This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  And that no usuries shall run in time coming from the feast of St Edward last past. Nothwithstanding the covenants before made shall be observed, saving that the usuries shall cease. But all those who owe debts to Jews upon pledge of moveables shall acquit them between this and Easter; if not they shall be forfeited. And if any Jew shall lend at usury contrary to this Ordinance, the King will not lend his aid, neither by himself or his officers for the recovering of his loan; but will punish him at his discretion for the offence and will do justice to the Christian that he may obtain his pledges again.

  And that the distress for debts due unto Jews from henceforth shall not be so grievous but that the moiety [part] of lands and chattels of the Christians shall remain for their maintenance; and that no distress shall be made for a Jewry debt upon the heir of the debtor named in the Jew’s deed, nor upon any other person holding the land that was the debtor’s before that the debt be put in suit and allowed in court.

  And if the sheriff or other bailiff by the King’s command hath to give Saisin to a Jew be it one or more, for their debt, the chattels shall be valued by the oaths of good men and be delivered to the Jew or Jews or to their proxy to the amount of the debt; and if the chattels be not sufficient, the lands shall be extended by the same oath before the delivery of Saisin to the Jew or Jews, to each in his due proportion, so that it may be certainly known that the debt is quit, and the Christian may have his land again; saving always to the Christian the moiety of his land and chattels for his maintenance as aforesaid, and the chief mansion.

  And if any moveable hereafter be found in possession of a Jew, and any man shall sue him the Jew shall be allowed his warranty if he may have it; and if not let him answer therefore so that he be not therein otherwise privileged than a Christian.

  And that all Jews shall dwell in the King’s own cities and boroughs where the chests of the chirographs of Jews are wont to be.

  And that each Jew after he shall be seven years old, shall wear a badge on his outer garment that is to say in the form of two tables joined of yellow fait of the length of six inches and of the breadth of three inches.

  And that each one, after he shall be twelve years old pay three pence yearly at Easter of tax to the King whose bond-man he is; and this shall hold place as well for a woman as for a man.

  And that no Jew shall have the power to infeoff another whether Jew or Christian of houses, rents, or tenements, that he now hath, nor to alien in any other manner, nor to make acquittance to any Christian of his debt without the special licence of the King, until the King shall have otherwise or ordained therein.

  And forasmuch as it is the will and sufferance of Holy Church that they may live and be preserved, the King taketh them under his protection, and granteth them his peace; and willeth that they be safely preserved and defended by his sheriffs and other bailiffs and by his liege man, and commandeth that none shall do them harm or damage or wrong in their bodies or in their goods, moveable or immovable, and they shall neither plead not be impeaded in any court nor be challenged or troubled in any court except in the court of the King whose bondmen they are; and that none shall owe obedience, or service or rent except to the King or his bailiffs in his name unless it be for their dwelling which they now hold by paying rent; saving the right of Holy Church.

  And the King granteth unto them that they may gain their living by lawful merchandise and their labour, and that they may have intercourse with Christians in order to carry on lawful trade by selling and buying. But that no Christian for this cause or any other shall dwell among them. And the King willeth that they shall not be reason of their merchandise be put to lot and soot nor in taxes with the men of the cities and boroughs where they abide; for that they are taxable to the King as his bondmen and to none other but the King.

  Moreover, the King granteth unto them that they may buy houses and castilages in the cities and boroughs where they abide, so that they hold them in chief of the King; saving unto the lords of the fee their services due and accustomed. And that they may take and buy farms or land for the term of ten years or less without taking homages or fealties or such sort of obedience from Christians and without having advowsons of churches, and that they may be able to gain their living in the world, if they have not the means of trading or cannot labour; and this licence to take land to farm shall endure to them for fifteen years from this time forward.

