The Plantagenets: The Three Edwards Part 1

The Plantagenets.

The Three Edwards.

Thomas B. Costain.

BOOK ONE.

Edward the First.

CHAPTER I.

A Proper King Is Crowned.

1.

THE Crusades were running down like an unwound clock. For nearly two hundred years men had been suffering and dying under the blistering sun of the desert without gaining any lasting results. Only the hold that saintly King Louis of France had on the hearts and minds of men had made another effort possible in this year of grace 1270; and the fact that he had again unfurled the flag with the gallant cross brings to the fore a young man who was to play a very great part in history.

Prince Edward, heir to the throne of England, had taken the cross at once. He was granted a subsidy by Parliament and on August 11 had sailed from Dover with a small band of zealous Englishmen. King Louis had taken his army to Africa earlier with the intention of striking into the Holy Land through Egypt. Edward's wife, the lovely Eleanor of Castile, had also gone ahead.

When the little English fleet arrived off Tunis, the prince learned that the great French king was dead. The blood burned fiercely in his veins when he was told that the son who had succeeded him had decided to abandon the crusade and was taking back to France the army his father had raised.

"By the blood of G.o.d!" cried Edward in a fine Plantagenet rage. "Though all my fellow soldiers and countrymen desert me, I will enter Acre with Fowin, the groom of my palfrey, and I will keep my word and my oath to the death!"

He was thirty-one years old; tall and long-legged, and with the handsome head of the Plantagenets, the golden hair, the blazing blue eyes, and the finely chiseled features. As would soon be made clear, he had all the good qualities of his family and few of their many bad ones; and he had something no Plantagenet had ever before possessed-a true sense of the responsibility of kings.h.i.+p, with a desire to rule justly and well when his turn came. He was going to make a great king, this Edward, perhaps England's greatest.

He found that, after all, he could depend on the aid of more than Fowin. Every man in the company responded when he announced his intention of going on. And on they went, a sorry little force of slightly more than a thousand men, a few knights, a few stout English bowmen, a few Frisians. Could anything have been more rash and foolhardy? But on the other hand nothing would have served so well to kindle again the guttering light of crusading zeal; if the spark, alas, had not been so close to total extinction.

It was particularly daring because all of the Near East had been roused to fighting pitch by the efforts of a far more dangerous leader than the chivalrous Saladin who had opposed Richard of the Lion-Heart. A former slave in Egypt named Bibars had risen from the ranks of the Mamelukes (a body of professional fighting men) and had made himself sultan. Bibars was cruel, unscrupulous, fiercely ambitious, and incredibly able. He meant to weld the Near East into an ent.i.ty under his own control and to put an end for all time to these troublesome irruptions of knights in chain mail.

Nothing daunted, Edward and his gallant one thousand ("It is magnificent but it is not war," someone might have said on this occasion also) landed the following year, 1271, near Acre, a city still held by Christians but now under siege. So fiercely did the little force strike that the Mussulmen retreated and Edward marched triumphantly into the beleaguered city. The start of his desperate venture had been successful.

Knowing that he must strike quickly, for Bibars would soon be stretching out his steel-pointed claws to scoop him in, Edward carried the cross up the dusty road to Nazareth, which he captured. It was not a strategic victory, but there was a great moral advantage in having the home of Christ once more in Christian hands. A body of Saracens attacked them on the way back but were driven off. Edward then struck at the strong city of Haifa and won a second victory there. All this was indeed magnificent and it should have brought the laggard knights of Christendom to his aid. But the spirit had gone out of crusading, and the news that an English loon with long legs and a stout heart was striving to do with a thousand men what a hundred thousand had failed to do before him did not strike any spark.

On the evening of June 17 Edward sat alone in his tent, unarmed, wearing only a tunic, for the heat of the day had turned the desert into a furnace. He knew that a messenger was coming from the emir of Jaffa to propose terms of peace, and he knew also that he would have to accept them. Such reinforcements as had reached him had been pitifully small, and all about him the bearded sons of the Prophet were gathering, ready to strike.

He recognized the envoy who presented himself in the entrance of the royal pavilion, a plausible fellow who had already paid him four visits and was therefore above suspicion. It may have been that the offer to negotiate was no more than a ruse. At any rate, the turbaned visitor drew a knife from his belt and struck savagely at the unprepared prince. Edward took the blow on his arm and had succeeded in killing the a.s.sa.s.sin with the same knife before his attendants came to his a.s.sistance.

