WISSANT IN THE LATE NINETEENTH and early twentieth century was the home of a small artists’ colony. The painters employed an Impressionist-like style in their sea-and dune-scapes and as a group have come to be regarded as a distinctive École de Wissant. Today the village of about one thousand inhabitants also bills itself as the surfing capital of France. Exploitation of the sand and gravel deposits in its vicinity in the early twentieth century created artificial pools and lakes that have by now morphed into refuges for wild waterfowl and favored destinations for ecologists, birders, and nature buffs. The dunes and dune grasses, the pretty cottages with the gorgeous seasonal blooms in their flower boxes, and the colorful and beautifully maintained fishing boats, whose crews take their catch according to so-called authentic traditional practices, give the village a quaint appearance to tourists. Cafés and restaurants offer hospitality to transients. The Chunnel train reaches France very near the village, which makes it all the more accessible to summertime day-trippers from Britain and the French interior.1
The Wissant of the High Medieval past is invisible in the modern tourist village.2 Yet, until the mid-fourteenth century, the settlement (referred to occasionally as britannicus portus) was a critical link in maintaining regular contact between England and the continent.3 It was an emporium, with ties to cloth towns such as Ypres.4 It was also a staging point for troops needing naval transport.5 And in times of peace and war it was the regular site of embarkation and disembarkation for diplomats.6 The village, because of its importance, was home to an English agent and his staff who represented and tried to protect their countrymen’s interests there.7
Clerical and lay elites, including religio-political exiles such as Thomas Becket and members and would-be members of the English royal family, passed through the village in their travels to and from the continent.8 In 1243, two of the latter were Sanchia of Provence, the bride of Earl Richard of Cornwall, Henry III’s brother, and Sanchia’s mother, the dowager countess.9 On 7 December 1265 the English queen, Eleanor of Provence, Sanchia’s sister, used the same sea lane when she came to England after one of her visits to the continent.10 A very big present from the king of France to the king of England, an elephant, was also dispatched from Wissant to Dover in 1255.11 Even when parties from Dover traveled to other continental ports—as when the entourage of Princess Eleanor (Edward III’s sister) for political reasons disembarked at Sluys for her wedding trip to Nijmegen in 1332—they could choose to ship their baggage via the shorter and cheaper route to Wissant and to return via Wissant whenever they had occasion to visit to England.12
Well-off medieval travelers, like their present-day counterparts, would have found a layover of a few hours or even a day or two in the village quite tolerable, whether they were waiting for companions to arrive or sitting out a period of contrary winds, as the constable of France had to do on his way to a mission in England around 1330. He ran out of money in the interim but sent a two-man delegation to Saint-Omer to borrow a hefty sum (400 l.p. [French pounds]) to carry out his mission.13 As there are a few tolerable inns now, there were acceptable ones then in which he could have stayed and eaten and drunk his pleasure. (There were bad ones, too; the variety of inn and tavern cultures in medieval France was staggering.14)
Singers of the time sang French songs of adventure in the better venues to entertain guests and to earn money from travel-weary clerics and diplomats resting up in these establishments. Aristocratic English crusaders, many of whom knew French and were in transit to and from the Holy Land, had perhaps a special fondness for these songs. In time their own tales of derring-do found their way into a few of them. Wissant itself figured at least in passing in the songs.15 It also was mentioned in a number of epic tales, including the Chanson de Roland and the Commedia. In the Chanson Roland’s doomed last battle is said to have been accompanied by the earth’s groaning and shaking throughout Charlemagne’s realm, from Mont-Saint-Michel to Sens and from Besançon to Wissant.16 In Dante’s poem the reference is to the dikes that crisscrossed the landscape from Wissant to Bruges and had their analog in the pilgrims’ hell-scape in the opening to Book XV of the Inferno.17 It has been suggested that the Italian polymath Brunetto Latini, who knew the region, described it to the Italian poet and inspired his usage, although Gladstone argued rather cleverly that Dante actually visited the region on his way to England.18
Diversions for the lower-class exiles who disembarked at Wissant did not extend to the posher entertainments or the respectable establishments of the medieval village. In general, indeed, the newly arrived Anglophone abjurers and whoever among their friends and family had followed them into exile could not understand songs, stories, or much of anything else expressed in sophisticated chanted or spoken French, and they comprehended nothing of the patois, a variety of Dutch, which was the language in general use among natives in the village and the region. So, to the English exiles beginning life anew on the continent Wissant was a disorienting, dispiriting, and altogether wretched hole. If they did stay long enough to pick up a few words of Dutch, they might have learned that the village took its name from the ubiquity of the “white sand.”19 They might also have learned that the name was a homophone of the local word for the stinking polecat (wissantz) which must have been a wonderful stimulus for rank punning among natives.20
To the archeologist Louis Cousin, who carried on excavations in the 1850s, and to most other post-medieval observers down through the end of the nineteenth century, Wissant was almost as depressing as it was to England’s medieval exiles, but for different reasons.21 The bustle of the High Medieval site was long past by the time these observers took the measure of the shrunken village. The port had always needed regular and costly maintenance (good surf made and makes a bad harbor), but locals failed to undertake it in the later Middle Ages, in large part because of the fiscal and military crises of the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453).22 Moreover, the year 1346 saw Edward III, in the full pride of his victory at Crécy during the war, destroy Wissant’s port facilities for military and commercial reasons.
Wissant, a burgher of Valenciennes wrote a little later, “was completely destroyed by fire” along with a vast hinterland (fut Wissant toute brûlée et tout le pays environ à VI lieues en tous sens).23 The historian of the Hundred Years’ War Jonathan Sumption, drawing on such reports, describes Edward III’s work as one of obliteration; the nineteenth-century local historian Pagart d’Hermansart concluded that the English troops wrought a consummate work of destructive dismantlement of the harbor facilities.24 Daniel Haigneré, writing in the late nineteenth century, would have thought these conclusions hyperbolic and the contemporary reports themselves perhaps exaggerated, since there is evidence that Wissant somewhat bounced back and was once again operating as a significant port ten or fifteen years after Edward III’s attack.25 Nonetheless, the destruction was severe. Thousands of charred beams were soon covered by blowing sand and lay hardening into faux ebony for centuries, periodically harvested for use in building repairs.26 Thousands of parchments, long lamented by local historians, perished in the sacking of the village and the other settlements in its vicinity: “Où sont les archives de la ville de Desvres, celles de la ville d’Étaples, de la ville d’Ambleteuse, de la ville de Wissant?” Haigneré asked himself rhetorically.27 Far more records were destroyed, one might add, than were available for that fate during the Allied raid that recaptured the then-fortified village in World War II, its defensive armaments serving as part of the German occupiers’ Atlantic Wall.28
Soon after Edward III’s successful attack on the vulnerable unwalled village had “left Wissant to solitude and sand,” the walled town and port of Calais also fell to him in 1347, these after a long siege.29 Calais had already emerged as Wissant’s competitor in the late twelfth century, but it gained a privileged place in English commercial and military calculations after its capitulation, the exile of its French citizens, and their replacement by Englishmen.30 In any event, Wissant’s position as the principal embarkation point for seaborne travel to England and the usual disembarkation point for travelers from Dover never recovered.31 In hindsight, citizens came to imagine that this inexorable deterioration had actually had no human cause. Rather it was explained that the choked and ruined harbor of “old Wissant was buried by the moving sands in a single night,” or so this popular story was reported in the Westminster Review of 1862.32
The village, whether before 1346 or in its truncated state thereafter, was inhospitable and depressing in wintertime (when ex–Chief Justice Thomas Weyland arrived) and remained so until well into the twentieth century. Despite some natural geographic shelter,33 it suffered from the frequent winds and driving rains and sleet off the Channel that blew the abundant eponymous white sand and choked the streets with it. In order to compensate for their lost income after the 1347 rise of Calais, unemployed and underemployed ferry crewmen switched to fishing in order to supply inland settlements, but in the end this resulted in the overexploitation of the once-thriving herring stocks. (The species was wistfully recalled in Wissant as the Holy Herring). This aggravated the village’s decline.34 The squat one-story houses with thatched roofs and impoverished occupants possessed no charms for Louis Cousin, archéologue et savant, in 1850. And the fishing boats, in the absence of the tourist trade of today, were tired-looking work vessels in various states of decrepitude when he saw them, dragged up from the seashore to the dunes and anchored to prevent their being battered and washed out to sea pending preparation for future use.35
