24 Comes militibus ut muniantur equis et armis
R. Comes Cestrie omnibus militibus suis salutem. De dileccione vestra quamplurimum confisi, vobis mandantes (precipimus; attentissime petimus)2 quatinus pro amore nostro parati sitis cum equis et armis in die tali coram nobis ubicumque fuerimus. Scituri3 quod dominus rex nos sicut alios fecit summoniri et cum eo transfretaremus cum totis viribus nostris sicut amorem suum desideramus. Quare tantum faciatis ut domino regi placere poterimus et fideliter servire in necessitatibus4 [suis].5 Valete.
An earl orders his knights to equip with horses and arms
R., Earl of Chester, to all his knights, greetings. We, putting the highest trust in your love, order you (we have ordered; we have most earnestly besought) that, for the sake of our love, you be prepared with horses and arms on such a day before us wherever we may be. You shall know that the lord king has caused us, like others, to be summoned, and we are to take ship with him with all our men, as we desire his love. Therefore, I trust that you will act in such a way that we may be able to please the king and faithfully serve him in his needs. Farewell.
This text gives us an unparalleled glimpse into the military organization of medieval England. Very few texts survive that record the procedures for summoning an army in the twelfth or thirteenth century, which has led many scholars to assume that written summonses were rarely issued. This text, however, clearly shows the king’s summons to a lord being transmitted down the chain of command in the form of a private writ (formal order), in Latin, to the lord’s military tenants (that is, those who held land of him by knight service).
Like DOCUMENT 2, which may be based on a genuine letter of Amaury, earl of Gloucester, this private writ of summons may well be based on an original text. There are several reasons for believing that this document may have a genuine letter behind it. The first is that the “Earl R.” who issued it seems likely to be Ranulf III, earl of Chester (1181–1232), sometimes known as Ranulf de Blundeville. It is even possible to suggest likely dates for Earl Ranulf’s original document. Summonses were issued by the king to his barons for service overseas on several occasions during Ranulf’s tenure of the earldom. The writ on which the text above probably was based may have been a response to the summons of King Richard I (1189–99) for service in Normandy in 1196. Ranulf is also known to have answered summonses by John (1199–1216) in 1213 for service in Poitou in 1214, and by Henry III (1216–72) in 1229 for the Breton campaign of 1230. Of these three possibilities, we can eliminate both 1196 and 1229–30. In 1196, the king asked that his magnates bring no more than seven knights with them, at most.6 DOCUMENT 24, however, says that the earl has been ordered by the king to mobilize all his men. A text of Henry III’s actual writ of summons to Earl Ranulf in 1229 also survives.7 It did not specify the level of service required of the earl, and in 1230, as the campaign’s muster roll tells us, Ranulf was asked only to bring twenty knights with him.8
The likelihood, therefore, is that if there was an original writ upon which the text above was based, it was issued in 1213. There is some possible support for this in the title that the earl uses. In 1217, Ranulf was awarded the earldom of Lincoln as well as Chester, and he took that double title until his death. Earlier in his career, between 1188 and 1199, he also enjoyed another multiple title: duke of Brittany and earl of Chester and Richmond. Here, however, he calls himself simply “earl of Chester,” which was indeed Ranulf’s only title in 1213. However, Ranulf did not use his multiple titles at all consistently, and in any case he might very well have called himself simply “earl of Chester” when addressing the tenants of his earldom, so, although suggestive, the evidence of his title is not conclusive.9
It can be argued from other evidence that in France and England knights had been summoned for feudal service by the writs or letters of their lords for well over a century before this sample writ was entered into the formulary. Previously, the earliest text of a military summons was thought to be a writ of 1072 supposedly sent by King William the Conqueror (1066–87) to Abbot Aethelwig of Evesham, summoning him for the five knights he owed the king, but there are strong reasons to suspect that this writ is in fact a forgery of the later twelfth century.10 However, there is a reliable early reference (1081 × 87) to such a summons in a Norman act of William the Conqueror, which mentions that an abbey’s tenants may be liable for a summons to military service, by writ.11 Another is in a private charter (1088 × 1106) of Robert fitz Hamo, lord of Gloucester, to a man to whom he had granted a tenancy, that “when I instruct [him] by my letter (litteras meas) he should appear for my service.”12 Mention of a military summons is a feature in other early grants of this type, including one original surviving Warwickshire example of the late 1120s or early 1130s.13 In the northern French romance Le Couronnement de Louis (c. 1130), Count William of Orange sends out his writs (ses briés) to his knights summoning them to join him for military service.14 In another such literary incident in the Chanson d’Aspremont (c. 1190), Duke Girart of Burgundy summons his army in haste and causes his writs (briés) to that effect to be sealed and sent.15 The fact that counts and dukes communicated with their tenants by sealed instruments is such a literary commonplace in the twelfth century that it must reflect actual practice.
But although it seems that, by the decades around 1100, writs of summons were routinely issued by kings to their magnates, and by magnates to their knights, very few texts actually survive, even of royal summonses. That is what gives this document its extraordinary value. Most summonses were ephemeral documents, written for a particular occasion and purpose and soon discarded. On a single night in 1188, for example, the clerks of Count Richard of Poitou (the future Richard I) allegedly drew up more than two hundred letters (letres) summoning Richard’s knights and barons as he traveled in haste to escape his father, King Henry II (1154–89).16
A surviving summons of Henry II of England can be dated to that same fateful campaign of 1188 in which the king fell out with his son, Count Richard. Its text was also copied into a formulary, compiled in the north of England around 1200 and later sliced up by a clerk to make seal tags, which is how it was preserved. It is probably the earliest known text of an individual writ of military summons and runs as follows: “Henry, by the grace of God, king of England, greets William Marshal. I request that you come to me fully-equipped as soon as may be, with as many knights as you can get, to support me in my war, and [that you let me know] how many and what sort of troops will be in your company. You have ever so often moaned to me that I have bestowed on you a small fee.17 Know for sure that if you serve me faithfully I will give you in addition Châteauroux with all its lordship and whatever belongs to it [as soon as] we may be able.”18 Note here that the summons applies only to the Marshal himself. But the king expects Marshal to appear with the rest of his military household and offers the handsome inducement of the great French honor of Châteauroux in Berry, whose heiress was at the time in Henry’s wardship.
The form of summons probably took a while to stabilize.19 A little more formal is the general summons contained in a letter of Richard I to Archbishop Hubert Walter in 1196:
We instruct you to cause all those who have baronies-in-chief20 in Normandy to cross the sea without delay. You should also summon everyone who owes us the service of a knight in England, except for William de Briouze, William d’Aubigné and the barons of the Welsh March, that they may all join us overseas in Normandy the Sunday before Pentecost [June 2] with horse and arms, ready for service, and that they should come ready for a long time in our service, so that they need not encumber themselves by too many knights nor bring more than seven with them at most. Also, you should summon the bishops and abbots who owe us knight service so that they should oblige us with knights in a way that will do them credit and earn our thanks.21
Here again the king is not levying the full service owed to him by his barons, but only a fraction. His reason is that such a small number will be less of a logistical and financial burden for his barons. But this mandate at least gives a date and place for the levy to assemble. The model writ in DOCUMENT 24 is just the sort of follow-up that the earl would have made to such a summons, although it has been edited so that specific dates and locations have been changed to generic phrases such as “on such a day” and “wherever I may be.” A genuine writ would have specified the date and place of assembly, as in King Henry III’s summons to Earl Ranulf himself in 1229:
The king to his beloved and faithful Ranulf, earl of Chester and Lincoln, greetings. Know that, at the request of certain of our friends overseas and on the advice of our earls and barons of England, we are determined, God willing, to cross the sea, so that we will be at Portsmouth a fortnight after Michaelmas [October 13] ready and able to board our ships. So we instruct you, firmly enjoining you by the faith in which you are bound to us, to be with us on the said day and in the said place with twenty knights, ready to cross with horse and arms with us, and so by this you may earn our gratitude. Witnessed by myself. St. Neots. July 27 [1229].22
This is the basic form of the summons as it became formalized in the course of the thirteenth century, although, of course, each royal summons was tailored to the nature of the campaign and the particular needs of the king.23
The final significance of DOCUMENT 24 is what it tells us about the internal organization of a great English honor.24 The text makes it clear that the earl has lists of his knights and the services that they owe him, since without such lists he could not have gauged the knights’ response to his summons. Contemporary literature suggests that many magnates kept rolls of the names and obligations of their followers. In Thomas of Kent’s Le Roman de toute chevalerie (late 1170s or early 1180s), for example, great lords register their followers so that they will know who should be in their hosts and who has defaulted.25 In the mid-thirteenth century the earldom of Chester owed the king eighty knights for Cheshire itself and the lands across the frontier with Wales, as well as at least 112 more knights for lands in England outside Cheshire—quite a large number to keep track of.26 There is a reference to a register preserved at Chester by the earl’s clerks in the time of Ranulf III. Such a register might well have included a list of knights and the service they owed.27
1 Add. 8167, fol. 98v.
2 The italicized words shown in parentheses here are part of the text and represent variant phrasings supplied by the author or compiler of the formulary. Similar variant phrasings can be found in Documents 5 and 32.
3 Sciturus in MS.
4 Corrected in MS from necessitabtibus.
5 Word inserted to preserve the sense of the document.
6 The text of this writ is given below.
7 The text of this summons is given below.
8 Close Rolls, 1227–1231, 248; Ivor J. Sanders, Feudal Military Service in England: A Study of the Constitutional and Military Powers of the Barones in Medieval England (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), 121.
9 For Ranulf’s various titles, see Geoffrey Barraclough, ed., The Charters of the Anglo-Norman Earls of Chester, Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 126 (1988), nos. 202–437. The act analyzed here is not in Barraclough’s collection.
10 David Bates, ed., Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum: The Acta of William I (1066– 1087) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 449–52. Professor Bates notes the reasons for doubting the Evesham writ’s authenticity, but equivocates on the grounds that its uniqueness is what largely condemns it. But it would seem to be compromised by its ostentatious support for the abbey’s assessment as owed in the 1159 aid and the 1166 royal inquisition on service owed the crown. The only text is to be found in a late thirteenth-century cartulary of the abbey. J. H. Round noted grounds for suspecting it, but dismissed them by saying that there was not “anything to be gained by forging a document which admits, by placing on record, the abbey’s full liability.” John Horace Round, “The Introduction of Knight Service into England,” in idem, Feudal England: Historical Studies on the XIth and XIIth Centuries (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964), 238. But there were many reasons why the abbey should do so, especially if a later king were attempting to increase the assessment. Nonetheless, the Evesham writ has value, at the very least in indicating the possible shape of a late twelfth-century writ of summons. On the subject of military mobilization, see David Crouch, The English Aristocracy, 1070–1272: A Social Transformation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 20–30.
11 Bates, ed., Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum, 261.
12 Peter R. Coss, ed., The Langley Cartulary, Dugdale Society, 32 (Stratford-upon-Avon, 1980), 10.
13 This was a serjeantry granted by Osbert of Arden to Thurkil Fundu. BL, Cotton Charter xxii. 3, translated with commentary in David Crouch, Tournament (London: Hambledon, 2005), 163.
14 Ernest Langlois, ed., Le Couronnement de Louis, Classiques franc¸ais du moyen âge, 22 (Paris: Champion, 1984), line 1997.
15 Louis Brandin, ed., La Chanson d’Aspremont, chanson de geste du XIIe siècle. Texte du manuscrit de Wollaton Hall, 2 vols., Classiques franc¸ais du moyen âge, 19, 25 (Paris: Champion, 1919–21), 1: line 1512.
16 Anthony J. Holden and David Crouch, eds.; Stewart Gregory, trans., History of William Marshal, 3 vols., Anglo-Norman Text Society, Occasional Publications Series, 4–6 (London, 2002–7), 1: lines 8248–49.
17 A “fee” translates the Latin word feodum, which means a piece of land subject to particular sorts of service, mostly military.
18 The text and the extraordinary story of its discovery are in Nicholas Vincent, “William Marshal, King Henry II and the Honour of Châteauroux,” Archives, 25 (2000), 15. The translation is that offered in David Crouch, William Marshal: Knighthood, War and Chivalry, 1147–1219, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 2002), 61.
19 Helena M. Chew, The English Ecclesiastical Tenants-in-Chief and Knight Service (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), 75, makes this point, even though she did not know of the evidence mentioned here.
20 A “barony” was an estate inherited by a baron, which would consist of at least several knights’ fees, and might be hundreds. A “barony-in-chief” is one held directly of the king.
21 Translated from Ralph de Diceto, Radulfi de Diceto decani Lundoniensis opera historica, ed. Wlliam Stubbs, vol. 2, Rolls Series, 68 (London: Longman, 1876), lxxix–lxxx.
22 Close Rolls, 1227–1231, 248. The assignment of a ship to Earl Ranulf in September 1229 is noted in ibid., 252.
23 For numerous examples of the military summonses of Edward I, see Francis Palgrave, ed., The Parliamentary Writs and Writs of Military Summons, 2 vols. in 4 (London: Records Commission, 1827–34), 1:193ff. For comments on the situation in the earlier thirteenth century, see Michael R. Powicke, Military Obligation in Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 65–67; and J. S. Critchley, “Summonses to Military Service Early in the Reign of Henry III,” EHR, 86 (1971), 79–95, although this article deals rather with the schedules attached to the actual initiating summons.
24 An “honor” was the complex of estates and rights that belonged to a great English magnate.
25 Thomas of Kent, Le Roman de toute chevalerie, ed. Brian Foster, 2 vols., Anglo-Norman Text Society, 29 and 31 (London, 1971–73) 1: lines 1063–64, 3339–40.
26 Figures extrapolated from Ivor J. Sanders, English Baronies: A Study of Their Origin and Descent, 1086–1327 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1960), 32n.
27 David Crouch, “The Administration of the Norman Earldom,” in The Earldom of Chester and Its Charters, ed. Alan T. Thacker, Journal of the Chester Archaeological Society, 71 (Chester, 1991), 94–95.
25 Huiusmodi litere sunt responsales et postea petentes
Dilecto amico suo A., B. salutem. Mandastis michi ex parte domini regis ut munitus essem cum equis et armis, quod mandatum non ausus sum transgredi. Michi providi inquantum melius potui set moneta michi deficit ad tam magnum iter arripiendum, quare dileccioni vestre pias preces effundens, attencius rogans .xx. marcas michi acomodetis. Sciturus quod .C., famulus meus, vobis redditurus est quam cito poterit vendere bladum vel lanam. Quare tantum faciatis ne pro defectu nummismatis iter meum inpediatur. Valete.
Replies and requests (given hereafter) use this form of letter
To his dear friend A., B. [sends] greetings. You sent me word on the king’s behalf that I should be equipped with horses and arms, which is an order I did not dare disobey. I have provided for myself as best I could, but I do not have the money for setting out on so long a journey, and so, pouring out my dutiful prayers to your kindness, I request most earnestly that you lend me twenty marks. You will know that C., a member of my household, will repay you as soon as he can sell grain or wool. So I hope that you will act in such a way that my journey will not be hindered for lack of cash. Farewell.
This letter provides an unprecedented look into military relations between a magnate and his knights. It is written in response to the summons to appear for knight service for a royal campaign in DOCUMENT 24. The magnate (who in DOCUMENT 24 is R[anulf], earl of Chester) has communicated the king’s summons to the knights of his honor, or barony, or at least to those whom he wishes to take with him. Here a knight replies, acknowledging his duty to appear but citing financial difficulties.
The customary duty (servitium debitum) that he has been asked to fulfill was known as campaign (expeditio) or army (exercitus) service. The Angevin kings of England not infrequently issued writs to assemble armies in such a way. In the long reign of Henry III (1216–72), a feudal army was summoned to serve in Wales in 1223, 1231, 1245, 1257, 1258 and 1264. Other such armies were summoned against Scotland and for overseas service in France.2 Once the knight had been summoned, there was the issue of his costs. According to Norman sources from the reign of William the Conqueror (1066–87), a knight called up as a result of such a summons had to finance his own travel and service for a term of days (given variously as sixty or forty). Beyond that, the lord had to pay the knight’s costs if he wished to retain him for the rest of the campaign.3 Slightly fuller evidence about the conditions of service in England comes from a charter of around 1156 in which the king’s marshal, John fitz Gilbert, sells a knight’s fee (an estate to support a knight) in Somerset: “Know that I have granted Hugh de Raleigh my land of Nettlecombe, for him and his heirs to hold in fee and inheritance for the service of a knight, by this condition that, if there is war, Hugh should provide me with a knight available for two months, and if peace, then for forty days, doing such service as knights can reasonably be expected to do for any English magnate.”4
It may have been this time restriction that made lords, and the kings who summoned them, unwilling to take large contingents overseas, since they would quickly have to meet substantial expenses. The costs of full quotas of knights from large honors (if they all appeared and served more than forty days) would have been prohibitive, even with the resources of the king behind the summons. At the end of the twelfth century the honor of Chester, for example, was supposed to muster eighty knights from Cheshire and 118 from the rest of England. In fact, however, when a summons to serve abroad was issued to the earl in 1229, he was asked to bring only twenty knights (see DOCUMENT 24, above). It was not unusual for a limit of this sort to be imposed, nor for such contingents to be reckoned in multiples of five and ten. In 1165, Richard fitz Gilbert, earl of Striguil, served in the king’s army in Wales with twenty knights and forty mounted serjeants (cavalry troopers armed less heavily than knights).5 His lands, however, were actually supposed to answer for a hundred knights.
Henry II had begun limiting the numbers of knights summoned to war by 1157, when he called up an army for service in Wales “in such a way that, throughout England, every two knights fit out (pararent) a third.”6 That is, two-thirds of the knights whose service he could have demanded were excused from the campaign, and they in return provided money and arms to support the other third. In this way, the king picked knights who served at a reduced cost. His sons Richard I and John used similar arrangements when they called up the feudal host.7 As early as 1100, another option was for the king to take “scutage” payments from knights (called after the scutum, or shield) instead of having them serve in person. He would then use the money to hire companies of professional soldiers or pay royal household troops. In this way, he would have a small but elite and willing army, which would serve until the end of the campaign. So it was that in 1159, in assembling his great army to attack Toulouse, we are told that Henry II, “considering the distance and difficulty of the route, rather than trouble the knights of the countryside, the townsfolk and peasantry,” took scutage of sixty shillings per fee across his realm. With these funds, he then “took with him his chief barons and a few men, but innumerable paid knights.”8
By the reign of King John (1199–1216), a knight’s daily wage was around two shillings. A force of twenty knights in the field would have cost their lord two pounds sterling a day in their wages alone.9 The knight in the letter above knows very well that he himself will have to pay the heavy cost of the first part of his service, and he is not happy about it. By the customary rates, before he could expect wages, he would have to find at the very least the large sum of four pounds sterling for his own maintenance and that of his servants, as well as fund his travel to the point of embarkation and equip himself with horses, arms, and armor. No wonder he is driven to ask his lord for a loan, to be secured on the grain or wool that his estate will produce that year. Knights who haggled and negotiated over their customary obligations, however, like the knight in the letter above, were not the type of knight who would have been most welcome to their lords on campaign.
1 Add. 8167, fol. 99v.
2 Powicke, Military Obligation, 65–66.
3 Charles Homer Haskins, Norman Institutions, Harvard Historical Studies, 24 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1918), 20–21, gives this evidence. See a review of the question in C. Warren Hollister, “The Annual Term of Military Service in Medieval England,” Medievalia et Humanistica, 13 (1960), 40–47. Hollister perceives a negotiated reduction in the term from sixty to forty days during Stephen’s reign, seeing the sixty-day term as a relic of service in the fyrd (the Anglo-Saxon militia), but his deduction depends on a mistaken early date range for the fitz Gilbert charter (p. 45).
4 Collectanea Topographica et Genealogica, 2 (London, 1835), 163. Discussed, but misdated, in Frank M. Stenton, The First Century of English Feudalism, 1066–1166, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961), 177–78.
