On Saturday, 1 November 1326, a man whose name appears on record as John in the Hale de Reynham, i.e. originally from Rainham in Essex, stole a surcote or overtunic and hood from a tailor called Roger Child in Ironmonger Lane, London. The clothes were valued at 10d. John was imprisoned and sentenced to be flogged, and then released. He was very lucky; the usual punishment for theft was hanging, and almost certainly it was only the low value of the clothes he had stolen which saved him from execution.1
Roger Mortimer of Wigmore’s daughter Joan Mortimer, future Lady Audley, was released from Sempringham Priory in Lincolnshire on 2 November.2 Roger had four sons and eight daughters, and Joan was one of his three daughters whom Edward II sent to live at various convents in April 1324 a few months after their father escaped from the Tower. Joan Mortimer’s mother was also called Joan, née Geneville or Joinville, and was born on 2 February 1286.3 The elder Joan spent the period from March 1322 until late 1326 under house arrest with six or eight attendants, first in Southampton and then at Skipton Castle in Yorkshire, and from 22 July 1326 at Pontefract Castle also in Yorkshire.4
Just before he and Hugh Despenser left Caerphilly on or about 2 November, King Edward pardoned several local felons ‘on condition that [they] go with the king against the invaders’, or if the men went to Caerphilly Castle and defended it. Anyone who had participated in the murder of Sir Roger Belers in January 1326 was excluded from the pardon.5 Edward’s utter desperation is all too apparent. Nothing at all was going his way; men were deserting him in droves or joining the queen. His misrule and general incompetence and his acceptance of Hugh Despenser’s extortions for the last few years were mostly to blame.
Why the king left the safety of Caerphilly Castle is unknown, but he and Hugh Despenser left it remarkably well-stocked with food and drink. When the castle garrison finally surrendered to the queen on 20 March 1327, among the numerous provisions found in the larders were seventy-eight oxen carcasses, 280 mutton carcasses, well over 100 quarters of wheat, over 100 quarters of beans, sixty quarters of salt, six tuns of red wine – more than 6,000 litres – one tun of white wine ‘whereof ten inches are lacking’, and 1,956 stockfish, i.e. dried unsalted fish. This was after almost 150 men had lived in the castle for four and a half months. Edward II sent his chamber valet Jack Coppehouse to Caerphilly in March 1325 with sacks full of aketons and habergeons, on two carts, to store at the castle. In March 1327, thirty-five habergeons and forty aketons were found within the castle, twenty-one of the aketons ‘old’ or ‘worn’ and covered with linen cloth, and one of ‘green camoca [heavy silk cloth] covered over with red kid’.6 By 5 November 1326 the king, Hugh Despenser and the handful of men who remained with them had reached Neath Abbey, where they received news of the execution of Hugh’s father the earl of Winchester in Bristol nine days before.7
Nichol of Rainham, possibly a relative of John ‘in the Hale’ who had stolen clothes a week previously, wrote his will in London on 8 November.8 He left his tenements in Ismongernelane (Ironmonger Lane, off Cheapside) and Cattestrete or Cateaton Street to his daughters Johane, Katherine, Margery and the oddly-named Rayna. His shops and houses in Ealdefisshstrate or Old Fish Street were to be sold and the proceeds given to the rector of the church of St Nicholas Cole Abbey, one of the many medieval churches of London destroyed in the Great Fire 340 years later. Nichol of Rainham had acquired his tenements in the first place from William Sautreour, a name which meant a person who earned a living by playing a stringed instrument called a psaltery. William Sautreour’s first name often appears as Gillot or Gillotin, and he worked as a minstrel in the households of Edward II’s stepmother Queen Marguerite and wife Queen Isabella from 1299 to 1315. Edward called Gillot ‘the king’s well beloved’ in 1310, and he is one of the most well-known minstrels of the early fourteenth century. His son’s name was John Grey, and this presumably was his own real last name.9
Edward II appointed five envoys on 10 November to send to his wife Isabella and son Edward of Windsor, though most probably they never departed.10 Two were his chamber squires John Harsik of Norfolk and Oliver of Bordeaux, who owned lands in Windsor and was married to the noblewoman Maud Trussell. The king called John Harsik ‘Jankyn’, and in December 1324 paid 24d for six pieces of otter-skin to make him a jerkin. Jankyn was sufficiently well-off to be able to lend the king the large sum of 20 marks (3,200d) the same month and got it back in early February 1325, and on another occasion, Edward gave him £10 as a gift.11A third envoy to the queen and her son was the abbot of Neath, and a fourth was the Welsh knight Sir Rhys ap Gruffudd, who in September 1327 would flee to Scotland after taking part in a plot to free the deposed Edward from Berkeley Castle. The fifth was the king’s teenage nephew Edward de Bohun, born either c. 1309 or c. 1312/13, one of the younger brothers of the earl of Hereford, John de Bohun. Edward de Bohun was destined to drown in a river in Scotland in 1334; his younger twin William (d. 1360) was made earl of Northampton by their cousin Edward III in 1337 and was a great-grandfather of Henry V.
