The Fifteenth Century XIX: Enmity and Amity 1783277424, 9781783277421

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THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY VOLUME XIX

The Fifteenth Century ISSN 1479-9871 General Editor Dr. Linda Clark Assistant Editor Dr. Hannes Kleineke Editorial Advisory Committee Dr. Rowena E. Archer, University of Oxford Professor Matthew Davies, Birkbeck, University of London Dr. Catherine Nall, Royal Holloway, University of London Dr. Stephen Mileson, Oxfordshire Victoria County History Professor A.J. Pollard, University of Teesside Professor Carole Rawcliffe, University of East Anglia Dr. Benjamin Thompson, Somerville College, Oxford Professor John Watts, Corpus Christi College, Oxford This series aims to provide a forum for the most recent research into the political, social, religious and cultural history of the fifteenth century in Britain and Europe. Contributions for future volumes are welcomed; prospective contributors should consult the guidelines at the end of this volume.

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY XIX ENMITY AND AMITY

Edited by LINDA CLARK

THE BOYDELL PRESS

© Contributors 2022 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2022 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge

ISBN 978-1-78327-742-1 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-80010-676-5 (ePDF) The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731 website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate Cover Design: Simon Loxley

CONTENTS List of Contributors Preface List of Abbreviations England and Europe, c.1450–1520: Nostalgia or New Opportunities? MALCOLM VALE Mariners and Marauders: A Case Study of Fowey during the Hundred Years’ War, c.1400–c.1453 S.J. DRAKE Henry V’s Army of 1417 ANNE CURRY and DAVID CLEVERLY

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‘Get out of our land, Englishmen’. French Reactions to the English Invasion of 1512–13 68 CHARLES GIRY-DELOISON Encountering the ‘Duche’ in Margery Kempe’s Lynn  SUSAN MADDOCK ‘C’est le Beaulté de Castille et d’Espaigne, qui le Soleil cler d’Austrice accompaigne’: Jean Molinet makes the Habsburgs Burgundian CATHERINE EMERSON

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Magna Carta in the Late Middle Ages, c.1320–c.1520 NIGEL SAUL

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The Business of the Southern Convocation in 1462 PAUL CAVILL

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Index

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CONTRIBUTORS Paul Cavill is a Senior Lecturer at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Pembroke College. Originally a historian of parliament, he has extended his interests to ecclesiastical legislation and has recently published on Lyndwood’s Provinciale. David Cleverly is currently studying for a Ph.D. supervised by Dr. Mark Bryant at the University of Chichester. He is researching aspects of the development of the English arms industry in the seventeenth century. Anne Curry is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the University of Southampton. She is continuing her work on the armies of Henry V and Henry VI in France, and also producing an online calendar of the Norman Rolls of 1417– 22. In January 2022 she published with Rémy Ambühl an important and hitherto unexplored chronicle written by two soldiers and dedicated to Sir John Fastolf: A Soldiers’ Chronicle of the Hundred Years War. College of Arms Manuscript M 9. Samuel Drake is an Honorary Research Associate of the University of London and the author of Cornwall, Connectivity and Identity in the Fourteenth Century (2019). Catherine Emerson is a Lecturer in French at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Her research interests are in history and literature, particularly those of the fifteenth-century Burgundian Netherlands, in adaptation and publication, and in personal networks in the early years of printing. She has also published on text and image relations and on the social significance of the Manneken Pis fountain. Charles Giry-Deloison is Emeritus Professor of Early Modern History at the Université d’Artois (Arras, France). He has written extensively on Anglo-French relations from the late fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. Susan Maddock, previously Principal Archivist at the Norfolk Record Office, is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of chapters on late medieval Lynn in Town Courts and Urban Society in Late Medieval England, 1250–1500 (2019) and in Encountering the Book of Margery Kempe (2021). Nigel Saul is Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at Royal Holloway, University of London. He was a member of the MC800 Committee, which co-ordinated the celebrations marking the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta in 2015.



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Malcolm Vale was Fellow and Tutor in History at St. John’s College, Oxford, from 1978 to 2010. He is the author of many published works on the late medieval period, ranging from English Gascony, 1399–1453 (1970) to the more recent The Princely Court: Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe, 1270–1380 (2001), The Ancient Enemy: England, France and Europe from the Angevins to the Tudors (2007), Henry V: the Conscience of a King (2016) and The Renaissance in Northern Europe (2020).

PREFACE The Hundred Years’ War loomed large over the first half of the fifteenth century, and its effects and the long continuing hostility between England and France cast their malign shadow far into the sixteenth. Even though the conflict has been pored over by generations of historians, the contemporary record sources which are still extant continue to offer fresh insights and provide evidence that can enhance our understanding of the events: military successes and failures, unexpected twists of fate, and the motivations of participants in the confrontations. Yet such sources may also provide a different picture: one of amicable relationships established with immigrants to England from the Netherlands and other parts of the continent, diplomatic alliances with the rulers of Burgundy, and growing cultural and social links with Italian potentates. Enmity and amity emerge as central themes in six of the essays in the present volume. The Cornish port of Fowey and its inhabitants’ engagement in warfare at sea are the focus of Samuel Drake’s essay. The early years of the century witnessed the supersession of fragile truces by a full-scale invasion of Normandy under Henry V, and ultimately, in 1453, the expulsion of the English from all but a fraction of their territory both there and in Gascony. Fowey’s vessels and mariners were impressed for service by governments needing to convey sizeable armies overseas, and in the 1420s the transportation of troops and supplies predominated in the port’s contribution to the war-effort. But over the next two decades reversals of English fortunes in France turned the Channel into a frontier zone, and the safe-keeping of the seas and defence of south-coast harbours became a pressing concern; piracy, here termed ‘salt-water larceny’, became ubiquitous. Nevertheless, the recorded cases of such violent engagements provide little or no evidence of the attacks launched by the English against enemy French vessels, for they nearly always only tell of assaults on neutral, allied or denizen shipping, based on the victims’ appeals for restitution. Exploration of a wide range of documents filed in the exchequer enable Anne Curry and David Cleverly to examine closely the army which Henry V assembled to invade France in 1417, and study in depth its personnel, organisation and structure, thereby increasing our knowledge about the successful conquest of Normandy. This particular army is much less well documented than those which had successively embarked in the two preceding years, but fresh research has produced here as definitive figures of the numbers of armed men involved as may now be possible. By looking at the records of musters held in various locations, adding in the troops of archers from Cheshire, Lancashire and Wales as well as forces from Gascony, study­ing the treaty and Norman rolls and assessing the accuracy of the account in the Vita Henrici Quinti, Curry and Cleverly can claim with conviction that the recorded number of nearly 11,000 English combatants must still fall short of the real total. By addressing the question of continuity of military service over the period 1415–17,

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they challenge the earlier assumptions of historians that the companies that sailed in 1417 lacked previous experience of warfare beyond the Channel. Nearly one hundred years later, in 1512–13, campaigns on both sea and land saw another army setting forth to invade France, this time led by Henry VIII. Rather than examining the personnel engaged in this conflict, in his essay Charles Giry-Deloison focuses not only on what happened as the English army progressed from Calais to its successes at Thérouanne and Tournai, but also, and in more depth, to the reactions of the French to the incursion, which they expressed not only in narrative accounts and diatribes, but also in the dramatic outpourings of poets. Lengthy poems recording the aggression of the English and defeat of the French were printed as booklets, and, destined for a popular market, sold in Paris, Lyon and Strasbourg. Their authors called on compatriots to rise up to throw these enemies out of their country, and while being understandably reluctant to mention openly the fear the English armies aroused amongst local populations (with their entrenched folk memories of the devastating raids of the previous century), the images in the poems conjure up the widespread feelings of terror, and focus on the systematic destruction of chattels and religious buildings. The crimes committed during campaigns in 1512 along the coast of Brittany and in 1513 in eastern France fuelled negative opinions about the abhorrent characteristics of the English invaders. The essay by Malcolm Vale, which opens this volume and introduces its principal topics, considers a period in between the invasions of France of 1417 and 1513, by looking at the extent to which political and military nostalgia informed the assumptions of the English after the debacles in France of the mid fifteenth century and before the changed conditions of the 1520s. From the 1450s to the 1470s the times were so far out of joint as to have disintegrated into civil war. For the Pastons in this ‘queasy world’, stability was to be found in an imagined past, by looking back at the reigns of Edward III and Henry V as times of military and diplomatic success which set a ‘gold standard’ for government; while William Worcester lamented that whereas in the past the English nobility and gentry had been a true warrior aristocracy, now their sons chose instead to enter the legal profession and waste their time on ‘needless business’ when they should have been out practising the martial arts. England’s natural alliances against the French had hitherto centred on accord with the dukes of Burgundy, whose dominions included the urban centres in the Low Countries where so much of England’s external trade was conducted. This relationship with the Valois dukes turned after 1477 into an Anglo-Habsburg alliance, but if any kind of effective encirclement of France was to be achieved then friendship might also be sought with one or more of the Italian states. The reigns of Edward IV and Henry VII witnessed the establishment of a permanent English presence at the papal court in Rome and the emergence of a shared aristocratic and courtly culture with Italy, a culture with similar tastes and aspirations. These were exemplified by the novel presence of Italian bishops in English sees, and by the election of Italians (including the king of Naples and the dukes of Milan, Urbino and Ferrara) to the Order of the Garter – a significant new mark of friendship given visual emphasis in their painted portraits. The ‘Amity’ of the sub-title of the volume, brought to life by Malcolm Vale in his exploration of relations between England and Italy, and touched on by Charles GiryDeloison in his discussion of Henry VIII’s not always entirely amicable alliance with Emperor Maximilian, is examined in Susan Maddock’s essay on the population of



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the town and port of Lynn Episcopi in the early years of the century. Her scrutiny of the experiences of immigrants living in Lynn, the varying dynamics of the relationships between resident aliens and the enfranchised freemen, between freemen and other non-alien inhabitants and between alien craftsmen and their English counterparts, should provide an opportunity for other historians of the fifteenth century to compare and contrast what happened in Lynn with similar studies of foreigners living in such diverse places as London, Great Yarmouth, Southampton and Exeter. Those described as ‘Duche’, while comprising a range of people from the Low Countries, also included migrants from the Baltic regions settled by Germans, so were seemingly closer to the ‘Deutsche’ than to the modern Dutch. The family connections of Margery Kempe show how intimate such friendships could be. Also leaving warfare aside by employing a different perspective, Catherine Emerson has studied the poems written by Jean Molinet to celebrate the births in 1498 and 1500 of two children of Philip the Fair, duke of Burgundy. The events of 1477, when the death of Charles the Bold at the battle of Nancy had left his daughter Mary as successor to the duchy, marked the end of the regime of the Valois dukes, for the duchy, as a French apanage, could not be inherited by a woman. Louis XI reclaimed the Burgundian territories, and those who remained in Mary’s service viewed the alliance of certain military leaders with France as treason. Molinet’s work may be considered as propaganda for the descendants of Mary and her husband Maximilian of Austria. Multilingualism provided a key to new alliances: the inhabitants of Burgundian territories not only spoke French, but also Dutch and German, while many educated writers were familiar with Latin. Molinet’s poems drew attention to the new level of political complexity in the region, by stressing the multinational heritage of the new-born: the beauty of Castille and Spain, lit by the light of Austria. He minimised the disruption of the new regime by behaving as if he was still operating under the old order, representing the court as he would like it to be – a continuation of Valois Burgundy. The final part of the volume puts outright enmity, if not disagreement, at a further remove. Nigel Saul seeks answers to significant questions regarding the use of the Magna Carta of 1215 in the late Middle Ages – principally whether it continued to be a document of practical value to litigants, and how long it continued to be an effective constraint on the exercise of arbitrary royal power. In the fifteenth century, the charter retained significance to common lawyers, who studied it at the Inns of Court, and until then the exercise of royal authority was constrained by the re-issuing of the charter on many occasions, often in response to petitions from the Commons in parliament and in return for their grants of taxation. Evidence that the Lords Appellant of 1388 took their programme of oath-taking from the procedures of King John’s opponents in 1215, and that the articles for the deposition of Richard II in 1399 point to his breaches of the charter, marked a turning-point. The tradition of royal confirmations of the charter ended in the reign of Henry VI, and Saul argues that this change occurred because Henry’s grandfather had not been the deposed King Richard’s direct heir. Henceforth the place taken by the machinery of constitutional restraint would be taken by a challenge to the monarch’s title; by contrast, the parliamentary justifications for depositions in 1461, 1483 and 1485 did not mention the charter. Furthermore, litigants who had once looked to Magna Carta now sought justice by turning from the common lawcourts to the equitable jurisdiction of

