Edward I
The following is verbatim from Carr's Dictionary of English Kings, Consorts, Pretenders, Usurpers, un-natural Claimants & Royal Athelings, a pocket book of unknown publication date, which lacks a copyright notice. No infringement is intended: I merely admire both the style, and the compactness of the editor's summary of documented fact.
- Edward I, (Longshanks, Malleus Scotorum), d.1307 aged 67, of a violent flux. He was unusually tall and had curly hair, sparkling back eyes, one drooping eyelid and a stammer. His first wife, Eleanor of Castile, bore 15 children and inspired an astonishing progress of memorial crosses, built while he was enjoying a second wife, 42 years his junior. This choleric man banished the Jews, planned several new towns, stole the Stone of Scone, subdued Wales and, at death's approach, still consumed with a lifelong antipathy towards Scotsmen ordered that, after his heart had been despatched to Jerusalem, his bones must be borne before an invading army.
Two of the sites of his Eleanor crosses were at Waltham Abbey, north of London, and at Charing Cross in London (original now sadly lost). He married Eleanor when she was 10 according to Carr.
His son, Edward II, bears the distinction of being the first English Prince of Wales, as well as the first king to be deposed in England since before the Conquest, and the subject of a complicated murder, allegedly at the arrangement of his wife, involving a garderobe, a nether passage, and hot metal.
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