A History of Britain - Volume 1: At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC-AD 1603

by Simon Schama

  In mid-November, perhaps mindful of the difficulty of surviving a winter with his supply routes cut off, Llewellyn broke out of Snowdonia and marched south into Powys. It was a bold and literally fatal move because on 11 December Llewellyn was killed near Builth by a Shropshire soldier who failed to recognize his opponent. (Had he done so he would, in all likelihood, have kept him alive as a valuable prisoner.) His severed head was sent to Edward and with it went the organizing genius that had sustained Welsh resistance. The war went on well into 1283, but there was a flurry of desertions on the Welsh side, hurrying to make their peace with the king before his vengeance overtook them. Their haste may have been indecent but it was understandable. In areas of the country that held out against Edward’s huge force, large numbers of the population saw their villages burned to the ground and their men marched off into captivity as hostages. But the king of England was unforgiving. When Daffydd had been turned in by some of his own men, Edward raved to his barons: ‘The tongue of man can scarcely recount the evil deeds committed by the Welsh against our progenitors . . . but God wishing, as it seems to put an end to these evil proceedings has, after the prince had been slain, destined David [Daffydd] as the last survivor of the family of traitors . . . to be the king’s prisoner after he had been captured by men of his own race.’ Daffydd was made an example of in the most hideous fashion, quadruply punished: sentenced to be dragged by horses to the scaffold (as a traitor), hanged alive (as a homicide), have his bowels burned out as a violator of religion (since he had attacked at Easter) and his body quartered (as he had plotted the king’s death). At Shrewsbury, where the sentence was carried out, a brawl broke out between Londoners and Yorkshiremen over which should get the prime body parts. Needless to say, the cockneys got the head.

  Early in 1284 Edward presided over an Arthurian-style court at Nefyn in north Wales, complete with elaborate tournaments and round table. The weight of the new Camelot was such that the floor collapsed during the festivities. In the Welsh epics, Arthur had been, of course, a true western Briton, a Celt, in fact. Geoffrey of Monmouth, the borderer, had begun the process of anglicization, and Edward had completed it. The British hero was now an English emperor, an emperor, moreover, to whom, in the words of the Statute of Rhuddlan that formalized the annexation of Wales, ‘divine providence has entirely transferred under our proper dominion the land of Wales along with its inhabitants’. This was just the beginning of a comprehensive exercise in cultural demolition and imperial control. Just because Edward had himself witnessed his father’s creation of a sacred mystique of princely rule (and was its first beneficiary), he knew exactly what to rip out from the Welsh tradition to maximize their demoralization. At Aberconwy, the Cistercian monastery that had been the burial place of Llewellyn the Great – the equivalent to the Westminster sanctuary of the Confessor – was demolished (its monks moved eight miles away) and replaced by an immense castle, one of a stone ring of fortresses interposed between Snowdonia and the sea. The relic of the Croes Naid, the fragment of the True Cross which had been in the safe keeping of Llewellyn’s house, was taken away to England along with Llewellyn’s coronet. And since a son, Edward, the eleventh child to be born to Edward and Eleanor, had been born at Caernarfon in 1284, the title that had defined Welsh autonomy – the Prince of Wales – would now be bestowed on the most English of princes, the heir-apparent, the emperor in waiting. Edward of Caernarfon was formally invested in 1301 – in Lincoln, which was about as far as one could travel from Wales and still be in Britain.

