A Great and Terrible King Quotes

“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: Edward I and the Forging of Britain

“Having begun their protest by demanding that the realm should be governed only by ‘native-born men’, the opposition now insisted on nothing less than the total expulsion of all foreigners, ‘never to return’.”
― Marc Morris, A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain

“In the final analysis, therefore, the tomb of Edward I may stand, like the unfinished castle at Caernarfon, not only as a monument to the past, but also as a warning to the future: a final reminder of the power of myth to shape men’s minds and motives, and thus to alter the fate of nations.”
― Marc Morris, A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain

“In his effort to appease his Christian taxpayers in parliament, Edward stripped away the traditional protections that earlier kings of England had extended towards the country’s Jewish community. During his rule the Jews were forbidden to lend money at interest, stigmatised as infidels and ultimately expelled. Modern commentators have naturally judged Edward harshly for this, though they often err in presenting him as a pioneer. He was, it is true, the first European leader to carry out an expulsion on a nationwide scale, but this only goes to show that he was a powerful ruler of a precociously united kingdom. Other kings, earls and counts before him had expelled Jews to the furthest extent of their more limited authority. To say this much is not to deny that Edward was a thorough-going anti-Semite: he was, as his pogrom of 1279 proves all too clearly. It is merely to emphasise that, in his anti-Semitism, Edward was altogether conventional. A bigoted man, he lived in a bigoted age, and was king of a bigoted people. Abhorrent as it seems to us today, the fact that ‘he expelled the faithless multitude of Jews and unbelievers from England’ was regarded by his Westminster obituarist as one of Edward’s most commendable achievements.”
― Marc Morris, A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain

“By this stage, anyone who had quizzed me about the making of this book – assuming they were still listening – must have had a third question forming in their minds, though they were all too polite to pose it. That question, I imagine, was ‘why bother?’ Why devote a sizeable chunk of one’s own life to re-examining the deeds of a man who has been dead for seven centuries? The answer, as I hope the finished product will make clear, is that the reign of Edward I matters.”
― Marc Morris, A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain

“helium.”
― Marc Morris, A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain