The Demon's Brood

by Desmond Seward

  During the next thirteen years, the ‘period of statutes’, Edward clarified and improved the legal code. It is wrong to compare him to Justinian, as he had no intention of creating a new, all-embracing body of law, but simply wanted to make the machinery work by codifying what had grown up haphazardly. He succeeded. ‘For ages after Edward’s day king and parliament left private law and private procedure, criminal law and criminal procedure, pretty much to themselves.’6 The future of Common Law (the unenacted law of the land as opposed to statutes) became assured, resulting in a new class of lay lawyers.

  The man

  When Edward’s skeleton at Westminster Abbey was examined in 1774, it measured 6 ft 2 in. (Most contemporaries were 5 ft 6 in.) A painting on a wall of the abbey, dating from just after his death, shows a handsome, athletic man with a clean-shaven, hawk-like profile.

  ‘Elegantly built, enormously tall, he towered head and shoulders above ordinary men’, says the Dominican Nicholas Trivet, who often saw him. ‘His hair, in boyhood between silver and yellow, became darker during his youth, turning swan white when he grew old. His forehead, like the rest of his face, was broad while he had a drooping left eye that gave a certain look of his father. He spoke with a slight lisp, but was always eloquent in arguing or persuading. His arms, as long as the rest of his body, were muscular and ideally suited for swordsmanship. His girth was widest round the chest. His long legs helped him keep a firm seat when riding the most mettlesome horse.’7

  High spirited, Edward was only saddened by the death of those he loved. His greatest fault was a temper he sometimes regretted. As a young man, he ordered his attendants to put out the eyes and crop the ears of a youth who had angered him. During his daughter Elizabeth’s wedding to the Count of Hainault, he snatched the coronet off her head and threw it in the fire, while more than once he struck courtiers or servants. A dean of St Paul’s who tried to rebuke him dropped dead from fright. Yet he could be merciful. ‘Forgiveness?’ he once said. ‘Why, I’d give that to a dog if he asked me for it.’ He knew how to be gracious and had a sense of fun, losing a war horse on a bet with his laundress and buying it back.

  Edward was deeply in love with his wife Eleanor, to whom he had been betrothed when he was fifteen and she about twelve. If she resembled the sculpture at Lincoln Cathedral, she must indeed have been beautiful. Over a dozen children were born to them, and he never took mistresses. Like their uncle Louis, Eleanor’s father had been a crusader hero, King Ferdinand III ‘el Santo’, who regained much of Spain from the Moors. (Ironically, she was descended from Mohammed, one of her forebears having married a daughter of a Caliph of Cordoba.) She was also half-French, inheriting the county of Abbeville from her mother. Like her husband, she loved Arthurian romances, employing scribes to copy them; and when they were on Crusade she commissioned as a present for him a French translation of Vegetius’s treaty on war, De Re Militari. Eleanor’s avaricious streak – she bought up loans from Jewish moneylenders – did not affect their relations.

  Family ties meant much to the king, because of a happy childhood. When his mother died in 1291, he wrote to a cousin that since his father’s death she had been closer to him than any other human being.8 He admired his uncle Louis IX deeply, although nobody was more different, and stayed on friendly terms with Louis’s son, Philip III – a bond between ruling families unique in thirteenth-century Europe.

  While giving alms as lavishly as his father and annually touching hundreds of sufferers for the King’s Evil (scrofula), Edward was less pious. Nor did he have Henry III’s cult of St Edward. When he had the Painted Chamber at Westminster redecorated, it was with scenes from the life of Judas Maccabeus instead of the Confessor’s. His favourite saint was Thomas Becket, to whose shrine he once sent a wax image of a sick gyrfalcon, praying for the bird’s cure.

  As a young man he loved tournaments – according to some, he was the best lance in Christendom. His pleasures were not those of the mind, and while he enjoyed tales of King Arthur and the music of Welsh harpers he was less well read than Henry III, except in law. His Latin was poor even by thirteenth-century standards, but he wrote French and some Spanish, and spoke English. If he had idle moods (hunting, hawking, playing chess) that hint at boredom, never for a moment did he lose his love of power.

