The Plantagenets: History of a Dynasty

by J. S. Hamilton

  What followed next is referred to by the chronicler Walter of Guisborough as the ‘Little Battle of Châlons’ rather than a tournament, a battle in which much blood was spilled.5 Nevertheless, Edward probably enhanced his reputation both as a tournament knight and as a leader of men in this encounter.

  From Châlons, Edward travelled on to Paris, where he performed homage for his French lands to Philip III during a 10-day stay from 26 July to 6 August.

  Although he met with at least one English clerk while in Paris, instead of crossing the channel, he next went south to Gascony to confront a revolt by Gaston de Béarn, ‘in the firm belief that his first duty was to Gascony’. 6 While in the duchy, he launched an inquiry into feudal holdings, prior to receiving homage as king-duke. The resultant Livre des Hommages may perhaps anticipate the more famous Quo Warranto inquests and the generation of the Hundred Rolls in England, once again suggesting Edward’s keen interest in administrative efficiency, even if the returns probably added little of material value to the ducal coffers.7I If nothing else, this process reinforced Edward’s personal position as lord in Aquitaine, and strengthened the bonds of loyalty between the king-duke and his Gascon subjects.

  Eleanor had parted company with Edward shortly before his arrival in Paris. She was once again pregnant, and travelled ahead to Aquitaine in anticipation of giving birth. Throughout the summer, she encouraged her brother Alphonso to visit her, which he finally did in Bayonne in November when he was present at the baptism of his nephew. The king of Castile stood as godfather for the child, named in his honour as Alphonso. He also took the opportunity presented by this occasion to seek an increase in his sister’s dower assignment. During these same months, in the autumn of 1253, Spanish marriages were arranged for two of the four surviving children of Eleanor’s marriage to Edward; young Eleanor was affianced to the heir to the throne of Aragon, while Henry was betrothed to the heiress of Navarre.

  King Edward I finally returned to England in 1274, landing at Dover on 2 August. The royal family proceeded to London by way of Tonbridge, where they were entertained by the earl of Gloucester, and Reigate, where they were hosted by John de Warenne, earl of Surrey. London, and more specifically Westminster, was a hive of activity in anticipation of the king’s arrival. Huge stocks of food were laid in preparation for the coronation, and considerable building activity was likewise put into motion in order to house and feed the throng of both men and beasts expected to descend on the capital.

  The coronation of Edward I and Eleanor took place on 19 August 1274, the first such ceremony in nearly half a century. In spite of squabbles over precedence by the king’s brother, Edmund of Lancaster (who claimed the right to carry the Curtana sword as hereditary steward of England) and by the archbishop of York, Walter Giffard, which may well have resulted in a boycott of the ceremony by each, on the whole both the coronation and the celebrations that followed seemed to go off without a hitch. Edward did, however, clearly make a point of emphasizing the rights of the crown, which he had seen challenged so forcefully in the reign of his father. During the coronation, he apparently swore to uphold the standard oaths, and one chronicle relates that immediately after Robert Kilwardby, archbishop of Canterbury, anointed and crowned both Edward and Eleanor, the king removed the crown from his head, refusing to wear it until he had recovered the crown lands relinquished by his father. Nevertheless, the coronation was followed by lavish feasting and merry-making. Indeed, orders for foodstuffs had gone out as early as February, and both staples and delicacies were gathered from across the kingdom and abroad. Prelates were called upon to furnish exotic poultry, including swans, peacocks and cranes, while London fishmongers were hard-pressed to provide enough pikes, eels and lampreys.

  Temporary lodges, stables and kitchens covered all the open space available in Westminster, and in London the conduit at Cheapside flowed with both red and white wine. The highpoint of the celebration may have come when the king of Scots, accompanied by the earls of Lancaster, Cornwall, Gloucester, Pembroke and Surrey, appeared before the king, each at the head of a force of 100 knights.

  All dismounted before the king and set these valuable horses free, to be taken and kept by whoever could catch them. Such a grandiose celebration had surely not been seen in living memory and must have inspired great enthusiasm for the new reign.

  But what of the man who now, at 35 years of age, had been crowned king?

  In 1274, Edward was, and must have remained, something of a mystery to his subjects. In many ways, he embodied the very image of kingship. Standing six feet and two inches tall, he was powerfully built, and his experiences on both the tournament field and the field of battle had long since proved his personal courage, a courage he would continue to demonstrate until his dying day. He felt little need to wear rich apparel, confident in the appearance he made, although the impact of his physical presence may have been marred somewhat by a lisp, and by the drooping left eyelid that he had inherited from Henry III. Edward I ascribed to a rather conventional chivalric outlook and was deeply concerned with his own honour and that of the crown, although his behaviour – particularly in his youth, but in some instances right down to the end of his life – may have led some to doubt the sincerity of his conviction to these ideals. Nevertheless, his favourite pastimes – hunting and hawking – fit neatly into this ethos, as did his interest in Arthurian traditions.

