A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain

by Marc Morris

  Arthur’s Crown

  From the declaration of war on 12 November 1276 to the proclamation of peace on 9 November 1277, it had taken Edward just short of a year to reduce Llywelyn ap Gruffudd to obedience. After such a sustained military effort the king was anxious to ensure that the gains he had made and the terms he had imposed would not be undone or reversed. Consequently, for much of the year that followed, he remained highly engaged with Welsh affairs, directing his energy and resources to the task of creating a settlement that he intended would be permanent.1

  The most visible manifestation of Edward’s will in this regard were his new castles. At Rhuddlan, Flint and Aberystwyth, as the king’s armies withdrew, his workmen stayed on, labouring in their thousands to transform the temporary timber stockades thrown up during the campaign into the stone fortresses that have survived to this day. Rhuddlan, in particular, required a tremendous deployment of manpower, for besides the castle (itself the largest of the three), Edward had foreseen the necessity of straightening the adjacent River Clwyd. Teams of diggers – at one point they numbered almost a thousand men – would work on this project for the next three years to ensure that in future the inland garrison could be kept supplied by sea.2

  Nor was it just new foundations that received such attention. In mid-Wales Roger Mortimer had recovered for the king the castle at Builth that he had lost to Llywelyn some seventeen years before. Building work there was under way even before the main assault on Wales had begun. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the same region, and also further south, the Crown had obtained many other new lands and castles by virtue of depriving their former Welsh owners. Consider, for example, the fate of Rhys Wyndod, one of the most powerful lords of south Wales. He had offered minimal resistance in 1277 and come to terms swiftly, yet he was still obliged to surrender all his fortresses along the River Tywi – Dinefwr, Llandovery, and the lofty eyrie that is Carreg Cennen. All three now passed to Edward, expanding his stock of strongholds, but also increasing his already massive construction programme.3

  To oversee such a major exercise in castle-building required a project manager of considerable genius, and so it was fortunate that Edward had just such a man at his disposal. Five years earlier, in the course of his return journey from the Holy Land, the king passed through the lands of his mother’s relatives, the counts of Savoy; for a week or so in the summer of 1273 he and his fellow crusaders had paused at Count Philip’s new castle of St Georges de Espéranche, not far from the French city of Lyon. And there, it seems, Edward was probably introduced to the castle’s designer and builder, a young master mason who came to be known as Master James of St George. For some years James and his father had been selling their building services to the counts of Savoy and their nobles; a string of towns and castles in the Swiss and Italian Alps still stand as witness to the duo’s industry and skill, and also their flair for organisation. In the autumn of 1275, however, Master James himself vanishes from the administrative records of Savoy. When he reappears, some two and a half years later, it is in the pay of a new employer. On 8 April 1278 Edward I sent him from England into Wales ‘to ordain the works of the castles there’.4

  The new castles were not intended to be isolated outposts where lonely English garrisons would guard against future Welsh insurgency. On the contrary, they would be the focal points of the new and better Wales that Edward saw it as his job to build. Rhuddlan and Flint were administrative centres, attached to the justiciar of Chester, from which royal bailiffs could superintend the Welsh interior, and to which the Welsh were regularly summoned to attend the king’s courts. Aberystwyth played a similar role in the west, ultimately answering to a new ‘justiciar of west Wales’, based at Carmarthen. Edward, it is fair to say, did not try as part of this exercise to introduce English law into Wales. When, in January 1278, he appointed a seven-man legal team (the so-called Hopton Commission) ‘to hear and determine all suits and pleas … in the Marches and in Wales’, three of its members were Welsh, and they were instructed to do justice ‘according to the customs of those parts’. Nevertheless, he intended that both Welsh law and Marcher law should be brought firmly within the framework of his own overarching jurisdiction. The king’s high estimation of his authority in Wales is well demonstrated by his ongoing efforts to thin out its forests and widen its roads. Marcher and Welsh lords alike were ordered to see to it that this work was done in their districts, or else the king’s agents would do it for them and charge them for the privilege.5

