On the feast of the Purification, Sunday, 2 February 1326, a boy called Wauter or Walter Romsey, son of Margaret and John Romsey, was born in the Somerset village of Oakley.1 Little Walter was baptised in the church of Chilthorne Domer on the day of his birth, and a neighbour of the Romseys called John Turk was present and received a gift of a bow and three arrows from the infant’s father. John Doo, aged 43, was also there, and as he made his way to his home in Coker afterwards, he was attacked by robbers and wounded. Seventeen-year-old John Dommere attended a ‘grand feast’ in the town of Martock two days later which was hosted by John Fiennes, lord of the town, and the proud father John Romsey boasted to Dommere and others about the birth of his son.
The day after Walter’s birth, Robert Clavering was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and baptised in the church of St Nicholas.2 Robert’s mother was named Maud, and his 22-year-old father William Clavering dined with a man called Gilbert Wyndegates on the day of Robert’s birth and gave him a ‘good sword’ so that Gilbert would remember his son’s birth date years later when Robert needed to prove his age. Robert was heir to the manors of Yetlington and Callaly in Northumberland, though they were both ‘worth nothing because of the devastation of the Scots’, an indication of Edward II’s failure to protect the north of England against incursions from over the border throughout his reign. Robert’s grandfather Alan Clavering died in February 1328 when Robert was 2 years old, and his father William was dead by February 1335 when his mother Maud was pardoned for marrying her second husband without the necessary royal licence.3 Maud lived until November 1351, and Robert’s grandmother Isabel Clavering, remarkably, until May 1360. Robert Clavering himself also lived a long life: he died on 17 January 1394 shortly before his sixty-eighth birthday, during the reign of Edward II’s great-grandson Richard II (r. 1377–99), leaving his son John Clavering as his heir. At the end of the fourteenth century his two manors in Northumberland were still, or again, almost worthless because of ‘burnings and destruction by the Scots.’4
Other, more famous men born in England around 1326 were the great poet William Langland of The Vision of Piers Plowman fame, whose grandfather Peter Rokele was under-sheriff of Buckinghamshire in the 1320s and an adherent of the king’s powerful chamberlain Hugh Despenser; and the religious reformer John Wycliffe (d. 31 December 1384), doctor of theology from Oxford and founder of the Lollard movement.5 The astronomer Richard of Wallingford, born in the early 1290s, composed a work describing an original astronomical instrument almost certainly in 1326, and around the same time wrote his highly influential ‘Treatise on the Albion’. Perhaps in 1327 after he gained his bachelor’s degree in theology from Oxford, Richard began his great astronomical clock at St Albans, the oldest mechanical clock in the world for which we have detailed knowledge.6 And William Ockham of Surrey, the Franciscan friar after whom Ockham’s or Occam’s Razor is named, was born around 1287 and was active in the 1320s. Ockham was ordered to the court of Pope John XXII (born Jacques Duèse) in Avignon, southern France in 1324, and in 1325/6 a group of commissioners there examined his work for possible errors and heresies. He was cleared, but in 1328 Ockham declared one of John XXII’s teachings to be heretical and fled from the papal court to join John’s greatest enemy, the German emperor Ludwig of Bavaria (1282–1347). The pope ordered his arrest.7
King Edward II spent several days in early February 1326 at Walsingham in Norfolk, where a shrine to Our Lady stood which was one of the great pilgrim sites of medieval England. On 4 February, Edward ordered the sheriffs of all English counties to proclaim that it was now forbidden to take or send horses, armour, gold, silver or money out of the kingdom without his licence. An extra order was sent to the mayor and sheriffs of London that they should ‘diligently search’ any merchants leaving the city to ensure that they did not attempt to remove any of the items, or letters ‘prejudicial to the king or his subjects’.8 Edward did not trust the Londoners nor have a good relationship with the city, and London in the Middle Ages tended to be anti-royalist.
