On 1 June, Edward II went out into the park of Saltwood Castle, where he played a ball game with his household steward Sir Thomas Blount, the newly-married Sir Robert Wateville, and others. The game is not specified – ‘playing at ball’ is what appears in the king’s accounts – though the previous August Edward had paid twenty-two men for playing a ball game for his entertainment at Langdon Abbey 5 miles from Dover. This sounds like two teams of eleven men, reminiscent of modern football or cricket. At Saltwood the king and Hugh Despenser met two envoys, Guillaume Laudun, archbishop of Vienne, and Hugues Aiméry, bishop of Orange, sent by Pope John XXII, who was doing his utmost to reconcile the king and queen of England.1 On 19 May, the king had sent astonishingly detailed instructions to Ralph Basset of Drayton, who as constable of Dover Castle was the man responsible for welcoming the envoys to England. Basset was to ensure that the two men were ‘well and comfortably lodged’ in Dover Castle, and when they were settled in, was to ask them politely ‘Lords, you have come by the king’s [safe-]conduct, please show it’. He was then to give a long speech forbidding the two envoys from undertaking any actions prejudicial to the king or his crown while in England, and if he failed to do so, Edward pointed out, he was liable to be impeached in parliament.2 Laudun and Aiméry questioned both the king and Hugh Despenser and translated their answers from the dialect of French called Anglo-Norman which they spoke into Latin for the pope. (John XXII came from Cahors in south-west France and was a native speaker of Occitan, another dialect of French.) Edward was adamant that his queen had nothing at all to fear from anyone if she returned to England, and would not budge from this position. In France, Isabella was equally adamant that her life would be in danger from Despenser if she returned to her husband. The envoys’ efforts failed.
The sailor Adam Cogger was at Saltwood with the king, and on 5 June was ordered to take his ship the Godyer to Cardiff and deliver it to the officials of Hugh Despenser (who owned Cardiff, along with most of the rest of South Wales). The king’s master carpenter Jack Cressing and his team were still busy repairing a tower of Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire, so at Saltwood in early June Edward hired another master carpenter called Syme Clere and five other carpenters, two sawyers and two blacksmiths. He sent them to Dover 12 miles away to repair the ‘defects’ in the castle there, and his clerk Peres Pulford went with them to supervise them. Because of the ‘great work’ the men would have to do at Dover Castle – even though Jack Cressing and his team had spent ten weeks working on the castle the previous autumn – the king gave them a bonus of 20s. Syme Clere had already worked for Edward in January 1325, when the king sent him to Iron Acton in Gloucestershire.3
A landowner called Robert Wolrington of Eaton in Nottinghamshire died shortly before 8 June 1326. He had until recently been coroner of Nottinghamshire, replaced on 28 April 1326 because he was ‘incapacitated by paralysis and infirmity’. Robert owned two-thirds of the manor of Eaton, 2 miles from Retford, with three cottages, two messuages (dwelling-places with outhouses) and 28 acres of land there. Robert’s heirs were his four daughters: Elizabeth, born 12 November 1313; Alianore, born 14 January 1315; Isabel, born 4 February 1317; and Alis, the only sister whose date of birth is not recorded, born in 1318 or 1319.4 The manor of Eaton had belonged to the sisters’ late mother Margery, and they had an older half-brother Robert, who had no claim to Eaton though did inherit a messuage, 30 acres of land and 12 acres of meadow in another Nottinghamshire village on their father’s death.
