One of the features or bugs of reading five or six books at a time is that sometimes you finish them all in the course of a day and then wander around feeling strangely bereft.
One of the books I just finished is Marc Morris’ superb bio of Edward I: A Great and Terrible King (2009).
There’s a lot to it, and I may blog about it and a much older history I was reading around the same time (Davis’ England Under the Normans and Angevins; 1905) when & if my ideas about them settle into place.
One takeaway is that idealism in medieval statesmen often went hand-in-hand with anti-Semitism. Both Simon de Montfort and Edward I engaged in murderous cruelty towards England’s Jewish population, even as they laid the foundations for Parliamentary government in England.
Another is that, although Edward I (like his father, the mostly hapless Henry III), had lots of kids, most of the ones he had by his first queen didn’t survive into adulthood. The eventual Edward II was his 4th son. For a while, his older brother Alphonso was the heir apparent.
If this kid could have held on, medieval England would have had a King Alphonso–perhaps a whole string of them, given how names repeat in royal dynasties. That would have brightened up the later Middle Ages.