Edward’s wife Queen Isabella, at the court of her brother Charles IV in Paris, wrote a letter on 5 February to Walter Reynolds (d. 1327), archbishop of Canterbury. In it, she explained her reason for failing to return to her husband: she was terrified of his chamberlain and favourite Hugh Despenser, whom she called nostre mauvoillant, ‘our evil-wisher’. She stated that she wished nothing more than to return to the company of her husband, whom she referred to affectionately as ‘our very dear and very sweet lord and friend’, but that to do so would put her in life-threatening physical danger from Despenser, whom she described, correctly, as being in control of the king and his government.9 The queen was now 30 years old and had married Edward in Boulogne on 25 January 1308 in the presence of her father Philip IV of France, when she was only 12. Four years later, the royal couple conceived their eldest child Edward of Windsor, who was at the French court with his mother at the beginning of 1326 (whether under his own agency or not is a matter for speculation; he was only 13). The queen’s household servants, whom she could no longer afford to pay, trailed back to England from Paris in late 1325 and early 1326. Among them were the marshal of her hall, Robert Sendal, her huntsman Thomas Martel, and her cook Wille Balsham.
Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent fell on 5 February in 1326, the date of the queen’s letter to the archbishop of Canterbury. Meat was now forbidden and fish and seafood were on the menu until Easter, and fortunately for Edward II he loved both. Later in the year, he gave one of his household purveyors a bonus of 20s for bringing him crabs and prawns, and stated that ‘nothing has been so much to his taste for a long time’. In 1324/5, the king bought oysters from two oyster-mongers of London called Jack and Roger of Hatfield, and on another occasion paid eight women of Portchester in Hampshire 1s each for gathering them.10 The king spent 8s 6d in December 1325 for large quantities of salt, used to salt the meat of twenty-six pigs, sixty sheep and five containers full of beef, to be stored in the larders at Cippenham. This was a manor in Berkshire which Edward had inherited from his father’s cousin Edmund, earl of Cornwall (1249–1300) and Edmund’s widow Margaret (d. 1312).
Strict rules governed the sale of meat in the 1320s. No butcher in the city of London was allowed to cut any fresh meat for sale after the bells of St Paul’s rang for None, the ‘ninth hour’ or around three p.m., and any meat he had cut before None had to be sold before Vespers.11 The pork and beef belonging to John Perer, John Esmar and Reynald atte Watre was seized on one occasion in the early 1320s because the men were alleged to have sold it by candlelight after the hour of curfew. The punishment for selling rotten meat was to be locked into the pillory – a wooden contraption with spaces for the head and hands – and to have the meat burnt beneath you. This happened to William Clerk of Higham Ferrers in Northamptonshire in July 1320 when he offered for sale ‘putrid and poisonous’ meat from an animal that had died of disease. The pillory in London stood on Cornhill opposite a bakehouse and near a gaol called the Tun, and a letter of Edward II dated 2 May 1326 reveals that Tickford Priory in Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire had its own pillory which the prior used in cases of ‘infringement of assize of bread and ale’.12 In an age when most people did not have enough to eat and deaths from starvation were not uncommon, those who sold food to the public and broke the regulations were punished harshly and subjected to public ridicule. Bakers who sold bread of insufficient weight or ‘made of rotten materials’ were either dragged through the streets on a hurdle or locked into the pillory with a quantity of their bad dough hanging from their necks.13
On 7 February 1326, the king reached the Norfolk village of Harpley, near Coxford Priory, a house of Augustinian monks. Local resident Wille Carter, who really was a carter, worked for the prior of Coxford, and encountered the king personally on the road between Walsingham and Harpley. He lent Edward two carts which belonged to the prior for the use of the royal servant Jack Coppehouse, who was responsible for the brass vessels used in the royal household, and the carts were transferred to Jack’s possession in the king’s presence. Wille Carter received 12d for his trouble. Two days later, three heavy brass pots and two warming-pans were bought from Wille Colle of Lynn for 16s 4d and delivered to Coppehouse.
