Free Kings and Castles by Marc Morris

possible, in the first half of the twentieth century, to present Edward I
in a largely uncritical light. Indeed, it was in the middle of the century that
the argument that Edward was a truly great king received its most powerful
restatement to date in the works of Sir Maurice Powicke .
In his Henry III and the Lord Edward (1947), Powicke urged readers ‘to forget everything that has happened since 1307 (the year of
Edward’s death) and to look at the world as he saw it’. By doing this, the
historian hoped to convince his audience that his subject was indeed ‘a great
man’, conventionally medieval in his tastes, and hence well suited to fill ‘a
great position’. As late as 1965, it was still possible to write that ‘the
stock of other medieval kings may rise or fall; that of Edward I remains firm
and … conspicuously high’.
    This, however, was the first line of a well-known article by
K. B. McFarlane, in which the author went on to deliver a devastating broadside
against the king from which he has never recovered. McFarlane did not try to
knock corners off Edward for his conduct in Wales
and Scotland, or his
questionable conduct in England
during the last ten years of his reign. Instead, he hit the English Justinian
where it hurt the most, and called into question his reputation as a just
ruler. A historian who had pioneered the idea that medieval society might be
usefully examined from the point of view of the nobility rather than that of
the Crown, McFarlane proceeded to examine ‘a remarkable series of transactions’
between Edward and his great magnates, and argued that the king had acted
illegally, or at the very least unjustly and coercively, to persuade many of
these men and women to part with their lands and disinherit their families.
    Immediately Edward’s hitherto high stock started to go into
free fall. In the same year that McFarlane’s article was published, a new
scholarly biography of Robert Bruce by the Scottish historian Geoffrey Barrow
appeared, in which the English king was subjected to similarly well-aimed
blows. Barrow gave substance to the age-old Scottish accusations of tyranny,
and further dented Edward’s prestige by questioning his credentials as a
paragon of chivalry. Women prisoners hung in cages on the outside of castle
towers; castle garrisons bombarded with missiles even after they had offered to
surrender; Scottish patriots – most notably William Wallace – ripped to pieces
in public and dispatched for public display: were these really the actions of a
great and noble king? Barrow thought not, and condemned Edward for his
‘meanness of spirit and implacable, almost paranoid hostility’. Within a few
years these sentiments were being echoed in other scholarly works, such as
Michael Prestwich’s War, Politics and Finance under
Edward I. The king’s defenders found themselves fighting a desperate rearguard
action. Lionel Stones published a very brief, excusatory book about Edward in
1968, and five years later a critical review of Prestwich .
Accordingly, when the latter came to write his own giant biography, published
in 1988, he drew a more balanced picture of the king, and in many instances
granted him the benefit of the doubt.
    But the Celtic assault continued. Just as Prestwich went to press, Rees Davies was delivering a series of lectures in Belfast that
would eventually become a book called Domination and Conquest, in which Edward
I appears as the antithesis of Powicke’s ‘ordinary
Christian gentleman’. Not only is he ‘ruthless’ as in Gray’s poem; he is, in
addition, ‘sinister’ and even ‘chilling’ – this last on account of the writs he
sent out in the winter of 1282, in which he proposed ‘to put an end finally …
to the malice of the Welsh’. And it was not just the Welsh, of course, for whom
Edward devised a final solution. His reign also witnessed the total expulsion
of all Jews from England,
a fact which, as Colin Richmond pointed out in an