While completing his pacification with Philip the Fair, Edward was busily engaged in establishing his power at home, at the expense of the clerical and baronial opposition, which had stood for so many years in the way of the conquest of Scotland.  Since the parliament of Lincoln, Winchelsea was no longer dangerous.  He failed even to get Boniface on his side in a scandalous attack which he instigated on Bishop Langton.  His constant efforts to enlarge his jurisdiction raised up enemies all over his diocese and province, and the mob of his cathedral city broke open his palace, while he was in residence there.  His inability to introduce into England even a pale reflection of the struggle of Philip and the pope showed how clearly he had lost influence since the days of Clericis laicos.  A more recent convert to higher clerical pretensions also failed.  Bishop Bek of Durham lost all his power, and was deprived of his temporalities by the king in 1302.  Two years later the insignificant Archbishop of York also incurred the royal displeasure, and was punished in the same fashion.  With Durham, Norhamshire, and Hexhamshire all in the royal hands, the road into Scotland was completely open.

The heavy hand of Edward fell upon earls as well as upon bishops.  Even in the early days of his reign when none, save Gilbert of Gloucester, dared uplift the standard of opposition, Edward had not spared the greatest barons in his efforts to eliminate the idea of tenure from English political life.  A subtle extension of his earlier policy began to emphasise the dependence of the landed dignitaries on his pleasure.  The extinction of several important baronial houses made this the easier, and Edward took care to retain escheats in his own hands, or at least to entrust them only to persons of approved confidence.  The old leaders of opposition were dead or powerless.  Ralph of Monthermer, the simple north-country knight who had won the hand of Joan of Acre, ruled over the Gloutester-Glamorgan inheritance on behalf of his wife and Edward’s little grandson, Gilbert of Clare.  The Earl of Hereford died in 1299, and in 1302 his son and successor, another Humphrey Bohun, was bribed by a marriage with the king’s daughter, Elizabeth, the widowed Countess of Holland, to surrender his lands to the crown and receive them back, like the Earl of Gloucester in 1290, entailed on the issue of himself and his consort.  In the same year the childless earl marshal, Roger Bigod, conscious of his inability to continue any longer his struggle against royal assumptions and at variance with his brother and heir, made a similar surrender of his estates, which was the more humiliating since the estate in tail, with which he was reinvested, was bound to terminate with his life.  In 1306, on the marshal’s death, the Bigod inheritance lapsed to the crown.  Much earlier than that, in 1293, Edward had extorted on her deathbed from the great heiress, Isabella of Fors, Countess of Albemarle and Devon, the bequest of the Isle of Wight and the adjacent castle of Christchurch.  In 1300, on the death of the king’s childless cousin, Earl Edmund, the wealthy earldom of Cornwall escheated to the crown.  To Edward’s contemporaries the acquisition of the earldoms of Norfolk and Cornwall seemed worthy to be put alongside the conquests of Wales and Scotland.[1]