Stephen Alard, who came from an eminent naval family of Winchelsea in Sussex and was a former admiral of the western fleet and of the Cinque Ports, came to the king in person on 7 February to discuss certain unstated matters with him. The Alards were notorious for committing piracy in the English Channel, and Edward II accused Stephen and some of his relatives and associates of attacking and robbing a German ship off Harwich in 1322 and a Gascon ship off Sandwich in 1323. He soon pardoned them, however.14 A week after Alard’s visit, the king sent his chamber valet Jack Pyk and his sergeant-at-arms Rodrigo de Medyne to Stephen and his brother Robert Alard with 40s and orders for them to purchase a Spanish ship called La Seinte Katherine which had been shipwrecked in Winchelsea harbour. The king owned a ship called La Alianore la Despensere which he had named after his niece Eleanor Despenser (‘Alianore la Despensere’ was the contemporary spelling of her name) and which had also once been a Spanish ship, abandoned by its crew on the Isle of Wight in or before 1323 and taken to Portchester in Hampshire.15
The Spanish captain of La Seinte Katherine, ‘Senche Garsy’ – surely an English clerk’s attempt at writing Sancho Garcia – and the merchant whose goods were being transported on it before it was wrecked, Garsy Peres of Bayonne in the far south-west of France, had ridden the 120 miles from Winchelsea to Exning in Suffolk to inquire of Edward II in person if he wished to buy the ship. While they were at court, Sancho and Garsy took the opportunity to complain to the king about the behaviour of a nobleman called Ralph, Lord Basset of Drayton (Staffordshire). Basset, constable of Dover Castle, warden of the Cinque Ports and a cousin of Hugh Despenser, had commandeered La Seinte Katherine to transport all his horses and goods from Bordeaux to England, but had never paid Sancho for using his ship or compensated Garsy for removing Garsy’s goods to make space for his own. Edward gave the two men 100s in compensation.
At Harpley on the night of 7 February, Edward II sat next to the bed of his squire Oliver of Bordeaux ‘a little before midnight’. Oliver in fact came not from Bordeaux as per his name but from the town of Morlaàs, capital of the ancient region of Béarn in the far south-west of France, 115 miles from Bordeaux. He was the son of the curiously-named Lop-Bergunh, a merchant of Morlaàs. His elder brother, also called Lop-Bergunh, was their father’s heir and was mayor of Bordeaux in 1318/19, and they had two other brothers called Guilhem and Domengeon.16 Piers Gaveston, the long-dead companion and almost certainly the lover of Edward II, killed by some of the king’s barons in June 1312, also came from Béarn. The kings of England ruled the south-west of France from the middle of the twelfth century – when Edward’s great-great-grandparents Eleanor of Aquitaine and the future King Henry II of England married – until the fifteenth. Numerous Gascons made their way to England, both in Edward II’s reign and long before and after, and Gascon men working for Edward in 1326 included Isarn Lanneplaà, Simon Montbreton, Burgeys Tilh and Garsy Pomit.
Oliver of Bordeaux rose high in the king’s favour, and Edward arranged a favourable marriage for him with the noblewoman Maud Trussell, née Mainwaring, a widow with sons called John, William and Warin Trussell. The king personally attended Oliver and Maud’s wedding ‘at the door of the chapel within the park of Woodstock’, a royal palace near Oxford, on 26 June 1317 (medieval marriages were solemnised at the church door, not inside). Oliver arrived in England in 1308 or earlier, and was still alive in June 1360 and dead by February 1365. His wife Maud was half a year old in June 1289 when her father Warin Mainwaring’s inquisition post mortem was held, and Oliver was probably about the same age.17 Oliver held almost 500 acres of land in Eton, Old Windsor and Windsor, houses and gardens in Windsor and pasture for 500 sheep and 12 cows in Windsor Forest, and owned houses in a London street near the Tower of London then called Sevyng Lane, later Seething Lane and the home of Samuel Pepys. As late as March 1473, 163 years after Edward II gave it to him, a plot of land in Eton was said to be ‘sometime of Oliver of Bordeaux’.18
