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The Century of Baronial Conflict
The 1200s
May 1199
(The Death of Richard the Lionheart)
to
July 1307
(The Death of Edward I)

King John and his Legacy
King John and the Loss of the Plantagenet Empire
King John and his Struggle with the Church
Campaign Disaster, the Magna Carta and the First Barons’ War
The Minority of Henry III
Henry III’s Coming of Age and Friction with his Barons
The Sicilian Fiasco and the Provisions of Oxford and Westminster
Simon de Montfort and the Second Barons’ War
The King’s Last Years – the Lasting Achievements
The Accession of Edward I
Edward I and the Invasion of Wales
The Invasion of Scotland and the War with France

1

King John and his Legacy
When King John succeeded his brother in May 1199, he was already, at the age of
32, a hugely rich, powerful and experienced prince
...
From this position of importance and power, he was to
spend much of the following decade, and especially the time during Richard’s
long absence abroad on crusade and as a prisoner, cementing his place in
England’s elite hierarchy and, in 1193, had even felt powerful enough to try and
usurp his brother’s throne
...
This was not only to the English crown but also to the
many other Angevin titles that Richard and his father had spent their lives
fighting to secure
...
These were added to John’s already considerable possessions
...

However, from this auspicious start he departed the throne 17 years later as one
of England’s most unsuccessful and unpopular kings
...
Both these powerful institutions felt that the crown
under the Plantagenets had trespassed onto areas of their traditional authority,
and their ability to fight back against the king, of course, increased considerably
when John proved so ineffectual on the battlefield
...

This loss of ancestral land in France, and most especially the loss of Normandy in
the spring of 1204, resulted in King John becoming both unpopular and weak,
2

with the new king seen by contemporaries, in great contrast with the chivalric
and successful Richard, as short, fat, capricious and selfish
...
This was the first time an English monarch had
raised money in this way, and he charged on rents and property at a rate of onethirteenth
...

In all of this, John followed the lead of the first two Plantagenet kings who had
moved away from the successful relationship between the monarchy and the
barons that a century before had characterised the reign of Henry I
...
A weaker king, or rather perhaps a king in a weak position as
John was to become increasingly in the first decade of the new century, could
not, and this proved the catalyst for a movement initiated by both the barons and
the Church that aimed to secure the reclamation of a series of rights, privileges
and concessions that had been slowly eroded since the time of Stephen
...

In essence, John was not able to maintain the royal policy of centralisation that
had been used since the time of Stephen to pay for royal wars and crusades but
which had been deeply resented throughout the country, especially by the
barons who had been forced to pay for them
...
This famous and
far-reaching

3,500-word-long

document,

therefore,

should

be

seen

as

concessionary and reactionary, as well as revolutionary
...
Under
the rule of his father, this social contract between the king and his barons, whose
support was essential for the successful administration of the realm, had become
blurred while his brother’s wars in the Holy Land and France, as well as his
ransom, had nearly bankrupted the country
...

John has often been seen as an unpleasant and unpopular character, a capricious
king who was an autocrat, a womaniser and a murderer, although records show
that he was not an unintelligent man and that he was one well-versed in the
wiles of government and the law needed to run a successful administration
...
This was at a time when the principal quality
needed by kings and princes was martial presence
...
This was a role that John, in stark contrast to his brother, was unable
to fulfill
...
In 1199 at his accession, the size of these holdings in
France had rivalled those of the French king himself, including huge holdings in
northern France west of Paris as well as the Angevin Empire of Normandy,
Anjou, Touraine and Maine
...
All these lands,
dominating the western side of Europe from Scotland to the Pyrenees, had made
the Plantagenets economically, as well as politically, rich, and had cemented
their position as Europe’s leading dynastic family
...
Leading barons there were unhappy with the idea of being ruled by the
John and so instead, going against Richard I’s will, declared for Duke Arthur, the
12-year-old son of John’s dead elder brother, Geoffrey
...
But John’s blundering in Brittany soon
provoked Philip’s anger and he quickly changed sides, a diplomatic about-turn
that was made more permanent when the young Arthur was betrothed to
Philip’s daughter, Mary
...
The starting
point of the series of events that led to this demise began in the early months of
1202 in the strategically crucial region of Poitou, just to the north of Gascony
...
However, unfortunately and inconveniently for John, she was at the
time betrothed to another great aristocratic landowner of central France, Hugh of
Lusignan, the Lord of Poitou
...
This had
made him very unpopular in Gascony, Isabella’s home, where support for her
cause grew among its barons
...
This was an unwanted
invitation that, as king of England, John found not only unacceptable and
demeaning but also, having been given no guarantees to his safety, extremely
dangerous
...
This refusal in April 1202 to go before his overlord
led to the confiscation of all of his French lands, with a sizeable amount then
awarded to Duke Arthur of Brittany
...

John’s first reaction to this was untypically robust with he and his army quickly
rounding on Arthur who was besieging Eleanor of Aquitaine, John’s mother and
the latter’s grandmother, at her castle at the Norman stronghold of Mirebeau
...

