Subject to Change
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Subject to Change
Edward I - a Great and Terrible King
A six-foot-two prince who loved tournaments, outfoxed a revolution, and nearly died on crusade returns to build castles that still dominate the Welsh coast and to bend Scotland to his will until Robert the Bruce strikes back. We follow Edward I’s path from a devoted crusader to the architect of a more centralised, harder-edged medieval state, where finance, logistics, and image mattered as much as swords. Along the way, we discuss the political craft behind his parliaments, the Italian bankers who kept his campaigns moving, and the trade-offs needed to fund his empire.
We don’t shy away from the darkness. The 1290 expulsion of England’s Jews reveals the brutal alignment of prejudice and power. So does the battlefield assassination of Simon de Montfort at Evesham and the legal sleight that turned Scottish arbitration into overlordship. For all that Edward comes across as very human. His marriage with Eleanor of Castile was unusually close for the age, marked by shared journeys, many children, and the Eleanor Crosses erected on her death.
If Wales became Edward’s lasting triumph in stone and statute, Scotland proved a different matter. It was larger, more resilient, and capable of rebirth under Bruce. And on the continent, a friendly France turns hostile, tricking the king into surrendering Gascony leading to a war England can barely support.
Edward does indeed emerge a ruler both great and terrible: a master of war and administration who built a stronger English polity while leaving scars at home and abroad. If you care about medieval power - crusader ideology versus realpolitik, taxes versus consent this episode will sharpen your view of how states harden and why reputations endure.
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Hello and welcome to Subject to Change with me, Russell Hogg. My guest today is Mark Morris. Mark is an historian and broadcaster whose work concentrates on the Middle Ages. He's written on the Anglo-Saxons, the Norman Conquests, and the notoriously unsuccessful King John. But today we're going to talk about an altogether more capable monarch. That is to say, we're going to talk about the subject of Mark's book, Edward I, A Great and Terrible King. Anyway, uh, welcome Mark to the podcast. Thank you very much for inviting me. Nice to be here. So I mentioned in the introduction that you've written on the Anglo-Saxons and on the Norman conquest. So is the England of Edward's time still very much a Norman world, or has that sort of faded away?
SPEAKER_01:No, I think it shifted quite a lot. I mean you did me a great service there by pretending or uh implying that I'd written these books in chronological order as some sort of master plan, but in fact they they went all over the place back and forth in time. Edward I was my first book from about twenty years ago. And I think by the time you get to Edward's certainly his reign, it's almost exactly 200 years after the Norman conquest. And in that time, obviously there's been a lot of change, there would be in any any country, any circumstances after two centuries. But there's been a lot of accommodation and acclimatization between the English and the Normans in that period. And people tend to assume, because when people are in a hurry or they're sort of they're not medievalists, they will sort of say, Oh, post-conquest England, almost all the way down to the end of the Middle Ages, that's Norman England, is the shorthand for that. This is a Norman castle, he's a Norman monarch. And, you know, if you're sort of talking about the way people feel about themselves, their ethnicities, I mean, you know, my my father was a Dubliner, he was from Ireland. Um, I don't think of myself as Irish because I'm the son of that Irishman. He emigrated, you know, in the 50s to Britain. So people people ditch their ethnic, or can ditch their ethnic identities quite quickly and reinvent themselves. And by the time you get from 1066 to 1272, when Edward begins to reign, the Normans have had more than two centuries to reinvent themselves. And what you see by the middle if of the 12th century, if not earlier, is the Normans who settled, or the the Norman families who settled in England, the representatives by the middle of the 12th century may be three or four generations after the original conquerors. And they might still speak French amongst themselves or at home, or especially when they're at court, but they're almost certainly bilingual, and they're speaking to the people around them and under them, and you know, people they're marrying into, the English, in other words, the you know, numerically vastly superior English, they're speaking to them in English as well. So they they may be bilingual or trilingual, but the crucial thing is they think of themselves as English. When you start to see the way they talk about themselves and the way they're perceived by their neighbours in Wales, Scotland and Ireland in the late 12th century, they are they consider themselves as English as anybody else, even though their ancestors had come over with the Conqueror. So that's the crucial change, is if Edward I would have thought of himself as English, even though he spoke Norman French.
SPEAKER_00:And one of the things I sort of picked up from your book, which was quite amusing, was well, and part of the reason I asked the question was because Edward was considered to be a very unusual name because it was an Anglo-Saxon name. And and and this was the first King of England to have an Anglo-Saxon name.
SPEAKER_01:Well, first post-conquest king, of course. Yes. Pre-conquest, everyone had an Anglo-Saxon name. And this is the crucial thing. So after the conquest, Anglo-Saxon names obviously fall out of favour. This is the culture that had lost, this is the side that had lost. So no one is going to call their son Harold if he's born in 1067. And in fact, Harold becomes very, very unpopular thereafter. But other Anglo-Saxon names um they they all sort of fall by the wayside. And so the the the kings, the the the the aristocrats, um, the queens, they all have good French names. So it's uh Guillaume, Henri, Ricard, uh, you know, etc. Uh Jean even. And every woman seems to be called Matilda after 1066. And then all of a sudden, Henry III, good traditional French Norman name, decides to call his firstborn son Edward, which would be as weird today as me giving my firstborn son. I say weird, you know, it would have been as as outlandish as me giving my firstborn son an Egyptian name or uh a Japanese name. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but people say, oh, why did you choose to call him that? Because it sounds very odd. And Henry III's answer was because Edward the Confessor, the sort of penultimate king of Anglo-Saxon England, was just the best king in all the world, as far as far as Henry III was concerned. The monks of Westminster had done a real number on him and convinced him that Henry uh that Edward the Confessor was just the best, most wise, peace-loving, pious king, worthy of emulation, and Henry III bought into that entirely. And so he naturally, being a super fan of Edward the Confessor, chose to call his firstborn son Edward. And then from that point on, partly because every royal name is popular, but because Edward I was such a successful, dominant, powerful king, that name becomes vastly popular, and you don't think anything of it. It sounds it sounds completely normal English name now. But it was very, very strange at the time.
SPEAKER_00:So you mentioned Henry. So so what is Edward's family life like? You know, what what kind of royal family is it? Is it is it a nice environment that he grows up in?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, I think so. Compared to you might I mean, because the sort of the the figures that make the headlines from this period are you mentioned I did a book on Bad King John. That's Henry III's own father, Edward's grandfather, and his personal life and the personal lives of his parents and his brothers. It's a complete mess. It's the sort of thing for of which television miniseries dramas are you know made. Because it's, you know, dad locks mum up in prison, so she rebels against him, he puts her in prison. You can imagine the sort of psychological effects this has on the kids. The kids are scrapping amongst themselves. There is it's it's really, really, really unpleasant stuff. Henry III, growing up in that environment, um, until his father dies when he's nine, is all of a sudden then raised by sort of older statesmen, kind of, you know, more more more sober personalities. So he doesn't have a very sort of uh perhaps a sort of loving childhood because he's if he's lost both his parents, his mother goes back to Normandy, um, or rather goes back to France. But but he he he grows up in a in a in a in a fairly um stable environment. But to get on to his son, what I all of that is to say that Henry III is a much more sort of straightforward personality, his reign to begin with isn't particularly tumultuous, and he seems to be a very nice, loving, decent chap. He has all kinds of faults as a king, which we'll probably come on to, but as a as a personality, he's the very opposite of his father, King John. So he's a he's in in a sense a sort of decent chap, and he seems to have, although his wife is a lot younger than him, he seems to have a sort of decent relationship with his wife as well. And so Edward's upbringing is very stable. He's sort of mostly at Windsor Castle, but he occasionally is wheeled out for royal occasions at Westminster or Winchester. But it's it's pretty much a a nice stable environment he grows up in until he gets to his late teens, when the factions at Henry's court start to start, you know, pull it uh pull it to pieces, and sort of politics starts to uh become something that Edward has to, or Edward becomes part of the the political landscape.
