Thirteenth Century England X: Proceedings of the Durham Conference, 2003

THIRTEENTH CENTURY ENGLAND X PROCEEDINGS OF THE DURHAM CONFERENCE 2003

THIRTEENTH CENTURY ENGLAND X

PROCEEDINGS OF THE DURHAM CONFERENCE 2003

Edited by Michael Prestwich, Richard Britnell and Robin Frame

THE BOYDELL PRESS

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CONTENTS

PREFACE ABBREVIATIONS

The Meetings of Kings Henry III and Louis IX David Carpenter

vii ix 1

Counting the Cost: The Financial Implications of the Loss of Normandy Nick Barratt

31

Networks of Markets and Networks of Patronage in Thirteenth-Century England Emilia Jamroziak

41

Three Alien Royal Stewards in Thirteenth-Century England: The Careers and Legacy of Mathias Bezill, Imbert Pugeys and Peter de Champvent Michael Ray The Eyre de terris datis, 1267–1272 Susan Stewart Joan, Wife of Llywelyn the Great Louise J. Wilkinson

51

Town and Crown: The Kings of England and their City of Dublin Seán Duffy English Landholding in Ireland Beth Hartland

95

69 81

119

The Reception of the Matter of Britain in Thirteenth-Century England: A Study of Some Anglo-Norman Manuscripts of Wace’s Roman de Brut Françoise Le Saux

131

Fearing God, Honouring the King: The Episcopate of Robert de Chaury, Bishop of Carlisle, 1258–1278 Henry Summerson Cloistered Women and Male Authority: Power and Authority in Yorkshire Nunneries in the Later Middle Ages Janet Burton Taxation and Settlement in Medieval Devon Harold Fox Clipstone Peel: Fortification and Politics from Bannockburn to the Treaty of Leake, 1314–1318 David Crook

147

155

167 187

Royal Patronage and Political Allegiance: The Household Knights of Edward II, 1314–1321 Alistair Tebbit

197

‘Edward II’ in Italy: English and Welsh Political Exiles and Fugitives in Continental Europe, 1322–1364 Seymour Phillips

209

PREFACE

Preface

This volume contains papers delivered at the tenth Thirteenth Century England Conference, which met at St Aidan’s College, Durham in September 2003. Speakers addressed a variety of themes in social, political, economic, ecclesiastical and cultural history, though (refreshingly) papers often move across two or more of those categories. Some contributors took up the customary invitation to deal with a ‘long’ thirteenth century (from late Henry II to early Edward III), or to look beyond the confines of England itself. David Carpenter uses a minute investigation of some of the meetings between Henry III and Louis IX, and their wives, to develop a wide-ranging discussion of the similarities and differences between French and English kingship, and between the sources and approaches employed by historians on either side of the Channel. He counterpoints, on the one hand, the close ties, similar values and shared etiquette of the English and French courts, and, on the other, the sharply contrasting political skills of the two kings. Four papers deal with aspects of English government, politics and society. Nick Barratt traces the long-term significance of the defence, and subsequent loss, of Normandy for royal finances. Only in the reign of Edward I did the monarchy again find a viable fiscal base after the dispersal of royal demesne begun by Richard I and the financial constraints imposed by Magna Carta in response to King John’s exactions. Emilia Jamroziak analyses grants of markets and fairs under Henry III. Their variable frequency was linked to changing patterns of royal patronage and the crown’s need for cash payments; but the demand for charters, particularly from lesser landholders, reflected the economic and social aspirations of recipients. Michael Ray examines the contrasting fortunes of three royal stewards of alien origin and their families. Men with little continental property may have found it easier to assimilate into English society, but even for those who served the crown over many years, assimilation was not always accompanied by advancing wealth and status. Susan Stewart demonstrates that the eyre de terris datis of 1267–72, while not immune from political manipulation (not least by Queen Eleanor), made a significant contribution to the resolution of conflicts over land in the localities in the aftermath of the Barons’ War. Three papers explore interactions between England and her insular neighbours. Louise Wilkinson assesses the significance of the marriage of Llywelyn the Great to Joan, an illegitimate daughter of King John. Llywelyn arranged for Joan to be legitimised; her importance to both sides at a time when Anglo-Welsh relations were tense ensured not only that she was treated as having the full status of a royal daughter and sister, but that her alleged adultery was quickly forgiven. Seán Duffy traces the close link between the English ruling elite of Dublin and the crown from the time of Henry II’s arrival in Ireland in 1171; this is traceable both in the flow of royal privileges to the city and in the services provided by Dublin in times of crisis, above all in the face of Robert Bruce and an advancing Scottish army in 1317. Beth Hartland introduces a project designed to record English landholding in Ireland. As

viii

Preface

well as revealing some of the challenges of this undertaking, she shows the danger of making sweeping judgements about Irish lands and revenues: grants could be virtually worthless, or potentially very lucrative; in either case they might be regarded as sinecures or might on the other hand involve significant political and military commitment. All depended on the nature of the property, the identity of the grantee, and the context in which the grant was made. The next four papers take up cultural, religious and economic themes. Françoise Le Saux uses a close study of several Anglo-Norman manuscripts of Wace’s Roman de Brut to draw important conclusions about the ways in which Wace was perceived and read in the thirteenth century. Some English readers clearly regarded it as ‘straight’ history, finding in it useful information about such subjects as royal successions, constitutional precedents, and place-names. Henry Summerson uses the case of Robert de Chaury, bishop of Carlisle to reveal the interdependence of episcopal and royal authority; he suggests that training in royal government could produce a conscientious and charitable bishop, not merely an efficient one. Janet Burton challenges the notion that cloistered women were incompetent to run the affairs of their houses or were passive in the face of male authority; Yorkshire examples show that nuns carried significant administrative responsibilities, competed for office, and resisted those who sought to control them. Harold Fox uses early fourteenth-century taxation records to probe the nature of Devon society. In an argument with important implications, he suggests that low returns from taxation do not prove that Devon was poor; rather, they show the practical difficulties collectors faced in a county with large areas of dispersed settlement, and an established tradition of light assessments. The volume concludes with three papers relating to Edward II. David Crook illuminates both the nature of fortifications (which might be largely of timber and prefabricated far from their intended sites) and the turbulent politics of the middle of the reign. He shows that Clipston Peel served as a significant centre of royal authority in a region where Lancastrian power was strong. Alistair Tebbit reassesses the motivations and behaviour of Edward’s household knights: having on the whole survived earlier political and military tests, loyalties tended to crumble in the face of the rapacity of the Despensers and Edward’s failure to moderate their monopoly of crown patronage. Finally, Seymour Phillips stretches the ‘long thirteenth century’ to include Edward’s (imagined) afterlife in Ireland, France, Germany and Italy. It may be too much to hope that his paper will put an end to speculation that the king survived his supposed murder in September 1327, but it provides a fascinating demonstration of the ways in which such stories grew between the fourteenth century and the twentieth. After five conferences at Durham, which were preceded by five at Newcastle upon Tyne, the series now passes from north-east England to Wales, under new management. It is therefore particularly appropriate to thank those who made the final Durham conference a success. Tracy Swaddle, administrator in the Department of History, looked after our business affairs patiently and efficiently; she also came cheerfully to the rescue when Robin Frame was baffled by contributors’ computer programs and discs. As always, Dorothy Anson and her staff at St Aidan’s ensured that the domestic and social sides of the conference ran smoothly and agreeably. Robin Frame Richard Britnell Michael Prestwich

ABBREVIATIONS

Abbreviations

Here and throughout the volume all works are published in London unless otherwise specified. Citations of unpublished records, except where otherwise indicated, relate to material in The National Archives: Public Record Office (TNA: PRO). Ann. Mon. BBCS Becket Materials BIHR BL BN Bodleian Burton CACWales CAD CARD CChR CCR CDI CDS CFR CIMisc CIPM CLR CM Complete Peerage CPL CPR

Annales Monastici, ed. H.R. Luard, 5 vols (RS 36, 1864–9) Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, ed. J.C. Robertson, 7 vols (RS 67, 1875–85) Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research British Library, London Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris Bodleian Library, Oxford ‘Annals of Burton’, in Ann. Mon., i. 183–500 Calendar of Ancient Correspondence concerning Wales, ed. J.G. Edwards (Cardiff, 1935) A Descriptive Catalogue of Ancient Deeds in the PRO (1890–1915) Calendar of Ancient Records of Dublin, ed. J.T. Gilbert, 19 vols (Dublin, 1889–1944) Calendar of Charter Rolls, 6 vols (PRO Texts and Calendars, 1903–27) Calendar of Close Rolls (PRO Texts and Calendars, 1892 onwards) Calendar of Documents relating to Ireland, ed. H.S. Sweetman, 5 vols (1875–86) Calendar of Documents relating to Scotland, ed. J. Bain, 4 vols (Edinburgh, 1881–8) Calendar of Fine Rolls, 22 vols (PRO Texts and Calendars, 1911–62) Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous, 7 vols (PRO Texts and Calendars, 1916–68) Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, 20 vols (PRO Texts and Calendars, 1904–95) Calendar of Liberate Rolls, 6 vols (PRO Texts and Calendars, 1916–64) Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, ed. H.R. Luard, 7 vols (RS 57, 1872–83) G.E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, ed. V. Gibbs and others, 12 vols (1910–59) Calendar of Papal Letters, ed. W.H. Bliss and others, 13 vols in 14 (1893–1955) Calendar of Patent Rolls (PRO Texts and Calendars, 1891 onwards)

x CR CRR CS CSMLT CStM DBM DD DNB Dunstable EcHR EETS EHD EHR Fees Feudal Aids Flores Foedera Gerald, EH HKF HMC HMDI HMSO Howden HR HRH IHS J. Joinville King’s Works Margam Med. Dublin Na Buirgéisi NAI

Abbreviations Close Rolls of the Reign of Henry III, 14 vols (PRO Texts and Calendars, 1902–38) Curia Regis Rolls of the Reigns of Richard I, John and Henry III preserved in the Public Record Office, 17 vols (PRO Texts and Calendars, 1922–91) Camden Society, Camden Series Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought Chartularies of St Mary’s Abbey, Dublin, ed. J.T. Gilbert, 2 vols (RS 80, 1884–6) Documents of the Baronial Movement of Reform and Rebellion 1258–1267, selected R.F. Treharne, ed. I.J. Sanders (Oxford, 1973) Diplomatic Documents 1101–1272, ed. P. Chaplais (1964) Dictionary of National Biography ‘Annals of Dunstable’, in Ann. Mon., iii. 3–408. Economic History Review Early English Text Society English Historical Documents, ed. D.C. Douglas, 12 vols in 13 (1953–77) English Historical Review Liber Feudorum: The Books of Fees Commonly Called Testa de Nevill, 1198–1293 (1920–31) Inquisitions and Assessments relating to Feudal Aids, with Other Analogous Documents preserved in the PRO, 1284–1431 (1899–1920) Flores Historiarum, ed. H.R. Luard, 3 vols (RS 95, 1890) Foedera, Conventiones, Litterae, et . . . Acta Publica, ed. T. Rymer, amended edition by A. Clarke and F. Holbrooke, 4 vols in 7 (Rec. Comm., 1816–69) Expugnatio Hibernica. The Conquest of Ireland, by Giraldus Cambrensis, ed. A.B. Scott and F.X. Martin (Dublin, 1978) W. Farrer, Honors and Knights Fees, 3 vols (1923–5) Historical Manuscripts Commission Historic and Municipal Documents of Ireland A.D. 1172–1320, ed. J.T. Gilbert (RS 53, 1870) Her Majesty’s Stationery Office Chronica Magistri Rogeri de Houedene, ed. W. Stubbs, 4 vols (RS 51, 1868–71) Historical Research Heads of Religious Houses in England and Wales, ii. 1216–1377, ed. D.M. Smith and V.C.M. London (Cambridge, 2001) Irish Historical Studies Journal [of the] Jean Sire de Joinville. Histoire de Saint Louis, ed. N. de Wailly (Paris, 1874) The History of the King’s Works: The Middle Ages, ed. R.A. Brown, H.M. Colvin and A.J. Taylor, 2 vols (HMSO, 1963) ‘Annals of Margam’, in Ann. Mon., i. 3–40 Medieval Dublin I [etc.]: Proceedings of the Friends of Medieval Dublin Symposium, ed. S. Duffy (Dublin, 2000– ) G. Mac Niocaill, Na Buirgéisi XII–XV Aois, 2 vols (Dublin, 1964) National Archives of Ireland, Dublin

Abbreviations Osney PatR

xi

‘The Chronicle of Osney’, in Ann. Mon., iv. 3–352. Patent Rolls of the Reign of Henry III [1216–32], 2 vols (PRO Texts and Calendars, 1901–3) PR Pipe Rolls, published by the Pipe Roll Society PRO The National Archives: Public Record Office Proc. Proceedings [of the] PRS Pipe Roll Society PW Parliamentary Writs and Writs of Military Summons, ed. F.T. Palgrave, 2 vols (Rec. Comm., 1827–34) RC Rotuli Chartarum in Turri Londinensi Asservati, ed. T.D. Hardy (Rec. Comm., 1837) Rec. Comm. Record Commission Reg. Register [of] RF Excerpta e Rotulis Finium in Turri Londinensi Asservatis, 1216–72, ed. C. Roberts (Rec. Comm., 1835–6) R. Gasc. Rôles Gascons, ed. F. Michel and C. Bémont, 3 vols (Paris, 1885–1904) RH Rotuli Hundredorum temp. Hen. III et Edw. I (Rec. Comm., 1812–18) RHF Recueil des Historiens des Gaules et de la France, 24 vols (Paris, 1793–1904) RIA Royal Irish Academy RLC Rotuli Litterarum Clausarum in Turri Londinensi Asservati, 1204–27, 2 vols, ed. T.D. Hardy (Rec. Comm., 1833–44) RLP Rotuli Litterarum Patentium in Turri Londinensi Asservati, 1201–16, ed. T.D. Hardy (Rec. Comm., 1835) Rot. Fin. Rotuli de Oblatis et Finibus in Turri Londinensi Asservati, ed. T.D. Hardy (Rec. Comm., 1835) Rot. Parl. Rotuli Parliamentorum, 6 vols (Rec. Comm., 1783) RS Rolls Series (Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores, 1858–96) Royal Letters Royal and Other Historical Letters Illustrative of the Reign of Henry III, 2 vols, ed. W.W. Shirley (RS 27, 1862–6) Saint-Pathus Vie de Saint Louis par Guillaume de Saint-Pathus, ed. H.-F. Delaborde (Paris, 1899) ser. series Soc. Society [of the] Soc. Antiqs. Society of Antiquaries of London SR The Statutes of the Realm, ed. A. Luders and others, 11 vols (Rec.Comm., 1810–28) TCE, i–ix Thirteenth Century England, 9 vols so far, i–v, ed. P.R. Coss and S.D. Lloyd; vi–ix, ed. M.C. Prestwich, R.H. Britnell and R.F. Frame (Woodbridge, 1986–2003) Tewkesbury ‘Annals of Tewkesbury’, in Ann. Mon., i. 43–182 TNA The National Archives, see PRO Torigni Robert of Torigni, in Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I, ed. R. Howlett, 4 vols (RS 82, 1884–9), iv Trans. Transactions [of the] TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society VCH The Victoria History of the Counties of England, ed. H.A. Doubleday and others (1900– , in progress)

xii Waverley Wendover WHR Winchester WL Worcester Wykes

Abbreviations ‘Annals of Waverley’, in Ann. Mon., ii. 129–412 Rogeri de Wendover Chronica sive Flores Historiarum, ed. H.O. Coxe, 5 vols (English Historical Soc., 1841–4) The Welsh History Review ‘Annals of Winchester’, in Ann. Mon., ii. 3–128 The Royal Charter Witness Lists: Henry III, ed. M. Morris, List and Index Soc. 291–2 (2002); Edward I, ed. R. Huscroft, List and Index Soc. 279 (2000) ‘Annals of Worcester’, in Ann. Mon., iv. 355–562 ‘Thomas Wyke’s Chronicle’, in Ann. Mon., iv. 6–354

The Meetings of Kings Henry III and Louis IX

David Carpenter The Meetings ofDavid KingsCarpenter Henry III and Louis IX

Henry III and Louis IX met on five occasions, or, to put it more precisely, there were five periods during which Henry III was in France and they had meetings. These meetings illuminate the personalities, conduct and outlook of the two kings, and also the forms of symbolic and non-verbal communication about which Björn Weiler has written.1 Study of the meetings also prompts reflection on the very different source materials available for the study of English and French history in this period and the very different ways they have sometimes been utilised by historians. Henry III and Louis IX had long and overlapping reigns, Henry’s from 1216 to 1272, Louis’ from 1226 to 1270. They both endured minorities. They married sisters and were faithful husbands. Indeed this paper might also be called the meetings of Eleanor and Margaret of Provence. Both kings were deeply religious. Both were peacemakers. They started as enemies and became friends. One understands Nicholas Vincent’s question ‘is there really that great a difference between their respective styles?’2 And yet everyone would agree that the two kings were also very different. Henry was of middle height, compact of body with a drooping eyelid. Louis was tall, willowy, angel faced.3 Henry III was deserted by his mother, Louis brought up under his mother’s care. Both kings took the cross but only Louis went on crusade. Above all, Louis was far more successful as a king. He was made a saint and Henry was not. Despite the comparisons and contrasts between the reigns, there have been few thirteenth-century historians equally at home on both sides of the Channel. French, British and American scholars alike have tended to concentrate either on France or on Britain. On the French side the field is dominated by Jacques Le Goff ’s extraordinary study of Saint Louis.4 Over 900 pages long, it is divided into three parts. Part 1, ‘la vie’, covers the reign chronologically but is more a series of discursive reflections on Louis’ life and times than any kind of detailed narrative. In part 2, Le Goff considers the sources, and in part 3 he tries to pick out what he thinks are the essential elements of the ‘real’ St Louis. This organization entails a great deal of repetition, but that does not really matter. No one is going to read through the book with sufficient speed to notice. Rather the structure, with numerous subheadings, invites the reader to sample a section here and a section there, thus appreciating the book’s 1

B. Weiler, ‘Symbolism and Politics in the Reign of Henry III’, TCE, ix (2003), 15–41. I am most grateful to Sally Dixon-Smith, John Gillingham, Margaret Howell, Elisabeth Lalou, Janet Nelson and Nicholas Vincent for commenting on a draft of this paper. 2 N. Vincent, The Holy Blood: King Henry III and the Westminster Blood Relic (Cambridge, 2001), 196. 3 Nicholai Triveti Annales, ed. T. Hog (1845), 280; D.A. Carpenter, The Reign of Henry III (1996), 428; G.G. Coulton, From St Francis to Dante: Translations from the Chronicle of the Franciscan Salimbene 1221–1288, 2nd edn (Philadelphia, 1972), 140. 4 J. Le Goff, Saint Louis (Paris, 1996) [hereafter Le Goff].

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wonderful richness and fertility, a comparatively limited body of source material being used to illuminate so many different aspects of Louis’ conduct and culture – ‘le roi pèlerin’, ‘Saint Louis et la mer’, ‘un roi en musique’, ‘la parole royale’, ‘les gestes d’un roi saint’ and so on. On the English side, the book that most stands comparison with Le Goff is John Maddicott’s classic biography of Simon de Montfort, published in 1994 two years before Saint Louis.5 Here there are superb chapters on ‘religion and virtue’, and ‘familia and friends’ but they are set very much within a detailed narrative structure which re-interprets much of the politics of this dramatic period. Unlike Le Goff, it is a book which derives much of its power and ultimately its pathos from being read through. These differences in approach are partly because the influence of the Annales school is far more overwhelming in France than it is in England. They also reflect very different sources. Whereas it would be possible to write a study of Montfort on Le Goffian lines, it would be quite impossible to write one of Louis with anything like the narrative detail found in recent work on the reign of Henry III. For France there is simply no equivalent to the great array of contemporary historical writing, climaxing in the 1,700 pages of Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora, pages which offer an amazing array of information for the years 1235 to 1259, much of it tolerably accurate. Nor is the gap filled, at least as far as political narrative is concerned, by the French historians, hagiographers and biographers writing after Louis’ death, at least for the periods outside the crusades. There is an equal imbalance on the record side of the account. France has no parallel to the government rolls which enable English political history to be written with such precision, partly because the French materials have been lost, partly because the output of the Capetian chancery was never recorded so fully.6 When it comes to studying the personality and outlook of the two kings, the source material is more even. Those who wrote about Louis after his death provide a wealth of detail about his ‘paroles et gestes’, detail which, in many ways, goes far beyond anything known about Henry III. Whereas, moreover, Joinville, Louis’ greatest biographer, seems in a profound way to get inside his subject, placing the ‘true’ Saint Louis physically and spiritually before us, Matthew Paris catches Henry’s words and actions without any kind of comparable sympathy. It is the difference between empathy and incomprehension. This imbalance in the historical writing, however, is considerably redressed when we come again to the record evidence. In Le Goff ’s view, ‘les actes royaux officiels de Saint Louis’ offer little useful information about ‘la personne’ of the king.7 The voluminous rolls of English royal government, on the other hand, can bring us very close to Henry III. The English material, both chronicle and record, has, moreover, one other advantage. It is strictly contemporary. However near to the king they had been, all those writing after Louis’ death did so in expectation or in celebration of his sainthood. Many were influenced by hagiographical genres and stereotypes. In varying degrees and in different ways, they all pose the problem, central to Le Goff ’s book, of how far we can penetrate through their ‘production of his memory’ to the ‘real’ Saint Louis.8 Matthew Paris, by contrast, may have had agendas, but what he wrote about Louis was penned soon after events and with no expectation of his sainthood. The record 5 6

J.R. Maddicott, Simon de Montfort (Cambridge, 1994). The records do, however, cast a great deal of light on Louis’ reform of the realm; see W.C. Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade (Princeton, 1979). 7 Le Goff, 322, 327. Jordan’s Louis IX would suggest this view needs qualification. 8 Le Goff, 17, 313–15, 387.

The Meetings of Kings Henry III and Louis IX

3

evidence dispenses with producers of memory altogether and allows Henry III to speak and act for himself. This paper will show how the record evidence, when combined with Matthew Paris and other historical writing, can be used to investigate the meetings of Henry III and Louis IX. The five periods within which these meetings took place were as follows: November to December 1254 when Henry III, on his way home from Gascony, went on a pilgrimage to Pontigny and was welcomed by Louis both at Orléans and Paris. November 1259 to April 1260 when Henry III went to France to do homage to Louis under the terms of what was to be called the Treaty of Paris. July to December 1262 when Henry visited Paris to deal with various problems arising from the treaty and the arbitration for a settlement with the Montforts. September to October 1263 when Henry and the Montfortian government visited Louis at Boulogne to see if he could broker a settlement between them. January to February 1264 when Henry went to Amiens for the Mise Louis issued on the Provisions of Oxford. The purposes of Henry’s visits were, therefore, diverse. The source material for them is also uneven although the overwhelming bulk of it is English. As a result, it is much easier to see Louis’ impact on Henry than Henry’s on Louis. The first meeting benefits from a long and magnificent narrative by Matthew Paris, probably drawing on information given by Henry and his court when they visited St Albans in March 1255. There is also a valuable but neglected account in the annals of Burton Abbey.9 By comparison, the chronicle material for the meetings of 1259–1260 and 1262 is much sparser, but this is more than counterbalanced by abundant record evidence. The visits of 1263 and 1264 are the least well served both in terms of chronicles and records. We have no idea how often the kings and queens met and what was said between them; a pity because of all the visits that of January 1264 was by far the most important for the course of English domestic politics. Because space is limited, and I wish to show the value of new material, I here concentrate on Henry’s visit to France in 1259–60, while also looking back to the visit of 1254 and forward to the one of 1262. The 1259–60 visit is recorded in full by what is in fact the only complete household roll to survive for the whole of Henry’s reign.10 Since until recently such rolls have been neglected by historians, and that of 1259–60 is a central source for this paper, I shall begin with a word about them. Recording where the household was on every day, they provide by far the best indication of the king’s itinerary, often filling in the gaps when there is no evidence from chancery enrolments.11 The rolls also give information about the king’s religious practices, providing a daily record of the costs incurred by the pantry, buttery and kitchen in feeding specified numbers of paupers. Since all three departments were involved, it was clearly the custom to provide a balanced meal of bread, ale, meat and fish, not just a dole of bread, which in turn perhaps implies that the almsmen sat down to formal meals rather than just receiving takeaways. Henry’s practice was to feed in this way a minimum of 150 people a day when the queen was present at court, and 100 when she was away, the usual cost being between 1d and 1½d a head. 9

CM, v. 475–84, 489; Burton, 327–9. Note how Henry II evidently provided Robert de Torigni with an account of his visit to Paris in 1158: Torigni, iv. 196–7. I owe the reference and the point to John Gillingham. 10 E 101/349/27. Unless stated, all information about Henry’s household expenditure during 1259–60 comes from this roll. 11 For 1259–60 see R.F. Treharne, The Baronial Plan of Reform 1258–1263 (Manchester, 1932), 383–7.

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In the household roll the relevant entry refers not in fact to paupers but to fratres – in pascendis cl fratribus. A frater could be either a friar or a monk. If friar appears more likely in this context, it still seems almost inconceivable, given the numbers involved, that the whole body can have been made up of friars. Perhaps they simply headed the list, or perhaps Henry called his almsmen fratres to emphasise his brotherhood with the poor.12 The rolls also record the daily consumption of wax, most of it presumably being for candles. Some of this was for domestic purposes, but some was also for religious. From the earliest days of the established church, the provision of light had been central to Christian ritual, not surprisingly since light was a holy thing, associated continually in the scriptures with the understanding and salvation which flowed from God himself. Letters on the chancery rolls show Henry giving precise and profuse instructions for the lighting up of churches on great religious festivals, and he was probably equally enthusiastic within the household. Whereas the first surviving fragments of a household roll (for 1225–6) simply give a single overall figure for the daily consumption of wax, the roll for 1259–60 (the next to survive) gives as well a subsidiary figure for the wax used in the chapel, or in the chapel and the almonry. The appearance of the almonry (on around 110 days in the year 1259–60, including most of the great religious festivals) perhaps indicates occasions when the eating and the praying of the paupers were specially illuminated.13 The section about the feeding of paupers in the rolls always come at the end of the daily entry. At the start, cash figures are given for the main costs of the pantry, buttery and kitchen, followed by further figures (always much smaller) for the scullery, saucery, hall and chamber, the costs of firewood for the hall and chamber being noted separately. There are then cash figures for the king’s stables and, when she was present, the stables of the queen.14 At first sight, the cash figures in the roll might seem to indicate the cost of the daily purchases made by the departments, but, for various reasons which I hope to discuss in another paper, this is unlikely to be the case. Rather, the figures assigned to the pantry, buttery and kitchen (which accounted for the great bulk of the daily charge) represent not the cost of their daily purchases but a cash valuation placed on the victuals which they supplied that day for consumption. Those victuals might have been purchased (by cash or credit) on that day, but they might equally have been purchased earlier. The rolls do not,

12

A surviving portion of Queen Eleanor’s household roll for 1252–3 has her too feeding fratres but the corresponding entry in the account enrolled on the pipe roll refers to pauperes: E 101/349/16; E 372/96, m. 36. I owe this point to Margaret Howell. 13 The 1225–6 fragments are printed in Roll of Divers Accounts . . . Henry III, ed. F.A. Cazel (PRS, new ser. 44, 1974–5), 93–102. These are the only portions of the rolls in print. There appears to be no hard evidence as to where exactly the fratres ate, whether in the hall, almonry or elsewhere. Much may have depended on the numbers involved, the nature of the day and the buildings available. Henry certainly used his halls (see below p. 17) when it came to feeding thousands of paupers and they may also have hosted smaller numbers. In the household roll the wax is specifically said to be consumed ‘in the chapel and the almonry’ which suggests that it was ‘in the almonry’ that eating sessions were illuminated. This does not mean, however, that the almoners necessarily burnt their wax in dedicated almonry buildings for the latter cannot always have been available or suitable. For light see P. Fouracre, ‘Eternal Light and Earthly Needs’, in Property and Power in the Early Middle Ages, ed. W. Davies and P. Fouracre (Cambridge, 1995). I am grateful to Paul Fouracre for allowing me to see the text of his inaugural lecture at Goldsmiths College on ‘Light and the consequences of its use in Christian worship’. There is much information about almonries and candles in CLR. Candles could vary in weight from half a pound to (very exceptionally) 100 pounds. 14 The costs of the royal stables are given under three headings: stable, livery of grooms (liberacio garcionum) and livery of horses.

The Meetings of Kings Henry III and Louis IX

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however, give the total value of daily consumption because anything the departments had not themselves bought was excluded, notably game and fish from the royal forests and fish ponds and all the wine acquired by the king’s purveyors. Although the rolls sometimes notice the consumption of such items, describing them as coming from ‘stock’, they do so haphazardly, and without giving their nature or value. While, therefore, the rolls underestimate the costs of daily consumption, they probably get much nearer to them in France than in England since less can have come from stock. They certainly reflect, in France and in England, how costs fluctuated according to the nature of the day. The victuals supplied by the departments were designed in the first instance simply to support the king and his household. If nothing else, their quality was important for the latter’s morale. But, of course, the entertainment the king offered, most notably at the great feasts held on secular and religious festivals, was also calculatedly political. It is in revealing such feasts that the household rolls are particularly valuable. There were to be splendid examples in Paris. The rolls give daily, weekly and termly totals, the grand total for the year 1259–60 being £7,489 7s 5d, a daily average of £20.52; this at a time when an income of £20 a year was qualification for knighthood, and a labourer’s wages were a penny or 1½d a day.15 These costs in 1259–60 were running at roughly three times the level suggested by the fragmentary roll of 1225–6, a change which reflected the arrival of a queen, the increased size of the royal household, a generally grander scale of entertainment and a certain amount of inflation. Both the foundations and the framework for Henry’s visit in 1259 had been set during his earlier trip in 1254. That had originated in Henry’s vow, during an illness in 1252, to go on pilgrimage to the shrine of St Edmund of Abingdon (archbishop of Canterbury 1234–40) at Pontigny.16 Two years later, with Louis now back in France after his crusade and Henry in Gascony ready to return home, the ambition became realisable. Louis not merely sanctioned the pilgrimage but invited his brother-in-law to Paris. So, conducted by the archbishop of Bourges, Henry left Bordeaux early in November, saw the tombs of his mother and his Angevin predecessors at Fontevraud, and then was met by Louis at Orléans on the border of the French royal demesne.17 After three days festivities, Henry continued to Pontigny and then headed for Paris which he entered on 6–7 December. This time a week of celebrations and meetings with Louis followed after which Henry reluctantly set off for home. The purpose of this coming together of the courts in 1254 was partly social and personal. The kings wished to see each other for the first time; their sister queens wished to meet again after so long apart. But there was also a political context. Louis saw the celebrations as part of the re-affirmation of his kingship after the disasters of his crusade. Henry, on his part, was still pressing for the return of his continental empire, a demand which Louis politely deflected by saying that the peers

15

The daily totals given in the roll exclude the costs of both the queen’s stables and the feeding of paupers, the result of these items not having appeared at all in the early rolls. However, these costs were added in for the weekly, termly and yearly totals. I have myself added them in when giving daily totals in what follows. 16 CR 1251–3, 433; CM, v. 304. The story that Edmund died in exile after a quarrel with Henry was false; see C.H. Lawrence, St Edmund of Abingdon (Oxford, 1960), 168–81. 17 Matthew Paris, perhaps by a slip of the pen, places the meeting at Chartres but all the other evidence, chronicle and record, shows it was at Orléans: CM, v. 475–6; Burton, 327–8; RHF, xxiii. 215; CPR 1247–58, 383. Henry did not reach Chartres on this visit to France.

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of France would never alas permit it.18 More realistically, Henry also wanted the French to accept the papal scheme to place his second son, Edmund, on the Sicilian throne. It was a combination of these personal and political factors that led to the Treaty of Paris and the visit of 1259. Henry’s desire to concentrate on the Sicilian business meant he was willing at last to accept the loss of Normandy, Anjou and Poitou. This made the treaty possible. The mutual affection generated by the 1254 visit, and the desire of both kings for peace between their families, eased the negotiations and gave another reason for carrying them through to success. By 1259, however, the political position of the two kings was very different from that in 1254. Then Louis had just returned from his crusade chastened and in some ways humiliated. Henry, on the other hand, had set Gascony in order and could hope that great vistas were opening up in Sicily. By 1259, in contrast, Louis had reformed his realm and re-established his kingship. Henry had been forced into reform and had surrendered authority to the council of fifteen set up by the Provisions of Oxford. He had also seen the pope withdraw the offer of the Sicilian throne. The purpose of the 1259 visit was much more specific than that of 1254, namely to allow Henry to do homage to Louis under the terms of the new treaty. The nature of the treaty, however, also created a wider agenda that both kings were able to share. Before as large an audience as possible, both were concerned to celebrate the treaty since both had been criticised for concluding it: Louis for conceding to Henry substantial territories; Henry for resigning his claims to Normandy, Anjou and Poitou. More intimately, both kings wished to affirm and consolidate the family friendship which had been established so successfully and movingly in 1254. That friendship was going to be just as vital in the future, for the treaty was a beginning not an end. Henry now held Gascony as a fief from the king of France which meant he would have to defend law cases coming on appeal to the French parlement. Even more, the money due to Henry under the treaty depended on reaching a settlement with the Montforts (a matter in which the French court was intimately involved), and agreeing with Louis a valuation of both the Agenais and the costs of supporting 500 knights for two years. For all these similarities of aim, Henry also had a quite singular reason for wishing to make a show in France. This was to demonstrate that his kingship was still intact despite the restrictions imposed by the Provisions of Oxford. Technically, these meant that Henry could take no major decision without the consent of the council of fifteen, and Simon de Montfort, a member of the council, was himself in France in 1259–60 telling everyone just that.19 In fact, however, the situation for Henry was better than this implied. Montfort, during the French visit, seems to have been largely detatched from the court. Of the councillors active there only Peter de Montfort (no relation) was his ally. By contrast, John Mansel, Henry’s faithful clerk, and Peter of Savoy, the queen’s uncle, both helped overthrow the Provisions in 1261; the earl of Aumale was not a major politician; and the earl of Gloucester, though attached to conciliar rule, was at odds with Montfort and respectful of the king’s position. Early in 1261 he sanctioned letters which spoke in high terms of royal rights and honour. In this environment the 1258 system probably worked much as Henry had hoped it would, with the councillors taking proper account of his views and not treating him like a ‘ward’ as Simon de Montfort sought to do.20 In any case, 18 19 20

CM, v. 480, 482–3. Louis was not necessarily insincere in expressing his regrets, see RHF, xxii. 325. DBM, 204–5, no. 23. CR 1259–61, 272–3 (DBM, 170–3); DBM, 222–5, no. 5 [7].

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in the kind of ceremonial activities described in this paper, there was no reason for even the sternest councillors to restrict the king, for they gave gloss to the regime and showed it was operating with royal consent. There were further factors which influenced Henry’s conduct in France and meant, in a sense, he had to try harder than Louis. It is likely that his household expenditure was normally smaller than Louis’. The accounts for ‘les six métiers’, the Capetian equivalent of the departments covered by Henry’s household roll, survive on wax tablets for the year February 1256 to February 1257. These show costs averaging about 100 livres parisis a day, the rough equivalent of £28 10s sterling.21 It is almost impossible to know how far here one is comparing like with like, but, on the face of it, Louis’ household was costing on average £8 a day, or nearly 30% more than Henry’s on the 1259–60 figures; a significant gap but not one unbridgeable over a short period by a special effort. Henry had a further reason for effort. He was playing away. He himself had always been aware of how England’s buildings and rituals could impress important foreigners. He ordered the latter to be welcomed into London with processions of the citizens and, on one occasion, told the castellan of Dover to show off the castle ‘in a courteous manner so that its nobility is revealed and no defects are seen’.22 How Henry must have wished that he could show Louis London cleaned and adorned, and conduct him round Westminster Abbey. Instead in 1259 it was Louis who could say, as in 1254, ‘my friend, here is the city of Paris laid out before you’, thus welcoming Henry but also, perhaps subconsciously, putting him in his place. A reason for Henry’s visit in 1254 had been his desire to see Paris and the Saint-Chapelle, ‘the most noble chapel of the king of France with its incomparable relics’. Now, ‘le touriste exceptionnel’ (Le Goff), he could see the sights again, but the last thing he wanted was to be smothered by them.23 Through the size of his entourage, the generosity of his gifts, the scale of his almsgiving, the lavishness of his hospitality, and the débonereté of his conduct, Henry rose to these challenges, as now we shall see. The final English version of the peace treaty was sworn at Westminster on 13 October 1259, and it was agreed that Henry should be in Paris on 26 November to perform the required act of homage.24 Henry and Eleanor celebrated All Saints day at Westminster by feeding 390 fratres, and burning, across the vigil and the feast, 230 pounds of wax in the chapel and the almonry, this against the 25 to 35 pounds which was a more ordinary daily figure for the two departments. (Between 7 and 10 pounds was a normal day’s consumption for the chapel alone.)25 Next week Henry and Eleanor left Westminster for the coast. The justiciar, Hugh Bigod, remained behind in England while Henry was accompanied from the ruling council, as we have seen, by the earls of Gloucester and Aumale, Peter de Montfort, and John Mansel, Peter of Savoy later joining in Paris. Simon and Eleanor de Montfort, meanwhile, were already in France, and still demanding a settlement of their grievances before Eleanor would renounce her rights in the lands to be ceded under the treaty, a renunciation without which Louis would not put the treaty into force.

21

Les comptes sur tablettes de cire de Jean Sarrazin, chambellan de saint Louis, ed. E. Lalou (Brepols, 2003), 19–20. 22 CR 1254–6, 212; CR 1247–51, 8. 23 CM, v. 475–8; Le Goff, 576. 24 Layettes du Trésor des Chartes, ed. A Teulet and others, 5 vols (Paris, 1863–1909), iii. no. 4554; Foedera, I, i. 390; Treaty Rolls 1234–1325, ed. P. Chaplais (1955), nos 130, 132–3. 25 The total consumption of wax by the household for the whole year was 17,641½ pounds, an average of 48.33 pounds a day.

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On 10 November the court reached Canterbury where Henry announced his presence in the city by feeding 220 fratres and burning 114 pounds of wax in his chapel and almonry. He evidently stayed with the archbishop, the queen’s uncle Boniface of Savoy, for the household roll notes that he was ‘in all things with the archbishop save stables and alms’. As a consequence the sum for the day was only £6 17s 2d. Henry’s thanks took the form of a charter, issued on 11 November, which granted Boniface a market and fair in his manor of Teynham.26 Three days later, the household crossed the channel between Dover and Wissant and immediately there was an increase in its daily costs. Whereas the sum total for the last full week in England was £110, an average of £15.71 a day, fairly typical of a quiet week in England with the queen, the first full week in France cost £167, nearly £24 a day. This change was doubtless due in part to the higher costs in France where less could be drawn from stock. But it may also reflect the growing size of the royal entourage. Certainly it was much larger now than towards the end of the visit in March 1260 when the costs sank down to under £110 a week. Apart from the councillors just mentioned, the king and queen had with them their second son, Edmund, their daughter, Beatrice, and a group of 78 knights, clerks, magnates and ministers to whom letters of protection were issued, including the bishop of Ely and the bishop elect of London. At some point they were also joined by John de Balliol and the bishops of Lincoln, Norwich and Carlisle.27 According to Matthew Paris’s continuator at St Albans, those meeting Henry’s train across the sea affirmed that so noble a company had never before left England. The number of the king’s sumpter horses alone was extraordinary, leaving aside the formosissimi palfreys of himself and his nobles and the nobilissimi carriages of the queen and her ladies. The continuator was here echoing a passage in Matthew Paris about the visit of 1254, but the French may indeed have been impressed. Certainly the monk of Saint Denis, William de Nangis, in his Life of Saint Louis written between 1285 and 1297, recalled that Henry came to Paris with the earl of Gloucester and ‘many princes and nobles of his kingdom’.28 The large number of horses may be indicated by a rise in the costs of the royal stables from around £5 a day for the last week at Westminster to around £9 a day in France.29 For all the extra expenditure, Henry did not cut down on his almsgiving. The feeding of the 150 fratres continued as usual, even on the day of the channel crossing. So Henry moved towards Paris and on 21 November reached the city of Amiens. Three days later Eudes Rigaud, archbishop of Rouen, noted in his register, ‘We were at Saint-Denis with the king of France with whom we went to meet the king of England.’30 The meeting must have taken place at the royal castle of Beaumontsur-Oise where the household roll places Henry on this day. Here Louis was very much the host, for the household’s costs dropped to £13 7s, as against £32 9s the day before at Beauvais. There was no entry at all for the scullery, saucery, hall and chamber and only 16 pounds of wax were burnt, all in the chapel, as opposed to 73 26 27

CChR 1257–1300, 25. CPR 1258–66, 54–6, 110–12; CR 1259–61, 265; RHF, xx. 410–11, xxii. 325; Layettes, iii. no. 4566. Both Edward and Richard of Cornwall were in England. 28 Flores, ii. 438; CM, v. 476; RHF, xx. 310–11. Henry’s train was opulent indeed if it beat Becket’s in 1158 when going to Paris as Henry II’s chancellor: Becket Materials, iii. 29–33. Note how Henry II, on his own visit, went with a deliberately small entourage: Torigni, 196. 29 The extra expense in France needs again to be considered, of course. The costs (which are for both king and queen) fell back towards the end of the stay. 30 Reg. Eudes of Rouen, trans. S.M. Brown, ed. J.F. O’Sullivan (New York and London, 1964), 396; RHF, xxi. 581 for the Latin text.

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pounds, with eleven in the chapel, the day before. For the next two days Rigaud’s register and the household roll agree about Henry’s movements. On 25 November he was welcomed at Saint-Denis; on 26 November he entered Paris. So, for once in his life, Henry was on time. On 26 November he was supposed to be in Paris and on 26 November he was there, correct etiquette that was all of piece with Henry’s general deportment during his time in France. The household roll reflects the entertainment of these days only through the quiet normality of its costs – £25 3s on the 25th and £22 15s on the 26th – suggesting that the main expenses were borne by the monks of Saint-Denis and King Louis. Something of the pageantry can be glimpsed in Rigaud – the solemn procession of monks which welcomed Henry into the church of Saint-Denis, ‘the king of France being there with us and many others’; the ‘honourable’ reception by the citizens of Paris the next day; and another solemn procession which conducted Henry into the great church of Nôtre-Dame. The citizens, and the students of the University, including the large English contingent, dressed in festive clothes, the singing and music, the town decorated with flowers and lit up by tapers, the feasting for two days and a night – all this we have to imagine from Matthew Paris’s parallel account of Henry’s entry into Paris in 1254.31 Having got Henry to the French capital on 26 November, the household roll continues to place him there until 27 December, without unfortunately revealing where he actually stayed. However, Nangis says that having received Henry ‘honourably’, Louis ‘lodged him in his own palace’, presumably le palais de la Cité, ‘the great palace in the middle of Paris’, where Henry had also spent a night or two in 1254.32 Did Louis issue the invitation to stay there with the same laughing command he had made in 1254, ‘I am lord and king in my kingdom and I wish to have my way’? The joke, relayed to Matthew Paris by an appreciative English court, was made on a Friday, a day, according to one biographer, on which Louis did his best not to laugh, which probably goes to show one should not believe all the biographers tell us.33 Nangis adds that while at the palais de la Cité in 1259, Louis honoured Henry for several days (probably the duration of his stay) with ‘choice wines and dishes and large rewards’. Earlier, in 1254, according to Paris, Louis had ordered fine and sumptuous supplies at his own expense to be given liberally to Henry while he was in France.34 We come now, however, to a crucial point. The household roll may reflect the extent of Louis’ hospitality, notably in the low levels of expenditure at Beaumont-sur-Oise and on the first day in Paris. But there was no occasion in Henry’s whole time in France in 1259–60 when Louis, or anyone else, took over all the costs of the royal household in the manner of Archbishop Boniface. Indeed, Henry’s own expenditure even in the first days in Paris, 27–29 November, when apparently supported by Louis at the palais de la Cité, was still running at a high level, £37 a day. Why is this? Initially I did wonder whether Louis’ failure to do more was related to the increased austerity of his life generally noted after his return from his crusade. But this cannot, I think, be right. Le Goff in an amusing section on ‘Saint Louis à table’ shows how his ‘ascèse alimentaire’ was balanced by his ‘commensalité royale’ and his sense of the measure in all things required of ‘le prud’homme’.35 Geoffrey 31 32 33 34 35

CM, v. 477–8. RHF, xx. 410–13; CM, v. 481; Burton, 329. CM, v. 481; Saint-Pathus, 123 (RHF, xx. 108); Le Goff, 759. RHF, xx. 411–12; CM, v. 476. Le Goff, 624–41. For Salimbene’s account of a stupendous feast thrown by Louis in 1248, see Coulton, From St. Francis to Dante, 142.

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de Beaulieu, Louis’ confessor and biographer, declared that ‘in royal solemnities and in the daily costs of his house and parliaments, he acted liberally and generously as befitted the royal dignity’, a passage copied by Joinville.36 We have seen how Nangis mentions the gifts Louis gave Henry in 1259. Of course, all this is later testimony, and one might think there is defensive tone to it, designed to ward off criticism, were it not for the strictly contemporary evidence of Matthew Paris. Clearly in 1254 the English court saw nothing in Louis other than a gracious and generous host. In all this, Louis’ conduct was very much conditioned by a long tradition of what ‘befitted the royal dignity’. It was ‘the custom’ and part of the ‘nobility’ of ‘the kings of the French’ to provide provisions for anyone coming to and staying at their court. So said William fitz Stephen when writing about Becket’s visit to Paris in 1158 as chancellor of Henry II. Likewise, when John went to Paris in 1201, the royal palace was vacated for his benefit and he was ‘honourably maintained’ there, causing King Philip much amusement, according to one tale, by drinking all the bad wine in the cellars and leaving the good.37 Against this background we may be fairly sure that if Louis in 1259–60 did not take over more of Henry’s costs, it was not for want of offering; it was because Henry refused to accept, refused because of his sense of what befitted his own royal dignity. If Louis was influenced by ‘son idéal du prud’homme mesuré et sa volonté de tenir malgré tout son rang’, that was equally true of Henry.38 It was one thing to accept ‘total hospitality’ from a subordinate like the archbishop of Canterbury, quite another to do so from a superior like the king of France. Henry had taken the same line in 1254, for, according to Matthew Paris, he only accepted the supplies Louis proffered ‘in part’. If, moreover, Henry was reluctant to accept hospitality beyond a certain point, he was very keen to offer it as a testament to his own regality, a testament all the more necessary, as we have seen, given his circumstances in 1259. We are entering here a world of complex etiquettes about when and when not to give and receive hospitality, a subject much explored by early medievalists.39 The ostensible purpose of hospitality was for the host to give ‘honour’ to his guest, a word that appears again and again in this context. But equally the host gained honour himself, and, in some circumstances, might be seeking to dull the display of his guest and indicate his inferiority. This was why important foreigners arriving in England were sometimes reluctant to receive ‘total hospitality’ from Henry. When the ambassadors of the king of Castile landed in 1255, they refused Henry’s offer to meet all their costs and insisted on coming to London under their own steam. On another occasion, Henry was more robust and enforced his hospitality by forbidding the sale of any food by the sheriffs. Here, consciously or not, he was imitating a similar prohibition which Louis VII had issued against Becket in 1158, one the latter adroitly sidestepped by having supplies bought secretly at the French fairs.40 We should not, however, think of Henry and Louis trying to force food down each other’s throats. There may have been an element of competition, but essentially their 36

RHF, xx. 12; Joinville, 394–5; Joinville and Villehardouin: Chronicles of the Crusades, ed. M.R.B. Shaw (Harmondsworth, 1963) [hereafter, Shaw], 343. 37 Becket Materials, iii. 32; Howden, iv. 164; The Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols (RS 73, 1879–80), ii. 93. For the tale (set at Fontainebleau) see RHF, xxiii. 760, a reference I owe to John Gillingham. 38 Le Goff, 634. 39 P. Kershaw, ‘Laughter after Babel’s Fall: Misunderstanding and Miscommunication in the Ninth-Century West’, in Humour, History and Politics in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. G. Halsall (Cambridge, 2002), 194 and the references in n. 71. 40 CR 1254–6, 114, 132–3; Becket Materials, iii. 32.

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conduct was governed by a mutual sense of what was appropriate. In 1254 Louis’ jocular insistence that Henry be his guest at the palais de la Cité was the response to the great feast Henry himself had just thrown at the Paris Temple. Earlier, Henry’s refusal to allow Louis, tired out from the crusade, to accompany him on his pilgrimage to Pontigny was not a snub but the polite and proper answer. So was his equal refusal, on the grounds that he was on pilgrimage, to accept hospitality from the French nobles along the way. In 1259, reinforced by their common desire to celebrate the treaty, we may be sure the two kings interacted with equal understanding.41 Out of this common purpose emerged the celebrations during the week of the Treaty of Paris itself, from Sunday 30 November to Saturday 6 December. 30 November was both a good day to start celebrating the treaty’s adventus since it was Advent Sunday, and also a bad one since it marked the start of the pre Christmas fast. How rigorously this was usually observed by Henry we do not know, but Louis, according to his biographer William de Saint-Pathus (the chaplain of Queen Margaret), fasted in Advent on the same food as in Lent. Indeed, during both periods he would have worn a hair shirt, had not his confessor persuaded him otherwise. That Louis, however much his own diet remained frugal, now countenanced and, we may presume, contributed to the alimentary largesse is thus all the greater testimony to the importance he attached to the launch of the treaty.42 By this time Henry had probably moved from the palais de la Cité to the great monastery of SaintGermain-des-Prés just to the west of the city walls: he was certainly there on 3 and 6 December. Probably it was Louis who suggested the move, showing the same sensitivity to Henry’s needs as he had in 1254. Then he had offered Henry as his residence either the palais de la Cité or the Paris Temple ‘which is outside the city where there is more space’ and Henry, though staying briefly at the palais, had chosen the latter. The same considerations operated in 1259. Henry was welcome in the palais de la Cité but also constricted by it. At Saint-Germain he could house his entourage and throw feasts of his own. By this time a large audience had probably gathered to witness and share the events. In 1254, according to the Burton Abbey annalist, Louis ‘summoned all the magnates of his kingdom subject to his rule, to give honour and reverence to the king and queen of England’ and doubtless he did so again in 1259. The crowd, as in 1254, was provided by the Parisians themselves, male and female, who from their four-floored houses leaned out of the windows to watch Henry go past.43 It was Henry who began the celebrations. On 30 November the costs of his household soared to £92, £55 more than the day before, with no less than £53 worth of food being supplied by the kitchen.44 Two days of ordinary expenditure – £32 14s and £26 – then followed, at least as far as Henry was concerned, before there was a rise on 3 December to £43 15s. Perhaps this reflected the arrival of the Montforts for, on 3 December at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Henry announced that 15,000 marks owed him by Louis under the treaty would be kept back until the couple’s grievances

41 42 43

CM, v. 481; Burton, 328. Saint-Pathus, 121 (RHF, xx. 107); RHF, xx. 10; Le Goff, 633–4. CM, v. 478, 481; Burton, 329. Becket with his vast entourage had stayed at the Temple in 1158: Becket Materials, iii. 32. For the importance of the audience, see Weiler, ‘Symbolism and Politics’, 19–27; Le Goff, 616–19. 44 30 Nov. was also St Andrew’s day but this was not particularly celebrated by the English court judging from Records of the Wardrobe and Household 1285–6, ed. B.F. and C.R. Byerly (London, 1977), no. 1322.

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were satisfied; terms on which, since they maintained pressure on Henry to settle, the Montforts agreed to make the required renunciations.45 And so we come to 4 December, the day of the Treaty of Paris itself, when Rigaud archbishop of Rouen ‘recited and published’ the treaty ‘in the orchard of the king of France’ and Henry did homage to Louis under its terms. An orchard in midwinter must have been a cold place for such a ceremony (Henry burnt 19s worth of firewood in the hall and chamber during the day) but perhaps that is explained by the numbers present being too large for any building.46 Henry certainly shouldered his share of the entertainment. The total cost recorded in the household roll was no less than £77 14s, again over £50 being put down to the kitchen.47 On Friday 5 December there was a breather for Henry’s household, the cost in the roll being only £30 16s. On the next day, Saturday 6 December, Rigaud noted ‘we dined with the king of England at Saint-Germain-des-Prés’. He could have said that again for on this Saturday Henry hosted an absolutely gigantic feast.48 The total cost for the day was £176 18s 8d, by far the largest expenditure on any day recorded in the surviving household rolls of Henry III. The kitchen alone supplied food worth £126 10s. Admittedly, for great feasts in England far more would have been supplied from stock unvalued in the household roll, but at the very least the 6 December banquet was of the same order as the greatest festival recorded in England, that held on 13 October 1260, where Henry, as so often, combined the spiritual and the secular, by both celebrating the feast of the translation of Edward the Confessor and knighting his new son-in-law, John of Brittany. The cost for 12 and 13 October, the vigil and the feast being combined together in the roll, was £229, an average of £114 across the two days, although the great bulk of this must represent consumption on the feast day itself. On 6 December 1259 Henry also made a special effort for the poor. The cost of the pantry’s share in feeding the 150 fratres reached no less than £5 6s 3d, whereas 6s 3d was a normal sum. The 150 would have been very full indeed had they eaten all the bread this could have provided since it was enough for 5,100 farthing loaves. More likely, the pantry was here baking bread for a general distribution to multitudes of paupers, hence apparently (as on some other similar occasions) the way the household roll places an ‘etc’ after the 150 fratres. On the buttery and kitchen side on 6 December, the costs of the 150 remained as normal, but one wonders whether the almsmen, on this occasion, partook of the main feast. Certainly 6 December was one of the occasions when consumption of wax was recorded for the chapel but not for the almonry, which would be compatible with the almsmen dining in the hall. In various ways, therefore, Henry was perhaps mindful of the words of Christ: ‘when thou makest a feast, call the poor . . . and thou shall be blessed; for they cannot recompense thee; thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of the just’ (Luke 14, 13–14). Something of the preparations for the great feast on 6 December can be sensed from an entry on the dorse of the household roll for 1262 relating to extraordinary expenditure of the scullery and the hall when the king was at Saint-Maur-des-Fossés

45 46

Layettes, iii. no. 4565; CPR 1258–66, 106–7; DD, no. 306; Maddicott, Simon de Montfort, 187. Reg. Eudes, 396–7 (RHF, xxi. 582); RHF, xxii. 325. Eudes’ Register actually places these events on 3 Dec. but it seems certain that they took place on the 4th: Layettes, iii. no. 4566; CR 1259–61, 225. For occasional mistakes in the register over dates, see Reg. Eudes, 510–11 nn. 21, 25. 47 Some of the provision for the fratres this day came from ‘stock’. 48 Reg. Eudes, 397 (RHF, xxi. 582). 6 Dec. was the day of St Nicholas but this was not apparently celebrated either in 1225 or 1285: Divers Accounts Henry III, 93; Records of the Wardrobe 1285–6, no. 1328.

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on the south-eastern outskirts of Paris: the casks, bowls, caldrons, small dishes, great plates and chests obtained by the scullery; the carpenters busy repairing the windows of the hall and making trestles, tables and benches, while more tables and benches, 18 and 28 respectively, were obtained on hire.49 Drawing in part on the descriptions by Matthew Paris and the Burton annalists of the feast Henry held at the Temple in 1254, we can conjure up the day itself: the great crowds of Parisians, including the paupers getting their loaves, thronging all the buildings of the monastery, for no one was denied entry; and in the hall itself, seated according to rank alongside the 150 fratres, the knights, barons, earls, dukes, abbots, bishops, archbishops, countesses, queens, and royal princes, with at the very centre Henry and Louis themselves.50 The feast of 6 December affirmed the family unity at the heart of the Treaty of Paris and radiated the celebrations through the differentiated diners in the hall into the undifferentiated masses eating without. One thinks of the funeral of Diana Princess of Wales, with the great and the good seated according to status in Westminster Abbey, and the masses outside sharing and responding through watching on the great screens, an image here replacing food as the unifying element. Of course, the funeral of Diana revealed at its heart not family unity but disunity. It was very different on 6 December 1259. We can imagine Henry and Louis sitting together (as in 1254) now talking sotto voce about private or pious things, now joining in the joyful clamour. For Louis, as Joinville stresses, was good company at table. Perhaps the two kings had begun proceedings with the same delicate, delightful parade of politesse they had exhibited in 1254. Then Louis had wanted Henry to sit in the central place only for Henry to refuse, remarking ‘you are my lord, and will be’. In 1259, did Henry with a smile now sit Louis in the centre and say, referring to his act of homage, ‘well now you really are my lord’?51 There is one final point to note about the feast of 6 December 1259 and those like it. They gained much of their power from their rarity, not merely in terms of their costs, but also in terms of their situation. They took place in the hall whereas it is highly likely that Henry (like Louis) dined mostly in his chamber. Certainly in all the Henrician household rolls the expenditure on the chamber is nearly always larger than on the hall. Indeed in winter, judging from the respective costs of their firewood, the hall must often have been a rather cold place while a cheerful fire always burnt in the chamber. The great feast of 6 December was one of the rare occasions when the balance of costs was the other way round. Indeed no entry at all was made for firewood in the chamber. By usually dining in his chamber rather than the hall the king lost in inclusiveness but gained in intimacy. His aim in so doing might simply be to enjoy congenial and relaxing company. Hence Hitler, as the war began to go badly, ceased to dine with his generals in the mess and preferred to eat either alone or with secretaries and sycophants.52 But chamber meals could also have a political purpose with important diners being flattered by their presence in the exclusive inner circle.53 If, however, a great feast worked well, it brought the intimate and the inclusive fruitfully together with those on the High Table, those below it, and those outside being mutually vivified by each other’s company; in a sense the

49 50 51 52

C 47/3/6, m. 3d. CM, v. 479–81; Burton, 329. Joinville, 368–9 (Shaw, 331); CM, v. 480. A. Speer, Inside the Third Reich (1970), 239, 296–7; T. Junge, Until the Final Hour: Hitler’s Last Secretary (2003), 41, 62–82, 105. For Henry II’s desire to dine privately see Torigni, 197. 53 Hence the importance of Speer’s return to the nightly tea party circle after his quarrel with Hitler in 1944: Inside the Third Reich, 341–2.

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reverse of what happened at Diana’s funeral when the good and the great reluctantly joined in as the applause of the crowd reverberated into the Abbey. Matthew Paris affirmed of Henry’s feast in 1254 that with the variety of splendid dishes, the abundance of delicious drink, the attentiveness of the servants and the status of the guests, there had never been such a convivium celebrated even in the times of Asshur (founder of Tyre), Arthur and Charlemagne. He would surely have said the same about the feast held on 6 December 1259.54 After the week of celebrations, Henry stayed on in Paris in part to deal with the consequences of the treaty, presumably, in the absence of other evidence, remaining initially at Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Meetings between the kings continued. At one, shortly before Christmas, Alphonse count of Poitiers, Louis IX’s brother, and Reginald de Pons and his wife appeared, the former to complain about damages done to his men in Gascony and the two latter to seek possession of the castle of Bergerac. In response, Henry and his council sent a writ to the Lord Edward, the ruler of Gascony, instructing him to do them justice, and warning that they might otherwise resort to the king of France; clearly the judicial consequences of Gascony’s status as French fief were plain from the start. The evidence for this period before Christmas as usual reveals Louis’ influence on Henry (for example in securing repayment of debts owed to Rouen wine merchants), rather than vice versa, but it is not impossible that one matter Louis now dealt with had a significant impact on his own conduct.55 On 10 December Henry and his council, ‘at the prayers of the illustrious king of France’, took steps to secure for the abbey of Fontevraud the arrears of the annual payment due from the exchequer ‘by concession of the progenitors of the king for the celebration of their anniversaries each year’, the anniversaries in question being of course those of Henry II, Richard I and Eleanor of Aquitaine, who were buried at the abbey. That Henry had to be told by King Louis to show due honour to his ancestors might seem surprising, yet it was so much easier for Louis to remember ancestors than it was for Henry.56 The bodies of Louis’ Capetian forebears, stretching back now for centuries, had nearly all been buried at Saint-Denis where they merged seamlessly with those of their Carolingian and Merovingian predecessors. The bodies of the much broken line of the English kings, by contrast, were scattered across France and England. For a brief moment it had seemed that Fontevraud might become a dynastic mausoleum, but the loss of the Angevin empire brought that possibility to an end. When Henry visited Fontevraud on his way from Gascony to Pontigny in 1254, he willed his heart to the monastery, moved the body of his mother, Isabella of Angoulême, from the cemetery to the church and gave her an effigy similar to those already commemorating Henry, Richard and Eleanor.57 But his own body, of course, was to lie at Westminster. There, in the creation of a dynastic mausoleum to rival Saint-Denis, he must make a new start. Louis had to do nothing of the kind, but intervening now, doubtless at the request of the abbess, for Henry’s predecessors at Fontevraud, he may well have reflected on their splendid effigies and begun to think how he could do the same for his own progenitors at 54 55

CM, v. 479. I owe the identification of Asshur to John Gillingham. CR 1256–9, 232, 226. For other business see DD, no. 308 [4]. The affair over Bergerac is succinctly explained in M.W. Labarge, Gascony: England’s First Colony (1980), 39. 56 CR 1259–61, 225–6. However, for Henry’s effort, before departure for France, to establish the size of the arrears owed to Fontevraud and get them paid, see CLR 1251–60, 483. 57 CM, v. 475; Carpenter, Reign of Henry III, 428.

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Saint Denis. Thus in 1263–4 he did not merely regroup their bodies, he also raised them above the ground in tomb chests and made them live in regal effigies, eyes open gazing into eternity. There could be no more visible demonstration of monarchical continuity and immortality.58 During these pre-Christmas weeks, Henry’s household roll reveals no further feasts, but the general costs of the household were still running at a significant level, £36 a day in the week from 7 December and £33 a day in that from the 14th. For Christmas itself, Henry made a bigger effort, the total for the vigil and the feast (joined together in the accounts) being some £101 14s, the bulk of this, including over £3 spent on special quality flour, flos dominicus, presumably representing consumption on Christmas Day itself. (In 1225, the only other Christmas for which a roll survives, the sum for the two days was £51, the special flour itself costing half as much.) Across the two days, Henry also burnt 171 pounds of wax, 75 of them in the chapel and the almonry, and fed 450 fratres, which suggests that 300 were fed on Christmas Day itself if the quota for the vigil was the normal 150.59 Once again, the household roll may only reveal one half of the festivities for, according to Matthew Paris’s continuator, Henry celebrated the feast ‘ceremonially’ with Louis and his nobles. Fortunately, Louis had no eye for clothes, otherwise he would have noticed that while Henry’s knights were decked out in new robes, his clerks and serjeants were making do with old ones, this because Henry was running short of money. On 22 December he wrote home asking urgently for funds, and next month took a loan from the Paris Temple.60 Henry’s original intention had been to return home after Christmas. However, during this period, in an important subtext to the business of the treaty, negotiations had been continuing in Paris for the marriage of Henry’s daughter, Beatrice, to John son and heir of the duke of Brittany. These were now reaching fruition and Henry, ‘at the instance of the king and queen of France’, agreed that the nuptials should be celebrated in the presence of the royal families at Compiègne on 14 January.61 Henry therefore stayed on, and after Christmas went for two days, 28–29 December, to Saint-Denis. Why? The answer reveals the same astute and sensitive conduct that he often showed during this visit to France. For Henry had gone to Saint-Denis to celebrate the vigil and the feast of Becket’s martyrdom, doing so with an abundance of candles, for he burnt 179 pounds of wax across the two days, 90½ of them in the chapel and the almonry. Thus, surrounded by light, Henry showed his own clearness of conscience and cleansed his dynasty of its most notorious crime by commemorating Becket before the monks of Saint-Denis, the great upholders and propagandists of the Capetian state. Having left Saint-Denis, Henry visited two royal palaces on the western side of Paris, first Saint-Germain-en-Laye and then from 2 January, Pontoise. It was at Pontoise on 5 January that he celebrated the anniversary of the death of Edward the Confessor, a day in his year second only to the feast of the Confessor’s translation on 13 October. One would like to think that Louis IX was present, for Henry had after all honoured Saint Denis with his own presence. Yet it seems unlikely for the feast

58 59

For all this, see Le Goff, 273–89. Again the feeding of the specified number of fratres may have been combined with a wider distribution of bread. There seems to have been an earlier distribution on 11 Dec. For 1225 see Divers Accounts Henry III, 95. 60 Flores, ii. 440; CR 1259–61, 234, 229–30; CLR 1251–60, 521; CPR 1258–66, 114. The letter home was not in fact sent. For Louis and Christmas: Saint-Pathus, 122 (RHF, xx. 107). 61 CR 1259–61, 267–8 (DBM, 164–9).

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was a quiet affair. Queen Eleanor had left court after the visit to Saint-Denis and did not return for 5 January. The costs of the day were £22, several pounds more than for the days either side,62 but a paltry sum compared with what had gone before in Paris. Perhaps Henry was restricted by lack of funds; perhaps also he had failed to interest Louis in the Confessor. To be sure, Louis might understand the Confessor as a patron saint like Saint Denis, and was surely above seeking to ignore him as a potential rival to the latter. His own devotion to Saint Denis was real enough. He was regularly at Saint-Denis for his feast on 9 October, just as Henry was regularly at Westminster for the Confessor’s feast four days later. During the celebration, according to Saint-Pathus, Louis would place four bezants of gold on his head before offering them on the altar, thus showing that he was the saint’s man, a ritual to which he introduced his eldest son.63 This, however, is all Saint-Pathus tells us about Louis’ attachment to Denis, despite writing exhaustively about other aspects of his piety. Admittedly Saint-Pathus was a Franciscan, but even Nangis, a monk of Saint-Denis, is no more forthcoming. Le Goff himself states that Saint Denis, the Virgin Mary and Christ formed ‘la grande trilogie’ to whom Louis prayed and for once leaves it at that.64 There is nothing to suggest that Louis had for Denis (or any other saint) the same kind of overwhelming and deeply personal devotion that Henry felt for the Confessor. Indeed, in parallel letters in favour of Deerhurst priory, a daughter house of Saint-Denis, it was Queen Margaret who spoke of ‘our most glorious and devout patron, the blessed Denis’. Louis was content simply with ‘the blessed Denis’.65 Quite possibly he considered that Henry’s obsession with the Confessor lacked balance and threatened to obscure other necessary elements of religion.66 If Henry failed to bring the potentates to Pontoise on 5 January, he had a solution. He would bring the poor instead. On this day the numbers of fratres fed rose from the 100 usual in the queen’s absence to 1500. The total bill was £7 7s 2d, which represents an expenditure of only 1.1d per head, but the distribution of the costs between pantry, buttery and kitchen shows that a full meal was on the menu, and the paupers were not simply given rations of bread. In terms of specified numbers, this was in fact by far the greatest feeding during the king’s stay in France (the next largest being the 321 fed on Maundy Thursday) and was topped during the year as a whole only by the 5016 dined at Westminster on 12 and 13 October, the vigil and the feast of the Confessor’s translation. Did the paupers at Pontoise listen to a sermon about the Confessor as they ate (once again perhaps in the hall, for no wax was burnt in the almonry) and then go out into the homes and highways of Paris to spread the glad news about this saint of ‘mighty power’and the king who loved him? That surely must have been the intention. Like so much else in 1259–60, the feeding on 5 January 1260 had its parallel during the 1254 visit to Paris. Then, on his arrival at the Temple, Henry had ordered all the buildings to be filled the next morning with paupers, all of whom, although the number was ‘infinite’, enjoyed an abundance of meat and fish, bread and

62 63

I am leaving out here the cost of feeding paupers, for which see below. Saint-Pathus, 43–4 and 44 n. 1 (RHF, xx. 75–6). For Louis’ itinerary, which shows he could have attended the feast regularly, see RHF, xx. 408–23, l–li. 64 Le Goff, 540, 296. For Louis praying to Saint Denis on his deathbed, see RHF, xx. 23. 65 DD, nos 314–15. 66 The English version of the Treaty of Paris sent to Louis, although concluded on 13 Oct., the Confessor’s feast day, was dated instead ‘Monday before the feast of St Luke the Evangelist’. This suggests the French court’s knowledge of the Confessor was known to be limited.

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wine.67 These great feedings of December 1254 and January 1260 had all the greater impact because in them Henry was displaying one of the most characteristic and distinctive features of his piety. Almsgiving was, of course, one of the most basic of Christian obligations, as Christ had taught both in the Dives and Lazarus parable and in his description of the Last Judgement. There the blessed were precisely those who had fed and clothed the poor and nursed the sick, in so doing, feeding, clothing and nursing Christ himself. ‘In as much as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me’ (Matthew 25, 31–46). Such charity also enabled the prayers of the poor to be harvested both for the donor and for any other named beneficiary, hence the practice of feeding the poor for the souls of the departed. What, however, distinguished Henry’s almsgiving was its sheer scale, a scale, he clearly believed, which dignified his royal state and secured the more certain promise of divine aid, prayers being all the more powerful if issuing from many lips. Thus, as Sally Dixon-Smith has shown, it was Henry’s frequent practice to fill the halls at Westminster and elsewhere with paupers.68 Often he specified the numbers involved: 1000, 1500, 5000 (probably the capacity of Rufus’s great hall) and upwards. For the feast of 13 October 1263, which Henry feared (in fact wrongly) he would miss because of his trip to see Louis at Boulogne, he ordered provision to be made ‘for the poor coming to Westminster to the number of a 100,000’.69 That people both knew of Henry’s almsgiving and considered it remarkable, is shown by an anecdote in the annals of Osney Abbey. One All Souls Day, Henry ordered his servants to go out through the villages and open spaces and gather 10,000 poor, only to be told by a despairing official that ‘in the whole province it is not possible to find so many’!70 Henry’s almsgiving was all the more likely to make an impact in Paris because there is no sign in either the biographical or record sources that it was paralleled, or at least paralleled in its precise form, by the almsgiving of Louis IX. The largest specific number of paupers said to have been fed by Louis is 300.71 When he went above this kind of figure it seems to have been not through meals in halls to defined numbers, but through general distributions either of bread (which Henry also sometimes made) or of money (which Henry seems to have eschewed) to unnumbered multitudes – Saint-Pathus talks vaguely of ten or twenty thousand recipients a day when Louis visited his kingdom on return from his crusade.72

67 68

CM, v. 478. For Henry II’s almsgiving in Paris in 1158, see Torigni, 197. S. Dixon-Smith, ‘The Image and Reality of Almsgiving in the Great Halls of Henry III’, J. British Archaeological Association 152 (1999). This paper and Dixon-Smith’s ‘Feeding the Poor to Commemorate the Dead: The pro anima Almsgiving of Henry III of England’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 2002) are central for almsgiving in general, and I owe a great deal to them. See also H. Johnstone, ‘Poor Relief in Royal Households of Thirteenth-Century England’, Speculum 4 (1929) and M. Prestwich, ‘The Piety of Edward I’, in England in the Thirteenth Century, ed. W.M. Ormrod (Harlaxton, 1985). It should be stressed that in this paper I am not giving a total picture of the almsgiving of either Henry or Louis. For John ordering the feeding of 2,100 paupers daily in the summer of 1204, see RLP, 95–6; PR 1204, 80, 94, 106, 121, 146, 176–7, 187, 248, xxxvi. 69 CPR 1258–66, 282–3. 70 Osney, 77. Henry rejoined that the abbot of Osney was able ‘at his nod’ to gather 15,000! Cf. CLR 1240–5, 324, a reference I owe to Sally Dixon-Smith. For papal efforts to moderate the scale of Henry’s ‘pious expenses’ see Foedera, I, i. 302. 71 Saint-Pathus, 85 (RHF, xx. 93). For record evidence of Louis feeding 200 paupers, Les comptes sur tablettes de cire de Jean Sarrazin, 86–7, section 207 (RHF, xxi. 366); more generally, see X. de la Selle, Le service des âmes à la cour: confesseurs et aumônier des rois de France (Paris, 1995). 72 Saint-Pathus, 82, 89–90 (RHF, xx. 91, 95). I am most grateful to Sally Dixon-Smith for sending me her translation and analysis of Saint-Pathus’s long chapter on Louis’ ‘oeuvres de pité’.

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If, however, Louis did not fill halls with thousands of dining paupers in the same way as Henry, the almsgiving of the kings had nevertheless much in common. Both were active on a grand scale. Indeed Louis’ costs provoked not merely wonder but outright criticism.73 Yet both were also abreast of contemporary ideas about how alms should go to those most in need. Louis’ biographers show him focusing his personal attentions on the old, sick and blind, and concentrating his large-scale alms on the most deprived areas of his kingdom. In Henry’s case it is natural to think that the London citizenry simply piled into the Westminster halls for free meals, but it was not meant to be like that. When Henry, absent himself, ordered 6000 poor to be fed at Westminster on the day of the Circumcision, 1 January 1244 ‘for the state of the king, the queen and their children’, he specified that the old and weak were to be fed in the great and small halls, the less weak and the middle aged in the king’s chamber, and the children in the queen’s chamber.74 For all the despair of the official in the Osney anecdote, this was a time when there were a great many genuine poor about. When it comes to the more day-to-day feeding of the poor at court, the kings were again very comparable. We have seen how Henry’s general practice was to feed 150 fratres daily when the queen was present and 100 when she was away, a practice he maintained assiduously throughout his time in France. Since there are no similar entries in the household roll for 1225–6, he must have introduced these feedings at some subsequent date.75 Thus, wherever he was, whatever he did, Henry was surrounded and supported every day by the prayers of his almsmen, their efforts, as we have seen, illuminated on occasions by numerous candles.76 The balance within the 150 friars (see above, p. 4), almsmen permanently attached to the court, and casual poor appears irrecoverable. What is striking is that the numbers are not dissimilar to those fed daily by King Louis, as described by his biographers. Thus Louis fed 122 paupers each day ‘in his house’, a number which could rise to 200 or 300 on special feasts. As with Henry’s 150, these men seem to have sat down to formal meals. The biographers, notably William de Saint-Pathus, also provide details of far more intimate form of almsgiving in which Louis on particular days personally served separate groups of three and thirteen paupers who dined with him in his chamber or wardrobe. Although there is no evidence that Henry did the same, there is equally no reason to think he did not.77 In one intimate and numinous area of religious activity, modelled very much on the practice of Christ, the two kings were certainly at one, namely in washing the feet of the poor, though here again Henry’s activities seem to have been on a larger scale. ‘It would make me sick’ exclaimed Joinville when Louis asked him if he indulged in this practice. ‘Very unwillingly then would you do what the king of England does – who washes the feet of lepers and kisses them’, rejoined Louis.78 73

Saint Pathus, 88–9 (RHF, xx. 94); RHF, xx. 12 (Geoffrey de Beaulieu, copied in Joinville, 394–5; Shaw, 342); and see Le Goff, 814–25. 74 CR 1242–7, 150. 75 However the introduction during the course of 1225–6 under the pantry of a new item elemosina forinseca represents a move towards the later entries: Divers Accounts Henry III, 100–2. I hope to discuss this more fully on another occasion. 76 The prayers at court were, of course, only one part of Henry’s prayer network. See Flores, ii. 431–2. 77 Saint Pathus, 79–82 (RHF, xx. 90–1); RHF, xx. 11; Joinville, 368–9, 380–1, 390–3 (Shaw, 331, 337 (where ‘hall’ should read ‘chamber’), 342). Louis also gave daily two loaves of bread and four pence to a further 60 paupers, and here there does not seem to be a parallel with Henry’s usual practice. In general, Henry appears not to have given money to the poor with the same frequency as Louis. 78 Joinville, 16–17, 378–81 (Shaw, 169, 336).

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There is no other evidence that Henry washed the feet of lepers, but his own records show that he certainly washed those of the poor. Indeed, during the 1260s the wardrobe possessed a ‘great silver basin to wash the king’s feet and the feet of the poor at his maundy’. Thus, in sharing the same basin, as perhaps in calling them his fratres, Henry put himself on a par with paupers and paupers on a par with kings.79 Louis himself washed the feet of three paupers each Saturday (having a separate bowl for each) and thirteen on Maundy Thursday, cleansing sessions which, according to Saint Pathus, he tried to keep as secret as possible.80 Henry too was attracted by the idea of secret acts of piety (itself biblically based) but it must have been difficult to achieve in this area of his activities, given the numbers involved. The oblation roll for 1238–9 shows that he washed the feet of 300 paupers both on Maundy Thursday and at Christmas, on the latter occasion, at a cost of over £25, also providing clothes and shoes.81 Presumably the 300 paupers fed on Christmas Day 1259 were thus also the beneficiaries of royally administered ablutions. The multitudes involved on such occasions may help to explain why the silver basin in the wardrobe was so large, weighing all of £10 2s 6d. There seems, therefore, little doubt that their mutual attachment to the poor constituted a deep bond between Henry and Louis. If Matthew Paris can be believed, the foundations for this had been laid long before they met. ‘Be silent’ Louis had told those deriding Henry in 1242, ‘his alms and his masses’ (here picking out another striking feature of Henry’s piety) ‘will free him from all shames and dangers’. Louis must have felt that all the more strongly having seen Henry’s piety in action.82 On 11 January 1260 Henry left Pontoise for Saint-Denis. On the next day he moved on again, this time northwards to Asnières-sur-Oise hard by Royaumont, the great Cistercian abbey founded by Louis. On 13 January he was back again at Saint-Denis where he remained until 24 January, on the 18th being joined there by the queen. In Nangis’s much later recollection Henry stayed at Saint-Denis for over a month. ‘Perhaps it felt like that’ would be an ungenerous and indeed an inaccurate reflection. Nangis, in a rare indication of how Henry’s conduct was viewed by the French, states that ‘desiring to visit the blessed Denis’, Henry came to his church ‘with great devotion and reverence’, being received ‘with great honour’ by the convent, dressed in silk copes. During his stay he gave the convent a gold chalice and a bowl of great weight, and was visited on several occasions by King Louis.83 There was indeed much to discuss for this period saw two further ceremonies, one of sorrow and one of joy. 14 January had been intended as the day for the marriage of Henry’s daughter, Beatrice, with John of Brittany at Compiègne. Instead it was the day on which Louis, King Louis’ fifteen-year-old eldest son and Henry’s nephew, was buried at Royaumont.84 Perhaps Henry, in leaving Pontoise on 11 January, had been on his way to Compiègne before news arrived of the prince’s death. The body stayed one night at Saint-Denis and on the morrow was borne 79 80

I owe this last point to Sally Dixon-Smith. E 372/113, m. 2; E 372/114, m. 40d; Saint-Pathus, 63, 80, 82 (RHF, xx. 83,90–1). This was another ritual to which Louis introduced his sons. 81 C 47/3/44, m. 2. The washing and clothing seems to have been on Christmas Eve rather than Christmas Day. For clothes and shoes provided for 171 paupers at great festivals, see e.g. CLR 1251–60, 430–1, 443, 456, 461, 502. 150 were for the king and queen, 21 for the royal children. 82 CM, iv. 231–2. For further discussion see below, pp. 25–7. 83 RHF, xx. 410–13. 84 CR 1259–61, 267–8 (DBM, 164–7).

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through the town and onwards for half a mile on the shoulders of King Henry and the ‘most noble barons of France and England’. This was a graceful and gracious act of Henry’s, which showed just how deeply he shared the anguish of the French royal family. Appearing in no English source, it made a deep impression on the French for it was described by Nangis in two different versions, and then in a unique scene, sculpted on the prince’s tomb chest where Henry can be seen to this day shouldering his doleful burden.85 The marriage between John and Beatrice now took place at Saint-Denis on Thursday 22 January.86 Henry played his part in the festivities for the household’s expenses rose to £49, nearly double those of the day before and the day after. Three days later, Henry at last set out for home. We know comparatively little of the exchange of gifts which must have marked the parting of the courts, as indeed they must have marked the whole course of the visit, for they were just as important in establishing and consolidating relationships as the exchange of hospitality. After his great feast at the Temple in 1254 Henry had given the French magnates silver cups, gold brooches and silk belts ‘as it behoved so great king to give and such primates gladly to receive’.87 Unfortunately the jewel accounts on the pipe rolls for the year 1259–60 (there is no account for 1254) lump the king’s gifts together and do not reveal what he gave specifically in France, but doubtless he was as generous as in 1254, especially if we can judge from his donations to Saint Denis. We are better informed about the activities of Queen Eleanor for a roll shows that she gave rings to the countesses of Brittany, Guisnes and Eu, to her niece, the queen of Navarre, and to her sisters, Queen Margaret and Beatrice, countess of Provence, the wife of Louis’ brother, Charles of Anjou. Just as the entertainment reached out from the high table to embrace the followers lower down the hall, so did the gifts, for Eleanor’s equally included the knights who ‘stood’ with these noble women as well as their clerks, valetti and officials.88 Louis himself had followed up the success of the 1254 visit by sending Henry an elephant, while Queen Margaret gave him a fantastic jewel shaped like a peacock. Both, according to Matthew Paris, excited wonder in all who beheld them. For the 1259–60 visit the jewel accounts, more revealing about gifts received than those given, show that Louis presented Henry with a cup of gold weighing 51s 10d, a great silver incense boat, weighing £22 6s 8d and two cloths of gold. One cloth of gold was received from Alphonse of Poitiers, while a samite came from the countess of Provence.89 In such interchange of gifts, the royal houses and their aristocracies appear very much as ‘a family with its centre in Paris’, to quote Malcolm Vale.90 Simply in terms of the expenditure recorded on the household roll, the cost of Henry’s nine weeks in Paris was some £2,069, an average of £33 a day. The cost for the week of the Treaty of Paris itself was £479, an average of £68, by far the most expensive week of which there is record during the reign. For the five weeks down to 85

RHF, xx. 412–13, xxi. 119; Flores, ii. 442. The scene on the tomb (now at Saint-Denis) is a nineteenth-century reproduction but one based on the original tomb chest: G. Sommers Wright, ‘A Royal Tomb Programme in the Reign of St Louis’, Art Bulletin 66 (1975), 226 n. 7. I am grateful to Lindy Grant for this reference and for help generally on the subject. In the scene, Henry is accompanied by another king, presumably Theobald of Navarre, Louis’ son-in-law. 86 CR 1259–61, 267–8 (DBM, 164–7). 87 CM, v. 479. For Becket’s gifts in 1158, see Becket Materials, iii. 32–3. 88 E 101/349/26; see M. Howell, Eleanor of Provence (Oxford, 1998), 165, 78–80. 89 CM, v. 489; Burton, 329; CR 1254–6, 34; E 361/1, m. 2. 90 M. Vale, The Angevin Legacy and the Hundred Years War (Oxford, 1990), 47. The reflection is Margaret Howell’s: Eleanor of Provence, 165.

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and including Christmas the daily average was £42 and for the four weeks thereafter £21, a difference explained by the absence of the queen for much of the second period and the generally smaller scale of entertainment. In so far as Henry had been paying his way, as opposed to operating on credit, the money had come from £2,400 the exchequer had delivered into the wardrobe before departure, from a loan of £640 contracted with the Paris Temple in January 1260, and from £2,181 raised by the sale in Paris and elsewhere of the remains of Henry’s gold treasure. As a result, over 20,000 of Henry gold pennies, minted in 1257, were sold in Paris, doubtless disappearing at once into the melting pot.91 If this was an inglorious end for the coins that depicted Henry sitting so elegantly on his throne holding orb and sceptre, it was surely money well spent. During his time in Paris, Henry had strengthened his relationship with Louis IX, got the treaty off to a splendid start before admiring audiences, and enhanced his general reputation with the French for piety and munificence. Matthew Paris had averred that Henry’s stay in 1254, which lasted only a week, had cost £1,000, much to the mutilation of his treasure. ‘However,’ he added, in a rare display of balance, ‘the honour of the king of the English and of all the English was no little exalted and much augmented.’ Earlier he had been just as complimentary about Henry’s great feast at the Temple: ‘his fame shone forth on account of the generosity of his gifts, the plenty of the day, the copiousness of his almsgiving and the choiceness of his company’.92 All this could surely have been said too of Henry in 1259–60. Of course, it was not just the money. What stands out most powerfully from the record of the 1259–60 visit, is how utterly fitting had been Henry’s conduct (unlike apparently John’s in 1201); fitting in his exchange of gifts, his visits to Saint-Denis, his bearing of young Louis’ coffin, and his proffering, reception and refusal of hospitality. In all this, he had measured up perfectly to the standard required of le prud’homme. After this encomium, one returns to the reality of Henry’s kingship with a bump. For Henry did not in fact return home. Although he reached the coast at St Omer on 15 February, he then remained there till 15 April and only finally crossed the channel on 21 April. In letters home Henry initially explained that he was eager to settle the value of the money owed him under the terms of the treaty, hence he implied his delay in France. He also blamed the home government’s failure to give him proper advice on the subject.93 But the real reason for the delay was the dangerous situation in England, at least as discerned by Henry and the councillors who were with him. After the proclamation of the Treaty of Paris, Simon de Montfort had returned to England without taking leave of the king. He had then attempted to hold the parliament required on 2 February by the terms of Provisions of Oxford, despite the king’s prohibition relayed to him by the justiciar Hugh Bigod. Montfort was in alliance with the heir to the throne, the Lord Edward, and the two were rumoured to be gathering troops and plotting war. As a result of this threat, Henry eventually returned to England with a considerable body of foreign mercenaries.94 Against this background, Henry’s conduct, supported by Gloucester and Mansel, might appear justifiable. Perhaps he also saw its value in driving a wedge between Montfort and the other councillors, thus weakening the whole regime of the 91 92 93 94

CLR 1251–60, 483–4; CPR 1258–66, 122; CR 1259–61, 240; E 361/1, m. 1. CM, v. 481–2. The continuator’s tone about 1259–60 was not dissimilar: Flores, ii. 437–8, 440. CR 1259–61, 267–8, 272–3, 276 (DBM, 164–75). For all this see Maddicott, Simon de Montfort, 192–5.

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Provisions of Oxford. But it was (and is) equally possible to criticise Henry for feebleness and credulity. Certainly Louis himself became increasingly concerned about what was going on and visited Henry at St Omer between Palm Sunday (27 March) and Maundy Thursday (1 April). He was thus able on Maundy Thursday to witness Henry’s feeding of 321 fratres. Perhaps the two kings also joined together in washing feet. On Maundy Thursday, Louis’ practice, as we have mentioned, was to wash those of 13 paupers. There was a lot more washing to do now, however, if, as seems likely, Henry washed the feet of all 321. At St Omer, Louis did not merely admire Henry’s piety. He also gave him some advice. ‘Since it is shameful to us and harmful to our whole kingdom that we should be away so long from our realm, as the aforesaid king and other friends of ours have told us, we cannot delay any longer where we are now’, Henry wrote to the earl of Gloucester, who was now himself back in England. This must surely rank as one of the most extraordinary letters ever written by a king of England, extraordinary in that Henry had to be told by the king of France that his conduct was shameful and he really must return home; and extraordinary too in that Henry was ready to confess this to the earl of Gloucester, apparently sensing that his own judgement about his return would not carry sufficient weight.95 The whole episode encapsulates the two kings’ contrasting levels of wisdom and shows Louis had a far stronger sense of how the duties of kingship should be discharged in practice. To advice, indeed, he also added practical help for he soon gave Henry 25,000 pounds Tours (£5,690 sterling) as a down payment towards the cost of maintaining the 500 knights.96 From kings we turn to queens and to queens who were sisters, Eleanor and Margaret of Provence. Both Matthew Paris and the Burton Abbey annalist place the meetings of Eleanor, Margaret, their mother, Beatrice, and their younger sisters, Sanchia and Beatrice, the one married to Henry’s brother, Richard of Cornwall, the other to Louis’ brother, Charles of Anjou, at the centre of the celebrations in 1254. Edmund’s Sicilian candidature, and the conflicts with Charles over the future of Provence (which he had obtained through his marriage to Beatrice) must have given them a good deal to talk about. In Paris in 1259, with their mother apparently absent and with Sanchia probably in Cornwall with her husband, there were just the three sisters, Beatrice, countess of Provence, and Queens Eleanor and Margaret.97 The central role played by Queen Eleanor in the politics of Henry’s reign has been revealed by Margaret Howell’s magnificent biography, very much a companion volume to Maddicott’s Simon de Montfort. We have already glimpsed Eleanor with her ladies travelling to the French capital, and seen her gifts once she got there. Just as the women travelled in their own coaches, and ate at their own tables,98 so all but ten of the seventy rings Eleanor distributed in Paris went to other women or their associates. If male conventions thus promoted female networking, the networks formed influenced and intermeshed with those of men. Queen Margaret, as we shall see, was very close to Henry, as Eleanor quite probably was to Louis. At the end of the 1262 visit she presented him with a ruby ring worth £13 6s, the most valuable she is known to have given.99 It is testimony to the general strength of the family 95 96 97

CR 1259–61, 282 (DBM, 178–81). CPR 1258–66, 123, 121; CR 1259–61, 256; E 361/1, m. 1. CM, v. 476–7, 480–1; Burton, 329; E.L. Cox, The Eagles of Savoy (Princeton, 1974), 246–9; J. Dunbabin, Charles I of Anjou (1998), 15–16, 41–3; Wykes, 123. 98 See the account of the great feast Louis IX held at Saumur in 1241 in Joinville, 54–7 (Shaw, 187–8). 99 E 101/349/26.

