The Three Edwards: A Century of Kings

Edward I: the "English Justinian" whose statutes reshaped the common law, and whose wars in Wales and Scotland set the century's pattern.

The Model Parliament of 1295: a label that overstates its own novelty, and the real reason Edward wanted the whole community of the realm behind his taxes.

The Conquest of Wales: two wars, a ring of castles, and the end of Welsh political autonomy for more than a century.

The Edict of Expulsion, 1290: the first outright expulsion of a Jewish population by a European crown, carried here without softening.

The Wars of Scottish Independence: two numbered wars, one long argument over who ruled Scotland, that would break Edward II and outlast Edward III's early victories too.

Edward II: a disastrous defeat at Bannockburn, a court dominated by favourites, and a reign that ended in the first deposition of an English king in three centuries.

The Deposition of Edward II, 1327: framed as an abdication to dodge a legal problem nobody had solved before, and the precedent later cited to depose Richard II too.

Edward III: fifty years on the throne, remembered as a golden age of chivalry, though the reign's own final decade tells a harder story.

The Hundred Years' War: opened in 1337 on a dynastic claim through Edward's mother, and still being fought by his great-great-grandsons a century later.

The Order of the Garter, 1348: England's highest order of chivalry, founded on a legend even its own institution cannot confirm.

The Black Death: the plague that struck England in 1348 and 1349, in the middle of a war and a reign both still finding their footing.