  King Arthur

  On his way home from Palestine, Edward commissioned Rustichello da Pisa (who later helped Marco Polo with his Travels) to write the Romance of King Arthur, a compendium of Arthurian tales. In 1278 he and Eleanor went to Glastonbury Abbey when the supposed bodies of Arthur and Guinevere, found in the previous century, had been rediscovered, and moved them to a worthier tomb before the high altar, helping personally to carry Arthur’s coffin. It was probably Edward who ordered the construction of the Round Table still displayed in the Great Hall of Winchester Castle.

  Enlisting the Arthurian cult in his campaign to rule all Britain, in 1284 he staged a Round Table tournament in north Wales, portraying his conquest of the Welsh as an adventure of the sort undertaken by Arthur’s knights. Champions from all over Europe came to the joust, where he was presented with Arthur’s crown, discovered just in time. He held another Round Table tournament at Falkirk in 1302, to show that subduing Scots was an Arthurian duty.

  Pillars of the realm

  The earls could not help being dwarfed by the king’s huge shadow. Two were Plantagenets, his brother Edmund ‘Crouchback’ of Lancaster and his cousin Richard of Cornwall – both mediocrities who never caused trouble. Another two were uncles, Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, Henry III’s Lusignan half-brother, and John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, who had married Henry’s half-sister. The king treated his impeccably loyal nephew John of Brittany, later Earl of Richmond, almost as a son, and he took a prominent part in the Gascon and Scottish campaigns.

  Among those unrelated to the king, Gilbert de Clare, the immensely rich Earl of Gloucester, red-headed, stupid and unreliable, who had fought on de Montfort’s side at Lewes, was less of a nuisance than might have been expected despite a tendency to quarrel with everybody. He married Edward’s daughter, Joan of Acre. However, Roger Bigod of Norfolk, the Earl Marshal, and Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford and hereditary constable, neither of whom had blood ties with the king, were less inclined to obey. Edward had no trouble from William Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, a fine soldier who rescued him when he was trapped by Welsh rebels at Conwy in 1295. The magnate he most trusted was Henry de Lacy, Earl of Lincoln, whom he left as Protector of England when away on the Scottish campaigns.

  From the mid-1260s until Edward’s death his greatest friend was the Savoyard Othon de Grandson, who accompanied him on Crusade. The king’s right-hand man, Othon took a prominent part in the Welsh wars, helped to govern Gascony and fought the Scots. His family home at Grandson near Lausanne may have inspired Edward’s castles in Wales.

  The first great statutes

  In 1275 the king presided over the enactment of the First Statute of Westminster, which strictly speaking was a code rather than a statute. Fifty-one clauses in Norman French, it overhauled and corrected the entire legal system, making justice available to everyone, rich or poor. Hitherto, only the person dispossessed had been able to sue someone who stole his or her land, but now heirs might sue. Abuse of wardship, unfair demands for feudal dues, coroners’ duties, all received attention. The statute was not just an expression of the royal will, but reflected Magna Carta. Three years later, the Statute of Gloucester (or Quo Warranto) put right abuses uncovered by the Ragman Rolls. In future, disputes in the hundred courts over ownership of land were to be investigated by the travelling judges, to ensure that great men had not stolen the property of lesser, while plaintiffs could recover costs. It made local government fairer, defining and limiting the magnates’ power to administer law in their own courts.

  The barons were angry at being asked to show by what right they held their land, ‘Quo Warranto’. ‘Look, my lords, this is my right’, shouted the Earl of Su
rrey, brandishing an old sword. ‘My ancestors came with William the Bastard and won my lands by the sword, and I’ll use the same sword to keep them!’9 A less formidable ruler than Edward might have faced a serious revolt and, well aware of it, he weakened the magnates by securing control of as many earldoms as possible. Royal marriages helped, while Cornwall and Norfolk were escheated to the Crown after their holders died without heirs of the body.

  Another Becket?