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relationships that in 1258, according to Matthew Paris, Louis IX refused to allow the Lusignans to come to France, having learnt from Margaret how they had defamed her sister.100 In 1259 itself Eleanor’s importance and the considerable size of her establishment are reflected in Henry’s household roll. The daily costs of her stables were usually a third or more of the king’s. Her share in the number of paupers fed was evidently 50, the numbers falling, as we have seen, from 150 to 100 when she left court.101 At the end of 1259 the overall costs of the king’s household dropped from £34 18s on 29 December to £17 14s on the following day, the first on which Eleanor was absent. Likewise they rose from £13 12s on 17 January to £26 on the 18th, the first day of her return.102 Eleanor’s return on that day also suggests her political influence for it was apparently then that Henry issued, or was made to issue, another remarkable letter, one it is inconceivable that Louis IX would ever have written. In it, he begged the pope to prevent the return of his half-brother, Aymer bishop-elect of Winchester to England on the grounds that Aymer had ‘provoked us many times against our consort’.103 We have no evidence as to Eleanor’s whereabouts between 29 December and 17 January, but by far the most likely scenario is that she was staying with her sister, Margaret. She did not give rings merely to Margaret’s knights and ladies, but also to her two cooks and their two assistants, her baker, wine buyer, door-keeper, and valet who ‘cut’ before her, as well as to the master of the royal children.104 Since many of these rings were only priced at 2s 6d, they were clearly for ‘other ranks’, the medieval equivalent of the old British Empire Medal. A similar set of rings was given to the domestic servants of the countess of Provence so perhaps Eleanor also spent time with her, or perhaps the three sisters stayed together. It is Margaret who emerges as a real political force in this period. From Le Goff she receives short shrift. In over 900 pages only five are devoted exclusively to her, these under the rather impersonal heading of ‘l’épouse’, ‘the wife’.105 In Joinville she appears as resented by Louis’ mother and ignored by Louis himself, so that she despaired of influencing a husband so ‘divers’.106 Both her frustrations and her aspirations seem reflected in the secret agreement in which her eldest son swore to remain under her tutelage until he reached the age of thirty, a pact which Louis, when he found out about it, got the pope to quash in 1263. Seven years later Louis pointedly did not make Margaret regent when he left on his second crusade. As Margaret Howell puts it crisply, ‘one imagines he quite simply did not think she was up to it’.107 Yet while this evidence cannot be gainsaid, it is certainly balanced by the English records between 1259 and 1265.108 There Margaret acts independently in important affairs, and both claims influence with her husband and is thought to have it. She also 100 101 102

CM, v. 703; Howell, Eleanor of Provence, 149–50, 157–8. That she fed 50 fratres a day is confirmed by her own household roll for 1252–3: E 101/349/16. For Eleanor’s household and its costs, see Howell, Eleanor of Provence, 196–9, 274, and for Margaret’s, G. Sivéry, Marguerite de Provence (Paris, 1987), 143–68, esp. 150–1. 103 CR 1259–61, 264–5. The date cannot be certain because the enrolled letter ends teste ut supra. 104 E 101/349/26. 105 Le Goff, 729–34. 106 Joinville, 324–7, 330–3, 346–7 (Shaw, 313, 315–16, 322). According to the regulations Louis issued for the running of Margaret’s household, she was to feed thirteen paupers a day and four more on Saturdays. Since this was to be combined with the distribution of ‘méreaux’ (jetons distribués comme bons de nourriture) worth 12 sous parisis a day, her costs were probably much the same as those of Eleanor feeding 50 paupers: J. Favier, Finance et Fiscalité au Bas Moyen Âge (Paris, 1971), 72–3. 107 Howell, Eleanor of Provence, 112. See Sivéry, Marguerite de Provence, 209–16. 108 The importance of the English material and other record sources in giving a different picture of Margaret is stressed by Sivéry, Marguerite de Provence, e.g. 7, 143.

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displays a relaxed sense of humour, one quite at odds with the anxious individual suggested by the agreement with her son.109 Thus in 1259 it was Margaret, according to English royal letters, who both initiated the proposal for John of Brittany to marry Beatrice, and then furthered the negotiations to bring it about. No wonder she was keen to attend the eventual marriage. In the same month, January 1260, she stood surety for the loan to Henry from the Paris Temple. Later she took on the unenviable task of trying to arbitrate in the dispute with the Montforts. Henry and Eleanor also asked her to intercede with Louis over a whole range of issues, including such no hopers as the renewal of the Sicilian business.110 Margaret certainly believed she had influence. When English envoys arrived in Paris early in 1262 she told them not to see Louis until she was at court and could help. At the end of Henry’s visit to France in 1262, when he wrote requesting a final meeting, he begged Louis to bring Margaret as well, ‘our dearest sister’ . . . ‘whom we much desire to see so that we can bid mutual farewells’.111 For all the ties binding the English and French royal courts, the relationship, at least in the contexts of the visits of 1259–60 and 1262, remained unequal. Henry was a subordinate and a supplicant. He now held Gascony as a fief and desperately needed the money due to him under the terms of the treaty. The very fact that he had come to Paris, instead of meeting Louis on the border between their territories, underlined his status as a vassal. Louis desired peace and thus the smooth implementation of the treaty but he was dependent on Henry for nothing. Nor, in listening to Henry’s petitions, was he in any way a soft touch.112 This, however, is only part of the story for, on both sides, the relationship rose above any narrow material considerations. Louis was Henry’s lord and also ‘his kinsman and his friend’.113 The friendship stands out clearly in the sheer joy, the sheer refreshment of the meetings. This is very plain, at least on the English side, when one looks at Henry’s visit to France in 1262. The visit was proposed by Henry in the April of that year. The valuation of the 500 knights under the terms of the treaty, the Montfort arbitration, and the case over Bergerac due before the parlement of Paris all gave reason for it, but none of these issues imperatively required Henry’s presence and none was settled by it. The Dunstable annalist remarked that ‘no one knew’ the reason for the king’s trip and many began to fear that evil would arise from it.114 There was every reason to do so. Since Henry had only just overthrown the Provisions of Oxford and recovered unfettered power, it is difficult to think of a worse time for him to leave the country. The real reason for the visit was expressed in his letters to both Louis and Margaret: ‘from our heart we wish to enjoy your conversation and presence’. Henry repeated the words in June when Louis offered him as residences either Poissy or Saint-Maur. He chose the latter ‘so that with you at Vincennes we can more easily enjoy your conversation and presence (frui vestro colloquio et aspectu)’.115 Such words can be conventional when describing meetings, yet in this case they catch a real truth: the extent to which Henry longed to enjoy, ‘to feed upon (frui)’

109 110

The sense of humour also appears in Joinville, 328–31 (Shaw, 314–15). DD, nos 313, 307, 308 [3], 325, 347, 362; CR 1259–61, 167, 240, 465, 467; CR 1261–4, 97, 281; Sivéry, Marguerite de Provence, 185–201. 111 DD, nos 377 (but see no. 348), 372. Cf. CR 1264–8, 552. 112 E.g. DD, no. 349. 113 CR 1261–4, 281. 114 Dunstable, 218. 115 CR 1261–4, 120, 130.

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Louis and Margaret’s presence. The same language occurs in the descriptions of the 1254 visit. Having met Louis for the first time at Orléans, Henry is depicted by the Burton annalist as expressing his joy at the prospect of seeing Louis again (in Paris) and ‘being fed and revivified (refocillari) by his delightful conversation’, a remark which recalled the way that Saul had been revivified (again the word used is refocillo) by listening to David’s lyre (1 Samuel 16, 23).116 Louis may not have thirsted to see Henry with quite this intensity. Sustained rather than deserted by his mother, he was far more certain about himself, and had far less need for the support of family and father figures, temporal or spiritual. But Louis too seems to have looked forward to the meetings. For both Matthew Paris and the Burton annalist the ‘recreation’ and ‘consolation’ they provided was mutual. Indeed Paris has Louis quoting the psalms to Henry – ‘O how sweet are thy words unto my throat’ – and lamenting that they might never meet again (Psalm 119, 103).117 Queen Margaret, on her part, entered fully into the English court’s joys and sorrows. In March 1263 she told Henry in a letter how her mind had lapsed into dolorem et triciam at his illness and was now happy on his recovery.118 The community of outlook which underlay this friendship will have already become apparent. It derived from a common sense of the behaviour fitting for le prud’homme, or to put it another way, from a common respect for the calm, courteous, cheerful conduct encapsulated in the word débonereté. Débonereté, triumphing over Anger, was a figure that Henry had painted in one of the window splays opposite his bed in his chamber at Westminster.119 Such qualities were not always characteristic of him, but during his visits to France he displayed them in abundance. The shared mentality of the courts stands forth very clearly in something else we have already encountered, their sense of humour. Indeed, nowhere do we get closer to the atmosphere of this family circle and its lightness of heart than in the letter from Margaret to Henry so brilliantly re-dated and re-interpreted by Margaret Howell; the letter in which, after the battle of Evesham, she said she was hastening Eleanor’s return to England lest Henry should take it into his head to marry someone else, perhaps, she hinted, the countess of Gloucester!120 How Henry must have laughed, the more so since his own sense of humour was so similar: one thinks of the letter patent, no less, which he issued in 1237 empowering William Peretot to cut the long hairs of the clerks of the royal household and warning that if he didn’t ‘we will have to take the scissors to your own hair’.121 Finally, of course, the courts and above all the kings were bonded by their mutual piety which brings us, in conclusion, to what is probably the best known story relating to the meetings of Henry III and Louis IX. Up to a point it tells of differences in their religious practices. On close examination, however, it also tells of how much they had in common. The story begins by introducing two ‘catholic kings’. One, Louis, delighted in hearing sermons daily between masses. The other, Henry, heard three or more masses a day. When Henry was summoned to Paris to attend the parlement as duke

116

Burton, 328–9. The rareness of the word refocillo, and its biblical usages, were pointed out to me by Nicholas Vincent. 117 Burton, 328–9; CM, v. 476–7, 480–3. 118 DD, no. 384. 119 P. Binski, The Painted Chamber at Westminster (1986), 41–3; for débonereté and the cultural links between the courts see Vale, Angevin Legacy, 21–47. 120 DD, no. 244; Howell, Eleanor of Provence, 231–2. 121 CPR 1232–47, 202.

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of Aquitaine, he stayed at Saint-Germain-des-Prés. On the first day of the parlement, however, Henry arrived so late at the royal palace (evidently the palais de la Cité) that no business could be done, this because he had dismounted and entered all the churches along the way, remaining in each until mass was completed. On the morrow, despite being urged to be on time, and dutifully getting up before dawn, exactly the same thing happened. Louis and his counsellors now resorted to other measures and ordered all the churches along Henry’s route to be shut until he had gone past. This worked and next day Henry was one of the first to arrive, only to declare that he could not possibly attend the parlement because the closed churches showed Paris was under an interdict. Louis, then, confessed his ruse and asked a question, ‘Why do you like hearing so many masses?’ Henry responded with a question of his own: ‘Why do you delight in so many sermons?’ ‘It seems to me exceedingly delightful and healthy to hear very often about my creator’, replied Louis. ‘And to me it appears even more delightful and healthy to see him frequently [at the elevation of the host] than to hear about him’, came back the answer. This anecdote was contained in a volume in the Cotton collection, BL, Vitellius D XIV, destroyed by the fire of 1731. It survives thanks to having earlier been copied by Rymer.122 The content of Vitellius D XIV is known, but does not help with the story’s provenance, for it had merely been copied into that volume along with many other miscellaneous items: it was preceded by Innocent III’s process against King John in 1212 and followed by material relating to the capture of the bishop of Beauvais in 1196. Since the anecdote begins with the words ‘around the same time’, it had evidently been transcribed into the Cotton volume from a larger historical work but the latter’s identity at present appears unknown.123 There are several reasons for thinking that the story has at least a foundation in truth. It is early, for Louis is not described as a saint. It could relate to the visit of 1259, but would fit equally with that of 1262 when Henry was staying at Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and, as duke of Aquitaine, was supposed to appear before the parlement in connection with the case over Bergerac.124 It is also worth noting that the final section, the conversation between the kings, appears in different words in the chronicle of the Dominican, Nicholas Trevet. Trevet was writing in the 1320s (Louis is now conspicuously a saint) but he had studied in Paris and collected historical material there. He was also the son of one of Henry III’s judges.125 Precisely because the story may have a foundation in truth, it needs to be treated with care if it is not to be misleading. That Louis believed strongly in the importance of sermons is confirmed by Geoffrey de Beaulieu and William de Saint-Pathus. In that sense he was very much in tune with the age which not merely ‘accordent de plus en plus d’importance a l’écrit’ but also saw, above all through the preaching of the friars, ‘un renouveau de la parole, d’une parole nouvelle’.126 Henry, for his part, 122

Rymer’s copy is BL, Add. MS 4573, fols 57r–58v, a reference I owe to Nicholas Vincent (see his Holy Blood, 36 and n. 18). The story has been printed twice: Lettres des Rois, Reines . . . des Cours de France et Angleterre, ed. M. Champollion-Figeac (Paris, 1839), 1, 140–2, and ‘Historiola de pietate Regis Henrici, AD 1259’, ed. E.A. Bond, Archaeological J. 17 (1860). Champollion-Figeac placed the episode in 1262. 123 Report from the Committee appointed to view the Cottonian Library (1732), 106–7. 124 In late Aug. to early Sept. 1262, Henry, suffering from illness, appointed proctors to appear for him but he expressed the firm intention of attending himself: CPR 1266–72, 730; DD, nos 366A, B. 125 Triveti Annales, 279–80; A. Gransden, Historical Writing in England c.550–c.1307 (1974), 501–3. From Trevet the story passed into Rishanger (Willelmi Rishanger, Chronica et Annales, ed. H.T. Riley (RS 28, 1865), 74–5). 126 RHF, xx. 14; Saint-Pathus, 38–9 (RHF, xx. 73); Le Goff, 595–6.

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may well have heard more masses than sermons, but, with a Dominican friar, John of Darlington, as his confessor, there is no reason to think he did not consider the latter important. Indeed an account of how the Dominican, William of Abingdon, was so concerned with buildings that he lost his ‘incomparable gift for preaching’ concludes with a rebuke from Henry: ‘Brother William, there was a time when you used to speak of spiritual things; now all you can say is “give, give, give”.’127 When it comes to devotion to the Mass, there was probably little difference between the kings. Indeed we have already seen how Louis admired Henry for his masses as well as his almsgiving. In actual fact, Henry’s two surviving rolls which record his daily offerings at mass and elsewhere (for 1238–9 and part of 1265) do not confirm that he heard three or more masses daily. His usual practice was to hear one, although occasionally he heard two and on the greatest festivals three. The number of days on which he heard more than one mass actually diminished between the two rolls, as Nicholas Vincent has observed.128 That Henry, however, had a deep reverence for the Mass is clear. He was, for example, always giving silver cups to churches along his route in which to hold the reserved Host. At York on 5 January 1252, he ordered no fewer than twenty-three cups (worth 4 or 5 marks apiece) to be given to neighbouring priories and nunneries. One can well believe that Henry was delayed on his journey into Paris by going into all the churches on the way. Louis’ question ‘Why do you hear so many masses?’ might seem to imply he thought hearing three or four a day excessive. But the anecdote begins by observing that Louis himself heard sermons ‘between masses’ and Geoffrey de Beaulieu asserts that it was rare for him not to hear two a day, and he frequently heard three or four. If so, he did better than Henry, though one suspects that record evidence for Louis might show that the practices of the two kings were much on a level, and the claims made by writers about them equally inflated.129 Louis may well have been mildly irritated by Henry going into so many churches, thereby being late for the parlement. This was not displaying the measure in all things required of le prud’homme. Louis had no place in his life for a saint like Edward the Confessor. His religious regime, with its fasts, flagellations and hair shirts seems far more austere than Henry’s.130 As the founder of Royaumont, he was much closer to the Cistercians. Yet both kings had fabled relic collections. Both were in tune with their age in their veneration for the Virgin Mary.131 If Louis had accompanied Henry on his way home, he would have seen the 271½ pounds of wax, 189½ of them in the chapel and almonry which were burnt on 1 and 2 February, the vigil and feast of the Virgin’s purification or Candlemas. There is nothing to gainsay the testimony of Matthew Paris and Joinville, that Louis had a profound respect for Henry’s piety, for his almsgiving, his masses and his washing the feet of the poor. One returns, therefore, to Nicholas Vincent’s question, ‘Is there really that great a difference between their respective styles?’ Indeed, one could press the question further and ask whether at times during their lives, as opposed to after their deaths, contemporaries always made that sharp a distinction between them. This is not an 127

Fratris Thomae de Eccleston Tractatus de Adventu Fratrum Minorum in Angliam, ed. A.G. Little (Manchester, 1951), 46. 128 C 47/3/44, m. 2; E 101/349/30, r. 2; Vincent, Holy Blood, 36 n. 17. 129 RHF, xx. 13; see Saint-Pathus, 34–7 (RHF, xx. 71–3). 130 See Maddicott, Simon de Montfort, 90–2, 206. 131 I am grateful to Nicholas Vincent for allowing me to see his forthcoming paper on Henry III and the Virgin Mary. For comparable attitudes to the Jews, see R.C. Stacey, ‘The Conversion of Jews to Christianity in Thirteenth-Century England’, Speculum 67 (1992); Le Goff, 793–814; Jordan, Louis IX, 154–7; and see Jordan’s The French Monarchy and the Jews (Philadelphia, 1989).

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easy question to answer. Although aware of the problem, Le Goff tends to flatten out the changes both in Louis himself and in his reputation over time. If that is partly the fault of the source material, for strictly contemporary comment is so limited, it is certainly compounded by his decision to call Louis ‘Saint Louis’ throughout. Was it always like that? For a moment in 1254, at least, it could have seemed that God was to favour not Louis but Henry, with the latter’s conquest of Sicily leading on to a crusade which would succeed where Louis’ had failed. Matthew Paris did not go that far, but, in describing the two kings in 1254, he does seem to praise them both in about equal measure.132 Simply in terms of their religiosity, this perspective persisted, for the Cotton anecdote places Henry and Louis completely on a par; both are ‘holy kings, sancti reges’. One final voice claimed not parity but superiority for Henry. This was that of the English leather worker at Saint-Denis, Hugh of Northampton, who declared in 1275 that Henry was a better man than Louis and mocked those who came to the latter’s tomb. Retribution swiftly followed and Hugh was crippled until he acknowledged Louis’ power, but at least his claim shows how high Henry’s reputation stood in some friendly quarters.133 In England itself, the Furness chronicler recorded under 1275 that ‘in these days it was said that frequent miracles were performed at the tomb of the blessed King Henry’. The court itself looked to Henry for cures, and the Cosmati tomb which Edward I commissioned for his father was perhaps envisaged as a potential shrine.134 After all, the Confessor, if a king, was no more a dynastic saint for the Angevins than Denis was for the Capetians. In both countries there was a gap to be filled. Would Henry himself have disagreed with a verdict which gave him, in some ways, parity with Louis? As duke of Aquitaine certainly he was Louis’ vassal, but as a king he was surely his equal. Would he necessarily have accepted Matthew Paris’s claim that the king of France was ‘the king of earthly kings’ both because of his heavenly anointing and his power?135 True, the line of the English kings was broken, but Henry too, of course, had been anointed and boasted Angevin predecessors far more powerful than the pre-1204 Capetians. Henry had been influenced by Louis’ example both in assuming the cross and in translating the Holy Blood to Westminster, but he may well have believed the sermonists who pronounced the latter a more precious relic than Louis’ Crown of Thorns. He would surely have agreed with Wykes’ description of Westminster Abbey as the greatest church in the world. If one ballad, written after the 1254 visit to Paris, has Henry wishing to take the Saint-Chapelle back to England in a cart, the changes made to the design of Westminster Abbey after 1259 owed nothing to its influence.136 While it is possible that Henry began to touch for the king’s evil, having seen Louis do the same (as Frank Barlow has suggested), the evidence equally permits the view either that Henry did not touch at all, the practice being begun by Edward I, or that, if he did so, he was imitating not Louis IX but his own Angevin predecessors.137 Of course, in the end Louis IX was canonised, Henry was not, and, to be fair to 132

For Sicily and the crusade see S.D. Lloyd, English Society and the Crusade 1216–1307 (Oxford, 1988), ch. 6. 133 Guillaume de Saint-Pathus: Les Miracles de Saint Louis, ed. P.B. Fay (Paris, 1931), 83–5. 134 Chronicles of . . . Stephen, Henry II and Richard I, ii. 571; Flores, iii. 28; Carpenter, Reign of Henry III, 423–4. 135 CM, v. 480. 136 Wykes, 227; The Political Songs of England, ed. T. Wright (CS old ser. vi, 1839), 67. The limited impact of Paris, the Sainte-Chapelle and Saint-Denis on Westminster is a theme of P. Binski, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets: Kingship and the Representation of Power (1995), e.g. 36–45, 90–3. 137 F. Barlow, ‘The King’s Evil’, EHR 95 (1980); Vincent, Holy Blood, 193–4.

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Louis, it was the surge of popular veneration and the ensuing miracles which were vital in the process. In launching this devotion, however, Louis was surely lucky in the circumstances of his death, a death in Tunis on crusade followed by the slow and hugely public progress of his body back to Sain-Denis. The miracles began at once, one of them performed on the outskirts of Paris as a great crowd of citizens thronged to welcome the body home for burial.138 Henry had no such luck. He died at home, with his son abroad, the kingdom disturbed, and London in tumult over the election of a mayor. While some miracles, as we have seen, were reported, they soon died away with even Edward I disbelieving one reported to him by Eleanor of Provence. If only Henry had been killed at, say, an Edwardian victory at Lewes, then his cult might have been launched, and there would have been a Saint Henry, with all the attendant literature, to rival Saint Louis.139 In these ways, therefore, one can do one’s best for Henry but it is not really enough. When all allowances have been made, there remains a yawning gulf between the two kings. Le Goff is surely right to see Louis as driven on throughout his reign by a desire ‘pour être l’incarnation du roi chrétien idéal’.140 Henry may have had the same ideal but he had far less idea how to put it into practice. Louis crusaded and reformed his realm. Henry did neither. He may have wished to take the Saint-Chapelle home from Paris in 1254 but he would have done far better to have taken a copy of the great reforming Ordinances which Louis promulgated that December, the very month of Henry’s visit to the French capital. How one wishes too that Henry had digested the kind of advice Louis IX always remembered, or thought he remembered, receiving from Philip Augustus: ‘reward servants some more and some less according to their deserts; no one can govern a kingdom well who does not know how to refuse as boldly as he knows how to give’.141 Henry’s failure to return to England in 1260 had been a decision Louis himself had questioned, and more grotesquely, there was a repeat performance in 1262, though this time, as far as the records go, it was that loyal and long suffering servant John Mansel who protested. As he wrote home to Walter of Merton, ‘the king still persists in his intention of making a pilgrimage through various and remote parts of Burgundy, which without doubt is wholly against our counsel. For we, while we were with him, did not cease to urge his return to England, and afterwards through our letters we have urged the same and still will urge it.’142 It is hard to imagine Henry being called upon to arbitrate on a major quarrel in France in the same way as Louis was asked to arbitrate on the Provisions of Oxford in England. In the final analysis, Henry’s failures as a king also impinged on his credentials as a saint. It was not just the circumstances of his death that held him back. It was also his failures in life. In the narrow terms of his religiosity, he deserved just as much to be a saint as Louis IX. In terms of discharging his obligations as a Christian king, he most certainly did not. Henry’s career shows that religion, ritual and symbolism are not enough to compensate for a lack of real power and ability.143

138

Miracles de Saint Louis, 173–5. The importance of the circumstances of Louis’ death was pointed out to me by Björn Weiler. 139 Annales Triveti, 302–3. 140 Le Goff, 21. 141 Joinville, 364–5 (Shaw, 329). For Louis’ reforms, see Jordan, Louis IX. 142 Foedera, I, i. 422. For John see Hui Liu, ‘John Mansel, councillor of Henry III: his life and career’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 2004). 143 See the similar conclusion in Weiler, ‘Symbolism and Politics’, 38.

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Again and again, Henry’s alms and masses did not save him from all shames and dangers. This was the essential reason for the failure of any cult to develop. In another way, the facts of power provide the context in which the meetings of Henry and Louis must he set. The family harmony engendered by the meetings made possible the Treaty of Paris, and prevented it breaking down afterwards as it so easily might have done. Instead England and France enjoyed a quarter century of peace. Louis believed passionately in the virtues of peace and family concord. So did Henry as his statesmanlike settlement with his brother in law the king of Scots in 1237 shows. Yet it remains true that he only made peace with Louis when it became abundantly clear that he could not recover the Angevin empire by war. In 1242 Louis had led his men across the Charente to confront Henry’s army at Taillebourg and drive it back to Saintes. Without that campaign, which ended with the Lusignans grovelling tearfully at Louis’ feet, and Simon de Montfort telling Henry that he should be put away like the Carolingian king Charles the Simple, there would have been no happy meetings and no Treaty of Paris to celebrate.144 The facts of power stand supreme. I will end as I began, with historians. It would be difficult to think of two more different than Jacques Le Goff and J.O. Prestwich, my old supervisor, who died early in 2003. JOP was master of looking at individual documents, putting them in chronological order and drawing conclusions, often very wide conclusions, from them. I like to think that something of that methodology has been used in this paper.

144

Joinville, 56–61 (Shaw, 188–9); C. Bémont, Simon de Montfort (Paris, 1884), 341.

Counting the Cost: The Financial Implications of the Loss of Normandy

Nick Barratt Counting Nick Barratt the Cost

The loss of Normandy in 1204 should rightly be considered one of the most important events in British history, mainly because King John’s unprecedented financial activity in the subsequent decade was the main reason behind the political dissent that culminated in the formulation of Magna Carta. The charter’s financial significance cannot be overstated, as the restrictions it imposed on the crown’s ability to raise revenue shaped the political landscape for the remainder of the thirteenth century. Both major crises of the thirteenth century, namely the baronial reform movement from 1258 to 1265, and the opposition to Edward I from 1297, share the same underlying factor – the crown’s desperate need for money caused by the impositions of 1215. Therefore fully to comprehend why momentous political events occurred in the way they did, it is imperative to grasp the financial circumstances that lie behind them. In consequence, this paper provides an overview of English state finance from 1190 to 1307 in relation to the causes and implications of the loss of Normandy. There are two primary areas of focus. First, by using recent surveys of the Angevin financial administration, it is possible to reassess John’s role in the collapse of the Anglo-Norman realm. The somewhat surprising conclusions of this initial survey make it possible to demonstrate that the impact of the disaster on the constituent elements of royal revenue, as well as the mechanics of the financial administration, was still relevant at the end of Edward’s reign over a century later. Mark Ormrod tackled this subject ten years ago at the fifth Thirteenth Century England conference,1 but since his paper appeared, new data on the composition of royal revenue has emerged.2 It is now possible to challenge some conventional perceptions of state finance, and therefore justify another examination of the subject, 800 years after Normandy was lost. Historians have constantly argued amongst themselves about where to pin the blame for the loss of Normandy, with the burden of guilt usually falling upon the shoulders of King John.3 The crucial moment in the relationship between England, Normandy and Capetian France was the death of Henry II; from a financial perspective, his reign had been one of steady recovery from the chaos of his predecessor, and the key achievement was the restoration of the royal demesne as the most important component of royal revenue. It is possible to calculate real values for the county 1 2

M.W. Ormrod, ‘Royal Finance in Thirteenth-Century England’, TCE, v (1995), 141–64. In particular N. Barratt, ‘The Revenue of King John’, EHR 111 (1996), 835–55; and idem, ‘The English Revenue of Richard I’, EHR 116 (2001), 635–56. 3 See W.L. Warren, King John (Yale, 1997) and R.V. Turner, King John (1994). J. Gillingham revisits the subject in the second edition of The Angevin Empire (2001). See also recent articles by N. Barratt, V.D. Moss and D. Power in King John: New Interpretations, ed. S.D. Church (Woodbridge, 1999).

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farms from the pipe rolls, by subtracting the terrae datae entries from the nominal county farm value and expressing the remainder as a percentage. In 1156 the real value stood at 50% of the nominal value; by the end of the reign this figure had risen to 60%, and Henry could expect nearly £7,000 each year from this source. Whilst this sum is still less than the £8,000 accounted for in the 1130 pipe roll, it still represented a sizeable proportion of Henry II’s average annual revenue from England.4 Richard’s accession saw his father’s careful husbandry of the royal demesne undone overnight. Entire counties were handed to Prince John as part of a package of appeasement, and elsewhere land was removed from shrieval control and farmed out to others. The impact was instant and dramatic – in 1189 the real value of the farms had fallen to 50%; by 1190 it was only 39%; and at John’s accession, just under £4,000 from a nominal value of £11,000 was available to the king. Furthermore, this erosion came at a time when Philip Augustus was successfully reconstructing Capetian royal demesne revenues, from about £7,500 sterling in 1179 to £12,500 on the eve of the Norman campaigns in 1203. Therefore in terms of the fiscal base, the balance of power had swung dramatically in favour of Philip. A direct comparison of the situation in 1190 shows Richard with little over £4,000 demesne income to his name, in contrast to Philip’s £9,000, and clearly indicates that the damage had been done long before John’s accession.5 Thus the real watershed in the Angevin-Capetian struggle was 1190, four years earlier than Holt’s preferred date of 1194.6 Yet 1194 was significant in another way. After his return from captivity, Richard addressed the shortfall in royal revenues by squeezing money from areas hitherto considered by Richard fitz Nigel as largely incidental, exploiting patronage, judicial revenue, feudal dues, scutage and tallage with great success. For perhaps the first time since the Conquest, England was plundered for cash at a sustained rate, far above that demanded by any previous regime. From 1194 until his death, Richard’s average audited annual revenue from England was just under £25,000; his father’s annual average was only about £18,000, whilst John’s average between 1199 and 1203 was only £23,500.7 This data makes it abundantly clear that John merely continued the precedent set by his brother, and thus was saddled with a system of state finance based on politically sensitive and largely unsustainable sources. Although the records for Normandy are deficient, the pattern of events across the Channel would appear to be the same.8 Richard’s enormous expenditure on castle-building along the Norman Vexin was based on imported revenue from England, as the resources from Norman demesne revenue were insufficient to cover even the annual cost of garrisoning the duchy’s defences. Richard’s policies had critically weakened the Angevin financial system, and John’s personal shortcomings did the rest. Once the Norman revenues had been incorporated onto the Capetian side of the balance sheet, any lingering doubts over who had the comparative advantage were finally laid to rest. John’s response to the catastrophe was to turn to extraordinary taxation, with the Seventh of 1203 and the Thirteenth of 1207. The latter raised £57,000 but provoked 4

A full explanation of the methodology of the calculations is provided in Barratt, ‘English Revenue of Richard I’, 646; the background to the figures for Henry II is provided by N. Barratt, ‘Financial Pressures and Dynastic Problems in Angevin England’, in Harlaxton Medieval Studies IX: Family and Dynasty in Late Medieval England, ed. E. Eales and S. Tyas (Stamford, 2003). 5 Figures derived from calculations published in Barratt, ‘English Revenue of Richard I’. 6 J.C. Holt, Magna Carta and Medieval Government (1985), 39. 7 Ibid. For John’s finances, see Barratt, ‘Revenue of King John’. 8 V.D. Moss, ‘The Norman Exchequer Rolls of King John’, in King John: New Interpretations, ed. Church, 101–16.

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such resistance that John was unable to repeat the measure. Instead, he embarked upon a policy that can only be described as asset stripping, systematically extracting revenue from incidental sources at levels never before witnessed in England. Overnight, he doubled annual revenue from the counties by demanding ever-higher sums from his magnates to secure patronage, whilst feudal dues were ruthlessly exploited and exorbitant fines to ensure ‘the goodwill of the king’ arbitrarily imposed. John’s exactions after 1204 represent a truly astonishing gamble, a frenetic attempt to gather enough cash to recover his lost possessions. It is perhaps remarkable that he was not brought to account earlier than he was, as he took Richard’s already unpopular measures to unprecedented extremes. One of the great ‘what-ifs’ of history thus surrounds the battle of Bouvines – it is possible that vindication of his measures through victory, coupled with an immediate reduction in the financial exactions and the prospect of the dispersal of Norman patronage, might have bought John time, if not popularity. But the fact remains that John and his allies failed, Philip’s gains of 1204 were confirmed, and Magna Carta was drawn up to place curbs on any future financial rapacity of the English crown. Two important factors emerge from the wreckage of John’s last years. The turning point in the regime came with the rejection of the Thirteenth as an acceptable means of bolstering state finance, leaving John few options other than the path he took. Thus Magna Carta specifically imposed limits on feudal dues and encapsulated the notion that justice was not for sale, whilst the Charter of the Forest, formulated by the minority government of Henry III, attempted to limit another area of arbitrary exaction. Viewed as a financial package, the charters were remarkably successful in imposing effective restrictions on royal revenue, returning state finance to the status quo of Henry II’s reign. However the underlying erosion of the fiscal base – the county farms – was not addressed, and no viable replacement was found until 1275, when customs revenues were granted to pay off Edward I’s crusading debts. In consequence, Henry III was forced to live off little more than £25,000 a year for most of his reign, and the critical state of the royal demesne was targeted by the reform movement in 1258. One of the baronial council’s grievances, laid before Louis IX for arbitration in 1264, was that: certain courtiers . . . arranged that escheats, wardships and other perquisites of the lord king, by means of which he ought to replenish his treasury, . . . should be conferred upon themselves in turn. Further, out of the assured revenues of the lord king they procured grants of so many and such large fees . . . that the royal patrimony was almost completely exhausted by fees of this kind.9 Although this can be read as justification for the attacks on the king’s Lusignan half-brothers, it was not just ‘certain courtiers’ that had benefited from Henry’s profligate generosity. In an attempt to provide a suitable allowance for Edward’s marriage, Henry bestowed so many territories on his son in 1254 that Matthew Paris sneered in disgust that he had turned himself into a ‘mutilated kinglet’.10 The crisis of 1258 had been precipitated by Henry III’s proposed invasion of Sicily, and in particular by his demands for extraordinary taxation at the rate of a Third. The rejection by the political community opened the floodgates of protest against his regime, but in all honesty Henry should not have been too surprised,

9 10

DBM, 277, Baronial Gravamina clause 7. CM, v. 450.

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because links between grants of taxation and good government were explicitly forged in 1225. A Fifteenth was granted to fund a defensive campaign in Poitou, in exchange for the re-issues of the charter. Consequently Henry had all but agreed that his father’s methods of financing overseas adventures were unacceptable, and for the remainder of the reign he was unable to shake off the self-imposed shackles, because the 1225 re-issue of Magna Carta became engrained in people’s minds as the benchmark for good government. From a financial perspective, Henry III’s reign serves to highlight the atrophied state of royal revenue, and the failure of the baronial reformers to improve matters was to shape Edward I’s approach to state finance. However, another important consequence of the loss of Normandy emerged during Henry’s reign – the damage caused to the exchequer as the primary organ of the financial administration. John’s use of the chamber to speed up the collection of revenue, with monies paid directly to the king and then audited at a later date, undermined the exchequer’s position as the main collector and distributor of revenue. It was a necessary part of John’s strategy to stockpile huge sums of money in castle treasuries, because the rigidity of exchequer procedures of receipt, issue and audit had been exposed. The 1214 pipe roll shows evidence of the strains imposed by the system on its methods of audit, and the institution virtually collapsed in 1215 as the fighting began.11 It took a decade for the exchequer to resolve the administrative chaos of the civil war; by 1225, retrospective accounts had been compiled, outstanding war expenditure had been audited, and a package of measures – specifically atterminated and grouped debts – were implemented to tidy up the pipe rolls and guarantee a minimum level of income.12 Yet the exchequer failed to modernise, and retained the same inflexible procedures described by Fitz-Nigel in the late twelfth century. During Henry III’s campaign to Gascony in 1242, large cash sums were diverted to the wardrobe for disbursement on military expenditure. Of course this was the most convenient way to conduct an overseas campaign, but on Henry’s return the wardrobe accounts clearly show that an increasing proportion of revenue continued to find its way directly into its coffers without passing first through the lower exchequer.13 This quiet usurpation of traditional exchequer functions of receipt and issue was also targeted by the reformers in 1258 – a clause in the Provisions of Oxford stipulated that ‘all issues of the land should go to the exchequer’.14 It is one of the greatest ironies of the baronial movement that genuine attempts to shore up the crown’s fiscal base and establish clear guidelines for the financial administration resulted in an even more catastrophic collapse of exchequer efficiency. Mills has demonstrated the extent of the chaos in a series of articles, using the decline of adventus vicecomitum payments and falling shrieval attendance at prescribed audit dates as evidence of a breakdown in exchequer procedures and authority, whilst the pipe rolls during and after the crisis are littered with blank entries reflecting debts that were unsummoned or impossible to collect.15 Receipt roll evidence also shows that the volume of revenue paid into the exchequer declined dramatically during the 11

J.E.A. Jolliffe, ‘The Chamber and Castle Treasuries under King John’, in Studies in Medieval History Presented to F.M. Powicke, ed. R.W. Hunt, R.W. Southern and W.A. Pantin (Oxford, 1948), 117–42. A review of the exchequer during the last decade of John’s reign by N. Barratt is forthcoming. 12 D.A. Carpenter, The Minority of Henry III (1990), offers the most comprehensive account of the difficulties facing the minority government during this period. 13 Figures for wardrobe data were compiled from T.F. Tout, Chapters in the Administrative History of Medieval England, 6 vols (Manchester, 1920–33), vi. 74–83. 14 Burton, 446–53. 15 M. Mills, ‘Adventus Vicecomitum, 1258–72’, EHR 36 (1921), 481–96.

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period of baronial control. Reconstruction only began in 1270, when the treasurer John de Chishull began to clear dead and desperate debts from the pipe roll; and the process of making the exchequer a more streamlined and effective institution was to continue for the next twenty years. On returning from crusade in 1274, Edward I was faced with a bleak financial situation. The fiscal base had continued to decline, and was totally insufficient to meet royal needs; incidental sources of revenue were restricted by Magna Carta; whilst the exchequer was in a mess. Furthermore, Edward had borrowed vast sums during his campaign, and had offset anticipated future income from England to repay his Italian bankers. Yet, perversely, it was this combination of indebtedness and exchequer inefficiency that provided a solution to the endemic problems facing English state finance. There is insufficient space in a general overview such as this to describe in full the institutional developments that occurred during Edward’s reign. As Tout once commented, ‘the broad lines of late medieval state finance only reveal themselves with difficulty to those who perforce must study them in vast and unwieldy manuscripts’,16 who then usually write vast and unwieldy books on the subject. The orthodox view is that Edward died heavily in debt, a result of massive military expenditure coupled with a labyrinthine system of ‘credit revenue’ routed through the wardrobe. Whilst these conclusions are based on retrospective attempts to account for Edward I’s debts during the reign of his son, there is sufficient evidence available in contemporary documents to offer a revised view of the important alterations that occurred after the crisis of 1297. The steps taken to ease Edward’s initial indebtedness began in 1275 with the grant of an export tax on wool, woolfells and hides – the customs – for the first time tapping into England’s burgeoning trade, and finally providing a new fiscal base to replace the county farms. It was initially intended as a means to pay back Edward’s creditors, but the creation of a sustainable, regular and lucrative source of income – which annually averaged about £10,000 in the first five years of collection – allowed Edward to seek new Italian loans to finance his wars in Wales. The proceeds of the customs were collected by the Riccardi, as repayment for their loans. Thus Edward was effectively anticipating his income, using customs revenue as security against further advances.17 In addition, prior to 1297 Edward successfully negotiated grants of extraordinary taxation, which were also paid to the Riccardi. Thus credit finance was built into the financial administration at an early stage. Yet the need for loans and injections of extraordinary taxation was clearly illustrated by a prototype exchequer balance sheet produced in 1284. County farm revenue, once terrae datae was removed, was little over £2,000, whilst traditional incidental sources produced £7,500. This compares with new income from customs of £8,000. In total, the exchequer estimated that Edward could only rely on £20,000 a year, insufficient for his needs.18 The favoured administrative mechanism for Edward’s new financial system was the wardrobe, which received the Italian loans and controlled expenditure, particularly during Edward’s military campaigns in Wales. The weakness of the exchequer and the inflexibility of its bureaucracy were important reasons behind this 16 17

Tout, Chapters, vi. 73. See M. Prestwich, ‘Italian Bankers in Late Thirteenth and Fourteenth Century England’, in The Dawn of Modern Banking (Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, New Haven, 1979), 77–104; R.W. Kaeuper, Bankers to the Crown: The Riccardi of Lucca and Edward I (Princeton, 1973). 18 M. Mills, ‘Exchequer Agenda and Estimate of Revenue, Easter Term 1284’, EHR 40 (1925), 229–34.

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preference, and a succession of zealous treasurers overhauled the institution’s procedures and record keeping in an attempt to make it more effective. The most important period in the exchequer’s recovery came in the 1290s when William March and Walter Langton, men with experience of wardrobe administration, brought all crown receipts back under exchequer control. Thereafter, large cash drafts were made to the wardrobe, but revenue from the customs and extraordinary taxation were paid directly into the lower exchequer. In October 1290, it was decreed that tallies should bear the date when they were struck, which permitted their later development as negotiable instruments.19 New series of documents were created to record the transactions, the most important, but least utilised by historians, being the jornalia rolls which summarised daily receipts and issues at the exchequer, both ordinary and extraordinary. It is this series of documents that hold the key to understanding the important changes in state finance that occurred between 1297 and 1307.20 Many pages have been devoted to the political crisis of 1297, and many more written about the last decade of Edward’s reign. The traditional view of state finance is that political opposition to Edward’s financial demands from 1294 to 1297 meant that he could no longer raise vast sums from extraordinary taxation or arbitrary seizures of goods and wool; once again, the shackles of Magna Carta were re-applied to state finance with the confirmatio cartarum and the articuli super cartas. Consequently, Edward’s chief ministers, Walter Langton and John de Droxford, were forced to secure services and payments for the Scottish wars by issuing wardrobe debentures, which in theory would then be presented to the exchequer by the creditor for redemption, either for cash or offset against their due accounts. However, the exchequer was chronically short of cash, and was unable to accept large numbers of debentures. The result was that these unpaid debts accumulated to such an extent that, at his death, Edward was estimated to be £200,000 in arrears. This figure has been used to demonstrate that the wheels had fallen off Edward’s financial administration.21 Whilst it is clear from surviving wardrobe accounts that Edward’s ministers had indeed run up huge debts by 1307, there are other indications that the worst of the crisis was over by this date. Indeed, amendments to the traditional picture of relationship between the exchequer and wardrobe are also required. For example, there is evidence in the jornalia rolls that tallies of assignment were used on a limited basis to secure money in advance from collectors of the customs and subsidies granted in 1296–7, mainly to speed up the flow of money as Edward hurried to leave for Flanders. This mechanism of revenue anticipation should be seen in the same light as the loans from the Riccardi, which were secured on the same sources. After the political protests of 1297 made it extremely difficult to negotiate tax grants, it was no longer possible to operate this system; and thus debentures were used instead to secure services, as opposed to anticipate revenue. A complicated series of entries were made in the receipt and issue rolls to maintain the fiction that money was being

19

E 401/116. For more information on tallies as negotiable instruments, see N. Barratt, ‘Finance on a Shoestring: The Exchequer in the Thirteenth Century’, in English Government in the Thirteenth Century, ed. A. Jobson (Woodbridge, 2004), 80 n.50. 20 Jornalia rolls are in E 405/1/1–58. 21 These arguments are put forward in W.M. Ormrod, ‘State-Building and State Finance in the Reign of Edward I’, in Harlaxton Medieval Studies I: England in the Thirteenth Century, ed. W.M. Ormrod (Stamford, 1991), 15–35; M. Prestwich, War, Politics and Finance under Edward I (1972); and M. Prestwich, ‘Exchequer and Wardrobe in the Later Years of Edward I’, BIHR 46 (1973), 1–10.

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paid into the treasury and then re-issued, but the reality was that the exchequer relinquished these roles to the wardrobe.22 The move from the cash-rich to credit-based system is clearly indicated in the jornalia schedules, which strip away the fictitious entries and simply record the actual cash balances in the treasury at the end of each day. Graphs 1–4 are compiled from these schedules, and represent the totals visually. Graph 1 covers the Michaelmas and Hilary terms for the 1295–6 financial year, and a clear pattern of deposit and withdrawal emerges. Large sums of cash were allowed to accrue, as high as £16,000 at one point, which were then periodically removed under writs of liberate into the wardrobe. In contrast, Graph 2 shows that only very small daily totals are recorded throughout the entire 1302–3 financial year, rarely reaching £1,000. This strongly suggests that the exchequer was chronically short of cash; indeed on several occasions whilst at York it was forced to borrow from external sources to cover its daily expenses.23 During this period, most transactions were made through wardrobe bills, and it is possible to use the jornalia rolls to calculate exactly how much money was transferred by this mechanism. There are clear signs that fewer bill transfers were taking place at the end of the reign; and this is supported by the increased levels of cash in the treasury in the Michaelmas 1306–7 jornalia rolls, represented in Graph 3, whilst Graph 4 confirms that deposits and withdrawals had returned to pre-1297 patterns. Coupled with Edward’s ability in 1306 to turn a feudal aid into an assessed Twentieth and Thirtieth, it suggests that yet another cycle of financial recovery was about to begin. The whole system was carefully monitored on separate onus scaccarii, which detail all exchequer issues made under large liberate writs of £20,000 issued to cover expenditure for each regnal year.24 There is a certain beauty about the relationship between the records of the exchequer and wardrobe after 1297, despite the complexity of the system; they demonstrate that Langton and Droxford saw themselves, and their institutions, as two intertwined halves of a unified financial system designed to facilitate the rapid transfer of money to their royal paymaster. To portray the last years of Edward’s reign as financial meltdown is to misrepresent the surviving documentary evidence, and in particular that of the jornalia rolls. Did Edward know about the level of indebtedness? In October 1301, he wrote to the exchequer from his campaign headquarters in Scotland: Know that we wonder greatly why you have sent us as little money as you have sent up till now, and in particular, we are surprised you have sent it in such small instalments . . . we would have achieved such a success against our enemies, that our business in these parts would have been brought to a satisfactory and honourable conclusion in a short time.25 Perhaps the real question should be whether he cared about the level of debt – and the answer is that he probably did not.

22 23 24 25

Examples are provided in Barratt, ‘Finance on a Shoestring’. E 405/1/15 on 19, 22, 24 May and 27 July 1301; E 405/1/22 on 16 Oct. 1301, 8 Jan. and 1 Feb. 1302. E.g. E 101/361/12 covers 30–31 Edward I (1301–2). E 159/75 m. 7.

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Nick Barratt Graph 1. Recorded Treasury Balance 1295–6

Graph 2. Recorded Treasury Balance 1302–3

Counting the Cost Graph 3. Recorded Treasury Balance 1306–7

Graph 4. Comparative Treasury Balances 1295–6, 1302–3 and 1306–7

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Networks of Markets and Networks of Patronage in Thirteenth-Century England*

Emilia Jamroziak Networks of Markets Emiliaand Jamroziak Networks of Patronage

The development of medieval markets and fairs is an issue of central significance in economic history and historical geography. The already complex marketing network in England was supplemented during the thirteenth century by a great increase in new grants. Traditional interpretations linked this development to the commercialisation of the English economy in that period and increased need for places to sell surplus and purchase supplies. More recently, historians have been taking into consideration the impact of political and institutional factors on the development of the markets and fairs network in this period. In addition, markets have been investigated as cultural and social phenomena and from the perspective of the physical space of urban and rural markets. The questions of how market days became associated with theatre spectacles, public acts of penance, and social control have been the subject of recent research.1 As a result, markets and fairs are not seen solely as tools of economic exchange; instead, like other social institutions, their role for those who owned them, traded there or used them is examined on many levels: social, political and cultural. The income derived from markets and fairs may have been a useful addition to other manorial rights, whilst their ownership could enhance prestige and provide better control over the neighbourhood. It is no accident that this paper concentrates on the mid-thirteenth century. This was the period of the highest increase in grants of markets and fairs, and this growth had social and economic significance. The sheer number of grants issued at that time makes possible qualitative and quantitative exploration of several issues. First, there is the question why and how grants of markets and fairs could have been used as a patronage tool in the context of thirteenth-century England. Markets and fairs had the status of a royal franchise, and their existence was relatively strictly controlled by the beginning of the century; thus grants could easily be used for patronage purposes by the king. Secondly, the paper explores how grants of markets and fairs were used in particular political contexts, in the 1250s and again in 1267–8, immediately after the Barons’ War. Thirdly, it uses case studies of grants of markets and fairs in the mid-thirteenth century in order to consider the question why so many noblemen wanted to establish or increase the number of markets on their estates. *

This paper results from research undertaken within the ESRC project (Ref: R000239108) ‘Markets and Fairs in Thirteenth Century England’, at the Centre for Metropolitan History, Institute of Historical Research, University of London, between Sept. 2002 and Dec. 2003. I would like to thank Professor Derek Keene, Professor Richard Britnell and Professor David Carpenter for their helpful comments and suggestions. 1 J. Masschaele, ‘The Public Space of the Marketplace in Medieval England’, Speculum 77 (2002), 383–421; D. Postles, ‘Penance and the Market Place: A Reformation Dialogue with the Medieval Church (c.1250–c.1600)’, J. Ecclesiastical History 54 (2003), 441–68.

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My point of departure is the observation, expressed by a number of scholars, that in the mid-thirteenth century there was a sudden and significant rise in the number of grants of markets and fairs. Detailed research based on the data from the Gazetteer of Markets and Fairs revealed that there was a marked increase between 1251 and 1254, in 1257, and again in 1267 and 1268.2 Particularly large increases occurred in 1251, 1252 and 1253 when the total numbers of new markets and fairs granted were 63, 76 and 113 respectively. The next peak occurred in 1257 with 98 new markets and fairs, which was an increase of 345% from the previous year. Finally in 1267 King Henry III granted 98 new franchises which amounted to a 717% increase from 1266. The causes and reasons behind these statistics are manifold. Growing commercialisation and monetisation, but also tighter administrative control over royal franchises from the beginning of the thirteenth century, are seen as the prime factors behind this increase in the number of recorded grants.3 In the political climate of the mid-thirteenth century, when Henry III was increasingly facing financial shortages, grants of markets and fairs became a useful and inexpensive way of rewarding particular people and raising additional income. The steepest rises in the number of charters issued coincided with important political developments and crises, which suggests that the patronage dimension of market and fairs grants was particularly useful during periods of political instability. At times of uncertainty the king needed many ways to reward and secure loyalty. Grants of market and fairs had another distinct advantage, of generating additional income for the king in the form of payments from the recipients, usually in gold.4 These payments were recorded in the Fine Rolls. Even taking into the account the inefficiency of the clerk enrolling information, and the probability that some payments might not have been recorded, a definite pattern emerges from the entries. Aristocrats paid for charters only in the exceptional cases of William de Forz, count of Aumale in 1251 and Baldwin de Insula, earl of Devon in 1257.5 Royal favourites and members of the court are also missing, with the exception of John de Grey and Bertram de Crioll in 1251.6 On the other hand, many members of the gentry and lesser knights did pay for their charters. This is likely to indicate that non-payment was an extension of the patronage aspect of the grants and an additional favour given to individuals. Since grants to lesser people often did not have a patronage dimension, they were more likely to make a payment. In a few cases, market charters themselves indicate that the fee was waived as an additional royal favour. James Masschaele detected three cases of this type: a grant to Robert Muscegros in 1251, to the abbot of Pershore in 1251, and to Robert de la Parrock in 1253.7 A strong pattern also emerges from the timing of the payments. In 1251 only 33% of markets/fairs grants were paid for, in 1252 the proportion increased to 35%, but in 1253 it was only 20%. In the following years payments became sporadic and appear 2

S. Letters, Gazetteer of Markets and Fairs in England and Wales to 1516, http://www.history.ac.uk/ cmh/gaz/gazweb2.html ; printed version, S. Letters, Gazetteer of Markets and Fairs in England and Wales to 1516, 2 vols (List and Index Soc., special ser. 32, 33, Kew, 2003). See also S. Letters, ‘Markets and Fairs in Medieval England: A New Resource’, TCE, ix (2003), 218–23. 3 R.H. Britnell, ‘The Proliferation of Markets in England, 1200–1349’, EcHR, 2nd ser. 34 (1981), 209–21. 4 D.A. Carpenter, ‘The Gold Treasure of King Henry III’, TCE, i (1986), 61–88. 5 21 marks (not gold) for a market, fair and warren, C 60/48, m. 8; ½ mark of gold for a market and fair, C 60/55, m. 11. 6 11 marks (not gold) for a market and fair, C 60/48, m. 10; 11 marks (not gold) for a market and fair, C 60/48, m. 11; 2 marks of gold for a market and fair, C 60/49, m. 4. 7 CChR 1226–57, 357, 365, 416.

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to have been superseded by other forms of paid-for privileges which gentry, in particular, wanted to secure. In 1255 and 1256 there were a great number of payments in gold for respite from knighthood, as a result of distraint of knighthood in 1255, with only sporadic payments for market and fairs.8 This trend continued in the later years of the same decade. The recipients of grants, in the mid-thirteenth century, fell into nine groups: members of the royal family, aristocrats, foreigners at the court (aliens), knights from the king’s retinue, royal servants, justices, gentry, religious houses and local knights (that is knights with no connections with the royal court and relatively small holdings of one or two manors). For these groups of recipients, the most important factor in securing the grants appears to be proximity to the king and the royal court, together with services they could provide for the king as his servants, advisors, soldiers and supporters. The structure of the social networks from which the recipients came had its core at the royal court. The individuals located on the periphery can be divided into subgroups, some of which had better connections than others. The king was at the centre of the patronage structure; around him were located individuals who were permanent or very frequent members of the court. This group closest to the core of the network can be examined through the composition of the witness lists of the royal charters. In 1251–7 there was a group of about twenty individuals who were frequent and regular members of the royal court and, at the same time, recipients of grants of markets and fairs. They were not a homogenous group and only their social position and relation to the king indicates why they became recipients. Foreigners were represented by Matthew Bezill, a Savoyard knight and steward of Queen Eleanor’s household, and Bishop Aymer of Winchester, the king’s half-brother.9 A number of aristocrats – Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk, William de Ferrers, earl of Derby, and William de Forz, count of Aumale – were at times powerful supporters of Henry III, but could also turn against him, as Roger Bigod did in 1258 when he became the leader of baronial opposition. Knights from the royal retinue – Wakeline de Arderne, Bertram de Crioll, and John Grey – all served during important military campaigns and often held key posts and strategic castles. Finally the royal servants William Grey (steward) and William Belet were involved with providing various day-to-day services for the king.10 Being present at the court increased the chances of receiving a grant; however it was not a straightforward correlation. Regular appearance at court was not an automatic guarantee of gifts and favours. Providing various services to the king was highly significant, and royal servants were rewarded by a variety of royal favours, including markets and fairs. William Belet received on 3 March 1254 a licence for life to hunt with his dogs in the forest of Bernewood (Oxfordshire), and on 15 June 1254 he was given a grant to establish a market and fair on his manor in Gayton (Norfolk).11 Tracing the career paths of individuals in the closest circle shows how grants of markets and fairs fitted into the overarching patterns of their political careers and relationships with the king. One of the most trusted knights from the royal retinue, Bertram de Crioll, was already a keeper of the Cinque Ports before he received a grant of market and fair in Great Mongeham in November 1250, which followed a 8 9

C 60/53, m. 40. H.W. Ridgeway, ‘The Ecclesiastical Career of Aymer de Lusignan, Bishop Elect of Winchester, 1250–1260’, in The Cloister and the World: Essays on Medieval History in Honour of Barbara Harvey, ed. J. Blair and B. Golding (Oxford, 1996), 148–77. 10 WL, Henry III, ii. 11 CPR 1247–58, 297; R. Gasc. 1242–54, no. 3784; CPR 1247–58, 305.

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more substantial grant of a part of a wardship in June of the same year.12 This pattern was repeated with many other regular members of the court. Proximity to the king could also be achieved by providing hospitality to the travelling court; this is particularly true in the case of religious houses. For example the grant of a market to the Augustinian priory of Walsingham was made when the court was there in 1251. A grant to Ripley Abbey in Derbyshire was made in similar circumstances. Warter Abbey received its grant of market and fair when the court resided in Bishopthorpe near York in December 1251. In May 1253 the abbey of Waltham Cross in Essex received a grant of two markets and fairs whilst Henry III was staying in Waltham.13 The evidence shows that grants of markets and fairs were an element in a more complex mechanism of royal patronage, coexisting with various other types of patronage tools, namely grants of free warren, hunting rights, either for a limited period or for life, and freedom from service as an escheator, or from being put on assize. These grants can all be viewed as belonging to a category of privilege, distinct from those whose financial benefits were more measurable, such as money fees and grants of manors or wardships. Grants of markets to the people associated with the royal court were rarely made in isolation from other favours. Drew de Barentino, a knight from the royal household, and a frequent witness to royal charters, received a string of grants, in various forms, on three consecutive days in 1253. On 16 March he was pardoned by the king from all his debts to the exchequer, the following day he was appointed as seneschal of Gascony, and on 18 March he received a grant of market and fair on his manor of Harksted at Birdbrook in Essex.14 Grants of markets and fairs as a patronage tool may have been applied flexibly in cases when more substantial rewards were not available. The Liberate Rolls and Patent Rolls in the 1250s show that the king often made promises to reward particular individuals with a manor or wardship (although never with markets or fairs) but often had to give them yearly monetary payments due to the lack of available land. The evidence suggests that grants of markets and fairs were on some occasions used by the king in place of other gifts. For example Ralph de Bakepuz was given £10 in April 1254 until the king should find more plentiful provision for him; then in September 1254 Ralph received an exemption from being put on assize and a grant of a market.15 It is possible that Ralph’s grants in September were a ‘consolation’ for the lack of the promised funds. Vertical connections were just as important as core-periphery links. Close relatives of the important aristocrats benefited from royal patronage, which was prompted by the requests of their more powerful kinsfolk. This is illustrated by the central position at court held by Richard de Clare, earl of Gloucester after 1254, whose younger brother, William, constable of Winchester castle, received two grants of markets and fairs on his manors, at Little Walsingham in 1252 and at Petersfield in 1255.16 Similarly, Richard de Grey a younger brother of another central figure at the court throughout 1250, William de Grey the steward of the king, received grants in Sandiacre in 1252. It is important not only to see these grants as a result of the influence of key figures on the king, but also to consider the possibility that the grants to William de Clare and Richard de Grey were intended by Henry III to be a 12 13 14 15 16

CLR, iv. 312; CChR 1226–57, 356; CPR 1247–58, 69. CChR 1226–57, 354, 370, 372, 427. CPR 1247–58, 183; CChR 1226–57, 422. CLR, iii. 163; CPR 1247–58, 329; R. Gasc. 1242–54, no. 4102. CChR 1226–57, 377, 449.

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positive gesture towards their more powerful brothers. Some of the prominent servants in almost constant attendance on the king also acted as a transmitter element in the patronage network, sponsoring the applications of others. William Belet, for example, was clearly championing the interests of Walter de Thorp, a parson of the church of Grimston (Norfolk) where he acquired a fair in October 1254 at William’s request. Then, two years later, William Belet secured for Walter de Thorp an exemption from taking up offices.17 William Belet and Walter were neighbours, although William did not have a direct interest in Grimston church as the advowson was held by the earl of Arundel.18 The importance of the particular political context and personal connections for the increase of the number of grants is particularly visible at times of crisis or uncertainty when the king wanted to ensure the loyalty of these around him. In the early 1250s the control of Gascony was in the hands of Simon de Montfort, but the situation there continued to be unstable. The resulting importance of foreigners at the royal court elevated them to the role of leading favourites. Henry III became very dependent on them and was perceived to be so by the increasingly resentful political elites.19 Among the recipients of markets and fairs were a number of foreigners, but they formed only 3% of the total of the beneficiaries between 1251 and 1257. They were often recipients of more substantial monetary grants. Several of them were granted estates in England, but their interest was limited to drawing income from these assets, and they showed less concern for developing them. The first of the distinctive increases in the number of grants of markets and fairs coincided with the expedition of Henry III to Gascony in 1253–54. The preparations for the campaign started in December 1252 with a whole series of grants to key servants and curiales. Grants during the immediate build-up to the campaign, including grants of markets and/or fairs, show that the king targeted a particular group, as exemplified by two grants in April 1252 to Stephen Lungspee who subsequently became seneschal of Gascony. In 1253 there was a wave of grants preceding the royal departure: Roger Thurkelby (January), Peter de Percy (February), Peter of Savoy, Richard of Cornwall and Drew de Barentino (March – he became seneschal of Gascony in May 1253), and Roger Bigod earl of Norfolk (May). There were also during May and June multiple grants to William de Vescy, who accompanied the king to Gascony, as well as to a group of important knights. The spring of 1253 also witnessed a significant rise in grants to religious institutions.20 During the campaign itself, the greatest beneficiary was Wakelin de Arderne, the marshal of the royal household.21 Important royal servants and courtiers (of baronial status) were rewarded as well for having accompanied the king, as testified by the witness lists, namely Roger de Somery, Peter de Malo Lacu, William Gernun, Nicholas Seymour, Wakelin Arderne, William Belet, Roger de Monte Alto, Ralph de Bakepuz and John de Curtenay. Statistically, 53% of the grants of markets and fairs (29 out of 55) distributed during the period of the Gascon expedition between October 1253 and October 1254 were given to those who went on the campaign. They had regular contact with the king, who wished to reward their loyalty and service. 17 18 19

CPR 1247–58, 349, 466. C. Parkin, County of Norfolk, viii (1808), 442. H.W. Ridgeway, ‘Foreign Favourites and Henry III’s Problems of Patronage, 1247–1258’, EHR 104 (1989), 590–610. 20 CChR 1226–57, 415, 418, 421, 433, 422, 433, 434. 21 CPR 1247–58, 317.

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The next significant rise in the number of grants occurred in 1257 and 1258. Financial crisis was compounded by the end of 1257 by political difficulties, which included a war against Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (which began in 1256) and increasing pressure from Pope Alexander IV for the king to commit himself to the Sicilian affair. The situation at court became progressively complex and in May 1258 Henry III promised reform and to stop excessive grants to his favourites. However, the war in Wales did not have such a strong impact on the grants given to participants as did the expedition to Gascony; only 36% of grants (20 out of 56 markets and fairs) given during the preparations and the campaign itself from January to December 1257 went to participants. The increase in grants in 1267 and 1268, the third and last period discussed here, closely correlates with the end of the Barons’ War and the period of political reconciliation. Among the reasons influencing the rise in grants at that time, the most noticeable was the desire to reward those loyal to the king during the period of disturbances. For example John de Vaux received a grant of a market and fair on his manor of Wissett (Suffolk) on 20 February 1267; six days later he received 50 marks to buy a horse as compensation for one lost in the king’s service at Kenilworth. In the spring he became the keeper of Norfolk castle and royal fleets in Norfolk and Suffolk.22 On 11 July he was given two tuns of wines as a king’s gift. On 17 April 1268 he and the members of his household were pardoned for any trespasses they might have committed ‘during the time of disturbances in the realm at the nonobservance of the Provisions of Oxford’ and received special letters.23 Peter Scudemore was also a royal supporter and was given a grant of two markets and fairs on 4 March 1267. A year later, on 26 April 1268, he received a pardon for any trespass he committed during the time of the Barons’ War when he was a member of the household of John Giffard.24 Another wealthy knight, Baldwin de Akeny, received a grant of market and fair to be held at his manor of Hockham (Norfolk) on 20 March 1267 and in June 1268 he received a similar letter of pardon.25 There is strong evidence that these grants were a way of rewarding loyal supporters of the king and were one of the tools used by the king at the time when the shortage of money severely limited other options. The Fine Rolls for these years do not show any payments for grants of markets and fairs. In fact the rolls for 1266–7 and 1267–8 are significantly shorter than those in the 1250s and devoid of payments in gold.26 If the recipients of the charters in the late 1260s did not pay for the grants, this would strengthen the interpretation of these grants as acts of patronage. Proximity to the king remained an important issue in procuring grants in the late 1260s, but there is less correlation between witnessing charters and receiving grants in this period than between 1251 and 1257. This suggests that the themes of reward and reconciliation were more important than proximity in that period. Among the recipients of grants in 1267 and 1268 only Richard earl of Cornwall, Peter de Scudemore and John Turbervill were witnessing royal charters and receiving grants of markets and fairs. This change is also linked to the life-cycle changes among the royal court members. Powicke pointed to the fact that by 1263 the number of earls had been significantly depleted and many of their heirs were still under age.27 By 22 23 24 25 26 27

CLR, v. 264. Ibid., 282; CPR 1266–72, 219. Ibid., 222. Ibid., 148. C 60/65, C 60/66. F.M. Powicke, King Henry III and the Lord Edward: The Community of the Realm in the Thirteenth Century, 2 vols (Oxford, 1947), ii. 434.

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1267 many of the key players of the period 1251–7 were gone, including William de Forz, count of Aumale (d. 1260), John fitz Alan, earl of Arundel (d. 1267), Hugh le Bigod, son of the earl of Norfolk (d. 1266), and Baldwin de Insula (d. 1262). As a result of the expulsion of the aliens, this group also dwindled. From among the trusted circle of the royal court Edmund de Lacy died in 1257, and William de Grey was described as ‘old and infirm’ in 1268.28 The political context of the grants discussed so far points strongly to the patronage dimension of their rapid increase in the mid-thirteenth century. This is, however, not enough to enable us to understand the implications of the expansion of the network. The remainder of this paper deals with the expectations of the recipients of grants; in particular it explores status as an important aspect of holding a market through examination of the patterns of setting up these new institutions on the estates of lesser knights and gentry. In order to understand fully how grants of markets and fairs became tools of royal patronage we need to examine why people wanted to receive them. The two most numerous groups of recipients – lesser knights and gentry – are particularly important in this. Economic, social and cultural reasons were strongly intertwined in this process. In the thirteenth century obtaining market rights was important for individuals who were on the economic and social rise. For those who can be classified as belonging to the gentry, having a right to hold a market or fair had many dimensions. First, establishing a market was an element of rationalisation and maximisation of the income from their estates. Secondly, landholders without any existing markets wanted to enlarge their portfolio of manorial rights. Often grants of markets and fairs were given jointly with another element of these rights, free warren. Thirdly, for many lesser landholders securing market rights signified prestige, confirming a position of significance in the locality and increasing control over its economic resources. An interesting case of the combined economic and social reasons behind establishing markets comes from one Lincolnshire family who were representative of a group which can be called ‘first-time buyers’ of markets. Andrew Luterel came from a rising family. First, he was a justice in Nottinghamshire (1239–40), then in May 1251 he was appointed sheriff of Lincoln.29 Although the offices which he held indicate a significant standing in the region, this was also an expensive and timeconsuming business, so in March 1252 he secured a privilege of exemption from these offices.30 Andrew held estates in Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire. His principal manor, Irnham, held in chief from the king, had been acquired by his family c. 1200.31 In Nottinghamshire he held the manor of Gameliston from Gerard de Rodes. In 1252 he received a grant of a market and fair to be held in Irnham. It was the first grant of this type to the Luterel family. His son Geoffrey held, during his father’s life, a manor at Hooton Pagnell (Yorkshire) where he received a grant of a market and fair in August 1254. This grant was given at the request of William de Grey, Geoffrey’s father-in-law, who was an important figure at the royal court. This shows that this family established important connections and could use them to its own advantage.32 In subsequent generations the family continued to increase its position through advantageous marriages, and their prominence was confirmed by 28 29 30 31 32

CPR 1266–72, 299. CPR, 1247–58, 96. Ibid., 133. A.C.E. Welby, ‘Irnham, Painel and Gant Family’, Lincolnshire Notes and Queries 12 (1913), 217. CPR 1247–58, 324.

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practical and symbolic means. The great-grandson of Andrew, Geoffrey Luterel (d. 1345), commissioned the famous Luttrell Psalter, another status symbol.33 In the mid-thirteenth century many well-established gentry families went through the process of acquiring market rights in locations additional to those in which they already held markets or fairs. A representative case comes again from Lincolnshire. Philip de Arcy had all his lands concentrated in that county, comprising six manors, but only one of them held in chief. The grant of a fair in his principal manor of Nocton occurred in 1257, although a market had been given to his predecessor there in 1214. The fair was granted to Philip de gratia, a clear indication that it was a royal favour.34 He was a relatively prominent knight in his locality and had contacts with the royal court as attested by his appearance in the witness lists of royal charters in 1252 and 1255. There is no evidence that there were any markets and fairs on his other manors, so he seems to be following the same pattern as Andrew Luterel in commercially developing the core of his estates. Establishment of either market or fair, or both, at the centre of their landholdings had not only a practical dimension (an additional source of income), but could also play, to some degree, the role of a status symbol in the locality and provide another means of controlling it. It was also a way of expressing, together with free warren, a rise in social scale. It might be tentatively compared to the establishing of private churches in the eleventh century and the development of the parish network.35 The role of markets as status symbols has been noted in the literature, but not explored further. Brian Coates stated that distribution of the markets granted in the thirteenth century was, to a large degree, motivated by the decision of the important landowners to set up markets on their estates, often in a location which did not have economic value. Having a market was described by Michael Reed as ‘almost a status symbol, and the more the better’, and was often not linked to the subsequent existence of the institution or its failure.36 These ideas have been recently expressed again by Masschaele, who somewhat tentatively reiterated that ‘there was certainly an awareness that markets did more than simply generate revenue’. More importantly, he stressed the significance of locating the new market on the manor of the holder, for his/her convenience and that of the tenants, not necessarily for the purpose of deriving long-term high income from the venture.37 In the mid-thirteenth century the lesser knights formed the largest group of recipients. They were individuals who had small estates (usually one or two manors), had no presence at the court, and no detectible significance beyond their close locality. Grants to these lesser people had much less direct patronage importance for the king, although sometimes such people were themselves clients of royal servants or other prominent figures, who secured these grants for them. The use of market and fairs grants as a patronage tool extended beyond the relationship of the king with the immediate recipients to a more complex web of intermediaries who had their own more or less ambitious patronage aspirations. For example, William de Burmingham received the right to hold two fairs on his two manors in September 1254 at the 33

M. Camille, Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England (Chicago, 1998). 34 CChR 1226–57, 476; RC, 201. 35 J. Blair, ‘Parish Churches in the Eleventh Century’, in Domesday Book Studies, ed. A. Williams and R.W.H. Erskine (Cambridgeshire Domesday 3, 1987), 65–8. 36 B.E. Coates, ‘The Origin and Distribution of Markets and Fairs in Medieval Derbyshire’, Derbyshire Archaeological J. 85 (1966 for 1965), 100–1; M. Reed, ‘Markets and Fairs in Medieval Buckinghamshire’, Records of Buckinghamshire 20:4 (1980 for 1978), 570. 37 Masschaele, ‘The Multiplicity’, 267.

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request of Wakelin de Ardern, whilst William de Montgomery received a grant of market and a fair on his manor in Cubley in Derbyshire with the assistance of Nicholas Seymour in November 1254.38 The chain of patronage often enabled grants to individuals who did not have access to the king. The rapid increase in the number of grants of markets and fairs in the mid-thirteenth century was a result of combined economic, political and social trends. These grants became, during the reign of Henry III, a useful patronage tool for the king, but that was possible only because there was an economic and social value attached to having a market or fair rights. In particular, knights, both those with relatively limited economic and political status, as well as gentry who held at least part of their lands in chief, made conscious efforts to acquire markets on their estates. For some it was a new addition to their manorial portfolio, for others it was an additional trading place. Having a market was, by the mid-thirteenth century, not just an economic asset; it was also a matter of prestige. As for the king, he could derive, in particular in the first half of the 1250s, a substantial income in gold from the payments for the new grants. The statistical data presented in this paper shows that marked rises in the number of grants coincided with important political events, whilst the composition of the recipient group shows that a connection to the king either directly or by proxy was very important in securing the grants. Grants of markets and fairs were an element in a more complex system of reward, linking not only the king and the recipients, but also intermediaries such as important relatives, in-laws and other patrons. Giving, or assisting in securing, a grant of market and fair was often an element in a broader patronage scheme.

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CPR 1247–58, 338, 385.

Three Alien Royal Stewards in Thirteenth-Century England: The Careers and Legacy of Mathias Bezill, Imbert Pugeys and Peter de Champvent1

Michael Ray Three Alien Michael Royal RayStewards

This paper, which arises from a study of the experiences of fourteen alien curial families in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, compares the careers and impact of three aliens who came to England in the thirteenth century and served as royal stewards.2 Mathias Bezill (d. 1268) was steward of Queen Eleanor’s household from 1254 until at least 1261.3 Imbert Pugeys (d. 1263) acted as steward of the royal household from 1257 until his death.4 Peter de Champvent (d. 1303) not only served Edward I as steward from 1290 to 1292 but also was later promoted to the office of chamberlain;5 he continued to be close to the court until the final years of his life. The thirteenth century is often seen as a period that saw an increase in hostility to aliens. Principal landmarks in this rise of xenophobia were the exclusion clauses in Magna Carta, the opposition to Peter des Roches in 1232, the action taken against the Poitevins in 1258, and the Statute against the Aliens of 1263.6 The careers of these men will be assessed to see whether they overcame this animosity and assimilated. Successful assimilation would result in the newcomers being regarded as members of the host community both in practical ways and psychologically. 1

I am grateful to Professor David Carpenter and Dr Louise Wilkinson for their suggestions in preparing this paper, a version of which was given at the Institute of Historical Research’s Late Medieval Seminar on 10 Jan. 2003. 2 M.G.I. Ray, ‘Alien Courtiers of Thirteenth-Century England and their Assimilation’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 2003). For genealogies of the Bezill, Pugeys and Champvent families, see pp. 65–7 below. 3 CR 1259–61, 393. His successor, Hugh de Dyve, was first noted as steward in 1266, CLR 1266–72, 251. 4 CLR 1251–60, 400. 5 Handbook of British Chronology, 3rd edn, ed. E.B. Fryde, D.E. Greenway, S. Porter and I. Roy (1986), 76; T.F. Tout, Chapters in the Administrative History of Medieval England, 6 vols (Manchester, 1920–33), ii. 26, 43–4; vi. 41. 6 See, e.g., J.C. Holt, ‘Philip Mark and the Shrievalty of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire in the Early Thirteenth Century’, Trans. Thoroton Soc. 56 (1952), 8–24; idem, The Northerners: A Study of the Reign of King John (Oxford, 1965); idem, Magna Carta, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1992); D.A. Carpenter, The Minority of Henry III (1990); idem, ‘King Henry’s Statute against the Aliens’, EHR 107 (1992), 425–44 (repr. idem, The Reign of Henry III (1996), 261–278); idem, The Struggle for Mastery: Britain 1066–1284 (2003), ch. 1; M. Prestwich, English Politics in the Thirteenth Century (1990); H. Ridgeway, ‘The Lord Edward and the Provisions of Oxford (1258): A Study in Faction’, TCE, i (1986), 89–99; idem, ‘King Henry III and the “Aliens” ’, TCE, ii (1988), 81–92; idem, ‘Foreign Favourites and Henry III’s Problems of Patronage, 1247–58’, EHR 104 (1989), 590–610; idem, ‘William de Valence and his familiares, 1247–1272’, HR 65 (1992); M.T. Clanchy, England and its Rulers 1066–1272 (1983); and N. Vincent, Peter des Roches: An Alien in English Politics 1205–1238 (Cambridge, 1996). For an alternative view, see D. Matthew, The English and the Community of Europe in the Thirteenth Century. The Stenton Lecture 1997 (Reading, 1997).

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The three stewards all came from French-speaking areas. However, only with Champvent can we be certain of his exact origins. His grandfather, Ebal de Grandson, who held a large block of lands in the foothills of the Jura at the southern end of Lake Neuchâtel in the Pays de Vaud (which is now in Switzerland), divided his patrimony amongst three of his sons. Henry received Champvent, Gerard, La Sarraz, and Peter, Grandson.7 Henry’s son was Peter de Champvent. The other two stewards do not appear to have toponymic surnames, which obscures their origins. Although some historians have assumed that Bezill was another Savoyard, Vincent was correct in assigning him a Touraine provenance.8 A Renaud Besille, who bore the same arms as the English Bezills, was noted over a century later in Touraine;9 like the first English Bezills, he did not use the particle ‘de’. Bezill might be derived from the verb besilier meaning ‘to snatch or steal’,10 hence Vincent’s description of Bezill as ‘The Plunderer’.11 In a 1309 document, ‘besiller’ was used to describe the mutilation of a document.12 Exactly where Pugeys came from is not clear. He is noted as a man ‘who came to England with the Queen’,13 and as ‘de Salvadya’, a rendering of Sabaudia (Savoy).14 Like ‘Bezill’, ‘Pugeys’ might have a derogatory meaning; in French pugeis meant a ‘small coin’ or a ‘worthless object’.15 There were thus striking differences in their backgrounds. Whilst Champvent was related to counts, twelve past or future bishops, and had a castle, no relatives of Pugeys beyond an obscure brother are known. Bezill had up to three brothers and his relatives in the Athée clan were noted for their apparently humble origins.16 Their backgrounds have a direct bearing on who introduced them to England. Bezill is first noted in January 1233,17 at the time of the ascendancy of Peter des Roches, and was probably introduced into royal service by him. Pugeys arrived in 1236 with the new Queen, Eleanor of Provence, who was well known for her encouragement of Savoyards from her mother’s country. Clifford believed that Peter de Champvent and his cousin, Otto de Grandson, were brought to England by Peter of Savoy soon after 1252.18 But already in 1252 Champvent’s elder brother, William, had received a belt at the English court,19 and Peter de Champvent was first recorded in June 1252 when he was granted money to buy a horse.20 Whoever or whatever stimulated his decision to come to England, it was as a Savoyard that he was received and perceived. From their arrival in England all three stewards made their careers as household

7

Besides Champvent, Henry received nine other holdings, E. Mottaz, Dictionnaire historique, géographique et statistique du canton de Vaud, i (Lausanne, 1914), 349. 8 He was the nephew of Emeric de Chanceaux, one of the Athée clan banned by ch. 50 of Magna Carta, RF, i. 319. 9 G. Demay, Inventaire de Sceaux de la Collection Clairambault (Paris, 1885–6), nos 968–9. 10 Anglo-Norman Dictionary, ed. H.W. Rothwell, L.W. Stone and T.B.W. Reid (1992), 67. 11 Vincent, Peter des Roches, 330. 12 Cal. Chancery Warrants 1244–1326 (1927), 303. 13 Fees, 1373. 14 Fees, 1379. 15 Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 565. 16 Guillelmi Britonis-Armorici Philippidos Libri XII sive Gesta Philip. Francorum Regis, versitus heroicis descripta (RHF), ed. M.J.J. Brial (Paris, 1878) 217, lines 418–20. 17 CChR 1226–57, 174. 18 E.R. Clifford, A Knight of Great Renown: The Life and Times of Othon de Grandson (Chicago, 1961), 12–13. 19 E 101/349/13, m. 2. 20 J.-P. Chapuisat, ‘Au service de deux rois d’Angleterre au XIIIe siècle: Pierre de Champvent’, Revue Historique Vaudoise 72 (1964), 158, citing C 62/28 m. 7.

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knights. Tout and others drew attention to the military importance of these knights.21 The most striking feature of almost all the prominent first-generation lay members of the curiales was their recruitment initially as soldiers.22 Their main opportunity to display their martial skills came in the civil war. It is not known whether Bezill or Champvent took part in the battles of Lewes or Evesham. If they were at the former they were not captured. Bezill was in the garrison at Windsor when he was offered a series of safe conducts to come to the king in his captivity.23 When, in 1261, opposition to the king’s appointment of royalist sheriffs led to Bezill’s replacement by the county gentry of Gloucester with one of their own men as sheriff, William de Tracy. With a strong force Bezill seized Tracy at a meeting of the county court, had him beaten, dragged through the mire and imprisoned in Gloucester castle.24 When, two years later, the Savoyards were also engulfed by violence, the local men had their revenge and Bezill endured a savage siege of Gloucester castle. Although he was forced to surrender, a chronicler noted that he was ‘a foreigner, but a bold and brave knight’, and included an elegant tribute stating that ‘neither fear of death nor the threats of his enemies made him wish to surrender voluntarily and this was noted by his enemies as being worthy of praise’.25 Champvent was involved in the capture of Northampton,26 and was probably at the 1266 siege of Kenilworth.27 However, at the time of Lewes, when he was affected by the Statute against the Aliens, he may have been out of court, possibly with Peter of Savoy at Pevensey. Later, he served in at least one of Edward I’s Welsh wars, sharing the king’s discomfort of the blockade of Conway,28 and also in Flanders.29 Although around sixty, he also fought at the battle of Falkirk.30 All three stewards served as castellans. Pugeys was constable of Hadleigh (1244), Oxford (1253) and the Tower of London (1257),31 and Bezill of Gloucester (1251) and Dover (1266).32 Champvent too was constable of Gloucester (1268),33 and he and Bezill were also sheriffs of that county.34 The stewards’ position in the royal households must have brought them very close to the king and queen. Richard Huscroft has demonstrated the reliability of the recording of royal charter witnesses at this period.35 So one indicator of their relative importance at court is the number of charters they witnessed. Bezill was an attestee on 44 occasions.36 But Pugeys witnessed 324,37 while Champvent’s 236 attestations 21

Tout, Chapters, ii. 135–6; S.D. Church, ‘The Knights of the Household of King John: A Question of Numbers’, TCE, iv (1992), 151. 22 Although Imbert Pugeys was present on the Gascon campaign of 1253–4 and the Welsh campaign of 1257 as well as being constable of the Tower of London (CPR 1247–58, 538; WL, Henry III, ii. 110–14), David Carpenter believes that he was more of a courtier than a soldier. 23 CPR 1258–66, 322, 324, 325, 329, 330. 24 The Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, ed. W.A. Wright (1887), lines 502–50. 25 Flores, ii. 480. 26 CLR 1260–7, 222. 27 CPR 1258–66, 632. 28 Cal. Chancery Rolls Various (1912), 359; J.E. Morris, The Welsh Wars of Edward I (Oxford, 1901), 255–6. 29 CPR 1292–1301, 302. 30 BL, Harl. MS 6589, fol. 9r. 31 CLR 1245–51, 22, 38; Rotulorum Originalium . . . Abbreviatio, i, ed. H. Playford and J. Caley (Rec. Comm., 1805), 13; CPR 1247–52, 538. 32 CR 1247–51, 485; CPR 1258–66, 512. 33 CR 1268–72, 75. 34 List of Sheriffs for England and Wales from the earliest times to AD 1831 (1898), 49. 35 WL, Edward I, xvi. 36 46 if we count R. Gasc., i. nos 3784, 4004. 37 347 if we include R. Gasc. i. nos 2129, 2130, 2131, 2228, 2230, 2307, 2315, 2339, 2344, 2457, 2458, 2559, 2630, 2632, 3780, 3782, 3798, 3919, 3923, 3988, 4227, 4240, 4267.

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stretched over two reigns. The comparative infrequency of attestations by Bezill partly reflects his position as queen’s rather than king’s steward, and indeed Eleanor acted as his executor.38 But it should not be assumed that their attachment to the court was uninterrupted by political events or loss of favour. The fall of des Roches set back Bezill’s career and the Montfortian ascendancy delivered another blow. Henry III seems to have had an affection for Champvent. In 1252 he ordered that 10 marks be given to ‘our dear squire, Peter de Champvent who was ill in London’.39 But while attestations indicate his importance in the final years of Henry III, there was an eclipse at the beginning of Edward I’s reign when he did not witness for seven years.40 However, he rebuilt his career and, having gained the trust of Edward I, held major positions at court. Champvent received an individual summons to parliament. Although there is evidence that Bezill may have been so summoned in 1268,41 he and Pugeys were usually regarded as no more than wealthy knights. All three stewards did well from their service. They were granted lands, wardships, marriages and money fees as well as legal rights such as markets and free warren. The amount of patronage a curialis received was an indication of his standing at court. Evidence for gifts is found in the chancery rolls but they may underestimate the amounts received by curiales. For instance, robes were normally issued to royal servants of the rank of the three stewards twice a year when they were at court, but Imbert Pugeys is only mentioned once as a recipient.42 A direct comparison is not really possible as the periods over which patronage was received varied significantly and it is difficult to apply money values to each gift.43 Bezill built a career with increasing success. Between 1238 and his death thirty years later,44 he received a valuable wardship, 23 tuns of wine, 127 deer, 64 trees, a sparrow hawk, two sows and six bream. In addition his wife was given three tuns of wine, fifteen deer and six oaks. For Pugeys the figures are 75 trees, four tuns of wine, five deer, fifteen hounds, three money gifts (totalling 50 marks), falcons, one felon’s goods, and a set of robes. In addition his wife was given two tuns of wine and two robes. He also received two wardships, those of his step-son and, later, his son. Champvent served Henry III for twenty-one years and received two wardships, three marriages, five grants of Jewish debts, twelve grants of land, fourteen deer, fourteen trees, six horses, seven money gifts and two tuns of wine. From Edward, whom he served for thirty-one years, some as steward and chamberlain, he obtained no wardships, marriages or land, but just twelve trees, seven money gifts, one horse and two tuns of wine, together with two grants of free warren and a market. However, this reduction in patronage may not represent a decline in royal esteem as Edward I was criticised even by contemporaries for his lack of generosity compared with the munificence of his father.45 Although it cannot be proved, the ultimate objective of an incoming family in 38 39 40 41 42 43

M. Howell, Eleanor of Provence: Queenship in Thirteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1998), 280. Chapuisat, ‘Au service’, 158. WL, Henry III; C 53/63–79; C 66/105a, 106a. The Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury, ed. W. Stubbs (RS 73, 1880), ii. 246. CR 1259–61, 114. These figures are compiled from entries in the relevant volumes of CR, CChR, CCR, CLR, RF, Pipe Roll transcriptions, R. Gasc., Liber Quotidianus Contrarotularis Garderobae Anno Regni Regis Edwardi Primi Vicesimo Octavo, together with Records of the Wardrobe and Household 1285–1286 and 1286–1289, ed. B.F. Byerly and C.R. Byerly (1977, 1986); BL, Add. MSS 7965, 7968A; C 62/28, 31, 36, and E 101/349/26. 44 CLR 1226–40, 311. 45 M. Prestwich, ‘Royal Patronage and Edward I’, TCE, i (1986), 41–52.

