Edward II

John Trevisa And That Famous Red-Hot Poker

2009-07-11T18:56:00.000+02:00

A post about a misconception I've been dying to clear up! John Trevisa was an English writer of the later fourteenth century, and one of his most famous works is his 1387 translation, from Latin into English, of Ranulph Higden's Polychronicon, written in c. 1350. Higden was one of the chroniclers who believed in the red-hot poker murder of Edward II, which Trevisa translated into English as "a hoote broche putte thro the secret place posteriale." I've often seen it argued that because Trevisa was the chaplain and confessor of Thomas, Lord Berkeley, Edward II's custodian of 1327, he was therefore in a position to know the truth about Edward's murder, and because he translated Higden's words without comment, the story must be correct. It's also sometimes stated that Trevisa came from the village of Berkeley and was a small boy there in 1327. This article ("John Trevisa, who was born in Berkeley and, though a child at the time, later served as chaplain to one of Edward II's keepers and so knew the truth") is a good example, as is this page quoting a published book: "some years later one John Trevisa, who had been a boy at the time, revealed what had actually happened. Trevisa had grown up to take holy orders and become chaplain and confessor to the King’s jailer, Thomas, Lord Berkeley, so he was well placed to solve the mystery." The myth that 'John Trevisa was Berkeley's chaplain and so must have known the truth about Edward II's murder' is mindlessly repeated in a number of books, some of them very recent, by writers who should know better. Naming no names, but glaring in their general direction. I mean, do some research, people.

All of this theory is based on fundamental misconceptions. (No pun intended with 'fundament', honest.) Firstly, according to his biographer Professor David C. Fowler, John Trevisa was born in about 1342, fifteen years after Edward II's alleged murder. Secondly, he didn't come from the village of Berkeley but from Cornwall, probably Trevessa in the parish of St Enoder between Newquay and St Austell, hence his name. Thirdly and most importantly, the Thomas, Lord Berkeley he served as chaplain was not Edward II's custodian of 1327, but his grandson of the same name.

Thomas Berkeley, the custodian of 1327, died in October 1361, when Trevisa was about nineteen. According to Professor Fowler, the earliest documented evidence of a connection between Trevisa and the lords of Berkeley is Trevisa's dedication in his translation of the Polychronicon, which he completed on 18 April 1387, to Thomas, Lord Berkeley the grandson. Trevisa was still at Oxford when he finished his translation, and the first certain evidence that he was living at Berkeley comes in 1388 - in other words, twenty-seven years after the death of Edward II's custodian Lord Berkeley, and a whopping sixty-one years after Edward's supposed murder.

Thomas Berkeley the grandson was born on 5 January 1353, was eight years old when his grandfather of the same name died in 1361, succeeded as Lord Berkeley when he was twenty-one in January 1374, and lived until July 1417. His ancestry is fascinating: grandson of Edward II's custodian, grandson also of Hugh Despenser the Younger, great-grandson of Roger Mortimer. Thomas was the eldest son of Maurice Berkeley, himself the eldest son of Thomas Berkeley the Elder and born sometime in 1330, about two and a half or three years after Edward II's alleged murder in his father's castle. Maurice married Hugh Despenser the Younger's daughter Elizabeth in August 1338 when he was eight, and died in June 1368, supposedly of old wounds received at the battle of Poitiers in 1356. Whether the Thomas Berkeley of 1327 ever told his son Maurice anything about Edward II's fate, and whether Maurice passed this information on to his own son - or to his wife Elizabeth Despenser, Edward's great-niece - is a matter for conjecture. Given that John Trevisa copied the story of the red-hot poker, which is an utterly ludicrous fabrication, if his patron Lord Berkeley did know the truth of what happened to Edward II, evidently he didn't tell Trevisa.

If people would just think a little before repeating the myth 'Trevisa was Lord Berkeley's chaplain and must have heard the truth about Edward's murder' they'd realise that as Trevisa translated the Polychronicon into English, the Lord Berkeley of the dedication cannot be Thomas Berkeley the grandfather. He lived in an England where the French language still dominated among the nobility, and the odds that he would have wanted to read a text translated into English are remote. For his grandson, however, who grew up in a world where English was becoming more and more significant as a literary and courtly language, it does make sense. If people would just think a little, they'd realise that a man with the last name 'Trevisa' is not likely to have come from Berkeley. If people would just do a little basic research - I found Trevisa's correct date of birth in about five seconds on Google Books - they'd discover that he was not alive in 1327, did not serve as confessor to Lord Berkeley the grandfather and arrived at Berkeley Castle six decades after Edward II's supposed murder. But then, why bother to do such basic research when it's so easy to mindlessly repeat the unfounded assumptions of earlier writers? And it always amuses me when I see writers solemnly declare that Trevisa was a child in Berkeley village when Edward was imprisoned at the castle there, as though this means that Trevisa therefore had inside knowledge of the king's fate. Are we supposed to think that Lord Berkeley was in the habit of sharing state secrets with local village boys?

By the time John Trevisa arrived at Berkeley in the late 1380s, there couldn't have been anyone alive there who knew the truth about Edward II's fate, and he had no more insight into the affair than anyone else. As for Ranulph Higden of the Polychronicon, he was a monk of Chester and knew no more about Edward's death than anyone else did either, and just because both men repeated the red-hot poker story is not proof that it's true.

Edward II Should Have Been Born...

2009-07-07T12:49:00.001+02:00

...a fisherman on the Thames. He really, truly should. There are countless references to fishermen - and women - in his chamber journal of 1326, and Edward spent much of that summer pootling up and down the Thames and other waterways west of London chatting to fishermen and women and giving them presents. There are also more references than I could ever count regarding the purchase of fishing-nets for the king's household.

This is my fourth and last post on the chamber journal of Edward II, the king who declared at his abdication in January 1327 "I greatly lament that I have so utterly failed my people, but I could not be other than I am." And what he was was utterly unconventional - as I hope these blog posts about his activities in 1325/26 go some way to demonstrating.

- Edward gave two shillings to John de Walton on 25 July 1326, who "sang before the king [chaunta deuant le Roi] every time he passed by water through these parts," and also gave Edward a present of loach. John The Singing Fisherman!

- Edward gave his valet/fisherman Edmund 'Monde' Fisher a gift of ten shillings on 12 June 1326 towards the costs of his illness, maybe the same illness that was then cutting a swathe through the king's household, but Monde sadly died the following day. Edward gave a pound to his widow Isabelle and ten shillings to his daughter Joan - the women received the money "in the king's presence" - and granted permission for Monde's son, his page Little Will Fisher, to go home with two shillings for his expenses. On 25 July, Edward encountered Monde's widow Isabelle (or Sibille) again, near Sheen - the same day he saw John The Singing Fisherman - and she gave him and his niece Eleanor Despenser a present of loach. He gave her a present of five shillings.

- on 13 and 14 July at Chertsey and Isleworth, Edward gave cash gifts of between two and five shillings each to six men and one woman who had brought him flounder, roach, unspecified other fish and chickens. As he so often did, he handed over the cash with his own hands.

- he gave five shillings on 26 July to Edward of Kennington, who had brought him two pike, "to repair his house."

- as well as fish, Edward liked seafood. He gave a pound to his purveyor William Wythe on 29 July for bringing him crabs and prawns, and "said that for a long time nothing had been so much to his satisfaction." I have a reference somewhere, which I can't find at the moment, to Edward giving an equally generous gift to an oystermonger for bringing him oysters that he really enjoyed.

- he gave six pence on 24 July to Jack le Frenche of Walton, who "brought to the king by his command water from a well" - it was a hot summer - six pence to Robyn atte Hethe, "who suffers from a great illness," and three pence to Will de Pykingham, who retrieved a knife one of Edward's squires had dropped in the river.

- Edward sent one pomegranate each to two members of Hugh Despenser the Younger's household on 9 June, who had been left behind ill at Saltwood in Kent: his chamberlain Clement Holditch and his clerk Richard Navely.

- Edward celebrated the Nativity of St John the Baptist, 24 June 1326, by playing dice with Sir Giles Beauchamp at the Tower of London. He spent three shillings.

- the eccentric king spent quite a bit of time in 1325 and 1326 at 'Burgundy', his hut or cottage at Westminster. On 15 July, he paid twenty-eight men for cleaning the ditches there "in the king's presence."

- 26 July 1326: "Item, paid to Will the gardener of Kenilworth who came to talk to the king on some business touching him, of the king's gift for his expenses in returning to the said Kenilworth, three shillings."

- the king's chamberlain and favourite Hugh Despenser was away from Edward yet again in late July 1326, having gone to Wales, where Edward sent him letters. Those two were apart far more often than I'd ever imagined.

- on the other hand, Edward's niece Eleanor Despenser was with the king, yet again. He spent two days at Sheen with her in July, then they travelled together by water to Byfleet, Edward spending eighteen pence on roach and dace for her. She appears so often in the chamber journal that Edward's clerks sometimes referred to her merely as 'my lady', with no name necessary.

- the king went from the Tower of London on 20 July to visit Hugh Despenser's newly-married nephew-in-law Robert Wateville at his house without Aldgate. Robert was ill, and received forty marks from Edward.

- Edward went stag-hunting at Walmer on 30 July. His cook Morris (spelt Moryz) was riding in front of him and kept falling off his horse, though why is not clear - intentionally, to amuse the king, or unintentionally because he was ill? Anyway, Morris received a pound because "the king laughed greatly." Either this reflects well on Edward for still having a sense of humour and being generous, or badly if he was laughing at someone too ill to stay on his horse (how cruel!)

- Edward bought some cloth for himself on 3 August - I still need to do some work on that entry, as it's hard to read and there are a few words I don't know, but it included 'vermilion silk decorated with silver'.

- on the same day, he bought a habergeon or sleeveless coat of chain-mail for a pound, also spending three shillings and sixpence having his sword repaired and 'improved' and getting a chape, a cap or cover for the point of the sword, made. None of this did him any good when the invasion came, of course.

- in May 1326 at Down Ampney in Wiltshire, various lovely things were delivered to Edward: a gold crown with fourteen rubies and emeralds; a silver crown decorated with artificial jewels; a gold chaplet; a hat of vermilion velvet with a "vine of gold" and bells; a white velvet hat lined with pure miniver; and another hat of vermilion velvet "powdered with diverse animals." And lots of other gorgeous items. Edward may not have acted like a king, but he certainly looked like one. I wonder if he wore all this finery when handing over money to fishermen or watching a group of men clean ditches.

All these details bring Edward II and the realities of his life close to me. Whatever anyone else might think of him, and there does seem to be an awful lot of negativity about him online - lots of it, I have to say, not really justified - to me he was utterly wonderful, and I adore him. So there.

Edward II Laughs (And Even Plays Ball-Games!) In The Face Of Impending Disaster

2009-07-02T12:29:00.005+02:00

Here's my third post (part one; part two) about entries in Edward II's chamber journal of 1325/26: glimpses at what Edward was up to in the last few months before his disastrous downfall. Although he knew that an invasion by Queen Isabella and her favourite Roger Mortimer was coming, life went on as normal for Edward to a great extent.

- Edward attended the wedding of Hugh Despenser the Younger's niece Margaret Hastings to Sir Robert Wateville at Marlborough on 19 May 1326, and gave a gift of a pound to Will Muleward, valet of the bride's mother Lady Hastings. The reason? Will "was for some time with the king and made him laugh greatly," fust ascun temps od le Roi e lui fist g’ntement rire. Edward II's willingness to talk and joke and laugh with those of low (or lowish) birth is still apparent even near the end of his reign - this was about three months after he gave a year's wages to Jack of St Albans also for "making him laugh very greatly," by dancing on a table.

- at Saltwood Castle in Kent on 1 June 1326, Edward went out into the park to play some kind of ball-game - iewer a pelot, it says, literally 'playing at ball' - with Robert Wateville, his steward Thomas le Blount and unnamed others. (Blount got twenty marks from Edward for this; maybe he was a demon goal-scorer.) Edward had gone to Saltwood on the very serious business of meeting the pope's envoys, the archbishop of Vienne and the bishop of Orange, who had travelled to England in an unsuccessful attempt to reconcile the king and his estranged wife Isabella. Edward II being Edward II, he still found time to have a bit of fun and take some outdoor exercise.

And if anyone wants to know why I so vastly prefer Edward to any other king of England and am completely infatuated with him, there are two reasons, right there. Can you imagine other English kings having a laugh with a servant or kicking a ball around or actually being fun to spend time with? Can you imagine Isabella, for all her undoubtedly fine qualities, actually being fun to spend time with? I can't; I can only picture her looking down her perfectly-formed aristocratic little nose in disgust and disbelief as she watches Edward roaring with laughter and joking around with some carpenter or cowherd or fisherman. Edward might have been a disastrous king, completely out of step with contemporary expectations of a ruler and lacking in regal dignity, but at least he was a person you can imagine having a right good laugh with, the life and soul of the party.

- Hugh Despenser, by comparison, evidently wasn't coping well with the stress of Isabella and Mortimer's impending invasion. In late February 1326, one of his squires received five pounds for some unspecified prompt action he took when Hugh "made a small affray" at Rothwell in Northamptonshire, whatever that means.

- on 20 January 1326, Edward paid thirty shillings to a draper of Norwich for fourteen ells of 'cloth of Coggeshall' - a town in Essex famed in the Middle Ages for its production of cloth - to make tunics (cotes) for the wives of five of his porters.

- the cloth, however, turned out to be "too stiff" for this purpose, and was sent to Edward's wardrobe to be used for something else. Edward bought instead eighteen ells of "bright blue English cloth," at twenty pence an ell, from a draper of Leicester, to make cotes hardies and hoods for the five women.

- 29 April 1326: "Item, paid to Little Will Fisher [Litel Wille Fyssher], page of the king's chamber, who remains at Kenilworth, ill, of the king's gift, for what he did when the king mounted his horse, five shillings." Edward left Kenilworth for Stratford-on-Avon that day.

-same date: "Item, paid to Hick Mereworth, valet of the king's chamber, who has the king's permission to go to Henley to his house with his wife, who came to Kenilworth great with child [grosse denfaunt], for his expenses in going, of the king's gift, for what he did at Kenilworth before the king left there, twenty shillings. Item, paid to Joan, wife of the said Hick, who came to her baron [i.e. husband] at the said Kenilworth great with child as is said above, because she had heard that her said baron was ill, of the king's gift, for her expenses in returning, forty shillings."

- so the couple got three pounds from Edward, a lot of money. A few other members of the king's household were ill at this time, so presumably something was going around at Kenilworth. An entry of 30 June, which calls Hick by his real name of Richard, says that he got Edward's permission to leave the royal household again after receiving news that "his goods were stolen from his house." He got another pound for his expenses on that occasion.

- Edward often gave generous gifts of several pounds to his knights and squires for "that done when the king ate" or for "what he did in the king's bedchamber when the king went to sleep." Annoyingly, what these rituals might have involved are not specified. Ditto what Little Will did "when the king mounted his horse."

- on 10 July 1326, the day before he ate in the park at Windsor with his niece Eleanor, Edward gave a pound to "John, minstrel of Spain, who played on the guitar and the lute" (a la gytarre e la lute) for him.

- Edward gave an enormously generous gift of a pound on 13 July, by his own hands, to one Alis de la Churche, who came to him while he was travelling between Chertsey and Shepperton and gave him a "great pike." Hick le Fisher, who also gave the king a pike at this time, for some reason received only six pence - one-fortieth of Alis's gift. (Maybe it was a much smaller and inferior pike, or maybe Edward just liked the look of Alis.) Considering how wildly unpopular Edward is meant to have been in 1326 among all classes of society, there was certainly no shortage of people willing to give him presents when he showed up in their part of the country; they appear on numerous pages of his chamber journal.

- on 15 July, Edward de Shepperton gave the king a gift of twelve chickens. Yep, that's The King Everyone Hated receiving yet another present.

- on 4 February 1326, Edward spent two pounds on "masts, cables and other equipment for ships" from a merchant of Lynn in Norfolk. His clerk recorded these items as being "for the use of the king."

- in this context, it's probably relevant that in late March, Edward invited various shipwrights (the word appears in English, shipwreghtes) of London, named vaguely as 'Adam, Martyn his brother and others', to come to him at Kenilworth. The Scalacronica says that Edward "amused himself with ships, among mariners, and in other irregular occupation unworthy of his station, and scarcely concerned himself with other honour or profit, whereby he lost the affection of his people." (But not the people who owned chickens and caught fish, apparently.)

- Edward dined with his sister-in-law Alice, countess of Norfolk, on 30 January 1326 at Burgh in Suffolk. He gave a pound each to Henry Newsom, harper, and Richardyn, citoler, who "made their minstrelsy" before them as they ate.

- there's a surprisingly large number of references to fish and fishing in the journal - or maybe it's not surprising, for a king who bought his own fish and stood by a river in November 1322 to watch men fishing. On 24 January 1326, Edward gave three shillings to Edmund 'Monde' Fisher, who is normally described as the king's valet and here as his fisherman (peschour), as per his name, to buy himself "boots for the water," presumably the fourteenth-century equivalent of waders. Monde sadly didn't have long to enjoy his new boots, as he was dead by 11 August that year.

- Edward spent a pound playing cross and pile (the medieval version of heads and tails) on 10 May 1326, and on the same day returned five shillings to his barber, Henry, which Henry had lent to him to play cross and pile at some earlier date.

- The king lost eight shillings playing cross and pile against Robert Wateville on 22 May, which was only three days after Robert's wedding - shouldn't he have had better things to do than chuck coins around with the king? (And shouldn't Edward also have had better things to do, like worry about the invasion or even, you know, govern his kingdom?) A couple of months later, Edward lost another two shillings playing cross and pile, yet again, with Peter Bernard, usher of his chamber. Peter, incidentally, was one of the men who joined the earl of Kent's 1330 conspiracy to restore Edward to the throne.

Edward II and Eleanor Despenser

2009-06-27T12:52:00.001+02:00

This is a continuation of my last post - entries from Edward II's chamber account of 1325/26 relating to the king's eldest niece Eleanor, née de Clare, wife since 1306 of his chamberlain and favourite Hugh Despenser the Younger. The account is a fascinating illustration of the significant position the couple held in the king's life in the 1320s, and in fact two contemporary Flemish chronicles even claimed that Edward was having an incestuous affair with his niece. Whatever the truth of that, it's obvious that Eleanor was extremely important to Edward in the last years of his reign, and here are a few examples of his great affection for her.

Hugh Despenser is usually just called 'Sir Hugh', mons' Hughe, with no surname necessary - which in itself is evidence of his dominant position at court - or sometimes 'my lord Sir Hugh' or 'my lord Despenser', mon seign' le Despenser. Eleanor is usually referred to as 'my lady, Lady Eleanor Despenser', ma dame dame Alianore la Despensere. Isabella, always called 'my lady the queen', is the only other woman acknowledged with the honorific 'my lady' - other noblewomen, even Edward's niece the countess of Surrey and sister-in-law the countess of Norfolk, are not. Hugh and Eleanor's eldest son Hugh (born c. 1308) also appears in the account on occasion, called by the nickname 'Huchon'.

- I'd known for ages that Edward II had a ship called La Alianore, The Eleanor - 'Eleanor' was always spelt Alianore, Alianor, Alienora etc in the fourteenth century - and had assumed it was named in honour of his mother Eleanor of Castile or his grandmother Eleanor of Provence or even his daughter Eleanor of Woodstock. As it turns out, the ship's full name, as revealed by an entry in a chamber journal of 1323, was La Alianore la Despensere.

- Edward visited Eleanor at Sheen on the night of 2 December 1325, sailing along the Thames from Westminster and taking along only eight attendants. It appears that Edward rowed himself and that his attendants followed behind in another boat, which would hardly be surprising, given what we know of him. (This being the king who bought his own fish, invited sailors and carpenters to dine with him and went swimming in the Fens with "a great concourse of common people.") He gave his niece a whopping hundred marks or sixty-six pounds, and the chamber account says the money was "paid to my lady, Lady Eleanor Despenser, as a gift, by the hands of the king himself, when he went from Westminster to Sheen to my said lady and returned that same night to Westminster."

- Eleanor must have been heavily pregnant at the time, as on 14 December, Edward made an offering of thirty shillings to the Virgin Mary to give thanks for the fact that "God granted her a prompt delivery of her child." (As this was probably her ninth or tenth baby, I suppose it's hardly surprising that her labour didn't last long.) To the annoyance of Lady D, Susan Higginbotham and myself, who would love to know when and in what order the Despenser children were born, the clerk didn't give the child's name or even specify if it was a boy or girl. Honestly, you'd think these people didn't care at all about the needs of historians 700 years later!

- On 1 January 1326, as her New Year gift, Edward gave Eleanor a palfrey with saddle and all other necessary equipment, and paid Wat Somer for looking after the horse and Richard de la Grene, Eleanor's 'chief carter', for taking it to her at Sheen (Edward was a hundred miles away at Haughley near Stowmarket, Suffolk). If the king gave Hugh something for New Year, too, it isn't recorded here - in fact, the palfrey is the only New Year gift to anyone recorded in the chamber journal.

- Edward gave Jack the Trumpeter ten shillings on 9 October 1325 for bringing him forty-seven goldfinches in a cage from Dover. The reason for this is clarified in the next entry, where Edward paid Will of Dunstable to look after the birds "until the arrival of my lady Despenser," for whom Edward had bought them as a present. In early December, however, Jack the Trumpeter was paid a pound for bringing Edward thirty goldfinches in a cage. Were these different goldfinches, and if so, who did the king intend them as a gift for? Or had Will failed in his allotted duty and allowed seventeen of the birds to die? And why, as Susan Higginbotham reasonably asks, only forty-seven and not fifty goldfinches in the first place? I can only speculate. What is especially interesting is that the word 'goldfinches' appears in English in the middle of the French text: q’ porta au Roi vne cage od xxx Goldfynches.

- Edward and Eleanor dined alone together in Windsor park on 11 July 1326. The entry about this one is fascinating: a cook named Will was given a present of two pounds - a lot of money for a cook, a year's wages or almost - and a hackney "on which he followed the king to my lady Despenser when they ate privately in the said park." Does Edward taking a cook with him mean that Will prepared their meal in the park, i.e. that they had some kind of picnic? 11 July, during a summer when the Pauline annalist says there was a drought in England, is likely to have been a hot sunny day.

- In July 1326, a couple of weeks after the picnic with Eleanor, Edward gave Hugh a manuscript of the doomed love story of Tristan and Isolde. For some reason this gift was not recorded in the chamber account at the time but a few months later, and is one of the last entries before the account abruptly ended on 31 October 1326, sixteen days before Edward's and Hugh's capture.

- In early June 1326, Edward sent his sergeant John de Mildenhale with twenty marks as a gift for Eleanor, called 'my lady, Lady Eleanor Despenser, consort of Sir Hugh'.

- the day after Edward visited Eleanor at Sheen at night in December 1325, there's an entry recording that she gave him vne robe de iiij garnamenz, 'a robe of four...?' I'm not sure how to translate the last word in this context - it usually means garments or clothing in general, or riding gear or some kind of armour.

- Edward stayed at Sheen, where Eleanor was also staying, from 12 to 18 October 1325. Meanwhile, Hugh Despenser was in Wales: an entry of 9 October says that he was at Caerphilly, and he was still "in the parts of Wales" on 18 November, when Edward wrote to him there. The two men kept in frequent touch while apart, although, frustratingly, their letters don't survive or at least have never been discovered.

- Edward paid Eleanor's expenses while she was staying at Sheen that October, and ordered forty bundles of firewood for her chamber. He also paid her expenses at Leeds Castle in Kent when she was staying there on another occasion.

- Eleanor wrote to Edward shortly before 30 December 1325, when the king paid her valet John a pound for bringing her letters to him. She was still at Sheen (or was at Sheen again) in February 1326, when Edward gave ten shillings to his valet Syme Lawe, sent there with the king's letters to his niece.

- In March 1326, Edward gave Eleanor a silver hanap worth twenty pounds, and Hugh a silver cup worth twenty-two pounds.

- And finally for now...in July 1325, Edward paid three shillings for two gallon jars of honey to make sucre de plate for Eleanor, which I assume means some kind of sweet (sucre means sugar). But I've only gone through part of the manuscript, so no doubt there will be more interesting discoveries about Edward, Hugh and Eleanor in the future!

Random Moments in the Life of Edward II

2009-06-24T11:14:00.001+02:00

Here are a few entries from Edward II's chamber account of 1325/26, which I've transcribed and translated from the original manuscript in the Society of Antiquaries library at Piccadilly. Edward's chamber accounts are a fascinating glimpse into his private world, detailing presents he gave out, whom he dined with and what he ate, minstrels who performed for him, names of the men who served him closely and thus knew him best, and so on - hence my willingness to ruin my eyesight by spending many hours, weeks and months peering at tiny, faded handwriting in medieval French.

