Living in Medieval England, page 19
Isabella Despenser and Richard Fitzalan had married on 9 February 1321 at the royal manor of Havering-atte-Bower in Essex, when Isabella was 8 and Richard 7 years old. They became parents at the start of their teens, and Richard was to claim in 1344 that they were ‘forced by blows to cohabit’, resulting in the birth of their son Edmund.38 Those of royal and noble rank in the fourteenth century almost always married very young, in adolescence and sometimes even in childhood, whereas the common people of England did not. Evidence from the 1310s and 1320s reveals that they married in their 20s and 30s. To take just a few examples, John Vavasour of Yorkshire was 36 when he married his wife Margaret on Saturday, 29 September 1319; Roger Brounger of Norfolk was 37 when he married Cecile in June 1325; William Sprot of Dorset was 39 or older when he married Johane Hulle on Sunday, 5 July 1327; William Walleye of Shropshire was 32 when he married Edith in October 1327; William Estwode of Suffolk was 24 when he married Johane Cok in Wormingford, Essex on Friday, 5 February 1328; John Sherewynd of St Pancras (‘a town by London’) was 27 when he married Alis Cotesmor in February 1329; and Robert of Clunton in Shropshire was 35 when he married Isabel Clinton in April 1329. John atte Watre of Kent and Walter atte Mote of Essex were both 35 when they married their wives, both named Alis, in 1329, and in 1328 Thomas Godyng was 28 when he was betrothed to Johane Page.39
Nor did people necessarily venture into early parenthood. John Gobaud of Warwickshire was 29 when his wife Johane bore their son John in April 1321, Robert Tylere of St Pancras was also 29 when his wife Johane gave birth to their son John in February 1329, John Leybourne was 39 when his wife Katherine gave birth to their eldest son William in Braintree, Essex on 12 March 1329, and William Fyveley of Scampston, Yorkshire was 31 when his wife Alis gave birth to their daughter Anneis also in March 1329. Thomas atte Mille of Buxted in Sussex, referenced above, was in his late 40s when his son Simon was born in 1304. John Blouwere of Tirrington, Norfolk, was, however, only 21 when his son Walter was born on 26 May 1325, and William Brokton of Ludlow, Shropshire, was also 21 when his son John was born on 11 November 1328.40 Rohese Burford, the wealthy London merchant who was the co-heir of her mother Juliana Romeyn in 1326, was 34 when she gave birth to her son James in 1320, though her daughter Johane was older than James. Women’s ages are unfortunately only very rarely recorded in the fourteenth century, but there seems little reason to suppose that they were routinely much younger than their husbands or that men in their 20s and 30s generally married teenagers. There also remains the issue that some people perhaps only knew their age somewhat vaguely, and a man who believed he was 33 might in fact have been 31 or 32 or 34. The evidence of inquisitions post mortem reveals, however, that people were aware of how many years had passed since a particular event, and are unlikely to have been too inaccurate when reporting their own age.
Queen Isabella kept her wardrobe in the Tower of London, though she cannot have seen any of the items in it since she had left England for her native France in early March 1325. She sent her clerk Master John Brumham there on 30 November 1326 to bring her some items she had stored there: these included a silver-gilt enamelled cup, a gilt ewer ‘enamelled in part with grotesques’, and three gilt cups. Isabella also helped herself to the late Hugh Despenser’s possessions from his own wardrobe at the Tower: almost thirty gold cups and six gold ewers. The order to remove them from the Tower was issued on 30 November, and the queen received the items five days later.41 Just one of the gold cups was worth more than most people alive in England in 1326 earned in an entire year.
December
Bartholomew, Lord Burghersh, a landowner in eleven counties, was appointed constable of Dover Castle and warden of the Cinque Ports on 1 December, replacing Ralph, Lord Basset of Drayton.1 Bartholomew was imprisoned in the Tower of London as a Contrariant from October 1321 until October 1326, when the mob who invaded the Tower freed him and other prisoners. He was a nephew of Bartholomew, Lord Badlesmere, executed as a Contrariant in April 1322, and the brother of the bishop of Lincoln, Henry Burghersh. Bartholomew Burghersh’s date of birth is not known, but his brother Henry was elected bishop of Lincoln in 1320 when he was under 30 years old. Bartholomew’s daughter Joan, Lady Mohun (who lived until 1404) and his son and heir, also Bartholomew, were born probably in the early 1320s while Bartholomew the elder and his wife Elizabeth, née Verdon, were held in captivity in the Tower of London.
