In the intervals of the legislation which formed the main feature of the first half of his reign, Edward was often distracted by external matters. He was, on the whole, on very good terms with his first cousin, Philip III. of France; Welsh wars. the trouble did not come from this direction, though there was the usual crop of feudal rebellions in Gascony. Nor did Edward’s relations with the more remote states of the continent lead to any important results, though he had many treaties and alliances in hand. It was with Wales that his most troublesome relations occurred. Llewelyn-ap-Gruffydd, the old ally of de Montfort, had come with profit out of the civil wars of 1263-66, and having won much land and more influence during the evil days of Henry III., was reluctant to see that his time of prosperity had come to an end, now that a king of a very different character sat on the English throne.
Friction had begun the moment that Edward returned to his kingdom from the crusade. Llewelyn would not deign to appear before him to render the customary homage due from Wales to the English crown, but sent a series of futile excuses lasting over three years. In 1277, however, the king grew tired of waiting, invaded the principality and drove his recalcitrant vassal up into the fastnesses of Snowdon, where famine compelled him to surrender as winter was beginning. Llewelyn was pardoned, but deprived of all the lands he had gained during the days of the civil war, and restricted to his old North Welsh dominions. He remained quiescent for five years, but busied himself in knitting up secret alliances with the Welsh of the South, who were resenting the introduction of English laws and customs by the strong-handed king. In 1282 there was a sudden and well-planned rising, which extended from the gates of Chester to those of Carmarthen; several castles were captured by the insurgents, and Edward had to come to the rescue of the lords-marchers at the head of a very large army. After much checkered fighting Llewelyn was slain at the skirmish of Orewyn Bridge near Builth on the 11th of December 1282. On his death the southern rebels submitted, but David his brother continued the struggle for three months longer in the Snowdon district, till his last bands were scattered and he himself taken prisoner. Edward Conquest of Wales. beheaded him at Shrewsbury as a traitor, having the excuse that David had submitted once before, had been endowed with lands in the Marches, and had nevertheless joined his brother in rebellion. After this the king abode for more than a year in Wales, organizing the newly conquered principality into a group of counties, and founding many castles, with dependent towns, within its limits. The “statute of Wales,” issued at Rhuddlan in 1284, provided for the introduction of English law into the country, though a certain amount of Celtic customs was allowed to survive. For the next two centuries and a half the lands west of Dee and Wye were divided between the new counties, forming the “principality” of Wales, and the “marches” where the old feudal franchises continued, till the marcher-lordships gradually fell by forfeiture or marriage to the crown. Edward’s grip on the land was strong, and it had need to be so, for in 1287 and 1294-1295 there were desperate and widespread revolts, which were only checked by the existence of the new castles, and subdued by the concentration of large royal armies. In 1301 the king’s eldest surviving son Edward, who had been born at Carnarvon in 1284, was created “prince of Wales,” and invested with the principality, which henceforth became the regular appanage of the heirs of the English crown. This device was apparently intended to soothe Welsh national pride, by reviving in form, if not in reality, the separate existence of the old Cymric state. For four generations the land was comparatively quiet, but the great rebellion of Owen Glendower in the reign of Henry IV. was to show how far the spirit of particularism was from extinction.
Some two years after his long sojourn in Wales Edward made an even longer stay in a more remote corner of his dominions. Gascony being, as usual, out of hand, he crossed to Bordeaux in 1286, and abode in Guienne for no less than three years, reducing the duchy to such order as it had never known before, settling all disputed border questions with the new king of France, Philip IV., founding many new towns, and issuing many useful statutes and ordinances. He returned suddenly in 1289, called home by complaints that reached him as to the administration of justice by his officials, who were slighting the authority of his cousin Edmund of Cornwall, whom he had left behind as regent. He dismissed almost the whole bench of judges, and made other changes among his ministers. At the same time he fell fiercely upon the great lords of the Welsh Marches, who had been indulging in private wars; when they returned to their evil practice he imprisoned the chief offenders, the earls of Hereford and Gloucester, forfeited their estates, and only gave them back when they had paid vast fines (1291). Another Expulsion of the Jews. act of this period was Edward’s celebrated expulsion of the Jews from England (1290). This was the continuation of a policy which he had already carried out in Guienne. It would seem that his reasons were partly religious, but partly economic. No earlier king could have afforded to drive forth a race who had been so useful to the crown as bankers and money-lenders; but by the end of the 13th century the financial monopoly of the Jews had been broken by the great Italian banking firms, whom Edward had been already employing during his Welsh wars. Finding them no less accommodating than their rivals, he gratified the prejudices of his subjects and himself by forcing the Hebrews to quit England. The Italians in a few years became as unpopular as their predecessors in the trade of usury, their practices being the same, if their creed was not.
