Foundation

by Peter Ackroyd

  In the parliament of 1275 Edward extracted from the assembled lords and knights and townsmen a tax upon the export of wool; from this time forward the king received 6 shillings and 8 pence upon every sack shipped out of the country. At one stroke, his finances were improved. He handed over their care to the Riccardi bankers of Lucca. In other legislation he bore down heavily upon the Jews, but this is matter for Chapter 20. In the same parliament a long and complicated Act, known as ‘the statute of Westminster the First’, was passed by which the king intended ‘to revive neglected laws that had long been sleeping because of his predecessors’ weakness’; these neglected laws, of course, were those that implied or required strong royal control. In a similar move towards royal dominance he replaced most of the sheriffs of the counties with men whom he knew and trusted.

  Edward I, unlike his ancestors, had no great empire. Instead he had a kingdom, which he determined to strengthen and consolidate. He first marched into Wales, where he set up the line of castles that still endures. Edward’s castles are magnificent creations, in part conceived as the edifices of chivalric romance. The king had a very strong attraction to the mythical history of Arthur and the Round Table; by claiming kinship with his fabulous predecessor, he could also claim sovereignty over the whole island. Arthur was known as ‘the last emperor of Britain’. Yet he had been considered by many to have been a Welsh or British king fighting against a Saxon enemy. It was rumoured that he was not dead, only resting, and that he would come again to destroy the enemies of the Welsh. This was not comforting news for Edward’s English soldiers.

  So his death, and permanent removal from the arena of combat, had in some way to be confirmed. It was fortunate that the bodies of Arthur and Guinevere had been discovered by miracle, in the grounds of Glastonbury Abbey, during the reign of Henry II. Now Edward decreed that the bodies should be dug up, and then reinterred in a magnificent sarcophagus. The corpses of Arthur and Guinevere, if such they were, were wrapped in silk by Edward and his queen before being placed in a tomb of black marble. Their skulls were retained for public display. They were definitely dead. Such was the pious belief in the efficacy of the past, however, that elaborate rituals were considered to be necessary.

  The Welsh castles of Edward I, like the stone edifices of imperial Rome and of Norman England, are tokens of brute power. The walls of the castle at Conway are 10 feet (3 metres) thick. Fifteen hundred workmen and craftsmen laboured on its construction for four years. The towers and masonry of Caernarfon Castle are based upon the double line of walls built around Constantinople by the emperor Theodosius in the fifth century; it was written in legend that the father of the emperor Constantine was buried at Caernarfon, so the historical allusions are clear. The new building also retains the motte of the Norman castle, originally built upon the site, as an emblem of previous English sovereignty. The supervisor of the works at Caernarfon, Conway, Criccieth, Harlech and Beaumaris – Master James of St George – was one of the great spirits of the age through whom the genius of a warrior aristocracy was embodied.

  Edward believed that, in the conquest of Wales, he was pursuing his own regal rights in the same spirit that inspired the ‘quo warranto?’ investigations. This was his land. Or so he declared. The Atlantic folk, who had lived in the territory for many thousands of years, may not have agreed with him. With a cavalry force of approximately 1,000 men Edward chased the Welsh from mountain to mountain, and from hill to hill, until the native princes finally submitted to his authority. English law, and the English system of shires, were then imposed upon them. In the safety of the shadow of the castle walls, settlements of English colonists were introduced. Towns sprang up from markets. The life of the country was being quickened. Subsequent revolts and rebellions disturbed the peace, but the settlement itself has never since been overturned. When all was complete the king held an Arthurian tournament at Nefyn, a small coastal town from where the Prophecies of Merlin were supposed to emanate.

  The costs of this war of conquest had been huge. That is why Edward called so large a parliament early in his reign; the wider the net, the larger the catch. The whole country was soon enmeshed in a general system of taxation that heralded the rise of a fiscal state. It was a necessity of war that became, almost by accident, a principal element of the English administration.

