The Return of the King

Henry III had suffered several bouts of ill health in the two years since the departure of his sons, and in consequence had rarely ventured far beyond his palace at Westminster. It was there, in the early days of November, that his final illness took hold. Confined to his chamber for almost a fortnight, he died in the evening of Wednesday 16 November 1272. He was sixty-five years old, and had reigned for fifty-six years. Since his death was not sudden, we may suppose with some confidence that his beloved wife, Queen Eleanor, was with him at the end.¹

The funeral took place the following Sunday in Westminster Abbey, the building upon which Henry had lavished so much money and attention for over a quarter of a century. He had long intended to be buried in the church, and had latterly decided that his final resting place should be the tomb once occupied by Edward the Confessor and recently left vacant by the saint’s translation. In contrast to the rather inglorious scenes that had marred that occasion, Henry’s funeral passed without a hitch. All the leading magnates of the realm were present. The ceremony was magnificent. The king’s body, carried on an open bier, was dressed in robes of red samite, decorated with gold embroidery and precious stones. ‘He shone more gloriously in death than he did in life,’ said one perceptive chronicler.²

Edward had known that his father was ill. In the spring of 1271 letters had been sent after him by the council in England, urging him to return home. It is highly unlikely, however, that this news reached him before his arrival in the Holy Land, and in due course he would have heard of Henry’s recovery. When, therefore, he landed in Sicily on his return journey, Edward had every reason for hoping to see his father again, and consequently it came as a galling blow in January when he received the news of Henry’s death. According to one chronicler, he wept for his irreplaceable loss, and in a letter written immediately afterwards Edward himself spoke of his ‘bitter sadness’.³ Despite the disagreements that had occasionally arisen between them, and the marked difference in their tastes and abilities, father and son had been very close, and the bond between them had been very strong. For all his faults as a king, Henry had been a doting and affectionate parent. Indeed, blind affection for his family was one of the main factors that had compromised his kingship.

While Edward’s grief is therefore not surprising, his reaction to his father’s death was, in one respect, highly unusual. A normal response would have been to drop everything and hurry in the direction of Westminster Abbey. By long tradition, the abbey was England’s coronation church: every king since the Norman Conquest, beginning with the Conqueror himself, had been crowned there. The argument for haste was simple: convention also decreed that it was the coronation that made a man a king. Indeed, no king of England had ever been regarded as such until he had gone through with the ceremony. The all-time record for reaching Westminster was set in 1100 by Henry I, who was crowned just three days after the death of his brother, William II. But all would-be kings tended to spur their horses that bit harder when news reached them that the position had become vacant.⁴

Until 1272, that is. When Henry III died this ancient tradition was broken. The decision to break it was evidently deliberate and premeditated, and arose as a direct consequence of Edward’s decision to go on crusade. When a king died, his authority died with him. Once Henry III was dead, all government in his name ceased. It would clearly have been intolerable for England to have remained without royal government until Edward’s return (or, for that matter, to assume that he would be returning). Consequently, the matter was decided (although there is no record of it) before the crusaders’ departure. Edward would not have to wait for his coronation; his reign would commence immediately after his father’s death.

For this is exactly what happened. The day after Henry’s death, Edward’s peace was proclaimed in Westminster Hall. Three days later, in the course of the funeral in Westminster Abbey, the assembled magnates swore allegiance to Edward as their new king. They did this, as they explained in a letter to Edward, before his father’s tomb had been sealed: an interesting point of detail that shows they were already thinking in terms that future generations would reduce to the famous maxim, ‘the king is dead; long live the king’.⁵

Similarly, Edward, from the moment he received this letter, understood that his world had changed. He had no crown to wear, nor for that matter any of the other trappings of kingship. Indeed, in his response to the news from England, Edward had to apologise for using Charles of Anjou’s seal to authenticate his letters. But those letters were his first royal act, and began with the words ‘Edward, by the grace of God, king of England’.⁶

For the first time, therefore, there was no overriding need for haste. There could be no challenge to Edward’s accession. Not only had his right been formally accepted by the great men of the realm at Westminster. Careful forethought had also ensured that the instruments of royal power were already in his hands. A few months before his son’s departure, Henry III had taken the remarkable step of transferring all the royal castles and counties in England to keepers of Edward’s choosing. As a consequence Edward’s grip on England was quite secure.⁷

Nevertheless, a kingdom could not cope without its king forever, especially when it had suffered so many other misfortunes. Henry III was only the leading loss of the last two years. While Edward had cheated death in the Holy Land, the family he left behind had not been so lucky. His eldest son, John, had not survived the summer of 1271, dying soon after his fifth birthday. More serious in the short term, the committee of five men that Edward had left to superintend his affairs had been reduced to three, the chief casualty being its senior member, Richard of Cornwall. Having shouldered much of the burden of government during his brother’s incapacity in 1271, Richard himself had suffered a stroke at the end of the year, and had died the following spring. As a consequence, although Edward’s grip on the provinces was secure, the direction of his affairs at the centre was altogether less robust. In their letter to Edward the remaining regents urged him to make haste, and Edward, in response, promised to hurry.⁸

While he was on the Continent, however, it made sense to sort out Continental business, and the first item on his agenda was another fatality. In this case, death was not only an occasion for grief on Edward’s part, but also for anger. His father, his uncle and his son had at least died of natural causes. His cousin, Henry of Almain, had been murdered.

It had happened in the spring of 1271, soon after Edward had sent Henry from his side in the course of their outward voyage. Henry’s mission, as we have seen, was to superintend affairs in Gascony and, eventually, in England – an additional precaution that was probably deemed necessary in light of the new and uncertain conditions arising from the death of Louis IX and the early return of the French crusaders.⁹ It is also likely, however, that part of his remit was to deal with the sons of Simon de Montfort, Simon and Guy, last seen fleeing from England in the early months of 1266. In the time since their escape the two brothers had done remarkably well for themselves, carving out new careers in the service of none other than Charles of Anjou, who had found their warlike qualities useful and rewarded them well as a result. Guy, for example, had been appointed as governor of Tuscany, where he had also received generous grants of land, and married a rich heiress.

When, therefore, Edward in due course had found himself obliged to rely on Charles’s generosity, and his crusading plans to some extent dependent upon his host’s goodwill, the case for a rapprochement with the Montforts had become quite compelling. Later, as king, Edward claimed that the reason he had sent Henry of Almain north was to effect a reconciliation on his behalf. Henry seemed well suited for the task: he was, like Edward himself, a cousin to the two brothers.

Events, however, had taken a very different turn when the two parties met in Viterbo, not far from Rome, just a few weeks later. Guy de Montfort had come there to meet his lord, Charles of Anjou, who was also travelling with the French court. But when he learned that Henry was also present in the city, Guy sought him out and, finding his cousin hearing mass in the church of St Silvester, stabbed him to death. It was an unpremeditated act of retribution: a hot-blooded response to the cold-blooded killing of his father and brother at Evesham six years before. The victim, unlike the murderer, had not been present at the battle; Henry was simply a convenient royalist target for Guy’s terrible wrath. ‘I have taken my vengeance,’ he said, as he left his cousin dying in the church, before returning to drag the body out into the street, where it received the same mutilation that had been inflicted on his father’s corpse.

