Chapter 2

FATHER AND SON I (1367–1382)

On 12 September 1368, when he was seventeen months old, Henry of Bolingbroke's mother died in childbirth aged twenty-one. Duchess Blanche had been married to John of Gaunt for nine years and borne him six children, three of whom survived her. Commemorated by Chaucer in his Book of the Duchess and by Froissart in his poem Joli Buisson de Jonece (1373), where he described her as ‘young and beautiful . . . vivacious, happy, fresh and charming, gentle and sincere, modest in manner’, she would not be forgotten by her son, who twenty-four years later named his first daughter after her.1

For three or four years after his mother's death Henry was brought up with his sisters in the household of their sexagenarian great-aunt, Blanche Lady Wake, but soon after Gaunt's remarriage in September 1371 to the Castilian princess Constanza, the three children resided for the most part with their stepmother at Tutbury (Staffordshire), the chief Lancastrian stronghold in the Midlands.² Their governess here was the duke's mistress, Katherine Swynford, sister-in-law to Geoffrey Chaucer and former lady-in-waiting to Duchess Blanche. It was around the time of his second marriage that Gaunt and Katherine's public affair began, and in 1373 their first child was born, followed by three more in four years. Known as the Beauforts, they became valued friends to Henry, but his closest boyhood companion was probably Thomas Swynford, Katherine's son by her first marriage, who was just a year younger than Henry and was also brought up in the ducal household.³

In 1374, having reached his seventh birthday and thus, by contemporary reckoning, passed from infancy to boyhood, Henry was given his own governor, the veteran Lancastrian esquire Thomas de Burton,4 who in 1376 was replaced by William de Mountendre, a Gascon knight who had served in Gaunt's army in France in 1373–4.⁵ By this time Henry was increasingly to be found at court with his cousin, the future Richard II, who was three months older than him.⁶ On 23 April 1377 they were both knighted, along with another ten scions of the English nobility, by the dying Edward III at Windsor castle during the annual St George's day festivities, with Henry and Richard simultaneously inducted as Knights of the Garter.⁷ It was also from this moment that Henry began to be styled as earl of Derby,⁸ one of the five earldoms to which Gaunt could lay claim, and it was as earl of Derby that, three months later, he performed his most onerous public duty to date when he bore the principal sword, the Curtana, at his cousin's coronation. Edward III had died on 21 June 1377, and Richard II was crowned on 16 July at a ceremony presided over by Gaunt, the new king's senior uncle since the deaths of his elder brothers Lionel of Clarence in 1368 and Edward the Black Prince in 1376. Gaunt himself carried the Curtana during the coronation ceremony, but for the banquet in Westminster Great Hall which followed he relinquished it to Henry who, throughout the meal, ‘standing on the right hand of the king as he sat at table, held in his hand the said principal sword naked and drawn’ – a disciplined performance for a boy of ten.⁹

Once Richard became king, Henry initially passed more time at court, regularly receiving gifts of robes, cloaks and shoes from the young king for the hunting and hawking seasons, for Christmas and Easter, and for the Garter festivities each April. Garter robes were of scarlet cloth, lined with belly fur and embroidered with garters of blue taffeta inscribed with the motto of the Order, ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’.10 Henry's courtly upbringing also encompassed occasions such as the wedding of Richard II's half-sister Maud Holand to Waleran of Luxemburg, count of St Pol, celebrated at Windsor during Easter week 1380, when Henry presented the bride with a goblet of gilded silver worth sixty shillings, paid for by his father.¹¹ The next wedding of comparable significance in England would be Henry's own, and would mark his introduction to the more cut-throat side of court life.

It was Gaunt who arranged Henry's marriage. The object of his attentions was Mary, the co-heiress to Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford, Essex and Northampton, who had died at the age of thirty in January 1373, leaving no sons, two underage daughters, and a very substantial inheritance. The elder daughter, Eleanor (born in 1366), was married to Gaunt's brother, Thomas of Woodstock, earl of Buckingham, probably in 1374.¹² What now happened to Mary (born in 1369–70) was naturally a matter of considerable interest to Buckingham. As long as she remained single, the entire Bohun inheritance would fall to him; were she to marry, he would be obliged to share it with her husband. Inconveniently, other duties now deflected his attention. On 3 May 1380, he indented with the king and council to lead an expedition to Brittany with a retinue of 5,000 men.¹³ During the following two months he did what he could to ensure that the Bohun patrimony did not slip from his grasp during his absence: on 8 May he obtained a royal grant of the custody of Mary's share of the inheritance during her minority; on 22 June Eleanor came of age and Thomas performed his fealty to the king for his wife's share of the lands.14 Shortly before leaving he even took the precaution of bringing Mary to stay with her sister at Pleshey castle (Essex), where he arranged for her to be instructed by nuns with the intention that she should join the order of St Clare. According to Froissart, ‘the young lady seemed to incline to their doctrine, and thought not of marriage’.¹⁵

Hopeful of having ensured the integrity of his inheritance, Buckingham shipped his troops to Calais and, on 24 July 1380, set out with his army on a campaign from which he would not return for nine months.¹⁶ No sooner had he done so than Gaunt made his move. Three days after his brother's crossing, he secured a royal grant of Mary's marriage, ‘for marrying her to his son Henry’,¹⁷ and shortly after this induced her mother, Joan countess of Hereford, to spirit her away from Pleshey and take her to Arundel, where the young couple were rapidly betrothed.¹⁸ They were married on 5 February 1381 in a service held at Countess Joan's manor of Rochford (Essex).¹⁹ The connivance of the king and council, who would have been aware of the blow this inflicted on Buckingham, is a measure of the financial and political leverage Gaunt exercised in Richard II's minority government. Gaunt attended and presented Mary with a ruby, as well as paying for the festivities; Henry's sisters, Philippa and Elizabeth, each gave their new sister-in-law a goblet and ewer. The king and Edmund earl of Cambridge (Gaunt's younger, and Buckingham's older, brother) may also have been there, for ten royal minstrels and four of Cambridge's minstrels received gratuities from Gaunt for enlivening the proceedings.20 There was nothing hasty or clandestine about the wedding.

Buckingham, meanwhile, was still in France, preparing to withdraw from a frustrating and embarrassing campaign.²¹ When he realized that his brothers had colluded against him in the loss of half of his inheritance, ‘he became melancholy, and never after loved the duke of Lancaster as he had done hitherto’.²² In addition to the personal slight, there was also the question of how the details of the Bohun partition would be worked out, an issue which it took fifteen years to resolve, and although Henry and Buckingham would soon demonstrate that they were capable of concerted political action, theirs was a relationship which henceforward seems always to have been tinged by a degree of personal rivalry.

His wedding excepted, there is one other day during the first half of 1381 when Henry's whereabouts are known with certainty. This was Friday 14 June, a day of mortal danger for the young heir to the Lancastrian inheritance, for it was the second of three days during which gangs of rebels from Kent, Essex and London ran amok in the streets of the capital on a scale never seen before and rarely since: the climactic moment of the Peasants' Revolt. Henry was in the Tower of London that Friday morning, along with his cousin the king, Richard's mother Princess Joan, the chancellor and treasurer of England (Simon Sudbury and Robert Hales), and a number of other lords, knights and clerks.²³ Sudbury and Hales had already been singled out by the rebels as objects of special hatred to them; so too had John of Gaunt. The rebels demanded the heads of all three of them, accusing them of treachery to the young king. Fortunately for Gaunt, he was in Scotland at the time, but that was little consolation to those associated with him, some of whom were summarily despatched by the rebels.²⁴

