In the middle of the night between Tuesday, 31 December 1325 and Wednesday, 1 January 1326, an 80-year-old woman called Alis Pursere passed away a day and a half after falling down the stairs in her home in the London parish of St Mary Colechurch. Alis received the last rites before she died, and was survived by her husband Richard. In cases of death by misadventure, the value of the inanimate object which caused the accident had to be paid as a fine to the king and was called deodand, ‘gift to God’. The staircase down which Alis slipped was valued at 4d by the jurors who investigated her death.1 A few hours after Alis’s death and 75 miles away, two men called Richard Grene and Wauter Somery, who was known by the nickname ‘Watte’, approached the village of Haughley, 2 miles from Stowmarket in Suffolk. They were leading an expensive dapple-grey palfrey horse and carrying its saddle on a cart. The men had set off from the royal manor-house of Sheen on the River Thames west of London a few days before, and had now, after almost 90 miles, reached the end of their journey. John of Dunchurch (Warwickshire) and Thomas Wheler, known as ‘Thomme’ or Tom in modern spelling, both carters, also approached Haughley on 1 January 1326. For the last three days, each man had driven a cart pulled by five horses and full of military equipment: a hundred aketons (padded jerkins often worn under armour), a hundred basinets (a kind of helmet), and a hundred pairs of gauntlets, all of which they were taking to the king.
Anneis May – ‘Anneis’ or ‘Anneys’ was the fourteenth-century spelling of the name Agnes – was already in the village of Haughley with her husband Roger. The couple came from the area of Lindsey in Lincolnshire, and their friends called them Annote and Hogge. Anneis was a talented seamstress who in January 1325 had stitched shirts for the two most powerful men in the country, the king and his chamberlain.2 Her husband Roger ‘Hogge’ May had worked in the royal household as a valet of King Edward II’s chamber since 1324 or earlier, and on 5 December 1325 Edward broke with convention and hired Anneis as one of his chamber valets too. It was unheard of for any royal or noble household in the fourteenth century to hire a woman in such a position. Great households, even those headed by women, consisted entirely of men, except the lady’s personal attendants and the nurses of any small children. Rather remarkably, Edward seemingly was an early believer in the concept of equal pay for women, and Anneis May received the same wages as her husband and all the other thirty or more male valets of the royal chamber: 3d a day. In the fourteenth century, women were usually only paid half of what men received.3 On 1 January 1326, Anneis May received the wages of 7s (84d) she was owed for the first twenty-eight days of her employment, and with her husband, worked in the king’s couche chambre or bedchamber. ‘Valet’ is a difficult word to translate and in the fourteenth century had many different meanings, but in this context basically meant a servant of low to middling rank.
King Edward was halfway through the nineteenth year of his reign, and was 41 years old. He spent the Feast of the Circumcision, 1 January 1326, in Haughley, and gave permission for two of his ‘bondmen’ – villeins or unfree tenants – of the village, Thomas Wright and William son of Laurence of Hoo, to take holy orders.4 The king appointed Sir Simon Warde as constable of the massive and important castle in Pontefract in distant Yorkshire on 3 January, ‘for the bridling of any malefactors in those parts’, and rather insultingly declared that the inhabitants of the county of Lancashire were ‘flighty and violent’ and in need of good leadership. He therefore ordered Simon Warde to choose the best man he could find to act as the county’s undersheriff.5
The Suffolk village of Haughley belonged by right to the queen, Isabella of France (c. 1295–1358), but the king had confiscated all his wife’s lands in September 1324 after he went to war against her brother King Charles IV of France (r. 1322–28), and Haughley was presently in Edward’s own hands. The palfrey horse brought to Edward in Haughley by Richard Grene and Watte Somery was a gift from his eldest and favourite niece Eleanor, Lady Despenser; it was the custom for the king to give and receive gifts on the Feast of the Circumcision. Eleanor sent letters to her uncle too, though her messenger who carried them to him, John Mot, arrived in Suffolk two days before Richard, Watte and the dapple-grey palfrey. Lady Despenser, born in October 1292 and now 33 years old, just eight years younger than her uncle, had married Hugh Despenser in May 1306 when she was 13 and he about 17. Twenty years later, Hugh was the king’s chamberlain with responsibility for controlling access to Edward, and the man who had really been in charge of the English government for the previous few years.
