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

by Marc Morris

  And as for Edward himself: never was he more leisured. An examination of his itinerary in this period shows him devoid of any major political agenda. It was seemingly for want of anything better to do in the summer and autumn of 1280 that he embarked on a tour of northern England, taking in Carlisle, Newcastle, Durham, Lincoln and York. In January 1281 he travelled to East Anglia to visit his preferred places of pilgrimage. Edward remained, at forty, as vigorous as ever. On several occasions during these years we catch him on what are evidently hunting trips, in Essex, Northamptonshire and the New Forest. And even when he was in Westminster, it cannot have been all business. At least some of his time there must have been spent enjoying the new Royal Mews that he had established at Charing (the site on which Trafalgar Square now stands). Arranged around a garden courtyard, complete with an elaborate ornamental bird bath at its centre, this home for his hawks and their keepers must have afforded the king many hours of pleasure. Of all his various pastimes, falconry was clearly the favourite.33

  The leisured lifestyle of the queen in these years is also evident. For the most part Eleanor’s interests, like her itinerary, overlapped with those of her husband. She too, for example, liked to hunt, though she used dogs rather more than he did, and she probably preferred the bow whereas he reportedly favoured the sword. Something more of Eleanor’s individual tastes can be gleaned from the accounts of her estate management. The occasional purchase of citrus fruits and olive oil from overseas merchants suggest the appetites acquired in childhood were not wholly forgotten. Similarly, her employment of two Spanish gardeners at her manor of King’s Langley in Hertfordshire (visited several times in 1280– 81) and the creation there of ditches and wells may imply an attempt to reproduce in England the kind of water gardens favoured in southern Castile. Perhaps most evocative of royal tastes, however, is the way in which the king and the queen together transformed Leeds Castle in Kent. Acquired by Eleanor in 1278 and rebuilt with her husband’s help in the years that followed, Leeds became a veritable pleasure palace (an aspect it retains today, despite considerable modern alterations). The inclusion of a bath for the king may hint at another attempt to recreate something of that same Spanish style in balmy Kent, but the castle’s most notable features – its wide moat and its isolated ‘gloriette’ of privy apartments – indicate that Edward and Eleanor’s tastes were chiefly informed by their shared love of romance and fantasy.34

  These easy days would have allowed both the king and the queen to spend more time with their children. Since her return to England, Eleanor’s relentless round of pregnancies had continued: new and lasting additions to the royal nursery in the late 1270s came in the shape of Margaret (b. 1275) and Mary (b. 1279). Edward’s visits to Windsor and Woodstock, while by no means rare, remained occasional, so neither baby daughter would have seen much of their father, nor perhaps their mother. But the same was not necessarily true of their older siblings. By the end of the decade, Eleanor (b. 1269), Joan (b. 1271) and Alfonso (b. 1273) would have been old enough to accompany the court as it travelled, at least for short periods, and certainly able to join their parents for Christmas, Easter and other festivities.35

  Perhaps, therefore, it was with his family that Edward paid his mysterious springtime visits to Gloucestershire. From 1278 until 1282, and always in the month of March, the king spent an average of two to three weeks each year at Quenington and Down Ampney, two manors in the neighbourhood of Cirencester. Since these visits had no discernible purpose, political, religious or otherwise, the assumption is that they too were a luxury afforded by the relative calm of these years, a regular period of relaxation in a rural locale for a king and queen whose tastes, when given free rein, tended towards escapism.36

  Such freedom could not last forever. It was just after leaving Down Ampney in March 1282 that Edward began to receive urgent messages from every corner of Wales.

  While Edward’s existence had become increasingly easy, Llywelyn’s life had become correspondingly hard. Publicly, the post-war relationship between the two men had been all smiles and handshakes; privately, the prince felt unduly put upon. On the day of his wedding, for example (a spectacle already contrived in part for English amusement), Llywelyn, so he later alleged, was ‘compelled by fear’ into making additional written concessions to the king, in contravention of their earlier peace agreement.

