From 26 February to 7 March 1326 Edward II stayed in Leicester, a town which belonged to his cousin Henry of Lancaster (b. 1280 or 1281), earl of Leicester, the man with whom Sir Roger Belers had been on his way to dine when he was murdered on 19 January. On 2 March, Edward bought eighteen ells of ‘clear blue English cloth’ from the Leicester draper Henry Malling to make cotes hardies with hoods for Anneis, Maude, another Anneis, Johane and Sibille, wives of his chamber valets Roger ‘Hogge’ May, Robyn Curre, Hugh ‘Huchon’ Smale, Robyn Traghs and Richard Gobet. The cloths cost 30s in total, and a cote hardie was a long, fitted, outer garment with long sleeves and, usually, a row of buttons down the front, worn by both men and women. This gift of cloth to the five women was intended to replace fourteen ells of ‘cloth of Coggeshall’ to make cotes or tunics which the king had bought for them in Norwich on 20 January also at a cost of 30s, but this cloth was found to be ‘too stiff ’ for its intended purpose and was sent to the royal wardrobe to be used for something else.1 The aptly-named John Shereman of Leicester was paid 8d to shear the cloth. In June 1325, Edward had bought tunics and courtepies or short jackets for four of the same five women and gave the women 5s each to have the items tailored.
The king himself was present in ‘the orchard around the manor of Leicester’ on 3 March 1326 when three of his servants bought two iron carts and eight carthorses with all equipment from William Jue and Richard Palmer of Donington. Given the frequency with which the royal court travelled, purchasing carts and carthorses, and looking after them, assumed a great importance. Some of the king’s servants bought various items, including daggers and several kinds of knives, from two cutlers of Leicester called Wille atte Barre and John Lodgate. The items were for the use of Edward’s blacksmith John Cole, his wheelwright Jack Grinder, and Phelip Lytchet, one of the cooks of the royal household. Also on 3 March, Edward gave instructions to the treasurer and barons of the exchequer to send another twenty armed men to garrison the Tower of London, all of them on generous wages of 4d a day. The treasurer and barons were ordered to examine the walls, turrets, houses and enclosures of the Tower and make any necessary repairs.2
Edward II and Henry of Lancaster, earl of Leicester, whose fathers King Edward I and Edmund of Lancaster (1245–96) had been brothers, were hardly on the best of terms. Edward had Henry’s elder brother Thomas beheaded in March 1322 after a baronial rebellion against himself and Hugh Despenser, and although he allowed Henry to have his brother’s earldom of Leicester in 1324, he refused to allow him the earldom of Lancaster which was rightfully also his, and kept much of Henry’s inheritance in his own hands. Henry was at court with the king on 28 February and 10 March and probably on the days between, rare evidence that the two cousins spent any time together in the 1320s.3
One young man who was a close ally of the king of England was Donald or Domhnall of Mar (b. 1290s/early 1300s), nephew of Robert Bruce, king of Scotland (r. 1306–29) and the rightful earl of Mar. Donald was captured by Edward II’s father Edward I in 1306, spared from execution unlike numerous men of his family because he was still a child, and imprisoned at Bristol Castle. He joined Edward II’s household in 1309 or before and became so devoted to the wayward king that he declined to return to his native Scotland after Edward lost the battle of Bannockburn to Donald’s uncle Robert Bruce in 1314, when Edward had to release all the Scottish hostages in England (who included several of Donald’s aunts and his cousin Marjorie Bruce, mother of the first Stewart king of Scotland, Robert II [r. 1371–90]). While he was in Leicester in early March 1326, Edward appointed Donald of Mar to arrest Roger Belers’ murderers, whose identities had now been discovered: the Folville brothers Eustace, Robert, Walter, Richard and Thomas, the Zouche brothers Ralph and Roger, and the Zouches’ cousin Ivo Zouche. Shortly afterwards, Edmund Fitzalan, earl of Arundel and justice of Wales, and John Darcy, justiciar of Ireland, were also ordered to find, arrest and imprison the men. Edmund Ashby was appointed sheriff of Leicestershire and Warwickshire on 5 March, but sometime afterwards was himself arrested and imprisoned for allowing Roger Zouche – lord of the Leicestershire village of Lubbesthorpe – to escape.4 The Folvilles and Zouches fled overseas beyond the king of England’s reach. Ivo Zouche, eldest son and heir of William, Lord Zouche of Harringworth in Northamptonshire, died in Paris on Sunday, 27 April 1326, and his associates joined Roger Mortimer of Wigmore and other enemies of Edward II in France.5 The Folville and Zouche brothers returned to England a few months later with the invasion force of Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer, who pardoned them for Belers’ murder. From the late 1320s until 1340, the Folvilles conducted a notorious life of crime which included kidnapping, extortion and murder.
