2

King and Reformer: Edward’s Government

Edward inherited the throne at the age of thirty-three, having already established himself both in English politics and on a European stage. He was evidently confident that the government of England could manage in his absence, for he was in no hurry to return to his realm. Instead, he went to Rome to visit the pope; sojourned with his relatives, the counts of Savoy; and stopped off on the way across France for a tournament, which turned so violent that it became known as ‘the little war of Chalons’. In July, he arrived at Paris, where he performed homage to the new French king, Philip III, for the duchy of Aquitaine. He spent the next year in Gascony, suppressing a revolt and attending to its affairs.

It was not until 2 August 1274 that Edward again set foot on English soil. His coronation was marked by a gesture which set the tone for his reign. When the Archbishop of Canterbury placed the crown on his head, Edward immediately removed it, declaring that he would not wear it until he had recovered all the crown lands his father had granted away. The recovery of the lands, rights and dues lost during his father’s tumultuous reign, both at home and abroad, would be central to Edward’s conception of his rule. He had seen royal authority overruled and brought low; as king, he was determined to preserve that authority. In order to do so, he was willing to learn from his father’s mistakes – and to take up the ideas of his father’s opponents.

On 11 October, barely two months after his return, Edward issued writs appointing commissioners to conduct investigations (known as the Hundred Roll inquiries), intended to uncover usurpations of the king’s rights, and corruption by royal officials. England was perhaps the most intensively governed kingdom in Christendom, and Edward was determined that its bureaucracy should be made to work for him. Corruption affected crown revenues and the efficiency of royal government, as well as bringing it into disrepute. But these inquiries also reflected the concerns of the reformers, for they were intended to answer popular complaints about the maladministration of local government, one of the factors which had aroused opposition to his father’s rule. And this was successful, to the extent that Edward was at least seen to be addressing these concerns; the Dunstable chronicle recorded that ‘the lord king sent inquirers everywhere to inquire how the sheriffs and other bailiffs had conducted themselves’. Unfortunately, the inquiries may have raised expectations beyond Edward’s power to deliver, for the chronicler added dolefully that ‘nothing useful came of it’.1

Edward continued his dual approach of pursuing offences against the rights of the crown, and also offences committed by crown officials, in a further inquiry of 1279 into ‘various encroachments made on us and others, rich and poor’. The survey was meant to ensure ‘that in future, that which is and ought to be ours and that which is and ought to be theirs may be clear’.2 The behaviour of royal officials would remain a concern for much of Edward’s reign. When he returned to England in 1289 after three years in Gascony, he appointed auditors to receive complaints concerning maladministration in his absence. Over the following four years, some forty officials were imprisoned and fined for misconduct. Rather more spectacular was his purge of the highest ranks of the king’s judges: Thomas Weyland, chief justice of the Common Bench, was sent into exile, while most of the other senior judges were dismissed and fined.

This was undoubtedly a popular move, enhancing Edward’s reputation for listening to his subjects’ grievances, for it was widely reported that the judges were tried as a result of the complaints (it even inspired a satirical biblical parody, ‘The Passion of the Judges’). This was not, perhaps, entirely deserved, for the complaints appear to have been solicited to justify a purge that had already been set in motion. And Edward’s motivation was, at least in part, financial. Although the judges’ misdemeanours were mostly comparatively trivial, the fines garnered from the exercise amounted to nearly £20,000 – a huge sum, not much less than the normal annual income of the crown.

The 1274–5 Hundred Roll inquiries had revealed the extent to which numerous lords had taken advantage of Henry III’s lax government to encroach on crown rights, particularly during the civil war of the 1260s. Edward was especially perturbed by the widespread arrogation of franchises and liberties, a form of lordship which devolved many of the functions of royal government to the lord’s own officials. This amounted to a large-scale usurpation of the crown’s authority, which Edward was determined to redress. By the late thirteenth century, legal theorists were arguing that all franchises were derived from the crown, and that no lord should hold any franchise unless he could prove his right to it. This was a principle which appealed strongly to Edward’s elevated conception of kingship. To this end, in 1278, he launched the quo warranto inquiries, to discover ‘by what warrant’ such franchises were held.