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chancery; civilian lawyers now predominating in government favoured the elevation of princely power for the common good. Another charter, the charta de libertatibus clericorum, the last great royal concession to the English Church, investigated by Daniel Gosling in a previous volume (XVI) of this series, is considered again by Paul Cavill, who sets it into the context of the business of the convocation of 1462. The business of the meetings of convocations is poorly recorded; only three of the 13 meetings held during the long archbishopric of Canterbury of Thomas Bourgchier are recorded in his register. Accordingly, emphasis has been laid on the grants of subsidies – the reason for the crown to call such assemblies. Yet convocations dealt with other matters of importance too. A register preserved in Canterbury cathedral priory reveals four of the grievances of the convocation of 1462 addressed to the king, lords and commons, of which the first three correspond to the three parts of the charter, so almost certainly formed its basis. Cavill identifies six further items of business in the convocation, two of them being pieces of provincial legislation known as ‘constitutions’, and three being decrees concerning the observance of certain saints’ feast days. He provides transcripts of hitherto overlooked documents, observing that successive assemblies returned to the same topics, and that decrees led to constitutions. Although we can know only a fraction of what went on in these assemblies, convocation had not been reduced to a mere tax-raising body, but rather continued to range over the Church’s affairs. The Fifteenth Century conference, originally scheduled to take place at the University of Bristol in September 2020, had to be postponed owing to the Covid-19 pandemic. Our warm congratulations and thanks are due to Professor Helen Fulton of the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University for her exemplary achievement in organising the gathering which assembled a year later in September 2021 at St. James Priory in Bristol, successfully overcoming challenges not encountered in normal circumstances. The entirely apposite theme of the conference was ‘Disruption’. The papers presented by Paul Cavill and Catherine Emerson are published in the present volume. The others, listed below, have not yet been published in The Fifteenth Century series. Maria Abellàn, Tapestries: A Matter of Continuity on the Iberian Peninsula Richard Asquith, A Death in the Household: The Case of Sir Ralph Verney (d.1478) Anne Baden-Daintree, Blank Spaces and Narrative Disruption in BL Harley MS 682 Teresa Barucci, ‘For he wants to move this university to Germany!’: Disruption and Change at the Fifteenth-Century Universities of Paris and Orléans Clive Burgess: A Game of Two Halves? Weaponising Ecclesiastical Provision in Pre-Reformation Bristol Joe Chick, Religious and Cultural Change at a Time of Disruption: Reading in the Late Fifteenth Century Jane Clayton, Disruption: Bastardy in the Paston Family Margaret Condon and Evan T. Jones, Bristol, Iberia and Atlantic Exploration, 1453–1500



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Peter Crooks, Resuming Service after the Ultimate Disruption: The Four Courts Fire of 1922 and Surprising Survivals from Fifteenth-Century Ireland Giles Darkes, Making Bristol Medieval: The Historic Towns Trust and the 1480 Map of Bristol Steven Ellis, Building Ireland’s English Pale across the ‘Four Shires’: English Civility and Security from Irish Disruption Alexander Falileyev, Disrupting or Following a New Tradition? William Worcestre and the Legendary History of Britannia Mynor in the Fifteenth Century Sandy Gale, Praying ‘like hypocrites’: Conflict and Anxiety in Fifteenth-Century Devotion Rachael Harkes, ‘To keep night-watches with the dead’: The Palmers’ Guild of Ludlow and its Deceased Brethren Alfred Hiatt, Mapping Britain in the Fifteenth Century Mark Hinsley, ‘To put all to hazard’: Motivations for Gentry Participation in the Wars of the Roses Andrea Hugill, King Henry VII’s Church of England Cathy Hume, Disease, Disaster, and Death: Disruption in the Fifteenth Century – The Life of Job and the 2020 Pandemic Rory MacLellan, A Disruptive Legacy? Remembering Henry V in Yorkist England Lynsey Metcalfe, The Psychopathology of Henry VI Francis Mickus, Wheel of Fortune: Making Sense of the Chaos from Lydgate to Shakespeare Ad Putter, Coping Abroad: Dutch Migrant Communities in Late Medieval England Maria Schmueckle, Disrupted Relationships: Scottish Marriages in the PreReformation Archives of the Penitentiary Gabrielle Schwarzmann, Shame and Conjugal Masculinity in Fifteenth-Century Impotence Cases in England Katharina Strika, Disruption in Epic Poetry: Orazio Romano’s Literary Rendering of Stefano Porcari’s Conspiracy against Pope Nicholas V Lizzie Swarbrick, Pigs Piping in the Abbey: Grotesque Sculpture and Lay Use at Melrose Helen Swift, ‘Everything is broken; it needs repair’: Relishing Disruption in Fifteenth-Century French Poetry

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Adele Sykes, ‘To be guardian of my aforsayde children’: The London Widows and Orphans of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury Logge Register, 1476–83 Grigory Vorobyev, Textual Corruption as a Cause of Disruption: The Case of Pope Nicholas V’s Letter to the Byzantine Emperor Janet Walls, Thunder Prognostic Texts (Brontologies) in Medieval England – Disruption or Application? Linda Clark, March 2022

ABBREVIATIONS

BIHR BJRL BL BNF Bodl. Cal. Inq. Misc. CCR CFR CPR EETS EHR HR Oxford DNB PPC PROME RS Statutes TNA TRHS VCH

Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research Bulletin of the John Rylands Library British Library, London Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris Bodleian Library, Oxford Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous Calendar of Close Rolls Calendar of Fine Rolls Calendar of Patent Rolls Early English Text Society English Historical Review Historical Research Oxford Dictionary of National Biography from the Earliest Times to the Year 2000, ed. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (61 vols., Oxford, 2004) Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council of England, ed. N.H. Nicolas (7 vols., 1834–7) Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, 1275–1504, ed. Chris Given-Wilson et al. (16 vols., Woodbridge, 2005) Rolls Series Statutes of the Realm (11 vols., 1810–28) The National Archives, Kew Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Victoria County History

Unless stated otherwise, the place of publication of books cited is London.

ENGLAND AND EUROPE, c.1450–1520: NOSTALGIA OR NEW OPPORTUNITIES? Malcolm Vale

As an undergraduate in the Oxford of the 1960s, I heard a series of lectures on Lancastrian kingship given in Magdalen College Hall by K.B. McFarlane, Fellow of that College. Apart from the sticky surface of the Hall tables, recently subject to spills of breakfast marmalade, the lectures were memorable for many things, not least for the lapidary prose in which they were delivered. McFarlane’s lecture on Henry V began as follows (his audience tried to take more or less verbatim notes, suspecting that what he said would be unlikely to be seen in print before they took Finals – or perhaps never): ‘If there were a great medieval English king, then Harry of Monmouth was he’.1 McFarlane then, by contrast, went on in a later lecture to deliver his verdict on Henry VI whose ‘head was too small for his father’s crown’ and to lament the consequences, as he saw them, of Henry V’s premature death in late August 1422.2 He was to some extent simply sharing and echoing the views of many fifteenth-century English people. England, they considered, had experienced its days of glory but they were no more. Their radiance cast a long shadow, a shadow that fell especially on English attitudes and behaviour towards continental Europe for at least the following century. But there were other tendencies at work, of both a warlike and more pacific nature, which were to determine England’s relations with its continental neighbours over that period. So this contribution to the present volume falls into two (hopefully not unrelated) parts. First, I would like to look at the extent to which what we might call political and military nostalgia informed the thoughts and assumptions of the English between the debacles in France of the 1450s and the changed conditions of the 1520s. Secondly, I will try to offset that apparently retrospective and possibly regressive approach with evidence for innovations or new directions in England’s external relations. Clearly political and diplomatic conditions did – in many but not all areas – change radically between the mid-fifteenth and the end of the first quarter of the sixteenth centuries. How England adapted and adjusted to those conditions will, I suggest, necessarily take us to some extent outside the kind of Anglo-Franco Some of the content of the lecture is to be found in McFarlane’s essay ‘Henry V: A Personal Portrait’, in Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights, ed. G.L. Harriss (Oxford, 1972), 114–33. 2 The quotation appeared again in McFarlane’s essay on ‘The Wars of the Roses’ in his England in the Fifteenth Century. Collected Essays, ed. G.L. Harriss (1981), 239. 1

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Netherlandish perspective in which England’s relations with its continental counterparts at this time has traditionally been viewed. Nostalgia In 1489, William Caxton printed an English translation of Christine de Pizan’s Livre des faits d’armes et de chevalerie and, in his Preface, exhorted the knights of England to ‘behold that victorious and noble king Harry the fifth and the captains under him, his noble brethren, the earl of Salisbury, Montague, and many other whose names shine gloriously by their virtuous noblesse and [the] acts that they did in honour of the order of chivalry’.3 The ‘glorious days’ were, above all, celebrated by those Englishmen who were, after Henry V’s early and unexpected death, prone to lament the kingdom’s decline: a decline, as they perceived it, of England’s military power and diplomatic presence on the European stage. Caxton was by no means alone in his expression of regret for England’s apparent eclipse. His views were not confined to Englishmen. Writing of the battle of Montlhéry (July 1465) during the French civil war of the so-called Public Weal (Bien Public), Philippe de Commynes, Flemish nobleman, Burgundian courtier and diplomat, noted that the ‘most honoured’ among the Burgundian officer class were those who followed the English practice of dismounting and standing among the archers so that the common soldiery might be ‘made more confident and would fight better’.4 In his usual discursive manner, Commynes then went on to observe that The English at that time were rich and powerful under the wise, handsome and very courageous king Henry [V], who had wise and valiant men all around him, and very great captains such as the earl of Salisbury, Talbot and others whom I won’t mention, as it was not in my time, though I’ve seen what results they have left behind them; for when God was weary of doing them good, this wise king died in the Bois de Vincennes. His senseless [insense] son was crowned king of France and England at Paris. And so the English nobles grew restless and created divisions among themselves which have lasted to this day …5 It was not the first time that such sentiments had been expressed. But England’s mid-fifteenth-century failures in the French war, and the descent into civil war within the kingdom itself after 1455, made the contrast between past and present all the more stark. As is well known, between 1449 and 1453 all English continental possessions, as then held by the Lancastrian dynasty, with the sole exception of the town and Marches, or Pale, of Calais, were lost. Now it has often been argued that the recourse to nostalgia as a political tool is prompted by a perception that the present time is in some way witnessing a sad decline since a time of real or imagined past glories. So-called ‘political’ nostalgia The Prologues and Epilogues of William Caxton, ed. W.J.B. Crotch (EETS, orig. ser., clxxvi, 1928), 1–2. 4 Philippe de Commynes, Memoires, ed. Joseph Calmette and Georges Durville (3 vols., Paris, 1924), i. 23. 5 Ibid., 23–4. My translation. 3