SPEAKER_00:And when does Edward get married? Because I have a feeling he gets married very young.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. Well, this is kind of his entry into politics. I mean, because he is the heir to the throne, people are plotting around him from the moment he's born. But he's married to Eleanor of Castile, his wife, when he's fifteen. As as Henry has to just put it in some context, Henry III has the sort of the rump still of the great Angevin Empire. So if you go back to the late 12th century, John's father, Henry II, was Duke of Aquitaine by virtue of his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, he was Count of Anjou, he was Duke of Normandy. He had more land in France than the King of France. That is all lost by John, except for the Duchy of Aquitaine, or a part of it that we call Gascony. So there's a very small amount of the Angevin Empire left, but it's still very important to the kings of England, and Henry is trying to defend that or preserve that for the future, for himself, for his heirs, and one of the ways to do that is to make a marriage alliance with the King of Castile. So that's why Edward is sent to Spain to marry Eleanor of Castile. But he's fifteen and Eleanor of Castile is twelve, going on thirteen. So they're both young kids when they get married. But it seems to be one of those marriages that work out quite well.
SPEAKER_00:Is it normal for monarchs to to get married at that young age? Uh, and do they do they live together as man and wife?
SPEAKER_01:Well, the first one is is I I is one of those I I don't know because I haven't kind of seen the stats, I haven't quantified it. For English monarchs, it can be one way or the other. My I'm just whipping through them quickly. William the Conqueror is married at quite a young age, but it really depends. I mean, it depends on the politics. So um in in Henry III's case, he was married in his early uh late twenties to a girl who was only just turned twelve. So them that as far as the church is concerned, once you're over the age of twelve, you're marriageable. You can be betrothed when you're an infant, you can be promised, but you can't get married until you're twelve. At which point, you ask the sort of the question delicately, do they live together as man and wife? Yes, they can after the age of twelve. Seems seems very young to us, but that's what that's what medieval society deemed as the the age of consent, if you like. And in Edward I's case, in Eleanor of Castile's case, it does seem that they were having marital relations from the start of their wedding because Eleanor seems to have a child that, or she miscarries at some point, or has a child that dies quite young when she's about thirteen. Gosh. Um but they don't then they don't start having children and then until she's about eighteen. So perhaps there's some sort of parental control when they get back in England. But um it's it's I think it varies from one political situation to the next, precisely how old or young they are when they get married. My my general gut feeling, just running through numbers in my head, is most kings ideally like to wait, or most you know, f future rulers like to wait until they are well established in power before they they choose their wife. But in Hen Edward's case, it's chosen for him by dint of these um international politics.
SPEAKER_00:And one of the things that struck me, well, I mean, I think you you sort of adverted to it the sort of the disruptions in Henry's reign. And it seems to come down to various influential foreigners. There's almost a Brexit feel to uh the atmosphere or the way the English are complaining about all these dreadful continentals.
SPEAKER_01:I mean I wouldn't put it in those terms just because it's really it's just family. I mean, Henry III is married to Eleanor of Provence, and it's her family in the first instance that come over, and they seem to sort of integrate quite well and they're accepted by the English aristocracy, is then Henry III's younger half-brothers, the Lusignans, come over in the 1240s, and they fall out with the Queen's family. So it's just an extended family. And the reason that they're falling out is because they've come there looking for handouts and land, and and Henry being sort of kind-hearted but sort of politically simple, sort of obliges them and kind of ends up kind of setting them at loggerheads. So it's it's if you wanted to sort of skip through this sort of prelude to Henry Edward's reign, it's really Henry, Henry is a sort of a non-masterful monarch. He can't control his own family, never mind his extended baronage, and lay the law down. Partly, that's personality, it's also partly because he's a non-martial monarch, which makes him very odd. One of the things that kings are expected to do is to defend their people and go after enemies with fire and sword and be masters of war. And that counts for a lot in a kind of a warrior society. And Henry III, he doesn't even like hunting, never mind military campaigns. So he's very odd, and his idea of a kind of a good knees up is everyone gets together on a festival linked to Edward the Confessor and has a good old prey and you know holds hands. And you know, most of the kind of martial men at his court, that's not enough to sate them. And it's certainly not enough when he comes to laying down the law to people who are, you know, perhaps hot hot tempered, or their first instinct is to pick up a sword when they're crossed. Doesn't work very well for a character like Henry III. All of which is to say, when when um the politics breaks down in Henry's reign, it does result in war, fisticuffs, and eventually civil war. And Edward is kind of coming of age at this point, you know, he's in his late teens, early twenties when this civil war breaks out. And um he's an entirely different character to his father. He's, as most people know, he's nicknamed at the time Longshanks because he was six foot two. When he was dug up in the 18th century, they found he was six foot two. So he's a he's a good five or six inches taller than the average man. And you know, whether it's just a reaction to his his father's, you know, all all all kind of young men tend to sort of push against their fathers at some point, but whether it's a reaction to that or just because he's reverting to the norm, he loves tournaments, he loves warfare, he loves kind of the the the martial side of of king of the aristocratic culture and kingship. So he's much more kind of able to bar bond with his um his his kind of uh fellow um aristocrats in a way that Henry never was. And that means he becomes a real player in the civil war that that is the culmination of Henry III's reign.
SPEAKER_00:The civil war, this is this is the de Montfort rebellion, is it?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, de Montfort is very much the name to conjure with. Uh Simon de Montfort, who was Henry's brother-in-law, is an interesting mix of kind of um self-importance and idealism and self-interest. Everything that Henry's not really, he's kind of uh military very adroit and skilled, and he's um politically very savvy, smooth talking, uh silver-tongued. So he's a he's a he's a competent politician and a player who constantly runs rings around Henry III. And as I say, a combination of kind of uh what's the word I want? Sort of embracing kind of almost populism, if you like, embracing popular causes and sort of he's able to kind of manipulate crowds and get a get a kind of popular following whenever he's um thwarted. That and his own sort of private interests combine to sort of, you know, it it ultimately sort of builds to a head and uh it is it is ended in battle, and it's ended in battle by Edward. The the royalists are defeated in 1264, but in 1265 Edward leaves this leads this great fight back in which he liberates his father Henry III from from Simon de Montfort's clutches, and Montfort is bumped off in battle. There's no better way to put it. Um most battles at the time, people, aristocrats, expected to emerge unscathed, wearing their heavy armour, and be ransomed. But Edward makes damn sure that Montfort is killed on the battlefield at Evesham. So that sort of very much draws the line under that chapter. And going forward, although it's another seven years until Henry dies, Edward is is a king in a king in waiting from the moment Montfort dies.