However, from this seemingly invincible position of strength John would soon
ruin his chances of suing for a successful peace when he was presumed to have
murdered his young nephew who disappeared soon after
...

Philip now went to work with all the expertise and stratagem expected of a
martial lord who had done battle for two decades with the Lionheart and
Saladin
...
A series of
victories throughout Normandy resulted, and this, by the end of 1203, had forced
John to flee from his French lands back for England
...
As a result, Normandy and England
stopped being ruled as a single entity for the first time since 1066
...

This had been commissioned by Henry II 33 years earlier and, spanning the
Thames from the City to the south bank in Southwark, it was made up of 19
arches, with a drawbridge in the middle to allow taller ships access to the river
further west
...

King John and his Struggle with the Church
The final eviction of John’s forces from Normandy in 1206 led, in part at least, to
a number of struggles within the English political elite that eventually led to the
signing of the Magna Carta 8 years later
...
The
Plantagenet kings had long used these taxes for their foreign campaigns and
crusades, but they were bitterly resented by the Anglo-Norman barons who had
to pay them
...
John’s military defeat in 1206 gave them a political opportunity
that they had not had for a generation, and they rounded on their king in everincreasing numbers
...
This was represented by Stephen Langton,
an English cardinal from Lincolnshire of impeccable credentials who had studied
and taught at the great Sorbonne University in Paris and who since 1206 had
been working for the pope in Rome
...
This was a battle that John was ultimately destined to lose, with
Langton later playing a crucial role in securing the concessions at Runnymede
enshrined in the Magna Carta in 1215
...
He had
not only been archbishop but had also for much of the 1190s carried out an
important role for Richard as his chancellor
...
As a result, they secretly chose their own
abbot as Hubert’s successor
...
This was the
Bishop of Norwich who was not only a leading political and religious figure but
also a close political ally
...
However, the
monks refused the king’s demands and so both rival candidates raced off to
Rome to court the support of Pope Innocent III
...
He was now quick to use this opportunity to stamp his
authority once again over an England that during Richard I’s reign had become
at best an errant waiverer and at worst an avowed enemy
...

Earlier, Innocent III had shown himself to be a man every bit as interested in the
temporal and the secular as the spiritual when he committed himself to the
Fourth Crusade
...
This had restored much of the land taken by Saladin
in the kingdom of Jerusalem but had never recaptured the holy city itself
...

But the crusaders of the Fourth Crusade was never to sail further west than
Constantinople where a refusal there by the Byzantine emperor to pay for the
thousands of Crusaders who disembarked resulted in an orgy of looting and
8

plunder, mainly of the priceless relics that had been collected under the
Byzantine emperors over a thousand years
...
This concluded the Great Schism between the
two churches that had begun in the 1050s
...
This
strong, resurgent Muslim force, however, did not deter many thousands of
Christian European crusaders from trying to recapture the holy sites over the
next few hundred years with the saddest of these perhaps being the Children’s
Crusade of 1212
...
The lucky ones survived, but many of these
found themselves sold into slavery throughout the eastern Mediterranean
...
This took place under
the leadership of Temujin, who in the 1190s united the Mongol tribes and who in
1206 was proclaimed Genghis Khan, the leader of all between the seas
...
This force, under his
command and then under that of his sons and grandsons, swept across Asia,
China and the Middle East over the next fifty years
...

As a result, the Mongol Empire was to become the largest land empire the world
9

had ever seen, with the Mongols later settling, building great cities and helping
the spread of trade, commerce and learning
...
This journey was undertaken in the
company of his uncle and his father, merchants from Venice who had already
made the journey before, and culminated with his extended 17-year visit to the
Mongol court of Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan
...

Despite Innocent’s clear show of firepower in the eastern Mediterranean, John
refused to accept his appointment of Langton and stood by his own choice, the
Bishop of Norwich
...
To add to the king’s woes, he also in 1207 lost the support of his
illegitimate half-brother, Geoffrey, the Archbishop of York
...

John’s spat with the Church dragged on until 1213 when he was finally forced to
accept Langton’s appointment
...
This essentially forbad church services, the
giving of holy sacraments and the burying of the dead in hallowed ground, and
only allowed the baptism of infants and the priests to hear the last confessions of
the dying
...
This was followed in 1209 by
John’s excommunication that forced many of England’s bishops into exile
...

John’s precarious position had begun soon after his return from Europe,
although he was able to hold onto power for so long partly because of the
disunity and the mistakes of his opponents
...
But
John was also able to survive for other reasons that had kept him at the centre of
European power politics for thirty years
...

Indeed in 1210, after a successful campaign in Ireland, John was able for a while
to reassert his authority over his barons
...
This joint force was able to defeat errant Anglo-Norman barons who had
long resented the authority of the English crown over their affairs
...

As a result, John’s support from these men, especially in the north where
resentment against the Plantagenet kings had traditionally been strongest, slowly
ebbed away until by 1212 when open rebellion was threatened
...
In return, it was agreed that he
would receive his kingdom back as a fiefdom
...

