A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain by Marc Morris

A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain by Marc Morris

Author:Marc Morris
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Biography, Military History, Britain, Medieval History, Political Science, British History
ISBN: 9780099481751
Publisher: Windmill
Published: 2009-04-06T04:00:00+00:00


The Great Cause

Within a month of the close of the autumn parliament of 1290 Queen Eleanor was dead. During her stay in Gascony she had contracted a malarial fever that, although it obviously did not prevent her from travelling, probably lingered and left her susceptible to the sickness that took hold at Clipstone in the last days of October. At that point a household sergeant was dispatched to Lincoln, twenty-five miles to the east, to procure better medicines. But a further fortnight brought no improvement, and it was evidently decided that the only hope was to get the queen to Lincoln in person, almost certainly so that she could be near the shrine of St Hugh in the city’s cathedral. The royal party proceeded by short journeys and managed to cross the River Trent, but by that stage it must have been clear that Eleanor could cope with no more. On 20 November the court was forced to stop in Harby, a small village six miles short of their destination, and for another week the queen rested in the modest home of Richard Weston, a local knight. These, though, were to be her last lodgings. During the evening of 28 November Eleanor died. She had recently passed her forty-ninth birthday.1

Contemporary Englishmen who recorded the queen’s passing composed only the shortest of obituary notices, and what little they wrote was hardly positive. ‘A Spaniard by birth,’ said the annalist at Dunstable Priory, ‘she acquired many fine manors.’ As far as most people were concerned, there was not much more that could be said. Since her arrival in England thirty-five years earlier, Eleanor had made scant effort to cultivate popular affection. Medieval queens could endear themselves by the personal distribution of alms to the poor, and by interceding with their husbands on behalf of the needy, the oppressed or the condemned. But Eleanor had preferred to let others make donations on her behalf and – to judge from comments once made by Archbishop Pecham – was reckoned to have encouraged Edward to be more severe in his judgements, not less so. As the Dunstable annalist implies, foreignness was one part of her problem. Unlike the king, Eleanor had never learned to speak English. Acquisitiveness – the accumulation of ‘fine manors’ – was another. In the course of her career Eleanor had amassed lands worth a total of about £50,000 (or £2,500 a year). This was not simply a question of greed: at the time of her arrival in England the queen’s resources had been quite inadequate and required development. Yet the means employed by Eleanor and her officials to effect this expansion, especially the snapping up of estates encumbered by Jewish debts, had become notorious. So too had her methods of estate management, which inquests carried out after her death revealed to have been high-handed and ruthless. Not until her last moments did Eleanor seek to make amends. ‘After she had devotedly received the sacrament of the dying,’ wrote one chronicler, ‘she



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