  Edward’s Welsh conquest gave him the chance to play Roman emperor, an ambition that may well have been stimulated by his experience of Latin Christendom in arms on the crusade. While the excavations for Conwy Castle were under way, bones were unearthed which were said to be the remains of Magnus Maximus, the father of the first Christian Roman Emperor, Constantine the Great. Edward had the bones taken to the nearby site of the ancient Roman city of Segontium and re-interred with great pomp and ceremony. The king may not have had much time for book learning, but he often behaved as if he were an heir to the Caesars: formidable on the battlefield, a stickler for homage in triumph, and all the while trumpeting the belief that he was creating an empire of law. The Welsh and Irish (whose traditional laws Edward had decreed were ‘detestable to God and so contrary to all law that they ought not to be deemed law at all’) were to be deprived of their traditional practices but would gain the immeasurable satisfaction of being enfolded within the king’s law. To cap it all, the greatest warlord of the century kept harping on about ‘Pax’. Come to my peace, he would say, like some latter-day Trajan, and all will be well. Choose otherwise and you will regret it. In The Mabinogion, the cycle of early Welsh tales, there is mention of a king who had dreamed of a castle with high, coloured towers. That dream had been translated into reality at Constantinople, and at Caernarfon Edward created a Byzantium by the sea, with banded octagonal towers copied slavishly from the Theodosian walls of Constantinople. On top of the battlements he set the eagles of imperial Rome.

  The scale of castle-building, the most ambitious exercise in colonial domination ever undertaken anywhere in medieval Europe, was likewise Roman-crusader in its colossalism. The construction of Conwy was organized like an imperial military campaign. Between the spring of 1283 and late autumn of 1287, when most of the work was done, there were on site some 1500 minuti (semi-skilled labourers) and around 500 specialized artisans shipped in from wherever it was that they did things best: the forested west Midlands for the carpenters, the boggy fens of Lincolnshire for the fossatori (the excavators who made water defences) and stony Devon and Dorset for the cementarii (masons). First, the skilled craftsmen were shipped to posting stations (just like soldiers) in Bristol or York and then to regimental headquarters at Chester. From Chester they arrived on site, along with the stone and timber, to be assigned to their tents and work places. It must have been at places like Conwy and Harlech that West Countrymen and Midlanders and men from Yorkshire and Lincolnshire would have had their first encounter with each other, just like the many nations that found themselves bonded together in the legions of Rome. There, beneath the lion standard of Edward Plantagenet, they were made to understand what it meant to be part of the great Britannic realm.

  Over all this presided Edward’s master-builder, an architect of consummate genius and versatility, Master James of St-George, a Savoyard whom Edward had met on his way back from the Holy Land and whose work he had seen in southern France. Master James was someone who understood how to build not just great crusader fortresses (the closest thing to the Welsh castles), but what were actually entire walled colonial cities, controlling supply routes, fitted out with modern conveniences like bath-houses and with flexible defences: towers that could be manned or abandoned, connected or isolated as circumstances required. The last time that anything like this had happened in Britain was the construction of Hadrian’s Wall.

  As for the natives themselves, they were now second-class citizens in their own country, treated like naughty children down in the satellite towns and villages built at the feet of the stone monster. They were forbidden to carry arms or to have strangers stay overnight without permission. They were allowed to keep some of their more esoteric laws, as long as they understood that they could be superseded at any time by the king’s laws. And the sheriffs responsible for administering royal law, were, for several generations, overwhelmingly English, as befitted the government of a colony. Worst of all perhaps, in the mind of the conquerors they were doomed to a kind of patronized quaintness – permitted to retain (for the entertainment of their colonial overlords) their quaint blind harpists, bards and choirs. As for those who wanted to do something more serious with their lives and get aboard the Plantagenet gravy train, Edward’s army awaited.

  It could have been worse. And for the Jews of England it was. In 1290 England acquired the distinction of becoming the first country in Christian Europe – or anywhere else for that matter – to expel its
Jews as if they were a contagious disease. It is sometimes supposed that this enormity was perpetrated as a financial expedient to meet the huge bills falling due as a result of the Welsh wars. Indeed, the costs of empire were staggering – probably a third of a million pounds or ten times the annual revenue of the treasury – and Edward certainly wished to avoid the imposition of heavy taxes, which might provoke the same kind of opposition in and out of parliament that had been his father’s and his grandfather’s ruin. But he also had the banking house of the Riccardi from Lucca ready and willing to advance substantial sums, albeit at equally substantial rates of interest. The three thousand Jews, on the other hand, had been so exhaustively bled by earlier forced loans and penal taxes that they were in no condition to yield much at all to Edward’s needy coffers. Throughout their history in England they had always been treated as property rather than humanity; something to be used and disposed of once that usefulness had been exhausted.