Two years on, and it was Edward who burned with a desire for revenge. The murder had scandalised all of Europe, and both Montforts had once again become fugitives from justice. Simon, the older brother, who was apparently complicit in the murder, had himself died in 1271 (‘like Cain, cursed by God,’ said one English chronicler). Guy, on the other hand, was still at large in Italy, being sheltered by the powerful family of his wife. As Edward set out northwards at the start of 1273, his first thoughts were of laying hands on the killer. Attempts to muster local support for a military campaign, however, came to nothing: the citizens of central Italy were understandably keener that a negotiated solution be found. Edward therefore looked to the help of the papacy, now fully functional once again after the recent election of Gregory X. The new pope was Edward’s friend – he had accompanied Cardinal Ottobuono to England, and preceded the crusaders to Acre – and he received the new king in the city of Orvieto with great ceremony. But in the course of a stay that lasted over two months, nothing could be done to induce Guy’s surrender. Eventually, Edward realised he would have to depart empty handed, and had to content himself with the knowledge that his intended quarry had at least been excommunicated. He would have been less pleased with the later intelligence that the sentence had been lifted and, later still, to learn that Guy had regained his liberty after a number of years in prison. It would, however, surely have grati fied him to know that the notoriety of his cousin’s killer would be everlasting. At the time of Almain’s murder, Dante Alighieri was only a small boy living in Florence. But when he later came to write his Divine Comedy, he condemned Guy de Montfort to the seventh circle of Hell, steeped to the neck in a river of boiling blood.¹⁰

Although he had tarried for many weeks in his quest for justice, Edward left Italy in no great hurry. All along his route crowds flocked to see him, and every city through which he passed – Bologna, Parma and Milan being the major ones – feted him as a hero. As a result, when he eventually crossed the Alps in early June, he encountered a delegation of bishops and nobles from England, who had been expecting to meet their new king in Paris and eventually gone to seek him out. There was clearly considerable anxiety to have Edward back home. The men who met him would have been able to convey some positive news – a parliament had been held in his absence, and the knights and burgesses present had sworn their allegiance – but they would also have brought less glad tidings: magnates feuding with each other, risings in distant parts of the country, and a general increase in lawlessness. The absence of a king was keenly felt.¹¹

By this stage, however, Edward had already decided that his first priority lay in a different direction. Now that his father was dead, he was not only king of England, he was also – at last! – duke of Aquitaine. Almost twenty years on from his first visit, Edward finally had the title and authority to deal decisively with his French dominions, which were at least as needful of his attention as England, and arguably more so. In any case, it made good sense to attend to them while he was this side of the Channel. Gascony, therefore, was to be Edward’s next stop; England would have to wait a little longer.¹²

The first and most crucial matter to attend to in respect of Gascony was its relationship with the neighbouring kingdom of France. Accordingly, having left Eleanor (who was again pregnant) to go straight on to the duchy, Edward headed north to Paris, where towards the end of July he was welcomed by the new French king, Philip III. Some fourteen years earlier their late fathers had met in the same city and agreed a historic peace: a deal by which, as we have seen, Henry III had surrendered his ancestral claims to Normandy, Maine, Anjou and Poitou in return for recognition of his right to hold Gascony from Louis IX. On that occasion, as part of the same agreement, Henry had done homage to Louis. Which is to say, both men had participated in an ancient ritual, practised for centuries in every corner of Europe, by which one individual acknowledged that he or she was in some way subservient to another. On that day – 4 December 1259 – Henry had knelt before Louis, placed his hands within Louis’s hands, and declared that, as far as Gascony was concerned, he was Louis’s man.¹³

But what precisely did this mean? Homage could signify as little or as much as either party wanted it to. Neither Henry nor Louis seems to have felt that they had done anything especially novel; both took it as self-evident that the king of France was, or at least ought to be, the overlord of the duke of Gascony.¹⁴ And yet, as the treaty they drew up makes manifestly clear, neither had much clue as to what this might entail in practice. When, for example, having promised to do homage to Louis, Henry had tried to specify what services he would render as a result, words had failed him. ‘We will do appropriate services,’ he had declared vaguely, ‘until it be found what services are due for these things.’ ‘Then we shall be bound to do them,’ he had added, helpfully, ‘just as they have been found.’

Such was the general tenor of the Treaty of Paris – well-intentioned but mired for the most part in clauses that were hopelessly imprecise or that looked to some later date for their resolution. The latter was especially true of the treaty’s opening section, which endeavoured to answer perhaps the most fundamental question of all: what, territorially speaking, was Gascony? For more than a century its border with France had been debated with swords rather than words. While it was noble of Henry and Louis to have preferred to pick up their pens, it meant that clause after clause began with a hesitant ‘if’. Possession of one disputable district after another was declared to be contingent upon the future decision of this court, the outcome of that inquiry, or (in one particular case) whether the owners in 1259 ended up having children or not.¹⁵

Fourteen years on, and almost nothing had been done to resolve these problems. Henry III had sealed the treaty only to be distracted for a decade by domestic politics in England. While, therefore, there was no question of either Edward or Philip refusing to abide by the deal – both of them had been signatories in 1259 – it did mean that they had an immense amount of fine detail to work out, and therein the devil lurked. Accordingly, when Edward came to Paris to repeat his father’s performance, he chose his words with care. ‘Lord king,’ he said to Philip, ‘I do homage to you for all the lands I ought to hold from you.’¹⁶

It was with the intention of beginning the process of clarification that Edward left Paris for Gascony in August. Just as he had done homage to Philip as his king, he now required his subjects within the duchy to do the same to him as their duke. He also let it be known that he wanted to create a written record of the services they owed. ‘By voice of herald and by sound of trumpet’, his tenants were advised to assemble at his coming and furnish him with the requisite information. Having passed through Bordeaux – where, as well as accepting the homages of the citizenry, he was presumably received with some pomp – Edward proceeded further south to the town of St Sever, where he received the same acknowledgement from the leading lords of the duchy, and where the laborious process of registering their obligations began.¹⁷

At this point, however, his plans were rudely interrupted by the rebellion of the greatest lord in Gascony (after Edward himself, that is). Gaston de Béarn, whose lands lay in the hills along the duchy’s southern border, had a history of causing trouble. He had been, for example, the chief ringleader of local resistance during the unpopular rule of Simon de Montfort. The reason for his recalcitrance in 1273 is altogether less certain, but it seems to have stemmed from an escalating disagreement with the duchy’s abrasive new seneschal, Luke de Tany. (Before his departure on crusade, Edward had appointed his old friend Roger Leybourne as lieutenant in Gascony, but Leybourne had been another of the many unexpected casualties during Edward’s absence, dying in the autumn of 1271.) Whatever the precise cause, Gaston refused to appear before Edward, forcing the new duke to break off his administrative business and embark on a punitive military expedition.

This took a long time. Although Gaston was initially brought to heel within a matter of weeks, he immediately broke the terms of his surrender and retreated to his castles in the foothills of the Pyrenees. Flushing him out involved a series of sieges that kept Edward occupied throughout the autumn and into the winter. It was not until the beginning of 1274 that the rebellious vicomte was finally cornered and once again forced to submit.