  The taxation on wool, also passed by the parliament, materially assisted the king’s treasury. But it had further consequences. Edward set up the system of customs that, for better or worse, has been a feature of English economic life ever since. For the first time the king was seen to be acting in concert with the merchants, to whom he now offered his protection. Foreign traders were granted certain privileges. They were allowed to come and go as they wished, were made free from interference by local officials and were immune from local taxes. The merchants of Gascony and elsewhere were given the status of citizens in all dealings with Londoners.

  The king’s connection with the bankers of Lucca meant that he was now involved in questions of international finance; that is why he took great care to preserve the standard of the money supply. Debased coinage would not bolster his prestige with the brokers of Europe. A more elaborate system of credit, borrowed from the financiers of Venice and Genoa, was introduced to England. The necessities of war once more created the context for innovation.

  Edward also found ingenious ways of making money. The law stated that those with property worth more than £20 a year were obliged to adopt the status of knights; but knighthood was an expensive business, with the cost of equipment alone, and many landowners were ready to pay a relatively large sum to avoid the honour. By an order known as ‘distraint of knighthood’ Edward ordered that all eligible men should bear arms, and then proceeded to collect the money from those who wished to remain exempt. It was a legal form of extortion.

  Edward I was once known as the ‘English Justinian’ on the grounds that he gave shape and purpose to English law. The great jurist of the seventeenth century, Edward Coke, remarked that he enacted ‘more constant, standing, and durable laws than have been made ever since’. The ‘Statute of Westminster the First’, passed in the earliest parliament of his reign, was followed by nine other statutes ranging from matters of law and order to the debts of merchants. They were practical and specific measures to confront immediate problems. In the Statute of Winchester, for example, it was decreed that all hedges and underwood should be cleared from the sides of the highways to a distance of 200 feet (61 metres); they could not then be used to provide shelter for thieves.

  The measure was timely and necessary. Parts of the countryside were beset by marauding gangs, many of them drawn from the soldiers who had fought in Edward’s wars. There were no other rewards for old soldiers. Other groups of ruffians were hired by members of the local gentry in order to pursue private feuds or to terrify their tenants. So special courts known as ‘trailbaston’, which meant the act of clenching a club or staff, were set up to deal with acts of felony and trespass. The name originally described the ruffians themselves, and then became applied to the judges who sentenced them.

  The king took his share of the proceeds of justice, of course, and the judges themselves grew rich. They were despised as much as they were feared. In some of the popular verses of the period the judges are compared unfavourably to those outlaws who sought refuge in the woods. What difference between the thieves in hiding and the thieves in office? In one song the usher of the court addresses a defendant. ‘Poor man, why do you trouble yourself? Why do you wait here? Unless you give money to everybody in this court, you labour in vain. If you have brought nothing, you will stand altogether out of doors.’ We have here a medieval paradox. Even as the law was being shaped and refined, the exponents of the law were mocked and vilified. Royal law was being condemned even as it was being extended.

  Nevertheless forms and procedures had to be followed; there had developed a legal routine. In the period of Edward’s reign the number of attorneys rose from appro
ximately 10 to 200. They became a new elite. Where there is money to be made, there are people who will wish to create privileged access to it. The phenomenon itself is of a piece with other developments of the early fourteenth century. The households of the great were being run by staffs of trained managers, and farms were organized by estate managers. War itself was being professionalized. The king no longer summoned a national host from the shires; instead he came more and more to rely upon paid troops led by full-time commanders. As the business of the realm became more complex, it became the province of full-time officers whom we might describe as a civil service; the chancery alone employed more than 100 clerks, and had a secure home at Westminster. The first proper parliamentary record, giving an account of proceedings, dates from 1316.

  Yet the force of the royal will was still paramount. Two judges were once arguing a case in the king’s presence. Edward was beginning to lose patience with their lengthy deliberations. Eventually he interrupted them, saying, ‘I have nothing to do with your disputations, but God’s blood, you shall give me a good writ before you arise hence!’ He did not mean good in the sense of meritorious; he meant one that worked in his favour. The monkish author of The Song of Lewes had written of Edward, when he was a prince, that ‘whatever he wants he holds to be lawful, and he thinks that there are no legal bounds to his power’.

