The king sent 700 armed men and 1,300 archers to ‘Erewell’ in Suffolk (probably the River Orwell) on 2 September, to arrive there on 21 September and to stay there for a month.1 The queen’s invasion force landed at the Orwell only twenty-two days after his order, on 24 September, but the king’s foresight did him no good whatsoever; although he probably did not realise it, he had lost the support of much of his nobility and the knightly class, and many of the men in charge of Edward’s soldiers simply took them to the queen instead or ignored their orders.
Archbishop William Melton had sent a letter to the king at an uncertain date informing him of the condition of the castle in York, by far the largest city in the north of England and either the second or third largest overall, after London and perhaps Bristol. The drawbridge and two other bridges, and the stockade between the castle and the tower, were rotten and falling apart. The lead on the great tower had mostly fallen away, and the springalds within the castle were broken and there were no crossbows, bows or quarrels. Edward II therefore sent a letter to the sheriff of Yorkshire on 2 September, ordering him to amend all the defects.2 Clifford’s Tower is the only part of York Castle which still survives today, named after one of the three noblemen Edward II hanged there as Contrariants in March 1322: Roger, Lord Clifford.
In the Sussex village of Buxted (then spelt ‘Bokstede’) on 2 September, John Shodwelle or Shodeswell proved that he had come of age and had turned 22 years old on 24 August 1326. John was the nephew and co-heir, with his aunt Alianore Frennyngham, of his uncle Philip Brode (d. 1311), and they inherited three residences, 124 acres of arable land, ten acres of meadow, ten acres of marsh and 25 acres of land called ‘Brunnemanneslond’. One of the jurors, Thomas atte Mille, was about 70 years old in 1326, and remembered John Shodwelle’s date of birth because his son Simon was born in the same year, 1304. Another juror, Walter Grenhurst, was also about 70 and remembered the date because he married his wife Maud in 1304.3 Thomas atte Mille and Walter Grenhurst, although they may not have been exactly 70 years old as reported, provide a handy reminder that some people in the fourteenth century lived to a good age and that not everyone died young. Alis Pursere, who died in London in the early hours of 1 January 1326, was around 80 years old when she passed away after falling down her stairs. Her husband Richard, presumably the same age, outlived her. Joan Burghersh, Lady Mohun, was born in 1320 or a little later and died on 4 October 1404 in her 80s, and Hugh Bodyton, who inherited land in Sussex from his brother Andrew in 1331, was said to be ‘aged 80 years and more’. Three of the dozen jurors who sat on a proof of age assessment in Dorset on 18 April 1327 were about 70 years old and another six were around 60, and two jurors at the proof of age of Sir Nichol Kyriel’s son John (b. 29 September 1307) in Kent on 16 August 1329 were about 65 and 70.4
Edward II sent a letter on 2 September 1326 to Alina Burnell (c. 1287– 1363), the eldest of Hugh Despenser’s four sisters, whom the king had appointed constable of Conwy Castle in North Wales on 30 January 1326. The messenger sent with the letter to Alina was a Franciscan friar of Oxford, Adam Freford. The letter was written under the king’s secret seal, implying that it was important and a matter of some delicacy, and Adam was told to bring Lady Burnell’s reply ‘wherever the king may be’. Alina Burnell was only the second woman in the fourteenth century to be appointed custodian of a castle in England or Wales; the first was Isabella, Lady Vescy at Bamburgh in Northumberland, appointed by Edward I in 1304 and reappointed by Edward II soon after he came to the throne in 1307. Another letter from Edward, to the archbishops of Canterbury and York and to six of the English bishops, was sent on 3 September. Edward told them to remove any French men of religion who dwelt in a convent near the coast and to send the men to houses of the same order (i.e. Benedictine, Cistercian, Augustinian and so on) in more remote areas of the realm.5 He suspected that such men might aid their fellow Frenchmen if Charles IV invaded England.