SPEAKER_00:So at Evesham, as I understand it, I mean they actually go after de Montfort. I mean, there's some I think in your book you talk about a sort of a hit squad that they that they're specifically designed for him.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. I mean, one of the great things about Evesham is one of the great things in general about Henry III's reign is it's very well chronicled. We have lots of contemporary writing about it, you know, newsletters and chronicles and what have you. And uh it seems like recently, but it was in fact about almost thirty years ago now, twenty-five years ago at least, that a new account of the Battle of Evesham was discovered, which set all this out in in in in sort of irrefutable detail. People have previously said, well, maybe this or maybe that, but this became clear was the sort of the Ur account from which all other accounts derived. And it made made clear that Edward had handpicked a dozen men at arms to go after Montfort and and kill him, do him in. And it's it's real, it has to be, it's it's real kind of um knife work, you know, it's really nasty stuff because you have to pull them off their horses and stab them between their armour. So it's not kind of like, oh, he fell down the stairs, so he fell off his horse and broke his neck. It's it's a real um um assassination.
SPEAKER_00:And is de Montfort's failure inevitable? Because I sort of struggle to understand where he thought it was all going to end, because when you've got the King of England under Lock and Key and you've got the heir under Lock and Key, it's just not very clear to me what the end game is for de Montfort.
SPEAKER_01:No, and I think it's one of those things where it's kind of this is where it feels like one of those kind of things almost a Shakespearean tragedy. It's like, where is this go- where where do you think this is gonna end? How do you think this is gonna go? Um I it's difficult to think of any parallels apart from the sort of civil war of the 17th century when the king is deposed. It's like, well, what what's your ultimate end game? I mean, the the the there's a sort of hint in some of the sources that Montfort is thinking about elevating his own sons to the kingship. Because there's some I can't quite remember the details because it's 20 years since I wrote the book, but it's there's there's some things like if Edward doesn't comply and do as he's told, uh then then you know consequences will follow. But whether Montfort and the thing I think this is where Mont the support starts to drain away from Montfort, is it's one thing to kind of say, Well, we're we're making the king do as he's told, but when you start to say, well, we're gonna disinherit the heir to the throne, that's the sort of basis on which aristocratic society rests. And if you think, well, if he's gonna go for the king, then who knew who's he gonna or the king's heir, who's he gonna disinherit next? So i i i I think that's ultimately why Montfort ends up with a kind of um a very small band of dedicated supporters, it's because just he hasn't got the political clout across the whole country anymore. But that's I think that's the only way it could have gone. He could have ended up sort of, you know, locking up Edward permanently. But n clearly no one was gonna stand for that.
SPEAKER_00:One thing I rather liked about Edward uh was the way that he escaped from de Montfort. Uh I don't know if it was considered to be entirely respectable, but there was this sort of strange affair with with uh with the various horses which they which they were riding around.
SPEAKER_01:Oh well there's just a good there's a there's a good story. I mean, I say good story, all these stories are uh are largely credible. Um but he's um he's under arrest, but because he's in sort of king's heir, they they he's he's sort of sort of a loose house arrest, and I think his jailers just just underestimate him. They sort of say, Oh, we can go out into the paddock and you know try out some new horses. And they Edward sort of rides all of these horses into the ground for a couple of hours, so they're kind of completely exhausted, and there's one horse left that can you know go go off at a gallop, and he mounts this horse and runs off. Um so it's it's just a kind of you know, I pity the poor person who had to convey this news to Simon de Montfort that you know his his trump card had just galloped off over the horizon. Uh but that's the beginning of the end for Montfort is Edward's escape from captivity.
SPEAKER_00:So just moving on a bit, so one of the things that surprised me very much is that Henry III he lets Edward he lets Edward, aged thirty or thereabouts, head off on crusade, which seems an incredibly risky undertaking.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, you're right. I've I'd forgotten he was that old at that point. I mean, because it takes him so long to get the funds together. Well, yes, but I think that it's at the stage where Henry III wouldn't have gone, and I'm sure he didn't want Edward to go, um, and did everything he could probably to sort of dissuade him. But Ed Edward is very much his own man by this point. As you say, he's he's approaching or n or 30 by the time he leaves. And um Henry is is kind of broken, I think, largely by his experiences in the civil war. He's in his 60s by this point. And also it's we think of and we might think of crusading now in the 21st century as like, why would anybody do that? What a what a crazy idea. Yeah but at the time it was the highest calling. You know, everybody from the Pope downwards said, This is the thing you should be doing, this is the thing rulers ought to be doing. This is certainly the thing if you're a member of the the aristocracy, if if fighting is your job, then stop fighting amongst yourselves and go east and fight against the infidel. You know, that's we as I say, we would judge that to be, you know, a bad thing to do. But at the time, Western society, Western Christian society was a crusading society, and this was the highest possible calling as as a young knight. And one of the one of the benefits for uh Edward, I mean, the the as you say, the risk is enormous because any number of things can kill you between Britain and the Middle East, even just getting there, you know, shipwreck diseases you've never been exposed to before, etc., etc. Heat stroke when you get to the Middle East. But if you survive that experience as Edward does, it's a brilliant team-building exercise. You know, and Edward takes off the people with whom he will subsequently, you know, rule and reign and conquer in the next generation. They're all the people that his brothers in arms from that crusade. So that's the great benefit to Edward. That that Henry never had. You know, as I say, Henry was nine years old and and sort of cloistered and cosseted almost like a monk by elder statesmen. And Edward is subject to initially the rough and tumble of tournaments, then an actual full-blown civil war and all the politics that that involves, and then a crusade. So his his learning curve by the time he becomes king when he's about 33 yeah, 33, is a really intense one. So his his his schooling in the art of politics and the art of of kingship is much better than most kings ever got.
SPEAKER_00:I'm surprised in a way that that crusading is still so popular, because by this stage, Jerusalem has been lost. And I don't think there's much left uh at at this stage, and you you kind of wonder what they're hoping to achieve.
SPEAKER_01:I still think they thought they'd get Jerusalem back. I mean they come close. I mean, Rich the th Richard I comes close. You can almost see Jerusalem, and of course, Richard I was for the for the English, the great hero. This is Edward's uh great uncle. But then Frederick uh II, the the the the German emperor, he sort of negotiates the return of Jerusalem in the middle of the 13th century. So the they they constantly think it's possible, and if they just try harder, and and they're constantly there's constant appeals coming from the crusader states saying we desperately need help. And and and and as I say, it's kind of um it's it's the church's line is like, yes, this is still, you know, the thing we ought to be doing. So, you know, yes, it it seems it seems um it's it's irretrievable once they've lost the crusader states altogether by the end of the 13th century. But while there are communities living in in the Middle East, Christian communities, constantly asking for help, then it's it's just seen as being the thing you do. It's almost a rite of passage. You should go on crusade and and help out.
