An Old Interview about Edward I

Clearing up my hard-drive, I discovered an interview that I did for Waterstone's back in 2008 for the promotion of A Great and Terrible King. As far I as remember it was never used, and is certainly not available any more, so I've decided to post it here.

What inspired you to undertake a biography of Edward I?

I have studied the Middle Ages since I was an undergraduate, and the thirteenth century – i.e. Edward’s century – was the focus for my postgraduate studies. During these years I was particularly inspired by the teaching and writing of Rees Davies, a historian who had pioneered the notion that the period could only be understood by examining the British Isles as a whole, rather than simply the national histories of England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland. Because of his aggressive policy towards the Welsh and Scots, Edward I provided a great way of examining the momentous changes that occurred in Britain during the Middle Ages. It’s no exaggeration to say that his is an epic story, but in recent years no one had told it as such.

What were your most valuable primary sources? Did you uncover any new evidence during your research?

Well, in this period it’s either chronicles or government records. But both are far more voluminous than most non-medievalists can imagine. My most valuable resource has been the National Archives in Kew, which is a short cycle from where I live in London. The Archives are home to thousands of original parchment rolls generated by Edward’s government (fortunately, the most important ones are also in print). Because of the quantities involved, it’s very rare (though not impossible – see below) to make new discoveries based on a single new find. Most of my innovations have arisen from the simple expedient of putting this great mass of evidence in the correct chronological order. I have, for example, proposed a new date for the giant Round Table, made by Edward, that now hangs in Winchester Great Hall.

Is it possible to describe Edward as the ‘greatest’ of English medieval kings?

It is, but then ‘greatness’ is a pretty subjective measure, isn’t it? When the BBC, for example, asked the British people to put its greatest sons and daughters in rank order in 2002, the actor Michael Crawford did better than Queen Victoria, and the Enoch Powell – generally regarded as an odious racist – achieved a very respectable 55th place. Edward’s contemporaries certainly wrote about him as the greatest king that had ever been, outshining all of his predecessors. But their praise was predicated on certain royal actions that we would now regard with horror, such as the expulsion of the Jews in 1290. That said, there are certain empirical measures that are hard to contradict: the biggest armies raised in England during the Middle Ages; the largest taxes, the largest parliaments, and the most legislation. Slice him however you like, Edward was in most respects superlative.

What was his most remarkable achievement?

Bearing in mind the above comments – i.e. I’m not saying it was a good thing – the conquest of Wales. The sheer size of the resources that Edward was able to mobilize, and the single-minded determination with which he set about the task – both were remarkable. And, of course, the castles that he built to cement his victory.

When did Edward first become known as ‘Longshanks’? Was it a contemporary sobriquet?

The first references come at the end of his reign, in chronicles and songs. I’ve seen two. So yes it was contemporary, but it’s impossible to say how widely it was used. Edward was massively tall – his corpse, exhumed in 1774, measured 6 foot 2 inches, and that was presumably after some shrinkage – so it clearly struck people as his defining characteristic. In later centuries he was sometimes called Edward the Long.

To what extent was Edward responsible for the unprecedented slaughter of rebellious nobility at the Battle of Evesham? Is there any evidence to suggest that he ordered his men to ‘murder’ Simon de Montfort on the battlefield?

The answers are ‘entirely’ and ‘yes’. Evesham had long been recognized as an unusually bloody encounter – in this era, the nobility spared and ransomed each other, and killing was strictly taboo. One contemporary writer, aghast at the amount of blood spilt, described it as ‘the murder of Evesham’. Edward’s personal role in instigating the slaughter only became clear about ten years ago, when a new account of the battle was discovered on the reverse of a roll in the College of Arms. Evidently written by a well-informed eye-witness, this amazing find added the fact that, before the two sides engaged, Edward hand-picked a death squad to hunt down Montfort and kill him.