Meanwhile in the same year that saw the expulsion of the Jews, King Edward’s good fortune began to wane, with the rise of the Scottish question, which was to overshadow the latter half of his reign. Alexander III., the last Edward I. and Scotland. male in direct descent of the old Scottish royal house, had died in 1286. His heiress was his only living descendant, a little girl, the child of his deceased daughter Margaret and Eric, king of Norway. After much discussion, for both the Scottish nobles and the Norse king were somewhat suspicious, Edward had succeeded in obtaining from them a promise that the young queen should marry his heir, Edward of Carnarvon. This wedlock would have led to a permanent union of the English and Scottish crowns, but not to an absorption of the lesser in the greater state, for the rights of Scotland were carefully guarded in the marriage-treaty. But the scheme was wrecked by the premature death of the bride, who expired by the way, while being brought over from Norway to her own kingdom, owing to privations and fatigue suffered on a tempestuous voyage.
She had no near relatives, and more than a dozen Scottish or Anglo-Scottish nobles, distantly related to the royal line, put in a claim to the crown, or at least to a part of the royal heritage. The board of six regents, who had been ruling Scotland for the young queen, seeing their own power at an end and civil war likely to break out, begged Edward of England to arbitrate between the claimants. The history of the next twenty years turned on the legal point whether the arbitrator acted—as he himself contended—in the capacity of suzerain, or—as the Scots maintained—in that of a neighbour of acknowledged wisdom and repute, invited to settle a domestic problem. This question of the relations between the English and the Scottish crowns had been raised a dozen times between the days of Edward the Elder and those of Henry III. There was no denying the fact that the northern kings had repeatedly done homage to their greater neighbours. But, save during the years when William the Lion, after his captivity, had owned himself the vassal of Henry II. for all his dominions, there was considerable uncertainty as to the exact scope of the allegiance which had been demanded and given. And William’s complete submission had apparently been cancelled, when Richard I. sold him in 1190 a release from the terms of the treaty of Falaise. Since that date Alexander II. and Alexander III. had repeatedly owned themselves vassals to the English crown, and had even sat in English parliaments. But it was possible for patriotic Scots to contend that they had done so only in their capacity as English barons—for they held much land south of Tweed—and to point to the similarity of their position to that of the English king when he did homage for his duchy of Guienne at Paris, without thereby admitting any suzerainty of the French crown over England or Ireland. On the last occasion when Alexander III. had owned himself the vassal of Edward I., there had been considerable fencing on both sides as to the form of the oath, and, as neither sovereign at the moment had wished to push matters to a rupture, the words used had been intentionally vague, and both parties had kept their private interpretations to themselves. But now, when Edward met the Scottish magnates, who had asked for his services as arbitrator, he demanded that they should acknowledge that he was acting as suzerain and overlord of the whole kingdom of Scotland. After some delay, and with manifest reluctance, the Scots complied; their hand was forced by the fact that most of the claimants to the crown had hastened to make the acknowledgment, each hoping thereby to prejudice the English king in his own favour.
This submission having been made, Edward acted with honesty and fairness, handing over the adjudication to a body of eighty Scottish and twenty-four English barons, knights and bishops. These commissioners, after ample discussion and taking of evidence, adjudged the crown to John Baliol, the grandson of the eldest daughter of Earl David, younger brother of William the Lion. They ruled out the claim of Robert Bruce, the son of David’s second daughter, who had raised the plea that his descent was superior because he was a generation nearer than Baliol to their common ancestor. This theory of affinity had been well known in the 12th century, and had been urged in favour of King John when he was contending with his nephew Arthur. But by 1291 it had gone out of favour, and the Scottish barons had no hesitation in declaring Baliol their rightful king. Edward at once gave him seizin of Scotland, and handed over to him the royal castles, which had been placed in his hands as a pledge during the arbitration. In return Baliol did him homage as overlord of the whole kingdom of Scotland.
