Read Online The Demon's Brood by Desmond Seward - Free Book Online
Authors: Desmond Seward
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and administration, and the Wardrobe for the executive. Edward found the right man to manage these departments, a young chancery clerk from Shropshire, Robert Burnell, who understood what he wanted. When appointed chancellor (in place of justiciar), Burnell established the Chancery court at London so that it no longer accompanied the king on progress. Ignoring Burnellâs greed and scandalous private life, Edward got the best out of him, even if eventually it cost the Crown over eighty manors.
The upheavals of the 1260s had resulted in a dramatic rise in murder, robbery, rape and arson. Edwardâs solution was a team of judges who prosecuted on the slightest evidence of wrongdoing. Accompanied by the judges of Kingâs Bench, he spent the winter on progress through the Midlands and southern England, finding so much proof of extortion, bribery, embezzlement and wrongful imprisonment that he dismissed nineteen sheriffs. Equipped with a list of forty questions supplied by him, commissioners investigated abuses in each hundred, especially of Crown rights and revenues by local landowners, and of extortion by bailiffs (sheriffsâ officials). Tagged by countless parchment slips with the seals of those who made depositions, their reports â the Hundred Rolls â became known as the âragman rollsâ.
During the next thirteen years, the âperiod of statutesâ, Edward clarified and improved the legal code. It is wrong to compare him to Justinian, as he had no intention of creating a new, all-embracing body of law, but simply wanted to make the machinery work by codifying what had grown up haphazardly. He succeeded. âFor ages after Edwardâs day king and parliament left private law and private procedure, criminal law and criminal procedure, pretty much to themselves.â 6 The future of Common Law (the unenacted law of the land as opposed to statutes) became assured, resulting in a new class of lay lawyers.
The man
When Edwardâs skeleton at Westminster Abbey was examined in 1774, it measured 6 ft 2 in. (Most contemporaries were 5 ft 6 in.) A painting on a wall of the abbey, dating from just after his death, shows a handsome, athletic man with a clean-shaven, hawk-like profile.
âElegantly built, enormously tall, he towered head and shoulders above ordinary menâ, says the Dominican Nicholas Trivet, who often saw him. âHis hair, in boyhood between silver and yellow, became darker during his youth, turning swan white when he grew old. His forehead, like the rest of his face, was broad while he had a drooping left eye that gave a certain look of his father. He spoke with a slight lisp, but was always eloquent in arguing or persuading. His arms, as long as the rest of his body, were muscular and ideally suited for swordsmanship. His girth was widest round the chest. His long legs helped him keep a firm seat when riding the most mettlesome horse.â 7
High spirited, Edward was only saddened by the death of those he loved. His greatest fault was a temper he sometimes regretted. As a young man, he ordered his attendants to put out the eyes and crop the ears of a youth who had angered him. During his daughter Elizabethâs wedding to the Count of Hainault, he snatched the coronet off her head and threw it in the fire, while more than once he struck courtiers or servants. A dean of St Paulâs who tried to rebuke him dropped dead from fright. Yet he could be merciful. âForgiveness?â he once said. âWhy, Iâd give that to a dog if he asked me for it.â He knew how to be gracious and had a sense of fun, losing a war horse on a bet with his laundress and buying it back.
Edward was deeply in love with his wife Eleanor, to whom he had been betrothed when he was fifteen and she about twelve. If she resembled the sculpture at Lincoln Cathedral, she must indeed have been beautiful. Over a dozen children were born to them, and he never took mistresses.
The upheavals of the 1260s had resulted in a dramatic rise in murder, robbery, rape and arson. Edwardâs solution was a team of judges who prosecuted on the slightest evidence of wrongdoing. Accompanied by the judges of Kingâs Bench, he spent the winter on progress through the Midlands and southern England, finding so much proof of extortion, bribery, embezzlement and wrongful imprisonment that he dismissed nineteen sheriffs. Equipped with a list of forty questions supplied by him, commissioners investigated abuses in each hundred, especially of Crown rights and revenues by local landowners, and of extortion by bailiffs (sheriffsâ officials). Tagged by countless parchment slips with the seals of those who made depositions, their reports â the Hundred Rolls â became known as the âragman rollsâ.
During the next thirteen years, the âperiod of statutesâ, Edward clarified and improved the legal code. It is wrong to compare him to Justinian, as he had no intention of creating a new, all-embracing body of law, but simply wanted to make the machinery work by codifying what had grown up haphazardly. He succeeded. âFor ages after Edwardâs day king and parliament left private law and private procedure, criminal law and criminal procedure, pretty much to themselves.â 6 The future of Common Law (the unenacted law of the land as opposed to statutes) became assured, resulting in a new class of lay lawyers.
The man
When Edwardâs skeleton at Westminster Abbey was examined in 1774, it measured 6 ft 2 in. (Most contemporaries were 5 ft 6 in.) A painting on a wall of the abbey, dating from just after his death, shows a handsome, athletic man with a clean-shaven, hawk-like profile.
âElegantly built, enormously tall, he towered head and shoulders above ordinary menâ, says the Dominican Nicholas Trivet, who often saw him. âHis hair, in boyhood between silver and yellow, became darker during his youth, turning swan white when he grew old. His forehead, like the rest of his face, was broad while he had a drooping left eye that gave a certain look of his father. He spoke with a slight lisp, but was always eloquent in arguing or persuading. His arms, as long as the rest of his body, were muscular and ideally suited for swordsmanship. His girth was widest round the chest. His long legs helped him keep a firm seat when riding the most mettlesome horse.â 7
High spirited, Edward was only saddened by the death of those he loved. His greatest fault was a temper he sometimes regretted. As a young man, he ordered his attendants to put out the eyes and crop the ears of a youth who had angered him. During his daughter Elizabethâs wedding to the Count of Hainault, he snatched the coronet off her head and threw it in the fire, while more than once he struck courtiers or servants. A dean of St Paulâs who tried to rebuke him dropped dead from fright. Yet he could be merciful. âForgiveness?â he once said. âWhy, Iâd give that to a dog if he asked me for it.â He knew how to be gracious and had a sense of fun, losing a war horse on a bet with his laundress and buying it back.
Edward was deeply in love with his wife Eleanor, to whom he had been betrothed when he was fifteen and she about twelve. If she resembled the sculpture at Lincoln Cathedral, she must indeed have been beautiful. Over a dozen children were born to them, and he never took mistresses.
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