Merry Christmas!

A very Merry Christmas to all my readers, all 35,000 to 45,000 of you every month and over two million in total! May the festive season of 2017 bring you happiness and peace. (And lots of great presents.) 700 years ago, at Christmas 1317, Edward II was at Westminster with Queen Isabella, who was pregnant with their third child and first daughter. Edward spent one pound, thirteen shillings and six pence on a "great wooden table" to be placed in the palace hall, and also paid thirty pounds to Thomas de Hebenhith, mercer of London, for "a great hanging of wool, woven with figures of the king and earls on it, for the king’s service in his hall, on solemn festivals."

I'll be posting again in the New Year. Until then, take care!

Edward II And Dice Games

For the record, in a piece of news unrelated to the current post, this blog had a whopping 6,434 visitors yesterday! Thank you all for visiting and reading. :-)

It was Edward II's custom for many years to play at dice on Christmas Eve and/or Christmas night with members of his retinue. At Nottingham on 25 December 1316, for example, the king spent the large sum of five pounds to play (whether he won or not, I don't know). Edward didn't only play dice at Christmas: on 7 January 1323, he played while at the royal manor of Cowick in Yorkshire, and spent two pence at Langdon Abbey playing dice in late August 1325 and celebrated the Nativity of St John the Baptist at the Tower of London on 24 June 1326 playing dice with Sir Giles Beauchamp. On the Langdon occasion, Edward sent his chamber servant Piers Pulford to buy new dice at a cost of two pence. Christmas does seem, though, to have been Edward's favourite time to play at dice. Again at Nottingham on Christmas night 1324, he played a game called rafle or raefle with three members of his chamber staff and with William Montacute (b. 1301), future earl of Salisbury and the son of one of Edward's greatest friends, the elder William Montacute, who died in Gascony in 1319.

Edward also enjoyed a game called cross and pile, the medieval equivalent of heads or tails. On 5 May 1326, he borrowed five shillings from his barber Henry to play with him, and spent another twenty shillings playing again a few days later (these were large sums of money!). Edward II attended the wedding of Hugh Despenser the Younger's household retainer Sir Robert Wateville and Hugh's niece Margaret Hastings on 19 May 1326, and three days later lost eight shillings to the newly-married Wateville playing cross and pile with him. On 13 July 1326 the king lost another two shillings playing against his chamber usher Peter Bernard, so apparently wasn't very good at it, or was very unlucky.

The king did not only enjoy indoor games, he loved outdoor physical activity as well; I've previously written posts about his love of swimming and rowing, ball games, digging ditches and so on. But, sadly, the British climate and long hours of darkness for part of the year does not always permit outdoor activities - though Edward did go swimming in the Thames in February one year, brrrrrrr - and so Edward stayed inside and took part in games of chance to while away the long winter evenings.

The 'Portours' Of Edward II's Chamber, And Their Wives

I've written before (and here and here) about the men who served in Edward II's chamber, who are referred to in his chamber accounts as his vadletz or portours. There were around thirty of them at any one time, plus half a dozen pages, who are either called 'pages' or 'boys', garsons. Then there were the squires of the chamber, a higher rank, of whom I've been able to find about nine at any given time. Oh, and there were knights of the chamber, and clerks, and other categories of men whose wages were paid out of the chamber: Edward's archers, carpenters, whelers, the men who bought and looked after the carthorses, etc.

I make no apologies for another post about Edward's servants, because history is not only about royalty, and I find it endlessly fascinating to discover details about the men and women who knew the king well and to gain insights into the lives of ordinary people in England in the 1320s.

