tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-195450492024-03-18T08:42:27.874+00:00Edward IIWelcome to the site which examines the events, issues and personalities of Edward II's reign, 1307-1327.Kathryn Warnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00397714441908100576noreply@blogger.comBlogger945125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19545049.post-57953345341547876032024-01-21T11:41:00.000+00:002024-01-21T11:42:00.377+00:00Royal Travel: Two Months at Edward II's CourtUnlike later centuries when the monarch spent most of the year in and around London, and went on progresses in the summer when the city got too hot and stinky, the fourteenth-century English kings spent their reigns on a never-ending circuit around the south and Midlands of England, all year round, even in winter. They tended not to go farther west than Bristol or farther north than Nottingham, and only rarely did they go to the north of England (to be fair, the north was pretty empty in the Middle Ages, with York the only settlement of any size). Edward II rarely spent more than a handful of days in one place, and when he did, it was usually Westminster, Windsor, the royal hunting-lodge of Clipstone in Nottinghamshire (in the first half of his reign), the royal palace of Clarendon near Salisbury (in the second half of his reign), York, or his favourite residence of Kings Langley in Hertfordshire. Because of the ongoing war against Scotland, Edward spent more time in the north of England than many other medieval kings, and, unusually, visited the area around Newcastle-upon-Tyne on occasion.<div><div><br /></div><div>I've taken a couple of months from Edward's reign to illustrate the frequent travelling, and have calculated the distances he and his enormous household must have ridden, or rather, in many cases, trudged. His household was somewhere in the region of 500 people, Queen Isabella's was around 200, and the king was never alone but always accompanied by a number of earls, bishops and barons, each of whom had their own sizeable retinues. We're talking about several thousand people, plus a few hundred horses, either being ridden, pulling carts, or carrying loads. The logistics of it all are almost unfathomable. Just imagine being in charge of finding accommodation and food for all those people and animals.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>October 1317</b></div><div><br /></div><div>1 October: Edward had spent the night of 30 September to 1 October at Monk Bretton in Yorkshire, just outside Barnsley. He travelled sixteen miles to Doncaster, where he spent two nights.</div><div><br /></div><div>3 October: Eight miles from Doncaster to Tickhill.</div><div><br /></div><div>4 October: Twelve miles from Tickhill to Retford.</div><div><br /></div><div>5 October: Thirteen miles from Retford to Sutton-on-Trent.</div><div><br /></div><div>6 October: Nine miles from Sutton-on-Trent to Newark.</div><div><br /></div><div>7 October: Fifteen miles from Newark to Grantham, where Edward spent two nights.</div><div><br /></div><div>9 October: Twenty-two miles from Grantham to Stamford.</div><div><br /></div><div>10 October: Eleven miles from Stamford to Fotheringhay.</div><div><br /></div><div>11 October: Sixteen miles from Fotheringhay to Molesworth.</div><div><br /></div><div>12 October: Sixteen miles from Molesworth to St Neots.</div><div><br /></div><div>13 October: Twenty miles from St Neots to Baldock.</div><div><br /></div><div>14 October: Eighteen miles from Baldock to Ware.</div><div><br /></div><div>15 October: Eleven miles from Ware to Waltham.</div><div><br /></div><div>16 October: Sixteen miles from Waltham to Westminster.</div><div><br /></div><div>Edward then spent the second half of October 1317, and until 5 November, at Westminster. I make this a total of 203 miles that he travelled in just sixteen days, with only two occasions when he spent more than one night in a location (Doncaster and Grantham).</div><div><br /></div><div><b>May 1326</b></div><div><br /></div><div>On 1 and 2 May 1326, Edward was at Hailes Abbey in Gloucestershire, which had been founded eighty years earlier by his great-uncle Richard of Cornwall, Henry III's brother.</div><div><br /></div><div>3 May: Twenty miles from Hailes to Barnsley (the one in Gloucestershire, not the one in Yorkshire mentioned above).</div><div><br /></div><div>4 May: Fourteen miles from Barnsley to Purton in Wiltshire.</div><div><br /></div><div>5 May: Seventeen miles from Purton to Marlborough.</div><div><br /></div><div>6 and 7 May: Edward stayed in Marlborough.</div><div><br /></div><div>8 May: Twenty-seven miles from Marlborough to Cirencester.</div><div><br /></div><div>9 May: Eighteen miles from Cirencester to Gloucester.</div><div><br /></div><div>10 to 13 May: Edward stayed in Gloucester.</div><div><br /></div><div>14 May: Nine miles from Gloucester to Coberley.</div><div><br /></div><div>15 May: Seventeen miles from Coberley to Down Ampney.</div><div><br /></div><div>16 May: Twenty miles from Down Ampney to Ogbourne St George.</div><div><br /></div><div>17 May: Four miles from Ogbourne St George to Marlborough, again.</div><div><br /></div><div>18, 19 May: Edward stayed in Marlborough.</div><div><br /></div><div>20 May: Twenty-five miles from Marlborough to Crookham.</div><div><br /></div><div>21 May: Sixteen miles from Crookham to Caversham.</div><div><br /></div><div>22 May: Fourteen miles from Caversham to Bisham.</div><div><br /></div><div>23 May: Twenty-five miles from Bisham to Sheen.</div><div><br /></div><div>24 May: Edward stayed at Sheen.</div><div><br /></div><div>25 May: Twenty-eight miles from Sheen to Otford.</div><div><br /></div><div>26 May: Eighteen miles from Otford to Maidstone.</div><div><br /></div><div>27 May: Fourteen miles to Charing (the one in Kent, not Charing Cross in London).</div><div><br /></div><div>28 May: Twelve miles from Charing to Chartham.</div><div><br /></div><div>29 May: Eight miles from Chartham to Bishopsbourne.</div><div><br /></div><div>30 May: Fourteen miles from Bishopsbourne to Saltwood.</div><div><br /></div><div>31 May, 1 to 6 June 1326: Edward stayed at Saltwood.</div><div><br /></div><div>That's a remarkable 320 miles travelled in just one month, and sojourns in several counties from Gloucestershire in the southwest all the way over to Kent in the southeast. The longest daily journey was twenty-eight miles. Edward II's bodyguard of archers were not on horseback but ran alongside him on his horse; we know this from an entry in Edward's chamber account of 12 June 1326, when he bought his archers new hose made of linen and mentioned that it was a reward for 'running next to him in the hot weather'. Can you imagine running twenty-eight miles in one day? That's longer than a marathon, and the next day, the archers had to run eighteen miles. There were another five occasions in that one month of May 1326 when the journey in one day was twenty miles or more. Three hundred and twenty miles in thirty days. Wow.</div></div>Kathryn Warnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00397714441908100576noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19545049.post-3321563664423139662023-06-27T12:38:00.000+01:002023-06-27T12:38:18.624+01:00The Problem of Hindsight <div>There's an old joke that goes something like "Dear Diary, the Hundred Years War started today." Or imagine a novel written in the twenty-first century - and I'm pretty sure there actually is one where something like this happens - with a character whose husband is one of the American sailors stationed at Pearl Harbor, and on 6 December 1941 she clings to him and cries out "Oh honey, I have a strong feeling that something terrible is about to happen. Don't go to work tomorrow." We'd scoff that an author writing decades later, in the full knowledge of what happened at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, gives such implausible foresight to a character who's living through the events of the 1940s as they happen. It's cheap and a bit silly. </div><div><br /></div><div>It's obvious that human beings cannot foretell the future. We all know that. Yet in some modern nonfiction writing about history, it sometimes seems that they can. Too many writers seem to forget that people living through events didn't know how those events were going to end; they didn't know that something momentous was just around the corner; they didn't know years in advance that they were going to be involved in a particular event. Just because we, decades or centuries later, can construct a narrative where <i>this</i> happened, then <i>that</i> happened as a result, then something else happened as a result of that second thing, doesn't mean that the people experiencing those events were aware of a narrative unfolding. Some writing on Edward II's reign is problematic to me because it looks at where people ended up and assumed that they had always intended to end up there, and had planned it all as though they had some way of knowing how things were going to turn out. I'll give some examples.</div><div><br /></div><div>The first example concerns the possibility that when Edward II's queen Isabella was visiting the French court in 1314, she revealed to her father Philip IV that two of her sisters-in-law, Marguerite and Blanche of Burgundy, were committing adultery. I've seen it argued that Isabella did this deliberately to increase her English son's chances of inheriting the French throne one day, by making her brothers' children illegitimate. This is, of course, written with the knowledge that Edward III did claim the French throne nearly a quarter of a century later in 1337 (and thus began the Hundred Years War, not that he could possibly have known that).</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBtgHOWFHHIDr_7V0bVeL1LKgCxcaHNVU6HFnQQSwtWYEijJLmQy7JzJM8nrjWWRWggp69AGASnDFpATijhC1ikVN8OOuRlXPI-3i67FlcoXr-8kz6n5jKnlepMYwZy1pEQgab7y80EL-9tEMChvUYh9DaXN0BfZry1h-dnGunE4QzdrBFmw/s891/foresight1.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="141" data-original-width="891" height="51" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBtgHOWFHHIDr_7V0bVeL1LKgCxcaHNVU6HFnQQSwtWYEijJLmQy7JzJM8nrjWWRWggp69AGASnDFpATijhC1ikVN8OOuRlXPI-3i67FlcoXr-8kz6n5jKnlepMYwZy1pEQgab7y80EL-9tEMChvUYh9DaXN0BfZry1h-dnGunE4QzdrBFmw/s320/foresight1.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div>In April 1314, Isabella's father was forty-five and healthy, and her brothers Louis of Navarre, Philip of Poitiers and Charles of La Marche were twenty-four, about twenty-two, and nineteen going on twenty. All three young men were married, all were perfectly healthy as far we know, and all had children. How could Isabella have anticipated that barely fourteen years later, all four of these men would be dead without any male heirs? How could she have anticipated that her brothers would all die in their twenties and early thirties? How could she anticipated that their sons - and her three brothers fathered at least four sons between them - would all die in early childhood? Not to mention that her dynasty, the Capetians, had managed an unbroken male line of succession to the French throne since as far back as 987, more than 300 years before Isabella was born. </div><div><br /></div><div>This is a classic example of history written with hindsight, of knowing that Edward III of England claimed the French throne in 1337, and assuming that his mother somehow had foreknowledge of this, or had planned for it to happen and thus manipulated events so that it might come to pass, as early as 1314 when Edward was a toddler. For all three of Isabella's brothers to die comparatively young, and for all four or more of their sons to die in childhood, was a series of relatively improbable events which she could not have anticipated. For all Isabella knew in 1314, her brothers might all live into their fifties or sixties and father six or ten or twelve healthy sons between them, and the Capetians might manage another 300 years of male succession to the throne of France.</div><div><br /></div><div>Another example is the way that Roger Mortimer's escape from the Tower of London in August 1323 was, with hindsight, an important early step that would ultimately lead to the downfall of Edward II in late 1326 and early 1327. We can see that. That doesn't mean that anyone in 1323 knew it. Even if Roger himself, and the people who helped him to flee, had an idea that his being at liberty might cause Edward II and Hugh Despenser the Younger problems in some way, this doesn't mean that he and his allies had the specific ultimate goal that his escape would end up forcing Edward to abdicate. It doesn't mean that Roger knew for years that he was the man fated to bring down a king, and that every action he took, every conversation he had, and every journey he made, was intended to take a step towards that objective. Yet this is the way his escape and his life on the Continent between 1323 and 1326 are sometimes written.</div><div><br /></div><div>Surely it's more plausible that Roger escaped from the Tower without any clear idea of what he was going to do in the future, and fled to the Continent because he had relatives (his mother's family, the Fiennes) and friends there beyond Edward II's reach who would help him and shelter him. He was, after all, a fugitive, with no income and no home. Roger Mortimer did not know in 1323 that some years later he would return to his homeland and would, thanks to his association with Queen Isabella, become hugely wealthy and influential. He didn't know that he would become the co-ruler of England and Wales during Edward III's minority after playing a vital role in Edward II's downfall, that he would end his life on the Tyburn gallows, that a dramatist (Christopher Marlowe) born 234 years after his death would feature him as an important character in one of his plays, and that he would be famous down the centuries as an example of an over-mighty royal favourite. For all Roger knew in 1323, Edward II - who wasn't even forty then and was a fit, strong, healthy man - was going to live for another twenty-five or thirty years, and he, Roger, might die of old age or ill health without ever seeing his homeland and his family again, dependent on the goodwill and support of others.</div><div><br /></div><div>We, with the benefit of hindsight, can create a narrative of historical events that was absolutely not apparent to people who were living through the events in question and had no way of knowing how things were going to turn out. Event W happened, and a result, Event X happened, and a result of that, Event Y happened, and a result of that, Event Z happened. Just because we know that Event W set a series of dominoes in motion that ultimately, years later, resulted in Event Z, does not necessarily mean that the people involved in Event W intended to bring about Event Z. It's like claiming that when Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, which triggered the start of the First World War, he did so with the intention of bringing about the horror of the trenches, the deaths of millions of people, the collapse of various European monarchies, and everything else that happened as a result of WW1. This seems astonishingly unlikely, to say the least.</div><div><br /></div><div>Boris Johnson was once sacked from the<i> Times</i> for writing a story about Edward II cavorting at his Thames-side house of <a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2017/08/la-rosere-london-edward-iis-house.html" target="_blank">La Rosere</a> (which he acquired in October 1324) with Piers Gaveston (who was killed in June 1312), and fabricating a quote about it from his historian godfather. (Seriously, <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/revealed-boris-johnson-s-piers-gaveston-porkies/" target="_blank">this is true</a>.) Johnson went to work at the <i>Telegraph</i> instead, and later became editor of the <i>Spectator</i>. He parlayed his years of experience as a political journalist into a career in politics, ultimately becoming Prime Minister. Imagine if a biography of him in the future claimed that he deliberately got himself sacked from the<i> Times</i> as an important first step in his aim of becoming PM one day, as though he knew many years in advance that he was destined to be PM. Edward II's reign and downfall have sometimes been written a bit like this, as though certain special people who lived through it had knowledge of the future and their own important role in it.</div><div><br /></div><div>It makes Isabella of France and Roger Mortimer seem cunningly Machiavellian to an extent that seems wildly improbable and implausible. They don't make short-term or fairly random decisions, like normal people; everything they do is planned years in advance and ten steps ahead of everyone else. They have a global overview of everything that's going on and are able to manoeuvre everyone into position, and Edward II and Hugh Depenser unwittingly fall into their cleverly-laid traps at every turn and, without knowing it, do exactly what Isabella and Roger want them to do. Isabella and Roger can't just react to events as they occur and make decisions based on the limited information they have at the time; they are key players in a years-long, Europe-wide conspiracy to bring down the king of England, and manage to communicate with their fellow conspirators across borders without leaving a trace on written record. Isabella can't just - assuming she ever did this in the first place - tell her father that her sisters-in-law have taken other men as lovers because she's worried that a non-royal child might be foisted onto the French throne or because she's concerned about her brothers' dignity and about her family's royal bloodline, she has to be plotting her English son's possible accession to her French father's throne many years in the future. </div><div><br /></div><div>Another example is Isabella's journey to France in March 1325, when she negotiated a peace settlement between her husband and her brother Charles IV, who had gone to war in 1324. It's entirely possible that she had some idea of using her sojourn in her homeland to improve the intolerable situation in which she found herself, with Hugh Despenser the Younger dominating Edward II's government and determined to sideline the queen as much as possible. Yet even here, in the story as it's now often told, Isabella has to scheme and plot, and manipulate everyone including Pope John XXII, to ensure that she does indeed get sent to France. Because, in this narrative, she's already in cahoots with Roger Mortimer, and helped him escape from the Tower because she's in love with him and conspiring with him to bring down her husband. Long before March 1325, she's secretly in touch with Roger on the Continent (at least indirectly, via intermediaries), and is dying to join him there so they can continue to scheme against Edward together, get rid of him, and subsequently enjoy the wonderful romantic relationship together that they know is their destiny while ruling England in her son's name. And lo and behold! Edward duly falls into Isabella's cunning trap and sends her to France, without the faintest idea that his wife is plotting his downfall behind his back with her lover and has manipulated him into doing what she wants, and that he's essentially digging his own grave. Gosh. Imagine. Six months later in September 1325, he unwittingly does the exact thing that Isabella wants him to do yet again, and sends his son to France as well to pay homage to Charles IV, because this is the vital next stage in the vast conspiracy between Isabella, Roger Mortimer, the king of France, the count of Hainault, the king of Bohemia and who knows who else, half of Europe apparently, who have nothing else to do but plot with an escaped English prisoner how to bring the king of England down for years on end. </div><div><br /></div><div>At every turn in this narrative, Edward II unknowingly acts against his own interests by doing exactly what his enemies, who include his own wife though he has no idea of that either, want him to do and are hoping that he will do. A few years ago, I <a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2009/04/edward-ii-did-not-stupidly-fall-into.html" target="_blank">wrote a post</a> debunking the common idea that in September 1325 Edward fell into a trap set for him by Isabella, who was hoping to get her son under her control to use him as a weapon against his father. Every option available to Edward II by that time was fraught with possible risk, and whatever he did might ultimately have led to his deposition in one way or another. If he had, in fact, gone to France instead of sending his son, perhaps he would have been kidnapped or assassinated, and historians would now be asking how he could have been so stupid as to travel to France himself, when making his son duke of Aquitaine and sending him instead would have been so much more sensible and would not have brought about his downfall or death. They'd probably be declaring that Edward II going to France in person was <i>exactly</i> what Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer wanted him to do and that by doing so he fell into the trap they had laid for him, and that they had intended for years to have him assassinated, or kidnap him and force him to abdicate his throne once he made the stupid mistake of leaving England. If only he had sent his son to France in his place, he could have foiled their dastardly plans! </div><div><br /></div><div>Isabella of France and Roger Mortimer were both highly able and intelligent people, certainly, but it's as though they're omniscient narrators writing a story that no-one else even knows they're part of, and while all the other characters in the story wrongly think they have agency and are making their own choices, they are in fact being controlled and manipulated at every stage. It reminds me a bit of the way Mahaut, countess of Artois, the mother-in-law of Isabella's brother Philip V of France, is written in Maurice Druon's <i>Accursed Kings</i> series of novels. Druon's fictional Mahaut is a murderous über-schemer, bumping off Philip's brother Louis X and Louis's days-old posthumous son John I so that Philip will become king of France and Mahaut's daughter Jeanne will be queen consort. It's not that a baby who was only days old sadly though not terribly unsurprisingly died of natural causes in an age of horrifically high infant mortality; no, it's that Mahaut poisoned him so his uncle would become king of France. This take on things is essentially pointing to some random or fairly improbable event and claiming "this particular person totally meant for that to happen and was responsible for it." Edward II spent weeks changing his mind about who should travel to France to pay homage to Charles IV, himself or his son, and no-one could possibly have known beforehand who would turn up in Paris because even Edward himself didn't know until pretty well the last minute, but Isabella and Roger totally planned the whole thing and had always known that Edward of Windsor, not Edward II, would be the one who stepped off the boat. Honest, guv, they did.</div><div><br /></div><div>Maybe all this scheming stuff makes a great fictional tale, full of drama, intrigue and murder, but does it really bear much resemblance to the overwhelming majority of real human beings and how they behave? Modern writers often describe Isabella of France as highly manipulative, and sure, the way she's been depicted in recent decades, as someone who could foretell the future and was able to plot things nearly twenty-five years in advance, does make her look pretty darn manipulative. But is that the real Isabella, though, or a fictional character who's been given her name? Most people just muddle through, they react to situations as they occur, they make whatever decisions seem best at the time but which they might come to regret later or which might well prove to be disastrous decisions. Oh, and another thing this whole hindsight issue somewhat reminds me of is the death of Diana, princess of Wales, and the endless conspiracy theories it spawned. Tragic accidents and bad things including car crashes sometimes also happen to celebrities, but it's as though some people are special and should therefore be immune to random events, and we must create some shadowy, nefarious plot to explain their deaths.</div><div><br /></div><div>Another issue is that although it later became reasonably common for unsuccessful English kings to be deposed or forced to abdicate, and subsequently executed or murdered, in 1326/27 it had never been done before. It was revolutionary. The common modern assumption that lots of people, both in England and on the Continent, planned for years in the 1320s to depose Edward II, ignores the fact that there was no precedent for such a thing. It's so easy for us, centuries later, to see what happened to Richard II in 1399 and Henry VI in 1461 and 1471 and Edward V in 1483 and Charles I in 1649 and think, ah yes, it's pretty easy to get rid of a king, look at all the times it's happened throughout English history. Therefore, people during Edward II's era must also have known that it was pretty easy to get rid of a king. But they didn't. How could they? How could Roger Mortimer, in 1323, even conceive of the forced abdication of the king of England? Let alone imagine that he, of all people, might end up ruling the kingdom during the minority of that king's son? Events of 1326/27 tend to give the impression of people groping their way towards a possible solution to the problem of Edward II rather than putting long-standing, cleverly-formulated plans into action. </div><div><br /></div><div>And finally, another problem with the hindsight issue is that we know Edward II and Isabella's marriage went badly wrong in the 1320s, and therefore it's often written as though the entirety of it was a disaster and as though Isabella always knew that it was going to end badly and was unhappy for every single minute of her marriage. The ending of something colours people's opinions of the entirety of it, so because their marriage went wrong, this means that it must have been bad from the very beginning. This is strange to me, because surely we've all had relationships that didn't work out? Does it mean that we were constantly unhappy throughout, or that the relationship was doomed from the start? When it comes to Edward and Isabella's marriage, the narrative so often becomes almost childishly simplistic, as though people only ever feel one emotion for their spouse of nearly twenty years, and as though the complex relationship of two complex people can be reduced to "Edward neglected Isabella and she hated him." </div><div><br /></div><div>This issue bedevils writing on Edward II and his reign, and has done for a very long time. Fourteenth-century narrative accounts are much the same, because, with the notable exception of the <i>Vita Edwardi Secundi</i>, chroniclers of the era knew what happened to Edward in 1326/27, and this awareness coloured their accounts of the earlier parts of his reign. They knew, and we know, that Edward was forced to abdicate and that his reign was one of the most unsuccessful in English history, therefore, his every action must have been unsuccessful or bad, whereas the same actions carried out by other kings are portrayed much more neutrally. One example I often talk about is the silly claim that Edward II 'stole' Isabella's three younger children - and they're always referred to like that, as though they weren't Edward's children as well - to punish her and cause her pain. By contrast, when Edward II's father Edward I set up a separate household for his son Thomas in early 1301 when the latter was only a few months old, then Thomas's brother Edmund was sent to join him when he was less than half a year old, this is reported neutrally as just the way things were in the medieval royal family. Writers don't dissolve into histrionics and take to their fainting-couches over Edward I cruelly stealing Queen Marguerite's tiny infants from her. But because it's Edward II, who was a bad king and a bad husband, always, all the time, every moment of his life, that means that everything he ever did was bad and wrong, and he's judged harshly even when he did things that were entirely normal for his era and status. </div>Kathryn Warnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00397714441908100576noreply@blogger.com25tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19545049.post-34211634271920288782023-06-08T12:00:00.000+01:002023-06-08T12:00:14.768+01:00John of Lancaster (early or mid-1280s - 1317), Edward II's Obscure Cousin<p>Here's a post about Edward II's cousin John of Lancaster. Although he was a grandson of Henry III, king of England, a great-grandson of Louis VIII, king of France, the younger half-brother of Juana I, queen regnant of Navarre and queen consort of France, and the uncle of Edward II's queen Isabella and her brothers Louis X, Philip V and Charles IV of France, John is rather obscure.