EDWARD 1. OF ENGLAND 111 Two months later he started for home, and at Capua, in the January of 1273, heard of his father's death two months before. Meantime he had been quietly proclaimed king, and as things went well in England, he visited the pope, did homage at Paris for his French provinces, and did not return to his kingdom till the August of 1274. At his coronation he received the homage of Alexander III. of Scotland for his lands in England, but Prince Llewelyn of Wales neg- lected the summons to attend, and only did his homage in 1276, under the com- bined terrors of excommunication and the royal army. Edward at once com- menced that wise and large policy of domestic consolidation and financial as well as legal reform, that has shed such lustre upon the reign of the English Justinian, as he has been called, and made it almost the most important epoch in the con- stitutional 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 Llew- elyn and his brother David, were but the preludes to the final struggle which com- menced three years later, and ended in the complete suppression of Welsh na- tionalism, with the defeat and death of Llewelyn, near Builth, in Brecknockshire, and the cruel execution of David at Shrewsbury, as a traitor, in 1 284. 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 re- turn to quell fresh disturbances in Wales, and even in England, where the great Statute of Winchester, which had been passed in 1 285 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 Ed- ward 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 com- posite kingdom was inhabited by people of English blood and English institu- tions ; 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 portion of the kingdom was purely Celtic in blood, and had at no time been sub-
