A Great and Terrible King Page 3

  One of the things that had made literacy easier and more appealing for the English aristocracy by the thirteenth century was the increasing quantity of literature being translated into their everyday tongue. The Bible, prayer books and psalters were all available in French translation, and, since religious devotion was the primary spur to reading, these were probably the first kind of books that Edward would have encountered. Nevertheless, despite the increasing availability of such material and the increasing use of French in letters, both public and private, it was important for a boy who was being groomed as a future king to obtain at least a basic level of literacy in Latin (here his clerks may have been more help to him than his mother). Latin remained the principal written language of royal government, and the only lingua franca suitable for corresponding with other European rulers, particularly the pope. Lastly, Edward would also have learned English from an early age, probably from the mouths of his native-born guardians, Hugh and Sybil Giffard, and perhaps his nurses, rather than from his Provencal mother. Such knowledge would offer him no great social benefits — hardly anything of value was committed to writing in English, nor was English spoken in the sophisticated court circles in which Edward generally moved — yet there would have been advantages later in life for a king who could communicate in the tongue used by the vast majority of his subjects.

  What kind of things would Edward have learned about? There was no curriculum as such, but there were nevertheless a wide range of subjects that were considered suitable for study. A knowledge of history was desirable, chiefly because it furnished examples of worthy individuals whose successful behaviour could be emulated, as well as losers whose mistakes ought to be avoided. To this end Edward probably learned a good deal of the history of his own family, which provided ready-made heroes, such as Richard the Lionheart (Edward's great-uncle), as well as less laudable figures, such his grandfather, King John. The unavoidable exemplar, however, was Edward the Confessor. Henry III filled his palaces with images of his favourite royal saint, and never failed to celebrate his two annual festivals (usually at Westminster). Henry had been particularly keen that his wife should join him in appreciation of the Confessor's all-round wonderfulness from the moment she arrived in England, and commissioned none other than Matthew Paris to write for her, in French, a history of the saintly king's reign. Eleanor dutifully obliged her husband by imitating his hero-worship, and must surely have shared her new-found knowledge with her eldest son: Edward also became a devoted follower of his namesake's cult, albeit not to the same excessive extent as his father.

  If Eleanor had a personal hand in the development of her son's historical awareness, it may have been to teach him about the more distant, legendary past of the country she had come to regard as home. To judge from her book purchases, the queen was a great reader of medieval romances — that is, stirring tales of chivalry, rather than love stories in the modern sense. Her enthusiasm for such literature was probably formed during her youth in Provence — the fashion for romances had originated in southern France in the half century before her birth. The stories they recounted were set in a variety of historic epochs, including Ancient Greece and Rome (the Romance of Alexander) and early medieval France (the Romance of Charlemagne). By far the most popular romances of all, however, not just in England and with Eleanor, but in every part of Europe, were those set in Ancient Britain - the tales of King Arthur, and his knights of the Round Table.

  Such stories were read, or listened to, for fun and amusement. They were typically full of action, often violent and bloody, and placed a high value on sheer physical accomplishment. Heroes were praised for their prowess in tournaments and their body count on the battlefield. But, at the same time, romances also had a didactic purpose, to the extent that they celebrated a wider set of virtues that society — especially secular, aristocratic society — held dear. Those who heard tell of Arthur and his knightly companions knew that they should be courageous, not cowardly; loyal, not treacherous; generous, not greedy; frank and open in their dealings, not sly and deceptive.16

  When it came to learning about geography there was no substitute for venturing out into the wider world. While it made sense not to expose young children to too much travel, they were moved on special occasions. Henry III, for example, typically celebrated Christmas at Winchester or Westminster, and we can be fairly certain that he would have wanted his family with him for the festivities. Similarly, Eleanor had places she liked to stay apart from Windsor: the royal palace at Woodstock, near Oxford, and the palaces at Clarendon and Marlborough in Wiltshire, were among her favourite destinations. Her children must have been brought to her from time to time - as infants both Edward and Margaret had special saddles made to allow them to ride with an adult — or have travelled with their mother in her carriage. Leaving the safety of the nursery inevitably brought risks: on his seventh birthday in 1246 Edward was with his parents on the Hampshire coast, celebrating the dedication of Beaulieu Abbey, when he suddenly fell so seriously ill that he was unable to be moved for three weeks. By the same token, illness could strike anywhere: Edward was also reportedly sick as a child in the more familiar surroundings of Westminster and Windsor.'7