Edward II's Household Ordinance of December 1318 states that no member of the royal household may have his wife at court or following along behind. Edward, however, did not vigorously enforce this rule: as I've said before, he hired two of the wives of his chamber vadletz/portours to the same job as their husbands, at the same wages. They were Johane (i.e. Joan) Traghs and Anneis (i.e. Agnes) de May. Johane and her husband Robyn Traghs had a daughter born in London shortly before 15 September 1325, and in early 1326 Johane joined the royal household as a portour and was still with Edward at the end of October 1326 when his accounts ceased to be kept, a couple of weeks before his capture. Someone, therefore, was looking after Robyn and Johane's daughter while they both travelled all over the country with the king. On 16 May 1325, Roger de May was given half a mark (six shillings and eight pence) for his expenses going home for a while, and some months before, his wife Anneis de May had been paid for sewing shirts for the king and Hugh Despenser the Younger and for making smocks for the chamber servants. This was a few months before she was hired as a chamber portour, and her making clothes for the king and his attendants seems to mean she was living somewhere close to the royal household, at least for a while. On 14 December 1325 shortly before she was hired as a portour, Anneis was given ten shillings to cover her expenses visiting the royal household, and "for what she did at the gate of the Tower [of London]" to mark the feast of St Katherine on 25 November. Anneis's name sometimes appears in the account as Annote, an affectionate diminutive of her name, while her husband Roger's name often appears as Hogge.

On 16 May 1325, Beatrice the wife of the chamber portour John Gos received six shillings and eight pence/half a mark for her expenses coming to the royal household, and another twelve pence for four nights' accommodation in London (Edward II was then staying in Chertsey). We see here how the wives of royal servants were allowed to visit their husbands at court but not to stay overnight with them there, and the king paid for their accommodation somewhere nearby. Though not too near; Chertsey is a good twenty miles from London, so maybe John Gos was given four days' leave to go and stay with his wife.

On 8 July 1325, Edward II gave a gift of ten shillings - and to put that in perspective, it was a few months' wages - to Anneis Lawe, wife of his chamber portour Henry Lawe. This implies Anneis was then visiting her husband. Henry was given permission to go home on 22 May 1325, with twenty shillings for his expenses. Henry's brother Syme Lawe was also a chamber portour, and also married to a woman called Anneis. This Anneis Lawe received twenty shillings in early July 1326 when she "came from her home to visit and talk to the said Syme, her baron [husband], for her expenses in returning to her home." The Lawe brothers' sister Alis Coleman sometimes brewed ale for Edward, their brother Willecok Lawe once helped with the ropes on a royal boat, and the king sent their father Roger Lawe a gift of money once when he was ill.

On 5 September 1325 at Dover, when Edward II was still debating whether or not to sail to France to pay homage to Charles IV or to send his son instead: "Paid to Nanne, wife of John Pecteman, one of the king's portours, who came to talk to her baron [husband] before he crossed the sea, of the king's gift, for her expenses towards the household, five shillings."

15 September 1325: "Paid to Robyn Traghs, one of the portours of the king's chamber, who went to London to talk to Johane his wife, who was delivered of a daughter, for his expenses, five shillings." This was a few months before Johane was admitted to wages as a fellow portour of the chamber.

16 October 1325: "Item, paid to Will Shene, one of the portours of the king's chamber, who will marry his wife at Henley next Sunday, five shillings. Item, paid to Isode, whom the said Will will marry, for their expenses on the said Sunday when they marry, twenty shillings."

29 April 1326: "To Hick Mereworth, vadlet of the king's chamber, who had permission to go to Henley to his house with his wife, who came to Kenilworth great with child, for his travel expenses and for what he did at Kenilworth before the king left there, twenty shillings. Item, to Johane wife of the said Hick, who came to her baron at the said Kenilworth great with child as is said above, because she had heard that her said baron was ill there, forty shillings." 

10 May 1326: "Paid to Johane wife of Robyn Traghs, one of the portours of the king, assigned to wages of three pence a day by the king as one of his portours from Saturday 8 March, on which day the king was at Sibson [near Leicester], and when he left the parts of Leicester the said Johane left court for the parts of Norfolk and the house of Lady Haward, where she stayed at the king's order because she was ill, and now on this day is being paid her wages, from 8 March until this day, sixty-four days, sixteen shillings."

Sick pay in the early fourteenth century! Awesomeness! And for two whole months as well. Who'd have thought it? Edward II offered equal pay for women, and gave sick pay to a woman he'd just hired who was unable to work for him for two months.

