A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain
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Authors: Marc Morris
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A Great and Terrible King
Marc Morris is an historian and broadcaster. He studied and taught history at the universities of London and Oxford, and his doctorate on the thirteenth-century earls of Norfolk was published in 2005. In 2003 he presented the highly-acclaimed television series
Castle
, and wrote its accompanying book.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Castle: A History of the Buildings that Shaped Medieval Britain
The Bigod Earls of Norfolk in the Thirteenth Century
A Great and
Terrible King
Marc Morris
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781446410288
Published by Windmill Books 2009
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Copyright © Marc Morris 2008
Marc Morris has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in Great Britain in 2008 by Hutchinson
Windmill Books
The Random House Group Limited
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 2SA
Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at:
www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm
The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099481751
In memory of Rees Davies
Countries are not laid up in heaven; they are shaped and reshaped here on earth by the stratagems of men and the victories of the fortuitous.
R. R. Davies,
The First English Empire
(2000)
Like Alexander, he would speedily subdue the whole world, if Fortune’s moving wheel would stand still forever.
The Song of Lewes
, on Edward I (1264)
Contents
Illustrations
First section
The Mappa Mundi (
© The Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust
)
A page from the Alphonso Psalter (
© The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. Add. MS 24686, f.14v
)
The chapel doors at Windsor Castle (
By permission of the Dean and Canons of Windsor
)
An initial from the Douce Apocalypse (
© The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, MS Douce 180, fol. 1r
)
The coronation of Edward the Confessor (
© Society of Antiquaries of London
)
Edward and Eleanor pictured wearing their crowns (
© The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. Cotton Nero D. II, f.179v
)
A silver penny of Edward I (
© Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
)
The Great Seal of Edward I (
© King’s College Library, Cambridge, GBR/57a
)
A seal bag from Westminster Abbey (
© Dean and Chapter of Westminster
)
Conwy Castle (
Cadw/Crown Copyright
)
Harlech Castle (
Cadw/Crown Copyright
)
Caernarfon Castle (
Cadw/Crown Copyright
)
Beaumaris Castle (
Cadw/Crown Copyright
)
Edward I’s chamber at the Tower of London (St Thomas’s Tower) (
© Historic Royal Palaces/newsteam.co.uk
)
The Round Table in Winchester Great Hall (
By permission of Hampshire County Council
)
Second section
Matthew Paris’s map of Britain (
© The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. Cotton Claudius D. VI, f.12v
)
Flint (
Cambridge University Collection of Air Photographs, Unit for Landscape Modelling
)
Monpazier (
© Philippe Dufour
)
Winchelsea (
© Crown Copyright/MOD. Reproduced with the permission of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office
)
The tomb of Eleanor of Castile (
© Westminster Abbey, London, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library
)
The Eleanor Cross at Geddington (
© English Heritage Photo Library
)
The persecution of the Jews (
© The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. Cotton Nero D. II, f.183v
)
The tomb of Henry III (
© Dean and Chapter of Westminster
)
Débonaireté
defeating
ira
(
© Society of Antiquaries of London
)
The Coronation Chair (
© Dean and Chapter of Westminster
)
A possible portrait of Edward I (
© Dean and Chapter of Westminster
)
The warfare of Judas Maccabeus (
© Society of Antiquaries of London
)
The tomb of Edward I at Westminster (
© Dean and Chapter of Westminster
)
Edward I in his open tomb (
© Society of Antiquaries of London
)
Maps
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Preface
On learning that I was writing a book about Edward I, my non-historian friends and neighbours have asked me, almost invariably, the same two questions. ‘Was he Edward the Confessor?’ has been by far the most common. No, I would always answer, he was not; but he was named
after
him. In many cases this only served to provoke a subsidiary, more vexed inquiry. If my subject was named
after
one of his forebears, then how on earth could he possibly be ‘the First’? The answer, of course, is that he couldn’t, and that, strictly speaking, he wasn’t. For those who would care to know precisely how this confusing situation came about, I have added a short note of explanation at the end of this Preface.
The second question that has usually been put to me concerns the nature of the evidence for writing the biography of a medieval king, and specifically its quantity. In general, people tend to presume that there can’t be very much, and imagine that I must spend my days poking around in castle muniment rooms, looking for previously undiscovered scraps of parchment. Sadly, they are mistaken. The answer I always give to the question of how much evidence is: more than one person could look at in a lifetime. From the early twelfth century, the kings of England began to keep written accounts of their annual expenditure, and by the end of the century they were keeping a written record of almost every aspect of royal government. Each time a royal document was issued, be it a grand charter or a routine writ, a copy was dutifully entered on to a large parchment roll. Meanwhile, in the provinces, the king’s justices kept similar rolls to record the proceedings of the cases that came before his courts. Miraculously, the great majority of these documents have survived, and are now preserved in the National Archives at Kew near London. Some of them, when unrolled, extend to twenty or thirty feet. And their number is legion: for the thirteenth century alone, it runs to tens of thousands. Mercifully for the medieval historian, the most important have been transcribed and published, but even this printed matter would be enough to line the walls of an average-sized front room with books. Moreover, the quantity is increased by the inclusion of non-royal material. Others besides the king were keeping records during Edward I’s day. Noblemen also drew up financial accounts, issued charters and wrote letters; monks did the same, only in their case the chances of such material surviving was much improved by their membership of an institution. Monks, in addition, continued to do as they had always done, and kept chronicles, and these too provide plenty to keep the historian busy. To take just the most obvious example from the thirteenth century, the monk of St Albans called Matthew Paris composed a chronicle, the original parts of which cover the quarter century from 1234 to 1259. In its modern edition it runs to seven volumes.
I say all this merely to demonstrate how much there is to know about our medieval ancestors, and not to pretend that I have in some way managed to scale this mountain all by myself. For the most part I have not even had to approach the mountain at all, for this book is grounded on the scholarly work of others. Nevertheless, even the secondary material for a study of Edward I presents a daunting prospect. At a conservative estimate, well over a thousand books and articles have been published in the last hundred years that deal with one aspect or another of the king’s reign. For scholarly works on the thirteenth century as a whole, that figure would have to be multiplied many times over.