Early in the morning of 14 June, the fourteen-year-old king left the Tower with some of his advisers, having arranged to meet the rebel leaders at Mile End, outside the city walls. His reasons for doing so are fairly clear – to negotiate an end to the violence, to draw the rebels away from the city, and to give those in the Tower who were at risk a chance to escape – but his plan misfired. Sudbury and Hales attempted to flee, but were spotted and forced to retreat; when, around mid-morning, groups of rebels broke into the Tower and began searching it for ‘traitors’, they were located in the chapel of St John, dragged out to Tower Hill, and immediately beheaded. William Appleton, a Franciscan friar who was also Gaunt's physician, suffered the same fate.25 Whether Henry was identified but spared on account of his age, or smuggled out of the Tower, or managed to hide from the rebels, is not known, but escape he did, and shortly after he had become king, when a certain John Ferrour rebelled against him, he was granted a pardon by Henry because he had ‘wonderfully and gloriously’ (mirabiliter et gloriose) saved the king's life in the Tower of London nearly twenty years earlier. Ferrour is usually said to have come from Southwark, but there is no record (until 1400) of either Gaunt or his son rewarding him for saving Henry's life.²⁶

By the evening of the following day, Saturday 15 June, the revolt in London had been brought under control and the process of suppression began. In the neighbouring counties, however, especially in Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk, the violence barely abated, so that during the last two weeks of June detachments of nobles and gentry were sent out to restore order. Among them was Henry – the first occasion on which he had been involved in military, or at least punitive, action – although there is no indication as to where he went.²⁷ From October 1381 until September 1382, however, the survival of his first household account makes it possible to trace his activities on a regular, sometimes daily, basis. It also tells us much about the lifestyle of a young nobleman during the later fourteenth century and about the tastes and interests Henry was beginning to develop.

For an earl, albeit a young one, Henry's domestic establishment appears modest. His income for the year totalled £426, his expenses only a little over half that sum, £237.²⁸ Between ten and twelve horses were stabled in his household, and he had eighteen servants, the most important of whom were Sir William de Mountendre, his ‘master’; his receiver Hugh Waterton, whose family stood as high as any in Gaunt's confidence; and his chaplain, Hugh Herle. These three had formed the nucleus of Henry's household for at least the past five years.29 In addition to his boyhood companion Thomas Swynford, Henry also had two esquires (‘Arnald and Wynsell’) and three clerks to expedite his affairs (William Loveney, John Waterton, and ‘Ralph the clerk’). The below stairs component of the household comprised a wardrober (John Dyndon) and his page (Henry), a valet of the chamber (Thomas Totty), a sergeant (Thomas Page), a servant of the kitchen (John Blakedon), a purveyor (William) and three men to care for the horses: John Gysely, keeper of the palfreys, and two sumptermen, Richard and John.

Henry's expenditure fell broadly into two categories: what was needed to keep his household functioning on a daily basis (wages of servants, care of the horses, expenses of messengers, etc.) and what he spent on maintaining the noble lifestyle (clothes, jewels, leisure, gifts, and so forth). About £60 was spent during the course of the year on clothes, textiles, furs and shoes, bought mostly from regular suppliers in London.³⁰ A further £26 was paid to goldsmiths, some of it for new purchases, some for the repair or refashioning of existing items. For the jousts which followed the wedding of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia in late January, Henry bought 1,000 sequins of gilded copper; a month earlier he had spent £3 on twenty-nine gilded rings from Paris which he distributed as New Year gifts. By contrast, just two rings of gilded silver bought as clasps for a falconer's bag cost over £1.³¹ Falconry gloves, hounds for the hunt, gratuities to his father's minstrels for providing entertainment on New Year's Day and a modest four shillings in total for gaming (ludendum ad tabulas) all bear witness to his enthusiastic embrace of the noble lifestyle.³² Also to be expected, although perhaps not in one so young, is the evidence for Henry's jousting, the preferred entertainment of the court as well as vital military training. He took part in at least three jousts during the year: at Smithfield during the festivities following the royal wedding in January, at Windsor during the Garter Day celebrations, and at Hertford castle on 1 May.33 Henry also had a bow which had belonged to his mother, for which he bought arrows and bird-bolts.³⁴ All this suggests an active early interest in martial pursuits; Henry would later acquire something of a reputation for jousting.

