Arthur’s Crown

From the declaration of war on 12 November 1276 to the proclamation of peace on 9 November 1277, it had taken Edward just short of a year to reduce Llywelyn ap Gruffudd to obedience. After such a sustained military effort the king was anxious to ensure that the gains he had made and the terms he had imposed would not be undone or reversed. Consequently, for much of the year that followed, he remained highly engaged with Welsh affairs, directing his energy and resources to the task of creating a settlement that he intended would be permanent.¹

The most visible manifestation of Edward’s will in this regard were his new castles. At Rhuddlan, Flint and Aberystwyth, as the king’s armies withdrew, his workmen stayed on, labouring in their thousands to transform the temporary timber stockades thrown up during the campaign into the stone fortresses that have survived to this day. Rhuddlan, in particular, required a tremendous deployment of manpower, for besides the castle (itself the largest of the three), Edward had foreseen the necessity of straightening the adjacent River Clwyd. Teams of diggers – at one point they numbered almost a thousand men – would work on this project for the next three years to ensure that in future the inland garrison could be kept supplied by sea.²

Nor was it just new foundations that received such attention. In mid-Wales Roger Mortimer had recovered for the king the castle at Builth that he had lost to Llywelyn some seventeen years before. Building work there was under way even before the main assault on Wales had begun. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the same region, and also further south, the Crown had obtained many other new lands and castles by virtue of depriving their former Welsh owners. Consider, for example, the fate of Rhys Wyndod, one of the most powerful lords of south Wales. He had offered minimal resistance in 1277 and come to terms swiftly, yet he was still obliged to surrender all his fortresses along the River Tywi – Dinefwr, Llandovery, and the lofty eyrie that is Carreg Cennen. All three now passed to Edward, expanding his stock of strongholds, but also increasing his already massive construction programme.³

To oversee such a major exercise in castle-building required a project manager of considerable genius, and so it was fortunate that Edward had just such a man at his disposal. Five years earlier, in the course of his return journey from the Holy Land, the king passed through the lands of his mother’s relatives, the counts of Savoy; for a week or so in the summer of 1273 he and his fellow crusaders had paused at Count Philip’s new castle of St Georges de Espéranche, not far from the French city of Lyon. And there, it seems, Edward was probably introduced to the castle’s designer and builder, a young master mason who came to be known as Master James of St George. For some years James and his father had been selling their building services to the counts of Savoy and their nobles; a string of towns and castles in the Swiss and Italian Alps still stand as witness to the duo’s industry and skill, and also their flair for organisation. In the autumn of 1275, however, Master James himself vanishes from the administrative records of Savoy. When he reappears, some two and a half years later, it is in the pay of a new employer. On 8 April 1278 Edward I sent him from England into Wales ‘to ordain the works of the castles there’.⁴

The new castles were not intended to be isolated outposts where lonely English garrisons would guard against future Welsh insurgency. On the contrary, they would be the focal points of the new and better Wales that Edward saw it as his job to build. Rhuddlan and Flint were administrative centres, attached to the justiciar of Chester, from which royal bailiffs could superintend the Welsh interior, and to which the Welsh were regularly summoned to attend the king’s courts. Aberystwyth played a similar role in the west, ultimately answering to a new ‘justiciar of west Wales’, based at Carmarthen. Edward, it is fair to say, did not try as part of this exercise to introduce English law into Wales. When, in January 1278, he appointed a seven-man legal team (the so-called Hopton Commission) ‘to hear and determine all suits and pleas … in the Marches and in Wales’, three of its members were Welsh, and they were instructed to do justice ‘according to the customs of those parts’. Nevertheless, he intended that both Welsh law and Marcher law should be brought firmly within the framework of his own overarching jurisdiction. The king’s high estimation of his authority in Wales is well demonstrated by his ongoing efforts to thin out its forests and widen its roads. Marcher and Welsh lords alike were ordered to see to it that this work was done in their districts, or else the king’s agents would do it for them and charge them for the privilege.⁵

And if, moreover, it was impracticable to introduce English law into Wales, anglicisation could still be advanced by other means. At Flint, Rhuddlan and Aberystwyth, the king’s new castles were paired with new royal towns, not for the benefit of the natives, but in order to host immigrant communities of English settlers. England’s population was rising in the thirteenth century, and the country was already approaching a stage where it had more people than the land could support. Consequently there was no shortage of Englishmen and Englishwomen ready to accept the offer of a new life in Wales, even if it meant living in the midst of a hostile people. Edward’s new boroughs were surrounded by palisades and ditches, and ultimately protected by their adjacent castles. The settlers would supply the soldiery by providing local services and – here was the ultimate hope – soften the natives by their peaceful, law-abiding and industrious example.⁶

And what of the man who, despite his reduced circumstances, remained the greatest and potentially the most hostile native of them all? It is clear that, despite his symbolic submission at Christmas 1277, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd was still regarded with considerable suspicion in England, especially by the king. Although in the new year Edward allowed his erstwhile adversary to return to his diminished principality, he had already taken steps that effectively placed the prince on probation. One of the conditions of the surrender, for example, had been Llywelyn’s agreement to an annual oath-taking ceremony, by which twenty men from every district in his possession would swear that their belittled leader was behaving himself. In the more immediate term, the prince had also been required to hand over ten hostages, and at the start of 1278 these men remained in the Crown’s custody. And to their number, of course, could be added Edward’s long-term guest, Eleanor de Montfort. Her release was probably discussed during Llywelyn’s visit to England, but was not carried out. For a while longer, she too would remain in the king’s keeping as a guarantee of her fiancé’s good conduct.⁷

Within a few months, however, Edward started to soften in the face of Llywelyn’s ready compliance. As early as March he was pleased to note that the prince was submitting his territorial disputes to the Hopton Commission. ‘With goodwill,’ the king told his chancellor, Robert Burnell, ‘he seeks and receives justice and judgement.’ By the end of the summer Edward was ready to release the hostages; in September he returned to Rhuddlan for this purpose, and to rule on the territorial disputes between Llywelyn and his brothers. Finally, in the early autumn, the king travelled to Worcester in order to attend the prince’s wedding. This could go ahead, of course, only because Edward had agreed to release the bride, and the ceremony showed other signs of being arranged to suit the king’s own agenda. Not only did it take place in an English cathedral; it was celebrated – with what Edward no doubt considered to be mischievous humour – on 13 October, the feast of the translation of Edward the Confessor, patron saint of the English monarchy. Nevertheless, it remained an act of royal generosity, and the best dynastic match ever made by a Welsh ruler. Eleanor de Montfort, for all her father’s crimes, was still the king’s cousin. It was Edmund of Lancaster who gave her away at the church door, and Edward himself who paid for the wedding feast.⁸

Edward, then, was much engaged in the business of settling Wales during 1278. Given this evident preoccupation, it is astonishing that his most interesting act of the year, which fits squarely into this context, has received so little attention from historians, or been noted only briefly and in passing in order to deny that it was in any way relevant. At Easter 1278 Edward took his court to Somerset, and to the abbey at Glastonbury, to visit the tomb of King Arthur.⁹

The tomb of King Arthur at Glastonbury, regrettably destroyed in the seventeenth century, was obviously a fake. ‘Obviously’ because, as all sane historians will nowadays readily attest (whatever the assertions of lament able Hollywood films to the contrary), Arthur himself never existed. Beyond any reasonable doubt, the legendary ‘king’ began life as an elemental figure or demi-god – a sort of low-grade Thor or Wodin. What is also unquestionably clear, however, is that his otherworldly origins were in no way apparent to Edward I and his contemporaries. To them, Arthur was a historical personage as real as Richard the Lionheart, William the Conqueror or Edward the Confessor.¹⁰

Diligent and painstaking modern scholarship reveals to us what thirteenth-century folk could not possibly know: that Arthur was not historic, but had been ‘historicised’. That is to say, a number of earlier medieval writers, at different times and for different reasons, had taken the legendary or god-like figure and written about him as if he had been a real person. In the early ninth century, for example, an author known to posterity as Nennius wrote Arthur into his account of the struggle between Britain’s original inhabitants, the Ancient Britons, and the Anglo-Saxon invaders who eventually displaced them. The deity was thereby demoted into a warrior who successfully battled for the Britons around the year AD 500.