The word ‘midnight’, or la mye noet as it was written in the dialect of French then used by the English elite (modern French: minuit) was not so much a precise clock time in the early fourteenth century as a rather vague expression meaning ‘the middle of the night’. Generally in 1326, people told the time by the canonical hours, in three-hour chunks: Prime, around 6am; Terce, ‘the third hour’, around 9am; Sext, the sixth hour, midday; None, the ninth hour, 3pm or simply mid-afternoon; Vespers, sunset; Compline, 9pm; Matins, midnight. Edward II’s father Edward I died ‘at the ninth hour’ or in mid-afternoon on 7 July 1307, and Edward II himself was said to have returned to England also ‘about the ninth hour’ on 7 February 1308 after marrying Isabella of France in Boulogne. When he and Isabella returned to England after a two-month visit to the queen’s homeland on Monday, 16 July 1313, they came ashore at Vespers, i.e. sunset.19 It was not common to state a date as, for example, ‘22 June 1326’; instead, it would be given as ‘Sunday before the Nativity of St John the Baptist in the nineteenth year of the reign of King Edward, son of King Edward’. The 16th of July 1313 was written in the chancery rolls as ‘Monday before St Margaret the Virgin in the seventh year of his [Edward II’s] reign’, and 7 February 1308 was ‘Wednesday after the Purification, 1 Edward II’. Edward I died on 7 July 1307 and thus Edward II’s first regnal year ran from 8 July 1307 to 7 July 1308, and his nineteenth from 8 July 1325 to 7 July 1326. The usual style of writing dates in England in 1326 did not have the virtue of brevity. To work out any date recorded by a contemporary, one must know the date of the feast or holy day referred to, and the date and year when the reigning king acceded to the throne. Edward II was born on the feast day of St Mark the Evangelist in the twelfth year of his father’s reign, or 25 April 1284. His son and heir Edward of Windsor was born at Windsor Castle on the Monday after St Martin in the sixth year of his reign, or 13 November 1312; his second son John of Eltham was born at the palace of Eltham in Kent on the feast of the Assumption in Edward’s tenth regnal year, or 15 August 1316.
At Gaywood in Norfolk (another manor of William Airmyn, the absent bishop of Norwich) on 8 February, the king ordered all the sheriffs of England and his two admirals – Sir Nichol Kyriel of the western fleet and Sir John Sturmy of the eastern fleet – to proclaim that ‘aliens, strangers, and enemies of the king may attack the realm’. All earls, barons, knights, men-at-arms and hobelars were to be ready to set out against them. The king stated that his wife and queen, Isabella, ‘is adopting the counsel of the Mortimer [i.e. Roger Mortimer], the king’s notorious enemy and rebel, and of other rebels’, and that she had made an alliance with his baronial enemies abroad in order to ‘come in force with the king’s son against England, to aggrieve and destroy the king’s men and his people’. He added that if his wife and son, the 13-year-old Edward of Windsor, returned to England in the ships he had sent for them, they must be treated ‘honourably and courteously’.20 Edward still hoped that Isabella might return to him, but he refused to do what she demanded and send Hugh Despenser away, and so she remained in France. This proclamation is the first piece of evidence of the queen’s association with her husband’s enemies, men who had fled from England in 1322 and 1323 after a failed baronial rebellion against the king and Despenser. Perhaps the shocking realisation that his own wife had allied with his foes was the reason for the king sitting beside the bed of his squire Oliver of Bordeaux the night before his proclamation; perhaps it made him unable to sleep.
Roger Mortimer, lord of Wigmore in Herefordshire and Ludlow in Shropshire, the king’s enemy and now an ally of the queen, was born either on 3 May 1286, 25 April 1287 or 3 May 1287.21 He was two or three years younger than Edward II, and if he was born on 25 April, they shared a birthday. Roger was a baron of middling rank, important enough to have been appointed the king’s lord lieutenant of Ireland in the 1310s before Edward’s blatant favouritism towards Hugh Despenser pushed him and others into opposition in the early 1320s, but still, not vastly more important than dozens of other English lords. Now he was the king’s chief enemy by virtue of being at large on the Continent beyond Edward’s grasp, and because he had the will, the ability and the ruthlessness to strike at Hugh Despenser, a man he and Queen Isabella loathed above all others. They both wished to destroy Despenser in revenge for what he had done to them – forced Mortimer into imprisonment and exile, imprisoned his wife and some of their children and deprived him of his lands and home, and destroyed Isabella’s political influence and her marriage – and now they had formed an alliance to do so.
