Henry of Lancaster and His Children

The close bonds which Edward II's cousin Henry of Lancaster, earl of Lancaster and Leicester, forged with his children have fascinated me for a long time. Here's a post about the family. 

Henry of Lancaster (b. 1280/81) and Maud Chaworth (b. February 1282) were betrothed at the end of 1291 and married before 2 March 1297. [1] They had six daughters and one son born between the early 1300s and the late 1310s or early 1320s. In birth order, the Lancaster children were, with approximate birth dates: 

1. Blanche, b. early 1300s; married Thomas Wake (b. 1298) in 1316.

2. Isabella, b. c. 1305/08; joined Amesbury Priory in 1327 and became its prioress in 1343.

3. Maud, b. c. 1308/12; married firstly William de Burgh (b. 1312), earl of Ulster, in 1327, and secondly Ralph Ufford in 1343. (Maud might have been younger than her brother Henry and the fourth of the seven siblings.)

4. Henry of Grosmont, b. c. 1310/12, only son and heir, duke of Lancaster; married Isabella Beaumont (b. c. 1315/20) in 1330. 

5. Joan, b. c. 1313/15; married John Mowbray (b. 1310) in 1328.

6. Eleanor (or Alianore), b. c. 1316/18; married firstly John Beaumont (b 1317 or 1318) in 1330, and secondly Richard, earl of Arundel (b. c. 1313), in 1345.

7. Mary, b. c. 1319/21; married Henry Percy (b. c. 1320/21) in 1334.

There is often confusion about the order in which Henry of Lancaster and Maud Chaworth's six daughters were born, but in fact it's perfectly clear from Henry's will of 8 September 1345, which lists them in birth order and names them as Blanche Wake, Isabella, Maud, Joan, 'Alianore countess of Arundel', and Mary Percy. [2] Genealogical sites often put Isabella, the second daughter, lower down the birth order and state that she was born in 1317, but as she is known to have gone on pilgrimage that year (see below), that's impossible. Blanche the eldest daughter was named after her paternal grandmother Blanche of Artois, queen of Navarre and countess of Lancaster, and Isabella the second was named after her maternal grandmother Isabella Beauchamp, Lady Chaworth and Despenser (d. 1306), which is indirect confirmation that she was indeed the second daughter. The only uncertainty is where to place the only son, Henry of Grosmont, in the birth order; whether he had three older and three younger sisters, or two older and four younger. Maud Chaworth died in 1322 when her youngest child Mary was perhaps only a toddler, though her eldest, Blanche, had been married for six years by then. Her widower Henry outlived her by almost a quarter of a century, though never remarried.

Henry of Lancaster related to his children as individuals, not merely as pawns to use in the noble marriage market. One example is that he allowed his second daughter Isabella of Lancaster to become a nun. The children of the medieval nobility often went into the Church, but it was far more usual for a younger daughter or son to do so, not a second daughter, who would almost always be expected to marry. Normally, it would have been one of the youngest Lancaster daughters, Eleanor or Mary, who was given to the Church. This suggests that Isabella had a vocation which her father accepted and encouraged. She went on pilgrimage with Edward II's sister Mary, a nun of Amesbury (albeit one without much of a vocation) and their niece Elizabeth de Burgh née de Clare in 1317 when she was about ten or twelve years old, and her wish to do so might have been one of the early signs of her religious devotion. [3] Isabella was perhaps already living at Amesbury Priory then, at least sometimes, though officially entered ten years later on Ascension Day in 1327. She was one of thirty-six girls and young women to do so on that day, by which time she must have been at the end of her teens or in her early twenties. [4]

