The Demon's Brood (15 page)

In the summer of 1270 Edward crossed to France, then sailed from Aigues-Mortes to join the Eighth Crusade at the siege of Tunis, where he learned that its leader, his uncle Louis IX, had just died. He sailed on to Palestine, landing at the capital, Acre, in May 1271 with less than a thousand troops. The kingdom of Jerusalem, now a mere strip of land along the coast, was reeling from the attacks of Sultan Baibars of Egypt, a Kipchak Turk who sometimes skinned prisoners alive. All that Edward could do was to lead a few raids.

Nevertheless, in June 1272 Baibars tried to murder him, using a Muslim whom the English trusted. Coming to his tent late at night when he was alone, the man stabbed him with a poisoned dagger, and, although Edward killed his assailant, he nearly died. The story of his wife sucking the venom from his wound is improbable – more likely, the flesh around it was cut away – but he made a complete recovery.

When Edward left Acre for Sicily in September 1272, the kingdom of Jerusalem was no more secure than when he arrived, but he had gained enormous prestige. He also made useful friends – Archbishop Tebaldo Visconti, a pilgrim to the Holy Land, and Fra' Joseph de Chauncy, Prior of the Knights Hospitaller of England, whom he made his treasurer. He had learned, too, how impregnable castles supplied from the sea could protect exposed territory.

In Sicily, news came of the deaths of his five-year-old son John and of King Henry. When the Sicilian king, Charles of Anjou, marvelled that Edward mourned his child so little and his father so much, he answered that he could beget another son but fathers were irreplaceable. At Orvieto he was greeted magnificently by his friend Visconti, now Pope Gregory X. He also received a warm welcome in Savoy from his mother's kindred, staying at the count's new castle of St Georges d'Esperance and meeting its architect, James of St George. In France, the Count of Chalons-sur-Marne tried to seize him during a tournament, hoping to extract a rich ransom – instead, Edward captured the count. At Paris he paid neatly phrased homage to St Louis's son, Philip III, ‘for all the lands I ought to hold from you'.
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Landing at Dover on 2 August 1274, Edward and Eleanor were crowned at Westminster a fortnight later. As Stubbs says, ‘He had all the powers of Henry II without his vices and he had too that sympathy with the people whom he ruled.'
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The ceremony was attended by the King of Scots, Alexander III, who paid homage.

By now central government was increasingly sophisticated, with the Exchequer for revenue, the Chancery for law and administration, and the Wardrobe for the executive. Edward found the right man to manage these departments, a young chancery clerk from Shropshire, Robert Burnell, who understood what he wanted. When appointed chancellor (in place of justiciar), Burnell established the Chancery court at London so that it no longer accompanied the king on progress. Ignoring Burnell's greed and scandalous private life, Edward got the best out of him, even if eventually it cost the Crown over eighty manors.

The upheavals of the 1260s had resulted in a dramatic rise in murder, robbery, rape and arson. Edward's solution was a team of judges who prosecuted on the slightest evidence of wrongdoing. Accompanied by the judges of King's Bench, he spent the winter on progress through the Midlands and southern England, finding so much proof of extortion, bribery, embezzlement and wrongful imprisonment that he dismissed nineteen sheriffs. Equipped with a list of forty questions supplied by him, commissioners investigated abuses in each hundred, especially of Crown rights and revenues by local landowners, and of extortion by bailiffs (sheriffs' officials). Tagged by countless parchment slips with the seals of those who made depositions, their reports – the Hundred Rolls – became known as the ‘ragman rolls'.

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

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

‘Elegantly built, enormously tall, he towered head and shoulders above ordinary men', says the Dominican Nicholas Trivet, who often saw him. ‘His hair, in boyhood between silver and yellow, became darker during his youth, turning swan white when he grew old. His forehead, like the rest of his face, was broad while he had a drooping left eye that gave a certain look of his father. He spoke with a slight lisp, but was always eloquent in arguing or persuading. His arms, as long as the rest of his body, were muscular and ideally suited for swordsmanship. His girth was widest round the chest. His long legs helped him keep a firm seat when riding the most mettlesome horse.'
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High spirited, Edward was only saddened by the death of those he loved. His greatest fault was a temper he sometimes regretted. As a young man, he ordered his attendants to put out the eyes and crop the ears of a youth who had angered him. During his daughter Elizabeth's wedding to the Count of Hainault, he snatched the coronet off her head and threw it in the fire, while more than once he struck courtiers or servants. A dean of St Paul's who tried to rebuke him dropped dead from fright. Yet he could be merciful. ‘Forgiveness?' he once said. ‘Why, I'd give that to a dog if he asked me for it.' He knew how to be gracious and had a sense of fun, losing a war horse on a bet with his laundress and buying it back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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