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most cases must have been the acquisition of hereditable lands. This would give the family a permanent guarantee of wealth and a place in a local community. The most secure way of gaining land was by a gift from the king by royal charter but a capricious king could sometimes cancel his original largesse although he might later relent. Lands forfeited by those who had taken the side of the French king after the fall of Normandy in 1204, the terra Normannorum, were available for redistribution.46 It was not considered appropriate to use royal demesne lands for such a purpose, so it is not surprising that all three stewards were endowed in part from the terra Normannorum. Pugeys held Eaton Neston in Northamptonshire for a time, and Bezill, West Alvington in Devon and, in 1265, Woodhill in Wiltshire.47 In 1268, after John Mansel died, the king gave Champvent Mansel’s Sussex fee at Wepham, on the left bank of the river Arun east of Arundel.48 Pugeys was granted lands in Bampton in Oxfordshire in 1238.49 Bampton was a large and rich manor that had long been in the lands of the count of Boulogne. In addition he was granted the rest of Bampton in farm.50 But in 1248 the manor was bestowed on the king’s favourite half-brother, William de Valence, to whom Henry had promised an income of £500.51 Pugeys lost the part of the manor which he held at farm and he cannot have been pleased to lose so much of his income and become a tenant of another incomer for the rest. This was a case of a member of the Savoyard faction being replaced by a Poitevin. Edward I conquered lands in Wales and Scotland which he could redistribute. Although he was sparing in this patronage, the Champvents did gain some Scottish lands.52 Lands forfeited for felony were also available. From this source Champvent gained Little Reynes in Essex when Henry III gave him the escheated lands of Thomas de Welles, worth £12, to hold in chief, Robert de Welles having lost them through felony.53 In the same way in 1268 he obtained Rodbaston and Wyrley in Staffordshire,54 and Rowden in Wiltshire,55 but only for a short time. A royal grant of the debts originally owed to the Jews enabled a man to acquire lands from the debtor; it was through this process that Champvent obtained Impington in Cambridgeshire,56 and Pugeys Arrington in the same county.57 Some probable royal

46

F.M. Powicke, The Loss of Normandy 1189–1204: Studies in the History of the Angevin Empire (Manchester, 2nd edn 1960), 286–90, 328–58; Vincent, Peter des Roches, 29–31, 335–7; D.A. Carpenter, ‘A Noble in Politics: Roger de Mortimer in the Period of Baronial Reform and Rebellion, 1258–1265’, in Nobles and Nobility in Medieval Europe: Concepts, Origins, Transformations, ed. A.J. Duggan (Woodbridge, 2000), 188. While there were hopes of recovering the duchy, these grants were regarded technically as temporary. 47 The lands of the late William de Englisheville, possibly a casualty of the Barons’ War (CR 1264–8, 52). 48 CChR 1257–1300, 89. 49 CChR 1226–57, 235–6. 50 Great Roll of the Pipe 26 Henry III, ed. H.L. Cannon (Oxford, 1948), 55–6. See also Receipt and Issue Rolls for the Twenty Sixth Year of the Reign of King Henry III, 1241–2, ed. R.C. Stacey (PRS, new ser. 49, 1992), 18, 57. 51 CR 1247–51, 133; Ridgeway, ‘Foreign Favourites’, 595. 52 CDS, ii. no. 1321(11). 53 CR 1261–4, 131; CPR 1266–72, 34. 54 CPR 1266–72, 262. 55 CR 1264–67, 474. 56 Later known as Burgoyne’s manor, VCH Cambridgeshire, ix. 131–2; Cal. Plea Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews, ed. J.M. Rigg and others, 5 vols (Jewish Historical Soc. of England, 1905–92), ii. 43, 66, 67; CPR 1266–72, 398. 57 CP 24/1/25/31, no. 4; VCH Cambridgeshire, v. 142; CR 1261–4, 33.

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grants are not adequately documented: Bezill seems to have had Didmarton in Gloucestershire before 1260.58 Marriage arranged by the king was another source of land and wealth, but only Pugeys’ wife was an heiress, and that in a modest way. Her son, Robert, acquired some of his mother’s inheritance.59 These consisted of a small rent at Berwick in Sussex and two Norfolk manors, Flitcham and Beechamwell, all of which he shared with other representatives of the Aguillon co-heiresses. But in all three cases these lands had passed to other families before 1302.60 This suggests that Joan was a minor heiress. But the marriage did open up the possibility of Pugeys gaining the FitzBernard wardship. In addition to royal grants of land other opportunities of acquisition were open. By joining the affinities of great magnates or becoming their friends, more grants might be made to them. Other alien curiales such as the Tyes family and Grandsons benefited from this strategy. The stewards benefited from curial links. Champvent acquired 120 acres at Beaumont-cum-Moze near the Essex–Suffolk border, which the king had granted to his great minister, John Mansel’s brother-in-law, the curialis Richard de Tilbury, who, in turn, granted it to Champvent.61 Private transactions or purchases saw Champvent obtaining a knight’s fee at Rawreth in Essex from John de Berneval in 1296.62 By 1270 Champvent was involved with Offham, on the right bank of the Arun opposite Wepham, suing Hugh de Neville over it.63 He was noted there in 1296, having been enfeoffed by William Esturmy to hold of Hugh as a quarter of a knight’s fee.64 From another curial family, the Asphale, Pugeys obtained Great Delce and Little Chatham in Kent.65 How 42 acres in Haddenham, Little Thetford and Stretham (Cambridgeshire), south of Ely and held of the bishop, were acquired from William Oliver by Champvent is not known.66 As a way of rewarding the stewards’ service in addition to money fees, the king could make life grants of land but these would not add to the guaranteed foundation of wealth built on hereditary land. However, it might be possible to hold such land, and obtain permanent privileges attached to it, for such a long period that the temporary holding began to become permanent. Apart from Pugeys’ temporary possession of part of Bampton at farm, only Bezill benefited significantly in this way. He received the life grant of Sherston in Wiltshire in 1240.67 Sherston was also terra Normannorum.68 When a market and fair were granted in 1241, the grant noted that Bezill held the lands for life, but the market and fair were for the benefit of future holders of the manor.69 This suggests that Bezill was consciously trying to convert Sherston into a hereditary holding. While in Gascony in January 1242, he was granted Sherston in hereditary right,70 and in 1247 he and his heirs were granted free

58 59 60 61

CPR 1258–66, 101. CIPM, i. no. 901; RH, i. 461, 542. RH, ii. 205; Feudal Aids, 399, 408. Abbrevatio Placitorum in Domo Capitulari Westmonasterensi asservatum, ed. W. Illingworth (Rec. Comm., 1811), 171. 62 CPR 1292–1301, 185. 63 KB 26/200A, m. 25d. 64 CCR 1302–7, 37–8. 65 Year Book of the Reign of Edward II 10, 1316–17, ed. M.D. Legge (Selden Soc. 54, 1935), 102–4. 66 CIPM, iv. no. 152; CCR 1302–7, 37–8; C 133/107, no. 24. 67 CChR 1226–57, 255; CR 1237–42, 254. 68 See also Powicke, Loss of Normandy, 342–3. 69 CChR 1226–57, 260. 70 R. Gasc., i. no. 741.

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warren in his demesne lands at Sherston,71 a sign that the lands were expected to be held in perpetuity. In 1253 a further grant was made which reads like a hereditary grant, it being held as a quarter of a fee.72 Both before and after that date, Bezill was not recorded as paying the exchequer for his holding.73 However, there is no trace of Sherston in Mathias’s inquisition post mortem.74 In 1270–1 his son John did not pay for it,75 although in 1280 he was confirmed as a life tenant only.76 It is likely that Peter de Champvent was the wealthiest of the three stewards.77 As steward, he received 4s a day which would have meant an additional income of £73 if he was paid every day. Robes, or money equivalents, were worth a further £6. When at court his living expenses would have been reduced by having free board and lodgings. In addition there would have been the fees he received as steward and chamberlain from people seeking access to the king, or those such as were paid by the Scottish king.78 As chamberlain, he was entitled to old bench coverings, hangings, curtains and the king’s beds as well as other used furnishings and some part of all the presents made to the king in the form of foodstuffs which came into the chamber.79 Random royal gifts would also have helped, and finally there would have been income from lands held of others such as the bishop of Ely and the abbot of Bury St Edmunds. He must have had an income in excess of £200, which would place him just in the £200–£500 range normal for a baron.80 Wealth from his English and Vaudois lands was sufficient to pay £130 to redeem the debts to the Jews of Simon de Insula,81 and to allow Champvent to complete his ancestral castle. It is unlikely that the other two stewards were so wealthy. Bezill’s manor of West Alvington was valued at £5 p.a., but in 1282 his son felt it was necessary to pay 20 marks to Ralph Daubeny for a quitclaim.82 He also had income from Didmarton and Woodhill. Sherston was worth at least £36 p.a.,83 and the Albermarle wardship £60.84 But the latter was a temporary holding. Opportunities arising from his position as the queen’s steward and gifts would also have raised his income. Pugeys’ hereditary lands at Bampton were worth nominally £30.85 His holdings in Kent, Cambridgeshire and his control of his wife and step-son’s lands, together with his fees as steward, must have raised his income to the level of a rich knight or minor baron. His wife’s dower at Abbots Aston and Ilmer was valued at £20.86 The FitzBernard lands were valued at over £91 but some of the income was paid to Imbert instead of his 40 mark fee as steward of the royal household.87 71 72

CChR 1226–57, 328. It is partly damaged and does not mention whether the grant was in perpetuity, for life, or at the king’s pleasure (CChR 1226–57, 436). 73 1245–6 and 1255–6: E 372/90, mm. 5, 5d; E 372/100, mm. 11, 11d. 74 CIPM, i. no. 718. 75 E 372/115, m. 12. 76 CPR 1272–81, 366. 77 He was promised this level of income in 1267: CPR 1266–72, 171. 78 CCR 1288–92, 317. 79 Fleta, ii, ed. H.G. Richardson and G.O. Sayles (Selden Soc. 72, 1955), 117. 80 C. Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England c.1250–1520 (Cambridge, 1989), 29. 81 CPR 1266–72, 682. 82 CR 1234–7, 458; CChR 1226–57, 231; Fees, 1371. 83 Fees, 1421; Crown Pleas of the Wiltshire Eyre 1249, ed. C.A.F. Meekings (Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Soc., Records Branch, 16, 1961), no. 217. 84 CR 1261–4, 189. 85 Fees, 823. 86 In 1259 they were valued at £16 8s 7¾d (CIPM, i. no. 468). 87 CPR 1258–66, 84.

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So how were these men regarded by the host nation, and did they assimilate over time? Bezill was a relative of the hated group of Tourangean soldiers who served John so well, were proscribed in Magna Carta, and suffered hostility as a reaction to the rule of Peter des Roches. This gave him a difficult early start. Ridgeway has argued that when the explosion of baronial wrath against the king occurred in 1258, the aliens that were in the firing line were the Poitevins rather than the Savoyards. However, probably because of his connection with the queen and her Savoyard circle, Bezill was permitted to stay on as constable of Gloucester. Although Pugeys was replaced as constable of Oxford, he was allowed to continue as steward and, in a possible gesture of conciliation, Oxford was given to his step-son.88 His death in 1262 spared him from personal experience of anti-Savoyard hostility. Bezill, however, did not escape hostility entirely. In September 1258 he appeared before Hugh Bigod’s eyre at Clarendon. He had been accused of the disseisin of Clement of Sherston of two virgates at Sherston and the jury had found against him. Bezill accused the jury of swearing a false oath and claimed that Clement was his villein, but the jury had said he was a free tenant. A new jury confirmed the verdict of the earlier one and Bezill was to be committed to prison.89 It is not clear whether he was jailed but he presumably paid a fine for his release. No sign appears in the Pipe Rolls of unpaid amercements for the case.90 Paul Brand believes the committal to prison was standard practice,91 but it is tempting to see the outcome as evidence of anti-alien feeling. Admittedly there is no specific evidence that Bezill’s origins were relevant to the opposition he encountered: but would a man as well connected as Bezill have been sued, lost such a case, or been imprisoned before 1258? The grudging respect that the English had for Bezill after the siege of Gloucester did not stop his lands at Sherston being ravaged. In Robert of Gloucester’s words, ‘they took sir Maci and into the March led him, and sir John Giffard took all his livestock to himself, and all that he found of his, and namely at Sserston [sic]’.92 Champvent’s advancement came after the decline of anti-alien hostility, but he did suffer attacks on his servants and had difficult times with some of his tenants. Anti-alien feeling could have been behind the attack at Ixworth on the sergeant of Otto de Grandson and Peter de Champvent in 1288.93 In 1301, a commission was set up to investigate the murder of Champvent’s sergeant at Rayleigh.94 However, these events were well past the peak of anti-alien hostility. As in the case of Bezill, local administration could itself bring hostility. Whilst Champvent himself was largely uncriticised, his deputy, Walter de Bocking, was accused of malpractices such as releasing the guilty, imprisoning the innocent and extracting money from merchants.95 The role of wives in the assimilation process, although largely hidden, must have been vital. Acceptance in a locality might increase, especially if the newcomer identified with his wife’s family and perhaps adopted its religious patronage. We know 88 89

CPR 1247–58, 639; DBM, 112–13. A. Hershey, ‘An Introduction to and Edition of the Hugh Bigod Eyre Rolls, June 1258 – February 1259, JUST 1/1187 and JUST 1/873’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1991), A 339, 394–5; Carpenter, ‘King Henry III’s Statute against the Aliens’, in The Reign of Henry III, 269. 90 E 372/103 mm. 8, 8d; E 372/104, m. 19. 91 Personal discussion. 92 Robert of Gloucester, lines 548–50. See also ‘The Song of The Barons’: ‘neither to Sir Matthew de Besille did they leave one farthing in country or town’ (Thomas Wright’s Political Songs of England from the Reign of John to that of Edward II, ed. P. Coss (Cambridge, 1996), 62). 93 CPR 1281–9, 89. 94 PW, i. 90–4; Documents Illustrative of English History, ed. H. Cole (Rec. Comm., 1844), 336; CPR 1292–1301, 624. 95 RH, i. 171b, 173.

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that two of the stewards had English wives, but neither seems to have brought her husband a permanent position in a locality. The two stewards who patronised religious houses favoured houses with no known links to their wives’ families. Marriage in the king’s gift to a ‘native’ was a potent way of helping an alien family assimilate, and it seems clear that Henry III had a policy of marrying alien curiales to widows. Bezill married Beatrice, the widow of John de Bassingham.96 She was possibly a Luvel by birth.97 Pugeys was married, at the king’s wish,98 to Joan, widow of Ralph FitzBernard. It has been assumed that she was the mother of Ralph’s son, John,99 who would have inherited her paternal legacy from Robert d’Aguillon, a member of an East Anglian branch of the Sussex-based curial Aguillon family.100 But three records show that Robert Pugeys acquired some of his mother’s Aguillon inheritance.101 The attitude of the wives to their husbands could vary from hostile or neutral to supportive, and attitudes could change over time. Nicholas Vincent argued that Bezill had difficulty in persuading an English heiress to marry him.102 In 1246, Beatrice, widow of John de Bassingham, was excused her oath not to marry without the king’s consent, providing she took Mathias Bezill as her husband.103 Beatrice might have preferred to marry Robert de Luffwyke instead,104 but by 1249 she was wife to Bezill.105 Later she endured the siege of Gloucester alongside her husband.106 But in 1270, two years after Bezill’s death, it was as Beatrice de Bassingham that she received a grant of trees.107 Does this reversion to her first husband’s name indicate a lack of attachment to Bezill? Apart from the receipt of gifts, Joan Pugeys made no impact on the records. Despite surviving references to a number of possible marriages through royal grants,108 the identity of Peter de Champvent’s wife is a mystery. She seems to have brought him no lands and it is significant that, when he died, it was disclosed that all the lands acquired and held by her husband on his death, were held jointly with her.109 Her name, Agnes, was a common Savoyard name and it is likely that she was a fellow Vaudoise. This apparent lack of an English wife may have had a material effect on his dynasty’s survival. Agnes de Champvent, the possible alien, always seems more involved with her husband. They appeared together in the courts in 1278,110 and in 1310 she defended Champvent’s legacy to his son, John.111 In 1302 96 97

CLR 1245–51, 265. Proof of her identity, C 66/57, m. 5. This is suggested by the presentation in 1261 by Mathias of his nephew, John Luvel, to Minsterworth Gloucs.: RF, ii. 314; CPR 1258–66, 141. 98 Fees, 1379. 99 Complete Peerage, v. 400, note b. 100 CPR 1258–66, 247; L.F. Salzman, ‘The Family of Aguillon’, Sussex Archaeological Collections 79 (1938), 59–60. 101 CIPM, i. no. 901; RH, i. 461, 542. This information is posted on the internet: www.medievalgenealogy.org.uk/cp/vol5.shtm#fitzbernard. 102 Vincent, Peter des Roches, 414. 103 CPR 1232–47, 478. 104 HKF, ii. 410; Final Concords of the County of Lincoln from the Feet of Fines 1244–1272, ii, ed. C.W. Foster (Lincoln Record Soc. 17, 1920), 38. 105 CLR 1245–51, 265. Proof of her identity, C 66/57, m. 5. 106 Gervase of Canterbury, ed. Stubbs, ii. 221. 107 CR 1268–72, 229. 108 CR 1253–4, 275; CPR 1247–58, 180, 337; CPR 1258–66, 36, 38 etc. 109 CIPM, iv. no. 152. 110 CP 40/26 m. cxxxiiiid. 111 Year Books of Edward II, AD 1309–11, ed. F.W. Maitland and G.J. Turner (Selden Soc. 20, 1907), 128–9.

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an accusation of homicide in Cambridgeshire shows her active in Champvent’s principal land base.112 She and Champvent shared friends: Godfrey Giffard, bishop of Worcester, left Champvent a cup, and Agnes a cup, ring and a cloth of gold.113 Agnes’s joint holding of the lands acquired by Champvent may indicate her strength of character.114 Although the overall evidence is slight, she seems to have been the most supportive wife even though she brought no tangible English benefits. Since two of the stewards married non-heiresses, they had no opportunity of acquiring lands to be passed on to their children by their English wives. However, wardships enabled curiales to marry their sons and nephews to Englishwomen. The Champvents eschewed their opportunities, but Bezill’s brother’s holding of the wardship of the Averinges heiress,115 enabled Mathias’s second son to be set up with hereditary land after his marriage to her. In the same way Imbert Pugeys’ son, Robert, was married to the heiress of Richard de Stokes, bringing him lands in Buckinghamshire.116 There were many reasons for patronising religious houses. One might be to please other important men and women who were already well known as patrons of the house that benefited. A possible attempt to please the queen is provided by Imbert Pugeys’ conveyance of Gussage to her favoured Tarrant Abbey.117 Bezill’s disposal of Gomshall to Netley Abbey, the foundation of his patron, Peter des Roches, may also have been to impress the king who took over patronage of the abbey.118 Another reason could be a desire to impress the local community. Bezill, who held land in the county, funded an obit at Gloucester Abbey,119 and Imbert Pugeys, an Oxfordshire landlord, benefited Eynsham Abbey,120 and his son Robert granted fishing rights to Osney Abbey in 1275 for 6d p.a.121 Despite all their clerical connections no evidence has been found of benefactions made by the Champvents. One way of retaining royal support and patronage for the family was to continue in royal service and to establish one’s sons in service as well so that the second generation might benefit. All the stewards saw to it that some of their sons entered royal service. John de Champvent served in a military capacity, rising to the rank of banneret in the Scottish wars.122 He also witnessed two royal charters.123 This infrequency of attestation reflects his decline in status compared with his father, but this is more striking with the other two families. Neither John Bezill nor Mathias II Bezill witnessed the king’s charters; nor did Robert Pugeys, although he witnessed 112

CPR 1301–7, 60. No additional local information on this case has been found. It was settled at the King’s Bench but with no indication of what really happened (KB 27/171, m. lxxiiii). 113 Reg. William de Geynesborough, Bishop of Worcester 1302–7, ed. J. Willis Bund (Worcestershire Historical Soc., 1928), 57–8. 114 CIPM, iv. no. 152. 115 CR 1256–59, 184; CPR 1258–66, 38. 116 JUST 1/67, m. 17. There is no record of its grant but in 1254–5 it was noted that Imbert held the Stoke lands as part of the honour of Dudley, RH, i. 34. 117 CR 1242–7, 375. 118 C.A.F. Meekings, Studies in 13th Century Justice and Administration (1981), 196–211; CAD, iii, D327, D131, D200; VCH Surrey, iii. 115. 119 Historia et Cartularium Monasterii Sancti Petri Gloucestriae, ed. W.H. Hart (RS 33, 1863), i. 37. 120 The Cartulary of Eynsham Abbey, ed. H.E. Salter (Oxford Historical Soc. 49, 51, 1906–8), no. 271. In 1591 Ralph Brooke, York Herald, noted Imbert le Pugeys of Bampton’s charter in favour of Eynsham Abbey, BL, Harl. MS 4757, p. 294. 121 Cartulary of Oseney Abbey, ed. H.E. Salter (Oxford Historical Soc. 89–91, 97–8, 101, 1929–36), iv. no. 500. 122 Among other campaigns, he fought in Galloway in 1300 (Aspilogia I: A Catalogue of English Medieval Rolls of Arms, ed. A.R. Wagner (1950), 34). 123 WL, Edward I, 139, 156.

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for Eleanor of Provence.124 John Bezill also served a queen, Eleanor of Castile.125 After 1307 John de Champvent, like Otto de Grandson, withdrew or was forced to withdraw from the English court. Later, withdrawal was the possible strategy of Mathias II Bezill, and certainly that adopted by Robert Pugeys. Continuation in royal service could hinder assimilation at local level. It involved absenteeism and a lack of time to participate in local activities, including taking local office. Robert Pugeys’ withdrawal from court occurred in the 1280s, coinciding with the ageing and death of Eleanor of Provence. From then on during the rest of his life he was very active in Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire and served as a local official at least seventeen times.126 None of the second generation Bezills or John de Champvent served in local offices, but later generations of the Bezills were sheriffs and knights of the shire. There is no evidence of the Bezill brothers or John de Champvent witnessing local charters but Robert Pugeys did.127 Among the later generations, a shift from fellow alien to native spouse is a clear indicator of assimilation. A sign of local assimilation is the making of marriage alliances with neighbouring families, but in the three cases dealt with in this paper the evidence is either not there or can be interpreted in various ways. John Bezill married a daughter of Elyas Rabayn,128 who, like him, held lands in Wiltshire. But the match probably owed more to the curial fellowship of his father with Elyas, who was also a Poitevin. The second Bezill son, Mathias II, married an heiress with some lands in Oxfordshire and Somerset but his father’s lands were in other counties, and as we have seen the marriage resulted from a wardship bought by his uncle. Of Eva,129 wife of John de Champvent, we know nothing. He was granted the marriage of Joan, daughter of Philip Marmion in 1291.130 It has been assumed that he married her,131 but she actually married William de Morton,132 by whom she was childless.133 So perhaps John too married a Savoyard; he certainly gained no English lands from his marriage. Were the families of the stewards proud of their ancestry and anxious to perpetuate family memory and maintain links with home? The perpetuation of surnames and christian names, particularly unusual ones, might indicate family piety. Despite the possible derogatory origins of two of the names, none were changed, although on one occasion Pugeys was noted as Imbert de Bampton.134 His only son was named for his father-in-law but one of his grandsons was also called Imbert which is presumably a rendering of the popular Savoyard name, Humbert, and another, Peter, possibly for Imbert’s brother. The Bezills retained Mathias into the fifth generation. The Champvent names were common on both sides of the Channel. Thus Peter had 124 125 126

CAD, v, A11072; CChR 1257–1300, 204, 227; CPR 1281–92, 189, 484; E 159/50, m. 8, schedule 5. SC 1/29/190. CPR 1292–1301, 104, 217, 319, 477; CPR 1301–7, 381; CPR 1307–13, 31, 53, 226, 329; CPR 1313–17, 108, 123; CCR 1307–13, 205; PW, i. 20, 27, 86, 125; ibid. ii. part 1, 654, 11, part 2, 9, 12, 28, 73, 75; SC 1/28/127; Return of Members of Parliament 1213–1702 (1878), 5, 10, 13, 17, 37. 127 CChR 1327–41, 98; The Manuscripts of St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, ed. J.N. Dalton (Windsor, 1957), 301; The Cartulary of Missenden Abbey, ed. J.G. Jenkins, i–ii (Buckinghamshire Archaeological Soc., Records Branch, 1938–46) and iii (HMC, 1962), 64; Cartulary of Eynsham Abbey, ed. Salter, no. 539. 128 Cal. Feet of Fines relating to Wiltshire, 1193–1272, ed. E.A. Fry (Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Soc. 1930), 62. 129 CPR 1317–21, 83. 130 CPR 1281–92, 468. 131 Complete Peerage, iii. 154. 132 Complete Peerage, viii. 512, n. 1. 133 C.F. Palmer, The History of the Town and Castle of Tamworth (Tamworth, 1845), 350. 134 Fees, 1396.

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sons called Henry (after his grandfather), Hugh and Humbert. The son who remained in England was John and this name, as Jean, was borne by two of Peter’s Vaudois grandsons. While all three stewards made journeys to France, it is only in the case of Peter de Champvent that we can be clear that he visited his home.135 Bezill’s home province was now ruled by the kings of France. Some of the other alien curiales, especially the Grandsons and Cusances, were reinforced by later arrivals of siblings and nephews from home. Some brothers of the stewards may have come a little later than they did, but there is no clear evidence for this trend in their cases. Since the Bezills and Pugeys had no lands in their homelands, they were not faced by the problem of how to separate them in order to endow their sons or daughters. But Peter de Champvent left behind four children in the Pays de Vaud. Humbert took Peter’s inherited lands there and passed them on, in his turn, to a son, Jean, the last of his line. Another son, Hugh, was a canon of Lausanne and left only illegitimate children. His daughter married a Vaudois seigneur. The remaining son, Henry, died around 1315.136 The acquired English lands went to John. But whilst John did visit his homeland,137 there is no evidence of a persistence of the links that were so evident with the Grandson family. Unless Renaud Besille returned to Touraine from England, and there is no evidence that he did, it seems clear that neither the Pugeys nor Bezill families perpetuated links with home. What happened to the stewards’ families? Did they all assimilate into the English local scene with English wives and lands? The picture is mixed. Imbert Pugeys had only one son, Robert, but he in turn had three sons. Two had predeceased him when Robert’s heir and grandson were both murdered at the behest of the husband of one granddaughter. John de Moleyns, an important curialis, the husband of Egidia, daughter of Robert’s daughter Margaret and John Maudit, took advantage of the confusion of Edward II’s reign and arranged for his servant to murder the male Pugeys heirs. Peter and his son, John, were both killed. Because Robert himself was still alive, there could be no case of novel disseisin brought against those who took the lands which Peter was due to inherit.138 Moleyns was charged with involvement in the murders but was acquitted by Justice Inge. Later it was shown that Inge was a confederate of Moleyns, but John could not be retried. The family still survives in the female line, but the male line was extinguished in 1330. John de Champvent gradually disposed of his lands in Essex, Cambridgeshire,139 and Sussex.140 By 1311 he owed £100 to William de Gosefield.141 Two years later he owed another £100 to William de Goldington,142 who in 1309 had obtained his manor of Rawreth.143 During 1320 he owed £20 to Geoffrey de Cambridge,144 a debt 135 136

Chapuisat, ‘Au service’, 163. G.A. Matile, Monuments de l’histoire de Neuchâtel (Neuchâtel, 1844), i. 321; A.P. Piaget, ‘Le château de Champvent et le Comté de Neuchâtel’, Musée Neuchâtelois (1937), 219; D. Schwennicke, Europaische Stammtafelin, xi (Marburg, 1986), table 153. 137 E 101/369/11, fol. 106. 138 N. Fryde, ‘A Medieval Robber Baron, Sir John de Moleyns of Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire’, Medieval Legal Records edited in memory of C.A.F. Meekings, ed. R.B. Hunnisett and J.B. Post (1978), 203. 139 CPR 1313–17, 109; Feet of Fines for Essex 1272–1422, ed. R.E.G. Kirk (Colchester, 1910–49), ii. no. 152. See also E 151/1, m. 13. 140 CPR 1324–7, 99, 101, 106, 155, 322. 141 CCR 1307–13, 445. 142 CCR 1307–13, 572. These debts occurred before the 1315–16 famine. 143 CPR 1313–17, 109; Feet of Fines for Essex, ed. Kirk, ii. no. 152; E 151, no. 13. 144 CCR 1318–23, 335.

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that may explain a life grant of Impington to Geoffrey Seman in 1321.145 Four years later John began the disposal of parts of Wepham to four different men,146 but eventually Seman obtained the manor.147 Both Geoffrey Seman and William de Goldington were money-lenders.148 The absence of an individual summons to parliament was another indication of John’s lack of wealth.149 John was dead by 1333 and he was succeeded by his son, John, who was aged more than twenty-one in that year.150 John II’s inheritance is unclear and from this time almost all trace of the family is lost. There is a reference in Glover’s Ordinary to Sir Hugh de Champvent, a knight of Somerset in ‘temp E’.151 The final mention of the family is in an inquisition of 1409 referring to John de Chevent receiving 40s annual rent from Stony Stoke for life.152 The Bezills with their two strong branches, heiress marriages and commitment to their local counties lasted longest.153 An important heiress married a fourth-generation Bezill, bringing Leigh (Berkshire) to the family. Although this line eventually failed, their lands passed to the senior branch. Thus it was not until 1515 that the well-established gentry family of Bezill became extinct. What conclusions can be drawn about the relative success of these men and their families? All made good starts. Did their initial status make a difference to the success of the families? Of the three, the Champvents had the easiest entrée into court circles. William de Champvent, a significant curialis and Dean of St Martinle-Grand, London, was employed on missions to the pope.154 Peter’s other clerical brothers benefited from English connections. Otto obtained three livings from the crown and another through his brother’s holding of a wardship,155 and Gerard was a canon of Lincoln.156 Although they were to rise in ecclesiastical rank, they were largely absentees.157 Pugeys’ brother, however, was a humble knight, and of Bezill’s two brothers, Luke received one living and the promise of another,158 and John just one.159 Despite the problems associated with the political upheavals of the thirteenth century, none of the stewards lost the support of his sovereign. The Pugeys family pursued the most overt strategy to assimilate. Hereditary lands were obtained, 145 146 147 148

VCH Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely, ix. 131. CPR 1324–7, 99, 101, 106, 155. CPR 1324–7, 322. CP 40/173, mm. ccxxvi, ccclxv, lxxxv, cccclxxxxviii, clxxviiid, xxiiiid; A. Harding, England in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, 1993), 173. 149 S. Painter, Studies in the History of the English Feudal Barony (Baltimore, 1943), 176. 150 CIPM, vii. no. 511. Between 1337 and 1350 his arms were recorded on an ordinary (N.H. Nicolas, Rolls of Arms of the Reigns of Henry III and Edward III (1829), 44). 151 BL, Cotton MS Tiberius D X, fol. 679. The folio edge is burnt and the identification of the king is lost. 152 CIPM, xix. no. 559, p. 202. 153 See, e.g., the career of Peter IV Bezill (d. 1423): List of Sheriffs, 108; CPR 1391–6, 498; CPR 1399–1401, 211, 556; CPR 1401–5, 287, 515; CPR 1405–8, 197, 489; CPR 1413–16, 178; CCR 1402–5, 367; CCR 1405–9, 64; A.E. Preston, The Church and Parish of St Nicholas, Abingdon and Other Papers (Oxford Historical Soc. 99, 1935), 462; CIPM, xix. nos. 37, 432; The House of Commons 1386–1421, Members A–D, ed. J.S. Roskell, L. Clark and C. Rawcliffe (Stroud, 1992), 216–17. 154 Royal Letters, ii. 207; CPR 1258–66, 221. 155 CPR 1258–66, 44, 169; CPR 1266–72, 710; CPL, i. 508. 156 SC 1/23/164. 157 SC 1/23/164; CPL, i. 508; Reg. Thomas of Corbridge, Lord Archbishop of York 1300–14, 2 vols (Surtees Soc. 138, 141, 1925–8), i. 136–7, 148. 158 CPR 1232–47, 39, 355, 386. 159 CPR 1232–47, 244.

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English wives married, and local office was accepted without losing the support of the crown. But a marital link to the murderer, John de Moleyns, brought the family to an abrupt end. The Champvents squandered their chances. Their decline was caused by an apparent lack of identification with England shown by the absence of English wives and local allegiances. This was coupled with indebtedness. Whilst their cousins, the Grandsons, rose to the highest ranks of the baronage, married into comital families and obtained the Order of the Garter,160 the Champvents simply melted away. In the end it was the Bezills with their commitment to England and, above all, their fertility who made the most sustained impact. Seemingly typical English villages with poetic double names such as Broughton Poggs, Besselsleigh, and above all Stoke Poges, the scene of Gray’s Elegy, all retain memories of these alien families. Perhaps it is significant that the name ‘Stokechauent’ in Somerset, recorded in 1397, did not persist.161 The alien origin of the families was not forgotten. Around 1535, three hundred years after the Bezills had first arrived in England and a generation after they had become extinct, the antiquary John Leland, commenting on Besselsleigh, wrote ‘The Blessells hathe bene lords of it syns the time of Edwarde the First or afore’, and that they ‘cam out of Province in France, and were men of activitye in feates of armes, as it apperithe in monuments in Leigh how he faught in listes with a strange knight that chalengyed him, at the whiche deade the Kynge and Quene at that tyme of England were present’.162

160 161 162

Complete Peerage, vi. 60–73. CIPM, xvii. no. 869. The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the years 1535–1543, v, ed. L. Toulmin Smith (1910), 72–3. Nothing has been discovered about the tournament referred to.

John b c. 1362 m Thomasina Berton Radcot, Brompton

Cecily m Thomas Rogers

Elizabeth m Richard Fettiplace

William III fl. 1451 d 1515 Sheriff of Oxfordshire and Berkshire m Alice Harcourt

Thomas fl. 1428 d 1458 m Clemence, remarried John de Nowers Leigh Carswell

William II fl. 1425–30 Coroner of Wiltshire m Mabel Chilton, Boure, Stilton, Little Trowle

William fl. 1391–1430 Coroner of Wiltshire Stourton?

Peter fl. 1361 m Isabel Eweton

Thomas 1313–1378 Thomas fl. 1300–1323 m Katherine, Rector of All Saints h. of John de Leigh the Less London Brompton, Redcot, Grafton, Carswell, Hestercombe Leigh (Besselsleigh)

Alexander fl. 1316 Keeper of Chippenham

Peter, nephew of Aimery, fl. 1274/6 m Joan Dagenham

John fl. 1241–58 Parson of Essinden

Peter b bef. 1363 ob.s.p. 1423 (heir was Thomas) m (1) Joan Coteway (2) Margaret Hannys remarried William Warbleton MP Oxfords, Sheriff, Escheator and Commissioner Oxfords and Berks

Geoffrey fl. 1352–80 Prior of Brandestoke

John fl. 1303 Brompton

Margaret fl. 1478 m Nicholas Hall

Humphrey fl. 1463–68 Rector of Sherfield on Loddon

Edmund fl. 1346 m Elizabeth Brompton

John fl. 1431 Petersham, Chilton

Peter fl. 1343–5 Rector of Didmartorum

Mathias III 1301–1361 Way Baieuse, Little Piddle, Woodhill

Peter 1302–1327 Woodhill, Alphington

Thomas fl. 1275–80 Woodrow

Edward d 1304 m Joan Woodhill, Alphington

daughter fl. 1260 m son of Hugh de Vivonne

Aimery fl. 1253–73 King’s Valet Osmondiston, Stutson, Dagenham

Geoffrey 1275–1339 m Agnes fl. 1318 d 1349 Buckland, Grafton

Mathias II fl. 1271 d 1295 m Elizabeth coh. of John d’Averinges Brompton Regis, Buckland, Radcot

Mathias I arrived 1233 d 1268 m Beatrice de Bassingham d bef. 1276 Alphington, Woodhill, Sherston

John b c. 1245 d 1291 m Margaret dau of Elias Rabayn Alphington, Didmarton, Langford, Sherston and Woodrow

Luke fl. 1234–43 Parson of Alesthorp

The Bezill Family

Three Alien Royal Stewards 65

Peter knighted 1258 fl. 1281

Edith fl. 1294 m Geoffrey Langlay

Edith fl. 137? Wiltshire ?

Imbert fl. 1285

William ? fl. 1343 Prior of Panfield

Thomas m Alice (de Brok?) remarried Richard de Waledon

John murdered 1326

Alice b 1298 m William Langley Arrington

Margaret m John Maudit

Joan b 1302 m Batholomew Galyen

Peter murdered 1326 m Elizabeth fl. 1324–45 remarried (1) Nicholas le Sperse (2) Gilbert Havard

Robert fl. 1264 d 1330 m before 1269 Amice h of Richard de Stoke (d 1254) Bampton, Arrington, Stoke Poges, Poyle, Great Delce, Berwick, Flitcham, Beechamwell

Imbert arrived England 1236 d 1263 m Joan dau. of William d’Aguillon widow of Ralph FitzBernard Knight of the Shire Gussage, Comshall, Bampton, Arrington Warringford, Kingsdown, Tong, Bapchild, Little Chatham (Ilmer Abbots Aston, Joan’s dower)

The Pugeys Family

Egidia b 1308 d 1366/7 m John de Moleyns Stoke Poges

66 Michael Ray

Henry d c. 1315

Girard Otto d 1312 Canon of Lincoln Bishop of Lausanne Geneva and Lausanne

Hughes Canon of Lausanne

Jean Gaucher (illegitimate)

Humbert d c. 1313 Savoyard lands

Jean ob.s.p. 1336 m Catherine dau Rudolf, Count of Neuchâtel

John fl. 1344

John d bef. 1333 m Eva Impington Wepham

Jordanne d. 1300 m (1) Girard de la Tour (2) James de Cossonay

others

Marguerite m Richard le Duin Seigneur de Vuflens

Peter d 1303 Gaucher fl. 1251–69 m Agnes fl. 1310 Impington, Wepham Offham, Hesset Rougham, Little Reynes Beumont cum Moze

Otto de Grandson

William d 1301 Dean of St Martin le Grand Bishop of Lausanne

Peter de Grandson m Agnes dau of Count Ulric of Neuchatel

Henry de Champvent d c. 1256 m Helvie

Guillaume de Sarraz m Antoine d’Oron

Ebal de Grandson

Michael Ray

The de Champvent Family

Three Alien Royal Stewards 67

The Eyre de terris datis, 1267–1272

Susan Stewart Susan Stewart

On 28 October 1267, William de Sutwell came before the justices de terris datis at Lewes in Sussex to complain that William de Detling was depriving him of his wardship of a carucate of land in Bodiam, which his father, also William de Detling, had appropriated during the recent civil unrest. William de Detling did not come to answer the complaint and was resummoned to be in court on 31 October, when he again defaulted; the wardship was taken into the king’s hand. After further non-appearances, it was adjudged that William de Sutwell should recover the wardship. William de Sutwell was lord of Bodiam, from whom John de Bodiam held a carucate. John had died at Kenilworth Castle fighting with the rebels who continued resistance after the battle of Evesham, leaving an under-age son to inherit. William de Detling senior, a knight from Folkestone and a loyal supporter of the king, was granted after Evesham, among other modest rewards, the lands and tenements of John de Bodiam. William de Detling died shortly after John de Bodiam, and was succeeded by his son, William, whose inheritance included the wardship of John de Bodiam’s heir, which William de Sutwell claimed as lord of the fee. When William de Detling heard of the judgment, he hastened before the justices by then in session at Chichester to claim his right to redemption payment for the wardship under the terms of the Dictum of Kenilworth. The case was adjourned by request of the parties to Bermondsey on 27 January 1268 but William de Detling again defaulted and the case was heard coram rege at Westminster on 22 April 1268, where William de Detling regained seisin in anticipation of receiving ransom.1 Before redemption was agreed, claims for damages on both sides had to be assessed by inquest. After adjournments through lack of jurors, the court coram rege passed the case back to the justices de terris datis, who were by then in session at Barnwell in Cambridgeshire.2 The king ordered them to fix up the redemption settlement immediately and sort out the claims for damages, but on 20 January 1269 William de Detling again did not come to court, the wardship was again taken into the king’s hand, and the case was put back to 16 February.3 By then William de Sutwell was ready with his list of damages which included compensation for the theft of four oxen, wood valued at 4 marks, and fish from the Great Fishpond in Bodiam worth 10 marks. The two men disagreed on the value of the wardship, William de Sutwell claiming he should pay redemption on a value of 6 marks and 10s a year, while William de Detling said it was worth 12 marks a year. A local jury was ordered to bring a valuation to the hearing at Lambeth in April 1269, where William de Sutwell

1 2 3

KB 26/184A, m. 11; JUST 1/1207, m. 2d. KB 26/184A, m. 11; KB 26/186, m. 1d. JUST 1/83, mm. 4, 11d.

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had a litany of new complaints ready.4 He accused named local men from both the Sussex and Kent sides of the county boundary of breaking into Bodiam church during the period of civil war and stealing arms and other goods which he had in safe-keeping there to a value of 73 marks in addition to the destruction of his woods and the theft of his fish. He also produced witnesses that William de Detling had threatened him with bodily injury. After at least three further adjournments, both men came coram rege on 6 October 1269, where each sought licence to make a concord with the other, the terms of which were that they remitted and quitclaimed all trespass and injury each to the other, William de Detling gave up all claim to redemption, and William de Sutwell recovered seisin of his wardship.5 This dispute was typical of the post-war court processes which the eyre de terris datis had been set up to hear and determine. After a period of civil conflict such as that between 1258 and 1265, retribution involving loss of life, lands and liberty might have been expected to be inflicted on the losers. What in fact took place after 1265 was a carefully crafted set of procedures, based on a humanely conceived and implemented formula of ransom instead of forfeiture, through which the wounds of civil strife were mitigated and healed in a way broadly acceptable to both sides. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the part played by the eyre de terris datis in this reconciliation process, with particular reference to people and events in the counties of Surrey, Sussex and Kent. No one can consider the aftermath of the Barons’ War without acknowledging the debt owed to C.H. Knowles for his work on The Disinherited, 1265–80, written in 1959.6 This paper is extensively informed by his penetrating thesis. From more than a quarter of a century before Knowles’s work, Part II of Jacob’s Studies in the Period of Baronial Reform and Rebellion contains insights and guidelines to illuminate the way for future investigators.7 To begin, a reminder of the circumstances and scope of the eyre de terris datis. Immediately after the defeat of Simon de Montfort at the battle of Evesham on 4 August 1265, there was a wholesale and uncontrolled appropriation of the lands of the rebels by the victorious royalists. Quite quickly, the royal administration realised what was happening and ordered that all rebel lands were to be surrendered to the king. On 21 September royal commissioners were appointed for each county to ascertain who were the rebels and what lands they had held and who held them now.8 Some of the commissioners’ reports and valuations have survived, among them many for Sussex and Kent and a few for Surrey.9 Once the king knew what lands were forfeit to him, he then was able to grant them away as rewards to his supporters, often confirming a de facto occupation usually in the form ‘To A, all the lands and tenements of B, the king’s enemy’. The records of a great many of these grants also survive.10 That, as far as the victorious royalists were concerned, should 4 5 6

JUST 1/1207, mm. 12, 12d. JUST 1/83, m. 15; KB 26/193, m. 11. C.H. Knowles, ‘The Disinherited 1265–80: A Political and Social Survey of the Supporters of Simon de Montfort and the Resettlement after the Barons’ War’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Wales, 1959). 7 E.F. Jacob, Studies in the Period of Baronial Reform and Rebellion, 1258–1267 (Oxford, 1925), Part II, ‘Some Legal Records of 1264–70 relating to the Period of Disturbance’. For a more recent overview, see J.R. Maddicott, ‘Edward I and the Lessons of Baronial Reform, 1258–80’, TCE, i (1986), 1–9. 8 CPR 1258–66, 490. 9 CIMisc i. nos 609–940, 1024. 10 There are four main sources of evidence for royal grants of rebel land: Close Rolls (Supplementary) of the Reign of Henry III 1244–66, ed. A. Morton (1975); an Exchequer roll, E 1/24, ‘Terrae Rebellium

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have been that. But the aftermath of war is never straightforward. In the first place, the war was not over; faced with ruin, disinherited Montfortians with nothing to lose continued to fight in Kenilworth, the Isle of Ely, the Isle of Axholm and the forests of Hampshire.11 Secondly, some of those reported by the commissioners to be rebels protested that they had never fought against the king and therefore should not be deprived of their lands. Thirdly, there were all those who could claim immunity from penalty for their activities during the civil war on the grounds that they were of the household or service of Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester, Thomas his brother or John Giffard.12 Fourthly, there were quarrels among the victors over the spoils. At the parliament held in August 1266 beside the besieged Kenilworth Castle, in return for the promise of financial aid, the king acceded to the pressure of the papal legate, Ottobuono, which led to the drafting of the terms of surrender by a committee of magnates.13 They were published as the Dictum of Kenilworth at the end of October – a take-it-or-leave-it settlement offering to the rebels or their heirs repossession of their lands in return for a graded scale of payment to be made by the disinherited rebel to those to whom the lands had been granted.14 By a demonstration of strength in London in April 1267, Gilbert de Clare bought for the rebels in the Isle of Ely the promise of safe-conduct and inclusion in the terms of the Dictum of Kenilworth.15 By July the bulk of the rebels had accepted the terms of the Dictum and had made arrangements for the payment of their ransom. However, it became clear that there remained a hard core of difficult cases requiring judicial intervention. Some cases appeared coram rege but to speed the process, a special eyre was commissioned in September 1267 ‘to hear and determine pleas concerning lands and tenements granted (de terris datis) and trespasses committed in the time of disturbance in the realm’.16 The country was divided into four circuits, North, Central, East and West, with four teams of experienced and loyal justices.17 It is difficult to appreciate the extent of the work of the de terris datis justices as their surviving records are seriously incomplete: only eight plea rolls of the eyre de terris datis are preserved and some of those are fragmentary. From the Central

datae fidelibus tempore RHIII in diversis comitatibus Angliae’ printed in Rotuli Selecti, ed. J. Hunter (Rec. Comm., 1834); CChR 1257–1300, 56, 58; and entries in CPR 1258–66, e.g. 457, 464, 467, 503, 514. 11 The Osney chronicle, on the side of the Montfortians, attributes Simon the younger’s resistance at Kenilworth and the continued defiance of many rebels to the perceived injustice of disinheritance: Osney, 182–3. 12 As recorded in a copy of the royal charter in JUST 1/1207, m. 1d. This immunity was the reward to the earl of Gloucester and Giffard for changing allegiance from Montfort to the king in March 1265. 13 CPR 1258–66, 671–2; Dunstable, 243. The group comprised four bishops, of Exeter, Bath, Worcester and St David’s, the earls of Gloucester and Hereford, Philip Basset, John Balliol, Robert Walerand, Alan de la Zouche, Roger de Somery and Warin de Bassingbourne. Any disagreement within the group was to be submitted to the arbitration of the legate and Henry de Almain. 14 DBM, 316–37. The Dictum and the Addicio Dicti of modifications and interpretations are printed in SR i. 12–18. 15 Wykes, 198–205. 16 The words of the headings of the de terris datis plea rolls. 17 CPR 1266–72, 160. The circuits and justices were: NORTH, Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmorland, Lancashire, Nottingham and Derby (Eustace de Balliol, Adam de Gesemouth and Richard de Middleton); CENTRAL, Lincoln, Northampton, Leicester, Warwick, Rutland, Oxford, Berkshire, Buckingham and Bedford (John le Breton, Robert de Nevill and Roger de Somery); WEST, Shropshire, Stafford, Hereford, Worcester, Gloucester, Devon, Somerset, Dorset, Wiltshire and Hampshire (Nicholas FitzMartin, the abbot of Sherborne and Andrew Wake); EAST, Surrey, Sussex, Kent, Middlesex, Hertford, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridge and Huntingdon (William de St Omer, Simon de Creye and John Lovel).

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circuit, led for several years by Nicholas de Yattendon, who replaced Roger de Somery in November 1267, rolls of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire survive, and from the Eastern circuit, those from Essex, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, fragments from Norfolk and JUST 1/1207 from Surrey and Sussex, which is at the heart of this paper.18 From the two other circuits nothing remains. The results of their work can be found in redemption agreements in the Close Rolls, in charters and in follow-up cases and cross-references in coram rege plea rolls.19 In April 1272 their work was suspended, presumably because no new cases were coming forward. The nearest relative to de terris datis is Hugh Bigod’s special eyre of 1258–9. Both were political in intent but judicial in execution. Both relied heavily on the testimony of local people. Not least, many of those who in 1258–9 brought complaints against sheriffs and royal officials and favourites were the rebels (some succeeded by their heirs) answering to the Dictum of Kenilworth in 1268–9.20 John FitzGeoffrey was the first complainant before Hugh Bigod in July 1258, the issue being the fracas at Shere which was the trigger to the initial rebellion in April 1258; his son, John FitzJohn fought beside Montfort at Evesham and his lands were granted to Gilbert de Clare, including Shere as reported by the jurors of Blackheath at de terris datis.21 Michael Tovy the younger and Stephen Buckerel, members of London merchant families, brought querelae before Hugh Bigod and were indicted for rebel activities before the justices de terris datis.22 Geoffrey de Lucy, who complained to Hugh Bigod of the wasting of his manors while in the wardship of Geoffrey de Lusignan in the 1250s, was named by the jurors of Southwark as a companion in plundering expeditions with Simon de Montfort junior.23 Ralph de Imeworth brought complaints against Robert Aguilon and Aymer de Lusignan in 1258; the jurors of Emleybridge and Kingston reported that he was killed at Lewes fighting against the king, and that after Evesham his lands were given to Robert Aguilon.24 Robert, Gervase and William Bestenover, Ralph Heringaud and William Marmiun all had grievances against Peter of Savoy, the queen’s uncle, and his bailiffs to bring to Hugh Despenser’s special eyre in Sussex in 1260–1; in 1268–9 the hearings before the justices de terris datis were glutted with claims for damages made by Peter of Savoy and his associates resulting from the plundering activities of these very men and their associates.25 The de terris datis roll, JUST 1/1207, is very short, being only nine membranes with a couple of attached writs. The roll opens with the continuation of pleas and investigations from Lewes in Sussex where William de St Omer, Simon de Creye and John Lovel began their work in the last week of October and early November 1267. They moved on to Chichester in December.26 It seems likely that William de 18

Surviving rolls, Easter circuit: Cambridge, JUST 1/83; Essex, JUST 1/237; Suffolk, JUST 1/821; Norfolk, JUST 1/569B; Surrey and Sussex, JUST 1/1207. Central circuit: Berkshire, JUST 1/42; Buckinghamshire, JUST 1/59; Northamptonshire, JUST 1/618. 19 Two pleas from the Western circuit, copied following a writ of certiorari transferring them coram rege, appear in KB 26/201, mm. 7, 18. 20 Hugh Bigod’s eyre followed up the findings of the knights commissioned to investigate grievances, CPR 1247–58, 645–9. Pleas and querelae before Hugh Bigod are found in JUST 1/1187 and JUST 1/873, and those before Hugh Despenser in JUST 1/911. 21 JUST 1/1187, m. 1; JUST 1/1207, m. 5d. 22 JUST 1/1187, mm. 3, 8d, 9, 9d; JUST 1/1207, mm. 4, 9. 23 JUST 1/873, mm. 4d, 7d; JUST 1/1207, mm. 4, 9. 24 JUST 1/873, m. 9; JUST 1/1207, m. 5d. 25 JUST 1/911, mm. 2, 3, 18d; JUST 1/1207, mm. 2d, 3, 6, 9d, 11, 12d. 26 The Chichester session is referred to in KB 26/184A, m. 11.

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St Omer used the Christmas break to seek advice about the exact limits of his authority from the royal justices at Westminster who had drawn up the commission, with the result that a dozen complainants adjourned from Chichester to Bermondsey in January and February 1268 were told that the justices de terris datis would not hear their pleas and that they should buy a writ and take it to the general eyre or the Bench if they so wished.27 In March the Eastern team was in Essex, from which a small roll survives.28 From Easter up to the end of May, JUST 1/1207 records hearings back in Bermondsey. At some time in the late summer or early autumn, the team visited Norfolk, though the week of 13 October found them in Surrey again, this time at Lambeth. Then to Huntingdon in November 1268 and Cambridgeshire from December to February 1269. For a considerable time William de St Omer lodged at Barnwell Priory with his whole household, as the prior complained bitterly that he was ‘singularly burdened’ by William who occupied his residence for a whole year with ‘a great household and in addition his wife who sometimes had 22 women [in attendance] and although the prior had great expenses and made many sacrifices for Sir William and his household, however the same justice, not grateful for the prior’s very great kindness, amerced him 40s in the course of the eyre’. The prior complained that this amercement was made with no opportunity to clear himself of fault, so an inquest was held which exonerated the prior, and he was quit of the fine ‘with bad grace on the part of the justice’.29 The household remained at Barnwell while the team travelled to London to take the last recorded session in JUST 1/1207 at Lambeth in the week of 7 April 1269. After returning to Cambridge in May, the justices visited Suffolk in 1269–70 (for which there are records), and after that probably revisited some of the counties already covered. In June 1271 justices Ralph de Hengham and Stephen de Penchester were commissioned to hear a trespass committed during the time of disturbance in Kent because William de St Omer was too occupied elsewhere to attend to it.30 Though short, JUST 1/1207 is packed with information. It contains a full jury kalendar which allows comparison with the Surrey hundred juries in 1255 and 1263 to demonstrate continuity of administration at hundred level.31 Half the Surrey freeholders named as jurors in 1268 had served in previous juries or were of the family of a former serving juror. In eleven hundred juries and two borough juries of 1268, between five and seven jurors had served in 1263 or 1255 (and in the half hundred of Effingham four out of six), and in the eighteen juries both (eight hundreds and one borough) or one of (six hundreds and three boroughs) the electors were experienced eyre jurors. This level of continuity ensured that juries incorporated a knowledge of the law and of processes and procedure in the courts that gave credibility to their work, and the reliance put on their evidence confirmed the growing confidence and self-awareness of the hundred community.32 The de terris datis justices came, like justices itinerant, armed with a set of questions to be put to the hundred juries. The 27

The instruction, part of the Addicio Dicti, to the justices de terris datis to exclude all common pleas from their jurisdiction was written into the Marlborough Ordinance of Nov. 1267 in case the terms of the original commission had not made this plain. It is copied in JUST 1/998, m. 18 (a Wiltshire plea roll) and was included in Edward I’s reprise of the purpose of the eyre, dated 19 March 1276, CCR 1272–9, 333. 28 JUST 1/237. 29 Liber Memorandum Ecclesie de Bernewell, ed. J. Willis Clark (Cambridge, 1907), 124–5. 30 CPR 1266–72, 543. There is no record to show that William de St Omer ever held sessions in Kent, though some pleas from Kent were heard at Lewes and subsequently at Bermondsey. 31 JUST 1/1207, mm. 1, 1d; JUST 1/872, m. 42; JUST 1/874, m. 33. 32 The recorded default of some jurors gives hints of pockets of Montfortian support, e.g. in the borough of Kingston: JUST 1/1207, m. 2.

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first seven questions dealt with seizures and grants of land, the last eight asked about the loyalties and plundering activities of various groups of individuals. In response to the questions, the hundreds of Farnham, Godalming and Godley and the boroughs of Guildford, Reigate and Bletchingley all declared nichil: no seizures, no grants of land, no rebels.33 It may well be significant that all these except the royal borough of Guildford were private hundreds and boroughs owned respectively by the bishops of Winchester and Salisbury, the abbot of Chertsey, Gilbert de Clare, earl of Gloucester, and John Warenne, earl of Surrey. (The abbot of Chertsey had good reason to be wary of the de terris datis justices. One of the questions to the juries asked ‘what churchmen of whatever rank and degree aided and abetted in any way the earl of Leicester?’ At the Berkshire hearings held at Windsor in 1269, the abbot was asked to explain why he had supplied the garrison of Windsor with wood, corn and other necessities when it was held by rebels commanded by John FitzJohn. The abbot denied the charges and said that if any such goods had been supplied in his carts, his tenants were acting without his knowledge.34) The jurors of Wallington, Copthorne, Brixton, Kingston and Tandridge hundreds and the vill of Southwark gave informative and detailed statements demonstrating the effects of the civil disturbances in Surrey. In contrast to the plea rolls of the general eyre and other royal courts, references to women are very sparse. For example, in the Surrey eyre roll of 1263 (a roll three times longer), women take a part, often a leading part, in over half the civil actions: 194 women are named either as plaintiffs or defendants apart from references in other capacities. In JUST 1/1207, only eleven women are named and two are referred to without name. The lack of women in de terris datis proceedings is not because women were unaffected by the aftermath of the civil war. Indeed the plight of the widows and wives of the disinherited was an early concern of the king: in February 1266 ‘by way of grace and humanity’ the wife of a rebel who was languishing in prison and whose lands had been granted to a royal serjeant was given back a third of the property for the maintenance of herself and her children.35 Many wives and widows benefited from similar consideration; their right to lands of their own inheritance, to dower and sufficient maintenance was written into the Dictum of Kenilworth.36 Ransoms to those who had been granted these lands were deferred until the death of the dowager which meant that a few redemptions were still incomplete in the first decade of the fourteenth century. To return to particular cases, and first briefly back to William de Detling. Before the battle of Lewes, as reward for his active service for the king in Kent, William senior was granted the manor of Peckham with two carucates held by John de Peckham who was at that time fighting on the rebel side at the siege of Rochester Castle.37 After Evesham, this grant stood and John de Peckham took early steps to redeem his lands from William. John de Peckham, probably on his way home from the battle of Lewes, raided Nicholas de Yattendon’s manor of Bungehurst in Mayfield in the Canterbury lordship of South Malling, taking goods to the value of £10. Nicholas, who was the leading justice in the Central de terris datis circuit, brought his case against John de Peckham by attorney.38 John declared that as he already was ransomed, according to the Dictum of Kenilworth he did not have to answer any further charges. On submitting proof of his status, John was quit. The entry in the roll is of interest as it closely follows, in an abbreviated and slightly 33 34 35

JUST 1/1207, m. 3d. JUST 1/42, m. 15d. CPR 1258–66, 558.

36 37 38

Clause 31. CPR 1258–66, 311. JUST 1/1207, m. 3.

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garbled form, the wording of clause 35 of the Dictum of Kenilworth which the clerk evidently copied from the transcript carried by the justices.39 The terms of the Dictum allowed former rebels to argue and plead their way out of trouble. Whereas officers of the earl of Leicester who committed crimes must pay five times the annual value of their lands (clause 12), those who were coerced or driven by fear to rob and plunder had to pay a ransom of only one year’s value of their lands (clause 27); and those who proved that they were not rebels could immediately recover their lands (clause 32). William de Goldingham, of whose activity as a rebel in Sussex the de terris datis record bears witness, used every loophole and powerful contacts at court to regain his lands after Evesham. In November 1265, Philip Basset and Roger Mortimer testified his loyalty to the king, and he recovered his confiscated lands.40 He cannot have felt his position to be assured as he is listed among those submitting and receiving royal pardons in July 1267.41 He was accused at the de terris datis hearings in Lewes of robbing Peter of Savoy, and charged that as chief bailiff of Simon de Montfort junior he harmed the king’s supporters in whatever ways he could.42 He could not deny the charges, but said in mitigation that he had become Simon’s bailiff under duress. Despite this plea, Goldingham was ordered by the justices de terris datis to redeem himself according to the terms of the Dictum of Kenilworth. Whether he was able to call on his friends at court again is not on record, though he was relentlessly pursued for damages by Denise de Norton, a wine merchant of Pevensey (the most prominent of the few women whose pleas are recorded in JUST 1/1207), whose daughter was married to John de la Rede, Peter of Savoy’s steward. In January 1269 at Barnwell, the sheriff was still trying to locate land from which to levy £5 8s to compensate Denise for the loss of 36 acres of hay.43 In February 1269 Goldingham’s name came up again at Barnwell.44 After the battle of Evesham, he had allegedly sent rebel forces from the Isle of Ely to plunder the manor of Dullingham and the stolen goods were taken to his house in Essex. (So much for his loyalty to the king!) The dispute between Walter de Mulsham and Richard de Exemouth was presented by the jurors of Southwark. Richard, a London merchant, was granted Walter’s houses in Southwark worth 4½ marks as reward for his own loyalty and long service to the king and for that of his recently deceased father.45 Walter was pardoned on 17 January 1268 and came before the justices at Bermondsey to redeem his property later in the same month.46 Richard’s response to Walter’s request for redemption was, even as recorded dispassionately by the clerk, a forceful outpouring of detail about Walter’s activities as a rebel, at the battle of Lewes, at Mortlake (where he plundered the archbishop of Canterbury of two horses, four oxen and 300 sheep), at Kingston (where he robbed and killed Jews and carried off royal treasure), at Maldon and Merton (where he plundered Walter de Merton of eight oxen and other goods and treasure), at Lewisham (where he robbed William Bonquer of chattels and timber), and at a house near Southwark that had belonged to Richard’s father, William de Exmouth (which he robbed and then burnt down).47 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Edward I’s instructions to Roger de Seyton and his fellows, CCR 1272–9, 333. CR 1264–8, 218. CPR 1266–72, 148–50. JUST 1/1207, m. 2. JUST 1/83, m. 4. Ibid., m. 11. CPR 1258–66, 468; CR 1264–8, 60, 87; CPR 1266–72, 364–5. CPR 1266–72, 273. JUST 1/1207, mm. 3d, 4d, 5.

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Walter denied that he had been at the battle of Lewes, or Maldon or Merton or Kingston or at William de Exemouth’s house. He admitted that he had taken part in the incidents at Mortlake and Lewisham but only as the agent of the earl of Gloucester, who at that time was against the king but who subsequently received pardon for himself and all his adherents. The jurors of the hundreds of Kingston, Brixton and the vill of Southwark were called on to give the facts on oath. They said that Walter had set out for Lewes but had fallen ill before the battle and gone home. He had plundered, with others, the goods of Walter de Merton. He had gone to Kingston in the company of armed men but had done no harm to either Jews or Christians. He had, with his accomplices, gone to William de Exemouth’s house and taken goods, and after failing to burn it because it was tiled and plastered, pulled it down and carried off the timbers. Judgment followed that Walter should pay redemption to Richard of five times the annual value of the forfeited properties. The details of the redemption agreement are enrolled, together with a transcript of the charter (of 18 October 1265) by which the king granted the houses to Richard and which was cancelled by the redemption. But before the agreement with Richard de Exemouth was completed, Richard de la Vache, the steward of John Warenne, earl of Surrey, claimed that one of the houses belonged to his lord.48 It later transpired that Warenne had bought one of Walter’s forfeited houses from Richard. Now Walter de Mulsham was up against a formidable opponent. Unresolved hearings moved from St Albans, back to Bermondsey in April, to Stonecross in July, at Lambeth and then Huntingdon in October, to Barnwell in December 1268 and January and February 1269. In April 1269 at Lambeth and at Barnwell in May, Walter was still pressing his case; John Warenne’s default caused a further adjournment to Hertford on 25 June.49 There the records run out, but it is clear that Warenne was making life as difficult as possible for Walter. Walter, represented by an attorney who seemed less than competent, became embroiled in a legal argument about the precise nature of the property in dispute and the validity of a writ that had not specified the quantity of land and tenements. This sequence of events demonstrates that when someone as powerful and tenacious as John Warenne was determined to keep a property, he could frustrate a former rebel’s attempts to pay ransom despite the efforts of the justices de terris datis to facilitate the process. Walter may have been somewhat consoled by the relative kindness of Walter de Merton, who accepted only 4 marks as damages for his depredations at Maldon and Merton.50 Walter de Merton as a principal royal official was targeted by Montfortian forces on many occasions. Details of considerable loss and damage to his Surrey properties at Maldon, Merton and Farlegh were reported by the jurors of Kingston and Tandridge. His property in Finsbury was also plundered. Several of the leading perpetrators were vouched by the earl of Gloucester, and to others Walter showed a dignified measure of Christian forbearance.51 Another royal official targeted by Montfortian plunderers was John Mansel, but he did not survive exile to recover his property. A long and somewhat defaced account, dated 3 February 1268, of Mansel’s

48 49

Ibid., m. 5. JUST 1/83, mm. 1d, 8, 13d; JUST 1/1207, mm. 9, 11d, 12d. The Stone Cross, in the Strand close by St Clement Danes, was an ancient open-air manorial court assembly place; the name was attached to the locus of the Middlesex eyre and county court, by the thirteenth century no doubt adjacent to the growing complex of inns of court. 50 JUST 1/1207, m. 9. 51 Ibid., mm. 5, 5d, 9d.

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lease of the manor of Sheen, the losses he incurred there, and the efforts of his executors to recover both his chattels and the unexpired leasehold is the earlier stage of the plea held coram rege on 29 February 1268. As the case involved people of importance, including the earl of Gloucester, there was an augmented jury including experienced and knowledgeable knights and leading freeholders from Kingston, Copthorne and Wallington hundreds cited individually, as well as the whole juries of Copthorne and Kingston hundreds.52 The justices received an order by royal writ to investigate the losses and damage to the properties in Southwark, Mitcham and Carshalton of another hardworking curialis, John le Moine.53 John’s main holdings were in Cambridgeshire, and immediately after Evesham he was given charge of the crucial counties of Cambridge and Huntingdon, where rebels were still defying the king. In the following years he served as a justice of the Jews, guardian of the see of Worcester following the death of Walter Cantilupe (the staunchly Montfortian bishop who gave absolution to Simon de Montfort’s army before Evesham), escheator south of the Trent, and steward of the forests between Oxford and Stamford.54 The jurors of the hundred of Wallington and the vill of Southwark reported on John’s losses during 1264–5 from his manor of Carshalton which he leased from Ingram de Fiennes, a Flemish knight much in favour at court. They described how Simon de Montfort junior and Geoffrey de Lucy stole a horse that John’s bailiff had distrained against rent arrears. Of more value, 50 marks worth of corn and other goods were taken over two harvests by an opportunist and chronically indebted neighbour, Gilbert de Colville. Perhaps it was the bailiff who offset the loss against rent to Ingram, but John himself should have checked. By judgment of the court, John was amerced for making a false claim and Ingram later collected the 50 marks from Gilbert de Colville.55 I think it is more than my imagining that detects a spirit of malice and ill will on the part of the jurors. John’s losses in Southwark were at the hands of the Londoners Stephen Bukerel, Michael Tovy and others, who also plundered Walter de Merton’s London property and that of Peter of Savoy.56 In February 1265, according to the jurors of Southwark, they took eight horses and jewels, wine, corn and other goods from John’s house in Southwark to the huge value of 200 marks. John had already accused these plunderers in November 1265 coram rege but they failed to appear.57 Indeed Stephen Bukerel escaped justice; by the time of his summons to answer before the justices de terris datis the message came from the bailiffs of London that he had died. But when Robert de Gotele, another Londoner named by John le Moine, appeared before the justices at Bermondsey in April 1268, John, without further explanation, withdrew from the case and he and his pledges were amerced.58 John le Moine’s main manor was at Shelford in Cambridgeshire where the local jurors reported arson, damage and loss. John brought a series of pleas against men 52

Ibid., m. 4d; KB 26/182, m. 17. The manor had been a royal serjeanty, held by John Belet until his death in 1231 when it was inherited by his daughters Emma Oliver and Alice de Vautort, and held in chief by knight service. A transcript of the plea coram rege is printed as Appendix VIII in Jacob’s Studies because it is an exemplar of the writ talem qualem framed in Addicio Dicti to give more time for loyalists to sue for recovery. See also Jacob, 204, 214. 53 JUST 1/1207, m. 4. 54 CPR 1258–66, 287, 445, 517, 553, 607; CR 1264–8, 154; CR 1268–72, 34 and elsewhere. 55 CR 1268–72, 144. 56 JUST 1/1207, mm. 5, 9. 57 KB 26/174, m. 18d. 58 JUST 1/1207, m. 9.

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who he believed had been responsible for the attack. Again the local juries were less than helpful; some defendants were found not guilty and John was amerced for a false claim against others.59 More defendants evaded judgment by constant defaults, and distraining them proved difficult as their property was in other counties. Finally, the case of young William Heringaud. His father Ralph was appointed baronial sheriff of Hampshire in the autumn of 1258, but had been unable to take up the office because of illness.60 He brought complaints at the special eyre of 1260–1 about unreasonable distraints made by Geoffrey de Brayboeuf, bailiff of Peter of Savoy on his Sussex manors (Icklesham, a major Battle Abbey honor), perhaps at the root of his reformist sympathies.61 Ralph fought and died for Simon de Montfort at the battle of Lewes. After Evesham, his lands, which extended across eight counties including Sussex, Surrey, Kent and Hampshire, were granted to Queen Eleanor. William, who had been present with his father at Lewes, inherited both the obligation to redeem the family lands and his father’s considerable debts to the Jews.62 All went well at first; at the instance of Gilbert de Clare, he received the king’s pardon and restoration of his lands subject to redemption.63 In March 1268 he acknowledged he owed Queen Eleanor £40.64 He appeared at the eyre de terris datis among the plunderers of Peter of Savoy and expressed his readiness to come to a settlement. The record of his hearing in the coram rege roll of Hilary 1270 shows that William de St Omer and his fellow justices were ordered to have his lands valued because the redemption he had so far paid reflected, allegedly, scarcely half the value of his lands.65 Gilbert de Chalfont on behalf of the queen argued that scarcely a quarter of Ralph’s lands in Sussex alone had been valued and that lands in other counties had never been valued because they had been the dower of his widow Alice, who had lately died. Moreover William fought at Lewes against the king and should also answer for robberies, arson and other depredations against friends and supporters of the king. William in vain produced his charter of pardon and quitclaim from the king and asserted that he had been under age at Lewes, under his father’s authority, and of too tender years to be carrying arms. Gilbert de Chalfont swept aside William’s protestations and said that his activities against the king in Surrey and Sussex had been proved at the eyre de terris datis, and moreover that the king’s charter was useless because William had no paper from the queen witnessing that redemption had taken place. Valuations were ordered from the sheriffs of Surrey and Sussex, and Hampshire, and when the manors were found to be worth £70 5s 8d a year, Gilbert de Chalfont again dismissed William’s evidence. On 9 February 1272, it was adjudged that William must satisfy the queen with full redemption based on the new valuations, and until he did so, the land was returned to the queen. The queen also had an interest in Ralph’s debts to the Jews as an amount of no less than £116 of Ralph’s debt to Benjamin Crespin was earmarked when paid as queen’s gold.66 In Trinity 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

JUST 1/83, mm. 7, 13, 22. CPR 1247–58, 655; E 368/34, m. 5. JUST 1/911, m. 18d. CPR 1258–66, 205; CR 1264–8, 466, 471. CPR 1258–66, 552; CR 1264–8, 237. CR 1264–8, 523. KB 26/197, m. 20d. Queen’s gold was a levy for the private use of the queen of 10% on voluntary fines of 10 marks or more made with the king. In this case, Crespin had lent money to Ralph for payment of his fines to the king, of which 10% was due to the queen from William as Ralph’s heir. See M. Howell, Eleanor of Provence: Queenship in Thirteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1998), 262–3, 273–4.

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term 1279 William, appearing at the Exchequer of the Jews, tried to deny this obligation.67 He said that anyway the queen still occupied his lands, but the queen’s treasurer said this was against the unpaid redemption. William said that by now she had received the issues for so many years that all his debts and more were covered. The case was adjourned but there is no further record in the Michaelmas plea roll.68 William Heringaud was no match for the implacable Queen Eleanor and her wily attorney, but in many cases the justices de terris datis succeeded in bringing settlement and concord. While the political intentions of the restoration of royal authority and the king’s peace were secured, the judicial process of the eyre brought reconciliation to the shires. The justices of the eyre worked in co-operation with the court coram rege, and together decisions of the courts had a profound effect on the lives of both disinherited rebels and loyalists.69 The records made of their investigations give a detailed and vivid account of the impact of civil war on local communities.70 The examples quote a variety of experiences after Evesham, and show how the justices de terris datis, following the terms and textual twists of the Dictum of Kenilworth brought judgment in a fair manner in the disputes which inevitably arose. The justices emphasised at all times the value of agreement and reconciliation to mitigate bitterness and strife and to resolve conflict. Their remit was defined and restricted, but their approach, as far as we can judge from the rolls that survive, was systematic, rigorous and impartial. The record of their work in the surviving rolls de terris datis both confirms and expands insight into the protagonists and events in the localities during the civil wars and gives distinctive and unique detail and definition to post-war social and political adjustment.

67 68

E 9/32, m. 2d. Margaret Howell (Eleanor of Provence, 266) saw this as an example of the queen using her privileged position to victimise her opponent. 69 Jacob (Studies, 217) surmised that the relatively few redemption cases under the Dictum of Kenilworth that were originated coram rege, as distinct from those brought from the eyre de terris datis sessions by writs of certiorari, probably demonstrate the thorough way in which the de terris datis justices did their work. 70 Particularly as the disputants tended to be locally based rebels rather than the leading rebels who paid their ransoms without argument (Jacob, 188).

Joan, Wife of Llywelyn the Great*

Louise J. Wilkinson Joan, Wife Louise of Llywelyn J. Wilkinson the Great

Within recent years, the pioneering research of Margaret Howell and John Carmi Parsons has brought into sharper focus the importance of personal and dynastic ties forged through marriage in shaping the fabric of thirteenth-century politics.1 Together their work permits us to reconsider the question of women’s agency, in the light of some interesting models for female involvement in political life. Continually recurring themes are the roles played both by kings’ wives and by kings’ daughters as benevolent counsellors and intercessors with their husbands, fathers and sons, following the biblical examples of Esther and the Virgin Mary.2 Although thirteenth-century English queens have been well served by biographical studies in the last decade, the lives of the daughters, wives and widows of the native Welsh princes are only beginning to attract renewed interest. This paper will place the eventful life of Joan, the illegitimate daughter of King John and wife of Llywelyn the Great, prince of North Wales, within the context of existing scholarship on royal women. Joan is one of the few wives of a native Welsh prince who emerges as more than a name from the sources. In charters, letters, English government records, and the accounts of both English and Welsh chroniclers, she appears as a politically active figure in her own right, nurturing relations between the royal courts of England and Gwynedd. Admittedly, her prominent participation in politics did not meet with universal approval. Robin Chapman Stacey has recently argued that the compiler of at least one early thirteenth-century Welsh legal text remodelled the traditional material on the king’s wife in order to criticize Joan’s involvement in Welsh affairs.3 Joan’s experiences are also illuminating because they stand in sharp contrast to *

I am grateful to Huw Pryce for his helpful suggestions and advice on various aspects of this paper. Both writers have shed important light on the patriarchal structures governing royal marriages in this period, but they have also shown how some royal women, like Eleanor of Provence, exercised considerable power and influence within their husbands’ realms by building upon personal relationships and manipulating contemporary perceptions of ‘queenship’. See M. Howell, Eleanor of Provence: Queenship in Thirteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1998); M. Howell, ‘Royal Women of England and France in the Mid-Thirteenth Century: A Gendered Perspective’, in England and Europe in the Reign of Henry III (1216–1272), ed. B.K.U. Weiler and I.W. Rowlands (Aldershot, 2002), 163–81; J.C. Parsons, ‘Mothers, Daughters, Marriage, Power: Some Plantagenet Evidence, 1150–1500’, in Medieval Queenship, ed. J.C. Parsons (Stroud, 1994, repr. 1998), 63–78; J.C. Parsons, Eleanor of Castile: Queen and Society in Thirteenth-Century England (1995). 2 Howell, Eleanor of Provence, 257–9; J.C. Parsons, ‘The Queen’s Intercession in Thirteenth-Century England’, in Power of the Weak: Studies on Medieval Women, ed. J. Carpenter and S.B. MacLean (Chicago, 1995), 147–77; J.C. Parsons, ‘The Intercessionary Patronage of Queens Margaret and Isabella of France’, TCE, vi (1997), 145–56. See also L.L. Huneycutt, ‘Intercession and the High Medieval Queen: The Esther Topos’, in Power of the Weak, ed. Carpenter and MacLean, 126–46. 3 See R.C. Stacey, ‘King, Queen, and Edling in the Laws of Court’, in The Welsh King and his Court, ed. T.M. Charles-Edwards, M.E. Owen and P. Russell (Cardiff, 2000), 29–62 at 53–62. 1

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those of her stepmother, Isabella of Angoulême, whose political influence within England, Nicholas Vincent has shown, was deliberately circumscribed by her husband, King John. Denied control of her dower and also possibly of her Queen’s Gold, Isabella lacked the material resources which might have allowed her to play a more prominent part in court politics.4 Nevertheless, accounts of the lives of Isabella and Joan overlap in one significant respect: chroniclers charged both women with adultery. Although in Isabella’s case, the reports of her adultery are only to be found in two unreliable accounts by Matthew Paris and a later Irish chronicler,5 in Joan’s case, several writers recorded her adultery with William de Braose the younger, a leading marcher baron; its political repercussions can be traced in contemporary correspondence. The main body of this paper will therefore examine how Joan’s portrayal in Anglo-Welsh records and chronicles satisfied many of the contemporary ideals of royal women, most notably queens, in western Europe in the thirteenth century. This will provide the essential background to her adultery and its personal consequences. Marriage and status Joan first appeared on the political stage in the build-up to her marriage to Llywelyn between 1204 and 1205. Her early life is extremely poorly documented, and her date and place of birth are unrecorded, reflecting her uncertain status as a female royal bastard. It has long been recognized by historians that King John fathered a number of illegitimate children, by both noble and more humbly born mistresses, but little has been discovered about Joan’s mother, her social status or whether she played any part in her daughter’s upbringing.6 Although the names of no fewer than six of King John’s illegitimate sons are known, Joan remains his only identified illegitimate daughter, sharing the same Christian name as John’s sister, the queen of Sicily, and the feminine version of John’s own name.7 Evidence that her father at least took an early interest in his daughter’s welfare is suggested by an entry in the Norman pipe roll for 1203. Joan was probably the king’s daughter whose expenses were accounted for a ship to carry her from Normandy to England in this year.8 Joan’s future husband, on the other hand, was an experienced statesman who had swept to power in Gwynedd in the 1190s, defeating his uncles, Dafydd and Rhodri, and removing the threat posed by other members of the ruling house to his regime.9 Llywelyn had also proven himself adept at negotiating Anglo-Welsh relations, especially in the face of English claims to overlordship. In 1199, shortly after King John’s accession in England, Llywelyn had accepted the English king’s protection and confirmation of his lands, and in 1201 Llywelyn and John had concluded the

4

Isabella’s inheritance was also, in practice, beyond her control. See N. Vincent, ‘Isabella of Angoulême: John’s Jezebel’, in King John: New Interpretations, ed. S.D. Church (Woodbridge, 1999), 165–219 at 184–206. 5 Ibid., 200–4. 6 The Tewkesbury annalist described Joan as the daughter of King John by a woman named Clemencia, whom this author erroneously styled queen (regina), thereby conveying his uncertainty of Joan’s matrilineal connections. See Tewkesbury, 101. 7 For John’s bastards, see C. Given-Wilson and A. Curteis, The Royal Bastards of Medieval England (1984), 127–31. For John’s sister, Joan, see D.D.R. Owen, Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen and Legend (Oxford, 1993, repr. 1994), 44, 73, 83–5, 92, 96. 8 Magni Rotuli Scaccarii Normanniae sub Regibus Angliae, ed. T. Stapleton, 2 vols (London, 1840–4), ii. 569; Vincent, ‘Isabella of Angoulême’, 194 n. 100. 9 R.R. Davies, Conquest, Coexistence and Change: Wales 1063–1415 (Oxford, 1987), 239; C. Insley, ‘The Wilderness Years of Llywelyn the Great’, TCE, ix (2003), 163–74.

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first surviving written Anglo-Welsh treaty.10 The value that Llywelyn attached to a more enduring Anglo-Welsh alliance was demonstrated by his abandonment of long-standing plans for an alliance with the king of Man’s daughter in order to marry Joan.11 Llywelyn’s apparent volte-face over his marital ambitions strongly suggests that the initial overtures for an Anglo-Welsh marriage had come from the English court. With John fully occupied by the disastrous events in Anjou, Maine and Normandy in 1203–4,12 it was essential for the king to safeguard England itself. A marriage alliance with Llywelyn served the dual purpose of maintaining an ascendant and potentially troublesome neighbour within the king’s sphere of influence, while helping John to keep the territorial ambitions of one of the greatest marcher barons, Ranulf III, earl of Chester, firmly in check.13 English royal letters close indicate that Joan and Llywelyn’s betrothal took place in 1204,14 and was probably followed by their marriage in the spring of 1205. On 23 March 1205, King John instructed the sheriff of Shropshire to hand over to Llywelyn the manor of Ellesmere, which he had granted in marriage with Joan, and a royal charter, formally recording the settlement, was issued at Dover three weeks later.15 Joan’s status within Gwynedd after her marriage remains elusive. As Huw Pryce has reminded us, even the titles that accompanied Joan’s new dignity as Llywelyn’s wife have to be traced largely through English government records. At first, she appeared simply as ‘lady of North Wales’, only later being addressed as ‘lady of Wales’ in the 1230s, as Llywelyn’s own hegemony over the other native Welsh rulers became more firmly established.16 The contemporary Iorwerth version of the Laws of Court is strangely silent on the nature of her office, but does at least suggest that 10

I.W. Rowlands, ‘King John and Wales’, in King John: New Interpretations, ed. Church, 273–87 at 278–9; I.W. Rowlands, ‘The 1201 Peace between King John and Llywelyn ap Iorwerth’, Studia Celtica 34 (2000), 149–66; R. Turvey, The Welsh Princes (2002), 87. 11 In April 1203, after protracted negotiations with the papal curia, Llywelyn had secured Innocent III’s approval for the marriage between himself and a daughter of Reginald, king of Man, who had previously been betrothed or even perhaps married to Llywelyn’s uncle, Rhodri (d. 1195). In Feb. 1205, however, presumably at Llywelyn’s instigation and in order to facilitate an Anglo-Welsh alliance, the pope had withdrawn his support for the marriage, allegedly on the receipt of new evidence that Rhodri’s marriage with the girl had previously been consummated. See The Letters of Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) concerning England and Wales: A Calendar with an Appendix of Texts, ed. C.R. Cheney and M.G. Cheney (Oxford, 1967), nos 168, 469, 600; H. Pryce, Native Law and the Church in Medieval Wales (Oxford, 1993), 84–5. 12 See D. Carpenter, The Struggle for Mastery: Britain 1066–1284 (2003), 264–70. 13 Ibid., 283. 14 On 15 Oct. 1204, the king had instructed the sheriff of Shropshire to assign to Llywelyn, prince of North Wales, 20 librates of land which ‘we have given to him with our daughter’ (RLC, i. 12). 15 Ibid., i. 23b; RC, I, i. 147. It is, however, worth noting that the later Chester annals state that the marriage took place in 1204, while the Worcester annals record it in 1206. See Annales Cestrienses; or Chronicle of the Abbey of St Werburgh at Chester, ed. R.C. Christie (Record Soc. Lancashire and Cheshire 14, 1886), 48–9; Worcester, 394. The grant of Ellesmere also appears to have been supplemented by other properties. For the manors of Bidford (Warw) and Suckley (Worcs.) as Joan’s marriage portion, see RLC, i. 370b, 486; PR 4 Hen. III, ed. B.E. Harris (PRS, new ser. 47), 30, 189; PR 5 Hen. III, ed. D. Crook (PRS, new ser. 48), 215, 228; CACWales, 25; Foedera, I.i. 152; cf. RLC, i. 226b. In a letter addressed by Llywelyn to Henry III, which was written after 1218 and concerned a property dispute with Hugh Mortimer, Llywelyn also claimed that the manors of Knighton and Norton (Salop) had been given to him in free marriage. See CACWales, 23; Royal Letters, i. 60; J.J. Crump, ‘The Mortimer Family and the Making of the March’, TCE, vi (1997), 117–26 at 122–3. 16 Joan’s change in title accompanied Llywelyn’s change of style from ‘prince of North Wales’ to ‘prince of Aberffraw and lord of Snowdon’. The title ‘prince of Aberffraw’ was equivalent in consequence to ‘prince of Wales’. See H. Pryce, ‘Negotiating Anglo-Welsh Relations: Llywelyn the Great and Henry III’, in England and Europe, ed. Weiler and Rowlands, 13–29 at 19–20.

