The Story of England, page 19
Wodard was accused of murder. By an added piece of good fortune the inquiry by the judge, Gilbert of Preston, into the circumstances in which Wodard killed William King also survives, on a roll recording numerous assizes and inquiries heard by Preston that year. From it we learn that the inquiry was commissioned by the king on 6 October 1264 at Canterbury, which, given the date, means it was commissioned by the Montfortian government when Simon and the king were in Kent directing the English army against the great ‘alien’ invasion. Very likely it was Saer who obtained the commission on behalf of his man John, appealing for a pardon at the time when the Kibworth troops were outside the city in the great camp on Barham Down. Wodard presumably then was down there in the ranks of Simon’s peasant army, loyal to his lord, and perhaps even to his cause.
Preston heard the inquiry the next spring at Rockingham Castle near Market Harborough (the castle is visible from the terrace above the allotments at Westerby) on 11 April 1265. The jurors were all local men who had ridden over from Kibworth and neighbouring villages: William of Gumley, Walter the clerk of Langton and Richard of Saddington (who was married to a Kibworth woman), along with four villagers: Hugh of Kibworth, Richard Fisseburn, Nicholas ‘at the Thorn’ and John Faukin. With no Bowden men the jury was perhaps loaded in John’s favour. They simply had to decide ‘whether Wodard of Kybbeworth killed William Kyng of Bowden in self-defence so that otherwise he could not have escaped his own death, or through felony or premeditated malice’.
Weighing up the witnesses, they concluded on oath that King had been the aggressor, had stopped them going into the church and struck Wodard with an axe and had intended to kill him. ‘So they say certainly that the foresaid Wodard killed the foresaid William in self-defence and not through felony or premeditated malice.’
With Saer’s encouragement, had the fateful Pentecost procession turned into a celebration of the Montfortian victory? This might well have aroused fury at Harborough, which was a royal manor – even William King’s name suggests a king’s man. Certainly axes at the church door seem hardly the way to welcome pilgrims at Pentecost. King and the locals had evidently come prepared. According to the royal patent rolls Wodard’s pardon was finally given at Northampton, on 22 April 1265. The letter patent was issued at the instance of the Lord of Kibworth, Saer de Harcourt, who is specifically called ‘a knight of Simon de Montfort, the steward of England’. Thus in the letter which Wodard himself would have taken away and doubtless shown to his fellow villagers, the Kibworth peasant was associated both with Saer, his lord, and with Saer’s lord, the Earl of Leicester and guardian of England, the great Montfort himself.
Alien invasion: ‘We will fight on beaches’
Following his capture after the battle at Lewes on 14 May 1264, King Henry was now in the hands of the council of barons under Simon de Montfort. With Prince Edward also under arrest, the royalists grouped for a counter-attack around Henry’s French-born queen, Eleanor, and her supporters across the Channel. Eleanor had a deep war chest, and now approached King Louis of France for assistance, gathering allies and mercenaries to form an invasion army. The royalist fleet began to assemble in Boulogne, while back home the barons unleashed a tide of nationalist propaganda picturing the queen’s forces as ‘a vast horde of aliens thirsting for English blood’ who would spare no one if their army got a foothold in Kent. These were the circumstances in which the barons summoned the gigantic army that assembled on Barham Down that August: ‘All men capable of bearing arms … wherever they live in England, are to join us,’ the royal decree runs, ‘to protect the country night and day and not to go home without specific orders from us.’ Putting words into the captive king’s mouth, the royal letters emphasized that ‘Peace between ourselves and our barons to the honour of our Lord and for the good of ourselves and of our kingdom is now firmly established thanks be to God.’ Simon wrote to the king of France on Henry’s behalf: ‘We are day by day working on rectifying the problems which have arisen since the time of discord.’ At the same time Simon was firing off patriotic letters to the sheriffs in the shires claiming to speak now for all England. The Barons’ Proclamation of 7 July said:
We know for a fact that a vast horde of aliens is preparing to invade the land – so let no one plead as an excuse that the harvest is at hand or that some personal cause or private duty calls him. Much better to suffer a little personal loss and be safe than be delivered to a cruel death, with the loss of all your lands and goods at the impious hands of foreigners who are thirsting for your blood.