There was a flurry of activity in the Lancaster family in 1327 once Henry was restored to his rightful inheritance from his executed older brother Thomas early in Edward III's reign, and things returned to something at least vaguely approaching normality after all the chaos of Edward II's reign. In early 1327, Henry's niece Queen Isabella granted him the marriage rights of two important young noblemen: John Mowbray, son and heir of Lord Mowbray (executed 1322), and William de Burgh, heir to his late grandfather's earldom of Ulster and to his wealthy mother Elizabeth de Burgh, with whom Isabella of Lancaster had gone on pilgrimage in 1317. [5] Henry married his third daughter Maud to William de Burgh, who was born in September 1312, and his fourth daughter Joan to John Mowbray, who was born in November 1310. In short, he may have matched the couples by personality, rather than merely assigning the third daughter to the elder of his two wards and the fourth daughter to the younger. Perhaps he thought that Maud, who had a stronger and more outgoing personality than her quiet younger sister Joan, was better equipped to handle leaving England for Ireland and to deal with the conflicts and troubles faced by the Anglo-Irish nobility there.

Kenneth Fowler, biographer of Henry of Lancaster and Maud Chaworth's only son and heir Henry of Grosmont, pointed out many years ago that the five of Henry of Lancaster's daughters who married continued living with him even after they had wed. By 1334, all the Lancaster siblings except the nun Isabella were married, yet they and their spouses spent most of their time living with Henry, even Blanche, who had married as early as 1316. [6] Mary, the sixth daughter and youngest Lancaster sibling, stayed with her father until she married Henry Percy in 1334 and for some years afterwards as well. And a surviving account of Henry's second daughter Isabella the nun shows that she regularly left Amesbury Priory to stay with her father for long periods. [7] This would normally not have been allowed, but as Henry of Lancaster was powerful, wealthy and royal, it was permitted for pretty much the same reasons that Edward II's sister Mary was allowed to leave Amesbury and visit her father's and brother's courts whenever she felt like it. During one year in the early 1330s, Isabella of Lancaster stayed with her father for a total of ninety-six days at Kenilworth, and the next year visited Henry at Tutbury and Kenilworth for a few weeks. She stayed with him on yet another occasion in 1334, accompanied by ‘the ladies of her chamber.’ On the way back to Amesbury after one visit, her eldest sister Blanche, Lady Wake, travelled with Isabella and ended up staying at the priory with her for at least six months (she paid some of her own expenses). Isabella left the priory yet again in 1336, and travelled from York to Leicester with her second youngest sister Eleanor, the fifth Lancaster daughter. Eleanor and Mary sent letters to Isabella at Amesbury Priory in 1334 and in the same year, Isabella sent gifts for Mary’s wedding to Henry Percy, future Lord Percy. 

Henry of Lancaster's only son and heir Henry of Grosmont married Isabella, second daughter of Edward II's kinsman Henry, Lord Beaumont, in 1330, and in the same year the fifth Lancaster daughter Eleanor married Isabella's brother John, future Lord Beaumont, their father's heir. Henry Beaumont fled to the Continent and spent much of the period 1329/30 outside England after making his opposition to the regime of Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer known, and Henry, earl of Lancaster, took Beaumont's family under his protection. Henry of Grosmont and his young wife Isabella Beaumont spent much time with his father, sisters and brothers-in-law over the next few years. Grosmont was at Leicester with his wife Isabella, his father and his sisters Blanche and Eleanor in June and September 1330, was with his father at Kenilworth in September 1333 and June 1338, and with him again on numerous other occasions. The Lancaster siblings attended a famous jousting tournament at Cheapside in London in September 1331 together, and in April 1348 Blanche, Lady Wake and her niece Elizabeth de Burgh (b. July 1332), Maud's only child from her first marriage to William de Burgh (d. June 1333), watched Henry of Grosmont compete in a tournament at Lichfield. William sometimes lived in Ireland, but on other occasions lived with the Lancasters. He visited a jousting tournament with his brother-in-law Grosmont in February 1328, and was still with the Lancasters in June that year. [8]

