Power and kingship

More on power and titles from RR Davies:

“Never had the presence of English power, be it in the person of the king himself or that of his appointed representatives…been so ubiquitously and awesomely present in the outer zones of the British Isles as in the last fifteen years or so of Edward I’s reign.

It was, of course, the triumph of power; contemporaries were not short of saying so. Sometimes they said it crudely: the magnates had bragged that England could exterminate Scotland without any external help. ‘What matter if both the Welsh and Scots are our foes?’ so Edward I is alleged to have boasted. ‘Let them join forces if they please. We shall beat them both in a single day.’ These statements may have been made, as we would say, off the record, but even on the record Edward I’s language made no bones of the fact that in this instance might was right. Power and proprietorship were the twin bases of his authority in Britain. The land of Wales had come ‘into the lordship of our possession’ and had been ‘annexed and united to the crown of the said kingdom as part of the said body’. As for Scotland, it was ‘subjected by right of ownership to our power’ and to his ‘right and full dominion…by reason of property and possession.’

In the process the latent high kingship of earlier days - be it the stage-managed submissions of Henry II’s day or the apparently genial ceremonies of 1278 - was being transformed into a more direct authority. Terminology and titles made the point crisply. Wales and Scotland in succession lost their princely and kingly status; both now came to be described simply and pointedly as ‘lands’. The title of prince of Wales was adopted, or usurped, for the English king’s eldest son as heir apparent to the crown of England. Though Edward I was occasionally referred to as ‘king of England and Scotland’, in reality the kingship of the Scots was in suspense for rebellion, subsumed in effect within the crown of England as that of its sovereign lord. If to that we added the title lord of Ireland, then Edward I was now in 1305 in truth, if not in name, king of the British Isles, ‘our realm’, as he occasionally referred to it, if only implicitly, in the singular.”