Edward I of England

**Edward I of England** (17 June 1239-7 July 1307), also called **Edward Longshanks** or **Hammer of the Scots**, was the King of England from 1272 to 1307, succeeding Henry III of England and preceding Edward II of England. He was infamous for his cruelty, butchering the Welsh in 1286 and the Scots in 1298, and he expelled the Jews from England in 1290; they would only return with Oliver Cromwell's repealing of the law in 1656.

## Biography

Edward was the son of King Henry III of England and Eleanor of Provence, born in 1239 to the English House of Plantagenet. Edward was involved in his father's political intrigues from a young age, but in 1259 he backed the Provisions of Oxford, a baronial reform movement that sought to increase the nobles' power. He later reconciled with his father, and during the Second Barons' War in the 1260s, he escaped jail after the Battle of Lewes and crushed the rebels at the Battle of Evesham in 1265, freeing his father and restoring him as king.

In 1270, Prince Edward went on the Ninth Crusade against the Mamelukes in Egypt. The crusaders fared unwell against the Mameluke cavalry, and while he was returning in 1272, he found out that his father died. His return trip was slow and he was coronated in 1274, two years after his father's death. When he became King, he began his career by smashing Llewelyn ap Gruffyd's Welsh rebellion in 1286. Edward made the title "Prince of Wales" the hereditary title of the heir apparent to the Kingdom of England, and Wales became a permanent province of England.

### Scottish wars

But King Edward did not stop here; in 1286, when King Alexander III of Scotland died, a succession struggle began. Edward ordered John de Warenne, the Earl of Surrey, to invade Scotland, and in 1296 Warenne defeated the Scots in the Battle of Dunbar and Scotland fell under the control of England. King Edward used brutality and trickery; he hung Scottish rebel delegates in a barn where he was supposed to meet them. In 1297, to lure more English nobles to Scotland to ensure control of the lands, he invoked the law of *Prima Noctae*, where nobles could take a bride from her wedding into their bed for the first night of marriage, before returning her to the groom. The law was extremely controversial among the people of Scotland, and resulted in the death of the wife of a Lanarkshire villager named William Wallace. An enraged Wallace slaughtered the English garrison of Lanark and gathered a band of people from the village, with his army growing in size as he took down more and more English garrisons. King Edward entrusted his son Prince Edward of Wales with quelling the uprising as he headed to France to campaign against King Philip IV of France.

King Edward, and Prince Edward before the Battle of Loudoun Hill, 1307]]
When he returned from his sieges in 1298, he found that the northern army was annihilated in the Battle of Stirling and York was sacked while Prince Edward did nothing about it, and King Edward took personal command of the army. In the Battle of Falkirk, he massacred both the Scots and his own men with archers, and he nearly ended the rebellion. However, Wallace continued guerrilla warfare until his execution in 1305 after being betrayed by powerful Scottish nobles. King Edward died in 1307, having never quelled the Scots.