The Struggle for Mastery

While Edward had been duping and bullying the Scots into submission, the Christian communities of the Holy Land had been driven into the sea. On 5 April 1291 the new Egyptian sultan, al-Ashraf Khalil, had drawn up a massive army before the walls of Acre, much as his predecessor Baybars had done twenty years before. On this occasion, however, it was to be no mere display of Muslim might. In the six weeks that followed, the great city was subjected to a sustained siege that heralded nothing less than the total destruction of crusader power. On 18 May the sultan ordered a general assault, and within hours it was all but over. Caught up amid the chaos and the carnage were Otto de Grandson and the small force of English knights that Edward I had sent east the previous summer. Dispatched for diplomatic purposes, these men unexpectedly found themselves fighting for dear life. Otto himself was among the fortunate few who managed to buy their way onto a boat, saving his skin but losing everything else, and sustaining no small damage to his reputation into the bargain. Thousands of others were far less lucky, among them the English esquire seen burning to death inside his armour like tar in a barrel. By the end of May Acre’s last outpost, the Templar stronghold by the sea, had fallen, and by the end of the summer every other city, castle and province had also been taken. So ended the kingdom of Jerusalem and the other colonies of Outremer. In a few short months, two centuries of Christian rule in the East had been brought to an abrupt and inglorious close.

The reaction in the West was one of profound shock. It had been widely appreciated that the situation in the Holy Land was deteriorating, but no one had expected a disaster on a scale such as this. News of Acre’s fall engendered both horror and an acute sense of guilt, and provoked a fresh round of crusade planning and propaganda. The Church, in response to a call from the pope, drew up ambitious schemes for remodelling society in order to recover the lost territories. The threat to Christendom, meanwhile, was emphasised by a sensational and widely circulated letter, purporting to be from the sultan himself, gloating over the slaughter and slavery of Acre’s citizens, and promising that worse was to come.¹

No one could have been more startled than Edward I. Just weeks before the disastrous news broke in England, he had dispatched (at what eventually proved to be colossal expense) an embassy to the il-khan Arghun, his putative Mongol ally. (The timing turned out to be doubly unfortunate, for Arghun was already dead.) Nevertheless, once Acre’s fate was known, the king clearly showed himself determined to press ahead with his long-planned expedition. That much is suggested by the letters he exchanged with other sworn crusaders, and especially by the new architectural and artistic works that he decided to commission.²

Not long before, Edward had suddenly cut all funding to Vale Royal Abbey, the foundation closely associated with his original crusading adventure. ‘The king has ceased to concern himself with the works of that church,’ noted one financial official, ‘and henceforth will have nothing to do with them.’ His mysterious decision may have had something to do with the monks’ misuse of money; it certainly freed up funds for the two projects ordained in the spring of 1292. The first was the complete reconstruction of the royal chapel of St Stephen in the Palace of Westminster. The design of the new building was closely modelled on that of the Sainte Chapelle in Paris, created half a century earlier by Louis IX in preparation for his first crusade. That Edward was responding to a similar stimulus in 1292 is strongly suggested by the other project he began at precisely the same time. Royal artists at Westminster were also ordered to redecorate the king’s chamber: the room where Henry III had died and where Edward had spent his coronation vigil. To the existing, peaceable wall-paintings that showed the Confessor being crowned and virtues triumphing over vices, extensive new murals were added depicting biblical scenes of war and suffering. Mostly based on stories from the Book of Maccabees, these images were seemingly an allusion to the recent fate of the Christian communities in the Holy Land, and intended to inspire thoughts of vengeance in those who saw them.

They evidently inspired wonder. Two Irish friars who regarded the ‘Painted Chamber’ in the early fourteenth century wrote of their ‘great admiration’ at ‘the greatest royal magnificence’. Similarly awe-struck were the antiquaries who rediscovered the friezes in the early nineteenth century, concealed beneath thick layers of whitewash. And yet, tragically, the inferior copies made by these men are the only visual record we have today of Edward I’s most extensive artistic endeavour: in 1834 the Painted Chamber was consumed by fire, along with St Stephen’s Chapel and the rest of the medieval Palace of Westminster.³

When, therefore, the English king returned from Scotland at the start of 1293, he was still clearly committed to effecting Jerusalem’s recovery. At the same time, it was equally plain that he would not be setting out that summer, as had previously been planned. Scotland was partly to blame: for the past two years Edward’s attention had admittedly been somewhat distracted. Yet a preoccupation with affairs in the north can only go so far in explaining why no material preparations had been made for the East. More significant, probably, was the failure on the part of the papacy to hand over all of the money promised in 1290. The king had, as agreed, received half of the accumulated crusade funds (100,000 marks) in the summer of 1291; but the following year the second instalment had failed to materialise. Presumably this was due to the death, in April 1292, of Pope Nicholas, which itself served to scupper any chance of a new crusade leaving in the immediate future: once again, the college of cardinals had been unable to decide on a successor, and at the start of 1293 they were still debating. Until Christendom had a new leader, and until Edward had received the balance of papal payment, no new departure date was likely to be set. Accordingly, the king’s journey south from Scotland was slow and unhurried. It was not until the middle of April that he arrived back in Westminster, in time for the first proper parliament for over a year.⁴

The king’s absence meant that there was much routine business to discuss. Top of the agenda, however, was a sudden and mysterious quarrel that had arisen in the past year between English and French sailors. According to one north-country chronicler, trouble had started when a brawl in a Norman port had gone too far: swords had been drawn and one man had ended up dead. Since then, in spite of efforts on Edward’s part to intervene, the dispute had intensified, to the extent that the two maritime communities were now virtually at war with each other. So serious was the problem by the spring of 1293 that the king appointed a high-ranking embassy, including two earls, to cross to France in order to devise a solution. But before it had set out, news arrived of a great battle at sea.⁵ On 15 May English and Gascon ships had been assailed off the coast of Brittany by a large and overtly hostile Norman fleet. As the men of the Cinque Ports later testified, their attackers had flown red streamers, ‘which everywhere among mariners means killing without quarter and war to the knife’. In the bloody engagement that followed, though, it was the English and Gascons who had evidently had the best of the fighting: several French ships were captured, along with their crews and their cargoes. And the Gascons, for an encore, had gone on to sack the French port of La Rochelle on their way home.⁶

What had started as a scrap between sailors had escalated into a major diplomatic incident. Soon letters arrived in England from the king of France, requiring the release of those taken prisoner and the restitution of goods. Edward, in response, now proposed three different ways by which the matter might be resolved. First, he offered to do justice in England to any complainants. For obvious reasons, the French were unlikely to accept this, which probably explains Edward’s second suggestion, that the dispute be settled by a joint Anglo-French commission, which would rule according to ‘the Law of the Sea’ (evidently a kind of maritime Marcher law). Lastly, in case neither of these options found favour in France, the king proposed that the quarrel be put to the arbitration of the pope. Edward clearly continued to regard the business as very serious. His threefold offer was carried to France by a new embassy, more legally qualified than the aborted original, which set sail from Dover at the end of July. The king then turned and headed west, to spend what remained of the summer in the comfortable environs of Windsor, Winchester and Corfe, before moving to Bristol in September, where he celebrated the wedding of his eldest daughter, Eleanor, to Henry, count of Bar (in eastern France).⁷

By the time the court returned to Westminster for the customary autumn parliament, however, it was clear that the English embassy had (metaphorically speaking) run aground. All three of Edward’s proposed solutions had been rejected. Joint commissions, arbitration – these rested on the assumption that this was a matter between two sovereign powers. The French had chosen to see it very differently. In their view it was not a disagreement between two kings, both alike in dignity, but a dispute between the king of France, a superior lord, and the duke of Gascony, his vassal. For this reason, the French had made much of the involvement in the maritime clashes of the men of Bayonne, and had demanded the surrender of the mayor and jurats of the town, as well as one hundred of its citizens. When the Bayonnais had inevitably refused to comply, the French had further upped the ante, demanding the surrender of Bordeaux and the Agenais. This process culminated on 27 October, when Philip IV peremptorily summoned Edward, his disobedient liege-man, to appear before him in Paris.⁸

The timing of this summons, which must have arrived in Westminster around mid-November, could not have been more ironic. At that very moment, John Balliol, the newly installed king of Scots, was up before the king of England and his parliament in response to a similar summons – obliged to explain why he, Balliol, had acted against one of his own Scottish earls, who had appealed to Edward as his superior lord. Balliol, having meekly accepted English overlordship at the start of the year, but no doubt having had the gravity of his mistake explained to him in the meantime, now put up more of a fight. ‘I am king of the kingdom of Scotland,’ he told the assembled magnates, ‘and I dare not answer … anything concerning my kingdom without the advice of the responsible men of my realm.’ Confronted by King Edward, however, Balliol swiftly buckled, and reaffirmed his vassal status. Indeed, he did not even use his royal title, accepting his position as ‘your man of the realm of Scotland’. Judged in contempt of court, he was sentenced to lose three of his castles and towns. ‘Like a lamb amongst wolves,’ said a contemporary English chronicler, Balliol did not dare to open his mouth.⁹

The irony was probably not altogether lost on Edward, but he would not have seen the two situations as analogous. In Edward’s view, Balliol was his vassal in every respect: the king of Scotland exercised no authority beyond what was delegated to him by the king of England. The situation on the Continent was seen as very different. Edward, as duke of Gascony, was a vassal of the French king and had always admitted as much. But he was also king of England, in which capacity he answered to no one (except God). He was certainly not about to trot to Paris at the king of France’s command.

