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00:00This is Caernarfon Castle in North Wales.
00:15Its vast walls are built out of layers of different coloured stone,
00:20in imitation of the walls of the imperial city of Constantinople.
00:25While, on top of the battlements of the great tower there,
00:29now worn to stumps by the sea winds and the rain,
00:32perch stone sculptures of imperial eagles.
00:37For this castle was built by a man whose ambitions were truly imperial,
00:43King Edward I, conqueror of Wales and hammer of the Scots.
00:49Edward was the founder of a line of kings, father, son and grandson,
00:56who all bore the Anglo-Saxon name Edward,
01:00and they carried England to new heights of power.
01:04They would conquer Wales, Scotland and even France,
01:08or at least the first and third Edwards would.
01:12But the second Edward, unconventional and self-indulgent,
01:16reopened the old debate about royal power.
01:19His weaknesses brought the monarchy to the brink of disaster
01:23and may have inflicted a uniquely horrible death on the king.
01:29Nor was it all gore and glory,
01:32for the Edwards were lawgivers as well as soldiers,
01:36parliamentarians as well as conquerors,
01:39with the result that, by the end of the Edwardian century,
01:43the shape of an England ruled by king, lords and commons
01:48was already becoming clear.
01:54THE END
02:12In 1272, Edward I inherited the crown from his father, Henry III,
02:19but his inheritance was flawed.
02:22During the later years of his father's reign,
02:25the crown had sunk to its lowest depths.
02:28Edward and his father had been kept under house arrest
02:31and the king forced to rule through a group of barons.
02:35Edward would never forget this humiliation.
02:38It was Edward who led the royalist fight back
02:41and it was Edward who learnt the painful lesson
02:44of what could happen to a weak king.
02:48These were Edward's first battles.
02:51He learned early that he had to fight for the rights of the crown.
02:55When he was young, he fought like the leopard, with speed and cunning.
02:59When he got older, he fought like the lion, with awe-inspiring power.
03:05There's a story told that, at his coronation in 1274,
03:10he removed the crown from his head
03:12and swore that he'd never wear it again
03:15until he'd regained what his father had lost.
03:22And to do this, Edward's first task was to reunite his realm,
03:27divided by the barons' revolt.
03:30But instead of waging a vendetta against his surviving opponents,
03:34he forgave them, allowing them to buy back the property
03:37that his father had confiscated.
03:40The result made Edward appear magnanimous,
03:43but he'd also raised money for the crown.
03:47Edward had learned from the rebel barons as well
03:50and he understood that it was in the towns and villages of England
03:54that the roots of his power lay.
03:56So he decided to reinforce the bonds between king and people
04:00by ordering a huge nationwide investigation into official corruption.
04:05It would be king and people versus the fat cats.
04:10The results were recorded in what are known as the Hundred Rolls.
04:15Here, for instance, in the Stamford Roll,
04:18is a bit of the local dirt on the bailiff of the town, Hugo Bunting.
04:23One of the things that he's accused of
04:25is levying an illicit toll of five shillings
04:28on a certain William Gaber Cockey
04:31when he took his millstones through the middle of the town.
04:35Duxit per medium vilae.
04:38Now, this is just for Stamford.
04:41Multiply for all England and you get information overload.
04:46So very few actual prosecutions took place.
04:50But it's the PR that was most important.
04:53Edward was showing that he cared,
04:56that the king's rights complemented the rights of his subjects
05:00and that he was able to guarantee equal justice for all his subjects,
05:05no matter how humble.
05:07It would be hard to think of a better beginning for a reign
05:11or of a more effective answer
05:13than those who, like the baronial revolutionaries of his father's reign,
05:17claimed that strong royal government meant oppressive royal government.
05:27Edward's next task was to restore the authority of the King of England
05:32over the whole of Britain.
05:37For in different ways, the rulers of Wales and Scotland
05:40had taken advantage of Henry III's weakness
05:43to regain power and independence
05:45at the expense of their English overlord.
05:50In 1276, from his wild fastness in North Wales,
05:54Llywelyn ab Griffith had extended control over most of Wales.
06:01But Edward was loath to accept the rise of Wales as an independent power,
06:06so he insisted on the homage or ritual submission
06:09which the rulers of Wales traditionally paid to the King of England.
06:16There resulted a struggle of wills.
06:19For Llywelyn, his homage was a bargaining counter
06:22in a relationship of semi-equals.
