Edward’s crusade started under a cloud. He travelled to the Holy Land via a familiar path: through the south of France to Sicily, graveyard of his father’s ambition, with the intention of moving on to Outremer via Cyprus. Before he had even reached Sicily, however, he discovered that the crusade as a pan-European venture had begun to unravel. Louis IX’s army was travelling several weeks ahead of Edward’s, and when Louis passed through Sicily he met up with his younger brother, Charles of Anjou, who had succeeded where Henry III had failed and claimed the Sicilian throne. While Edward was still marching through France, Charles managed to convince his brother Louis to divert his mission from Outremer to Tunis, where various enemies of Sicily were hiding from justice.
The French set sail assuming an easy victory, but just days after landing on the north African coast, Louis IX died of a plague that swept through the French army. In shock, Charles led the crusade back to Sicily, only for the majority of the French fleet to be smashed by a storm while in harbour at Trapani. Edward, Henry of Almain and the rest of the English arrived in Sicily in November 1270 to find the French in utter disarray. They wintered on the island, hoping that the spring might bring better fortune, but they were helpless when, in January 1271, Louis’s timid 25-year-old son, now King Philip III, decided that providence was against the French and turned for home, leading his men overland through Italy back to Paris.
Edward, however, was determined. When spring arrived, he sent Henry of Almain back to ensure the new French king did not attempt to threaten his lands in Gascony, then set out with his remaining men for Outremer. They arrived in mid-May.
Just over a year later Edward found himself in the heart of the labyrinthine politics of the Middle East. Christian Outremer had dwindled almost into oblivion. Frankish rule was in a parlous way. Despite Richard earl of Cornwall’s efforts briefly to reinstate control over Jerusalem during the 1240s, and Louis IX’s massive expenditure fortifying the city of Caesarea at the same time, most of the great cities of Christian Palestine had since fallen to Mamluk invaders. Caesarea and Jerusalem were in infidel hands. So too were Antioch and the supposedly impregnable crusader fortress the Crac des Chevaliers, whose soaring walls had resisted the hammering of trebuchets but which had fallen to trickery. What remained of the kingdom was ruled from Acre – a demoralized city surrounded by hostile country and dreading any day the arrival of a Mamluk army thousands strong beneath its walls.
It was clear from the outset that Edward’s crusade was never destined to be much more than a sortie into a hopeless battlefield. The Christians were done for, and the days of great triumphs before the walls of the most spectacular cities of the Middle East were over. The main enemy to the Muslim forces of Palestine was now no longer the Frankish knights of the West but the terrifying Mongol horsemen who attacked them from the north and east. Edward and his companions found not a vast war to be joined, but a diplomatic jigsaw to be puzzled over.
Yet Edward stayed for more than a year, organizing sorties into Muslim territory, exchanging letters with the Mongol leader Abagha Khan in Marageh – a city some 700 miles from Acre – and welcoming the occasional arrival of fresh troops from the West, including a party led by his brother Edmund. He was determined to make the best of his crusade, even in heroically unpromising circumstances.
On the evening of 17 June 1272 – his thirty-third birthday – Edward lay in bed with his wife in his private chambers in Acre. As he drifted into sleep, he had much to contemplate. His small band of men suffered horribly from heat and dysentery. The Mamluk leader Baybars had vastly superior forces and supplies. Hugh III, the titular king of Jerusalem, was more inclined to peace than war, and the previous month had signed a ten-year peace with Baybars, which restricted Edward’s hopes of glory still further. Edward had been furious when the treaty was agreed. He had refused to become a party to it: quite likely he was still brooding as he fell asleep on his night of reckoning in the East.
What happened to Edward that evening became the stuff of legend. As he slept, a messenger arrived, claiming to be a renegade diplomat: a turncoat from Baybars, here at the English court bearing lavish gifts and ready to give up his own side’s secrets. Whatever message he gave Edward’s servants and guards must have sounded both urgent and convincing, for they woke the sleeping prince and asked him to meet his visitor. Edward staggered out of his sleeping chamber and met the man while still wearing his nightclothes.
As it transpired, the messenger wished to give Edward a very special birthday gift: a death blow. His position as the only non-signatory to the peace deal had made him a dangerous presence, whom Baybars wished to be rid of. The messenger rushed at Edward with a dagger, attempting to stab him in the hip. But Edward, no mean fighter, was up to the task. ‘The Saracen met him and stabbed him on the hip with a dagger, making a deep, dangerous wound,’ wrote the chronicler known as the Templar of Tyre. ‘The Lord Edward felt himself struck, and he struck the Saracen a blow with his fist, on the temple, which knocked him senseless to the ground for a moment. Then the Lord Edward caught up a dagger from the table which was in the chamber, and stabbed the Saracen in the head and killed him.’ In hand-to-hand combat, there were few who could match the long-limbed Englishman.
Nevertheless, when he rose from his opponent’s dying body, Edward realized that the blow that had caught him was a serious one. As attendants rushed to the scene, it was feared that the weapon might be poisoned. Legend has it that Eleanor of Castile tried to suck the venom from her husband’s wound, though as it turned out the dagger was almost certainly poison-free.
