A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (26 page)

The real key to Edward’s success, however, lay in privatisation. During his crusade he had come to rely on the services of a company of Italian bankers known as the Riccardi of Lucca; on his return journey, in particular, their loans had helped to keep him solvent. This, like the use of customs, was not a wholly novel departure. Edward’s predecessors had been turning to such banking societies for the occasional loan since the twelfth century, when the Italians had cornered the market in international finance. Where Edward innovated was in transforming an occasional relationship into a permanent one. Earlier kings of England – Henry III, as always, furnishes a good example – had obtained loans from the Italians without giving much thought as to how they might be repaid. Edward, by contrast, struck a new deal, whereby the Riccardi agreed to provide him with credit on demand, and he, in return, handed them the entire operation of his new customs. It was a simple yet brilliant arrangement: Edward, even in a financial emergency, would always have sufficient cash, and the Riccardi had the security of knowing that, in time, they could recover their money from the steady profit (on average, around £11,000 a year) that the customs brought in. It was not a cheap system as far as the Crown was concerned – the Riccardi probably charged interest at something like 33 per cent – but for the guarantee of liquidity it was worth every penny. By knitting together two existing ideas – customs and Italian loans – Edward had solved the problem of hand-to-mouth finance that had blighted his father’s reign.
⁴⁹

But there was still one major and inescapable problem. Edward had returned from his crusade with colossal debts. This might seem surprising, given the sizeable sums that he had secured to finance the expedition in advance of its departure. In addition to the £17,500 Edward had raised by mortgaging the customs of Bordeaux to Louis IX, the hard-won tax he had wrung from parliament in 1270 had (eventually) yielded an impressive total of £31,500. All this money, however, had been proved quite inadequate to the task. Louis’s loan had been almost entirely absorbed by the initial contract payments to Edward’s followers, and those contracts had been set to run for one year only. The cost of repeatedly renewing them over the next three years would by itself have been enough to soak up the proceeds of the parliamentary subsidy. Besides this, of course, Edward had had plenty of other expenses to meet: the transportation of men and horses by ship (a contractual obligation); the purchase of fresh horses in the Holy Land; the construction of his tower in Acre. Above all, there had been the day-to-day cost of running his extensive household – a royal household from January 1273 – while it was overseas. Borrowing had begun while Edward was still in Acre and had increased dramatically during his return; debts to the Riccardi alone amounted to some £22,500. It helped that the new pope, Gregory X, agreed to a retrospective tax on the English Church that generated a yield almost equivalent to this sum. But Edward was still left owing numerous creditors, and the Riccardi in particular, what were, in the words of one chronicler, ‘inestimable sums’.
⁵⁰

The only solution was to seek the thing that, in general, Edward hoped to avoid – a tax. This was a tricky proposition, for it ran counter to the policy of conciliation he had pursued during the early months of his rule. Obtaining consent to the imposition of customs had been one thing – the merchant class, compromised by contraband, had needed to strike a deal with the king. Obtaining consent to a general subsidy was, by contrast, a challenge of quite a different order, for it required the consent of the knights of the shire, and they felt no corresponding obligation to make concessions. It is true that, like the merchants, the knights had been summoned en masse to the first parliament of the reign, and, like the rest of the king’s subjects, they must have been gladdened by the contents of the Statute of Westminster. By themselves, however, the new laws were evidently not enough to secure support for grant of taxation. Indeed, it is not impossible that Edward sought the knights’ consent during his first parliament, only to be rebuffed. In spite of all the consultation and legislation, nothing had been done on the matter that still troubled these men most. The Statute of Westminster, for all its breadth, had been silent on the subject of England’s Jews.
⁵¹

