A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (58 page)

But by this point the country was groaning under the weight of Edward’s wartime exactions. It was not just that his subjects had already paid two heavy taxes in as many years. They were also suffering from the new, impossibly heavy customs rate that the king had slapped on the export of wool. The merchants had simply absorbed this blow by slashing the prices they paid to their suppliers, and that included just about everyone, whether they owned ten sheep or ten thousand. It was no wonder that the new duty had become known as the maltote – the ‘evil tax’.
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More aggravating still was the phenomenon known as purveyance, or prise. Since ancient times the royal household had claimed the right to seize goods – principally food, but sometimes horses, carts, boats and so on – without contradiction, and in return for only the promise of later compensation. Irritating enough in peacetime, prise had become the most controversial issue since the outbreak of war. Royal agents everywhere, whether they were with the household or not, had started to seize whatever they needed, whenever they felt like it, in the name of the king. Predictably, this had led in some instances to accusations of robbery by those being dispossessed, and even violent clashes. What was worse, however, was the fact that Edward was using prise to feed whole armies. Since 1294 orders had gone out for the seizure of grain in ever larger quantities. By the autumn of 1296 even the king’s collecting officials had begun to object that the amounts being demanded were impossible.
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Unsurprisingly, therefore, it took time to wrangle yet another tax out of the laity. The parliament at Bury was under way by 6 November, but it was not until the end of the month that the assembled knights and burgesses agreed to a grant. The fact that the rate – a twelfth – was the lowest since 1294 was another sign of mounting opposition. There is no sign that any concession had been offered in return. One chronicler complained that the tax had been extorted.
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Altogether more surprising to Edward was the resistance he encountered from the clergy. They too, of course, were suffering from the same economic burdens. But, as the king had been pleased to recall in his writs of summons, the Church had nevertheless promised him further financial aid should France refuse a truce. One year on, and it was fair to say that all talk of truce had been firmly rejected. When, in January, Edward had sent his aged uncle, William de Valence, to meet with French negotiators at Cambrai, the result had been an out-and-out fight – Valence had returned wounded and died soon afterwards. The king, therefore, was quite clear: it was time for the clergy to honour their promise and pay up.
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That promise, however, now had to be balanced against a new proclamation from the pope.
Clericis Laicos
, as this bull was known, forbade the Church from granting taxes to secular rulers without prior permission from Rome. Ostensibly addressed to all of Christendom, its specific denunciation of rulers who extorted taxes of ‘a half’ suggests that the pope’s particular target was the king of England; quite possibly the document had been drafted after a secret appeal by Robert Winchelsea. After days of debate in November, the archbishop approached the king and asked if the clergy could postpone their decision. Edward was not at all pleased, but allowed them until January to give him a definite answer. To focus their minds in the meantime, he began calling in the debts to the Crown of eminent churchmen. Winchelsea himself was advised he would have to pay £3,500 by mid-December.
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There was apparently no demand for military service in parliament. Such discussions as occurred took place behind closed doors, informed by English ambassadors who had just returned from the Continent. Ever since the outbreak of war, Edward had been endeavouring to construct a grand alliance against Philip IV. The English king had spent enormous sums – at least £75,000 – to secure the support of the dukes and counts on France’s northern and eastern borders. For the first two years the results had been decidedly mixed. Some allies, such as the duke of Brabant (Edward’s son-in-law), had signed up and remained loyal. Others, like the count of Holland (sometime claimant of the Scottish throne), had taken the king’s money, only to turn against him. But, as 1296 drew to a close, the balance was at last tipping in England’s favour. In June, the count of Holland met with an unfortunate accident – English involvement cannot be entirely ruled out – and his twelve-year-old son and successor had indicated that Holland was ready to revert to Edward’s allegiance. So too, more importantly, was the count of Flanders, who had grown tired of being bullied by Philip IV. Early in the new year, when the court was at Ipswich, the alliances were sealed. On 7 January the young count of Holland was married to Edward’s daughter Elizabeth. The same day the treaty with the count of Flanders was ratified. At last, the king’s grand strategy was coming to fruition. He now had landing grounds in the Low Countries; a new northern front against France could be opened up.
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But not without the money to pay for these new allies and the necessary English troops. A week after the royal wedding at Ipswich, the clergy assembled in London to formulate their final answer to the royal demand for tax. As before, Edward sent thuggish knights to intimidate them, with the warning that, if they did not pay, their goods would be seized anyway. The clergy debated for several days but, by 26 January, the king had heard of their decision. They said no.
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Edward’s anger was predictably great, as all the chroniclers attest. What must have infuriated him more than anything was the clergy’s failure to honour their earlier promise. As the royalist Peter Langtoft commented, ‘promise is debt due, if faith be not forgotten’. The king, in response, certainly kept his word, and made good his earlier threat. On 30 January 1297 the clergy were outlawed. Royal agents moved in at once to seize ecclesiastical estates and all the food and livestock they contained. Other laymen, understanding that it was effectively open season on the Church, began to rob clergymen of their horses. Edward made it known that the Church could easily buy back his protection: the price would be the same as the tax they had denied him.
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According to one chronicler, Edward’s intention was that the laity should pass judgement on the Church. As soon as he had heard of the clergy’s refusal, the king had summoned a parliament to meet at Salisbury in one month’s time. It was to be an entirely secular assembly – only the earls, barons and knights were invited.
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In the few weeks that followed, however, two crucial things happened. First, news arrived in England of a fresh military catastrophe in Gascony. The earl of Lincoln had led an army from Bayonne to the new bastide at Bonnegarde, but had been ambushed en route by the French. Large numbers of infantry had been killed and several knights taken prisoner, including John of St John. This defeat, English monks noted with grim satisfaction, had taken place on 30 January – the same day that the king had outlawed the clergy.
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The second occurrence was a sudden and dramatic spike in the incidence of prise. Once the November parliament had ended, Edward had reiterated his mandate for a mammoth seizure of goods. In readiness for the renewed effort against France, royal agents were told to grab supplies of grain totalling 60,000 tons.
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When Edward met with his magnates at Salisbury, therefore, the question of the outlawed clergy was no longer the only item on the agenda, nor even the main one. Even the greatest men who came to the assembly – men who could normally bribe royal officials to go away – were feeling the full weight of the war burden. Taxes were being exacted, with no talk of special pardons; profits from wool had plummeted to less than half their pre-war levels; royal officials were moving into aristocratic estates, arbitrarily seizing corn, oats and barley by the ton.
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The king realised all of this, but reckoned that the recovery of his Continental inheritance mattered more. News of the disaster at Bonnegarde had convinced him that, in addition to the army he intended to lead into northern France, more men would have to be sent to Gascony. After his arrival in Salisbury, in the closing days of February, he therefore asked his magnates, for what was now the third time, to go and fight in the duchy.

