Edward I

by Michael Prestwich

  Warfare on Edward I’s scale had many effects on society. The methods used to summon men to fight did not merely reflect the social structure but influenced it. The burden of the demand for men, money and goods in support of the war effort was economically significant. The breakdown in law and order, which became marked in the later stages of the reign, was clearly linked to the king’s concentration on his military objectives. The intention of this book is to examine the way in which the problems of raising armies and financing war were dealt with, and to investigate the relationship of Edward I’s wars to administration, politics and society.

  II. Households and Retinues

  The cavalry troops formed the elite of the Edwardian army. There was a clear distinction between these men, many of whom were knights, prominent as landowners and officials in their counties, and the levies of footsoldiers. The king never tried to enforce cavalry service from men below the rank of those holding land worth twenty pounds a year. The cavalry were heavily armoured and fought with sword and lance. They were mounted on horses which were ‘barded’, or protected with armour and padding, and which might equal in value a year’s revenue from their lands. A knight would receive 2s. a day in pay, a sergeant-at-arms, whose equipment was similar, 1s., whereas the wage of an ordinary infantryman was only 2d. In the field the cavalry were organised and paid on a different system from the infantry, and it was rare for the two to be combined into a fully integrated force.

  The most important cavalry troops were those of the royal household. Tout, who did much to explain and elucidate the very important rôle played by the household — in particular the department of the Wardrobe — in the wars of Edward I, considered that the reign saw the process of ‘a little company of peace-time guards’ being enlarged ‘into the dimensions of a small army’.[33] But Tout, whose concern was mainly with the clerical element of the household, underestimated the military rôle of royal knights whose functions he considered to be chiefly administrative. It has been pointed out that the household of Henry I was far more like the developed military household of Edward I than he would have allowed. Just as Edward’s household knights provided one of the four battalions of the army which won the battle of Falkirk in 1298, so did those of Henry I form one of the divisions of the army at Brémule in 1119. The career of Robert Tiptoft in the household of Edward I can be paralleled by that of Brian Fitz-Count under Henry.[34] Later, even so unwarlike a king as Henry III could usually put at least 100 household knights into the field in an emergency, and there was a permanent core of thirty or more knights in receipt of annual fees at the Exchequer.[35]

  There was therefore nothing novel in the fact that Edward I’s household was more of a small army than a domestic establishment. In addition to the sergeants-at-arms who received £2 6s. 8d. a year in robes, the military element consisted of bannerets, paid £24 a year in fees and robes, knights who were given half as much, and squires who had only £2 a year in robes.[36] Edward had of course a substantial household before he came to the throne. According to Matthew Paris, he increased its size to two hundred horse after his first quarrel with his father, in 1256.[37] In 1261 he was expected to be able to put fifty knights into the field.[38] Naturally, many of the members of Edward’s household after his accession had served him during his father’s reign, and an important group of men were those who went on crusade with him. Roger Clifford was one of the Marcher lords whose adherence to Edward in the autumn of 1263 had done much to advance the royalist cause — he had already served as one of Edward’s bailiffs,[39] and had in the past been a household knight of Henry III. He went on crusade with the Lord Edward, taking with him nine knights, and was paid a fee of 1,000 marks.[40] Clifford served Edward in his Welsh wars, being entrusted with Hawarden castle in 1277. He was captured there by Prince Dafydd in 1282, and his career ended with his death in 1286.[41]