  And if, moreover, it was impracticable to introduce English law into Wales, anglicisation could still be advanced by other means. At Flint, Rhuddlan and Aberystwyth, the king’s new castles were paired with new royal towns, not for the benefit of the natives, but in order to host immigrant communities of English settlers. England’s population was rising in the thirteenth century, and the country was already approaching a stage where it had more people than the land could support. Consequently there was no shortage of Englishmen and Englishwomen ready to accept the offer of a new life in Wales, even if it meant living in the midst of a hostile people. Edward’s new boroughs were surrounded by palisades and ditches, and ultimately protected by their adjacent castles. The settlers would supply the soldiery by providing local services and – here was the ultimate hope – soften the natives by their peaceful, law-abiding and industrious example.6

  And what of the man who, despite his reduced circumstances, remained the greatest and potentially the most hostile native of them all? It is clear that, despite his symbolic submission at Christmas 1277, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd was still regarded with considerable suspicion in England, especially by the king. Although in the new year Edward allowed his erstwhile adversary to return to his diminished principality, he had already taken steps that effectively placed the prince on probation. One of the conditions of the surrender, for example, had been Llywelyn’s agreement to an annual oath-taking ceremony, by which twenty men from every district in his possession would swear that their belittled leader was behaving himself. In the more immediate term, the prince had also been required to hand over ten hostages, and at the start of 1278 these men remained in the Crown’s custody. And to their number, of course, could be added Edward’s long-term guest, Eleanor de Montfort. Her release was probably discussed during Llywelyn’s visit to England, but was not carried out. For a while longer, she too would remain in the king’s keeping as a guarantee of her fiancé’s good conduct.7

  Within a few months, however, Edward started to soften in the face of Llywelyn’s ready compliance. As early as March he was pleased to note that the prince was submitting his territorial disputes to the Hopton Commission. ‘With goodwill,’ the king told his chancellor, Robert Burnell, ‘he seeks and receives justice and judgement.’ By the end of the summer Edward was ready to release the hostages; in September he returned to Rhuddlan for this purpose, and to rule on the territorial disputes between Llywelyn and his brothers. Finally, in the early autumn, the king travelled to Worcester in order to attend the prince’s wedding. This could go ahead, of course, only because Edward had agreed to release the bride, and the ceremony showed other signs of being arranged to suit the king’s own agenda. Not only did it take place in an English cathedral; it was celebrated – with what Edward no doubt considered to be mischievous humour – on 13 October, the feast of the translation of Edward the Confessor, patron saint of the English monarchy. Nevertheless, it remained an act of royal generosity, and the best dynastic match ever made by a Welsh ruler. Eleanor de Montfort, for all her father’s crimes, was still the king’s cousin. It was Edmund of Lancaster who gave her away at the church door, and Edward himself who paid for the wedding feast.8

  Edward, then, was much engaged in the business of settling Wales during 1278. Given this evident preoccupation, it is astonishing that his most interesting act of the year, which fits squarely into this context, has received so little attention from historians, or been noted only briefly and in passing in order to deny that it was in any way
relevant. At Easter 1278 Edward took his court to Somerset, and to the abbey at Glastonbury, to visit the tomb of King Arthur.9

  The tomb of King Arthur at Glastonbury, regrettably destroyed in the seventeenth century, was obviously a fake. ‘Obviously’ because, as all sane historians will nowadays readily attest (whatever the assertions of lament able Hollywood films to the contrary), Arthur himself never existed. Beyond any reasonable doubt, the legendary ‘king’ began life as an elemental figure or demi-god – a sort of low-grade Thor or Wodin. What is also unquestionably clear, however, is that his otherworldly origins were in no way apparent to Edward I and his contemporaries. To them, Arthur was a historical personage as real as Richard the Lionheart, William the Conqueror or Edward the Confessor.10

  Diligent and painstaking modern scholarship reveals to us what thirteenth-century folk could not possibly know: that Arthur was not historic, but had been ‘historicised’. That is to say, a number of earlier medieval writers, at different times and for different reasons, had taken the legendary or god-like figure and written about him as if he had been a real person. In the early ninth century, for example, an author known to posterity as Nennius wrote Arthur into his account of the struggle between Britain’s original inhabitants, the Ancient Britons, and the Anglo-Saxon invaders who eventually displaced them. The deity was thereby demoted into a warrior who successfully battled for the Britons around the year AD 500.