  Edward’s enthusiasm for Arthur and the Round Table has already been mentioned in terms of his literary patronage of Rustichello of Pisa, but it also took a more active form. The king and queen visited Glastonbury in 1278 to witness the translation of the remains of Arthur and Guinevere, and the king organized what were called Round Tables at Nefyn in Wales in 1284 and at Falkirk in Scotland in 1302. Most intriguingly of all, he hosted a little-known tournament in Winchester in 1290, which coincided with the celebration of the impending marriages of his daughters Joan of Acre to Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester, and of Margaret to John, duke of Brabant. Although the tournament was overlooked by contemporary chroniclers, the scraps of evidence that survive in the royal accounts suggest an altogether lavish affair. Considerable sums were expended on building works at Winchester Castle throughout 1289 and 1290 in preparation for the tournament, and during the actual event the king’s nephew, John of Brittany, received a grant of 1,000 marks to cover his expenses, while John of Brabant’s household consumed 3 tuns (1,088 gallons) of wine during 3 days in Winchester. The most remarkable feature of this tournament is the famous ‘Winchester Round Table’, which has been displayed on the wall of Great Hall in Winchester since at least 1464, when the chronicler John Hardyng noted that:

  The Rounde Table at Wynchestre beganne

  And ther it ende and ther it hangeth yet. 8

  This massive oak table has a diameter of 18 feet and weighs more than a ton, and although the painted decoration of Arthur and the names of his knights on the rayed surface of the table is a later addition, there can be little doubt of the Arthurian inspiration for this unique artefact that consciously tied the Plantagenet dynasty to the legendary king of an earlier British empire.

  On a more mundane level, Edward III was possessed of a thoroughly conventional piety. Like his father, although less extravagantly so, he was generous in the provision of alms, feeding some 200 paupers weekly at the outset of the reign, and more than three times that number towards the end of the reign, with substantial supplements on feast days and other special occasions. On the rare occasions when the king was unable to attend morning chapel, the gifts of alms were supplemented, as they were every year on 25 April, the birthday of his son and heir, Edward of Caernarfon. Edward also demonstrated a devotion to the cult of the Virgin, as well as to that of St Thomas Becket. The king regularly made generous gifts to Canterbury, especially in times of crisis, but these gifts could on occasion take unusual forms. In 1285, the king offered four golden statues, including one of St George, valued at nearly £350. Fifteen years later, the king left four
gold florins at the saint’s altar ‘for the foetus currently in the queen’s belly’ (Thomas of Brotherton was born to Margaret of France on 1 June 1300). On another occasion in 1297, the king demonstrated both his piety and his interest in hunting when he presented the saint with a wax effigy of one of his falcons in hopes of a cure for the ailing bird. Finally, Edward I may well have been the most devoted of all English kings when it came to the royal touch. Although this practice of healing those suffering from scrofula had begun under his father, documentary evidence suggests that, on average, Edward touched more than a thousand of his subjects for the king’s evil each year. This practice, both majestic and humbling at one and the same time – scrofula is a tubercular disease that causes swelling of the lymph nodes in the neck and draining sores – seems to embody the often contradictory nature of Edward I’s personality.

  His ecclesiastical patronage cannot measure up to that of his father. By 1290, for instance, Vale Royal, the Cistercian Abbey which he founded in Cheshire in 1277 in fulfilment of a vow made in the face of shipwreck in the Channel, had foundered. He did, however, patronize painters and sculptors to work on the Painted Chamber in Westminster Palace in the 1290s, and St Stephen’s Chapel was begun in 1292. Particularly in the Painted Chamber, some of the differences between the mind of Henry III and that of Edward I become clear. Rather than the depictions of vices and virtues and associations with the Confessor that his father had favoured, Edward sponsored a massive pictorial programme focusing exclusively on the Old Testament, and particularly on the first Book of Maccabees.

  In Judas Maccabeus, Edward celebrated a warrior king in the mould of both King Arthur and himself. Indeed, in 1323, two visiting Irish friars commented that the Painted Chamber contained all of the warfare of the Old Testament, and observed that Edward himself had been ‘the most Maccabean of English kings’.

  A secondary cycle of paintings depicted the downfall of tyrannical kings and may be combined to articulate Edward’s own vision of chivalric kingship.

  Edward never let his personal piety stand in the way of political expediency. He was almost constantly at odds with his archbishops of Canterbury, Pecham and later Winchelsey, and according to one chronicler, in 1304, Edward’s harsh treatment of the archbishop of York, Thomas of Corbridge, led directly to the prelate’s death. 9 Similarly, the king would brook no papal interference in English affairs. Not only did he quarrel with Archbishop Winchelsey over the legitimacy of his appropriation of papal tenths earmarked for crusade in the 1280s, in 1297 when the archbishop attempted to enforce the papal bull Clericis laicos to prevent ecclesiastical taxation by laymen, Edward outlawed the clergy and collected fines in the amount of the tax they refused to pay. His relations with Boniface VIII after 1300, when the pope was increasingly consumed in a struggle with Philip IV of France, and with the Gascon pope, Clement V, were more cordial.