Most of the nobility, however, took a somewhat different view, vigorously voiced by John de Warenne. Summoned before the royal justices, he brandished ‘an ancient and rusty sword’, proclaiming:

Here, my lords, here is my warrant! For my ancestors came with William the Bastard* and conquered their lands with the sword, and with the same sword, I shall defend those lands from anyone who wants to take them.³

While this tale undoubtedly improved in the telling, it summed up the widely held view that franchisal rights came not from the king, but from individual right of conquest. In fact, de Warenne had particular cause to resent the proceedings: a liberty granted him by Edward himself in 1263 was disallowed, on the grounds that Edward was not then king, and thus did not have the right to make such a grant. Another problem was that many families had held and exercised franchises for generations, without documentary proof of their right to do so. But by Edward’s reign, writing had replaced oral testimony as the predominant means of recording property rights, and so the royal courts were increasingly unwilling to recognize such rights in the absence of documents. Thus, according to the contemporary chronicler John of Oxnead, ‘a great many men, not having charters, lost liberties and free customs of which they had been in possession for a long time’.4

The quo warranto proceedings dragged on interminably, at the glacial pace customary for royal justice. Nor were matters helped by a distinct lack of clarity or consistency; while some judges took an increasingly hard line, Edward ensured that franchises held by his relatives and favourites were accepted. Eventually, in the face of mounting complaint, Edward agreed to a compromise: the Statute of Quo Warranto of 1290 conceded the rights to any franchise that could be shown to have been held since ‘before the time of King Richard’ (effectively fixing Richard’s accession in 1189 as the limit of legal memory).⁵ And Edward finally abandoned the proceedings altogether in 1294.

While Edward was ultimately forced to accept existing franchises, regardless of proof, he did successfully curb any further such encroachments on crown rights, and firmly established the principle that franchises in England derived from royal authority. All of this demonstrated Edward’s skill as a politician and his willingness to compromise, as he managed to head off any serious dispute in an area which was potentially highly contentious – for, just like their king, magnates were notably sensitive to any perceived threat to their rights over their lands.

The Statute of Quo Warranto was only one of a series of statutes issued in Edward’s name which would establish his reputation as one of England’s greatest lawmakers. This stemmed in part simply from the way in which his legislation was issued. Previously, new laws had usually taken the form of writs (instructions sent to judges and royal officials), which were recorded only haphazardly alongside the routine business of government. Edward, however, took care to have his laws formally promulgated as statutes, generally in Parliament. This gave them authority and standing, and – on a practical level – publicity. The first of Edward’s statutes, Westminster I, was formulated in response to the Hundred Roll inquiries of 1274–5. It was issued at his first parliament, at Easter 1275, to which he summoned twice the usual number of representatives, making it one of the largest parliaments of the Middle Ages. The statute addressed many problems of misgovernment, which were of obvious concern to the assembled representatives. Another innovation ensured an even wider audience: a copy was sent to the sheriff of every county, with orders that it be proclaimed in every village and borough.

Statutes were not of themselves a novelty; Magna Carta was an obvious early example. Nor was Edward intending any radical overhaul of the law. Rather, his statutes were made within the existing legal framework, and were generally intended to reform and revise the law so that it functioned better. Much of his legislation was based on practical experience in the courts, and was intended to streamline procedures. As the preamble to the 1285 Statute of Westminster II had it:

Our Lord the King … calling together the prelates, earls, barons and his council … and considering that many of his realm were disinherited, by reason that in many cases, where remedy should have been had, there was none provided by him nor his predecessors, ordained certain statutes very necessary and profitable for his realm, whereby his people of England and Ireland, governed under his rule, have obtained more speedy justice in their oppressions than before.6

