rejected the temptation which Bruce and Hastings dangled before him of splitting up the realm into three parts, and he restored the land and its castles as soon as the suit was settled.  There is nothing to show that up to this point his action had produced any resentment in Scotland, and little evidence that there was any strong national feeling involved.  Scottish chroniclers, who wrote after the war of independence, have given a colour to Edward’s policy which contemporary evidence does not justify.  From the point of his generation, his action was just and legal.  He had, in fact, performed a signal service to Scotland in vindicating its unity; and by maintaining the rigid doctrines of Anglo-Norman jurisprudence, he rescued it from the vague philosophy which Bruce called natural law, and the recrudescence of Celtic custom that gave even bastards a hope of the succession.  The real temptation came when, after his triumph, Edward sought to extract from the submission of the Scots consequences which had no warranty in custom, and made Scottish resistance inevitable.

The expulsion of the Jews, the reform of the administration, the statute Quia emptores, the treaty of Tarascon, the humiliation of Gloucester, and the successful issue of the Scottish arbitration, mark the culminating point in the reign of Edward I. The king had ruled twenty years with almost uniform success, and his only serious disappointment had been the failure of the crusade.  The last hope of the Latin East faded when, in 1291, Acre, so long the bulwark of the crusaders against the Turks, opened its gates to the infidel.  With the fall of Acre went the last chance of the holy war.  Before long the peace of Europe, which Edward thought that he had established, was once more rudely disturbed.  Difficulties soon arose with Scotland, with France, with the Church, and with the barons.  These troubles bore the more severely on the king because this period saw also the removal of nearly all of those in whom he had placed special trust.  The gracious Eleanor of Castile died in 1290, at Harby, in Nottinghamshire, near Lincoln,[1] and the devotion of the king to the partner of his youth found a striking expression in the sculptured crosses, which marked the successive resting-places of her corpse on its last journey from Harby to Westminster Abbey.  A few months later Edward’s mother, Eleanor of Castile, ended her long life in the convent of Amesbury, in Wiltshire.  The ministers of Edward’s early reign were also removed by death.  Bishop Kirkby, the treasurer, died in 1290, and Burnell, the chancellor, in 1292, soon after he had performed his last public act in the declaration of the king’s judgment as to the Scottish succession.  Archbishop Peckham died in the same year.  New domestic ties were formed, and fresh ministers were found, but the ageing king became more and more lonely, as he was compelled to rely upon a younger and a less faithful generation.  Of his old comrades the chief remaining was Henry