As well as being extremely close to their father, the Lancaster siblings also often visited, wrote to and demonstrated their affection for each other. In February 1332, Henry of Grosmont and Eleanor of Lancaster stayed with their sister Blanche Wake at Deeping in Lincolnshire, and Blanche’s husband Thomas Wake was one of the men who accompanied Grosmont to Spain in 1343. Wake, on excellent terms with his father-in-law Henry, earl of Lancaster, for many years, and a member of his council, visited Henry in Leicester in July 1339 and gave him one of his manors in Yorkshire. [9] Like Henry Beaumont, Thomas Wake fled from England in early 1330 after taking part in the conspiracy of the earl of Kent, his sister Margaret's husband, and returned in November 1330; his wife Blanche spent the period with her father and siblings and attended the weddings of her siblings Henry of Grosmont and Eleanor to the Beaumont siblings that year. There was a considerable age difference between Blanche the eldest Lancaster sister and her youngest siblings, and she was probably just about old enough to be Eleanor and Mary's mother. Despite being practically another generation to her youngest sisters, she was remarkably close to them.

Isabella of Lancaster the nun of Amesbury kept in touch with Blanche, Lady Wake by letter, and the two eldest siblings seem to have been particularly close. In the early 1330s they visited Salisbury, Winchester and King’s Somborne in Hampshire – a manor which had belonged to their late mother Maud Chaworth, now held by their father – together as well as spending at least half a year in each other’s company at Amesbury Priory. Eleanor, dowager Lady Beaumont, stayed in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire with the fourth sister Joan and her husband Lord Mowbray in September 1343, and in January 1345 visited her father in Leicester with her soon-to-be second husband the earl of Arundel, shortly before they wed. [10] The third sister Maud of Lancaster visited the papal court at Avignon in 1343, and made requests of the pope on behalf of 'Henry earl of Lancaster her father and Eleanor Beaumont her sister'. [11] Henry of Grosmont talked in 1344 of his 'sincere affection' for his 'dearly beloved sister' Isabella when granting a favour to Amesbury Priory, and when his sister Maud was widowed for a second time and left with a baby daughter (Maud Ufford, future countess of Oxford) in 1346, Grosmont and his household officials helped her look after her affairs. [12] In 1337, Grosmont gave his eldest sister Blanche and her husband Thomas Wake one of his manors, to pass after their deaths to Thomas’s foundation of Haltemprice Priory in Yorkshire, and in 1361 he appointed Blanche as one of the executors of his will, a clear sign of his trust in her. Of his six sisters, Grosmont seems to have spent the most time with Eleanor, perhaps because they were married to the siblings Isabella and John Beaumont, and because her second husband the earl of Arundel was a close associate of his. [13] 

Five of Henry of Lancaster and Maud Chaworth’s seven children had children of their own, the exceptions being the two eldest: Isabella was a nun and then a prioress, and Blanche's marriage of more than thirty years to Lord Wake produced no offspring. One thing that strikes me is that in all cases, there was a delay of a few years between their wedding and their first pregnancy, and not all of the delay can be explained by the girls' youth when they married. Eleanor was born around 1316/18, married her first husband John Beaumont in 1330 when they were both about 12 or 13, and had her first child Henry Beaumont in late 1339 or early 1340; Mary was born around 1319/21, married Henry Percy in 1334, and had her first child Henry Percy the younger (future first earl of Northumberland) in November 1341; Joan married John Mowbray in 1328 and gave birth to her only son John Mowbray the younger in June 1340 when she was at least twenty-five, though her two daughters may have been older; Maud married William de Burgh in 1327 and had her first child Elizabeth de Burgh in July 1332; and Isabella Beaumont married Henry of Grosmont in 1330, and their first surviving child Maud of Lancaster was born in April 1340, though another daughter is mentioned in 1338/39 who must have died in infancy. Seemingly, Henry of Lancaster encouraged his children and their spouses not to rush into parenthood. 