</p><p>John was the third and youngest son of Edmund of Lancaster (1245-96), who was the younger son of Henry III and the only brother of Edward I, and his second wife <a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2012/06/blanche-of-artois-queen-of-navarre.html" target="_blank">Blanche of Artois</a> (<i>c</i>. 1245/48-1302), dowager queen of Navarre. Edmund and Blanche's eldest son and heir Thomas <a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2020/12/thomas-of-lancasters-date-of-birth-29.html" target="_blank">might have been born</a> on 29 December 1277 or shortly afterwards, and their <a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2011/04/henry-of-lancaster.html" target="_blank">second son Henry</a>, his brother Thomas's heir in 1322 and ancestor of all the later Lancasters, in <i>c</i>. 1280. John of Lancaster was born sometime before May 1286, when his paternal grandmother Eleanor of Provence, Henry III's widow and the dowager queen of England, bequeathed her claim to the county of Provence to her three Lancaster grandsons. [<i>Calendar of Patent Rolls 1281-92</i>, p. 243] </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqoHUY7bmr9rNDyVJB7BY3rL30Bdw1u61QibmuSFyHGcFz8OosTzkBFtyov2KaKoszNyVhezk87rEfp4A9byxCaYJ4KdXw1E7EZ5HThSLpM5Ytktee0LILnO45NEd09ssdia95dydb6UacF4cbyddocMvUdbi98yAK1K3Hh2cyC9TgE4mpZA/s855/lancaster.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="454" data-original-width="855" height="170" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqoHUY7bmr9rNDyVJB7BY3rL30Bdw1u61QibmuSFyHGcFz8OosTzkBFtyov2KaKoszNyVhezk87rEfp4A9byxCaYJ4KdXw1E7EZ5HThSLpM5Ytktee0LILnO45NEd09ssdia95dydb6UacF4cbyddocMvUdbi98yAK1K3Hh2cyC9TgE4mpZA/s320/lancaster.png" width="320" /></a></div><p>Edmund of Lancaster, earl of Lancaster and Leicester, arranged the marriage of his second son Henry to <a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2007/04/maud-de-chaworth-and-her-daughters.html" target="_blank">Maud Chaworth</a>, older half-sister of Hugh Despenser the Younger and sole heir of her late father, the Marcher lord Patrick Chaworth, in December 1291. [<i>CPR 1281-92</i>, p. 464] In the usual oh so terribly romantic fashion of medieval arranged marriages, John of Lancaster was named as Maud's substitute future husband in case his brother Henry died. (John was the third son, not the second, as stated.)</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGNfmeaup_7qHXVfGTvpRhPWZhtaHKj-M4JV-hEF_i-5nENGvXqyfxg-0ifvILhzqfZWs4gNMAWORbkkZGf3YG6gVu-bq3VkLmpZyNndTtUJw7OeyN7v_CrjnirBakyfBY5-JqfrjwsFSE_IIboUSXgc1EdTUDudt5n0Gy5NHE4Qu_HDCGlA/s1065/lancaster2.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="316" data-original-width="1065" height="95" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGNfmeaup_7qHXVfGTvpRhPWZhtaHKj-M4JV-hEF_i-5nENGvXqyfxg-0ifvILhzqfZWs4gNMAWORbkkZGf3YG6gVu-bq3VkLmpZyNndTtUJw7OeyN7v_CrjnirBakyfBY5-JqfrjwsFSE_IIboUSXgc1EdTUDudt5n0Gy5NHE4Qu_HDCGlA/s320/lancaster2.png" width="320" /></a></div><p>Edmund died on 5 June 1296. The bulk of his vast estate went to his eldest son Thomas, though in August 1292 Edmund had arranged for his four castles in Wales plus the Gloucestershire manors of Rodley and Minsterworth to pass to his second son Henry. Thomas was named as heir to these estates if Henry died without children, with John as next heir. [<i>Calendar of Charter Rolls 1257-1300</i>, p. 423; The National Archives DL 10/191] </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsdSB5uiNQ0nTqHxtGj5Okqu4cNzdHMu1ASKkL0Boh75xvUy8aBpqaBWO0Rgv4cyQQHgYotHcjh1bWaWCxE7lc_ymz8AYhUvDVZ6r95dEDWiL3eDZn-4c1p-JlFA-ZBriXBcGQoGh2dXAV3Fk3pWPzFsBeIunKumR6RQWsDiUTLnZOT1uKfA/s849/johnlancaster.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="511" data-original-width="849" height="193" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsdSB5uiNQ0nTqHxtGj5Okqu4cNzdHMu1ASKkL0Boh75xvUy8aBpqaBWO0Rgv4cyQQHgYotHcjh1bWaWCxE7lc_ymz8AYhUvDVZ6r95dEDWiL3eDZn-4c1p-JlFA-ZBriXBcGQoGh2dXAV3Fk3pWPzFsBeIunKumR6RQWsDiUTLnZOT1uKfA/s320/johnlancaster.png" width="320" /></a></div><p>To my knowledge, John of Lancaster held no lands in England or Wales, though somehow, and I'm not sure how, he acquired the French lordship of Beaufort, now called Montmorency-Beaufort. It's in the region of Champagne, between Troyes and Nancy, and is 115 miles east of Paris. John's mother Blanche of Artois's first husband Enrique I (d. 1274) was count of Champagne as well as king of Navarre, and the county passed to John's half-sister Queen Juana (b. 1273), countess of Champagne in her own right, a fact which presumably had something to do with John's acquisition of a lordship there. John also appears to have held the lordships of Soulaines, 'Bargencourt' (which probably means Boulancourt) and Nogent l'Artaud, or to be precise, in 1329 his brother and heir Henry wrote to King Philip VI of France about goods which he owned in those places. [<i>Documents Parisiens du Règne de Philippe VI de Valois (1328-
1350): Extraits des Registres de la Chancellerie de France</i>, ed. Jules Viard, vol. 1, pp. 84-5]</p>Considering that when they were growing up, the three Lancaster brothers were nephews of the king of England and brothers-in-law of the king of France, Philip IV (who married their half-sister Juana of Navarre and Champagne in 1284), and thus could hardly have been better connected, their childhoods are almost completely obscure. The household account, in England, of Jan of Brabant survives for a few months in 1292/93; he was the son and heir of Jan I, duke of Brabant, and married the Lancaster brothers' cousin Margaret, one of Edward I's daughters, in 1290. Thomas and Henry of Lancaster appear several times in the account; John of Lancaster does not. ['Account of the Expenses of John of Brabant and Henry and Thomas of Lancaster, 1292-3', <i>Camden Miscellany</i>, 1853, ed. Joseph Burtt] During the same time period, Thomas and Henry are also mentioned several times, as 'Thomas and Henry the sons of Lord Edmund', in the extant account of their cousin Edward of Caernarfon, but John is not. <br /><br />It strikes me as highly likely that John of Lancaster spent most of his life in his mother Blanche of Artois's native France, and as he held lands there, he might well have been born in France (his brothers Thomas and Henry, who inherited lands in England, must, by English inheritance law of the time, have been born in England itself or in another of the territories ruled by the king of England).<br /><br />Unlike his two older brothers, John married a French noblewoman. She was Alix de Joinville, youngest child of the chronicler and historian Jean de Joinville, lord of Joinville, and his second wife Alix, daughter of the lord of Reynel. Jean de Joinville lived a remarkably long life. He was born around 1224 or 1225 - he was excused from fighting in the battle of Taillebourg in 1242 as he hadn't been knighted yet - and did not die until December 1317. I have no idea when Alix de Joinville was born, but she likely wasn't too much older than John of Lancaster, and was probably born when her father was in his fifties. Her parents married in 1262, and her own first marriage to Jean, lord of Arcis-sur-Aube - which is just twenty miles from John of Lancaster's lordship of Beaufort - was arranged in 1300. Jean d'Arcis-sur-Aube died childless in 1307, the same year that John of Lancaster's cousin Edward II succeeded John's uncle Edward I as king of England. Alix de Joinville herself died in or after 1336, and her brother Anseau in 1342 or 1343. [Information from the Medieval Lands project on the <a href="https://fmg.ac/">Foundation for Medieval Genealogy</a> site]<br /><br />John of Lancaster's half-sister Juana I, queen regnant of Navarre, queen consort of France and countess of Champagne, obviously knew Alix's father Jean de Joinville: she commissioned him to write a history of Louis IX of France (r. 1226-70), who was her husband Philip IV's grandfather and was also the great-uncle of herself and her three Lancaster half-brothers (their mother Blanche of Artois was the daughter of Louis IX's brother Robert, count of Artois). It's possible therefore that John knew the Joinville family via Queen Juana, though Juana can't have arranged his marriage to Alix as she died in 1305, two years before Alix's first husband Jean d'Arcis-sur-Aube.<br /><br />John and Alix de Joinville were married by July 1312 when a grant made to the abbey of Chapelle-aux-Planches by <i>Jehans de Lancastre, sires de Biaufort</i> [lord of Beaufort], <i>et Aalis de Joinville</i> is <a href="http://telma.irht.cnrs.fr/chartes/chartae-galliae/charte209850/">recorded</a>. Alix is called John's 'loyal consort and wife' (<i>sa loiaulx compaigne et espouse</i>). To put the date into context, that's the month after Piers Gaveston, beloved of John's cousin Edward II, was killed in Warwickshire, and four months before John's niece Isabella, queen of England, Juana's daughter, gave birth to the future Edward III.<div><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoaw0BV2XW8WSCUFYQc6fMMI0pHxHoOqdAKehgQ54tA3xz6IfTO6d3UD6BbtLEduW1oasQAVSS9G7CLtxOEukZ7httNsYte9FEXBE8cZ8hy5xeXodEcbUSrLoYWb9KmhaBk9cYU1jv1OGTr0sL_dd7D18Y2IpLf0lFf6bF9m4185FdPVGXCw/s1456/johnlancaster2.png"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoaw0BV2XW8WSCUFYQc6fMMI0pHxHoOqdAKehgQ54tA3xz6IfTO6d3UD6BbtLEduW1oasQAVSS9G7CLtxOEukZ7httNsYte9FEXBE8cZ8hy5xeXodEcbUSrLoYWb9KmhaBk9cYU1jv1OGTr0sL_dd7D18Y2IpLf0lFf6bF9m4185FdPVGXCw/s320/johnlancaster2.png" /></a><br /><br />A slightly later grant by John, calling himself Jehan de Lancastre and his wife Aalis de Joinville, is also extant. It's interesting to see that he called Alix by her maiden name, not 'de Lancastre' or 'd'Arcis-sur-Aube' for her first husband. [<i>Mémoires de la Société d’Agriculture, Commerce, Sciences & Arts du Département de la Marn</i>e, 1883-84, pp. 151-2] On another occasion, in October 1312, he referred to himself as Jehans de Lancastre and to Alix as 'our beloved and loyal consort Aelips de Joinville'. Alix put her own seal to the document as well, calling herself Aleyps de Joinville and John 'my dearest and loyal lord and companion, Jehans de Lancastre'. [<i>Collection des Principaux Cartulaires du Diocèse de Troyes</i>, vol. 4, pp. 78-80]</div><div><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5hnDtexq66-mQSFIuOIZ6fKOdjvU2PKBJusDawPyfv_G0ueKrO7ddweozevzKO2lNZqyPQfNwlJV-5qdMlOzeV8NTk-FLN86rIQvaTkvuaAqO3Yv280-bHeRAFbU3gBd9XdQVcXii3MVDTVIc46-h3Z1R2nj-DJppDY9ShjmLBpyRnYMPgA/s1030/johnlancaster3.png"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5hnDtexq66-mQSFIuOIZ6fKOdjvU2PKBJusDawPyfv_G0ueKrO7ddweozevzKO2lNZqyPQfNwlJV-5qdMlOzeV8NTk-FLN86rIQvaTkvuaAqO3Yv280-bHeRAFbU3gBd9XdQVcXii3MVDTVIc46-h3Z1R2nj-DJppDY9ShjmLBpyRnYMPgA/s320/johnlancaster3.png" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOySZX0UdDM8slJbveITEalS_gQHg_yf_0gY-6bLKMCpLIYsBD1aeW19gFC4D7vS1ZQ0YSWo9L8qih-ZjwARa1VQmOhQHKAiHFK3-L1aEoI7eU-QUhxTVJMpgdsAP1NA3YruALYxTLyN6WxakvtfI5RhIL0Vldp6oxMQ_MR5QJY9rZeK7MRQ/s997/johnlancaster4.png"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOySZX0UdDM8slJbveITEalS_gQHg_yf_0gY-6bLKMCpLIYsBD1aeW19gFC4D7vS1ZQ0YSWo9L8qih-ZjwARa1VQmOhQHKAiHFK3-L1aEoI7eU-QUhxTVJMpgdsAP1NA3YruALYxTLyN6WxakvtfI5RhIL0Vldp6oxMQ_MR5QJY9rZeK7MRQ/s320/johnlancaster4.png" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_DAzWCHOAois2de2-eFkZGxbenIsyoghASnRSseNLNO4iReBnBW65j3f0SXHAmuI4C8rOGvm3KDiadR6_5a5WoGZbyZr5_Djkl8uP4uo2asVqWn8nJ1ab15x0vko9l7S8E0bD-czu_I6ir4j24_OyqTRFZY3G9qors2ImqMb4m6iTnDeP1A/s598/johnlancaster5.png"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_DAzWCHOAois2de2-eFkZGxbenIsyoghASnRSseNLNO4iReBnBW65j3f0SXHAmuI4C8rOGvm3KDiadR6_5a5WoGZbyZr5_Djkl8uP4uo2asVqWn8nJ1ab15x0vko9l7S8E0bD-czu_I6ir4j24_OyqTRFZY3G9qors2ImqMb4m6iTnDeP1A/s320/johnlancaster5.png" /></a><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjABsn1FxMd5W0SfYMpNObtjs3R2HYAlMK7-GzjE6q7JFeEfpDLnGP6bZ6Pyky457X0w2_K6n328hsm3Lrj7EfO24L_JoxjKgZ75sxvX8P-VIM7FrSyZhP7shfIanfBwJVzKge8AXdis1IWRw8NHN6ABIi5XnQbbMuGKX3kt8jdkS-ADtSJzg/s535/johnlancaster%206.png"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjABsn1FxMd5W0SfYMpNObtjs3R2HYAlMK7-GzjE6q7JFeEfpDLnGP6bZ6Pyky457X0w2_K6n328hsm3Lrj7EfO24L_JoxjKgZ75sxvX8P-VIM7FrSyZhP7shfIanfBwJVzKge8AXdis1IWRw8NHN6ABIi5XnQbbMuGKX3kt8jdkS-ADtSJzg/s320/johnlancaster%206.png" /></a><br /><br />John of Lancaster died childless sometime before 13 June 1317, a few months before his father-in-law Jean de Joinville finally passed away in his nineties, in the reign of his nephew Philip V of France, Queen Juana's second son. On that date, his cousin Edward II wrote to Philip V, asking him to postpone the required homage of John's brother and heir Henry until after the next feast of the Purification, i.e. 2 February 1318. Edward's letter indicates that John had owned lands in <i>Chaumpayn & Brye</i>, Champagne and Brie (yummy!). Henry of Lancaster left England for France sometime after 1 June 1318, and on 28 September that year, Edward II stated that he 'is staying in France to obtain the inheritance in that land which by the death of John de Lancastre, his brother, descended to him.' [<i>Foedera 1307-27</i>, p. 334; <i>CPR 1317-21</i>, pp. 145-46, 153, 217] Just as I'm not sure how John obtained his French lands in the first place, I'm also not sure why Henry, and not the eldest Lancaster brother Thomas, earl of Lancaster and Leicester, was John's heir to them. John was in his early or mid-thirties when he died, and his older brothers outlived him; Thomas was executed by Edward II in 1322, and Henry, who was Thomas's heir as well as John's, died in his mid-sixties in 1345.</div><div><br />The lordship of Beaufort thus passed in 1317 to Henry of Lancaster, later earl of Lancaster and Leicester; then on Henry's death in 1345 to his son Henry of Grosmont, first duke of Lancaster; then on Duke Henry's death in 1361 to his daughter Blanche, who married John of Gaunt. In the 1370s, Gaunt had four children with Katherine Swynford who were given the last name Beaufort.</div>Kathryn Warnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00397714441908100576noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19545049.post-59270065841507926262023-01-22T13:31:00.001+00:002023-01-22T13:32:04.094+00:00Elizabeth de Montfort, Lady Montacute and Furnivall (d. 1354), and Her Children<p>Elizabeth de Montfort, Lady Montacute and Furnivall (d. 1354), was the mother of William Montacute, earl of Salisbury (1301-44). Here's a post about her, her marriages and her children.</p><p>Elizabeth was the daughter of Peter or Piers de Montfort of Beaudesert in Warwickshire, who died not long before 4 March 1287, and Matilda or Maud de la Mare, and had a brother called John de Montfort, their father's heir. [1] This branch of the de Montforts was only distantly related to the famous Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, who was French by birth and ancestry, though Elizabeth's grandfather Peter de Montfort the elder was a staunch supporter of Simon and was killed alongside him at the battle of Evesham in August 1265. Peter de Montfort the elder was the first ever holder of a parliamentary office later known as the Speaker of the House of Commons.</p><p>Elizabeth's date of birth isn't known, but her marriage to her first husband <a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2011/01/william-montacute-another-royal_17.html" target="_blank">Sir William Montacute</a> or Montagu(e) of Somerset (d. 1319) was arranged in June 1292. The grant of the marriage was made to Elizabeth's brother John as their father was dead by then, and the record of it on the Patent Roll confusingly refers to Elizabeth as John's daughter by mistake. [2] William was the son and heir of Simon Montacute (d. 1316 or 1317), and his date of birth isn't known either and has been estimated as anywhere between 1265 and 1285. He was one of the many men knighted with Edward of Caernarfon on 22 May 1306. Elizabeth and William's second son William Montacute (d. 1344), earl of Salisbury and a close friend of Edward III, was probably born in 1301 (see below). This means that their eldest son John was born in or before 1300, and several of their daughters might also have been born before 1300. It seems unlikely therefore that either Elizabeth or William was born later than the early 1280s, and they might both have been born in the 1270s (1265 seems much too early to me).</p><p>Elizabeth de Montfort and William Montacute had a large family, four sons and six daughters; four of their ten offspring entered the Church. In 1348, <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/Cartulary/fkdDAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=elizabeth" target="_blank">Elizabeth founded a chantry</a> to pray for the souls of her parents, her two husbands, and her ten Montacute children. She named her four sons in birth order, then her six daughters also in birth order. They were:</p><p>- <b>John</b>, first son, born in 1300 at the latest and perhaps in the mid or late 1290s, who married <a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-four-daughters-of-theobald-de.html" target="_blank">Joan de Verdon</a> (b. 1303) in Edward II's presence at Windsor Castle on 28 April 1317. The young man died in July or August that year, and Edward II paid for his funeral in Lincoln Cathedral. [3] There is no doubt that John was the eldest son, as his mother named him as the first of her four sons in 1348 even though he had not been knighted by the time of his death and his brother William (d. 1344) was an earl and thus massively outranked him. The fact that his father William the elder (d. 1319) arranged his, rather than his brother the younger William's, marriage to the heiress Joan de Verdon in April 1317 also indicates that he was the eldest son. John's death in July/August 1317, given that he had been married mere months before, surely came as a shock to everyone, and Edward II seems to have been deeply affected by it.</p><p>- <b>William</b>, second son, earl of Salisbury. He was certainly born after 3 May 1300, as on 3 May 1321 Edward II called him 'a minor in the king's ward' when he allowed him seisin of part of his inheritance, and before 21 February 1302, as on 21 February 1323 he was granted full possession of his late father's lands as he had proved his age and done homage to the king. Sadly the proof of age, which would give William's exact date of birth, no longer exists, though the royal order to hold it does, and is dated 29 June 1322. It states that William 'says he is of full age' - which would place his date of birth before 29 June 1301, probably not too long before - and that he was born in Cassington ('Carsyngton'), a village in Oxfordshire not far from Oxford. At his father's inquisition post mortem in April/May 1320, William was said rather vaguely to be seventeen or eighteen years old. </p><p>Somewhat peculiarly, Edward II's chamber account of 22 April 1326 states that William had permission from the king to travel to London because he was going to be dubbed a knight, and the entry calls him 'a child in the keeping of the king's chamber'. William was certainly no longer a child in April 1326 and must have been twenty-five or almost by then, so I suspect this might be an error for his younger brother Edward. William married Katherine Grandisson (d. 1349) around 1327 and died on 30 January 1344. He was the father of another William Montacute, earl of Salisbury (b. in Donyatt, Somerset on 19 June 1328, d. 1397), Philippa, countess of March (d. 1382), and several others. [4] </p><p>- <b>Simon</b>, third son, bishop of Worcester and Ely, born in 1303 or 1304. He was a student at Oxford by 29 November 1318 when a petition from Edward II to Pope John XXII stated that he had not yet completed his fifteenth year. He appears, as 'Simon de Mountagu', on 26 March 1317, when Edward II called him 'the king's cousin and clerk'. [5] Simon was appointed bishop of Worcester in late 1333 when he was probably not yet thirty, and bishop of Ely in 1337. He died in June 1345.</p><p>- <b>Edward</b>, fourth and youngest son, most probably the godson of Edward II or at least named in his honour (or was perhaps the godson of Edward I, if he was born before July 1307). Edward Montacute accompanied his father in 1318/19 when William the elder was made steward of Gascony, and he had a boat there called <i>La Peronelle</i> which appears in Edward II's accounts. If I'm correct in thinking that the reference in Edward II's chamber account of April 1326 refers to Edward Montacute rather than his brother William, he was knighted in London not long after 22 April 1326, or at least his knighting was planned then. On the other hand, an entry on the Patent Roll in March 1337 implies that he had recently been knighted by Edward III. [6] He married Edward I's granddaughter <a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-life-and-tragic-death-of-alice-of.html" target="_blank">Alice of Norfolk</a> in or before August 1338 and, horribly, beat her to death in the early 1350s. Their two young daughters were subsequently sent to live with their paternal grandmother Elizabeth de Montfort.</p><p>- <b>Alice Daubeney</b>, the eldest Montacute daughter, who married Sir Ralph Daubeney or Daubeny or Daubenay of Somerset (b. 3 March 1305), the son and heir of Sir Eli(a)s Daubeney, who died when his son was mere weeks old. Alice was the mother of Sir Giles Daubeney (d. 1386), who was born outside England, though I don't know where. [7] The family name often appears in medieval records in its Latin form, 'de Albiniaco'.</p><p>- <b>Mary Cogan</b>, second daughter; the identity of her husband is not known, and I know absolutely nothing about her.</p><p>- <b>Elizabeth Montacute</b>, third daughter, prioress of Haliwell or Holywell in Shoreditch, London from 1340 to 1357. A letter from the abbot of Westminster dated 5 November 1334 states that 'Elizabeth de Monte Acuto, a girl of noble birth, had entered the priory of Halywell by London as a nun...she had nothing of her own to provide for her food and clothing...and they [the abbot and convent of Westminster] out of pity for her poverty' granted her an income of 100 shillings a year. [8]</p><p>- <b>Hawise Bavent</b>, fourth daughter; she married Roger Bavent, whose father Roger Bavent Sr was born in Sussex in March 1279 and was one of the men knighted with Edward of Caernarfon and Hawise's father on 22 May 1306. Roger Jr died on 23 April 1355, and his widow Hawise Montacute was still alive on 13 October 1361. They had a son John, twenty years old in June 1357, who died childless, and a daughter Joan, who married Sir John Dauntsey. [9]</p><p>- <b>Maud/Matilda Montacute</b>, fifth daughter, abbess of Barking Abbey from 1341 to 1352. The abbess of Barking outranked all the other English abbesses, and was always of noble birth. According to the <i>Annales Paulini, </i>Maud's brother Simon, bishop of Ely, and sister Elizabeth, prioress of Haliwell, attended her consecration on 29 April 1341. [10]</p><p>- <b>Isabel Montacute</b>, sixth daughter, who succeeded her sister Maud as abbess of Barking in 1352, and held the position until her death in 1358. Isabel was succeeded by Katherine Sutton and then by her niece Maud Montacute the younger, one of Edward Montacute and Alice of Norfolk's daughters.</p><p>The Genealogics website and Wikipedia give William Montacute and Elizabeth de Montfort a seventh daughter, Katherine, who married Sir William Carrington. I don't know which primary source(s) confirm(s) that, but it would be deeply odd if she alone was not mentioned in her mother's list of children in 1348, so without seeing primary source evidence I remain to be convinced that she existed. Genealogics also omits John Montacute, who lived into his teens and appears quite a few times on record. The birth order of the four sons of Elizabeth de Montfort and William Montacute (d. 1319) is clear, as is the birth order of the six daughters, but putting them together is basically impossible. John Montacute was the eldest son and Alice Montacute, later Daubeney, was the eldest daughter, but which of them was the eldest sibling, or whether William the second son was older or younger than Alice or older or younger than the second daughter Mary, is anyone's guess. Edward Montacute the youngest son might have been born in <i>c</i>. 1305 or a decade or so later than that.</p><p>Elizabeth de Montfort was widowed in the autumn of 1319 when Sir William Montacute died in Gascony, where Edward II had appointed him steward the year before. News of his death reached Chancery in England on 13 November 1319; the writ to hold his inquisition post mortem was issued belatedly on 9 April 1320; and Elizabeth was granted her dower on 23 May 1320. [11] She married her second husband Sir Thomas Furnivall of Sheffield, the widower of Hugh Despenser the Elder's sister Joan and a landowner in Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, sometime before 8 June 1322, when Edward II fined them £200 for marrying without a royal licence. [12] In 1318, Thomas Furnivall and Joan Despenser's son Thomas Furnivall the younger had married Joan de Verdon, widow of Elizabeth de Montfort and William Montacute's eldest son John (i.e. Elizabeth's former daughter-in-law married her future stepson). On 11 September 1321, Thomas Furnivall the elder had acknowledged that he owed debts to several of Elizabeth's children, his future stepchildren: £300 to Edward Montacute the fourth son, another £300 to Hawise Montacute the fourth daughter, and £40 to Elizabeth Montacute the third daughter. [13] Thomas died in 1332, and Elizabeth received her dower on 6 June 1332; she did not marry again. [14] Her third son Simon became a bishop in 1333, her second son William was made earl of Salisbury in 1337, her third daughter Elizabeth became a prioress in 1340, and her fifth daughter Maud became an abbess in 1341.</p><p>Elizabeth de Montfort Montacute Furnivall lived long enough to witness the annulment of her grandson William Montacute's (b. 1328) marriage to Joan of Kent, later princess of Wales, in 1349, and the horrible death of her daughter-in-law Alice of Norfolk in the early 1350s following a terrible beating by Elizabeth's youngest son Edward and some of his retainers, after which Elizabeth looked after her toddler granddaughters for a while. She died in August 1354, either on the 6th, the 10th, the 19th, the 26th, the 27th or the 29th; the jurors at her inquisition post mortem gave different dates, though she was certainly dead by 30 August when the writ to hold the IPM was issued. She must have been in her mid-seventies or thereabouts, and her grandson William Montacute, earl of Salisbury, then aged twenty-six, was the heir to her extensive Montacute dower lands. One of her manors was Cassington, where her second son Earl William was born in 1301. [15] Elizabeth had outlived three of her four sons, John, William and Simon, and several of her six daughters. She was buried in St Frideswide's Priory in Oxford, later Christ Church Cathedral.