by Dan Jones
Slowly, though, the royalists grew more secure, and by the middle of the summer they could make their advance on the great castle at Kenilworth, a vast fortress that had been fortified by King John and subsequently by Simon de Montfort with the intention of making it impervious to siegecraft. It was defended by huge walls and fortifications and a massive man-made lake, and garrisoned by more than 1,000 men. Cracking the defences was likely to take months of dirty, technical engineering work. Trebuchets and huge wooden siege towers with gantries from which archers could fire were brought in and the site, overseen by Edward’s younger brother Edmund, teemed with miners and engineers. Special barges from Chester were used to try and storm the castle across its water defences, and the food supplies of counties across the Midlands were severely drained as the besiegers maintained a full feudal muster outside the fortress walls. Yet it was an effort in which Edward the soldier had little part to play. He remained on duty stamping out isolated rebellions in East Anglia, and enjoying the summer with his wife, who gave birth to their first boy on 14 July. The couple rather provocatively named the child John.
After months of expensive, draining effort, it became clear that Kenilworth could only be starved into submission – a painful process that could take more than a year. With the Disinherited still causing problems all over England, conciliatory tactics were once more foisted upon the royalists. The wisest political head among them was that of the papal legate Ottobuono, who alongside Henry of Almain led a committee to produce a peace that would bring out the rebels from the stinking fortress and somehow reconcile them with those royalists who had been awarded their lands and possessions. They produced the Dictum of Kenilworth. Set out in forty-one clauses, the Dictum was formally addressed from England’s leading loyalist bishops and barons to the king, the realm and the Holy Church. It defended the king’s right to ‘freely exercise his lordship, authority and royal power without impediment or contradiction’, but asked him to ‘appoint such men to do justice and give judgement as do not seek things for themselves but things which are of God and justice’. After the obligatory request that the king obey Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest, the Dictum went on to set out the means by which rebels who had followed de Montfort could be rehabilitated and restored to their lands – ‘that the course to be followed is not disinheritance, but redemption’. It allowed the Disinherited to buy back their confiscated lands, or what portions of them they could afford, albeit at the severe rate of between five and seven times the land’s value, payable to the royalists who had been granted the lands since confiscation. These were hardly generous terms, but they at least provided a mechanism for restoring peace. The Dictum was given and made public in front of the castle walls on 31 October 1266. The garrison in the castle surrendered, dirty, freezing and starving, in the middle of December.
It was an important step towards peace, which had been achieved by consensus and negotiation, rather than the bloody grind of military force. There was a brief moment of crisis in the spring when the earl of Gloucester invaded London in protest against the fact that the Disinherited were being forced to pay their entire fines before they were allowed to enter into their confiscated property. But the danger was averted thanks to the interventions of Ottobuono, who persuaded England’s better-off barons to pay into a distress fund to assist the Disinherited, and Richard earl of Cornwall, who negotiated an amendment to the Dictum of Kenilworth allowing rebels to return to their lands at once, rather than at the end of their terms of repayment. As Gloucester was persuaded to withdraw from the capital and Henry made his way in, it was clear that the peace process had truly begun.
With Henry and Edward now in firmly conciliatory mood, the Dictum of Kenilworth was followed in September 1267 by the Treaty of Montgomery, which brought peace with Wales by conceding vast feudal power to Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. The Welsh prince had been allied with de Montfort and made great headway in establishing his power over Gwynedd during the turbulent years of the Barons’ Wars. Rather than attempt to force Llywelyn into a humiliating peace, he was now granted extensive control and territory in north-west Wales, in return for a tribute of 25,000 marks. The price to Edward of this was immense, for it effectively gutted his personal power beyond the Marches. This was a situation that he would take much trouble to reverse later in his reign, but for the sake of peace, in 1267 he gritted his teeth and consented.