How deep was Edward’s commitment to the crusading cause? Was it the militaristic equivalent of his father’s devotion to the cult of Edward the Confessor?

Well, he actually went on crusade, which is more than any other English king did, with the obvious exception of his great uncle, Richard the Lionheart. You don’t save up for years on end, sacrificing all other concerns and ignoring pleas to remain at home, then trek from one end of Europe to the other, risking your life with numerous sea voyages, and suffering manifold privations, unless you’re pretty committed. What hasn’t really been stressed enough in the past, however, is the extent to which Edward continued to be committed to the crusade for the rest of his reign. He firmly intended to go again, at the head of a much greater host, and spent most of the 1280s making preparations to do so. The only reason these plans collapsed was the unexpected outbreak of a war with France in 1294. As for the second part of the question, Edward’s devotion to the crusade was far less odd than his father’s devotion to the Confessor – recovering Jerusalem was the highest ideal of his age. His father’s attachment to a long-dead Anglo-Saxon saint was by contrast quite quirky.

Was Edward’s queen, Eleanor of Castile, as politically active as his mother, Eleanor of Provence?

No. Eleanor of Provence is a fascinating character, and the subject of a wonderful recent biography. She acquired a political role, and hence attracted more contemporary comment, because of Henry III’s weakness, which allowed factions to develop within his own family. Edward, on the other hand, was one of the most masterful kings England has ever known, and there were no similar divisions at his court. Hence his wife (and, for that matter, his younger brother) are less easy to characterize, because they supported him at all times, and their personalities were overshadowed by his.

Who would you consider to be Edward’s most formidable military opponent?

It’s either Baybars, the Egyptian sultan whom Edward faced when he was in the Holy Land, or Philip IV, king of France, with whom Edward went to war in 1294. Both were considerably more powerful.

Why did Edward embark upon such a monumental campaign of castle-building in Wales? Would you agree that it was the ‘most coordinated and impressive…in medieval history’?

Edward considered that he had solved the problem of Wales in 1277. When, therefore, the Welsh subsequently rebelled in 1282, he determined on outright conquest. The new castles at Caernarfon, Conwy and Harlech were necessary to hold the newly conquered territory. They were certainly the most impressive chain of fortresses erected in Britain in the Middle Ages, and probably in Europe too, though no doubt someone will tell me otherwise. Whether they were unnecessarily large is a moot point. They did the job as intended, in that the Welsh never recovered their independence. And although the cost was considerable, totalling about £100,000, that was not much less than the cost of a war, which the castles ensured would not have to be repeated.

What would you describe as Edward’s most serious lapse of judgment? Did he ever face the real threat of a rebellion in England?

His most serious lapse of judgement did not concern England at all, but Scotland. Edward’s mistake was to assume that he could treat Scotland like Wales. When his plans for a marriage alliance with the Scots collapsed in 1290, Edward browbeat the Scots into admitting his superior lordship, ignoring their claims to be an independent kingdom. The trouble this ultimately caused him – viz. ceaseless war from 1294 – almost led to a tax revolt in England. In the summer of 1297, the king’s opponents were holding armed assemblies, and the earl of Hereford’s men were going about saying he was against the king’s peace.

If you had to give one reason for Edward’s failure to conquer Scotland, what would it be?

Regnal solidarity. There were, of course, myriad reasons why Scotland proved too much for Edward: it was bigger than Wales, more distant from England, and the king himself was becoming older. But the bottom line is that, whereas Wales was politically divided, Scotland had a strong sense of itself as a united kingdom. Scottish nationalism was given a massive boost by Edward’s attempt at conquest, but it also had a long history of existence before that time.

Which of Edward’s castles do you admire the most?

Caernarfon is the grandest but can sometimes leave me rather cold – there’s little sense of Edward’s personality there, because it was never finished. Conwy, for that reason, is probably my personal favourite of the Welsh castles. Finished in just four years, and with the king’s chambers still intact, it imparts, to my mind, a strong sense of the man behind it.

