A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (68 page)

Only one individual of consequence was wholly exempted from the general clemency, and Edward did not intend to waste any more time tracking him down: the Scots themselves could do that as proof of their newly professed loyalty, and in due course they did. William Wallace was captured by his own countrymen in August the following year, led to London in chains, and charged with the crime of treason. This was somewhat ironic, for Wallace was probably the only Scottish leader who had
not
sworn allegiance to the English king – a fact that the prisoner himself pointed out at his hearing in Westminster Hall. Needless to say, it availed him nothing. On 23 August 1305, while Edward amused himself in the forests of Essex, his sometime adversary was dragged from Westminster to Smithfield, hanged on a gallows, cut down while still alive, disembowelled and beheaded. His entrails were then burned, his body quartered, and the quarters dispatched for public display in Newcastle, Berwick, Stirling and Perth. His head was mounted on a spike above London Bridge. Thus were the Scots made aware of treason’s terrible reward, and the slaughter at Stirling Bridge was avenged.
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A Lasting Vengeance

F
or several months after the siege of Stirling, Edward I did little except recover his strength and savour his victory. Having left Scotland in the last week of August, he spent two months travelling slowly through the north of England, and a further seven weeks resting at the royal manor of Burstwick in Yorkshire – a stop that Peter Langtoft described as a ‘sojourn awhile for his health’. At length the court crossed the Humber in December and arrived in Lincoln, where Christmas was kept in exceptionally lavish style. As one annalist explained, the buyers of the royal household had been ordered to prepare a feast worthy of a man who was now ‘the king and lord of the monarchy of two realms’. Edward was also unusually lavish in his distribution of rewards, handing out valuable gifts as well as compliments to the earls and knights who had helped him obtain what the same writer referred to as ‘his triumphant peace’.
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There was ample reason for feeling triumphant. With Scotland finally surrendered, Edward exercised a direct lordship in the British Isles far greater than that enjoyed by any of his ancestors. From the far north of Britain to the far west of Ireland, across the liberties of the March of Wales, the writ of the king of England now ran without challenge or contradiction. Nor was victory to be measured merely in insular terms. Gascony was also back in English hands as a result of the recently ratified peace with France. In June 1303, while Edward had been decisively harrying the Scots into submission, the duchy had been ceremoniously restored to his representatives in the church at St Emilion. At home and abroad, the king’s rights were at last respected and acknowledged.
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Obtaining that acknowledgement, however, had come at an exceedingly heavy price. In order to recover Gascony, and especially to subjugate Scotland, Edward had placed an enormous, almost intolerable strain on the rest of his empire. The peoples of England, Wales and Ireland had been asked repeatedly, year in year out, to provide the men to fight in these wars, the food to feed them and the money to pay them. In financial terms alone the costs were staggering. During the decade between the seizure of Gascony in 1294 and the surrender of Scotland in 1304, Edward had spent a sum well in excess of a million pounds. To raise it he had resorted to terrible expedients – visiting violence on the clergy, seizing the goods of his subjects without their consent, and even trying to impose taxation against the will of parliament. In consequence he had faced censure from the pope, provoked rebellion in Wales and very nearly sparked a new civil war in England.
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As this brief list of repercussions implies, the costs had been more than financial. The overall consequence of Edward’s wars was massive dislocation and disarray. In England, for example, the prolonged nonresidence of the king and his magnates had led directly to a dramatic rise in lawlessness, far worse than the temporary crime waves occasioned by their earlier absences in Wales and Gascony. The remarkable robbery of the Crown jewels from the treasury at Westminster Abbey in the spring of 1303 was but one manifestation of the increase; across the country as a whole its effects were far more serious and endemic. Crime, in a word, had become organised. Every town and county had witnessed the appearance of bands of armed men, popularly known as ‘trailbastons’ on account of the clubs they habitually dragged around with them. Through threat of violence these thugs held local society in their thrall. Langtoft explains how they would openly offer their services on market days, undertaking to beat people up in return for a fee. Other evidence shows how they indulged in racketeering, the intimidation of juries, robbery and murder. It was all highly embarrassing for a king who earlier in his reign had issued so much legislation with the aim of reducing crime, yet it was hardly unexpected, for Edward’s contribution to the problem amounted to more than just negligence. At the start of his war with France, such had been his desperate need, the king had handed out pardons to all who were willing to fight, emptying his prisons in the process. The problem he now faced was partly the result of these former jailbirds coming home to roost.
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Bad as things were in England, they were worse in Ireland, where the same combination of pressure and neglect had brought an already troubled lordship to a point of more or less perpetual crisis. Edward’s war effort had several times emptied Ireland of its English military tenants, leaving the colony’s less martial members at the mercy of their native Irish neighbours. At the same time, his willingness to pervert the course of justice in pursuit of his rights in Scotland had made it ridiculously easy to secure pardons for murder, which meant that homicides among the settler community had risen as a result. The extent of the problem had already been apparent in 1297, when a celebrated parliament had assembled in Ireland and drawn up a set of emergency measures ‘to establish the peace more firmly’. As these measures indicated, lawlessness was seen to be increasing in line with absenteeism of English landlords and the degeneracy of those who remained. Profits at the Dublin exchequer were diminishing, and the area of the country under English control was contracting.
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In Gascony, meanwhile, the disarray was equally great, albeit for different reasons. Although the rule of law was now slowly returning to the duchy, for the past decade its inhabitants had known little besides disorder and destruction. French occupation had led to many Gascons being dislocated and disinherited; English military efforts to reverse the situation had merely added to the devastation. According to the terms of the recent peace, Gascony was to be returned to its
status quo ante bellum
. But naturally this was proving impossible in practice, partly because of the chaos the conflict had created, and partly because the duchy’s legal relationship with France was now more hopelessly confused than ever.
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Nowhere, of course, was the confusion greater than in Scotland. It was not just that the country had been invaded and laid waste time and again by English armies, with the result that so many churches, castles, abbeys, towns and villages now lay in ruin. It was also that, for a whole generation, Scotland had been a nation divided against itself, with Robert Bruce and his adherents almost always ranged against the supporters of the absent John Balliol. Healing this rift was going to be a time-consuming and nigh-on impossible task; so too was the job of reconciling the rights of Englishmen who had been rewarded with lands north of the Border with the competing claims of Scotsmen who had latterly been guaranteed the restoration of their estates. For the moment Scotland had been left in the care of an ad hoc regime of military governors; for the future, some new form of civilian government would have to be found.
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Thus, while Edward rested and gave thanks, it fell to others to begin the business of restoring order on his behalf. Towards the end of November 1304, before he had left Burstwick, measures were put in place to deal with the trailbaston gangs. In three northern counties, commissioners were appointed with wide powers to identify, arrest and detain any individuals suspected of involvement, and the authority to raise posses for pursuit should the need arise. As the king moved into East Anglia in January to visit the holy sites of Norfolk and Suffolk the operation was extended into these areas too, and by the time he arrived in Westminster at the start of March it had evidently become nationwide. A few weeks later the first justices of trailbaston were appointed to hear cases up and down the country against the numerous individuals who were already in gaol awaiting trial. The crackdown had clearly been effective, though in some quarters it was regarded as disproportionate. A contemporary songsmith who purported to be a war veteran complained that, as a result of the new measures, good men like himself were being falsely accused and unjustly imprisoned, simply because they had knocked their servants about a bit.
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Parliament, naturally, was the forum in which such new remedies were discussed, and Edward’s return to Westminster after an absence of over two years coincided with the start of a new session. With both knights and burgesses in attendance it was as large an assembly as could be, perhaps for no other reason than to celebrate the victory over the Scots. Towards its end, on the feast of the Annunciation (25 March), the king held a special service in Westminster Abbey to thank God and St Edward for his triumph.
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Scotland, however, was also the subject of much businesslike discussion. Several leading Scots were present for the purpose, and three of them were called upon to advise how their country might best be governed in the future. Their involvement indicates the extent to which Edward had learned from his earlier mistake of disregarding Scottish opinion, and their identities reveal the quite considerable lengths to which he was now ready to go in order to retain Scotland’s loyalty. Robert Bruce was admittedly an unsurprising choice, as arguably was John Mowbray, a close confidant of John Comyn. But it must have required a very dispassionate state of mind on the king’s part to accept advice from Robert Wishart, the bishop of Glasgow, who just a few months earlier had been accused of committing ‘great evils’. Nevertheless, on the recommendation of this trio, it was decided to give the Scottish political community time to hold a parliament of their own, and to choose a ten-man delegation to treat for a final settlement later in the year.
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Because of the length of time since the last parliament there was plenty of other business to deal with besides Scotland, and the many petitions that poured into Westminster from England, Ireland and Gascony provide a further reminder of the scope of Edward’s authority. Petitions came from Wales too, though in this case they were heard at nearby Kennington – a reminder that part of the king’s authority had lately been delegated, for Kennington was the London residence of his eldest son.
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Wales was arguably the territory that had suffered least as a result of the Scottish wars, for it had not been required to supply money or provisions on the same scale as England or Ireland. If anything, Wales had been a beneficiary of the conflict, for the wealth extracted from these other regions had provided the wages for the Welsh armies that had been so frequently called upon to fight.