What, Edward must have wondered, was Philip playing at? The French king’s summons had not only been unwarranted but gratuitously offensive, failing even to address Edward with his title as duke of Gascony. By November it was creating unnecessary tension in the duchy, where French officials were riding from town to town to read it out and being treated with predictable contempt in return. This was simply not the way the English and French did business. For forty years the two royal families had avoided confrontation by cultivating warm personal relations. Their friendship had blossomed in 1254, when Henry III, passing through Paris, had first met Louis IX. The two men had hit it off immediately, but the real credit for the concord belonged to their queens. Margaret and Eleanor of Provence had also been present in Paris that December, along with their younger sisters Beatrice and Sanchia – respectively the wives of Charles of Anjou and Richard of Cornwall. Louis had looked at their gathering and seen the seeds of a lasting European accord. ‘Have we not married two sisters,’ he said to Henry, ‘and our brothers the other two? All that shall be born of them, sons and daughters, shall be like brothers and sisters.’¹⁰

And how wonderfully prophetic these words had proved. Edward I, Philip III and Charles of Salerno had all endeavoured to maintain this spirit of affection and unity, in spite of the powerful contrary forces that had sometimes threatened to pull them apart. When the three of them had met at Amiens in 1279, Philip and Edward had worked diligently to resolve their outstanding differences as lord and vassal. And, of course, when Charles was later captured and imprisoned, it had been his English cousin who had come riding to his rescue.

With this long history of family friendship in mind, it was perfectly natural that Edward should entrust the task of calming Anglo-French relations in 1293 to his brother: Edmund of Lancaster was, of course, part of the same circle of cousins. He was, moreover, in some respects better qualified in this respect than Edward himself. In 1275, following the death of his first wife, Edmund had married into the French aristocracy, taking as his second wife Blanche of Artois, countess of Champagne. Blanche, a widow herself, had a daughter called Jeanne of Navarre, who had subsequently become the wife of Philip IV. Thus Edmund was not only second-cousin to the king of France, but also stepfather to the French queen.¹¹

And he was in Paris in the autumn of 1293. No doubt thinking that his brother’s entrée into the highest circles of French royal power might prove useful, Edward had dispatched Edmund in the summer, an informal attaché to the official English embassy. Now that the formal, legalistic pleading had apparently failed, the king looked to his brother to play the family card.¹²

And so, early in the new year 1294, Edmund sat down to negotiate with his wife, his stepdaughter and Mary of Brabant (Philip III’s widow and stepmother of Philip IV). In friendly fashion, the earl and the three royal ladies devised a secret scheme that would simultaneously salve wounded French pride, simplify the relationship of England and France over Gascony, and strengthen the existing bonds of amity between the two Crowns. Together they agreed that several important Gascon towns, including Bordeaux, would be surrendered to Philip, along with a score of Gascon hostages. Edward would submit to this public dressing-down on the private understanding that it would be quickly reversed. A summit meeting between the two kings would follow at Amiens, as of old, and Philip would regrant Gascony to Edward on new, favourable terms that would reduce the likelihood of future contention. Lastly, to seal the deal, Edward would marry Philip’s sister, Margaret. Honour would be satisfied, stability would be secured, and the family settlement created by Henry III and Louis IX would be renewed for generations to come.¹³

In all of this, the English king, his brother and the royal ladies of France were deceived. Their secret negotiations at the start of 1294 were not the beginning of a new period of friendship, but the last part of a carefully contrived plot to deprive Edward of his Continental dominions. A crucial player in this plot was Philip IV himself. Throughout the secret negotiations the French king looked in several times on Edmund and the ladies, to reassure them that the harsh words and aggressive noises being made by his council were all a front, necessary for appearances’ sake. The reality, he averred, was the confidential business they had in hand, and all would soon be well. A question mark hangs over Philip’s sincerity. Either he was a brilliant actor and an accomplished liar who intended to deprive Edward all along; or he may genuinely have intended to honour the secret deal but been overruled by his own council. One thing is certain: whether he was part of it or not, there was powerful faction at Philip’s court that had gained the upper hand in the 1290s, and its aim was the destruction of Edward I’s rule in Gascony.¹⁴

At its head was Philip’s younger brother, Charles of Valois. He most of all had special reason to hate the English. When, a decade earlier, France had been preparing to invade Aragon in order to remove its excommunicated king, Charles, then thirteen years old, had been crowned as his anticipated replacement. Subsequently, however, his crown had been bartered away by Edward I during the negotiations for a European peace. The rest of the Continent, including his older brother Philip, may have been pleased, but Charles was evidently not. As one modern historian has memorably put it, ‘he had been addressed as a king when he was still in his teens and had never quite recovered from the experience’. Even in 1294, by which time he was in his mid-twenties, Charles was still refusing to relinquish his royal title. And, though the prospect of realising his claim was long gone, he was determined to revenge himself on the man he regarded as responsible for his loss. English chroniclers recognised Charles as the author of the war at sea. The Normans who had plundered English ships and killed their crews had been acting on his orders, said one writer. ‘He persecuted the English with an inveterate hatred,’ wrote another.¹⁵

None of this would have mattered so very much had Charles been a lone loose cannon. But the fact was that, by the 1290s, his ‘inveterate hatred’ was shared by many others at the French court. Edward’s last trip to the Continent, a triumph in English eyes, had been viewed as so much grandstanding by envious Frenchmen. Philip IV, like Edward, might have intended to preserve amicable relations, but he too was surrounded by aggressive royal lawyers, whose raison d’être was to push the rights of the French Crown to their utmost logical limits. Such men must have been particularly annoyed by the swagger of the English king’s entourage during their visit to Paris in 1286. Robert Burnell’s speech, querying the extent of Edward’s vassalic obligations on the eve of his homage for Gascony, was seen as a gauntlet thrown down. Charles of Valois and his co-conspirators were now ready to pick it up.¹⁶

Had Burnell been involved in the negotiations with France in the winter of 1293–94, it is impossible to imagine that they would have been so badly handled. But the great chancellor, after eighteen years in office and a lifetime in Edward’s service, had died at Berwick the previous year, towards the end of the Great Cause proceedings. His replacement, John Langton, was no fool but, as a mere chancery clerk, did not command the king’s respect as Burnell had done. When the new chancellor advised against the secret deal, Edward simply ignored him.¹⁷ In February 1294 the order to surrender Gascony was given: in March English officials packed their bags and started to ship out, dismayed to be handing over towns, cities and hostages to the French on the express orders of their king.¹⁸

In fact, throughout the negotiations that winter, Edward seems to have ignored almost everyone, and kept no counsel other than his own. The men who were normally consulted in such matters – the magnates – appear to have sensed that important business had been concluded without their involvement. During Lent the king moved into East Anglia, touring his favourite shrines and churches, praying for a successful outcome to his daring and highly personal diplomatic initiative. At this time, noted one local chronicler, the magnates did not attend his court.¹⁹

The denouement came at Easter. Edward had moved into Kent, partly to bid farewell to his eldest daughter and her new husband, but mainly in anxious expectation of good news from France: a safe-conduct from Philip to come to Amiens, to marry his sister, and to receive Gascony back on new, improved terms. The newly-weds sailed, and Easter came and went, but still no messengers arrived from France. Then, on 20 April, a sorry band of Englishmen arrived, led by John of St John, the man who until just a few weeks earlier had been seneschal of Gascony. From the horse’s mouth, Edward learned what the king of France’s men had said and done as they had occupied the duchy, and the awful truth finally dawned. ‘The king went red,’ said the best informed chronicler, ‘and became very afraid, because he had acted less than wisely.’²⁰ In France, more or less simultaneously, Edmund of Lancaster was also discovering the enormity of his error, and being told by Philip’s counsellors that Gascony would remain in French hands. A few weeks later Edward was condemned in Paris for failing to attend the French king’s summons, and the duchy was declared forfeit.²¹

