Edwardus Primus Scottorum Malleus hic est. Pactum Serva.
(Here is Edward I, Hammer of the Scots. Keep the vow.)Inscription on Edward I's tomb in Westminster Abbey, added in the sixteenth century
Edward I
parents: Henry III and Eleanor of Provence
date and place of birth: 17 June 1239 at the Palace of Westminster
wives: Eleanor of Castile; Margaret of France
dates of marriage: 1 November 1254 at Las Huelgas, Burgos (Eleanor); 8 September 1299 at Canterbury (Margaret)
children: at least fourteen with Eleanor, including Eleanor, Joan of Acre, Alphonso, Margaret, Mary, Elizabeth and Edward (later Edward II); Thomas, Edmund and Eleanor with Margaret
years of reign: 1272-1307
date of coronation: 19 August 1274 at Westminster Abbey
date and place of death: 7 July 1307 at Burgh by Sands, near Carlisle
place of burial: Westminster Abbey
Edward I stood about six feet two inches tall, a head above most of his subjects, and the nickname "Longshanks" stuck to him for life. When antiquaries opened his tomb in 1774 they measured the body at six feet two. He had a drooping left eyelid, inherited from his father, and a lisp, and he had a temper that frightened his own household. One story, told by the chronicler Walter of Guisborough, has the Dean of St Paul's dropping dead of fright during an argument with the king over taxation.
He grew up in the shadow of his father's troubles. Henry III was a pious, extravagant king who filled his court with foreign relatives, and by the 1250s the barons had had enough. Led by Henry's brother-in-law Simon de Montfort, they forced the Provisions of Oxford on the king in 1258 and went to war when he tried to escape them. The young Edward switched sides more than once in these years, but he ended on his father's. De Montfort beat the royalists at Lewes in 1264 and took both Henry and Edward prisoner. Edward escaped in May 1265, raised an army in the Welsh Marches, and caught de Montfort at Evesham on 4 August. His men cut the earl down and mutilated the body. You can read the full story on our page on the Second Barons' War.
Crusade and Accession
With England at peace, Edward took the cross. He sailed for the Holy Land in 1270 and reached Acre in 1271, on what historians now call the Lord Edward's Crusade and our site lists as the Ninth Crusade. He achieved little militarily, and in June 1272 an assassin stabbed him with a poisoned dagger. He survived; a later legend has Eleanor sucking the poison from the wound, though the chronicler closest to events says his attendants dragged her weeping from the room while a surgeon cut away the infected flesh. Henry III died in November 1272 while Edward was on his way home. The barons swore allegiance to him in his absence, and he took his time returning, reaching England only in August 1274. He was crowned at Westminster two weeks later.
The Lawgiver
Edward's early reign produced more legislation than any English reign before it, and some Victorian historians called him the English Justinian. He began with an inquiry. In 1274 and 1275 royal commissioners toured the country collecting evidence of abuses by sheriffs and barons; their returns became the Hundred Rolls. Edward followed them with the Statute of Westminster of 1275, a long code covering everything from wreck of the sea to the conduct of elections. The quo warranto inquiries demanded that every lord who claimed a private jurisdiction show "by what warrant" he held it. The Statute of Mortmain of 1279 stopped landowners from dodging feudal dues by giving land to the church, and the Statute of Westminster of 1285 reshaped the law of inheritance. Most of this aimed to strengthen royal authority and royal income, but it also gave English law much of its shape for the rest of the Middle Ages.
The Conquest of Wales
Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, Prince of Wales, had done well out of England's civil war, and the Treaty of Montgomery of 1267 recognised his title. He then refused to do homage to the new king. Edward invaded in 1277, cut Llywelyn off from the grain of Anglesey, and forced him to surrender most of his lands. In 1282 Llywelyn's brother Dafydd rose in revolt and Llywelyn joined him. This time Edward meant to end Welsh independence for good. Llywelyn died in a skirmish at Cilmeri in December 1282; English troops took his head to London and displayed it at the Tower. Dafydd was captured the following summer and became one of the first men of rank to suffer hanging, drawing and quartering, at Shrewsbury.
The Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284 annexed the principality to the English crown and divided it into English-style shires. To hold it, Edward built a ring of stone fortresses under his master mason, James of St George: Conwy, Caernarfon, Harlech and, from 1295, Beaumaris, with new walled towns for English settlers beside them. These are some of the finest medieval castles in Europe, and they cost Edward a fortune. His son Edward was born at Caernarfon in 1284, and in 1301 the king made him Prince of Wales, the first heir to the English throne to hold the title.
The Expulsion of the Jews
The darkest act of Edward's reign came in 1290. England's Jewish community had been heavily taxed by his father and grandfather, and in 1275 Edward's Statute of the Jewry banned them from lending at interest, the one trade Christian law left open to them. In 1278 and 1279 royal officials arrested hundreds of Jews on charges of clipping coins, and more than two hundred and fifty were hanged in London. On 18 July 1290 Edward issued the Edict of Expulsion, ordering every Jew to leave England by 1 November. Parliament paid for it with the largest tax grant of the Middle Ages. Perhaps two to three thousand people left. Jews were not formally readmitted to England until 1656, under Oliver Cromwell.
The Eleanor Crosses
Edward's first wife, Eleanor of Castile, died at Harby in Nottinghamshire on 28 November 1290. They had been married for thirty-six years, and she had travelled with him on crusade and on campaign. The king had her body carried to Westminster, and at each of the twelve places where the procession stopped overnight he raised a stone cross in her memory. Three survive, at Geddington, Hardingstone near Northampton and Waltham Cross. The Charing Cross outside the railway station in London is a Victorian replacement. Nine years later Edward married Margaret of France, the half-sister of Philip IV, as part of a peace treaty; he was sixty, she was about twenty.
The Model Parliament
Wars in Wales, Scotland and Gascony cost more than any king had spent before, and Edward needed the consent of his subjects to raise the money. In November 1295 he summoned what historians later named the Model Parliament: bishops, abbots, earls and barons, two knights from each shire, two burgesses from each borough, and representatives of the lower clergy. His writ of summons quoted a principle of Roman law, "what touches all should be approved by all." Parliaments did not take this fixed shape every time afterwards, but the idea that the commons should be summoned to consent to taxation took root. In 1297, with the country close to revolt over his demands, Edward had to confirm Magna Carta and promise not to levy extraordinary taxes without common consent.
Hammer of the Scots
In 1286 Alexander III of Scotland rode his horse off a cliff in the dark. His heir, his granddaughter Margaret, the Maid of Norway, died in Orkney in 1290 on her way to take the throne. Thirteen claimants came forward, and the Scots asked Edward to judge between them. He agreed on condition that they accept him as overlord, and in 1292 the "Great Cause" ended with the crown going to John Balliol. Edward then treated Balliol as a vassal, summoning him to answer appeals in English courts and to serve in his French war. When the Scots made an alliance with France in 1295, Edward invaded.
He sacked Berwick in March 1296 and killed much of its population, defeated the Scots at Dunbar, stripped Balliol of his crown and carried the Stone of Scone to Westminster, where it sat under the Coronation Chair until 1996. The Scots rose the following year under William Wallace and Andrew Moray and destroyed an English army at Stirling Bridge in September 1297. Edward beat Wallace at Falkirk in July 1298 with his Welsh longbowmen, but Scotland would not stay conquered. Wallace was betrayed in 1305, taken to London, and hanged, drawn and quartered at Smithfield on 23 August. Within months Robert the Bruce had murdered his rival John Comyn in a church at Dumfries and had himself crowned King of Scots.
Edward, now in his late sixties and ill, marched north one more time. He died at Burgh by Sands, within sight of the Solway and the Scottish shore, on 7 July 1307. The story that he asked for his bones to be carried at the head of the army until Scotland submitted comes from the chronicler Jean Froissart, writing decades later; his son ignored it and turned back. Edward I lies in a plain black marble tomb in Westminster Abbey. Someone in Tudor times painted on it the words that gave him his second nickname, Hammer of the Scots.
For the family he came from, see the Plantagenet dynasty and Plantagenet queens.
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Link will appear as Hanson, Marilee. "Edward I, Longshanks" https://englishhistory.net/middle-ages/edward-i/, September 30, 2026