A Great and Terrible King Read online

  Lacy apart, Edward's commanders were thus well rehearsed for the roles the king wanted them to play. To a large extent his declaration of war on Llywelyn simply meant that the old firm established in the

  1260s was back in business. These were men whom Edward could trust to start the conflict on his behalf. At the end of January 1277, after taking counsel with his friends for a final time, the king left the border and left them to it.

  Assaults began at once on all fronts. In the south Payn de Chaworth advanced from the royal castle at Carmarthen into the same region where, twenty years earlier, Edward's forces had been completely obliterated by Welsh attack. In the north, meanwhile, the earl of Warwick, operating in tandem with Dafydd ap Gruffudd, pushed out from his base at Chester and into Powys, where he encountered stiff resistance at Castell Dinas Bran. The fiercest fighting, however, seems to have occurred in the middle March, where Llywelyn concentrated his resources in the hope of opposing the onset of Roger Mortimer from Montgomery. Mortimer's objective was the prince's newly completed castle at Dolforwyn, and Llywelyn was determined that he should not achieve it.42

  While his friends and the troops of his household began to drive into the principality of Wales, Edward was attending to the preparations for his own advent in the summer. These were, in the first instance, spiritual. Even as Mortimer and company were hacking their way into hostile territory and raining down arrows on Dolforwyn, the king was touring the quiet countryside of East Anglia in order to pray before the shrines and relics at Walsingham, Bromholm and St Faiths. His thoughts, though, were rarely far from matters military. During the same month of pilgrimage, for example, Edward ordered no fewer than 200,000 crossbow bolts from the chief centre of their manufacture, St Briavel's Castle in the Forest of Dean. At the same time, royal agents were active in France, buying up warhorses for the king's use, and carts were being requisitioned from abbeys and priories in order to transport his tents from London to Wales. Henry III had failed in his fight against Llywelyn by rushing into north Wales unprepared. Here, as elsewhere, Edward was determined not to make his father's mistakes.

  By May the king had returned to Westminster and a parliament buzzing with the news of his lieutenants' success. Payn de Chaworth had won over south Wales using a combination of force and negotiation: in a letter to Edward he indicated that the Welsh lords of his region would soon be heading towards England, ready to acknowledge the king as their new master. In like manner the earl of Warwick and his Welsh allies had recovered all of Powys — Dinas Bran had been abandoned by 10 May — and its former lord, the conspirator Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn, was back in possession. Perhaps the most symbolic victory had been won in the middle March, where Roger Mortimer and his companions had taken Dolforwyn at the start of April after a siege that had lasted only a week (signs of the castle's bombardment are still apparent from its surviving masonry). By the middle of May, when Mortimer wrote to Edward, it was essentially to report the total collapse of Llywelyn's power in the March. It was a sure sign of how much had been achieved that several of the king's commanders -Chaworth, Clifford and Vescy — were able to leave their posts in order to attend parliament in person. In the space of a few short months almost all of Llywelyn's earlier conquests had been reversed. In southern and central Wales the prince's vassals, tired of his extortionate rule, had deserted in droves and were preparing to fight against him. For the English it remained only to tackle Gwynedd, and the prince himself. Now that the summer was approaching, the time for that task was at hand. And, thanks to his careful preparations, Edward was now ready.

  On 3 July the king arrived in Worcester to meet the force with which he intended to reduce Llywelyn to submission. Six months earlier, the same city had seen him deploy the crack troops of his household. Now it was host to all the remaining cavalry he had the ability to command. Which is to say, in response to Edward's earlier orders, the great men of his kingdom had turned out in all their power and splendour.

  Ever since the Norman Conquest (and very likely well before) all those in England who held their lands directly from the king had been obliged to provide him with military service when he demanded it. The men assembled in Worcester in the summer of 1277 were there because Edward, on the same day that he had declared Llywelyn 'a rebel and disturber of the peace', had simultaneously summoned 'all who held of the king "in chief", and owed him service ... to be at Worcester ... with horses and arms'.

  Had Edward relied solely on obligation, his cavalry host would have been a small one. Naturally, the number of warriors each landowner was expected to provide varied according to the number of estates he or she held, but, thanks to a fairly recent adjustment, the numbers themselves were very low. In earlier centuries the burden of military service had been heavy indeed: at the time of the Conquest, two hundred years before, the king's greatest tenants had been expected to furnish him with dozens of knights when required. It was during the reign of Henry III that these long-established obligations had been drastically reduced, probably in deference to the rising costs of knightly arms and armour. As a consequence, many men were obliged to serve only in their own person, or perhaps with one other companion. Even the very greatest individuals - the earls - had knightly quotas that for the most part could be expressed in single figures.