  This Arthur was shadowy and obscure, brief and boring; had his development ended there and then he would have undoubtedly remained a little-known and seldom-mentioned curiosity. But Arthur underwent a subsequent re-imagining that transformed him out of all proportion. In the 1130s a mischievous Oxford scholar called Geoffrey of Monmouth sat down and perpetrated what stands to be regarded as the most brilliant and audacious literary hoax of the Middle Ages, if not of all time. The History of the Kings of Britain, as his book has come to be known, was in reality nothing of the sort. It was a work of fiction, laced with just enough snippets from more sober and bona fide chronicles to convince the credulous. And into his long, tall tale of imaginary kings in a distant imaginary past, Geoffrey inserted Arthur – King Arthur, as he now became – the greatest of all Britons, one-time ruler of the whole world.11

  Not everyone was taken in by such nonsense. ‘It is quite clear,’ wrote the infinitely more responsible William of Newburgh some fifty years later and with palpable irritation, ‘that everything this man wrote about Arthur and his successors, and indeed his predecessors … was made up!’ By this stage, however, it was far too late: Geoffrey’s book had become a runaway success, a medieval bestseller. Even today, some 215 manuscript copies of the History still survive, putting it way ahead of its nearest rivals, and second only to the Bible. And as for Arthur – the part of the book that everyone liked best – he rapidly spawned an entire industry. Tales of his exploits were taken up by other writers and poets, especially Continental ones, and made taller still. Soon Arthur acquired a castle called Camelot, a host of knightly companions, and a Round Table.12

  It was only a matter of time before he acquired a tomb. When the church at Glastonbury Abbey burned down in 1184, it quickly dawned on the monks there that a sure-fire way to increase the number of paying visitors was a spot of creative marketing involving everyone’s favourite king. Accordingly, they dug around in the churchyard and unearthed a pair of skeletons that, they claimed, were those of Arthur and his queen, Guinevere. To the monks’ credit, their forgery was first-rate: the excavations were carried out in secret, and the bones were discovered under an inscribed lead cross that confirmed, with convenient explicitness, the identities of their former owners. As with other famous hoaxes (Piltdown Man, the Hitler Diaries, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History), even the very clever and sceptical were taken in. Gerald of Wales, a man who considered himself nothing less than a genius, saw both the bones and the cross and was convinced of their authenticity. Other writers followed suit, and Glastonbury’s claim to be Arthur’s final resting place was rapidly accepted as a matter of fact. By the early thirteenth century it was proof positive that the fabulous king about whom Geoffrey of Monmouth had written had once really existed.13

  Thus, by Edward’s day, Arthur-mania knew no bounds, and evidence of enthusiasm for the king was abundantly apparent. Richard of Cornwall, for instance, soon after gaining his earldom, spent considerable sums building the remote castle at Tintagel, a place that offered neither strategic nor domestic benefits but that was, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, the location where Arthur had been conceived. Eleanor of Provence, it is touching to note, was taken to Glastonbury soon after her arrival in England, by a new husband evidently anxious to please a twelve-year-old queen who (as other evidence shows) loved all things Arthurian. By this time, moreover, one did not even have to be a great reader like Eleanor to join in the fun. Even those knights who were insufficiently in touch with their feminine sides to endure interminably long tales of courtly love were still able to fill their leisure time with Arthur-themed entertainment. It is in the middle decades of the thirteenth century that we first begin to hear of special tournaments called ‘Round Tables’, where the emphasis was on jousting, pageantry and prizes. Edward’s good friend Roger Mortimer would organise just such a tournament at Kenilworth Castle in 1279 in order to celebrate the end of his military career.14