Around sunset on Sunday, 8 June, two groups of legal apprentices studying at the Bench in London, one group from Norfolk and the other from Yorkshire, came to blows on Aldersgate Street. Hordes of young men ran around the streets with swords and other weapons, and others who had nothing to do with the quarrel joined in. One David Arpada, servant of the royal clerk Nichol Hugate (an ally of the powerful royal favourite Hugh Despenser), grabbed his bow and arrows and shot into the scuffling crowd at random. His arrow struck Simon Fermorie, a skinner by profession, on the left side of his stomach, and Simon died of the wound the following afternoon. Another man, Thomas of St Albans, also became a victim of the apprentices’ quarrel. Thomas was a cordwainer and was standing in the doorway of his workshop when two goldsmiths called James of Shoreditch and Thomas Walpole ran past with swords, intending to deal with the violence. Wrongly believing them to be ‘disturbers of the king’s peace’, Thomas of St Albans attacked Thomas Walpole with a staff and knocked him to the ground, whereupon James of Shoreditch stabbed him in the head, right side and left arm with his sword, and killed him.5
The riot was the culmination of a long-running quarrel which had come to Edward II’s ears by 8 May 1326. The king complained that ‘some of the craftsmen of London are evil-doers and are leagued together to do evil’, and that homicides and robberies occurred in the city by day and night. He ordered a number of measures to come into immediate effect, including that no-one might carry arms in the city unless they had a specific commission from him personally to do so, that no-one might use a bow or crossbow ‘out of his own house’, and that anyone with a grievance must not take revenge into their own hands but wait for those with the proper authority to deal with the matter.6
The king’s trumpeter Roger Bennyng’s wife Anneis Watnow came from her home in Nottingham to visit her husband at court in Kent at this time and was given 40s for her expenses. Edward II had at least four trumpeters: Roger Bennyng, Ferrand of Spain, Janyn the Scot and Hothekyn Nortleye. He gave Janyn the Scot a house, 8 acres of land and an acre of meadow in Pontefract, Yorkshire in August 1325 as a reward for his good service.7 On 9 June 1326, the king paid a fiddler called Richardet 20s for his excellent performance which had, the king said, given him enormous pleasure.
As well as the tunics he had bought them the month before, on 12 June Edward gave the eight archers who formed his personal bodyguard shoes and linen cloth to make themselves hose, a kind of leggings worn by everyone. This was a reward for the archers running fast and well alongside the king in the hot weather. This is the earliest reference to the scorching summer of 1326. The French Chronicle of London talks of the ‘great dryness’ and says that there was a severe shortage of water in many parts of the country. Shortly before 24 June, the Nativity of St John the Baptist, the weather was so hot and dry that fires burst out in the Hertfordshire town of Royston, the village of Wandsworth (now in South London) and at Croxton Abbey in Leicestershire. The French Chronicle adds that there was such a shortage of fresh water that the sea flooded the River Thames and made the water ‘dirty’, and that lots of people complained about the foul-tasting ale made from it. Alis Coleman, née Lawe, who lived in the Surrey village of Byfleet near the Thames and made a living from brewing ale, must have been one of those adversely affected by the hot weather and the seawater in the river, assuming the sea had overwhelmed the river as far up as Surrey.
The annalist of St Paul’s Cathedral also comments on the ‘great drought’ throughout England in 1326 and confirms the French Chronicle of London’s statement that the Thames became seawater. The dry weather continued well into autumn, and people who owned animals had to lead them three or four leagues (i.e. three or four hours’ walk) to find water for them. Fountains, rivers, streams, ponds and wells completely dried up, including Newport Pond in Essex which was a league in circumference, and all the fish in it died. A body of water the St Paul’s annalist calls ‘Haveringmere’, usually deep enough for ‘great ships’ to be moored there, became so shallow that only small boats could float on the water.8 Edward II made another reference to the ‘dryness of the season’ on 15 July when talking about a water-mill in Norfolk and a marsh around it which had been ‘converted into meadow’.9
On 12 June when he bought the cloth for his archers, the king was at Sturry in Kent, a manor belonging to the archbishop of Canterbury. Evidently some kind of stomach disorder was going around Hugh Despenser’s household members there. Perhaps it was a virus, though one wonders whether drinking ale made from seawater was to blame. Edward bought four enormously expensive pomegranates – long considered a cure for stomach ailments and digestive problems – for four of Despenser’s servants: his chamberlain Clement Holditch, his clerk Richard Nately, and his squires Rauf Tissington and Wille Enfaunte. When Edward left Sturry for the village of Boughton-under-Blean 9 miles away on 12 June, he had to leave his valet and fisherman Esmon ‘Monde’ Fisher behind as Monde was seriously ill, perhaps with the stomach ailment then going around. Monde had officially retired on 1 April 1326 and the king asked the prior of Coventry to welcome him into the priory, as often happened with retired royal servants, but Monde had not yet departed from the royal household.10 The king gave Monde a generous 20s (240d, or one pound) on his departure from Sturry, but the fisherman’s condition soon worsened, and Edward sent Monde’s son Litel Wille Fisher back to Sturry to look after his father with another 2s for Wille’s travel expenses and lost wages. Monde, however, died on Saturday, 14 June, and Litel Wille sent a boy called Peres (i.e. Peter) to the king with the news that Monde had been ‘called to God’. Edward gave Peres 12d for bringing him the message.