A nobleman called John Mowbray was born in Hovingham 16 miles north of York on 29 November 1310. He was the only son and heir of John, Lord Mowbray (b. 1286) and Alina, co-heir of her father William Braose, lord of the Gower Peninsula in South Wales; William died shortly before 1 May 1326. John Mowbray the elder was ill in November 1310, and because of the worry over her husband’s condition, Alina delivered their son John prematurely. Edward II’s cousin Thomas of Lancaster, earl of Lancaster and Leicester, gave a gift of 20s to the messenger, Robert Scot, who brought him news of the birth.6 John Mowbray the elder joined the same baronial rebellion in the early 1320s as the earl of Lancaster and Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, and like the earl of Lancaster was executed in Yorkshire in March 1322. In early 1326 John Mowbray the younger was still only 15 years old, but he burned with rage against King Edward, who had hanged his father and imprisoned 11-year-old John and his mother Alina in the Tower of London for a time.7
Around the beginning of March 1326, John Mowbray and a group of other young men attacked the Yorkshire castle of Tickhill south of Doncaster, a royal castle whose constable Sir William Aune was a friend and ally of the king. One of Mowbray’s allies was another young nobleman, Robert Clifford, born on 7 November 1305 and only 20 years old himself.8 Robert’s elder brother Roger, Lord Clifford (b. 1299/1300) took part in the baronial rebellion against the king and was hanged next to John Mowbray the elder in March 1322 at the tower in York which still bears his name, Clifford’s Tower. The king took to calling his baronial enemies of 1321/22 the ‘Contrariants’, and by 1326 most of them were dead, in prison or in exile on the continent.
Fifteen-year-old John Mowbray, his 20-year-old ally Robert Clifford and their men passed through the Staffordshire town of Burton-on-Trent on their way to Tickhill, ‘with banners unfurled’, an open declaration of war on the king. In Burton, they allegedly killed some people and committed theft, and did the same at Tickhill.9 Having managed to capture a royal castle, and having made their point, Mowbray and Clifford fled and were never caught, and were restored to royal grace a few months later after Edward II’s downfall. Sir William Aune, the constable of Tickhill Castle, was far from a saint himself. After he lost his friend Edward’s protection in late 1326 he was accused of theft, extortion, oppression ‘and other misdemeanours’ and was associated with a criminal gang who operated in England in the late 1320s and were nearly as infamous as the Folvilles: the Coterels.10
The king told all the sheriffs of England on 6 March that ‘certain evildoers and disturbers of his [Edward’s] peace’ had armed themselves and were riding about in warlike fashion, that they ‘take and rob men at their will’ and imprisoned others until they paid a fine for their release. In addition, ‘evildoers come into fairs and markets and take men’s goods without paying’ and beat those who resisted.11 By ‘evildoers’ Edward meant the remnant of the Contrariant faction of 1321/2, and John Mowbray and Robert Clifford more specifically. As Hugh Despenser did even worse things with Edward’s connivance and support – imprisoned men and women until they handed over lands or money to him or accused them of fake crimes so that they paid him a large bribe to stay out of trouble – the king’s statement was more than a little hypocritical.