As the news of the confiscation spread, the English people weighed the evidence available and concluded that their king must have gone mad. ‘Up till now,’ said one writer, ‘Edward … had in all his acts shown himself energetic, generous and triumphant, like another Solomon.’ His departure from reason, it was popularly decided, was down to that old demon, Lust. The prospect of marrying a beautiful young woman had clearly turned the head of the fifty-four-year-old king.²²

Accordingly, when parliament assembled on the last day of May there were extraordinary scenes: Edward, usually so masterful, appeared almost meek, while his magnates, normally so agreeable, were furious. Having not been consulted, they felt no obligation to meet his request for help. According to one well-informed chronicler, it took a public act of contrition from the king to turn the situation around. Before all who were present, Edward swore an oath that he had not acted out of lust for the girl, but in order to have peace with France, without which he could not fulfil his vow to go on crusade. The magnates, moved by this declaration, now promised to help the king win back the lost duchy, saying they would follow him ‘in life and death’. ‘Mount the warhorses!’ urged Anthony Bek, the bellicose bishop of Durham. ‘Take your lance in your hand!’²³

The challenge that lay before them was enormous. France was not Wales. A war there was a fight against a formidable opponent, whose resources, by even the most charitable estimate, were the equal of Edward’s own, and in many respects much greater. Moreover, Philip IV was already prepared for war: since 1292 the French king had been building a fleet of galleys. The professed reason for this project had been a desire to assist in the ongoing ‘crusade’ against Sicily. Now, in retrospect, it was obvious that these ships had been intended all along for a conflict with the king of England.²⁴

Of course, Edward’s fury at the French action was fuelled by the knowledge that his own crusade, the true crusade, was now dead in the water. The quest for peace, the years of planning, the endless diplomacy: at a stroke it was all rendered obsolete. In June, the king wrote to the prince of Achaea in Greece, who was to have been an ally in the East, angrily lamenting the sudden change in circumstances.²⁵ The only con solation was that he was comfortably in credit. Conscious of the gargantuan task ahead of him, and resigned to the eclipse of his crusade, Edward determined to do as his enemy had done, and use his crusad ing resources to fund what was now an inevitable secular conflict. Accordingly, he turned to his bankers, the dependable Riccardi of Lucca, and asked them for the 100,000 marks that they had received from the papacy some three years earlier.

But the Riccardi, like Edward, had been caught completely off guard. They, like he, had conducted their business on the not unreasonable assumption that Anglo-French relations would remain amicable. The money they had been holding on his behalf was, it seems, tied up in overseas investments, and could no longer be recovered. And so, presumably with a good deal of trepidation, the Italians regretfully informed the king that, in present circumstances, they were unable to meet his request.

Edward’s reaction, sadly, is not recorded, nor is it known for certain when he received this devastating news. The evidence, however, suggests it must have been early, and probably before mid-June, for at that point parliament instituted a series of drastic emergency measures. First, on 12 June, it was ordered that all the wool in the country should be seized; then, four days later, notice was given that all churches were to be searched for monetary deposits – in particular the proceeds of the crusading tax that was still being collected. The king was clearly engaged in a desperate hunt for funds, rendered more frantic by the realisation that his bankers had failed him. The Riccardi themselves may have been granted a period of grace to see if they could recover any of the lost money, but by the autumn Edward had ordered their arrest. They were, he later opined, ‘men who had deceived him’. In this way the profitable relationship that had served them both so well for more than two decades, and that had underpinned all of the king’s earlier military enterprises, came to an end. The clever system of customs-for-credit was left in tatters.²⁶

More than ever before, Edward needed the voluntary support of his subjects. Thankfully, the English magnates in parliament were as good as their word. One of the first off the mark was Roger Bigod, the earl of Norfolk. A decade earlier he had rendered the king inestimable good service, not only fighting in Wales but also shipping large quantities of produce from his Irish estates to feed the conquering armies. Now the earl showed himself ready to perform the same task again, ordering his servants in Ireland to buy up all the food they could and ship it to Gascony in advance of his arrival. Edward would need exactly this kind of altruism to be widely replicated if he was to succeed. Throughout June the writs flew, first to England, then to Ireland and Scotland. All the king’s lieges were enjoined to be at Portsmouth, ready to sail, on 1 September.²⁷

By the end of June, when the last of these orders were issued, Edward himself had already arrived in Portsmouth – the great royal naval complex developed a century earlier by his illustrious ancestor, Richard I, for prosecuting a war against France – and was overseeing the build-up of his invasion force. As ever, the troops and clerks of the royal household had sprung into action like a well-oiled machine. They had already been in Portsmouth for over a fortnight, requisitioning warehouses, commandeering horses and carts, and impressing ships. Around the town, fields had been hired to accommodate hundreds of head of cattle, driven on the hoof from as far afield as Salisbury. Other produce – pigs, fish, cheese, chickens and some 24,000 eggs was pouring in from local suppliers and from London.²⁸

Already, as well, troops were starting to arrive. 1 September was the date for a general muster: before that, Edward intended to dispatch a smaller, rapid-reaction force to lead the first assault. As early as 8 June he had summoned a select number of barons to come to him as quickly as possible to this end. Some of these were young men, or must have brought young men with them, for the king knighted certain of them after their arrival in Portsmouth. As Edward explained in letters to his Gascon subjects (dated 1 July), this first force would be led by one such young man, his nephew, John of Brittany, aided by the more experienced John of St John, Gascony’s ousted seneschal. The second, larger fleet would then follow, captained by Edmund of Lancaster and the earl of Lincoln. Finally, in the fullness of time, Edward would come to the duchy in person.²⁹

This scheme, however, was disrupted by the appalling weather noted by many chroniclers that summer. In Ireland, monks wrote of a great storm in mid-July that destroyed the crops and caused widespread famine. A writer at Bury St Edmunds confirmed that there was similar dearth and want throughout England. ‘Worse still,’ he added, ‘during August and September there was a continuous drenching downpour of rain.’³⁰

This deluge, and the contrary winds that accompanied it, delayed the departure of the first fleet, probably for several weeks. It was not until the third week of August that the ships were able to put to sea. This meant that they would not be back in time to transport the main muster, which was accordingly postponed from the start of September to the last day of the month. No doubt frustrated by the delay, but glad to have finally blessed his troops and bidden them farewell, the king left Portsmouth on 21 August and went on pilgrimage to Worcester. God’s blessing, and the intercession of St Wulfstan, were also deemed necessary for the great English enterprise that was finally under way.³¹

The Church was much on Edward’s mind. The scrutiny of funds that had taken place on 5 July had succeeded in locating such crusade funds as still existed – a useful £32,000. But it had also revealed that the English Church itself was rich, and therefore able to help finance the French war. Finance was still the king’s major concern. By this stage he had thought better of his plan to seize all the country’s wool, having been persuaded by the mercantile community that an increase in customs duties would be more workable and render better results. But the scale of the increase – a punitive six-fold hike – shows that the need for money remained desperately acute. As the king prepared to leave Portsmouth, therefore, he instructed his clergy – his apparently comfortably off clergy – that he wanted to talk with them in Westminster in one month’s time.³²

The trip to Worcester was accordingly of short duration: a flying visit to secure the necessary spiritual aid. Meanwhile, the material build-up continued. On his way to and from the cathedral city, Edward ordered the infantry levies that would accompany the second fleet – these were to come from Wales. The king’s lieutenants there were enjoined to raise as many of the strongest and most powerful men as possible and have them ready at Shrewsbury by the end of September.³³

When Edward returned to Hampshire in the middle of the month, however, it was to news of fresh disaster. The first fleet, once out in the English Channel, had been dashed by the same contrary winds that had earlier delayed its departure. Some ships had been blown back to Portsmouth, but others had been swept as far afield as Plymouth, 150 miles to the west. Weeks after it should have arrived, his rapid-reaction force for Gascony was now scattered along the coast of southern England.³⁴

