscan John Pecham as the new archbishop of Canterbury. Immediately upon his return to England, Pecham held a provincial council at Reading in June 1279, where he focused on abuses in the church, such as pluralism, and stressed the need for thoroughgoing reform. He also addressed the issue of royal writs of prohibition, which prevented ecclesiastical courts from hearing cases specified therein. He concluded by ordering that the Magna Carta be posted in all cathedrals and collegiate churches, implicitly suggesting that it was not being honoured. In O
ctober, he followed up on the Reading council by excommunicating a number of individuals whom he considered to have contravened the council’s statutes.

  The king’s response was both immediate and forceful. Pecham was obliged in parliament in the following month to withdraw his order to publish the Magna Carta, to rescind three orders of excommunication, and to agree that none of the statutes agreed in Reading should be pursued to the detriment of the king or crown. Arguably, the Statute of Mortmain enacted at this same parliament was a warning shot across the bow, cautioning the archbishop against direct confrontation with the king. Nevertheless, Pecham continued his campaign against pluralism with great vigour. Although the continuation of pluralism was crucially important to both the king and his clerks (virtually all of whom held multiple benefices), here the archbishop had papal support and the pronouncements of the recent Second Council of Lyons. At the Lambeth council in 1281, Pecham renewed his excommunications of several royal clerks, and tensions continued to exist between king and archbishop, finally coming to a head in the summer of 1285 when the king ordered the clergy in the diocese of Norwich to desist from hearing cases reserved to royal jurisdiction and ordered the justices in eyre to launch an investigation into clerical conduct there from the beginning of the reign. In the end, however, a compromise was reached, and in the following year Edward issued Circumspecte agatis, limiting areas where the writ of prohibition could be applied. This compromise solution was finalized with the Statute of Consultation in 1290.

  Archbishop Pecham died in December 1292, and was followed by Robert Winchelsey. Winchelsey was a theologian of note, having been trained at Paris, where he became rector, and Oxford, where he became chancellor; he did not rise to office as a royal clerk. He was, however, elected by the monks of Christ Church, Canterbury, without interference from either the king or the pope. When he returned to England from Rome in 1295, he continued Pecham’s opposition to pluralism and other abuses by royal clerks. He was faced by a difficult situation, as in this year the king was seizing papal tenths designated for the crusade in order to fund wars in both Wales and Scotland, and Edward had ordered an unprecedented tax of a half on all ecclesiastical incomes. At the ‘Model Parliament’ in November 1295, Winchelsey opposed an additional levy of a quarter or third on the clergy. In the following year, emboldened by the papal bull Clericis laicos, which prohibited ecclesiastical taxation without papal approval, he refused any further grant to the king. In the crisis that followed in 1297, as Edward I tried to field armies in both France and Scotland, Winchelsey made common cause with the king’s noble opponents, led by the earls of Hereford and Norfolk, and his voice can be heard in the Remonstrances of that summer. The Confirmatio Cartarum of November 1297 marked a bitter, if temporary, defeat for the king, and a triumph for the archbishop. Winchelsey’s relations with Edward I were probably not improved in 1300 when he travelled to meet the king at Sweetheart Abbey in Galloway to deliver the papal bull Scimus fili, which pronounced papal overlordship of Scotland. In June 1305, the election of Bertrand de Got, a former royal clerk in Gascony, as Pope Clement V, signalled a reversal of fortune for the archbishop. Still bitter over the failure of the church – and, most particularly, Winchelsey – to respond to the perceived needs of the kingdom in 1297, Edward now charged the archbishop with conspiracy. Winchelsey was summoned to the pope’s presence in Bordeaux to answer for his ‘perversities’ and ‘excesses’. He sailed from Dover on 19 May 1306, and would not be recalled until after Edward II had ascended the throne.

  The conquest of Wales was by no means inevitable when Edward I came to the throne. Even as earl of Chester, Edward had shown little interest in Wales beyond his ability to extract resources from the region. But this seeming indifference was badly misread by Llywelyn ap Gruffydd of Snowdonia, who had greatly expanded his power during the disturbed conditions that existed in England in the 1260s.

  First of all, he refused to perform homage to Edward I. Beyond that, he moved to occupy English territory (Caerphilly, for instance, was seized from the earl of Gloucester in 1270) and to consolidate this with the construction of a castle at Dolforwyn in 1273 – despite a prohibition by the English government. Finally, he planned to marry Eleanor, daughter of Simon de Montfort, who was (through her mother, Eleanor) the king’s own first cousin: a proxy marriage ceremony was performed in 1275, although both Eleanor and her brother Amaury de Montfort fell into Edward’s hands when they were shipwrecked off the Welsh coast. In the end, however, it was the matter of homage that proved non-negotiable and led inexorably to war.