- a fisherman called Cock atte Wyk - seriously - gave Edward a present of a "great eel," a barbel, dace and other fish, and received a gift of two shillings in return, in October 1325.

- in October/November 1325 Edward paid various men, including his squire Thomelyn de Haldon and the Dominican friar Thomas Dunheved, for bringing him letters from his chamberlain and favourite Hugh Despenser the Younger, "who is in the parts of Wales," and returning to Hugh with the king's letters. This is very interesting, given that Hugh had successfully persuaded Edward a few weeks earlier not to go to France without him in the belief that he would be killed in the king's absence, but evidently was happy enough to set off for Wales by himself while Edward (and Hugh's very pregnant wife Eleanor) remained in the south-east.

- Edward also paid five shillings on 23 February 1326 to one of his messengers "sent out of court secretly with letters of the king to Sir Hugh [Despenser]," and a pound on 21 March to Hugh's squire Janekyn de Sufford, "who is sent from Kenilworth to London with letters of the king to the said Sir Hugh, on private business." So it seems that Edward and Hugh were apart far more than I had ever realised, which changes the mental picture I had of their relationship.

- in August 1325, Edward gave a gift of ten shillings to Robert Traghs, porter of his chamber, whose wife had recently borne a daughter. Robert got permission to travel to London to visit his wife, Joan, and their child. (Ten shillings, half a pound or 120 pence, was a pretty generous gift to a man of Robert's rank, who only earned one and a half or two pence a day - so was the equivalent of at least two months' wages.)

- Edward gave twenty-five shillings to Will Shene, another porter of the chamber, about to marry a woman whose name the king's clerk recorded as 'Isode'. The money was intended in part as a gift and in part to cover the expenses of their wedding, celebrated at Henley-on-Thames on Sunday 20 October 1325.

- on his way from Walton-on-Thames to Cippenham on 17 October 1325, Edward bought a pike, two barbels and a trout from Jack Fisher ('Jak Fyssher', as his clerk wrote it) of Shepperton, also giving Jack four shillings as a gift. The entry makes it clear that it was Edward himself, not one of his servants, who bought the fish from Jack: achatez de lui p’ le Roi mesmes. Edward also bought quantities of fish from four other people the following day, which were carefully recorded as having been purchased by the king himself.* That is soooo Edward.

* les queux choses susditz furent achatez en lewe de Tamyse p’ le Roi mesmes.

- there's a nice fishy entry in the account for the period when Edward was staying at Langdon in Kent, the end of August 1325, while he and his advisers debated whether or not he should travel to France to pay homage to Charles IV for his French lands - you know, the time he didn't stupidly fall into Isabella and Mortimer's Oh-So-Cunning Trap as so many writers like to claim he did. He, both Hugh Despensers, the earl of Arundel, Edward's friend the abbot of Langdon, the chancellor Robert Baldock, Robert Mohaut and unnamed "other magnates" sat in the garden at the abbey of Langdon and dined on large quantities of fish and seafood bought for them in Dover, Sandwich and other places: bream, cod, whiting, sole, salted herring, crabs and so on. There's a nice image, I think - the king and some of his great magnates sitting in an abbey garden enjoying the late-summer sunshine*, eating platters of fish and seafood.

* presumably - though I don't actually know what the weather was like then. There was a drought in England the following summer, 1326, according to Annales Paulini.

- Edward had chamber staff called Litel Wille, Litel Colle and Grete Hobbe.

- it has been known for many years that Edward gave two and a half pounds or the equivalent of a year's wages to his painter Jack of St Albans for dancing on a table and making him laugh uproariously. What is usually missed or ignored is that Edward intended the gift for Jack to support his wife and children - en eide de sa femme et ses enfauntz, the entry says - and that he gave Jack the money with his own hands, a great honour for the painter. Nor is it ever stated that this pleasant little interlude took place on 11 March 1326, when Edward was expecting Isabella and Mortimer's invasion at any time - but evidently hadn't lost his sense of humour.

- Edward gave a pound to one Alis Coleman for brewing ale for him in late 1325. He seems to have been fond of that particular drink: in February 1323, he gave five shillings to another Alis who had travelled from York to Pontefract to bring him ale as a present from her mother.

- Edward also gave a pound in November 1325 to a woman named Luce, who had brought him a gift of bread, chickens and ale (again!) while he was staying at Cippenham. Maybe she thought his cooks weren't feeding him properly. A pound each to two women of humble birth - very generous.

- The king spent five pounds on food for the poor to celebrate St Katherine's Day, 25 November 1325, and somewhat mysteriously, gave ten shillings to a woman called Anneis "for that done at the gate of the Tower" of London to mark the day. Presumably this had something to do with the church of St Katherine's by the Tower, next to the Tower.

- Edward's fondness for the company of the lowborn is demonstrated by the entries revealing that he invited sailors, carpenters and the like to dine privately with him reasonably often, such as Adam Cogg, captain of Hugh Despenser the Younger's barge, who ate with the king on four days in June 1325.

- contrary to popular belief, there is nothing in Edward's chamber account to demonstrate that he didn't enjoy the company of women. For example, he dined alone with Lady Hastings on or shortly before 8 August 1326 and with his sister-in-law Alice, countess of Norfolk on 30 January that year, giving presents of ten shillings to Lady Hastings' valet and the same each to Henry Newsom, harper, and Richardyn, citoler, who "made their minstrelsy" before Countess Alice and himself as they ate. Not to mention his enormous affection for his niece Eleanor Despenser, who, with her husband Hugh, was arguably the most important person in Edward's life in the last eighteen months or so of his reign.

- Alison Weir, in her biography of Queen Isabella, points out that men named Wat Cowherd, Simon and Robin Hod and others appear in Edward's chamber account of 1322 and received what she calls "substantial" sums of money (though she doesn't specify the amounts) from the king for spending time "in his company." She speculates that Edward "was being promiscuous with low-born men" and that Isabella must have heard about it and been angry. In fact, Wat, Simon and the others were pages and porters of Edward's chamber and crop up extremely often in the accounts, accompanying the king on his travels and receiving their wages. There's no way of proving that Edward didn't have sex with them, of course, but there's no reason at all to think that he did. Sadly, reality proves far more mundane than speculation.

- Edward's scribes sometimes referred to his chamber staff by nicknames in the account - for example, the Simon Hod mentioned above (not the king's bit of rough but one of his porters) was often called 'Syme', short for 'Symond', the usual spelling then, as was Syme Lawe, a valet of the chamber. Hugh de Greenfield and Hugh Smale were often called 'Huchon'. Edmund Fisher and Edmund Quarrell, valets, were called 'Monde', short for 'Esmond', the usual contemporary spelling. Monde Fisher's wife Isabelle was sometimes called 'Sibille'. Men called John were often called 'Janekyn', men called Thomas 'Thomelyn' and the name Richard was sometimes written 'Richardyn'. Wat Cowherd's name was spelt 'Watte Couherde' (or Couhierde).

- One especially interesting piece of info I've found is the approximate date of the marriage between Sir Richard Talbot - a Lancastrian knight captured at the battle of Boroughbridge in 1322, who pragmatically switched sides and joined the Despensers - and Elizabeth Comyn, daughter of the John Comyn, the lord of Badenoch murdered by Robert Bruce in 1306, and niece and co-heir of the earl of Pembroke. Richard and Elizabeth married in secret, at Pirbright in Surrey, shortly before 10 July 1326: an entry in the chamber account on that day giving Richard a gift of ten marks says that he avoit espouses p’uement la dame de Comyn, 'had married secretly the lady Comyn'.

I'll post soon about entries from Edward's accounts relating to his niece, Eleanor Despenser.

The Tower Of London, 2

2009-06-21T19:11:00.000+02:00

More pics of the Tower of London!

Left: this is Water Lane, which lay under the Thames until the 1270s, when Edward I pushed back the river and extended the Tower, building a new curtain wall. Ahead on the left is Wakefield Tower (the round building) and Bloody Tower; ahead on the right, St Thomas's Tower and Traitors' Gate.

Right: the Byward Tower, which was behind me when I took the photo of Water Lane. It contains wall paintings dating from the reign of Richard II at the end of the fourteenth century, but isn't open to the public. You can see some of the paintings here and here.

Another shot of the Traitors' Gate and St Thomas's Tower. The timber-work dates from 1533, during a renovation of the Tower for Queen Anne Boleyn's coronation.

The White Tower, oldest part of the Tower, built by William the Conqueror. In the background on the left is the building which houses the Crown Jewels. In the foreground on the left you can see the remains of the old wall of the Inmost Ward, built by Henry III. According to the guidebook, these remains were covered over by later buildings and only discovered thanks to bomb damage to the Tower during World War Two.

Next photo: taken from the same spot as the last one, with the White Tower on the right and the remains of the Inmost Ward and some of the famous Tower ravens in the foreground. The low building behind the trees is the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, with Tower Green in front and the Beauchamp Tower on the left.

Photo taken out of a window in the Lanthorn Tower (you can see bird droppings on it, which I didn't notice when I took the pic!) of Cradle Tower, built by Edward III as his private watergate.

There's a lot of graffitti in the Salt Tower - built c. 1240 - carved in the walls by men imprisoned there in the sixteenth century. Sadly the pics haven't come out well at all, and you can see me reflected in the protective glass in one of them.

Some medieval pottery:

The archway of Bloody Tower, vaulted by Edward III at the beginning of the 1360s.

Below, the castle moat.

Photo taken from the (modern) entrance to the Tower of London, with Middle Tower on the right and Byward Tower in the, umm, middle, with Water Lane just past Byward. Both were built by Edward I.

Staircase in the White Tower, where two bodies discovered in 1674 were assumed to be those of the Princes in the Tower. The sign says "The tradition of the Tower has always pointed out this as the stair under which the bones of Edward the 5th and his brother were found in Charles the 2nd's time and from whence they were removed to Westminster Abbey."

Display in Bloody Tower, where you can cast your vote for 'What really happened to the Princes in the Tower?' Options, left to right: murdered on the orders of Henry VII, murdered on the orders of Richard III, not murdered but disappeared. Richard III is currently a nose ahead of 'not murdered'.

Drawings of how the Tower of London might have appeared in the thirteenth century, in the reigns of Henry III and Edward I.

I haven't mentioned Edward II at all in this post, have I? Unlike his father and son, he didn't do any major building work at the Tower, though he did spend a lot of time here in the last year or two of his reign. He was here on 24 February 1325, when he paid Thomelyn Sautriour a pound for playing the psalter before him in his chamber, probably in the Lanthorn Tower.

The Tower Of London, 1

2009-06-18T16:38:00.003+02:00

Lady D and I spent a fantastic few days in London last weekend, mostly to view Edward II's chamber accounts of 1322 to 1326 at the Society of Antiquaries library and the National Archives (thanks to the staff of both places, by the way). Strange people that we are, we jumped up and down with excitement to see the original fourteenth-century documents written by Edward's clerks! I've posted a random page of the accounts - which are in French - so you can see what they look like.

Last Sunday, we visited the Tower of London - extremely crowded on a warm, sunny weekend. Talking of the Tower, I found an entry in Edward's chamber account of July 1326 where the king spent four pounds on cloths with gold and silver thread for his favourite Hugh Despenser the Younger's chapel in the Tower - which is an interesting revelation in itself, that Despenser had his own chapel there. (Of course the entry doesn't say where it was, frustratingly.) Lots more on Edward's chamber accounts coming soon.

OK, time for some pics! Clicking on them should bring up a larger version, at least if Blogger's behaving itself. And apologies in advance for any formatting weirdnesses. Blogger is not great on photo posts.

If you're visiting the Tower with a tiresome relative and have exhausted the possibilities of the cafe, shop, education centre and church, why not take them along to be beheaded?

This is the Lanthorn Tower, originally built between about 1220 and 1240, where Edward II mostly stayed when he was at the Tower. Sadly, the original building was destroyed by fire in the 1770s, and this one is a nineteenth-century reconstruction.

A view of Tower Bridge (far left) and across the Thames from the Lanthorn Tower, as never seen by Edward II. (Bet he'd have appreciated that ice-cream van.)

Reconstruction of Edward I's bedchamber in St Thomas's Tower:

A touchy-feely exhibition of cloths in said bedchamber:

In the Constable Tower, there's an exhibition on the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 (with Lady D's hand in one of the pics!):

Below: a portable altar of the fourteenth century. Not a great photo - came out a bit blurred with the windows behind me reflected in the protective glass - but an incredibly gorgeous object.

The rounded building on the right of this pic is Wakefield Tower, built in the early thirteenth century, where Henry VI died (or rather, was murdered) in 1471. The rectangular building on the left is Bloody Tower, formerly called Garden Tower, where Edward V and his brother the duke of York were held in 1483. (And possibly murdered. There's a display in the tower where you can vote for who you think murdered them, or if they weren't murdered at all. And no, I'm definitely not wading into that particular argument.)

The green area in this pic is the part of Tower Green where executions took place. On the right, the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula; in the middle, the Beauchamp Tower, built by Edward I in the 1270s and named after Thomas Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, imprisoned there by Richard II in 1397. The other buildings in the pic aren't open to the public.

Sculpture commemorating the deaths on Tower Green. The text begins: "Close to this site were executed: William, Lord Hastings 1483 - Queen Anne Boleyn 1536 - Margaret Pole, countess of Salisbury 1541..."

Below: St Thomas's Tower, built by Edward I in the 1270s, and its water gate, later known by its far more notorious name, Traitors' Gate.

More pics of the Tower to follow soon!

The Queens Of France, 1314-1328

2009-06-15T14:45:00.000+02:00

A post about the six women who married Queen Isabella's three short-lived brothers Louis X (1289-1316), Philippe V (c. 1291/93-1322) and Charles IV (c. 1294-1328). With one exception, the women themselves didn't live very long, either. The three brothers fathered five sons between them, none of whom lived past the age of eight, and the throne of France passed from the Capets to the Valois.

Oh, and if anyone's landed on this page searching for the correct date of Charles IV's wedding to Jeanne of Evreux, which practically every book/genealogy site gets wrong: they married on Thursday 5 July 1324, not July 1325. See below.

Marguerite of Burgundy (1290-1315)

Marguerite married the future Louis X of France, who was already king of Navarre, on or about 21 September 1305, when she was probably fifteen and Louis not quite sixteen. Marguerite was the daughter of Duke Robert II of Burgundy (d. 1306), and through her mother Agnes was the granddaughter of Louis IX of France, so was the first cousin once removed of her husband. Two of Marguerite's brothers, Hugues and Eudes, were dukes of Burgundy, her brother Louis was titular king of Thessalonica, her sister Marie married Edward II's nephew Count Edouard I of Bar, and her sister Jeanne 'the Lame' (la Boiteuse) married Philippe VI of France, first cousin and successor of Louis X, Philippe V and Charles IV.

Marguerite and Louis had one child, named Jeanne after Louis's mother Queen Jeanne of Navarre, who was born on 28 January 1311 and became queen of Navarre in her own right in 1328, on the death of her uncle Charles IV. The couple had been married for at least four and a half years by the time they conceived their daughter. In early 1314, one of the great scandals of the Middle Ages came to light: Marguerite and her sister-in-law Blanche of Burgundy had been committing adultery with the d'Aulnay brothers Philippe and Gautier. The unfortunate young men suffered horrific torture, broken on the wheel, castrated, flayed, hanged and beheaded. Marguerite and Blanche were imprisoned at Château Gaillard in Normandy.

Marguerite's husband succeeded his father as king of France in November 1314; Marguerite remained in prison and, needless to say, was never crowned queen of France. She died at Château Gaillard on 14 August 1315, probably murdered so that Louis could remarry and father a son, and was buried at Vernon in Normandy. The recently-deceased Maurice Druon told her story in his novel La Reine Étranglée or The Strangled Queen.

Her younger sister Jeanne 'the Lame' became queen of France in 1328, when Philippe VI succeeded his cousin Charles IV. Marguerite's daughter Queen Jeanne of Navarre, who died in October 1349, married her cousin Philippe of Evreux and was the mother of the interestingly-named Charles the Bad (le Mauvais), king of Navarre. Marguerite of Burgundy was the great-grandmother of Jeanne of Navarre (1370-1437), duchess of Brittany and queen of England, who married Henry IV in 1403.

Clemence of Hungary (or Clemence of Anjou) (1293-1328)

Clemence was the daughter of Charles Martel, titular king of Hungary, and Klementia von Hapsburg, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf I. Her paternal grandfather was Charles 'the Lame' (le Boiteux), titular king of Jerusalem, Sicily and Naples, who attended Edward II and Isabella's wedding in January 1308. Clemence was remarkably well-connected to European royalty, and her aunts and uncles included: Philip, titular emperor of Constantinople, prince of Achaea and Taranto and despot of Epirius; Robert the Wise, titular king of Naples and Jerusalem, duke of Calabria and count of Provence; Saint Louis, bishop of Toulouse; Albrecht von Hapsburg, king of Germany and duke of Austria, who also attended Edward and Isabella's wedding in January 1308 and was murdered by his nephew Johann a few weeks later; Jutta, queen of Bohemia; Blanche, queen of Aragon; Eleanor, queen of Sicily; and Hartmann, betrothed to Edward II's sister Joan of Acre, who drowned in 1281. Clemence's brother Charles, or Károly, succeeded their father as king of Hungary.

Clemence married Louis X on 19 August 1315, a mere five days after the suspicious death of his first wife Marguerite. The marriage was arranged by Charles of Valois, brother of Philippe IV and Louis's uncle, and also Clemence's uncle by marriage (his first wife Marguerite of Anjou, mother of Philippe VI, was the sister of Clemence's father). Her unusual name caused problems for one of Edward II's clerks: when Edward wrote to her and Louis in May 1316, the clerk addressed her as 'Queen Elizabeth'.

Louis X died on 5 June 1316 at the age of only twenty-six, supposedly from drinking chilled wine after a vigorous game of jeu de paume, leaving Clemence about four months pregnant. She gave birth on 15 November to a boy who immediately became king of France: Jean I, the Posthumous. Unfortunately the baby king only lived for five days, and Clemence's brother-in-law succeeded as Philippe V. Clemence died on 12 October 1328, in her mid-thirties, and was buried at St Jacques in Paris.

Jeanne of Burgundy (c. 1292-1329)

Jeanne was the daughter of Othon (Otto) IV, count palatine of Burgundy, and Mahaut, countess of Artois in her own right. Jeanne's brother Robert, who was born in 1300, succeeded their father in 1302, but died unmarried in 1315. Edward I had on 8 May 1306 opened negotiations for Robert to marry his youngest child, Eleanor; the girl was four days old at the time. On the death of her brother, Jeanne inherited the county of Burgundy, and on her mother's death in 1329, the county of Artois. She married the future Philippe V in January 1307.

Jeanne was embroiled in the adultery scandal of 1314 and imprisoned. She was soon released, however, on the grounds that she had known of the adultery of her sisters-in-law but had not taken a lover herself - either because she was genuinely believed to be innocent, or because Philippe IV wanted to preserve her rich inheritance for his son. Her husband succeeded as Philippe V of France in November 1316, and died on 3 January 1322, aged about thirty. Jeanne outlived him by eight years, and left four daughters: Jeanne, who married Duke Eudes IV of Burgundy, and died in 1349; Marguerite, who married Louis I, count of Flanders, and died in 1382; Isabelle, who married Guigues VIII, dauphin of Viennois, and died in 1348; and Blanche, a nun at Longchamps, who died in 1358. Queen Jeanne also had two sons: Philippe, born in January 1313, died on 24 March 1321; and Louis, born in June 1316, died a little over six months later. Edward II gave twenty marks to the messenger who brought him news of Louis's birth. Like his brothers, Philippe V was destined to die with no surviving male heirs.

Blanche of Burgundy (c. 1295-1326)

Blanche was the younger sister of Jeanne, above, and married the future Charles IV probably in 1307, when they were both about twelve or thirteen. She was found guilty of adultery with one of the d'Aulnay brothers in 1314 and imprisoned, although the pope refused to annul her marriage to Charles until 7 September 1322, after Charles had succeeded as king of France. Blanche remained in prison at Château Gaillard until 1325, when she was allowed to retire to the abbey of Maubisson, and was dead by April 1326 or perhaps by the end of 1325, probably aged thirty. She bore Charles two children, neither of whom lived long: Philippe, January 1314-March 1322, and Jeanne, 1315-May 1321. Her daughter was born a few months into her imprisonment. I wonder what would have happened if her son had survived; given Blanche's adultery, would Charles have accepted the boy as his heir?

Marie of Luxembourg (c. 1304-1324)

Marie was the daughter of Henry VII (of Luxembourg), Holy Roman Emperor and king of Germany, and Margaret, sister of Duke Jan II of Brabant, husband of Edward II's sister Margaret. Henry of Luxembourg, said to be the greatest knight in Europe, attended Edward II's coronation in February 1308. Marie's sister Beatrix married King Charles of Hungary, brother of Queen Clemence, and died in childbirth in November 1319 at the age of only fourteen, and her brother John the Blind was king of Bohemia. John was the grandfather of Anne of Bohemia, who married Richard II of England, and was killed fighting on the French side at the battle of Crecy in 1346.

Marie married Charles IV on 21 September 1322, only two weeks after the annulment of his first marriage to Blanche of Burgundy. She was pregnant in 1323 but miscarried, and was pregnant again in March 1324 when she was involved in an accident. She gave birth to a premature son, hastily baptised Louis, who lived for some days, and died herself shortly after giving birth, aged nineteen or twenty.

Jeanne of Evreux (c. 1310-1371)

Jeanne was the daughter of Louis, count of Evreux, who was the half-brother of Philippe IV of France, and was thus the first cousin of her husband Charles IV. Her mother Marguerite was the daughter of Philippe of Artois, and the great-granddaughter of Henry III of England. Jeanne's eldest sister Marie married Edward II's nephew Duke Jan III of Brabant, and her brother Philippe married Queen Jeanne of Navarre, daughter of Louis X and Marguerite of Burgundy. Her uncle Robert of Artois (1287-1342), was involved in a decades-long struggle with his aunt Mahaut, mother of Jeanne and Blanche of Burgundy, over the county of Artois, and supported Edward III during the Hundred Years War.

Jeanne married Charles IV on Thursday 5 July 1324 at Annet-sur-Marne east of Paris, when she was probably fourteen and Charles thirty. For some reason there is a great deal of confusion about the date of their wedding, and most books and websites place it in July 1325. But the date is certainly known from a letter sent to Edward II by his envoys to France on 10 July 1324: "we found him [Charles IV] at Annet on the Thursday next before the feast of the Translation of St Thomas, where he had married on the same day the sister of the present count of Evreux." (lui trovasmes a Annet' le joedy prochein devant la feste de la Translacion de Seint Thomas, ou il avoit espouses mesmes le jour le soer le conte de Drews qore est.) The Translation of St Thomas Becket is 7 July, which fell on a Saturday in 1324. The letter is printed in The War of Saint-Sardos (1323-1325): Gascon Correspondence and Diplomatic Documents, ed. Pierre Chaplais, pp. 189-190, and cannot date to July 1325, as its contents - relating to Edward's failure to travel to Amiens to pay homage for his French possessions and Charles's confiscation of them - would make no sense if they'd been written a year later, by which time Charles and Edward had signed a peace treaty. Besides, Charles IV was desperate for a son and would hardly have waited more than fifteen months after the death of Queen Marie to marry again.

Jeanne was crowned queen of France on 11 May 1326, and Roger Mortimer attended and carried the train of Edward II's son the duke of Aquitaine, to Edward's fury. Jeanne bore Charles two daughters: yet another Jeanne, who died at a few months old in January 1327, and Marie, who died in 1341 at the age of fourteen. Charles IV died on 1 February 1328 at the age of about thirty-four, leaving Jeanne seven months pregnant. She gave birth on 1 April to another daughter, Blanche, and thus the throne of France passed to her husband's Valois cousin, Philippe VI. Blanche married Philippe de Valois, duke of Orleans, son of Philippe VI, and died on 8 February 1382. Apart from her cousin Marguerite, countess of Flanders, who oulived her by three months, Blanche was the last of the Capets.

Queen Jeanne survived her husband by forty-three years, and died on 4 March 1371 in her early sixties. She was buried next to Charles at Saint-Denis in Paris.