But despite Edward’s conservative intent, some of the measures passed were to have a huge impact. One such was the first clause of this statute, known as de donis conditionalibus (‘concerning conditional grants’). Landowners had begun to develop arrangements such as entails, by which lands might be granted to a younger son or daughter, on condition that these be returned to the main family line in the absence of a male heir; this statute made such conditions legally binding. This fundamentally altered patterns of inheritance, with consequences for generations of landowners (the plight of a certain Mr Bennett’s daughters, some five hundred years later, was owing to just such an arrangement). As with statutes such as Acton Burnell (1283) and Merchants (1285),7 which made the collection of private debts much easier, this addressed issues which were of concern to Edward’s subjects, rather than directly benefiting the crown.

Edward’s expulsion of the Jews from England, in 1290, was similarly a response to widespread popular demand. This was driven in part by the vicious anti-Semitism so characteristic of medieval Christendom, further whipped up by crusade mania. But equally important was resentment arising from Jewish involvement in moneylending. Canon law (the law of the Church) prohibited Christians from lending money at interest. Fortunately for the state of Edward’s finances, Italian bankers had devised various ways round this. However, the majority of Edward’s subjects did not have access to the international money market. Not being subject to canon law, the Jewish community in England had long dominated the business of lending money to landholders. In turn, the crown took a predatory propriety interest in the Jewish community, taxing them ruthlessly; and many debts owing to Jews ended up in the king’s hands. Those with close connections to royal government were able to exploit the system to acquire lands, buying these debts on the cheap from the crown, and then using the royal courts to foreclose on them (in this, they were greatly aided by the new debt-collection procedures introduced under the statutes of Acton Burnell and of Merchants). Edward’s wife, Queen Eleanor, and his younger brother, Edmund, Earl of Lancaster, were both notoriously enthusiastic players of this profitable game (as a contemporary verse had it: ‘The king covets our pennies, and the queen our fine manors’8). The expulsion of the Jews was dictated by a cold-heartedly ruthless assessment of the crown’s best financial and political interests. The Jewish community had already been financially drained by heavy taxation; it was now more profitable to expel the Jews than to protect them.

Edward was undoubtedly determined to address the concerns of his subjects out of a sense of obligation, for this was a fundamental part of a king’s function. But there was undoubtedly also an element of hard-nosed political bargaining. The Statute of Quo Warranto and the edict expelling the Jews were just two of a series of measures conceded in 1290, in return for a desperately needed grant of taxation. And the forum for Edward’s political bargaining was Parliament. Medieval parliaments were an occasion, rather than a permanent institution, summoned at the king’s will, and dismissed once their work was completed (usually after a few weeks). They were essentially a development of the thirteenth century, though arguably their roots stretched as far back as the Anglo-Saxon witan. Under Edward’s predecessors, parliaments had been summoned only sporadically; and the reformers’ Provisions of Oxford had demanded that three parliaments be held every year, at fixed dates. Edward went a long way to meeting this, summoning parliaments more frequently than any other medieval King of England. After his return to England in 1274, he regularly held parliaments twice a year, at Michaelmas (30 September) and Easter. There were interruptions, in 1277 and again in 1282–3, when Edward was busy waging war in Wales, and in 1286–9, when he was absent in Gascony. After 1293, the timing of parliaments became somewhat more erratic, though there was at least one, and frequently two, every year until 1302. For the next three years, Edward decided he could manage without parliaments, but they were resumed in Lent 1305, followed by parliaments that autumn, in spring 1306 and January 1307.

The composition of Parliament was still very flexible. There was no fixed parliamentary peerage, and individual magnates, bishops, abbots and royal servants were summoned at the king’s discretion; this body would eventually become the House of Lords. The other body was the representatives: the knights of the shire (usually two elected from each county) and the burgesses (usually two elected from selected towns, plus four from London); together, they would eventually become the House of Commons.9 The election of representatives from the shires was first ordered by Henry III, in 1254; and burgesses were first summoned by Simon de Montfort in 1265.

