The Life and Reign of Edward I.

by Robert Benton Seeley

we might feel a doubt whether the king had shielded an unworthy favourite, or the barons had conspired against an officer of inconvenient integrity. Happily, we are enabled to discover a few other facts respecting Walter Langton, and those facts all redound greatly to his honour.

Foremost of these must be placed his steady resistance to the excesses of the young prince and his favourite Gaveston. The king was now in the decline of life, and the young Edward had every prospect of being king in a few years. Langton was treasurer, and had the duty assigned to him of providing the young prince with a regular and a liberal income. What could have been a more obvious policy, with any minister of flexible morality, than to cultivate, by any practicable means, the good opinion and the favour of the young prince and of his minion? Yet we find Langton, during all the latter years of this reign, in a state of constant warfare with young Edward and with Gaveston; and as one very natural result—a result which the bishop himself must always have contemplated—we find Edward II., as one of his first acts on ascending the throne, depriving Langton of all his offices, throwing him into prison, and granting to Gaveston all the moveable property of the deprived prelate. This single fact of itself is sufficient to give us a favourable impression of Langton’s character. To have withstood the follies of the young prince and his favourite, and to have been persecuted by them for so doing, are surely circumstances which tell much in Langton’s favour; but they do not stand alone.

Two or three years pass over, during which the poor ex‐treasurer languishes in prison, while his enemies are occupied with the endeavour to find evidence to warrant his condemnation. The discontented barons at Lincoln had brought “many complaints” against him. If he had actually wronged any man, that person would now have the strongest reason for laying the crime to his charge; for in so doing he would not only gratify his own natural desire for vengeance, but would also please those who were now in power. But what do we hear? After being immured in a prison for nearly three years, Langton is at last released, there being no case against him. Under all the circumstances, we doubt if any higher or more triumphant proof of the integrity of the ex‐treasurer’s character could have been given.

But even this is not all. Winchelsey, the restless intriguer, has now returned, the only man who could keep him in check having been removed; and this factious ecclesiastic at once resumes his former work just where he had been forced to drop it, and begins to conspire against the son as he had been used to do against the father. The “confederacy” of the barons is revived, and Winchelsey is again its inspiring genius. What could have been more natural than for Langton, indignant at the persecution which he had endured, to have joined with eagerness this confederacy, the main object of which was to get rid of Gaveston, the cause of all his sufferings? But the course taken by this honest minister was one of singular integrity. He had been “imprisoned, deprived of his offices, and stripped of all his property;” and yet, after all, his persecutors had been obliged to admit his innocence, and to let him go free; and now “he was the only prelate who refused to join the confederacy against Edward II.”[113] Notwithstanding all the wrongs which he had received at the young king’s hands, this noble‐minded man remembered his great master, and that master’s faithful support of him against his enemies at Lincoln; and he refused to take part in any conspiracy against that master’s son. But the proof of Langton’s purity and integrity does not even end here. He had been released; the charges against him were now known to be groundless; but one more evidence of the highest kind was yet to be given. Three or four years after he had ignominiously expelled the bishop from his office, and ordered his imprisonment and his prosecution, the young king himself felt compelled to pay a reluctant tribute to Langton’s ability and integrity, by actually asking him to resume the treasurership, and to serve him as faithfully as he had served his father! Considering all the past quarrels between these two men, and their frequent collisions and consequent ill‐blood, this application must be admitted to be one of the most striking proofs of integrity that an expelled and disgraced officer ever received; and, taken in connection with the first Edward’s other selections, of such men as Burnel, Brabazon, etc., it gives us a deep impression both of that king’s skill and judgment in selecting his ministers, and also of his firm and steady support of them in the discharge of their duty.

