EDWARD I, King of England. - Firstborn son of Henry III Plantagenet, b. at Westminster on June 18, 1239, and d. at Burgh (Scotland) on July 7, 1307. In the years 1270-72 he took part in the last Crusade and was at Tunis with Louis IX of France, then at St. John of Acre.

Having succeeded his father in 1272, he began important reforms, reorganizing the economic and judicial administration, and earning the title of the English Justinian. Edward I also promoted the formation of Parliament in its modern form, convoking (1295) the representatives of the Commons so that they might collaborate in the work of legislation. Although profoundly Catholic, Edward I was dragged by his centralizing policy into conflict with the Church. A struggle with John Peckham, archbishop of Canterbury, caused by the statute of "mort-main" (1279), which forbade the granting of lands to religious bodies without the king's prior license, ended with the limitation of ecclesiastical jurisdiction to purely spiritual causes. A new clash occurred in 1297, when Peckham's successor, Archbishop Winchelsea, relying on the recent bull Clericis laicos, refused the contributions demanded from the clergy by Edward I for the Gascony campaign. The king, having yielded at first, later (1306) succeeded in exiling Winchelsea, who had remained isolated in the struggle. A year later Edward I died during an expedition against rebellious Scotland.

Bibliography5 works

BIBL.: G. Stubbs, Chronicles of the reigns of Edward I and Edward II (Rev. Brittan. med. aevi scriptori), 2 vols., London 1882-1883; T. F. Tout, The First Edward, ibid. 1893 (important is the review of it by A. Zimmermann, in Zeitschrift für balt. Theologie, 18 [1894], pp. 372-74); E. Jenks, Edward Plantagenet, ibid. 1902; W. E. Lunt, Papal taxation in England in the reign of Edward I, in The engl. histor. review, 30 (1915), pp. 398-417; G. M. Trevelyan, Storia d'Inghilterra, Italian trans. by M. Merlini, 3rd ed., Milan 1945, pp. 213-21.

Stanislao Majarelli

@incollection{ec5_edoardo_i_re_d_inghilterra, author = {Majarelli, Stanislao}, title = {Edoardo I, re d'inghilterra}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {V}, pages = {87}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1950}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/edoardo-i-re-d-inghilterra} }

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Edward I, King of England

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