In late July the transports for the alien army were reported to be assembling at Boulogne, as Hitler and Napoleon were to do later; and beacons were readied along the south coast. The threat of invasion was on everyone’s lips, and rumours of a fifth column spread like wildfire, engendering a nasty tide of jingoism against resident aliens. Simon’s letters to King Louis of France meanwhile were searching for a diplomatic solution, pointing out that a ‘horrendous loss of life in both kingdoms will occur if the invasion takes place’. Meanwhile to meet the ‘alien army’ the feudal host, summoned in the king’s name through the local sheriffs, began to gather. Every magnate and every knight was expected to answer the king’s summons. But Montfort also called up a national levy drawn from the freemen of the shires. ‘By land and sea … capable and trustworthy men are to gather for the defence of the realm.’ Watchers were set on the coasts from the Wash to the Solent; in Lincolnshire for example 700 freemen of the shire were put on coast guard with only the poor exempted. The men of London and Greenwich were deployed to defend the estuaries of the Thames and the Medway. The archers of the Kentish Weald camped on the shingle between Romney and Winchelsea – ready literally to ‘fight on the beaches’. A circular letter to the shires shows that Midland shires were required to send knights and free tenants, but also ‘at the common charge’ eight, six or four men from each manor depending on its size. Each man was to be provided by his village with money to cover forty days’ supplies.
The atmosphere was at first electric. There may even have been football-style chants though these only survive in French:
Coment hom le nome? WHAT’S HIS NAME!!
He’s called MON-FORT!!
He’s in the monde and he’s big and strong
He loves what’s right and he hates what’s wrong
And he’ll always come out on top!!!
Flushed with their first successes the rebels’ mood grew ever more anti-alien; they sneered at the king’s despised brother Richard (‘Thah thou be ever trichard’: a deceiver, trickster) and threw metaphorical rotten vegetables at the queen (as indeed Londoners had done for real before the war broke out). But Simon for them was ‘brave and true’. Strange for a French-speaking aristocrat not known for his sympathies for the peasantry but now punning on his name, he was ‘in the world’ – their world – and the commoners were right with him.
The standoff in Kent, however, went on longer than the planned forty days and the army began to suffer as the weeks passed, supplies and money ran out, and the weather began to turn. The call-out had coincided with harvest time and the fieldwork for the autumn. By the end of August there were mounting desertions. One case recorded in detail involves John of Kibworth, a constable and trusted man of Saer. John acted as a messenger for Simon’s council in Canterbury. On 29 August Simon wrote ‘on the matter of raising funds for expenses for units on the sea coast’ to the Sheriff of Rutland: ‘We order you without delay to raise further allowances for the aforesaid men until the octave of the coming feast of the Virgin Mary.’ Formerly set at 3d a day, the allowance was now put up to 4d. John of Kibworth carried these messages on horseback between the king and the Rutland sheriff. But by 6 September the constables of the Rutland contingent were reporting that ‘the men were in want and had exceeded their term and had no lands or tenements from which they could support themselves.’ As the muster wore on into the autumn (and one imagines by then sanitary conditions in the camp had become intolerable) the Sheriff of Rutland was eventually forced to ask his villagers to find a hefty 8d a day for each of their men. Only in late October, when the invaders disbanded across the Channel, were the forces finally sent home, just in time to join their neighbours in ploughing last year’s fallow field ready for next year’s winter corn.