SPEAKER_00:And they're slightly unfortunate because they are they're up against what is it, Babars, who sounds he sounds absolutely terrifying.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, well, I mean, I I this was only sort of one shortest chapter in Edward's life, so I don't can't speak much about Babers. But I mean the the just in terms of the the reason we might look at it coldly with the the uh the advantage of seven centuries of hindsight is to say you are vastly outnumbered, guys, you know, and your your law your supply lines are very long, even if it's just coming from, you know, Cyprus or something. Um whereas that your enemies are numbered in their armies are numbered in tens and tens of thousands, you know, and their resources are infinite compared to yours, which are very thinly stretched. So it might seem to us like a hiding to nothing, but as I say, it it was just in terms of ideology, it this was still the highest thing you could aspire to do, so they continued to keep doing it.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I suppose, you know, on the other hand, a European knight was a was a pretty formidable fighting machine. So I suppose we shouldn't underestimate uh their power either.
SPEAKER_01:Aaron Powell No, I I I think that's true, but then again, um the the the the the Islamic equivalent was also um you know a formidable fighter and perhaps better acclimatised to fighting in that climate and that you know in in in sort of desert warfare than someone who'd come all the way from Britain in a male shirt with a he with a heavy helmet, you know. So um as I say, this is kind of I'm sort of speaking slightly out of school here because I'm not a historian of the crusades, I'm much more insular in my interests. But um I my my general impression is that yes, they that or for though for all that they kept taking kind of repeated beatings and failures in the 13th century, they knew, because the the Chansons de Geste told them so, uh their histories told them so, that they had once triumphed, and you know, the first crusade had been a huge success, and Richard I had been a huge success. He didn't recover Jerusalem, but he was very much a sort of figure of sort of song and legend. So while you're you know, if great Uncle Richard could do it, then why not, you know, young ri young Edward and his team.
SPEAKER_00:And then they did have one secret weapon, which again I'm not sure if this is your specialist subject, but it was very striking to me, which is that they had the Mongol sort of you know lurking towards the east, always, you know, looking like they might pounce on the Mamluks.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, again, well, they this is a kind of they they Edward Edward, when he gets out there, I think, realizes he can't do much on his own. And on the principle uh the old old ancient dependable principle of my enemy's enemy is my friend, he sends ambassadors to the Mongols and and uh i uh you know they they seem to be on the brink of doing a deal, but the Mongols give up about two hundred miles north of Jerusalem. They they stop their advance. The truth of the matter is there's very little Edward could do once he gets out there, and this must eventually dawn on him uh that no matter how much money he throws at it, how long he stays, it's you know that he's never gonna achieve anything meaningful.
SPEAKER_00:Well I suppose one thing that dawns on him is is that Baybars is smart enough to have him stabbed.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that that would wake you up, wouldn't it? Um But um yes, I mean that's that's the conclusion to his crusade. Uh it's the conclusion to my chapter on it as well, is Edward on his thirty-third birthday is stabbed by uh an assassin. Whether he's you know in Baybars' pay or not, I I think is hard to say. But I think he's Edward is seen as being someone who won't agree to a truce or a ceasefire. He's he wants to, you know, he wants to get on with the fighting. And all the other interested parties are kind of like, we just want to sort of um the status quo. And so Edward as an opponent to that peace, the easiest way to deal with him is just to rub him out. And they're unsuccessfully, I mean that that's a very interesting what-if is what would have happened to the British Isles if Edward had died in the sands of of um the Middle East. But um he survives this assassination attempt and um eventually makes his way back via Sicily and Italy to and France for that matter, to Britain, uh to England, in uh the late summer of 1274. And of course, by the time he gets there, dear old dad, Henry III, has has uh shuffled off. He died a couple of years earlier. So Edward um Edward is the first king after the conquest, who who accedes without any succession dispute, and also accedes in absentia. You know, he doesn't doesn't need a coronation to make him king, which have been the case for the past two centuries. He's king the moment Henry III dies, and he arrives in England as king, ready to be crowned.
SPEAKER_00:And it is slightly strange because I think he's in Sicily when he hears that he's king. And you would think, oh great, I'm gonna rush back and uh you know and take possession. And I think he he spends still quite a long time in Italy and then he heads off to Gascony. And just it seems very peculiar behaviour.
SPEAKER_01:It does, but then you're forgetting that he's Duke of Gascony. I mean, this is the thing. Um it seems like he's just you know extending his gap year. But in fact, in Sicily, I mean I think one of the things is he's still unwell. He's only recently been stabbed, he's recovering from a life-threatening injury, so he can't set off at a gallop. So he takes his time going through Italy. But there he's he's again, he's doing a lot of um pressing the flesh with other rulers, you know, uh the Holy Roman Emperor who he's being entertained by. His father being dead means he has to go in the first instance to Paris or to the King of France to renew the bonds of homage that have been broken by Henry's death. So that's why he makes a beeline for Paris, albeit relatively slowly. And having settled his relationship with the King of France, he then heads southwest to sort out his own relationships as Lord of Gascony, Duke of Gascony, with his underlings there. And Gascony is far more difficult to rule, because he has far fewer resources as a ruler than stable old England. So although England England was crying out for him, and perhaps stable seems like the not a very good term, bearing in mind it's recently had a civil war, but England is a very precociously well organised state, in a way that Gascony is not. So he goes to Gascony for I think the best part of a year, uh, before finally returning to England in August 1274. And England is England is is there is trouble in England, but he's appointed good regents and he's. Before he left on Crusade, he'd made sure all the all the most important royal castles were in the hands of his agents. So there's no question of really anything kicking off in England. The problem he comes back to, the inherited problem from the previous reign, is Wales. Because it's really, really about to kick off in Wales. By the time he gets back, it's a boiling point. Which probably tees up your next question.
