EDWARDIAN TRIVIA
SIGNIFICANCE
Edward I was fascinated by the legends of King Arthur, holding ‘Round Table’ events in 1284 and 1302, which involved tourneys and feasting. He commissioned ‘King Arthur’s Round Table’ which hangs in the Great Hall at Winchester Castle.
Having tried to impose a ‘Greater Britain’, overlorded by England, during Edward I’s reign, the reign of Edward III would see a newly-confident realm proclaiming its lordship ‘of the English sea on either side’ and launching an expansionist campaign against the French in the guise of the Hundred Years’ War that would last until the reign of Henry VI.
The First Edwardians. I don’t know whether anyone’s called them that before but I’m thinking of the first three Edwards who sat on the English throne from 1272 to 1377, a period of just over a century. They were three generations, father, son and grandson; the first and last martial and mighty, the one in between a dismal failure They resembled a sandwich: two marvellous pieces of bloomer bread with a distasteful filling. In fact, this will be a tale of four Edwards, as we should also have had the martial ‘Edward IV’, the famed Black Prince, but he died of dysentery a year before his father, Edward III. We’d have to wait until the Wars of the Roses for Edward IV.
When Edward I’s first wife, Eleanor, died the king erected a series of 12 stone crosses (the ‘Eleanor Crosses’) along the route of her funerary cortege, each one representing an overnight stop. The last, Charing Cross, gave its name to a railway station.
Prince Edward overcomes and kills a would-be assassin in 1272 during his participation in the Crusades. It was just a few months before Edward learned that his father, Henry III, had died, and that he was King of England
Edward II was our first monarch to take a keen interest in the theatre although none of the plays he attended have survived.
Evesham