A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (45 page)

He began in the autumn of 1289 with the same kind of move that had won him popularity on that earlier occasion. In October it was announced that all those who had grievances against the king’s local officials could come forward and complain. This time around, however, the strategy fell flat, probably because it was perceived as overtly cynical. Edward obtained more popularity – and a convenient windfall of cash – from a simultaneous crackdown on corruption among his judges. Most of the leading lights of the judiciary were found guilty of one charge or another, lost their jobs and were made to pay large fines. The chief justice, Thomas Weyland, was sent into exile. But, unpopular as the judges were, this purge produced no corresponding boost for the king. When a parliament met at the start of 1290 – the first since 1286 – there was naturally much business to be discussed, but nothing was done to improve the king’s finances.
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For Edward to get the support and the money he needed, he was going to have to do more than conciliate. Concessions were required, and, as far as the magnates were concerned, the key was Quo Warranto. When parliament met again after Easter, the protests and petitions on this issue reached their highest pitch. For several weeks, in spite of his need, the king remained obstinate: as far as he was concerned, any rights without proof of entitlement were usurpations, and he had sworn at his coronation to recover them for the Crown. Eventually, however, around 21 May, a compromise was reached. Edward allowed that liberties could stand where landowners could prove continuous and responsible usage since 1189 (the start of the reign of Richard I). The face-saving formula was that all claims accepted in this way had to be confirmed by the king, thereby preserving the fiction that the Crown had conceded them in the first place.
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By this partial royal climbdown, the magnates were partially appeased. It helped Edward’s cause that he had successfully neutralised his chief opponent, the earl of Gloucester, by making him an offer he couldn’t refuse. At the start of the parliamentary session, in a private ceremony in the royal chapel, Earl Gilbert was married to the king’s daughter, Joan. The spirited eighteen-year-old princess may have presented obvious attractions to the forty-six-year-old divorcee, but the match’s principal enticement was the proximity it promised the earl to the centre of royal politics, allowing him a prominence he had not enjoyed since the 1260s.
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By themselves, however, the magnates – as Edward must surely have appreciated – were in no position to grant him the huge amount of money that he needed to achieve solvency. In their capacity as his principal tenants, they offered him the kind of levy that any lord might demand on the occasion of his daughter’s wedding, but this promised to yield such a nugatory sum that the king did not even bother to collect it. What he needed to clear his debts was a grant of general taxation, and, while mending fences with the magnates was an essential first step, consent for such a measure could come only from the knights of the shires. In the middle of June writs of summons were sent out to the counties, and parliament went into recess until their arrival.
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The lesser landowners of England, like the magnates, had one outstanding grievance: in spite of successive rounds of legislation, for which they had paid through the nose on two earlier occasions, the problems associated with Jewish credit had persisted. The ban on moneylending that Edward had imposed at the start of his reign had not worked – all it had succeeded in doing was to drive the practice underground. The Jews had continued to lend money as before, albeit covertly, with some concealing their deals with false contracts for commodities. Moreover, the king’s ban had not eradicated debts taken out before 1275, and so the dubious trade whereby Christian speculators could snap up encumbered estates had also continued unabated.
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As of old, the most notorious speculators were the richest members of society who congregated at the king’s court, and none was more notorious than the queen. Eleanor of Castile, a smart and shrewd woman, had never assumed a political role in England – there were no rival factions at her husband’s court to compare with those of the previous reign. Instead, and with Edward’s encouragement, Eleanor had directed her energies into playing the property market, pouncing on estates whenever their owners looked vulnerable. ‘The king would like to get our gold/The queen, our manors fair, to hold,’ ran one scurrilous rhyme. The fair Leeds Castle was one of many properties acquired in this way. It had been obtained from William Leybourne (son of the king’s friend, Roger) in exchange for clearing his debts to the Jews.
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Such sharp practice had a corrosive effect on Eleanor’s reputation – so much so that, while the queen had been away in Gascony, Archbishop Pecham had felt compelled to write to one of her leading clerks. ‘A rumour is waxing strong throughout the kingdom,’ Pecham began, ‘and has generated much scandal. It is said that the illustrious lady queen, whom you serve, is occupying many manors, lands, and other possessions of nobles, and has made them her own property – lands which the Jews have extorted with usury from Christians under the protection of the royal court.’