On 8 February 1326, the first Sunday in Lent, a fight broke out in a tavern in London, next to the home of Robert Haselsagh. Originally only three men were involved, but after the hue and cry was raised and ‘very many of the neighbourhood came to maintain the king’s peace’, one man’s left arm was broken by a stick, another man was stabbed in the right hand and a third was stabbed in the thigh. Most of the men involved were skinners, i.e. those who skinned animals for a living.22 The city of London could be a raucous place: one inhabitant was accused of making ‘a great roistering with unknown minstrels, tabor-players [drummers] and trumpeters to the grave damage and tumult of the whole neighbourhood’. William of Grimsby, resident of Bradstrete (Broad Street), became so furious with the group of fourteen men who gathered outside his shop in the middle of the night on 7 February 1322, ‘singing and shouting, as they often did at night’ and ignoring his pleas to let him and his neighbours sleep in peace, that he ran outside and hit one of them over the head with a staff, and killed him.23 John Rokeslee was imprisoned for ‘unlawfully frequenting taverns … with harlots’ after curfew and of ‘doing much mischief ’ in the night-time, and Elmer Multone was imprisoned for enticing men into taverns after curfew and cheating at dice, and for being a bruiser and a common rorere.24 This word, literally ‘roarer’, meant a wild and disorderly person.
For once, Edward II’s niece Eleanor Despenser and her husband Hugh Despenser were not at court in early February 1326. Edward wrote to Eleanor at the royal manor-house of Sheen (later Richmond Palace) west of London on 10 February and to Hugh in London on the 11th, and ordered a goldsmith called John of Castle Acre (in Norfolk) to make a gold seal for Hugh, i.e. for impressing into the wax with which his letters were sealed. The chamber valet Syme Lawe was given 10s for travelling the 90 miles to Sheen from West Dereham in Norfolk, where the king was, with the letters for Lady Despenser. Eleanor had given birth to her ninth surviving child at Sheen on or a little before 14 December 1325, and perhaps was still recovering. The infant was probably the Despensers’ fifth daughter Elizabeth, and she may already have been sent to a foster family, as happened to her sister Margaret shortly after her birth in August 1323: Margaret Despenser was born at the royal manor of Cowick in Yorkshire and was sent to live in the nearby village of Hook with Sir Thomas Hook and his family within weeks or months of her birth. The Despensers’ third daughter Eleanor the younger, born in the late 1310s or thereabouts, lived in the household of her aunt, Hugh Despenser’s sister Isabella Hastings.25 The elder Eleanor Despenser’s younger sister Elizabeth de Burgh (1295–1360), however, kept her daughters, born in the late 1310s and early 1320s, in her own household until they married, so it is difficult to make generalisations about noblewomen and their care of their children.
The king told the inhabitants of Lynn, later King’s Lynn and called Lenne or Bishop’s Lenne in 1326, to guard the town ‘against the attacks of aliens and contrariants’ on 12 February.26 By mid-February, Edward II had arrived in the village of Barnwell in Northamptonshire which belonged to Hugh Despenser’s father Hugh Despenser the Elder, earl of Winchester. There was an Augustinian priory there, where Edward might have stayed. John the blacksmith of Barnwell sold the king’s household an axe which Edward’s enthusiastic clerk described as ‘flat and very beautiful’, and two other large axes also said to be ‘very beautiful’ and intended for the royal carpenters. William Tonge worked as a fourbour, furbisher or polisher of arms, in Cambridge 35 miles from Barnwell, and mended some basinets (helmets) belonging to the king or members of his enormous household.
