Edward was delighted at his victory over Llywelyn. He celebrated in Easter 1278 with an eerie ceremony at twilight in Glastonbury Abbey on 19 April, at which the tomb of Arthur and Guinevere was opened. According to the local chronicler Adam of Domerham, the skeletons were found side by side, each in a casket with their images and arms painted on the sides. The following day, the piles of bones were moved to a grand new resting place in the abbey. The new tomb was destroyed in the dissolution of the monasteries, but the sixteenth-century antiquary John Leland described it as made from black marble with two lions at each end and an effigy of Arthur himself at the top. The ceremony fairly pulsed with messages about the new regime: on the one hand, the King Arthur whom the Welsh so venerated was dead; but on the other, he was to live long in Edward. As the king and Queen Eleanor venerated the piles of bones in Glastonbury Abbey, they sought to stitch the myth of Arthur into the fabric of Plantagenet family lore. It was a well-contrived end to a brutally effective campaign.
In the aftermath of Edward’s first victory over Llywelyn, he turned his attention to domestic affairs. His chancellor Robert Burnell was pressing ahead with the first stages of a sweeping programme of legal reform, and three extremely wide-ranging statutes were passed in 1275, 1278 and 1279 (known respectively as the first Statute of Westminster, the Statute of Gloucester and the Statute of Mortmain). They dealt with matters as diverse as rules on land tenure, ensuring free elections to parliament and the right of all free men, rich or poor, to justice (Westminster); establishing a new system of eyres to travel the country investigating abuses of royal rights (Gloucester); and preventing land from being granted to the Church in order to avoid feudal dues and taxes (Mortmain). They marked the start of a legal revolution by statute, which would continue for more than a decade.
The matter of the Church also began to vex the King. He was prevented from promoting Burnell to archbishop of Canterbury by Pope Nicholas III, and had to accept the difficult and extremely pious Franciscan friar John Pecham as archbishop instead. Pecham was a highly principled ecclesiastical politician and a strict observer of the Franciscan rule. He refused all personal property (which meant that he had no income, and was thus constantly in crippling debt to Italian bankers), insisted on extremely strict discipline from the English clergy, and believed that he had a divine mission to root out corruption and abuse in the Church, most notably among those clergy who grew rich from pluralism – the practice of holding multiple benefices. His view on relations between Church and Crown was pithily alluded to in his official seal, which had an image of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket on the reverse.
Unsurprisingly, Pecham clashed numerous times with Edward from the very beginning of his tenure as archbishop. His stance on pluralism irritated the king, who gained a good deal of advantage from being able to award his royal clerks multiple lucrative posts in the Church as reward for their work. There was also a long-running battle over the jurisdictions of royal and Church courts – a battle which had its roots in the same issues that had animated Becket against Henry II – and Pecham frequently expressed to the king his frustration at royal ministers’ reluctance to help enforce sanctions against those (numerous) people whom he had excommunicated from the Church. In autumn 1279 a furious argument blew up in which Pecham was forced to back down over his demand that a copy of Magna Carta should be hung in all of England’s cathedrals and collegiate churches.
Fortunately, despite their equally strong characters, Edward and Pecham were diplomatic enough to ensure that their relationship never spilled over into the murderous hostility that had ended Henry and Becket’s. Indeed, despite their political differences, they were generally on good terms, and on some matters they agreed wholeheartedly. One such matter was the character of the Welsh, whom both king and archbishop considered unreconstructed savages. It was as well for his survival that Pecham took such a view, for in 1282 Edward’s war with Wales once more exploded, this time in an even bloodier form.
On the weekend before Easter 1282, during the night preceding Palm Sunday, Llywelyn’s brother Dafydd – a former ally at the English court – appeared unexpectedly at Hawarden castle. The residence of Edward’s ally Roger Clifford loomed in the darkness, a great 40-foot stone keep on top of its rounded motte. The Welsh prince had been expected as an Easter guest, but he turned up early, in company and armed. In the dead of night, Dafydd led a band of men in storming the castle, seizing Clifford from his bed and filling the corridors of the stone fortress with the stifled screams of men whose throats were slit in the dark. This was no Easter visit. It was a declaration of war.
During the next few days Wales slid into rebellious uproar. Royal officials were tricked, grabbed and held as hostages. Castles in English hands were attacked and taken in lightning raids by bands of armed Welsh rebels. The peace imposed by Edward I at Rhuddlan disintegrated almost overnight as Wales was plunged back into violence.
The instigator on this occasion was Dafydd, but his brother Llywelyn’s hand lurked close behind. The villain of 1277 had been welcomed into Edward’s circle, allowed to marry Eleanor de Montfort in a ceremony at which Edward himself gave away the bride, and gently coaxed into the ranks of the Edwardian aristocracy. But he was never quite of the English camp. And although the prince professed his ignorance of the rebellion until it had fully erupted, he had spent his time since 1277 moving quietly to re-establish his prestige among the minor Welsh princes.