THE ENGLISH OFFICIAL PRESENCE IN WISSANT
In peacetime in the period of our principal interest, that is, before the middle decades of the fourteenth century had passed, Wissant, together with the other Franco-Flemish Channel ports, was a center for the export of cloth to England from Picardy, Artois, and Brabant and, when there was also peace between the French and the Flemings, from Flanders, of which the Wissant region was a linguistic extension.36 It was preferred because the crossing was so short there, and merchants wanted to avoid the danger of the longer sea journeys from the more northerly French and Netherlandish ports.37 When war between France and Flanders undermined this path of exchange, the English were predisposed to sell raw wool and purchase cloth at Antwerp and Mechelen (Malines), which were east-northeast of the French coast, or to use Brabantine merchants or other intermediaries to do so.38 Such practices, sometimes crossing the line into smuggling, piracy, and embargo breaching, provoked Frenchmen’s retaliation, which also skirted legality. Although less common during the thirteenth century, these actions and reprisals became an important and growing bone of contention in foreign relations throughout the fourteenth. Time and again English merchants called upon their government in petitions to Parliament to intervene and speak and act in behalf of their interests.39
So, a great variety and quantity of business relating to official travel and commercial interests came under the purview of the appointed English liaisons (somewhat analogous to modern-day consuls, but by contemporary rank, royal sergeants) in Wissant. The chief liaison in the mid-thirteenth century, to concentrate on one example, was Eustace Bricun.40 He, his predecessors, and his successors needed to be attuned to local mercantile and maritime politics in and around Wissant, and to that end the English crown provided him with the means to get around the region on horseback, as is implied by the payment of ten marks from the royal treasury on 16 November 1257 for a mount of his that died in the king’s service.41 He also had to be attentive to French royal policies and activities that might affect commercial relations and to politics back home in England, all of which could compromise his ability to do his job.
Eustace, we know, also acted in more sensitive situations for the king during Henry III’s troubles with his barons, between 1258 and 1265, when the latter dominated the country or at least contested Henry’s rule. An entry on the rolls for 12 February 1264 shows him, for instance, standing surety for Henry’s promise to repay 100 marks borrowed from Saint Mary’s of Boulogne during one of the monarch’s trips to France during the crisis. It was stipulated that if the loan were not repaid by mid-Lent, Saint Mary’s or its proctors were not to harm Eustace himself, a provision that prohibited them from detaining his physical person, although his goods were liable to distraint and potential forfeiture.42
Despite his good work of this sort on the king’s behalf, Eustace was susceptible, like so many of Henry’s supporters during the years of troubles, to interruptions in the wages to which he was entitled and to a general insufficiency of pay. On 5 May 1262 the crown directed that he receive ten marks per year drawn on the Exchequer at the Michaelmas term, 29 September, for his maintenance, but it was noted on the roll that this payment was low and that the king wished to augment it in the future.43 Moreover, less than two weeks later (18 May 1262) Henry acknowledged that these ten marks, if my understanding of the record is correct, were more like a gift to cover part of the arrears of the royal sergeant’s pay than the regular wage itself.44 Still, when generosity was possible, the king was inclined to show it, this itself being another, if indirect, indication of Eustace’s loyalty and good service. On 18 June 1261, an order was issued to buyers for the king’s wardrobe to provide a robe as the king’s gift to the royal sergeant.45 On 18 January the next year an order was given to deliver another ten marks to him, as the king’s gift, for a trip Eustace had to make back to England.46
POLITICAL AND JURISDICTIONAL AUTHORITY IN WISSANT
The activities of the English royal sergeant of Wissant were constrained by indigenous authorities who exercised paramount, if divided, control. The village was in the county of Boulogne. The count exercised his jurisdiction and his economic rights in the port per se through a prévôt and vicomte (viscount) who answered to the count’s regional administrator, the bailli of Boulogne.47 These officials had much to do, including dealing with English interests in the county. For example, Canterbury Cathedral priory enjoyed a long and beneficial relationship with the comital lineage. Over the years the priory had been granted immunity from tolls at Wissant and other privileges bestowing freedom of travel on its monks, message bearers, and other servants.48 These costs could otherwise be considerable for aristocratic and ecclesiastical entourages, and their collection fattened the Count of Boulogne’s purse.49 The organizational structure or hierarchy (bailli-prévôt and bailli-vicomte) of the officials who oversaw all these matters paralleled that of the French royal administration in Normandy and elsewhere in the north.50 Also, just as the great lords often shared jurisdiction with lesser lords or had limited jurisdiction in many of their towns and villages, so too the count of Boulogne shared power with the mayors and aldermen of the “commune” of Wissant. The very word “commune,” used in contemporary records, together with the village’s possession of a corporate seal implies a substantial level of self-government and judicial authority exercised by the permanent residents of Wissant.51
This was instantiated in the size of the old village hall, far larger than structures similar in function elsewhere in the rural settlements of the region, because, as scholars have supposed, the business of a major port (indeed the major Franco-Flemish port for entering from and returning to England for at least a century and a half) made it necessary. The antiquarian Jules Lecat considered the edifice, which was later razed, an imposing relic of the medieval period. Based on his reading of an early modern deed involving its conveyancing and the still-current local lore of the mid-nineteenth century, he concluded that as long as the building existed it evoked the “past”—and, one might add, long lamented—“grandeur of the old village.” Ernest Deseille, the historian who communicated Lecat’s notice to the Société académique of Boulogne-sur-Mer, concurred.52
To guarantee that one’s requests or demands had a chance of receiving a positive response in our period from both the authorities who operated from this building and others who were headquartered elsewhere meant soliciting all parties. One sees the truth of this inference from a criminal proceeding in 1266, which has the added benefit of a focus on an Englishman. In that year an English barber by the name of Richard of Rochester (quidam Anglicus, qui vocabatur Richardus de Roucestre, barbitonsor), who had been a boarder in a house in Paris in the bailiwick of the abbey of Sainte-Geneviève, fled to Wissant after being accused of murder, intending to take ship to England, perhaps by appealing to his countryman Eustace Bricun to help him secure passage. But he was apprehended and surrendered to local beadles before he could depart. He would have been better off to abjure France and be repatriated to his native land. The abbey of Sainte-Geneviève abjured (fourjura in the original) similar miscreants the same way.53 This time, however, the abbey could and did claim the right to adjudicate the fugitive for the homicide, because it had high justice in its bailiwick in Paris.54 In transmitting this claim to the authorities in Wissant, the abbey officials took no chances and addressed their letter to multiple recipients, including the bailli of Boulogne and his prévôt in the village, as well as to the mayor and aldermen of the commune.55 The request was received with favor, but rather than insist on Richard of Rochester’s extradition, the abbey as a matter of convenience allowed the authorities in Wissant to execute sentence on the English fugitive, who in remorse (super periculum anime sue) and voluntarily, it was alleged, had confessed to the crime (spontaneus, non coactus, recognoverat quod dictum murtrum perpetraverat). He was drawn on a hurdle to the village gallows and there hanged. (The abbey of Saint-Geneviève of Paris exonerated the owners of the boarding house in the capital, who had at one time been suspected of the murder, and also by right the abbey took possession of the movables the executed Englishman had left behind.)56
Besides providing information on the nature and possession of judicial authority in Wissant, this case reveals the existence of a gallows in the port for the execution of capital justice, a significant privilege in the High Middle Ages and another instantiation, like the village hall, the seal, and communal status, of the importance of the port. One could deduce from the same case the existence of a prison or holding pen, where Richard of Rochester was kept while negotiations were going on between the abbey of Sainte-Geneviève and the various authorities in Wissant. Explicit evidence of prison capacity in fact exists already from a somewhat earlier period. There were facilities available or made over to hold English captives of war around the time of the failed French invasion of England under Prince Louis in 1217.57 Nothing is known now of the nature of this structure or structures, whether they were imposing or ramshackle, but they were extensive since they could have served as a prisoner of war camp. It would not have been difficult for the exiles from England to learn from English-speaking captains and ferry crews the location of the holding pens that awaited them if they ran afoul of local beadles.