  Having made Robert Burnell Bishop of Bath and Wells, the king wanted him as Archbishop of Canterbury when the see fell vacant in 1278, but, learning that Burnell kept a mistress by whom he had sons and daughters, the pope would not allow it. Instead, a zealous Franciscan friar from Sussex was appointed, John Pecham, who denounced the custom of giving benefices to bureaucrats. He also promised to excommunicate judges who refused to arrest men under the bishops’ ban, and Crown lawyers who interfered in canon law cases or infringed clerical freedoms listed in Magna Carta, posting copies of the Great Charter on church doors. When parliament met in 1279, the king ordered Pecham to withdraw his threats and remove the charter from church doors. Reluctantly, the archbishop complied. Pointedly, the king issued the Statute of Mortmain, forbidding bequests of land to the Church without royal permission.

  Pecham grumbled for the rest of his life, but was too frightened of Edward to disobey.

  Conquering Wales

  Medieval Englishmen thought of Welshmen in much the same way nineteenth-century Americans would think of the Sioux. Apart from the principality of Gwynedd (Snowdonia and Anglesey), Wales was a mosaic of lordships, divided between native chieftains, the Crown and Marchers. The Marchers were English barons, usually with large estates in England, who had occupied the fertile south and east, and brought in settlers.

  While accepting Edward’s suzerainty, Llewelyn ap Gruffydd of Gwynedd, Prince of Wales, regarded himself as an independent sovereign and overlord of the Welsh chieftains in the south. Several times Edward ordered him to come to court and pay homage as his grandfather had done, but Llewelyn declined. In 1275 Llewelyn’s brother Dafydd fled to England after plotting to depose him, and was given sanctuary. When Simon de Montfort’s daughter Eleanor, to whom Llewelyn had been betrothed for ten years, sailed to Wales for their wedding, her ship was intercepted and she was taken to Windsor. The king refused to release her until the prince paid homage. At the end of 1276 Edward appointed commanders for north Wales, west Wales and the central Marches. Allying with disaffected Welsh chieftains, they quickly overran the new lands acquired by Llewelyn.10

  The king understood Welsh tactics very well – to raid, then hide among trackless hills, hardy mountain ponies giving them mobility. Living in rough bothies, they could move their families and flocks at a moment’s notice, luring enemies into harsh country where bad weather and lack of provisions took a severe toll. ‘Grievous is war there, and hard to endure’, says a chronicler. ‘When it is summer elsewhere, it is winter in Wales.’11 Their weapons were spears, javelins and long knives, while men of the south used bows that could send an arrow through a church door. If unable to face a charge by mailed knights, they were lethally effective in ambushes.

  Edward did not intend to conquer Wales, however, merely to tame Llewelyn. In July 1277 he assembled an army 16,000 strong (with 9,000 mercenaries from south Wales) at Worcester, where munitions and food were stockpiled, and marched up to Flint. He brought woodmen and miners to build roads through the woods and mountains, to dig earthworks and erect stockades, as well as masons and labourers to construct castles. Thirty Cinque Port ships with supplies were stationed on the River Dee.

  From his headquarters at Flint, Edward invaded Gwynedd and Powys, destroying crops and livestock, capturing enemy strongholds. By 29 July he was at Deganwy on the River Conwy’s west bank, sending troops over to Anglesey, who burned the harvest on which the prince’s people relied to feed them in winter. His area commanders had already wrecked much of Llewelyn’s regime – and what was left disintegrated. Early in November 1277 at the treaty of Conwy, Llewelyn formally surrendered half his territory, agreeing to pay an indemnity of £50,000. When he did homage for his ‘fief’, the king not only remitted the indemnity but let him marry Eleanor de Montfort, giving a wedding banquet at Worcester in their honour.

  Having hoped to replace his brother as Prince of Wales, Dafydd was furious. Eventually, knowing that his fellow countrymen resented the arrival of new settlers and the replacement of the code of Hywel Dda with English law, on Easter Sunday 1282 Dafydd ‘went playing the fox’.12 He and his men got into Hawarden Castle near Flint by bearing palms in token of peace, then slaughtered the garrison to show that he too hated Englishmen. Other castles fell, and even if they did not fall, the Welsh who lived around them rose, defeating the Earl of Gloucester at Llandeilo in June and massacring settlers. Realizing this was a revolt by the whole nation, Llewelyn assumed leadership. Trying to lessen the English campaign’s impact by broadening the front, he moved down to Powys.

