LITTLE PHIL CAVILLON, the murderous three-fingered English abjurer whose misfortunes contributed to the story that concluded the last chapter, never returned to his homeland, Blessed Albion. But let us suppose for the sake of argument that he had succeeded in illegally reentering the realm years before his name appears in the surviving French records. In England we shall also assume he reverted to a life of crime. Espied in the commission of a felony, say, theft, we can imagine him fleeing to sanctuary. Who was this man? He would not have admitted that his missing digits, if they had already been severed at the time, were evidence of prior abjuration(s) elsewhere. Philip might have been his real name but the French-sounding Cavillon was in all probability an alias—and unless he had considerable linguistic skills, he would still have sounded English, at least from time to time. Would the authorities suspect that he was an Englishman who had once abjured England? How would an investigator have set about finding whether some Philip somewhere had foresworn the realm within the appropriate period for the current felon’s age (a year, five years, ten years before)?
Now, let us grant his interrogators the benefit of an extraordinary stroke of luck. A man recollects that he once saw a Little Phil (Philippus le Petyt in the English legal records) who abjured from the town where he, the man, once lived. The London felon now seeking to abjure resembled this other Little Phil, but it was a long time ago, and the witness to the earlier abjuration, though the event was memorable, could not be certain of the identification. How much time and money would officials spend on bringing depositions to London in hope of identifying their captive as the same Philippus le Petyt?1
Or what if Philip, too, was an alias that Cavillon used, and no witness popped up to identify him? What then? It would have been so easy to lie in answer to direct questions such as “Where were you born?” and “Where did you grow to manhood?” Perhaps he would have broken under pressure, for consider another—genuine—case. It was supposed in 1328 (though evidently not sworn, just suspected) that a captive who called himself Adam of Pickering resembled a man whose place of origin was enrolled differently on an earlier list of abjurers. Was he the same man? Adam seemed to think that the authorities had found him out and possessed all the proof they needed. With no payoff to be had from dissembling, he admitted he was the very man. Our Little Phil Cavillon might also, like Adam of Pickering, have capitulated in our hypothetical scenario, but even in Adam’s case, the justices took no chances: they summoned and consulted the coroner under whose supervision the list of abjurers was made. Only after he confirmed Adam’s identity did they order the returnee’s execution by hanging.2 This suggests that if no evidence had been garnered to confirm Adam’s confession or if he had stood mute, the justices would have been hesitant to condemn him to the gallows. Such judicious hesitation did not always manifest itself in similar cases.3
Nevertheless, if the officials had hanged Adam without the confirmation of the coroner’s identification and if evidence later surfaced that he was not an illegal returnee—what then? Would the crown have investigated and exacted retribution on the justices? These officials would have heard stories that troubled them. Blunders with or without tragic consequences were known to have happened before. Had not an innocent woman once been mistaken for an exiled Oxfordshire vagabond and robber, Agnes Daythef, who abjured London around 1253–54? Happily, the error in that case was recognized before it was too late.4 But officials would certainly have heard stories of men serving in similar positions being fined for not carrying out all aspects of an abjuration investigation with punctilious correctness.5
Working, of course, from the likelihood that those exiles who returned without permission to do so just wanted to “go home,” a common topos among nineteenth-century novelists, there was perhaps some chance of recognizing abjurers who turned up in their old haunts, but otherwise the likelihood of identification was low. So let us suppose, for the last time in this hypothetical excursus, that the authorities decided to suspend their investigation. Here was a man who identified himself as Little Phil Cavillon. He perhaps had a suspicious-looking hand as abjurers on the continent often did, a French name, and an English accent. Despite misgivings, they were willing to accept his claim that he had been maimed by accident, and so they permitted him to abjure the realm. What followed was the road to Dover, embarkation, return to Wissant, and relapse into crime. Then, later, moving from our fiction to reality, Little Three-fingered Phil was exposed as an abjurer from England by another Englishman, the fugitive Richard of Godstone (Goodtown), alias Alexander Bonneville, and his company, vicious criminals all. He would now suffer his allotted fate.
ILLEGAL REPATRIATION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
We need not rely on speculation for cases of illicit return from exile and their unhappy immediate consequences.6 In the reign of King John, and therefore no later than 1216, Walter White (Albus, or Blandus, Fair-haired) killed a basket maker named Robert. There was, as we shall see, some sympathy or popular forgiveness for Walter. Nothing is known of how he endured on the continent, but a decade after the king’s death, Walter was back in England living in peace in the Somerset village of Stineleg (literally, Stone-meadow; the vocable stine, an alternative rendering of stone, is common in the county). Perhaps the basket maker’s family forgave him. In France the approval of the victim’s family could be one of the conditions for royal permission to return from exile,7 just as elsewhere and in other circumstances the approval of kin could lead to the mitigation of a convicted felon’s punishment to forced pilgrimage.8 But in Walter’s case there is no mention of such an intervention, and it is certain that the crown issued no approval of his return. In time someone reported his presence in the village, and an investigation revealed that his neighbors had knowingly harbored him. The crown levied a fine on the village and directed that Walter, who had accumulated chattels worth two marks, making him solidly middle class, be dealt with as an outlaw, signifying execution without hope of reprieve.9
John Wagg, who abjured from Northamptonshire a century or so later, was on the point of suffering the same fate as Walter in 1323. He, too, had succeeded in coming back to England without permission. It seems that he was infirm and wanted to spend his last days at home. Yearning for home was a well-known sentiment among these exiles, as André Réville long ago pointed out.10 John Wagg somehow made it to his patria, but was recognized and then imprisoned in the castle of Northampton to await disposition of his case. While in custody he expired of natural causes. If his hope was to die in peace at home, one could argue that he more or less succeeded, though in a venue and under circumstances not as he wished.11
Certainly there were exceptions: if an abjured man returned from abroad without license and could prove he was in major orders when he abjured (we saw earlier how this might happen), he would enjoy benefit of clergy. He would be saved from the hangman but confined under perpetual imprisonment. There are a number of examples. But very good proof, including the ability to read Latin, was necessary to make one’s case.12 Another man who was caught upon his illegal return told the authorities that he had been party to a treason plot and was willing to turn crown’s evidence against his alleged co-conspirators. Treason was special; the man’s execution was delayed until the truth of his allegations could be determined and a process devised to deal with the interesting issue.13 The punishments eventually imposed—either on the approver-abjurer or his alleged co-conspirators—would have been particularly horrendous. Outside of treason, however, there was no allowance for an illegal returnee to turn approver and enjoy what few protections the status conferred.14 In 1337 one tried to. Desperate men will try almost anything. This man appealed a number of men for felony at Newgate. They lost no time in pointing out to the justices that as an abjurer who had returned without a royal pardon, their accuser had no legal capacity to appeal them. After the justices verified the accuser’s abjuration on the rolls, he was handed over for execution.15
Lest England’s law and procedures appear harsh, let us recall a fundamental fact. In most instances illegal returnees had abused a grant of mercy which had secured to them their lives, lives which would otherwise have been legitimately forfeit.16 The courts of the king of France and the count of Artois, to name two institutions with extensive records, also executed those whom the beadles apprehended and who were found to have been banished yet had dared to come back.17 In 1267 a thief who had earlier foresworn the bailiwick of Sainte-Geneviève of Paris was caught stealing in an area under the abbey’s jurisdiction and was therefore hanged; no other penalty could be substituted and no withdrawal of condemnation was permitted.18 Indeed, there was no crime in anyone’s killing an illegally returned bannitus, if the latter’s status could be proved in, among many other jurisdictions, the Beauvaisis, the Orléanais, Champagne, and the Lyonnais.19 Further south, the customs of Béarn recognized the special appropriateness of relatives of the original victim summarily—and without culpability—executing a bannitus or bannita who showed his or her face in the province.20 A recidivist in Gascony, one already bearing the branding mark (signatus in Latin; senhat in the vernacular), was subject to execution even if he or she committed a crime whose punishment could have been mitigated in other circumstances.21 The customs of Alais, another southern French town, put it picturesquely: people mutilated in their members or blinded and then exiled by order of the courts were never again entitled to a meal within the municipal boundaries.22
Such abuse, this coming back to dwell near the scenes of their crimes—to sit down to their meals again—ordinarily deserved, according to the judicial logic of the period, the reimposition and expeditious execution of the death penalty. Laws and practices elsewhere—from Ghent to the kingdom of Poland—adhered to the same logic.23 As in France there was no crime in killing an illegally returned bannitus according to the customary law of Ypres, which governed areas in what is now Belgium and as far south as Saint Dizier.24 Near Colmar a young man who was banished from the town after killing his stepbrother found the separation from his wife unbearable. He was unaware, however, that she had chosen to leave their home and the unpleasant atmosphere his crime had made for her there. When he returned to Colmar without permission and was apprehended, the authorities had him beheaded. Upon the news reaching his widow, a chronicler informs us, she perished cum dolore, or as we might say, “of a broken heart.”25 Judging from a case in 1314, authorities in Metz, to give just one further example, ordered banned criminals who were discovered in the city to be drowned in the Moselle.26 The practice sounds exceptional, and to some extent it was, but punitive drowning for blasphemy or for the rape of a virgin was not unknown even in the absence of recidivism, as prescriptive and narrative sources from the early fourteenth century show.27
To return the discussion to France, I noted in chapter 1 that in 1273, a woman banished from the bailiwick of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés (Paris) was apprehended after committing a crime. When officials discovered that she was branded with the fleur-de-lys, her fate was sealed. She was executed and her body dishonored by burial beneath the gallows, which does not mean that she was hanged first. The gallows were the symbol of capital authority, but the execution of women in the bailiwick of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés more typically was by burial alive. And we learn more: it was all performed in a public manner: hunc casum viderunt omnes de villa,28 a point we need to pursue.