06:25For Edward, it was a non-negotiable acknowledgement
06:29of his superiority over a subject and inferior.
06:34Three more times, Prince Llywelyn was summoned to perform homage
06:38and three times he refused.
06:41Finally, and with plenty of time to make his preparations,
06:45Edward declared war.
06:52Edward mobilised the whole country.
06:55Merchants and craftsmen laboured to supply the army.
07:01Huge arsenals of weapons were stockpiled
07:04and Llywelyn was no match for the resources of England.
07:09But it took two campaigns, in 1277 and 1282, to subdue the Welsh.
07:19Edward effectively laid siege to Llywelyn in Snowdonia and starved him out.
07:26Edward was not the first King of England to fight the Welsh,
07:30but Edward carried the old policy to new extremes.
07:33There would be no more native princes of Wales
07:36acknowledging the vague overlordship of a King of England.
07:41Instead, Wales was crushed under the heel of a brutal military occupation
07:46whose symbol was the mighty castles, which still dominate the landscape.
07:53And the Welsh were treated as second-class citizens,
07:56ruled over by an English-speaking elite.
08:01It was Edward's treatment of the rebel leaders
08:04that shows most clearly that he was a new kind of King,
08:08with a new, harder attitude to kingship,
08:11which he'd learned during the struggles of his father's reign.
08:15Ever since the Norman conquest,
08:17barons and kings had fought with each other
08:20with few hard feelings on either side.
08:23No longer, because Edward now declared
08:26that to wage war against the King was treason.
08:30Treason was effectively a new crime
08:33for which a new, terrible punishment was devised.
08:38And the first to suffer it was Daffodil Griffith,
08:41Prince Llywelyn's brother.
08:44Because he'd betrayed the King,
08:46he was dragged to the place of execution by horses.
08:50Because he'd killed noblemen, he was hanged.
08:54And because he had committed murder at Easter,
08:57he was cut down while still alive,
09:00castrated, disembowelled, and his entrails burned.
09:05And because he'd committed crimes in different parts of the kingdom,
09:09his body was hacked into four of the quarters
09:14distributed throughout the realm.
09:18The fate of Wales was scarcely less brutal.
09:22If the Hundred Rolls had shown that Edward was an astute politician,
09:27the conquest of Wales demonstrated his brutal, lion-like strength.
09:34This is Bomaris Castle on the island of Anglesey,
09:39built by Edward I to set the seal on his father's throne.
09:44It was built by Edward I to set the seal
09:47on his final crushing of Welsh resistance.
09:50Edward's empire now stretched secure
09:53from east to west across the British Isles.
09:56But in the south,
09:58the King of France was threatening Edward's lands in Gascony,
10:02whilst in the north,
10:04Scotland at last seemed about to fall into his grasp.
10:09This struggle on two fronts,
10:11to renew Scotland and to preserve his lands in France,
10:15was to dominate the rest of Edward's reign
10:18and, for better and for worse,
10:20to shape the reigns of his son and his grandson as well.
10:30Behind me lies Edinburgh, the capital city of Scotland.
10:35With devolution, it's once again the seat of a Scottish parliament
10:39and the focus of a revived and intensified sense
10:43of Scotland's separate nationhood.
10:46But when Edward came to the throne,
10:49that sense of separate identity was not nearly so clear.
10:53Scotland was an ancient monarchy,
10:56but its kings were much intermarried with the English royal house.
11:01They had vast land holdings in England.
11:04They swore fealty to the English kings.
11:07He swore them, as well as with them,
11:09and they sat in English councils and parliaments.
11:13In short, were they separate monarchs
11:16or were they the greatest subjects of the kings of England?
11:20It was a highly ambiguous relationship,
11:24but Edward, with his sharp lawyer's mind
11:27and his acute awareness of his own rights, hated ambiguity.
11:31When he could, he would make the relationship
11:34between the king of Scotland and the king of England clear,
11:38on his own terms and in his own interests.
11:45Edward's opportunity came in 1291.
11:48The sole heir of the Scottish throne was the little Norwegian princess,
11:53the granddaughter of the deceased king of Scots.
11:56She was brought back to Scotland, but died on the way.
12:00As feudal overlord of the country,
12:02Edward claimed the right to choose the next king.
12:06Edward would be kingmaker in Scotland,
12:09and he would remake the relations between the two kingdoms.
12:14Of the 13 candidates, Edward chose John Balliol.
12:18Balliol had a good claim,
12:20but he was also the most anglicised of the candidates,
12:24the founder of an Oxford college and a major landowner in England.
12:30Moreover, Edward was clear that,
12:33even after he'd chosen Balliol as king,
12:36he remained sovereign lord of Scotland.
12:39He, Edward, was finally responsible
12:42for justice and good government in Scotland,
12:45and he would enforce those responsibilities
12:48as he enforced his laws in England, in his own English course.
12:55Knowing Edward's attitude, Scotsmen appealed to him
12:58to have their own king's judgments overruled.
13:01Even Balliol's acquiescence was tested.
13:05But when Balliol complained, Edward informed him
13:08that he could summon even Balliol himself
13:11to appear before him at Westminster.
13:14Before long, he did just that.
13:17For Balliol was a humiliation too far.
13:23The Scots were provoked into rebellion.
13:27Edward to invasion.
13:33Berwick was the first town to fall.
13:37It was said that Edward was so angry that the town had dared to resist him
13:42that he fell on it with the anger of a wild boar pursued by dogs.
13:49From Berwick, Edward pushed up the coast to Dunbar.
13:53The Scots taunted the English troops, calling them tailed dogs.
13:58The castle fell after only a few days.
14:03Edward then took his army on a military promenade through Scotland.
14:09The great fortress of Edinburgh fell after only five days' siege,
14:14and sterling before Edward even arrived.
14:18He boasted that Scotland was conquered in only 21 weeks.
14:23Now Edward had achieved what he probably always wanted,
14:27the direct rule of Scotland.
14:30So, in a cruel inversion of a coronation,
14:33the vestments, symbols and regalia of kingship were stripped off Balliol.
14:39Edward literally unkinged him.
14:42Even more radically, Edward decided to unkingdom Scotland.
14:47Take this piece of sandstone here.
14:50It looks ordinary enough, but then why the glass and the high security?
14:55Because it's the stone rich with legend
14:59on which, for 400 years, the kings of Scotland were crowned.
15:04After the conquest, Edward took the stone to England, where it remained,
15:10under the coronation throne in Westminster Abbey for the next 700 years.
15:16By removing the stone of destiny,
15:19Edward was declaring that Scotland had ceased altogether to be a kingdom
15:24and become a mere province of England.
15:28Edward was now at the pinnacle of power.
15:32He was an English Caesar, a new Arthur,
15:37a mightier, mightier conqueror.
15:43Finally, Edward took on the King of France,
15:46who, in the first example of what became known as the Old Alliance,
15:51had allied with John Balliol
15:53and confiscated Edward's remaining French territories.
15:57To fight his great wars, Edward needed taxation,
16:02and the only effective way of raising taxation was to summon a parliament,
16:07usually to Westminster here.
16:09A parliament was necessary constitutionally,
16:13because Magna Carta had laid down
16:15that no-one could be taxed without their consent.
16:18It was also necessary practically,
16:21because it had proved impossible to raise taxes any other way
16:25without the taxpayers going on strike.
16:29As usual, the most important group of taxpayers were the middle earners,
16:34the knights, the country gentlemen, and the leading townsfolk.
16:37So, in 1295, on the eve of the Scottish invasions,
16:42Edward summoned representatives of these groups
16:45to what became known as the Model Parliament.
16:48They'd have a stake in Edward's vision for England,
16:51but they'd have to pay for it.
16:54The result was that Edward, the most naturally autocratic of kings,
16:59followed in the footsteps of the great rebel Simon de Montfort
17:03to become the father of parliament.
17:08It was a shrewd gesture,
17:10but fierce guerrilla resistance to the English conquest
17:13broke out in Scotland,
17:15and Edward was forced into war on two fronts.
17:19As costs escalated, the king faced broad-based opposition,
17:24led by an important group of nobles.
17:27To appease them, he was forced to reissue Magna Carta
17:31and to promise once more that there would be no taxation
17:35without consultation of the whole realm.
17:38Nevertheless, to pursue his obsession of conquering Scotland,
17:43Edward resorted to any means to raise money.
17:47Finally, in 1305,
17:49William Wallace, the leader of Scottish resistance, was betrayed,
17:53and Edward decided to make an example of him.
17:57Wallace was brought on horseback
18:00here to the Place of Judgement in Westminster Hall for his trial.
18:05As was usual in cases of treason,
18:08there was no jury or counsel for the accused.
18:11Otherwise, both the facts of the case
18:14and those of law were carefully observed.
