Kings and Castles

Marc Morris

© Marc Morris 2012

Marc Morris has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

First published 2012 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

Contents

1. English Castles – A Spotter’s Guide

2. Castles and Symbolism

3. The Castles of the Conqueror

4. Castle Acre and the Warennes

5. Goodrich Castle

6. Framlingham Castle and the Bigods

7. The King’s Companions

8. Introducing Edward I

9. Encapsulating Edward I

10. The Best of Kings, the Worst of Kings

11. The Conquest of Wales – A Visitor’s Guide

12. The Riddle of the Winchester Round Table – Revealed

13. Slaying Myths: The Origins of the Cult of St George

14. 1290: The Watershed in Anglo-Scottish Relations

15. Lanercost Priory and Edward I

Acknowledgements

Free book preview: History Today and Tomorrow by Paul Lay

1. English Castles – A Spotter’s Guide

Castles are an exceedingly mixed bunch. They can apparently be anything from giant fortress-palaces to underwhelming mounds of earth; they can date from thousands of years ago or from well into the modern age. Even for those who know their history, the diversity of what constitutes a castle can seem more than a little baffling.

So what is a castle? The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the word itself derives from the Latin castellum, and suggests that a castle is ‘a fortified building... a stronghold’. Most castle experts would go further. A true castle, they would say, was also a private residence – a home – and this important qualification helps narrow the field considerably. Take, for example, Maiden Castle in Dorset, or Uffington Castle in Oxfordshire – both majestic fortifications, but, crucially, communal ones, erected to protect entire prehistoric communities; rightly speaking, we should (and generally do) refer to them as Iron Age hill forts. Similarly, we can disqualify Richborough ‘Castle’ in Kent, which was in reality a camp for Roman soldiers. And, while we’re kicking impostors out of the castle club, we should exclude all those little ‘castles’ that Henry VIII built along the south coast to foil a French invasion. Deal, Walmer, Pendennis, St Mawes, Camber, Calshot, Hurst, Portland – sturdy little troopers all, but artillery forts for Henry’s gunners, not homes for the king himself.

The true castle was not prehistoric, Roman or Tudor, but medieval. It is in the Middle Ages (from 1066 to, say, 1500) that we see fortification and domesticity fusing to create a new and distinctive category of building. In a castle, defensive elements (the drawbridge, the portcullis, arrowloops and battlements) are elegantly combined with the residential ones (the hall, the chapel, chambers and kitchens). Of course, not all castles possess all these features – like modern private homes, no two are exactly alike. As you might expect, in a period spanning more than four centuries, there was an awful lot of variety in castle design.

As the date 1066 suggests, the story of castles in England begins with the Normans. These earliest castles were first and foremost weapons of conquest, used by the Normans to hold down a reluctant English population, and as such the vast majority of them were built at great speed – out of wood. For the most part they were also built to a common design – the famous ‘motte and bailey’. The motte, a giant artificial mound of earth surmounted by a wooden tower, was the castle’s look-out and ultimate place of defence; the adjacent bailey, an enclosure formed by steep banks and ditches, housed the rest of the castle’s buildings. Pickering in Yorkshire provides an excellent example. Of course, the original wooden walls at such castles are now long gone but, if you spot a motte, you can be sure it was erected early: certainly within a century (and most likely within a generation) of the Conquest itself.

While most early castles were hastily erected from earth and wood, a tiny handful were being built out of stone, and to a far grander design. In place of a motte, the richest castle-builders – the king and his greatest barons – erected giant stone towers (or keeps, as they are sometimes called today). The earliest belong to the eleventh century, but in general ‘the great tower’ is a twelfth-century phenomenon. And phenomenon, as the recreated interior of Henry II’s Great Tower at Dover makes clear, is an entirely appropriate word, for these buildings were palaces, nothing less. Identifying them is fairly straightforward, because of their sheer size and bulk (Rochester in Kent, soaring to 113 feet, is the tallest such tower in Europe). The period in which they were built means that they exhibit ‘Romanesque’ features – look out for semi-circular arches, chevron decoration and blind arcading (as at Castle Rising in Norfolk). Perhaps surprisingly, great towers often display no obvious military hardware – few of them, for example, have arrowloops – because in each case they were surrounded by defensible walls which have often (as at Orford in Suffolk) entirely vanished.

Those walls, however, are the key to the next big development in castle design. Around the year 1200, great towers fell out of favour – probably because they were viewed as vulnerable to new more advanced forms of attack (the giant catapults known as trebuchets). Attention shifted to the perimeter walls, which were now interrupted by towers. Early examples (such as Framlingham in Suffolk) favoured square towers, but soon the preference was for round ones (again, probably because they were believed to be stronger). At the same time, extra care was taken to defend the castle’s entrance by positioning a tower either side of it, creating a ‘twin-towered’ gatehouse. Such gatehouses, and round mural towers – these are the tell-tale signs that you are confronting a thirteenth-century castle. Goodrich, near the Welsh border in Herefordshire, provides a splendid example.

As we move into the late Middle Ages, identifying a common type of castle becomes virtually impossible. Contrary to popular belief, England at this time was relatively peaceful; there was little need to build for defence and, consequently, castles tended to become more architecturally exuberant. Certain defensive features help with dating: sure signs of a late medieval build are gunloops (as opposed to arrowloops) and machicolation (masonry standing proud around the top of a tower). At the same time, these features are often so mannered that modern experts wonder whether they were merely stuck on for reasons of status. In general, if a castle seems to be almost too picturesque (like Nunney in Somerset), or its design too clever by half (Old Wardour in Wiltshire, or Warkworth in Northumbria), a late medieval date is likely. The same is true if a castle is built of brick, like Kirby Muxloe in Leicestershire, built from 1480. Or rather half-built, for construction there came to an abrupt halt in 1483 when its unfortunate owner had his head chopped off – about as good an end for the story of the medieval castle as one could wish for.

2. Castles and Symbolism

Castles are the most important architectural legacy of the Middle Ages. In terms of scale and sheer numbers, they outclass every other form of ancient monument. What’s more, the public has an enduring love affair with these great buildings. Every year, over fifty million people pay a visit to a castle in the UK.

But what is a castle? A thousand years after their introduction to Britain, you’d have thought the experts could come up with a straightforward answer to such an apparently simple question. But when it comes to castles, we live in uncertain times. At present, a satisfactory definition of what they really are seems to be more elusive than ever.

The Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, is not particularly helpful. A castle, it tells us, is ‘a fortified building, a stronghold’. But it takes only a moment’s reflection to work out that this definition will not do as a qualifying test. Plenty of other things besides castles could be described in this way: Iron Age hill forts, nineteenth-century Martello towers, and Second World War pill boxes are all ‘strongholds’ – but they are clearly not castles.

In fact, historians have been pointing out for a long time that a ‘true’ castle ought to have more than just military potential; it also had to function as a home. A real castle was a private residence for a lord and his family, not simply a stronghold for a garrison of fighting men. Accordingly, at a castle we should expect to find not just arrowloops, battlements and drawbridges, but also great halls, chapels, bedrooms, kitchens – all the things necessary for an aristocrat and his household to lead the medieval good life.

So historians eventually settled on a definition of a castle as a ‘strongly fortified, private home’, and this seemed to do the trick. It distinguished the earliest Norman castles from the communal defences of the Anglo-Saxons and the Romans that came before them, and it differentiated later castles from the purely military buildings that were constructed once the Middle Ages were over. Using this definition, we could point to places like Uffington Castle in Oxfordshire (really an Iron Age hill fort) or Deal Castle in Kent (one of a number of artillery bastions built along England’s south coast by Henry VIII) and knowledgeably expose them as castle frauds. For a long time everybody was happy with the idea that a true castle was a fortress and a private home rolled into one.

Recently, however, some bright sparks have politely pointed out that there is a tiny problem with this definition: a lot of the country’s favourite castles seemed to be useless as fortresses.

Take, for example, Bodiam Castle in Sussex. A late fourteenth-century creation, it belongs towards the end of the castle-building tradition in England. Nevertheless, its credentials as a castle seem impeccable. Indeed, Bodiam seems to strike a perfect balance between the military and the domestic – a beautiful, comfortable place to live, but also a supremely well-equipped fortress. Bristling with battlements and towers, protected by portcullises and gun-loops, and situated at the centre of a broad moat, Bodiam exhibits all the military hardware that the security-conscious medieval family could wish for.

The only snag is that none of these military features actually work. The gun-loops are ill-positioned, the moat could easily be drained and the battlements are small and thin. The castle’s main gate, which speaks loudly of military might, is contradicted by its back entrance, which would have been easy to access and weakly defended. Bodiam, in other words, is all talk and no action; in a real fight, it would have been almost useless.

The castle, however, is not weedy by accident. Its builder, Sir Edward Dallingridge, was an expert soldier – indeed, he paid for Bodiam using the profits he made in war. As such, he would have been the first person to spot whether or not a building was suitable for defence. But like the mason whom he employed to design the castle, Sir Edward was well aware that late fourteenth-century England (Chaucer’s England, if you like) was a peaceful place, where serious fortification was unnecessary. What he needed was not an impregnable fortress, but a splendid home, crammed to the rafters with accommodation. At Bodiam, you can still count around thirty fireplaces and a similar number of toilets. Dallingridge was a man rising rapidly through the ranks of society – his family came from humble origins, but he ended his days as a royal councillor. The castle he built was not intended to house a garrison of soldiers, but to provide hospitality for honoured guests.

At the same time, Sir Edward was a knight, not a hotelier. He needed a home in which to play the host, but it had to be a home that spoke of nobility. In short, it had to be a castle. Bodiam is decked out with portcullises, battlements, towers and a moat, not because they were necessary as defences, but because they were essential as symbols of aristocratic power.

It is this symbolic value of castles that has attracted the attention of scholars in recent years. They have been keen to point out that castles did not necessarily have to be built as functional fortresses, but as symbols of their owners’ right to rule. What’s more, this was true not only of late medieval castles like Bodiam, where defence was only a minor consideration, but also of earlier examples, where fortification would still have been high on the list of priorities.

Travel back a hundred years from Bodiam to the late thirteenth century, and leave the rolling hills of Sussex for the wild frontier of Wales. King Edward I, having conquered the country, has secured his hold on it by building the most remarkable string of castles in the world. The mighty structures that still stand at Harlech, Conwy, Caernarfon, Beaumaris, Rhuddlan and Flint are tribute to the iron will of the king, the genius of his master mason, and the enormous power of late medieval England as a state. There is no question that these buildings, as well as being luxury residences fit for a king, were also fighting machines par excellence. The technology of defence at each of Edward’s castles is absolutely state of the art.

But Edward also wanted his new castles to be symbols of his power. By choosing to build the greatest of them at Caernarfon, he was bringing to life an ancient legend. The king was an enthusiastic devotee of chivalric literature, and knew of an old Welsh story that told of a great castle at Caernarfon, ‘the fairest mortal ever saw’. The fortress-palace that Edward began to build was certainly worthy of such a description. But fulfilling the legend meant more than simply creating a castle that was big and beautiful. When they came to design Caernarfon, Edward and his architect made a radical departure from the features used at his other Welsh castles. At Rhuddlan, Beaumaris, Conwy and Harlech, the towers are round, and the walls were once whitewashed. At Caernarfon the walls are polygonal, and the masonry was left bare, in order to expose the different coloured bands of stone in the castle’s walls.

Why the difference? The answer is that Caernarfon was said in legend to be the birthplace of the Roman emperor Constantine, founder of the city of Constantinople. The ancient walls of this imperial capital had polygonal towers and banded masonry. Edward, by building his new castle to the same pattern, was delivering a powerful message to all who cared to read it. Welsh independence, he declared, was over; Wales was now part of a new English empire. As a finishing touch, stone eagles were perched on top of Caernarfon’s greatest tower, hammering the imperial message home.

Edward I was not the first English king to go to such elaborate lengths in order to make a political point. The greatest castle building king of the previous century, Henry II, was also responsible for creating castles in order to symbolise his authority. One of the king’s castles, Orford in Suffolk, has a great tower built to a highly unusual design. The body of the keep is round, and supported by three large buttressing towers. Traditionally these features have been explained as developments in military technology, but recently this analysis has been rejected; if anything, such novelties made the keep itself more vulnerable. Orford actually seems to be an intentionally whimsical creation, built as an exercise in geometry, and inspired by descriptions of circular halls in twelfth-century romances.

Likewise, Henry’s new keep at Dover, which is always interpreted as a stronghold built to guard the White Cliffs from some unspecified foreign menace, can be understood as the king’s response to a threat much closer to home. Just fifteen miles from Dover stands Canterbury Cathedral, then as now the administrative heart of the English Church. Thanks to Henry’s unintentional martyring of Archbishop Thomas Becket in 1170, Canterbury became an international destination for pilgrims. The keep at Dover, constructed just over decade after Becket’s death, was perhaps a royal response to Canterbury’s growing power – a reminder to all who saw it that Henry, although he was very sorry about Becket’s death, was still determined to be master in his own kingdom.

Even when we cast our eye back to the eleventh century, we find William the Conqueror, the builder of the first stone castles in England, using castles for propaganda purposes. The king’s contemporary biographer is forever comparing his royal subject to Julius Caesar, and likens William’s leading men to the Roman senate. Such flattery seems to have rubbed off on the king himself, to judge from some of the castles he built. Wherever he invested in stone, William deliberately invoked the Roman past. In his new capital, he began to build the Tower of London, making use of the existing Roman walls to form the outer enclosure. At Colchester, a similar great tower was erected over the foundations of the ruined Roman temple of Claudius. At Chepstow the king constructed a great hall using material from an old Roman town, and decorated throughout in an imperial style. With such grand castles, built in a ‘Romanesque’ style, William declared himself a conqueror on a par with Julius Caesar.

Even the humblest type of early castle – the kind made from earth and timber – could be built with attention to symbolic detail. Take a look at the castle at Bayeux as shown on the famous Bayeux Tapestry. The mound of earth, or motte, is topped with a very elaborate, decorated structure, complete with what appears to be a dragon’s head over the doorway. This image is a useful reminder that even castles made of wood were not constructed exclusively for reasons of defence and accommodation. They were built to proclaim loudly their owners’ authority, and to show off their strength. In England after 1066, such castles advertised the arrival of a new power in the land.

Such ostentatious castle-building was not confined to England and Wales. The distinctive type of castle that dominated late medieval Scotland, the tower house, had a symbolic importance that often outweighed considerations of security. This is especially obvious in the case of the very last examples, like Craigievar in Aberdeenshire (about as useful in a siege situation as the Disney castle it resembles). But it is also true of earlier models. Take Borthwick, near Edinburgh, the biggest tower house of them all. When the Scottish king James I licensed the construction of the tower in 1430, he gave the builder specific permission for ‘defensive ornaments on top’.

Kings and nobles at the time, in other words, were under no illusion that the castle they built made flamboyant statements about their own importance. It is only later, more imaginative generations who mistakenly interpreted the architectural embellishments on these buildings as serious military hardware. The main purpose of Borthwick Castle was the same as Bodiam – hospitality. Its suitability in this regard is perfectly underlined by its present day use as a fancy hotel.

So, the next time you visit a castle, and the guide talks exclusively in terms of crossbows and cannonballs, boiling oil and battering rams, ask yourself if you’re getting the whole picture. Remember, castles were homes to their owners, not just instruments of war. And ask yourself if the castle is really spoiling for a fight, or just wearing a military costume for eye-catching effect. Medieval society was steeped in symbols, from coats-of-arms to religious icons. A castle’s symbolic power was often the greatest strength that it possessed.

3. The Castles of the Conqueror

In 1066, as everybody knows, the Normans invaded England. That most engaging of all medieval sources, the Bayeux Tapestry, shows them landing their horses at Pevensey in Sussex and racing to occupy nearby Hastings, from where they will shortly set out to fight the most famous battle in English history. Before that, however, they pause to have an elaborate sit-down meal – barbecued chicken is on the menu – and attend to their own protection. ‘This man’, says the caption above an important-looking Norman holding a banner, ‘orders a castle to be dug at Hastings’, and to his right we see nine other men, armed with picks and shovels, setting to do just that.

The Normans’ decision to erect a castle at the very moment of their arrival might not strike us as particularly remarkable: after all, medieval warfare revolved around the building and besieging of fortresses, and the English landscape of today is liberally studded with their remains. But at the time of the invasion in late September 1066 the Normans’ action was startlingly novel, for prior to that point castles had been virtually unknown in England. The only exception was a tiny handful constructed a few years earlier by the French friends of King Edward the Confessor. ‘The foreigners had built a castle in Herefordshire’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1051, ‘and had inflicted every possible injury and insult upon the king’s men in those parts’. The fact that he was reporting a new phenomenon is conveyed not only by the chronicler’s palpable outrage at the Frenchmen’s behaviour, but also by his need to borrow their word for the offending object: this is the first recorded use of ‘castle’ in English.

The Conquest that followed fifteen years later ensured it would not be the last: the castle was the primary instrument by which the Normans stamped their authority on England. From having almost none in the period before 1066, the country was quickly crowded with them. According to one conservative modern estimate, based on the number of surviving earthworks, at least 500, and possibly closer to 1,000, had been constructed by the end of the eleventh century, barely two generations since the time of the Normans’ initial landing.

Of course, England had not been without defences before 1066: the pre-Conquest landscape contained, among other things, Iron-Age hill forts, Roman legionary forts, and the fortified towns built by the Anglo-Saxons themselves, known as boroughs or burhs. But all of these differed from what followed by being large enclosures designed to protect large communities, including, in some cases, non-military personnel. Castles, by contrast, were comparatively small affairs, designed to be defended by a limited number of fighting men. They had originated in France around the turn of the first millennium as a result of the collapse of royal and provincial authority, when power ultimately devolved to those who had the means to build their own private fortifications and fill them with mounted warriors.

As well as being smaller, castles were also taller. Some of the earliest French examples were great stone towers, such as the soaring donjon at Loches on the River Loire, built by the buccaneering Fulk Nerra, count of Anjou, around 1000 AD, and still impressive a thousand years on. But the crucial thing about castles was that they could be created without the need for such colossal investment. It was quite possible to obtain the same advantage of height quickly and on a fraction of the budget by throwing up a great mound of earth and topping it with a tower of wood. As every schoolchild knows, such mounds were known from the first as ‘mottes’.

The point about size and speed is reinforced by the Normans’ behaviour in England immediately after their arrival. At Pevensey they created a castle by adapting a Roman fort, and at Hastings by customizing an Iron-Age hill fort, in each case hiving off a smaller section of the much larger original. After their victory at Hastings, as they set about crushing the remaining English resistance, they continued to act in exactly the same manner, adding new fortifications to the ancient defences at Dover, and almost certainly creating the castle at Wallingford by destroying a corner of the Anglo-Saxon borough. When, towards the end of 1066, the citizens of London at last submitted to William the Conqueror, his first thought was to plant a castle in the south-eastern angle of the city – the site which would soon become home to the Tower.

In the months and years that followed, the castle-building campaign intensified. The Normans, wept the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1067, ‘built castles far and wide throughout the land, oppressing the unhappy people, and things went ever from bad to worse’. Part of the reason for this intensification was the repeated attempts by the English to throw off the rule of their conquerors. The southwest of England rose in revolt at the start of 1068, apparently led by the surviving remnants of the Godwine family, while in the summer of the same year there were similar risings in the Midlands and northern England. William methodically crushed them all, marching in with his army and planting castles in major towns and cities. Exeter, Warwick, Nottingham, York, Lincoln, Cambridge and Huntingdon all received new royal fortresses at this time, and further examples were added in the years that followed: Chester and Stafford in 1069–70, Ely in 1071 and Durham in 1072. The northernmost outpost of Norman power was established in 1080 by the Conqueror’s son, Robert, who planted a ‘new castle’ upon the River Tyne, while William himself marked the western limit of his authority during an expedition to Wales the following year, founding a new fortress in an old Roman fort called Cardiff.

The foundation of castles, however, was far from being an exclusively royal affair. William may have raised armies to quell major rebellions, but the rest of the time he relied on other Normans to keep order in his newly conquered kingdom. In the two decades after 1066, the new king rewarded his closest followers with extensive grants of land in England, and the first act of any sensible incoming lord was invariably to construct a castle. In some instances it appears that these were planted on top of existing English seigneurial residences, so as to emphasize a continuity of lordship. But in the majority of cases such continuity was lacking because the process of conquest had caused the country’s existing tenurial map to be torn up. Sussex, for example, was sliced up into half-a-dozen new lordships, known locally as rapes, which paid no heed whatsoever to earlier patterns of ownership. New lordships required new castles, and the rapes were named in each case after the fortresses that sprung up at Chichester, Hastings, Bramber, Arundel, Lewes and Pevensey.

The reorganization of Sussex into continental-style, castle-centred lordships seems to have been a decision determined by cold military logic. The county was the Normans’ initial beach-head, and also the former Godwine heartland. The rapes run north-south, and their castles are all located near the coast, as if to keep the route between London and Normandy secure.

In recent decades, however, the scholarly trend has been to emphasize that castles had other roles beyond the military. The fact that they were often sited so as to command road and river routes, for example, meant that their owners were also well placed to control trade, and could both protect and exploit mercantile traffic. We are also reminded that part of the reason for building a castle could be symbolic. A great fortress, towering above everything else for miles around, provided a constant physical reminder of its owner’s power, a permanent assertion of his right to rule.

During the Conqueror’s reign, this was most obviously true in the case of the three great stone towers the king himself is known to have created at Chepstow, Colchester and (most famously) London. In each case these giant buildings, the like of which England had not seen since the time of the Romans, have strong Roman resonances, and were partially constructed using the stone from nearby Roman ruins (not for nothing did twentieth-century scholars christen the style ‘Romanesque’). Indeed, in the case of Colchester, it is difficult to suggest a reason for the construction of so massive a building beyond a desire to be associated with the town’s imperial past. There are no reports of rebellions or military action in Essex at any point during William’s reign; but the great tower he created in Colchester was erected on the ruins of the town’s ruined Roman temple. The Conqueror’s sycophantic biographer, William of Poitiers, draws frequent comparisons between his royal master and Julius Caesar. To judge from buildings like Chepstow, Colchester and the Tower of London, it was a comparison that the king himself was keen to cultivate.

At the same time, we need to guard against hyper-correction. In recent years, it seems to me, the revisionist arguments about Norman castles have been pushed too far, to the extent that some historians now come close to arguing that they had almost no military function at all. Take, for example, the castle that William the Conqueror caused to be built at Exeter in 1068. Its original gatehouse still survives, and has been judged defensively weak because it was originally entered at ground level. This may be so, but it takes a considerable leap to conclude from this, as one historian has done, that the whole castle was ‘militarily ineffectual’. Much of the site has now vanished, but it occupied an area of around 600 feet by 600 feet; Domesday suggests that 48 houses were destroyed in order to make room for it. It was built on the highest point in the town, and separated by a deep ditch and rampart. Exeter fell to William in 1068 after a bitter three-week siege which saw heavy casualties on both sides (and during which, if we believe the later chronicler William of Malmesbury, one of the English defenders signalled his defiance by dropping his trousers and farting in the king’s general direction). It beggars belief to suppose that the Conqueror, having taken the city at such cost, would have commissioned a building that had no military capability, and was concerned only with the projection of what has been called ‘peaceable power’.

The notion that castles had little military purpose also requires us to ignore the testimony of contemporary chroniclers. The Conqueror’s biographer, William of Poitiers, repeatedly describes the castles his master besieged on the Continent before 1066 using terms such as ‘very strong’ or ‘virtually impregnable’, and such descriptions are borne out by the fact that it took the duke months and in some cases years to take them. Yet some scholars are curiously reluctant to allow that castles built in England after the Conquest served a similar military purpose. The Conqueror’s great stone tower at Chepstow, for instance, has been plausibly reinterpreted in recent years as an audience chamber where the king or his representatives could receive and overawe the native rulers of Wales. But the fact remains that it was still a formidably tough building, situated high on a cliff above the River Wye, and defended at each end by ditches cut deep into the rock. True, it does not bristle with arrowloops, turrets and machicolations, but then no castles did in this early period, because the technology of attack was also primitive in comparison to what came later. Without the great stone-throwing machines known as trebuchets, there was not much an enemy at the gates could do, beyond mounting a blockade and trying to starve a garrison into submission. In these circumstances, a well-situated and well-stocked castle could be militarily decisive. In 1069 the people of Northumbria succeeded in taking Durham, massacring its newly arrived Norman garrison who tried and failed to hold out in the hall of the local bishop. But when the Northumbrians attempted to take the town for a second time in 1080, they failed, because they were unable to take its new castle.

One of the remarkable things about the Norman Conquest was how quickly the rift between the English and the Normans was healed. Within a generation or two, it is possible to point to castles that did owe more to ideas of peaceful living than military deterrence. But in the years immediately after 1066, filled as they were with bloody rebellion and even bloodier repression; when a few thousand Normans lived among a population of two million English in the daily fear of violent death: in these circumstances castles have to be regarded first and foremost as military installations, introduced to subdue an unwilling population. Unfashionable though it may be among castle scholars, there is every reason to listen to the testimony of the half-English, half-Norman historian Orderic Vitalis, born in Shropshire within a decade of 1066, who attributed the success of Conquest to one factor above all others. ‘The fortifications that the Normans called castles’, he explains, ‘were scarcely known in the English provinces, and so the English – in spite of their courage and love of fighting – could put up only a weak resistance to their enemies’.

4. Castle Acre and the Warennes

Castle Acre, a wonderful little village in Norfolk, offers the most amazing three-for-one deal. A really splendid Norman fortress, so impressive in scale that it could command attention all by itself. A gorgeous priory, the best preserved example of its kind in England. And, as if these two were not enough, there’s also a medieval town there too, still discernible from the layout of its streets, its earth ramparts and a well-preserved stone gate. As the new interpretative displays and audio tour of the priory explain, it’s one of the best locations in Britain for seeing how the forces of violence, religion and commerce combined in the Middle Ages to shape the landscape that we see today.

We owe this concentration of quality sites to a family by the name of Warenne, so called because they originally hailed from a town called Varenne in Normandy. Like so many men of those parts, the Warennes backed the winning horse in 1066. ‘My ancestors came with William the Bastard and conquered their lands with the sword’, said one of the their number some two centuries later, brandishing an ancient, rusty blade to prove his point. It was a exclamation born of frustration with the interference of royal government, but such conflict with the Crown was exceptionally rare. The story of the Warennes is, in fact, proof positive that the way to get ahead in medieval England was to swing a strong right arm in the service of the king.

The founder of the family’s fortune, and therefore putative owner of the rusty sword, was William de Warenne. One of the Conqueror’s closest companions, he was at the front of the queue when the spoils were being dished out. Extensive lands in Sussex were given to him when he was barely off the boat, and he set about organizing them around the town and castle of Lewes. Other prizes soon followed. By the time Domesday Book was compiled in 1086 William was the fourth richest individual after the king himself, and owned estates in more than a dozen English counties. The overwhelming bulk of them were concentrated in East Anglia, and centred on what would become known as Castle Acre.

Castles were, of course, one of the most striking innovations that the Normans introduced to the English countryside, and the earliest examples tended to be built to a common-or-garden design. A great mound of earth raised the lord’s residence high above its surroundings, and a larger, lower enclosure accommodated his household and their horses. Such castles, as every schoolgirl knows, we now call ‘motte-and-baileys’.

At first glance, the structure created by William de Warenne at Castle Acre would seem to be a prime example of this type. Initial appearances, however, can be deceptive. Archaeological investigation has revealed that, whilst the bailey probably dates to William’s time, there was originally no motte at all. William had instead settled for a much shallower, lightly defended enclosure, in the middle of which he built a rather luxurious stone house (the foundations of which can still be seen). It was only his later descendants, living through the uncertainty of a civil war, who decided that a large mound of earth would be a good idea after all. Castle Acre, therefore, presents a uniquely peculiar case, a motte-and-bailey without a motte. Curiously, and by contrast, William’s other castle at Lewes has not one motte but two. One cannot help wondering if part of his intention was to frustrate castle historians of the future.

Unconventional he may have been when it came to building castles, but in all other respects William was a textbook Norman conqueror, a warrior who carved out an empire for himself and ran it with ruthless efficiency. Such men wanted not only glory but profit – hence, in part, the need for a town at Castle Acre. They also needed to atone for a lifetime of maiming and killing. In the 1080s William set off on pilgrimage to Rome, but in the event got no further than Burgundy and the great abbey of Cluny. Suitably inspired, he returned to England and founded two priories of his own, one at Lewes, the other at Acre. As the earlier of the two, Lewes had the greater claim on the Warenne’s loyalties. When William died in 1088 – killed, appropriately, by an arrow-wound sustained during a siege – he was buried there, as were all his later descendants. But Lewes Priory suffered severely in later centuries, not least from having a railway driven through its precinct. Castle Acre Priory, by contrast, is a wonderfully well-preserved ruin, located in as serene a setting as could be imagined. Visit on a fine day, and you’ll almost wish they were still looking for new monks.

Shortly before his death, William de Warenne was created earl of Surrey – a rare distinction, and a final confirmation of his highly successful career. It was a success replicated by his descendants who, over the next three centuries, emulated his model of dynamic lordship and service to the Crown to maintain their place at the top of society. But in the fourteenth century, the story came to an abrupt end. John de Warenne, seventh earl of Surrey, was by no means incompetent either as a soldier or as a politician, but his personal life was a disaster. His marriage, forced on him by Edward I, was doomed from the start: he was not quite twenty, his new wife not quite ten. But, since she was the king’s granddaughter, the match proved hard to dissolve, and successive popes refused to grant a divorce. The earl’s case was not helped by his notorious way with the ladies: he had at least two mistresses, and later confessed to having had an affair with his wife’s aunt, a decidedly loose-living nun. Earl John ended his days living with a certain Isabella Holland, referred to in his will as ‘my companion’. Through these various liaisons he had at least six children, but none by his wife. Thus, when he died in 1347, his vast estate passed by law to his legitimate but distant relatives. Castle Acre, where generations of his family had kept company with kings, fell quickly into ruin. And so passed the Warennes, one of the greatest dynasties in medieval England, their fortune won with the sword, but lost through lust and love.

5. Goodrich Castle

Colonel John Birch (1615-91) could boast an impressive CV – war-hero, politician, sometime wine-merchant – but he might well have failed an interview with English Heritage, especially had he been quizzed about Goodrich Castle. ‘I humbly conceive it is useless,’ he wrote to parliament in 1646, ‘and a great burden to the country’. As his letter to the house made abundantly clear, the colonel was all in favour of having the castle pulled down.

We may be thankful that his advice was not followed: Goodrich still stands today, perched high above the banks of the River Wye in Herefordshire, and is one of the finest properties in EH’s care. At the same time, one has to sympathize somewhat with Birch’s destructive urges, for in 1646 the castle had given him an awful lot of trouble. That year had seen the conclusion of the English Civil War (the first one, at any rate), during which the colonel and his Parliamentarian comrades had spent a great deal of time and effort trying to wrest control of Goodrich, and other castles like it, from the hands of their royalist opponents.

To tackle Goodrich itself, Birch had not only been forced to deploy the usual array of trenches, tunnels and cannon; in addition, he had also been obliged to have a new weapon, nicknamed Roaring Meg, made especially for the occasion. A squat little tub of malevolence, Meg was not a cannon but a mortar-piece, designed to lob 200lb grenades over the castle’s walls and amongst its defenders. Unsurprisingly, once she had been finished and brought out to play, the garrison at Goodrich soon decided it was time to surrender.

Having gone to such lengths, Birch and his colleagues were anxious not to have to repeat the experience, and saw pulling down castles as the answer to their problem. Unfortunately for them, however, but luckily for us, outright demolition also proved to be problematic, owing to the time and costs involved. In the end the Parliamentarians had to content themselves with partial destruction – a process they called ‘slighting’. Castles that were slighted had their defensible parts knocked down or undermined so that they could not be held in future. Such was the fate of Goodrich, which is why it still stands today, albeit in ruins.

Goodrich, of course, was not a new building when Birch and Meg began smashing it up in 1646. Like the vast majority of castles, it was established in the late eleventh century, in the wake of the Norman Conquest. Unfortunately, little is known about its actual beginnings. How it came to acquire its distinctive name is pretty clear: a documentary reference of 1102 reveals that this was once ‘Godric’s Castle’, and Godric himself is named as the local landowner in the Domesday Book (compiled 1086). Who he was, however, and what his castle looked like, is altogether more mysterious: this is Godric’s only brush with the historical record, and nothing survives of the castle’s original structure. The mystery is rendered all the more perplexing by the fact that name ‘Godric’ would appear to indicate we are dealing with Englishman. Precisely how an Englishman came to be holding a castle in Herefordshire in the immediate aftermath of the Norman invasion would have been a story well worth hearing.

But no matter: whatever once stood at Goodrich, the building that stands today is unquestionably finer and has better tales to tell. Apart from its twelfth-century keep – a splendid building, but of uncertain sponsorship – the castle is chiefly the work of William de Valence, one of the most powerful and controversial magnates to have lived in thirteenth-century England.

Valence owed his existence, in a fundamental sense, to King John, who in October 1216 obliged his wife Isabella of Angoulême and the rest of subjects by dropping dead. No sooner was the king in his tomb than the queen had abandoned England and with it her children by her late, unloved husband. Isabella returned to her homeland in France, remarried and had more children – nine more, to be precise. Valence was one of the youngest.

As for his career in England, Valence owed that to King John’s son, Henry III. In 1247, Henry invited his young half-brother to cross the Channel and gave him the hand of a rich heiress, thereby making him the owner of vast estates – including Goodrich Castle. Unfortunately, the king’s indulgence also extended to turning a blind eye to Valence’s excessively violent behaviour, which so angered the rest of the aristocracy that it eventually helped trigger a constitutional crisis – the one usually associated with Simon de Montfort. It was, indeed, Montfort himself who told Valence in 1258 ‘make no mistake about it: either you lose your castles, or you lose your head’.