SPEAKER_00:I was slightly nervous about mentioning the Welsh campaigns, but of course it's an absolutely central part of the reign. Oh yeah. The reason I'm nervous is that there seem to have been so many of them, because it's success after success, and then it all falls apart, and then they have to go again and again.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, Scotland, that's certainly the case. I mean Scotland is far less successful. Well, Wales, I mean, Wales is fairly simply dealt with. I mean, Wales had been Wales is kind of um had been a a a galaxy of competing rulers. So there's no King of Wales. There's there's like the the the Prince of Gwynneth, there's the sort of lords of De Hoybath, and there's the Prince of Powers, etc. But what happens in the 13th century is Gwynneth, the the the most mountainous region of northwest Wales, starts to kind of pull ahead and dominate the rest. And by the time also because of Henry III's disastrous reign with civil war in England, civil war in England and a sort of collapse at the centre means the people on the periphery, the Welsh rulers, are able to flourish. So they make hay while um while the Montfortian civil war is going on. And Henry III, in exchange for peace with the Welsh, who had sided with Montfort, gives them more or less everything, everything they desire, particularly Clean Ap Griffith, the ruler of Gwyneth. He is given the title Prince of Wales. So he's recognised as being the ruler of all of Wales, and his territory is vastly expanded. While Edward is away on crusade, the people who've lost out, the English barons across the frontier, the so-called Marcher Lords, they start to start to nibble away, or more aggressively, you know, hack away at Qelen's Principality. And so when Edward gets back, Qelen has a huge amount of grievances, and the marchers have kind of got another set of grievances. And um and for one reason or another, Qelen tries to make his homage to Edward negotiable. He says, Well, look, you know, we can't, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna negotiate until all the all my grievances have been settled. And Edward says, We don't have a relationship until you kneel before me and do homage. Then we can talk. And over this issue, which seems very trivial but goes to the sort of heart of both their personalities, they fall out. And so Edward invades Wales in 1277 and tears Clewellyn down to size. He reduces him to, you know, more or less the just the Lord of Gwynneth, Lord of Snowdonia again. With the English kind of in control and being sort of oppressive colonisers in the next five years, there's a much more general uprising in 1282 against English imperialism, which results in the destruction of both Hlewell and his younger brother Daffith, at which point North Wales is conquered. And that's really the last outpost of independent Welsh power. So you have then this string of mighty castles that Edward builds to cement that conquest, famous places like Conwy, Carnarvon, Harleck, etc. And then to sort of round off the story, there is a Welsh rebellion and about twelve years later, in the mid-1290s, when there's a a series of uprisings against Edward on all fronts. But Wales is Wales is a great, for all the effort and all the material and the men that Edward has to pour into Wales, it is the great success story of his reign in terms of military conquest, because it's never reversed. Wales had been independent, and from that point on is tied to the English crown, is a dependency. So, you know, I'm not I here to praise Edward I, but that is one thing you would chalk up and say, that was uh uh from his point of view an unmitigated success. From the Welsh point's point of view, not at all.
SPEAKER_00:I know that you're something of an expert on castles. Yeah. And of course the English do use them in Wales, but I was interested, I was reading a book on sea power by N. A. M. Rogers, a famous author on sea power, and he was extremely scathing on the subject of the English castles. I can just read a little bit of it. Go ahead. It says it has been remarked that the existence of the castles made sea power more important. What this means is that most of the naval and military strength urgently needed for the recapture of English Gascony had to be diverted in a desperate and only partly successful attempt to save the king's white elephants from slaughter. The entire overseas empire was put at risk to preserve garrisons of twenty six men in Harlich and thirty in Crishith. Carnarvon was taken by the rebels in twelve ninety four with heavy loss of life and heavier loss of prestige.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, I don't agree with any of that. I didn't think you did. It's it's it's I mean, I I I I don't think there's any way you can argue that Edward I's uh uh conquest of Wales was anything other than a success. And as for I mean, yes, he he does run into enormous difficulties in the 1290s, which is what um uh Rogers is talking about there. But he's facing a rebellion against Scotland, he's facing a completely unprovoked and unlooked-for war with the King of France, who's by any measure more than you know, stronger than Edward I, in France itself, you know, as uh Gascon Gascony is obviously part of Greater France. And so he's he's fighting a war on three fronts. And yes, resources have to be well, he he wants to get troops to Gascony, he wants to get troops to the Netherlands. But the the crucial thing here is he does hang on to Gascony. I mean, when although there's it requires vast expenditure to fight a war on three fronts, Edward ends up hanging on to Wales, and Wales remains conquered for the rest of forever. And he also hangs on to Gascony, which had been confiscated by the French, and then i i the English hang on to Gascony for another 150 years until the mid-15th century. So it's hard to see Edward as a failure. Had he lost Wales or lost Gascony or lost both, then you could argue that. But I find it very difficult to think of Edward as anything other than a master of war, a master of logistics.
SPEAKER_00:So I think Rogers' argument is not so much that Edward is ultimately a failure. I think I think what he's arguing is that the English aren't good at utilising sea power in the way that they might. Because he thinks that uh they are now free to land troops wherever they want on the Welsh coast. So that's the way to deal with the Welsh rather than concentrate these small garrisons which you then have to you know ride to the rescue of, which are you know at times which are not to your choosing.
SPEAKER_01:So I think that that would be true if if castles weren't the kind of the universal answer to the way you made war in the Middle Ages. And also if if the you know the the the English had um managed to exert any power in Wales prior to that point, it it it was i I just think it's very bizarre to kind of and and sort of if I may, kind of suggest a slight ignorance of the way the medieval people made war. It's like castles are the answer. You know, you plant your castles, so your your your colonists, etc., can't be driven out.
SPEAKER_00:It's only one page in in Rogers' book, but um but I th I th I thought it I thought it was quite interesting, so I ought to raise it with you. I wish he was here to do the fighting, because I I have no I have no uh I have no knowledge of the subject at all.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, no, I th I think those castles were were pretty successful as they go.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. So you kind of mentioned Edward's need of uh resources and of logistics, and and something I'm just beginning to understand, really, is just how much in medieval history, how difficult it was to finance wars. So how good is Edward at sort of sorting out the finances?
SPEAKER_01:Aaron Ross Powell Well, that's the crucial thing to the success of his reign, I think. I mean, one of the things is is I think I, you know, it sounds very dull. If I was if I were to pitch uh my subject, I don't teach in a university, but were I to sort of pitch it to students, I wouldn't lead with the kind of, oh, it all boils down to finances. And when I was a kid studying it, I didn't, you know, waste time. I like the sort of stories of daring do and you know, the sort of the knights on horses and the castles and sort of thing. But ultimately all these things cost money, right? And this is where as a sort of a sort of a middle-aged man, you kind of go, oh, I get it now. This is this this you can't just kind of you can't just work on charisma alone and say once more into the breach. You need tens of thousands of men and ships and food and fodder for the horses and and you know, half a million crossbow bolts, and you know, and it all boils down to kind of where are you going to get the money? And in in um in England, England is a rich country, it's a prosperous country with a strong silver economy. But what they lack is a after the conquest is a viable kind of tax system. It had one in the Anglo-Saxon period, which was very oppressive, that raised something called the GELT, and the GELT kind of is finally abandoned about a century after the conquest because it's bringing in pennies. And what they start to do in the 13th century is they sort of introduce national taxes, but people don't like them, obviously, for obvious reasons. And what Edward does is he he initially avoids having taxes by a sort of a clever deal he does. He marries up the customs system to international finance. He has Italian bankers, um, the Riccardi of Lucca initially. They kind of say, well, we can we can sort of advance you credit, we can give you all the money you want, but we they sort of get the sort of the the the customs. They get all the revenue of the customs. So they're kind of guaranteed that. So that's a kind of clever fix that that Edward does to make sure he's he's always got sort of this liquidity. Henry III was always running out of cash. It's the way Henry III's schemes never came to fruition was because he'd always say, Well, I I I promised to do this, and then you go to Parliament and say, Can I have the modern equivalent of half a billion pounds? Parliament would say, No, not until you've fixed all our grievances, and then they'd have a big row and everyone went home upset. Whereas what Edward does is he has regular parliaments and he addresses people's grievances, and then when he does need a grant of tax, which is regarded as extraordinary, he's on good terms with the the MPs, if you like, the Knights of the Shire, the townsmen, and he's able to promise them redress of the grievances they want, and they will vote him an extraordinary tax. So he he doesn't take them very often. He takes one, he takes them, for example, the conquest of Wales and says, You've seen the way the Welsh are behaving, isn't it despicable? We need to finish this once and for all, so I'm going to need this huge subsidy, and Parliament votes it for him. He starts to run into trouble in the late 1290s when, as we've already said, he's fighting a war on multiple fronts, and the tax demands go through the roof, and he starts to get more arbitrary, sort of saying, Well, if they won't give us it, we'll just take it, sort of thing, which is the kind of behaviour that his grandfather, King John, had indulged in. And he starts to behave in a kind of King John type way. It's he's a more sympathetic character. It seems strange to describe Edward I as sympathetic, but you if you put yourself in his position, you can see he's kind of feels like he is fighting for his birthright, he is fighting for the you know the rights of his citizens or subjects. But it is very difficult to convince people to part with their cash if you suddenly quadruple or put the price of things up tenfold to make people understand that it's absolutely necessary. But again, to be fair, Edward, although his subjects kind of come close to kicking up on this, um he he he survives, he stays in power, he's he's you know venerated as a very successful, very popular king to the what to the end of his days. He sort of you know dies as an old man in the saddle. Uh he's the he's the longest-lived English monarch up to that point. No, no, no English monarch lives as long until Elizabeth I, three centuries later. So um he is someone who fights tooth and nail for what he believes is right, and again, we would disagree with a lot of what he thinks is right, we would say it was wrong. But his subjects are for the most part behind him and willing to shell out, even when the building is extremely high.