Edward sent a stern letter on 9 March to Thomas, Lord Wake (1298– 1349), one of the keepers of the peace in Yorkshire he had reprimanded a few days previously. Edward fumed that he had ordered Wake to come to him personally, but Wake had ‘taken care not to receive’ his letters, deliberately ‘hiding himself so that the bearers thereof cannot come to him to deliver them’. Wake was strictly ordered to attend the king directly after Easter, just over two weeks in the future; not long for him to receive the order and to make the journey south. He did not dare disobey a direct royal command though probably arrived late, and was at court by 20 April.12 Another royal letter went to the constable of Portchester Castle in Hampshire, the mayor of Southampton and the sheriff of Hampshire on 10 March. Edward ordered the three men to search for and arrest the ‘many armed men, Englishmen and others, coming from parts beyond sea … and wandering about secretly’ to ‘spy out the secrets of the realm’.13
Jack of St Albans (in Hertfordshire) had worked as the king’s painter for some years. In 1324, he painted scenes from the life of Edward’s father King Edward I on the walls of the Painted Chamber in the Palace of Westminster, and in February 1326 he began to make an illustrated book for Edward about ‘all the earls, barons and knights of all England’.14 Jack was also a born comedian. On 11 March 1326 at Tamworth in Staffordshire, he danced on a table and made the king laugh hugely, and Edward gave him 50s as a reward for his excellent performance and to support Jack’s wife and children. In Tamworth, the king encountered a former sailor of his called Wille Jetour, who had become very poor and was reduced to begging in the street, and gave him 40s in alms. This was the equivalent of several months’ wages for Wille in his former job as captain of a ship called the Seint Jorge and later as captain of the barge Le Messager of Berwick-on-Tweed on the far north-east coast of England.15 Wille came originally from Yorkshire, and in 1321 Edward had pardoned him and his son John for outlawry.16 There was, of course, no social welfare in England in 1326, so people who could no longer work and had no families to support them had little choice except to beg for money.
Andrew, apprentice of the London fishmonger Hugh ‘Huchon’ Madefray, came to court at Tamworth on 12 March with six pots of lampreys from Nantes in Brittany for the king, as a gift from Madefray. Edward gave Andrew 5s. Huchon Madefray had been arrested in 1311 after he bought pots of Nantes lampreys from a supplier called Thomas Lespicer of Portsmouth and stowed them in his house for several days. A city regulation stated that lampreys had to be offered for sale under the wall of St Margaret’s Church in Briggestrete (Bridge Street) immediately on arrival in London. The mayor, Richer Refham, forgave Huchon on condition that he warned merchants from outside London of the regulation in future, and his supplier Thomas Lespicer swore on the Gospels never to do this again. Huchon Madefray had two sons: John, a chaplain, and Nichol, also a fishmonger, who wrote his will in 1349 and had a son John Madefray and a daughter Johane Reyner.17
The king was considerably less happy on 13 March than he had been two days earlier while watching Jack of St Albans’ performance, when he ordered the sheriff of Sussex to arrest his first cousin John of Brittany, earl of Richmond.18 Richmond had been sent to France the year before as part of Queen Isabella’s retinue, and like her was presently refusing to return to England. He was born around 1266 so was about eighteen years the king’s senior and 60 years old in 1326, was the son of King Edward I’s sister Beatrice (1242–75), and spent almost all his life in England. His older brother Arthur II (1262–1312) succeeded their father as duke of Brittany in 1305 when John II died in an accident worthy of a medieval Darwin Award: a wall fell on him as he led the horse of the newly-elected pope Clement V (born Bertrand Got) around the French city of Lyon. The earl of Richmond’s English relatives called him by the pet name ‘Brito’.19 Brito had written to the king sometime in early 1326 setting out the reasons for his failure to return to England, but Edward declared his excuses to be ‘wholly frivolous’.
Sir Ralph Cobham died before 13 March 1326, and his heir was his 2-year-old son John Cobham, born at Reigate in Sussex on 29 February 1324, a leap year. Ralph was also survived by his widow Mary.20 He had sent a letter to Hugh Despenser at the beginning of 1325, telling him that he had fallen from his horse and broken his foot.21 John Cobham was named after his godfather John de Warenne (1286–1347), earl of Surrey and Sussex, who was married to Jeanne de Bar (1295/6–1361), a French niece of Edward II.22 After John Cobham turned 21 in 1345, he came into a sizeable inheritance with lands in Sussex, Middlesex, Kent, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Norfolk, and ‘five shops called Coppdehalle’ on Dowgate Hill in London.
