In medieval England the beginning of a new reign often furnished the occasion for a shift in the direction and fortunes of the realm, and the events following upon the death of King Henry III in 1272 were certainly a case in point. The accession of Henry's son, the ambitious Edward I, paved the way for an era of conflict, both within the British Isles and in France, on a scale that had never previously been witnessed during the Middle Ages. For the administrative historian T.F. Tout, writing shortly after the defeat of Kaiser Wilhelm II's armies in the First World War, the parallel with the increased military demands of his own day seemed striking. ‘The magnitude of the military efforts of Edward I’, he observed, ‘as far transcended those of his predecessors as the war which has laid low German imperialism transcended the Napoleonic wars, or the Napoleonic wars the war of the Spanish Succession.’ The comparison seems particularly appropriate when we consider that both the First World War and the Napoleonic wars necessitated the extension of the obligation to military service to new social groups and classes. By stretching his manpower reserves to their limit through his wars in Wales, France and Scotland, Edward ensured that the land-holding elites of late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century England became accustomed to the martial calling to an extent that could not have been foreseen during the reign of his father.