By itself, this latest setback was probably enough for the king and his advisers to decide that the main muster would have to be postponed indefinitely. There would be no point in having an army assembled at Portsmouth at the end of September without the means to transport it into the war zone. At the same time, it is possible that Edward was aware by this point of a more insidious problem. Some men, it seems, were refusing to obey his summons. The ancient obligation to provide the king with military service, as we have already seen, was limited by time – forty days being the longest period upon which the king could insist. But service was also subject to geographical limits – or so the landowning classes claimed. The question of whether Englishmen were duty bound to fight overseas had arisen on several occasions in the thirteenth century, and in the summer of 1294, prompted by Edward’s demand, the argument appears to have flared back into life. In Cambridgeshire, for example, the abbot of Ramsey was distraining his tenants – that is, seizing their horses and cattle – in order to compel them to turn out for the king. When this failed, he confronted the same men with the abbey’s own records, which showed that their grandfathers had fought on the Continent over fifty years earlier. But this too produced no compliance and, in desperation, the abbot paid out of his own pocket to send substitute knights to the king in order to fulfil his obligation. In the event, the fact that the muster had been abandoned meant that they were sent home again and told to await further orders, as were presumably the other knights who came to Portsmouth, and the 5,000 Welsh infantry who marched as far as Winchester before being turned back. There was no recorded reaction on Edward’s part to the opposition, but he would surely have been aware of it. As he set out for Westminster, therefore, it was probably with the knowledge that he would have to talk with his lay subjects, as well as his clergy, about the extent of their obligation to the Crown.³⁵

But the clergy came first. Edward met the assembled bishops, abbots and lesser churchmen on 21 September, as agreed, and found them champing at the bit. The cause of their ire was the scrutiny of church funds that had taken place in July. The fact that the king had chosen to lay hands on the crusading tax was one thing: a matter for his own conscience and the pope. In their quest for cash, however, royal agents had been quite indiscriminate, and had made off with an additional £11,000 of private deposits. This seizure, moreover, had been handled with gross insensitivity, with the king’s men forcing their way into ecclesiastical buildings and breaking open chests with axes. It was an act in many ways reminiscent of Edward’s personal smash-and-grab at the Temple Church in London some thirty years earlier, but carried out on a nationwide scale. And, to add insult to injury, it had taken place on a Sunday.

The king, in response, came close to apologising, and promised redress where offence had been caused. But, as he went on to explain, this was a national emergency – a war forced upon him, a peacemaker and a sworn crusader, by the deceitful king of France. He needed their help, which meant he needed their money. The clergy considered the matter for three days and offered him a tax of 20 per cent.

Now it was Edward’s turn to be angry – so much so that the elderly dean of St Paul’s who came to deliver the clergy’s response collapsed and died in the royal presence. A troop of knights was dispatched to the assembled churchmen, with the message that Edward wanted half their money, or else they would be outlawed – that is, literally placed outside the king’s protection, and exposed to all the dangers of robbery and physical violence that that implied. Anyone wishing to oppose Edward was invited to stand up and identify himself as a breaker of the king’s peace. Unsurprisingly, there were no takers. At this critical moment, the English Church lacked a leader: Archbishop Pecham had died almost two years earlier, and his replacement was still in Rome awaiting papal confirmation. Fearing for their safety, the clergymen crumpled and agreed that the tax, unprecedented in its severity, could be levied.³⁶

Shocking as Edward’s bullying tactics appear, his anger is readily understandable. Not so long ago, he could have imagined himself in the Holy Land in the autumn of 1294, perhaps even in the Holy City itself. But it had been a year of accumulating disasters: the treacherous occupation of Gascony by the French; the loss of the crusade funds and the consequent collapse of his financial system; the failure, in spite of his preparation and his prayers, of the first fleet to reach the troubled duchy; the rumour, and perhaps more than the rumour, that at least some of his subjects might refuse to fight for its recovery.

Edward felt every right to be angry. It was now early October, and still no help had reached Gascony. The first fleet was still regrouping in Plymouth; the magnates were talking in Westminster when they should have been fighting in France. There were also reports of trouble in Wales – apparently some of the infantry ordered to Shrewsbury had revolted. Moreover, whatever money Edward had been able to grab or extort, it was still clearly not enough: on 8 October, the king summoned the knights of the shire to meet in Westminster with the intention of negotiating a new tax.³⁷

One week later, the next hammer blow fell. The trouble in Wales, it transpired, was not local at all, nor was it spontaneous. It was planned, it was national, and it was deadly serious. Three baronial castles had already been taken. The royal castles at Harlech, Conwy and Criccieth were surrounded and under siege. And Caernarfon, the great, unfinished fortress, centre of royal power and symbol of Edward’s imperial rule, had fallen. The castle walls were being thrown down. The new English borough burned.³⁸

‘The stirrers of this sedition were a duo called Madog and Morgan.’ So wrote Walter of Guisborough, one of the most important chroniclers of the last part of Edward’s reign, and to some extent he was right. Revolt in north-western Wales had been raised by Madog ap Llywelyn, a distant relative of the late prince of Wales who, rather ambitiously, sought to revive the title for himself. Meanwhile, in the south, the rebels were being led by Morgan ap Maredudd, a disinherited local lord whose particular grudge was against the earl of Gloucester. It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that the major spur to action in 1294 was the frustrated ambition of fading Welsh dynasties. More than ever before, the rising was popular. Madog, Morgan and other leaders like them were not exciting a docile people to rebellion: they were riding a tidal wave of popular indignation. Welsh resentment against English rule had been building for over a decade, encouraged by the familiar pattern of oppression and apartheid that had fuelled earlier outbreaks. What had caused it to swell so spectacularly in the early 1290s had been Edward’s effort to raise taxes – specifically, the fifteenth granted to him in 1290 for the expulsion of the Jews. There was no tradition of taxation in Wales, and unreasonable assessment had meant that, in some areas at least, the Welsh – a much poorer people to start with – had been expected to pay more than double what had been asked of the English. Collection was culminating in 1294, just as Edward’s Continental crisis broke. With what must have been considerable curiosity, the Welsh watched as their oppressors departed from the new towns and castles, leaving behind only the most minimal of garrisons. Then, with what must have been utter amazement, they learned that they would be required to fight – to band together in their thousands and be issued with arms. Unsurprisingly, when the day of the muster arrived, they needed no further encouragement.³⁹

‘May Wales be accursed of God and St Simon/For it has always been full of treason!’ So rhymed another important north-country chronicler, Peter Langtoft, on hearing of the Welsh rebellion, and one can well imagine similar (albeit less poetic) oaths forming on the lips of his king. By the middle of October Edward realised that the rising in Wales was so serious that the troops and supplies originally intended for Gascony would have to be redeployed. It was a minor blessing, perhaps, that by this date the long-delayed first fleet had finally put out of Plymouth and sailed beyond recall. But writs reached Portsmouth instructing the earls of Lancaster and Lincoln to send their men and matériel westwards; they and the king’s other lieges were requested to rendezvous at Worcester, as on previous occasions. Requested, not required: as the scale of the crisis continued to increase, so Edward recognised the need to moderate his natural imperiousness. Fighting the French and the Welsh simultaneously, and having already browbeaten the Church into submission, he could not afford any additional confrontation with his lay magnates.⁴⁰ When, after what must have been an intensely frustrating four-week wait, the laity assembled in Westminster to consider the royal request for cash, it was the cue for more concessions. The controversial Quo Warranto inquiry, moderated in return for the last tax, was now dropped altogether – and at a knockdown price. The laity, unlike the clergy, did not lack a leader. When the king asked for a tax of a third, his old sparring partner the earl of Gloucester stepped forward to object. A tenth was all Edward was able to obtain in exchange for abandoning one of his most cherished projects. It must have been with a new, bitter taste in his mouth that, immediately after the tax was agreed, the king set out for Wales.⁴¹

The military strategy was by now familiar: three armies, from three bases, would drive into north, south and central Wales. The scale, by contrast, was extraordinarily novel: no fewer than 35,000 foot soldiers were mobilised, a figure that dwarfed the total deployed during the conquest by a factor of four. Leaving his earls to tackle the other theatres, Edward, as ever, commanded the northern assault. With some 5,000 men by his side, the king pushed through the valleys of the interior, while another 16,000 marched along the coastal road. Progress was swift, resistance seemingly slight: within a week or so, his forces were reunited and, as the end of the year approached, Edward drew up his whole army on the eastern edge of the River Conwy.⁴²

There, on the opposite shore, was a sight to lift all their spirits. Conwy Castle, which can only have stood a few feet high at the time of the king’s last visit, was now completed. Master James of St George and his fellow masons had worked at lightning speed to finish the fortress, and its close counterpart at Harlech, in just six building seasons. Grafted onto its platform of rock, surrounded on three sides by the sea, Conwy stood like a ship in harbour, its whitewashed walls rising sheer and tall, the royal flags flying from its turrets. When Edward and some of his soldiers crossed the river to celebrate Christmas in the castle’s great hall, he may well have reflected that it represented the best £15,000 he had ever spent.⁴³

At the start of the new year (1295) Conwy certainly proved it was worth every penny. In early January, for reasons unknown, the king decided on an immediate advance. Possibly he hoped to relieve Caernarfon, or even the castles further round the coast; perhaps he had intelligence concerning the whereabouts of his enemies on which he aimed to capitalise. Impatience almost certainly played a part – Edward was anxious to deal with Wales so he could return to the business of Gascony. Whatever the case, without waiting for the rest of his army to cross the Conwy, on 7 January the king took such soldiers as he had with him and struck out into the west.