Edward spent Christmas Eve 1324 at Nottingham, playing dice with three of his chamber squires: they were called Giles of Spain (who later took part in the earl of Kent's plot to free the supposedly dead Edward in 1329/30), Burgeys de Till, and Garsy de Pomit. Garsy at least must have been an older man, as he had a son who was rewarded financially in 1326 for bringing the king news from Gascony. Another chamber squire was John Pymmok, who also had a son who was an adult in the 1320s. The chamber portours seem to have been of different ages: Will Shene, Robyn Traghs and Hick Mereworth and their wives evidently were pretty young in c. 1325 as they were getting married and having children - probably they were in their late teens or twenties - but Hick Hustret must have been older, as his son Henry Hustret was also a chamber portour. The pages of the king's chamber are often called garsons or boys, implying they were teenagers (or perhaps even younger), and sometimes are referred to by nicknames which reveal their youth and small stature: Litel Wille Fisher, Litel Colle, Litel Robyn. By contrast, one of the chamber portours was called Grete Hobbe, 'Great Hob', or in modern English Big Rob, implying that he was either tall or well-built, or both.
So we see that Edward II allowed the wives of his portours to come and visit them, and paid all the women's expenses. Servants were often given permission to go home to visit their families as well, with generous expenses that surely also counted as a kind of holiday pay. The permission to go home appears in the accounts as conge de aler en son pais, "leave to go to his country." The frequent use of nicknames in Edward's chamber accounts reveals the mutual affection and camaraderie among the chamber staff, and Edward took good care of his staff and was hugely generous to them. These were the men, and occasionally women, with whom Edward II spent the most time, and who knew him best. Six of the chamber portours slept in the king's bedchamber with him every night or most nights and thus knew Edward II intimately (I don't mean that in the sense of 'sexually'). This also strongly implies Edward's ability to speak fluent English, as men bearing names like Will Shene and Henry Lawe who worked as servants on pay of three pence a day were never going to speak French, though we can see from the names of some of the chamber squires like Burgeys and Garsy, above, that they were Gascon and thus French-speaking.

Edward II's Sense of Humour

I've posted here before, and written in my biography of Edward II, some lovely details which reveal that the king's sense of humour ran very much towards the slapstick. In the summer of 1326, he gave a pound to his cook Moris for falling off his horse and making him laugh, and the same year gave two and a half pounds to his painter Jack of St Albans for dancing on a table and also making him laugh (the money was said to be to help Jack support his wife and children). In early 1325, two of Edward's chamber squires, Giles of Spain and Burgeys Till, accidentally burned themselves quite badly while performing some kind of show with fire for the king's entertainment at his Westminster cottage of Burgundy, and around the same time Edward paid a man for putting on a performance for him inside the Tower of London, outdoors, in what his account calls "the area in front of the long stable." In the summer of 1312, an Italian minstrel was paid for "making his minstrelsy with snakes before the king," and Edward also enjoyed watching conjurors.

I've just found another lovely entry in one of Edward II's chamber accounts - all of the details in this post are from his chamber accounts - revealing that just before Easter 1325, the king played some kind of prank or practical joke on Hugh Despenser the Younger while they were just outside Southampton on the way to Beaulieu Abbey. Edward's clerk wrote that "the king frightened Sir Hugh." Sadly there are no more details, but Edward was a very playful person who loved to laugh and have fun (though I'm not entirely sure if Hugh Despenser appreciated it!). In May 1326 at the wedding of Hugh Despenser's niece Margaret Hastings, Edward gave a pound to a servant of Hugh's sister Lady Hastings who spent time with him "and made him laugh very greatly." I've also found numerous entries revealing how the king played dice and cross and pile with members of his retinue; on Christmas Eve 1324 at Nottingham, he spent the evening playing dice with his chamber squires Burgeys Till, Giles of Spain and Garsy de Pomit. He also played unspecified ball games in the parks of various castles with some of his household knights. One of Edward II's friends, or at least an acquaintance, was a Thames fisherman called Colle Herron, and the king often chatted to fishermen while sailing up and down the Thames and invited a group of shipwrights to come and stay with him in April 1326. In October 1315 he went on a swimming and rowing holiday with "a great company of common people." What strikes me very strongly from the evidence of Edward II's chamber accounts is that he comes across as a boon companion, a person you can imagine meeting and having a good laugh with, a man who didn't stand on his royal dignity but could get on well with absolutely anyone. There aren't many medieval kings you can say that about.

24 November 1326: Execution of Hugh Despenser the Younger

691 years ago on 24 November 1326, Hugh Despenser the Younger, lord of Glamorgan, was executed in Hereford on the orders of Edward II's queen Isabella of France and her ally Roger Mortimer, lord of Wigmore. It was an atrocious death by hanging, drawing and quartering, and Hugh was also castrated. When it was finally over, Hugh's head was placed on London Bridge (on 4 December) and the four quarters of his body were sent for public display in York, Carlisle, Bristol and Dover. On 15 December 1330 after he had overthrown his mother and Mortimer, Edward III gave permission for Hugh's remains to be collected and buried, and his tomb at Tewkesbury Abbey in Gloucestershire exists to this day. His wife Eleanor was also buried in the abbey in 1337, as were several of their descendants including their eldest son Hugh or Huchon (d. 1349), grandson Edward (d. 1375), great-grandson Thomas, briefly earl of Gloucester (d. 1400), and great-great-granddaughter Isabella, countess of Warwick (d. 1439).

My biography of Hugh will be published in about September/October 2018, by Pen and Sword. Its current working title is Downfall of a King's Favourite: Edward II and Hugh Despenser the Younger. I guarantee there's plenty of stuff about him in it that you've never seen before!

Here's a post about Hugh's execution I wrote eleven years ago today (yowza, time flies!).

And here is my translation of the long list of charges against him at his show trial, from 2009.

My examination of the most devastating charge against Hugh, that he had someone called 'Lady Baret' tortured into insanity (which I very much doubt he did). This is one of the central planks in the popular modern notion that he was basically a psychopath, but there's no evidence for the tale whatsoever beyond the charge against him at his trial, and the list of charges is basically a tissue of fact and fiction, mostly the latter. The unpleasant idea that Hugh raped Queen Isabella is an invention of two writers of the twenty-first century entirely without evidence (see my 2012 post about it here), and even the notion that he had the Welsh lord and rebel Llywelyn Bren hanged, drawn and quartered in Cardiff in 1318 isn't nearly as certain a fact as you might think.

I also wrote here about some of the common modern misconceptions about Hugh Despenser the Younger, including the ever-popular but entirely false idea that Edward II arranged Hugh's marriage to Edward's niece Eleanor de Clare after Hugh became the royal favourite. Hugh and Eleanor married on 26 May 1306 in the presence of her grandfather Edward I, who had arranged it. I stated in that post, wrongly, that Hugh Despenser the Elder did not give his son and daughter-in-law an income of £200 a year as he had promised Edward I. I've since found out that actually he did. Two historians of the twentieth century state that in 1309 Edward II gave Hugh the Younger the former Templar manor of Sutton in Norfolk. I have never been able to find a source for this.

Following in the Footsteps of Edward II

One of my many current writing projects - I have so much work I'm reluctantly having to turn some down - is a book for Pen and Sword titled Following in the Footsteps of Edward II, a travel guide to places in the UK associated with Edward. You can easily guess what some of the places are: Berkeley Castle, Gloucester Cathedral, Caernarfon Castle, etc. What I'm really having fun with at the moment is writing about Edward's Oxbridge foundations. He was the first of only two people in history to found colleges at both Oxford and Cambridge, an accomplishment not often noted (and not by a certain popular Twitter historian who wrote not long ago that Edward II succeeded his father on the throne in July 1307, and "never succeeded at anything ever again." Hahaha! Bless, isn't that so funny and clever?)

Edward II celebrated the tenth anniversary of his accession to the throne on 7 July 1317 by establishing the Aula Regis or King's Hall at the University of Cambridge. In 1546, his descendant Henry VIII founded Trinity College by merging King's Hall and Michaelhouse, which was founded in 1324 by Edward's friend and ally Hervey Staunton, chief justice of the King's Bench. On 21 January 1326, Edward and his almoner Adam Brome founded Oriel College, Oxford, or as they called it, the Hall of the Blessed Mary. It became known as Oriel in Edward III's reign, and still exists, and its long official full name is "The Provost and Scholars of the House of the Blessed Mary the Virgin in Oxford, commonly called Oriel College, of the foundation of Edward the Second of famous memory, sometime king of England." Oriel is the fifth oldest college foundation at Oxford; the fourth oldest is Exeter, founded in 1314 by Walter Stapeldon, bishop of Exeter and Edward II's treasurer of England. Stalpeldon was murdered by a London mob in October 1326 after the queen's invasion.

A Letter from the Archbishop of York to 'Your Royal Majesty' Edward II

A little while ago, I was looking through a very useful book called Recueil de lettres anglo-françaises 1264-1399, edited by F. J. Tanqueray (an historian who wrote an excellent article called 'The Conspiracy of Thomas Dunheved, 1327' in the English Historical Review in 1916, which I have read and used more times than I can count). Anyway, I found a letter in the book sent by William Melton, archbishop of York, to Edward II (on pp. 123-4). The letter is dated 8 January although the year is not given, but as far as I can tell it must be 1326, as Melton calls himself Edward's treasurer, and he held that position from July 1325 to November 1326. I loved the letter and have translated a bit of it here, to give a flavour of how Archbishop Melton addressed Edward II in writing. Melton was a staunch ally and supporter of the king without ever being a yes-man, and wasn't afraid to stand up to him when necessary (e.g., he protected Adam Orleton, bishop of Hereford, when Edward was persecuting him in 1323/24). He was one of the few men who spoke out on Edward's behalf at the parliament of January 1327 which deposed him, refused to attend Edward III's coronation out of respect for Edward's father, and was heavily involved in plots to free the supposedly dead Edward in 1329/30. Edward III also trusted William Melton and made him treasurer of England shortly after he overthrew his mother and Mortimer in October 1330, and Edward II was a far better judge of character than his father, so if he trusted Melton then we know Melton was trustworthy.

The letter of 8 January [1326], in Anglo-Norman in the original - which kind of goes without saying - begins:

"To the very high, very noble and very powerful prince, his very dear and beloved lord, if it please him, by his liege chaplain and servant, his treasurer, with all the honour, reverence and service he can, with the blessing of God."

It goes on:

"My very dear and beloved lord, because several people have told me that your wish is that your Tower of London be provisioned with various things, and I do not dare nor must not install such things from your treasury without your express command, my lord..."

And goes on to ask Edward if he wishes Melton and the barons of the Exchequer to make an estimate of the cost for the provisioning of the Tower. One sentence begins Prie ge a vostre reale mageste, "I beg your royal majesty," which surprised me as I hadn't realised such language was in use as early as Edward II's reign. Calling him "very high, very noble and powerful prince" at the start of the letter is something I've often seen; Edward himself addressed his father-in-law Philip IV of France the same way. But "I beg your royal majesty"? Interesting.

Archbishop Melton's letter ends:

"My very dear and beloved lord, may God in his grace keep you in joy, honour and health. Written at our lodgings [hostiel] near Westminster, the eighth day of January."

Ah, people certainly knew how to write letters 700 years ago, didn't they? Fab stuff.

Book Giveaway: Richard II

My fourth book Richard II: A True King's Fall is out now in the UK, and I have two free hardback copies to give away! I'll sign them, and if you win you can let me know whatever dedication you'd like me to write in your copy. I can send them anywhere in the world, so don't worry about having to have an address in Europe.

If you'd like to win a copy, leave a comment here with your email address (so I can get in touch with the two winners), or if you prefer, email me at edwardofcaernarfon(at)yahoo.com. If you're on Facebook, you can also message me via my Edward II page, here. The closing date is Sunday 19 November, midnight GMT, so you have two weeks to enter! Best of luck!

Oh, and my third book Long Live the King: The Mysterious Fate of Edward II is out now in the US and can be purchased from Amazon (and of course other retailers): see here if you're interested in a detailed account of what happened to the deposed and disgraced king in 1327!

c. 28 October 1294: Wedding of Alice de Lacy and Thomas of Lancaster

I missed the date yesterday, oopsie! Then again, the date of the wedding of the great heiress Alice de Lacy and Edward I's nephew Thomas of Lancaster is not 100% certain, but may have taken place on 28 October 1294. Alice was not yet thirteen, born on Christmas Day 1281; Thomas was probably sixteen, going on seventeen. His date of birth is not known for sure, but my research indicates that the end of 1277 or beginning of 1278 is the likeliest date. He was thus four years older than his wife. Alice was set to inherit the earldoms of Lincoln and Salisbury, and Thomas was set to inherit the earldoms of Lancaster and Leicester, and their fathers Henry de Lacy and Edmund of Lancaster arranged their marriage in 1292. (Thomas had previously been betrothed to Beatrice, granddaughter of Duke Hugh IV of Burgundy, but she died young in 1291.)

Alice de Lacy and Thomas of Lancaster were married for twenty-seven and a half years, but it proved to be an unhappy disaster, and Alice left her husband in the spring of 1317. The couple had no surviving children, and Thomas's younger brother Henry (born c. 1280/81) was therefore his heir. Thomas did have two illegitimate sons, John and Thomas, who joined the Church, and I have recently discovered that Alice de Lacy was pregnant in 1307 or 1308. She sent a messenger to Leicester, one of Thomas's towns, to inform the mayor and townspeople of her pregnancy sometime between Michaelmas (29 September) 1307 and Michaelmas 1308. The messenger was rewarded with a shilling for bringing the good news. Sadly, Alice must have lost this child - perhaps a miscarriage or stillbirth, or s/he died in early infancy. I feel terribly sorry for Alice, but from my point of view as a historian I have to admit that I was also thrilled to have found the reference to her pregnancy, as I'd long assumed that she must have been infertile (Thomas, as he had at least two illegitimate children, obviously wasn't). Perhaps the loss of this child of 1307/08 contributed to the couple's unhappiness. I can't help feeling sad for them and wishing they had been happier. Anyway, happy (almost) wedding anniversary, Thomas and Alice.

27 October 1326: Execution of Hugh Despenser the Elder, Earl of Winchester

On this day 691 years ago in 1326, Hugh Despenser the Elder, earl of Winchester, was hanged in Bristol on the orders of Queen Isabella and her allies including Edward II's half-brothers the earls of Norfolk and Kent and cousin the earl of Leicester (now styling himself earl of Lancaster as well). Despenser was sixty-five years old, born on 1 March 1261, not ninety as stated by the later chronicler Jean Froissart. He was left to hold Bristol after his son Hugh the Younger and Edward II went on to South Wales to try (unsuccessfully) to raise troops, and sent a letter to them on 18 October, the last letter Hugh the Younger would ever receive from his father. Isabella of France and her allies arrived outside Bristol on the same day, and on the 27th the city fell to them. The earl of Winchester was given a show trial during which he was not allowed to speak on the same day, and immediately hanged in his armour on the gallows where common criminals were executed. His head was placed on a spear and sent to Winchester, the town of which he was earl, to be displayed there in public, and supposedly the rest of his body was fed to dogs. Pretty vile even by the standards of the day. A chronicler of Bury St Edmunds claimed that Queen Isabella tried to save Despenser's life, but Bury St Edmunds is on the other side of the country from Bristol and therefore hardly seems like a reliable source, especially as no-one else mentions this tale. Besides, I'm not sure how Isabella's social inferiors would have overridden her wishes in public. Despenser was widely hated in England not only for his association with the regime of his son in the 1320s, but because of his own greed, brutality and corruption, especially in his capacity as justice of the forest. Still, if English medieval noblemen were executed merely for being greedy, brutal and corrupt, there wouldn't have been any English medieval noblemen left.