  There was one kingly virtue, however, that seems to have largely escaped Edward I. Largesse, the lavish dispensation of patronage and favours, was a virtue that had posed serious problems for Henry III and would also do so for Edward II. If Edward I had a problem with largesse, it was its reverse – parsimoniousness. Perhaps influenced by the events of his youth, Edward I was miserly in the dispensation of patronage. Certainly, he was generous to his family and to a small inner circle of trusted companions and advisors. Men such as Robert Burnell, Walter Langton and Antony Bek were raised to dizzying heights through the king’s advocacy. And Edward could make generous, if modest, spontaneous gifts to completely unknown figures when appropriate. But his often-heated relations with the higher nobility has led to a longstanding debate. Although Edward maintained a close relationship with a few of his magnates, notably Henry de Lacy, earl of Lincoln, he found himself unable to get along with many others. His longstanding feud and ultimate destruction of the earl of Derby has already been mentioned, and his dealings with the earl of Gloucester were more often than not troubled. His high-handed acquisition of the earldom of Aumale in 1274, simply to allow it to slip into abeyance, seems to point toward an ongoing policy to diminish the power of the magnates, reinforced by his similar treatment of the earldom of Devon in the 1290s, and his manipulation of the earldom of Norfolk in 1306. Moreover, when comital families were married into the royal family – the earl of Gloucester to Joan of Acre in 1290, and the earl of Hereford to Elizabeth in 1302 – their lands were entailed in such a manner that they would descend through the royal line. Equally telling is the king’s failure to elevate new men to fill the ranks of the earls. When Edward came to the throne in 1272, there were fewer than a dozen English earls, whereas when he died in 1307, there were only eight, none of them new creations, and most of them close kinsmen. Although this may have been more of a dynastic than a political policy, which allowed him to concentrate wealth in his family, in the longer term it was one element in the difficult political landscape that would challenge the abilities of his son Edward II following his own death.

  Without question, one of Edward I’s defining characteristics was a violent temper. His feud with Robert Ferrers, earl of Derby, coloured his youth, and his strained relationship with Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk and marshal of England, and Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford and constable of England, would similarly colour the later years of his reign. His anger could often boil over into physical action. At the wedding of his daughter Margaret to John of Brabant in July 1290, the king attacked a squire for unknown reasons. That he subsequently felt some remorse is indicated by the payment of 20 marks to the squire. Similarly, in 1297, Edward paid for repairs to a coronet of Princess Elizabeth after having thrown it into a fire in a rage. Even if one doubts the veracity of the well-known account of the chronicler Guisborough set in 1305, in which the king is alleged to have assaulted his son Edward, pulling out his hair and kicking and beating him out of the room over an inappropriate request, the story must have rung true to contemporaries.

  And yet, for all the accounts of Edward’s explosive temper, he had a gentler side as well. Perhaps the most favourable light that can be cast upon the character of Edward I has to do with his relations with his family. Putting aside the outbursts of temper cited above, and his dismissive reaction to the news of the death of his young son John in 1274, Edward seems to have been genuinely devoted to his family. Although Eleanor of Castile gave birth to perhaps 15 children, only 6 survived childhood. Three boys – John, Henry and Alphonso – died at the ages of 5, 6 and 10 years, respectively, with only her fourth and final son, Edward, surviving. Born in 1284, he grew to adulthood in the last difficult decade of the reign, and his relationship with his father seems never to have been as close as either might have hoped. The situation with Edward’s daughters, however, was different. Five of these girls – Eleanor, Joan, Margaret, Mary and Elizabeth – survived into adulthood, and seem to have been closer to their father. Joan did not marry until 1290, when she was 18 years of age, whereas Eleanor was 24 years old at the time of her marriage in 1293. Although Edward was undoubtedly furious at Joan’s scandalous second marriage to a mere squire, Ralph de Monthermer, in 1297, he nevertheless forgave her. He was lavish in gifts to the messengers who brought him news of the birth of any of his grandchildren, and he indulged all of his daughters with jewels and clothes, especially Elizabeth and Mary, who were frequent visitors to the royal court.

  Finally, we must consider Edward I as a husband. Like his father, Edward appears to have been entirely faithful to his first wife Eleanor of Castile, and later to his young French bride, Margaret. Not only did Eleanor provide the king with numerous children (although only one surviving son), but she was a companion to him, travelling on crusade to the East, as well as to Wales and Gascony. Although she developed a reputation for acquisitiveness in the land market, she did not bring with her the large entourage of aliens that had made Eleanor of Provence so controversial. The king’s grief at the death of his consort at Harby in Lincolnshire in 1290 inspired one of the best-known sets of monuments of medieval En
gland, the so-called Eleanor Crosses. The queen’s remains were entombed in three different places – her entrails being housed in Lincoln, her heart in Blackfriars, London, and her body in the elegant tomb that survives to this day in Westminster Abbey. More poignant, then and now, than these tombs were the series of 12 crosses constructed on the site of each of the resting places on the route of her funeral cortege. Even if we allow for an element of inspiration coming from the crosses that had commemorated the death of Louis IX in 1270, the three surviving crosses, especially the triangular canopied sculpture at Geddington (Northants), continue to evoke an emotional response that renders Edward more human than perhaps any other relic of his time.