Two months later, the final plank of rehabilitation and reform was put in place when the Statute of Marlborough was issued, again with Edward’s approval, if not his detailed involvement. The statute was a vast and influential set of legal provisions touching on areas of government that had been under discussion since 1258. Marlborough recognized in its preamble that ‘the realm of England, oppressed of late by many tribulations and unprofitable dissensions, needs amendment of its laws and legal rules so that the peace and tranquillity of its people may be preserved’. The statute that followed touched in its twenty-nine detailed chapters on a wide range of legal matters, from the jurisdiction of courts and the supremacy of royal justice in matters of distraint to matters of wardships, charter repeal and communal fines. The language was highly technical, concerning matters of procedure, precedent and jurisdiction. It was not a statute of such fundamental principle as Magna Carta, but it began a long process of statutory reform that would carry on until the end of the century.
For Edward, however, twenty-eight years old in 1267 and approaching the prime of life, the world was still a place for making war, rather than law. Paradoxically, now that the realm was beginning a long process of healing after the violent uproar of the last decade, it had less to offer him. Peace had been made both with the rebel barons and the Welsh, and Henry III had settled back into making expensive plans for a new tomb for Edward the Confessor at Westminster Abbey, to which the saint’s body would be transferred on 13 October 1269. This left few opportunities for the prince and his friends to further their military reputations. Edward, his brother Edmund and his cousin Henry of Almain jointly sponsored an edict allowing tournaments to be held in England, but this was still not quite enough to sate their appetites for military adventure. If Edward wished to continue his soldierly career, he must look further afield, to the Holy Land. Since 1267 King Louis IX had been planning a new crusade, due to leave Europe in 1270 with the aim of beating back the advances of the Mamluk sultan Baybars, who had pushed deep into what remained of the Christian states in Outremer.
This, for Edward, was a field of war in which he could gild his reputation. Deeply intoxicated by the promise of glory in the East, he scraped together cash from whatever sources he could in an effort to fit out a crusader army. This included taking a £17,000 loan from Louis IX himself, repayable from the revenues of Bordeaux. After Easter in 1270, Edward and his fellow crusaders succeeded, with the utmost effort, in convincing the knights of the shire gathered in a highly sceptical parliament to grant them a crusader tax. The price was a renewal of Magna Carta and a limitation on Jewish moneylending, which gave the shire landowners enough respite from debt to be able to afford their contributions to Edward’s adventure. From the end of May, England sprang into action and Edward prepared to depart. He submitted to arbitration to settle a long-running and bitter dispute that had blown up between himself and Gilbert, earl of Gloucester. He put his lands into trust under a committee headed by his uncle Richard, earl of Cornwall, and – since Eleanor of Castile was determined to come on crusade with her husband – he also named Richard as guardian of his three young children – John, aged four, Henry, aged two, and a baby called Eleanor. Finally, on 20 August 1170, the royal crusading party set sail from Dover, leaving the cares of England far behind them, and headed towards the dusty land of spiritual warfare in the East.
King at Last
Edward’s crusade started under a cloud. He travelled to the Holy Land via a familiar path: through the south of France to Sicily, graveyard of his father’s ambition, with the intention of moving on to Outremer via C
yprus. Before he had even reached Sicily, however, he discovered that the crusade as a pan-European venture had begun to unravel. Louis IX’s army was travelling several weeks ahead of Edward’s, and when Louis passed through Sicily he met up with his younger brother, Charles of Anjou, who had succeeded where Henry III had failed and claimed the Sicilian throne. While Edward was still marching through France, Charles managed to convince his brother Louis to divert his mission from Outremer to Tunis, where various enemies of Sicily were hiding from justice.
The French set sail assuming an easy victory, but just days after landing on the north African coast, Louis IX died of a plague that swept through the French army. In shock, Charles led the crusade back to Sicily, only for the majority of the French fleet to be smashed by a storm while in harbour at Trapani. Edward, Henry of Almain and the rest of the English arrived in Sicily in November 1270 to find the French in utter disarray. They wintered on the island, hoping that the spring might bring better fortune, but they were helpless when, in January 1271, Louis’s timid 25-year-old son, now King Philip III, decided that providence was against the French and turned for home, leading his men overland through Italy back to Paris.