</p><p><b>Sources</b></p><p>1) <i>Calendar of Fine Rolls 1272-1307</i>, p. 235.</p><p>2) <i>Calendar of Patent Rolls 1281-92</i>, p. 496.</p><p>3) Thomas Stapleton, 'A Brief Summary of the Wardrobe Accounts of the tenth, eleventh, and fourteenth years of King Edward the Second', <i>Archaeologia</i>, 26 (1836), p. 339.</p><p>4) <i>Calendar of Close Rolls 1318-23</i>, pp. 287, 629; <i>CFR 1319-27</i>, p. 56; <i>Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem 1307-27</i>, no. 238; <i>CIPM 1336-46</i>, no. 700;<i> CIPM 1347-52</i>, nos. 64, 244, 310; SAL MS 122, p. 61.</p><p>5) <i>Foedera 1272-1307</i>, pp. 379-80; <i>Calendar of Chancery Warrants 1244-1326</i>, p. 465.</p><p>6) <i>CPR 1334-38</i>, p. 401.</p><p>7) <i>CIPM 1300-07</i>, no. 324; <i>CPR 1350-54</i>, p. 63.</p><p>8)<i> CPR 1334-38</i>, pp. 92-3.</p><p>9) <i>CIPM 1300-07</i>, no. 55; <i>CIPM 1352-60</i>, no. 387; <i>CCR 1360-64</i>, p. 38; <i>Complete Peerage</i>, vol. 2, p. 34.</p><p>10)<i> Annales Paulini 1307-1340</i>, in <i>Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II</i>, ed. W. Stubbs, vol. 1, p. 370.</p><p>11) <i>CFR 1319-27</i>, pp. 8-9, 13; <i>CIPM 1317-27</i>, no. 238; <i>CCR 1318-23</i>, p. 192.</p><p>12) <i>CFR 1319-27</i>, p. 133.</p><p>13) <i>CCR 1318-23</i>, p. 496.</p><p>14) <i>CIPM 1327-36</i>, no. 470; <i>CCR 1330-33</i>, pp. 471-2.</p><p>15) <i>CIPM 1352-60</i>, no. 173.</p>Kathryn Warnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00397714441908100576noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19545049.post-36045338263828398182022-11-15T12:35:00.001+00:002023-01-15T13:27:06.033+00:00The Faces of Edward II, Isabella of France, and OthersI recently did a podcast for History Hack about London and Londoners in the first half of the fourteenth century. It's now online; give it a listen <a href="https://historyhack.podbean.com/e/history-hack-medieval-london/" target="_blank">here</a>! It's just under 45 minutes long.<div><br /></div><div>Also recently, I had the good fortune to stumble on the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgokSYCEqZE_yVLswO1vPXg" target="_blank">Youtube channel of Panagiotis Constantinou</a>, a supremely talented visual artist who recreates the faces of historical figures, including many of the medieval kings of England and their queens, from effigies, sculptures and manuscript images. I won't post screenshots of the faces here because I don't want to deprive Mr Constantinou of any clicks, and I urge you to take a look at his work (all the links below are to his Youtube videos). His recreated faces smile, blink, move their heads, and look very much alive. They're all stunning to behold, and the effect of watching stone or a manuscript image morph into (what appears to be) flesh is incredible. The videos are also very informative about the lives of the people being recreated, and the music is awesome. I have lost an entire day watching and re-watching these so far, and no doubt will lose far more. :-D</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo9bam1NMec&t=225s" target="_blank">Edward II and Isabella of France</a>, based on the effigy on Edward's tomb in Gloucester Cathedral and a sculpture of Isabella's face in Beverley Minster. I have no words for how much I adore both of them.</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbmGTkvrBe0&t=450s" target="_blank">Henry III and Eleanor of Provence</a> Edward II's grandparents. </div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGjjTuADlIc" target="_blank">Edward I and Eleanor of Castile</a> Edward II's parents.</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ui3kzBWbeM&t=527s" target="_blank">Edward III and Philippa of Hainault</a> Edward II's son and daughter-in-law. I particularly love the young Edward, aged downwards from the effigy on his tomb in Westminster Abbey. I think he looks rather beautiful rather than merely handsome, which perhaps isn't surprising, given that both of his parents seem to have been very good-looking. Queen Philippa is also 'youthified' from her effigy.</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Nkam8aU748" target="_blank">Henry II, Richard Lionheart, King John, Eleanor of Aquitaine</a></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhhUtUoqeJQ&t=105s" target="_blank">Berengaria of Navarre</a>, queen of Richard Lionheart</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9f66MCGJi8" target="_blank">Richard II</a>, from the famous portrait of him in Westminster Abbey.</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgA4xbbFCKA" target="_blank">Richard II, John of Gaunt, Henry IV, Henry's queen Joan of Navarre</a>. Mr Constantinou's recreation of Richard II in this one is from the king's effigy, also in Westminster Abbey, with that funny little tufty beard. I'd have loved to see Richard's first queen Anne of Bohemia as well!</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWFHh0MWmh8&list=PL2kXMeqSMazPYI0Vn9hAv901SzEjSLjTx&index=24" target="_blank">Joan of Arc, Henry V, Charles VI and VII of France</a></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=As5el_VZX44" target="_blank">Henry VI</a></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBpB9QXOO20&t=212s" target="_blank">Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville</a></div><div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zT4hawjDs7c&t=592s" target="_blank">Richard Neville, earl of Warwick</a> (1428-71), his daughters Isabel, duchess of Clarence and Anne, queen of England, and Isabel's husband George, brother of Edward IV and Richard III</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vh8f2-kdXb4&list=PL2kXMeqSMazPYI0Vn9hAv901SzEjSLjTx&index=6" target="_blank">Richard III</a></div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1P9M85Y1rU" target="_blank">Henry VII, Elizabeth of York and their son Arthur</a></div><div><br /></div></div><div><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAOBUylyndI" target="_blank">Henry VIII's wives</a></div>Kathryn Warnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00397714441908100576noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19545049.post-3603932505960863282022-11-08T14:46:00.001+00:002023-01-15T13:27:05.456+00:00Uterine Suffocation...?The <a href="https://mortimerhistorysociety.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Society/Publications/MortimerMatters/No.50-Oct22.pdf" target="_blank">latest edition of <i>Mortimer Matters</i></a>, the journal of the Mortimer History Society, featuring an article by me called 'The Joys of Medieval Sex', is online! I talk about the dangers of 'uterine suffocation' caused by women failing to expel their own sperm by intercourse or menstruation, busybody London officials creeping around the city streets and arresting adulterers in the middle of the night, women describing their husbands' privates as a 'sorry pin' and 'the length of a snail', and much else. :-D My book <i>Sex and Sexuality in Medieval England</i> is available on <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0BFJRQHG5/" target="_blank">Amazon UK</a> and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BFJRQHG5/" target="_blank">Amazon US</a>, or via the <a href="https://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/Sex-and-Sexuality-in-Medieval-England-Hardback/p/21630" target="_blank">Pen&Sword website</a>.<div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKlDiVG58TrJK3oxmDHSt4EtHD7wR2b7U1Ge2kKfLa-l3a2O4BCHunccjnbppcf9ScNMqEx_BougnNsscvbYIhtQvNKx8f4gnIKHK1ug0KZfpzRfl8W9vymlZMxdUrRd4B0q3N3TGtJiGC1kS-bepjntGCQYvt9kxpot3y2y5aQEHZSMu3aw/s1158/Screenshot%202022-11-08%20104055.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="753" data-original-width="1158" height="208" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKlDiVG58TrJK3oxmDHSt4EtHD7wR2b7U1Ge2kKfLa-l3a2O4BCHunccjnbppcf9ScNMqEx_BougnNsscvbYIhtQvNKx8f4gnIKHK1ug0KZfpzRfl8W9vymlZMxdUrRd4B0q3N3TGtJiGC1kS-bepjntGCQYvt9kxpot3y2y5aQEHZSMu3aw/s320/Screenshot%202022-11-08%20104055.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div><div>I've done an <a href="http://henrytheyoungking.blogspot.com/2022/11/celebrating-ten-years-of-henry-young.html" target="_blank">interview with Kasia</a> on her fantastic blog about Henry the Young King (1155-83), to celebrate its tenth anniversary! Many congrats to Kasia for her hard work! The interview is about fourteenth-century London, based on my book <i>London: A Fourteenth-Century City and Its People</i> (available on<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/London-Fourteenth-Century-City-its-People-ebook/dp/B0B6GP8T94/" target="_blank"> Amazon UK</a> and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/London-Fourteenth-Century-City-its-People-ebook/dp/B0B6GP8T94/" target="_blank">Amazon US</a>).</div><div><br /></div><div>And I recently did a podcast for <a href="https://historyhack.podbean.com/" target="_blank">History Hack</a> on the topic of fourteenth-century London, also based on my book. It'll be online on 18 November.</div><div><br /></div><div>If you're in the UK and have a Kindle, my book <i><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B098PHXKKN/" target="_blank">Daughters of Edward I</a></i> is currently only £2.99! If you're in the US, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B098PHXKKN/" target="_blank">it's $3.40</a>.<br /><div><br /></div><div>And last but definitely not least, did you know that William Ockham or Occam, of Occam's Razor fame, was a Franciscan friar from Surrey who was almost exactly the same age as Edward II? William is believed to have been born in or around 1287, and died in 1347. Michael Harmon has written a novel called <i>Invincibilis</i> about him, with Edward II, Hugh Despenser the Younger and Eleanor de Clare as important characters. It's available on <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Invincibilis-William-Mystery-Michael-Harmon-ebook/dp/B0BJ7TSY1Q" target="_blank">Amazon UK</a> and <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Invincibilis-William-Mystery-Michael-Harmon-ebook/dp/B0BJ7TSY1Q" target="_blank">Amazon US</a>. Many thanks to Michael for sending me a copy and for kindly mentioning me in the Acknowledgements! If you're interested in Edward II's fate in 1327, it's well worth a read (and is well worth a read even if you're not particularly!).</div></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivxOC5fH4rWUBiNLxDECMUj1lXdfyKsBxcCT5R98Yo_hO6_Juuh0W5-pEOm9D_Yzu75My9u81Vpy83AltxEErMdT73LCe-fvpHzZptJo7EkcEWjUaxtDTqaAzJ3Vn_HLA6nbylqVZbuQ70YBNuVNvI9HssFbhLlIyqS4NTZsra62bEPe-wUA/s706/Screenshot%202022-11-08%20103007.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="706" data-original-width="523" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivxOC5fH4rWUBiNLxDECMUj1lXdfyKsBxcCT5R98Yo_hO6_Juuh0W5-pEOm9D_Yzu75My9u81Vpy83AltxEErMdT73LCe-fvpHzZptJo7EkcEWjUaxtDTqaAzJ3Vn_HLA6nbylqVZbuQ70YBNuVNvI9HssFbhLlIyqS4NTZsra62bEPe-wUA/s320/Screenshot%202022-11-08%20103007.png" width="237" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixsddHsLMPpuveuXQbrKNwng0d4lNShPe66g8C6GM9F3R4Wf7Uh09J4HPI8SHTVNQ4dQJFJfaV1YCnOxDxs-86aGoVjo283vKEXctV72c1M0QzW2-aQFkwmHo5g7PYKaSYeWIErtFrJc0hLhDEGCoB2nJxtnTLtlbBB3O0gZ5ki4M-eHBxXQ/s456/Screenshot%202022-11-08%20102747.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="198" data-original-width="456" height="139" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixsddHsLMPpuveuXQbrKNwng0d4lNShPe66g8C6GM9F3R4Wf7Uh09J4HPI8SHTVNQ4dQJFJfaV1YCnOxDxs-86aGoVjo283vKEXctV72c1M0QzW2-aQFkwmHo5g7PYKaSYeWIErtFrJc0hLhDEGCoB2nJxtnTLtlbBB3O0gZ5ki4M-eHBxXQ/s320/Screenshot%202022-11-08%20102747.png" width="320" /></a></div></div>Kathryn Warnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00397714441908100576noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19545049.post-42965065837938175282022-10-16T14:13:00.000+01:002023-01-15T13:27:06.144+00:00Hugh Despenser the Younger Takes Against John Inge, 1322/23<p>Hugh Despenser the Younger took possession of the lordship of Glamorgan in South Wales, part of his wife Eleanor de Clare's inheritance from her late brother the earl of Gloucester, in November 1317. A number of letters from Hugh as lord of Glamorgan to Sir John Inge, the sheriff of Glamorgan, still survive, the earliest of them written during Edward II's disastrous siege of the port of Berwick-on-Tweed in September 1319 and the last three years later. Three of the letters are printed in the original Anglo-Norman in volume 3 of<i> Cartae et Alia Munimenta quae ad Dominium Glamorgancia Pertinent</i>, others are calendared in English translation in <i>Calendar of Ancient Correspondence Concerning Wales</i>, and one was printed in an 1897 <i>English Historical Review</i> article by W.H. Stevenson, also in the Anglo-Norman original. The originals are mostly held in the National Archives. Most of the letters are very long and very detailed, and reveal several things: that Hugh Despenser the Younger micromanaged the affairs of Glamorgan even when he was far away from his lordship; that he endlessly hectored the unfortunate John Inge and demanded that the sheriff bend over backwards to do everything he wanted; that he was a hard man to please and serving him was a thankless task; and that he felt a certain degree of contempt for the Welsh people.</p><p>It's the last of Hugh the Younger's letters to John Inge that I want to look at today, which is printed on pp. 1101-04 of <i>Cartae et Alia Munimenta</i>, vol. 3. Unlike most of his letters to Inge, it's not dated, but from references within the letter it's apparent that it must have been written in the autumn of 1322. Firstly, the <a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2008/11/brief-biographies-2-robert-lewer.html" target="_blank">Robert Lewer</a> situation was still ongoing, and Edward II ordered Lewer's arrest on 16 September 1322; and secondly, Hugh wrote that he was following up the matter of the forfeited manor of Iscennen, and Edward granted Iscennen to him on 6 November 1322. Part of the letter refers to Hugh's dealings with Edward's niece Elizabeth de Burgh, whom Hugh politely but rather coldly called <i>la dame de Burgh</i>, 'Lady de Burgh', without acknowledging his relationship to her as his wife Eleanor's sister, as would have been usual and conventional.</p><p>In the middle of the very long missive, Hugh wrote, seemingly casually before moving on to talk about Robert Lewer, the following hair-raising sentence:</p><p>"And know that we trust you more the more you advise us, but we are very worried about having some reason for which we might be prepared to harm you in some way, or for which we might lose the good will which we have for you."</p><p>Ouchie. At some point not too long afterwards, though I don't know exactly when - probably in 1323 or 1324 - Hugh Despenser the Younger imprisoned Sir John Inge and all his council in Southwark because of his 'rancour towards him'. He made Inge and six guarantors promise to pay him £300 for Inge's release, and they had handed over £200 of it by the time of Hugh's downfall in November 1326. In February 1333, Edward III respited the remaining £100 on the entirely true and accurate grounds that the debt was "obtained by force and duress". One of Inge's councillors, Thomas Langdon, died while imprisoned by Hugh, and a petition about him presented probably in 1327 when it was safe to talk about the Despensers' many misdeeds also talks of Hugh the Younger's anger towards Sir John Inge (<i>por corouz qil avoit vers mons' Johan Inge</i>). [1]</p><p>John Inge was pardoned in early 1327 at the start of Edward III's reign for having adhered to Hugh Despenser the Younger, though one could hardly blame him if he heaved a sigh of relief when Hugh fell from power and was executed in November 1326. [2] For years, John received endless letters from Hugh that basically say "Do this, do that, go over there right now. No, not like that, you fool, like this. I'm keeping a copy of this letter and you'll regret it if you don't do exactly what I say. Don't make me hurt you." After years of falling over himself to do everything that Hugh wanted in exactly the way he wanted it done, this was John Inge's reward: to be threatened with being harmed, then imprisoned with his councillors, because he had angered Hugh in some way. Chroniclers tell us that even the great English magnates were frightened of Hugh Despenser the Younger, and Queen Isabella certainly was. It's not hard to see why.</p><p>Below, part of Sir John Inge's petition to Edward III requesting that he and his guarantors might be pardoned the remainder of their debt to the late Hugh the Younger.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXHaGCOIvSjfcuXJa3ChAa4DhHRG79G63M8QWVXrf8DEJRgVv9NzJQjkq2PVkd9oPl6VHtRy9OX4dkCxqTiClKwDlBRpikpY7rMPuiBTpM3fhawRCqIRUg1alKgVPNASd32pG3JGZ-QzZozg3iH6xJzdcEBiOARcsQ9pYP4z0mYGTSls8Xdw/s1030/Screenshot%202022-10-16%20141107.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="280" data-original-width="1030" height="87" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXHaGCOIvSjfcuXJa3ChAa4DhHRG79G63M8QWVXrf8DEJRgVv9NzJQjkq2PVkd9oPl6VHtRy9OX4dkCxqTiClKwDlBRpikpY7rMPuiBTpM3fhawRCqIRUg1alKgVPNASd32pG3JGZ-QzZozg3iH6xJzdcEBiOARcsQ9pYP4z0mYGTSls8Xdw/s320/Screenshot%202022-10-16%20141107.png" width="320" /></a></div><p><b>Sources</b></p><p>1) <i>Calendar of Close Rolls 1318-23</i>, pp. 723-4; <i>Calendar of Patent Rolls 1330-34</i>, p. 404; The National Archives SC 8/176/8753 and SC 8/59/2947.</p><p>2) <i>CPR 1327-30</i>, p. 32.</p>Kathryn Warnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00397714441908100576noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19545049.post-84294326433650568692022-10-12T15:05:00.000+01:002023-01-15T13:27:07.403+00:00The Abduction and Ordeal of Elizabeth Luttrell, 1309<p>I recently <a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2022/09/sir-geoffrey-luttrell-and-attack-on.html" target="_blank">wrote a post about</a> Sir Geoffrey Luttrell (1276-1345), who commissioned the <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-luttrell-psalter" target="_blank">Luttrell Psalter</a> around 1325/30, and his involvement in an attack on Sempringham Priory, Lincolnshire in 1312. Geoffrey's son and heir Andrew, from his marriage to Agnes Sutton, was most probably born around Easter 1313, and they had other children too: younger sons named Geoffrey (b. before 1320), Guy and Robert, and daughter Isabella, who in 1345 was a nun of Sempringham Priory. [1] Geoffrey and Agnes also had a daughter called Elizabeth, who suffered a very distressing experience when she was abducted and raped. It is virtually certain that this was a case of child rape.</p><p>Elizabeth Luttrell must have been a good bit older than her four brothers. She first appears on record on 1 June 1309, when she was already betrothed to a young man named Walter, son of Walter Gloucester. [2] On this date, Elizabeth and Walter the younger were granted the reversion of the Lincolnshire manors of Ingoldsby and Skinnand - which is a Deserted Medieval Village - plus lands and meadows in Welbourn and Navenby also in Lincolnshire. Ingoldsby is less than three miles from the Luttrells' chief manor of Irnham and about ten miles from Sempringham Priory, and the Gloucester family also owned manors in Lincolnshire.</p><p>Sir Walter Gloucester Senior, Elizabeth Luttrell's father-in-law, died not long before 26 August 1311, and his inquisition post mortem of September that year says that his son and heir Walter was 'seventeen on 15 January last' or 'eighteen on Christmas Day next'. This gives Walter a date of birth around Christmas 1293 or mid-January 1294, though I can't find his proof of age or any mention of it in the chancery rolls. Walter Junior's mother or stepmother was named Hawise, and she outlived her husband by more than twenty years and was still alive in the early 1330s. [3] Walter Jr and his younger brother John attacked Hawise's Lincolnshire manor of Heydour not long before 8 October 1321, and stole twenty oxen, eighteen horses and sixty-six pigs, plus 'jewels and silver vessels'. Wonder what was going on there; apparently a family dispute. [4] </p><p>Elizabeth Luttrell gave birth to her son, inevitably also named Walter Gloucester, around Easter 1316, according to her husband's inquisition post mortem. Walter, however, proved his age, ie. twenty-one, sometime before 19 July 1336, which strongly implies that he was born before July 1315. On 10 July 1336, he was said to be 'aged twenty-one years and more'. [5] Walter was only a couple of years younger than his uncle Andrew Luttrell, the eldest of his mother's four younger brothers, and given that Elizabeth gave birth in or around 1315, she must have been born in <i>c</i>. 1300 at the latest. Sometime before 23 July 1315, possibly while Elizabeth was pregnant or had recently given birth, her husband and his brother John were accused of attacking the manor of one William Mortimer in Ingoldsby: 'with a multitude of horse and foot[men]', the brothers besieged William's house, threw stones and shot arrows at the doors and windows, finally gained entrance to the property by setting fires outside the doors, and stole the unfortunate William's goods after tying him up. [6] Hmmmm, I see a pattern emerging here. Walter Gloucester died not long before 20 February 1323 at not yet thirty years old, and on 12 May that year, Hawise founded a chantry for her late husband Walter (d. 1311) and for her son or stepson, having evidently forgiven him for his theft of her livestock in 1321. Elizabeth received her widow's dower on 20 October 1323, and on 7 March 1324, she and her father Geoffrey Luttrell jointly acknowledged a debt of £100. [7]</p><p>In the summer of 1309, before she married Walter, something horrible happened to Elizabeth Luttrell. Already living with her future husband's family, she was abducted from somewhere called 'Laund' - I'm not sure where that is, maybe Lound in Nottinghamshire - by John Ellerker, and raped. I don't know how old the unfortunate Elizabeth was when she suffered this ordeal, but she was certainly a child or at the very most in her early teens. Her father Geoffrey was only thirty-three years old in 1309, and her four brothers were still years away from being born.</p><p>John Ellerker was a clerk, and Ellerker, presumably where he came from, is a village in Yorkshire, about ten miles from Beverley and thirty from York. There's a huge number of entries in the chancery rolls and elsewhere during the reigns of Edward II and III relating to 'John Ellerker the elder' and 'John Ellerker the younger', who were, oddly enough, brothers. The majority of the entries deal with people acknowledging debts to the two men, and one of them was chamberlain of North Wales at one point. I have no idea if one of them was the man in question or if they were unrelated. It appears that the John Ellerker who abducted and assaulted Elizabeth Luttrell was later the rector of Willingham by Stow in Lincolnshire, became a canon both of Beverley and York in the 1320s, and was a royal clerk. [8] From <a href="https://archbishopsregisters.york.ac.uk/searches/show?all_sterms=Dispensations++&entry_id=pg15bj153&folio_id=mc87pr383&folio_title=Register+8+f.107+%28recto%29+entry+1&page=1&rows_per_page=10&search_mode=advanced&search_term=Dispensations++++" target="_blank">this entry</a> in the archbishop of York's register, dating to early 1315, Ellerker was illegitimate.</p><p>The first piece of evidence for Ellerker's abduction of Elizabeth Luttrell dates to 1 July 1309 ('the Tuesday next after the feast of St Peter and St Paul, 2 Edward II'), when the Close Roll records an '[e]nrolment of agreement between Sir Walter de Gloucester, knight, and John de Ellerker, clerk, concerning the abduction by the said John of Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Geoffrey Luterel, at Laund, she being in the company of Amice de Gloucestre'. [9] The 'Sir Walter Gloucester' named here means Elizabeth's soon-to-be father-in-law, and I assume Amice was the daughter of the older Walter and sister of the younger Walter, and Elizabeth's future sister-in-law. The ill feeling of his victim's father and future father-in-law towards Ellerker was, understandably, so bad that John Langton, bishop of Chichester and chancellor of England, felt compelled to intervene. He persuaded Geoffrey Luttrell and Walter Gloucester the elder to remit not only their ill feeling, but 'all actions, challenges etc' they might wish to undertake against John Ellerker. It appears that Ellerker had become infatuated with Elizabeth, as he had to declare, on pain of paying £1000, that he 'will not claim the said Elizabeth as his wife in court Christian, or ravish or abduct her, or cause her to be ravished or abducted...he has sworn upon the gospels that he will not procure the abduction nor rape of the said Elizabeth, nor induce her to leave the company of the said Walter [Gloucester the elder].' </p><p>How Ellerker might claim to be married to Elizabeth when he was in holy orders is not clear to me, and numerous other details of the story are not explained, such as, how exactly Ellerker abducted Elizabeth (on his own or with accomplices?), how a clerk became so dangerously infatuated with a young girl of noble birth, where he took her after the abduction, and how she was freed and restored to her natal family or the Gloucesters. It certainly seems that Elizabeth's father and father-in-law believed that she remained at risk from John Ellerker even after her release. Elizabeth's mother Agnes Sutton and future mother-in-law Hawise Gloucester - I don't know Hawise's maiden name - must also have been deeply concerned and distressed by what had happened to her, but are not mentioned in the record of the agreement. Thanks, fourteenth-century England.</p><p>The agreement between John Ellerker and Sir Walter Gloucester the elder does not directly state that Ellerker raped Elizabeth after he kidnapped her, but on 5 August 1309, Edward II pardoned Ellerker 'for the rape and abduction of Elizabeth, daughter of Geoffrey Luterel'. This was done 'at the instance of Hugh le Despenser' and was recorded on the Patent Roll. [10] Which Hugh Despenser was not specified, but at this stage of Edward II's reign, the name 'Hugh Despenser' used alone basically always meant Hugh the Elder (b. 1261), later earl of Winchester, not his son Hugh the Younger, later lord of Glamorgan. I don't know whether Hugh Despenser the Elder had any real connection to John Ellerker, or whether the latter had merely persuaded a well-known courtier and ally of Edward II to use his influence with the king. I did find a connection between Hugh the Elder and Walter Gloucester, the one who died in 1311 and was Elizabeth Luttrell's father-in-law: on 5 February 1309, just months before this tragic situation occurred, Walter was one of the men who witnessed Sir Thomas Gredley granting his manor of Pirton to Hugh the Elder. [11]</p><p>As Elizabeth was still named as 'daughter of Geoffrey Luttrell' in July and August 1309, she evidently hadn't married the younger Walter Gloucester yet. I'm not sure what became of her after March 1324, when she and her father acknowledged a joint debt the year after she was widowed, though I have wondered if the Isabella, nun of Sempringham Priory named as Geoffrey's daughter in his will of 1345 might in fact be Elizabeth; the names Isabella and Elizabeth were often used interchangeably. It would hardly seem surprising if Elizabeth sought a religious life in widowhood after experiencing such a horrible attack in her youth. Whatever happened to her, I sincerely hope she found some measure of happiness after surviving such an awful ordeal, though her husband robbed the manors of at least two people and seems to have been pretty wild (to be fair, there's no evidence that Walter Gloucester harmed the people he stole from or was violent). As noted above, John Ellerker, sadly, thrived after his abduction and rape of Elizabeth, becoming a rector and a canon. It strikes me that he might also have been very young in 1309, albeit not as young as Elizabeth: a 'John Ellerker, archdeacon of Cleveland' appears on record several times in 1351. [12] If this is the same man, he was still active forty-two years after 1309, and the situation reminds me somewhat of <a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-ordeals-of-elizabeth-hertrigg-in.html" target="_blank">John Berenger's rape and abduction of Elizabeth Hertrigg</a> in 1318, when they were both about fourteen.