Hugh Despenser was the son of the earl of Winchester (Hugh Despenser the Elder, born in 1261 and still alive in 1326), grandson of the late earl of Warwick and step-grandson of the late earl of Norfolk, a nobleman of high birth, and a pirate and an extortionist. He was present with Edward II in Suffolk at Christmas 1325 and the beginning of 1326. It is beyond doubt that the king loved Despenser and was highly dependent on him, and quite possible that the two men were lovers. The queen of England, Isabella of France, loathed and feared Hugh Despenser, and had sworn to destroy him. Edward refused to send Despenser away from court as Isabella demanded, and so the queen refused to return to England from her brother Charles IV’s court in Paris, or to permit her and Edward’s 13-year-old son Edward of Windsor, heir to the English throne and in her custody in her homeland, to return either. Such was the state of affairs in England at the start of 1326.
Edward II had until very recently been at war with France, and still expected his brother-in-law Charles IV to invade his kingdom at any moment. Besides the king of France, the enemy Edward feared most was Roger Mortimer of Wigmore in Herefordshire, an English baron in his late 30s who had escaped from the Tower of London in the summer of 1323 and was currently at the French court making threatening overtures in Edward’s direction. On 3 January 1326, the king ordered Roger’s mother Margaret Mortimer, née Fiennes to be sent to Elstow Abbey in Bedfordshire as a punishment because she had supposedly been holding ‘meetings of suspected persons’ in Worcester and Radnor. Edward must have changed his mind or released Margaret very soon, however, as two months later he told her to make repairs to Radnor Castle (in Powys, Wales).6 Edward realised that Roger Mortimer and his allies on the Continent had plenty of allies in England and Wales as well, and his concern is apparent in his order on 3 January to many dozens of men in ports all along the coast of England to ‘search in all places where ships put in … and to arrest all men carrying letters prejudicial to the crown, and send such letters with all speed to the king’.7
With the king at Haughley in early January 1326 was his master carpenter Jack Cressing, who often travelled with Edward and who received 6d a day in wages. Jack came from Essex, and his father John Cressing was also a master carpenter and worked for the king until November 1324 or later. Jack had eight journeymen working under him: brothers Thomme and Watte Cadewelle, Adam of London, Jack of Lincoln, Robert Albon, John Hardyng, Robert of Bedford and Thomme of Edwinstowe (a village in Sherwood Forest). Two sawyers called Thomme Crabbe and Willecok Bovyndon from Langley in Hertfordshire, and the woodcutter Wille Stonaysshe, completed the team. The king had left Jack Cressing behind when he departed from Dover Castle in Kent in September 1325 and charged him with ‘putting right the defects’ in the castle, a task Jack and his men had completed by 24 November when they were set to work enlarging the hall at Edward’s manor of Cippenham in Berkshire. Earlier in 1325, they had constructed a new chapel at Henley just outside Guildford in Surrey – the king sent 115 gallons (522 litres) of ale to them and six ditchers also working there – and before Christmas 1325 Adam of London and Watte Cadewelle worked for twenty-one days repairing a ship called La Blome on the River Thames while their colleagues did some work on the king’s bedchamber at the Tower of London.8
The eight journeymen carpenters working under Jack Cressing were paid 4d a day. In November 1325, Edward II bought cloth from the London draper Simon Swanland and had elbow-length cloaks made for all nine men which were striped vermilion and black and were decorated with yellow, white, black and vermilion threads. The cloths cost a pricy 46s 8d each, the equivalent of about four and a half months’ wages for each journeyman – vermilion and black were both very costly dyes – so this was a hugely generous gift. By late April 1326, Thomme of Edwinstowe had found alternative employment (or perhaps had retired or died), and Jack of Lincoln’s brother Henry of Lincoln joined the team in his place. Henry had already worked for the king in October and November 1324, travelling the 170 miles from a job in Ravensdale, Derbyshire to Portchester, Hampshire to join Edward, and sometime before February 1325 complained that he had been assaulted and robbed by twenty men in Derby.9 Two other men made the same complaint, so apparently the twenty were a gang who preyed on whatever victims they could find. Jack Cressing the master carpenter was assaulted in July 1320 in the Essex village of Ingatestone a few miles from his home; England in the fourteenth century was often a violent and dangerous place.10
It was extremely common in the 1320s for men to go into the profession their father had practised, as Jack Cressing did, and for brothers to work together, as Thomme and Watte Cadewelle and Jack and Henry of Lincoln did. Three brothers from Warwickshire, John, Henry and Thomas ‘Thomelyn’ Palington, were all hobelars, men-at-arms on horseback. With at least three and sometimes five other hobelars, the Palington brothers formed the personal bodyguard of the king’s powerful chamberlain Hugh Despenser. On Friday, 29 June 1325, the three Palingtons and their colleague Robert the Irishman were attacked inside a house belonging to one Robert Gumby on Fleet Street in London. They were assaulted and robbed by twenty-three men, ten of whom were fishmongers.11 This may have been an indirect attack on the hated Despenser, or it may have been a random attack, or something personal against the four men. John, Henry and Thomelyn Palington, Robert the Irishman, Henry the Lombard from Italy, and Roger atte Watre from London left court with Hugh Despenser on 2 January 1326 and rode the 20 miles from Haughley to the village of Winfarthing in Norfolk, a manor held by Despenser. Edward II gave the six hobelars a gift of 20s to be shared out among themselves when they left court, and later in the year thanked them for their excellent service in protecting Hugh Despenser. This was probably not an easy job; Despenser was widely loathed, and in November 1325 rumours that he had been assassinated swept the country.
