Chapter 2

THE NATURE OF A KING¹

EDWARD'S BIRTH

Edward of Caernarfon, the future Edward II, king of England, was born on St Mark's Day, 25 April 1284,² at Caernarfon castle in North Wales,³ and was baptized there on 1 May.⁴ Even in its present ruined state, the massive bulk of Caernarfon castle, set against the backdrop of the mountains of Snowdonia, is an impressive and even awe-inspiring sight. At the time of Edward's birth however the construction of the castle had only recently begun. Although the Eagle Tower in which Edward is traditionally said to have been born may already have been sufficiently complete to house such an important event, the actual birthplace was probably the king and queen's lodgings, a wooden building which had recently been provided with glazed windows for additional comfort. Caernarfon castle as a whole was little more than a vast building site strewn with wood, earth and stone, and, to all appearances, a most unlikely location for the birth of a new royal child.⁵ Royal children did of course come into the world wherever their mother happened to be at the time, sometimes in very unlikely places,⁶ yet in this case there is little doubt that Edward I deliberately chose Caernarfon as the birthplace of his latest offspring.⁷

Edward of Caernarfon's birth was but one detail, and probably at the time not the most important, in the process by which his father Edward I took final control of the territory of the principality of Wales. In December 1282 the first native Prince of Wales,⁸Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, had been killed in a skirmish near Builth, while in June 1283 his brother Dafydd was betrayed and captured, and in October suffered a cruel death as a traitor to the English crown. In the spring and summer of 1283 Edward I sealed his victory by beginning the construction of a series of great fortresses at Conwy, Caernarfon and Harlech; in March 1284 at Rhuddlan he issued the Statute of Wales which laid down the practicalities of the future English government of Wales;⁹ and in July of 1284 he celebrated his conquest with a splendid tournament and Arthurian ‘round table’ at Nefyn, south-west of Caernarfon on the Lleyn peninsula.¹⁰

Edward I was however concerned to do much more than simply achieve a military conquest and the introduction of a new administrative framework for Wales. As he was to do later in Scotland, he also took possession of the religious and political centres, the holy relics, and the symbols of Welsh independence. The surviving children of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd and his brother, Dafydd, were dispatched for safekeeping in England, the sons to imprisonment in castles and the daughters to convents.¹¹ In the summer and autumn of 1284 Edward I and Queen Eleanor made a triumphal tour of Wales and of Welsh places of pilgrimage;¹² the sacred possession of the dynasty of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the relic of the True Cross, Y Groes Naid, was sent to England, as were Llywelyn's crown and the ‘crown of King Arthur’; while his seal was melted down to make a chalice.¹³ Edward I pointedly arranged for Alfonso, his elder son and heir to the throne of England, to present the Welsh treasures to the shrine of Edward the Confessor, the dynastic saint and protector of the English monarchy, in Westminster Abbey.¹⁴ The author of the annals of Waverley abbey, commenting on the event, remarked aptly: ‘and thus the glory of the Welsh was transferred to the English’.¹⁵ In all possible ways Edward I sought to appropriate for himself and his successors every claim to legitimacy over the newly conquered ‘land of Wales’.¹⁶

Within Wales, Caernarfon was a place of particular significance because of its associations with imperial Rome, both through the remains of the nearby Roman fortress of Segontium and, more powerfully, in Welsh legend. Magnus Maximus, a Roman commander in late fourth-century Britain who was proclaimed emperor by his troops, had later become immortalized as Macsen Wledig who had dreamt of ‘a great fortified city at the mouth of the river, and a great fort in the city, the fairest man ever saw, and great towers of many colours on the fort; and in its hall a chair of ivory, and the image of two eagles in gold thereon’.¹⁷ He was also believed to have been the father of the emperor Constantine and, very conveniently for Edward I's purposes, a body was discovered at Caernarfon in 1283 and identified either as that of Magnus Maximus or even of Constantine himself.¹⁸ On this slender but alluring foundation Edward I determined to build a magnificent fortress of his own, which would be the focus of royal authority and the administrative centre of the new English order in Wales.¹⁹

EDWARD AND WALES

There is no apparent basis for David Powel's late sixteenth-century statement that the newly born Edward of Caernarfon was presented to the Welsh nobility as a prince ‘that was borne in Wales and could speake never a word of English’.²⁰ On the other hand it is possible that Edward I may have considered setting up in Wales a new ruling house, subordinate to that of England and taking its legitimacy both from the fact of English conquest and from the signs and symbols of Welsh authority which Edward I had gone to such lengths to take over. Edward's new son would have been the obvious candidate to found such a dynasty.²¹

This is of course speculation since there is nothing in the records of the time to indicate what immediate plans, if any, Edward I had for his youngest son, Edward. In the event Edward spent little time in Wales. Within a few months of his birth he left Wales, together with his sisters Eleanor and Joan, via Chester for Acton Burnell in Shropshire and thence to rejoin his parents at Bristol.²² He did not return until his progress through Wales in 1301 after his creation as Prince of Wales, and after that not until the tragic autumn of 1326 when he fled to Wales for refuge from his enemies in England.

Nonetheless Wales played an important part in the life and career of Edward, first simply as Edward ‘the king's son’, later as Prince of Wales and finally as Edward II. From his birthplace he was forever to be known as Edward of Caernarfon. Even if the claim by the St Albans chronicler William Rishanger that in 1301 the Welsh rejoiced, from the highest to the lowest, and accepted him as their legitimate lord because he had been born in Wales,²³ is certainly an exaggeration,²⁴ there is no doubt that Edward enjoyed a remarkable degree of loyalty from his Welsh subjects. At critical moments, such as the English civil war of 1321–2, they stayed loyal and helped to defeat his enemies,²⁵ while in 1327 Welsh conspiracies threatened for a time to release him from his captivity in Berkeley castle and even to restore him to his throne.²⁶ The opinion quoted by several fourteenth-century English chroniclers that Edward II's one great fortune was that Wales never revolted against him was amply borne out by events.²⁷ It was somehow appropriate that even the impostor, who turned up at Cologne in 1338 claiming to be the long-dead Edward II, should apparently have been a Welshman.²⁸

How Edward in his turn regarded Wales and the Welsh is impossible to know with any certainty, although there are some clues. His first wet-nurse, Mariota or Mary Maunsel, may have been Welsh, but her connection with Edward was so short that no influence upon her royal charge can be inferred.²⁹ Edward may have enjoyed Welsh music, since in September 1305 he sent a member of his household, Richard the Rhymer, to Shrewsbury abbey to learn the Welsh stringed instrument, the crwth.³⁰ It is also known that he possessed, although he could not possibly have read, a manuscript in Welsh, which may have been an anthology of Welsh religious and secular poetry by bardic poets. The manuscript ‘may not even have predated 1300’, although the poems it contained were probably already old.³¹ This has been described as one of ‘the chance spoils of war’,³² but it is perhaps more likely to have been produced by a Welsh scribe for presentation to Edward, the newly created English Prince of Wales, during his tour of Wales in 1301 to accept the homage of his Welsh subjects.³³ Another hint of his attitude to Wales and the Welsh can be found in the well-known letter he addressed in May 1305 to Count Louis of Évreux,³⁴ which has variously been described as displaying petulance or frivolity on the part of Edward.³⁵ What it really shows is that Edward had a wry affection for Wales and also that he had a sense of humour:

We send you a big trotting palfrey which can hardly carry its own weight, and some of our bandy-legged harriers from Wales, who can well catch a hare if they find it asleep, and some of our running dogs, which go at a gentle pace; for well we know that you take delight in lazy dogs.³⁶ And dear cousin, if you want anything else from our land of Wales, we can send you plenty of wild men (gentz sauvages)³⁷ if you like, who will know well how to teach breeding to the young heirs or heiresses of great lords.³⁸

The best indication however of how Edward regarded Wales is in his careful cultivation after he became Prince of Wales of influential figures in native Welsh society and their employment in important administrative posts, especially as sheriffs. Men like Gruffydd Llwyd, Rhys ap Gruffudd, and others came into Edward's service at this time, stayed with him when he became king and showed their loyalty in the years to come.³⁹ Sadly Edward was not to show the same ability to manage and to sustain loyalties on the greater and even more complex stage of English political life.

EDWARD AND HIS FAMILY

Edward was the last of at least fourteen (and possibly as many as sixteen) children born to Edward I (1272–1307) and his first wife, Eleanor of Castile.⁴⁰ The choice of Edward for his Christian name was significant. Edward I's father, Henry III (1216–72), had, for the first time since the Norman Conquest, given English names to his two sons, Edward and Edmund. This was in token of Henry's devotion to the cult of the Anglo-Saxon king, Edward the Confessor (1042–66), whose body was buried in Westminster Abbey and who had been canonized in 1161.⁴¹ Edward I had at first followed earlier royal tradition in his choice of names. His eldest son John was called after his grandfather King John, while his second son Henry⁴² was named after both Edward I's own father and his great-grand-father Henry II (1154–89), the founder of the Plantagenet dynasty. Alfonso, his third son, was named after Alfonso X, king of Castile (1252–84), the half-brother of Edward I's wife Eleanor.⁴³ Only with his last-born son did Edward I revert to the English name, which he himself bore.⁴⁴

By the time of Edward of Caernarfon's birth at least seven of the children of Edward I and Eleanor of Castile were already dead, including their two elder sons John (1266–71) and Henry (1268–74).⁴⁵ The surviving children were Alfonso (born in 1273) who was the heir to the throne, and five sisters, Eleanor (born in 1269), Joan (born in 1272), Margaret (born in 1275), Mary (born in 1279), and Elizabeth (born in August 1282 at Rhuddlan in Wales).⁴⁶ The death of Alfonso in August 1284 left the newly born Edward both as the only surviving son and as heir to the throne; with unpredictable consequences for the future of the kingdom of England should he too die in infancy.⁴⁷ Childhood illnesses therefore took on a more than usual importance. While there is nothing to suggest that Edward experienced any life-threatening illness as a child, it is known that he and his sister Margaret suffered a bout of ‘tertian fever’, lasting more than a month, early in 1294.⁴⁸ A few years earlier, probably in September 1290, Edward I's mother, the formidable Eleanor of Provence, expressed her alarm at the possible consequences if the king were to take his son into le mauveis air of the north of England.⁴⁹ Although the young Edward of Caernarfon seems in fact to have been strong and athletic, and also to have been a good horseman, the need to preserve his life remained paramount. This may, in part, explain why, unlike his father in his own youth or his first cousins, Thomas and Henry of Lancaster, he is never known to have taken part in a tournament.⁵⁰Lack of interest or aptitude may also have been a reason, as is usually assumed, but it is just as likely that it was simply too dangerous to risk the life or health of the heir to the throne, and hence also the life and health of the kingdom itself, in such a sport.⁵¹ The death of Duke John I of Brabant, the father-in-law of Edward's sister Margaret, in a tournament in 1294 was a close family example of what might so easily happen.

It is not therefore surprising that the issue of the succession to the crown became of increasing concern to Edward I as he grew older. The death without a male heir of Alexander III of Scotland in 1286 was a further warning of how easily a kingdom could be plunged into uncertainty.⁵² The question came to centre stage in 1290, when Edward I was completing his plans for a new crusade. Because of the possibility that he might die during the expedition, he held a gathering of family members, leading churchmen, nobles and administrators on 17 April at the convent of Amesbury in Wiltshire, to which Eleanor of Provence had withdrawn in 1286. The six-year-old Edward of Caernarfon was among those present on this important occasion. Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester, who was about to marry Edward I's daughter, Joan of Acre (1272–1307), took an oath that he would recognize the young Edward as king, if Edward I should die.⁵³ On the same day Edward I, as he thought, copper-fastened the succession by writing to the king of Norway to complete arrangements for a marriage between Edward and Margaret of Norway, the heiress to the throne of Scotland.⁵⁴ Edward I however knew that he too might not be succeeded by a male heir when he ensured the rights of succession in turn of each of his surviving daughters and any future offspring: Eleanor (1269–98); Joan of Acre; Margaret (1275–c.1333); and Elizabeth (1282–1316) then eight years old.⁵⁵

The plans for Edward of Caernarfon's own marriage and for the succession to the English throne were celebrated soon after by a tournament held not far from Amesbury, at Winchester on 20 April 1290. The centrepiece of the feast held afterwards was the ‘Round Table’ of King Arthur, which today hangs on the wall of the former Great Hall of Winchester castle.⁵⁶ Within months of the agreement Edward I's plans were thrown into disarray by the death of Edward of Caernarfon's intended wife, the ‘Maid of Norway’, in September 1290, followed by the loss of his own wife and devoted companion, Eleanor of Castile, in November that year.

It is easy, but probably misleading, to argue that Edward's childhood was a very unsatisfactory one, that he lacked contact with and affection from his family, and that such factors go far to explain many of his personal problems in later life. His parents travelled a great deal in the course of royal business so that for long periods they would have seen neither Edward nor their other children. As already noted, for several months after Edward's birth in 1284 both parents were touring Wales. For three years, between May 1286 and August 1289 Edward I and Eleanor of Castile were absent in Gascony,⁵⁷ and from the summer of 1291 to late 1292 the recently widowed Edward I was in the north of England about the business of the Scottish ‘Great Cause’.⁵⁸

The young Edward also lost several members of his family to whom he had been close. On 19 August 1284, when he was only a few months old, the death of his ten-year-old brother Alfonso deprived him of future companionship and a possible role model.⁵⁹On 15 August 1285 his five-year-old sister Mary entered the convent of Amesbury in Wiltshire, the English daughter-house of the great abbey of Fontevraud in France where Henry II and Richard I were buried.⁶⁰ A year later, on 7 July 1286, Edward's grandmother, Eleanor of Provence, the widow of Henry III, also entered the convent at Amesbury.⁶¹ On 30 April 1290 Edward's eighteen-year-old sister Joan was married in Westminster Abbey to Gilbert de Clare, the earl of Gloucester, and so left the family circle.⁶² On 9 July another sister, the fifteen-year-old Margaret, was also married in Westminster Abbey, to John de Brabant, the heir to the duchy of Brabant in the Low Countries. John had lived in England since 1285, awaiting the time of his marriage, and seems to have been treated as one of the English royal family, staying on occasions both with Edward I and with Edward of Caernarfon, whom he clearly knew well.⁶³ On 20 September 1293 a third sister, Eleanor, at the mature age of twenty-four, married count Henry of Bar at Bristol. She left England and lived only a few more years, dying in 1298 probably in Ghent.⁶⁴ Edward's last remaining sister, Elizabeth, born in 1282 and the one nearest to him in age, was married in January 1297 at Ipswich to John, count of Holland and Zeeland. She was, however, widowed in 1299 and returned to the English scene in 1302 when she married Humphrey de Bohun, the earl of Hereford and Essex.⁶⁵

More serious for Edward's childhood and his future emotional development was the loss in quick succession of both his mother, Eleanor of Castile and his grandmother, Eleanor of Provence. Eleanor of Castile died on 28 November 1290 at Harby in Nottinghamshire and was buried in Westminster Abbey on 17 December.⁶⁶ Except for great occasions, she rarely saw her children when they were young and not yet able to join the court on its travels. Nonetheless she was devoted to them and concerned about their welfare. During her long separations from her children she kept in regular contact with them by messenger. In 1282 she joined her mother-in-law in protesting against Edward I's plans for the marriage of the thirteen-year-old Eleanor on the grounds that she was still too young; in 1285 she was very reluctant for Mary to enter the convent at Amesbury; and in 1290 she sent Dominican friars and one of her scribes to the young Edward's household to ensure his spiritual and intellectual formation.⁶⁷

During October 1290 Edward and his household had been at the royal manor of Clipstone in Nottinghamshire, and on 16 November he was at Laxinton (probably Laxton) where he and his sister Elizabeth attended mass for the soul of Henry III.⁶⁸ It seems at any rate that he was not far away when news of his mother's death came. As a child of six Edward cannot have understood the depth of his father's grief at the loss of Eleanor or have appreciated the ‘state progress of unprecedented splendour followed by a majestic funeral’ which marked the passage of his mother's body from Lincoln cathedral via several stopping places until her final burial in Westminster Abbey on 17 December.⁶⁹ We do not know whether the young Edward was present at his mother's funeral, but as he grew up his own loss would have gradually been borne in upon him. Eleanor of Castile's death was followed only a few months later, on 24 June 1291, by that of his grandmother. Eleanor of Provence was given a solemn burial at Amesbury on 8 September in the presence of Edward I and a great gathering of nobles and clergy. With her passed not only a great figure in the history of thirteenth-century England but also the last female member of the older generation to take an interest in Edward of Caernarfon.⁷⁰

This is not however the whole picture. While the deaths of Edward's mother and grandmother in quick succession were probably severe blows, the departure of his sisters from the family circle was more apparent than real. Mary, the nun of Amesbury, was far from being an exponent of the enclosed religious life. She led an independent and often extravagant existence, which included a love of gambling; she frequently visited either the royal court or her brother Edward, travelling in style with many companions and servants. She was herself often visited at Amesbury by her father, by her brother Edward, and by other members of her family.⁷¹ It was no accident that Mary should have become a nun at Amesbury. Eleanor of Provence had apparently been planning to retire there since the early 1280s and as part of her arrangements for her future comfort and companionship she made sure that Mary and another granddaughter, Eleanor the daughter of Beatrice of Brittany, entered the abbey first, together with twenty other girls drawn from aristocratic families. Mary's admission to Amesbury on 15 August 1285 was a great family occasion, attended by Edward I and Queen Eleanor and by many of the leading nobility and clergy of the kingdom. Even the one-year-old Edward of Caernarfon was there, probably making his first appearance at a major public event. Although her two granddaughters eventually became professed nuns, they probably did so only after Eleanor's death in 1291 and it is likely that she herself never took vows. Amesbury, in close proximity to Salisbury and to the royal palace at Clarendon, thus became like an extension of the royal court and a regular port of call. The abbess of the mother house of Amesbury at Fontevraud steadfastly hoped that Mary would transfer there after the death of Eleanor of Provence, but she refused, and Edward I refused to allow it. Mary was having too good a time.⁷²

Two of Edward's other sisters also remained within his social circle for a time, even after they were married. Edward I was so reluctant for the fifteen-year-old Elizabeth to leave court after her marriage to the count of Holland in 1296 that nine months later her anxious husband had to plead with the king to let his wife join him.⁷³ Edward's sister Margaret and her husband John de Brabant both stayed in England after their marriage in 1290 until her husband returned to Brabant in 1294 after the death of his father. During this period she and her husband continued to have frequent social contact with Edward of Caernarfon. Even in 1294 Margaret remained in England and did not finally rejoin her husband until 1297.⁷⁴

Despite his loss of close relatives through death and, to a lesser extent through marriage, Edward of Caernarfon's childhood was not a lonely one. There is really nothing to suggest the conclusion that ‘ease and confidence, as a member of a happy family circle, played no part in Edward's childish experience’.⁷⁵ As his household accounts and many other records indicate, he had extensive social contacts, with his own sisters, with his older cousins Thomas and Henry of Lancaster, and with other children; and also, as he grew up, with adults.⁷⁶ His childhood experiences were not untypical of his social class and time.⁷⁷ Edward was probably more fortunate than his future father-in-law, Philip IV of France, who as a child ‘lived in the shadow of St. Louis, the perfect king, a daunting example and challenge’.⁷⁸

EDWARD AND HIS FATHER

The young Edward of Caernarfon also lived in the shadow of a great king, but Edward I was at least still alive, all too obviously human, and never likely to be declared a saint. Nonetheless Edward I was a difficult father for any of his children, not least for the heir to the throne who would be expected to match his achievements in war and in government. Edward I's loss of his wife in 1290, when he was already fifty years old, and, in the years to come, the frustrations of prolonged and ultimately unsuccessful warfare and of political difficulties at home, amid the growing evidence of his own mortality, made difficult relations with his son all the more likely at some stage. The bitter and violent quarrel between father and son which ultimately occurred in 1305 is of course well known and will be examined in the next chapter, but it would be unwise to assume that the roots of the quarrel were connected in any simple and straightforward fashion to the events of Edward of Caernarfon's childhood in the 1280s and 1290s, or even of his young manhood in the early 1300s.⁷⁹ If Edward I was disappointed in or dissatisfied with his son at this early stage of his career, there is nothing obvious in the records or in the chronicles of the time to suggest it. Edward I is known to have had a violent temper,⁸⁰ but whatever disagreements he may have had with the younger Edward they did not yet lead to pulling his son's hair out by the roots, as allegedly happened in 1307.⁸¹ Edward nonetheless had an underlying respect for his father, which he showed in 1324 when he ordered Master John of St Albans to paint the walls of the Lesser Hall of Westminster Palace with scenes, probably martial and heroic in character, from the life of Edward I, ‘whom God assoil’. Perhaps at the last Edward felt reconciled with his father and that in destroying his internal enemies during the civil war of 1321–2 he had somehow matched Edward I's greatness in war.⁸²

Ironically, Edward II was to match his father in another way in June 1326 when he received news of his son's intended betrothal without his permission to Philippa of Hainault. Edward was greatly angered and, in an echo of the scenes between himself and his own father, wrote to his son that unless he obeyed ‘he will ordain in such wise that Edward shall feel it all the days of his life, and that all other sons shall take example thereby of disobeying their lords and fathers’.⁸³ In his own youth Edward I had had a number of serious, and sometimes angry, disagreements with his father, Henry III; while in the twelfth century the disputes between Henry II and his sons had led to open civil war.⁸⁴ Too much should not be made of the mere fact of differences between father and son: these were almost par for the course.⁸⁵

EDWARD AND HIS HOUSEHOLD

Although in his earliest years Edward of Caernarfon was frequently in the company of other of the royal children,⁸⁶ a separate household especially established for him already seems to have existed in the year 1284–5.⁸⁷ His personal needs were looked after by his nurse, Mariota Maunsel's successor, Alice de Leygrave, who may earlier have served as berceresse or ‘rocker’ for Edward's elder brother Henry.⁸⁸ Alice remained close to Edward even in adult life. In 1313 she was described as ‘the king's mother … who suckled him in his youth’ and in the same year was in the service of Queen Isabella.⁸⁹ The financial management of Edward's household was at first the responsibility of an experienced royal clerk, Giles of Oudenarde, who accounted for £832 expenditure for 1284–5,⁹⁰ and for £686 in 1285–6.⁹¹ Giles was still in charge in 1288–9 when the household expenses rose to over £2,140, and included the wages of seven knights and nine serjeants, as well as the expenses of Edward himself and ‘other children living with him in the keeping of the king’.⁹² Another experienced royal administrator, William of Blyborough, who had served with Edward I in the Holy Land, was already a member of Edward's household in 1290, and succeeded Giles as its keeper in 1293.⁹³ By this time the household appears to have become definitively Edward's own personal establishment rather than indifferently ‘the household of the king's children’ or ‘the household of the king's son’ as in the past.⁹⁴ It was evidently now assumed that Edward's sisters would be less regularly in his company. In 1292–3 the household expenses reached £3,896,⁹⁵ and in the following year £3,785.⁹⁶ William of Blyborough probably remained in office until 1301 when Edward became Prince of Wales. That event brought great changes both to Edward and to those who served him, but as early as November 1295 another important change had taken place. From that date Edward's household received its income from and accounted directly to the exchequer rather than his father's household. Between 1295 and 1299 the annual income averaged about £1,300. The total expenditure during this period on the other hand was over £10,813.⁹⁷ Some of this additional cost may have arisen from the increasingly public role which Edward was then assuming, especially while he was Regent of England in 1297–8 during his father's absence in Flanders. But it also seems likely that at a time of great financial stringency the exchequer was systematically supplying Edward's household with less than it needed to function efficiently.⁹⁸

Even while his household was still adequately financed, Edward's presence could impose stresses upon the local community through a combination of steady pressure on resources and slowness in payment. This is well illustrated by the complaints recorded in 1294 by the author of the Annals of Dunstable who remarked:

Two hundred dishes a day were not sufficient for his kitchen. Whatever he spent on himself or his followers he took without paying for it. His officials carried off all the victuals that came to market, even cheese and eggs, and not whatever was for sale, but even things not for sale, in the houses of the townsfolk. They scarcely left anybody a tally. They seized bread from the bakers and beer from the alewives, or if they had none, forced them to brew and bake.⁹⁹

Too much should not be made of this one reference, since the lengthy periods spent at King's Langley in Hertfordshire by Edward and his household made it likely that sometimes their needs would exceed the resources available locally, or ill-feeling would arise if payments were not prompt. There were also occasions, as will be seen later, when Edward was entertaining large numbers of visitors at Langley and would have required substantial quantities of food and drink at short notice. On the other hand, this is but one example of the multitude of complaints about the purveyance of food supplies by royal officials, delays in payment by the royal household and the exchequer, and excessive taxation by the crown which accumulated during the later years of the reign of Edward I. These grievances contributed to the political crises of 1297 and 1300 while Edward I was still king and were a foretaste of what Edward of Caernarfon was himself to face as king after 1307. In embryo the demands for reform of the royal administration made by the Ordainers in 1310 were already present at a local level in 1294. The complaints by the Dunstable annalist are also an indication of how Edward's own personal reputation could have developed in his early years. Edward's continued close proximity to centres of population like St Albans and Dunstable and to the main route between London and the north, made it natural that all kinds of gossip and innuendo about the doings of the heir to the throne and his companions would have spread, while the existence of locally based monastic chroniclers gave local rumour the chance of a much wider circulation.

The expense roll for 1292–3, which records a total expenditure of nearly £3,900,¹⁰⁰ also reveals a great deal about the young Edward of Caernarfon and his activities. For over four months of this period, between 23 November and 12 April, Edward was at Langley,¹⁰¹ the manor near St Albans where he had already spent much time as a small child,¹⁰² which was given to him by his father in 1302, and became one of his favourite residences¹⁰³ as king. Edward then set out on a series of travels,¹⁰⁴ which took him, for example, to Westminster in late April and to Mortlake and Kennington in Surrey for the months of May and June. In early July he was at Canterbury, where on 7 July he was present for the celebration of the feast of the Translation of St Thomas Becket, a saint to whom in later life he appears to have had a particular devotion. He was briefly at Windsor Park in early August, after which he was almost constantly on the move until his return to Mortlake in October. His travels took him through Hampshire and Wiltshire, to cathedral cities such as Winchester, Salisbury and Bath, to the royal manor of Clarendon, and to country towns such as Melksham and Devizes. On 8 September he went from Clarendon to attend mass in Salisbury cathedral; on 9 September he was at Amesbury, where his grandmother Margaret of Provence was buried and where his sister Mary was a nun; and on 20 September he was in Bristol for the wedding of his sister Eleanor to Count Henry of Bar.¹⁰⁵

The marginal notes, which were added to the roll in order to explain days of unusual expense and which sometimes show a degree of impatience or even exasperation, name the people who visited Edward and dined with him during the period of this account. The nine-year-old Edward's social circle in 1293 was already a sophisticated one, drawn chiefly from the upper levels of the English nobility and with a considerable leavening from among the clergy and the religious. Langley was a very convenient stopping-place for visitors because of its proximity both to Westminster and to the main route north via St Albans, so it is hardly surprising that many people called there, sometimes staying for several days. From 22 to 24 January Edward was visited by the countess of Gloucester (his sister Joan), with her knights, ladies, clerk and squires;¹⁰⁶ on 7 February by the castellan of ‘Bergles’ with four knights and the two sons of Sir Robert de Tibetot; from 11 to 13 February by Sir Hugh de Vere (brother of the earl of Oxford), Sir Stephen Fitz Walter and Sir Peter and Sir John de Stratling.¹⁰⁷ On Thursday, 12 February, it was the turn of Sir John de Brabant, the son and heir of the duke of Brabant who had married Edward's sister Margaret in 1290, and of Edward's first cousins, Thomas and Henry of Lancaster, with ‘a great company’, who had come from a tournament at nearby Dunstable. Sir John left on Sunday, 15 February, to go to Canterbury, but left the boys behind; he returned from Canterbury on 22 February and went again on the Tuesday following, taking Thomas and Henry with him.¹⁰⁸ On 3 March the earl and countess of Gloucester came with a ‘decent company’ of knights, ladies, damsels and squires, and stayed for two days. On 7 March he entertained at dinner his father's close friend and counsellor, Anthony Bek, bishop of Durham, together with a bishop of the Friars Minor who was with him and an important royal clerk Sir John de Berwick. The two bishops left after dinner but Sir John stayed the night.¹⁰⁹ The Franciscan was probably the bishop of Jebail in Syria who dined with Edward and the bishop of Durham at Mortlake on Sunday, 24 May.¹¹⁰ On 24 April the ‘arrival of the lords’ was recorded, presumably for the celebration of Edward's ninth birthday the following day and probably included Edmund of Lancaster, the king's brother, who was certainly present on 28 April.¹¹¹

The transfer of Edward and his household to Mortlake led to another stream of visitors: on 7 May the bishop of Durham, Thomas and Henry of Lancaster, and John de Brabant;¹¹² at Whitsun (17 May) Edward Balliol, the son of the king of Scots John Balliol; the lady Agnes de Valence, the daughter of Edward of Caernarfon's great-uncle William de Valence; the prior of Merton; Master John de Lacy, a son of the earl of Lincoln; the Leyburn brothers; and the lady Isabella de Vescy. Several of these were again present on 18 and 19 May, while Henry de Lacy, the earl of Lincoln, and four knights were there on 20 May. On the 21st there was another large gathering at dinner: Sir John de Bar, whose brother Count Henry of Bar was shortly to marry Edward's sister Eleanor; Sir Roger de Mohaut, Sir Roger de Leyburn, the castellan of ‘Bergles’ with three knights, and the wife of Sir Walter de Beauchamp with one knight. All those in attendance on 21 May, and presumably many of the others as well, were there to attend the wedding of Eleanor, the daughter of Sir John de Mereworth. Three days later came the visit of the bishop of Durham and the bishop of Jebail in Syria.¹¹³

Another round of entertaining began in June, with the arrival on the 12th of Edward's sister, the lady Mary, ‘nun of Amesbury with a great company of nuns’,¹¹⁴ and Thomas and Henry of Lancaster with their following. All of them appear to have stayed until 14 June. Only three days later, John de Brabant arrived with thirty horses and twenty-four boys, while Thomas and Henry were back again with thirty horses and twenty-one boys, all of them staying ‘at our expense’. They remained until 22 June when John, Thomas and Henry breakfasted at Kingston on the way to jousting at Fulham, and caused great expense to Edward's household ‘because many strangers came to them’. Day by day during this period, Edward's household clerk noted their presence with growing annoyance: ‘they are staying’, ‘they are still here’, and, on the final day, ‘here they are still. And this day is burdensome’. Having to pay for the breakfast of so many guests was clearly the last straw. The three weeks of entertaining itinerant nuns and tournament-goers between Sunday 7 June and Saturday 27 June cost Edward's household about £370, almost 10 per cent of the whole year's expenditure.¹¹⁵

Edward's travels began again in early July. On 7 July he gave a reception in the Great Hall of Archbishop Robert Winchelsey at Canterbury;¹¹⁶ on 27 July at Otford in Kent he entertained two of Edward I's administrators, John de Berwick and the keeper of the royal household, Walter Langton, ‘a man of great ability and little principle’, who in 1305 was to be the cause of a bitter dispute between Edward and his father.¹¹⁷ On 17 and 18 August, while he was at Ashley near Winchester, in company with John de Brabant and Thomas and Henry of Lancaster, he was visited by his father Edward I ‘and many others’ who had come to hunt in Ashley forest. This was the beginning of a series of family gatherings. Between 27 and 29 August Edward was his father's guest at Clarendon; from 31 August to 2 September he was joined at Downton by the steward of the royal household, some Welsh huntsmen and many of the king's household ‘at our expense’; the next day the king dined there with his son; and on 4 September Thomas and Henry of Lancaster were again with Edward. Thomas left the following day but Henry stayed because of illness. After attending High Mass at Salisbury cathedral on 8 September, the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary, Edward entertained to dinner the canons, and many others. The following day at Amesbury he was joined by his sister Mary and other nuns, all of whom plus their servants were with him again on the 10th.¹¹⁸ Edward was in his father's company in Bristol between 20 and 26 September, at the time of the wedding of his sister Eleanor to Henry of Bar,¹¹⁹ after which he moved back again by stages to Surrey. On 13 October he celebrated the feast of St Edward the Confessor at Kennington; on Saturday, 24 October, and again on the 31st, he was joined at Mortlake by the count of Bar, John de Brabant and a large number of the knights and squires of the king's household.¹²⁰ Thus ended a remarkably eventful year.

EDWARD'S OWN EDUCATION

Little is known in detail about the young Edward's education and personal formation, although much has been said on the theme in the past and sweeping conclusions have been drawn on slender evidence. One thing that is known is the identity of Edward's ‘master’, a veteran Gascon knight named Guy Ferre, who had previously been a prominent household knight and administrator of Eleanor of Provence, as well as acting as one of her executors. He was also closely connected to the queen, Eleanor of Castile, whom he had accompanied to the Holy Land in 1270–1. Guy's uncle John Ferre was steward of her household until 1288; in the mid-1280s Guy was a member of her council and was himself steward of her household in 1289–90, the final year of her life.¹²¹ Guy was therefore a man of great experience who was clearly trusted by both the queens whom he served and, by implication, by Edward I as well. He should have been a very suitable person to act as a kind of father figure for Edward of Caernarfon, providing discipline, and instilling in him an appreciation of the ideals of the crusade and of the rules of behaviour in noble society, as well as the skills of horsemanship and the use of arms that would be needed on future battlefields.¹²² Guy's service with Edward of Caernarfon had probably begun before 1295; it ended with Guy's death in 1303.¹²³ It is not known how well Edward and Guy got on together, but in 1299 there is a hint, which suggests that Guy was a hard master to serve but which also reflects well on Edward personally. On 16 November, at Langley, Edward gave one mark (13s 4d) to Guy Ferre's chamberlain, Roger, ‘to acquit him of a silver dish of his lord which he lost and for which he ought to have lost his service, until he was able to restore its value’.¹²⁴ In later life, at the battle of Bannockburn and in other tight spots, Edward had good cause to be grateful that, whatever else Guy failed to instil in him, he taught him to ride well. When Guy died at Durham in 1303 Edward showed at least his formal respect by attending mass in Guy's memory on 14 April.¹²⁵ Any influence Guy had exerted on the character and behaviour of his royal charge was at an end. Ironically, a new and much more powerful influence upon Edward was already present and growing rapidly, in the form of another Gascon knight, Piers Gaveston.

The traditional assumption that Edward of Caernarfon's formal education was inadequate and, in particular, that he was ‘illiterate’ in the sense of knowing little or no Latin rests on two pieces of evidence.¹²⁶ The first is the fact that in 1308 Edward took his coronation oath in French, in a form allegedly devised for a king who did not know Latin.¹²⁷ From this circumstance and from evidence that in 1300 a primer was bought for Edward from William the Bookbinder of London at a cost of £2, V.H. Galbraith concluded damningly that ‘It was thus stupidity or laziness, and not want of opportunity to learn Latin, that made it necessary for Edward II to take his coronation oath in French’.¹²⁸ The second piece of evidence is a letter of 1317 in which Pope John XXII thanked the archbishop of Canterbury for translating a papal letter from Latin into French ‘so that what is the better understood may bear the richer fruit’.¹²⁹ Such evidence may seem conclusive, but it is seriously misleading and has been substantially undermined by more recent scholarship.¹³⁰

The damage caused to Edward's posthumous reputation by the coronation oath was brought about by a roll produced at Canterbury in 1311 and still preserved there. In it there are two versions of the oath, the first in Latin and headed ‘if the king shall be literate’, and the second in French and headed ‘if the king shall not be literate’.¹³¹ The implication seems clear enough, and the appropriate conclusions were drawn by scholars from William Stubbs to Vivian Galbraith. However, H.G. Richardson and G.O. Sayles, writing in 1938–9, concluded that the references to literacy and illiteracy had been added as a gloss by the clerk who produced the roll and were of no authority, and that Edward took the oath in French in order to use ‘the common idiom of all those assembled in the abbey’.¹³²This is clearly correct. The Canterbury clerk, who presumably was highly educated in Latin, was being too clever. French was the spoken language of the upper levels of English society as well as a language of record and it was entirely appropriate that it should be used on a great public occasion such as a coronation. Richardson and Sayles also pointed out, quite properly, that if Edward had needed to take the oath in Latin, he could easily have been taught the appropriate responses, whether he knew Latin or not.¹³³ Later kings, from Edward III in 1327, also took their oath in French, but have not been charged with illiteracy.¹³⁴ Furthermore, the Canterbury roll containing Edward II's coronation oath included the text as a postscript to the Ordinances of 1311, another great public document which was of course also composed in French.¹³⁵ The language of the coronation oath of 1308 thus has no bearing whatsoever on Edward's knowledge of Latin.

Pope John XXII's letter to the archbishop of Canterbury in 1317 is equally fragile as evidence.¹³⁶ The fact that the pope was writing to persuade Edward II to engage himself more seriously in his duties as king has probably made the translation of his words from Latin into French seem even more pointed to modern observers. However, none of this necessarily proves that Edward knew little or no Latin. As Hilda Johnstone wisely remarked, ‘the stately periods of the papal chancery were no easy reading, even for a scholar’.¹³⁷ The problems of comprehension were not confined to Edward II, since in 1326 he himself wrote to John XXII in Latin rather than in French, on the assumption that the pope, as a speaker of the langue d'oc, would find Latin easier to understand. In 1323 the pope had also written to Charles IV of France telling him that he had a recent letter translated for him from French into Latin because his reading knowledge of the French vernacular was inadequate, and asking him to write in Latin in future.¹³⁸

With the grosser charges of illiteracy out of the way, it is arguable that Edward's level of education has been underestimated. Although the belief that Walter Reynolds, the future archbishop of Canterbury, who was a prominent member of Edward's household from 1297 to 1307, was his intellectual mentor has long since been disproved,¹³⁹ there is evidence to suggest that Edward's education was given special attention, especially by his mother, Eleanor of Castile. She had been brought up in her native Castile in an atmosphere of learning. Her half-brother, Alfonso X, was deeply interested in literature and in law, and fully merited his nickname, ‘the Wise’.¹⁴⁰ She herself may have been educated by Dominican friars at the court of her father Ferdinand III, and it has been suggested that she may have ‘developed a command of the written word that went beyond the decorative or pious accomplishment it is often said to have been for medieval women of rank’.¹⁴¹ During her time in England she is known to have owned a library of romances, and to have employed scribes to write books for her and a painter to illuminate them.¹⁴² She appears to have tried to pass on something of her own education and cultural appreciation to her children: her daughters Eleanor and Mary, for example, were probably both literate,¹⁴³ and there is no reason to suppose that she treated the young Edward in any different manner. In 1290 she sent one of her scribes named Philip to join Edward's household at Woodstock. If Philip transcribed books for the use of his royal master, some attempt was presumably made to put them to practical use, perhaps under the guidance of the Dominican friars who were already in Edward's household in 1289–90.¹⁴⁴ It is also likely that one of the tasks of Edward's magister, Guy Ferre, an experienced administrator who must therefore have been literate himself, was to ensure that his royal charge acquired some degree of learning along with the ability to ride a horse.

EDWARD'S BOOKS AND MANUSCRIPTS

It is known that Edward possessed a few books, such as the ‘book of romance’, probably in French and formerly the property of Eleanor of Provence which he was given in 1298–9;¹⁴⁵ this might even have been the big book containing a Tristram romance which Edward loaned to Hugh Despenser the Younger in the autumn of 1326 when they were fleeing to Wales in the hope of safety.¹⁴⁶ He also owned a primer or prayer book and a copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae which were bought for him in 1300 and 1301, and the French Life of St Edward which he obtained in 1302.¹⁴⁷ Later in life Edward borrowed a manuscript containing the Lives of St Anselm and St Thomas from the library of Christ Church, Canterbury, and did not return it.¹⁴⁸ In 1324 fourteen romances and a French psalter were issued by the privy wardrobe, possibly for Edward's use.¹⁴⁹ In 1320 the survey of the contents of the treasury made on the instructions of the treasurer, Walter Stapeldon, bishop of Exeter, revealed a number of books, which included the book of Welsh poetry alluded to earlier and which the English clerks described simply as written in a language unknown to the English (‘de Ydiomata Anglicis igno-rata).¹⁵⁰ The rest of the collection was made up of ‘a book called De Regimine Principum (On Royal Rule) bound in red leather, a “little book” of the rules of the Knights Templar, a quire (that is part of an unbound book) of the life of St Patrick … and a book of the chronicles of Roderick archbishop of Toledo’.¹⁵¹ The fact that these manuscripts were all kept in the treasury rather than among the household records suggests however that they were not part of the everyday reading material available to Edward. The book on the rule of the Templars might, for example, have been consulted at the time of the arrest of the Templars in England in 1308.

Edward does not appear to have been active as a patron of manuscript production, with two possible exceptions. The first is the Isabella Psalter, which is now preserved in the Staatsbibliothek in Munich.¹⁵² According to one opinion, the psalter was written in Paris and illuminated in England and was made for Isabella either on or before her marriage to Edward II in 1308,¹⁵³ but a more recent view is that the psalter was entirely English in origin, probably being made in the vicinity of Nottingham between the betrothal of Isabella and Edward in 1303 and their marriage.¹⁵⁴ The other manuscript, now known as the Queen Mary Psalter, is even more tentatively connected with Edward.¹⁵⁵ Joan Evans considered that this was also commissioned by Edward (who appears in gold in the calendar) for presentation to Isabella but that it was made a little later than the Isabella Psalter.¹⁵⁶ More recent opinion is divided on the subject of a possible connection with either Edward II or Isabella.¹⁵⁷

But possession of books or the possible commissioning of manuscripts does not prove that he read them: Geoffrey of Monmouth was after all a very appropriate text to present to the newly created Prince of Wales, while the Life of St Edward was copiously illustrated.¹⁵⁸ As Michael Clanchy has remarked, ‘In having no library and in leaving little evidence of possessing books, the English kings were no different from other contemporary rulers … The explanation for the dearth of libraries is not primarily that kings were ignorant laymen, more interested in fighting and hunting than in study. Rather it is that the business of government, whether ecclesiastical or secular, only gradually became associated with book-learning and written precedents.’¹⁵⁹

The French poem, supposedly written by Edward while in prison after his deposition in 1327, and which appears in two fourteenth-century manuscripts, has no bearing on Edward's literacy or lack of it. It was almost certainly composed by another and anonymous author and embodied the idea of the wheel of fortune, as did another fourteenth-century work, the English poem Somer Soneday (Summer Sunday).¹⁶⁰ Although Edward was closely related to two kings, who were practised poets, his cousin and contemporary, Dinis of Portugal (1279–1325), and Edward's uncle and Dinis's grandfather, Alfonso X of Castile (1252–84), there is no reason to suppose that Edward possessed any of their literary skill.¹⁶¹ The safest conclusion about Edward of Caernarfon's educational achievements is that, like his father Edward I, ‘his main language was … French, more specifically the Anglo-Norman dialect, but [that] he had some understanding of Latin and could speak English’.¹⁶² Although, again like his father, it cannot be certain whether Edward learned to read, it seems probable that he did.¹⁶³ Neither is it known whether, like his son Edward III, he could write, but again the possibility should not be ruled out.¹⁶⁴

EDWARD AS A PUBLIC SPEAKER

The opinion expressed by Ranulf Higden in his Polychronicon that Edward II was ‘ready in speech’ is borne out by contemporary evidence. In January 1312 at York he dictated the French text of a proclamation announcing the return of Gaveston from exile.¹⁶⁵In July that year he gave a powerful speech to the mayor and citizens of London, calling upon their loyalty against Thomas of Lancaster and the other opposition magnates.¹⁶⁶ In January 1320 he apparently addressed parliament on the arrangements for him to perform homage to Philip V of France for the duchy of Aquitaine.¹⁶⁷ This was a prelude to the speech he gave at Amiens in June 1320 when he bluntly refused the French suggestion that he should perform liege homage rather than simple homage;¹⁶⁸ he gave another speech concerning Aquitaine to an assembly of knights, prelates and magnates in London in October 1324;¹⁶⁹ and according to the Vita Edwardi Secundi he delivered a speech before the Westminster parliament of November 1325 concerning Isabella's refusal to return from France.¹⁷⁰

Edward did not need to achieve the heights of scholarship of a university master or the skills in reading and writing of an experienced royal clerk, but there is little doubt that he had sufficient education to perform his duties as king. He was, in other words, probably no better and no worse educated than his predecessor and successor on the English throne.

EDWARD AND EDUCATION

For a king who is supposed to have been illiterate and ignorant, if not stupid,¹⁷¹ Edward contributed significantly to the development of the English universities during his lifetime. Even allowing for motives of national prestige and the need to educate trained administrators for the royal service, this says something positive about Edward's intellectual interests. In January 1301, for example, he gave a certain Richard, one of the boys of his household, 5s 4d to keep him for eight weeks at the school of St Martin's in London; while in 1302–3 two scholars, Richard of Nottingham and Thomas Duns were sent at Edward's orders to study at the schools of Oxford, for which Edward gave them 6d a week each for their maintenance there for an entire year, and also provided them with 32 shillings for their clothing, shoes and other necessaries.¹⁷² Earlier English kings had also supported individual clerks at the English universities,¹⁷³ but Edward II's involvement went far beyond this. Although his petition in 1317 to Pope John XXII to grant Oxford graduates the same ius ubique docendi as had recently been given to the university of Paris, was unsuccessful, another petition from Edward on behalf of the university of Cambridge brought its confirmation by the pope as a studium generale in 1318.¹⁷⁴Edward also supported the creation of a new university in Dublin under the auspices of the archbishop of Dublin; this was formally established by Pope Clement V in 1312 and functioned briefly from 1320.¹⁷⁵

The Dominican priory which Edward II established at King's Langley in or before 1308 included a school for preparatory studies for the universities. Many of the members of the Carmelite priory he founded in Oxford after 1314 studied at the university, while it is likely that the priory also accommodated secular students.¹⁷⁶ Several of Edward's administrators were directly involved in the development of the university. Roger de Northburgh, keeper of the wardrobe and bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, planned to found halls for the study of logic and theology; between 1314 and 1316 Walter Stapeldon, Edward's treasurer and bishop of Exeter, founded Stapeldon Hall, the future Exeter College; in 1324 Adam de Brome, a chancery clerk, founded Oriel College with royal licence.¹⁷⁷The latter college was so closely associated with Edward that it was later re-established with the king as the nominal founder. After his death in 1327 prayers were regularly said for his soul, and his tomb in the former Gloucester abbey (a cathedral since the Reformation) was restored on several occasions at the college's expense.¹⁷⁸

Edward's association with Cambridge University was to be even more significant. Apart from obtaining papal recognition of the university, in 1317 he established his Society of the King's Scholars for the education in Cambridge of twelve children of the Chapel Royal. Although in 1337 the Society was to be absorbed into Edward III's foundation of King's Hall, Edward II was regarded as the true founder and under the university statute, De exequiis annuatim celebrandis, the regent masters of the university were required to attend mass in memory of Edward of Caernarfon every year on 5 May in the church of Great St Mary. King's Hall existed down to 1546 when it was amalgamated with Michaelhouse to form the present Trinity College.¹⁷⁹ The scholars of King's Hall were ‘the first royal colony of clerks to be located in the English Universities and constituted the initial institutional link forged between the latter and the royal household’, and ‘until the foundation of King's College, Cambridge, in 1441, [King's Hall] remained the only truly royal establishment at either of the English Universities’.¹⁸⁰ Edward's patronage of Cambridge made it attractive to other intending benefactors of university education, such as Hervey de Stanton, a leading official of the exchequer (Michaelhouse, 1324), and to wealthy noblewomen such as Elizabeth de Clare (Clare Hall, 1326) and Marie de St Pol, countess of Pembroke (Pembroke Hall, 1347).¹⁸¹

EDWARD AND RELIGION

Like his father and his son, Edward of Caernarfon was probably in most respects ‘a man of unsophisticated piety’¹⁸² and ‘conventional and predictable in his personal devotions’.¹⁸³ It is known, for example, that he inherited a very large collection of relics from his father and passed them on intact to his son, Edward III.¹⁸⁴ Edward II does not appear to have added significantly to this collection, unless we include the ampoule containing the Holy Oil of St Thomas of Canterbury; but even this had originally belonged to Edward I and was simply brought to greater public attention by his son.¹⁸⁵