5 Pipe Roll of 11 Henry II, 13. Striguil was the lordship based on Chepstow in South Wales. For the figures given here, see Thomas K. Keefe, Feudal Assessments and the Political Community Under Henry II and His Sons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), passim.
6 Robert de Torigny, Chronica, in Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I, ed. Richard Howlett, Rolls Series, 4 vols. (London: Longman, 1886–89), 4:193.
7 See comments in Robert Bartlett, England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075–1225 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 263–64.
8 Torigny, Chronica, 202 (emphasis added).
9 For the intricacies of knight service at a national level, see Sanders, Feudal Military Service.
26 Litere excusationis
Karissimo amico suo A., B. salutem. Mandatum domini nullo modo relinquerem imperfectum nisi necessitate magna inpeditus essem. Pater enim meus ultimum diem vite sue clausit hora qua literas vestras accepi, unde celebratis exequiis illius, oportet me ire London’, et debita2 illius persolvere ibi et domino meo reddere relevium;3 quod nisi fecero cum festinacione patrimonium amittere possum. Quare supliciter vos exoro ut habeatis me excusatum coram domino rege. Sciturus quod si scire potero quod me excusaveris dabo tibi unum palefridum trium marcarum. Tantum ergo faciatis ne per meam absenciam regi incurram offensam. Valete.
A letter of excuse
To his dearest friend A., B. [sends] greetings. I would never leave a lord’s request unanswered unless I was hindered by pressing business. For my father passed away on the very day on which I got your letter, and so after his funeral I was obliged to go to London, to settle his debts there and to pay a relief to my lord; had I not done it promptly, I could have lost my inheritance. Therefore I humbly request that you make my excuses to the lord king. Bear in mind that, should I learn that you will get me excused, I will give you a palfrey worth three marks. So take care of this in such a way that I may not cause offense to the king by my absence. Farewell.
This letter addresses a very vexed area in the life of a medieval landowner: the hereditary succession to a fee or property. Other letters (e.g., Documents 29 and 36–38) show how elite landholders were affected by the customary obligations attached to property, rights over the marriage and custody of heirs, and obligations for military service. The letter above touches on another sensitive area, the right of a lord to demand a “relief” (relevium) from his tenant—a sort of entry-payment or inheritance tax—on succession to an estate. This gave the overlord of an estate a significant occasional boost to his income, so its non-payment or denial was a frequent source of litigation. It was also a source of concern to the tenant, for unless the money was paid and the act of homage performed, he did not technically possess his father’s land. The legal position is laid out in the 1180s in the legal tract known as Glanvill: “When anyone’s father or ancestor dies, the lord of the fee is immediately bound to receive the homage of the right heir, whether the heir is a minor or of full age, provided that he is male. For women may not by law do homage, though they generally swear fealty to their lords . . . it is a general principle that no-one may demand service, whether it be a relief (relevium), or something else, from an heir, whether of full age or a minor, until he has received his homage for the tenement in respect of which he claims to have the service.”4
The importance of this payment is underlined in the letter above by the fact that the writer, who received a summons to the royal court on the very day on which news reached him of his father’s death, ignored the king’s summons in order to attend the funeral and then went to London to settle his father’s debts, presumably those owed to moneylenders. It was customary to settle outstanding claims on a person’s estate on the day of the funeral, as a sort of extension of the deathbed obligation to wind up one’s moral and spiritual affairs on one’s deathbed. Medieval funerals normally followed within a day or two of death, though in some cases the funeral was delayed, especially if the corpse had to be transported to a distant burial site, such as a family’s monastic foundation.5
The writer of the letter above chose family obligations and the protection of his own inheritance over his duty to the king, but some put their duty to the king above that to their family. In 1194, William Marshal received a summons to attend King Richard, who was newly returned from Crusade and captivity, at the same time as he heard of his brother’s death at Marlborough, and he determined that his self-interest lay in serving the king:
At the time when the king arrived, the Marshal was at Striguil [Chepstow]. Hear now what happened to him there. The bitter news reached him that his brother, Sir John, had died. He was so distressed at this news of his brother, when he heard it, that he almost died of grief. And it would have been a very cruel blow to him had there not been another piece of news, thanks be to God, which he found most pleasing, for there appeared before him an eloquent, courtly and wise messenger who informed him that the king of England had arrived in his own land. . . . The body [of Sir John] was carried into the church for a magnificent funeral service. The king’s messengers went there to hurry the Marshal along, and prevented him from going to the place where his brother was to be buried. All his men went to Bradenstoke, carrying the body in high estate and giving it a magnificent burial; he was buried with great ceremony in the place where his ancestors lie. The Marshal went to join the king, but he took with him only three knights, since his men had gone with his dead brother.6
In William Marshal’s case there was every reason for him to get to King Richard quickly. His brother had been in revolt when he died—or possibly was killed—and the latter’s lands were at the king’s disposal. Marshal had to get to the king to make sure of his elder brother’s inheritance, and that took precedence over attending his brother’s burial.
William Marshal had some reason for insecurity about succession in his day. His father, John Marshal the elder, had held land from the archbishop of Canterbury, and in 1163 Archbishop Thomas Becket had refused to take homage for it. Since John Marshal had not been able to do homage, the archbishop had argued that he was within his rights to dispossess him of the estate and he did so. This case triggered a debate in England about hereditary right to succeed to an estate that resulted in a legal process to establish possession independently of the mechanism of homage and service, a process called nouvel disseisin.7 The sender of DOCUMENT 26 clearly feared that some legal chicanery would challenge his right to his father’s estate. He chose to pay someone to make his excuses, and risk the king’s displeasure, rather than to risk losing his inheritance.
1 Add. 8167, fols. 99v–100r.
2 Fol. 100r commences here.
3 relevum in MS.
4 George Derek Gordon Hall, ed., The Treatise on the Laws and Customs of the Realm of England Commonly Called Glanvill (London: Thomas Nelson & Son, 1965), 103–4.
5 For deathbed and funeral practices in the middle ages, see Ronald C. Finucane, “Sacred Corpse, Profane Carrion: Social Ideals and Death Rituals in the Later Middle Ages,” in Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death, ed. Joachim Whaley (London: Europa, 1981), 40–60; David Crouch, “The Culture of Death in the Anglo-Norman World,” in Anglo-Norman Political Culture and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, ed. C. Warren Hollister (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 1997), 157–80; Christopher Daniell, Death and Burial in Medieval England, 1066–1550 (London: Routledge, 1997), 44–64. For the settling of claims on estates after funerals, see David Crouch, “Death in Medieval Scarborough,” Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 72 (2000), 68.
6 Holden and Crouch, eds., History of William Marshal, vol. 2, lines 10018–32, 10065–80.
7 Mary Cheney, “The Litigation Between John Marshal and Archbishop Thomas Becket in 1164,” in Law and Social Change in British History, ed. John A. Guy and H. G. Beale, Royal Historical Society Studies in History, 40 (London, 1984), 9–26.
27 Amicus mandat amico ut muniatur militibus sibi traditis incarceratis bene et honorifice custodiendis
Karissimo amico suo A., B. salutem. Comoditatem vestram non minus desiderans quam propriam, illud nos amovere propono quod non minus vobis quam vestris credere profuturum, ut milites quos de precepto domini regis tenetis incarceratos benigne custodiatis et diligentem curam eis inpendatis. Scituri quod si de [hoc]2 querelam fecerint in presencia regis, dominus rex bona vestra confiscabit ut ei placeat [et]3 in propriam convertet peccuniam. Quare tantum faciatis pro prefatis militibus ne aliqua mergat occasio unde vester tardetur4 effectus.
A friend sends word to a friend that he should provide handsomely and honorably for the knights given him to keep imprisoned
To his dearest friend A., B. [sends] greetings. Desiring your advantage as much as my own, I suggest that we set about something that we trust will benefit you no less than your own people: that you take good care of the imprisoned knights whom you have in custody by the king’s command, and don’t stint on their maintenance. Bear in mind that if they were to create a fuss about [this] in the king’s presence, the lord king will seize your goods as it suits him [and] convert them into cash for himself. So treat those knights in such a way that no excuse might emerge by which your fortunes might suffer a setback.
Prisoners were a lucrative source of income in medieval northern Europe, but also potential sources of great trouble for their captors and jailers. DOCUMENTS 27 and 28 demonstrate this very starkly. The prisoners mentioned here are knights taken in warfare or rebellion against the king. The king could grant such men to his courtiers as a form of reward, for the prisoners would then be held until they paid the ransom of money or land that would secure their release. Unfortunately it did not always work out that way. In 1184, for example, the Limousin poet Bertran de Born recorded the complaints of Gaston, lord of Béarn and Pau, who had received prisoners from Henry II of England with the intention of collecting their ransoms, but got nothing because they would not pay up.5
Worse dangers were represented by the possibility of escape. An early example of just how serious this might be was the escape in 1101of a state prisoner, Bishop Ranulf Flambard, from the Tower of London. The constable of the Tower, Geoffrey de Mandeville, was so crippled by the punitive fines imposed on him by the king that it took his family two generations to repair the losses.6 Penalties such as these were by no means unusual. In 1130, the sheriff and courtier Aubrey de Vere owed £550 and four palfreys for, among other things, the escape of prisoners in his custody.7 In a similar way, Henry II of England fined the northern baron Robert de Vaux a hundred marks in 1186 for a variety of offenses, including that he had allowed his prisoners to escape.8 These sorts of fines were exploited ruthlessly by the Angevin kings of England, especially King John (1199–1216), and DOCUMENT 28 is a direct consequence of their harshness in such matters.9
The costs of guarding and maintaining prisoners were the responsibility of the jailer, as was the liability should they escape.10 In the twelfth century it was only rare state prisoners, such as Duke Robert of Normandy (held at Devizes from 1106 until 1126, and subsequently at Bristol and Cardiff until his death in 1134)11 or Bishop Peter of Beauvais (held at Rouen from 1197 to 1199), whose costs were paid for by the royal exchequer in England or Normandy.12 High-ranking prisoners could be very demanding, and this may have been the source of the difficulty highlighted in this letter. It seems that the prisoners in the custody of the recipient were sufficiently well connected to be able to have their complaints heard at court. Under such circumstances, it was clearly important for their jailer to try to make them comfortable.
1 Add. 8167, fol. 100v.
2 Word inserted to preserve the sense of the passage.
3 Word inserted to preserve the sense of the passage.
4 Corrected in MS from dardetur.
5 Poésies complètes de Bertran de Born, ed. André Antoine Thomas, Bibliothèque meridionale, première ser., 1 (Toulouse, 1888), 50.
6 C. Warren Hollister, “The Misfortunes of the Mandevilles,” History, 58 (1973), 315–33.
7 Pipe Roll of 31 Henry I, 53, 113. See generally Ralph B. Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England (London: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 232ff.
8 Pipe Roll of 32 Henry II, 98.
9 Nicholas Vincent, “Hugh de Neville and His Prisoners,” Archives, 20 (1992), 190–91.
10 Jean Dunbabin, Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe, 1000–1300 (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2002), 53–55.
11 For the duke’s imprisonment, see William Aird, Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2008), 248–52.
12 Pipe Roll of 31 Henry I, 144, 148; Dunbabin, Captivity and Imprisonment, 55.
28 Amicus mandat amico ut custodiat firmiter milites incarceratos
Karissimo amico A., B. salutem. Habetis in domo vestra milites incarceratos, quos nisi melius solito custodieritis, ipsi vobis iacturam machinabuntur, ipsi enim cotidiano more famulos vestros inebriant ut possint invenire locum exeundi. Quod si invenerint rex omnia bona vestra confiscabit. Set absit ut hoc eveniat, et ne sic fiat, adibeatis illis novos custodes vobis fideles et obsides duros, qui nec prece nec precio possint molliri. Et tantum faciatis ne dominus rex inveniat occasionem vobis malignandi. Valete.
A friend sends word to a friend that he should keep a close guard on some imprisoned knights
To his dearest friend A., B. [sends] greetings. You are keeping knights imprisoned in your house who will be the cause of your downfall if you do not keep a closer guard on them than you have been doing, for every day they get your servants drunk so that they can find a means of escape. If they do find a way out, the king will seize all your possessions. I hope that this never happens, but to make sure it doesn’t,2 you should impose new jailers on them—men who are faithful to you, so that they cannot be softened either by pleading or by bribe—and tough pledges. Handle this in such a way that the king may find no excuse to do you harm. Farewell.
This letter is comparable to DOCUMENT 27 but is prompted by different concerns about the keeping of prisoners. It reflects a danger that had actually threatened a number of magnates in the reign of King John (1199–1216). A concern of the barons who negotiated Magna Carta in 1215 was the king’s practice of levying “amercements” (fines) to regain his good will after an offense.3 The king’s need for money could lead to the imposition of crippling fines on offending magnates, such as the 1200 marks (£800) levied on the northern baron Robert de Ros when a captured French knight whom Robert was guarding escaped with the help of one of his own guards. Robert was himself imprisoned until he paid up, and he found himself fined a further 300 marks (£200) in 1207 by King John after another prisoner escaped from his custody (though he was later pardoned for this).4
An even more extreme example of this kind of exploitative fine is that imposed on Hugh de Neville (d. 1234), the chief forester of Richard I and John. Following John’s Irish campaign of 1210, Hugh was given custody of two knights who subsequently escaped. The king used their escape as part of his justification for fining Hugh the astonishing sum of 6000 marks (£4000), along with outstanding arrears of other debts to the Exchequer. Nicholas Vincent has drawn attention to the consequences of this for Hugh’s later prisoners. In 1216 he was holding several rebel knights. Nervous about the possibility of their escape, Hugh got his clerks to draw up bonds for five prisoners by which they undertook not to escape from his prison, and promised to indemnify Hugh for his losses if they did escape. Hugh even had seals made for the captive knights so that they could properly transact the deeds. The bonds ran as follows:
Know that in consideration of the honor which Sir H[ugh] de Neville has done me while I was in prison in his custody and because he has firmly promised not to remove me from his custody to be imprisoned elsewhere, I have given my word and sworn on holy relics, I shall not attempt any trick or strategy to deceitfully escape from his prison. I have also sworn and given my word and confirmed by this charter that if by the siege of the castle or any other means I may be taken or liberated from prison, and if King John of England may wish Hugh to be prosecuted or fined for this, I will return in person to his prison, or if not I will reimburse and indemnify Hugh for the money the king demands from him and look to his interests in all things. If I cannot do this, I will hand over my estates to Hugh to hold or to mortgage to whomever he wishes, from year to year for a reasonable length of time until the money is paid.5
Jailbreaks during sieges actually happened. Around 1194, for example, when John himself was besieging Salisbury castle, several prisoners escaped from the castle when his troops broke in.6 DOCUMENT 28 clearly reflects the world and concerns of men such as Robert de Ros and Hugh de Neville. The writer warns his friend that his prisoners are likely to escape, which will leave him liable to the sort of punishment that Robert and Hugh experienced from Kings Richard I and John. He advises better guards and the taking of serious pledges, which are reminiscent of the bonds that Hugh required from his prisoners in 1216.
1 Add. 8167, fol. 100v.
2 Literally, “so that this happens, and not that.”
3 The charter states (clause 21) that “Earls and barons shall not be amerced except by their peers and only in accordance with the nature of the offence.” James C. Holt, Magna Carta, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 457.
4 Pipe Roll of 9 Richard I, 61; Thomas Duffus Hardy, ed., Rotuli de oblatis et finibus in Turri Londinensi asservati (London: Record Commission, 1835), 413. See James C. Holt, The Northerners (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961), 25.
5 Translated by David Crouch from Vincent, “Hugh de Neville and His Prisoners,” 196–97.
6 See Pugh, Imprisonment in Medieval England, 218–19, for this and other examples.
29 Vicecomes Cantebrig’ servientibus hundredi salutem. Mandatum domini regis suscepi quatinus comuniter summonicionem per totum comitatum Cantebrig’ facerem2 omnibus qui debunt servicia domino regi. Et ideo vobis mando quatinus illam summonicionem faciatis ita quod omnes qui debunt domino regi servicia parati sint apud Portes-mutiam in crastino sancti .N. ad transfretandum sicut se et tenementa sua diligunt, ne pro defectu terre eorum in manus domini resaysientur. Valete.
The sheriff of Cambridge to the serjeants of a hundred, greetings. I have received the lord king’s writ that I should make a common summons throughout Cambridgeshire of all who owe the lord king service. Therefore I order you to make that summons so that everyone who owes service to the lord king may be ready to make the crossing at Portsmouth, on the morrow of the feast of St N., as they care for themselves and their properties, lest their lands be taken back into the king’s hand for their default. Farewell.
This writ, sent by a sheriff to his subordinate officers, is a rare glimpse of a level of administration for which records barely survive. In this case, the sheriff is transmitting onward the king’s general summons to the knights of the shires for military service abroad. His subordinates, the hundred serjeants, are to have the summons read out at their hundred courts.3 English local government was already well developed before the Normans conquered the country in 1066. The south and west of England (Wessex) had been divided into shires as early as the tenth century. Each shire was administered on the king’s behalf by his sheriff (“shire-reeve”). Shires were subdivided into smaller districts called hundreds, which had their own reeves, subordinate to the sheriff. This system was extended to the center of England (Mercia) after its re-conquest from the Vikings in the tenth century, and then further extended into Yorkshire and the north in the eleventh century, though here and in parts of the north Midlands another unit called a wapentake either took the place of the hundred or was an intervening level between it and the shire. The last English shires (Cumberland and Westmorland) were formed at the end of the twelfth century.4
This model writ follows quite closely the genuine form of a royal summons to service, and it may be drawn from an authentic document. However, it has been rendered into a generic form by deleting all details except the name of the port of embarkation, and by giving the date of assembly as the day after the feast of St “N.” This stood for the Latin word nomen (“name”), and was the equivalent of saying, “fill in the blank.” The sheriff’s writ has close parallels in the summons by the earl of Chester to his knights in DOCUMENT 24, and also in a summons for service in Brittany issued by Henry III in 1234: “Henry king of England, etc., greets his beloved and faithful Henry de Turberville. We send you this instruction, asking that, as you love and honor us, you be at Portsmouth with four other knights promptly at the feast of the Ascension in the eighteenth year of our reign (June 1, 1234). Depart fully equipped with horses and arms to cross the sea to the aid of the count of Brittany and ready to remain in our service as the said count may more fully instruct you on our behalf, so that we may owe you our gratitude.”5 The main difference between DOCUMENT 29 and the summons of 1234 is that the latter is directed to a man important enough to have an individual summons. The writ in DOCUMENT 29 was for lesser men, royal tenants of no more than local importance, who are being summoned collectively rather than individually.
1 Add. 8167, fol. 126r.
2 facere in MS.
3 On the hundred courts, see DOCUMENT 42.
4 For these developments, see James Campbell, ed., The Anglo-Saxons (London: Penguin, 1982), 172–73; and Helen M. Cam, The Hundred and the Hundred Rolls (London: Methuen, 1930), 1–19.
5 Thomas Rymer, Fœdera conventiones litteræ et acta publica, ed. Adam Clarke and Frederick Holbrooke (London: Record Commission, 1816–69), vol. 1, pt. 1, 211.
30 H. dei gratia, rex Anglie et cetera, dilecto et fideli suo comiti Cestrie salutem. Iniquum est merita sua suo premio defraudare. Nichilominus est equitati consonum transgressiones et iniurias ulcissi. Satis datum est nobis intelligi quod per experienciam congnovimus: quam fideliter [et]2 integre predecessoribus nostris et nobis vos devotes et fideles in servicio bono prebueritis, et quanta pro nobis pericula in transmarinis partibus iamdudum sustenueritis. Restat, igitur, ut in hiis partibus solitam probitatem vestram et probissime familie3 vestre fortitudinem nostri infestantes senciant inimici, Walenses precipue, qui sub principe suo Leulino regni nostri partes australes invaserunt. Quosdam enim de militibus nostris in insidiis sedicione captos detinet in carcere, quosdam autem inter-fecerunt. Ad quorum ulcionem vos et alios fideles nostros invitamus, ut perfida gens Walensis, viribus Anglorum repulsa, nemorum suorum latibulam querere compellatur et ad habitaciones defugere ferinas.