The king travelled to Leeds Castle in Kent, a royal residence which stands on two islands in the middle of a lake and today still looks like a fairy-tale castle. Leeds had belonged to Edward’s mother Queen Leonor and she spent much time there in the 1270s and 1280s, and, less happily, Edward besieged it in October 1321 and subsequently hanged a dozen of the garrison. Robert Portere of Leeds sold four cows, intended to provide ‘milk for the mouth of the king and Sir Hugh [Despenser]’, to Edward’s chamber staff on 15 June 1326. Edward’s clerk, as he often did, carefully recorded the cost and the colour of the animals: 13s 4d for a pale red one, 12s for another pale red one, 11s for the third which was also pale red, and 10s for the last, pale and speckled. Robyn Baker, one of the king’s chamber valets, was appointed to look after the beasts. Edward encountered a ‘poor man’ on the road when he left Leeds Castle and rode towards Rochester, and borrowed 4s from his usher Peres Bernard to give the man as alms. At Boxley Down on their way to Rochester, Edward and Hugh Despenser met Hamo Hethe, bishop of Rochester and one of the few important men in the kingdom who supported them, and talked to him for a while. After the king and his chamberlain left Rochester they travelled to Gravesend, and two galleys transported Edward and his household from there along the Thames to London.
Richard ‘Hick’ Fylle, who would be appointed keeper of the River Thames on 3 October 1326, was the captain of a ship belonging to the king which Edward had named La Despenser after Hugh Despenser. La Despenser had supposedly been a gift from Hugh to the king some years before, but Edward himself paid the £130 it cost.11 On 17 June 1326, Hick Fylle and his twenty-five crewmen were paid 40s for taking Hugh’s wife Eleanor Despenser to the king at the Tower of London, in a barge. It reveals much about the paucity of given names in fourteenth-century England that ten of the twenty-five sailors were called John, five were Robert, two were Thomas, two were Richard and two were William. Then again, one of the sailors was called Salomon and another bore the name Malin, probably a short form of Malculin, a fourteenth-century variant of ‘Malcolm’. Also on Tuesday, 17 June, a little over a mile away from the king in the Tower of London, a French goldsmith called Perot le Freynsshe died in Newgate prison. He had been incarcerated for a robbery in Middlesex on William Melton, archbishop of York (c. 1270s–1340), a friend and ally of Edward II.12
The king complained to Pope John XXII on 18 June about the ‘ingratitude and disobedience’ of his 60-year-old cousin John of Brittany, earl of Richmond, aka ‘Brito’, still in France with the queen and refusing to return to England. This was probably in response to a letter the pope had sent to Edward on 10 April, begging him to show justice to Richmond.13 The following day, Edward sent letters to his son Edward of Windsor and to his brother-in-law Charles IV of France. In previous letters, Edward II had addressed Edward of Windsor affectionately as Beaufuitz or ‘fair son’, but he took an entirely different tone here. He had been informed that his son had attended the coronation of King Charles’s third wife Jeanne of Evreux as queen of France in Paris on 11 May in the company of Roger Mortimer, and that his wife Isabella had thus forced his son and the heir to the English throne to appear in public with his greatest enemy. Edward ended the letter to his son with a cold threat that if he continued with his disobedience, he ‘shall feel it all the days of his life, and all other sons shall take example thereby of disobeying their lords and fathers’.14