  Luckily for Edward, however, his great men shared his own attitude in their need to have magnificent entourages. An earl might be required to provide only half a dozen horsemen when the king called him to war, but his stature and sense of self-worth demanded that he be surrounded by many times that number. Most of Edward's earls typically rode to war with at least thirty knights and esquires in tow, and in some instances twice that number. Other great landowners also brought contingents well in excess of their nominal quotas. The king's total cavalry forces, therefore, tended to be far more impressive than the minimal force to which he was theoretically entitled. In the summer of 1277 they totalled somewhere in the region of 1,000 mounted men.

  Not all of these men turned up at Worcester. Edward's plan for invading Gwynedd was a two-pronged assault: one force would drive northwards from Carmarthen, while another would push west from Chester. In other words, the operation would be launched from the bases established during the preliminary campaign, and it therefore made sense for those cavalrymen already under the commands of the earl of Warwick (at Chester) and Payn de Chaworth (at Carmarthen) to remain at their posts. Both men, however, were about to be superseded. When the troops mustered at Worcester divided, those who rode south joined an army that was now captained by Edmund, earl of Lancaster, Edward's younger brother. Thanks to the king's earlier generosity, Edmund was the biggest landowner in south Wales, and Carmarthen was his lordship: it was only fitting that the responsibility, and the honour, of leading the southern army should be given to him.

  Important though it was, Edmund's role was essentially a supporting one. His army was allocated only a fraction of the forces that came to Worcester, bringing his total cavalry to somewhere in the region of 200 men. The great majority of the assembled host — including all the other earls and their militarised households, rode north to Chester, where (together with Warwick's contingent) they formed a company of horse in excess of 800 strong. They were to be the main strike force that would bring down Llywelyn. And their captain was, of course, the king himself.

  Edward arrived in Chester on 15 July. The old Roman city was already humming with activity, and swollen to many times its normal size by thousands of other outsiders. The coming of the king and his cavalry appears to have coincided neatly with the arrival of a fleet of eighteen ships from the Cinque Ports. They, their crews and their captains, like the army they were there to support, had also turned up as a matter of ancient obligation. Other ships, some local, some from as far afield as Gascony, were soon hired by royal agents, bringing the total number of vessels squeezed along the quayside to thirty-five. In the city itself, some 700 or so sailors jostled for space with the 800 or more cavalrymen and an even g
reater number of horses.

  Both the seamen and the horsemen together, however, were outnumbered by the foot soldiers, who at the time of Edward's arrival accounted for almost 3,000 additional souls. Theirs was an altogether more mixed company. Some of them, like the sailors, were evidently men of prior experience. The 270 individuals who came carrying crossbows, for example, clearly constituted an elite group by virtue of owning one of the deadliest weapons of their age (and, presumably, the knowledge of how to use it). For the most part, though, the infantry were a ragbag, whose skill and equipment varied from the merely adequate to the virtually non-existent. Unlike the other elements in Edward's army, there was no formal obligation for foot soldiers to turn up and fight in his wars. The humblest freeman was required by law to furnish himself with a helmet, spear and gambeson (a padded tunic), but seemingly only for reasons of local defence. Obligation, if anything, operated in the opposite direction in the infantry's case, for those who turned out expected the king to pay them the respectable wage of two pence a day (or four pence in the case of the crossbowmen).

  The unknown factor is how much coercion and compulsion were involved when the sheriff or other royal officers rode into a village looking for raw recruits. Sometimes the compulsion may have been economic; for the poor and unskilled, the king's money must have been hard to refuse. Others, by contrast, may have been conscripted by their communities in order to meet the king's demand. What seems more certain is that the quality of foot soldiers raised by such methods was generally pretty lamentable. The best may have been practised bowmen, but many — probably the majority - may have turned out armed only with swords and knives. Whatever the case, exceedingly few of the 3,000 men who trudged to Chester in the summer of 1277 can have mustered the same level of enthusiasm as the knights who had ridden there alongside the king.

  Chester was therefore busy — yet apparently not busy enough. We lack good eyewitness reporting, and are reliant on the detailed but dry financial records kept by the king's ministers. But, from these, it seems that the initial groundwork carried out by the earl of Warwick and his deputies was deemed insufficient by the king and his advisers on their arrival. Take, for example, the fundamental question of food. Some preparations, it is plain, must have been made in order to feed the thousands of men and animals already in Chester by the middle of July. Edward's local officials in Cheshire had been seizing corn in his name as early as January, and in February the king himself had ordered his ministers in Ireland to ship 1,600 quarters of cereal to Chester by midsummer at the latest. It is striking, however, that on 17 July, just two days after Edward's arrival, fresh stocks of grain were ordered from nine English counties. 'Other misfortunes can in time be alleviated: fodder and grain supply have no remedy in a crisis except storage in advance.' So wrote the Roman general Vegetius in his manual De re militari, which Edward owned and had therefore almost certainly read. Of course, the book offered no advice as to how much food should be stockpiled. That was a lesson that could be learned only from experience, and experience told Edward that, at the start of his campaign in the summer of 1277, he did not have nearly enough.