  Robert Tiptoft, an Essex man, was associated with Edward as early as 1260, and was in 1264 one of the knights garrisoning Bristol castle. A man of no great means initially, he profited considerably from the wave of confiscations of rebel property that followed Evesham. He took a retinue of five knights with him on crusade, and was rewarded on his return for his good service by appointment to the keepership of Nottingham castle. His importance is indicated by the recurrence of his name in lists of councillors in the early stages of Edward’s reign, but it was not until 1280 that he was given an office of great importance in the form of the Justiciarship of West Wales, also receiving the custody of the royal lands in those parts. Tiptoft served loyally in the Welsh wars, and fought in Gascony in the 1290s. He died in 1298, after a lifetime spent in Edward’s service.[42] Another who served Edward long and loyally was William Latimer. He went on crusade with him, fought for him in Wales, Gascony and Scotland, investigated the malpractices of his justices and officials, and was still retained as a banneret of the household in 1300, as was his son.[43] A more exotic figure was Otto de Grandson, a Savoyard brought to England in 1258 when he entered Edward’s service. He is found witnessing charters for Edward before his accession,[44] and the high regard the king had for him is indicated by his appointment as an executor when Edward made his will the day after he was wounded by an assassin in Syria. According to one account it was Grandson, not the queen, who sucked the poison from the wound. Otto served in Wales, and in 1284 was made Justiciar of North Wales, an office he largely exercised by deputy, for his main functions were diplomatic. As a Savoyard he was an obvious choice to negotiate on Edward’s behalf abroad. These activities took him away from the household, and after the early stages of his career he was never so closely associated with the household as were men like Latimer.[45]

  Important as the group of men who accompanied Edward on crusade were, including as it did Luke de Tany, Geoffrey de Geneville, Thomas de Clare and Hugh FitzOtto, in addition to those already mentioned,[46] they were but a small section of the household knights. How were men recruited for the household, how long did they serve, and what were their rewards? Unfortunately no actual agreements for service in the household survive, although there are two ordinances for the diet, robes, and allowances for horses and servants of two magnates’ sons, John de Warenne and Roger Mortimer, both of whom were squires in the household at the end of the reign of Edward I.[47] These do not suggest that the way by which the king retained men differed greatly from the methods of the major magnates. They received liveries of robes and fees twice a year, and were fed in the royal hall, though there was no question of their remaining permanently at court.

  There was a family tradition of service among the men who became household knights. John l’Estrange had been a household knight under Henry III, and two members of the family, Roger and his nephew John, were knights of Edward’s household. Among the familiar names in Edward’s household which are also found in his father’s are Rivers, Tregoz, Beauchamp, Grey, Oddingseles, Turberville and Gorges.[48] In 1300 Walter Beauchamp as steward of the household was in command of his son Walter; and William Charles, an earlier steward, was followed in the royal service by his son Edward. Three members of the Gascon family of Ferre were household knights: Guy senior, Guy junior, and Reginald. In addition to the family partnerships of the Beauchamps and the Latimers, John Russel, a veteran Montfortian, and William Russel were also serving in the household in 1300. Examples could be multiplied, with the families of Badlesmere, Bikenore, le Brun, Cantilupe, Felton, Hausted, Knoville, Leyburn, Maulay, Morham, Segrave, Sulleye and Welles each providing two household knights during this period from 1297 to 1306.[49]

  Often, men were brought straight into the household as knights, especially when military needs made it necessary to augment the household strength, as in 1297 when twenty-two knights were enrolled to meet the demands of the expedition to Flanders for additional household troops.[50] But many entered the household at a lower rank. John 1’Estrange, Alexander Freville, Thomas de Bikenore, Robert de Bures and William Felton, to name only a few, all began their careers as squire
s.[51] Eustace de l’Hacche first appears in the household records as a sergeant-at-arms in 1276. He was a knight by 1285, a banneret by 1300, and was still in receipt of fees within two years of his death in 1306. His devotion to Edward’s service brought him honour and promotion, but — according to his executors — no riches. They were forced to petition for payment of what was due to him for robes, wages and loss of horses in royal service; unless this was made the many legacies left by Eustace to the Holy Land and to his dependants could not be paid.[52]

  The majority of this tightly-knit body of knights were English, but Edward also employed Gascons and Spaniards. Naturally during his stay in Gascony from 1286 to 1289 many local men were brought into the household,[53] and in 1297 four Gascons and one Aragonese were admitted.[54] Arnold de Gaveston, father of the notorious Piers, was a household knight in the late 1280s, and again in 1301.[55] The Gascon Arnold de Cavapenna’s household career lasted from at least 1285, when he was a squire, until 1301.[56] Aragon provided Jaime, señor de Gerica, and Pascual of Valencia, known as the adalid.[57] These men were full members of the household, in a different category from the handful of foreigners who appear in the wardrobe accounts of the years up to 1297 as receiving annual pensions, but did not attend the royal court regularly.[58] A further class of foreigner present in Edward’s household during the first half of the reign was that of the sons of foreign rulers, sent to England to receive an education at the court of a king who, following his crusade, had an extremely high reputation on the continent. Both John II, duke of Brabant, who married Edward’s daughter Margaret in 1290, and John, count of Holland, who married another daughter, Elizabeth, in 1297, spent much of their childhood in Edward’s household.[59]