Henry, earl of Lancaster and Leicester, died on 22 September 1345, and was outlived by all seven of his children. Isabella the second sister, prioress of Amesbury, was alive on 30 January 1348 but died before 4 February 1349. [14] Joan the fourth sister, Lady Mowbray, died on 7 July 1348, 7 July 1349, or 7 July 1350. In early 1348, John Mowbray and 'Joan his wife' (Johane sa femme) presented a petition to Edward III, so she was obviously still alive then, but by early March 1351 her widower John Mowbray had married his much younger second wife Elizabeth, daughter of John de Vere, earl of Oxford (b. 1312). Joan of Lancaster definitely died on 7 July, the feast of the Translation of St Thomas Becket; the date is given in the Sarum Missal (Translacio sancti Thome Martyris: Obitus domine Iohanne domine de Moubray filie Comitis Lancastriae), but no year is provided. [15]

Henry of Grosmont, duke of Lancaster and earl of Leicester, Lincoln and Derby, was the third of the Lancaster siblings to pass away, dying in his town of Leicester on 23 March 1361 (among other sources which confirm Henry's exact date of death, the 23rd of March is also recorded in the Sarum Missal). The youngest sibling, Mary, Lady Percy, died eighteen months later on 1 September 1362, just six days before Edward III's sister Joan of the Tower, queen of Scotland, also died. Eleanor, countess of Arundel and Lady Beaumont, died on 11 January 1372, and Maud, dowager countess of Ulster and Lady Ufford, on 5 May 1377, a few weeks before her kinsman Edward III. Blanche, Lady Wake, eldest of the siblings, was the last of them to die, and finally passed away between 3 and 11 July 1380 when she must have been at least 75 and perhaps closer to 80. Her heir by blood was her brother Henry's namesake grandson Henry of Lancaster, earl of Derby (b. 1367), who became Henry IV in 1399, and the heir to the dower lands she held from her long-dead husband Thomas Wake was Thomas's niece Joan of Kent, dowager princess of Wales, Richard II's mother.

Sources

1) Calendar of Patent Rolls 1281-92, p. 464; CPR 1292-1301, p. 239.

2) Early Lincoln Wills: An Abstract of All the Wills and Administrations Recorded in the Episcopal Registers of the Diocese of Lincoln, 1280-1547, ed. Alfred Gibbons (Lincoln, 1888), p. 18.

3) The National Archives E 101/377/2.

4) J. E. Jackson, 'Consecration of Nuns at Ambresbury, A.D. 1327', The Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine, vol. 18 (1879), p. 287; 'A Fragment of an Account of Isabel of Lancaster, Nun of Amesbury, 1333-4', ed. R. B. Pugh, in Festschrift zur Feier des zweihundertjährigen Bestandes des Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchivs, vol. 1, ed. Leo Santifaller (Vienna, 1949), p. 487.

5) Calendar of Patent Rolls 1327-30, pp. 8, 26.

6) Kenneth Fowler, The King’s Lieutenant: Henry of Grosmont, First Duke of Lancaster 1310-1361 (1969), p. 27.

7)  'A Fragment of an Account of Isabel of Lancaster', pp. 487-98.

8) Fowler, The King’s Lieutenant, p. 27; Kenneth Fowler, 'Henry of Grosmont, First Duke of Lancaster 1310-1361', PhD thesis, University of Leeds, 1961, pp. 19, 542-44; The National Archives DL 25/966/751, DL 25/2184, DL 25/2061.

9) Fowler, 'Henry of Grosmont, First Duke of Lancaster 1310-1361', pp. 20, 155 note 2; TNA DL 25/964/749.

10) 'A Fragment of an Account', pp. 489, 491-92, 496, 497; TNA SC 1/39/143; Warwickshire County Record Office CR 162/238.

11) Petitions to the Pope 1342-1419, ed. W.H. Bliss, p. 31.

12) 'A Fragment of an Account', p. 493; Fowler, 'Henry of Grosmont, First Duke of Lancaster 1310-1361', pp. 590-91; CPR 1345-48, pp. 96, 372, 401, 449-50, 470; CPR 1348-50, p. 97.

13) TNA DL 25/330; A Collection of All the Wills Now Known to be Extant of the Kings and Queens of England, ed. John Nichols and Richard Gough (London, 1780), p. 86; Fowler, King's Lieutenant, p. 216.

14) Calendar of Close Rolls 1346-49, p. 428; CCR 1349-54, p. 5.