‘There is public outcry and gossip about this in every part of England,’ the archbishop continued, before urging the recipient of his letter to intercede. For her own good, he averred, the queen must desist: her dealings were damnable.
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In 1290, therefore, Edward was almost as fed up with the Jewish problem as the knights of the shires themselves. In several different ways, on several different occasions, he had tried to solve it by means that, to his mind, seemed very conscientious. In 1275 he had banned moneylending and exhorted the Jews to live by lawful trade; in 1280 he had ordered all Jews to attend special sermons, preached by Dominican friars, with the hope of persuading them to convert. But his ban had not been obeyed, and his exhortations were ignored. The problem was as bad as ever, and its taint now reached so high, touching even the queen, that it threatened to discredit the king himself. Something would have to be done.
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One option was simply to get rid of the Jews altogether. Wholesale expulsions were nothing new in thirteenth-century Europe. The king of France had expelled all Jews from his own lands in 1182; the duke of Brittany had driven them out of his duchy in 1239. In England, as we have already seen, both Simon de Montfort and Eleanor of Provence had ordered local expulsions from their own estates. According to one chronicler, it was his mother who suggested to Edward that he expel the Jews from England in 1290. For those who ordered them, such expulsions were a matter of Christian conscience and, for this reason, they were sometimes ordained as a preparatory step towards going on crusade. In the late 1240s Louis IX had expelled the Jews from the French royal demesne in advance of his first passage to the East. And Edward, having taken the cross for the second time in 1287, had ordered the Jews out of Gascony. After God had spared him from falling to his death, it seemed the least he could do.
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The downside for any prince or potentate who acted in this way was that, while spiritually beneficial, it was commercially disadvantageous. Of course, the property of expelled Jews could be sold off, but the profits involved were not huge and, besides, profiteering was hardly in keeping with the piety of the exercise. When Edward had expelled Gascony’s Jews, he had given the proceeds to the local friars.
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An expulsion, therefore, might cut the Gordian knot of England’s Jewish problem, but financially it would be a backward step. The Jews were no longer the great cash cow they had once been – successive royal depredations, culminating in the king’s own coin-clipping pogrom of 1279, had seen to that – but 1290 was not a year for doing away with any form of revenue, no matter how small. Indeed, it looks very much as if, in June that year, Edward was preparing to tallage the Jews, hoping to squeeze out of them what little money remained.
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But then, it seems, someone – we don’t know precisely when, where or with whom the idea originated – had the happy notion that the king might be able to copy his cousin. Following his release from captivity, Charles of Salerno had expelled the Jews from his counties of Maine and Anjou. Naturally, his expulsion edict made much of the Jews manifold crimes (usury, in Charles’s mind, was apparently trumped by the Jews tendency to ‘cohabit evilly with Christian maidens’). But – and this was the notably pioneering part – Charles also made no bones about the fact that, by expelling the Jews, he was hurting his own pocket. As the edict went on to explain, it was for this reason – ‘as some recompense for the profit which we lose through the said expulsion’ – that Charles’s subjects had agreed to vote him a tax.
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In the second week of July 1290, parliament resumed in Westminster. The session re-opened with another royal wedding, as Edward’s fifteen-year-old daughter Margaret married John, heir to the duchy of Brabant. In contrast to the private ceremony of the spring, this match was deliberately presented as a great affair of state, and celebrated on a maximum scale. The marriage itself took place in Westminster Abbey, and hundreds of lords and ladies attended, along with almost a thousand Londoners. At the wedding feast no fewer than 426 minstrels entertained the throng. Immediately afterwards – again, no doubt by deliberate design – Archbishop Pecham preached the cross. Gilbert de Clare and his new wife swore to go east, as did many other nobles and bishops.
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In this atmosphere of celebration and heightened religious fervour, the knights of the shire assembled. The magnates, mindful of the king’s concession on Quo Warranto and appeased by a raft of other recent measures, approved the grant of a tax. Would the knights oblige the king by doing the same? We do not know if the idea was put to them first (as seems most likely) or whether they demanded it as the price of their consent. Whatever the case, the deal was quickly done. Edward was granted his tax. And, in return, on 18 July the royal orders went out. All Jews were to leave the realm before the 1 November.
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For what was very definitely the final time, the Jews were made to pay the price for the king of England’s insolvency. That summer, the small, impoverished and broken community – perhaps numbering only 2,000 souls by this time – gathered together their belongings, and the enforced exodus began. In general, their departure was peaceful, and they made their way to the coast without incident. Once on board ship, some groups fell victim to murderous Christian captains, who were later punished, though more for their failure to respect royal authority than on account of any belated sympathy for the Jews. In his anti-Semitism, as in other aspects of his bigotry, Edward marched in step with his subjects. The knights of the shire were so pleased at the prospect of being rid of the Jews that they had agreed to a generous grant of one-fifteenth of their goods. Its yield, a massive £116,000, was not only the biggest of the whole reign, but the single biggest tax collected in Britain during the entire Middle Ages. The Church was so delighted with the king’s pious performance that they voted a thank-you tax of their own in the autumn. Without doubt, the expulsion of the Jews was the most popular act Edward ever committed.
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By this expedient, the king had once again squared the circle. His critics were appeased, his finances restored. He could now devote his attention fully to the great project of his crusade. Already in 1290 he had received a further embassy from the Mongols and sent Otto de Grandson to the Holy Land on an advanced reconnaissance mission. There was also excellent news from Europe: in spite of further difficulties since his departure, a universal peace between France, Aragon, Anjou and Rome now seemed to be in train. Meanwhile, during negotiations with his subjects in England, parallel negotiations with Rome had come to final fruition. By the start of the year the new pope had endorsed the financial package agreed by his predecessor, and by the end of the summer, after further fine-tuning, Edward held in his hands a document to which he was ready to commit. A special, select parliament of magnates was summoned. They met in October, at Clipstone, a royal hunting lodge in Sherwood Forest. There, surrounded by his great men, with whom he was once again united, Edward set his seal to the pope’s offer. He would be paid the £130,000 of crusading funds already collected, and would receive the proceeds of a new, six-year tax as quickly as they came in. The date for departure was set. The king and his fellow crusaders would leave at midsummer 1293.
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Then the queen fell ill, and Edward’s world fell apart.

The Great Cause

W
ithin a month of the close of the autumn parliament of 1290 Queen Eleanor was dead. During her stay in Gascony she had contracted a malarial fever that, although it obviously did not prevent her from travelling, probably lingered and left her susceptible to the sickness that took hold at Clipstone in the last days of October. At that point a household sergeant was dispatched to Lincoln, twenty-five miles to the east, to procure better medicines. But a further fortnight brought no improvement, and it was evidently decided that the only hope was to get the queen to Lincoln in person, almost certainly so that she could be near the shrine of St Hugh in the city’s cathedral. The royal party proceeded by short journeys and managed to cross the River Trent, but by that stage it must have been clear that Eleanor could cope with no more. On 20 November the court was forced to stop in Harby, a small village six miles short of their destination, and for another week the queen rested in the modest home of Richard Weston, a local knight. These, though, were to be her last lodgings. During the evening of 28 November Eleanor died. She had recently passed her forty-ninth birthday.
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