Kings and Castles (7 page)

The king’s desire to appease his subjects in 1290 brings us
to his expulsion of the Jews. There is no point trying to defend him, as some
have done, on the grounds that the exercise was carried out efficiently and
that the incidents of murderous violence involved were unauthorised and
apparently
few in number
. Edward had no sympathy with
the Jews and had already visited plenty of violence on them of his own accord.
A decade earlier, to maximise the profits of an impending
recoinage
,
he had instituted a covert crackdown on ‘coin-clippers’ – criminals who shaved
silver off the edge of his coins to make new ingots. Of those convicted and
hanged, twenty-nine were Christians but almost ten times that number were Jews,
which makes Edward I responsible for the biggest pogrom in British history.

His expulsion of the Jews, by contrast, is not quite as
remarkable or record-breaking as is often portrayed. Edward, it is true, became
the first king to enforce a nationwide Jewish exodus. Yet all this proves is
that his was the powerful king of a precociously united kingdom; for more than
a century, other kings, princes and counts had been expelling Jews from their
demesnes to the fullest extent of their more limited authority. Simon de
Montfort, for example, whose name is commemorated by a new university in Leicester, had expelled the Jews from that town at the
start of his English career. Moreover, he had done so expressly for the
salvation of his and his family’s souls. Thirteenth-century Europe was a
profoundly anti-Semitic
place,
and no corner of it
more so than England.
What motivated Edward to expel the Jews in 1290 was not simply his own personal
hatred; it was his desperate need of money, which could only be satisfied by a
grant of tax from parliament. The knights of the shires, those heroes of
Victorian constitutional history, were duly summoned, and demanded the
expulsion as the price of their consent. The expulsion, in short, was a popular
act in every sense: Edward received the biggest tax of the English Middle Ages,
and his subjects cheered him for his pious performance in driving ‘the
faithless multitude of Jews and unbelievers from England’. It is quite easy to
present Edward I as a Hitler figure; more difficult, perhaps, to confront the
fact that all Englishmen once shared his virulent anti-Semitism.

We could likewise easily condemn Edward for his wars, but
this too would be to adopt an anachronistic stance: contemporaries were quick
to praise him. ‘Long may he live and conquer and rule’, wrote a jubilant
English clerk in Rome
when he heard that Edward had defeated the Welsh, ‘that domestic enemy … the
disturber of English peace’. After the king’s death, it was recalled with
approval that ‘he tried to war down all those who wished to throw his people in
confusion’ – this from a sermon preached before the pope. Medieval monarchs
were expected to go after their enemies with fire and sword. As one poet
proudly put it, the English king confronting his foes was alike to the three
lions on his banner: ‘proud, fierce and cruel’. Another writer put expressed
the same point in even more concise terms. To the sons of pride, he said,
Edward I was ‘a terrible king’. The terror he unleashed against the Scots has
been the basis of much modern criticism. Yet it has been recently and
convincingly argued that, in prosecuting this war, Edward’s conduct was
entirely in keeping with the contemporary laws of arms. If anything, in fact,
Edward was surprisingly lenient in his treatment of the Scots, at least until
1306. One north-country English chronicler averred that the king was too
compassionate.

Nevertheless, there are limits to the amount we can forgive
or understand Edward’s behaviour, even when judged by the standards of his own
day, and this is most obviously the case in relation to Scotland. The
English and the Scots, unlike the English and the Welsh, got on well in the
thirteenth century. To take just the most obvious examples, Edward’s aunt,
Joanna, had been married to Alexander II (king of Scots from 1214–49), and
Edward’s sister Margaret was married to Alexander III (1249–86). The kings of England had
always taken the trouble to stress their superiority in this relationship, and
the Scots, in return, had always politely insisted on their independence. But
in 1290, following the tragic deaths of Alexander III and all his direct heirs,
Edward saw a unique opportunity for extracting from the Scots an unqualified
admission of their subordination. He appealed to history to make his case,
ordering a trawl of monastic chronicles to unearth the evidence that would
prove his right to
overlordship
. That case, built as
it was on flimsy or fantastical foundations, failed to convince, and the Scots
rejected both the king’s dodgy dossier and his demand for submission. But when
argument failed Edward bullied and coerced, and at length the Scots crumpled,
and told the English king what he wanted to hear.