  Risk had to be balanced against the importance of allowing a growing boy to experience the world beyond the palace walls, and to practise the kind of activities that would allow him to develop a more robust physique. Seven was precisely the age when it was thought that such training should begin. Following the death of his first mentor, Hugh Giffard, in 1246, Edward was committed to the care of Bartholomew Pecche, a knight formerly responsible for little Margaret's welfare. It must have been under Bartholomew's watchful eye that his new charge first began to acquire the skills and enthusiasms that he demonstrated in later life: how to gallop a horse; how to train and track hawks; how to hunt. Henry III, almost uniquely among medieval monarchs, does not seem to have engaged in such pursuits, and clearly did not relish them. But in 1247, a year after Pecche's appointment, the king granted his son permission to hunt in Windsor Forest. This assumes that Edward was becoming familiar with weapons, learning how to handle knives, bows and swords. It cannot have been much later that he found the strength to lift a lance, and began to hone the ability of hitting a target.

  As Edward left his infancy behind, therefore, he grew fitter, stronger, more accomplished, and more aware of the world around him: not only the hills and woods around Windsor and a number of other royal residences, but also the landscape of southern England as a whole, seen first from the windows of his mother's carriage, and increasingly standing in the stirrups of his own horse. By today's standards, this landscape would seem thinly populated and underproductive: in the thirteenth century, only around 3 to 4 million people lived in England, the vast majority of them dwelling in small villages, and obliged (either to their lords, or for their own sakes) to till the soil in order to survive. Yet by medieval standards this was a densely populated country with a dynamic and expanding economy. The population was growing rapidly, which meant that more and more land was being brought under the plough. A kingdom that to us would have seemed almost empty must have seemed bustling to Edward. Everywhere he looked, there were ancient forests being felled, new towns being founded, and peasants on their way to market to sell their surplus produce.

  And what of the world beyond? Except for what he saw with his own eyes, Edward would have had only a limited concept of geography.

  Accurate maps of the kind that we today take for granted were in his day entirely unknown. The extent of cartographical science as it stood in the thirteenth century is best summed up by the large sheet of parchment that now hangs in Hereford Cathedral, and that is generally referred to as the Mappa Mundi (although other medieval maps also go by the same name, which means 'cloth of the world'). Edward may never have seen this particular map - it was created towards the end of his life, probably in Lincolnshire. He would, however, have seen other examples drawn to an identical scheme, for they were quite p
opular among those able to afford them. In the 1230s Henry III commissioned two such world maps for the royal residences at Winchester and Westminster, and miniature versions were sometimes copied into prayer books. It would have been quite likely that Edward owned one himself.

  It is a popular misconception that in the Middle Ages people believed that the world was flat. They didn't — this is a patronising but sadly pervasive modern myth. Astronomical observation and ancient authorities told medieval man that his world was spherical. A true understanding of the Earth's surface, however, eluded him, due to the limited extent of his geographical knowledge. In an age before Columbus, Europeans knew of only three continents: Africa, Asia, and Europe itself. These, they believed, were entirely concentrated in the northern hemisphere, for the equator was held to be an impassibly hot barrier, beyond which no life could exist. This, therefore, is what the Hereford Mappa Mundi endeavours to show: the northern half of a spherical world, and the many wonders within it.