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can be couched in terms of an awareness of current moral, spiritual, or simply pragmatically political decay or even collapse. Unlike later, wistful evocations of nostalgia, this seems to refer back to a past age which may not be entirely lost for ever, but can be to some degree re-created or at least emulated to good effect in the present. It can therefore form part of a political programme – it might be called comparative, purposeful nostalgia. As a recent newspaper article put it: a ‘retreat into an idealised past’ can give rise to a notion of ‘yesterday disguised as tomorrow’.6 It is, then, on this argument, as much an active as a passive force. To distinguish it (if we ever really can) from those many medieval references back to past precedent, which are the stock-in-trade of so many of our sources, is not easy. But a realisation that times do change, certainly not always – if ever – for the better, underscores the idea. And this is of course prevalent when the times seem especially out of joint or unstable, and when the world appears to be going to hell in a handcart. The England of the 1450s, 60s and 70s throws up some good examples of this tendency. In the correspondence of the social-climbing Norfolk family of Paston the theme is taken up repeatedly. ‘Be my feyth, here is a coysy werd [unstable world]’ (Friar Brackley to John Paston, 1459);7 ‘For loue of Good take good awayte to your person, for the world is right wilde’ (William Lomner to John Paston, 1461);8 ‘The worlde, I ensure yow, is right qwesye [queasy]’9 (Sir John Paston to Margaret Paston, four days after the battle of Barnet, 1471, at which he had managed to end up on the losing side); or again ‘It semythe þat the worlde is alle qwaveryng’10 (Sir John Paston to his brother John, reporting, among other things, the sudden death in battle of Charles the Bold of Burgundy in 1477). And so it goes on … So it is in the past, often an imagined past, that stability may be found and that past could, it was thought, be in some way recovered. A precondition for the emergence of what I have called ‘political nostalgia’ may therefore be a widely shared perception that there is something peculiarly disturbed, and disturbing, about the present. In fifteenth-century England, the two past reigns which were thought to represent the twin peaks of English achievement on both the European and domestic stages were those of Edward III (1327–77) and Henry V (1413–22). Later generations looked back on Henry V’s reign not only as a time of military and diplomatic success but, as Jeremy Catto pointed out, because it provided a ‘gold standard’ for government.11 Despite the king’s absences abroad, domestic peace was maintained and his extraordinary assiduity in the conduct of all the manifold tasks of personal kingship was widely praised. Within fifteen years or so of Henry V’s death, nostalgia was already beginning to inform and energise political protest. In a forthright, if partisan, attack on Cardinal Henry Beaufort’s betrayal or sell-out (as he saw it) of his brother Henry V’s legacy, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, cast himself in the role of the true heir and custodian of Henry’s achievements. In his protest of 1440 against Beaufort’s advocacy of the release of the Agincourt prisoner Charles, duke ‘The Brexit past is a hopeless country’, The Guardian, 17 June 2017, p. 41. Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, ed. Norman Davis (2 vols., EETS, special ser., xx, xxi, 2004), ii. no. 582. 8 Ibid., ii. no. 636. 9 Ibid., i. no. 261. 10 Ibid., i. no. 302. 11 Jeremy Catto, ‘The Burden and Conscience of Government in the Fifteenth Century’, TRHS, xvii (2007), 98. 6 7

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of Orleans, Gloucester nostalgically invoked, in reverential tones, the memory of Orleans’s capture by ‘the moost victorious and mighte prince, kyng Henry the fift, at the battaille of Agincourt, the day of saintes Crispin and Crispinian …’.12 Other recent actions by Beaufort would, claimed Gloucester, never have been assented to by Henry V. Beaufort’s advice to Henry VI, to renounce his right and title to the throne of France, would lead to the greatest ‘infamy that ever felle to you … or to eny of youre noble progenitours …’.13 In their reply to Gloucester’s charges, Henry VI’s council were forced to admit that ‘the king’s father [Henry V] had … by his victorious battle of Agincourt, and other battles and journees by water and by land, so prospered the conduct of the said war, that the greater part of the noble realm of France was obedient and subject to him and his rule …’.14 But times had changed, and new conditions, the council argued, demanding different policies, were now in force. This consciousness of changed and changing times and conditions, which could seemingly stand in the way of any wholesale reversion to past ideas and practices, was often to be found in the thoughts and writings even of the most zealous exponents of this kind of political reversionism. It certainly outlasted the fifteenth century. Consciousness of change was of its essence, and between 1450 and 1520 it can hardly be argued that significant changes did not take place in England’s external relations. One of the most fervent advocates of a resumption of an actively pursued war with France after the English defeats of the 1450s, was Sir John Fastolf’s secretary, William Worcester (c.1415–c.1482), gentleman and antiquary, of Bristol.15 Fastolf (d.1459) had of course served both Henry V and John, duke of Bedford, in Lancastrian France. Irascible and unrelenting to the end, Fastolf employed Worcester on many essentially self-justificatory and litigious tasks. One of these was to compile a copious collection of documentary evidence justifying Fastolf’s behaviour and, more generally, advocating the continuance of the French war. In 1475, a copy of the collection was presented to Edward IV, urging the mounting of a campaign against France which did in fact take place – without much in the way of glory – in that year. Worcester summed up the splendours of the past in an expansive passage in a Prologue addressed to the king, replete with examples of past glories. These included a reminder that Bedford chose to be buried, not in England, but in Rouen cathedral ‘where Richard Coeur de Lion’s heart is entombed’.16 The Lionheart’s memory had previously been recalled by Fastolf himself in the report that he wrote on the future conduct of war, drawn up after the Burgundian defection from the English to the Valois French cause in 1435.17 Yet although a later, anonymous writer (possibly Worcester himself) was quite adamant, in 1449, that Henry V’s reign should be ‘to us a mirror and exemplar’,18 he was prepared to admit that times had changed and earlier proposals could be deemed irrelevant. This notion was also put forward, but robustly countered, by Worcester’s exhortation to Edward Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Wars of the English in France during the Reign of Henry VI, King of England, ed. Joseph Stevenson (2 vols. in 3, RS, xx, 1861–4), ii (pt. 2), 441. 13 Ibid., 446. 14 Ibid., 454–5. 15 For what follows see K.B. McFarlane, ‘William Worcester: A Preliminary Survey’, in his England in the Fifteenth Century, 199–224. 16 Letters and Papers, ed. Stevenson, ii (pt. 2), 524. 17 Ibid., 576–7. 18 ‘Recommendations for the security of the English possessions in France’, in ibid., 729–30: ‘nobis bene debet esse speculum et exemplar’ (Aug. 1449). 12



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IV in 1475. Commenting on Fastolf’s report of forty years earlier, he told Edward (in a somewhat convoluted Middle English, which I have modernised) that Although the case is now greatly changed from … [what it] was in those days … and … in the opinion of some persons it might be … said that [Fastolf’s arguments] will be of but little effect today … they should not be set aside nor forgotten, nor their good purpose lost, for in some proposals made at that time a man may find … a good and effective argument which is still valuable and relevant at this time.19 Further recommendations on the conduct of the war drawn up by and for Richard, duke of York, in the 1440s, were also deemed pertinent to the situation in 1475, as ‘although the case be changed, yet men of great discretion, expert in matters of war [who study these recommendations] … may more easily deliver, and more surely advise on, those things which shall be most fruitful and expedient for the advancement of the war’.20 What had changed – and changed most dramatically – was of course the loss of all the French possessions, bar Calais. Without Normandy and Gascony, any English strategy against France had of necessity to be very different, and the renewed Anglo-Burgundian alliance (after 1468) was clearly of even more vital significance. And, as we shall see, the search for other allies was imperative. It is well known that the most developed example of William Worcester’s mode of thought and writing lies in his treatise known as the Boke of Noblesse. It is to some extent a book of remembrance, above all of the ‘noble deeds’ of a past generation. But there is also real and genuine outrage expressed for the ‘most grievous loss of the realm of France’ and the provinces of Normandy, Gascony, Guyenne, Maine and Anjou.21 The English were to be reminded that ‘you were once those who, through your great prowess, courage, fierceness, manliness and strength, overcame and put in subjection the great might and power of the fiercest and most powerful fighters of all foreign nations that presumed to set themselves against this land’.22 A list of English war heroes follows, among whom (inevitably) both Edward III and Henry V loom large. Remember Agincourt, ‘renew your courageous hearts to take up arms … seeing so many good examples before you of so many victorious deeds of arms done by your noble progenitors’.23 In the Boke of Noblesse, the image of the past as a mirror is again introduced, in which the king and his nobles are constantly invited to look and find examples to follow of their predecessors’ prowess and ‘valiantness’ in arms. But mirrors can, of course, distort an image, never more so, perhaps, than when a haze of nostalgia spreads over it. When, for example, he embarks on the past history of the Order of the Garter, Worcester reaches near-lyrical heights. The past knights of Edward III’s (and Henry V’s) Order fought like lions, never ever withdrawing or fleeing from a field of battle. Worcester’s patron and employer, Fastolf, himself a knight of the Order, had however, rather ironically, been accused of fleeing from the field on one occasion, but was ultimately vindicated, though not without Ibid., 528. Ibid., 528–9. 21 The Boke of Noblesse: Addressed to King Edward the Fourth on his Invasion of France in 1475, ed. J.G. Nichols (1860), 1–2. 22 Ibid., 9. 23 Ibid., 29. 19 20

