called, and made it
almost the most important epoch in the constitutional history of
England.

His first warfare was with the turbulent and disaffected Welshmen, who
had profited by the intestine turmoil of the preceding reign, and
intrigued perpetually with the rebellious nobles of Henry III. for
their own ends. The forced peace of 1277, and the national
dissatisfaction at the stringent terms granted by Edward, which was
not abated by the personal favors he heaped upon the princes Llewelyn
and his brother David, were but the preludes to the final struggle
which commenced three years later, and ended in the complete
suppression of Welsh nationalism, with the defeat and death of
Llewelyn, near Builth, in Brecknockshire, and the cruel execution of
David at Shrewsbury, as a traitor, in 1284. By the famous Statute of
Wales in the same year, the ancient principality was finally annexed
to the English crown, while English laws and English institutions were
forced upon the conquered people.

Edward devoted the next year to legislation, then went abroad to
mediate, without success, in the quarrel between France and Aragon. He
had soon to return to quell fresh disturbances in Wales, and even in
England, where the great Statute of Winchester, which had been passed
in 1285 to place the defence of the country on a really national
basis, had not yet had time to effect its end. Finding that most of
his judges had been corrupting justice, he punished them with an iron
hand, next banished in 1290 all the Jews to the number of over sixteen
thousand from the kingdom, on the plea of extortionate usury. Earlier
in the reign he had hanged 280 for money-clipping and forgery.

Just at this time the death of the young Scottish queen, the Maid of
Norway, whom Edward had caused to be betrothed to his eldest surviving
son, Edward of Caernarvon, opened up a fatal contest for the Scottish
crown, which gave Edward his opportunity to assert anew the old but
somewhat shadowy claim of the English crown to the over-lordship of
Scotland. The southern half of that composite kingdom was inhabited by
people of English blood and English institutions; its southeastern
part, the Lothians, had undoubtedly once formed part of the Anglian
kingdom of Northumbria; while its southwestern, Strathclyde or
Scottish Cumbria, the population of which was in great part Celtic,
had in 945 been given by the English king Edmund I. to Malcolm as a
fief. The northern porti