As one would expect, the records of Edward's household, both in childhood and in adult life, contain many references to conventional acts of piety: his attendance at masses on saints' days and other religious festivals, his feeding of the poor and his donations to religious houses. On 12 January 1301, for example, Edward offered 4s 7d at the funeral mass for his cousin Edmund, earl of Cornwall, at Ashridge in Hertfordshire; and 10s 10d at the threshold of St Thomas the Martyr; and on 24 January in Lincoln cathedral he made offerings totalling 20s 6d at the mass for the soul of his dead mother, Eleanor of Castile, at the shrine of Hugh of Avalon (bishop of Lincoln, 1186–1200) and at the tomb of Robert Grosseteste (bishop of Lincoln, 1235–53).¹⁸⁶ Edward's household records for the year 1302–3 give a detailed picture of the extent and purposes of his alms-giving and are not untypical.¹⁸⁷ During the year he attended masses for the souls of his mother, Queen Eleanor, in the church of Bradfield in Berkshire; for his grandmother Queen Eleanor, at Amesbury where she was buried; at South Warnborough in Hampshire for his clerk, John de Haneworth; at Chalfont near Amersham in Buckinghamshire for Edward I's steward, Walter de Beauchamp; at Langley for a member of his own household, William Comyn, on the day he heard of the latter's death; and for Sir Guy Ferre, his ‘magister’, at Durham. He gave alms to the prioress and nuns of Amesbury, to the Dominican, Franciscan, Augustinian, Carmelite and Crutched friars, and to the friars of the Sack, all of London; the Augustinian friars of Tickhill; the monks (unidentified) of Derby, and the Dominicans of Roxburgh. On Maundy Thursday 1303 (4 April) he gave a pair of slippers and a penny each with his own hands to thirty poor people at Strelley in Northants (one for each completed year of Edward I's reign); and on his birthday, 25 April, at Byland in Yorkshire he gave a penny to each of 300 poor people.¹⁸⁸ A similar pattern of behaviour continued after he became king. From 1315 to 1316, for example, he made a daily oblation in his private chapel of 7d, except for the feast of the Epiphany (6 January) when he offered gold, frankincense and myrrh. In the same year he gave £38 6s 8d to the Carmelites of Sheen to celebrate masses for the souls of his ancestors.¹⁸⁹

Edward's religious formation, like his education, was probably begun by the Dominican friars whom his mother sent to join his household in 1290. She had a particular devotion to the Dominicans, to whom she gave generous endowments in her lifetime and in her will, and whose religious practices, including the saying of the rosary, she followed.¹⁹⁰ In 1300, just before his sixteenth birthday, Edward was given an expensive primer, at a cost of £2. This has sometimes been interpreted as a textbook for Edward to learn Latin but it was probably a book of devotions. The book itself is no longer extant, so it is impossible to say whether the prayers which it contained would have been in accordance with his mother's wishes and those of her Dominican mentors.¹⁹¹ Both Eleanor of Castile and her husband had Dominican confessors in their households, and this practice was to be followed by their son, Edward of Caernarfon.¹⁹² John of Lenham was Edward's confessor as early as 1301 and remained until his retirement in 1315, when he was succeeded by John of Warefield who had been in Edward's service since at least 1303. Later in his reign Edward employed Luke of Wodeford and Robert of Duffeld as his confessors. Edward sometimes used Dominicans such as John of Wrotham in 1311 and Nicholas of Wisbech in 1317–19 for particularly delicate royal business at the papal curia. The records of Edward's household are full of gifts and donations made to individual Dominicans or to their houses, notably the house at King's Langley which he founded and where the body of Edward's favourite, Gaveston, was finally buried in 1315.¹⁹³.

As early as 1305, in a letter to the mayor of Northampton on behalf of the local Dominicans, Edward had expressed ‘a great affection for the order of friars preacher, for many reasons’, and showed his affection for them in practical ways both then and on many other occasions during his life.¹⁹⁴ It is not surprising that in 1327 Dominicans were involved in plots to release Edward from captivity, first at Kenilworth and then at Berkeley, or that in later years they were instrumental in spreading tales of Edward's sanctity. Edward's most striking involvement with the order was the episode of the Holy Oil of St Thomas of Canterbury between 1317 and 1319 when Nicholas of Wisbech, a former confessor to Edward's sister Margaret the duchess of Brabant, persuaded Edward to ask the pope to allow him to be anointed with the oil in the hope that the ceremony would end the political troubles in which he was then immersed. The pope refused to sanction what would, in effect, have been a second coronation, and the attempt ended in the imprisonment and subsequent flight of Nicholas of Wisbech and in the deep embarrassment of Edward himself. These events, however, suggest that in religious matters Edward combined a greater piety than either his father or his son with a certain gullibility. In a remarkably frank letter, which he addressed to the pope in the summer of 1319, Edward admitted that through his own weakness (‘imbecillitatem’) he had allowed the unscrupulous friar to take advantage of his ‘dovelike simplicity’.¹⁹⁵

Apart from his bad experience with Nicholas of Wisbech, Edward appears to have enjoyed the company of religious men and to have been at ease with them. He was so much at ease that in 1316 an unidentified monk cited by the author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi complained that Edward II spent too much time in monasteries.¹⁹⁶ In May 1300, when he was on his way to Scotland for his first taste of warfare, he and his father stayed at the abbey of Bury St Edmund's in Suffolk. Edward remained after his father had left, ‘enjoying the seclusion of the monastery. He became our brother in chapter. The magnificence of the place and the frequent recreation of the brethren pleased him greatly. Every day, he asked to be served with a monk's portion, such as the brothers take in the refectory. Some say that he declared that he had never enjoyed the pleasant company of monks so much. But on the twelfth day, he said farewell to the monks and hurried to join his father.’¹⁹⁷ Although there is no connection between the two, this report anticipates the story of Edward's going into seclusion as a hermit, which was contained in the famous letter of Manuel Fieschi composed some time in the late 1330s.¹⁹⁸ When he visited the cathedral abbey of Ely at Easter 1314 and debated with the monks over whether they or the monks of St Albans possessed the true relics of St Alban, he seems to have been greatly enjoying himself, even if his hosts were embarrassed.¹⁹⁹ On another occasion when Edward was dining with Abbot Thoky of St Peter's abbey in Gloucester, the king is supposed to have looked at the painted figures of his predecessors around the hall. The abbot asked Edward whether he would like to be portrayed among them, only for Edward to reply ‘more in prophecy than in jest’ that he hoped he would occupy a more honourable place, ‘and so it turned out’.²⁰⁰ One of Edward's close personal friends was William, the abbot of the Premonstratensian house at Langdon in Kent. In 1321 Edward II's favourite, Hugh Despenser the Younger, fled the country allegedly disguised as a monk of Langdon, while in October 1323 Edward wrote to the pope asking (unsuccessfully) for the appointment of William as bishop of Bath and Wells in place of John Droxford who had opposed the king in 1321–2; in late August 1325 Edward spent time at Langdon debating whether to cross to France to do homage. William's loyalty to Edward II survived the king's deposition: in 1330 he was one of those implicated in the earl of Kent's doomed plot to free Edward II, as they hoped, from captivity.²⁰¹

Edward's piety and his tendency to turn to religion for help when in a tight corner were expressed on a number of other significant occasions. The Dominican house at King's Langley was said to have been founded by Edward in fulfilment of a vow he had made ‘when in peril’. It is not known to what this refers, but it was probably during one of the Scottish campaigns between 1300 and 1307. The first friars arrived at Langley in late October 1307, presumably in the wake of a decision taken by Edward very soon after his accession to the throne in July; they were to have numbered 100 but in 1311 there were only 45. Edward also intended the house to be built in the park at his manor of King's Langley but until 1311 the friars were staying ‘at Langley in another place’, the king's lodge known as Little London. In March that year Edward granted them 700 marks for the construction of their house ‘in which to celebrate prayers daily for the souls of his ancestors, and for himself and his state’. The money was however to be provided by the abbey of St Albans at the rate of £100 a year, in payment of a debt to the king. The church, which was the first building to be constructed, was consecrated as ‘Christ Church’ or ‘St Saviour’ in the summer of 1312 and was the scene of the solemn burial of Edward II's former favourite Piers Gaveston in January 1315.²⁰² Edward II made the tomb of Gaveston a focal point of his spiritual life, and both then and for the rest of his reign he made regular and generous offerings at it. On 31 January 1325, for example, he attended mass for Gaveston's soul at Langley, during which he made offerings of 9s 4d and placed two cloths of gold, one red and one white, and worth £5, on the tomb.²⁰³ The church was not however complete in 1315; the buildings of the priory were not finished for another sixty or seventy years and Little London remained the home of the friars. Edward also intended to found a house of Dominican nuns subject to the priory of King's Langley, but this did not become reality until its establishment by Edward III at Dartford in Kent in 1346.²⁰⁴ At the time Edward II made the grant to the Dominicans in 1311 he was in another tight spot, one of a political kind, following the recent appointment of the Ordainers to reform his administration.

Edward's second religious foundation in the wake of a narrow escape was an addition to the Carmelite house which had existed at Oxford since 1256. When Edward was in danger of capture at Bannockburn in 1314 he is said to have vowed to the Virgin Mary that if he escaped he would found a house for twenty-four Carmelites to study at Oxford. The twenty-four friars were initially installed in 1315 at Edward's manor of Sheen near London (the present-day Richmond) and moved to Oxford in 1318 after Edward had given them his manor, known as the palace of Beaumont, by the North Gate of Oxford. Each friar was to receive five marks per year for his support. Edward apparently made this foundation despite attempts by Hugh Despenser the Younger to dissuade him on grounds of cost.²⁰⁵

On two other occasions Edward's attempts to invoke divine assistance came to nothing. On Palm Sunday 1314 (31 March), when he was beginning his journey north for a new campaign in Scotland, he stopped at St Alban's abbey where he made an offering to the saint of a gold cross set with precious stones and containing relics of various other saints. Edward commended himself and his affairs to the protection of St Alban and to the prayers of the monks.²⁰⁶ On Easter Sunday (7 April) he was at Ely where he caused great embarrassment to the bishop and to the monks, who claimed to possess the body of St Albans, by telling them that his brothers at St Albans sincerely believed that they had the body. Edward, who seems to have been greatly interested in the question, then ordered an inquiry which proved that the true relic was indeed at St Albans.²⁰⁷ Whatever benefit he might have hoped for from the various relics of St Alban was not forthcoming since he led his army to disaster at Bannockburn on 24 June. His final quest for divine aid came in South Wales in October 1326 when he was fleeing from the advancing forces of Queen Isabella. Having set sail from Chepstow with the Younger Despenser in an attempt to reach Lundy and possibly even Ireland, Edward made an offering to Despenser's confessor in return for prayers to St Anne for a fair wind. Sadly both the prayers and the wind failed and Edward had to land at Cardiff and seek refuge in Caerphilly castle.²⁰⁸

EDWARD'S PERSONAL DEVOTIONS

One of his devotions was to his name saint and that of his dynasty, St Edward the Confessor, whose cult was central to the rebuilt abbey of Westminster and who was to figure prominently in the ceremonial of Edward's coronation in 1308. On that occasion the first clause of his coronation oath was a promise to uphold the laws, customs and liberties granted by St Edward to the Church and people. He was crowned with the crown of St Edward which was afterwards placed upon the altar in the saint's shrine; the sword of St Edward (curtana) was carried before him in procession; he made an offering of a pound weight of gold fashioned to represent St Edward offering a ring; and the chalice, patten, sceptre and rod of St Edward were used in the ritual. Edward II was in other words surrounded at his coronation by reminders of St Edward and of his own intermediate place between God and mankind.²⁰⁹ Throughout his reign the feast of St Edward the Confessor was routinely observed by Edward and his household, nowhere more significantly than in the chapel of St Edward at Windsor. This chapel was already old in Edward II's day, having been built by Henry III between 1240 and 1245/6 and matching Henry's rebuilding of Westminster Abbey as a shrine to St Edward.²¹⁰ In the summer of 1313 Edward ordered the refurbishment of the chapel, the appointment of four chaplains to serve there and to say two masses daily, one for the Virgin Mary and the other for the soul of Edward I. The king's chancellor was to inspect the chapel and its fittings once a year.²¹¹ A few months earlier the chapel had been the scene of the baptism on 16 November 1312 of the future Edward III, who was born at Windsor on 13 November.²¹²

Edward's other devotion to the cult of a particular saint was to that of St Thomas of Canterbury,²¹³ a practice he inherited from his father Edward I who visited the shrine of St Thomas at Canterbury on six occasions between 1279 and 1305.²¹⁴ Edward himself was there in July 1293 on the feast of the Translation of St Thomas, for the second marriage of Edward I and Margaret of France in September 1299, and visited Canterbury on sixteen occasions between December 1307 and April 1323.²¹⁵ As noted earlier, a Life of St Thomas was one of the manuscripts which Edward later borrowed from Canterbury and failed to return. More significant, however, was his choice of the martyrdom of St Thomas as the theme of the painting he commissioned from William of Northampton in April 1301 for the chapel of Chester castle shortly after he became Prince of Wales.²¹⁶ Although there are many surviving representations of Becket, this appears to be the only recorded medieval reference to an actual commission.²¹⁷ The later episode of the Holy Oil of St Thomas and Edward's unsuccessful attempt to make use of it and the accompanying legend for his own propaganda purposes is another highly significant example.²¹⁸ Edward did, however, involve St Thomas in another practice which was also designed to emphasize and to extend the sacred powers of the monarchy. This was the chevage or annual payment at the shrine of St Thomas at Canterbury which is first recorded in 1316 and which closely resembles the offerings that French kings had made at the abbey of St Denis since the time of Philip I or Louis VI.²¹⁹

These examples suggest that Edward II was very conscious of the sacred character of monarchy and of the indefinable yet very real power he derived from it. This was inherent in the ceremony of coronation which he had undergone in March 1308 and was always a bulwark against the power of his opponents. Only in the exceptional circumstances attending Edward's deposition in 1327 could this first and last line of defence of his royal power be breached, and even then with dubious legality. It should not be thought, for example, that when Edward sought to be anointed with the Holy Oil of St Thomas he was acting simply out of political weakness. There is little doubt that he genuinely believed that the oil had the magical powers ascribed to it. Another aspect of sacred monarchy was the ‘sacred touch’, the miraculous ability to cure scrofula (a tubercular inflammation of the lymph nodes) which was believed to be possessed by both the French and the English kings. In his study of the phenomenon Marc Bloch presented evidence from the royal household records suggesting that Edward II performed the ritual far less frequently than either his father or his son and that this indicated that his subjects were not inclined ‘to come for healing to a monarch lacking in prestige’.²²⁰ He also concluded that even within the reign of Edward II there was a marked decline in the numbers presenting themselves for healing, from 214 in 1316 to 93 in 1320, and only 79 in 1320–1: in a ‘good year’ during the reign of Edward I, 1296–7, 725 persons were touched by the king. However, Bloch examined the records for only those three years of the reign of Edward II.²²¹ On the other hand too much weight should not be attached to statistics alone, as Bloch himself observed.²²² Edward II also appears to have been responsible for introducing a new royal miracle, first recorded in 1323 (and possibly reflecting his new-found confidence since his defeat of his enemies in 1322), which had no parallel in France. After the adoration of the cross during the Good Friday ceremonies the king would place upon the altar a number of gold and silver coins which would then be ‘redeemed’ and made into wonder-working rings or ‘cramp rings’ which were supposed to cure the wearer of certain unspecified diseases.²²³

LEISURE ACTIVITIES

Edward II's interest in rustic activities ‘and other pointless and trivial occupations unsuitable for the son of a king’ was well known and commented on by, for example, the authors of the Lanercost chronicle,²²⁴ the Brut²²⁵ and the Vita Edwardi Secundi,²²⁶ by a household messenger in 1314,²²⁷ in the articles of his deposition in 1327,²²⁸ and in Ranulf Higden's Polychronicon.²²⁹

There is some evidence to support these statements. His liking of rowing, for example, is attested in September 1315 when he had a narrow escape from drowning while rowing at Fen Ditton near Cambridge;²³⁰ while a year earlier the Scots allegedly made fun of his engagement in this sport.²³¹ The ‘great company of simple people’ who accompanied him at Fen Ditton is one indication that he enjoyed the near-presence of the low-born, as are the records in 1325 showing that the master of the royal barge, along with royal sailors and carpenters dined in the royal chamber.²³² There is no direct evidence to support the claims about Edward II's interest in hedging and ditching,²³³ but the recent suggestion that the objections to these practices may have been to the enclosure of land for hunting and should be seen in the context of poems of social protest rather than taken literally is not convincing.²³⁴ If Edward really did engage in hedging or ditching or any of the other improper occupations, it is likely that he did so first at Langley, his favourite manor.

