A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (42 page)

A tragedy for some, the incident was generally held to have been a miraculous escape: proof that Edward and those around him had been spared for a reason. If, as one later chronicler seems to suggest, the collapse was caused by a bolt of lightning that passed through a window, it can only have reinforced the impression that the event was heaven sent. As it was, the fact that it had happened on Easter Sunday – the day of Christ’s passion – must by itself have been seen as significant. Edward had been expressing his willingness to go on crusade – that is, to recover Jerusalem, the site of Christ’s passion – for more than three years by this point. In spite of this, however, he had still not yet taken the cross.
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That was now set to change. The king, for the time being, could go nowhere. It may have taken him as long as five weeks to recover from his injuries. But within days of the near-disaster, three of his servants were given money for their journey to the Holy Land. Soon afterwards, letters arrived from the pope, dated three weeks before the accident, offering final terms for the payment of crusade funds, provided that Edward accepted the offer before 24 June.
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The king, once he was able to move, needed no further encouragement. By 12 May he had left Bordeaux for nearby Blanquefort, a recently acquired castle that served as a retreat from the city, and there made his vow. Many others joined him in doing so. The ceremony was conducted by the archbishop of Ravenna, a papal legate empowered for the purpose. Edward was recognised as ‘captain of the Christian army’.
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It must have been just a few days later that they had further news from Rome. Pope Honorius was dead – he had passed away nineteen days after sending his last letter. This meant that the legate’s authority had expired before he had signed the king with the cross. Worse still, it meant that the tortuous and protracted business of negotiating the financial terms of the crusade would have to begin all over again with Honorius’s successor.
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At least negotiations with Aragon were moving forward, perhaps impelled by the same sense of divinely ordained purpose. In the first week of May, after a stay that may have lasted longer than they intended, the Aragonese ambassadors left to return home. At the same juncture, and probably in their company, Edward’s close associate John de Vescy rode south to finalise plans for the two kings to meet in person. By 10 June he was back with a date and a place. At once Edward dispatched certain members of his household to make the necessary arrangements for his coming. Then, twelve days later, the king and his company set out.
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Their destination was Oloron, a substantial town on the southernmost fringes of Edward’s power, just twenty miles distant from the peaks of the Pyrenees. The English court had arrived there by 11 July; the Aragonese court must have arrived a few days later, and Edward would have welcomed Alfonso III, the twenty-two-year-old successor to the late King Peter. Of Alfonso himself little is known. Like Edward, though, he seems to have travelled in great state. Just as the English king had brought with him some Welshmen in order to advertise the extent of his power, so the Spaniard had come attended by several Saracens, reluctant recruits from his own wild frontier. Their meeting was characterised by the kind of celebratory festivities that generally accompanied such royal rendezvous. Jousts and other games took place outside the town, destroying cornfields and vineyards, whose owners Edward later felt obliged to compensate. Exotic gifts were exchanged: Alfonso presented Edward with a lion and a wildcat. The lion later killed a horse belonging to a local, further increasing the English bill for compensation. And two of Alfonso’s Saracens absconded, taking with them a mule. But otherwise the chivalric ice-breaker appears to have passed without incident.
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Amid the gaiety and the gift-giving, of course, there was serious business to be getting on with. Edward’s primary reason for coming to Oloron was to secure the release of his cousin, Charles of Salerno. Until Charles was a free agent there could be no lasting European peace; anything he promised in captivity was likely to be obviated by a later claim that it had been exacted under duress. Alfonso, for his part, was happy to consider Edward’s request, but made it clear that he would require a lot in return. It was not a question of greed: the captive king was Aragon’s best guarantee against future French and papal aggression. Charles was not going to be liberated unless he agreed to hand over very substantial new securities by way of exchange. In a nutshell, Alfonso wanted hostages and money: three of Charles’s sons, including his heir, were to be handed over, along with sixty nobles from his French county of Provence. In addition, Charles was bound to pay 50,000 marks. All of these were in return for a three-year truce and would be restored if a lasting peace was sealed by the end of that term. If not, they would be returned only if Charles returned to captivity, and Provence would be forfeited to Alfonso.

These, at least, were the conditions that Edward accepted on 25 July, when an agreement at Oloron was reached. In order to move matters forward more quickly, the English king made himself personally involved, taking on the responsibility for finding 20,000 of the 50,000 mark security. He also promised to seek papal permission for his daughter, Eleanor, to marry Alfonso. Their long-planned wedding had latterly been forbidden by the papacy in view of Aragon’s pariah status.
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Papal approval was the point on which the whole deal pivoted. As his eagerness to ally himself with Edward shows, what Alfonso wanted most was to be welcomed back into the fold of European princes. But he was also determined to retain Sicily, and it was a central requirement of the Oloron agreement that both France and the papacy should acknowledge his right to the island. In any circumstances, therefore, Edward’s ambassadors were going to have a hard time persuading both powers to accept the results of his honest brokerage. But in the summer of 1287, when they set out for the attempt, there was a more fundamental problem. Despite the fact that Honorius IV had died in April, the college of cardinals had still not agreed on who should be his successor. This was the great short-term stumbling block to peace. There could be no papal approval (or, for that matter, disapproval) while there was no pope.
