The Life and Reign of Edward I.

by Robert Benton Seeley

As the first question would be a trial on which life or death depended, the king summoned no prelates to this parliament; probably feeling that in the discussion of such matters it was desirable that the clergy should take no part. The second subject to be brought under discussion was one relating to trade and commerce, and the king saw in it an opportunity of giving more form and substance than heretofore to that idea which had never been absent from his mind,—that, in a well‐constituted parliament, “the lower as well as the higher estate” should be represented.

We have already said that we cannot doubt that, in the first parliament of Westminster, some citizens, under the name of “the commonalty of the realm,” were present; but we find no record of any formal summoning of burgesses or borough‐representatives. Now, however, the chancellor had a particular statute, relating to trade, to bring forward, and now, therefore, he could advise the king to summon, from the city of London and from twenty other great towns, from each two representatives, “de sapientioribus et aptioribus,” for the consideration and discussion of the said statute. Here we have the real commencement of the borough representation of England. Let Simon de Montfort have all the merit which can justly be attributed to him, for having, in 1265, called to a council in Westminster some burgesses or borough‐representatives:—that fact must always be taken with two qualifications: first, that earl Simon needed these borough‐representatives to fill the empty benches, only five earls and seventeen barons attending at his call; and secondly, that that council was not what we now understand by the term, a “parliament,”—no legislation being attempted in it.

Some historians have been too ready to assume or assert, on all occasions, that our free constitution has been won by the repeated struggles of the people, who succeeded in wresting from their sovereigns one privilege after another. The whole course of Edward’s government clears him from any imputation of this kind. At the opening of his political life, when he stood as a victorious leader at the head of an army, we find him again and again asserting the principle, that in a well‐constituted parliament all classes should be represented; and now, when he orders these writs to be issued for the summoning of forty‐two borough representatives to Shrewsbury, it is wholly of his own free will, and without the slightest “pressure of circumstances,” that he acts. His chancellor feels the want of a new law for the regulation of commerce, and at once the idea seems to occur, and is forthwith acted upon, “Let all the principal towns, where the merchants and traders dwell—let them send representatives to this parliament, and let the new statute be passed with their help and in their presence.”

The parliament of Shrewsbury met on the 30th of September, 1283, in that town. The business to be done consisted, first, of a criminal trial, and, secondly, of a statute on commercial matters. No prelates, as we have said, were summoned. To bring them from many distant places to Shrewsbury would have imposed upon them much trouble and expense, and for no fitting end. The persons summoned were—eleven earls, ninety‐nine barons, two knights for each county, and two citizens from each of twenty‐one great towns; and the writs themselves expressed, with all Edward’s usual frankness, the purpose and the desire with which he called together this, the first complete parliament, though still in outline, that England ever saw. They remind the barons, knights, and citizens that they had seen “how Llewellyn and David his brother, spurning the obligations of fidelity into which they had entered, had, more treacherously than usual, suddenly set fire to villages, slain some of the inhabitants, burnt others, and shut up others in prison, savagely shedding innocent blood.” The king desires those to whom the writs were directed to come to Shrewsbury on the day indicated, “there to determine what ought to be done with the said David, whom we received when an exile, nourished when an orphan, and enriched out of our own lands, placing him among the nobles of our court.” “We charge you, therefore,” the king concludes, “to meet us at Shrewsbury, on the day after the feast of St. Michael, to confer upon this and upon other matters.”

Before this parliament, then, was David of Snowdon impeached.“He was tried,” says the chronicle of Dunstable, “by the whole baronage of England.” It is quite clear that Edward desired that others, and not himself, should decide upon the fate of the unhappy man. He appears to have retired to his chancellor’s residence of Acton Burnel, and to have taken no part in these proceedings. The trial was entered upon, and, according to the custom of those days, the criminal was arraigned for several crimes, and for each crime a distinct punishment was ordered. As a traitor to the king, David was to be drawn to the place of execution; as the murderer of certain knights in Hawarden Castle, he was to be hanged; having sacrilegiously committed these crimes on Palm Sunday, he was to be disembowelled; and having conspired the death of the king in various places, he was to be quartered.[24]

This sentence, deliberately passed, was carried into effect, and many have been the exclamations of modern writers at its cruelty. One of the most moderate of these critics condemns Edward for “permitting his nobles and lawyers to devise and carry into effect such a barbarous sentence.” In like manner is he censured for ordering Llewellyn’s head to be set up over the gate of the Tower.

Such writers forget that a man must be judged, not by the ideas or usages of other times, but by those of the age in which he has been brought up and has lived. In our day, the thought of setting up a gory head over Temple Bar would horrify all men. But when the last rebellion was suppressed in England, little more than a century ago, the government of which lords Hardwicke and Chatham were members, beheaded men on Kennington Common, and sent their heads to Carlisle, to be set up over the castle‐gates. Johnson and Goldsmith, Cowper and Whitfield, were accustomed to see human heads on Temple‐Bar as they passed up and down Fleet Street.

The mutilation of the criminal’s body is another feature of the case which shocks our modern notions, but it was a prevalent custom of those times. In 1238, before Edward was born, a man was found lurking in the palace, who confessed that his object was to kill the king. He had been guilty of no overt act, yet for this treasonable design he was sentenced first to be dragged asunder by horses, then to be beheaded, and his body to be divided into three parts, to be exposed in three cities.

Nor were these mutilations ordered in criminal cases only. Robert Bruce, like many others, ordered his heart to be taken out after his death and carried to the Holy Land. Edward himself, if ever a man loved a wife, dearly loved his Eleanor. Yet, on her death, he ordered her heart to be interred in the church of the Black Friars, her bowels in Lincoln Minster, and the rest of her body in Westminster Abbey. Such were the habits and modes of feeling when a king could sleep in the open air on the night before a battle; when the gory head of an earl was thought a fitting present for a noble lady; and when even friendly sports often ended in slaughter.