</p><p>Elizabeth's son Walter Gloucester the third, probably born in 1315, married a woman named Pernell, and they had two sons, John, born around 1 August 1349, and Peter, born <i>c</i>. 1354/55. Walter died on 10 July 1360 and Pernell at the beginning of 1362. Their first son John died sometime in the eighteen months between his father's death and his mother's, probably aged twelve, and Peter Gloucester died on 24 September 1369. Although Peter had married a young woman called Alice who received dower after his death, he was only about fourteen or fifteen when he passed away, and left no children. [13] Unless Elizabeth Luttrell had other children I haven't discovered, her line ended with her two grandsons in the 1360s. Of her younger brothers, Andrew lived to be seventy-seven; Geoffrey seems to have died young; Guy died before their father, but left four sons and a daughter; and Robert became a Knight Hospitaller and was still alive in 1345.</p><div><b>Sources</b></div><div><br /></div><div>1) <i>Early Lincoln Wills</i>, ed. Alfred Gibbon, pp. 18-19; Feet of Fines, CP 25/1/124/52, no. 193.</div><div>2) Feet of Fines, CP 25/1/135/76, no. 47.</div><div>3) <i>Calendar of Fine Rolls 1307-19</i>, pp. 100, 140; <i>Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem 1307-17</i>, no. 350; <i>Calendar of Close Rolls 1307-13</i>, pp. 380, 439; <i>CCR 1330-33</i>, pp. 338-9, 544-5, 566, 576.</div><div>4) <i>Calendar of Patent Rolls 1321-24</i>, p. 58.</div><div>5) <i>CIPM 1317-27</i>, no. 420; <i>CCR 1333-37</i>, p. 603; <i>CIPM 1336-46</i>, no. 37.</div><div>6) <i>CPR 1313-17</i>, p. 410.</div><div>7) <i>CFR 1307-19</i>, p. 197; <i>CIPM 1317-27</i>, no. 420; <i>CPR 1321-24</i>, p. 285; <i>CCR 1323-27</i>, pp. 25, 162.</div><div>8) <i>Calendar of Papal Letters 1305-41</i>, pp. 243, 253; <i>CCR 1323-27</i>, pp. 19, 44, 53.</div><div>9) <i>CCR 1307-13</i>, pp. 160-61.</div><div>10) <i>CPR 1307-13</i>, p. 181.</div><div>11) <i>Catalogue of Ancient Deeds</i>, vol. 2, no. A.3189; The National Archives E 40/3189.</div><div>12)<i> Calendar of Papal Letters 1342-62</i>, p. 431; <i>Petitions to the Pope 1342-1419</i>, pp. 209, 217.</div><div>13) <i>CIPM 1352-60</i>, no. 597; <i>CIPM 1361-65</i>, no. 333; <i>CIPM 1365-69</i>, no. 356; <i>CFR 1356-68</i>, pp. 133, 245-6; <i>CFR 1369-77</i>, pp. 56, 68; <i>CCR 1360-64</i>, p. 88; <i>CCR 1369-74</i>, p. 131.</div>Kathryn Warnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00397714441908100576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19545049.post-23062047716574094102022-10-07T14:08:00.001+01:002023-01-15T13:27:05.744+00:00A Petition from Blanche of Lancaster, Lady Wake, 1320<p>Blanche of Lancaster was born sometime in the early 1300s as the eldest child of Edward I's nephew <a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2011/04/henry-of-lancaster.html" target="_blank">Henry of Lancaster</a> (b. <i>c</i>. 1280/81), later earl of Lancaster and Leicester, and <a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2007/04/maud-de-chaworth-and-her-daughters.html" target="_blank">Maud Chaworth</a> (b. 1282). She was born in the reign of her great-uncle Edward I and died between 3 and 11 July 1380 in the reign of Richard II, when she must have been in her mid to late seventies, having outlived her six younger siblings. She was the aunt, and perhaps godmother, of the more famous Blanche of Lancaster (1342-68) who married John of Gaunt and was the mother of Henry IV.</p><p>Blanche married Thomas Wake, future <a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2017/10/thomas-lord-wake-1298-1349.html" target="_blank">Lord Wake of Liddell</a> (b. March 1298), before 9 October 1316, probably not too long before. Edward II fined his ward Thomas £1000 when he found out, as the marriage had taken place without his licence; he had offered Thomas the marriage of Piers Gaveston's <a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2012/07/joan-gaveston-piers-daughter.html" target="_blank">daughter and heir Joan</a>, only to find that Thomas preferred to wed Blanche. Edward pardoned Thomas on 9 December 1318, and allowed him seisin of his late father John Wake's lands a couple of years early at the request of his cousin, Thomas's father-in-law Henry of Lancaster. [1] As to why Thomas preferred to marry Blanche of Lancaster, who had a younger brother and five younger sisters (though not all of them had been born by 1316) and was not an heiress, over Joan Gaveston, who was an only child until her half-sister Margaret Audley was born <i>c</i>. the early 1320s and was a sizeable heiress, we can only speculate. Blanche and Thomas Wake were married for over thirty years until Thomas died in 1349, though they had no children (Thomas's heir was his nephew John, earl of Kent, d. 1352).</p><p>On 24 April 1320, Edward II gave Thomas Wake permission to go overseas on pilgrimage with two attendants, William Wasteneys and Richard Normanby. Thomas was, however, still at his Lincolnshire manor of Bourne on 6 June 1320, when he made a grant to <a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-murder-of-sir-roger-belers.html" target="_blank">Sir Roger Belers</a> that was witnessed by, among others, his younger brother John Wake and Wasteneys and Normanby, the men who would accompany him on pilgrimage. [2] Thomas did eventually leave England that year, and as chance would have it, his Lancastrian father-in-law Henry also spent much of the period from 1318 to 1322 overseas. Henry's obscure younger brother John of Lancaster, whose heir he was, died in France before 13 June 1317, and Henry went there in May 1318. On 28 September 1318, he was 'staying in France to claim his inheritance', and on 21 August 1320 was 'staying beyond the seas' until the following June, though he returned to England for a while in November 1320. [3] His wife Maud Chaworth accompanied him (see below for source).</p><p>Sometime in 1320, after 6 June and before 24 November, Blanche of Lancaster presented a petition in Anglo-Norman to Edward II and his council, calling herself 'Blaunche Wake, cousin of our lord the king and consort of Lord Wake' and stating that her husband had gone on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela (<i>seint Jake</i>) with royal permission. [4] She added rather plaintively that 'her father Sir Henry of Lancaster and her mother are overseas, and therefore she remains alone'. Blanche went on to say that one of her husband's manors had been attacked by 'numerous robbers and murderers' from the town of Spalding in Lincolnshire, who had killed some of Thomas Wake's servants and her own, and badly wounded others to the point of death. She did not specify which manor, but Thomas held several in Lincolnshire, including Bourne and Market Deeping, which are both about twelve miles from Spalding. The people from Spalding had also stolen goods and chattels from the manor, and had taken away the dead bodies (<i>les corps de eux q' sont mortz aloignez</i>), an unusual detail which I don't recall seeing in a fourteenth-century petition before. Blanche finished by stating that she and her 'ladies', i.e. her attendants, were so frightened and distressed that they did not dare to stay at the manor, and she begged Edward II and the royal council to help her as soon as possible. Unfortunately, they did not, but only responded that she had no right to an action resulting from the petition. I haven't been able to find any other reference to this attack on a nearby manor by the people of Spalding.</p><p>Below, part of Blanche's petition.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDoC4-YoCzcfZekvCgwsumf_hV6PrPnfx0Yaa7Od9WHoz_fzLXsAHt2UKVHTyp5R8i3drsUtgeL12KpoMYCWzCyZ2aEj5Z5O-yYTxkICZGU6j8goQcTEH2pqMqPtgCV5ePkf8e0htNSKAI32svZKrsdiWxUKBRD0PRTCUirMefXatAjRLy7g/s493/Screenshot%202022-10-07%20140556.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="276" data-original-width="493" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDoC4-YoCzcfZekvCgwsumf_hV6PrPnfx0Yaa7Od9WHoz_fzLXsAHt2UKVHTyp5R8i3drsUtgeL12KpoMYCWzCyZ2aEj5Z5O-yYTxkICZGU6j8goQcTEH2pqMqPtgCV5ePkf8e0htNSKAI32svZKrsdiWxUKBRD0PRTCUirMefXatAjRLy7g/s320/Screenshot%202022-10-07%20140556.png" width="320" /></a></div><p>In 1320, Blanche was only a teenager, who might have been eighteen but perhaps was as young as fifteen, and obviously felt isolated and afraid with her husband and her parents overseas. Her closest relatives in England were, apart from her younger siblings (assuming they weren't abroad with their parents), her father's cousin the king and her paternal uncle Thomas of Lancaster, earl of Lancaster and Leicester. Thomas of Lancaster isn't mentioned in the petition, and I have no idea if he tried to help her or not. Another close relative was Hugh Despenser the Younger, half-brother of Maud Chaworth, and thus also Blanche's uncle. Hugh was then Edward II's chamberlain and had already become a pretty powerful royal favourite, though I have no idea either if he did anything to help her. I find the petition poignant. Many years later, as a widow in the 1350s, Blanche, Lady Wake had an awful feud with Thomas Lisle, bishop of Ely, and gave as good as she got, but in 1320 she was young and vulnerable.</p><p>Thomas, Lord Wake was back in England by 24 November 1320 when he settled two of his own manors in Cumberland and Yorkshire on himself and Blanche jointly, and Henry of Lancaster had also returned by 16 November 1320. [5] I wonder if this isn't a coincidence, especially as Henry had originally intended to remain overseas until June 1321, and perhaps Blanche sent messengers to her husband and her father and they both hurried home. It kind of amazes me that Blanche lived for another sixty years after the events she described in her petition.</p><p><b>Sources</b></p><p>1) <i>CPR 1313-17</i>, p. 553; <i>CPR 1317-21</i>, pp. 43, 251-2; <i>CCR 1313-18</i>, p. 413; <i>CIPM 1291-1300</i>, no. 597 (John Wake's IPM; <i>CIPM 1352-60</i>, no. 219 (Thomas Wake's); <i>CIPM 1377-84</i>, nos. 438-45 (Blanche's).</p><p>2) <i>CPR 1317-21</i>, pp. 440, 494-5.</p><p>3)<i> Foedera 1307-27</i>, p. 334; <i>CPR 1317-21</i>, pp. 145-6, 153, 217, 503, 524, 548; <i>CPR 1321-24</i>, p. 69.</p><p>4) The National Archives SC 8/87/4346.</p><p>5) <i>CPR 1317-21</i>, pp. 524, 531.</p>Kathryn Warnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00397714441908100576noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19545049.post-9357728492079745182022-09-24T08:46:00.000+01:002023-01-15T13:27:05.506+00:00Marriage Rights<div>When a tenant in chief, the people who held land directly from the king, died with his/her heir underage - under 21 if male, 14 if female and married, or 16 if female and unmarried - the king owned the rights to the heir's marriage. He either arranged the heir's marriage himself, or sold the rights to someone else. Men owned their own marriage rights when they came of age at 21</div><div><br /></div><div> When Theobald de Verdon died on [] July 1316, he left his three daughters from his first marriage to the late Maud Mortimer (d. 1312), and his second wife Elizabeth (de Clare) de Burgh was a month pregnant with his fourth daughter. On [], Edward II granted the marriage of Theobald's eldest daughter Joan (b. August 1303) to Sir William Montacute, who waited until Elizabeth de Burgh had given birth to her daughter Isabella de Verdon on 21 March 1317. If Isabella had been a boy, she would have become Theobald's sole heir from the moment of birth and would have disinherited Theobald's three living daughters, but as it was, the birth of a girl meant that Theobald's estate would be divided into four equal portions for his four daughters. In the knowledge that Joan de Verdon would inherit a quarter of the sizeable inheritance, William Montacute married her off to his eldest son John (b. <i>c</i>. late 1290s) on 28 April 1317, a few weeks after the birth of Joan's half-sister. If Joan had been disinherited by the birth of a half-brother, William would most probablyn not have 'wasted' her on his eldest son but would have married her off to another of his relatives, probably one of his younger sons or a nephew.</div><div><br /></div><div>In March 1352, Thomas Staple of Southwark offered his 20-year-old ward John Amory of Leicestershire (b. November 1331) a choice between two brides: Alice Cleet of Berkshire or Isabel St Albans of Surrey. John 'utterly refused both, and of his own accord' married Alianor Baryngton instead. An inquiry found that Thomas Staple had lost £200 from John's marriage, and John acknowledged that he owed Thomas this amount. William Cantilupe or Cauntelo or Cantelewe was born in 1293. Sometime before 15 January 1314 when he was 20, his stepmother Eva, who owned the rights to his marriage, also offered him a choice between two brides: Joan, daughter of John de Grey, or Margaret, daughter of Robert de Strenle. William 'expressly answered and said that he would not have any woman to wife'. He was told to pay Eva the value of his marriage, and died at an unknown date after November 1320, having apparently never married.</div>Kathryn Warnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00397714441908100576noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19545049.post-83052665640868051492022-09-18T13:53:00.002+01:002023-01-15T13:27:07.348+00:00Sir Geoffrey Luttrell and an Attack on Sempringham Priory, 1312<div>The <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-luttrell-psalter" target="_blank">Luttrell Psalter</a>, <a href="https://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/luttrell/accessible/introduction.html" target="_blank">now held</a> in the British Library, is a gorgeous, lavishly illustrated manuscript dating to sometime between about 1320 and 1330, i.e. it was made either late in Edward II's reign or early in Edward III's, for Sir Geoffrey Luttrell. As well as commissioning one of the most stunning pieces of art to survive from medieval England, Geoffrey took part in a raid on Sempringham Priory in Lincolnshire in 1312. Here's a post about it, with some information about Geoffrey and his family.</div><div> </div><div>Sir Geoffrey Luttrell was born on 23 or 24 May 1276 early in Edward I's reign and died on 23 May 1345, his sixty-ninth birthday or the day before. He was granted the lands of his late father Robert Luttrell, who died shortly before 18 June 1297, on 3 November 1297 after he proved he was twenty-one. [1] The name was also spelt Loterel, Loterell, Louterel, Louterell, Lutterel or Lutterell, and the family held the manors of Irnham in Lincolnshire, Hooton Pagnell in Yorkshire, Saltby in Leicestershire, and Gamston and Bridgford in Nottinghamshire. Irnham was their chief manor. Geoffrey married Agnes Sutton, who died in 1340, and their son and heir was Andrew, Lord Luttrell, who was born around Easter (15 April) in 1313: he was 'aged 32 years and more at the feast of Easter last' in June 1345. Somewhat peculiarly, Pope John XXII granted Geoffrey Luttrell and Agnes Sutton a 'dispensation...to remain in the marriage which they contracted in ignorance that they were related in the third and fourth degrees' as late as October 1331, decades after they wed. [2] Like his father, Andrew Luttrell lived a long life and died on 6 September 1390 at the age of seventy-seven, having married firstly Beatrice Scrope, who appears in the Luttrell Psalter and was one of the daughters of Sir Geoffrey Scrope (<i>c</i>. 1285-1340), chief justice of the King's Bench, and secondly Hawise Despenser (b. 1344/45, d. 10 April 1414), mother of his son and heir Andrew the younger, born<i> c</i>. 1364. Hawise was a great-granddaughter of Hugh Despenser the Elder (1261-1326), earl of Winchester, via his younger son Philip Despenser (d. 1313). The Luttrell/Despenser wedding took place in 1363 in the castle of Bourne in Lincolnshire, held by the Despensers' cousin <a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2007/04/maud-de-chaworth-and-her-daughters.html" target="_blank">Blanche of Lancaster</a> (d. 1380), dowager Lady Wake. [3] Andrew Luttrell was fifty when he married his second wife and not even seven when he married his first: he and Beatrice Scrope were wed by 22 February 1320, when they appear on record as 'Andrew son of the said Geoffrey [Luttrell] and Beatrice his wife'. [4] Beatrice Scrope Luttrell died childless sometime after 3 April 1345, when she was left ten marks (£6.66) in her father-in-law Geoffrey's will. It's a pity the will doesn't mention the gorgeous Psalter Geoffrey commissioned. EDITED TO ADD: 'Beatrice Luterelle' appears on the Close Roll on 18 October 1350, granted permission to travel to Rome on pilgrimage with four attendants. [5]</div><div><br /></div><div>Below, the brass of Andrew, Lord Luttrell (1313-90) in St Andrew's Church, Irnham, Lincolnshire.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWh-RahDPUrhlHIurYQ62NtAXleupJ4Y4F-gH5bAo09OUYUBT3tEXPIw_F7FC8l-Wsy4feM6mQMNYl6mPqcDrLr5vpID_halqWxcuQtSHPCHSfAh3Pmmm3KsKpSh17kfKgpFCNHuHP2tur3EJujBkiHHqGm26vAovXUiR9HxjPbo3M4_mdBg/s441/Screenshot%202022-09-18%20123759.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="441" data-original-width="397" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWh-RahDPUrhlHIurYQ62NtAXleupJ4Y4F-gH5bAo09OUYUBT3tEXPIw_F7FC8l-Wsy4feM6mQMNYl6mPqcDrLr5vpID_halqWxcuQtSHPCHSfAh3Pmmm3KsKpSh17kfKgpFCNHuHP2tur3EJujBkiHHqGm26vAovXUiR9HxjPbo3M4_mdBg/s320/Screenshot%202022-09-18%20123759.png" width="288" /></a></div><br /><div>Below, Sir Geoffrey Luttrell on horseback in one of the Luttrell Psalter's gorgeous illustrations, with his wife Agnes Sutton and their daughter-in-law Beatrice Scrope, Andrew's first wife.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCiVVw_WTl7C0kps_3Benl0KghI7j9c9KWsZ_XsMICWs75uu5fTy05qCcFM-N6BQr698iJnquVcx5bHAY5wtWoFJYqNAPQtkFF7b-reYPXHBFclqyG_HavGsEU6DBQGPfkg7ojRaxD23dzqNyxoijv3A78SyCNrxJY7cpF751a3BNl4PJ1Aw/s622/Screenshot%202022-09-17%20172143.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="541" data-original-width="622" height="278" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCiVVw_WTl7C0kps_3Benl0KghI7j9c9KWsZ_XsMICWs75uu5fTy05qCcFM-N6BQr698iJnquVcx5bHAY5wtWoFJYqNAPQtkFF7b-reYPXHBFclqyG_HavGsEU6DBQGPfkg7ojRaxD23dzqNyxoijv3A78SyCNrxJY7cpF751a3BNl4PJ1Aw/s320/Screenshot%202022-09-17%20172143.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div>The Luttrells' Lincolnshire manor of Irnham lies about ten miles from Sempringham Priory, which was founded by St Gilbert of Sempringham (d. 1189) and was the first house of his Gilbertine Order. One of Sempringham's residents in 1312 was Gwenllian ferch Llywelyn (d. 1337), then aged thirty, daughter of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, prince of Wales and Eleanor de Montfort, and a second cousin of Edward II (they were both great-grandchildren of King John). Edward granted Gwenllian, whose name usually appears in English records as 'Wenthlian(e)', an allowance of twenty pounds a year for life. [6] Another nun of Sempringham was Geoffrey Luttrell's daughter Isabella, Andrew's sister, and in 1322 Edward II sent his niece Margaret de Clare to live there for a while, with a number of attendants, after her second husband Sir Hugh Audley took part in the Contrariant rebellion.</div><div><br /></div><div>Below, the church of Sempringham Priory; pics taken by me during a visit in 2019. The priory was closed down in 1538 during the Dissolution.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhva0Vws8pM9D0MkUV3wfngMmaRt2D4nqpgO7VbcpzENv7d7kjrlHE6qwEiZOhdE6Xb7alb4bEq2DBlibfjWrv0MeN7eT6DFGTMmXdaTajTB7UjWrAwndbPNeUfEV0HqqjtiKa-ExTfM5j1MhtWOR50K0tq1LX-hhSq_4oDdfgEEQFtgHwlqA/s1192/Screenshot%202022-09-17%20134015.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="783" data-original-width="1192" height="210" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhva0Vws8pM9D0MkUV3wfngMmaRt2D4nqpgO7VbcpzENv7d7kjrlHE6qwEiZOhdE6Xb7alb4bEq2DBlibfjWrv0MeN7eT6DFGTMmXdaTajTB7UjWrAwndbPNeUfEV0HqqjtiKa-ExTfM5j1MhtWOR50K0tq1LX-hhSq_4oDdfgEEQFtgHwlqA/s320/Screenshot%202022-09-17%20134015.png" width="320" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLJeNJ205osSkT2aYIxUjS3PbCG5MNRjPyUzL_ZbNLad-n6DHDAjzLo-jQ2eBSOK4AxTBx3vYxYBC9eyNYIWGcmMCmouUd71NcG3n5pmwYJe1U8tkG97hYkEDyIvDMDpPPa8xzwDoMhL_TAoOaCnGNWsSEhrsY8VNoq7UcexK0Zem6P9WgPw/s1222/Screenshot%202022-09-17%20135241.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="886" data-original-width="1222" height="232" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLJeNJ205osSkT2aYIxUjS3PbCG5MNRjPyUzL_ZbNLad-n6DHDAjzLo-jQ2eBSOK4AxTBx3vYxYBC9eyNYIWGcmMCmouUd71NcG3n5pmwYJe1U8tkG97hYkEDyIvDMDpPPa8xzwDoMhL_TAoOaCnGNWsSEhrsY8VNoq7UcexK0Zem6P9WgPw/s320/Screenshot%202022-09-17%20135241.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div>The memorial to Gwenllian at Sempringham, in Welsh and English.</div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzU-DHFRA1eyCmGb604U4Q3kcaptXNUz9JQXno357n4x_UZSHvXpQGRhkSfytBqweC2NwaTp9GnjUCk0IsB0NZouJ25_LKwsKq8EAra0t2Nhc9-QCYpOBeAjDnS2oJD5vfHzu06EAFzuqVFrPsD3OQWFi_lcdlBjTc1CMw06fgPf7xhSmQZA/s1224/Screenshot%202022-09-17%20134237.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="901" data-original-width="1224" height="236" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzU-DHFRA1eyCmGb604U4Q3kcaptXNUz9JQXno357n4x_UZSHvXpQGRhkSfytBqweC2NwaTp9GnjUCk0IsB0NZouJ25_LKwsKq8EAra0t2Nhc9-QCYpOBeAjDnS2oJD5vfHzu06EAFzuqVFrPsD3OQWFi_lcdlBjTc1CMw06fgPf7xhSmQZA/s320/Screenshot%202022-09-17%20134237.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div>The first evidence that a raid had taken place on Sempringham Priory appears in an entry on the Patent Roll dated 27 July 1312, a time when Edward II was dealing with the aftermath of Piers Gaveston's death on 19 June, and while Queen Isabella was pregnant with Edward III. The king gave a commission of <i>oyer et terminer</i> to three men 'on the information of H. de Bello Monte', i.e. Sir Henry de Beaumont, a French-born kinsman of Edward II who was an important landowner in Lincolnshire; he owned Folkingham Castle and the manor of Heckington, among others. According to the commission, the prior of Sempringham had complained that 'Geoffrey Luterel of Irnham', Edmund Coleville, John son of John Gobaud, Roger Birthorpe and his brothers John and Thomas, John Graveneye, Willaim Pleseleie and John Hunte, and unnamed others, 'broke his doors and walls at Semplyngham, co. Lincoln, and carried away his goods, and assaulted Thomas Hougate and John Irnham, his fellow canons, and also certain of his men and servants'. Another entry on the Patent Roll dated 7 September 1312 relates to a retaliatory attack: John, prior of Sempringham, Thomas Hougate and John Irnham, and ten named other men, attacked Roger Birthorpe's home at Birthorpe. They broke into his park and stole some of his animals, 'carried away his goods' and assaulted three of his servants. [7] </div><div><br /></div><div>The village of Birthorpe is just two miles from Sempringham Priory and also two miles from Folkingham, chief manor of Edward II's kinsman Sir Henry de Beaumont who reported the attack on the priory, and the other men named as taking part in the raid on Sempringham were also local. Sir Edmund Coleville (25 January 1288 - shortly before 16 March 1316) was the lord of Castle Bytham sixteen miles from Sempringham Priory. I'm unfamiliar with the Gobaud family, though Guy Gubaud, who was most probably the older brother of 'John son of John Gobaud', died not long before 8 May 1314 and left property in Lincolnshire to his thirteen-year-old son. Guy's father John died in 1310. [8]</div><div><br /></div><div>As well as the information on the Patent Roll, a petition still exists in the National Archives which appears to date to shortly after Edward II's downfall in 1327. [9] It was presented by Roger Birthorpe. The prior of Sempringham in 1312, called simply 'John' on the Patent Roll, is now named as John Camelton, and Roger Birthorpe claimed that he had lawfully taken some of the prior's cattle to settle a dispute between them. Roger went on to say that he had gathered 'other great lords and good men' of the locality, including Geoffrey Luttrell, Edmund Coleville, and Guy Gubaud, apparently an error for Guy's younger brother John. The lords, supposedly, went to Sempringham to have a reasonable conversation with the prior, but he maliciously broke down his own doors to make it look like the lords had done it, and raised the hue and cry against them. </div><div><br /></div><div>Below, part of Roger Birthorpe's petition of 1327, with Geoffrey Luttrell's name.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcaY002daxu0xIRXTyZdHBKdxkVZzi0HD9wZgIsIaiQknLx2dKjDHrgzZtfj-Gtd8A2L0siOXHUkrLADpZUSKHP-u7759wlXErxRb8VVNDwHZ5N5u5BIwQ6xoha4Q2GPyVk6c7Bxguxq2DeaYmAkSoRDNPslbVQnCvF0YgF4W7CPwu5RZIfw/s885/Screenshot%202022-09-18%20093105.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="304" data-original-width="885" height="110" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcaY002daxu0xIRXTyZdHBKdxkVZzi0HD9wZgIsIaiQknLx2dKjDHrgzZtfj-Gtd8A2L0siOXHUkrLADpZUSKHP-u7759wlXErxRb8VVNDwHZ5N5u5BIwQ6xoha4Q2GPyVk6c7Bxguxq2DeaYmAkSoRDNPslbVQnCvF0YgF4W7CPwu5RZIfw/s320/Screenshot%202022-09-18%20093105.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div>Roger Birthorpe also stated that the prior of Sempringham had the support of 'Sir Hugh Despenser and his sisters, ladies in the said priory' (<i>Mons' Hughe le Despenser et ses seors dames en la dite priorie</i>) in this matter. He didn't specify whether he meant Hugh the Elder (born in 1261 and in his early fifties in 1312) or his son Hugh the Younger, who was twenty-four or so, though at this stage in Edward II's reign, the name Hugh Despenser used on its own inevitably meant Hugh the Elder. Hugh the Younger had four sisters, but the eldest two, Alina and Isabella, were married in 1312 and were definitely not nuns of Sempringham, and the youngest two, Margaret and Elizabeth, seem too young to be involved, as they were almost certainly born in the second half of the 1290s or at the beginning of the 1300s. Hugh the Elder also had several sisters or half-sisters, daughters of his father Hugh Despenser, justiciar of England, killed at the battle of Evesham in 1265 fighting with Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester. One (half?-)sister, Eleanor (d. 1328), was the mother of Sir Hugh de Courtenay of Okehampton (1276-1340) and grandmother of Hugh de Courtenay, earl of Devon (1303-77), and another, Joan, married Sir Thomas Furnival (d. 1332). It's certainly possible that Hugh Despenser the justiciar (d. 1265) had other daughters who became nuns at Sempringham. Hugh Despenser the Younger's third daughter Eleanor did end up as a nun of Sempringham, but that was much later, and 1312 was a few years before she was even born.</div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>Mons' Hughe le Despenser</i> in Roger Birthorpe's petition.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg89YjcudAbr0ARbrWO7NGNI1Wqfi8RSmH7uKZBNxwmuZRcB6sqVoQL59N8faPwpbXRLocSbiF02Q495i5uWnm9MauAU6u0AqaTRarrlSyh8tFUNsfDcc-uADWGDVuv1gJJ-kV459P8CpgiLaQGSZHl0gzqHufA9eopcPM2LKg3igqjiYUZWw/s751/Screenshot%202022-09-18%20101805.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="103" data-original-width="751" height="44" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg89YjcudAbr0ARbrWO7NGNI1Wqfi8RSmH7uKZBNxwmuZRcB6sqVoQL59N8faPwpbXRLocSbiF02Q495i5uWnm9MauAU6u0AqaTRarrlSyh8tFUNsfDcc-uADWGDVuv1gJJ-kV459P8CpgiLaQGSZHl0gzqHufA9eopcPM2LKg3igqjiYUZWw/s320/Screenshot%202022-09-18%20101805.