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Edward I of England

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Edward I

Edward I (17/18 June 1239 – 7 July 1307), also known as Edward Longshanks and the Hammer of the Scots, was King of England from 1272 to 1307. Before his accession to the throne, he was commonly referred to as The Lord Edward.

Quotes

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  • The laws the Irish use are detestable to God, and so contrary to all law that they ought not to be deemed law.
    • Speech (1277), quoted in Marc Morris, A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (2009), p. 220

Quotes about Edward I

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  • Perhaps he will be rightly called a leopard. If we divide the name it becomes lion and pard; lion, because we saw that he was not slow to attack the strongest places, fearing the onslaught of none. ... A lion by pride and fierceness, he is by inconstancy and changeableness a pard, changing his word and promise, cloaking himself by pleasant speech.
    • The Song of Lewes (c. 1264), quoted in English Historical Documents, 1189–1327 (1975), p. 936
  • Edwardus Primus Scotorum Malleus hic est, 1308. Pactum Serva
  • Here is Edward the First, Hammer of the Scots, 1308. Keep the Vow.
    • Inscribed on his tomb in Westminster Abbey, quoted in Michael Prestwich, Edward I (1997), p. 566
  • In Edward the line of English Kings begins once more. After two hundred years of foreign rule, we have again a King bearing an English name and an English heart—the first to give us back our ancient laws under new shapes, the first, and for so long the last, to see that the Empire of his mighty namesake was a worthier prize than shadowy dreams of dominion beyond the sea. All between them were Normans or Angevins, careless of England and her people. Another and a brighter æra opens, as the lawgiver of England, the conqueror of Wales and Scotland, seems like an old Bretwalda or West-Saxon Basileus seated once more upon the throne of Cerdic and of Æthelstan.
    • Edward Augustus Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest of England, its Causes and its Results. Volume III. The Reign of Harold and the Interregnum (1869), pp. 521-522
  • With the single exception of the accession of Elizabeth, no such fortunate event ever occurred in English history as that which placed Edward I. upon his father's throne. By him the bases were settled upon which the English constitution rests. With marvellous sanity he comprehended the purport of every true thought which was floating on the surface of the age in which he lived. Perhaps no man, excepting Cromwell, possessed of equal capacity for government, ever showed less inclination to exercise arbitrary rule. He knew how to mould his subjects to his own wise will, not by crushing them into unwilling obedience, but by inspiring them with noble thoughts. When he first reached man's estate, he found his countrymen ready to rush headlong into civil war. When he died, he left England free as ever, but welded together into a compact and harmonious body. There was work enough left for future generations to do, but their work would consist merely in filling in the details of the outline which had been drawn once for all by a steady hand. All the main points of the constitution were accepted at his death. That the law was to be supreme; that that law was to be obtained from a body which should represent all the various classes and interests of the kingdom, and which was therefore most likely to look with fairness upon all; that power was to be lodged in the hands of the Government sufficient to combat against anarchy, whilst it was powerless to encroach upon the rights of the subjects—were means fully acknowledged by that great King, and brought out by him into practical operation.
    • Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James I. to the Disgrace of Chief-Justice Coke. 1603–1616. Vol. I (1863), pp. 15-16
  • In his own time, and amongst his own subjects, Edward was the object of almost boundless admiration. He was in the truest sense a national king. At the moment when the distinction between conquerors and conquered had passed away, and England felt herself once more a people, she saw in her ruler no stranger, but an Englishman. The national tradition returned in more than the golden hair or the English name which linked him to her earlier kings. Edward's very temper was English to the core. In good as in evil he stands out as the typical representative of his race, wilful and imperious as his people, tenacious of his rights, indomitable in his pride, dogged, stubborn, slow of apprehension, narrow in sympathy, but in the main just, unselfish, laborious, conscientious, haughtily observant of truth and self-respect, temperate, reverent of duty, religious.
  • A strange tenderness and sensitiveness to affection lay in fact beneath the stern imperiousness of his outer bearing... He is the first English king since the Conquest who loves his people with a personal love, and craves for their love back again. To his trust in them we owe our Parliament, to his care for them the great statutes which stand in the forefront of our laws.