The teenager Hugh ‘Huchon’ Despenser, future lord of Glamorgan, was still inside Caerphilly Castle while a besieging force camped outside, and on 1 December Queen Isabella ordered Sir Roger Chandos to ‘cause the siege … to be diligently kept up’. Only two knights were inside Caerphilly: Thomas Lovel, and John Felton, whose son had been murdered in London a few months previously. The besieging force consisted of twenty-five knights, twenty-one squires, 400 footmen, and an unspecified number of men-at-arms.2 The castle of Caerphilly, however, built by Huchon’s grandfather Gilbert ‘the Red’ de Clare (1243–95), earl of Gloucester, in the early 1270s, was virtually impregnable. It sat in the middle of artificial lakes too far away for siege-engines to be effective, and the only way to take the castle was to starve it out. Given the vast quantities of food and drink inside Caerphilly in 1326/7, this would take an extremely long time.
John Mowbray, who turned 16 on 29 November 1326 and had seized the castle of Tickhill in Yorkshire earlier in the year then fled, felt safe enough with Edward II in captivity and Hugh Despenser dead to come forward publicly. He asked for the sentence of treason made on his father John Mowbray the elder in March 1322 to be examined and reversed. A writ was issued in Edward II’s name on 3 December, ordering the judgement to be brought before the royal council. The rights to John’s marriage were granted to Henry of Lancaster in early 1327, and John married Joan, fourth of Henry’s six daughters.3 Their grandson Thomas Mowbray (b. 1367) was made the first duke of Norfolk in 1397 and was permanently exiled from England by Richard II the following year, and features in the first scenes of William Shakespeare’s play about Richard.
The captive Edward II reached Kenilworth Castle on or a little before 5 December in the custody of his cousin Henry of Lancaster. It was exactly sixty years to the month since Kenilworth had been given to Henry of Lancaster’s father Edmund by his own father King Henry III. On either 4 or 6 December, Hugh Despenser’s head was carried down Cheapside in the middle of London to the sound of trumpets and cheers from the local populace, and placed on a spike on London Bridge, not too far from where his widow Eleanor was imprisoned in the Tower of London.4 The four parts of his body were sent to Carlisle, York, Dover and Bristol, and they and his head would remain on public display for four years. Hugh’s sister-in-law, Eleanor Despenser’s sister Margaret Audley, née de Clare, was released from captivity at Sempringham Priory in Lincolnshire on 11 December.5 Margaret was finally reunited with her husband Sir Hugh Audley almost five years after they can last have seen each other. Their only child Margaret Audley, born in the early 1320s and, like her cousins Huchon Despenser and William de Burgh, heir to a third of the great earldom of Gloucester, would be abducted by and forcibly married to Sir Ralph Stafford (1301–72) in 1336. Margaret Audley and Ralph Stafford’s descendants became dukes of Buckingham in the fifteenth century, and their great-great-great-grandson Henry Stafford was executed by Richard III in 1483.