Another violent incident happened in London on Thursday, 13 February, in the parish of St Lawrence Jewry (one of the many medieval London churches destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666). Wauter Anne of Hampshire was having an affair with Alis of York, and at dusk that evening was with her in a room he had hired where they could meet. Unbeknown to him, she was also the lover of Aleyn Hacford – probably from Hackford in Norfolk – who was a chaplain. Aleyn caught Wauter and Alis together, and in a blind rage stabbed Wauter near the navel, ‘reaching to the bowels’. He and Alis fled, and Wauter survived for four days and died on Monday, 17 February. Aleyn Hacford’s goods were seized and valued by the jurors who investigated Wauter Anne’s death. They included two small cups worth 4d, a pot and salt-cellar worth 4d, a ‘brass dish for washing the head’ worth 2d, six small white wooden cups worth 1½d, a torn tablecloth and towel worth 10d, a mattress and three pillows worth 16d, and a piece of pork and a piece of beef worth 10d. Aleyn, being a chaplain, also owned a ‘desk for books’, though it was only worth a penny.27
Edward II’s personal physician was Master Pancio da Controne, an Italian who lived in England for decades and who later worked for Edward’s son Edward III as well. Pancio’s brother Peregrine also lived in England and had an illegitimate son called John, who was ordained into the Church in 1336.28 Pancio had been left behind ill when the king left the Suffolk village of Hoxne on 9 January 1326, and returned to court at Rothwell, Northamptonshire on 17 February for some days before he departed again for London. Edward gave him a gift of 20 marks. A pound consisted of 240 pence; a mark was two-thirds of a pound, or 160 pence; a shilling consisted of 12 pence and twenty of them made a pound; 13 shillings and 4 pence made a mark; and 6 shillings and 8 pence was half a mark. To most people, who earned several pence per day, both pounds and marks were purely nominal amounts. The only coin in general circulation in England in 1326 was the silver penny which could be broken in half and then into quarters to make a farthing, and the only way large amounts of money could be transported was in barrels or coffers full of coins. Very few people, however, needed to do so, as only the government and the wealthiest handful of people in the country ever had so much money in their possession at one time. Edward II’s clerks stored money in locked coffers, and in February 1323 one of them had to buy a key to replace one ‘which the king himself lost’.29 Later in 1326, the king transported the vast sum of £13,000 – in modern terms, tens of millions – from London to South Wales in twenty-six barrels. The richest person in England in 1326 after the king himself was Hugh Despenser, with an annual income estimated in excess of £7,000.
Shortly before 18 February 1326, a dead whale washed ashore at Walton-on-the-Naze in Essex. Stephen Gravesend, bishop of London, and the dean and monks of St Paul’s Cathedral also in London, complained to the king that although ‘they have been accustomed to have all great fish taken in their land, except the tongue’, and that the whale thus rightfully belonged to them, a group of locals had made off with it.30 Edward II gave a commission of oyer et terminer (‘to hear and to determine’) to three men regarding the issue on 18 February. Thirty-two men were named as the thieves responsible, including John, vicar of the church of Great Holland 4 miles from Walton-on-the-Naze.
On 20 February, the king granted permission for the chancellor of the University of Cambridge to found a ‘perpetual residence of poor scholars to be called the house of Our Lady’, using two messuages which the university owned on Milnestrete in the parish of Saint John in the city.31 Milnestrete, Milne Street in modern spelling, is now called Queens’ Lane, and on the street in 1326 stood the new foundation of Michaelhouse, established in 1324 by Edward’s ally Sir Hervey Stanton or Staunton, lord chief justice and chancellor of the exchequer. Edward himself had founded the King’s Hall at the University of Cambridge in 1317 as a place to educate his chancery clerks, and more than 200 years later his descendant Henry VIII amalgamated King’s Hall and Michaelhouse to create his new foundation, Trinity College. In February 1317, Edward declared that ‘the realm is enriched by two universities as by two special jewels’, and in March that year asked Pope John XXII to recognise Cambridge’s official status as a university.32 Sometime in 1326, Richard Badew, chancellor of the University of Cambridge, founded University Hall, presumably the ‘residence of poor scholars’ mentioned by the king on 20 February. It did not thrive, and in 1338 Edward II’s wealthy niece Elizabeth de Burgh, née de Clare stepped in and generously endowed the foundation. It became known as Clare Hall, later Clare College.