There was still a real risk of infection, though, which could lead to the same sort of agonizing gangrenous death that Richard I had suffered at Châlus-Chabrol. Edward was saved from a similar fate by a more skilful surgeon, who cut away the rotting flesh that festered around his wound. He took his time to recuperate, before he and Eleanor of Castile, together with their young daughter Joan who had been born in Acre, departed Outremer for Europe in late September. They stopped in Sicily on their way home, before travelling to the Italian mainland for Christmas. It was here that they were met by English messengers bearing sad news. Henry III had died in November, aged sixty-five, following a short illness. After a magnificent funeral, he had been buried in the tomb vacated by Edward the Confessor’s recent translation. And after one of the most remarkable apprenticeships in his family’s eventful history, Edward I was now king.
He took his time returning to England. Trusting the government of his kingdom to ministers such as Robert Burnell, his most trusted and senior clerk, Edward stayed abroad to enjoy the fruits of his glamorous crusader reputation. He joined in French tournaments, did homage to Philip III for his French lands, and settled the rumblings of rebellion in Gascony. Then, during the dog days of 1274, he sailed for England, his coronation day set for Sunday 19 August 1274.
Edward alighted at Dover on 4 August, setting foot on home soil for the first time in nearly four years. He returned to a country that had waited patiently for his kingship, and which now acclaimed him in style. There had been plenty of time to prepare for his arrival. Edward was the first king to be crowned for more than half a century. There was a whole new royal family to welcome. At the coronation Queen Eleanor was in the early stages of her tenth pregnancy with a child, Margaret, who would be born in 1275. After the long and troubled reign of Henry III, here was a brand-new generation of royal power and people to welcome.
The citizens of London – despite or perhaps because of their acrimonious history with Edward – used the occasion to produce a festival of show and wealth. ‘When Edward thrives, behold!’ wrote one enthusiastic Londoner. ‘He shines like a new Richard!’ Unfortunately, no detailed accounts of the ceremony survive, but it is known that the city was draped in gold cloth, and certain that there was pageantry and mass celebration in the streets as the king and his entourage rode into the city. Edward most likely processed from the Tower of London to the palace of Westminster on the day before his coronation, before staying overnight in the Painted Chamber, richly decorated with biblical images and scenes from his family’s history.
The abbey must have been packed with magnates from England and her neighbours, who would have watched rapt as Edward processed towards a giant wooden stage at the crossing of the church. They would have watched him make an offering at the altar of two gold figurines – one of St Edward the Confessor and another of St John the Evangelist. Then he made the same coronation oath that his ancestors had sworn. In what was now time-honoured fashion, Edward promised to protect the Church, to do justice to all men, to abolish evil customs and to protect the rights of the Crown. Unlike many of his predecessors, as Edward swore these things to a packed abbey, he meant every word. However he conceived of simple lordship, he always treated kingship as an office predicated on the need for strong, universal authority. It was time to win back the power lost by his forebears.
Edward’s first priority was the oath he swore to protect the rights of the Crown. Almost as soon as the celebrations were complete, royal servants began a survey of royal rights in England that was conducted on a gigantic scale – comparable only to the Domesday Book of William I’s reign. It was known as the Hundred Rolls inquiries, since it concentrated on the hundreds – the smaller subdivisions of the English shires, which were used for administrative and judicial purposes at a local level. Between November 1274 and March 1275, every hundred in England received a visit from royal commissioners, who put detailed questions before local juries ‘about the lord king’s rights and liberties which have been taken away and the excessive demands of the sheriffs, coroners, escheators and other of the lord king’s bailiffs and of any other bailiffs whosoever appertaining/belonging to the lord king in any way, in the third year of King Edward’s reign 1274–1275’. This, at least, was the purpose laid out in the text of the enrolled returns that collated the information that the commissioners gathered.
The Hundred Rolls inquiries were massively wide-ranging and extremely detailed. They were the first great project undertaken by Edward’s new chancellor Burnell, now the bishop of Bath and Wells, and a trusted, highly capable diplomat. Robert Burnell had governed England during Edward’s absence on crusade, and he would oversee much of the governance and administrative reform of England until his death in 1292. The commissioners he appointed collected vast amounts of material from the hundreds, ranging from examples of appalling abuses of power (beatings, torture and illegal imprisonment by royal officials cropped up in some places) to comical, harebrained schemes by imaginative or deluded men during the civil war (the sheriff of Essex was accused of having plotted to release flying cockerels carrying incendiary bombs over London during the troubles in 1267). They produced, in practice, far more information about wrongdoing and royal rights than could be manageably dealt with, and even when a general eyre was sent out to punish the crimes uncovered, it was clear that the king could not successfully prosecute every deviant royal official in the land. Still, the keen investigations into wrongdoing in county society conveyed the message to everyone in England that the new king was deeply committed to shaking out the corruption among royal officials that had blighted Henry III’s reign, and which had so animated the knightly class in particular.
The point of the Hundred Rolls inquiries, then, was more their symbolic value than their practical use. They showed that Edward had learned lessons from the baronial reform programmes of the 1250s, and had taken to heart the spirit of the Provisions of Oxford and the Montfortian protesters. By adopting and expanding the programme under the royal banner, Edward made an immediate statement about his reign: he would be the king who remedied ills of his own accord.
Well might Edward do so. For although he did not share his father’s instinctive dislike of political reform, he shared with him an extraordinary capacity for spending money. Edward had returned from the Holy Land with debts amounting to more than £100,000, much of which was owed to Italian bankers. Simply to manage debt like this would require political consensus and financial innovation. And given the ambitious plans that Edward would shortly unveil for an even more expensive and ambitious foreign policy than his father’s, he would need the community of the realm behind him. Legally, financially and politically, England – and Britain – was to be transformed. The first area of transformation would be Wales.