This, unfortunately, turned out to be the beginning, not the end, of troubles. Edward was determined to exact all the ordinary feudal rights of an overlord—whatever might have been the former relations of the English and Scottish crowns. The Scots, on the other hand, were resolved not to allow of the introduction of usages which had not prevailed in earlier times, and to keep the tie as vague and loose as possible. Before Baliol had been many months on the throne there was grave friction on the question of legal appeals. Scottish litigants defeated in the local courts began to appeal to the courts of Westminster, just as Gascon litigants were wont to appeal from Bordeaux to Paris. King John and his baronage, relying on the fact that such evocation of cases to a superior court had never before been known, refused to allow that it was valid. King Edward insisted that by common feudal usage it was perfectly regular, and announced his intention of permitting it. Grave friction had already begun when external events precipitated an open rupture between the king of England and his new vassal.
Philip III. of France, who had always pursued a friendly policy with his cousin of England, had died in 1285, and had been succeeded by his son Philip IV., a prince of a very different type, the most able and unscrupulous of Edward I. and Philip IV. all the dynasty of Capet. In 1294 he played a most dishonourable trick upon King Edward. There had been some irregular and piratical fighting at sea between English and Norman sailors, in which the latter had been worsted. When called to account for the doings of his subjects, as well as for certain disputes in Gascony, the English king promised redress, and, on the suggestion of Philip, surrendered, as a formal act of apology, the six chief fortresses of Guienne, which were to be restored when reparation had been made. Having garrisoned the places, Philip suddenly changed his line, refused to continue the negotiations, and declared the whole duchy forfeited. Edward was forced into war, after having been tricked out of his strongholds. Just after his first succours had sailed for the Gironde, the great Welsh rebellion of 1294 broke out, and the king was compelled to turn aside to repress it. This he accomplished in the next spring, but meanwhile hardly a foothold remained to him in Gascony. He was then preparing to cross the Channel in person, when Scottish affairs began to become threatening. King John declared himself unable to restrain the indignation of his subjects at the attempt to enforce English suzerainty over Scotland, and in July 1295 leagued himself with Philip of France, and expelled from his realm the chief supporters of the English alliance. Finding himself involved in two wars at once, Edward made an earnest appeal to his subjects to rise to the occasion and “because that which The “model parliament” of 1295. touches all should be approved of all” summoned the celebrated “model parliament” of November 1295, which exactly copied in its constitution Montfort’s parliament of 1265, members from all cities and boroughs being summoned along with the knights of the shires, and the inferior clergy being also represented by their proctors. This system henceforth became the normal one, and the English parliament assumed its regular form, though the differentiation of the two houses was not fully completed till the next century. Edward was voted liberal grants by the laity, though the clergy gave less than he had hoped; but enough money was obtained to fit out two armies, one destined for the invasion of Scotland, the other for that of Gascony.
The French expedition, which was led by the king’s brother Edmund, earl of Lancaster, failed to recover Gascony, and came to an ignominious end. But Edward’s own army achieved complete success in Scotland. Berwick was Invasion of Scotland. stormed, the Scottish army was routed at Dunbar (April 27), Edinburgh and Stirling were easily captured, and at last John Baliol, deserted by most of his adherents, surrendered at Brechin. Edward pursued his triumphant march as far as Aberdeen and Elgin, without meeting further resistance. He then summoned a parliament at Berwick, and announced to the assembled Scots that he had determined to depose King John, and to assume the crown himself. The ease with which he had subdued the realm misled him; he fancied that the slack resistance, which was mainly due to the incapacity and unpopularity of Baliol, implied the indifference of the Scots to the idea of annexation. The alacrity with which the greater part of the baronage flocked in to do him homage confirmed him in the mistaken notion. He appointed John, earl Warenne, lieutenant of the realm, with Hugh Cressingham, an English clerk, as treasurer, but left nearly all the minor offices in Scottish hands, and announced that Scottish law should be administered. He then returned to England, and began to make preparations for a great expedition to France in 1297.