18:17The judges accused Wallace of having encouraged the Scots
18:21to ally with Edward's enemies,
18:23the French of having invaded England
18:26and killed women, children and churchmen,
18:29and, above all, of having traitorously conspired the king's death
18:34and marched in war with banners flying against him.
18:38Wallace indignantly denied that he'd ever been a traitor,
18:42presumably meaning that he'd never recognised Edward as king.
18:47This only made his crime the worse,
18:50and he was sentenced to the worst punishment that the law could give.
18:57At Smithfield, now London's meat market,
19:00Wallace was horrifically tortured and killed.
19:06Like the Welsh rebel Daffod,
19:08he too was hanged, disembowelled,
19:12beheaded and quartered.
19:20It was a graphic message of what happened to those who crossed King Edward.
19:28No sooner had Edward dealt with Wallace
19:30than a daunting new enemy took his place, Robert the Bruce.
19:34Despite the absence of the Scottish crown and the Stone of Destiny,
19:38Bruce had himself crowned King of Scots in 1306.
19:44Bruce continued to terrorise the English Edward retaliated
19:48with punitive campaigns.
19:50And it was on his way north in 1307
19:53to wage yet another campaign against Bruce,
19:56that Edward died at the age of 68.
20:01There's a story that his last wish was that his body should be boiled
20:06until the bones were clean of flesh
20:08and his skeleton be carried at the head of every English army
20:12until the Scots were finally crushed.
20:15It didn't quite work out like that.
20:18Instead, his body was buried in his father's great church
20:21at Westminster Abbey,
20:23but inscribed on his tomb was the words,
20:28Hammer of the Scots.
20:31What Edward had done was right and just by his standards,
20:36but he had the weakness of his strength.
20:39If he had been less rigid and less hammer-like,
20:43the union of England and Scotland, then so close,
20:46might have come about quickly and naturally,
20:50and both countries would have been spared centuries of war,
20:54bloodshed and devastation.
21:00Edward was a supremely self-confident king
21:03with a clear sense of the power and the rights of the crown.
21:08He may be remembered for his wars, but his legacy is much greater.
21:12At home, Edward reaffirmed the direct bonds between crown and people.
21:17Abroad, his victories began to foster a sense of national pride.
21:24But how would England cope with his successor,
21:27a man ruled by private obsessions rather than royal ambition?
21:36Edward I was a difficult act to follow for any son,
21:40but Edward II was particularly ill-equipped
21:43to step into his father's shoes.
21:46He may have looked like his father, tall, handsome and strong,
21:50but, in fact, they had little in common.
21:52Disturbingly, it was noted that Edward shunned
21:55the traditional pastimes of princes,
21:58preferring instead common pursuits like rowing, swimming and boat-building.
22:05At the beginning of Edward's reign,
22:07the contrasting character with his father
22:10wasn't necessarily seen as a bad thing.
22:13Edward I had undoubtedly been a great king,
22:17but, especially towards the end,
22:20his realm had paid a terrible price for his driving ambition,
22:24and men were looking forward to a quieter life
22:27under his apparently more accommodating son.
22:30And the symbol of the change was the new coronation oath
22:34which Edward swore here in Westminster Abbey.
22:38Out went Edward I's promise to defend the rights of the crown.
22:43It became a new oath that the king would uphold and defend
22:48the laws and righteous customs
22:50which the community of the realm shall choose.
22:54I so agree and promise, Edward swore.
22:58In those few words, he'd abandoned any claim to absolute royal power,
23:03and he undertook instead to rule by consent
23:07and in cooperation with the nobles.
23:11A brave new world, it seemed, adorned.
23:15Edward, the hope was, would be a conciliator,
23:19not an authoritarian monarch.
23:22But he lacked his father's strength of will
23:25and had, for contemporaries, an even more worrying personality flaw,
23:30which was evident even at his coronation.
23:33Edward was crowned with his wife, Queen Isabella, by his side,
23:38but it was his childhood friend, Piers Gaveston, who stole the show.
23:43Edward had eyes and ears only for Piers,
23:46and Piers, in turn, gave himself the airs and graces of a royal favourite.
23:51At the coronation, he openly flouted convention
23:54by wearing purple robes rather than the traditional gold.
23:59To add injury to insult,
24:01Edward presented Piers with the best of his new wife's jewels and wedding presents.
24:07Whether or not the relationship between Edward and Piers
24:11was actively homosexual is unclear.
