A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (44 page)

For three generations, this English colony prospered. New castles, towns, abbeys and churches were built, the area under cultivation was expanded, flocks were increased, trade boomed, and some men made a fortune. But, around the middle of the thirteenth century – that is, around the time that Edward took over the island’s lordship – the colony began to stall and stagnate. Several of the great English lordly dynasties died out, and the flow of settlers from England dried up. From this point on, more often than not, the lords of Ireland were absentees, rarely if ever crossing the sea to visit their Irish estates.
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This, of course, was true above all of Edward himself. Distracted by events in Wales from 1256 and then by political upheaval in England from 1258, the future king had little time or thought to spare for Ireland. As a result, the decline there steepened: English colonists began to fight among themselves, and the native Irish began to reassert their power. In 1258 one Irish chieftain even went so far as to declare himself ‘king of Ireland’, much as Llywelyn ap Gruffudd had proclaimed himself ‘prince of Wales’. This would-be king, and hence his revolt, proved short lived. But other revolts followed in its wake. Provinces formerly under English power began to be lost. A Gaelic revival was under way.
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Hence, at the time of his accession, Edward knew that something had to be done about Ireland. The country might have held no personal attractions for the king, but he appreciated its value as a source of soldiers, food and money, and by 1274 these useful returns were suffering badly. After twenty years of his lax lordship, for instance, profits from the Irish exchequer had halved, from £5,000 to just £2,500 a year.
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Edward’s solution was delegation. As with Gascony, so too with Ireland: the king dispatched a number of capable, trustworthy men, armed with wide powers of discretion to turn the lordship around. But whereas the individuals he sent south were smooth conciliators, those who went west were tough enforcers, licensed to use almost any means to restore order. Consider the example of Thomas de Clare. The younger brother of Earl Gilbert of Gloucester and one of the key players in Edward’s escape from Montfort’s clutches, Thomas had subsequently cemented his friendship with the future king by following him on crusade. Within weeks of his return and coronation, Edward had dispatched this daring and militaristic young man to Ireland to exercise his talents. As a younger son, with no inheritance to look forward to, Clare had a strong personal incentive to make a name and fortune for himself. The lordship he carved out in south-west Ireland was based on the former Irish kingdom of Thomond, centred on the estuary of the River Shannon. For a decade from 1276, Clare behaved like an old-school English conquistador of the previous century. Settlers were drafted in from England and planted on the Shannon’s north shore. New stone castles were constructed. At Bunratty, the giant fortress that Clare erected has now vanished, but an impressed contemporary described it as ‘girt with a thick outer wall, containing an impregnable roofed tower, and other buildings, large and limewashed’. By such irresistible methods, and with the Crown’s backing, the ambitious Englishman was able to impose his domination on a wild frontier.
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Part of Edward must have realised that such a policy of repression could not provide a lasting solution. At some stage, and to some degree, the Irish would have to be included. That, after all, was very much the wish of the Irish themselves. In 1277 they collectively petitioned the king to allow them to use English law, and offered to pay handsomely for the privilege. But, while Edward may have been minded to accept such a move, the English settler community made it clear that they were not. To allow the Irish to use English law would be tantamount to treating them as English, and that would never do. The colonists jealously guarded their law as a marker of their identity, and so the proposal was ultimately rejected. The alternative path to integration, of course, would have been for the king to recognise Irish law and bring it under the umbrella of the Crown’s jurisdiction. Edward, after all, had been prepared to do this with Welsh law before 1282, and parts of Welsh law had been allowed to stand after the Conquest. In Ireland’s case, however, incorporation was regarded as a bridge too far; Irish law was so perverse and barbarous that its absorption was completely unconscionable. As the king himself declared in 1277, ‘the laws the Irish use are detestable to God, and so contrary to all law that they ought not to be deemed law’.
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Denied the right to use English law and condemned for using their own, Ireland’s original inhabitants were thereby destined to remain a race apart, and the only way left for the newcomers to deal with them was further marginalisation and military repression. Thus in 1277 Thomas de Clare dealt with one of his Irish rivals, Brian O Brian, by personally executing him at Bunratty, while in 1282 the English justiciar of Ireland – a bishop, no less – dealt with the troublesome MacMurrough brothers, native leaders of the south-east, by having them assassinated. It was hardly chivalrous, never mind Christian, but chivalry did not extend to the Irish. They were literally outlaws, living beyond the rules of civilised society.
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In any case, the proof of the pudding was in the eating. By 1289, as Edward prepared to leave Gascony, English royal policy in Ireland was seen as having succeeded. Profits at the exchequer in Dublin were back at the former high levels, boosted in part by the need to supply food to the troops and construction workers in north-west Wales. Thomas de Clare himself died in 1287, apparently of natural causes. But at the end of that same year, an anonymous Englishman in Ireland could write that the country ‘was so pacified these days that in no part of the land is there anyone at war, or wishing to go to war, as is known for sure’.
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In many respects, therefore, royal power was at its height when Edward and Eleanor returned to England in the summer of 1289. (They were met off the boat at Dover on 13 August by five girls and one five-year-old boy, all pleased to see their parents after a separation of three years.) The king’s patient diplomacy had given him a standing in Europe that was beyond compare, his rule in Gascony had been consolidated peacefully in person, and his power in Wales and Ireland had been consolidated forcefully by his deputies.
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In England itself, however, there was considerable disquiet. General lawlessness, for example, appears to have increased, in spite of the king’s earlier legislation. There had been violent feuding between both magnates and merchants; men had ridden about the country in armed gangs. At Boston in Lincolnshire there had been a particularly notorious incident in 1288 when certain individuals had conspired to rob the town’s famous annual fair, with the result that much of it went up in smoke.