Edward, however, was determined. When spring arrived, he sent Henry of Almain back to ensure the new French king did not attempt to threaten his lands in Gascony, then set out with his remaining men for Outremer. They arrived in mid-May.
Just over a year later Edward found himself in the heart of the labyrinthine politics of the Middle East. Christian Outremer had dwindled almost into oblivion. Frankish rule was in a parlous way. Despite Richard earl of Cornwall’s efforts briefly to reinstate control over Jerusalem during the 1240s, and Louis IX’s massive expenditure fortifying the city of Caesarea at the same time, most of the great cities of Christian Palestine had since fallen to Mamluk invaders. Caesarea and Jerusalem were in infidel hands. So too were Antioch and the supposedly impregnable crusader fortress the Crac des Chevaliers, whose soaring walls had resisted the hammering of trebuchets but which had fallen to trickery. What remained of the kingdom was ruled from Acre – a demoralized city surrounded by hostile country and dreading any day the arrival of a Mamluk army thousands strong beneath its walls.
It was clear from the outset that Edward’s crusade was never destined to be much more than a sortie into a hopeless battlefield. The Christians were done for, and the days of great triumphs before the walls of the most spectacular cities of the Middle East were over. The main enemy to the Muslim forces of Palestine was now no longer the Frankish knights of the West but the terrifying Mongol horsemen who attacked them from the north and east. Edward and his companions found not a vast war to be joined, but a diplomatic jigsaw to be puzzled over.
Yet Edward stayed for more than a year, organizing sorties into Muslim territory, exchanging letters with the Mongol leader Abagha Khan in Marageh – a city some 700 miles from Acre – and welcoming the occasional arrival of fresh troops from the West, including a party led by his brother Edmund. He was determined to make the best of his crusade, even in heroically unpromising circumstances.
On the evening of 17 June 1272 – his thirty-third birthday – Edward lay in bed with his wife in his private chambers in Acre. As he drifted into sleep, he had much to contemplate. His small band of men suffered horribly from heat and dysentery. The Mamluk leader Baybars had vastly superior forces and supplies. Hugh III, the titular king of Jerusalem, was more inclined to peace than war, and the previous month had signed a ten-year peace with Baybars, which restricted Edward’s hopes of glory still further. Edward had been furious when the treaty was agreed. He had refused to become a party to it: quite likely he was still brooding as he fell asleep on his night of reckoning in the East.
What happened to Edward that evening became the stuff of legend. As he slept, a messenger arrived, claiming to be a renegade diplomat: a turncoat from Baybars, here at the English court bearing lavish gifts and ready to give up his own side’s secrets. Whatever message he gave Edward’s servants and guards must have sounded both urgent and convincing, for they woke the sleeping prince and asked him to meet his visitor. Edward staggered out of his sleeping chamber and met the man while still wearing his nightclothes.
As it transpired, the messenger wished to give Edward a very special birthday gift: a death blow. His position as the only non-signatory to the peace deal had made him a dangerous presence, whom Baybars wished to be rid of. The messenger rushed at Edward with a dagger, attempting to stab him in the hip. But Edward, no mean fighter, was up to the task. ‘The Saracen met him and stabbed him on the hip with a dagger, making a deep, dangerous wound,’ wrote the chronicler known as the Templar of Tyre. ‘The Lord Edward felt himself struck, and he struck the Saracen a blow with his fist, on the temple, which knocked him senseless to the ground for a moment. Then the Lord Edward caught up a dagger from the table which was in the chamber, and stabbed the Saracen in the head and killed him.’ In hand-to-hand combat, there were few who could match the long-limbed Englishman.
Nevertheless, when he rose from his opponent’s dying body, Edward realized that the blow that had caught him was a serious one. As attendants rushed to the scene, it was feared that the weapon might be poisoned. Legend has it that Eleanor of Castile tried to suck the venom from her husband’s wound, though as it turned out the dagger was almost certainly poison-free.