At some point during this sortie they were attacked. We do not know precisely when, because even the routine royal record-keeping was disrupted as a consequence. Immediate losses were apparently small – it was not the king and his soldiery that were targeted, but their baggage train. This, however, had the effect of creating a more pernicious problem. They were deep inside enemy territory and had been deprived of supplies. Having penetrated as far as Nefyn – ironically, the scene of his earlier victory celebrations – Edward ordered a retreat. By 20 January he and his army were back at Conwy Castle.⁴⁴

But they were still cut off. Outside the castle walls, the worst storm in living memory raged. ‘It was so terrible,’ wrote one English chronicler, ‘that even men who were a hundred years old could recall nothing similar.’ The harsh conditions meant that no contact could be had with the reinforcements stationed on the opposite side of the estuary. Edward and his troops found themselves in the uncomfortable position of being under siege and running out of rations. Walter of Guisborough has a nice story, not too tall to be entirely incredible, of how the soldiery had set aside the last barrel of wine for the king’s personal consumption, but that Edward insisted on sharing with everyone.⁴⁵

Their isolation was comparatively short lived. By the start of February, if not before, contact with the main army had been re-established and supplies were able to get through.⁴⁶ During that month ships arrived from Bristol and Chester, Lancashire and Dorset, Ireland and even Gascony. The seaborne operation served to emphasise the wisdom of Edward’s choice of coastal sites for his castles; yet it also highlighted the folly of his recent, impetuous foray. After his brush with disaster, the king showed himself in no hurry to move anywhere until victory seemed more certain. By the second week of March his well-fed soldiers were so bored from inactivity that they begged to be allowed out for a bit of adventure. A brief sortie led to the killing of some Welshmen and the recovery of items from the lost baggage train.⁴⁷

The eagerness of the troops at Conwy was probably encouraged by the knowledge that elsewhere in Wales a renewed English assault was well under way. As early as the middle of February the earl of Hereford had struck out from his base in the south and successfully recovered the town and castle at Abergavenny. A few weeks later, on 6 March, the royal forces in the north-west had marched out of Rhuddlan and into the interior. The best news, however, had emerged from mid-Wales. On 5 March, some eight miles north-west of Montgomery at a place called Maes Moydog, the earl of Warwick had fought a pitched battle with the army of Madog ap Llywelyn. ‘They were the best and bravest Welshmen that anyone had seen,’ an English eyewitness admitted, but explained that 700 Welsh soldiers fell compared with just seven Englishmen. Madog himself evaded death and capture, but his power had been decisively broken.⁴⁸

At last, in early April, the king moved out of Conwy. His target was Anglesey, which had been the centre of the revolt in the north. Thanks to the ingenuity of James of St George in the preceding weeks, the island was quickly retaken by amphibious assault, using an armada of ships, pontoons and siege-engines. By 10 April Edward had arrived at Llanfaes, Anglesey’s most populous and prosperous settlement, where seven months earlier the rebels had executed the English sheriff. As punishment, the king had the town levelled and its inhabitants moved to a virgin site on the other side of the island that still bears the name Newborough. Llanfaes, for the sake of future security, was to be superseded by another new English plantation, protected by yet another new castle. Within a week of the king’s arrival, Master James had begun work on a marshy site christened Beaumaris.⁴⁹

What followed was also largely an exercise for ensuring future security. In early May Edward set out southwards, probably passing via Criccieth and Harlech to inspect his new and reconditioned castles, both of which had held out for the duration of the revolt, supplied by ships from Ireland. By the middle of the month, some ten miles north of Aberystwyth, the king was reunited with his other commanders – the earl of Warwick and the Rhuddlan garrison under Reginald de Grey – who had pushed right through the Welsh interior to reach the western coast. As he moved through each district, Edward was all the while receiving submissions and taking hostages in large numbers. The pacification process drew to a close in June as the king moved into the south, where he received into his peace the rebel leader Morgan ap Maredudd – much to the chagrin of the earl of Gloucester, who had once again bungled his allotted task, and now suffered the additional ignominy of having Edward confiscate his lordship of Glamorgan. By midsummer, the business of restoring order was complete. On 30 June the king was back at Conwy, with only a token military force.⁵⁰

One last place remained to be visited. Until this point, it seems, Edward had not stopped at, and perhaps had not seen, his castle at Caernarfon.⁵¹ Now, at last, he was ready to behold the stricken giant. Incomplete at the time of the revolt, Caernarfon had latterly suffered substantial damage at the hands of the rebels. Any wooden buildings are likely to have been destroyed by fire, and the town walls, in particular, must have suffered considerable damage – repairs later came to more than £1,000. But enough masonry remained standing in 1295 for Edward to appreciate that the majestic building he and his masons had envisaged twelve years earlier was well on the way to being realised. The king’s last concern that summer was to ensure that enormous resources were earmarked for Master James and his team, so that Caernarfon and the new fortress at Beaumaris could be speedily finished. That done, his tour of inspection complete, and with some 250 Welsh hostages in his custody, Edward returned to England.⁵²

Gascony, of course, was uppermost in his thoughts. During the winter, while he and his magnates had been effectively reconquering Wales, the first fleet had finally arrived in the duchy and had met with moderate success. John of Brittany and John of St John, although they had failed to retake Bordeaux, had managed to recapture several towns along the Gironde estuary and the River Garonne. The onset of spring, however, had brought with it the inevitable French counter-attack: a large army led by the war’s principal architect, Charles of Valois, had quickly reversed these gains, and captured some dozen English knights as they were retreating. Within a few days, all that remained in English hands were Bourg and Blaye, two embattled outposts on the Gironde, and Bayonne, the maritime town in the south-western corner of the duchy.⁵³

These places would not be able to hold out for ever, as Edward keenly appreciated. In March, even before the French counteroffensive had begun, the king had been trying to ship excess supplies from Wales to Gascony, where he knew the need was greater. According to one well-informed chronicler, he also succeeded in sending several thousand infantry to the duchy under the command of John de Botetourt, a knight of the royal household. Such measures, however, were only sticking plasters, insufficient to provide anything more than temporary succour to what was, after all, only ever intended to have been an advance expeditionary force. What Gascony needed more than ever was the deployment of the large English army that Edward had ordered, then cancelled, then finally redirected into Wales the previous year. It was probably to discuss this matter more that any other that the king summoned a small, select parliament to meet in Westminster at the start of August.⁵⁴

This assembly had barely had time to gather when the news arrived that the French were attacking England’s south coast. On 2 August Dover was raided and burned. It was a short-lived assault and not too serious. Although some locals lost their lives (including a monk who achieved sainthood as a result), the raiders were successfully repulsed. More than anything else, the attack was ironic in its timing, coinciding as it did with Edward’s return to Westminster after an absence of eight months. Prior to his departure for Wales, the king had been visibly anxious at the prospect of leaving England undefended. Before leaving London he had spent a week at the Tower (his longest stay for seventeen years) and en route to Worcester he had ordered the construction of a fleet of galleys. The raid on Dover probably explains why the parliament summoned for the start of August did not get under way until the middle of the month. It certainly explains why the cardinals who had arrived in England a few weeks earlier made little headway in their effort to secure an Anglo-French peace.⁵⁵

War with France was still the order of the day, and Edward had given some thought as to how it could be successfully prosecuted. Back in February, during his self-enforced sojourn as Conwy Castle, the king had ordered his sheriffs to identify all those men in their districts with lands worth more than £40 a year and warn them to be ready to fight at three weeks’ notice. Here, in other words, was a radical attempt on Edward’s part to redefine his subjects’ obligation to provide him with military service – a move no doubt inspired by the difficulties that had started to emerge the previous year. By such a measure the vagaries of the existing, ancient system, wherein duty was determined by an individual’s tenurial relationship with the Crown, would be swept away, replaced by a more straightforward arrangement based on an assessment of landed wealth. The idea was not entirely new: on the eve of the conquest of Wales, and apparently after an argument with his magnates about the terms of their service, the king had contemplated a similar scheme, only to abandon it at an early stage. Now, with the need in Gascony so great, it seemed imperative that the plan be revived in earnest.⁵⁶

But when the parliament of August 1295 finally settled down to business in the middle of the month, the magnates were already restless. At that very moment, royal tax collectors were moving into their estates in order to collect the tenth that had been granted the previous year. Having responded to the king’s ‘affectionate request’ to fight in Wales at their own expense, the military men evidently expected that they might be excused payment. Yet all that Edward had been prepared to grant them since the campaign’s outset were individual, temporary respites that (in the longest cases) had expired on 1 August.⁵⁷ It may have been to appease his magnates on this issue that Edward publicly sacked his treasurer (a man already unpopular with the Church and the citizens of London) at the start of the parliament. As a next step, the king may have floated the idea that the demand for tax would indeed be dropped – for those who agreed to serve him in Gascony. On 20 August some men who were already fighting in the duchy received just such an acquittance, as a mark of the king’s ‘special favour’.⁵⁸ Within three days, however, Edward’s attempts at persuasion were seen to have failed. When the king ordered some of the assembled magnates to fight in Gascony, fourteen of them – about a quarter of those present – flatly refused to go.