Almsgiving and gift exchange accounted for less than £20 of Henry's expenditure in 1381–2. He distributed a regular penny a day to paupers and more when travelling, on feast days, or to mark anniversaries such as those of his grandfathers, Henry of Grosmont and King Edward III. He dried the feet of fifteen paupers on his fifteenth birthday, and on Good Friday gave a penny each to twenty-five indigents at the gate of Hertford castle.³⁵ Apart from traditional gift-giving occasions such as New Year's Day,³⁶ he also gave occasional gifts such as wine to his sister Philippa and a horse to the earl of Nottingham.³⁷ Yet Henry received considerably more in gifts than he disbursed, mainly from his father and Duchess Constanza,³⁸ on whom he was still financially dependent, because his earldom of Derby was a courtesy title. Most of his income came either from the annual sum of 250 marks which Gaunt had been assigning to him for the past few years, or from the issues of the manors of Soham (Cambridgeshire), Daventry (Northamptonshire) and Passenham (Buckinghamshire), which Gaunt had made over to him, and which yielded a combined total of £192.³⁹ His reliance on his father is also reflected in his itinerary.⁴⁰ Although he visited Pontefract independently in October 1381 while Gaunt was engaged in political matters in the south-east, Henry spent the winter and spring almost constantly with his father, either in the Midlands or at various Lancastrian residences around London, where they attended a succession of court events together.⁴¹ Christmas was spent at Leicester, Easter at Hertford. During the summer, Gaunt and Henry toured the Midlands and northern estates of the duchy. June, July and August saw them at Kenilworth, Higham Ferrers and Tutbury, with visits to Beverley in late June and Lincoln in early July; most of September was spent at York and Pontefract, before Gaunt's return to London for the third parliamentary session of the year, which opened on 6 October. The fact that his account fails to include any expenditure on food and drink indicates that Henry and his servants still boarded and lodged in his father's household, of which, in effect, they formed a sub-unit – not so much a separate household as a separate chamber within the ducal household. Nor was Mary de Bohun mentioned in the account: aged eleven, she was still living at Rochford with her mother, Countess Joan, to whom Gaunt granted 100 marks a year for her maintenance.42 Henry did visit Rochford once, on 18 April 1382, shortly after the birth of a son to his sister-in-law, the countess of Buckingham.⁴³ He and Mary also doubtless met at court events such as Richard II and Anne's wedding in January 1382, but not until she reached her majority in December 1384 did they begin to cohabit.

Henry's account also provides evidence of his involvement in two controversies. First, it confirms his presence with his father at Lincoln on 11 July 1382, the day judgment was passed by Bishop Buckingham in the cathedral chapter house on the notorious Lollard preacher William Swinderby.⁴⁴ Swinderby had been preaching in and around Leicester for several years. Gaunt had initially supported him, granting him an allowance and a hermitage in the woods near Leicester abbey (of which he was the patron); according to the Leicester abbey chronicler Henry Knighton, ‘the pious duke of Lancaster always liked to give assistance to the Lollards, for, on account of their appearance and the allure of their sermons, he believed them to be God's saints’ – although the chronicler added that ‘like many others, he was deceived in this’.⁴⁵ Gaunt had certainly acquired such a reputation during the 1370s, not least because of his defence of the controversial Oxford theologian John Wyclif,46 but by the summer of 1382 his help for men such as Wyclif and Swinderby was becoming an embarrassment. The contentious nature of Wyclif's views, especially concerning the Eucharist, had led to his forced withdrawal from Oxford in the autumn of 1381, and at church councils in London in May and June 1382 several of his opinions were condemned as erroneous or heretical, and a more vigorous process was begun to hunt down and silence his disciples. This was what brought Swinderby to trial.