He had an interest in building at places of personal importance to him. Surprisingly, there is least evidence of royal building at Langley. The main construction work here was centred instead on the Dominican priory which Edward founded.²³⁵ When he was on his tour of Wales after being made Prince of Wales in 1301 he appears to have taken a personal interest in the refurbishing of Chester castle.²³⁶ There is particular evidence that in 1308 he was directly concerned in the preparation of Westminster Palace for his coronation. Two new chambers, one between the Green Chamber and the ‘queen's bridge’ and the other alongside the Painted Chamber for use as Edward's bedroom were constructed per proprium divisamentum Regis. Edward was also involved in the fitting out of the royal ship, the Margaret of Westminster, which was to fetch his bride and queen from France.²³⁷ There is also evidence that Edward played some part in the design of the great tower of Knaresborough castle and of buildings in Nottingham castle.²³⁸ He certainly influenced the details of work carried out, but there is nothing to suggest he was involved in the work itself at any of these places. The purchase in 1310–11 of iron and plaster for ‘the private works of the king’ suggests that Edward sometimes got his hands dirty, but even this does not prove that he did so.²³⁹

Edward did not engage in tournaments, which were in any case discouraged for political reasons during much of his reign;²⁴⁰ and showed only an occasional interest in hunting,²⁴¹ despite his huntsman William Twiti's dedication to him late in the reign of a treatise on the subject, The Art of Hunting.²⁴² He was, however, very interested in horses and clearly was a good judge of their quality. In 1304–5 Edward came into possession of the stud which had belonged to the late earl of Surrey and also asked the archbishop of Canterbury for assistance in obtaining a good breeding stallion.²⁴³ When Anthony Bek the bishop of Durham died in 1311 Edward II reserved for his own use Bek's famous Weardale stud of 240 horses and ten stabuli for destriers and other horses.²⁴⁴ Edward was also a connoisseur of dogs, which figure on several occasions in his correspondence for 1304–5.²⁴⁵ It was an interest he was to share with Isabella, his future wife and queen, who left her hunting dogs in the custody of the monks of Christ Church, Canterbury during her stay in France in 1325–6, much to the annoyance of the prior, Henry of Eastry.²⁴⁶ Hawking was another activity closely associated with the court. While Edward on occasions gave or received hawks as special gifts, again he does not seem to have engaged in hawking in person. Compared with the reign of Edward I, hawking declined during that of Edward II but revived under Edward III.²⁴⁷

There is ample evidence of Edward's interest in music, which included the Welsh stringed instrument, the crwth;²⁴⁸ and also the organ. He had an organ at Langley which was repaired in 1303 ‘against the coming of the king and queen’,²⁴⁹ while in 1305 he sent another organ to his sister Mary, the nun of Amesbury.²⁵⁰ At the feast held in May 1306, after Edward was knighted the guests were entertained by eighty minstrels, fourteen of whom were provided by Edward himself, including two trumpeters, five boy minstrels, one taborer (the tabor was a small drum), one harper, one player of the vielle (a four-stringed instrument), two crowders (who played the crwth), and one guitarist.²⁵¹ During Edward's reign as king there are many references to the performances of minstrels and others for the entertainment of Edward and his court, including John de Colon, from Lombardy, who used snakes in his act at Canterbury in August 1312; Cardinal Luke Fieschi's minstrel who performed before the king in December 1317; and John de Trentham the king's harper who went into honourable retirement at Muchelney abbey in 1328.²⁵² Edward II was not in any way exceptional in having minstrels in his service. The records show that members of the royal family, the nobility and the clergy all employed minstrels.²⁵³ They were an international fraternity, part of a cultural area in which French was the common literary language: when Edward's sisters Joan and Margaret married in 1290 minstrels came from all over northern France and the Low Countries; the same thing occurred when Edward I married Margaret of France at Canterbury in July 1299.²⁵⁴ However, not all of the performances witnessed by Edward II were of evident cultural merit. The most extraordinary took place at Pontoise in France in 1313 when he and Isabella were visiting the French court. On 19 June, ironically the first anniversary of his former favourite Gaveston's death, Edward and Isabella were entertained ‘with jubilation’ (cum tripudio) by Bernard le Fol and fifty-four naked dancers.²⁵⁵ Whether we are to interpret this event as ‘a decadent extravagance, fitting the familiar stereotype of the king’,²⁵⁶ or simply as something appropriate to a stay in France (for they were apparently French performers),²⁵⁷ there is little to be gained from pursuing the point.

Minstrelsy was not the only form of entertainment available to Edward. He kept a camel at Langley, both in his childhood and adulthood;²⁵⁸ and he had a pet lion which he even took with him on campaign to Scotland in 1303.²⁵⁹ Malcolm Vale has also commented that ‘the future Edward II of England, was already an experienced player of games of skill and chance in July 1299 when he was given 40s. by his father to meet the costs of his wagering in diversos ludos’.²⁶⁰ These probably included dice, chess and ‘tables’, international games which were part of the knightly way of life.²⁶¹ Edward played such games regularly with Piers Gaveston: in Scotland, for example, in 1302–3 and at Christmas 1310, and sometimes for high stakes.²⁶²

In many ways Edward II was typical of his class and time, in his level of education, religious practices, social relations and forms of relaxation. His experience of war was also considerable, as the next chapter will show. But it was in the wider realm of politics and kingship that he proved to be very different from both his father and his son. Some of the reasons lay beyond his control but the difference also lay within himself, not least in his obsessive friendships and eccentricities of behaviour.

¹ The classic account of Edward's early years by Johnstone in Edward of Carnarvon drew extensively on the substantial surviving household records both for Edward of Caernarfon and for Edward I. Although I disagree with some of her conclusions, much of what she wrote retains its value. I shall not attempt to emulate the detail of her study. The much older work of Dr J. Doran, The Book of the Princes of Wales (London, 1860) is of little value.

² Edward shared his birth date with St Louis IX of France. Liturgically St Mark's Day was celebrated by the carrying of black crosses in procession and by ‘prayers for good weather, good harvests and good health in the ensuing year’. Louis IX's biographer, Joinville, saw the date as prophetic of all those who would die with Louis while on crusade and of the king's own tragic end. No one in England noted the possible gloomy significance for Edward's own life of his birth date, which was celebrated annually during Edward's youth by rejoicing and the entertaining of ‘hundreds of poor people in honour of St. Mark’: Johnstone, 7–8.

³ Twelve shillings were paid for feeding 100 poor people, as the private alms of Edward I, and a sum of £9 was distributed at Caernarfon to mark the birth of ‘the lord Edward, the king's son’: E 101/351/15, m.2. Edward I was clearly present at Caernarfon on the date of the birth and not at Rhuddlan as stated elsewhere: cf. ibid., 8, n. 3. The birth was recorded by several chroniclers, one of whom remarked that at the news of his birth ‘many rejoiced, especially the Londoners’: ibid., 8, n. 1.

⁴ £10 in alms was distributed at Caernarfon on the day of the baptism: E 101/351/ 15, m.2.

⁵ E 101/351/9, m.12; A. J. Taylor, Caernarfon Castle, 4th edn (Cardiff, 1997), 10; KW, i, 372. The famous tower with its triple turrets, each surmounted by an eagle, was not finished until much later. The first evidence of any of the eagles being put in place dates from 1316–17, in the middle of the reign of Edward II. In 1321 a statue of Edward II was erected on the King's Gate, one of the last sections of the castle to see building works: Taylor, 10–17.

⁶ A good example is the birth in 1300 of Edward I's son, Thomas, at Brotherton in Yorkshire instead of at the archbishop of York's manor at Cawood, when Edward's new wife, Margaret of France, went into labour unexpectedly: Prestwich, Edward I, 131.

⁷ Here I am in fundamental disagreement with Hilda Johnstone, Edward, 6.

⁸ And the last native Prince of Wales until the revolt of Owain Glyndr in 1400.

⁹ R.R. Davies, Conquest, Coexistence and Change (Oxford & Cardiff, 1987), 353–6, 364–5; J.B. Smith, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, Prince of Wales (Cardiff, 1998), 562–7, 575–9.

¹⁰ Although the site had first to be cleared of nettles and thistles by two small boys, who were paid 4d for two days' work (E 101/351/9, m.13), it was a highly successful occasion which effectively demonstrated the English victory. The choice of Nefyn, the site of one of the former courts of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, was deliberate on the part of Edward who ‘took a particular delight in appropriating the residences of the Gwynedd dynasty’: Davies, Conquest, 355; Davies, The First English Empire (Oxford, 2000), 31–2. For Edward I's interest in the legends of King Arthur see R.S. Loomis, ‘Edward I’, Speculum, xxviii (1953), 114–27, and the more sceptical views in Prestwich,Edward I, 120–2.

¹¹ Smith, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, 579–80. Llywelyn had no sons but his daughter, Gwenllian, lived as a nun at Sempringham in Lincolnshire for over fifty years; one of Dafydd's sons, Owain, lived until at least 1325; Llywelyn's brother Rhodri lived until about 1315: Smith, 580; Prestwich, Edward I, 203; Davies, Conquest, 438.

¹² On 5 Aug., for example, the king and queen visited Bardsey Island, a famous place of pilgrimage off the tip of the Lleyn peninsula; they were at St David's cathedral in November: these and other details appear in the Alms Roll of 1283–4 (E 101/351/15). This is discussed in A.J. Taylor, ‘Royal alms and oblations in the late thirteenth century’, inTribute to an Antiquary, ed. F. Emmison & R. Stephens (London, 1976), 93–125.

¹³ Davies, Conquest, 354–5; Smith, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, 580–1; Prestwich, Edward I, 203–4.

¹⁴ Davies, First English Empire, 27. For a detailed study of the relationship between St Edward, Westminster Abbey and the English monarchy see Binski, Westminster Abbey, esp. ch. 2, ‘The cult of St Edward’. See also Prestwich, Edward I, 4–5. On 18 July 1297 the Stone of Scone, which Edward I had seized at Scone Abbey in Scotland in 1296, was dedicated in Westminster Abbey to St Edward. By 27 March 1300 the Stone had been incorporated in a specially made chair, ‘intended as the sacred reliquary of a sacred relic’, which was placed in the chapel of St Edward beside the shrine of the saint. The Stone remained at Westminster until its recent return to Scotland: S. S. Jervis, President, Anniversary Address 1997, in Society of Antiquaries of London: Annual Report: Proceedings 1997 (London, 1997), 12–13.

¹⁵ Annales Monasterii de Waverleia, Annales Monastici, ii, ed. H.R. Luard, Rolls ser. (London, 1865), 401–2.

¹⁶ Davies, Conquest, 356.

¹⁷ Phillips, ‘Edward II and the prophets’, 190; Davies, Conquest, 360; Prestwich, Edward I, 120.

¹⁸ Davies, Conquest, 360. The finding of the body and its ideological significance could be compared with the convenient discovery of the Holy Lance by the crusaders besieging Antioch in 1098. The legend confused another Constantine, the early fifth-century claimant of the Roman Empire, with the historical emperor Constantine of a century earlier: see Edward James, Britain in the First Millennium (London, 2001), 92–3.

¹⁹ Davies, Conquest, 360; Taylor, Caernarfon Castle, 39–41. The striking resemblance between the polygonal towers and bands of light and dark stone at Caernarfon and Constantinople suggested to Taylor that it could only have been intentional. The great tower known as the Eagle Tower also reinforced the imperial associations. Very little of this elaborate plan of construction had of course been realized when Edward II was born in 1284. Recent research has confirmed the imperial association in respect of Magnus Maximus, while calling into question the suggested connection with Constantine and the parallel with the walls of Constantinople: A. Wheatley, The Idea of the Castle in Medieval England (Woodbridge, Suffolk & Rochester, NY, 2007), ch. 4, ‘The imperial castle’.

²⁰ D. Powel, The Historie of Cambria (London, 1584), 377. The legend was duly repeated, with some embellishment, in J. Doran, The Book of the Princes of Wales (London, 1860), 15–16. This story was firmly discarded by Hilda Johnstone in Edward of Carnarvon, 6–7. However, modern research has shown that earlier material preserved in 16th- and 17th-century sources can sometimes be of great importance for writing the history of medieval Wales: J.B. Smith, ‘Gruffydd Llwyd and the Celtic alliance, 1315–1318’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, xxvi, part 4 (May 1976), 469–71, 477–8.

²¹ Edward was not at the time of his birth the immediate heir to the English throne.

²² E 101/351/12, m.2; Johnstone, 10.

²³ Annales Regis Edwardi Primi, Fragmentum I, in Chronica Monasterii S. Albani, ed. H.T. Riley, Rolls ser. (London, 1865), 464; also cited by a later St Albans historian, Thomas Walsingham, in his Historia Anglicana, ed. H.T. Riley, Rolls ser., i (London, 1863), 83. For whatever motive, Edward was remembered in his birthplace. On 2 August 1290, 6s 8d was given to ‘certain men of Caernarfon’ who had brought him four herons. These were probably the two Welshmen, Iorwerth and Dafydd, who were given the same sum on 15 Aug. for their return home: C 47/3/22, m.1. In Jan. 1301 the bishop of Bangor sent Edward presents of two falcons and a palfrey from Powys: E 101/360/10, m.2. See also Johnstone, 10, n. 4.

²⁴ One reason for Welsh loyalty was the fact that royal power in the principality of Wales was seen by the Welsh as a source of protection against the abuses of power by the English lords in the Welsh March, the borderland between Wales and England: cf. Davies, Conquest, 386–8, 394–7; and J.B. Smith, ‘Edward II and the allegiance of Wales’,Welsh History Review, viii (1976–7), 139–71.

²⁵ Phillips, Aymer de Valence, 221–2; Davies, Conquest, 397.

²⁶ Phillips, ‘Edward II and Ireland’; Davies, Conquest, 397.

²⁷ E.g. Polychronicon, 300–1. The same comment can also be found in Gesta Edwardi, in Melsa, and in Knighton. According to Thomas Walsingham, who was however writing long after the death of Edward II and in an abbey which had strong ties with the crown, the Welsh attachment to Edward went much further: ‘When Scotland would openly rebel against him and all England would rid herself of him, then the Welsh in a wonderful manner cherished and esteemed him, and, as far as they were able, stood by him grieving over his adversities both in life and in his death, and composing mournful songs about him in the language of their country, the memory of which lingers to the present time, and which neither the dread of punishment nor the passage of time has destroyed’: G.C. Coulton, Medieval Panorama (Cambridge, 1943), 560, citing Historia Anglicana, i, 83.

²⁸ The Wardrobe Book of William de Norwell, ed. Lyon et al., 178–9. The impostor's name was apparently William le Galeys (i.e. literally ‘William the Welshman’). On William see Phillips, ‘“Edward II” in Italy’, 222–6, and ch. 11 of this book.

²⁹ E 101/351/12, m.2; Johnstone, 9. She fell ill at Rhuddlan in Sept. 1284.

³⁰ Johnstone, 64; Letters of Edward Prince of Wales, 1304–1305, ed. H. Johnstone, Roxburghe Club (Cambridge, 1931), 114. This is an edition of E 163/5/2, a roll containing transcripts of over 600 privy seal letters sent on behalf of Edward in 33 Edward I, i.e. Nov. 1304–Nov. 1305. The roll throws a great deal of light on Edward's affairs and personality, but it is unfortunately a unique survival and also does not cover the entire year, there being a gap of six months between Langley on 27 Nov. 1304 and Sunbury on 18 May 1305.

³¹ The manuscript's former existence is known only from the first line which is recorded in an inventory of books owned by Edward II in 1320: The Antient Kalendars and Inventories of His Majesty's Exchequer, ed. F. Palgrave (London, 1836), i, 106, 116; R. I. Jack, Medieval Wales (London, 1972), 53–4. The possible nature of the manuscript has been identified in a brilliant piece of linguistic detective work by Andrew Breeze in ‘A manuscript of Welsh poetry in Edward II's library’, National Library of Wales Journal, xxx, part 2 (Winter 1997), 129–31.

³² Jack, Medieval Wales, 54.

³³ This is entirely speculation on my part but it seems a plausible way to account for Edward's possession of the manuscript.

³⁴ Louis of Evreux (1276–1319) was the half-brother of Philip IV of France and became Edward's uncle when his sister Margaret (1282–1318) married Edward I in 1299. There is evidence both here and elsewhere that Edward was on close and friendly terms with Louis, who was perhaps almost a father figure at a time when Edward was on bad terms with his own father. In 1305 Louis was visiting England, together with his mother, Marie, the queen-mother of France, at about the time of the start of Edward's quarrel with his father: Johnstone, 99

³⁵ Johnstone, 64; Prestwich, Edward I, 227. The modern reaction to this letter, especially that of Johnstone, is a very good example of the unfairness with which Edward has often been treated both in his own day and since. In this letter Edward is simply sharing a joke with someone he knew well. In her introduction to the Letters of Edward Prince of Wales, xxxvii, Johnstone made the very odd remark that the letter ‘seems to suggest that Edward himself was far from content with his position and his sporting equipment’. In fairness, her translation of the letter on this occasion (1931) is much less considered than in Edward of Carnarvon (1946).

