Free Kings and Castles by Marc Morris Page B

determination to
recover the rights that he contended had been usurped during the lax rules of
his predecessors. Disgruntlement with the king’s famous Quo Warranto inquiry (so-called because of the inquisitors persistent demand to know ‘by
what warrant’ a landowner claimed his special privileges) mounted during the
late 1280s, partly because the inquiry intensified in these years, and partly
because there were no parliaments during this period – Edward spent the years
1286–89 overseas, attending to his duchy of Gascony. But on his return Edward
punished the judges and ultimately compromised on Quo Warranto ,
allowing that landlords could retain their privileges if they were able to show
more than a century of continuous usage. Unlike the implacable tyrant of some
texts, this was a man who was quite capable of finding a middle course.
    The king’s desire to appease his subjects in 1290 brings us
to his expulsion of the Jews. There is no point trying to defend him, as some
have done, on the grounds that the exercise was carried out efficiently and
that the incidents of murderous violence involved were unauthorised and
apparently few in number . Edward had no sympathy with
the Jews and had already visited plenty of violence on them of his own accord.
A decade earlier, to maximise the profits of an impending recoinage ,
he had instituted a covert crackdown on ‘coin-clippers’ – criminals who shaved
silver off the edge of his coins to make new ingots. Of those convicted and
hanged, twenty-nine were Christians but almost ten times that number were Jews,
which makes Edward I responsible for the biggest pogrom in British history.
    His expulsion of the Jews, by contrast, is not quite as
remarkable or record-breaking as is often portrayed. Edward, it is true, became
the first king to enforce a nationwide Jewish exodus. Yet all this proves is
that his was the powerful king of a precociously united kingdom; for more than
a century, other kings, princes and counts had been expelling Jews from their
demesnes to the fullest extent of their more limited authority. Simon de
Montfort, for example, whose name is commemorated by a new university in Leicester, had expelled the Jews from that town at the
start of his English career. Moreover, he had done so expressly for the
salvation of his and his family’s souls. Thirteenth-century Europe was a
profoundly anti-Semitic place, and no corner of it
more so than England.
What motivated Edward to expel the Jews in 1290 was not simply his own personal
hatred; it was his desperate need of money, which could only be satisfied by a
grant of tax from parliament. The knights of the shires, those heroes of
Victorian constitutional history, were duly summoned, and demanded the
expulsion as the price of their consent. The expulsion, in short, was a popular
act in every sense: Edward received the biggest tax of the English Middle Ages,
and his subjects cheered him for his pious performance in driving ‘the
faithless multitude of Jews and unbelievers from England’. It is quite easy to
present Edward I as a Hitler figure; more difficult, perhaps, to confront the
fact that all Englishmen once shared his virulent anti-Semitism.
    We could likewise easily condemn Edward for his wars, but
this too would be to adopt an anachronistic stance: contemporaries were quick
to praise him. ‘Long may he live and conquer and rule’, wrote a jubilant
English clerk in Rome
when he heard that Edward had defeated the Welsh, ‘that domestic enemy … the
disturber of English peace’. After the king’s death, it was recalled with
approval that ‘he tried to war down all those who wished to throw his people in
confusion’ – this from a sermon preached before the pope. Medieval monarchs
were expected to go after their enemies with fire and sword. As one poet
proudly put it, the English king confronting his foes was alike to the three
lions on his banner: ‘proud, fierce and cruel’. Another writer put