Sir Warin Bassingbourne of Cambridgeshire supported the queen and her son in the autumn of 1326, and joined them in their pursuit of Hugh Despenser. While Warin was in the west of England with the queen on 11 November, the feast of St Martin, his wife Avice gave birth to their son in Abington, South Cambridgeshire. She named him Warin after his father, but sadly, Avice Bassingbourne died shortly after giving birth.12 Women in the fourteenth century had an approximately one in fifty chance of dying in childbirth or soon afterwards, and the infant mortality rate was nothing short of horrific, even for children born into royal or noble families.13 Edward II’s mother Queen Leonor gave birth to at least fourteen children, perhaps as many as sixteen, and only six of them outlived her. Edward’s sister Elizabeth, countess of Hereford, fifth of those six children – Edward himself was the sixth – died after giving birth to her tenth child Isabella de Bohun in May 1316. Born in August 1282, Elizabeth was then 33 years old. Three of Elizabeth’s children died in infancy, including her daughter Isabella born in May 1316, and a fourth died as a teenager. On the other hand, Edward and Elizabeth’s second eldest sister Joan of Acre, countess of Gloucester, gave birth to eight children who all survived into adulthood, and Joan’s eldest daughter Eleanor Despenser, née de Clare, gave birth to at least eleven children between c. 1308 and c. 1330 of whom only one died in infancy. Roger Mortimer of Wigmore’s wife Joan gave birth to twelve surviving children between about 1304 and the early 1320s, and lived until 1356 when she was 70.
In the ‘great church at Wells’ (i.e. Wells Cathedral in Somerset) on 11 November, Walter Hulle, rector of the church of Shepton Beauchamp, proved a will. It had been written by a resident of Bath, Benedict of Hanging Stoke, also sometimes called Benedict the Yonge (‘young’), on 17 October, and he died sometime between then and 11 November. Benedict left his best robe and 5s of annual rent from a tenement on Froggemere Lane (now called New Bond Street) in Bath and another tenement ‘outside the south gate in the suburb of Bath’ to John, his son from his first marriage. To his second wife Johane Canynges, the widow of William Sautemareys (‘saltmarsh’) – Benedict had wed Johane sometime after 8 June 1326, so the marriage was a short one – Benedict bequeathed several tenements. One stood on Stall Street in Bath ‘between the lane leading to the king’s bath, on the north, and a tenement of Walter Clement, on the south, and it extends from the highway as far as the wall of the bishop [of Bath and Wells], on the east’. Johane married her third husband John Freman not long afterwards, outlived him too, and wrote her own will on 10 August 1348 leaving her extensive property in Bath to her daughter Isabella and son-in-law Roger Love.14
The king and queen’s elder son Edward of Windsor turned 14 years old on Thursday, 13 November 1326. He was duke of Aquitaine, count of Ponthieu and earl of Chester but not prince of Wales, a title he, unlike his father, never held, and he was never called ‘Prince Edward’, a form of address which did not yet exist. He became King Edward III in January 1327, lived until 21 June 1377 when he was 64, claimed the throne of France in 1337 and thus began the Hundred Years War, and inadvertently brought about the Wars of the Roses in the fifteenth century by fathering five sons whose descendants battled for the throne. He was born as the heir to his father’s throne on Monday, 13 November 1312, and his birth was the cause of great celebration. A messenger called Robert Oliver took the news the 25 miles from Windsor Castle to London on the same day, and at sunset a large crowd gathered outside the Guildhall and showed their joy by singing, dancing and blowing trumpets. A spontaneous procession ‘with great glare of torches’ took place through the streets of the capital. Very early the following morning, proclamation was made throughout the city that it was a public holiday, and that everyone should dress in their best clothes and assemble at the Guildhall at Prime or six a.m., then proceed to St Paul’s Cathedral ‘to make praise and offering to the honour of God who had shown them such favour on earth’. The conduit at the junction of Cheapside and Poultry ran with wine to which all city inhabitants were invited to help themselves, and the mayor and aldermen led a party which lasted most of Tuesday night.15