John’s humiliation was completed when he was forced to accept Langton who
11

soon was to take a leading role in the politics of the nation
...
Suddenly, he became the champion of the Church with
his new alliance turning the tables completely on his chief secular enemy, Philip
of France
...
Thus, it seemed that John, for once, might
succeed in clutching victory from the jaws of disaster
...

This disastrous series of events began in the spring of 1214 with a renewed
campaign on the continent that initially promised much
...
This hugely profitable province lay just
to the north of Aquitaine, his mother’s ancestral homeland, and it had provided
the core of the Angevin empires of both Henry II and Richard
...

The years since 1206 had been used in England to tax and extort the money
needed for this campaign with John invoking the scutage, a royal tax that forced
the barons to raise money for their king
...
Much of this was in flagrant disregard for the traditions and
customs that had grown up concerning the government of feudal society and
this, led by a number of influential northern barons who bitterly resented the
control that the monarch was claiming over their lives, had forced England to the
brink of civil war
...
However, victory in France was not won, and John’s
decimated and demoralised army, under the command of John’s nephew, Otto of
Saxony, was driven north to the borders of Flanders where, while John waited
for news across the English Channel at Dover, it suffered a decisive defeat in July
1214 at the Battle of Bouvines
...

The defeat at the Battle of Bouvines, which is seen in France as a defining act in
the birth of the nation, ended any realistic claim to ancestral lands in France and
led to open rebellion in England where the inhabitants of London welcomed the
barons, supported by the French, by the early summer of 1215
...

As a result, the king was forced to meet with them at Runnymede, a meadow by
the River Thames near Windsor where William the Conqueror had built his first
Norman castle in England 150 years before and which before had been a
traditional venue for the Anglo-Saxon Witan
...
Here the barons were
able to extract from the king a series of promises that aimed to redress the
injustices that had built up over the previous 70 years of Plantagenet-Angevin
rule, and which had been highlighted throughout the increasingly tyrannical
reign of John
...
Some of the sixty-three clauses in the charter
concerned such parochial issues as weights and measures, and in particular
looking to impose uniform measures for the sale of ale, the safety of merchants in
13

London and even fishing rights in the Thames estuary
...

This abuse of power had grown rapidly during the previous PlantagenetAngevin century and this had hugely curtailed the feudal rights and privileges of
the Anglo-Norman nobility
...
In essence, the
charter called the king to order and made him clearly agree that he would be
constrained by the law
...
The
Magna Carta demanded that the monarch should govern lawfully, and not as a
tyrant, and, in legal terms, it strengthened the dominance in England of
common law
...
This common law tradition was later exported by Britain in to
its vast colonies
...
Furthermore, by signing the charter, the king also agreed that he would
meet with, inform and seek the advice of his subjects in time of war and this,
within a century, had led to the development of institutions that were to become
parliament
...
These,
across the nation, numbered around 5,000, and these in time, accompanied by
their esquires, would travel to the king’s court annually for consultation and
instruction
...

The king really had little option but to sign this list of promises and this he did
14

on 15 June 1215
...
Parchment scrolls of the agreement made at Runnymede were then
hurriedly copied and sent around a kingdom that was fast approaching full-scale
civil war
...

Although the king was forced to sign the Magna Carta in 1215, he never truly
accepted its provisions and this was a sentiment echoed by countless English
monarchs over the next 400 years
...
So within weeks
of the signing at Runnymede, it is not surprising that it became clear that John
had no intention of keeping his word, with the First Barons’ War breaking out
soon after at the end of the summer after abortive negotiations on the River
Thames at Staines had broken down
...
But the barons too were determined, and were very
reluctant to give up the concessions that they forced from the king at
Runnymede
...

Later in the year, King John marched south from his strongholds in the north
and, on 11 October 1215, began a siege of Rochester Castle, which, following the
king’s agreement at Runnymede, had been handed over to Langton
...
The king was persuaded not to order the slaughter of all
15

inside, as was the custom of the day, but rather to mutilate the survivors instead
...

But Rochester was to be a singular victory in the war that was increasingly being
won by the barons and by Louis, whose invasion of Kent in May 1216 forced
John to flee his capital, first for Winchester and then for Corfe Castle in Dorset
where he set up his headquarters
...
With his star in the ascendency, more and more barons went over to
him, and in June 1216, he took Winchester
...
However, the castle there, whose protection was organised by Hubert
de Burgh, the Earl of Kent and the king’s last justicular, his chief law officer, held
out successfully
...
John ventured on from East Anglia to
Nottinghamshire where, at the age of just 48, he died unexpectedly of dysentery
at Newark Castle in October 1216
...
His 9year-old son, Henry III, who was quickly crowned at Gloucester Cathedral,
succeeded him
...
As a result, the First Barons’
War was to continue for another 18 months after the death of King John but, in
the end, the prospect of an aggressive campaign against them focused the minds
of all but the most Francophile of the English-based barons and this force slowly
16

united behind their young king
...