In the first half of Edward’s reign, representatives were summoned only to a minority of parliaments, depending on the business to be discussed. They were, for instance, summoned to the Shrewsbury Parliament of Michaelmas 1283 to witness the treason trial of the Welsh magnate Dafydd ap Gruffudd; but once they had witnessed Dafydd’s execution, they were dismissed, and the council conducted the rest of the Parliament’s business at the nearby manor of Acton Burnell, belonging to the chancellor, Robert Burnell. However, representatives were almost invariably summoned when a grant of taxation was required. And from the 1290s, as Edward required such grants more frequently, so they were summoned more frequently; increasingly, indeed, they were summoned even when no taxes were to be requested. By the end of the reign, precedent had hardened into custom: Parliament was settling into a regular form, and the principle had been firmly established that lay taxes could not be imposed without the consent of the Commons in Parliament.

Grants of taxation were necessary because the crown’s own regular income (roughly £27,000 a year, derived from sources such as crown lands, feudal dues, the profits of justice and customs) was sufficient only to cover routine peacetime expenses. Any additional expenditure required additional income. Henry II, Richard Cœur de Lion and King John had all resorted to racking up feudal dues and auctioning justice to fund their wars. However, such arbitrary exactions aroused bitter resentment, leading to the rebellions of John’s reign, and the outlawing of such practices under Magna Carta. By the late thirteenth century, the usual resort for trying to raise additional revenue was a form of direct taxation, known as aids or subsidies, charged as a proportion of the value of movable goods and property. A typical grant was a fifteenth and a tenth, meaning rural dwellers would be taxed at a fifteenth part of their movable wealth, and those living in towns (the boroughs) at a tenth. On occasion, town and rural dwellers might also be taxed at the same rates, as for the grants of a fifteenth in 1275, 1290 and 1301. This form of taxation had originated in Henry II’s reign, initially to fund the crusades; and each of Henry’s successors had raised similar aids, usually to fund wars. However, such a tax could not be imposed arbitrarily, and required consent (as Magna Carta had laid down); and by Edward’s reign, it was customary to obtain such consent from a parliament. Henry III had been notably unsuccessful in this regard, failing to obtain consent for any grants of taxation between 1237 and 1270, when a twentieth was granted for Edward’s crusade. By contrast, Edward wrung more such aids from his subjects than all of his predecessors put together. For the first eighteen years of his reign, his spending was relatively modest, and he raised only two aids (one of them to pay for the Welsh war of 1282–3); but between 1290 and 1306, he collected no less than seven aids, bringing in altogether nigh on £400,000.

It was the king’s need to obtain consent to taxation which enabled the Commons (albeit usually following the leadership of the Lords) to negotiate concessions such as the expulsion of the Jews. However, while Edward accepted that consent was necessary, he did not take refusal lying down. The Bury St Edmunds chronicler describes how, at the Parliament of 1296, he hectored the knights of the shire and the burgesses until they granted him a tax to fund his wars: ‘Whoever should have hesitated to comply with the king’s demand … or refused as much as he could, was publicly attacked by the king and dishonoured.’10