Edward II spent the period from 11 to 17 March in Tamworth and Lichfield, Staffordshire, and on Monday, 17 March, the royal justices John Stonor and John Denum sat on a special commission in Tamworth to ‘enquire into illicit assemblies, homicides, depredations, burnings and other damages’ in that county.23 The sheriff of Staffordshire was commanded to summon twenty-four knights or other men from each hundred and borough of the county. The justices heard various instances of homicide, including the murder of the forester William Wolf by Sir Roger Swynnerton in the village of Hopwas near Tamworth in July 1324. Wolf had tried to arrest a man called Roger Whetwode because he was travelling through the local forest at night – it was against the law to be out and about after curfew – and Roger Swynnerton ‘came up suddenly and killed’ Wolf. Both he and Whetwode fled. The main reason for the justices’ commission, however, was a complex feud running since early 1321 between many of the important families of Staffordshire over who should be the rector of Church Eaton, a village 6 miles from Stafford. William Ipstones and Thomas Brumpton both claimed the church of St Editha in the village and both enjoyed much support among the knights and gentry of the county, and their quarrel became extraordinarily complex and violent. Both Ipstones and Brumpton ‘collected a multitude of armed men’ in and before August 1325, with the result that around 120 men rode armed around Stafford and Church Eaton that summer and terrified the local populace.
William Ipstones managed to gain control of the church building and held it by force against his rival, then he and his allies were ejected by a large armed group of Thomas Brumpton’s supporters and Brumpton himself seized the church. One of Thomas Brumpton’s main supporters was his kinswoman Isabel, lady of the nearby town of Ingestre. Isabel was questioned by the justices Stonor and Denum in March 1326 on the matter, as were many of Brumpton’s other supporters including the knights Roger Trumwyne, Hugh Meignil and the brothers John, Walter and William Stafford. Sir Thomas Wyther took the side of William Ipstones, his own kinsman, as did Ipstones’ brother Sir John Ipstones, John’s father-in-law Sir Henry Cresswell and Henry’s brother Thomas Cresswell, and another Ipstones brother or cousin called Philip Ipstones. Several men lost their lives as a result of the feud, including John Cowley, John Picheford, Roger Hatton and Robert of Draycote, and Henry Cresswell admitted that he had beaten up a Walter Pykstok and extorted 12 marks from Richard Wenlok as a bribe not to beat him up. The Stafford jury taking part in the commission of March 1326 named Cresswell as a ‘common malefactor and beater of men’, and he was imprisoned. Ironically, Henry Cresswell was the coroner of Staffordshire, a royal official who played a vital role in the justice system. The Ipstones faction besieged Thomas Brumpton’s mother Mary in her home at Church Eaton ‘with swords, bows and arrows’, and the three Ipstones brothers stole two cows, two oxen, fourteen lambs and four brass pots from Brumpton himself. For their part, Thomas Brumpton and about fifteen of his followers broke into William Ipstones’ home, stole goods worth £40, and beat his servants.