Nor was that the end of the matter. After his second surrender, Gaston immediately appealed to Philip III, and the French king obliged him by revoking his dispute with Edward to Paris. In this way, Gaston exposed and exploited the great chink in Edward’s armour: namely, the non-absolute nature of his authority. Here was the most pernicious effect of the Treaty of Paris. If the duke of Gascony was properly subordinate to the king of France, it followed that any Gascon who was disgruntled by a ducal decision could appeal to the higher judgement of the French king’s court. Edward could do all he might to limit this tendency, but he could not deny the fundamental principal. In 1274, therefore, much to his chagrin, he had no option but to abandon his attempt to discipline Gaston de Béarn and leave the matter in the hands of his lawyers.¹⁸

It was time to move on. With the winter now wasted by his fruitless pursuit of Gaston, Edward had to abandon his intention of returning to England by Easter. Instead he spent the spring completing the interrupted survey of his ducal rights, which culminated in March with a parliament in Bordeaux. In April he and Eleanor left Gascony, but on their way north there was more delay in Limoges, a once debatable area of ducal authority, where the oppressed citizens were keen to acknowledge Edward as their lord, but the oppressive local viscountess would have none of it. The result was yet another appeal to Philip III, who must have been pleased at the frequency with which opportunities to display his superiority were accumulating. It was not until the end of July that Edward reached the French coast and took ship to England.¹⁹

His year in France had not been a complete waste of time. During his stay in the south Edward had taken the opportunity to cultivate good relations with his neighbours, the kings of Navarre and Aragon, and had concluded alliances with both. Eleanor, meanwhile, had been pleased to meet up with her half-brother, Alfonso X of Castile, for the first time in twenty years. The Spanish king had travelled to meet her at Bayonne, where he had become the godfather to her newly delivered third son: Alfonso junior had been sent back to England ahead of his parents in June.²⁰ In overall terms, however, the visit to Gascony had been a frustrating one. Edward had made a start on consolidating his authority within the duchy, but there was still much work to be done. Moreover, with regard to the all-important issue of his relationship with the king of France, things seemed more complicated than ever, and the questions of territory and authority remained to be satisfactorily answered.

When Edward landed at Dover on 2 August 1274 it was clearly to a tremendous sense of popular excitement. ‘Behold, he shines like a new Richard!’ enthused one Londoner in a song written shortly before the new king’s arrival. But it was not merely the fact that Englishmen now had not one but two crusading heroes to boast about; nor was it that, after almost four years of absence, Edward had kept his public in England waiting for such a very long time. It was probably not even the palpable sense of relief at his safe return, and the prospect of better royal rule that only a resident king could provide. Important though all these factors were, they must for the moment have taken second place to the sheer visceral thrill that accompanied the knowledge that the country was about to witness a coronation.²¹

Coronations were by their nature rare events, but in this particular instance the wait had been quite exceptional. Almost four decades had elapsed since the ceremony staged in 1236 for Eleanor of Provence, and Eleanor had only been a queen consort. To recollect the coronation of a reigning monarch would have been a feat beyond the memories of most Englishmen, for it was well over half a century since the young Henry III had been transformed from a boy of nine into a king.

Edward, of course, by virtue of the groundbreaking decision taken before his departure, was considered a king already. This did not mean, however, that in his case a coronation was in any way redundant or unnecessary: quite the contrary. The royal title may have passed to him, as his writs proclaimed, ‘by the grace of God’, but it still remained to call upon the Almighty to bless his rule, and for that the ancient, mystical rite of a coronation remained essential. Moreover, the fact that there was no longer the need to rush matters meant that those responsible for orchestrating the ceremony had months rather than days to make their preparations, and this in turn meant that the scale of the celebrations could be truly majestic. If there was a quantum leap in the history of the coronation as a royal spectacle, this was it.

On Saturday, 18 August Edward and his entourage rode into London. The mayor and citizens had adorned their city ‘without consideration of cost’ with silks and cloth of gold. Not just the citizens themselves, we are told, but all the magnates of the kingdom, both clerks and laymen, had gathered in the capital to cheer the arrival of their new king. Unfortunately, only one chronicler set these events down in any detail, and he was evidently somewhat overwhelmed by the spectacle, declaring that ‘neither tongue nor pen’ would suffice to describe it. He does, however, mention the ‘multifarious inventions’ that had been prepared in Edward’s honour, which sound a lot like the kind of pageants that are generally held to be the preserve of later coronations.

The fact that Edward had entered London on a Saturday was also highly significant. Very likely what our tongue-tied correspondent was witnessing was the birth of the custom whereby a new king would ride from the Tower of London to Westminster on the day before his coronation. The king’s ministers had certainly taken the trouble to spruce up the Tower in advance of his arrival, and, at Edward’s express request, the mayor had cleared the clutter from Cheapside – London’s main market, and the east–west thoroughfare along which later ‘vigil processions’ would pass. This being the case, Edward would seem to have begun another new tradition in 1274; one that would last until the seventeenth century.²²

In processing ceremoniously through London, Edward was following a fashion laid down by his father, who had loved to indulge in such showy excesses – spectacle being one of the few things that Henry III could usually be relied upon to get right, and a way of compensating for his political failures. On several important occasions during his reign – the reception of Eleanor of Castile in 1255, for example – the late king had staged similarly elaborate parades through the capital. Henry’s contribution, moreover, went beyond the provision of general precedents. In fact, much of the detailed long-term planning for Edward’s coronation can be traced back to his father’s initiative.²³

As an example, consider where and how Edward spent the night before his coronation. When the procession ended, the king and his household would have installed themselves in the Palace of Westminster, where Edward would have prepared himself for a solemn spiritual exercise akin to the one he had performed in Burgos some twenty years before. Just like a young man about to be knighted, so too with a king about to crowned: he was expected to spend the night before the ceremony in quiet contemplation, reflecting on the responsibilities that went with the awesome status about to be conferred upon him.

The location for this time-honoured tradition would have been the king’s bedchamber in the palace – later known, for reasons that will become apparent, as the Painted Chamber. It was here that Henry III had died, and in 1274 his spirit still hung about the walls. Some ten years earlier, the old king had caused the room to be redecorated. A disastrous fire that had ripped through the palace in 1263 had provided the excuse, and Henry’s life-threatening illness the same year had suggested a suitable theme. On the wall directly behind the royal bed, the king’s painters had created a coronation scene. The subject, naturally, was Edward the Confessor, being crowned by a crowd of bishops. On either side, outside of the curtains that closed around the bed, King Solomon’s guards stood watch. Henry’s aim, we must assume, was to provide his son with appropriate images on which to reflect during his vigil. Edward was to ponder the example of the Confessor, and the wisdom of Solomon.²⁴

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On Sunday, 19 August, the day itself dawned. Regrettably, we have no detailed eyewitness accounts of the kind that survive for some other medieval coronations. Past precedent and later example indicate that Edward, accompanied by Eleanor, led by the clergy and the magnates, would have processed the short distance from the palace to the abbey. The new abbey, of course, was Henry III’s greatest legacy, and Edward was the first king to be crowned in it. Henry and his architect had been acutely conscious of Westminster’s long-standing role as the coronation church, and had tailored the new building accordingly. Its ornate north portal was sufficiently huge to admit with ease those processing from the palace; the galleries around its transepts allowed spectators to view the proceedings from on high. The crossing of the church, where much of the ceremony would be acted out, seems to have been rendered deliberately massive for this reason. On the day of Edward’s coronation, as on later occasions, it was very likely filled with a giant wooden stage. This was elevated so that those standing in the nave could observe the king, and – most remarkably – of sufficient height that those earls, barons and knights among the congregation could ride underneath it. In seeking to picture Edward’s coronation, we must imagine the north and south transepts of the abbey filled with aristocrats who were not merely elaborately dressed, but apparently mounted on their horses too.²⁵

