Edmund, 2nd Earl of Cornwall

Edmund, 2nd Earl of Cornwall. Book illustration from the 13th century

Edmund Plantagenet, 2nd Earl of Cornwall (also Edmund of Almain ; born December 26, 1249 in Berkhamsted Castle , † before September 25, 1300 in Ashridge ) was an English magnate .

Origin, childhood and youth

Edmund Plantagenet came from the Anglo-Norman ruling dynasty of the Plantagenets . He was the son of Richard of Cornwall and his second wife, Sancha of Provence , daughter of Raimund Berengar, Count of Provence . His father was a younger brother of King Henry III of England . , his mother a sister of his wife, Queen Eleanor of Provence . Edmund was baptized by Boniface of Savoy , Archbishop of Canterbury , who was his mother's uncle, and named after the recently canonized Archbishop Edmund of Abingdon , Boniface's predecessor as Archbishop.

His father had a son from his first marriage, Henry of Almain , who was fourteen years older than Edmund and was intended to be his father's heir. Little is known about Edmund's childhood, and until 1269 he owned only the Alderley estate in Gloucestershire . In 1257 Edmund accompanied his father and mother to Germany after his father had been elected Roman-German king . In 1259 the family returned to England. After his father was captured by the rebelling barons at the Battle of Lewes during the Second War of the Barons in 1264 , Edmund was also captured and imprisoned with his father at Kenilworth Castle . It was only after the victory of the king's party in the Battle of Evesham that he and his father were defeated by Simon VI in September 1265 . de Montfort released. From August 1268 to August 1269 he accompanied his father to Germany again.

Inheritance from his father

Edmund took part in the crusade of his cousin, the heir to the throne Eduard , and set out for the Holy Land in February 1271 with Eduard's younger brother Edmund Crouchback, 1st Earl of Lancaster . However, when they learned on the trip that Edmund's older half-brother Henry of Almain had been murdered in Viterbo , Edmund was sent back to England to the relief of his father. His father died on April 2, 1272, and around May 1, 1272 Edmund paid homage to the king and was recognized as the heir to his father's extensive estates. He inherited a vast estate from his father in 25 counties . The main focuses of his holdings were Berkhamstead in Hertfordshire , Eye in East Anglia , Oakham in Rutland , Knaresborough in Yorkshire , Beckley in Oxfordshire and Wallingford in Berkshire , but above all the county of Cornwarll with its rich tin mines. For a fee of 3,500  marks he leased the city and dominion of Leicester for four years from his cousin Edmund Crouchback, who was still on the crusade, in July 1272 . In 1278 he also acquired the rights to the Devon tin mines , and from the early 1270s he had lifelong rights to appoint the sheriff of Cornwall and Rutland. With an annual income of around £ 8,000, Edmund was the richest English magnate of his time.

On October 6, 1272, he married in the chapel of Ruislip Margaret de Clare , a sister of the powerful magnate Gilbert de Clare, 6th Earl of Hertford . A week later, on October 13th, he was on the name day of Edward the Confessor together with 50 other nobles from home and abroad in Westminster by King Henry III. Knighted , the day he was also awarded the title of his father, Earl of Cornwall . Since his father was only an elected German king, Edmund had not inherited his claim to the German throne, but he often called himself Edmund of Almain ( Almain of the French Allemagne for Germany).

Supporters of King Edward I.

When King Henry III. Edmund died in November 1272 and was a member of the Regency Council until the return of the heir to the throne, Eduard. In June 1273 he traveled to Paris, where he met Edward, who had returned from the crusade. On August 19, 1274, he took part in the king's coronation at Westminster Abbey , and in the summer of 1277 he took part in the campaign against Wales with fourteen knights from his entourage . In September 1278 he was present when the Scottish King Alexander III. paid homage to the English king. When the king traveled to France in 1279, Edmund was on the Regency Council with Bishop Thomas de Cantilupe of Hereford and Bishop Godfrey Giffard of Worcester. In May 1280 Edmund traveled to France with the Abbot of Colchester Abbey . In June 1281, through the mediation of Queen Eleanor of Castile and Lord Chancellor Robert Burnell , he was able to settle a protracted dispute with the Bishop of Exeter over the jurisdiction of their courts.

While the king undertook his second campaign against Wales from 1282 , Edmund was the king's deputy in England from April 1282 to Christmas 1284. During this time he represented the king in January 1283 at a church meeting in Northampton . As royal deputy, he secured a number of lucrative guardianship himself during his reign, including that of Baldwin Wake's heir , for which he paid the high fee of 7,000 marks. When the king set out again for Gascony in southwest France on May 13, 1286 , Edmund was again regent of England. From June 1287 he had to put down the revolt of the Welsh Lord Rhys ap Maredudd , during which he conquered the headquarters of Dryslwyn Castle with a large army in September . He had to borrow from Italian bankers to cover the cost of the campaign, which exceeded £ 10,000. In June 1289 he had to intervene in a dispute between Gilbert de Clare and Humphrey de Bohun in the Welsh Marches , where he forbade de Clare to continue building the controversial Morlais Castle . When King Edward returned to England from Gascony on August 12, 1289, he had investigations carried out into mismanagement and abuse of power during his absence. Several senior judges and officials were dismissed and fines of nearly £ 20,000 were imposed. No allegations were made against Edmund himself, however, and allegations against his administration in Cornwall he was allowed to respond with the permission of the king himself. In the 1290s Edmund took part in parliaments regularly .