Edward II's Executions Of 1322

2009-06-08T13:35:00.000+02:00

Because you so often read exaggerated numbers of men executed by Edward II in March and April 1322 after his successful campaign against the Marcher lords and the Lancastrian faction - the Contrariants, as Edward called them - here's an accurate list of the executions. Fourteenth-century chronicles are consistent in recording the names; some modern writers have inflated the numbers, saying that men were 'hunted down and slaughtered', that bodily remains decorated the walls of every town in England, that a veritable 'bloodbath' took place. Given the highly emotive way the executions are described in some secondary sources, I'd always assumed that many dozens or even hundreds of men were executed and/or murdered, then when I researched them, discovered there were in fact between 19 and 22 executions of lords and knights, plus one knight killed by Edward II's supporters without the king's prior knowledge. That's a heck of a lot, obviously, but hardly seems to meet the requirements for a 'bloodbath' or to justify the frequent statements about men being hunted down and murdered in cold blood on Edward or the Despensers' orders. I also include information about men who were killed at the battle of Boroughbridge, but whose names are often incorrectly included on the list of executions by writers too lazy or sloppy to check primary sources.

Talking of sloppy research: you often seen in books that Edward II had the 'elderly' countess of Lincoln, the earl of Lancaster's mother-in-law, imprisoned in 1322. Oh, the pathos! Oh, the opportunities for bewailing Edward's dreadful cruelty! Natalie Fryde, for example, writes in The Tyranny and Fall of Edward II 1321-1326 "One wonders whether the aged countess of Lincoln, mother of Alice, countess of Lancaster, could have done much harm. She was carried off to prison..." Well, that would really be something, given that Countess Margaret had been dead for about fifteen years in March 1322. But who cares about such minor details when you can bash Edward II?

What is difficult to comprehend about Edward II's actions in 1322 is the way he had some men executed but others merely imprisoned, and the executions come across as extremely arbitrary and capricious. Having said that, the Vita Edwardi Secundi says that in 1322 the Contrariants "killed those who opposed them, [and] plundered those who offered no resistance, sparing no one," a quote mysteriously missing from every book I've ever read on the subject. It is apparent from numerous petitions and inquisitions that the Contrariants committed homicide, assault, theft, false imprisonment and extortion on non-combatants and bystanders, burned and vandalised towns and the countryside - not only Despenser lands - and committed treason by asking Robert Bruce and his adherents to come to England and ride with them against their king. Not that you'd ever guess it from most secondary sources, which usually ignore the Contrariants' numerous crimes and make out that the fault was all on Edward II's side. Edward did push these men into rebellion by his stupid favouritism towards Hugh Despenser, but the Contrariants were a very long way from being the snowy-white innocent victims of That Nasty Edward II And His Appalling Favourite and the glorious freedom fighters against royal tyranny of legend. Contrary to popular report, there was wrong on both sides: Edward threatened his magnates by favouring Despenser, and had no ability whatsoever to learn from past mistakes; the Contrariants took out their anger and frustration on innocents. Seeing the situation of 1321/22 in shades of black and white, as it so often is (Edward and the Despensers = Bad! Contrariants = Good!) is ludicrously simplistic.

To give a handful of examples of the Contrariants' actions in 1321/22 (there are many more): John Mowbray, Jocelyn Deyville and Stephen Baret stole goods from the townspeople of Laughton-en-le-Morthen in Yorkshire, even robbing the church, and took the goods to Mowbray's manor of Axholme. Roger Mortimer and his adherents stole wheat, grain, livestock and other goods worth over £140 from villagers in Herefordshire. Lord Berkeley told the villagers of Lydney in Gloucestershire that he would burn the village unless they gave him three pounds. Unsurprisingly, they sent the money. Other Marchers travelled through Gloucestershire seizing goods and selling them to raise funds. Roger Mortimer of Chirk "violently ejected" William la Zouche from his manor and stole goods worth 100 marks from him, because Zouche refused to join the rebels. A group of John Mowbray’s adherents stole provisions worth forty pounds from a boat belonging to a Grantham merchant. The earl of Lancaster's adherent Robert Holland chased the 'poor people' of Loughborough from their homes, and they dared not return for three months. When fleeing from Edward II in late 1321, because they didn't want to face him in battle - although their army was nearly four times larger than his - the Contrariants burned and devastated the Gloucestershire countryside behind them. The earl of Hereford and the two Roger Mortimers arrived in the town of Bridgnorth in January 1322 and, in an attempt to prevent Edward's army crossing the Severn, the Vita says that they "burned a great part of the town and killed very many of the king’s servants." They killed, beat up and wounded townspeople, stole "garments, jewels, beasts and other goods," and imprisoned people "until they made grievous ransoms." For all the Contrariants' grievances -and I'm not at all denying that they had plenty and that Edward provoked them into rebellion - they could always have tried, you know, not killing, wounding, imprisoning and impoverishing bystanders. The two Hugh Despensers were the targets of the Contrariants' ire, but it was the innocent who suffered most from their brutality and vindictiveness.

All the English earls alive in 1322 except Lancaster, Hereford and maybe the obscure and insignificant Oxford (and Edward II's son the earl of Chester, who was only nine) supported the king both before the executions and after, as did numerous other lords and knights and three Scottish earls (Atholl, Angus and Mar), which is hard to explain if they thought Edward was behaving like a blood-soaked, power-crazed despot. The inconvenient fact that Edward enjoyed the support of a very large part of the English nobility in 1322 is often ignored, as is the fact that no fewer than seven earls - Kent, Pembroke, Richmond, Surrey, Arundel, Atholl and Angus - condemned the earl of Lancaster to death, an execution blamed solely on the Despensers in 1326 and used as an example of Edward II's tyranny ever since.

The abbreviation 'JYD' means 'Judgement on the Younger Despenser', a transcript of the charges against Hugh Despenser at his trial in November 1326, when he was accused of the deaths of nineteen men in 1322. The abbreviation 'CCW' means 'A Chronicle of the Civil Wars of Edward II', ed. G. L. Haskins (Speculum, 14, 1939), a short and unnamed chronicle which covers some of the events of Edward's reign. I've added the sources for each execution in brackets.

Men certainly executed:

1) Thomas, earl of Lancaster, Leicester, Derby, Lincoln and Salisbury, beheaded at Pontefract on 22 March 1322. [Sources: Foedera, JYD and every contemporary or near-contemporary chronicle.]

Off-topic here, but interesting: secondary sources often say that Queen Isabella remained in the south and only joined her husband in Yorkshire after the execution of Lancaster, her uncle. In fact, she had evidently joined him before, as Edward's squire Oliver de Bordeaux told the earl of Richmond that the king and queen "were well and hearty, thank God" when he saw them on St Cuthbert's Day, 20 March 1322, two days before the execution. The wording implies that Oliver saw them together. [Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland] Edward arrived at Pontefract on 19 March and stayed until the 25th.

2-7) Six of Lancaster's knights were hanged at Pontefract around the same time: William Cheyne or Cheney, Warin Lisle, Henry Bradbourne, William Fitzwilliam, Thomas Mauduit and William Tuchet. The Flores Historiarum says that Lancaster was tormented by being forced to watch nine of his knights executed before him, but the official indictment in Foedera and the 1326 judgement on Hugh Despenser give six. The names of the three other knights the Flores thinks were executed appear in no source, not even the Flores. Lanercost says that eight barons of Lancaster's affinity were executed; other chronicles correctly give six. [Foedera, JYD, CCW, Anonimalle, Croniques de London, Brut, Lanercost, Livere de Reis, Adam Murimuth, Bridlington, Annales Paulini]

8) Bartholomew, Lord Badlesmere, formely Edward II's steward, suffered the traitor's death at Canterbury. [Livere de Reis, Brut, Flores, Croniques de London, Lanercost, Adam Murimuth, CCW, JYD]

9-11) Roger, Lord Clifford and the church-robbing John, Lord Mowbray were hanged in York. Sir Jocelyn Deyville, whom the Lanercost chronicler calls "a knight notorious for his misdeeds," was also hanged there. [Lanercost, Bridlington, Flores, Brut, Anonimalle, Croniques de London, Adam Murimuth, Scalacronica, CCW, JYD, Livere de Reis, Bridlington, Annales Paulini]

12-13) Sir Henry Montfort and Sir Henry Wilington were hanged in Bristol. [Foedera, Flores, Brut, CCW, JYD, Anonimalle, Croniques de London; Adam Murimuth names Wilington]

14-17) Sir Henry Tyes was hanged in London, Sir Thomas Culpepper in Winchelsea, Sir Francis Aldham in Windsor, and Sir Bartholomew Ashburnham in Canterbury. [Annales Paulini, Anonimalle, Adam Murimuth, Croniques de London, Lanercost, Livere de Reis, Flores, Brut, CCW, JYD]

18-19) Sir Roger Elmbridge and John, Lord Giffard of Brimpsfield were hanged in Gloucester. [Flores, Anonimalle, Croniques de London, CCW, JYD, Adam Murimuth, Bridlington, Brut; the Vita Edwardi Secundi names Elmbridge]

Men probably executed:

20) Three chronicles (Croniques de London, CCW and Flores) say that Sir Stephen Baret was hanged; Croniques gives the location as 'Collyere', probably Swansea. This is probably correct, although Baret is not mentioned in the judgement on Despenser. He was certainly dead by 1327, when his brother and heir David petitioned for the restoration of his inheritance. [Close Rolls] Edward II ordered on 26 March 1322 that Baret be taken to Swansea "to be there delivered as they are more fully instructed" by three men of his (Edward's) household, one of whom, Guy Amalvini, had been captured by the Marchers in South Wales in May 1321 when they were attacking Hugh Despenser's lands. [Patent Rolls, wardrobe accounts]

21) Sir William Fleming was probably hanged in Cardiff, though he is also not mentioned in the judgement on Despenser. [CCW, Flores, Brut, Croniques de London] Edward sent John Inge and Thomas de Marlebergh, Despenser adherents, to pronounce judgement on Fleming on 26 March 1322, at the same time as he sent men to try the other Contrariants. [Patent Rolls]

22) Two chronicles (Brut, Flores) say that the earl of Lancaster's squire John Page was also executed. This is probable: an entry on the Close Roll of 1323 says that a John Page "underwent the punishment of death by consideration of the king’s court for being a rebel." However, there are two references to a man of this name imprisoned in the Tower of London in February 1323 and June 1324 (Close Rolls, records of King's Bench), and the judgement on Despenser does not name Page among those executed. Something of the confusion over Page's possible execution is apparent in Natalie Fryde's The Tyranny and Fall of Edward II 1321-1326, where Mrs Fryde says twice (pp. 63, 160) that Page was imprisoned after 1322, and once (p. 61) that he was executed.

Men definitely not executed

- Men who have frequently been named among those executed who were certainly not were Sir Ralph Eplington or Ellington, Sir William Sully and Sir Roger Burghfield, Bromsfield or Bernesfield. They were killed at the battle of Boroughbridge on 16 March 1322. [Annales Paulini, Anonimalle, Brut, CCW, JYD, Parliamentary Writs, SC 8/47/2305, SC 8/95/4719] Natalie Fryde's Tyranny and Fall of Edward II of 1979 was the first work to say that these men were executed, and this totally wrong 'fact' has been copied in later books, which does at least usefully demonstrate which writers didn't bother to do their own research into primary sources.

- Mrs Fryde also claims that Hugh Lovel and his three squires were executed. Hugh Lovel, a Scottish knight imprisoned at Gloucester Castle between 1307 and 1311, was in fact also killed at the battle of Boroughbridge, with said three squires. [Parl Writs] Not one of the sources cited here and in Tyranny and Fall says that Lovel, Sully, Eplington and the others were executed, so I can't imagine why Mrs Fryde thought they were, and she cites Parliamentary Writs and various other sources that clearly state they were killed at Boroughbridge. For example, a petition of c. 1322/1327 begins "Joan, widow of Roger de Burghfeld, who died at Boroughbridge, requests her dower," the Anonimalle Chronicle says "There on the bridge of the said town [Boroughbridge] the noble earl of Hereford was killed, and Sir William de Sule, Sir Roger de Bromsfeld and Sir Rauf de Elpingdon were also killed," and the Brut says "Sire William of Sulley and Sire Roger of Bernesfelde were slain in that battle." The 1326 judgement on Despenser also names Sully and Burghfield with the earl of Hereford at Boroughbridge, not in the list of the men executed. Oh dear, Mrs Fryde. That's seriously sloppy work in what has become a standard textbook on Edward II's reign.

- The chronicles Livere de Reis, Lanercost and Flores say that the Lancastrian knight Sir John Eure was executed at Bishop's Auckland. From various entries on the Close and Patent Rolls, however, it is apparent that Eure was captured and beheaded by fourteen of Edward II's supporters without Edward's prior knowledge or consent. Edward named the men responsible for the murder as 'malefactors' and said that they had killed Eure "while he was in the king's peace" and had "declared that he was the king's enemy, which he was not." (He did pardon them, though.)

In March 1324, at the request of the bishops - not Queen Isabella, as some writers believe - Edward ordered the sheriffs of London, Middlesex, Kent, Yorkshire, Gloucestershire and Buckinghamshire to take down the bodies of the twentyish executed men and have them buried. Yes, that's only six counties. [Close Rolls, Foedera, Adam Murimuth, Annales Paulini]. I've seen it stated, without a reference, that Pope John XXII begged Edward to show restraint over the executions. Having trawled through the papal letters, the only reference John made to events of March/April 1322 that I can find is his advice to Edward to ascribe his victory over the Contrariants to God. Far from sympathising with Edward's opponents or wailing over their deaths, John in fact excommunicated "those nobles and magnates who attack the king and his realm." [Papal Letters 1305-1342]

The executions of, at most, 22 men and the murder of one knight were capricious and vengeful and some contemporary chroniclers were shocked by them, but they were hardly the indiscriminate and cold-blooded slaughter of innocents ordered by a despotic king and his nasty favourite, the appalling bloodbath and the pitiful sight of bodies hanging in every English town that some modern writers seem to think.

Possessions of the Losers of 1326

2009-06-02T11:42:00.004+02:00

I finally got back from holiday last night after a truly nightmare journey of endlessly delayed trains and delayed planes. Hideous. Made me feel like I never ever want to get on a plane again, which is unfortunate, as Lady D and I are off to London on a research trip a week on Thursday. Several days of looking at Edward II's chamber accounts in the original French - woot, so exciting! (I mean that seriously, not sarcastically.) Talking of Lady D, many thanks to her for all her recent brilliant work on our soon to be up and running Edward website! It is going to rock.

I've had emails from a few people saying they haven't been able to comment on the blog as it keeps crashing - I've had the same problem myself on other blogs, and apparently it's something to do with the 'followers' widget. Hope Blogger fixes it soon. Until I get my act together and write a proper post, here's a quick one on some possessions of Edward II and Edmund Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, in 1326.

When Edward fled from London in early October 1326 after the arrival of Isabella and Mortimer's invasion force, he left some items behind with the merchant Simon Swanland. Swanland was a draper who occasionally provided cloth for the king's household, became mayor of London in the autumn of 1329, and was the recipient of his kinsman the archbishop of York's incredible letter in January 1329 or 1330 stating that Edward was "alive and in good health of body." The items Edward left with him included:

- a cloth-of-gold mantle edged with "diverse white pearls" and silver.

- three velvet garments with green stripes, and matching hat.

- four ells of ‘Tarse’ cloth with golden stripes.

- a green coverlet with three matching tapestries.

- a cushion cover of vermilion sendal.

- a silver cup with foot and cover.

- three "gilded acorn branches."

- a "piece of beautiful napery, which contains fifty-three ells."

- two "good and beautiful" Bibles (ij bibles bons et bels), one covered with red leather and the other with tanned leather, and a missal covered with black leather.

- this entry is partly damaged: "the sixth book of ...vel, well-glossed, covered with green leather."

- two coffers (or cases, or boxes), well-decorated.

- a "good and beautiful" chalice of silver which weighed four marks, and two matching pitchers.

- an encensq (incense-holder?) of silver which weighed sixteen shillings.

- an orfiller - not sure what that is - of silk, with golden birds.

- four mazers [entry damaged] with sorrels and silver-gilt.

- a piece of coarse black woollen cloth (i. neyr falding)

Edward's ally the earl of Arundel was executed in Hereford on 17 November 1326, and a week later, the possessions he had stored in the cathedral church of Chichester "pertaining to the king by the forfeiture of the earl" were delivered into the wardrobe of "Queen Isabel and of Edward the king's firstborn son," i.e. the soon to be Edward III. They were:

- £524, 2 shillings and 1p in 6 canvas sacks, labelled £533, 6 shillings and 8p.

- a silver-gilt cup, enamelled in parts, with a cover but without a foot, which weighed 7 marks.

- a silver-gilt cup, enamelled all over, with foot and cover and a basin to match, which weighed £11, 6 shillings and 8p.

- a silver-gilt cup, enamelled all over with foot and cover and a pint pot to match, which weighed 6 marks.

- a silver cup, gilt and partly enamelled, with a trivet, which weighed 103 shillings and 4p.

- a silver salt-cellar, enamelled all over, with a cover, which weighed 35 shillings.

- three silver-gilt cups, partly broken, with feet and covers, which weighed six pounds and 1 shilling.

- three silver-gilt cups, with feet and covers, which weighed 108 shillings and 4p.

- three cups of plain silver, with feet and covers, which weighed 101 shillings and 8p.

Evidently Arundel really liked silver things.

Sources
J. Harvey Bloom, ‘Simon de Swanland and King Edward II’, Notes and Queries, 11th series, 4 (1911), p. 2.
Calendar of Patent Rolls 1324-1327, p. 339.

Edward II And The Never-Ending Story Of Thomas De Banbury

2009-05-20T19:12:00.000+02:00

This will be my last post until 3 June or thereabouts, as I'm off on my holidays - home to the Lake District, where it's currently about 12 degrees C, the low 50s F. Yippee for 'summer' weather in the north of England.

It was extremely common for Edward I, Edward II and Edward III to send former members of their household to a religious house 'to receive sustenance for life' when the men had reached the end of their working life, and there are literally hundreds of entries relating to this on the Close Roll of Edward II's reign. Normally this presented few problems, but in 1310/11, Edward had some difficulties placing Sir Thomas de Banbury, a household knight who had long served himself and his father.

It began on 9 June 1310, when Edward asked the Benedictine house of Holy Trinity, Canterbury, to take in Banbury so that he might "receive maintenance for his lifetime according to the requirements of his estate, and a chamber, etc." Either Edward forgot that he'd already requested a place for Banbury at Holy Trinity or they refused to admit him, as two months later he wrote to the Benedictine abbey of Burton-on-Trent to request (or demand!) that Banbury might "receive the necessaries of life in food, drink, robes, etc, according to his estate." The abbot wrote to Edward claiming that although he would willingly fulfil the king's request, his house could not afford to admit Banbury as "theirs is the poorest and smallest abbey of their order in England." Edward, unimpressed, sent someone to investigate their accounts, and responded in early October 1310: "which excuse the king learns from trustworthy evidence deviates in many ways from the truth, and he learns that they have means to fulfil his request, wherefore he regards their excuse as wholly insufficient."

The abbot continued to plead poverty and refused to admit Thomas de Banbury. Edward continued to press for his admittance, and ordered the abbot on 3 March 1311 to take in Banbury "without delay, and to administer to him the necessaries of life, according to the king's former orders." By now Edward was furious, and added "the king considers their excuses for not obeying his former orders are frivolous, untruthful, and unacceptable." Not cowed by the king's rage, the abbot still refused, and on 9 June 1311, Edward seized his temporalities to "punish the abbot for his disobediences and contempts." He wrote "they have despised and disobeyed the king's commands and done nothing, to the great contempt of the king and prejudice to the right of his crown and damage of Thomas [de Banbury], and the king will not and should not let this disobedience go unpunished for the prejudice to his royal right in the future if he cannot assign maintenance to people who have long served him."

This was still to no avail, however, and by 20 August 1311, Edward had given up. He sent Thomas de Banbury to the bailiff of the abbot of Fécamp (a Benedictine house in Normandy) in England, to "receive the necessaries of life in food and clothing for himself and a yeoman, two grooms, and two horses within some manor of that house." Even this proved unsucessful: "the bailiff has replied that he cannot do so as he is simply a bailiff." By now gnashing his teeth, most probably, Edward wrote directly to the abbot of Fécamp on 5 October, asking him to admit Banbury into one of his English manors with food and clothing for himself, three servants, two horses and his own chamber. A full sixteen months after Edward's first efforts to find a home for Thomas de Banbury, he finally succeeded, and nothing more is heard of the knight. I hope Banbury spent a peaceful retirement after all that palaver.

Edward also had problems placing his former servant Robert le Usher: in June 1315, he sent him to the abbey of Glastonbury "to receive the same allowance in food and clothing, etc, as Kentus le Charetter*, deceased, had in their house by the king's request." (* Great name!) He informed the chancellor on 20 September 1315 that he had asked the abbot and convent "many times" to admit Usher, but they "have done nothing and have not excused themselves sufficiently." Edward ordered the abbot to appear in person before him "wherever he may be" to explain himself. The abbot failed to arrive at the appointed time, though I assume he eventually cleared it all with Edward and admitted Usher, as I can't find any more references to the situation. As for the abbey of Burton-on-Trent, they later admitted other people at Edward's request - including Alice, mother of Robert Duffield, prior of Edward's foundation of Langley Priory and his confessor - without any complaint that I've found. Probably not surprising.

I find this interesting as an illustration of the kind of living standards a retired knight could expect, and I love that bit "deviates in many ways from the truth." Such a stylish way of telling someone that he was lying. Edward was considerably more understanding in May 1317, when he tried to send his servant Robert de Crouland to Tupholme Abbey and the abbot informed him that the house's small income was "already heavily burdened with the charge of finding a chaplain to say mass for the soul of Sir Piers de Gaveston, formerly earl of Cornwall." Edward, without comment, sent Crouland to Reading Abbey instead. But then, invoking Piers Gaveston's name never did anyone any harm when trying to get a favour from Edward II.

See you in June!

Sources: Calendar of Close Rolls 1307-1313 and 1313-1318; Calendar of Chancery Warrants 1244-1326; The National Archives.

The Siege of Berwick and the Chapter of Myton

2009-05-18T13:13:00.006+02:00

Berwick-upon-Tweed is a port in the north-east of England which changed hands between England and Scotland over a dozen times in the Middle Ages. (It's been on the English side of the border since 1482, when the future Richard III captured it.) Edward I took the town in 1296, sacked it and massacred the inhabitants, the Scots re-took it after Edward's defeat at Stirling Bridge, then lost it to the king again in 1298.

In Edward II's reign, Robert Bruce attempted to take the town from the English three times, in March/April 1312, January 1316 and August 1317. He finally succeeded on 2 April 1318 thanks to, according to the Scalacronica and Lanercost chronicles, the treachery of an English inhabitant of the town called Peter Spalding, who was responsible for a section of the town wall and whom the Scots "bribed by a great sum of money…and the promise of land." The castle held out until around 20 July. Edward II, unwilling as always to accept his own culpability in failing to keep the north of England safe from Scottish incursions, declared himself "much enraged" and "justly incensed" at the "carelessness" of the burgesses of Berwick and seized their goods and chattels. In late May 1319, Edward relented somewhat and pardoned one Walter de Gosewyk "of the anger and rancour of mind which the king had conceived against him" because Berwick had fallen to the Scots, freed his son from prison and restored Gosewyk to his favour at the request of Hugh Despenser the Younger, though he added ominously that this pardon was conditional: "unless he can be lawfully charged with sedition or assent to the betrayal of the town."

It was vital for Edward's future military campaigns in Scotland to retake Berwick, and on 10 June 1318, he summoned his cousin the earl of Lancaster and many others to muster against the Scots. As so often happened with Edward II's Scottish campaigns, however, it failed to take place, Edward being far too busy feuding with Lancaster and allowing his kingdom to teeter on the brink of civil war. The campaign was postponed until 1319, giving Bruce ample time to strengthen the town fortifications and make it much harder for Edward to retake. Having come to terms with Lancaster, in November 1318 Edward once again summoned men to muster on 10 June 1319, but on 22 May, inevitably, he postponed it until 22 July. Such enthusiasm.

On 20 July 1319 at York, Edward asked both the archbishops and all the bishops of England to pray for him on his way to Scotland. Then he spent the rest of July and the whole of August in and around Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and didn't arrive at Berwick until 7 September - perhaps because it took longer than Edward had expected for his army to assemble. Despite the summons to muster the previous November, the Vita Edwardi Secundi implies that Edward only decided to attack Berwick on the spur of moment: on his way to Scotland, he "first came to Berwick with his whole army, and decided on advice that this should be the first place to be besieged, because it had renounced his authority." Edward II's utter brilliance as a military commander [/sarcasm] is apparent from his failure to bring along siege-engines and diggers, which had to be called up after the siege had begun. (Though to be fair, it doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone else either that siege-engines and diggers might prove useful in a siege.) Edward wrote to Chancery on 9 September to say that he had arrived at Berwick "and is lodged here until he has conquered it by the aid of God, and he has great need of diggers," and asked for "100 of the best" to be summoned and for "all the king's engines in the castle of York" to be loaded onto ships and brought to him as quickly as possible.