³⁶ Edward may well have been thinking of the two greyhounds sent to him by the constable of Conway in 1300: Liber Quotidianus Garderobae, 28 Edward I, ed. J. Topham (London, 1787), 166 (an edn of SAL Ms. 119); Johnstone, 10, n. 4.

³⁷ Literally this means ‘men of the woods’: ‘homines silvatici’, and by extension ‘wild men’. The ‘wild man’ was a familiar theme in medieval tradition and folklore: see Phillips, ‘The outer world of the European middle ages’, in Implicit Understandings, ed. St. B. Schwartz (Cambridge, 1994), 48.

³⁸ Johnstone, 64, citing Letters of Edward Prince of Wales, 11.

³⁹ Davies, Conquest, 386 –7, 409–10, 415–16.

⁴⁰ J.C. Parsons, Eleanor of Castile (New York & London, 1995), 33; Prestwich, Edward I, 125–6.

⁴¹ Henry III had the abbey entirely rebuilt between 1245 and 1272 as a setting for the shrine of St Edward and for the royal tombs grouped around it: see Binski, Westminster Abbey, esp. ch. 2, ‘The cult of St Edward’. Henry III's other surviving son was named after another Anglo-Saxon ruler, the martyred Edmund, king of the East Angles (d. 869): see Prestwich, Edward I, 4–5.

⁴² J.C. Parsons, ‘The year of Eleanor of Castile's birth and her children by Edward I’, Mediaeval Studies, xlvi (1984), 258–60.

⁴³ Ibid., 261–2.

⁴⁴ When it came to family names, Edward I's devotion to the Angevin origins of his dynasty was greater than to the Anglo-Saxon.

⁴⁵ Edward's own existence had been threatened by the fire in the king and queen's chamber at Hope castle near Chester in Aug. 1283, at about the time when he must have been conceived: Parsons, Eleanor of Castile, 33, 267, n. 77.

⁴⁶ The fullest treatment of the children of Edward I and Eleanor of Castile is in Parsons, ‘The year of Eleanor of Castile's birth’, 249–65.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 261–2. Alfonso was buried in Westminster Abbey next to the shrine of St Edward. See Binski, Westminster Abbey, 93, 100; Sally Badham, ‘Edward the Confessor's chapel, Westminster Abbey’, Antiquaries Journal, lxxxvii (2007), 197–208.

⁴⁸ Johnstone, 12; M.A.E. Green, Lives of the Princesses of England, ii (London, 1850), 375–6. Of Edward I's children by his first marriage only two, his daughters Mary (1279–1332) and Margaret (1275–c.1333), lived to be over fifty: Parsons, ‘The year of Eleanor of Castile's birth’, 262, 264. The remaining daughters survived only into their late twenties or mid-thirties. In this company Edward of Caernarfon's life-span of 43 years was above average. Although Edward I was to live to the age of sixty-eight, his health in childhood often gave cause for concern; he had one brother, Edmund, but four other brothers and sisters died in infancy: Prestwich, Edward I, 6.

⁴⁹ SC 1/16/170: 1 Sept., 1286–90; prob. 1290: Johnstone, 24. There is nothing to suggest any other cause of concern for Edward's health at this time.

⁵⁰ Johnstone, 17. He apparently intended to hold a tournament at Wark in Northumberland in Jan. 1307 but gave up the plan: BL, Add. Ms. 22923, f. 14v; Johnstone, 117. It has also been suggested that he held a tournament at Roxburgh on 29 Oct. 1306, but Hamilton, 33, 138, n. 50, thinks this is unlikely. In any case arranging a tournament did not necessarily imply actual participation.

⁵¹ On the other hand, Edward did take part in a considerable number of military campaigns and was several times in imminent danger.

⁵² The Capetian dynasty, which had ruled England's powerful neighbour and rival the kingdom of France since 987, had been blessed with an unbroken succession of male heirs to the throne. However, in 1328 that succession too was to end, with disastrous consequences for France.

⁵³ Foedera, I, ii, 742; Prestwich, Edward I, 348–9; C. Given-Wilson, ‘Legitimation, designation and succession to the throne in fourteenth-century England’, in Building Legitimacy, ed. I. Alfonso, H.N. Kennedy and J. Escalona, The Medieval Mediterranean, liii (Leiden & Boston, 2004), 99–100.

⁵⁴ See the papers by G.W.S. Barrow, ‘A kingdom in crisis’, and M. Prestwich, ‘Edward I and the Maid of Norway’, Scottish Historical Review, lxix (Oct. 1990), 121–41, and 157–74. The negotiations had begun seriously in April 1289 but a marriage may have been considered even earlier: Prestwich, ‘Maid of Norway’, 165–8.

⁵⁵ F.M. Powicke, Henry III and the Lord Edward (Oxford, 1947), 732–3, 788–90; M. Howell, Eleanor of Provence (Oxford & Malden, Mass., 1998), 305; M. Biddle, ed., King Arthur's Round Table (Woodbridge, Suffolk & Rochester NY, 2000), 361–4.

⁵⁶ Biddle, ed., King Arthur's Round Table, 361–4, 390–1. The conclusion is that the most likely date of manufacture was 1289 but dates earlier in the reign of Edward I cannot be ruled out.

⁵⁷ J.P. Trabut-Cussac, L'Administration anglaise en Gascogne sous Henry III et Édouard I de 1254 à 1307 (Paris & Geneva, 1972), 79; Prestwich, Edward I, 307.

⁵⁸ Prestwich, Edward I, 364–9.

⁵⁹ Parsons, ‘The year of Eleanor of Castile's birth’, 261.

⁶⁰ Prestwich, Edward I, 128; A large family gathering, which appears to have included Edward himself, took place at Amesbury to mark the occasion. There is a detailed account of the event in Green, Lives, ii, 409–10.

⁶¹ Howell, Eleanor, 300.

⁶² Parsons, ‘The year of Eleanor of Castile's birth’, 261.

⁶³ Ibid., 262; there is a detailed account in Green, Lives, ii, 368–73. Edward and his sister Elizabeth made offerings of 2s 2d at the wedding: C47/3/22, m.1.

⁶⁴ Parsons, ‘The year of Eleanor of Castile's birth’, 260.

⁶⁵ Ibid., 265.

⁶⁶ Parsons, Eleanor, 59–60; Prestwich, Edward I, 125.

⁶⁷ Parsons, Eleanor of Castile, 37–42, and esp. 37–8. In 1285 she was resisting her mother-in-law's pressure. See also Parsons, ‘Eleanor of Castile (1241–1290)’, in Eleanor of Castile, 1290–1990, ed. D. Parsons (Stamford, 1991), 38–40.

⁶⁸ C47/3/22, m.2. This roll of daily expenses finishes on 19 Nov., the end of Edward I's regnal year. There is no surviving evidence to show Edward of Caernarfon's movements in the days immediately following. See also Johnstone, 24.

⁶⁹ Parsons, Eleanor, 58–60; Howell, Eleanor, 307–8; E. Hallam, ‘The Eleanor crosses and royal burial customs’, in Eleanor of Castile, 1290–1990, ed. D. Parsons (Stamford 1991) 15–18. Between 1291 and 1294 Edward I gave further expression to his grief by erecting elaborate stone crosses at the twelve places at which his wife's body had rested on its way to Westminster: N. Coldstream, ‘The commissioning and design of the Eleanor Crosses’, in D. Parsons, ed., Eleanor, 55–67.

⁷⁰ Howell, Eleanor, 310–12. She had shown her concern in the letter mentioned earlier in which she expressed anxiety about Edward's health if he were taken to the north of England: Johnstone, 24. It was no coincidence either that the family conference in April 1290 at which allegiance was sworn to Edward of Caernarfon as Edward I's successor was held at Amesbury: Howell, 305.

⁷¹ Prestwich, Edward I, 124. There is a detailed account of her long life and doings in Green, Lives, ii, esp. 408–42.

⁷² Howell, Eleanor, 300–5; Green, Lives, ii, 408–10. Mary's cousin, Eleanor of Brittany, did however go to Fontevraud, of which she became abbess in 1304.

⁷³ Prestwich, Edward I, 128.

⁷⁴ E 101/353/18; Phillips, ‘Edward II and the prophets’, 198; Green, Lives, ii, 373–5.

⁷⁵ Johnstone, 128.

⁷⁶ In 1290, e.g., when he was six, Edward had the company of his sisters, Eleanor, Margaret and Elizabeth, and of numerous other children, including Eleanor de Burgh, Matilda de Chaworth (the daughters of Richard de Burgh, the earl of Ulster, and of Payn de Chaworth, the lord of Kidwelly in Wales and one of Edward I's leading commanders in the conquest of Wales), and Humphrey de Bohun (the future earl of Hereford, who was born in about 1276 and therefore some years older than Edward): C47/3/22, m.1. Edward's contacts with other children were very similar to those of his father: Prestwich, Edward I, 5.

⁷⁷ My conclusions are essentially the same as those of Johnstone, 21–2. Her remark that ‘there is no doubt that in many respects Edward's boyish environment and experience have been seen askew by later writers, who viewed them through lenses coloured by the preconceptions, prejudices and patriotic convictions, of their own age’ is a very apposite one. Many modern comments have been unfair, when they have not been inaccurate.

⁷⁸ Philip IV grew up starved of affection after his mother died in childbirth when he was only three years old. He also had a poor relationship with his stepmother Marie de Brabant, unlike Edward who appears to have been on very friendly and easy terms with his own stepmother, Marie de Brabant's daughter Margaret, after she married Edward I in 1299. See Brown, ‘The prince is father of the king’, esp. 332–4. To make matters worse, Marie was more closely descended from the former Carolingian rulers of France than was Philip himself, so there was the nagging doubt that in a sense his claim to the French throne was weaker than that of his younger half-brother Louis of Evreux: Brown, 321, 332–4.

⁷⁹ This will be discussed in ch. 3. It is too simple to assume that after his mother's death ‘the little boy was left to become accustomed to a father, hitherto unknown, who never fully recovered from the loss of his wife, and who daily became more irascible and terrifying’: Johnstone, 128.

⁸⁰ Prestwich, The Three Edwards, 36.

⁸¹ Johnstone, 123–4, citing the account of Walter of Guisborough. Cf. ibid., 97–8, for the breach between Edward and his father in 1305.

⁸² P. Binski, The Painted Chamber at Westminster (London, 1986), 112; KW, i, 508, n. 7.

⁸³ CCR, 1323–27, 577.

⁸⁴ Disputes between Edward I and Henry III are recorded in 1255 (over Gascony) in 1257 (over Wales), and in 1260 (during the baronial period of reform): Prestwich, Edward I, 14, 18–19, 21, 33. On another occasion Edward clashed with his father when he wished to give the island of Oléron in Gascony to his uncle Guy de Lusignan. This can be compared with the bitter row between Edward I and his own son Edward in 1307 when the latter allegedly wanted to give the county of Ponthieu to his favourite, Piers Gaveston: Johnstone, 124, n. 2. These disagreements came as Edward grew to maturity and wished to exercise a degree of real as opposed to nominal power rather than because of any fundamental differences between father and son. The causes of dispute between Edward I and his own son and successor were very similar. My view of Edward of Caernarfon's relations with his father at this early stage contrasts sharply with that of Prestwich: Edward I, 127.

⁸⁵ Ironically, the only evidence of violence directed by Edward I against a member of his family at this period is in relation to his daughters. In a famous incident in 1297 he threw his daughter Elizabeth's coronet into the fire; while at the wedding of his daughter Margaret in 1290 he struck a page on the head and badly wounded him: C 47/3/25; Prestwich, Edward I, 111; Prestwich, The Three Edwards, 36. However, Prestwich also argues that ‘Edward appears to have been fonder of his daughters than of his sons’: Edward I, 127–9. My opinion is that there is no strong evidence one way or the other.

⁸⁶ There are numerous references to Edward and his sisters, Elizabeth and Joan, in E 101/351/9, m.14: in Oct. 1284 a feeding bowl, a ewer and basin for washing, a ‘little pot’, and a curtain and cord were bought for Edward and buttons for sewing on to his sister Elizabeth's smock.

⁸⁷ Records of the Wardrobe and Household, 1285–1286, ed. B. F. & C. R. Byerly (London, 1977), 194. (These are records of Edward I's household.)

⁸⁸ Johnstone, 9.

⁸⁹ CCR, 1307–13, 581; Johnstone, 9. Isabella was herself only about seventeen years old in 1313 and the mother of a young baby, the future Edward III.

⁹⁰ Records, ed. Byerly & Byerly, 194. Giles was described as ‘keeper of the wardrobe of Edward, the king's son’. The accounting period was Nov. 1284–Nov. 1285, covering the 13th year of the reign of Edward I. The figures quoted in this chapter have usually been rounded up or down to the nearest pound to avoid the confusion of pre-decimal pounds, shillings and pence.

The extant household records for Edward of Caernarfon preserved in the Public Record Office are recorded in List of Documents relating to the Household and Wardrobe: John to Edward I (London, 1964), 94–5. Some of Edward's household records are preserved elsewhere: e.g. BL, Harleian Ms. 5001 and Add. Ms. 22923.

For a detailed account of the organization and operations of Edward of Caernarfon's household before he became king see T.F. Tout, ‘The wardrobe and household of the Prince of Wales’, in Tout, Chapters, ii, 165–87.

⁹¹ Tout, Chapters, ii, 242: this sum included the expenses of Edward's sisters when they were in his company. There was no clear-cut division as yet between the households of Edward and other royal children.

⁹² Johnstone, 11. This was clearly a large household for a five-year-old child. On the other hand Edward I and Eleanor of Castile were absent in Gascony for the three years 1286–9, so their son's household in England inevitably gained in size and responsibility. The money to run it came from the revenues of the king's household and continued to do so until Nov. 1295 when Edward began to be funded from the exchequer: Johnstone, 11.

⁹³ C 47/3/22, passim: Roll of necessaries of the household of the Lord Edward, Son of the King, 18 Edward I; Tout, Chapters, ii, 166. Since Giles of Oudenarde ceased to act in Feb. 1290, William may have become keeper from this earlier date: Tout, ii, 165. On Blyborough see Records, ed. Byerly & Byerly, xx–xxi.

⁹⁴ Tout, Chapters, ii, 166–7.

⁹⁵ E 101/353/18, m.10: this figure includes a sum of £285 for gifts, offerings and other expenses (which accounts for the different figure quoted in Johnstone, 11).

⁹⁶ Tout, Chapters, ii, 166. There is some difficulty in distinguishing between receipts and expenses. It appears that the royal household paid out the sum accounted for by Blyborough, so that receipts and expenses remained in balance.

⁹⁷ The total of the receipts for 1295–9 was £5,264: ibid., ii, 167, and nn. 2, 3, 4; Johnstone, 11–12.

⁹⁸ On the crown's financial problems during this period see M. Prestwich, War, Politics and Finance under Edward I (London, 1972); and idem, Edward I, ch. 16, ‘The years of crisis, 1294–8’.

⁹⁹ Annales Prioratus de Dunstaplia, Annales Monastici, ed. H.R. Luard, Rolls ser. (London, 1869), iii, 392; Johnstone, 26–7. Viewed from another perspective, the presence of Edward and his followers was good for business.

¹⁰⁰ E 101/353/18; Tout, Chapters, ii, 166 and n. 6.

¹⁰¹ E 101/353/18, mm.1–4.

¹⁰² E.g., for much of 1288–9: E 101/352/16. It was from Langley that Edward and his sisters left for Dover on 28 July 1289 to meet their parents on their return from Gascony: E 101/352/16; Johnstone, 11, n. 2.

¹⁰³ On Langley see Johnstone, 28–30, 65. Johnstone, 28, plausibly but rather coyly suggests that his long residences at Langley were influential in ‘the formation of young Edward's tastes and habits’, presumably thinking of his notorious interests in swimming, hedging and ditching, but not being any more specific.

¹⁰⁴ For the details of his itinerary during this year see the table ibid., 26, derived from E 101/353/18.

¹⁰⁵ A much-delayed wedding since Eleanor had been betrothed to Alfonso, the son of King Peter of Aragon, in 1282. The 1293 wedding suited the changed diplomatic needs of Edward I: Prestwich, Edward I, 320, 389. The county of Bar was situated in north-eastern France near the border with the Empire in Germany.

¹⁰⁶ E 101/353/18, m.2d.

¹⁰⁷ E 101/353/18, m.3d.

¹⁰⁸ Ibid. On the links between England and Brabant, which were to be of great importance to the personal life of Edward as king, see Phillips, ‘Edward II and the prophets’, 198–200.