The public aspect of justice was not limited to the treatment of bannis who reneged on their oaths. Judicial scribes often remarked, indeed emphasized, how other executions, as well as the cropping of the ears of convicted thieves, were showcased to everyone in the jurisdiction served.29 Seeing a man boiled alive in the marketplace, which was the punishment prescribed for false moneyers in Lille or on one of the Channel Islands (because they had boiled metal to carry out their crimes), was meant to be the high point of a cautionary and memorable public tale, as was the hanging of the condemned man’s body after boiling in the province of Brittany.30 Just seeing a giant pot intended for the deed (one was sometimes commissioned expressly for the purpose) was a marvelous warning.31 The execution of a rapist by drowning, referred to above, was accomplished turpiter, by which the chronicler indicated the deserved shame of the crime and of the criminal which justified recourse to this visually arresting method.32 Such displays, often costly, were also an awesome representation and instantiation of municipal, seigneurial, or state authority, as the case might be.33
Nevertheless the perjury—the repudiation of the abjurers’ oaths never to return—predisposed authorities to increase the spectacle of their punishment.34 So although it might be construed as a second grant of mercy that a few towns, including Valenciennes and Saint-Quentin in the north and Saint-Antonin in Languedoc, punished an illegal returnee by cutting off a foot and then sending him or her back into exile, this leniency (graded as such by the salient fact of being less final than the death penalty) was fearsome in its exemplarity.35 The thirteenth century, as Paul Friedland has argued, indeed saw an increasing “spectacularization” of punishments, which, pace Foucault, did not come to a more or less definitive end in Western Europe until the late eighteenth century.36 Such acts of justice were visible and vivid warnings—a foot was hacked off, seared so the amputee did not bleed to death, and the victim left to crawl or struggle with a stick to the municipal boundary whence he or she was delivered into renewed exile in everybody’s sight. Even more creative was the contemporary procedure prescribed in Laon for a second banning: if a miscreant did manage an illicit return he or she was to be buried erect on a succession of three Saturdays for at least half a day each time all the way up to the breasts. At the end of the burial on the third Saturday, officials and crowds of jeering youths (ribauds) escorted the humiliated prisoner out of the commune with threats of full burial alive if there was a next time.37
Such draconian measures could be mollified for particular reasons and most especially with respect to those who sheltered illegally returned exiles. By right any accessory of this type could be executed—and in the immediate aftermath of a crime, harboring, even by a close family member, did result in the death penalty38—but there must have been some sense, in the long aftermath of abjuration and exile, after tempers moderated, that it was just too grievous for close relatives to refuse shelter to a beloved sister or son or father who succeeded in sneaking back home. Perhaps this is why in the Lyonnais the penalty imposed on the harborer of an illicitly returned exile was limited to the loss of a hand.39 Perhaps, too, the realization among the exiles themselves that their return might result in the mutilation or worse of loved ones deterred the former from trying to come back.
LEGAL REPATRIATION
By now in our story it almost goes without saying that if one returned from exile, it was a good deal better to do so after having obtained license. The proper manner to achieve this, in England as elsewhere, was by obtaining a pardon.40 Men and women convicted of felonies in the regular courts in England and condemned to die could apply for and sometimes obtain royal pardons, because of circumstances or at a price or both, following conviction. Even those who flouted justice by fleeing and were outlawed had access to pardons for their outlawry on condition that they deliver themselves and stand trial on the original charge or charges.41 It would have been inconceivable to permit this to outlaws while denying it to exiles who had succeeded at ordeals or submitted themselves to an established form of legal process in sanctuary, confessed their crimes, and suffered the hardships of displacement. It was still the case, as with a pardoned outlaw, that a pardoned abjurer from sanctuary could be compelled to stand trial for his acknowledged crime,42 particularly if a kinsman of the victim, one with proper standing—a widow, say, or a relative who had witnessed the felony—made a direct accusation or appealed him, in the legal jargon. The pardon did not nullify the abjurer’s victim’s right of appeal. This limitation was identical with provisions on the continent.43 Yet, in reality, such post-pardon judicial accusations were rare, a fact that will be explored more fully later.44
As Karl Shoemaker has remarked, obtaining pardons for condemned men in custody and for outlaws occurred “with a surprising frequency.” It was typically preceded by people in good standing coming forward to pay the crown for its special grace. Even when nothing else is known except that a pardon was obtained by an abjurer, it is usually safe to assume that he or she had contacted sympathetic people of moderate to substantial means or with access to credit. John, son of Siward, a Lincolnshire abjurer for homicide in King John’s time, was obliged to pay an enormous but at the time not unusual sum of five marks for his pardon in 1218.45 How else could he do so but by the intervention of well-off friends or ones willing to borrow money and carry debt on his behalf?
We know that, always excepting a few high-born exiles, the abjurers’ typical social and personal networks in England consisted of destitute, poor, or middling folk. We shall return to the fate of these “ordinary” abjurers in a moment. But first let us turn to one or two examples of people of high status who were obliged to abjure. An early fourteenth-century mayor of Bristol, a certain John le Taverner, was one such person. The records allege that John was party to a conspiracy to keep him in office against the wishes of “good and lawful” citizens of the town who desired him to relinquish the position. The records also allege that the conspirators “ejected many [of John’s opponents] from the liberty of the town and took their goods and chattels.” The situation escalated, and in the course of the dispute the mayor, his son Thomas, and Robert Martyn, a burgess and an alleged co-conspirator, were accused of murdering one of their opponents. All three abjured the realm in 1317.46 They would have gone to Ireland, given Bristol’s location. Evidence of the crown’s ongoing investigation into the extent of their property preparatory to its sequestration followed soon after, on 12 February 1318.47
Men as well-connected as these would have had little difficulty in reestablishing contact with sympathizers who worked to obtain royal pardons for them.48 But even so, it took several years to seal the deal. The three men returned to Bristol with pardons dated 28 November 1321.49 Their pardons notwithstanding, their wrath at having been exiled still burned hot. They wanted to avenge the wrong they felt they had suffered. But it was well to know what a pardon did not accomplish. Since a pardon created a “new man,” it did not allow a grantee to upset legal or properly adjudicated arrangements (civil or criminal) that preceded the original abjuration.50 Consequently, many of those pardoned felt frustrated. Richard Tilly, the mayor of Bristol at the time of the three pardons just mentioned, was witness to this frustration and to the ensuing new period of disruption. For in their resentment the returnees found ways to harass the citizens whom they blamed for blocking John from office and for now preventing them from achieving the same preeminence they had enjoyed in Bristol before their exile. The records speak of their wreaking vengeance “immediately” after their return. They were accused in formal depositions taken on 16 March 1324 of “maliciously vex[ing] many good and lawful men of the town by divers grievances and extortions.”51 In a word, they wrongly treated their pardons as licenses for retribution, a pattern that Helen Lacey has also observed among a few grantees of pardons in her study of English judicial mercy.52