SPEAKER_00:And speaking of something where where we would think he was very much in the wrong, there's his treatment of the Jewish community. Yeah. So you just want to explain how how you know that relationship is uh it seems like the difficulty is not between the Jewish community and Edward, but rather between between the Jews and some of the aristocracy. Did I understand that?
SPEAKER_01:Well, suffice to say, I mean, it's a sort of thing you could do a whole hour on, so I'm going to sort of choose my words economically and carefully. Um Jewish th there was a minority of Jewish people in England since after the Norman conquest, and their principal function, if not their only function, was to lend money, because Christians couldn't lend money at interest. It was prohibited by the church. Whereas if you were them, I mean, then they're the only minority. It's not like nowadays where you have any number of minorities within um the existing modern population of England or Britain. You had the Christian majority and the Jewish minority, and that was it. And the the Jews were just a few thousand people, and the and and their their principal principal business was money lending. And that meant that they were they were in favour with the kings because the kings always needed money, you know, on demand. But because of rising anti-Semitism, which is almost from the moment the Jews arrive, but particularly becomes particularly virulent in England in the 12th century, across Europe as a whole, but particularly in England, that they become a sort of a protected community, but also a vulnerable and persecuted community. And Henry III kept sort of taxing them and taxing them and taxing them because he couldn't get, or I say taxing, that sounds almost like they had a say in it, mulkeding them, you know, demanding money from them with menaces. Um because he couldn't get taxation from his Christian subjects, he would turn to the Jewish community. So by the time Edward becomes king in 1272, the Jewish community is is a shadow of what it once was. And I suppose to kind of cut to the chase, Edward finds it more lucrative to sort of give in to his subjects anti-Semitism than it is to protect the Jewish community because they were valuable moneylenders. He's already got Italian moneylenders now who have kind of found a theological workaround, although they're Christians, they're happy to lend money and sort of dress it up as a as a loan. Oh not a loan, but as a sort of a well, a you know, they're not they they make it they make it out that they're not charging interest when in fact they are. But it means that the Jewish, the Jews no longer have a monopoly in England on moneylending, which leaves them vulnerable. And Edward's ultimate way of well, what ultimately the the notorious thing about Edward's reign is he expels the Jews in 1290 from his kingdom. And that's a first in terms of in European history, in terms of being the first state that makes itself kind of, you know, that that expels a Jewish community. But other European rulers had been doing the same thing for decades, but they were only able to expel the Jewish communities to the furthest extent of their more limited power. So the King of France had expelled Jews multiple times, but they had gone into neighbouring polities like Burgundy or Gascony or whatever. And individuals, Simon de Montfort, who we mentioned, you know, is that the first thing he does when he comes to England in the 1230s is he expels the Jews from Leicester. He's made Lord of Leicester, he expels the Jews. So that's kind of the thing that kind of quote-unquote conscientious, you know, died in the wool Christians did to show just how committed they were to the Christian faith was they persecuted the Jewish minority. And that's what Edward does in 1290. He says to Parliament, you know, what can what what do you want in return? You know, how how can I get more money out of you? What will you what what do you want in return for this vote of tax that I need? And they said, We want you to expel the Jews. Or it's put the it's put to them that you know we could expel the Jews. And he gets the biggest tax grant in medieval English history. So, you know, yes, Edward I was a, if you like, a pioneering anti-Semite. I'm not um, you know, he was a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semit, as anti-Semitic probably as any any you know other man in in medieval England. But the point is, medieval Europe was a profoundly anti-Semitic place, and no corner of it more so than medieval England. So that he's cheered to the rafters by his English subjects for this. Um of the things that he's praised for in his obituaries in 1307 is the fact that he expelled the faithless multitude of Jews, etc. So again, it's one of those, like crusading, if you like, it's one of those things that we would go rightly so. We would say, gosh, how awful, what a terrible anti-Semite, as he was. The other side of that is, though, and this is the important thing, is you don't you don't kind of give England a free pass. No one at the time said, Oh my god, what a terrible anti-Semite, except for the Jewish communities themselves. Um, everyone else in England went kind of like, brilliant, it's exactly the sort of thing we want. So, as I say, uh you you have to be careful, sort of saying uh just how awful Edward I was. England was, I say, a very, very virulently anti-Semitic place to be.
SPEAKER_00:And do we have any sense of why anti-Semitism is on the rise at this time in medieval history? Is there any cause?
SPEAKER_01:Medieval society becomes more persecuting as a whole. If you look in in France, for example, there's they're also cracking down on others like the Cathars, you know, the uh in southern France. In England it's it it is the Jews who are being targeted, but elsewhere society is just becoming more and more intolerant. So it's a noticeable thing in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
SPEAKER_00:So we talked about Edward's family life early on. So how's his relationship with his uh with his wife? Because one thing that struck me is the number of pregnancies that poor Eleanor goes through.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I mean that that testifies to the fact that they they continued having regular marital relations throughout the all uh you know their their entire married lives. So there's one thing they have a lot of children, and and you know, you might skeptically, rightly skeptically say, well, that come on, that doesn't prove anything. Just because you're having sex with your wife doesn't necessarily mean that she loves you back. But she goes everywhere he goes. So when he goes on crusade, she goes with him. When he goes on campaign in Wales, she goes with him. You know, wherever he travels, they are virtually inseparable. And that's he wouldn't have had her there if he didn't enjoy her company. And you know, you she you might sort of say, well, she might have been compelled to go, but what's the point, you know? So, and also, you know, these sound very crude statistical measures of like they had lots of kids and they were they were inseparable. But also we have the testimony of certainly Edward himself, because Eleanor dies age 49 in 1290. And well, there's one more thing to say. She dies in 1290 in Nottinghamshire, very close to the Lincolnshire border. Her viscera, her entrails are buried in Lincoln Cathedral. The rest of her body is brought south in December 1290, so bitterly cold, the whole royal court moved south, and every place that the cortege stops for the night, Edward, in the subsequent weeks and months, cause a great stone cross to be erected, monumental stone cross, in her memory. These are the so-called Eleanor Crosses, to maximise the number of prayers for her soul to get her more quickly out of purgatory. Now, again, very cynically, you can say, well, that's just royal, you know, that's kind of sort of a the grandiose thing a monarch like Edward I would do. He likes to build big castles. Of course, he's going to build big monuments to his wife. But there's a lovely letter he writes in January 1291, within a month of her death, to the abbot of I Can't Remember Where, let's say Clooney, but he writes a letter to a French abbot, and in this he says he refers to something like the the the wife whom in life we loved and in death cannot cease to love. You know, so that's from that's a private communication from Edward to another private individual. It's not put out for public consumption. So the obvious way of kind of joining all these dots here is they did get on very well and they did love each other very much.