  Jews were to cease usury; they now had to live in effectual ghettos and were restricted in how far they could travel; and any Jew over the age of seven had to wear the yellow star of David on the sleeve. This racial identification predated by eight centuries, therefore, the distasteful practice adopted elsewhere in Europe. On the brighter side for the Jews, the King did promise to protect them with equal rights of any other in his realm. But the restrictions on what the Jews could do meant that many became poverty-stricken and left England. For those who waited, expulsion came in 1290. It was inevitable. Apart from social discrimination, the spread of the Italian banking system made it easier for the barons and feudal rulers to get money. The Jews who managed to continue to trade for the limited period allowed had less money to lend and therefore they could not compete so easily with the rates of the bankers. Then, two years after the Statute of Jewry, Edward I seized all Jewish property and took it into Crown ownership. Anyone who had borrowed from a Jewish usurer now owed that debt to the Crown. It could not end there. In July 1290, Edward I published the Edict of Expulsion and Jews were given until 1 November 1290 to leave England or be imprisoned and even executed. Most Jews, perhaps 3,000, had to leave. Others stayed and some secretly returned. None professed their faith for fear of death.

  Not only for the Jews was the England of Edward I a period of quickly changing fortune. Margaret was about to become Queen of Scotland, to be quickly followed by John Balliol. The Welsh, once more, revolted against the English. Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, Prince of Wales, was killed and Dafydd, who succeeded his brother Llywelyn, was captured and executed. And as the century drew to an end, the Scot William Wallace defeated the English at Stirling Bridge, only to be vanquished the following year at Falkirk before escaping to France.

  The population of England had doubled since the Conquest. By now it was probably about three million. The villages had grown, split into three or four communities, and the land that had been ravaged by the Conqueror was restored. Towns thrived. Newcastle became the centre of the only big coalfield of the time. Lynn (later King’s Lynn) became the port for the Fens, Hull for York. It was a land of exporters and importers: wool (the equivalent of modern-day oil to the finances of medieval England) was sent to Flanders where the best weavers were to be found; corn went to Norway and to France; and fish to the Continent. In return came timber, French and Italian wines, currants, jewels, ginger and peppers. Peppers were so important that tradesmen had banded together to form the Guild of Pepperers in 1180. As we shall see later, by the sixteenth century peppers and spices became the focus for the huge investments in Asian commercial exploration that led to the founding of the East India Company and, with sugar, were responsible for the building of the British Empire. The twelfth-century pepperers became merchants and they started dealing ‘en gros’ – hence the word, grocers.

  But this was not a wealthy and sophisticated society. Most people were peasants and while they were no worse off than at the time of Domesday, there’s little evidence that their lot had much improved. Magna Carta and social and legal reform did not make people wealthier. The rich were richer and the divide between the haves and have-nots was greater. Perhaps the biggest change came from the King himself. Edward I set out to remove as much corruption as was convenient so to do. His principal reformer was his Chancellor, the Bishop of Bath and Wells Robert Burnell, who built what is still the chapel of Wells Cathedral, to which his remains were taken after his death at Berwick. Burnell was to be an indispensible figure at Edward’s court and had looked after his interests during the interregnum between Henry II’s death a
nd Edward’s enthronement.

  Burnell was born c.1239 in Shropshire and became a clerk in the royal chancery. It was there that he learned the vagaries of administration as well as the formal style and script of court writing. It was from the chancery that he joined Edward’s household and became his personal clerk (we would probably describe him as a private secretary) at the end of 1264. Six years later, Burnell, surely for services to Edward, was appointed Archdeacon of York. In fact, Edward wanted him to be Archbishop of Canterbury, but the canons frustrated even the King’s wishes (and then the Pope frustrated theirs by appointing his own man, Robert Kilwardby).