The knife had been poisoned and in a few days the prince's arm had swollen to a great size and the flesh had turned dark and gangrenous. His wife sat at his couch and wept bitterly. She had loved him from the day they had taken the marriage vows; Edward, a tall youth with his blond locks clipped short below his ears, she the ten-year-old infanta with great dark eyes.

"Can I not be cured?" asked Edward when his surgeons grouped themselves about his couch and shook their heads and muttered.

Fortunately one of them thought so. When he proposed a heroic operation the prince agreed but said that Eleanor must not remain in the room. It was a measure of her devotion that she had to be removed forcibly before the surgeon took a knife and cut away all the flesh from around the wound. The story that it was Eleanor herself who saved the prince by sucking the poison from the wound is not generally accepted, but there is no reason to think that she would have hesitated had the thought occurred to her, so completely did she love him. He did survive, fortunately, and in a very few days was able to sit up again.

Bibars could have crushed the little band of Englishmen, but he had gained respect for their fighting spirit and instead he proposed a truce to last for ten years, ten months, ten days, and ten minutes. Edward, thin and weak and discouraged, could do nothing but accept. Accordingly he signed the papers and on August 15 he went sadly on board his s.h.i.+p and set sail for Sicily. Another of the long series of crusades had come to an end; the smallest, the least important perhaps, but certainly the most daring and courageous.

2.

While in Sicily, Edward received tragic intelligence from England. Three deaths were reported: that of his father, King Henry III; his uncle, Richard of Cornwall; and his first-born son, John, who had been left in England and had succ.u.mbed to one of the illnesses which kept infant mortality so high. Charles of Sicily was amazed that Edward's grief appeared greater for his father than for his promising young son.

"The Lord who gave me these can give me other children," said Edward, "but a father can never be restored."

This was the highest encomium ever paid that unreliable, bickering old weatherc.o.c.k of a king, but it did not sound strange to those who understood the relations.h.i.+p between father and son. At home Henry had been a fond and indulgent parent and Edward had loved him deeply.

The new king did not return at once, for the message from England made it clear that he was under no compunction to hurry. Henry had been buried in the abbey-church of Westminster, close to the tomb of Edward the Confessor, and the n.o.bility had sworn fealty to his successor at the foot of the high altar, the first time in English history that the reign of a new king had begun with the death of the inc.u.mbent. The people of England were ready to welcome him with open arms. They were proud of his military exploits and they spoke gratefully of his merits. He was even a learned man, they said. Did he not speak three languages, French, Latin, even English, each with "the silver tongue of oratory"? His reign, so ran the common report, would "s.h.i.+ne with great l.u.s.ter."

The new king, accordingly, took his time about returning. He spent some months in Rome seeking papal punishment for the murder of his cousin, Henry of Almaine, by Guy, son of the dead Simon de Montfort.* He engaged in some spirited jousting in France and paid homage to the king of that country for the lands he still held there. He visited Gascony and chastised a disobedient underlord, one Gaston of Bearn. Finally, on August 2, 1274, he landed at Dover and was given a loud and warm welcome.

A large part of the welcome was for Eleanor. The people of England had not taken to her when she first came from Spain as a girl bride. They knew that the old king, Edward's father, who was an absurd spendthrift, had depleted the royal treasury to give banquets for her and to have quarters fitted up for her in Windsor Castle in the Spanish habit, with costly tapestries, and carpets on the floors and with raised hearths and wardrobes and oriel windows. Moreover, on this first appearance, the infanta had brought a train of Spanish officials with her, little men of "hideous mien" who rode, not on horses like proper men, but on mules like monkeys!

This time they welcomed the mature and beautiful young woman who came ash.o.r.e with the king. They cheered themselves hoa.r.s.e when they saw the hungry affection with which both king and queen received the two surviving children of the three they had left behind; Eleanor, the oldest, who was developing into a rare beauty and who would always be the apple of her father's eye (he would even break off a match with the heir to the Spanish throne because he could not bear to have her go so far away), and the second son, who had been named Henry and who was a very sickly and wan little boy.

It was decided to hurry the coronation because Edward, back at last, had a world of things on his mind. Carpenters were set to work building frame kitchens at Westminster where food could be prepared for everyone, even the poorest apprentice in London. When the king arrived with a long train of barons and knights at the same time that King Alexander of Scotland put in an appearance with an equally long train of Scottish n.o.blemen, it was decided to indulge jointly in an extraordinary act of generosity. The horses in both parties were turned loose while heralds announced that whoever caught one could keep it. The knights, it is said, grew hilarious watching while rich men, poor men, beggarmen, and thieves fought to get possession of the lordly steeds.