The importance of retaking Berwick was such that even the earl of Lancaster co-operated with Edward for once, and wrote to the king: "On that day we shall be there, with God's help, if we are alive and you are there. And, sire, if going there requires greater haste, then move there, sire, when you please and we will follow you in honour of you and for the salvation of your land and your person and of your people. And, for God's sake, sire, make haste to do it." The earls of Pembroke, Surrey, Hereford, Atholl and Angus also accompanied Edward to Berwick, as did the king's nineteen-year-old half-brother the earl of Norfolk, whom Edward had knighted on 15 July. The earls of Arundel and Richmond did not attend in person, but sent 260 men and 35 men respectively. Edward's court favourites Roger Damory and Hugh Audley, and his chamberlain and rising favourite Hugh Despenser the Younger, took along 82, 74 and 98 men respectively. Edward's force totalled around 14,000, including 2400 footmen from Wales, and the king paid just under £3050 in wages from 1 August to 24 September.

Predictably, given Edward's slap-dash approach and obvious lack of enthusiasm, the siege was unsuccessful. On 8 or 9 September, and again on the 13th, he ordered a simultaneous attack by land and sea, and although his force "almost scaled the wall in the first assault delivered with great fury…the inhabitants regained their courage and defended themselves with spirit," says Lanercost. The attack on 13 September took place at dawn, and the 'sow' which the English were using as cover for the miners trying to breach the town walls was smashed and burnt. Berwick's defenders stoned Edward's ships, and his troops were repulsed and forced to withdraw. Edward kept himself amused during the siege, and paid his minstrel Robert Withstaff and two musicians sent to him by his brother-in-law Philippe V of France for playing before him, ordered hunting dogs sent from Wales, and had two of his falcons brought from London. The falcons were named Damory after his friend Roger Damory, and Beaumont after his French cousin Henry Beaumont.

As a decoying tactic, Robert Bruce's allies James Douglas and Thomas Randolph, earl of Moray, led an army into England and reached as far south as Boroughbridge, near York; Edward had heard by 3 September, four days before he even arrived at Berwick, that the Scots had entered Yorkshire "and are lying in wait for the city and castle" of York. Douglas came close to capturing Queen Isabella, who was staying at a small manor belonging to the archbishop of York, either Brotherton or Bishopthorpe. Fortunately, one of the Scottish scouts was captured and revealed the plans, and Isabella hastened to York, from where she escaped by water to the safety of Nottingham. A horrified and mortified Edward later gave her jewels and other gifts in consolation. The Vita points out that "if the queen had at that time been captured, I believe that Scotland would have bought peace for herself," and repeats a rumour, almost certainly a false one, that the earl of Lancaster had plotted with the Scots to capture his niece in exchange for £40,000. Perhaps to divert attention from himself, Lancaster in turn accused Hugh Despenser the Younger.

Despenser, an enthusiastic letter-writer, told the sheriff of Glamorgan "before he [Edward] had been there [Berwick] eight days news came to him that the Scots had entered his land of England with the prompting and assistance of the earl of Lancaster. The earl acted in such a way that the king took himself off with all his army, to the great shame and damage of us all. Wherefore we very much doubt if matters will end so happily for our side as is necessary." According to the Vita, Lancaster "blamed Hugh [Despenser] for the disgrace which had attached to his name at Berwick, and this he wished to avenge as occasion offered." An anonymous chronicle says that Despenser blamed Lancaster to divert attention from his own intriguing with the Scots to capture the queen. None of this proves anything much except that rumours and accusations were swirling around, though the fact remained that someone must have revealed the queen's whereabouts to the Scots. The real culprit, according to Annales Paulini and Flores Historiarum, was a knight called Edmund Darel.

On 12 September 1319, Douglas and Moray's force defeated an English army hastily cobbled together by William Melton, archbishop of York, near the village of Myton-on-Swale. So many clerics died – Lanercost says 4000, with another 1000 who drowned in the Swale – that the battle became known as the Chapter of Myton. The abbot of St Mary’s in York later founded a chapel in the village, "in honour of the Transubstantiation and the flesh and blood of Our Lord," to pray for the souls of the men who died. News of this latest military disaster reached Berwick on 14 September, and the earl of Lancaster left the port two days later, though whether to protect his lands, to cut off the Scots’ retreat or out of disgust with Edward is not clear.

Although relations between the two most powerful men in the country, the king and the earl of Lancaster, had been, prior to the siege, outwardly amicable, Edward proved what was really on his mind by ominously announcing "When this wretched business is over, we will turn our hands to other matters. For I have not forgotten the wrong that was done to my brother Piers." This threat to avenge Piers Gaveston's death was clearly aimed at Lancaster, and may have been a reason for his departure from Berwick - although Lancaster's biographer J. R. Maddicott says that the threat was made about a week before the earl's departure. The Bridlington chronicler claims that some people (unnamed) deliberately fostered dissent and conflict between Edward and Lancaster, falsely reporting Edward’s words to the earl and vice versa.

According to Lanercost, Edward summoned his council and told them that "he wished to send part of his forces to attack the Scots still remaining in England, and to maintain the siege with the rest of his people; but by advice of his nobles, who objected either to divide their forces or to fight the Scots, he raised the siege and marched his army into England, expecting to encounter the Scots." Edward himself told Chancery that "the king cannot depart from the siege without great dishonour," but he had little choice. The St Albans chronicler says that the king lay in wait for the Scottish force at Newminster, a Cistercian abbey near Morpeth in Northumberland, and Edward’s itinerary does indeed place him at Newminster on 19 September - he told the archbishop of York and the chancellor on the 18th that "the king is coming with his host against his enemies who have entered the land" - but they eluded him by returning to their homeland by the western route.

By this time, it is clear that Hugh Despenser had become close to Edward; the king promised to make his chamberlain keeper of the castle once Berwick fell, and also promised to make Roger Damory constable of the town – thus presumptuously handing out favours he hadn’t yet won. The author of the Flores, who loathed Edward, calls his friends – presumably referring to Roger Damory and Despenser – "despicable parasites." Edward and said despicable parasites were back in Newcastle on 20 September, then stayed in and around York until late January 1320.

And thus Edward II failed to retake Berwick-upon-Tweed and never again bothered to try to re-capture it, and signed a two-year peace treaty with Robert Bruce on 21 December 1319. The town remained in Scottish hands until July 1333, when Edward's twenty-year-old son Edward III - who had more military ability in his little fingernail than Edward had in his whole body - annihilated the Scottish nobility at the battle of Halidon Hill and captured Berwick. As for the earl of Lancaster, Edward II did avenge Piers Gaveston's death on him two and a half years after the unsuccessful siege. Edward's next, and last, Scottish campaign in September 1322 proved to be a disaster. But then, you'd probably already guessed that.

EDIT: This post hadn't even been up two hours when someone ran it through an online translator and re-posted it, with such gems as "brought to him as lickety-split as empathy," "In up to date charter brainy May 1319," "but they eluded him at close-fisted returning to their homeland at close-fisted the western itinerary," "By this age, it is clearly that Hugh Despenser had develop bashful to Edward; the ruler promised to frame his chamberlain attendant of the awesome in two shakes of a lamb’s tailpiece b together Berwick cut, and also promised to frame Roger Damory flatfoot of the municipality," and Edward III "had more military joking in his uncomfortable fingernail than Edward had in his unharmed association." Edward pardoned Gosewyk "of the paddywack and hatred of undecided which..." Brilliant.

Sources

Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland 1307-1357; Calendar of Patent Rolls 1317-1321; Calendar of Close Rolls 1318-1323; Foedera, II, i; Calendar of Chancery Warrants 1244-1326.

Vita Edwardi Secundi, ed. N. Denholm-Young; The Chronicle of Lanercost 1272-1346, ed. Herbert Maxwell; Scalacronica: The Reigns of Edward I, Edward II and Edward III as Recorded by Sir Thomas Gray of Heton, knight, ed. Herbert Maxwell; Flores Historiarum, vol iii, ed. H. R. Luard; Johannis de Trokelowe et Henrici de Blaneforde Chronica et Annales, ed. H. T. Riley; Gesta Edwardi de Carnarvon Auctore Canonico Bridlingtoniensi, ed. W. Stubbs; Annales Paulini 1307-1340, ed. W. Stubbs; The Brut or the Chronicles of England, ed. F. W. D. Brie; Le Livere de Reis de Britanie e le Livere de Reis de Engletere, ed. John Glover; Thomas Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, vol. i, ed. H. T. Riley; G. L. Haskins, 'A Chronicle of the Civil Wars of Edward II', Speculum, 1939.

George Osborne Sayles, The Functions of the Medieval Parliament of England; J. R. Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster 1307-1322: A Study in the Reign of Edward II; J. R. S. Phillips, Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke 1307-1324: Baronial Politics in the Reign of Edward II; G. W. S. Barrow, Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland; Ian Mortimer, The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III; Mary Saaler, Edward II 1307-1327; Paul Doherty, Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II.

Misconceptions about Hugh Despenser the Younger

2009-05-14T15:38:00.000+02:00

I've seen plenty of books published recently which still perpetuate myths about Hugh Despenser the Younger: that Edward II arranged his marriage to his (Edward's!) niece Eleanor de Clare after Despenser became his favourite; that he was nothing more than a humble knight; that he became Edward's favourite shortly after the battle of Bannockburn in 1314, or even before. Some recent writers even follow the same line as R. Perry's Edward the Second: Suddenly, at Berkeley (1988, p. 35) which makes the astonishing claim that Despenser and his father were "not members of a baronial family." Hugh Despenser the Younger was in fact the grandson of the earl and countess of Warwick and of the countess of Norfolk. Bizarre.

Hugh Despenser married Eleanor de Clare on 26 May 1306, eight years before her brother died at Bannockburn and over a year before Edward II acceded to the throne. The marriage was arranged not by Edward II but Edward I, who attended the wedding in his chapel at Westminster and paid thirty-seven pounds for minstrels to perform there, including harpers called Richard de Whiteacre and Richard de Leyland. The king gave his granddaughter almost twenty-nine pounds to buy jewels for her wedding, plus ten pounds to buy robes for her household. (Thanks to Susan Higginbotham for sending me this ref.) [1]

Chronicler Piers or Pierre Langtoft (died c. 1307) writes of the knighting of Edward of Caernarfon and his companions on 22 May 1306:

Three hundred knights of account in truth
Were dubbed at the cost of king Edward.
Several of the most noble were married on that occasion.
The earl of Warenne, with his newly received title,
Espoused the daughter of the count de Barre.
The earl of Arundel, in possession of his fees,
Took there the damsel whose father was named
William de Warenne, who had departed to God.
Sir Hugh son of Hugh, called Despenser,
Took there the maiden of noble kindred,
Whom Gilbert de Clare had begotten
On Joan the countess surnamed of Acres. [2]

Notice how Langtoft calls Despenser "of the most noble" of the nearly 300 new knights. Edward I agreed to pay Despenser the Elder a whopping £2000 for the younger Hugh's marriage, and an entry on the Patent Roll of June 1306 describes the financial arrangements made for Hugh and Eleanor: Despenser the Elder was to give them land worth £200 a year for the rest of his life. (Which in fact he didn't.) [3]

Edward II wrote to his Exchequer clerks regarding the dower of Eleanor's damsel Joan in March 1309, "at the request of the king's niece Eleanor le Despenser." [4] He gave twenty marks on 21 October 1310 to a messenger called John Chaucomb for the news he had brought to the king "respecting the Lady Eleanor le Despenser." [5] Queen Isabella's household book for 1311/12 still survives and has been published, with English translation, and contains at least ten references to "Lady Eleanor le Despenser." [6] An entry on the Close Roll of 20 April 1311 mentions "John de Berkhamstede, who has long served Eleanor le Despensere, the king's niece..." [7] There are numerous other entries which call Eleanor 'le Despenser' long before her husband became the king's favourite. How difficult can it possibly be for writers to check the correct date of Despenser and Eleanor's wedding, or at least notice the many instances when she is called by Despenser's name, instead of assuming that Edward II arranged their marriage in or after 1314? Even Wikipedia gets the date right on both Despenser's and Eleanor's pages, for pity's sake. It doesn't say much for authors' research when published works are sub-Wikipedia standard.

Marriage to the king of England's eldest granddaughter was a brilliant match for Despenser considering he was not set to inherit an earldom, and rather less brilliant for Eleanor, but evidently Edward I thought he was a good enough husband for her. He would hardly have paid £2000 for the marriage of a nobody who was the son of a nobody. Confusion arises, at least among people who don't do enough research, because Edward II did marry his other favourites off to Eleanor's sisters: Piers Gaveston and Hugh Audley to Margaret, Roger Damory to Elizabeth. But there is no doubt whatsoever that he had nothing to do with Despenser's marriage to Eleanor. By the time Despenser became Edward's favourite in or shortly after 1318, he'd been married to Eleanor for a dozen years, and had perhaps half a dozen children, the eldest of whom was born in 1308 or 1309. Their known children were: Hugh, Edward, Gilbert, John, Isabel, Joan, Eleanor, Margaret, Elizabeth and an unnamed boy who died young in 1321, perhaps stilborn.

Although Despenser was not of the highest rank of the nobility, he was a heck of a long way from being merely a humble knight. His mother Isabel Beauchamp was the daughter of the earl of Warwick who died in 1298, and sister of the earl of Warwick who abducted Piers Gaveston in 1312. That Despenser was the nephew of the man who abducted Edward II's first favourite is not nearly as well-known as it should be. The earl of Ulster, Richard de Burgh (c. 1259-1326) was the first cousin of Despenser's mother - their mothers Maud and Aveline FitzJohn or FitzGeoffrey were sisters. Despenser's elder half-sister Maud Chaworth, daughter of Isabel Beauchamp's first marriage to Patrick Chaworth, married Edward I's nephew Henry of Lancaster in 1296 or 1297. Hugh Despenser the Elder's mother Aline Basset (died 1281) was countess of Norfolk by her second marriage, the first wife of Roger Bigod (died 1306) who married secondly Alicia, daughter of the count of Holland and Hainault. Despenser the Elder was thus the son-in-law of the earl of Warwick and the stepson of the earl of Norfolk, not to mention an able and experienced diplomat high in favour with Edward I, and was a very long way from being the nobody some writers insist he was. (See Marc Morris's The Bigod Earls of Norfolk in the Thirteenth Century for the fascinating story of Norfolk trying to dispossess his stepson of Aline Basset's inheritance by pretending that Aline had borne him a child.) Despenser the Elder's step-grandmother Ela - the second wife of Aline Basset's father Philip - was the daughter of Henry II's illegitimate son the earl of Salisbury and countess of Warwick by her first marriage. Despenser the Younger was, through his mother, the great-great-great-grandson of the famous William Marshal, earl of Pembroke, and the great-great-grandson of Geoffrey FitzPeter, earl of Essex and of Hugh Bigod, earl of Norfolk. Yes, these are the men who were "not members of a baronial family."

Hugh Despenser the Younger was first summoned to parliament on 29 July 1314, "whereby he is held to have become Lord le Despenser." [8] He was appointed Edward II's chamberlain in the summer of 1318 "at the request and counsel of the magnates," and thus was not chosen by Edward himself, and continued in the position until his execution in November 1326, except for his few months in exile in 1321/22. [9] The later chronicler Geoffrey le Baker says that Edward was indignant at Despenser's appointment as chamberlain, as he disliked him. Whether that's true or not is hard to say, but it is certainly true is that Edward did precious little for Despenser before 1317/18.

Edward refused to hand over Despenser and his wife's share of her brother the earl of Gloucester's inheritance until November 1317, nearly three and a half years after Gloucester's death, even though Despenser went before parliament and Edward's council about half a dozen times in 1316 and 1317 to point out that Gloucester's widow could not possibly be pregnant by him and could he and his wife please, please have their rightful inheritance? From 1320, Edward II fell over himself to give Hugh Despenser anything he wanted, and his actions here demonstrate conclusively that Despenser was not yet in his favour. As late as March 1318, Edward took the county of Gwynllwg into his own hands after Despenser had persuaded its tenants to pay homage and fealty to himself instead of to Hugh Audley, the rightful owner, and ordered Despenser to withdraw from the county and the tenants to pay homage to Audley instead. [10] Hardly the actions of a man in the grip of an infatuation with Hugh Despenser.

Although Despenser's wife was Edward's favourite niece and Despenser's father one of the king's most loyal supporters and friends, Despenser himself wielded minimal influence at court and over the king until he took possession of his wife's share of the de Clare inheritance, and the favours he was granted were pretty trivial ones. For example, in 1313 and 1315 Despenser asked for favours on behalf of a chapel near Winchester and for permission for his brother-in-law John St Amand to re-grant two of his manors. [11] Grateful though the chapel and St Amand most probably were, this is a very far cry from Despenser's later supremacy at court. Edward granted Despenser the forfeited lands of two Scotsmen in June 1314 (which he never received thanks to Edward's failures in Scotland) and two wardships in October 1313 and April 1317, and gave him permission in September 1312 to hunt foxes, hares, cats and badgers but not the king's deer. [12] And that's about it. Before 1316 Despenser did not witness a single charter of Edward's. This stands in stark contrast to his father, who witnessed more than half of all Edward's charters between 1307 and 1314, including 98.5% of them in 1312/13 and 88.5% in 1313/14. Despenser the Younger witnessed just 5.7% of Edward's charters in 1317/18, 35.5% in 1318/19, 68.6% in 1319/20, and just under 80% in 1320/21. There's his rise to Edward's favour, right there. His position as chamberlain evidently had little to do with this, as the king's previous chamberlain John Charlton witnessed only a little over 3% of Edward's charters between 1314 and 1316, and none at all in other years. [13] Despenser's first big grant from Edward came in November 1317, when he received lands in South Wales "in satisfaction of 600 marks due to him for staying with the king." [14]

After Piers Gaveston's death in June 1312, Edward II had no male favourite for quite some time, three and a half years in fact, until numerous grants of land, money and favours from late 1315 onwards demonstrate the rise of the Oxfordshire knight Roger Damory in his affections. Damory really was little more than a humble knight, a younger son with few prospects. Hugh Audley and William Montacute were also prominent at court from 1316 to 1318. Writers who think that Despenser became Edward's favourite in about 1314 thus miss Damory, Audley and Montacute completely. The first real indication that Hugh Despenser, who as royal chamberlain spent a considerable amount of time in Edward's company, was growing close to the king comes during the siege of Berwick-on-Tweed in September 1319: the king promised to make Despenser keeper of the castle once Berwick fell. On the other hand, he also promised to make Roger Damory constable of the town, so Damory was evidently still high in Edward's favour. It was as late as 26 October 1320 when Edward finally demonstrated that he was prepared to do anything for Despenser, no matter how politically suicidal and unpopular, when he took the peninsula of Gower into his own hands, almost certainly with the intention of granting it to his favourite. [15] The king thus kicked off the Despenser War and the (temporary) exile of both Hugh Despensers.

That's much later than a lot of writers seem to think. I've also seen it written that Edward heaped Despenser with titles, which he didn't: Despenser was lord of Glamorgan by right of his wife, and never received any other titles. It was only after Edward's 1322 defeat of the magnates who had exiled Despenser that he bestowed numerous forfeited lands on his favourite, again much later than lots of people seem to think. It's fascinating to contemplate precisely when, why and how Edward became so infatuated with a man he'd known for most of his life and had evidently never much liked or trusted before, to what extent Despenser's machinations were responsible for this, and what the nature of their relationship was. But whatever else Hugh Despenser the Younger was - pirate, extortionist, tyrant, one of the most hated men of the Middle Ages - he certainly wasn't a humble knight who only married into the royal family because of Edward II's infatuation with him.

For lots more information about Hugh, see Lady D's terrific blog.

Sources

1) Minstrels and jewels: National Archives E 101/369/11.
2) Chronicle of Pierre de Langtoft, ed. Thomas Wright, vol. 2, pp. 368-369.
[Sir Huge le fiz Hug, Despenser appellez,
I prist la pucelle de gentil parentz,
Quele Gilbert de Clare avoit engendrez
Sur Jone la countesse de Acres surnomez.]
3) Calendar of Close Rolls 1307-1313, p. 5; Calendar of Patent Rolls 1301-1307, p. 443.
4) Calendar of Chancery Warrants 1244-1326, p. 283.
5) Frederick Devon, Issues of the Exchequer, p. 124.
6) The Household book of Queen Isabella of England, for the fifth regnal year of Edward II, 8th July 1311 to 7th July 1312, ed. F. D. Blackley and Gustav Hermansen.
7) Close Rolls 1307-1313, p. 351.
8) Complete Peerage.
9) Parliament Rolls of Medieval England.
10) Close Rolls 1313-1318, pp. 531-532.
11) Patent Rolls 1307-1313, pp. 528, 561, 571; Ibid. 1313-1317, p. 265.
12) Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland 1307-1357, p. 69; Patent Rolls 1307-1313, p. 492; Patent Rolls 1313-1317, pp. 20, 640; Fine Rolls 1307-1319, pp. 181, 203, 223, 242, 278.
13) J. S. Hamilton, 'Charter Witness Lists for the Reign of Edward II', Fourteenth-Century England 1, ed. Nigel Saul, pp. 5, 11, 14.
14) Patent Rolls 1317-1321, p. 56.
15) Close Rolls 1318-1323, p. 268.

News

2009-05-09T11:21:00.002+02:00

First news: Lady D and I have decided that we're going to set up another website about Edward II, because we're sick to death of all the inaccurate, uninformed and downright invented crap spewed out about him in books and online, such as the recent book which says that Isabella was besieged in the Tower of London by the earl of Pembroke in 1321, and the recent blog post which confidently asserts that Edward confined Isabella to the Tower in 1324/25 - I mean, where do people get this stuff? We want to flood the internet with correct information about Edward II, and we are Women On A Mission. (And possibly deranged, given how much time we spend obsessing about people who lived 700 years ago, but hey, at least we're passionate.) We don't even have a name for the website yet, let alone a URL or any content, and it might have to wait a while as I'm going on holiday soon, but as soon as we have something, I'll post more info and a link.

Second, great news: a Bristol film company is making a film about Edward II escaping from Berkeley Castle! It's called Uncertain Proof and features Manuele Fieschi, an Italian priest who wrote to Edward III in about 1336/37 to tell him that his father had escaped from Berkeley, went to Corfe Castle and then Ireland, visited the Pope in Avignon and ended up in Italy. (The letter is historical, not the scriptwriter's invention - you can see it here.)

The film tells the story of Fieschi, who finds clues which suggest Edward was not murdered at Berkeley, and becomes obsessed with tracking down the former king in the mountains of Italy. Events of Edward's life, his love for his favourites, Hugh Despenser's execution and so on, appear in flashback. Wonderful news! There's a short article about the film here, and lots more information here (PDF file; scroll down to page 18).

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Edward II Hampshire contact details If anyone knows how to contact Edward II in Hampshire, or indeed anywhere else, let me know immediately.

John Daniel and Robert de Micheldever

2009-05-05T13:37:00.002+02:00

John Daniel and Robert de Micheldever were executed with the earl of Arundel in Hereford on 17 November 1326, without a trial, a few weeks after Roger Mortimer and Queen Isabella's invasion force landed in England. The chronicler Adam Murimuth says Arundel, Daniel and Micheldever were beheaded "at the direction of Lord Roger Mortimer, who hated them with a perfect hatred, and whose counsel the queen followed in all things." [1] Murimuth gives Micheldever's first name as Thomas, which baffled me, because I couldn't find a single piece of evidence to prove that a Thomas de Micheldever even existed in the 1320s, though I did find plenty of references to a Robert de Micheldever and wondered if Murimuth had made a mistake. When I checked the printed edition of Murimuth, I found that different manuscripts of the chronicle give Micheldever's name either as Thomas or Robert. Chronicler Geoffrey le Baker used Murimuth as a source in the 1350s, and evidently saw a manuscript which calls Micheldever 'Thomas' and used this name. [2] Murimuth's modern editor also calls Micheldever 'Thomas'.

Micheldever's name was in fact Robert, as proved by a petition presented to parliament in about 1327 by "Alice, who was the wife of Roberd de Mucheldevere...who was beheaded at Hereford without judgement and without being arraigned." I'm sure Alice knew her husband's correct name. The fact that a 'Thomas de Micheldever' did not even exist in 1326 hasn't prevented everyone who's ever written about the executions, including myself here on the blog, calling Micheldever 'Thomas' without checking his identity. Oops.