So Valence wisely chose to forsake Goodrich Castle and go into exile, though only for a short time. His saving grace was his close friendship with Henry III’s son, Edward, later to become the formidable Edward I, who was able to make good use of his half-uncle’s penchant for violence. Valence fought with Edward at the Battle of Evesham (where Montfort met his end), accompanied him on crusade, and assisted the king in the most successful military enterprise of his reign – the Conquest of Wales.

It is the Conquest of Wales that provides the most likely context for Goodrich’s reconstruction, although not in the obvious way that one might imagine. To subjugate his new territories, as is well known, Edward I built a string of celebrated castles – Conwy, Caernarfon, Harlech and Beaumaris being the most spectacular. His leading magnates followed suit, constructing new castles of their own or upgrading existing ones. In many cases, though, this massive aristocratic investment in stone was less about improving military security, and more about keeping up with the Joneses. Goodrich shares many architectural similarities with its near neighbour at Chepstow, rebuilt in the last decades of the thirteenth century by Valence’s contemporary, the earl of Norfolk. Neither man was really expecting much in the way of trouble from the already vanquished Welsh. But, with everyone’s attention focused on Wales, they were anticipating having to spend a lot more time in the region, with their great households in tow. The pressure was on to outdo each other, to entertain each other, and – occasionally – to entertain the king.

What is striking about Goodrich, therefore, is not so much its strong stone walls as the wealth of luxury accommodation crammed within them. You’ll find many more window seats, fireplaces and toilets than you will arrow-loops. Indeed, with its well-preserved ‘solar’ of private apartments, and its chapel, complete with recently restored stained-glass windows, Goodrich possesses one of the best-preserved interiors of any thirteenth-century English castle. It’s not so much of a fortress; more of a stately home with attitude.

For those who demand their history grisly, however, Goodrich can now boast an additional bonus. In 2003, having languished for many years outside a local museum, Roaring Meg returned. The last surviving mortar-piece of the English Civil War, she sits today within the courtyard of the castle she was specially created to ruin. To those unaware of her past, she must seem an unassuming object, no more terrifying than a cement mixer or a water-butt. But the ghosts of Goodrich Castle know better, and remember the sound of her roar.

6. Framlingham Castle and the Bigods

If you want to imagine yourself in the guise of a medieval warrior – and, let’s face it, who doesn’t – there are few better places to visit than Framlingham Castle in Suffolk. Approach as if to attack, and you are confronted with one of the most impressive and impregnable-looking fortresses in England: a mighty ring of stone walls, thirteen metres high, surrounded by a broad, deep ditch. Twelve surviving towers stand taller still, and are amply supplied with arrow-loops. Make no mistake about it: this is a fantastically tough old building, designed in expectation of trouble.

To say that this is a veritable and venerable fortress, however, is to tell only a small part of its story. Inside those giant walls, the only structure that stands today is a seventeenth-century poorhouse. Now home to the local museum, it’s a building well worth visiting in its own right, with a harrowing history that once reduced the normally flinty Jeremy Paxman to tears. Medievalists, meanwhile, lament the fact that it was ever built at all, for its stones were salvaged from the castle’s original interior. As a result, the casual observer now has a highly distorted view of Framlingham; one which reinforces the traditional misapprehension that castles were all about fighting, battlements and boiling oil. The reality was, of course, very different.

Framlingham was established by the Bigods, a family who came to England with William the Conqueror in 1066 and quickly established themselves as the most powerful barons in East Anglia – a position officially acknowledged in the middle of the twelfth century when they were invested as earls of Norfolk. A cursory glance at the history of these men suggest that they liked nothing better than a scrap with England’s kings. Earl Hugh Bigod (d. 1177), for instance, unsuccessfully challenged Henry II, with the result that the original Framlingham Castle, a conventional earth-and-timber structure, was torn down by royal command in 1174. The present castle was built by Hugh’s son and successor, Roger (d. 1221), to proclaim that the Bigods were back in business – and ready to challenge King John, who laid siege to the castle in 1216. But in actual fact, the Bigods, like most medieval magnates, almost always worked in partnership with the Crown. Framlingham was hardly ever used as a fortress (even the so-called ‘siege’ of 1216 lasted less than 48 hours). It was, on the contrary, a place where power was expressed in a very different way – through benign local lordship, conspicuous consumption and luxurious living.

Ironically, a fantastic snapshot of ordinary, everyday life at Framlingham has been preserved because of the desperate, extraordinary decision taken by the last of the Bigod line. In 1297, at the end of a long but fairly unremarkable career, Earl Roger IV led a movement of popular resistance against the indomitable Edward I, whose government was widely deemed to have become unjust and oppressive. Although he met with considerable success, the earl was bankrupted by this stand, and so ended up having to cut a deal with the king. In return for an annuity for the rest of his life, Roger agreed to make Edward his heir. Accordingly, when the earl died a few years later, his vast estate in England, Wales and Ireland – Framlingham Castle included – passed to the Crown. And so too did all his estate accounts, some 650 neatly written rolls of parchment, which survive to this day in the National Archives at Kew. It is these documents which permit a unique glimpse into the earl’s private affairs, and a window through which we can look at life inside Framlingham Castle.

Roger himself was only occasionally in residence. Medieval magnates, like modern rock stars, were forever on tour. Nevertheless, in the earl’s absence, the castle did not stand idle. It was from here that his officials oversaw the workings of the entire Bigod administration in East Anglia, and it was to here that money generated on other manors was sent to be kept in the treasury. Framlingham was also an agricultural centre in its own right: the account rolls reveal all manner of produce being farmed, ranging from the expected (dairy, poultry, sheep and cattle) to the surprising (regular wages and robes were given to the earl’s vintner for tending his vineyards). Periodically there were visits from members of the earl’s own household: his knights came to hunt venison or to track falcons in the adjacent park; his accountants to check every bushel and barrel, even as they themselves consumed large quantities of fancy foodstuffs.

When the earl himself was due to arrive, the administration went into overdrive. Roger typically travelled with around fifty people in tow, and the castle had to be brought rapidly up to speed to cater for this entourage. Produce and provender poured in from the outlying manors. Deer were driven from the park, beer was brewed and bread baked. At Easter 1286 it was even necessary to bring in extra crockery from Tattingstone, some twenty miles away. Equally as important, the buildings in the castle had to be cleaned, repaired and, where necessary, rebuilt. The full extent of the castle’s vanished interior stands revealed in the rolls. We read of service buildings, such as the saucery, larder and kitchen, and accommodation, including the chambers of the earl, his steward, his knights and his servants.

The most important building of all was the castle’s hall. It was here that the earl and his household were wined, dined and entertained. Originally located on the eastern side of the courtyard, the hall was moved to face west when the castle was rebuilt around the year 1200, and this move reflects a corresponding shift in the Bigods’ domestic priorities. To the west of the castle, the ground falls away until it reaches a great lake or mere. This itself was a man-made feature, a piece of medieval landscaping. Of course, it could have helped to defend the castle, but its primary purpose was to provide dramatic effect. From afar, the castle’s appearance is greatly enhanced by its own reflection. From within, the views to the west are spectacular, which explains the relocation of the hall. The mere also provides the backdrop to the so-called

Lower Court, a levelled area directly below the hall, almost certainly created as a private enclosure for the earl and his family. Whether in the hall or the garden, the Bigods and their guests could watch the sun setting across the water as they dined and relaxed.

Such was the normal life at Framlingham during its thirteenth-century heyday. It was not a place that the Bigods used to confront their kings, but rather to welcome them. In 1256 Roger’s predecessor threw open his doors to Henry III, and Roger himself played host to Edward I in 1277 (sadly, a year for which no accounts exist). The earl died a peaceful death at Framlingham in 1306 and, under the terms of his agreement with Edward, his dynasty drew to an close. It seems only fitting, on the seven-hundredth anniversary of the family’s eclipse, that we remember their main castle as it really was. Mount the walls at Framlingham and exercise your imagination, but bear in mind that the sight of an advancing army would have been almost as surprising for the Bigods as it would be for us today. Picture instead a ‘landscape of lordship’: men fishing in the mere and felling trees, knights hunting in the park; carpenters and masons, glaziers and gardeners, all seeking to beautify the castle and its surroundings; carts creaking across the drawbridge, laden with building materials, fine foods and bags of money. A peaceful panorama, but a busy one, animated by the news that the earl was riding towards Framlingham, eagerly anticipating the comforts and pleasures to be had within.

7. The King’s Companions

Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk and marshal of England, was by all accounts a very bellicose and irascible chap, and so knew a golden opportunity to settle an old score when he saw one. In 1245, while travelling through France on diplomatic business, he was rudely detained by Arnaud, count of Guisnes. This minor French aristocrat failed to show the earl the respect he felt was his due and extorted money from him and his men in exchange for their continued safe passage. When, therefore, some four years later, Arnaud showed up on this side of the Channel, Bigod had no hesitation in ordering his immediate seizure. This led to the whole business coming before King Henry III (1216–72), enabling the earl to justify his retaliation: if an upstart French count was free to sell the roads and the air to travellers, Bigod reasoned, then so was he. ‘I am an earl’, he barked, ‘just as he is!’

To modern ears this defence sounds puzzling: ‘earl’ is (almost self-evidently) an English word, and was used as a title from the eleventh century by those who governed large regions of Anglo-Saxon England in the king’s name. How, then, could it be applied to the count of Guisnes? The problem is that the sense of Bigod’s retort has been lost in translation. The above episode comes down to us thanks to the reporting of Matthew Paris, a gossipy monk of St Albans who was frequently at Henry III’s court. Paris wrote his account in Latin and, in Latin, ‘earl’ and ‘count’ are denoted by the same word – comes. Similarly, Bigod, while he probably understood English and knew that most of his fellow countrymen referred to him as an ‘earl’, was a high-ranking member of an aristocratic elite that still habitually spoke French. Thus the word he would have used to describe himself would have been cuens or conte: again, the same word used to describe a French count.

At a purely linguistic level, therefore, Bigod was right – he and the count of Guisnes did have exactly the same title. On another level, however, he was quite wrong, as he must have known well. The powers of a continental comes (a count) were very different to those of an English comes (an earl). The count of Guisnes was only small fry, but there were French counts in the thirteenth century who were virtually independent rulers of their own provinces – for example, the counts of Anjou, Toulouse and Flanders. Such men could make their own laws, mint coins in their own name, and answered in only a vague and occasional way to the king of France. By contrast, English earls like Bigod were altogether less impressive creatures, being merely the greatest subjects of the English king.

The equation of English earls with French counts began, unsurprisingly, with the Norman Conquest. It was also, as we shall see, precisely at this point that the powers enjoyed by earls were dramatically curtailed. Prior to 1066, earls exercised real authority in their regions, albeit delegated from the king: they presided over the provincial courts, handing down judgements of life and death; they assisted in the collection of fines and taxes, in return for which they received a third of the profits from both; and, in times of war, it fell to them to lead the armies. Earls were essentially the same as ealdormen, who first occur in the seventh century, and who exercised the same kind of wide powers from the early tenth century. The preference for the shorter title was a semantic shift caused by the less-celebrated take-over of England by the Danes in 1016. King Cnut (1016–35) preferred to call his English provincial governors jarls like their contemporary Scandinavian counterparts. There was precious little difference, however, in the kind of powers they exercised. If anything, ealdormen/earls were becoming more powerful in the eleventh century. The greatest among them governed regions that corresponded to the former kingdoms that had combined to form the English state: Northumbria, East Anglia, Mercia and Wessex. Thus, hardly anyone blinked when, at the start of 1066, the earl of Wessex, Harold Godwineson, decided that he would be the best person to succeed the recently deceased Edward the Confessor and had himself crowned king.

William the Conqueror (1066–87), who took a rather different view on the succession, also viewed the balance of power between the Crown and the earls with a fresh and critical eye. After a few years trying to govern England along conventional English lines, only to be rewarded with one rebellion after another, he set about a radical restructuring of power. The size of surviving earldoms was much reduced and, when new earls were created, as was the case in Herefordshire, Shropshire and Cheshire, their territorial responsibilities were confined to a single shire – or ‘county’ as the Normans began to call these units, for it was at this point that the English earl was equated with the French count. This, too, signalled a demotion: previously, the English word ‘earl’ had been translated into Latin as dux (duke). Duke was William’s own title as ruler of Normandy – he was not about to start sharing it.

The policy of keeping earls firmly in their place was followed by William’s sons. Under William Rufus (1087–1100) and Henry I (1100–35) the number of earldoms was kept down to single figures, and the formal powers that earls had enjoyed before the Conquest began to ebb away. Earls no longer aided in the collection of tax and were seen less and less in the county courts. If they raised and led armies, they did so in their capacity as the king’s sworn men, obliged to aid him as a condition of their landholding, rather than because of any public duties attached to their titles. Increasingly, ‘earl’ was regarded as only an honorary designation.

It was just at the point, however, when the position of the earls seemed to be almost entirely empty, that England acquired a king who took the deliberate decision to increase their number and devolve huge, unheard-of amounts of authority directly into their hands. King Stephen (1135–54) clearly felt that this was the best way to deal with the tricky state of affairs that obtained at the start of his reign, namely an aristocracy chafing at the bit for greater rewards, and a rival for power in the shape of his cousin, Matilda. His aim seems to have been to have an earl for every county: by the end of his reign only five counties had no earl, and the overall number of earls had trebled. But what seemed a straightforward and inexpensive way to appease his greatest subjects and outdo his opponents quickly spun out of control. Governmental powers that were given to one earl – say, the right to hold a royal castle, or to control the king’s sheriff – came to be expected by the others. Such expectations were difficult to contain, moreover, for this was not an insular aristocracy, but a cross-channel one. A man called comes in England was naturally likely to compare himself with a similarly-styled cousin or brother on the continent and think, as Roger Bigod did a century later, ‘I am an earl, just as he is’. Why, therefore, should English earls not hold their own courts? Why settle for a third of judicial profits when you could have the lot? Come to that, why not mint your own coins, with your own face on, rather than the king’s? By the end of Stephen’s reign, several English earls had done just that.

Stephen soon repented of his policy and tried to throw it into reverse. It took the greater skill and firmer purpose of his successor, however, to restore the primacy of the Crown and ensure that England did not become – as, for example, Germany had – a confederation of independent princes rather than a united kingdom. Nevertheless, Henry II (1135–54) faced a formidable task in this, the nature of which is well illustrated by the example of Hugh Bigod, great-grandfather of Roger, and no less bellicose than his descendant. Hugh was one of the new earls of Stephen’s reign, and it is quite clear from his actions that he intended to make East Anglia his own. Along the River Waveney, which divides Norfolk from Suffolk, he seized a string of manors, and built a new castle at Bungay to control them. Further afield, he set his sights on controlling the royal castles and county towns at Norwich and Ipswich. His comital title (that is, his earldom) had been given to him by Matilda, Henry II’s mother, and for this reason he may have expected some degree of latitude from her son. But Hugh and others like him who had done very well for themselves during Stephen’s reign suffered a rude awakening during the reign of his successor. Henry II not only wrested control of royal castles from those who had usurped it; he also in some instances compelled the destruction of fortresses built by the earls themselves. After Hugh Bigod and some other old die-hards attempted to reassert their independence in 1173–74, the earl was compelled by Henry to hand over his main castle at Framlingham, and watch as the king had it torn down.

Because of his success in dealing with the separatist tendencies of the English earls, Henry II is regarded as one of the great heroes of England’s ‘constitutional’ history. During his reign no new earldoms were created and many existing ones were allowed to lapse on the death of their holders. Hugh Bigod’s son, for example – another Roger – was not allowed to style himself ‘earl of Norfolk’, in spite of his record of loyal service to the Crown. It was only thanks to the generosity – and dire financial need – of Richard I (1189–99) that the Bigod family were able to buy back their lost title. Other changes initiated by Henry, especially his expansion of royal justice, increased the power of the Crown to the extent that, while the king himself might be challenged, his position was never again called into question.

By the thirteenth century, therefore, there was no power that automatically went with being an earl: certainly nobody claiming independence from royal control by virtue of his title. This is not to say that earls were not powerful men – they were. Their power, however, was based on purely material measures: how much land they had, how much money they raked in, and how many men they could afford to keep in their service as a consequence. Most earls had land and money in abundance, and were therefore politically important. But the few exceptions prove the point that simply being an earl did not in itself grant much of an advantage. The earl of Oxford, for example, had little in the way of land and resources; his wealth was only a fraction of that enjoyed by his fellow earls, and he was less well-off than a good many barons. As a result, he was politically inconsequent – his title counted for next-to-nothing. Of the public powers that had once belonged to the earl in Anglo-Saxon times, only a single vestige remained in the thirteenth century. This was the so called ‘third penny’, once taken as a third share of the profits of royal justice, but now commuted to a fixed sum, and not a particularly large one at that.