The king personally bought two black carthorses for 30s from Anneis of Kimbolton on 22 February, in the village of Kimbolton a few miles from Huntingdon, after he saw them pull a cart full of wood. Presumably Edward stayed at Kimbolton Castle, where his great-great-great-great-granddaughter Katherine of Aragon (1485–1536), Henry VIII’s first wife, would die 210 years later, though his interaction with Anneis and her carthorses reveals that he must have spent time in the village itself.33 Two days later, Thomme Gentilcorps, keeper of the king’s carts, and William of Langley, royal clerk, bought three carthorses for 32s in the king’s presence, one chestnut, one black and one piebald, from men called Henry Roger and John Halyday. John Halyday and Jack in the Lane of Higham Ferrers 10 miles from Kimbolton also sold two ‘iron carts’ to the royal household.
One of the king’s corours or ‘runners’ – this word is the origin of the modern word ‘courier’ – was Montz or Mountz Novell. On 23 February, Montz was sent from Kimbolton ‘secretly’ with Edward’s letters for Hugh Despenser, who had briefly left court. Montz, who travelled all over England and Wales with Edward’s letters in 1325/6, was given 5s before he departed for ‘what he did when the king ordered his palfrey to be brought to him’, perhaps the palfrey given to him on 1 January by Lady Despenser. Montz’s last name meant ‘new’ in medieval French, perhaps not a coincidence given that his job involved carrying news around the country. While Hugh Despenser was away from court for barely even a day, he became involved in a public brawl in Rothwell, and Edward hastily sent Despenser’s squire Thomelyn Bradeston to deal with the situation as soon as he and his large retinue arrived in the town. John Seler of Rothwell, whose name means ‘saddler’ in the medieval variant of French used in the king’s accounts, made a saddle for one of Edward’s carthorses on the same day, and the chamber valet Syme Lawe gave him 2s for it.
On Sunday, 23 February, a man named John Felton, son of Sir John Felton the elder who was a household knight of Hugh Despenser, was murdered in London. The younger John Felton was staying in the house which belonged to Adam of Drayton in the High Street of Bredstrete or Bread Street, one of the twenty-five wards into which medieval London was divided. At the hour of Compline, around 9pm, Felton heard some of his father’s servants and others fighting in the street. He ran outside with his sword drawn, but was attacked with staffs by four men, who struck him ‘on the top of the head down to the brain’. After he collapsed to the ground, a man called John Janyn hit him again. Felton was carried half-dead into Adam of Drayton’s house, and died at daybreak on Tuesday, a day and a half later. The four men who had attacked him fled.
On the same evening as the attack on John Felton, Richard of Doncaster was also killed in London, in the ward of Candelwykstrete or Candlewick Street. Richard quarrelled with William of Tutbury, servant of Bankin Bromlesk, in the street, and William stabbed him to death. Edward II pardoned William of Tutbury, who had been imprisoned in Newgate gaol, on 10 June 1326 on the grounds that he had killed Richard of Doncaster in self-defence. The names ‘of Drayton’ and ‘of Tutbury’, both towns in Staffordshire, and ‘of Doncaster’ in Yorkshire, reveal that in the 1320s many people travelled to London from other parts of the country to live, work and settle there. This impression is confirmed by the names of some of the jurors who investigated the murders: John of Dunster (Somerset), William of Huntingdon, Stephen of Kent, William of Newport and Henry of Carmarthen (both in South Wales), John of Lincoln and Hugh of Depden (Suffolk). Bankin Bromlesk was a successful merchant from Florence in Italy who had lived in London since at least 1319, and had a son whose name appears on record as Nepus.34
The king reprimanded the three keepers of the peace in Yorkshire – Thomas, Lord Wake, Sir William Thweng and Sir Rauf Bulmer – on 28 February. He had ordered them ‘to be more active in dispersing unlawful assemblies and arresting malefactors’, and declared himself astonished that ‘these evils are now more frequent than before their appointment, which may be set down to their negligence and connivance.’ Over the next few weeks and months, identical letters were sent out to the keepers of the peace in virtually every English county.35 Edward II’s grip on his kingdom was failing; he was unable to control his own officials, many of whom were openly disobedient or in secret contact with his enemies abroad. For this Edward had no-one but himself to blame, as his rule over the last few years had mostly been disastrous, and within a few months he would pay the ultimate price.