Hello everyone and welcome back to the history of England, episode 86, handing over. Right,

enough messing about all that social and legal stuff, let's get back to the real thing,

battles, dates and all. So, do I assume we've all heard of the ice-bog rule, i.e. that

nine tenths of everything is hidden? Well, there's a bit of that in 1305. On the face of it,

everything was sorted. The Scots were beaten. Gascony had been handed back. The Welsh were part of Edward's

Great British Empire, and in Browning's words, God was in his heaven and all was right with the world.

Not, sadly. Now, for once in his life, Edward had tried to be sensitive to Scottish feelings after

comming surrender. Rather than just imposing a colonial administration like he'd done the last

time, Edward called in the leading Scots and talked it through with them. There was a Scottish

Parliament and all, and the sheriff's appointed were almost exclusively Scottish rather than English.

Even Robert Wishett, the implacable Bishop of Glasgow, was part of the conversations.

But despite all of this, it was still something of a mess, a Gordian's knot that would take

an Alexander to one pick. In Scotland, there'd been years of war, despair and murder.

Even more complicated, was the fact that the Scottish lords had been disinherited as rebels,

and the English lords had all been granted their lands.

But now that the Scots had come back into the fold, that was just a little awkward to say the least.

A solution was found that the Scots would buy their land back, but still pretty chaotic.

Ireland was in a mess, too. Edward had ruthlessly and carelessly drawn on its resources to help him in

the fight against Scotland, without a care of what actually happened there. The normal aristocracy

had become largely absent, resulting in a resurgence of the power of native lords,

and the result was an uneasy political situation at best, and a rise in general lawlessness.

Ireland, as in so many times in its history, was suffering from at once neglect and repacity.

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