Once the procession from the palace had passed inside the abbey, the ceremony itself began. In keeping with the grandeur of the setting and the splendid array of the participants, it was a magnificent piece of religious drama. Solemn prayers were intoned, censers were swung, torches and candles burned, glorious anthems rang out. If this all sounds slightly vague, it is because, once again, we cannot say precisely what took place. Indeed, contemporaries would have struggled to do so. The long years from one king’s inauguration to the next gave ample scope for old practices to be forgotten and new ones to be introduced. In the case of Edward’s coronation, one senses that Henry III, as well as designing the theatre, must also have contributed many details to the script. Later medieval kings, for example, would begin by making an offering at the altar of two gold figurines, one of Edward the Confessor, the other of St John the Evangelist – a ‘tradition’ almost certainly introduced in 1274 on the posthumous instructions of the Confessor’s most avid devotee.²⁶

Nevertheless, at the heart the proceedings lay strong strands of contin uity. In its bare essentials, the English coronation service had changed (and has changed) very little across the centuries. The coronation oath, for example – Edward’s next significant act after making his offering at the altar – had been a central part of the service since it was first devised in the tenth century. By this long-established convention, the new king made three basic promises: to protect the Church, to do good justice, and to suppress evil laws and customs. A fourth promise, to protect the rights of the Crown, had been added in the mid-twelfth century. This was, of course, a much more self-interested pledge as far the king was concerned, and one to which Edward would attach much importance later in his reign.²⁷

The next part of the service, the unction, was of similar long standing. Edward would have descended from the stage towards the altar and dis robed down to his undershirt, in order that the archbishop of Canterbury could anoint various bits of his body with holy oil. The most mystical part of the whole ceremony, it took place on a suitably mystical pavement of multicoloured marble mosaic, the work of Italian craftsmen, and another finishing touch supplied by Henry III. The unction was the point where medieval practice drew on biblical precedent: the Old Testament kings, David and Solomon, had been anointed in this way, and, for this reason, the choir in Westminster Abbey sang the anthem Unxerunt Salomonem (They Anointed Solomon) while the act was performed. Traditionally this had been the critical part of the service – the religious ritual that transformed a mere man into a king – and Edward, although king in name already, must nevertheless have regarded it as the supreme spiritual moment. At this moment his rule became blessed, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit were bestowed upon him. In more practical terms, it meant that, in addition to the holy oil that had been applied to his breast, shoulders and elbows, Edward also had chrism – an even holier oil – poured over his head, where custom decreed that it must remain for a full seven days.²⁸

Lastly came the investiture: the part of the ceremony where the king was re-dressed in the most elaborate royal fashion and adorned with all manner of symbolic baubles (collectively known as the regalia). These had tended to multiply over the years, with the result that by the thirteenth century the new king was weighed down with glittering ornament. Edward was vested in a golden tunic, girded with a sword, and robed with a mantle woven with gold. A gold ring was placed on his finger, and golden spurs were attached to his heels. Once he was wearing his special coronation gloves, a golden rod and a golden sceptre were placed in his hands. These items had for the most part been wrought in the early thirteenth century but, thanks to the enthusiasm and credulity of Henry III, by 1274 each was believed to have been an original first used by Edward the Confessor himself. When, therefore, Edward was invested with the greatest item of all – described in a later account as ‘a great crown of gold … with precious jewellery of great stones, rubies and emeralds’, he understood this to be the same object once worn by his sainted namesake.²⁹

Edward’s coronation, therefore, for all that it took place in a magnificent new church, and despite the manifold small details of staging introduced by Henry III, was essentially traditional in format and stuck to a time-honoured script. There was, however, one genuine moment of novelty in the proceedings, a deviation so striking that several chroniclers saw fit to record it, even though they recorded nothing else. It was supplied by the king himself, at what was literally the crowning moment. Once the great gold crown had been placed on his head, Edward immediately removed it and set it aside, saying (according to one chronicler) ‘he would never take it up again until he had recovered the lands given away by his father to the earls, barons and knights of England, and to aliens’.³⁰

By this deliberately dramatic act, Edward revealed the policy that would preoccupy him during his first years of government, and to some extent for the rest of his reign: namely, the recovery of things that he believed his father had lost. The chronicler’s implication that the king was concerned only with lands is probably slightly skewed, perhaps through misreporting, perhaps through oversimplification. Henry III, it is true, had granted away plenty of property, both to Englishmen and foreigners: the greatest beneficiaries had been those closest to him, such as Richard of Cornwall, William de Valence and Simon de Montfort. It would have been politically unthinkable, however, for Edward to have taken back these lands from such men or their descendants, and even more inconceivable for him to have implemented what in the fifteenth century would have been called an Act of Resumption, demanding at a stroke the return of all the lands alienated by his father. Edward did have the sense that the Crown could use more land, but he preferred to act privately, and wrangle it out of softer targets.³¹

What Edward was determined to recover – and what he more likely declared he would recover – were his rights. Chroniclers were apt to confuse lands and rights, since the two often went together.³² In the Middle Ages, landowners might claim all manner of rights and privileges: the right to hold a court, for example, or to take a toll, even the right to do justice on red-handed thieves with their own private gallows. Rights could also be expressed negatively, as the right not to have to do something. Some landowners would claim that they and their tenants did not have to attend the king’s court, or to answer the summons of his officials. Either way, in asserting and maintaining such rights or liberties, there was financial advantage to be had. Holding your own court, for example, meant you received the profits it raised in fines; not attending a royal court meant you avoided paying similar fines to the king.

Such rights and privileges could be very ancient and legitimate; they might also be officially sanctioned by the king. Henry III, when he found it difficult to obtain the support of his greatest subjects, was wont to appease them by granting just such exemptions. Often as not, however, rights and privileges were simply assumed by landowners who sensed that they could get away with it, and this had been the case during much of Henry’s lax rule. Great men in particular had taken excessive liberties, shutting out the king’s agents – his sheriffs, justices and bailiffs – and creating what amounted to their own private fiefdoms.³³

Edward was determined not only to halt this tendency (thereby upholding his coronation oath to protect the rights of the Crown), but also to throw it into reverse (hence his vow to recover his father’s losses). He was, of course, well-qualified for the task, by virtue of being a more masterful man than Henry. In the course of the struggle with Simon de Montfort he had fought hard to earn the personal authority that his father had so visibly lacked. There was, as a result, little chance of anyone scaring or dominating Edward in the way that Montfort had scared and dominated Henry. Similarly, Edward’s crusade had further enhanced his standing, cementing his relationships with a powerful circle of friends of the kind his father had never known. The crusaders returned from the East as brothers-in-arms, their loyalties to each other, and above all to their new king, heightened by a sense of having been tested together in a great adventure. With such men to support him, Edward would have no need to resort to his father’s policy of appeasement in order to get his own way.