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div>It's impossible to tell whether the alleged involvement of one of the Hugh Despensers and his sisters in the whole affair is true, or whether the name was added to the petition after the Despensers' downfall and executions in 1326 to give it more weight. In 1327, at the start of Edward III's reign and during the regency of his mother Isabella, numerous petitions were issued against the two Despensers. Most of them were true; some were probably not. The Despensers were, however, connected to the Luttrell family and to the county of Lincolnshire in some ways. On 5 August 1309, a clerk named John Elleker who had abducted Geoffrey Luttrell's young daughter Elizabeth, Andrew's older sister - Andrew wasn't even born in 1309 - was pardoned at the behest of Hugh Despenser, almost certainly the Elder. [10] Hugh Despenser the Elder's second son Philip (b. <i>c</i>. 1292/94, d. 1313) married the Lincolnshire heiress Margaret Goushill or Gousell (1294-1349) before 29 June 1308, probably not too long before. [11] Philip and Margaret's granddaughter Hawise Despenser (1344/45-1414) was the decades-younger second wife of Andrew Luttrell, as noted above, and this cadet branch of the Despenser family were firmly Lincolnshire-based for generations. On 17 May 1313, Edward II granted the fines due from John Graveneye, one of the men who attacked Sempringham Priory who was 'convicted...of diverse trespasses committed by him and others against the prior of Sempyngham' to <a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2010/02/maud-fitzalan-and-maud-burnell.html" target="_blank">Sir John Haudlo</a>, a long-term adherent of Hugh Despenser the Elder, 'on the information of H. le Despenser'. [12]</div><div><br /></div><div>Roger Birthorpe also stated in his petition that because of the 'great malice' of John Camelton, prior of Sempringham, he had to leave England altogether and move to Ireland, and was declared an outlaw. Furthermore, his manor of Birthorpe, worth £40 a year, was granted to Sir Henry de Beaumont. There is evidence that Birthorpe did indeed pass to Henry (d. 1340) and his son and heir <a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2017/10/john-lord-beaumont-1317-1342.html" target="_blank">John de Beaumont</a> (d. 1342), though isn't listed in their inquisitions post mortem. [13]</div><div><div><br /></div><div>It's often difficult to get to grips with these local feuds and to figure out what was really going on, or to determine who, if anyone, was more at fault or was the more injured party. Another feud that I've always found amusing took place in Essex a few decades later, between Maud de Vere née Ufford (1345/46-1413), dowager countess of Oxford, and the prior of Earls Colne. Yes, another prior. The prior claimed that the countess had him assaulted and imprisoned, and dragged him around Essex 'shamefully clad'. Maud countered that the prior and his men besieged her in her home in the village of Earls Colne, and 'threatened her with arson and other evils'. [14] The raid on Sempringham Priory in the summer of 1312, and the prior's revenge attack on one of the perpetrators - the one who lived closest to the priory, coincidentally or not - is all too typical of the era, and the real interest of this one lies in the involvement of the man who commissioned the Luttrell Psalter. And to finish, just one last thing about this attack on Sempringham Priory. It presumably took place not long before 27 July 1312, when it's first mentioned in the chancery rolls. Andrew Luttrell was said in 1345 to have been born around Easter 1313, and as Easter Sunday fell on 15 April in 1313, Geoffrey Luttrell and Agnes Sutton must have conceived him around the time of the raid.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>Sources</b></div><div><br /></div><div>1) <i>CCR 1296-1302</i>, p. 70; <i>CFR 1272-1307</i>, p. 387; <i>CIPM 1291-1300</i>, no. 406; <i>CIPM 1336-46</i>, no. 589.</div><div>2) <i>Calendar of Papal Letters 1305-41</i>, p. 368.</div><div>3) <i>Early Lincoln Wills</i>, ed. Alfred Gibbon, pp. 18-19, 56-7, 99; <i>CIPM 1384-92</i>, nos. 1008-9; <i>CIPM 1392-99</i>, nos. 1062-63; <i>CIPM 1413-18</i>, nos. 154-56; <i>CIPM 1418-22</i>, nos. 30-32.</div></div><div>4) <i>CPR 1317-21</i>, p. 424.</div><div>5) <i>Early Lincoln Wills</i>, pp. 18-19;<i> CCR 1349-54</i>, pp. 271-2; TNA, SC 8/246/12265.</div><div>6) <i>Calendar of Memoranda Rolls Michaelmas 1326-Michaelmas 1327</i>, no. 2160.</div><div>7) <i>CPR 1307-13</i>, pp. 530, 533, 584, 598.</div><div>8) <i>CIPM 1307-17</i>, nos. 157, 473, 592; <i>CFR 1307-19</i>, pp. 72, 74, 199.</div><div>9) TNA, SC 8/34/1671, and see Joyce Coleman, 'New Evidence about Sir Geoffrey Luttrell's Raid on Sempringham Priory, 1312', <i>British Library Journal</i>, 25 (1999), pp. 103-28.</div><div>10) <i>CPR 1307-13</i>, p. 181.</div><div>11) <i>Calendar of Chancery Warrants 1244-1326</i>, p. 275.</div><div>12) <i>CPR 1307-13</i>, p. 584.</div><div>13) <i>CCR 1343-46</i>, pp. 201, 321; <i>CIM 1308-48</i>, no. 1835; <i>CIPM 1336-46</i>, nos. 271, 381.</div><div>14) <i>CPR 1399-1401</i>, pp. 414-15, 519.</div>Kathryn Warnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00397714441908100576noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19545049.post-25036211149950760392022-09-11T13:49:00.001+01:002023-01-15T13:27:05.851+00:00Book Giveaway: Sex and Sexuality in Medieval England<p>My new book <i><a href="https://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/Sex-and-Sexuality-in-Medieval-England-Hardback/p/21630" target="_blank">Sex and Sexuality in Medieval England</a></i> is out now! It's part of <a href="https://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/Sex-and-Sexuality/s/183" target="_blank">a series</a> on sex and sexuality from Pen&Sword that includes Tudor England, Stuart Britain, and Victorian Britain.</p><p>I have TWO free copies to give away to readers! You can live anywhere in the world, as long as you have a postal address I can send the book to. Please contact me with your email address or some other means of getting in touch with you, so I can notify the winners. To enter the draw, do one of the following: leave a comment here on the blog; comment or message me on my <a href="https://www.facebook.com/EdwardofCaernarfon" target="_blank">Edward II Facebook page</a> or comment on my <a href="https://twitter.com/RoyneAlianore" target="_blank">Twitter page</a>; email me at edwardofcaernarfon(at)yahoo(dot)com; or if we're friends on Facebook or follow each other on Twitter, you can message me there. Best of luck! Deadline is midnight BST on Sunday 25 September. And<b> please remember</b>, if you leave a comment on the blog, give me an email address or some other way of contacting you. If I can't contact you, I have no way of telling you that you've won!</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiHcq3NFlE1OUM_KJbSBTZkV_AQ8F0OlU0IaM_ykD6mv1w4aYPdiZYXWNv_V47D2cF3jm7KwkU6-ilM2RGTm9Hz9RqnXvaOoqAlPYIGG-2qCyohZ6bjBLODlsr-95aYk-rctASQEXe4dpNG6d65amESF2Up5LvB0wbgOKJuKCp-LM5OH6Fkg/s786/Screenshot%202022-09-11%20095103.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="786" data-original-width="738" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiHcq3NFlE1OUM_KJbSBTZkV_AQ8F0OlU0IaM_ykD6mv1w4aYPdiZYXWNv_V47D2cF3jm7KwkU6-ilM2RGTm9Hz9RqnXvaOoqAlPYIGG-2qCyohZ6bjBLODlsr-95aYk-rctASQEXe4dpNG6d65amESF2Up5LvB0wbgOKJuKCp-LM5OH6Fkg/s320/Screenshot%202022-09-11%20095103.png" width="300" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMAgFE_LgN3Kv3yVFIMtgO4jCIYH2vI6MM3M1oygarQtC_tb0Td8AiPlvbH2TddQNoU8z6sxD2yMhbKp2CGIyr0KNbIxbJ7Lvx_WMo-WegkYTSgaN1twbHtxCqZEk4D-5zv1QZjvBKySn40ATpd91ep006Ayfl2s7MMnExrIe7c0O3Tv_TPQ/s508/Screenshot%202022-09-11%20094746.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="508" data-original-width="345" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMAgFE_LgN3Kv3yVFIMtgO4jCIYH2vI6MM3M1oygarQtC_tb0Td8AiPlvbH2TddQNoU8z6sxD2yMhbKp2CGIyr0KNbIxbJ7Lvx_WMo-WegkYTSgaN1twbHtxCqZEk4D-5zv1QZjvBKySn40ATpd91ep006Ayfl2s7MMnExrIe7c0O3Tv_TPQ/s320/Screenshot%202022-09-11%20094746.png" width="217" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhL6aFJBwnyIEQxaDmJH90-_D0Gx5NbWi0ccjkNAfptWalE2VFty9sxb32VXTjx3LX9Nefs3YC02NHpWcTNqXatJ31Y071xuzDtDkcY0OHvLqxLlTDUxq1pyyL_kw4pKto28ttCQUxCGPHBZdycRo1FHk7AN_jGaoDhbvq5VnMsCSMc8T5bzQ/s499/Screenshot%202022-09-11%20094804.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="334" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhL6aFJBwnyIEQxaDmJH90-_D0Gx5NbWi0ccjkNAfptWalE2VFty9sxb32VXTjx3LX9Nefs3YC02NHpWcTNqXatJ31Y071xuzDtDkcY0OHvLqxLlTDUxq1pyyL_kw4pKto28ttCQUxCGPHBZdycRo1FHk7AN_jGaoDhbvq5VnMsCSMc8T5bzQ/s320/Screenshot%202022-09-11%20094804.png" width="214" /></a></div>Kathryn Warnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00397714441908100576noreply@blogger.com23tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19545049.post-18534298065918875862022-09-04T15:34:00.001+01:002023-01-15T13:27:05.664+00:00The Abduction of John Chaucer, 1324The poet Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London around 1342/44 as the son of John Chaucer and Agnes Copton, and the Chaucers were a family of vintners and taverners in London and Ipswich. In 1324 during Edward II's reign, Geoffrey's then underage father John was abducted by his aunt, who tried to force him to marry her daughter, John's own cousin; here's a post about it. We know quite a bit about this event thanks in large part to Chaucer scholars, who over the decades have done brilliant work digging out every last reference to Geoffrey and his family in medieval documents. The King's Bench record of John Chaucer's abduction is printed in English translation in <i>Life-Records of Chaucer</i>, Parts I to IV (1900), pp. ix-x, 141-4, with more information in <i>Calendar of Close Rolls 1330-33</i>, pp. 90-91, 93-4, <i>Letter-Books of London</i>, vol. E, pp. 218-19, 226, 237, 239-40, and The National Archives SC 8/169/8432. This is a petition from Geoffrey Stace, one of John Chaucer's abductors (and in fact his uncle by marriage), which is also printed in the second volume of <i>Rotuli Parliamentorum</i>, p. 14, in the original Anglo-Norman.<div><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">This post might get really confusing, especially as some of the people involved had the same names, so here's a list of the important people:</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><br /><b>Geoffrey Chaucer</b>, the poet, b. <i>c</i>. 1342/44.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><b>John Chaucer</b>, b. <i>c</i>. 1309/12, Geoffrey's father.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Mary Chaucer</b>, died before 1349, John's mother, </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Geoffrey's </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">grandmother.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Robert Chaucer </b>aka Robert Malyn or Robert of Ipswich or Robert of Dynyngton, d. <i>c</i>. 1315, Mary's second husband, John's father, Geoffrey's grandfather.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Richard Chaucer</b>, d. 1349, Mary's third husband, John's step</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">father, </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Geoffrey's </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">step-grandfather.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><b>Thomas Heyron</b>, d. 1349, Mary's son from her first marriage, </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">John Chaucer's </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">older half-brother, </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">Geoffrey Chaucer's uncle, Richard Chaucer's other stepson.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Agnes Westhale</b>, formerly Malyn, Robert Chaucer/Malyn's sister and </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">John Chaucer's </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;">aunt, resident in Ipswich.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Joan Westhale</b>, Agnes's daughter from her first marriage to Walter Westhale, cousin and putative wife of John Chaucer.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Geoffrey Stace</b>, Agnes Westhale's second husband, Joan Westhale's stepfather, John Chaucer's uncle.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Thomas Stace</b>, a relative of Geoffrey Stace, either his father, brother or a son from a previous marriage.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><b>Sir Geoffrey Scrope</b>, 1285-1340, chief justice of the King's Bench.<br /></span><div><br /></div><div><div><div>Geoffrey Chaucer's paternal grandparents were Robert Chaucer, a vintner or taverner who moved from Ipswich to London and died before 29 October 1315, and Mary, who as a widow married Richard Chaucer. [1] Richard Chaucer was either a relative of Robert Chaucer or perhaps merely someone who confusingly shared his name, and to make it even more confusing, last names were often still very fluid in this era, and Geoffrey's grandfather Robert Chaucer was also sometimes called Robert Malyn, Robert of Ipswich, or Robert of Dynyngton. Richard Chaucer was the third husband of Robert's widow Mary; she had been married to another man named John Heyron (d. early 1300s) before she wed Robert Chaucer, the poet's grandfather, and had a son called Thomas Heyron or Heroun or Hayron or Heyroun, older half-brother of Geoffrey's father John Chaucer. Thomas's will of 7 April 1349 mentions 'John le Chaucer, my brother', and his and John's stepfather Richard Chaucer made his own will just five days later on 12 April 1349, which was Easter Sunday. [2] It seems highly likely that both men were victims of the Black Death, then raging in London, and Thomas had died in the five days between making his own will and being mentioned in his stepfather's: Richard left money for prayers to be said for the souls of his late wife Mary and her late son 'Thomas Heyroun'. John Chaucer, his wife Agnes Copton and their son Geoffrey Chaucer all survived the plague, and imagine how much poorer English literature would be if the child Geoffrey had been, like his uncle and step-grandfather, one of the untold tens of thousands of Londoners who succumbed (see the last chapter of my book <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0B6GP8T94/" target="_blank"><i>London: A Fourteenth-Century City and Its People</i></a> for more information on some of the many victims).</div><div><br /></div><div>The date of birth of John Chaucer, son and heir of Robert Chaucer aka Robert Malyn, is uncertain. The King's Bench record of John's abduction says that he had reached the age of twelve by December 1324 when it took place, and furthermore that 'he is underage, to wit, under fourteen years' in the Hilary term of the King's Bench in Edward II's nineteenth regnal year, i.e. January to March 1326. A letter from Edward III dated 16 December 1330 (see below), however, states that John Chaucer is 'now of full age', and 'of full age' when applied to a male usually meant twenty-one, which would indicate that John was born before 16 December 1309. On the other hand, John's aunt and uncle who abducted him gave as their justification the fact that in Ipswich, the custom was that an heir was deemed 'of full age' at the end of his twelfth year. At any rate, John was still a young child when his father died in or before October 1315 and in his thirties when his son Geoffrey the poet was born sometime in the early 1340s. His mother's first husband John Heyron was still alive in 1302, and Mary married Robert Chaucer/Malyn in or before January 1305. [3] John Chaucer was old enough to take part as a mounted man-at-arms with his half-brother Thomas Heyron in the disastrous Scottish campaign of the summer of 1327, when the young Edward III came close to being captured by Scottish forces, and was one of the men named as taking part in an attack and robbery on the abbot of Bury St Edmunds at the abbot's manor of Chevington, 30 miles from Ipswich, on 17 October 1328. [4] This might imply that John was in his late teens rather than about fifteen or sixteen in 1327/28, but who knows.</div><div><br /></div><div>After his father Robert's death, John Chaucer was in the custody of his mother Mary and her third husband Richard Chaucer, not simply because she was his mother but in accordance with the medieval custom that, if possible, an underage heir should be given into the care of his nearest blood relative to whom his inheritance could not descend after his death. John had an aunt called Agnes, or Anneis(e) as contemporary records spell her name, the sister of Robert Chaucer/Malyn. Unlike her brother, who moved to London, Agnes remained in their native Ipswich ('Gippewiz' in fourteenth-century spelling), and married firstly Walter ('Wautier') Westhale or Westhall and secondly Geoffrey ('Geffrei') Stace. Agnes and Walter had a daughter called Joan ('Johane') Westhale, first cousin of John ('Johan') Chaucer. Basically, the abduction was to do with a tavern and property in and around Ipswich which was John Chaucer's inheritance, and his aunt's wish to keep it in the family.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>Agnes argued that as her nephew John had reached (or passed) the age of twelve, was able to 'reckon and measure' and was therefore <i>sui juris</i>, i.e. was of legal capacity to act on his own behalf, he ought not to be in anyone's wardship. She and her associates - her second husband Geoffrey Stace, a man named Thomas Stace, and a servant called Lawrence Geffreyesman Stace - abducted John during the night of Monday 3 December 1324 ('the Monday next before St Nicholas, 18 Edward II'), from Mary and Richard Chaucer's home. This was located in the London ward of Cordwainer Street, probably on Watling Street. John Chaucer's abduction is described in contemporary records as a 'ravishment', <i>ravis(s)ement</i> in medieval French; the verb<i> ravir</i> meant to seize or take by force, and was used by Lord Berkeley in the summer of 1327 when the former king Edward II was temporarily <a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2007/08/freeing-edward-1327-attack-on-berkeley.html" target="_blank">removed from his custody</a> by the Dunheved gang. Originally it was believed that Agnes and Geoffrey Stace had forcibly married John Chaucer to Agnes's daughter Joan Westhale, John's cousin, though later it was shown that they had not (<i>qils avoient ravi le dit heire mes ne mie mariee</i>). Thomas Stace must have been a relative of Geoffrey Stace, perhaps his father, brother or son, and I found several references to a Thomas Stace from Ipswich who appears on record between 1296 and 1317. Geoffrey Stace was named as the son of Thomas Stace in 1317, so possibly the Thomas Stace who aided the abduction of John Chaucer in 1324 was Geoffrey's father, though Geoffrey might have had a brother or son with the same name. [5]</div><div><br /></div><div>At some point, John Chaucer was restored to his mother and stepfather, though I don't know when, or whether he was taken to Ipswich in December 1324 by his aunt and uncle, or what became of his cousin and putative wife Joan Westhale. As is so often the case, the records that we have raise more questions than they answer, and the whole intriguing situation remains rather murky. If John Chaucer had married his cousin Joan Westhale, he wouldn't have been able to marry Agnes Copton a few years later unless Joan died in the meantime, and Geoffrey Chaucer would never have been born. I haven't been able to discover a single thing about Joan Westhale except for this case. Marriage between first cousins was most unusual in the fourteenth century, and would certainly have required a papal dispensation for consanguinity.<br /><br />One thing we do know is that Mary and Richard Chaucer asked for damages of £300 and were awarded £250, a massive sum in an age when £5 was a normal yearly income. Geoffrey Stace sent a petition to the king in the late 1320s or 1330, complaining that the lands of John Chaucer's inheritance were only worth £1 per year and that therefore £250 was an ureasonably excessive amount. Incidentally, the Second Statute of Westminster in 1285 set the punishment for abducting a child (whether male or female) whose marriage belonged to someone else at two years' imprisonment, as long as the person restored the child still unmarried, or paid what the marriage was worth. Otherwise, the punishment was either life imprisonment or abjuration of the realm, i.e. permanent exile from England.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;"> [6</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;">]</span></span><span style="line-height: 18.4px;"> It was taken very seriously.</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;"> </span></span>John's stepfather and guardian Richard Chaucer, and John's older half-brother Thomas Heyron, apparently exacted revenge on Geoffrey Stace and Agnes after the abduction. They travelled from London to Ipswich, a distance of about 70 miles, and stole goods worth £40 from Agnes Westhale/Stace's house, or so the indignant Agnes claimed in 1325. [7] John Chaucer was around twelve or fifteen in 1324/25, and his Heyron half-brother, given that his father died sometime around 1303/04, must have been in his early twenties or older. There is much evidence that the two half-brothers were very close and often acted together.</div><br />On 16 December 1330, eighteen-year-old Edward III - who had recently taken control of his own kingdom from his mother Isabella of France and Roger Mortimer - sent a letter to Sir Geoffrey Scrope, one of the chief justices of the King's Bench and ancestor of the Scropes of Masham (Henry, Lord Scrope of Masham, executed by Henry V in 1415 after the Southampton Plot and mentioned by Shakespeare in his play about Henry, was Sir Geoffrey Scrope's great-grandson). The letter, stating that John Chaucer was now 'of full age', is printed in the <i>Calendar of Close Rolls 1330-33</i>, pp. 90-91, and was almost certainly a response to Geoffrey Stace's petition. Geoffrey Stace had been detained in the Marshalsea prison in London because of his 'trespass against the king's peace', as well as being held liable for the massive sum of £250, and Edward ordered his release. The<i> Letter-Books of London</i> (vol. E, pp. 218-19, 226, 237, 239-40) show that several inquisitions were held in the city in 1328, one of which was to determine whether Geoffrey Stace, his relative Thomas Stace and his servant Lawrence had committed perjury, and the whole thing dragged on for several years, as often happened in medieval court cases (and the delay in this one was worsened by the dramatic events of 1326/27 when Edward II was forced to abdicate in favour of his son). The 16th of December 1330 was six years and thirteen days after John Chaucer's abduction had taken place.<br /><br />A few years after his abduction by his aunt and uncle, John Chaucer married Agnes Copton, and they became the parents of Geoffrey Chaucer. I wonder if it's a coincidence that Geoffrey bore the same name as his father's uncle Geoffrey Stace, or if the latter was his great-nephew's godfather and John Chaucer was doing his best to bury the hatchet. Geoffrey Stace was still alive in February 1344, and Geoffrey Chaucer had probably been born by then. [8]<div><br /></div><div>Below, part of a petition sent by Geoffrey Stace, to which Edward III responded in December 1330, and in the second pic, part of the petition printed in <i>Rotuli Parliamentorum</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIJMw4qdbMA9RIoHJ6HJm3Nrzur8GK87-GNMY83A7FW46H17HhclqcbcXhu5YQqwMWg6aKNBLDYp-w3aNFw-cef8TfJwv1bjQrn6p0eUluUqOAE6hUWG33ce779D1KOsew4I4tomduv7j1xHIbPrAZRmTqhrcG0RH98Wd1rS6zVaU6ehDCJw/s724/Screenshot%202022-09-03%20134547.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="402" data-original-width="724" height="178" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIJMw4qdbMA9RIoHJ6HJm3Nrzur8GK87-GNMY83A7FW46H17HhclqcbcXhu5YQqwMWg6aKNBLDYp-w3aNFw-cef8TfJwv1bjQrn6p0eUluUqOAE6hUWG33ce779D1KOsew4I4tomduv7j1xHIbPrAZRmTqhrcG0RH98Wd1rS6zVaU6ehDCJw/s320/Screenshot%202022-09-03%20134547.png" width="320" /></a></div><div><br /></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFyKfrN8waLhT1FZyikHtgWxpqtAFCbZPLYa_2tyg-QOPFvi-kKw5m54DAuROXsG-UtUsgyWhOghCduwiFldxB8CIA_0kEb2FYapEBBhnGdKP2EdR2Jm_PAGNbw4niKGUSNoqlWP0vPyxKo0WypupwT0crE141FInYjsMjntdg9jQxn-jmMA/s535/Screenshot%202022-09-04%20101427.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="385" data-original-width="535" height="230" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFyKfrN8waLhT1FZyikHtgWxpqtAFCbZPLYa_2tyg-QOPFvi-kKw5m54DAuROXsG-UtUsgyWhOghCduwiFldxB8CIA_0kEb2FYapEBBhnGdKP2EdR2Jm_PAGNbw4niKGUSNoqlWP0vPyxKo0WypupwT0crE141FInYjsMjntdg9jQxn-jmMA/s320/Screenshot%202022-09-04%20101427.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div><b style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">Sources</b></div><div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">1) </span><i>Cal</i><i>endar of Close Rolls 1313-18</i>, p. 318.</div><div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">2) </span><i>Calendar of Wills Proved and Enrolled in the Court of Husting, London</i>, vol. 1, pp. 544, 590. Thomas Heyron's will of 1349 does not mention any children, so he appears to have been the last of the line.</div><div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">3) </span>Vincent B. Redstone and Lilian J. Redstone, 'The Heyrons of London: A Study in the Social Origins of Geoffrey Chaucer', <i>Speculum</i>, 12 (1937), p. 185.</div><div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">4) </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span>'The Heyrons of London', pp. 186-9; <i>Calendar of Select Plea and Memoranda Rolls of the City of London</i>, vol. 1, 1323-1364, p. 73 note 14. At this stage of his life, John was often identified as 'John Chaucer, brother of Thomas Heyron'.</div><div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">5) </span><i>CCR 1313-1</i>8, pp. 271, 289, 483; <i>Calendar of Patent Rolls 1317-21</i>, p. 689;<i> Catalogue of Ancient Deeds</i>, vol. 2, nos. A3586, A3638</div><div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">6) </span><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-GB;">Statutes of the Realm</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18.4px;">, vol. 1, pp. 88-9.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">7) </span>'Heyrons of London', pp. 185-6.</div><div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt;">8) </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 16px;"><i>CCR 1343-46</i>, pp. 107, 347.</span></div><div></div></div>Kathryn Warnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00397714441908100576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19545049.post-87652187926658604852022-08-15T13:34:00.001+01:002023-01-15T13:27:07.457+00:0015 August 1342: Wedding of Lionel of Antwerp and Elizabeth de Burgh<p>Edward III and Philippa of Hainault's third, but second eldest surviving, son Lionel of Antwerp married the heiress Elizabeth de Burgh in the Tower of London on 15 August 1342, the feast of the Assumption. The date is given in the <i>Calendar of Select Plea and Memoranda Rolls of the City of London </i>(vol. 1, 1323-64, p. 153), and confirmed in the <i>Continuatio Chronicarum</i> of the royal clerk Adam Murimuth (ed. E.M. Thompson, p. 125).</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6X1U_KsQcNjRvRRpfscCWK5FFF87CCAM3OJdOE-zsCqJUyNZPlHyn25MjN6-3lsPTgherpjVd-JisaFzHdd8bqmdGPp5pmy3hJ6AGDWK4wNYO-Is6QqncLOCIPpAwsYQ4fD1xpHOaYFFtlwfaGTUrWqKeygerrjIS4gVE8AEZH7tDch5z7g/s1024/LionelWedding2.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="324" data-original-width="1024" height="101" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6X1U_KsQcNjRvRRpfscCWK5FFF87CCAM3OJdOE-zsCqJUyNZPlHyn25MjN6-3lsPTgherpjVd-JisaFzHdd8bqmdGPp5pmy3hJ6AGDWK4wNYO-Is6QqncLOCIPpAwsYQ4fD1xpHOaYFFtlwfaGTUrWqKeygerrjIS4gVE8AEZH7tDch5z7g/s320/LionelWedding2.png" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqbLi6_R6TMi3yOaRhFkJdkLKveuyXWRChena8cCm7NVYvuXJc73zV6SdkhOXbCkbsSSjIKrhg0j4w4fhozjj3sAQo146YJ6DuWbg8qGruWLHhRYmdHa1oR7eI4GoT9OMYaVb_heyjQaTYxe7jLs2XUhM9ynXKReUsFuKxY8DC8F9Pm1YuFw/s715/LionelWedding.