Still at Haughley, Edward sent his chamber valet Watte Pramptout to buy yarns to make fishing nets for him, an activity the unconventional king enjoyed. He had gone fishing by himself on the River Medway at Tonbridge in Kent in August 1324, borrowing a boat from a local fisherman, Henry, and in April 1325 went out on the lake near Beaulieu Abbey in Hampshire with a fisherman called Jack Bere and seven others.12 The yarns cost 23d. Edward also sent another chamber valet called Jack Pyk to Eleyne Glaswreghte, a glasswright who ran her own successful business in London, and Jack bought twenty-eight glass bowls and other containers from her at a cost of 4s. The bowls were used to keep rosewater and other types of water (not specified) in Edward II’s bedchamber at the Palace of Westminster. Red and white roses had been bought from a man called Syme in London a few months previously to make rosewater.
Women were often economically active in the England of the 1320s, ran their own businesses, and sold produce. In 1325/6, Edward II and his household bought sail-cloths from Margery Faderwyf and Sabyne Warin of London; fish from numerous fisherwomen along the River Thames including Isabelle Fisher and Alis atte Churche; rope from Maud Roper of London and Anneis of Portsmouth; ale from Alis Coleman, Anneis atte Churche, Maud Taillour and others; wood from Cristine Wytherlok of Greenwich; leather from Cecile Maar of Lenton near Nottingham, Margery Muleward of Nottingham and Isabelle Lynne of King’s Lynn; thread from Hawys Turel and Katherine Crewes of South Elmham in Suffolk; oxen and cows from Emme atte Gate of Mortlake; nails from Isabelle atte Churche of Winchester; carthorses from Anneis of Kimbolton; carts from Alis Lely and Eleine Lambley of Nottingham and Maud atte Rode of Henley-on-Thames (Alis and Eleine both worked as carters); hemp from Bele Beneyt, Anneis Rode and Alis Poyntel of Preston in Kent, Johane of Rochester, Alis Moundel of Sandwich and Isabelle Bonbrigg of Melton Mowbray; fishing nets from Emme Palmer, Alis Brewere, Nelle Prat and Emmote atte Cros of Walsingham in Norfolk; cheese from Anneis la Deye of Isleworth; and others. Women generally took their husband’s name on marriage and kept that name until their death, though Anneis la Deye’s husband was called Thomas le Botiler. ‘La Deye’ translates as ‘the dairy-maid’ in the variant of medieval French used in the king’s accounts, and ‘le Botiler’ means ‘the butler’, so we have an example of a married couple in different jobs who each used their occupation as their name (and ‘butler’ in the fourteenth century meant either a bottle-maker or a cup-bearer). Margery Faderwyf ’s surname means ‘Fader’s wife’. Many people bore their occupation as their surname, such as the sailor Hobbe Shypman, others their place of origin, such as the king’s carpenters Jack of Lincoln and Robert of Bedford, and others the part of their native village where their house stood, such as Geffrei of the Brugg or ‘Geoffrey of the bridge’, Jack in the Lane and Robyn atte (‘at’) Lane, Wauter atte Park, Alis atte Churche, Emmote atte Cros, Geffrei atte Chapele, Roger atte Watre, Henry atte Wode (wood), William atte Grene, Emme atte Gate, John atte Ponde, and so on.