The royal justices John Stonor and John Denum pointed out in March 1326 that all of this was ‘manifestly in contempt of the king and against the king’s peace’, and the dozens of accused were bailed on condition that they appeared again on 18 July. The two antagonists both failed to appear on that date and the sheriff of Staffordshire was unable to find them. Proceedings were thus postponed again until Monday, 6 October, but by this time the kingdom was in complete chaos because the queen’s invasion force had arrived and the king was fleeing towards South Wales. The matter had still not been resolved by early 1328, when Pope John XXII ordered the archbishop of Canterbury to remove William Ipstones from the church of Church Eaton and restore Thomas Brumpton.24 If nothing else, the affair demonstrates that English people of the 1320s could carry out family feuds as enthusiastically as any Sicilian, and in fact the quarrel between the Ipstones and Brumpton families continued into the 1370s, half a century later.25 It was perhaps in connection with the Church Eaton feud that Edward II ordered his Gascon sergeant Burgeys Tilh to ‘lead Henry Bisshebury to the king wherever he may be’ on 27 March 1326. Bisshebury had been sheriff of Staffordshire and Shropshire until 13 January 1326.26
On the king’s last day in Lichfield, he gave a carter called Thomme de Doddeleye (‘of Dudley’, a town 18 miles from Lichfield) 5s to have himself a courtepie, a short jacket or doublet, made, because of ‘what he did in the king’s bedchamber in the king’s presence’. Just before the enormous royal retinue left the town, Thomme Gentilcorps, keeper of the king’s carts, paid 8s to Ravlyn Sadeler, saddler of Lichfield, for eight collars for carthorses, and 4d to Richard Chapman for nails. (A chapman was a salesman, often itinerant.) In the far north of England near the Scottish border, the walls of the city of Carlisle were crumbling, and news of this came to Edward II’s ears on 17 March as he was leaving Lichfield. He ordered the townspeople to repair and rebuild the walls, using £160 which the city owed to the exchequer and which he pardoned them on condition that they carried out the repairs as speedily as possible.27
Margery Dunheved, wife of John Dunheved who owned land in Dunchurch on Dunsmore Heath near Rugby in Warwickshire, presented a petition to the king around this time. The village of Dunchurch is only 15 miles from Kenilworth where the king arrived on 19 March after leaving Lichfield, so Margery may have travelled to Kenilworth to make her complaint to one of the royal clerks in person.28 On 9 February 1325, her husband murdered his cousin Oliver Dunheved in Dunchurch: John set the house where Oliver was staying on fire, then shot him through the heart ‘with a bow and a barbed arrow’ when Oliver ran outside.29 Margery, a biased witness, claimed that the murdered Oliver was ‘a common thief ’. She stated that Sir John Pecche, lord of Hampton-in-Arden 20 miles away, whose rent-collector Oliver was, rode to Dunchurch with his wife Lady Gorges and twenty armed men with the intention of killing John Dunheved in revenge for Oliver’s murder. Pecche had his men break down the Dunheveds’ gates and door in the middle of the night, only to discover that John was absent. Still wearing his gauntlets, Pecche dragged Margery out of bed naked and took her into her hall, while his men set fire to a pile of straw outside or in an outhouse. For reasons which Margery did not explain, John Pecche told his wife and his men to witness that Margery was not pregnant and that John Dunheved had not begotten a child on her, and with that they left, taking some of Margery’s goods to a value of 100s with them.
Whatever the indignant Margery may have thought, her husband was a bad lot: in September 1319 John Dunheved was accused of raping Edith Grasbrok but failed to appear in court, was outlawed in Gloucestershire sometime before July 1316, and on one occasion burned down his mother Eustachia’s grange in Dunchurch.30 His brothers Stephen and Thomas Dunheved, hardly any less violent than he was, would lead a plot to free the deposed Edward II from Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire in the summer of 1327, and Stephen was also involved in a conspiracy by Edward’s half-brother the earl of Kent to free Edward from captivity in 1329/30, years after his supposed death. Curiously enough, Sir John Pecche, who had wished to kill Stephen Dunheved’s brother John, also took part in that plot.31
The 18th of March in 1326 marked the first anniversary of the death of Sir Roger Felton, presumably a relative of Sir John Felton whose son had been murdered a few weeks before. Edward II paid thirty Franciscan friars of Lichfield 10s for celebrating divine service for the soul of Roger Felton on the anniversary of his being ‘called to God’, as contemporary idiom had it. The king wrote to his son Edward of Windsor at the French court on 18 March, ordering him to come home, but the adolescent boy was not acting under his own agency and was under his mother Isabella’s control. Edward II also wrote to his brother-in-law Charles IV of France on the same day, a long, rambling and emotional letter in which he demonstrated that his chief priority was defending his beloved Hugh Despenser from Isabella’s accusations.32 He remained adamant that Isabella had nothing to fear from Despenser; Isabella remained adamant that her life would be in danger from Despenser if she returned to her husband. Neither would shift from their position. Edward continued to refuse to send Despenser away from him, and thus Isabella remained in France and maintained her alliance with her husband’s baronial enemies in exile there.