This Arthur was shadowy and obscure, brief and boring; had his development ended there and then he would have undoubtedly remained a little-known and seldom-mentioned curiosity. But Arthur underwent a subsequent re-imagining that transformed him out of all proportion. In the 1130s a mischievous Oxford scholar called Geoffrey of Monmouth sat down and perpetrated what stands to be regarded as the most brilliant and audacious literary hoax of the Middle Ages, if not of all time. The History of the Kings of Britain, as his book has come to be known, was in reality nothing of the sort. It was a work of fiction, laced with just enough snippets from more sober and bona fide chronicles to convince the credulous. And into his long, tall tale of imaginary kings in a distant imaginary past, Geoffrey inserted Arthur – King Arthur, as he now became – the greatest of all Britons, one-time ruler of the whole world.¹¹

Not everyone was taken in by such nonsense. ‘It is quite clear,’ wrote the infinitely more responsible William of Newburgh some fifty years later and with palpable irritation, ‘that everything this man wrote about Arthur and his successors, and indeed his predecessors … was made up!’ By this stage, however, it was far too late: Geoffrey’s book had become a runaway success, a medieval bestseller. Even today, some 215 manuscript copies of the History still survive, putting it way ahead of its nearest rivals, and second only to the Bible. And as for Arthur – the part of the book that everyone liked best – he rapidly spawned an entire industry. Tales of his exploits were taken up by other writers and poets, especially Continental ones, and made taller still. Soon Arthur acquired a castle called Camelot, a host of knightly companions, and a Round Table.¹²

It was only a matter of time before he acquired a tomb. When the church at Glastonbury Abbey burned down in 1184, it quickly dawned on the monks there that a sure-fire way to increase the number of paying visitors was a spot of creative marketing involving everyone’s favourite king. Accordingly, they dug around in the churchyard and unearthed a pair of skeletons that, they claimed, were those of Arthur and his queen, Guinevere. To the monks’ credit, their forgery was first-rate: the excavations were carried out in secret, and the bones were discovered under an inscribed lead cross that confirmed, with convenient explicitness, the identities of their former owners. As with other famous hoaxes (Piltdown Man, the Hitler Diaries, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History), even the very clever and sceptical were taken in. Gerald of Wales, a man who considered himself nothing less than a genius, saw both the bones and the cross and was convinced of their authenticity. Other writers followed suit, and Glastonbury’s claim to be Arthur’s final resting place was rapidly accepted as a matter of fact. By the early thirteenth century it was proof positive that the fabulous king about whom Geoffrey of Monmouth had written had once really existed.¹³

Thus, by Edward’s day, Arthur-mania knew no bounds, and evidence of enthusiasm for the king was abundantly apparent. Richard of Cornwall, for instance, soon after gaining his earldom, spent considerable sums building the remote castle at Tintagel, a place that offered neither strategic nor domestic benefits but that was, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, the location where Arthur had been conceived. Eleanor of Provence, it is touching to note, was taken to Glastonbury soon after her arrival in England, by a new husband evidently anxious to please a twelve-year-old queen who (as other evidence shows) loved all things Arthurian. By this time, moreover, one did not even have to be a great reader like Eleanor to join in the fun. Even those knights who were insufficiently in touch with their feminine sides to endure interminably long tales of courtly love were still able to fill their leisure time with Arthur-themed entertainment. It is in the middle decades of the thirteenth century that we first begin to hear of special tournaments called ‘Round Tables’, where the emphasis was on jousting, pageantry and prizes. Edward’s good friend Roger Mortimer would organise just such a tournament at Kenilworth Castle in 1279 in order to celebrate the end of his military career.¹⁴

In Gascony and Germany, Italy and Sicily, France, Scotland and even in the Holy Land – everyone everywhere loved Arthur and told tales about him. In England, however, the famous king, fantastic though he was, did present something of a problem. Geoffrey of Monmouth, sticking to his earlier sources (like Nennius), had located his superhero at the turn of the fifth and sixth centuries. Arthur was not merely a British king, but a British king who had fought against the Anglo-Saxons – that is, the founding fathers of the kingdom of England. The English, in other words, were the bad guys in the Arthur story; the invaders who had ultimately defeated the Britons and driven them into the northern and western extremities of their island. Arthur, the most excellent king that had ever been, might be admired by the English, but he did not belong to them in any meaningful sense. On the contrary, he belonged to the descendants of the Britons – the Welsh.

The fact that Arthur was Welsh, though galling, was not his biggest problem as far as English audiences were concerned. A more disturbing difficulty was that he was apparently due for a comeback. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, the king was merely wounded in his last battle with the Saxons; nothing was said about his death. Arthur, Geoffrey maintained, had been taken to the mysterious island of Avalon, in order that he might recover from his injuries. And when he did, so the story went, he would return and lead the Britons to victory once more. For fairly obvious reasons, the Welsh were very fond of this idea.

The English, for reasons that are equally obvious, preferred the version of the story that ended in Glastonbury. Not only did the tomb there prove that Arthur had really lived, and was therefore apt to be emulated; it also proved that he was really dead, and would not be coming back to cause any trouble. One of the few people who seems to have been in on the original fraud at Glastonbury was Edward’s great-grandfather, Henry II, who had problems of his own with the Welsh. It was reportedly his suggestion – and one imagines him tapping his nose and winking as he made it – that had set the monks digging in the first place. If, however, it was indeed Henry’s aim to discomfort his Celtic neighbours by this discovery, his propaganda missed its mark. The English might have been predisposed to accept that Arthur was dead and buried, but the Welsh simple refused to believe it. ‘In their stupidity,’ scoffed Gerald of Wales, ‘[they] maintain that he is still alive.’¹⁵

It was, therefore, more than just idle curiosity or exaggerated devotion that brought Edward I to Glastonbury in the spring of 1278. The king, like his mother and his wife, owned Arthurian romances and appears to have been well versed in their contents; but, as has been rightly observed, there is nothing to show that his enthusiasm in this regard was anything other than ordinary.¹⁶ So far as we can tell, Edward’s trip to Glastonbury in 1278 was his first and only visit, and it was not a secular pilgrimage of the kind that had drawn his parents there forty years earlier. Edward came not to praise Arthur, but to bury him. Again.

Two days after Easter, which the court celebrated at the abbey, the king ordered Arthur’s tomb to be opened. ‘There, in two caskets,’ said a local chronicler, ‘were found the bones of the said king, of wondrous size, and those of Guinevere, of marvellous beauty.’ The next day, Edward had these remains removed to the abbey’s treasury, there to be kept while a new and better tomb was constructed. From a description in the sixteenth century it seems that the eventual outcome was a box of black marble with a lion at each end, and an effigy of Arthur at its foot.

What took place at Glastonbury was a piece of political theatre every bit as pointed and significant as Llywelyn’s homage the previous Christmas, or the prince’s marriage the following October. As on these occasions, every effort was taken to ensure that the event was momentous and memorable. The disinterment of the bodies, we are told, took place at twilight, no doubt deliberately to heighten its dramatic effect. The following morning the court was treated to an equally arresting spectacle when Edward personally wrapped Arthur’s bones in silk, while Eleanor of Castile similarly prepared the remains of Guinevere for reburial. There may even have been, in addition to these macabre solemnities, some kind of celebratory jamboree. Immediately prior to its arrival at Glastonbury, the court had gone out of its way to stop at Eleanor’s manor of Queen Camel, which stands close by the giant Iron Age hill-fort at South Cadbury. Since Cadbury had already been identified by this date as Camelot (presumably because of its proximity to Camel, as well as to Glastonbury), it seems likely that the two visits were connected, and that there might have been a chivalric prelude to the exhumation.

Such efforts, coming as they did within a few months of Edward’s humbling of Llywelyn, and at a time when the king was engaged in a general drive to redefine the relationship between England and Wales, can hardly be interpreted as anything other than an exercise in propaganda directed squarely at the Welsh. The attempt to deal decisively with Arthur shows in the attention to detail: having wrapped the skeletons and returned them to their caskets, Edward and Eleanor affixed their seals, so as to certify that the contents were indeed authentic. More telling still is the intention to ensure that the evidence was left on permanent display: the skulls of ‘Arthur’ and ‘Guinevere’ were not reinterred, but placed outside the tomb, ‘on account of popular devotion’.¹⁷ Edward, it would seem, was determined to prove to his turbulent neighbours, once and for all, that Arthur would not be coming back to save them.

Before we leave Arthur and Glastonbury, it is appropriate to ask one final question. Why did Geoffrey of Monmouth write The History of the Kings of Britain, the startlingly inventive book that set the whole Arthurian avalanche in motion?

For his chief critic, William of Newburgh, there were two possible answers. It was ‘either from an inordinate love of lying, or for the sake of pleasing the Britons’.¹⁸

There can be little doubt that Geoffrey took pleasure in spinning his stories, but Newburgh probably came closer to striking the nail on the head with his second suggestion. Geoffrey of Monmouth was only latterly an Oxford scholar. Originally, as his surname implies, he hailed from Wales. And, as a Welshman living in England during the 1130s, he found himself having to listen to a lot of racism from his clever contemporaries.¹⁹

The English and the Welsh, it must be admitted, had never really seen eye to eye. From the moment that the first Anglo-Saxon settlers had arrived in Britain, their relationship with the Britons was characterised by mutual distrust and suspicion. Welisc was the Anglo-Saxon name for the Britons: it meant ‘strangers’. And all too often this estrangement resulted in bursts of war and violence. Offa’s Dyke, the great earthwork erected between England and Wales in the eighth century, stands as an eloquent reminder of the extent to which the two peoples were divided.

In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s day, however, this age-old antipathy was given a new twist. Latterly, the English had decided that the Welsh were not only different and dislikeable; in addition, they had now concluded that Welsh society was, by almost every conceivable measure, inferior to that of England.

The instigator of this new attitude, or at least the individual responsible for its earliest and most trenchant expression, was an English monk called William of Malmesbury. Writing in the 1120s, Malmesbury looked at his own society and saw that it was good. England, he noted, had abundant, well-tended fields, thriving nucleated villages and bustling market towns; its people used a plentiful silver coinage, built impressive castles and cathedrals, ate good food and drank good wine. The Welsh, on the other hand, had none of these things. Theirs was a pastoral economy of scattered settlements, lacking money, towns and trade. We have already noted this, and accounted for it chiefly in terms of an unforgiving upland landscape. William of Malmesbury, however, made no such allowances. To him, the differences between England and Wales were to be explained by the different characters of their inhabitants. If Wales was unproductive, it was because the Welsh were indolent and ignorant, preferring to stand around all day idly tending sheep, rather than setting their hands to the plough like industrious Englishmen.

Nor was that their only moral failing. Malmesbury and his contemporaries also noticed that, whereas the English chivalrously spared their enemies in battle, the Welsh gave no such quarter, nor did they spare the lives of non-combatants. Similarly, when it came to sex, the Welsh were way out of step with what was normal or acceptable. Marriages in Wales were celebrated within degrees of consanguinity that were prohibited in England, and furthermore could be dissolved or disregarded with unreasonable ease.

Lazy in their work, savage in warfare, lax in their love lives: there was only one word fit for such a people, the English intelligentsia decided. They were barbarians.

It was almost certainly with the intention of challenging such hostile attitudes that Geoffrey of Monmouth put pen to parchment in the 1130s. The History of the Kings of Britain sets out to show that, whatever the current state of the Britons (which, Geoffrey conceded, was pretty bad), they had once been a great and noble people. Their pedigree, he said, stretched all the way back to the fall of Troy, 1,200 years before the birth of Christ. Britain had been founded by and named after Brutus, the leader of a doughty band of Trojan exiles and forefather of the British people. In all their deeds, Brutus and his successors (who included Camber, ruler of Cambria; Corineus, founder of Cornwall; and, of course, Arthur) showed themselves to be truly heroic individuals, leaders of the greatest people on Earth. What is most striking, however, is the frequency with which they indulged in the kind of activities that contemporary Englishmen alleged were alien to Welsh nature. From the minute of their arrival, Geoffrey’s Britons ‘began to cultivate the fields’. Not long afterwards they started founding towns and cities. Thus Carlisle was the creation of King Leil, and Colchester the work of Old King Cole. London, we are assured, was so called after being rebuilt by an enterprising Briton called Lud. The subtext of such assertions seems undeniable. Geoffrey of Monmouth was not merely praising the Britons for the sake of it; he was attempting to prove that, contrary to the claims of their English critics, the Welsh were indeed a civilised race.²⁰

In this respect, The History of the Kings of Britain was a grand failure. The English bought copies of the book in their thousands, but it did not alter their attitude to the Welsh one little bit. They loved Geoffrey’s stories, but proved remarkably able to separate in their minds the old British heroes they admired from the contemporary Britons they despised. (This disconnect is well illustrated in the Arthurian Romance Perceval, when one knight of the Round Table turns to another and informs him that ‘all Welshmen are by nature more stupid than beasts in the field’.) In spite of Geoffrey’s valiant literary efforts on behalf of his countrymen, English hostility towards Wales and its inhabitants continued to grow inexorably during the twelfth century, with the result that, by the thirteenth century, the barbarity of the Welsh was treated as a matter of fact. Old socio-economic proofs, for example, could still be trotted out as late as 1265. When Simon de Montfort led his followers into Wales that year, one English chronicler noted casually that they had to subsist on milk and meat because the Welsh, ‘that wild people’, did not know how to make bread. Welsh warfare was likewise still regarded as unreasonably savage by Matthew Paris, who noted that it spared ‘neither churches nor churchmen, women or girls’. And as for their other moral failings, these continued to excite comment in England, especially among churchmen. When, in 1280, the archbishop of Canterbury examined Welsh law, he concluded that much of it was contrary to the teachings of the Bible and should be abolished.²¹

In October 1278, having presided munificently at the wedding of his cousin Eleanor and Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, Edward left Worcester and turned his mind to other business.

The highest matter on the agenda, it seems, was how he was going to pay for the settlement of Wales. Before the outbreak of hostilities, thanks to the generosity of his first parliament, the king had been comfortably in credit. Now, three years on, his finances were once again in the red. The war itself had cost around £23,000, and during the campaign Edward had borrowed a sum equivalent to this amount from his Italian bankers, the Riccardi of Lucca. Of course, thanks to their special relationship with the king, the Riccardi could look forward to recovering this money from their control of the customs. That process, however, might take a very long time, for Edward’s expenses in Wales were ongoing. Road clearance, canal construction and, especially, the building of the new royal castles – by October 1278 the settlement was running up a substantial additional tab that would eventually exceed the cost of the conflict itself. After the war Edward was still taking out new loans from the Riccardi, his borrowing on average three times what it had been at the start of the reign. If, therefore, the system was not going to collapse in bankruptcy and mutual recrimination, more money would have to be found from somewhere.²²

The king was evidently anxious that it should not come from parliament. To get another grant of taxation so soon after the last one would probably have proved impossible in any case; it would certainly have required political concessions on a scale that Edward would have regarded as unconscionable. The king, therefore, cast around for other ways of raising cash that did not require parliament’s consent. In the summer of 1278, for example, he resorted to an old fashioned money-raising expedient by ordering a so-called ‘distraint of knighthood’, a measure that compelled all landowners with property above a certain value (on this occasion it was £20 a year) to become knights before a certain date (in this case, Christmas). Since knighthood was an expensive business and generally beyond the means of such men, most of them chose to avoid the obligation by paying an exemption fine, which was the point of the exercise. But this, and the other traditional devices he tried, could not raise the large sums that Edward required. And so, in the autumn of 1278, he embarked on a far more drastic course of action.²³

For some time, it seems, the king had been concerned about the state of his coinage. Some new coins had been struck since the start of his reign, but there had been no general reminting for over thirty years. Consequently, many of the silver pennies in circulation were old and worn, and still bore the name and image of Henry III. To Edward’s tidy mind, this must have seemed a fairly shameful state of affairs, and would probably by itself have constituted sufficient reason for reform. But there were other incentives for improvement besides appearances. Poor currency pushed up prices, deterred foreign merchants and made tax collection unduly taxing for the collectors. Perhaps most importantly, however, a king who issued new coins stood to make a handsome profit. In exchange for reminting their old currency, Edward could charge his subjects a small fee, and, by making subtle alterations to the weight and silver content of new specie, he could increase his profits further still. There was nothing especially extortionate or exploitative in this process: the king stood to make money, but his subjects also benefited from having a superior quality coin. It was a mutually beneficial proposition.²⁴

Nevertheless, a desire to derive maximum advantage from this proposition led Edward to commit one of the most exploitative and shameful acts of his career. He appears to have decided that a good way to increase the efficiency of a recoinage would be to round up in advance all those guilty of coinage offences. Coins, it was widely appreciated, diminished in size and weight not only through long use; they also shrank as a result of a practice known as ‘clipping’, whereby small amounts of silver were shaved off each penny and melted down into new ingots or plate. Needless to say, altering the currency in this way constituted a serious crime: convicted coin-clippers stood to lose either their lives or the readily detachable bits of their bodies. Where the criminal suffered, however, the Crown prospered. Fines imposed on the guilty, property confiscated from the condemned: it all amounted to an appreciable increase for the treasury if enough convictions could be secured. And it was apparently for this reason that Edward, in February 1278, sent two of his clerks to tour the country with the instruction to buy up melted silver. At best it was a sting operation to catch known criminals; at worst, it was a mission to entrap the unwary. By the autumn these undercover agents had obviously accumulated enough evidence for the government to act. In late October Edward and his council authorised the arrest of the suspects, and in November the king’s officers swooped.²⁵

Every single Jewish adult male in England was seized and imprisoned – at least 600 individuals out of a total community of only 2,000 to 4,000 people. They, it seems, were the special target of the sting operation. Of course, the Jews had a long-standing dominance of the money and metalworking trades, so to some extent an investigation into coin-clipping was bound to focus on their activities. There can be little doubt, too, that some Jews were guilty of coinage offences: the king’s recent prohibition of moneylending must have driven many of them to desperate measures in order to survive. But Edward’s readiness to believe that all Jews were involved in devaluing his currency, and the disproportionate conviction rate of Jews and Christians, tell us that there was a darker dimension to the story. Early in the new year of 1279, when the trials of the accused began, some twenty-nine Christians were hanged for their crimes, but around ten times as many Jews suffered the same fate. In his drive to improve his finances – and the recoinage, by the way, was a glowing success, generating a profit of around £36,000 – Edward executed half of the adult males in a minority population. Almost incidentally, he had committed the single biggest massacre of Jews in British history.²⁶

The next item on Edward’s agenda was France. A year earlier, in February 1278, he had dispatched two of his closest companions, Robert Burnell and Otto de Grandson, to deal with the ongoing problems in his Continental dominions. ‘We have no one about us,’ he told them in a revealing letter, ‘whom we believe could know [these affairs] and do our will better or more advantageously than you’, adding that he would stand by whatever they decided to do, for he would regard their deeds as his own.²⁷

One year on, and it was evident that the king’s trust had not been misplaced. There had been substantial progress on all fronts. Gascony itself, extremely fractious at the start of 1278, was now pacified. Burnell and Grandson had taken it upon themselves to dismiss the abrasive and unpopular English seneschal, Luke de Tany, and replace him with John de Grilly, a Savoyard with a softer touch. More impressive still was the deft way in which the two ambassadors had handled the king’s biggest headache in the duchy, the turbulent vicomte Gaston de Béarn. In the wake of his earlier rebellion, Gaston had continued to cause trouble. It had not helped matters, for instance, that he had subsequently defamed Edward, publicly calling the king ‘a faithless traitor’ and challenging him to a duel. By the start of 1279, however, this row too had been mended. Gaston obtained Edward’s forgiveness, and also a generous pension from the customs of Bordeaux to keep him sweet in the future. In this respect, his fate forms an interesting contrast with that of the king’s other defiant vassal, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. The difference, of course, was that Gaston, unlike Llywelyn, had the advantage of being able to appeal over Edward’s head to the king of France, underlining the fact that the relationship between Gascony and France remained the fundamental question on which all others turned. And here, too, Burnell and Grandson had made substantial progress. By February 1279 it had been agreed that the two kings should talk together in person in order to take matters forward.²⁸