Edward’s triumph, however, was short-lived. As soon as he had
finished browbeating the Scots into submission, he found himself on the
receiving end of similar aggression from the king of France, who confiscated
and invaded his duchy of Gascony.
Edward was dragged into a Continental war which, in different circumstances, he
might have concluded with reasonable speed. But, because of his recent
hostility, the Scots, who might otherwise have sided with him, allied
themselves with the French, and as a result Edward found himself embroiled in
ceaseless fighting for the rest of his days. In his efforts to beat the Scots
and the French, he was forced to undermine much of the constructive achievement
of the first half of his reign. Criminals were pardoned in return for military
service; taxation was demanded at punitive levels and, as a result, the
political consensus in England
began to collapse. Faced with opposition to his demands for money and military
service, the consensus-builder resorted to evermore arbitrary measures,
attempting to levy taxes without consent, and disregarding his subjects’
demands for the confirmation of their existing liberties. Once again,
Englishmen started to regard Edward as an untrustworthy creature.

By the time of Edward’s death in July 1307, this crisis had
subsided. The French had returned Gascony; the
Welsh, who had also rejoined the fray, had been re-conquered; England was
once again politically acquiescent. Only in Scotland was there ongoing trouble
in the shape of Robert Bruce, but this too looked certain to be a passing
thing. There seemed little doubt at the time that the newly proclaimed Scottish
king would soon be defeated, captured, and treated to the same grisly death
that William Wallace had experienced just two years before.

In conclusion therefore, we must surely allow Edward I the
greatness that has been denied to him in almost all recent writing. We are,
after all, talking about the man who out-
generalled
and defeated Simon de Montfort in battle; who, alone of all the crusade leaders
of 1270, reached the Holy Land; the man who conquered Wales and built the
castles at Conwy,
Beaumaris
,
Harlech
and Caernarfon; the man who for a time gave England the best government it had
enjoyed since the Norman Conquest and left an enduring legacy in the shape of
his laws and in the development of parliament. All of this can be admitted,
provided at the same time we recognise that Edward was also, as contemporaries
observed, a terrible king. He was, as one native Irish annalist put it, ‘a
knight most prudent, most violent and most valiant. It was by him that the
greatest number of people fell in his time.’ Terrible in his wars, Edward also
made a terrible error of judgement in trying to lord it over Scotland, destroying the previously good
relations that had existed with England,
and leaving a legacy of vengeance that endured for centuries, and that still
resonates today.

11.
The Conquest of Wales
– A Visitor’s Guide

In the mid-thirteenth century Wales was to all intents and
purposes an independent nation. Its people not only spoke their own language;
they also lived according to their own laws and customs, and were governed by
their own native princes. Yet in the space of a single generation this
independence was decisively terminated. By the end of the thirteenth century,
the halls of the Welsh princes had been razed and replaced by mighty English
castles. The country was governed by Englishmen, and English law prevailed. Wales, in a
word, had been conquered.

Anglo-Welsh hostility had a long history – not for nothing
were the two peoples separated by the eighth-century earthwork known as Offa’s
Dyke – but in the century or so before the conquest this hostility had been
sharpened by contrasting economic fortunes. Thanks to its expanding
agricultural base, twelfth-century England could boast new towns,
large cities, great cathedrals, international trade and a plentiful silver
coinage. Wales,
with its pastoral economy, had none of these things, though Englishmen at the
time felt that the fault lay in Welsh themselves, whom they began to regard as
wilfully backward, indolent and immoral – barbarians in need of taming.

A more recent cause of the conquest was political change in Wales. Before
the thirteenth century it had been a country divided against
itself
,
with dozens of petty kings and princes fighting each other for supremacy.
Because Welsh custom decreed that a man’s possessions must be divided on his
death, any territorial gains made in one generation were generally lost during
the next, with brother fighting brother for a share of the spoils. During the
thirteenth century, however, one princely dynasty began to dominate all the
others. By 1258,
Llywelyn
ap
Gruffudd
, ruler of the
northwest region of Gwynedd, had achieved such success against his neighbours
(and his brothers) that he felt justified in styling himself ‘prince of Wales’.
Nine years later, even the English king, Henry III, was obliged to recognize
the prince’s self-proclaimed status.

But
Llywelyn
failed to appreciate
that his success owed much to Henry’s ineptitude. When the old king died in
1272 he was succeeded by his masterful and warlike son, Edward I – better
known, thanks to
Braveheart
, by his contemporary
nickname,
Longshanks
. The Welsh leader continued to
act as he had always done, meeting English demands for homage and fealty with
bluster and defiance, reckoning that he would always triumph if matters came to
blows. The scale of his misjudgement became clear in 1277, when Edward led a
huge, well supplied and well-disciplined army into northwest Wales.
Llywelyn
lost all but a handful of the lordships he had
acquired since the start of his career, and Snowdonia was surrounded by several
new English castles.