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Joan enjoyed certain rights over her husband’s property which, although dependent upon his goodwill, might have allowed her some scope for political action within his territories. By virtue of her position as ‘the king’s wife’, for example, Joan was entitled to a third share of her husband’s revenue from his lands, and was allowed to dispose of a third of her casual acquisitions.17 The manner in which the Iorwerth redaction also incorporated French loanwords into its text,18 and increased the number of the queen’s household officers from four to eight,19 is certainly suggestive of Joan’s personal prominence at Llywelyn’s court and her wider cultural influence within Gwynedd. There had, of course, been another recent consort of a Welsh prince who had helped to smooth Anglo-Welsh relations, paving the way for Joan. In 1174, Llywelyn’s uncle, Dafydd ab Owain, had married King Henry II’s illegitimate half-sister, Emma of Anjou, hoping to inspire fear in his Welsh neighbours through this alliance.20 Emma’s arrival in Gwynedd, like that later of Joan, presumably caused quite a stir. The English pipe roll for Michaelmas 1174 recorded expenses of £28 17s ‘for the clothes and apparel of the king’s sister whom David son of Owen has married’,21 revealing that Emma was dispatched to her new husband’s court in finery befitting her royal Plantagenet connections. In addition to this, Henry II richly endowed his sister, as John was later to endow Joan, with the manor of Ellesmere as her marriage portion.22 Emma maintained a high profile in England and Gwynedd throughout her marriage, consenting to, and separately confirming, Dafydd ab Owain’s alienation of part of her English maritagium to Haughmond Abbey (Salop).23 More importantly, the English pipe rolls also reveal that Emma had perhaps assumed an ambassadorial role between the royal courts of England and Gwynedd, visiting her royal brother in person in 1176.24 17

The section on the king and queen stated that it was ‘right for the king to give the queen a third of the goods he gets from land and earth’. See The Law of Hywel Dda, ed. D. Jenkins (Llandysul, 1986), 5; Stacey, ‘King, Queen, and Edling’, 53. On casual acquisitions, see The Law of Hywel Dda, 54; D. Jenkins and M.E. Owen, The Welsh Law of Women (Cardiff, 1980), 19. 18 See D. Jenkins, ‘Prolegomena to the Laws of Court’, in Welsh King and his Court, ed. CharlesEdwards and others, 15–28 at 16. This raises the question of whether Joan learned to speak Welsh at her husband’s court. 19 The queen’s household officers were: queen’s steward, queen’s priest, queen’s chief groom, queen’s chamberlain, queen’s handmaid, queen’s doorkeeper, queen’s cook and queen’s candleman. Three of these officers (cook, candleman and chamberlain) were entirely new creations in the Iorwerth redaction. See Law of Hywel Dda, 5, 28–31. For discussion, see Stacey, ‘King, Queen, and Edling’, 55–62. 20 Emma was the illegitimate daughter of Geoffrey of Anjou. See Radulfi de Diceto Decani Lundoniensis Opera Historica, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols (RS 68, 1876), i. 397–8. 21 PR 20 Hen. II (PRS 21), 9. For further expenses incurred by Emma, see ibid., 16, 94. 22 The chronicler, Roger of Howden, observed the presence of Dafydd ‘who had married the sister of the said king of England’ at a council at Oxford in 1177 when Henry formally bestowed on Dafydd ‘the land of Ellesmere’. See Howden, ii. 133–4. Emma also received the manor of Hales (now Halesowen) as her marriage portion and later, in her turn, granted lands there in maritagium with Agnes her kinswoman (cum Agnete nepte sua) to Stephen fitz Stephen de Chatteleg. See CRR, x. 137–8. 23 The Cartulary of Haughmond Abbey, ed. U. Rees (Shropshire Archaeological Soc., 1985), nos 268, 1169–70, 1173; Handlist of the Acts of Native Welsh Rulers 1132–1283, ed. K.L. Maund (Cardiff, 1996), nos 116–17, 119, 121. 24 The pipe roll for Michaelmas 1176 recorded the payment of corrodies for Emma by the burgesses of Bridgnorth and Shrewsbury. See PR 22 Hen. II (PRS 25), 56–7. After Dafydd’s subsequent defeat and capture at the hands of Llywelyn in 1197, Emma continued to safeguard her family’s interests in England at least, seeking protection from Henry II’s sons. In April 1200, for example, King John granted protection to Emma for any lands that she held on the day that Henry II had granted her the manors of Ellesmere and Hales. See RC, I, i. 44. Ellesmere, however, came back into the English king’s hands after Dafydd’s death, no later than 27 May 1203. See J.E. Lloyd, A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest, 2 vols (London, 1911), ii. 616 n. 26. For a discussion of Emma and Dafydd’s tenure

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Like her predecessor, Joan also made her most visible contribution to AngloWelsh politics as a negotiator between her father, brother and husband, softening relations between them. The importance of male family relationships for Joan’s career in diplomacy is illuminated by the terms used to describe her in the English records after her marriage. In grants addressed to her by her father, King John, she was designated ‘our beloved daughter, Joan, wife of Llywelyn’,25 and in the letters of her brother, Henry III, she was ‘our beloved sister Joan, wife of our beloved and faithful Llywelyn, prince of North Wales’, ‘our sister Joan, wife of Llywelyn, prince of North Wales’, or simply ‘our sister, the lady of North Wales’.26 Significantly, it was in the aftermath of a disastrous military defeat for Llywelyn and his allies at the hands of King John in 1211 that Joan’s skills as a diplomat were first recorded.27 When Llywelyn’s fortunes were at their lowest ebb, following the second English campaign against him that year, the anonymous Welsh copyist of Brut y Tywysogyon described how ‘Llywelyn, being unable to suffer the king’s rage, sent his wife, the king’s daughter, to him by the counsel of his leading men to seek to make peace with the king on whatever terms he could.’28 In such desperate circumstances, there was no one more suited or better placed at Llywelyn’s court than Joan to make a personal appeal to King John.29 The extract from Brut y Tywysogyon successfully conveys the potentially ambiguous political position in which Joan found herself in 1211 as the daughter of her husband’s enemy. The compiler carefully emphasized not only that it was Llywelyn who sent Joan to the king, and who therefore as a husband lent authority to her representations, but also that Llywelyn, in sending her, was acting on the advice of his leading men. From an English perspective, the Worcester annalist also highlighted the key part played by Joan in preparing the way for a settlement, relating how Llywelyn, having been brought to his knees, made peace with King John ‘on account of the grace of the king’s daughter, whom he had accepted long ago in marriage’.30 Llywelyn’s marriage to Joan also directly influenced the terms of his submission in 1211, whereby he conceded that if he died without heirs of his body by ‘the daughter of the lord king, my wife’ then his lands would revert to the English crown, except for those which John might decide to give Gruffydd, Llywelyn’s natural son.31 of Ellesmere, see Antiquities of Shropshire, ed. R.W. Eyton, 12 vols (1854–60), x. 234–5; A.J. Roderick, ‘Marriage and Politics in Wales, 1066–1282’, WHR 4 (1968–9), 14. 25 RLP, i. 126. 26 RLC, ii. 135; ibid., i. 622, 628. Llywelyn addressed Henry as ‘brother’, but Henry rarely returned the compliment in his charters and letters. See Pryce, ‘Negotiating Anglo-Welsh Relations’, 21. 27 Although Llywelyn had assisted his father-in-law during the Scottish campaign of 1209, the peace between England and Gwynedd crumbled in 1210. During the five years since his marriage, Llywelyn had extended his hold over Wales beyond Gwynedd, subjecting southern Powys to his rule, and exerting his influence over the native Welsh dynasties of the central March. See Davies, Conquest, 241. 28 Brut y Tywysogyon or The Chronicle of the Princes: Peniarth MS. 20 Version, ed. T. Jones (Cardiff, 1952), 85. See also Brut y Tywysogyon or The Chronicle of the Princes: Red Book of Hergest Version, ed. T. Jones (Cardiff, 1955), 190–3. 29 English chancery records reveal that Llywelyn, and also possibly Joan, had employed regular messengers to John’s court during peacetime. A clerk named Instructus (or Ostricius and other variants), who was probably one of at least two men to bear this name in Llywelyn’s employment, was also maintained in John’s service, and presumably helped Joan to keep in touch with her father. Rather fittingly, when John rewarded Instructus for his service to him in Dec. 1205, he granted him a prebend in the church of Ellesmere, the advowson of which had remained in the king’s hands when the manor was granted as Joan’s marriage portion. See RLC, i. 5b, 10b, 43, 60b. 30 Worcester, 399. 31 As J.B. Smith has convincingly argued, the peace terms imposed on the Welsh were crushing. Vast territorial concessions were made to the English crown, and Llywelyn was forced to provide John with

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Welsh custom, of course, differed from both canon law and English inheritance practices by allowing both legitimate and illegitimate sons rights of inheritance to lands.32 Although Llywelyn’s submission created the legal possibility that his territories might escheat to John on his death, rather than passing to Gruffydd, it also had an important bearing on, and arguably elevated, the political significance of Joan’s maternity. Yet by undermining Gruffydd’s right to be designated as Llywelyn’s heir, it presumably raised questions about the burden of Joan’s own illegitimacy, and these were questions which Llywelyn was ultimately unable to ignore. Joan’s position in Gwynedd, in the face of renewed Anglo-Welsh hostilities in 1212, was undoubtedly difficult. The St Albans chronicler, Roger of Wendover, relates the dramatic tale of how John, having executed twenty-eight Welsh hostages at Nottingham Castle, was eating a meal when two messengers arrived within quick succession, one from the king of Scotland, warning John of imminent treachery, and another carrying secret letters ‘from the daughter of the same king [John], the wife of Llywelyn, king of Wales’. According to Wendover, both messengers brought news that ‘if the king persisted in the war which he had begun, he would either be slain by his own nobles, or delivered to his enemies for destruction’.33 After digesting the news, John sent home the army he had gathered for the Welsh campaign. Joan’s role in these events is intriguing, possibly suggesting some sense of filial loyalty towards her father, even in the face of Anglo-Welsh conflict. If Wendover’s account is accurate, the timing of Joan’s intervention, whether by her own agency or that of her husband, was once again crucial for Anglo-Welsh affairs. At the very least, it shows that one English chronicler thought that Joan was in communication with her father, and believed her to be politically sympathetic towards him. Joan’s involvement in Anglo-Welsh affairs during the final years of John’s reign and the early years of Henry III’s minority remains obscure. Hitherto, Joan had come to the fore at moments of crisis for Llywelyn, when he was forced to rely upon her person as an important bargaining counter. Between 1213 and 1218, however, Llywelyn was once more ascendant in Wales, recovering territories conceded in 1211, supporting the English rebels against his father-in-law, securing the restoration of further lands, liberties and hostages under Magna Carta, and finally making peace with the English crown through the so-called treaty of Worcester in 1218.34 English royal letters patent, issued in the winter of 1214–15, before relations finally soured between Llywelyn and his father-in-law, indicate that Joan again served as an intermediary between the English and Welsh royal courts at this critical time at least, using her influence with her father to secure the release of Welsh hostages.35 We also know that Joan had begun to fulfil the potential of her maternity by giving birth to a son, Dafydd.36 Following Henry III’s second coronation in May

hostages for his good behaviour, including Gruffydd. Llywelyn was also to provide John with no fewer than 10,000 cattle, 40 warhorses and 60 steeds. See J.B. Smith, ‘Magna Carta and the Charters of the Welsh Princes’, EHR 99 (1984), 344–62 at 355, 362. 32 Pryce, Native Law, 82, 86. 33 Wendover, ii. 61. 34 Davies, Conquest, 242–3; Pryce, ‘Negotiating Anglo-Welsh Relations’, 16. 35 When John was at Monmouth in Dec. 1214, for example, he instructed Engelard de Cigogné that he had decided to release four Welsh hostages in his custody expressly ‘at the petition of our daughter, the wife of Llywelyn’ (RLP, i. 125). Similarly, at the beginning of Jan. 1215, the king informed William de Cantilupe that he had surrendered another Welsh captive ‘to our beloved daughter Joan, wife of Llywelyn’ (ibid. i. 126). 36 Dafydd was presumably born after Llywelyn’s submission to John in 1211, as no mention of him was

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1220, Llywelyn took advantage of the young king’s weakened authority to engineer an agreement on 5 May, whereby Henry recognized Dafydd, Llywelyn’s legitimate son by Joan, as Llywelyn’s heir, thereby disregarding Gruffydd’s claims.37 Although there is no direct evidence for Joan’s participation in the May negotiations, it is likely that she helped to safeguard her son’s future.38 Within a slightly different context, Parsons has drawn attention to the roles played by Plantagenet queens in arranging the matrimonial alliances of their children.39 Joan also appears to have taken an active interest in her offspring’s marriages.40 An extant chirograph, for example, shows her facilitating a union between her daughter, Helen, and John the Scot, the future earl of Huntingdon, and the nephew and heir of the earl of Chester, in 1222. According to this document, Llywelyn had agreed to give in marriage with his daughter, the two manors of Bidford (Warwicks.) and Suckley (Worcs.) which had supplemented King John’s grant of Ellesmere to Llywelyn as Joan’s marriage portion.41 Llywelyn now arranged that on the day of his daughter’s marriage, John the Scot should have his (i.e. Llywelyn’s) charter, together with ‘the charter of Lady Joan his wife’.42 Although, under the common law, Joan’s consent was formally required for the alienation of her English maritagium, her appearance in this context, issuing a charter on her own behalf, suggests not only that she issued her own acta, but also that she helped to engineer this particular match.43 Joan’s absence as a prominent negotiator between her husband and the English crown during the early 1220s was perhaps a consequence of the personalities and rivalries that dominated Anglo-Welsh politics. Llywelyn’s alliance with the earl of made in Llywelyn’s charter (Smith, ‘Magna Carta’, 362). Motherhood played a key part in the construction of the public image of thirteenth-century Capetian and Plantagenet queens. See Howell, Eleanor of Provence, 255–6; Howell, ‘Royal Women’, 168–70. 37 Immediately after this, further concessions were made to Llywelyn, and special hearings were arranged to settle disputes between Llywelyn and the marcher barons (D.A. Carpenter, The Minority of Henry III (1990), 191–2). 38 Mother and son can be found travelling together to Henry III’s court later in his reign (CPR 1225–32, 56; CPR 1232–47, 4). 39 Edward I’s first wife, Eleanor of Castile, e.g., played an active role in negotiating and arranging twenty royal and noble marriages (Parsons, ‘Mothers, Daughters, Marriage’, 72–3). 40 Admittedly, it is not clear whether Joan was involved in the negotiations for the marriages of her daughter, Gwladus Ddu, to (1) Reginald de Braose and (2) Ralph Mortimer, or for the marriages of her daughter, Margaret, to (1) John de Braose and (2) Walter Clifford. The nature of Joan’s relationship with Gwladus and Margaret is problematic. Chroniclers generally refer to them both simply as the daughters of Llywelyn. See, for example, Brut: Peniarth, 91, 97; Brut: Hergest, 204–5, 218–19. I am following A.J. Roderick in treating both Gwladus and Margaret as Llywelyn’s daughters by Joan (Roderick, ‘Marriage and Politics’, 16–17). Gwladus was described as daughter of both Llywelyn and Joan in a Mortimer family history preserved at Wigmore Priory (W. Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, ed. J. Caley, H. Ellis and B. Bandinel (1817–30), VI, i. 350). In the case of Gwladus’s second marriage, it is interesting to note that the previously disputed lands of Knighton and Norton (see n. 15 above) were granted by Llywelyn to his son-in-law (Handlist, no. 139; Crump, ‘The Mortimer Family’, 124). 41 Llywelyn also gave the couple the manor of Wellington (Salop) and 1,000 silver marks, which were to be followed by another 50 marks at the time of the marriage (22 Aug.), and a further 50 marks at the following Michaelmas. In return, Helen was to be assigned 100 librates of land in dower on the day of the marriage. See The Charters of the Anglo-Norman Earls of Chester c. 1071–1237, ed. G. Barraclough (Record Soc. Lancashire and Cheshire 126, 1988), no. 411; Handlist, no. 346. 42 Charters of the Earls of Chester, ed. Barraclough, no. 411. 43 This marriage was of great significance for both Gwynedd and the palatinate of Chester. In the words of the Chester annalist, it was ‘for the purpose of effecting a lasting peace’, cementing the friendship between Llywelyn and John the Scot’s uncle, Ranulf, which had been initiated in 1218, and reaffirmed on Ranulf’s return from crusade in 1220. See Annales Cestrienses, 50–3; Davies, Conquest, 248; Carpenter, Minority, 81, 212, 260–1; Carpenter, Struggle for Mastery, 323–4.

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Chester helped to counter the ambitions of Llywelyn’s enemy, the earl of Pembroke, in south Wales; the earl of Pembroke, in his turn, was associated with Hubert de Burgh, the leading figure in the minority government, who was himself at variance with the earl of Chester.44 Joan’s relationship with the English king apparently carried less political weight in a situation where the young king was under Hubert’s influence.45 Intriguingly, her profile returned to sharper focus in English government records as Henry III himself began to exercise a greater influence over the affairs of the realm. In September 1224, for example, Joan smoothed the path for a conference between Llywelyn and Henry by personally visiting the king at Worcester.46 Furthermore, an undated letter, addressed by Joan, to ‘her most excellent lord and dearest brother’ King Henry, offers a tantalizing glimpse of the way in which Joan traded upon her relationship with her brother in order to alleviate tensions between the royal courts of Gwynedd and England. In this letter, Joan expressed her grief ‘beyond measure’ that unnamed enemies had sown discord between her husband and the king, and sought to reassure Henry of Llywelyn’s ‘genuine fondness (sincerum affectum)’ towards him. Placing herself within a strong framework of biblical intercessionary references, Joan adopted a humble, submissive and entreating tone towards her brother, physically positioning herself ‘on bended knee and shedding tears’.47 The advent of more cordial relations between the siblings found expression in a personal gift by Henry to Joan of the manor of Rothley (Leics.) in February 1225.48 Henry’s generosity towards his elder sister and her family did not stop there. He judiciously acted alongside Llywelyn as her sponsor in the spring of 1226 when Pope Honorius III granted a special dispensation, declaring Joan legitimate, but without any prejudice to the English king or realm.49 In 1222, Honorius had already confirmed an ordinance issued by Llywelyn, with Henry III’s consent, stating that Dafydd his son by Joan should succeed him.50 The papal letters of 1226, establishing Joan’s legitimacy, served Llywelyn and Joan’s dynastic ambitions well, further enhancing Joan’s prestige, as the now legitimate daughter of a king, as well as the lawful wife of Llywelyn and the mother of Llywelyn’s designated, legitimate heir. The further signs of royal favour that Joan received from her brother fortify the conviction that she was a key player in Anglo-Welsh relations in 1226. During the summer, a family meeting was convened at Shrewsbury, for which letters of

44 45

Carpenter, Minority, 260. References to Joan’s intervention were noticeably lacking in royal letters and correspondence when Pembroke invaded south Wales during the spring of 1223, and Hubert de Burgh lent Pembroke valuable military support against Llywelyn. Even when Llywelyn and his Welsh allies submitted to the English crown at Montgomery in Oct. 1223, Joan’s presence went unrecorded. See PatR 1216–25, 411–12, 471, 481; Carpenter, Minority, 306–9, 311–14. 46 RLC, i. 622; Lloyd, History of Wales, ii. 665. 47 Royal Letters, i. 478–8; Letters of Medieval Women, ed. A. Crawford (Stroud, 2002), 54; CACWales, 20. Pryce has now dated this letter to c. 1231, based on Joan’s use of the title ‘Lady of Wales’ and taking into account her release from prison in that year (discussed below). See The Acts of Welsh Rulers, 1120–1283, ed. H. Pryce with the assistance of C. Insley (Cardiff, forthcoming), no. 280. 48 Llywelyn was not named as a co-beneficiary in the grant, reinforcing the impression that Henry’s relationship with Joan was the motivating force behind the gift. Instead, Henry informed the sheriff of Leicester that he had committed the manor to ‘Joan, wife of Llywelyn, prince of North Wales’ (RLC, ii. 18). 49 CPL 1198–1304, 109. 50 Ibid., i. 87. See also J.B. Smith, ‘Dynastic Succession in Medieval Wales’, BBCS 33 (1986), 199–232 at 218–19.

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protection and safe conduct were issued by Henry III to Llywelyn, Joan and Dafydd.51 By 29 August 1226, both the English and Welsh royal parties were at Shrewsbury, and Henry III took advantage of this opportunity to grant Joan the manor of Condover (Salop).52 Royal messenger accounts record the exchange of news between Henry III and Llywelyn and his wife in the months after this conference.53 Furthermore, in March 1227, Henry III saw fit to exempt Joan from the levying of tallage on her two new manors, advising her tenants that they should pay a reasonable aid to his sister instead.54 It was a mark of the continuing high regard in which Henry III held his sister that when hostilities again broke out between Henry III and his brother-in-law in 1228, and Henry took back the manors of Rothley and Condover,55 he directed a small series of conciliatory gestures towards her. In May 1228, he granted Joan permission for her officials to remove her beasts and chattels from Condover, and in July 1228, he ordered the sheriff of Shropshire to see that the corn, which she had directed to be sown on the manor, was handed over to her.56 Perhaps Henry hoped that Joan would intervene with Llywelyn on his behalf to resolve the dispute between them. Somewhat predictably, it was Joan who once again paved the way for a truce between her husband and brother, securing letters of safe conduct on 13 August 1228 for herself and her men to visit the king at Shrewsbury.57 Her efforts were rewarded with the return of Rothley in November.58 Furthermore, on 5 September 1229, Henry III issued letters of safe conduct for Joan and Llywelyn’s son to come to him in order to perform homage.59 Joan as adulteress Throughout the first twenty-five years of her marriage, Joan emerges from the records as a capable consort to Llywelyn who, in spite of occupying a sometimes controversial political position, succeeded in producing a male heir, in influencing her offspring’s future and, above all, in serving as a mediator between her husband, father and brother. This was precisely what made Joan’s adultery in 1230 so shocking. News of her affair, and her husband’s wrath against Joan’s partner, William de Braose the younger, spread quickly throughout Wales and the Welsh marches to England, and Llywelyn’s swift and exacting vengeance was subsequently recorded in the Annales Cambriae, Brut y Tywysogyon, Roger of Wendover, and the annals of Chester, Margam, Tewkesbury, Waverley, Winchester and Worcester.60 Their accounts of what happened are broadly similar, and can be confirmed by a well known series of letters, most recently re-examined by J.J. Crump, that passed, on the one hand, between Llywelyn and William’s wife, Eva, and her brother,

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

PatR 1225–32, 56, 59. RLC, ii. 135. Ibid. 139b. PatR 1225–32, 112. RF, i. 169; Lloyd, History of Wales, ii. 667. CR 1227–31, 50, 68–9. PatR 1225–32, 201. See also CR 1227–31, 114. CR 1227–31, 123; Lloyd, History of Wales, ii. 669. PatR 1225–32, 263. The letters of safe conduct extended to cover Dafydd’s sister, the recently widowed Gwladus Ddu, who can be found pursuing claims to her English dower in 1230 (CR 1227–31, 389–90). 60 Annales Cambriae, ed. J. Williams ab Ithel (RS 20, 1860), 77; Brut: Peniarth, 101–2; Brut: Hergest, 228–9; Wendover, ii. 383; Annales Cestrienses, 56–7; Margam, 38; Tewkesbury, 101; Waverley, 308–9; Winchester, 85; Worcester, 421.

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William Marshal junior, earl of Pembroke, and on the other hand, between Marshal’s seneschal, and King Henry III’s chancellor, Ralph de Neville.61 William de Braose the younger, a scion of one of the most famous AngloNorman families to have become established in south Wales, had spent a brief time as Llywelyn’s captive following the failed English campaign of 1228. William had secured his release early in 1229 at a heavy price, agreeing to pay Llywelyn a ransom of £2,000, and promising that his daughter, Isabella, would marry Joan and Llywelyn’s son, Dafydd, and bring with her the strategically important castle of Builth as her marriage portion. At Easter 1230, William was visiting Llywelyn’s court when he was apparently discovered with Joan. Llywelyn’s anger against the couple was extreme, and William was first imprisoned, and then hanged a few weeks later.62 Joan’s extra-marital liaison was shocking, especially for a woman of her status, at a time when the Church was keen to stress the indissolubility of marriage. It was a measure of the severity with which adultery was regarded in twelfth- and thirteenthcentury canon law that it ranked alongside apostasy, heresy and excessive cruelty as justifiable grounds for ending conjugal cohabitation. Women, as the heiresses of Eve, were regarded by many churchmen as being particularly vulnerable to sexual temptation; it is interesting that canon lawyers seem to have treated adultery as a mainly female offence.63 Although Welsh law followed different rules from canon law on separation and divorce, it also advocated stiff penalties for sexual infidelity within marriage, notably by wives.64 Indeed, adultery was regarded as the ‘ultimate insult’ that a wife could inflict on her husband, and justified immediate divorce.65 Stacey has quite plausibly claimed that Joan’s adultery directly shaped the contents of the Iorwerth version of the Welsh laws on the subject of marriage and divorce.66 It is certainly striking that in the special case of the ruler, sexual misconduct by his wife was singled out quite specifically in this text as the ‘greatest disgrace’ of all that might befall him.67 Bearing this in mind, the neutral tone employed by the various chroniclers, whether Welsh or English, to describe the events of 1230 is curious. Brut y Tywysogyon, for example, simply noted that ‘in that year William de Breos the Younger, lord of Brycheiniog, was hanged by the Lord Llywelyn in Gwynedd, after he had been caught in Llywelyn’s chamber with the king of England’s daughter, Llywelyn’s wife’.68 Similarly, when the compiler of the chronicle of the abbey of St Werburgh of Chester, a religious house closely connected with the earls of Chester, later recalled the events of 1230, he simply stated that ‘William de Braose was charged by Llewelin, prince of Wales, with adultery with his wife, and was hanged.’69 Roger of Wendover also resisted the temptation to embellish the tale, 61

J.J. Crump, ‘Repercussions of the Execution of William de Braose: A Letter from Llywelyn ab Iorwerth to Stephen de Segrave’, HR 73 (2000), 197–212. 62 For a summary, see ibid., 200. 63 Pryce, Native Law, 91; J.A. Brundage, ‘Sex and Canon Law’, Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. V.L. Bullough and J.A. Brundage (1996), 33–50 at 42; J.E. Salisbury, ‘Gendered Sexuality’, in ibid., 81–102 at 86–7. 64 The Welsh lawbooks set out comprehensive schemes of compensation and reparation for both husbands and wives whose partners had breached carefully defined codes of sexual conduct. See Jenkins and Owen, Welsh Law of Women, 40–68. 65 Ibid., 52–3; Law of Hywel Dda, 48. 66 R.C. Stacey, ‘Divorce, Medieval Welsh Style’, Speculum 77 (2002), 1107–27. 67 Jenkins and Owen, Welsh Law of Women, 46–7. 68 Brut: Peniarth, 101–2. See also Brut: Hergest, 228–9. 69 Annales Cestrienses, 56–7.

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stating that ‘William de Braose, a noble and powerful man, was hanged by Llywelyn the Welsh prince, being caught, as was said, in adultery with the wife of that prince.’70 Joan’s treatment appears all the more remarkable if we compare it with that of other women at the hands of male religious authors, who were often only too willing to manipulate gender in order to embellish their narratives, especially in order to convey messages about appropriate and inappropriate Christian behaviour.71 Matthew Paris’s damning portrayal of Isabella of Angoulême as a notorious, ‘incestuous and depraved’ serial adulteress, clearly demonstrates how female sexual reputations were particularly vulnerable to this form of critique.72 Yet at no point in the chronicles that I have consulted was Joan explicitly accused of seducing William with her womanly charms. It is almost as if the chroniclers were too preoccupied with William’s violent end even to examine Joan’s fate. Referring to her simply as ‘the woman (mulier)’, only the later Chester annalist recorded that she ‘was imprisoned for a long time’.73 When writers commented on the events of 1230, they focused their attention on the main male protagonists, rather than on Joan. Even Paris chose not to elaborate on Roger of Wendover’s account of Joan’s adultery with William de Braose in his Chronica Majora.74 Admittedly, some writers implied that Llywelyn had masterminded the affair in order to avenge himself on William the younger for political injuries that he had suffered at the hands of the Braose family. The highly partisan account of events put forward in the annals of Margam Abbey in Glamorgan, a Cistercian house patronized by the Braose family, cast Llywelyn firmly as the villain in the piece. ‘In this same year’, the Margam annalist related, Llywelyn ‘treasonably (proditorie) . . . seized William de Braose the younger in his house’ because he suspected William and Joan. In reality, this annalist claimed, Llywelyn wanted to settle a long-standing score against William’s grandparents, William de Braose the elder and Matilda de St Valery his wife, who had killed many ‘noble and powerful’ Welshmen. The annalist reported how, after imprisoning William and his knights in chains, Llywelyn exacted his ultimate revenge against him by hanging him, and described how the Welsh who were present insultingly exclaimed ‘now is avenged the blood of the Welsh which William de Breusa and his men spilled on the land’.75 Joan’s liaison with William de Braose came at a high personal cost to all parties concerned.76 Henry III’s personal reaction to his sister’s downfall and imprisonment

70 71

Wendover, ii. 383. See, for example, J.L. Nelson, ‘Gender and Genre in Women Historians of the Early Middle Ages 750–900’, in The Frankish World, ed. J.L. Nelson (1996), 183–97 at 183–4. 72 This comes at the end of a section vilifying John (CM, ii. 560–3). Paris’s treatment of women is examined in R. Reader, ‘Matthew Paris and Women’, TCE, vii (1999), 153–9. 73 Annales Cestrienses, 56–7. 74 CM, iii. 194. 75 Margam, 38. The Margam annalist was perceptive in his comments that William de Braose the younger’s grandparents had committed atrocities against the native Welsh. His grandfather had participated in the massacre of Abergavenny in 1175. See Turvey, Welsh Princes, 45. Surely, though, if Llywelyn had really been concerned to settle such a score, he would have taken the earlier opportunity that presented itself in 1228 when William was in his custody. Of course, the reasons for Llywelyn’s actions in 1230 may have been more complex, possibly involving an element of seeking favour with the southern Welsh in executing William de Braose the younger, and thereby exploiting the Braose family’s tarnished reputation. Llywelyn’s discovery of the affair in 1230 may have provided him with the necessary pretext, lacking in 1228. My thanks to Huw Pryce for this suggestion. 76 According to Matthew Paris, the after effects were still being felt in 1232 when the unsubstantiated charges brought against Henry III’s unpopular minister, Hubert de Burgh, included the allegation that he

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in 1230 is not recorded, but the reassignment of the custody of William’s castles indicates that the news had reached the English royal court by 20 April.77 At the beginning of May 1230, Llywelyn dispatched two letters, one to William’s wife, Eva de Braose, and another to Eva’s brother, William Marshal junior, seeking to salvage relations with them by highlighting the ‘opprobrium’ which Llywelyn had suffered, and stressing that he had only acted against William de Braose the younger by the counsel of his men. Llywelyn’s letter to Eva asked whether she wished the marriage alliance between her daughter, Isabella, and Dafydd to remain in place, and claimed that he had been simply unable to prevent his magnates from taking revenge for the injury that William had done to him.78 The second letter, addressed to William Marshal junior, similarly informed William of Llywelyn’s magnates’ actions in passing judgement against William de Braose, who was described as having plotted against Llywelyn and having treacherously entered his chamber. Llywelyn also sought Marshal’s opinion on whether the marriage alliance between Llywelyn’s son and Marshal’s niece should stand.79 Tellingly, neither letter mentioned the part played by Llywelyn’s disgraced wife in the affair. What is clear from this and later correspondence, is that Llywelyn’s execution of Eva’s husband understandably strained relations between Llywelyn and the Braose family, so much so that Eva’s household chaplain repeatedly excommunicated Llywelyn, and the threat of war reared its head throughout the summer of 1230.80 Sir John Lloyd was discerning in measuring the ferocity of Llywelyn’s wrath by the confidence that he had previously placed in Joan as his bedfellow, confidante and supporter.81 It was, however, a measure both of the strength of Llywelyn and Joan’s earlier relationship, and of Joan’s continuing importance in Anglo-Welsh affairs, that her incarceration ended in 1231. In this year, the Chester annalist recorded, ‘Llewelin, prince of Wales, took back (recepit) his wife, the daughter of King John, whom he had formerly imprisoned.’82 It is not noted whether Joan’s rehabilitation was accompanied by any public or private act of penance, or whether Henry III helped to soften Llywelyn’s stance.83 Perhaps Joan’s relatively short time in political exile reflected a belief on Llywelyn’s part that she had been the reluctant recipient of William de Braose’s attentions. It is clear that Llywelyn greatly needed Joan’s talents as a mediator once more in the troubled climate of 1231–2. Already in May 1232, Henry was issuing letters of safe-conduct to Joan, so that she and two of Llywelyn’s leading Welsh advisors could attend a meeting between Henry and Llywelyn at Shrewsbury.84 Further letters were issued in December, so that this time Joan, wife of Llywelyn, and Dafydd his son, ‘the king’s nephew’, could come to Shrewsbury to confer with the king.85 Joan’s association with her son in this second had been responsible, through letters that he had sent to Llywelyn, for William de Braose the younger’s death at Llywelyn’s hands. See CM, iii. 222; R.F. Walker, ‘Hubert de Burgh and Wales, 1218–32’, EHR 87 (1972), 465–94. 77 PatR 1225–32, 336; Crump, ‘Repercussions’, 206. 78 Royal Letters, i. 368; CACWales, no. 56a. 79 Royal Letters, i. 369; CACWales, no. 56b. 80 Crump, ‘Repercussions’, 201. 81 Lloyd, History of Wales, ii. 670. 82 Annales Cestrienses, 56–7. 83 Penitentials usually stipulated that sex between a married man and another’s wife should incur a penance of five years, whereas fornication between two unmarried people carried a more lenient penance of one to two years. See J. Richards, Sex, Dissidence and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages (1991), 28–9. 84 PatR 1225–32, 476. 85 CPR 1232–47, 4.

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grant, in a typically familial context, underlines the continuing importance of her maternity, especially after her return to her husband’s favour. Joan’s adultery, it seems, was simply not allowed to cast its shadow over her son’s future. When Joan died in February 1237, she was staying at Aber, one of Llywelyn’s favourite royal residences.86 On her death, the completeness of her political restoration, the extent of Llywelyn’s personal debt of gratitude towards her, and the importance of her connection with the royal house of England for the future of Gwynedd, were all rendered explicit by Llywelyn’s decision to celebrate her memory by founding a house for Franciscan friars, near the royal manor of Llan-faes in Anglesey.87 If anything, Joan’s experiences show how male family relationships could both expand and severely restrict the political activities of royal women in thirteenth-century England and Wales. We can talk about notions of sexual honour and shame, but, as the final years of Joan’s life show, personalities and political circumstances also mattered.

86

Annales Cestrienses, 60–1; Annales Cambriae, 82; Brut: Peniarth, 104; Brut: Hergest, 234–5; Tewkesbury, 101; T. Jones, ‘Cronica de Wallia and Other Documents from Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3514’, BBCS 12 (1946), 27–44 at 12. 87 Brut: Peniarth, 104; Brut: Hergest, 234–5.

Town and Crown: The Kings of England and their City of Dublin

Seán Duffy Town Seán andDuffy Crown

The city of Dublin, having started life in the ninth century as a Viking encampment, had been in evolution for over 300 years by the time of its conquest by the English on 21 September 1170. For much of the tenth century its rulers also ruled the city of York,1 and it was minting its own coins, modelled on the Anglo-Saxon equivalent, by that century’s end.2 In the early eleventh century there is some evidence of links with the Anglo-Danish empire,3 then a close if doomed partnership with the house of Wessex.4 The only visible effects of the coming of the Anglo-Norman and Angevin ages, until the late 1160s, were ecclesiastical ties, particularly with Canterbury,5 and an expansion in the market for Dublin’s traders.6 The latter and their fellow citizens could in 1121 write collectively of themselves as omnes burgenses Dublinae civitatis.7 We know that they met regularly in an assembly, which was presumably not unlike the Folkmoot of London, and which the Dubliners called their Thingmoot (Þingmót).8 Even if we had no documentary evidence for the Thingmoot, we should have to extrapolate its existence from the abundant surviving proof – archaeological, ecclesiastical, diplomatic, and so forth – of collective activity.9 But in 1170 Dublin was conquered. A battle took place between its hereditary Hiberno-Norse ‘king’, Ascall Mac Turcaill, commanding a substantial military and naval force, and Richard de Clare (‘Strongbow’), sometime earl of Pembroke and Strigoil.10 The latter considered himself heir to the kingdom of Leinster because he had recently married the daughter of its king, Diarmait Mac Murchada, and, like

1

A.P. Smyth, Scandinavian Dublin and York: The History and Archaeology of Two Related Viking Kingdoms, 2 vols (repr. Dublin, 1987); idem, Scandinavian Kings in the British Isles 850–880 (Oxford, 1977). 2 R.H.M. Dolley, Viking Coins of the Danelaw and of Dublin (1965); idem, Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles: The Hiberno-Norse Coins in the British Museum (1966). 3 B.T. Hudson, ‘Knútr and Viking Dublin’, Scandinavian Studies 66 (1994), 319–35. 4 Idem, ‘The Family of Harold Godwinson and the Irish Sea Province’, J. Royal Soc. Antiquaries of Ireland 109 (1979), 92–100. 5 M.T. Flanagan, Irish Society, Anglo-Norman Settlers, Angevin Kingship: Interactions in Ireland in the Late Twelfth Century (Oxford, 1989), ch. 1. 6 Pottery is a good indicator of this: see, e.g., J.G. Hurst, ‘Medieval Pottery Imported into Ireland’, in Keimelia, ed. G. Mac Niocaill and P.F. Wallace (Galway, 1988), 229–53; A.G. Vance, ‘Early Medieval English Pottery in Viking Dublin’, in ibid., 254–70. 7 Eadmeri historia novorum in Anglia, ed. M. Rule (RS 81, 1884), 297. 8 S. Duffy, ‘Ireland’s Hastings: The Anglo-Norman Conquest of Dublin’, Anglo-Norman Studies 20 (1998), 69–86. 9 See, e.g., P.F. Wallace, ‘The Origins of Dublin’, in Medieval Dublin: The Making of a Metropolis, ed. H. Clarke (Dublin, 1990), 70–97. 10 For an account of the conquest, see Duffy, ‘Ireland’s Hastings’.

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most of his contemporaries, viewed Dublin as implicitly the province’s capital city.11 When the battle of Dublin went against the Hiberno-Norse (or Ostmen) some, perhaps all, of their ruling elite took to the seas and found refuge in the Isle of Man or the Western or Northern Isles.12 They made one memorable attempt to retake the city following Mac Murchada’s death in May 1171, but were unsuccessful; their king, Mac Turcaill, was beheaded, and the remnants of his army again betook themselves to the Isles.13 Strongbow’s departure for Ireland in August 1170 had happened without the approval of King Henry II, and was quickly followed by a royal edict closing the ports to Ireland and ordering all who had gone there without permission to return by Easter 1171. That embargo was lifted only when the king and Strongbow were reconciled by about the end of August 1171, at which point Henry took Dublin and its surrounding area into his own hands; it was converted from that moment onwards into an English royal city.14 In October Henry became the first king of England to set foot in Ireland and spent most of his brief Irish sojourn in Dublin; most of his time in Dublin was, no doubt, given over to securing the city for himself and his purposes. It was almost certainly Henry who oversaw the initial perambulation of the bounds of the city. Although the earliest record of these is in the great charter of liberties granted to Dublin by Henry’s son John, as lord of Ireland, in 1192, the charter states that the citizens of Dublin were to have their boundaries ‘as perambulated on oath by good men of the city by command (per preceptum) of King Henry, my father’.15 The date of the first perambulation is implicit in some of the boundary points named in the 1192 charter, which include man-made structures such as St Kevin’s church, St Patrick’s church, the priory of the Holy Trinity at Christ Church, and St Mary’s abbey, all of which existed at the time of Henry’s visit in the winter of 1171–2. But by 1174 at the latest the city was bounded to the west by the hospital of St John of Jerusalem at Kilmainham, founded by Strongbow. St Thomas’s abbey was founded, also west of the city, on Henry’s behalf in 1177. The fact that neither is referred to in the 1192 charter suggests that the perambulation was ordered before their establishment, and most likely therefore while the king was himself in Dublin in 1171–2. It was undertaken per sacramentum proborum virorum who, if they were able to pronounce on the pre-existing boundaries of the city, must surely have included at least some of the old pre-conquest city elite. This can perhaps be inferred from the place-names in the charter. The Gaelic names are quite corrupt and have the appearance of poor attempts at a phonetic rendering. This is not the case, however, for the northern transpontine suburb of Dublin, known in Latin documents as villa Ostmannorum, in English Ostmantown, but rendered in the 1192 charter in

11

Ibid. for Dublin as capital of Leinster; for Dublin as capital of Ireland, idem, ‘Irishmen and Islesmen in the Kingdoms of Dublin and Man, 1052–1171’, Ériu 43 (1992), 93–133. 12 Gerald, EH, 68–9. 13 Ibid., 76–9; Song of Dermot and the Earl, ed. G.H. Orpen (Oxford, 1892), lines 2255–2492. 14 Flanagan, Irish Society, ch. 4. It is noteworthy that, while at Dublin, Henry issued a charter to the Augustinian priory of All Hallows (founded some years earlier by Mac Murchada as overlord of Dublin), in which he confirmed all the possessions that it had ‘before my coming to Ireland (ante adventum meum in Hiberniam)’ (Registrum prioratus Omnium Sanctorum juxta Dublin, ed. R. Butler (Dublin, 1845), 11). In 1174, however, Henry issued a charter to another of Dublin’s pre-Norman religious houses, St Mary’s Cistercian abbey, this time confirming all the possessions ‘which were given to it before and after Earl Richard of Strigoil arrived in Ireland’ (CStM, i. 81). The phraseology reflects the changed political landscape: by 1174 Strongbow had been rehabilitated, and was acting as his king’s representative in Ireland. 15 Na Buirgéisí, i. 78–81.

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the Old Norse form Houstemanebi. It would seem therefore that the men who dictated it to Henry’s scribe in 1171–2 were native Norse-speaking Dubliners. The English king, no doubt, set his seal on other matters while at Dublin. Although the river Liffey ran directly through the city bounds, Henry seems to have silently claimed it for himself. At least part of the object in so doing was to provide for the needs of the garrison, as his son John while count of Mortain (1189–99) granted St Thomas’s abbey a tithe of the salmon ‘due to my kitchen in the castle of Dublin (decimam salmorium venientium ad quoquinam meam de castello Dublin)’.16 In claiming the Liffey, the crown none the less recognised certain pre-conquest claims to the produce of the river. The most powerful native Irish lord in Dublin’s hinterland at the time of the city’s conquest was Domnall Mac Gilla Mo-Cholmóc, king of Uí Briúin Chualann, a son-in-law of Diarmait Mac Murchada, who was among the Irish kings who submitted to Henry II at Dublin.17 As well as confirming him in possession of at least some of his lands, Henry seems to have accepted his claim to an inherited right to take salmon from the Liffey. We hear nothing of this at that time, but, when King John granted the fee-farm of Dublin to the citizens in 1215, he excluded from it ‘boat-fishings which we have previously given in free alms and other boat-fishings which others have by ancient tenure (ex antiqua tenura)’.18 Four years later, the government of Henry III confirmed the right of John son of Diarmait son of Domnall Mac Gilla Mo-Cholmóc ‘to have a boat for fishing in the river of Dublin, as he and his ancestors were wont and entitled to have’.19 When King John had instructed his justiciar in 1215 to enquire whether the prior and canons at Holy Trinity were ‘entitled by ancient right to have a boat on Anna Liffey’, he specified that Ostmen were to be included among the jury who would investigate the matter,20 since the right was one purportedly established before the invasion. Perhaps of greater significance is the fact that, as late as 1494, when an investigation was ordered into the priory’s claim to a tithe of the Liffey fishery, a jury of citizens was empanelled to meet in St Brigit’s parish church to decide the matter, half of them (Nicholas Gorman, John Dowgan, John Kenane, Makyn Kelly, Thomas Kelly, and Nicholas Laghnan) have names that suggest pre-invasion forebears.21 The royal claim to a fishery at Dublin included the right to a fixed net in the vicinity of the city bridge. The earliest mention of it may be as late as 1303 when Edward I stated that his progenitors ‘were wont to have, at our city of Dublin in the water of the Avenelyf, a fixed net contiguous to the bridge of the city, which was let, as belonging to the city, by the king’s progenitors to the citizens together with the city itself to hold in fee-farm’. This net had been removed by a former mayor, at the insistence of the prior of the Knights Hospitallers at Kilmainham, ‘as injurious to the fishery of the prior elsewhere on the river’. The citizens asked the king to enquire into the matter. Edward, like his predecessors, showed willingness to oblige the citizenry (assuming their claim was a valid one). He ordered his justiciar to empanel a jury, which found that such a net had existed and yielded a profit of £10, but in

16 17 18 19

National Library of Ireland, Harris Collectanea, i, fol. 22r–v; see also, CARD, i. 166. Gerald, EH, 94–5. Na Buirgéisí, i. 86. CDI 1171–1251, no. 903. Having secured the right, John then gave batellum meum quod habeo et habere debeo jure hereditario in aquis Dublin ad salmones capiendos to the Augustianian canons of All Hallows (Reg. Omnium Sanctorum, 23). 20 CDI 1171–1251, no. 641. 21 Christ Church Deeds, ed. M.J. McEnery and R. Refaussé (Dublin, 2001), no. 360.

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1268–9 the prior and his men had forcibly removed it, whereupon the mayor and citizens responded by prostrating a mill belonging to the Hospitallers. In fine for this act the net had never been restored, and that situation could not now be reversed, despite the king’s readiness to come to the aid of his loyal men of Dublin.22 The lord of Ireland also claimed the right to have a boat (or boats) on the Liffey. We first hear of this when John visited Dublin in 1185: he confirmed to the Cistercians at St Mary’s abbey ‘their boat in the water of the Avenlif for fishing’, but added ita liberum sicut meus batellus est.23 As count of Mortain, John granted a confirmation-charter to Archbishop John Cumin of Dublin that included ‘his boat which he and his predecessors were used to having in the fishery along with my own and that of my father’.24 Henry II was dead by then, so this is presumably a reference to Henry’s establishment of a claim to a fishing-boat on the Liffey after taking possession of Dublin, a right that subsequently passed to John as lord of Ireland; it does not mean that Henry retained such a right alongside John. But that more than one boat was maintained is apparent from John’s confirmation to the priory of the Holy Trinity, after he became king, of ‘their boat to fish for salmon anywhere in the Amliffi along with his [King John’s] own boats’.25 In practice, John took a relaxed view of his riverine rights. Under the terms of his 1192 charter of liberties, individual citizens were granted the right to build wherever they thought advantageous upon the Liffey bank, provided it did not damage the city or other citizens.26 This grant facilitated the extensive reclamation of the south bank of the Liffey, beyond the line of the pre-conquest city wall, that was a feature of Dublin life for the next half-century or more.27 Shortly after ascending the throne John gave the Dubliners a confirmation of his 1192 charter, but added that they and their heirs could hold ‘a moiety of the water of the Avenlith to fish’, the other moiety remaining to the crown.28 In 1214 he granted the citizens the right to build a bridge or bridges across the Liffey in locations of the Dubliners’ own choosing, ad utilitatem civitatis nostre.29 Finally, in 1215, when John granted the citizens the fee-farm of the city, he included ‘that part of the water of Avenlith that pertains to them, along with our part of the same water’.30 But the crown could, and did, occasionally recover direct control of the river. In 1276, when the city was taken into the king’s hand, Edward I granted ‘custody of the bailiwick of the water of the city of Dublin’ to two individuals who were to ‘receive to the king’s use in regard to that water whatever other bailiffs of Dublin were wont to do and receive ere the city was taken into the king’s hand’.31 These are the only individuals of whose appointment to Dublin we hear at this time, which indicates the importance of the fishery, and the great advantage the Dubliners had earlier gained by the willingness of the city’s lord to cede its profits to them. Of course, from the moment that Dublin became a royal city, royal bailiffs were

22 23 24

HMDI, 216–19. CStM, i. 86. C 47/9/4: cum batello suo quem ipse et antecessores eius in piscatione habere solebat cum proprio batello meo et patris mei. 25 Cal. Archbishop Alen’s Reg. c. 1172–1534, ed. C. McNeill (Dublin, 1950), 29. 26 Concessi etiam quod quilibet eorum posit se emendare quantum poterit in edificiis faciendis ubicumque voluerit super ripam sine dampno civium et villate (Na Buirgéisí, i. 81). 27 See, e.g., L. Simpson, Excavations at Essex Street West, Dublin (Dublin, 1995). 28 Na Buirgéisí, i. 85. 29 HMDI, 62. 30 Na Buirgéisí, i. 86. 31 CDI 1252–84, no. 1230; HMDI, 185–6.

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employed there. John’s 1192 charter of liberties refers to the entitlement of bailliuus meus to requisition a portion of wine from every ship docking in the city (two butts of wine, one before the mast and one behind, at a fixed payment of 20s per butt).32 But this wine levy does not appear to have been new in 1192, and was presumably put in place years earlier by John’s father. It was probably Henry too who instituted an entitlement on the part of the lord of Dublin to a duty later known as the Tolboll, paid by the city’s taverners, and defined as late as 1524 as ‘of every brew of ale or methe to be solde in Dublin one mesure callit the Tolboll (conteynyng in hitself a gallon and dimidium) of the best ale and methe, and as mych of the secound’.33 The first reference to the custom appears to be in a charter of John issued at Windsor while lord of Ireland (?1184x1189) granting ‘a tithe of the ale which I have out of the duty of the taverns of Dublin (decimam cervisie quam habeo ex consuetudine de tabernis de Dublin)’ to the canons of St Thomas’s, a gift that was followed, possibly while he was in Ireland in 1185, by a grant to St Thomas’s of the entire ‘duty on ale and mead which I have been accustomed to have in the taverns of Dublin (consuetudinem ceruisie et medonis quam consueui habere in tabernis Dublin)’.34 The problem with this grant is that the custom had apparently been established, like the claim to the Liffey salmon, to cater for the needs of the castle garrison. Almost half a century later, in 1234, Henry III wrote to his justiciar of Ireland stating that the ‘good men’ of Dublin had communicated to him that, although the prisage of beer levyable in that city ‘to the use of the castle’ had been granted by John to the abbot of St Thomas’s, the king’s constable of Dublin was exacting another prisage of beer and distraining the citizens to pay for it: again in this instance the king showed an inclination to put the citizens’ interests before those of the garrison of his own castle, and the justiciar was ordered to proscribe the constable’s action.35 The existence of the Tolboll, and confusion as to its origins and purpose (which far outlasted this episode), incidentally throws light on one of Henry II’s acts of munificence towards Dublin. In the later fourteenth century it was alleged that the Tolboll custom existed so that the abbot of St Thomas’s could find and keep 60 paupers and scholars in food, drink and clothing, in a house called the King’s Alms House, but that the abbot had ceased to provide this service in 1365. A jury found that Henry II had indeed made a grant for the purpose stated, but it was distinct from that of the Tolboll, which King John had made solely for the sustenance of the canons of St Thomas’s.36 If Dublin was to be royal property it must pay a rent to its lord. The first we hear of this may be the grant by John, as count of Mortain, to St Thomas’s abbey of a ‘tithe of my rent of the city of Dublin (decimam redditus mei ciuitatis Dublin)’.37 The rent was calculated in the form of ‘landgable’ (landgablum) payable on each

32 33

Na Buirgéisí, i. 80. CARD, i. 179 (‘White Book of the City of Dublin’, fol. 133v). When New Street was developed in the early thirteenth century, within the bounds of his manor of St Sepulchre, the archbishop levied his own Tolboll on the ale sold there, which in 1326 was worth 10s a year (Cal. Alen’s Reg., 171). 34 HMDI, 50. 35 CDI 1171–1251, no. 2095. The entitlement was a source of dispute as late as the reign of Henry VIII, when the abbot of St Thomas’s brought a bill of complaint against the mayor and bailiffs stating that ‘Kyng John, then being Kyng of Ingland, did gevv and graunt, and by his dede, conferme . . . such custom of ale and methe as the sayd Kyng John usyd to havv and levvy in the taverens of Dublin’, until the mayor and bailiffs, in 1524, prevented its collection (CARD, i. 179–83). 36 H.F. Berry, ‘Proceedings in the Matter of the Custom called Tolboll, 1308 and 1385’, Proc. RIA 28 C (1910), 169–73. 37 HMDI, 55.

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burgage. The important text that survives in the ‘Chain Book’ in the municipal archives under the heading Ces sunt les leys & les usages de la cyte de Diveline (which every citizen must obey, kar il sunt establiz par auncien temps) sets the landgable payable on burgages at 15d and states that such plots should not exceed 64 feet.38 While the city remained in royal hands, the officers of the lord of Ireland collected this rent, non-payment of which could result in the property escheating to the crown. When Dublin was granted to the citizens at farm in 1215, city officials collected it, with right of escheat, as in 1261, when the mayor, ‘for the benefit of the city’, granted to St Mary’s abbey ‘the land which was held by Geoffroi de Trivers, escheated to the city for non-payment of landgable for thirty years and upwards’.39 While Henry II may have staked his claim to these various rents and taxes, and showed a degree of lordly benefaction when in Dublin in the winter of 1171–2, his visit is better remembered for a particular charter he issued while in the city. This charter, which concerned his other city of Bristol,40 is often cited at the first royal charter of privileges to Dublin. But the position is more complex than appears at first sight. The charter begins with the stock phrase ‘Know that I have granted and conceded and by the present charter confirmed to my men of Bristol my city of Dublin (Sciatis me dedisse et concessisse et presenti carta confirmasse hominibus meis de Bristowa civitatem meam de Duvelina)’, and thus represents a grant of Dublin to Bristol. That it has not always been viewed as such is because the grant appears to be qualified by the phrase that immediately follows, ad inhabitandam, and the (redundant) reiteration that Dublin should be inhabited by the men of Bristol (ut ipsi eam inhabitent). This can be, and has been, taken to indicate that the charter was merely a licence to the men of Bristol to settle in Dublin. But the charter then states that the Bristollians are to hold Dublin of the king and his heirs (et teneant illam de me et de heredibus meis) with all the liberties and free customs that they had in Bristol and throughout all Henry’s lands. Henry II, therefore, established Dublin as, in the words of Howard Clarke, a ‘dependency’ and ‘colonial adjunct’ of Bristol.41 Indeed, during John’s 1185 expedition he issued a confirmation of his father’s charter in slightly clearer terms, confirming to the men of Bristol, ‘the gift (donationem) which the lord king of England, my father, gave to them, namely, my city of Dublin to inhabit (ad inhabitandam)’.42 If the 1171–2 charter was a multi-purpose device to reward the Bristollians, to provide for the repopulation of Dublin with loyal Englishmen, and to slot into place there an established set of civic customs, the confirmation of the grant by John served a simpler purpose. It is purely a reaffirmation by John of the donatio of Dublin to the Bristollians. Henry had referred to the latter as hominibus meis de Bristowe, which, since he was king of England, they indubitably were. John, in his 1185 charter, refers to Dublin as civitatem meam, which it indeed was by then, as he was lord of Ireland. But he refers to the Bristollians too as hominibus meis de Bristowe. Had Henry granted Dublin to the men of London, or Southampton, or Chester, this phrase would not have recurred in John’s confirmation, and indeed the confirmation itself might not have been forthcoming. But following his implication in the failed rebellion in 1173–4 of Henry II’s son Henry, the Young King, the earl of 38 39 40 41

Na Buirgéisí, i. 2. CARD, i. 93. Na Buirgéisí, i. 75–6. H.B. Clarke, ‘The 1192 Charter of Liberties and the Beginnings of Dublin’s Municipal Life’, Dublin Historical Record 46 no. 1 (1993), 5–14, at 6, 7. 42 HMDI, 49.

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Gloucester had been forced to acknowledge John as his heir; although John did not marry the earl’s daughter until 1189, he enjoyed the profits of the earldom and was the effective lord of Bristol for years before that.43 His 1185 confirmation of Henry’s charter was therefore, like his father’s charter of 1171–2, not a grant of privileges to Dublin but an act of favour to his own subjects at Bristol (who presumably petitioned for it). Thus, when Bristol got its charter of liberties in 1188, modelled on that of London, it was not Henry but John who granted it, and it was this charter, mutatis mutandis, that provided the basis of the great charter of liberties conceded by John to Dublin four years later. Henry’s 1171–2 charter, one might almost think, belongs in the Bristol municipal archives, since the inhabitants of that city were, on the face of it, the sole beneficiaries. Yet instead it has survived intact for more than 800 years in the care of the municipal authority of Dublin.44 The charter is therefore one that the men of Dublin considered of fundamental importance. Its significance seems to rest on two grounds, constitutional and commercial. With extraordinary nonchalance (not to say arrogance) Henry refers to this city that until perhaps a matter of days before he had never laid eyes on as ‘my city (civitatem meam de Duvelina)’. The charter thus established Dublin as a royal possession, among other things entitled to the protection of its new lord. Henry and his successors did take this duty seriously. When Henry granted the kingdom of Mide (Meath) to Hugh de Lacy just prior to his departure from Ireland, he added that Hugh could if he wished increase the size of the grant by acquiring additional fees circa Duueliniam dum ballivus meus est, which presumably means that he acted as Henry’s bailiff in the city in addition to being constable of Dublin Castle (unless the terms are synonymous). But de Lacy was to hold Meath by the service of 50 knights to be provided at Dublin (ad faciendum mihi seruicium apud ciuitatem meam Duuelinie).45 King John’s instruction to his justiciar in 1204 to build a castle anew in Dublin if its defence required it is well known.46 Three years later, when he granted Eustace de Rupe three carucates in the honor of Lusk, Co. Dublin, previously held by a money payment of 60s a year, they were to be held in capite of the king by service of half a knight’s fee, ‘to be rendered by guarding the king’s city of Dublin’.47 In or before 1215 John’s justiciar in Ireland, Bishop John de Gray of Norwich, granted a loan of at least 500 marks to the citizens ‘to fortify their vill’.48 In 1221 the government of Henry III granted the men of Dublin the right to levy certain tolls ‘in aid of enclosing the town, for its security and protection (ad securitatem et tuicionem ejusdem ville)’.49 In 1226 Henry allowed the citizens to retain 50 marks of the annual 200 marks payable for the fee-farm of the city, to be spent on enclosing and fortifying the city.50 In 1234 he granted them the right to levy customs on merchandise brought for sale to the city, again to enable the citizens to enclose the city,51 and murage grants became commonplace thereafter. 43

For John’s English lands and revenues before 1194, see A.L. Poole, From Domesday Book to Magna Carta 1087–1216 (2nd edn, Oxford, 1955), 348. 44 See M. Clark, ‘People, Places and Parchment: The Medieval Archives of Dublin City’, in Med. Dublin III (2002), 140–50, at 140. 45 Cal. Gormanston Reg., ed. J. Mills and M.J. McEnery (Dublin, 1916), 177. 46 HMDI, 61. 47 CDI 1171–1251, no. 345. 48 Ibid., no. 529. 49 HMDI, 76. 50 CDI 1171–1251, no. 1296. 51 Ibid., no. 2137.

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The commercial and other benefits that the 1171–2 charter afforded meant that Bristollians who came to Dublin in or after 1172 (and Bristollians by no means predominated there), and all others who lived as freemen of Dublin after the grant of the charter, were able to have there the same privileges, liberties and customs that had grown up in Bristol. This was a standard formula, of course. Many royal charters to towns referred to the conditions obtaining in London or Oxford or Newcastle upon Tyne or some other model, and these customs were then extended by the charter to the grantee town, as, for instance, foundation charters of towns in the Welsh marches and Ireland often refer to the laws of the little Norman town of Breteuil-sur-Iton.52 Henry’s charter is terse and unspecific because the grantor did not feel the need to specify to the grantee the liberties that were being awarded: it was for the latter to ascertain this.53 A comparable Irish instance is John’s remarkably detailed inventory of liberties granted to Dublin, which were extended inferentially to Limerick five years later, although it was not until 1292 (oddly enough, exactly a century after the Dublin grant) that Limerick received a charter actually specifying the liberties it had enjoyed since 1197.54 It is worth pondering to whom, when the ink dried on the little piece of parchment issued in Henry’s name, his 1171–2 charter was physically given. What form of collective organisation was in place in Dublin at this point? In writing, over fifty years ago, of the events that took place at Dublin in September 1170 and their aftermath, Aubrey Gwynn remarked that ‘the Norman conquest under Strongbow and Henry II swept whatever civic institutions may have existed before 1170 into oblivion’.55 The city that Henry gave to the men of Bristol, while not uninhabited, was occupied by the leaderless remainder of its pre-conquest population and the garrison installed by Strongbow, and perhaps also some recently arrived English entrepreneurs. There is no evidence for the continued existence of the Thingmoot of Dublin except in petrified form as the name of a small suburban area just east of the town, where one presumes it had formerly met.56 It is hardly a coincidence that it was in precisely this small suburb that Henry II established his court when he came to Dublin. Roger of Howden was almost certainly there. He is exact in describing the location, near the church of St Andrew, of a post-and-wattle palace that Henry ordered to be constructed, in accordance (we are told) with local custom, and in which he held his Christmas court in the company of the Irish kings.57 This was Henry’s Thingmoot; it is quite possibly where he ordered the drawing up of the Dublin charter, but implicit in the text of the charter is that the Thingmoot would be no more, and that Dublin would henceforth have whatever Bristol had. It is hardly a coincidence that the only charter issued by Henry to a layman while he was in Dublin to survive in any of the Dublin collections grants to Aelelmus brother of Hamund of Bristol the very location of the Thingmoot, that is, ‘all the land and tenements at Dublin which are outside the eastern gate on both sides of the area between that gate and the bridge towards St Andrew’s church’.58 52 53 54 55

See, e.g., S. Reynolds, An Introduction to the History of English Medieval Towns (1977), 98–102. Na Buirgéisí, ii. 332–4. Ibid., 332. A. Gwynn, ‘Medieval Bristol and Dublin’, IHS 5 (1947), 277. Cf. the recent statement by James Lydon that ‘there seems no doubt that the transition from Ostman Dublin to the English borough was neither as dramatic, nor traumatic, as has often been supposed’ (Med. Dublin II (2001), 141). 56 Duffy, ‘Ireland’s Hastings’, 82–5. 57 Howden, ii. 32. 58 CStM, i. 140–1. The area was further stripped of past associations by John, probably when he was in Dublin in 1185: he granted William Dubleday the site of a mill ‘between the gate of the church of St Mary

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If the Thingmoot was no more, presumably a new communa or communitas was in the process of formation. Gerald of Wales describes Miles de Cogan in 1171 as urbis custos, which presumably means simply that he was commander of the garrison left in the city by Strongbow during the latter’s absence. However, Gerald adds that when Ascall Mac Turcaill failed to recapture Dublin he was brought back to the city and made a defiant address in curia coram Milone constitutus in publico auditorio,59 which certainly carries the sense of a public forum, however short-lived. A stronger hint of communal organisation among the citizens, as opposed to the garrison, comes in 1174. The rebellion of Henry’s son put loyalty to the old king to the test, but the inhabitants of Dublin remained loyal, as did the men of London. Jordan Fantosme’s contemporary chronicle says of London that ‘there are none to compare with the barons of that town . . . for never did they fail to be continually first in coming to the support of their liege lord in his moment of need . . . That is why you [King Henry] ought to love them and honour them and cherish them, and reward their loyalty in their difficult times.’60 That reward was forthcoming,61 and it may supply the context for Henry’s second Dublin charter, which was issued in 1174.62 This granted the Dubliners freedom from toll, passage, pontage, lestage, pavage, murage, quayage, carriage, and all customs for themselves and their goods throughout England, Normandy, Wales, and Ireland. The charter was issued at Saint Lô in Normandy and the witnesses listed have no known Dublin connections, so that somebody else must have lobbied for it. It is not unreasonable to assume that a group was selected from among the citizens and sent to the king to petition for this generous privilege, for which no doubt a considerable sum was paid. The grant may have been all the easier to obtain because the city had proven itself to its new lord by its recent steadfastness. If so – and Henry is hardly likely to have offered such advantage to the merchants of Dublin without their petitioning for it – the town had already put in place structures for ascertaining and obtaining common purpose. Who was likely to have played a part in such decision-making? Who was entitled to membership of whatever basic communal structure had been put in place? This may have a bearing on the obscure process whereby Dublin acquired a new English population. In the few months during which he enjoyed possession of it, Strongbow cannot have gone far in populating the town. Once Henry had lifted his initial embargo on traffic to Ireland, it was presumably legitimate for his subjects to go to Dublin and, at the very least, seek to turn a profit in this new royal town; we may assume that an assortment of entrepreneurs, primarily from England and Wales, did so. But was it permissible for individuals to arrive in Dublin, simply grab a plot of earth and call it their own? This is the initial impression left by a literal reading of, for instance, the early charter issued by a certain W. the clerk of ‘Hamwoda’, by which he granted to Alured of Wendover, Reiner the Palmer, and Ralph of Norwich ‘a plot of land which I have de conquestu meo outside the western gate of the city of Dublin’;63 or that of Robert of Winchester who gave St Thomas’s abbey, ‘de meo conquestu, one of my lands in Dublin which is beside St Nicholas’s church’.64 The

of Dublin and the church of St Andrew, and as much of the water-course as pertains to said mill-site’ (HMDI, 58). 59 Gerald, EH, 76–7 (where it is rendered ‘in the court, in Miles’s presence . . . in everyone’s hearing’). 60 Jordan Fantosme’s Chronicle, ed. R.C. Johnstone (Oxford, 1981), 69. 61 S. Reynolds, ‘The Rulers of London in the Twelfth Century’, History 57 (1972), 337–53, at 344. 62 Na Buirgéisí, i. 76–7. 63 Reg. Abbey of St Thomas, Dublin, ed. J.T. Gilbert (RS 94, 1889), 384. 64 Ibid., 389.

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abbey was also granted by a certain Thomas la Martre ‘one [plot of] land de meo conquisitu beside the bridge of Dublin’;65 the same man gave to St Mary’s abbey ‘a half of the tithes of the rent of my lands which I have inside and outside the walls of the city of Dublin ex conquestu meo’.66 Another two individuals, Baldwin son of Gille and his son-in-law Elias of Chester, granted to the hospital of St John the Baptist at Dublin ‘a garden which we have outside the city of Dublin de conquestu nostro’.67 But these men were not making a claim to hold their lands at Dublin by right of conquest; they were simply providing the technical clarification that they held them by acquisition rather than inheritance. That said, it seems likely that they had in fact participated in the conquest of Dublin and won some land, presumably from a banished or otherwise eliminated Ostman. Their tenure was not affected by Henry’s assumption of lordship, and they were now exercising the right to pass it on to the beneficiary of their choice. Presumably, therefore, these recent immigrants were among those who benefited from Henry’s 1171–2 charter extending to Dublin the liberties that Bristol enjoyed. The stabilisation of the governance of Dublin can possibly be witnessed in the Dublin charters issued by Strongbow. At an unknown date after his arrival in Dublin, he granted Clonliffe to St Mary’s abbey, along with land near the sea between the abbey and the river Tolka.68 Strongbow’s charter does not acknowledge any circumscription on his grant, even though he claimed to have made it for the health of his own soul and that of Domini mei, Henrici, Regis Anglie.69 He dispossessed a certain Gille Colmáin, probably an Ostman,70 of his lands at Raheny and gave them to his own follower Vivian de Curzon, along with a messuage at the northern end of the Liffey bridge which had also belonged to Gille Colmáin, and a messuage within the walls of Dublin with the buildings it contained, formerly the possession of a certain Sunhanha the Ostman, who was presumably also dispossessed. These lands were to be held by Vivian and his heirs of Strongbow and his heirs, for the service of half a knight’s fee, free of all services ‘except those which pertain to the crown’.71 As in his grant of Clonliffe to St Mary’s, Strongbow makes no reference in this grant to any sanctioning authority. This contrasts starkly with his grant, presumably made somewhat later, to a certain Savaric the saddler of Exeter of a full burgage within the city, in front of the church of St Mary del Dam and fronting onto the route towards the castle gate, ‘on behalf of my lord, the king of England (ex parte domini mei, Regis Anglie)’, and also ‘with the consent and assent of the citizens of Dublin (consensu et assensu civium Dubliniensium)’.72 We also have a charter of King John confirming to the canons of Holy Trinity land which they hold ‘of the gift of Earl Richard and the burgesses of Dublin’, which in its original format may have had a similar ‘consent and assent’ clause.73 65 66 67

Ibid., 418. CStM, i. 211. Reg. Hospital of S. John the Baptist without the Newgate, Dublin, ed. E. St J. Brooks (Dublin, 1936), no. 41. 68 It is more a confirmation of the abbey’s existing position since the Lord John, while in Dublin in 1185, granted to St Mary’s terram de Cluenlif, in qua monasterium illorum situm est, cum proximo plano juxta mare: CStM, i. 84. 69 Ibid., i. 78–9. 70 I assume that ‘Gille Colmáin’ is the correct rendering of the ‘Gilcolman’ and ‘Gylcolman’ of the original (CStM, i. 258), rather than ‘Mac Gilla Mo-Cholmóc’, as stated in E. O’Byrne, War, Politics and the Irish of Leinster 1156–1606 (Dublin, 2003), 21. 71 CStM, i. 258. 72 Reg. St Thomas, 369–70. 73 Cal. Alen’s Reg., 29.

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Leaving aside the question of why Strongbow should have deemed it necessary to include this clause in these latter charters and not in those to St Mary’s abbey and to Vivian de Curzon, how was that consent obtained if not by means of some formal or informal gathering of the citizens? Before 1180 (the year of his death at Eu in Normandy), Archbishop Laurence of Dublin made a grant to St Thomas’s abbey, probably in his own priory of Holy Trinity, since his charter states that the entire cathedral chapter witnessed it. But it was witnessed also by Hugh de Lacy and all his familia, by six named citizens of Dublin, and also omnibus burgensibus de Dublinia.74 Are we to take this literally, or simply as meaning that some mechanism existed for securing popular consent? A later charter of the hospital of St John the Baptist near Dublin seems to be quoting from one issued by John in or before 1189, in referring to lands given to it by John concessu & assensu civium Dublinie.75 It is quite likely that this charter was issued when John was in Dublin in 1185, perhaps, as it implies, in the presence of the assembled citizens. The annals of Dublin record a major fire in the city in 1191,76 and one can imagine such an event spurring the citizens into further concerted action. When John as count of Mortain granted the canons of St Thomas’s the right to ‘one boat to fish in the Aveyn Liffy’, the privilege was confirmed by a charter issued in the name of universitas civium Dubliniensium.77 The phrase has some significance. Another charter of this same period was issued in the name of universi cives Dublin and is a grant to St Mary’s abbey ‘on behalf of ourselves and our lord, John, count of Mortain and lord of Ireland’. Significantly, it was in return for a gift of 9 marks of silver by the abbey to the citizens ‘in aid of acquiring the liberty of the city (in auxilium libertatis civitatis adquirende)’.78 It was probably at the same time that the citizens of Dublin quitclaimed certain lands to the archbishop and, we are told, ‘for this the archbishop gave the citizens 20 marks to pay their debt to the count [of Mortain] for the liberty of their city’.79 These charters must date from about 1192, because in that year John granted Dublin its great charter of liberties. One of the concessions of the charter was the right of the citizens to dispose of ‘all tenures within and without the walls, as far as the aforesaid boundaries . . . by common assent of the city (per communem assensum civitatis)’.80 The charter goes on to say that these tenures are to be held in free burgage, by service of landgable (per servicium landgabuli) rendered within the walls. As already noted, John also sanctioned construction on the bank of the Liffey, and decreed that the citizens might ‘have and possess all lands and vacant places contained within the aforementioned bounds to build upon at will’ (excluding, of course, lands already held by charter). It is hardly surprising that after this concession there was a splurge of grants of lands that had been lying vacant for years in the dead hand of the crown, by charters issued in the name of universitas civium Dubliniensium, or some such formula. The effect of these grants was to increase greatly the rent collected in the city. When in February 1317 the citizens burned the western suburb to prevent it falling into the hands of Robert Bruce and his Scots army, they proceeded to petition

74 75

Reg. St Thomas, 285. The date is suggested by that fact that John is referred to simply as the son of King Henry, his normal style until 1189: Reg. S. John the Baptist, no. 13. 76 CStM, ii. 306. 77 Reg. St Thomas, 281. 78 CStM, i. 250. 79 Cal. Alen’s Reg., 22. 80 Na Buirgéisí, i. 80.

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Edward II for a remission of at least half the rent payable for the city, which had been set in 1215 (if not earlier) at 200 marks a year. They argued that ‘from the suburb they previously received the greater part of the crown rent’; when the king ordered an enquiry, the jury found that ‘the amount hitherto levied to pay the city rent to the crown has been diminished to the extent of £100 17s 2¼d annually, in consequence of the prostration and burning of the suburb, whence the receipts were mainly derived’.81 The charters issued by the commonalty granting these suburban tenements are almost always undated and their editors have tended to ascribe very wide date-ranges to them, but they are a direct product of the 1192 grant of liberties. For instance, one charter, issued simply in the name of nos, cives Dublinienses, adds almost the exact formula used in the 1192 grant, ‘by our common assent and consent (nostro communi assensu et consensu)’, and there are many more like it. In giving to a certain Allewin of Winchester a full burgage outside the western gate of the city, this charter adds that is to be held in free burgage ‘by the liberty which John, lord of Ireland and count of Mortain, gave to us, and confirmed with a charter’. So it seems fairly safe to ascribe to it a date in or shortly after 1192. This charter is all the more important for what it says next. It adds – and it is the first Dublin charter to contain the landmark phrase – that ‘we have validated the present deed with our common seal (communi sigillo nostro)’.82 A charter of similar date issued by nos, ciues Dublin, grants property plots, communi consilio, to Roger of Lyminster in return for an ounce of gold towards the improvement of the town walls and for 20s which paid the expenses of messengers going to the Lord John pro negotio ciuitatis: one would imagine that this latter business concerned the petitioning of John for the charter of liberties, but this undated grant was also sealed by communi sigillo nostro.83 The citizens of Dublin got their charter of liberties from Count John on 15 May 1192. The charter was issued in London, and we can imagine the Dublin petitioners there present, having handed over at least a down payment for the precious piece of parchment, heading off the to best sigillator London could offer to commission their new seal. It is important to view the grant in its political context. King Richard was still on crusade and news of his capture on the journey home only reached England at Christmas 1192. But long before that John was seeking to win England for himself. In October 1191 he had bought the loyalty of the Londoners by conceding to them their commune. One contemporary chronicler describes them assembled in his presence in St Paul’s proposing to make John ‘chief governor of the whole kingdom’, another adding that they swore to acknowledge him as king if Richard died without issue.84 John conspired to seize the throne, aided by Philip Augustus, just returned to France from the crusade, and took possession of most of the royal castles of England. A council was called to meet in London after mid-Lent (12 March 1192), with the specific purpose of ‘speaking with Count John about his seizure of the castles’, but when John eventually appeared before it, no criticism of his actions was forthcoming; instead the council bought him off with a gift of 2,000 marks from the royal treasury.85 It was while in London, on 15 May, that John granted Dublin its

81 82 83 84 85

CARD, i. 149–51. Reg. St Thomas, 397–8. HMDI, 56. The best narrative of these events is still K. Norgate, John Lackland (1902), chap. 2; see p. 39. Ibid., 40–44.

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charter of liberties. The money that the Dubliners handed over to him at that juncture was little more than a contribution to his war-chest. The 1192 charter was an extraordinarily generous concession. Since, immediately after specifying the bounds of the city, it stated that no citizen should have to plead outside the walls of the town (except pleas pertaining to extern tenements), it could be argued in law that the citizens acted as judge and jury in their own cases. This was precisely what was asserted in a case that came before the justiciar in 1319 which by then had been dragging on for nearly twenty years, involving one of the highest-ranking nobles in the land, Edmund Butler. Edmund sought recovery of le Rath (later Baggot Rath) near Donnybrook from Robert and William Bagod, claiming it as heir of Theobald Walter, who held it during the time of Henry III. But the mayor and citizens claimed that the lands in question were within the precinct of the city liberties, produced John’s charter and its subsequent confirmations, and asserted the right to have cases tried in their own hundred court and to be exempt from pleading elsewhere except for extern tenements. Butler asserted that this made the citizens at the same time ‘parties and judges’ in the case (quod ipsi essent partes et judices in predicto placito), but ultimately the justiciar found against him and in favour of the citizens’ right to have the case heard before their own court, in a judgement that reproduced verbatim the wording of the relevant section of John’s 1192 charter.86 As this case shows, the city boundaries set out in the 1192 charter were jealously guarded by the citizens. In later centuries this gave rise to a periodic, and increasingly more ceremonial, tradition known as the Riding of the Franchises, several detailed accounts of which fortunately survive.87 But however festive the perennial perambulation became, the origins of the ceremony were sober and serious. One of the earliest surviving records of a perambulation dates from 1327, and it is significant that it occurred as part of an action by the citizens to secure royal affirmation of their rights. The mayor and commonalty of Dublin complained to the king that ‘under charters from his progenitors they hold the city of Dublin and its liberties within boundaries specified in those instruments’, but that certain named religious houses had acquired lands within the bounds since the enactment of the Statute of Mortmain in 1279, and ‘have without royal licence encroached on the citizens, to their great prejudice, detriment and damage’. The justiciar of Ireland was instructed to enquire into the matter. He empanelled a jury and had them perambulate the city and pronounce on its boundaries. The record of this perambulation repeats much of the precise language of John’s charter, suggesting that the jurors had a copy with them on their journey, but is a much more detailed record, adding the names of natural landmarks and, more frequently, topographical features that did not exist (such as ‘the lane near the church of the Holy Sepulchre’ or ‘the pond of the house of St Thomas the Martyr’) or existed by different names (such as ‘the field called the Irendam’ or ‘the ditch called le Rugh dich’) when the bounds were first set out. The outcome of this inquisition was unspectacular: the jurors found that the priory of the Holy Trinity had, during the preceding forty years, ‘occupied and usurped upon the Ostmans’ Green thirty perches of land on both sides of the old mill, worth by the year three halfpence, to the damage of five shillings to the citizens of Dublin’. The case is none the less significant as another demonstration of the readiness of the royal government to respond to the Dubliners’ concerns.88 86 87 88

HMDI, 426–35. See the wonderfully elaborated description dating from 1603, in CARD, i. 190–8. Ibid., i. 156–8.

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The 1192 charter floods the subject of the governance of Dublin with light; from it also flowed a stream of governance that extended into other Irish towns, where the privileges that Dublin’s citizens had obtained were soon eagerly sought. The Dublin charter refers to the hundred court of the city as an existing entity. It also tells us, in passing, that the city is run on behalf of its lord by a provost (prepositus) and that a bailiff oversaw the exaction of the wine prisage on his behalf. It mentions ‘the common customs of the city (communibus consuetudinibus civitatis)’, where customs on goods are intended, but elsewhere uses the word consuetudo in its other sense to mean the laws or usages of the city, repeating the phrase secundum consuetudinem civitatis, in a way that implies precedent as established in the hundred court or its predecessor.89 Famously, the 1192 charter also states that Dublin may have all reasonable guilds, as the burgesses of Bristol have. The phrasing does not necessitate the conclusion that, like the hundred court and provost, one or more guilds had already been formed in the city, but since so much of the charter is of its nature confirmatory, we can probably assume that at least a guild merchant had been formed – and it had probably begun keeping its splendid membership-roll that still survives in the municipal archives.90 That this is where the roll survives is, of course, testament to the fact that in Dublin as elsewhere the guild of merchants and its members were almost synonymous with the city’s government. If the guild had not already a home it soon would. The earliest reference to it, called even in a Latin charter Gildhalle, is hard to date but is probably from about the first decade of the thirteenth century.91 Subsequently, the terms guildhall and tholsel are used interchangeably for what is patently the same building: for example, in 1311 Thomas of Coventry, a citizen of Dublin, granted to Robert Burnel ‘six warehouses with their appurtenances under the New Tholsel of Dublin in the High Street’, but his charter stipulates that ‘all the Guildhall over the warehouses is reserved to the commonalty’.92 This dual use presumably existed from the start; there is no reason to believe that the hundred court of the city met anywhere other than in the hall of the guild merchant.93 The guildhall too is probably where the city’s precious collection of royal charters of privilege was stored for safekeeping. Those privileges could be eroded by subsequent royal actions. Shortly after he ascended the throne, John granted to St Thomas’s abbey the ‘right to hold their court of their men and of all plaints and pleas except those which pertain to the crown’.94 As the abbey lands at Donore lay within the extramural boundaries of the city, this amounted to the establishment of a liberty within a liberty. As late as 1527 there was contention between the city and the abbot of St Thomas’s over the jurisdiction of the houses in Thomas Street, over the arrangements for the riding of the franchises 89 90 91 92 93

Na Buirgéisí, i. 79. The Dublin Guild Merchant Roll c. 1190–1265, ed. P. Connolly and G. Martin (Dublin, 1992). Reg. S. John the Baptist, 62. CARD, i. 110. In 1363, when Edward III issued a reaffirmation and enhancement of the earlier royal charters of liberties to Dublin, he stated that, apart from pleas relating to extern tenures not pertaining to the hundred of the city, no legal action could be brought against the citizens of Dublin set infra muros civitatis illius in gyhalla sua (Na Buirgéisí, i. 95). When Robert de Willeby was given ‘permission to build upon the Guildhall of Dublin’, and he and his heirs were given ‘a key to the outer gate of the Guildhall for ingress and egress without injury to the city’, it was in the form of a bipartite charter, which bore Robert’s seal and that of the commonalty, and contained no mention of the guild of merchants (CARD, i. 106–7). Robert was one of the witnesses to the grant, dated 1311, whereby ‘the mayor and commonalty of Dublin grant to Robert de Bristol, their fellow citizen, all their tenement, where their old Guildhall stood, in the Taverners’ street in the city’ (CARD, i. 110–11). 94 CARD, i. 166.

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about Thomas Court, and over the coronership within the franchises of St Thomas’s.95 Arbitrators between the parties set guidelines for the orderly passage of the mayor and community through the abbey lands, and decreed that the abbot and convent had jurisdiction ‘of all maner of trespaces and offences don and commyttyt within ther Abbay or carue [carucate] of Donouer, or within such howsis as they pretend to be of their glebe, except pleas of the crown and landgable of the city’.96 Other grants of liberties followed. St Mary’s abbey, a liberty by 1229,97 presumably lay beyond the bounds of the city if that is what the phrase et deinde usque ad ecclesiam sancte Marie de Houstemanebi in the 1192 charter is intended to convey. The abbot and monks certainly thought so. In a case heard in the justiciar’s court in 1282–3, the mayor and community of the city objected that the abbot of St Mary’s, in delivering a prisoner from his own prison to that of Dublin Castle, did so ‘in prejudice of the liberties of the city’, since the mayor and community had right of attachment within the metes of the town. When the abbot countered that St Mary’s was outside the town boundaries, the mayor disagreed, and produced in evidence King John’s confirmation of his 1192 charter containing details of the boundary-points of the city’s liberties, within which the abbey was situated. But the abbot denied this, ‘especially since the abbey itself was founded and liberties granted long before the liberties of the said city were conceded’. He produced not only a charter of Henry II to that effect but ‘a certain writing, sealed with the common seal of the aforesaid city’, which detailed an earlier quarrel between the abbey and the city, eventually resolved when the mayor and community ‘remised and quitclaimed to the abbot and monks of the said house all right and claim in the aforesaid tenement’. Having viewed this agreement and King Henry’s charter, the justiciar found that the abbey was not within the bounds of the city, the mayor and community were fined for false claim, and, for the first time since 1215, the justiciar ordered that the liberty of the city be taken into the king’s hand: it was subsequently restored upon payment of a fine of £20.98 Here, the justiciar, acting in the king’s name and normally a stout defender of Dublin’s liberty, found against the citizens where they sought to challenge the royal prerogative of diminishing that liberty at will. That, one would imagine, should have settled the matter, but it is not what a jury (comprised, of course, of prominent Dubliners) found in 1327. The two city bailiffs, who were coroners for the king within the city, took a case before the justiciar’s court against the king’s coroner for Fingal, objecting to his having view of the body of an individual drowned in the mill-pond of St Thomas’s abbey and of two others killed within the precincts of St Mary’s abbey. They argued that both monasteries were within the boundaries of the city. The coroner for Fingal claimed that they were outside. The jury of Dublin citizens found that ‘the abbeys of St Thomas and of the Blessed Virgin are within the boundaries of the city of Dublin as granted by the royal charters produced in court’. The finding was thought of such significance to the city that written alongside the entry in the margin of the municipal ‘White Book’ is the note ‘St Mary Abbay. Verdict that Thomas Court is within the citie liberties and St Mary Abbay.’99 95

‘the jurisdiction of all the howsis in Seynt Thomas strett, that the forsayd Abbot pretends to be of his glebe . . . the ordirryng and rydying of the fraunches in every wher about Seynt Thomas Court, [and] the Coronership of all wheres within the fraunches’: CARD, i. 183–9. 96 Even after the abbey was dissolved and granted to the Brabazon family, the Brabazons pursued a claim to the liberty in the early seventeenth century: CARD, i. 201–2. 97 CDI 1171–1251, no. 254. 98 CStM, i. 296–9. 99 CARD, i. 155–6.

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If contemporaries had such difficulties in determining the extent of the city’s bounds and liberties, modern scholars can perhaps be forgiven for being confused by the evidence. When King John commanded the Dubliners to fortify their city in 1204, he gave permission to the justiciar of Ireland to compel them to do so if they did not (et quod nisi fecerint mandavit justiciario ut ipse ad hoc faciendum compellat).100 The tone, typically of John, is intimidating. At the same time he gave permission for an annual eight-day fair at Donnybrook,101 which could be interpreted as softening the blow of his other decree. But Donnybrook was an odd site to choose for such a fair, since the 1192 charter specified the bounds of the city as extending per divisam terre de Duvenolbroc ad Dother, which clearly suggests a boundary that ran along that of Donnybrook as far as the river Dodder, but did not include Donnybrook. If this is so, the 1204 grant of a fair would have yielded profit, not to the city, but rather to John’s sheriff of the county. Three other fairs were licensed by the same mandate, the third and fourth of which refer to Waterford and Limerick, the profits of which would likewise have gone to the crown.102 The second fair was located apud Pontem Beati Johannis Baptiste, which it has been suggested may be an otherwise unattested bridge over the city ditch near the hospital of St John the Baptist outside the Newgate of Dublin.103 But it is quite possible that the bridge in question is that over the Boyne at Drogheda, a hospital of the same name and order having recently been founded on the Meath side (where the de Lacys had founded a town now in royal hands).104 It is possible therefore that John, for whatever reason, reproached rather than rewarded the Dubliners in 1204. The city did get a grant of a fair in a charter issued by John on 23 August 1214, less than a month after the disastrous defeat of his allies at Bouvines, but before John had agreed to a cessation of hostilities with the French and when he was located at Saint-Maxant near Bordeaux. In his letter John states that the fair is to be located infra metas libertatis sue ubi pocius viderint expedire, which confirms the impression that the Donnybrook fair was not within the city’s liberties.105 England was now drifting into civil war and John was keen to replenish his coffers. On 1 February 1215 he ordered his justiciar, the archbishop of Dublin, to demand certain fines, one of which was of 60 marks or more from St Mary’s abbey in Dublin, ‘for bounds such as they had when the English came to Ireland’.106 In this letter John also first indicated his willingness to grant the fee-farm of Dublin to the citizens at a moderate fixed rent of 200 marks per annum.107 The important charter granting the city at farm to the citizens was finally issued at Marlborough on 3 July, less than three weeks after the sealing of Magna Carta.108 When the terms of the Great Charter were extended to Ireland, not merely were the liberties and usages of Dublin

100 101 102

HMDI, 61–2; CDI 1171–1251, nos 226, 228. HMDI, 62. The honor of Limerick, excluding the city, had been granted to William de Braose in 1201 (RC, 66; Rot. Fin., 99); although the city was added to the grant in 1203 (RC, 100b), it had reverted to the justiciar’s hands by 1204, when the grant of a fair was made. By 1205 de Braose was back in possession of the city, but the entire grant lapsed with his fall from grace in 1208–9. 103 Clarke, ‘The 1192 Charter of Liberties’, 10. 104 A. Gwynn and R.N. Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses: Ireland (Dublin, 1970), 211. 105 HMDI, 62. 106 CDI 1171–1251, no. 529. 107 Howard Clarke has noted that the pipe roll of 1211–12 records the receipt from Dublin of 200 marks de firma civitatis per annum, which indicates that the rent payable to the crown by the provost(s) of Dublin had been fixed at an earlier date: Clarke, ‘The 1192 Charter of Liberties’, 10. 108 HMDI, 63–4.

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confirmed, but the weights and measures adopted for Dublin were declared to be the standard throughout Ireland.109 We know the names of those who petitioned for the grant of the fee-farm, thanks to the text that begins Ces sunt les leys & les usages de la cyte de Diveline, which concludes by naming nous cyteins qui avoms achate les fraunchises de la cyte de Diveline as Sir Gilbert Lyuet, Rauf de la More (recte Hore), Thomas de la Cornere, Robert Pollard, and plusurs autres prodeshommes de la cite, who ordained, on behalf of the king, that ‘all the aforementioned franchises shall be observed without infringement by all those who come after our time’.110 The grant of the city at farm did not have economic advantages only. Although John was careful to exclude from it the prise of wine that his bailiff collected from ships docking in Dublin, and the sites of mills in the Liffey, both of which entitlements would certainly require the employment of someone acting on his behalf, fewer officers of the king would presumably now be required in the city to secure what was due to him. It followed that the city’s autonomy was significantly increased. The grant consisted of the fee-farm of the city cum prepositura et omnibus aliis pertinentiis suis, so that henceforth the city provostship and all other such positions were municipal appointments. Thus, when the jurisdiction of the citizens was challenged by the archbishop five years later, the citizens responded that ‘when pleas and the hundred were in the hands of King John, his seneschals or bailiffs had jurisdiction’ in cases such as that now in dispute, but that ‘after the king granted the city in fee-farm to them, the citizens exercised that jurisdiction to this day, and they will continue to exercise it . . . the citizens have not dared to annul their liberty; they will not and cannot do so without the king’s mandate’.111 The 1215 concession of autonomy was, therefore, considerable, and not one the Dubliners would lightly let slip from their grasp. Although not specifically mentioned, one royal officer who became a city official as a consequence of the acquisition of the fee-farm was the coroner. As late as 1344 the two bailiffs of the city, claiming that they were coroners ‘for the king within the boundaries of the city’, took a case to the justiciar’s court against ‘the king’s coroner for the parts of Leinster outside the boundaries of the city’, asserting that they were entitled ‘to execute there all acts appertaining to the office of coroner for the king, as they and their predecessors did from the time when his majesty’s progenitors granted the city to the citizens of Dublin at a fee-farm rent’. They objected to the extern coroner viewing the bodies of four men slain at St Thomas’s abbey. A jury of Dublin citizens indeed found that ‘the place at the abbey of St Thomas where the bodies were viewed is within the boundaries of the liberties of the city’, and therefore came within the jurisdiction of the city bailiffs acting as its coroners.112 The case is an indication of the doggedness of the Dubliners in seeking to defend the rights they claimed having secured the city at farm. But there is some evidence that royal involvement in this matter was maintained beyond the 1215 grant. This comes from the case from 1327, cited above, where the jurors found that 109

This mandate was renewed in 1244, but in 1268–9 those of London were adopted instead: HMDI, 70, 102, 502. 110 Na Buirgéisí, i. 52. It is possible that this refers to the purchase of the 1192 charter of liberties, but as three of the four men named were mayors of Dublin in succession in 1231, 1232, and 1233, and the fourth, Ralph le Hore, co-provost of the city for two terms in 1230 and 1231 (H.F. Berry, ‘Catalogue of the Mayors, Provosts and Bailiffs of Dublin City, AD 1229 to 1447’, Proc. RIA 28 C (1909–10), 47–61; repr. in Medieval Dublin: The Living City, ed. H. Clarke (Dublin, 1990), 153–62), it seems likely that the reference is to the acquisition of the fee-farm in 1215 or indeed of the mayoralty in 1229. 111 CDI 1171–1251, no. 935. 112 CARD, i. 145–7.