Edward had three ushers of the chamber, Peres or Peter Bernard, John Carleford and John Dene, who each received 7½d per day in wages and whose responsibilities included counting the portions of food served daily in the chamber and accounting for them to senior household officials. John Dene was allowed to go to his home near Canterbury in Kent on 19 March 1326 and given 100s (£5) for his expenses, because he was ‘very ill in one side’. John had been in France with the queen and was one of her many servants who came back to England in late 1325 and early 1326 after she refused to do so: he received 10s from the king on his return to England in December 1325 and was reassigned to a position in Edward’s own household.
Henry the blacksmith lived and worked in Cambridge. On 20 March he arrived at Kenilworth Castle, having travelled the 80 miles from his home in the company of a groom named Blak John, who helped Henry transport the items he had made for Edward II. These were a dozen battle-axes and another four battle-axes of another kind, half a dozen smaller axes, five pole-axes, and ten daggers, two long and eight ‘in the manner of falchions’, i.e. a single-edged sword. Henry was paid 33s 11d with 50s still owing. The king also gave Henry 16s for his expenses travelling from Cambridge to Kenilworth, and, evidently delighted with his work, appointed him chief blacksmith at the Tower of London. Henry soon departed for London to take up his new employment.
Another Henry, Henry Caldewell, worked as a cart-maker in the village of Coleshill 12 miles from Kenilworth. At the newly-built lodge in the park of Kenilworth Castle on 20 March, he sold a ‘good iron cart’ with two chestnut carthorses and one bay, and all necessary equipment, to Edward II in person. The king was also present when John Dene, merchant of Coventry (who coincidentally bore the same name as the king’s ailing usher from near Canterbury), sold Eudo de Stoke, constable of Kenilworth Castle, 524 pounds of straw at a cost of 1½d per pound. The straw was to be sent to Hugh Despenser’s Worcestershire castle of Hanley – this castle no longer exists, but the nearby village’s name is still Hanley Castle – and a cart and three carthorses were purchased from Stephen Quarrell of Coleshill to transport it the 45 miles to Hanley. A local resident called John son of Nichol was hired to drive the cart. Edward II, who had no cash on him, borrowed 5s from his valet Henry Lawe to pay John in advance for the journey, and as he often did, added on another shilling when he ordered Henry’s money to be repaid to him later that day. (One shilling, 12d, was four days’ wages for Henry Lawe.) Hugh Despenser was the richest man in the country after the king himself and well able to afford his own straw, and this purchase says much about Edward’s infatuation with him. Edward had, on other occasions, bought Despenser’s household wax as well, and wax cost 6d per pound in the 1320s.33
Three choristers, their names unfortunately not recorded, came to work in the king’s chapel on 20 March, and Edward paid 3d for white thread to stitch the hems of their surplices. The choristers had arrived just in time for Easter which fell early in 1326, on 23 March. Edward often played a pleasant game on Easter Monday, a tradition he had inherited from his parents Edward I and Leonor of Castile: he allowed his wife’s female attendants to drag him out of bed early in the morning, and paid them a large ‘ransom’ for his release. This sweet little diversion is not mentioned this year, because Queen Isabella and her ladies-in-waiting and damsels were not in England. On Easter Sunday, 23 March, Richard Wyldeler died in Newgate prison in London, where he had been imprisoned for larceny. Exactly a week previously on Palm Sunday, Robert Sely had also died in Newgate, his crime non-payment of debt, and on 5 April Nichol the mason died there too, imprisoned for counterfeiting money in Norwich.34
The 25th of March is the feast of the Annunciation or Lady Day, and in fourteenth-century England was considered the first day of the new year. For contemporaries, therefore, the year 1326 really began on 25 March. The father of Ivo Zouche, one of the killers of Sir Roger Belers on 19 January and now in Paris, where he would die on 27 April, was William, Lord Zouche of Harringworth in Northamptonshire. Ivo was the eldest son, but Lord Zouche had a large family: his other sons were William, John I, Roger, Thomas, John II and Edmund, and he had daughters Millicent, Isabel and Thomasina. On 25 March 1326, the king gave Lord Zouche permission for himself and the men of his household to bear arms, contrary to his general prohibition on carrying weapons, so that Lord Zouche ‘may not suffer attack by evildoers who threaten him in many ways’.35 This suggests that adherents of the murdered Roger Belers were threatening Zouche in revenge for his son’s part in Belers’ murder. Ivo Zouche was not yet 30 when he died in Paris in April 1326. He left a 4-year-old son William, future Lord Zouche of Harringworth and his grandfather’s heir, from his marriage to Johane, daughter and heir of Margery Grapinel and Sir William Inge (d. 1322), chief justice of the court of King’s Bench.36