  Edward had remained in Gascony from 1286 to 1289, seeking to control the affairs of the land that mattered as much to him as England. On his return he discovered, according to one chronicler, ‘a very real oppression hanging over the country’. One of his clerical servants, Adam de Stratton, had acquired an unsavoury reputation for various financial malpractices. He was part of a system of bribery and corruption that had flourished more than ever in the king’s absence of three years. The rage of the king was wonderful to behold. He stormed into the chambers of the man, exclaiming, ‘Adam! Adam! Where art thou?’ In Adam’s house, at Smalelane near the Fleet Prison, was found a hoard of £13,000.

  Edward could trust only the advisers whom he had taken with him to Gascony, and he ordered them to find out the truth about all accusations. As a result of their enquiries many judges were found to be manifestly corrupt. One of them, the chief justice on the Bench of Common Pleas, fled for sanctuary to a Franciscan friary. From there he was forced to abjure the realm, walking barefoot to Dover with a cross in his hand. The king had returned from abroad, and had become an avenging angel. Once more he had proved his strength.

  In November 1290, his queen died. Eleanor of Castile is not well known to history. She is supposed to have been devout, but her principal devotion was to her family’s interests; she speculated in land, for example, and took financial advantage of those who were heavily in debt to the Jews. One contemporary reveals that ‘day by day the said lady continues to acquire plunder and the possessions of others by these means. There is public outcry and gossip about this in every part of England.’ In this she was not very different from other members of the family who, travelling in the wake of Edward, were inclined to be rapacious and mercenary; it was one of the settled policies of his realm that his kinsmen should be granted the great earldoms of the realm. Four of his daughters were safely married to the richest magnates and were given extensive lands.

  The king was much affected by his wife’s death, and along the route of her burial procession from her deathbed in Nottinghamshire to her sepulchre in Westminster he caused to be erected a series of crosses. These are the ‘Eleanor crosses’, three of which still stand at Geddington, Northampton and Waltham Cross. Another of them, at Charing Cross, is a replica and is in the wrong place. After the funeral the king went into a religious retreat for more than a month.

  By March 1291, however, he was on the border with Scotland. He had travelled there to arbitrate between the claimants to the Scottish throne, on the assumption that he was somehow overlord of the kingdom. He chose one of them, John Balliol, and then proceeded to treat him as a vassal. The Scots would not endure this situation for long. Four years later Balliol was persuaded by his barons to renounce his homage to the English king, ally himself with the French monarch, and declare for independence. Edward then marched north and, within a matter of weeks, had subdued the Scottish army. Dunbar opened its gates to him; Edinburgh made a token resistance; Perth and St Andrews submitted unconditionally. He destroyed Berwick and butchered the people savagely; according to a chronicler thousands of the inhabitants ‘fell like autumn leaves’. He seemed to have a thirst for blood.

  Edward now believed himself in truth to be the proper king of Scotland. Lia Faéil, ‘the speaking stone’ otherwise known as ‘the stone of destiny’, was taken from Scone Palace and removed to Westminster Abbey where it remained until 1996. According to legend it formed the pillow on which Jacob’s head rested when he was vouchsafed the vision of the angels ascending the ladder. It is in truth an oblong rectangular block of limestone, pitted and fretted with age. But it was a token of Scottish destiny. When Edward handed the seal of Scotland to its new English governor, he remarked that ‘a man does good business when he rids himself of a turd’. One Scottish patriot was determined to cure him of this complacency. William Wallace had fled to the safety of the woods, having been convicted of murder, and there he gathered together a band of disaffected men.

  Curiously enough Edward had placed Balliol in an invidious situation similar to his own; as lord of Gascony and duke of Aquitaine, Edward was theoretically the vassal of the king of France. This meant that, in practice, he was continually colliding with the interests of the court at Paris. It took only a small spark to light a modest flame. Some rowdy fights between English and Norman sailors led to reprisals and confrontations; the French king then summoned the English king to his court and, when he refused, he declared Edward’s lands in France to be confiscated.