But we must terminate this digression, and go back to the moment of Winchelsey’s disgrace and banishment to Rome. The chief criminal had thus been punished, but, as in many similar cases, the effects of his crime remained. He had fostered the discontent of the earls, and had guided and suggested their course. At Lincoln, though substantially defeated, the “confederacy” evidently obtained from the king some larger concessions, in regard to the forests, than he thought just or right; and the archbishop adroitly struck in at the close of the matter with his denunciation of the greater excommunication, which was calculated and intended to make those concessions unalterable and irrevocable. But this violent way of ending and deciding a great and intricate controversy only led, as violent courses usually do, to further complications. Questions of title and boundary, in the case of territory or landed estates, are those which, beyond most others, require patience and moderation. The king, also, in the present instance was dealt with in a manner which the great barons themselves would not tolerate in their own cases. Twenty years before this period the king had proposed a general investigation of titles, and one of the earls at once drew his sword, exclaiming, “It was by this that my forefathers won their lands, and by this I mean to maintain them.” To this repugnance the king gave way. But now a different rule was to be applied to the royal domains. The principle asserted was, that whatever could not be shown to have been forest at the accession of Henry II., in 1154, should be disafforested. The adoption of so wide a range must inevitably have introduced great differences of opinion, but there can be no doubt that many of the great barons added largely to their estates at the king’s expense by these “disafforestings.”

Yet, after all, there was another class, and that not a small one, which had a deep interest in these questions—an interest of a very different, and, indeed, opposite kind to that of the barons. The royal forests were not vast solitudes, or parks occupied solely by animals for the chase. Their borders, especially, were largely peopled by cottagers; who, under the permission of the king or his officers, had reared up dwellings within the privileged limits, and were allowed pasturage and even some kind of tillage therein. This whole class of persons now found their position imperilled. A sudden change of owners had in many places been experienced, and often the poor cottager found reason to regret the alteration. In this way, it soon became evident, that the “disafforesting” question was not one bearing upon the king’s personal recreations merely; but was intimately connected with the interests of thousands of his people. We are not imagining a possible or even a probable case. It is upon record, that divers petitions were sent in to the king, at his parliament of 1305, held at Westminster, on the day before the feast of St. Matthew, by “certain people that be put out of the forests by the great men,” and who “pray the king that they may be as they were wont to be heretofore.” This is set forth in the preamble to the ordinance. It was, then, in answer to the prayers of many who felt themselves aggrieved and oppressed, that the king passed, in that parliament, an “Ordinance of the Forests;” in which, with his usual frankness and explicitness, he explains the real position of the question.

He adverts, first, to the origin of the “disafforesting,” saying, “Our lord the king (to these petitions) answers, that since he hath granted the perambulation, he is pleased that it should stand, in like manner as it was granted; albeit that the thing was sued and demanded in an evil point.”

But next the king proceeds, as far as he was able, to amend the evil complained of, and to give comfort to those who had “cried unto him for succour.” He says, that with respect to “them that have lands and tenements disafforested by the late perambulation, and do desire to have common within the bounds of the forests,” “the intent and will of our lord the king is,” “that if any of them would rather be within the forest as they were before, than out of the forest as they are now, it pleaseth the king very well that they shall be received hereunto; so that they may remain in their ancient estate, and have common and other easement, as they had before. And our lord the king willeth and commandeth, that his justices of the forests, etc., shall take notice of this ordinance.”

This was an attempt to undo, so far as might be, some of the ill consequences of the hasty and violent determinations of 1301. But it may easily be perceived, that controversies and collisions would be likely to arise out of this state of things. Upon the strength of the charters and perambulations, and oaths and excommunications of 1301, the “great men” had begun to take portions of the royal forests to themselves, and to add them to their own estates. They also frequently got rid of the cottagers who had long found a home in the forests; and proceeded either to add the land to their farms, or to their own demesnes. To stop these evictions, the king issues a new ordinance. But that ordinance, when produced, would doubtless be met by an appeal to the charter, to the perambulations, and to the archbishop’s excommunication of all who departed from them. And, with many churchmen, this terrible anathema would be admitted to have a fearful weight.

It must have been this “conflict of the laws” which drove Edward to a course which, with our light, it is impossible to defend; but which, in those days, was of a kind which was by far too common. The sentence of a primate could only be absolutely nullified by an authority of a still higher kind. Hence, to undo the act of Winchelsey, the king sent to Rome, and asked of the pope a bull, cancelling and setting aside all the obligations of 1301.