between English and French sailors led to appeals to Philip. The issue came to involve
Edward’s feudal status in Gascony when Philip emphasized an incident between crews of
English ships and a ship from Bayonne. The situation that Edward had always sought to
avoid was realized. He refused summons to appear before the Parlement de Paris. To
Edward, however, the crisis appeared to have been averted in 1294 with a secret
arrangement whereby, in return for surrendering Gascony to Philip, Edward would
receive back Gascony with Philip’s sister Marguerite in marriage. But once Philip took
custody of Gascony, he broke this agreement and the war began. Edward’s troubles in
Scotland and Wales kept him from pursuing his cause forcefully until 1297, when, as an
ally of its count, he landed in Flanders. A truce and papal mediation soon followed.
Edward married Philip’s sister but did not regain all of Gascony until 1303, when
rebellion in Bordeaux and his other difficulties brought Philip to hand over Edward’s
duchy. In 1306, Edward granted Aquitaine and the Agenais to his son, Edward, Prince of
Wales. The prince’s officials took charge of these lands in 1307, and Edward I died that
same year.
Michael Burger
[See also: PHILIP III THE BOLD; PHILIP IV THE FAIR]
Chaplais, Pierre. English Diplomatic Practice. London: Her Majesty’s Stationer’s Office, 1975–82.
——. Essays in Medieval Diplomacy and Administration. London: Hambledon, 1981.
Labarge, Margaret Wade. Gascony, England’s First Colony 1204–1453. London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1980.
Prestwich, Michael. Edward I. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Trabut-Cussac, Jean-Paul. L’administration anglaise en Gascogne sous Henry III et Édouard I de
1254 à 1307. Geneva: Droz, 1972.
Vale, Malcolm. The Angevin Legacy and the Hundred Years War, 1250–1340. Oxford: Blackwell,
1990.
EDWARD II
(1284–1327). King Edward I of England relinquished the duchy of Aquitaine to his son,
the future Edward II, in 1306. After his father’s death the next year, Edward II inherited,
along with the English throne, the generations-old quarrel of the Plantagenêts with the
kings of France over the family’s French lands. In an attempt to secure peace, Pope
Boniface VIII had arranged in 1299 a betrothal between Edward and Isabella, daughter of
King Philip IV of France; the marriage took place early in 1308. Nonetheless, the
fundamental problem of reconciling Edward’s status as an independent monarch with his
position as vassal of the French king caused two recurrent tensions: conflicts over appeals
by Edward’s Gascon subjects to the Parlement de Paris and insistence by the French
crown that Edward do homage, a claim exacerbated by the rapid turnover of French kings
during Edward’s reign. France’s aid to Scotland in its resistance to Edward added to the
difficulties. Official attempts at mediation, as at the Process of Périgueux in 1311,
achieved little, but Edward’s personal efforts, such as his journey to Paris to do homage
in 1313, smoothed over some of the problems.
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