The case of Thomas Weyland, the former Chief Justice, was less fraught. His hard times had been brutal—starved out of sanctuary and sickened almost to death on the road to Dover in the winter of 1290. But he recovered, and in the initial period of his exile found ways, perhaps through friends who joined him in Wissant, to survive with dignity, if not to flourish. No doubt there was sentiment to the effect that Edward I would have pity and forgive his former Chief Justice. The king was known to have relented in his punishments in other cases when his anger abated.53 Indeed, it has been asserted that despite his mercurial character, Edward I came across in his own time as in general too forgiving of his enemies.54 Thomas made his way to Paris where in 1292 he waited for the pardon that would be proof of the king’s softened mood. Evidence has not been discovered of when the pardon came or when news of it reached the great French metropolis. But it was granted. Weyland returned to one of his wife’s manors and enjoyed a quiet retirement thereafter until his death in early 1298.55
The outcome in cases like those of John le Taverner, mayor of Bristol, and Chief Justice Thomas Weyland was predicated on the exiles’ establishment and maintenance of communication with partisans of their cause in England. But abroad the vast majority of low-born and undistinguished men and women abjurers were cut off from their social and vocational networks with even greater effect than was the case for outlaws who remained at large in the English woods.56 At least outlaws might be made aware of their pardons through people who had heard—or heard of—public criers announcing them in the streets and marketplaces of towns where, if the fugitives had not fled, they would have stood trial for their crimes.57 But “run-of-the-mill” exiles and fugitives to France had gone off to almost another world. As long as they were in Wissant, there was the possibility of receiving an official communication through the resident English royal sergeant. After they left the village, however, how were their friends and families in England to locate them? Indeed, it must be acknowledged that for the most part the break with their native land was shattering and complete.58 All that most ordinary exiles and loved ones back home had were memories which faded and hopes which were never fulfilled. As far as one can tell, most exiles of other jurisdictions suffered the same sort of loss to more or less the same degree, and some of it must have been reinforced by their relatives’ attempts to live down their association with the bannis, which could be used as a slur in its own right.59
In the previous paragraph I used the phrase “to more or less the same degree.” On the one hand, exile from a kingdom, across even a narrow sea, and into a wholly different linguistic community was harder to overcome and perhaps to bear than exile from a continental realm or province or from a town and its hinterland, where isolation and deracination (dépaysement is Gonthier’s term) was relative rather than close to absolute.60 On the other hand, recall that municipalities were accustomed to exchanging lists of exiles to establish written evidence that could be used to prevent them from benefiting once again from abjuration if they committed crimes elsewhere.61 Were lists of those pardoned also exchanged? Were old lists updated by the erasure of names of those known to have been pardoned in nearby jurisdictions? Or was it left to the pardoned abjurer to prove his or her pardon if confronted on the issue? We shall have to take up this issue of proving a pardon more systematically later in this chapter.
To refocus now on the English situation, there were a few opportunities for those whom I have termed ordinary or typical exiles abroad to obtain permission to return to the realm. In the initial period after abjuration friends and/or family were one possibility.62 They could move with haste and see what might be accomplished even before an abjurer reached the embarkation port. Recall the admittedly unique case of Walter Haket who appeared to be trying to escape but in reality chased down a more notorious felon whom he recognized on the road to Dover. His friends and family promptly rallied and raised ten marks for his pardon.63 At times, as has been remarked, family members followed exiles to Wissant. Some stayed with them throughout their exile. Others could only remain for brief intervals. Before taking return passage to Dover, however, they might arrange to have information about their success at securing pardons sent privately to the resident English royal sergeant, the priest of Saint Nicholas-Sombres, or a local taverner of Wissant. Gratuities must have been given for the promise to try to get the information to their loved ones. A lucky few exiles may have been able to remain in the port for a time or revisit it in expectation of news through these sources.
Still another possibility existed for exiles who obtained some sort of steady work and managed to establish settled residences in France over time. I am thinking of those abjurers whose specialized skills made them employable in respectable trades. Might not a few of the surfeit of anglici and anglois remarked by Christopher de Hamel as being in the early Paris book trade have been exiles rather than, as he suggested, all voluntary migrants from England simply drawn by employment possibilities to the more active Paris market?64 Working in this or another respectable trade they would come into contact with well-connected Englishmen and women—men traveling on business, aristocrats, churchmen, pilgrims, indeed perhaps churchmen and pilgrims in particular—to whom they could tell their “sad” stories. They could hope to. After all, a few—a very few—succeeded in gaining an audience with the English king when he was traveling in France. Henry III was touched by the tales he was told.65 Edward I was open to listening to them, too.66
The case of Halengrat the Balister is informative—to a degree. Born in Bordeaux, he served Henry III as a royal sergeant in England. But he came under censure for the killing of a certain Adam le Sauser. Adam was also a royal sergeant, one who had been assigned to the personal guard of Prince Edward, the future Edward I, and he appears to have worked with an array of members of Halengrat’s family. What rivalries stood behind the altercation leading to Adam’s killing, I do not know, but Halengrat abjured the realm upon confessing to the deed and went into exile in France during the mid-1240s. He had the advantage, at least, of being a native speaker of the southwestern dialect. During one of the king’s visits to Gascony, the disgraced sergeant managed to reach him and appealed for a pardon in what must have been a convincing way, for Henry III extended his grace for both the homicide and the abjuration. By 1253 the once-disgraced royal sergeant was so far returned to the king’s good graces that he was receiving property in England in Henry’s gift and was sent on a sensitive and successful mission to his hometown of Bordeaux to help negotiate on the king’s behalf a major loan of 1,500 pounds in the local currency.67
In another example the king’s intervention must have seemed a truly extraordinary gift from heaven. Henry III was in France in late 1254, but was planning to return to England after a visit during which he had cemented his friendship with his brother-in-law, King Louis IX, in one of the many steps toward sealing a lasting peace with the traditional Capetian enemy. He was in Wissant on 21 December, as the Christmas feast approached. Christmastide would have been a time when more ships crossed between Dover and Wissant than was usual for the rest of the cold and stormy season. And a no-doubt despondent Thomas of Sheppel, an abjurer who had confessed to harboring a felon named Thomas Crabbe, was scheduled for passage to Wissant. Thomas of Sheppel’s friend, a woman named Alesia de Warrena, had gone to Dover, probably with the intention of reuniting with him on the continent. But I assume that she heard tell during her brief sojourn in the port that the English king, though in France, was planning to return and would do so from Wissant. Acting on this knowledge, she secured passage on a ship and apparently arrived before her abjuring friend. She also succeeded in obtaining an audience with Henry III at which she interceded on Thomas of Sheppel’s behalf. The king’s visit with the French king’s family and his own queen’s extended family had made Henry happy, very happy.68 And it was Christmas time. He made the importunate Alesia very happy, too, by issuing a pardon for her friend then and there, on the spot in Wissant.69 So, by the time Thomas of Sheppel arrived in the French village his exile was over. Did the couple hear mass and offer thanks at Wissant’s Saint Nicholas Church? Whether or not they did so, it was a very merry Christmas.