One other building besides the village hall which would have impressed the newcomers was the church of Our Lady, also known as the church of Saint Nicholas because one of its major chapels was dedicated to him.58 Already an imposing edifice in the thirteenth century, it was refurbished and enlarged in the course of the fourteenth. The extant church still has a remnant of the fourteenth-century building at its core along with a fifteenth-or sixteenth-century choir, despite the reconstructive impulses of the post-medieval period, including the rebuilding of the nave in 1835.59 The sanctuary was “considerée comme le secours de sombres,” an asylum for those fallen into deep depression and despondency and needing religious refreshment.60 This reputation may have originated from mere association with Wissant’s tiny contiguous hamlet of Sombres, in which the church was actually situated.61 But it was appropriate at the least to the presumed state of mind of the transient population of abjurers and hangers-on. It was at and from this church that the needy exiles and those who followed them would have appealed for alms and advice—which estate managers were hiring? would they be recruiting at the portico of the church?—as a few later ones would do from the religious institutions at Calais.62
Nicholas, with the Virgin Mary the co-patron of the church at Wissant, was venerated in part as the protector of sailors and in part as the benefactor of children in general and girls in need of money to marry in particular. He was also noted for his succor of prisoners.63 This cluster or elements from this cluster of associations, and the expectations that went with them, may have solaced a few of the more prayerful among the abjurers, as they did pious people in general, such as the pilgrims in transit at the port.64 The priest of St. Nicholas’s altar was indeed overworked by the care these folk requested. Men and women competed for his comfort and support. In 1273, the native seamen of Wissant, who felt a particular fondness for the saint and his altar and resented sharing the priest’s attention with other worshippers, tried to secure a second celebrant to minister to their needs exclusively.65
From the early twelfth century Wissant’s social welfare landscape also included a hospital (Saint-Inglevert) with brethren who had received lands near Luton in Bedfordshire and Brill in Buckinghamshire from Henry II early in his reign, as is attested in sources of both English and French origin.66 The king, it has been suggested, may have provided the endowment in gratitude for the hospitality furnished to him during one of his trips to the continent or, perhaps more likely, as part of the arrangements accompanying the reestablishment of peace after the long period of unrest in England and on the continent during the Civil War (1135–53).67 The modest English hospice that took root on the endowment remained dependent on Saint-Inglevert until the fifteenth century. During this long period the Buckinghamshire house was reckoned an alien priory, existing as a daughter house of the continental establishment under the same regulations as a great many other local English ecclesiastical establishments which men in the retinue of William the Conqueror had offered as gifts to their families’ continental abbeys after their victory in 1066.68 One could imagine the inmates of Saint-Inglevert, in gratitude for their English endowments, giving alms to needy English folk, such as the exiles and their companions, although I have no found no explicit evidence of this.
The close economic relationships between governmental authorities in Boulogne and England and among institutions on both sides of the Channel make the idea of cooperation in the matter of accepting English exiles plausible. Through his spouse, King Stephen in the times of trouble in the first half of the twelfth century clearly cultivated interests in Boulogne, and his penchant for exiling his enemies is well-attested.69 Other kings of England were less intensely committed to nurture relations with Boulogne,70 but undoubtedly as a residual effect of Stephen’s good will, local comital and communal authorities on the continent tolerated, as we have seen, a registered English government agent and his staff in Wissant. And other kings of England at least continued to cultivate institutions like the hospital of Saint-Inglevert by endowing it and then enforcing over the long term its dependency on a hospice and lands in the heartland of their realm. Even when English influence in the county waned and French influence increased in the 1230s,71 traditional trade and other economic relations between the island kingdom and Boulogne persisted. At times, as for example when King Edward I through his wife exercised the countship of Ponthieu from the 1280s, English interest in the region was reinvigorated.72 True, no agreement has been found about the exiles, but it is not unreasonable to suppose—and I borrow this idea from Nicholas Vincent—that among the many understandings governing relations between Dover and Wissant was one between an English king, probably Stephen, and a count of Boulogne to accept English exiles transported from the one port to the other whence they would speedily fan out as best they could after their disembarkation.
THE EXILES
What were the exiles to do, having arrived in Wissant and before making their way inland? Are we doomed to take refuge in J. Charles Cox’s puzzled wonder?73 There is evidence for several plausible scenarios.74 They could have learned a little something of the village from the English-speaking shipmen who transported them. After all, the latter frequented the inns and hostelries and other specialized shops—such as the charcouteries for sausages75—during their layovers. Those abjurers whose friends and kin had followed them had access to additional information garnered in Dover’s taverns and churches, which could now be passed on to the exiles. A central element of this information was the names of taverns to patronize in Wissant, for there was a good deal to be learned—and plotted out—in establishments known to be sites of contact for the English exiles. Taverns were exploited as information centers for marginal people throughout France.76 Indeed, this was the case throughout Europe. And wherever foreigners congregated over any length of time or at regular intervals there would always arise an establishment or two catering to them, places where the languages of the foreigners were spoken.
Many newcomers, a remarkable proportion, chose to open or work in inns and taverns for this very reason: in a number of towns from 30 to 95 percent of hostellers and staff were foreigners.77 Native English taverners in France could exploit a niche market that was loyal to them, made up of patrons who did not frequent establishments where, for instance, Breton, Dutch, or French monopolized communication. Many upscale and midlevel establishments, although somewhat more cosmopolitan than their cheaper counterparts, functioned in the same way. The English boys and young men of the “English Nation” at the University of Paris, consisting of English, Germanic, and Slavic students, congregated together at their favorite taverns, which offered something like protected environments where they could lapse from Latin into their native tongues and meet women and other countrymen, students or not, who haunted the same establishments.78 Whether this flocking together of people of the same origin occurred “naturally” or not, it is quite understandable.79
In establishments that catered to English travelers in Wissant, exiles and their followers formed a small proportion of customers. Perhaps two, three, or four exiles a day disembarked in the shipping season and on some days even fewer friends and family members. (How many of them would or could afford to leave their jobs behind even briefly?) At the taverns the exiles encountered men and women who could, for a drink or a few small coins obtained from kith and kin or begged at Saint-Nicholas church, put them in touch with bosses and recruiters of work gangs who performed seasonal labor as they moved through the countryside. Some women would have made their first contacts with other women who could help them find jobs as scullery maids or other servants in local households or eating and drinking establishments or, either by preference or in desperation, as prostitutes. Of course, crime was a possibility. I shall return to and address all of these options later. The point that needs to be made now is that the “luckiest” among the exiles should have been able to exploit the various initial contacts they made and thereby begin the process of constituting new networks of economic support and friendship.