On 6 December, the queen – though the order was issued in the king’s name – ordered four constables and thirty armed men in the Tower of London to be paid their wages, a very generous 8d a day for the constables and 4d for the other men. Eleanor Despenser, in captivity in the Tower, was to be given reasonable expenses for herself and those with her, presumably some of her nine children and several attendants.6 The 6th of December is the feast day of St Nicholas, and in the early fourteenth century there was a popular and widespread custom on this day to choose a ‘boy-bishop’ who served until 28 December, the feast of the Holy Innocents. A boy, usually a chorister, was chosen and dressed in the robes of a bishop, and for the next twenty-two days performed all the ceremonies and duties of a real bishop except for leading Mass. In 1316, Edward II gave 6s 8d to John son of Alan of Scroby for officiating as boy-bishop in his chapel on 6 December, and another 10s to the unnamed child of Nottingham who performed the same service in his presence on the feast of the Holy Innocents.7
An order sent to the constable of Windsor Castle, Thomas Huntercombe, on 7 December 1326 reveals that Edmund Algate was the ‘janitor of both gates’, Adam was the gardener of the king’s garden outside the castle, and there were four watchmen who each received 2d a day. Nighwatchmen performed a vitally important job: in April 1306, one saved the future king Edward II’s life by rousing him from his bed and evacuating his retinue as flames swept through Windsor Castle.8 Alisandre ‘Sandre’ Peyntour and Thomas Rotour were supervisors of the king’s building work at Windsor in 1326, and Robert Wodeham was the forester of Windsor Forest.9 Meanwhile, John ‘Bi the Water’ of Edwinstowe, the verderer of Sherwood Forest – an official who administered royal law in the forests – had to retire on 7 December as he was ‘incapacitated by infirmity and age’.10 Thomas, Lord Wake, in great favour with the queen and her allies, and a first cousin of Roger Mortimer of Wigmore as well as the son-in-law of the earl of Leicester and Lancaster and brother-in-law of the earl of Kent, was appointed to the important position of constable of the Tower of London on 9 December.11
Edward II’s French niece Jeanne de Bar (b. 1295/6), countess of Surrey, was granted custody on 10 December of the ‘crops, horses, oxen and other animals and all other goods’ belonging to the executed Edmund Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, in the Isle of Axholme, Lincolnshire.12 Arundel’s widow Alis was the sister of Jeanne’s husband John de Warenne, earl of Surrey (b. 1286). Although the earl of Surrey had no children with Jeanne de Bar, he fathered at least nine illegitimate children from relationships with mistresses. Surrey made strenuous efforts in the 1310s and again in the 1340s to annul his marriage to Jeanne to marry one of his mistresses instead, and became so desperate that he claimed to have had an affair with his wife’s aunt, Edward II’s sister Mary (1279–1332) – who was a nun of Amesbury Priory in Wiltshire. He hoped to persuade the pope to annul his marriage on the grounds of incest, but the ploy failed.13 Surrey had been a close ally of Edward II in the 1320s, but switched his allegiance to the queen at the right moment, and unlike his brother-in-law Arundel survived the revolution of 1326/7 and lived for another twenty years.
Adam Swynburn, a landowner in Cumberland and Northumberland, died shortly before 12 December. His heirs were his daughter, the unusually-named Barnaba, born 11 November 1292; his grandson Gerard Woderyngton or Widdrington, son of his late daughter Christiana, born 29 September 1302; and another grandson, William Heron, son of his other late daughter Elizabeth, born 29 November 1304. Barnaba Swynburn married a man named John de Strivelyn, which means ‘of Stirling’, and as late as 1358 John had to petition Edward III for his and Barnaba’s rightful inheritance because her father Adam had ‘adhered to the Scots, enemies and rebels’ of Edward I and Edward II. Barnaba was still alive on 6 July 1361 when she was close to 70.14
In all the chaos of the invasion and its aftermath, the King’s Scholars of Cambridge, the young men who studied at the King’s Hall which Edward II had founded in July 1317 to mark the tenth anniversary of his accession to the throne, had been forgotten. On 14 December, the sheriff of Cambridgeshire was ordered to pay the scholars the arrears of the money Edward had granted to them for their maintenance. Parliament was summoned on 14 December to sit in London in January 1327, and the new constable of Dover Castle, Bartholomew Burghersh, was ordered to hunt sixty hinds in the park of Brabourne and have the meat salted and sent to the ‘keeper of the king’s stores’ in Westminster for consumption during the parliamentary session.15
Jakinet de Marigny, from the village of Marigny in Normandy, was one of Queen Isabella’s household valets. On 20 December, the queen granted him an annual income in the county of Lincolnshire, formerly held by Odet Lespicer. Odet, sometimes called Odinet or Odin, had in 1316 been given land in Halton and Killingholme, Lincolnshire forfeited by a Scotsman called Alexander FitzClay, who fought against Edward II at the battle of Bannockburn.16 Odet was Queen Isabella’s personal apothecary, and an extant document reveals how he looked after her when she was ill in late 1313. Isabella appears to have had a miscarriage, as Odet gave her pennyroyal, often used after miscarriages to clear the womb of infection. Isabella was also suffering from insomnia which Odet treated with ‘women’s [breast] milk’ and the juice of poppies, and Odet made salves for bad burns to her arms which the queen suffered when Edward II rescued her from a fire in their pavilion during a visit to France in June 1313.17
John of Eltham was taken from the Tower of London on 21 December, and arrived at Wallingford to be reunited with his mother Queen Isabella on Christmas Eve.18 He would be made earl of Cornwall in October 1328, and from the abdication of his father Edward II in January 1327 until the birth of his nephew Edward of Woodstock, later prince of Wales, in June 1330, was heir to the English throne. Had anything untoward happened to Edward III in those years, he would have succeeded him as King John II of England. John of Eltham died in September 1336, unmarried and childless; his mother Queen Isabella outlived him by twenty-two years.