  Further indignities and irritations had followed. Llywelyn’s messengers were arrested without reason at Chester; his huntsmen were maltreated by the king’s men near Aberystwyth. Most trying of the prince’s patience was his legal effort to recover a strip of territory on his south-eastern border (Arwystli) from his old adversary, Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn. The case, Llywelyn contended, should be decided by Welsh law. Not so, said Gruffudd: English law should apply. Edward, in his capacity as supreme judge, responded by ordering one inquiry after another, repeatedly adjourning his decision, but always obliging the prince to jump through the tangled loops of English judicial procedure. After four years of pleading, Llywelyn had achieved nothing, and it was beginning to tell on his patience. Once a great man, he knew the war had made him small, but latterly he had been made to feel it.37

  And yet, irritating though the prince’s experiences undoubtedly were, they were nothing compared to the oppressions being endured elsewhere in Wales. New English castles thrusting their way skywards; intolerant English administrators trying to govern their districts in line with their own notions of normality: outside of Snowdonia, the Welsh were suffering on an altogether different scale. Indeed, that they ‘were treated more cruelly than the Saracens by the king’s bailiffs and other royal officers’, was one later complaint. To the men of the north-east it was a throwback to the worst days of the 1250s, when Henry III had imposed a similar regime on the Four Cantrefs. To their countrymen in south and west Wales, it was domination of a kind they had neither experienced nor anticipated. Life under Llywelyn had seemed taxing at the time, but now, with the advent of English officialdom, the prince’s rule was assuming the retrospective aspect of a golden age.38

  We scarcely need to look for specific reasons for such oppression. Edward was in general terms anxious to avoid his father’s mistakes; he did not set out deliberately to provoke Wales, its inhabitants or its prince. Nor, in all probability, did the men whom he appointed to administer his conquests. But both the king and his lieutenants were conditioned from birth to regard the Welsh as an inferior race. If they preferred to conduct business along English lines, it was because those lines were to them self-evidently more sensible than the backward and barbarous ways of a people whose language, habits and culture they could not comprehend.

  Nevertheless, specific reasons did exist. Just as Llywelyn felt belittled by Edward, so Edward felt antagonised by Llywelyn. From the king’s perspective, it seemed that the prince was engaged in a deliberate attempt to test the limits of their peace agreement, and was trying to force him into a judgement that would damage the rights of his Crown. When Llywelyn reactivated his plea for Arwystli in the autumn of 1281, Edward’s patience – febrile at the best of times – seems to have snapped. He responded by removing the justiciar of Chester and replacing him with the hard-liner Reginald de Grey. The result was an immediate intensification of the English grip on north-east Wales.39

  This change had little direct impact on Llywelyn, ensconced as he was in Snowdonia. It did, however, affect his younger brother. Dafydd ap Gruffudd, prickly by nature, already considered himself a man hard done by. The English failure to cross the Conwy in 1277 had denied him the prize he most desired, his rightful share of Gwynedd. In acknowledgement of this disappointment, Edward had granted him lands in lieu; but since this compensation amounted to two of the Four Cantrefs, it meant that Dafydd’s lordship bordered that of the king himself. Consequently it was Dafydd rather than his brother who bore the full brunt of the new and high-handed English regime at Chester. In later letters to the archbishop of Canterbury Dafydd complained of how, on one occasion, the justi
ciar had wrongly accused him of harbouring fugitives; of how, at another time, his woods had been chopped down and sold off by the justiciar’s men; and of how, most contentiously, he had been summoned to be judged at the king’s court at Chester for lands that he held in Wales.40

  Dafydd was not alone in feeling mightily oppressed. Elsewhere in Wales, wherever newly extended English power marched with that of the natives, other Welsh lords, some of whom had helped to bring down Llywelyn, also wondered at their newly straitened circumstances. Rhys Wyndod, the southern lord who lost no fewer than three castles in 1277, complained that six of his men had been killed by the English and yet no amends had been made. Faced with such injustices, such men, like Dafydd himself, began to borrow from the script written by Llywelyn. They were unable to obtain redress; they were compelled to attend English courts; their own law was being denied. And, if their law was being denied, it followed that their identity as a people was being denied. ‘Let the law of Wales be unchanged,’ Dafydd told Edward I, ‘like the laws of other nations.’ It was a powerful and popular idea for a downtrodden people. In the spring of 1282, it became their cry to arms.41