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‘the view of bodies of persons accidentally killed should be made by the bailiffs in the presence of the constable of the castle of Dublin, if, on notification, he desired to attend’.113 A related office was that of custodian of the city gaol, which also apparently became a city appointment arising from the 1215 charter. When Piers Gaveston was in Ireland as Edward II’s lieutenant in 1309 a certain Osbert le Taillur appeared before him, applying for custody of the gaol by mandate of the king, but a jury found in favour of the mayor and citizens, on the grounds that King John ‘demised to them the said city in fee-farm, of which they were always in possession, and which included custody of the gaol’, adding that the previous keeper, Robert le Forester, who had died in seisin, had been appointed by the city and not the king.114 But an official who remained a royal appointment after 1215 was ‘the king’s keeper of the market at Dublin’, whose function was to oversee the standard of weights and measures, and about whose activities the citizens were to complain to their lord in 1323. They claimed that ‘from the time when Dublin was granted to their predecessors by his majesty’s progenitors, the mayor and commonalty have always had in aid towards their rent the standard and assay of all measures and weights within the city, as well as the corrections and profits collected therewith’, and that the king’s keeper of the market was formerly accustomed to make only one annual assay, but was now doing so at least quarterly, and appropriating the profits. A jury empanelled at the king’s instance found against the king’s keeper of the market and in favour of the citizens.115 One of the liberties granted to the citizens of Dublin by John, to the effect that ‘no man shall take lodging within the walls, by assize or billeting of marshals, against the will of the citizens’,116 severely circumscribed the freedom of royal officers. It came back to haunt his successors. Over 130 years later, the citizens of Dublin complained to Edward II that the justiciar’s officials ‘against the will of the citizens occupy lodgings in their houses and appropriate their goods and chattels in contravention of the article in the charter of John, and its ratification by the present king’. King Edward, ‘for the protection of the citizens’, ordered his justiciar of Ireland to discontinue the practice, ‘and to have a care that there shall be no infringement of the rights of the citizens of Dublin under their charters’.117 But the problem persisted and the citizens continued to make their feelings known to the king, so that in 1338 Edward III felt obliged, in ordering the discontinuance of enforced billeting in Dublin, not only to confirm the relevant article of John’s charter, but to amplify it.118 In consequence, when four years later the justiciar’s marshal and the ‘sergeant of the city of Dublin’ sought to requisition without payment bread, ale and other goods for the use of the household of the deputy justiciar, they were prevented from doing so by a number of individuals. When arraigned, the latter pleaded that ‘they were citizens of Dublin, and proffered in evidence the article of the charter of John, as inspected and amplified by his present majesty’, prohibiting royal ministers from 113 114 115

Ibid., i. 156. HMDI, 230–31. Ultimately, in 1420, the mayor himself, ‘in consideration of the good services, exertions, expenses and losses of the mayor and commonalty of Dublin in connection with the preservation and defence of the loyal subjects in that city, and for maintenance of its walls, towers, and pavements’, was appointed as clerk of the king’s market at Dublin (CARD, i. 28). 116 quod nemo capiet hospicium infra muros per assisam vel per liberationem marescallorum contra voluntatem civium (Na Buirgéisí, i. 79). 117 CARD, i. 154. 118 Ibid., i. 16.

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appropriating the citizens’ goods against their will. The deputy justiciar, presiding, inspected the charter and, ‘being unwilling to infringe the liberties specified in it’, found in favour of the defendants.119 In general, the citizens seem to have liked to keep a little distance between themselves and the king. The city lay within the royal county of Dublin. Even though some royal bailiffs had been withdrawn from the city, the sheriff was never far away, and it was obviously very important for them that a sharp delineation be maintained between their respective areas of jurisdiction: it was imperative that they resist being hauled before the county court in cases that their own court was intended to try. John’s mandate to the justiciar of Ireland in 1204 ordering the construction of Dublin Castle is, for instance, extraordinary in citing the city’s defence as a secondary reason after the prior requirement ad urbem justiciandam.120 The phrase presumably refers to the castle’s intended use as a court of justice for John’s lordship of Ireland as a whole, but it could equally be translated as ‘for the judicial administration of the city’, in which case it is by no means clear what role the justiciar had in that regard. It would certainly seem to conflict with the city’s entitlement to self-governance (except for the usual four pleas of the crown, which were explicitly excluded from John’s grant of the fee-farm in 1215).121 A lot of ink, and occasionally some blood, was spilt in attempting to enforce the provision of the 1192 charter that established the precedence of the hundred court. In one case, heard by the justiciar of Ireland in 1327, a citizen of Dublin was charged with forestalling, violence, and other offences. The mayor and bailiffs of the city appeared on his behalf, brandishing ‘the charters from the king and his progenitors in evidence of the rights of the citizens from the time of the foundation of the city’, and argued successfully that as a Dublin citizen all the charges except that of forestalling (of which he was in any case innocent) should instead be tried before the hundred court.122 It may be the case, although it is an argument based only on the silence of the records, that the Dubliners were reluctant to approach the king in such disputes lest they lose the battle and the privilege. Apart from rethinking a grant of privilege, the king could, of course, simply forget it. John’s 1192 charter, for example, was quite clear that ‘no alien merchant shall delay in the town with his merchandise, to sell his merchandise, beyond forty days’.123 But thirty years later the government of Henry III had no knowledge of this: in 1223 the king wrote to his justiciar to the effect that ‘very many merchants of England, Poitou and Gascony . . . have complained that when they arrive at Dublin they are not permitted to remain beyond forty days unless they unlade their merchandise’. What is more, the government thought the idea preposterous, adding that ‘the king does not believe that the bailiffs and burgesses of Dublin obtained a warrant to do so from himself or his predecessors, and the king commands the justiciar to cause them to desist from this harassing of or exaction from merchants’.124 Although we know that the citizens must have petitioned their lord many times, it seems odd that perhaps the first trace of a surviving letter addressed by the citizens

119 120 121 122 123

Ibid., i. 152. HMDI, 61. Ibid., 63. CARD, i. 158. quod nullus extraneus mercator moretur in villa cum mercibus suis pro mercibus suis vendendis nisi per XL dies (Na Buirgéisí, i. 80). 124 CDI 1171–1251, no. 1096.

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of Dublin to the king is one that dates from half a century after the city’s conquest. Henry III, in a letter to his justiciar in 1220 ordering an enquiry into the matter, informs him that the probi homines of Dublin had notified him that a building had been erected in an open place and in the highway (in medio platee et strate regie) in Dublin to the great detriment of the city. He ordered that if an enquiry by probos et legales homines, having viewed the building, found that it did harm the city, it was to be immediately removed.125 That the citizens needed to seek the king’s intervention in this instance is an indication of the limitations on their power notwithstanding the 1192 grant.126 When they wrote again to the king in that same year it was because they sought his aid against his own justiciar. They complained that he and his bailiffs and others were making undue exactions of them, including prisage and loans of wine, and of cloth, victuals and other goods, so that they had little left to live on, and their goods were taken, nominally as loans, whether or not they agreed; as a result, the city of Dublin was now so repellent to foreign merchants that none would bring their merchandise there, to the great damage of its citizens. The king’s habitual endorsement of the rights of the men of Dublin meant that the justiciar was duly ordered to cease the practice immediately and the Dubliners got their way.127 They also wrote to the king in March 1220 on another issue, a challenge to their liberties, and by extension to the king’s, by the archbishop of Dublin. This arose when two of the archbishop’s men assaulted a couple of citizens in the market-place, and were arrested by the provosts, but the archbishop’s bailiffs demanded their release so that the matter could be dealt with in the archbishop’s court. The justiciar, at the behest of the archbishop, sent the sheriff to the hundred court to order the defendants’ release. When this was refused the archbishop turned to spiritual sanctions, and ‘interdicted the provost from entering the church, and subsequently excommunicated him, and did the like in regard to the seneschal, and the 24 principal men of the council appointed to preserve the laws and liberties of the city’.128 The matter was eventually resolved, though not until August 1223, by an admonition from the king to the archbishop, ordering him to cease insisting that lay causes be judged in ecclesiastical courts, ‘otherwise we shall settle matters with a heavy hand’.129 This case is, of course, but one of dozens of such interminable legal wrangles, often over matters of far less consequence, that are all too familiar from the period; yet it is important as the first mention of the fact that Dublin was governed not just by a provost but by a council of ‘24 principal men . . . appointed to preserve the laws and liberties of the city’. It appears that the English government came to the defence of the rights of the king’s liege men of Dublin in August 1223 only because Hugh de Lacy had just invaded Ireland to recover his earldom of Ulster, and the loyalty of Dublin needed to be bought. The country was put in a state of high alert and considerable resources were required to counter the threat of war.130 To this effort the men of Dublin 125 126

HMDI, 74. The case is not entirely comparable to the request in 1234 from the archbishop, and the prior and canons of Holy Trinity (at Christ Church) to occupy and close up a street to the west of the priory in order to enlarge their church; this was granted by Henry III, provided that they replaced the street with an alternative route on the other side of the church, and the mayor and citizens were ordered to allow it ‘notwithstanding that the obstruction be a nuisance to the city’ (CDI 1171–1251, no. 2137). 127 HMDI, 74–5. 128 CDI 1171–1251, no. 935. 129 HMDI, xliii, 78–9; CDI 1171–1251, no. 1130. 130 A.J. Otway-Ruthven, A History of Medieval Ireland (1968), 90–2.

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contributed the considerable sum of £366. The threat abated but the debt remained unpaid. An order to the justiciar to pay it in April 1225 went unheeded. Another was issued in December 1226 and largely ignored, although we next hear that the debt is a mere £312. Eventually, on 18 June 1229, Henry III granted the men of Dublin the right to elect their own mayor: the hefty price paid for this honour was their agreement to quitclaim the £312 debt. The problem with this arrangement was that the money had not been given by all the citizens, but by twelve acting on behalf of the whole community. Only these twelve men stood to lose if the debt was acquitted. So the king announced that a tax was to be levied ‘throughout the whole city of Dublin (per totam universitatem civitatis Dublinie) on each person according to his ability’, including the twelve creditors. Only after this had been done, and the justiciar’s letter, issued in 1223 in acknowledgement of the debt, had been surrendered, could the election of Dublin’s first mayor proceed. Henry’s charter is dated at Hereford on 18 June, and was presumably conveyed back to Dublin within days. Since the election proceeded as planned at Michaelmas (29 September), in the interval an assessment had been made of the relative capacity of all the citizens of Dublin to contribute to the tax, the tax had been collected, and the promissory note returned to the justiciar, all in a matter of about twelve weeks – a tribute to the effectiveness of the governance of thirteenth-century Dublin. Henry III’s concession of the right of the Dubliners to elect a mayor annually from among their fellow citizens must be deemed a major landmark. It was a right that few English cities hitherto possessed and was therefore an acknowledgement of Dublin’s status within his dominions. Great prestige attached to the mayoralty. When the citizens granted ‘for his good and faithful service’ a plot of ground near the Newgate to a certain William fitz Robert, clerk of the city with the coif (cum coypha tunc clericus civitatis), the grant was issued by the assent of Sir Gilbert del Lyuet (one of those who had purchased the fee-farm in 1215), the first mayor of Dublin, Richard Muton, and the city’s two provosts, Guido of Cornwall and William Taylburgh, and ‘many others of their fellow citizens in the full hundred court of the whole commune’, the memorandum recording the event was dated ‘the first Monday after the feast of Blessed Matthew the Apostle in the fourteenth year of the reign of King Henry the third, the year in which the mayoralty and commune (maioratus et commune) were first conceded by Henry to the citizens of Dublin’.131 The ‘Laws and Usages’ of the city set the annuity of the mayor at £10, compared to 5 marks for the city clerk and half a mark for each sergeant.132 They cite heavy fines for insulting the mayor – 40s compared with 10s for an ordinary citizen; striking the mayor could result in a fine of £40 or, if blood was shed, £100 or loss of the right arm, or even life imprisonment.133 Another text also preserved in the ‘Chain Book’, entitled Provisiones ordinate per commune consilium civitatis Dublinie, specifies that the 40s fine for insulting the mayor applies to ‘any place outside the guildhall and tholsel (in quocunque loco extra guyaldam et theolonium)’, but an insult to him when on the bench (in banco) in the hundred court incurs a £10 fine.134 Fifteen years elapsed after the grant of the mayoralty before Henry III again

131 132 133 134

HMDI, 485–6. Na Buirgéisí, i. 54. Ibid., i. 10. HMDI, 232. When a royal grant of £10 a year for forty years was made in 1455, for the repair and maintenance of Dublin’s walls and gates ‘now in a ruinous condition’, the high status accorded to those who had occupied the office of mayor is clear from the instruction of the justiciar that the funds were to be expended ‘under the supervision of two citizens who have been mayors of Dublin’ (CARD, i. 31).

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showed any visible sign of favour to his city of Dublin. In 1244 his justiciar commanded the sheriff of Dublin to enquire how a water-supply could be found and ‘conducted to the king’s city of Dublin, for the benefit of the city’. If the sheriff found that damage to certain individuals was caused by diverting the water to the city, he was to notify it to the justiciar: the intention was, not that the citizens would have to make amends, but that the damage would be ‘repaired at the cost of the king’, and anyone who opposed the project was to be ‘suppressed by force’.135 Needless to say, there was an ulterior motive: in 1244 Henry was contemplating visiting Ireland, was having the hall of Dublin Castle prepared for his arrival, and ordered that a pipe should lead from the city water-conduit to the hall.136 None the less, royal munificence manifested itself again in 1252 when Henry granted unlimited letters of protection to his citizens of Dublin, and ordered the justiciar of Ireland ‘not to molest them contrary to the charters of the kings’ predecessors, the kings of England’.137 When Henry granted Ireland to his son, the future Edward I, in 1254, Dublin, along with Limerick and Athlone, was initially excluded from the grant. Within months the king had changed his mind, Edward became lord of Dublin, and indeed referred in 1266 to the Dubliners as cives nostros Dublin.138 As king, Edward could be heavy-handed in his dealings with the city. As noted above, in 1276 Dublin was taken into the king’s hand and bailiffs of the Liffey fishery were appointed as royal officers for the duration.139 Towards the end of his reign in 1303, Edward was more sympathetic when the Dubliners approached him to complain that the liberty of the city had again been taken into the king’s hand, on this occasion without cause, by Gilbert de Arderne, ‘keeper of our market in Ireland (custodem mercati nostri in partibus Hibernie)’. Edward ordered an enquiry into the matter. It found that Gilbert sought to occupy ‘the office of our marshal of the city of Dublin (officium marescalie nostre in dicta civitate Dublinie)’ without the king’s licence in the absence elsewhere of the justiciar, ‘against the custom hitherto prevailing in those parts’, and the mayor and citizens refused to appear before Gilbert, who thereupon took the city into the king’s hand. Edward ordered its restoration to the citizens.140 In 1309 the liberty was again taken into the king’s hand. On this occasion, the offence concerned an instruction to the mayor, the two bailiffs, and all the collectors of murage, to appear before the king’s exchequer at Dublin to account. The others appeared, but not the mayor, on whose behalf a prominent citizen, John le Decer, appeared to say that the mayor was away from the city on business of his own. For leaving the city without appointing a deputy approved by the exchequer, ‘in contempt of the king and the manifest danger of perdition of the city’, it was taken into the king’s hand, and a keeper and bailiffs appointed on behalf of the king. Subsequently, when it was explained by certain citizens that the mayor had been ignorant of this requirement of his office, a day was fixed for mayor, bailiffs, and collectors of murage to come and account, and at the instance of the justiciar and the chancellor, the mayor’s transgression was pardoned and the city’s liberty restored. The delinquent mayor in this case, Robert of Nottingham, became the hero of the hour when the city faced capture by King Robert Bruce and his Scots and Irish army 135 136 137 138 139 140

CARD, i. 92; HMDI, 105–6. HMDI, 106. CDI 1252–84, no. 41. Ibid., ii. nos 335, 371; HMDI, 135–6, 179. CDI 1252–84, no. 1230. HMDI, 221–2.

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in the early weeks of 1317. It was Robert of Nottingham who apprehended Bruce’s father-in-law, Richard de Burgh, earl of Ulster, suspecting him of collusion with the enemy.141 It was he who ordered the dismantling of St Saviour’s Dominican priory and of the parish church of St Mary del Dam in order to strengthen the city walls in the face of an impending Scots assault. And it was he who presided over the desperate gamble of setting fire to the suburbs to deny cover to the approaching enemy army.142 The actions of the mayor and citizenry proved justified in the circumstances and undoubtedly contributed to the failure of this extraordinary attempt to overthrow English rule in Ireland. The citizens were soon rewarded by the remission of debts owed to the crown, temporary licences to levy tolls, and a once-off reduction in the rent.143 As on that occasion, so in succeeding years, the Dubliners showed where their loyalties lay. The last great charter of liberties granted to Dublin in this age, issued by Edward III at Westminster on 22 November 1363, was a confirmation of a grant made by his son Lionel, duke of Clarence, while at Dublin two months earlier, ‘in recognition of the good and praiseworthy service which the said citizens and their predecessors have many times rendered to us and our progenitors, especially in the protection and defence of that city and adjacent parts against the attacks of our Irish enemies’.144

141

For a discussion, see J. Lydon, ‘The Bruce Invasion of Ireland: An Examination of Some Problems’, in Robert the Bruce’s Irish Wars, ed. S. Duffy (Stroud, 2002), 80–5. 142 HMDI, 397–412. 143 Ibid., 402–12. 144 Na Buirgéisí, i. 92–9. I am grateful to Professor Howard Clarke for helpful comment on this paper.

English Landholding in Ireland

Beth Hartland English Landholding Beth Hartlandin Ireland

The title of this paper derives from an AHRB research project currently under way at the University of Durham.1 The primary purpose of the project is to establish as complete a record as possible of property-holding in Ireland by those who also held land elsewhere. A relational database (Figure 1) will be used to manage and store this information,2 and it is planned that this database will be available on-line to allow interested parties to access data relating to particular individuals or particular landholdings in Ireland. Equally important to the project are the questions which will be asked of the data gathered, questions which will be addressed through more traditional means of publication. As is well known, following Anglo-Norman intervention in Ireland at the behest of the Irish king of Leinster in 1169 and Henry II’s decision to take royal ownership of what was becoming a process of conquest in 1171, a web of proprietorship building on existing ‘well-worn lines of contact’ soon linked Ireland to other parts of the British Isles.3 Important scholarly work examining certain of these landed ties was carried out in the early to mid-twentieth century, the work of Eric St John Brooks on the descent of lands in several families and the descent of the knights’ fees of Carlow, Kilkenny and Wexford being particularly significant. More recently, other scholars have studied portions of this web of proprietorship, focusing on particular localities, individual families, or given periods of time.4 The project aims to add a substantial body of detailed research, on which sound generalisations might be based, to this existing corpus of case-studies. Despite its title, the project is not exclusively concerned with individuals who held land only in England and Ireland – ‘English landholding in Ireland’ does not exclude those men, women and institutions who held land in Ireland and Scotland, or Ireland and Wales, or indeed in Ireland and on the Continent. Thus William Reymund, citizen and merchant of Bordeaux, granted land in Dublin by King John;5

1

‘English Landholding in Ireland, c.1200–c.1360’. Grant no. B/RG/AN7194/APN14532. Grantholder: Professor Robin Frame. 2 Relational databases have been found to be ‘ideally suited to prosopographical research’ (K.S.B. Keats-Rohan, ‘Prosopography and Computing: A Marriage Made in Heaven?’, History and Computing 12 (2000), 6). The main obstacle in designing a workable entity relationship model for the project was that it had to be able to incorporate highly un-standardised data from a wide variety of sources. 3 A. Gwynn, ‘Medieval Bristol and Dublin’, IHS 5 (1947), 278; R. Frame, ‘King Henry III and Ireland: The Shaping of a Peripheral Lordship’, TCE, iv (1992), 191 (quote) (repr. in idem, Ireland and Britain 1170–1450 (1998)). 4 See, e.g., R. Frame, English Lordship in Ireland 1318–1361 (Oxford, 1982); B. Smith, Colonisation and Conquest: The English in Louth 1170–1330 (Cambridge, 1999); M. Hagger, The Fortunes of a Norman Family: The De Verduns in England, Ireland and Wales 1066–1316 (Dublin, 2001); P. Dryburgh, ‘The Career of Roger Mortimer, First Earl of March (c.1287–1330)’ (Ph.D., University of Bristol, 2002). 5 CDI 1171–1251, no. 860; RLC, ii. 39a.

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Reginald, king of Man, endowed with one knight’s fee in Ulster by John in 1212;6 and Gilbert de Valle, landholder in Pembrokeshire and Wexford in the midthirteenth century,7 could all fall within the remit of the project. Neither does the ‘English’ of the title indicate a particular ethnicity: English here does not necessarily mean Anglo-Norman, for landholding across the Irish Sea was not the preserve of men or women who could trace their ancestry back to England, Normandy or France. Keneveg fitz Richeric, possible kinsman of Llywelyn ab Iorwerth and landholder in Ireland, who may have held lands in Wales;8 Margaret Gillemichelle (who from her name was probably of either Norse or Gaelic descent), resident of Dublin and possessor of at least a small amount of rent in Bristol;9 and Walerand Teutonicus (Tyeys), a knight of German origin high in the favour and service of both John and Henry III,10 and a landholder in a number of English counties,11 who had a short-lived interest in Ireland as the custodian of the lands of William Marshal the younger in 123112 – all three belong to this study just as much as members of the Trubleville family, providers of household knights to a line of English kings,13 landholders (and holders of land as custodies) in more than fourteen English counties,14 and holders of the manor of Balimadun, Co. Dublin, between 1227 and c. 1260,15 but whose heart (quite literally in the case of Henry de Trubleville, former seneschal of Gascony) lay in Normandy.16 Constraints of time and evidence, however, dictate that aristocratic landholders together with religious institutions will be the primary focus of the project. Townspeople will not be included in the database, apart from those cases (such as Margaret Gillemichelle and William Reymund) where sufficient evidence happens to come to light. Proving that the same individual held land on both sides of the Irish Sea is not always easy, even when townspeople have been taken out of the equation. Indeed, obvious examples such as the Marshals aside, it can be difficult even at the level of magnates. It is only relatively recently that Seán Duffy demonstrated that John de Courcy, the conquistador of Ulster, was not the landless younger son from Somerset that generations of historians have held him to be, but in all likelihood inherited lands in Northamptonshire from his mother’s family.17 Similar detailed investigation 6 7 8

CDI 1171–1251, nos 428, 898, 977. E. St J. Brooks, Knights’ Fees in Counties Carlow, Wexford and Kilkenny (Dublin, 1950), 66–7. CDI 1171–1251, nos 673, 870; M.T. Flanagan, ‘Historia Gruffud vab Kenan and the Origins of Balrothery, Co. Dublin’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 28 (1994), 74–91. 9 CDI 1171–1251, no. 2210. 10 N. Fryde, ‘How to get on in England in the Thirteenth Century?’, in England and Europe in the Reign of Henry III (1216–1272), ed. B.K.U. Weiler and I.W. Rowlands (Aldershot, 2002), 208; R. Stacey, Politics, Policy and Finance under Henry III (Oxford, 1987), 64; RLP, 161a; RLC, i. 253b, 581b; RLC, ii. 100a, 160b. 11 See R.V. Turner, Men Raised from the Dust: Administrative Service and Upward Mobility in Angevin England (Philadelphia, 1988), 69; RLC, i. 248a, 305a, 456a, 555a, 586b, 590a; RLC, ii. 64a, 168b, 191b, 200b; CChR 1226–57, 130; Fees, i. 256, 286; ii. 884, 908, 1419, 1466. 12 CDI 1171–1251, nos 1872, 1880, 1905. 13 S.D. Church, The Household Knights of King John (Cambridge, 1999), 3, 22, 29, 118, 120; CDI 1252–84, nos 436, 696. 14 See RLC, i. 247b, 319b, 448a, 455b, 477b–478a; CChR 1226–57, 36, 63, 242, 246; CPR 1232–47, 33, 82; CR 1256–9, 156; CChR 1257–1300, 7; CR 1237–42, 177; Fees, i. 279, 360, 376–9, 386, 388; ii. 1118, 1340, 1356. Henry also held land in Poitou (RLC, ii. 164a) 15 CDI 1171–1251, nos 1471, 1509, 1567, 1611, 1649, 1865, 1966, 1987, 2233, 3010, 3035, 3036, 3111, 3186; CDI 1252–84, nos 564, 565, 696. 16 CR 1237–42, 174. For his seneschalship of Gascony see Stacey, Politics, Policy and Finance, 174–8. 17 S. Duffy, ‘The First Ulster Plantation: John de Courcy and the Men of Cumbria’, in Colony and Frontier in Medieval Ireland. Essays Presented to J. F. Lydon, ed. T. Barry, R. Frame and K. Simms (1995), 5–7.

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needs to be undertaken to attempt to answer questions about the landholding of other Irish magnates. Whether Hugh II de Lacy, the royally sanctioned usurper of de Courcy in Ulster, also held land outside Ireland is, for example, not a clear-cut issue. The general assumption, in the face of what so far remains a lack of direct evidence, is that Hugh II held no lands in Britain.18 Nevertheless, it would not be surprising to learn that he did hold lands elsewhere in the British Isles. As a younger son, he could have received lands from his father for his sustenance during his lifetime with reversion to his elder brother, Walter, lord of Meath and Weobley: this was the arrangement which Hugh I had made for another of his sons, Gilbert, in Hereford and Shropshire.19 Alternatively, Hugh II could have acquired lands in Scotland later in his career: his daughter, Rose, married Alan, lord of Galloway, sometime between 1219 and 1229; and in 1237 Hugh’s gift of churches in Ulster to the church of St Andrew the Apostle in Scotland was confirmed.20 The case of Hugh II de Lacy highlights the necessity of informed intuition when making judgements about whether an individual did hold land on both sides of the Irish Sea, a necessity that is magnified in the cases of certain lesser landholders such as the Praeres family of Cheshire. It seems very likely that Robert de Praeres who inherited his father’s land in Ireland in 1217 also held land in England, since a contemporary Robert de Praeres was associated with Henry de Audley in both England and Ireland.21 Robert, son of Thomas, certainly held land in Ireland of Henry de Audley;22 and a Robert de Praeres was a witness to a charter of Earl Ranulf of Chester which confirmed a grant of land to Henry of Audley at about the time that Robert, son of Thomas, came into his father’s lands in Ireland.23 It is a leap from charter witness to tenant but not too great a leap when the fact that Robert’s son, Henry de Praeres, granted the land he had inherited from Thomas and Robert in Ireland to Henry de Audley in 1227 is considered.24 Common sense would suggest that Henry de Praeres would not have granted his Irish land to his mesne lord unless he also held land elsewhere, and in the late thirteenth century we find a line of the Praeres family which included both a Robert and a Thomas holding land in Weston, Chester, from Nicholas de Audley, grandson and heir of Henry de Audley.25 This conclusion is not entirely watertight – the most obvious hole in the argument being 18

See Frame, ‘Henry III and Ireland’, 184. N. Vincent, ‘England and the Albigensian Crusade’, in England and Europe, ed. Weiler and Rowlands, 73, states that Hugh de Lacy was exiled from his English and Irish estates in 1210. Although the Annals of Margam state that the many goods of Walter and Hugh in England, Wales and Ireland were confiscated in 1210, the goods in England and Wales may only have belonged to Walter de Lacy, lord of Weobley (Margam, 30). According to his petition to the king in 1222 Hugh asked to be restored to terram suam de Hibernia (Dunstable, 75). 19 CR 1227–31, 464–5. Hugh held land of his brother Walter in Ireland, and may have held land of him elsewhere (CDI 1171–1251, no. 1073; RLC, i. 501a). Walter had granted the manor of Britford to his half-brother William (CR 1231–4, 38; Frame, ‘Henry III and Ireland’, 185). 20 K.J. Stringer, ‘Periphery and Core in Thirteenth Century Scotland: Alan, son of Roland, Lord of Galloway and Constable of Scotland’, in Medieval Scotland: Crown, Lordship and Community. Essays presented to G.W.S. Barrow, ed. A. Grant and K.J. Stringer (Edinburgh, 1993), 93; Liber Cartarum Prioratus Sancti Andree in Scotia (Edinburgh, 1849), 118. 21 CDI 1171–1251, no. 796. For this family see Frame, ‘Henry III and Ireland’, 191–2. 22 RLC, ii. 95; CDI 1171–1251, nos 1325, 1346, 1393; The Irish Cartularies of Llanthony Prima and Secunda, ed. E. St J. Brooks (Dublin, 1953), 109. 23 The Charters of the Anglo-Norman Earls of Chester, c.1071–1237, ed. G. Barraclough (Record Soc. Lancashire and Cheshire 126, 1988), no. 395. 24 CChR 1226–1257, 37. 25 CIPM, ii. no. 760; CIPM, iii, no. 536. Nicholas de Audley brought, and subsequently dropped, a plea against Robert de Praeres concerning land in Weston in 1287–9 (Calendar of the County Court, City Court and Eyre Rolls of Chester, 1259–1297, with An Inquest of Military Service, 1288, ed. R. StewartBrown (Chetham Soc., new ser. 84, 1925), nos 97, 125, 104).

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the fact that there was more than one individual named Robert de Praeres holding land in Cheshire in the late thirteenth century.26 Nevertheless, the likelihood that Thomas, Robert and Henry de Praeres held land on both sides of the Irish Sea in the early thirteenth century, and the need to include them in a database cataloguing such landholding, remains. Another problem centres both on the identification of individuals as members of the main or the cadet line of a family, and on which line held which lands. The de Cogan family, whose various branches held land in England, Ireland and Wales, demonstrate these challenges frustratingly well. Indeed, in the case of the de Cogans, this task is complicated by the early genealogy of the Devon and Somerset branch published in Cokayne’s Complete Peerage, which in fact conflates two branches of the family.27 Given the recent acceptance of this genealogy,28 it is worth highlighting some of the errors in it. First, it is incorrect in identifying Miles de Cogan (d. 1182), one of the original conquistadors of Ireland, as lord of the manor of Cogan in Wales, and therefore wrongly identifies Miles as the ancestor of the main de Cogan line who came to hold land in both Glamorgan and Cork.29 This place in the family history rather belongs to his elder brother, Richard,30 sent to Ireland by Henry II to assume the role of constable and governor of Dublin following Miles’s murder (see Figure 2).31 Second, the Cokayne genealogy identifies John de Cogan (d. 1302), the father of Thomas (d. 1314), of Devon and Somerset, as the son of Juliana, the sister and eventual heir to Maurice fitz Gerald of lands in Limerick. This is clearly incorrect. The sources are quite clear that Juliana’s son, John, died in 1311; and that his heir was his son Miles.32 The de Cogans of Cork, Limerick, and Glamorgan, and those of Devon and Somerset were distinct, even if closely related, branches of the same family; and rather than representing the main de Cogan line with lands in Wales and Ireland, the Devon and Somerset branch were a cadet line who do not appear to have held any land in Ireland. In the light of this knowledge, it is clear that the landholding strategies of the family require reassessment. The main branch were far from being an example of a family who retired from Ireland when the going got tough in the late thirteenth century, ‘apparently content to retreat to the recently-acquired estates in Devon and Somerset, leaving whatever interest remained in southern Ireland to various cadet members’.33 In fact, whilst the going in county Cork undoubtedly got tougher for the de Cogans in the late thirteenth and 26 27 28

Cal. County Court of Chester, no. 103. Complete Peerage, i. 357. R.J. Burls, ‘Society, Economy and Lordship in Devon in the Age of the first two Courtenay Earls, c.1297–1377’ (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 2002), 134. 29 Recent work on the lineages of Co. Cork discusses the actual descent of Miles’s lands (K. Nicholls, ‘The Development of Lordship in County Cork, 1300–1600’, in Cork: History and Society. Interdisciplinary Essays on the History of an Irish County, ed. P. O’Flanagan and C.G. Buttimer (Dublin, 1993), 157–211; P. McCotter, ‘The Sub-infeudation and Descent of the Fitzstephen/Carew Moiety of Desmond (Parts I and II)’, J. Cork Historical and Archaeological Soc. 101 (1996), 64–80; 102 (1997), 89–106; see also Figure 2 below). 30 For discussion of this point see E. St J. Brooks, ‘The Family of Marisco’, J. Royal Soc. Antiquaries of Ireland 71 (1931), 25–6, n. 14; idem, ‘Anglo-Irish Medieval Genealogy’, The Irish Genealogist 2 (1943–55), 37; Cal. Ormond Deeds, ed. E. Curtis (Dublin, 1935), iii. notes to no. 436; M.T. Flanagan, Irish Society, Anglo-Norman Settlers, Angevin Kingship: Interactions in Ireland in the Late Twelfth Century (Oxford, 1989), 154. 31 Gerald, EH, 189. 32 NAI, RC 8/5, 621; RC 8/10, 289; CPR 1307–13, 381. It is easy to see how confusion has crept in. In 1277, for example, both John de Cogan (d. 1278) and John de Cogan (d. 1302) seem to have served in the king’s army in Wales (CPR 1272–81, 216; CCR 1296–1302, 531). 33 Burls, ‘Society, Economy and Lordship in Devon’, 135–6 (quote), 142–3.

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early fourteenth centuries,34 the family were concerned to maintain their landed interests in Wales.35 Thus, painstaking as genealogical research may be, the case of the de Cogan family demonstrates its fundamental importance to this and any project concerned with landholding in providing clues ‘for answering [the] larger questions that interest historians today’.36 The problems inherent in establishing just who held what, and where, do not outweigh the advantages of working out the web of proprietorship between Britain and Ireland in detail. Whilst it was not necessary for an individual to hold lands in both Ireland and Britain in order to have both British and Irish aspects to his or her career, the landholding nexus was a crucial aspect of the relationship between Britain and Ireland. All the connections between the two islands whether in terms of politics, supplies for war, petitions or personnel of government,37 were ultimately related to and derived from the most fundamental link of all: that the king of England was the lord of his land of Ireland.38 Without a detailed investigation of the landholding between Britain and Ireland, its true significance in the many-sided relationship between kingdom and lordship will remain uncertain. Investigation of such landholding may be profitably approached from a number of angles. Consideration of the means by which, as well as from whom, land in Ireland was acquired could, for example, throw light on the nature of the patronage system in operation in the lordship and the attractiveness of land in Ireland to those with interests elsewhere. To narrow the focus, grants of land ad se sustenandum might be examined in order to establish both how many of these grants were realised and for how many of their recipients such grants were the beginning of a long-term landed involvement in the lordship.39 The manner and timing of how lords, both lay and ecclesiastical, sought to rationalise their landed interests by disposing of their Irish property must be reviewed alongside similar questions about the acquisition of land in Ireland. Such an approach will either confirm, or lead to revision of, the suggestion put forward in recent work that the ‘Gaelic Revival’ of the late thirteenth 34

For the strong-arm tactics of John fitz Thomas, lord of Offaly, see C. Ó Cléirigh, ‘The Absentee Landlady and the Sturdy Robbers: Agnes de Valence’, in ‘The Fragility of Her Sex’? Medieval Irishwomen in their European Context, ed. C.E. Meek and K. Simms (Dublin, 1996), 107, 111, 114. For the Gaelic threat in the fourteenth century see Nicholls, ‘Lordship in County Cork’, 167–9. 35 In the early to mid fourteenth century, Robert Calf, a trustee or husband of a de Cogan widow, granted lands in Wales and Cork to John son of John de Cogan; and the main branch of the Cogans in Cork still held the manor of Cogan, Wales, at the beginning of the fifteenth century (Cal. Ormond Deeds, iii. no. 346 and notes). The demise of the manor of Cogan made in 1297 to Thomas Cantok, chancellor of Ireland, for the term of his life (NAI, RC 7/4, 161–2) clearly did not mark a shift in the family’s interest in their patrimonial lands. 36 C.R. Young, ‘Hugh de Neville: An Early Thirteenth-Century Problem in Identification’, Medieval Prosopography, 2 (1981), 38. 37 See Frame, English Lordship; idem, Ireland and Britain; the works of J. Lydon listed in his The Lordship of Ireland in the Middle Ages (2nd edn, Dublin, 2003), 247–8; B. Smith, ‘Irish Politics, 1220–1245’, TCE, viii (2001), 13–22; A. Thomas, ‘Interconnections between the Lands of Edward I: A Welsh–English Mercenary Force in Ireland, 1285–1304’, BBCS 40 (1993), 135–47; B. Hartland, ‘The Household Knights of Edward I in Ireland’, HR 77 (2004), 161–77; eadem, ‘Edward I and Petitions Relating to Ireland’, TCE, ix (2003), 59–70. 38 Cf. J.F. Lydon, ‘Lordship and Crown: Llywelyn of Wales and O’Connor of Connacht’, in The British Isles 1100–1500: Comparisons, Contrasts and Connections, ed. R.R. Davies (Edinburgh, 1988), 53. 39 The examples of David Basset and Amaury de St Amand illustrate how the same form of grant could produce widely different outcomes. In Basset’s case, payment at the Dublin exchequer was provided in lieu of his 1225 grant of £20 from the king’s escheat lands. Conversely, the descendants of Amaury de St Amand in the mid to late fourteenth century were still holding the land which he had been granted for his maintenance in 1226 (CDI 1171–1251, nos 1272, 1294, 1342, 1400). Amaury’s success was undoubtedly helped by his marriage to Isolda, widow of Henry Biset, whose land in Ireland he was subsequently granted.

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century marked the point at which the tide of interest in landed investment by those with interests outside Ireland began to turn against the lordship.40 By examining such questions the project will establish how and why patterns of property-holding changed across the period, and will address the effects this had on the political and socio-economic links between Britain and Ireland. Because of constraints of space, what follows are merely preliminary comments upon the acquisition of land in Ireland through royal grant, focusing on the varying expectations of defence and fortification which the crown placed upon those recipients with interests outside the lordship. At the start of the thirteenth century, there was still a clear emphasis on the colonization of land, and the recipients of land in the lordship were expected to fulfil the duties of defence incumbent upon all landholders, irrespective of their other landed interests. Thus, in 1200 Hamo de Valoignes, a landholder in Kent,41 and former justiciar of Ireland,42 was granted licence to ‘lead his men to colonize his land’ in Limerick, granted to him by King John the previous year.43 This land was still held by his granddaughter, Gunnora, at the beginning of the fourteenth century.44 Similarly, Henry III was prepared to respect the grant of land made by his father to Robert de Mandeville (a landholder in the south-west counties of England)45 if it was found that Robert had ‘colonized and built on it at his cost’.46 The expectation of the English kings that grantees would actively defend (having first secured) their lands, was most obviously made in the mid-thirteenth-century series of speculative grants of extensive tracts of land still under native Irish control. Land which was still held by the O’Brien kings of Thomond47 was granted by Henry III to John FitzGeoffrey, his justiciar of Ireland and a prominent landholder in Buckinghamshire,48 and to Robert de Muscegros, steward of Queen Eleanor, who was also a landholder in England.49 Edward I likewise granted Thomond as a liberty 40

See C. Ó Cléirigh, ‘The Problems of Defence: A Regional Case-study’, in Law and Disorder in Thirteenth-century Ireland: The Dublin Parliament of 1297, ed. J.F. Lydon (Dublin, 1997), 46; R.R. Davies, The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093–1343 (Oxford, 2000), 178–9. I plan to address this subject in a forthcoming paper. 41 Fees, ii. 656, 662, 670, 671; CDI 1171–1251, no. 150; cf. Earldom of Gloucester Charters: The Charters and Scribes of the Earls and Countesses of Gloucester to A.D. 1217, ed. R.B. Patterson (Oxford, 1973), no. 187. 42 H.G. Richardson and G.O. Sayles, The Administration of Ireland 1172–1377 (Dublin, 1963), 74–5. 43 CDI 1171–1251, nos 92, 120; cf. J. Otway-Ruthven, ‘The Character of Norman Settlement in Ireland’, Historical Studies 5 (1965), 77. 44 In 1260–1 Gunnora owed £100 relief for the land of ‘Inskyfti’ (Askeaton) which her brother had held of the lord Edward in Limerick (RIA, MS 12 D 9, 108). Gunnora retained possession of these lands until early 1305 when she demised the manor to Hugh le Despenser. Her decision to give up her Irish lands at this time may have been related to a land case first brought against her in 1302 (NAI, RC 7/10, 134, 147, 220, 330; RC 7/11, 94; RC 8/1, 222; RC 8/2, 170). 45 RLP, 61b; RLC, i. 51b, 76b, 308b, 373b, 572b; Fees, i. 75, 83, 85, 94, 96, 265, 612. The association of Robert in Ireland with Ernest de Dunheved of Somerset increases the likelihood that he held land on both sides of the Irish Sea (CR 1234–7, 531; The Great Chartulary of Glastonbury, ed. Dom A. Watkin (Somerset Record Soc., 1952), ii. 461–3; CDI 1171–1251, nos 1682, 1768). 46 CDI 1171–1251, no. 1677. 47 For these grants and the thinking behind them, see A. Nic Ghiollamhaith, ‘The Uí Bríaín and the King of England 1248–1276’, Dal g Cais 4 (1984), 94–99, and Frame, ‘Henry III and Ireland’, 196–9. John FitzGeoffrey was granted the cantred of the Isles (CDI 1252–84, no. 289); and Robert de Muscegros, the cantred of Tradery (CDI 1171–1251, no. 2920). 48 Turner, Men Raised from the Dust, 69; CR 1227–31, 276; CR 1231–4, 164. He also held land in other English counties (see e.g. RLC, i. 331b, 339b; CR 1227–31, 66, 97, 302–3, 495; CR 1231–4, 80; CChR 1226–57, 253). 49 Robert held land in Somerset, Wilts., Dorset, Gloucs. and Staffs. (PatR 1225–32, 513; CChR

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to Thomas de Clare, one of his household knights and the younger brother of the earl of Gloucester, following the withdrawal of the de Muscegros family from active lordship in the area.50 That the kings of England were concerned about the proper defence of these lands is evident in the grants of power to fortify their lands made to John FitzGeoffrey, Robert de Muscegros and Thomas de Clare; and whilst patronage of these key figures, in the form of financial aid towards that end, somewhat blunted the sharp edge of royal expectations, those expectations were still to be met.51 Neither did established landholders escape the focus of the royal eye: and as such Ralph Pippard, a landholder in Uriel, was both granted the service and aid of his tenants to fortify a castle in his lands in 1252 and instructed to defend his lands in the marches of Ulster on pain of forfeiture in 1254.52 Royal grants, far less a selection of grants such as those outlined above, do not a royal policy make. Indeed, it may not be reasonable to expect royal attitudes to be any more consistent than the membership of the circle that was in attendance on, or in regular contact with, the king. The presence of the justiciar of Ireland at the royal court, or failing that the receipt of communications from him, may have influenced the king to make more responsible use of his landed resources in Ireland. Robin Frame has highlighted the strong likelihood that the justiciar, John FitzGeoffrey, took a central role in shaping the strategic planning which lay behind the king’s grants to Robert de Muscegros and FitzGeoffrey himself; and a similar case can be made to show the leading part which the then justiciar, Geoffrey de Geneville, probably played in Edward I’s grant of Thomond to Thomas de Clare. In the pressurized court atmosphere of the mid-thirteenth century, it was not only the justiciar who had opinions about how the king should distribute the lands which were within his patronage. Most notably, Henry’s half-brother Geoffrey de Lusignan leant hard upon the king, encouraging Henry to endow him with lands in Ireland; and the proximity of William de Valence, another of Henry’s Poitevin siblings, to the king undoubtedly influenced how both Henry III and Edward I were to view William’s failure to attend to the defence of his Irish lands in person. The exercise of patronage dictated that the kings regarded certain of their subjects through what must have seemed to many to be a distorted lens, and it was through such a lens that Geoffrey de Lusignan and William de Valence were viewed. Although it was Henry’s intention to meet his promise of £500 worth of land to Geoffrey de Lusignan from exposed western territories in the King’s Cantreds in Connacht and, if necessary, Thomond,53 it is clear that he did not expect the same level of commitment to his Irish lands from his half-brother that he did from his justiciar, John FitzGeoffrey, whom he had recently enfeoffed in Thomond. Even though de Lusignan was eventually awarded more secure lands in Louth,54 and so never received grants to help him fortify his lands against the Irish, Henry’s intention to

1226–57, 242, 249; RLC, i. 244a, 259a, 572a; CR 1231–4, 428; CPR 1232–47, 102, 120; CR 1242–7, 164; CR 1253–4, 31, 53; Fees, i. 378, 421, 425; ii. 718, 731, 751, 754). 50 CDI 1252–84, nos 1192, 1194. 51 FitzGeoffrey was granted the power to fortify castles within his lands (CDI 1252–84, no. 392); Muscegros the power to fortify castles for the defence of his lands and respite for two years of the farm of £30 which he owed for them (CDI 1171–51, no. 3126; CDI 1252–84, no. 4); and de Clare the knight service of Ireland for the pacification of his liberty, together with the hostages taken for the preservation of peace in Thomond (CDI 1252–84, nos 1191, 1194, 1197; CCR 1272–9, 470–1). 52 CDI 1252–84, no. 411; B. Smith, ‘The Concept of the March in Medieval Ireland: The Case of Uriel’, Proc. RIA 88 C (1988), 263. 53 See CDI 1252–84, nos 369, 436, 447, 478. 54 Ibid., no. 524.

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reward his half-brother with lands which could be used as a sinecure can be inferred from the string of instructions sent to his justiciar stipulating that Geoffrey should be given a favourable extent made in the safer part of Connacht,55 and from the king’s attempts to convince Felim O’Connor, the resident native king of the province, that this grant would not be to his injury.56 Although Edward ‘not remembering this grant’ impleaded Geoffrey’s son, another Geoffrey, of the lands given to his father in lieu of lands in Connacht in 1302,57 this was not evidence of a lack of favour but rather the opposite, as in confirming this grant Edward confirmed the favoured position which his uncle had occupied and which had allowed him to receive a grant of land from Edward’s appanage in the first place.58 There was no danger of William de Valence being the victim of a bout of royal forgetfulness. Ridgeway argued that William’s marriage to a Marshal co-heiress in 1247, in whose right he became lord of Wexford in south-east Ireland, and lord of Pembroke in Wales, was an example of Henry III’s ‘preference for deploying foreigners in potentially treacherous borderlands’, through which Henry created more loyal power-bases in Wales and Ireland.59 However, despite plans in c. 1270, William never travelled to Ireland during Henry’s reign;60 and far from expecting William’s personal management of his Irish or Welsh lordships, Henry instead ‘intervened repeatedly’ in these lands on his behalf.61 Neither did Edward I require his uncle to attend to the growing problems of defence in Leinster in the late thirteenth century in person, despite requiring this of the earls of Gloucester and Norfolk.62 Clearly, the lands which William acquired in his wife’s name were intended to be sinecures, as was Edward I’s grant of lands in tail in Co. Tipperary to his favoured household knight, Otto de Grandison.63 The negotiations between Edward I and his justiciar, Robert Ufford, over the service to be rendered by John de Walhope for £30 of waste lands assigned to him in 1279, are instructive, and may reveal something of the Dublin government’s perspective on such royal grants. Ufford seems to have feared that the king would assign the lands with an inappropriate level of service; in the event the lands which Ufford committed to John de Walhope for the service of 1½ knights’ fees were indeed confirmed to him by the king for the service of one fee.64 Walhope may only have been in receipt of lands to 55

Ibid., nos 415, 439. As Henry put it, ‘it is not just or fitting that the king’s brother should be of worse condition than any other but rather of a better’ (CPR 1247–58, 384). De Lusignan lobbied the king to fulfil his promise of land in Ireland, but this does not necessarily indicate that he regarded land there as highly attractive. H. Ridgeway, ‘Foreign Favourites and Henry III’s Problems of Patronage, 1247–1258’, EHR 114 (1989), 602, has suggested that Henry decided to settle Irish lands on Geoffrey in order to allow de Lusignan to circumvent the precedence system created to help Henry meet all his obligations (ibid., 600–1). 56 See, e.g., CR 1254–6, 213; cf. Lydon, ‘Lordship and Crown’, 59. In the end it was Geoffrey’s own ‘justifiable unease about the area’s value and defensibility’ that helped cause the plans to founder (Frame, ‘Henry III and Ireland’, 197). 57 CDI 1302–7, no. 143. 58 Under the terms of his appanage, Edward was not allowed to alienate land (J.R. Studd, ‘The Lord Edward and King Henry III’, BIHR 50 (1977), 6–7, 14). 59 H. Ridgeway, ‘King Henry III and the “Aliens”, 1236–1272’, TCE, ii (1988), 85 (quote); idem, ‘The Politics of the English Royal Court, 1247–1265, with Special Reference to the Role of Aliens’ (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1983), 17, 93–4. 60 SC 1/8/45; cf. Ó Cleirigh, ‘The Absentee Landlady and the Sturdy Robbers’, 101–18. 61 Ridgeway, ‘Politics’, 93. 62 Hartland, ‘Petitions’, 59. 63 This was not so obviously the case when Otto was initially granted the lands for life, in conjunction with the office of sheriff of Tipperary in c. 1267 (Hartland, ‘Household Knights’, 164, 165–6). 64 CDI 1252–84, nos 1466, 1613, 1625, 1626. Cf. no. 67, where Henry III granted more land to William de Trubleville without increasing the service owed.

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the value of £30 per annum, but Dublin ministers’ concerns that the king’s grants resulted in a reduction of the money available for the prosecution of their duties were also voiced over the more substantial grant of the liberty of Thomond to Thomas de Clare.65 Whilst the preferential treatment meted out to Valence and Grandison was significant on account of the size of their lordships in Ireland, the royal attitude to the lands held by the more numerous and rather smaller fry such as Walhope might well be more enlightening. This is where the need for systematic study becomes more apparent as hand-picked exempla are necessarily less likely to be representative and can be chosen to tell whatever story historical fashion dictates. Thus, in order to support an argument that Henry III saw Ireland as an answer to his problems of patronage, his grants made in the early 1240s to John de Brademere and Richard de Dovor might be highlighted. In the case of Richard de Dovor, ‘the king’s cousin’, the grant of the custody of the lands of Geoffrey de Costentin in Ireland enabled him to make a quick buck, as he was granted licence to sell the custody a year later.66 In Brademere’s case, the evidence appears to be of a sinecure proper: £10 of land granted to maintain him in the king’s service, supplemented with various payments at the Dublin exchequer, culminating in commutation of his grant of land during pleasure to a grant for life, and all this for service centred on Gascony.67 The Trubleville family and their thirty-odd-year tenure of the manor of Balimadun, for maintenance on the king’s service, rendered, again, primarily in Gascony, but also Wales and Scotland, adds weight to this argument. In selecting such examples, however, the historian of the lordship of Ireland should be careful not to grind an axe well-worn on the issue of royal misuse of the resources of the lordship, without stopping to notice that the 1240s also saw the granting of English lands to nonresidents.68 Neither should attention focus solely on whether the grantee sojourned in Ireland or not (ideal as that scenario might have been for the security of the lordship): however non-resident lords chose to manage their lands, whether directly or by farming them out, communication between Ireland and the lord’s centre of interests was necessary; and such administrative and legal arrangements were themselves a distinct layer in this, and any, landholding nexus.69

65

Thomas was allowed to hold Thomond for the service of 5 knights’ fees, a reduction from the original 10 (CDI 1252–84, no. 1189). Treasury officials noted that whereas O’Brien had given 140 marks p.a. for the lands they were ‘now committed to others, and . . . on pretext of the waste of Ireland, the K. loses much, and the tenants have great profit . . .’ (ibid., no. 2329). 66 CDI 1171–1251, nos 2682, 2772. 67 Ibid., nos 2602, 2605, 2861; CDI 1252–84, nos 426, 887; CPR 1266–72, 180. Brademere may have been resident in Co. Limerick in the early 1260s (NAI, RC 7/1, 250; RIA, MS 12 D 9, 110–11; RIA, MS 12 D 10, 7). 68 Ridgeway, ‘Politics’, 188. In the 1240s six absentee Savoyard pensioners received landed estates in England. In contrast, during the 1250s, when Henry’s patronage resources were severely over-stretched, only one absentee Poitevin was endowed with land in England. 69 See B. Hartland, ‘ “To Serve Well and Faithfully”: The Agents of Aristocratic English Lordship in Leinster, c.1272–c.1315’, Medieval Prosopography (24 (2003), forthcoming) for a discussion of the Irish administrations of great ‘absentee’ lords; see R. Bartlett, ‘Colonial Aristocracies of the High Middle Ages’, in Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. R. Bartlett and A. Mackay (Oxford, 1989), 38–41 for a discussion of the administrative problems that might be encountered by lesser landholders.

The Reception of the Matter of Britain in Thirteenth-Century England: A Study of Some Anglo-Norman Manuscripts of Wace’s Roman de Brut

Françoise Le Saux The Reception Françoise of theLe Matter Saux of Britain

For students of literature and history alike, the rise in popularity of the Matter of Britain following the publication in 1135–8 of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britannie is an important and far-reaching phenomenon. Geoffrey’s work, which had initially met with some scepticism in scholarly circles (as may be seen from William of Newburgh’s virulent attack on its reliability), had by the end of the twelfth century attained academic respectability,1 an acceptance reflected in the fortunes of Wace’s translation into French verse of the Historia Regum Britannie, the Roman de Brut, completed in 1155. Nowadays, the Roman de Brut is studied mainly by literary scholars but, to a great extent, current perceptions of the poem are anachronistic. In the twelfth century, the term ‘roman’ referred to any text (particularly adaptations from the Latin) in a vernacular language, and did not necessarily indicate ‘literariness’, while verse was a medium used in a range of twelfth-century French vernacular works, including medical textbooks.2 Wace’s Roman de Brut presents itself from the outset as a truth-bearing, historical narrative, based on an original which required translating (i.e. from Latin): Ki vult oïr e vult saveir De rei en rei e d’eir en eir Ki cil furent e dunt il vindrent Ki Engleterre primes tindrent, Quels reis i ad en ordre eü Ki anceis e ki puis i fu, Maistre Wace l’ad translaté Ki en conte la verité. Whoever wishes to hear and to know about the successive kings and their heirs who once upon a time were the rulers of England – who they were, whence they came, what was their sequence, who came earlier and who later – Master Wace has translated it and tells it truthfully.3 1

For a general outline of the reception of the Arthurian material in Britain, see J.P. Carley, ‘Arthur in English History’, in The Arthur of the English: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval English Life and Literature, ed. W.R.J. Barron (Cardiff, 1999), 47–57. 2 See P. Damian-Grint, The New Historians of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance (Woodbridge, 1999). 3 Roman de Brut, lines 1–8. Quotations of the Roman de Brut are from Ivor Arnold’s two-volume edition, Le Roman de Brut de Wace (Société des Anciens Textes Français, Paris, 1938 and 1940). Unless otherwise specified, all translations of the Roman de Brut are from J. Weiss, Wace’s Roman de Brut: A History of the English. Text and Translation (Exeter, 1999).

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So the Roman de Brut is first and foremost a work of scholarship, retracing in sequence the deeds of the first kings of England, with the added bonus of being lively narrative poetry. Part of Wace’s readership would have been interested in the Roman de Brut primarily as an authorising sub-text for the increasingly popular Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes and his followers, and as a backdrop to the ‘romans antiques’ such as the Roman d’Eneas. We know that this was especially the case on the Continent, where the Roman de Brut was frequently copied in manuscripts alongside Arthurian and other romances.4 In Anglo-Norman England, however, this literary interest was subordinated to, or at the very least, coexisting with the work’s historical interest, inasmuch as it purports to be an accurate account of the past of the homeland. It is my aim in this paper to identify any clues given by a sample of thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman manuscripts of the Roman de Brut regarding the way the work was read and received in England at the time. Wace’s Roman de Brut was a very successful work, if manuscript survival is anything to go by: some 32 manuscripts and fragments containing all or part of the poem.5 We are far from the over 200 extant manuscripts of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s phenomenally popular Historia Regum Britannie, but for a non-religious vernacular text, these are high figures. Nineteen manuscripts (eighteen of these being medieval) preserve a complete, or near-complete, text, while thirteen fragments preserve more or less extensive scraps of the poem. About half of the extant manuscripts are Anglo-Norman: nine of the nineteen complete or near-complete witnesses, and seven of the thirteen fragments. These manuscripts span four centuries.6 The oldest complete manuscript is Durham Cathedral Library, MS C IV 27 (I), an AngloNorman copy dated to the end of the twelfth century; the scraps preserved in Oxford (Bodleian Library, MS Rawl. D 913) were also originally part of a manuscript copied in the late twelfth century. Some fifteen of the extant manuscripts, eight of which are Anglo-Norman, were copied in the thirteenth century;7 a further four (all Anglo-Norman) date from the late thirteenth century, and six from the fourteenth century, two of which are Anglo-Norman.8 These figures suggest a shift in interest 4

See for example the thirteenth-century ‘Guiot’ manuscript (BN, MS 794), where the Roman de Brut is copied alongside the Roman d’Eneas, Chrétien de Troyes’ Chevalier de la Charrette, Cligès, Yvain and Perceval, the continuation of the Perceval, the Siège d’Athènes, Benoît de Sainte Maure’s Roman de Troie and Calendre’s Les empereurs de Rome. 5 A full list of these manuscripts is provided by Judith Weiss in the introduction to her edition and translation of the work. New fragments were discovered as recently as 1999: J. Weiss, ‘Two Fragments from a Newly Discovered Manuscript of Wace’s Brut’, Medium Aevum 68 (1999), 268–77. At the latest count, we have 32 manuscripts or fragments of the Roman de Brut. For a full description of the manuscripts known before 1937 (in effect, all the complete or near-complete manuscripts), see Arnold, i. vii–xiv. 6 Or indeed seven, if one counts the eighteenth-century copy of the fourteenth-century continental manuscript, Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève MS 2447. In the following discussion, I shall disregard this late copy. 7 Nine of these are complete or near-complete. They are: BL, Cotton Vitellius MS A x (A.N.); BL, Add. MS 32125 (A.N.); BL, Add. MS 45103 (A.N.); Lincoln Cathedral Library MS 104 (A.N.); Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 50 (A.N.); Vatican Library, Otto. Lat. MS 1869 (A.N.); BN, fonds fr. MS 1450 (Cont.); BN, fonds fr. MS 1416 (Cont.); BN, fonds fr. MS 794 (‘Guiot’ manuscript; Cont.); Montpellier, Bibl. Interuniv. Sect. Médecine MS 251 (Cont.; first 5664 lines only); National Library of the Netherlands, Royale MS 73 J 53 (Cont.; preserves 7348 lines of the poem); Cologny (Geneva), Bibl. Bodmer. MS 67 (A.N.; lines 13642 to end); Zadar, Croatia, Archepisc. Dioc. (Cont., 13485–629 and 14287–443); Berkeley, Bancroft UCB MS 165 (Cont., 387–580 and 1769–954); Westminster Abbey Muniments Room, two fragments from the same A.N. manuscript (from 9065 to 11534, with lacunae). 8 Five of the ten late thirteenth/fourteenth-century manuscripts are complete or near-complete. These are: Arundel MS xiv (London, College of Arms; A.N.); BL, Harley MS 6508 (Cont.); BL, Royal MS 13

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in the work. Of these six fourteenth-century manuscripts, only two are AngloNorman, suggesting that interest in Wace’s Roman de Brut was on the wane in England. The texts copied alongside the Roman de Brut strongly suggest that the poem was received by its early Anglo-Norman readers as a work of history; typically, it is bound with material of specifically English, and sometimes local, interest. The late twelfth-century Durham Cathedral Library, MS C IV 27 (I), thus provides an overview of the history of the country, starting with Wace’s Roman de Brut, continuing with Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis, and ending with Jordan Fantosme’s account of Henry II’s wars with the Scots. All three works, in French verse, were clearly considered to be ‘serious’ historiography, even though in the eyes of modern historians only Jordan Fantosme may merit such a description. The manuscript tradition of Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis is closely bound up with that of the Roman de Brut; all surviving copies of the work are preserved alongside Wace’s poem, the others being in the thirteenth-century manuscripts Lincoln Cathedral MS 104 (which also contains the only other preserved text of Fantosme), British Library, MS Add. 32125 and British Library, Royal MS 13 A XXI. The oldest Anglo-Norman manuscripts thus provide their readers with a chronological sequence, starting with the British past of England (Wace), continuing with the Anglo-Saxon past (Gaimar), and finishing with the Anglo-Norman near-past and present. This is also true of the late thirteenth-century manuscript British Library, MS Add. 45103, which continues Wace’s Roman de Brut with the statutes of King Edward I (1275–90) and the legend of Joseph of Arimathea, a combination that might not be entirely unconnected with the reburial in 1278 of the bones of Arthur and Guinevere by King Edward and his queen at Glastonbury Abbey (founded, according to legend, by Joseph of Arimathea himself).9 In addition to the contents of the manuscripts, an indication as to the reception of the Roman de Brut may be found in their layout and marginal inscriptions. More specifically, the areas of interest of the manuscript planners (and hence, of the intended readership of the manuscripts themselves) may be deduced from the themes and passages highlighted by the presence of a coloured capital letter in the text, and, in certain cases, by nota bene signs in the margins included from the inception of the copying project. These capitals and marginalia are generally unassuming in appearance, of little artistic value, and add nothing to the text itself; they have therefore tended to be ignored. However, in the relative absence of punctuation in medieval manuscripts (to the modern eye, at least), the placing of a coloured capital is an obvious device to signal the structural or thematic articulations of the text copied. It is well known that the first letter of the opening word of a given work is typically much larger and more ornate than any within the body of that work: its function, in the absence of our modern convention of providing a title announcing a new text, being to signal the beginning of a new work, and prevent the reader from assuming it was just a continuation of the previous piece in the manuscript. The less

A xxi (A.N.; Wace text starts line 8729); Paris, Bibl. Sainte-Geneviève MS 2447 (Cont.); Paris, Bibl. de l’Arsenal 2981 (Cont.; much of the end is missing from line 13944); BN, nouv. acq. Fr. MS 1415 (A.N.); BN, fonds fr. 12603 (Cont.; lines 67–1950); Bodleian Library, Rawl. MS D 913 (A.N., fragments); London, University Library MS 574 (A.N.; lines 6680–710 and 6782–812); Yale, Beinecke Library MS 395, item 12 (A.N.; 1–7141). 9 L’Estorie de Joseph d’Arimathie is also found in another late thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman manuscript, BL, Add. MS 32125, where it follows Wace and Gaimar.

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ornamental coloured capitals in the body of the work similarly fulfil a number of functions currently ensured by punctuation and typographical usage, in particular: 1. To highlight major articulations within the overall perceived structure of the text. This would nowadays be indicated by a new chapter, or a sub-section. 2. To signal a change in focus within individual sections; something we would now indicate through a new paragraph. 3. To mark the boundaries of a stylistically marked passage (typically, in Direct Speech), which we would now indicate through typographical devices such as inverted commas. In addition, coloured capitals, like nota bene signs, would have been an important mnemonic device, placed at certain points in the manuscript to aid memorisation, and facilitate the retrieval of specific information within the manuscript.10 All the manuscripts which will concern us here share similar layouts. The Roman de Brut is copied in two columns; the first letter of the first word of any line is typically slightly larger than the rest of the text, and is set back from the ‘body’ of the poem by a space of approximately two letters. Coloured capitals occur irregularly; they usually alternate red and green or blue, and are noticeably larger than the black-ink capitals at the beginning of each line. The coloured capitals were added to the completed text by a different scribe; hence inconsistencies in the alternation of colour, and missing capitals. Where a coloured capital was missed out by the scribe, one may notice a clear indent in the text in the line beneath, and, frequently, a small guide letter in black ink either where the capital should have appeared, or in the margin. The placing of coloured capitals in the manuscripts of Chrétien de Troyes’ Erec et Enide was shown by Roger Middleton to signal predominantly changes in focus, the words highlighted by a coloured capital being mainly deictic markers such as ‘quand’ or ‘lorsque’, or else a proper name.11 This is what we would expect to find in any narrative; in the case of Wace, we might also expect coloured capitals to echo the divisions in his source, Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britannie. Any study of the manuscript tradition of Wace’s Roman de Brut must have as point of reference the oldest extant witness of the text, Durham Cathedral Library, MS C IV 27 (I), which therefore needs to be described in some detail. The exact origins of this manuscript are unknown; the only certainty is that it had been acquired by Durham before 1727.12 It is roughly in-8o in size (22 x 17 cm); the Wace text covers folios 1 to 94v, copied in two 36-line columns, and featuring a total of 92 coloured capitals in the body of Wace’s work proper (i.e. not counting the initial letter of the text, or the coloured capitals contained in the Prophecies of Merlin interpolated by the manuscript planner in the Roman de Brut). The late twelfthcentury date for this manuscript was determined on codicological grounds: the first line of text begins under the first line drawn on the parchment, rather than above it, as became the usage in the thirteenth century; in other respects, however, it is not dissimilar in hand and layout to the slightly later manuscript, Lincoln Cathedral MS 104. The Wace section of the manuscript is clearly composite, bearing the mark of

10

See M. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1996) and P. Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford, California, 1997). 11 See R. Middleton, ‘Coloured Capitals in the Manuscripts of Erec et Enide’, in Les Manuscrits de Chrétien de Troyes, ed. K. Busby, T. Nixon, A. Stones and L. Walters (Amsterdam–Atlanta, 1993), i. 149–93. 12 See Thoma Rud, Codicum Manuscriptorum ecclesie cathedralis Dunelmensis (Durham, 1825), 311–12. I wish to thank the Librarian of Durham Cathedral Library, Mr Roger Norris, who kindly checked this point in the cathedral archives for me.

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three different scribes, and possibly as many different manuscript planners. At folio 26, though no change is apparent in the ink and layout, the hand is slightly less regular and neat, and coloured capitals become more plentiful: 39 over some 28 folios,13 as opposed to just 4 over the preceding 25 folios. Moreover, the interpolation on folios 42–8 of the prophecies of Merlin, not included by Wace in his own work, and translated here by one Helias, had clearly led to some difficulties in estimating the space needed for the new material. Folio 59v has a blank space of approximately 16 lines, while folio 60r (which continues the text where folio 59v had ended, and with the same layout), copying from a different quire, is in a hand both larger and less neat. The lineation is made with a wider stylus, and the copyist used a thicker quill. This third and final part of the Durham text is also rich in coloured capitals, with a total of 49. The distribution of the coloured capitals suggests that the highpoints for the manuscript planner(s) of Durham Cathedral Library, MS C IV 27 (I) were the foundation narrative (2 capitals), the Roman invasion (4 capitals), the Breton dynasty (on average, one coloured capital every 126 lines) and its greatest son, King Arthur himself: of the 49 capitals in the last 5000-odd lines of the poem, 32 occur in the Arthurian section, 17 of these being connected to the build-up to war and its practice, such as battle arrangements, taunting, battle-speeches or single combat scenes.14 This points to an Arthurian interest rather than a specifically English one, and a certain taste for rhetoric and amplificatory devices – in other words, for the literary dimension to the work. A more detailed survey of the material highlighted by coloured capitals shows that contrary to what might have been expected, there is no significant correlation between the paragraph divisions of the Historia Regum Britannie and the presence of a coloured capital: only 13 of 92 such capitals, 9 of which appear in the second part of the manuscript. They therefore reflect the manuscript planners’ reading(s) of the Wace text alone. Fifteen coloured capitals mark the beginning (or, more commonly, the end) of a passage in direct speech or an intervention by the narrator; two of the four capitals in folios 1–25, in the Brutus section, belong to this category. Otherwise, these ‘typographical’ capitals occur predominantly after folio 60. A high proportion of the passages opening with a coloured capital, especially on folios 26–59, are connected with issues of succession and power struggles: for example,15 the absence of an heir (King Luces, 5269); a change of dynasty (the election to the throne of Constantine of Brittany, 6439), civil unrest (Coel seizes the throne, 5598; the raids of Wanis and Melga, 6141, 6259; the crisis following the murder of Constantine, 6469); treachery and aggression (Vortigern disempowers Constans, 6555; Hengist hoodwinks Vortigern, 6845; the Stonehenge massacre, 7227; Paschent’s attempts to invade the land, 8181); or the protection of law and order (Trahern’s victory over the usurper Octaves, 5765, following Constantine’s decision to remain in Rome, 5739, rather than defend his throne himself; Vortimer’s energetic campaign against the Saxons, 7121; Aurelius establishes his rule, 7653;

13 14

I am not taking into account here the 6 folios devoted to the Prophecies of Merlin. The coloured capitals highlighting ‘Arthurian’ battle scenes occur on lines 9977, 10113, 11503, 11741, 11881, 12041, 12083, 12263, 12305, 12397, 12655, 12743, 12813, 12967, 13953, 13143 and 13167. 15 The examples given are not exhaustive. For a full list of the coloured capitals in the Durham manuscript signalling succession and power issues, see my ‘On Capitalisation in Some Early Manuscripts of Wace’s Roman de Brut’, in Arthurian Studies in Honour of P.J.C. Field, ed. B. Wheeler (Cambridge, 2004, 29–47).

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Arthur’s war against Childric, 9119). Arthur’s entrusting the regency of Britain to Modred before his Roman campaign is similarly marked by a coloured capital (11173). Some 19 coloured capitals highlight material of this nature in the first 59 folios of the manuscript alone; in the post-Arthurian section, where dominion over England passes from the British to the English, the vagaries of the balance of power account for the surprisingly high density of coloured capitals (17, over fewer than 1500 lines of text) in a narrative that is usually perceived by readers as somewhat lacklustre after the glories of the reign of Arthur. This suggests a strong interest in issues of legitimacy of rule and effective kingship. Other coloured capitals occur at points that would have offered a degree of political or ideological relevance to an Anglo-Norman readership. Gioia Paradisi, in her recent monograph, stresses the highly unorthodox view of Roman history promoted by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and notes that Wace, in his translation of the Historia Regum Britannie, tends to ‘correct’ his source’s pro-British (and therefore, antiRoman) bias.16 The relationship between Britain and Rome is a core issue in Geoffrey’s material, and the manuscript planner(s) of Durham Cathedral Library, MS C IV 27 (I) appear to have recognised this. The relationship between Caesar and Androgeus (who betrayed his people to the Romans) is highlighted by four capital letters (4425, 4683, 4807, 4829), as is Frollo’s unsuccessful attempt to defend Gaul, a Roman territory, against Arthur (9917). The Roman theme is closely intertwined with that of Brittany. A coloured capital introduces the passage, in direct speech, where Maximien, king of Britain and legitimate emperor of Rome, offers his rival Conan the newly conquered Armorica as a kingdom of his own (5913): as a direct consequence of Maximien’s choice of Rome over Britain, the British have to appeal to Conan’s descendant, King Aldroën of Brittany, for help (6335), leading to the establishment of the dynasty that will produce Arthur. The distribution pattern of coloured capitals thus gives the sense of a build-up towards the accession to the throne of Britain of the dynasty born of Conan of Brittany, the ‘Roman’ line having failed to protect the land. All of the ‘anomalous’ passages highlighted by a coloured capital – that is, signalling neither a passage in direct speech, a new section in the narrative, nor a relevant incident in the transmission of political power – concern this dynasty, directly or indirectly. The rape and murder of Ursula and her companions (6081) deprives Conan of his bride, and condemns the Breton settlers to miscegenation,17 the dangers of which are made obvious by Vortigern’s disastrous marriage to the Saxon Ronwen.18 The extent of the threat posed by the Saxons to Conan’s descendants is underscored by the presence of a capital when Aurelius encourages Eldulf, reminding him of the butchery of Stonehenge (7625), while the moral dimension to the conflict is pointed to by the presence of a coloured capital drawing attention to the biblical authorities invoked in Hengist’s trial scene (7837). The Roman connection, whose failings may be said to be directly responsible for the existence of King Arthur (his grandfather Constantine would not otherwise have been called to the throne of Britain), is reaffirmed in the section describing the Roman embassy presenting Arthur with the Roman ultimatum and the discussions which ensue (five coloured capitals: 10621, 10639, 10711, 10865, 11005). Rome 16

See G. Paradisi, Le Passioni della storia. Scrittura e memoria nell’opera di Wace (Rome, 2002), especially Part II, 93–182. 17 On the question of Brittany/Armoriche in the Historia Regum Britannie and its vernacular reworkings, see E.J. Bryan, ‘The Afterlife of Armoriche’, in La
amon: Contexts, Language and Interpretation, ed. R. Allen, L. Perry and J. Roberts (2002), 117–55. 18 The wassail scene where Ronwen entrances Vortigern is marked by a coloured capital, 6953.

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offers the yardstick against which to gauge Arthur’s achievements, hence the many coloured capitals adorning the colourful battle-scenes of the once-and-future king’s Roman war. It may or may not be significant that the manuscript planner chose to place three coloured capitals at the very beginning of Arthur’s Roman campaign, in the episode with the Mont Saint Michel giant: Arthur is in Brittany, the cradle of his lineage, and valiantly defends his people against a vicious monster (11317, 11599) – but he is unable to save his kinswoman, a fact underlined by the capital marking Hoel’s lament for Helen (11599). A hint to the reader, perhaps, that things will not end well? The Roman strand recurs in the post-Arthurian section, with a focus on the issues of conversion and Christianity already present in the martyrdom of Ursula and Hengist’s trial. The extent of the interest shown in the events that led to the christianising of the Anglo-Saxons may be deduced from the relative wealth of coloured capitals on the last ten folios of the text. Six of the seventeen coloured capitals in this final part of the work coincide with new paragraphs in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britannie: an indication, perhaps, of a more scholarly reading of the text than had been the case, though equally it might reflect the fact that new sections tend to be shorter, coincide with the advent of new rulers, and potentially have a higher ideological or political charge. The need for mission is established by the destructiveness of Gurmund’s pagan followers (13493, 13625); Augustine’s preaching and the Dorchester miracle (13683, 13745) then leads to a new balance of power that results in the Bangor massacre (13987), an incident which can be read as an affirmation of the power of Rome over Britain on a spiritual as well as a temporal plane. The account of the consequences of these events – the unsuccessful attempt at shared power between the British and the now Christian English, and Cadwalan’s eventual victory over Edwin and his successors – displays a fair number of coloured capitals,19 suggesting that the Durham manuscript planner for this section of the codex recognised that this was a crucial moment in the eventual passage of dominion from the British to the English. As in the Arthurian section, the planner also has an eye for the more entertaining features of the text, placing coloured capitals at key moments in the life of Brian, the nephew of Cadwalan: in particular the episode where he sets out hunting to obtain meat for his uncle, and in the absence of game ends up carving up part of his own thigh to be cooked (14205), and his role in reinstating Cadwalan in power after killing Edwin’s astrologer, in a memorable cloak-and-dagger manner (14325). But on the whole, the post-Arthurian section appears to have been perceived as ‘serious’ material. The last three coloured capitals in the text highlight the famine that led the last British king to flee Britain for Brittany (14707), King Alan of Brittany’s search for authorities to interpret Cadwalader’s vision (14807), and the discussion of the origin of the name of Wales (14855), in the closing lines of the work. The placing of this last coloured capital is especially noteworthy, as it occurs in the middle of a comment by the narrator, rather than at its beginning, and implicitly shifts the emphasis from Wace’s statement that the Welsh of his day were completely degenerate and unworthy of their glorious ancestors (lines 14852–3), to learned, philological considerations. The essentially ‘serious’ elements highlighted by coloured capitals in the manuscript as a whole make the Arthurian section stand out all the more. The image constructed from the passages signalled by a coloured capital in the account of

19

In all, 8 coloured capitals, at lines 13965, 14051, 14115, 14205, 14325, 14425, 14495 and 14639 of the published text.

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Arthur’s reign is worthy of romance or epic: Arthur’s campaigns are highlighted, but also his wondrous conception (8733);20 the marvels of Britain (9529); the twelve-year peace and the fables about Arthur (9787); the Whitsun festivities (10147, 10303, 10385, 10437); his fight with the Mont St Michel giant (11317, 11599); and, of course, his final voyage to Avalon (13275). The entertainment value of Wace’s work is clearly appreciated: Arthur, the larger-than-life figure connected with marvels and monsters, and immortal dweller in the mysterious Avalon, is just as important as Arthur the defender of Christianity and scourge of Roman hubris. Scholarly concerns go hand in hand with a taste for narrative for its own sake. In this respect, the interests of the manuscript planner seem somewhat different to those of the readers who left their trace in the margin. The Durham manuscript is noteworthy for the presence in the margins of the Roman de Brut of inscriptions by an unknown number of medieval readers (strangely, neither the Gaimar nor the Fantosme texts that follow bear any such evidence of readerly activity).21 These marginalia show that however the late twelfth-century manuscript planner may have perceived the Roman de Brut, the beneficiaries of his labours (who we may assume were somewhat younger and therefore representative of thirteenth-century sensibilities) clearly used Wace’s work primarily as a historical textbook. Most of the marginal inscriptions dating from the medieval period occur before folio 60. They may be divided into two main categories: those in faded light brown ink, and those in a later, darker ink. Neither appear to have been contemporary with the planning of the manuscript, though a correction to the text in the Locrin section (line 1267) in the same light brown ink as the earlier marginalia suggests that some of these inscriptions were made very soon after the completion of the copying task proper. They are of three sorts: ink circles; nota bene signs; and glosses in the form of words (mainly illegible) or pictorial doodles. The most common of these inscriptions are the ink circles. They are simple affairs, with horizontal, vertical or slanting inner bars, originally with a numeral above them, beside lines where a new king accedes to the throne; after folio 60, these circles are made in carbon point, rather than ink. Not all the numerals are still legible, but what does appear certain is that the two parts of the manuscript were read as a sequence, as the final count of British kings is inaccurate: the manuscript has a few lacunae in the earlier part of the text that have led to the ‘loss’ of some minor kings. The marginal circles build up a king-list, pointing to a reception of Wace’s work as ‘straight’ history. Moreover, this way of reading the Roman de Brut cannot be dismissed as the quirk of an isolated late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century reader, as a later reader took the trouble to go over these circles in darker ink, where they had grown faint. There are some 14 nota bene signs in the margins, in the shape of a stylised letter ‘n’ with descending ‘legs’ of varying length and ornamentation. One of these, in red ink accompanied by the gloss ‘Thelesini de Xsto’, was probably planned from the inception of the copying work, as it marks the beginning of a new era; further in the margin, a brown-ink symbol draws attention to the same passage. The other signs, sometimes very faded, betray a marked concerned with onomastics. Six of them, in a brown ink similar to the marginal circles, draw the reader’s attention to the origins of certain toponyms and/or the changes undergone by these names through the

20

However, this could equally be construed as proving his parentage, and therefore be related to the more general interest in legitimacy of rule observed in the manuscript. 21 For a full list of the marginal inscriptions in the Durham manuscript, see my ‘On Capitalisation’.

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course of history:22 a recurrent theme of the Roman de Brut, but of especial relevance to readers with roots in England. In addition, a faded sign (6839–44) points to the lands granted to Hengist by Vortigern, suggesting a quasi-legalistic concern with the Saxon claims to ownership over parts of England. Other interests betrayed by the faded ink nota bene signs have a moral colouring: the first British war of aggression (1501); Cordeille’s bluntly honest words to her father Leir (1471–2); and Elidur’s generosity towards his brother Argal (3523–4). Two further, badly faded nota bene signs are connected with Merlin: his explaining the virtues of the Giants’ Circle to Aurelius, and extolling the superiority of skill over brute strength (8056) and his announcement of Aurelius’s death to Uther (8309). Contrary to the marginal circles, the nota bene signs were not freshened up in darker ink by later readers, who appear to have preferred to add more explicit glosses or symbols.23 The marginal inscriptions that are neither circles nor the nota bene symbols described above vary in date, appearance and language. As we have seen, a red-ink inscription signals the birth of Christ; in the top margin above the two columns of text, we also read ‘Jhesuz’, in faded black ink. Opposite line 5230 of the text, a star and a crescent moon in black ink draw attention to another event of religious significance, the mission of saints Dunian and Fagan.24 The two legible glosses in the faded brown ink of the earlier readers of the manuscript are in Latin. The first one appears in conjunction with a nota bene symbol, the name ‘Brutus’ and a little stylised crowned head in the margin, at the point where the king founds London; the gloss itself is made in the lower margin and reads ‘Brutus regnavit xxiiii ann. et habuit tres filios’, ‘Brutus reigned for 24 years and had three sons’. The second gloss appears in the top margin of folio 91r, and reads ‘Legere et non intellegere non legere est’, ‘to read and not to understand is not to read’. The immediate context is the defeat of Edwin by King Cadwalan, but the aphorism clearly has a wider bearing on the work, suggesting that the reader should reflect on these events, and learn from them: the sort of response expected to history, not fiction.25 It is also noteworthy that it appears in connection with the last strong British king; Cadwalan’s successor Cadwalader will prove to be ineffectual, fleeing a plague-stricken Britain, then renouncing any plans to reconquer the land from the English. Issues of succession and legitimacy seem once again to underlie the faded brown ink. The darker ink seems to have belonged to a less scholarly reader, as the surviving glosses are in Anglo-Norman French rather than Latin. Tonuenne’s successful intervention between her warring sons (2817) is marked by the gloss ‘Ici la pes forme’, ‘Here peace is made’; the names of the town of Caerleon (3196) are highlighted by a marginal ‘Issi change l’em plusurs nuns’, ‘Here several names are changed.’ Remains of a gloss in French are also present in the margin alongside the mention in the text of the hostages and the tribute given by the defeated British to Julius Caesar (4810). It might be of some relevance for dating purposes that the Prophecies of Merlin interpolation features a marginal eye in dark ink opposite the prophecy of the loss of Normandy: issues such as the rise and fall of nations, of legitimacy of rule, of moral entitlement, would have had been of some topicality. The overall pattern of 22

These are: in brown ink, opposite lines 1221 (foundation of London), 1272 (Severn), 1311 (Humber), 1522–6 (Ebrauc’s foundations), 5073 (Gloucester), 5948 (Brittany). 23 Only two dark ink nota bene symbols are still discernible in the manuscript, in the margin alongside the circle signalling the accession to the throne of King Belin (2599). 24 A further black ink inscription appears in the margin of line 3213 of the text, reading ‘Billing’ – apparently as a corrective to Wace’s statement that the English for Billingsgate was ‘Belinesgate’. However, it might be a later gloss. 25 See Damian-Grint, The New Historians, esp. 114–17.

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distribution of marginal inscriptions seems to suggest a remarkable lack of interest in King Arthur. Only three inscriptions occur in the Arthurian section of the text; two of these, as we have seen, relate to Merlin whilst the third one is a trace of a light brown cross beside the mention of the queen at Arthur’s Whitsun celebrations. While the manuscript planner anticipated a dual reception of Wace’s work, where it would be read for entertainment (and also, possibly, to provide a backdrop for vernacular romances) as well as for its educational value, the actual users of the manuscript clearly valued the Roman de Brut for the information it transmitted about the British past. An overview of the distribution patterns of the coloured capitals in a selection of thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman manuscripts of the Roman de Brut suggests that the readers of the Durham manuscript were not unrepresentative. Lincoln Cathedral MS 104 is dated to the early thirteenth century; it shares with the Durham manuscript the presence of interpolated Prophecies of Merlin and the inclusion of Gaimar’s Estoire des Engles and Jordan Fantosme’s Chronique, and like the Durham manuscript, its original provenance is unknown. It has 92 coloured capitals (or planned coloured capitals) in the Wace text:26 in other words, the same amount as in the Durham copy. Two of these occur in the Foundation narrative (691, 805), one in the Belin section (1251), 16 in the reigns between King Belin and Caesar’s invasion,27 two in the account of the Roman invasion (4425, 4829), five in the aftermath until the advent of the Breton dynasty (5615, 5913, 6001, 6141, 6259) and five in the section recounting the rise of Vortigern and his dealings with Hengist, before the Prophecies of Merlin.28 Six of these thirty passages correspond to new chapters in the Historia Regum Britannie. After the Prophecies, ten coloured capitals appear in the reigns of Aurelius and Uther, two of these occurring in the account of the conception of Arthur.29 The Arthurian section in its entirety has 36 coloured capitals; as a folio (fol. 80) of the Lincoln text is missing, these figures are equivalent to the 38 capitals in the corresponding section of the Durham manuscript. As in the Durham manuscript, well over half of these capitals occur in the latter part of Arthur’s reign, in the Roman campaign. The final 1500 lines have 15 coloured capitals, against Durham’s 17. These figures suggest that the Lincoln copy may be related to the Durham manuscript, at least in the post-Arthurian section of the Roman de Brut, where all the Lincoln capitals occur on the same line as in the Durham text. The earlier sections are less straightforward. The first line to be highlighted by a coloured capital in both manuscripts is at the death of Morpidus fighting a sea-monster (3417); thereafter, 14 passages share a capital in both manuscripts until the reign of Arthur (out of a potential maximum of 25), while in the Arthurian section both manuscripts agree 30 times in their placing of coloured capitals, nine of which occur before the Roman campaign. The coloured capitals of the Lincoln text thus point to a different planning in the part of the text prior to folio 60 of the Durham manuscript, but a near-identical one thereafter.30 The main impact of these observations on the reader’s perception of the Lincoln

26

As with the Durham manuscript, I am not counting the coloured capitals placed in the interpolated Prophecies of Merlin. 27 At lines 1537, 1675, 2003, 2085, 2181, 2529, 2635, 2879, 2919, 3205, 3241, 3335, 3417, 3651, 3827 and 4111. 28 6687, 6845, 7031, 7227, 7515. 29 7543, 7625, 7837, 7895, 7957, 8181, 8285, 8407, 8637, 8733. 30 The text itself is very close in both manuscripts, throughout the poem: see Arnold, i. xxviii.