All of which is to say that the more thoughtful earls of thirteenth-century England, if they ever took a moment to reflect on the nature of the title they enjoyed, must have been left wondering precisely what the point of it was. To be an earl was clearly to be special: in the first half of the thirteenth century there were never more than twenty individuals who could style themselves as such at any one time, and in the second half their numbers rarely rose above ten. ‘Earl’ was, moreover, a unique distinction: there were no other competing ranks of nobility – no dukes or marquises of the kind found on the continent, and introduced to England in the fourteenth century. English society at this time was quite open to ambitious social climbers, and those with sufficient drive and ambition could rise through a variety of means: a career in royal service, distinguished conduct on the tournament field or in battle, the acquisition of lands by purchase. Such men could get themselves knighted, but they could not buy or fight their way to an earldom. Only the king, it was accepted, could create an earldom from scratch and, after Stephen’s reign, kings were understandably reluctant to do so. The only way to obtain an earldom was to inherit one or marry into one, and in both cases the king might still withhold the title (as nearly happened in the case of the Bigod family, and as did happen in the case of William Longespée and John fitz Geoffrey, who succeeded to their fathers’ lands but not to their titles). When an individual was admitted to the rank of earl, it involved a special public ceremony, in which he was ‘belted’ by the king with a sword. The restricted numbers, the ceremonial investment: it all suggested that contemporaries still saw the rank of earl as significant, yet if they had any specific theories about the rights and duties that went with the title they have not survived.

Doubtless many earls conceived their role rather vaguely as being leaders of local society and the king’s natural advisers. For most of the time, it is important to remember, kings and their magnates got along with the routine business of government. We might expect, therefore, that theories about the nature of ‘comital’ power would develop more rapidly at times of political crisis, when this normal working relationship broke down. Again, however, this does not seem to have happened. There were three great crises in the thirteenth century – in 1215, 1258 and 1297 – and in each case earls were at the forefront of opposition to the Crown. Yet, in the propaganda and the programmes for reform they generated, nothing specific is said about the role of earls. ‘Community’ and ‘common counsel’ – these were the buzzwords of thirteenth-century political debate. Nor was this mere rhetoric to disguise the schemes of great aristocrats: the demand for greater political involvement of the wider community led to the firmer establishment of parliament, and parliament involved more than just earls and barons.

The failure to develop any special claims for the rank of earl is seemingly underlined by the fairly desperate attempts of certain thirteenth-century earls to invest their other honorific titles with greater meaning. Simon de Montfort, the celebrated earl of Leicester who effectively seized control of Henry III’s government after the battle of Lewes in 1264, sought to bolster his precarious position by investigating his rights as hereditary steward of the king’s household – even to the extent of quizzing an aged and distant female relative about their precise extent. Similarly, when Roger Bigod and Humphrey de Bohun opposed Edward I’s plan to lead an army to Gascony in 1297, they took their stand not as the earls of Norfolk and Hereford, but in their capacities as the king’s hereditary marshal and constable.

And yet, as the thirteenth century progressed, and the power of the Crown increased inexorably, the notion did begin to develop that earls were in some sense uniquely placed to challenge it. The germ of such an idea can be found as early as the 1230s, in a legal treatise known as Bracton, notable in almost every other respect for its staunch defence of royal supremacy. In one particular passage, inspired by a rebellion against Henry III in 1233–34, the author speaks of the necessity of ‘bridling’ the king if he goes beyond the rule of law. He is not terribly specific about what this entails or who is to do it – responsibility for dragging the king into line falls to the ‘his court – that is, his earls and barons’. Elsewhere, however, Bracton had more to say on the subject of earls. They are called comites (the plural of comes), he said, because they are the king’s companions. Etymologically speaking, he was quite right: originally comes had simply meant ‘companion’; it was first used as an official title in the fourth century for the courtiers of the Roman emperors. Having reasserted this idea, Bracton expanded on it: the king’s associates helped him to govern the people, he said, and the swords with which they were girded signified the defence of the kingdom.

From these two unconnected and rather unpromising strands a new theory of what it meant to be an earl was woven in the latter part of the thirteenth century, when the power of the English medieval monarchy reached its highest point. During the reign of Edward I (1272–1307), huge armies, tens of thousands strong, conquered Wales and invaded Scotland, while in England royal lawyers were pushing the Crown’s rights to their utmost limits, even to the extent of debating whether in all instances the king was bound by the law. Just as military expansion provoked resistance from the likes of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd and William Wallace, so too did the extension of the king’s power in England find its opponents. The Mirror of Justices, a legal diatribe written in the period 1285–90, took as its main theme the idea that the king should not be allowed to rule unfettered. Taking his cue from the earlier comments of Bracton, the author of The Mirror concocted a spurious historical justification for what he saw as the proper function of earls vis-à-vis the king. When the Anglo-Saxons, he says, first came to Britain, they were a folk led by as many as forty sovereigns; only after a long time fighting among themselves did they agree to put themselves under the rule of a single king, whom they elected and crowned. The forty sovereigns, the author then explained, settled down to govern and defend individual districts, which were known as counties, so-called because the sovereigns were the king’s companions. From all this nonsense a powerful conclusion flowed: namely, that it was the special job of the earls to bring the king to book if he should govern badly.

Frustratingly, we do not know who wrote The Mirror of Justices, or for whom it was written. It is interesting to note, however, that in its detestation for royal justices and its appeal to an imagined past in which the king and earls were partners, the Mirror chimes very well with the views famously put into the mouth of John de Warenne, earl of Surrey in precisely the same period. According to a later chronicler, Warenne reacted angrily when called before the king’s justices to defend his rights. When asked ‘by what warrant’ (quo warranto) he held his lands, the earl produced an ancient and rusty sword, and said ‘Look at this, my lords: this is my warrant! For my ancestors came with William the Bastard and conquered their lands with the sword, and by the sword I will defend them from anyone intending to seize them. The king did not conquer and subject the land by himself, but our forebears were sharers and partners with him.’

It is unlikely that appeals to history of this kind would have convinced Edward I to share more of his authority with his earls, or to allow that they had the right to correct his actions. This was, after all, a king who regarded history as yet another weapon in his own armoury; who ordered every monastery in England to search their chronicles for historical precedents that would justify his superior lordship of Scotland, and who had dug up King Arthur at Glastonbury to prove to the Welsh that their legendary leader was not coming back to save them. When, in 1297, the earl of Norfolk chose to make a stand against Edward, he appealed to the rights of the community as set down in Magna Carta, and what he called ‘human and divine reason’. It was only after the king’s death that the theories that had been germinating in his reign began to be advanced as political argument. During the reign of Edward II (1307–27) there was far less talk of community, and much greater emphasis on the importance of earls. Chroniclers who otherwise lamented the behaviour of certain individual earls nevertheless claimed that England’s woes – especially its embarrassing defeats in Scotland – were caused by their insufficiency. ‘There was a time,’ opined one anonymous writer, ‘when fifteen earls or more were wont to follow the standard of English kings to battle. But now only five or six earls bear help to our king.’ Such sentiments caught on fast, to the extent that by the beginning of the next reign the necessity of having more earls was accepted as self-evident truth even by the king himself. In 1337, Edward III declared that royalty worked best when ‘buttressed by wise counsels and fortified by mighty powers’, expressed regret at the ‘serious decline in names, honours and ranks of dignity’, and aimed to set things right by the simultaneous creation of no less than six new earldoms. It was the first deliberate attempt to increase the numbers of earls since the reign of King Stephen two hundred years before.

Fortunately, much had changed in that time: England’s aristocracy now had a much greater sense of themselves as the leading members of a united kingdom. When Hugh de Courtenay, created earl of Devon by Edward III in 1335, went around boasting that his new title made him the king’s equal and gave him the right to make laws, there was little cause for genuine alarm. Courtenay had been a victim of Edward I’s masterful meanness, denied his ancestral right to inherit his earldom when still a teenager. Having spent almost forty years pressing for redress, he was no doubt rather surprised in his old age to find his claim suddenly upheld, and seems to have let his imagination get the better of him. Back in the real world, there was no likelihood that England might fragment into tiny pieces, each governed by an independent earl who thought himself the equal of the king. It was no longer possible to say to the king, ‘I am an earl, therefore you cannot touch me’. Instead, the earls had developed a new theory: something along the lines of ‘we are earls, and therefore we can replace you’. Before the deposition of Edward II in 1327, no king of England had been permanently removed in this way. In the late Middle Ages, however, many others would share his fate. And it was the earls, above all, who were the kingmakers.

8. Introducing Edward I

Many people, confronted with the long line of heroes and villains who have at one time or another sat on England’s throne, would no doubt struggle to identify Edward I. His life, unlike those of several of his successors, was never celebrated by Shakespeare; he was neither hunchbacked nor notably handsome; he did not murder any nephews nor meet with a grisly end; to the best of our knowledge, he never urged his men once more unto the breach, nor offered his kingdom in exchange for a horse. It is understandable, therefore, that this thirteenth-century king should sometimes slip from our collective national consciousness, or be confused with his numerous royal namesakes (altogether we have had eleven King Edwards). But it is also a great pity, because Edward I was the most important of them all, and, indeed, one of the most important monarchs this nation has ever known.

Edward has not been entirely overlooked in popular culture. In 1995 he made his big-screen debut in Braveheart, appearing as ‘Longshanks’, the villainous nemesis of the film’s hero, Sir William Wallace. The nickname, at least, had some basis in contemporary fact: Edward was a remarkably tall man for his day and age, standing around six foot two in his silken socks (such was the length of his corpse when exhumed in 1774). But otherwise, as you might expect, Gibson’s biopic provides a poor guide to understanding the king’s character and motivations, especially since it deals with only the last decade of a remarkably long reign. Edward was the longest lived of all England’s medieval monarchs, 68 years old when he died in the summer of 1307. Not until Elizabeth I limped on into the seventeenth century was his record broken.

And what a life he had lived. Before his accession, Edward had served one of the toughest apprenticeships of any English ruler, having seen his father, the ineffectual Henry III, stripped of power, and having suffered defeat and imprisonment at the hands of his uncle, Simon de Montfort. It fell to Edward to lead the royalist fightback and restore Henry to full authority, a feat he eventually achieved in 1265 at Evesham, where he met Montfort in battle and had him hacked to death.

Restoring the power of the Crown remained one of Edward’s principal preoccupations for the rest of his days. The other was recovering Jerusalem for Christendom. In 1270, still uncrowned, Edward became the second of only two English kings (the other being his great uncle, Richard the Lionheart) to lead a crusade to the Holy Land. It was, much to his disappointment, an unsuccessful expedition, and it remained Edward’s lifelong ambition to return east at the head of a far greater host. Nevertheless, his crusade, and his other youthful adventures in Europe (to Spain, for instance, where he married Eleanor of Castile), made Edward the most widely travelled English monarch until well into the modern age. Not until the future Edward VII visited India in 1875 did any king or queen travel further.

Plans for a new crusade, however, were ultimately dashed by struggles closer to home. Edward returned from the East determined to assert his authority on all fronts. One of his initial projects, for example, was to rebuild the Tower of London – the massive scale of the site that exists today is largely Edward’s achievement. A grander architectural legacy still arose as a consequence of the king’s intervention in Wales, which prior to this point was essentially an independent country. When the native Welsh princes met Edward’s demands for submission with defiance, the king responded by terminating their power forever. In 1277 and 1283 Wales was conquered in two devastating campaigns, and conquest was cemented with the most spectacular string of castles ever created. The mighty fortresses at Harlech, Conwy, Beaumaris and Caernarfon (to name just the four most famous) are all World Heritage Sites, and testimony to the awesome power that the English medieval state achieved with Edward I at the helm.

For the first half of his reign Edward enjoyed almost unqualified success. As well as victory in Wales, there were triumphs on the domestic front. The Crown’s finances were righted by the creation of a national customs system; new laws were promulgated and the peace well kept. Parliament, a novel but hitherto malfunctioning institution, was transformed into a forum in which the nation could come together and devise common remedies. In 1290, for example, the knights of the shires assembled in Westminster to solve the pressing problems associated with Jewish credit. In a profoundly anti-Semitic age, the solution was a simple one, and Edward ordered the total expulsion of all Jews from his kingdom – the first European monarch to take such a measure.

From that moment on, however, Edward’s success started to unravel. Just a few weeks after the Expulsion, he lost his beloved queen, Eleanor of Castile. Around the same time, news arrived of the death of Margaret, the so-called ‘Maid of Norway’, heiress to the Scottish throne and fiancée of Edward’s namesake son. The collapse of this matrimonial alliance – a scheme that would have seen England and Scotland united in 1290 rather than 1603 – persuaded Edward to impose himself on the Scots by force. They responded by allying themselves with the French, and the English king soon found himself at war with two formerly friendly neighbours. Edward spent his final years, not fighting in the Holy Land as he had hoped, but engaged in a ceaseless round of campaigns north of the Border. It was en route towards the Border that he eventually died, trying but failing to stamp out the rebellion of Robert Bruce. A king both great and terrible, he left England far stronger and more united than he found it at the time of his accession. But he left a legacy of division between the peoples of the British Isles that has lasted from his day to our own.

9. Encapsulating Edward I

For the past four years or so, I have been writing a biography of King Edward I, the working title for which was Edward I. As it happens, all of my publications to date have been labelled in this does-exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin fashion. My last book, for example, a serial biography of the thirteenth-century earls of Norfolk, was entitled The Bigod Earls of Norfolk in the Thirteenth Century. Similarly, my first foray in the field of popular history was a television series and a book about castles, both of which, after numerous agonised production meetings, were eventually called Castle.

It therefore presented a novel challenge when, some six months ago, my publishers informed me that, in today’s competitive marketplace, Edward I would simply not pass muster. How, they reasoned, would the book-buying public, historically curious but not necessarily historically aware, distinguish him from the numerous other monarchs who have shared the same name? This, I should say immediately, was a suggestion I readily embraced, having reached much the same conclusion myself in the course of researching the book. On those rare occasions when I ventured out of the library, I had inevitably been asked what I was working on, and when I replied ‘Edward I’, it often engendered a kind of mild panic in the eyes of the questioner. Was he the gay one? No, he was the father of the Black Prince, wasn’t he? (this mostly from French people); No, wait a moment, an Englishman would interject, surely he was the Confessor? This last, of course, caused yet more confusion. No, I would have to remind them, Edward I was not the Confessor, but he was named after him. How, then, could he be ‘the First’, some people worried, while others decided it was time to slip off in search of another drink.

Thank heavens, therefore, for Mel Gibson (not a phrase that historians of the thirteenth century are known to overuse). Invariably, the quickest and surest route to helping the temporarily befuddled to identify the king in question was to remind them of Braveheart, Gibson’s hilarious biopic of the celebrated Scottish patriot, William Wallace. Yes, of course, Edward I was ‘Longshanks’, Braveheart’s bad guy – a cruel, scheming monster, played with relish by Patrick ‘The Prisoner’ McGoohan, ordering men into battle like some anglicised medieval Nazi commandant (and hence, for my money, by far the best thing in it).

How about that for a title then: Longshanks? Has a certain ring to it, and enables us to pin down the particular Edward we’re after. The problem, however, is that Longshanks, while it helps a good many people put Edward I into some sort of context, doesn’t actually tell you much else about him, besides the fact that he was remarkably tall (six foot two, to be precise: a figure established when antiquarians cracked open his coffin in 1774 and measured his decomposing corpse). Likewise, Edward’s other well-known, vaguely contemporary epithet, ‘The Hammer of the Scots’, must also be rejected because it locates the king in too narrow a context. It was not until the end of his reign that Edward turned his attention to Scottish affairs, and before that he had already lived an astonishingly action-packed life.

Remember Simon de Montfort? It was Edward who defeated and killed him in battle, thereby saving his future crown. Interested in the crusades? So was Edward: before his accession he had travelled to the Holy Land and back, taking in Sicily, Cyprus and North Africa for good measure. Ever visited North Wales, and marvelled at the magnificent castles at Conwy, Caernarfon, Harlech and Beaumaris? All of them, and many others besides, are Edward’s handiwork, the end result of his devastating conquest of 1282–83, a conquest which was never reversed and which marked the end of Wales as an independent nation.

Longshanks, you soon realise, hardly begins to do justice to the man. Nor, for that matter, do any of the epithets that contemporaries attached to him. ‘Edward the Conqueror’, for example, was how he was remembered in the decades after his death by the new English settlers in north Wales. Yet there was more to Edward than just war and conquest. True, he raised the largest armies seen in Britain during the Middle Ages – an impressive 30,000 men smashed Wallace’s forces at Falkirk. But Edward also summoned the largest parliaments of the Middle Ages and promulgated the most legislation. To England, and to his duchy of Gascony in southern France, he gave the best government that they had experienced for more than a century. He lived longer than any other medieval English monarch, and fathered no fewer than eighteen children (fifteen of them by his first wife, Eleanor of Castile, in memory of whom he erected the Eleanor Crosses). He travelled further than any other king or queen of England until the modern age. Not until Elizabeth I lived on into the seventeenth century, and Edward VII visited India in 1875, would Edward I’s records be broken.

The problem, therefore, remained: how to encapsulate such an epic and varied life in a short and punchy title? Dozens of ideas were proposed and rejected. All the time, however, that we were batting around words like Conqueror and Hammer, one word lurked at the back of my brain, a word which was often used by contemporaries to describe Edward and, until recently, by modern historians too. Even Mel Gibson, in his enthralling director’s commentary to Braveheart, acknowledges that his villain was ‘a great king’.