The magnates, like the clergy, now said no. ‘One after the other,’ explains Walter of Guisborough, ‘they began to excuse themselves.’ The protest at overseas service, a rumble in 1294, marginal in 1295, had finally become general, and spread to the highest echelons of the aristocracy. The earl of Arundel was once again among those who refused the king’s order, but was now joined by his peers. The earl of Warwick, normally so loyal, was one such. With the earl of Lincoln pinned down in Gascony and the earl of Surrey preoccupied in Scotland, Edward found himself without any major support. In hopeful expectation, he turned to Roger Bigod, the earl of Norfolk, the most powerful figure present besides the king himself, and the man who had been so demonstrably willing to help when war had first been declared.

But Bigod too now said no. Like the other magnates, he had been hit hard by almost three years of continuous warfare – serving at his own expense in Wales and Scotland, while back in England his wool could not be sold and his grain was being seized. Like the others, however, he couched his objection in terms of non-obligation. As well as being earl of Norfolk, Bigod also bore the ancient title ‘marshal of England’: by hereditary right, it fell to him, along with the constable, to muster the king’s armies and maintain their discipline. As such, he accepted that it was his responsibility to fight – but only with the king. The suggestion that he could be sent elsewhere to perform his duty he denied.

‘I am not bound,’ he told Edward, ‘nor is it my will, to march without you.’

At this, says Guisborough, the king became enraged.

‘By God, Earl,’ he exclaimed, ‘either you will go, or you will hang!’

‘By the same oath,’ replied Bigod, ‘I will neither go, nor hang!’

And, to prove his point, the earl quit the court without leave. The other earls, Arundel and Warwick, followed in his wake, and were soon joined by Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford and constable of England, who was apparently absent at the time of parliament. Their numbers, says Guisborough, grew into a multitude, and the king began to fear them.
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But, the chronicler added, he did not show it. In fact, as royal records attest, Edward reacted to the desertion of his earls with swift retaliation. On 1 March he attempted to limit the political fall-out from the row by denouncing as ‘rumour-mongers’ those who were trying to create discord between the king, his clergy and his barons. Around the same time he resurrected the abandoned, draconian scheme of 1294 and ordered the seizure of all the country’s wool. Then, on 12 March, the gloves really came off, with an order for the immediate investigation of all debts to the Crown. Edward had broken Arundel before by calling in his debts; now, it seems, he was out to break all his earls in the same way. In the last week of March, royal officials arrived at Roger Bigod’s manors, demanding hundreds of pounds in unpaid money. Obligation, the king’s opponents were being forcibly reminded, could cut both ways.
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Throughout Lent, therefore, and for several weeks thereafter, the country was plunged into a state of high tension. Edward pressed on to Plymouth, where he remained for most of April, declaring to his officials that he would not leave until he had dispatched some help to Gascony. The earls, according to Walter of Guisborough, ‘went off to their own lands, where they would not allow the king’s servants to take either wool or hides, or anything whatsoever out of the ordinary’. Both sides, in other words, went to ground, waiting to see who would break first.
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During this time, the clergy crumpled. A month and more of hunger, humiliation and robbery had already taken its toll, and in February Edward had raised the stakes further, promising his churchmen that their outlawry and loss of land would be made permanent if they failed to settle by Easter. Accordingly, when the prelates, abbots and priors assembled in London at the end of March, they collectively petitioned their archbishop for a change of course. Winchelsea responded by allowing that each could follow his own conscience, at which point the stream of submissions to the king turned into a flood. Only the archbishop himself and a few diehard supporters continued to hold out, retiring to their dioceses and remaining quietly defiant.
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Even as the clergy collapsed, however, the magnates were reassembling and reaffirming their determination to resist. Around Eastertime, the four recalcitrant earls – Norfolk, Hereford, Arundel and Warwick – met in the woods near Montgomery and declared that they would not cross overseas with the king on account of the innumerable taxes that he had extorted from them. Economic hardship was, no doubt, their chief complaint, and would have played well with both the other men present, as well as the wider public. But it is also significant that the earls should have chosen to congregate in the March of Wales. To a greater or lesser degree, each of them was a Marcher lord and, in this capacity, had run up against Edward’s increasingly masterful behaviour in recent years. This was most obviously true of Hereford, who cannot have forgotten his humiliating treatment at the king’s hands in 1291. But Arundel, too, had latterly been forced to surrender part of his lordship of Clun, and charged with refusing to admit royal officials there. The same was true of Edmund Mortimer, son and successor of the famous Roger, who was also present at the Montgomery meeting. All these men shared the sense that the liberties won by their ancestors were being eroded for the benefit of an overbearing Crown. Now the government’s grip was weakening, they saw an opportunity to restore things to their proper order.
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