Advanced age gave an “elderly chaplain’s” saga poignancy. He had languished in France for years. He had not abjured. He had fled the power of the English legal system because, he said, accusations made against him with regard to a homicide were false and he did not even learn of them until it was too late for him to avoid being outlawed. And by now (1279) he had grown old in France. He longed for a pardon and a return to England. He got word that the king, Edward I this time, was on his travels. The elderly exile managed to reach him, tell of his long expatriation, and plead the frailty of old age. The king was kind, but the case was strange. The old man claimed that he could have had benefit of clergy and vindicated himself, but if so, why had he fled? Perhaps the chaplain was just confused, cloudy in his dementia. Edward beneficently promised him that he would look into the matter when he returned to England, and he kept his promise. Soon after, he issued the pardon.70
Another sad story was that of Stephen of Handsworth, a Staffordshire man. He found himself in France because he had abjured after a terrible altercation with his brother on 4 July 1288. It was a moving tale that he told the king, but it would be confirmed by the investigation that Edward I ordered into it. Stephen had spent a year in exile when it happened that the king traveled to France and his itinerary took him near enough to where Stephen was staying, to Condom in the Agenais, so that the latter appealed for an audience. The exile told of how he and his brother Richard were drinking in a tavern in company with Richard’s wife, Julia. The town was Hampstead, and the tavern was owned by Geoffrey the miller. All three left in the evening (about vespers). Stephen had a flimsy summer jacket on, but he felt chilled on that rainy July night. Julia had a broad cloak, and Stephen asked if he could share it with her to shelter himself from the rain as they walked along. Then Richard lost his temper. He was jealous of his wife and distrusted his brother. He had a heavy stick and he started to strike her as she was bringing Stephen under the folds of her cloak. Stephen was furious, he related to the king, and tried to restrain his brother, but then Richard turned on him. He insisted to the king that he tried to escape his brother’s blows, but Richard kept after him. Stephen caught sight of a Danish axe resting nearby and seized it. He struck back at his brother in self-defense—the blow came down on Richard’s head—and brought an end to the assault. A week later Julia lost her husband and Stephen his brother to the wound. Stephen fled. He had not intended to kill, but he was afraid of his possible fate. That was his story. And now, almost a year later, in June 1289, he told it in France to the king of England, for whom it was confirmed by an investigation preliminary to the grant of pardon.71
English rulers could grant pardons more or less immediately while traveling in France, as Henry III did at Wissant in 1254, but they typically preferred to initiate the process and follow up later, as Edward did in the case of the elderly chaplain and that of Stephen of Handsworth.72 But what if the king was at too great a distance or there were other obstacles for the suppliants? In these cases, the latter would have sought out intermediaries, including other English travelers, to carry messages to the ruler. Or, if the king returned to England before contact could be made, it might be possible to persuade English travelers to intercede with him if they could procure an audience or at least to contact kinfolk or friends on their return to the island kingdom and urge them to continue to work for their repatriation. If the petitioners were leading settled lives, they could be located with fair ease if anything came of these efforts.73 It was a long shot, but an abjurer who embedded himself or herself in new networks of French friends might persuade them either to help finance efforts to obtain a pardon or to put in a good word with a distinguished English traveler when the opportunity arose.74
Whatever the scenario, a few rather ordinary abjurers did obtain pardons and return to England.75 But “few” is the operative word for English exiles and fugitives abroad (or “fewer” in comparison to their counterparts expelled from other jurisdictions).76 It was outlaws in England and condemned felons in custody in England, not abjurers and fugitives in cross-Channel France, who received the bulk of pardons whose “frequency” Shoemaker otherwise regarded as “surprising.” No wonder cases of victims’ kin appealing pardoned abjurers of their crimes, a right they retained, were so rare. Almost no ordinary abjurers managed to return, but of the few who did and can be documented, there are some further revelatory stories to be told.
Richard of Oakington abjured the realm from the county of Hereford around 1260 or a little before. Richard was mentally challenged (“in his simplicity”), and he was frightened by a scuffle that he was involved in with Warin le Chaluner of Ledbury. Indeed, Richard thought that he had killed Warin and in his unsettled state of mind fled to the parish church of Ledbury for sanctuary. No dead body was ever discovered, but the confession following upon the altercation persuaded the authorities that a felony had been committed, with the body presumably disposed of, and that the rules for sanctuary and abjuration were met. Richard abjured the realm, but his friends could not believe that their slow-witted companion had committed such an act. The absence of the corpse motivated them to do some investigating on their own. I have grounds for inferring that at least one friend followed Richard into exile to look after him and await word of the result.