  In this global scheme the British Isles are extremely peripheral, squeezed against the edge of the bottom left-hand quadrant. Yet, in spite of the very limited amount of space that this affords, the result is surprisingly detailed: over thirty towns and cities are crammed in, as well as mountain ranges and major rivers. The map's designer, however, was concerned to record more than the merely topographic. The further he ventured beyond western Europe and the hazier his geographical knowledge became, the more he felt able to include material of a mythological nature. The map's southern edge is populated by strange human creatures: hermaphrodites, people with four eyes, men with their faces in their stomachs. Africa teems with monsters and beasts, among them the cyclops, the fawn and the unicorn. In the Mediterranean, too, there is a heavy emphasis on ancient legend: the Golden Fleece, the Labyrinth and the Scylla and Charybdis all jostle for space.

  And yet, in spite of the wealth of classical and fantastical material that the Mappa Mundi includes, its view of the world is unmistakably a Christian one. Scenes from the Bible, including Noah's Ark and the Tower of Babel, dominate the depiction of the Holy Land. At the top edge of the parchment, above the Earth itself, sits God, surrounded by angels, and below him stands the Virgin Mary. But it is to the middle of the map that the viewer's eye is inevitably drawn. At the centre of the circle — directly over the marks made by the artist's compass as he drew the outline of the world — is the city of Jerusalem.

  To regard Jerusalem as the centre of the world was obviously another consequence of possessing a Christian perspective: immediately above his picture of the Holy City, the Mappa Mundi artist drew a picture of the crucified Christ. More than this, though, it was to see the world through the eyes of a crusader. By the middle of the thirteenth century, the Christians of western Europe had been engaged for 150 years in a struggle to wrest control of Jerusalem from the Islamic rulers of the Middle East. At the end of the eleventh century, when the first crusaders had departed, the idea had been a revolutionary one; by Edward's day it was a central and universally accepted fact of life. A journey to the East to fight the infidel had become a major part of what it meant to be a knight, as fundamental as owning a horse or knowing how to hold a lance. To wear the sign of the cross and to fight in defence of the Holy City was the highest of all knightly endeavours. Nor was it just the concern of the military classes: all ranks of society were exhorted to support crusaders, morally and financially. Rarely would a year go by without a new preaching initiative, intended to drum up prayers and funds for a new expedition.

  Edward's understanding of the history of crusading would have been limited to what he heard in popular tales. From these he would have known, for example, how the knights of the First Crusade had travelled thousands of miles, overcome unimaginable hardships, and eventually succeeded in liberating Jerusalem. Likewise he would have heard the equally famous stories of the Third Crusade, the attempt to retake Jerusalem after its fall in 1187 - an ultimately unsuccessful mission, but one redeemed by the heroic exploits of Richard the Lionheart. King Richard, of course, provided a family connection with crusading, being the uncle of Henry III, but by Edward's day he had been dead for almost half a century. An altogether more vital link with crusading existed, however, in the form of Edward's own Uncle Richard, Henry's younger brother.

  Richard, earl of Cornwall (or Richard of Cornwall, as he is usually known) had left England on crusade in the summer of 1240, before Edward's first birthday. It was, in fact, thanks to Edward's arrival that the earl's departure had become a feasible proposition, because before that moment he had been first in line to the throne. Alas, when it came to fighting, Richard had more in common with his older brother than his illustrious namesake, and as a consequence there was no military action of any consequence in the course of his expedition. But Richard was far more intelligent than Henry, and was especially skilled at negotiation. Indeed, such was his diplomatic ability that, during his brief stay in the Holy Land, the earl negotiated the return of Jerusalem. The deal proved short lived — the city fell again four years later - but at the time it secured Richard an international reputation for statesmanship, and he returned to England in 1242 garlanded with laurels and convinced of his own triumphant success. Moreover, he returned full of the wonders he had seen: bands of musicians riding on the back of elephants, Saracen girls who danced on balls. The earl told these tales to Matthew Paris, who wrote them down, and we can be fairly certain he would have shared them with his nephew as well: Richard, as well as being Edward's uncle, was one of the more important of his many godparents, and the two of them became very close.