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For a while Edward was evidently optimistic that matters might be wrapped up quickly. Once the summit at Oloron was over and the two courts had gone their separate ways, the English king remained in the south of his duchy. As the summer turned to autumn, he spent one listless week after another, first at Dax, then at St Sever, waiting hopefully for news that would allow the early release of his cousin. During this time, he was pleased to receive an unexpected visitor in the form of Rabban Bar Sauma, a Chinese monk who had come to Europe as an ambassador for the Mongols. His master, il-khan Arghun, son and successor of Edward’s erstwhile ally il-khan Abagha, was contemplating renewed military action in the Middle East against the forces of Islam, and hoped for European support. Encouraged by this news, the king made a statement that the ambassador recorded in his journal and that reveals the strength of conviction that underlay his actions at this time. ‘We … have taken the sign of the cross upon our body,’ Edward said, ‘and have no other thought than this affair. My heart swells when I learn that what I am thinking is also being thought by King Arghun.’
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As autumn turned to winter, however, the hope in the king’s heart of an early settlement of Europe’s affairs began to fade. Part of the problem was Philip IV. Having given Edward a free hand to negotiate, the French king now balked at the provision that Aragon should occupy Provence if peace did not ensue. The main obstacle, though, was the continuing vacancy of St Peter’s throne. In November the cardinals wrote to Edward commending him for his efforts but, before these letters reached him, the king had already concluded that Charles of Salerno would not be freed that year. On 21 November he turned and headed north, back to Bordeaux, where the English court stayed for Christmas. Until a new pope was in place, everything – the truce, the peace, the projected crusade – hung in the balance.
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Perhaps to occupy his time more than for any other reason, Edward elected to spend the early months of the new year founding a new town. For most of February, March and April 1288 the king and his court were camped on the banks of the River Garonne, some twelve miles north of Bordeaux. At this point the Garonne joins the region’s other main river, the Dordogne, and together they form the wide estuary of the Gironde, which flows out into the Bay of Biscay and beyond into the Atlantic. It was here, at the confluence of the two main commercial arteries of his duchy, that Edward chose to plant his new settlement. From the first it was given the Latin name
Burgus Reginae
, in tribute to Eleanor of Castile. In England it would have been known as Queensborough.
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Although Edward’s decision to involve himself (and Eleanor) so directly in the creation of Burgus Reginae looks slightly self-indulgent, in general there was nothing whimsical about such urban initiatives. The creation of new towns had been official policy in Gascony from the moment of Edward’s accession as duke. Following the example of the counts of neighbouring Toulouse, who had begun a similar programme some two decades earlier, in 1274 Edward had ordered his seneschal in Gascony to plant new settlements wherever in the duchy he saw fit. As a consequence, dozens had sprung up in the twelve years that had elapsed since the king’s previous visit, and many more were still being laid out at the time of his return in 1286.
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The local word for such new towns was ‘bastides’ – it derived from a southern French word meaning ‘to build’. For those who equate medieval with muddle, the most striking thing about the majority of these places is the regularity of their design. Planned with precision, and with each plot laid out to the same size as its neighbour, the streets of a bastide form a perfect gridiron: the kind of effect more commonly associated with the towns and cities of modern America than those of thirteenth-century Europe. Of the scores that were created, some have swollen to become substantial modern towns, while others have shrunk to the smallest of villages. Perhaps the best preserved, in terms of overall ambience as well as original size, is the bastide in the Agenais known as Monpazier. Founded in 1285, and visited by Edward himself during his tour of the region the following year, Monpazier still exhibits many of the original details that made bastides so distinctive. Its regular grid of streets give out onto a central square, with an open market hall at one end, where even the original metal bins for measuring grain still survive. Around the square, the buildings with vaulted archways known as
cornières
are another characteristic medieval feature. Monpazier is also the only place, to the best of this author’s knowledge, that can boast a Hotel Edward Premier.
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The creation of bastides served Edward in two ways. First, and most obviously, as commercial centres they were a source of profit, both direct (in the form of local tolls and taxes) and indirect (they increased trade that was taxed at other points, such as Bordeaux). Secondly, and perhaps less obviously, they were a means by which he could increase his authority as duke. As we have already noted, Edward’s power as duke of Gascony was nothing like his power as king of England. In Gascony he had comparatively little land of his own, and far less money. Towns founded in his name not only swelled his coffers; they also looked to him as their lord and protector. As the bastides spread, therefore, so too did Edward’s seigneurial influence.
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As such, it was wont to run up against existing vested interests. Other landlords were often quick to object when a new town was being planned or planted on their doorstep, recognising that their own profits were bound to suffer, not least because their tenants tended to slope off to become townsmen. The lowest sections of society were lured to bastides not only by the prospect of becoming richer, but by the promise of freedom that urban life would bring.
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For this reason, around half of all bastides were founded on the principle of
paréage
, a public-private partnership, whereby the local lord or lords would put up the land, the duke provided the authority and the permission, and the profits were split between all parties. Monpazier again supplies a good example: the town was created by an act of
paréage
between Edward and the lord of Biron, whose castle still stands some four miles to the south of the town. By such a method, it was possible for all parties – duke, lords and peasants – to profit from a new foundation.
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The whole initiative of creating new urban communities on virgin sites was possible only because Gascony, at the time of Edward’s accession, was an economically underdeveloped region. Although it still preserved the visible traces of its civilised, Roman past, the duchy had latterly fallen on hard times (in the early thirteenth century, for example, it had been ravaged by decades of war). Consequently, it lagged behind other regions in western Europe and was ripe for economic exploitation. With the advent of stability from the middle of the thirteenth century and a growing reliance on the wine trade with England, there was a great incentive to clear the surrounding forests and plant vineyards in their place (some bastides even provided for this in their foundation charters). It was all for the greater good. New towns meant new roads; new roads and fewer forests meant fewer places for rebels and robbers to haunt. A region that had grown wild was once again being tamed and civilised.
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