The alleged murder victim, Warin le Chaluner, had been deep in debt. This was the key. Richard’s friends began to snoop around and discovered that a man answering to Warin’s description was dwelling in a different location and had taken up residence there soon after the incident with Richard in Ledbury. The friends confronted the man, who proved to be Warin le Chaluner. They then induced him (one can imagine that the scene was not a pretty one) to return to Ledbury and arranged for a hearing to be held before the sheriff and the coroners of Herefordshire. There Warin admitted that he had gone into hiding “because of his debts for the payment of which his goods did not suffice.” The officials pressed him on the far more serious charge that he had “maliciously” fled so that Richard would be accused of his murder and hanged or, given the actual circumstances, sent into exile from sanctuary. He insisted that this had not been his intent. In any case, with Warin le Chaluner alive, a petition was remitted to the crown, and Richard received a royal pardon on 27 May 1260.77 Richard would have learned the news at Wissant where he was probably abiding with a friend.
Less is known of the case of Alan le Lung of Newbury, who had broken prison, taken sanctuary, and abjured sometime in the 1260s. It is revealing that he had a contact in the royal sergeant, Walter Achard, from the locality where these incidents took place.78 The escape was by definition an affront to the royal administration and a negative reflection on the service which men like a royal sergeant were expected to provide. Yet, one may doubt whether any prior association with the escapee sullied Walter Achard’s personal reputation, for it was at his petition that the crown offered a pardon to Alan le Lung on 5 December 1266.79 Given his connections, it would not be surprising if Walter found a way to get word to Alan of this favorable turn of events.
It is possible that money changed hands in order to obtain the hearing on behalf of Richard of Oakington and perhaps in order to solicit support from local officials for Walter Achard’s request. However, evidence of monetary exchange is limited to promises of payments and receipts of payments to the crown. On 30 May 1218, for example, William of Duston pledged to pay one mark for the pardon of Henry of Handsacre, who had abjured from Derbyshire for the murders of Richard and Geoffrey Frost, a father and son. William pledged the mark with the understanding that he would make the payment if Henry could not otherwise scrounge the sum from other sources and remit it.80
Patrons did not have to be related by blood or marriage or even be friends of their clients to use their good offices and their money to secure pardons.81 There was a nasty case of arson and disruption (breach of peace) in Hampshire around 1235 involving a number of men. These common servitors of the bishop of Winchester received sanctuary and abjured. Whether he had encouraged or consented to their actions or whether their actions were misguided—carried out without the prelate’s knowledge but in his interest—is unknown. Whatever the case, the bishop did what a lord-patron was expected to do.82 He paid half a mark for the pardon of Ralph of la Hes’ and half-marks for both William le Vilur and Adam of Wystle, who were identified as his men.83 One supposes that they awaited word in Wissant to be communicated to them at the parish church, Saint Nicholas-Sombres, to which the bishop would have sent a personal messenger or a missive.
Those who were able to do so looked to the top rank of society for intervention. We have already seen personal appeals to the king, but it was an acknowledged aspect of the system that if the king was unavailable, queens and princesses should be solicited. In fact, they were expected to make themselves available for appeals for clemency and pass these on to their royal husbands and fathers.84 It should come as no surprise, to give one instance, that after John of Brankiston obtained the favor of the queen of Scotland he was pardoned. John had abjured England from Northampton and had gone into exile in Scotland. He appealed for the queen’s intercession, not because of her Scottish dignity or her capacity to intervene formally or informally in the operation of Scots law. Indeed, notwithstanding the occasional use of the language of abjuration when, for example, during wartime Scottish authorities exiled those whom they suspected of sympathizing with their enemies, there is little evidence that, despite their resort to exile, they incorporated foreswearing as a regular practice of their law.85 Rather, the queen was an English princess, the daughter of the English king, Henry III, and was known as an intercessor with her father for pardons.86 The English monarch responded with generosity to his daughter’s prayer. He both pardoned John of Brankiston and returned half of his goods, even though pardons did not imply automatic restitution of property.87
I imagine that it was through the good offices of prelates that a few men with connections to the church but without benefit of clergy were rescued from exile. Acting the patron was almost part of their job description.88 In the lists of patrons assembled by Helen Lacey, I count twenty-three prelates who, up until the mid-fourteenth century, are known to have interceded to obtain pardons for felons.89 I am not saying that any of these men in particular did so for abjurers or fugitive exiles. My point is that it would not have been absurd for exiles who had once had some connection to the church to make appeals to traveling English prelates for succor, any more than it was unexpected for royal sergeants to intercede for brother sergeants.90 Such exiles as I have in mind were employable in many occupations in France since they could read and write Latin to some degree and with their earnings could establish fixed abodes for themselves. They could also write to churchmen they knew in England or correspond with those they met on the continent and implore them, as members of the same profession, to intercede for them when they returned to England.
It is probable that William of Bugbrooke obtained his pardon through some such effort. The records describe him as a chaplain and tell of how he escaped the wrath of his lover’s husband by seeking sanctuary, confessing to crimes he had not committed, and abjuring the realm from Leicestershire in 1270. As the years passed on, he burned to return. On 19 October 1282, twelve years after the abjuration, he obtained his pardon. The process was not smooth. The coroners who supervised the abjuration had died during William’s exile, so a time-consuming new investigation was necessary, but he finally succeeded.91 Less has been recovered on Adam Balle of Lichfield, also described as a chaplain, who abjured for the killing of an unnamed man but was pardoned on 12 December 1294.92 Had he panicked when menaced by this unknown man, struck him dead, and fled to sanctuary? And then did he repent of his actions, write home, and set the pardoning process in motion from afar?
