A Great and Terrible King Edward I and the Forging of Britain

This is the first major biography for a generation of the formidable king who, by force of character, pragmatism and by his Arthurian sense of destiny, conquered and unified Great Britain - but laid the seeds for its destruction soon after. The story covers the massive subjugation of Wales and Llewellyn (all the huge castles built within an astonishingly short time-span), the massive campaign against Scotland (resisted by Wallace, popularly known as Braveheart), the struggles with Simon de Montfort which led to the first ideas about Parliament, the battles for a Crusade and finally the tender story of his love for Eleanor, marked by the famous Eleanor Crosses at the points her coffin rested on its return to London. Through his actions Edward I scores above almost any other medieval English monarch. Few Kings did as much as Edward, or reigned as long. Fewer still can claim to have altered the destiny of a country so profoundly; even today we are living with the consequences of Edward's ideas about the proper shape of the British Isles. This is a sweeping, immaculately researched but popular vision of an extraordinary King and a panorama of the medieval world which he helped create.