Among Swinderby's supporters was Philip Repingdon, a canon at Leicester abbey who had studied at Oxford, where he fell under Wyclif's spell. It was probably Repingdon who, with Gaunt's at least tacit support, helped to establish in Leicester the first identifiable Lollard cell outside Oxford University.⁴⁷ When Swinderby, following his days as a hermit, expressed an interest in a more coenobitic lifestyle, the canons of Leicester, ‘believing him to be the lord's anointed’, granted him a chamber in the abbey church along with food and a pension.⁴⁸ Swinderby's views were generally more anticlerical than heretical: among the characteristically Lollard themes of his sermons was the idea that tithes were pure alms and could be withheld from an errant priest; that excommunication was a matter for God rather than for the Church; that preaching should not be constrained by episcopal prohibition; that temporal possessions undermined the true work of the Church; and (more riskily) that a priest in mortal sin could not perform the Eucharistic miracle.⁴⁹ Nevertheless, the anticlericalism of the 1381 rebels, who some believed to have been inspired by Wyclif, led to an association in the minds of the authorities between anticlericalism, heresy and sedition, and Swinderby was swept up in the net. He was first ordered to stop preaching and appear before Bishop Buckingham's officials on 5 March 1382. This reprimand was ineffective (Swinderby simply ‘made his pulpit’ between two millstones in the street and continued to preach from there),⁵⁰ and on 12 May further investigations were ordered. It was as a result of these that he appeared in Lincoln cathedral on 11 July, where, before an audience including Gaunt, Henry and other notables, he vigorously proclaimed his innocence. However, barely had he begun to purge himself when a number of friars and priests shouted out for him to be burned and began collecting wood for the pyre, declaring his guilt to be notorious.51 It was Gaunt who persuaded the bishop to commute the sentence; instead, Swinderby was ordered to recant his views publicly and banned from preaching without licence, but although he moved away from Leicester he did not give up preaching, and nine years later he was again brought to trial for heresy, although once again he escaped with his life.⁵²

Like their patron Gaunt, the canons of Leicester were probably a bit coy about their community's early support for ‘William the Hermit’. Repingdon himself was not present at his protégé's trial. Following an inflammatory sermon in support of Wyclif at Oxford on 5 June, he had been excommunicated on 1 July and would not be restored to the Church until he recanted in October. Nevertheless, he continued to be much favoured by both Gaunt and Henry, later becoming abbot of Leicester and then bishop of Lincoln, and soon after Henry became king, Repingdon became his confessor – a brave choice, for despite his recantation Repingdon remained equivocal about some aspects of the Church's teaching.⁵³ Lollardy was still in its infancy at this time, and action such as that taken by Bishop Buckingham helped to dissuade great men like Gaunt from patronizing Lollard preachers, but it would be another thirty years before Lollardy was driven underground. Swinderby's trial had not only brought Repingdon to Henry's attention, it also introduced him to controversies which, by the time he became king, had become much harder to resolve.

The second controversy involved Henry more directly and was the first sign of trouble between him and Richard II. Henry's manor of Passenham, in the north-eastern corner of Buckinghamshire, adjoined Stony Stratford in Northamptonshire, which was held by Sir Aubrey de Vere, chamberlain to the king and uncle of Robert, the nineteen-year-old heir to the earldom of Oxford whose intimacy with Richard II would soon make him almost universally reviled. In the spring of 1382 a dispute broke out between the tenants of Passenham and Stony Stratford,⁵⁴ which by 29 May had become serious enough for Henry to despatch sixty valets armed with bows to arrest the malefactors from Stony Stratford. A week later, Hugh Waterton was sent to retrieve a horse stolen from Passenham: here he encountered five hundred esquires and valets from Coventry and its vicinity whom he managed to mollify by offering them breakfast (at a cost to Henry of nearly £2), but a few days later he had to be despatched again to try to reconcile the two sets of tenants. However, even this failed to resolve matters, and in the following month, at his father's suggestion, Henry sent Waterton and William Loveney to tell the king, who was at Easthampstead, that he (Richard) had been misinformed about the dispute, presumably by Aubrey de Vere, or perhaps his nephew.55 Whatever the outcome, this seems to have settled the matter, but it had afforded an object lesson in curial politics from Gaunt to his son. Henry must have encountered Aubrey and Robert de Vere on a number of occasions, for like him they were both much in evidence at court. Gaunt, too, was well aware of the influence which the de Veres exercised over the young king, but he probably thought Henry's decision to despatch sixty bowmen to Passenham to be an overreaction liable to escalate a dispute between tenants into a dispute between their lords. What Gaunt understood better than his son was the importance of ensuring that the king heard both sides of the story. Sixteen years later, when much graver danger threatened, it was a lesson Henry would act upon.

