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Many others clearly had to be argued into fighting, and this could produce distinctly limited results. The muster roll for the 1300 campaign noted that Hugh fitz Heyr, a Shropshire landowner of little consequence, was obliged by the terms of his tenure to serve in the king's war 'with bow and arrow'. It also noted that 'as soon as he saw the enemy he shot his arrow, then went home'.
Marc Morris, A Great and Terrible King
Although many books on the Anglo-Saxons do not say much about it, more than ten per cent of England's population were slaves. Slavery was a widespread institution in early medieval Europe, and the sale and export of slaves was one of the main motors of the economy. Since the ninth century the trade's most outstanding exponents had been the Vikings, whose warfare was predicated for the most part on seizing young men and women as merchandise, to be sold either at home in Scandinavia or - very commonly - to Arab merchants in the Middle East. England was one of their principle hunting grounds, so individuals abducted from the coasts of Devon, Wales or Northumbria might eventually find themselves labouring under a desert sun to construct a caliph's palace, or members of a sultan's harem.
Marc Morris, The Norman Conquest, (2018) p.25
Dazzlingly beautiful - Philip le Bel (the Fair), his countrymen called him - he was also apparently painfully shy. This reserve may explain why some people found him aloof; later in his reign the king was famously described by a hostile French bishop, who caustically compared him to an owl. 'The handsomest man in the world, [he] can do nothing except stare at men.'
Marc Morris, A Great and Terrible King
His financial accounts show frequent payments to jesters, acrobats, minstrels and dancers (including, in the last instance, a certain Matilda Makejoy). They also record the charming fact that every year on Easter Monday the queen's ladies-in-waiting would try to catch the king in bed, and he rewarded them with a ransom if they were successful.
Marc Morris, A Great and Terrible King
When you see the [Bayeux] Tapestry in all its extensive, multicolored glory, you can appreciate in an instant why it is so important. This is not only an account of the Norman invasion of 1066; it is a window on to the world of the eleventh century.
Marc Morris, The Norman Conquest, (2013) p.2
The fundamental measure of Edward's wisdom, however, is that he was a good judge of other people. He could spot frauds (such as the knight who claimed to have been cured of blindness at the tomb of Henry III), and he had a talent for selecting men of outstanding ability to serve him. As one of the preachers in Poitiers put it: 'He did not rule in a frivolous state of mind, nor under the influence of flatterers... but with the prudent counsel of good and wise men.'
Marc Morris, A Great and Terrible King
Readers with very retentive memories may recall how, at the end of his struggle with Simon de Montfort, Edward and his friends had compelled Robert de Ferrers, earl of Derby, to surrender his estates to Edmund of Lancaster. John de Ferrers, as the son of the dispossessed and long-deceased victim, had lately begun a campaign to recover his lost inheritance, and Winchelsea had decided to act as his champion. In 1301, having secured permission from the pope, the archbishop had actually begun to judge the case in his own court, and had summoned the new earl of Lancaster to answer Ferrers' accusation of unlawful disseisin. Needless to say, the king, already deeply embittered, must have been enraged by Winchelsea's efforts to revisit this discreditable episode from his distant past. The archbishop had soon found himself being countersued in the king's courts, charged with trying to disinherit the Crown and subvert the realm. In 1305 the gloves really came off. During the spring, as Bigod was being pardoned his debts, Winchelsea was hit with a demand for £4,000 of unpaid taxes.
Marc Morris, A Great and Terrible King
Roger Clifford, for example, was the latest in a long line of lords who took their name from Clifford Castle in Herefordshire, and who took their position as Marchers seriously (one of his relatives once famously forced the bearer of a royal writ to eat it - parchment, wax seal and all).
Marc Morris, A Great and Terrible King
