David, however, still held out for six months, though eagerly sought
after by the King, and hunted by his own countrymen. One of them
finally betrayed him with his wife and children. He was sentenced to be
hanged, drawn, and quartered; and from that time this became the
established punishment of Traitors in England—a punishment wholly
without excuse, as being revolting, vile, and cruel, after its object
is dead; and which has no sense in it, as its only real degradation
(and that nothing can blot out) is to the country that permits on any
consideration such abominable barbarity.
Wales was now subdued. The Queen giving birth to a young prince in the
Castle of Carnarvon, the King showed him to the Welsh people as their
countryman, and called him Prince of Wales; a title that has ever since
been borne by the heir-apparent to the English throne—which that little
Prince soon became, by the death of his elder brother. The King did
better things for the Welsh than that, by improving their laws and
encouraging their trade. Disturbances still took place, chiefly
occasioned by the avarice and pride of the English Lords, on whom Welsh
lands and castles had been bestowed; but they were subdued, and the
country never rose again. There is a legend that to prevent the people
from being incited to rebellion by the songs of their bards and
harpers, Edward had them all put to death. Some of them may have fallen
among other men who held out against the King; but this general
slaughter is, I think, a fancy of the harpers themselves, who, I dare
say, made a song about it many years afterwards, and sang it by the
Welsh firesides until it came to be believed.
The foreign war of the reign of Edward the First arose in this way. The
crews of two vessels, one a Norman ship, and the other an English ship,
happened to go to the same place in their boats to fill their casks
with fresh water. Being rough angry fellows, they began to quarrel, and
then to fight—the English with their fists; the Normans with their
knives—and, in the fight, a Norman was killed. The Norman crew, instead
of revenging themselves upon those English sailors with whom they had
quarrelled (who were too strong for them, I suspect), took to their
ship again in a great rage, attacked the first English ship they met,
laid hold of an unoffending merchant who happened to be on board, and
brutally hanged him in the rigging of their own vessel with a dog at
his feet. This so enraged the English sailors that there was no
restraining them; and whenever, and wherever, English sailors met
Norman sailors, they fell upon each other tooth and nail. The Irish and
Dutch sailors took part with the English; the French and Genoese
sailors helped the Normans; and thus the greater part of the mariners
sailing over the sea became, in their way, as violent and raging as the
sea itself when it is disturbed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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