History of England 1-6

Ploughing time, and the season for mowing, were earlier in some parts of the country than in others. Yet the rewards of labour were the same. The scythe and the sickle, the flail and the winnowing fan and the plough, were part of the common inheritance. A medieval folk song celebrated the appearance of ‘oats, peas, beans and barley’ that in The Tempest became ‘wheat, rye, barley, fetches, oats and peas’. In the great fields we would see fifty or sixty men working on the land, scattered over the strips, bent over with toil. Many illustrations of them can be found in calendars and books of hours, dressed in tight breeches with a smock or blouse made of cloth and tied at the waist by a belt; in cold weather they wore a hooded mantle of wool that covered the upper part of the body. Sometimes they wore woollen caps.

‘First thing in the morning,’ the peasant recites in a tenth-century treatise, ‘I drive my sheep to pasture and stand over them in heat and cold with dogs lest wolves should devour them, and I lead them back to their sheds and milk them twice a day and move their folds besides, and I make cheese and butter …’ On the common land of the village, the cattle would be watched by a boy.

The farm animals of the medieval period were smaller and weaker than their modern counterparts, and the productivity of the soil was far inferior. It was a continuing and earnest business of survival for the farmer and the labourer, who often lived in conditions of rank squalor. The world was not progressing; it was believed to be in a state of steady deterioration from the age of gold to the age of iron. This portrait of the seasonal year must not be taken as an advertisement for a ‘merry England’. Even the entertainments, those sports and games and rituals that are at the heart of the ritual calendar, were often brutal and violent. It was a life of sweat and dirt, but one that was quickly over.

19

The emperor of Britain

At the time of Henry’s death the Lord Edward was in Sicily, recovering from an attempted assassination. He had been in the Holy Land, where he had achieved nothing. He had been attacked in the city of Acre by a man wielding a dagger dipped in poison and almost died from the wound; the blackened flesh, corroded by the poison, had to be cut away in an operation almost as deadly as the original assault. But he survived, and sailed to safe harbour in Sicily. It was here that he learned of the death of his father.

He did not hurry back for his coronation. He had already been declared king in his absence, but he did not arrive in London for another eighteen months. He lingered in France until the summer of 1274. He had been born at Westminster, but he was by inheritance still essentially French; more pertinently, he was a member of the royal family of Europe. One of the reasons for the delay in his coronation had been his desire to put the affairs of Gascony in order. Gascony was, for him, just as important as England.

In his absence a parliament had been held, suggesting the solid continuity of the country’s administration. But there had been instances of disorder, and of rivalries between magnates, that the new king would be obliged to quell. He was one who in truth demanded submission; unlike his father, he was a good soldier. He came back with his crusading knights who would in large part make up his royal household; they were in effect a private bodyguard for the king, descended from the warrior bands of an earlier period. It is evidence of the militaristic nature of his reign that, at his coronation in the new abbey (not yet entirely built), his retainers rode into the transepts on their horses. The new reign opened with the clatter of hooves upon stone.

Edward I looked the part. He was of ‘great stature’, according to Nicholas Trevet, a Dominican scholar who knew him well. His long legs caused him to be known as ‘Edward Longshanks’; when he hunted, he galloped after the stag with his drawn sword. He was considered to be ‘the best lance in the world’, which meant that he embodied all of the chivalric virtues of pride and honour. He was quick to anger, and quick to forgive. Trevet stated that the king was guided by ‘animo magnifico’, or what might be described as magnanimity, but this may merely be a truism applied to a warrior king. He had a slight lisp, or stammer, and his left eyelid drooped in the same manner as that of his father. He could be very fierce. When the dean of St Paul’s Cathedral approached him in order to complain about the taxation of the clergy, the unfortunate cleric expired on the spot. The archbishop of York, after being rebuked by Edward, died of depression. The aura or presence of the king was very powerful.