Historical non-fiction books that I tend towards typically organize around a story: Kon Tiki, The Motorcycle Diaries, Endurance. I rarely read biographies because I’m just not that interested in minutiae of major historical figures. However, when a historical popularizer takes on a biography of a long-dead, often misunderstood English king, and Amazon puts it on sale, I am ready to try again.
Edward I, Longshanks, the Hammer of the Scots, was somebody I knew little about. He appeared tempestuous, but rarely; just but vengeful; loving to his wife, always; and effective nine times out of ten. Those couple of mistakes he makes are glaring—freeing prisoners, ignoring his councellors about Gascony, and taxing his subjects too heavily. However, he also had a series of wars to fight that left him broke, so the latter makes some sense.
In building the character of Edward, Marc Morris let’s the events do the talking before filling in the details from primary documents after the fact. The problem with this style of character building is that I’m too often surprised by the actions of the King. Maybe he was a surprising person, but when all is said and done, I feel like I understand Edward I in all of his actions, but that’s the conclusion of the book, and it runs the risk of leaving me wondering through far too much of the book itself. It holds the cards too close to the chest.
But the impetus for holding cards close rests in the narrative style of chronological telling. Morris just runs through Edward’s life, from A to B, then ends the book with a brilliant chapter that briefly weighs up a conclusion based on all the evidence given. Like a pulp author, there are cliff-hangers in many of the chapters and sections within chapters: none more striking to me than ending a chapter with the phrase, “The Devil had assumed a new guise, and his name was William Wallace.” These cliffhangers work for me, as they are often moments of surprise for Edward in his own life: the death of the Maid of Norway, the murder of Comyn, the sudden rise of William Wallace. Why not surprise the readers with what also surprised Edward? It’s a tactic I appreciate in this history book, and one I wish more people employed as it gets me excited for the next chapter.
The writing works well enough—nothing to praise highly, but nothing to call out as particularly bad either. There is one part, near the end, where Morris seems to have discovered the word precocious, but that’s actually the only writing that annoys me.
The focus, or theme of the book appears to deal more with Edward’s role in spending thirty years to set a foundation to what came after. The subtitle of this book—Edward I and the Forging of Britain—sets the tone for the whole. He conquers Wales, and the focus in on the conquering, and not Edward in that situation. He hammers Scotland, but again, the focus is on the attempt, and not the thoughts—though Morris does tend to let Edward’s thoughts into the book, I wanted a little more.
Now, I’m not sure how much of that lack of thoughts is down to lack of access to Edward himself—he’s dead. But still, I knew he liked building things—from his actions, not his thoughts—until way late in the book when Morris gets into some of the specifics: Edward, in his sixties, is deep into the minutiae of designing a wooden fort’s ditch depth.
In all, I finished this book and loved it. I looked forward to reading it every day. And I read it late until my eyes stopped being able to focus. It’s something I would recommend to nerds of this sort of thing, and even people interested in this sort of thing, but not to people uninterested—like I would Kon Tiki or Endurance. I’ll look for another Marc Morris book in the future. Actually, I've already got one picked out.
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