  * * *

  It was the night of 21 March 1282, and Roger Clifford, one of Edward’s oldest friends, was asleep in Hawarden Castle. Some five miles to the west of Chester, Hawarden had come to the Crown as a result of the recent war, and its castle was seemingly new. Most likely the building works there had begun soon after Clifford’s appointment as keeper of the lordship just over a year earlier. That being the case, they can scarcely have been finished on the night in question – it happened to be the eve of Palm Sunday – when Dafydd ap Gruffudd and a band of armed Welshmen descended, burned the castle, killed several members of Clifford’s household, and carted the constable himself off into captivity.42

  A widespread revolt against English rule was under way. The following day Flint and Rhuddlan were subjected to identical assaults; two days later Aberystwyth was taken by trickery. In each case the castles were attacked: Aberystwyth was destroyed, and Rhuddlan too may well have fallen. But, in each case, the castles formed only part of the target. The rebels’ fury was directed equally at the attendant towns, those enclaves of English privilege, where the Welsh were obliged to trade but could not live, and where the legal discrimination between the two peoples was a fact of everyday existence. Property was looted, houses were burned, and those settlers who could not flee were killed.43

  The scope and success of the revolt shows that it was popular; its timing reveals that it was planned. As Dafydd and his followers launched his attacks in the north, Rhys Wyndod and his allies mounted copycat assaults in the south, recovering the castles at Llandovery and Carreg Cennen. Meanwhile, other Welsh lords led the attacks on Oswestry, an English town on the eastern border, subjecting it to the same fate as the other new boroughs. Clearly these leaders had leagued together in the weeks and months beforehand and agreed on the date that their pent-up anger would be released.44

  It seems equally clear that Llywelyn was not among their number. The prince, when later given the chance to account for his actions, claimed to have had no prior knowledge of the rebellion, and indeed there is no good evidence of his involvement. The sudden outbreak therefore placed him in a terrible dilemma: whether to support Dafydd’s intemperate action or to assist Edward I in suppressing it. If patriotic sensibility urged him to back his brother, his sense as a politician restrained him, for the timing was wrong, and the chances of success impossibly slim. For a while, at least, Llywelyn must have debated, with his councillors, and with himself. It has been suggested, temptingly, that he may have waited until as late as June before making his decision.

  In 1282 Llywelyn’s own time was running out. He was approaching, if he had not already attained, his sixtieth year. But in the spring of that year, his young wife, Eleanor, was pregnant. If their child was male, then it might be worth playing the long game: putting down his perfidi ous brother to protect the patrimony for his son, and thereby preserving an independent Gwynedd, and a principality that might one day recover its greatness.

  On 19 June this hope for the future evaporated. Eleanor died in childbirth. The child, which survived, was a girl, christened Gwenllian. It was, perhaps, a broken and desperate prince who finally joined his brother and his people that summer, to face the king of England’s immeasurable wrath.45

  It was 25 March, three days after the first attacks, that Edward heard the news. More than anything else, it was the treachery that seems to have astonished him. Dafydd, the king was later minded to recall, ‘had been received as an exile, nourished as an orphan, endowed with lands and placed among the great ones of the palace’. That such generosity should be repaid by rebellion almost beggared belief. When, later that same day, writs began to emanate from the royal chancery, they naturally dwelt on the killing, burning and kidnapping. But when Edward said the Welsh were ‘unmindful of their own salvation’, he meant they had sworn sacred oaths to obey him, and these oaths had now been broken.46