There was in Westminster a slab of marble called the King's Bench. As the first step in the ceremony, Edward was seated atop it on a white chair and proclaimed king. Then, accompanied by his glowing and lovely queen (for he had decided to set a precedent and have her crowned with him), he crossed from the palace to the abbey under a canopy carried by four of the most powerful n.o.blemen in the kingdom. The old king had been an inveterate builder, and a good one (he would have been a much better architect than a king), and had spent his last days in turning the abbey into an edifice of surpa.s.sing beauty. The original high altar had been extended and an apsidal chancel added. In the center of this new chancel, on earth which had been brought from the Holy Land for the purpose, a tomb of great magnificence had been raised for Edward the Confessor. Over this again a vast triforium was erected. It was in the dimly lit beauty of this new royal chapel that the returned crusader and his queen took their vows. Eleanor was in the customary white and gold, and her dusky eyes shone with content as she sat beside Edward on the falstool while Kilwardby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, preached to them.

There was a legend in Ireland that when a new king was seated on the Lia Fail, the coronation stone on the sacred hill of Tara, the stone remained silent if he was a true successor but groaned aloud if he was a pretender. The people who had come out from London on this fine morning to see the crowning were so well content with Edward that they might not have felt surprise if the marble of the King's Bench had suddenly acquired this capacity to discriminate and had cried aloud, "This is indeed a proper king!"

Although he had loitered on his way home, the new king's head had been filled with a great project which later would justify the motto Pactum Serva carved upon his tomb. The laws of England needed attention and he had brought in his train two men who could a.s.sist him in the work of amendment and codification which he saw was necessary. One was Francesco Accursi, the son of a famous Italian jurist, who learnedly occupied the chair of law at Bologna. He was destined for Oxford, where he would lecture on law and be available for advice on the major task which lay ahead. The second was a capable and bland young churchman named Robert Burnell, who had been of great a.s.sistance to Edward in the years before the prince went off to the Crusades. Edward was so convinced of the capacity of Burnell that he interrupted his departure in 1270 to ride at top speed to Canterbury when the death of Boniface of Savoy (an uncle of his mother's who had been foisted on the English people by royal pressure) left the archbishopric vacant. Edward was determined to have Burnell succeed the much-execrated Boniface. When he arrived, however, the monks had already gone into secret conference behind locked doors in the chapter house, so that, as they declared, they could achieve a spiritual communion in making their selection. The impatient prince thumped loudly on the door and, receiving no response, had it broken down. He then demanded of the indignant clerks that they select Burnell as the man best qualified for the exalted post.

There had been another occasion when the monks of Canterbury, filled with a sense of their own importance, had met secretly at midnight and selected their sub-prior Reginald and had then packed him off to Rome to get the papal consecration, thus precipitating the situation which resulted in the final selection of that greatest of archbishops, Stephen Langton. They listened to Edward in aggrieved silence and, as soon as he had withdrawn, they proceeded to elect their prior, Adam of Chillenden. But priors and sub-priors were not deemed of fit caliber for the archiepiscopal honors, and so again a pope, Gregory X, stepped in and selected a member of the Dominican order, Robert Kilwardby.

Long before the decision was reached, Edward was on his way to the Crusades. Burnell could not now be made archbishop, but the newly anointed king did the next best thing. On September 21, Edward appointed him chancellor, a post where he could be used to advantage in the mighty labor the king was planning.

* See previous volume, The Magnificent Century.

CHAPTER II.

The English Justinian-and the Queen Who Had Many Handsome Children

1.

EDWARD had not hurried on the way home from the Crusades, but he proceeded now to make up for his tardiness. Consider the schedule he followed. He landed at Dover on August 2, was crowned on Sunday, August 19; he proceeded at once to a reorganization of the civil machinery and on September 21 made Robert Burnell chancellor; on October 2 he appointed a commission with that brisk and efficient official at its head to review what had been done to the royal demesne during his absence, and on the first of November he was at Shrewsbury to discuss the adjustment of relations with Wales and to begin on what was his main function, the reform and codification of the laws of the land. This monumental labor was to continue throughout most of his reign, but the steps he initiated at the beginning were so carefully conceived and so ably conducted that on April 22 of the following year he felt free to summon a great Parliament at Westminster to convert his suggestions into the permanency of national law.