  Prodded by the Church, Edward had already abolished usury in his kingdom, immediately depriving the Jews of the only form of livelihood to which they had been allowed access. At the same time he required that they wear yellow badges of identification, the better to be recognized as the subspecies of humanity he undoubtedly believed they were. In 1285 he took the further disingenuous step of requiring them to abandon money-lending for other pursuits while doing nothing to make those alternative occupations available. Five years thence he was able to ask the Church and parliament for an enormous grant of taxes, the quid pro quo for which would be the expulsion. The measure, as Edward well knew, was immensely popular, as attacks on the Jews always were. Edward’s mother, Queen Eleanor of Provence, had been an enthusiastic anti-Semite and piously believed (along with countless others) the obscenities of the blood libel that claimed that, because Jews needed blood to bake their Passover matzo (unleavened bread), they regularly took the lives of innocent Christian children to ensure a supply. The boy Hugh of Lincoln, whose body had been found in a well in 1255, was assumed to be one such martyr, much mourned over by the Plantagenet court and given his own shrine in Lincoln Cathedral. Whenever a child went missing a hue and cry went up that the diabolical Jews had claimed yet another victim, so their elimination would merely remove from the body of Christianity a particularly offensive toxin.

  Edward’s modern biographer, Michael Prestwich, describes this ethnic cleansing – the violent uprooting of entire communities in York, Lincoln and London – as an ‘operation [that] went surprisingly smoothly’, congratulating the king and his officers on carrying it out without unseemly massacres. But there were ways to avoid the messiness of public bloodshed and still see the Jews off with a satisfying degree of loathing for the crucifiers of the Saviour. One ship’s captain devised a method that doubtless gave him, his crew and all those who heard about it enormous amusement. When the ship was beached at low tide in the Thames estuary at Queenborough, he suggested that his Jewish passengers might like to stretch their legs. When the tide came in they were barred from re-embarking. Vastly entertained, the captain told them to beseech their God to part the waters as he had done for their ancestors in the Exodus. But there was no miracle this time. The Jews drowned.

  Not long after the expulsion of the Jews Edward I had his own loss to mourn. In that same year, 1290, Eleanor of Castile died in Lincoln. Like his father before him (and in stark contrast to the libidinous Angevins), he had been tied to his wife by what seem to have been bonds of real affection. Most of their life had been together. She had been twelve when they married, had given birth to fifteen children of which only one boy and five daughters survived into adulthood and was still comparatively young when she died. Edward, normally so thick-skinned and emotionally coarse, was torn apart by her death, plunging into deep mourning. He ordered two tomb effigies be made in gilt bronze, one for her entrail tomb at Lincoln, the other for Westminster. And between the place of her death and the place of her interment he created a monument unique in medieval kingship: a series of elaborately carved stone crosses – at Waltham, Charing and Cheapside among other places – all marking the journey of her body.

  There was another royal death in 1290, and its implications were dramatic enough to pull Edward out of his mourning and back into the chess-game of politics he played so wickedly well. In September the six-year-old Maid of Norway died at Kirkwall in Orkney. She had been the granddaughter of Alexander III of Scotland, and with her the house of Canmore became extinct. Her death was only the last of a series of mortal misfortunes that had created the succession crisis in Scotland. Alexander’s two sons had both died young and childless, and his daughter, Margaret, the wife of the king of Norway, had died while giving birth to a baby girl, also called Margaret. But Alexander was only in his early forties, and by his marriage in 1285 to the young French noblewoman, Yolande of Dreux, he could reasonably expect a decent chance of producing more heirs. On the tempestuous night of 18 March 1286 he was in too much of a hurry to get on with the succession project for his own – and Scotland’s – good. Eager to reach his manor on the far side of the Firth of Forth, Alexander was twice told in no uncertain terms to turn back, first by the ferryman and then by the baillie who met him on the north shore. Ridiculing their fears, he rode off with a small company towards the manor along the coast road. In the morning his body, neck broken, was discovered on the shore.