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awkward questions being asked about his conduct. Knights of the Garter such as Sir John Chandos, killed in battle in 1370, were ‘of the lions’ kind’,24 and their successors would also have been so, Worcester claimed, if they had been properly supported, resourced and paid. Normandy and Lancastrian France would then not have been lost by ‘the sudden and wretched intrusion lately leading to the unmanly dispossessing and putting out’ of England’s overseas possessions and of those Englishmen who had invested in them. But the ‘wheel of fortune turned against this land’, and England’s military classes had suffered loss of honour and livelihood, languishing in ‘dolour, anguish and heaviness’.25 In the past, the English nobility and gentry had been a true warrior aristocracy; but now their sons are, Worcester laments, sent into the legal profession. They spend their time ‘wastefully’ on ‘needless business’, sitting on their backsides in quarter sessions and shire courts when they should be out practising the military arts.26 This theme of a fall from grace and glory was to some extent taken up, perhaps surprisingly, by the founder of that worthy institution All Souls College, Oxford. Henry Chichele, archbishop of Canterbury, son of a Northamptonshire townsman, brother to two prominent London master grocers, was in no sense a military man.27 But, in May 1438, he founded a college which was in part a chantry, or ‘place of prayer’, specifically for the souls of Henry V, his brother Thomas, duke of Clarence, and ‘all the English nobles and other faithful subjects … who had drunk from the cup of bitter death’ in the French wars.28 It was in effect a Lancastrian war memorial. It is worth quoting the statutes, in their final version, issued just before the founder’s death in 1443: We also do not fail to lament, remembering the time of magnificence and honour, when the militia [soldiery] of both Church and state, competing with each other in pious emulation, even in our own times, made the kingdom of England, by its merits, formidable to its adversaries, and resplendent and glorious among nations abroad.29 The reference back in time must be to the reign of Henry V and the earlier part of his son’s reign, before the setbacks, especially of the mid-to-late 1430s, began adversely (though still not yet disastrously) to affect the ongoing English war effort. The glory days were over, but (to adapt a phrase which has a certain contemporary resonance) England ‘must be made great again’. The prestige of a kingdom which rested, at least in part, on its status as a European continental land power, with both conquests (or – if 26 27 28

Ibid., 46: Chandos was ‘as a lion fighting in the feelde’. Ibid., 48–9. Ibid., 77–8. VCH, Northamptonshire, Vol. II, ed. R.M. Serjeantson and W.R.D. Atkins (1960), 177–9. Statutes of the Colleges of the University of Oxford, ed. E.A. Bond (3 vols., Oxford, 1853), ii. 11 (Apr. 1443). Chichele died on 12 Apr. For Henry VI’s original letters licensing the foundation see ibid., 4–8 (20 May 1438). Estates were granted to the new college by the king on 24 Apr. 1442 and he confirmed the foundation charter on 28 Jan. 1443: VCH, Oxfordshire, Vol. III, University of Oxford, ed. H.E. Salter and M.D. Lobel (1954), 173–93. 29 Statutes of the Colleges of the University of Oxford, ii. 11: ‘Non dolore nequivimus, rememorantes magnificentiam et honorem quibus predicta utraque militia, pia aemulatione se invicem excedere contendentes, dudum etiam nostris temporibus inclitum Angliae regnum adversariis merito formidandum effecerat, et apud nationes exteras splendidum praedicaverat ac plurimum gloriosum’. 24 25



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you prefer it – re-conquests) and inherited ancestral lands in France, was about to be gravely undermined. Chichele thus pledged, as he declared, in however ‘small and modest’ a way, to offer aid ‘both in spiritual and temporal terms … through this antidotal medicine’,30 to a kingdom in crisis. Martial prowess and unceasing prayer must again combine to restore that kingdom, as he saw it, to health. New Opportunities and Directions? The fifteenth century did not witness an end to this backward-looking, though in some respects curiously forward-thinking, frame of mind. But there were, as we shall see, signs of shifting emphases and directions that were very significant for England’s future external relations. Early sixteenth-century sources, however, still resonate with the nostalgic recall of past glories. Henry VIII (1509–47) wished for a second Agincourt, failed to get one, and had to be content with short-lived successes at Tournai, Therouanne and Boulogne. In the hope of inspiring the king, on 10 March 1524, at Calais, a four-volume work was completed, ‘translated out of French into our maternal English tongue by John Bourchier, knight, Lord Berners, Deputy General of the king’s town of Calais and Marches of the same, at the high commandment of our most high redoubted sovereign lord King Henry VIII, king of England and of France’.31 This was Berners’ translation of Froissart’s Chronicles, that repository of ‘the famous acts and glorious deeds done in our parts … which redound to the honour of Englishmen’.32 It was to become a source upon which subsequent generations were to draw for their nostalgic re-creations of a vanished past; but a past from which, it was thought, examples could still be taken and lessons might be learned. The after-life of chivalry, both real and imagined, and enshrined in Froissart’s work, had a very long journey to travel, often suffused with nostalgia for a past which was not entirely a fiction or invention. The recovery of Europe-wide prestige and the acquisition of an alternative role in the politics of continental Europe after the defeats of the 1450s became an essential aim for the Yorkist and early Tudor monarchy. So much is obvious. But how was that to be achieved? Holding on to Calais, defending England’s southern and western coastlines, keeping the ‘Narrow Seas’ secure, and attempting to exploit the changing configurations and shifting balances of European politics were part and parcel of the more traditional armoury of English military, naval and diplomatic strategy. Excellent work by, among others, Steven Gunn, Susan Doran and David Grummitt, has told the story of Yorkist and early Tudor military and diplomatic involvement on the northern European mainland.33 I will not rehearse their arguments here. Suffice Ibid., ii. 11: ‘Quocirca, nobis divina mentis versatione cogitantibus qualiter, juxta nostrae parvitatis modulum, utrique rei militari praedictae tam graviter vulneratae per alicuius antidote medicinam possemus, vel in minimo, spiritualiter vel temporaliter subvenire’. 31 The Chronicles of Froissart, translated by John Bourchier, Lord Berners, ed. G.C. Macaulay (1908), 475. [My version in modern English]. 32 Ibid., p. xxix. 33 Steven Gunn, David Grummitt and Hans Cools, War, State and Society in England and the Netherlands, 1477–1559 (Oxford, 2007); Steven Gunn, The English People at War in the Age of Henry VIII (Oxford, 2020); Susan Doran, England and Europe, 1485–1603 (1996) and England and Europe in the Sixteenth Century (1998); The English Experience in France, c. 1450–1558: War, Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange, ed. David Grummitt (Aldershot, 2018). 30

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it to say that they have (among other things) re-assessed the significance of English efforts to maintain a grip on Calais – the one remaining continental outpost of the English kingdom, an English town, with its own MPs, which in fact marked the kingdom’s southernmost border – until its final loss in 1558.34 Among many other factors, the emergence of the Habsburg empire and its rulers to play a vital and determining role in the politics of north-west Europe and, after 1506, the rise of Habsburg-Spanish power, were perhaps the most significant changes of all. In some ways, an Anglo-Habsburg alliance (largely directed against France) could be seen as a renewal, in a rather different form, of the previous AngloBurgundian accord. After all, the emperors Maximilian I and Charles V – or their delegates, regents and family members – now acted as dukes of Brabant and counts of Flanders and Holland, inheriting most of the former Burgundian dominions in the north, as well as the more southerly county of Burgundy. Until the religious crises of the 1530s and after, they were England’s natural allies – though not always very reliable ones – against the French. And their dominions included the centres – Antwerp, Brussels, Malines, Louvain, Amsterdam, Middelburg and the other towns of the Low Countries – in which and through which so much of England’s external trade was conducted. Commerce in English wool and cloth, and what one can call international financial services, as well as the trade in works of art and artefacts, were in the hands not only of the English Staplers at Calais but also of Italian merchants and merchant-bankers who acted as intermediaries between suppliers and customers.35 And the onset of the Valois-Habsburg Italian wars was not without significance for England. Changes in the balance of power in Italy had wider repercussions and – to cite one example – the role of the papacy became, if anything, more rather than less significant in English dynastic politics than it had previously been. The marital problems of the Tudors and their offspring – under both Henry VII and Henry VIII – meant that a vigilant presence at Rome and a cultivation of those who might influence papal decisions and conduct became increasingly imperative. And, in the search over a wider net for continental European allies, interactions with Italy, as well as the longer-established connections with Spain and Portugal, became a means of securing potential recruits to England’s causes abroad. In that search for allies, in particular against France, English rulers had in the past largely confined themselves to two main sources: the Iberian peninsula and the Low Countries. But if any kind of effective encirclement of France was to be considered, or a joint north–south pincer-style operation undertaken, then an alliance – or at least a guarantee or likelihood of neutrality – might be sought with one or more of the Italian principalities or republics. And in the changed and changing political conditions of the later fifteenth century, a permanent English presence at the papal court in Rome, backed by Italian agents and allies, was also increasingly desirable. The 1460s saw the first appearance since its foundation in 1348 of Italian members of the Order of the Garter.36 The earlier election, in 1450, of Alfonso V, David Grummitt, The Calais Garrison: War and Military Service in England, 1436–1558 (Woodbridge, 2008). 35 Jonathan Woolfson, ‘Renaissance Intersections: The Arts of Italy and Early Tudor Visual Experience’, Visual Resources, xxxvi (2020), 1–20; C.M. Sicca, ‘Consumption and Trade of Art between Italy and England in the first half of the 16th Century: The London House of the Bardi and Calvalcanti Company’, Renaissance Studies, xvi (2002), 163–201. 36 P.J. Baigent and H.C. Chesshyre, The Most Noble Order of the Garter. 650 Years (1999), 231–2, 313. 34



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king of Aragon and Naples, had already introduced a part-Italian as well as an Iberian dimension into the membership of the Order. It has sometimes been claimed that, in terms of pragmatic politics, election to an order of chivalry was no more than a decorative ornament among a ruler’s attributes and acquisitions. But – as Cecil Clough pointed out long ago in his pioneering work on the courts of England and the duchy of Urbino – such elections were often made prior to (as well as after) the forming of alliances.37 In 1463, both Ferdinand I, king of Naples, and Francesco Sforza, duke of Milan, became knights of the Order.38 Their evident value as potential, if not actual, opponents of French claims to Aragonese-held Naples on behalf of the house of Anjou, and Sforza’s succession to the duchy of Milan in the face of Frenchbacked Orleanist rivalry in 1450, made them potentially useful allies. Then, in 1474, Federigo da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino, was elected, while in 1480 Ercole d’Este, duke of Ferrara became a member.39 A greater presence of ‘foreigners’ among the knights of the Garter, especially under Edward IV and, to a slightly lesser extent Henry VII, may be revealing of England’s changed situation. Under Edward, eight were elected, of whom four were Italian, three Iberian and one Burgundian (Charles the Bold). Under Henry VII, six were elected, of whom three were Habsburgs (and therefore Austro-Spanish), two were Italian and one Scandinavian.40 Under Henry VIII, there were seven ‘foreign’ elections, of whom just one was Italian, and (interestingly) three were French.41 Of the second two Garter elections of Italians under Edward IV, one is of especial interest. On 18 August 1474, Federigo, duke of Urbino, was elected unanimously to membership of the Order.42 A relatively minor Italian despotism, ruled by a condottiere captain who had made his fortune in papal and other service, was here being treated as on a par with the kingdom of Naples, or the much larger duchy of Milan (though that was also, of course, by this time ruled by the family of a former condottiere). But Federigo was no ordinary mercenary captain. However much of a propaganda exercise it was, here was a Renaissance prince who very publicly combined the arts of war and peace, arms and letters, pen and sword.43 And, for an English sovereign, he might have both military and diplomatic uses. In the proposal for his election to the Garter he was described as ‘standard-bearer of the Church of Rome’ (i.e. papal gonfaloniere), ‘confederate of the Emperor [Frederick III]’, and creator of a ‘stately palace’ at Urbino. His soldierly attributes were much praised: he had fought ‘dyvers battles, tooke 6 standerds in the felde; 8 tymes he overthhrewe his enemyes, and in all his werres was ever victorious, which greetly increased his riches’.44 In best Renaissance fashion, ‘the arming sword that he wore bore this inscription: “Son C.H. Clough, ‘The Relations between the English and Urbino Courts, 1474–1508’, Studies in the Renaissance, xiv (1967), 203–4, 208–9. 38 Ibid., 208; Baigent and Chesshyre, Most Noble Order, 313. 39 Baigent and Chesshyre, Most Noble Order, 313; Clough, ‘Relations between the English and Urbino Courts’, 202, 204–5. 40 Baigent and Chesshyre, Most Noble Order, 313–14. 41 Ibid., 314–15. 42 Clough, ‘Relations between the English and Urbino Courts’, 204–5; James Dennistoun, Memoirs of the Dukes of Urbino, Illustrating the Arms, Arts and Literature of Italy from 1440 to 1630 (3 vols., 1851), i. 213. 43 For his role as a Maecenas, see C.H. Clough, ‘Federigo da Montefeltro’s Patronage of the Arts, 1468–82’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xxvi (1973), 129–44. 44 BL, Add. MS 6298, f. 277; Dennistoun, Memoirs of the Dukes, i. Appendix VII, 429–30. 37