On 3 September, Sandre Baddyng of Winchelsea came to Edward at Portchester with a habergeon (a coat of light mail, often sleeveless) that his brother John Baddyng had made for Edward, for which the king paid him 20s, and vermilion yarn was purchased for 4d from Sandre Gancy of Portsmouth to feather arrows. Jack Holm, one of the servants who looked after the king’s clothes, paid 20s for a silver chape (the protective covering at the bottom of a scabbard) and for having the king’s sword repaired. Edward was preparing himself for the war he knew was coming, and one of his clerks on 13 September called it ‘the war between the king and the magnates of the land’.6 A sailor of Winchelsea with the king at Portchester in September 1326 was called Litel John, traditionally the name of one of Robin Hood’s associates. (Also rather intriguingly, in November 1324 Edward had paid 5s as a retirement gift to his chamber valet Robyn Hod, who was no longer able to work.) Edward sent Litel John with letters for the Alard brothers Stephen and Robert, and the bailiffs of Winchelsea, on 3 September, ordering them to take the captured French ship La Dorre from Winchelsea to Portsmouth. The king pardoned two men from Bristol, John Celer, who part-owned the ships La Alisote and the Cog Johan, and Richard Welles, who part-owned La Laurence, for not taking part personally in the attack on Normandy. Both men were, the king stated, ‘so weak and aged that they cannot labour in this service’.7
In early September 1326, the king dealt with the issue of the forty-six cows and seven horses which lived in the Yorkshire villages of Thornton Steward and North Duffield. An unnamed local man had travelled all the way south to ask Edward whether he wanted to sell these animals. The king duly expressed his wishes on the matter, and the horses were taken to York to be sold while four men, also unnamed, were paid 1½d each per day for taking all the forty-six cows from the two villages to Pickering Castle also in Yorkshire. This all subsequently necessitated another long journey south by the first man to Edward to ask what he wanted to do with the money raised by the sale of the horses, and this latest journey was recorded in the royal accounts on 6 September. Pickering was part of the estate of Edward’s executed cousin Thomas of Lancaster which the king had kept for himself, and he rebuilt some of the castle between 1322 and 1326.
Around midnight on Monday, 8 September, a fire broke out in a shop belonging to John and Alis Ryvet in the parish of St Botulph without Aldersgate in London, as they were going to sleep above the shop. The fire was caused by a candle that Alis had forgotten to extinguish, and as the couple fought their way outside past the fire, John shouted out that Alis was to blame for it and callously pushed her back inside the burning shop. She died of her burns the following day, and John fled.8 Fire was of course always a great risk in an era when most buildings were made of wood, and another fire in London on 27 April 1322 claimed the lives of Robert of Kent, a cordwainer, and his son William. Robert’s wife Maud had fixed a candle to the wall of their chamber, but during the night it fell onto their bed. Maud herself and her other son John managed to escape the resulting conflagration that destroyed their house.9
A blacksmith called Hick Hugh worked in Portchester, and on 8 September sold large iron nails for a ship called the Katherine, under the command of Thomas Springet. Montz Penteleworth was an armourer of Portchester and on the same day received 7d for his work wiping and polishing basinets and ventails (a piece of armour for protecting the neck) which Edward II had given to his sailors before they sailed to Normandy. Edward knew the Palmere brothers, shipwrights of London, well, and while in Portchester at this time praised another five shipwrights, Jack Large, Wille Weymouthe, Hugh Bermyng, Thomme Gaske and John Baddyng, for their hard work and achievement making a large barge for his use and ensuring that it was ready to launch. Another shipwright called Hick Alwode of London was paid on 10 September for making decks and partitions on the Blome of Westminster, of which Jack Pyk was captain (and which the master carpenter Jack Cressing’s colleagues Adam of London and Watte Cadewelle had repaired in December 1325). One ship mentioned in 1326 is the Jonete Baddying, so apparently John Baddying had named a ship he made after his wife or mother or daughter.