If you had to recommend two other books on Edward that everyone should read, what would it be?

I’m going to cheat, because I have to mention the two previous biographies by Prestwich and Powicke. But for more recent writing that deals with interesting aspects of Edward’s reign, I’d say Expulsion by Richard Huscroft, and The First English Empire by Rees Davies.

What are you working on at the moment?

Rediscovering the bits of my brain that haven’t been completely conquered by Edward I.

Imperial Overstretch? King Æthelstan and the Conquest of the North

The terrible attack on their community by ‘heathen men’ in 793 must have long haunted the monks of Lindisfarne, and left them feeling vulnerable and unsettled. At some point in the first half of the ninth century, with viking activity increasing everywhere, they abandoned the island that St Aidan had selected for them two centuries earlier and moved to the mainland, bringing with them the bones of their most celebrated and powerful predecessor, St Cuthbert. For a time they resided on the banks of the Tweed at Norham, but in the mid-870s, as Northumbria was being carved up by Scandinavian warlords, they set off again, apparently wandering from place to place for seven years. Eventually, around 883, they settled at Chester-le-Street, an old Roman fort about sixty miles to the south, situated on the River Wear. They were still there half a century later, when they were visited by King Æthelstan.

The year was 934, and Æthelstan was leading an army from Wessex through Northumbria in order to fight the Scots. He decided to pause at Chester-le-Street to venerate the remains of St Cuthbert, and to shower the monks with gifts. These were described in a charter issued by the king at the time of his visit and copied into a history of the community composed a century or so later. They included many items of richly embroidered fabric: ecclesiastical vestments, altar coverings, curtains, tapestries, and ‘a royal headdress woven with gold’. There were also numerous other treasures worked from or decorated with both gold and silver: cups, candlesticks, armlets, bells, drinking horns, and a cross ‘finished with gold and ivory’. Æthelstan in addition gave the monks an extensive royal estate on the south bank of the Wear, and also several books: three ornate sets of gospels, a missal, and ‘a life of St Cuthbert written in verse and prose’.

Remarkably, some parts of this generous donation have survived. Six decades after the king’s visit, and more than a century after their arrival at Chester-le-Street, the monks decided to move again, and relocated seven miles further south, establishing a new church in a loop of the Wear which became Durham Cathedral. The shrine that was constructed in the cathedral for Cuthbert’s body after the Norman Conquest was destroyed during the Reformation, but his coffin was secreted in a wall space and survived. When it was rediscovered and opened in 1827, it was found to contain not only the saint’s complete skeleton, but fragments of the elaborately carved wooden casket in which he had originally been buried, his gold pectoral cross (colour picture 7), and a gospel book written not long after his death. It also contained some scraps of the embroidered items donated by Æthelstan in 934 – probably the stole and the maniple mentioned in the king’s charter (colour picture 19). All these items are now on display in the cathedral’s treasury.

No less miraculously, one of the books donated by Æthelstan is still with us. Many items from the cathedral’s library were dispersed during the sixteenth century, including the Lindisfarne Gospels, which ultimately ended up in the British Library. In the case of Æthelstan’s books, we do not know what happened to the missal, and two of the three gospel books are also unaccounted for. The third survived until the eighteenth century, but perished in the fire of 1731 that also consumed Asser’s Life of Alfred and singed the pages of Beowulf. But the volume donated by the king that contained a life of St Cuthbert is still in existence, having found its way to Corpus Christi College in Cambridge. It is a copy of the two lives of Cuthbert written by Bede, and has at the beginning a full-page picture of the saint being presented with the book by Æthelstan himself (colour picture 18). It is the earliest manuscript image of an English king.