  Henry III was predictably more muted in his enthusiasm for crusaders and crusading than his brother and most of his other subjects. He possessed the requisite piety in abundance, but lacked the necessary penchant for violence. In the late 1240s, however, in the wake of Jerusalem's recent fall, the pressure on him to participate was becoming irresistible. Many English noblemen were ready to go east under their own banners, or even to join the expedition of Louis IX, king of France, who set sail for the Holy Land in 1248. This last, in particular, really threw down the gauntlet to Henry, for the French king was his great rival. Would he, the king of England, stand idly by while King Louis took all the glory? With national and dynastic pride at stake, Henry eventually decided that the answer was no. In March 1250, in a grand public ceremony, the king surprised his subjects and took the cross. Many other nobles and knights also took their vows at the same time, and crusade fever soon took hold of the whole court. Within a few weeks, Queen Eleanor had borrowed a copy of The Song of Antioch, a romance history of the First Crusade. The following year Henry began to commission new wall-paintings in many of his castles and palaces, featuring scenes from the same story, or episodes from the life of Richard the Lionheart. Wherever an impressionable eleven-year-old looked or listened, there was an exhortation to go on crusade.

  Having taken his vow, Henry III could not depart at once. A crusade was not a whimsical jaunt; on the contrary, it was the undertaking of a lifetime, and required many months, running into years, of careful preparation. Crusaders had to be sure, above all, of two things. First, that they had enough money to fund their expedition. To this end, Henry made economies in his expenditure, and began to save up a gold treasure (gold having greater currency in the East than the silver coinage used in the West). Second, a crusader needed to ensure that his lands would be safe and secure during his absence. Here Henry had less success, and soon found himself running into deep difficulties. These difficulties, however, even as they cast the king's crusade into doubt, were the making of his eldest son.

  Henry III was first and foremost king of England, but he was also lord of other lands besides. In Ireland, for example, English adventurers had carved out new domains in the last decades of the twelfth century, and Henry's grandfather, Henry II, had intervened to ensure that the English Crown had the whip hand. In Wales too, the English had made considerable inroads in the course of the twelfth century, with t
he result that large parts of the south and east of the country were ruled by English lords or royal officials. Neither of these 'British' zones, however, was a cause for concern in 1250; they, like England, seemed secure. The problem that loomed in 1250 lay across the Channel with Henry's ancestral lands on the Continent.

  Ever since 1066, when Duke William of Normandy had seized the throne of England, English kings had held extensive lands in what is now France. In the course of the twelfth century they had expanded their empire further and further south, until eventually their power reached the Pyrenees. Henry II, the chief architect of this expansion, had ended up with more lands in France than the king of France himself, and this, naturally, was the main cause of Anglo-French antagonism. The balance of power, however, had been dramatically reversed in the next generation. Henry II's son, the incompetent King John, had lost almost all the lands his father had assembled. Within a decade of John's death in 1216, and before his son - Henry III - had come of age, all that remained of a once great family inheritance was the south-western corner of France, known as Aquitaine, or Gascony.

  Seen in this light, Gascony was a much diminished rump, but regarded on its own the duchy was an extensive possession, stretching over 150 miles from north to south and around half that distance from east to west. Henry III jealously guarded this last remnant of his Continental inheritance, and sought anxiously to protect it by extending his influence elsewhere in the region. It had been for this reason, and to keep up the continuing competition with France, that the king had sought a wife from Provence: eighteen months before Henry had married Eleanor, King Louis had married her elder sister, Margaret. One day, Henry hoped, he would regain the territories his father had lost. It was with this ambition that he had set out for France during Edward's infancy - a disastrous adventure that had served only to underline his reputation as a military bungler. In the meantime, what mattered most was conserving Gascony. This was a particular priority for Eleanor and her advising uncle, Peter of Savoy, for they had long determined that the duchy should one day go to Edward. Almost from the moment of his birth they had seen off other would-be claimants — principally Richard of Cornwall — and, soon after his tenth birthday, their labours were rewarded: in September 1249, Henry III made a formal grant of Gascony to his eldest son. But by the time the king took the cross some six months later, affairs in the duchy were spinning out of control. Rebellion was beginning to rage, imperilling both Edward's inheritance and Henry's crusade. Its cause was Simon de Montfort.