  And how the writs flew. Edward, as we have noted, was effectively on holiday at the time of the revolt, caught off-guard and with few of his great men about him. But as soon as the news broke messengers sped out in all directions. Within ten days the council was in session. On 6 April the other magnates were called to muster in mid-May, at Worcester, as before. On 7 April the knights of the household began to draw pay, and a contingent galloped north to see to the relief of Rhuddlan. Orders started to pour out for supplies. Food was demanded from Essex, Surrey, Kent and Hampshire. Workmen – 345 carpenters and more than 1,000 diggers – were summoned from no fewer than twenty-eight counties. The men of the Cinque Ports were warned to prepare their ships, the Riccardi to be ready with their money. Naturally this activity was not confined to England. Crossbowmen were ordered from Gascony, horses were purchased from France, and other supplies were requested from Ponthieu, Ireland and even from Scotland.47

  It was only in May, when the king arrived at Worcester, that his tremendous momentum suffered a setback. Edward’s call to arms had been highly unusual. He had not, as was conventional, asked men to serve him out of obligation, nor had his summons been universal. Instead, some half a dozen earls and 150 other named individuals had been ‘affectionately requested’ to serve in return for pay. It was, it seems, the king’s intention to avoid the limitations of the customary forty days’ service, and instead to put the relationship between him and his cavalry forces on a more businesslike basis.

  Some of the earls, at least, must have agreed to this idea, for they were with the king in early April when the orders had gone out. It was probably the unconsulted majority, beyond the council, who objected to a scheme that would have effectively made them the king’s mercenaries. Moreover, the suggestion that they should forget their ancient obligations and embark on a novel arrangement must have seemed more than a little rich, coming as it did from a king who, from the moment of his accession, had insisted on the most traditional interpretation of his own rights. No official protest is recorded, but the idea of paid service was quietly dropped. Three days into the muster, new writs were issued of the conventional kind: the magnates were summoned to reassemble at Rhuddlan at the start of August. None of the earls, in the event, accepted pay. It is not impossible that two of them, the earl of Hereford and the earl of Gloucester, had some hand in leading the opposition to the king. Hereford held the hereditary honour of ‘constable of England’, with responsibility for compiling the lists of men who served in a campaign, as well as for their discipline. As early as 6 April he had insisted on receiving the traditional perquisites that went with his office. Meanwhile, Gloucester (that is, our old friend Gilbert de Clare) was clearly put out at the suggestion that he should serve in an army under the command of the new justiciar of south Wales, Robert Tiptoft. On 10 April, the earl had evidently insisted that the honour of leading the southern forces should be his.48

  As this mention of a southern army suggests, Edwar
d’s strategy in 1282 was much the same as it had been five years earlier. Having left Gloucester in charge of the south (albeit with Tiptoft as his deputy), the king proceeded north towards Chester, from where, as before, he would lead the main force into north Wales. En route he stopped in Shrewsbury, and parted company with Roger Mortimer. The old warrior who had said farewell to arms three years earlier was once again called upon to do what he did best, and hold the line in the middle March.49

  Nevertheless, although the strategy was the same in broad terms, there were important differences this time around. In 1277 Llywelyn had been quite isolated; Edward’s main opponent that year had been the Welsh terrain. On this occasion, by contrast, the opposition was far more general, the fighting fiercer and more widespread. Before he could advance along the coast road to Rhuddlan, the king had first to tackle the resistance in the interior of the Four Cantrefs, led by Dafydd ap Gruffudd. The rebel leader and his Welsh allies had made their chief stronghold at Denbigh, and also held a number of other castles in the same region.50

  The initial stage of this operation was carried out in early June, soon after Edward had arrived at Chester. While the king remained in the city supervising the assembly of men and materials for his push along coast, it fell to Reginald de Grey – justiciar of Chester, antagoniser of Dafydd and, since March, captain of the king’s northern forces – to lead the first inland assault. With some 7,000 foot soldiers already at his disposal, many of them archers, Grey made swift progress. In the middle of June he recovered the castle at Hope (Caergwrle), which Dafydd destroyed in his retreat, and where over 1,000 English workmen immediately began the business of reconstruction. By the end of the month the king’s forces had retaken another castle at Ewloe, and also Hawarden, the point from which the whole conflagration had been started.51