  Edward sailed with his army across the Channel in 1297, although many of the participants were quite unwilling to join this continental endeavour. Why should they fight for Edward’s lands in France when they derived no benefit from them? The earl of Norfolk and marshal of England, Roger Bigod, had refused to take command of the army. ‘Bigod,’ the king said in a rage, ‘you shall go or hang.’ ‘By God, sir,’ the earl replied, ‘I shall neither go nor hang.’ He did not go. In fact Edward never actually engaged his opponents in battle. He sailed to Flanders to attack the French king from the north, but he did no more than bluster. In the end he signed a treaty, by which he retained Gascony, and then he sealed it with a kiss. He married the French king’s sister, Margaret, making sure that European power stayed within the family.

  The news nearer home was more disquieting. Reports of a Scottish invasion were widespread and, in the autumn of 1297, William Wallace and his men defeated an English army at Stirling Bridge. More significantly, a domestic rebellion was growing in the face of royal extortions. The taxation for the French expedition had been immense. The king had taken one fifth of the income of the clergy; the clerics had at first refused to grant as much, and the king promptly outlawed them on the grounds that a body which did not support the country did not deserve to be protected by it. The goods of the clergy were seized, and the courts of law were closed to them. Their tenants refused to pay rent, and often physically attacked them. They were in the end compelled to surrender to the force of a powerful and ruthless king.

  They were not the only ones to suffer from his depredations. The citizens of London were compelled to part with a sixth of their moveable wealth. Edward had increased the customs on exports of wool, and as a result the merchants had cut payments to their suppliers. The wool tax became known as the ‘bad tax’ or ‘maltote’. The plight of those in the countryside who suffered from excessive taxation is captured in a vernacular poem written in 1300, Song of the Husbandman:

  Yet cometh budeles [beadles] with ful muche bost [pride]:

  ‘Greythe me selver [silver] to the grene wax [official document].

  Thou art writen yn my writ, that thou wel
wost [know]!’

  Every fourth penny went to the king; seed-corn, and immature corn, had to be sold in order to raise money for taxes; the king’s bailiffs seized oxen and cattle; bribes were paid to the royal officials; some people were forced to flee their lands because they could not afford to be taxed. Royal officials had taken grain from the farmers in order to feed the troops in France. Edward also levied fines and taxes on the great magnates, with whom he never enjoyed satisfactory relations.

  Whereupon some of the earls – Roger Bigod among them – decided that it was time to confront the king. Another round of warfare between king and barons seemed to be inevitable. The regency council that governed the nation during the king’s absence, under the nominal command of the king’s young son, retreated for safety within the walls of London. A baronial army was assembled at Northampton. At this point the royal party gave in. With the news of the defeat at Stirling Bridge before them, they could not risk a war on two fronts. The earls demanded a reissue of the Magna Carta with important new provisions, such as the removal of the ‘maltote’. This was granted to them. It was now solemnly sworn that there would never be taxation without the consent of those being taxed. The king returned a month later from his inconclusive overseas adventures, and reluctantly agreed. The Magna Carta had, by slow degrees, now become the guardian of English liberty – or at least the English economy – against royal aggression.

  The earls then for the most part turned their attention towards the threat from Scotland. Edward convened a parliament in York, a sure sign that he was now intent upon subduing the northern regions. He gathered a great army of more than 28,000 men, including the soldiers previously posted to Flanders and Gascony. Yet a major victory for the English at Falkirk in 1298 over the army of William Wallace did not prove decisive, and the next six years of the Scottish wars consisted of seasonal campaigns in which the English forces were matched by fierce native resistance. The Scots eventually came to terms in 1304, and a year later William Wallace was captured; he was dragged on a pallet from Westminster to Smithfield, where he was ritually hanged, disembowelled while still alive, and quartered. A plaque is still fixed to the wall close to the point where he was killed. Yet all the butchery did not work against a determined people. A year after Wallace’s execution, Robert Bruce was crowned king of Scotland at Scone. The old war continued.