The tough attitude towards his brother-in-law Gilbert de Clare in the dispute with Humphrey de Bohun was certainly influenced by his separation from his wife Margaret in 1289. Whose brother Bogo de Clare , a clergyman who threatened him out with the support of John Peckham , Archbishop of Canterbury, the excommunication , and demanded in April 1290 Archbishop Peckham during the Parliament in Westminster Hall , is that Edmund because of the separation from his court in Canterbury must answer. Parliament then sentenced the archbishop to pay an enormous fine of £ 10,000. This is believed to be one of the earliest known cases of a member of parliament enjoying the protection now known as parliamentary immunity . Edmund had Bogo de Clare imprisoned in the Tower of London , and Christmas 1290 was celebrated by the king in Edmund's Ashridge estate in Hertfordshire .

Richest magnate in England

With Edmund of Cornwall, England's richest magnate, numerous courtiers were in debt. The king also owed him large sums of money, Edmund is said to have lent him £ 4,000 in 1290 alone. In May 1292, Edmund's treasurer, Roger of Drayton, was murdered at Westminster, presumably in revenge for having mercilessly collected debts from debtors. The alleged killers were able to flee to Dover and on to the mainland.

After the May 1296 campaign in Scotland, Edmund kept numerous captured Scots in his castles at Wallingford and Berkhamstead. During the Franco-English War he traveled to Gascony in 1297, where he pledged the entire annual yield from his tin mines in Devon and Cornwall to the city of Bayonne in order to repay the king's debts of 7,000 marks. In 1299 the king already owed him £ 6,500, and Edmund lent him a further 2,000 marks (about £ 1,332), for which the king gave him the income from the vacant Archdiocese of York . In total, Edmund had lent his cousin over £ 18,000, but despite his wealth, and although he was at least twice regent of England and close confidante of the king, Edmund had had little influence on his cousin's politics.

The ruins of Edmund's sponsored Hailes Abbey in Gloucestershire

Death and inheritance

Edmund was seriously ill as early as December 1298. At the Scottish campaign of 1299 , he probably did not participate more, for which he paid a fine of 1,000 marks. In 1300 he was terminally ill and died in Ashridge in late summer or early fall. His heart and the detached body were buried in the presence of the heir to the throne Edward in Ashridge, while his bones were buried on March 23, 1301 in the presence of the king himself in Hailes Abbey .

From his marriage to Margaret de Clare, Edmund had no surviving children. In 1285 his wife presumably miscarried or the child died shortly after birth. After the couple had been separated from as early as 1289, the marriage was officially annulled in 1293 or 1294. In February 1294 Edmund gave Margaret land for lifelong use, from which she had annual income of £ 800, in return Margaret took a vow of chastity until his death. After Edmund's death, the king gave her a Wittum , and most of his lands immediately returned to the crown after Edmund's death. As early as 1297, the king had Edmund brought Edmund's cash from Berkhamstead Castle to London. The fortune and the high income from his lands helped the king to continue the war against Scotland in a critical phase. Edmund's lands became the Earldom and later the Duchy of Cornwall Apanage of the English heir to the throne.

In view of his childlessness, Edmund made rich donations to the church. He sponsored Hailes Abbey in Gloucestershire , founded by his father , as well as the Cistercian monastery of Rewley near Oxford and the Trinitarian monastery near Knaresborough, whose monks guarded the grave of Robert of Knaresborough . On his second trip to Germany from 1268 to 1269, he is said to have acquired a blood relic of Jesus Christ, which Emperor Charlemagne is said to have owned and which was previously kept in Trifels Castle . He gave part of the relic to Hailes Abbey. Its largest foundation was Ashridge Abbey in Hertfordshire, which was founded in 1283 and completed in 1285 and received the other part of the blood relic. In 1288 Edmund had a chapel built at the birthplace of his namesake Edmund Rich in Abingdon , where miracles are said to have occurred as early as 1289. In 1289 he had the relics of St. Frithuswith transferred to Oxford. Edmund also promoted the canonization of Thomas de Cantilupe , the bishop of Hereford who died in 1282, and whose heart he had buried in Ashridge. In his will he gave generous donations to over ten other churches as well as the Franciscan , Dominican , Carmelite and Augustinian hermits, but he also left the Knights Templar and the Order of St. John considerable sums for the fight against the unbelievers.

Web links

Commons : Edmund, 2nd Earl of Cornwall  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Nicholas Vincent: Edmund of Almain, second earl of Cornwall (1249-1300). In: Henry Colin Gray Matthew, Brian Harrison (Eds.): Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , from the earliest times to the year 2000 (ODNB). Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004, ISBN 0-19-861411-X , ( oxforddnb.com license required ), as of 2004

Individual evidence

1. ^ William Arthur Shaw: The Knights of England. Volume 2, Sherratt and Hughes, London 1906, p. 5.
2. ^ Michael Prestwich: Edward I. University of California, Berkeley 1988, ISBN 0-520-06266-3 , p. 462
3. ^ National Trust: Ashridge Estate. Monastic foundations. Retrieved June 27, 2015 . 

predecessor	Office	successor
Richard of Cornwall	Earl of Cornwall 1272-1300	Title expired