Thomas of Brotherton (born 1 June 1300), earl of Norfolk, the elder of the king’s two much younger half-brothers, was at court with Edward II from 27 December 1325 or earlier until 7 February 1326.13 There were nine English earls alive in 1326 plus three underage heirs to earldoms, and it was the highest hereditary rank in the country after the king, as the titles of duke and marquess were not yet used in England (except that the king was also duke of Aquitaine in France).14 Edward spent three days from 5 to 7 January visiting the earl of Norfolk’s manor of North Lopham, 17 miles from Haughley. He was somewhat estranged from both his half-brothers, who had been shunted out of power by the king’s all-powerful chamberlain Hugh Despenser, and the other brother, Edmund of Woodstock, earl of Kent (b. 5 August 1301), had joined Queen Isabella in Paris and was now also refusing to return to England. Edmund married the widowed Margaret Comyn, née Wake, sister of Lord Wake, in mid-December 1325 without Edward II’s permission. The king ordered the seizure of Margaret’s lands and goods on hearing of the wedding, though changed his mind and gave them back to her on 27 January 1326.15 Thomas of Brotherton and Edmund of Woodstock were the sons of King Edward I’s (r. 1272–1307) old age: they were born when the king was over 60, and their mother was his second wife, Marguerite of France (1278/9–1318). Edward II’s mother was the long-dead Spanish queen of England, Leonor or Eleanor of Castile (c. 1241–90).
A clerk called Rauf (Ralph in modern spelling) of Nottingham died on Tuesday, 7 January, the day after the feast of the Epiphany, in the home of James Beauflour in the London parish of St Martin Vintry. At the hour of Vespers or sunset on 30 December 1325, Rauf quarrelled with a fishmonger called William Turk, apprentice and relative of Godwin Turk, outside a tavern. William Turk hit Rauf of Nottingham hard over the head with a shovel – why he was carrying a shovel around with him was not explained – and inflicted a wound 7 inches deep, ‘reaching to the brain’, as the jurors appointed to investigate solemnly declared. Rauf was carried into James Beauflour’s house nearby and lingered for over a week with his serious head injury. William fled and was never caught.16 James Beauflour himself was a well-off vintner and the collector of customs in the port of London. He leased a tavern belonging to Thomas Drinkewatere at the north end of London Bridge, called, not very creatively, ‘Drinkewaterestaverne’. Probably this was the tavern near his home where William Turk attacked Rauf of Nottingham. James and his wife Emme had sons James, John, Thomas, William and Hugh (a fishmonger, d. 1347) and daughters Isabel and Katherine, and owned 12 acres of land in Stepney, then called ‘Stebenhuthe’ or ‘Stebbenheth’. The Beauflours lived near a wharf called La Lauenderebrigge or ‘The Laundress’s Bridge’ owned by a John White, and in November 1324 James was one of the neighbours questioned about a woman who had drowned in the Thames under the wharf. He wrote his will in September 1328, and probably died soon afterwards.17
The king’s minstrel Ivo Vala, who played a string instrument called the citole which was not dissimilar to a modern guitar, returned to court on 9 January. Ivo had accompanied the king’s 12-year-old son and heir to France on 12 September 1325 when Edward of Windsor went to pay homage to his uncle Charles IV for the duchy of Aquitaine in south-west France and the county of Ponthieu in northern France, territories ruled by the English kings. (Edward II inherited Aquitaine from his father and ultimately from his great-great-grandmother Eleanor of Aquitaine [d. 1204], and Ponthieu from his mother Queen Leonor, who although Spanish had a French mother.) Ivo Vala and his wife Annote had travelled together from London, where they lived, to Dover before Ivo and the rest of the party sailed to France with the king’s son in September 1325, and Edward II gave Annote 10s for her expenses.