24:14No contemporary explicitly says that it was.
24:18Instead, they use phrases like,
24:21the love that surpasseth the love of a woman.
24:25One wrote...
24:27I do not remember to have heard that one man so loved another.
24:31Jonathan cherished David, but we do not read that they were immoderate.
24:36Our king, however, was incapable of moderate favour
24:39and, on account of Piers, was said to forget himself.
24:44In short, Edward and Piers were breaking the rules
24:48and they were offending those who saw themselves as the guardians of the rules,
24:54the English nobility.
24:58Only two months after the celebrations of the coronation,
25:02the nobility delivered an ultimatum to their new king.
25:05Either exile Piers or face civil war.
25:10Piers was sent to France, but Edward wasn't to be browbeaten.
25:17Edward had inherited his father's determination as well as his looks,
25:22just as Edward I had conquered Wales and Scotland,
25:26so Edward II would have Piers by his side.
25:30He cajoled, bribed and threatened his nobles.
25:34Until they relented and allowed Piers to return.
25:39The king wrote to Chester to be reunited with his friend,
25:43but Piers had learned nothing from his exile.
25:46Instead, he continued to treat the leading magnates of the country with contempt
25:51by giving them nicknames like Burst Belly, Joseph the Jew,
25:55the Cuckoo's Bird and the Black Dog of Arden.
26:00This amused Edward, but it made deadly enemies of Piers' targets.
26:06Piers' mockery of the nobility was the classic response of the outsider,
26:11confronted by a clique of crusty old insiders,
26:16because the English nobility saw government as being rather like a club.
26:21Membership, they felt, should be limited to people of the right background,
26:26in other words, to nobles like themselves.
26:29And everybody should obey the rules, including the king himself.
26:34And rule number one was to respect the rights and privileges,
26:39the sensitivities and values of the right sort of people,
26:43by which, once again, the nobility meant themselves.
26:47Now, of course, this attitude was selfish and class-ridden,
26:52but it was also the only way that the idea of royal government
26:57as responsible government could be given real meaning.
27:01Only the nobility were strong enough to hold the king to account,
27:06and that, in the circumstances of 1312,
27:09meant forcing him, by violence if necessary,
27:13to get rid of Piers Gaverston.
27:17Edward and Piers fled north,
27:19Edward abandoning his pregnant wife, Isabella, to his enemies.
27:23She would not forget the insult.
27:27But it was all for nothing.
27:29Piers was caught and taken prisoner by the Earl of Warwick,
27:33the man whom he'd mocked as the Black Dog.
27:38There was no formal trial.
27:40Instead, Warwick and four nobles decided Piers' fate.
27:45The verdict was death.
27:50Edward was grease-stricken at Gaverston's murder,
27:55but it was more than a personal loss.
27:57He'd also lost face as king.
28:00Gaverston was the thing in the whole world that mattered most to him,
28:05but he'd not been powerful enough or feared enough
28:08to protect his life or to avenge his death.
28:12What was the authority of such a king worth?
28:17But now Edward, under attack at home,
28:20had the opportunity to recoup his position abroad.
28:26Bruce's long guerrilla campaign in Scotland was at last bearing fruit.
28:31He drove the English from their key castles
28:34and he even dared to strike across the English border
28:38with increasingly devastating raids.
28:41By 1313, war was unavoidable.
28:45Edward and his nobles sank their differences sufficiently
28:49to mount a vast punitive expedition against Scotland.
28:54Here, in the field of battle, Edward might yet redeem himself.
29:01The English and Scottish armies met on 23rd June 1314,
29:07just outside Stirling.
29:09Much to the English surprise,
29:11the Scots took the initiative.
29:13At daybreak, it was they who advanced,
29:16but then Edward's surprise turned to amazement.
29:20Edward was reported to say,
29:22''They kneel and ask for mercy.''
29:25One of his Scottish officials knew his countrymen better and replied,
29:30''They ask for mercy, but not from you.
29:33''To God they pray. For them, it's death or victory.''
29:38The battle began, and the English knights charged the Scots' front line.
29:43But the Scots held firm.
29:45Unable to break the front rank, the English retreated.
29:49But their retreat turned into a rout.
29:53Encumbered by heavy armour, many men drowned in the boggy ground.
29:57The losses were huge and Bannock burned.
30:01Many men drowned in the boggy ground.
30:04The losses were huge and Bannock burn
30:07became infamous as England's most shameful defeat by the Scots.
