Edward I: The King Who Built Castles to Crush the Wales

Written by Simon Williams

Edward I built seventeen castles. He reformed the common law so thoroughly that lawyers five centuries later still called him the English Justinian. He invented the Model Parliament. He reorganised Wales into shires, issued statutes that shaped English governance for generations, and carried his military campaigns from the Scottish Highlands to the plains of the Holy Land with a logistical precision that commanders half his age could not match.

He also expelled every Jewish person from England in 1290. All of them. Roughly two thousand people — men, women, children — given until All Saints' Day to leave or face execution. It was the longest-lasting expulsion of its kind in European history. The order was not reversed for 365 years.

These two facts belong to the same man. That is the thing about Edward I that his reputation as a great lawgiver and castle-builder tends to obscure: the same qualities that made him effective at reforming English institutions also made him capable of the most sweeping acts of state violence. He did not separate governance from brutality. He combined them, systematically, across thirty-five years on the throne.

Born on 17 June 1239 at the Palace of Westminster, the eldest son of the hapless Henry III and the formidable Eleanor of Provence, Edward entered a realm still scarred by baronial strife. He grew tall beyond the common measure — six feet and two inches in an age when most men scarce reached five and a half — earning the sobriquet Longshanks. Blond in boyhood, his locks darkened with the years; a drooping left eyelid lent his gaze a certain asymmetry, yet his speech, though lisping, carried persuasive force. These are the surface details. The more important truth is what the reign produced: an England transformed in law, in territory, and in the lives it destroyed along the way.

Early Life and the Lessons of Baronial War

A depiction of King Edward I, inspired by his portrait in Westminster Abbey. Known as "Longshanks" for his impressive height, his physical presence was as formidable as his political will.

In the tumult of his father's reign, young Edward learnt the arts of survival and command. The Second Barons' War thrust him early into the fray: captured at Lewes in 1264, he escaped with characteristic daring, regrouped his forces, and crushed Simon de Montfort at Evesham the following year. Blood stained his hands there, yet he emerged not as mere avenger but as the architect of a restored royal power.

The Crusade and the Path to the Throne

His crusade to the Holy Land in 1270–1272, undertaken while his father lay dying, revealed the same resolute temper: wounded by an assassin's dagger at Acre, he rose to fight on, binding his own wound and pressing forward. He returned to claim a throne already his in name, crowned at Westminster in 1274 after a two-year absence.

Reforms and the Strengthening of Royal Authority

The England he inherited was fractious, its nobility jealous of ancient liberties, its administration creaking. Edward set about reform with the energy of a man who brooked no opposition. He summoned parliaments, not as concessions but as instruments of royal will; the Model Parliament of 1295 drew knights, burgesses, and clergy alike into the business of taxation and law-making. His statutes, Westminster I and II, Winchester, Quo Warranto, tightened the crown's grip on land, justice, and feudal rights. Lawyers would later hail him the English Justinian, for in codifying and refining the common law he laid foundations that endure to this day.

The Conquest of Wales

Caernarfon Castle, a primary link in Edward I’s "Iron Ring" of fortresses. These massive stone structures were designed to project English power and secure his hard-won conquest of Wales.

Yet it is for conquest that history chiefly remembers him. Wales, long a thorn in the English side, fell first. Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, styling himself Prince of Wales, had expanded his dominion under the weakness of Henry III. Edward would suffer no such rival. In 1277 he invaded with meticulous preparation: three armies converging, a fleet blockading the coast, supply lines secured. Llywelyn bent the knee, stripped of his conquests. When rebellion flared again in 1282, Edward struck harder: Llywelyn slain in battle at Orewin Bridge, his brother Dafydd captured and executed with barbarous ceremony. By the Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284, Wales was annexed, reorganised into shires on the English model.

The Iron Ring: Castles of Domination

To hold it, Edward raised those stupendous castles—Caernarfon, Conwy, Harlech, Beaumaris—ringing the north like an iron chain, monuments of military engineering and royal megalomania that still dominate the landscape. These fortresses, with their concentric walls, towering keeps, and ingenious defences, proclaimed not mere occupation but eternal sovereignty.

The Scottish Wars and the Hammer of the Scots

Scotland proved a sterner test. When Alexander III died childless in 1286 and his granddaughter Margaret, the Maid of Norway, perished en route to her kingdom, Edward seized the moment. As feudal overlord, he claimed ancient suzerainty, he adjudicated the succession among the competitors, choosing John Balliol in 1292. But Balliol chafed under English tutelage. Defiance brought invasion in 1296: Berwick sacked with savage cruelty, Dunbar taken, the Stone of Destiny carried off to Westminster. Balliol deposed, Scotland reduced to a province. Yet resistance flared, William Wallace, the guerrilla knight, raised the north; Robert Bruce, once Edward's man, claimed the crown. Falkirk in 1298 saw Edward's heavy cavalry smash Wallace's schiltrons, but the Scots would not submit.

The Edict of Expulsion: Edward's Most Consequential Domestic Act

On 18 July 1290, Edward I issued the Edict of Expulsion. Every Jewish person in England — estimated at around two thousand, concentrated in London, York, Lincoln, and Norwich — was ordered to leave the kingdom by 1 November, All Saints' Day, or face execution. They were permitted to take their moveable goods. Their property and outstanding debts owed to them were seized by the crown.

The edict was not spontaneous. It was the culmination of decades of systematic legal restriction. Jews had been prohibited from lending money at interest since 1275, under the Statute of the Jewry — which had the practical effect of stripping the community of its primary economic function, since most other trades were closed to them. Tallages (forced taxes levied specifically on Jewish communities) had grown increasingly punitive. By 1290, Edward had already extracted most of the financial value available from the community; the expulsion was, in a grim sense, the logical endpoint of a policy of extraction followed by disposal.

The edict was broadly popular. Parliament, from which Edward sought and received endorsement, granted him a significant tax in return. The expelled community dispersed across France, the Low Countries, and the Iberian peninsula. Some drowned, there are accounts of ship captains abandoning passengers at sea or stranding them on tidal sandbanks.

England would not readmit a formal Jewish community until 1656, under Oliver Cromwell, 366 years after Edward's order.

This act sits in uncomfortable proximity to Edward's reputation as a lawgiver. The same Parliament that granted him the tax in exchange for the expulsion was, in other respects, a vehicle for the extension of legal protections for his subjects. Edward did not see a contradiction. For him, the expulsion was an administrative and financial decision, executed through legal process. That is, in some ways, the most disturbing thing about it: it was not an aberration from his governance. It was an expression of it.

Death and Legacy

Hammer of the Scots men called him after his death, the inscription upon his plain Purbeck marble tomb in Westminster Abbey declaring: "Here lies Edward I, the Hammer of the Scots. Keep troth." He died in harness in 1307, at Burgh by Sands near the Solway, his last campaign unfinished, his dream of a united Britain unfulfilled.

Edward I was no gentle prince. Ruthless in war, implacable towards rebels, he taxed without mercy and bent the nobility to his purpose. He expelled England's Jewish community in an act of calculated state violence that parliament endorsed and celebrated. He executed Dafydd ap Gruffudd — the last native Prince of Wales — with a four-part barbarity reserved for traitors: hanged, disembowelled, beheaded, quartered. He pursued William Wallace to the same end. The borders he redrew by force have broadly held for seven centuries.

Yet he was also the lawgiver who strengthened the crown against feudal anarchy, the builder whose castles still stand as among the finest achievements of medieval military architecture, and the administrator whose statutes shaped English common law for generations. In him the medieval monarchy reached its zenith of power and ambition — a sovereign who sought not merely to rule England, but to remake Britain entirely in its image. His legacy endures in stone and statute, in the borders he redrew and the laws he shaped.

The question his reign leaves open is not whether he was great. It is whether greatness of that kind, built on that foundation, is the right word to use at all.

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