But what did Mel mean by this? ‘Great’ is an attractive word but, as the BBC’s efforts to provoke a national debate on the matter in 2002 shows, people have very different ideas about what greatness entails. The Great British public, when ask to place its greatest sons and daughters in rank order, unsurprisingly put that celebrated scourge of fascism, Sir Winston Churchill, in the number-one spot. But they also awarded a quite respectable 55th place to Enoch Powell, thereby demonstrating that, for certain sections of the population, being an unpleasant racist constitutes no bar to greatness. More baffling still was the appearance of the actor Michael Crawford at number seventeen, just ahead of Queen Victoria. Greatness, we can only conclude, is very much in the eye of the beholder.

Where, then, does this leave Edward I (number 92 on the BBC’s list), apart from well below his rivals William Wallace (48) and Robert Bruce (74)? For historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Edward’s greatness lay for the most part in his success as a lawgiver and constitution-builder. Edward, we were once assured, was the king who had given parliament its definitive form (the so-called ‘Model Parliament’ of 1295). The sheer volume of legislation that the king enacted was such that it prompted the seventeenth-century lawyer Sir Edward Coke to describe Edward as ‘our Justinian’ (after the emperor who codified Roman law), and the name stuck. A biography published in 1902 was actually entitled The English Justinian. Another, written a few years before but in much the same spirit was called The Greatest of All the Plantagenets.

It will hardly be a surprise to learn that neither of these biographies were written by Scotsmen. North of the Border there has been an equally long and wholly understandable tradition of regarding Edward as a cruel tyrant, very much in the Patrick McGoohan mode. Similarly, the Welsh have found few positive things to say down the years about a king who terminated their political independence so decisively. ‘Ruin seize thee, ruthless king!’ shouts the eponymous Bard at Edward in the opening line of Thomas Gray’s famous poem. Perhaps the most damning indictment, however, has emerged in the recent re-examination of Edward’s policy towards the Jews, a policy that resulted in the largest state-sanctioned pogrom in British history, and ultimately in the outright expulsion of all Jews from England in 1290. Jewish and (somewhat belatedly) non-Jewish historians have quite rightly suggested that this should temper any positive general conclusions we might otherwise be tempted to draw about Edward I.

Thus, in recent years, historians have been understandably reluctant to use the word ‘great’ to describe this particular English king. It’s a pity, because it was a word used to describe him by his contemporaries. Edwardus Magnus is a phrase found in obituaries written as far afield as Westminster and the west of Ireland. Thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century folk, of course, had quite different ideas about greatness to our own. They also praised Edward for his parliaments and for his justice, but to them what made the king a truly awesome figure was his success in war. ‘He ruled with the power of warring down his enemies’, said one clergyman approvingly when he preached a memorial sermon before the pope. We regard Edward’s expulsion of the Jews with horror; contemporary Englishmen who shared his bigoted Christianity regarded it as one of his most commendable acts – a fact that forces us to confront an unpleasant truth about our medieval ancestors.

Yet even as they cheered his victories, they were not oblivious to the consequences of his rule. As one poet who marched in his army put it, the English king confronting his enemies was like the three lions embroidered in gold on the red of his banner – dreadful, fierce and cruel. And one anonymous obituarist put it in even more telegraphic terms. Edward, he said, was peaceable to the obedient, but to those who opposed him he was ‘a terrible king’.

When I stumbled across this line, I realised I had my title. It was possible to allow Edward his greatness, as long as we also acknowledged the terrible nature of his rule. On first hearing the phrase ‘great and terrible’, many people remark on the apparent contradiction. How can someone, or something, be both at the same time? Naturally, not everything can be described in this way: we could hardly recommend to our friends a great and terrible restaurant, or boast to them about our new, great and terrible carpet. But when we move beyond the mundane and begin to contemplate the mighty, great and terrible seem to be less contradictory, and even complementary adjectives. ‘The great and terrible wilderness’ is how the Bible describes the Sinai Desert; ‘Do not tempt me!’ says Gandalf to Frodo, alarmed by the hobbit’s offer of the One Ring. ‘I should have a power too great and terrible.’ The kind of power, in fact, pretended by another, altogether less bona-fide wizard. ‘I am Oz, the Great and Terrible’, he booms, before being exposed as a pathetic little man hiding behind the curtain.

Kings, like wizards, were expected to wield enormous power. Some of them found it too much to handle and were merely terrible in the more modern sense of the word. Others abused their power and were truly terrible, to the extent that they could inspire great terror. King John, for example, that famously bad king of England, was regarded by contemporaries with considerable dread. Being terrible, clearly, did not make one great. But did being great mean one had to be terrible? When it comes to kings, I would argue that the answer must be yes. William the Conqueror, Henry I, Henry II: all could justly be described as great, and in each case this was partly down to their ability to inflict immense terror. None of them, however, was greater, or more terrible, than Edward I.

10. The Best of Kings, the Worst of Kings: A Reassessment of Edward I

On an otherwise unremarkable building opposite Holborn tube station, some five or six storeys above the commuter throng, sits a serene and noble-looking Edward I. The work of a young sculptor Richard Garbe (d. 1957), he was placed there in 1902, and evidently intended as a tribute: on the opposite corner of the same building sits a similar statue of Edward VII, who was crowned that same year.

The accession of a new King Edward, the first in 350 years, evidently prompted some of his subjects to look back through the annals of English history in search of a similarly named exemplar. No doubt they quickly dismissed as unsuitable the two boy kings, Edwards V and VI, the usurper Edward IV and the unspeakable Edward II, and ignored the three unnumbered pre-Conquest Edwards on the grounds of their comparative obscurity. Today they might have considered the merits of Edward III, a successful king whose reign witnessed the greatest English triumphs of the Hundred Years War. But at the start of the twentieth century no one was in the mood to celebrate a man who appeared to have gone looking for glory on the battlefields of Europe; the victor of Crécy and the founder of the Order of the Garter was at that time regarded as a feckless and irresponsible warmonger.

By a process of elimination, therefore, it had to be a statue of Edward I. Like his namesake grandson, Edward had also been a warrior king. His wars, however, were perceived to have been conflicts of quite a different order, fought in the national interest, and forced him on him by the rebelliousness of his subjects in Wales and Scotland. Moreover, the first Edward, unlike the third, could be held up as man possessed of strong moral fibre, uxorious to an almost Victorian degree, the father of no less than fifteen with his first wife, Eleanor of Castile, in whose memory he erected the celebrated Eleanor Crosses.

There was more to recommend Edward I, however, besides his martial and marital virtues. What endeared him most to observers at the turn of the nineteenth century were his roles as lawgiver and constitution-builder. It was in the 1870s that William Stubbs, one of the founding fathers of history as a modern academic subject at Oxford, had first published his Constitutional History of England, in which he argued that it was under Edward’s firm guiding hand that that most cherished of English institutions – parliament – had attained its definitive form; so much so that he dubbed the not-especially-noteworthy assembly of 1295 ‘the Model Parliament’. Recognition of Edward’s achievement as a legislator, meanwhile, had a much longer pedigree. In the early seventeenth century the lawyer Edward Coke, surveying the statute book and noting how much of its contents had originated in the late thirteenth century, declared that we should regard Edward I as ‘our Justinian’ – implying, of course, that the king rivalled the Roman emperor who had codified imperial law. It was an epithet that stuck. In 1902 – again, the year of the coronation, and just as the two statutes were being hoisted into place in Holborn – the juror and writer Edward Jenks published a biography of Edward I to which he gave the subtitle ‘the English Justinian’. For some, it seems, the dawn of a new Edwardian age was a positive invitation to sing the praises of their new king’s most illustrious namesake. A certain Wallace Leonard Palmer spotted a gap in Shakespeare’s canon and began penning his own cod-Shakespearean epic The Life and Death of Edward I: a play in four acts. Alas, by the time it was published in 1910 the world had moved on, Edward VII was dead and buried, and – to the great loss of theatre-lovers everywhere – his masterpiece has rested in utter obscurity ever since.

There were other reasons, however, why this burst of enthusiasm for Edward I at the start of the twentieth century should have proved short-lived. Truth be told, Garbe, Palmer and even Stubbs were working with fairly intractable material. It was difficult to present a king whose tomb is inscribed ‘Here is Edward I, Hammer of the Scots’ as a hero whom all Britons might hold in admiration. While Englishmen might enthuse about the quality of Edward I’s justice, north of the Border there was an equally longstanding tradition of regarding him as a cruel oppressor. Another play about Edward I, published in Edinburgh in 1844, is subtitled ‘The Tyrant’s Triumph’. Nor were the Welsh, for that matter, ready to forgive the king who had terminated their independence so decisively with his devastating military campaigns and mighty castles. ‘Ruin seize thee, Ruthless King!’ is how the eponymous Bard greets the arrival of Edward in Thomas Gray’s famous poem, before proceeding to heap further curses upon the conqueror’s head.

For a long time, Englishmen were happy to dismiss such peripheral sniping as nothing more than Caledonian and Cambrian sour grapes. ‘No native of that northern kingdom,’ opined Robert Seeley in the preface to his unambiguously titled Edward I: The Greatest of All the Plantagenets (1860), ‘could be expected to write this king’s history in a just and impartial manner.’ (Impartiality, of course, being the sole preserve of those lucky enough to live south of the Tweed and the Solway.) It was still possible, in the first half of the twentieth century, to present Edward I in a largely uncritical light. Indeed, it was in the middle of the century that the argument that Edward was a truly great king received its most powerful restatement to date in the works of Sir Maurice Powicke. In his Henry III and the Lord Edward (1947), Powicke urged readers ‘to forget everything that has happened since 1307 (the year of Edward’s death) and to look at the world as he saw it’. By doing this, the historian hoped to convince his audience that his subject was indeed ‘a great man’, conventionally medieval in his tastes, and hence well suited to fill ‘a great position’. As late as 1965, it was still possible to write that ‘the stock of other medieval kings may rise or fall; that of Edward I remains firm and … conspicuously high’.

This, however, was the first line of a well-known article by K. B. McFarlane, in which the author went on to deliver a devastating broadside against the king from which he has never recovered. McFarlane did not try to knock corners off Edward for his conduct in Wales and Scotland, or his questionable conduct in England during the last ten years of his reign. Instead, he hit the English Justinian where it hurt the most, and called into question his reputation as a just ruler. A historian who had pioneered the idea that medieval society might be usefully examined from the point of view of the nobility rather than that of the Crown, McFarlane proceeded to examine ‘a remarkable series of transactions’ between Edward and his great magnates, and argued that the king had acted illegally, or at the very least unjustly and coercively, to persuade many of these men and women to part with their lands and disinherit their families.

Immediately Edward’s hitherto high stock started to go into free fall. In the same year that McFarlane’s article was published, a new scholarly biography of Robert Bruce by the Scottish historian Geoffrey Barrow appeared, in which the English king was subjected to similarly well-aimed blows. Barrow gave substance to the age-old Scottish accusations of tyranny, and further dented Edward’s prestige by questioning his credentials as a paragon of chivalry. Women prisoners hung in cages on the outside of castle towers; castle garrisons bombarded with missiles even after they had offered to surrender; Scottish patriots – most notably William Wallace – ripped to pieces in public and dispatched for public display: were these really the actions of a great and noble king? Barrow thought not, and condemned Edward for his ‘meanness of spirit and implacable, almost paranoid hostility’. Within a few years these sentiments were being echoed in other scholarly works, such as Michael Prestwich’s War, Politics and Finance under Edward I. The king’s defenders found themselves fighting a desperate rearguard action. Lionel Stones published a very brief, excusatory book about Edward in 1968, and five years later a critical review of Prestwich. Accordingly, when the latter came to write his own giant biography, published in 1988, he drew a more balanced picture of the king, and in many instances granted him the benefit of the doubt.

But the Celtic assault continued. Just as Prestwich went to press, Rees Davies was delivering a series of lectures in Belfast that would eventually become a book called Domination and Conquest, in which Edward I appears as the antithesis of Powicke’s ‘ordinary Christian gentleman’. Not only is he ‘ruthless’ as in Gray’s poem; he is, in addition, ‘sinister’ and even ‘chilling’ – this last on account of the writs he sent out in the winter of 1282, in which he proposed ‘to put an end finally … to the malice of the Welsh’. And it was not just the Welsh, of course, for whom Edward devised a final solution. His reign also witnessed the total expulsion of all Jews from England, a fact which, as Colin Richmond pointed out in an excoriating article of 1992, most of the English historical profession had contrived to ignore, or to view in sympathetic terms. They would not do so any more. When Michael Clanchy came to write a new epilogue about Edward I for the second edition of his England and its Rulers (1998), he pointed out that, because of the expulsion, the king ‘has affinities with Hitler’.

From hero to Hitler in just a hundred years: how the mighty have fallen! Small wonder that no one has been tempted to erect any new statues of Edward I in the past century. Who now, to adapt McFarlane’s metaphor, would want to buy shares in such a king? Nevertheless, what I aim to do in the remainder of this article is to reconsider some of this criticism. My intention is not to whitewash Edward or to excuse any of his actions; only to place the criticism of him in some kind of revised perspective.

To start in an obvious place, we may observe that modern criticism of Edward I is almost entirely at odds with contemporary praise for the king. At the time of his death, Edward was lauded as brave, eloquent, wise, just and pious. In both Westminster and the west of Ireland he was described as ‘Edward the Great’, and in the years thereafter his life continued to be celebrated, both in written form and as mural paintings on the walls of various royal and episcopal palaces.

So what, you might reasonably say: eulogists are bound to be eulogistic. What of contemporary criticism of the king? The problem is, there really isn’t that much. If we go back to the very beginning of Edward’s career, we find, unsurprisingly, that he was condemned for being an unruly teenager. The chronicler Matthew Paris has a well-known (but suspiciously vague and uncorroborated) story about how Edward, out one day with his gang of thuggish followers, met another young man and ordered his gratuitous mutilation. Other more credible evidence shows that, by the time he was twenty, Edward was determined to put his wayward past behind him. In a private letter of August 1259, the future king wrote to the chief official in his lordship of Chester, instructing him to deal justly with everyone. ‘If … common justice is denied to any one of our subjects,’ he declared, ‘then we lose the favour of God and man, and our lordship is belittled’.

Another well-known piece of criticism was levelled at Edward a few years later in the course of his struggle with Simon de Montfort. In The Song of Lewes, one of Montfort’s clerical acolytes suggested that Edwardus was like a leopardus – a beastly blend of vice and virtue. While brave like a lion (leo), he was also shifty and duplicitous like a panther (pardus). McFarlane took this ex parte statement as the starting point in his famous article, arguing that it was a more accurate guide to the king’s conduct than the empty words of his eulogists. Yet McFarlane overstated his case. There can be no doubt that, in one or two of his dealings with the nobility, Edward overreached himself and committed acts which were unjust. But many of the other examples that McFarlane went on to adduce – the king’s land-deals with the earls of Gloucester, Hereford, Lincoln and Norfolk – hardly bear out the accusation of injustice. All of these men entered into arrangements with the Crown voluntarily. In fact, as another private letter written towards the end of his life proves, Edward had never abandoned his earlier respect for what was legal. ‘Be as stiff and harsh … in this business as can be,’ he instructed his chancellor in 1304, ‘without offending the law’. Edward’s court was never perceived as unjust, as those of his father and grandfather had been. ‘Truly, in our times no king’s kingdom was made firm and strong with so much justice’, said a preacher before the pope in 1307, and in general terms he was right.

The only real criticism that was levied at Edward during the first two decades of his reign arose as a result of his determination to recover the rights that he contended had been usurped during the lax rules of his predecessors. Disgruntlement with the king’s famous Quo Warranto inquiry (so-called because of the inquisitors persistent demand to know ‘by what warrant’ a landowner claimed his special privileges) mounted during the late 1280s, partly because the inquiry intensified in these years, and partly because there were no parliaments during this period – Edward spent the years 1286–89 overseas, attending to his duchy of Gascony. But on his return Edward punished the judges and ultimately compromised on Quo Warranto, allowing that landlords could retain their privileges if they were able to show more than a century of continuous usage. Unlike the implacable tyrant of some texts, this was a man who was quite capable of finding a middle course.

The king’s desire to appease his subjects in 1290 brings us to his expulsion of the Jews. There is no point trying to defend him, as some have done, on the grounds that the exercise was carried out efficiently and that the incidents of murderous violence involved were unauthorised and apparently few in number. Edward had no sympathy with the Jews and had already visited plenty of violence on them of his own accord. A decade earlier, to maximise the profits of an impending recoinage, he had instituted a covert crackdown on ‘coin-clippers’ – criminals who shaved silver off the edge of his coins to make new ingots. Of those convicted and hanged, twenty-nine were Christians but almost ten times that number were Jews, which makes Edward I responsible for the biggest pogrom in British history.

