A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (34 page)

The English and the Welsh, it must be admitted, had never really seen eye to eye. From the moment that the first Anglo-Saxon settlers had arrived in Britain, their relationship with the Britons was characterised by mutual distrust and suspicion.
Welisc
was the Anglo-Saxon name for the Britons: it meant ‘strangers’. And all too often this estrangement resulted in bursts of war and violence. Offa’s Dyke, the great earthwork erected between England and Wales in the eighth century, stands as an eloquent reminder of the extent to which the two peoples were divided.

In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s day, however, this age-old antipathy was given a new twist. Latterly, the English had decided that the Welsh were not only different and dislikeable; in addition, they had now concluded that Welsh society was, by almost every conceivable measure, inferior to that of England.

The instigator of this new attitude, or at least the individual responsible for its earliest and most trenchant expression, was an English monk called William of Malmesbury. Writing in the 1120s, Malmesbury looked at his own society and saw that it was good. England, he noted, had abundant, well-tended fields, thriving nucleated villages and bustling market towns; its people used a plentiful silver coinage, built impressive castles and cathedrals, ate good food and drank good wine. The Welsh, on the other hand, had none of these things. Theirs was a pastoral economy of scattered settlements, lacking money, towns and trade. We have already noted this, and accounted for it chiefly in terms of an unforgiving upland landscape. William of Malmesbury, however, made no such allowances. To him, the differences between England and Wales were to be explained by the different characters of their inhabitants. If Wales was unproductive, it was because the Welsh were indolent and ignorant, preferring to stand around all day idly tending sheep, rather than setting their hands to the plough like industrious Englishmen.

Nor was that their only moral failing. Malmesbury and his contemporaries also noticed that, whereas the English chivalrously spared their enemies in battle, the Welsh gave no such quarter, nor did they spare the lives of non-combatants. Similarly, when it came to sex, the Welsh were way out of step with what was normal or acceptable. Marriages in Wales were celebrated within degrees of consanguinity that were prohibited in England, and furthermore could be dissolved or disregarded with unreasonable ease.

Lazy in their work, savage in warfare, lax in their love lives: there was only one word fit for such a people, the English intelligentsia decided. They were barbarians.

It was almost certainly with the intention of challenging such hostile attitudes that Geoffrey of Monmouth put pen to parchment in the 1130s.
The History of the Kings of Britain
sets out to show that, whatever the current state of the Britons (which, Geoffrey conceded, was pretty bad), they had once been a great and noble people. Their pedigree, he said, stretched all the way back to the fall of Troy, 1,200 years before the birth of Christ. Britain had been founded by and named after Brutus, the leader of a doughty band of Trojan exiles and forefather of the British people. In all their deeds, Brutus and his successors (who included Camber, ruler of Cambria; Corineus, founder of Cornwall; and, of course, Arthur) showed themselves to be truly heroic individuals, leaders of the greatest people on Earth. What is most striking, however, is the frequency with which they indulged in the kind of activities that contemporary Englishmen alleged were alien to Welsh nature. From the minute of their arrival, Geoffrey’s Britons ‘began to cultivate the fields’. Not long afterwards they started founding towns and cities. Thus Carlisle was the creation of King Leil, and Colchester the work of Old King Cole. London, we are assured, was so called after being rebuilt by an enterprising Briton called Lud. The subtext of such assertions seems undeniable. Geoffrey of Monmouth was not merely praising the Britons for the sake of it; he was attempting to prove that, contrary to the claims of their English critics, the Welsh were indeed a civilised race.
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In this respect,
The History of the Kings of Britain
was a grand failure. The English bought copies of the book in their thousands, but it did not alter their attitude to the Welsh one little bit. They loved Geoffrey’s stories, but proved remarkably able to separate in their minds the old British heroes they admired from the contemporary Britons they despised. (This disconnect is well illustrated in the Arthurian Romance
Perceval
, when one knight of the Round Table turns to another and informs him that ‘all Welshmen are by nature more stupid than beasts in the field’.) In spite of Geoffrey’s valiant literary efforts on behalf of his countrymen, English hostility towards Wales and its inhabitants continued to grow inexorably during the twelfth century, with the result that, by the thirteenth century, the barbarity of the Welsh was treated as a matter of fact. Old socio-economic proofs, for example, could still be trotted out as late as 1265. When Simon de Montfort led his followers into Wales that year, one English chronicler noted casually that they had to subsist on milk and meat because the Welsh, ‘that wild people’, did not know how to make bread. Welsh warfare was likewise still regarded as unreasonably savage by Matthew Paris, who noted that it spared ‘neither churches nor churchmen, women or girls’. And as for their other moral failings, these continued to excite comment in England, especially among churchmen. When, in 1280, the archbishop of Canterbury examined Welsh law, he concluded that much of it was contrary to the teachings of the Bible and should be abolished.
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In October 1278, having presided munificently at the wedding of his cousin Eleanor and Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, Edward left Worcester and turned his mind to other business.