The young king, who was crowned at Bristol with his mother’s gold bracelet,
was also helped by the death of Innocent and the election of a new pope,
Honorius III, whose support of Henry III allowed the young king’s supporters to
dress in the cross of a holy war in their renewed efforts to drive out the French
...

The reversal of this situation in favour of the new king’s cause was primarily due
to the efforts of William the Marshal, the Earl of Pembroke, a knight particularly
known for his honour and chivalry
...
William Marshal
was particularly revered as a knight for taking part in a pilgrimage to Jerusalem
and, in 1216, as he took over as regent, he was 70 years old
...
This royalist
victory, which was followed by the slaughter of thousands of inhabitants of
Lincoln, routed the baronial French forces and secured the road north
...
The political reality brought about by defeats at
Lincoln and Dover was quickly accepted by Prince Louis who withdrew to the
continent soon after he had signed the Treaty of Lambeth in September 1217
...

17

The restoration of peace was added to in 1219 when a treaty at Worcester ended
hostility with Wales
...
Under this treaty, Llewellyn, the prince of the Welsh, paid
homage to Henry III as his overlord, but was confirmed as regent of Wales until
the king came of age
...

William the Marshal was to run Henry II’s government as regent until his death
in 1219, at a time when the young king was still a papal ward
...
Both were originally from Poitou, which had
remained loyal to John’s Plantagenet cause, and both were to be central figures in
the government of the country over the next two decades
...
This was not only as a mentor to
the young king but also as his main military commander, with de Burgh being
instrumental in putting down the various minor rebellions, especially in the
north, that threatened the young king’s realm
...
From the 1220s, they founded houses in Oxford,
London and Canterbury, as first the Franciscans, then the Greyfriars, the
Dominicans and, finally, the Blackfriars arrived from Europe
...
But more than that, it changed the whole social structure of
18

English life with the religious ideal of monastic solitude soon replaced by the far
more gregarious charity and evangelical work of the friars
...

During these early years of the young king’s reign, the advisers of the young
king were acutely aware that they needed to retain the support of the barons if
further war was to be avoided, and this was done primarily through the
reissuing of the Magna Carta
...
It was also a time when the institutions
of law and order under the crown were restored after the tyranny of John, with
circuit judges and tax collectors from the Exchequer returning to their roles in
national life
...
Henry III himself at least paid lip service to such ideas, and
this meant that he emerged from his minority in 1227 with a realm in a much
healthier, peaceful and increasingly prosperous state than his supporters might
have expected in 1216
...

Henry III’s Coming of Age and Friction with his Barons
Henry III formally assumed control of his government in 1227, but for the next
five years remained very closely reliant on the advice and counsel of those, led
by de Burgh, who had helped him govern during his minority
...
De Burgh was
also stripped of his earldom, which he had received in 1227, although this was
returned to him in 1234 when he was released from his confinement in order to
enjoy a quiet retirement
...

This, not surprisingly, was once again to rankle with the barons who, as a result,
went into open rebellion
...
Many of
the complaints made by the barons during the revolt of Richard Marshal were
similar to the ones that had been aired by generations of their forebears since the
Norman Conquest 170 years before
...
These centred on
problems concerning the growing influence of the papacy over English affairs
and the encroachment of parasitic French elements within the King’s court
...

The revolt of Richard Marshal was defeated in 1234, with Richard himself dying
from wounds suffered in battle in Ireland in the April of that year
...
But this authority was never held with the full consent of
the barons, and this conflict within English elite society was to simmer for the
next 25 years
...
The positions, influence, patronage and control that these men took
concerning English matters, money and policy were bitterly opposed by the
barons
...

Included in those who joined the new queen her uncle, the Count of Savoy, who,
on his arrival in London, was granted the earldom of Richmond and was gifted
land on the north bank of the River Thames, south of the Strand, on which he
built the grandest palace in London
...
The Savoy Hotel, London’s first luxurious
hotel, was built on the same ground at the end of the nineteenth century
...

The barons in the 1230s, however, were a powerful and important group, as their
fathers had been a generation before, and they could not simply be ignored or
sidelined
...
For his part, the king worked harder and harder to secure central
authority for the crown
...
Much of this was to be spent
regaining lands lost by John and many campaigns were inspired by the French
exiles who had arrived with the queen
...

The campaign of 1242 was particularly unsuccessful and this forced the king to
accept compromises with the barons that led to a period of relative calm and
peace
...
New techniques in
architecture and building were imported to help the construction of a series of
21

huge cathedrals, and Dutch technology that allowed the adoption of the
windmill helped English farmers, especially in East Anglia, helped to improve
agricultural output at a critical time
...
The acre, measuring a furlong in length and a chain in
width, represented the amount of land that one team of oxen were expected to
plough in a day
...
Namely, he seemed to preside over a prosperous nation in which the
authority of the monarchy was dominant, and one in which the challenge of the
barons had been held in check
...