¹ J. Palmer, ‘The Historical Context of the Book of the Duchess: a Revision’, Chaucer Review 8 (1974), 253–6; The Register of Thomas Appleby of Carlisle, ed. R. Storey (Canterbury and York Society, Woodbridge, 2006), no. 166; Chaucer, The Book of the Duchess, ed. Helen Phillips (Durham and St Andrews Medieval Texts, 1982), ll. 948–50 (pp. 4, 108).

² Goodman, John of Gaunt, 48–50; JGR I, nos. 299 (dated September 1373, not 1372), 524–5, 535–6, 1236. The three children's household cost 300 marks a year, paid to John Cheyne, treasurer of their chamber.

³ JGR I, no. 1342; for the date of birth of John, the eldest Beaufort, see S. Walker, ‘Katherine, Duchess of Lancaster’, ODNB, 30.888–90. Sir Hugh Swynford, Katherine's first husband, died in November 1371.

⁴ JGR I, nos. 679, 1614; Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 29 and n. 86.

⁵ DL 28/3/1, m. 12; Mountendre was a former retainer of the great Gascon warlord the Captal de Buch (Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 54, 71, and SC 8/258/12863 and 300/14973). In 1376–7 Gaunt allocated separate sums to Henry (£61) and his two elder sisters (£200), indicating that he was being brought up separately from them at least in some respects (DL 28/3/1, m. 5). For other gifts from Gaunt to Henry see JGR I, 1342, 1614, and JGR II, no. 715.

⁶ For £20 allocated to Gaunt's esquire Hugh Waterton to cover Henry's expenses while he was ‘staying in the company of the lord prince [Richard]’, see DL 28/3/1, m. 12, dated 10 May 1377.

⁷ Anonimalle Chronicle 1333–1381, ed. V. H. Galbraith (Manchester, 1927), 106; Richard's household account records the purchase for 10s of three swords for this occasion, for himself, Henry, and the son of John d'Arundel, younger brother of the earl of Arundel (E 101/398/9, m. 2), and in 1378 Gaunt levied an aid from his tenants for the knighting of his eldest son (JGR II, no. 320). Those knighted with Richard and Henry were Thomas of Woodstock (youngest son of Edward III), Robert earl of Oxford, Lords Beaumont and Mowbray, the sons of the earls of Stafford and Salisbury, the three sons of Henry Lord Percy, and John Sotheray (illegitimate son of Edward III by his mistress, Alice Perrers): E 101/397/20, m. 28.

⁸ Somerville, Duchy of Lancaster, i.67 and n. 4.

⁹ English Coronation Records, ed. J. Wickham Legg (London, 1901), 132, 149; Anonimalle Chronicle, 114.

¹⁰ E 101/400/4, mm. 4, 15–18. Liveries to Henry from the Great Wardrobe during the first two years of the reign included a parti-coloured gown and hood of russet and mottled green of the king's livery for the hunting season; a pelisse (fur-trimmed cloak) of grey, decorated with white chevrons and a maunch collar, plus two further long cloaks and doublets for the winter; a robe of gilded blue brocade, two gowns and two cloaks with hoods for Christmas 1377; three coats of blue silk brocade of the king's livery at Easter 1378; a gown ‘for hawking’ during the winter of 1378–9; another gown ‘for the hunting season’ during the summer of 1379; and, at various times during these two years, a further fourteen sets of robes, a pair of sheets for his chamber, and several pairs of stockings, slippers, boots, galoshes and gilded spurs. His Garter robes bear witness to his physical development at this time, for in April 1378, when the other Garter knights were each allocated five ells of cloth from which to fashion their robes, Henry, who had just passed his eleventh birthday, received only three ells; a year later, however, he received the full five ells. One ell was roughly 45 inches (114 centimetres).