30:17Leaving his troops to be massacred, Edward fled from the battlefield
30:21and, with only a handful of followers,
30:24rode desperately for Dunbar.
30:27He took refuge overnight in the castle here,
30:30which was in friendly hands,
30:32and then, the following morning, set sail for England.
30:37The war with Scotland had given Edward the opportunity
30:41to redeem his reputation.
30:43Instead, the shattering defeat of Bannock burn sent it to new depths.
30:48He proved to be as bad a general as he was a politician,
30:52and his flight made him seem like a coward as well.
30:56He appeared to be unmanly as well as unkingly.
31:01How, people asked, could such a creature as this
31:05be the son of the great Edward?
31:08And they answered their own question by saying that he wasn't,
31:12that he was a changeling and not royal at all.
31:15And thus began the rumours about the king's birth,
31:19which his own fondness for such peasant activities
31:22as rowing, thatching, fishing and boat building
31:26seemed only to confirm.
31:31Nor was Edward any more successful as a husband.
31:35Enraged by his neglectful treatment,
31:38Edward's wife, Isabella, had taken a lover, Mortimer,
31:42and fled to France with him,
31:44and it was from there that they planned their invasion of England.
31:48In September 1326, Isabella landed in England
31:52and met with little resistance.
31:55She seized the crown in the name of her and Edward's eldest son,
31:59a third Edward.
32:03Isabella and Mortimer may have had no difficulty in seizing the throne,
32:07but it proved less easy to justify it,
32:10because there was no constitutional machinery
32:13to depose a crowned and anointed king.
32:16Instead, they resorted to the astonishing legal innovation
32:20of the Articles of Accusation,
32:22which convicted the king, the fount of justice,
32:25of a series of high crimes against his country.
32:29Instead of good government by good laws,
32:32he'd been ruled by evil counsel.
32:35Instead of justice, he'd sent noblemen to shameful and to illegal deaths.
32:40He'd lost Scotland and Gascony,
32:43and he had oppressed and impoverished England.
32:46In short, he had broken his solemn contract
32:50with his people and his country, and he must pay the price.
32:56For the first time in English history,
32:58a reigning monarch was formally deposed from the throne.
33:03Edward's miserable state was described in a poem
33:06which he may have written himself.
33:09In winter, woe befell me,
33:11by cruel fortune threatened,
33:14my life now lies a ruin.
33:16Once was I feared and dreaded,
33:19but now all men despise me
33:22and call me a crownless king,
33:24a laughingstock to all.
33:29Edward was imprisoned here in this guardroom
33:32in the keep of Berkeley Castle.
33:34He soon escaped, but was recaptured.
33:37Soon after, his imprisonment became stricter
33:40and heavy locks and bolts were bought for the doors.
33:43Finally, he was murdered.
33:46It couldn't be seen as murder, of course,
33:49and pains were taken to leave as few marks as possible on the body.
33:53According to most contemporary accounts,
33:56he was pressed down with a table with heavy weights and suffocated.
34:01But this story, first written down about 30 years after the king's death,
34:06suggests a more horrible end.
34:09The king was held down,
34:12and then a hollow instrument, like the end of a trumpet,
34:16was forced into his fundament,
34:19and a red-hot poker thrust up through it into his bowels.
34:25The Articles of Accusation had been an inversion
34:29of Edward's coronation oath.
34:31If this story is correct,
34:33his death was a vile parody of the pleasures
34:37that he was supposed to have enjoyed with Piers Gaveston.
34:46In April 1331, a three-day tournament was proclaimed
34:51in the name of the new king, Edward III.
34:55His father had banned the tournament.
35:00Edward III excelled at the joust.
35:02Indeed, whilst Edward II had disappointed
35:05the traditional expectations of what a king should be,
35:09Edward III was the perfect image of kingship.
35:14Like Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria after him,
35:18Edward III personified the values of his age.
35:22Edwardian England was an age of knights and fantasy castles,
35:27of honours and arms.
35:29England was a culture rooted in war,
35:32and leading the country into battle was a hero king.
35:38After the disasters of his father's reign,
35:41it was natural that Edward would model himself on his grandfather,
35:45the heroic warrior king, Edward I.
35:48But it was a return with a difference.
35:51Edward had none of his grandfather's ruthless driving energy
35:56and stiff-backed authoritarianism either.
35:59Instead, he cultivated an easy, winning charm.