There was still a real risk of infection, though, which could lead to the same sort of agonizing gangrenous death that Richard I had suffered at Châlus-Chabrol. Edward was saved from a similar fate by a more skilful surgeon, who cut away the rotting flesh that festered around his wound. He took his time to recuperate, before he and Eleanor of Castile, together with their young daughter Joan who had been born in Acre, departed Outremer for Europe in late September. They stopped in Sicily on their way home, before travelling to the Italian mainland for Christmas. It was here that they were met by English messengers bearing sad news. Henry III had died in November, aged sixty-five, following a short illness. After a magnificent funeral, he had been buried in the tomb vacated by Edward the Confessor’s recent translation. And after one of the most remarkable apprenticeships in his family’s eventful history, Edward I was now king.
He took his time returning to England. Trusting the government of his kingdom to ministers such as Robert Burnell, his most trusted and senior clerk, Edward stayed abroad to enjoy the fruits of his glamorous crusader reputation. He joined in French tournaments, did homage to Philip III for his French lands, and settled the rumblings of rebellion in Gascony. Then, during the dog days of 1274, he sailed for England, his coronation day set for Sunday 19 August 1274.
Edward alighted at Dover on 4 August, setting foot on home soil for the first time in nearly four years. He returned to a country that had waited patiently for his kingship, and which now acclaimed him in style. There had been plenty of time to prepare for his arrival. Edward was the first king to be crowned for more than half a century. There was a whole new royal family to welcome. At the coronation Queen Eleanor was in the early stages of her tenth pregnancy with a child, Margaret, who would be born in 1275. After the long and troubled reign of Henry III, here was a brand-new generation of royal power and people to welcome.
The citizens of London – despite or perhaps because of their acrimonious history with Edward – used the occasion to produce a festival of show and wealth. ‘When Edward thrives, behold!’ wrote one enthusiastic Londoner. ‘He shines like a new Richard!’ Unfortunately, no detailed accounts of the ceremony survive, but it is known that the city was draped in gold cloth, and certain that there was pageantry and mass celebration in the streets as the king and his entourage rode into the city. Edward most likely processed from the Tower of London to the palace of Westminster on the day before his coronation, before staying overnight in the Painted Chamber, richly decorated with biblical images and scenes from his family’s history.
The abbey must have been packed with magnates from England and her neig
hbours, who would have watched rapt as Edward processed towards a giant wooden stage at the crossing of the church. They would have watched him make an offering at the altar of two gold figurines – one of St Edward the Confessor and another of St John the Evangelist. Then he made the same coronation oath that his ancestors had sworn. In what was now time-honoured fashion, Edward promised to protect the Church, to do justice to all men, to abolish evil customs and to protect the rights of the Crown. Unlike many of his predecessors, as Edward swore these things to a packed abbey, he meant every word. However he conceived of simple lordship, he always treated kingship as an office predicated on the need for strong, universal authority. It was time to win back the power lost by his forebears.
Edward’s first priority was the oath he swore to protect the rights of the Crown. Almost as soon as the celebrations were complete, royal servants began a survey of royal rights in England that was conducted on a gigantic scale – comparable only to the Domesday Book of William I’s reign. It was known as the Hundred Rolls inquiries, since it concentrated on the hundreds – the smaller subdivisions of the English shires, which were used for administrative and judicial purposes at a local level. Between November 1274 and March 1275, every hundred in England received a visit from royal commissioners, who put detailed questions before local juries ‘about the lord king’s rights and liberties which have been taken away and the excessive demands of the sheriffs, coroners, escheators and other of the lord king’s bailiffs and of any other bailiffs whosoever appertaining/belonging to the lord king in any way, in the third year of King Edward’s reign 1274–1275’. This, at least, was the purpose laid out in the text of the enrolled returns that collated the information that the commissioners gathered.