The earl of Arundel himself, aka Edmund Fitzalan, was a supporter of Edward II and remained loyal to the king after Mortimer and Isabella's invasion. He was captured in Shropshire by John Charlton, Edward's steward until 1318, whose son was married to one of Mortimer's daughters, and taken to the queen and Mortimer at Hereford. Charlton and Arundel were on opposite sides of a long-running and bitter feud over an inheritance in Powys, and Arundel and his kinsman Roger Mortimer - they were first cousins once removed - also loathed each other for reasons I don't have space to go into here. Geoffrey le Baker in the 1350s called Daniel and Micheldever Arundel's clerks, which they weren't, and Alison Weir in her biography of Isabella calls them the earl's "henchmen," which they weren't either. As these two men never, ever, ever get more than a passing mention anywhere, and Micheldever has to suffer the indignity of being called by the wrong first name, I thought it was high time someone researched them to try to discover why Mortimer hated them enough to have them beheaded without trial. Here's what I've been able to find out about them.

John Daniel

John Daniel was a younger son of John Daniel the Elder, lord of the manor of Tideswell in the wapentake of High Peak, Derbyshire, and Cecily le Seculer of Herefordshire, who was born in about 1252 and was the heir of her brother Nicholas. John Daniel the Elder died shortly before 14 April 1286, leaving as his heir his eldest son Richard, who was born in Wexford, Ireland, on 25 April 1274 - so was ten years to the day older than Edward II - and who died shortly before 15 December 1321. John Daniel was probably born in the mid to late 1270s. He had another brother, called Nicholas; John and Nicholas lent Richard £200 in May 1307, a very large sum. Richard Daniel was one of the men knighted with the future Edward II, Roger Mortimer, Piers Gaveston, Hugh Despenser and the rest in May 1306, though I don't know if John Daniel himself was ever knighted. [3] The name was often spelt Danyel or Daynel.

Richard Daniel granted his brother John lands in Herefordshire, to wit, "a moiety of a virgate of land and a plot of meadow in Wynstanton, [held] of the king by service of 9d for all service, and 35s of yearly rent in Hamfraieston by service of 5s rendered to the king yearly at the hundred of Wormeslowe," and he also held "diverse other lands of other lords by various services." [4] In August 1310, Daniel acknowledged a debt of £7 12s to Richard and Cecilia de Bere, and the following month was pardoned for the death of one Margery le Wolfhunte of Wormhill, Derbyshire, at the request of John de Warenne, earl of Surrey. Daniel's brother Richard, Richard's wife Joan de Knyveton, and Joan's sister Katherine had previously been indicted of the death. [5] In about 1316, Daniel presented a petition to Edward II's council, stating "that he brought the King's protection before William de Berford and his companions at the octaves of Trinity in the King's eighth year, and the suit between him and John de Hothum and Agnes his wife remained without a day until lately, at Pentecost in the King's ninth year, when John and Agnes made a false claim in Chancery that he was not in the King's service." [6]

By April 1319, John Daniel had been appointed keeper of 200 acres of wasteland in the forest of High Peak. [7] He was twice appointed as a commissioner of array, in Herefordshire in August 1316 and Worcestershire in March 1322, to raise footmen to go against the Scots. [8] On 15 February 1322, Edward II appointed Daniel to make inquisition in Herefordshire into the goods, chattels, jewels, armour, vessels of silver and other goods belonging to four of the king's baronial enemies, including Roger Mortimer's uncle Roger Mortimer of Chirk. One of the men appointed on the inquisition with Daniel was none other than Stephen Dunheved. [9]

John Daniel did have other connections to Roger Mortimer. On 6 March 1326, Edward ordered him, with the Despenser adherent John Inge, to inquire in Herefordshire "touching adherents of Roger de Mortuo Mari [Mortimer] and of other rebels who are in parts beyond the seas." [10] Daniel was also appointed the keeper of Mortimer's Herefordshire manor of Pembridge, and in late 1325/early 1326 Edward II wrote to Mortimer's mother Margaret ordering her to go to the convent of Elstow in Bedfordshire, and appointed Daniel steward of the castle and lands of her manor of Radnor. Edward obviously changed his mind about sending Margaret to a convent, however, as in March 1326 he told her to repair the houses within Radnor Castle, and in April wrote that Margaret would keep the income from her lands and that she should pay Daniel his fee out of the issues. [11] Daniel was ordered on 12 October 1326, with a few others including Thomas de la Haye of the Dunheved gang, John Inge, Robert de Micheldever and Malcolm Musard, to select men-at-arms and archers and lead them to the king - one of Edward II's last, desperate and unsuccessful attempts to repel the invasion. [12] Daniel was apparently still with the king on 14 October, at Chepstow, when he acknowledged a debt of eighteen shillings and four pence to Robert Baldock, captured with the king and Hugh Despenser a month later. [13]

That's the last mention I can find of John Daniel before his execution, or rather, his murder seeing as he had no trial, in Hereford on 17 November. [14] The escheator in Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire and the Welsh Marches was ordered on Christmas Day 1326 to "take into the king's hand the lands late of John Daynel, deceased, tenant in chief." [15] I can't find anything to suggest that Daniel was associated with the earl of Arundel, and how he came to be with Arundel in Shropshire to be captured by John Charlton, I don't know. He was pardoned for murder in 1310 at the request of the earl of Surrey, who was Arundel's brother-in-law, though this seems a pretty tenuous connection. Daniel was keeper of two Mortimer manors and on two inquisitions involving Mortimer and his uncle, and presumably he acted in some way, or Mortimer thought he had acted in some way, to arouse Mortimer's hostility.

Robert de Micheldever

Micheldever is a village in Hampshire between Winchester and Basingstoke, and stood on the main London-Winchester road in the Middle Ages. I'm sure it will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the vagaries of fourteenth-century spelling to learn that 'Micheldever' was written in a variety of exciting ways, from Mychedevre to Muchuldovere. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to discover who Robert de Micheldever's parents were, or anything about his natal family; a Ralph de Mucheldever lent money to Walter le Butler and Walter Russell of Winchester in 1297, and he may be Micheldever's father or brother or uncle, but that's just speculation. [16] The first reference I've found to him is in 1304, when one Jordan de Larkestok granted him a messuage, land and rent in Laverstock, just outside Salisbury. [17] In May 1321, Henry and Edith Burre of Salisbury enfoeffed Micheldever of a messuage, sixty acres of land, four and a half acres of meadow and sixteen shillings of rent in Laverstock and Winterbourneford, and the bailiwick of the forestership of Clarendon Forest in Wiltshire. [18]

Micheldever was accused in April 1311 of breaking into Edward II's manor of Clarendon and stealing timber, stones, iron, lead and other goods. [19] Ironically, Edward appointed him keeper of the manor, park and forest of Clarendon in July 1325, replacing Walter Gascelyn, who was probably the brother of Edmund Gascelyn, one of the men who joined the Dunheveds and temporarily freed Edward from Berkeley in 1327. [20]

Robert de Micheldever was described as Edward's valettus in April 1322, when he and a clerk were sent to Yorkshire "to search and view all the charters, writings and muniments in the castle of Skipton in Cravene affecting Roger de Clifford and others, and to certify the king of the tenor thereof." [21] Clifford had been executed in York the month before. In early March 1324, Micheldever was the keeper of "certain forfeited lands" in Gloucestershire, and was ordered to hand over Berkeley Castle and all the lands of the imprisoned Lord Berkeley to John Frelond. [22] Micheldever and Robert Holden, controller of Edward II's wardrobe and one of the few men who remained with Edward at his capture, were appointed on 5 August 1322 as keepers of the lands of the recently-deceased Sir John Somery, a royal knight accused of being 'more than a king' in Staffordshire in 1311. Micheldever received a shilling a day in wages; Holden, two shillings. One of the manors was Dunchurch in Warwickshire, which Stephen Dunheved had demised to Somery before abjuring the realm for a felony. [23]

Edward ordered Micheldever on 12 October 1326 to "levy all fencible men, horse and foot" in Wiltshire, and that's the last reference I can find to him before his beheading on 17 November. I don't know how he came to be with the earl of Arundel in Shropshire. I haven't found any connection between Micheldever and Arundel, or between Micheldever and Roger Mortimer. And I have absolutely no idea what Micheldever was meant to have done to have caused Mortimer to hate him "with a perfect hatred." Possibly he was just unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and his only 'crimes' were to be loyal to the king and in the company of a man Mortimer detested. For Simon de Reading, executed with Despenser the Younger at Hereford a week after Micheldever and the others, a vague charge of 'insulting the queen' was trumped up - though he was also given no trial - but Micheldever and Daniel were never accused of anything, at least, nothing that survives in any source. Mortimer's "perfect hatred" sufficed to condemn them.

The lands "late of Robert de Mucheldevre, deceased, tenant in chief of Edward II" were taken into the king's hand on 12 February 1327. [24] Micheldever's widow Alice petitioned parliament in about 1327, saying that Micheldever was "beheaded at Hereford without judgement, and without being arraigned" (fust decole a Herford saunz jugement et saunz estre areigne), and that his lands were in the king's hands and in the keeping of John Maltravers (son en la main n're seign'r le Roy et en la garde Mons'r Johan Mautravers). Alice asked for her rightful dower, and that their son, who was only eight, might not be disinherited. The response was: "It will be declared by the great men of the land whether he was put to death as an enemy etc." (Soit declare p' les Grantz de la t're s'il fust mi a la mort come enemi &c.) [25]

Robert de Micheldever's son was called John, named "son and heir of Robert de Mucheldevere" in 1343, when three men acknowledged that they owed money to him. [26] John de Micheldever was to be imprisoned in Winchester Castle with William Taillefer in August 1339 for "making unlawful assemblies and confederacies to disturb the peace," was pardoned for outlawry in November 1341, and was convicted in 1343 of receiving goods stolen at sea and of being an accessory to piracy. [27] Hugh Despenser the Younger would have been proud of him.

Sources

1) Adae Murimuth Continuatio Chronicarum, ed. E. M. Thompson.
2) Galfridi le Baker de Swinbroke, Chronicon Angliae Temporibus Edwardi II et Edwardi III, ed. J. A. Giles.
3) Calendar of Fine Rolls 1272-1307; Calendar of Close Rolls 1272-1279; Close Rolls 1279-1288; Fine Rolls 1319-1327; Close Rolls 1318-1323; Close Rolls 1323-1327; The National Archives; C. Moor, Knights of Edward I; Alfred John Horwood, Year books of the reign of King Edward the First.
4) Close Rolls 1330-1333.
5) National Archives; Calendar of Patent Rolls 1292-1301; Pat Rolls 1301-1307; Pat Rolls 1307-1313.
6) National Archives.
7) Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous 1308-1348; National Archives.
8) Fine Rolls 1307-1319; Pat Rolls 1321-1324.
9) Fine Rolls 1319-1327.
10) Pat Rolls 1324-1327.
11) Pat Rolls 1324-1327; Close Rolls 1323-1327.
12) Close Rolls 1323-1327; Pat Rolls 1324-1327; Fine Rolls 1319-1327.
13) Close Rolls 1323-1327.
14) Daniel's inquisition post mortem is held at the National Archives.
15) Fine Rolls 1319-1327; Fine Rolls 1327-1337.
16) National Archives.
17) National Archives.
18) Pat Rolls 1317-1321; National Archives.
19) Pat Rolls 1307-1313.
20) Fine Rolls 1319-1327; Close Rolls 1323-1327; Pat Rolls 1327-1330.
21) Pat Rolls 1321-1324.
22) Fine Rolls 1319-1327.
23) Fine Rolls 1319-1327; Close Rolls 1318-1323; Close Rolls 1323-1327; Pat Rolls 1321-1324; Inquisitions Miscellaneous 1308-1348.
24) Fine Rolls 1327-1337.
25) Rotuli Parliamentorum ut et Petitiones, et Placita in Parliamento Tempore Edwardi R. III; National Archives.
26) Close Rolls 1343-1346.
27) Pat Rolls 1338-1340; Pat Rolls 1340-1343; Reginald G. Marsden, Select Pleas of the Court of Admiralty.

With Irreverent Mind: The Adventurous Career Of Henry Beaumont

2009-05-01T13:34:00.005+02:00

Henry, Lord Beaumont was a French nobleman who played an important role in Edward II's reign and in the early years of Edward III's.

Henry was born around 1280 as the elder son of Louis de Brienne, sometimes called Louis of Acre (c. 1225-c. 1297) and Agnes de Beaumont, vicountess of Beaumont-au-Maine (died 1301). He and some of his siblings took their mother's name. Henry was the nephew of, among others, Yolande, queen of Jerusalem in her own right, John de Brienne, stepfather of Alexander III of Scotland, and Marie de Brienne, married to the titular emperor of Constantinople. Through his paternal grandmother Berenguela of Leon, Henry was, like Edward II, a great-grandson of Queen Berenguela of Castile and King Alfonso IX 'the Slobberer' of Leon, which makes him Edward's second cousin. Henry and his siblings are often described as cousins of Isabella of France, though in fact they were more closely related to Edward II than to his queen.

Henry's sister Isabella, who must have been many years his senior - their parents had married as early as 1253 - arrived in England probably in the late 1270s, and married John, Lord Vescy (1244-1289) in 1280. Henry and his younger brother Louis, a cleric, followed their sister to England in the 1290s, and would spend the rest of their lives there, high in favour with Edward I and Edward II. Henry was a knight of Edward I's household in 1297, and the king granted him 200 marks a year in 1301, though it was after the accession of Edward II in 1307 that he reached the heights of royal favour. Edward arranged his marriage to Alice Comyn, one of the two nieces and co-heirs of John Comyn, earl of Buchan (d. 1308), in or shortly before 1310, which gave Henry a strong claim to the earldom.

Edward appointed Henry joint warden of Scotland in 1308, and he was first summoned to parliament in 1309. His closeness to the king made him a target of the Lords Ordainer, who ordered in late 1311 that he and his sister Isabella Vescy be removed from court. Edward had in 1308 granted Henry the Isle of Man, and the Ordainers demanded instead that it be given to "a good Englishman." Henry ignored their demands to stay away from the king, and was with Edward in Yorkshire in early 1312 when Piers Gaveston returned from his third exile. For many years, he was a staunch supporter of the king, fighting for Edward at Bannockburn and attending Piers Gaveston's funeral in January 1315. In early September 1314, Edward empowered Henry, with the earl of Pembroke and the bishop of Exeter, to open the York parliament on his behalf, claiming that he had urgent business elsewhere. (In fact, he merely took himself off to the small village of Oulston for a few days, almost certainly a doomed attempt to avoid his enemies in parliament after his humiliating defeat in Scotland.)

Henry was instrumental in the 1317 election of his brother Louis as bishop of Durham, after telling Edward II that if Louis "or another person of noble origin had the rule of the church of Durham a defence like a stone wall [against the Scots] would be provided for those parts," and persuading Edward to promote Louis's candidacy with the pope. Louis was supposedly illiterate, and had two club feet: the Lanercost chronicler calls him "a Frenchman of noble birth, but lame on both feet, nevertheless liberal and agreeable." Henry and Louis were involved in a somewhat mysterious affair in September 1317, when they were attacked, robbed and taken prisoner by Sir Gilbert Middleton, while travelling to Durham in the company of two cardinals for Louis's consecration. This attack may have been the work of the earl of Lancaster, annoyed at the failure of his own candidate to gain the bishopric, though an indignant Pope John XXII blamed the Scots.

Henry remained staunchly loyal to Edward during his 1321/22 campaign against the Marcher lords, and fought against the earl of Lancaster at the battle of Boroughbridge on 16 March 1322. He also accompanied the king on the Scottish campaign later that year, and it was Edward's thirteen-year truce with Scotland in May 1323 which finally pushed Henry into opposition to him. Henry had a strong claim to the earldom of Buchan via his wife, and if Edward made peace with Scotland, Henry would never be able to claim his title and lands. At a meeting of Edward's counsellors at Bishopthorpe on 30 May 1323, Edward asked their advice about the truce. Henry, "with an excessive motion and irreverent mind," refused to advise the king, and continued to refuse. Edward lost his temper and ordered him out of the room, whereupon Henry retorted that "it would please him more to be absent than to be present." Five days later, Edward ordered his arrest for this "contempt and disobedience." [1]

Henry was probably also angry at a bitterly sarcastic letter Edward II had sent to his brother Louis Beaumont, bishop of Durham, on 10 February 1323: "The king remembers that Richard, the bishop's predecessor, was frequently reproached by Henry de Bello Monte [Beaumont], the present bishop's brother, and other friends and relations for causing by his negligence the wasting of the bishopric by Scotch rebels...but the king knows actually that greater damage is done in the bishopric by the bishop's default, negligence and laziness than in the time of his predecessor, neither the bishop, nor his friends or relations giving counsel or aid according to their promises." [2] Given that Edward II himself had few equals when it came to negligence and laziness, especially when it came to defending his subjects against Scottish raids, there is much of the pot calling the kettle black about this letter.

Henry did not remain long in custody, however, and Edward trusted him enough in 1324 to send him as an envoy to France. He was still sufficiently in favour with the king in September 1325 to travel abroad with Edward's son, and witnessed the young duke of Aquitaine performing homage to Charles IV on 24 September. Unlike other opponents of the king, however, Henry did not remain in France with Queen Isabella, but returned to England, a bad mistake: the Sempringham annalist says he was imprisoned at Kenilworth Castle in February 1326 "because he would not swear to the king and to Sir Hugh Despenser the son, to be of their part to live and die," a story confirmed by the Croniques de London and the judgement on Hugh Despenser the Younger. [3] Henry was certainly in prison at Warwick Castle in early August 1326. [4]

Henry must have been released soon after Isabella and Roger Mortimer's invasion force arrived in the autumn of 1326, and joined the queen at Gloucester in mid-October. The much later chronicler Jean Froissart, who is hopelessly unreliable for Edward II's reign, has a hilariously inaccurate story of Edward and Hugh Despenser the Younger being stuck in their boat within a mile of Bristol Castle for a full eleven days, unable to move because their sins weighed so heavily on them, until finally Henry Beaumont sallied forth in a barge to capture them. As Froissart also says that Edward and his favourite witnessed the execution of Despenser the Elder and the earl of Arundel at Bristol, which they certainly didn't (Arundel was executed in Hereford anyway), that Despenser was ninety at the time of his death - he was actually sixty-five - and that Henry was the "son of the viscount of Beaumont in England," obviously his testimony is not worth very much. [5]

Henry was much in favour with the new regime after late 1326, and can hardly be blamed for his abandonment of Edward II, who had imprisoned him. But Isabella and Roger Mortimer were unable to hold his loyalty for more than two years. Henry was infuriated by their treaty with Robert Bruce in 1328, which acknowledged Bruce as king of Scots and meant that he would never be able to claim his earldom or his lands. He joined the earl of Lancaster's unsuccessful rebellion against the queen and her favourite in late 1328, and was one of the four men specifically excluded from a pardon in early 1329. (Another was William Trussell, who had read out the charges against Despenser the Younger.) With a death sentence hanging over his head, Henry fled abroad.

Henry became embroiled in the earl of Kent's 1330 plot to restore Edward II to the throne, and met Kent in the duke of Brabant's chamber in Paris. Even after Kent's execution in March 1330, Henry continued plotting against Isabella and Mortimer, and travelled to Brabant, a safe haven - the duke was Edward II's nephew, and Edward's sister Margaret, the dowager duchess, was still alive - and with his allies planned an invasion of England. Isabella and Mortimer were forced to raise soldiers up and down the country to repel the invasion, though in the end it never took place, perhaps because the exiles couldn't afford to pay for it, or because they couldn't stomach the notion of fighting against Edward III. [6] They had no quarrel with the young king, only with the pair ruling England in his name.

After Edward III overthrew his mother and her favourite in October 1330, he recalled Henry and the other exiles to England, and restored their lands. Henry was subsequently to play a vital role in the king's Scottish wars of the 1330s, but as I know next to nothing about Edward III's Scottish wars, I won't embarrass myself by trying to write about them.

Henry Beaumont died shortly before 10 March 1340, aged about sixty, leaving his widow Alice, who lived until 1349. They had three children: John, Lord Beaumont, killed in a jousting tournament in Northampton in 1342, who married Henry of Lancaster's daughter Eleanor (she married secondly the earl of Arundel); Isabella, who married Henry of Lancaster's son Henry, duke of Lancaster; and Katherine, who married David de Strathbogie, earl of Atholl. All his children have numerous modern-day descendants, and through his daughter Isabella, Henry Beaumont was the great-grandfather of Henry IV.

Sources

1) Cal Close Rolls 1318-23, p. 717.
2) Cal Close Rolls 1318-23, p. 697.
3) Le Livere de Reis de Britanie e le Livere de Reis de Engletere, ed. John Glover, pp. 354-5; Croniques de London depuis l’an 44 Hen III jusqu'à l'an 17 Edw III, ed. J. G. Aungier, p. 49; G. A. Holmes, ‘The Judgement on the Younger Despenser, 1326’, English Historical Review, 70 (1955) p. 266.
4) Cal Close Rolls 1323-27, p. 593; Cal Fine Rolls 1319-27, p. 418.
5) Froissart: Chronicles, ed. Geoffrey Brereton, pp. 41-3.
6) Cal Pat Rolls 1327-30, pp. 544, 563, 570-572; Cal Close Rolls 1330-33, pp. 51, 147, 151.

Brief Biographies: John Norton and John Redmere

2009-04-25T13:11:00.002+02:00

Happy 725th birthday to Edward II today! I read a blog recently which noted Edward's date of birth, then asked 'I wonder what he's doing now'. Well, not a lot, I shouldn't imagine.

John Norton and John Redmere were Dominican friars who were involved in the Dunheveds' plot to free the former Edward II from Berkeley Castle in the summer of 1327. Edward's guardian Thomas, Lord Berkeley wrote a letter on 27 July 1327 naming the men who had attacked his castle and seized Edward from his custody, and also wrote that "two great leaders of this company have been arrested [literally 'taken'] by the community of Dunstable and are held there in prison, that is: Brother John Redmere, keeper of our lord the king's stud-farm, and John Norton." [Et sunt pris deux grant menors de cele compaignie par la comunalte de Dunestaple e illeosques sont tenuz en prison, c’est assavoir: frere Johan de Redemere, gardein del haras nostre seignor le roy, et Johan Nortone.] [1]

So I did a bit of digging into these two men, and discovered that John Redmere was indeed keeper of the king's stud-farm, a position he had held since at least 1317/18, the eleventh year of Edward II's reign. [2] John Norton was, I assume, the man of this name who was a clerk of Edward II's, and who for many years was "surveyor of the works of the king's palace at Westminster and of the Tower of London." He was responsible for purchasing provisions for Edward's coronation in February 1308, including lime and sea coal, and proved remarkably tardy in paying for the items: the unfortunate merchants were still pleading for their money as late as 1320. He was also responsible for buying planks and timber for Edward III's coronation in February 1327. In September 1312, Edward II appointed Norton as his attorney before the justices of King's Bench, and in December 1316, ordered him to provide ships at Bristol and Haverford for Roger Mortimer's journey to Ireland. [3] Norton's unwillingness to pay his debts got him into trouble with Edward: he was in prison in the Tower of London in December 1325, when Edward asked the treasurer and barons of the Exchequer for their advice in finding "means whereby the king may best and most quickly recover the debt" Norton and his associate Nicholas of Tickhill owed him. [4] Given his willingness to fight for the former king's release in 1327, I presume that Norton forgave Edward for imprisoning him.

(Assuming that all these entries relate to the same man; 'John Norton', after all, is not an uncommon name.)

The Dominicans were staunch supporters of Edward II, and many of them, according to the Brut, willingly helped Brother Thomas Dunheved's plot and "cast and ordained, both night and day" how they might release Edward from captivity. So it is hardly surprising to find that Norton and Redmere were among them; a Dominican from the Warwick convent, John of Stoke, was an important enough member of the conspiracy for his arrest to be ordered at the same time as Stephen Dunheved's in May 1327, and he was to be taken before the king. [5] On 3 March 1327, John Norton was accused with several other men of "carrying away the goods" of William Trussell, who had pronounced the death sentence on Hugh Despenser the Younger the previous November, although this crime may date to years before, after Trussell had fled the country following the Contrariants' defeat at the battle of Boroughbridge. [6] On 28 May 1327, Norton was sent to Cheshire and the marches of Wales "on business concerning Queen Isabella." [7] What's interesting is that the Dunheved brothers and some of their adherents were in Chester in June 1327 - did Norton join them then, or was he already a sympathiser to their cause, unbeknownst to Isabella? The attack on Berkeley Castle to free Edward had almost certainly taken place by 28 June - or, at the very least, was just about to take place - when Norton was given letters of protection, presumably to travel to Cheshire on Isabella's behalf. [8] He was an important member of the gang, at least according to Lord Berkeley, though evidently his participation was still unknown on 28 June when he received his letters of protection, and was discovered some time later by Lord Berkeley and 'the community of Dunstable'.

