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

by Marc Morris

  Whether distraint would solve anything in this instance remained to be seen. Within a week of the confrontation, parliament had broken up, Edward had left Westminster and nothing had been agreed on how to help Gascony. The king remained furious at the men who had refused him – on 3 September he repeated the order to distrain them in even harsher terms – but at the same time he could not afford to allow their opposition to provoke a wider crisis.61 Things were already threatening to spiral out of control as the summer drew to a close. Before leaving London Edward had instituted new measures to protect the country’s coast. His new galleys – fighting ships with 120 oars a piece – were now ready, under the command of William Leybourne, who was duly accorded the newly coined title ‘admiral of the sea’. They were to be backed up by teams of paid men patrolling the shoreline. Even as orders were going out for their recruitment, however, the French – once again, with impeccable timing – launched attacks on the south coast, striking at Winchelsea and Hythe. These assaults were even less successful than the last, but, taken with the king’s new orders, they seemed to confirm that a French invasion was an imminent prospect. By mid-September, from Land’s End to Lincolnshire, men stood watch in their thousands, scanning the horizon for French sails.62 In this tense atmosphere mad rumours started to circulate. In Essex the people of Harwich went into a panic, believing that an invasion was already under way. In Huntingdonshire the prior of St Neots was said to have raised the standard of the king of France above the belfry of his church – a completely malicious rumour, it later turned out, but one that at the time was given credence even by the councillors around the king. These men, above all, had good reason to feel jumpy and suspicious, having just discovered a traitor in their midst. Thomas Turbeville, a knight of the royal household, had been one of those men captured by the French earlier in the year, but had since returned to England, claiming to have escaped. In truth he had been turned, and had come back with the intention of provoking rebellion to coincide with a French landing, and even of kidnapping the king. His treason was uncovered – a messenger betrayed him – and Turbeville was sent to be executed in London. But the episode can only have served to emphasise a crucial point: in this time of great crisis, Edward could not afford to lose the loyalty of his leading men.63

  Having left London in anger at the start of September, Edward was in danger of becoming isolated. But in the weeks that followed, he backed down on the issue of tax. As the king and his advisers moved into Kent, pardons began to be issued to dozens of magnates, excusing them from payment of the tenth, irrespective of whether they were serving in Gascony or not.64 He also settled with the men who had refused to fight, though it is not clear on precisely what terms. Some of them had already crumpled under the force of his distraint, and may have agreed to go to the duchy merely in return for the release of their goods. At least four of their number, however, including the earl of Arundel, were also pardoned their tax, suggesting that Edward was ready to conciliate, even if he did not wish to seem conciliatory. When these men, along with several others, were ordered on 3 October to fight for a second time, the primary emphasis was on their duty (‘you should omit nothing, just as you love the king and his honour’). But the writs informed their recipients that they would be accompanied by the steward of the royal household, who would not only pay their wages, but would also value their horses (for the purposes of compensation), and ‘do other things that might arise during the voyage’. If men were willing to fight for him, Edward was willing to ensure that they did not end up out of pocket.65

  The breach with his magnates repaired and the preparations for a new army at last in train, the king called another parliament. It was to be an exceptionally large assembly, with the usual array of earls, barons, bishops, abbots and priors joined by a wide range of representatives: knights of the shire, men of the towns and cities and members of the lower clergy. The Victorian historian William Stubbs, impressed by the scope of consultation on display, dubbed this ‘the Model Parliament’, rather ignoring the fact that it was an emergency session. The aim, naturally, was to obtain more money, but the difficulties during the summer had shown that to do so Edward would have to make a more convincing case for war. Not since the conquest of Wales had the king sought such a wide audience, and his writs of summons recaptured the same propagandist tone used on that earlier occasion. ‘The king of France,’ Edward warned, ‘not satisfied with the treacherous invasion of Gascony, has prepared a mighty fleet and army, for the purpose of invading England and wiping the English tongue from the face of the earth.’66

  Originally summoned for mid-November 1295, this giant parliament did not begin until the end of the month – Edward, as he explained in his letters proroguing the meeting, was detained at Winchelsea, ‘assembling his fleet and making other preparations for the defence of the kingdom’. When the session finally started, the king was probably relieved to find that there was little opposition to his demands among the laity, who granted a tax of an eleventh after only a few days of debate. It may have helped Edward’s case that the earl of Gloucester was absent, lying sick at his castle of Monmouth, where he died in early December.67

  While the laity had lost their leader, however, the clergy had found their champion. Robert Winchelsea, the new archbishop of Canterbury, had returned to England from Rome at the start of the year, and been enthroned as recently as October. Winchelsea – he seems to have hailed from the town that Edward had saved from the sea – was described by chroniclers as well-mannered, affable, and more than a little overweight. But he was also formidably clever, and fierce in his determination to defend the rights of the Church. When the king sought from the clergy another punitive tax – he was hoping on this occasion for a quarter, perhaps even a third of their goods – the new archbishop led the opposition. While agreeing with Edward that the realm did indeed face grave danger, the assembled churchmen indicated that they were prepared to pay a tax of only 10 per cent. All the king managed to secure beyond this was a promise that more money would be forthcoming if the threat from France persisted.68

  Edward was doubtless disappointed by the clergy’s response, but now was not the time to risk another showdown with his subjects in England, because, as the king must have explained to those present in parliament, he now needed to lead an army against the Scots.

