History of England 1-6

As soon as the great golden crown of state had been placed upon Edward’s head at his coronation, he removed it with a dramatic gesture. He then made a statement that deviated from the set procedures of the ceremony. ‘I will never take up this crown again,’ he declared, ‘until I have recovered the lands given away by my father to the earls, barons and knights of England and to the aliens.’ He was as good as his word. Over the next twenty years he established commissions that looked into the supposed rights and claims of the landowners of the country. The phrase used was quo warranto?, ‘by what right or title’ do you hold these lands? Which of course might mean – surely they are mine? The whole process created a nest of lawyers. As a piece of contemporary verse put it:

And the Quo Warranto

Will give us all enough to do.

One old nobleman, when asked by what right, simply brandished his sword. That was the ancient and instinctive response. Come and fight me for it. But no lord, however mighty, could fight Edward. He had learned the lessons of his father’s long and confused rule.

In the first parliament of his reign, convened at Westminster in the spring of 1275, Edward further strengthened his hold upon the kingdom. With some 800 representatives, it was the largest parliament ever assembled. Edward can in fact be considered the first king to use that body in a constructive manner. He invited its members to submit complaints about malfeasance or maladministration, some of them no doubt designed to trim the power of over-mighty lords. These complaints were known as ‘petitions’ and from this time forward parliament was held to be in part a judicial tribunal. Petitions soon arose from all over the kingdom. There were too many of them, and they impeded the work of the parliament, but they had one valuable function. They allowed the king to see what was going on in the various regions of the realm.

At the same time the demand of the king for more taxes turned the knights and burgesses into a definite group; they were the ones, after all, who would have to levy the money from their shires and their towns. So they began to deliberate together, in the chapter house of Westminster Abbey, and came to be distinguished from the prelates and barons. They were not a ‘House’ of Commons, but they had common interests. They were essentially a parliamentary committee, duly subservient to the full parliament of their betters. They were not always summoned by the king, but steadily they grew in importance. The bishops and magnates still determined the great matters of state, but the knights and burgesses were the voices of those who were being taxed. There would soon come a time when their assent, and oversight, became vital. It should be stressed, however, that there was no general demand from the towns and the shires for representation. It was the king who called forth the knights and townsmen; he imposed upon his subjects the duty of coming to parliament, where he might command them and tax them. When they had obeyed his will, he dismissed them.

In the parliament of 1275 Edward extracted from the assembled lords and knights and townsmen a tax upon the export of wool; from this time forward the king received 6 shillings and 8 pence upon every sack shipped out of the country. At one stroke, his finances were improved. He handed over their care to the Riccardi bankers of Lucca. In other legislation he bore down heavily upon the Jews, but this is matter for Chapter 20. In the same parliament a long and complicated Act, known as ‘the statute of Westminster the First’, was passed by which the king intended ‘to revive neglected laws that had long been sleeping because of his predecessors’ weakness’; these neglected laws, of course, were those that implied or required strong royal control. In a similar move towards royal dominance he replaced most of the sheriffs of the counties with men whom he knew and trusted.

Edward I, unlike his ancestors, had no great empire. Instead he had a kingdom, which he determined to strengthen and consolidate. He first marched into Wales, where he set up the line of castles that still endures. Edward’s castles are magnificent creations, in part conceived as the edifices of chivalric romance. The king had a very strong attraction to the mythical history of Arthur and the Round Table; by claiming kinship with his fabulous predecessor, he could also claim sovereignty over the whole island. Arthur was known as ‘the last emperor of Britain’. Yet he had been considered by many to have been a Welsh or British king fighting against a Saxon enemy. It was rumoured that he was not dead, only resting, and that he would come again to destroy the enemies of the Welsh. This was not comforting news for Edward’s English soldiers.