Presumably Ivo performed for the king on his return to court four months later; Edward, in common with most medieval kings, loved music. In 1325/6, his other court minstrels included Jennan, Henry Newsom and Wille Bromley the harpers, Little Aleyn and Laurence the hornblowers, Master Richard Dorre and Thomas who both played the vielle (a string instrument similar to the modern violin), and William, King of Heralds. Mention is made in the king’s accounts in 1325 of ‘the book of interludes’, presumably a book of music, which Edward had bound in leather.18
On Tuesday, 14 January 1326, Edward II dined in the park of South Elmham in Suffolk, a manor which belonged to the bishop of Norwich. The current bishop was William Airmyn or Ayreminne, elected by Pope John XXII a few months earlier, to the king’s great annoyance; Edward had wished the bishopric to be given to his chancellor Robert Baldock, archdeacon of Middlesex, and refused to accept Airmyn’s election. The king seems to have gone out of his way to feud with some of the English bishops between 1322 and 1326, and William Airmyn was no exception. Unwilling to face the capricious king’s wrath, Airmyn failed to respond to a royal summons and hence was not at South Elmham while the king stayed there. He later fled abroad and joined Queen Isabella.
Hugh Despenser’s confessor, the Carmelite friar Richard Bliton, served the king as he ate in South Elmham park, and after his alfresco meal, Edward sat in the garden next to his private chambers. Presumably it was a mild day, though Edward enjoyed the outdoors even in the depths of winter: he went swimming in the River Thames near Windsor in February 1303, and on 26 December 1322 sat in his garden in York and listened to two women singing for him.19 Winters of the early fourteenth century tended to be harsh, and the Little Ice Age is generally assumed to have begun around 1300. In 1308/09, people walked across the frozen River Thames from London to Southwark, and a London annalist vividly described the Great Frost of 1309/10: ‘There was such cold and such masses and piles of ice on the Thames and everywhere else that the poor were overcome by excessive cold.’20 The winters of 1312/13, 1313/14 and 1316/17 were also bitterly cold, and in 1322 snow lay on the ground for most of the first three months of the year.21
On 6 December 1325, there is a reference in the London Assize of Nuisance to the ‘wintry conditions’. John Hemenhale complained to the Assize that the earthen wall between his property and his neighbour John Havering’s in the parish of St Ethelburga within Bishopsgate was ‘ruinous and broken down so that men and dogs, pigs and other animals can come in and out freely’. The Assize ordered that repairs were to be carried out within forty days when the weather was more suitable for outside work.22 John Flete, keeper of the king’s possessions at the Tower of London, paid 20d just before Christmas 1325 to have a piece of stag leather turned into a pair of gloves for Edward, and the king had half a dozen boats stacked with firewood brought to his residences in London and Westminster, more evidence of the cold weather.
In London on 14 January 1326, John Toly, servant of the alderman Henry Gisors, died in the parish of St Martin Vintry. In the middle of the night, John rose naked from his bed to answer a call of nature, and decided that it was a good idea to do so out of the window of his solar (a room on an upper floor often reached by ladder) 30 feet above the ground. This reveals much about hygiene and public sanitation, or rather the lack thereof, in the largest city in England in the 1320s. Even in 1309 Edward II had complained that Londoners simply removed the ordure from their homes by throwing it into the street. He set the fine for failing to take waste properly to the River Thames or outside the city at 40d and the fine for a second offence at 80d, at least a month’s income for most people. The existence of a road in London called Shitebournelane or Shitteborwelane (now called Sherborne Lane) gives another indication of levels of cleanliness and hygiene in the city, though there were at least three public latrines in London in the fourteenth century, located at the top of St Vedast Lane (now called Foster Lane) near Cheapside, on London Bridge, and at Queenhithe.23 John Toly lost his balance while relieving himself and fell out of his window, and ‘crushed his neck and other members’. His body was discovered at cockcrow the following morning by a neighbour, Robert the Welshman, and no fewer than thirty jurors went to John’s street to investigate his death. The thirty included Robert Crokkere, a maker or seller of pots; John Coupere, a maker or repairer of wooden casks and barrels; Moris Peleter, a furrier; the unusually-named Copin Barber; and William Parmonter, a tailor. Henry Gisors, the alderman for whom John Toly had worked, was one of the neighbours questioned about John’s sudden death.24