15) TNA SC 8/167/8311; Calendar of Papal Letters 1342-62, pp. 375, 385; The Sarum Missal, ed. J. Wickham Legg (1916), p. 515.

Royal Travel: Two Months at Edward II's Court

Unlike 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.

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.

October 1317

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.

3 October: Eight miles from Doncaster to Tickhill.

4 October: Twelve miles from Tickhill to Retford.

5 October: Thirteen miles from Retford to Sutton-on-Trent.

6 October: Nine miles from Sutton-on-Trent to Newark.

7 October: Fifteen miles from Newark to Grantham, where Edward spent two nights.

9 October: Twenty-two miles from Grantham to Stamford.

10 October: Eleven miles from Stamford to Fotheringhay.

11 October: Sixteen miles from Fotheringhay to Molesworth.

12 October: Sixteen miles from Molesworth to St Neots.

13 October: Twenty miles from St Neots to Baldock.

14 October: Eighteen miles from Baldock to Ware.

15 October: Eleven miles from Ware to Waltham.

16 October: Sixteen miles from Waltham to Westminster.

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).

May 1326

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.

3 May: Twenty miles from Hailes to Barnsley (the one in Gloucestershire, not the one in Yorkshire mentioned above).

4 May: Fourteen miles from Barnsley to Purton in Wiltshire.

5 May: Seventeen miles from Purton to Marlborough.

6 and 7 May: Edward stayed in Marlborough.

8 May: Twenty-seven miles from Marlborough to Cirencester.

9 May: Eighteen miles from Cirencester to Gloucester.

10 to 13 May: Edward stayed in Gloucester.

14 May: Nine miles from Gloucester to Coberley.

15 May: Seventeen miles from Coberley to Down Ampney.

16 May: Twenty miles from Down Ampney to Ogbourne St George.

17 May: Four miles from Ogbourne St George to Marlborough, again.

18, 19 May: Edward stayed in Marlborough.

20 May: Twenty-five miles from Marlborough to Crookham.

21 May: Sixteen miles from Crookham to Caversham.

22 May: Fourteen miles from Caversham to Bisham.

23 May: Twenty-five miles from Bisham to Sheen.

24 May: Edward stayed at Sheen.

25 May: Twenty-eight miles from Sheen to Otford.

26 May: Eighteen miles from Otford to Maidstone.

27 May: Fourteen miles to Charing (the one in Kent, not Charing Cross in London).

28 May: Twelve miles from Charing to Chartham.

29 May: Eight miles from Chartham to Bishopsbourne.

30 May: Fourteen miles from Bishopsbourne to Saltwood.

31 May, 1 to 6 June 1326: Edward stayed at Saltwood.

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.

The Problem of Hindsight

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. 

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 this happened, then that 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.

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).

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

Boris Johnson was once sacked from the Times for writing a story about Edward II cavorting at his Thames-side house of La Rosere (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, this is true.) Johnson went to work at the Telegraph instead, and later became editor of the Spectator. 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 Times 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.

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. 

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. 

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 wrote a post 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 exactly 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! 

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 Accursed Kings 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.

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.

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. 

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." 

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 Vita Edwardi Secundi, 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. 

John of Lancaster (early or mid-1280s - 1317), Edward II's Obscure Cousin

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.

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 Blanche of Artois (c. 1245/48-1302), dowager queen of Navarre. Edmund and Blanche's eldest son and heir Thomas might have been born on 29 December 1277 or shortly afterwards, and their second son Henry, his brother Thomas's heir in 1322 and ancestor of all the later Lancasters, in c. 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. [Calendar of Patent Rolls 1281-92, p. 243] 

Edmund of Lancaster, earl of Lancaster and Leicester, arranged the marriage of his second son Henry to Maud Chaworth, older half-sister of Hugh Despenser the Younger and sole heir of her late father, the Marcher lord Patrick Chaworth, in December 1291. [CPR 1281-92, 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.)

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. [Calendar of Charter Rolls 1257-1300, p. 423; The National Archives DL 10/191] 

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. [Documents Parisiens du Règne de Philippe VI de Valois (1328- 1350): Extraits des Registres de la Chancellerie de France, ed. Jules Viard, vol. 1, pp. 84-5]

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', Camden Miscellany, 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.