H[enry] by the grace of God king of England, etc., greets his beloved and faithful earl of Chester. It is unfair to deprive someone of reward for his merits; likewise, it is only reasonable to avenge offenses and injuries. We have been told what we have ourselves observed: how faithfully and completely you have offered your devoted and loyal self in sterling service to our predecessors and us, and how many dangerous missions you have undertaken for us overseas in days gone by. It remains, therefore, that our turbulent enemies in these parts should experience your usual prowess and the might of your veteran military household, especially the Welsh, who under their prince, Llywelyn, have invaded the southern part of our kingdom. For he is holding in prison some of our knights, captured by treachery in ambushes; others the Welsh have killed. To avenge them, we are summoning you and our other vassals, so that the traitorous Welsh people, routed by the power of the English, will be forced to seek a refuge in their forests and flee back to their bestial lairs.
Though there is no known original of this letter, there are some that are comparable. In 1220 William Marshal II, earl of Pembroke (d. 1231), wrote to King Henry III to complain about the problems he was having with the same Prince Llywelyn mentioned above. He described the many attacks that the prince had made on his lands in the southern March of Wales, and referred to the several letters that he had written to the king about them. He also stigmatized the prince as a liar.4 Henry III’s own letters about Llywelyn tended to be more circumspect in their language than the one above.5 This was hardly surprising, since in 1205 Llywelyn had married the king’s elder half-sister Joan (d. 1237), and Henry was thus Llywelyn’s brother-in-law and the uncle of Llywelyn’s heir, Dafydd.
Llywelyn ab Iorwerth came to sole power in the northwestern Welsh principality of Gwynedd in 1201, after several decades of rivalry among the sons and grandsons of Owain Gwynedd (d. 1170). Llywelyn had to compete with the rival principality of Powys and the military power of his father-in-law, King John (d. 1216). By the conclusion of the Barons’ Wars in 1217, however, Llywelyn had broken the power of Powys and secured the submission of most of the important Welsh magnates. Thereafter, Llywelyn dominated Wales until his death in 1240, commencing a castle-building program and ruling his growing realm in princely style. His wife Joan styled herself as “lady of Wales” and Llywelyn called himself “prince of Aberffraw and lord of Snowdon,” evidently in allusion to the way the king of England bolstered his status by employing multiple titles (such as “King of England, Lord of Ireland, and Duke of Normandy”).6
The racial rhetoric deployed here in relation to the Welsh is by no means unprecedented. The characterization of Celtic peoples in Britain as barbaric and bestial is evident in the early twelfth century in the historical writings of Anglo-Norman chroniclers, not least in those of William of Malmesbury.7 Such rhetoric justified any sort of atrocity, and had been a feature of Norman writings about the Bretons in the previous century. The Welsh, like the Bretons, were characterized by the English as a pastoral, primitive people, without settled habitations or towns, whose lack of self-discipline led them to treachery and vicious violence. An Anglo-Norman baron, William de Briouze, told the royal clerk, Walter Map, about a Welsh lord who was a neighbor of his. According to the baron, this Welshman was devout and austere in the practice of his religion, fasting and keeping vigil in prayer naked on a cold floor, but in warfare there was no deed too abominable for him to contemplate.8 As a result of such characterizations, the English regarded themselves as justified in any harsh action they took against the Welsh, including forced dispossession and massacre. This is clearly the sentiment behind DOCUMENT 30, and can also be seen in DOCUMENT 31, which follows.
1 Fairfax 27, fol. 4r.
2 Word supplied to fit the sense of the passage.
3 tue expunged here in MS.
4 Shirley, ed., Royal Letters, vol. 1, 143–44.
5 See, for example, a letter dated 1233 to the constables of the border castles of Clun and Whitchurch, in Shirley, ed., Royal Letters, vol. 1, 423–24.
6 See Huw Pryce, “Negotiating Anglo-Welsh Relations: Llywelyn the Great and Henry III,” in England and Europe in the Reign of Henry III, 1216–1272, ed. Björn K. U. Weiler and Ifor W. Rowlands (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2002), 13–29; Huw Pryce, ed., The Acts of the Welsh Rulers, 1120–1283 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005), 26–29.
7 John Gillingham, “The Context and Purposes of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain,” Anglo-Norman Studies, 13 (1990), 106–9; idem, “Conquering the Barbarians: War and Chivalry in Twelfth-Century Britain,” Haskins Society Journal, 4 (1992), 67–84. For similar hostile descriptions of the Welsh in the thirteenth century, see Sir Maurice Powicke, The Thirteenth Century, 1216–1307, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), 383–84.
8 Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium, trans. Montague Rhodes James, ed. Christopher N. L. Brooke and Roger A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 146.
31 H. dei gratia rex Anglie, et cetera, dilectis et fidelibus suis baronibus et militibus et libere tenentibus salutem. Satis vobis2 omnibus innotuit qualiter dominia nostra Walenses iam devastaverunt, damna nobis multa faciendo. Nos enim illam gentem omnino delere proponimus, et totius Wallie3 nobis universa adversancia destruere municipia. Set quia in suffragio nostro hec non possumus facere, vobis mandando precipimus, quatinus cum equis et armis et omni aparatu bellico nobiscum contra Walenses veniatis, ut per vos illius gentis4 et alios fideles nostros falcitatem adnichiliare valeamus.
H[enry] by the grace of God king of England, etc., greets his beloved and faithful barons and knights and freeholders.5 It is well known to all of you how the Welsh are currently laying waste our lordships, doing us many injuries. Now we plan to annihilate that race completely, and to destroy every settlement hostile to us in the whole of Wales. But because, in our judgment, we cannot do this [unaided], we issue this instruction to you, ordering that, with horses, arms, and all military supplies, you march with us against the Welsh, so that through you and our other faithful vassals we shall be able to eliminate the treachery of that race.
This writ of summons to an army for war against the Welsh is rather more literary in style than one would expect. The writ issued by Henry III in June 1245 to all his feudal tenants to muster against the Welsh under Prince Dafydd ap Llywelyn is much more laconic, simply stating the cause of service and the time of the muster.6 The author of DOCUMENT 31 knows the correct form of address of a king to his tenants, but the rest of this undoubtedly fictional text is a rhetorical exercise, portraying Henry III as a justly enraged monarch, determined, as in DOCUMENT 30, to destroy a treacherous, barbarous race with the aid of his loyal subjects. In fact, in 1245 King Henry had been reluctant to move against his nephew, Prince Dafydd, who had been at war with the Marcher barons since the previous summer.7 The writ above does, however, echo the fact that the military demands on the cash-starved king were causing him to press for full feudal knight service from his tenants. This actually happened in 1245, and would happen again with increasing frequency during the later thirteenth century.8
1 Fairfax 27, fol. 4r.
2 nobis in MS.
3 Walense in MS.
4 gentes in MS.
5 Freeholders were holders of land not bound by peasant service. These could be quite considerable landowners who were not knights.
6 Close Rolls, 1242–47, 357.
7 On Anglo-Welsh relations at this period, see Robert Rees Davies, The Age of Conquest: Wales, 1063–1415 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
8 Sanders, Feudal Military Service, 130–35.
32 Excellentissimo domino suo salutem. (H. dei gratia, et cetera, sui fideles et ligii semper ad servicia.)2 Gentis Walensis3 versuciam et machinamenta delere defacili possetis, nisi quidam de vestris privatim Walensibus consentirent. De quorum privata confederacione4 diligenter inquiratis5 et, illis ab expedicione remotis,6 inter vos et inimicos7 vestros conflictis inhibeantur,8 ne tantarum transgressionum9 eorum impunitas amplioris fiat eius occacio presumcionis. Penitus enim frivola fiet et inutilis est expedicio, si iunctim super inimicos nostros procedant vestri fideles, et Walentibus confederatis.
To their most excellent lord, greetings. (To H[enry], by the grace of God, etc., his faithful and liege men, always at his service.)10 You could easily destroy the craftiness and trickery of the Welsh people, were not some of your own men secretly conspiring with them. You should make a careful inquiry into their confederacy and, having removed those men from the campaign, you should not let them be employed in the fighting between you and your enemies, lest their exemption from punishment for such treasonable activities should give them an opportunity for even greater plotting. For the campaign [against the Welsh] will be completely worthless and pointless if your faithful vassals should jointly advance upon your enemies, and those men [i.e., the English traitors] are already confederated with the Welsh.
The March of Wales, the region on the Welsh-English frontier that was controlled by English barons rather than Welsh princes, was built up by the piecemeal conquests and strategic marriages of Anglo-Norman aristocrats between the 1080s and 1170s. By the 1150s, the name “March” (a Germanic word meaning “border region”) was in general use. Though ruled by English lords and colonized by English peasants and townspeople, the March was not England. The king had influence there, because he was the overlord of the Marcher barons for their English lands, and sometimes he himself ruled over Marcher lordships for long periods of time. But English law and the king’s administration had no authority there. Marcher lords had their own courts and governments within their lordships. They conducted war and relations with the Welsh, and with one another, as it suited them, not the king. There was a good deal of intermarriage in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries between the families of Marcher lords and the Welsh princely dynasties of Deheubarth, Gwynedd and Powys,11 and on occasion Welsh princes and Marcher lords cooperated militarily, sometimes even in warfare against the king. It was, for instance, the backing of troops from Welsh kings that made the rebellion of Earl Robert of Gloucester against King Stephen possible in 1139. The support of Prince Llywelyn ab Iorwerth of Gwynedd against King John allowed the Briouze family to recover its lands in the March in the warfare of 1215–16.12
It is therefore not surprising that this document alleges that a party among the king’s own English subjects was conspiring against him with the Welsh. As early as 1145, informers insinuated to King Stephen of England (1135–54) that Earl Ranulf II of Chester wanted to lure the king into the March, where the Welsh would do away with him. The king believed them and had the earl arrested on the strength of the allegations.13 There is, however, little in the historical record to justify the allegations made in DOCUMENT 32. In 1228 the young King Henry III (1216–72) summoned a large army to Ceri in support of the earl of Pembroke against Prince Llywelyn, but a vigorous Welsh counter-response led to an inconclusive campaign. The contemporary historian Roger of Wendover picked up rumors—probably from disgruntled courtiers—that “there were many among the magnates in the king’s army who were allied with Llywelyn and merely pretended to follow the king.”14 But it is unlikely that the Ceri campaign could have provided the material for this letter. It is more likely that its paranoia is rooted in the suspiciousness of medieval courts toward any group—like the Marcher barons—that aspired to independence from royal control.