Henry III was a pious and devout man, and had firmly allied himself to the pope
...
This was a crucially important strategic island at the
centre of the Mediterranean Sea and was a stopping-off point not only for the
many merchants who plied the lucrative trade routes east and west, but also for
the many thousands of crusaders and pilgrims who over hundreds of years
made their way to the Holy Land
...

The pope’s problem centred on the conquest of the island by the son of the Holy
Roman Emperor, his bitterest political rival, and it was the agreement between
the pope and Henry III over this issue that was to drive the English barons once
again into rebellion
...
However, in addition to the purchase of the
island, Henry III also agreed to take on the huge debt that had already been
spent by the pope trying to win it back
...
Failure to meet these obligations would lead to
Henry III’s excommunication and the return of England to the papal interdict
that had strangulated English society so badly during the reign of his father
...
It was clear, therefore,
where the barons stood on the massive increase in taxes that would inevitably
fall at their door to pay for this expedition, especially as it was so abundantly
clear that it would be Henry’s French subjects and relatives, most of whom came
from the southern province of Gascony that would benefit from the
Mediterranean trade, who would benefit from the installation of Prince Edmund
as the monarch of such a far flung enclave
...
English taxes, in essence, were to be
used to protect and enrich Gascon barons and, not surprisingly, they refused to
do their king’s bidding
...
In 1257, he tried to bolster his status by issuing
23

England’s first gold coin, but the commercial classes of the City of London
refused to support it and soon, embarrassingly for the king, it had to be
withdrawn
...

The cumulative effect of all these combined pressures finally forced Henry III to
meet in Oxford with his barons at a ‘parleyment’, which at this time simply
meant, from the French, a place to meet and talk
...
Similar meetings had taken place in the 1230s, but this
showdown in the autumn of 1258 differed in that the barons at Oxford were to
issue a series of demands, written down as if as a latter-day Magna Carta, which,
in essence, were forced on the king
...

The success of the barons at Oxford was, at least in part, due to the support that
de Montfort received from Prince Edward, the king’s son and heir, whose height
and long limbs had earned him the nickname Longshanks
...
The bones found and examined suggested a man of
well over six-feet tall
...
Central to the Provisions of Oxford,
reiterated at Westminster, was the setting up of a council of 24 barons charged
with monitoring and overseeing the government of the nation
...
This crucial development
stemmed from the barons’ increasing annoyance at their king’s 20-year
24

preference to consult with the French courtiers that surrounded his court
...
This Council was a crucial development
away from the absolutism of the Norman and Plantagenet models of monarchy,
and a crucial development in the evolution of a permanent parliament that, in
time, was to find a home at Westminster
...
One of the
great ironies of this was that this champion of the English barons was himself the
very thing they raged against
...

However, de Montfort’s rise within the king’s court had been swift and, for
much of the 1230s, he had been loyal to the king, showed himself capable and
efficient, and had often been chosen to represent the king on royal business on
the continent
...
Again in 1248, he was sent to Gascony by the king
on official crown business
...
The great
contradiction in de Montfort was that he was obviously gregarious and
charismatic in public life, but remained deeply pious in his private life, keeping
25

company with many of the most devout man of the age, including men like
Grosseteste and a number of other leading Franciscans
...
Prince Edward, who won back a number of barons to his
father’s side, led this and it resulted in a series of spats that forced de Montfort
into exile in 1261
...
De Montfort, clearly a charismatic and captivating leader of
men, as a result led his army into London in the summer of 1263, with both sides
eventually agreeing to lay the issue before the arbitration of the king of France,
Louis IX
...

Louis IX gave his judgement concerning the Provisions at a meeting in Boulogne
in January 1264 and ruled in favour of the king
...
One important factor that undoubtedly leaned Louis in
the direction of Henry was the Treaty of Paris that the two monarchs signed in
1259
...
One other
major result of the treaty was the agreement that the Channel Islands would
become Crown Dependencies of the English king
...

26

It was here that de Montfort, with his five sons as his chief lieutenants, showed
his acumen for military action and, by the end of the day, had captured both the
king and Prince Edward
...
After the battle,
the royal side was forced to agree to the Mise of Lewes, signed on the night of the
battle, which moved to shore up and extend the Provisions of Oxford and
Westminster
...

Indeed, de Montfort soon went even further than before and, on 20 January 1265,
summoned a parliament of two knights from each shire and two burgesses from
selected boroughs, ostensibly to discuss what to do with the captured young son
of the king who, under the terms of the Mise of Lewes, was held as a hostage
rather than as a prisoner
...

De Montfort’s military acumen on the South Downs may have won him control
of England in May 1264, but his lack of political wisdom in the year that followed
soon lost any advantage that this may have brought
...

For these reasons and for others, Simon de Montfort’s interregnum was to be
short-lived and, within a year, he was to lie dead on a battlefield in
Gloucestershire
...
In this, Edward
Longshanks was very much helped by the defection of the Earl of Gloucester, de
Montfort’s right hand man and the most influential of the barons whose support
27

had been vital at Lewes the year before
...
This had come
about when he gave orders that fresh horses should be called for so that,
ostensibly, he might try them out for the hunt
...