His expulsion of the Jews, by contrast, is not quite as remarkable or record-breaking as is often portrayed. Edward, it is true, became the first king to enforce a nationwide Jewish exodus. Yet all this proves is that his was the powerful king of a precociously united kingdom; for more than a century, other kings, princes and counts had been expelling Jews from their demesnes to the fullest extent of their more limited authority. Simon de Montfort, for example, whose name is commemorated by a new university in Leicester, had expelled the Jews from that town at the start of his English career. Moreover, he had done so expressly for the salvation of his and his family’s souls. Thirteenth-century Europe was a profoundly anti-Semitic place, and no corner of it more so than England. What motivated Edward to expel the Jews in 1290 was not simply his own personal hatred; it was his desperate need of money, which could only be satisfied by a grant of tax from parliament. The knights of the shires, those heroes of Victorian constitutional history, were duly summoned, and demanded the expulsion as the price of their consent. The expulsion, in short, was a popular act in every sense: Edward received the biggest tax of the English Middle Ages, and his subjects cheered him for his pious performance in driving ‘the faithless multitude of Jews and unbelievers from England’. It is quite easy to present Edward I as a Hitler figure; more difficult, perhaps, to confront the fact that all Englishmen once shared his virulent anti-Semitism.

We could likewise easily condemn Edward for his wars, but this too would be to adopt an anachronistic stance: contemporaries were quick to praise him. ‘Long may he live and conquer and rule’, wrote a jubilant English clerk in Rome when he heard that Edward had defeated the Welsh, ‘that domestic enemy … the disturber of English peace’. After the king’s death, it was recalled with approval that ‘he tried to war down all those who wished to throw his people in confusion’ – this from a sermon preached before the pope. Medieval monarchs were expected to go after their enemies with fire and sword. As one poet proudly put it, the English king confronting his foes was alike to the three lions on his banner: ‘proud, fierce and cruel’. Another writer put expressed the same point in even more concise terms. To the sons of pride, he said, Edward I was ‘a terrible king’. The terror he unleashed against the Scots has been the basis of much modern criticism. Yet it has been recently and convincingly argued that, in prosecuting this war, Edward’s conduct was entirely in keeping with the contemporary laws of arms. If anything, in fact, Edward was surprisingly lenient in his treatment of the Scots, at least until 1306. One north-country English chronicler averred that the king was too compassionate.

Nevertheless, there are limits to the amount we can forgive or understand Edward’s behaviour, even when judged by the standards of his own day, and this is most obviously the case in relation to Scotland. The English and the Scots, unlike the English and the Welsh, got on well in the thirteenth century. To take just the most obvious examples, Edward’s aunt, Joanna, had been married to Alexander II (king of Scots from 1214–49), and Edward’s sister Margaret was married to Alexander III (1249–86). The kings of England had always taken the trouble to stress their superiority in this relationship, and the Scots, in return, had always politely insisted on their independence. But in 1290, following the tragic deaths of Alexander III and all his direct heirs, Edward saw a unique opportunity for extracting from the Scots an unqualified admission of their subordination. He appealed to history to make his case, ordering a trawl of monastic chronicles to unearth the evidence that would prove his right to overlordship. That case, built as it was on flimsy or fantastical foundations, failed to convince, and the Scots rejected both the king’s dodgy dossier and his demand for submission. But when argument failed Edward bullied and coerced, and at length the Scots crumpled, and told the English king what he wanted to hear.

Edward’s triumph, however, was short-lived. As soon as he had finished browbeating the Scots into submission, he found himself on the receiving end of similar aggression from the king of France, who confiscated and invaded his duchy of Gascony. Edward was dragged into a Continental war which, in different circumstances, he might have concluded with reasonable speed. But, because of his recent hostility, the Scots, who might otherwise have sided with him, allied themselves with the French, and as a result Edward found himself embroiled in ceaseless fighting for the rest of his days. In his efforts to beat the Scots and the French, he was forced to undermine much of the constructive achievement of the first half of his reign. Criminals were pardoned in return for military service; taxation was demanded at punitive levels and, as a result, the political consensus in England began to collapse. Faced with opposition to his demands for money and military service, the consensus-builder resorted to evermore arbitrary measures, attempting to levy taxes without consent, and disregarding his subjects’ demands for the confirmation of their existing liberties. Once again, Englishmen started to regard Edward as an untrustworthy creature.

By the time of Edward’s death in July 1307, this crisis had subsided. The French had returned Gascony; the Welsh, who had also rejoined the fray, had been re-conquered; England was once again politically acquiescent. Only in Scotland was there ongoing trouble in the shape of Robert Bruce, but this too looked certain to be a passing thing. There seemed little doubt at the time that the newly proclaimed Scottish king would soon be defeated, captured, and treated to the same grisly death that William Wallace had experienced just two years before.

In conclusion therefore, we must surely allow Edward I the greatness that has been denied to him in almost all recent writing. We are, after all, talking about the man who out-generalled and defeated Simon de Montfort in battle; who, alone of all the crusade leaders of 1270, reached the Holy Land; the man who conquered Wales and built the castles at Conwy, Beaumaris, Harlech and Caernarfon; the man who for a time gave England the best government it had enjoyed since the Norman Conquest and left an enduring legacy in the shape of his laws and in the development of parliament. All of this can be admitted, provided at the same time we recognise that Edward was also, as contemporaries observed, a terrible king. He was, as one native Irish annalist put it, ‘a knight most prudent, most violent and most valiant. It was by him that the greatest number of people fell in his time.’ Terrible in his wars, Edward also made a terrible error of judgement in trying to lord it over Scotland, destroying the previously good relations that had existed with England, and leaving a legacy of vengeance that endured for centuries, and that still resonates today.

11. The Conquest of Wales – A Visitor’s Guide

In the mid-thirteenth century Wales was to all intents and purposes an independent nation. Its people not only spoke their own language; they also lived according to their own laws and customs, and were governed by their own native princes. Yet in the space of a single generation this independence was decisively terminated. By the end of the thirteenth century, the halls of the Welsh princes had been razed and replaced by mighty English castles. The country was governed by Englishmen, and English law prevailed. Wales, in a word, had been conquered.

Anglo-Welsh hostility had a long history – not for nothing were the two peoples separated by the eighth-century earthwork known as Offa’s Dyke – but in the century or so before the conquest this hostility had been sharpened by contrasting economic fortunes. Thanks to its expanding agricultural base, twelfth-century England could boast new towns, large cities, great cathedrals, international trade and a plentiful silver coinage. Wales, with its pastoral economy, had none of these things, though Englishmen at the time felt that the fault lay in Welsh themselves, whom they began to regard as wilfully backward, indolent and immoral – barbarians in need of taming.

A more recent cause of the conquest was political change in Wales. Before the thirteenth century it had been a country divided against itself, with dozens of petty kings and princes fighting each other for supremacy. Because Welsh custom decreed that a man’s possessions must be divided on his death, any territorial gains made in one generation were generally lost during the next, with brother fighting brother for a share of the spoils. During the thirteenth century, however, one princely dynasty began to dominate all the others. By 1258, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, ruler of the northwest region of Gwynedd, had achieved such success against his neighbours (and his brothers) that he felt justified in styling himself ‘prince of Wales’. Nine years later, even the English king, Henry III, was obliged to recognize the prince’s self-proclaimed status.

But Llywelyn failed to appreciate that his success owed much to Henry’s ineptitude. When the old king died in 1272 he was succeeded by his masterful and warlike son, Edward I – better known, thanks to Braveheart, by his contemporary nickname, Longshanks. The Welsh leader continued to act as he had always done, meeting English demands for homage and fealty with bluster and defiance, reckoning that he would always triumph if matters came to blows. The scale of his misjudgement became clear in 1277, when Edward led a huge, well supplied and well-disciplined army into northwest Wales. Llywelyn lost all but a handful of the lordships he had acquired since the start of his career, and Snowdonia was surrounded by several new English castles.

It is a moot point as to whether Edward had intended to conquer Wales completely at this point and found it beyond his resources, or whether he had always planned to leave a diminished Llywelyn in place. The mountainous heartlands of the prince’s power would be difficult to conquer and promised little by way of financial return. It was only after a major Welsh uprising in the spring of 1282 that outright conquest became inevitable. Edward again led a large army along the north Welsh coast, only to suffer a disaster in November when a company of his men were fatally ambushed as they tried to cross the Menai Strait by means of a pontoon bridge. ‘The people of Snowdonia’, declared Llywelyn and his council a few days later, ‘do not wish to do homage to a stranger of whose language, manners and laws they are entirely ignorant.’ Shortly afterwards, Edward’s own letters proposed ‘to put an end finally to the matter that he has now begun of suppressing the malice of the Welsh’. Henceforth it would be a struggle to the death.

In Llywelyn’s case, death followed swiftly: he was killed in a skirmish with English forces in mid-Wales the following month. For Wales itself, the agony was more protracted, as Edward cautiously massed the necessary forces for a final push. In March 1283 English troops spilled across the River Conwy and occupied Snowdonia. Llywelyn’s brother, Dafydd, who had led the Easter uprising, was captured on the slopes of Snowdon and taken to Shrewsbury to be executed. Thousands of others must have died in the fighting, both Welsh and English. The death toll is unknown, but we know that Edward I had raised what were at the time the largest armies ever seen in the British Isles. When the Welsh rose up again in 1294, the king deployed a staggering 37,000 men to crush the rebellion. ‘What is left to us that we should linger?’ wailed one Welsh poet. ‘No place of escape from Terror’s prison / No place to live – wretched is living!’

Edward’s conquest was brutally thorough. Some secular treasures and sacred relics were carted off to be kept as trophies at Westminster Abbey; others were eradicated. The silver seal matrices of Llywelyn and Dafydd were melted down and made into a chalice for the king, while Conwy abbey, which housed the bones of the prince’s ancestors, was destroyed in order to make way for Conwy Castle. It was his new castles, above all, that cemented Edward’s conquest and symbolized his determination that it should never be underdone. ‘Divine providence’, began his Statute of Wales in 1284, ‘has wholly and entirely converted the land of Wales into a dominion of our ownership’.

Caerphilly

A major short-term cause of Edward’s first war of 1276–77 was the territorial disputes along the Welsh border between Llywelyn and the English marcher lords. The most serious of these was a clash between the prince and Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester, the legacy of which is the mighty castle of Caerphilly. The earl began building the fortress in 1268 to assert his right to rule upland Glamorgan, and Llywelyn spent much of the next four years trying to destroy it (at one stage, indeed, the Welsh leader succeeded in overrunning the site). But Gilbert was one of the greatest (i.e. wealthiest) of all English magnates, able to deploy resources on a scale that the prince simply could not match. Caerphilly is a giant among castles; at the time of its construction it was the greatest building of its kind in the British Isles, its concentric design predating by several years the similar scheme that was used by Edward at the Tower of London. Yet there is no sign that these defences were ever put to the test. The conquest of Wales meant that Caerphilly’s role as a frontier fortress was extremely short-lived.

Rhuddlan

To cement his territorial gains after the first Welsh war, Edward built three new fortresses: Aberystwyth, Flint and Rhuddlan. Rhuddlan was the most substantial of the three and was intended to serve as the principal administrative seat for the newly conquered territories. It was located not far from Dyserth, where Henry III had built a new castle just thirty years earlier. Henry’s castle, however, had been located on high ground – easy to defend but also easy to encircle – and in 1263 Llywelyn had captured and destroyed it. Mindful of his father’s mistake, Edward ensured that his own new fortresses could be easily resupplied by sea. At Rhuddlan this called for a major civil engineering project, since the River Clwyd that linked the site to the sea had too many meanders for large ships. During the first three years of construction, therefore, a separate army of diggers, almost a thousand strong, laboured to make the river straighter.

As the foremost English base in north Wales, Rhuddlan was naturally the muster-point for Edward’s army (and his fleet) when the second Welsh war erupted in 1282. It was also here that the king, famed for his lawgiving, issued the Statute of Wales in 1284, laying down the legal framework that would be used to govern the newly conquered country.

Glastonbury Abbey

At Easter 1278, within a few months of accepting Llywelyn’s homage at Westminster, Edward travelled to Glastonbury to visit the tomb of King Arthur. We can say with confidence that the tomb was fake, because we know that Arthur had never really existed. But Edward and his contemporaries had no means of knowing this – to them the legendary king was as real a historic figure as William the Conqueror or Richard the Lionheart. The only problem with Arthur was his origins – he was an ancient British king who had battled against the Anglo-Saxons – or, put another way, a Welshman who had fought the English. To the Welsh, therefore, he was a potent symbol of resistance. They maintained that he had never actually died, and one day he would return to lead them to victory.

Hence Edward’s decision to visit Glastonbury in the immediate wake of Llywelyn’s defeat. In a carefully contrived ceremony, the king unearthed the bones, wrapped them in cloth of gold and had them reinterred in a new tomb. The skull was not reburied, but left on display ‘on account of popular devotion’. The real reason, surely, was to make a political point. Arthur was dead, and would not be coming back to save anyone.

Cilmeri

The Welsh rising that triggered the second Welsh war was orchestrated by Llywelyn’s young brother, Dafydd; there is no good evidence that the prince himself was privy to the plan. Once the war was underway, however, Llywelyn had little choice but to support his brother and the Welsh people in their struggle. Seeking to avoid the encirclement that had brought about his surrender in 1277, the prince decided in late 1282 to strike at the middle March, hoping to exploit the confusion caused by the recent death of Roger Mortimer, Edward’s commander in the region. On arrival, however, Llywelyn found huge English forces ranged against him. The two sides met in battle on high ground to the west of Builth, at a place called Cilmeri, and during the encounter the prince of Wales fell. At first he was unrecognized, but at length the English realized they had scored a decisive victory. ‘Know, Sire’, wrote their captain to his royal master, ‘that Llywelyn ap Gruffudd is dead, his army broken, and the flower of his men killed’. Letters found on the prince’s body suggest that he had been lured into a trap by Mortimer’s sons, who had pretended to be ready to switch sides.

Dolwyddelan

The second war of 1282–83 was a war of outright conquest, with English troops driven right into the what had been the heart of Llywelyn’s power. In January 1283 Edward’s forces pushed across the River Conwy into Snowdonia, where they laid siege to the native Welsh castle at Dolwyddelan. Compared with the giant fortresses that Edward was in the process of erecting, the castles of the Welsh princes were small and outmoded. Dolwyddelan was certainly no match for the English war machine, and its defenders surrendered after a short siege. Two months later Edward himself crossed the Conwy – probably the first English king ever to do so – and in May 1283 he made the castle his temporary headquarters. Its fall was a symbolic as well as a military triumph, for Dolwyddelan had been the birth place of Llywelyn’s grandfather, Llywelyn the Great, who had built the castle there during the early decades of the thirteenth century.

Like several other natives castles (e.g. Criccieth and Castell-y-Bere), Dolwyddelan was retained and renovated after the English conquest. Records show that in 1283 a new chamber block was added, along with a new bridge and a water mill.

Caernarfon

Just as with the first Welsh war, so too with the second: victory was cemented with a trio of new castles. Similarly situated on the coast, they were more ambitious than their predecessors, and more dramatic. Conwy, with its multiple towers and turrets, looks like something out of medieval romance, while Harlech, perched high on its famous rock, is one of the most visually striking castles ever built. It was at Caernarfon, however, that Edward and his architect pulled out all the stops. A giant fortress-palace, and the seat of the principality’s new government, this mighty castle also drew its power from the past. According to Welsh legend, Caernarfon was the birth place of the Roman Emperor Maximus (and apparently also his death place: in 1283, Edward discovered and reburied Maximus’s bones there, much as he had done with Arthur at Glastonbury). The fact that Maximus was also said to be the father of the Emperor Constantine, founder of Constantinople, almost certainly explains the castle’s unusual design: with its polygonal towers and different coloured bands of masonry, Caernarfon appears to be built in conscious imitation of Constantinople’s walls. Work continued after the revolt of 1294–95, during which the castle was damaged, but despite colossal expenditure it was never fully finished.

Llyn cwm Dulyn

In the spring of 1284, almost a year on from the end of hostilities, Edward I returned to Wales to consolidate his conquest. Besides issuing the statute of Rhuddlan (see above), the king orchestrated a host of special events, including the birth of his namesake son (and future successor) at Caernarfon on 25 April, and, later in the summer, a ‘Round Table’ tournament at Nefyn, where the prophecies of Merlin were said to have been discovered. Such Arthur-themed entertainment served an obvious political purpose, but one gets the strong impression that by this point Edward was also indulging a genuine enthusiasm. (The Welsh themselves seem to have picked up on this and pandered to it, presenting the king with a coronet they called ‘Arthur’s Crown’). Such enthusiasm would also explain why Edward’s itinerary that summer took him to so many remote locations, for several of them have legendary associations. Bardsey Island, said to be the burial place of 20,000 saints, was one. Another was Llyn cwm Dulyn, a deep, dark lake some ten miles south of Caernarfon, where Edward spent three whole weeks, including his 45th birthday. Was he waiting, one wonders, for Excalibur to be borne aloft from the waters?