To speak of the luckiest, with the word ornamented by quotation marks as in the last paragraph, is to intimate how inauspicious were the prospects of even the most fortunate of the exiles and their companions.80 For matters could be much worse, and for many they were. This is brought home from a grim discovery made in the nineteenth century. It was in order to test the theory that Wissant was an ancient port known to Julius Caesar and used in his conquest of Britain that Louis Cousin undertook the excavations in the 1850s referred to earlier. Though local patriots have never given it up, Cousin came to believe that there was little if anything to commend this theory.81 Wissant was a medieval village with no antique past of consequence. But he did notice one thing that was astonishing. The medieval cemetery, which provided little or no material evidence for him of ancient burials or inurnments, was nonetheless, his excavators discovered, immense; indeed it was larger by far than one might imagine for any village. It was, in Cousin’s own words, “a graveyard of vast extent.”82
Why was it so large? Haigneré had good reason to think that a number of insular (and other) pilgrims to whom the cemetery was made available by papal decree, in particular those sick and wearied from their exhausting journeys, died in numbers in the village in the period of its greatest importance and that their interment necessitated the steady expansion of the burial site.83 Among these debilitated travelers were lepers, who came to Wissant in order to visit nearby healing shrines, including Notre-Dame of Boulogne.84 The cluster of diseases called leprosy was coming to be regarded as a condition which resisted saintly intervention, but the old idea had not died out.85 Wissant’s own leprosarium, known as the Gazevert and in existence in the thirteenth century, would have served as a way station for other frail pilgrims in addition to lepers, if it was like other hospices in the region.86
Equally vulnerable in the circumstances were many of the English abjurers to Wissant. They arrived in an already-weakened state of health from the character of their travel to Dover, bareheaded, barefooted, and unsheltered along the way. For those who were delayed by weather or local political conditions in boarding ship and thus had to bear the additional burden, if I am right, of incarceration in Dover and the ritual of entering the sea before embarking, the situation was even worse. And the final and besetting terror was the journey across the Channel, which, while short in terms of distance, was fraught with danger from seasickness, gales, and fog, the last two of which often forced departing ships back to Dover. How many of the unfortunate abjurers died penniless in Wissant can never be known, but the vast cemetery, so uncharacteristic of a medieval village, offers a grim hint that over the years England’s abjurers made a significant contribution to the burials there.
Thomas Weyland, the disgraced Chief Justice, was not one of those who perished in Wissant. Although he was already weak and ill from starvation when he set out on his nine-day walk to Dover in the winter of 1290, although he made his journey without the amenities of decent raiment, shoes, or refuge, and although, given the low incidence of shipping out of the Channel ports in February, it is a good bet that he had to wait at Dover Castle and wade out into the frigid sea before a captain chanced to brave the elements and ferry him to the continent, he survived. Would this once-esteemed man have been treated with such indifference in Dover? Was there no compassion for him in his misery? Or, rather, would anyone—any Englishman—take the chance that the report of an act of kindness toward the fallen Chief Justice might find its way back to an enraged Edward I?
At least Weyland knew French and could read and write. He could communicate with those who followed after him to Wissant and get money from them. The former Chief Justice could speak with other men of importance passing through Wissant. He could correspond with family and friends back home, where his son of the same name was feverishly trying to obtain the king’s grace to reclaim his father’s confiscated property.87 With the proper instruments the exiled Thomas Weyland could even draw resources from traveling merchants. Two years after his arrival in Wissant as a broken man, the former Chief Justice had risen above acute illness and despondency and was residing in Paris. Thomas Weyland was a “lucky” man, and as we shall see later on, his life story did not end in exile in the French capital.88
John de Balliol, the deposed king of Scotland, was destined to abjure as a political exile after Edward I took him captive. For a while the English monarch was content to keep his prisoner incarcerated in the Tower of London, granting him the occasional privilege of short-distance travel and hunting under guard. But in 1299, Edward agreed to turn John over to papal authorities in France. To obtain this mercy the former king abjured England and was sent to Dover to take ship. Although part of his treasure was confiscated, he was allowed to retain ample resources for his life to come in France. He disembarked, as one would expect, at Wissant, from which he at once moved on. Although it long remained a question as to whether on his own or with French connivance John might return to Britain, in fact he spent most of the rest of his life in honorable retirement at family estates in Ponthieu.89 Like Thomas de Weyland, old King John was a fortunate exile.
AFTER WISSANT
For the ordinary spring and summer arrivals in Wissant who needed sustenance beyond what could be supplied by their companions or begged and who could not speak French or read or write any other language, including their own, fortune was rare. There were nonetheless a few opportunities, as I remarked earlier. The need for seasonal and occasional hired labor in the region has been well documented by Carola Small.90 The tasks included clearing stones from fields and weeding in the spring, and drew on male and female transient labor. Ten women, to give just one example, were hired in 1304 by one estate overseer to help in doing this work. Extra labor beyond that of native serfs, tenants, and the permanent work force was recruited in springtime for loading marl (lime-rich mud used as a fertilizer) from the pits where it was dug and for spreading it on the fields. Plowing was a specialized task, and since the extent of fields to be plowed did not change very much from one season to another, it was unusual to hire extra plowmen, but in rare cases (the untimely death or injury of one of the village plowmen, say), overseers might find a replacement from a labor gang. Extra sowers were often needed. And harvesting and threshing, along with putting up the harvest in barns and turning the grain (to avoid rot), were the most common farm jobs offered to labor gangs in the fall.91 Bronislaw Geremek documented the presence of immigrant labor in the agricultural sector in jobs like the above as well as in the repair of fortifications and canals, dikes, and bridges.92 Wissant lay close to dike and bridge country.
Yet it should also be noted that, valuable as this extra labor was to reeves and stewards at crunch times, the native labor force expressed resentment at other times, for migrants (non-residents) sometimes, like other “reserve” workers, displaced locals by accepting lower wages.93 In England, access to migrant labor was sometimes forbidden, and those who housed such laborers faced fines.94 Moreover, seasonal labor was precisely what its name implied, temporary; migrants had to find ways to supplement their incomes and obtain lodging in slow or off times. Churches were sources of alms, and hospitals were places, at least in theory, of succor.95 Migrants’ own experience and conversations with veteran crew members would provide them with vital information about the most welcoming sites—or the least unwelcoming.
The vast majority of seasonal and immigrant laborers in northern France and Flanders were not English exiles. Rather, the latter joined and blended in with already existing groups of men and women, some natives, some voluntary immigrants, some exiles, all of whom were on the move looking for work.96 As these men and women traveled they came, for a time, to be under the authority of the work gang supervisors who acted in the name of estate managers and lords. This authority implied responsibilities of a considerable weight, which evoked the very nature of the exiles’ and perhaps other immigrants’ coming to France. It was incumbent on overseers, reeves, and seigneurs to police the foreigners, to accompany them from place to place until the latter finished their employment. A group of foreign workers might even be obliged to make a declaration of their good intentions—or, at least, their willingness to be watched—by announcing their presence in some way, such as sounding a horn. It should come as no surprise that foreigners who were observed committing crimes could be treated like wild beasts when apprehended: that is, subjected to summary execution.97 The word étrangers has a variety of meanings, but nineteenth-century scholar Louis-Charles Bonne, to whose work in this matter I am referring, was discussing “véritables étrangers, c’est-à-dire ceux qui étaient nés dans un autre royaume.” In whatever manner such foreigners died, whether in peace and law-abiding or as the direct or indirect result of criminal activity, their possessions became the property of the king or of those lords in whose jurisdiction they met their end and who enjoyed this princely right.98
Many women, in particular the younger women exiles, had a different kind of work available to them, again already alluded to: prostitution. Of course, some of the abjured Englishwomen who disembarked at Wissant or other ports had already been prostitutes in England, not unlike one Edith Stoker. Sometime around 1287 in Bristol, Walter Blakers killed Henry Leverych. Walter fled the scene and was outlawed. Edith, who was identified as a prostitute, confessed in sanctuary that she had held Henry while Walter murdered him. She had no chattels and abjured.99 It is probable that Edith departed England at Bristol for Ireland and either plied her trade there or tried for a fresh start.