The laws of England had been in a sorry tangle since the coming of the Normans. William the Conqueror had retained much of the Anglo-Saxon machinery of justice, including the Hundred-moot and the s.h.i.+re-moot, but the conflict between the grasping newcomers and the resentful English had led to feudal impositions. The despotism of the lords of the manor, with their tall grim castles, had reached its height in the reign of Stephen when each baron had his own dungeons, his own torture chamber, and his own gibbet. The diabolical practice of deciding guilt by a man's ability to carry a heated iron bar or to walk over red-hot plowshares had been hard to eradicate, as had another superst.i.tious survival, the ordeal by water. The Normans had a preference for settling lawsuits by hiring champions to fight it out in the lists. The hatred between the newcomers and the downtrodden Saxons had imposed presentment of Englishry on the land, which meant proving the victim of murder to be English in order to escape the furious penalties exacted from whole towns.h.i.+ps in which a Norman had been a.s.sa.s.sinated.

The reforms of Henry II had tended to break the hold of feudalism by bringing justice under the supervision of the crown. His system of periodical a.s.sizes, presided over by itinerant judges, was not only revolutionary but so sound in practice that it has been continued to this day. The Great Charter had recognized the right of the individual, even against sovereign authority, but through the long years of his reign Henry III, Edward's father, had never ceased his stubborn efforts to disregard the limitations the Charter had placed on kingly power.

In setting about the arduous task of bringing order out of this tangle, the young king had the best advice. Henry de Bracton, a clear-thinking and able legal commentator, was not present in person (he had died six years before) but he was there in spirit. His books on English law, written during the previous reign, while a weak monarch sought to increase its perplexities still further, had been concise and convincing and had pointed the way to what Edward was striving to accomplish. With the king, of course, were Francesco Accursi and Robert Burnell. The latter might be termed the work horse of the combination. He it was who labored over the detail, who contrived and indexed and found ways to overcome difficulties, and who saw where compromise could be applied to vexed problems.

When Parliament met at Westminster, therefore, Edward had something tangible to lay before that body. It was a measure of fifty-one clauses and so broad in its applications that it has been described as practically a code in itself. It dealt not only with the clarification of common law but went into matters of governmental control. Most important of its many exactments was its affirmation of the Great Charter. The rights and privileges of the individual were to apply not only to men of n.o.ble birth but to all free men. The exact words of the Charter were employed, in fact, in denying the right to imprison or "amerce" the individual except by due process of law. The right of kings and their ministers to make irregular financial demands on the nation was denied. A redefining of wards.h.i.+ps limited the power of guardians to profit from the estates of minors, not excepting the kings, who had battened on the heritage of widows and orphans. The highly practical measures of Henry II were confirmed and, where necessary, amended to suit new conditions.

Out of the reports laid before this first Parliament of his reign came the Statute of Westminster I, which embodied all of his recommendations. It would be followed by many other enactments over the years, each directed at some specific reform. In the end they would add up to a complete code, combining the best measures of the past with the new provisions that the spirit of the times made essential. In addition Edward would succeed in converting Parliament, which had been for two centuries a Normanized version of the Anglo-Saxon Witanagemot, into a House of Commons.

The strength of Edward was not in innovation but in his genius for adaptation and his appreciation of the need to define and codify. He would in the years ahead of him earn the t.i.tle of the English Justinian.

Edward did not rest his case, nor indeed rest his labors, with the Statute of Westminster I. It was the first of many enactments, each carrying on to a further point the refinement and amendment of laws old and new. In 1285 he placed before Parliament a series of declarations that were embodied in the Statute of Westminster II, which is described in the Annals of Osney as follows: "He stirred up the ancient laws that had slumbered during the disturbances of the realm; some of which have been corrupted by abuses he recalled to their due form; some which were less evident and clear of interpretation he declared; some new ones, useful and honorable, he added."

The points covered had largely to do with land laws, with dower rights, and with advowson (the right to present to ecclesiastical offices). The holding of a.s.sizes at stated periods to permit of itinerant justices was remodeled to fit the changes in conditions since Henry II began the system. Manorial justice was sharply restricted. The second Westminster enactment deserves, in fact, to be ranked in importance with the first. The two, placed together, form an almost complete code bearing on the practice and extent of manorial jurisprudence.

