Foundation (History of England Vol 1) (35 page)

The measure was timely and necessary. Parts of the countryside were beset by marauding gangs, many of them drawn from the soldiers who had fought in Edward’s wars. There were no other rewards for old soldiers. Other groups of ruffians were hired by members of the local gentry in order to pursue private feuds or to terrify their tenants. So special courts known as ‘trailbaston’, which meant the act of clenching a club or staff, were set up to deal with acts of felony and trespass. The name originally described the ruffians themselves, and then became applied to the judges who sentenced them.

The king took his share of the proceeds of justice, of course, and the judges themselves grew rich. They were despised as much as they were feared. In some of the popular verses of the period the judges are compared unfavourably to those outlaws who sought refuge in the woods. What difference between the thieves in hiding and the thieves in office? In one song the usher of the court addresses a defendant. ‘Poor man, why do you trouble yourself ? Why do you wait here? Unless you give money to everybody in this court, you labour in vain. If you have brought nothing, you will stand altogether out of doors.’ We have here a medieval paradox. Even as the law was being shaped and refined, the exponents of the law were mocked and vilified. Royal law was being condemned even as it was being extended.

Nevertheless forms and procedures had to be followed; there had developed a legal routine. In the period of Edward’s reign the number of attorneys rose from approximately 10 to 200. They became a new elite. Where there is money to be made, there are people who will wish to create privileged access to it. The phenomenon itself is of a piece with other developments of the early fourteenth century. The households of the great were being run by staffs of trained managers, and farms were organized by estate managers. War itself was being professionalized. The king no longer summoned a national host from the shires; instead he came more and more to rely upon paid troops led by full-time commanders. As the business of the realm became more complex, it became
the province of full-time officers whom we might describe as a civil service; the chancery alone employed more than 100 clerks, and had a secure home at Westminster. The first proper parliamentary record, giving an account of proceedings, dates from 1316.

Yet the force of the royal will was still paramount. Two judges were once arguing a case in the king’s presence. Edward was beginning to lose patience with their lengthy deliberations. Eventually he interrupted them, saying, ‘I have nothing to do with your disputations, but God’s blood, you shall give me a good writ before you arise hence!’ He did not mean good in the sense of meritorious; he meant one that worked in his favour. The monkish author of
The Song of Lewes
had written of Edward, when he was a prince, that ‘whatever he wants he holds to be lawful, and he thinks that there are no legal bounds to his power’.

Edward had remained in Gascony from 1286 to 1289, seeking to control the affairs of the land that mattered as much to him as England. On his return he discovered, according to one chronicler, ‘a very real oppression hanging over the country’. One of his clerical servants, Adam de Stratton, had acquired an unsavoury reputation for various financial malpractices. He was part of a system of bribery and corruption that had flourished more than ever in the king’s absence of three years. The rage of the king was wonderful to behold. He stormed into the chambers of the man, exclaiming, ‘Adam! Adam! Where art thou?’ In Adam’s house, at Smalelane near the Fleet Prison, was found a hoard of £13,000.

Edward could trust only the advisers whom he had taken with him to Gascony, and he ordered them to find out the truth about all accusations. As a result of their enquiries many judges were found to be manifestly corrupt. One of them, the chief justice on the Bench of Common Pleas, fled for sanctuary to a Franciscan friary. From there he was forced to abjure the realm, walking barefoot to Dover with a cross in his hand. The king had returned from abroad, and had become an avenging angel. Once more he had proved his strength.

In November 1290, his queen died. Eleanor of Castile is not well known to history. She is supposed to have been devout, but
her principal devotion was to her family’s interests; she speculated in land, for example, and took financial advantage of those who were heavily in debt to the Jews. One contemporary reveals that ‘day by day the said lady continues to acquire plunder and the possessions of others by these means. There is public outcry and gossip about this in every part of England.’ In this she was not very different from other members of the family who, travelling in the wake of Edward, were inclined to be rapacious and mercenary; it was one of the settled policies of his realm that his kinsmen should be granted the great earldoms of the realm. Four of his daughters were safely married to the richest magnates and were given extensive lands.

The king was much affected by his wife’s death, and along the route of her burial procession from her deathbed in Nottinghamshire to her sepulchre in Westminster he caused to be erected a series of crosses. These are the ‘Eleanor crosses’, three of which still stand at Geddington, Northampton and Waltham Cross. Another of them, at Charing Cross, is a replica and is in the wrong place. After the funeral the king went into a religious retreat for more than a month.

By March 1291, however, he was on the border with Scotland. He had travelled there to arbitrate between the claimants to the Scottish throne, on the assumption that he was somehow overlord of the kingdom. He chose one of them, John Balliol, and then proceeded to treat him as a vassal. The Scots would not endure this situation for long. Four years later Balliol was persuaded by his barons to renounce his homage to the English king, ally himself with the French monarch, and declare for independence. Edward then marched north and, within a matter of weeks, had subdued the Scottish army. Dunbar opened its gates to him; Edinburgh made a token resistance; Perth and St Andrews submitted unconditionally. He destroyed Berwick and butchered the people savagely; according to a chronicler thousands of the inhabitants ‘fell like autumn leaves’. He seemed to have a thirst for blood.

Edward now believed himself in truth to be the proper king of Scotland. Lia Fáil, ‘the speaking stone’ otherwise known as ‘the stone of destiny’, was taken from Scone Palace and removed to Westminster Abbey where it remained until 1996. According to
legend it formed the pillow on which Jacob’s head rested when he was vouchsafed the vision of the angels ascending the ladder. It is in truth an oblong rectangular block of limestone, pitted and fretted with age. But it was a token of Scottish destiny. When Edward handed the seal of Scotland to its new English governor, he remarked that ‘a man does good business when he rids himself of a turd’. One Scottish patriot was determined to cure him of this complacency. William Wallace had fled to the safety of the woods, having been convicted of murder, and there he gathered together a band of disaffected men.