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quella che difende la ragione, non ti fidar di me s’il cor ti manca”’.45 This military paragon had gained a wider reputation through his victorious siege of Volterra (June 1472), concluded in a very short space of time, albeit with a brutal outcome in the sacking of the rebel town according to the laws of war. Federigo was viewed as Italy’s leading condottiere – one-eyed and broken-nosed as a result of jousting injuries, he needed a Piero della Francesca to render his features worthy of admiration in noble, imperial profile.46 But he allegedly questioned his fame, saying ‘no one in Spain or France has ever heard of me. Think you that it [i.e. his reputation] has ever crossed the Alps?’47 It clearly had – certainly enough to qualify him for Garter membership. He sent his relative Pietro degli Ubaldini, a high-status knight of Urbino’s own Order of the Golden Spur, to act as proxy for him at the installation ceremony at Windsor in the spring of 1475. Ubaldini returned from England to Urbino bringing with him a gift of hunting hounds, sparrow hawks and a ‘high-mettled ambling colt’ for Federigo’s three-year-old son and heir Guidobaldo, of whom more later.48 I mention these mutual exchanges of gifts because they demonstrate that Renaissance or no Renaissance, humanism or no humanism, Alps or no Alps, a common European aristocratic and courtly culture prevailed. Many similar tastes, aspirations, habits and assumptions seem to have been shared in a culture in which horses, dogs and falcons, as they had long done, played an extremely important part. The barking of their hounds, the neighing of their steeds and the calling of their falcons were as music in the ears of these people. And it did not mean that they were, like some of their successors in the royal, princely and noble houses of Europe, all philistines. Far from it. That said, such cultural affinity was offset by ever-present rivalries, tensions (often within families), and calculated manoeuvres to gain advantage. There were plenty of Machiavellians before Machiavelli. It was intended that Federigo of Urbino might serve the English crown in two capacities: first, as a potential source of military aid against France. Edward IV was, in the spring of 1474, beginning to plan his campaign to invade France in order to reclaim his rights and titles there, but in effect to cause as much damage and trouble by way of raiding, pillaging and looting as he could.49 The fourteenth-century English chevauchee lived again. It was mooted that an attack from the south, led by the duke of Urbino, via the duchy of Savoy, might be co-ordinated with Edward’s and Charles the Bold of Burgundy’s incursions from the north.50 Although Federigo wrote to Edward pledging his support in late August 1475, nothing came of the plan. But it was not necessarily far-fetched or hare-brained. In 1465, a contingent of Italian troops (much praised by Commynes) had served under Jean, duke of Calabria, in the Montlhéry campaign and, on the other side, Galeazzo Sforza had led a Milanese ‘I [the sword] am one that defends the right; rely not on me should thy heart fail thee’. For what follows see Dennistoun, Memoirs of the Dukes, i. Appendix VII, 424–30. 46 Robert Baldwin, ‘Politics, Nature and the Dignity of Man in Piero della Francesca’s Portraits of Battista Sforza and Federico da Montefeltro’, Source, vi (1987), 14–19. 47 Dennistoun, Memoirs of the Dukes, i. 425; also Clough, ‘Relations between the English and Urbino Courts’, 204–5. 48 Dennistoun, Memoirs of the Dukes, i. 205. 49 For the expedition see Charles Ross, Edward IV (1974), 226–38; for the composition of the army and its leaders see Edward IV’s French Expedition of 1475. The Leaders and their Badges, ed. F.P. Barnard (Oxford, 1925). 50 Clough, ‘Relations between the English and Urbino Courts’, 205, 209. 45



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force into France against the duke of Bourbon at the same time. Commynes considered Italian heavy cavalry as far superior to anything that the Burgundian side could field at the battle of Montlhéry.51 Secondly, Federigo’s connections with the papacy by means of the marriage of his daughter into the Della Rovere family was thought to give him privileged access and influence at the court of Rome. He was a papal vassal, as well as a ‘natural servant and subject’ (as he described himself) of both the pope and the king of Naples.52 He could (and did) therefore feel that he was ‘especially entrusted with the English monarch’s interests at the Holy See’.53 And he was extremely impressed by, and clearly proud of, his election to the Garter. Urbino court poets and chroniclers extolled its merits as well as those of their duke.54 He commissioned two pictures of himself wearing the Garter insignia, probably from Justus of Ghent, one for his palace at Urbino,55 while the Garter is also shown on the marquetry (or intarsia) panels of his studies in his palaces at Gubbio and Urbino.56 To display the insignia of the Order so prominently and consistently57 was a reminder of England’s prestige on the European scene and Federigo wrote telling Edward IV and his representatives that he had diligently studied its statutes and wore the pendant of the Order on a daily basis.58 Federigo’s candidacy had clearly been supported by Ferdinand of Naples, into whose own Order of the Ermine he (Federigo) had been admitted in September 1474, one month before his election to the Garter.59 The case for an alliance with the duchy of Urbino may initially have also been made by Robert Flemmyng, dean of Lincoln, English representative at Rome (1473–7) who knew Federigo and had been a pupil of the humanist educator Guarino da Verona at Padua and Ferrara.60 Charles Ross, in his biography of Edward IV, was sceptical about the value of what he called Commynes, Memoirs, i. 47, 57. Clough, ‘Relations between the English and Urbino Courts’, 210–11. For his service to Naples, see C.H. Clough, ‘Federico da Montefeltro and the Kings of Naples: A Study in Fifteenth-Century Survival’, Renaissance Studies, vi (1992), 113–72. 53 Dennistoun, Memoirs of the Dukes, i. 428. Letters between Federigo and Edward IV at this time are published in Federico da Montefeltro. Lettere di Stato et d’Arte (1470–1480), ed. Paolo Alatri (Rome, 1949). Translations of some of these letters are found in Dennistoun, Memoirs of the Dukes, i. 212–13, 424–30, 430–2; ii. 443–4. 54 Dennistoun, Memoirs of the Dukes, i. 430–2. The Urbino court poet Giovanni Santi referred to the Garter as ‘a holy brotherhood in arms’, given for ‘rare worth and dauntless prowess’, while another panegyrist, Porcellio, in his epic poem Feltria (1465–75), composed Latin verses on the Garter insignia, translating its motto as ‘Dispereant qui prava putant’. Federigo was said to have offered to Edward IV that he would ‘auxilium prestare, et duris succerrere in armis’. 55 Lorne Campbell, Renaissance Portraits (New Haven and London, 1990), 49, 62, 232; idem, The Early Flemish Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen (Cambridge, 1985), 59–65. 56 For detailed descriptions of the Gubbio study, now re-assembled in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, see Olga Raggio, The Gubbio Studiolo and its Conservation. Volume 1. Federico da Montefeltro’s Palace at Gubbio and its Studiolo (New York, 1999), 78–9, 116, 118–19, 122–3, figs. 5-4, 5-75. The Garter is also carved in stone on the lintel above the doorframe over the entrance to his Gubbio studiolo, and also appeared depicted in illuminated MSS in his Library (figs. 5-77, 5-78). 57 For Urbino, and the connotations of military fame and glory expressed by the Garter imagery, see Luciano Cheles, ‘The Inlaid Decorations of Federico da Montefeltro’s Urbino Studiolo: An Iconographic Study’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz, xxvi (1982), 1–46, esp. 6, 23–4, 25, fig. 6. Also C.H. Clough, ‘Art as Power in the Study of an Italian Renaissance Prince: The Case of Federico da Montefeltro’, Artibus et Historiae, xvi (1995), 19–50, esp. 28, 29, 31. 58 Dennistoun, Memoirs of the Dukes, i. 426. 59 Ibid., i. 212. Ferdinand of Naples had been elected to the Garter in 1463. 60 Clough, ‘Relations between the English and Urbino Courts’, 214–15. 51 52

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‘these distant diplomatic forays’ as ‘nothing practical emerged’ from them.61 But Federigo was clearly a potentially useful agent at the court of Rome, adding his secular voice to the English clerical element already there. He soon gained from Sixtus IV a speedy and apparently munificent grant of indulgences and remission to those visiting the Garter chapel at Windsor.62 So at least the canons of St. George’s stood to gain practically from the Italian connection. And the part which Federigo played in the setting up under Edward IV of a diplomatic machinery at the papal curia which was to serve Henry VII and, for a time, Henry VIII well was not negligible. There was Yorkist-early Tudor continuity here. That continuity was maintained by the subsequent renewal of the alliance with the court of Urbino under Henry VII. There is something of a sense of déjà vu here: Guidobaldo, duke of Urbino, captain-general of the Roman Church, was elected to the Order of the Garter, as his father had been, in February 1504. It seems that he may have requested to be elected to the Order.63 The Garter insignia was received by him at Rome from Henry VII’s envoys Sir Gilbert Talbot, K.G. (elected 1495), Robert Shirborne, dean of St. Paul’s, who remained as Henry’s representative at the Papal curia, and Richard Beere, abbot of Glastonbury.64 Henry requested Guidobaldo to act ‘as our agent, with your gracious influence, which has great and just weight with our Holy Father’.65 Julius II, himself a member of the Della Rovere clan and therefore closely related to the Montefeltro, granted special indulgences to Henry VII’s new and very grand chapel, with its Italianate tomb by Pietro Torrigiani, at the east end of Westminster abbey, as Sixtus IV had, in 1474, favoured St. George’s, Windsor.66 Gifts were again exchanged. Guidobaldo’s envoy, who he sent to England as proxy for his installation as a Garter knight on 10 November 1506, was none other than Baldassare Castiglione, author of The Book of the Courtier.67 He came with gifts to Henry VII of falcons, horses (one of which was found en route to be blind – a nasty trick played on the Montefeltro by its former owners, the Gonzaga of Mantua) and, remarkably, Raphael’s painting of St. George and the Dragon in which the saint wears the Garter around his knee.68 In return, Castiglione came back to Urbino with presents for the duke of the inevitable horses, dogs, and (as a personal gift to Castiglione himself) a collar of linked ‘SS’ with two portcullises and a golden Tudor rose as pendants, as worn (it was reported) by English chief justices and others.69 This was to appear in The Courtier as an object of the Urbino court’s after-dinner speculations on the meaning Ross, Edward IV, 213. Dennistoun, Memoirs of the Dukes, i. 428–9. 63 Clough, ‘Relations between the English and Urbino Courts’, 206; for the whole episode and for what follows see Dennistoun, Memoirs of the Dukes, ii. 443–9. 64 C.H. Clough, ‘Sir Gilbert Talbot, K.G., and Raphael’s Washington “St George”’, Report of the Society of the Friends of St. George’s and the Descendants of the Knights of the Garter, vi (1984–5), 242–54. 65 20 Feb. 1504; Dennistoun, Memoirs of the Dukes, ii. 443, citing Pesaro, Bibliotheca Communale, MS 374. 66 Clough, ‘Relations between the English and Urbino Courts’, 206. 67 Dennistoun, Memoirs of the Dukes, ii. 447–9; Julia Cartwright, Baldassare Castiglione the Perfect Courtier: His Life and Letters, 1478–1529 (2 vols., 1908), i. 42–3, 170, 173–4, 189–90; Clough, ‘Relations between the English and Urbino Courts’, 207–8. 68 Clough, ‘Sir Gilbert Talbot, K.G., and Raphael’s Washington “St George”’, 247–8; D.A. Brown, ‘Saint George in Raphael’s Washington Painting’, Studies in the History of Art, xvii (1986), 37–44. 69 Dennistoun, Memoirs of the Dukes, ii. 449. 61 62



