Free The Great Turning Points of British History by Michael Wood Page A

France, resigned his claims and returned to France. Had a French king ruled England, the political structure of Europe would have developed on incalculably different lines.
    1221 The friars move in . The first Dominicans arrived in England, soon followed by the Franciscans. By around 1300 there were more than a hundred Dominican and Franciscan houses in Britain. With an emphasis on poverty, preaching and university study, they transformed the religious life of the island. A sermon by an educated preacher now became an everyday part of town life.
    1225 Magna Carta is reissued . In 1216 and 1217 the minority government of Henry III had reversed John’s policies and issued new versions of Magna Carta. In 1225, yet another version was issued in return for a heavy tax that saved the dynasty’s continental possessions in Gascony. The 1225 version of the charter became definitive, the one confirmed by subsequent kings, clauses of which are on the statute book today.
    1236 A strong queen emerges . Henry III married Eleanor of Provence, laying the foundations for a remarkable resurgence of queenly power. No queen consort had played a role in English political life since Eleanor of Aquitaine in the 1160s. Eleanor of Provence, made of far sterner stuff than her indulgent husband, changed that. Supporting, and supported by, her relations from Savoy, whom Henry established in England, she was a central figure in the politics of the reign.
    1237 Treaty of York . Alexander II of Scotland resigned claims to the northern counties of England, which Scottish kings had pursued for 200 years. In return he gained substantial territory in Tynedale. He consolidated the Anglo-Scottish peace (it lasted from 1217 to 1296), and was free to concentrate on the conquest of Galloway, where he had taken armies in 1235 and 1236, thus extending the reach of the Scottish state.
    1240 End of a great Welsh leader . This year marked the death of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, justly called in his own lifetime Llywelyn the Great. His death ushered in a period in which the king of England recovered his power in Wales. But Llywelyn’s vision of a Welsh principality under a single native ruler, the prince of Wales, was to be realized, if only for the ten years between 1267 and 1277, by his grandson.
    1249 Scotland loses King Alexander . King Alexander II of Scotland (who had come to the throne aged 16 in 1214) died on an expedition to wrest lordship of the Isle of Man and the Hebrides from the king of Norway. The expedition summed up the way Alexander had re-oriented Scottish kingship. It would expand not south into England but north and west. The acquisition of Man and Hebrides was ultimately achieved by his son, Alexander III, securing Scotland’s western borders. Together they had constructed a state strong enough to resist English attempts at conquest.

1295
Edward I goes on the warpath
MICHAEL PRESTWICH
    England was prosperous in the thirteenth century, with a growing population. Great monastic estates, such as those of Winchester Cathedral Priory, or of the Cistercian monasteries of Yorkshire, were doing very well, as were the estates of earls and major barons. Some knightly families, however, found it increasingly hard to maintain their status in society. More and more land was put under the plough, as agricultural activity expanded to feed an increasingly numerous populace. Fenland was drained and exploited.
    The wool trade was booming. Italian merchants were attracted to England; they provided credit mechanisms that helped to fuel the expansion of trade. The urban economy thrived. New towns continued to be founded – if not at quite the rate of the first half of the century – and established towns expanded. This was an economic expansion driven by a commercially minded populace, above all in England, but also in Scotland and Wales.
    By 1295, however, there were beginning to be indications that population growth was no longer matched by the expansion of resources