  Llewelyn rushed back to Gwynedd, however, when a shipborne force under Luke de Tany occupied Anglesey in October, building a bridge of boats across the Menai Strait to attack western Snowdonia. Meanwhile, the king established his headquarters at Rhuddlan, subduing the Perfyddwlad (Flint and Denbighshire) and eastern Gwynedd. At the same time, Marchers cowed the Welsh in their area, burning churches and slaughtering men, women and children – including babies at the breast. Yet Edward was so alarmed that secretly he offered Llewelyn an English earldom in exchange for Gwynedd.

  In October the Welsh were encouraged by the death of Roger Mortimer, a Marcher lord who had been one of the king’s principal commanders. In November it seemed they might win. Ambushed on the way back from a raid, Luke de Tany was drowned with many troops (including twenty knights) when the pontoon bridge collapsed into the sea as they retreated. The English counteroffensive had stalled, and Llewelyn finally rejected peace offers.

  This only hardened Edward’s determination. He did not see the struggle as conquest – he was punishing rebellion. To avoid being starved out of Snowdonia, Llewelyn returned to Powys, where on 11 December 1282 during a skirmish at a bridge over the River Irfon near Builth, he was run through with a lance by a knight who did not recognize him. His head was displayed on a stake at London, crowned with an ivy wreath. After the death of ‘Llewelyn the Last’, who despite his volatility had been a superb leader, the spirit went out of the Welsh.

  The war was not over, as his successor, his brother Prince Dafydd, knew he could expect no mercy. Ignoring the winter weather, Edward marched into Snowdonia in January 1283, taking the enemy’s remaining castles. When Castell-y-Bere, the last stronghold in Welsh hands, fell in April, Dafydd fled into the mountains. Betrayed by a fellow countryman, he was caught hiding in a marsh and taken in chains to the king at Rhuddlan, then tried at Shrewsbury in September by a ‘parliament’ of barons. It condemned him to be drawn on a hurdle to a gallows, half-hanged, then cut down alive for castration, disembowelment and quartering – the first to suffer this ghastly penalty.

  The Welsh had never stood a chance, overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Mustering so many men was a remarkable achievement by Edward’s bureaucracy.13 Munitions as well as men were assembled in huge quantities, crossbow bolts ordered by tens of thousands. The king’s tactics may sometimes be questioned, but not his logistics.

  In spring 1284 Edward issued the Statutes of Wales, replacing Welsh cantreds with English shires and hundreds in regions annexed by the Crown such as Gwynedd, although Marcher lordships retained their autonomy. English criminal law was introduced, but this time the Welsh kept some of Hywel Dda’s code for civil matters. New towns were founded in freshly conquered areas, five defended by huge castles where settlers could take refuge. Because of thirteenth-century land hunger there was no shortage of ‘Saxon’ immigrants, who were encouraged to settle by the king.

  The biggest of eight new castles was Caernarfon, with its polygonal towers; almost a town. Edward’s arc
hitect was James of Savoy, whose work he had seen when returning from the Holy Land. Operating from Harlech, which he had designed and where he was castellan, James constructed all eight. Intended to hold down a conquered country, they were within close reach of the sea, so that troops and supplies could be rushed in by ship.

  In 1294, when Edward was preparing for war with France, there was a dangerous revolt in north Wales, led by Madog ap Llewelyn, a member of the old ruling family, who called himself Prince of Wales. Still only half-built, Caernarfon was captured, but at Harlech forty men held off Madog’s entire army. The size of the force Edward sent to deal with the rising, twice as big as in 1277 and formed of troops needed in Gascony, shows his alarm. He took charge of operations in December, but his baggage train was ambushed and he found himself besieged in Conwy – sharing his one barrel of wine with his men. Madog was decisively defeated in March, however, all resistance petering out by summer.

  Finance

  Where finance was concerned, Edward was thoroughly unscrupulous. Having sucked dry the Jews (who were outside the law), he confiscated their property and in 1290 expelled the entire community from England – about 2,000 souls. He had paid for the Welsh wars by borrowing from the Riccardi of Lucca, who were allowed to collect customs duties on wool. Owing to commitments elsewhere, the Riccardi could not help with his request for a big loan in 1294, so Edward took the wool duties away from them and seized their other English assets (such as security for loans), which ruined them.