An inquisition was held at Corfe Castle in Dorset on 17 January, a royal castle in Edward II’s own possession, to discover what repairs were needed there. It reveals that the castle had three gates, one called Middelghete or ‘middle gate’, one with a chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary inside it, and a ‘great outside gate’ with a bridge leading to it. There was also a ‘long hall’, a chamber called Le Parlour, a ‘high tower with chambers and garderobes’, another tower called Cocayngne or ‘Cockayne’ in modern spelling, and a chamber for the queen with its own porch.25 Edward II kept some of the ‘Contrariants’, as he called the men who had taken part in a rebellion against him and Hugh Despenser in 1321/2, in captivity at Corfe Castle. Probably sometime in 1326, Sir Robert Walkfare escaped from Corfe by killing a porter called William Foulere.26 Sir Hugh Audley, another Contrariant, also escaped from Nottingham Castle in 1326.27 Audley, from a noble family of Stratton Audley in Oxfordshire, was the king’s former infatuation, whom Edward had married to his niece Margaret de Clare (Eleanor Despenser’s sister) in 1317, but Audley turned against Edward after Hugh Despenser rose in the king’s favour and joined the Contrariant rebellion. He was imprisoned in March 1322. His father Sir Hugh Audley the elder, also imprisoned as a Contrariant, died still in prison soon before 9 March 1326, leaving his elder son James Audley as his heir.28
The king’s household steward, Sir Thomas Blount, left court on or soon after 8 January 1326 and sent Edward a letter from Leicester on the 17th, stating that his wife Juliana Hastings was ill and therefore he would be delayed returning to the king. In fact, he was back at court on 20 January, in Norwich, so had travelled the 115 miles from Leicester very rapidly.29 Thomas’s wife Juliana, Lady Hastings, was born in 1303 or 1304 as the daughter of Sir Thomas Leyburne (d. 1307) and Alice Toeni (d. 1324), and was the older half-sister of the heir to the earldom of Warwick and was herself heir to her grandparents Lord and Lady Leyburne, sizeable landowners in Kent. Her son from her first marriage, Laurence Hastings, born in March 1321, was heir to the earldom of Pembroke. Juliana’s grandmother Juliana the elder, Lady Leyburne, was born sometime before 1253 when her mother Joan d’Auberville married her second husband, inherited her father Henry de Sandwich’s lands, married William Leyburne (d. 1310) in or before 1265, and was still alive in 1326.30 The elderly Lady Leyburne was imprisoned in Canterbury in 1318 for aiding an outlaw called Robert Coleman atte Mersh, but sent the king a petition claiming that she and four men imprisoned on the same charge had been ‘indicted by malice’. Edward II released them.31
On 19 January 1326, Sir Roger Belers or Bellars, a baron of the exchequer and a lawyer, departed from his Leicestershire manor of Kirkby Bellars and rode towards the town of Leicester, where he had arranged to dine with the king’s cousin Henry of Lancaster, earl of Leicester. As Belers rode through the village of Rearsby 5 miles into his journey, he was attacked and killed by a large group of men who drove a knife into his heart.32 Belers had been a close ally of Thomas, earl of Lancaster and Leicester, Edward II’s cousin whom the king executed in 1322, and afterwards became close to Hugh Despenser. It is sometimes thought that his murder was an indirect attack on Despenser, but as Belers was on his way to dine with Thomas of Lancaster’s brother and heir Henry – certainly no friend of Despenser – when he was murdered, his allegiances were evidently somewhat complicated. His murder is far more likely to have been a result of a local Leicestershire vendetta, though it would take some time for the wheels of justice to turn and for the murderers’ identities to be revealed. Sir Roger Belers left his widow Alis and their 7-year-old son Roger as his heir, and had a younger son, Thomas. Peculiarly, both little Belers boys had already married by 3 May 1325, and their wives were sisters, the daughters and heirs of Sir Richard Ryvere and Maud Heriz. Equally peculiarly, the Ryvere sisters were both called Margaret. Alis Belers was granted a third of her late husband’s lands as dower, as was customary for widows, and Edward II gave her custody of the other two-thirds until her son came of age. Much her husband’s junior, Alis lived until October 1368.33