36:03He was a good family man, with a pretty wife
36:06and a rapidly growing brood of fine sons,
36:10and he was capable of striking populist gestures,
36:13as when he entered a town in triumph,
36:16not on horseback, but on foot,
36:19and leading his wife and eldest son by the hand.
36:23Edward was a knight, the humblest knight in the tournament,
36:27man to man and win.
36:30In short, Edward was the perfect gentleman,
36:33affable, sporting and brave,
36:36who would rule England as one of the club,
36:39as a first amongst the equals of his nobility.
36:44This was a quiet revolution.
36:47For Edward, there would be no divisive, upstart favourite like Piers.
36:52Instead, Edward, unlike his father or even grandfather,
36:56truly accepted that he had to work in harmony with the nobility.
37:01Indeed, to do so was a pleasure as well as a duty.
37:06The result was that Edward encouraged an aristocratic culture
37:10which bound the kings and nobles together.
37:13Its most vivid expression was in heraldry.
37:17Originally, your coat of arms had a purely practical function
37:21of identifying you on the battlefield when you're encased in a suit of armour.
37:26But soon, a whole world of meaning was added.
37:30Your coat of armour showed who your ancestors were,
37:34who you'd married, whether you were a younger or an elder son,
37:38and what honours you'd won.
37:40Edward III was an aficionado of all this,
37:44and he established a new order of chivalry
37:47based on King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table
37:51called the Order of the Garter.
37:54The story goes that, at a court ball,
37:57a lady let slip her garter, which fell to the floor.
38:01Amidst the laughter, the king himself bent down,
38:04retrieved it and silenced the titters by saying,
38:08On y soit qui mal y pense.
38:11Shame be to him that thinks evil of it.
38:15Be that as it may, the garter, with its blue and gold ribbon
38:20encircling your coat of arms,
38:22became the supreme mark of noble honour.
38:27But all this glamour and glitz masked a Dark Earth imperative.
38:33Edward and his nobles belonged to a killing culture
38:37in which you gained honour and respect by slaughter.
38:42Sport, in particular, was all about the kill.
38:46You killed animals in the hunt,
38:48and you came near to killing human beings
38:51in the joust and the tournament.
38:53And war, where you killed for real,
38:56was the noblest sport of them all.
38:59But war was also a political necessity as well.
39:07As the chronicler Froissant noted...
39:10The English will never love and honour their king
39:13unless he be victorious and a lover of arms
39:16and war against their neighbours,
39:18and especially against such that are greater and richer than themselves.
39:25Edward's first target was Scotland.
39:30Scotland had eluded his grandfather, Edward I,
39:34and defeated and humiliated his father, Edward II.
39:39So, for Edward III, war with Scotland was a matter of honour.
39:47Edward took personal charge of his armies
39:50and managed to instil his own military enthusiasm
39:53from the nobles at the top
39:55to the ordinary common soldier at the bottom.
40:01And it was the common soldier who largely won the wars,
40:05thanks to the powerful new weapon, the longbow.
40:09Edward understood the value of the longbow,
40:12and later in his reign, he passed an act
40:15which banned other village sports, such as football and bowls,
40:19to force a concentration on archery.
40:23The border town of Berwick, now back in Scottish hands,
40:26was Edward's first target.
40:30On Hallidon Hill, just outside Berwick, the English and Scots met.
40:36It was a first victory for Edward and the longbow.
40:40As the Scots approached, the English archers
40:43fired their deadly wave of arrows with devastating impact.
40:48England's honour, lost at Bannockburn, was restored,
40:52and balladeers celebrated.
40:56Scots out of Berwick and Aberdeen,
40:58at the burn of Bannock, you are far too keen.
41:01King Edward has avenged it now, and fully too, I ween.
41:07Edward's victory, high up here on Hallidon Hill,
41:11was the making of him as a man and as a king.
41:15He'd smashed the Scots, even more completely than his grandfather.
41:21He'd won Berwick-on-Tweed over there,
41:24then Scotland's main port and trading city,
41:27and for the first time in over 20 years,
41:30he'd freed the north of England from the risk of invasion.
41:34But his personal gains were even greater.
41:37He showed himself to be a natural general and leader of men,
41:41and a man of his word.
41:43He was a man of his word.
41:45But even greater, he showed himself to be a natural general
41:49and leader of men, and a master of the new tactics of the longbow.
41:54And he'd done all this at the age of 21.
41:58Already, he was hailed as a new Arthur.