An entry of 11 August 1327 on the Close Roll confirms Berkeley's statement that Norton and Redmere were being held in prison at Dunstable - the prior of Dunstable's prison, in fact - when the bailiffs were ordered to send them to Wallingford Castle. [9] Another order was issued on 21 October, to send them and the men held with them, Robert of Ely and Nigel Mereman of Cornbiry, to the notorious Newgate prison in London. [10] Robert of Ely was Norton's servant, but I haven't been able to trace Nigel Mereman. Presumably they heard the news in late September 1327, while in captivity at Dunstable, that Edward II had died at Berkeley - allegedly.

I very much doubt if it is a coincidence that the writ to send the men to Newgate was issued three days after an order to the sheriff of Bedfordshire, on 18 October, to "take and keep in prison" four named men and unnamed, uncounted others, "who are riding about, as the king learns, armed in diverse parts of that county [Bedfordshire] with other malefactors, lying in wait by day and night for the prior of Donestaple and his men and other subjects of the king, committing many evils there." [11] This sounds to me as though these men were trying to free Norton, Redmere and their associates from prison, hence their removal to Newgate. The four named 'malefactors' were Philip de Wibbesnade (Whipsnade), John Salbot, Thomas atte Halle and Robert Duraunt. That these men were hostile to the regime of Isabella and Roger Mortimer and probably, therefore, sympathetic to Edward II is demonstrated by the fact that Wibbesnade, Duraunt, atte Halle and his brother William joined the earl of Lancaster's rebellion against Isabella and Mortimer in late 1328. They were among the men, many of them former allies of the queen and her favourite who had been imprisoned or exiled by Edward II or played an important role in his and the Despensers' downfall, such as William Trussell, Hugh Audley, Thomas Wake, Henry Leyburne, Thomas Roscelyn and Henry Beaumont, who rode to Bedford "against the king with armed power." [12] Of course they weren't riding 'against the king' at all, but against the pair ruling England in his name.

Thomas Berkeley's letter of 27 July 1327 also declared that "I have heard from certain people of my household, who have seen and heard of it, that a great number of people have made assemblies in Buckinghamshire and other adjoining counties, for the same cause"; that is, attempting to free Edward. [j’ai entendu par certeines gentz des meons, que le sevent de vue e de oie, que assembleez se fount a grant noumbre des gentz en counte de Bokyngham e es autres counteez joignauntz, por mesme la cause.] The existence of this plot is known only from Berkeley's letter, and nothing came of it, but Dunstable is in Bedfordshire, which borders Buckinghamshire.

Probably in September or October 1327, John Norton and John Redmere petitioned Edward III, who was not yet fifteen, saying that "when they were at Dunstable, to hear mass in the house of their [Dominican] order there, they were arrested by the Bailiffs and community and thrown into prison," accused of trying to rescue the lord king's father from Berkeley Castle.* Because this was such a sensitive matter, the bailiffs declared that "John and John can only be delivered before the king." Redmere and Norton asked "that they might be able to come before our lord the king to stand to right according to the law of the land, as they have been in prison first at Dunstable and now at Aylesbury, and are at point of death as a result." When they were in prison at Aylesbury, I don't know. [13]

* This is one of the very few direct references to the Dunheveds' plot to free Edward of Caernarfon, the others being: Lord Berkeley's letter; a writ to the sheriff of Oxfordshire in August 1327 concerning William Aylmer, another conspirator; brief accounts in various chronicles, the Brut (and several continuations of it), Annales Paulini and Lanercost.

John Redmere is one of the many men trying to free Edward II who vanishes from the pages of history after the summer/autumn of 1327. I have no idea what became of him. John Norton's petition, on the other hand, was successful, and he was still alive in the 1330s; in October 1333, he - again, assuming it's the same John Norton - was said to be "constantly attendant on the king's [Edward III's] business." [14] He was thus one of only a handful of the men who had tried to free the former king who certainly lived after 1327.

Sources

1) F. J. Tanqueray, ‘The Conspiracy of Thomas Dunheved, 1327’, English Historical Review, 31 (1916), pp. 119-124.
2) The National Archives E 101/100/12 and E 101/99/27; Calendar of Patent Rolls 1321-1324, p. 334, Cal Pat Rolls 1324-1327, p. 297.
3) TNA SC 8/6/286, SC 8/6/287, SC 8/114/5675, SC 8/3/150, SC 8/4/153; Calendar of Chancery Warrants 1244-1326, pp. 274, 306; Cal Pat Rolls 1307-1313, p. 490; Cal Pat Rolls 1313-1317, pp. 574-575. There are numerous other mentions of Norton in contemporary records.
4) Calendar of Close Rolls 1323-1327, p. 437.
5) Cal Pat Rolls 1327-1330, p. 99.
6) Cal Pat Rolls 1327-1330, p. 75.
7) Cal Pat Rolls 1327-1330, p. 107.
8) Cal Pat Rolls 1327-1330, p.133.
9) Cal Close Rolls 1327-1330, pp. 156, 179.
10) Cal Close Rolls 1327-1330, p. 179.
11) Cal Close Rolls 1323-1327, pp. 232-233.
12) Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous 1308-1348, pp. 274-275.
13) TNA SC 8/69/3444.
14) Cal Pat Rolls 1330-1334, p. 470.

The Charges Against Hugh Despenser The Younger, November 1326

2009-04-19T13:37:00.008+02:00

This is my translation of the charges against Hugh Despenser the Younger at his trial in Hereford on 24 November 1326, which are printed in the original Anglo-Norman in G. A. Holmes' 'Judgement on the Younger Despenser, 1326' (English Historical Review, 70, 1955). Investigating the accuracy of the charges would be a major undertaking, and although some of them are certainly true, some are utterly ludicrous. May McKisack (The Fourteenth Century 1307-1399) calls the charges "an ingenious tissue of fact and fiction," while Roy Martin Haines (in his biography King Edward II) points out that "it is an ingenious document, another piece of propaganda that puts the blame for all the ills of the reign on one man and his father," ignoring - for the time being, at least - Edward II's own manifold failings and that the earl of Lancaster and his followers were in armed rebellion against their king in 1322, and in treasonous correspondence with Robert Bruce to boot. The original text begins Hughe le despenser en parlement nostre seignur le Roi Edward qui ore est tenu a Westmonstre Lan de son regne xvme...

***
Hugh le Despenser, in the parliament of our lord King Edward who now is, held at Westminster in the fifteenth year of his reign [August 1321], by investigation of the prelates, earls and barons and all the community of the realm, it was found to be well-known that your father and you, Hugh [votre piere et vous hughe], were traitors and enemies of the realm, for which cause, by the assent and the command of our lord the king and all the baronage, your father and you, Hugh, were exiled from the realm never to return, which was done by the assent and permission of our lord the king and all the baronage and all those who were duly summoned to full parliament.

Against which judgement and exile, your father and you, Hugh, returned to the realm and were found at court without authorisation. And you, Hugh, in returning to the realm, feloniously robbed two dromonds of their goods to the value of £60,000 sterling, to the great dishonour of the king and the realm, and to the great peril of the merchants who often visit foreign countries. After this felony done by you, Hugh, you approached our lord the king and made him ride in arms against the peers of the realm and others of his faithful liegemen, to destroy and disinherit them contrary to Magna Carta [la grant chartre] and the Ordinances, and so riding in force and in arms, seizing royal power, you, Hugh, and your father and your adherents feloniously robbed the good men of the realm. With Andrew Harclay and other traitors, your adherents, you had the good earl of Hereford and Sir William Sully [Monsieur William suyllee] and Sir Roger Burghfield feloniously and maliciously murdered. [1]

You took the good earl of Lancaster [le bone Counte de Lancastre], who was the cousin-german of our lord the king and his brothers and uncle of the very noble king of France and his sister my lady the queen of England, and had him falsely imprisoned and robbed, and in his own hall in his castle, by your royal power which you had seized from our lord the king, had him judged by a false record contrary to law and reason and Magna Carta and also without response, and you had him martyred and murdered by hard and piteous death. And this wickedness and tyranny done to such an exalted person could not sate you of spilling the blood of Christians, and also on this same day, to further torment my said lord, before his vanquished eyes*, you had his barons and knights condemned to death by drawing and hanging. By this false record contrary to law and reason, you shamefully had them hanged without mercy: Sir Warin Lisle [Warin del yle], Sir William Tuchet, Sir Thomas Mauduit, Sir Henry Bradbourne, Sir William Cheney, Sir William Fitzwilliam the younger. At York, my lord Clifford, my lord Mowbray, Sir Jocelyn Deyville. At Canterbury, the lord Badlesmere and Sir Bartholomew Ashburnham. At London, Sir Henry Tyes. At Windsor, Sir Francis Aldenham [A Wyndesore monsieur franceys de Aldenham]. At Gloucester, the lord Giffard and Sir Roger Elmbridge. At Bristol, Sir Henry Wilington and Sir Henry Montfort. At Winchelsea, Sir Thomas Culpepper. [2]

[* sez oilz veintz - I'm not quite sure about that bit.]

Many other magnates you had sent to hard prison, to murder them without cause for covetousness of their lands, such as the lord Mortimer and Mortimer the uncle [le seignour le Mortimere et le Mortimere luncle], and the lord Berkeley and Sir Hugh Audley the father and son, and the children of Hereford who were the nephews of our lord the king, and great ladies, wives of these lords, and their children, you kept in prison and orphaned. And after the deaths of their barons, you pursued widowed ladies such as my lady Baret, and as a tyrant you had her beaten by your mercenaries [or rascals, or menials: ribaldes]** and shamefully had her arms and legs broken against the order of chivalry and contrary to law and reason, by which the good lady is forever more driven mad and lost [la bone dame est touz iours afole et perdue]. [3] And many other such people who should have been ladies of great honour, you made follow the court on foot in great poverty, without pity and without mercy, and every day they were held in such great ignominy that God by his mercy sent our good and gracious lady and her son [Isabella and Edward III] and the good men who have come in their company to the land, by which the realm is delivered.

[** that part is often mistranslated as 'making her the butt of his ribaldry']

Hugh, after this destruction of our noble liege lord [Lancaster] and of other men of the realm done falsely, shamefully and treacherously, you, Hugh, and your father and Robert Baldock [4], who between you treacherously embraced royal power, had our lord the king and his people led to Scotland to the enemies, where you, by your treacherous conduct, lost more than 20,000 of his [Edward II's] people who died piteously by your default, to the great dishonour and damage of our lord the king and of all his people, without gaining advantage. After returning, you, Hugh, your father, and Robert Baldock, falsely and treacherously counselled our lord the king to leave my lady the queen in peril of her person in the priory of Tynemouth in Northumberland. You had our lord the king led in flight to Blackhow Moor [la More de Blachou], where his enemies of Scotland [ses enemys descoce] by your treacherous conduct surprised him, to the great dishonour and damage of the king and his people. [5] And in such great misfortune and peril of her person, my lady who was your liege lady, by your treacherous deed might have been lost, to the perpetual dishonour and damage of the king and his realm, if God had not sent her deliverance by sea, thereby rescuing her from danger to her life and saving her honour, in such great grief of heart and body that no good lady of her estate and nobility should have at any time.

Hugh, neither this treason nor cruelty could suffice for you, but by the royal power which you had seized from our lord the king, you destroyed the privileges of Holy Church. The prelates Hereford, Lincoln, Ely, Norwich, you feloniously robbed of their goods inside Holy Church [seinte Eglise], and outside, you carried off their horses and their plate and their baggage, and made them go on foot [les faistes aler a pee]. And their lands and their possessions you seized by force, against law and reason. It did not only suffice for you to make war on the ministers of Holy Church, but also you plundered it, as a false Christian, renegade and traitor against God himself. And because you knew that God made miracles by my good lord [Lancaster] whom you murdered so cruelly against the law without cause, you, Hugh, as a false Christian [come faux cristiene], sent armed men into Holy Church and had the doors of monasteries shut down and closed so that no-one was bold enough to enter the Church and worship God or his saints, for which merit and in defiance of you, God made divine gifts and miracles. [6]

After this wickedness, you falsely and treacherously counselled our lord the king, to the disinheritance of his crown and his heirs, to give to your father, who was false and a traitor, the earldom of Winchester, and the earldom of Carlisle [Cardoile] to Andrew Harclay, who was a notorious traitor and criminal, and to you, Hugh, the land of Canteruaure [?], and other lands which belong to the crown. And also, Hugh, you, your father and Robert Baldock had my lady the queen ousted from her lands, which were given and assigned to her by our lord the king, and set her on her journey [to France in March 1325] meanly, against the dignity of her highness and of her estate. As a false and disloyal traitor, you daily abetted and procured discord between our lord the king and herself, by your complete royal power. And, Hugh, when my lady the queen and her son, by the command and assent of our lord the king, crossed the sea to save the land of Gascony, which was at point of being lost [pur la terre de Gascoigne sauuer que fuist en poynt destre perdue], by your treacherous counsel you sent over the sea a large sum of money to certain evil men, your adherents, to destroy my lady and her son, who was the rightful heir of the kingdom, and to prevent their return to this country, which would have been to their damage and their destruction, if you had succeeded in doing this [i.e., bribing people to murder Isabella and her son].

Hugh, your father and Robert Baldock and the other false traitors, your adherents, travelled around the kingdom by land and by sea, assuming royal power, making great and small people [les grantz et les petitz], by constraint, promise and assure you that they would maintain you in your false quarrels against all people, regardless of the fact that such confederations were false and treacherous and against the bond and estate of the king and his crown. By your royal power you had them put in arduous prison, such as Sir Henry Beaumont [7], who did not want to swear that they would assent to your wickedness. And when you, Hugh, and the other false traitors, your adherents [vous Hughe et les autres fauxes traitours vos aerdantz] knew that my lady and her son were returning to this land, you made our lord the king, by your treacherous counsel, remove himself from them, and led him out of the kingdom in great peril of his person. [8] And to the great dishonour of himself and of his people, you feloniously took the treasure of the realm and the great seal with you.

Hugh, as a traitor you are found, and as such are judged by all the good people of the realm, great and small, rich and poor [graindres et mayndres, riches et poures]. By common assent you are found as a thief and a criminal, and for this you will be hanged. And because you are found a traitor, you will be drawn and quartered, and [the pieces of your body] sent throughout the realm. And because you were exiled by our lord the king and by common assent and returned to the court without authorisation, you will be beheaded. And because you were always disloyal and procured discord between our lord the king and our very honourable lady the queen, and between other people of the realm, you will be disembowelled, and then they will be burnt.

Withdraw, you traitor, tyrant, renegade; go to take your own justice, traitor, evil man, criminal!

[Retrees vous traitour, tyrant, Reneye, si ales vostre iuys prendre, traitour, malueys, et atteynt; malueys or malveis can also be translated as 'coward' or 'weakling' as well as 'evil man' or 'wicked man']

***
And with that, Despenser was dragged off to his grotesque execution. According to several chroniclers, he was also castrated (or emasculated), though that wasn't officially part of his sentence. Surprisingly enough, his tomb still exists in Tewkesbury Abbey; his remains were finally interred there in December 1330 after Edward III overthrew his mother and Mortimer and gave "the friends of Hugh" permission to bury him.

One of the men watching the proceedings, no doubt with enormous satisfaction, was Roger Mortimer, the next royal favourite, who, having decried Despenser's behaviour, then proceeded to act in much the same way himself over the next four years. The man who read out the above charges against Despenser was Sir William Trussell, who had fled the country after the battle of Boroughbridge and returned with Mortimer and Isabella. A mere two years after Despenser's execution, he and Thomas Wake, who had read out the charges against Hugh Despenser the Elder, joined the earl of Lancaster's rebellion against Isabella and Mortimer. Many of the pair's erstwhile allies fled abroad with Wake and Henry Beaumont, "fearing the cruelty and tyranny of the said earl of March," i.e. Mortimer, who had awarded himself a grandiose earldom - even Despenser never went that far - and "who at that time was more than king in the kingdom." They plotted an invasion of England in the summer of 1330. [9] Mortimer faced many of the same charges as Despenser at his own trial four years almost to the day later. Sometimes, I can't help thinking that none of these people had the sense God gave a sheep.

Notes

1) Hereford, Sully and Burghfield were killed at the battle of Boroughbridge on 16 March 1322.
2) This is a mostly complete list of the men executed in March/April 1322, though it omits Stephen Baret and William Fleming. I'll be looking at the executions of 1322 in a future post.
3) Presumably a reference to Joan de Gynes or de Mandeville, wife of Stephen Baret, who was probably executed in 1322. No chronicle, petition or inquisition, or other source, confirms that Despenser had Joan tortured. Her three manors were in Edward II's hands in July 1324: Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous 1308-1348, pp. 200-201.
4) Archdeacon of Middlesex and chancellor of England, a close ally of Despenser.
5) A reference to the battle of Byland on 14 October 1322 and Edward's near-capture by the Scots at Rievaulx Abbey.
6) Miracles were being reported at the site of Lancaster's execution and at his tomb within weeks of his death.
7) Henry Beaumont was imprisoned in the castles of Kenilworth, Warwick and Wallingford in 1326, supposedly because "he would not swear to the king and Sir Hugh Despenser the son to be of their part to live and die." [Le Livere de Reis de Britannie e Le Livere de Reis de Engletere, ed. J. Glover, pp. 354-355; Calendar of Close Rolls 1323-1327, p. 593; Calendar of Fine Rolls 1319-1327, pp. 417-418]
8) A reference to Edward II and Despenser sailing from Chepstow in mid-October 1326, probably in an attempt to reach Ireland.
9) Chronicle of Lanercost 1272-1346, ed. H. Maxwell, pp. 265-266, for the quotations. Isabella and Mortimer's atttempts to raise troops and defend towns in order to repel the invasion are in Calendar of Patent Rolls 1327-1330, pp. 544, 563, 570-572; Cal Close Rolls 1330-1333, pp. 51, 147, 151.

Edward II Did Not Stupidly Fall Into A Trap, September 1325

2009-04-14T13:01:00.009+02:00

In September 1325, Edward II sent his twelve-year-old son Edward of Windsor, earl of Chester and now duke of Aquitaine and count of Ponthieu, to France to perform homage to Charles IV for Edward's French lands. Queen Isabella seized control of their son and refused to allow him to return to England, arranged the boy's marriage to the count of Hainault's daughter and used the dowry to pay for ships and mercenaries, and invaded England in September 1326. This, of course, led to Edward II's forced abdication in favour of his son in January 1327.

Many writers on this subject have assumed that Edward's sending his son to France is proof that that he was stupid, that he sent his son blindly unaware of the dangers, and that he fell into the cunning trap his wife and her ally/lover Roger Mortimer had planned for him. Edward's behaviour in August and September 1325 in fact demonstrates that he was completely aware of the risks, as I will prove.

Edward was meant to perform homage for Gascony and Ponthieu at Beauvais on 29 August 1325 to his brother-in-law Charles IV, his overlord for these lands. If he failed to do so, the lands would be forfeit to the French king. Edward's great-great-grandmother Eleanor of Aquitaine had brought the duchy of Aquitaine to the English Crown on her marriage to (the future) Henry II in 1152, while Ponthieu was Edward's inheritance from his mother Eleanor of Castile, countess of Ponthieu in her own right. He could not possibly allow these lands to pass under the king of France's control. On the other hand, there were several reasons why Edward was most reluctant to travel to France at this time. He was worried that he would be indicted in the French court for the 1322 death of his cousin Thomas of Lancaster, Charles IV's uncle. [1] His enemies, Roger Mortimer and other English exiles, were living on the continent, and Edward was afraid of assassination or capture. Edward was at war with France - the War of Saint-Sardos - from August 1324 to June 1325, so his relations with his brother-in-law Charles IV were a long way from cordial. Not to mention, Edward's ineptitude and tyranny meant that there was seething discontent in England, and he might have been worried that the country would erupt into rebellion during his absence.

Edward had other concerns. He could not take his favourite Hugh Despenser with him, as Despenser was loathed in France for his piracy of 1321; it was said that if he set foot there, he would be arrested and tortured. [2] But leaving Despenser behind was risky, too: he and his father Despenser the Elder, earl of Winchester, were also widely loathed in England, and feared that they would be put to death as soon as they lost the king's protection. As the Vita Edwardi Secundi says, they "realised that in the absence of the king they would not know where to live safely." [3]

So Edward could not go to France with Despenser, he could not go to France without Despenser, and he could not avoid performing homage. His only other choice, other than losing his French inheritance, leaving his friend behind to be murdered or taking him along and risking him being tortured, was to make his son Edward of Windsor duke of Aquitaine and count of Ponthieu in his place, and send him to perform homage instead. This had been suggested by the French at the end of 1324 or beginning of 1325, but Edward's counsellors rejected the proposal "with one voice." They did consent to send Queen Isabella to negotiate with her brother on Edward's behalf, but were understandably unwilling to send the twelve-year-old heir to the throne to an enemy country until peace had been established. (quant al point del aler nostre dame la royne et de mons' son filz, touz de une voice desconseillerent laler mons' le fitz quant a ore et si la qe la pees feust meux tretee et accordee: Regarding the journey of our lady the queen and Monsieur her son, they [Edward's advisers] with one voice counselled against the journey of Monsieur the son at present and until peace should be better negotiated and agreed; dated c. 13 January 1325.) [4]

Henry III had in 1253 been equally reluctant to send his fourteen-year-old son, the future Edward I, to Castile, as suggested by Alfonso X, then inciting a rebellion in Gascony with a view to invading and taking over the duchy, in case Alfonso took Edward as a hostage. And Edward II knew in September 1325 that sending his son to France also had serious drawbacks: he would lose control of his French lands and their income, and far more dangerously, the king was well aware that that his enemies could seize his son and use him as a hostage, not to mention the more general risks of sending the future king of England to a hostile country with whom he had only recently established a shaky peace (Edward signed a truce with Charles IV on 13 June 1325).

So in September 1325, Edward II was in an impossible position; every course of action open to him had serious risks and drawbacks. For this, of course, he only had himself to blame. If he had performed homage when Charles IV first invited him to do so, between Candlemas (2 February) and Easter (15 April) 1324, if he hadn't made himself so wildly unpopular, if he hadn't allowed the Despensers to make themselves so loathed, if he hadn't behaved so vindictively in 1322 and ensured that he and the Despensers had numerous enemies both at home and abroad, if he hadn't alienated Queen Isabella, and so on, he wouldn't have been in such a mess in the first place.

Edward's indecisiveness as to the correct course of action is painfully apparent. He spent the second half of August and early September 1325 hovering uncertainly in Kent prior to departure to perform homage, staying at Sturry, Langdon and Dover. Although some writers would have you believe that he was utterly and stupidly oblivious to the dangers of sending his son to France, this is in fact very far from being the case. Edward at first decided to go himself, then changed his mind, then decided to go himself, then changed his mind:

- Pope John XXII had heard by late June 1325 that Edward himself was going to France. [5]

- On 20 July, Edward appointed keepers of the truce between himself and Robert Bruce and ordered men to guard the coast of Northumberland during his absence overseas. [6]

- On 29 July, Edward told Robert Kendale, constable of Dover Castle, that he was going to France around the Assumption (15 August) "upon great and arduous affairs touching him and his realm," and ordered Kendale to provide as many ships as necessary for himself and the magnates accompanying him. [7]

- On 21 August, eight days before he was due to pay homage, Edward began issuing letters of protection for the retinue accompanying him to France. On the same day, he asked the Dominicans of Lincoln to pray for him, Isabella, Edward of Windsor, and their other children. [8]

- his Italian bankers the Bardi gave him over £3515 for his expenses, and silver plate worth £1768 to hand out as gifts at the French court. [9]

- on 24 August, Edward changed his mind about going, and told Charles IV that he had suddenly been taken ill and would not be able to come to France. This was almost certainly feigned; Edward was a healthy, strong and fit man who rarely suffered from illness. [10]

- on 30 August, the day after he should have performed homage at Beauvais, Edward changed his mind again and appointed his son regent of England while he went to France. [11]

-on 1 September, Edward told Louis Beaumont, bishop of Durham, that he was "shortly going to France" and had appointed his son as regent, and ordered Beaumont to keep the bishopric safe during his absence. [12]

- also on 1 September, Edward appointed Anthony Lucy and the earl of Arundel as wardens of Cumberland and Westmorland, and of the Welsh marches, during his absence overseas. [13]

- on 2 September, Edward changed his mind again and made his son count of Ponthieu. [14]

- evidently still unsure whether he was doing the right thing, Edward continued issuing letters of protection for the men accompanying him to France - him, not his son - on 3 and 4 September. [15]

- Edward began issuing letters of protection for the men accompanying his son on 5 September, but waited until 10 September before making young Edward duke of Aquitaine prior to sending him to the king of France. [16] The delay is a further indication of his uncertainty as to whether he was doing the right thing. But this remained his final decision, and the boy sailed from Dover on 12 September and performed homage to his uncle Charles IV at Vincennes on 24 September. [17]

- according to the chronicle of Adam Murimuth, who should know, because he was there, Edward and his advisers continued to discuss while he was staying at Langdon whether he should travel overseas. Edward was at Langdon from 24 August to 3 September. [18]

If Edward had been as oblivious to the consequences of his actions as many commentators have assumed and stated as fact, he would have blithely sent his son to France without a second thought, but as is apparent from his frequent changes of mind, he was most emphatically not oblivious; he was torn between the dangers of sending his son to France and going himself. He was also perfectly well aware of the dangers of sending his son unmarried, as proved by his injunctions to the boy both prior to his departure and in subsequent letters not to marry "without the king's consent and command." [19] Edward did not fall into Isabella and Roger Mortimer's cunningly-laid trap, and whether Isabella had ever even been in contact with Mortimer and his allies on the continent, men who had fled England after the battle of Boroughbridge in March 1322, is a matter for speculation. It is a possibility, but there is nothing to prove it.