England and Europe, c.1450–1520 13

of the letter ‘S’. It has been suggested that one of the letters had been detached by Castiglione from the collar and given to the duchess Elisabetta Gonzaga, who wore it as a pendant from a headband.70 An apparently lost sonnet by Unico Aretino (alias Bernardo Accolti) claimed to disclose the meaning, strenuously rejecting the view that it represented the serpentine, snake-like and deceitful nature of women.71 Raphael’s portrait of Elisabetta certainly shows her wearing a pendant on her forehead, but it is formed by a scorpion, not a letter ‘S’.72 And to strengthen these cultural links, and as a contribution to Renaissance Latin literature, Castiglione had delivered a eulogy of Guidobaldo at his Garter installation, later worked up into an illuminated presentation copy at Urbino, and sent to Henry VII for the royal library.73 Polydore Vergil, another Urbino product, tells us (with a degree of sycophantic courtier’s flattery) that Guidobaldo himself was ‘of the princes of our age, the most accomplished in the Latin and Greek tongues and in military discipline’.74 Like father, like son – although the relatively short-lived, impotent and sadly sickly Guidobaldo (died 1508) rested largely on his father’s laurels rather than making a name for himself. But conditions were changing. In May 1504, Sir Gilbert Talbot and his entourage were received at Rome and welcomed by the bishops of Worcester and Hereford, both papal appointees, agreed with Henry VII. Adriano de Castello (Castellesi) was bishop of Hereford (1502–4), then Bath and Wells (1504 to 1518, when he was deprived). Silvestro de Gigli was bishop of Worcester (1498–1521) to be followed by Giulio de’ Medici (1521–2) and Geronimo de’ Ghinucci (1522 to 1535, when he was also deprived).75 Ghinucci was to be one of Cardinal Wolsey’s most regular correspondents and informants on papal and Italian affairs.76 A course was being navigated towards a more permanent and influential English presence at the papal curia, leading to the establishment of English curial cardinals, resident at the Holy See. In 1511 Cardinal Bainbridge became the first Englishman to be made curial ‘cardinal protector’ for the English crown at Rome, with a short three-year tenure until his murder, allegedly by his male servant lover, in 1514. Reginald Pole took the office and saw its demise after the breach with Rome, but that is another story.77 Maybe some art historians are right when they claim in recent work that there was an ‘Italian moment’ (or moments?) in English art at this time.78 Perhaps we can also Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, ed. and trans. L.E. Opdycke (New York, 1903), 16–17; Clough, ‘Relations between the English and Urbino Courts’, 217. 71 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 16–17. 72 For a recent discussion of the iconography of the portrait see Simona Cohen, ‘Elisabetta Gonzaga and the Ambivalence of Scorpio in Medieval and Renaissance Art’, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, xiii (2018), 408–46. 73 Clough, ‘Relations between the English and Urbino Courts’, 208; also C.H. Clough, ‘Federigo da Montefeltro: The Good Christian Prince’, BJRL, lxvii (1984), 305, n. 47. The copy of the presentation MS entitled Ad Henricum Angliae Regis Epistola de Vita et Gestis Guidobaldi Urbini Ducis is apparently now lost. 74 Dennistoun, Memoirs of the Dukes, ii. 447. 75 Clough, ‘Sir Gilbert Talbot, K.G. and Raphael’s Washington “St George”’, 244–5; Clough, ‘Relations between the English and Urbino Courts’, 206. For the dates of their episcopates, Handbook of British Chronology, ed. F.M. Powicke and E.B. Fryde (1961), 206, 230, 262. 76 Dennistoun, Memoirs of the Dukes, ii. 423: letter to Wolsey, Rome, 11 July 1526. 77 D.S. Chambers, Cardinal Bainbridge (Oxford, 1961), 1–5; Clough, ‘Relations between the English and Urbino Courts’, 210. 78 Woolfson, ‘Renaissance Intersections’, 3; see also The Anglo-Florentine Renaissance: Art for the Tudors, ed. C.M. Sicca and L.A. Waldman (New Haven, CT, 2012). 70

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detect other ‘Italian moments’ in English politics and diplomacy, as well as culture, under Edward IV and Henry VII. And the rise of the ‘Italianate Englishman’ has certainly been detected at this time. From John, Lord Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, Robert Flemmyng, John Gunthorpe and John Argentine to Sir Gilbert Talbot, Richard Fox, bishop of Winchester, Henry Parker, Lord Morley and above all, perhaps, Thomas Cromwell, Englishmen with experience of, and acquaintance with, things Italian became a decidedly marked feature of English political and cultural life. Diarmaid MacCulloch, in his recent biography, has commented on Cromwell’s ability to be (during his early career) ‘the best Italian in all England’.79 He spoke, wrote and read Italian fluently and owned copies (in Italian) of Machiavelli’s History of Florence and The Prince.80 Whether this acquaintance with Italian ideas of statecraft and despotic government had any influence whatsoever on these Englishmen, informing some aspects of both Yorkist and early Tudor government, must remain an object of speculation. But, as under their Lancastrian and Yorkist predecessors (to adapt another of Bruce McFarlane’s pronouncements) there may have been ‘many things that [the Tudors] had more will than strength to do’.81 Perhaps Henry VIII actually managed to do at least some – or more – of those things? But the way had already been prepared under the Yorkist regime for a number of these Tudor developments. If the so-called ‘Tudor Revolution in Government’ is really now more or less dead in the water, it has been shown that other aspects of English life under the early Tudors also owed much to earlier precedent, experiment and innovation. On the continental European stage, wider horizons had certainly opened up as one result of the loss of the French possessions. Yet nostalgia for a lost past continued to co-­ exist alongside new opportunities. Conclusion What can we conclude from all this? A new and rather different role in European politics had to be found for England after 1453 and again after 1558. New ventures, as we have seen, were tried – some successfully, others less so. The twists and turns of European power-struggles and dynastic manoeuvrings made long-term strategies difficult to formulate and sustain. But the past was not so easily forgotten. Nostalgia was difficult to eradicate. I would argue (as I have previously done elsewhere)82 that one strand of continuity in what we would call English foreign policy – but which contemporaries referred to as ‘matters beyond the seas’ – lay in the imperative task of keeping the continental coastline of north-west Europe out of the hands of a single dominant power. In this process, English possession of Calais (‘Caliss’ in its Anglicised form) had played a very significant part. It was a true English border town Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cromwell. A Life (2019), 28. ‘Triumphs of English’: Henry Parker, Lord Morley, Translator to the Tudor Court. New Essays in Interpretation, ed. Marie Axton and J.P. Carley (2000), esp. the essay by K.R. Bartlett, ‘Morley, Machiavelli and the Pilgrimage of Grace’, 77–86. 81 K.B. McFarlane, ‘Loans to the Lancastrian Kings: The Problem of Inducement’, in his England in the Fifteenth Century, 65. 82 Malcolm Vale, The Ancient Enemy. England, France and Europe from the Angevins to the Tudors, 1154–1558 (2007), esp. 17–19, 108. For continuities and changes in policy during the Tudor period see 111–28. 79 80



England and Europe, c.1450–1520 15

like, for example Berwick, with its own frontier zone. It lay not only between the kingdoms of England and France divided, as they were on a north–south axis, by the sea. But it also formed a kind of small buffer between French and imperial territory. The relatively narrow coastal strip and its immediate hinterland running west–east from Boulogne to Gravelines might seem an irrelevance in a world of early modern state formation and consolidation. But as a small wedge, inserted between the two dominant powers of continental north-west Europe (France and the Empire), Calais and its Pale could be said to symbolise England’s new and future role as a third party in European politics. And that role was to continue long after the loss of that alleged ‘jewel’ in the English crown, albeit a very costly one. So England’s interest continued to lie in attempting to ensure that French, and then Spanish, efforts to achieve hegemony over the Low Countries were constantly impeded, if not thwarted, by English alliances (sometimes diplomatic, sometimes military, sometimes completely unsuccessful) with other neighbouring or more distant powers. The threat of invasion was always there, lurking beneath the surface of events. The island kingdom – or rather the island of two kingdoms – was very vulnerable, and literally so, to the ebb and flow of the tides and the changing direction of the winds. No human being, however powerful, had any control, whatsoever over that. The prevailing south-westerlies could always favour invading fleets and raiders by bringing them on through the western approaches into the Channel while English ships might be penned by the wind and tides in the harbours, landfalls and moorings of the west and south coasts.83 But there were other considerations beside such geo-strategic ones which shaped English relationships with its continental neighbours and counterparts. The specific and very particular nature of England’s pre-Reformation relations with the Holy See at Rome, as well as with other Italian principalities and republics, demanded that a vigilant and watchful eye be kept on Italian politics. This was not only because of Henry VIII’s ‘great matter’. From the death of Arthur, prince of Wales, in 1501 onwards, the stage was set for a process which began with a papal dispensation for the heir to the English throne to marry, and ended with the subsequent failure to get that marriage annulled. These matters required sources of both intelligence and influence at the curia. A permanent and more powerful English presence there was required, supported by those of his Italian relatives, cardinals and other secular figures who might best persuade, cajole or even try to coerce the Holy Father. Above all else, the French invasion of Italy in 1494 had altered the balance of forces in Europe as a whole and a close attention to events in the Italian peninsula was incumbent on all regimes in the furtherance of their own interests. Italian allies and agents could work to England’s advantage, undermining French and other hostile powers wherever and whenever they could. After all, the English claim to the throne of France – however titular – was never abandoned until 1802, when there was of course no French crown to renounce. That ancient enmity with France – punctuated, as ever, by long truces and rapprochements – remained, and a so-called second ‘Hundred Years War’ was to be fought between 1689 and 1815. But that is another, and rather different, story. For these considerations see R.B. Wernham, Before the Armada. The Emergence of the English Nation, 1485–1588 (1966) which provided a starting-point for many subsequent studies. The crucial importance of winds and tides was set out in detail throughout Garrett Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish Armada (1959), esp. 223–30.

