Kings and Castles by Marc Morris Page B

reached much the same conclusion myself
in the course of researching the book. On those rare occasions when I ventured
out of the library, I had inevitably been asked what I was working on, and when
I replied ‘Edward I’, it often engendered a kind of mild panic in the eyes of
the questioner. Was he the gay one? No, he was the father of the Black Prince,
wasn’t he? ( this mostly from French people); No, wait
a moment, an Englishman would interject, surely he was the Confessor? This
last, of course, caused yet more confusion. No, I would have to remind them,
Edward I was not the Confessor, but he was named after him. How, then, could he
be ‘the First’, some people worried, while others decided it was time to slip off
in search of another drink.
    Thank heavens, therefore, for Mel Gibson (not a phrase that
historians of the thirteenth century are known to overuse). Invariably, the
quickest and surest route to helping the temporarily befuddled to identify the
king in question was to remind them of Braveheart ,
Gibson’s hilarious biopic of the celebrated Scottish patriot, William Wallace.
Yes, of course, Edward I was ‘ Longshanks ’, Braveheart’s bad guy – a cruel, scheming monster, played
with relish by Patrick ‘The Prisoner’ McGoohan ,
ordering men into battle like some anglicised medieval Nazi commandant (and
hence, for my money, by far the best thing in it).
    How about that for a title then: Longshanks ?
Has a certain ring to it, and enables us to pin down the particular Edward
we’re after. The problem, however, is that Longshanks ,
while it helps a good many people put Edward I into some sort of context,
doesn’t actually tell you much else about him, besides the fact that he was
remarkably tall (six foot two, to be precise: a figure established when
antiquarians cracked open his coffin in 1774 and measured his decomposing
corpse). Likewise, Edward’s other well-known, vaguely contemporary epithet,
‘The Hammer of the Scots’, must also be rejected
because it locates the king in too narrow a context. It was not until the end
of his reign that Edward turned his attention to Scottish affairs, and before
that he had already lived an astonishingly action-packed life.
    Remember Simon de Montfort? It was Edward who defeated and
killed him in battle, thereby saving his future crown. Interested in the
crusades? So was Edward: before his accession he had travelled to the Holy Land
and back, taking in Sicily, Cyprus and North Africa
for good measure. Ever visited North Wales,
and marvelled at the magnificent castles at Conwy, Caernarfon, Harlech and Beaumaris ? All of
them, and many others besides, are Edward’s handiwork, the end result of his
devastating conquest of 1282–83, a conquest which was never reversed and which
marked the end of Wales
as an independent nation.
    Longshanks , you soon realise, hardly
begins to do justice to the man. Nor, for that matter, do any of the epithets
that contemporaries attached to him. ‘Edward the Conqueror’, for example, was
how he was remembered in the decades after his death by the new English
settlers in north Wales.
Yet there was more to Edward than just war and conquest. True, he raised the
largest armies seen in Britain
during the Middle Ages – an impressive 30,000 men smashed Wallace’s forces at Falkirk. But Edward also summoned the largest parliaments
of the Middle Ages and promulgated the most legislation. To England, and to his duchy of Gascony
in southern France,
he gave the best government that they had experienced for more than a century.
He lived longer than any other medieval English monarch, and fathered no fewer
than eighteen children (fifteen of them by his first wife, Eleanor of Castile,
in memory of whom he erected the Eleanor Crosses). He travelled further than
any other king or queen of England
until the modern age. Not until Elizabeth I
lived on into the seventeenth century, and Edward VII visited India in 1875,
would Edward I’s records