Free A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain by Marc Morris

Illustrations

    First section
The Mappa Mundi ( © The Hereford Mappa Mundi Trust )
A page from the Alphonso Psalter ( © The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. Add. MS 24686, f.14v )
The chapel doors at Windsor Castle ( By permission of the Dean and Canons of Windsor )
An initial from the Douce Apocalypse ( © The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, MS Douce 180, fol. 1r )
The coronation of Edward the Confessor ( © Society of Antiquaries of London )
Edward and Eleanor pictured wearing their crowns ( © The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. Cotton Nero D. II, f.179v )
A silver penny of Edward I ( © Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge )
The Great Seal of Edward I ( © King’s College Library, Cambridge, GBR/57a )
A seal bag from Westminster Abbey ( © Dean and Chapter of Westminster )
Conwy Castle ( Cadw/Crown Copyright )
Harlech Castle ( Cadw/Crown Copyright )
Caernarfon Castle ( Cadw/Crown Copyright )
Beaumaris Castle ( Cadw/Crown Copyright )
Edward I’s chamber at the Tower of London (St Thomas’s Tower) ( © Historic Royal Palaces/newsteam.co.uk )
The Round Table in Winchester Great Hall ( By permission of Hampshire County Council )
    Second section
Matthew Paris’s map of Britain ( © The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. Cotton Claudius D. VI, f.12v )
Flint ( Cambridge University Collection of Air Photographs, Unit for Landscape Modelling )
Monpazier ( © Philippe Dufour )
Winchelsea ( © Crown Copyright/MOD. Reproduced with the permission of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office )
The tomb of Eleanor of Castile ( © Westminster Abbey, London, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library )
The Eleanor Cross at Geddington ( © English Heritage Photo Library )
The persecution of the Jews ( © The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. Cotton Nero D. II, f.183v )
The tomb of Henry III ( © Dean and Chapter of Westminster )
Débonaireté defeating ira ( © Society of Antiquaries of London )
The Coronation Chair ( © Dean and Chapter of Westminster )
A possible portrait of Edward I ( © Dean and Chapter of Westminster )
The warfare of Judas Maccabeus ( © Society of Antiquaries of London )
The tomb of Edward I at Westminster ( © Dean and Chapter of Westminster )
Edward I in his open tomb ( © Society of Antiquaries of London )
    Maps

England
 
Wales
 
Gascony
 
Scotland
 

Preface

    On learning that I was writing a book about Edward I, my non-historian friends and neighbours have asked me, almost invariably, the same two questions. ‘Was he Edward the Confessor?’ has been by far the most common. No, I would always answer, he was not; but he was named after him. In many cases this only served to provoke a subsidiary, more vexed inquiry. If my subject was named after one of his forebears, then how on earth could he possibly be ‘the First’? The answer, of course, is that he couldn’t, and that, strictly speaking, he wasn’t. For those who would care to know precisely how this confusing situation came about, I have added a short note of explanation at the end of this Preface.
    The second question that has usually been put to me concerns the nature of the evidence for writing the biography of a medieval king, and specifically its quantity. In general, people tend to presume that there can’t be very much, and imagine that I must spend my days poking around in castle muniment rooms, looking for previously undiscovered scraps of parchment. Sadly, they are mistaken. The answer I always give to the question of how much evidence is: more than one person could look at in a lifetime. From the early twelfth century, the kings of England began to keep written accounts of their annual expenditure, and by the end of the century they were keeping a written record of almost every aspect of royal government. Each time a royal document was issued, be it a grand charter or a routine writ, a copy was dutifully entered on to a large parchment roll. Meanwhile, in the provinces, the king’s justices