The alien threat had been averted. But the great issue for Simon and the barons once they had power was what to do with it. They had the king in their grasp but they still believed in the office of kingship; they simply wanted to limit its power. Finally the barons began to fall out among themselves with bitter arguments between erstwhile friends and allies. Then over in the west, Simon’s enemy Roger Mortimer gathered the Marcher lords against him. When Simon carelessly allowed Prince Edward to escape and to join Mortimer, he faced disaster. Events now began to move with all the momentum of a Shakespearean tragedy. Simon moved his army west to attack Mortimer, only to be intercepted by Edward, now joined by many magnates opposed to Simon’s overweening behaviour. At the start of August, finding the Severn crossing at Bridgenorth blocked, Simon forded the river and made a night march to Evesham hoping to rendezvous with the forces of his son. Arriving in the town soon after dawn his exhausted army found itself trapped by superior forces in a loop of the Avon. Realizing that he was surrounded, Simon is reported to have said: ‘God have mercy on our souls, for our bodies are theirs.’
The battle was over quickly. It was as one contemporary remarked ‘the murder of Evesham, for battle it was none’. The recent discovery of a new eyewitness account conveys with horrible immediacy what Constable John of Kibworth and John Wodard experienced – if they were still in the army with their feudal lord (our sources of course were not interested in the names of the poor rank and file who died there). Simon marched out of the town and charged his enemy, but Edward and his generals had appointed a death squad to isolate him and almost immediately Simon was killed and hacked to pieces. There it might have ended but hatred and anger among royalists was so great that they mercilessly hunted their defeated enemies down. Two or three thousand Welsh foot soldiers were butchered trying to cross the Avon, ‘with the express approval of the king and his ministers’. In the blood-soaked aftermath even those taking refuge in the abbey down in the town were slaughtered as altar and shrines ran with blood. Below the hill many of the fugitives ran into a marshy stretch of water meadows along the Avon, where they were cut to pieces. Perhaps it was here that Wodard breathed his last breath, or perhaps he made his way back to the village. John himself disappears from Kibworth documents, though a generation later his kinsman Reginald is found in a typical village feud in the manor court fighting Nick Polle for trespass. In the village, life of course went on.
Retribution was inevitable. In the immediate aftermath of Evesham the estates of the Montfortians were pillaged in an irresistible wave, spreading out from the battlefield. And by an incredible chance, in the Court of Pleas records in the National Archives in Kew, what actually happened in the Kibworth area after the revolt is revealed in astonishing detail. Three days after Evesham, on Friday, 7 August, the news of Montfort’s defeat and death had already reached the heartland of his powerbase in Leicestershire. Royalists rapidly appeared in the shire with armed forces and the king’s marshal, Peter de Nevill and his standard bearer, Eudo de la Zouche. They moved to take control of the villages of south Leicestershire which had been sympathetic to Earl Simon, the estates of lords like Ralph Bassett (who had been killed in the battle) and Saer de Harcourt (who had been captured). Among them were Newton Harcourt and Kibworth Harcourt, and to the west of Kibworth a little place called Peatling Magna.
On Saturday, 8 August, one of Nevill’s grooms tried to go through Peatling Magna with a cart of supplies. The villagers objected and ‘some foolish men of the village’ then sought to arrest him with his cart and horses. In the scuffle the groom was wounded ‘in the arm above his hand’. On Wednesday the 12th Peter himself arrived with a large company of armed men to take revenge. Then the villagers confronted the marshal, and, according to Nevill, accused him and his men of sedition and ‘other heinous offences’ saying that they were ‘against the barons and against the welfare of the community of the realm’ (utilitas communitatis regni).
Not surprisingly the scene now turned nasty. Nevill threatened to burn the village down unless he got redress and the men took to the church for refuge. Now the women of the village took the lead, led by the wife of one of the peasants. Worried that their houses would be burned, they tried to negotiate a compromise, and according to Nevill promised that a sum of twenty marks should be paid to him as a fine on the following Sunday (a mark was 6s 8d – so twenty was a large sum for a small village).