Despite the attempts to rehabilitate both brothers, in the early 1280s Dafydd and Llywelyn still had personal grievances with Edward, which dwelt on the redistribution of lands seized after the first war. As their attitudes towards the English king hardened in the years following Rhuddlan, they adeptly spun their complaints into a wider argument about Edward’s apparent desire to override Welsh law and customs.
After his victory, Edward had imposed English law, customs and administrative efforts harder on the Welsh than any Plantagenet king before him. Llywelyn and Dafydd suggested to their compatriots that in doing so, the English king was making a deliberate attempt to crush the whole spirit of the Welsh people. The effort was crystallized in a complex legal dispute between Llywelyn and his compatriot Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn over the cantref of Arwystli – a county to the south-east of Gwynedd. Llywelyn wished it to be judged under Welsh law; Edward pushed for it to be ruled upon under Marcher law. A dispute over an obscure parcel of land was effectively parlayed into a test-case for the very survival of Welsh law and customs. The result was to produce a quite different Welsh opposition to that which Edward had faced at the beginning of his reign. In those days he had taken it upon himself to discipline a wayward neighbour. Now he faced a war of national identity.
The invasion blueprint he followed was essentially that which had proven so effective in 1277. Once more, troops and engineers worked in tandem, tearing through the Welsh countryside and establishing building sites where they went. Military assistance was requested from the English earls, which was formalized as a call to the feudal host in May. To carry the cost of the building works, large loans were raised with Italian bankers. Once more, forces were mustered at Worcester and marched via Chester to Rhuddlan. Once more the Cinque Ports provided shipping. Once more, Marcher lords were relied upon to carry out private engagements in the south. The main body of the Welsh was encircled in Snowdonia, and Anglesey was linked to the mainland by a giant bridge formed of forty pontoon boats, built to order by huge teams of Chester carpenters. Those remaining outposts of the Plantagenet dominions that lay overseas were called upon for their support, and aid was sent from Ireland, Gascony and Queen Eleanor’s county of Ponthieu.
Progress was not so swift as it had been five years previously. The Welsh were in no mood to trust Edward, nor to submit to another round of his punitive treaty-making. Edward, for his part, was determined that he should not give an inch. The best offer he was prepared to make to Llywelyn was to exchange Snowdonia for a rich English earldom, which Llywelyn rejected out of hand. Losing Snowdonia would mean giving up land so valuable that Gerald of Wales had written during the previous century that ‘if all the herds in Wales were driven together, Snowdonia could provide them with pasture’. Moreover, it could not be granted to the English without destroying the territorial integrity of Gwynedd, the centre of Welsh resistance and national identity. This Edward well knew. Pecham tried to arbitrate, but it was clear from the outset that the two sides were set for a bitter fight.
The Welsh fought valiantly, as was their way. Llywelyn orchestrated the war from the north, while Dafydd roamed more freely across the principality. (Their borther Owain had retired to his estates and took no part in the rising.) They achieved a significant victory in November 1282, when forces led by Edward’s Gascon supporter Luke de Tany were ambushed near the pontoon bridge with Anglesey, and large numbers of knights drowned beneath the weight of their armour in a cold sea. But these losses were not enough to deter the English king from his task.
The English fought into the winter, reinforced by hundreds of men drafted over from Gascony. They squeezed Snowdonia hard, and in December Llywelyn, fearing starvation, tried to make a desperate sortie from his hideaway. He was ambushed at Irfon Bridge, near Builth in the central Marches, and slaughtered in battle on 11 December 1282. The accounts of his death are hopelessly confused, but he was probably run through with a lance before his prone, bloodied body was decapitated.
Llywelyn’s death was the final blow to Welsh independence, struck on a freezing hillside surrounded by bare trees, shortly before Christmas. The Welsh fought on under Dafydd until the spring came, but in April 1283 the final Welsh stronghold, Castell y Bere, was captured after a short siege, and in June Dafydd was betrayed and captured by Edwardian Welshmen. He was taken to Rhuddlan, and then to Shrewsbury for trial in front of a Michaelmas parliament.
Edward delivered the severest punishment on a man who he felt had betrayed his hospitality and lordship, and represented the scion of a family of traitors. Dafydd was hauled roughly to the scaffold and hanged as a common killer. Before he was dead, his intestines were slashed clean from his body with a butcher’s blade, and burned in front of him. His body was hacked into quarters and sent to four English cities. His head was sent to London and set on a spike at the Tower of London. It was a traitor’s death. In London Dafydd was reunited with his brother: the two Welsh princes stared lifeless over England’s largest city. Meanwhile the nation for which they had given their lives was smothered beneath a typically ambitious Plantagenet building project. Edward was determined that his victory should be Arthurian: complete. To ensure that Wales would not rise again he put into action the greatest castle-building programme that Britain had ever seen.