Free The Demon's Brood by Desmond Seward Page B

out by summer.
Finance
    Where finance was concerned, Edward was thoroughly unscrupulous. Having sucked dry the Jews (who were outside the law), he confiscated their property and in 1290 expelled the entire community from England – about 2,000 souls. He had paid for the Welsh wars by borrowing from the Riccardi of Lucca, who were allowed to collect customs duties on wool. Owing to commitments elsewhere, the Riccardi could not help with his request for a big loan in 1294, so Edward took the wool duties away from them and seized their other English assets (such as security for loans), which ruined them.
    Later, he persuaded the Frescobaldi at Florence to lend him large sums, again in return for wool duties, but insolvency loomed. The only hope was taxing his subjects, but he had to secure their consent. ‘After 1215 the next great halting place in the history of the national assembly is the year 1295’, wrote Maitland, referring to the Model Parliament at Westminster in which earls, barons and knights agreed to give a twelfth of their movable goods to pay for war with France, burgesses agreeing on an eighth. 14 Yet it is anachronistic to think of Edward as founding parliamentary government – he soon reverted to sporadic bursts of arbitrary taxation.
    At the same time, he did his best to stimulate the economy, issuing a new coinage in 1279 and introducing a Statute of Merchants in 1285 that ordered debtors to pay bills on pain of imprisonment or distraint. Aware that Winchelsea, with a bigger fleet than any other Cinque Port, was vanishing under the sea, Edward began building a town and haven in 1283 to replace it, employing an architect who had built fortified towns (bastides) for him in Gascony. Laid out on a grid pattern, it was given seventy huge cellars to encourage the wine trade with Bordeaux.
The deaths of Eleanor of Castile and Robert Burnell
    In autumn 1290 Eleanor of Castile fell gravely ill near Lincoln and Edward hurried north to be with her, but she died before he arrived. Heartbroken, he rode with her corpse to Westminster, and later had a stone cross (originally wooden) erected at each halting place. A contemporary translator of Langtoft’s chronicle comments. ‘On fell things he thought and wax[ed] heavy as lead . . . His solace was all [be]reft that she from him was gone.’ 15
    Robert Burnell died in 1292. Three years later his place was taken by Walter Langton, Keeper of the Wardrobe, who became treasurer and Bishop of Lichfield. Even greedier than Burnell, he aroused widespread dislike. Later he was charged with adultery and murder – helping his mistress to strangle her husband – besides being accused of ‘intercourse with the devil’ whose backside he was said to have kissed; but he was acquitted. The king ignored these peccadilloes, regarding Walter as his eyes and ears.
Gascony
    Another blow was Philip IV’s abandonment of the family entente. Guyenne (Gascony) had been Edward’s patrimony when he was a boy. He knew it well, having spent 1254–6 there, besides visiting it on his way back from the Crusades. As a French-speaking Englishman, with southern blood from his mother and grandmother, he felt at home there. He visited again from 1286 to 1289, overhauling the region’s administration, improving its legal system, building bastides and exacting homage from its noblemen – many of whom had fought for him in Wales.
    The sphinx-like Philip ‘the Handsome’, who succeeded his father as king in 1285, was the most formidable man in Europe; he later bridled the papacy and destroyed the Templars. His forebears had conquered most of the Plantagenet lands and he wanted Gascony too, despite Edward paying homage for it. In1293 mercantile rivalry erupted in a pirate war, during which Gascon sailors sacked La Rochelle and a Cinque Ports fleet routed a Norman flotilla. Philip saw his chance. Marching into the Agenais and Perigord, he seized