None of these men were especially powerful, nor did they constitute an organised political clique. The most important among them was the earl of Arundel, Richard fitz Alan, but even he was a relatively unimportant figure, a newcomer to the ranks of England’s earls and apparently quite hard-up as a result. Poverty – or what passed for poverty among the ruling classes – was likely to have been the chief complaint of all of these men, most of whom can be proved to have fought in Wales earlier in the year. Their stand, though, was probably taken on a matter of principle: namely that, no matter what innovations their king might care to devise, Englishmen were not obliged to provide military service overseas.⁵⁹

Edward was massively angry at their refusal. On that day – 23 August – he instructed his officials to distrain these men, just as the abbot of Ramsey had done when he had come up against similar refusals the previous year. Distraint by the king, however, meant suffering of an altogether different degree. Armed with a writ from the exchequer, royal agents would move in to an offender’s manors and confiscate goods to the value of any outstanding debts to the Crown. Such debts, which might accumulate from one generation to the next, could be huge. Along with the earldom of Arundel, for example, Richard fitz Alan had inherited debts to the Crown in excess of £5,000.⁶⁰

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 Scottish 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.’

This idyllic vision, alas, proved to be fleeting. For reasons that remain unclear, Edward himself soon decided that the deal was off. Possibly the English, having taken Edinburgh, unearthed documentary evidence of the Franco-Scottish alliance to suggest that Balliol was more culpable than he had claimed. Whatever the case, by the time the king of England caught up with his disobedient vassal, he had devised for him a different fate. On 8 July Balliol and his supporters, having already confessed their crime of rebellion by letters, gave themselves up at Montrose, a town on Scotland’s eastern seaboard. And there the Scottish king, created by Edward less than four years earlier, was ceremoniously and humiliatingly unmade. Balliol resigned his regalia, and suffered the personal indignity of having the royal coat-of-arms ripped from the tabard he was wearing (hence his popular nickname, Toom Tabard). Together with the other Scottish leaders, the demoted king was then dispatched into England, not to enjoy an earldom, but to endure a period of captivity at the Tower. Later he was conceded a less strict confinement in Hertfordshire, where he was at least allowed to do a bit of hunting.⁸¹

Edward, meanwhile, was completing his tour of Scotland, taking hostages and homages, and travelling – as in Wales – further than any English king before him. By the end of July he had reached Elgin, the northernmost limit of his progress, and by the end of August he was back at Berwick, where his campaign had begun just five months earlier. A parliament was held there, to which the Scots came in their thousands to swear fealty to their new, direct overlord, and Edward sat to decide the future governance of the country he had conquered.⁸²

One thing was certain: Scotland was to have no new king, at least not for the time being. At the outset of the campaign, the Bruces had been optimistic at the prospect of belated promotion. The elderly Robert Bruce, erstwhile competitor for the Scottish throne, had died the previous year; but his namesake son had kept up the family tradition of collaborating with the English, and had joined Edward’s army in the hope of supplanting Balliol. Once expressed, however, the hope had been immediately crushed. ‘Do you think we have nothing better to do,’ the English king had asked him, ‘than to win kingdoms for you?’ It was a put-down so withering that the poor man retired to his estates in Essex and never set foot in Scotland again.⁸³

There remained, of course, the possibility that other disappointed candidates might be tempted to try their luck, so Edward had taken the trouble to remove temptation from their path. In the course of his victory tour, the king had confiscated the ancient Stone of Scone, the seat on which Scottish monarchs had been made since time immemorial. Like the relics and regalia of Wales (and, indeed, like the other regalia of Scotland), the Stone was dispatched into England, the latest addition to Edward’s now impressive collection at Westminster. The king even had a special cabinet made in which to display this new trophy, the so-called Coronation Chair.⁸⁴

For the time being, Edward decided, he would rule Scotland directly. A new, English-style administration would be set up, based at Berwick – the ruined town would be rebuilt, like a bastide, with the help of experts like Henry le Waleys. From there, the country would be governed by a team of English officials, in charge of a new, nationwide network of sheriffs, soldiers and constables, overwhelmingly English in their origins. In charge of the whole operation would be the earl of Surrey, who had led the English to victory at Dunbar. In September, as Edward returned to England, he formally handed over the seal of Scotland to its new colonial governor. ‘A man does good business,’ he exclaimed, jokingly, ‘when he rids himself of a turd.’⁸⁵

As their conquering king returned south, his English subjects sang in praise of his astonishing victory. Soldiers made up ribald rhymes mocking the incompetence of their enemies at Dunbar. Monastic chroniclers composed more stately eulogies to celebrate so great a triumph. The reaction of Peter Langtoft is worth quoting in full:

Ah God! how often Merlin said the truth
In his prophecies, if you read them!
Now are the two waters united in one
Which have been separated by great mountains;
And one realm made of two different kingdoms
Which used to be governed by two kings.
Now are the islanders all joined together
And Albany (Scotland) reunited to the regalities
Of which king Edward is proclaimed lord.
Cornwall and Wales are in his power
And Ireland the great at his will.
There is neither king nor prince of all the countries
Except king Edward, who has thus united them
Arthur never held the fiefs so fully.
Henceforward there is nothing to do but provide his expedition
Against the king of France, to conquer his inheritances
And then bear the cross where Jesus Christ was born.⁸⁶

In these last lines, at least, Langtoft was entirely right. The war with France was once again at the top of Edward’s agenda and, more than ever, Gascony stood in need of his help.

The second force sent to the duchy had fared no better than the first. By the autumn of 1295, when Edward had twisted enough aristocratic arms to elicit the necessary enthusiasm, the main expedition was already a year behind schedule – and even then it had not left on time. Edmund of Lancaster, the king’s appointed captain, had fallen ill, and had not recovered until after Christmas. It was not until January 1296 that the much-delayed fleet had finally set sail. Once arrived in Gascony, their luck had not improved. The French, having been left unmolested for so long, were found to be well entrenched. English attempts to retake Bordeaux, and even the smaller towns along the Garonne, came to nothing. Eventually, as his money had started to run out, Lancaster had been forced to abandon his efforts and had retired to Bayonne. There he had once again fallen sick, and died on 5 June. Henry de Lacy, the ultra-loyal earl of Lincoln, had taken command of the demoralised English forces.⁸⁷

News of his brother’s death had reached Edward while he was still in Scotland, just days after he had received John Balliol’s resignation. Orders had been sent out immediately for masses to be said for Edmund’s soul. The king spoke of his devastation, and enjoined his churchmen to pray for ‘our dearest and only brother, who was always devoted and faithful to us, and to the affairs of our realm, and in whom valour and many gifts of grace shone forth’. It was almost certainly with Edmund’s eternal salvation in mind that Edward had summoned his next English parliament to meet, not around the feast of St Edward (13 October), as was usual, but one month later, around the feast of St Edmund (20 November). For the same reason, the venue was not to be Westminster, but Bury St Edmunds, where his brother’s saintly namesake was interred. The local chronicler confirms that, when the king arrived in the town in November, he and his great men solemnly kept St Edmund’s feast.⁸⁸

The principal reason for calling the parliament, however, was financial. War on all fronts was forcing Edward to disgorge unheard-of sums of money. Even before he had set out for Scotland, the king had spent something in the region of £250,000 – that is, considerably more than the cost of his crusade and the conquest of Wales combined. In January, as a damage-limitation exercise, all royal building projects had been cancelled, with the exception of Caernarfon, Beaumaris and the murals in the Painted Chamber (an indication that, in Edward’s mind, the crusade was still a priority). The conquest of Scotland had demanded tens of thousands of pounds in addition; the recovery of Gascony would require a sum many times greater. Somewhere, somehow, more funds must be found.⁸⁹