Most other abjuring women in Edith Stoker’s predicament, penniless, departed Dover and would have been able to pick up information in those taverns of Wissant catering to English folk about brothels in nearby towns and further afield. The slide into this life in France and Flanders, either by choice or necessity, was fueled in part by the fact that prostitution and brothel culture were flourishing and that “foreign” women were prized in towns that served travelers and businessmen.100 Not even so dedicated an eradicator of sin as Louis IX could root out prostitution in his domains, though he tried and was admired for trying to do so by later legal commentators who lauded his legislation when they made reference to it.101 Some towns in the north (Valenciennes and Saint-Quentin are examples) and elsewhere also opted to outlaw brothels and prostitution and to banish those who kept bawdy houses or engaged in the sex trade.102 But most authorities settled for regulating or licensing prostitution in various ways,103 saving banishment for abjurers and convicted felons such as rapists or would-be murderers—for instance, the woman who tried to poison her husband by feeding him a toad.104
The network of brothels in the towns of Flanders and northern France in most periods was staggering. Bruges, a town of about 45,000 with many international merchants always passing through or staying over on business, had an average of about twenty-five brothels in operation in any year in the first third of the fourteenth century.105 Many of their international customers were English merchants. For them, an English sex partner after a long trip in foreign lands allowed for conversation. For other customers—natives or international—an Englishwoman was attractive in part because she was different, a bit exotic. But the presence of foreign prostitutes could also be resented, as one disgusted observer’s exclamation in Forez in eastern France makes clear: Vil puta d’etrangi terra!, “Foul whore from a foreign land!”106
Prostitution as a business had its fair share of violence. Most was inflicted on prostitutes by the authorities, customers, pimps, or other prostitutes as the result of competition for customers or for attention from pimps. Violence extended to customers as well, perpetrated by prostitutes who had suffered abuse at their hands or by pimps who avenged the women’s injuries. In 1386 English Betty (Inghelsche Bette) scarred another prostitute in the stews where she worked by hurling a stone goblet in her face in a fit of anger that got her dragged before a magistrate in brothel-glutted Bruges.107 Abortions prevented many unwanted pregnancies from coming to term, but in cases in which babies were born, there could be terrible effects for the children. Two thirteenth-century Britones, women from Britain or Brittany, strangled their babies in Aurillac in the Auvergne, where I would suggest they were working in a brothel. Their deed became known, and both were executed by burning.108
Some aspiring English prostitutes in France became madams. Men sometimes owned the brothels, employing madams to hire the sex workers and manage them for a regular wage or, in the best of financial circumstances, for a part interest in the enterprise, expressed as a fixed percentage of the women’s take.109 Alternatively, men provided protection or enforced the madams’ orders to stubborn employees. Perhaps this was the case for an Englishman named Henry who, I would surmise, abjured England and was followed by his sister, Margaret. In 1300 he was residing in the digs his sister had managed to obtain in Paris. Margaret acted as the madam for the brothel for which the residence doubled. But her career was cut short. On 29 April 1300 Margaret, who had not left England as an abjurer, was arrested for keeping the brothel, which was in the bailiwick of the monastery of Sainte-Geneviève of Paris. Only now was she obliged to abjure, but in her case from all the lands under the jurisdiction of the monastery, on pain of being burned (or worse!) if she returned.110
In a number of cases England’s exiles, it has been supposed, lost no time in turning to violent crime, alone or in concert with others.111 This was a pattern of behavior among such people that has been detected elsewhere in contemporary Europe.112 In Trevor Dean’s words, “When strictly enforced, exile was a fearful punishment, pushing exiles into destitution and banditry, cutting their contacts with family and friends, and exposing them to the unpunishable violence of bandit-catchers.”113 How did it begin for those among the English exiles who took to crime? Guarded conversations in Wissant’s taverns started the process a good many times with hints that a criminal band was recruiting. This would have been the opening gambit in bringing exiles into existing criminal circles or in constituting new ones. Prying eyes and attentive ears, however, were everywhere. Foreigners—Englishmen, but not solely Englishmen—became more suspect in the French Atlantic ports as the character of relations between the realms began its plummet toward the end of the thirteenth century.114 Later, during the early phases of the Hundred Years’ War, this suspicion was even worse: English residents began to be expelled even from inland towns like Agen.115 Truces could not induce English students to attend the University of Paris in the numbers that had flocked there in the late thirteenth century.116
Initial contacts, if they were to be successful, necessarily included instructions about meeting later in more confidential settings, away from police plants and from drunks who might repeat what they overheard. To protect his goods at Calais the count of Artois, as his fiscal account for 1303–4 informs us, sometimes sent his own undercover detective—the account uses the word “spy” (espie)—to the port.117 If he smelled out a thief, he was supposed to turn him over to the proper public authorities in what was, in fact, a town with longstanding monitoring of prostitutes, hooligans, gamblers, and habitués of taverns.118 Just as in Calais, with wealthy travelers passing through and expensive goods in transit, Wissant would have been a well-policed and at times spy-infested village, in contrast to the situation of typical medieval rural settlements,119 and would have had similar undercover men keeping an eye on foreign transients of mean condition. Protecting the vast sums of money accumulated in the village under the aegis of the head of the customs service (custumarius) from duties on horses, saddles, harness, wool, and the like and guarding the specie that was transported inland to the count of Boulogne and other aristocrats, who counted the customs and rents as part of their income, were two additional necessities for vigilant official eyes.120 The fragmentary illustrated thirteenth-century verse life of Thomas Becket, now known as the Becket Leaves, depicts one such agent, a certain Milo, the count of Boulogne’s man, whom the archbishop mistakes for the collector of passage money. Milo appears with a fat purse.121 Wariness was the watchword in a village where such people had to do lucrative business.
A singular incident of violence might have brought any one of the English exiles to abjuration in the first place. Other exiles, however, had been habitual criminals before they arrived in France and could choose to resume their criminal careers.122 The problem of eking out a living in the new environment was so profound that some of the former may also have decided that they had no choice, indeed that they had no chance of survival except by pursuing criminal careers. Piracy was a possibility, since it was not hard to pick up hints in a polyglot port that there was money to be had smuggling or overpowering crews transporting valuable goods to or from Wissant. Nonetheless, it was less dangerous to operate away from the well-surveilled village.