  The Scots, much like the Welsh, had observed their self-appointed overlord struggling to cope with his Continental crisis and decided that they too were witnessing a moment of opportunity that was not to be missed. Their response had differed from that of their Celtic cousins only in being more carefully considered, more closely co-ordinated, and hence somewhat slower to make itself manifest. By the summer of 1295, however, the signs were unmistakable: the Scots had found the courage that had failed their unfortunate king. In July that year the great men of Scotland had taken steps to impose their corporate will on John Balliol, depriving him of executive initiative in much the same way that the English baronage had ultimately constrained Henry III. At the same time, they dispatched representatives across the sea to seek assistance from the king of France, who had already signified some two months earlier that he now regarded the Scots ‘not as our enemies, but rather as our friends’. On 23 October this new-found friendship had been cemented in the form of a firm alliance: together, Scotsmen and Frenchmen would wage war against the king of England.69

  That Edward I was aware of these manoeuvres is hardly open to doubt. When the traitor Thomas Turbeville was taken in September, his letters indicated that part of his plan was to foment rebellion not only in Wales but also in Scotland.70 In October the king ordered the seizure of all property held by Scotsmen in England. Edward being Edward, however, he moved against Scotland using the deliberate, legalistic steps that he believed gave his actions their legitimacy. John Balliol had already been sentenced in Westminster to lose three of his towns and castles. When, therefore, the Scots king failed to respond to subsequent summonses in 1295, Edward dispatched two
senior churchmen to demand the surrender of these sureties. And, when this demand met with an inevitable refusal, it gave the English king his mandate. On 16 December Edward declared his intention ‘of marching against John, king of Scots, who has violated the fealty he owes the Crown of England’.71

  The fact that Edward intended to apply his hand destructively rather than correctively can be reasonably surmised from the scale of his military preparations. In January 1296 the king advised the officials of his exchequer that he would need £5,000 a week for his trip to Scotland, since he intended to recruit 1,000 mounted men and 60,000 foot soldiers. Even if this infantry figure was an exaggeration, it implies that Edward wished his army to be large, perhaps the largest he had ever assembled. This is also suggested by the king’s extraordinary efforts to secure military support from his magnates in Ireland.72

  Like the rest of his domains, Ireland had been engulfed by trouble since 1294. Disorder there, however, was not so much due to increased disaffection among the natives (there was hardly room for increase) as the development of new attitudes among the English settlers. Absenteeism on the part of many of Ireland’s greatest landlords (for example, the earls of Gloucester, Norfolk and Pembroke); lax and parasitic lordship on the part of the Crown: these had combined to leave those who remained in Ireland more or less free to chart their own course. And for some men – especially those magnates living on the frontiers – the key to survival and self-betterment had turned out to be the adoption of the methods, morals and manners of their Irish neighbours. The immediate cause of disorder in 1294 had been the sudden and violent re-eruption of an ancient feud between the settler community’s two most powerful men: Richard de Burgh, earl of Ulster, and John fitz Thomas, last of the Geraldine dynasty. In December that year, fitz Thomas had rampaged through de Burgh’s lands, captured the earl and cast him into prison, and as a result, said a contemporary, ‘all Ireland was disturbed’.73

  From a long-term perspective, however, the dispute’s most disturbing feature was that, in raiding his rival’s lordships, fitz Thomas had allied himself with the native Irish. This was hardly very surprising, given that fitz Thomas, although born of settler stock, had apparently been raised in an Irish household. But that simply served to make him the prime example of the phenomenon that the settler community feared most: degeneracy. Fitz Thomas and others like him had literally parted company with their own people (Latin, gens), fallen from the acceptable standards of civilised English society.74

  Edward had been concerned about the feud between fitz Thomas and de Burgh – apart from anything else, such infighting among the settlers encouraged risings among the natives, as was the case in 1295. That summer the king had summoned fitz Thomas to Westminster to explain himself and bound both men to keep the peace on pain of forfeiting their estates. In real terms, however, Edward did nothing to stop the rot in Ireland, and plenty to encourage its spread. From 1294 his officials had shipped hundreds of tons of grain and other foodstuffs out of the lordship, in spite of the famine caused by poor harvests. He had also continued to drain money from Ireland, on top of the taxes he had introduced there in the early 1290s. And, ever since the French crisis had broken, the king had been trying to get men from Ireland, infantry and cavalry, to fight on his behalf in other theatres. Down to the start of 1296 he had met with no success, which explains the extraordinary offers he was willing by this point to make to his Irish magnates. In exchange for their agreement to serve in Scotland, Edward not only agreed to pay these men handsomely – Richard de Burgh received the highest rate of pay of any earl during the campaign – he also offered to pardon any crimes they had committed, and to cancel any debts they owed the Crown. In return for this generosity, the king managed to secure some 3,000 men (mostly infantry), the biggest force to set sail from Ireland up to that time. The cost to his own authority there, however, and the health of the lordship in general, would be disproportionately large in comparison.75