  But Burnell was not denied promotion and in April 1275 he was consecrated Bath and Wells. It may have been expected that Edward could now be in a position to have Bishop Burnell elected to Canterbury, but perhaps because he kept a mistress rather publicly, Pope Nicholas III turned him down. Burnell was not to be remembered as a Bishop but as the King’s Chancellor. He restructured the way in which the important departments of State worked and it was he who established the department of Chancery and the treasury, the Exchequer, in London. As well as organizing the King’s household, Burnell made sure that his own house was in good order, particularly financially. When he died in October 1292, he was said to have eighty manor houses throughout the country, particularly in Worcester, Kent and Surrey. He needed to leave a good legacy; like many clergy of the time in eccentric orders of chastity he fathered many children. However, Burnell should be remembered not as a man of fortune and office but as someone who above all things looked after the interests of his King.

  But Edward’s personal world had changed for the worse. His wife, Eleanor of Castile, had died, as had his mother, Eleanor of Provence, and his two eldest sons. The loss of his wife was particularly sad for him. He was clearly in love with her; it had not been a medieval marriage of convenience. Eleanor had been with Edward on his Crusade in 1270. In 1290 she died at Hadby in Nottinghamshire. Her body was brought to London and that last journey can be traced because Edward built crosses everywhere the cortège stopped. He built them at Lincoln, Grantham, Stamford, Geddington, Northampton, Stony Stratford, Woburn, Dunstable, St Albans, Waltham and, perhaps most famously, in London at Charing Cross. The word Charing comes from the Saxon word ‘cierring’ that means a bend or a turn – in this case the bend in the River Thames. Charing was a hamlet at the entrance of the royal mews of the Palace of Westminster. The cross was made of oak, but later replaced by a marble monument. It eventually fell to ruin and was replaced again after the Commonwealth of Cromwell in 1675 by a statue of the mounted Charles I.

  Four years after Eleanor’s death and still in mourning, Edward went to war with France. He would seem to have been forced into that war, as what had gone before suggested that he had not wanted war. Edward had come to an arrangement – a token surrender of the English garrisons in Gascony – so that the French King, Philip IV, known as Philip the Fair (1268–1314) could show that his position of overlord was recognized. The matter did not rest. The token surrender became absolute. Edward had to raise money for the campaign and even needed to justify it. He did so by calling together a council, a Parliament that imposed heavy taxes on an already impoverished people. The winter of 1294 was a winter of open discontent. The nation muttered against the King. The Welsh rebelled. The Scots renewed an alliance with France. The barons and earls grew openly against him. Entries in the record of Walter of Guisborough give some idea of the heated debate with the king.

  The king held his Parliament near at Salisbury where he asked certain of the magnates to cross over to Gascony. They began to excuse themselves. And the king was very angry and threatened some of them, that either they went or he would give their lands to others who were willing to go. And many were offended at this and a split began to appear between them.

  The Earl of Hereford and the Earl Marshal said they would gladly go if the King marched with them. But the King wanted them to march without him. A bitter argument flared up and the Earl Marshal walked out.

  The two Earls, Hereford and the Earl Marshal, joined by many magnates and more than thirty picked banners, grew into a multitude. They numbered 1500 men on armed horses ready for war and the King began to fear them. They went off to their own lands, where they would not allow the King’s servants to take either wool or hides or anything whatever out of the ordinary or to exact anything from anyone against his will. Indeed they forbade them entry to their lands.

  Edward I sailed for Flanders but the recalcitrant earls and barons rode into London and demanded that Magna Carta and extensions and protocols covering taxes on wool and hides (which Edward was exacting to pay for the war), liberties of the clergy and people, and much more, should be accepted by the King. Edward by that time was in Ghent. He accepted the principles, but acceptance and observance are different matters. Eventually, at another Parliament, this time held at Lincoln, solemn agreement was reached. The agreement was more than simple triumph. Here was a point of constitutional principle that declared the King did not have total power and could not therefore order his knights and nobles to ride with him into war. If they did not want to go, then they could argue their case. This was not a triumph for the barony, more the establishment of case precedent. The second consequence of the challenge to the monarch’s authority was that it led to the eventual change in the structure, purpose and manner of an army. If the King could not rely on the barons to send soldiers on demand, then a new type of army had to evolve. It did not happen overnight, but here was the beginning of the professional army, a standing group of soldiers paid for their services rather than being obliged to go to war under the feudal system. The third precedent to evolve over time was that after this confrontation, it became clear that the King would have to accept that his powers were no longer unquestioned and that in future Parliament would have to be asked to give its authority in such major issues as tax raising and making war.