The mayor of London, Hamo of Chigwell (d. 1332), the city sheriffs, Gilbert Mordon (d. 1327) and John Coton (d. 1340), and the twenty-five city aldermen met Edward II in his chamber at the Tower of London on 20 June to discuss how they would keep the peace in the city, with reference to the ongoing quarrel among craftsmen and apprentices.15 Edward’s account reveals that there was something called the ‘long house’ in the postern gate of the Tower, and that he hired three women to weave hemp baskets there in June/July 1326. Two were Johane of Rochester and Elyne del Hethe, and the other bore the curious nickname of Grete (Great) Moterouse and came from Sandwich in Kent. At the end of July 1326, 120 oars were bought from Wauter Weyere of London at 11d each, and stored in the long house. A ‘long stable’ within the Tower is also referenced, and had a space in front of it where minstrels sometimes performed for Edward II. Whenever the king stayed at the Tower, its bridge was drawn up, implying that at all other times the bridge was left down and anyone could wander in and out as they pleased.16
Edward paid 14s for summer surcotes, i.e. overtunics, for two of his clerks, John Chyngden and Richard Kenebrok, on 21 June, and his chamber valet Watte Pramptout bought eels for the king’s dinner at La Rosere, one of his houses opposite the Tower. Jack Kene, the Kenilworth boy who had joined the royal household in April and who was responsible for cleaning the brass, and his colleague Jack Pope received their wages of 3s 8d on 21 June, at 2d a day each. The carpenters John Baker and his son Simon, working for the king in the absence of Jack Cressing and his team who were still at Kenilworth, also received their wages. Edward sent 300 quarts of Poitou salt – Poitou, one of the regions of France ruled by the kings of England in the Middle Ages, was and is famous for its salt-marshes – to Cardiff Castle for the use of Hugh Despenser. Eleven sailors, including John of Shoreditch, Thomme of Kingston, John Baudet, Wille Dene and Adam Furnival, transported the salt to Wales after Thomas Springet successfully completed his mission to return the king’s ship La Seintecroiz and its cargo of salt to England from Brittany, where Sir Gerald Chaluz had seized it.
On 23 June, Edward sent Sir Robert Welles, the royal justice John Denum and Robert Thorp to Scotland, to ‘declare his [Edward’s] intention touching certain articles concerning the truce between the king and the men of Scotland’.17 England and Scotland had been at peace since Edward II and Robert Bruce, king of Scotland, signed a thirteen-year treaty in 1323, but relations between the two kingdoms were far from cordial, and Edward consistently refused to recognise Robert as king. In late 1315, Edward had sent Sir Robert Welles, one of his three envoys to Scotland in June 1326, with three other knights and thirty-six men-at-arms to rescue Maud, the widowed Lady Clifford. She had been kidnapped by an adventurer called Jack the Irishman and imprisoned at Barnard Castle in County Durham. Robert Welles and his associates set Maud free, whereupon, romantically, Maud decided to marry him. Less romantically, Edward II temporarily confiscated Maud and Robert’s lands as punishment for marrying without his permission. Maud’s 20-year-old son Robert Clifford, Robert Welles’ stepson, had seized Tickhill Castle with his associate John Mowbray earlier in 1326.18
The 24th of June was the Nativity of St John the Baptist, one of Edward II’s favourite saints, and Tuesday, 24 June 1326 marked the twelfth anniversary of Edward’s heavy defeat to Robert Bruce, king of Scotland, at the Battle of Bannockburn near Stirling Castle. Edward’s clerks tended to refer to the battle as ‘the discomfiture at Strivelyn’, i.e. Stirling. Edward borrowed 5s from his chamber valet Roger May at the Tower of London to play dice with a household knight called Sir Giles Beauchamp and unnamed others to celebrate John the Baptist’s birth, and gave Roger his money back on 7 July. The king also paid an old debt of 5s to Alis of Weybridge on 25 June; she lent him the money at Easter 1325 and he promised to pay it back by the feast of St Michael that year, 29 September, but failed to do so. Alis, perhaps a little disgruntled, came to the king in person to ask for her money, and received it.