In the end, it was Hugh Despenser who persuaded Edward not to go, and the Anonimalle says that the favourite "made a great sorrow, and lamented piteously to the king that if he passed beyond sea, he [Despenser] would be put to death in his absence," a story confirmed by Adam Murimuth and the Vita. [20] Edward must surely have remembered what had happened when he left Piers Gaveston at Scarborough Castle on 10 May 1312: his beloved was killed six weeks later.

And therefore, Edward made the decision for which he has unfairly been condemned as a stupid, blind fool ever since, and sent Edward of Windsor to France. He never saw his son again. (At least, not officially; unless the William the Welshman who met Edward III in 1338 was Edward II himself, but that's another story.)

In sending his son to France, Edward made a very bad decision, but that does not mean he made it blindly and unwittingly, and if he had gone to France himself and been assassinated or kidnapped, historians would no doubt ask how he could have been so stupid as to travel abroad himself when he could have sent his son instead. If neither he nor his son had paid homage and let Gascony and Ponthieu fall forfeit to the French Crown, he would of course be castigated for losing such an important part of his inheritance. If he had left Despenser behind, he would be sneered at for not caring if his friend was murdered. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and it seems to me that whatever decision Edward II made in September 1325 would, in retrospect, have been the wrong one.

Sources

1) Mark Buck, Politics, Finance and the Church in the Reign of Edward II: Walter Stapeldon, Treasurer of England, p. 156, note 199.
2) Vita Edwardi Secundi, ed. N. Denholm-Young, p. 142.
3) Vita, p. 140.
4) Pierre Chaplais, ed., The War of Saint-Sardos (1323-1325): Gascon Correspondence and Diplomatic Documents, pp. 195-196.
5) Calendar of Papal Letters 1305-1342, p. 466.
6) Foedera, II, i, p. 603.
7) Calendar of Close Rolls 1323-1327, p. 496.
8) Calendar of Patent Rolls 1324-1327, pp. 161-2, 166-8; Cal Close Rolls 1323-1327, p. 503.
9) Natalie Fryde, The Tyranny and Fall of Edward II 1321-1326, p. 96.
10) Foedera, p. 606.
11) Cal Pat Rolls 1324-1327, p. 171.
12) Cal Close Rolls 1323-1327, p. 399.
13) Cal Pat Rolls 1324-1327, p. 171.
14) Cal Pat Rolls 1324-1327, pp. 173-175.
15) Cal Pat Rolls 1324-1327, pp. 167, 169-170.
16) Cal Pat Rolls 1324-1327, pp. 168, 173-175.
17) Chaplais, War of Saint-Sardos, p. 243; Cal Pat Rolls 1324-1327, p. 175; Cal Close Rolls 1323-1327, p. 507.
18) Adae Murimuth Continuatio Chronicarum, ed. E. Maunde Thompson, p. 44.
19) Cal Close Rolls 1323-1327, pp. 577-578.
20) The Anonimalle Chronicle 1307-41, from Brotherton Collection MS 29, ed. W. R. Childs and J. Taylor, p. 120; Murimuth, p. 44; Vita, p. 138.

Books, etc

2009-04-09T10:05:00.003+02:00

Congratulations to Susan Higginbotham, whose excellent novel The Traitor's Wife, about Edward II's niece Eleanor (de Clare) Despenser, was published recently and has been garnering terrific reviews online. I'm delighted on Susan's behalf, as she's become a good friend since we met via the blog some years ago, and also because - yes, I admit it - it means people are reading a far more positive portrayal of Edward II than is usually seen, though Susan certainly doesn't skate over his many faults.

Paul Doherty's third Mathilde of Westminster murder mystery, The Darkening Glass, came out on 2 April, though I haven't bought it yet. It's set in March 1312, and features Edward and Piers Gaveston forced to flee to Tynemouth Priory to escape the earl of Lancaster - and one of their party being murdered.

The twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh instalments of Michael Jecks' popular Templar series are coming out on 11 June: The King of Thieves in paperback, and No Law in the Land in hardback and trade paperback. They're set near the end of Edward II's reign, as everything starts to go pear-shaped for the king when Queen Isabella refuses to return to England and keeps their son in France with her.

Ian Mortimer has two books coming out this year, in May and September: The Dying and the Doctors: the Medical Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England, and 1415: Henry V's Year of Glory.

The sheer number of books about the battle of Bannockburn coming out these days is astonishing. Chris Brown's excellent Bannockburn, 1314: A New History is due out in paperback this December - though it's definitely worth splashing out on the hardback - Michael Brown's Bannockburn: The Scottish War and the British Isles, 1307-1323 came out last July, and David Cornell's Bannockburn: The Triumph of Robert the Bruce was published in hardback on 30 March this year. I haven't read the latter two yet, but am hoping to very soon. In case that isn't enough Bannockburn for you, there's also Michael Sadler's Bannockburn: Battle for Liberty and David Simpkin's The English Aristocracy at War: From the Welsh Wars of Edward I to the Battle of Bannockburn, both published last year.

Melissa Mayhue's A Highlander of Her Own came out in late January: a romance novel set in present-day Texas and Scotland in 1304. I'm happy to say that I get a mention in the acknowledgements for helping Melissa with her research.

Blog searches from the last few days:

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Andrew Harclay, Earl Of Carlisle

2009-04-05T10:55:00.006+02:00

A post about a man who held the earldom of Carlisle for less than a year and suffered a terrible death by hanging, drawing and quartering.

Andrew Harclay or Hartley was born in about 1270, son of Michael Harclay, sheriff of Cumberland from 1285 to 1298, and Joan Fitzjohn of Yorkshire. Andrew's name in his own lifetime was usually written as Andreu de Ercla, Harcla, Hercla, Hercelay, Hartcla, Hertcla, Harkla, Harccla, Harklay, Harteclath or Artcla. He had a sister called Sarah and brothers named John and Henry, the latter (died 1317) chancellor of Oxford University.

Andrew was appointed sheriff of Cumberland in 1311, a position he held on and off for the next dozen years, and warden of Carlisle Castle in 1313. In the summer of 1315, he led the staunch defence of Carlisle against a Scottish attack, led by Robert Bruce in person, for which Edward II rewarded him with 1000 marks. Edward granted Carlisle a royal charter in 1316; the charter has an initial letter which depicts Andrew throwing a spear at a Scottish soldier. (See Gabriele's post for more information about the defence of Carlisle Castle.) Unfortunately, Andrew was captured by the Scots in late 1315 or early 1316, and begged Edward II to grant him two Scottish prisoners "in aid of his ransom, as he does not see how to deliver himself otherwise." He also asked Edward to hasten his deliverance, "that he may appear to answer the malicious charges made by some persons against him at court" - whatever that was about. Edward eventually paid 2000 marks towards his ransom. [1]

Andrew is probably best known for his defeat of the earls of Lancaster and Hereford at Boroughbridge on 16 March 1322: somewhat ironically, he won the battle by using the same tactics Robert Bruce had used to such great effect against Edward II at Bannockburn in 1314. In November 1318, Andrew and his brother John had been pardoned as adherents of Lancaster. [2] Edward II rewarded Andrew by making him earl of Carlisle on 25 March 1322 and girded him with the comital belt himself, promising him 1000 marks of land annually. [3] Andrew took part in Edward's doomed Scottish campaign of autumn 1322, though he was unable to come to Edward's aid when the king was almost captured at Rievaulx Abbey on 14 October. The Brut chronicle calls Andrew a traitor and says that he deliberately abandoned Edward at Rievaulx in exchange for "a great sum of gold and silver" from the Scots, for which reason "the king was towards him full wroth," while the Anonimalle claims that Andrew intended to allow the Scots to destroy the north of England. [4] These accounts are most unlikely to be true; the authors of the Brut and the Anonimalle were extremely pro-Lancastrian and therefore loathed Andrew for defeating their hero Thomas of Lancaster at Boroughbridge. The equally pro-Lancastrian author of the Flores Historiarum also called Andrew a traitor.

It might have been this disastrous campaign which finally forced Andrew to conclude that Edward II would never be able to make himself overlord of Scotland, defeat Robert Bruce, or protect the inhabitants of northern England from endless Scottish raids. Therefore, he took desperate measures and met Bruce at Lochmaben on 3 January 1323, and concluded a treaty with him: that Edward would recognise Bruce as king of Scots and would be granted the marriage of Bruce’s son and heir, that Bruce would pay England 40,000 marks of silver over ten years, and that Scotland would be entirely independent of England. [5] On 8 January, Edward declared that truces with the Scots must not be made without his consent, "as that would be to his dishonour," and ordered Andrew to inform him of the terms of the treaty he had made and to come to him immediately. [6] I think it's highly likely that Andrew's rival Sir Anthony Lucy had prior knowledge of the meeting and informed the king, as Edward gave Lucy’s messenger a pound on 2 January for bringing Lucy's letters to him. [7] For only five days to pass between the Lochmaben meeting and Edward’s response to it, 3 to 8 January, seems impossibly fast otherwise. Precisely how Andrew ever thought he could have been reconciled to Edward after making a treaty with Bruce against Edward's wishes is uncertain.

Andrew failed to obey Edward’s summons, and the king, "exceedingly put out (and no wonder!)" as the Lanercost chronicle puts it, ordered his arrest on 1 February 1323. [8] Lanercost gives a colourful account of Edward’s sending Anthony Lucy to "take him by craft," whereupon Lucy and a small group of knights and men-at-arms hid their weapons under their clothes to disguise their hostile intent, and arrested Andrew while he was dictating letters in the great hall of Carlisle Castle. The Brut says that Edward sent Lucy to arrest Andrew "and put him to death." [9] Edward sent several men on 27 February to "degrade" Andrew, "a traitor to the king and the realm": his half-brother the earl of Kent; Geoffrey le Scrope, chief justice of the King's Bench; John, Lord Hastings; and three knights, John Pecche, Ralph Basset and John Wisham. This involved tearing the spurs of knighthood from Andrew's boots and removing his belt of earldom, and, according to the Brut, breaking his sword over his head. [10] Edward had already on 12 February ordered the earls of Kent and Atholl and two others "to receive into the king's grace all persons misled or constrained by Andrew de Harcla," and the day after he sent Kent, Scrope and the others to "degrade" Andrew, offered a general pardon for all offences committed in the king's forest to one Ughtred de Geveleston, "in consideration of the good news which he brought to the king of the capture of Andrew de Harcla, a rebel." [11]

The outcome of Andrew's 'trial', at which he was not allowed to speak, was never in doubt. Anthony Lucy told him that he was "a traitor unto the lord the king," and said "our lord the king's will is that ye...be brought to nought, and thy state undone, that other knights of lower degree might after beware." Andrew's spurs were removed and his sword broken over his head, then Lucy "let him unclothe of his furred mantle and of his hood, and of his furred coats and his girdle," and told him "Now art thou no knight, but a knave." [12]

Andrew was condemned to the full horrors of the traitor’s death by hanging, drawing and quartering, his head to be set on London Bridge and the four quarters of his body publicly displayed in Carlisle, Newcastle, Shrewsbury and York. On 3 March 1323, Andrew died well and bravely at Carlisle: when he heard the sentence, he announced "You have divided my carcass according to your pleasure, and I commend myself to God," and gazed towards the heavens, hands clasped and held aloft, as horses dragged him through the streets of the town he had defended so staunchly for many years. [13] Edward gave a mark to Ranulphus, the trumpeter of Anthony Lucy, who brought him a message on 15 March and returned to Lucy with Edward's letters; perhaps Ranulphus brought the news that Andrew was dead, though Edward must surely have already heard about it by then. [14] One account says that Andrew's head was sent to Knaresborough for Edward's inspection. [15] Edward was at Knaresborough Castle from 26 February to 16 March 1323, so the timing fits.

Lanercost points out that Andrew was "a single individual, none of whose business it was to transact such affairs," and certainly he had considerably overstepped his authority, but it is easy to sympathise with his growing frustration at Edward II's incompetence. The St Albans chronicler says that Andrew hated Edward's favourite Hugh Despenser, which would hardly be surprising – most people did – and his anger with Despenser may have contributed in some way to his decision to treat with Bruce, while his promotion to an earldom angered his rival Anthony Lucy, who grabbed his chance to bring about Andrew’s downfall and who was granted some of the late earl’s lands. [16] Andrew, to some extent, only had himself to blame for Lucy's hostility: he had in 1322, high-handedly and almost certainly spuriously, accused Lucy of adherence to Thomas of Lancaster, and seized his lands. [17]

Edward II, with his usual vindictiveness towards family members of people who angered him, ordered the treasurer and barons of the exchequer to remove Andrew’s cousin Patrick Corewen or Culwenne from his position as sheriff of Westmorland in September 1323, and appoint instead "a successor of undoubted loyalty." [18] On the other hand, he didn't punish anyone except Andrew for the Scots treaty, and readily pardoned Andrew's supporters and adherents. Andrew had certainly committed treason, though he did not do so for his own benefit but to spare the inhabitants of northern England the endless suffering inflicted on them by Scottish raids. Although Edward had no choice but to punish Andrew, he thus destroyed a man who had always been loyal to him and who was one of the very few men of his reign to enjoy military success. Less than three months after Andrew's death, Edward signed a thirteen-year peace treaty with Scotland, though still refused to acknowledge Robert Bruce as king.

Andrew's sister Sarah Leyburn finally received permission in August 1328 to "gather the bones of Andrew and commit them to ecclestiastical sepulchre where she may wish." [19] Andrew left no children, and his nephew and heir Henry Harclay petitioned, probably around the same time, to be restored to the Harclay inheritance on the grounds that Andrew "was never regularly convicted of treason." Henry said that Edward III should annul the proceedings "in deliverance of his royal father's soul from peril," but his petition was unsuccessful. [20] It is sometimes said, for example on Andrew's Wikipedia page, that his brother John - father of Henry - was executed with him in March 1323, but John had in fact died in November 1322, of natural causes. [21] (Wikipedia also says, incorrectly, that Andrew left a son, John.)* The earldom of Carlisle was dormant for almost exactly 300 years, until James VI and I revived it in 1622 for James Hay.

* Actually, it doesn't, as I've just corrected the page.

Sources

1) Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland 1307-1357, pp. 98, 132.
2) Calendar of Patent Rolls 1317-1321, pp. 228-229.
3) Cal Pat Rolls 1321-1324, p. 93.
4) The Brut, ed. F. W. D. Brie, p. 227; The Anonimalle Chronicle 1307-41, from Brotherton Collection MS 29, ed. W. R. Childs and J. Taylor, p. 112.
5) Foedera, II i, p. 502; Cal Docs Scotland, p. 148.
6) Calendar of Close Rolls 1318-1323, p. 692; Cal Pat Rolls 1321-1324, p. 234.
7) J. C. Davies, 'The First Journal of Edward II's Chamber', English Historical Review, 30 (1915), p. 678.
8) The Chronicle of Lanercost 1272-1346, ed. H. Maxwell, p. 242; Foedera, p. 504.
9) Lanercost, pp. 243-244; Brut, p. 227.
10) Cal Pat Rolls 1321-1324, p. 260; Foedera, p. 509; Brut, pp. 227-228; Lanercost, p. 245.
11) Cal Pat Rolls 1321-1324, pp. 240-241, 265.
12) Brut, pp. 227-228.
13) Lanercost, p. 245. Accounts of Andrew's execution also appear in Bridlington, Flores Historiarum, Annales Paulini, Trokelowe etc.
14) Richard Rastall, ‘Secular Musicians in Late Medieval England’ (PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 1968) vol 2, p. 70.
15) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 'Andrew Harclay'.
16) Lanercost, p. 242; Johannis de Trokelowe et Henrici de Blaneforde Chronica et Annales, ed. H. T. Riley, p. 127; Foedera, p. 527.
17) ODNB.
18) Cal Docs Scotland, p. 152.
19) Cal Close Rolls 1327-1330, p. 404.
20) Cal Docs Scotland, p. 170.
21) Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous 1308-1348, p. 265; Calendar of Fine Rolls 1319-1327, p. 187.

Law and Order in Edward II's Reign

2009-03-30T14:47:00.002+02:00

Some random examples of murder, assault and candidates for Darwin awards, etc, in Edward II's reign that I found amusing or noteworthy, taken from the patent and close rolls, inquisitions miscellaneous, petitions, records of parliament, chancery warrants and so on.

On Sunday 25 September 1323 in Nottinghamshire, Henry de Mustiers and Hugh de Whassyngbourn, chaplain, went walking in the fields between Elston and Syerston with a woman called Jonetta de Staunton. They encountered three brothers, Robert, Nicholas and Thomas de Sireston, "who politely saluted Jonetta. And Robert embraced her, upon which Henry angrily put away Robert's hands and whispered to Hugh to go to his [Henry's] home and bring his men with arms." Hugh returned with three named men and unnamed, uncounted others, "who met Robert and his brothers and bade them 'Stand' and abused them. Hugh attacked them with an iron-pronged fork wounding Robert, who then killed him with a knife. No man received Robert or his brothers. Nicholas and Thomas are in no way guilty." Robert de Sireston was pardoned in April 1325 for Hugh's death and "any consequent outlawry."

A salutary lesson on the perils of embracing strange women in fields and carrying pitchforks around, I suppose.

On 1 August 1324, Robert Anlek of Jersey (Channel Islands) was pardoned for the death of Joan Hamond, "on his petition showing that, as he was passing through the town of Haumouns, he threw a stone at a dog that was following to bite him, and the stone by accident struck the said Joan and killed her."

In May 1311, William Bereford, chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas, claimed that Sir John Somery had "obtained such mastery in the county of Stafford that no one can obtain law or justice therein; that he has made himself more than a king there; that no one can dwell there unless he buys protection from him, either by money or by assisting him in building his castles; and that he attacks people in their own houses with the intention of killing them, unless they make fine for his protection." Somery accused Bereford of defamation.

An inquisition taken at Stratford-on-Avon on 30 October 1320 found that Andrew le Frank "threw his knife at a wall" on 4 June 1319 at his house in 'La Whiteparosshe', wherever that is, and "Agnes his wife came in the way and was wounded in the leg, and so died by misadventure."

An addition to Lady D's recent post about Newgate Prison in London: James de Galduches, formerly imprisoned there, complained in September 1314 that Richard de Honewyk, keeper of the gaol, handed him over to his sergeant John le Parker, and "although the complainant for such cause ought not to have been placed in the depths of the gaol as a felon or thief, [Parker] did so immure him so that he might extort money from him, and detained him there, placed with notorious felons and thieves and horribly laden with iron fetters." Parker forced Galtuches to promise to pay him sixty pounds, an astonishingly large sum, and when he failed to pay it, Parker "procured grievous distresses" upon his goods.

My hero Stephen Dunheved was not the only man to escape from Newgate: a John Bourt of Mendham was pardoned in November 1310, on account of good service in Scotland, for "breaking Neugate prison and for abjuring the realm," and two men named Robert le Bakere and Stephen de Thresk also escaped from there before January 1325. In March 1315, Newgate was said to contain "certain chambers which are in a ruinous state to the injury of the city of London, and danger of the escape of prisoners who are in that gaol."

In June 1309, Ralph Bedel of Old Sarum in Wiltshire was released from prison, having "made a distress by a cow" on Nicholas Cope and John Smart, "sub-keepers of the peace in the town of Bradelegh."

Bertrand le Vylar, merchant of Bayonne, complained in December 1323 that "whereas he laded a ship of the parts of Malogret called a 'Galey' at La Skluse in Flanders with diverse wares to take to Spain, and ran towards Sandwich to take refuge from pirates,"* men of the Cinque Ports entered his ship while it was at anchor, assaulted him and stole his goods.

* Not Hugh Despenser the Younger. :-)

Inquisition taken at York, the Tuesday after Trinity Sunday 1324: "Dionisia Ketel fled for diverse larcenies imputed to her...and entered the sheepfold of Maud, late the wife of William Amyson of Hemmyngburgh, and killed two ewes; on hearing which the said Maud came to her sheepfold and found the said Dionisia skinning the ewes; when the said Dionisia perceived the approach of the said Maud, she attacked her with the knife with which she was skinning the ewes, and the said Maud, seeing the knife, fled to Clyff by Hemmyngburgh, and there the said Dionisia cornered her in a house to kill her, and the said Maud, seeing she could not escape death, found an axe lying at her feet with which she struck the said Dionisia on the head, whereby she died. The said Maud immediately journeyed to the king's court to seek the king's peace."

She just happened to find an axe lying at her feet? How convenient. Maud was pardoned for the death on 26 June 1324.

Nicholas Gest was pardoned in November 1309 for the death of Emma Chappere, "killed by him before he had completed his seventh year."

Edward II ordered the treasurer and chancellor in December 1323 to make a visitation of the chapel of St Martin le Grand in London, "as it has come to the ears of the king that the ornaments and books are often wanting, officers and other ministers neglect their duties although they receive their stipends, and raise brawls, contentions and scandals amongst themselves; and that some carry on dissolute lives in other places."

An inquisition taken at Stafford on 21 August 1320 found that Sir Roger Swynnerton, Stephen Swynnerton, parson, and Thomas Ace of Newport killed Henry le Salt in Stafford "for insulting language." The same inquisition found that Richard Swynnerton killed Henry le Persons "on account of an old quarrel," and Stephen Swynnerton the parson killed Thomas de Vernay for the same reason. Those Swynnerton brothers were pretty murderous.

A fight broke out in a London tavern one Sunday in March 1326, during which a clerk, Luke Walram, hit a skinner called Robert de Aynesham on the arm with a stick and broke it (Aynesham's arm, not the stick), and Thomas de Popelingecherche hit another skinner called John de Arnhale and wounded Arnhale's right hand. A third skinner, Laurence de Lenne, was felled to the ground when Thomas de Haselhegh hit him with a stick, and stabbed Robert de Haselhegh's chaplain Richard in the thigh with his knife.

John Dunheved, brother of Stephen and Thomas Dunheved from my last post, murdered Oliver Dunheved, a rent-collector and presumably the brothers' cousin, on 9 February 1325. Oliver was staying at the house of William Mori in Dunchurch, when John, "designing Oliver's death, came by night with others unknown and attacked the house and would have set it on fire. This frightened William Mori so that he opened the door that Oliver might escape; but thereupon John shot Oliver to the heart with a bow and a barbed arrow, so that he died."

On 27 September 1324, the ship of one Richard de Wodehouse was floating in the river Ouse at Selby in Yorkshire, with Richard's son William sitting on the gunwale, when a post in the water struck William and threw him into the water, and he drowned.

On 1 March 1308, at Weybourne in Norfolk, it was found that William son of Thomas de Wabrone "wickedly slew William Bright with a dung fork, because he found him idling in his service."

After the execution of Bartholomew Badlesmere in April 1322, he was accused of having prevented Simon and Margery de Kinardsle from entering a messuage in London: "by his great power as the steward of the king's household, he would not allow them to enter, wherefore they brought the king's writ against him; whereupon the said Bartholomew grievously threatened them, and seized the said Simon by the beard, and otherwise vexed them."

On 18 May 1319, Edward II sent a letter to the chancellor, ordering him to write letters of pardon for Hugh le Smale regarding the death of Robert Spendelove: Hugh and Robert were together at the house of Robert atte Watre "about the hour of vespers at table, and Robert raised strife against Hugh and attacked him to kill him, and Hugh [words missing] caused the windows of the house to be closed to avoid his malice, and Robert [words missing] returned and broke the doors and entered the house and chased Hugh from corner to corner and got him in a corner towards the east, and Hugh in self-defence drew [words missing] struck Robert on the right shoulder and so killed him but not of malice or felony aforethought." Smale was pardoned the same day, and the letters say that he killed Spendelove "in the presence of the king."

May 1315: Edward II's garrison of Builth Castle, "maliciously seeking occasion against the said commonalty [of Builth] went forth by night from the castle, and feigned to besiege the castle and shot arrows at it; and afterwards, having secretly re-entered the castle, wickedly laid such attack upon the burgesses of the town, and on that account imprisoned very many of the burgesses in the castle and maliciously detained them in the prison there until they were delivered therefrom by the king's escheator."