  The same may well have been true of the men he was hoping to feed. Three thousand foot soldiers was not the making of a great army of invasion. Again, we have to guard against the limitations of our sources. It may be that the king intended from the outset that his infantry should accumulate gradually, increasing in number as his advance gathered momentum. If, however, this was indeed the case, it is difficult to see why he should have mustered all his cavalry at the beginning of July or have had all his ships assembled in the middle of the same month. The aristocracy and the Cinque Ports were both bound to assist Edward, but their obligations were not indefinite. Cavalry service was compulsory for only forty days, while the Portsmen were required to turn out for only two weeks. The king might appeal to both to serve for longer, either in return for payment, or simply as a favour, but his appeal might well fall on deaf ears.

  The clock, in short, was ticking. Within a matter of a few more weeks, the men Edward had with him would be obliged to offer him nothing, and might well decide to return home. Despite the fact, therefore, that his resources might have been considerably less than he had hoped, the king had to make a swift start. A week after their arrival in Chester, he and his army left the city and crossed the border into Wales.

  There was no Welsh army with Llywelyn at its head advancing to meet them. The events of the spring, and the fall of Dolforwyn in particular, had shown beyond any doubt that the prince's resources were no match for those of the king of England. Even at the height of his power, Llywelyn was able to deploy only 300 mounted men, and they were unlikely to have been equipped to the same high standard as Edward's knights, with their great warhorses, heavy armour, mail shirts, swords and lances. When it came to warfare, the economic and industrial gulf between England and Wales was all too apparent. Llywelyn had no fleet to speak of and no money to hire one. He could not afford to bring crossbowmen from Gascony, nor to furnish them with an almost unlimited supply of ammunition. His resources were those of a primitive and underdeveloped society, set against those of a thirteenth-century superpower. Direct confrontation was out of the question.

  But the prince did not need to meet the English army head on to see it defeated. Geography could do that for him. Wales, it bears repeating, was 'not of easy access'. The same physical obstacles that limited Llywelyn's dreams of expansion — marsh, forest and mountain — also served, in the final analysis, to protect the core of his power. What nature had made difficult, moreover, man might make doubly so. During the previous English invasion of 1257 Llywelyn had gone to great lengths to obstruct his enemy's advance. Holes had been dug in the middle of fords to render them impassable; meadows had been ploughed up; bridges had been broken. The prince, so it was said, had even destroyed the mills of his homeland rather than see them used to grind corn to feed an English army.

  No doubt similar preparations were made in 1277. But, whatever else he might have done, the fact was that Llywelyn had already ensured that this new invasion would face far greater difficulties than its precursor. The destruction of the castles at Dyserth and Deganwy meant that Edward had no secure bases at which to aim his army. Everything west of Chester was hostile terrain that afforded neither shelter nor safe haven. In this environment, unforgiving and inhospitable, even the greatest armies might become entangled or bogged down, and once that had happened the eerie silence might suddenly be broken by the noise of a surprise attack. The Welsh might have lacked the latest military hardware, but they themselves were famously fierce and fearsome. Dressed in leather, armed with bows, arrows and spears, they would sweep down on their enemies, catching them unawares and wreaking havoc, before retreating with equal swiftness into the woods and hills. Such guerrilla tactics had served them well against would-be invaders for centuries. They were precisely the tactics by which a small nation might defeat a superpower.

  Edward was determined to avoid such a fate. Well aware of the challenges presented by the terrain he wished to traverse, he had already devised a strategy by which it would be tamed. The essential feature of his plan was new and better castles. Since early June royal agents had been busy recruiting hundreds of masons, carpenters, diggers and woodsmen, and this separate army of workers now marched with the main host as it advanced from Chester to the edge of hostile territory. Their first stop was a spur of rock on the estuary of the River Dee, which they christened 'the Flint'. Work began immediately on the castle that has borne that name ever since.

  Protection was the first priority. More than half the 1,850 or so men engaged in the initial stages of construction were diggers, who laboured to create huge ditches around the site, 'for the security of the king and his company'. Speed was also of the essence. Almost all of the initial building work was carried out in timber; carpenters outnumbered masons by more than two to one.

  Once again, however, speed was not all it might have been. Des
pite the impressively large workforce, it is clear that not enough building materials had been gathered in advance. At the end of July, by which point Edward had already been at Flint for over a week, trees were still being felled in the forests of Cheshire for use at the castle. The king was therefore obliged to retrace his steps in the direction of Chester in order to hasten the shipment of further supplies. The fact that his journey was a short one only served to emphasise how little had been achieved thus far. One month on from the muster, one week since beginning his assault, and Edward had advanced all of twelve miles.