Edward II, via his almoner Adam Brome, founded Oriel College at the University of Oxford on 21 January 1326, and called it the ‘Hall of the Blessed Mary’. The foundation charter says that love of the Virgin Mary and a desire to increase her ‘divine cult’ motivated Edward to establish the college, and the king declared his zeal for sound learning and religious knowledge. The name ‘Oriel’ comes from a house called La Oriole granted to the college by Edward’s son and successor a few years later, after his deposition, and in the twenty-first century Oriel College still exists and is the fifth oldest college of the University of Oxford and the oldest royal foundation. Its startlingly long official name is ‘The Provost and Scholars of the House of the Blessed Mary the Virgin in Oxford, commonly called Oriel College, of the Foundation of Edward the Second of famous memory, sometime King of England’. Edward intended Oriel as a ‘college of scholars studying in theology and dialectic’ and gave his foundation a messuage (a house with outbuildings and some land), five shops, five solars and a cellar in the parish of St Mary in Oxford, and another messuage in the suburbs of the town, called ‘La Perilloshalle’.34
The king heard about Roger Belers’ murder on 24 January; the news took five days to travel the 105 miles from Rearsby near Leicester to the village of Horsham Saint Faith near Norwich where Edward was staying. He ordered his steward Sir Thomas Blount and two other men to investigate what had happened.35 Edward’s blacksmith John Cole paid 2d for twelve candelabras to be used in the king’s chamber in Norwich (this may be a clerical error in the king’s account for 2s, as it seems improbably cheap) on the day Edward heard of Belers’ murder. A shipwright of Yarmouth called Gerveys, or Gervais in modern spelling, was given 20s for his expenses travelling to the forest of Tonbridge in Kent and back to fetch timber for a ship at Yarmouth called La Crystofre or ‘The Christopher’. This was a round trip of some 250 miles. Wille Snoryng, sailor of Lynn (now called King’s Lynn), sent the king masts, cables and other equipment for ships and was paid 40s, and Edward’s fisherman Esmon Fisher, who was always known by the nickname ‘Monde’, received 3s from the king to buy himself ‘boots for the water’.
Around curfew – probably eight p.m. in winter – on Sunday, 26 January, a group of people left the tavern of Henry Deumars in the Langbourn ward of London. They were William of Guildford in Surrey, a webbe (weaver) called John Joye, Nichol the barber, and Nichol’s mistress Anneis Houdan. The four reached Anneis’s home, and once there, she, John and Nichol stabbed William of Guildford through the heart with a ‘long and thin’ knife and killed him, presumably in order to rob him. John and Nichol carried William’s body down St Swithin’s Lane towards the River Thames and dumped it outside a house belonging to Sir Henry Scrope. A neighbour found the body and altered the authorities, and the two men and Anneis tried to flee, but were immediately caught and sent to Newgate prison.36
Andrew Medestede, sheriff of Surrey, held an inquisition at Snailslinch near Farnham on 30 January, and accused a William Cosyn of ‘doing waste in a grange’ to the damage of 40s, in a sheepfold to the damage of 20s, and of destroying sixty oaks worth 60s and ten apple trees worth 10s. Anther inquisition taken before the mayor and bailiffs of Lincoln at the end of January revealed that they had recently sent a tun of wine from Lincoln to Chester on a cart pulled by two horses, but a cartwheel broke near Nottingham and the wine spilt all over the road.37 A tun was 252 gallons or 1,145 litres, so that was a lot of spilt wine, and a great deal of money wasted.
From 26 to 31 January 1326, the king stayed at the royal manor of Burgh near Woodbridge in Suffolk. His master carpenter Jack Cressing and his team of eight carpenters, two sawyers and a woodcutter stayed behind at Burgh when Edward left and worked there until 1 April. An inquisition taken at Burgh reveals that the king had his own chamber there adjoining the great hall and that the queen’s chamber had its own chapel and its own bridge leading into the park. Another bridge to the park was located near the bakehouse, and there were two watchtowers, one inside the moat and one outside, ‘a chamber for the knights’, a large chapel, a granary, a dairy, a larder, a watermill, and a ‘great chamber’ outside the moat. Around the whole manor stood earth walls, and there was a park enclosed by fences.38 On 27 January, some of the king’s chamber valets made hedges around the manor of Burgh, and the king had pairs of white gloves bought for them all at 2d a pair.
Edward dined at Burgh with his sister-in-law Alice, née Hales, countess of Norfolk and the wife of his half-brother Thomas of Brotherton, on 30 January. The king gave 20s each to the two minstrels – Henry Newsom, harper, and Richardyn, citoler – who entertained them during their meal. Katherine of Micklefield managed to reach the king’s ear at Burgh on 31 January, when she asked him to exempt James of Micklefield – presumably her husband or brother – from being put on assizes or juries against his will. The king granted her request.39 Katherine had travelled a long way from home: Micklefield is a village near Leeds in Yorkshire, 185 miles from Burgh in Suffolk.