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="687" data-original-width="715" height="307" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqbLi6_R6TMi3yOaRhFkJdkLKveuyXWRChena8cCm7NVYvuXJc73zV6SdkhOXbCkbsSSjIKrhg0j4w4fhozjj3sAQo146YJ6DuWbg8qGruWLHhRYmdHa1oR7eI4GoT9OMYaVb_heyjQaTYxe7jLs2XUhM9ynXKReUsFuKxY8DC8F9Pm1YuFw/s320/LionelWedding.png" width="320" /></a></div><p>Born in Antwerp on 29 November 1338, Lionel was still only three years old when he married, and it therefore seems highly unlikely that he would have had any memories of his own wedding. On 5 May 1341, Edward III had issued a 'grant that Elizabeth, daughter and heir of William de Burgo, late earl of Ulster, deceased, who held of us in chief, shall marry our dearest son Lionel [<i>Leonello filio nostro carissimo</i>] ... when he is old enough', and evidently being three years and eight and a half months old was deemed 'old enough'. [<i>CPR 1340-43</i>, p. 187; <i>Foedera 1327-44</i>, p. 1159] Incidentally, Lionel's name was spelt Leonell or Lyonell in his own lifetime, revealing its contemporary pronunciation: as in Lionel Messi, not Lionel Ritchie.</p><p>As for Elizabeth de Burgh, she was almost six and a half years older than her bridegroom. According to the inquisition post mortem of her father William 'Donn' de Burgh, earl of Ulster, Elizabeth was born on or close to 6 July 1332: in early August 1333, she was said to be 'aged one year on the eve of St Thomas the Martyr last'. [<i>CIPM 1327-36</i>, no. 537] Her father, himself born on 17 September 1312, was not yet twenty when his daughter was born and not yet twenty-one when he died on 6 June 1333, and was a minor in the wardship of the king, his first cousin once removed Edward III, who in fact was two months younger than he was. Elizabeth was surely named in honour of her paternal grandmother Elizabeth de Clare (1295-1360), Lady de Burgh, Edward II's niece. The older Elizabeth mentioned her granddaughter, who was her principal heir, in her will of September 1355, but only thus: 'Item, I bequeath to Lady Elizabeth my [grand]daughter, countess of Ulster, all the debts which my son, her father, owed me on the day he died' (<i>It'm je devise a dame Elizabeth ma fille countesse Dulvestier tote la dette qe mon filz son piere me devoit le jour qil morust</i>). Ouchie.</p><p>Elizabeth was her father's sole heir and was his only child, or at least his only child who survived infancy. She alone was named as his heir in his inquisition post mortem. There is some evidence, however, that William de Burgh's widow Maud of Lancaster (c. 1310/12-1377) might have given to birth to posthumous twins. On 16 July 1338, there's a reference on the Patent Roll to 'Isabella, daughter and heir of William, late earl of Ulster'. [<i>CPR 1338-40</i>, p. 115] It is quite possible that this means Elizabeth, as Isabel(la) was a variant of the name and they were sometimes considered interchangeable, though it does seem that by this stage of the fourteenth century they were thought to be separate names, and every other reference to Elizabeth de Burgh that I've found calls her Elizabeth, not Isabella. And on 6 April 1340, Edward III granted the marriage of 'Margaret, daughter and heir of William de Burgh, earl of Ulster' to his sister and brother-in-law Eleanor of Woodstock and Reynald II of Guelders, to use for their second son Eduard (b. 1336). [<i>CPR 1338-40</i>, p. 445] This might, however, be a scribal error; it wasn't unusual for clerks to get names wrong sometimes. Assuming that these two girls ever did exist, they must have died young, and if Maud of Lancaster was pregnant when her husband died in 1333, the jurors at his IPM hadn't heard about it. Assuming that 'Margaret' was an error for Elizabeth, at some point between 6 April 1340 and 5 May 1341 Edward III changed his mind and decided that Elizabeth should marry his son rather than his nephew.</p><p>Elizabeth de Burgh was ten when she wed three-year-old Lionel. She was related to him via both her parents: via her father she was a great-great-granddaughter of Edward I, who was Lionel's great-grandfather, and via her mother Maud of Lancaster, she was a great-great-granddaughter of Henry III, also Lionel's great-great-grandfather. Via Maud of Lancaster, Elizabeth was related to pretty well everyone: Henry of Grosmont, first duke of Lancaster, was her uncle, and her first cousins included Henry IV's mother Blanche of Lancaster (b. 1342), Henry Percy (b. 1341) and Thomas Percy (b. c. 1343), earls of Northumberland and Worcester, John, Lord Mowbray (b. 1340), Henry, Lord Beaumont (b. 1339), and Richard Fitzalan, earl of Arundel (b. c. 1347) and his sisters Joan, countess of Hereford and Alice, countess of Kent. Elizabeth was the eldest grandchild of Henry of Lancaster, earl of Lancaster and Leicester, who died in 1345 when she was thirteen, and her much younger half-sister was Maud Ufford (b. late 1345 or early 1346), who married Thomas de Vere, earl of Oxford (d. 1371) and was the mother of Richard II's 'favourite' Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford (1362-92). Elizabeth's namesake great-aunt Elizabeth de Burgh, one of the many sisters of her grandfather John de Burgh (d. 1313), was queen consort of Scotland as the wife of Robert Bruce, and was the mother of David II, king of Scotland (1324-71). Isabella of France was, I assume, the person responsible for granting William de Burgh's marriage rights to her uncle Henry of Lancaster, earl of Lancaster and Leicester, at the start of her son Edward III's reign on 3 February 1327. [<i>CPR 1327-30</i>, p. 8] Sometime that year William married Maud, third of Henry's six daughters, who was close to his own age, so this was a wedding of two people both aged about fourteen or fifteen at the time. Their daughter Elizabeth was born five years after their wedding.</p><p>According to the <a href="https://fmg.ac/Projects/MedLands/CONTENTS.htm" target="_blank">Medieval Lands</a> project on the <a href="https://fmg.ac/" target="_blank">Foundation for Medieval Genealogy</a> site, Lionel and Elizabeth had another wedding ceremony at Reading Abbey on 9 September 1342 three weeks after they married in the Tower, but no primary source is cited, so I can't confirm this. Edward III was nowhere near Reading in September 1342, spending all that month in Sandwich and Eastry in Kent. By contrast, he was certainly at the Tower of London on 15 August 1342. </p><p>Elizabeth de Burgh, countess of Ulster and later duchess of Clarence, gave birth to her only child, Philippa of Clarence, countess of March and Ulster, on 16 August 1355. Rather astonishingly, that was the day after her and Lionel's thirteenth wedding anniversary, and Lionel was still only sixteen when his daughter was born (Elizabeth was twenty-three). I doubt it's a coincidence that Philippa was born thirty-seven weeks after her father's sixteenth birthday on 29 November 1354. The Medieval Lands site states that the marriage was consummated in 1352, which to be honest I find a bit of a bizarre thing to claim, as I'm not sure where something like that would be recorded. Lionel turned fourteen on 29 November 1352, and for sure some noble and royal boys were allowed to consummate their marriages at fourteen, but the only way we know that is because a pregnancy resulted. To give an example, Lionel of Antwerp and Elizabeth de Burgh's grandson Roger Mortimer, fourth earl of March, was born on 11 April 1374, and his and Alianore Holland's daughter Anne Mortimer, countess of Cambridge, was born on 27 December 1388.</p><p>Neither of the child-couple who married in August 1342 lived long lives. Elizabeth de Burgh died on 10 December 1363 at the age of thirty-one, and Lionel of Antwerp died in Italy on 17 October 1368 a few weeks short of his thirtieth birthday, having been briefly married a second wife, the Italian noblewoman Violante Visconti. Elizabeth was outlived by her mother Maud of Lancaster, dowager countess of Ulster, who became a canoness after the death of her second husband Sir Ralph Ufford and died on 5 May 1377, a few weeks before her kinsman, Lionel's father Edward III. The couple's daughter and heir Philippa of Clarence gave birth to her eldest child Elizabeth Mortimer in February 1371 when she was fifteen and a half, and if Lionel had still been alive then, he would have become a grandfather at just thirty-two years old. If he'd still been alive at the end of 1388, when Anne Mortimer was born, he would have become a great-grandfather a month after he turned fifty.</p>Kathryn Warnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00397714441908100576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19545049.post-59990722426203983252022-08-13T08:13:00.000+01:002023-01-15T13:27:07.056+00:00No, Isabella of France Was Not a 'Pawn'<div>There's a tendency among a few modern writers of history to describe medieval women, or at least certain medieval women, as 'pawns' because their marriages were arranged. Anne Neville, queen of Richard III, is one, though people inevitably fail to point out that her own father was himself married to her mother when he was six and she was eight.</div><div><br /></div>The presenter of a BBC documentary a few years ago featuring Edward II's queen Isabella of France moaned that Isabella was 'little more than a pawn in the power-play between England and France', and 'little more than a decorative accessory to a diplomatic alliance'. Isabella herself would have laughed to scorn the notion that she was a pawn in a power game played by men that had nothing to do with her, and as the daughter of the king of France and the queen regnant of Navarre, there was no one else in Europe she'd rather have married than the king of England (except perhaps the king of Castile and Leon). Do people honestly think she'd have preferred to marry Roger Mortimer, a baron of middling rank? She'd have considered that a deadly insult! Edward II himself was betrothed for the first time at the age of five and was subsequently betrothed to another three girls or young women, the last of whom was Isabella, by the time he was fourteen. No one would dream of whining that he was 'a pawn' or a 'decorative accessory'.<div><br />Let's take a look at how Isabella herself viewed royal marriages. She purchased the marriage of twelve-year-old Philippa of Hainault from Philippa's father Willem, count of Hainault and Holland, in August 1326, in exchange for Willem providing troops and ships for Isabella's invasion of England. The third daughter of a mere count was hardly a great match for Isabella's son Edward III, son of a king and grandson of two more kings. As for poor Philippa, she got to be exchanged for ships and mercenaries. Is it possible to have a less romantic start to a marriage, albeit one that ended up being very close and loving? It's hardly any wonder that, later in life, Philippa herself told the chronicler Jean Froissart that Edward III chose her as his future wife from among her sisters. Froissart repeated this pleasant little tale uncritically as though it were gospel truth, as have numerous later writers, but it's nonsense on stilts, and represents Queen Philippa decades later looking back on her early life through rose-coloured spectacles. Philippa's older two sisters Margaretha and Johanna had both married in February 1324 - a double wedding in Cologne with two German bridegrooms, Ludwig of Bavaria and Wilhelm of J[]lich - and the only other Hainault sister alive in the summer of 1326, Isabella, was little more than a toddler at the time. She was obviously far less suitable as a bride for the nearly fourteen-year-old Edward of Windsor than twelve-year-old Philippa was, but if anything had happened to Philippa before her and Edward's wedding, he would indeed have married Isabella instead. If anything had happened to both Hainault sisters, the replacement would have been their cousin [], daughter of the count of Hainault's younger brother Jehan de Beaumont. If anything had happened to Edward III before he married Philippa, she would have married his younger brother John of Eltham instead. To imagine that the whims and choices of adolescents had anything to do with power politics at this level, and with the supremely hard-headed and unromantic negotiations between the queen of England and the count of Hainault, is frankly absurd.</div><div><br /></div><div>When Isabella negotiated a peace treaty with Robert Bruce, king of Scotland, in 1328, she married off her youngest child Joan of the Tower, who had just turned seven, to Robert's four-year-old son and heir David, to seal the settlement between the two kingdoms. At just seven, Joan was sent to live in a country she'd been raised to think of as her country's enemy; yet the people who a few chapters earlier in their books were wailing about Isabella's suffering at being betrothed to Edward at age three or so and being sent to live in England at age twelve remain silent on Joan's feelings. Instead, Isabella is lauded for being so amazing as to make a peace treaty with Scotland.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Does any of this make Isabella sound even remotely like a woman with a romantic view of royal marriages, who'd have whined to her father 'But I don't love Edward, it's not faaaaaaaaaaair'? I really do not understand why Isabella of France is treated as so incredibly special and unique that things which were entirely normal in her world, and happened to every royal child, make so many modern writers froth with indignation when they happened to her, or why the woes of her two daughters, whose marriages were arguably more troubled and unhappy than hers, are completely ignored by people who drone on and on about Isabella's terrible suffering.</div>Kathryn Warnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00397714441908100576noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19545049.post-20896230362579042572022-07-07T14:16:00.001+01:002023-01-15T13:27:05.691+00:00Book Giveaway: Fourteenth-Century London<p>My new book, <i>London: A Fourteenth-Century City and Its People</i>, is out now! It's a social history of the city and its inhabitants from 1300 to 1350, with dozens of short chapters on numerous aspects of life, such as Health, Houses, Food, Misadventure, Gardens. Privies, Belongings, Assault, Murder, and many others.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVc1guKm_e1uWVOzW5cpg4V3QoCRuygk_WE-kL-h0hWyQ0UY5AUk08xmF8TjYJ5FWJ0F1n-rZ3a6kePSRlQzyKTLsHSRN7Xrr4QHqZHnzbaQ6tb9YC1ppG33dWx21g0pDVrJVJqJHptZMM8HT998_UciJhPk4xBhVfWCT4nZ_i1rFXxb467g/s624/Screenshot%202022-07-06%20072837.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="624" data-original-width="430" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVc1guKm_e1uWVOzW5cpg4V3QoCRuygk_WE-kL-h0hWyQ0UY5AUk08xmF8TjYJ5FWJ0F1n-rZ3a6kePSRlQzyKTLsHSRN7Xrr4QHqZHnzbaQ6tb9YC1ppG33dWx21g0pDVrJVJqJHptZMM8HT998_UciJhPk4xBhVfWCT4nZ_i1rFXxb467g/s320/Screenshot%202022-07-06%20072837.png" width="221" /></a></div><p>If you lived in London in the fourteenth century and a physician diagnosed you with <i>tisik</i> or a <i>posteme</i>, what were you suffering from? What were <i>penitourtes,</i> <i>evecheping </i>and<i> deodand</i>? What jobs did women called <i>cambesteres.</i> <i>callesteres</i> and <i>frutesteres</i> do? If you were accused of being a <i>rorere</i> or a <i>pikere</i>, was this a good thing or not? What was the murder rate like in fourteenth-century London and what happened to criminals? What happened to the drunk and disorderly? How much would you have to pay to rent a house in London, and what would your accommodation be like? What did people do in their spare time? What did they eat and drink, and where? The answers to all these questions and hundreds more are in the book!</p><p>I have TWO free copies to give away to readers! You can live anywhere in the world, as long as you have a postal address I can send the book to. Please contact me with your email address or some other means of getting in touch with you, so I can notify the winners. You can either leave a comment here on the blog, on my <a href="https://www.facebook.com/EdwardofCaernarfon" target="_blank">Edward II Facebook page</a> or on my <a href="https://twitter.com/RoyneAlianore" target="_blank">Twitter page</a>, or you can email me at edwardofcaernarfon(at)yahoo(dot)com, or if we're friends on Facebook or follow each other on Twitter, you can message me there. Best of luck! Deadline is midnight BST on 20 July.</p>Kathryn Warnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00397714441908100576noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19545049.post-48542113882676764862022-05-08T13:44:00.000+01:002023-01-15T13:27:06.311+00:00Hugh Chastilon, Tutor of Edward II's Illegitimate Son Adam (d. 1322)<div><div>A few years ago, I <a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2009/07/in-which-i-fail-to-discover-any-new.html" target="_blank">wrote a blog post</a> about my frustration at being unable to find any information about Hugh Chastilon or Chastilloun, tutor of Edward II's illegitimate son Adam in 1322. On a recent visit to the National Archives, I looked at a bundle of documents (E 101/379/5) that relate to the <a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2022/04/huchon-despensers-great-hunting_18.html" target="_blank">1322 hunting expedition</a> of the teenaged Hugh 'Huchon' Despenser. As I wrote in that post, Huchon's own tutor was called Hugh Lulleford, and Lulleford accompanied his charge on the months-long hunting trip. At Barnard Castle on 14 September 1323, Lulleford acknowledged that he owed Edward II eleven pounds, five shillings and eleven pence; Edward II was himself at Barnard Castle at the time. Fifth on the list of Lulleford's six mainpernors is 'Hugh de Chastilon'. First on the list is Thomas Borhunt(e), one of the men who accompanied Huchon Despenser on his hunting adventure, and the third name is 'Simon de Redinge', a sergeant-at-arms of the royal household who would be executed alongside Huchon's father Hugh Despenser the Younger in Hereford on 24 November 1326. The names of the other three men, whose identities I don't know, are Robert de Dumbelton, Thomas de Aldone, and William Bacoun. Another hand has added the information that Hugh Lulleford paid the king the money he owed him on 14 November 1323, only slightly late; he was due to pay it around the feast of All Saints (1 November) or the feast of St Martin (11 November).</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjonjvYL5wHD5KbKW-l008Ci6qnp9xbBfrNo4V2WIUdQgh5G-6_xYe2OZB-vjddoxo_9KfNHvwX-ObRrl1oI1p0oHMWtuBZpjiLWP7rADDHAETaSKo2LUTAD9PfGAJ6pVqxjqCGVb8NY1bVcrLnQibxi9pHwmuN1lT1eb1ekX-a9WfbxpRM6w/s828/Screenshot%202022-05-07%20132055.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="828" data-original-width="520" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjonjvYL5wHD5KbKW-l008Ci6qnp9xbBfrNo4V2WIUdQgh5G-6_xYe2OZB-vjddoxo_9KfNHvwX-ObRrl1oI1p0oHMWtuBZpjiLWP7rADDHAETaSKo2LUTAD9PfGAJ6pVqxjqCGVb8NY1bVcrLnQibxi9pHwmuN1lT1eb1ekX-a9WfbxpRM6w/s320/Screenshot%202022-05-07%20132055.png" width="201" /></a></div><br /><div>I think it's quite likely that Adam's tutor was the same man as the 'Hugh Castellon' who was appointed keeper of the executed Contrariant John, Lord Mowbray's manor of Kirkby Malzeard in Yorkshire on 20 September 1323, just days after the indenture of 14 September 1323 in which a Hugh Chastilon mainperned Hugh Lulleford's debt to the king. He may also be the 'Hugh Castellion' who was one of the eight mainpernors of John Mauduit, another Contrariant, sometime in 1322. [<i>Calendar of Fine Rolls 1319-27</i>, pp. 156, 240] It also seems very likely to me that Adam's tutor was the same man as the Hugh Chastilon who was one of Hugh Lulleford's mainpernors, almost exactly a year after Adam himself died, still only a teenager, during his father's disastrous last Scottish campaign of the late summer and autumn of 1322.</div><div><br /></div><div>That's all there is about Hugh Chastilo(u)n, and it's precious little, but at last I've found out something else about him, haha. I'm not sure if his connection to the Despensers means anything very much, as by 1322/23 it was probably pretty difficult for anyone at court not to be associated with them in some way. I'd never heard of Hugh Lulleford before, Huchon Despenser's tutor, and don't know what happened to him after 1326 or anything else about him, though the bundle of documents I looked at in the National Archives shows that he had a wife and a daughter, who are unnamed, and a nephew called Richard de Popleham. There's a list of items given to Lulleford and his family by Edward II, which included a belt of green cloth given to his daughter, and blue cloth, six ells of striped cloth and a jerkin worth three shillings and six pence given to his nephew. The total cost of all the items came to eleven pounds, five shillings and eleven pence, the amount that Lulleford gave back to the king.</div></div>Kathryn Warnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00397714441908100576noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19545049.post-83970630152108596092022-04-18T13:40:00.002+01:002023-01-15T13:27:07.376+00:00Huchon Despenser's Great Hunting Adventure, 1322 (part 2)<p>This is a continuation of my post yesterday, which is directly below this one, or can be found <a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2022/04/huchon-despensers-great-hunting.html" target="_blank">here</a>. I've just noticed that E 101/379/5, a bundle of documents I looked at in the National Archives recently, also relates to Huchon's hunting trip of 1322. Firstly, there's the Latin original of the letter I cited in the post, sent by Edward II to twenty-three sheriffs on 21 July 1322, telling them that Huchon would be travelling through their areas, hunting. Secondly, there's a bundle of letters and memoranda from some of the sheriffs informing the king of the numbers of deer Huchon and his crew had successfully hunted, which they had been ordered to salt and store in barrels until further orders. There's also a letter from Thomas Rous, sheriff of Warwickshire and Leicestershire, stating that while Huchon and his companions were staying in his jurisdiction he had paid out £11 and 4 shillings for their expenses and wages, and one from 'Amory la Souche' (or Aymer la Zouche), sheriff of Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire, who paid £14, 17s and 8d during their stay in his counties. The sheriff of Suffolk - and also of Norfolk, though Huchon didn't go there - was Sir John Howard ('Johan Houward'), who paid out £13 5s for Huchon's expenses, and who interests me because a) he was married to Edward II's second cousin Joan Cornwall, and b) he was an ancestor of the Howard dukes of Norfolk. The sheriff of London and Middlesex, or rather, one of them - there were always two sheriffs of London - was Richard Costantyn, though his letter is missing the total sum of expenses. There are other letters and memoranda from sheriffs of other counties too, and the letter from the sheriff of Essex, Sir Nicholas Engayne, says that he and Huchon had met at Waltham Abbey.</p><p>Below, the letters, indentures and memoranda.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhgJdrE60Qk9rRZAxEk8P0y6gyYbdryDGGdq5h8QWaO0dkWK5h8oQ5qQHdjovkQntSBiIb54z-MYqjuPAv0sMhgbXs2NxLerMv8zYHoZsXnbBNqRjcfS1bcKXX3sq5zFj7GXhxKUprhb1p7ZReXi6wjw68resJAt9ENIO7qboWrb75ZLkqLg/s4608/20220331_112112.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4608" data-original-width="3456" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhgJdrE60Qk9rRZAxEk8P0y6gyYbdryDGGdq5h8QWaO0dkWK5h8oQ5qQHdjovkQntSBiIb54z-MYqjuPAv0sMhgbXs2NxLerMv8zYHoZsXnbBNqRjcfS1bcKXX3sq5zFj7GXhxKUprhb1p7ZReXi6wjw68resJAt9ENIO7qboWrb75ZLkqLg/s320/20220331_112112.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><p>Then there are several memoranda which give the number of <i>deymes</i> or deer Huchon and his crew killed, and where:</p><div>- In the park of Kenilworth in Warwickshire, thirty.</div><div><br /></div><div>- In the forest of Leicester, in the jurisdiction of Robert Squyer, ten.</div><div><br /></div><div>- In the parks of Essex, Hertfordshire and Suffolk, whose keeper was William Marny, a total of sixty-seven. </div><div><br /></div><div>Presumably, there must have been more meat than that, but that's all that exists now. And finally, there's also a letter written by Huchon himself - well, written by a clerk in his name, one assumes - which begins "To all those who see or hear these present letters, Hugh the son of Sir Hugh Despenser the younger [<i>Hugh le fuiz mons' Hugh le Despenser le puisnez</i>], greetings in God."</div><div><br /></div><div>Below, Huchon's letter.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZK_p7qDCtzRZdmf3BUfG0i1gNdPwGcOALdXLnb3tjYr-t4cnuaXFJIBu5x7lOXN2fgkUtkrL99HXt38il7gydCk6cMpWqadT-TTuQLUHBVEdGBYaXjkXTBDlfPkdU8AEXSU9cL5XpRVMq-SXJeS2RYKItNV7n-e4_FSmvK1Y_vw7JBo2yWQ/s4608/20220331_112309.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3456" data-original-width="4608" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZK_p7qDCtzRZdmf3BUfG0i1gNdPwGcOALdXLnb3tjYr-t4cnuaXFJIBu5x7lOXN2fgkUtkrL99HXt38il7gydCk6cMpWqadT-TTuQLUHBVEdGBYaXjkXTBDlfPkdU8AEXSU9cL5XpRVMq-SXJeS2RYKItNV7n-e4_FSmvK1Y_vw7JBo2yWQ/s320/20220331_112309.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div>Huchon states in the letter that he had received £9 from Simon Chamberleyn, sheriff of Lincolnshire, "for my expenses and the expenses of my retinue" from 17 to 25 October 1322, which is exactly the same date range given by Edward II in a letter of 10 November 1322 (see last post) for Huchon's sojourn in the county. It gives the same names of his nine companions as the king's letter of 21 July on the Close Roll, just with the usual variations in spelling, and repeats the same wages as the royal letter, e.g. 7½d per day for the huntsman, 4½d for the berners, and so on. The letter also makes clear that Huchon, despite his youth, already had his own seal, and he dated the letter from Nettleham, a village in Lincolnshire which was a manor of the bishops of Lincoln, on 25 October (his father Hugh the Younger and great-uncle Edward II were seventy miles away in York at the time).</div><div><br /></div><div>Also included in this bundle of documents is one relating to Huchon Despenser's <i>magister </i>Hugh de Lulleford or Lullesford, about whom I know nothing and had never even heard of before, though he was married with a daughter, and also had a nephew called Richard Popleham. Edward II bought five and a half ells of green cloth for Lulleford's unnamed daughter and blue cloth for Richard, six ells of striped cloth for him on another occasion, a jerkin (<i>corset</i>) for 3s 10d, and several pairs of shoes.