Curiously enough Edward had placed Balliol in an invidious situation similar to his own; as lord of Gascony and duke of Aquitaine, Edward was theoretically the vassal of the king of France. This meant that, in practice, he was continually colliding with the interests of the court at Paris. It took only a small spark to light a modest flame. Some rowdy fights between English and Norman sailors led to reprisals and confrontations; the French king then summoned the English king to his court and, when he refused, he declared Edward’s lands in France to be confiscated.

Edward sailed with his army across the Channel in 1297, although many of the participants were quite unwilling to join this continental endeavour. Why should they fight for Edward’s lands in France when they derived no benefit from them? The earl of Norfolk and marshal of England, Roger Bigod, had refused to take command of the army. ‘Bigod,’ the king said in a rage, ‘you shall go or hang.’ ‘By God, sir,’ the earl replied, ‘I shall neither go nor hang.’ He did not go. In fact Edward never actually engaged his opponents in battle. He sailed to Flanders to attack the French king from the north, but he did no more than bluster. In the end he signed a treaty, by which he retained Gascony, and then he sealed it with a kiss. He married the French king’s sister, Margaret, making sure that European power stayed within the family.

The news nearer home was more disquieting. Reports of a Scottish invasion were widespread and, in the autumn of 1297, William Wallace and his men defeated an English army at Stirling Bridge. More significantly, a domestic rebellion was growing in the face of royal extortions. The taxation for the French expedition had been immense. The king had taken one fifth of the income of the
clergy; the clerics had at first refused to grant as much, and the king promptly outlawed them on the grounds that a body which did not support the country did not deserve to be protected by it. The goods of the clergy were seized, and the courts of law were closed to them. Their tenants refused to pay rent, and often physically attacked them. They were in the end compelled to surrender to the force of a powerful and ruthless king.

They were not the only ones to suffer from his depredations. The citizens of London were compelled to part with a sixth of their moveable wealth. Edward had increased the customs on exports of wool, and as a result the merchants had cut payments to their suppliers. The wool tax became known as the ‘bad tax’ or ‘maltote’. The plight of those in the countryside who suffered from excessive taxation is captured in a vernacular poem written in 1300,
Song of the Husbandman
:

Every fourth penny went to the king; seed-corn, and immature corn, had to be sold in order to raise money for taxes; the king’s bailiffs seized oxen and cattle; bribes were paid to the royal officials; some people were forced to flee their lands because they could not afford to be taxed. Royal officials had taken grain from the farmers in order to feed the troops in France. Edward also levied fines and taxes on the great magnates, with whom he never enjoyed satisfactory relations.

Whereupon some of the earls – Roger Bigod among them – decided that it was time to confront the king. Another round of warfare between king and barons seemed to be inevitable. The regency council that governed the nation during the king’s absence, under the nominal command of the king’s young son, retreated for safety within the walls of London. A baronial army was assembled at Northampton. At this point the royal party gave in. With the news of the defeat at Stirling Bridge before them, they could not risk a war on two fronts. The earls demanded a reissue of the Magna Carta with important new provisions, such as the removal
of the ‘maltote’. This was granted to them. It was now solemnly sworn that there would never be taxation without the consent of those being taxed. The king returned a month later from his inconclusive overseas adventures, and reluctantly agreed. The Magna Carta had, by slow degrees, now become the guardian of English liberty – or at least the English economy – against royal aggression.

The earls then for the most part turned their attention towards the threat from Scotland. Edward convened a parliament in York, a sure sign that he was now intent upon subduing the northern regions. He gathered a great army of more than 28,000 men, including the soldiers previously posted to Flanders and Gascony. Yet a major victory for the English at Falkirk in 1298 over the army of William Wallace did not prove decisive, and the next six years of the Scottish wars consisted of seasonal campaigns in which the English forces were matched by fierce native resistance. The Scots eventually came to terms in 1304, and a year later William Wallace was captured; he was dragged on a pallet from Westminster to Smithfield, where he was ritually hanged, disembowelled while still alive, and quartered. A plaque is still fixed to the wall close to the point where he was killed. Yet all the butchery did not work against a determined people. A year after Wallace’s execution, Robert Bruce was crowned king of Scotland at Scone. The old war continued.

As long as the war was being prosecuted successfully, the magnates took the side of the king; but in periods of failure or indecision the huge sums of taxation that the wars incurred became a matter of considerable concern. The king was, as always, untrustworthy; he tried various means of evading the provisions of the Magna Carta to which he had assented. He was so convinced of his rectitude that any means of attaining his ends was considered acceptable. That is the point – in all his demands and exactions, the king never thought that he was doing anything wrong. He was behaving only as a king ought to behave. He was raising
his
money from
his
country in order to wage war against those who threatened him. That was his duty. The magnates were suspicious and resentful, but they did not rebel. They harried him, and chided him, but they did not seek to overthrow him. He was now growing old as
well as stubborn and irate. They waited for his death, and the reign of his son. An unfinished war, combined with a rapidly growing debt, were the two stones against which the last ten years of Edward were ground. The king’s finances were in disorder, with all the prudent measures of previous years discarded or ignored. Edward had been made by war, and would be broken by war.

In 1307 Robert Bruce appeared at the head of an army, ready to claim his rights as the crowned king of Scotland, and at Loudoun Hill in Ayrshire defeated an English force that had been ordered to hunt him down. Edward decided to march north, with the settled purpose of destroying Scottish royal ambitions for good, but even the best-laid plans are never perfect. In the summer of 1307, at the age of sixty-eight, Edward I died at Burgh-by-Sands on the Solway.