Hello everyone and welcome back to the History of England, episode 77, edit with the first

and reconstruction. We left Edward last week at his coronation, eyeballing his magnets

and declaring to all of them that everything would be different from now on. Let's just

rerun that coronation promise again. He's never going to put the crown on again until

he's recovered the lands given away by his father to the elves, barons and knights of

England and to aliens. So, okay, there better be no thought about pushing the king around

or showing him the hand. Baroneal faces had better be listening.

The truth is that Edward did face something of a challenge. The last years of Henry's reign

had seemed pretty uneventful and peaceful and indeed they were. But under the surface

nothing had changed from the bad old days. The magnets settled down to a country where

Royal Power didn't get in their way very much at all, and they could get on with the things

they'd been doing before Demotford came onto the scene, ignoring the Royal Sheriff and

running things their way. Meanwhile, there's been a wave of crime and general lawlessness,

because the rest of the nation had been on Benzadreen for the last few years. The Benzadreen

had been taken away and it wasn't going to be easy to keep the habit.

One of the signs of this was the fuss that went on at Evesham. The sight of Demotford's

death quickly became a point of pilgrimage. In the late 1260s and early 1270s over 200

miracles were recorded at the battle well. People of all social rank rubbed shoulders

as they came to get a piece of Demotford's magic. The records show as the great and

the good in the form of Robert Devere, the Earl of Oxford and the masters of the University

of Oxford. Countesses, lords, as well as just the good, village constables, carpenter's,

millers, tailors and so on. Elsewhere the peasantry continued to struggle and challenge

...