Beaumaris

The Welsh revolt of 1294–95 had begun, in north Wales, on the Island of Anglesey, when the local people in the town of Llanfaes had lynched their English sheriff. The attack had exposed Anglesey as the weak link in Edward’s chain of castles, and the king responded by levelling Llanfaes and replacing it with one final giant fortress. Beaumaris, as its name implies, was built on marshy ground, rather than the usual rocky platform, and Edward’s architect responded by creating a moated castle of perfect symmetry. In terms of total area it was his bigger even than Caernarfon, with an outer perimeter that ran for a quarter of a mile, and a harbour that enabled ships of up to forty tons to dock at the water-gate. The castle’s island location meant that most of the building material had to be brought there by ship, and this, combined with the scale of the enterprise – at one stage there were almost 3,000 workers on site – meant that construction was hugely expensive. Unfortunately for Edward he was by this stage fighting new wars against France and Scotland which drained his treasury. As a result, Beaumaris, like Caernarfon, remained unfinished at the time of the king’s death in 1307.

12. The Riddle of the Winchester Round Table – Revealed

More so than any other medieval monarch, Edward I loved to travel. Every corner of Britain, most of Europe, and even the Holy Land – there were precious few places that this particular English king had not visited. At first glance, therefore, his arrival in Winchester in September 1285 might seem unremarkable – a routine royal pit-stop, notable only for the promulgation of some law-and-order legislation. In actual fact, this was the occasion for a great chivalric festivity, long since forgotten, but which probably explains the creation of one of the most intriguing of all medieval artefacts – the Winchester Round Table.

The Round Table at Winchester – ‘King Arthur’s Round Table’ – is justly famous. A giant disc of solid oak, eighteen feet in diameter and three-quarters of a ton in weight, it now hangs at the end of the Great Hall of what was once Winchester Castle. Obviously, the table has nothing to do with a real King Arthur (whisper it quietly – he never existed). Scientific analysis has proved that it was made at some point in the second half of the thirteenth century, and thus most likely dates from the reign of Edward I (1272–1307).

The current orthodoxy holds that the table was probably made in 1290, in connection with a two-day tournament that Edward staged in Winchester to celebrate the marriage of one of his daughters. A closer reading of the evidence, however, suggests that the true context of the table’s creation lies in the little-regarded royal visit of five years earlier. A glance at the names of those witnessing the king’s charters, for example, shows that in September 1285 Edward was surrounded by almost all his earls and most of his greater barons, but almost none of his bishops. Far from being a routine parliament, as historians have previously supposed, this was an exclusively secular assembly. Moreover, the unusual nature of the event finds powerful confirmation in the reliable (but hitherto overlooked) words of a contemporary chronicler. In his entry for 1285, the Worcester Annalist states laconically that ‘on the feast of the nativity of the Virgin [8 September] the king gave arms to 44 knights at Winchester’. In other words, Edward was involved in dubbing that day – creating new knights, en masse, surrounded by the greatest military men in his realm.

Creating a large number of knights at one time, while comparatively rare, was nothing new. Typically kings or other potentates would organize such grand ceremonies when they wanted to honour one especially important participant. (When, for instance, Edward himself was knighted by the king of Spain in 1254, the same accolade had been simultaneously bestowed on a crowd of lesser candidates.) Frustratingly, in the case of the Winchester ceremony, we know the names of only a handful of those present, and none of these men are important enough to have been the focus of festivities. Possibly the occasion was contrived in order to honour Edward’s nineteen-year-old nephew, John of Brittany, whose career on the tournament field appears to have begun around this point.

The king, however, clearly had other motives for organizing a mass knighting in the autumn of 1285. Earlier in the year he had ordered that all men in his kingdom with lands worth more than £100 a year should come before him to be knighted on 8 September – the same date, that is, on which the Winchester ceremony took place. This was quite unusual. English kings often decreed that their subjects with income above a certain level should take up arms, but normally they did so in order to raise money, reckoning that most men would rather pay a fine than actually have to bear the expense that knighthood entailed. In 1285, by contrast, Edward I seems genuinely to have wanted to increase the number of knights in his kingdom.

The reason for the king’s determination to dub on this occasion was his recent conquest of Wales. In 1282–83 Edward had driven huge armies into Snowdonia and extinguished its ruling dynasties, while much of 1284 had been spent touring the newly conquered territory (supervising, amongst other things, the construction of the mighty castles at Conwy, Harlech and Caernarfon). The scale of the victory was awesome, but it had inevitably led the king to place huge demands on his English subjects, and sparked arguments about the extent of military obligation – several times in the course of the conflict Edward had tried to compel men to take up arms. By revisiting the issue in 1285 Edward hoped to draw a line under these arguments, and to establish a clear precedent for the future, namely that men of certain economic means ought to be knights as a matter of course.

The conquest of Wales also explains why the dubbing ceremony should assume an Arthurian air. Of course, in the thirteenth century Arthur was immensely popular all over Europe, and nowhere more so than in England. For the English, however, the legendary king presented a peculiar problem because of his British origins – ethnically, the man that everyone admired so much was Welsh. Edward I set about squaring this circle by appropriating Arthur for himself, effectively rebranding the British warrior as an honorary Englishman. In 1278, for example, just months after the conclusion of his first war with Wales, the English king visited Glastonbury, and ceremoniously reburied the body that the local monks swore blind was that of Arthur. Similarly, in 1283, the conquered Welsh sought to placate their new overlord by presenting him with a trinket which they claimed was ‘Arthur’s crown’. The following year, as part of his victor’s progress, the Edward held a celebratory tournament at Nefyn, which contemporaries described as a ‘round table’.

Edward, in short, was an Arthurian enthusiast, and for political reasons – because of his recent engagement with Wales – his enthusiasm was probably at its peak in 1285. On his return to London in May that year, the king celebrated his victory once again for the benefit of the citizens, processing from the Tower of London – still decorated with the mouldering heads of the defeated Welsh princes – to Westminster Abbey, where he presented some of the religious relics he had liberated from Wales at the high altar. This was the immediate context for his decision to hold a mass knighting in four months’ time: the order to the £100 landowners to come before him and receive arms was given just two days later.

Short of an explicit statement on a royal roll – and, alas, a comprehensive trawl of the surviving documents has revealed no such nugget – we cannot be entirely certain. We can, however, be fairly sure that, having issued the order that would lead to the great chivalric gathering in September 1285, Edward would have started to plan the ceremony itself. He must have soon settled on Winchester, with its royal castle and resplendent great hall, as a suitable venue. And it also seems very probable that, being in an Arthurian frame of mind, and keen to be regarded in the same light as the legendary British king, Edward also let it be known that for this occasion he required a special centrepiece. Most likely it was that summer that royal carpenters assembled in Winchester and began, on the king’s instructions, to build him a great round table.

The Later Life of the Round Table

The Winchester Round Table was originally built to serve as a functional piece of furniture – that much is clear from the holes on its reverse side left by its twelve lost legs. Quite when these were removed to transform it into a wall hanging is unclear, but it may have been as early as the mid fourteenth century. It was certainly displayed in this manner by the late fifteenth century, to judge from the comments of a contemporary chronicler, and in the sixteenth century it was painted with its current decorative scheme, giving it in the unfortunate appearance of a giant dartboard. For hundreds of years thereafter it remained largely undisturbed, no doubt because of its immense weight and size; only in 1873, when the entrance to the hall was remodelled, was it moved from one end of the hall to the other. In the 1970s, however, a restoration of the hall meant that the table had to be moved again, allowing for a thorough scientific analysis under the direction of Martin Biddle, which led to the conclusion that it had been made in the reign of Edward I. All they got wrong, it seems, was the date.

Further Reading

Martin Biddle, King Arthur’s Round Table: An archaeological investigation (Woodbridge, 2000).

Marc Morris, ‘Edward I and the Knights of the Round Table’, Foundations of Medieval Scholarship: records edited in honour of David Crook, ed. P. Brand and S. Cunningham (York, 2008).

13. Slaying Myths: The Origins of the Cult of St George

As is widely appreciated, St George owes much of his popularity in England to the enthusiasm of Edward III. In 1348, when the king established the Order of the Garter, his super-select chivalric club, he picked George as its special patron, at the same time designating his birthplace, Windsor Castle, as the order’s spiritual headquarters, and rededicating the chapel there (formerly devoted to St Edward) in the saint’s honour. Just three years later the king was pleased to refer to St George in his letters as ‘the most invincible athlete of Christ, whose name and protection the English nation invoke as that of their patron, especially in war’.

This was, it seems, a considerable exaggeration. Recent historical writing, while still giving Edward III full credit for establishing George’s cult on the firmest of royal footings, has questioned the saint’s popularity with the English people as a whole. George may have been beloved of Edward and his knights, but it was not until the fifteenth century, in the wake of the victories of Henry V, that his cult really began to assume a truly national status. Moreover, while it is clear that Edward was particularly devoted to St George from an early age, it is also apparent that interest in the saint’s cult had been intensifying in royal and aristocratic circles for some time before the king’s accession.

The cult of St George, which originated in the eastern Mediterranean in the fourth century, transferred to England in two phases. He was known to the Anglo-Saxons, but only in his original manifestation as an early Christian martyr. To judge from the minimal number of references to him, he was never very popular in this guise, and some authorities – Bede, for example – clearly considered him to be a dubious addition to the saintly canon. By the time of the Norman Conquest, however, George had been reinvented as a Byzantine soldier-saint, and his new-found military prowess made him irresistibly popular with the knights of western Christendom, many of whom went east themselves in the course of the First Crusade. Indeed, a quantum leap for George’s popularity in the West was his reported appearance in aid of the First Crusaders during their successful siege of Antioch in 1098; soon thereafter we find some of the earliest images of St George as a knight on tombs and church doorways in England.

When did he move from the margins to the mainstream? One thing is now certain – the shift had nothing to do with Richard the Lionheart. Until very recently, any book on the subject of St George would invariably assert that his first flush of popularity in England, if not his introduction to these shores, was due to the devotion of the famous crusader king. Richard, it was confidently reported, had beheld a vision of George during the siege of Acre, rebuilt a church in his honour at Lydda, and, most significantly, had adopted the saint’s emblem – the red cross on a white ground – as England’s arms. This tradition, however, was completely discredited fifteen years ago by Oliver de Laborderie, who showed Richard’s connection with St George to be entirely spurious, a legend invented for political purposes at the Tudor court and unquestioningly accepted and embellished thereafter. Contemporary sources for Richard’s reign mention neither visions nor church-building, and inform us that the king and his crusaders wore white crosses, not red ones. Apart from the incidental fact that he was married in a church dedicated to St George, Richard has no demonstrable connection with him at all.

As far as can be determined, the earliest interest in St George in royal and aristocratic circles in England was expressed two generations after Richard’s death, in the middle decades of the thirteenth century. In 1245, for example, King Henry III paid a certain Henry the Versemaker for writing an account of George’s life, and a decade later he ordered an image of the saint to be installed over the entrance to the hall at Winchester Castle. Similarly, at some point before his death in 1251, Paulin Piper, one of the king’s closest courtiers, composed some lines of poetry (now sadly lost) in George’s honour, while in 1251 itself, William de Cantilupe, a baron with strong court connections, decided to call his firstborn son George – the earliest person mentioned in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography to bear that name after the saint himself.

Possibly this early English interest in St George had something to do with crusading – it is interesting to note that each of the above men – Henry III, Piper and Cantilupe – had taken the cross. At the same time, none of them actually went on crusade; their interest in George equally likely to have been stirred by the growing enthusiasm that his cult was attracting elsewhere in Europe. In England itself that enthusiasm remained muted. These are the only two references to connect Henry III with George in a 56 year reign, compared with the thousands that link the king to his favourite saint, Edward the Confessor, in whose honour he rebuilt Westminster Abbey. Likewise, young George de Cantilupe may have been the first of that name, but for a long time he was also the last. Of the 1550 entries in the Dictionary of National Biography for the thirteenth century, he is the only George.

If there was significant interest in St George at Henry’s court, it is less likely to have been driven by the king, whose model was the peaceable and pious Confessor, than by the more martial and mettlesome members of his family circle. Henry’s queen, for instance, Eleanor of Provence, was an avid reader of romance literature and an enthusiastic devotee of the cult of chivalry. A romance work written for her after Henry’s death contains only a passing reference to St George, but its very terseness shows that by this date (1270s) the saint had become a byword for knightly prowess.

More likely still to have been an advocate for St George was Henry’s son, the Lord Edward, later to reign as the formidable Edward I. Henry may have had no need for a military role model, but that was not true of Edward and his contemporaries, who hungered for glory on the tournament field, and who yearned to go on crusade. For these young men George would have been an ideal patron, and it is therefore probably significant that, when Henry’s reign collapsed into civil war, they rode into battle against Simon de Montfort wearing red crosses on a white ground – the earliest recorded use of the saint’s device in England, although not identified as such in the sources.

Unequivocal evidence of Edward’s identification with St George, and the biggest advance for his standing in England before the founding of the Garter, came in the course of the English conquest of Wales. In both his campaigns against the Welsh (1276–77 and 1282–83) Edward led armies that marched behind St George’s banner, and his infantry were issued with St George’s cross armbands, now explicitly described as such in royal financial accounts. The association of George with the conquest was further underlined on the king’s return to England in 1285, when he gave thanks for his victory by presenting four gold figures at the altar of Canterbury Cathedral: St Edward and St John, the favourites of his father, were now joined by St George and his horse.

Edward I was clearly not as singularly devoted to St George as his namesake grandson. Indeed, when it came to the heavenly host, he preferred to recruit as widely as possible. In later campaigns against the Scots his troops still carried George’s banner, but they also bore the arms of St Edward, St Edmund, St Cuthbert and St John of Beverley. Nor does Edward appear to have had any marked personal interest in George’s cult. He regularly gave alms St George’s day (23 April), but did the same for scores of other saints. More tellingly, in the inventory of royal relics taken after the king’s death in 1307, George finds no mention.

In this respect, therefore, the prominence given to St George during the conquest of Wales seems peculiar and precocious, and one naturally wonders what lay behind it. Edward, unlike his father, had not only taken the cross but had also been on crusade (1270–72); as an experienced holy warrior, it was perhaps unsurprising that his struggle against the Welsh should assume the aspect of a holy war. More tentatively, one cannot help but wonder, given the longstanding association of the Celtic peoples with the image of the dragon, whether George was invoked because of his special skills in the slaying department. Certainly the dragon legend, which had formed no part of George’s earliest lives, was known in England by this date.

Whatever the case, Edward I’s decision to invoke St George as his special patron during the conquest of Wales – the earliest recorded occasion on which English armies marched under St George’s banner – was a seemingly unique experiment, and George had to wait another two generations before he his pre-eminent status was assured.

Would he have had to wait so long, however, had events in 1284 taken a slightly different turn? In the wake of his conquest of Wales, Edward returned to Snowdonia for a series of carefully contrived victory celebrations, and on 25 April, his queen, Eleanor of Castile, gave birth at Caernarfon Castle to a son who would eventually become his father’s successor. But would Edward II have borne that name had he arrived just 48 hours earlier? Might the fourteenth century, rather than the eighteenth century, have seen our first King George?

14. 1290: The Watershed in Anglo-Scottish Relations

At the start of the year 1290, Edward I was fifty years old and at the height of his power. King of England for over seventeen years, he had been a legend for even longer. Half a lifetime earlier he had defeated and killed his notorious uncle, Simon de Montfort, at the Battle of Evesham; a little later, in his early thirties, he had travelled to the Holy Land on crusade – an adventure in which he had miraculously dodged death by surviving an attack from a knife-wielding Assassin. Above all there had been his conquest of Wales. During the first decade of his rule, Edward had decisively terminated Welsh independence with an awesome display of military power, still manifest today at Conwy, Harlech and Caernarfon, to name just the three most celebrated of his many Welsh castles.

Now, at the start of 1290, Edward was close to realizing an even greater goal. Since the conquest of Wales, his overriding ambition had been to lead a new crusade and recover Jerusalem. It was a project that had kept him busy for years, partly because of protracted negotiation with the papacy on the question of funding, but mainly because the other kings of Europe had been engaged in a fratricidal war. From 1286, Edward had spent over three years outside of England, trekking back and forth across the Pyrenees, trying to broker peace between France and Aragon, and to effect the liberation of his cousin, the captive king of Sicily. By the time he returned home in the summer of 1289, his plan was approaching fruition. The Sicilian king was free, peace seemed to be in prospect, and, at the end of the year, the pope proposed a financial package for the crusade that would require only minuscule fine-tuning. When, in January 1290, a parliament assembled in Westminster – the first in almost four years – Edward was pleased to receive an embassy from the Mongol il-khan of Persia, who professed to be ready to ally with the English king, and who promised to meet him outside the walls of Damascus in one year’s time.

The year 1290, moreover, looked set to be an annus mirabilis in more ways than one. Another subject for discussion in that parliament would have been the situation in Scotland. Almost four years earlier, on the eve of Edward’s departure for the Continent, the northern kingdom had suffered a terrible tragedy. King Alexander III, forty-five years old, vigorous and successful, had set out riding in a storm and tumbled over a cliff. The scale of the disaster was magnified by the fact that all three of his children by his first marriage had predeceased him, and the pregnancy of his second queen had ended after his death with the delivery of a stillborn child.

Yet out of this tragedy a golden opportunity had arisen, for Alexander had not died entirely without heirs. Five years earlier, his late daughter had been married to the king of Norway, and in their brief time together the young couple had produced a daughter of their own. This girl, only three years old at the time of her grandfather’s untimely end, was named Margaret, like her mother. But to posterity she is better known as ‘the Maid of Norway’. She was the last chance of survival for Scotland’s established line of kings, but also the hope of something far greater still.