  The earliest list of Edward I’s reign showing the establishment of the household knights dates from 1284-5, and reveals that fourteen bannerets and eighty-seven knights were in receipt of robes.[60] Eight men are named as commiltones, a term which Denholm-Young tentatively suggested meant that they were ‘more equal’ than their fellows: he felt that use of the word might ‘point to the intention of founding some confraternity or military order’.[61] But the account makes it clear that this word was simply used of knights serving with a companion, so that although only eight men are named, payments to sixteen knights were made. These men had presumably made agreements of mutual assistance with their partners; they were ‘brothers-in-arms’.[62] An account of fees for the next year makes no mention of this category of commiltones. It shows that at Michaelmas 1285 twenty bannerets and fifty-six knights were paid fees, and that by the following Easter numbers had fallen to thirteen bannerets and thirty-nine knights.[63] A wardrobe book of the next two years shows that fees were paid to some eighty bannerets and knights,[64] but in 1289, when the household was in Gascony, the strength stood at about fifty knights and ten bannerets.[65]

  The period of almost continuous warfare after 1294 did not see the expansion of the force of household knights that might have been expected. In 1297 only ten bannerets and twenty-six knights were listed as being in receipt of fees, but of the twenty-two new recruits to the household only two appear in the fees section of the account.[66] By 1300, although the number of bannerets had risen to thirty, there were only fifty knights,[67] and despite a campaign in Scotland in the following year, the size of the military establishment was cut sharply, to eighteen bannerets and thirty-six knights. As a result, expenditure on fees was reduced from £590 to £350.[68] For the rest of the reign numbers continued at much the same level. In 1303 there were twenty-three bannerets and thirty-one knights,[69] and in 1306 seventeen bannerets and twenty-eight knights.[70] Besides changes in personnel, the documents also reveal that in the 1280s the class of commiltones disappeared, and that at the end of the reign the proportion of bannerets to knights rose.[71]

  The class of squires retained by the household included many who never attained knighthood, while it also comprised sons of nobles like John de Warenne and Roger Mortimer. In the winter of 1296-7 there were almost 100 squires in receipt of robes, but by the following summer the figure was nearer seventy. In 1300 there were about sixty in all,[72] and the same number in 1304,[73] but by 1306 numbers had fallen to fifty. In the 1280s there had been over thirty sergeants-at-arms, and in 1306 they numbered only fifteen.[74] All the indications are that, far from increasing the military establishment of the household, towards the end of the reign financial stringency forced an appreciable reduction in its size. Regrettably there are no lists of the household for the Welsh wars of 1277 and 1282 that can be compared with those of the Scotch campaigns, but in 1277 Edward had a corps of some forty household knights and seventy sergeants immediately available to fight for him in Wales, which suggests that the total number retained must have been appreciably higher.[75]

  The lists of the household knights show a higher degree of continuity of personnel in royal service than was usual in the retinues of the great magnates. Almost 150 men are named in the entries in these lists for the period from 1297 to 1306. About 100 of these occur more than once, while of the other fifty, some were men whose service in the household ended in 1297, and eleven were knights newly admitted in 1306. A few men, however, departed from the service of the crown after a very brief period. Of the twenty-two admitted in 1297, seven never appear in later lists, but of these, four were Gascons, which makes their disappearance very explicable. Nonetheless, there is a striking lack of continuity between the lists of royal knights in the 1280s and those of the later years of the reign. Only twenty-one of the eighty men in the household in 1285-6[76] feature in the later lists, and only ten of those in receipt of fees in 1288-9 appear again.[77] The reason for this changeover of personnel is simple. Moor has worked out the biographies of fifty-three of the eighty household knights of the 1280s.[78] Fourteen were still in the household in 1297 or later. One man, Simon de Grey, abjured the realm for felony,[79] eight had retired from royal service, including Roger l’Estrange, a loyal veteran of the Welsh wars who from 1298 was too ill to take any part in public affairs.[80] But no less than thirty were dead by 1297, and this is why the corps of household knights changed in composition.