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Some of these disturbances were a natural consequence of Edward’s absence; robbers as well as rebels would seize the opportunity if they thought the government seemed weak. But England’s restlessness during these years was also fuelled by a deepening sense of political discontent. The citizens of London, for instance, still bridled at their loss of liberty in 1285; the clergy, too, had become increasingly resentful of royal interference in their affairs and challenges to their jurisdiction. Above all, though, the trouble lay with the magnates, who were furious at the treatment they had been receiving from the Crown. When the regent had warned certain men against riding around causing trouble in 1288, four of them were earls. Before the king’s departure these men had been reasonably quiescent, but soon after he left they were literally up in arms.
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The principal reason for disgruntlement among England’s great men was the ongoing royal investigation into their rights and liberties as landowners. Launched by Edward soon after his coronation, but then postponed on account of the first Welsh war, the long-running inquiry had resumed in earnest in 1278–79. At that point the king’s justices had begun to summon men to court to defend their claims, and their insistent question ‘quo warranto?’ had given the whole process its popular name. In every case, the justices demanded to know ‘by what warrant’ an individual claimed his or her special privileges.
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From the first the magnates had found this all very tedious, frustrating and expensive. It meant having to hire lawyers to defend perfectly legitimate ancient rights, and having to bribe jurors where those rights were not quite so old and unimpeachable. As one piece of contemporary doggerel put it, ‘And the Quo Warranto/Will give us all enough to do!’ The main problem was one of evidence. Naturally, the best rejoinder to the question ‘by what warrant’ was to say ‘by this one’, and wave under the inquisitor’s nose a royal charter that set out in precise detail all the rights that one was defending. But in most cases such a charter simply did not exist; only latterly had society come to place such a heavy reliance on documentary proof. Often the only defence a landlord could offer was that he and his ancestors had enjoyed such rights since time immemorial, and hope that local jurors would back him up in his assertion.
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This is why, latterly, the magnates had become so agitated. In 1285 royal justices had announced that, in future, claims of long usage would not be admissible as evidence – only a charter would do. (Hence, probably, the rush to get old charters confirmed by the king during that year’s summer parliament.) When, therefore, the hearings had resumed in Edward’s absence, the landowning classes had found themselves losing out badly to the king’s lawyers. As one chronicler succinctly explained, ‘a great many men who did not have charters lost, without recovery, liberties and free customs of which they had been seized for a long time before’.
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One can well understand the magnates’ frustration. They had helped Edward reduce and conquer Wales in two separate campaigns, in many cases at considerable personal expense and in return for little, if anything, by way of compensatory reward. More recently they had given the same support to the regency government in suppressing the rebellion of Rhys ap Maredudd. Their reward for this service, it seemed, was to be dragged through the courts by arrogant royal justices and forced to defend the hard-won liberties of their ancestors. So much for the king’s pretence that they were like Arthur and his knights, a brotherhood of equals sat at a Round Table. Of late, it felt more like a conventional domestic setting, with Edward and his lawyers sat together at the high table, while the magnates sulked on the benches below.

It is no coincidence that this period saw the production of anonymous tracts, not only attacking royal justices but also simultaneously asserting the rights of the magnates.
The Mirror of Justices
, for instance, as well as demonstrating a pronounced hostility for the king’s lawmen, begins with a fabulous justification for restricting royal power. Its author explained how, when the Anglo-Saxons had first arrived in Britain, it was the earls who had been the sovereigns; only after many years of infighting had they agreed to elect one of their number as king. Edward’s great men, in other words, had begun to follow his own example, and were appealing to (and, in this case, inventing) history to justify present politics. According to a well-known chronicle tradition, either the earl of Gloucester or the earl of Surrey made a similar, impassioned appeal to the past when he came before the Quo Warranto judges. When asked by what warrant he claimed his rights, the earl brandished an ancient, rusty sword. ‘Behold, my lords!’ he said. ‘This is my warrant. For my ancestors came with William the Bastard and conquered their lands with the sword – and by the sword I shall defend them from anyone wishing to seize them. The king did not conquer and subject the land by himself, but our forebears were sharers and partners with him.’
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Edward therefore returned to England realising that he faced opposition on several fronts – a situation similar to the one that had greeted him at the start of his reign. If the discontent and disorder did not run as deep as they had done fifteen years earlier, the disillusionment was greater, and the grounds for optimism were fewer. There was, moreover, a strong similarity between the Crown’s financial position in 1274 and 1289: once again, the king was coming home in serious debt. His time in Gascony had been massively expensive, and not just because of obvious costs, such as his payment to free Charles of Salerno or the lavish hospitality laid on for the Aragonese court. The main cause of insolvency was that Gascony’s resources were totally inadequate for maintaining an entourage on the scale that royal dignity had demanded. For three years, Edward had been keeping up a kingly appearance on a ducal income, and as a result he had run up a debt to compare with the cost of his crusade or the conquest of Wales. On the day he had sailed for England, the king acknowledged that he owed the Riccardi a sum of almost £110,000. Attempts to alleviate this burden in his absence had already run aground. Asked for an aid at the start of 1289, the discontented magnates, led by the earl of Gloucester, had assured the regency government that no tax would be granted as long as the king was outside his kingdom. Whether or not they would change their tune now he was back remained to be seen. As at the start of his reign, Edward needed to do some serious conciliating.
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