  • A prince unequalled by any who had reigned in England since the Conqueror for prudence, valour and success.
    • Henry Hallam, View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages. Vol. II (1818), p. 205
  • The enterprizes finished by this prince, and the projects which he formed and brought very near to a conclusion, were more prudent, more regularly conducted, and more advantageous to the solid interests of his kingdom than those which were undertaken in any reign either of his ancestors or his successors. He restored authority to the government, disordered by the weakness of his father; he maintained the laws against all the efforts of his turbulent barons; he fully annexed to his crown the principality of Wales; he took the wisest and most effectual measures for reducing Scotland to a like condition; and tho' the equity of this latter enterprize may reasonably be questioned, the circumstances of the two kingdoms promised such certain success, and the advantage was so visible of uniting the whole island under one head, that those who give great indulgence to reasons of state in the measures of princes, will not be apt to regard this part of his conduct with much severity.
  • Edward, however exceptionable his character may appear on the head of justice, is the model of a politic and warlike King: He possessed industry, penetration, courage, vigour, and enterprize: He was frugal in all expences that were not necessary; he knew how to open the public treasures on a proper occasion; he punished criminals with severity; he was gracious and affable to his servants and courtiers; and being of a majestic figure, expert at all bodily exercises, and in the main well proportioned in his limbs, notwithstanding the great length and the smallness of his legs, he was as well qualified to captivate the populace by his exterior appearance, as to gain the approbation of men of sense by his more solid virtues.
  • But the chiefe advantage which the people of England reaped, and still continue to reap, from the reign of this great prince, was the correction, extension, amendment, and establishment of the laws, which Edward maintained in great vigour, and left much improved to posterity: For the work of wise legislation commonly remain; while the acquisitions of conquerors often perish with them. This merit has justly gained to Edward the appellation of the English Justinian.
  • The royal hero of this time was Edward I, a tall and relentless king who was said to be so fierce that he once literally scared a man to death. Under Edward's belligerent leadership, the English were finally induced to cease fighting one another and turn their attentions on their neighbours: Scotland and Wales. Edward I's brutal attempts to become the master not only of England but the whole of Britain are the subject of the 'Age of Arthur.' The popularity of Arthurian tales and relic-hunting increased as a new mythology of English kingship was explored. Edward cast himself as the inheritor of Arthur (originally a Welsh king) who sought to reunite the British Isles and usher in a great new age of royal rule. Despite flurries of outrage form his barons, who began to organize political opposition through the nascent political body known as parliament, Edward very nearly succeeded in his goals, and his influence over England's relations with Scotland and Wales has never entirely waned.
    • Dan Jones, The Plantagenets: The Kings Who Made England (2012), p. xxxv
  • He was so handsome and great, so powerful in arms,
    That of him may one speak as long as the world lasts.
    For he had no equal as a knight in armour
    For vigour and valour, neither present nor future.
    • Peter Langtoft, quoted in The Chronicle of Pierre de Langtoft, in French Verse, from the Earliest Period to the Death of King Edward I, Vol. II, ed. Thomas Wright (1868), p. 381
  • Edward had friends, but no favourites; he picked out suitable or congenial men as he pleased, but it never enterred his mind to "pack" his court. He was the king. He used aliens freely and had foreign friends, but he did not put them in positions of permanent trust at the centre of affairs, nor did he admit them to the intimate places of household administration. There were few foreign clerks in the wardrobe during his reign. The court was so English that the large number of aliens in Edward's service raised no outcry.
    • F. M. Powicke, King Henry III and the Lord Edward: The Community of the Realm in the Thirteenth Century, Volume II (1947), pp. 694-695
  • No king laid more emphasis on his duty to hold his own and to recover what he had lost. And it was a social duty, to be enforced on him by his counsellors if he neglected it himself. In matters touching his state he insisted on discussion in council, sometimes in parliament, before he had made a decision... The king takes good and learned counsel. He and his vassals are one. Justice must be observed, self-help restrained, corruption—the curse of social relationships everywhere—investigated and punished.