Gerveys Whyting of Winchelsea was the captain of a ship called La Esmon (‘The Edmund’) of Winchelsea and had a crew of twenty-five sailors. Around 24/26 June, Gerveys and his crew were on their ship at the Pool of London – a stretch of the River Thames from London Bridge along Billingsgate – and the king sent them 20s to buy themselves drinks. This was enough to purchase almost 10 gallons (45 litres) of ale for each man. On Wednesday the 25th, Gerveys and some of his crew sailed the king across the Thames from the Tower of London to La Rosere on the opposite bank, and waited there while he dined. Edward, who often bought clothes and shoes for his archers, purchased eight striped cloths and four green cloths for the eight archers and his hobelars (armed men on horseback) on 25 June, the day he dined at La Rosere.
The following day, the king gave two cloths of pricey vermilion velvet to Edmund Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, who was 41 years old and a year younger than Edward. Edmund of Arundel was half-Italian via his mother Alesia di Saluzzo (d. 1292), daughter of Tommaso del Vasto, marquis of Saluzzo in north-west Italy, and he was a great-grandson of Beatrice of Savoy (d. 1259), queen of Sicily. He was one of the king’s very few remaining noble allies. Another was Hugh Despenser’s father Hugh Despenser the Elder, now 65 years old and created earl of Winchester by the king in May 1322. Winchester and Walter Stapeldon, bishop of Exeter and former treasurer of England, also received two vermilion velvet cloths from the king on 26 June. Stapeldon founded Exeter College at the University of Oxford in 1314; it still exists. On 18 June 1326, the king granted Stapeldon permission to give five residences in Oxford to the college he had founded, and called it ‘the house of Stapeldon’.19 Walter Stapeldon had been in Paris with Queen Isabella the previous year and fled from Paris back to England disguised as a merchant or a pilgrim, in the belief that some at the French court meant him harm. The annoyed queen sent him an irate letter on 8 December 1325 accusing him of being more loyal to Hugh Despenser than to herself.20 Walter Stapeldon’s perceived hostility to the queen was to have tragic consequences later in 1326.
Edward II asked four canons of Leeds Priory in Kent to ‘celebrate divine service daily’ in the chapel of Leeds Castle for the souls of two people on 28 June.21 One was his long-dead Spanish mother Leonor of Castile, twelfth of the fifteen children of the great warrior king and saint San Fernando, king of Castile and Leon (r. 1217–52). Queen Leonor died on 28 November 1290 when Edward was 6 and she 49. The other was Edward’s beloved Piers Gaveston, whom the king had made earl of Cornwall in 1307 and who was murdered by some of Edward’s barons, including his brother-in-law the earl of Hereford and his first cousin Thomas, earl of Lancaster, in Warwickshire on 19 June 1312. Gaveston was the first of the men the king loved; Hugh Despenser was the last.
Edward II sent a letter in Latin on 28 June to his cousin Juan el Tuerto (‘the One-Eyed’), lord of Biscay in northern Spain, telling Juan that his wife Isabella and son Edward of Windsor were being ‘held’ in France and that Charles IV was not permitting them to return.22 This, of course, was hardly the truth, and Edward’s rage is apparent in his remarkably abrupt description of Queen Isabella as uxor nostra soror sua, ‘our wife, his [Charles IV’s] sister’. Previously, the king had usually referred to her as ‘our dearest consort, the Lady Isabella, queen of England’.
Richard ‘Hick’ Mereworth, valet of the king’s chamber, was informed on 29 June that his house in Henley-on-Thames had been broken into and robbed, and Edward II allowed him to go home to his wife Johane and their young baby and gave him 20s. Edward himself arrived in Henley a week later and presumably Hick re-joined the court then. The king was having work done on the house called La Rosere opposite the Tower of London which he had acquired in October 1324. Edward had a new kitchen put in, hired plasterers called Watte of Coventry and Robyn to plaster it, and had it covered with 800 tiles. A new pentice, i.e. a covered area or porch, built between the hall and the kitchen, was also tiled and had its own gutter, and the king did not neglect the garden, having trees, plants, shrubs, flowers and vegetables planted. He also improved the hedges or palisades around the property. On 30 June 1326, Edward had another pentice built between the door into the hall and the bridge, presumably a bridge over a small moat surrounding La Rosere or a jetty leading to the house from the river. A hundred laths – long, thin strips of wood – used to make this pentice cost 3½d and were purchased from John of Southwark by the sailor Wille Ponche, while fifty nails for the pentice cost 1d.