1 Fairfax 27, fol. 4r–v.
2 The italicized passage here, as in Documents 5 and 24, represents a variant phrasing included in this model text.
3 Walense in MS.
4 consideracione in MS.
5 Corrected in MS from inquirastis.
6 In MS, the words et ne follow remotis; they do not make sense in this context.
7 Fol. 4v commences here.
8 inhiantur in MS.
9 tante transgressiones in MS.
10 The italicized passage represents a variant salutation included in this model text.
11 For a comprehensive study of its origins and development, see Max Liebermann, The March of Wales, 1067–1300: A Borderland of Medieval Britain (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008).
12 David Crouch, “The March and the Welsh Kings,” in The Anarchy of King Stephen’s Reign, ed. Edmund King (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 276–78; Ifor W. Rowlands, “King John and Wales,” in King John: New Interpretations, ed. Stephen D. Church (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1999), 284–87.
13 Kenneth R. Potter and Ralph Henry Carless Davis, ed. and trans., Gesta Stephani (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 192–96.
14 Flores Historiarum, ed. Henry G. Hewlett, vol. 2, Rolls Series, 84 (London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1886–89), 350; for comment, see Ron F. Walker, “Hubert de Burgh and Wales, 1218–32,” EHR, 87 (1972), 481–82.
33 D. mandat E.1 ut movet bladum suum a via regis
Karissimo amico suo A., B. salutem. Rex profecturus in Walliam capiet omnia cibaria que invenire potest per viam et transitum. Quare bladum vestrum a via eius submoveatis. Scituri quod quicquid ceperit nunquam revocetis nec eius precium, et ita provideatis vobis ne dampnum incurratis contra eius adventum. Valete.
D. sends word to E. to get his grain off the royal highway
To his dearest friend A., B. sends greetings. The king, who is about to go to Wales, will seize all the food that he can find on the road and the route. Therefore, get your grain off his road. You will know that you will never recover whatever he seizes, or its price, and thus you should watch out lest you incur any loss because of his coming. Farewell.
This letter gives a vivid picture of the depredations caused by royal purveyors (provisioning agents). King John’s abuse of purveyance was so notorious that a remedy for it was sought in Magna Carta (1215). The king was required to stipulate, for example, that “No constable or any other of our bailiffs shall take any man’s corn [i.e., grain] or other chattels unless he pays cash for them at once or can delay payment with the agreement of the seller” (clause 28). King John also had to guarantee that “No sheriff or bailiff of ours or anyone else is to take horses or carts of any free man for carting without his agreement” (clause 30).2 The problem was not usually that provisions were seized without any compensation (as the writer of the letter above fears), but that payment was delayed and did not match the value of what was taken. For a discussion of royal purveyance of goods and transport, see DOCUMENT 19.
Although Henry III made four military expeditions to Wales before 1250 (see Documents 25 and 30), it is unlikely that this letter was inspired by any particular campaign, but the royal right of “prise” or seizure was a contentious issue. The language of this letter, while it makes no mention of war, nevertheless implies that the king is heading for Wales with a very large party under conditions of such urgency that the royal purveyors are not purchasing grain in the local markets in an orderly fashion, but simply seizing it wherever they find it. The warning to the addressee to get his grain off the road suggests that this letter may reflect conditions around the time of the autumn harvest, when cereal crops—wheat, rye, oats, and barley—were being carted to manorial granges and to markets. If so, it may indeed have been inspired by one or more of Henry III’s Welsh campaigns, all of which took place in the autumn months.
1 The discrepancy in the initials of the sender and recipient between the heading (“D. to E.”) and the body of this letter (“B. to A.”) reflects the rather careless manner in which it was copied from another letter collection. Similar examples can be found in Documents 10, 16, 50, 70, and 90.
2 Holt, Magna Carta, 459. For these two clauses of Magna Carta, see also the Articles of the Barons, clauses 19 and 20, and the re-issue of Magna Carta in 1225, clauses 20 and 21, in ibid., Appendices 5 and 12.
34 Rex mandat comitibus2 et baronibus3 ut adiuvant ei ad sororem maritandam
Henricus dei gratia Rex Anglie, dominus hybernie, dux Normannie et Aquitannie, comes Andegavie, comitibus et baronibus et omnibus fidelibus suis salutem. Ad honorem et commoditatem nostram vos et omnia vestra de iure vestre fidelitatis exponere tenemini. Quoddam enim speciale dominium regi solummodo debitum est corpora vestra pro me ponere. Vobis igitur mandamus ut inter vos provideatis in quantum ad sororis mee maritagium nobis auxiliari velitis, et tantum super hoc facientes ut de vestra bona voluntate et voluntatis exsecucione personas4 vestras debeamus commendare. Valete.
The king sends word to his earls and barons to aid him in arranging for the marriage of his sister
Henry, by the grace of God, king of England, lord of Ireland, duke of Normandy and Aquitaine and count of Anjou, to his earls, barons and all his faithful men, greetings. We are justified in disposing of you and all your goods for our own honor and convenience, as follows from your oath of fealty. For it is a special prerogative due to a king alone to dispose of you for my own advantage. Therefore, we command you that you take thought among yourselves as to how much you might wish to aid us for the marriage portion of my sister, acting in such a way in this matter that we may owe you our thanks for your good will and for your performance of our wish. Farewell.
This model document, although fictional, nonetheless reflects the actual political situation in England in the mid-1230s. It is based on a contemporary debate over the extent of the king’s power to tax his subjects, based on his rights as their feudal lord.
By the end of the twelfth century it was established that a lord might exact money payments, known as “aids” (auxilia), from his tenants on a number of occasions when he might need cash for particularly heavy expenses. A Northamptonshire landowner of the early 1180s defined these occasions as follows: “if need shall arise [my tenants] shall help to ransom my body and to make my eldest son a knight and to give in marriage my eldest daughter.”5 But it is never suggested by any contemporary source that a lord might levy an aid for the marriage of a sister. When the barons imposed their view of aids on King John in Magna Carta (1215), the king and barons stated the custom in similar terms, though with an added restriction on the marriage of the eldest daughter: “No scutage or aid is to be levied in our realm except by the common counsel of our realm, unless it is for the ransom of our person, the knighting of our eldest son or the first marriage of our eldest daughter; and for these only a reasonable aid is to be levied.” The charter laid out the same terms for the levying of aids by any lord.6
The issue resurfaced in 1235, when Henry III (1216–72) married his sister Isabel to the German emperor Frederick II (1215–50), and the king asked his subjects for an aid. Isabel’s marriage portion of 30,000 marks (£20,000) was a huge sum, and its payment caused a financial crisis in England. The government of Henry III was driven to a variety of desperate measures in order to meet the installments, the last of which was not paid until 1237.7
A council of barons and prelates granted the necessary sum as an aid early in the summer of 1235.8 They imposed a levy of two marks on each tenant-in-chief for every knight’s fee, and on the English clergy of one-thirtieth of their income.9 The slow rate of payment drove the king to extend the tax to his Irish barons and clergy in 1236. The exceptional nature of this tax is noted by the king in the writ that he sent to his sheriffs in July 1235 concerning its collection. He said that his barons “conceded us a worthwhile aid to further our important business, of their own free will and without creating any precedent.”10
The letter above reflects the baronial distrust of the monarchy that was fanned anew by the events of 1235. It presents a stark statement of the royal position on aids in the king’s declaration that “We are justified in disposing of you and all your goods for our own honor and convenience, as follows from your oath of fealty.” We may doubt very much whether this is a genuine letter of Henry III to his barons, but it may nonetheless preserve one of the positions in the debate between the king’s counselors and his magnates. As such, it has a wider significance yet. The crisis of 1235 added to escalating problems between Henry III and the political community that grew, in 1258 in the Provisions of Oxford, into a demand for the permanent reform of royal government by the magnates and bishops, united as the “whole community of England.” The underlying cause of the events in 1258 was the same as that in 1235: the king’s political weakness, which stemmed from his continual need for cash to fund his foreign ventures.
1 Add. 8167, fol. 105r.
2 Corrected in MS from commilitibus to commitibus.
3 boronibus in MS.
4 persona in MS.
5 Stenton, First Century, 277.
6 Holt, Magna Carta, clauses 12 and 15, p. 455.
7 Stacey, Politics, Policy and Finance, 98–99.
8 It was specifically an aid for the marriage of Henry’s sister, although it was also referred to as a “scutage,” “tallage,” and “carrucage.”
9 Sydney Knox Mitchell, Studies in Taxation Under John and Henry III (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1914), 208–14. A tenant-in-chief was a landowner holding his estates directly from the king; a knight’s “fee” was the amount of land thought necessary to support him. Opinions vary as to how much land that needed to be.
10 William Stubbs, Select Charters and Other Illustrations of English Constitutional History, ed. Henry William Carless Davis, 9th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1913), 357 (emphasis added).
35 Responsio ad predictas
Excellentissimo regi, et cetera. Sciatis2 [quod]3 connovimus quod quicquid4 possumus et quantum ex debito ligancie nostre vobis tanquam domino nostro debemus, set dominium super nos habeatis tantum in debitis exaccionibus; nos non gravare debetis. Si vestre sororis maritagium5 tesauros6 vestros in magna parte consumsit, ut quid ad nos recuritis cum redditus et firmas habetis quibus tesauros vestros tesaurare valeatis? Absit a regia dignitate liberos subditos in debitis molestare consuetudinibus, et ab eis exigere que nunquam facere solebant.