So it was that, three months later, Edward and Eleanor crossed the Channel and travelled to the northern French city of Amiens in order to meet with King Philip. It was a timely rendezvous in more ways than one. A few weeks earlier, news had arrived in England of the death of Eleanor’s mother, Joan of Dammartin. Joan, although a former queen of Castile, was not herself Castilian. She originally hailed from France, and it was to France that she had returned in 1254, to rule the small county of Ponthieu, which belonged to her by hereditary right. Now, by the same right, the county passed to Eleanor, who was able to do homage to Philip III at Amiens, and visit the newly acquired lordship, which lay nearby. As for the main purpose of the visit – the very necessary clarification of Franco-Gascon relations – this was a resounding success. Philip made significant concessions on several scores, but none more so than by his agreement to cede the Agenais. This large and prosperous swathe of territory, lying on Gascony’s eastern border and centred on the city of Agen, was due to Edward under the terms of the Treaty of Paris, and had been his chief demand during the past five years. The French king’s readiness to let it go was testimony to the hard work of Burnell and Grandson, but it also proved that the warm personal relations achieved between Henry III and Louis IX were being carefully maintained by their sons. The meeting at Amiens was a diplomatic triumph. The two courts came together in feasts and banquets, tournaments and jousts, as well as high religious ceremonies in the city’s cathedral.²⁹

Edward returned to England just in time for his fortieth birthday; such celebrations as there were must have taken place at Dover Castle. One wonders if the anniversary and the location gave him pause to take stock. It was almost five years since his last landing at Dover, when he had returned as a new king to take up his father’s crown and to confront a host of problems, the roots of which in some cases stretched back a generation or more. Five years on, and most of those problems had been solved. In England, royal authority had been restored, political and provincial unrest quietened, and the Crown’s finances placed on a new and secure footing. In Wales, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd had been reduced to obedience, his inflated principality torn down to its proper size. Gascony, thanks to the king’s friends, was now at peace, and relations with France were in an excellent state.³⁰

For the first time since his boyhood, Edward discovered he had little to do. In the months after his return from Amiens there was no urgent business to be getting on with. Indeed, if we consider the four-year period after the war with Wales, 1278–81, as a whole, we see a remarkably regular pattern. Parliaments meet every Easter and autumn, without fail and without controversy. By providing an outlet for his subjects’ grievances, Edward had ensured that they did not mount up. There were, of course, some disagreements. The new archbishop of Canterbury, John Pecham, who replaced Robert Kilwardby in 1279, brought an earnest desire for reform to his role that to some extent set him against royal interests and antagonised the king. But the dispute, such as it was, did not impair relations between the two men, let alone more general relations between Church and State. It was a measure of the clergy’s goodwill that in 1280, having resisted the request since the start of his reign, they finally obliged Edward with a grant of taxation.³¹ Similarly, the king’s resumption in 1278–79 of his investigation into the rights and liberties that went with landholding gave some concern to his lay magnates. Yet an examination of the witness lists to Edward’s charters shows that all his earls, and other great men besides, continued to attend his court, and not just when parliament was in session. The king was firm with his magnates, as he was with his prelates, but he remained friendly with both, and did not make his father’s mistake of alienating either group.³²

And as for Edward himself: never was he more leisured. An examination of his itinerary in this period shows him devoid of any major political agenda. It was seemingly for want of anything better to do in the summer and autumn of 1280 that he embarked on a tour of northern England, taking in Carlisle, Newcastle, Durham, Lincoln and York. In January 1281 he travelled to East Anglia to visit his preferred places of pilgrimage. Edward remained, at forty, as vigorous as ever. On several occasions during these years we catch him on what are evidently hunting trips, in Essex, Northamptonshire and the New Forest. And even when he was in Westminster, it cannot have been all business. At least some of his time there must have been spent enjoying the new Royal Mews that he had established at Charing (the site on which Trafalgar Square now stands). Arranged around a garden courtyard, complete with an elaborate ornamental bird bath at its centre, this home for his hawks and their keepers must have afforded the king many hours of pleasure. Of all his various pastimes, falconry was clearly the favourite.³³

The leisured lifestyle of the queen in these years is also evident. For the most part Eleanor’s interests, like her itinerary, overlapped with those of her husband. She too, for example, liked to hunt, though she used dogs rather more than he did, and she probably preferred the bow whereas he reportedly favoured the sword. Something more of Eleanor’s individual tastes can be gleaned from the accounts of her estate management. The occasional purchase of citrus fruits and olive oil from overseas merchants suggest the appetites acquired in childhood were not wholly forgotten. Similarly, her employment of two Spanish gardeners at her manor of King’s Langley in Hertfordshire (visited several times in 1280– 81) and the creation there of ditches and wells may imply an attempt to reproduce in England the kind of water gardens favoured in southern Castile. Perhaps most evocative of royal tastes, however, is the way in which the king and the queen together transformed Leeds Castle in Kent. Acquired by Eleanor in 1278 and rebuilt with her husband’s help in the years that followed, Leeds became a veritable pleasure palace (an aspect it retains today, despite considerable modern alterations). The inclusion of a bath for the king may hint at another attempt to recreate something of that same Spanish style in balmy Kent, but the castle’s most notable features – its wide moat and its isolated ‘gloriette’ of privy apartments – indicate that Edward and Eleanor’s tastes were chiefly informed by their shared love of romance and fantasy.³⁴

These easy days would have allowed both the king and the queen to spend more time with their children. Since her return to England, Eleanor’s relentless round of pregnancies had continued: new and lasting additions to the royal nursery in the late 1270s came in the shape of Margaret (b. 1275) and Mary (b. 1279). Edward’s visits to Windsor and Woodstock, while by no means rare, remained occasional, so neither baby daughter would have seen much of their father, nor perhaps their mother. But the same was not necessarily true of their older siblings. By the end of the decade, Eleanor (b. 1269), Joan (b. 1271) and Alfonso (b. 1273) would have been old enough to accompany the court as it travelled, at least for short periods, and certainly able to join their parents for Christmas, Easter and other festivities.³⁵

Perhaps, therefore, it was with his family that Edward paid his mysterious springtime visits to Gloucestershire. From 1278 until 1282, and always in the month of March, the king spent an average of two to three weeks each year at Quenington and Down Ampney, two manors in the neighbourhood of Cirencester. Since these visits had no discernible purpose, political, religious or otherwise, the assumption is that they too were a luxury afforded by the relative calm of these years, a regular period of relaxation in a rural locale for a king and queen whose tastes, when given free rein, tended towards escapism.³⁶

Such freedom could not last forever. It was just after leaving Down Ampney in March 1282 that Edward began to receive urgent messages from every corner of Wales.

While Edward’s existence had become increasingly easy, Llywelyn’s life had become correspondingly hard. Publicly, the post-war relationship between the two men had been all smiles and handshakes; privately, the prince felt unduly put upon. On the day of his wedding, for example (a spectacle already contrived in part for English amusement), Llywelyn, so he later alleged, was ‘compelled by fear’ into making additional written concessions to the king, in contravention of their earlier peace agreement.

Further indignities and irritations had followed. Llywelyn’s messengers were arrested without reason at Chester; his huntsmen were maltreated by the king’s men near Aberystwyth. Most trying of the prince’s patience was his legal effort to recover a strip of territory on his south-eastern border (Arwystli) from his old adversary, Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn. The case, Llywelyn contended, should be decided by Welsh law. Not so, said Gruffudd: English law should apply. Edward, in his capacity as supreme judge, responded by ordering one inquiry after another, repeatedly adjourning his decision, but always obliging the prince to jump through the tangled loops of English judicial procedure. After four years of pleading, Llywelyn had achieved nothing, and it was beginning to tell on his patience. Once a great man, he knew the war had made him small, but latterly he had been made to feel it.³⁷

And yet, irritating though the prince’s experiences undoubtedly were, they were nothing compared to the oppressions being endured elsewhere in Wales. New English castles thrusting their way skywards; intolerant English administrators trying to govern their districts in line with their own notions of normality: outside of Snowdonia, the Welsh were suffering on an altogether different scale. Indeed, that they ‘were treated more cruelly than the Saracens by the king’s bailiffs and other royal officers’, was one later complaint. To the men of the north-east it was a throwback to the worst days of the 1250s, when Henry III had imposed a similar regime on the Four Cantrefs. To their countrymen in south and west Wales, it was domination of a kind they had neither experienced nor anticipated. Life under Llywelyn had seemed taxing at the time, but now, with the advent of English officialdom, the prince’s rule was assuming the retrospective aspect of a golden age.³⁸

We scarcely need to look for specific reasons for such oppression. Edward was in general terms anxious to avoid his father’s mistakes; he did not set out deliberately to provoke Wales, its inhabitants or its prince. Nor, in all probability, did the men whom he appointed to administer his conquests. But both the king and his lieutenants were conditioned from birth to regard the Welsh as an inferior race. If they preferred to conduct business along English lines, it was because those lines were to them self-evidently more sensible than the backward and barbarous ways of a people whose language, habits and culture they could not comprehend.

