A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (4 page)

Little is known of Edward’s education, but we may make some general observations. Hugh Giffard, husband of Sybil, was described by Matthew Paris as the boy’s teacher (
pedagogus
), and it is entirely possible that Hugh was responsible for giving Edward some of his earliest lessons, though these were more likely of a basic social nature rather than an overtly scholarly one. Hugh died before Edward’s seventh birthday, which was the stage at which most medieval thinkers reckoned that infancy ended and the more rigorous training associated with boyhood ought to begin. Up to that point, the care and education of children was considered to be principally a female concern.
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It was therefore more likely Sybil Giffard, the nurses Alice and Sarah, and, indeed, the queen herself who began one of the most important aspects of Edward’s education, namely teaching him to read. Although there were a number of male clerks in the boy’s household, their tasks were probably administrative in nature and connected with the performance of religious services. It was, as one thirteenth-century poem put it, ‘woman [that] teacheth child the book’. Learning to read was perfectly normal for aristocrats in the thirteenth century, as indeed it was for most other ranks of society. By the time Edward was king, for example, it was a legal requirement that even serfs (unfree peasants) should own a seal with which to authenticate documents. Writing, on the other hand was a more specialised technical skill, and because it was rather messy many nobles no doubt considered it somewhat beneath them, especially since they employed plenty of dedicated clerical staff in their households. Edward, therefore, was certainly a reader, but probably not a writer.
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One of the things that had made literacy easier and more appealing for the English aristocracy by the thirteenth century was the increasing quantity of literature being translated into their everyday tongue. The Bible, prayer books and psalters were all available in French translation, and, since religious devotion was the primary spur to reading, these were probably the first kind of books that Edward would have encountered. Nevertheless, despite the increasing availability of such material and the increasing use of French in letters, both public and private, it was important for a boy who was being groomed as a future king to obtain at least a basic level of literacy in Latin (here his clerks may have been more help to him than his mother). Latin remained the principal written language of royal government, and the only
lingua franca
suitable for corresponding with other European rulers, particularly the pope. Lastly, Edward would also have learned English from an early age, probably from the mouths of his native-born guardians, Hugh and Sybil Giffard, and perhaps his nurses, rather than from his Provençal mother. Such knowledge would offer him no great social benefits – hardly anything of value was committed to writing in English, nor was English spoken in the sophisticated court circles in which Edward generally moved – yet there would have been advantages later in life for a king who could communicate in the tongue used by the vast majority of his subjects.
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What kind of things would Edward have learned about? There was no curriculum as such, but there were nevertheless a wide range of subjects that were considered suitable for study. A knowledge of history was desirable, chiefly because it furnished examples of worthy individuals whose successful behaviour could be emulated, as well as losers whose mistakes ought to be avoided. To this end Edward probably learned a good deal of the history of his own family, which provided ready-made heroes, such as Richard the Lionheart (Edward’s great-uncle), as well as less laudable figures, such his grandfather, King John. The unavoidable exemplar, however, was Edward the Confessor. Henry III filled his palaces with images of his favourite royal saint, and never failed to celebrate his two annual festivals (usually at Westminster). Henry had been particularly keen that his wife should join him in appreciation of the Confessor’s all-round wonderfulness from the moment she arrived in England, and commissioned none other than Matthew Paris to write for her, in French, a history of the saintly king’s reign. Eleanor dutifully obliged her husband by imitating his hero-worship, and must surely have shared her new-found knowledge with her eldest son: Edward also became a devoted follower of his namesake’s cult, albeit not to the same excessive extent as his father.
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If Eleanor had a personal hand in the development of her son’s historical awareness, it may have been to teach him about the more distant, legendary past of the country she had come to regard as home. To judge from her book purchases, the queen was a great reader of medieval romances – that is, stirring tales of chivalry, rather than love stories in the modern sense. Her enthusiasm for such literature was probably formed during her youth in Provence – the fashion for romances had originated in southern France in the half century before her birth. The stories they recounted were set in a variety of historic epochs, including Ancient Greece and Rome (the Romance of Alexander) and early medieval France (the Romance of Charlemagne). By far the most popular romances of all, however, not just in England and with Eleanor, but in every part of Europe, were those set in Ancient Britain – the tales of King Arthur, and his knights of the Round Table.
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Such stories were read, or listened to, for fun and amusement. They were typically full of action, often violent and bloody, and placed a high value on sheer physical accomplishment. Heroes were praised for their prowess in tournaments and their body count on the battlefield. But, at the same time, romances also had a didactic purpose, to the extent that they celebrated a wider set of virtues that society – especially secular, aristocratic society – held dear. Those who heard tell of Arthur and his knightly companions knew that they should be courageous, not cowardly; loyal, not treacherous; generous, not greedy; frank and open in their dealings, not sly and deceptive.
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When it came to learning about geography there was no substitute for venturing out into the wider world. While it made sense not to expose young children to too much travel, they were moved on special occasions. Henry III, for example, typically celebrated Christmas at Winchester or Westminster, and we can be fairly certain that he would have wanted his family with him for the festivities. Similarly, Eleanor had places she liked to stay apart from Windsor: the royal palace at Woodstock, near Oxford, and the palaces at Clarendon and Marlborough in Wiltshire, were among her favourite destinations. Her children must have been brought to her from time to time – as infants both Edward and Margaret had special saddles made to allow them to ride with an adult – or have travelled with their mother in her carriage. Leaving the safety of the nursery inevitably brought risks: on his seventh birthday in 1246 Edward was with his parents on the Hampshire coast, celebrating the dedication of Beaulieu Abbey, when he suddenly fell so seriously ill that he was unable to be moved for three weeks. By the same token, illness could strike anywhere: Edward was also reportedly sick as a child in the more familiar surroundings of Westminster and Windsor.
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Risk had to be balanced against the importance of allowing a growing boy to experience the world beyond the palace walls, and to practise the kind of activities that would allow him to develop a more robust physique. Seven was precisely the age when it was thought that such training should begin. Following the death of his first mentor, Hugh Giffard, in 1246, Edward was committed to the care of Bartholomew Pecche, a knight formerly responsible for little Margaret’s welfare. It must have been under Bartholomew’s watchful eye that his new charge first began to acquire the skills and enthusiasms that he demonstrated in later life: how to gallop a horse; how to train and track hawks; how to hunt. Henry III, almost uniquely among medieval monarchs, does not seem to have engaged in such pursuits, and clearly did not relish them. But in 1247, a year after Pecche’s appointment, the king granted his son permission to hunt in Windsor Forest. This assumes that Edward was becoming familiar with weapons, learning how to handle knives, bows and swords. It cannot have been much later that he found the strength to lift a lance, and began to hone the ability of hitting a target.
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As Edward left his infancy behind, therefore, he grew fitter, stronger, more accomplished, and more aware of the world around him: not only the hills and woods around Windsor and a number of other royal residences, but also the landscape of southern England as a whole, seen first from the windows of his mother’s carriage, and increasingly standing in the stirrups of his own horse. By today’s standards, this landscape would seem thinly populated and underproductive: in the thirteenth century, only around 3 to 4 million people lived in England, the vast majority of them dwelling in small villages, and obliged (either to their lords, or for their own sakes) to till the soil in order to survive. Yet by medieval standards this was a densely populated country with a dynamic and expanding economy. The population was growing rapidly, which meant that more and more land was being brought under the plough. A kingdom that to us would have seemed almost empty must have seemed bustling to Edward. Everywhere he looked, there were ancient forests being felled, new towns being founded, and peasants on their way to market to sell their surplus produce.
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And what of the world beyond? Except for what he saw with his own eyes, Edward would have had only a limited concept of geography. Accurate maps of the kind that we today take for granted were in his day entirely unknown. The extent of cartographical science as it stood in the thirteenth century is best summed up by the large sheet of parchment that now hangs in Hereford Cathedral, and that is generally referred to as the
Mappa Mundi
(although other medieval maps also go by the same name, which means ‘cloth of the world’). Edward may never have seen this particular map – it was created towards the end of his life, probably in Lincolnshire. He would, however, have seen other examples drawn to an identical scheme, for they were quite popular among those able to afford them. In the 1230s Henry III commissioned two such world maps for the royal residences at Winchester and Westminster, and miniature versions were sometimes copied into prayer books. It would have been quite likely that Edward owned one himself.

It is a popular misconception that in the Middle Ages people believed that the world was flat. They didn’t – this is a patronising but sadly pervasive modern myth. Astronomical observation and ancient authorities told medieval man that his world was spherical. A true understanding of the Earth’s surface, however, eluded him, due to the limited extent of his geographical knowledge. In an age before Columbus, Europeans knew of only three continents: Africa, Asia, and Europe itself. These, they believed, were entirely concentrated in the northern hemisphere, for the equator was held to be an impassibly hot barrier, beyond which no life could exist. This, therefore, is what the Hereford
Mappa Mundi
endeavours to show: the northern half of a spherical world, and the many wonders within it.

In this global scheme the British Isles are extremely peripheral, squeezed against the edge of the bottom left-hand quadrant. Yet, in spite of the very limited amount of space that this affords, the result is surprisingly detailed: over thirty towns and cities are crammed in, as well as mountain ranges and major rivers. The map’s designer, however, was concerned to record more than the merely topographic. The further he ventured beyond western Europe and the hazier his geographical knowledge became, the more he felt able to include material of a mythological nature. The map’s southern edge is populated by strange human creatures: hermaphrodites, people with four eyes, men with their faces in their stomachs. Africa teems with monsters and beasts, among them the cyclops, the fawn and the unicorn. In the Mediterranean, too, there is a heavy emphasis on ancient legend: the Golden Fleece, the Labyrinth and the Scylla and Charybdis all jostle for space.

And yet, in spite of the wealth of classical and fantastical material that the
Mappa Mundi
includes, its view of the world is unmistakably a Christian one. Scenes from the Bible, including Noah’s Ark and the Tower of Babel, dominate the depiction of the Holy Land. At the top edge of the parchment, above the Earth itself, sits God, surrounded by angels, and below him stands the Virgin Mary. But it is to the middle of the map that the viewer’s eye is inevitably drawn. At the centre of the circle – directly over the marks made by the artist’s compass as he drew the outline of the world – is the city of Jerusalem.
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To regard Jerusalem as the centre of the world was obviously another consequence of possessing a Christian perspective: immediately above his picture of the Holy City, the
Mappa Mundi
artist drew a picture of the crucified Christ. More than this, though, it was to see the world through the eyes of a crusader. By the middle of the thirteenth century, the Christians of western Europe had been engaged for 150 years in a struggle to wrest control of Jerusalem from the Islamic rulers of the Middle East. At the end of the eleventh century, when the first crusaders had departed, the idea had been a revolutionary one; by Edward’s day it was a central and universally accepted fact of life. A journey to the East to fight the infidel had become a major part of what it meant to be a knight, as fundamental as owning a horse or knowing how to hold a lance. To wear the sign of the cross and to fight in defence of the Holy City was the highest of all knightly endeavours. Nor was it just the concern of the military classes: all ranks of society were exhorted to support crusaders, morally and financially. Rarely would a year go by without a new preaching initiative, intended to drum up prayers and funds for a new expedition.
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