  Since the end of the twelfth century, the English kings had fought their own clergy, barons and earls. The clergy refused to accept that, in matters spiritual, kings were above the Church. The barons were protecting their own interests. But there was a constant in the conflict between monarch, people, Church and baronage. It was this: the English kings were devoted to protecting their interests in France. It was, after all, where they came from. And their magnates had land, titles and families across the Channel. So for a long time after the Conquest it was easy for the king to convince his nobles, and therefore their exchequers, to fight for him in France. But by the second half of the thirteenth century, fewer of the English magnates were directly tied to Continental lands. The king’s difficulty then was to persuade them to come up with the money, as well as the soldiers, for overseas expeditions.

  By the closing years of the thirteenth century, successive kings had been so obsessed with their French campaigns that they had never properly dealt with the threat closer to home. It began in Scotland and, more immediately, in Wales. The king’s sentries at the Scottish and Welsh borders were the Marcher Lords. The Marches (from the Norman French marche as an edge) were the borders, often imprecisely denoted between two States, but not necessarily two peoples. The Marcher Lords had an enormous responsibility of keeping the order in the borders, but they also held two particular forms of power. Firstly, because they had considerable armed resources for their duty, they could with impunity raid either side of the border for their own gains – here was a good use of the medieval term ‘robber baron’. Secondly, as powerful barons, they continuously suggested a threat to the monarch himself. Edward was not the first or the last king to assume that the Marcher Lords could easily be the source of palace revolution.

  As for the people the Marcher Lords were there to contain the Welsh, in particular; they rarely had need to raid into England. When they were pursued by the Marchers, then the Welsh had the advantage of home turf, or rather home granite. They knew better than the barons the often treacherous terrain on their sides of
the borders. Moreover, like the Scots, geography had a great deal to do with the character of the Welsh and their relations with the English. Warring Welsh chieftains had long had the tactic of being able to withdraw to the hills and mountains, and even across the sea to Ireland. Their biggest disadvantage was not so much the power of the Marcher barons; like the Scots, the Welsh were often at each other’s throats. Neither in Wales nor in Scotland was there a national purpose. Why? Mainly because there may have been an identifiable nation but there was no State as we understand the term. Certainly, we cannot claim that in most medieval States there was anything as definable as national purpose. One nation could detest another, but marshalling that detestation and prejudice into an uncompromising force was quite another thing. What brought a nation to war as a cohesive force was leadership behind the strength of the ruler with one obvious faculty being obligation either to monarch or feudal lord. There was no such obligation and sense of national strength among Scots and certainly not among the Welsh where local jealousies were apparently stronger than some claim of Welsh unity. Even when great Welsh lords such as Rhys ap Tewdwr or Owen Gwynedd commanded the country, family feuds dissipated resolve.

  This variable sense of unity of the Welsh was, of course, a conundrum for the English. There could be no single opponent. No single standard could be struck and no one surrender to be received. Edward had need of patience. He had to accept that it would always be a land never quite subjugated but neither could any campaign be abandoned. Edward knew this was to be a drawn-out campaign. It has a particular interest to us today as it was probably the patch in military history that the feudal system of supplying soldiers under obligation began to be replaced by the establishment of paid armies; here then, in the late thirteenth century, was the birth of the professional army in England and coincidentally the appearance on the battlefield of the longbow, the most devastating battlefield weapon and ironically one which was developed not in England, but south Wales.