French royal records and the documentation of seigneurial jurisdictions with capital justice provide quite rich information on all the activities I have imagined.123 They retell the stories of any number of exiles’ misspent lives—English and non-English, too—and describe every species of felony perpetrated by them in France. A bastard, Galhard de Montlaur, who abjured the English-held duchy of Gascony for France on account of a homicide committed in Bordeaux around 1300, represents a type of criminal, the veteran of violence, willing to use more violence either to his advantage or for the perverse pleasure of exercising power over new victims in France. Our Gascon bastard committed thefts, rapes, murders, and “many other terrible crimes” (plura alia enormia crimina), or at least the allegations that he did so were deemed worthy of investigation. One could interpret much of his behavior, if the allegations were just, as an expression of rage over his overall powerlessness as an exile—his poverty and lack of friendships—in comparison to most of the people with whom he now came in contact. Or perhaps his example simply reveals the obdurate resistance of his pathology to exploiting the second chance provided by exile in a morally reconstructive manner. If local authorities could hunt him down and establish the justice of the charges against him, they were to punish him and no doubt countless others like him in other cases, in an exemplary fashion (taliter puniatis, quod transeat ceteris in exemplum).124
On occasion one comes across similar solitary figures, such as an English thief on whom justice was done in the lands of the count of Artois, according to the count’s fiscal accounts of 1303–4, for having stolen wool (Pour justice faire d’un Englés qui avoit emblé laine).125 But English criminals in France more often seem to have joined gangs. When they did so, they opted for those already including Englishmen as members. Alternatively, two or more English exiles would join a gang together. Like all people, except the most secluded hermits, the exiles craved social support and camaraderie, which might be cultivated with more rapid success when communication was easy with at least one or two other members of the gang. Camaraderie, if not the goal in joining a gang, was at least one potential result.126 On the other side, law-abiding subjects lived in terrible fear of gangs.127
This desire for social support and camaraderie was analogous to the impulse that led many immigrants to seek shelter in neighborhoods already populated with a few of their countrymen in larger towns, neighborhoods whose thoroughfares and byways in time came to bear the “ethnic” names of the incomers. Paris was in many ways a town of immigrants, of whom the English made a substantial number.128 There were rues of the Bretons, Normans, Flemings, Picards, and English.129 To be sure, the ethnic composition and quality of neighborhoods changed over time in the Middle Ages as it does now, and sometimes governments “cleansed” neighborhoods of targeted populations. Not one of the hundreds of rues des Juifs in France had any Jewish residents from 1306 to 1315. Nevertheless, la rue aus Englès in the bailiwick of the abbey of Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, which may have obtained its name from the concentration of English university students residing there in the thirteenth century, continued to attract English immigrants until the Hundred Years’ War, such as one Master William of Pancras (mestre Guillaume de Paincris), by his title a University man, who resided there in 1300.130 That William was from the island kingdom is obvious from his toponym, which was distinctively English at the time. The ancient martyr Pancras or Paincras gave his name to several places in southeastern England, because it was to him that Augustine the Lesser dedicated the first Christian church he founded in Britain after Pope Gregory the Great sent him there as a missionary in 597.131
Paris, given its enormous population, was also a favored haven for gangs whose modus operandi was to strike in the countryside, on the roads, or in smaller towns, before retreating to the relative anonymity and therefore safety of the city.132 In Paris, they could blend in with the crowds, rest up from their pillaging in safe houses (hideouts), fence stolen goods, enjoy and dissipate their profits in taverns and with prostitutes and friends, and recruit new members.133 Getting lost in the crowds could be a quite active process. A false tonsure was a possible disguise in a city alive with clergymen. Clerical haircuts were in general forbidden to laymen for precisely this reason: they could facilitate acts of fraud. However, if authorities for any reason came to doubt the validity of a man’s tonsure, there was hell for him to pay when he was ordered to but could not read Latin.134 If an exile could obtain it, clothing appropriate for a knight might predispose observers to ignore or downplay circumstantial evidence that should otherwise have raised suspicions about him.135 Yet, many were suspected, and then came the questioning.
What could questioning accomplish? Gang members, once caught, tried to hide their identities, either by giving aliases or by refusing to name themselves.136 A slip of the tongue, the use of a suspect’s real name rather than his alias by an accomplice, might be decisive, since many jurisdictions, Valenciennes, Saint-Quentin, Hamburg, and Lübeck among them, exchanged with other nearby authorities lists of the names of men and women whom they had banished. The object of these lists was, sometimes, to prevent exiles’ entry from the jurisdictions they had abjured. This goal received explicit expression in a statement dated 1227, issued by the municipality of Cambrai.137 Probably more often, however, the lists were prepared and archived so that they would be available as written evidence, should the circumstances arise, in any later adjudication of the exiles. The finding of a man’s or woman’s name on a list, if such a person subsequently committed a crime, would bar access to another abjuration and would also justify capital punishment.138 The lists that have been discussed in the best scholarly literature are all from northern Europe, but if my reading of Nicole Gonthier, who used these sources, is correct, she believed that such exchanges occurred in many other regions.139
To the extent possible, of course, certain exiles involved in crime took pains not just to distract peoples’ suspicions but to destroy the evidence of being abjurers. Some continental abjurers who were branded on a finger severed the digit themselves or had their comrades do it for them. Certainly authorities expected such attempts at dissembling.140 We can infer this from the fact that so many criminals who were apprehended in France (and elsewhere) were missing fingers and that authorities had come to expect the trait in captured felons. One such criminal was three-fingered Philippot (Little Phil) Cavillon; another was Perrin-Quatre-Doigts (Pete-Four-Fingers), whose career has been discussed by Bronislaw Geremek. He was a late fourteenth-century example of an abjurer of a jurisdiction who appears to have had his finger severed in order to conceal the mark of his prior exile for felony.141
If they were suspected of being gang members, English offenders arrested in France were encouraged to identify their partners in crime under what one would now call torture. This was also the case for native thieves who were suspected of being members of gangs, such as one Abbeville captive who was put to the question (the locution for “tortured”) in order to obtain information on “all [other] thieves, church robbers, [and] destroyers of houses [burglars].”142 A legitimate question that arises out of this observation is how strong gang members’ loyalties were in general and among immigrant gang members in particular. For working together in committing crimes, disposing of and apportioning the profits from such undertakings, and socializing with their fellows could generate animosities and jealousies as much as comradeship, even for those of the same origin or from similar backgrounds. It could do so even when the fundamental basis of interaction was not partnership in crime after all. Consider the example of a group of Englishmen who, in various capacities, came before French authorities in 1333. On 14 February one of them, Jehannot Lenglais (Johnny the Englishman), was released from jail on pledge that he would show up when his case came before the magistrate of Saint-Martin des Champs of Paris. Johnny was under suspicion of wounding another Englishman, Guillot (Little Guy) Lenglais, who had a job in the local watch. Is it certain that these men were of English origin? Although the epithet Lenglais alone is insufficient to prove this, since in many other cases it served as a surname,143 in this instance it is certain that both men were native English. For, pledging that he would see to Johnny’s appearance in court when he was called was his acquaintance or friend, a menial laborer (gangne-maille), Jehan Poule-Cras (John Fat-Hen), who, it was noted, was also an Englishman. The other pledges were Robin Lenglais (Bobby the Englishman), Thomas Lenglais (Thomas the Englishman), and Jehan Lenglais (John the Englishman).144
Suspicion of strangers and foreigners was a general if not universal European sentiment in the High Middle Ages.145 English foreigners in Paris, like immigrants, itinerants, and exiles from other regions (Brittany, Lombardy, and Lorraine provide examples), often ran afoul of the law whether gang members or not. It was proverbial in other regions of France that Bretons were thieves. It was a miracle (res miranda!) when one, the later Saint Yves, turned out not to be a felon.146 There was no miraculous revelation, though, in 1278 for Agnes of York (Agnès d’Evroic, engelsche). She was English. She was a thief. She was arrested for the crime in Paris.147 A Lombard also fulfilled the stereotype of the dangerous stranger. The accused child rapist was at large in the city before being apprehended in July 1333.148 And so it went: in January 1333 a German skinner landed in a Paris jail after wounding an Englishman named Richard Bantene in his side.149 A Lorrainer who beat a groom on the head with a board was taken from the Parisian streets and put into custody in October 1336.150 In September 1337, a group of English travelers (one a visiting cleric) vented their anger with savage blows on a French local or locals and also landed in jail.151 And another Lombard, who abused a Paris streetwalker by beating her and humiliated her further by chopping off her hair, was brought before the bar in January 1338.152
Immigrants of the same origin also got into nasty scrapes with one another, further feeding the stereotype, as the case of Johnny the Englishman earlier suggested.153 Paris, with its poor, often unassimilated and numerous immigrant groups, was beset with such encounters. In the late winter of 1333 a group of Englishmen came to blows, sullying the reputation of the English immigrant community in the city’s bailiwick of Saint-Martin des Champs.154 But, of course, Paris was not unique in this respect. North and south, it was the same. In Ypres in Flanders one Lambert, an Englishman, brutalized another soul within an inch of his life in 1313.155 Lambert was fortunate enough to get away from the authorities with his own life, but his misdeed would have done nothing positive for the reputation of English immigrants.