Edward II’s household controller Robert Holden bought a cask of cider from Robert Kyngestok of Portchester on 10 September. The king had it sent to the crew of a ship named La Nicholas of Winchelsea – which Edward’s clerk called ‘the beautiful ship’ – and their captain John Dyn. The cider, and the expenses of Robert Holden and the seller Robert Kyngestok travelling from Portchester to Winchelsea with it and back, set Edward back 80d. The king announced to the bailiffs of numerous ports along the English coast on 10 September that all the expenses incurred by the sailors who had mustered for the attack on Normandy should be borne by the men of the ports where the ships came from, as it was only fair that those who worked hard ‘for the common benefit and defence of the realm’ should be supported by those who stayed at home. Ships’ captains received 6d a day and each crew member 3d.10
On 13 September, the king was personally present in a forge in Portchester where a blacksmith called Phelip Darryngton and his apprentice William of Dartmouth were temporarily at work (they normally plied their trade in Southampton). Phelip was paid 5d a day and William 3d, and Edward gave them 10s for their expenses returning home to Southampton. The two men made a bell, metal plates and nails of various sizes for Edward’s ships, boats and barges at Portchester. The king, who took endless pleasure in both performing and watching manual labour, also observed three men called Henry of York, John of Stamford and Thomas of Bradford, ‘fletchers of London’, as they feathered arrows and quarrels (or bolts, the arrows used in crossbows) in his presence. Edward’s wheelwrights Jack and Rauf ‘Dawe’ Hunte, Wille Gentilcorps, Jack Grinder, Elis ‘Eliot’ Peck and Wauter ‘Watte’ Buffard were also in Portchester, making carts and wheels. Watte Buffard had just returned from a week’s holiday visiting his family in the Forest of Dean. The king found the time on the same day to order the sheriff of Sussex to arrest twenty-eight footmen and archers of the county who had refused to obey his summons to travel to Portchester.11
Edward II’s niece Elizabeth de Burgh turned 31 on 16 September 1326, and the following day her son William de Burgh turned 14. William was the heir of his paternal grandfather, the great Anglo-Irish nobleman Richard de Burgh, earl of Ulster (William’s father John, the earl’s eldest son, died in 1313 when his son was a baby). The earl of Ulster died in County Tipperary on 29 July 1326 at the age of about 67 and was buried at Athassel Priory. News of Ulster’s demise reached Edward II on 23 August, and Elizabeth de Burgh’s household bought black cloth for young William in Ipswich after Elizabeth heard of her father-in-law’s death.12 William de Burgh married Maud of Lancaster, third of the six daughters of the king’s cousin Henry of Lancaster, in 1327 – she was his age or a little older – and their daughter Elizabeth, born in July 1332, was one of the great heiresses of the fourteenth century. William was murdered near Belfast in June 1333 at the age of only 20.
In the Suffolk village of Bawdsey on 17 September 1326, Robert Coleville, son and heir of the late Sir Edmund Coleville and Margaret, née Ufford, proved that he had come of age. Robert was born in Bawdsey on 20 October 1304, ‘the Tuesday after St Luke in Edward I’s thirty-second regnal year’. Alisandre Oxeney, aged 48 in 1326, remembered Robert’s date of birth because he ‘gave the said heir lying in his cradle a buckle of gold’. Robert Gardiner, aged 50 in 1326, remembered because he had gone into his local church to hear Mass and saw Robert Coleville being baptised. John Grym, aged 42, remembered because his own son Richard died two days after little Robert was born, and Ranulph Skot, aged 52, remembered because he was sitting in a tavern with some friends when Robert’s birth was announced. William Nichole, aged 41, knew the date ‘because he was in a garden and heard the cries of the said heir’s mother labouring in childbirth’, and 58-year-old William Haskes remembered because he and many others were invited to a banquet by Robert’s mother Margaret to celebrate his birth. Robert Coleville inherited manors in Rutland, Cambridgeshire, Leicestershire and Lincolnshire. His father Edmund Coleville, born on 25 January 1288 – Edmund was 16 years and 9 months old when his son was born – died in March 1316. Robert lived until January 1368 when he was 63, and his heir was his 4-year-old grandson Robert, son of his son Walter (b. 1340) whom he had outlived by a few weeks. By January 1349 Walter Coleville was married to Margaret, granddaughter and heir of Sir Humphrey Bassingbourn; he was then 8 and she was 14.13
The king’s half-brother Thomas of Brotherton, earl of Norfolk, married Alice Hales, daughter of the coroner of Norfolk, Sir Roger Hales (d. 1313), probably in 1321, and their young children were Margaret, Alice and Edward. Whatever her personal qualities may have been, Alice Hales’ rank made her a peculiar choice of bride for a man who was son and brother of kings of England, grandson and nephew of kings of France. In 1320 before Thomas wed Alice, Edward II had tried to arrange a far more suitable marriage for his half-brother with Maria (b. 1299), widowed daughter of King Jaime II of Aragon in Spain. Rather unflatteringly for Thomas, Maria of Aragon decided to become a nun instead. Countess Alice sent her cousin John Hales, who worked for her as a squire, to the king with her letters in early June 1326, and her sister Johane Germye had been placed in charge of the household of the king’s daughters Eleanor of Woodstock and Joan of the Tower earlier in 1326. Johane Germye had a damsel, i.e. a female attendant – the word ‘damsel’ meant a woman who was either not married or married to a man who was not a knight, and had nothing to do with her age – called Jonete Pynsom. Jonete’s son was named Fouk (i.e. Fulk), and he came to court to meet the king. On 18 September, Edward gave Jonete 20s for Fouk’s expenses because he was going to study at Cambridge. On the same day, the king gave half a mark (6s 8d) to the two chaplains, Esmon of York and Wauter Bower, who worked in his private chapel at Portchester Castle.