  Edward arrived in Newcastle on 1 March 1296 to meet the giant English army he had summoned. The Scots, who had been ordered to present themselves on the same date, unsurprisingly failed to appear. The king therefore marched his host along the Northumbrian coast and drew it up at Wark, a castle on the River Tweed, where the English lord had decided to join the Scots on account of his love for a Scottish lady – a nice reminder, at this critical moment, that the Tweed was a political boundary between the two countries, not a cultural one. Edward’s arrival at the Border coincided with the start of Holy Week, and so, with proper respect for Christian piety, the English army sat and waited. During this time, the Scots made an attack on nearby Carham, and on Easter Monday they tried, unsuccessfully, to take Carlisle. When the festivities at Wark were over, therefore, the English king had all the justification he needed for his invasion. As the end of March approached, he crossed the Tweed and led his army in the direction of Berwick.76

  Berwick was one of the three towns whose surrender Edward had demanded by proxy the previous year, and that demand was now repeated in person. The citizens again rejected it, throwing back insults, taunts and gibes at the king, and even – according to one English chronicler – baring their buttocks at him. Such bravado was quite surprising, given the size of the English army, and the fact that Berwick’s defences at this time amounted to no more than an insubstantial wooden palisade. The assault that followed, however, seems to have caught both sides unprepared. The king had drawn his forces up in front of the town and was engaged in the pre-battle ritual of creating new knights – a display perhaps intended to persuade the Scots to reconsider their position. But to the English navy lurking offshore, this military activity looked like a cry to arms, and they duly began their attack. When the sailors in turn got into difficulty and several ships were set on fire, Edward was obliged to sound a general advance. His troops rapidly breached Berwick’s flimsy defences and poured into the town, putting many of its stupefied citizens to the sword.77

  The king has often been criticised for his behaviour at Berwick, and stands accused of having ordered the indiscriminate massacre of the townspeople. In fact, Edward’s tactics and the killing that took place – however reprehensible they may seem to modern sensibilities – were entirely in keeping with the conventions of medieval warfare. A town or city that refused to surrender left itself liable to be sacked in just this way. That Edward was operating squarely within the usual chivalric norms at Berwick is emphasised by his treatment of the 200-strong garrison who holed themselves up in the town’s castle. To these men the king offered generous terms of surrender: safety of life and limb, the right to retain their lands and possessions, and even the right to go free, provided they swore never again to bear arms against him. It was a most magnanimous package, which the garrison wisely chose to accept.78

  The mistake of the Scots, arguably, was to behave with the same kind of chivalric propriety in response. Having taken Berwick, Edward remained in its smoking ruins for a full four weeks, improving the town’s defences with a great new ditch, reportedly eighty feet wide and forty feet deep. (The king, demonstrating his sureness of touch when it came to popular gestures, wheeled the first barrow of earth himself.) How long he could have remained there though, holding his expensive army together, is an open question. As it was, within days of Berwick’s fall, Edward received a formal message of defiance from John Balliol, in which the Scottish king renounced his homage and fealty (‘extorted by your violent pressure’). Then, as the end of April approached, the Scottish army abandoned its raids in northern England and offered the English battle. The setting for their encounter was Dunbar, some thirty miles further along the coast from Berwick. Edward had sent some troops under the earl of Surrey to capture the castle there, and the Scottish host soon materialised with the intention of raising the siege. The result was a total disaster for the Scots, whose inexperienced and undisciplined ranks collapsed in the face of a well co-ordinated English assault. Scottish foot soldiers perished in their hundreds, and several Sc
ottish nobles were taken captive. The next day Edward himself arrived, Dunbar Castle was surrendered, and more prestigious prisoners – including three Scottish earls – were taken. The war was barely one month old, with just one city and one castle conceded, but already the Scottish resistance was in tatters.79

  What followed was therefore more like a victory parade than a military campaign. From Dunbar Edward marched back to the Border, where he swiftly secured the submission of Roxburgh and Jedburgh – the two towns besides Berwick demanded in 1295 – and where he finally joined forces with the Irish magnates, who had arrived two months too late. Then it was north to Edinburgh, which surrendered after a siege of just five days. Stirling, the king’s next target, put up no resistance at all. By the time the English army arrived, the castle’s garrison had already fled.80

  It was now mid-June and those Scottish leaders still at large were looking for a way to come in. John Balliol, a man bullied from above and bullied from below, had long since come to rue his promotion to ranks of royalty, and pined for the days when he had been a mere English magnate. He had also been in London and had no doubt seen the severed head of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd on its spike. Hence, when the bishop of Durham, acting on Edward’s behalf, proposed to him the kind of deal that the late prince of Wales had proudly scorned, Balliol leapt at the chance. He would resign the Scottish kingship and become an English earl. ‘Then he would go out of the realm of Scotland, to England, to dwell there in the ways that used to be his, and would hunt in his parks, and do what he wished for his solace and his pleasure.’