Just before Christmas, the new keeper of the Tower of London, Thomas, Lord Wake, and the bishop of Winchester, John Stratford (b. c. 1275, archbishop of Canterbury 1333–48), rode to the Guildhall in London. They inquired why work on the repairs being made to the chapel adjoining the Guildhall had ceased. The new mayor, the half-French Richard Betoyne, avoided answering the question, but stated that with their help and with God’s grace the work would soon be completed. Thomas Wake gave timber for the construction, and John Stratford provided lead.19As well as taking possession of the late Hugh Despenser’s possessions in the Tower of London, on 24 December Queen Isabella acknowledged receipt of the belongings of Edmund Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, summarily executed in Hereford on 17 November. Edmund had kept his valuables in the cathedral church of Chichester in Sussex, and they were discovered there and sent to Isabella. The items included £524 in cash – over a million pounds in modern terms – kept in six canvas sacks, sixteen silver cups, a silver salt-cellar enamelled all over, and a basin.20
It was common for noblemen and noblewomen, and other wealthy persons such as bishops, abbots and justices, to store their money at religious houses, as Edmund of Arundel did and Hervey Staunton did at the abbey in Bury St Edmunds. In June 1321, Edmund, earl of Arundel sent a letter to the townspeople of Shrewsbury regarding a sum of money he had stored in the town, almost certainly at the abbey. He suspected his cousin and enemy Roger Mortimer, ‘who is so close to us in blood’ and who would have him slowly and agonisingly killed in November 1326, of wishing to steal the money.21 Two banking firms from Florence, the Bardi and the Peruzzi, operated in England in the 1320s. The Peruzzi were closely associated with the exceedingly wealthy Hugh Despenser, who often availed himself of their services, and after his downfall in 1326 they almost entirely ceased their operations in England until 1335.22
John of Brittany, earl of Richmond, Edward II’s first cousin and known to his family as ‘Brito’, was restored on 25 December to the lands his cousin had confiscated from him earlier in the year. Brito lived until 1334 when he was about 68, and as he never married or had children, his heir by blood was his elder brother Duke Arthur II’s son John III (1286– 1341), duke of Brittany. The jurors at Brito’s inquisition post mortem in 1334 stated, however, that they did not know the identity of his heir, as he was ‘born in foreign parts and was never married, and concerning collateral heirs born in foreign parts, the jury cannot be certain’. Brito owned a house near St Paul’s Cathedral in London, and in 1317 hired Adam Plastrer to plaster the hall.23
Brito’s cousin Edward II, now king of England in name only, spent Christmas 1326 at Kenilworth Castle ‘in great depression’.24 Edward’s wife Isabella of France and their sons Edward of Windsor and John of Eltham – and perhaps their daughters Eleanor of Woodstock and Joan of the Tower as well – spent the festive period at Wallingford Castle a few miles from Oxford. Edward II had given this castle to Isabella a few years previously, and it later passed to their eldest grandson Edward of Woodstock (1330–76), prince of Wales and father of King Richard II, and known to posterity as the ‘Black Prince’. It had always been Edward II’s custom to play a game of dice called raffle, whose objective was to throw three dice with the same number, with members of his retinue on Christmas night. In 1324, effectively the last ‘normal’ festive season of Edward’s reign (as Queen Isabella had already refused to return to him or to allow his elder son to do so by Christmas 1325), the king played raffle with his squires Garsy Pomit, Burgeys Tilh and Giles of Spain and with the young nobleman William Montacute (c. 1301–44), later earl of Salisbury. Edward bet £1 on the game on Christmas Eve and another £2 10d on Christmas night.25 As the king was being held in captivity in Kenilworth at Christmas 1326 and as he must have been grieving for Hugh Despenser, it seems unlikely that he played dice this year.