A third enactment, called the Statute of Westminster, which was made law by parliamentary sanction the same year as the second from Westminster, moved backward in point of time to restate, define, and amend the old laws relating to popular action. The obligations of the Hundred in regard to enforcement of justice and the defense of the realm were adjusted. The term "hundred" referred to divisions of land in a towns.h.i.+p (some variations being "ward" and "wapentake") and generally meant as much land as made up a hundred "hides," a hide in turn being as much land as could be tilled annually by a single plow. The Hue and Cry, a regulation by which all men were obligated to join in the pursuit and apprehension of offenders against the law, came under consideration and was amended, removing among other things all traces of the obnoxious presentment of Englishry.

It was on these amendments that Edward's reputation as a wise lawgiver rests.

2.

While Edward labored thus to establish order in the land, his queen was equally active. She was finding some difficulty in settling down with her family. To begin with, she had no liking for the Tower of London as a home. This was not strange. It was too bleak, too grim, and too busy. The White Tower, which contained the royal apartments, was ninety feet high, with walls varying in thickness from twelve to fifteen feet. It had been built by a Norman architect, a monk of Bee named Gundulf, who was called the Weeper, and in accordance with Norman ideas he had been concerned only with its strength and durability. The White Tower was built for the ages, but it was square and graceless and cold. It developed also that Master Gundulf the Weeper had been guilty of a curious error: he had forgotten that the people who lived there would need to move about.

There was only one entrance to this towering block of masonry, a door so narrow that no more than one person could go through it at one time. Inside there was only a single well-stair, which began in the dark and damp vaults, where prisoners were kept, and continued on up to the floors above. Now the White Tower swarmed with people at all seasons and all hours. Not to mention the prisoners, who did not have a chance to get about, there were the king's guards, the workers in the Mint, the Jewel House, and the Wardrobe (the word "Wardrobe" included all the household departments as well as the household troops, the War Office, and the Admiralty), and the myriad clerks who served the officials of state in the Council Chamber and the Lesser Hall of the Justiciars as well as the members of the royal household with all their body servants and lackeys and grooms. The one entrance and the one well-stair with its hazardous stone steps were sadly inadequate for so many people. There was another serious drawback. The only fireplace in the Tower was in the state banqueting room on the second floor. The royal apartments were on the floor above, at the end of a dark pa.s.sage from St. John's Chapel. The place was so lacking in comfort and coziness (a flagrant understatement) that the lovely queen from sunny Castile felt she must find a better home for her ailing children.

There were innumerable royal residences to choose from; so many, in fact, that a lifetime was hardly sufficient to get acquainted with all of them. It would be many years, for instance, before the devoted couple would perceive the charms of Leeds Castle, which stood on an island in the midst of a Kentish lake, and make it their favorite. But Eleanor's choice was limited by the fact that the king must not be many miles from London, and so it inevitably fell on Windsor Castle. It should have been a happy selection, for Windsor stood high and dry above a thickly wooded countryside, and it had come in for the serious attentions of Edward's father. The old king had seen that the King's House built by Henry I in the shadow of the round Norman keep had suffered too badly in the many sieges the castle had sustained. His instinct for building aroused, Henry III had constructed a new wall along a chalk range and inside the cover thus provided had raised a new King's House sixty feet long, a Queen's Chamber, a chapel of seventy feet, and a Great Hall of truly magnificent proportions. But, alas, his builders had been optimistic in their estimate of the strength of the chalk ridge. Gradually the handsome new walls began to creak and sag. Then one day the ramparts were seen to be heaving, and soon there was a loud crash; and down came all the walls, taking with them some of the pride of the builder king.

It was to the King's House of Henry I, therefore, that Edward's queen took her family. It had been renovated earlier and fitted up at great expense, as already noted, and so they were quite comfortable there. Although the queen was to continue bearing children with great regularity, she contrived to accompany her royal spouse on most of his journeyings at home and abroad. This meant there had to be a home in which to leave the children, and Windsor was selected.

There is a disagreement among authorities as to the number of children presented to Edward by his queen, some saying fifteen, others claiming a total of seventeen. On one point there is accord, however. Only four of the children were sons. Of the eleven or thirteen daughters, as the case may be, a number died in their infancy and nothing is known about them, not even their names. With those who lingered just long enough to acquire names, there has been little statistical recognition. Let us pick out one at random from the long list: Eleanor, Joanna, Margaret, Berengaria, Mary, Elizabeth, Alice, Blanche, Beatrice, Katherine; Berengaria let it be, the fifth (an unnamed one was born in the East), who was called after the sad princess from Navarre who married Richard the Lion-Heart and was so openly neglected all her life. Here is what is recorded of little Berengaria. She was born in 1276, the exact day not known, at Kennington, and died either that year or the next, being buried at Westminster beside two of her little brothers; so ends the story of her brief existence. It may have been that princesses given that rare and lovely name were destined to ill luck.