Yet parliaments were not only – or even primarily – about taxation. One truly innovative measure introduced by Edward was his acceptance of petitions in Parliament. Petitioners might request individual favours or grants; ask for allowances to be made for particular circumstances; or seek justice or redress of wrongs. In this last regard, petitions served much the same purpose as the complaints invited for the Hundred Roll inquiries, but on a regular basis. Petitions enabled individuals and communities to seek the king’s aid in matters not adequately covered by the normal procedures of royal government, or in cases where those procedures had broken down or were being abused. Previously, petitioning had been on a haphazard basis, requiring access to the king in person. Now, it was possible (at least theoretically) for any subject, or group of subjects, to submit a petition to the king and his council as a matter of routine. And they could be confident that it would be given due consideration, and, if accepted, acted upon – as witnessed by the official endorsements on surviving petitions (of which there are many hundreds from Edward’s reign alone). They could be submitted to the English Parliament not just from England, but from Edward’s other lordships, including Gascony, Ireland, Wales and – from 1305 – Scotland. However, Parliament remained an entirely English institution; aside from isolated cases in 1296 and 1305 (when Scottish nobles were summoned to English parliaments to discuss Scottish affairs), no representatives were summoned from these lands.

Edward was also active in reforming justice – an area of increasing concern to his subjects, for England was widely perceived to be facing a mounting crisis of law and order. In the Parliament of 1300, Edward conceded that ‘many more evildoers are in the land than ever there were, and innumerable robberies, arsons and homicides are committed, and the peace is less well kept’.11 And in a memorandum to his justices of 1306, he referred to ‘the riots and outrages … which were like the beginning of war’.¹²

Since the reign of Henry II (another great reformer), royal justices had been sent on circuits round the counties, known as eyres, which saved suitors from having to come to Westminster to obtain the king’s justice. Their caseload had been steadily increasing throughout the thirteenth century, but Edward’s reign saw a huge rise. However, the eyres were suspended during the Welsh war of 1282–3, and again with the outbreak of war with France in 1294. Although Edward considered them to be of great importance in representing royal authority in the localities, they were not resumed during his reign. And this was partly because he had already introduced alternative mechanisms.

In 1304, Edward appointed special commissions to inquire into crime and disorder, known as commissions of trailbaston, from the clubs, or ‘bastons’, used by highway robbers. The following year, more such commissions were appointed, this time with the authority to hear and determine cases. This was the first time any King of England had mounted such a deliberate and concerted campaign to tackle crime on a nationwide scale. And, in keeping with Edward’s policy of making royal government more responsive, the crown had also begun to issue ad hoc commissions of oyer et terminer. These provided for the appointment of nominated local justices and knights to ‘hear and determine’ specific cases in the localities in response to individual complaints or petitions. This was a major step in the process which would, over the fourteenth century, see much of the crown’s routine legal jurisdiction devolved to the great and good of county society as justices of the peace.

However, for all the sound and fury surrounding law and order, it is hard to gauge the true extent of the problem; as with all crime statistics, there are difficulties of interpretation. There does appear to have been some increase in crime, much of it stemming from Edward’s own wars. The taking of ‘prises’ (supplies commandeered for the king’s wars) caused disputes which often turned violent; and the purveyors who seized them were often accused of theft. Soldiers frequently turned to brigandage, forced to steal in order to feed themselves because of the difficulties and delays in organising prises. And campaigns ended with the discharge of large numbers of men who had got into the habit of living by plunder and ransom. Indeed, many were already felons, for it was Edward who first initiated the grand tradition of filling the ranks of English armies with criminals. In June 1294, pardons were offered to outlaws, fugitives and prisoners who were prepared to serve in Gascony. Typically, Edward justified this as a public good, sparing criminals from punishment

because we are moved to pity for that so many and divers men of our kingdom so often incur the loss of life or limb … with the hope of the betterment of such malefactors and for the quiet of the people of our realm.13

In fact, he was putting a good face on an expedient forced on him by difficulties in recruiting for an unpopular campaign. Nevertheless, the measure proved so successful that it was repeated on a regular basis for future campaigns.

On the other hand, the rising tide of complaint may also simply have reflected rising expectations. As the crown took on more and more criminal cases, and people were encouraged to present their complaints, so they increasingly came to expect the crown to deal with crime. Furthermore, Edward may himself have helped to spread the impression of rising crime. For instance, the preamble of the 1275 Statute of Westminster claimed that the legislation was needed ‘because … the peace had been less kept, and the laws less used, and the offenders less punished, than they ought to be, by reason whereof the people feared the less to offend’.14 And this statute was proclaimed throughout the realm, in every village and borough.