83

MARINERS AND MARAUDERS: A CASE STUDY OF FOWEY DURING THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR, C.1400–C.1453 S.J. Drake

Everyone knows that the Hundred Years’ War was fought chiefly in France. After all, it was the king of England’s claim to the French throne that formed one of the defining features of the long conflict. Yet despite this truism, there can be equally little doubt that the war exercised great influence on England, with the ports of the south coast in particular holding a place on the frontline. Since contemporaries characterised fighting at sea as ‘bloody and murderous’, however, it is perhaps unsurprising that the naval aspects of the conflict have received comparatively little attention from contemporaries and historians alike.1 Efforts by James Sherborne and Colin Richmond to redress this state of affairs have more recently been bolstered by Maryanne Kowaleski, Ian Friel, Nicholas Rodger, Susan Rose, and others.2 In his monograph, Craig Lambert has given us a particularly full account of naval logistics in this period.3 While the naval service of several English port towns has also been studied, it is fair to say that the fourteenth century, with its richer records, forms the focus of most of this scholarship.4 For example, Jean Froissart, Chronicles, trans. Geoffrey Brereton (Harmondsworth, 1968), 64. J.W. Sherborne, ‘The Hundred Years’ War: Shipping and Manpower 1369–89’, Past and Present, xxxvii (1967), 163–75; C.F. Richmond, ‘The War at Sea’, in The Hundred Years War, ed. Kenneth Fowler (1971), 96–112; Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘Warfare, Shipping, and Crown Patronage: The Impact of the Hundred Years War on the Port Towns of Medieval England’, in Money, Markets and Trade in Late Medieval Europe, Essays in Honour of John H.A. Munro, ed. Lawrin Armstrong, Ivana Elbl and Martin Elbl (2007), 233–54; Ian Friel, ‘Winds of Change? Ships and the Hundred Years War’, in Arms, Armies and Fortifications in the Hundred Years War, ed. Anne Curry and Michael Hughes (Woodbridge, 1994), 183–93; N.A.M. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea. A Naval History of Great Britain, Vol. I, 600–1669 (1997); Susan Rose, Medieval Naval Warfare, 1300–1500 (London and New York, 2002). 3 Craig Lambert, Shipping the Medieval Military, English Maritime Logistics in the Fourteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2011); Andrew Ayton and Craig Lambert, ‘Shipping, Mariners and Ports in FourteenthCentury England’ (2011) http://discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk/catalogue/?sn=850665&type=Data%20 catalogue [accessed 19 Feb. 2015]. 4 For example, Christian Liddy, War, Politics and Finance in Late Medieval English Towns, Bristol, York and the Crown, 1350–1400 (Woodbridge, 2005); Susan Rose, ‘The Value of the Cinque Ports to the Crown 1200–1500’, in Roles of the Sea in Medieval England, ed. Richard Gorski (Woodbridge, 2012), 41–58; Andrew Ayton and Craig Lambert, ‘A Maritime Community in War and Peace: Kentish 1 2



Mariners and Marauders: A Case Study of Fowey 17

As technological limitations resulted in naval squadrons only enjoying ‘a measure of local control for the limited time and limited area of their operation’, confining our attention to the king’s fleets presents a by no means complete picture of the war at sea.5 The maritime lands of the realm were often left on the frontline, with the result that portside defences were of paramount importance to both the inhabitants of these areas and the crown itself.6 At the same time as local and national efforts sought to raise formal fleets and secure coastal defences, a great many ‘pirates’ were to be found roving the Channel in search of their prey. Although scholars from Charles Kingsford through to C.J. Ford have considered maritime predation, the degree to which direct action at sea formed part of the war effort remains debated.7 A detailed study of one port, Fowey, in Cornwall, can serve as an entrée to all these aspects of maritime warfare. Fowey’s experience of the fourteenth-century phase of the war has been considered elsewhere;8 the present study examines the effects of the conflict through the half-century from 1400. At this time Fowey was home to around 1,000 inhabitants; in 1334 the government had reckoned this small town to contain movable wealth of just over £34.9 It only enjoyed a modest form of burghal autonomy, for the Benedictine priory of Tywardreath – some three miles away – exercised lordship over the town, running Fowey through its manorial court.10 Yet the prior’s powers did not extend beyond the shoreline, for the duke of Cornwall held the seigniorial prerogative of FoweyWater, allowing his officials considerable sway over the port.11 Despite being a comparatively small settlement, Fowey developed infrastructures for shipping and a considerable merchant marine.12 Its vessels were found trading far and wide, with Fowey-based merchants handling commodities as varied as tin, wine and wool.13 As this deep-water port was located on major sea-routes to Aquitaine and beyond, it also formed an important point of trans-shipment for many seafarers from England and beyond. That Fowey was by no means an insignificant port, is affirmed both by its position as the head port of the Cornish customs district and by the prominence given it in the ‘Libelle of Englysche Polycye’, which claimed that Ports, Ships and Mariners, 1320–1400’, Archaeologia Cantiana, cxxxiv (2014), 67–104; Anthony Saul, ‘Great Yarmouth and the Hundred Years War in the Fourteenth Century’, BIHR, lii (1979), 105–15. 5 Richmond, ‘The War at Sea’, 99. 6 H.J. Hewitt, The Organisation of War under Edward III, 1338–62 (Manchester, 1966); J.R. Alban, ‘English Coastal Defence: Some Fourteenth-Century Modifications’, in Patronage, the Crown and the Provinces in Later Medieval England, ed. R.A. Griffiths (Gloucester, 1981), 57–78. 7 C.L. Kingsford, Prejudice and Promise in Fifteenth Century England (Oxford, 1925), 78–106; C.J. Ford, ‘Piracy or Policy: The Crisis in the Channel, 1400–1403’, TRHS, 5th series, xxix (1971), 63–78; N.A.M. Rodger, ‘The Law and Language of Private Naval Warfare’, The Mariner’s Mirror, c (2014), 5–16. 8 S.J. Drake, ‘“The Gallaunts of Fawey”: A Case Study of Fowey during the Hundred Years’ War, c.1337–1399’, HR, xc (2017), 296–317; more generally, S.J. Drake, Cornwall, Connectivity and Identity in the Fourteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2019), 191–7. 9 The Lay Subsidy of 1334, ed. R.E. Glasscock (1975), 31. 10 Placita de Quo Warranto, ed. William Illingworth and John Caley (1818), 109. 11 See The Havener’s Accounts of the Earldom and Duchy of Cornwall, 1287–1356, ed. Maryanne Kowaleski (Devon and Cornwall Record Society, new series, xliv, 2001). 12 Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘Coastal Communities in Medieval Cornwall’, in A Maritime History of Cornwall, ed. Philip Payton, Alston Kennerly and Helen Doe (Exeter, 2014), 43–59, at 45. 13 Drake, Cornwall, Connectivity and Identity, ch. 14.

18

S.J. Drake

To fortefye anone he [Edward III] dyd devyse Of Englysshe townes iij, that is to seye Derthmouth, Plymmouth, the thyrde it is Foweye.14 The Hundred Years’ War had especially serious repercussions for England’s ports because the kings of this period, having little in the way of a permanent navy, often called on their merchant shipping to serve in the country’s interests. Although kings could form fleets in several ways, the ancient right of impressment yielded by far the most vessels. This complex process in its simplest form involved the despatch of agents, commonly sergeants-at-arms, from port to port with the power to arrest vessels and crews for royal service.15 By the fifteenth century local customs officials had come to play a more prominent role in arresting ships and crews, but whoever these royal representatives were they always included Fowey on their itineraries,16 for Fowey played host to a merchant fleet worth impressing. Once they had been arrested by royal officials, ships and seafarers were held ready under the command of the admiral of the south-west, in whose bailiwick Fowey stood.17 Between 1337 and 1453 the crown impressed no fewer than 274 of Fowey’s vessels and 4,213 of its mariners. It is clear that the ‘Gallaunts of Fawey’, as John Leland dubbed them, made a far from inconsiderable contribution to the war at sea.18 To make full sense of these figures, our sources need to be subjected to careful scrutiny. With numerous vessels and mariners impressed on multiple occasions, evidently there were neither 274 separate ships nor 4,213 individuals from Fowey who served the crown at sea; we should be wary of ‘double counting’. There is also a danger that ships based in the vicinity of Fowey were recorded as hailing from the town itself, when in fact they did not, for the crown sometimes grouped small ports together for the purposes of financing naval levies. More significantly still, as Table 1 shows, only seventy ships and 897 sailors from Fowey can be shown to have served the crown in the years from 1400 to 1453. The fifteenth century’s relatively poor showing in comparison to 1337‒99 is in part the result of the fragmentary nature of the source material. Whereas for the fourteenth century a near complete series of naval payrolls survive, listing the vessels impressed and the pay that mariners received, this is not the case after 1400. Although orders to arrest vessels from Fowey and elsewhere are extant, on many occasions we have no evidence to show how many ships and seafarers were actually impressed.19 While bearing these caveats in mind, the surviving documents still demonstrate the demands that the war placed on the port.

The Libelle of Englysche Polycye. A Poem on the Use of Sea Power, 1436, ed. George Warner (Oxford, 1926), lines 215–16. 15 Lambert, Shipping the Medieval Military, ch. 1; Sherborne, ‘Shipping and Manpower’, 164. 16 E.g. CPR, 1436–41, p. 313. 17 Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea, 134. 18 John Leland, The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the Years 1535–1543, ed. Lucy Toulmin Smith (5 vols., 1907), i. 204–5. 19 E.g. CPR, 1416–22, p. 85; 1429–36, p. 533. 14



Mariners and Marauders: A Case Study of Fowey 19

Table 1. Fowey Ships in Royal Service, 1400–53 Date

Ships

Average Tunnage*

Sources

1400–5

4

133

TNA, C47/2/49/19–20; CCR, 1399–1402, p. 238; CPR, 1401–5, p. 195

1405–10

2

—

CCR, 1405–9, p. 175

1410–15

—

—

1415–20

16

84

TNA, C47/2/49/41; E101/49/25

1420–5

4

60

TNA, E101/51/10, mm. 14–15, 43, 52 TNA, E101/51/28

1425–30

1

—

1430–5

—

—

1435–40

10

129

TNA, E101/53/23, 25

1440–5

16

—

CPR, 1441–6, p. 105; PROME, xi. 373‒5; TNA, E101/53/39, 54/4; E364/92, m. 14

1445–50

2

180

TNA, E101/54/10

1450–5

15

146

TNA, E101/54/14; E364/89, m. 6; CPR, 1446–52, pp. 448–9

Total number

70

*The tunnage of each vessel is not always recorded, so the averages produced are a guide rather than a strict rule.