A reply to the aforesaid letter
To the most excellent king, etc. Know that we acknowledge that we owe to you as our lord whatever and as much as we can [give], as due from our allegiance, but you ought to have lordship over us only for payments that are actually owed to you; you have a duty not to harm us. If the marriage portion of your sister has taken most of your wealth, why then do you resort to us, when you have rents and farms7 with which you might enrich your treasury? Let it be far from the royal dignity to harass your free subjects concerning the customary payments due [to you], and to demand from them what they used never to do.
This letter is a response to the royal position on taxation presented in DOCUMENT 34. Although a purely fictional exercise in composition, the attitude that it records may well reflect a genuine debate between the king and his subjects at the time of the marriage of the king’s sister Isabel in 1235. This letter evidently is intended to be a remonstrance from the magnates and barons of England to Henry III for attempting to impose an unaccustomed and unacceptable demand for money to pay for his sister’s marriage portion. Written representations of this sort were actually made at times, the earliest known being a letter directed to King John from the barons of Leinster and Meath in 1207, which does not survive but is known from the outraged monarch’s irate response.8
An interesting point in this letter is the argument that the king has enough rents and farms by which he may finance his projects without having to trouble his subjects. This may well be the earliest manifestation of the opinion that a monarch should live off his own resources, a view that became a perennial feature of debates between the sovereign and the nation into the seventeenth century. The other argument that this letter contains is a protest against innovations. This echoes the king’s disclaimer (discussed under DOCUMENT 34) that he did not intend his request for an aid to create a precedent. The refusal to countenance demands beyond those allowed by custom is much older than the view that the king should live off his own resources, and recurs in every generation after the Conquest.
1 Add. 8167, fol. 105r–v.
2 scintatis in MS.
3 quod missing in MS.
4 quicquit in MS.
5 Fol. 105v commences here.
6 teusaros in MS.
7 A farm (firma) or fee-farm was an annual fixed charge paid to the Crown by a “farmer” in return for a body of rights, such as the right to collect tolls or taxes. The farmer made his profit on what he could extort on top.
8 Rotuli litterarum patentium, 72.
36 Pontifices et prelati mandant comitibus et baronibus tocius Anglie, habendi consilium de rege precepcione
Pontifices et prelati tocius Anglie, comitibus et baronibus et militibus, salutem in domino. Communi negocio et ad omnium commodum est insistendum, et siquis [dis]senterit2 in quantum unanimiter est ei resistendum. Maior enim est universitas subditorum quam sit alicuius domini super subditos constituti dignitas3 aud4 dominium. Set dominus rex, iuri iusticieque [. . .]5 constituere in titulo quibusdam adulatoribus hec ad eum adientibus.6 Cuius propositum cum equitate sit contrarium modis omnibus quassare studeamus, cum ex tali proposito nos et successores nostri gravari possumus in posterium. Quod7 enim monemus [?melius] est quam ad8 omnem regis exigenciam iustam vel iniustam favorabiles existere. Si sic procedere posset sicut iam incepit in scutagiis et aliis auxiliis exig[e]ndis,9 quis tam dives quis tam habundans in tali casu subsisteret? Certe plus a nobis posset exigere quam nos omnes ei possimus facere. Conveniamus igitur et provideamus quid et qualiter respondeamus, et ab omnibus nobis tanquam ab uno nostrum responsum accipiat. Nullo quia modo sustineamus ut unius tam avaricia nos et heredes nostros confundat inperpetuum.
The bishops and prelates send word to the earls and barons of England, for taking counsel concerning the king’s order
The bishops and prelates of all England to the earls, barons and knights, greetings in the Lord. It is necessary to pursue a common problem to the benefit of everyone, and if anyone [should dissent], he is to be unanimously opposed as much as possible. For the community of all subjects is more important than might be the dignity or estate of any one lord set over subjects. But the lord king, after certain flatterers had appealed these matters to him, [?blind] to law and justice, [?has refused] to constitute [this principle] as an established right.10 Since it is contrary to equity, we should endeavor to suppress their proposal by all means, since, as a result of such a proposal, we and our successors can be harmed in future. For indeed we declare [?this better] than to appear favorable to every royal demand, whether just or unjust. If the king is allowed to carry on as he has now begun to do in demanding scutages and other aids, who could survive in such circumstances, however rich, however abounding in wealth? It is a fact that he can demand more from us than we all combined could produce for him. So let us come together and consider what we should say in response and how, and let him receive our answer from all of us as if from one of us [i.e., let him receive the same answer from one and all of us]. Because in no way ought we to allow that so much greed of one man might ruin us and our heirs11 forever.
This is the third of three letters, the others being Documents 34 and 35, that appear to derive from the debate about the aid for the marriage portion of the king’s sister Isabel in 1235. On that occasion, the clergy of England granted the king a tax of one-thirtieth of the value of their income, while the lay magnates allowed a levying of scutage on their knights’ fees. It is not surprising, therefore, to find this letter linked with the others. What is interesting is to find the prelates of England (the bishops, abbots, priors, and cathedral dignitaries) depicted as consulting with the magnates to organize a common front against the king. Again, it is unlikely that a genuine letter lies behind this one, but it may well represent its author’s understanding of the interplay between clergy, laity, and king in the financial crisis of 1235. No such early letter of the prelates of England survives, though it is by no means unlikely that they could have written as a body. Matthew Paris, for example, preserved an extensive list of the complaints of the Church in 1257 against the government of Henry III in the name of the bishops of England.12
Together, these three letters are important in elucidating an otherwise little-known crisis in Henry III’s government in the mid-1230s. DOCUMENT 36 illustrates how his constant need for money, which caused him to resort to new and extortionate demands, became a grave and persistent irritant in the relations between the king and his country.
1 Add. 8167, fol. 105v.
2 senterit in MS.
3 dingnitas in MS.
4 Sic for aut.
5 A phrase evidently is missing here; something like “cecus negavit” would fit the sense.
6 Corrected in MS from adiacentibus.
7 quidam in MS.
8 Corrected in MS from ead.
9 exigndis in MS.
10 The gaps in the text mean that this can only be an approximate sense of the passage.
11 The term “heirs” here is used in the sense of successors in ecclesiastical office, to which real property such as knights’ fees was attached. In addition, numerous bishops acquired knights’ fees by purchase, which they bequeathed to blood-relations.
12 Councils and Synods, 2:1, 539–48.
37 Miles mandat militi ad habendum consilium de rege qui vult2 maritare filiam inliberiori quam deberet
Miles militi salutem. Communi periculo communiter est occurendum. Rome vicinitas, vicino vicinus in necessitatis articulo consilium et auxilium prebere tenetur. Quasdam novas et3 inconsuetas dominus rex consuetudines vult4 introducere, satellitibus suis generosas filias nostras et neptas volens coniungere coniugali copula. Ignot’ nobis est cuius sint condicionis quibus matrimoniali foedere5 filie nostre debeant copulari. Quidam enim in sua provincia sutores erant, quidam porcarii, et quidam inveniendus est quam generosam innobili copulare. Hinc indiscreto domini regis proposito modis omnibus satagamus obviare, et humilimis precibus et si necesse fuerit muneribus regiam voluntatem flectere studeamus.
A knight sends word to a knight to get his advice about the king’s intention to marry a daughter to a man of lower station than he ought
A knight to a knight, greetings. It is necessary to combine when under a common threat. As a province to Rome, so a neighbor is bound to give aid and counsel to his neighbor in the face of an emergency. The lord king wants to introduce certain new and unprecedented customs, proposing to unite our noble daughters and granddaughters to his hangers-on in a bond of marriage. It is unknown to us of what condition are those men to whom our daughters might have to be joined in marital union. For some were shoemakers in their own shires, some swineherds, and the man has yet to be found who would couple a girl of such noble birth to a man of ignoble origins. So let us busy ourselves to thwart in every way this unwise proposal of the lord king, and endeavor to divert the king’s will with the humblest of prayers—or, if necessary, with bribes.
The issue of “disparagement” (dispargacio; see DOCUMENT 38) is prominent in complaints of English and French barons against their king for much of the twelfth century. Put simply, disparagement was the marriage of a noble person to someone of inferior rank or standing.6 The king was entitled to use the wardship of noble girls and boys, and the disposal of their marriages and those of noble widows, to reward his allies and servants. When, however, the ally or servant was of comparatively low birth and connections, the marriage was considered degrading (“disparaging”) to the noble spouse, whether male or female, but the outcry was loudest when the injured party was female.7 The issue would seem to have been a heated one when King Henry I came to the throne of England in 1100. In his coronation charter he felt obliged to assure his subjects that, “if when one of my barons or other men die leaving a daughter as heir, I will not give her in marriage except according to the advice of my barons.”8 The intention here seems to have been to reassure his magnates that noble heirs would be treated responsibly by making their marriage conditional on baronial advice. It was this level of monitoring that the barons wanted over King John in 1215 when they were negotiating Magna Carta, although the eventual settlement drew back from that position. In the end, Clause 6 read simply: “Heirs shall be given in marriage without disparagement (disparagacione), yet so that before a marriage is contracted it shall be made known to the heir’s next of kin.”9
It would appear that the king’s exploitative treatment of female heirs (whether daughters or widows) had antagonized the Anglo-Norman aristocracy as early as the reign of William Rufus (1087–1100), since his brother Henry I was so keen to distance himself from the practice in the aftermath of his seizure of the throne. But, as commentators have noted, Henry (like his successors) continued to make the most of his rights of wardship throughout his reign, making widows pay if they wished to be free of his control of their marriage, and selling and granting wardships to his favored officers.10 The potential for revenue and patronage implicit in the control of marriage was too much for the Norman and Angevin kings to leave alone.