Many years earlier, a group of Englishmen stopped over at one Bertrand de Carpentras’s house in Beaucaire in southern France. The sojourn occurred around the year 1240, since it is noted in the surviving records that the incident about to be described occurred while Raoul (Radulfus) de Salenchino was the city’s chief agent of royal authority, the viguier, which can be dated to this period.156 Bertrand let rooms to travelers, and he put these men up (de quibusdam Anglicis qui in domo ipsius Bertrandi fuerant hospitati). In this instance it was a mistake. The Englishmen were suspicious characters, but the innkeeper had little standing with the authorities, who were reluctant to take up Bertrand’s cause after the sojourners’ alleged beating of him and other members of his household (qui [Anglici] Bertrandum et familiam ejus in domo propria verberaverant) brought him to the viguier’s attention. The viguier demanded a high pledge from Bertrand to pursue the case and pledges from the suspicious English travelers as well, suggesting that responsibility for the altercation was not clear cut. In the end, the pledge, ten French pounds, demanded of Bertrand was too high for him to pay, and he offered a silver cup that he had purchased for sixty-three shillings. This was never returned, indicating that the viguier did not believe his accusations could be sustained or else that he thought Bertrand shared the blame. Years afterward, the innkeeper accused the viguier of fraud for retaining the pledge and tried to persuade King Louis IX’s enquêteurs (investigators of corruption) to compensate him for his loss, which is why we are privy to so much information on the incident. Whether he succeeded in his suit is unknown.
Documents for the year 1334 reveal another criminal gang—a large band of thieves—who counted an Englishwoman among their members. This was rare: gangs were most often male in composition. The woman in question went by the name of Ysabellot, a diminutive of Isabelle/Elizabeth. Betty might be the best translation. Betty the Englishwoman (Ysabellot l’Engelsche) was held as a prisoner in Rouen on suspicion of theft when she entered the records. Held along with her were Jehannot (Johnny) Rauche de Preaux, Jehannot (again, Johnny) Herpin de Saint Joire, Michiel Farmant, Jehan Augustin, Perrot (Pete) Rose, Borchier Jehannot (Johnny the Butcher) Aguillon, Guillaume Fremont, Jehan le Teillier (the Slasher), and Jehan Haust rès. It must have taken time to round up the gang, for 169 days’ worth of bread had been purchased for the prisoners’ sustenance.157 The average length of stay in prison for the ten captives was therefore almost seventeen days. Of course a few must have been incarcerated longer, as one or another of the prisoners betrayed his (or her) comrades who were subsequently hunted down. Honor among thieves had its limits.
RICHARD THE ENGLISHMAN AND HIS GANG
Still another vicious criminal gang with English immigrants, exiles, and fugitives that operated in France two years later (1336) highlights many of the points already made.158 The prévôt of the town of Château-Landon, a town now in the département of the Seine-et-Marne, took the confessions of various gang members in the presence of ten other citizens on 15 April 1336. The first was a certain Alexander. But this was an alias. He was otherwise known as Richard the Englishman and as Richard de Veneys, and he disguised himself as a knight. A second gang member, Johnny (Jehanneton) David, also confessed to an alias, Jake or Jimmy (Jacquet) Carmadin. A third, who acted as Richard’s servant, was known as Ralphie (Raoulin). The main charge revolved around their complicity in the murder of one Odart de Courtchamp, which took place at Ouzouer-sur-Trezé (Loiret). The prévôt sent authentic copies of the confessions to the royal court of Paris for review. What had he and his suitors discovered?
Richard, in whatever manner he was persuaded to do so (the official assertion that judicial torture was not used could be true), confessed that he sometimes called himself Alexander Bonneville, a name he used because it evoked his native land in the diocese of Winchester in England. If he was telling the truth (and it seems an odd thing to lie about), Bonneville is the French form of Godstone which was in the medieval diocese of Winchester and lies within the boundaries of the present county of Surrey. The name goes back to the eponymous OE “Goda’s town,” but in popular parlance it was thought to mean “Good Town,” hence the choice of Bonneville.
Richard was talkative and a little brash—or he was terrified. Back in England a wealthy local man had left ten silver marks to each of four religious houses (colleiges de religieux). Richard’s father was the wealthy decedent’s executor. He entrusted his son with the task of transferring the legacies to the religious houses. But Richard saw an opportunity and fled to Paris with the money. Given Godstone’s location, Richard would have used the port of Southampton to take passage to the continent. When he reached Paris, he gave the money to a certain John the Englishman for safekeeping. He must have learned of these contacts from Englishmen he met at Southampton and/or en route to Paris. Then he started going by the name of Alexander. It was the summer of 1335, and Richard, as I shall continue to call him, stayed in Paris under his assumed name until 29 September, the Feast of Saint Michael Archangel. He confessed that he then partnered with another criminal, Little Phil (Philippot) Cavillon. They traveled to Provins (Seine-et-Marne) in Champagne where they heard tell of a wealthy resident’s or business’s hoard and made plans for a robbery. But the plans failed: when they broke in, they were unable to crack the strongbox and so returned, disappointed, to Paris.
Further into the confession Richard ratted on Johnny David, accusing him of joining in a trip from Paris to Orléans (Loiret) where they robbed a priest of two gold coins and twenty shillings in change. This was the beginning of a crime spree. From Orléans they went to Saint-Jeand’Angély (Charente-Maritime), and along the way they fell in with another Johnny, a serving man (probably at an inn), who turned out to be a thief. He robbed pilgrims. Gangs also targeted pilgrims. Such appears to have been the case with a three-person band of thieves, two men and one woman, who were apprehended after attacking and killing a pilgrim in Aurillac, in the Auvergne, around 1240. They were strangers to the area, as Richard and Johnny David would have been in their travels. Neither their names nor aliases were uncovered after they were caught, tried, and executed by hanging, the murderess between her two male companions.159
In any case, Richard and Johnny David joined forces with Johnny the accoster of pilgrims and split the profits (ten shillings) among themselves. This Johnny’s modus operandi was distinctive. He drugged the pilgrims, in all probability by serving them drinks with the powders that Richard mentioned to his interrogators. This technique would be used again, to worse effect, as Richard would confess, but it was not unique to the serving man Johnny or this gang. A few years later in 1340 still another Johnny (Johannin de la Vente) was prosecuted for a theft in the pays d’Auge in Normandy; he too had drugged his victims with sleeping powders or was accused of having done so.160
The next leg of their journey took them to the famous pilgrimage center of Rocamadour (Lot) and thereafter to Millau (Aveyron) and Montpellier (Hérault). The band made a good haul. At an inn in the first town Richard managed to steal a gold coin and seven silver pennies from the pilgrims who were visiting the shrine of Our Lady (the Black Madonna) of Rocamadour, whose miracles so captivated the medieval imagination.161 Perhaps they did not captivate the thieves’ imaginations in the same way, however, for robbers mentioned in the miracles often received severe divine retribution.162 But fear of this, if they had any, did not stop them. At Millau the band got their hands on two gold coins and two shillings in small change from two unlucky merchants. They passed through Montpellier without committing any crimes. But at Nîmes (Gard) they resumed their thieving ways, robbing a priest of eleven florins and other monies minted in Florence.
By now, as they turned north, they were on one of the great commercial routes, following the Rhône. Robbing a priest who had Florentine money already indicates the “international” flavor of the travelers with whom they came in contact. They stayed in Avignon (Vaucluse) for two days before setting out for Mondragon (also Vaucluse). One of the Johnnies came upon a German, from whom he stole six gros tournois, the commonest currency in France besides the penny coin. He turned over the take to Richard for safekeeping, which makes me believe that the Johnny in question was Johnny David, who had a lengthier experience of trusting Richard than a newcomer to the gang could have had.
One after another the band found victims as they continued on the long return trip to Paris. At Saint-Vallier (Drôme) the victim was a priest, the take five florins. They fell in with another priest and a Gascon on the road from Condrieu (Rhône) to Lyon (Rhône) and thence Décize (Nièvre) and took four gold French coins and a gold florin from the cleric. I surmise that there were serious suspicions following this series of thefts. So the band proceeded with considerable dispatch and put their criminal activities on hold. But after passing through Nevers (Nièvre) and Montargis (Loiret), they reached Corbeil (Essonne) and resumed their robberies. Richard stole two florins and another gold coin from a merchant before setting out for Paris.