¹⁰⁹ E 101/353/18, m.3d. For the career of Bek see C.M. Fraser, A History of Anthony Bek (Oxford, 1957). Bek died in March 1310, just as the demands for administrative and financial reform were about to force Edward II to appoint the Ordainers. The Bridlington chronicler remarked that many considered that if Bek had survived, the dissension between the king and the magnates would not have lasted: Gesta Edwardi, 38–9.

¹¹⁰ E 101/353/18, mm.3d, 5d; in 1306 Bek was appointed as the nominal patriarch of Jerusalem by Clement V: Fraser, Bek, 164–5. These two visits to Edward in 1293 took place only two years after the loss of Acre and the virtual extinction of the crusader states in Syria and Palestine. In 1293 Edward I was still hoping to realize his long-standing ambition to lead another crusade to the East. It is more than likely that the young Edward of Caernarfon's two visitors tried to inspire him with stories of the crusade. Edward did eventually take the cross himself in 1313, although he never fulfilled his vow: see J.R.S. Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1998), 129.

¹¹¹ E 101/353/18, mm.4, 4d.

¹¹² E 101/353/18, m.4d.

¹¹³ All these details are in E 101/353/18, mm.4d, 5. In Nov. 1292 Edward I had declared Edward Balliol's father John the rightful successor to the vacant Scottish throne at the end of the ‘Great Cause’: Prestwich, Edward I, 363–70. Agnes de Valence, who had been married to Edward's uncle, Hugh de Balliol (d. 1271), was the sister (not the wife) of Aymer de Valence the future earl of Pembroke: Phillips, Aymer de Valence, 2; cf. Johnstone, 27.

¹¹⁴ Mary was only just fourteen in 1293 and had been a nun since 1285.

¹¹⁵ E 101/353/18/ m.6; and Johnstone, 28.

¹¹⁶ E 101/353/18, m.6.

¹¹⁷ E 101/353/18, m.7d; Prestwich, Edward I, 139–40.

¹¹⁸ All these details are in E 101/353/18, mm.8, 8d.

¹¹⁹ E 101/353/18, m.8.

¹²⁰ E 101/353/18, m.9, 9d.

¹²¹ Prestwich, Edward I, 127; Johnstone, 16–17; Howell, Eleanor, 292–3; Parsons, Eleanor, 88.

¹²² S.D. Lloyd, English Society and the Crusade, 1216–1307 (Oxford, 1988), 124. Experience of the crusade may have been a particular qualification for Guy's role as tutor to the future king. Two earlier crusaders, William Marshal and Philip Daubeny, had acted as tutor to Henry II's eldest son, the Young Henry, and to the future Henry III respectively: Lloyd, 100.

¹²³ Johnstone, 17. There is no surviving list of the members of Edward's household between 1288–9, when Guy does not appear, and 1300–1, when Guy is listed fourth in order of importance after Edward himself: E 101/360/17.

¹²⁴ E 101/355/17. On the same occasion Edward gave 40s to his hunter Edmund to buy a ‘rouncey’ or ‘nag’ ‘which the king's son had promised him for a long time’.

¹²⁵ E 101/363/18, f. 2; Johnstone, 17. Guy's son, also named Guy, was to have a distinguished career in royal service in his native Gascony, of which he was seneschal for both Edward I (1298–9) and Edward II (1308–10). This may suggest that Edward of Caernarfon appreciated the services that his father had rendered him and other members of his family. See J.L. Boehm, ‘The maintenance of ducal authority in Gascony’, in Essays in History, xxxiv (Univ. of Virginia, Charlotteville, 1992) (although there is some confusion between the careers of father and son).

¹²⁶ For a valuable summary of the debates on Edward's education see Johnstone, 18–21.

¹²⁷ Ibid., 19.

¹²⁸ Liber Quotidianus Garderobae, 55; Johnstone, 18; V.H. Galbraith, ‘The literacy of the medieval English kings’, Proceedings of the British Academy, xxi (1935), 215.

¹²⁹ Johnstone, 19–20.

¹³⁰ Ibid.

¹³¹ ‘Si Rex fuerit litteratus talis est’ & ‘si Rex non fuerit litteratus’: Roll K11 in the Canterbury cathedral archives: this text was used by the editors of the Statutes of the Realm: SR, i, 168.

¹³² Johnstone, 19; H.G. Richardson & G.O. Sayles, ‘Early coronation records’, BIHR, xvi (1938–39), 140; Richardson, ‘The English coronation oath’, TRHS, 4th ser., xxii (1940), 135, 144–5.

¹³³ Just as Prince Charles was coached in Welsh before his inauguration as Prince of Wales in 1968.

In the official records of the coronation, the Latin version of the oath appears on the Coronation Roll (C 57/1) and the French as a schedule to the Close Roll (C 54/125, m.10) which shows that they were regarded as equally authentic. The Close Roll text is omitted in the calendared version (CCR, 1307–13, 53) but is printed in Foedera, II, i, 36, which also includes the Latin text.

¹³⁴ Johnstone, 19. Edward III took the same oath as his father, both in language and in content: CCR, 1327–30, 100; Foedera, II, ii, 684. It is worth adding that, in the absence of official records of Edward I's coronation in 1274, it is unknown whether he also took the oath in French: see Richardson, ‘English coronation oath’, 131. A Latin version of his oath has however recently been discovered by Dr Bernadette Williams of Trinity College Dublin. See ‘The coronation oath of Edward I’, in Medieval Dublin, ix, ed. S. Duffy (Dublin, 2009), 84–90.

¹³⁵ SR, i, 157–67.

¹³⁶ Johnstone, 19–20, citing f. 218 of the still unpublished Register of Archbishop Walter Reynolds in Lambeth Palace Library. The register is the basis of a major study by J.R. Wright, The Church and the English Crown, 1305–1334 (Toronto, 1980). See also P. Chaplais, English Medieval Diplomatic Practice (London, 1982), i, 22, n. 126.

Another example, albeit at a different social level, occurred in Nov. 1317 when two French clerks first of all read out letters from Philip V of France to Gilbert Pecche, the seneschal of Gascony, in Latin before explaining them in French because he did not understand Latin: AN, J 633, no. 37.

¹³⁷ Johnstone, 20. The specialized language of papal documents was devised as a way of ensuring that papal letters could not readily be forged, but also to couch what was sometimes a blunt message in diplomatic language. A good example is another letter sent by John XXII to Edward II in 1318, in which he asked Edward to remedy the grievances of the Irish against English rule: CPL, 1305–42, 440; A. Theiner, Vetera monumenta Hibernorum et Scotorum historiam illustrantia (Rome, 1864), 201. A more recent example, which shows how readily an unpractised reader or hearer could lose the message of a complicated document, is Henry VIII's proclamation of 20 Feb. 1537 which began by rehearsing the many reasons why there should be a legislative union between Wales and England. Only towards the end does it become apparent that the ‘Act of Union’ of 1536, which provided for this, was in fact being suspended: Tudor Royal Proclamations, i, The Early Tudors, 1485–1553, ed. P.L. Hughes & J.F. Larkin (New Haven & London, 1964), no. 172, 254.

¹³⁸ Chaplais, Diplomatic Practice, 21–2, n. 126. The problem of language is more complicated than I have suggested here: ibid.

¹³⁹ Johnstone, 20–1. In 1297 Reynolds was responsible for purchasing supplies for the household, of which he was joint controller from 1301 to 1307: Johnstone, 21. Although he was not a university graduate, Reynolds was a patron and promoter of learning and was certainly not illiterate as his enemies claimed: see Wright, The Church and the English Crown, 250–7; idem, ‘The supposed illiteracy of Archbishop Walter Reynolds’, Studies in Church History, v (1969), 58–68.

¹⁴⁰ See R.I. Burns, ed., The Worlds of Alfonso the Learned and James the Conqueror: Intellect and Force in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1985).

¹⁴¹ Parsons, Eleanor, 9.

¹⁴² Prestwich, Edward I, 123.

¹⁴³ The Wardrobe Book of 14 Edward I (1285–6) records the purchase of ‘writing tablets for Eleanor the king's daughter’: Galbraith, ‘Literacy’, 215. This immediately follows Galbraith's remarks about Edward's laziness and stupidity and makes Edward's lack of education seem even more improbable.

¹⁴⁴ Parsons, Eleanor, 41–2, 271, n. 120; and idem, ‘Eleanor of Castile’, 38 –9, 51, n. 64.

¹⁴⁵ BL, Add. Ms. 24509, f. 61 (vol. 1 of Joseph Hunter's collections); Johnstone, 18.

¹⁴⁶ SAL Ms. 122, p. 92; M. Prestwich, ‘The court of Edward II’, in The Reign of Edward II: New Perspectives, ed. G. Dodd & A. Musson (Woodbridge, Suffolk & Rochester, NY, 2006), 69.

¹⁴⁷ Johnstone, 18.

¹⁴⁸ The manuscript was recorded as missing from the library in 1337: Ancient Libraries of Canterbury and Dover, ed. M.R. James (Cambridge, 1903), xlv–xlvi, 148. There is no indication of when Edward II had borrowed the manuscript but it could have been during the period 1317–19, when he was trying to make political use of the legend of the Holy Oil of St Thomas of Canterbury.

¹⁴⁹ Prestwich, ‘The court of Edward II’.

¹⁵⁰ Antient Kalendars, ed. Palgrave, i, 106, 116; Jack, Medieval Wales, 53–4.

¹⁵¹ M. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1993), 162. The latter work was De Rebus Hispaniae, by a former chancellor of the kingdom of Castile who had also been present at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1213, which had determined once and for all that the future of Spain was to lie in Christian rather than Muslim hands. It seems highly probable, as Clanchy suggests, that Eleanor of Castile had brought the book to England.

¹⁵² Codex Gall. 16. The manuscript should not be confused with another Isabella Psalter, which was made before 1270 for Isabella, the sister of Louis IX of France and is now Ms. 300 in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

¹⁵³ Evans, English Art, 15.

¹⁵⁴ D. D. Egbert, ‘Sister to the Tickhill Psalter: the Psalter of Queen Isabella of England’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, xxxix (1935), 759–88, esp. 760. But, even if Edward nominally commissioned it, he is unlikely to have had much if anything to do with the finished manuscript. Lewis argues however in ‘The Apocalypse of Isabella of France: Paris, Bibl. Nat. ms. Fr. 13096’, Art Bulletin, lxxii (New York, 1990), 234, that the psalter was commissioned by Edward I's widow, Queen Margaret, who was also Isabella's aunt, but presents no evidence other than ‘Edward's scarcely disguised indifference to his bride in preference to his favourite Gaveston’.

¹⁵⁵ The psalter later came into the possession of Queen Mary Tudor and is now in the British Library as Ms. Royal 2 B.VII.

¹⁵⁶ Evans, English Art, 15–16.

¹⁵⁷ Nigel Morgan in his article in the Grove Dictionary of Art (online version) argues that the manuscript was produced in England in the decade between c. 1310 and 1320 but can find no evidence of patronage or ownership. Kathryn Smith, ‘History, typology and homily’, suggests the ms. was made for Isabella, while the lengthy discussion of the subject by Anne Rudloff Stanton in The Queen Mary Psalter: A Study of Affect and Audience, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, xci, part 6 (Philadelphia, 2001) argues for but provides no conclusive evidence of a link with Isabella.

¹⁵⁸ Johnstone, 18–19.

¹⁵⁹ Clanchy, From Memory, 162.

¹⁶⁰ See ch. 1 of this book; Valente, ‘The Lament of Edward II’, and Tyson, ‘Lament for a dead king’. Neither argues that Edward II was the actual author of the poem.

¹⁶¹ See H.R. Lang, Das Liederbuch des Königs Denis von Portugal (Halle, 1894; repr. Hildesheim & New York, 1972); Burns, ed., The Worlds of Alfonso the Learned and James the Conqueror; and S. R. Ackerlind, King Dinis of Portugal and the Alfonsine Heritage (New York, 1990). Ironically, Dinis was also nicknamed el labrador, ‘the farm labourer’, but this referred to his encouragement of agriculture in his kingdom rather than to any interest in hedging and ditching which he might have shared with his English cousin.

¹⁶² Prestwich, Edward I, 6. I have deliberately quoted this description of Edward I, since even less is known of his education than of his son's, yet it has never been assumed that he was ignorant and untrained. The most thorough discussion of the languages spoken in thirteenth-century England is in Clanchy, From Memory, 197–211.

On the ability of Edward I and of some of his leading officials to speak English see J.R.S. Phillips & E.L.G. Stones, ‘English in the public records’, Nottingham Medieval Studies (1988), 1–10; see also N. Denholm-Young, History and Heraldry, 1254–1310 (Oxford, 1965), 54, on Edward I and English as well as his knowledge of Latin and French.

¹⁶³ It is interesting that Galbraith argued that from the time of Henry II ‘all our kings were taught letters in their youth, and their literacy, as distinct from their culture, has no particular importance … How far they were literate, in the strict sense of the word, that is to say to what extent they were Latin scholars, is hard to know; but, and this is much more important, we can hardly doubt that henceforth they could all read French’: Galbraith, ‘Literacy’, 215. He also notes that from the time of Edward I, for about a century, wills were normally written in French: ibid., 234, n. 35. It is worth adding, in relation to Edward II, that of the 719 items in his roll of letters in 1304–5, 676 were in French and only 43 in Latin. ‘A form of French, perfectly comprehensible to both Frenchmen and Englishmen alike, was the normal language of secular correspondence’: Vale, 43–4. The relaxed tone of the language of Edward's letters also suggests that, although he would have had clerks to do the actual writing, he understood perfectly what was set down in his name.

¹⁶⁴ As with knowledge of English, so with writing: the problem is ‘catching them at it’. It is only through the chance survival in the Vatican Archive of the young Edward III's 1330 letter to the pope with the words ‘pater sancte’ written in his own hand that we know he could write. It is also possible that Edward III wrote the response to a petition of 1350 in his own hand: Galbraith, ‘Literacy’, 222–3 & 236, n. 47. It seems unlikely that Edward III possessed a skill, even in a very basic form, which his father had not also possessed. For the text and comment on the ‘pater sancte’ letter see Chaplais, Diplomatic Practice, i, no.18, 21–3. The original document is ASV, AA, Arm. C, fasc.79.

¹⁶⁵ Foedera, II, i, 153; CCR, 1307–13, 448–9; J. Masschaele, ‘The public space of the marketplace in medieval England’, Speculum, lxxvii (2002), 393.

¹⁶⁶ Ann. Lond., 208; G.A. Williams, Medieval London, 2nd edn (London, 1970), 272.

¹⁶⁷ ‘Apparently’, since it is possible that the speech was delivered on his behalf. The speech itself is not recorded but is reported in the proceedings of the Oct. 1320 parliament: C 49/43/20: see Rotuli Parliamentorum Hactenus Inediti, ed. H. G. Richardson & G. O. Sayles, Camden, 3rd ser., li (London, 1935), 87, and PROME, sub Oct. 1324, in the CD-ROM edition or online version or in the print edition, iii, 420.

¹⁶⁸ Vale, 51.

¹⁶⁹ E 30/1582 (in Rotuli Parliamentorum Hactenus Inediti, ed. Richardson & Sayles, 94–8, where it is wrongly dated to June 1325). See PROME, sub Oct. 1324.

¹⁷⁰ Vita, 242–5.

¹⁷¹ Marc Bloch's verdict, for example, that Edward II ‘seems to have been a prince of second-rate character and intelligence’, is very like that of Galbraith: Bloch, The Royal Touch (London, 1973), 59.

¹⁷² E 101/360/10, m.2 (Roll of Edward's household expenses in Jan. 1301); E 101/363/18, f. 2 (wardrobe book of Edward of Caernarfon for 31 Edward I).

¹⁷³ A.B. Cobban, The King's Hall within the University of Cambridge in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1969), 11.

¹⁷⁴ Cobban, ‘Edward II, Pope John XXII and the university of Cambridge’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, xlvii (1964–5), 49, 62–3, 66–8; Cobban, The Medieval English Universities (Aldershot, 1988), 58–9.

¹⁷⁵ A. Gwynn, ‘The medieval university of St Patrick's, Dublin’, Studies, xvii (Dublin, 1938), 199–200, 207–8, 442–3.

¹⁷⁶ D. Knowles & R.N. Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses (London, 1953), 185, 198.

¹⁷⁷ Buck, Politics, Finance and the Church, 100–8.

¹⁷⁸ Cobban, Medieval English Universities, 129; Evans, English Art, 164, n. 4. The prayers for Edward II have continued into modern times.