Some of the stories were poignant, crafted in part no doubt by common expectations—“rhetorical strategies”—of what would work, but not like later French pardon tales, whose drafting by professionals had, in my view, a far more pronounced distorting effect.93 We have already encountered the poor man who was afraid that he would be accused of suffocating his six week-old daughter when he rode out with her one day in 1242. Ashamed, he tried to evade responsibility, then panicked and fled to sanctuary. Yet after abjuring he broke down and pleaded for mercy (a pardon), claiming that his act was unintentional. The coroner at least agreed to reconsider the matter.94 In 1260 there was some doubt that John le Chaumpeneys committed the murder to which he had confessed and for which he had abjured the realm. Hugh Bigod, the Justiciar, who was exercising though not monopolizing the pardoning power in the years when the barons controlled Henry III’s government, agreed to reopen the case.95 In 1267 another inquiry was ordered into the process of John, the son of Roger of Fincham, who “sometime ago abjured the realm when he was a minor, out of simplicity and fear,” the exact words—the legal formula—that had been used to describe Richard of Oakington who also had not had the capacity to understand what was happening to him. John had not even reached adulthood.96
Irrational, all-consuming fear is a recurrent motif in the descriptions of the circumstances that drove young people into exile and could be alleged as a factor in justifying their pardon. One of the Inquisitions Miscellaneous describes a remarkable case which, although it does not involve an abjuration, vividly evokes the fear characteristic of the criminal justice system and of those who had the power to enforce its sanctions. A twelve-year-old boy, following the execution of his brother and mother for felony and harboring a felon, was so frightened by the threats of the local bailiff, who wanted to get his hands on the family’s property, that he fled the country and went overseas with what resources he could carry with him. Thereafter the bailiff insinuated the boy’s complicity (by his flight?) in the original crimes and got him outlawed. In time and with persistence the youth, named John of Elmbridge, made contact with people willing to argue his case in England. After a successful judicial inquiry beginning on 29 July 1284, he received a royal pardon from Edward I on 17 October.97
Another case, that of Alice of la Venele, is both poignant and bizarre.98 She averred that a certain John of Norwich had promised to marry her. Before doing so he wanted to reclaim some property in her name from a group of men (bailiff of Bury St Edmunds Nicholas Fuke, John of Hockwold, and others) who had evicted her. As Fuke’s office implies, the property, a freehold, was located in Bury. Alice’s fiancé obtained the necessary writs from the Chancery to initiate the prosecution of her claim, but she alleged that before the matters could be resolved, the men conspired to have John arrested on a false accusation of theft, which led to his indictment. She further insisted that their conspiracy had as its goal nothing less than his judicial murder and that her fiancé saved himself only by successfully claiming benefit of clergy. (One wonders whether he was an appropriate betrothed.) Frustrated and not content to leave matters as they were, the men turned their attentions to Alice (or so she alleged) with the intention of killing her. She had no idea what to do or how to protect herself, so she fled to a church and asked for sanctuary. It is hard to know precisely what happened next. She certainly confessed to a felony and abjured. She claimed that she was advised to do so—bad advice, she conceded—though she took the advice because of her hope to seek out the king in Gascony for a pardon and full remediation of all her problems. She pleaded in a formal petition for an investigation in Norfolk (her betrothed’s home county) and Suffolk (where Bury St Edmunds is located). This would have been about 1288. Her hopes—or dreams—notwithstanding, she received no rectification of her situation.
THE MATTER OF WAR
One story that involved numerous English abjurers living in France and was chilling in the extreme occurred in 1326. Disputes in Gascony had provoked aggressive displays and the possibility of war between the English and French kings. Edward II, it was reported, was expelling Frenchmen from his kingdom, and Charles IV chose to retaliate—or so we are told. He ordered the seizure of English residents in France and the confiscation of half their goods, with the obvious intent of holding the aliens to ransom until his political disputes with the English ruler were resolved. Many of the English, in particular the exiles from the island, were desperately poor, and Charles and his advisers perceived no advantage in confiscating their miserable goods, which would cost as much or more to carry out than the campaign was worth. But something had to be done. There was no purchase in holding the poor to ransom, so it was not intended that they be kept in holding pens to await release. Instead, they were to be expelled.99 The consequences, if this policy were fully executed, would have been devastating to the exiles. (There is an uncanny modern parallel in Cuba’s expulsion of its undesirables in 1978 as part of the Mariel boatlift.) There is no evidence so far as I know that they would have been allowed to return to England to live free. As it turns out, the policy seems to have been curtailed once the political disputes between the two kings cooled and the threat of war temporarily abated. But mutual threats of this sort would be made in future years.100
One other story that arose from disputes, indeed from war, between the two kingdoms (and between England and Scotland) was repeated again and again around the time the incidents just described took place. It was of abjurers and a few outlaws abroad who volunteered or were recruited for the English army or navy when it was on campaign. The government of Edward I received, for example, the petition of Gregory of Stradsett who claimed that he had taken sanctuary while still underage (he said at age twelve, which appears to have been the cutoff101) and that he also, not knowing any better, foreswore the kingdom, even though his crime, theft, was petty—some geese and a hen. Since that time he had grown to adulthood and “had served in the king’s war in Gascony.” He pleaded for the king to restore him to his peace: in effect, to pardon him. In response the Chancery was instructed to issue a writ to the coroners to have the record of the abjuration brought to the Council (“before the king”).102