42:02Would he, like Arthur, reunify Britain,
42:05or would he seek for wider fields to conquer?
42:11Edward chose the wider fields,
42:14and his pick would be France,
42:17the country with which England had been intertwined
42:21in peace and war since the Norman conquest.
42:25War with France offered the chance of rich booty, vast ransoms,
42:30and controlling the lucrative trade in the English Channel.
42:35But not even Edward could have guessed
42:37that he was about to start a war that would last 100 years.
42:42But if Edward and his nobles fought the war,
42:45it was the grey men of Parliament who paid for it.
42:49From here, high up on the London Eye,
42:52you can see the houses of Parliament.
42:55Their proper name is still the Palace of Westminster.
42:59Back in Edward's reign, it was the King's real palace,
43:02but it was also becoming the home of Parliament too,
43:06with a special Parliament chamber.
43:08And what was turning Parliament into a regular institution
43:11was Edward's need for money to fight his wars with France.
43:15That, and his willingness to do whatever was necessary
43:19to persuade Parliament to dig their hands deep
43:22into their constituents' pockets.
43:25It meant doing deals, greasing palms, slapping backs.
43:30Edward's victories were reported in detail to Parliament.
43:34Parliament was consulted on the war diplomacy,
43:38and Parliament ratified the peace treaties with France.
43:42It was good politics, but it was more,
43:45because it turned Edward's wars into a joint enterprise
43:49between the King and the English nation,
43:52and it made the English monarchy a national monarchy as well,
43:56of which Englishmen could be proud,
43:59and in which they felt they had a stake and an investment.
44:05Edward's war became England's war.
44:09Bishops and priests led patriotic services and prayed for success.
44:14Dispatches from the front were read out in every town,
44:18and triumphant peals of bells celebrated victory.
44:23It was in August 1346
44:26that Edward's style of kingship was fully vindicated.
44:30The English and French met at Crecy, near Calais.
44:35The French were confident that victory was theirs,
44:39for they outnumbered the English eight to one.
44:43But Edward unleashed the full martial potential of his country.
44:48Now the training in the longbow and the promise of rich plunder,
44:52all under the command of the King, created a truly terrifying force.
44:58By nightfall, the battle was over, and a witness described the scene.
45:04When no more shouting or rallying cries could be heard,
45:08the English concluded that the enemy were routed,
45:11so they lit great numbers of lanterns and torches because it was very dark.
45:15They hailed it as a glorious victory, and several times at night
45:19they gave thanks to God for showing them such great mercies.
45:23The French fled, leaving behind 4,000 dead knights.
45:28Edward's armies had gone into battle wearing the cross of St George,
45:33and St George, the patron saint of soldiers and nobles,
45:37became the patron saint of England.
45:43This great window in Gloucester Cathedral is known as the Crecy window.
45:48It was built to commemorate the victory,
45:51and it contains the shields of King Edward and his companions in arms.
45:56There, in the middle, is the coat of arms of King Edward himself,
46:00now showing the lilies of France as well as the lions of England.
46:04There's Lord Barclay's, who'd been forgiven for having acted as jailer
46:08to Edward's father, Edward II.
46:10And there's Lord Badderston's, who'd probably paid for the window
46:14out of the fortune that he made from the war in France.
46:18The war in France made England rich.
46:21It also remade England.
46:24England had been culturally in the shadow of France
46:27ever since the Norman conquest,
46:29but now that France was shattered and defeated,
46:33England had got the confidence to strike out on its own,
46:37as in the architecture here.
46:40The window is an early masterpiece
46:43of the new English perpendicular style.
46:47So it's more than a window.
46:49It's a kind of symphony in which architecture, heraldry and religion
46:54all come together in a single hymn of praise
46:57to England's god, to England's king and to England itself.
47:06After Crecy, Edward's popularity reached its zenith.
47:13The English thought that a new sun had risen
47:16because of the abundance of peace in England,
47:18the plentitude of goods and the glory of the victories.
47:22The century of Edwards had reshaped the English monarchy.
47:26The king was now more closely identified with the interests of his people
47:31and he would never again be able to rule effectively
47:34without the consent of Parliament.
47:36He was expected to fight wars,
47:38but they had to be wars in the national interest.
47:43For the most memorable legacy of the Edwards
47:46was the forging of a nation that defined itself through war,
47:50symbolised in the flag of the soldier saint.
47:53A superman like Edward I could manage it,
47:56or a man's man like Edward III,
47:59but could their successors?