The highest matter on the agenda, it seems, was how he was going to pay for the settlement of Wales. Before the outbreak of hostilities, thanks to the generosity of his first parliament, the king had been comfortably in credit. Now, three years on, his finances were once again in the red. The war itself had cost around £23,000, and during the campaign Edward had borrowed a sum equivalent to this amount from his Italian bankers, the Riccardi of Lucca. Of course, thanks to their special relationship with the king, the Riccardi could look forward to recovering this money from their control of the customs. That process, however, might take a very long time, for Edward’s expenses in Wales were ongoing. Road clearance, canal construction and, especially, the building of the new royal castles – by October 1278 the settlement was running up a substantial additional tab that would eventually exceed the cost of the conflict itself. After the war Edward was still taking out new loans from the Riccardi, his borrowing on average three times what it had been at the start of the reign. If, therefore, the system was not going to collapse in bankruptcy and mutual recrimination, more money would have to be found from somewhere.
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The king was evidently anxious that it should not come from parliament. To get another grant of taxation so soon after the last one would probably have proved impossible in any case; it would certainly have required political concessions on a scale that Edward would have regarded as unconscionable. The king, therefore, cast around for other ways of raising cash that did not require parliament’s consent. In the summer of 1278, for example, he resorted to an old fashioned money-raising expedient by ordering a so-called ‘distraint of knighthood’, a measure that compelled all landowners with property above a certain value (on this occasion it was £20 a year) to become knights before a certain date (in this case, Christmas). Since knighthood was an expensive business and generally beyond the means of such men, most of them chose to avoid the obligation by paying an exemption fine, which was the point of the exercise. But this, and the other traditional devices he tried, could not raise the large sums that Edward required. And so, in the autumn of 1278, he embarked on a far more drastic course of action.
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For some time, it seems, the king had been concerned about the state of his coinage. Some new coins had been struck since the start of his reign, but there had been no general reminting for over thirty years. Consequently, many of the silver pennies in circulation were old and worn, and still bore the name and image of Henry III. To Edward’s tidy mind, this must have seemed a fairly shameful state of affairs, and would probably by itself have constituted sufficient reason for reform. But there were other incentives for improvement besides appearances. Poor currency pushed up prices, deterred foreign merchants and made tax collection unduly taxing for the collectors. Perhaps most importantly, however, a king who issued new coins stood to make a handsome profit. In exchange for reminting their old currency, Edward could charge his subjects a small fee, and, by making subtle alterations to the weight and silver content of new specie, he could increase his profits further still. There was nothing especially extortionate or exploitative in this process: the king stood to make money, but his subjects also benefited from having a superior quality coin. It was a mutually beneficial proposition.
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Nevertheless, a desire to derive maximum advantage from this proposition led Edward to commit one of the most exploitative and shameful acts of his career. He appears to have decided that a good way to increase the efficiency of a recoinage would be to round up in advance all those guilty of coinage offences. Coins, it was widely appreciated, diminished in size and weight not only through long use; they also shrank as a result of a practice known as ‘clipping’, whereby small amounts of silver were shaved off each penny and melted down into new ingots or plate. Needless to say, altering the currency in this way constituted a serious crime: convicted coin-clippers stood to lose either their lives or the readily detachable bits of their bodies. Where the criminal suffered, however, the Crown prospered. Fines imposed on the guilty, property confiscated from the condemned: it all amounted to an appreciable increase for the treasury if enough convictions could be secured. And it was apparently for this reason that Edward, in February 1278, sent two of his clerks to tour the country with the instruction to buy up melted silver. At best it was a sting operation to catch known criminals; at worst, it was a mission to entrap the unwary. By the autumn these undercover agents had obviously accumulated enough evidence for the government to act. In late October Edward and his council authorised the arrest of the suspects, and in November the king’s officers swooped.
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Every single Jewish adult male in England was seized and imprisoned – at least 600 individuals out of a total community of only 2,000 to 4,000 people. They, it seems, were the special target of the sting operation. Of course, the Jews had a long-standing dominance of the money and metalworking trades, so to some extent an investigation into coin-clipping was bound to focus on their activities. There can be little doubt, too, that some Jews were guilty of coinage offences: the king’s recent prohibition of moneylending must have driven many of them to desperate measures in order to survive. But Edward’s readiness to believe that
all
Jews were involved in devaluing his currency, and the disproportionate conviction rate of Jews and Christians, tell us that there was a darker dimension to the story. Early in the new year of 1279, when the trials of the accused began, some twenty-nine Christians were hanged for their crimes, but around ten times as many Jews suffered the same fate. In his drive to improve his finances – and the recoinage, by the way, was a glowing success, generating a profit of around £36,000 – Edward executed half of the adult males in a minority population. Almost incidentally, he had committed the single biggest massacre of Jews in British history.
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The next item on Edward’s agenda was France. A year earlier, in February 1278, he had dispatched two of his closest companions, Robert Burnell and Otto de Grandson, to deal with the ongoing problems in his Continental dominions. ‘We have no one about us,’ he told them in a revealing letter, ‘whom we believe could know [these affairs] and do our will better or more advantageously than you’, adding that he would stand by whatever they decided to do, for he would regard their deeds as his own.
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One year on, and it was evident that the king’s trust had not been misplaced. There had been substantial progress on all fronts. Gascony itself, extremely fractious at the start of 1278, was now pacified. Burnell and Grandson had taken it upon themselves to dismiss the abrasive and unpopular English seneschal, Luke de Tany, and replace him with John de Grilly, a Savoyard with a softer touch. More impressive still was the deft way in which the two ambassadors had handled the king’s biggest headache in the duchy, the turbulent vicomte Gaston de Béarn. In the wake of his earlier rebellion, Gaston had continued to cause trouble. It had not helped matters, for instance, that he had subsequently defamed Edward, publicly calling the king ‘a faithless traitor’ and challenging him to a duel. By the start of 1279, however, this row too had been mended. Gaston obtained Edward’s forgiveness, and also a generous pension from the customs of Bordeaux to keep him sweet in the future. In this respect, his fate forms an interesting contrast with that of the king’s other defiant vassal, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. The difference, of course, was that Gaston, unlike Llywelyn, had the advantage of being able to appeal over Edward’s head to the king of France, underlining the fact that the relationship between Gascony and France remained the fundamental question on which all others turned. And here, too, Burnell and Grandson had made substantial progress. By February 1279 it had been agreed that the two kings should talk together in person in order to take matters forward.
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