  The preparations for the 1277 campaign were extensive and, once again, point to Edward’s logistical and administrative awareness. Not only were men and mounts summoned to muster at Worcester on 1 July, but massive quantities of victuals and arms were also ordered – the king ordered some 200,000 crossbow bolts from a single castle in Gloucestershire. Some of the troops who arrived at Worcester were sent south to the king’s brother, Edmund of Lancaster, at Carmarthen, but the bulk of the army marched north with the king to Chester, to be joined there by the fleet of the Cinque Ports. The army advanced west along the north coast of Wales, cutting a new road through the forest as they marched, reaching Flint by 25 July. Rhuddlan was reached by late August, and at the end of the month Edward’s trusted lieutenants Otto de Grandson and John de Vescy were sent on by sea to Anglesey with a labour force tasked with harvesting the grain there, at once depriving the Welsh and supplementing the stores of the English force.

  Llywelyn, wisely, came to terms with Edward in the treaty of Aberconwy in November. The Four Cantrefs were returned to English possession, but Llywelyn was allowed to maintain possession of Anglesey in return for an annual payment of 1,000 marks. He was allowed to continue to receive homage from the Welsh lords of Snowdonia, but not from the rest of the country. Finally, he was saddled with a massive indemnity of £50,000, designed to keep him quiescent rather than there being any expectation of repayment. In fact, the fine was quickly pardoned, the point having been made. He was even allowed to marry Eleanor de Montfort, but on the English king’s terms. The wedding took place at Worcester on 13 October 1278, the feast day of Edward the Confessor, with Edward I himself giving away the bride and providing a lavish wedding feast.

  Despite the settlement of 1277, tensions remained high between the English and the Welsh. Much of the dissatisfaction of the Welsh arose in response to the increasing imposition of English law, a concern upon which Llywelyn was able to draw. Equally important was the fact that several Welsh princes who had supported the English cause in 1277, and particularly Llywelyn’s younger brother Dafydd, felt themselves to have been poorly compensated by Edward I for their efforts. In late April 1282, Dafydd launched a surprise attack on the marcher lord, Roger de Clifford at Hawarden Castle, and other attacks quickly followed on Oswestry, Flint and Rhuddlan, with Llywelyn soon joining his brother’s revolt.

  In 1282, Edward responded energetically to the Welsh threat, dispatching small contingents under his household knights almost immediately and initially summoning a muster for 17 May. From Rhuddlan, Edward followed a similar strategy to that of 1277, concentrating his own efforts in North Wales, while smaller contingents operated in the marches and South Wales. The English advance was inexorable, and the Welsh were pushed back into the rugged mountains of Snowdonia. Although Welsh morale was boosted by a victory over the royal forces led by Luke de Tany in early November, when the pontoon bridge that the English had built between Anglesey and the mainland collapsed, Edward continued to receive reinforcements, including a sizable contingent from Gascony.

  Hoping to take advantage of confusion caused in the Marches by the death (from natural causes) of Roger Mortimer, in November Llywelyn marched out of Snowdonia and made his way toward Builth. Near Irfon Bridge, his force was apparently trapped while attempting to ford the river. Llywelyn, according to the chronicler Guisborough, was not recognized by the English knight Stephen de Frankton, who fatally struck him down with
his lance. 11 Dafydd, nevertheless, continued the fight into the following year, but with little realistic hope of success.

  As another contemporary chronicler puts it, ‘After the death of Llywelyn, prince of Wales, his brother David...who had lost all his army, wandered aimlessly like a vagabond through little-known regions and at length turned aside to hide in a small cottage, to his own undoing’. Betrayed by Welsh soldiers, he was delivered to the English king at Shrewsbury, where ‘he was convicted of treason, lèse-majesté and sacrilege, and condemned to be drawn, hanged, beheaded, burned and quartered....his bowels were condemned to the flames to punish his crimes of sacrilege, for he had often set fire to churches’.12 By this time, Edward had secured virtually all of Wales, the last stronghold, Castell-y-Bere, having fallen to William de Valence and Roger Lestrange in April 1283. Wales had been subdued, but at no little expense. The most recent estimate places the cost of the 1282–1283 campaign, including the costs associated with castle building through 1284, at a staggering £120,000. 13

  The settlement that followed the conquest of Wales was not magnanimous.

  Llywelyn had been decapitated after his death at Irfon Bridge, and Edward I had his head displayed on London Bridge, where it was subsequently joined by that of his brother Dafydd in a grisly declaration of victory. The princes’ sons and daughters were sent off to imprisonment in castles and convents: Dafydd’s son Owain languished in captivity for more than 30 years. Symbols of Welsh princely power, such as the Neith Cross and the seal matrices of Llywelyn and Dafydd, were taken into Edward’s possession to be transformed into symbols of English royal power. Although some Welshmen who had served Edward I loyally were rewarded with marcher lordships, the Welsh aristocracy was virtually eliminated by disinheritance, with powerful new lordships created for some of the English king’s closest associates, such as Bromfield and Yale for Earl Warenne, Chirk for the Mortimers, and Denbigh for the earl of Lincoln. Meanwhile, the Statute of Wales of 1284 was designed to extend the scope of English administration, facilitated by the creation of the new counties of Flint, Anglesey, Merioneth and Caernarfon, each with their own sheriff (all of them English) and courts. The statute resounds with the language of conquest, while the Edwardian castles speak of empire.