By the mid 1290s, Edward’s reform programme was starting to run out of steam. Now in his fifties, he was becoming increasingly isolated, both politically and personally. His uncle William de Valence had died in 1286. He lost his beloved queen, Eleanor, in 1290. Robert Burnell, his chief adviser and architect of many of his reforms, died in 1292. And in 1296, Edmund of Lancaster succumbed to illness while commanding the English forces in Gascony. Edward had lost

our dearest and only brother, who was always ready in the affairs of our realm, proving himself devoted and faithful, and in whom virtue and many gifts of grace shone forth … and by whose loss we and our whole realm are made desolate.15

The main reason the reform programme stalled, however, was war. Edward’s wars were prodigiously expensive. Between 1294 and 1298, he spent some £750,000 fighting the French, the Welsh and the Scots. Such spending required unprecedented levels of taxation; and unfortunately, in 1294, just as war with France was looming, Edward’s government became embroiled in an international banking crisis, partly of the king’s own making. He had previously depended heavily on credit from an Italian banking company, the Ricciardi of Lucca. Crown borrowing from Italian bankers was nothing new; what was new was the scale and long-term systematic basis of Edward’s arrangements for borrowing and repayment. The Ricciardi took over the collection of the English wool customs (and sometimes direct taxes as well), and advanced money on them to the crown when occasion demanded. They had also taken on the collection of crusade taxation in England for the pope, and, while his Holiness was deciding how the proceeds might best be employed, the Ricciardi used the money as capital for loans. Then, in 1291, the pope decided to grant the money to Edward, to fund his proposed crusade. This gave Edward a huge amount of credit with the Ricciardi, and in 1294 he attempted to draw on it to fund his war. Unfortunately, however, much of this money was tied up in long-term loans, and the Ricciardi were bankrupted.

Without the Ricciardi’s credit, Edward’s finances were left running on a desperately hand-to-mouth basis. Money was usually needed immediately, but taxes took many months to be agreed, assessed and collected. At the same time, tax yields were declining. The fifteenth granted by the laity in 1290 raised nearly £115,000 – one of the most lucrative taxes in England in the Middle Ages. However, following repeated tax grants over the next decade, the fifteenth granted in 1301 raised just £45,000. This was partly because tax evasion was becoming more widespread (some surviving monastic financial accounts meticulously record the costs of bribing tax collectors); but it may also have been simply because the country was becoming impoverished by relentless taxation.

Whatever the cause, from the middle of the 1290s Edward’s government was rapidly racking up debt – a problem exacerbated when the accounting system of the king’s household (the department responsible for war finance) collapsed under its excessive workload. Correspondingly, Edward’s demands for money became ever more pressing. In 1294, he bullied the clergy into granting an aid of no less than one half of their movable wealth, which yielded some £80,000. And he imposed a new export duty of £2 per sack of wool, on top of the existing custom of 6s 8d. Over the following three years, this raised more than £110,000. However, much of the cost was passed on by wool merchants, who cut the prices they paid to producers – and these included many landowners, who wielded significant political clout. So controversial was the new custom that it soon became known as the maletolt (‘bad tax’, in the form of French spoken in England).

Another exaction was prises, the compulsory purchase of supplies and commodities. This was based on a long-standing right to obtain supplies for the king’s household; Edward took advantage of this right to obtain supplies for royal armies, on the grounds that they were organized from within the household. Again, this was not a new practice, but dated back at least as far as the reign of Henry II. However, Edward’s use of prises was on an altogether larger and far more frequent scale, and payment was invariably made belatedly or – all too often – not at all. Furthermore, the collection of prises was wide open to abuse and corruption, while much of the food that was collected went to waste, left to rot in barns.