In another case, on 20 March 1318, seven years after Richard Oldere and his wife Sabine fled the country following a homicide, they, too, received pardons for both the crime and the flight in return for the husband’s good military service for the English king in Scotland.103 This case and that of Gregory of Stradsett in the preceding paragraph are emblematic. What began as a trickle became a flood of abjurers and outlaws seeking and being granted royal pardons for serving in the king’s wars or for being willing to.104 The earliest evidence that this was being systematized occurs in 1294, coinciding with the initial breakdown of the long Anglo-French peace.105 By the mid-fourteenth century, at the end of our story, one has entered the veritable age of blanket pardons, though the purpose of the grants was not limited to providing soldiers and sailors for the crown’s forces.106 Some English jurists and commentators expressed concerns about the equity of blanket pardons.107 Such criticisms, although they did not lead in the short term to substantial reform, since manpower needs were acute, were themselves the culmination of decades upon decades of concern about the proper exercise of the pardoning power.108
PROVING A PARDON
How did one prove a pardon? This question had to be asked from time to time, as for example of a certain Walter Bukerel, who was known to have abjured but was recognized in London in 1244. He was brought before the London Eyre of that year to answer for his presence in the kingdom.109 What proof did he have that he had been permitted to return? In truth, the challenge was a fairly easy one to meet. And it mimicked a process simultaneously in use in other circumstances and undoubtedly other jurisdictions. For example, a person who lost an ear not as a punishment for theft but in an innocent way could obtain written official confirmation to help relieve suspicion. A Londoner, John the son of William de Bosco, did so in 1276 and thus carried proof that a horse had bitten off his ear.110 Presumably, one could obtain such documentation for other mutilations that appeared to be similar to those inflicted as punishments by authorities throughout Europe, the list of which was very long—severed tongues and feet, lost eyes, burns (brandings) on the lips, cheeks, and forehead, etc.111 Similarly, people whom the king of England pardoned, each and every one of them, received a parchment letter of protection, a pardon ticket, so to speak.112 From at least the early thirteenth century in the English case, the document was supposed to be delivered into the successful petitioner’s hands when he or she came forward to receive it in a judicial forum for public declaration.113 It is an a fortiori indicator of how separated abjurers in exile abroad were that a few of the pardons obtained by friends and families were, because of loss of contact, apparently never retrieved.114
A pardon ticket took the form of a letter patent that was to be retained on a returned exile’s person at all times: “he must be armed with a pardon.”115 I cannot but assume that the requirement was similar for those pardoned by continental jurisdictions. The ticket stood proof, in particular, against administrators’ failure or reluctance to expunge a pardonee’s name from lists of abjurers which circulated among municipal administrators.116 If, in England, a recognized abjurer was arrested or got into a scrape or was implicated in a crime and evidence of prior abjuration was suspected or revealed, defense—protection from the peril of execution—was also possible by showing the official scrap of parchment that had restored one to the king’s peace.117 Yet, no action lay with the victim, the pardoned exile, for slander (scandal) if he were slurred as an illicit returnee, as it did in the case of other pardons. The latter created wholly new men, who were not supposed to be publicly referred to as the authors of the crimes for which they were pardoned. The king’s grace, the early commentator Giles Jacob (d. 1744) averred, “so far clears the Party from the infamy, that he may have an Action for a Scandal in calling him Traitor or Felon, after the Time of the Pardon.”118 Jacob was slurred as a dunce by Alexander Pope in the Dunciad (“Jacob, the scourge of grammar, mark with awe, / Nor less revere the blunderbuss of law”), but he was a formidable legal scholar.
The theoretical limitation on the abjurer’s pardon, that is, the rule that there was no action for slander against those publicly deriding the pardonee as a felon or illegal returnee, was enforced in practice, as one John l’Angleyse discovered. He had abjured for the killing of a village worthy in Lympne in Kent and spent three years in exile before returning to England after his pardon in 1350. He tried to appeal those who accused him of entering the country illegally, but if I am interpreting the evidence with accuracy, his effort went for nothing as “no grievance was shown.”119 It was important to the safety of the community that people comparable to whistleblowers in modern business organizations and government bureaucracies be allowed to make their suspicions of illegal returnees known without fear of reprisals, even if their accusations proved mistaken.
A parchment pardon ticket, which was supposed to be on one’s person at all times, could be lost, worn out, or stolen. A lost or worn ticket could be verified against the Patent Rolls and replaced for a fee.120 The Patent Rolls also provided a check against the effective forgery of tickets. Both the English and the French were more than a little concerned that imitations of their letters were available from professional forgers.121 But what of a stolen pardon ticket? It is hard to imagine a more insidious revenge than stealing a man’s or woman’s proof of being in the king’s peace and then accusing the victim of making an illicit return to the kingdom. Yet, the crime was not unsuspected.122 Victims of such thefts (rare, one supposes) upon being denounced to the authorities would, of course, protest their innocence. It is an open and troubling question whether officials unfailingly responded to the protests with a full inquiry or by asking the central government for a laborious search of the rolls.
The last sentence is not intended to prejudge the situation by implying that the authorities were lax. A case from 1345 shows them very concerned and expressing willingness to investigate an accusation of forgery. In this instance the accuser who claimed victimhood alleged that his enemies had wrongfully gained access to a coroner’s roll listing those who had foresworn the kingdom under that official’s supervision. The accuser averred that his tormentors had maliciously enrolled his name on the roll.123 If he was being truthful, one can only hope that the officials entrusted to assess his claim made a thorough investigation.