It is a moot point as to whether Edward had intended to
conquer Wales
completely at this point and found it beyond his resources, or whether he had
always planned to leave a diminished
Llywelyn
in
place. The mountainous heartlands of the prince’s power would be difficult to
conquer and promised little by way of financial return. It was only after a
major Welsh uprising in the spring of 1282 that outright conquest became
inevitable. Edward again led a large army along the north Welsh coast, only to
suffer a disaster in November when a company of his men were fatally ambushed
as they tried to cross the
Menai
Strait
by means of a pontoon bridge. ‘The people of Snowdonia’, declared
Llywelyn
and his council a few days later, ‘do not wish to
do homage to a stranger of whose language, manners and laws they are entirely
ignorant.’ Shortly afterwards, Edward’s own letters proposed ‘to put an end
finally to the matter that he has now begun of suppressing the malice of the
Welsh’. Henceforth it would be a struggle to the death.

In
Llywelyn’s
case, death followed
swiftly: he was killed in a skirmish with English forces in mid-Wales the
following month. For Wales
itself, the agony was more protracted, as Edward cautiously massed the
necessary forces for a final push. In March 1283 English troops spilled across
the River Conwy and occupied Snowdonia.
Llywelyn’s
brother,
Dafydd
, who had led the Easter uprising, was
captured on the slopes of Snowdon and taken to Shrewsbury to be executed. Thousands of
others must have died in the fighting, both Welsh and English. The death toll
is unknown, but we know that Edward I had raised what were at the time the
largest armies ever seen in the British Isles.
When the Welsh rose up again in 1294, the king deployed a staggering 37,000 men
to crush the rebellion. ‘What is left to us that we should linger?’ wailed one
Welsh poet. ‘No place of escape from Terror’s prison / No place to live –
wretched is living!’

Edward’s conquest was brutally thorough. Some secular
treasures and sacred relics were carted off to be kept as trophies at
Westminster Abbey; others were eradicated. The silver seal matrices of
Llywelyn
and
Dafydd
were melted
down and made into a chalice for the king, while Conwy abbey, which housed the
bones of the prince’s ancestors, was destroyed in order to make way for Conwy Castle.
It was his new castles, above all, that cemented Edward’s conquest and
symbolized his determination that it should never be underdone. ‘Divine
providence’, began his Statute of Wales in 1284, ‘has wholly and entirely
converted the land
of Wales into a dominion
of our ownership’.

Caerphilly

A major short-term cause of Edward’s first war of 1276–77 was
the territorial disputes along the Welsh border between
Llywelyn
and the English marcher lords. The most serious of these was a clash between
the prince and Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester,
the legacy of which is the mighty castle
of Caerphilly. The earl
began building the fortress in 1268 to assert his right to rule upland
Glamorgan, and
Llywelyn
spent much of the next four
years trying to destroy it (at one stage, indeed, the Welsh leader succeeded in
overrunning the site). But Gilbert was one of the greatest (i.e. wealthiest) of
all English magnates, able to deploy resources on a scale that the prince simply
could not match. Caerphilly is a giant among castles; at the time of its
construction it was the greatest building of its kind in the British Isles, its
concentric design predating by several years the similar scheme that was used
by Edward at the Tower
of London. Yet there is
no sign that these defences were ever put to the test. The conquest of Wales meant
that Caerphilly’s role as a frontier fortress was extremely short-lived.

Rhuddlan

To cement his territorial gains after the first Welsh war,
Edward built three new fortresses: Aberystwyth, Flint and
Rhuddlan
.
Rhuddlan
was the most substantial of the three and
was intended to serve as the principal administrative seat for the newly
conquered territories. It was located not far from
Dyserth
,
where Henry III had built a new castle just thirty years earlier. Henry’s
castle, however, had been located on high ground – easy to defend but also easy
to encircle – and in 1263
Llywelyn
had captured and
destroyed it. Mindful of his father’s mistake, Edward ensured that his own new
fortresses could be easily resupplied by sea. At
Rhuddlan
this called for a major civil engineering project, since the River Clwyd that
linked the site to the sea had too many meanders for large ships. During the
first three years of construction, therefore, a separate army of diggers,
almost a thousand strong, laboured to make the river straighter.

As the foremost English base in north Wales,
Rhuddlan
was naturally the muster-point for Edward’s army
(and his fleet) when the second Welsh war erupted in 1282. It was also here
that the king, famed for his lawgiving, issued the Statute of Wales in 1284,
laying down the legal framework that would be used to govern the newly
conquered country.