We have some indications in contemporary literature that the same resentment was current in the parts of France where the king could control wardships. In the earliest portion of the epic Raoul de Cambrai, which dates from around 1150 and was composed in the northeast of France, the malevolent King Louis proposes to marry the widow of the count of Cambrai to a lowborn courtier, no more than a hired soldier, to the disgust of the nobles who considered it to be “coupling a mongrel with a greyhound.”11 There is an earlier English literary parallel to this in Geoffrey Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis (c. 1138 × 40), in which Argentille, the heiress to the kingdom of Lindsey, is outrageously obliged by her wicked uncle and guardian to marry a cook.12 A parallel example to Gaimar’s comes from two or three decades later, in the northern French romance-epic Garin le Loherenc, in which Count Dreux of Amiens urges Baldwin of Flanders to marry off quickly his widowed sister Helisent, since he has heard that the king of France intends to marry her off “to one of his kitchen scullions who roasts his chickens.”13 In the French historical epic the Roman de Thèbes (1150s), a royal princess, Antigone, reluctantly spurns the advances of a knight, Parthenopus, for not being “of such linage that you might be de mon parage,” a phrase that anticipates the verb desparager by some decades.14
It seems fair to conclude from this evidence that behind Documents 37 and 38 lay over a century of aristocratic insecurity in both France and England about the fate of noble children and widows, and a long-running item on the agenda of business between kings and their magnates. In fact, barons may not have been quite so exercised on the subject as this letter implies. To begin with, the disparagement itself was not necessarily committed by the king, but by the person who obtained the wardship from him. It seems also that Richard I and John married off noble heiresses to relatively humble royal servants without incurring any known condemnation.15 Nonetheless, the barons brought the issue forward in 1215. Indeed, in 1218 the Flemish writer known as the Anonymous of Bethune singled out the clause on disparagement as a major issue between the king and barons when he described the negotiation of Magna Carta, and disparagement was an issue with which Earl Ranulf III of Chester had to deal in 1215 when his own tenants demanded a charter of liberties.16
The letter above is a literary exercise, and a rather overblown one. The king certainly could not be accused of wanting to marry off girls of noble family to any artisans and peasants who had the money to buy superior marriages. Such accusations recall the absurd literary mismatches in the romance-epics of the previous century. Furthermore, as the canon law of marriage developed in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it was impossible for any ward to be forced to marry someone to whom he or she objected.17 However, the charges do reveal a willingness in their author to question the king’s intentions toward aristocratic heiresses. They also portray Magna Carta as a bastion against the king’s inclination to disparage girls in marriage. Why was this? One possible explanation is that social rank was becoming more self-conscious and structured in the first decades of the thirteenth century. As this happened, the possibility of disparagement became increasingly threatening and offensive to an emerging social order. As a result, the king was demonized, especially by the social group that had only recently secured recognition as nobles, the knights. These letters seem, therefore, to reflect a strengthening feeling of hierarchical class within English society.18
DOCUMENT 37 is addressed by a knight to another knight. The sender is evidently the senior or more important of the two, since he puts himself first, but both of these county knights are depicted as defensive about their social standing—fearful that they will be linked with men of lesser rank, not only artisans and peasants but, by implication, also tradesmen and nonnoble landowners, men of no birth or social standing. To these knights, Magna Carta is their guarantor of noble status, their bulwark against being lumped forcibly into the lower orders, and they take it very seriously. What is clear is that county knights were well acquainted with the text of Magna Carta. For instance, among the surviving papers of a Northamptonshire knight, Richard Hotot, compiled in the 1240s, was a copy of the 1225 reissue of Magna Carta.19
1 Add. 8167, fols. 105v–106r.
2 wlt in MS.
3 Fol. 106r commences here.
4 wlt (i.e., vult) added in caret here in MS.
5 federe in MS.
6 A par (in English, “peer”) is a person’s equal. “Disparagement” literally means a slight to one’s “parage,” a term that comprehends status through noble connections. See David Crouch, The Birth of Nobility: Constructing Aristocracy in England and France, 900–1300 (London: Longman, 2005), 135–48. It has been suggested that the word disparagacio was coined in England in the reign of John, as a result of the intensive exploitation of wardships by Richard and John. See Scott L. Waugh, The Lordship of England: Royal Wardships and Marriages in English Society and Politics, 1217–1327 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 80n. However, the word itself first appeared in Latin in 1194 (Pipe Roll of 6 Richard I, 238), and occurred earlier still in the French past participle form desparagee, in the Anglo-Norman romance Protheselaus, which was composed in England between 1180 and 1190. See Hue de Roteland, Protheselaus, ed. A. J. Holden, vol. 2, Anglo-Norman Text Society, 47–49 (London, 1989–93), 118, line 10734. The sudden appearance of the word in French and Latin forms at the end of the twelfth century may well be a consequence of English royal exploitation of underage heirs, but its earliest occurrences clearly pre-date John’s reign.
7 It should be noted that the first occurrence of the word in English royal records relates to money paid in 1194 for the marriage of a Gloucestershire boy heir “where he may not be disparaged”; it does not concern a girl. Pipe Roll of 6 Richard I, 238.
8 Latin text in Holt, Magna Carta, 425 (translation by David Crouch).
9 Holt, Magna Carta, 452, 453.
10 See observations in Frank Barlow, William Rufus (London: Eyre Methuen, 1983), 255–56, noting Orderic Vitalis’s comments about the excessive fines demanded by Rufus from his barons. See also Judith A. Green, The Government of England Under Henry I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 84–86, and particularly James C. Holt, “Feudal Society and the Family in Early Medieval England: IV. The Heiress and the Alien,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 35 (1985), 24–25, who lists the social disparities between Henry I’s servants and the noble brides they were awarded but does not see significant resistance to the practice at the time.
11 Raoul de Cambrai, ed. and trans. Sarah Kay (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), lines 214–16.
12 Geoffrey Gaimar, L’Estoire des Engleis, ed. Alexander Bell, 3 vols., Anglo-Norman Text Society, 14–16 (1960), lines 97–167. As noted in Holt, “Feudal Society and the Family in Early Medieval England: IV. The Heiress and the Alien,” 25.
13 Garin le Loherenc, ed. Anne Iker-Gittleman, 3 vols., Classiques franc¸ais du moyen âge, 117–19 (Paris: Champion, 1996–97), 1: lines 2617–21.
14 Le Roman de Thèbes, ed. Francine Mora-Lebrun (Paris: Lettres Gothiques, 1995), lines 4256–29.
15 Holt, “Feudal Society and the Family in Early Medieval England,” 26–28.
16 Francisque Michel, ed., Histoire des ducs de Normandie et des rois d’Angleterre (Paris: Société de l’histoire de France, 1840), 149. The “Magna Carta of Cheshire” granted by Earl Ranulf III to his tenants in mid-1215 deals with disparagement (clause 8): “Neither a widow nor an heir should be married where disparagement occurs (disparigetur), but by permission and gift of their family.” Barraclough, ed., Charters of the Anglo-Norman Earls of Chester, 389.
17 See the review of the issue in Sue Sheridan Walker, “Free Consent and Marriage of Feudal Wards in Medieval England,” Journal of Medieval History, 8 (1982), 123–34. Those disappointed men who bought the marriages of wards who then refused to marry as directed were offered financial compensation from the ward’s estate.
18 Other later thirteenth-century attacks on the king’s alleged misuse of grants of marriages focused on the grants to “aliens,” unworthy foreign favorites. Matthew Paris was a writer particularly exercised by this issue. Scott L. Waugh, “Marriage, Class and Royal Lordship in England Under Henry III,” Viator, 16 (1985), 181–82, 202–3.
19 On the Hotot papers, see Edmund King, “Estate Records of the Hotot family,” in idem, ed., A Northamptonshire Miscellany, Northamptonshire Record Society, 32 (Northampton, 1983), 1–58.
38 Responsio ad predictas
Militi miles salutem. Similis rerum omnium disposicio2 communi debet ordinari consilio, set tamen res ille tangant et exigant periculum vestrum. Michi vestris literis significastis quod non minus quam me alios tangit et solicitat. Cum meam filiam3 coniungamus sic ut de ipsa idem casum eveniat quo et vos gravari pertimescitis. Non regis set regni deo dante constitucio servabitur, [quam]4 rex5 et predecessores [eius]6 nobis concesserunt.7 Materia [in]8 eorum cartis continetur quod filias nostras sine dispargacione maritare possimus. Deum testor—et per experienciam probare poteritis—quod in hoc negocio me fidelem habeatis auxiliarium et auxiliatorem. Ad quod dicam, vestra providencia, negocium istud commune profectum perducatur ad effectum, omnibus vestris commilitonibus consilium et auxilium vobis inperpendentibus. Valete.
A reply to the previous letter
To a knight, a knight [sends] greetings. The appropriate outcome of all matters should be decided by common deliberation, but nevertheless those matters might concern and involve your own peril. You told me in your letter that it touches and concerns others no less than me. Since we are marrying off my daughter, the same circumstance may occur as regards her that you fear may affect you. The constitution—not, God willing, of the king, but of the realm—will be preserved, [which] the king and his predecessors granted to us. The matter is included in their charters: that we can marry off our daughters without disparagement. God is my witness—and you can prove this by past experience—that you may count on me in this business as a faithful aid and assistant. To which, may I say, this common business may be brought to an effective conclusion by your prudence, bearing in mind the aid and counsel given you by all your fellow knights. Farewell.
The central issue of this letter—disparagement (the marriage of a person of noble family to one of lesser rank)—is also the focus of DOCUMENT 37, where it is discussed in full. Both letters also dwell on the insecurity and even paranoia of the landowning classes as to the king’s intentions concerning Magna Carta. Here the knights have heard rumors that the king may not honor the provisions of Magna Carta, although it was reissued by Henry III’s advisers and ministers during his minority in 1217 and again in 1225. In fact, no such thing was contemplated by the king, but that it was feared is evident enough from this letter. The clauses of Magna Carta had already, by 1220, become catch-phrases for the politically active among the aristocracy and urban classes in their local courts. In 1226, for example, the knights of Lincolnshire were in hot dispute with their sheriff about just how Magna Carta affected the regularity of the sessions of the county court.9 Documents 37 and 38, therefore, though probably written as classroom composition exercises, offer glimpses into the psychological world of the early thirteenth-century knights and their families.
1 Add. 8167, fol. 106r.
2 dispocicio in MS.
3 mea filia in MS.
4 Word inserted to preserve the sense of the passage.
5 reg’ in MS.
6 Word inserted to preserve the sense of the passage.
7 concessores ruunt in MS.
8 Word inserted to preserve the sense of the passage.
9 Holt, Magna Carta, 390–93.