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text is a greater importance allowed to the episode of Leir and his daughters (1675, 2003), and more specifically the abdication in favour of the eldest sisters’ husbands, and Cordeille’s agency in helping her father recover his land from them; the hostility between the brothers Belin and Brennes and their subsequent joint conquest of Rome (2529, 2635, 2879, 2919, 3205); and the rise and fall of the traitor Vortigern (6687, 7031, 7515, 7543). The central theme thus highlighted is, as in the Durham manuscript, the issue of legitimacy, but with an added emphasis on dissension within the ruling family; moreover, the Lincoln capitals suggest a greater focus on Arthur himself. Belin and Brennes are precursors of Arthur, in that they also take on successfully the might of Rome, while Vortigern is closely bound up with Merlin, who is in turn intimately involved in the story of Arthur. This Arthurian interest is accompanied by the near-disappearance of any capitals in passages bearing any relevance to the Breton strand in Wace’s material, which in turn means that the inadequacy of Rome as a protector and ruler remains hidden in the text rather than being brought to the reader’s notice. The Lincoln manuscript has some memorable marginalia, not all of which appear to have a direct bearing on the text on the page. The margins are peppered with ink doodles of humanoid faces, grotesques and monsters. The bottom margin of folio 8v thus has two characters, one big, one small, on the two sides of what look like some scales, but what was probably meant to be a wall, as the text recounts the founding of London by Brutus. A little humanoid face peeps out from the bottom margin of folio 10r, roughly at the mention of King Saul in Judea (1469); a grimacing head is sketched opposite lines 7313, at Vortigern’s council prior to his attempt to build his stronghold in Wales, and a bewimpled female face opposite line 7331, where the building actually starts – and starts collapsing. The connection, if any, is not obvious. A bearded head, some three lines high, appears under the capital L of line 7957, where Aurelius grants the Saxons some land on the Scottish borders, while the first British successes against Emperor Lucius of Rome in Arthur’s Roman campaign are accompanied by a sketch in the margin of folio 87r of two harpies, one wielding a big sword, the other apparently losing its entrails. In the top left-hand margin of folio 93r, a sword streaming with blood is brandished by a male torso, while the text recounts Arthur’s definitive victory upon Lucius. In addition to these ‘illustrations’, which were clearly meant to help the reader find his way around the text, two conventional nota bene signs are placed opposite lines 1482–3 (indicating the length of the reign of King Menbriz) and 13965 (the English petty kings submit to Cadwan). Some circles with inner bars and circles reminiscent of the Durham marginalia may also be observed in the margins of lines 10961 (Hoel offers his support to Arthur), 10994 (Angusel’s demand that the British curb Roman pride), 11862 (Gawain cuts down a pursuing Roman) and 14210 (Brian’s hunting party), suggesting a degree of interest in Romano-British relations, but also in the more anecdotal, with the gruesome tale of royal cannibalism. Finally, two glosses, both in Latin, were all but lost in the binding process: one in a later (fourteenth-century?) hand, opposite line 5651, signals the death of King Coel, while the other, on the top margin of folio 100r, apparently consists of religious verse. The exact connection with the text beneath (Augustine’s mission) is not clear, though the expression of religious sentiment at this stage would not be unexpected. The passages signalled by these marginalia confirm the nexus of interests suggested by the coloured capitals: Brutus’s establishment of England and its capital city, which gives legitimacy to the rule of his successors; the treachery of Vortigern, which allowed this legitimate dominion to be threatened by the Saxons; Arthur’s successful military campaign against Rome’s claims over Britain; while the gloss at

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the point of Augustine’s mission could suggest that the Lincoln reader perceived this to be a key moment in the passage of power from the British to the English (rather than Gurmund’s granting of the land to the Anglo-Saxons, or Cadwalader’s renunciation of it). It is noticeable that the Lincoln ‘doodler’ had a slightly different interest in the character of Arthur to that of the manuscript planner: the marginalia clearly point to the war leader rather than the glorious monarch of the Whitsun crown-bearing festivities. As in the Durham manuscript, therefore, the manuscript planner appears to have anticipated a hybrid reception to the text, where interest in Arthur as a character of romance would have coexisted with a scholarly intent, while the reading suggested by the marginalia points to an unmistakeable privileging of the historico-political dimension to Wace’s work. One may therefore conclude from the testimony of these two early manuscripts of the Roman de Brut that, contrary to what was happening on the Continent, Wace’s work was primarily an object for study, rather than entertainment. How does this compare with later Anglo-Norman manuscripts, copied towards the end of the thirteenth century? In general terms, the codicological evidence becomes more difficult to analyse, as late thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman copies of Wace’s work tend to display an inflation of coloured capitals, a prime culprit in this respect being British Library, Add. MS 32125, where the Roman de Brut is copied alongside Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis, like our earlier witnesses, but with no fewer than 306 coloured capitals, on average one every 40 lines or so.31 This abundance of coloured capitals in a manuscript where the Wace text is copied in two columns of 51 lines each might make one suspect that their presence was due to their ornamental value, though it is more likely that it was the result of a tendency by manuscript planners to integrate as capitals the nota bene signs in the margins of their master-copy, to save time and labour. That this is indeed what must have happened is hinted at by British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius A x, which contains just 26 coloured capitals, but over 180 nota bene symbols, some of them quite ornate and clearly planned from the inception of the project rather than added by a later reader or owner.32 The Roman de Brut is the second of six items in this manuscript, which also contains, among other things, annals ab initio mundi to 1325 (the first item), fragments of the history of the abbey of Malmesbury (the item following the Roman de Brut), some statutes of the see of Lincoln (1334), and the Constitution of the church of Lichfield (1454). At the bottom of the first page of the Wace section (fol. 19r), a gloss reads ‘Liber sanctae Marie de Ffontes ordinis cister. Eboracum dioc.’, ‘book [belonging to] St Mary of the Fountains of the Cistercian, diocese of York’, suggesting that the copy was owned by Fountains Abbey. The bottom margins of the Wace text (copied in two columns of 36 lines) feature Latin aphorisms, moralising verse (some of it macaronic) and practical advice that typically bears no relation to the body of the work: for example, ‘Si piger est iuuenis/ si luxuriosa est senectus/ si miser elatus/ hec tria valde nocent’, ‘if youth is slothful, if old age is lascivious, if the wretch is extolled: these are three harmful things indeed’ (fol. 20v), or, more down to earth: ‘Zinzibar extirpat tussim’, ‘ginger gets rid of coughs’ (fol. 78r).33 In addition, in the upper margins of folios 19 to 28v, we find ‘headlines’ in French announcing the 31 32

The manuscript has a lacuna of over 2000 lines (10527–12772). The nota bene signs were added in the margins after the body of the text had been copied; the location where they were to appear was marked by two fine pen-strokes in the margin close to the text. These pen-strokes are still clearly visible in certain cases. 33 This body of inscriptions, which would merit study in its own right, is frequently very difficult to read.

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content of (and sometimes actually summarising) the column of text below. Of the 180 nota bene signs in the manuscript, some 45 correspond to new chapters in the Historia Regum Britannie, while twenty mark the boundaries of passages in direct speech; 19 nota appear in the early reigns, 5 in the account of Caesar’s conquest of Britain, one at the birth of Christ, 46 between the birth of Christ and the reign of Arthur, 78 in the Arthurian section, and 32 during the reigns of the last British kings. The material thus highlighted is extremely varied: place names, personal names, descriptive passages (especially of warfare, hence a disproportionate amount of nota bene symbols in the Arthurian section, with its high incidence of battles and single combat), and generally wherever a plot-advancing event occurs, as when Edwin seizes Brian’s sister (14150). The coloured capitals, by contrast, suggest very clear lines of interest. They are concentrated in three main clusters, with two isolated instances: six capitals appear in the Foundation of Britain, where they draw attention to Brutus’s dealings with the Greeks, his meeting with Corineus (the future founder of Cornwall), the Trojan arrival in Britain and Brutus’s survey of the land;34 a further six are placed in the early British reigns, three of which occur in the Belin and Brennes episode,35 suggesting an interest in Romano-British issues, but also in the history of the British Isles, as two capitals mark the reign of Gurguint, who is credited with having established the Irish in Ireland, while the third (3389) signals the passage where Morpidus defends his northern territories against the duke of Murienne. Only two other coloured capitals appear in the manuscript before the Arthurian section: marking the statement (5147) that Arviragus respected his treaty with the Romans all of his life (suggesting once again an interest in Romano-British issues), and the narrator’s mention of French attacks on Conan of Brittany (6001). The other coloured capitals in the text are all concentrated in the later Arthurian section, dealing with the Roman campaign and Modred’s treason: 13 in total, 7 of which highlight passages in direct speech with strong ideological content. One coloured capital also occurs in the episode of the giant of Mont St Michel (11319), where Arthur’s Breton origins and his status as protector of his people come to the fore. The last coloured capital in the Vitellius Wace text signals line 13235, where we learn of Arthur’s anger at Modred’s treason. The issues deemed worthy of coloured ink are therefore markedly Celtic in nature, with a special focus on Britain, Ireland and Brittany. The significance of Vortigern, the Saxons, Gurmund, St Augustine, and the eventual passage of dominion over England to the English is diluted in the proliferation of nota bene symbols. As with the Durham and Lincoln manuscripts, however, this suggested reading did not correspond to the interests of at least one of the medieval users of the Vitellius manuscript. A hand (9057) and a finger (9167) in the margins draw attention to the siege of York by Arthur, then the siege of Lincoln by Childric; similarly, fingers point to the division of land between Edwin and Cadwallan (13998), the battle of Helfelde (14524), and finally, to Penda (14524). These marginalia clearly indicate a specifically English interest, and show that Wace’s Roman de Brut was being studied as a source for British history in the wider sense of the term, and not specifically for its Arthurian dimension. I shall close this survey with some short considerations on another late thirteenthcentury Anglo-Norman manuscript of the Roman de Brut, British Library, Add. MS 34 35

These correspond to lines 149, 289, 591, 811, 1057 and 1209 of Wace’s text. I.e., lines 2325 (the division of land between the brothers), 3153 (Brennes lord over Rome) and 3205 (Belin’s building achievements) in the Belin section, and 3241 (Gurguint succeeds Belin), 3327 (Gurguint’s death) and 3389 (Morpidus defends Northumberland) for the later reigns.

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54103. The contents of this manuscript reflect the more general interest in galfridian material of its day, but with an Arthurian bias: the Roman de Brut appears alongside the Statutes of King Edward (1275–90) and the Estoire de Joseph d’Arimathie, thus gathering together Arthur, an Arthur-struck king, and Glastonbury. A French translation of the Prophecies of Merlin was also interpolated in the Wace text. The manuscript contains 272 coloured capitals, that is, on average, one every 52 lines of text (approximately one per page),36 and three fingers drawn in the margin by one of its readers. The fingers appear to betray a taste for the epic, as two of them point to battle scenes;37 the third one concerns Merlin, with Vortigern’s quest for a ‘fatherless man’ (7350): one reader at least enjoyed Wace’s work for its entertainment value. The picture given by the placing of the coloured capitals in the manuscript, however, is somewhat different. 66 of the 272 capitals coincide with new chapters in the Historia Regum Britannie, and 40 of them indicate passages in direct speech. Coloured capitals are at their highest density in the Foundation narrative and the early kings:38 that is, the part of the work establishing the legitimacy and pedigree of the British kings, and charting the colonising of the island with new towns. By contrast, the adventures of Belin and Brennes which follow have only 9 coloured capitals, an average of just one every 105 lines, three times fewer than for the rulers between Leir and Belin. None of these 9 capitals occur in the section relating the brothers’ conquest of Rome. Interest seems to pick up somewhat in the reigns prior to the Roman invasion (14 coloured capitals, one every 42 lines), dips slightly in the account of Julius Caesar’s conquest of Britain (15 capitals, one every 67 lines), then plummets until the appearance of Constantine, Arthur’s grandfather (14 capitals, one every 110 lines only). In other words, the Breton strand is virtually ignored. The reigns of Vortigern and Aurelius fare even worse, with 7 coloured capitals in the Vortigern section (one every 180 lines), and 9 for Aurelius (one every 145 lines): suggesting a relative lack of interest in the religious dimension to the narrative, as this is where the pagan Saxons make their first appearance. The figures rise again with the reign of Uther, Arthur’s father (12 coloured capitals, one every 60 lines), the density of coloured capitals in the Arthurian episode being comparable to that in the account of the early kings of Britain. The first part of Arthur’s rule, where he conquers Ireland, Scotland, Denmark, Norway and France, has 33 coloured capitals (one every 35 lines), but his Roman campaign and its aftermath, even including the Caerleon festivities, only has some 42 capitals, on average one every 74 lines. The focus is firmly on what might be termed Arthur’s insular exploits, which ensure the peace and stability of Britain, and which also echo the territorial ambitions of the English kings (especially Edward I). By contrast the Roman dimension is marginalised, as it had been in the earlier part of the poem. The invasion of Gurmund and the following mission of Saint Augustine are equally undistinguished in the eyes of the planner: 8 coloured capitals (one every 88 lines), confirming the manuscript planner’s relative indifference to religious themes.39 The struggle between King Cadwalan and the Northumbrian English appears to have elicited greater interest (12 capitals, one every 54 lines), the 36 37

The Wace poem is copied in two columns of 25 lines (26 lines on fol. 13, where the poem begins). These are line 468, where Brutus and his men massacre the sleeping Greeks, and 7099, where Catiger and Hors kill each other in battle. 38 The Foundation narrative until the death of Brutus thus has 41 coloured capitals (about one every 30 lines); the early kings have 19 capitals (one every 21 lines); the Leir episode has 9 capitals (one every 45 lines); and the kings after Leir and before Belin have 8 capitals, one every 31 lines. 39 The only religious events highlighted by a coloured capital in this manuscript are the birth of Christ (3827) and Taliesin’s prophecy of Christ (4855 and 4877).

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end of the poem actually outstripping the beginning for its number of coloured capitals (8 in the final Cadwalader section – i.e. approximately every 25 lines). This pattern suggests that the person responsible for the layout of this manuscript, unlike the Durham or Lincoln planners, placed the passage of dominion from the British to the English under the reign of King Cadwalader, as a result of his renouncing Britain following his vision, rather than owing to Gurmund’s invasion or the conversion of the English to Christianity; Yvor and Yni, Cadwalader’s successors in Wales (1483), are however given due recognition as heirs to the British kings. The accent is on the internal balance of power rather than external pressures – with the exception of divine intervention, in the case of Cadwalader – and the field of interest is markedly focused on the British Isles. The last coloured capital in the manuscript (other than the colophon) concerns the names given to Wales (14855), ending the text on an onomastic note in accord with the concerns indicated by coloured capitals elsewhere in the manuscript. With the notable exception of the weakness of emphasis on religious themes, the overall reading of Wace’s material by this manuscript planner is not dissimilar, one may note, to that of the first English adaptor of the Roman de Brut, the early thirteenth-century Worcestershire poet-priest La
amon.40 It is of course possible to read too much into minutiae of this nature, especially in view of the possibility that later manuscript planners may have tended unthinkingly to retain coloured capitals at the places where they occurred in their master copy, but I hope it is also apparent that manuscript layout can offer useful insights into the reception over time of a work such as Wace’s Roman de Brut. The increasingly English focus evidenced in our manuscripts betrays the increasing Anglicisation of even French-speaking Anglo-Normans through the thirteenth century, which eventually leads in the fourteenth century to new, updated redactions of the material: in French, with the Chronicle of the Yorkshire Augustinian canon Peter de Langtoft, and then in English, with those of Robert Mannyng and Thomas Castleford. The relevance of Wace’s Roman de Brut for his Anglo-Norman readers lay in its status as auctoritas rather than in its literary merit, increasingly so as the thirteenth century unfolded; and like many a work of popularisation, it ended up being outdated. This, as we have seen, is reflected in the number of manuscript copies made of the work in England. After the outburst of copying on both sides of the Channel in the thirteenth century, there is a clear slump in the fourteenth century, especially in England, and by the fifteenth century, English readers had apparently lost interest in Wace’s Roman de Brut completely. Of the three extant manuscripts dating back to the fifteenth century, none were copied in England.41 As the English language had established itself as a medium for historiography, French no longer was a fitting medium to articulate the political and social concerns present in the Matter of Britain;42 moreover, by the fourteenth century, French attitudes towards verse narratives had changed, with the rise of prose as the preferred medium for historical (and indeed fictional) texts. The Roman de Brut was well on its way to becoming the preserve of antiquaries and literary scholars, claimed as its masterpiece by France, rather than England. 40 On La
amon’s ‘weighting’ of the various episodes in his material, see F. Le Saux, La
amon’s Brut: The Poem and its Sources (Cambridge, 1989), esp. 31ff. 41 BN, fonds fr. MS 1454; BN, fonds fr. MS 12556, Vienna, Nat. Lib. 2603. All Continental and identical copies. 42 See W.R.J. Barron, F. Le Saux and L. Johnson, ‘Dynastic Chronicles’, in The Arthur of the English, ed. Barron, 22–46.

Fearing God, Honouring the King: The Episcopate of Robert de Chaury, Bishop of Carlisle, 1258–1278

Henry Summerson Fearing Henry God, Honouring Summersonthe King

As bishop of Lincoln, according to Sir Richard Southern, Robert Grosseteste ‘was – far more effectively than the king could ever be – the ruler of about one fifth of the whole population of England . . .’.1 It is the prerogative of great historians to pose challenges to their lesser successors, and what follows here is in effect a gloss on Southern’s observation. It investigates the workings of church government within a limited area – the diocese of Carlisle, one far smaller than Lincoln – over the period of a single episcopate. And it is concerned less with diocesan government per se than with its secular implications, with what that government entailed for the laity upon whom it impinged. Between 1258 and 1278 the diocese of Carlisle was ruled by Robert de Chaury. Almost certainly he took his name from Chawreth in Essex – he is first recorded in that county in 1239.2 By the end of 1244 he was employed in the wardrobe of Queen Eleanor of Provence, and in 1249 he became its comptroller.3 Of illegitimate birth, he needed a papal dispensation to take holy orders, and received one some time after 1243.4 By 1250 he had at least two benefices in Wiltshire and Somerset, and although he acquired at least two more elsewhere, in Cambridgeshire and Yorkshire, it was mainly in the two former counties that his ecclesiastical career prospered.5 Meanwhile his secular one advanced as well. His services to the queen were such as to bring him into contact with the royal court and government; thus he is recorded as taking plate to court for New Year’s Day 1253 and treasure to Porchester for shipping to Gascony in March 1254.6 In January 1255 he was made a chamberlain of the exchequer, while by January 1257 he was archdeacon of Bath.7 It was commonplace for archdeacons to go on to become bishops – Grosseteste had done so. Following his steady if unspectacular advance in the service of crown and church, by 1257 Chaury had clearly joined the ranks of those who could hope

1

R.W. Southern, Robert Grosseteste: The Growth of an English Mind in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 1986), 237. I am most grateful to Professor David Smith of the Borthwick Institute for Historical Research, York, for allowing me the use of his forthcoming edition of English Episcopal Acta, 30: Diocese of Carlisle, 1133–1292, cited in this paper as EEA Carlisle. 2 CRR, xvi. no. 530, where he is pledge for Peter de Ardern. It is probably significant that c. 1294 Isabel, widow of Bartholomew de Ardern, held in dower a third of the manor of Chawreth, CIPM, iii. no. 208. 3 CLR 1240–5, 310; M. Howell, ‘The Resources of Eleanor of Provence as Queen Consort’, EHR 102 (1987), 377. 4 CPL 1198–1304, 346–7. 5 Feet of Fines for the County of Somerset 1196–1307, ed. F. Green (Somerset Record Soc. 6, 1892), no. 34; CPL 1198–1304, 265, 307; CPR 1247–58, 396. 6 E 101/308/1, m. 2; CR 1253–4, 36. 7 CR 1254–6, 30; CR 1256–9, 28.

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for a like promotion. In fact the process began soon afterwards, but then proved long and problematic. Bishop Thomas de Vipont of Carlisle had died on 25 October 1256, and the chapter’s first choice, the archdeacon of Northumberland, had declined by the end of the year.8 The Carlisle canons then elected Chaury, presumably at the king’s bidding – to all appearances he was totally unknown in the north-west. Henry III gave his consent on 12 February 1257,9 but he had not counted on the opposition of Archbishop Bovill of York, who according to the Dunstable annalist deferred giving his own consent so that he could postulate his chancellor, John Gervase, per lapsum temporis.10 Bovill may also have raised the issue of Chaury’s illegitimacy, for when the latter – with royal support – appealed to Rome, he also obtained an indult referring to his earlier dispensation, as well as papal authorisation to receive the episcopal dignity. Alexander IV also instructed the bishops of Salisbury and Bath and Wells to look into the case, and, if they found the elect worthy, to consecrate him. They duly did so, at Bermondsey, though not until 14 April 1258.11 But since the temporalities were restored on 29 September 1257, the pope was clearly understood as having already approved Chaury’s election. By 4 June 1258 the new bishop was in, or at least on his way to, his diocese – on that day the sheriff of Cumberland was ordered to provide him with four stags from Inglewood Forest, presumably a royal contribution to the enthronement celebrations.12 The diocese to which he came had had a good deal of experience of direction by former royal administrators – Vipont’s immediate predecessors had been Walter Mauclerc and Silvester of Everdon.13 And for much of his episcopate Chaury himself retained links with the royal court and government. At the end of 1259 he went to France with Henry III (or possibly in attendance on Queen Eleanor).14 His being in London in October 1263 implies that he attended that month’s parliament, while in June 1264 he was with the king when Henry was in virtual imprisonment.15 Recorded as entering his diocese on his way back from court in May 1266, his being at Coventry on 4 November following suggests that he had attended the previous month’s Kenilworth parliament.16 He was present at the dedication of Westminster Abbey on 13 October 1269.17 Associated with a royal justice in taking an assize in Cumberland in 1263,18 in Henry III’s last years Chaury was closely and directly involved in the government of that county, acting as its sheriff from October 1270 to May 1272. Though an unusual appointment for a bishop by this date, it was not without parallels at the end of Henry III’s reign, and must reflect the influence in government of Archbishop Walter Giffard of York (who himself became sheriff of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire in 1270).19 Although he failed in 1271 to make his 8

John le Neve, Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae 1066–1300: Monastic Cathedrals, ed. D.E. Greenway (1971), 20–1. 9 CPR 1247–58, 541. 10 Dunstable, 205; CPL 1198–1304, 372–3. 11 CPR 1247–58, 580; CM v. 678. 12 CR 1256–9, 228. 13 C.M.L. Bouch, Prelates and People of the Lake Counties (Kendal, 1948), 46–51; H. Summerson, ‘The King’s clericulus: The Life and Career of Silvester de Everdon, Bishop of Carlisle, 1247–1254’, Northern History 28 (1992), 70–91. 14 CPR 1258–66, 110–12. 15 EEA Carlisle, no. 138; CPR 1258–66, 324. 16 E 32/5, m. 2; EEA Carlisle, no. 154. 17 WL, Henry III, 175. 18 The Lanercost Cartulary, ed. J.M. Todd (Surtees Soc. 203, 1997), no. 202. 19 CPR 1266–72, 470, 649. Alongside Chaury and Giffard, Roger de Meuland of Coventry and

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proffer at the Michaelmas exchequer, Chaury carried out repairs on Carlisle Castle, and overall there is no reason to suppose he proved incompetent as sheriff.20 However, Chaury quarrelled with his successor as sheriff, Richard de Crepping, both at the time of his own surrender of office and later after the accession of Edward I, when Crepping accused him of preventing his tenants from taking the oath of fealty to the new king.21 Chaury denied the charge, but Edward may have distrusted him thereafter. The bishop never witnessed a charter for him, and he received from Edward none of the gifts of timber or venison that had intermittently come his way from Henry III. And whereas at Michaelmas 1270 a challenge to his liberties in the exchequer had led on 10 January 1271 to Chaury’s obtaining from Henry an inspeximus and renewal of three charters granted forty years earlier to Bishop Mauclerc,22 barely seven years later, in March 1278, he lost to King Edward the advowson of the Northumberland church of Rothbury, valued at £133 6s 8d and so representing perhaps as much as a fifth of the bishop’s entire income.23 Edward’s case, based on King John’s having presented to Rothbury (as indeed he had done, albeit when the see of Carlisle was vacant), looks thin to modern eyes; the fact that in 1290 Edward granted the church back to Chaury’s successor, Ralph of Irton, for the remarkably small sum of 100 marks, may confirm the suspicion that his lawsuit in 1278 was personally motivated.24 Be that as it may, when Chaury died, probably on 3 October 1278, he left his see somewhat diminished financially, while debts to the crown totalling £133 16s 4d, some of them arising from his shrievalty, were demanded of his executors.25 Other debts, allegedly owed to or by the bishop, were still being pursued in the early 1290s.26 It was accepted doctrine that a bishop should be utilis regno et regi,27 and his recorded actions show that Chaury, at least up to 1272, met the conventional demands of such utility. But the king was not the only source of authority a bishop had to heed. From the circumstances of his elevation, Chaury would have been well aware of the weight of papal authority. He visited the curia on diocesan business in 1260, and was at least once a papal judge delegate.28 And it was in accordance with expectations originating in Rome, strongly reinforced if not actually initiated by the Fourth Lateran Council, that he issued a set of diocesan statutes within about a year of his arrival in the north-west.29 They were well-nigh identical with those issued for Lichfield was sheriff of Berks. and Oxon. from May 1271 to Michaelmas 1272: details from List of Sheriffs, PRO Lists and Indexes 9 (reprinted 1963). 20 E 372/118, m. 15. 21 EEA Carlisle, nos 156–7. 22 E 159/44, m. 2; CChR 1257–1300, 161. 23 KB 27/35, m. 5; Three Early Assize Rolls of the County of Northumberland, ed. W. Page (Surtees Soc. 88, 1891), 333. 24 Rotulorum Originalium . . . Abbreviatio, i, ed. H. Playford and J. Caley (Rec. Comm. 1805), 66. 25 The date of his death is suggested by E 372/128, m. 34d – the sheriff of Cumberland began to account for the issues of the diocese that day. For Chaury’s debts to the crown, see CPR 1272–81, 419–20. 26 E 13/13, mm. 16d, 31, 40; E 13/15, m. 10d. 27 M. Gibbs and J. Lang, Bishops and Reform 1215–1272 (Oxford, 1934; repr. 1962), 2. 28 JUST 1/1190, m. 4d; Cartularium abbathiae de Whiteby, i, ed. J.C. Atkinson (Surtees Soc. 69, 1878), 281–2. 29 Councils and Synods, II, 1205–1313, ed. F.M. Powicke and C.R. Cheney (Oxford, 1964), i. 586–630. Since the publication of this text, another has come to light in Lambeth Palace Library MS 4504, fols 5r–33r, differing from the former in mostly minor respects, but with at least one additional clause, concerning tithes. Unfortunately there is no internal evidence whereby these points of difference can be dated and shown to have belonged, or not belonged, to Chaury’s statutes. For comment on the latter, see C.R. Cheney, ‘The Medieval Statutes of the Diocese of Carlisle’, EHR 62 (1947), 52–7; more generally, idem, Medieval Texts and Studies (Oxford, 1973), 138–57, 183–202.

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Bath and Wells in 1258 by William Button (one of the prelates who had consecrated Chaury), adapted only slightly to Cumbrian conditions, for instance by taking into account Carlisle diocese’s having only one archdeacon. But their significance lies less in the external influences upon them than in the preoccupations they reveal and the impact they were intended to make on a diocese not hitherto favoured with episcopal legislation. Their interventionist character was not novel in the church as a whole, indeed they were fully in accord with the programme set out in the Fourth Lateran Council, but nothing like them is recorded from the far north-west of England before, and they show a bishop whose agenda, if implemented, would have had a far-reaching impact on the lives of the laity. They included the prohibition of court sessions and markets in churches and cemeteries, though these must often have been the most convenient places for them, and restrictions on the communal amusements known as scotales. Personal morality was targeted when parish priests were directed to warn their flocks that fornication was a mortal sin. Four statutes dealt with marriage, five with wills. The purses of the laity were affected by the requirement that they maintain the naves of parish churches, as well as by a further four statutes on tithes – for wage-earners, at least, due on all income exceeding 5s per annum. The goods and revenues on which tithes were due were spelt out in some detail, with attention being given to the problem of tithing animals which were moved between parishes – an issue potentially contentious in a predominantly pastoral region where there was a good deal of transhumance of flocks and herds. To ensure that lay people knew what was required of them, parsons were ordered to expound the statutes to them in the vernacular – in vulgari. To implement this formidable programme Chaury had the services of a small but centralised administrative apparatus – archdeacon, official, four rural deans and an unknown number of clerks. Something of the way it could impact upon the laity, and also of the responses it evoked, is revealed by a plaint heard at the 1278/9 Cumberland eyre.30 The plaintiff was in fact the official, Master Nicholas of Barwise, who complained that on 21 October 1267 he had been set upon, when travelling between Carlisle and Thorpenhow, by men of the latter’s manorial lord, Sir Robert of Muncaster, who beat him up, relieved him of possessions which included his seal of office, and carried him off to their lord’s residence, where he was detained for much of the day. The complaint was largely upheld by a jury, which told how when Sir Robert was told that Nicholas coming to Thorpenhow to hold his chapter there, he exclaimed that ‘if he had men who loved him, Nicholas should not come so near him’. A number of his servants, mostly employed in his stables, had then taken Sir Robert at his word. The case sheds valuable light on how a local lord might see the activities of the rural chapter. It is also revealing of the ways in which ecclesiastics might try to obtain redress from members of the laity, for there was an extended aftermath. At some point Nicholas sued Robert in court christian, but abandoned the case when both parties were persuaded to submit to the arbitration of Bishop Chaury himself – an outcome in accordance with the thirty-seventh of the latter’s statutes, which encouraged out-of-court settlements. However, it is not known exactly when these proceedings took place, and it is in fact possible that they came only after Chaury had fired another shot from the ecclesiastical locker, for on 11 January 1268 he requested the cooperation of the secular authorities against Sir Robert and several of those named in Nicholas’s plaint, as having remained contumacious for at least forty 30

JUST 1/132, m. 12 (see also EEA Carlisle, no. 125).

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days after they had been excommunicated, that is, since around the end of November 1267. Excommunication was in theory a terrible weapon, making a man a pariah within his own community, and it may have had the desired effect upon Sir Robert, for he was not named in a further notification of contumacy which Chaury issued against men involved in this case on 28 April 1268.31 But from the fact that he brought his action at the eyre it would appear that Nicholas was not satisfied with the outcome of the bishop’s award, though he waited until after Chaury’s death before taking up the cudgels again. Such a case shows both the strength and weakness of episcopal government – the animosity aroused by the chapter and the pressure to settle afterwards, but also the need, at least in some instances, for secular support if spiritual weapons were to be effective. Kings like Henry III and Edward I, for their part, were ready to give that support, partly because they were professedly Christian in their purposes, and partly because by alleging an offence against the royal dignity, Nicholas of Barwise had brought this case within the king’s jurisdiction (at the eyre there was uncertainty as to whether his plaint was a civil or a crown plea, and its opening sentences appear in both sections of the record). Chaury himself was several times involved in litigation, especially over churches, though more often as defendant than plaintiff. He lost Rothbury to the king, but saw off claims to Salkeld from the king of Scots,32 and to Caldbeck from the countess of Aumale.33 He also had to face a determined challenge to his rights in the manor and church of Dalston from the Westmorland landowner Michael de Harcla, who brought actions in the bench in 1274, 1275 and 1276, and despite being regularly non-suited persisted with his claims until he was finally bought out by Bishop Irton in 1281.34 Chaury’s apparent claim to the church of Brough under Stainmore, recorded in 1268, was possibly an assertion of his right to present per lapsum temporis rather than a substantive action.35 His unsuccessful suit in 1264 against Carlisle Priory, for half the Northumberland church of Whittingham, may have been more purposeful, but occurring as it did in the same year as the settlement of the priory’s equally fruitless claim to half the church of Kirkland, which was occupied by an episcopal clerk, it may instead have been a collusive action to resolve difficulties surviving from the division of property between the bishop and priory made in 1249.36 Chaury was also several times involved in the disputes of others, in ways which illustrate both his own qualities and the scope of church government. The former civil servant’s attention to detail can perhaps be seen in his settlement in 1275 of a tithe dispute between the canons of Lanercost and the vicar of Irthington, involving exact definitions of parochial boundaries and precise allocations of tenths of produce, right down to the crops growing in people’s gardens, all recorded in modo cyrograffico.37 Three years earlier Chaury had been even more searching when he appropriated Lazonby church to Lanercost. In his award he referred to the testimony of trustworthy people, to the merits of the canons, and to the counsel of prudent men 31 32 33

EEA Carlisle, nos 143–4. CR 1261–4, 116–17. KB 26/186, m. 14. For this dispute, see also SC 6/824/7, m. 1d; Reg. Walter Giffard, Lord Archbishop of York, 1266–1279, ed. W. Brown (Surtees Soc. 109, 1904), 91–2. 34 CP 40/6, m. 64d; CP 40/11, m. 77d; CP 40/17, m. 3d; CP 40/36, m. 43d; J. Wilson, Rose Castle (Kendal, 1912), 35–6, 203–5. 35 CPR 1266–72, 301. 36 Northumberland Pleas from the Curia Regis and Assize Rolls, 1198–1272, ed. A.H. Thompson (Newcastle upon Tyne Records Committee 2, 1922 for 1921), no. 704; EEA Carlisle, no. 127. 37 Lanercost Cartulary, ed. Todd, no. 225.

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which he had taken before he acted. Perhaps this was common form, but there was nothing rhetorical about the award itself, which was minutely precise in deciding what from the issues of the parish should go to the priory and what to the vicar; who should pay which due (synodalia, archidiaconalia and the like), provide the vestments, the ornaments and even the missal (the responsibility of the parishioners), and maintain the fabric. The provision that tithes from lands newly brought under cultivation should be divided between the canons and the vicar provides a glimpse of a region in a state of continuing agricultural development. Again, a cyrograph was to record the award.38 Any analysis of the claims which the medieval clergy made on their flocks readily takes on an anticlerical tinge, and indeed, Alan Harding has stated baldly that ‘The demands of the clergy for tithes and offerings must have been felt by the villagers to outweigh by far the benefits they conferred . . .’.39 This may be to balance demands against benefits more precisely than the evidence permits, but it can hardly be denied that the impositions on the laity of the clerical establishment which prelates like Chaury controlled must often have been burdensome and unwelcome. There were certainly times when an effective bishop was a decidedly exacting one. A case involving the monks of Wetheral shows Chaury impinging even more directly on the parishes of his diocese, but in a different way. On 17 March 1275 he wrote to the parsons and parishioners of Kirkland, Newbiggin and Kirkbythore, reporting that unknown sons of iniquity had damaged the monks’ mill at Culgaith and so incurred sentence of excommunication.40 But before sentence was given, the priests were first to warn the perpetrators publicly, through proclamations in their churches, that they should give satisfaction to the priory, and as well as launching a general sentence against the malefactors, they were also to inquire into their identities and then cite them to appear before the bishop and his commissaries. This last the priests and parishioners did, on 25 April returning letters patent (along with cyrographs perhaps an echo of instruments of central government) to the bishop, in which they named two principal culprits and reported further damage to the millpond by four more people, as well as by one of the original offenders. All had now been cited to appear before the bishop. What happened thereafter is unrecorded, but it may be significant that a list of contumacious excommunicates sent to Westminster on 11 October following does not name any of those said to have attacked the mill, raising the possibility that in the meantime they had either compensated the monks or submitted to the bishop.41 Less speculatively, these letters show how Chaury operated the chain of command which the network of parishes gave him in order to observe and direct the conduct of members of the laity. In his recorded actions and aspirations Chaury had much in common with other thirteenth-century English bishops, and like them he was influenced by the general outlook and policies, as these developed, of the ecclesia anglicana, and even of the whole western church. But he was no less affected by circumstances local and regional, just as his responses to them were also moved by his own personality and resources. It seems clear that he was an efficient administrator, as one might expect of a former royal clerk. A peacemaker, he was also firm when he had to be in standing up to others having authority in his diocese, for instance to Thomas of Moulton, as lord of Gilsland one of the greatest secular magnates in the north-west, 38 39 40 41

EEA Carlisle, no. 151. England in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, 1993), 89. Reg. Priory of Wetheral, ed. J.E. Prescott (Kendal, 1897), no. 200. EEA Carlisle, no. 129.

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after Moulton had occupied Lanercost Priory in 1261 and refused to remove.42 He was vigilant, but also realistic, in defending his own rights. In 1266 he settled a dispute with St Mary’s, York, over the custody of the latter’s daughter-house of Wetheral during vacancies by abandoning his own claim in return for the quitclaim of a yearly pension of 33s 4d previously payable to the monks each year from his church of Nether Denton, in a document which records in so many words his opinion that from such a cause little benefit – parvum emolumenti – can accrue either to himself or his diocese.43 He added to his material assets by constructing two sheepfolds near Penrith, and also by leasing estates well away from his diocese, in Lincolnshire and Hertfordshire.44 That he was aware of the need to keep up appearances is suggested by his entering that diocese in 1266 with a familia of sixteen people, including three magistri, the man later recorded as his undersheriff, a chaplain, a marshal, a groom and a huntsman.45 It would be quite wrong, however, to suggest that Chaury’s concerns as bishop were predominantly secular, even though evidence for the religious side of his episcopal functions is scarce – in 1260 he granted a place of inclusion to a Newcastle anchoress, while at an unrecorded date he disposed of the chattels of a man who died intestate, giving two thirds of them to his widow and children, and devoting the rest to charity, as was customary in the diocese.46 But his almsgiving appears to have gone beyond what was merely traditional, for at his death he received a glowing tribute from the author of the Lanercost Chronicle (almost certainly a Carlisle Franciscan): ‘eager for the honour of God, philanthropic and ready in courtesy; the world may testify without our assurance how bountiful and liberal he was’.47 In support of this encomium there survives a mortgage made to the bishop by one Adam son of Roger for property in Carlisle’s Shaddongate suburb, ‘made in consideration of a sum of money which the bishop had given to the grantor in his great necessity’.48 As well as the humane virtues appropriate to a Christian bishop, Chaury seems also to have had gifts of personality which could soften the impact of the potentially abrasive system of ecclesiastical administration whose workings he directed. It is noteworthy that he was capable of disregarding his own statutes, not only by poaching in Inglewood Forest (no. 49) but also by accepting office as sheriff (no. 34). There may have been a shortage of acceptable alternatives in the aftermath of the Barons’ War, but that his shrievalty had at least a beneficent side is suggested by the fact that at the 1278–9 Cumberland eyre he was not named among the sheriffs who had entrusted bailiwicks to extortionate underlings, and that not one of his appointees was named in a long list of bailiffs who took amercements without due cause.49 A mortgage was potentially usurious (no. 29), but it seems unlikely that Adam son of Roger saw himself as having been rescued under the shadow of sin. Nor is Chaury recorded as quarrelling with either his metropolitan at York or with the bishop of Durham – his only episcopal dispute, if it can be called that, was with Scotland, when John of Cheam, bishop of Glasgow, asserted (probably in the 42 43 44

Ibid., no. 152. Reg. Wetheral, no. 34. E 32/5, m. 34; Reg. John de Halton, Bishop of Carlisle, A.D.1292–1324, i, ed. W.N. Thompson (Canterbury and York Soc. 12, 1913), 170; CPR 1258–66, 523. 45 E 32/5, m. 2. 46 EEA Carlisle, nos 124, 161. 47 The Lanercost Chronicle, 1201–1346, ed. H. Maxwell (Glasgow, 1911), 16–18; ‘courtesy’ is my own rendering of urbanitas. 48 Cumbria Record Office, Carlisle, D/MH10/2, no. 19. 49 JUST 1/132, m. 14d.

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mid-1260s) that his own diocese extended as far south as the Rere Cross on Stainmore, on the border between Westmorland and Yorkshire. John had succeeded Chaury as archdeacon of Bath, so there may have been some personal grievance behind this antiquarian gesture.50 Alternatively, it may have originated in Scottish support for the baronial cause in England, and a consequent grudge against the royalist bishop of Carlisle. Either way, John’s provocative claim (which if upheld would have led to the complete disappearance of Chaury’s diocese) had no effect at all. Like Robert Grosseteste, Robert de Chaury was a man of humble origins, and again like Grosseteste, Chaury was personally affable and polite. But the bishop of Carlisle’s additional qualities of flexibility and moderation do not look like anything to be found in Southern’s representation of the eruditely extremist bishop of Lincoln. No doubt the difference was largely a matter of personality, but it may also point to the value to a bishop of the particular kind of experience to be gained from moving in governmental and curial circles. The qualities of a civil servant were by no means antithetical to those required in a bishop, and the aspirations of one had much in common with those of the other. Just as the church turned to the crown for support in dealing with excommunicates, so the crown expected the church to use sentences of excommunication for the good of the realm. The last of Chaury’s statutes contained the requirement (first laid down at the 1222 Council of Oxford, and subsequently found in all diocesan legislation) that sentence of excommunication should be pronounced three times a year against those who disturbed the peace of the king and kingdom. It was in this context of mutual endeavour for common ends that a bishop like Chaury manoeuvred to govern his diocese, a context which makes it hard to see any bishop as more effectively the ruler of his diocese than the king. In theory prelates disposed of considerable powers, but those powers could never be more than intermittently effective when deployed in separation from the actions of the crown. In the last resort, it seems, kings and bishops depended on each other.

50

Chronicon de Lanercost, 1201–1346, ed. J. Stevenson (Bannatyne Club 65, Edinburgh, 1839), 101–2; J. Le Neve, Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae, revised by T.D. Hardy, i (Oxford, 1854), 163.

Cloistered Women and Male Authority: Power and Authority in Yorkshire Nunneries in the Later Middle Ages

Janet Burton Cloistered Women Janet and Burton Male Authority

This paper seeks to investigate some of the issues associated with how medieval nunneries were governed, and the question of where power and authority lay within these institutions that were designed to accommodate women who wished to pursue a monastic vocation. Such questions are rather more complex than the same questions asked of male houses, where there was a clearly delineated structure of power and command, defined either in relation to an individual institution (by the Rule of St Benedict) or in relation to wider groupings of individual monasteries into orders. Recent scholarship has emphasized that we should not unquestioningly apply to female houses the same ideas about structure, or organization, as to male houses, and has demonstrated the richness and diversity of the female religious experience.1 There is, for instance, an ongoing debate about female participation in the Cistercian order: what did medieval people – nuns, monks, bishops, popes, founders of religious houses and their patrons, and so on – mean by a Cistercian nunnery? How – in what ways and to what degree – did Cistercian nunneries follow the observances of the White Monks and the structure of the order? In general, in terms of internal organization the experience in female houses was different from that of male houses in one important respect. Whereas in monasteries we would not expect to find women occupying any positions of authority, in nunneries we might expect to find a male presence. Within nunneries there was, indeed, a chain of female command, from the abbess or, since the majority of nunneries did not have the status of abbey, the prioress, through the usual monastic obedientiaries. But both inside and outside the nunnery there were male authority figures. First, there was the archbishop or bishop of the diocese in which the nunnery was situated, who had a duty of visitation, as he did in non-exempt male houses. In houses belonging to the Gilbertine order (the order of Sempringham) there was a formal male component, comprising the canons and lay brothers.2 And then there were those more shadowy figures, the male custodes and magistri, guardians and masters, of whom we find mention from time to time in both Benedictine and Cistercian nunneries. Even in non-Gilbertine nunneries we may find the lay brothers and indeed regular canons who were a

1

See, e.g., M. Oliva, The Convent and Community in Late Medieval England: Female Monasteries in the Diocese of Norwich, 1350–1450 (Woodbridge, 1998); R. Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women (1984); J. Burton, The Monastic Order in Yorkshire 1069–1215 (CSMLT, 4th ser. 40, 1999), 125–52. 2 For a comprehensive treatment of the history and organization of the order from the foundation of the first house at Sempringham by the parish priest, Gilbert, to the end of the thirteenth century, see B. Golding, Gilbert of Sempringham and the Gilbertines c. 1130–c. 1300 (Oxford, 1995).

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characteristic of the houses of the order of Sempringham.3 Chaplains were, of course, necessary for the provision of spiritual services, but these aside, why were these men there and what did they do? This is a basic question but one to which the answer is elusive. The author of the life of St Gilbert of Sempringham, writing in the early thirteenth century, seemed to be in no doubt of the answer when he remarked that ‘women’s efforts achieve little without help from men’,4 and this line seems to have been followed down the centuries, an influential exponent being the pioneer of research into the history of English women in the religious life, Eileen Power.5 We have come a long way since the days of Eileen Power, and our perceptions of the role of women in the religious life have changed. But there are still questions that need to be asked. What was the role of the male guardian? How did this relate to the role of the prioress? Did women exercise authority or did real power lie with the master or guardian? And were the women who governed Yorkshire houses really as powerless to control their own lives as some historians have thought? What kind of status and authority did they enjoy? I shall be arguing that the position of prioress, even of a small and poor house, may have been one that was sought after and far from insignificant.6 In terms of records generated by the houses themselves most of the twenty-five Yorkshire nunneries are poorly documented,7 and in my discussion I shall be turning to the more plentiful evidence of the archbishops’ registers from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century.8 First, however, I should place these late medieval Yorkshire prioresses in some kind of political and economic context. In many ways the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries were difficult times for the religious houses of Yorkshire. Some were easy targets for raiders and armies from north of the border, and the damage wrought may have fallen particularly heavily on the smaller and poorer houses.9 Moreover, as John Tillotson in his 1994 article demonstrated, the period witnessed heightened activity on the part of the archbishops of York, especially Greenfield and Melton, with regard to the nunneries of their diocese, and their close attention may have been connected with their desire to implement the

3

Guardians and masters are recorded in many Benedictine nunneries and at fifteen of the twenty-seven English nunneries which appear to have been Cistercian at some time in their history: see S. Elkins, Holy Women of Twelfth-Century England (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1988), esp. 84–97; S. Thompson, Women Religious: The Founding of English Nunneries after the Norman Conquest (Oxford, 1991). For the male element in Yorkshire nunneries see Burton, Monastic Order in Yorkshire, 170–7. 4 The Book of St Gilbert, ed. R. Foreville and G. Keir (Oxford Medieval Texts, Oxford, 1987), 37. 5 E. Power, Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275–1535 (Cambridge, 1922). 6 I am most grateful to Professor David Smith of the Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, University of York, whose knowledge of heads of medieval religious houses is unrivalled, for reading a draft of this paper and offering his comments. For any errors that remain I am alone responsible. I would also like to thank Brian Golding of the University of Southampton for stimulating discussions over the years about medieval nuns. 7 Only one of the Yorkshire nunneries has a surviving cartulary, although there is a good survival of original charters from Marrick Priory. See J. Burton, The Yorkshire Nunneries in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Borthwick Paper no. 56, York, 1979), and ‘Yorkshire Nunneries in the Middle Ages: Recruitment and Resources’, in Government, Religion and Society in Northern England 1000–1700, ed. J.C. Appleby and P. Dalton (Stroud, 1997), 104–16. On Marrick see J.H. Tillotson, Marrick Priory: A Nunnery in Late Medieval Yorkshire (Borthwick Paper no. 75, York, 1989). 8 On these see Power, Medieval English Nunneries; J. Tillotson, ‘Visitation and Reform of the Yorkshire Nunneries in the Fourteenth Century’, Northern History 30 (1994), 1–21. 9 See, for instance, C. McNamee, The Wars of the Bruces: Scotland, England and Ireland, 1306–1328 (East Linton, 1997), esp. ch. 3. For the impact of Scottish raids on the estates of the Yorkshire Cistercian houses see J.S. Donnelly, ‘Changes in the Grange Economy of English and Welsh Cistercian Abbeys, 1300–1540’, Traditio 10 (1954), 399–458. The impact on the small nunnery of Moxby is discussed below.

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papal bull Periculosa, which was intended to keep religious women firmly within their convent walls.10 It is against a background of economic difficulties and increased archiepiscopal intervention that the following discussion is set. What struck me particularly when revisiting the registers was the number of resignations and disputed elections in the nunneries in the late thirteenth century and the first quarter or so of the fourteenth century. The number is quite startling. Between about 1290 and 1330 there was some kind of problem, suggested by resignations or contested elections, in Yorkshire nunneries on seventeen occasions, and the explanations traditionally offered are those of female incompetence. I want to argue that in some cases they are more likely to be the result of clashes between authority figures inside and outside the cloister, and power-seeking within the convent walls. Resignations in themselves need not be interpreted as indications of crises, and it is clear that sometimes the reason was routine: ill health or old age, or poor administration. Some time after May 1315 the convent of Handale near Whitby elected Mariota of Harlsey as successor to Cecily de Irton, who had resigned through ill health.11 In May 1318 Archbishop Melton appointed Thomas of Middlesbrough, rector of Lofthus, as custodian of the priory goods, and by August of that year Mariota had also resigned – indicating that there may have been a problem with the administration of the priory.12 Melton examined the election of Mariota’s successor, Alice of Hutton, and found it for some reason to be uncanonical. However, as he was satisfied that Alice was of legitimate birth and good character he was prepared to overlook any irregularities and to permit the election to stand.13 What we see here is the archbishop taking a proactive but by no means unusual role in nunnery affairs, perhaps provoking a resignation because of poor administration, examining procedures in the election of a new prioress, and being prepared to overrule it if necessary. At Baysdale (Basedale), on the North Yorkshire Moors, Joan de Percy was elected prioress in 1301.14 Within two years Joan had attracted censure from Archbishop Corbridge, for in July 1303 he had sent her a warning about the ill-treatment of one of her nuns, Alice, who had complained to him.15 Six years after Joan’s election, on 16 May 1307, the archbishop ordered a visitation of the priory and the deprivation of the prioress for allowing the house to fall into dilapidation, and for excesses.16 By September 1307, presumably in protest at her deposition by the archbishop a few weeks earlier, Joan and other nuns had left Baysdale, and were

10 11

Tillotson, ‘Visitation and Reform’, 1–21. Reg. William Greenfield, Lord Archbishop of York, 1306–1315, ed. W. Brown and A.H. Thompson, 5 vols (Surtees Soc. 145, 149, 151–3, 1931–40), iii. 76, no. 1304 (confirmation of the election of Cecily de Irton, nun of Handale, as prioress, 7 June 1313), 106–7, no. 1363 (mandate to the prior of Guisborough to receive Cecily’s resignation propter varias infirmitates et sui corporis invalitudinem, 12 May 1315). For the prioresses and masters of Handale see HRH, ii. 568. 12 Reg. William Melton, Archbishop of York, 1317–1340, ed. R.M.T. Hill, D. Robinson, R. Brocklesby and T.C.B. Timmins, 5 vols (Canterbury and York Soc., 70, 71, 76, 85, 93, 1977–2002), ii. 15–16, no. 35. 13 Ibid., 27–8, nos 54–5. Alice of Hutton, too, resigned (by Oct. 1320) for reasons unknown, and Agnes was elected in her stead: ibid., 62–3, nos 130, 134. 14 Reg. Thomas Corbridge, Lord Archbishop of York, 1300–14, ed. W. Brown and A.H. Thompson, 2 vols (Surtees Soc. 138, 141, 1925–8), i. 124; HRH, ii. 542: Joan was presented for confirmation (10 May 1301) by two of her nuns, Mariota of Langtoft and Isabel of Whitby. 15 Reg. Corbridge, i. 88. In 1305 Joan reached an agreement with Gawain of Thweng, rector of Kirkleatham, concerning the nuns’ manor of Nunthorpe, a former site of the nunnery. In 1317 an unnamed prioress and the convent of Baysdale confirmed the 1305 agreement in the presence of the dean and chapter of York, sede vacante, after complaints by Gawain that the nuns had not kept the terms of the lease: Reg. Greenfield, v. 263–5, no. 2846. 16 Reg. Greenfield, iii. 17, no. 1164.

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allegedly wandering outside the monastery17 – this is not the only case we shall encounter where nuns were reluctant to accept an archbishop’s decision or discipline. Joan and her nuns were ordered back to Baysdale, and Joan then spent over a year doing penance at Sinningthwaite. She returned to Baysdale, as a simple nun, in 1309.18 Both these examples show the archbishop apparently keeping a tight control in the affairs of the nunneries and the activities of the prioress. Problems of a different nature seem to have caused the resignation of Constance de Crescy, prioress of Hampole. Constance was the sister of Sir Hugh de Crescy of nearby Melton, and during a visitation in 1312 it was found that, despite the archbishop’s prohibition of the reception of new recruits Prioress Constance had accepted two – one of them her own niece Jonetta and the other Matilda of Driffield, niece of the abbot of Roche, a Cistercian house which lay a dozen miles or so to the south of Hampole.19 Constance’s action in accepting these novices may well have been dictated by family and local pressure and loyalties. But she had flouted the archbishop’s attempt to control recruitment and she paid the price of her disobedience and resigned; in 1313 as a nun of Hampole she was sent to do penance at Swine.20 These seem to be quite straightforward cases of prioresses either ceding office through ill health or failing in their duties and being removed by the archbishop. However, I would argue that there is more to the large number of resignations and disputes in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries; and in order to discuss what may have been behind these apparent problems with the government of the Yorkshire nunneries, I should like to examine a number of case studies. Let us look first of all at the small priory of Arden, some ten miles to the north-west of Rievaulx. At Arden there were resignations in 1304, 1324 and 1329. In the late thirteenth century the priory was already suffering hardships, and in 1301 financial difficulties were recorded there.21 In 1304 Prioress Juliana resigned, ill health being given as the reason for her decision.22 However earlier trouble is hinted at in a letter of November 1303, written by Queen Margaret, wife of King Edward I, on behalf of a friend of the queen, Margaret de Punchardon, nun of Arden. The letter was addressed to the archbishop of York, and relayed by him to the custos of Arden. Margaret had evidently complained to the queen that she did not receive the same provisions as the other nuns.23 There was clearly some tension here, and a nun seems to have brought in a high-profile patron to apply pressure on her behalf. Moreover, the priory was one of those that sustained damage from Scottish raids. In 1306 an

17

‘Johanna de Percy et quedam alie monasterii de Basedale, nostre diocesis moniales, observancie regularis oblite, deserto monasterio, cum secularibus pro voluntatis libito conversantur, priorisse licencia non obtenta . . . in seculo evagantes’: Reg. Greenfield, i. 115–16, no. 251. Joan was apparently deposed in June, and the identity of the prioress of Baysdale to whom Archbishop Greenfield granted licence to eat meat three times a week because of illness (Sept. 1307) is therefore unknown: ibid., iii. 18–19, no. 1166. 18 Ibid., iii. 23–5, no. 1180 (mandate to Sinningthwaite to receive Joan, with details of her penance), and 48–9, no. 1233 (mandate for Joan’s return to Baysdale, 15 Aug. 1309). 19 Reg. Greenfield, ii. 124–5, no. 962; HRH, ii. 567–8. Constance is not named in this mandate, but is identified as the sister of Sir Hugh de Crescy and aunt of Jonetta. An earlier prioress of Hampole, Joan (occ. 1259), also bore the name of Crescy (HRH, ii. 567). 20 Constance, described as a nun of Hampole, was sent to do penance at Swine in March 1313, but allowed back within a month because of good behaviour: Reg. Greenfield, ii. 141–2, nos 984, 987. 21 Corbridge committed the affairs of the house to Robert de Coleville, canon of Newburgh (‘. . . domus monialium de Erden quarum inopie compatimur loco in quo ipse moratur satis vicina . . .’): Reg. Corbridge, i. 168. 22 Ibid., ii. 178. For the prioresses and masters of Arden, see HRH, ii. 539–40. 23 Ibid., ii. 140–1. Margaret de Punchardon was evidently still at Arden in 1320 when Archbishop Melton granted her licence to become a recluse: Reg. Melton, ii. 64, no. 137.

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archiepiscopal visitation ordered the (unnamed) prioress and officials to submit accounts twice a year, and to dismiss useless servants within a week.24 In 1315 a new superior was elected: Beatrice of Colton, was confirmed as prioress of Arden, having been presented to the archbishop by two nuns of the house, Margaret of Ampleforth and Beatrice of Holme. On her election Prioress Beatrice was given an indented inventory of the goods of the house so that she would in future be able to give an accurate account when needed.25 How long Beatrice survived is unclear but she may have been the unnamed prioress who resigned in 1324, just months after Melton appointed as guardians the rector of Gilling East and John of Speeton (perhaps a relative of Clarice of Speeton, nun of Arden) because of the many oppressions of the house.26 Beatrice’s replacement was in many ways a surprise one. Allegedly at the request of the Arden nuns Melton appointed Isabel Couvel, a nun of Arthington near Otley.27 As we shall see Isabel had been a lively presence at Arthington. She remained at Arden for four or five years until her resignation in 1329. The reason for her resignation is not recorded. Perhaps she made herself unpopular; perhaps she was inefficient; perhaps the appointment was not, despite Melton’s assertion, the wish of the Arden nuns but his own attempt to impose a prioress from outside the house. Isabel was ordered under pain of ecclesiastical censure to return to Arthington within three days.28 Arthington, to which Isabel Couvel returned in disgrace, was not free from problems, for there was one resignation there in 1302 and at least one, possibly two, in 1312. The priory seems to have had a history of disturbances in which Isabel Couvel had played her part. Agnes of Scriven, who may have been elected in 1300 to replace the late Prioress Matilda of Keswick, resigned in 1302.29 The reasons are, once again, not recorded, but the resignation coincides with the apostasy of two of the Arthington nuns, Helen of Castleford and Constance de Daneport of Pontefract, and the order of the archbishop for them to be received back at Arthington.30 One of two constructions can be placed on Agnes’s resignation. It may have been her protest at the archbishop’s intervention; or it may have been forced on her by the archbishop for her reluctance to comply with his orders to take back the two nuns. Either way, there was apparent conflict between the archbishop and the prioress. Once she had resigned Agnes of Scriven remained at Arthington, where she did not make life easy for her successor, Agnes of Pontefract, who – significantly perhaps – is recorded as having been appointed, not elected.31 During a visitation in 1307 Agnes of Scriven and a nun, Isabel Couvel, alleged that certain goods claimed by the priory were, in fact, their own property.32 Agnes of Pontefract was clearly 24

Reg. Greenfield, iii. 5–9, no. 1153. The visitation process revealed that another nun of Arden with the name of Punchardon, Joan, had borne a child. 25 Ibid., iii. 97–8, no. 1346. 26 Reg. Melton, ii. 102, nos 242–4; for Clarice see ibid., 3–4, no. 7. 27 Ibid., ii. 102, nos 243–4. 28 Ibid., ii. 135–6, no. 328 (mandate to the rector of Kirby Knowle, keeper of the seal of Arden Priory, to proceed with an election but to retain the common seal of the priory). 29 For her election see Reg. John le Romeyn, Lord Archbishop of York, 1286–96, Part II, and of Henry of Newark, Lord Archbishop of York, 1296–1299, ed. W. Brown (Surtees Soc. 128, 1917), 321, no. 351; Reg. Corbridge, i. 76, no. 204, recording the resignation and mandate to elect a successor. HRH, ii. 540. 30 Reg. Corbridge, i. 57 (Helen, 31 July 1301), 101–3, 108 (Constance, Nov.–Dec. 1303). On apostasy generally see F.D. Logan, Runaway Religious in Medieval England c. 1240–1540 (CSMLT, 4th ser. 32, 1996). 31 Reg. Corbridge, i. 78: the appointment of Agnes of Pontefract, nun of Arthington, as prioress (4 Dec. 1302). 32 Reg. Greenfield, ii. 32, no. 733.

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under pressure within the convent and by 1312 she was no longer in office.33 Permission to elect a new prioress for Arthington was requested by two nuns, both of whom appear, from their names, to have been local women, Maud of Batley and Margaret of Tang.34 As a result of this election Isabel of Barrowby was confirmed as prioress in March 1312, but Isabel Couvel was appointed her coadjutress by the vicar general.35 Quite what this was meant to signify is not clear, but what is apparent is that this power sharing was not to the liking of the new prioress. By August, taking Margaret of Tang (one of the nuns who had announced her election) and other nuns with her, Isabel of Barrowby left the house.36 There was a schism. In September 1312 Maud of Batley – the other nun who had announced Isabel’s election – was herself elected, and ordered to receive Isabel back. The former prioress was sent to do penance at Yedingham, and her co-apostate, Margaret of Tang, was also punished.37 When Isabel of Barrowby returned to Arthington she was always likely to have been a source of potential trouble, and the potential seems to have been fulfilled. In 1316 she was once again sent to do penance, and the rector of Rossington was appointed to supervise the affairs of the house.38 Incidentally Isabel of Barrowby stayed on in the monastic life at Arthington, and is recorded as one of two prioresses to occur in 1349.39 To sum up: the trouble at Arthington began with the resignation of Agnes of Scriven, an apparent gesture of defiance to the archbishop; it was fomented by Agnes’s continued presence in the priory; and erupted in 1312 as a power struggle, sparked off by the archbishop’s attempts to impose some form of power-sharing, or collective government within the house, which was resisted by a faction of the nuns. One of the most spectacular disputes occurred at the North Riding convent of Keldholme, where there were resignations in 1294, 1301, 1308, 1309 and a fifth in 1316. Beatrice of Grendale resigned in 1294 and was replaced by a nun of Keldholme named Emma of Stapleton, of a local North Riding family, who herself subsequently resigned in 1301.40 Thereafter, no prioress is recorded for seven years. That we might think could be due to the paucity of the sources, but on 17 April 1308 an enquiry was ordered into how long the office had been vacant, and it was reported that the appointment had lapsed to the archbishop.41 On 20 April 1308 Emma of York was appointed but resigned by 30 July in the same year, on which date the archbishop confirmed the appointment (not the election) of Joan of Pickering, nun of Rosedale.42 Keldholme and Rosedale are a matter of only seven or 33

She may have been the Agnes of Pontefract who succeeded Constance de Crescy at Hampole in 1313, or that may have been another individual of the same name: Reg. Greenfield, ii. 139, no. 980. 34 Ibid., ii. 116, no. 945. 35 Ibid., ii. 117, no. 948. 36 Ibid., ii. 123, no. 957. 37 Ibid., ii. 124–6, nos 960, 963; iii. 69–70, no. 1289. 38 Ibid., v. 243, 246–7, nos 2781, 2797. 39 HRH, ii. 540. The other was Isabel de Dautry. 40 Reg. Romeyn, i. 179, no. 507, for the resignation of Beatrice and confirmation of Emma (29 Jan. and 3 Feb. 1294), and Reg. Corbridge, i. 128, for the resignation of Emma of Stapleton on 13 July 1301. The priory had been visited on 25 May 1301 (ibid., i. 126). For the prioresses and guardians of Keldholme, see HRH, ii. 574–5. 41 Reg. Greenfield, iii. 20, no. 1169. 42 For the commission to appoint Emma of York as prioress see York, Borthwick Institute, Reg. 7, fol. 163 (Reg. Greenfield, iii. 20 note); for Joan’s appointment see ibid., iii. 27, no. 1188. In May the archbishop had been forced to warn six nuns of Keldholme, Beatrice of Roston, Anabel of Lockton, Orphania de Neuton, Isabella of Langtoft, Mary of Holme and Joan de Roseles, to obey the (unnamed) prioress: ibid., 21, no 1173. These were the nuns who opposed Joan’s appointment (July) and they seem to have been equally resistant to the regime of Emma of York.

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eight miles apart. Quite clearly Joan of Pickering (a local of both priories) was Greenfield’s choice for a troubled convent. On 5 August 1308 he reported that at a recent visitation the priory had been in a poor state, that Emma of York had voluntarily resigned, and that he had appointed Joan of Pickering, a nun of good reputation because he could find no-one in the convent whom he thought capable of assuming control – and the suggestion of a prolonged vacancy might seem to support his opinion.43 Joan’s appointment was fiercely resisted by a faction of nuns – five of them are named, which in a small house must have been a fair proportion of the total – and certain lay men, who had prevented her from exercising her office.44 The point I would emphasize here is that the questions of who held the office of prioress, and how they came to office, were clearly of concern to the local community and not just to the nuns. The monastery was placed under interdict until such time as Joan was accepted. On 3 September four trouble-making nuns were dispersed to other houses. Three more, including former prioress Emma of Stapleton, had left the house and so were summoned before the archbishop.45 The archbishop ordered the nuns of Keldholme to write to their patron, Lady Joan Wake, to inform her of the election of Joan of Pickering, and to request her to restore the temporalities to the prioress.46 However, his efforts came to nothing. In that same month he was forced to give licence for his commissioners to receive Joan’s resignation.47 He did, however, exact some revenge by imposing severe penance on one Nicholas de Repinghale for impeding the installation of Joan as prioress.48 On 7 March 1309 the election of a new prioress of Keldholme was confirmed – that of Emma of Stapleton, who returned to the office she had resigned eight years earlier.49 Joan of Pickering herself retreated, thankfully no doubt, to the safety of Rosedale, where she succeeded Mary de Ros as prioress in 1311.50 On 10 December 1314 Emma of Stapleton, prioress of Keldholme, apparently stood high in the favour of the archbishop for he granted her licence to accept her niece, Beatrice, as a boarder.51 But life at Keldholme was not easy. Emma of York, who had been Emma of Stapleton’s successor in 1308, and a nun named Mary of Holme, continued to cause trouble, insulted the prioress and disrupted her running of the house, and the custos, Richard del Clay, was ordered to summon the rebels before him; he was enjoined to read the archbishop’s letter of rebuke in the mother tongue in the chapter house.52 Nor was that the end of the affair, for in February 1316, two months after the death of the archbishop, Emma of Stapleton resigned, claiming old age and sickness – and Emma of York was once again elected as prioress; for the second time she succeeded Emma of Stapleton.53 Now this is truly a tangled web. What caused 43 44

Ibid., iii. 29–30, no. 1192. Ibid. This time the nuns were Joan de Stuteville, Hawise of Scarborough, Orphania de Neuton, Isabella of Langtoft and Mary of Holme. The involvement of local laymen shows the close interaction between the priory and the local community. Nine men are named, five from Kirkby Moorside, a mile or so to the west of the priory. 45 Isabella of Langtoft was sent to Handale, Mary of Holme to Swine, Joan de Roseles to Nun Appleton and Anabel of Lockton to Wallingwells: ibid., iii. 33–5, no. 1198. The nuns who had apparently left with Emma were Matilda Bigot and Alice of Pickering. 46 Ibid., iii. 39, no. 1216. 47 Ibid., iii. 40, no. 1218, note. 48 Ibid., iii. 42–4, no. 1221 (16 Feb. 1309). 49 Ibid., iii. 44, no. 1224. 50 Ibid., iii. 58, no. 1266; HRH, ii. 601–2. 51 Reg. Greenfield, iii. 93–4, no. 1341. 52 Ibid., iii. 111–12, no. 1377. 53 Ibid., v. 258, no. 2830, and note.

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Emma of Stapleton first to resign was probably the result of the visitation of May 1301. It is clear, however, that if one were seeking an adjective to describe the community of Keldholme harmonious would not be the word that would first spring to mind. Once again we seem to be witnessing a power struggle. The archbishop claimed that there was at Keldholme no nun capable of being prioress. But perhaps there was no shortage of able women wanting or willing to be prioress – were there perhaps too many? My final case study comes from one of the houses most troubled by the Scottish wars: the Augustinian nunnery of Moxby in the forest of Galtres.54 In 1322, as a result of the distress which they had suffered, members of the convent, Alice of Barton, prioress since 1310, and eight nuns were dispersed to other houses. Prioress Alice went to Swine; Sabina of Applegarth and Margaret de Neuson to Nun Monkton, Joan of Barton and Joan de Toucotes to Nun Appleton, two more to Nunkeeling and two to Hampole.55 The convent eventually reassembled and by 1325 Alice had been succeeded by Joan of Barton, who in that year resigned following an affair with a chaplain, Laurence of Dishforth.56 The nun who succeeded Joan as prioress in 1325 may have been Sabina of Applegarth; certainly a prioress named Sabina resigned in 1328.57 If this is the case, then a chequered career within the cloister was no bar to promotion. Sabina had apostasized as early as 1312, but had been received back into the community.58 She was mentioned in a decree following a visitation in 1318, when she had been barred by the archbishop from holding office.59 She had been sent to Nun Monkton during the dispersal of 1322, where she was, by all accounts, an unwelcome guest. Sabina’s career to 1325 may not seem to have been the best recommendation for a prioress, but one should not underestimate the difficulties of life in a small nunnery in the early fourteenth century: the poverty, the dangers from raiders, the threat of violence,60 and the trauma to a nun of being uprooted from one nunnery, a small, close-knit community, and moved to another where she was evidently not welcome. Nun Monkton, to which Sabina and Margaret de Neusom were sent, had tried, unsuccessfully, to escape the financial burden of the refugee nuns. The decrees following the visitation of Moxby in March 1328, that seems to have led to the resignation of Prioress Sabina, insisted – as they had in 1318 – that she be allowed to hold no further office. Such disputes and power struggles were no doubt inflamed by family expectations. Joan de Normanville, prioress of Nun Appleton, who was elected in 1303, was pressured in 1308 to receive as a nun Agnes of Saxton, probably a relative of Roger of Saxton, rector of Aberford and recorded as custodian of Nun Appleton in 1306, 1307 and 1311.61 In 1318 the archbishop forbad the reception of more than two or 54

For Scottish raids into Yorkshire in 1322 see McNamee, Wars of the Bruces, 100ff. Valuations in 1327 show a reduction of 50% and over in places in the vicinity of Moxby. 55 Reg. Melton, ii. 84, nos 209–11. For the election of Alice of Barton as prioress on the resignation of Euphemia, see Reg. Greenfield, iii. 58, no. 1263. 56 Reg. Melton, ii. 103, 105, nos 255, 263. 57 Ibid., ii. 126, no. 305 (mandate to the nuns to obey Joan de Tocoutes, elected prioress after the resignation of Sabina, 26 March 1328); a visitation commission of 7 March 1328 had given the visitors power to remove the prioress if necessary (ibid., 125–6, no. 303). 58 Reg. Greenfield, iii. 68, no. 1286. 59 Reg. Melton, ii. 12–14, no. 31. 60 In April 1323 the archbishop ordered the cleansing of the priory church of Moxby, which had been polluted by the shedding of blood (Reg. Melton, ii. 86, no. 220). 61 For Joan’s confirmation as prioress see Reg. Corbridge, i. 82. For licence to receive Agnes of Saxton, see Reg. Greenfield, ii. 47, no. 772. On Roger of Saxton as custos: ibid., ii. 2, no. 664, 40, no. 758, 111, no. 934.

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three sisters of the same family in the convent of Nun Appleton to avoid discord62 – this recalls an earlier case at Swine Priory, when a visitation found that three ‘sisters of the flesh’ constantly combined to make life difficult for the prioress.63 Whether or not Melton had a particular family at Nun Appleton in mind is uncertain, but it is worth noting that Joan de Normanville was prioress in 1308, and that the prioress elected in 1320 was another Normanville, Isabel.64 There was a tendency for members of a secular family to cluster in the same monastic one. Sometimes family pressure from the patron might be brought to bear and might increase internal difficulties. In 1310 Isabel of St Quintin, of the family of the patrons of Nunkeeling, held the office of cellaress, but was removed from office in the presence of the whole convent, and the nuns were enjoined to let her hold no other office. Nevertheless, she was appointed prioress by the dean and chapter on 20 August 1316, following the resignation of Avice de la More who had been warned of conspiracies and disobedience.65 Clearly to be appointed a prioress and to continue in office was a fraught affair in the north in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries – not that resignations were confined to that period, nor to female houses, but they are prominent then. What are we to make of them? First I would recall two comments that I made earlier: that these were frequently difficult times, politically and economically, for small and poor religious communities, and the situation could be exacerbated either when the archbishop sent a nun from one house to do penance at another, often for as long as a year, and by the wholesale dispersal of houses, as at Moxby in 1322. Both of these could result in financial hardship and disruption. The second point is that in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries we see increased archiepiscopal intervention in nunnery affairs, and the cases I have discussed seem to point to tension between the archbishop, and his ideas about the administration of a nunnery, and the ideas and expectations of the community or its prioress. To dismiss these problems as the result of the behaviour of gentleborn but idle nuns, with little vocation for the monastic life and time on their hands, is to parody the situation; and to write off a prioress, as Eileen Power tended to do, as ‘a bad woman’, or ‘a thoroughly bad character’, or to offer the solution that ‘the Yorkshire nuns were quarrelsome ladies’ is not very helpful.66 There is clearly more to this spate of resignations and disputed elections than the traditional explanations that have been offered, and both the

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York, Borthwick Institute, Register 9A (Reg. Archbishop Melton), fol. 131. Reg. Walter Giffard, Lord Archbishop of York, 1266–1279, ed. W. Brown (Surtees Soc. 109, 1904), 146–8, no. 578 (p. 147). 64 York, Borthwick Institute, Register 9A (Reg. Archbishop Melton), fol. 142v. Isabel was not Joan’s immediate successor: Elizabeth of Holbeck, nun of Appleton, was confirmed as prioress on 23 Oct. 1316 (Reg. Greenfield, v. 250, no. 2806). David Smith suggests that Sybil de Normanvilla, prioress in 1322, may be the same as Isabel (HRH, ii. 592). 65 Reg. Greenfield, iii. 187, no. 1524. Isabel was also suspected of incontinence and incest with two monks of Meaux: ibid., 188, no. 1525. For Avice’s resignation and Isabel’s appointment see ibid., v. 267, no. 2856. Isabel was not the only appointment made by the dean and chapter. In 1316 one faction of the convent at St Clement’s, York, elected Beatrice of Brandsby, another voted for Agnes of Methley, whom the chapter, sede vacante, appointed: ibid., v. 249, no. 2802; also R.B. Dobson and S. Donaghey, The History of Clementhorpe Nunnery, The Archaeology of York 2, Historical Sources for York Archaeology after AD 1100, fasc. 1 (Council for British Archaeology for the York Archaeological Trust, 1984), 13; J. Burton, ‘Archbishop William Melton’s Visitations of St Mary’s Abbey and St Clement’s Priory, York, 1317–1324’, in The Church in Medieval York: Records Edited in Honour of Professor Barrie Dobson, ed. D.M. Smith (Borthwick Texts and Cals 24, York, 1999), 29–49, esp. 38–9. 66 Power, Medieval English Nunneries, 85 (of Eleanor of Arden), 52 (of Mary of Holme), 58 (of the nuns of Nunkeeling).

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general economic situation and the increased attention paid by the archbishops might start to offer answers. What else do these episodes suggest about the office of prioress and those women who held it? Perhaps one of the first features that one notices is that there were some surprise appointments, instances where nuns with previous records of bad behaviour did achieve promotion. Some, like the appointment of Isabel of St Quintin so soon after archiepiscopal censure, may reveal family pressure or division in the community. Others may highlight that the disciplinary measures put in place by the archbishops were, by and large, effective. They show that high standards were expected and could be maintained. Moreover, I think we can say that the position of prioress was not to be despised, despite the presence of men acting as magistri or custodes. It is not certain that such custodes were a consistent feature of nunnery life; some at least seem to have been appointed in times of particular hardship, such as a vacancy, as a temporary expedient, and it is surprising how little we hear of what they actually did. Their function appears to have been to take care of any business that might take the prioress out of the cloister but it does not appear to have constrained or restricted her overall authority.67 Third, the office of prioress was no easy ride, no sinecure. A prioress was expected to play a full and responsible part in the administration of her house. My final example takes us forward to the closing years of the fourteenth century. In 1397 during a visitation the seven nuns then at Arden were loud in their complaints about the prioress, a young woman named Eleanor.68 They alleged that – among other shortcomings – she kept the conventual seal in her own possession, did not consult the sisters, sold wood and used the money for herself, and received – and spent – all the rents due to the priory. But their main concern seems to have been that in so doing she was an inefficient administrator: she ran up debts, pawned the goods of the house, among which were a set of sacred vessels which were clean when pawned but dirty when returned. Moreover the prioress was not a good bargainer – she bought a bushel of corn for 11d when she could have got it for 9d, 8d, or even 7d. She sent three young nuns haymaking, and they got back late, delaying the start of divine service. It would be easy to point to her shortcomings. The point I would emphasize is that, even in straitened economic circumstances, the prioress was expected to exercise financial control and oversee the administration of the house. What should be highlighted is not that she did it badly, but that she did it at all. It was part of the job description. The prioresses of the Yorkshire houses were not nonentities. They acted as executors for wills, guardians for children, keepers of evidences and valuables for the local nobility, and were prepared to take them on in court to defend their rights. Eileen Power, commenting on the appointment, in 1317, of a guardian to oversee all the manors and buildings of Kirklees Priory, to receive and hear accounts of ministers and bailiffs and to dismiss inefficient servants, wrote that ‘it must have been of great assistance to the worried and incompetent nuns’.69 67

For a discussion of the evidence for the role of guardians and masters at one Yorkshire nunnery, that of Swine, a Cistercian nunnery organized on lines resembling the arrangements at a double house of the Gilbertine order, see J. Burton, ‘The Chariot of Aminadab and the Yorkshire Nunnery of Swine’, in Pragmatic Utopias: Ideals and Communities, 1200–1630, ed. R. Horrox and S. Rees Jones (Cambridge, 2001), 26–42. I argue that the presence of male authority figures did not diminish the power of the prioress. 68 York, Borthwick Institute, Register 5A (Sede Vacante reg.), fols 228r–229r. Eleanor was said to have been twenty-six years of age when elected. The nuns named in the visitation were Christina and Elizabeth Darell, Elizabeth Sleyne, Alicia Bernard, Agnes de Midilton and Elizabeth de Thornton; all were apparently local women. 69 Power, Medieval English Nunneries, 235–7.

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What the circumstances of this one appointment were we do not know. However, evidence from other sources suggests that the nuns and prioresses of medieval Yorkshire did not always feel relief at male assistance, but actively sought control of their own affairs, many of them by aspiring to the highest office within their convent walls. This, perhaps, can be offered as another explanation for the apparent struggle for power, the reluctance to accept women appointed by the archbishop, and the interest which surrounding communities took in the running of the nunnery. As this paper has demonstrated, women dismissed by the archbishop might fight their way back to power. Even Archbishop Greenfield had to admit defeat in his attempt to foist a nun of Rosedale on Keldholme Priory, and his final defeat came posthumously when the prioress, Emma of York, whose resignation he had secured in 1308 returned to rule her flock.

Taxation and Settlement in Medieval Devon1

Harold Fox Taxation and Settlement Harold Fox in Medieval Devon

A brilliant paper by William Hoskins, published in 1952 and entitled ‘The Wealth of Medieval Devon’, was the first perhaps to bring medieval lay subsidies to the service of local economic and social history. Beginning with a sidelight from his own personal view of state authority – ‘tax assessments usually make melancholy reading’ – he went on to analyse the returns for Devon from the lay subsidy of 1334, famous for its almost complete coverage of England, and then added some highly suggestive pages on fifteenth-century taxation and economic growth (which will not concern us here). He argued that Devon in the early fourteenth century (and by implication in the thirteenth) was peopled by ‘a rather poor peasantry’ and was ‘one of the most backward counties of England’, largely because ‘the county was colonized late’ and there was ‘still a vast amount to be done before its agricultural resources could be said to be fully exploited’. The county’s total wealth, compared to that of, say, Oxfordshire and other Midland counties, appears dismal when measured through the tax returns for 1334.2 Since Hoskins wrote his important paper, a major advance in our understanding of the lay subsidy of 1334 has been provided by Robin Glasscock’s edition of all of the rolls, with a map showing regional variations in wealth throughout England. All taxed counties are split on this map into many smaller sub-divisions and assessed wealth per square mile is shown for each of these. In some English counties many adjacent sub-divisions were worth £20 per square mile and more (almost the whole of Oxfordshire and Norfolk, for example) or £10 and more (almost the whole of Wiltshire and Warwickshire). Well over half of Devon shows up at less than £5 per square mile – the borders of Dartmoor and Exmoor, those moors themselves and a great swathe of countryside (‘Culm Measures country’) in the north. A fringe of land (the ‘golden fringe’) along the south coast had wealth of between £5 and £9 per square mile, rising to a little over £9 in the vicinities of Exeter, Plymouth and Ottery St Mary (for Glasscock added the wealth of towns to that of their rural surroundings).3 The poor showing of Devon as a whole may be expressed in another way: whereas the wealthiest parts of the county – a few small pockets of land around the three towns mentioned above – were assessed to tax at between £9 and £19 per square mile, in Norfolk that band of wealth belonged to the county’s poorest region,

1

I am most grateful to Kenneth Smith and Gillian Austen for much practical assistance. I thank those who made cogent points at the Thirteenth Century England conference, especially Henry Summerson, Michael Prestwich, John Maddicott and Paul Harvey. I also thank the British Academy Research Readership scheme and research grants scheme for making time and funds available for this work. 2 W.G. Hoskins, ‘The Wealth of Medieval Devon’, in W.G. Hoskins and H.P.R. Finberg, Devonshire Studies (1952), 212–49. 3 The Lay Subsidy of 1334, ed. R.E. Glasscock (British Academy Records of Social and Economic History, new ser. 2, 1975), xxvii.

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in the south, the greater part of the shire being assessed at over £19.4 The people of Devon were indeed economical in their contributions to state finance, and this paper attempts to explore some of the reasons why this should have been so through an analysis of a sample of taxation units, the hundreds and tithings. Whereas Hoskins used the returns of the lay subsidy of 1334 (with details for tithings only and no personal names), we now have a fine edition, by Audrey Erskine, of the Devon returns for 1332 which also include the names of the tax-payers and the sums paid by each.5 The returns begin with the hundreds and within each there are sub-headings for the rural tithings, most of which were coincident in area with parishes of the same name. Thus in Haytor Hundred (the first listed), Berry Pomeroy tithing must represent the same area as the parish of that name, for no other tithings lie within it and all of the land surrounding it may be attributed to other tithings. The fit between the two types of administrative units is not perfect, however, for some parishes have two or more tithings within them, almost always based upon separate manors. Some ancient parishes are not recorded as tithings in 1332 and there is usually a good reason for the omission, although searches among sources relating to ecclesiastical and manorial geography are usually needed in order to explain them: in Haytor Hundred the apparent omission of the large parish of Stoke Gabriel, for example, may be explained by its status as a dependent parochial chapelry of Paignton, and entries in the returns for the tithing of Paignton make plain that the people of the dependency were being taxed under the heading of the superior place.6 Below the tithing headings are lists of the names of tax-payers in two columns and against each the sum which he or she paid, supposedly at the rate of one-fifteenth of personal wealth.7 This paper is largely about the sums, but it should be said that the personal names are reassuring and some of them, if occupational or containing place-names, bring the society and landscape of medieval Devon alive before our very eyes. A good proportion of the personal names are in fact of the locative type, the person taking his name from the farmstead or hamlet in which he lived, as is to be expected in a county where settlement was dispersed to the highest degree, and later on in this paper we shall be attempting to trace the journeys of the tax collectors across this landscape of lonely farms through use of the evidence which such names provide.8 The names of the under-collectors of the subsidy, working under the direction of the two chief county taxers are given at the end of the entries for each hundred. Following the hundreds and tithings in the returns for 1332 are the city of Exeter and the boroughs, twenty towns in all, whose tax-payers contributed at the rate of one-tenth, not one-fifteenth. The boroughs will not concern us much in this paper, but it should be noted here that those mentioned in the 1332 subsidy returns for Devon were not the only towns in the county at that time: there were many other boroughs, most of them seigneurial creations of the thirteenth century, whose populations, if taxed at all, were subsumed within the entries for the rural tithings in 4 5

Ibid. The Devonshire Lay Subsidy of 1332, ed. A.M. Erskine (Devon and Cornwall Record Soc., new ser. 14, 1969). I would like to record here how much I owe to the late Audrey Erskine who helped me in many ways from the 1960s onwards. 6 Erskine, Subsidy, 1. For example, listed under Paignton is Henry de Sandrugg who must have lived at Sandridge in Stoke Gabriel parish. 7 As Audrey Erskine acutely observed, the order of listing is from left to right across the two columns; it is crucial that this is recognized when the subsidy is being used to yield its true topographical potential. 8 For locative names in Devon, see D. Postles, The Surnames of Devon (Oxford, 1995), 112–32.

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which they lay.9 After the boroughs come the ancient demesnes, supposedly manors held by the crown at the time of the Norman Conquest, whose tax-payers also contributed at the rate of one-tenth because they had been granted considerable tenurial and other privileges: what had been given by one hand was taken away by another. On first looking into the Devonshire lay subsidy returns for 1332, one forms two general impressions. First, although all parts of the county were covered by the under-collectors, many of the rural tithings (on which this paper concentrates) appear to contain rather small numbers of tax-payers. Second, the individual personal contributions of tax are generally very small indeed: in tithing after tithing within some hundreds the frequency of payments at 8d is very striking, this being taxation at the lowest possible rate, for people with assessed wealth less than 10s were exempt, and 8d is one-fifteenth of this minimum. Ten shillings could be raised by the sale of two young bovines at this time, and it is unlikely that farmers of 30-acre holdings, which predominated on many manors, would have had surplus wealth of such little value. Payments at 12d were also very frequent. These impressions about the returns for Devon help to highlight apparent oddities, for here and there one is pulled up sharp by an enigma, a puzzle, an anomaly. For example, why, in Black Torrington Hundred, where the monotonous repetition of payments of 8d and 12d (or, more occasionally, 18d) is especially noticeable, do we suddenly come across, in the tithing of Werrington, hard up against the boundary with Cornwall, a very large number of individual payments at multiples of 12d – i.e. 2s or 3s – or at 20d (12d plus 8d?). Why, in Braunton Hundred, where tithing after tithing returned generally small numbers of tax-payers (average about 14), do we come across Braunton itself with the very large number of 90?10 Table 1. Taxation rates in a sample of Devon hundreds, 1332 Hundred

Tax-payers contributing 8d

Tax-payers contributing 9d–18d

Tax-payers contributing 19d or more

40% 44% 28% 49%

54% 42% 44% 45%

5% 15% 28% 6%

Witheridge N. Tawton E. Budleigh Plympton Source: Erskine, Subsidy.

Table 1 begins to explore (in a sample of hundreds) the impression that individual payments to the lay subsidy of 1332 were generally very low in Devon. In Witheridge and North Tawton Hundreds, where the slates and shales of the Culm Measures give soils not of the best quality, a very high proportion of all tax-payers contributed in the two lowest tax bands; in some tithings here, almost all contributors paid either 8d or 12d, as in Burrington. East Budleigh Hundred, by contrast, contains much fertile East Devon vale land, productive for both arable and pastoral farming, and here a significant proportion of the taxed population paid 19d and more. Among these were free tenants with considerable acreages, such as Thomas 9

H.S.A. Fox, ‘Medieval Urban Development’, in Historical Atlas of South-West England, ed. R. Kain and W. Ravenhill (Exeter, 1999), 400–7. 10 Erskine, Subsidy, 68, 83, 85.

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Soxpit, of the Sokespitch family which in Roman fashion invented an origin myth concerning a foundling founder discovered in a wood suckling a bitch; and the occupiers of several standard 30-acre villein tenements on the manor of Sidbury who may be identified in a rental close in date to the subsidy of 1332.11 But, as so often happens when the subsidy roll for Devon is examined, there is an apparent anomaly: the figures for Plympton Hundred, which contains some of the richest land in the country, in the golden fringe, show an even higher proportion of tax-payers than usual in the lowest tax band and a very small proportion in the highest. Whatever may have been the reasons for the anomaly of Plympton Hundred, the most striking features of Table 1 are the generally high number of people who paid at the lowest possible rate of 8d and the high number in the next tax band, many of whom contributed only 12d. Preliminary inspection of the 1332 returns for some other counties shows that such figures are not repeated elsewhere. For Wiltshire, in only a very few vills (about 30 out of about 490) did tax-payers contributing 8d rise above 20% of the total; for Warwickshire, 8d payments rose above 10% of the total contributions for a vill in only about 30 places out of 290.12 It is therefore necessary to try to explore the meaning and background of the low individual payments contributed by the people of Devon. The first, general, point to make is that special burdens were placed upon the under-collectors in areas of dispersed settlement where their task was very different from the experience of officials in parts of England where most taxation units contained a relatively compact nucleated village. Assessment in a nucleated village may be illustrated with the example of Cuxham in Oxfordshire where Paul Harvey has reconstructed the medieval plan, a street of around 800 yards long with farm tenements arranged in a row on its southern side. Several lists of people taxed at Cuxham survive (e.g. from 1295 and 1316) and it is clear from these that the assessors visited the tenants’ houses according to the order in which they were arranged on the village street. Lists of chattels at Cuxham assessed for the royal tallage of 1303–4 show that the collectors entered the houses of the tenants, each facing onto the village street, occasionally valuing pots and other utensils, then walked to their barns, a few feet away, where they found sacks of grain, and then visited their yards where piglets and hens foraged noisily. The tenements were closely spaced, and the assessors would have been accompanied by neighbours, curious and jealous and familiar with the principle of mutual assessment from earlier taxations, as they passed from one to another, rendering their task all the easier; above all, the relatively short journey along the village street meant that assessment could be carried out quickly. Despite the fact that they had been liberally entertained by the manorial staff, as Harvey shows from demesne accounts, and may not have been totally sober therefore, they surveyed the village street both rationally and thoroughly; moreover, they extracted relatively large sums from some individual peasants, 1s 4d being the minimum in 1295, with many others paying around 4s.13 In Devon, by contrast, where villages were few and many farms were isolated and distant from neighbours, concealment was easier and tax assessment may not have been so exemplary. 11

Hoskins, ‘Sokespitch’, in Hoskins and Finberg, Devonshire Studies, 105–19; Exeter Cathedral Archives [hereafter ECA], DC 3683(i). 12 The Wiltshire Tax List of 1332, ed. D.A. Crowley (Wiltshire Record Soc., 1989); The Lay Subsidy Roll for Warwickshire of 6 Edward III, 1332, ed. W.F. Carter (Dugdale Soc., 1926). 13 P.D.A. Harvey, A Medieval Oxfordshire Village: Cuxham 1240 to 1400 (Oxford, 1965), 105–7, 172 (for bribery and the order in which tenements were listed); idem, Manorial Records of Cuxham, Oxfordshire, circa 1200–1359 (HMC, 1976), 712–14, which prints the assessments. Those of 1295 were at the rate of one-tenth.