The king passed through Guildford and Woking in Surrey on 19 and 20 September on his way back to London, and prayed inside a chapel dedicated to Saint Katherine between the two towns, presumably his new chapel built by Jack Cressing and his colleagues with its brand-new glass windows. While Edward was in Guildford, he sent Litel John to Winchelsea to bring the captured French ship La Dorre to London for Edward’s use, although he had previously ordered it to be taken to Portsmouth. The king bought five ells of black russet cloth from the draper John Bertelmewe of Guildford, at 14½d an ell, for his page Wille of Dunstable. White russet had been bought from the draper Monde of Cornhill in London in December 1325 to make a tunic for another royal page, Richard ‘Hick’ Aysshele, at 14d an ell, and in August 1326 grey russet bought for one of the king’s fletchers cost 13d an ell. By way of contrast, the various types of velvet and silk cloth the king bought in 1325/6 for his teenaged great-nephew Huchon Despenser, who was the eldest great-grandchild of King Edward I and the grandson of two earls, and hence was of very high birth and status, cost between 48d and 120d an ell. The king’s chamber valet Anneis ‘Annote’ May, as well as stitching shirts for Edward and Hugh Despenser in 1325, made canvas smocks for his valets, another indication of the type of material worn by lower-ranking people of the 1320s.
Wille of Dunstable and Hick Aysshele were two of the five pages of the king’s chamber; the others were Litel Wille Fisher, Litel Robyn, and Phelip Lytchet, sometime affectionately addressed as Phelipot. The apparent littleness of the pages might indicate that some of them were boys or very young men, though sometimes it is a reference to their physical size. Wille of Dunstable and Litel Wille Fisher had served in the royal household since at least November 1322, when Edward bought shoes for them. Litel Wille cannot have been very young: he was one of the king’s huntsmen, and was deemed old enough in July 1325 to be assigned as one of the five men who were to lead eighty-four mares which Edward II had given to Hugh Despenser from London to Chepstow in South Wales. (It took ten days for the five men and eighty-four horses to travel the 125 miles.) In August 1324, Edward gave Litel Wille 6d when he went on pilgrimage to Hastings in Sussex, presumably to Battle Abbey. Phelipot Lytchet worked as one of the king’s personal cooks and retired to Whitby Abbey in 1326, and Litel Colle, a valet of the king’s chamber evidently also of small stature, was the captain of one of the king’s barges.14 An inhabitant of London accused of inciting one John Cavendisshe to stab a belt-maker called Nichol Horn to death in November 1324 was called Litel Robyn.15 Referring to men as litel and grete, and to tall men as longe, was common.
Every year on 21 September, the feast of St Matthew the Evangelist, the two sheriffs of London were elected. On 21 September 1326, Roger Chauntecler and a vintner and taverner called Richard Rothyng were chosen.16 Roger Chauntecler was perhaps an unlikely man for the job: he was accused in July 1319 of breaking into the house of John Marisco in Edmonton, Middlesex, and stealing his goods and his corn.17 Roger owned a tenement in Fleet Street, and on 1 August 1307 just weeks after Edward II’s accession to the throne had taken part in a commission regarding the Fleet Bridge in London. The pavement near the bridge was broken, and the commissioners determined that the wardens of the nearby Fleet prison would repair the woodwork of the bridge and that the sheriffs of London would take responsibility for paving it.18
As the king passed through Brentford on his way along the Thames to Westminster and London, a fisherman called Richard Capon sent him minnows and loach and received 8d, and Wille of Ireland sent lampreys and received the same amount. The three fletchers of London who had been in Portchester with the king, Henry of York, John of Stamford and Thomas of Bradford, were paid their wages at Westminster on 22 September and were said to ‘follow the king every day and make arrows and [crossbow] bolts for the war’. Although Edward did not know it, his wife’s invasion force left Dordrecht in the county of Holland on 21 or 22 September, but he certainly knew that war was coming and that his queen and her allies had sworn to destroy Hugh Despenser.