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).

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 Foundation for Medieval Genealogy site]

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.

John and Alix de Joinville were married by July 1312 when a grant made to the abbey of Chapelle-aux-Planches by Jehans de Lancastre, sires de Biaufort [lord of Beaufort], et Aalis de Joinville is recorded. Alix is called John's 'loyal consort and wife' (sa loiaulx compaigne et espouse). 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.

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. [Mémoires de la Société d’Agriculture, Commerce, Sciences & Arts du Département de la Marne, 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'. [Collection des Principaux Cartulaires du Diocèse de Troyes, vol. 4, pp. 78-80]

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 Chaumpayn & Brye, 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.' [Foedera 1307-27, p. 334; CPR 1317-21, 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.

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.

Elizabeth de Montfort, Lady Montacute and Furnivall (d. 1354), and Her Children

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.

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.

Elizabeth's date of birth isn't known, but her marriage to her first husband Sir William Montacute 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).

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, Elizabeth founded a chantry 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:

- John, first son, born in 1300 at the latest and perhaps in the mid or late 1290s, who married Joan de Verdon (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.

- William, 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. 

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] 

- Simon, 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.

- Edward, 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 La Peronelle 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 Alice of Norfolk 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.

- Alice Daubeney, 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'.

- Mary Cogan, second daughter; the identity of her husband is not known, and I know absolutely nothing about her.

- Elizabeth Montacute, 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]

- Hawise Bavent, 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]

- Maud/Matilda Montacute, 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 Annales Paulini, Maud's brother Simon, bishop of Ely, and sister Elizabeth, prioress of Haliwell, attended her consecration on 29 April 1341. [10]

- Isabel Montacute, 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.

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 c. 1305 or a decade or so later than that.

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.

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.

Sources

1) Calendar of Fine Rolls 1272-1307, p. 235.

2) Calendar of Patent Rolls 1281-92, p. 496.

3) Thomas Stapleton, 'A Brief Summary of the Wardrobe Accounts of the tenth, eleventh, and fourteenth years of King Edward the Second', Archaeologia, 26 (1836), p. 339.

4) Calendar of Close Rolls 1318-23, pp. 287, 629; CFR 1319-27, p. 56; Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem 1307-27, no. 238; CIPM 1336-46, no. 700; CIPM 1347-52, nos. 64, 244, 310; SAL MS 122, p. 61.

5) Foedera 1272-1307, pp. 379-80; Calendar of Chancery Warrants 1244-1326, p. 465.

6) CPR 1334-38, p. 401.

7) CIPM 1300-07, no. 324; CPR 1350-54, p. 63.

8) CPR 1334-38, pp. 92-3.

9) CIPM 1300-07, no. 55; CIPM 1352-60, no. 387; CCR 1360-64, p. 38; Complete Peerage, vol. 2, p. 34.

10) Annales Paulini 1307-1340, in Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II, ed. W. Stubbs, vol. 1, p. 370.

11) CFR 1319-27, pp. 8-9, 13; CIPM 1317-27, no. 238; CCR 1318-23, p. 192.

12) CFR 1319-27, p. 133.

13) CCR 1318-23, p. 496.

14) CIPM 1327-36, no. 470; CCR 1330-33, pp. 471-2.

15) CIPM 1352-60, no. 173.

The Faces of Edward II, Isabella of France, and Others

I 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 here! It's just under 45 minutes long.

Also recently, I had the good fortune to stumble on the Youtube channel of Panagiotis Constantinou, 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

Edward II and Isabella of France, 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.

Henry III and Eleanor of Provence Edward II's grandparents. 

Edward I and Eleanor of Castile Edward II's parents.

Edward III and Philippa of Hainault 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.

Henry II, Richard Lionheart, King John, Eleanor of Aquitaine

Berengaria of Navarre, queen of Richard Lionheart

Richard II, from the famous portrait of him in Westminster Abbey.