SPEAKER_00:And they shared, I think you said in your book, uh sort of a taste for medieval fantasy and uh, you know, the uh the world of King Arthur.
SPEAKER_01:Well, as everyone else did. I mean, that's like saying, you know, um kids like Harry Potter or, you know, the pe Marvel films are quite successful. I mean, you know, the these these this literature of escape, Arthurian literature, was what everybody liked. And it was dressing up and it was tournaments and it was round tables, and it was just, you know, an alternative to having kind of um biblical stuff shoved down your throat. You know, oh, you know, we've done you a tapestry of the apocalypse. I mean, that's quite fun, but you've also got kind of Arthur Arthur stuff. So it's it's it's the dominant kind of um culture that you're consuming. But they both Henry III, not into that at all. Edward, much more normatively, is into that, and so is Eleanor. So they have that. I think they just they they just clearly got on well. I mean, they were both teenagers when they met. He's a couple of years older than her, but not much. There's they certainly had a bit of a period in their teens when it was teens and early twenties, when it was kind of us against the world, you know, they were being, you know, they were political pawns. And so I think that their relationship was probably kind of forged in this kind of like when they were kids. And um and they stuck it out. So it's one of those, it's that you know, it's it's not in it's not completely rare, but I think it is more unusual. Most kings and most royal marriages aren't don't they don't get on as well. Their marriages are convenience, as indeed Edwards was, it was an arranged match, but happily for them, and you know, to a large extent for their subjects, it's never fun when when kings don't get on with their wives, you know, it leads to all kinds of political fallout. That's one of the things I think that was a great strength to Edward was that he had a good relationship with his wife, and by extension, his extended family as well. Not so much his son, but his he how is he well, that's the other part of the the question, isn't it? You said they had lots of kids, but very few of them survived to adulthood. Certainly not the boys. The first two boys he calls his firstborn son John, which is very telling. Uh he calls his secondborn son Henry. Both those boys are dead before they're six years old. Third son is called Alfonso, because that's Eleanor's brother. And had that boy lived, I'd be called Alfonso, and one in other, you know, one in twenty men would be called Alfonso because like Edward, it would be completely normal. That's a good, very good example actually, of why the way Edward would have come across in 1239. Alfonso, but you know, you you just Fonzi would be a perfectly normal English name had that boy lived. But he dies, aged 11, and then we should ultimately end up with the youngest born child of all, Edward II, Edward of Carnarvon. But he's not born until 1284, when Edward is 45. So um he doesn't, although he falls out with him towards the end of his life, there aren't there aren't any young men waiting in the wings to take over. It's just Edward, you know.
SPEAKER_00:So um I mean the reason I mentioned Arthur is that he's famously King of Britain, not just King of England. Yeah. And um is this extraordinary decision by Edward to interfere in the uh in the Kingdom of Scotland.
SPEAKER_01:Well, let's deal with the Arthur point first. I mean, I think yes, you I think Arthur I don't think Edward reads Arthur as a kid and says, Oh, Arthur was King of Britain, therefore I should conquer all of Britain. But I think it becomes useful when he starts getting into arguments with his neighbours about who has the sort of superior right within the British Isles. And his answer is kind of obviously it's me. And there's a fair there's a fair amount of kind of real-world politics to back that up. I mean, you know, let's be realistic about it. England is the dominant power within the British Isles because it's where all the lowland is, it's where all the fertile arable land is, it's where all the productive stuff is. It's therefore vastly more rich than either Scotland or Wales or Ireland. So it's it's a superpower within Britain and Ireland. And so the you know, the the rulers of these polities to the north and west of England, they do have to sort of you know acknowledge that, and for for the centuries before that they have done. But Edward sees it in very absolute terms. He's kind of like, well, of course, and when he starts to kind of actually try and find evidence of that, he's quite disappointed. He orders not just the sort of royal archivists, but all the monasteries of England to search their records in the 1290s to find proof that he has has the superior right over the King of Scots. And they don't come up with very much. Um, but but what they end up doing is when they're writing to the Pope about this, turning to legend and saying, Well, everybody knows King Arthur was the ruler of Britain. So it does become a sort of a political football. Um but to go on to your second point about his sort of interference in Scotland or his intervention in Scotland, the crucial thing is he's invited in in the first instance. And the backstory here, for those that don't know, is that the kings of Scots, or Scotland as a whole, got itself into real difficulty in the 1280s because they started to run out of potential kings. So we have Alexander III, who is very successful King of Scotland, and both his sons predecease him, and then he does what any responsible king would do. He marries a sort of a French princess, half his age, and rides out to meet her during a storm and falls off his horse and dies. I mean, that's not the sensible bit, but the sensible bit is he was trying trying to create more sons and died, died in the process. And so the Scotland is really in crisis because there's no collaterals. All there are the collaterals you have to go so far back up the family tree that they've got very weak claims to the throne. The one hope is that his granddaughter, one of his daughters, had married to a King of Norway, and he has a granddaughter who was brought over, and it was everyone accepted that she was going to become the queen, and you know, she was going to marry Edward II. She was going to marry the future Edward II, which would have been great. It would have been a very, very tidy union of the crowns there and then. But that girl dies en route to Scotland. And they, in desperation, they need they need a superior power to solve what is going to otherwise be solved by civil war. Because you've got two very, very bitter entrenched rival camps, the Bruces and the Balioles. They invite Edward in to say, help us choose. And what Edward does is he manipulates that and turns it into a kind of a throws it wide open and says, Oh, there's so many contenders, I can't arbitrate. I need to rule a rule over this as judge, judge and jury, which of course you will all agree to accept because I'm your overlord. So he he takes this invitation and twists it and makes it about you recognise my overlordship and then I'll judge. And and so that's that's where it becomes a uh well, it ultimately becomes a point where he he he it could be a long drawn-out legal process. He eventually picks the the candidate that has the best right, John Ballion, and uh and then proceeds to humiliate him for the next several years, making him trot to Westminster on trivial causes to answer in Westminster until the Scots say enough with this and rebel against him. And what he finds is Scotland is much harder to browbeat, coerce, and conquer than Wales. I mean I've been doing a lot of this for my new book, which covers all this these sort of pol not the politics, but sort of the the stories of England after the conquest and its neighbours. And um yeah, I mean one of the things I did sort of uh very early on, back of envelope calculation, Wales is nine per cent of Britain. Uh Scotland is thirty-four per cent. Scotland is a full third. So you might think from your occasional trips up to Edinburgh, which Edward has done as a kid, that Scotland is just like Wales, and then you find there's a lot more of Scotland beyond the Firth of Forth, that is going to be a lot harder. And so he spends the last ten years of his reign hammering at the Scots and finding that they're not going to break as easily. He nearly does it. He thinks he's conquered Scotland by 1305, but then in 1306 Robert Bruce rises up, has himself crowned at schoon, and um and that's the beginning of the end of Edward's empire. He doesn't live to see it because he dies the following year. But the the s Scotland cannot be sort of tamed and broken in the way that he was ultimately able to break Wales.