Grievances about Edward’s increasingly rapacious government came to a head in 1297. At the Parliament at Bury St Edmunds the previous November, he had demanded a tax from the clergy of a fifth. The pope had just prohibited the payment of taxes by the Church to secular authorities, and so in January, under the assertive leadership of Robert Winchelsey, Archbishop of Canterbury, the clergy refused to cough up. Edward’s response was that ‘since you do not hold to the homage and oath that you made to me … nor shall I be bound to you in any way’.16 He then outlawed them en masse, and seized all of the Church’s secular property, while allowing individual clerics to pay fines for the restoration of their lands – fines which matched what they would have paid in tax.

At the same time, Edward’s repeated demands for military service were arousing the opposition of his nobility. In the Lent Parliament at Salisbury, he demanded that they serve in Gascony. Led by Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, the hereditary marshal of the king’s army, they refused to go, unless the king himself headed the expedition. According to one account, Edward swore at him, ‘By God, sir Earl, you shall either go or hang’; but the earl swore back, ‘By the same oath, lord King, I shall neither go nor hang.’17 In the event, the earl neither went nor hanged.

Edward now demonstrated his political acumen, fending off the Church’s opposition by coming to a settlement with Archbishop Winchelsey. He could afford to do so anyway, because he had collected nearly as much by fining the clergy as he had hoped to gain by taxing them. However, he still desperately needed more money, for he was now planning an expedition to Flanders. In July, following yet another parliament, he announced that he been granted an unprecedentedly generous aid of an eighth and a fifth by the laity. In return, he promised to reissue Magna Carta. However, the Commons had not been summoned to this parliament, nor had the lords been summoned in proper form; indeed, the author of a contemporary English chronicle, the Flowers of History, claimed that Edward had obtained the consent only of ‘the people standing around in his chamber’.¹⁸ To add insult to injury, he also ordered a prise of 8,300 sacks of wool, for resale at a profit. The collectors met with such recalcitrance and evasion that fewer than 800 sacks could be collected; and it caused such disruption to the wool trade that more may have been lost from reduced customs than was gained from the sale of the wool.

On the morning of 22 August, a large force of men led by the Earls of Hereford and Norfolk, and including five prominent barons, turned up at the Exchequer. Claiming to speak for the whole community of the realm, Hereford harangued the clerks:

nothing sooner puts men in bondage than … to be tallaged at will, and that if the eighth were so levied it would lead to the disinheritance of them and of their heirs; and … that such a tallage and prise of wool were quite insufferable and they would in no wise suffer them.19

A tallage was an arbitrary tax levied by a lord on his feudal tenants; in effect, Hereford was arguing that, by imposing taxes without proper consent, Edward was treating his subjects like serfs.

For Edward, this must have seemed uncomfortably reminiscent of the events of 1258, when his father had been confronted by angry nobles. Yet, in the face of this overt opposition, he embarked for Flanders anyway, determined that nothing should be allowed to impede his expedition. In fact, there was a world of difference between nobles haranguing royal clerks at the Exchequer, as happened in 1297, and haranguing the king in his own court, as had happened in 1258. Meanwhile, Edward agreed that the levying of the eighth should not be taken as a precedent; as for the prise of wool, he justified it on the grounds that ‘it seems to us that we ought to be as free to buy wool in our country as anyone else’.²⁰

Some chroniclers would later claim that the country had teetered on the brink of civil war. But Edward had no intention of allowing any such breakdown; in his absence – but undoubtedly on his authority – his government prepared the way for a settlement with his opponents. On 5 September, just two weeks after his departure, another parliament was convoked; and on the 15th, writs were issued for knights of the shire to be summoned, so that they could receive copies of royal confirmations of Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest, a public acknowledgement that the king was prepared to make concessions. Magna Carta had come to be revered as a touchstone of good governance, a statutory barrier against the arbitrary exercise of royal power. The Charter of the Forest (originally issued alongside Magna Carta in 1215) was similarly regarded as a check on the administration of forest law, a jurisdiction which imposed onerous burdens on those living within the royal forest, which covered extensive parts of England.

