Stamping the legacy of conquest upon the Welsh was a project that required huge investment. The first Welsh war, it has been estimated, cost a relatively modest £23,000, but the second ran up costs of around £150,000. Much of this went on the castles built to secure victory, each of them worth between £14,000 (the eventual cost of the never-finished castle at Beaumaris) and £20,000 (for building Anglesey).
The investment was not all made in stone and timber. Edward imposed on Wales a conqueror’s peace as severe as the Norman settlement of England. In keeping with the legal revolution beginning in England under Robert Burnell’s supervision, the Welsh settlement was grounded in statutory law. The Statute of Wales, passed in 1284, overrode much of the native Welsh legal and administrative systems. Flint, Anglesey, Merioneth and Caernarfon all became English-style counties with the administrative machinery of sheriffs and courts that formed the central nervous system of government in the localities. English criminal law took formal precedence over Welsh custom and legal procedure. Edward also focused his ire on the Welsh princes, as family after family was destroyed, its lands taken and inheritances confiscated. Loyal Edwardians were parachuted into the principality to hasten the process of Anglicization from above.
But for all the changes the conquest imposed upon Wales, its effect in England was no less extraordinary. The vast price of conquest abroad – even if this only meant beyond the Marches – put Edward under serious pressure to make sure that a political consensus was maintained at home. As a child of the Second Barons’ War, he had seen his father fritter money on foreign policy, only to reap his rewards in the form of rebellion from the political community who paid for it. It was an experience he was determined not to repeat.
Clustered, therefore, around the wars of Welsh conquest was a huge programme of English legislative and financial reform. Almost every area of English administration, justice and financial regulation was addressed, as Edward’s government strove both to purge the machine of royal government of rogue agents, and to reach its hand deeper into the shires. The programme was the first great sweep of legal state-building that had taken place since Henry II’s day. Some of this was badly needed after the drift of Henry III’s reign, but the willingness of Edward’s government to engage with reform was also critical to the king’s success in raising the eye-watering levels of finance required to pursue his ambitious foreign policy in the British Isles.
The key measures were the statutes, overseen by Burnell, whose role in the architecture of the new English state was no less fundamental than Master James’s in Edward’s castle-building programme. The three statutes made before the second Welsh invasion (Westminster, Gloucester and Mortmain) had begun the process. After the invasions, the flood of legislation continued. The statutes of Acton Burnell (1283) and Merchants (1285) dealt with matters of debt. Westminster II (1285) was, like Westminster I, a massively wide-ranging piece of legislation whose fifty dense and detailed clauses set out new processes, rules and writs for everything from the inheritance and alienation of land and the passing of land from dead men to their widows, to the troublesome issues of false accusations of homicide and jury-dodging by rich men who bribed sheriffs to avoid doing their service.
These legal reforms were not simply aimed at making land disputes and trade agreements easier for the kingdom’s barons. Rather, they penetrated to the very lowest levels of society. The Statute of Winchester of 1285 revolutionized criminal justice at village level, where it was believed that criminals were avoiding justice because juries unwilling to indict and convict their own people were shielding them from the full weight of the law. ‘Whereas every day robbery, homicide, and arson are committed more frequently than used to be the case,’ it read, ‘and jurors … would see the felonies committed on strangers pass unpunished rather than accuse the offenders, many of whom are persons of the same country … our lord the king to reduce the power of felons establishes a penalty in such case, so that for fear of the penalty … they shall henceforth not spare anyone nor conceal any felony.’
Winchester demanded that local communities took responsibility for flushing out felons. If a crime was committed and no criminal produced, then the hundred would be punished collectively. It turned the whole system of law and order into a system where every subject had a responsibility to help keep the peace. ‘People living in the district shall answer for robberies and felonies committed in the district,’ said the statute, succinctly. ‘In great towns which are walled the gates shall be closed from sunset to sunrise … anybody harbouring or otherwise lodging persons suspected of being … violators of the peace’ would be punished as an accomplice to the crime.
But most visibly, Winchester left a stamp on the English landscape. Just as Edward’s workmen and woodcutters had cut a vast path through the woodlands of Wales during the pursuit of Llywelyn the Last, so now every commercial road in England was to be cleared for safety: ‘It is commanded that highways from one trading town to another shall be enlarged wherever there are woods, hedges, or ditches; so that there shall be neither ditches, underbrush, nor bushes for two hundred feet on the one side and two hundred feet on the other, where men can hide near the road with evil intent,’ read the statute. The mercantile arteries of England were turned into treeless highways to allow the free movement of goods and money about the realm.
Alongside the system of statutory reform, Edward’s government was characterized by a drive to streamline royal finances. A recoinage in 1279 sought to rectify the currency from Henry III’s reign, which was, according to Matthew Paris, ‘so intolerably debased by money-clippers and forgers, that neither natives nor foreigners could look upon it with other than angry eyes and disturbed feelings’.
Edward also instituted reform to the systems of royal bookkeeping. The Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284 arranged for old debts to be written off the pipe rolls on which government business was recorded, the processes for chasing up debts and fines from the royal courts were speeded up and royal commissioners were subsequently sent around the country to investigate debts owed to the Crown.
But even with these measures there remained a gaping deficit in royal finance by 1289. Edward relied heavily on bankers’ loans and a combination of regular taxes upon the lay and clerical population to top up his income. It was a sign of the political credit earned through his reform programme that he could raise taxes of fifteenths on lay and clerical goods early in his reign, and could continue to raise finance this way for years to come.
In law as in war, Edward was determined that his government should pursue radical and permanent policies that would leave a legacy long after his death. Only by this sort of active government could he hope to bind together a nation that would support him in his expensive foreign policy. Yet if his reforms were much needed and vital for the financial and political security of the Crown, there was a much darker side, too. The darkest stain upon Edward’s transformation of his kingdom spread from his treatment of England’s Jews.