The invading force consisted of perhaps 1,500 or so mercenaries; twenty ships were required to take them all back to ‘Almain’ (i.e. Germany or somewhere close to it) and the county of Hainault in December 1326.19 With them were the queen; her and Edward II’s 13-year-old son Edward of Windsor; the king’s half-brother Edmund of Woodstock, earl of Kent; Roger Mortimer of Wigmore; and other Contrariants who had fled from England in 1322. The Folville and Zouche brothers, who had killed Sir Roger Belers in Leicestershire in January, also came back to England with the queen and her army. They landed at the River Orwell in Suffolk on 24 September, on the lands of Edward’s other half-brother Thomas, earl of Norfolk, who immediately went to join them. This was the first invasion of England since 1216, when Queen Isabella’s great-great-grandfather Louis of France (the future King Louis VIII, r. 1223–26), came to England with his army at the behest of King John’s disgruntled barons. King John, Edward II’s great-grandfather, died not long afterwards with parts of his kingdom under Louis’s control.
The great fleet of ships which was meant to repel the invasion force failed entirely to do so, and one London chronicler states that ‘the mariners of England were not minded to prevent their coming, by reason of the great anger they entertained against Sir Hugh Despenser’.20 Edward II’s niece Elizabeth de Burgh, a victim of her brother-in-law Despenser’s illegal and quasi-legal land grabs, spent most of her time at her Suffolk castle of Clare less than 40 miles from where the queen and her allies landed, and heard of their arrival within hours. She sent a messenger called Thomas Ryot to her manor of Cranborne in Dorset ‘in haste’ to inform her people there on 24 September, though two days later cautiously and diplomatically sent letters to her uncle the king.21
On the day the force of Contrariants and mercenaries arrived, an oblivious Edward II went out to the postern gate of the Tower of London in person and paid a fisherman called Richard Marbon 3s for two ‘fine salmon’. The postern gate probably means the personal entry point from the river built by Edward’s grandfather Henry III which led to his private rooms in the Wakefield Tower via a flight of stairs.22 An ‘outer postern gate’ is also mentioned in December 1325. There was a ditch full of water around the Tower, said to be ‘within the second gate’ of the Tower, and in October 1321 two men, John Costard and Elias of Beverley in Yorkshire, drowned there in two separate incidents. Drowning in the Thames itself was also not uncommon. No incidents are recorded in 1326, but between 1322 and 1325 John Thorpe, Elena Gubbe, Robert Leyre, Henry Barber and Thomas Pountager all fell into the river in or near London and drowned.23
Edward’s servant Richard Pergate, whose job title was ‘keeper of the king’s possessions at Westminster’, paid 9d for cleaning buck-skin to make gloves for the king on 24 September. After the hot, dry weather which continued well into autumn, Edward was evidently anticipating another cold winter. He was still unaware of the arrival of his queen and her allies on 26 September when he dealt with an act of piracy in the English Channel. Four merchants ‘of the realm of Almain’ complained that while they were travelling from Waterford in Ireland to Bruges in Flanders, having loaded their ship with wool, hides and other goods, they passed near the Isle of Wight. Here, Alisandre Keu (‘cook’) of Winchelsea and Thomas of London, with numerous armed accomplices, boarded their ship by force on the sea. The men stole forty-two sacks of wool and twelve sacks of hides, three containers full of salmon and two of cheese, cloth, silver bowls, jewels, and several sparrow-hawks. This theft had become something of a political hot potato, and Edward received letters on the matter from his nephew Jan III (b. 1300), duke of Brabant – a large territory in modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands with its capital at Brussels – and his sister Margaret (b. 1275), the dowager duchess.24