With the help of the reeve and at the women’s prompting – but here the two sides would later strongly disagree over the course of events – five freemen agreed to stand as hostages for the payment of the fine, or perhaps were physically coerced by Nevill into doing so. They were poor freemen, and the rest of the community now clubbed together to provide the hostages with expenses. With that Nevill took the hostages away to prison and waited for the village to toe the line. But that wasn’t the end of the story. The community took their complaint about Nevill’s high-handed actions to the king’s justices of the peace. The upshot was that the peasants took the king’s marshal to court. Our surviving manuscript account is the record of this hearing and shows how English villagers now thought they could use the law. The case was brought against Nevill by the reeve and six others ‘on behalf of the community of the village’ claiming that he had used violence against them and that the five hostages had been taken illegally. Nevill denied force and wrongdoing. He had suffered trespass and violence at the hands of the ‘foolish’ villagers, who had accused him of heinous crimes ‘and beat and wounded and maltreated his men’. Speaking on behalf of the village community, Thomas the reeve and the local priest, who were alleged to have agreed the fine with Nevill, strongly denied that there had ever been any consent: as freemen they had been dragged out of church by force and wronged (in saying this were they perhaps aware of the clause in Magna Carta about arbitrary arrest?). They claimed compensation and the hostages too alleged they had ‘lain in prison in wretchedness … wherefore they say that as they are free men (liberi homines) and of free status, they have been wronged, and have suffered loss of livelihood to the value of a hundred marks.’ Thomas the reeve and the freemen of the village insisted that Peter had ‘dragged them by force and unwillingly out of the church and the churchyard’. In the end the king’s judges decided against them, but the case shines a fascinating light on the political views and class awareness of the peasants during this momentous national crisis. Here for the first time in English politics is the voice of the peasants of England.
The Hundred Rolls of 1279
The Barons’ Revolt had stirred up many questions about legal rights in the body politic. Royal rights had been usurped, ancient rights lost, mortgage documents stolen, debts cancelled by partisans. The peasants who had been down to Kent, who had fought in the armies, and whose villages had suffered at the hands of vengeful partisans knew well now how these things affected them and how some could be contested in law. In the aftermath of the war a flood of legal disputes began between peasants and their lords. Even villeins now went to court to contest their landlord’s view of their servile status. In 1275 at Stoughton three miles from Kibworth the landlord’s lawyers sneeringly dismissed such aspirations outside the courtroom when they cut short one rights case. They told the ‘foolish’ peasant litigants they would not be allowed to succeed in their plea, and that if they persevered they would waste a great deal of money; as the defence lawyers would be able to prove them villeins and therefore deny them the right to sue in a higher court. A satirical poem was then penned by a priest on the landlord’s side who uses his clever Latin learning to deride the leading peasant agitators and their wives: ‘What should a serf do except serve? And his son too? He shall be a serf pure and simple, deprived of freedom. The judgement of the Law, and of the King’s court, prove it so!’
From its own side, after such upheavals in politics with widespread confiscation and redistribution of estates, the government was anxious to re-establish clarity over land ownership and rights. Henry III had died in 1272 and was succeeded by his son, Prince Edward. At the time Edward was on crusade in the Holy Land and did not return to England till summer 1274, when he was crowned as King Edward I. Almost immediately Edward undertook a great survey of England, a second, but far more comprehensive Domesday, going into the most minute detail in every community and recording every member of the adult population for legal and tax purposes. Taken in 1274–5 and 1279–80, and known as the Hundred Rolls, these constitute the greatest body of evidence for the social history of England in this period, and the Hundred Rolls of 1279 are the most ambitious survey ever undertaken by an English ruler.
The questionnaire submitted to each of the local hundred juries had no fewer than forty-two questions on tenure, status, income, land holdings, stock and material holdings. Some of the original returns survive in the National Archives in Kew and some in county archives, though more than half are now lost. Had the survey been completed it would have amounted to a comprehensive register and customary of all England down to individual villeins, cottagers and serfs. For any place for which the returns have survived the rolls are a unique resource, some of which such as those from Kent are now available online.