As a result of the prince’s escape, royalist forces soon took Worcester and
Gloucester, and they were very much in the ascendency by the time they
intercepted and destroyed the army of de Montfort’s son at the latter’s family
stronghold at Kenilworth in Warwickshire
...
The Battle of
Evesham, fought in a thunderstorm on 4 August 1265, ended quickly in a rout
for the baronial army, with de Montfort, as well as many others who served with
him, killed on the battlefield
...
In the confusion of the battle’s end,
the king was nearly killed but was released and escorted to his son’s side
...
This continued resistance was particularly strong around their
headquarters at Kenilworth Castle and this was to last until 1267 when, under
favourable terms agreed in the Dictum of Kenilworth, which restored land and
titles to many who had fought with de Montfort at Evesham, peace was agreed
...

This was despite his absence between 1270 and 1274 when, alongside his uncle,
Louis IX, the king of France, he pledged himself to the Cross
...
But bitter infighting between
the various Crusader states meant that any hold over Acre was only ever very
tenuous, and that any break out that might involve the recapture of Jersualem
was never possible
...
Baybers, the great Saracen general, had earlier in September 1260,
in one of the great turning points of medieval history, succeeded in finally
stopping the onslaught of the Mongol Horde at the crucially important Battle of
Ain Jalut, a hundred miles or so to the north of Jerusalem
...
Edward was to leave the Holy Land
immediately after the initial capture of Acre although he was not to arrive back
in England for another two years, by which time he was king
...
But Longshanks knew that there would be more and
more challenges to his rule if he did not accept the constitutional changes that, in
essence, defined the role of the baronial class within feudal society
...
These changes were confirmed when the king agreed to the
Statute of Marlborough in November 1267 that, belatedly, accepted the changes
that had been proposed in the Provisions of Oxford and Westminster
...
Henry III, at heart a weak and
easily influenced king, was to accept neither the huge changes that Europe and
England experienced during the thirteenth century nor the consequences that
these changes brought
...
This was a fact that his son did
understand, and this was one reason why Edward I was to be so very successful,
at least at the beginning of his long reign, at expanding his control over much of
the rest of the British Isles
...
Under his patronage in the 1220s, the friars had arrived in England,
soon establishing Oxford as an academic centre
...
But it was after
the arrival of Henry III’s friars that this new seat of learning was to flourish and,
within a generation, this had produced Francis Bacon whose work on optics led
to the invention of the spectacles and who, like Leonardo di Vinci after him,
discussed ideas and concepts that anticipated cars, flying machines and
submarines
...

Henry III had always been both pious and devoted to the Church, and most
especially to the veneration of Edward the Confessor, and in his retirement he
continued to oversee various cathedral building programmes that had
dominated his reign
...
This replaced the stout and defensive Romanesque style of the Norman
Conquest, and this new style, developed through three specific stages and
dominating English civic and ecclesiastical architecture for the next 300 years,
culminated in the straight vertical lines of the English Perpendicular
...
Later, in the
nineteenth century, the English Perpendicular style was revived and used in the
rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament
...
Lincoln was soon joined by Wells, with its ornate frontage telling the
story of Christianity to a largely illiterate world, and by Salisbury, with its thin
columns, its large windows within tall pointed arches, and its soaring vaults
...
Others included Durham in the north and Ely in the east
...

But the crowning glory of this new early Gothic style was the reconstruction of
the Confessor's abbey at Westminster, and this was to be the king’s greatest
legacy
...
At its centre, Henry
III gave orders for the tomb of Edward the Confessor, on whom Henry had
always modelled himself, to be placed, and within this, Henry III placed a special
crypt for himself
...
The old king was 65years-old and his 56-year-long rule made him at the time England’s longest
ruling monarch
...
When the old king finally died November 1272, he had
seen his kingdom torn apart more than once by political crises that many blamed
on him
...

The Accession of Edward I
Edward Longshanks had spent much of his time after the defeat of de Montfort
in 1265 securing his family’s dynasty, and a series of campaigns, raids and finally
compromises over the next few years eventually brought reconciliation and
peace
...
In the Holy Land on this, the ninth and last of the great
crusades, Edward’s leadership and military prowess soon earned him the
reputation as the most qualified and natural leader of the Christian armies, and
this was particularly the case after the death from dysentery of his main
crusading ally, Louis III, the king of France, while besieging Tunis
...
However, his cousin, Henry of Almain, did not accompany him
to the Holy Land, and, instead, was sent from Africa to Gascony, via Italy, in
order to quell rebellion in there
...
Baybars had taken over the leadership of the Islamic world after the
Mongol destruction of Baghdad, the capital of the 500-year-old Abbasid Empire
in February 1258
...