In the short term, however, Edward’s crusade had exacerbated the problems in England. His four-year absence, and the absence of many other powerful individuals, had deprived royal government of valuable support at a time when such support was most necessary. In his last years, politically as well as physically, Henry III had become weaker than ever. The regency government that succeeded him was weaker still, its authority severely dented by the unfortunate deaths of Richard of Cornwall and his intended replacement, Henry of Almain. As a consequence, the situation in England had continued to worsen. Those magnates who had remained in England – a majority that included all the earls – had usurped more power and appropriated more privileges. In some cases they had begun feuding with each other for local dominance. This, and Edward’s continued absence, had led to another serious problem: a general rise in lawlessness. Murders and robberies had increased, sheriffs had turned a blind eye, the courts had failed to maintain order. Here too, the new king realised, something must be done, and done at once. Hence, according to one chronicler, another royal announcement was made at the coronation. Justice, said Edward, should be maintained everywhere; the guilty, even knights and great men, should be hanged, and justices, bailiffs and sheriffs should take no bribes.³⁴

To help him achieve these aims – restoring justice and royal rights – Edward looked above all to the man who, more than any other, had run the country in his absence. Robert Burnell was a man of modest social origins but great ability and seemingly limitless ambition. A clerk – that is, a man in holy orders – he had joined Edward’s household in the mid-1250s and gradually established himself as its most indispensable administrative member. By 1270, such was his standing that he was considered (by Edward, at least) as the obvious candidate to replace the late archbishop of Canterbury. The monks of Canterbury, alas, had disagreed. Burnell may have been an administrative genius and a charming man to boot, but his charms had in the past worked rather too well on the ladies. At least one mistress and as many as five bastard children were a standing argument against his promotion to England’s highest spiritual office.³⁵

The summer of 1270 had nevertheless been a decisive turning point. Up to that moment Edward had intended to take Burnell with him on crusade; after the Canterbury vacancy he decided that his trusted friend should stay at home. At the very last moment, the young clerk – he was probably not very much older than his master – was appointed as one of the five men responsible for superintending Edward’s affairs during his absence. Before long he was calling the shots for the other members of the committee. Once death had reduced their number to three, Burnell emerged as the natural leader and, when Henry III had subsequently succumbed, the humble clerk from Shropshire effectively replaced him. Official documents thereafter speak of Burnell as ‘occupying the king’s place in England’.³⁶

With Edward back in his kingdom, the obvious role for Burnell was chancellor; a month after the coronation he was appointed to the post. We tend to assume – because the chancellor was later styled Lord Chancellor – that the role was judicial in origin; in fact the remit of the medieval chancellor was far wider than that of his latter-day successors. Originally the job was more akin to that of a modern prime minister. The chancellor was so called because he ran the chancery, or royal writing office. In this capacity he controlled the great seal, the stamp with which the most important royal orders were authenticated. Charters, letters and treaties, as well as writs initiating legal actions originated from within his department, which employed around a hundred lesser clerks, so great was its workload. Put simply, the chancery was the instrument by which the king’s will was articulated. It was essential, therefore, that the chancellor was somebody in whom the king could have absolute trust, and whom other people would find accessible and approachable. Burnell was all these things. Although not faultless in his private life, he was extremely conscientious in his work, particularly when it came to ensuring government was just and fair. Chancellors by tradition were also bishops, so Burnell was in line for further promotion. When the bishop of Bath and Wells died in early December, the new chancellor was speedily elected as his replacement.³⁷

By then the business of reforming England’s government had already begun. In the middle of October, within weeks of Burnell’s appointment, orders had gone out for the removal and replacement of all England’s sheriffs. The sheriffs, as the king’s chief agents in the counties (shire-reeves), were responsible for executing royal orders and accounting for the profits of royal lands. They were also responsible for enforcing the law and doing justice, and to that extent their role is comparable with that of their more recent and familiar Hollywood counterparts. Like the sheriffs of the Wild West, the sheriffs of medieval England exercised great power in their localities; good ones were always in demand, bad ones a perennial cause for complaint. By beginning his reign, therefore, with a clean sweep of the board, Edward sent out a clear signal that major change was under way.³⁸

Shuffling the sheriffs, however, was only the first part of a much grander project. That same autumn, Edward and Burnell launched a great inquiry. In November, specially appointed commissioners began travelling in pairs around the country, assembling juries of local people, and requiring them to answer a long list of questions – as many as fifty in some cases. Certain questions demonstrated the same basic concern that Edward had shown in Gascony – that is, they asked how much land the king held in each county and what services he could expect in consequence. In general, however, this inquest went much further than its Gascon predecessor. Edward also wanted information, as he explained in his instructions to the commissioners, ‘concerning the deeds and behaviour of all our sheriffs and bailiffs’. This, in other words, was not merely an investigation into rights and liberties; it was also an exercise in uncovering their abuse. Hence the need for the sheriffs to be switched in advance: folk would be far more likely to come forward and complain of corruption or oppression once their chief oppressor was gone. Nor was it just royal officials who were under the spotlight. Local people were also asked ‘whether lords, or their stewards, or bailiffs of any kind’ had committed transgressions or crimes against the king and the community.³⁹

The main point of the exercise, to judge from the weighting of the questions, was to discover where and by whom the king’s rights had been usurped – the recovery of lost rights being Edward’s main pre-occupation. And yet, by virtue of asking questions about the conduct of local officials, both royal and baronial, it was seen at the time as being a much more laudable and less self-interested exercise. Indeed, the chroniclers who commented on the inquiry saw it exclusively as a crackdown by the king on the corrupt, and a step in keeping with his promise to improve law and order. It was, in short, a cleverly handled initiative on the government’s part, contrived with the intention not only of recovering royal rights and correcting official abuse, but also of winning popular acclaim for the new king and his government.

To this extent, the survey was a great success. In every district visited by the commissioners, men and women came forward in great numbers to give their evidence. It helped that there were no cumbersome legal procedures involved; people could just turn up and complain orally. The commissioners held their inquiries, not at a county level, but at the level of the now-redundant subdivision of the county known as the hundred (depending on size and density of population, a county could have as few as four hundreds or as many as forty). Consequently, their findings, once written up, formed what are now known as the Hundred Rolls. Working at great speed throughout the winter of 1274–75, Edward’s commissioners conducted the single greatest survey of England since the Domesday Book some two centuries before.⁴⁰

Domesday, however, was a dusty and fundamentally dissimilar precedent. The immediate ancestor of the initiatives that Edward introduced at the start of his reign was the reform programme that had been foisted on his father in 1258. Edward, of course, had strenuously resisted the attempt to limit the king’s authority by means of a baronial council, but, this important difference apart, he had otherwise admired the ideals espoused by the reformers. Montfort and his co-conspirators had taught him in a matter of months a lesson that Henry III had spent a lifetime failing to grasp, namely that royal power depended not merely on the support of a few great men at court, but ultimately on the goodwill of many hundreds of lesser men across the rest of the country. The first steps taken by the revolutionary council in 1258 had been to replace all the sheriffs and address the grievances of local society – precisely the steps that Edward sought to replicate after his accession. Such reforms had not failed the first time round because they were inherently unworkable; on the contrary, many of them were eminently sensible and practical, the product of much serious and conscientious thought on the part of their authors. What they would require to work – and what Edward was now able to provide – was firm application. The new king was ready to put his house in order himself.⁴¹

