This book has been a long time in the making. At one level its origins go back to the time when, as a schoolboy visiting the Royal Institution of South Wales in Swansea, I saw a framed document recording the betrothal of the future Edward II and Isabella in 1303 on the wall of the library and wondered how it could possibly have ended up in such an unlikely place. In practice however it stems from my first book, Aymer de Valence Earl of Pembroke, 1307–1324: Baronial Politics in the Reign of Edward II, which showed me both the complexity of the reign of Edward II and how much more research was still required to produce a fully rounded treatment of the period. My researches since then have progressed via a lengthy digression into the history of medieval Europe's relations with the outer world and a number of papers on the early fourteenth century, including the biography of Edward II published in the Oxford DNB in 2004, and most recently in my contributions to the Parliament Rolls of Medieval England (PROME) project published in 2005. In writing this volume for the Yale English Monarchs series I have drawn on my own published work and researches, as well as on the published work of many previous scholars such as J.C. Davies, Hilda Johnstone, H.G. Richardson, G.O. Sayles, T.F. Tout and Bertie Wilkinson, and of the numerous other scholars who have been active more recently in the field of late thirteenth-and early fourteenth-century history, notably Michael Altschul, Geoffrey Barrow, Paul Binski, Elizabeth Brown, Mark Buck, the late Pierre Chaplais, Wendy Childs, the late George Cuttino, the late Sir Rees Davies, Jeffrey Denton, Sean Duffy, Archie Duncan, Robin Frame, the late Edmund Fryde, Natalie Fryde, Chris Given-Wilson, Antonia Gransden, Roy Haines, Elizabeth Hallam, Jeffrey Hamilton, Gerald Harriss, the late Geoffrey Holmes, Michael Jones, Richard Kaeuper, Maurice Keen, Colm McNamee, John Maddicott, Ian Mortimer, Mark Ormrod, Edward Peters, Michael Prestwich, Nigel Saul, Beverley Smith, the late Lionel Stones, Matthew Strickland, John Taylor, Malcolm Vale, Claire Valente and Scott Waugh. I have also made use of unpublished work, in particular the outstanding D.Phil. thesis by Paul Doherty on the life and career of Isabella, Edward II's wife and queen; the Ph.D. theses by Arthur Echerd Jr on the cult of ‘St’ Thomas of Lancaster, and Alistair Tebbit on Edward II's household knights; and two papers on English coronations by John Carmi Parsons. I should also like to thank the many scholars who have helped me with information or offered encouragement, notably my fellow editors on the PROME project; James Lydon and the late F.X. Martin, o.s.a., who encouraged my interest in Anglo-Irish relations; Brenda Bolton, the late Leonard Boyle, O.P., John Henderson and Eileen Kane who helped me in my quest for the lost book of Edward II's miracles; Paul Brand, Boyd Breslow, the late Pierre Chaplais, Martin Cunningham, Gwilym Dodd, Paul Drybugh, John Gillingham, Jeffrey Hamilton, Jill Hughes, Donald Logan, Mark Ormrod, Guilhem Pépin, Richard Pfaff, Michael Prestwich, Brendan Smith, Shelagh Sneddon, Alistair Tebbit and Bernadette Williams. David Smith, the former county archivist of Gloucestershire and archivist for Berkeley Castle, and Lowinger Maddison, the librarian of Gloucester Cathedral, gave me invaluable help during my researches in Gloucester and at Berkeley. I am also greatly indebted to the staff of the former Public Record Office in Chancery Lane and The National Archives at Kew; the British Library and Bodleian Library; the Archivio Segreto Vaticano and Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana in Rome; the Archives Nationales and Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; and the Archives départementales de l'Hérault, Montpellier; and to the staff of the library at University College Dublin, especially in the interlibrary loans department, whose help was invaluable and sometimes crucial.
I was also greatly assisted by the award of a Fellowship at the National Humanities Center, North Carolina, in 1987–8, and a President's Fellowship from University College Dublin in 2000–1, which enabled me to plan my research and to begin writing; by British Academy-Royal Irish Academy Exchange Fellowships in 1984 and 1998, which allowed me to undertake research in London and in Gloucester and Berkeley Castle; by grants at an early stage from the British Academy and the Isobel Thornley Bequest which enabled me to gather material on microfilm; and by travel grants from the former Faculty of Arts in University Dublin in 1997 and 1999 which facilitated research in France and in Italy. I should also like to thank Carolyn Heighway for sending me the report on the recent refurbishment of the tomb of Edward II in Gloucester Cathedral, and Canon Celia Thomson for inviting me to give a lecture in the cathedral in September 2008 to mark the completion of the refurbishment.
My former colleagues and students in the Combined Departments of History (now the School of History and Archives) at University College Dublin offered support and encouragement over many years, even when they must have got tired of hearing me talk about Edward II. I should also like to thank Robert Baldock, my editor at Yale University Press, for his encouragement and for his patience while I was writing this book. The long wait for my biography of Edward II has I hope been less of a burden to him than the fate suffered by his namesake, Robert Baldock archdeacon of Middlesex and Edward II's last chancellor, who died weighed down by chains in prison in 1327. Elizabeth Bourgoin, Candida Brazil, Sarah Faulkner, Rachael Lonsdale and their colleagues have also shown great patience and skill in piloting a very long text through the press. The reader for Yale University Press also made valuable suggestions and saved me from a number of errors. Those that remain are of course entirely my responsibility.
Above all I owe my heartfelt thanks to my wife Nuala and to my son Eoin and daughter Catherine who kept me going at times when it must have seemed as if the book would never be completed. The finished work is appropriately dedicated to them.
Monkstown, County Dublin