</div>Kathryn Warnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00397714441908100576noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19545049.post-23553467636227189532022-04-17T11:00:00.001+01:002023-01-15T13:27:05.770+00:00Huchon Despenser's Great Hunting Adventure, 1322<p><a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2015/03/hugh-lord-despenser-c-1309-1349.html" target="_blank">Hugh 'Huchon' Despenser</a>, born in 1308 or 1309, went hunting between July and October 1322, and a large roll of his expenses survives in the National Archives (E 101/379/4). The roll refers to Huchon throughout as <i>le seignour</i>, 'the lord'; although he was only an adolescent, just thirteen or fourteen, he was the eldest great-grandchild of Edward I, grandson of the earls of Gloucester (Gilbert 'the Red' de Clare, d. 1295) and Winchester, and the eldest son and heir of the lord of Glamorgan. Huchon is also called <i>Hughe le Despenser le juvene</i>, 'the young', in the roll. Confusingly, he bore the same name as his grandfather Hugh Despenser the Elder (b. 1261), who had been made earl of Winchester earlier in 1322, and his father Hugh Despenser the Younger (b. late 1280s). The National Archives <a href="https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C4517483" target="_blank">identifies</a> the person in the roll as Hugh the Younger, but that it was in fact Hugh's eldest son is apparent from an entry on the Close Roll dated 21 July 1322, where Edward II sent letters to the sheriffs of no fewer than twenty-three counties, informing them that he was sending "Hugh son of Hugh le Despenser the Younger...to take fat venison of this season in the king's forests, chases and parks". [<i>Calendar of Close Rolls 1318-23</i>, p. 577; <i>Calendar of Patent Rolls 1321-24</i>, p. 184] Furthermore, it's highly doubtful that Hugh the Younger, royal chamberlain and favourite, and the man really in charge of the kingdom in and after 1322, would have taken three months away from court to go hunting. </p><p>The start of the expense roll states that Huchon would be going, in the original spelling, to "the counties of Cantebrigg [Cambridge], Huntingdon, Suff[olk], Essex, Hertford, Middelsex, Oxenford, Bokingham, Warwyk, Leycestre, Nottingham and Nicol [Lincoln]". Another royal letter sent on 10 November 1322 states that Huchon and companions hunted in Lincolnshire from 17 to 25 October, and from the roll it is clear that the expedition began in the Huntingdon/Kimbolton area on Monday 26 July 1322. [<i>Calendar of Close Rolls 1318-23</i>, p. 609] On 9 and 10 August, Huchon was near Barnwell, a manor which belonged to his grandfather the earl of Winchester, though the clerk who made up the account often forgot to add his location.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgClxuD27chQhys9BVzR_782LDimarFO1FKgLRGzkZVlols74Paq8wnX7EzfIuE741EcO_34WZusRt6BRUXPst6eIlJbQJ8TcjeoqguRlyHmbJSj6LMCSSbT8F1-GOZMs-KvXThusm-MPyGGUPRoQ-znlZvQIG0aOcVTRxLqdmpaNJmAyo5DA/s4608/20220331_110156.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4608" data-original-width="3456" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgClxuD27chQhys9BVzR_782LDimarFO1FKgLRGzkZVlols74Paq8wnX7EzfIuE741EcO_34WZusRt6BRUXPst6eIlJbQJ8TcjeoqguRlyHmbJSj6LMCSSbT8F1-GOZMs-KvXThusm-MPyGGUPRoQ-znlZvQIG0aOcVTRxLqdmpaNJmAyo5DA/s320/20220331_110156.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><p>Huchon was accompanied by nine men and a number of dogs: twelve greyhounds, five bercelets, thirty-four buckhounds, and eight harriers. His nine companions' names were Thomas Borhunt (a huntsman), Richard Wygemore (a larderer, i.e. in charge of storing the meat), John Abbot, Peter Bul (these two were both berners, i.e. in charge of the hounds), John Suthwyk, Stephen Woxbrigg (these two were both ventrers, which I think means in charge of the carthorses carrying the meat, but I might be wrong on that), Hugh Preest, John Bacun (these two were both berceleters, in charge of the bercelets), and Richard Herlyngton (in charge of the harriers). There are also several references to <i>garsones</i>, literally 'boys', apparently some other young men who were temporarily helping out in some way. One 'boy' was given 3d for coming to see Huchon on behalf of the sheriff of Middlesex. There's one reference on 3 August 1322 to a man who was paid three shillings because he 'took care of the lord', but I can't make out his job title. I assume it's either sergeant or surgeon, though the spelling is weird. The roll mentions some of the same men and their job titles as Edward II's letter of 21 July recorded on the Close Roll, which I somehow find very pleasing, and two other men are named as accompanying Huchon as well: his<i> magister</i> or tutor Hugh de Lulleford, and his <i>valet</i>, i.e. attendant, Gilbert le Noreys. These two men appear on the expense roll but not in Edward II's letter.</p><p>Edward told all the sheriffs to receive any venison taken by Huchon and his crew, "and to cause it to be put in barrels and salted, and kept until further orders". Eight horses appear in the roll of expenses, though they aren't, unlike the dogs, specifically mentioned in Edward's letters. It cost between 10d and 12d a day to provide hay for them, plus another 20d to 24d daily for four bushels of oats, and 4d to 8d for straw for their bedding. I presume at least some of these eight horses were packhorses to carry the meat, though Huchon was certainly on horseback. His courser is mentioned once and Huchon received a mark (thirteen shillings and four pence) for a new saddle for the animal from his great-uncle the king, and on another occasion 'the lord's palfrey' is mentioned as well. At least six of his companions appear to have been on foot, as six pairs of shoes and six pairs of boots were bought for them.</p><p>Most of the account details the food and drink consumed during the trip, which in itself is rather fascinating - to see how the men's diet varied day by day, and how much things cost - though it is entirely unilluminating as regards the game they hunted and how much venison they took. Every day, without fail, the company got through two and a half or three gallons (9.5 to 11.4 litres) of wine - three gallons cost 12d - twelve or fourteen gallons (45.6 to 53.2 litres) of ale, and between two and a half and three shillings' (30d to 36d) worth of bread. You could buy a loaf of the cheapest bread for a quarter of a penny, though one assumes that Huchon Despenser, as a partly royal nobleman, was eating bread of a far higher quality than that. The twelve gallons of ale consumed daily cost 24d, i.e. 2d per gallon, and you could always buy a gallon of ale for 1d in the 1320s, so obviously this was also very high-quality stuff and in fact is described as 'good ale' on at least one occasion in the roll. To me this seems like a staggeringly large amount of alcohol for a small group of people to consume every single day, even if we assume that it was weak and watered down and with a pretty low alcoholic content.</p><p>The food consumed, at least by Huchon if perhaps not by his more lowly companions, was flavoured with saffron (<i>safferan</i>), which cost a pricy 4d per ounce and was purchased at least twice during the expedition. Every day, wax candles (<i>chandeyl de cyer</i>) were bought for 2½d or 3d and were preferred over the much cheaper but much less nice tallow candles, so again we see that Huchon Despenser wasn't being forced to slum it but was living in the luxury to which he must have been accustomed, given his high rank. To put 3d a day into perspective, that was more than most people in England earned at the time, so it was heck of a lot of money to spend on candles, especially considering that the hours of daylight in late July and August are long. On 7 August, 2½d was spent on 'the lord's cresset', i.e. a lighted torch or other light of some kind set in a container and mounted on a pole.</p><p>Below, a typical membrane of the document.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEha54yCexgh8AVzEuAJsO9EtCad1Pk50gkbzqs88o-IBN0npzndVYA8eZm59db2YgQBHmKVG28R957FIqIyHCybUD4jYNBcqgXDMdgLAnY5-GxjDpADodDvTrM0UbFvV8rSB88EjMOJ-wsB-W6WOcdtk11NYHkp9VzODlUpxcDg0WdffZ7XyQ/s943/Screenshot%202022-04-15%20122237.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="943" data-original-width="792" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEha54yCexgh8AVzEuAJsO9EtCad1Pk50gkbzqs88o-IBN0npzndVYA8eZm59db2YgQBHmKVG28R957FIqIyHCybUD4jYNBcqgXDMdgLAnY5-GxjDpADodDvTrM0UbFvV8rSB88EjMOJ-wsB-W6WOcdtk11NYHkp9VzODlUpxcDg0WdffZ7XyQ/s320/Screenshot%202022-04-15%20122237.png" width="269" /></a></div><p>The men ate a lot of fish, especially salmon, herring, roach, pike and eels, and also a lot of stockfish, i.e. dried unsalted fish. S<i>tokfissh(e)</i>, incidentally, is a word that always appears in English in Edward II's accounts, which were kept in Anglo-Norman or Latin; this particular roll is in Anglo-Norman. The quantity of herring is usually given as 'half a hundred' (<i>demy C de haring</i>). They ate pottage, i.e. thick soup or broth, pretty well every day, but also meat sometimes: suckling pig is mentioned several times, as is <i>grosse char</i>, literally 'big meat' and meaning meat from animals other than poultry or game. Other food items and condiments mentioned include young pigeons (<i>columbeux</i>), chickens and young chickens, geese, a pheasant on two occasions (which cost 8d both times), a rabbit on two occasions (which cost 4d and 5½d), eggs, onions (only mentioned once), half a gallon of vinegar, 'white grease', fennel, galingale powder, sauce (which kind(s) was/were not specified), endless references to freshwater fish, butter (<i>bure</i>), milk (<i>leet</i>), almonds, and rice (<i>rys</i>). The almonds and rice are always mentioned together, and it was always two pounds of almonds and one of rice or a pound of almonds and half a pound of rice. Sugar (<i>sugre</i>) is mentioned once and cost 3½d per quarter.</p><p>There is absolutely no information in the roll about accommodation, so I have no idea where they slept every night, or who cooked all the food mentioned in the roll, or where all the food and drink came from; most of it was fresh, so presumably arrangements were in place to transport it regularly to wherever Huchon might be at the time. When Huchon was near Barnwell, I assume he stayed at his grandfather Hugh Despenser the Elder's manor-house there, and there was a castle at Kimbolton where his great-uncle Edward II sometimes stayed. There are a couple of payments of 3d to a <i>lavender</i>, i.e. a launderer/laundress. As this was almost certainly a woman, she did not accompany the men on their travels, but would have been a local woman hired to wash their clothes. Anyway, that's about all the information I've been able to extract from the document, and will finish this post by saying that I bet it was all massive fun for an adolescent boy at the start of his teens.</p><p>EDITED TO ADD, 18 April: there's now a continuation of this post, <a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2022/04/huchon-despensers-great-hunting_18.html" target="_blank">here</a>.</p>Kathryn Warnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00397714441908100576noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19545049.post-8571861723104720242022-03-12T18:54:00.002+00:002023-01-15T13:27:05.481+00:00Edward II Podcast, and Boroughbridge Talk<p>I'm grateful to the Tudors Dynasty podcast for inviting me on to talk about Edward II recently! Steph Stohrer did a great interview with me and was absolutely delightful to talk to.</p><p>So if you're interested in listening to me talking about Edward for an hour, it's on the Tudors Dynasty Podcast page, <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tudors-dynasty-podcast/id1308062825?i=1000552809036" target="_blank">here</a>, and on YouTube, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dEP5F8Mzco" target="_blank">here</a>.</p><p>And if you're anywhere near the village of Kirk Hammerton in Yorkshire this coming Monday, 14 March 2022, I'm giving a talk about the battle of Boroughbridge, which took place on 16 March 1322. Tickets cost £3.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjnZYDNNRYL0Ql_K4D2z0P6aTfDP2BCLbZdVNdpJxshhx8P6ICuW_HfCdWasPyZRzgH6h8bXGIBZaGBhqsRFsaj-RtbbuhWbmRiKRnVsiA6KEPXWm5HjKktWMclmQftwXBhPdPOb29rXbzrp6TgxJwOvB1wf35Miy56yGN6Q02N4uYyFLk3AA=s950" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="713" data-original-width="950" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjnZYDNNRYL0Ql_K4D2z0P6aTfDP2BCLbZdVNdpJxshhx8P6ICuW_HfCdWasPyZRzgH6h8bXGIBZaGBhqsRFsaj-RtbbuhWbmRiKRnVsiA6KEPXWm5HjKktWMclmQftwXBhPdPOb29rXbzrp6TgxJwOvB1wf35Miy56yGN6Q02N4uYyFLk3AA=s320" width="320" /></a></div>Kathryn Warnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00397714441908100576noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19545049.post-62600605362074202162022-03-02T13:36:00.002+00:002023-01-15T13:28:32.796+00:00Richard Councedieu (fl. 1310-39), Sailor and Edward II's Friend<div>Richard Councedieu was a sailor active between 1310 and 1339 who knew Edward II personally. His unusual last name is French: <i>dieu</i> means God, and <i>counce</i> means 'begin' in Anglo-Norman, i.e. <i>commence </i>in modern French, so Councedieu means something like 'may God begin (it)'. Fourteenth-century clerks spelt the name in a variety of different ways, including Komsedeu, Comsedieu, Cumsedeu, and Concedeu.</div><div><br /></div><div>Richard originally came from Sandwich in Kent, though by 1319, and surely well before, had settled in London. A subsidy roll of that year shows that he lived in Tower ward, where his name is recorded in Latin as Ricardo Counsedieu. [1] It is apparent from Richard's appearances in the extant Coroners' Rolls of London that he lived in the parish of St Dunstan by the Tower (later called St Dunstan in the East), near one wharf called 'St Laurence's wharf' and another which belonged to a William Box, on or close to the street now called Lower Thames Street. [2] In March 1310, 'Richard Consedeu of Sandwich' was the captain of a ship called the <i>Marie</i> of Westminster, and as he had risen to be a ship's captain must have been at least in his twenties then, perhaps older. In March 1311, as captain of the <i>Marie</i>, Richard was paid to "ferry the earl of Cornwall [Piers Gaveston] across the Forth at Queensferry." [3] Adam Councedieu, who must surely have been Richard's son (or perhaps his brother?) and was known by the diminutive Adecok, was also a sailor, and in 1325/26 was a crew member of a ship called the <i>Rodecok. </i>The <i>Rodecok</i>'s<i> </i>captain was Jack Black, and other crew members were Cock atte Wose and Hick atte Wose. [4]</div><div><br /></div><div>At an unknown date, Richard Councedieu married a woman called Rohese - possibly Adam's mother? - and on 29 October 1324, he received a very generous gift of ten marks (£6.66) from Edward II "because he was loyally devoted to Rohese his wife". [5] This is one of my absolute favourite things that I've ever found in Edward's chamber accounts, especially as the entry makes clear that Richard was actually in the king's bedchamber (<i>couche chambre</i>) in the Tower of London when he received this money. This was just days after Edward II left the Tower and hired a man to sail him across the Thames to his new house, La Rosere, where he <a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2021/02/edward-iis-secret-female-lover-october.html" target="_blank">"secretly took his pleasure" </a>with an unknown woman. I wonder if Edward was feeling really horny at the time and hit on Richard, who managed to wriggle out of going to bed with the king on the grounds that he was married and didn't want to cheat on his wife. Whatever the reason, Edward II was obviously deeply amused, or was extremely pleased with Richard Councedieu, because ten marks, to a man who earned six pence a day - ships' captains earned six pence and crew-members three pence - was a good few months' wages. A few months later, Richard was present on another occasion when Edward went to bed. [6]</div><div><br /></div><div>In early July 1326, Richard sailed Edward II from Burgundy, the king's cottage near Westminster Abbey, to Byfleet in Surrey (<i>paie a Richard Councedieu marin[er] le Roi q' ala oue le Roi de Burgoyne a Byfleet</i>). Edward went swimming in the river at Byfleet on that day, or, as his chamber account puts it, <i>voleit iewer par ewe</i>, literally "wanted to play by water". [7] A few weeks later, now captain of the royal ship the <i>Valence</i> - which must have been named after Edward II's kinsman Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke (d. 1324) or his father William (d. 1296) - Richard 'Komsedeu' took part in Edward's <a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2021/08/edward-iis-attacks-on-normandy-and.html" target="_blank">curious assault on Normandy</a> and the French fleet. [8] A few months earlier, Richard had been one of the sailors granted protection to go with Edward II to France when Edward had to pay homage for his French lands to Charles IV (ultimately Edward sent his son instead), along with Richard 'Hick' atte Wose, crew-mate of Adam 'Adecok' Councedieu, Richard's son or brother. [9]</div><div><br /></div><div>Below, Richard Councedieu in Edward II's accounts; the top one is his gift of ten marks for being loyal to his wife, and the second one is his sailing Edward to Byfleet.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiDQWFiJcfUbzh8byVtezRcCvTuYbDXl_KNI6bhoA5_ewFX4UZiTHQsNhUO-beqIXYTdkAM-PhU5bFr1nSUWmW98BvKI5e9OjbnLCgfMNdbIgbkpr5u-wDy32O9Fkzhqn-iEGCuQ5u5IG70T8mJWn_NUhtWHtpK2N6Ephn5fypVXE-zq7RROg=s1150" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="1150" height="137" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiDQWFiJcfUbzh8byVtezRcCvTuYbDXl_KNI6bhoA5_ewFX4UZiTHQsNhUO-beqIXYTdkAM-PhU5bFr1nSUWmW98BvKI5e9OjbnLCgfMNdbIgbkpr5u-wDy32O9Fkzhqn-iEGCuQ5u5IG70T8mJWn_NUhtWHtpK2N6Ephn5fypVXE-zq7RROg=s320" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiDrgb02KoNRZ2JJ36oHDJYDLw3H9_C1D4PlqzvDEAnDCUDECIKN9bArLqddLVgXHIDJtDYH4mxa3AlmkCCdBhwqpBBEQ32aIRN7s-0nNH5YMLFfP7Ebttkz48HC5maC5gHgnRsBrbAmbM3O18c8JTc9vzxngg06wNvPeQGfpOtsxKbUHzlqg=s1403" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="184" data-original-width="1403" height="42" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiDrgb02KoNRZ2JJ36oHDJYDLw3H9_C1D4PlqzvDEAnDCUDECIKN9bArLqddLVgXHIDJtDYH4mxa3AlmkCCdBhwqpBBEQ32aIRN7s-0nNH5YMLFfP7Ebttkz48HC5maC5gHgnRsBrbAmbM3O18c8JTc9vzxngg06wNvPeQGfpOtsxKbUHzlqg=s320" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div>On 3 May 1336, there's a reference on the Patent Roll which states that Edward III had ordered the monks of Westminster Abbey to provide Richard with "sustenance for his life", as very often happened with retired royal servants. [10] He was still living in the parish of St Dunstan by the Tower in December 1339, however, when he was questioned about the drowning of Peter Skomakere in the Thames near Richard's home (Peter was drunk one Sunday evening and fell into the river). [11] That's the last reference I can find to Richard Councedieu, sailor from Sandwich and resident of London who was close enough to Edward II to be allowed into his bedchamber.</div><div><br /></div><div><u><b>Sources</b></u></div><div><br /></div><div>1) Two Early London Subsidy Rolls, available on British History Online: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/early-london-subsidy-rolls.</div><div>2) <i>Calendar of Coroners Rolls of the City of London 1300-1378</i>, ed. R.R. Sharpe, pp. 177, 199-200, 217, 245.</div><div>3) <i>Calendar of Patent Rolls 1307-13</i>, p. 210;<i> Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland</i>, vol. 5 (Supplementary), no. 562.</div><div>4) Society of Antiquaries of London Manuscript 122, pp. 18, 61; various entries in The National Archives E 101/380/4.</div><div>5) E 101/280/4, fo. 10r.</div><div>6) E 101/380/4, fo. 30r.</div><div>7) SAL MS 122, p. 69.</div><div>8) <i>CPR 1324-27</i>, p. 300.</div><div>9) <i>CPR 1324-27</i>, p. 168.</div><div>10) <i>CPR 1334-38</i>, p. 261.</div><div>11) <i>Coroners Rolls of London</i>, p. 245.</div>Kathryn Warnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00397714441908100576noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19545049.post-44579384777123115562022-02-27T11:33:00.000+00:002023-01-15T13:30:41.784+00:00Secrets of the Royal Palaces, Episode 8<p>The eighth and final episode of <i>Secrets of the Royal Palaces </i>was shown on Channel 5 in the UK in the evening of Saturday 26 February, and featured, among much else, Kate Williams talking about Isabella of France and Edward II. Oh dear lord. Where even to start.</p><p>The programme begins with a voiceover stating that at Windsor Castle, we will discover "one of England's most ruthless queens", meaning Isabella of France, then we hear Kate Williams claiming "Legend has it that Isabella killed him herself by pushing a red-hot poker up his bottom. What a brutal way to die."</p><p>How unutterably, unbearably stupid. Nobody has ever, in the fourteenth century or at any point in the 700 years since, accused Isabella of personally torturing her husband to death by inserting a burning hot metal implement inside him. What 'legend' says she did? That's a flat-out lie; a stupid, easily disproved, sensationalist lie.</p><p>It's basically certain that on the night of 21 September 1327 Isabella was in Lincoln, where her and Edward II's son Edward III (not yet fifteen years old) was holding parliament, when her husband was supposedly murdered at Berkeley Castle. Lincoln is 160 miles from Berkeley. There is not one single shred of evidence that puts Isabella anywhere near Berkeley Castle at any point in 1327.</p><p>As I've pointed out on numerous occasions, and Ian Mortimer has pointed out on numerous occasions, and other fourteenth-century specialists have pointed out on numerous occasions, it is, again, all but certain that the story of Edward II being murdered by red-hot poker is a myth. </p><p>At thirty-three minutes into the programme, we see an image on screen that says "Isabella, the She-Wolf". Because obviously. Because that stupid hateful name, given to Isabella by the poet Thomas Gray in 1757, 399 years after her death, is never ever going to die, is it. </p><p>"Edward's love for Piers means he snubs his wife." Having stated two seconds earlier that Isabella was *twelve* years old. Because obviously it would have been far better for a man in his twenties to fawn all over a girl who was barely pubescent.</p><p>"He gives Piers half her dowry of jewels." Of course, the tedious old tale invented by Agnes Strickland in the nineteenth century, endlessly repeated by lemmings who can't be bothered to look at primary sources and check that this story is nonsense.</p><p>"Soon Edward is back on the prowl for other men" after the barons "bump Piers off". Odd way of talking about Edward's relationships with men, as though he was some kind of predator. I'm pretty sure that wasn't the dynamic.</p><p>Edward "began showering titles and money on" Hugh Despenser the Younger. This is a frequently-repeated claim, and it's also untrue. Edward didn't give Hugh a single title. Hugh was lord of Glamorgan by right of his wife Eleanor de Clare, who inherited the lordship from her brother. His father was made earl of Winchester in 1322, but Hugh wasn't.</p><p>Isabella was "admired by everyone except her husband." So we'll just merrily skip over the decade and a half when they were happily and affectionately married then.</p><p>"Isabella starts her own affair with Roger Mortimer." Ah yes, the usual modern narrative of Isabella of France's life, where she's turned into this bored, sexually frustrated housewife who seeks revenge on her philandering husband in the most simplistic tit-for-tat way possible by taking a lover. All the complexities of the situation, the war against France, the Contrariant rebellion and its aftermath, Isabella as the mediator, intercessor and powerful politician that she so undoubtedly was, all of this is entirely ignored in favour of turning her into a character from a soap opera who apparently thinks "Right, I'll bring down a king for the first time in English history because he doesn't give me enough orgasms."</p><p>After the invasion of September 1326, we're told that "the queen storms to victory" over images of a battle, which is weird. What battle is that supposed to be?</p><p>"It's time for the She-Wolf to get her payback" when Isabella has Hugh Despenser executed. Can. We. Please. Stop. Using. That. Bloody. Word.</p><p>Edward abdicates, then we get the bit I mentioned above, "Legend has it that Isabella killed him herself by pushing a red-hot poker up his bottom. And the screams could be heard for miles around. What a brutal way to die." Told with a certain amount of relish, it seems, and Kate Williams was smiling at that point. Yes, a person being agonisingly raped to death really is madly hilarious, isn't it? I wonder if Williams would have smiled if it had been Isabella who had supposedly been murdered in such a vile fashion, or is it only funny when it happens to a gay or bi man? And yet again, the red-hot poker myth is repeated as though it's a certain fact.</p><p>"And that's why she was called the She-Wolf." So now we know. Isabella somehow teleported herself 160 miles to Berkeley Castle and murdered the man who was the father of her children, the man she'd been betrothed to since she was three years old, by insertion of a heated metal implement. That wouldn't make her a 'she-wolf' though, would it? It would make her an extremely sadistic, dangerous psychopath. Which I'm pretty sure Isabella actually wasn't. What an utterly bizarre way of portraying her, even in such an overly sensationalist programme.</p>Kathryn Warnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00397714441908100576noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19545049.post-28642909150291300612022-02-25T12:47:00.000+00:002023-01-15T13:27:05.878+00:00Names, Titles, Styles of Address, Letters in the Fourteenth Century (2)<p>I wrote <a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2007/06/titles-forms-of-address-names-letters.html" rel="nofollow">a post on this topic</a> all the way back in June 2007 (yowza, that's close to a decade and a half ago now!), and it's had an absolute ton of page views. I've decided it's time to write another one.</p><p>In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the children of kings, but nobody else, had the right to be called Lord and Lady from birth. Before his accession to the throne, Edward II was always known as Lord Edward, and after February 1301 was called 'Lord Edward, Prince of Wales' (<i>Dominus Edwardus Princeps Walliae</i> in Latin or (<i>Mon</i>)<i>sire Edward prince de Galles</i> in French), or often just 'the Prince' for short. He was never, however, called 'Prince Edward', an important distinction. Edward's wife Isabella, daughter of Philip IV, king of France and Joan I, queen of Navarre, was 'Lady Isabella' or more correctly 'my lady Isabella' (<i>ma dame Yzabel</i>) before she married Edward, and as his wife, was called 'Lady Isabella, queen of England'. A letter to Edward II from the bishop of Norwich and the earl of Richmond in the spring of 1325 talked of 'the queen of England, your consort, our lady' (<i>la royne Dengleterre, vostre compaigne, nostre dame</i>). It was also common to refer to Edward as 'our liege lord' and to Isabella as 'our liege lady'. </p><p>Edward's accounts from the year 1293/94, when he was nine years old, happen to survive. In them, he always appears as Lord Edward, while his Lancaster cousins, who stayed with him for a while, were referred to as 'Thomas and Henry the sons of Lord Edmund', i.e. Henry III's younger son Edmund, earl of Lancaster and Leicester. The Lancaster boys were grandsons of a king but sons of an earl, and so had no right to the title which their father had held from birth. The accounts of the joint household of Edward II's brother Henry (1268-74) and sister Eleanor (1269-98), and their cousin John of Brittany (1266-1334), son of Edward I's sister Beatrice, also survive for a few months when they were small children. Henry was always called <i>Dominus Henricus</i>, Eleanor was <i>Domina Alianora</i>, but John, grandson of King Henry III and son of Duke John II of Brittany, was simply <i>Johannis</i> or, rather amusingly, <i>Britonis</i>, meaning 'the Breton'. </p><p>The same applies to Edward's brother-in-law Jan of Brabant (1275-1312), who married Edward's sister Margaret in 1290 and was the son and heir of Duke Jan I of Brabant. A roll of expenses of Jan's household survives from an unknown date probably in the early 1290s, and he is simply called Jehan or Jehans in it. He hadn't yet been knighted, and was only the son-in-law of a king, not the son. By contrast, an indenture regarding the household of Edward I and Marguerite of France's first child Thomas of Brotherton, dated 7 January 1301, refers to the 'wardrobe of Lord Thomas the king's son', <i>garderobe domini Thome filii regis</i>. Thomas was then only seven months and six days old, but because he was the son of a king, the document calls him Lord Thomas. I assume it was the sixteenth century when the children of kings began to be known as Prince and Princess, and they certainly weren't in the fourteenth. Contrary to popular modern belief, Isabella of France was not a princess. That title was not yet given to the daughters of kings, and Isabella married Edward II after his accession to the throne and was never Princess of Wales.