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It is possible that the people of Devon simply refused to cooperate as much as they should have done in the machinery of tax collection which, by 1332, embodied three main principles: inspection of each potential tax-payer’s chattels, the involvement of local people at the level of the vill and, supposedly, a direct chain of command in which the chief county taxers dealt directly with the vills.14 To determine the value of moveables by inspection was clearly more satisfactory to the exchequer than reliance on an oath sworn by their owner, which was the practice prevailing in the late twelfth century and early thirteenth. Neighbours were instructed to help in assessments in the first tax on moveables, the Saladin ‘tithe’ of 1197, though only in cases where an oath was suspected to be false. In the instructions for the first true lay subsidy, that of 1225, each potential tax-payer was to assess his two nearest neighbours. In later subsidies the people of each vill were instructed to select a small panel from within their number to assess ‘moveables held in house, field and elsewhere’ and this practice was insisted upon down to 1332. Communities were essentially assessing themselves: they chose their assessors and, no doubt, in villages those men were helped by neighbours (as in 1225) when they came to make their valuations, because each tax-payer would wish to insist that the household next door was not treated lightly, believing that he himself would have to pay more if that happened. Involvement of the community usually resulted in a degree of fairness, as Chris Dyer has shown through study of assessment after 1334.15 In the assessment and collection of any tax, a well-ordered chain of command was essential. At one end of the chain were the chief taxers, usually two for each county, though in 1269 it was decided to make their task more easy by involving select men from the hundreds (under-collectors) who were to supervise the election of the panels from the vills. This system may have encouraged a degree of collusion within hundreds, and so the more direct chain of command, between the chief taxers and the vills, was resumed in the instructions for the lay subsidy of 1297 and thereafter. Despite royal instructions, the people of Devon seem to have had their own views on methods of assessment for the subsidies: in the words of a royal enquiry in 1317 the chief taxers and under-collectors went about their work ‘contrary to the method given by the council’. They expressed their independence by taxing at the level of the tithing, not the vill, a practice found nowhere else in England, although the reason for it is unclear. In the first subsidy, of 1225, Devon’s tax yield (per square mile) was lower than in any other county. On that occasion each potential tax-payer was instructed to assess two of his neighbours, but in a countryside of dispersed settlement, definition of nearest neighbour is difficult and resistance to this imposed task would have been easy. The men of Devon in the same year showed their dislike of royal authority by buying the right to have a sheriff from among themselves rather than a career official selected by the crown, paying a large sum for this privilege (hardly the action of an impoverished people); earlier in the thirteenth century they had distanced themselves from crown officials by purchasing the right to reduce the frequency of meetings of the sheriff ’s tourn from twice to once each year.16 Could it

14

This and the following paragraphs are based on S.K. Mitchell, Taxation in Medieval England (Yale, 1951), 87–96; J.F. Willard, Parliamentary Taxes on Personal Property 1290–1334 (Cambridge, Mass., 1934), 54–64; and M. Jurkowski, C.L. Smith and D. Crook, Lay Taxes in England and Wales (1998). 15 C. Dyer, ‘Taxation and Communities in Late Medieval England’, in Progress and Problems in Medieval England, ed. R. Britnell and J. Hatcher (Cambridge, 1996), 187. 16 CFR 1307–19, 332; Crown Pleas of the Devon Eyre, ed. H. Summerson (Devon and Cornwall Record Soc., new ser. 28, 1985), xx–xxii.

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have been that, in 1225, many of them simply refused to co-operate over the royal instruction about mutual assessment? Of course, some monies reached the exchequer, so some men must have been assessed, but it can be suggested that many potential tax-payers simply stayed at home hoping not to be noticed, just as the Cornish, in their remote valleys, did in 1233 when they refused to attend the royal eyre.17 Devon yielded very badly in all subsequent lay subsidies: it seems that entrenched habits of non-payment developed. Contrary to royal instructions, the hundred played an important role in the assessment and collection of the lay subsidy in Devon in the second quarter of the fourteenth century. For the subsidy of 1327 (and occasionally in 1332) the under-collectors for each hundred did not consult panels from the tithings or use the tithings as taxation units, practices known from no other county except Kent, and this, so far as we can tell, seriously reduced the tax yield.18 In 1332, again contrary to royal instructions, the direct chain of command, between awesome chief county taxers and the vills, was not implemented.19 The former were kept at arm’s length and instead those who were taxed met with the hundred’s under-collectors, husbandmen (though minor gentry and free tenants) who were more likely to be lenient and to accept hospitality when they made their judgements. Under all of these circumstances, small individual contributions to the subsidy were to be expected. A dispersed settlement pattern, moreover, meant that the task of assessing moveables was more difficult than it was in parts of England where nucleated villages predominated. This, and mild resistance to self-assessment and to involvement of communities at the level of the vill (attitudes which were themselves partly influenced by dispersed settlement and were far more easy to counter in a nucleated village), threw an intolerable burden on the under-collectors with two consequences as far as individual payments were concerned. First, lack of time meant that at those farms which they did visit, they had to be superficial in their judgements, and rapid valuations would produce low individual taxes; evidence to be presented elsewhere shows that they seem to have used a method other than laborious inspection of the chattels, probably a yardstick connected with rents, which were very low in Devon. Second, as explained later in this paper, lack of time meant that they covered the ground in a rather desultory fashion and their choice of farms to be taxed in any one year seems a little random; they would have levied so many taxes at the low rates of 8d and 12d in order to quell resentment among those who were chosen, rather arbitrarily, to pay the subsidy. Both the under-collectors and the rural tax-payers of medieval Devon were rational and wily, but not necessarily impoverished or backward. These practices may have begun in the collection of the lay subsidy of 1225, if not before, and became deeply entrenched. They became part of the culture of the county. In 1225 they resulted in a tax yield which was very low indeed, for Devon ranked bottom out of all the counties in that year in terms of assessed wealth per

17 18

Dunstable. 135. E 179/95/6, in which there are few heads for tithings, the main headings being for hundreds with no differentiation, by vill, of the people taxed within them. Erskine, Subsidy, 32–4 shows that this practice was occasionally carried over to 1332, e.g. in the Hundred of Crediton. Interestingly, when tithings were employed as taxation units in that hundred, in 1334, the tax yield increased by 50%: ibid., 130. For Kent see C.W. Chalklin, ‘The Kent Lay Subsidy Roll of 1334/5’, in Kent Records, ed. F.R.H. Du Boulay (Kent Archaeological Soc., 1964), 58–172. 19 This also applied to many other counties in 1327 and 1332.

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square mile.20 During the thirteenth century a belief must have developed about the low taxable capacity of the shire and in subsequent lay subsidies Devon also yielded badly, ranking 32nd out of 39 counties in 1334.21 The exchequer expected low returns from Devon, and received them. John de Grandisson, bishop of Exeter, must have considered that he might be believed when he wrote to Edward III in 1337, stating that it was difficult to sell grain in the county and that tenants could not pay their rents as a consequence of lack of sales.22 He was behaving in good Christian fashion in his attempt to reduce the ‘burden’ of taxation on his flock, but less so in concocting his reasons: manorial accounts from the 1330s show that grain was being marketed and that rents were being paid without the ‘defects’ which became so common much later in the fourteenth century. We now turn from small individual payments to another striking feature of the taxation roll for Devon in 1332, namely the generally short appearance of the lists of names for many tithings, which give the impression that rather few people were being taxed. From what has been said earlier, it is unlikely that few people were taxed because many had wealth which fell below the taxable minimum of 10s. Those familiar with the geography of Devon in the thirteenth century and later will at once suggest an alternative explanation: that in a county where many hundreds were large and cumbersome units, and where rural settlement was for the most part very dispersed, the tasks of collecting taxes from all who qualified to pay them were extraordinarily difficult, leading to failures to visit on the part of the undercollectors and evasion on the part of potential tax-payers. This suggestion could be tested through comparison of the tax returns with listings of tenants in manorial surveys and rentals, but in Devon these do not survive in large numbers for the early fourteenth century.23 Are other, proxy, approaches possible? Two will be explored here, analysis of taxation in relation to settlement pattern, and scrutiny of the subsidy returns according to size of hundred; but first something will be said in more detail about the work of the under-collectors in countrysides of dispersed settlement. In a Devon tithing or manor any task involving comprehensive inspection of the properties of all tenant farmers was greatly more complex than it was at Cuxham, described above. Some nucleated villages were to be found in the county during the middle ages, as will be shown below, but the majority of farms were scattered and dispersed. To take a single example, the parish of Staverton: here 27 separate places are shown on the one-inch Ordnance Survey map, 31 are named by The Placenames of Devon, and 32 occur in a detailed rental drawn up for the Dean and Chapter of Exeter in 1384: the medieval document is the most detailed of the three.24 Structures of settlement such as these posed challenges and difficulties for administrators of all kinds. Lords or tithe collectors might summons their tenants or parishioners to manor house or church, but as court rolls show, summonses were only 20

The figures are given in F.A. Cazel, ‘The Fifteenth of 1225’, BIHR 34 (1961), 72 for absolute ranking; R.A. Donkin, ‘Changes in the Early Middle Ages’, in A New Historical Geography of England, ed. H.C. Darby (Cambridge, 1973), 78 for figures converted to wealth per square mile. 21 Glasscock, ‘England circa 1334’, in New Historical Geography, ed. Darby, 141. Fluctuations in Devon’s tax yield over the course of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries are tabulated in J.F. Hadwin, ‘The Medieval Lay Subsidies and Economic History’, EcHR, 2nd ser. 36 (1983), 215–16. 22 Reg. John de Grandisson, ed. F.C. Hingeston-Randolph, part 1 (London and Exeter, 1894), 301. 23 Despite difficulties, the comparison is in progress. 24 J.E.B. Gover, A. Mawer and F.M. Stenton, The Place-names of Devon (Cambridge, 1931–2), 520–2; ECA, DC 3683. The figures from the OS map and the place-name volume are for the whole parish of Staverton; the figure from the rental is for the manor of Staverton, which covers only part of the parish.

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partially effective, so that the best means of supervision of property or chattels was inspection on the ground during the course of an itinerary. Medieval tithe collectors in Devon used this method in order to try to prevent concealment by parishioners and so did those who drew up extents or rentals.25 Some rentals were made by minor local lords themselves, one for Stoddon referring to tenentes mei and curia mea, terminology which would not have been used by an official.26 Others were made by stewards or bailiffs who, like lords, had detailed local knowledge of the land, and it is possible to prove that they involved an itinerary around the dispersed settlements from their internal arrangement, a point which may be demonstrated by a rental of conventionary tenants on the manor of Ashwater, drawn up in 1346. In Fig. 1 the numbers relate to the order in which the settlements are listed in the rental and it is very clear that the document must have been drawn up during the course of two itineraries, each perhaps lasting for one day. One ended at the manor house, with its hospitality and shelter, and the other began there. The draft of this rental, and of others like it, was made in the field by someone who had very good local knowledge and who wished to net in all of the tenants and perhaps to assess the buildings and lands of each with an eye to an increase or decrease in rent. The fair copy has farm names as marginal sub-headings as an aid to those who used it subsequently (perhaps in collecting rents); this format, or the use of farm names in each entry, is found in similar documents from other parts of England where dispersed settlement is common.27 In 1332 the under-collectors appointed for each hundred were faced with a task far more daunting than that achieved by the makers of the rental of Ashwater in 1346. They were local men to a degree but they would not have known intimately every corner of their hundred. They had to perform their task with speed, as instructed by royal writ. It is likely that they were greeted with suspicion, mistrust and deceit in some places. How did they go about their appointed task? The question will be answered by following in the footsteps of Baldwin de Haldesworthi, Matthew de Cokkeswall and Richard de Miriafelde who were charged with assessing the people of Black Torrington Hundred in 1332. Three is an unusual number: for most hundreds in Devon in 1332, and in other counties, the usual number of under-collectors was two, but Black Torrington covered a large area, 24 miles from west to east and in places 20 miles from north to south. The first of the under-collectors came from the tithing of Holsworthy in the west and the second and third from small settlements in the east. We do not know the status of these men, although they were almost certainly free tenants or minor lords as were their colleagues in other hundreds: in Hartland Hundred, immediately to the north of Black Torrington, one of the two under-collectors was William de Langforlang, the most substantial free tenant in the manor of Hartland, while in Ottery St Mary Hundred one of them occupied an exceptionally large tenement.28 To have assembled the suitors to the hundred court of Black Torrington would not 25

For tithe accounts based on this method, see ECA, DC 5244, 5245; Torre Abbey cartulary at Trinity College Dublin, fol. 138; Staffordshire Record Office, tithe account of Molland. 26 Devon Record Office, Exeter [hereafter DRO], CR 1049. 27 E.g. those mapped by G.R.J. Jones in ‘The Distribution of Medieval Settlement in Anglesey’, Trans. Anglesey Antiquarian Soc. and Field Club (for 1955), 27–96; The Caption of Seisin of the Duchy of Cornwall (1337), ed. P.L. Hull (Devon and Cornwall Record Soc., new ser. 17, 1971) which meticulously records locations of farms but without sub-headings; The Cornish Lands of the Arundells of Lanherne, Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries, ed. H.S.A. Fox and O.J. Padel (Devon and Cornwall Record Soc., new ser. 41). 28 Erskine, Subsidy, 73, and C 133/102/2; Erskine, Subsidy, 124, and BL, Add. MS 28,838, fols. 77–84v.

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Fig. 1. Making a rental of the manor of Ashwater in 1346. Source: DRO, partially catalogued Cary MSS.

have produced a fair taxation. The court probably met quite frequently, at intervals of three weeks, but those who attended were the representatives of the tithings and litigants in suits being pursued there, and these did not provide a fair sample for taxation; moreover, chattels could not have been inspected and assessed by such a method. The first tithing to have some of its population assessed (if we can judge from the order in which they are listed in the roll, which we surely can) was indeed Black Torrington rather than one of the home tithings of the collectors, so it may have been that an announcement of the taxation was made at a meeting of the hundred court.29 The jurors would then have dispersed to their localities to give warning of impending visitations. Following Black Torrington in the roll is its neighbouring tithing of Highampton, immediately to the east, and following that is 29

Wiltshire Tax List, ed. Crowley, xv.

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Fig. 2. Itineraries followed by the under-collectors of the lay subsidy for 1332 in Black Torrington Hundred. Source: Erskine, Subsidy, 65–71.

Hatherleigh, to the east of that, and so on until Broadwood Kelly is reached (Fig. 2). Close internal inspection of the entries for this hundred in fact reveals four groupings, each comprising a number of tithings which are arranged in the document according to their proximity to one another on the ground and these must surely represent the journeys actually taken by the under-collectors (although other explanations are remotely possible). At one level, that of the hundred, the work of de Haldesworthi, de Cokkeswall and de Miriafelde, as recorded in Fig. 2, seems remarkably thorough. They covered their ground. Their hundred contained 35 tithings, all but two of them corresponding with a parish. They touched on these two ‘misfits’, even Kigbeare tithing which to us seems an oddity because it lies within a parish belonging to another hundred. They appear to have missed only the tithings of Pancrasweek, Northcott and St Giles on the Heath, although it is possible of course that these contained no people of taxable potential.30 Within the tithings they theoretically had the option of assembling the chief tithingmen or a small panel of inhabitants (as officially required in 30

In 1334 the people of Northcott were taxed: Glasscock, Lay Subsidy, 61. The same source indicates that Pancrasweek was taxed with Bradworthy, which may explain its omission as a heading in 1332.

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1332) and asking them to report on the wealth of the households for which they were responsible. But this was not the course which they took: what is very remarkable about the 1332 taxation rolls for Devon (and will apply to some other counties too) is that they allow us to follow the sub-taxers not only from tithing to tithing but also from farm to farm within the tithings. This is possible because, as has been said, so many of the people who were taxed bore locative names, taken from the place-names of the farms or hamlets in which they lived. The itineraries of the under-collectors may be followed with the aid of Ordnance Survey maps in tithing after tithing in the Devon rolls for 1332, but just one example will be given here, from Sampford Courtenay in Black Torrington Hundred. The under-collectors raised money from a miserable total of 19 people in the very large tithing of Sampford Courtenay which took in not only the parish of that name but also the parish of Belstone to the south. Of those 19, eleven had locative names of the type de Durneford or atter Lake, and all of the ten place-names so recorded may be identified on modern maps, with the aid of rentals and surveys from the early sixteenth century onwards (Fig. 3).31 Two of the under-collectors lived in tithings just beyond the western boundary of Sampford Courtenay and, starting from their homes, they appear to have made two forays into Courtenay territory. On the first, their destination was the demesne where they taxed Hugh de Courtenay at 2s (representing ‘wealth’ of 30s), despite the existence of valuable crops and livestock there – later in the fourteenth century the cattle herd alone numbered 57 animals.32 Their second itinerary, also from the west, saw them operating in the south-western fringes of Sampford Courtenay tithing, on their way to Belstone where they taxed two farms only. Fig. 3 shows all medieval settlement sites and distinguishes those occupied by tax-payers with locative surnames, although we are unable to locate taxed people who did not bear names of this type. However, given the determined direction of the two itineraries (insofar as we can reconstruct them), it seems unlikely that they deviated much from their chosen routes. They appear to have avoided farms in the centre of the tithing and also its eastern parts, thereby generously releasing a good number of farmers from the opportunity of being assessed and taxed. Their selection of farms, closely related as it was to their chosen itineraries, was neither comprehensive nor representative. A comparison of their work with that of their predecessors for the lay subsidy a few years earlier shows that different itineraries were followed on the two occasions. It seems that a concept and policy had developed of excusing in one year those people who had paid tax at the time of the previous subsidy. This finding has prompted preliminary research into the degree of repetition of names, especially locative ones, in successive early fourteenth-century subsidy returns from other Devon tithings which have much dispersed settlement: the results are highly intriguing and tell us that the under-collectors followed different itineraries in different years.33 But there were also persistent non-payers at Sampford Courtenay if we can judge from the absence of many of the names of Sampford’s out-of-the way farms and hamlets from both subsidy rolls. In this context an important reference from Dorset is highly relevant: there, later in the fourteenth century, jurors sitting on an inquisition stated that the

31 32 33

SC 12/22/19; King’s College, Cambridge MSS, SAC 67; DRO, 56/10. ECA, VC 22279. A study of repetition of names in successive subsidies is in progress, based on Erskine, Subsidy, and E 179/95/6. Preliminary work on the tithings of Merton and Hartland shows that many of the individuals who were taxed in one year seem to have escaped when the subsidy was next collected.

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Fig. 3. The two itineraries followed by the under-collectors in the tithing of Sampford Courtenay with Belstone. Source: Erskine, Subsidy, 71, and King’s College Cambridge MSS, SAC 67.

people of certain small settlements had never before been assessed for royal subsidies.34 Our partial supervision of the under-collectors as they went about their work in Black Torrington Hundred prompts two main conclusions. First, they were relatively thorough in their coverage of the tithings, missing only a few. Second, within many tithings they appear to have been rather perfunctory in their duties, missing out many places in a rather random way and covering the ground in an unsatisfactory fashion. The under-collectors for this particular hundred faced exceptional difficulties: it was large, as we have said, and it was hilly, incised by the many tributaries of the Tamar and the Torridge, and dotted with bleak, uninviting local moors. The soil is in many places a sticky clay and the ways which linked tithings and led to isolated farms and hamlets, some of them at a lane’s end, can become wet under foot and 34

CIMisc 1377–88, 66–7.

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difficult to pass: it was not without reason that one small settlement in the same type of countryside (but just beyond the hundred boundary) was named Yendamore (Beyundemyre in the subsidy), ‘beyond the mire’.35 In addition to these difficulties of a local nature, but repeated in many parts of Devon, the under-collectors in Black Torrington Hundred in 1332 faced problems which were common to their colleagues elsewhere yet which were exacerbated by difficult roads and the dispersed nature of settlement. Their task was largely carried out in winter, for the writ appointing the chief tax collectors for the counties went out on 16 September 1332 and the under-collectors for each hundred presumably went about their work of initial assessment shortly afterwards. The tax was to be paid into the exchequer in two instalments, one due on 3 February 1333 and the second on 15 June 1333.36 Much of the work would therefore have been carried out between October and the end of January. Moreover, it will be clear from these details that the under-collectors theoretically needed to visit each tax-paying farmstead on three occasions: to make the initial assessment (when, it must be supposed, other farms were also visited but deemed not to be taxable), to collect the first instalment and, finally, to net in the second. In Black Torrington Hundred in 1332–3 they made just over 1,500 home visits during these winter months (excluding some initial visits to farms where they decided not to levy tax) and it is possible that more than this were not feasible.37 As stated above, two methods may be employed to test the suggestion that, in Devon, the task of properly assessing and collecting the lay subsidy from all people who qualified to pay was beyond the means of the under-collectors, the first involving a measure of efficiency in collection on the one hand and settlement type on the other. Luckily this is possible because the medieval settlement pattern in Devon was of a hybrid type, with many isolated farms and hamlets and a far, far smaller number of nucleated villages. Dispersed, isolated farmsteads and small hamlets of between two and five farms were ubiquitous settlement types throughout the county, except on unoccupied moorland. Occasionally we have contemporary descriptions of dispersal, as in a document which mentions rights in minutis hameletis within Hackpen manor or in another which refers to collection of rents in diversis locis in parochia de Modbir.38 But the surest guides to settlement pattern are rentals and surveys naming the dispersed settlements, which have already been mentioned above. Thus a rental for Ashwater manor, used as a basis for Fig. 1, mentions 37 settlement sites; the rental for Sampford Courtenay mapped in Fig. 3 mentions 34. One other example must suffice: on the great and sprawling manor of Hartland on the coast of North Devon, there were no fewer than 71 separate settlement sites in the late thirteenth century and the early fourteenth, some of them isolated farms at that time, but most small hamlets.39 These are excellent examples of what William Harrison in the sixteenth century described as farms ‘dispersed here and there, each one upon the several grounds of its owners’.40 35 36 37 38 39

Gover and others, Place-names of Devon, 100. Jorkowski and others, Lay Taxes, 37–8. Erskine, Subsidy, 130, which gives the number of tax-payers in each hundred. C 136/25/2; Eton College MSS, 1/140. DRO, Cary MSS; SC 12/22/19; C 133/102/2; Cornwall Record Office, Arundell MSS, Hartland rental; DRO, Z17/3/19. The last three documents form the basis of maps of the settlement pattern of Hartland in H.S.A. Fox, ‘The Occupation of the Land: Devon and Cornwall’, in The Agrarian History of England and Wales 1348–1500, ed. E. Miller (Cambridge, 1991), 166. My figure of 71 relates to a larger area than that shown on the maps. 40 W. Harrison, Elizabethan England (Scott Library edn, London, n.d.), 117.

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Maitland typified Devon as ‘a land of hamlets’ and although this is true of many parts of the county it is not universally so.41 The medieval settlement pattern in fact is of a hybrid type, for within some, a small minority, of the tithings of 1332 there was a nucleated village, although the great majority contained only dispersed settlement. Even within those tithings with a nucleated village the term ’hybrid’ is apposite, because a (usually centrally placed) village was in all cases surrounded by a rough circle of dispersed farmsteads at a distance from it. It is dangerous to infer the existence of villages in the thirteenth-century landscape of Devon from recent cartographic sources or from what we can see in the landscape today, because many changes have taken place over the intervening years. Coastal villages with a nonagrarian economic base began to develop from the fifteenth century, for example, while changes in the social relations of labour in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led in some parishes to the growth of quite large villages of labourers’ cottages clustered around the church, where there had been very few dwellings earlier on. Documentary sources occasionally help to establish the presence of villages in the early middle ages. Thus the lay subsidy return of 1332 lists Adam de Touneshende in the tithing of Dawlish: the name would make little sense in the context of a completely dispersed settlement pattern, so Adam must have lived at the edge (‘end’) of the nucleated village (often called ‘town’ in Devon, with no urban connotations) of Dawlish, near the church, whose existence we know of from medieval and later sources.42 Manorial rentals which name the settlements also help: in some, as well as place-names with one or just a few tenants attributed to them in the document, indicating single farms and hamlets, there is a place with a substantial number of tenants’ names, almost always the site of the church. In East Devon, medieval rentals of the manors of Sidbury and Ottery St Mary list approximately 50 and 40 dwellings at each of those places, which were therefore villages of some size, as well as the usual scattered farms and hamlets beyond.43 Medieval rentals of Dawlish and Parkham use the word villa to describe the central nucleation, and this is almost certainly a Latinization of ‘village’ (physical nucleation) not of ‘vill’ (territory).44 The hybrid settlement pattern of medieval Devon, with nucleated villages as well as dispersed settlement, makes it possible to test the suggestion that the under-collectors for the lay subsidy performed their tasks less efficiently where settlement was especially scattered, and this is done for seven tithings, the results being summarized in Table 2. The first three tithings in Table 2 contain nucleated villages today and in each case there is medieval or sub-medieval evidence to show their existence earlier on. The evidence for Braunton is very clear: Herbert Finberg’s reconstruction of the village’s medieval field system, based upon later maps and an assignment of dower made to the newly widowed Eleanor de Gorges in 1324 (with many furlong names), leaves no doubt that a large tract of land centred on the village, extending almost two miles to the west and south of it and almost one mile to the east, was occupied by a complex, unified arable open-field system farmed from the centre.45 There was no space for

41 42 43

F.W. Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond (Cambridge, 1897), map before p. 17. Erskine, Subsidy, 56; ECA, DC 3684. ECA, DC 2945, and BL, Add. MS 28,838, fols 77–84v; H.S.A. Fox, ‘Field Systems of East and South Devon, pt I: East Devon’, Trans. Devonshire Association 104 (1972), 90 is a map based on these medieval rentals but it is grossly deficient in that it fails to show cottage dwellings. 44 ECA, DC 3684; Royal Institution of Cornwall, Truro, HB/20/12. 45 H.P.R. Finberg, ‘The Open Field in Devon’, in Hoskins and Finberg, Devonshire Studies, 265–70.

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Table 2. Acres per tax-payer in selected tithings Tithing Braunton1 Kenton2 Otterton with Sidmouth Sampford Courtenay3 Tavistock4 Hartland5

Tax-payers

Acreage

Acres per tax-payer

110 86 110 19 56 49

10264 5181 4981 9668 23370 14020

93 60 45 508 417 286

Source: Erskine, Subsidy. 1 2 3 4 5

Braunton was two tithings, reflecting two manors. The figure for tax-payers in Kenton tithing excludes those in the detached parts. Sampford Courtenay tithing includes Belstone. Tavistock tithing includes Milton Abbot and Brent Tor. Hartland tithing excludes Stoke St Nectan.

settlement (other than the village) within this area, much fragmented as it was into furlongs and strips, so the implication must be that the nucleated village of Braunton (described as a villa in a charter of the early fourteenth century) occupied the same central site in the middle ages as it did in later times.46 The next tithing listed in Table 2 is Kenton, for which we have a detailed manorial rental of 1578, the first in a long series of topographical documents stretching down to detailed and highly accurate maps drawn in the eighteenth century. The settlement pattern of the manor was complex, for it had one detached portion 17 miles away on Dartmoor and another closer one, giving access to the open sea, as well as the central core called Kenton on the bank of the Exe. Within the core were a number of hamlets and isolated farms such as South Kenwood, an isolated free tenement, or Helwell, a little hamlet of three customary farms, and also the straggling village of Kenton itself. Here, in 1578, were located 40 customary tenements and 31 cottages – a sizeable nucleated village.47 Listed third in Table 2 is the tithing of Otterton, comprising all the land between the Rivers Otter and Sid. The lay subsidy return has a heading only for Otterton, but it is clear that tax-payers from Sidmouth were subsumed under that head: the two were assessed as one in 1332, as they had been at the time of Domesday Book.48 There were some isolated farms within this area, but both Otterton and Sidmouth were nucleated settlements, as is clear from medieval charters and a detailed rental drawn up for the prior of Otterton around 1260. For Sidmouth we have good evidence to show that the nucleation next to the sea shore was already there in the thirteenth century, because the rental lists Alice Poel and Adam Haka as occupiers of plots ‘upon the sand’ (super arena). The people of the nucleation were partly agricultural in their occupations, partly commercial, for here lived a merchant in 1260, while later, in the fourteenth century, ships ‘of Sidmouth’ were pressed into royal service: they were relatively few in number and were probably of low tonnage, for none appears to have been engaged in the long-distance wine trade with Bordeaux.49 For 46 47

ECA, DC 705. DRO, 1508M/Lon./manorial/Kenton/6; Lon./estate/valuations/4; 1508M/maps/Powderham/2 and later maps. 48 There is no main entry for Sidmouth in Domesday Book, but its existence in 1086 is shown by an oblique mention in the entry for Ottery St Mary. 49 DRO, T42, fols 26–31; M. Kowaleski, Local Markets and Regional Trade in Medieval Exeter (Cambridge, 1995), 29.

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Otterton, there is excellent evidence for the existence of the nucleated village in the middle ages. Several medieval charters describe plots or messuages in villa de Ottriton while one, of 1305, gives precise details of a messuage and elongated curtilage stretching from the village street northwards to the arable fields and compressed between two other tenements on the west and east respectively. Rather unusually for a Devon village, many of Otterton’s tenements today lie on either side of a village street; this runs from west to east, with tenement plots stretching northwards from its north side and southwards from its south side, the same arrangement which may be reconstructed from the charter of 1305.50 The other tithings listed in Table 2 contain much dispersed settlement and no nucleated village. Sampford Courtenay has already been discussed, in our analysis of the under-collectors’ work in Black Torrington Hundred. The skeleton of the medieval settlement pattern of this large tithing is portrayed in Fig. 3, which shows settlement sites only. A rental of the early sixteenth century, on which the map is based, gives the number of farmhouses at each: if we exclude the settlement by the church, at two sites there were five houses and at another two there were four, while the rest of the farms were in threes, in pairs or stood singly. Farmsteads were dispersed, therefore, to a high degree. At the churchtown of Sampford Courtenay itself were five farmsteads so in that respect it was no more than another hamlet, at which the church happened to be sited. There were also cottages here in the middle ages, with yards and gardens but without significant field land, perhaps about twenty in the early fourteenth century. Their occupants provided labour on the Courtenay demesne and, probably, for some of the tenant farmers to whose farms they would have walked daily. This nucleation near the church therefore had the character largely of a pool of labour for the rest of the manor and most of its inhabitants would have been too poor to have attracted the attentions of the undercollectors, whose tasks lay elsewhere in this large tithing.51 Tavistock tithing was also large and rural settlement was wholly dispersed, as shown by Finberg’s reconstruction of it, based largely on the evidence of early medieval charters.52 The last manor listed in the table is Hartland in which, if we include only that part of it which lay in the tithing of the same name, there were about 55 dispersed settlements in the fourteenth century, all faithfully listed in a rental of the 1360s although some at that time were on their way to desertion and do not exist today.53 After this discussion of the topography of settlement at the places listed in Table 2, we may turn to the figures given there. It must be stressed that the figures in the final column, ‘acres per tax-payer’, are simply a measure of how well the undercollectors went about their task and are not remotely connected to how many acres the tax-payers farmed. High figures show that there was a good deal of land which the under-collectors failed to cover (that is, acres which they do not appear to have traversed and whose farmers they did not assess); low figures show that they were more efficient at netting in tax-payers. The figures speak for themselves: where the under-collectors were presented with a nucleated village they netted in far more people than where their task involved itineraries between widely dispersed settlements, many of them at the ends of deep lanes and invisible from by-ways. Their exceptionally dismal performance on the ground at Sampford Courtenay has already 50 51

DRO, T42, fols 52–3, 56–7, 81. SC 12/22/19 for numbers of farms; SC 6/1118/6 and King’s College Cambridge MSS, SAC 90 for numbers of cottages. 52 H.P.R. Finberg, Tavistock Abbey (Cambridge, 1951), map facing p. 41. 53 Sources as in n. 39 above.

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been explored (above, Fig. 3) and shows up in the figures in Table 2. Other explanations of the sharp contrasts in the table are possible. The cynic might explain them by contrasts in density of population, but figures from the poll tax of 1377 do not support that explanation.54 Then again, the tithings of Braunton, Kenton, Otterton and Sidmouth occupy some exceptionally fertile land and are all close to urban markets, so it might be expected that their populations were relatively wealthy in the early fourteenth century, many having wealth above the taxable minimum. The North Devon tithing of Hartland, on the other hand, comprised inferior land remote from any significant urban market. Many of its people occupied holdings which were small by the standards of the region; they were numerous – the Romance of Fouke Fitz Waryn speaks of Josce de Dynham’s ability to raise ‘an army and a countless number of people’ from the manor in the twelfth century55 – but relatively poor with moveables valued below the taxable minimum. Yet even here, there were tenants with 30 acres or more (mostly freemen living in very remote places) many of whom appear to have escaped the subsidy.56 One may conclude that variables other than type of settlement may, to a degree, lie behind the differences brought out in Table 2 but that the contrasts are so sharp and striking, the discrepancy so wide, that our first explanation is the most attractive although it may be only a partial one: the task of the sub-taxers was rendered difficult where taxable population was highly dispersed but was easier where they were able, perhaps with the help of neighbours, to inspect farmhouses along a village street. It is significant that in some other English counties which have a zone of nucleated settlement and a zone of dispersal, assessed wealth per square mile, as calculated and mapped by Robin Glasscock, diminishes as the former gives way to the latter. One finds this in northern Staffordshire, western Somerset and northern Warwickshire, for example, and it is tempting to relate it to difficulties in tax collection, although other factors, of course, may have been at work.57 Another way of investigating the demanding nature of the task facing the under-collectors is to try to examine how well they coped in large and small hundreds respectively. One of the largest of Devon’s hundreds was that of Wonford, and it was also straggling, with detached parts. The returns from this hundred provide a good example of a feature mentioned earlier in this paper: unexpected variations between tithings in numbers of people taxed, and total tax collected, departures from what might be expected from knowledge of the size of these units. ‘Straggling’ is an apt description, for the hundred stretches from the smiling valley of the Exe (in the east) as far as the brooding open moors of Chagford, 14 miles away in the west. One detached part is in the ‘Ten Hide’ region on the southern shores of the River Teign and intrusions of Exminster Hundred into that of Wonford in the vicinity of Chagford give topographical difficulties there.58 The under54

Devon figures for people per square mile in 1377, based on the poll tax (E 179/37–55), never show variations as acute as those in the table. 55 Two Medieval Outlaws: Eustace the Monk and Fouke Fitz Waryn, ed. G.S. Burgess (Cambridge, 1997), 143. 56 Sources as in n. 39 above. 57 Glasscock, Lay Subsidy, xxvii. For the transition from nucleated to dispersed settlement in Warwickshire, see C. Dyer, ‘Rural Settlements in Medieval Warwickshire’, Trans. Birmingham and Warwickshire Archaeological Soc. 100 (1996), 120; for dispersed settlement in west Somerset, see M. Aston, ‘Deserted Farmsteads on Exmoor and the Lay Subsidy of 1327’, Procs. Somersetshire Archaeological and Natural History Soc. 127 (1983), 71–104. 58 Erskine, Subsidy, 48–54; F.R. Thorn, ‘Hundreds and Wapentakes’, in The Devonshire Domesday (1991), 26–42 and accompanying map.

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collectors did very well in the east of the hundred in the vicinity of Exeter. Here roads were good and many; here was the civility and the hospitality of the big city; here was familiarity, for one of the under-collectors, Robert Byestecolmp, lived locally.59 Together with his colleague he was able to collect the total sum of 79s 8d from five very small adjacent tithings to the north of the city and his record shows that they visited a good number of farms, more than are generally recorded in the 1332 subsidy returns for such a small area. In the far, remote west of the hundred the pair of under-collectors were far less successful: in four large parishes they collected only 25s 4d and appear from the record to have visited very few farms. The performance of the two under-collectors in Wonford Hundred varied according to their familiarity with its parts and with remoteness. This would suggest that the proportion of all farms visited and, therefore, the amount of tax collected would have varied with the size of the hundreds, for even in the smallest, two under-collectors were appointed, as in Ottery St Mary (a privileged parish of ancient demesne status) where Thomas de la Thorne and Ralph atte Burghe, two of the most substantial tenants on the manor, netted in a large number of tax-payers, some at the lowest rate, but many contributing high payments by Devon standards – and then promptly assessed themselves, improperly, at 8d.60 The suggestion about size is confirmed, at least by the sample of hundreds included in Table 3. Table 3. Efficiency of tax-collection in large and small hundreds Hundred

Acreage

Tax collected

Tax collected

(1000s of acres: rounded) (to nearest shilling) (in shillings per thousand acres)

Black Torrington Witheridge Wonford Cliston W. Budleigh

144.0 80.0 79.0 19.5 17.4

774 316 490 167 164

5.4 3.9 6.2 8.6 9.4

Source: Erskine, Subsidy.

Size of hundred, type of settlement pattern and the differences in wealth which were generated by different types of farming: all of these affected the amount of tax which was collected in the Devonshire lay subsidy for 1332. To work out which of these variables was the paramount one, with a far larger sample of hundreds than is explored here, would be a difficult but not impossible task, although it is the influence of the settlement pattern which has been stressed in this paper. Another task for the future would be to apportion blame for the low sums collected. Exploring what he called ‘the dim borderland that lies between honest and corrupt practice’, James Willard highlighted the two chief taxers responsible for each county as culprits in many of the cases of corruption, usually for pocketing some of the coin given to them by the under-collectors and adjusting their rolls accordingly.61 There are many examples from all over the country and one must suffice, that of Nicholas de Kirkham, a Devonshire chief taxer in 1307 who defrauded the exchequer of the large 59 60

His name indicates that he lived in one of the tithings containing the River Culm, close to Exeter. Erskine, Subsidy, 123–4. The people of Ottery St Mary, which was ancient demesne, paid at the rate of one-tenth so, with minimum taxable wealth of 10s, nobody should have paid less than 1s. 61 Willard, Parliamentary Taxes, 210–14.

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sum of £89.62 There were complaints, too, against the under-collectors, although these were fewer. One came from Devon in 1315 when the chief taxers reported that some of their subordinates had been inadequate in making their collections: significantly, they were not charged with corruption but simply with poor performance, perhaps of the type described in this paper.63 The role of the under-collectors has been highlighted here but we have more than once hinted too at resistance among tax-payers, potential and actual. The people of the south-west were described as troublesome and obdurate in character when faced with authority; they had a dislike of royal interference, attempting, in Henry Summerson’s words, ‘as far as possible to keep the king’s government at arm’s length’; they disliked royal enquiries, as when they fled from their homes in 1233 in advance of an impending royal eyre.64 Something a little more than a gentle resistance to taxation may lie behind the abbreviated record of their names which we have been studying.

62 63 64

Ibid., 215. Ibid., 218. Reg. Grandisson, part 2 (1897), 958; Crown Pleas, ed. Summerson, xv; above, n. 17.

Clipstone Peel: Fortification and Politics from Bannockburn to the Treaty of Leake, 1314–1318

David Crook Clipstone David Crook Peel

Defensive structures called ‘peels’ are mentioned quite frequently in early fourteenth-century sources, in England, in connection with the building of castles in Wales after the conquest, and in the Scottish wars, when they were mostly used to strengthen major castles.1 The Anglo-Norman French word pel means a stake, and seems to have been extended to describe fortifications in which palisades made up of stakes were a major component.2 It is certain that wood played the major part in their construction, and the one moved from Newcastle to Roxburgh in 1334, for example, was apparently made entirely of wood.3 The more varied composition of some peels is well illustrated by the one built at Frethun near Calais in 1351–2 by a master mason and a master carpenter, indicating a mixture of stone and wood.4 Peels built at English castles included one at Nottingham, ordered in 1312 to be built in haste at the castle on the west side towards Lenton, which was of stone.5 On the other hand, the peel at Hanley castle in Worcestershire, built in 1324, appears to have been only a wooden stockade round a ditch.6 Although most peels in England in the reign of Edward II were subsidiary parts of or close to castles, a few were evidently free-standing. Several were built in the north in the years immediately after the battle of Bannockburn, at the same time as some existing northern castles were strengthened, evidently for defence against the Scots. The clearest example was at Staward in Northumberland, halfway between Newcastle and Carlisle, built mostly of wood. In 1314 a peel was built at Northallerton, where the town was twice burned by the Scots, in 1319 and 1322. In 1316 an existing royal house at Haywra, near Fewston in the West Riding, first mentioned in 1301, was upgraded to a ‘fortalice’ (fortelletus, fortallicium) with a peel as an outer defence.7 Further south a peel was built at Clipstone in Nottinghamshire, in Sherwood Forest, at a place probably effectively out of the range of Scottish incursions. Castleford, which the Scots reached in 1319, was the furthest south they ever came in the whole period, and is some 40 miles north of Clipstone. There were even two peels in Essex, at Thundersley, begun in May 1315,

1 2

King’s Works, i. 409–19. Anglo-Norman Dictionary, ed. W. Rothwell, L.W. Stone and T.B.W. Reid (1992), 512; Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edition, 1989), xi, 430. 3 King’s Works, ii. 819, n. 2. 4 Ibid., i. 451. 5 Ibid., ii. 761, n. 9. Cf. C. Drage, Nottingham Castle: A Place Full Royal, Trans. Thoroton Soc. 93 (1989), 49, 142. 6 King’s Works, ii. 668–9. For details of other castle peels, see also ibid., i. and ii. 298, 318, 326, 403, 598, 822–3. 7 Ibid., i. 235.

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and nearby at Hadleigh, begun in the autumn of 1316, which were certainly too far south to be useful against Scottish raids. This curious geographical distribution puzzled me intermittently for over twenty-five years, until recently, when I re-examined the wardrobe book from which the evidence for the two Essex peels was taken by the authors of The History of the King’s Works. Information there which they overlooked indicates that, although the peels were built by royal carpenters in the south, they were linked to defence of the north. Once they were completed, they were dismantled and transported by ship to Hull to be stored in houses there until they were needed.8 At least one of them was in fact deployed at an unknown northern location in 1319.9 It seems likely that they were built in Essex, in the area near Hadleigh castle, because of the ready availability of supplies of timber and of carpenters not directly affected by the northern war, and because of the ease of transport to the north via the Thames estuary and the North Sea. The first, at Thundersley, was begun when Edward stayed in that area for most of May and June 1315, and it may be that the initiative for its construction came from the king himself. This clearer understanding of the role of the Essex peels significantly alters the general perspective. The free-standing peels known to have been constructed since 1314 are clearly to be linked with the defence of the north; all, that is, except the one at Clipstone. Built at the same time as the fortalice at Haywra, in 1316, Clipstone peel had many similarities with that building sixty-five miles further north, also built in a park but in a more upland area. Haywra was constructed by Master Richard the mason, and contained a hall, chambers for the king and queen, a chapel and a gateway defended by a portcullis, and was said to be surrounded by a peel, here clearly meaning a wooden outer defensive palisade. When a new moat was built there in 1335–7, a structure, also described as a peel, was set up on a bank by a master carpenter.10 The main buildings of the Haywra fortalice were clearly of stone, but its supplementary peel was evidently of wood, and Clipstone peel seems to have been similar. Why, therefore, was the peel at Clipstone built, so far from realistic danger from the Scots? A hint is given in a petition presented to King Edward II and his council by the burgesses of Nottingham. In it they complained of the infringement of their exclusive rights to have certain types of legal pleas held before the bailiffs of their town.11 They alleged that those rights were being infringed by the Marshalsea court, which was presided over by the steward of the king’s household, and which held pleas within the verge of the king’s household as it travelled around the country, superseding all inferior jurisdictions. Their complaint was that the clause in the Ordinances of 1311 which restricted the jurisdiction of the Marshalsea court of the king’s household by preventing it from hearing all pleas of freehold, debt, covenant, contract or any other common plea, and restricting its competence to trespasses committed by those in the king’s household or by others within the verge, was not being observed. Furthermore, the king’s own charter granting them the privilege that no-one should plead or be impleaded concerning trespasses and contracts made in the town, except before its mayor and bailiffs, was also being infringed. This was, they alleged, happening on all occasions when the king visited his manor of 8

Soc. Antiqs., MS 120, fols 18, 21v; E 101/376/7, fols 15v, 18, 27. In King’s Works, ii. 660, n. 5, the move of these peels to Hull is not noted. 9 CCR 1318–23, 152. 10 King’s Works, ii. 671–3. 11 SC 8/130/6495; printed below, p. 195.

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Clipstone which, they stated, was 14 leagues or more from Nottingham by the nearest road; furthermore, Clipstone peel, ‘where the king lodged’, was a league further still from the town.12 The burgesses said that they had suffered distress as a result of these activities, and asked for a remedy. They received one, in that the endorsement on the petition instructed that they were to have writs concerning their charters and the Ordinances, to ensure that nothing was attempted against their liberties. The petition is not dated, but it is virtually certain that it was presented to the York parliament of October 1318. The parliament met in the aftermath of the so-called ‘Treaty of Leake’, of 9 August 1318, and was summoned by letters dated 25 August and issued at Nottingham just before the king returned from there to Clipstone.13 The treaty made an accommodation between the king and his cousin Thomas earl of Lancaster, his leading and most powerful critic. The parliament resulted in the confirmation of a standing council on which Lancaster did not sit but was represented, and a general agreement to observe the Ordinances originally imposed on the king in 1311, against which he had been working for some years. It was to one of the Ordinances that the burgesses of Nottingham were appealing.14 Not long before the parliament, in August and September 1318, the Marshalsea court had sat at both Clipstone and Nottingham. On Saturday 26 August the court was in session in Nottingham, when the outstanding cases begun there were adjourned to the following Monday, 28 August; on that day the court sat at Clipstone and continued to deal with them there. Those involved must have had to travel to Clipstone for the continuing hearings in cases begun at Nottingham. The court went on to hold further sessions at Clipstone on 30 August and 1, 6, 7 and 11 September, when the king was still in residence, before moving on with him to Blyth.15 It was probably this series of sessions, and the knowledge that the Ordinances were again to be observed, which prompted the burgesses to draw up and submit their petition. It is probably to be identified as the one from the burgesses of Nottingham mentioned in the unique surviving list of petitions of that parliament.16 The Ordinances were imposed on Edward by a baronage alienated by the power and favours granted by him to Piers Gaveston in the earlier years of his reign, and represented the most serious attempt to regulate the king’s government since the terms imposed on Henry III by the baronial reformers in 1258. It was the 26th ordinance, which forbade future pleas of freehold, debt, covenant, contract or any common plea from being held in the Marshalsea, which was henceforth to concern itself solely with trespasses by those in the king’s household or committed within the 12

The court of the royal manor of Mansfield, also in Notts. and much nearer to Clipstone than Nottingham was, was also affected by the presence of the king at Clipstone. Its session of 13 Nov. 1315 was not held for that reason, and during 1315–16 a local man convicted of homicide was tried before the steward and marshal of the household and hanged at Clipstone: Nottinghamshire Archives, DDP 17/1, m. 3; JUST 1/686, rot. 47d; D. Crook, ‘The Community of Mansfield from Domesday Book to the Reign of Edward III’, part II, Trans. Thoroton Soc. 89 (1985), 17, 27. 13 CCR 1318–23, 99. 14 J.R. Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster 1307–1322 (Oxford, 1970), 226, 228. 15 E 37/4, rots 7–9d. Earlier, in 1316–17, the court sat at Nottingham on 31 Dec. and then moved to Clipstone for sessions on 4, 7, 10 and 12 Jan., before returning to sit at Nottingham on 17 Jan.: E 37/2, rots 6d–10. At that date the Ordinances were certainly not being observed, and the peel referred to in the petition was only just being completed, although it is possible that the court was able to sit there; see below. 16 E 175/1/22, m. 3, printed in Rotuli Parliamentorum Anglie Hactenus Inediti, 1279–1373, ed. H.G. Richardson and G.O. Sayles (CS, 3rd ser. 51, 1935), 77. I am grateful to Mark Ormrod for bringing this to my attention.

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verge.17 This clause to limit the jurisdiction of the court only repeated one of the terms of the Articuli super cartas of 1301 and a statute of the Stamford parliament of 1309, and so was not new in 1311.18 The charter mentioned in the petition was one granted to the burgesses by Edward himself on 16 March 1314 at Westminster, in return for a fine of 200 marks. On that occasion he had inspected and confirmed earlier charters of liberties granted to them by Henry III and Edward I and made a further grant of additional liberties, including some relating to the administration of justice. The burgesses were in future to be allowed to ‘more tranquilly attend to their affairs’ by virtue of the provision ‘that none of them shall plead or be impleaded before us, or our heirs, or any justices of us, or our heirs, outside the borough, as to lands and tenements in the borough, or of trespasses or contracts, or anything else done in or arising in the borough; but all pleas that shall be summoned or attached, before us or our heirs, or other justices of the Bench, or others, shall be pleaded and determined within the borough before the mayor and bailiffs of the borough for the time being, unless the pleas touch us or our heirs, or the community of the borough’.19 The charter was granted only three months before the catastrophic defeat of the king’s army by Robert Bruce and the Scots at Bannockburn in June 1314. The years after the battle were very difficult both for political reasons and because of the famine which began in 1315, during which, in December 1315, even the king’s household at Clipstone had difficulty in supplying itself.20 Until the spring or summer of 1316 Edward was unwillingly dependent on Lancaster, now the leader of the group of earls who had first captured and then killed Gaveston in 1312, for support. Thereafter he built up a new court party, which left Lancaster in a more isolated and dangerous position.21 One of the five main members of the new court party was William de Montague who, as steward of the king’s household from November 1316, presumably presided over the Marshalsea court when it sat at Clipstone.22 The petition of the burgesses of Nottingham was submitted towards the end of a period when Edward was frequently resident at Clipstone. He was there from about 30 October to 11 December 1315; from 22 December 1315 to 25 January 1316; from 24 February to 11 March 1316; for much of December 1316 and to 11 January 1317, although he spent Christmas at Nottingham;23 from 16 to 21 August and from 25 August to 15 September 1318; and finally, briefly from 1 to 3 February 1320.24 He had only visited Clipstone once before as king, for 11 days in September 1307, soon after his accession, and never visited it again after February 1320. None of the wide variety of sources used by Elizabeth Hallam to compile his itinerary indicates that he ever stayed at the peel mentioned by the burgesses of Nottingham in their petition. The assumption has always been that the king resided in the extensive ‘palace’ (usually referred to in the records as ‘the king’s houses’) at Clipstone, which 17 18 19

J. Conway Davies, The Baronial Opposition to Edward II (Cambridge, 1918), 376–7. SR, i. 138, 155–6. CChR 1300–26, 236. The calendar is defective in not detailing the new liberties, but they are conveniently given in full in the original charter, printed in Records of the Borough of Nottingham, i. 1155–1399, ed. W.H. Stevenson (1882), 77–80, with these clauses on 78–9. 20 H.S. Lucas, ‘The Great European Famine of 1315, 1316 and 1317’, Speculum 5 (1930); D. Crook, ‘Clipstone Park and “Peel” ’, Trans. Thoroton Soc. 80 (1976), 41 and n. 58. 21 There are two major modern accounts of this period, Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, chs 5, 6; and J.R.S. Phillips, Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke, 1307–1324 (Oxford, 1972), chs 3, 4. 22 On Montague see Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 194. 23 Soc. Antiqs., MS 120 (Wardrobe account 10 Edward II), fols 22, 26. 24 E.M. Hallam, Itinerary of Edward II, List and Index Soc. 211 (1984), 133–8, 148–9, 171–2, 193.

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stood outside the park near its eastern end. However, the implication of the petition’s use of the words le pel ou nostre seigneur le Roy gist is that those who wrote it at least assumed, and possibly knew for certain, that he now lodged in the peel during his visits. The word gist indicates a physical presence, and is sometimes used in funerary inscriptions in French which begin with the words Gist icy rather than the Latin equivalent Iacet hic, as for example in the later fourteenth-century brass of Simon de Felbrigg at Felbrigg church in Norfolk. This has implications for ascertaining what functions Clipstone peel was constructed to serve. During the four years after Bannockburn, when Edward was often at Clipstone, Lancaster was very frequently on his estates in the midlands as well as in his main castle at Pontefract and elsewhere in the north. His most recorded midland venues were his castles at Leicester, Castle Donnington in Leicestershire, Kenilworth in Warwickshire, Tutbury in Staffordshire and Melbourne in Derbyshire, all fortified places. The new castle at Melbourne, where construction began in 1313–14, added to the pressure already exerted on the royal castle at Nottingham from the west by the one at Castle Donnington.25 That pressure may have been what had led to the building of the peel on that side during the crisis following the return of Gaveston from exile in January 1312.26 The order to build it was dated at York, where the king had based himself, on 29 January, following Gaveston’s return from exile. It may have formed part of the preparations to defend the king and his favourite against the earl of Lancaster and the other earls who were trying to remove him, although it was only one of a number of castles ordered to be victualled and safely guarded at that time. Nottingham castle had been in Gaveston’s hands in late 1310 and its west side faced Lancaster’s castle at Castle Donnington, a dozen miles away to the south-west of Nottingham.27 The peace treaty between Lancaster and the king on 9 August 1318 was itself made at (East) Leake in southern Nottinghamshire, a convenient place between the fortresses of Nottingham and Leicester. After the treaty the earl seems almost always to have been at Pontefract castle, York, elsewhere in Yorkshire, or in Northumberland.28 The peel in Clipstone park must have been commissioned in 1316, because plasterers were being employed there to plaster or daub it from 29 November 1316 to 17 January 1317, when the first keeper’s account begins.29 Preparations for the livestock farm which was to be part of it seem also to have been made in the period from 1 November to 15 December 1316, when 244 cattle (grossa animalia) and 271 sheep taken from the manors of the vacant bishopric of Durham, and a further 309 sheep from Wales, were collected at York and driven to Clipstone via Scrooby.30 During much of this period when the peel was being finished, the king was at Clipstone, leaving less than a week before the opening date of the keeper’s account, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that he took a personal interest in the completion of the project during those weeks when he was mainly at Clipstone, and that he may have then resided there. Before it was even completed, on 6 January 1317, there was a protest from his tenants of Mansfield Woodhouse, which took the form of a petition

25

See above, n. 5. Melbourne castle became quite a formidable structure, as can be seen from the drawing of it made as part of a Duchy of Lancaster survey in 1561: MPC 1/95. I am grateful to Harold Fox for bringing this to my attention. 26 See above, n. 5. 27 CCR 1307–13, 396, 402; CPR 1307–13, 315. 28 Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 10, 25, 236, 343–7. 29 Soc. Antiqs., MS 120, fol. 33r; SC 6/953/7; Crook, ‘Clipstone Park and “Peel” ’, 35–46. 30 Soc. Antiqs., MS 120, fol. 20.

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complaining of the enclosure in Clipstone park of part of their commons, their rights to husbote and heybote, and the taking of their cattle, beasts and hay for the king’s use without payment.31 Normally the latter would be taken as an ordinary complaint against purveyance, but in this context it may mean that the tenants were made to contribute towards the stocking of the peel. The timing of this petition almost certainly resulted from the extension of the park in its south-west corner to accommodate the ‘peel field’. Edward’s break with Lancaster at the York parliament of August 1316 followed two years of uneasy cooperation characterised by John Maddicott as the period of ‘the Lancaster administration’, the highlight of which was his installation as the king’s chief councillor at the Lincoln parliament of February 1316, although he seems from his itinerary to have left the court as early as April that year, not long after the parliament at which the importance of his position was formally recognised.32 It looks as if the period in the later months of 1316 when Lancaster’s ascendancy was declining, followed by the argument between him and the king at the York parliament, was exactly the time when the peel was being constructed in Clipstone park. This was also when, between 10 September and 30 December 1316, the king tried to strengthen his own position by making military indentures with at least five major barons, John de Mowbray, Bartholomew de Badlesmere, Hugh le Despenser the younger, the earl of Hereford and John Giffard of Brimpsfield; and then on 15 January 1317 also made life grants to Roger Damory and William de Montague, formerly household knights, to maintain them in his service.33 The period from April 1316 to November 1317 as a whole has been characterised by Seymour Phillips as ‘the approach to civil war’.34 In view of the strength of Lancaster’s position in much of the area between Pontefract and Leicester in those years, the king may have felt the need of a fortified place in a district containing his own demesne manors of Mansfield and Edwinstowe and their sokes, and which of course also offered the pleasures of the hunt in Sherwood Forest. It would not need to be capable of resisting a full-scale siege, but had to be a place where he could be secure from a raiding party sent by the resentful earl. The unfortified residence in the manor of Clipstone, the venue of his father’s parliament in 1290 and the place at which his mother’s decline into death had then begun, could offer no such protection.35 There was no fortified manor house at Mansfield or Edwinstowe, and the castle at Nottingham was too far away to be an immediate refuge. In a period characterised by faction, intrigue and mistrust, illustrated by the outrageous abduction of the earl of Lancaster’s wife by the earl of Warenne in May 1317, for which Lancaster blamed the king, Edward may well have felt in personal danger of abduction when it was necessary to be in a part of the country where the earl was so powerful. The earl’s own manor of Kneesall lay only eight miles to the east of the king’s manors in the forest. Lancaster, on the other hand, himself feared the king’s new group of favourites, and was unwilling to attend a council meeting held at Nottingham in July 1317, while himself actively gathering armed retainers under the cover of doing so for a Scottish campaign planned to begin in August that year.36 31 32 33 34 35

Cal. Chancery Warrants 1244–1326 (1927), 456; C 81/97, no. 3915. Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, ch. 5, esp. 167, 180–1. Phillips, Aymer de Valence, 312–13. Ibid., ch. 4. D. Crook, ‘The Last Days of Eleanor of Castile: the Death of a Queen in Nottinghamshire, November 1290’, Trans. Thoroton Soc. 94 (1990), 17–28. 36 Phillips, Aymer de Valence, 120–3.

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When I first wrote about Clipstone Peel in 1976, after studying the accounts of the keepers, dominated as they are by information about their agricultural and stock-rearing activities, I saw it mainly in the context of the famine and the consequent difficulties in supplying the royal household with provisions. I concluded that ‘the accounts leave no doubt that the primary function of the peel was an agricultural one’.37 Other evidence which is less prominent in the accounts, and the circumstances and timing of its construction, now provide a rather different emphasis, although its importance as a farming enterprise potentially able to feed the king’s household in times of shortage also remains valid. An extent of the peel made by Humphrey de Walden on 19 August 1320 is concerned only with the value of the cultivated land there, and only mentions a grange among the buildings.38 The brief account of the peel given in The History of the King’s Works is based only on the pipe rolls and the extent, and does not mention the particulars of the accounts of the keepers, rendered in the chamber.39 The first of those accounts, that for the part of Peter le Pavour’s keepership running from 17 January to 29 September 1317, shows that the main construction work was being completed, and some of the details given in a section for ‘costs of the houses’ are revealing. Reference is made to a tiler working on the roofing, to windows and doors being made, and to the existence of a royal chamber, as well as a long chamber. There were also two windlasses ‘for raising the bridges’.40 It was therefore quite an elaborate structure, deemed fit enough for royal residence and probably including at least one drawbridge, indicating a capability for defence. In Pavour’s second account, running on to 26 August 1318, when the king arrived at Clipstone for a stay of three weeks, only minor expenditure on livestock buildings is recorded, and the cleaning out of a ditch around the enclosure and the diversion of a stream (undoubtedly the River Maun) below the peel to make a meadow.41 In his third, from that date until 29 September 1319, reference is made to a hall, the long chamber again, and to external doors, while a new grange was also built and one of the wooden cowsheds was plastered under the roof to reduce the danger of fire.42 The costs of residence there by two of the king’s familiars, Sir John de Ditton and Master Robert le Gynur, the latter’s wife and their two grooms, between 16 September and 16 November 1318, are also accounted for.43 The earl of Lancaster himself visited the peel on 18 September 1318, during the period between the Treaty of Leake, made nearly six weeks earlier, and the York parliament at which the burgesses of Nottingham presented their petition, when Ditton and le Gynur were staying there and only a few days after the king had left Clipstone.44 Lancaster was on his way from his castle at Tutbury, where he was on 12 September, to York, where he was with the king by 24 September, before retiring to Pontefract until the parliament met.45 Pavour’s fourth and final account, from Michaelmas 1319 to 2 February 1320, shows Peter de Driby and a groom in residence, and expenditure on a pentice house next to the ‘great wall’, not previously mentioned.46 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

Crook, ‘Clipstone Park and “Peel” ’, 40. E 143/7/5, no. 7. King’s Works, ii. 919–20. SC 6/953/7, m. 2. SC 6/953/8, m. 2. SC 6/953/9, m. 1. SC 6/953/9, m. 2. Ditton was the royal clerk who in 1319 was responsible for carrying the timber of a peel from Hull into northern parts: CCR 1318–23, 152. 44 SC 6/953/9, m. 5: ‘Item computat in expensis domini comitis Lanc’ xviii die Septembris ij s’. 45 Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 345. 46 SC 6/953/10.

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Clipstone peel was therefore constructed to be a short-term royal residence, and the burgesses of Nottingham assumed in their petition that it would be used as such. It may have been intended to have a function similar to that of the peel built around the monastery of Holmcultram by Edward I in the winter of 1306–7, when the court was staying close to the Scottish border during that king’s last winter.47 It would provide protection to the king and his household in potentially dangerous country. The difference was that it was not a defensive stockade built around an existing structure as at Holmcultram, but a separate entity built some distance away from the main residence, near the western edge of Clipstone park. It presumably took its name from the wooden stockade which marked the perimeter, but the gatehouse building where the main rooms were situated was its most permanent feature. The probability that Edward II never stayed there after it was fully commissioned probably owed more to the change in the political situation, following first the agreement with the earl of Lancaster in 1318 and then his downfall in 1321–2, than to doubts about the suitability of the peel for the purpose for which it was designed. Edward’s relations with Lancaster temporarily improved in the summer of 1318, and his first visit to Clipstone since the peel was completed in January 1317 was soon after the Treaty of Leake, and Lancaster’s own brief visit on 18 September 1318 immediately followed the king’s departure. The earl may have expected to find him at the peel, but had to follow him towards York; by the day that he arrived at Clipstone the wardrobe had already reached Tadcaster.48 In the end, it was the urgent need of Edward III early in his reign to placate his own tenants at Clipstone and Mansfield Woodhouse, and a neighbouring manorial lord, John de Sutton of Warsop, for their loss of rights in the area taken up by the peel and its agricultural adjunct, which brought about the effective demise of Clipstone peel in 1328.49 Most of the peel complex was wooden, and when it was ordered to be de-commissioned in January 1328, the keeper, Robert de Clipstone, was ordered to leave the ‘great gate of the peel and the house over it’ as it was, whereas all the houses in the peel were to be repaired with timber from Sherwood Forest after being removed, and then re-erected in the manor of Clipstone.50 The peel cannot have been entirely wooden, and the gatehouse that was left in place was clearly of stone. When it was repaired between 1367 and 1373 it was referred to as a ‘chamber’ in the park, and material including ‘lute’ (probably mud), sand and lime were used.51 The ‘great wall’ mentioned in 1319–20 cannot have been wooden. In 1317–18 the peel enclosure several times provided a refuge to people from the countryside during a period of disturbance there.52 It was secure enough to be used to imprison a captured adherent of Lancaster, John de Clif, for eight days in 1322. In 1328 it held a store of arms including 90 haubergeons, 24 crossbows and four barrels of bolts, 24 lances, a springald and three ‘kysarines’, one of them broken. The chapel in the peel contained a cross with an image of Christ, an image of the Blessed Virgin, and a bell.53 The gatehouse of the peel remained in place until at least the early fifteenth century, when it is shown on the famous late medieval map of Sherwood Forest to

47 48 49 50 51 52

King’s Works, i. 419. Hallam, Itinerary of Edward II, 172. Crook, ‘Clipstone Park and “Peel” ’, 37–40. CCR 1327–30, 194–6, 237–8. E 101/460/20, 21; Crook, ‘Clipstone Park and “Peel” ’, 41, 47 n. 64. SC 6/953/8, m. 5: ‘Et de les dispenses de gent du pays qui vyndrent plusur foiz au peel quant laffray fust el pays qui amaunte a xx s’. 53 E 372/172, rot. 47d; SC 6/1297/4, m. 2.

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have been at the western end of Clipstone Park, to the south of the river.54 In 1976 I suggested that it later became the building called ‘Beeston Lodge’, shown on larger-scale Ordnance Survey maps, while the ‘peel field’, also at the western end, maintained its name until corrupted to the present ‘Peafield’, used in road and farm names, in the eighteenth century.55 It may be now be appropriate to investigate the site archaeologically so that the defensible characteristics of the peel might be adequately confirmed and its purpose, at a time of high political tension in the north-east midlands, more clearly understood. TNA: PRO: SC 8/130/6495: petition of the burgesses of Nottingham to Edward II and his council, probably in the York parliament of October 1318 Notingh’ A nostre seignur le Roy et a soun counseil prient ses burgeys de sa vile de Notingham remedi de ceo qe come le maner de Clyppeston’ soit de la vile de Notingham par le proscheyn chemyn56 quatorze lues et plus et le pel ou nostre seigneur le Roy gist plus loyns de une lue; les seneschaus et mareschals del hostel nostre seignur le Roy nent countre esteauntz les ordenaunces ne nul bref qil purrount porter a totes les foiz qe nostre seignur le Roy vent a Clyppeston’ travaillent les dites burgeys a sute de partyes e en enquestes de Notingh’ a Clippeston’57 a graunt damages de eus et en countre les ordenaunces e estre ceo il ount del graunt nostre seignur le Roy par sa chartre qil ne pledent ne serent enpledes des contracts trespasses fets denz le dite vile fors qe devaunt le meire et baillifs de la ville et rens ne lur pust estre allowe dount il prient remedi. [Endorsed] Habeant brevia super cartis suis et super ordinacionibus etcetera ita quod nichil attemptetur contra liberaciones suas. Irrotulatur

54

M.W. Barley, ‘Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire, late 14th or early 15th century’, in R.A. Skelton and P.D.A. Harvey, Local Maps and Plans from Medieval England (Oxford, 1986), 132, 135, 137. 55 Crook, ‘Clipstone Park and “Peel” ’, 43–4. 56 Interlined using a caret. 57 de Notingh’ a Clippeston’ interlined using a caret.

Royal Patronage and Political Allegiance: The Household Knights of Edward II, 1314–1321

Alistair Tebbit Royal Patronage Alistair and Tebbit Political Allegiance

By 1321 the company of royal household knights that Edward II had created in the years after his defeat at the battle of Bannockburn had largely disintegrated. Instability and disloyalty are two striking features of the king’s knightly retinue in this period. Of the fifty-two household bannerets and knights retained by Edward in 1316, only eight were still members in 1322.1 In total, twenty-five knights who served in the household between 1314 and 1321 ultimately fought against the king in the civil war. Many of these former royal adherents were leaders of the factions that emerged in armed opposition to him. There is no question that Edward was entitled to absolute loyalty from his household retainers. Written agreements do not appear to have been drawn up between the king and his household knights in this or in previous reigns,2 but it is reasonable to suppose that the terms by which household knights were retained were similar to those revealed in the surviving indentures made between Edward and a number of leading magnates. In these the magnates guaranteed to provide the king with service in peace and war in return for a fee.3 An expectation of loyalty was implied and it was no doubt implied in the unwritten agreements that formed the basis for service in the king’s household. The disloyalty of royal household knights on such a large scale appears to be unique to Edward II’s reign.4 Studies of royal knightly retinues in the reigns of Edward I and Edward III have certainly suggested that loyalty was the norm. Edward I’s household knights were, with minor exceptions, consistently reliable and provided valuable service,5 and no cases of disloyalty in the knightly retinue of Edward III are recorded. In fact, the confidence Edward III had in some of his household knights is revealed in the decision to make four – William de Montague, Robert de Ufford, William de Clinton and William de Bohun – into earls.6 Even that other usurped king of the fourteenth century, Richard II, was served by his retinue

1

E 101/376/7, fols 54r and 54v; BL, Stowe MS 553, fol. 65. They were John de Haustede, Roger de Felton, Alan de Charlton, Giles de Beauchamp, William de la Beche, Robert de Sapy, Richard Lovel and John de Weston the Younger. 2 M.C. Prestwich, Edward I (1988), 149. 3 J.R.S. Phillips, Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke 1307–1324 (Oxford, 1972), 312–15, printed many of the indentures that survive from the reign that were made between Edward and certain magnates. See also ‘Private Indentures for Life Service in Peace and War 1278–1476’, ed. M. Jones and S. Walker, Camden Miscellany XXXII (CS, 5th ser. 3, 1994) for a collection of non-royal contracts from the period. 4 It should be noted that disloyalty occurred in the household of King John, as has been highlighted by S.D. Church, The Household Knights of King John (Cambridge, 1999), 104–12. It is clear, though, that the rebellion was not on the same scale as that experienced in Edward’s reign. 5 Prestwich, Edward I, 149–52, 382–3; R. Ingamells, ‘The Household Knights of Edward I’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Durham, 1992). 6 C. Given-Wilson, The English Nobility in the Late Middle Ages (1987), 35–6.

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more faithfully than Edward II. It has been convincingly argued that in 1399 Richard’s royal knights, under difficult circumstances, put up considerable resistance to the invasion of Henry Bolingbroke, a course of action that many paid for with their lives.7 In light of these facts, the behaviour of Edward II’s knights needs to be accounted for. It is not surprising, given the many cases of brazen disloyalty, that the subject has already attracted the attention of one historian. Michael Prestwich, in a recent article, has suggested a variety of reasons to explain the unreliability of Edward’s knights.8 He placed great emphasis on disillusionment with the regime. In the case of knightly retainers with northern origins, this stemmed from Edward’s failure adequately to defend the north from repeated Scottish incursions. Other household knights, he suggests, railed against the emergence of the Despensers as new favourites of the king. Furthermore, Prestwich has demonstrated that some knights were retained concurrently by Edward and his most constant opponent, Thomas, earl of Lancaster. This, he argues, placed great strain on loyalties during the many political crises of the reign. The present paper broadly accepts these conclusions. However, Prestwich has acknowledged that the question of patronage, and its impact on loyalties, remains unexplored. Potentially this is an issue of great relevance to the debate. Arguments concerning the extent to which Edward was abusing his right to purvey supplies, or disagreement over his conduct of the war against the Scots were undoubtedly issues of great contemporary political importance, but the question of royal patronage had equal prominence throughout the reign. As early as 1307 Edward had alienated many of his subjects by his astonishing advancement of the Gascon knight, Piers Gaveston, to the valuable earldom of Cornwall.9 Efforts were made by Edward’s opponents to restrict his freedom to dispense grants and appointments of all kinds through the Ordinances of 1311, and there were to be other wrangles over his distribution of royal patronage in the years leading up to the outbreak of civil war in 1321–2. It is the purpose of this paper to see whether these events affected the loyalties of household knights. Within this overall framework there are three developments between 1314 and 1321 that immediately stand out as being of potential relevance. They are the following: the attempt in 1314–15 by the earl of Lancaster to implement the Ordinances of 1311, the grants the king made to Hugh Audley the Younger, William de Montague and Roger Damory in the middle years of the reign, and Edward’s patronage of the two Despensers, Hugh the Elder and Hugh the Younger, from 1318 onwards. It makes chronological sense to look at the impact of the Ordinances of 1311 on royal patronage first. The Ordinances contained, along with a wide range of other measures, certain articles that were specifically designed to weaken the king’s power by requiring the assent of either the Ordainers or the barons in parliament before grants and appointments of any significance were made.10 The intention was probably to force Edward to negotiate with the barons in parliament for any distributions, thereby avoiding any repetition of the Gaveston incident. If this had been implemented, the king’s freedom to give out patronage would have been greatly limited 7

C. Given-Wilson, The Royal Household and the King’s Affinity: Service, Politics and Finance in England 1360–1413 (Yale, 1986), 224–6. 8 M.C. Prestwich, ‘The Unreliability of Royal Household Knights in the Early Fourteenth Century’, Fourteenth Century England II, ed. C. Given-Wilson (Woodbridge, 2002), 1–12. 9 Vita Edwardi Secundi, ed. N. Denholm-Young (1957), 2. 10 EHD 1189–1327, no. 100.

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and his hold over a royal household that constantly looked to him for rewards seriously damaged. Initially, though, there is only modest evidence to suggest that the Ordinances affected the knightly retinue. Apart from a few resumptions in late 1311 it was not until Lancaster’s assumption of power in late 1314 that there was any likelihood of the articles being fully applied. The murder in June 1312 of Piers Gaveston by Lancaster and his associate, the earl of Warwick, had splintered the baronial party that formulated the Ordinances and made implementation at that time impossible. This situation effectively lasted until a fateful day in June 1314. In the words of the earl of Lancaster’s biographer, ‘Edward’s failure at Bannockburn forced him into immediate dependence on Lancaster’.11 From the autumn of 1314 the earl was exerting pressure on the king to maintain the Ordinances in full. In March 1315 all grants of lands, marriages and escheats made without the consent of the Ordainers since their appointment in October 1310 were resumed. This overturned some forty-five awards that had been made over a period of four and a half years.12 The effects were tangible. Nearly a quarter of all the resumed grants had been made to current members of the knightly retinue. John de la Beche, John de Sapy, Edmund Bacon, John de Kingston, Hugh Audley the Elder, Hugh Audley the Younger, John de Charlton, Nicholas de la Beche, Warin de L’Isle and William de la Beche all suffered losses.13 Interestingly, though, there is no evidence that resumptions of royal grants undermined the king’s standing as a patron among his retainers. Apart from Warin de L’Isle, all the other knights who were dispossessed were still receiving the king’s fees and robes for at least another three years after the event, and some for longer.14 The revocation of royal appointments also appears to have had no effect on the stability of the knightly retinue. The insistence of Lancaster and Warwick that appointments should be made in parliament by the baronage, as also specified in the Ordinances, ensured the removal of those who had not been appointed in this manner when the two attained power, briefly in 1311 and again, more lastingly, from late 1314. This affected many household retainers. Badly disrupted in both 1311 and 1314 was the career of Hugh Audley the Elder.15 He was removed from the keeping of Staffordshire and Shropshire in wholesale changes to the sheriffs in October 1311, and was also to lose the royal castles of Shrewsbury and Bridgnorth in December. After being reinstated to all these offices in January 1312 Hugh was again removed from them in October 1314.16 John de la Beche, also in October 1314, lost the keeping of Hampshire and the royal castle of Winchester, which was appurtenant to his shrievalty. Other household knights, who were serving as sheriffs, were dismissed. These were William de Felton in Northumberland, John de Kingston in Wiltshire, Robert Darcy in Gloucester and Roger de Chandos in Hereford.17 All the individuals mentioned were being retained by the king when they lost their appointments.18 Again, though, there is no sign that their adherence to Edward was shaken. Felton, Audley, De la Beche and Kingston all remained members of the

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

J.R. Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 1307–1322 (Oxford, 1970), 160. CFR 1307–19, 240–4, 246. Ibid., 240–4, 246; E 101/378/6. Soc. Antiqs., MS 121, fols 36–8, 55, 62. Hugh was retained from 1309/10 at the latest (BL, Cotton MS Nero C VIII, fols 92r, 94r). CFR 1307–19, 119–20, 124, 220. Ibid., 220–1. E 101/378/6; CPR 1307–13, 555.

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household for some years,19 and although Chandos had left the household by 1316 he did continue to serve the king regularly as an arrayer of foot in Herefordshire and as a justice in the same county until at least November 1317.20 That the resumption of grants and appointments did not cause instability in the household can be explained. First, many of the confiscations and dismissals were only temporary. Hugh Audley the Younger and Nicholas de la Beche both received back their shares of a wardship that had been resumed in March 1315 within a few months.21 We can see from the example above concerning Hugh Audley the Elder that his shrieval appointment in Staffordshire and Shropshire, which had been lost in 1311, was quickly restored. His removal from the keeping of Montgomery castle in March 1315 was also reversed within three months.22 John de la Beche, too, was reinstated and John de Kingston later appointed a sheriff in a different county.23 By 1312 Edward was in a position to restore favours to household knights who had lost out. The strength of the opposition in 1311–12 had been short lived and collapsed completely after the murder of Gaveston. Why grants and appointments in 1315 were restored, however, is not so clear given Lancaster’s firm commitment to the Ordinances, and his continuing dominance in government until late 1316. It is possible, though, that negotiations between Edward and Lancaster played a part.24 The circumstances in which Lancaster’s administration took power were not propitious. The Scots controlled the northern march, the north itself was in a state of virtual anarchy, heavy rains had destroyed the harvest in 1314 and would do so again in 1315 reducing the country to famine, and the king’s treasury was empty.25 Under these circumstances it was probably necessary for Lancaster to obtain some cooperation from Edward if he was to achieve anything in government. It seems eminently likely that the king’s cooperation was bought, in part, by the restoration of some of the grants and offices that had been resumed in March 1315. The loyalty of the household never seems to have been in doubt at this time for good reason. Edward had demonstrated to his retainers that he was capable of restoring most of the resumptions and the pool of patronage that was available to him for distribution remained unchanged despite Lancaster’s efforts. The quality of rewards that the king offered was never seriously challenged over a long period and could not be matched by even the greatest magnates. These facts no doubt acted as a constant attraction to many retainers. It is likely, also, that the opposition’s insistence that grants and appointments not made in accordance with the Ordinances should be resumed, far from undermining the confidence of Edward’s retainers, instead had the effect of alienating them entirely from the king’s opponents and from Lancaster, in particular. To those affected, Lancaster’s policy probably appeared to be a deliberate attack on individual royal retainers rather than a sincere attempt to reform systems of royal patronage, as he claimed. If anything his actions probably bound the household knights more closely to the king for the time being. Edward’s indulgence of the three household knights Roger Damory, Hugh Audley the Younger and William de Montague is one of the key features of the period between Bannockburn and the York Parliament of late 1318. The marriage of

19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Soc. Antiqs., MS 121, fol. 37r. CFR 1307–19, 297; CPR 1313–17, 134, 136, 461, 683; CPR 1317–21, 97. CFR 1307–19, 247. Ibid., 240, 251. Ibid., 220–1, 282, 322. Phillips, Aymer de Valence, 85–6. Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 160–4.

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Damory and Audley to the two enormously wealthy Clare co-heiresses has been for historians the most conspicuous act of royal patronage in the middle years of the reign. What is more, there is evidence that Edward’s favour to the three created discord in the household. Establishing just how serious the discontent was is the purpose of the next section of this paper. Undoubtedly Edward’s generosity led to strong condemnation from sources outside the household. Lancaster was one critic. He wrote to the king with the words ‘you have held them dearer than they were before, and others you have newly taken to you, who are of the same condition, and you give them your substance daily, so that little or nothing remains to you’.26 Lancaster was probably referring in the first part of this letter, quoted by Adam Murimuth, to men like Hugh Despenser the Elder and Henry de Beaumont, whose removal from court had been demanded in 1311, but who had managed to remain in royal service. Those who are described as having been ‘newly taken’ refers almost certainly to the king’s latest favourites – Damory, Audley and Montague. Disapproval of these three extended beyond English shores to the papal curia, perhaps as a result of Lancastrian representations. In January 1318 the pope urged Edward ‘to lessen his expenses, and to remove those friends whose youth and imprudence injure the affairs of the realm’. Montague appears to have been singled out in another papal letter of April 1318 in which Edward was advised of the need ‘to have a prudent steward of his house, and to keep account of his expenses’.27 But of particular relevance to this paper are signs that disapproval of Edward’s patronage of Damory, Audley and Montague was a sentiment shared by some of their fellow household knights. In a colourful account, the chronicler John Trokelowe describes how a woman in theatrical dress entered Westminster Hall on horseback on 22 May 1317 and presented a letter to Edward, who was attending a feast with various magnates. When questioned why she had done this, she explained that she had been encouraged to do so by a household knight of the king who was angered along with other knightly retainers by Edward’s advancement of those who had seen little service on the battlefield and by his neglect of those who had long served both him and his father.28 Given that the marriages of Damory and Audley to the Clare sisters took place in April 1317, the timing of this intervention by a royal knight was almost certainly provoked by what was perceived to be Edward’s excessive generosity to the two courtiers.29 When one considers the quantity of patronage that the new favourites received in relation to their standing the evidence of Trokelowe takes on extra significance. The family backgrounds of Damory, Audley and Montague and the rewards they were granted have been discussed before, but it is essential that we should look briefly at the facts again.30 When we do so the grounds for the complaints of the unnamed household knight in Westminster Hall become easier to understand. Edward’s choice of Damory and Audley as husbands for the two unmarried Clare co-heiresses was to give them access to enormous landed wealth.31 The earldom of Gloucester was the biggest patrimony in the realm after that held by Thomas of 26 27 28

Adae Murimuth, Continuatio Chronicarum, ed. E.M. Thompson (RS 93, 1889), 275. CPL 1305–42, 414, 430. Johannis de Trokelowe et Henrici de Blaneforde, Chronica et Annales, ed. H.T. Riley (RS 28, 1866), 98–9. 29 Phillips, Aymer de Valence, 132. 30 Background sketches of Damory, Audley and Montague are provided by Phillips, Aymer de Valence, 12–13, 131–2, and Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 192–5. 31 The inheritance was confirmed in April 1317 (Phillips, Aymer de Valence, 132). Damory and Audley married their respective wives within a matter of weeks of the confirmation.

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Lancaster. The death at the battle of Bannockburn of Gilbert de Clare earl of Gloucester without a male heir had the eventual effect of splitting his estates into three portions. A parcel was assigned to each of Gilbert’s three sisters. The lands were worth in total £6,000 yearly.32 After the deduction of a third for the dowry of the widow, Damory and Audley received through their new wives third parts of £4,000, providing each with an annual sum of between £1,300 and £1,400. These were incomes commensurate with comital status and Audley and Damory were effectively transformed into earls in all but name. They received many other rewards from Edward but none rivalled the gift of the Clare marriages, which gave them landed endowments that were both valuable and hereditary.33 William de Montague also did very well from Edward. He became steward of the king’s household in November 1316, a position that placed him at the very heart of Edward’s court.34 An indication of this is perhaps revealed in royal charter witness evidence. In the eleventh year of the reign (1317–18) Montague witnessed over 96% of the eighty-seven charters Edward issued.35 Already by August 1316 he had been given the marriage of Joan the eldest daughter and heiress of Theobald de Verdun for his youngest son.36 After he became steward he was granted 200 marks yearly for life in January 1317 until such time that Edward could find him lands of equivalent value.37 The English estates of William de Carlisle, a rebel through his adherence to the Scots, were granted to him in 1317,38 and he also received the wardship of the lands of the late Herbert de Marisco in August 1317.39 It is worth noting that Edward I had not rewarded his household knights with anything of greater value than the odd perquisite like a minor wardship or keepership.40 Indeed, the patronage given by Edward II to household knights was quite unprecedented in scale. The novelty of this was no doubt appreciated by many contemporaries who could recall serving under Edward I, and perhaps explains why jealousies were provoked among those who were not so favoured. Moreover, it should be remembered that Damory, Audley and Montague were not drawn from the first rank of society. Although they all came from noble stock and Audley and Montague had a tradition of family service to the crown, the nature of their backgrounds made it possible for them to be branded upstarts.41 And while they showed their usefulness to the king occasionally – Damory for instance appears to have distinguished himself at the battle of Bannockburn42 – it cannot be said that they stood out from their fellow household knights in terms of ability. New-found wealth and power in the case of these three was emphatically not forged by great deeds on the battlefield, as was the case with two of Edward’s later comital 32 33 34

Given-Wilson, English Nobility, 30. See Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 193–5, for other examples of the royal patronage they received. CCR 1313–18, 441. T.F. Tout lists all the king’s stewards in his The Place of Edward II in English History (Manchester, 1914), 315. 35 J.S. Hamilton, ‘Charter Witness Lists in the Reign of Edward II’, Fourteenth Century England I, ed. N. Saul (Woodbridge, 2000), 15. 36 CPR 1313–17, 535. 37 Ibid., 609. 38 CIPM, vi. 143–4; CPR 1313–17, 670. 39 CFR 1307–19, 337. 40 Ingamells, ‘Household Knights of Edward I’, ii. 123–68. 41 Hugh Audley the Elder, the father of Hugh the Younger, and various relations of William de Montague had served as knights in Edward I’s household (ibid., 178, 181). Hugh the Elder continued to serve Edward II, first as justice of North Wales, an office he held from 1306 to 1308, and as justice of Chester from 1312 to 1318 (Tout, The Place of Edward II, 336–7). 42 CPR 1313–17, 622.

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creations, John de Bermingham earl of Louth and Andrew de Harclay earl of Carlisle.43 But if we accept that jealousies were stirred is there any actual evidence that royal knights deserted Edward because of his favourable treatment of the three in question? The fact remains that it is impossible to prove a direct link between the apparent excessive patronage of these three retainers and the abandonment of loyalties by other household knights. We can see from the material presented so far that an argument that suggests a connection is based largely on circumstantial evidence. And in fact, as we shall see, there is far more evidence to show that household knights were largely indifferent to Edward’s promotion of his new favourites. If we look at the rewards Damory, Audley and Montague received in the context of other acts of royal patronage they are, while still significant, much less substantial than they first appear. Indeed, it would be a mistake to think that these three were the only household knights who did well from the king at this time. Edward made a series of indentures with prominent household knights between 1317 and 1319, the terms of which were very generous to all concerned. The contracts stipulated that these individuals provided service for the king in peace and war. The fees received for this guarantee exceeded, in some cases enormously, the normal payments household knights were given over a year.44 Humphrey de Bohun earl of Hereford, John de Segrave the Elder, John Cromwell, John Giffard of Brimpsfield, John de Mowbray and John de Somery were all retained as household bannerets on this special footing. Giffard was receiving 200 marks yearly from December 1316, Hereford was contracted at 600 marks per annum for peacetime service in 1317–18 and 1319–20, Segrave and Cromwell were both listed to receive £100 in 1317–18, Somery received 200 marks for his service in 1317–18 and was paid a winter fee of £100 in 1319, and Mowbray received £340 in 1319.45 Aside from allocations of household fees, Edward was also generous in terms of conventional grants to minor household knights. John de Wysham was granted for life in August 1317 a handsome 200 marks per annum for his good service to Edward I and Edward II.46 Also in August 1317 Giles de Beauchamp was granted on account of his good service £40 per annum from lands in the king’s hands.47 And in April 1318 Edmund de Hakelute was awarded £50 a year in compensation for the loss of his fee as constable of Dinefwr castle after being replaced by Hugh Despenser the Younger. The fee he had received as constable was also £50, so Hakelute, no longer having to earn the sum, had done rather well.48 Edward’s munificence extended well beyond the household. In the summer of 1317 Bartholomew de Badlesmere was granted a fee of 1,000 marks a year merely for the value of his counsel.49 The earl of Pembroke agreed to perform life service in peace and war for a very generous fee, and even in peacetime,

43

John de Bermingham was raised to an earldom for his defeat of Edward Bruce at Faughart in October 1318 and Harclay for his victory over Thomas of Lancaster at Boroughbridge in April 1322. 44 Household bannerets and knights received 36 and 18 marks a year respectively in fees and robes. A list of household payments made on this basis can be seen in the wardrobe book for the year 1310–11 (BL, Cotton MS Nero C VIII, fols 91v, 93r, 108r, 114r). 45 CPR 1317–21, 621; Soc. Antiqs., MS 121, fols 36v, 38r; E 101/378/4, fol. 16r. 46 CPR 1317–21, 10. 47 Ibid., 14. Giles had received an income from his relation Guy de Beauchamp earl of Warwick but this had been lost after the earl’s death in 1315. Edward’s grant was compensation of this loss and was derived from the lands of Warwick’s son Thomas, who was a minor and a ward of the king. 48 CPR 1317–21, 130. 49 Badlesmere did not join the household until his appointment as steward in October 1318 (Tout, The Place of Edward II, 315).