The great conduit at Cheapside in London was an impressive feat of thirteenth-century engineering which brought fresh water to the centre of the city from the River Tyburn several miles away, via an underground channel. The guardians of the conduit in 1326 were William Latoner, Henry Ware, Bennet of the Guildhall, and a cutler named Geoffrey Gedelestone.16 The abbot of St Augustine’s Abbey in Bristol (which became Bristol Cathedral in the sixteenth century) complained to Edward II in April 1326 that eight men, including one called William of Kent, had broken his ‘underground leaden conduit’ at Clifton a mile and a half from the abbey, and stolen the lead.17 On 13 February 1327 permission was given to the Franciscan friars of Southampton to make an underground conduit from a well called ‘Colewell’ in the village of Shirley, ‘as far as Houndewellecrouche, and thence by King Street to their dwelling-house’. This was about 2½ miles, a feat dwarfed by the ambitious building programme of the Dominican friars of Boston, Lincolnshire in October 1327: they began to construct a subterranean conduit to their house from Bolingbroke, 15 miles away.18
On 15 November 1326, Richard Betoyne or Bethune, a supporter of Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, replaced Hamo of Chigwell as mayor of London.19 Hamo had been one of the men who condemned Roger Mortimer and his uncle Roger Mortimer of Chirk to death in 1322 after the Contrariant rebellion – Edward II commuted the sentence to life imprisonment – and managed to save his life in the autumn of 1326 by swearing an oath of loyalty to the queen.20 Richard Betoyne’s father Guillaume (d. 1305) was French, and Richard owned a tavern in St Pancras called ubi le Bere toumbeth which he left to his daughter Johane in 1340.21 Ubi le Bere toumbeth means ‘where the bear tumbles’ in a mixture of English, French and Latin, and surely indicates that the tavern had a dancing bear.
Far away from London, Edward II and Hugh Despenser were finally captured near Llantrisant in South Wales, apparently on their way back from Neath Abbey to the great stronghold of Caerphilly, on Sunday, 16 November. The men were found and taken during a terrific thunderstorm which lasted all day; this story sounds like dramatic licence or the pathetic fallacy, but two chroniclers who could not have influenced each other give the same story.22 The long period of dry weather had finally broken, and in stark contrast to the endless parched heat of 1326, the year 1327 would be a cool and rainy one.23
The Middle English Brut chronicle states that Hugh Despenser’s ‘hood was taken from his head’ and a chaplet of sharp nettles placed there instead.24 This is further evidence that men as well as women tended to cover their heads in the 1320s, though of course Hugh’s hood would have provided protection against the lashing rain that day. Edward was placed in the custody of his cousin Henry of Lancaster, earl of Leicester and now calling himself earl of Lancaster as well, and was treated with respect and consideration. Hugh Despenser was tied to a horse and taken very slowly to Hereford – the journey of barely 60 miles took seven or eight days – to show him off to as many people as possible. Squires riding alongside him blew bugle horns in his ears, and those who saw him pass hurled abuse at him and pelted him with rubbish and manure.
On 17 November, Roger Mortimer had his cousin Edmund Fitzalan, earl of Arundel, the only English earl left who supported the king and Hugh Despenser, executed in Hereford. Arundel had no trial, and his execution was carried out by a man one chronicler calls a ‘worthless wretch’.25 It took twenty-two strokes of the axe to sever the unfortunate man’s head from his body. Arundel and Roger Mortimer had a long-standing feud over land and influence in Wales, and it seems that Mortimer deliberately made his cousin’s unlawful execution as slow and agonising as possible, perhaps even by ordering a blunt blade to be used and evidently by appointing an inexperienced executioner to wield the axe.