¹¹ JGR II, no. 463.

¹² CPR 1374–7, 337.

¹³ A. Tuck, ‘Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester’, ODNB, 54.277–83.

¹⁴ CPR 1377–81, 502; CCR 1377–81, 390–5, 439–40; CCR 1381–5, 269.

¹⁵ Jean Froissart, Chronicles of England, France, Spain and the Adjoining Countries, ed. and trans. T. Johnes (2 vols, London, 1848), i.623–4. This story comes from a variant manuscript of Froissart's chronicles used by Johnes, but subsequently destroyed by fire. Cf. G. Holmes, The Estates of the Higher Nobility in Fourteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1957), 24 and n. 6.

¹⁶ N. Saul, Richard II (New Haven, 1997), 52–5.

¹⁷ CPR 1377–81, 537 (27 July 1380): her marriage was said to be valued at 5,000 marks (£3,333), but Gaunt paid nothing for it, since it was offset against a larger sum already owed to him for his wages of war. The terms of the grant also included the important concession that if either Henry or Mary were to die without issue before she reached the age of nineteen, Gaunt would be repaid his 5,000 marks.

¹⁸ Froissart claimed that ‘the marriage was instantly consummated’, but this was precipitate. He also got several other details of the story wrong, such as calling the two sisters Blanche and Isabel and saying that it was their ‘aunt’ who carried Mary away from Pleshey, but the essentials of his story are corroborated by other sources and undoubtedly correct. Countess Joan was complicit in the plot, presumably hoping to give her daughter a life outside the convent. She probably commissioned a pair of illuminated psalters for the marriage (see below, p. 79).

¹⁹ CCR 1377–81, 439–40; for the 5 February date, see CPR 1381–5, 95; BL Add. MS 5,937, fo. 74.

²⁰ JGR II, nos. 556, 688; Gaunt also paid forty shillings ‘for that number of pennies placed on the [service] book on the day of the wedding [esposailes]’, and for various sums offered in alms. Among the wedding gifts were two gilded cloths later sold by Henry in London for £12: DL 28/1/1, fo. 1.

²¹ Saul, Richard II, 55.

²² Froissart, Chronicles, ed. Johnes, i.624.

²³ Knighton, 210–12.

²⁴ An esquire of Gaunt's called Grenefeld was beheaded in London that day: Goodman, John of Gaunt, 79.

²⁵ R. Dobson, The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 (London, 1970), 155–208; according to the Westminster chronicler, the executions of Sudbury and Hales took place ‘at the eleventh hour’ on 14 June (ibid., 201).

²⁶ E 37/28; he may, however, have been the ‘John Ferrour of Rochester’, pardoned for homicide in March 1380: CPR 1377–81, 456.

²⁷ E 361/5, m. 19; also sent out were the earls of Buckingham, Kent, Salisbury, Warwick and Suffolk; Cf. SAC I, 507.

²⁸ Waterton's account is DL 28/1/1, a well preserved vellum book of eleven folios.

²⁹ Herle had bought a missal costing ten marks for Henry's use in 1377: DL 28/1/1, mm. 7, 12; JGR II, nos. 93, 206, 308a, 993.

³⁰ DL 28/1/1., fos. 1r–2v. Special occasions naturally required special garments: for Christmas 1381, Henry had a ‘royal cloak’ (clocum regalis) made for him; for the Garter Day festivities at Windsor in April, he had a ‘mantle of St George’ costing £4 made from blue brocade, and for Queen Anne's marriage and coronation in London on 22 January 1382 he also had new and ornate robes made up.