In other words, they attacked the castle themselves and pretended that the inhabitants of the town were responsible as an excuse to arrest them. To add insult to injury, they "took away diverse kinds of victuals and other things of the same burgesses and men found in their houses against their will and carried the same away, [and] maliciously killed the swine of the said burgesses and men casually coming near the castle."

The Dunheved Brothers

2009-03-25T10:36:00.005+01:00

Many thanks to Gabriele Campbell for giving me a 'Your blog is fabulous' award! I'm meant to name five blogs I think are also fabulous, so here goes (six, in fact): Lady D, Anerje, Disney's Robin, Satima Flavell, Brian Wainwright's Yorkist Age and Christy K. Robinson's Rooting For Ancestors. (Award yourselves the pretty picture in the sidebar on the left, with the woman and dog.) I also have to name five of my obsessions, though I don't think any reader of this blog will have any difficulties identifying them, as they're basically 1) Edward II, 2) anything that happened in Edward II's lifetime, 3) anyone related to Edward II, 4) anyone connected to Edward II and 5) anything or anyone connected to Edward II not covered in numbers 1 to 4. :-)

OK, one of my obsessions is the Dunheved brothers, Stephen and Thomas, fanatical supporters of Edward II and leaders of the group of men who temporarily freed the former king from Berkeley Castle in 1327. Here's a post about them, and you can also read about them, their allies and their plot to free Edward here, here and here.

Stephen Dunheved

Stephen was the eldest son of John Dunheved of Dunchurch, Warwickshire, though I have no idea when he and his siblings were born - presumably between 1275 and 1295. Stephen's paternal grandmother Christiane, daughter of Jordan Butler, was born before 1223, and his father John Dunheved was born sometime before 1260 and died between May 1305 and March 1309, leaving a widow Eustachia, Stephen's mother or stepmother. [1] Stephen inherited the manor of Dunchurch, on Dunsmore Heath near Rugby, on his father's death. He was certainly not a Dominican friar, as stated in Paul Doherty's The Darkening Glass and in the author's note. Nor is there any real evidence to back up Doherty's statement that Stephen was "very sinister."

Stephen is extremely difficult to trace before 1322, unlike his younger brother John, who was frequently in trouble with the law and was accused of rape and assault, pardoned for outlawry, and murdered a man with a crossbow in 1325. At some date, probably in 1321, Stephen committed a serious felony (murder?) and abjured the realm, that is, voluntarily exiled himself from England for life to avoid execution. He had returned by mid-February 1322, when he is found as a 'valet' of Edward II's chamber, and Edward appointed him custodian of Lyonshall Castle and ordered him to make inquisition into the goods and chattels of four of the king’s baronial enemies. [2] Lady D and I have a theory about Stephen: Hugh Despenser the Younger, banished from England by the Marcher lords in August 1321, became a pirate in the English channel, and we think Stephen may have joined him. We can't prove it, but the pardon for the felony and permission to return to England after abjuring the realm could only have been granted by Edward II, and as Stephen not only returned to England but entered Edward's household, this suggests royal favour. Stephen also appeared as a member of Edward's household at about the same time that Despenser returned to England, and it may be that Despenser asked Edward to give Stephen the pardon and a position in the royal household. That's only speculation, though. Maybe we're just being imaginative.

Stephen only acted as constable of Lyonshall Castle for a couple of months, and thereafter, is pretty obscure for the rest of Edward's reign. I presume, however, from later events, that he must have remained close to the king. Stephen's brother Thomas was with Edward when the king was wandering around Wales at the end of his reign, and it may be that the 'Stephen Dun' pardoned in March 1327 as one of the garrison who held out at Caerphilly - stronghold of Hugh Despenser and the only centre of resistance to the new regime - was in fact Stephen Dunheved. (Or maybe not.) [3] Other men who joined the brothers in freeing the former king in 1327 were still in Wales with Edward in late 1326, for example Roger atte Watre, another member of the Caerphilly garrison, and Thomas de la Haye, one of Edward's sergeant-at-arms.

It was probably in mid or late June 1327 that the Dunheved brothers and their allies attacked Berkeley Castle and succeeded, temporarily at least, in taking the former Edward II. Lord Berkeley wrote a letter to the chancellor John Hothum on 27 July, saying that the Dunheveds and their allies ravi Edward from his custody, which can be translated as 'abducted', 'seized' or 'snatched away'.

Either the gang were forced to flee without Edward or they got him out of the castle but he was recaptured shortly afterwards, and the men scattered; there are many entries on the calendared rolls in the summer and autumn of 1327 ordering the arrest of 'malefactors' and those who helped them evade capture in places as far apart as Cheshire, Dorset and Bedfordshire, and references to 'enemies of the realm' who had escaped abroad and were 'betraying the secrets of the realm'. Stephen Dunheved fled to London, and on 1 July, the mayor and sheriffs of the city were ordered to arrest him. [4] The Annales Paulini confirms that he was captured in the city. [5] Stephen was sent to Newgate prison, but managed to escape shortly before 7 June 1329, when an entry on the Close Roll says that he "wanders at large against the king's will." [6] Perhaps in response to this, Newgate was ordered to be strengthened and repaired some months later, as it was "so weak and threatened with ruin that the prisoners therein cannot be kept safely." [7] Stephen is next found on 31 March 1330, when his name appears on a list of dozens of men to be arrested for aiding the earl of Kent in his attempts to free the supposedly dead Edward II and restore him to the throne. [8]

I haven't been able to trace Stephen at all after this date. In a way, this is positive, in a 'no news is good news' kind of way, as it implies that he went into hiding or fled the country, because if he had been found and arrested, there would probably be references to it somewhere. Other men who joined the Dunheveds in 1327 - Peter de la Rokele and Roger atte Watre - disappear from the records between the summer of 1327 and late 1330 and crop up again in early 1331, which perhaps implies that they had fled abroad and returned after Edward III overthrew Roger Mortimer in October 1330, or had been imprisoned and were released. (More speculation, but given the secrecy of the Dunheveds' plot to free Edward and the subsequent disappearance of most of the men who took part in it, there's not much else I can do.) But Stephen doesn't appear again in any record that I've found. I hope he had gone overseas and decided to stay there and make a new life for himself. I hope he thrived.

Thomas Dunheved

Thomas, one of Stephen's three brothers, was a Dominican friar, an order much favoured and patronised by Edward II. Several secondary sources claim that he was Edward's confessor, but I haven't found any evidence to confirm that (Edward had three confessors during his reign: John Lenham, Robert Duffield and Luke Woodford). Thomas was made a papal chaplain in September 1325, which evidently went to his head, as John XXII wrote to the prior provincial of the Dominicans in July 1326 asking him to "keep under obedience and correct" Thomas, who, since becoming papal chaplain, "considers himself thereby freed from observance of the rule." [9] The Lanercost chronicle calls Thomas "a man of religion, acting irreligiously." [10] Given that Thomas was heavily involved in the attack on Berkeley Castle in 1327 and that the pope chastised him for disobeying the rule of his order, that seems a reasonable enough comment.

Edward sent Thomas with letters to the pope in 1325, and Lanercost and Annales Paulini report an improbable rumour that the king had sent him to persuade John XXII to annul his marriage to Isabella. [11] I'm not going to go into the many reasons why it is almost impossible to believe that Edward would have done this in 1324 or 1325, not least because there is no corroborating evidence whatsoever, and John XXII's own letter to Edward makes it clear that the king had in fact sent Thomas to the pope with letters spelling out his grievances against Alexander Bicknor, archbishop of Dublin. [12]

Thomas remained with Edward II in Wales in late 1326, and was paid for carrying the king's letters to Hugh Despenser (the Younger) - which itself is interesting, as it obviously means that Edward and Despenser were apart at least some of the time shortly before their arrest and downfall. [13] After Edward's deposition, Lanercost says that Thomas "travelled through England, not only secretly but even openly, stirring up the people of the south and north to rise for the deposed and imprisoned king and restore the kingdom to him." The Brut says that the "Friar Preachers [Dominicans] to him [Edward] were good friends evermore, and cast and ordained, both night and day, how they might bring him out of prison," and that Thomas "ordained and gathered a great company of folk for to help at that need." [14]

According to the Annales Paulini, Thomas was captured at Budbrooke in Warwickshire after the attack on Berkeley, though the date the annalist gives for his capture, c. 11 June 1327, cannot be correct, as Thomas was still at liberty when Thomas Berkeley wrote his letter on 27 July naming him as one of the attackers, and 11 June probably predates the attack on Berkeley Castle anyway. Thomas was taken to Queen Isabella, then sent to prison at Pontefract, where he tried to escape and was thrown into a dungeon and died in misery. Several other chronicles noticed his demise and the reasons for it: Lanercost, Croniques de London and the Brut, though the Croniques says he and many of his co-conspirators were "put in hard prison" at York (mis en dure prisoun a Everwik), thirty miles from Pontefract. [15] Although Lanercost says that Thomas,"that foolish friar," died in prison, it also claims that he played a role in Kent's conspiracy of 1330, by raising a devil who told Kent that Edward II was still alive. [16] Plausibility of devil-raising aside, I think it's highly likely - unfortunately - that Thomas was in fact dead by 1330. Thomas and Stephen's brother John was still alive in February 1338, when he acknowledged a debt of 200 pounds to Henry Beaumont. He had played no role in their plot to free Edward, and in fact was pardoned, probably for his 1325 murder of (his cousin?) Oliver Dunheved, on 5 May 1327, the day after Stephen was to be arrested and taken to Isabella. [17]

Sources

1) http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=57101; Calendar of Close Rolls 1302-1307, p. 269; Calendar of Patent Rolls 1307-1313, p. 97.
2) Calendar of Fine Rolls 1319-1327, pp. 95, 101.
3) Cal Pat Rolls 1327-1330, p. 38.
4) Cal Close Rolls 1327-1330, p. 146.
5) Annales Paulini, in Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II, ed. W. Stubbs, vol. 1, p. 337.
6) Cal Close Rolls 1327-1330, p. 549.
7) Cal Close Rolls 1330-1333, pp. 1, 47.
8) Cal Fine Rolls 1327-1337, p. 169.
9) Calendar of Papal Letters 1305-1342, pp. 253, 479.
10) The Chronicle of Lanercost 1272-1346, ed. Herbert Maxwell, p. 249.
11) Annales Paulini, p. 337; Lanercost, p. 249.
12) Cal Papal Letters, p. 474.
13) SAL MS 122, folio 34.
14) Lanercost, pp. 258-9; The Brut, ed. F. W. D. Brie, p. 249.
15) Annales Paulini, p. 337; Lanercost, p. 259; Croniques de London Depuis L'an 44 Hen. III. Jusqu' à L'an 17 Edw. III, ed. J. G. Aungier, p. 58; Brut, p. 249.
16) Lanercost, pp. 264-5.
17) Cal Close Rolls 1337-1339, p. 383; Cal Pat Rolls 1327-1330, pp. 51, 99.

Edward II's Claim to Castile and Provence

2009-03-20T11:06:00.001+01:00

A newsletter of late 1306, describing the visit of a Spanish cardinal to England, made the astonishing claim that the magnates of Castile had agreed that they would offer the Castilian throne to (the future) Edward II, should his cousin Fernando IV die without a son. And in 1323, Edward tried to claim a share of the county of Provence, as his inheritance from his grandmother Eleanor of Provence. Here's some more information.

Castile

As far as I can work out, Edward II is one of only two English monarchs with a Spanish parent, Mary Tudor being the other. In December 1306, a papal nuncio named Pedro, Castilian by birth and cardinal-bishop of Santa Sabina, visited England, and Edward I remarked to him that "he should have a special affection for our dear son Edward, as he [Edward] is of Spanish descent." According to a contemporary newsletter, Pedro had entered into an indenture with the magnates of Castile that Edward, as the son of King Alfonso X’s half-sister Eleanor, would succeed as king of Castile should his cousin Fernando IV die without a male heir.

This story, if true, strikes me as extraordinary; Edward II's mother Eleanor (or Leonor) had seven older half-brothers, and surely there must have been many more candidates for the throne than Edward, through the male line. But there had been a lot of conflict in Castile regarding the succession to the throne. Eleanor's eldest half-brother Alfonso X fathered five sons. The eldest, Fernando de la Cerda ('of the bristle'), predeceased him, leaving two young sons, Alfonso and Fernando. Alfonso X wished his throne to pass to his elder grandson Alfonso, but his second son Sancho demanded that he be made heir to the throne, and precipitated a bloody civil war in 1282. When Alfonso X died in April 1284 - the month his nephew Edward II was born - Sancho seized the throne as Sancho IV. He died in April 1295, leaving a nine-year-old son, Fernando IV. Sancho's brother Juan, the fourth son of Alfonso X, claimed the throne, claiming that his nephew Fernando was illegitimate. The kings of Portugal and Aragon took advantage of the chaos and invaded Castile in 1296, intending to divide the country between them, and the de la Cerda brothers, grandsons of Alfonso X, also continued to claim the throne.

Only Fernando's redoubtable mother Queen Maria de Molina - another close relative of Edward II - saved his throne, and in 1301, when Fernando turned sixteen, the pope finally declared that he was indeed legitimate. Fernando was, however, or at least was perceived by his nobles to be, a weak and ineffectual king, and they were unremittingly hostile to him. He compounded his faults by failing to father a son until he'd been married for ten years.

Given all this, maybe it isn't surprising that the Castilian magnates preferred the thought of the prince of Wales acceding to the throne (assuming the newsletter was correct). Whether Edward would ever have become king of Castile is a fascinating 'what if?', but Fernando IV finally fathered a son, Alfonso XI, in 1311, and thus spared Castile the trauma of being ruled by Edward II.

Provence

In February 1323, Edward II suddenly took it into his head to try to claim a share of Provence, and wrote several letters to this effect to Pope John XXII, asking for his help. His grandmother Queen Eleanor was the second of the four daughters of Count Raymond-Berenger V of Provence, while the third sister, Sanchia, married Richard of Cornwall, brother of Edward’s grandfather Henry III; Edward was also her heir. Maybe Edward thought that as the heir of two of the four sisters, he had a good claim. In fact he didn't, as Raymond-Berenger had left the entire county to his fourth daughter Beatrice in his will - to the fury of her sisters, who spent many years asserting their rights to Provence.

Edward also wrote to Beatrice’s grandson Robert, titular king of Jerusalem and Sicily, count of Provence and Edward's second cousin, asking him to "restore to the king amicably" the portions of the county that Edward said fell to him by inheritance. Thomas of Lancaster, another grandson of Eleanor of Provence, had also tried to claim part of the county, and John XXII rebuked him in early 1322 for failing to write courteously enough of Robert of Sicily. Queen Eleanor had transferred her claim to Provence to her Lancaster grandsons Thomas and Henry in May 1286, with reversion to Eleanor’s heirs, i.e. Edward I and Edward II, and Edward confirmed the Lancasters’ rights in the county in June 1319.

Although Edward wrote again to the pope and Robert of Sicily in August 1323, nothing came of it - John XXII politely informed him that he was unable to use his influence with Robert regarding the matter - and he abandoned his efforts. Oh well, it was worth a try, I suppose.

Sources

Peter Linehan, ‘The English Mission of Cardinal Petrus Hispanus, the Chronicle of Walter of Guisborough, and news from Castile at Carlisle (1307)’, English Historical Review, 117 (2002), pp. 615-20; Hilda Johnstone, Edward of Carnarvon 1284-1307 (1946), pp. 118-121.

Calendar of Close Rolls 1318-1323, p. 697; Cal Close Rolls 1323-1327, p. 136; Foedera II, i, pp. 396, 507, 531, 534; Calendar of Papal Letters 1305-1342, pp. 447, 455-456; Calendar of Patent Rolls 1281-1292, p. 243; Cal Pat Rolls 1317-1321, p. 341; Nancy Goldstone, Four Queens: The Provençal Sisters Who Ruled Europe (2007), pp. 106-8, 111-12, etc.

Aftermath of the Battle of Boroughbridge, 1322

2009-03-16T12:45:00.004+01:00

Today marks the 687th anniversary of the battle of Boroughbridge on 16 March 1322, when Andrew Harclay, sheriff of Cumberland, defeated the earls of Lancaster and Hereford and Edward II's other baronial enemies, whom the king had taken to calling the 'Contrariants'. I'm not writing an account of the battle itself - I'm pretty rubbish at describing military tactics and battles, and besides, accounts of Boroughbridge can be found all over the internet (Lady D's is great, and here's another excellent one) and in numerous books. So instead, a look at a little-known aspect of the battle: the capture of the rebel combatants and the seizure of their possessions.

The Vita Edwardi Secundi gives an account of how the knights and noblemen who fought at Boroughbridge tried to escape:

"Some left their horses and putting off their armour looked round for ancient worn‑out garments, and took to the road as beggars. But their caution was of no avail, for not a single well‑known man among them all escaped. O calamity! To see men lately dressed in purple and fine linen now attired in rags and imprisoned in chains!"

The bit beginning "O calamity!" is one of the misused quotations of Edward II's reign; I've seen too many secondary sources pretend that the author was referring to Edward's tyranny from 1322 onwards, and I've never seen any book quote the sentence that immediately follows, where the chronicler - who hated the Contrariants even more than he hated the Despensers - describes the royalist victory as "A marvellous thing, and one indeed brought about by God’s will and aid, that so scanty a company should in a moment overcome so many knights." The Vita also says that in 1322 the Contrariants "killed those who opposed them, plundered those who offered no resistance, sparing no one." [1]

Other Boroughbridge combatants tried to flee the country or to hide by donning religious habits. [2] Edward II sent men of his household to round up the fleeing Contrariants and seize their goods, and many inhabitants of Yorkshire joined in the hunt. [3] Here are a few details of the men who were arrested and their possessions:

- Stephen Baret, John Haunsard and 3 of their men, captured by the constable of Knaresborough Castle, must have been among those who threw away all their possessions, as they were "taken bare." Baret was executed in South Wales shortly afterwards; Haunsard was still in prison in 1326.

- 11 men were captured 35 miles away at Selby the day after the battle ("on the morrow of the discomfiture at Boroughbridge"), and their goods were sent to the king. They included: a pair of silk garters adorned with silver and red enamel with a cross bar of silver, a "great silver chain containing twelve links with a pipe at the end," 12 buttons of green glass adorned with silver gilt, 8 buttons of silver wire and 5 of white silver, 7 pearls the size of peas, 2 great chains, "one containing 31 links with a silver tirret, and the other 25 links with a silver tirret," a purse of silk worth a mark, a book worth 10 shillings, 8 horses, 6 silver dishes, 2 "worn swords" and 23 shillings in coin. "No other goods of the said prisoners were found except a worn dagger and such things as were stolen by thieves and were of no value."

- the villagers of Luttrington took 60 shillings from the Contrariants, and the men of four other villages found "arms, coats and overcoats" worth 40 shillings.

- The excellently-named Nogge of Luttrington found unspecified "arms and goods" of the rebels in the local wood.

- William de Lascy, vicar of Sherburn, and Nicholas atte Tounhend of Luttrington took "2 grooms of the house" of Sir Henry Tyes (executed in London shortly after the battle), 3 horses, a pack and 2 closed coffers.

- "John de Barnebi and Hugh de Pontefracto took 3 prisoners with 2 horses and 9s 6d and a bacinet, and allowed the prisoners to escape."

- 7 combatants were captured at Ripon 2 days after the battle, by 7 men who seem to have been inhabitants of the town rather than members of Edward II's household, and imprisoned in the archbishop of York's gaol in Ripon. They gave up 7 horses, 4 haketons, 6 bacinets, gauntlets, "swords, bucklers and other small arms," 9 ells of striped cloth and a bed belonging to William Dautery (one of the men captured), to a total value of 10 pounds. A man named James Dautery, presumably a relative, was also imprisoned at Ripon and handed over a hackney worth 6 shillings and 8p.

- the possessions the earl of Hereford had stored at Fountains Abbey were sent to Andrew Harclay, including a gold cup, a silver cup, 40 dishes and 2 horses worth 3 pounds.

- William Comine fled to the church of Escrick, where "acknowledging himself to be a felon" he gave himself up to the rector, Simon de Munketon, and handed over to him the 7 shillings, 2 and a half pence he was carrying, and his sword and a horn.

- William Puncy surrendered to the abbot of Fountains and gave him his silver cups, dishes and saucers. His 2 horses, each worth 30 shillings, were seized at Fountains, as well as a haketon worth 10 shillings, a horn and 14 shillings in cash, and he was imprisoned at Ripon. "Hugh fiz Ivon had of the said enemy a cup and ewer of silver of the price of 40s; Thomas de Doncaster and James de Stow had a little hackney of the price of 5s."

- 10 men of Boroughbridge, including John de Schirwod, Nicholas de Scalton and Richard de Tanfeld, rode out of the town "and pursued the enemy," each receving spoils of 6 marks and more.

- Matthew atte Halyat of Sherburn seized a red doublet worth 40 marks which belonged to Sir John Giffard, and John Ryther took possession of a "coat of armour of great price, and a pack with robes and good furs" belonging to John, Lord Mowbray. He also captured Mowbray's clerk Richard. Mowbray himself was hanged in York on 23 March.

- 2 men found "a beast with diverse arms" in the wood of ‘Bolwelwod’.

- John de Roucestre and his companions "took a knight and a lady with 2 palfreys and goods."

- "Laurence de Ledewodhouses found 2 coffers and the whole harness for a knight with a barehide."

- John son of William de Quixlay took 2 empty chests and "venison of unknown quantity" from Richard le Walays, and Geoffrey Braban took Walays' 2 bacon pigs and a white hackney.

- 2 horses belonging to the Lancastrian knight John Eure were found "at the park of Helagh" and "forcibly taken away by the men of Tadecastre" (Tadcaster), and his 4 other horses were found in the woods at Catherton. Eure's shield, lance, habergeon, leg-guards and plate shoes were found at Bilton. Eure himself was beheaded in Bishop's Auckland by 14 of Edward II's supporters, without Edward's knowledge or consent. Edward fumed that "malefactors" had killed Eure "while he was in the king's faith and peace," asserting "that he was the king's enemy, which he was not" (though he did pardon the killers). [4]

- men of Merston found 7 horses, armour and weapons, including a pair of plate gloves, a pair of cuisses, a pair of leg-guards, 4 swords, 3 lances and 2 pikes, and also a pair of shoes and a silver spoon. 1 of the horses belonged to the minstrel John le Boteler, called 'Burning King'.

- Alan, Robert and William le Pakker found 2 "empty chests with torches of wax." William of Sherburn found a bay horse and 2 empty chests.

- "Certain grooms, alleging themselves to be with the esquires of the king's chamber," found 2 pairs of leg guards, 2 pairs of shoes with cuisses, 2 bacinets with adventails, a coat of armour, a "saddle for a pack," a tunic, a barrel and a bridle.

- John del Grene found a horse and a lance belonging to Thomas Ughtred.

- "Fr. de Ledgraunge took a hackney in the park of Heselwod."

- John de Fenton took a rouncy worth 20s, a a habergeon and a haketon worth 10s, and John son of Emma of Sherburn found 2 horses, 1 bay worth 20s, and 1 iron-grey worth 2s - perhaps belonging to Adam Everyngham, below.

- Edward II's sergeant-at-arms Roger atte Watre - one of the Dunheved gang who temporarily freed the former king from Berkeley Castle in 1327 - seized a destrier and 2 rouncies of the Lancastrian knight Nicholas Stapelton at Drax Abbey. Stapelton himself was handed over to the custody of the bailiffs of York, and imprisoned there "with a bed and a robe." Other men imprisoned in York included Sir Robert Ryther, with a bed and 2 robes; Nicholas de Burgh, "with a sorel hackney, a seal, a sword, a trunk and the clothes he was wearing"; Edmund de Ryvers with a haketon and a black cloak; Sir Adam Everyngham with "a bed, 2 robes and 2 horses, one bay and other iron-grey"; Robert de Puntfrayt with a sword and the clothes he was wearing; Thomas de Stretford, groom, with an iron-grey courser.

- "Robert de Bretton and Denys de Mareis and others, their companions, took a man at arms and 8 other rebels at Athelsay and a horse of the price of 40s, and 6 pieces and dishes of silver."

- Sir Peter de Midelton found at Sherburn a black rouncey worth 100s, a white horse worth 40s, a 'pomel horse' worth 40s, and a bay horse worth 4s.

Sources

1) Vita Edwardi Secundi, ed. N. Denholm-Young (1957), pp. 121, 124-125.
2) Calendar of Close Rolls 1318-1323, pp. 534-535.
3) Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous (Chancery) 1308-1348, pp. 129-134.
4) Cal Close Rolls 1318-1323, pp. 430, 474; Calendar of Patent Rolls 1321-1324, pp. 127-128.