What if this young girl, heiress to the throne of Scotland, were to marry a son of the king of England? Edward I had been hardly more lucky than Alexander III in his family: he and his wife Eleanor of Castile had produced at least fifteen, possibly sixteen children, but only six of them were still living in 1290, and only one of the survivors was a boy. Nevertheless, one boy was all that was required. If the six-year-old Edward of Caernarfon were married to the Maid, he would become king of Scotland in right of his wife. Any children they went on to have would one day stand to inherit two kingdoms. Perhaps, in time, they would seek to rule them as a united kingdom. What was on the cards in 1290, in short, was nothing less than a union of the crowns, over three centuries in advance of the eventual union of 1603.

To many modern ears, this may sound like a ridiculous suggestion. The textbooks tell us that England and Scotland were enemies for much of their history, and we are inclined to believe that it was ever thus. ‘March straight back to England,’ says Mel Gibson’s William Wallace to his English opponents in Braveheart, ‘stopping at every home you pass by to beg forgiveness for a hundred years of theft, rape and murder’. But this is the biggest of the film’s many nonsenses. Not only had there been no armed conflict between the two kingdoms for eighty years before 1296; during those eighty years, and for many decades beforehand, the English and Scots had been getting on like a house on fire.

This was largely because, since the twelfth century, Scotland been busy approximating itself to England. The Scots, led by the example of their kings, had embraced social, economic and moral standards that were normal south of the Border. At the same time, Englishmen – merchants, labourers and monks – began emigrating to Scotland in their thousands, helping to found new towns, or to establish new religious communities which retained their links with England. Meanwhile Scottish aristocrats built castles (such as Caerlaverock, near Dumfries) after the English example, and intermarried with their English counterparts. And this was also true of their respective royal families. Edward I’s aunt, Joanna (d. 1238) had been married to Alexander II (d. 1249), and his sister, Margaret (d. 1275) had been the first wife of Alexander III. Nothing could have been more natural, therefore, than another Anglo-Scottish royal wedding in 1290. In March that year, the magnates of Scotland assembled on the Border at Birgham, and unanimously agreed that the match should go ahead.

The only difficulty lay in deciding how the new relationship would work in practice. The Scots wanted a powerful protector for their infant queen, and Edward I was certainly that. But they were concerned that he might prove too powerful, and might make demands that would compromise Scotland’s independence. Thus, during the spring of 1290, there was much discussion between the representatives of the two nations. On many points they were able to reach agreement, but when it came to control of Scotland’s royal castles, there was deadlock. Edward was determined that the right to appoint their keepers should belong to him alone, and the Scots were equally adamant in their refusal to accept his demand.

For a while, therefore, the projected marriage hung fire, and Edward proceeded with other momentous business. In April he took the remarkable step of safeguarding England’s future stability by fixing the English succession on his daughters, should he and his namesake son die without other heirs. At the end of the month, one of these daughters – Joan – became the first of the king’s children to marry, taking as her husband the earl of Gloucester. A few weeks later Edward caused the body of his father, Henry III, to be moved to a new tomb in Westminster Abbey, subsequently decorated with the magnificent gilded-bronze effigy that can still be seen today. Later, on 9 July, there was more ceremony in the abbey when another of the king’s daughters, Margaret, was married with great pomp to the duke of Brabant. Lastly, on 18 July, Edward committed one of the most notorious acts of his entire career when, in return for a generous grant of taxation, and to the universal delight of his other subjects, he ordered the expulsion of all the Jews from England. It would be more than three centuries before they were allowed to return.

At length, as the summer drew to a close, there was a breakthrough in negotiations with the Scots, though not because either side had abandoned their earlier contrary positions. What seems to have happened is that, around the end of August, Edward learned that the Maid had set sail from Norway and was en route to Scotland, and that this intelligence obliged him to settle. The crucial question of castles was fudged; the Scottish envoys contented themselves with the statement that their keepers would be appointed ‘on the common advice of the Scots and the English king’. In return they received a clear statement safeguarding their country’s independence. In the most resonant phrase of the agreement, Edward promised that Scotland would remain ‘free in itself, and without subjection, from the kingdom of England’.

With the third royal wedding that year seemingly just weeks away, Edward sent his own envoys into Scotland, bearing jewels with which to welcome the Maid on her arrival. At the same time, he prepared to finalize his crusading plans. By this stage he had received a final offer from the pope to which he was ready to commit, and a small parliament of magnates was summoned to meet in Sherwood Forest in October in order to witness its approval. In the meantime, Edward took himself into Derbyshire and the Peak District for a spot of hunting.

Then the wheel of fortune turned and the king’s plans collapsed. When he arrived in Sherwood in mid-October, it was to the news that the Maid of Norway was dead. Probably she had been inadvertently poisoned by eating decayed food during her voyage. A fortnight later and the next blow fell. Eleanor of Castile, who had contracted a lingering malarial fever on the Continent the previous year, suddenly became seriously ill. Despite desperate efforts to save her, the queen died at the end of November. Edward had her body carried from Lincoln to London in a slow, mournful procession – every stop would later be marked with an ornate monumental cross – and buried in Westminster Abbey on 17 December. The king then retreated into a religious house at Ashridge in Hertfordshire, to spend Christmas and New Year in the deepest sorrow.

Eleanor’s death was more devastating in personal terms, but it was the death of the Maid that altered the course of history. Had the girl lived, the union of the crowns would have taken place in the autumn of 1290, and England and Scotland could have been peaceably united for generations to come. Edward might well have gone on crusade for a second time (in spite of the bad news from the north, he did ratify the pope’s offer), with Scotsmen fighting by his side, as had been the case during his first expedition. Closer to home, too, there would have been ample scope for Anglo-Scottish co-operation. Together, the English and the Scots, led by a single monarchy and their intermarried aristocracies, might have directed their energies into subjugating the peoples who dwelt in the northern and western extremities of the British Isles – the ‘wild Scots’ of the Highlands and Islands, and the ‘wild Irish’ – resulting in a single kingdom that was precociously united.

But none of this was to be. The Maid’s death left the Scots unable to agree on who should wear their country’s crown, and the king of England was invited to come and arbitrate between the two most obvious candidates. But when Edward emerged from his mourning at Ashridge, it was to announce a disastrous Plan B, ‘to reduce the king and kingdom of Scots to his rule’. To the Scots’ dismay, he came north insisting that he was Scotland’s rightful overlord. By coercion and intimidation he persuaded the two principal claimants, plus a host of other less credible contenders, to admit his superiority. At length he found in favour of John Balliol, who was forced to perform an unambiguous act of homage, to annul the guarantees of independence that had been given in 1290, and to travel to Westminster whenever the king of England demanded.

In this way, Edward I turned the Scots, who had long been friends and allies of the English, into their most embittered enemies. When, in 1294, war unexpectedly broke out between England and France, Scotland for the first time allied itself to the latter. The trend towards convergence in the British Isles was thereby arrested and thrown into reverse. Edward spent the last ten years of his life hammering away at the Scots, devastating their country with fire and sword in an effort to persuade them to accept his authority. In so doing, he established the hostile relationship between the two countries that persisted for the rest of the Middle Ages and beyond, and which in some respects persists even in our own day. Scotsmen had once striven to make themselves more like their cousins south of the Border; in the years before 1290, many of them had been pleased to christen their sons ‘Edward’. They would not do so in the future. ‘As long as a hundred of us remain alive’, they famously wrote to the pope in 1320, ‘we will never on any conditions submit to the dominion of the English’. It was a change of heart that had been caused by the death of a seven-year-old girl from Norway, and the terrible miscalculation of Edward I.

15. Lanercost Priory and Edward I

By the start of 1306, Edward I had lived longer, travelled further, and achieved more than any previous king of England. At sixty-six years old, he had visited not only every corner of Britain but also France, Belgium, Italy, Sicily, Spain, Sardinia, Cyprus, North Africa and the Holy Land. And, in the eyes of his contemporaries, he had performed the most praiseworthy deeds. He had fought against the infidels on crusade; he had, as one chronicler put it, ‘expelled the faithless multitude of Jews from England’, and he had – also to the great rejoicing of his English subjects – conquered Wales.

The great chain of castles that the king constructed to cement his victory over the Welsh are his most enduring architectural legacy. Caernarfon, Conwy, Harlech and Beaumaris, to name just the four most famous, are collectively recognized today as a World Heritage Site, and are a must-see for anyone even marginally interested in the medieval past. They are not, however, the focus of this present story, which is devoted to the last few months of Edward’s life, and a ruined monastic church in Cumbria, now in the care of English Heritage.

Lanercost Priory lies on the Anglo-Scottish Border, close to Hadrian’s Wall, which might seem a foolhardy place for anyone to have planted a religious community. Most people assume that during the Middle Ages England and Scotland existed in a state of perpetual hostility. But, in fact, for a century and more after Lanercost was founded in 1169, the two kingdoms had been getting on famously. English merchants and monks had emigrated to Scotland, helping to found new towns and monasteries; the aristocracies of the two realms had intermarried, and so too had their royal families: Edward I’s aunt, Joan, and his sister, Margaret, were both married to consecutive kings of Scots. The line of the Border on which Lanercost lies was fixed by treaty in 1237. Far from being a hostile frontier, this was a place where two cultures met and merged on peaceful terms and for mutual profit.

But all this changed in the 1280s, when a series of tragic deaths wiped out the Scottish royal family, leaving the Scottish throne with no obvious heir. Edward I was invited to help decide between the various claimants, but used the opportunity to browbeat the Scots into accepting him as their superior lord. Having found in favour of one candidate (John Balliol), he forced him to perform a humiliating act of homage, and repeatedly required him to appear in Westminster. Eventually the new Scottish king and his subjects decided that they would stand for no more, and sought to reclaim their lost independence. For the first time in over eighty years, the two countries went to war.

Naturally, this was bad news for those living at Lanercost. Within days of the war’s outbreak in 1296, the priory had been raided by the Scots – ‘dastardly thieves’, as the local chronicler described them – and the following year it was attacked again, this time by none other than William Wallace (‘that bloody man’, said the same chronicler). In general, however, this was a war in which the English had the best of the fighting. In 1304, after eight years of devastating English invasions, the Scots surrendered. The following year Wallace was captured and sent to London to be executed. Edward erected a new government in Scotland, to be overseen by an English governor. Scotland was declared to be a kingdom no longer, and was to have no new king.

Which brings us back to the start of 1306. Just when Edward thought his life’s work was complete, news came out of the north of a new Scottish rebellion, led by Robert Bruce, who resurrected his country’s claim to independence by having himself crowned king. Inevitably this meant the resumption of war, and within weeks a new English army was advancing into Scotland. But Edward I was not there to lead it. News of Bruce’s revolt coincided with (and thus possibly triggered) a sharp decline in his health. When the English king eventually set out northwards that summer, he had to be carried on a litter. His intended destination was Carlisle, but after three agonizing months he was forced to stop just twelve miles short of the city – at Lanercost Priory.

Religious houses were accustomed to receiving the kings of England from time to time as they toured their domains. Such stays, however, were always kept short, for the royal household was a monstrous and all-devouring beast. Edward arrived at Lanercost on 29 September 1306 with almost 200 people in tow – mostly grooms, cooks, carters, clerks and huntsmen – and that was just the core of his entourage. He would have been attended in addition by military men coming and going from the field, and also by the merchants, beggars and prostitutes that his household invariably drew in its wake. Lanercost had been once again been invaded by an army, albeit a friendly one.

But it was quite clear that, on this occasion, the army was going nowhere. Edward’s condition meant that he could not be moved, so his household proceeded to ensconce itself in the priory for the long haul. Soon teams of carpenters, plumbers and glaziers were arriving to build new chambers for the king, the queen and their manifold servants. Surviving household rolls reveal the considerable extent of the work. The priory precinct may appear peaceful and empty today; but in the winter of 1306 it must have resembled nothing less than a small town, crammed with new timber buildings and innumerable tents.

Edward’s household rolls also reveal something of his existence that winter. He travelled with vast quantities of gold and silver plate, including a pair of table knives with crystal handles. Food was obtained in huge quantities: scores of oxen and pigs, and cartloads of almonds, rice, sugar and bread. The other great expense was medicine: the king’s doctors ordered a cornucopia of spices, herbs and oils in their effort to prolong his life. Edward also had the benefit of the chests of holy relics with which he habitually travelled – a hoard that included a fragment of Christ’s cross appropriated from Wales, a piece of St Andrew’s cross taken from the Scots, as well as a saint’s tooth ‘effective against lightning and thunder’.

In the spring of 1307, Edward finally left Lanercost, but he never recovered his health. Soon after reaching Carlisle he fell sick again, and the rumour arose that he was already dead. In a grand gesture of defiance, the king gave up his litter, mounted his war-horse and led his army out of the city towards Scotland. Ten days later he died at Burgh by Sands on the Cumbrian coast, having advanced barely six miles.

Lanercost never recovered either. In 1292 its estates had been valued at a healthy £200 a year, but at the time of the Dissolution in 1536 that figure had shrunk to just £85. This decline in prosperity was due in part to the long centuries of hatred that Edward I had engendered by his attempt to conquer Scotland. But the decisive turning point in the priory’s fortunes had come in the winter of 1306–7, when for five months its resources had been decimated by the magnificent court of a dying English king.

Acknowledgements

The essays and articles in this collection were originally published in BBC History Magazine, History Today and Heritage Today (the magazine for members of English Heritage). The author would like to thank the editors and owners of these periodicals for their kind permission to reissue them here. Places of original publication are noted below.

1. Heritage Today, no. 89, March 2010.

2. Living History Magazine, vol. 1, April 2003.

3. BBC History Magazine, vol. 13, August 2012.

4. Heritage Today, no. 75, September 2006.

5. Heritage Today, no. 79, September 2007.

6. Heritage Today, no. 74, June 2006.

7. History Today, vol. 55, December 2005.

8. Heritage Today, no. 82, May 2008.

9. This article appears here for the first time.

10. History Today, vol. 58, March 2008.

11. BBC History Magazine, vol. 12, August 2011.

12. BBC History Magazine, vol. 10, March 2009.

13. History Today, vol. 59, April 2009.

14. BBC History Magazine, vol. 9, March 2008.

15. This article was written for Heritage Today but never published, and so appears here for the first time.

If you enjoyed Kings and Castles you may like to read:

History Today and Tomorrow

Paul Lay

History, at its best, calls everything into question. It offers no comfort, no shelter and no respite, it is a discipline of endless revision and argument. It forces its students to confront the different, the strange, the exotic and the perverse and reveals in full the possibilities of human existence. It is unafraid of casting its cold eye on conflict, both physical and intellectual. And there is more history than ever. It is his story, her story, our story, their story, history from above and from below, richer, more diverse and increasingly global. It has no end, as the benighted Francis Fukuyama discovered when the permanent present ushered in by the fall of the Berlin Wall came crashing down on September 11th, 2001. History opposes hubris and warns of nemesis. It doesn’t value events by their outcome; the Whig interpretation of history expired long ago.

The discipline has undergone major shifts. It took the pioneering work of Peter Burke in the 1970s and 1980s to make cultural history acceptable, widening the remit of the academy considerably: now there are histories of fashion, of shopping, of the family, even of perfume and the Internet, yet the histories of high politics and military conflict are still evident and more skilfullt researched and written than ever. There are many more female historians: Amanda Vickery and Lucy Worsley reveal the intimate lives of men and women in Georgian England, Helen Castor illuminates the impediments to female rule in the Middle Ages and Juliet Gardiner paints vivid portraits of the home front.

There is a substantial audience for serious history.  Programmes such as BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time and The History of the World in 100 Objects have captivated audiences worldwide. Historians outside the academy such as Simon Sebag Montefiore, Antony Beevor and AmandaForeman sell large numbers of critically acclaimed books to readers unafraid of challenging narratives. History Today continues to gain new subscribers and readers from around the world eager to explore history from every continent, encompassing all periods and genres. The reputation of British historians and the history departments in which they work alongside an international cast of excellence, remains high. History departments in universities elsewhere, from Turkey to China, now teach their students in English. The future of the study of the past appears bright. Nevertheless there are problems, imposed largely from without, which threaten the discipline’s well being. This personal account examines history’s current condition and points to its future.

To continue reading and discover more Endeavour Press titles go to: www.endeavourpress.com

Table of Contents

Copyright

1. English Castles – A Spotter’s Guide

2. Castles and Symbolism

3. The Castles of the Conqueror

4. Castle Acre and the

5. Goodrich Castle

6. Framlingham Castle and the Bigods

7. The King’s Companions

8. Introducing Edward I

9. Encapsulating Edward I

10. The Best of Kings, the Worst of Kings: A Reassessment of Edward I

11. The Conquest of Wales – A Visitor’s Guide

12. The Riddle of the Winchester Round Table – Revealed

13. Slaying Myths: The Origins of the Cult of St George

14. 1290: The Watershed in Anglo-Scottish Relations

15. Lanercost Priory and Edward I

Acknowledgements

Excerpt from History Today and Tomorrow