SPEAKER_00:Robert the Bruce is obviously uh a huge figure in all this, though I must admit I sometimes get a bit confused because there seem to be so many uh Bruces. And at times it seems like uh they are prepared to uh submit to the English.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I mean I think Robert Bruce is perhaps the character. I think one of the things you've got to be careful with here is there is Robert Bruce is his number is Robert Bruce the Seventh.
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, so we've got so many Robert Bruce's going right back to sort of after the Norman conquest. There's always been a Robert Bruce. The great thing about Robert Bruce, the the future, the eventual king, Robert Bruce, is that the Bruces had the weaker claim to the throne. This is and this nobody likes to hear this, especially not the Bruces. Okay, so the Bruces spent the rest of forever from the mu from the 14th century making out they'd always been the good guys. But the Rob his grandfather and father, who are namesake Robert Bruce's, they had on by any measure the weaker claim to the Scottish throne. So what they do is they tell Edward whatever he wants to hear. They say they kind of have letters from them saying, Of course, Scotland is a limb of England. Of course, you should be able to tell us what to do. Please vote for us, you know. And Robert Bruce, the eventual king, Robert Bruce, number seven. Seven says at some point quite early in I think it's 1296, 1295, he he kind of sides with the Scots themselves and says, No, no, no, you know, with this is a fight for independence. Now, he may, for reasons of political expediency, when he thinks the game is up, I can't remember every twist and turn of his story, but he does at certain points submit to Edward. He submits certainly in 1303. But then as you know, there's I think there are a lot of Scots that submitted in 1303 after terrible, terrible suffering at the hands of English armies and Edward himself, thinking, this guy's 66, 67, he's gonna be dead. You know, we're literally kind of almost looking at their watches, saying, he'll be gone in six months. And then, have you seen the new guy? Have you seen Edward II? He's an idiot, he's a pushover. Then we take the kingdom back. And that's exactly what happens, of course. So um I think Bruce being a you know, doing what's politically expedient, I wouldn't judge him for. I think actually his siding with the rebels after the um the Wallace Rebellion is one of the is and breaking with his family's tradition of basically being, you know, um quislings, I think is to his enormous credit. So as I say, I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm a while from getting down for the new book. I'm gonna have to revisit all of this, but um um yeah, I'm sure it'll come out of it well again, Robert Bruce.
SPEAKER_00:And then not only does he spend all this time fighting the Scots, well, and a huge amount of time fighting the Scots, he he then sort of arrives about fifty years early for the Hundred Years' War and gets into gets into a fight with France.
SPEAKER_01:He's attacked by France, let's be clear. I mean, this is one of the few things where you know you could give Edward some sympathy, is growing kind of sense of nationalism in France, growing power of the French crown. People tend to think of England and France as always being at loggerheads, but what Edward had grown up with was England and France were best friends. His father, um, Henry III, had had arguments, wars with um Louis IX, um St. Louis, in the 1240s. But then they met and they got on like a house on fire, they were both very pious, um, they were married to the same set of sisters, and so they all grew up, all the cousins, basically being chums, you know, they met on a semi-regular basis whenever circumstances afforded. And Edward had grown up knowing only peace with France from the moment he was uh uh you know uh a child. You know, this was Uncle Louis. He went on crusade with Uncle Louis, you know, he was good friends with his cousin Philip III, and it's only when that family relationship started to break in the next generation with the sort of wily scheming Philip the Fair, Philip IV, who just turns on Edward and they trick him out into surrendering Gascony. They do it the old way, they say, Well, look, you you know, you give us Gascony, we'll give it back on new and improved terms, then we'll have a tournament, then you can marry my sister, and it'll be brilliant. And Edward, because he's kind of a, I think I think that there was part of a the sense that the comment at the time was, no fool like an old fool. You know, you offer them an 18-year-old princess, and of course they're gonna you know go for that hook line and sink us. There was a certain amount of that, but also because uh Edward just considered it a blip. He didn't consider it all the scheming French, he considered it them to be sincere in wanting peace. And in fact, they they took possession of Gascony and said, and they you know, the English ambassador said, Well, when do we get it back? Next month, the week after, and they said, No, you never get it back, sorry, that's all a trick. So he is he is, if you like, uh forced to go to war to defend his right. And as I said, although it's it's a huge strain on all his kind of British resources, the French ultimately back down, they get Gascony back, the English, and they hang on to it for another 150 years. So it's uh yeah, the seeds of the Hundred Years War are there. You can say the way that the wind is blowing, but you know, Edward is Edward, Edward emerges from that that chaos triumphant. So um you can see here, I'm I'm I've been I keep saying it sounded like a cheerleader for Edward I. He is by any standards, he is uh he is kind of like uh controlling, um you know, authoritarian type. And we've already discussed the the fact that attitudes in the 13th century were not the same as they are in the 21st. So he was you know virulently anti-Semitic, he was obviously obviously kind of aggressively pro-Christian in his prosecution of the crusades. So you're not here to cheerlead for him. At the same time, by medieval standards, he was a phenomenally successful ruler. You know, he he he increased his dominions, he protected his subjects, and he didn't lose any of the sub the dominions that other rulers, more powerful rulers, tried to deprive him of. And that's why when he died in 1307, the obituaries for him were glowing. He was a great king, said two chroniclers. You know, he was the he was a conqueror, he was bold, he was powerful, he was terrible, which is where I got the title for my book. Westminster Obituary says he was a rex terriblis to his enemies, to the sons of pride, he was a terrifying ruler. But that's what people wanted in the thirteenth century. You know, they didn't want people to sort of say, Oh, maybe if we go in and talk to them and hold hands. You know, they expected their rulers to be their protectors and go after their enemies with fire and sword. So the Scots detested him, and rightly so. The Welsh continued to hate him for centuries that followed, and to to a similar extent, perhaps a lesser extent, the Irish. Um but because he never went to Ireland, though you know he was ruling large chunks of it by proxy. But to his English subjects, being a terrible king was part of what made him a great king. They weren't opposing attributes, they were attributes that made him what he was.
SPEAKER_00:Brilliant. That's an absolutely fantastic summary. Um let's leave it there. Mark Morris, thank you very much indeed. It's been a pleasure, Russell. Thank you very much for having me on.