Either late on 27 September or on 28 September, Edward finally received news that the invasion force had landed in Suffolk four days previously. One of his first acts was to pardon around 110 imprisoned felons in various English gaols ‘on condition that [they] go against the king’s enemies’, though the murderers of Roger Belers in January 1326 were specifically excluded from the pardon. Sometimes the felons’ crime was referenced, so we learn that Thomas Fouk had been imprisoned for the theft of six sheep, William Seymour for breaking into Rockingham Castle in Northamptonshire, Francis Botiller for ‘assenting to the forging of false money’, and John Swynburn ‘for adherence to the Scots’. Many of the prisoners were pardoned for murder. William son of William atte Hide had killed German son of Reginald, and ‘Kenewrek ap David Obenthlyn’ – English scribes always struggled with Welsh names – had killed David Map Tuder Obenthlyn. On the same day, all the sheriffs of England were ordered to proclaim at least two or three times a week, at county courts, fairs and markets, that ‘Roger Mortimer and other traitors and enemies of the king and his realm have entered the realm in force, and have brought with them alien strangers for the purpose of taking the royal power from the king’. Edward pointed out that every man of the realm was bound to come to its defence, and set out the wages they would receive for doing so: 12d a day for a man-at-arms, 6d for a hobelar, 4d for a footman ‘with a double garment’ and 3d otherwise, and 2d for an archer.25 Most men, however, were unwilling to fight against Edward of Windsor, their future king, on behalf of the present king’s loathed favourite Hugh Despenser, even though Edward II put a price of £1,000 on Roger Mortimer’s head on 28 September.26
Anneis Cellers lived on Soper Lane just south of Cheapside in London, a lane which suffered badly during the Great Fire and was newly laid out and renamed Queen Street. Anneis was a neighbour of Rohese Burford, née Romeyn, who also lived on Soper Lane, and sold the king’s household servants two pounds of vinegar at 16d which was used as part of the process of colouring arrow feathers. Her neighbour Richard Furby sold yellow and vermilion silk also for arrow feathers. Phelip Lucas sold twelve sails at a shilling each for the royal ship La Jonete, built by Martyn Palmere, and Watte Talworth, shipwright of Fulham – then a village outside the city which belonged to the bishop of London, Stephen Gravesend – sold a boat for 20s which was to accompany the Jonete. The king gave Watte Talworth’s son and apprentice Jack a gift of 12d. John Combe, Gibbe atte Lyghe, Aleyn Helynton and Jankyn Cressyngham, ‘makers of oars’, were paid 4d a day each for working for the king at the Tower from 24 to 27 September. Jankyn Cressyngham had learned his trade from his father John (d. 1339), and Aleyn Helynton was another of John’s apprentices.
Edward II ordered three justices on 28 September to investigate the recent seizure of a ship called La Pelerym of Flanders, off the coast of Whitby, Yorkshire. The ship’s captain Walter Fosse was killed, as were nine Scottish merchants, sixteen Scottish pilgrims and thirteen women, so it was a particularly vicious attack on a defenceless group.27 A knight called Sir Piers Denarston and a group of his men attacked the home of John Neve in the Suffolk village of Brent Eleigh near Lavenham on 29 September. Perhaps Piers had decided to take advantage of the general confusion in the aftermath of the queen’s invasion. John Neve also owned a farm in nearby Milden which Denarston and his men attacked as well, and Neve claimed that Denarston stole his animals and other goods of his to a value of £200. Neve’s wife Emme was heavily pregnant at the time of the attack, and Neve said that Denarston’s men ill-treated or ‘defiled’ her and frightened her so much that ‘the child within her stomach perished’. Piers Denarston also owned land in Brent Eleigh and Milden and thus was the Neves’ neighbour, and soon afterwards made a counter-accusation that John Neve and three other men had broken into his houses, stolen some of his goods and cut down his trees.28 While she was in Bury St Edmunds just twelve miles from Brent Eleigh at the end of September, Queen Isabella helped herself to £800 which the chief justice and Edward II’s ally Hervey Staunton, founder of Michaelhouse at the University of Cambridge two years before, had deposited at the abbey in the town. Staunton died the following year without recovering his money and his executors had to plead for its return.29