This image, and the royal visit that inspired it, tell us several important things about Æthelstan. In the first place, he was notably pious. ‘The most pious King Æthelstan’ is how he was described on the first page of the gospel book that was destroyed by fire in 1731. The scale of his donation indicates that he was also abundantly rich: a ruler who could afford to reward his favourite subjects with almost embarrassing quantities of precious artefacts, as well as land and money. And, as his pronounced wealth implies, he was extremely powerful – arguably the most powerful of all the English kings before the Norman Conquest. Æthelstan was in Northumbria in 934 not as a foreign visitor but as its self-appointed ruler, having forcibly annexed the formerly independent kingdom seven years earlier. The army he was leading against the Scots was composed of men drawn from every region in southern Britain – not only English warriors from Wessex and Mercia, but also Danes who had settled in the eastern parts of the island, and Britons from the west. As the ruler of all these regions, Æthelstan has good claim to be considered the first king of England (although the word ‘England’ had yet to be invented) and even grander titles were touted at his court, where he was sometimes styled ‘king of all Britain’.

According to the same chronicle that preserved his charter, before Æthelstan continued on his expedition against the Scots, he gave instructions that ‘if anything sinister should befall him’, his body was to be returned to Chester-le-Street for burial near St Cuthbert, who would be able to present him before God on the Day of Judgement. As it turned out, this precaution proved unnecessary: the king’s campaign was a success, and he returned south to reign for a further five years. When he eventually died in 939, he was buried in Malmesbury, an ancient monastery in Wessex, founded in the late seventh century. The abbey church, now the parish church, still contains a tomb chest built for his remains in the late Middle Ages, topped with a life-sized effigy of its sometime royal occupant. But Æthelstan was less fortunate in death than Cuthbert, and during the Reformation his remains were destroyed. All we have now is a description of his body, written in the early twelfth century by William of Malmesbury, one of the greatest English historians. William was a monk at Malmesbury and had evidently seen inside the king’s tomb. He describes Æthelstan as being slim, ‘not beyond what is becoming in stature’, and having blond hair, ‘beautifully mingled with gold threads’.

It is thanks to William that we know more about Æthelstan than most other tenth-century English kings, whose lives are on the whole very poorly chronicled. Writing his Deeds of the Kings of the English, William interrupts his section on Æthelstan to explain how he had recently discovered ‘a certain obviously ancient volume’ that contained an earlier account of the king’s career, and goes on to incorporate some of this new material into his own narrative. Doubts have been raised in recent years about the authenticity of this information, chiefly because the sections that William appears to present as verbatim quotes can be shown on stylistic grounds to have been composed in his own day, rather than at some point in the more distant past. But this apparent obstacle is not insuperable, since William himself tells us that the original text in his ‘ancient volume’ was written in such a florid, bombastic style that he felt compelled to rewrite it using simpler and more comprehensible language. In addition, some of the information William reproduces from his lost source is so mundane in its detail that it seems unlikely to have been whimsically invented. Most modern historians are therefore prepared to admit this material as evidence, though perhaps with the caveat that it might not be wholly reliable.

The most famous anecdote that William of Malmesbury relates from his ancient book sits on the cusp of plausible history and convenient legend. As a child, we are told, Æthelstan was good-looking and graceful, and these qualities endeared him to his grandfather, King Alfred, who publicly acknowledged the boy’s suitability as a future ruler by investing him at a young age. Æthelstan, who could have been no more than six, was given a scarlet cloak, a jewelled belt, and a Saxon sword with a golden scabbard. Since his accession, which eventually happened twenty-five years after Alfred’s death, proved to be a very contentious affair, stories of him having been pre-approved by his illustrious grandfather might rightly be viewed with suspicion. But the tale draws some support from a poem dedicated to Æthelstan as a child that expresses similar sentiments, and from the fact that Alfred himself, at a comparable age, had been blessed and invested by the pope in a similar ceremony. Perhaps, then, the old king had indeed publicly bestowed honours on his grandson as his own reign drew to a close. The pity was he had not done more to quell the family feud among the generation immediately below him, which erupted in the days after his death.

The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England, pp. 247-51.