This, of course, was by no means a new issue. It had been by introducing measures intended to limit the burden of Jewish moneylending that Edward had obtained his first crusade tax in 1270. The trouble was, however, that these provisions – and also certain subsequent ones made during Edward’s absence – had not gone to the heart of the problem. The pernicious aspect of Jewish credit was not the business itself, but the dubious trade by which rich Christian speculators snapped up the estates of the indebted. The measures applied in 1270, while they had offered relief to some individuals by cancelling their debts, had imposed hardly any restriction on the illicit market; Jewish bonds continued to be bought and sold much as before, and small landowners continued to go under as result. Edward, in short, had raised expectations of relief, and charged handsomely for doing so, but his remedy had not worked. The knights of the shire had good reason to feel that in 1270 they had been sold a dud. Consequently, five years on, their complaint was more vociferous and to the point. If Edward wanted another vote of funds from parliament, he would have to provide a more effective solution to the Jewish problem.
⁵²

The king’s answer, when it came, was certainly bold. In October 1275, under the terms of a brand-new statute, Jewish moneylending was banned altogether. ‘The usuries of the Jews,’ Edward declared in the statute’s opening sentence, had led to ‘many evils, and instances of the disinheriting of the good men of his land.’ This was a move, in other words, intended in the first instance to win over the knights of the shire, and to this extent the new law was a great success. Published in the course of a parliament that assembled in October, the Statute of the Jewry was the essential concession that enabled Edward to levy his much-needed tax. With an assessment rate set at a fifteenth (6.6 per cent), the receipts were impressive. All told, it raised over £80,000 – enough to clear Edward’s crusade debts and leave him comfortably in credit.
⁵³

The losers, of course, were the Jews. The new statute outlawed the practice that had been their economic mainstay since their first arrival in England some two centuries before. Without moneylending the Jewish community could not hope to survive for long. Edward and his advisers were not oblivious to this; indeed, they had given considerable thought to providing a remedy. Henceforth, the statute declared, Jews were to live ‘by lawful trade, and by their labour’ – that is, they were permitted to set themselves up as merchants who might buy and sell with their Christian neighbours. There was nothing insincere in this ambitious attempt at social engineering: as far as Edward was concerned, he was being very conscientious about the whole business. Acknowledging that ‘he and his ancestors have always received great benefit from the Jewish people in the past’, the king took the Jews into his protection and granted them his peace. It was his will, he declared, ‘that they may be safely preserved and defended by his sheriffs and other bailiffs and faithful men’, and he further ordered ‘that none shall do them harm or damage or wrong, in their bodies or in their goods’.
⁵⁴

To this extent, the statute recognised and tried to limit the effects of anti-Semitism, which was not merely universal in thirteenth-century England but increasing in its intensity. This was a society in which conscientious Christians strove to keep pace with the bigoted teaching of their religious leaders. Simon de Montfort, a well-known fanatic, may have gone beyond what was lawful in encouraging his supporters to attack and kill Jews in the 1260s, but his virulent hatred was otherwise a matter for praise. When, for example, at the start of his career in England, he had expelled the Jews from Leicester, it was an act expressly intended to save his and his family’s souls, and carried out with the blessing of Robert Grosseteste, later bishop of Lincoln, and one of the greatest Christian theologians of his age. Moreover, it was far from being an exceptional initiative. Edward’s mother, Eleanor of Provence, although happy enough to have extensive contact with the Jews in her financial dealings, nevertheless requested royal permission to expel them from her dower lands in 1275 – permission that was duly granted. Henry III and Louis IX, both outstandingly devoted sons of the Church, were both pioneering anti-Semites as a result. Louis has the distinction of being the first European king to ban the Jews from lending money (an act of 1235). Henry, meanwhile, was the first king of England to endorse (in 1255) the pernicious myth, English in its origin, that the Jews ritually murdered Christian children.
⁵⁵