  The household knights of the early years of Edward I’s reign were very much of one generation. In the Welsh wars the king was able to rely on the service of men of roughly his own age and sympathies. The majority had been royalists in the Barons’ Wars, though there were exceptions, of whom the most striking was the leader of the Disinherited, John d’Eyville.[81] A typical figure was Hugh Turberville, whose connection with Edward went back to 1263, when he had been made constable of Carmarthen and Cardigan castles. He was one of the obstinate Marcher lords who refused to accept the defeat of Lewes and continued the war, even attempting to rescue Edward from custody at Wallingford. For a time he served in Gascony, but resigned the Seneschalship in 1272 and returned to England. He fought in Wales in 1277 and 1282, was engaged in recruiting infantrymen on the latter occasion, became constable of Bere castle and acted as Otto de Grandson’s deputy in North Wales. He was also a member of an embassy to Germany late in 1283. He died in 1293. His son Thomas was also a household knight, but — in great contrast to his father — turned traitor in 1295.[82]

  During the Scotch wars of the latter part of the reign the king was served by a younger body of men, who must have lacked the sense of being the king’s companions in arms that the men who fought in Wales possessed. Many of them were the sons of those who had served Edward in his youth and prime. One of the most notable knights of the later years was Robert Clifford, the grandson of the Roger Clifford who had served the king so well and loyally earlier.[83]

  The main activity of the military establishment of the household was, of course, fighting. Each of the household bannerets and knights would have a small troop of his own retainers, so that the total number of men that the household could put into the field was very considerable. In addition, men might be paid wages by the household simply for the duration of a campaign, so increasing
its military strength further. In fact, almost all the paid troops employed by Edward I received their wages from the household, so that it has been suggested that ‘the king’s army was essentially the household in arms’.[84]

  The accounts for the Welsh wars do not distinguish as clearly as do some later documents between the permanent household troops and other paid cavalry forces. Some squadrons composed solely of household men can be identified in the war of 1277, but many household bannerets and knights were divided up between different commands, serving alongside men who were being paid for the duration of the war only and were not permanently retained. For instance, Grandson with a retinue of fifteen and Leyburn with one of ten were both serving on the middle March in a squadron commanded by Henry de Lacy, the earl of Lincoln. Other household bannerets, among them Ralph Daubeny and Alan Plukenet, were serving for pay in South Wales under Payn de Chaworth, who as a Marcher lord was not accepting wages from the king. In this first Welsh war there were probably at least 300 paid cavalrymen, and possibly more: the incomplete nature of the records makes exact calculation impossible.[85]

  Documentation is fuller for the second Welsh war, but the main cavalry pay roll is not organized in a way which facilitates calculations,[86] and detailed accounts for the subsidiary armies engaged in the campaign do not survive. Morris calculated that the headquarters army at Chester was composed of almost 300 paid troops in June 1282, while a paid squadron of about 100 cavalrymen was sent to fight in the south.[87] It was customary for the king to recompense any of those in royal pay whose horses were lost on campaign, and to prevent fraudulent claims a brief description and valuation of each man’s horse was enrolled. The list of horses for this campaign gives the names of some 600 men, but not all of these were serving at the same time: the document includes men who joined the army as late as December 1282.[88] Similar horse valuation lists give details of the contribution made by the household to the army. On 5 April 1282 a council was held at Devizes, where plans for the war were discussed and household troops, numbering 116 in all, mustered.[89] Later, as the campaign proceeded, the number of household troops was very considerably increased: one document lists thirty-six bannerets and knights, who with their retinues provided a force of 173 heavy cavalrymen. In addition, there were seventy-two squires separately organized in seven constabularies, bringing the total to 245, which probably represents the total of the household forces engaged in the war.[90] It therefore seems probable that the household contributed roughly one-third of the paid cavalry engaged by Edward I.