  In Gascony and Germany, Italy and Sicily, France, Scotland and even in the Holy Land – everyone everywhere loved Arthur and told tales about him. In England, however, the famous king, fantastic though he was, did present something of a problem. Geoffrey of Monmouth, sticking to his earlier sources (like Nennius), had located his superhero at the turn of the fifth and sixth centuries. Arthur was not merely a British king, but a British king who had fought against the Anglo-Saxons – that is, the founding fathers of the kingdom of England. The English, in other words, were the bad guys in the Arthur story; the invaders who had ultimately defeated the Britons and driven them into the northern and western extremities of their island. Arthur, the most excellent king that had ever been, might be admired by the English, but he did not belong to them in any meaningful sense. On the contrary, he belonged to the descendants of the Britons – the Welsh.

  The fact that Arthur was Welsh, though galling, was not his biggest problem as far as English audiences were concerned. A more disturbing difficulty was that he was apparently due for a comeback. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, the king was merely wounded in his last battle with the Saxons; nothing was said about his death. Arthur, Geoffrey maintained, had been taken to the mysterious island of Avalon, in order that he might recover from his injuries. And when he did, so the story went, he would return and lead the Britons to victory once more. For fairly obvious reasons, the Welsh were very fond of this idea.

  The English, for reasons that are equally obvious, preferred the version of the story that ended in Glastonbury. Not only did the tomb there prove that Arthur had really lived, and was therefore apt to be emulated; it also proved that he was really dead, and would not be coming back to cause any trouble. One of the few people who seems to have been in on the original fraud at Glastonbury was Edward’s great-grandfather, Henry II, who had problems of his own with the Welsh. It was reportedly his suggestion – and one imagines him tapping his nose and winking as he made it – that had set the monks digging in the first place. If, however, it was indeed Henry’s aim to discomfort his Celtic neighbours by this discovery, his propaganda missed its mark. The English might have been predisposed to accept that Arthur was dead and buried, but the Welsh simple refused to believe it. ‘In their stupidity,’ scoffed Gerald of Wales, ‘[they] maintain that he is still alive.’15

  It was, therefore, more than just idle curiosity or exaggerated devotion that brought Edward I to Glastonbury in the spring of 1278. The king, like his mother and his wife, owned Arthurian romances and appears to have been well versed in their contents; but, as has been rightly observed, there is nothing to show that his enthusiasm
in this regard was anything other than ordinary.16 So far as we can tell, Edward’s trip to Glastonbury in 1278 was his first and only visit, and it was not a secular pilgrimage of the kind that had drawn his parents there forty years earlier. Edward came not to praise Arthur, but to bury him. Again.

  Two days after Easter, which the court celebrated at the abbey, the king ordered Arthur’s tomb to be opened. ‘There, in two caskets,’ said a local chronicler, ‘were found the bones of the said king, of wondrous size, and those of Guinevere, of marvellous beauty.’ The next day, Edward had these remains removed to the abbey’s treasury, there to be kept while a new and better tomb was constructed. From a description in the sixteenth century it seems that the eventual outcome was a box of black marble with a lion at each end, and an effigy of Arthur at its foot.

  What took place at Glastonbury was a piece of political theatre every bit as pointed and significant as Llywelyn’s homage the previous Christmas, or the prince’s marriage the following October. As on these occasions, every effort was taken to ensure that the event was momentous and memorable. The disinterment of the bodies, we are told, took place at twilight, no doubt deliberately to heighten its dramatic effect. The following morning the court was treated to an equally arresting spectacle when Edward personally wrapped Arthur’s bones in silk, while Eleanor of Castile similarly prepared the remains of Guinevere for reburial. There may even have been, in addition to these macabre solemnities, some kind of celebratory jamboree. Immediately prior to its arrival at Glastonbury, the court had gone out of its way to stop at Eleanor’s manor of Queen Camel, which stands close by the giant Iron Age hill-fort at South Cadbury. Since Cadbury had already been identified by this date as Camelot (presumably because of its proximity to Camel, as well as to Glastonbury), it seems likely that the two visits were connected, and that there might have been a chivalric prelude to the exhumation.