³¹ Ibid., fo. 3v.

³² Ibid., fos. 5r–6r.

³³ Ibid., fos. 4r, 6r–v, 10v. On the latter occasion, he purchased six new lances, while for the jousts at Windsor he bought a new saddle, reins and harness, all gilded and costing 23s; for the Smithfield jousts he acquired two new pairs of spurs as well as the copper sequins noted above. His armour and swords were kept in his wardrobe in Coleman Street, London.

³⁴ Ibid., fos. 3v, 6r.

³⁵ Ibid., fos. 4r–v.

³⁶ Henry also received an annidonum (New Year gift) from King Richard, and another from the queen mother, Princess Joan: ibid., fo. 5r.

³⁷ Ibid., fos. 6r, 10r.

³⁸ Ibid., 2r, 3r, 5r–v. They gave him material for garments, loaned him their servants and craftsmen, and paid for some of his alms and presents.

³⁹ Soham yielded £125, Daventry £60, and Passenham just 10 marks: ibid., fo. 1r. For Soham, see the unfinished entry in JGR II, no. 706, probably from the spring of 1382, for on 13 April Henry sent his servant William the Purveyor to receive seisin of the manor on his behalf: DL 28/3/1, fo. 8v.

⁴⁰ Indications of his whereabouts are scattered throughout DL 28/1/1, indicated with varying degrees of reliability by places where purchases were made (not very reliable), alms and gifts were distributed (more reliable), messengers were despatched, and so forth.

⁴¹ For Gaunt's itinerary in 1381–2 see Goodman, John of Gaunt, 89–93.

⁴² JGR II, nos. 646, 679, 996; BL Add. MS 5,937, fo. 74.

⁴³ DL 28/1/1, fo. 5r: he gave 40s to the boy's mistress and 26s 8d to his nurse. He also gave 66s 8d on 16 April to ‘an esquire of my lord of Buckingham called Westcombe bringing news to my lord that his lady was delivered of a boy’. This entry has caused confusion in the past, leading to the belief that the ‘lady’ referred to here was Henry's own wife, Mary, and that this record therefore contains the only surviving evidence of their first child, a boy presumed to have died in infancy. For the correct reading, see Mortimer, Fears, 370–1.

⁴⁴ DL 28/1/1, fo. 9v: expenses of Hugh Waterton for a journey from Higham Ferrers to Daventry on 4 July, ‘et revenit ad dominum apud Lincoln xi die Julii’.

⁴⁵ Knighton, 308–9, 312.

⁴⁶ Goodman, John of Gaunt, 241–65.

⁴⁷ A. Hudson, The Premature Reformation (Oxford, 1988), 77.

⁴⁸ Knighton, 308.

⁴⁹ Knighton, 310; Fasciculi Zizaniorum Magistri Johannis Wyclif cum Tritico, ed. W. W. Shirley (RS, London, 1858), 337–9; Hudson, Premature Reformation, 74–5, 352–3.

⁵⁰ Knighton, 312.

⁵¹ Registrum Johannis Trefnant 1389–1404, ed. W. W. Capes (Canterbury and York Society 20, 1916), 238–9; Knighton, 312–14; K. McFarlane, John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity (Oxford, 1953), 122–5.

⁵² Registrum Johannis Trefnant, 231–78, for the full account of his trial in 1391.

⁵³ S. Forde, ‘Repyndon, Philip’, ODNB, 46.503–5.

⁵⁴ Henry initially sent only his servant Thomas Page and his purveyor William to Passenham (in March and April). All the information concerning this episode is to be found in DL 28/1/1, fos. 8r–9r. For ‘the battle of Passenham’ see K. McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford, 1972), 19–20.

⁵⁵ The Latin is unambiguous: Waterton and Loveney were sent to the king per preceptum domini mei Lancastrie because suggestio non vera facta fuit domino nostro regi.