WHILE Edward's place among the more successful of England's medieval monarchs has remained secure since the above lines were penned in the aftermath of his death in 1307, his reputation among scholars of medieval England has to some extent waxed and waned. Bishop Stubbs, the leading English medieval historian of the late nineteenth century, had no doubt of Edward's greatness; and for the ‘Whig’ school of history, his reign represented the pinnacle of English constitutional achievement in the Middle Ages (a characterisation accurately skewered by Sellar and Yeatman's chapter on Edward, headed ‘A Strong King’). Edward's work, Stubbs argued:

Edward's reputation remained high in the early twentieth century, though Frederick Tout was less forgiving of the king's autocratic tendencies than was Stubbs.5 His standing reached its zenith, however, under the admiring gaze of Maurice Powicke, who had been taught by Tout in Manchester before working alongside him there in the 1920s, though it was during his time in Oxford that he began to write extensively on the thirteenth century. Both Henry III and the Lord Edward (1947) and The Thirteenth Century (1953) saw Powicke describe Edward in glowing terms: