Stuff

A somewhat random post today till I get round to writing the next proper one, featuring blog searches and, umm, pink palaces...! Apologies in advance for the weird formatting which seems almost inevitable when I include photos in my posts.

Recent searches which have hit the blog:

- amatory sex film

- caernarvon castle german head injury

- edwards 2 other name

- edvard homo Suggested alternative Google search for that one (it came from Lithuania): edvardas homo. First result on Lithuanian Google for edvard homo: my review of Maurice Druon's novel The She-Wolf of France. Weird.

- baron killed in battlein 1265 name please

- how would our lives be different if king edward was not married to eleanor of castile

- posters, eleanore of castile submitting to edward i

- woman suckyng small sex

- red hot maltese anus

- man died 700 years ago

- the year 1308 a. d. and what happened that year

- edward stuff Well, if you're interested in Edward stuff, you're certainly in the right place.

- poker king hot edward Given that Edward II was tall, strong and handsome, he probably was pretty hot, actually. I'm sure Piers Gaveston thought so.

- queen eleanor greedy land grabbing

- men falling off horses dressed in armour Let's point at them and laugh.

- photos of king edwards 2 in his cannons

- how much are juliana clocks worth

- scottish people cheering after edward ii lost the war

- castilian male photos

- Queen Isabella took over the reigns

And for no reason except that I visited it the other day, here are some pics of the castle of Kaiserswerth in Düsseldorf (on the Rhine in western Germany). You should be able to click on the pics to get a large version, if Blogger feels like it.

Edward II connection: his great-uncle Richard of Cornwall, brother of Henry III, spent Christmas 1257 here shortly after being elected king of Germany.


There are two pink palaces in Düsseldorf, believe it or not, in the suburbs of Kalkum and Benrath. (There should be lots more pink palaces in the world, in my opinion.) Here they are.

Benrath, the Rococo one, was built between 1755 and 1770 for Karl-Theodor von Pfalz-Sulzbach, elector of Bavaria, count palatine of the Rhine and duke of Jülich. He was Edward II's twelve greats grandson, via John of Gaunt and his daughter Catherine, queen of Castile.

Attacking Cardinals And A Bishop

On 1 September 1317, a shocking event took place on the road between Darlington and Durham*: the new bishop of Durham, Louis Beaumont, his brother Henry, and two cardinals were attacked and robbed of "a very great sum of money" while on their way to attend Louis's consecration as bishop. The four men were imprisoned, and although the cardinals were soon freed, the Beaumont brothers remained in captivity until mid-October, at Mitford Castle.

* the attack took place, according to various reports, either at Rushyford, Ferryhill or somewhere called 'Ache' (Aycliffe?).

The perpetrator of this spectacularly appalling piece of lawlessness - attacking cardinals, for pity's sake! - was one Gilbert Middleton, a household knight of Edward II's, who suffered dire punishment for his act: the furious cardinals excommunicated him, or, as the Vita Edwardi Secundi puts it, "solemnly and in public separated Gilbert de Middletone and his accomplices from the communion of the faithful." Edward II himself, furious and embarrassed that two high-ranking churchmen should be attacked in his kingdom, delared that he would "punish the sons of iniquity" who had perpetrated the outrage. He was as good as his word: Middleton was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered on 24 January 1318.

The two cardinals were Luca Fieschi, an Italian nobleman by birth and a distant relative of Edward II, and Gaucelin D'Eauze or Duese, a relative of the then pope, John XXII (born Jacques Duese). They had arrived in England in June 1317 to negotiate between Edward and Robert Bruce, king of Scots, who had supposedly declared that he would not meet them unless they acknowledged him as king, a forlorn hope; far from being neutral, the sympathies of the pope and his cardinals were entirely in Edward II's favour. No doubt it had also occurred to many people that Cardinals Luca and Gaucelin could also usefully negotiate between Edward and his over-mighty cousin, the earl of Lancaster, relations between the two men having deteriorated to the extent that England was teetering on the brink of civil war in 1317. (Not an uncommon situation in Edward II's turbulent reign, it has to be said.)

So that's why the bishops were in England, and here's a quick summary of the background to Louis Beaumont's election as bishop of Durham, which is probably relevant to the attack. The death of Bishop Richard Kellaw in October 1316 saw intense politicking on the part of Edward II, Queen Isabella, the earls of Lancaster and Hereford, and the monks of Durham themselves. Isabella favoured the election of Louis Beaumont; Edward himself promoted the controller of his wardrobe, Thomas Charlton; Lancaster put forward his clerk John Kinnersley; the earl of Hereford a clerk named John Walwayn, and the Durham monks, Henry Stamford. Edward abandoned his support of Charlton and wrote to the pope on behalf of Isabella’s candidate Louis Beaumont – his second cousin – after Louis’s brother Henry promised him that Louis would be "a defence like a stone wall" against the Scots, though the Rochester chronicler claims that the king changed his mind after Isabella implored him on her knees to support her candidate. The pope duly provided Beaumont to the bishopric on 9 February 1317.

It is likely, though not certain, that the earl of Lancaster was involved in the September 1317 attack. Furious at the failure of his candidate to attain the bishopric of Durham and already an enemy of the Beaumonts – he had demanded Henry Beaumont’s removal from court in 1311 and 1314, and their sister Lady Vescy’s in 1311 – Lancaster probably asked Gilbert Middleton to attack them on his behalf. This cannot, however, be proved. Pope John XXII, rightly or wrongly, thought that Robert Bruce was at least partly to blame for the attack, and told Edward II that Bruce had perpetrated outrages on the cardinals and seized and carried off the bishop of Durham. He also informed the cardinals that Bruce had torn up letters the pope had sent him and "laid violent hands" on the bishop of Carlisle.

Who supported Gilbert Middleton, the earl of Lancaster or Robert Bruce or neither of them or someone else entirely, remains uncertain. If Lancaster was involved - and some of the men co-accused with Middleton, among them Sir John Eure, were certainly Lancaster's retainers - he escaped punishment over the episode. Middleton himself had been on apparently amicable terms with Edward II until at least January 1317, when the two men exchanged letters via a messenger called Adam Shirlok. So what persuaded him to commit such an appalling act of violence against the king's friends? Perhaps Middleton was one of the knights of Edward’s household annoyed at his promotion of favourites - Roger Damory and Hugh Audley were extremely prominent and influential at court in 1317, and some of Edward's knights had staged a theatrical protest against his favouritism at Westminster that June - and equally annoyed that Edward failed to protect his subjects in the north from Scottish invasions. Scalacronica claims that Middleton was angry with Edward for arresting his cousin Adam Swinburn, who had "spoken too frankly" to the king about the state of the north. We can probably also see the attack in light of the general rise in lawlessness which followed the Great Famine of 1315-17. Presumably, Middleton (and Lancaster?) had no idea that the Beaumont brothers were accompanied by the two cardinals; he is hardly likely to have dared attack the party otherwise.

Lancaster met the cardinals and escorted them to Boroughbridge, where the earls of Pembroke and Hereford met them and took them to Edward II in York. Edward had heard of the attack by 12 September, on which day he ordered Hamo de Felton, parson of 'Luchham' church (I'm not sure where 'Luchham' is), to keep Gilbert Middleton's son, who was already in Felton's custody, safely, "under pain of forfeiture." On 20 September Edward told all his sheriffs to proclaim the news that he would punish the "sons of iniquity" who had "lately committed robberies and outrages." The king's squires William Felton, Thomas Heton and Robert Horncliffe captured Middleton and his brother John at Mitford Castle in January 1318 - "through treachery of his own people," says Scalacronica - and sent them to Edward, who ordered Simon Driby and thirteen other squires to deliver them to the Tower of London. Edward rewarded Middleton's captors with a generous income, up to fifty marks a year each, from the issues of Middleton's lands.

On 24 January 1318, royal justices sentenced Gilbert Middleton to execution, and he suffered a terrible death by hanging, drawing and quartering. Although some chronicles say that Middleton's brother John shared this awful fate, an inquisition taken in November 1319 proves that John was still alive then. For their part, Cardinals Luca and Gaucelin remained in England until late August 1318, and Edward II informed them in November 1320, not entirely helpfully, that he was unable to restore their stolen goods as he did not know where they were to be found.
Middleton was the only man who suffered the ultimate penalty for the attack, though dozens of others took themselves off to the pope to get his absolution for their role in it: Edward granted a safe-conduct on 12 September 1318 to sixty-two men "who are going to the Court of Rome on account of acts perpetrated in the Marches of Scotland, whereby they feel their consciences wounded." He renewed the safe-conduct in August and October 1319 for one Marmaduke Basset - known by the nickname Duket - who "returned without bringing with him sufficient evidence of his absolution," and thus had to travel to Avignon a second time. The attack on the cardinals combined with the fact that Gilbert Middleton was a household knight of Edward II's is sometimes seen as 'evidence' that Edward 'favoured lawless personalities', a discussion I'll save for another post.


Sources
- Calendar of Patent Rolls 1313-17, 1317-21; Calendar of Close Rolls 1313-18, 1318-23; Calendar of Papal Letters 1305-42; Foedera, vol. II, i; Calendar of Chancery Warrants 1244-1326; Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous 1308-48.

- Vita Edwardi Secundi Monachi Cuiusdam Malmesberiensis, ed. N. Denholm-Young; Scalacronica: The Reigns of Edward I, Edward II and Edward III as Recorded by Sir Thomas Gray of Heton, knight, ed. Herbert Maxwell; The Chronicle of Lanercost 1272-1346, ed. Herbert Maxwell.

- Thomas Stapleton, ‘A Brief Summary of the Wardrobe Accounts of the tenth, eleventh, and fourteenth years of King Edward the Second’, Archaeologia, 26 (1836); Michael Prestwich, ‘Gilbert de Middleton and the Attack on the Cardinals, 1317’, in Warriors and Churchmen in the High Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Karl Leyser, ed. T. Reuter (1992)

In Which I Fail To Discover Any New Information About Edward II's Illegitimate Son

The existence of Edward II's illegitimate son Adam has been known to historians since 1964, when Professor F. D. Blackley discovered references to the boy in Edward's wardrobe account of 1322: Adam accompanied his father on Edward's disastrous Scottish campaign that year. The lad was openly acknowledged as 'Adam, bastard son of the lord king' (Ade filio domini Regis bastardo) or simply as 'Adam, son of the king' (Ade filio Regis). The account records five payments to Adam, presumably in his mid-teens or thereabouts, old enough to go on military campaign but young enough to have his tutor with him. The payments totalled thirteen pounds and twenty-two pence, and were intended for Adam to purchase 'equipment and other necessaries' (armatura et alia necessaria). The money was paid out to him in five instalments between 6 June and 18 September 1322 by John Sturmy, steward of Edward's chamber, either to Adam himself or to his tutor (magister), Hugh Chastilloun. Adam is usually assumed to have died on the Scottish campaign, perhaps of the dysentery which ravaged the English army, as he never appears again in any known source.

[All this information comes from F. D. Blackley's article ‘Adam, the Bastard Son of Edward II’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 37 (1964), pp. 76-77.]

The identity of Adam's mother is unknown, though presumably Edward had a reasonably serious relationship with her, as I can't imagine that he would have acknowledged her child as his own unless he was certain that he was the father - which of course implies that he knew her well enough and for long enough to be sure that she wasn't having sex with anyone else. Given that 'Adam' is not a name from Edward's family, presumably the unknown mistress was the daughter or sister of a man called Adam, or a man called Adam was the boy's godfather. I haven't a clue as to who this man might be - Edward had several servants with this name, including Adam of Lichfield, his lion-tamer. (?!) As Adam was about in his mid-teens in 1322 and thus born around 1305 to 1308, he must have been conceived when Edward was in his early to mid-twenties.

As Adam The Mysterious Illegitimate Son Of Edward II annoyingly seems destined to remain completely obscure - I can't find any references to him anywhere else at all - I've been trying to trace his magister Hugh Chastilloun, in the hope that his whereabouts before 1322 might give me a clue as to where Adam was, or that I might indirectly learn something about Adam. Equally annoyingly, though, Chastilloun proved a hard man to trace. Such as they are, here are the results of my investigation.

Firstly I found a Hugh Chastillon who was lord of the manor of Leckhampstead in Buckinghamshire, who died sometime between 1316 and 1323 - though obviously he can't have been Adam's tutor if he died before 1322. Hugh was the son of Richard Chastillon, who died in 1279 when Hugh was already of full age, which means he can't have been born any later than 1258. The family is mentioned a couple of times on the Fine Roll of Edward I's reign, with the name spelt Castilun and Chastillun. (There are approximately 342 different ways of spelling the name Chastilloun, which didn't make my quest any easier.) The Hugh Chastillon in question was summoned to a meeting of the king's council in September 1297, served against the Scots in 1298, and was summoned to parliament as a knight of the shire for Buckinghamshire in 1300 and 1301. He had at least two sons: William, rector of Leckhampstead, and Richard, who succeeded his father as lord of the manor. Richard, name spelt Chasteloun and Chastiloun, went overseas with Hugh Despenser the Elder in March 1319, and accompanied Despenser on the Scottish campaign in 1322. Richard and his brother William the rector were accused in May 1327 of stealing the goods of Sir Richard Talbot in Oxfordshire - the man who married Elizabeth Comyn in secret in 1326. If this man was the correct Hugh Chastilloun, I can't find him in any context which might provide a link to Adam, and possibly he was too old anyway - and he's very hard to trace after the beginning of the 1300s.

Secondly, a man called Hugh Castellon was appointed keeper of the manor of Kirkby Malzeard near Ripon in Yorkshire in the autumn of 1323, which had been forfeited to Edward II by John Mowbray (executed March 1322). Edward stayed at Kirkby Malzeard from 18 to 20 September 1323, and appointed Castellon keeper on his last day there. Castellon was still alive in the early 1330s, when he was accused by Mowbray's son and heir of stealing his goods in Kirkby and elsewhere. He may be the same man who was one of the mainpernors of the Contrariant John Mauduit in 1322 as recorded on the Fine Roll, where the name is spelt 'Hugh Castellion'. If he was the man who was Adam's tutor, I can't find any references to him before the early 1320s, and I have no idea who he was or what happened to him after the early 1330s.

And here are a few other possibilities that might provide a clue to Hugh Chastilloun's real identity:

- there' s a French town near Bordeaux, nowadays called Castillon-la-Bataille (Castillon-sur-Dordogne until recently), which in the fourteenth century was within the territory controlled by the kings of England. Maybe the mysterious Hugh Chastilloun came from there; the lord of Castillon was high in Edward II's favour, and accompanied him on his return to England in February 1308 after marrying Isabella: Edward came ashore from his ship in a barge, "Hugh le Despenser [the Elder] and the lord of Castellione of Gascony being in his company."

- the family name of the counts of St Pol in this era was Chatillon, also spelt Castellion or Chastilloun. The count of St Pol who died in 1307 was called Hugh de Chatillon, and his brother and successor Guy, who died in 1317, was married to Edward II's first cousin Marie of Brittany (daughter of Edward I's sister Beatrice).

- there are other French towns called Chatillon - Chatillon-sur-Indre, Chatillon-sur-Marne, Chatillon-sur-Loire, etc.

- and finally, Holt Castle in Denbighshire, Wales was sometimes called Castel Lleon in the fourteenth century, with Chastellyon or Chastellion as alternative spellings. Hugh Chastilloun might have come from one of these places, or none of them, might be one of the men I've named here, or someone else entirely.

So to sum up: have I certainly identified Hugh Chastilloun? Nope, not even close. Have I discovered any new information about Edward II's out-of-wedlock son? Nope, absolutely sod-all. Research is really frustrating sometimes.

A Spanish Warrior-Saint

A post about Edward II's grandfather King Fernando III of Castile and Leon, who recaptured most of Andalusia from the Moors during the Reconquista and was canonised as San Fernando or Saint Ferdinand in 1671. Yep, Edward II's grandad was a Spanish saint who has a valley and city in California, a cathedral in Texas and a city in Trinidad and Tobago named after him. Edward's uncle King Alfonso X, incidentally, has a crater on the moon named after him. (Edward himself has a folk band called Edward the Second and the Red-Hot Polkas named after him. Not quite the same, is it?)

Fernando III was born in August 1201 in the forest between Salamanca and Zamora as the third child and eldest son of King Alfonso IX of Leon - the north-west corner of the Iberian peninsula - and his second wife Berenguela of Castile. Berenguela was born in 1180 as the eldest child of Alfonso VIII of Castile and his queen Eleanor of England, the second daughter of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, while Alfonso IX, known as el Baboso or the Slobberer because he foamed at the mouth during his frequent rages, was born in 1171 and succeeded his father as king of Leon in 1188. Fernando had two older half-sisters and a half-brother from his father's first marriage, four full siblings and at least a dozen, maybe as many as fifteen, half-siblings, his father's illegitimate children - one of whom, Maria, supposedly had an affair with her half-nephew, Fernando's son Alfonso X. Fernando himself had fifteen children, eleven sons and four daughters, all of them legitimate; most unusually for a Spanish king of the era, he is not known to have had any out-of-wedlock children. (Well, he was a saint, after all.)

Berenguela of Castile and Alfonso IX of Leon were first cousins once removed but didn't bother to apply for a dispensation on the grounds of consanguinity, and Pope Innocent III annulled their marriage in 1204 - although he did allow their children to remain legitimate. Alfonso, somewhat bizarrely, returned to his first wife Teresa of Portugal, who was his first cousin; the pope had previously annulled this marriage for consanguinity, too. Fernando III's elder half-brother, confusingly also called Fernando and the son of Alfonso IX and Teresa, died in August 1214 in his early twenties, leaving Fernando as the heir to his father's kingdom of Leon. A few weeks later, Fernando's maternal grandfather Alfonso VIII of Castile died, to be succeeded by his youngest child but only surviving son, ten-year-old Enrique I. (Fernando was three years older than his uncle.) Enrique reigned as king of Castile for less than three years, and was killed at Palencia by a tile falling off a roof in June 1217. To make this complicated family tree even more complicated, Enrique was married to Mafalda, sister of Teresa of Portugal.

Fernando's mother Berenguela, eldest child of Alfonso VIII and regent for her young brother from 1214 to 1217, succeeded as queen of Castile in her own right, but immediately abdicated in favour of her son. At not quite sixteen, Fernando was now king of Castile, and also succeeded his father as king of Leon on the latter's death in 1230. Alfonso IX tried to leave his kingdom to his daughters by Teresa of Portugal, Fernando's half-sisters Sancha and Dulce, but the two women were no match for Fernando and his determined, capable mother and chief adviser Berenguela (sister of the famous and equally capable queen-regent of France, Blanche of Castile).

Fernando married his first wife Elisabeth or Beatriz of Swabia in 1219, when he was eighteen and she fourteen. Remarkably, Beatriz was the granddaughter of two emperors: Frederick Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor, and Isaac Angelos, Byzantine Emperor. She bore Fernando three daughters and seven sons, including: his successor Alfonso X; Fadrique, executed for rebellion against Alfonso; Sancho, archbishop of Toledo at eighteen; and Felipe, archbishop of Seville also at eighteen, who gave up his ecclestiastical career to marry the Norwegian woman betrothed to one of his brothers. Fernando's most colourful child, however, was Enrique (1230-1304) who was at various times a mercenary in North Africa, a senator of Rome and the regent of Castile, spent thirty years in a Naples prison and four years in England cheerfully sponging off Henry III after his expulsion from Castile following an unsuccessful rebellion against his brother Alfonso X, and who was said - probably apocryphally - to be the lover of his stepmother, Edward II's grandmother Jeanne de Dammartin. Queen Beatriz died in 1235, aged only thirty - probably worn out from all that childbearing - and in 1237 Fernando married Jeanne de Dammartin, countess of Ponthieu, Montreuil and Aumale in her own right, in a match arranged by his aunt Blanche, queen of France. Fernando and Jeanne had four sons and a daughter, Edward II's mother Leonor or Eleanor, the only one of Queen Jeanne's children to outlive her.

Fernando is chiefly remembered for his great military successes, and he recaptured Cordoba, Jaen and Murcia from the Moors between 1236 and 1246. The emir of Granada paid tribute to Fernando as his vassal from 1246, though the king's greatest triumph was his conquest of the great city of Seville, which had been in the hands of the Moors for 536 years: after a sixteen-month siege, the king entered the city on 22 December 1248. I don't know for sure if she was, but I'd like to think that Edward II's mother Leonor, then probably aged seven, was present to witness the greatest moment in her father's life. Fernando more or less completed the Reconquista, with only Granada remaining in Muslim hands - and so the situation remained until 1492, when Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile defeated the emirate and annexed it to Castile.

According to one report, Fernando mocked the Muslim inhabitants of Seville in 1248 by riding his horse up the Giralda tower, the minuet of Seville’s Great Mosque (which he later converted into a cathedral), perhaps one of the factors which prompted a Muslim writer to describe him as "the tyrant, the cursed one." In fairness, however, Fernando is remembered for his role in the Convivencia, the peaceful co-existence of Christians, Jews and Muslims in Spain, and he asked the pope to end the practice of Jewish people being forced to wear distinguishing marks on their clothes. Fernando founded the cathedral of Burgos as a very young man in 1221 and turned the mosque (mezquita) of Cordoba into another cathedral, founded bishoprics, hospitals and monasteries, and became famous for his great piety - he often fasted, spent entire nights praying, and always wore a hairshirt. Ever the soldier, however, he had a famous sword named Lobera.

Fernando III of Castile and Leon died in Seville on 30 May 1252, at the beginning of his fifties, to be succeeded by his thirty-year-old son Alfonso X; his much younger widow Queen Jeanne returned to her native Ponthieu and outlived him by twenty-seven years. His daughter Eleanor/Leonor, then aged ten and the twelfth of his fifteen children, was present at his death-bed. He was canonised 419 years after his death with his feast day as 30 May, and is the patron saint of engineers, soldiers, prisoners, paupers, people in authority in general, and large families. His first cousin Louis IX of France - their mothers were sisters - was also canonised as St Louis, and his elder half-sister and her mother Teresa of Portugal were beatified: a very saintly family, evidently. Here's a picture of the statue of Fernando on Plaza Nueva in Seville, and here's an account of a tourist celebrating the feast of San Fernando in 2006, with a photo of Fernando's body - his tomb in Seville Cathedral is opened every year, and his body is said to be incorruptible. Fernando III was a superb military leader, a tolerant man of great integrity and a renowned upholder of justice; qualities which, sadly, were not inherited by his English grandson Edward II.

John Trevisa And That Famous Red-Hot Poker

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edward II Should Have Been Born...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edward II and Eleanor Despenser

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Random Moments in the Life of Edward II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Tower Of London, 2

More pics of the Tower of London!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some medieval pottery:

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

Below, the castle moat.

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

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

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

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

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

The Tower Of London, 1

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

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

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

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














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

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

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

A touchy-feely exhibition of cloths in said bedchamber:

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

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

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

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

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

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

More pics of the Tower to follow soon!