On the opposite side of the river from where workmen were improving the king’s house, a violent quarrel which had tragic consequences took place on Monday, 30 June. Lucy, the pregnant wife of Richard Barstaple, was walking near the Tower of London when she encountered a woman with the odd name of Anneis Houdydoudy or ‘howdy-doody’. The two women quarrelled, and Anneis punched Lucy in the face and knocked her to the ground, and carried on kicking and hitting her in the belly. Lucy’s horrified friends found her and carried her to St Katherine’s hospital nearby, where three weeks later her baby was born prematurely and died, and Lucy herself died early in the morning of 1 August as well. Anneis Houdydoudy fled leaving her victim lying half dead in the street, but was captured almost immediately and taken to Newgate prison.23 Newgate existed until the early twentieth century, and was notorious for centuries for the large numbers of its inmates who died of ‘gaol fever’ (typhus), malnutrition and ill-treatment. Prison guards in the 1320s had no obligation to feed their prisoners, so if inmates had no family and friends to bring them food or money to pay the guards for some, they starved to death. Three men died of starvation in Newgate in 1322 alone: William Brich on 1 May, Thomas atte Grene on 10 May and Adam May on 12 August. All three had been convicted of robbery.24
For all its notoriety, Newgate, however, was not always secure. On Saturday, 7 September 1325, ten men escaped through a hole in the western wall of the prison. Five were soon recaptured by warders, and the other five fled into sanctuary, four in the church of St Sepulchre close to the prison and the other in the church of St Bride on Fleet Street. These five subsequently abjured the realm, and the sheriffs of London, John Causton and Benedict Fulsham, were pardoned on 20 February 1327 for allowing them to escape.25 The two city sheriffs were officially in charge of Newgate, and in January 1325 Edward II pardoned the sheriffs who had been in office in 1320/21 for allowing Robert Bakere and Stephen of Thirsk to escape from the prison. Stephen Dunheved, imprisoned in Newgate around July 1327 after attempting to free the former king Edward II from Berkeley Castle, also escaped shortly before 7 June 1329 and was still at large on 31 March 1330.26
‘Abjuring the realm’ was a specific legal procedure whereby persons who knew they were likely to be convicted of a felony and sentenced to death chose to exile themselves from England forever, and to forfeit all their possessions, rather than face trial. The abjurer had to leave the church or abbey where he or she had sought sanctuary, carrying a cross, dressed only in a shirt for men or a shift for women, barefoot and bareheaded – not a great problem during a hot summer like 1326 but considerably less pleasant when snow and ice lay thick on the ground – and was assigned a port from where to leave the kingdom. Generally, an abjurer was given a specific number of days to reach the port and had to remain on the king’s highway on the way there, and once at the port, had to board the first ship whose crew agreed to transport him or her overseas. The abjurer would then have to make a new life for him or herself wherever he or she arrived, without money and even without shoes. Only the king had the right to pardon abjurers, and if they were seen in England after their required departure, they were declared ‘wolf’s heads’, i.e. outlaws. William Toliere of Yorkshire and Roger Leche of Shropshire abjured the realm in June 1325 after they admitted they had killed a man called William of York around Christmas 1322. (Roger’s last name implies that he was a physician using leeches.) William Toliere was assigned the port of Dover, and Roger was assigned Harwich and given three days to reach there from London. Juliana Aunsel admitted to the murder of her lover Esmon Brekles, a chaplain, and abjured the realm on Monday, 16 July 1324; she was assigned Dover and given five days to reach there from London. Her accomplice John of Malton, who had stabbed Esmon, was also assigned Dover but given only four days to get there, via another route.27