Glastonbury
Abbey

At Easter 1278, within a few months of accepting
Llywelyn’s
homage at Westminster,
Edward travelled to Glastonbury
to visit the tomb of King Arthur. We can say with confidence that the tomb was
fake, because we know that Arthur had never really existed. But Edward and his
contemporaries had no means of knowing this – to them the legendary king was as
real a historic figure as William the Conqueror or Richard the
Lionheart
. The only problem with Arthur was his origins –
he was an ancient British king who had battled against the Anglo-Saxons – or,
put another way, a Welshman who had fought the English. To the Welsh,
therefore, he was a potent symbol of resistance. They maintained that he had
never actually died, and one day he would return to lead them to victory.

Hence Edward’s decision to visit Glastonbury in the immediate wake of
Llywelyn’s
defeat.
In a carefully contrived
ceremony, the king unearthed the bones, wrapped them in cloth of gold and had
them reinterred in a new tomb. The skull was not reburied, but left on display
‘on account of popular devotion’. The real reason, surely, was to make a
political point. Arthur was dead, and would not be coming back to save anyone.

Cilmeri

The Welsh rising that triggered the second Welsh war was
orchestrated by
Llywelyn’s
young brother,
Dafydd
; there is no good evidence that the prince himself
was privy to the plan. Once the war was underway, however,
Llywelyn
had little choice but to support his brother and the Welsh people in their
struggle. Seeking to avoid the encirclement that had brought about his
surrender in 1277, the prince decided in late 1282 to strike at the middle
March, hoping to exploit the confusion caused by the recent death of Roger
Mortimer, Edward’s commander in the region. On arrival, however,
Llywelyn
found huge English forces ranged against him. The
two sides met in battle on high ground to the west of
Builth
,
at a place called
Cilmeri
, and during the encounter
the
prince
of Wales fell. At first he was
unrecognized, but at length the English realized they had scored a decisive
victory. ‘Know, Sire’, wrote their captain to his royal master, ‘that
Llywelyn
ap
Gruffudd
is dead, his army broken, and the flower of his men killed’. Letters found on
the prince’s body suggest that he had been lured into a trap by Mortimer’s
sons, who had pretended to be ready to switch sides.

Dolwyddelan

The second war of 1282–83 was a war of outright conquest,
with English troops driven right into
the what
had
been the heart of
Llywelyn’s
power. In January 1283
Edward’s forces pushed across the River Conwy into Snowdonia, where they laid
siege to the native Welsh castle at
Dolwyddelan
.
Compared with the giant fortresses that Edward was in the process of erecting,
the castles of the Welsh princes were small and outmoded.
Dolwyddelan
was certainly no match for the English war machine, and its defenders
surrendered after a short siege. Two months later Edward himself crossed the
Conwy – probably the first English king ever to do so – and in May 1283 he made
the castle his temporary headquarters. Its fall was a symbolic as well as a
military triumph, for
Dolwyddelan
had been the birth
place of
Llywelyn’s
grandfather,
Llywelyn
the Great, who had built the castle there during the early decades of the
thirteenth century.

Like several other natives castles (e.g.
Criccieth
and
Castell-y-Bere
),
Dolwyddelan
was retained and renovated after the English conquest. Records show that in
1283 a new chamber block was added, along with a new bridge and a water mill.

Caernarfon

Just as with the first Welsh war, so too with the second:
victory was cemented with a trio of new castles. Similarly situated on the
coast, they were more ambitious than their predecessors, and more dramatic.
Conwy, with its multiple towers and turrets, looks like something out of
medieval romance, while
Harlech
, perched high on its
famous rock, is one of the most visually striking castles ever built. It was at
Caernarfon, however, that Edward and his architect pulled out all the stops. A
giant fortress-palace, and the seat of the principality’s new government, this
mighty castle also drew its power from the past. According to Welsh legend,
Caernarfon was the birth place of the Roman Emperor
Maximus
(and apparently also his death place: in 1283, Edward discovered and reburied
Maximus’s
bones there, much as he had done with Arthur at Glastonbury). The fact
that
Maximus
was also said to be the father of the
Emperor Constantine, founder of Constantinople, almost certainly explains the
castle’s unusual design: with its polygonal towers and different coloured bands
of masonry, Caernarfon appears to be built in conscious imitation of Constantinople’s walls. Work continued after the revolt
of 1294–95, during which the castle was damaged, but despite colossal
expenditure it was never fully finished.