Nevertheless, specific reasons did exist. Just as Llywelyn felt belittled by Edward, so Edward felt antagonised by Llywelyn. From the king’s perspective, it seemed that the prince was engaged in a deliberate attempt to test the limits of their peace agreement, and was trying to force him into a judgement that would damage the rights of his Crown. When Llywelyn reactivated his plea for Arwystli in the autumn of 1281, Edward’s patience – febrile at the best of times – seems to have snapped. He responded by removing the justiciar of Chester and replacing him with the hard-liner Reginald de Grey. The result was an immediate intensification of the English grip on north-east Wales.³⁹

This change had little direct impact on Llywelyn, ensconced as he was in Snowdonia. It did, however, affect his younger brother. Dafydd ap Gruffudd, prickly by nature, already considered himself a man hard done by. The English failure to cross the Conwy in 1277 had denied him the prize he most desired, his rightful share of Gwynedd. In acknowledgement of this disappointment, Edward had granted him lands in lieu; but since this compensation amounted to two of the Four Cantrefs, it meant that Dafydd’s lordship bordered that of the king himself. Consequently it was Dafydd rather than his brother who bore the full brunt of the new and high-handed English regime at Chester. In later letters to the archbishop of Canterbury Dafydd complained of how, on one occasion, the justiciar had wrongly accused him of harbouring fugitives; of how, at another time, his woods had been chopped down and sold off by the justiciar’s men; and of how, most contentiously, he had been summoned to be judged at the king’s court at Chester for lands that he held in Wales.⁴⁰

Dafydd was not alone in feeling mightily oppressed. Elsewhere in Wales, wherever newly extended English power marched with that of the natives, other Welsh lords, some of whom had helped to bring down Llywelyn, also wondered at their newly straitened circumstances. Rhys Wyndod, the southern lord who lost no fewer than three castles in 1277, complained that six of his men had been killed by the English and yet no amends had been made. Faced with such injustices, such men, like Dafydd himself, began to borrow from the script written by Llywelyn. They were unable to obtain redress; they were compelled to attend English courts; their own law was being denied. And, if their law was being denied, it followed that their identity as a people was being denied. ‘Let the law of Wales be unchanged,’ Dafydd told Edward I, ‘like the laws of other nations.’ It was a powerful and popular idea for a downtrodden people. In the spring of 1282, it became their cry to arms.⁴¹

*   *   *

It was the night of 21 March 1282, and Roger Clifford, one of Edward’s oldest friends, was asleep in Hawarden Castle. Some five miles to the west of Chester, Hawarden had come to the Crown as a result of the recent war, and its castle was seemingly new. Most likely the building works there had begun soon after Clifford’s appointment as keeper of the lordship just over a year earlier. That being the case, they can scarcely have been finished on the night in question – it happened to be the eve of Palm Sunday – when Dafydd ap Gruffudd and a band of armed Welshmen descended, burned the castle, killed several members of Clifford’s household, and carted the constable himself off into captivity.⁴²

A widespread revolt against English rule was under way. The following day Flint and Rhuddlan were subjected to identical assaults; two days later Aberystwyth was taken by trickery. In each case the castles were attacked: Aberystwyth was destroyed, and Rhuddlan too may well have fallen. But, in each case, the castles formed only part of the target. The rebels’ fury was directed equally at the attendant towns, those enclaves of English privilege, where the Welsh were obliged to trade but could not live, and where the legal discrimination between the two peoples was a fact of everyday existence. Property was looted, houses were burned, and those settlers who could not flee were killed.⁴³

The scope and success of the revolt shows that it was popular; its timing reveals that it was planned. As Dafydd and his followers launched his attacks in the north, Rhys Wyndod and his allies mounted copycat assaults in the south, recovering the castles at Llandovery and Carreg Cennen. Meanwhile, other Welsh lords led the attacks on Oswestry, an English town on the eastern border, subjecting it to the same fate as the other new boroughs. Clearly these leaders had leagued together in the weeks and months beforehand and agreed on the date that their pent-up anger would be released.⁴⁴

It seems equally clear that Llywelyn was not among their number. The prince, when later given the chance to account for his actions, claimed to have had no prior knowledge of the rebellion, and indeed there is no good evidence of his involvement. The sudden outbreak therefore placed him in a terrible dilemma: whether to support Dafydd’s intemperate action or to assist Edward I in suppressing it. If patriotic sensibility urged him to back his brother, his sense as a politician restrained him, for the timing was wrong, and the chances of success impossibly slim. For a while, at least, Llywelyn must have debated, with his councillors, and with himself. It has been suggested, temptingly, that he may have waited until as late as June before making his decision.

In 1282 Llywelyn’s own time was running out. He was approaching, if he had not already attained, his sixtieth year. But in the spring of that year, his young wife, Eleanor, was pregnant. If their child was male, then it might be worth playing the long game: putting down his perfidi ous brother to protect the patrimony for his son, and thereby preserving an independent Gwynedd, and a principality that might one day recover its greatness.

On 19 June this hope for the future evaporated. Eleanor died in childbirth. The child, which survived, was a girl, christened Gwenllian. It was, perhaps, a broken and desperate prince who finally joined his brother and his people that summer, to face the king of England’s immeasurable wrath.⁴⁵

It was 25 March, three days after the first attacks, that Edward heard the news. More than anything else, it was the treachery that seems to have astonished him. Dafydd, the king was later minded to recall, ‘had been received as an exile, nourished as an orphan, endowed with lands and placed among the great ones of the palace’. That such generosity should be repaid by rebellion almost beggared belief. When, later that same day, writs began to emanate from the royal chancery, they naturally dwelt on the killing, burning and kidnapping. But when Edward said the Welsh were ‘unmindful of their own salvation’, he meant they had sworn sacred oaths to obey him, and these oaths had now been broken.⁴⁶

And how the writs flew. Edward, as we have noted, was effectively on holiday at the time of the revolt, caught off-guard and with few of his great men about him. But as soon as the news broke messengers sped out in all directions. Within ten days the council was in session. On 6 April the other magnates were called to muster in mid-May, at Worcester, as before. On 7 April the knights of the household began to draw pay, and a contingent galloped north to see to the relief of Rhuddlan. Orders started to pour out for supplies. Food was demanded from Essex, Surrey, Kent and Hampshire. Workmen – 345 carpenters and more than 1,000 diggers – were summoned from no fewer than twenty-eight counties. The men of the Cinque Ports were warned to prepare their ships, the Riccardi to be ready with their money. Naturally this activity was not confined to England. Crossbowmen were ordered from Gascony, horses were purchased from France, and other supplies were requested from Ponthieu, Ireland and even from Scotland.⁴⁷

It was only in May, when the king arrived at Worcester, that his tremendous momentum suffered a setback. Edward’s call to arms had been highly unusual. He had not, as was conventional, asked men to serve him out of obligation, nor had his summons been universal. Instead, some half a dozen earls and 150 other named individuals had been ‘affectionately requested’ to serve in return for pay. It was, it seems, the king’s intention to avoid the limitations of the customary forty days’ service, and instead to put the relationship between him and his cavalry forces on a more businesslike basis.

Some of the earls, at least, must have agreed to this idea, for they were with the king in early April when the orders had gone out. It was probably the unconsulted majority, beyond the council, who objected to a scheme that would have effectively made them the king’s mercenaries. Moreover, the suggestion that they should forget their ancient obligations and embark on a novel arrangement must have seemed more than a little rich, coming as it did from a king who, from the moment of his accession, had insisted on the most traditional interpretation of his own rights. No official protest is recorded, but the idea of paid service was quietly dropped. Three days into the muster, new writs were issued of the conventional kind: the magnates were summoned to reassemble at Rhuddlan at the start of August. None of the earls, in the event, accepted pay. It is not impossible that two of them, the earl of Hereford and the earl of Gloucester, had some hand in leading the opposition to the king. Hereford held the hereditary honour of ‘constable of England’, with responsibility for compiling the lists of men who served in a campaign, as well as for their discipline. As early as 6 April he had insisted on receiving the traditional perquisites that went with his office. Meanwhile, Gloucester (that is, our old friend Gilbert de Clare) was clearly put out at the suggestion that he should serve in an army under the command of the new justiciar of south Wales, Robert Tiptoft. On 10 April, the earl had evidently insisted that the honour of leading the southern forces should be his.⁴⁸

As this mention of a southern army suggests, Edward’s strategy in 1282 was much the same as it had been five years earlier. Having left Gloucester in charge of the south (albeit with Tiptoft as his deputy), the king proceeded north towards Chester, from where, as before, he would lead the main force into north Wales. En route he stopped in Shrewsbury, and parted company with Roger Mortimer. The old warrior who had said farewell to arms three years earlier was once again called upon to do what he did best, and hold the line in the middle March.⁴⁹

Nevertheless, although the strategy was the same in broad terms, there were important differences this time around. In 1277 Llywelyn had been quite isolated; Edward’s main opponent that year had been the Welsh terrain. On this occasion, by contrast, the opposition was far more general, the fighting fiercer and more widespread. Before he could advance along the coast road to Rhuddlan, the king had first to tackle the resistance in the interior of the Four Cantrefs, led by Dafydd ap Gruffudd. The rebel leader and his Welsh allies had made their chief stronghold at Denbigh, and also held a number of other castles in the same region.⁵⁰

The initial stage of this operation was carried out in early June, soon after Edward had arrived at Chester. While the king remained in the city supervising the assembly of men and materials for his push along coast, it fell to Reginald de Grey – justiciar of Chester, antagoniser of Dafydd and, since March, captain of the king’s northern forces – to lead the first inland assault. With some 7,000 foot soldiers already at his disposal, many of them archers, Grey made swift progress. In the middle of June he recovered the castle at Hope (Caergwrle), which Dafydd destroyed in his retreat, and where over 1,000 English workmen immediately began the business of reconstruction. By the end of the month the king’s forces had retaken another castle at Ewloe, and also Hawarden, the point from which the whole conflagration had been started.⁵¹

But by this time they had heard the bad news: Gloucester and his army had already been defeated. The haughty earl, having insisted on leading the king’s southern forces, had succeeded in advancing all of four miles before being overtaken by disaster. On 11 June some 1,600 English foot and at least a hundred horse had set out under his command from their base at Dinefwr to retake nearby Carreg Cennen. Five days later, their objective achieved, they were retracing their steps when the Welsh attacked. Gloucester himself escaped, but others were not so lucky. Among the knightly casualties was William, son of William de Valence, a cousin of the king. Many of the foot soldiers must also have perished; English military activity in south Wales came to an abrupt and inglorious halt.⁵²

