Unruly by David Mitchell

Author:David Mitchell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781405953207
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2023-09-27T23:00:00+00:00

22. King Edward I

King Edward I loved parliaments. That’s surprising because they were quite new and in general are seen as a constraint on royal power. I’d say it was the most remarkable thing about him, which makes it strange that his two main nicknames are ‘Longshanks’ and ‘Hammer of the Scots’. Being tall and trying to take over Scotland seem to me less unusual attributes for an English king than a fondness for parliaments.

It wasn’t because he was a fan of free and frank debate that Edward liked parliaments, but because he wanted things to be properly organized and he needed money to go and conquer places. He realized that a strong king with a reforming parliamentary agenda of attractive organizational stuff he wanted to get done, which would be of benefit to the major players in the realm, could reap rewards in terms of taxation. This was vital to his reign’s main aims of sticking it to Wales and Scotland, and to his hopes of going on crusade again.

He was on his way back from the Ninth Crusade when his father died, and for the rest of his life he was desperate to go back. He never did, which was definitely for the best. I mean, Ninth – for fuck’s sake! It had overtaken the number of French Louis. The continuing issue of the crusades is tedious and futile. So many people seemed desperate to pitch in barbarously to the general ongoing murderous mess.

It’s like when actors put ‘actor and activist’ in their biogs in an attempt to detrivialize their existences. In the same way, Edward remained ‘king and crusader’ until he died, as part of the muscular and murderous piety that was fashionable at the time and was used to legitimize a lot of horrible behaviour, all in the name of someone whose big pitch was kindness and eternal life.

For example, in 1290 Edward expelled all the Jews from England, an edict that remained in force until 1657. This is grim, but was par for the course – all the European kingdoms were expelling Jews around then as a result of a heady mixture of nasty piety and a desire to renege on debts. Jewish people, who unlike Christians were not prohibited by their religion from charging interest on loans, provided a useful financial service. But many who had availed themselves of this facility, as the enjoying of the lovely loan money morphed into the making of the horrible repayments, saw the light in terms of how terrible it was that not everyone in England was Christian.

This expulsion doesn’t come close to being the main thing about Edward, which is a savage indictment of the times he lived in. It was just a shitty thing that was happening everywhere that he joined in with, probably certain in his mind that it was morally the right thing to do. That’s what’s so chilling.

There was financial interest involved, but a lot of Christians will have thought that excising all Jewish people from Christian society was what ought to be done.

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