But by this point the country was groaning under the weight of Edward’s wartime exactions. It was not just that his subjects had already paid two heavy taxes in as many years. They were also suffering from the new, impossibly heavy customs rate that the king had slapped on the export of wool. The merchants had simply absorbed this blow by slashing the prices they paid to their suppliers, and that included just about everyone, whether they owned ten sheep or ten thousand. It was no wonder that the new duty had become known as the maltote – the ‘evil tax’.⁹⁰

More aggravating still was the phenomenon known as purveyance, or prise. Since ancient times the royal household had claimed the right to seize goods – principally food, but sometimes horses, carts, boats and so on – without contradiction, and in return for only the promise of later compensation. Irritating enough in peacetime, prise had become the most controversial issue since the outbreak of war. Royal agents everywhere, whether they were with the household or not, had started to seize whatever they needed, whenever they felt like it, in the name of the king. Predictably, this had led in some instances to accusations of robbery by those being dispossessed, and even violent clashes. What was worse, however, was the fact that Edward was using prise to feed whole armies. Since 1294 orders had gone out for the seizure of grain in ever larger quantities. By the autumn of 1296 even the king’s collecting officials had begun to object that the amounts being demanded were impossible.⁹¹

Unsurprisingly, therefore, it took time to wrangle yet another tax out of the laity. The parliament at Bury was under way by 6 November, but it was not until the end of the month that the assembled knights and burgesses agreed to a grant. The fact that the rate – a twelfth – was the lowest since 1294 was another sign of mounting opposition. There is no sign that any concession had been offered in return. One chronicler complained that the tax had been extorted.⁹²

Altogether more surprising to Edward was the resistance he encountered from the clergy. They too, of course, were suffering from the same economic burdens. But, as the king had been pleased to recall in his writs of summons, the Church had nevertheless promised him further financial aid should France refuse a truce. One year on, and it was fair to say that all talk of truce had been firmly rejected. When, in January, Edward had sent his aged uncle, William de Valence, to meet with French negotiators at Cambrai, the result had been an out-and-out fight – Valence had returned wounded and died soon afterwards. The king, therefore, was quite clear: it was time for the clergy to honour their promise and pay up.⁹³

That promise, however, now had to be balanced against a new proclamation from the pope. Clericis Laicos, as this bull was known, forbade the Church from granting taxes to secular rulers without prior permission from Rome. Ostensibly addressed to all of Christendom, its specific denunciation of rulers who extorted taxes of ‘a half’ suggests that the pope’s particular target was the king of England; quite possibly the document had been drafted after a secret appeal by Robert Winchelsea. After days of debate in November, the archbishop approached the king and asked if the clergy could postpone their decision. Edward was not at all pleased, but allowed them until January to give him a definite answer. To focus their minds in the meantime, he began calling in the debts to the Crown of eminent churchmen. Winchelsea himself was advised he would have to pay £3,500 by mid-December.⁹⁴

There was apparently no demand for military service in parliament. Such discussions as occurred took place behind closed doors, informed by English ambassadors who had just returned from the Continent. Ever since the outbreak of war, Edward had been endeavouring to construct a grand alliance against Philip IV. The English king had spent enormous sums – at least £75,000 – to secure the support of the dukes and counts on France’s northern and eastern borders. For the first two years the results had been decidedly mixed. Some allies, such as the duke of Brabant (Edward’s son-in-law), had signed up and remained loyal. Others, like the count of Holland (sometime claimant of the Scottish throne), had taken the king’s money, only to turn against him. But, as 1296 drew to a close, the balance was at last tipping in England’s favour. In June, the count of Holland met with an unfortunate accident – English involvement cannot be entirely ruled out – and his twelve-year-old son and successor had indicated that Holland was ready to revert to Edward’s allegiance. So too, more importantly, was the count of Flanders, who had grown tired of being bullied by Philip IV. Early in the new year, when the court was at Ipswich, the alliances were sealed. On 7 January the young count of Holland was married to Edward’s daughter Elizabeth. The same day the treaty with the count of Flanders was ratified. At last, the king’s grand strategy was coming to fruition. He now had landing grounds in the Low Countries; a new northern front against France could be opened up.⁹⁵

But not without the money to pay for these new allies and the necessary English troops. A week after the royal wedding at Ipswich, the clergy assembled in London to formulate their final answer to the royal demand for tax. As before, Edward sent thuggish knights to intimidate them, with the warning that, if they did not pay, their goods would be seized anyway. The clergy debated for several days but, by 26 January, the king had heard of their decision. They said no.⁹⁶

Edward’s anger was predictably great, as all the chroniclers attest. What must have infuriated him more than anything was the clergy’s failure to honour their earlier promise. As the royalist Peter Langtoft commented, ‘promise is debt due, if faith be not forgotten’. The king, in response, certainly kept his word, and made good his earlier threat. On 30 January 1297 the clergy were outlawed. Royal agents moved in at once to seize ecclesiastical estates and all the food and livestock they contained. Other laymen, understanding that it was effectively open season on the Church, began to rob clergymen of their horses. Edward made it known that the Church could easily buy back his protection: the price would be the same as the tax they had denied him.⁹⁷

According to one chronicler, Edward’s intention was that the laity should pass judgement on the Church. As soon as he had heard of the clergy’s refusal, the king had summoned a parliament to meet at Salisbury in one month’s time. It was to be an entirely secular assembly – only the earls, barons and knights were invited.⁹⁸

In the few weeks that followed, however, two crucial things happened. First, news arrived in England of a fresh military catastrophe in Gascony. The earl of Lincoln had led an army from Bayonne to the new bastide at Bonnegarde, but had been ambushed en route by the French. Large numbers of infantry had been killed and several knights taken prisoner, including John of St John. This defeat, English monks noted with grim satisfaction, had taken place on 30 January – the same day that the king had outlawed the clergy.⁹⁹

The second occurrence was a sudden and dramatic spike in the incidence of prise. Once the November parliament had ended, Edward had reiterated his mandate for a mammoth seizure of goods. In readiness for the renewed effort against France, royal agents were told to grab supplies of grain totalling 60,000 tons.¹⁰⁰

When Edward met with his magnates at Salisbury, therefore, the question of the outlawed clergy was no longer the only item on the agenda, nor even the main one. Even the greatest men who came to the assembly – men who could normally bribe royal officials to go away – were feeling the full weight of the war burden. Taxes were being exacted, with no talk of special pardons; profits from wool had plummeted to less than half their pre-war levels; royal officials were moving into aristocratic estates, arbitrarily seizing corn, oats and barley by the ton.¹⁰¹

The king realised all of this, but reckoned that the recovery of his Continental inheritance mattered more. News of the disaster at Bonnegarde had convinced him that, in addition to the army he intended to lead into northern France, more men would have to be sent to Gascony. After his arrival in Salisbury, in the closing days of February, he therefore asked his magnates, for what was now the third time, to go and fight in the duchy.

The magnates, like the clergy, now said no. ‘One after the other,’ explains Walter of Guisborough, ‘they began to excuse themselves.’ The protest at overseas service, a rumble in 1294, marginal in 1295, had finally become general, and spread to the highest echelons of the aristocracy. The earl of Arundel was once again among those who refused the king’s order, but was now joined by his peers. The earl of Warwick, normally so loyal, was one such. With the earl of Lincoln pinned down in Gascony and the earl of Surrey preoccupied in Scotland, Edward found himself without any major support. In hopeful expectation, he turned to Roger Bigod, the earl of Norfolk, the most powerful figure present besides the king himself, and the man who had been so demonstrably willing to help when war had first been declared.

But Bigod too now said no. Like the other magnates, he had been hit hard by almost three years of continuous warfare – serving at his own expense in Wales and Scotland, while back in England his wool could not be sold and his grain was being seized. Like the others, however, he couched his objection in terms of non-obligation. As well as being earl of Norfolk, Bigod also bore the ancient title ‘marshal of England’: by hereditary right, it fell to him, along with the constable, to muster the king’s armies and maintain their discipline. As such, he accepted that it was his responsibility to fight – but only with the king. The suggestion that he could be sent elsewhere to perform his duty he denied.

‘I am not bound,’ he told Edward, ‘nor is it my will, to march without you.’

At this, says Guisborough, the king became enraged.

‘By God, Earl,’ he exclaimed, ‘either you will go, or you will hang!’

‘By the same oath,’ replied Bigod, ‘I will neither go, nor hang!’