As in 1258, so too in Edward’s reign, the process of inquiry culminated in the drafting of new legislation. By March 1275 the Hundred Rolls commissioners had completed their work, and their findings were returned to the king, who used them to compile a comprehensive set of remedies. The result was a great statute, published at Westminster soon after Easter. It began by stating its intention boldly. ‘Our lord the king greatly wills and desires to set to rights the state of the kingdom in the things in which there is need of amendment.’ No fewer than fifty-one separate articles followed (more than double the number set down by the statute’s spiritual predecessor, the Provisions of Westminster drafted by the reformers in 1259). Most set out to address Edward’s two main policy aims – restoring royal rights and improving law and order. The latter intention, in particular, was emphasised from the start, where the statute lamented that ‘the peace has been less kept than it ought to be, the laws abused, and wrongdoers less punished than they ought to be’. ‘People are less afraid to do wrong,’ it continued, and for this reason many of the proposed solutions involved the introduction of stiffer penalties: mandatory minimum sentences and heavy fines. But steps were also taken to try to improve matters by other means. All men, for instance, were reminded of their duty to be armed and ready to accompany the sheriff when he needed to raise a posse (Latin, posse comitatus, the power of the county) for the pursuit and arrest of criminals.⁴²

Not all of this giant piece of legislation can have been concocted as a direct response to the Hundred Rolls inquiry. The commissioners had assembled a vast amount of information – far too much for even the most dedicated team of ministers to process in the short time that elapsed before the Statute of Westminster was published. As the targeted questions given to the investigators show, the king’s ministers had been aware from the start of the nature of the problems they faced. This was especially true in the case of Robert Burnell. The man who had steered the ship during Edward’s absence must have been one of the key figures in drafting the new statute, along with other ministers, senior judges and lawyers.⁴³

Nevertheless, some parts of the statute were clearly informed by the inquiry’s findings. In particular, those clauses that sought to alleviate the burden of local government seem to respond directly to the most common complaints recorded in the rolls. And being seen to respond was the essential point of the exercise. The inquiry had taken the country’s pulse. Each new roll, as it was received, must have sharpened awareness of the legislators, either confirming their earlier diagnoses or suggesting new ones. The Statute of Westminster is steeped in a sense of its own worth; designed, in its own words, ‘for the common good and for the relief of those who are oppressed’. It begins and ends with a reminder that this was Edward’s first act ‘after his coronation’, and in this respect it resembles the ‘coronation charters’ issued by earlier kings – promises of good government made at the start of their reigns in order to win popularity. Edward’s statute went much further than any of these earlier manifestos. Prepared over many months, during which there was unprecedented public consultation, it was the most thorough-going and extensive coronation charter ever issued.

This was reflected in the correspondingly elaborate efforts taken to publicise the finished statute. On the king’s instructions, it was read aloud in local courts, in the marketplaces of towns and cities, and in other places besides. Copies were given not only to sheriffs and royal bailiffs (to impress upon them their responsibilities) but also, as an additional safeguard, to several local knights in every county (the probable intention being that they should watch for infringements). The most impressive part of the publicity process, however, was the initial fanfare. Publication of the statute was timed to coincide with the first parliament of Edward’s reign, which was, for this reason, enormous in its size. As many as 800 representatives were summoned, both knights from the shires and, especially, burgesses from the towns. Together with the usual turnout of earls, barons, bishops and abbots, they constituted not only the largest audience imaginable, but also the biggest parliament assembled in England in the Middle Ages.⁴⁴

The confident assurance with which Edward and his ministers handled public opinion and legislation at the start of his reign is further reflected in the sure-footed way they managed parliament. As we have seen, parliament had experienced a quantum leap during the early part of Henry III’s reign. The word itself is first used in an official context around the time that the king, as well as summoning the great men with whom English monarchs had long been wont to discuss important matters of state, had taken the innovative step of summoning representatives from the shires and boroughs. But Henry, having fathered this new child, failed to nurture it, with the result that parliament became ever more argumentative and obstructive. The king wanted the knights and burgesses he summoned to approve his requests for money. They, in turn, demanded redress of their grievances with his government. Henry responded to such criticism by jamming his fingers in his ears; parliament retaliated by withholding its consent to taxation. From one assembly to the next, for year after year, this predictable pantomime was re-enacted. The king and his people would meet to parlay, only to talk at cross purposes.⁴⁵

With Edward’s accession, however, the relationship was reinvented, and the dialogue became meaningful and productive. Rather than ignore his subjects’ criticisms, the new king actively solicited them. The evidence suggests that those knights and burgesses summoned to his first parliament at Easter 1275 were encouraged to bring their complaints for consideration. Those that did so must have been moderately surprised to receive swift redress, either in the course of the meeting itself, or soon afterwards, by special commissioners who were sent out ‘to hear and determine’ (oyer et terminer) the plaintiff’s case. This was, therefore, an exercise in consultation in keeping with the spirit of the Hundred Rolls inquiry. The difference was that it was not intended to be a one-off. Parliaments were henceforward to be regular events, just as the reformers in 1258 had insisted they should be, and Edward continued to invite complaints, or ‘petitions’, as they became known. The initiative was, in fact, so popular that dealing with petitions quickly became one of parliament’s principal functions (later in the reign, restrictions on petitioning had to be introduced, to ensure there was still sufficient time to discuss more important matters of state). At a stroke, Edward had transformed the malfunctioning institution he had inherited from his father into a forum where the king and his people could come together for their mutual benefit.⁴⁶

In order to preserve this new spirit of bonhomie, Edward knew that it would be essential to avoid his father’s tendency of demanding money from parliament. Apart from antagonising his subjects, taxation was a dangerously unstable base on which to found the Crown’s finances. In all of his endeavours, Henry III had been repeatedly hamstrung by parliament’s refusal to grant him funds. If Edward was to avoid the same unpopularity and embarrassment, he had to find another, more reliable form of income.

The solution was to tap trade. Thirteenth-century England was a rich country with a rapidly expanding economy. The evidence was everywhere: markets and fairs were being established at a rapid rate; forests were being felled to create new arable land and pasture; more and more silver coinage was being minted and put into circulation. Nowhere, however, was this prosperity more apparent than in the ever-increasing numbers of sheep. Wool had long been England’s main export, sold to the textile manufacturers of Flanders. By the thirteenth century the business was booming. Great monasteries and lay magnates built up massive flocks on their estates, then sold their fleeces on to an increasingly prosperous class of merchants. If there was one sector of the economy that could afford to contribute to the royal coffers, the wool market was it.⁴⁷

What Edward therefore proposed in 1275 was the introduction of customs duties on wool. This had been tried on a couple of occasions in the past, but with no great success. On this occasion, however, the circumstances were more propitious. In the first place, Edward to some extent had the mercantile community over a barrel. During his absence on crusade a trade dispute between England and Flanders had prompted the regency government to impose an embargo on the export of wool. It had not been terribly effective – Edward at one stage complained that the number of contraband fleeces being smuggled out of England was making him a laughing stock on the Continent – but in the end this initial period of laxity worked to the king’s advantage. It meant that, when Edward returned, not only was the ban enforced with much greater stringency; he was also able to threaten the punishment of those who had contrived to evade it. Anxious to avoid Edward’s wrath, and desirous to have the restrictions lifted, the wool merchants were predisposed to lend a favourable ear to his new customs scheme. In the course of the Easter parliament they agreed that the Crown should collect half a mark (a third of a pound) on every sack of wool exported. Since a sack held around 250 fleeces and sold for about £10, the new duty only amounted to about 3 per cent.⁴⁸