As a result of his crusading, the death of his father found Edward in Sicily where
he was recuperating from a wound to his arm that had become infected
...
Edward’s procession back through Europe was to be in marked contrast
to the one made by his great-grandfather, King Richard, who had landed himself
in an Austrian dungeon
...
In Gascony, where he put down a rebellion,
Edward I was also to be the last English king to hold court at Bordeaux
...

However, he was wary not to promise too much and, although swearing
allegiance to his French overlord, he did so only in vague terms declaring that his
homage was paid only in those regions, which he left unspecified, where this
homage was due
...
The king’s stately procession back to England meant that he did not arrive
back at Dover until August 1274, a full two years after his accession to the throne
...
He was a man of immense courage and resolve, was pious and
devoted to his wife and family, and was very serious about keeping the
parliamentary reforms that had characterised the last years of his father’s rule
...

Edward I, a lawyer and a politician as well as a soldier, began his reign with a
wholesale reorganisation of the political systems that would serve him and pay
for his wars, and this was brought about following the most comprehensive
survey of the condition of the kingdom since 1086
...

The most important of these reforms, with these lasting for much of the first two
decades of his rule, was the establishment of regular parliaments in which the
grievances of the various sections of English society could be submitted
...
Subsequent
similar meetings soon followed and were in time to take on the distinctive
characteristics of the English parliamentary system, although in 1295 this did not
include the two-house bicameral structure
...

Certainly his toughness and authority was one reason why this remained the
case, but another certainly lay in his willingness to accept the legitimacy of their
position within the political, economic and social fabric of the nation
...
As part of this process,
the great offices of state, the Exchequer, the Treasury and the Chancery, which
since the time of William I and before had served the monarch, increasingly
veered towards a more neutral position somewhere between parliament and the
crown
...
As this was all going on, a permanent home for parliament was
found at Westminster, which for a century had been the administrative and
political capital of the kingdom
...
Edward I presided over a
booming economy while this was happening, and this was to transform not only
thirteenth century England but also thirteenth century Europe
...

England was an important northern centre of this new European trading
network with its wealth depending on corn and wheat, leather and tin, but most
especially depending upon the wool trade
...
This was the seat on
which the Lord Chancellor, the leader of the House of Lords, was to sit for the
next 700 years
...
As
part of this, a reliable coinage became imperative, and it was under Edward I
that the Royal Mint, in 1279, was brought under royal control at the Tower of
London
...
But it was in Edward I’s reign that
English coinage developed a far more regulated appearance and, aided by the
huge growth in English economic activity, was soon to take on the role of a major
European currency
...

This was good for the English commercial classes, but it was not good for
England’s small Jewish community who were blamed for the volatility of the
money supply
...
This small community had been present in
England since the time of the Norman Conquest, with one, Aaron of Lincoln,
becoming richer than the king himself
...
Four years
after his death, a debtor who still owed money despite Aaron’s death, attacked
his businesses in York in 1190, provoking a massacre against the whole of the
town’s Jewish community who were slaughtered together at York Castle
...
This followed a papal edict early in the century
when the pope ordered that all Jews and Muslims living under Roman Catholic
across Europe should be forced to wear special distinguishing clothes
...
This
came about after a series of loans lent to the king by the Jewish community had
landed them with a significant amount of English land and property
...
Having secured new finance
from Italian moneylenders, he confiscated this land and expelled the Jews, who
in total numbered about two to three thousand
...

Edward I and the Invasion of Wales
Edward’s political, economic and legal reforms were all brought about in order
to allow the dual objectives that were to dominate his reign until his death in
1307
...
This was partly
inspired by the king’s fascination with the life of King Arthur whose fabled
feats, largely invented by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century, a
thousand years before were received as established fact
...

Edward I’s campaign to unite the island of Britain under Plantagenet rule began
36

in 1277 with the full-scale attack on the strongholds of Llewellyn ap Gruffudd
around Snowdonia and the Isle of Angelsey
...
This was a position that was
tolerated, if not perhaps not completely accepted, by many of the Norman and
then Plantagenet-Angevin kings who had followed William the Conqueror
...
This had continued into
the reign of Henry III when Llewellyn ap Iorwerth’s position of pre-eminence
was confirmed by the English king
...
This played into the hands of the English who used it to increase
their presence as overlords, a situation that was cemented when Henry III turned
over all royal lands in Wales to his son, Prince Edward
...
Under Llewellyn, the Welsh reclaimed independence
after the civil war with de Montfort had loosened the crown’s control of the West
Country, and Henry III was forced to accept this situation in 1267 in the Treaty of
Montgomery
...

Edward I knew that control of Llewellyn’s mountain retreats around Angelsey
and Snowdonia, used so often in the past as launch pads for lucrative raids into
the English-held Marcher shires of western England and mid-Wales, was vital for
the control of Wales as a whole, and it was here that Edward Longshanks
directed his first assault
...