The travelers must have felt relieved that they were back in the relative safety of the great city. The problem was one of the others whom Richard later implicated in the band’s criminal activities: Little Phil Cavillon. Little Phil’s own behavior had aroused the suspicions of Parisian authorities. When Richard returned to Paris and resumed hanging around with him, he brought suspicion on himself. The authorities took him into custody but could prove nothing. Richard decided to leave the city. He and Johnny David, along with Richard’s servant Ralphie, hit the road once more. They headed for Orléans first, where Richard and Johnny had started their previous spree, and from there the three of them traveled to La Souterraine (Creuse). They made a tidy profit, stealing seventy-six florins. And then they got bolder. Money was great, but there were some nice goods to be had as well. At Saint-Esprit (though which one of the many towns and villages of this name is unclear) they stole a belt and coin purse, as well as two silver shillings. At Saint-Rambert (Loire) the trio broke into a strongbox and took three French gold coins, small coins of lesser value, three pairs of kerchiefs, a silver spoon, two silver visors, a woman’s surcoat trimmed in rabbit-belly fur (very soft), and an unlined doublet. Ralphie was bolder still. At the inn he stole a horse, which he was to ride in the course of his travels all the way to Vienne (Isère) before abandoning it.
Soon the gang arrived in Pierrefitte (Loiret) after passing through Marcilly-lez-Neuvy (also Loiret). There they met Odart de Courtchamp who, knowing no better, accepted them as traveling companions. This was a Saturday, 2 March 1336, and the group continued to travel together until Tuesday. On that evening they took shelter at the house of one Henri, a hostler with a quite appropriate epithet, Potafeu, Beef Stew. The hostelry was in Ouzouer-sur-Trezé. All four men took beds. Odart went to his first, after a meal but before the others had finished rubbing down their horses. After they came in they too went to bed. Late in the night the gang went over to the sleeping Odart’s bed. Richard admitted to his interrogators that he had drawn a knife. He struck Odart but he did not kill him. The victim fought back and managed to turn the knife enough to wound Richard in the hand. As they struggled Richard succeeded in using his foot to hold down Odart’s hand, which now held the knife. Then the others joined the fray. Johnny David struck Odart with his own knife.
Odart was senseless by now, but was he dead? Ralphie procured some horse harness and the trio lifted their victim up and then lowered him down en unes chambres aysiées, a euphemism for the public privy (obsolete modern French cabinet d’aisances and English “house of ease”). Then the scavenging began—four royal gold coins from Odart’s purse, two other gold coins, and three silver pennies. The victim had disrobed to go to bed, so Richard took his money belt and a good striped robe which was in his pack. Ralphie helped himself to the short riding jacket the unfortunate man had worn on horseback. There was other loot, too, including several royal letters. Odart was a crown messenger. Some of these letters they burned. Others they kept. A potential forger could use genuine models in his work. And then they set out. As before, the victim’s horse was taken along as booty. It was fawn-colored and had a cropped ear, which made it easy to identify. All this Richard confessed—and one thing more. He confessed that he had had sexual relations—had played sodomitement—with the three other members of his gang who had gone on this spree.163
It was not enough to hear Richard’s confession. The interrogators obtained similar narratives, differing in the slightest details, from Johnny David and Little Ralphie. In fact Johnny confessed first, that is, even before Richard. The interrogators also recorded that sometime after Ralphie confessed he changed his story and denied everything. This was a remarkable case, but since it involved the murder of a royal courier and the destruction of royal letters, it was, as remarked, sent for review to the court of the chief royal administrator and justice-official, the prévôt, of Paris. Alexander or Richard the Englishman, if he preferred, was to be interrogated once more by a rather more elite panel of knights and lords. An irony is that one among them would be executed a few months later for corruption, but for now his role was that of a champion of justice.164
During the course of the inquiry, the accused would have been held in the prison of the Châtelet, the suite of buildings that headquartered the prévôt.165 The prison was dismal. It included a dungeon for felons of the most serious sort, from which escape was almost impossible. Indeed, prisoners were lowered by rope into this dark pen. One purchase of rope for this purpose is recorded in the accounts of a former prévôt.166 The place was dank, given the water-table of the Ile de la Cité, and was referred to as la fosse, which in Old French bears connotations of ditch, pit, and grave as well as dungeon.167 There were no windows or doors to break or to squeeze through and no stairways to reach in order to effect their escape if inmates thought to attempt one. Prisoners who were accused of less heinous crimes and whose kinfolk or friends paid for the privilege might secure aboveground cells in this period.168 But this option would not have been made available to these gang members. After being retrieved from this holding pen, Alexander/Richard was implored to swear on the Gospels to confess, and without any coercion or torture (it was claimed) he admitted to everything once again. Everything except one thing: he withdrew his confession of sodomy. In the course of his incarceration in the prison-pit he must have learned from other inmates of the potential punishment, which in northern France was intended to fit the crime.169 For their first conviction sodomites were supposed to have their testicles (coüilles) severed; for their second, the penis itself; execution by burning was mandated for those convicted a third time.170 Richard’s many other capital crimes obviated this precise succession of punishments, but if his confession to sodomy stood he would be “unmanned” one way or another before his execution. He was trying to prevent this humiliation of his body.
In fear, Johnny David, a.k.a. Jake Carmadin, reaffirmed his confession and accused several other men of committing crimes. The clerk of the prévôt of Paris dutifully kept notes as to these other men. Then Ralphie had his chance. He had confessed in Château-Landon. Then he had recanted. Now in Paris he confessed again, acknowledging his complicity in the murder and giving details as to his fetching of the horse halter and their mutual placing of Odart in the common privy. He insisted over and over again that Odart was dead, undeniably dead, when they accomplished the deed, a hint that his accusers were repulsed by the possibility that the royal courier was still alive and had drowned in urine and feces. And, yes, he added, he had ridden Odart’s horse away after the crime.
Was it enough, all this information? Johnny had opened the way to telling about more crimes. And now there was no stopping the members of the gang. Richard told about how it all started, with his stealing of the legacies in England and delivering the money into the hands of John the Englishman, a horse merchant in Paris, for safekeeping. He did not accuse John of complicity; indeed, he exonerated him of all knowledge of the crime he had committed. Not so with Little Phil Cavillon, against whom Richard also turned. Who was Little Phil? For one thing, he too was an Englishman. For another, it was discovered that he had been exiled from England for homicide. In other words, Little Phil Cavillon was an abjurer. But he had evidently managed to obtain a second and maybe a third abjuration somewhere on the continent after his exile and then hide them, for he was missing his index and middle fingers and therefore any physical evidence of one or the other having been branded. Richard said more. Little Phil had told him how to make sleeping drugs like those Richard had begun to use in his thefts. He told the interrogators the source of the knife, the murder weapon. Another Englishman provided it. There was nothing necessarily conspiratorial in this. Being successful at theft Richard might have bought the knife. He may have found it easier to deal with an English-speaking cutler he was referred to than with someone else.
It was determined that he had used drugs on Odart. Where did he obtain them? Richard responded by reporting on a shop, an épicerie in Nevers, where he paid ten pence for the powders, but he could not recall the shopkeeper who had concocted them for him. How did he administer them? Richard told his high-born questioners that he slipped the powders into some oil with which Odart seasoned his soup during the meal he had before bed. As if the confessions were not enough the court received other evidence, including some of the recovered money, robes, and other stolen goods found in the gang members’ possession and the horses they were riding when they were apprehended. One, Odart’s fawn-colored mount with the distinctive cropped ear, must have been decisive in the case against them. It was expected that the animals would be sold to recover some of the costs of the investigation leading to the extirpation and extermination of the gang.