This much is well established, that all the royal children shared the Plantagenet beauty. Some of the daughters were blond and blue-eyed, some were cast in the duskier mold of Castile. Eleanor, the first, seems to have been the great beauty of the family. The second, Joanna, who was born at Acre and named after her maternal grandmother, was dark and of an imperious temper. She was left for several years at the court of Castile with her grandparents, who wors.h.i.+ped her, and she seems even at that tender age to have carried things off with a high hand. They could not fail to be bright, these children of a really great father and a vital and beautiful mother; all but one, and that story will have to be told later.

The first months at home were sad ones. The health of Prince Henry, the only son left after John's death, grew steadily worse. The king and queen did everything possible to save him. His wasted frame was kept wrapped in the skins of newly slaughtered sheep, in the hope that the animal heat would revive his energies. He was filled with all manner of queer medicinal mixtures. Wax replicas of his body were sent about to shrines to be burned in oil; a very strange superst.i.tion of that particular day. Nothing seemed to have any beneficial effect, and so finally they came to the last resort. A large number of poor widows were hired to supplement the efforts of the royal confessors by performing vigils ceaselessly for his recovery. Their mournful supplications, which filled the air at all hours, had no more effect than the weird efforts of the medical men. The heir to the throne, having been removed to Merton, pa.s.sed away there.

Edward loved all his daughters devotedly, but he must have looked them over with an uneasy eye. Daughters made poor successors to a throne as contentious as that of England.

CHAPTER III.

The English and the Welsh

1.

TO the English, Wales had always been a troublesome neighbor. To the Welsh, England was a constant threat to their liberty.

The Welsh were what was left (with additional population pockets in Cornwall and Devons.h.i.+re) of the inhabitants of the island who had fought so bravely against the Romans, the natives who were called in Rome "the black singers." They were an imaginative race, poetic, high-strung, brave, and much given to singing and the harp. Back into their mountainous corner, their interests were limited, as were their opportunities for prosperity and abundance. They had faithful memories for the heroes of the past and they still believed that Arthur, the pendragon of glorious memory, would shake off his cerements someday and rise from the grave to lead them again to greatness.

They were in a fortunate position to carry on persistent warfare with the English. They could swoop through the pa.s.ses in the hills and harry the countryside and then defy retaliation by retiring into the almost impa.s.sable land above which stood white-topped Snowdon. Although they were seldom united among themselves, the black singers could keep their wooded glens free of alien feet. This. .h.i.t-and-run warfare had been going on for centuries when the Normans came over. William the Conqueror decided that something decisive must be done. He led one force into the mountains, getting as far as St. David's, and then decided that the risks outweighed the possible gains. As a second-best measure he decided to "contain" the mountaineers. The strip of country that bordered on the Welsh foothills, and through which all invading forces going in either direction had to pa.s.s, was converted into a feudal no man's land. The country was divided among three Norman leaders, Hugo the Wolf, William Fitz-Osborn, and Roger de Montgomery. These palatine earls were given full control of their respective counties, in return for which they were to maintain armed troops in the field and a.s.sume the responsibility of holding the Welsh in check. This system had been in effect for nearly two hundred years when Edward came to the throne, and the earls had become known as Marcher Barons. Their control of the land had become so absolute that it was said "the king's writ did not run north of the Wye"; in other words, that they ruled in their own right and could wink at kingly powers. Political refugees were safe if they could get across the Wye.

A second move made by the resourceful Conqueror had been more successful. He had laid hands on southern Wales, which lacked the high barriers, and through the instrumentality of one Robert Fitz-Hamon had constructed a string of stone strongholds running from the Wye to the port of Milford Haven.

Edward fixed his piercing eye on Wales and he did not admire the prospect. His writ must run not only through the Marcher country but into the deepest fastnesses of the high Welsh hills. As a further stimulant, he was keenly conscious of the a.s.sistance Wales had given Simon de Montfort in the closing phases of his father's reign. That was a score to be wiped off the slate.

He made up his mind that the problem of Wales must now be settled once and for all.