37

However, this initial offensive was far from successful with Edward I’s armies
quickly rebutted near Offa’s Dyke, not far from the English border
...
But Edward I was not a king
who was to give in so easily and, redoubling his efforts, he quickly reasserted
English military superiority
...
This
initial conflict had not been planned as a war of conquest and Edward I had
hoped to secure Welsh subservience through a series of treaties
...
This was to need far more urgent
attention and soon resulted in Edward I mobilising a huge army that was sent
west to win a war of conquest and a peace of control and occupancy
...

Edward I’s commitment to conquest and subjugation of Wales was soon given
concrete form when he gave orders for the construction of a series of garrison
castles such as the ones at Carnarfon, Conway and Harlech that within a
generation had sprung up across mid and northern Wales
...

With Wales now in English hands, Edward I went about reorganising it into
counties based on the English model, banning local customs and practices, and
forcing English ones in their stead
...
This was a title that the kings and queens of England were to confer on
38

their first-born sons into the twentieth century
...
By the time of
the Norman Conquest, an established and expanded realm had been created,
although both Anglo-Saxon and Norman leaders in England claimed nominal
overlordship, a claim weakened during the reign of David I when the chaos of
Stephen’s rule led him to expand his own influence into the north of England
...

This relative independence was a situation that Edward I was determined to
rectify and this seemed settled after protracted negotiations in the late 1280s led
to a betrothal between his son, Edward, and Margaret, the Maid of Norway
...
Margaret, however, would
have known little of these negotiations, as she was only three-years-old at the
time
...

However, this was a journey that she was never to complete with storms off the
Orkneys shipwrecking her and her company
...

But this was not before Edward I had initiated a series of political manoeuvres in
Scotland that were designed to extend and solidify his future position there
...
Edward I, though, was also
persuaded by what he perceived as the weakness of his chosen candidate
...
Using the weakness of John’s rule,
Edward Longshanks set himself the task of consolidating and expanding his
position and influence north of the border
...
This was primarily because the king did not want just judicial
and political control of Scotland
...

It was during this time, in November 1290, that the king lost his wife of 38 years,
Eleanor of Castile, during their annual procession around the country to see
Eleanor’s various estates
...
The queen, increasingly ill through the journey,
died near Lincoln with her embalmed body making twelve nightly stops on the
journey back to London for burial at Westminster Abbey
...
A Victorian replica was erected outside the new
Charing Cross railway station and hotel in the 1860s
...
The young prince had been named
after the King of Castile, the queen’s brother, and was to die at the age of ten, just
after the birth of a brother who was to go on to become Edward II
...
This was said to be equally as happy despite the 40year gap in age between the 60-year-old king and his new wife, Margaret, the
sister of the king of France
...
This led to an unmitigated defeat for the
Scottish army with an increasingly modern and proficient English army not only
cutting his forces to pieces but also massacring most of Berwick’s townspeople as
well
...

The slaughter at Berwick was also to be the greatest massacre ever carried out on
British soil
...
As a result, John Balliol was forced to resign his crown to
Edward I three months later with Scotland, as Wales had been a decade earlier,
placed under direct English rule and administration
...
It was to
sit there for the next 700 years, until its return to Scotland in 1996
...
The end of 1296, therefore, saw
Edward I leave Scotland in the hands of the Earl of Surrey hoping that this
would free him to concentrate on more pressing matters on the continent
...
This
large and profitable region centring on Bordeaux had been kept by Henry III
under the terms of the Treaty of Paris in 1259 that had ceded all other
Plantagenet-Angevin claims to the French king
...
But early losses soon led to
English reverses and the taxes demanded by Edward I from Scotland to pay for
more troops and more supplies to counter this provided the major reason why
the rebellion of William Wallace initially proved so successful
...
This was because his plans for France had
not banked on the remarkable military campaign of William Wallace who united
his people in a way that soon resulted in the English being driven back deep into
their own territory
...
The
national protest against the English that followed swelled Wallace’s armies
through the summer of 1297, and this culminated in the stunning victory against
Surrey’s forces at the Battle of Stirling Bridge in the September of that same year
...
This time Edward I himself directed
his armies and, with the support of many Scottish nobles, including Robert the
Bruce who had been bribed with offers of estates in England, Edward I won a
decisive victory at the Battle of Falkirk in July 1298
...
He
was then taken to London where he was tortured, hung, drawn and quartered
with his body parts sent, as a warning to those who would rebel against his rule,
to the four corners of Edward’s newly acquired British kingdom
...
But despite the
eventual capture and execution of Wallace, these campaigns became more and
more ineffectual as the ravages of disease and old age slowed the old king and as
the complaints from parliament about over taxation became more and more
loud
...
This was while he was preparing to invade
Scotland for a fourth time, having nearly captured Robert the Bruce after his
dawn victory at the Battle of Methven, near Perth, the previous year in June 1306
...
However, the escape of Robert the Bruce to the
Highlands in June 1306 and decisive events seven years after the old king’s death
left this hope unfulfilled with the Battle of Bannockburn giving Scotland
independence until the accession of a Scottish king to the English throne in 1603

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