Richard II, John of Gaunt, Henry IV, Henry's queen Joan of Navarre. 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!

Joan of Arc, Henry V, Charles VI and VII of France

Henry VI

Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville

Richard Neville, earl of Warwick (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

Richard III

Henry VII, Elizabeth of York and their son Arthur

Henry VIII's wives

Uterine Suffocation...?

The latest edition of Mortimer Matters, 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 Sex and Sexuality in Medieval England is available on Amazon UK and Amazon US, or via the Pen&Sword website.

I've done an interview with Kasia 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 London: A Fourteenth-Century City and Its People (available on Amazon UK and Amazon US).

And I recently did a podcast for History Hack on the topic of fourteenth-century London, also based on my book. It'll be online on 18 November.

If you're in the UK and have a Kindle, my book Daughters of Edward I is currently only £2.99! If you're in the US, it's $3.40.

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 Invincibilis about him, with Edward II, Hugh Despenser the Younger and Eleanor de Clare as important characters. It's available on Amazon UK and Amazon US. 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!).

Hugh Despenser the Younger Takes Against John Inge, 1322/23

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 Cartae et Alia Munimenta quae ad Dominium Glamorgancia Pertinent, others are calendared in English translation in Calendar of Ancient Correspondence Concerning Wales, and one was printed in an 1897 English Historical Review 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.

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 Cartae et Alia Munimenta, 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 Robert Lewer 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 la dame de Burgh, 'Lady de Burgh', without acknowledging his relationship to her as his wife Eleanor's sister, as would have been usual and conventional.

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:

"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."

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 (por corouz qil avoit vers mons' Johan Inge). [1]

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.

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.

Sources

1) Calendar of Close Rolls 1318-23, pp. 723-4; Calendar of Patent Rolls 1330-34, p. 404; The National Archives SC 8/176/8753 and SC 8/59/2947.

2) CPR 1327-30, p. 32.

The Abduction and Ordeal of Elizabeth Luttrell, 1309

I recently wrote a post about Sir Geoffrey Luttrell (1276-1345), who commissioned the Luttrell Psalter 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.

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.

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] 

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 c. 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]

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, probably Launde in Leicestershire or 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.

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 this entry in the archbishop of York's register, dating to early 1315, Ellerker was illegitimate.

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].' 

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.

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]

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 John Berenger's rape and abduction of Elizabeth Hertrigg in 1318, when they were both about fourteen.

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 c. 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.

Sources

1) Early Lincoln Wills, ed. Alfred Gibbon, pp. 18-19; Feet of Fines, CP 25/1/124/52, no. 193.

2) Feet of Fines, CP 25/1/135/76, no. 47.

3) Calendar of Fine Rolls 1307-19, pp. 100, 140; Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem 1307-17, no. 350; Calendar of Close Rolls 1307-13, pp. 380, 439; CCR 1330-33, pp. 338-9, 544-5, 566, 576.

4) Calendar of Patent Rolls 1321-24, p. 58.

5) CIPM 1317-27, no. 420; CCR 1333-37, p. 603; CIPM 1336-46, no. 37.

6) CPR 1313-17, p. 410.

7) CFR 1307-19, p. 197; CIPM 1317-27, no. 420; CPR 1321-24, p. 285; CCR 1323-27, pp. 25, 162.

8) Calendar of Papal Letters 1305-41, pp. 243, 253; CCR 1323-27, pp. 19, 44, 53.

9) CCR 1307-13, pp. 160-61.

10) CPR 1307-13, p. 181.

11) Catalogue of Ancient Deeds, vol. 2, no. A.3189; The National Archives E 40/3189.

12) Calendar of Papal Letters 1342-62, p. 431; Petitions to the Pope 1342-1419, pp. 209, 217.

13) CIPM 1352-60, no. 597; CIPM 1361-65, no. 333; CIPM 1365-69, no. 356; CFR 1356-68, pp. 133, 245-6; CFR 1369-77, pp. 56, 68; CCR 1360-64, p. 88; CCR 1369-74, p. 131.