Two men were executed on 17 November with the earl of Arundel, also without a trial: Robert Micheldever and John Daniel, a landowner in Herefordshire and the younger brother of Sir Richard Daniel (1274– 1321). Robert Micheldever was a squire of the royal household who came from Hampshire, and was the custodian of the royal palace of Clarendon in Wiltshire and its forest.26 In March/April 1326, Edward II appointed John Daniel to investigate Mortimer of Wigmore’s adherents in Herefordshire and made him the custodian of Mortimer’s mother Margaret’s castle at Radnor.27 The reasons for Robert Micheldever’s execution are entirely mysterious, but perhaps he and Daniel simply had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. John Daniel was childless, and his heirs were his three nieces, the daughters of his late brother Richard: Elizabeth, aged 30, widow of Thomelyn Meverel of Derbyshire and now married to Rauf Marchington; Katherine, aged 27, widow of Thomas Curzon and now married to Reynald Marchington; and Johane, aged 18, wife of John Lutrington. Their father Richard Daniel was born in Wexford, Ireland on 25 April 1274, and was ten years to the day older than Edward II. His brother John Daniel’s date of birth is not recorded, but he was probably about 50 years old when he was killed.28 Robert Micheldever left his widow Alis and their son John, said to be 15 years old in April 1329 at Robert’s inquisition post mortem, though a petition from his mother c. 1327 says he was then only 8. John Micheldever was imprisoned in Winchester Castle in August 1339 for making ‘unlawful assemblies and confederacies to disturb the peace’ in the city.29
On 17 November, the day after her husband Hugh Despenser and her uncle the king were captured in distant South Wales, and the day the earl of Arundel, John Daniel and Robert Micheldever were killed in Hereford, Eleanor Despenser was imprisoned in the Tower of London. She would remain there for fifteen months.30 An inquisition held in Yorkshire on 19 November found that ten years previously, two sailors called Robert Garinge and Walter son of William Mckan had had a violent quarrel on a ship called La Blome in the River Humber, and that Robert had killed Walter with a pair of tongs.31 How this was achieved was not explained. A wine merchant called Arnold of Spain was beheaded in London on 19 November, apparently because he was believed to be a supporter of Hugh Despenser. The annalist of St Paul’s Cathedral says that riots took place in London in October and November 1326, and calls the rioters riffleres.32 Meanwhile, far to the south and west, Hugh Despenser himself was led slowly from Llantrisant to Hereford. He refused all food and drink after his capture and within a few days was ‘almost dead for fasting’.33 The sergeant-at-arms Simon or ‘Syme’ of Reading was forced to go before Hugh, carrying the Despenser coat-of-arms reversed as a sign of Hugh’s disgrace. Queen Isabella sent Sir Roger Chandos, formerly sheriff of Herefordshire, to besiege Hugh Despenser’s castle of Caerphilly around mid-November.34 Hugh’s son Huchon was inside, and so was the vast quantity of money Hugh and Edward II had left there in twenty-six barrels.
On Saturday, 22 November, William Zouche, lord of Ashby in Leicestershire, and the knights Edward and John St John carried four bags into Queen Isabella’s chamber in the palace of the bishop of Hereford, Adam Orleton, in Hereford. The bags contained the chancery rolls, memoranda and inquisitions which Edward II had left in Swansea Castle and which Henry of Lancaster, earl of Leicester, found there. The bags were delivered to Master Henry Cliff, ‘keeper of the rolls of chancery’. Henry of Lancaster also found £6,000 which the king had left in Neath Castle, and the money was still in his possession in March 1329.35
Hugh Despenser arrived in Hereford on 23 or 24 November, and was given a show trial on 24 November which consisted of a long list of – mostly absurd – charges being read out by Sir William Trussell. In front of the queen, the earls of Norfolk, Kent and Leicester, Roger Mortimer, Thomas Wake and many of the townspeople of Hereford, Hugh was sentenced to the traitor’s death by hanging, drawing and quartering. A gallows 50 feet high had already been constructed, and the sergeant-at-arms Syme of Reading was hanged below Despenser on it, though Syme was hanged until he was dead whereas Hugh was cut down and then subjected to disembowelment and castration before beheading finally ended his suffering. Syme of Reading was the man whose mare had been lost near the Thames six months earlier after she gave birth to her foal and was brought back to him by the ferryman of Sonning in Berkshire. Now he was hanged in front of a jeering mob, having been given no trial.