On 28 March, the king granted a ‘respite until Holy Trinity [18 May] to Alexander Luterel from taking up the arms of a knight’. Such a grant was incredibly common, and the king granted more such respites on 8 April, 15 April, 18 July, 21 July and so on.37 Edward had issued proclamations on 12 December 1325 and 25 January 1326 that all men who had held £40 a year in land or rent for at least two years ‘shall have knighthood’ at Easter 1326, and they were obliged to do so, under pain of forfeiture.38 There were around 1,000 or so knights in England in 1326, perhaps closer to 1,500, but many men did not wish to become knights, as the lifestyle was incredibly expensive. A destrier or war-horse could cost well in excess of £40, more than some knights’ entire annual income. Edward had issued another, vaguely threatening proclamation on 4 June 1324 to the effect that all men with £40 of income a year must equip himself with at least one horse for himself and one for another (i.e. a squire to attend him), and weapons ‘according to his estate’, and told all his sheriffs to make this order known far and wide. He added that he ‘will appoint certain men in whom he has confidence’ in every English county to make sure that his order was observed and gave the men power to punish those who failed to present themselves to be made knights.39 Compelling men with a certain level of income to become knights was called ‘distraint of knighthood’, and Edward’s father Edward I and grandfather Henry III had also practised it. Edward I set the necessary annual income at £20 in 1278; Edward II doubled the amount.40
Edward II had stayed at Beaulieu Abbey in Hampshire – founded in the early 1200s by his great-grandfather King John (r. 1199–1216) – for three weeks in April 1325, and went fishing while he was there. On 29 March 1326, Peter, abbot of Beaulieu, and fifteen of his monks and lay brothers were accused of complicity in the deaths of William and John Crul and John Daneman at Exbury in the New Forest 3 miles from Beaulieu Abbey. Some kind of fight or very violent quarrel had taken place between the monks of Beaulieu and a group of locals. The king pardoned nine men for outlawry on 20 June 1326 for their ‘trespass’ against the abbot of Beaulieu, presumably with reference to this fight, including Richard Daneman, whose brother John was one of the men killed. John Crul’s widow Margery and Richard Daneman began legal action against six monks of Beaulieu, and several lay brothers, clerks and other abbey servants including a cook and a blacksmith, on 29 March.41
A carter called Roger Neweman brought the brothers Aleyn and Martyn Palmere and six other shypwryghtes (shipwrights), and their tools and equipment, from London to the king at Kenilworth Castle on 31 March. Edward knew the Palmere brothers, natives of London, well, and in July 1325 gave them a gift of 5s each. Aleyn, the elder brother, inherited a tenement from their father William Palmere in the area near the Tower of London called Petit Wales or ‘Little Wales’, still known today as Petty Wales. Martyn owned a tenement with houses and a wharf also in Petit Wales, and left boats to his daughters Cecile and Johane and his youngest son John in his will of 1344. In July and November 1324, Martyn was one of the neighbours and possible eyewitnesses questioned about two murders within the Tower of London: carpenter Nichol Lightfot was stabbed in the head in his workshop there, and Elyas atte Park was stabbed in the heart by his brother John next to the external wall of the Tower by the Thames, after a violent quarrel. Their other brother Roger atte Park found Elyas’s body.42 The king bought a ship called La Jonete from Martyn Palmere sometime before September 1325, and its crew of eleven men included Gibbe, Henry and Hankyn of Lambeth, Hankyn Broun and a man who had the same name as the hero of the Pirates of the Caribbean films: Jack Sparuwe (Sparrow). The Palmere brothers worked for the king at Kenilworth until 22 April, and Edward paid them their usual wages of 6d a day. Their four journeymen received 5d a day and two apprentices 4d, and the eight men made a flat-bottomed boat, a small barge and two fishing-boats for the lakes at Kenilworth Castle.