  The completely unexpected death of the forty-four-year-old king was an immense disaster for Scotland. Alexander had presided over a long period of prosperity and had managed to keep the country out of the civil and foreign wars that had done such damage in Ireland, Wales and England. If Alexander had not managed to keep the thirteen great earls from pursuing their perennial clan vendettas and land and cattle feuds with each other, he had at least prevented the disputes from turning into anarchy. Now this long peace was in jeopardy, thrown by a horse and its rider too impatient for the marriage bed to wait for a storm to pass. An anonymous poet mourned:

  Sen Alexander our king was deid

  That Scotland left in luve and lee,

  Away wes sonse of aill and breid,

  Of wine and wax, of gamin and glee.

  The gold wes changit all in leid,

  The fruit failyeit on everilk tree . . .

  [Since Alexander our king was dead/That Scotland left in love and peace/Away fled abundance of ale and bread/Of wine and wax, of pleasure and glee/The gold it was all changed to lead/The fruit it fails on every tree . . . ]

  There was an heir, Margaret, the infant whose birth had caused the death of her mother, Alexander’s daughter. But she was in Norway and reputedly sickly. So while ‘the damsel’ was in her infancy, government was entrusted to a body of senior nobles and clerics known as the Guardians of the Realm. The mere fact that there was such a body presupposes a sense of the national community in Scotland (much as in England in the 1250s) that existed independently from the prince who happened, at any time, to personify it. And the Guardians believed that they had found a practical solution to the dangers of a long period of minority. The child Margaret would be betrothed to Edward’s infant son, Edward of Caernarfon. It was specified that in this marriage of realms, Scotland was to keep its independent identity, laws and customs. But Edward I doubtless assumed that he could now count, without fail, on Scotland’s loyal support in war – especially in conflicts with France.

  The death of the child-queen amid the dark red sandstone of Kirkwall wrecked all those finely tuned calculations. It was now unavoidable that the royal presence looming to the south would have something forceful to say concerning Scotland’s destiny. Edward, however, did not interfere unbidden in Scottish affairs. He was invited, first by letters and then by a delegation, to act as arbitrator in deciding the claims of the contenders for the Scottish throne. It was a priceless opportunity and Edward seized it with alacrity. The Scots needed something from him. Very well, then he would take something in return, an acknowledgement that he was their feudal overlord. An assembly of magnates
and prominent churchmen from England and Scotland was called to the border, on the river Tweed, in May 1291. The English gathered at Norham Abbey on their side of the frontier while the Scots, judiciously, remained at Upsettlington, north of the beautiful, winding river. Edward then duly invited representatives of the Scots to cross the Tweed to join him. But the meeting that transpired was not exactly a union of minds (though the proceedings took place, as usual, in French). As the price of settling their affairs, Edward summarily, and shrewdly, asked the Guardians to produce documents showing why he should not be recognized as their feudal overlord. What he got, instead, was an equally astute contradiction. ‘The bons gents – the responsible men – who have sent us here say they know full well you would not make such a claim if you did not believe you had a good right to it. Yet of any such right made or used by your ancestors we know nothing.’ This was as good as saying that the king might not be completely off his head to make such a demand, but it was for him, not them, to come up with the substantiating document. For good measure they added that they were unauthorized to answer any questions that would commit, in advance, a king who had not yet been installed on the Scottish throne and who (it was implied) might well have his own notions on the matter.

  In the end, of course, the liberty of the discussions at Norham was seriously circumscribed by a small but significant fleet of warships anchored at the mouth of the Tweed, not to mention the armed following of sixty-seven English magnates. Despite the epic of national resistance which would follow in the years ahead, in 1290 the leading contenders were so anxious to have succession settled (preferably in their favour) that they were prepared to take individual oaths of homage to Edward in June 1291. But as a group the Guardians had extracted some crucial conditions: Edward was to promise to maintain the ‘laws and liberties’ of Scotland during the period of his adjudication, and, once a king was decided on, he was to return the realm, and especially its castles, no later than two months after the new Scottish sovereign’s installation. Should he violate that agreement, Edward was to be penalized to the tune of £100,000!