Edward I and the Crown of France
King Edward as a historical figure looms large over my books, both the After Cilmeri series and my new book, Crouchback. Because in the middle ages, the King of England was also the Duke of Aquitaine, not to mention Norman, Edward had ties to France even before he became king. “France”, however, didn’t exist as we know it today, in that Aquitaine was a separate kingdom and the people there were not “French.” Aquitaine had come under the auspices of the kings of England after the marriage of King Henry II to Eleanor of Aquitaine in the late 12th century, as an addition to Henry’s already extensive “French” estates, which included Brittany and Normandy. Over the next century, the Kingdom of France wrested all but Aquitaine away from the Kings of England. Thus, when Edward left for Crusade from Aigues Read more…
The Kingdoms of France
You might ask, and reasonably so, why a blog about medieval Wales would be posting about the kingdoms of France in the Middle Ages. The main reason is that it’s hard to understand the Norman conquest of England (and Wales and Scotland), without reference to the fact that they were Norman. That means, they came from the Kingdom of Normandy, a region on the north coast of France. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_of_Aquitaine ‘France’ wasn’t ‘France’ as we know it today until after the Edwardian period. As the map dating from 1154 to the right shows, the King of France controlled a relatively small portion of the country. Edward I was the Duke of Aquitaine, whose lands are comparable in size to what the King of France held. The dispute of the control of France and these kingdoms, in fact, was one of the Read more…
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