Gloucester’s incompetence obliged Edward to alter his plans. The king had hoped to bring the full weight of his cavalry forces to bear against Snowdonia; now he had to divert some of these troops into the southern theatre. On 2 July the knights of the south-western counties of England were advised that their new muster point was Carmarthen; those of the west Midlands were told to go to Montgomery. Four days later, Gloucester, who by this time had appeared before the king to explain himself, was deprived of his command. In his place was appointed William de Valence, who may have been grateful for the opportunity to avenge the death of his son.⁵³

That same day Edward moved out of Chester and advanced towards Rhuddlan. His new castle there, far from complete at the time of his last visit, had been swiftly recovered by the knights of the household in April. Nevertheless, the Welsh had apparently done substantial damage with their siege engines before they departed: repairs were put in place immediately after the king’s arrival. Now was the time for Rhuddlan, as the foremost base of English operations, to prove it was worth its expensive price tag. At once the newly canalised River Clwyd was seen to have been a sound investment, when the forty-strong fleet of the Cinque Ports sailed up to the walls of the castle.⁵⁴

From Rhuddlan, Edward intended to achieve two separate but simultaneous objectives: the capture of Denbigh and the occupation of Anglesey. Both waited on the build-up of troops and supplies, but early August saw the arrival of the cavalry for their postponed muster, and by the middle of the month there were 6,000 infantry in pay.⁵⁵

The Anglesey divisions were the first to leave. Under the captaincy of Luke de Tany, erstwhile seneschal of Gascony, at least 200 horse and 2,000 foot occupied the island and, as before, secured its harvest. This was not, however, simply to be a repeat performance of the exercise of five years earlier. That August, while Tany and his troops fought to secure a beachhead, the men of the Cinque Ports began to ship great quantities of timber, nails, rope and iron from Chester to Rhuddlan, and from Rhuddlan to Anglesey. This was the makings of the most ambitious part of the campaign plan: a bridge of boats that would link the island to the mainland, allowing Tany’s army to penetrate Snowdonia from the rear. In early September hundreds of carpenters were engaged in its construction.⁵⁶

By that time the king’s army had also moved out. To them fell the more tedious task of securing every strongpoint and valley in the Four Cantrefs. Edward marched first to Ruthin, a castle further up the Clwyd that had fallen to Reginald de Grey before the end of August. Later he pushed west to Llangernyw, just a few miles from the upper reaches of the Conwy. Progress was painfully slow, no doubt out of caution. This was a war being fought on ground where mounted cavalry were of limited, not to say negligible use, but where guerrilla tactics could easily hand victory to the Welsh. Throughout September the king’s forces were divided into three smaller armies, each one inching their way forward, anxious not to repeat the earl of Gloucester’s error.⁵⁷

As the autumn began to set in, their task approached completion. In early October Edward was back at Rhuddlan, where he began to hand out portions of conquered territory to his friends as reward for their services. By this time, too, the south was secure. William de Valence had led a successful month-long mission from Carmarthen to Cardigan by way of Aberystwyth. It remained only to take out Dafydd’s main base at Denbigh, and this was done three weeks into the month. On 22 October the king arrived there in person, but Dafydd was nowhere to be seen. The rebels had retreated into Snowdonia, and the mountains that had always been their surest refuge. This time, however, Edward was quite determined: there would be no escape. His armies remained intact and, moreover, his bridge of boats was ready.⁵⁸

It was at this critical juncture that the archbishop of Canterbury arrived with the notion of ending the war by peaceful negotiation. Given the royal rebuffs he had already received since taking office three years earlier, John Pecham can hardly have expected that his latest idea would elicit the king’s unqualified enthusiasm. Apart from anything else, winter was now setting in; even a short delay at this stage could prove costly, if not calamitous, to English military plans. And yet, at the same time, Edward could not reasonably refuse a request by his most senior churchman to send an emissary into Gwynedd with the hope of inducing a Welsh surrender. Pecham, after all, was not proposing to act as an impartial arbiter: the letters he sent to Llywelyn were on a par with his earlier condemnation of Welsh law. The prince and his countrymen were reproached for their crime of rebellion, and exhorted to make an immediate and unconditional submission.⁵⁹

Within a few days, however, the archbishop had received a response that gave him pause. In a lengthy written statement Llywelyn and his councillors set out a justification for their actions (this is the principal record of Welsh grievances discussed earlier in this chapter). They also enumerated what they claimed were the crimes of the English in recent weeks: the burning of churches, the killing of monks and nuns, the indiscriminate slaughter ‘of women and infants at the breast and in the womb’. It was enough to persuade Pecham, when he came before the king in the closing days of October, to suggest that such complaints merited investigation and correction.⁶⁰

Edward would not stand for this. As far as he was concerned, the Welsh had always had the opportunity to present him with any complaints they might have had; he was not about to start a dialogue at this late stage with men who had attacked his castles and killed his other subjects. From what we can tell – for we have only the archbishop’s account – these exchanges with the king must have been very difficult indeed. Edward told Pecham that he would not issue safe-conducts for the Welsh to come and go from his court. In that case, Pecham informed Edward, he would go to see Llywelyn himself. The king made it clear that he did not approve. The archbishop went anyway.⁶¹

More days were therefore lost as Pecham, in defiance of Edward’s wishes, travelled into Snowdonia to hold talks with the Welsh leader. When he returned, in early November, it was with the unhappy knowledge that both parties were wedded to irreconcilable positions: Edward’s insistence on unconditional submission was matched by Llywelyn’s refusal to surrender except on guaranteed terms. In desperation, the archbishop, this time with Edward’s consent, tried to devise a formula that could satisfy both sides. Certain English magnates promised that, if the prince submitted, they would lobby the king on his behalf. In secret, a document was sent to Llywelyn, offering him an earldom in England if he would give up the fight for Wales.⁶²

Before the prince could respond to this offer, however, its credibility was hopelessly compromised by events elsewhere. During his negotiations with Pecham, it appears that Llywelyn had based himself at his hall of Garth Celyn, which lay on the coast, not far from Bangor. This meant that, thanks to the recently completed bridge of boats, he was also not far from the English base on Anglesey, and the temptation was evidently too great for the army there to resist. On 6 November Luke de Tany and his forces poured across the bridge, almost certainly with the intention of catching the prince and his council unawares and bringing the war to a swift conclusion. They rode out, in the words of one chronicler, ‘to acquire glory and reputation’.

What they found was death. That day saw the greatest English disaster in Wales, not just of this campaign, but in the course of Edward’s life to date. Reports of precisely what happened, as ever, differ in their detail. From the best of them it would seem that the cavalry had crossed the bridge and moved some distance along the coast when, suddenly, the Welsh swept down from the mountains and attacked. Outnumbered and outflanked, the horsemen turned to flee but, the tide having changed in the meantime, they found that they could not get back to the bridge. ‘Panic-stricken at the sight of their numbers,’ wrote one English chronicler, ‘our men preferred to face the water than the enemy. They plunged into the sea, burdened as they were with their armour, and were drowned all in a moment.’

At least sixteen English knights were lost, including Luke de Tany himself, and Roger Clifford, namesake son of the king’s captive friend. Also among the dead were two young relatives of the chancellor Robert Burnell, possibly his nephews, perhaps his bastard sons. Notable survivors included the redoubtable Otto de Grandson, and the household knight William Latimer, whose horse swam him through the waves to safety.⁶³

We do not know on whose authority the decision to launch the attack was taken. Some chroniclers are adamant that the initiative lay with the commanders on Anglesey, and others imply that Edward himself had not approved the action. We might reflect, however, that it would have taken a bold commander to have acted in this way without seeking the highest approval, and also note further that it would have been entirely in keeping with the king’s earlier daring stratagems – his raid on Kenilworth, his escape from Hereford – to have given such a scheme the go-ahead.

What is certain is that, in the wake of the thwarted assault, all talk of submission and secret deals was ended. Five days after their victory on the shores of Snowdonia, Llywelyn and his councillors sent their final reply. Nominally addressed to Archbishop Pecham, but surely written above all for the ears of Edward I, it rang with defiance. The king, they declared, had no legitimate claim to the Four Cantrefs or to Anglesey, for he had only ever held them by force, and using officers who had exercised ‘the cruellest tyranny’. These lands, they averred, belonged ‘purely to the prince, and the princes and their predecessors from the time of Camber, son of Brutus’ – the founding father of the British people was invoked in the document no fewer than three times. As for the secret offer of an earldom in England, Llywelyn publicly rejected it as a worthless promise made by men out to disinherit him. And even if the prince had been minded to accept, his council would have prevented him. ‘The people of Snowdonia,’ the letter concluded, ‘do not wish to do homage to a stranger, of whose language, manners and laws they are entirely ignorant.’⁶⁴

So this was it: not a struggle between an offended overlord and his rebellious vassals, as had earlier been pretended. This was a war between peoples; a veritable clash of civilisations. As soon as he heard the news from Anglesey, Edward returned from Denbigh to Rhuddlan to consult with his magnates and plan his next move. By any assessment their situation was no longer strong. The recent disaster apart, numbers of horse and infantry were falling, the obligation to serve having long since expired. But when Llywelyn’s letter arrived, there was no question about what would have to be done. On 24 November writs were dispatched to every county in England.

The king, they announced, proposed ‘to put an end finally to the matter that he had now begun of suppressing the malice of the Welsh’. This, it was explained, was an historic struggle that it fell to their generation to end. It would entail labours and expenses beyond what was customary; the burden might therefore seem hard. But it was better that they bear it now than be tormented by the Welsh in the future. In separate letters to the clergy of England, Edward added that he wished to finish the business in Wales for ‘the praise and honour of God, the increase and renown of him and his realm, and the perpetual peace of his realm and people’.⁶⁵

No doubt these writs reflected a genuine resolve on the part of the king and his magnates, ensconced at Rhuddlan in the deepening winter of 1282. Scores of other orders were sent out simultaneously, requiring new levies of infantry to be raised and new contingents of crossbowmen to be recruited. Nevertheless, the rallying cry to England was propaganda with a specific purpose. What Edward needed above all else was cash. Already this second Welsh war had gone on far too long; it would not be possible to pay for it using the kind of expedients that had eventually paid for its predecessor, nor, for that matter, with the emergency loans that the king’s ministers had managed to extract from various English towns and cities during the course of the summer. For the fight to be continued on the scale that was necessary, there was only one possible solution, and that was a grant of general taxation. This was the burden Edward needed his people to bear, and the reason behind his extraordinary writs. In January, he intended, two great assemblies would gather, one in Northampton, the other in York. Each would be larger than any parliament ever summoned: not only four knights from every county and two men from every town, but also every landowner with an income of more than £20 a year. All would come at the king’s command to help him in this hour of great national need.⁶⁶

Llywelyn and his allies could not afford to wait for this to happen. At present they were encircled, but, with the respite granted by their recent victory, they might open up new fronts. Already in the second half of November there were fresh risings in south and west Wales, perhaps fomented by the presence of the prince himself in those areas. It was in the middle March, however, that Llywelyn was hoping for the greatest gains. There, on 26 November, Roger Mortimer, not only the king’s commander in the region but also the most powerful lord in his own right, had died of natural causes. (‘His long and praiseworthy services,’ wrote Edward to Mortimer’s namesake son, ‘recur frequently and spontaneously to our memory.’) The old warrior’s passing had led to immediate fears of an English collapse in central Wales: within weeks the sheriff of Shropshire was reporting that Mortimer’s ‘fickle and haughty’ tenants were ‘on the point of leaving the king’s peace’. In Edward’s second set-back that autumn, Llywelyn saw his best opportunity. Leaving Dafydd in charge of Snowdonia, the prince took his army and struck out in the direction of Builth.⁶⁷

He arrived there on 11 December to find the might of the entire middle March ranged ready to meet him. Coincidence or conspiracy? There is circumstantial evidence to suggest that the Welsh leader had been lured into a trap devised by Mortimer’s sons and perhaps by some of his own men too. Whatever the truth, it is clear enough what happened next. On the high ground to the west of Builth, at a place called Cilmeri, a substantial battle took place between the English and Welsh forces, and in the course of the fighting the prince of Wales fell. Most accounts agree that he somehow became separated from his men, and was killed unrecognised by his English assailant. It was only when the battle was over, and the bodies were examined, that his corpse was identified.

‘Know, Sire,’ wrote Roger Lestrange, captain of the English forces, to his royal master, ‘that Llywelyn ap Gruffudd is dead, his army broken, and the flower of his men killed.’ Accompanying the letter as proof was the prince’s severed head. Edward had it sent on to Anglesey to cheer his other troops, and from there dispatched to London, where its arrival was greeted with a fanfare of trumpets and horns. Carried through the city’s streets on the end of a lance, it was finally placed on an iron spike above the Tower of London and crowned with a mockery of ivy. The prophecy that a Welshmen would one day wear a crown in London was in this grisly way seen to have been fulfilled.⁶⁸

While the English rejoiced, Wales despaired. ‘See you not that the world is ending?’ asked one Welsh poet. ‘Ah, God, that the sea would cover the land!’ For his countrymen, Llywelyn’s death was an unmitigated disaster. Their leader for more than thirty years, he had once given them a greater unity than they had ever known before. It is doubtful whether, had he lived longer, they would have recovered it. Without him, however, the hope of doing so evaporated entirely. Dafydd ap Gruffudd now took up the princely title and entered into the inheritance that he had coveted for a lifetime. But Dafydd was not a man to fill his brother’s shoes. Just a few weeks earlier he had been pleased to send his own letter of defiance to Archbishop Pecham, proudly proclaiming that the Welsh were fighting a just war, and hopeful of God’s help. Now he was ready to plead for peace, and (according to one English chronicler) sent the captive Roger Clifford to beg Edward for terms.⁶⁹

It was a request that, unsurprisingly, the king was not minded to consider. Already by the time of Llywelyn’s death, ships were arriving at Rhuddlan from Gascony, bringing 200 new horse, 1,300 foot soldiers and 70,000 crossbow bolts. Other ships from Ireland brought the food to feed the troops – cows, pigs, sheep, oats, wine, cheese and beer. Meanwhile, the knights of south-western England were dutifully reassembling at Carmarthen. By January new drafts of infantry were massing in both north and south.⁷⁰

Nor was it just a case of material preparation. The death of the Welsh leader had infused the English with an even greater sense of destiny and the righteousness of their cause. ‘Glory be to God in the highest, peace on earth to men of good will, a triumph to the English, victory to King Edward, honour to the Church, rejoicing to the Christian faith, confusion to jealous men, dismay to envious ones, and to the Welsh everlasting extermination.’ So wrote an English clerk in Rome in January when he heard the news of Llywelyn’s death. Edward, the same writer added, was the king ‘whose footsteps the heavenly king directs … long may he live and reign and conquer and rule’; in tackling the Welsh, he and his soldiers were ‘powerfully removing the reproach of their people, that domestic enemy … the disturber of English peace’. There can be little doubt that Edward himself shared this sense of missionary purpose. His war with Wales had taken on the aspect of a secular crusade. His infantry were issued with armbands bearing the cross of St George. His armies, when they advanced, marched behind St George’s banner.⁷¹

They advanced in January 1283. In a co-ordinated offensive, William de Valence led 1,500 foot-soldiers north from Carmarthen and retook Aberystwyth. In the north Edward’s army, some 5,000 strong, marched south-west out of Rhuddlan and struck into the heart of Snowdonia. Their target was the Welsh castle at Dolwyddelan, birthplace of Llywelyn the Great. It fell after the shortest of sieges and was occupied by a new English garrison. By the end of the month the brief campaign was over. Edward was back at Rhuddlan, Valence was ensconced at Aberystwyth, and the back of Welsh resistance had been broken.⁷²

For a short while Edward stayed his hand. The Welsh were now weak, crippled even, but the occupation of Snowdonia remained a daunting proposition, especially in the dead of winter. Royal resources, moreover, were not infinite: having achieved his targeted objectives, the king let go most of his infantry and mercenaries. Nevertheless, the means for achieving a decisive victory would soon be at Edward’s disposal. In January his two great assemblies had gathered in England and, in an atmosphere no doubt exhilarated by Llywelyn’s demise, agreed to a grant of taxation. On the last day of February the king sent out writs ordering its collection.⁷³

Two weeks later the invasion of Gwynedd began. On 13 March 1283 Edward sailed across the mouth of the Conwy and established a new base camp on the river’s western shore. With Eleanor by his side, the king took up residence in the hall that had been built there by Llywelyn, while his troops occupied the grounds of the nearby Cistercian abbey where the bones of the prince’s ancestors lay buried. The following day new writs went out. The earls and barons of England were summoned once again to muster at Montgomery and Carmarthen. One week later, a further 5,000 English infantry were ordered. The occupation of Wales was finally under way.⁷⁴

There was one man, above all, whom Edward wanted to catch, and Dafydd ap Gruffudd responded by running. At first he fled south, into the mountains of Meirionnydd, holing up in the isolated Castell-y-Bere at the foot of Cadair Idris. That fortress soon came under siege by English forces, and fell in the last week of April, but by then the fugitive prince had fled again. As a consequence, the English invasion of Snowdonia began to assume the character of a massive manhunt. Roger Lestrange led his men into Wales from the middle March; Valence pushed up from the south; the army of Anglesey, now under the more competent command of Otto de Grandson, crossed the pontoon bridge and penetrated the interior. Finally, in the second week of May, the king himself marched up the Conwy with 7,000 men and set up a temporary headquarters at Dolwyddelan. Bands of Englishmen swarmed through the valleys and over the mountains, finding many Welshman who were ready to make their submission. Dafydd, however, still could not be found.⁷⁵

No doubt somewhat frustrated, Edward returned to his camp at Conwy in early June, and a fortnight later retired to Rhuddlan in order to celebrate his birthday. He was still there a week or so later when, like a belated birthday present, the longed-for news arrived. Dafydd had been taken, captured near Llanberis at the foot of Mount Snowdon. On 28 June the king sent out jubilant letters to his people in England, announcing that the prince, ‘last of a treacherous line’, was now in his custody, having been caught by ‘men of his own tongue’. Edward immediately returned to Snowdonia for a two-month tour, during which hostages were taken and the submissions of communities were received. It was only at the end of August, after an absence that had lasted more than a year, that the king finally returned to England.⁷⁶

The conquest of Wales, so often contemplated by previous English kings but never carried through, was at last complete. It had taken a monumental effort on the part of Edward, his magnates and his people. The financial cost alone was colossal. As far as can be determined, the total budget stood somewhere in the region of £120,000 – that is, around five times the amount spent on the previous Welsh war. The king’s subjects in England had dug deep into their pockets to find him a tax of nearly £50,000; the Riccardi of Lucca, his bankers, had strained to keep the river of silver pennies flowing into the war zone in order that the troops could be paid. In terms of those troops, the cost had been higher still. Among the English nobility, the sons of William de Valence, Robert Burnell and Roger Clifford were just a few of the numerous high-status casualties; among the common foot soldiery, the numbers must have run to countless hundreds, probably thousands. As early as October 1282, before the invasion of Snowdonia had even started, the military cemetery at Rhuddlan had already run out of room for bodies. The bitter cold of a winter campaign – itself an unprecedented undertaking – must have accounted for the fact that many of those who had been marched to Wales from distant villages in England would not be returning home. Nor, of course, had the burden been borne by England alone: men and supplies had poured into Wales from Ireland, Gascony and Ponthieu at Edward’s behest.⁷⁷