Nevertheless, the reason Wales had been such a reliable source of manpower was because, in the wake of their own conquest, its people needed all the money they could get. As many of the petitions presented at Kennington attest, everyday life in Wales had become much more onerous under English rule. Tolls were heavier than they had been under the native princes, as were the labour services extracted in order to build the king’s new castles (construction at Caernarfon, abandoned during the Scottish wars, had recently been resumed). The Welsh looked to their new prince to put these and other matters right, ‘esteeming him their rightful lord, because he derived his origins in those parts’ (the words, admittedly, of an English chronicler). In practice, however, Edward of Caernarfon could do little to provide redress; he too was bound by the settlement that had been imposed on Wales in the weeks leading up to his birth.
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In any case, it is to be doubted whether the prince possessed the inclination to improve the lot of his Welsh subjects. His true attitude towards them is perhaps better indicated by a letter he sent to Philip IV’s half-brother, Louis of Evreux, just a few weeks after the hearings at Kennington. ‘If you want anything from our land of Wales,’ he joked, ‘we can send you plenty of wild men, who will know well how to teach breeding to the young heirs and heiresses of great lords.’ As this comment suggests, part of the prince’s problem was his frivolity. Other evidence – particularly the entry in his wardrobe book that shows he had gone swimming in February 1303 with Robert the Fool – points to the same conclusion. Of course, at that time he had still been a teenager, and in 1305 he was only just turned twenty-one; his father, at a similar age, had exhibited a similar irresponsible streak. But the older Edward was not a man to indulge his offspring as Henry III had been, as events soon showed.
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