By now, the need for a settlement was even more pressing, for the Scots had inflicted a devastating defeat on the English at Stirling Bridge on the 11th. But the necessary concessions had already been set in train by the time news of this disaster reached London. When Parliament met, Edward’s council issued the Confirmatio Cartarum (‘Confirmation of the Charters’), conceding that he would not take

aids … or prises from our realm henceforth except with the common assent of all the realm and for the common profit of the same realm, saving the ancient aids and prises due and accustomed.21

The council also agreed to abolish the maletolt, and to review the boundaries of the royal forest. In return, Parliament granted a desperately needed – though pointedly reduced – tax of a ninth, in place of the offending eighth. These measures were formally confirmed by Edward from Flanders, ‘after talking the matter over with his magnates who were there with him’22 – ostentatiously playing the good king, who acted with the counsel of his nobility and advisers.

Nevertheless, Edward proved notably reluctant to implement many of the concessions he had granted, particularly regarding the royal forest. Once again, as during the political crises of the 1260s, his good faith came into question. At the Parliament of March 1299, he went to the lengths of secretly leaving London overnight (for the benefit of his health, he subsequently insisted), to avoid giving a reply to the demands for further concessions. It is not perhaps surprising, then, that the following year, when Edward once again agreed to confirm Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest, the bishops and the earls requested that these be issued under their own seals, to prevent him from reneging on his promise. Edward indignantly refused, demanding: ‘Do you think that I am a child, or a liar?’²³ Nevertheless, he was constrained to make a further set of concessions, the Articuli super Carta (‘Articles additional to the Charter’ – i.e. Magna Carta), in return for an aid of a twentieth. In the event, he refrained from collecting it, seemingly because he considered that the conditions attached were too binding.

The need for money proved too pressing, however, and at the Lincoln Parliament in January 1301, Edward was forced to accept a bill demanding reform, in return for a fifteenth. In particular, he (again) conceded that the bounds of the forest should be reviewed. This time, the review actually happened; and as the inquiries were conducted by local juries, the predictable result was that the extent of the forest was reduced by about half. Edward also accepted limitations on his rights of prise, which severely restricted its use in supplying royal armies.

These concessions were enough to head off further opposition, and the rest of the reign saw comparative political peace. Edward sidestepped the thorny issue of taxation by the simple expedient of not paying his bills. Nevertheless, the concessions he had been forced to make continued to rankle. He got his chance to overturn them in 1305, when one of his clerks, the Gascon Bertrand de Got, was elected Pope Clement V. Within six months, Clement issued a papal decree absolving Edward from his oaths to observe ‘certain various and unjust concessions relating to the forests and other rights pertaining of old to the crown and the honour of your royalty’.24 The following year, Edward duly revoked the 1301 concessions on the forest, reinstating the former bounds. However, he tried to make this more palatable by passing an ordinance limiting the powers of the royal foresters, and making them more accountable for their actions.

There was more to all this than just political gamesmanship. Edward’s opponents accused him of imposing arbitrary, unaffordable and intolerable demands and exactions, well beyond reasonable bounds, and of reneging on his promises. But as Edward saw it, it was the duty of his subjects to assist and serve him to the utmost in maintaining and defending the lands and rights which had descended to him by Divine Providence as King of England. He was not prepared to compromise on matters affecting the property and rights of the crown, such as the bounds of the royal forest. While – however reluctantly – he could accept the political limitations to his kingship imposed by his opponents, he was determined that the crown’s estate should be preserved intact, to be passed on to his heirs. This was a matter of principle, of maintaining the rights of the crown undiminished, in keeping with the promise he had made at his coronation. And this was perhaps the guiding principle behind his government and his reforms.