But nowhere, naturally, was the impact of conquest felt more forcefully than in Wales itself. ‘What is left us that we should linger?’ wondered the author of Llywelyn’s lament. ‘No place of escape from Terror’s prison/No place to live – wretched is living!’ The trauma of 1282–83 was not to be measured merely by the loss of a prince, however mighty. It was also to be reckoned in the appropriation of the halls, houses and castles that had belonged to Llywelyn’s dynasty since time out of mind; the confiscation of Welsh secular treasures and holy relics; the destruction of churches and abbeys, most notably in the case of the abbey at Conwy. It must have been felt, above all, in terms of human suffering and loss, to an extent that is now unknown but that must have exceeded the English death toll many times over.⁷⁸

And yet, with the conquest now complete, the killing came to an end. Choleric English clerics at the Roman Curia, of course, full of Christian charity, might well wish the Welsh ‘extermination’, and no doubt other Englishmen, their deep-seated antipathy stoked by Edward’s propaganda, must have felt the same way. The king himself, however, subscribed to higher ideals of justice and chivalry. In victory, it behoved him to be fair, magnanimous and merciful. Thousands of Welshmen might have died, but they had died fighting. Those who had submitted or were captured might suffer imprisonment, but their lives would be spared.

Except Dafydd ap Gruffudd. His crimes, in Edward’s eyes, were too great, and his treachery too profound, to be punished or pardoned in the normal way. As the instigator and inciter of rebellion, Dafydd was deemed to deserve death, just as surely as that earlier troublemaker, Simon de Montfort, had done. But Montfort, and for that matter Llywelyn, had obliged the king by dying in battle; Dafydd had merely been wounded in the course of his capture. This may have been a cause of regret for Edward, for it meant that he had to take unprecedented action in the autumn of 1283. No one, however, would have more cause to regret his failure to die on the slopes of Snowdon than Dafydd himself.

In September the captive prince was brought under armed escort from Rhuddlan to Shrewsbury, and there, on the last day of the month, a parliament assembled to decide his fate. Edward proposed, and his magnates agreed, that the prince was guilty of treason: the crime of plotting the king’s death. Notionally, treason had existed for a long time, but never before had it been twisted to apply to rebellion, or attributed to someone of such exalted rank. The chroniclers who described what followed were aware that they had witnessed something ‘in previous times unknown’. On 2 October Dafydd was subjected to a four-fold punishment. For his treason, he was dragged through Shrewsbury ‘at the horse’s tail’ to a scaffold; there, for his homicides, he was hanged alive. Next, for having committed his crimes in Holy Week, he was disembowelled, and his entrails were burned. Lastly, for having plotted the king’s death, his body was quartered, and the parts were dispatched to the four corners of Edward’s kingdom. His head was carried off by the citizens of London, to be displayed next to that of his brother.⁷⁹

After the blood-letting came the thanksgiving. From Shropshire, Edward moved south, touring the cathedrals, abbeys and priories of Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire. Having returned to Rhuddlan for Christmas, in the New Year he crossed the Pennines to repeat the exercise in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. There can be no doubt that the king considered that the offerings he made during these months and the ceremonies he attended were entirely fitting and important in the wake of his victory. Yet the suspicion remains that he was also deliberately killing time, awaiting the onset of spring for the momentous finale he had planned.⁸⁰

When the spring arrived, Edward returned to Wales for a second time, and he came fully conscious of his rights and responsibilities as a conqueror. On 19 March, at Rhuddlan, a great statute was promulgated, setting out how Snowdonia and the other royal lands in Wales would be governed in the future. It was, on the whole, a wisely worded and well-balanced document, insisting, for example, that English law should apply in criminal cases, but also allowing that, for civil pleas (inheritance, debts and contracts) Welsh procedures might be maintained. Nevertheless, this synthesised system was to be administered on purely English lines. From now on, Snowdonia would be run by the full panoply of royal officials familiar in England – sheriffs, coroners, bailiffs and their deputies – all answering to a new justiciar of north-west Wales. As the king explained in the statute’s preamble, ‘Divine providence, which is unerring in its dispositions … has now, of its grace, wholly and entirely converted the land of Wales … into a dominion of our ownership.’⁸¹

From Rhuddlan Edward moved west, back into Snowdonia itself. There he was able to assess how the physical process of transformation was progressing. Just as with his earlier campaign, the king’s new conquest was being cemented with a trio of new castles. Each of them, like their precursors, was located on the coast so as to be suppliable by sea, and each of them, more so than before, was state of the art in terms of its defensive capabilities. These latest castles, too, were set to possess a glamour that their counterparts at Flint, Rhuddlan and Aberystwyth would lack by comparison. At Conwy, for instance, where Edward and Eleanor arrived on 26 March, a castle was rising every bit as fantastical as the one they were still fashioning at Leeds. Meanwhile, across the other side of the mountains, on a rock called Harlech, a similar fortress, replete with multiple towers and turrets, was also being founded.⁸²

It was for his third new castle, however, that the king had instructed Master James of St George and his colleagues to create something truly exceptional: Caernarfon, he intended, would be the greatest of all their many projects. The prominence it was afforded was, in part, a reflection of its future role. Situated at the southern end of the Menai Strait, the settlement was conveniently located in the heart of what used to be Gwynedd; from here the other parts of the king’s new conquest could be most easily reached. It was, therefore, an appropriate place for the new justiciar of north-west Wales to have as his base.

But Caernarfon had a stronger appeal still, and that was the pull of its past. A thousand years and more beforehand, the Romans had come to this part of Wales, and the remains of their legionary fort, Segontium, still stood close by (where, less extensive, they can still be seen today). Since that time, however, its origins had become the stuff of legend. According to Welsh tradition, the fort had stood since the time of Magnus Maximus, a Roman emperor who had seen it a dream, and who had come to Wales to discover it was a reality: ‘a great castle, the fairest that mortal had ever seen.’ And this was what Edward and his architects aspired to recreate, albeit on a new site at the mouth of the River Seiont: a truly tremendous castle, bristling with towers and turrets, amply supplied with arrow-loops, and apartments appropriate for future royal visits. To their design, moreover, they also decided to add a telling detail. The Emperor Maximus, so it was said, was the father of the Emperor Constantine. Caernarfon was therefore going to be built with polygonal towers, and different coloured bands of masonry, so as to resemble the walls of Constantinople.⁸³

When Edward arrived at Caernarfon at the start of April 1284, he was no doubt pleased to inspect the progress of the building works, but he had other, more important motives in mind. With the king, as ever, travelled the queen, who at that time was entering the ninth month of what was probably her sixteenth pregnancy. As a consequence, every effort was made to ensure that the royal couple felt as comfortable as possible in the midst of a busy construction site. Temporary timber apartments, constructed the previous year, were improved in advance of their coming by the addition of new glass windows; nearby, as at Conwy and Rhuddlan, a garden was laid out for Eleanor’s enjoyment. After keeping the court waiting for three more weeks, and missing St George’s day by just forty-eight hours, the queen gave birth on 25 April. To general rejoicing, the child was a boy, and a few days later he was baptised Edward after his father. The tradition that the king presented this new arrival to the Welsh as their future prince is a later improvement of the story, not recorded until the sixteenth century; precisely what future Edward senior foresaw for his second son at this stage we will never know. What can hardly be doubted, however, is that the child’s birth at Caernarfon was intentional. In the person of this new Edward, Wales’s distant imperial past and its future as an English dominion were deliberately linked.⁸⁴

Other symbolic events had already been contrived at Caernarfon to reinforce the connection. The previous year, during his hostage-taking tour, Edward had ‘discovered’ the body of the Emperor Maximus there; on the king’s orders, it was exhumed and then reburied in the local church. Here, in other words, was a repeat performance of the disinterment of Arthur some five years earlier, and to much the same purpose. Maximus was said to be the father of Constantine; Constantine was known to be the grandfather of Arthur – Geoffrey of Monmouth had said so. It was no coincidence that, around the same time, Edward had been presented with a coronet that had once belonged to Llywelyn, which was said to be ‘Arthur’s crown’. In the spring of 1284, once the royal goldsmith had rendered it more impressive, this trophy was sent to England. At some point soon after, Edward’s oldest son and heir, Alfonso, presented it at the shrine of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey.⁸⁵

Back in Wales, the search for symbols of conquest and the celebration of victory continued in a similarly Arthurian vein. For most of June, including his forty-fifth birthday, the king chose to keep his court at Llyn Cwm Dulyn, a deep, dark lake in the mountains to the south of Caernarfon, reputed to have mystical properties. At the end of July he held a magnificent ‘Round Table’ tournament at Nefyn, a remote little town where the prophecies of Merlin were said to have been found. In early August he toured the far reaches of the Lln peninsula, even the tiny islands off the coast. Edward was evidently revelling in his discoveries, and the knowledge that he had been further and seen more than any of his predecessors. Excepting Arthur, of course.⁸⁶

It was not until the middle of August that the festivities began to wind down. By 13 August the king was back at Caernarfon, and on 22 August he set out east along the coast, back in the direction of England. It was probably on that day that messengers from England arrived to meet him, with the news that Alfonso was dead.