And, to prove his point, the earl quit the court without leave. The other earls, Arundel and Warwick, followed in his wake, and were soon joined by Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford and constable of England, who was apparently absent at the time of parliament. Their numbers, says Guisborough, grew into a multitude, and the king began to fear them.¹⁰²

But, the chronicler added, he did not show it. In fact, as royal records attest, Edward reacted to the desertion of his earls with swift retaliation. On 1 March he attempted to limit the political fall-out from the row by denouncing as ‘rumour-mongers’ those who were trying to create discord between the king, his clergy and his barons. Around the same time he resurrected the abandoned, draconian scheme of 1294 and ordered the seizure of all the country’s wool. Then, on 12 March, the gloves really came off, with an order for the immediate investigation of all debts to the Crown. Edward had broken Arundel before by calling in his debts; now, it seems, he was out to break all his earls in the same way. In the last week of March, royal officials arrived at Roger Bigod’s manors, demanding hundreds of pounds in unpaid money. Obligation, the king’s opponents were being forcibly reminded, could cut both ways.¹⁰³

Throughout Lent, therefore, and for several weeks thereafter, the country was plunged into a state of high tension. Edward pressed on to Plymouth, where he remained for most of April, declaring to his officials that he would not leave until he had dispatched some help to Gascony. The earls, according to Walter of Guisborough, ‘went off to their own lands, where they would not allow the king’s servants to take either wool or hides, or anything whatsoever out of the ordinary’. Both sides, in other words, went to ground, waiting to see who would break first.¹⁰⁴

During this time, the clergy crumpled. A month and more of hunger, humiliation and robbery had already taken its toll, and in February Edward had raised the stakes further, promising his churchmen that their outlawry and loss of land would be made permanent if they failed to settle by Easter. Accordingly, when the prelates, abbots and priors assembled in London at the end of March, they collectively petitioned their archbishop for a change of course. Winchelsea responded by allowing that each could follow his own conscience, at which point the stream of submissions to the king turned into a flood. Only the archbishop himself and a few diehard supporters continued to hold out, retiring to their dioceses and remaining quietly defiant.¹⁰⁵

Even as the clergy collapsed, however, the magnates were reassembling and reaffirming their determination to resist. Around Eastertime, the four recalcitrant earls – Norfolk, Hereford, Arundel and Warwick – met in the woods near Montgomery and declared that they would not cross overseas with the king on account of the innumerable taxes that he had extorted from them. Economic hardship was, no doubt, their chief complaint, and would have played well with both the other men present, as well as the wider public. But it is also significant that the earls should have chosen to congregate in the March of Wales. To a greater or lesser degree, each of them was a Marcher lord and, in this capacity, had run up against Edward’s increasingly masterful behaviour in recent years. This was most obviously true of Hereford, who cannot have forgotten his humiliating treatment at the king’s hands in 1291. But Arundel, too, had latterly been forced to surrender part of his lordship of Clun, and charged with refusing to admit royal officials there. The same was true of Edmund Mortimer, son and successor of the famous Roger, who was also present at the Montgomery meeting. All these men shared the sense that the liberties won by their ancestors were being eroded for the benefit of an overbearing Crown. Now the government’s grip was weakening, they saw an opportunity to restore things to their proper order.¹⁰⁶

In the second week of May, aware of his opponents’ machinations, Edward seized the initiative. Having said goodbye to whatever troops he had sent to Gascony, the king summoned a parliament to meet at Westminster in June. At the same time, orders went out for a muster in London the following month. No concessions were made: the controversial attempt to link service with landed wealth was resumed, and in even starker terms: now all men worth just £20 a year were enjoined to attend. Nor was there any indication of where they would be going, beyond the fact that it was ‘overseas’. As he issued these orders, however, Edward was heading east along the Channel coast, towards Canterbury, almost certainly for talks with Winchelsea. Whatever else happened, the king did not want his clerical and lay opponents making common cause. The archbishop was accordingly conciliated: on 12 June his confiscated houses were restored.¹⁰⁷

One week later and Edward was back in Westminster. It was his first appearance there since the conquest of Scotland, and the king marked his arrival by ostentatiously presenting the regalia of the vanquished kingdom before the shrine of the Confessor. The audience for this act, however, was considerably smaller than it had been for the parallel performance that had followed the conquest of Wales. Those men with Edward in June were his remaining royalist supporters. It was not until 7 July, the day of the controversial muster, that the opposition arrived.¹⁰⁸

Both camps were cagey and cautious, communicating by messengers and exchange of letters, but it did not take long to get to the point. Would Norfolk and Hereford, in their capacities as marshal and constable, draw up the muster lists for the coming campaign? No, the earls replied, they would not: the king’s summons had been both irregular and inadequate. Talks immediately broke down. Edward summarily deprived the two men of their hereditary posts and appointed others in their stead. He then made ready to arrest his opponents but, before he could do so, they once again withdrew from his court.¹⁰⁹

Or at least some of them did. As opposition began to resemble out-and-out rebellion, resolve among the opposition began to crack. The earl of Warwick was probably the first to desert, allegedly bought off by the king, with whom he was in any case friends. John de Hastings, a Marcher lord who had attended the Montgomery meeting, soon went the same way. Arundel, too, was starting to waver, to judge from an undated letter he sent to Edward, pleading his case. The king, no doubt, was sending messages of his own to these men, making them individual offers, and working on their private fears.¹¹⁰

Edward’s bid for support culminated with a public performance on Sunday, 14 July, when he appeared on a stage outside Westminster Hall and addressed the assembled crowds. Admitting that he had made mistakes and acknowledging his subjects’ suffering, the king nevertheless asserted that he was acting for the good of the realm and the defence of his people. ‘I am castle for you, and wall, and house,’ Peter Langtoft has him say. It was powerful stuff, and well contrived: beside Edward on the stage stood a tearful Archbishop Winchelsea, to all appearances reconciled. The speech was also effectively an ultimatum, for the king, on the grounds that he might not return from France, went on to ask all those present to swear fealty to his son, the thirteen-year-old Edward of Caernarfon. The fact that Norfolk and Hereford could only do so two days later, and from a distance, left them looking isolated, their loyalty open to doubt.¹¹¹

For two more weeks, the stand-off continued. The clergy, led by Winchelsea, tried to mediate. Edward’s agents, more provocatively, invited the earls to submit to the king’s grace. Norfolk and Hereford hit back with their own propaganda, denouncing the summons to serve overseas, the maltote, the heavy taxes, and the general arbitrary turn that royal government had recently taken.¹¹² Edward himself clearly hoped for reconciliation. Towards the end of July he left London for St Albans, in a last-ditch attempt to meet with his opponents. But, when it came down to it, the king was not prepared to compromise, and was running out of time. His allies on the Continent, bought at immense cost, were waiting. On 28 July he gave up, and sent out new writs, merely inviting men to serve him in return for wages. Two days later, back in London, orders went out for yet another seizure of wool. With a candour born of his growing desperation, Edward explained he needed £50,000 to pay his allies, and that grabbing 8,000 woolsacks from his subjects was the only way to get it. Payment would be made later, he promised, from the proceeds of a new tax – an eighth – that parliament had approved the same day. This, of course, was a nonsense. Parliament by this time was just the rump of royalists whom the king still had with him – ‘the people stood about in his chamber,’ as one chronicler contemptuously put it.¹¹³

As soon as these orders had been issued, Edward left London, heading for the coast. His destination was the new town of Winchelsea, where the fleet to transport his army was waiting to sail. But as he rode south, the fragile consensus around him began to collapse, splintering under the weight of this last load of arbitrary measures. On 10 August, as the king reached Winchelsea, the town’s most famous son was holding an ecclesiastical council in London. The new tax was rejected as being incompatible with the pope’s proclamation, and the archbishop ordered the excommunication of anyone who laid hands on Church property. A few days later messengers from the lay opposition rode to meet Edward, but he refused to hear their petitions. Instead, the king elected to fight fire with fire. On 20 August he decreed that the Church was to be taxed ‘by royal authority’. The same day he prepared an answer for his opposition earls, ordering 170 armed knights to Rochester, a day’s ride from the capital. The earls, however, struck first. On 22 August they burst into the exchequer at Westminster and forbade the seizure of wool and the collection of the eighth, saying they would not suffer to be tallaged like serfs.¹¹⁴

Two days later, and more than three years since the start of his war with France, Edward finally set sail for Flanders. He left behind him a country teetering on the brink. As the end of August approached, the regency government ordered more knights to muster at Rochester. In the March of Wales Hereford’s men went about saying openly that their lord was against the king’s peace. On Sunday, 1 September, Winchelsea began preaching the excommunication of royal officials from the pulpit of Canterbury Cathedral; as he did so, he was shouted down by royalist knights sent to stop him. The regents summoned a parliament to meet in London; the earls called a rival assembly to Northampton. Civil war seemed all but inevitable.¹¹⁵

Then news came out of the north. The English forces in Scotland had been defeated in open battle, with massive loss of life. The Devil had assumed a new guise, and his name was William Wallace.¹¹⁶