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when he was not required to maintain soldiers in the field, he was receiving in excess of 1,000 marks per annum.50 Roger Mortimer of Wigmore was granted in July 1318 a share in the marriage of a royal ward, the minor Thomas earl of Warwick; this was worth 1,600 marks.51 When we consider the sheer number and value of the awards made in this period it becomes difficult to see how the patronage of Damory, Audley and Montague would not have been submerged, to some degree, by this wave of royal largesse. Under the circumstances it is far more likely that existing household knights would have been anxious to stay in the familia. Who would have turned their back on such prospects? If anything, the profitable careers of Damory, Audley, Montague and other household knights worked as an advertisement for recruitment. They demonstrated that men who were, to put it crudely, ‘on the make’ could obtain fortunes under Edward. At this time there were plenty of potential recruits offering themselves for employment in the household, who were no doubt motivated in part by a desire to reap the benefits. In the period 1315–20 there were, in any given year, between fifty and sixty-five knights retained by Edward in the household.52 Of the fifty-two knights who were retained in 1315, thirty were still members of the household in 1320. The turnover was considerable, but to what extent this was caused by factors other than natural wastage (i.e. retirements and deaths) is hard to establish. What is certain is that Edward had little difficulty finding new recruits to maintain numbers. In 1315–16, thirteen knights were admitted to the household and eight in the following year.53 In 1317–18, at the height of the careers of Damory, Audley and Montague, sixteen recruits were found.54 Further evidence for the wide appeal of service in the royal household at this time can be discerned in the recruitment of four knights connected to Thomas of Lancaster. Between May and September 1317 Peter de Lymesy, Richard de Lymesy, Roger de Swinnerton and Adam de Everingham were admitted to the household, the first as a banneret and the others as knights.55 All four were prominent Lancastrian retainers.56 Of course, it was not unusual for the retainers of other magnates to find service in the king’s household with the knowledge of their lord. Magnates, to some degree, probably encouraged the practice. It was useful for them to have eyes and ears within the royal household, and they may have thought it possible to exert influence over the king through a retainer who was placed there. But it is noteworthy that there was no occasion in the reign before 1317 when so many of Lancaster’s retainers were serving in the royal household. The appearance of these four is even more conspicuous when we consider the timing. If they had been encouraged by Lancaster to join it is hard to see how Edward would have been receptive in the spring and summer of 1317. Relations between the king and the earl had turned very sour and were about to deteriorate further. Lancaster was angered, as we have seen already, by the emergence at court of the king’s new favourites and his continuing 50 51 52

Phillips, Aymer de Valence, 313. CPR 1317–21, 193; CFR 1307–19, 369. See E 101/37/6/7 and E 101/377/1 for household lists in 1315–16; Soc. Antiqs., MS 120 for 1316–17; Soc. Antiqs., MS 121 for 1317–18; BL, Add. MS 17362 for 1319–20. 53 E 101/376/7, fol. 54r; Soc. Antiqs., MS 120, fol. 58r. 54 Soc. Antiqs., MS 121, fol. 36r. 55 Soc. Antiqs., MS 120, fol. 58r; Soc. Antiqs., MS 121, fol. 36r. 56 See Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 40–66, for extensive information on these men and their place in the earl’s retinue. Richard de Lymesy was perhaps the least important of the four. He served as a sergeant in Lancaster’s proffer of military service for the Scottish campaign of 1310–11. His elder brother Peter and Roger de Swinnerton also served as knights as part of Lancaster’s feudal quota (PW, II, ii. 42).

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attachment to Hugh Despenser the Elder and the Beaumont brothers. The many royal grants of 1317, the most notable of which are listed above, were made in defiance of the Ordinances that Lancaster held so dear. Lancaster was so infuriated by the summer of 1317 that he elected to use violence against those who were close associates of the king as his means of political expression. It is quite possible that he was behind Gilbert de Middleton’s attack in September 1317 on the newly chosen bishop of Durham, Louis de Beaumont, and his brother Henry as they made their way to Durham for Louis’ consecration.57 Lancaster’s involvement in the seizure later that autumn of various lands and castles held in Yorkshire by Roger Damory and John de Warenne earl of Surrey is less ambiguous.58 Also at this time Lancaster obstructed Edward’s muster for a new Scottish campaign at York by preventing troops from moving through his estates around Pontefract.59 Given the bad atmosphere immediately before and during these events it is unlikely that Edward would have welcomed members of Lancaster’s retinue unless they had volunteered on their own initiative or had been cultivated by Edward himself. We know that the quality of rewards given by Edward in 1316–17 was high and it is possible that the lure of royal patronage drew Lancaster’s men to the king. But this is not the only explanation for their appearance in household lists. It is likely that Lancaster’s political isolation influenced a number of his knights to improve their personal relations with the king. John Maddicott characterized the political conflicts of 1317–18 succinctly when he stated that ‘the struggle now was not between the barons and the king . . . but between the barons and Lancaster’.60 The failure of Lancaster’s administration to deliver a victory against the Scots in 1315–16 and his apparent decision to distance himself from daily government by retreating to his estates in the Midlands allowed the political initiative to drift back into Edward’s hands. The emergence from the end of 1316 of a ‘royal following’ that was composed of some of the most powerful magnates in the realm, many of whom were also leading household knights, began to overshadow Lancaster’s power. This following was made stronger still by being bound to the king through a collective need to protect the lucrative patronage it had received, much of which has been detailed above. The resumption of grants at the instigation of Lancaster in March 1315 was no doubt remembered well. Opposition to the king had been discredited by its failure and many key royal supporters now had a vested interest in keeping Lancaster out of power. Faced with these political realities it would hardly be surprising if a number of Lancaster’s retainers sought the king’s fee. They did not want to share in their lord’s isolation from royal goodwill. Instead they chose to manoeuvre themselves into a position where they would be protected if the power of their lord continued to fade. We should not be surprised that Edward welcomed

57

The Beaumonts had been on bad terms with Lancaster ever since the Ordainers had sought to expel Henry de Beaumont from court in 1311 (Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 204–7). For an interpretation at variance with the view that Middleton’s infamous act was instigated by Lancaster, see M.C. Prestwich, ‘Gilbert de Middleton and the Attack on the Cardinals, 1317’, in Warriors and Government in the High Middle Ages. Essays presented to Karl Leyser, ed. T. Reuter (London, 1992), 179–94. 58 Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 207–8. Warenne’s commitment to Edward is quite explicable. He had been alienated from Lancaster through the latter’s insistence in March 1315 that the castle and honour of High Peak, granted by the king to Warenne, should be resumed (CFR 1307–19, 244). Also, Warenne had managed to alienate himself from Lancaster by his extraordinary abduction of Lancaster’s wife in April 1317. For chronicle accounts of this incident see Flores, iii. 178–9, and The Historia Anglicana of Thomas of Walsingham, ed. H.T. Riley (RS 28, 1863–4), i. 148–9. 59 Vita Edwardi Secundi, 81. 60 Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 207–8.

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them. Any development that undermined the strength of Piers Gaveston’s principal assassin, even in a manner as subtle as this, was likely to please the king. The supremacy that Edward enjoyed in 1317–18 did not last long. The powerful royal party that had emerged from 1316 onwards was soon to be shattered by Edward’s failure to distribute royal patronage and protection equitably among his allies. The overweening influence of Hugh Despenser the Younger and his father led Edward to neglect the interests of other royal supporters both inside and outside the household. The rise of the Despensers and their sway over the king is well documented and does not need comprehensive discussion.61 Our interest rests, rather, in understanding how Edward’s immense patronage and protection of the Despensers affected his relations with household knights. It was at court where Edward’s increasing reliance on the Despensers first began to disturb relations with the knightly retinue. In particular, their rising prominence as royal councillors excluded many senior household knights from access to the king. John de Charlton, as well as being retained as a knight, had served Edward as his chamberlain from at least 1310.62 His career in Edward’s service was effectively curtailed when Despenser replaced him in October 1318.63 The earl of Hereford was a retainer of the king in 1320–1 but if charter witness evidence is any reflection his presence at court had waned dramatically.64 In 1316–17 and 1317–18 Hereford witnessed nearly 90% of royal charters. From 1318–19 this number was in decline and by 1320–1 it was down to less than 37%. More evidence from charter witness lists suggests that the Younger Despenser’s attendance was increasing as the influence of others diminished. In 1316–17 he witnessed less than 6% of charters. By 1319–20 that figure was up to nearly 70% and by the following year to nearly 80%. His father, Hugh Despenser the Elder, had long been a close ally to Edward and his attestations stood at nearly 90% by 1320–1.65 Bartholomew de Badlesmere also lost power. He was the steward of Edward’s household from October 1318 to June 1321.66 He had served the king for many years, but his place at court was now overshadowed by the Younger Despenser’s growing influence. Badlesmere saw his ambition to become earl of Kent thwarted when Despenser’s ally, the king’s half-brother Edmund of Woodstock, was advanced to the earldom in the summer of 1321.67 It is clear that by 1320–1 the Despensers dominated Edward’s court. Indeed, it was said that they controlled all access to the king.68 The Despensers had succeeded in effectively isolating the king from the counsels of old supporters like Badlesmere,

61

J.C. Davies, ‘The Despenser War in Glamorgan’, TRHS, 3rd ser. 9 (1915), 21–64; N.M. Fryde, The Tyranny and Fall of Edward II 1321–1326 (Cambridge, 1979), 37–57; Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 260–2. 62 BL, Cotton MS Nero C VIII, fol. 36. 63 Tout, The Place of Edward II, 315–16. 64 BL, Add. MS 9951, fol. 24v. 65 Hamilton, ‘Charter Witness Lists’, 11, 13–14. John de Charlton rarely witnessed charters in the eight or more years he held the post, and it is reasonable to conclude that this was a sign that the role of chamberlain under the Younger Despenser had been enhanced by the king. 66 Tout, The Place of Edward II, 315. 67 Edmund of Woodstock approved, with the earls of Pembroke, Richmond and Arundel, the return of the Despensers from exile in Dec. 1321. Unlike the latter three, Edmund had not consented to the banishment of the Despensers in the first place (Phillips, Aymer de Valence, 219). That Badlesmere harboured ambitions in respect of the earldom of Kent is revealed in a continuation of the Kentish chronicle of Gervase of Canterbury (J. Leland, Collectanea, ed. T. Hearne, 6 vols (1770–4), i. 272). Edmund was made earl on 26 July 1321 (E 101/378/11). 68 Walsingham, i. 159; Chronicon Galfridi le Baker de Swynbroke, ed. E.M. Thompson (Oxford, 1889), 11.

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Charlton and Hereford. This development undoubtedly provoked envy and angered many, but other influences were to play a large part in the decisions that would later lead these three to rebel. Without doubt the Younger Despenser’s activities in the Welsh March were a crucial factor. It was here that he threatened the estates of many individuals connected to the household, some of whom had also lost influence at court.69 By May 1320 Hugh Audley the Younger and his wife Margaret had been intimidated by Despenser into giving up their lucrative Clare estates in south Wales including the castle and town of Newport in exchange for less valuable lands in Surrey, Kent and Oxfordshire.70 Despenser also applied pressure, this time without success, on Roger Damory to give up his share of the Clare lands in Wales.71 However, the king’s handling of the dispute over the lordship of Gower, seemingly in favour of Despenser, was critical. John de Mowbray, who was still a retainer of Edward in 1320–1,72 was married to the eldest daughter of William de Braose lord of Gower. Braose had no sons and Mowbray was effectively his heir. Braose confirmed this by granting Gower to Mowbray, who subsequently took possession of the lordship.73 However, Hereford, also a retainer of the king at this time, as mentioned above, felt that he had a claim to Gower, having paid Braose a sum of money towards an acquisition.74 Whatever the merits of the various claims, Edward’s seizure of Gower from Mowbray in October 1320 on the grounds that the lands had been alienated without royal licence changed the nature of the dispute. Under Marcher custom alienation without royal licence was permissible and therefore royal confiscation seemed completely unjustified and illegal to many, but more importantly it was suspected that the Younger Despenser, with his influence over Edward at court, had prompted the decision and had designs on Gower himself. If the king now allowed Despenser to take Gower, as was anticipated, it seemed to the Marchers that other lands near to Despenser’s estates would be greatly threatened by him. Mowbray, Hereford, John Giffard of Brimpsfield and Roger Damory all had lordships in south Wales which they now believed were coveted by Despenser.75 The response of these former royal supporters was to form a coalition of mutual support. They subsequently pre-empted any moves by Edward or the Despensers by attacking and wasting Despenser lands across Wales and England in May 1321. Audley and Badlesmere already had grievances, as detailed above, and they joined the others in the assault.76 This was followed by an armed march against the king in London that produced, with the support of Lancaster, the banishment of the Despensers. However, their rapid return from exile at Edward’s bidding led to renewed conflict. All those involved in the attacks in May took up arms against Edward and the Despensers a second time over the winter of 1321–2.77 69

Factual statements not referenced in this paragraph are made on the basis of evidence provided by Davies, ‘The Despenser War in Glamorgan’, 21–64. 70 CPR 1317–21, 415, 456; Flores, iii. 342. 71 Ibid., 342. 72 BL, Add. MS 9951, fol. 24v. 73 Sir Christopher Hatton’s Book of Seals, ed. L.C. Loyd and D.M. Stenton (Oxford, 1950), no. 315. 74 Vita Edwardi Secundi, 109. 75 Giffard too had household connections, having been retained by Edward until at least 1318, and perhaps into 1319 (Soc. Antiqs., MS 121, fols 36v, 38r). 76 The Mortimers, former supporters of Edward, also participated for similar reasons (Flores, iii. 344). The involvement of Mowbray, Hereford, Damory, Giffard, Badlesmere and Audley in the attack on the Despensers is confirmed by the pardons they and their retainers received from the king in August (CPR 1321–4, 15–20). 77 John de Charlton rebelled at this stage too as is demonstrated by evidence that in mid-Jan. 1322 he

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Edward’s failure to protect the interests of royal supporters in the March in the face of Despenser’s ambitions was the main factor that gave rise to the conflict. But it should be noted that many of the central figures affected in the March were current and former household knights who had been esteemed highly by Edward at court. Damory, Audley, Charlton and Badlesmere are the obvious examples, but Mowbray and Hereford also enjoyed great favour before the rise of the Despensers. Displacement from court no doubt aroused jealousies and was a source of anger, but the practical effect for those who had lost out was far worse than perhaps they first realized. When Despenser cast his covetous eyes across the lands of others he knew that Edward’s attachment to him was so strong that he would be allowed to do as he wished without obstruction. The eventual comprehension of this fact in the early months of 1321 by those named above prompted the outbreak of war. It was believed by them, probably correctly, that the injustices perpetrated by Despenser, particularly in the March, would never have been remedied at court and therefore violence was the only recourse. It must be said that this situation arose entirely from Edward’s spectacularly imprudent management of royal patronage and favour. He made his first mistake by neglecting his old household knights whose support had been so useful in isolating Lancaster. This error was further compounded by the fact that Edward chose as the chief recipient of royal patronage a man who was prepared to use his new-found power to attack the lands, rights and influence of the same household knights. Edward’s unwillingness to stop Despenser from doing as he pleased destroyed any good will that may have remained in those affected. It may be concluded that Edward mismanaged royal patronage by his attachment to one individual who was exalted above all others. This relationship contributed perhaps more than any other to the rebellion in 1321–2 of those connected to the royal household. However, Edward’s kingship had an enigmatic quality to it. The royal household was relatively stable between 1314 and 1319 and this was probably due to Edward’s extensive and even-handed distribution of patronage. The significance of the favours bestowed on Damory, Audley and Montague, while very large, can be exaggerated when looked at in isolation. Also, this period saw the emergence of a ‘royal party’ located principally in Edward’s knightly retinue whose members were bound to the king by the patronage they had received. This gave them a vested interest in opposing Thomas of Lancaster whose declared policy was to resume all grants that were made contrary to the Ordinances. Whether Edward consciously created this ‘party’ has been questioned. Seymour Phillips has argued that to credit Edward with taking the initiative at this moment would be to endow him with political skills that he did not possess.78 This verdict may be a little harsh. The evidence of Edward’s recruitment of Lancastrian retainers in 1317 reveals a layer of the royal household that has received little attention from scholars. It is possible that Edward seized the opportunity presented by Lancaster’s weakness and cultivated Lancastrian followers. However, the suggestion that political developments favourable to Edward in the middle of the reign owed much to his resourcefulness is undermined significantly by the proof of his incompetence a few years later. Indisputably Edward’s decision to stand obstinately by Hugh Despenser the Younger despite the latter’s many depredations splintered the knightly retinue and would eventually plunge the realm into civil war.

was still under siege inside his castle of La Pole in Powys by royal forces after the main rebellion in the March, and Herefordshire had collapsed (CPR 1321–4, 48). 78 Phillips, Aymer de Valence, 150.

‘Edward II’ in Italy: English and Welsh Political Exiles and Fugitives in Continental Europe, 1322–13641

Seymour Phillips ‘Edward SeymourII’Phillips in Italy

During the years after 1320 many men suffered death in battle or by execution, others were condemned to imprisonment, while yet others made their escape from England, usually as political exiles or as fugitives from justice. There were many such exiles, and it is to some of them that this paper will turn first, but briefly, before finally concentrating on Edward II himself. Their stories were sometimes extraordinary, all of them were a product of the disturbed times in England, but they also illustrate in various ways the closeness and the complexity of the ties that existed between the kingdom of England and continental Europe.2 The earliest of the refugees was John Maltravers from Dorset (he also held the important manor of Rathkeale in Co. Limerick), who was a retainer of Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, one of the opposition leaders in 1321–2. Maltravers fled to France in 1322,3 and in 1323 was joined there by Mortimer, who had made a spectacular escape from the Tower of London shortly before his intended execution. Over the next three years Mortimer became the focus of a group of exiles from England. By the end of 1325 these included Edward II’s queen, Isabella, and Edward, his elder son and heir to the English throne. They had been sent separately to the French court in order to make peace and had then refused to return to England. Although Edward II’s fear that the French king, Charles IV, would help Mortimer and the queen to invade England was not realised, the end result was no different. Isabella and Mortimer turned instead to Count William of Hainault and Holland, and in return for promises of financial and military assistance, the future Edward III was betrothed to the count’s daughter Philippa. The invasion of England duly took place in September, with the results already mentioned.4 The exiles, 1

I should like to thank the Faculty of Arts at University College Dublin for the research grants which made it possible for me to visit the Archives départementales de l’Hérault in Montpellier in the summer of 1997 and Melazzo, Cecima and Sant’Alberto di Butrio in northern Italy in the summer of 1999. Many of the Italian publications cited below would have been unobtainable without the help of the inter-library loans department of University College Dublin library. 2 The close relationship between England and continental Europe at this period is well brought out in M. Vale, The Angevin Legacy and the Hundred Years War, 1250–1340 (Oxford, 1990), chs 1 and 2. 3 For the career of Maltravers see DNB, xii. 891–2; Complete Peerage, viii (revised edn, 1932), 581–5; and also G.P. Cuttino and T.W. Lynam, ‘Where is Edward II?’, Speculum 53 (1978), 530, 539–43. 4 For the background to the invasion of Sept. 1326, see N. Fryde, The Tyranny and Fall of Edward II 1321–1326 (Cambridge, 1979), chs 10, 13. The fear of the English government that France would support Roger Mortimer and other exiles in an attack on England is shown clearly in The War of St. Sardos (1323–25). Gascon Correspondence and Diplomatic Documents, ed. P. Chaplais (CS, 3rd ser. 87, 1954), 2, 5, 102–3, 179–80, 194, 196. The betrothal of Edward and Philippa took place at Mons on 27 Aug. 1326 in the presence of Roger Mortimer and of Edward’s uncle, Edmund earl of Kent, another highly placed English exile: Inventaire analytique du chartrier de la Trésorerie des comtes de Hainaut, ed. G. Wymans, Archives générales du Royaume (Brussels, 1985), 128–9, nos 574–6.

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including John Maltravers, returned with the invading army and became part of the new regime. Maltravers’ own part was his appointment as one of the deposed Edward II’s jailers at Berkeley castle. With the fall and execution of Roger Mortimer in 1330,5 a new wave of exiles departed from England. Prominent among them once again was John Maltravers, who was sentenced to death in his absence for his part in fabricating charges of treason against the earl of Kent in March 1330.6 This was not, however, the end of the story. In 1334 Maltravers contacted Edward III because he ‘was desirous to reveal to him many things concerning his honour and the estate and well-being of the realm’. It is likely that he wished to tell what he knew about the murder of Edward II, with which he had not been charged but about which he certainly knew more than was good for him. If he did tell his side of the tragedy, no record has survived. In 1345 Maltravers met Edward III in Flanders and submitted to him, having apparently in the meantime acted as an agent on Edward’s behalf in the Low Countries.7 In 1351 he was pardoned and eventually returned to England where he died in 1364.8 The Yorkshire knight, Bogo de Bayouse, was another former follower of Roger Mortimer who fled from justice in 1330. Like Maltravers, he was charged with the entrapment of the earl of Kent.9 His story has only recently come to light through a chance discovery in The National Archives. According to an inquest held at Helperby in Yorkshire in 1335, Bogo and his wife Alice had gone to Rome where they lived in a room rented from an unnamed Italian countess. After what was probably a miserable existence, Bogo had died in Rome on 26 July 1334 and was buried in the local parish church of San Celso, near the Ponte Sant’ Angelo.10 The church was rebuilt in the early sixteenth century as part of the refurbishment of Rome carried out by the architect Bramante. It was finally demolished in the eighteenth 5 For the details of the charges against Mortimer see Rot. Parl., ii. 52–3, and the forthcoming Parliament Rolls of Medieval England (PROME), Parliament of 1330 (C 65/2), item 1 (PROME will be published electronically and in a printed edition). 6 For the charges against Maltravers see Rot. Parl., ii. 53; PROME, Parliament of 1330 (C 65/2), item 3. 7 CPR 1330–4, 535; CPR 1343–5, 535. 8 Maltravers thus provides the initial and terminating dates of this paper. It is likely that he had become well known as an English exile during his long residence in the Low Countries, both after 1322 and again after 1330. It is conceivable, though not provable, that he may have been a real-life inspiration for the fictional English knight, Sir John Mandeville, who was the hero of one of the most widely read works of travel literature of the late medieval and early modern period. See J.R.S. Phillips, ‘The Quest for Sir John Mandeville’, in The Culture of Christendom: Essays in Medieval History in Memory of Denis Bethell, ed. M.A. Meyer (1993), 243–55, esp. 251–2. 9 For the charges against Bayouse see Rot. Parl., ii. 53 (where his family name is wrongly given as ‘Bayons’); PROME, Parliament of 1330 (C 65/2), item 4. 10 C 49/45, no. 30: proceedings on a petition of William de Bayouse for a writ to the justices of assize at York to go to judgement in a suit brought by him for restitution of lands in Helperby, Yorkshire, seized into king’s hand because Bogo de Bayouse, his brother, was an adherent of Roger Mortimer, Bogo having died at Rome. The record consists of a petition (damaged) to the king and council from William de Bayouse which says that his brother, Bogo, ‘morust a Rome e feust enterre en lieu certeyn’. The petition is endorsed with the statement that it was read before the council ‘et avis est au conseil qu la mort le dit Boggon est sufficeaument sure’ for judgement to be proceeded with in the plea but the council should not go to judgement ‘sanz conseiller le Roi’. C 49/45, no. 30 is a damaged copy of the full text of the proceedings in KB 27/301, rot. 25 (3 membranes). The proceedings were held at York in Trinity Term, 9 Edward III (1335), and contain a great deal of circumstantial detail about Bogo’s death in Rome, about other English people who were there when he died, and about individuals from Yorkshire who had gone either to Rome or to Avignon as pilgrims or on ecclesiastical business. Until the holding of the inquest at York, the authorities in England had been under the impression that Bogo had died at Vienne in the Rhône valley.

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century and with it went any remaining trace of one of the saddest of English exiles.11 The English government does not appear to have pursued Bogo de Bayouse with any great vigour, and his fate is recorded only because his brother William back home in Yorkshire wanted to regain the family lands, and needed proof that Bogo was dead. However, the story of Thomas Gurney, another former retainer of Roger Mortimer who also fled England in 1330, was very different. Like John Maltravers, Gurney had been one of Edward II’s jailers at Berkeley castle in 1327. He was there when the deposed king died on 21 September and he brought the news to Edward III at Lincoln ‘in the middle of the night’.12 But Gurney was more than just a messenger. In November 1330 he was convicted in his absence of having murdered Edward II.13 The new king, Edward III, was determined to capture and interrogate Gurney. The details of what followed are preserved in the records of the exchequer and have been known since 1838 when they were published by Joseph Hunter. In 1331 Gurney was discovered in Spain, and held prisoner in Burgos by the king of Castile, but escaped before Edward III’s agents could take charge of him. He made his way to Italy and was finally discovered in Naples, where an English agent, William of Cornwall, held him. Gurney was then taken back to Spain, and finally to Bayonne, in Edward III’s duchy of Gascony. There he died in the early summer of 1333. Any story he had to tell died with him: at least there is no record of anything. There is no likelihood, as some have suggested, that Gurney was murdered in case he implicated people in high places in England. Gurney was already seriously ill before reaching Bayonne and died despite strenuous efforts to keep him alive until he could be taken back to England.14 This finally brings the paper back to Edward II and his fate. Although it is impossible to provide absolute proof, it will be assumed for the purposes of the argument which follows that Edward II died at Berkeley castle on 21 September 1327; that he was almost certainly murdered, as the official accounts and most of the chronicles were later to claim; and that it was Edward II whose embalmed body was transferred to St Peter’s abbey, Gloucester, on 21 October, and buried there in the presence of Edward III and Queen Isabella on 20 December.15 The very fine tomb which still exists in the present Gloucester Cathedral was constructed at some point in the early 1330s, while the abbey church, as it then was, became for a time a centre of the cult 11

The church of S. Celso, near the Ponte Sant’Angelo, is first mentioned in 1127. It appears just to the left of the Castel Sant’Angelo in a fresco by the fifteenth-century artist Benozzo Gozzoli: R. Krautheimer, Rome: Profile of a City, 312–1308 (Princeton, 1980), 272 and fig. 208. There is also a picture of S. Celso in Krautheimer, p. 270, fig. 207: detail of a map of Rome, 1474, by Alessandro Strozzi, showing churches and fortified mansions in the Tiber bend. On the remodelling of the medieval church by Bramante see P. Portoghesi, Rome of the Renaissance (1972), 58–9, 73–4, 101. M. Harvey, The English in Rome, 1362–1420: Portrait of an Expatriate Community (CSMLT, 4th ser. 45, 1999), does not throw direct light on the Bayouse episode. But the English hospice of St Thomas, founded in 1362, was the predecessor of the present English College and was in the same area of Rome as the rented lodgings in which Bogo de Bayouse died in 1334. See Harvey, map 3 after p. xi. 12 DL 10/253 (Lincoln, 24 Sept. 1327). Letter from Edward III to the earl of Hereford informing him of the death of Edward II. For Gurney’s bringing of the news of Edward II’s death, see R.M. Haines, ‘Edwardus redivivus: The “Afterlife” of Edward of Caernarvon’, Trans. Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Soc. 114 (1996), 85, n. 98. 13 For the charges against Gurney see Rot. Parl., ii. 54; PROME, Parliament of 1330 (C 65/2), item 5. 14 J. Hunter, ‘On the Measures taken for the Apprehension of Sir Thomas de Gournay, one of the Murderers of King Edward the Second’, Archaeologia 27 (1838), 274–97; Haines, ‘Edwardus redivivus’, 76–9, 85 (including a map on p. 78 which shows the pursuit and capture of Gurney). 15 For the opening of the tomb in October 1855, see D. Wellender, The History, Art, and Architecture of Gloucester Cathedral (Stroud, 1991), 150.

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of monarchy, almost to rival Westminster Abbey itself. There is nothing to suggest that Edward III had any doubts as to who lay at Gloucester.16 However, within a very short time of Edward II’s death rumours began to circulate that he was not dead after all and that someone else was buried in his place.17 Given the highly charged political circumstances of the time, this was not surprising. Kings who lost their throne or who died mysteriously were often rumoured to be alive somewhere or other. This was to be the case with Edward II’s great-grandson Richard II after his deposition in 1399.18 Another fourteenth-century example is that of John I, king of France, the posthumously born son of Louis X, who lived for a few days in 1316. Forty years later, after the defeat of his namesake, John II, at the battle of Poitiers, a certain Giannino Baglioni of Siena in Italy was astonished to be told that he was none other than the lost John I and that he should vindicate his claim by invading France.19 In Edward II’s case there was some substance to the rumours, since at least three attempts were made by friends and allies to free him from captivity between January and September 1327. The most serious took place in July 1327 and temporarily succeeded in releasing him from his prison cell.20 When intelligence reached Roger 16

There is a considerable mystery about the tomb of Edward II, since no financial records connected with its construction have survived either at Gloucester or in TNA: PRO. Cuttino and Lynam (525 n. 20) cite the opinion of Dr H.M. Colvin, in reply to their query, that ‘It [the tomb] was certainly not paid for by the king [Edward III] and was presumably commissioned by the abbot and convent of Gloucester.’ On the other hand, Dr Paul Binski argues that the tomb was probably designed c. 1330 by Thomas of Canterbury, who was in charge of work at St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster c. 1323 to c. 1335–6: Binski, Westminster Abbey and the Plantagenets: Kingship and the Representation of Power, 1200–1400 (1995), 176, 178. The Age of Chivalry catalogue, ed. J. Alexander and P. Binski (1987), also accepts the attribution to Thomas of Canterbury: see catalogue entry 497 (by C. Wilson); on St Stephen’s Chapel see catalogue entries 324, 325 (also by C. Wilson). My view is that it would have been most unlikely for such an elaborate and sophisticated tomb to be created without the active approval and involvement of Edward III, especially if an artist with royal associations was directly involved. For the most recent discussion of Edward II’s tomb see A.McG. Morganstern, Gothic Tombs of Kinship in France, the Low Countries and England (University Park, Pennsylvania, 2000), ch. 5, esp. 82–91. She argues that the tomb was designed to emphasise the saintliness of Edward II, and the idea of the king as a type of Christ. On royal and other offerings at the tomb, see J. Evans, English Art 1307–1461 (Oxford, 1949), 164–5, and Wellender, 144–51. 17 The most recent discussions are Haines, ‘Edwardus redivivus’, 65–86; idem, Death of a King: An Account of the Supposed Escape and Afterlife of Edward II, King of England, Lord of Ireland, Duke of Aquitaine (Lancaster, 2001); idem, King Edward II: His Life, his Reign, and its Aftermath 1284–1330 (2003), 219–38; P. Doherty, Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II (2003), 113–215; I. Mortimer, The Greatest Traitor: The Life of Sir Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March, Ruler of England, 1327–1330 (2003), 244–64. There are also an historical novel by P. Doherty, The Death of a King: A Mediaeval Mystery Story (1985), and an account by a local historian, Reginald Perry, Edward the Second: Suddenly at Berkeley (Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucs., 1988). 18 N. Saul, Richard II (1997), 427. 19 C.T. Wood, ‘Where is John the Posthumous? or Mahaut of Artois settles her Royal Debts’, in Documenting the Past: Essays in Medieval History presented to George Peddy Cuttino, ed. J.S. Hamilton and P.J. Bradley (Woodbridge, 1989), 99–117. 20 A Dominican friar, John of Stoke, of the order’s house at Warwick, had plotted to free Edward II while he was still held at Kenilworth: SC 1/29/64; CPR 1327–30, 99. This plot presumably explains the former king’s transfer to the greater security of Berkeley in early April. John of Stoke was probably an accomplice of the brothers, Thomas (another Dominican friar) and Stephen Dunheved, who also came from Warwickshire, and were already suspected of plotting before the end of March 1327. The plot, which nearly succeeded in July, was led by the Dunheveds, who on this occasion were assisted by men from the Gloucestershire and Worcestershire areas. T.F. Tout, ‘The Captivity and Death of Edward of Caernarfon’, in The Collected Papers of Thomas Frederick Tout, iii (Manchester, 1934), 145–90, is the classic account of Edward II’s imprisonment and of the various attempts to free him. It may now be supplemented by the works by Haines, Doherty and Mortimer cited in note 17 above.

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Mortimer in mid-September of yet another plot to free Edward II, this time led by Rhys ap Gruffudd, a former Welsh ally of Edward II, this proved to be the former king’s death warrant: within days he was dead.21 The rumours of Edward II’s survival persisted to such an extent that in September 1330 the pope wrote to Edward III and to Isabella expressing amazement that anyone could believe ‘that he, for whom solemn funerals had been made, could still be alive’.22 The regime of Roger Mortimer had, however, unscrupulously exploited and spread the rumours to flush out possible enemies. In March 1330 Edward II’s half-brother Edmund, earl of Kent was deceived into believing that Edward was alive at Corfe, went in search of him and met only his own death.23 But this is not the end of the story, since there are two separate pieces of evidence which show that in the mid to late 1330s someone claiming to be Edward II was travelling around Europe. Although the two are at first sight unrelated, it will be argued below that they are in fact very closely connected. The first is contained in the records of the royal household which report that in September 1338 a man named William le Galeys or le Waleys was ‘arrested’ at Köln in Germany after apparently declaring that he was Edward II, and was then escorted to Koblenz where Edward III was meeting the emperor, Ludwig IV.24 The other evidence is an undated letter addressed to Edward III by a papal notary named Manuel Fieschi. In the letter Fieschi tells of a meeting with a man who had identified himself as Edward II, and who had then made a confession in which he told Fieschi a long and circumstantial tale. According to the confession, Edward II had escaped from Berkeley castle with a servant, after killing a sleeping doorkeeper whose body was later buried as if it were his; Edward had gone to Corfe and with his servant had then crossed to Ireland, where he had spent nine months. We are not told what Edward did in Ireland, where he went or if he met anyone. Then, fearing that he would be recognised, he took the habit of a hermit and returned to England, where he arrived at the port of Sandwich. Still dressed as a hermit, he crossed to Sluys in Flanders. From there he went to Normandy, and then to many other places. Having travelled through the Languedoc, he came to Avignon, where he gave a florin to one of the pope’s servants to take a letter to Pope John XXII. The pope summoned him and kept him honourably and in secret at Avignon for fifteen days. Finally, ‘after various discussions, and all things considered’, the pope gave Edward permission to leave. Edward then went to Paris, from there to the duchy of Brabant in the Low Countries, and to Köln, where he visited the shrine of the Three Kings ‘for the purposes of devotion’. He crossed Germany to Milan in Lombardy and entered a hermitage belonging to the castle of ‘Milasco’, where he stayed for two and half years. When this castle was overrun by war, Edward moved to another hermitage, in

21 22

Tout, ‘Captivity and Death’, 165–6, 185–9. For the widespread rumours of Edward II’s escape and survival which persisted long after 1327 see Tout, ‘Captivity and Death’, 172–3; Cuttino and Lynam, ‘Where is Edward II?’, 522–44; Haines, ‘Edwardus Redivivus’, 65–86; and the works cited in note 17 above. 23 For the latest account of this episode, see Haines, King Edward II, 211–12, 219–20. 24 Cuttino and Lynam, ‘Where is Edward II?’, 530, n. 43, citing the wardrobe book for 1338–1340, E 36/203, 178, 179 (The Wardrobe Book of William de Norwell: 12 July 1338 to 27 May 1340, ed. M. Lyon, B. Lyon, H.S. Lucas and J. de Sturler (Brussels, 1983)). For the references to William le Waleys, see 212, 214. These references were originally discovered by Dr Pierre Chaplais. For the meetings between Edward III and the emperor, see E. Baluze, Vitae Paparum Avenionensium, new edn, ed. G. Mollat, ii (Paris, 1927), 303–6; Knighton’s Chronicle, 1337–1396, ed. G.H. Martin (Oxford, 1995), 9–10: they sat side by side on thrones set up in the marketplace of Koblenz; the emperor declared Philip VI to have forfeited the throne of France, swore to aid Edward against Philip and made him his deputy.

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or connected with the castle of Cecima in the diocese of Pavia in Lombardy, and was in this hermitage for about two more years, ‘always the recluse, doing penance’, and praying to God for Edward III and other sinners.25 A distinguished French scholar, Alexandre Germain, who was a pupil of Michelet in Paris, found the letter in the 1870s. In 1838 he had been appointed as the first professor of history in the newly created faculty of letters at the University of Montpellier; he became dean of the faculty in 1861 and remained so until his retirement in 1881. Germain published many works based on the extensive medieval records preserved in the Archives départementales de l’Hérault and in the municipal archives at Montpellier.26 In the 1870s he was examining a mid-fourteenth-century register of documents belonging to the diocese of Maguelone, of which Montpellier formed a part, when he found the letter from Manuel Fieschi to Edward III. The document is preserved in the middle of an unrelated collection of charters concerning the bishop’s property rights in the small town of Cournonterral, to the south-west of Montpellier.27 Just how the document, which is otherwise entirely unknown, had reached Montpellier is uncertain.28 The clerk who was compiling the

25

Archives départementales de l’Hérault, ser. G 1123/ fol. 86r (Cartulaire de Maguelone, Register A) (in Cuttino and Lynam, ‘Where is Edward II?’, Appendix I, p. 537, the reference is wrongly given as GM 23). The extremes of possible dating are between 1329 and 1343, when Fieschi gave up his post at the papal curia and became bishop of Vercelli in north-east Italy. As will be argued below, a date between about 1336 and 1338 seems more likely. 26 Born Paris 14 Dec. 1809; died Montpellier 26 Jan. 1887. For his career and publications see Dictionnaire de Biographie Française, ed. M. Prevost, R. d’Amat, H. Tribout de Morembert, v (Paris, 1982), cols 1307–8. It is important to emphasise Germain’s significance as a scholar, since one modern commentator has described him rather dismissively as ‘an archivist named Germain’ (Fryde, Tyranny and Fall, 203, 295). 27 The Register covers six volumes, A to F: Series G, 1123–1128, followed by a contemporary index volume, Register G (Series G, 1129). Register A is a large, bound parchment volume, clearly written in a consistent hand or hands. According to Répertoire numérique des archives départementales antérieures à 1790, Hérault, archives ecclésiastiques, ser. G, clergé séculier, ed. M. Gouron (Montpellier, 1970), Register A was begun by Bishop Jean de Verdale of Maguelone (1339–52) and finished by Bishop Gaucelm de Deaux (1367–73). The Inventaire of the records of the diocese of Maguelone says that the Cartulary was started under Jean de Verdale and finished in six ‘recueils’ under Gaucelm de Deaux. It could be then that the whole of Register A was composed under Verdale, since the latest document is from the 1350s (1359 [document 247] is the latest date; there is one from 1351 and possibly one from 1352). The document from 1387 at the end of the volume is a later addition. All the others come from earlier and few are from the 1340s. The first document in the volume (fol. 1r) is dated 1293 and is headed Libertates Ville Nove. On fol. 3 there is some material written in a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century hand. On fol. 4r. are some apparent dedications: ‘A Monseigneur le Marquis de Louvoys ministre et secretaire d’Estat’; ‘A Monseigneur’; ‘Monseigneur Lafon premier duc et pair de France A La Cour’. The register proper begins on what would have been fol. 5, but the foliation starts again from fol. 1. The previous four folios were evidently blank and were therefore filled in by various persons at a later date. Fol. 1 is headed: ‘In isto cartulario continetur recogniciones recepte per reverendum in Christo patrem dominum A. dei gratia Episcopum Magalon a personis et nobilibus infrascriptis suis et Ecclesie predicte vassallis’. The documents that follow all appear to be recognitions of obligations or grants of property by lay vassals of the bishops of Maguelone. Throughout the volume documents are dated both by the year of grace and by the name of the French king then reigning. The range of French kings noted is from Louis VII to John II (one example). Sometimes in the fourteenth century the name of the reigning pope is also given. The seat of the diocese was at Maguelone, on a sand-spit overlooking the Mediterranean in one direction and a large fresh-water lagoon on the other. Here it was reasonably secure from outside attack. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Maguelone was coming under increasing pressure from the French monarchy, through its seneschals at Beaucaire and Nîmes; the important trading centre of Montpellier, some miles from Maguelone, was under the control of the kingdom of Aragon from 1204 until its acquisition by France in 1349. When the seat of the diocese moved to Montpellier in 1536, the twelfth-century basilica of Maguelone ceased to be a cathedral and is now an intact but empty shell. 28 Copies of the letter could have been circulating at the papal curia at Avignon, which was near

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register was evidently intrigued by the extraordinary story told in the letter and copied it along with more routine material. However, the clerk later added the single word, ‘vacat’ (‘it is vacant’, i.e. ‘it is cancelled’), in the top right-hand corner of the transcript, and the contemporary index volume to the registers of the diocese of Maguelone omits the Fieschi letter altogether.29 Alexandre Germain communicated his discovery to the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres in Paris on 21 September 1877 (by coincidence or perhaps design, the 550th anniversary of Edward II’s death), and published it in Montpellier in the following year.30 The document first became known in England in 1880 and has been republished and discussed on a number of occasions since.31 Until the spring of 2003, the latest treatments of the letter were the papers published by George Cuttino and Thomas P. Lynam in 1978 and by Roy Haines in 1997, and a short book by Haines published in 2001. However a large amount of new material on Edward II and his fate has recently appeared, in the books by Paul Doherty and Ian

Maguelone and with which its bishops had close connections. Pope Urban V’s stay of two months in Maguelone, starting on 9 Jan. 1367, at the time when the newly appointed bishop, Gaucelm de Deaux (who was also papal treasurer), was overseeing the completion of Register A, offers one possible explanation of the Fieschi letter’s appearance in Maguelone: A. Germain, Maguelone sous ses évêques et ses chanoines (Montpellier, 1869), 139. 29 There is a photograph of the document in Mortimer, The Greatest Traitor, at 188–9. The photograph does not however show the entire width of the folio, thereby omitting ‘vacat’. The text of the Fieschi letter is written in its entirety on one side of G 1123, Register A, folio 86r. The hand is no different from that of the documents entered before and after. There is nothing to suggest the document was added after the completion of the register in a previously blank space, or that it could be a clever modern forgery. Blank folios are very rare in the register. The ink is pale brown in colour and may have faded slightly over time. The folio containing the letter has a fold in it where the folio has clearly been bent over at some past time. There is nothing in the immediate appearance of the document to draw attention to it, apart from the lack of a date, which is usually the case in this register only with very early documents. The fourteenth-century documents always have a date in terms of the incarnation and also give the name of the ruling king of France (though not the year of his reign). The document is not part of any chronological sequence which would help to date it; it has nothing to do with the documents before and after; it is the only document in the Register (really a cartulary) which does not have something to do with the secular business of the diocese of Maguelone. There is none of the business one would expect in a bishop’s register of the usual kind. The Fieschi letter, document 120 on folio 86r, is preceded and followed by documents relating to Cournonterral: 119 (1264), 121 (1299), 122 (1317), 124 (1286), 125 (1315). These documents are all typical of the kind of material elsewhere in the cartulary. No. 120 is entirely untypical (except for being in Latin), since it is a document of outside origin, it is undated, and there is no indication where it was drawn up. The original documents which were transcribed into the six volumes of the Register are no longer extant, removing the possibility that the Fieschi letter in the form in which it reached Maguelone might still be available for study. Large-scale destruction of ecclesiastical archives occurred at Montpellier in 1566 and later, and again in 1621and 1623: Répertoire numérique des archives . . . Hérault, ed. Gouron, 1. 30 The document was published by the local learned society, the Société Archéologique de Montpellier, in 1878 as ‘Lettre de Manuel Fiesque concernant les dernières années du roi d’Angleterre Edouard II’, and republished in Mémoires de la Société Archéologique de Montpellier 7 (1881), 109–27. For a transcription of the Latin text of the letter and a good translation, see Cuttino and Lynam, ‘Where is Edward II?’, 537–8 and 526–7. This was not Germain’s first excursion into English history: in 1858 he had published a paper based on documents he had found in the municipal archives of Montpellier, and which related to the French plan to invade England in 1359 in order to free John II from captivity: ‘Projet de descente en Angleterre concerté entre le gouvernment français et le roi de Danemark Valdemar III, pour la délivrance du roi Jean’, Mémoires de la Société Archéologique de Montpellier, 1858 (the copy I have seen is a separately paginated extract from the journal for 1858). 31 J.T. Best, ‘Where did Edward the Second Die?’, Macmillan’s Magazine 41 (March 1880), 393–4; idem, ‘Where did Edward II Die?’, with a reply by J.H. Cooke, Notes and Queries 62 (13 and 20 Nov., 18 Dec. 1880), 381–3, 401–3, 489–90. The document was discussed by Stubbs in Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II (RS 76, 1883), ii. cvi–cviii, and by Tout, ‘Captivity and Death’, 179.

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Mortimer on Queen Isabella and on Roger Mortimer, and, most recently, in Roy Haines’ detailed study of Edward II.32 Opinions on the Fieschi letter have varied. Neither Stubbs nor Tout was convinced by the story of Edward II’s survival but did not offer any definitive explanation of the letter’s purpose and significance. Cuttino was impressed by the evidence, as he saw it, that Edward II did not die in 1327 and was not buried at Gloucester, while also expressing strong reservations about many of the Italian aspects of the story. He ended his classic paper with the unanswered question: ‘Where is Edward II?’33 Doherty and Mortimer also argue that Edward II did escape death in 1327. Mortimer believes that the story told in the letter was genuine, and that the Genoese used the letter as a means of forcing the English crown to pay outstanding debts; Doherty thinks it was a clever forgery put together by Manuel Fieschi, with the intention of embarrassing or even blackmailing Edward III. On the other hand Haines (like myself) does not believe that Edward II survived after 1327. He suggests that the letter was a forgery, to which the name of Manuel Fieschi was attached to give it plausibility, that its purpose was to foster a reputation of sanctity on behalf of the former king, and that Edward III, to whom the letter was nominally addressed, never received it. None the less, as we shall see, there is plenty still to be said on the subject.34 The Fieschi letter took longer to become known in Italy. The first reference to it in print was in a paper published in April 1901 by Count Costantino Nigra, a former diplomat of the kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont and a member of the Italian Senate, who had spent a considerable part of his service in Paris.35 This probably explains how he came to know of Germain’s publication of the document in 1878.36 While not dismissing the authenticity of the Fieschi letter out of hand, and drawing attention to the political importance and connections of the Fieschi family, he was none the less sceptical. Nigra however added to Germain’s research by identifying the two castles in which the supposed Edward II had stayed as Melazzo (near Acqui Terme, north of Genoa) and Cecima south of Voghera in the diocese of Tortona.37 In the 32 33

See note 17 above. Cuttino and Lynam, ‘Where is Edward II?’, 522–43. For a summary of the views of Stubbs and Tout see ibid., 527–8. 34 Mortimer, The Greatest Traitor, 251–63 (esp. 259–63), 301–3; Doherty, Isabella, 185–215 (esp. 207–13); Haines, ‘Edwardus redivivus’, 63–86 (esp. 65,79–80); idem, King Edward II, 220–38. 35 C. Nigra, ‘Uno degli Edoardi in Italia. Favola o Storia?’, Nuova Antologia: Rivista Lettere Scienze 92, ser. 4, fasc. for 1 April 1901, 403–25. 36 Nigra (1828–1907) was first a soldier, and then a prominent diplomat in the service of Sardinia-Piedmont. He played a very important role in Franco-Italian relations from 1855, and was in Paris continuously from 1861 until the end of 1876, when he was moved to St Petersburg. He would not therefore have been in Paris when Germain first publicly announced his discovery of the Fieschi letter in 1877. However he was also a considerable scholar in his own right (including published work in the field of Celtic studies), and so was probably familiar with the cultural scene in Paris during and after his time in France: A. Horne, The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune, 1870–71 (1965), 57; Enciclopedia Italiana (reprint of the 1934 edn, Rome, 1951), xxiv. 818–19. 37 Nigra, ‘Uno degli Edoardi’, 413–15, 419–25. In relation to Melazzo, Nigra noted that the owners had recently erected two plaques recording the supposed stay of Edward II in the castle, but remarked that there was no local tradition of such a stay and that the evidence was derived from Germain’s paper on the Fieschi letter: p. 413, n. 1. Nigra had visited Melazzo in 1890 in the course of his researches and had presumably told the owners about Germain’s paper (Nigra, 414). The castle of Melazzo still exists as a private residence. The castle of Cecima no longer exists, apart from the street name, Via Castello, and some overgrown ruins on the top of the hill on which Cecima stands. There was however a castle there in the fourteenth century. Cecima came under the secular lordship of the diocese of Pavia and the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the diocese of Tortona: Sangiuliani, Cecima, 37, 39; idem, Dell’Abazia S.Alberto di Butrio (Milan, 1865), 245–6.

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same year that Nigra’s paper appeared, a priest of the cathedral of Tortona, Canon Vincenzo Lege, published a history of the abbey of Sant’Alberto di Butrio, a short distance from Cecima, in which he also referred to the Fieschi letter and tentatively suggested that Edward II’s second place of refuge was this abbey rather than Cecima.38 In his history of Cecima, published in 1906, Count Antonio Cavagna Sangiuliani accepted this identification of Sant’Alberto.39 The work of Nigra and Lege was then developed by another Italian scholar, Anna Benedetti, who published a paper in 1924 in which she sought to prove not only that the exiled Edward II had been at the abbey of Sant’Alberto di Butrio, but that he had also been buried there, before finally being transferred to his resting place at Gloucester.40 Since the publication of the conclusions of Benedetti it has become accepted historical fact in Italy that Edward II was indeed in the country. There is a plaque in the main entrance hall of the castello at Melazzo recording his ‘presence’ there from 1330 to 1333;41 Sant’Alberto di Butrio displays an empty medieval tomb as that of the English king.42

38

V. Lege, Sant’Alberto Abate e il suo culto (reprinted from Atti dell’Accademia Tortonese Leone XIII (Tortona, 1901), ibid., 83–6). Lege however makes it clear that his source was Nigra’s paper and not any local tradition. Nigra’s work came to his notice while his own was in the press. It appears then that in the late nineteenth century Germain’s paper was becoming known in the areas of northern Italy associated with the Edward II story. The abbey of Sant’Alberto was founded in the eleventh century and had a continuous existence until its suppression in the early nineteenth century. Since the beginning of the twentieth century a religious community has again occupied the monastery, which is visited for Sunday mass by large numbers of people from the nearby town of Pontenizza. There is a short history of the abbey by a member of the present community, D. Sparpaglione, FDP, Una Gemma d’Oltrepo: S. Alberto di Butrio: Storia, Arte, Fede (4th edn, Tortona, 1990). 39 Sangiuliani, Cecima, 36–8. 40 A. Benedetti, Edoardo II d’Inghilterra all’Abbazia di S. Alberto di Butrio (Palermo, 1924). She had visited the abbey in 1919. She also published a study of the French poem supposedly composed by Edward II after his deposition: ‘Una canzone francese di Edoardo II d’Inghilterra’, Nuova studi medievali, i, part 2 (1923), 283f. This poem is almost certainly spurious: for the latest comment see C. Valente, ‘The “Lament of Edward II”: Religious Lyric, Political Propaganda’, Speculum 77 (2002), 422–39. 41 The former website (now removed) for the castle of Melazzo gave the same information. Melazzo is privately owned and not normally open to visitors. There is however a short history of the castle which refers to the Fieschi letter and contains a photograph of the memorial plaque: C. Violono, Melazzo nella Storia (Melazzo, 1995), 70–2. In the first half of the fourteenth century the castle may have been in the possession of the bishops of Acqui (ibid., 22) but there is insufficient detail to make this clear. 42 For details of the treatment of the ‘Edward II’ story in modern works on the abbey see Sparpaglione, Una Gemma d’Oltrepo (Barbati Orione Editore, 1990), 57–65, 82–3 (Cuttino and Lynam, ‘Where is Edward II?’, 531–2, cited the third edition, 1973). There is also an earlier and longer edition with the same title, published in Tortona (no date). In this version the material relating to ‘Edward II’ appears at 131–54, 186–7. The text is substantially the same as that in the later editions, but does not, for example, include a reference to Sparpaglione’s 1958 conversation with the 88-year-old man, Zerba Stefano. The text on the plaque above the tomb of ‘Edward II’ and a photograph of the tomb appear in Cuttino and Lynam, ‘Where is Edward II?’, 531 and figure 3. The most recent book about the abbey of Sant’Alberto is F. Bernini, La Badia di S. Alberto di Butrio tra Storia, Arte e Fede (Edizioni Eremo di S. Alberto, Pontenizza, 1993): the section dealing with Edward II appears at pp. 165–76. Bernini’s account adds nothing of significance, except that the tomb now displayed as that of Edward II was opened in 1900 by a local parish priest, Paolo Cassola, when only a portion of a cranium was found (Bernini, 169, citing Benedetti, Edoardo II, 23–4). If the date is correct, this was another consequence of the growing knowledge locally of the Fieschi letter at that time. Anna Benedetti met Cassola when she visited Butrio in 1919; Cassola wrote to her in May 1923 about the opening of the tomb, without seemingly giving a date for when this occurred (Benedetti, Edoardo II, 23–4). The investigation of the tomb evidently took place at or about the same time as the opening of that of the abbey’s founder, Sant’Alberto, on 9 July 1900. This was also when the revival of the abbey as a religious house was being seriously proposed: Sparpaglione Una Gemma d’Oltrepo (3rd and 4th editions), 67–8.

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The evidence for Edward II’s presence at Melazzo, and at Cecima or Sant’Alberto, is however questionable. Much of the material that Benedetti put forward to prove her thesis in relation to the tomb at Sant’Alberto was shown by Cuttino and Lynam to be entirely wrong.43 The available evidence also suggests that the tradition that Edward II was at Sant’Alberto goes back no further than the decade between 1890, when Costantino Nigra visited the castle of Melazzo, and 1901, when he published his findings and when the alleged tomb of Edward II was first examined.44 Don Domenico Sparpaglione’s conversation in 1958 with an 88-year-old man, Zerba Stefano, whose grandfather allegedly ‘well before 1900, had spoken of an English king who had taken refuge in the hermitage’, does not carry conviction.45 Sparpaglione himself asks whether there was any local tradition of an English king having been buried at Sant’Alberto di Butrio and concludes emphatically that no document written before 1901 and the publication of Nigra’s paper drawing attention to the Fieschi letter makes any such reference.46 The history of the abbey of Sant’Alberto, which was published in 1865 by Count Antonio Cavagni Sangiuliani, before Alexandre Germain revealed the Fieschi letter, has no mention of Edward II. Neither is there any reference in the second edition of Sangiuliani’s book published in 1890.47 If there were any medieval tradition of an exiled king or of an unusual holy man living and perhaps dying at Sant’Alberto di Butrio, some trace of it should appear in the history of the abbey. At the very least, one would expect the fourteenth-century monks of Sant’Alberto to turn a healthy profit from pilgrims, if they possessed the body or other relics of such a distinguished stranger, just as, for example, the monks of Eu in Normandy did after the death there of Laurence O’Toole, archbishop of Dublin, in 1180.48 One may go even further and argue that, while it is possible to accept the identification of Melazzo and Cecima with the places named in the Fieschi letter, the modern introduction of Sant’Alberto di Butrio into the story is ill-founded and best discarded altogether. So what about the letter itself? The story it tells is plausible, but ultimately unbelievable. It is plausible in that the author of the letter, Manuel Fieschi, was a member of an important family, prominent in the politics of Genoa and with territorial interests in Lombardy and Piedmont.49 The Fieschi were however especially prominent in the Church, providing two thirteenth-century popes (Innocent IV and Adrian V), 43

Cuttino and Lynam, ‘Where is Edward II?’, 531–7. Since their work is readily available, there is no need to summarise their arguments. 44 See notes 37 and 42 above. 45 Cuttino and Lynam, ‘Where is Edward II?’, 531, citing Sparpaglione, Una Gemma d’Oltrepo (3rd and 4th editions), 62. ‘Well before 1900’ could apply just as easily to the knowledge of Germain’s article that was beginning to circulate from 1890. 46 Sparpaglione, Una Gemma d’Oltrepo (3rd and 4th editions), 62–3. 47 Sangiuliani, Dell’Abazia S.Alberto di Butrio (Milan, 1865; 2nd edn, 1890). Sangiuliani knew of the Edward II legend and of the suggested connection with Sant’Alberto by 1906 when he published his history of Cecima, but only through his reading of Nigra’s 1901 paper and Lege’s 1901 history of the abbey: Sangiuliani, Cecima, 32–8. 48 If a portion of a cranium really was discovered when the tomb ascribed to Edward II was opened in 1900, this would also tell against the belief that Edward II had ever lain in the tomb. A piece of bone would scarcely have been left behind when the body was later transferred to Gloucester Abbey: Benedetti, Edoardo II, 23–4 (cited by Bernini, La Badia, 169). 49 The Fieschi were counts of Lavagna in Liguria; they also appear to have had influence or control over places such as Voghera and Vercelli, both of which figure in the story of the Fieschi letter. On the history of the Fieschi family see F. Federici, Della Famiglia Fiesca Trattato (Genoa, n.d. but 1645), 7–9; G. Petti Balbi, I “Conti” e la “Contea” di Lavagna (Genoa, 1984); B. Bernabo, ‘I Fieschi e la Val di Vara’, and M. Macconi, ‘I Fieschi e l’Impero nel XIV e XV secolo’, in I Fieschi tra Medioeve ed Età Moderna: Atti del ciclo di conferenze tenute in occasione del 450 anniversario della Congiura dei Fieschi, ed. D.

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numerous cardinals and a great many bishops.50 Manuel himself was a papal notary at Avignon from 1329 to 1343, a collector of papal taxes in Lombardy, in the same area as Melazzo and Cecima, and bishop of Vercelli from 1343 until his death in 1348;51 in the 1330s a relative of his, Percival Fieschi, was bishop of Tortona, the diocese in which Cecima and Sant’Alberto were situated;52 his uncle, Cardinal Luke Fieschi, had been a papal envoy in England in 1317–18;53 Manuel Fieschi held a number of benefices in the English church between 1329 and 1343 (exactly the period for which he was a papal notary);54 and he was also distantly related to the English royal house.55 Another of Manuel’s relatives, Nicolino Fieschi, was a confidential agent of Edward III in his dealings with the city of Genoa and with the papacy, and was also a member of Edward’s council from April 1336.56 So important was he, that on 13 April 1340 the French sent a small force across the Rhône to Avignon, captured Nicolino and one of his sons in their lodgings, and held them in French territory until the following June.57 The episode caused a major scandal, which is referred to in a second Fieschi-related document in the register of the diocese of Maguelone, dated 14 May 1340.58 Calacgno (Genoa, 1999). Manuel Fieschi was the son of Andrea, count of Lavagna, and nephew of Cardinal Luke Fieschi: Haines, ‘Edwardus redivivus’, 68. 50 Federici, Della Famiglia Fiesca Trattato, 49–52; Nigra, ‘Uno degli Edoardi’, 418–20. Bernabo, ‘I Fieschi e la Val di Vara’, passim. 51 For Manuel’s career and family connections see Cuttino and Lynam, ‘Where is Edward II?’, 529–30, 540–2; Germain, Maguelone, 10–11, 13; Nigra, ‘Uno degli Edoardi’, 418–20; B. Guillemain, La cour pontificale d’Avignon (1309–1376) (Paris, 1962), 314; Haines, ‘Edwardus redivivus’, 68. The diocese of Vercelli appears to have been a Fieschi preserve for much of the fourteenth century: Federici, Della Famiglia Fiesca Trattato, 52. Manuel’s successor was Giovanni Fieschi, who was bishop from 1349 until his death in Rome in 1380: Libro delle investiture del vescovo di Vercelli Giovanni Fieschi (1349–50), Biblioteca della Società Storica Subaplina, LXXIII, ii, ed. Domenico Arnaldi (Turin, 1934), 249–51. Several other members of Giovanni’s family are mentioned in this volume (254–62). 52 Bernini, La Badia, 167–8. 53 J.R.S. Phillips, Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke 1307–1324 (Oxford, 1972), esp. chs 4, 5. On Luke’s career see Federici, Della Famiglia Fiesca Trattato, 38–9; Guillemain, La cour pontificale d’Avignon, 185, 212, 219; and especially the detailed account in Z. Hledková, Raccolta Praghese di Scritti di Luca Fieschi (Charles University, Prague, 1985). 54 For details see Cuttino and Lynam, ‘Where is Edward II?’, 529–30, 539–42. 55 Ibid., 529, 544. Manuel was Edward II’s third cousin once removed. 56 There is a lot of information on Nicolino, who, although he was married and had two sons, Gabriel and Anthony, was commonly known as ‘the cardinal of Genoa’ (even in papal records: e.g. Codex Vaticanus Latinus 10883, fol. 221, Avignon, 13 Jan. 1331, at the start of the arbitration by the pope between Genoa and king of Cyprus, in which he was a proctor on behalf of Genoa). Officially Nicolino’s duties on behalf of Edward III involved such matters as the hiring of shipping to assist Edward in transporting and defending his forces in the Low Countries in the late 1330s. He was active from at least October 1336 in this role, which also involved preventing the French from gaining access to the same resources to use against England’s interests. It is clear from the way he is described in the English records that Nicolino’s real role was often that of a royal agent dealing with delicate affairs of state. See CPR 1334–8, 247; Foedera, II, ii. 941, 946–8, 1058, 1066, 1068, 1104, 1107. There is some interesting material on Nicolino in J. Sumption, Trial by Battle: The Hundred Years War, i (1990), 163, 249, 319–20, 437–8, 444. He is also discussed in Mortimer, The Greatest Traitor, 261, 263, 303, where he is however wrongly described as a cardinal, and in Haines, ‘Edwardus redivivus’, 68–9. Nicolino was not the first member of his family to be a member of the royal council in England. In August 1315 his relative Charles Fieschi had been appointed by Edward II: Foedera, II, ii. 274. It is not clear what services Edward II expected from his ‘cousin’. Genoa however provided invaluable financial services to the English crown for much of Edward II’s reign through the activities of the merchant and banker, Antonio Pessagno: see N. Fryde, ‘Antonio Pessagno of Genoa, King’s Merchant of Edward II of England’, in Studi in Memoria di Federigo Melis, ii (Naples, 1978). 57 See Sumption, Trial by Battle, 319–20; Baluze, Vitae Paparum Avenionensium, i. 205–6, 213–14. 58 Pope Benedict XII was particularly angry because the incident occurred on the night of Maundy Thursday and on 17 April issued a bull against those who had captured Nicolino and thrown him into

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The story in the Fieschi letter is also plausible in that many of the circumstantial details of Edward II’s capture and imprisonment in 1326–7 (which are omitted from the summary above) can be confirmed from other sources, and in that several genuine plots to free Edward II from captivity are already known, so that one more might appear a distinct possibility. Yet the story as told by Fieschi has obvious flaws. Edward II’s alleged escape from Berkeley past a doorkeeper, who is conveniently asleep at the very time when two knights have just arrived to kill him, defies credibility. It is very reminiscent of the stories told in the Acts of the Apostles of the miraculous release from prison of St Paul and Silas, and of St Peter; it is reminiscent, more specifically, of the chronicler Robert of Reading’s account of the escape of Roger Mortimer of Wigmore from the Tower of London in August 1323, which uses the same literary device.59 One might also ask how the real Edward II would have travelled to places like Paris and Avignon where he would have been in danger of being recognised, and then reveal himself only to the pope at the moment he chose; and where would a poor travelling hermit get a gold florin with which to tip the pope’s servant. And so on and so forth. Despite these objections (and one could pick out more), the Fieschi letter itself is almost certainly genuine. There is little doubt that Manuel Fieschi did meet someone who either claimed to be or thought he was Edward II. One explanation is that Fieschi could have encountered ‘Edward II’ by chance while in Italy on official business. Despite his links with England and with Edward himself, it is unlikely however that Fieschi had any firsthand knowledge of the former king’s true appearance, since he had probably never been in England and would never have met the real Edward II.60 Manuel Fieschi could then have written down the confession of the alleged Edward II and sent it to Edward III with a covering letter, saying in effect ‘I think you had better know the following story’.61 Edward III already knew that his father had been murdered in 1327 and by whom, but would have been curious to know more and replied, again saying in effect, ‘I should like to meet the impostor; send him to me by return. By the way, I shall be in Germany, so send him there.’ This is one explanation of the origins of the Fieschi letter, but there is another more likely answer, one which involves the papal curia, Manuel Fieschi and

prison: Baluze, Vitae Paparum Avenionensium, III (Documents), 483–6. The document, which is preserved in the second volume of the register containing Manuel Fieschi’s letter, records the reaction at Montpellier to the seizure of Nicolino: Cartulaire de Maguelone, Register B, G 1124, no. 429, fols 54v–55r. Germain noted the existence of this additional Fieschi document in his paper on the Fieschi letter: Germain, p. 11, n. 2. 59 Acts 16, 22–8 (St Paul and Silas, who did not take advantage of the opportunity to escape); Acts 12, 6–11 (St Peter). Robert of Reading used the story of the escape of St Peter from Herod’s prison (the words in italics are quoted from Acts): ‘The king sent his detestable cruel officials to the Tower of London, intending to bring forth the younger Roger after a few days to the people and condemn him to a violent death. And when the king would have brought him forth, behold on the night of St Peter ad Vincula, the Holy Ghost came . . . and touching Roger’s heart raised him up, saying, ‘Arise up quickly and follow me’. And Roger, leaving, followed him, which was done by Christ; thus it was not that he thought he saw a vision. When they were past the first and second ward they came to the river Thames’: A. Gransden, Historical Writing In England, ii, c.1307 to the Early Sixteenth Century (1982), 20, citing Flores, iii. 217. 60 The benefices he was given in England did not involve the ‘cure of souls’ and in practice could be held in absentia. The letters of attorney he was granted from time to time by the English crown (e.g. 8 June 1335, CPR 1334–8, 116) probably imply that he was already out of England rather than that he was about to leave the country. 61 Some kind of covering letter would have been necessary, since the ‘Fieschi letter’ is not strictly a letter in itself but more in the nature of a notarial instrument (although not, strictly speaking, that either). Any covering letter would presumably have been dated.

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Nicolino Fieschi, as well as Edward III himself. Assuming that the impostor really did visit Avignon on his travels, as recorded in the letter, the conclusion that he was not the real Edward II could have been reached very quickly. There were too many people at the papal curia or in its vicinity who had been papal envoys to England and had known Edward II personally, and would readily have determined whether the traveller was genuine or not. These included Manuel Fieschi’s uncle, Cardinal Luke Fieschi, who was still alive at Avignon until 1336; Cardinal Gaucelin d’Eauze, the other envoy to England in 1317–18, who was alive until 1348;62 Guillaume de Laudun, OP, archbishop of Vienne (1321–7) and later archbishop of Toulouse (1327–45), and possibly Hugh, the bishop of Orange, who together with Guillaume had made several visits to England between late 1324 and January 1327 in a last desperate attempt at mediation.63 Since the pope had already made it clear in his letters to Edward III and Isabella in September 1330 that he did not believe Edward II was still alive, he would have needed little persuading that his strange visitor was an impostor, and so have sent him on his way. However by the time the impostor’s wanderings brought him to northern Italy his claims had became so embarrassing both to the church and potentially to the legitimacy of Edward III as king of England,64 that he was sent for safe custody first to Melazzo and then to Cecima. Both places were under the control of the local bishop and within the area of influence of the Fieschi family, who were connected both with the papal curia and with the English royal house, and whose discretion could therefore be relied upon.65 However discreetly the pope and his agents attempted to deal with the situation, at some stage Edward III would have to be informed. It is likely that Manuel Fieschi was directed to go to Italy from Avignon in order to receive the ‘confession’ of the impostor and to put the information into a document which could then be sent to Edward III. Nicolino Fieschi, Manuel’s close relative, could have played a key role in these proceedings.66 Nicolino had been in direct personal contact with Edward III as early as July 1336, when he brought a letter from Genoa to Edward at Perth in Scotland. Fieschi’s official role on this occasion was to seek compensation from the English crown for Hugh Despenser the Younger’s seizure and plundering of a Genoese cargo vessel in the English Channel in 1321. This was a long-running dispute, which Edward III wisely settled by the payment of 8,000 marks in order to ensure future access to Genoese naval resources. Edward III was clearly impressed

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Guillemain, La cour pontificale d’Avignon, 219 (Fieschi), 214, n. 72 (d’Eauze). There is a short account of Gaucelin d’Eauze’s career by G. Mollat in Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie ecclésiastiques, ed. R. Aubert, xx (Paris, 1984), 18. 63 For their missions in England see R.M. Haines, Archbishop John Stratford: Political Revolutionary and Champion of the Liberties of the English Church (Toronto, 1986), 151, 153, 155, 157, 160, 168, 170, 177. On Guillaume de Laudun’s later career as archbishop of Toulouse see La papauté d’Avignon et le Languedoc (1316–1342), ed. M.-H. Vicaire, Cahiers de Fanjeaux 26 (Toulouse, 1991), 152, 212, 219. It is not clear whether the bishop of Orange might still have been alive in the 1330s. 64 If the impostor and his story had become public knowledge, they could have reflected on Edward III’s legitimacy as king of England and so provided the French with an excellent propaganda weapon just as England and France were going to war over the rights of succession to the French monarchy. Although, as Stubbs suggested, the story in the Fieschi letter could conceivably have been a French plot, there is no evidence to suggest that France was involved either in the production of the letter or in its aftermath. 65 For ecclesastical purposes Cecima was in the diocese of Tortona, of which Percival Fieschi was bishop in the 1330s, while it came under the secular lordship of the bishop of Pavia: Bernini, La Badia, 167–8; Sangiuliani, Cecima, 37, 39. It is possible, though not certain, that the castle of Melazzo was under the jurisdiction of the bishop of Acqui: Violono, Melazzo nella Storia, 22. 66 Here I am in agreement with Mortimer, The Greatest Traitor, 261, 263, 303.

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by Nicolino, whom he described in his reply to the Genoese as vir eloquens et industrius.67 However, Nicolino was working for Edward III before this: he was made a member of the royal council on 15 April 1336, which in turn implies that he had already come to the notice of Edward III. Nicolino also acted as Edward III’s proctor at the papal curia from 24 June 1336 until 12 July 1338. While Nicolino was not personally present at Avignon throughout this period, it is likely that at some point he became directly aware of reports circulating in Avignon of ‘Edward II’s’ wanderings. It is even possible that he was personally involved in the choice of Melazzo and later Cecima as places of detention for the impostor, and that he had a direct role both in Manuel Fieschi’s composition of his letter and in its onward transmission to Edward III.68 This would place the date of the Fieschi letter somewhere between the summer of 1336 at one extreme and the summer of 1338 at the other. If the Fieschi letter had some kind of official status as a document produced with the knowledge and approval of the pope, this would also help to explain how a copy of it came to be preserved in Register A of the diocese of Maguelone. Nicolino’s involvement in English affairs probably did not end there. Edward III’s wardrobe book for 1338–40 records in September 1338 that William le Galeys, ‘who asserts that he is the father of the lord king’ and who was recently ‘arrested’ (arestati) at Köln, was taken to meet Edward III at Koblenz by Francis the Lombard, a king’s sergeant. On 18 October a sum of 13s 6d was paid at Antwerp to Francekino Forcet (almost certainly the same man) for three weeks expenses in ‘December’ (sic: probably an error for September), during which he had custody of William le Galeys ‘because he named himself as king of England and the father of the present king’.69 It is most unlikely that William le Galeys had turned up in Köln by coincidence at a time when Edward III happened to be in the vicinity, and then proceeded to make a public demonstration which led to his arrest.70 The word ‘arrested’ in the wardrobe book record should probably be understood as meaning ‘confined’ or ‘in custody’.71 The most likely explanation is that William le Galeys was none other than the pious hermit whose confession was contained in the letter of Manuel Fieschi to Edward III, that he had been brought from Italy specifically in order to meet Edward III and that he had been in the custody all the time of Francis the Lombard, probably acting 67 68

Foedera, II, ii. 941; Fryde, Tyranny and Fall, 49, 243; Mortimer, The Greatest Traitor, 259–60. CPR 1334–38, 247. Nicolino’s account as king’s proctor in the papal curia, for 747 days from 24 June, 10 Ed. III (1336) to 12 July, 12 Ed. III (1338), for expediting the king’s affairs at the curia and elsewhere overseas, is preserved in E 372/184, m. 48 (13 Ed. III). He was owed £44 4s but received only £13 6s 8d at York in Nov. 10 Ed. III (1336). It is just possible, but I think unlikely, as Ian Mortimer suggests, that Nicolino brought with him Manuel Fieschi’s letter as early as July 1336: Mortimer, The Greatest Traitor, 259–60. Nicolino was again (or still) in England on 30 Oct. 1336, when he came into the chancery at York to confirm his letters patent of 16 Oct. in which he stated that he was acting as a special envoy of the city of Genoa in its dealings with Edward III. Earlier, on 6 Oct., Edward III had appointed him as his proctor and envoy to arrange for the hire of galleys and men-at-arms: Foedera, II, ii. 947–8. These were his official functions, but there was plenty of room left for him to engage in more sensitive and confidential activities. 69 Wardrobe Book of Norwell, 212, 214. The reference to Dec. in the second entry is surely a mistake for Sept.: three weeks expenses would scarcely be paid in Oct. for a date two months ahead. The meeting between Edward III and the emperor took place at Koblenz on 3, 4 Sept.: Baluze, Vitae Paparum Avenionensium, ii. 304. 70 This is the way in which both Chaplais and Cuttino and Lynam interpreted the event: Cuttino and Lynam, ‘Where is Edward II?’, 530, n. 43. Cuttino and Lynam did not however pursue the question of William le Galeys and his possible identity. 71 See R.E. Latham, Revised Medieval Latin Word-list (1965), 31. The second wardrobe book reference does use the word ‘custody’. Mortimer also considers that William was not ‘arrested’ in the modern sense of the word: Mortimer, The Greatest Traitor, 260.

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on the orders of Nicolino Fieschi who is known to have been with Edward III at Koblenz.72 William could have been brought overland from northern Italy, but the fact that he first appeared at Köln and then had to be taken south to Koblenz tells against this argument and suggests that he may have come by sea, most probably in one of the Genoese galleys which Nicolino Fieschi was engaged in hiring for Edward III. Nicolino’s kinsman, Nicholas Blank de Fieschi, who was a master of galleys, and had recently been sent to Edward III in England, had evidently caught up with the king instead in the Low Countries. At Koblenz on 6 September 1338 Nicholas was given licence to return home and was freed from all obligations that he had made to Nicolino at Marseilles. Some of those obligations were certainly to do with the hire of shipping, but it is possible that one of them had been to transport William le Galeys by sea from Marseilles to England and then on to Antwerp. From there is would have been a short journey overland first to Köln and then to Koblenz.73 This is all of course hypothetical, but it seems very probable that the appearance of the man claiming to be Edward II at Köln in September 1338 was not a surprise to Edward III. It is also significant that there is nothing in the English records to suggest that the impostor was tried and summarily executed, as one might expect.74 It is known that he was escorted to Antwerp by Francekino Forcet and perhaps taken back in Nicholas Blank’s galley from there to Italy, to end his days.75 At Antwerp on 6 January 1339 Nicolino Fieschi was re-appointed a member of Edward III’s council at an annual fee of £20, which would continue to be paid to his sons Gabriel and Anthony after his death. The letters patent state that the appointment had been made because of the purity of his affection for Edward III and his royal house and the circumspection with which he had carried out royal business.76 It is hard to resist the conclusion that Nicolino’s services to the English crown did not consist only of the hiring of Genoese galleys, however important these were to the English war effort, and that he was centrally involved in the events which led both to the writing and delivery of the Fieschi letter and to the custody and delivery of William le Galeys.77 There remains the question of who William le Galeys was. Ian Mortimer suggests that William was no less than Edward II himself, while Paul Doherty argues for 72 This is also the opinion of Mortimer, The Greatest Traitor, 261, 303. Although Francis Forcet is described as a royal serjeant-at-arms and therefore technically a member of the royal household, this was probably, as Mortimer suggests, to give him status. Forcet may in fact have been an associate of Dino Forcetti, of the Florentine banking company the Bardi, who was also with Edward III at this time and was closely involved in Edward’s credit operations in the Low Countries and Germany: Mortimer, The Greatest Traitor, 303; Wardrobe Book of Norwell, lxxv, 216. Nicolino Fieschi was probably at Antwerp on 24 Sept. when he was authorised to obtain shipping for use by Edward III and at the same time to prevent others (i.e. France) from doing so: CPR 1338–40, 190. 73 Foedera, II, ii. 1058. 74 One important clue as to Edward III’s opinion of William le Galeys is the fact that on 21 Sept. 1338 he attended mass at the conventual church of St Andrew in Antwerp for the soul of Edward II on the anniversary of his father’s death. Masses in memory of Edward II were also celebrated on that date by the Dominicans of Antwerp and by the Carthusians just outside the city: Wardrobe Book of Norwell, 207. Edward III would scarcely have done this if he had any doubt about the real identity of William le Galeys, unless he was being extraordinarily devious. 75 Despite being given licence to depart on 6 Sept., Nicholas Blank was still in Antwerp on 29 Oct.: Wardrobe Book of Norwell, lxv, 275. 76 ‘Cum nuper attendentes affectionis puritatem, quam dilectus et fidelis noster, Nicholinus de Flisco, dictus cardinalis de Janua, ad nos et domum nostram regiam optinuit, necnon ipsius circumspectionem providam, quam nobis in agendis nostris fore credidimus oportunam’: Foedera, II, ii. 1066. 77 Given Nicolino’s value to the English crown, it is hardly surprising that the French went to the trouble of seizing him from Avignon in April 1340. There is nothing to suggest that this episode was in any way connected with William le Galeys.

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William Ockley or Ogle, one of the men accused of Edward II’s murder who had fled England in 1330.78 It is however worth searching for someone named le Galeys who might fit the known evidence, even though ‘le Galeys’ or ‘le Waleys’, and in its various other forms, such as ‘Wallace’ and ‘Walsh’, was a common enough name, meaning simply ‘the Welshman’.79 There is least one plausible candidate. This is William le Walsh, son of William le Walsh (d. 1303) and stepson of Andrew de Beauchamp, who held the manor of Woolstrop just outside Gloucester from the earldom of Pembroke.80 William was a partisan of Roger Damory against the Despensers in the civil war of 1321–22; he appears to have had some connections with Edward II’s wife Queen Isabella,81 and possibly also with the Berkeley family, whose castle nearby was the prison and place of death of Edward II.82 While not of great importance in himself, William was the head of one of those locally well connected ‘gentry’ families who were on the verge of knighthood and performed many of the functions of that rank.83 Anyone living in Gloucester and its vicinity in and around 1327 would certainly have heard the stories and rumours both about the manner of Edward II’s death and about his supposed escape from captivity. William le Walsh would have been no exception, and perhaps better informed than most. But to transport William from the role of an interested observer of events to that of a 78 79

Mortimer, The Greatest Traitor, 260–2; Doherty, Isabella, 213–14. E.g. the Waleys family of Glynde in Sussex and that of Henry le Waleys, alderman and mayor of London under Edward I: see N. Saul, Scenes from Provincial Life: Knightly Families in Sussex 1280–1420 (Oxford, 1986); G.A. Williams, Medieval London: From Commune to Capital (1963). 80 William le Walsh was the stepson of Andrew de Beauchamp who had married William’s mother: Rot. Parl., i. 311. He was a commissioner of array in 1322 and 1324; in 1322 the sheriff of Gloucester included William Walsh in a list of ‘men-at-arms in his bailiwick aged between 16 and 60 who were able in body and could wield arms’; in 1324 the sheriff returned that W. Walsh was one of fourteen men holding lands in his bailiwick who were eligible to become knights (but Saul thinks that W. Walsh managed to evade actually taking up knighthood: N. Saul, Knights and Esquires: The Gloucestershire Gentry in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1981), 27, 31–2, 44–5). Woolstrop in Quedgeley is now on the outskirts of the city of Gloucester. As heir of Robert Pont de l’Arche (d. 1246) and of his son William, William le Walsh held Woolstrop from Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke, whose own manors of Whaddon, Moreton Valence, and Painswick were close at hand. In 1312 and again in 1315 William le Walsh, supported by the earl of Pembroke, petitioned in parliament over a disputed 10s a year service owed to the manor of the Barton, adjacent to Woolstrop and held by Queen Margaret, the widow of Edward I: Rot. Parl., i. 311 (SC 8/145/7245). See also VCH, Gloucestershire, x. 218–19. 81 On his role in 1321–2 see CPR 1321–24, 163–4. Queen Isabella had an interest in Woolstrop, which, as noted above, owed some service to the manor of the Barton, which formed part of her dower. William may have had other connections with the queen, since on 20 Feb. 1325 a certain William le Galeys (with twenty-nine others) was given letters of protection for going overseas on the king’s service with Isabella: CPR 1324–7, 91–2. This may mean that William was with the queen in France and the Low Countries before her invasion of England in Sept. 1327. Although William opposed the Despensers in 1321–2, in 1324–5 he was acting as receiver of revenues from the lands of Thomas of Lancaster and other rebels in Wales: N. Fryde, List of Welsh Entries in the Memoranda Rolls, 1282–1343 (Cardiff, 1974), 59, no. 495, citing E 368/96, m. 108d (Hilary term, 18–19 Ed. II). 82 William le Walsh gave evidence at Gloucester at the proof of age of Thomas de Berkeley of Coberley, son of Giles de Berkeley in February1311: CIPM, v. no. 280. This does not prove that he was a close associate of the Berkeleys of Berkeley Castle, but does place him in a Berkeley orbit. The Berkeleys of Coberley, Gloucestershire, were a junior but important branch of the main Berkeley family: see B. and M. Gittos, ‘Motivation and Choice: The Selection of Medieval Secular Effigies’, in Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England, ed. P. Coss and M. Keen (Woodbridge, 2002), 153–8. In 1335 Andrew le Walsh acquired land in Woolstrop from Thomas de Berkeley: VCH, Gloucestershire, x. 219. One of William le Walsh’s immediate descendants (probably a younger son), Ralph le Walsh of Woolstrop (and of Llanwern and Dinham in south Wales) was certainly a ‘Berkeley man’. He was receiver of the Berkeleys in 1373–4; escheator in 1376–7; sheriff of Gloucestershire in 1379–80 and 1383–4; MP for Gloucestershire in Oct. 1383: Saul, Knights and Esquires, 72, 117, 128, 138, 154, 288. 83 Ibid., 226–7: table of manors held by Gloucestershire knights and esquires in 1316.

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wanderer claiming to be Edward II is another matter entirely. Here there is no direct evidence; only speculation is possible. If William le Walsh of Woolstrop really was the William le Galeys who appeared at Köln in 1338, it is possible that he was so affected by the events of 1327 that he took to religion in a big way and abandoned his possessions for a life of wandering and prayer, or that he was simply deranged and suffered from delusions, or that he was a confidence trickster who knew enough to create a plausible story and hoped that his real identity would not be discovered. One small clue is that he also held two manors in south-east Wales, just across the Bristol Channel from Berkeley and close to Gloucester: the manor of Dynan (Dinham) held from the Earl Marshal’s lordship of Chepstow, and the manor of Llanwern near Newport, the site of the present-day steel-works, which was held from the Pembroke lordship of Goodrich.84 Llanwern was next door to Goldcliff priory, a daughter house of the famous abbey of Bec in Normandy.85 There is ample evidence that William le Walsh was closely interested in Goldcliff, and through this he had contacts with Bec.86 This might perhaps be an explanation for the statement in the Fieschi letter that the alleged Edward II spent some time in Normandy during his travels. There is at least one problem with this chain of speculation: William le Walsh of Woolstrop and Llanwern apparently died in 1329 and was succeeded not by another William, but by his son Andrew. Did William really die in 1329,87 or was he only

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CIPM, vii. no. 207, where he is named as William le Walsshe of ‘Wolvesthrop’ (Woolstrop). There is a full translation of the inquisitions in The Index Library: Abstracts of Inquisitiones Post Mortem for Gloucestershire, part V, 1302–1358, ed. E.A. Fry (British Record Soc. 40, 1910), 226–7. Transcripts of the original inquisitions are preserved in C 135/15. The inquisitions make it clear that the W. le Walsh who held Woolstrop was the same man who held Llanwern and Dinan. The editor of CIPM vii (p. 335) mistakenly identified Lanwaryn in Netherwent, as it appears in the inquisition, with the present-day Llanwarne in Hereford and Worcester, because of its connection with Goodrich castle in the same county. However the fact, as will appear below, that W. le Walsh of Lanwaryn was closely involved with the adjoining Goldcliff priory makes it certain that the identification should be with Llanwern. 85 See R. Graham, ‘Four Alien Priories in Monmouthshire’, J. British Archaeological Association, 2nd ser. 35 (1927), 104–5, 108–9, 112–13, 115–19. 86 In 1319 William held a water mill from Goldcliff priory: CPR 1317–21, 376. In May 1322 he and other former partisans of Roger Damory were accused of having tried to force the prior of Goldcliff to answer pleas in Roger Damory’s court and not in a royal court; and in the same month he and others were accused of having supported the former prior, Ralph de Rounceville, in his refusal in 1318 to accept the appointment by the abbot of Bec of William de St Albin as prior: CPR 1321–24, 163–4, 157. These matters are also described in two petitions from William de St Albin to the king and council: Cal. Ancient Petitions relating to Wales, ed. W. Rees (Cardiff, 1975), 102–4 (SC 8/68/3360); 118–19 (SC 8/83/4101). In 1319 the abbot of Bec, supported by the king of France, petitioned Edward II on behalf of the new prior: F.D. Logan, Runaway Religious in Medieval England, c.1240–1540 (Cambridge, 1996), 104, n. 30 (citing CPR 1317–21, 544–5 and Reg. Adam de Orleton, Bishop of Hereford (A.D. 1317–1327), ed. A.T. Bannister (Cantilupe Soc., 1907), 104). Ralph de Rounceville’s arrest was ordered on 15 Jan. 1319: Logan, 187 (citing CPR 1317–21, 268). William le Waleys was clearly in the thick of a long-running dispute over the prior of Goldcliff. Whether he would have received a welcome had he arrived at Bec as a wanderer is therefore debatable. 87 CIPM, vii. 156, no. 207. Andrew, who was aged twenty-four years or more, was named after William’s stepfather, Andrew de Beauchamp. Perhaps Andrew had a younger brother named William, who could have been the wanderer, but there is no evidence to support this. There is no suggestion in the original material in the PRO (C 135/15) that William le Walsh did not die in 1329. Each return says that he held the piece of land in question on the day that he died. No date of death is given. The Woolstrop inquest was held at Gloucester on 9 Nov., 3 Edward III (1329), so that William would have died in the late summer or early autumn of 1329. The returns to the individual inquisitions post mortem are all transcribed on a single sheet of parchment, which is damaged on the left side and also faded. The writ of diem clausit extremum is missing. The PRO Guide to the C 135 class notes that from the latter part of the reign

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dead in the eyes of the law, and free to go where he wished?88 But this is surely one speculation too many. Perhaps after all there are some mysteries worth preserving, whether they concern the deaths of kings or the fate of their humbler subjects.

of Edward II it became increasingly common for the Chancery to ask juries to provide the date of a tenant-in-chief’s death. From c. 1343 this information seems to have been customarily required. 88 If a man became ‘professed in religion’, his heir immediately inherited any land that he had, and, if he had made a will, it took effect at once as though he were naturally dead: Logan, Runaway Religious, 36, n. 108, citing F. Pollock and F.W. Maitland, The History of English Law before the Time of Edward I (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1968), i. 434. There is nothing to prove either that William le Walsh became a professed religious in 1329 and so passed on his lands to his heir, or that he decided to divest himself of his lands for some other reason, but it is not impossible. It is not however clear whether, in either of these situations, an inquisition post mortem would have been held, as if he were really dead. But there must have been such situations. In the case of William le Walsh, the only lands he held in chief were a messuage and a carucate in the manor of Woolstrop, which were held from the king’s Barton in Gloucester, which was of the king’s ancient demesne: CIPM, vii. 156, no. 207. The lords who would have been principally concerned in giving their assent were the heirs to the earl of Pembroke in the manors of Woolstrop and Llanwern and the Earl Marshal in the case of Dinham. There is one notable precedent, involving one of the most famous medieval persons, Peter Abelard. Both his parents retired to monasteries. ‘This form of retirement was a way of ensuring that the family property was passed on to the next generation under parental supervision, as well as giving husband and wife the chance to prepare for the next world.’ ‘Although Abelard had already surrendered his interest in Le Pallet [his family home in Brittany], confirmation of this was probably required. Unsuccessful clerics like him, who had not irrevocably committed themselves to celibacy by becoming priests, might return home unexpectedly like the Prodigal Son and get the fatted calf’: M.T. Clanchy, Abelard: A Medieval Life (Oxford, 1997), 71.