¹⁷⁹ Cobban, The King's Hall, 9–13, 302.

¹⁸⁰ Cobban, Medieval English Universities, 128–9. Cobban also suggests that Edward II's foundation of King's Hall in 1317 was part of an attempt to develop the independent power of the royal household by educating future administrators who would, presumably, be loyal to the king rather than to his baronial opponents: Cobban, The King's Hall, 19–23. While the monarchy no doubt did hope to gain the future services of graduates of the university, such benefits would be in the long term and would have no bearing on the immediate state of English politics.

¹⁸¹ Cobban, Medieval English Universities, 128–9.

¹⁸² Prestwich, Edward I, 111. For a discussion of Edward I's religious proclivities and practices see ibid., 111–14, and, in more detail, Prestwich, ‘The piety of Edward I’, in England in the Thirteenth Century, ed. W.M. Ormrod (Grantham, 1986), 120–8.

¹⁸³ W.M. Ormrod, ‘The personal religion of Edward III’, Speculum, lxiv (1989), 853.

¹⁸⁴ Ibid., 855–6, where the most important ones are listed. The details are derived from the list of royal relics in 1331–2 preserved in E 101/385/19, f. 10r. It is unlikely that so early in his reign Edward III would have made many additions of his own.

¹⁸⁵ Phillips, ‘Edward II and the prophets’, 198–9.

¹⁸⁶ E 101/360/10, m.2. The reference to St Thomas must relate to a chapel at Ashridge since Edward was certainly not at Canterbury at this time.

¹⁸⁷ E 101/363/18: Book of Peter of Abingdon, controller of Edward's wardrobe.

¹⁸⁸ E 101/363/18, f.2. In all Edward spent £23 2s 9d on alms in that year. His gifts to the friars of London were all made on 13 March, the day he left London to campaign in Scotland.

¹⁸⁹ M. Vale, The Princely Court (Oxford, 2001), 236–7, 307 (Table 7). This material comes from E 101/376/7, ff.5r, 5v (a wardrobe book which covers only the period 8 July 1315 to 31 Jan. 1316). However, as Dr Vale points out, much more was spent (£334 18s 11d) on New Year's gifts for members of the court.

¹⁹⁰ C 47/4/5, ff.13, 29; Parsons, Eleanor, 41–2. See also Parsons, ‘Eleanor of Castile’, 38 –40, and 51, nn. 64 & 65.

¹⁹¹ Johnstone, 18; cf. Galbraith, ‘Literacy’, 215.

¹⁹² Parsons, ‘Eleanor’, 38. The role of Dominicans as confessors to English kings has been studied by R.D. Clarke in an unpublished MA thesis, ‘Some secular activities of the English Dominicans during the reigns of Edward I, Edward II and Edward III, 1272–1377’ (London, 1930). See also W.A. Hinnebusch, The Early English Friars Preachers(Rome, 1951).

¹⁹³ For Edward's confessors see, for example (Lenham) E 101/359/5, f. 5v; E 101/376/7, f. 4; E 101/363/18, f. 6. When Lenham was dying in Aug. 1316 Edward took particular care for his comfort: E 101/376/7, f. 5v; SAL, Ms.120, f. 8v. (Wodeford and Duffeld): SAL, Ms.120, f.11v; BL, Add. Ms. 17362, f. 5; Add. Ms. 9951, f. 2. (Wrotham): BL, Cotton Ms. Nero C.VIII, f. 54v; E 101/373/26, f. 90. For royal gifts in aid of building work at Langley see BL, Add. Ms. 35293, f. 8v (1307); BL, Cotton Ms. C.VIII, f. 51 (1311); for the burial of Gaveston see Phillips, 63.

¹⁹⁴ Letters of Edward Prince of Wales, 1 & 21. A number of examples are cited.

¹⁹⁵ For details see Phillips, ‘Edward II and the prophets’, 196–201; C 70/ 4, m.6d. Even allowing for the rhetorical use of language in a letter to the pope, this is still an interesting choice of words. A fuller account appears in ch. 7 of this book.

¹⁹⁶ Vita, 128–31. Whatever spiritual benefits Edward obtained from his visits to monastic houses, his hosts would have been put to considerable expense in entertaining Edward and his household.

¹⁹⁷ V.H. Galbraith, ‘The St Edmundsbury Chronicle, 1296–1301’, EHR, lviii (1943), 75. The translation is that of Mary Saaler in her book Edward II, 1307–1327 (London, 1997), 17.

¹⁹⁸ See Phillips, ‘“Edward II” in Italy’.

¹⁹⁹ Historia Anglicana, 138–9.

²⁰⁰ Historia et Cartularium Monasterii Sancti Petri Gloucestriae, i, ed. W.H. Hart, Rolls ser. (London, 1863), 44. This tale was recorded in the context of the later death and burial of Edward II at Gloucester. It is not clear whether ‘painted figures’ (depictas figures) means two-dimensional images of kings or statues (see Historia, Introduction, lx). It is not known when this visit to Gloucester by Edward II took place. Edward was in Gloucester on a number of occasions, all of them late in his reign: in 1321, 1322, 1324, and in May and Oct. 1326: see the Index of Places in The Itinerary of Edward II and his Household, 1307–1327, ed. E.M. Hallam (London, 1984). Edward did not necessarily go to the abbey on each occasion, although as the biggest local source of hospitality, it would be the obvious place for the king to stay.

²⁰¹ Phillips, 206; Foedera, II, ii, 86; Haines, The Church and Politics, 137–8, 153 n. 95, 188 n. 51.

²⁰² Victoria County History, Hertfordshire, iv, ed. W. Page (Oxford, 1971), 46–51; Chaplais, 30, 110–11.

²⁰³ Proceedings of His Majesty's Commissioners on the Public Records, ed. C.P. Cooper, i (London, 1833), 502, citing E 101/381/4.

²⁰⁴ Knowles & Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses, 185; CPR, 1307–13, 453; KW, i, 257–9 (King's Langley), 264 (Dartford).

²⁰⁵ Knowles & Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses, 198. The story of Edward II's vow is recorded in the Chronicon of Geoffrey le Baker: see Gransden, ii, 38. The details are confirmed by a petition to Edward III by the Carmelites in 1330 in which they complained that their financial support was in arrears: SC 8/11/512, printed in RP, ii, 35, no. 23.

²⁰⁶ Historia Anglicana, 138. Edward was also reminded by the monks of an alleged promise by his father to help rebuild the choir of the abbey, and donated 100 marks and a supply of timber, urging that no expense be spared for the honour of God and of St Alban, the protomartyr of the English.

²⁰⁷ Historia Anglicana, 138–9. On inspection the relic of St Alban possessed by the monks of Ely turned out to be the cloak given to Alban by St Amphibalus to mark his conversion: ibid. The story of Edward's visit to Ely was reported by Thomas Walsingham, a St Albans chronicler.

²⁰⁸ SAL, Ms. 122, p.90.

²⁰⁹ See Binski, Westminster Abbey, 130–1; Foedera, II, i, 33–6; H.G. Richardson, ‘English coronation oath’, 149; idem & Sayles, ‘Early coronation records’, BIHR, xvi (1938–39), 7, 10.

²¹⁰ KW, ii, 868–9.

²¹¹ Foedera, II, i, 193; CCR, 1307–13, 586. No date is given but the entry appears at the very end of the roll, in company with entries for late June and early July 1313. The chapel had been served by four chaplains from its foundation.

²¹² Foedera, II, i, 187; CCR, 1307–13, 558.

²¹³ In 1320, in the course of trying to resolve a dispute between the archbishop of Canterbury and the prior of St Martin's, Dover, Edward remarked on his special devotion to St Thomas: RP, i, 370.

²¹⁴ A. J. Duggan, ‘The cult of St. Thomas Becket in the thirteenth century’, in St. Thomas Cantilupe, Bishop of Hereford, ed. M. Jancey (Hereford, 1982), 31.

²¹⁵ 1293: E 101/353/18, m.6. His visits to Canterbury as king are listed in the Index of Places, in E.M. Hallam, The Itinerary of Edward II. It does not of course follow that Edward went to St Thomas's shrine on each of these occasions but it is likely that he made a considerable number of visits.

Edward was also interested in encouraging the process for the canonization of another Thomas, Thomas Cantilupe bishop of Hereford (d. 1282). The bull of canonization was finally issued on 17 April 1320 during a mission to Avignon by Adam Orleton, bishop of Hereford and other royal envoys. Orleton then attended the ceremony on 27 May. Edward II expressed his pleasure at the canonization and stated that he would attend the translation of the remains of the new saint. In Nov. he gave orders for the collection of alms for the construction of St Thomas's shrine: Haines, The Church and Politics, 24–5; P.H. Daly, ‘The process of canonization in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries’, and P. E. Morgan, ‘The effect of the pilgrim cult of St. Thomas Cantilupe on Hereford cathedral’, in M. Jancey, ed., St Thomas Cantilupe, 135, 150–1.

²¹⁶ William was asked for ‘a picture of blessed Thomas the martyr with the four knights who slew him’: Johnstone, 61, citing the account roll of William Melton, chamberlain of Chester, 1301 (National Library of Wales, Wynnstay Ms. 86), ed. R.S. Brown in Cheshire in the Pipe Rolls, 1158–1301, Lancashire & Cheshire Record Soc., xcii (Manchester, 1938): see App., 209, 219. The painting is no longer extant.

²¹⁷ This was the opinion expressed to Professor Johnstone by Professor C.T. Borenius, the author of St Thomas Becket in Art (London, 1932). The Chester painting was not however previously known to him and does not figure in the list of English wall-paintings of the martyrdom: ibid., 98–9.

²¹⁸ Bloch, Royal Touch, 137–9.

²¹⁹ Ibid., 352, n. 116.

²²⁰ Ibid., 56–60.

²²¹ Ibid., 56–9, 310, n. 18, and 311, n. 25. Between 8 July and 19 Oct. 1322 he blessed a mere 36 sick poor men: BL, Stowe Ms. 553, f. 118; Prestwich, ‘The court of Edward II’, 67. Edward III continued the practice but it is recorded only between 1336 and 1344; the lack of further evidence may, as Mark Ormrod suggests, be the result of changes in record-keeping practice rather than disuse of the royal touch: Ormrod, ‘The personal religion of Edward III’, 862–3. Perhaps something of the kind also happened during Edward II's reign.

²²² Bloch, Royal Touch, 57–8.

²²³ Ibid., 92–3, 250 –2. The practice is referred to in the household ordinance of 1323 but it was probably already in use: ibid., 327, n. 5.

²²⁴ Lanercost, 236 (rowing, driving carts, hedging, ditching, ‘various works of ingenuity and skill’).

²²⁵ Brut, i, 208 (rowing).

²²⁶ Vita, 69 (rustic pursuits).

²²⁷ H. Johnstone, ‘Eccentricities of Edward II’, 264–7, citing the Memoranda Roll for 1315–16, E 368/86, m.32d. (‘making ditches and digging and other improper occupations’).

²²⁸ Select Documents, 37 (unsuitable work and occupations).

²²⁹ Polychronicon, 298: ‘he forsook the company of lords and sought out the company of harlots, singers, jesters, carters, delvers, ditchers, rowers and other craftsmen’.

²³⁰ Flores, 173. Fen Ditton is today the scene of the annual rowing races or ‘bumps’ held by the university of Cambridge, in which the object is to make physical contact with a rival boat. This form of rowing can lead to accidents and makes one wonder whether Edward's narrow escape was the result of a similar boisterous sport.

²³¹ Brut, i, 208.

²³² SAL, Ms. 122, pp. 4, 6, 7, 30; Prestwich, ‘The court of Edward II’, 72.

²³³ Except of course, E 368/86, m.32d, cited above: but this is a report of someone else's comment about Edward rather than an official record per se.

²³⁴ Richardson, ‘“Hedging, ditching”’, 40–2. Dr Richardson draws particular attention to the creation of the 1,737-hectare deer park at Clarendon in 1317.

²³⁵ KW, i, 972–3.

²³⁶ Cheshire in the Pipe Rolls, 189–90.

²³⁷ KW, i, 506.

²³⁸ Prestwich, ‘The court of Edward II’, 67; KW, i, 698, 761.

²³⁹ BL, Cotton Mss, Nero C.VIII, f. 57; Prestwich, ‘The court of Edward II’, 71–2. See also Richardson, ‘“Hedging, ditching”’, 31.

²⁴⁰ However J.S. Hamilton cites a number of occasions when, as Prince of Wales, Edward gave assistance to others who engaged in them. There were also the tournaments early in his reign in which Gaveston and his companions showed off their prowess, much to the annoyance of other barons. J.S. Hamilton, ‘The character of Edward II’, in The Reign of Edward II: New Perspectives, ed. G. Dodd and A. Musson (Woodbridge, Suffolk & Rochester, NY, 2006), 6.

²⁴¹ Prestwich, ‘The court of Edward II’, 72. In June 1312 Edward was shooting with a bow in Hatfield park. However, he had to borrow the bow and arrows for the occasion from a valet of the earl of Pembroke, so this may not have been a regular occurrence. It is also not clear whether he was using the bow for hunting or target practice: Vale, The Princely Court, 180.

²⁴² The most recent edition is by B. Daniellsson, Stockholm Studies in English, XXXVII, Cynegetica Anglica, i (Stockholm, 1977). The role of Twyti (who died in about 1328) seems to have been to feed the royal household rather than guide his royal master on the hunting field. The royal hunt in Clarendon park in August 1326, when 88 great bucks were taken in a single day, is more likely to have been of this kind rather than a personal outing by the king: cf. Richardson, ‘“Hedging, ditching”’, 37, citing C 145/106/8/2.

²⁴³ Letters of Edward Prince of Wales, 31; Hamilton, ‘The character of Edward II’, 7.

²⁴⁴ Article by C.M. Fraser in the Oxford DNB. Edward also kept the pick of his jewels, and later bought from his executors his gold plate for 2,075 marks (£1,383). He also bought for £500 Bek's campaign tents, consisting of two aulae, three camerae, and a chapel.

²⁴⁵ Letters of Edward Prince of Wales, 83, 116–17; Hamilton, ‘The character of Edward II’, 8.

²⁴⁶ Literae Cantuarienses, i, ed. J.B. Sheppard, (London, 1887), 164–71.

²⁴⁷ R. S. Oggins, The Kings and their Hawks (New Haven & London, 2004), 86, 89, 91, 108, 185.

²⁴⁸ Letters of Edward Prince of Wales, 114.

²⁴⁹ KW, i, 973.

²⁵⁰ Letters of Edward Prince of Wales, 134; Hamilton, ‘The character of Edward II’, 9.

²⁵¹ C. Bullock-Davies, ‘Multitudo’ (Cardiff, 1978), 1–13.

²⁵² Bullock-Davies, A Register of Royal and Baronial Minstrels, 1272–1327 (Woodbridge, Suffolk & Dover, NH, 1986), 32, 53, 209.

²⁵³ See Bullock-Davies, Register.

²⁵⁴ Vale, The Princely Court, 292–3.

²⁵⁵ E 101/375/8.f. 32; Bullock-Davies, Register, xiii, 9; E. A. R. Brown & N. F. Regalado, ‘La grant feste’, in City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, ed. B. A. Hanawalt & K. L. Reyerson (Minneapolis, 1994), 71–2.

²⁵⁶ Prestwich, ‘The court of Edward II’, 61. Edward was more tolerant of such displays than ‘the prudish Henry VI of England’ who ‘was said to have fled when naked dancers appeared at a Christmas feast’: Brown & Regalado, 84, n. 107.

²⁵⁷ As Constance Bullock-Davies mischievously puts it, ‘The entry is an unconscious confirmation of the waywardness of humanity, common to all men at all times; yet it cannot fail to raise a smile of amusement. Plus ça change, plus la même chose. The Folies Bergères has a long pedigree’: Bullock-Davies, Register, xiii. In any case ‘naked’ may mean scantily clad rather than nude.

²⁵⁸ In 1290 and again between 1322 and 1325: KW, i, 973.

²⁵⁹ CDS, ii, 364–67.

²⁶⁰ Vale, The Princely Court, 171.

²⁶¹ Ibid., 171–4.

²⁶² CDS, ii, 368; Vale, The Princely Court, 171–2. In 1307–8 Edward twice received sums of over £80 to pay for his gambling: ibid., 172; E 101/375/15, ff. 9r, 9v. The large sums involved may indicate that Edward II was a poor gambler or simply that he enjoyed the social contacts involved and did not mind too much whether he won or lost.