    • F. M. Powicke, King Henry III and the Lord Edward: The Community of the Realm in the Thirteenth Century, Volume II (1947), p. 712
  • Which puissant Princes raigne and life, wee cannot heere shut up with a nobler Euloge, than that where-with our Great and Judicious Antiquary [William Camden] hath already deportrayed him, as a Prince of chiefe renowne, to whose heroicke minde God proportioned (as a most worthy Mansion) a bodie answerable, so that as well in beautie and goodly presence, as in wisedome and valour, hee was sutable to the height of his Regall Dignitie, whose flourishing youth his Destinie did exercise with many warres and troubles of the State, so to frame & fit him for the British Empire; which, being King, he so managed with the glory of his Welsh and Northern victories, that by due desert he is to be reputed a chiefe honour of Britannie.
    • John Speed, The History of Great Britaine (2nd ed. 1623), p. 563
  • On the 21st September [1274] Burnell was made Chancellor. From that date, and with the able assistance of that minister, began the series of legal reforms which have gained for Edward the title of the English Justinian; a title which, if it be meant to denote the importance and permanence of his legislation and the dignity of his position in legal history, no Englishman will dispute.
    • William Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England, Volume II (1875), p. 105
  • It is true that Edward I has been far less roughly handled by historians than have some of the English kings. He has not suffered the fate of Charles I, who has been arraigned, tried and sentenced over and over again since he faced his judges in Westminster Hall, although in these later proceedings not his life but his reputation has been at stake. On the other hand, Edward's posthumous career among scholars has not been as spectacular as that of the Conqueror, but it is not entirely unremarkable. During the last two centuries he has been turned from a strong ruler into a national king; from a national king into an aspiring tyrant; and now from an aspiring tyrant into a conventional, if competent, lord. That these changes represent a growth of knowledge about him and his age is clear enough. What is no less important, they represent a growth of understanding as well.
    • G. Templeman, 'Edward I and the Historians', The Cambridge Historical Journal, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1950), p. 35
  • That Edward was above all things an English king, no one will deny. That the most important results of his work were seen in the organisation of English institutions and in the attempted extension of English rule over the rest of the British Islands is equally plain. But it is a very false and one-sided view that ignores his constant and vivid interest in his Aquitanian inheritance, and that puts aside as of no account his watchful care of English interests in Europe, and his constant efforts, in cases where direct English interests were very little involved, to uphold some sort of European balance, while strenuously striving to preserve or restore the peace of Europe.
  • When all deductions are made, Edward remains one of the greatest of English kings even in his foreign relations. He won for England a sure and foremost place in the councils of Europe. His honesty of purpose and his ability of conception have won the warmest praises both from his own contemporaries abroad and from those modern foreign writers to whose works we must, to the disgrace of English scholarship, have recourse if we wish to learn how truly great was the great English king when all Europe welcomed him as the mediator of peace, when his friendship was sought by every power of Western Europe, and when he made the name of England respected and feared in Germany, in France, in Spain, and in Italy.
  • As he lay dying he sent his last words of counsel to his absent son. He urged him to persevere in the subjection of Scotland, and to avoid unworthy favourites. His last thoughts turned to the two great enterprises on which he had bent his mind—the subjection of Scotland and the recovery of the Holy Land. Even after his death he longed to share in those great works. He begged his son to carry his bones about with him in his Scottish campaigns, so that even the dead Edward might still lead his warriors to victory against the hated enemy. He also requested that his heart should be sent to the Holy Land with a train of a hundred knights to fight for the recovery of the Sepulchre of the Lord.
  • Henrico regi Angliæ natus est filius, quem ab Othone legato baptizatum, in honorem gloriosissimi confessoris et regis Edwardi, Edwardum vocavit.
  • A son was born to Henry, King of England, whom the ambassador Otto baptized and named Edward in honour of the most glorious confessor and King Edward.
    • Nicholas Trivet, De Ordine Frat. Prædictatorum, Annales Sex Regum Angliæ, Qui A Comitibus Andega Vensibus Originem Traxerunt, (A.D. M.C.XXXVI.—M.CCC.VII.) Ad Fidem Codicum Manuscriptorum Recensuit (1845), p. 225
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