The real key to Edward’s success, however, lay in privatisation. During his crusade he had come to rely on the services of a company of Italian bankers known as the Riccardi of Lucca; on his return journey, in particular, their loans had helped to keep him solvent. This, like the use of customs, was not a wholly novel departure. Edward’s predecessors had been turning to such banking societies for the occasional loan since the twelfth century, when the Italians had cornered the market in international finance. Where Edward innovated was in transforming an occasional relationship into a permanent one. Earlier kings of England – Henry III, as always, furnishes a good example – had obtained loans from the Italians without giving much thought as to how they might be repaid. Edward, by contrast, struck a new deal, whereby the Riccardi agreed to provide him with credit on demand, and he, in return, handed them the entire operation of his new customs. It was a simple yet brilliant arrangement: Edward, even in a financial emergency, would always have sufficient cash, and the Riccardi had the security of knowing that, in time, they could recover their money from the steady profit (on average, around £11,000 a year) that the customs brought in. It was not a cheap system as far as the Crown was concerned – the Riccardi probably charged interest at something like 33 per cent – but for the guarantee of liquidity it was worth every penny. By knitting together two existing ideas – customs and Italian loans – Edward had solved the problem of hand-to-mouth finance that had blighted his father’s reign.⁴⁹

But there was still one major and inescapable problem. Edward had returned from his crusade with colossal debts. This might seem surprising, given the sizeable sums that he had secured to finance the expedition in advance of its departure. In addition to the £17,500 Edward had raised by mortgaging the customs of Bordeaux to Louis IX, the hard-won tax he had wrung from parliament in 1270 had (eventually) yielded an impressive total of £31,500. All this money, however, had been proved quite inadequate to the task. Louis’s loan had been almost entirely absorbed by the initial contract payments to Edward’s followers, and those contracts had been set to run for one year only. The cost of repeatedly renewing them over the next three years would by itself have been enough to soak up the proceeds of the parliamentary subsidy. Besides this, of course, Edward had had plenty of other expenses to meet: the transportation of men and horses by ship (a contractual obligation); the purchase of fresh horses in the Holy Land; the construction of his tower in Acre. Above all, there had been the day-to-day cost of running his extensive household – a royal household from January 1273 – while it was overseas. Borrowing had begun while Edward was still in Acre and had increased dramatically during his return; debts to the Riccardi alone amounted to some £22,500. It helped that the new pope, Gregory X, agreed to a retrospective tax on the English Church that generated a yield almost equivalent to this sum. But Edward was still left owing numerous creditors, and the Riccardi in particular, what were, in the words of one chronicler, ‘inestimable sums’.⁵⁰

The only solution was to seek the thing that, in general, Edward hoped to avoid – a tax. This was a tricky proposition, for it ran counter to the policy of conciliation he had pursued during the early months of his rule. Obtaining consent to the imposition of customs had been one thing – the merchant class, compromised by contraband, had needed to strike a deal with the king. Obtaining consent to a general subsidy was, by contrast, a challenge of quite a different order, for it required the consent of the knights of the shire, and they felt no corresponding obligation to make concessions. It is true that, like the merchants, the knights had been summoned en masse to the first parliament of the reign, and, like the rest of the king’s subjects, they must have been gladdened by the contents of the Statute of Westminster. By themselves, however, the new laws were evidently not enough to secure support for grant of taxation. Indeed, it is not impossible that Edward sought the knights’ consent during his first parliament, only to be rebuffed. In spite of all the consultation and legislation, nothing had been done on the matter that still troubled these men most. The Statute of Westminster, for all its breadth, had been silent on the subject of England’s Jews.⁵¹

This, of course, was by no means a new issue. It had been by introducing measures intended to limit the burden of Jewish moneylending that Edward had obtained his first crusade tax in 1270. The trouble was, however, that these provisions – and also certain subsequent ones made during Edward’s absence – had not gone to the heart of the problem. The pernicious aspect of Jewish credit was not the business itself, but the dubious trade by which rich Christian speculators snapped up the estates of the indebted. The measures applied in 1270, while they had offered relief to some individuals by cancelling their debts, had imposed hardly any restriction on the illicit market; Jewish bonds continued to be bought and sold much as before, and small landowners continued to go under as result. Edward, in short, had raised expectations of relief, and charged handsomely for doing so, but his remedy had not worked. The knights of the shire had good reason to feel that in 1270 they had been sold a dud. Consequently, five years on, their complaint was more vociferous and to the point. If Edward wanted another vote of funds from parliament, he would have to provide a more effective solution to the Jewish problem.⁵²

The king’s answer, when it came, was certainly bold. In October 1275, under the terms of a brand-new statute, Jewish moneylending was banned altogether. ‘The usuries of the Jews,’ Edward declared in the statute’s opening sentence, had led to ‘many evils, and instances of the disinheriting of the good men of his land.’ This was a move, in other words, intended in the first instance to win over the knights of the shire, and to this extent the new law was a great success. Published in the course of a parliament that assembled in October, the Statute of the Jewry was the essential concession that enabled Edward to levy his much-needed tax. With an assessment rate set at a fifteenth (6.6 per cent), the receipts were impressive. All told, it raised over £80,000 – enough to clear Edward’s crusade debts and leave him comfortably in credit.⁵³

The losers, of course, were the Jews. The new statute outlawed the practice that had been their economic mainstay since their first arrival in England some two centuries before. Without moneylending the Jewish community could not hope to survive for long. Edward and his advisers were not oblivious to this; indeed, they had given considerable thought to providing a remedy. Henceforth, the statute declared, Jews were to live ‘by lawful trade, and by their labour’ – that is, they were permitted to set themselves up as merchants who might buy and sell with their Christian neighbours. There was nothing insincere in this ambitious attempt at social engineering: as far as Edward was concerned, he was being very conscientious about the whole business. Acknowledging that ‘he and his ancestors have always received great benefit from the Jewish people in the past’, the king took the Jews into his protection and granted them his peace. It was his will, he declared, ‘that they may be safely preserved and defended by his sheriffs and other bailiffs and faithful men’, and he further ordered ‘that none shall do them harm or damage or wrong, in their bodies or in their goods’.⁵⁴

To this extent, the statute recognised and tried to limit the effects of anti-Semitism, which was not merely universal in thirteenth-century England but increasing in its intensity. This was a society in which conscientious Christians strove to keep pace with the bigoted teaching of their religious leaders. Simon de Montfort, a well-known fanatic, may have gone beyond what was lawful in encouraging his supporters to attack and kill Jews in the 1260s, but his virulent hatred was otherwise a matter for praise. When, for example, at the start of his career in England, he had expelled the Jews from Leicester, it was an act expressly intended to save his and his family’s souls, and carried out with the blessing of Robert Grosseteste, later bishop of Lincoln, and one of the greatest Christian theologians of his age. Moreover, it was far from being an exceptional initiative. Edward’s mother, Eleanor of Provence, although happy enough to have extensive contact with the Jews in her financial dealings, nevertheless requested royal permission to expel them from her dower lands in 1275 – permission that was duly granted. Henry III and Louis IX, both outstandingly devoted sons of the Church, were both pioneering anti-Semites as a result. Louis has the distinction of being the first European king to ban the Jews from lending money (an act of 1235). Henry, meanwhile, was the first king of England to endorse (in 1255) the pernicious myth, English in its origin, that the Jews ritually murdered Christian children.⁵⁵