Hugh Despenser was about 37 or 38 when he was executed and was the father of nine children, four sons and five daughters, the youngest of whom was under a year old. He was already a grandfather: his eldest daughter Isabella, married to the executed earl of Arundel’s son and heir Richard, gave birth to her son Edmund Arundel sometime before December 1326.36 Both of the infant Edmund’s grandfathers were executed a week apart in November 1326; his great-grandfather the earl of Winchester was also executed that October; and his grandmother Eleanor Despenser was imprisoned in the Tower and his other grandmother Alis, née de Warenne (b. 1287), the earl of Arundel’s widow, might also have been, but was spared by the intervention of her brother the earl of Surrey. Nor did Edmund Arundel have much better luck when he grew up. Although he made an excellent marriage to the earl of Salisbury’s daughter Sybil Montacute in the 1340s, his father Richard annulled his marriage to Isabella Despenser when Edmund was 18, made him illegitimate, and sneered at him as ‘that certain Edmund who claims himself to be my son’.37
Isabella Despenser and Richard Fitzalan had married on 9 February 1321 at the royal manor of Havering-atte-Bower in Essex, when Isabella was 8 and Richard 7 years old. They became parents at the start of their teens, and Richard was to claim in 1344 that they were ‘forced by blows to cohabit’, resulting in the birth of their son Edmund.38 Those of royal and noble rank in the fourteenth century almost always married very young, in adolescence and sometimes even in childhood, whereas the common people of England did not. Evidence from the 1310s and 1320s reveals that they married in their 20s and 30s. To take just a few examples, John Vavasour of Yorkshire was 36 when he married his wife Margaret on Saturday, 29 September 1319; Roger Brounger of Norfolk was 37 when he married Cecile in June 1325; William Sprot of Dorset was 39 or older when he married Johane Hulle on Sunday, 5 July 1327; William Walleye of Shropshire was 32 when he married Edith in October 1327; William Estwode of Suffolk was 24 when he married Johane Cok in Wormingford, Essex on Friday, 5 February 1328; John Sherewynd of St Pancras (‘a town by London’) was 27 when he married Alis Cotesmor in February 1329; and Robert of Clunton in Shropshire was 35 when he married Isabel Clinton in April 1329. John atte Watre of Kent and Walter atte Mote of Essex were both 35 when they married their wives, both named Alis, in 1329, and in 1328 Thomas Godyng was 28 when he was betrothed to Johane Page.39
Nor did people necessarily venture into early parenthood. John Gobaud of Warwickshire was 29 when his wife Johane bore their son John in April 1321, Robert Tylere of St Pancras was also 29 when his wife Johane gave birth to their son John in February 1329, John Leybourne was 39 when his wife Katherine gave birth to their eldest son William in Braintree, Essex on 12 March 1329, and William Fyveley of Scampston, Yorkshire was 31 when his wife Alis gave birth to their daughter Anneis also in March 1329. Thomas atte Mille of Buxted in Sussex, referenced above, was in his late 40s when his son Simon was born in 1304. John Blouwere of Tirrington, Norfolk, was, however, only 21 when his son Walter was born on 26 May 1325, and William Brokton of Ludlow, Shropshire, was also 21 when his son John was born on 11 November 1328.40 Rohese Burford, the wealthy London merchant who was the co-heir of her mother Juliana Romeyn in 1326, was 34 when she gave birth to her son James in 1320, though her daughter Johane was older than James. Women’s ages are unfortunately only very rarely recorded in the fourteenth century, but there seems little reason to suppose that they were routinely much younger than their husbands or that men in their 20s and 30s generally married teenagers. There also remains the issue that some people perhaps only knew their age somewhat vaguely, and a man who believed he was 33 might in fact have been 31 or 32 or 34. The evidence of inquisitions post mortem reveals, however, that people were aware of how many years had passed since a particular event, and are unlikely to have been too inaccurate when reporting their own age.
Queen Isabella kept her wardrobe in the Tower of London, though she cannot have seen any of the items in it since she had left England for her native France in early March 1325. She sent her clerk Master John Brumham there on 30 November 1326 to bring her some items she had stored there: these included a silver-gilt enamelled cup, a gilt ewer ‘enamelled in part with grotesques’, and three gilt cups. Isabella also helped herself to the late Hugh Despenser’s possessions from his own wardrobe at the Tower: almost thirty gold cups and six gold ewers. The order to remove them from the Tower was issued on 30 November, and the queen received the items five days later.41 Just one of the gold cups was worth more than most people alive in England in 1326 earned in an entire year.