</p><p>It's interesting to note that Edward II has always been very closely associated with his birthplace in North Wales. In January 1330 a little over two years after his funeral, his friend William Melton, archbishop of York, referred to him as 'our liege lord Edward of Caernarfon' (<i>n're seign' liege Edward de Karnarvan</i>) in a letter to the mayor of London. Some of Edward's sisters are also known by their places of birth, Joan of Acre in particular, and also Elizabeth of Rhuddlan. Edward's half-brothers and his children were always known by their places of birth in their own lifetimes - e.g. Edmund of Woodstock, Eleanor of Woodstock, Joan of the Tower - as were his grandchildren, the twelve children of Edward III and Queen Philippa, e.g. Lionel of Antwerp, Margaret of Windsor, Edmund of Langley. With the exception of Richard of Bordeaux, however, and sometimes Henry of Bolingbroke, this custom wasn't carried on to Edward III's grandchildren, who instead were mostly known by their fathers' ducal titles: Philippa, Elizabeth and Katherine/Catalina of Lancaster, Philippa of Clarence, Humphrey and Anne of Gloucester, Constance of York, and so on. Elizabeth of Lancaster, countess of Huntingdon (1363-1425), the second daughter of John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster, almost always called herself 'Elizabeth Lancastre' without a <i>de</i> or 'of', as though it was her family name. I find it interesting that she continued to refer to herself this way throughout her long and apparently very happy third marriage to Sir John Cornwall, and did not use his surname. When attending their grandmother Queen Philippa's funeral in early 1370, Elizabeth and her older sister Philippa (b. 1360, later queen of Portugal) were called 'the two daughters of Lancaster'.</p><p>The future Edward III (b. 1312) was created earl of Chester at a few days old but was never made prince of Wales - the next time the title was used was for Edward III's eldest son Edward of Woodstock in 1343 - and it is incorrect to call him 'Prince Edward' or 'Edward the prince'. He and his brother John of Eltham (b. 1316) were called <i>Monsire Edward de Wyndesore</i> ('Lord Edward of Windsor', his birthplace) and <i>Monsire Johan Deltham</i>, or d'Eltham as it would be in modern French,<i> </i>during their father's reign. A letter to Edward II of 1325 refers to his and Isabella's daughters Eleanor of Woodstock (b. 1318) and Joan of the Tower (b. 1321) as <i>mes dames vos deus files</i>, 'my ladies, your two daughters', and in Edward's accounts John of Eltham appears as <i>Monsire Johan Deltham fuiz le Roi</i>, 'son of the king'. Isabella appears in her husband's accounts as <i>ma dame la roigne </i>or 'my lady the queen', and in royal documents from the reigns of Edward I, Edward II and Edward III, the words<i> ma dame</i> used alone always refer to the queen.</p><p>Edward II was only very rarely called 'Edward II' in his own lifetime, and was usually 'King Edward son of King Edward'. His father was 'King Edward son of King Henry [III]'. On Edward III's accession in 1327, it appears that clerks decided that they couldn't keep writing 'King Edward son of King Edward son of King Edward' all the time forever and ever, sometimes adding 'son of King Henry' for good measure, because their hands were going to cramp or whatever. Therefore, they decided to start calling the young king 'Edward the third' (the third English king of that name after the Norman Conquest of 1066).</p><p>'Your Majesty' was a later title, as indeed were 'Your Highness' and 'Your Grace'. Edward II was addressed fairly simply in speech as 'Sire' or 'my lord king', or even just 'my lord' or 'my king'. In writing, it was polite to refer to him as 'our lord the king' or 'the lord king', and you can tell that the author of the <i>Vita Edwardi Secundi</i> was becoming utterly exasperated with Edward in and after 1322 when he started referring to him merely as 'the king' (<i>rex</i> in Latin) rather than 'the lord king' (<i>dominus rex</i>) as he had always done before. An extant letter sent by Hugh Despenser the Younger in 1319 rather discourteously refers to Edward simply as 'the king' (<i>le Roy</i> in the French original) and not as 'our lord the king' (<i>nostre seignur le Roy</i>) as Hugh always did in his later letters.</p><p>When talking to other people, even pretty high-ranking ones, Edward II appears to have addressed them by their first names. The <i>Vita</i> <i>Edwardi Secundi </i>records a conversation he had with Sir Andrew Harclay, sheriff of Cumberland, in early 1322, and Edward just called the sheriff 'Andrew' not 'Sir Andrew'. How he addressed earls when talking to them, or how he referred to them when they weren't present, isn't something I've been able to find evidence for. A few decades later, Edward's great-grandson Richard II addressed Thomas Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, as 'Thomas of Warwick'. I should probably note at this point that there were no dukes in England until 1337, except that either the king or his heir was duke of Aquitaine in south-west France. The first English duke was Edward III's eldest son Edward of Woodstock, made duke of Cornwall in 1337 and prince of Wales in 1343. The second was the royal cousin Henry of Grosmont, made duke of Lancaster in 1351, and until 1397 when Richard II went slightly mad creating lots of new <i>duketti</i> ('little dukes', as contemporaries contemptuously called them), the only other English dukes were Edward III's younger sons Lionel, John, Edmund and Thomas. The first English duchess (excepting that the queen of England was duchess of Aquitaine) was Henry of Grosmont's oddly obscure wife Isabella Beaumont (d. 1359/60) in 1351, because Edward of Woodstock, the first English duke, didn't marry until 1361. The first English duchess in her own right was Edward II's niece Margaret of Norfolk (b. <i>c</i>. 1322) in 1397.</p><p>In writing, people tended to be rather more polite and formal than when speaking, which is usually the case, of course. I somehow find it quite funny that in his extant letters of 1323 to 1325, Hugh Despenser the Younger always punctiliously referred to Roger Mortimer of Wigmore by his correct title, 'Sire Roger de Mortimer', even when telling people that Roger was planning an invasion of England and when Hugh certainly knew that Roger wanted him dead. </p><p>Hugh himself was addressed in letters of the 1320s, when he was the king's mighty favourite, in the most fawningly obsequious terms: 'the very noble man, my very honourable lord'; 'the very noble and wise man, his very dear and very honourable lord'; 'my very honoured and very dread lord'; 'to the noble man, very honourable lord, all manner of reverences', and so on. There's only one extant letter I know of sent from Hugh Despenser to Edward II, which dates to <i>c</i>. 1324 - and is more of a note than a proper letter - and it opens 'Honours and reverences, very honourable lord'. Others tended to address Edward in their correspondence as 'Very dear, very dread lord' (<i>trescher tresredotable seignur</i>), and throughout their letters often addressed him in the third person, as in 'Very dear, very dread lord, your humble subject recommends himself to your very high lordship. May it please your very high lordship to know...'. Three of Edward's clerks outdid themselves in a letter of July 1324, which opened 'To the very noble and very honourable lord, our lord, Lord Edward, by the grace of God king of England...'.</p><p>Edward II's own letters mostly began 'Edward, by the grace of God king of England, lord of Ireland and duke of Aquitaine, to our dear and faithful [name and title], greetings', sometimes 'greetings and dear affection'. It was conventional in the fourteenth century to end a letter with 'May God keep you' (<i>A Dieu qe vous gard</i> in French), or 'May the Holy Spirit have you in his keeping', or, rather more hair-raisingly but surprisingly common, 'May God grant you vengeance over your enemies'.</p><p>Below, part of a letter from the Gascon lord Arnaud Caillau to Hugh Despenser the Younger in 1325, with two closing salutations: 'May our Lord increase your honour, and grant you a good and long life, and give you vengeance over your enemies wherever they may be', and a few lines later, 'May our Lord have you in his keeping and guard you from all evils'.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEim0w9R1UcShb8an7CDZTS-Bb73fITaKNA4Vdq61TXOgD_71ZUciNjjyPKzfvCMMjw6lD4IPnKKL5iamzwOkNK2oz5sTukkErONx-hu4vh7Bulcw6VqAZobF4CW0vzDD54CU5x7SA-M1Qfqfhys3onOIawEp7G6tHLF9MIe1L-eFIIV3tNLBA=s880" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="330" data-original-width="880" height="120" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEim0w9R1UcShb8an7CDZTS-Bb73fITaKNA4Vdq61TXOgD_71ZUciNjjyPKzfvCMMjw6lD4IPnKKL5iamzwOkNK2oz5sTukkErONx-hu4vh7Bulcw6VqAZobF4CW0vzDD54CU5x7SA-M1Qfqfhys3onOIawEp7G6tHLF9MIe1L-eFIIV3tNLBA=s320" width="320" /></a></div><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: right;"><br /></div></blockquote>Kathryn Warnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00397714441908100576noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19545049.post-49820588900943254302022-02-15T08:44:00.000+00:002023-01-15T13:27:06.379+00:00Queen Isabella's Speech at the French Court in the Autumn of 1325<div>In late October 1325 or thereabouts, Edward II's queen Isabella made a speech at her brother Charles IV's court in Paris that appears in the <i>Vita Edwardi Secundi</i>, though nowhere else. Assuming that the <i>Vita</i> recorded Isabella's words correctly or approximately correctly - and bear in mind that the queen would have spoken in French, which the author of the <i>Vita</i> recorded in Latin, and which has been translated into modern English - this is the speech:</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhYf3qwd1ELsdCqjyVzAwwcXaMzSNh4fFxc4NN-63RMV1r-IEa4PbE_70nYrW67SV6HLywinCQovbEIlpJZ8q0Af6h88I4YUVt0Un9AFPSqRAIkKVkeLtri-7uE-2zTsqOf_TCsQJ31qwVpOUX4GCQ2Xzvs_p_uH6egRIWKMSrlVFxB-bpikA=s571" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="444" data-original-width="571" height="249" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhYf3qwd1ELsdCqjyVzAwwcXaMzSNh4fFxc4NN-63RMV1r-IEa4PbE_70nYrW67SV6HLywinCQovbEIlpJZ8q0Af6h88I4YUVt0Un9AFPSqRAIkKVkeLtri-7uE-2zTsqOf_TCsQJ31qwVpOUX4GCQ2Xzvs_p_uH6egRIWKMSrlVFxB-bpikA=s320" width="320" /></a></div><p>Paraphrasing the queen, what she said was: "There is a third person in my marriage who is trying to come between my husband and myself, and marriage is a very important institution to me but now I feel like a widow and am going to dress like one. I want my husband to send this Pharisee away so that I can return to him, and get my own back on this horrible person." </p><p>Her brother Charles IV, who evidently was present, responded: "My sister is always welcome to stay here with me if she wants, but if she wants to go back to England, that's fine too." </p><div>Modern writers often interpret this speech as Isabella openly admitting treason and saying "I hate my husband and am defying him and want to bring him down, because I'm in love with Roger Mortimer," and Charles IV saying he'll aid her rebellion because he also wants to bring down Edward II. And I go, wait, what? Oh, and for the avoidance of any doubt, because there are people who accuse me of being unfair to novelists when I discuss this on my social media, I'm not talking about fiction here. I'm talking about the way historians have interpreted Isabella's speech, in works of non-fiction, not novelists writing fiction. How novelists depict Isabella often makes me roll my eyes right out of my head but isn't a massive priority of mine, to be honest, but I do care a great deal about a distorted view of her and Edward II being presented in serious works of non-fiction as though it's certain fact.</div><div><br /></div><div>On the face of it, this speech is Isabella offering Edward II an ultimatum: he must send the unnamed 'Pharisee' away from him so she can return to him and resume their marriage. Some months later in early February 1326, Isabella sent a letter to Walter Reynolds, archbishop of Canterbury, in which she reiterated her strong wish to return to Edward, but stated that she did not dare to do so because she was so frightened of Hugh Despenser, who was in complete control of her husband and his realm. She referred to Edward as "our very dear and very sweet lord and friend", <i>nostre treschier et tresdouche seignur et amy</i>, highly unconventional terms which reveal her great affection for her husband (conventional would have been simply "our very dear lord"). But somehow, modern writers often seem to feel that they know exactly what Isabella was really thinking all the time, as though they're connected to her telepathically, so they go "Aha! She was just pretending to want to go back to Edward and didn't really mean it, so she made up her fear of Hugh Despenser as a useful excuse to stay away from Edward and to remain in Roger Mortimer's arms!" As <a href="http://francislovell.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Michèle Schindler</a> has so correctly pointed out to me, it's really odd that historians have invented all kinds of ways in which Isabella of France was supposedly a victim - the nonsense about her children being stolen from her in 1324, being abandoned by Edward in 1312 when she was pregnant, endlessly neglected by her cruel gay husband who gave her wedding gifts to his lover, and so on - but on the one occasion where Isabella outright stated that she was indeed a potential victim, because she was so frightened of Hugh Despenser and what he might do to her, it's dismissed as a self-serving lie. </div><div><br /></div></div><div>Another important point that I've been thinking about for a while is, who was this 'Pharisee'? According to the <i>Vita Edwardi Secundi</i>, Queen Isabella swore to destroy Hugh Despenser around the same time that she made this speech (see paragraph below). As she used the word 'avenged' in her speech at the French court to describe what she wanted to do to the 'Pharisee' who had come between her and Edward, it does seem natural that she was referring to the same person. But was she? It's almost always been assumed, including by me, that it must have been Hugh, but the queen didn't name him, and furthermore, the meaning of Pharisee is 'a self-righteous or hypocritical person'. That really doesn't seem to fit Hugh at all. He was a ruthless, clever, scary, ambitious and manipulative person, but for all his faults I can't think of a time when he demonstrated hypocrisy or self-righteousness. He was always cheerfully open about his ambitions to be supremely rich and to own most of South Wales, and about the less than entirely legal and ethical methods he employed to achieve this.</div><div><br /></div><div>Below, the <i>Vita</i> cites a letter which all the English bishops, on Edward II's command, sent to the queen in France sometime in late 1325. It makes clear that Isabella, in a speech or letter which does not now survive, had threatened to destroy Hugh Despenser with the aid of her brother Charles IV and other powerful Frenchmen. It might not be a coincidence that in November 1325, rumours spread that Hugh <a href="http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2018/11/rumours-of-killing-of-hugh-despenser.html" target="_blank">had been killed</a> in Wales.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjyVYwKGYZppj4iuOVwx9jW4CDAfZ_sujb3DxJJocmOHF7uvbHCCcSdP1Ms-5PbxLLqGQypRia1XhbqDn34Dv9REUcicfI77HSoemynXdNvzlDGFmxXjDCNmobIsv3hxdlEaP1rgnQx_6yDiR8YzK6pw8tNPbGbVbnLmL_U3ZLkBxAN1RUbjw=s698" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="282" data-original-width="698" height="129" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjyVYwKGYZppj4iuOVwx9jW4CDAfZ_sujb3DxJJocmOHF7uvbHCCcSdP1Ms-5PbxLLqGQypRia1XhbqDn34Dv9REUcicfI77HSoemynXdNvzlDGFmxXjDCNmobIsv3hxdlEaP1rgnQx_6yDiR8YzK6pw8tNPbGbVbnLmL_U3ZLkBxAN1RUbjw=s320" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEglTt1C5RTRW-lP3Cn4OGeX3_4OTsL-cdVeSS-CKyyE2xWwL_OcwbeNXzVIjWafbb-PZ0YaeMte8EAmPKIi8T53hoah4cF_Len-TdSCDZ46IuHbu356BxOB5c69XOGZVjMkWBlbWAtHGaRt23ZCSjPwKRvkq_td6C-bnCqlgf3pDdDGcgkX7w=s728" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="214" data-original-width="728" height="94" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEglTt1C5RTRW-lP3Cn4OGeX3_4OTsL-cdVeSS-CKyyE2xWwL_OcwbeNXzVIjWafbb-PZ0YaeMte8EAmPKIi8T53hoah4cF_Len-TdSCDZ46IuHbu356BxOB5c69XOGZVjMkWBlbWAtHGaRt23ZCSjPwKRvkq_td6C-bnCqlgf3pDdDGcgkX7w=s320" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div>I have wondered, and discussed the possibility in my book <i>Edward II's Nieces, the Clare Sisters: Powerful Pawns of the Crown</i>, whether the person Queen Isabella meant by 'Pharisee' was not Hugh Despenser but his wife Eleanor de Clare, Edward's eldest niece. There's a curiously large amount of evidence that Edward and Eleanor had some kind of intimate, and incestuous, relationship in the last years of his reign. And as Eleanor had regularly attended Queen Isabella going back to at least 1311 and probably earlier, and the two women had spent considerable time together for many years, it perhaps makes sense that Isabella would call Eleanor a hypocritical person if she was being friendly to Isabella's face while having an affair with her husband behind her back. </div><div><br /></div><div>One Continental chronicle* says that Edward II and Isabella met at some point after her invasion in September 1326 - the timing isn't clear but appears to be sometime after Hugh Despenser's execution on 24 November 1326 and his wife Eleanor's imprisonment at the Tower of London a few days earlier - and that Isabella fell to her knees and begged Edward to 'cool his anger' with her. The king, however, refused even to look at her, never mind talk to her or accept her apology. It's always taken for granted that it was Isabella who was in charge, who actively defied Edward and whose decision it was to end their marriage, while Edward just reacted passively to events as they unfolded and had no choice about his marriage coming to an end. In this reading, however, and if the chronicle bears any resemblance to reality, it was Edward who rejected Isabella, not the other way around.</div><div><br /></div><div>[* <i>Extrait d'une Chronique Anonyme intitulée Ancienne Chroniques de Flandre</i> in <i>Recueil des Historiens des Gaules et de Franc</i>e, ed. M.M. de Wailly, vol. 22, p. 425]</div><div><div><br /></div><div>Maybe Isabella genuinely did want to go back to Edward without Hugh and Eleanor Despenser's constant and irritating presence, and maybe it really was Edward who rejected her rather than vice versa. After all, it would appear that he refused the ultimatum that she offered him in or around late October 1325, perhaps to her great shock, and several months later in February 1326, Isabella told the archbishop of Canterbury that she still wanted to go back to her husband but that nothing had changed. Again, this letter has often been interpreted as Isabella playing a game, pretending that she wanted to go back to Edward when of course she can't possibly have done, because she was deeply in love/lust with the most heterosexual and virile manly man who has ever existed and who was sooooo superior to the horrid same-sex attracted man she'd been forced to marry. It's odd really. I'm not sure I've ever seen so many people so keen to argue that a person meant something so entirely different from the words she actually spoke, and so keen to claim that this pious daughter of Holy Church glibly told porkies to the most important churchman in England for no better reason than she wanted to continue having hot, doubly adulterous sex. I suppose it's because the constant but erroneous assumption that Edward II and Isabella of France's marriage was nothing but a tragic awful disaster from start to finish makes it hard to imagine that, just maybe, Isabella really did want to go back to Edward. That she wanted to resume a marriage in which she had been happy for many years, without Hugh and Eleanor Despenser always being around.</div><div><br /></div><div>Perhaps the invasion of September 1326 was aimed at removing Hugh Despenser from Edward II's side and executing him, as the barons had tried to do with Piers Gaveston on several occasions a few years earlier, rather than being intended to remove Edward himself from his throne. Events in the autumn and early winter of 1326, however, snowballed; Edward's support simply collapsed; and it became clear that he could not continue as king. But maybe Edward's downfall was never originally the intention of Isabella and her allies. We don't really know. Whatever anyone else tells you, these people who seem to think they can see into the heart and mind of a woman who lived 700 years ago, we genuinely do not know when Isabella and the others decided that Edward II must be made to abdicate his throne to his and Isabella's son. It might even have been as late as the festive season of 1326, when a big What On Earth Are We Going To Do About The King meeting took place at Wallingford Castle. It's also possible that Edward's downfall/abdication/assassination might have been kind of vaguely contemplated, at least as a concept, years earlier. We just don't know, and don't believe anyone who tells you that we do know, or who tells you with complete certainty that Isabella was repulsed by her husband and in love with Mortimer in 1326, because there is no way that we can know those things. We mustn't lose sight of the fact, either, that in 1326/27 a king of England had never been deposed or forced to abdicate before. How would Isabella and her allies even have conceived of the notion that they might be able to achieve this, years before it happened, and long before they and parliament painstakingly and painfully groped their way towards it? It's not as though they had a precedent to work with, or any way of knowing that deposing unsatisfactory English kings would later become reasonably common.</div><div><br /></div><div>There often seems to be this idea that everything that happened was always bound to happen and couldn't possibly have happened in any other way, and that any particular event wasn't a result of chance, or of fairly arbitrary decisions and choices, but must always have been carefully planned, step by step. Every single thing that we know Isabella and Roger Mortimer did or said, therefore, has to be fitted into a scheme of their clever and super-secret years-long plan to bring down Isabella's husband. So Isabella can't just stay at the royal residence of the Tower of London for a few nights in early 1323 because that's what the king and queen often did when they were in the city, she has to be conspiring against Edward with Roger Mortimer in prison there and helping him plan his escape as the vital first step in her plan to unking her husband. She can't argue with Edward in late 1322, flounce off in a huff but then go back to him a bit later and try to make up because that's what couples often do, she has to be conspiring against Edward with Roger Mortimer and spying on her husband's movements for him. She can't genuinely mean in late 1325 and early 1326 that she misses her happy marriage and wants to go back to her husband but is too frightened of Hugh Despenser to do so, she has to be conspiring against Edward with Roger Mortimer because she's in love with him, and is obviously lying her socks off so that nobody realises what she's up to. Roger Mortimer can't escape from the Tower and flee to the Continent without any clear idea of what the heck he's going to do once he gets there, he has to spend every waking moment from 1322 to 1326 manoeuvring everyone and everything into position so that the forced abdication of Edward II he's planning can be achieved.</div><div><br /></div><div>In this way of thinking, obviously it can't be the case that Isabella, Roger, the count of Hainault, the king of France, etc, react to events as they happen, or make decisions on the spur of the moment, or are taken by surprise by the outcome of things they've almost inadvertently set in motion. Somehow all of them have to be part of this massive Europe-wide conspiracy of powerful people who want to see the king of England dethroned, who plot with each other for years on end, and who are all incredibly cunning uber-Machiavellian types who spend years bringing about an English king's downfall for the first time in history without leaving the slightest trace of their machinations on written record. This is a result of looking at history backwards; knowing where people ended up and assuming they were always fated to end up there and had always planned to end up there, and is imposing a coherent narrative on events that at the time they were lived were simply random and chaotic. It forgets that the people themselves were living from day to day, and were making whatever choices and decisions seemed like a good idea at the time, and couldn't actually foretell the future. It's only with hindsight that we can look back at history and see that other English kings after Edward II lost their thrones - Richard II, Henry VI, Edward V, Charles I - and thereby assume that people alive in the 1320s had somehow gone through the same conceptual process that we have, to wit, that failed kings could be unkinged, and that this notion surely occurred to Isabella, Roger Mortimer and others as early as 1322/23.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's only with hindsight that we can look at Roger Mortimer's escape from the Tower in August 1323 and see that, yes, it was an important step in the events that would bring down Edward II a few years later. Neither Roger nor anyone else knew that in 1323. It's only with hindsight that we can look at Queen Isabella departing for France in March 1325 and see that, yes, this was another important step in the events that would bring down Edward II. Isabella didn't know that in 1325. It's certainly possible that when she left, she had some idea in mind of using her stay in her homeland and the influence of her royal French brother to try to alter her currently unhappy circumstances. Frankly, however, suggesting that she knew she would return to England at the head of an army with the aim of removing her husband from his throne, and that she'd been plotting to do so for years with the mid-ranking baron she was in love with, strikes me as an absurdity. And you know what? Sometimes when a woman says how unhappy she is about a third person in her marriage, what she really means is that she's unhappy about a third person in her marriage.</div></div>Kathryn Warnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00397714441908100576noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19545049.post-39848595033730793742022-02-13T10:47:00.001+00:002023-01-15T13:27:06.101+00:00Queen Isabella and Hugh Despenser the Younger<p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Letter cited in Vita, she'd sworn to destroy Hugh</p><p>Letter to Archbishop Reynolds February 1326</p><p>Close Rolls, Edward's letters in response to Isabella's letters which don't survive; she feigned friendliness to Hugh to protect herself</p><p>Chronicler, great magnates were frightened of Hugh. As he imprisoned people in chains, even his close supporters, threatened to hang them, it's easy to see that he could be frightening.</p>Kathryn Warnerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00397714441908100576noreply@blogger.com0