And yet, even as it tacitly acknowledged this rampant hatred, the Statute of Jewry took steps that reinforced it. Conscious of the fact that by exhorting the Jews to do business with Christians he might be seen as encouraging exactly the kind of close relations that the Church so roundly condemned, Edward endeavoured to restrict such interaction to a bare minimum. From now on, the new statute decreed, Jews were to live only in the king’s towns and cities; no Christians were to live among them. And, so that there should be no confusion whatsoever on this score, every Jew above the age of seven was to wear ‘a distinguishing mark on his outer garment’ – a badge of yellow felt three inches by six inches, shaped like the two tablets of the Mosaic Law. Such badges had been a key recommendation of the Church for more than half a century.⁵⁶

It was, therefore, highly unlikely that any Jews would survive, let alone prosper, ‘by lawful trade’ with their Christian neighbours. No one was more acutely aware of this than the Jews themselves. Shortly after its publication, they collectively petitioned Edward about the new law, pointing out the many disadvantages they would face in trying to compete with Christian traders, and beseeching him to allow them to live as they had before, ‘in the time of his ancestors’. Their protest, however, was in vain. The statute stood, unmodified, in all its points. ‘The good men of his land’ had paid their king too high a price for it to be otherwise.⁵⁷

When the autumn parliament of 1275 had ended, Edward left Westminster to spend a week at the Tower of London, where the direct correlation between the Crown’s power and its newly re-established wealth was already making itself manifest. On the king’s orders, the ancient fortress was being transformed in line with the latest developments in military thinking. This meant, above all, a massive expansion in the size of the site. Edward’s intention was to give the Tower a ‘concentric’ design, creating multiple lines of defence, one inside the other. That summer hundreds of men – their wages for that year alone came to £2,500 – had begun filling the existing moat and digging its replacement, the giant trench that surrounds the Tower today. Interestingly, the building accounts reveal that the individual in charge was ‘Brother John of the Order of St Thomas of Acre’, an engineer evidently recruited in the Holy Land and perhaps the man responsible for Edward’s building endeavours there. The moat, moreover, was only the first part of a major programme of redevelopment. Other experts were engaged in the more complicated business of completing the southern section of the new circuit, a task that involved extending the Tower’s site out into the River Thames. To the west, meanwhile, construction had started on a series of gatehouses that together would form a new main entrance. And, amid all this military engineering, domestic concerns were not being neglected. Also under way from the summer of 1275 were a new set of royal apartments, St Thomas’s Tower, which still survive more or less unaltered.⁵⁸

If there was a target audience for this massive restatement of royal power, it was the citizens of London themselves, the restless rabble who had dared to challenge the Crown on several occasions during the previous reign. To them Edward evidently wished to send a clear message from the start. Elsewhere in England the new king may have chosen to present a conciliatory face, but when it came to the capital his aspect was deliberately one of intimidation. The enlarged Tower stood as a permanent warning to the Londoners that their recent behaviour was not to be repeated. As such, the new works there, like Edward’s treatment of the Jews, introduced a discordant note of domination and intolerance to the otherwise harmonious fanfare that heralded the start of his reign.

It also signalled a dramatic shift in priorities. While the diggers and ditchers were beginning their noisy business on the eastern edge of the city, back in Westminster the stonemasons’ hammers had fallen silent. The abandonment of Henry III’s half-built abbey was yet another reminder that this was not simply a new reign, but a new political era.⁵⁹

The early days of this new era did not pass without disappointment or distress. Not long after their return to England, Edward and Eleanor’s eldest surviving son, Henry, had fallen seriously ill, and neither prayers nor medication had been sufficient to save him. He died in October 1274, leaving only one younger brother – Alfonso, not yet passed his first birthday – to take the place of heir apparent. Probably more distressing still for Edward was the sudden passing, in the early months of 1275, of both his sisters. Margaret and Beatrice, respectively queen of Scots and wife of the future duke of Brittany, were, in the words of one chronicler, ‘women of great fame and in the flower of youth’. Both had been present with their husbands at the coronation, and their subsequent deaths, said the chronicler, converted the great joy of that occasion into great sadness.⁶⁰

Nevertheless, these early days had been in every other respect quite astonishingly successful. Not for centuries had a king of England begun his reign so peacefully or auspiciously. This success was in large part down to Edward himself. By taking swift but well-considered action on a number of fronts – widespread public consultation, wide-ranging legislation, innovative financial reform – he had won the backing and the respect of his subjects. Or, as one chronicler put it at the time, ‘bound the hearts of his people to him with an inestimable love’. Even the citizens of London, in spite of past differences, had welcomed their new king with much pomp on the eve of his coronation, and thrown a well-lubricated party on the day itself (the water conduit in Cheapside reportedly ran with red and white wine). Back in Westminster, meanwhile, the coronation ceremony had been followed by the coronation banquet, preparations for which had been under way for months. Royal orders for victuals reveal a feast of Solomonic proportions: dozens of peacocks, cranes and swans; hundreds of pigs, boar and oxen; thousands of chickens, rabbits, eels and lampreys. The Palace of Westminster had been especially extended and redecorated for the occasion at a cost of over £1,000, with temporary accommodation for the thousands of guests, and temporary kitchens to feed them.⁶¹

Anyone attending this feast would have been struck by more than just the splendour; equally striking was the extent to which the world had moved on. It was not just that one king had replaced another; the whole court had been renewed in recent years. Henry III lay in the abbey next door; Richard of Cornwall was interred at his own foundation at Hailes in Gloucestershire; the butchered remains of Simon de Montfort were buried in the abbey church at Evesham. Peter of Savoy, one of the dominant figures of the previous reign, had died in 1268; his brother, Boniface, the longest serving archbishop of Canterbury since the tenth century, in 1270. The only survivors of note from the old days were Eleanor of Provence and William de Valence, but neither was set to resume the controversial roles they had played earlier in their careers.⁶²

As the old generation had passed away, a new one had risen to take its place. Edward himself, at thirty-five, was in his prime; Eleanor, at thirty-three, still fair and once again pregnant. Robert Burnell, the king’s closest adviser, was probably around the same age, perhaps a little older. And as for the rest of the court, they were all similarly youthful. Of the ten earls then living in England, four were also in the mid-thirties, and four more in their twenties. The septuagenarian earl of Hereford would shortly be succeeded by his twentysomething grandson, which left the earl of Surrey feeling very old at forty-three.⁶³

Edward and his companions had reached the point in their lives were they had ample experience – of politics, of war, of government, of life in general – yet at the same time they retained the vigour and energy to tackle the huge challenges that lay ahead. Their corporate character is captured perfectly by a tale (told somewhat later and therefore perhaps slightly improved with age) about the post-coronation celebrations. During the feast, we are assured, King Alexander of Scotland presented a little diversion of his own devising. A hundred of his knights appeared, alighted from their mounts, and then – to general delight – released them, so that anyone who caught a horse might keep it. Not to be outdone, a number of English earls, including the king’s brother Edmund and the formerly fractious Gilbert de Clare, repeated the exercise, releasing several hundred more.⁶⁴

Whatever the truth of the story, the coronation of Edward I had clearly been an occasion of great joy. And, as the presence of the king of Scots reminds us, simply everyone had been there to share in it.

Everyone, that is, except the prince of Wales.