And yet, even as it tacitly acknowledged this rampant hatred, the Statute of Jewry took steps that reinforced it. Conscious of the fact that by exhorting the Jews to do business with Christians he might be seen as encouraging exactly the kind of close relations that the Church so roundly condemned, Edward endeavoured to restrict such interaction to a bare minimum. From now on, the new statute decreed, Jews were to live only in the king’s towns and cities; no Christians were to live among them. And, so that there should be no confusion whatsoever on this score, every Jew above the age of seven was to wear ‘a distinguishing mark on his outer garment’ – a badge of yellow felt three inches by six inches, shaped like the two tablets of the Mosaic Law. Such badges had been a key recommendation of the Church for more than half a century.
⁵⁶

It was, therefore, highly unlikely that any Jews would survive, let alone prosper, ‘by lawful trade’ with their Christian neighbours. No one was more acutely aware of this than the Jews themselves. Shortly after its publication, they collectively petitioned Edward about the new law, pointing out the many disadvantages they would face in trying to compete with Christian traders, and beseeching him to allow them to live as they had before, ‘in the time of his ancestors’. Their protest, however, was in vain. The statute stood, unmodified, in all its points. ‘The good men of his land’ had paid their king too high a price for it to be otherwise.
⁵⁷

When the autumn parliament of 1275 had ended, Edward left Westminster to spend a week at the Tower of London, where the direct correlation between the Crown’s power and its newly re-established wealth was already making itself manifest. On the king’s orders, the ancient fortress was being transformed in line with the latest developments in military thinking. This meant, above all, a massive expansion in the size of the site. Edward’s intention was to give the Tower a ‘concentric’ design, creating multiple lines of defence, one inside the other. That summer hundreds of men – their wages for that year alone came to £2,500 – had begun filling the existing moat and digging its replacement, the giant trench that surrounds the Tower today. Interestingly, the building accounts reveal that the individual in charge was ‘Brother John of the Order of St Thomas of Acre’, an engineer evidently recruited in the Holy Land and perhaps the man responsible for Edward’s building endeavours there. The moat, moreover, was only the first part of a major programme of redevelopment. Other experts were engaged in the more complicated business of completing the southern section of the new circuit, a task that involved extending the Tower’s site out into the River Thames. To the west, meanwhile, construction had started on a series of gatehouses that together would form a new main entrance. And, amid all this military engineering, domestic concerns were not being neglected. Also under way from the summer of 1275 were a new set of royal apartments, St Thomas’s Tower, which still survive more or less unaltered.
⁵⁸

If there was a target audience for this massive restatement of royal power, it was the citizens of London themselves, the restless rabble who had dared to challenge the Crown on several occasions during the previous reign. To them Edward evidently wished to send a clear message from the start. Elsewhere in England the new king may have chosen to present a conciliatory face, but when it came to the capital his aspect was deliberately one of intimidation. The enlarged Tower stood as a permanent warning to the Londoners that their recent behaviour was not to be repeated. As such, the new works there, like Edward’s treatment of the Jews, introduced a discordant note of domination and intolerance to the otherwise harmonious fanfare that heralded the start of his reign.

It also signalled a dramatic shift in priorities. While the diggers and ditchers were beginning their noisy business on the eastern edge of the city, back in Westminster the stonemasons’ hammers had fallen silent. The abandonment of Henry III’s half-built abbey was yet another reminder that this was not simply a new reign, but a new political era.
⁵⁹

The early days of this new era did not pass without disappointment or distress. Not long after their return to England, Edward and Eleanor’s eldest surviving son, Henry, had fallen seriously ill, and neither prayers nor medication had been sufficient to save him. He died in October 1274, leaving only one younger brother – Alfonso, not yet passed his first birthday – to take the place of heir apparent. Probably more distressing still for Edward was the sudden passing, in the early months of 1275, of both his sisters. Margaret and Beatrice, respectively queen of Scots and wife of the future duke of Brittany, were, in the words of one chronicler, ‘women of great fame and in the flower of youth’. Both had been present with their husbands at the coronation, and their subsequent deaths, said the chronicler, converted the great joy of that occasion into great sadness.
⁶⁰