Although in 1400 Henry IV called on Fowey’s sailors to transport troops and supplies for the ‘refreshment’ of his army campaigning in Scotland, in the course of his reign the first Lancastrian king only commandeered a few Fowey-based vessels.20 This was because it was only under his son that full-scale hostilities with the French once again opened. It followed that the naval service of Fowey expanded greatly during the reign of Henry V, not least because the large armies that the king raised in 1415 and 1417 needed to be conveyed across the Channel. The ships and seafarers of Fowey were in all probability well represented on both these expeditions, with the government impressing over 1,000 vessels in 1415 alone.21 At the same time as arresting merchant ships for transport purposes, Henry also set about organising regular patrols of the Channel. To this end, he amassed a battle-fleet of his own and in 1417 there were some thirty-four royal ships in service.22 Fowey’s seafarers contributed to support of this select force, by shipping ropes, masts and other supplies for the outfitting of the king’s vessels.23 Out at sea, ships from the port are shown to have sailed alongside these Lancastrian flotillas, bolstering the fighting capacity

CCR, 1399–1402, p. 169; Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years War, IV. Cursed Kings (2015), ch. 2. 21 Sumption, Cursed Kings, 430; Christopher Allmand, Henry V (1992), 113–15, 220–32. 22 Richmond, ‘War at Sea’, 112–13. 23 Susan Rose, The Navy of the Lancastrian Kings. Accounts and Inventories of William Soper, Keeper of the King’s Ships, 1422–1427 (The Navy Records Society, cxxiii, 1982), 212. 20

20

S.J. Drake

of Henry’s naval forces. In 1418, for instance, three ships from Fowey served in a squadron of this sort keeping the sea for the king.24 Combined with Henry V’s conquests in France, the activities of these flotillas enabled him to master the Channel; ‘the conquest of Normandy was the best security England and English shipping could have’.25 In the 1420s, since the front line had by then been pushed deep into France, there was much less need for ships to fight battles in the ‘narrow sea’. Accordingly, the council of the young Henry VI sold off most of his father’s ships, and the evidence from these years suggests that Fowey-based vessels were more busy transporting troops and supplies than engaging in marine warfare.26 In 1421 Sir John Arundell of Lanherne had been ordered to ‘induce’ 105 archers to sail from Fowey to serve in Normandy; three years later, four vessels from Fowey once again shipped troops to the duchy, and in 1427–8 the Edward of Fowey conveyed some twenty-one soldiers to France for the furtherance of the war.27 Throughout the 1430s, however, as the French succeeded in slowly reversing English fortunes, the Channel increasingly came to serve as a frontier zone. It is illustrative of the times that in 1430 Fowey provided vessels for an expedition sailing ‘for the defence of the realm and the safe-keeping of the sea’.28 Six years later Calais itself was besieged, the pendulum having swung against England following the defection of the duke of Burgundy.29 Even though the French were never again to be a major naval power while the war lasted, the security of the sea became of pressing concern to the king and his subjects alike.30 With strong sea-keeping rising to the fore of the political agenda, in 1442 Henry VI was required to answer a petition from the parliamentary Commons about naval strategy. The Commons argued that eight select ships, each supported by an oared barge and balinger, should patrol the seas over the summer from 15 May to 15 November and do likewise from 1 March to 1 November in 1443.31 They specifically recommended that the Palmer of Fowey should serve in the flotilla. England’s military position on the continent was weakening fast. In an attempt to reverse the decline, the crown despatched a number of campaigning armies. Unsurprisingly, ships from Fowey played an essential role conveying these forces across the Channel. In 1439 eight Fowey-based vessels helped to transport the army of John, earl of Huntingdon, to Aquitaine, for the port was well placed to support campaigns in south-western France.32 After Normandy had fallen to the French, in the early 1450s the government again called on Fowey’s sailors, this time to help convey Lord Rivers and his army to Aquitaine, and at least nine of the eighty-one ships amassed for this purpose hailed from the port.33 When the council’s inactivity and the exchequer’s insolvency led to the cancellation of the departure of this force, in 1453 the town’s seafarers helped to transport fresh reinforcements to CPR, 1416–22, p. 73; Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea, 144–5. Richmond, ‘War at Sea’, 112, 115; idem, ‘Royal Administration and the Keeping of the Seas, 1422– 85’ (Oxford Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1963), 32; PROME, ix. 256. 26 Richmond, ‘War at Sea’, 115; idem, ‘Royal Administration’, 44. 27 CPR, 1416–22, pp. 386–7; TNA, E101/51/28. 28 CPR, 1429–36, p. 74. 29 Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea, 146. 30 Richmond, ‘War at Sea’, 115. 31 Ibid., 116–17; PROME, xi. 374. 32 Cf. M.G.A. Vale, English Gascony 1399–1453 (Oxford, 1970), 108–16. 33 TNA, E101/54/14. 24 25



Mariners and Marauders: A Case Study of Fowey 21

the threatened region,34 and Fowey contributed to the war effort until its bitter end and beyond – in September that year, after the disastrous defeat at Castillon, yet more of its vessels were impressed for the ‘safe keeping’ of the seas.35 Turning from major expeditions of this kind to smaller operations and supply flotillas, it is clear that Fowey was similarly well represented in these activities and as a point of embarkation. For example, William Penne, a citizen and grocer of London, rebuked in 1438 for ‘tarrying’ in Fowey rather than sailing for Picardy, had his safe conduct revoked accordingly. Four years later two ships were impressed from the port to transport John, Lord Talbot, and his men to Normandy.36 Diplomatic traffic also occasionally passed over Fowey’s wharves, such as in 1421, when Henry V had granted the envoys of the duke of Brittany permission to sail from the port.37 Throughout the Lancastrian phase of the war, vessels from the town patrolled the Channel, shipped supplies and transported troops and diplomats alike to places as far flung as Ireland, Scotland, Normandy and Aquitaine. In the fourteenth century the residents of Dartmouth had consistently provided more ships for the king’s fleets than those of Fowey, yet the latter had nevertheless supplied more vessels to the war effort than either Southampton or Winchelsea further up the Channel, and the town’s shipping contributions had sometimes exceeded those of Bristol.38 Although the evidence is less rich for the fifteenth century, some comparisons can be made of the composition of the royal fleets of 1424, 1440, 1442–3, and 1451, as shown in Table 2. All told, 254 ships sailed in these four fleets, so, as twenty-one of them came from Fowey, the town contributed nearly a tenth of the total naval force. Fowey’s contribution dwarfed that of Bristol and Great Yarmouth and far exceeded that of Plymouth, Southampton and Sandwich. Indeed, Fowey was second only to Dartmouth for the total number of vessels it despatched. Even if the fact that ships from havens close to Fowey – among them Polruan – may have been recorded as hailing from the town itself for ease of accounting, thus inflating the overall numbers, it would seem that Fowey stood out as one of the most prominent ports in the kingdom. The town incurred substantial costs from all this military involvement. There can be little doubt that the long periods when vessels were impressed hampered normal trade, and that during hostilities ships and mariners might be captured by enemy forces.39 Lacking direct representation in parliament, the residents of Fowey were denied the political and financial clout enjoyed by larger conurbations such as Bristol, leaving them susceptible to the demands of the crown and the resultant loss of income. On the other hand, the port can be shown to have reaped benefits from its sustained naval service, for impressed seafarers received ready money in the form of wages, and townsmen earned handsome profits from fitting-out ships and selling supplies to crews. Although the crown raised many fleets to protect English maritime interests, it by no means enjoyed complete control over the sea. As a consequence, some localities were often left on the frontline of the war and at these times Fowey appeared 36 37 38 39 34 35

CPR, 1446–52, pp. 444, 447–50; Vale, English Gascony, 132–40. CPR, 1452–61, p. 166. CPR, 1436–41, p. 171; 1441–6, p. 79. CCR, 1419–22, p. 148. Drake, “Gallaunts of Fawey”, 304–5. For the costs-benefit ratio of the war at sea, see Kowaleski, ‘Warfare, Shipping and Crown Patronage’, 233–54.

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Table 2: The Shipping Contributions of English Ports to Royal Expeditions Year

Fowey

Bristol Dartmouth Great Yarmouth

Plymouth Sandwich Southampton

1424

4

—

—

—

—

11

3

1440

2

1

7

—

4

2

2

1442–3 5

—

2

1

2

1

—

1451

10

1

13

—

7

—

6

Total

21

2

22

1

13

14

11

Source: Craig Lambert, The Merchant Fleet of Late Medieval and Tudor England, 1400–1580 (2017)

a tempting target to the foe;40 the port’s large merchant fleet presented many rich prizes for the taking. Strategically, hostile occupation of Fowey would have threatened essential communications between England and Aquitaine, weakening English power in this important lordship. Furthermore, the French could have employed the port as a springboard from which to launch further assaults, so such an occupation would have threatened the security of the realm at large. The defence of Fowey was thus of pressing concern to the government, and French activity prompted measures for more vigorous guarding of the coastline.41 A system of early warning was essential. In 1416, to resist the French and Genoese who ‘purposed to attack the realm in diverse ports’, it was ordered that signals and ‘bekenes’ be established across the kingdom so that the populace ‘may have speedy warning of the coming of the enemy’.42 If hostile forces were sighted, the crown relied on the obligation of every male aged between sixteen and sixty to provide military service for the protection of his homeland. By the fifteenth century local levies were regularly mobilised under the authority of commissions of array, issued for each county to empower local officials to raise troops.43 Those commissioned commanded the gathered forces in their respective shires, holding them in readiness for defence. A good example of this comes from 1402, when leading local landowners were ordered to ‘array all men-atarms, archers, and other fensible men’ for ‘the defence of the sea coast against the king’s enemies, who intend invasion’.44 In the early years of Henry IV’s reign the especial concern about the defence of Fowey and its county is evident from the issue of as many as half a dozen commissions of array for Cornwall that variously named the French and the Welsh as threats.45 The new king was right to be concerned, for in 1405 an unidentified Cf. Michael Oppenheim, ‘Maritime History’, in VCH Cornwall, ed. William Page (1906), 475–511, at 475; Drake, “Gallaunts of Fawey”, 306; idem, Cornwall, Connectivity and Identity, 197–201. 41 Alban, ‘Coastal Defence’, 69–70. 42 CCR, 1413–19, pp. 346–7; Sumption, Cursed Kings, 226. 43 For the wider importance of commissions of array, see Anthony Goodman, The Wars of the Roses: The Soldier’s Experience (Stroud, 2005), ch. 3. 44 CPR, 1401–5, pp. 115–16. 45 Ibid., 115–16, 288–90; 1405–8, pp. 62, 149; CCR, 1402–5, p. 291. 40



Mariners and Marauders: A Case Study of Fowey 23

Cornish port (named ‘Chita’ by a Castilian chronicler) was raided by a combined Franco-Castilian squadron under the command of Don Pero Niño.46 Since no surviving English source referred to this raid, and the description of the port’s topography could fit Helford, Fowey or Looe, it is impossible to be certain which of these settlements suffered from the assault. Nevertheless, such an event is representative of the kind of threats that Fowey faced during the war. In his chronicle of the raid, Niño’s standard bearer recorded that the Castilians sailed up a river into Chita on the incoming tide, and once there, the crews ‘threw down gangways’ and attacked the Englishmen drawn-up to defend the port, overcoming them in a ‘rough fight’. On dispersing the defenders, the oarsmen and crossbow-men pillaged the town while Niño held back the men-at-arms in case the English counter-attacked. After occupying Chita for a full three hours, and having carried off everything of value, the Castilians ‘set fire to the town and burnt it all’, taking two stolen ships with them, and then sailed east to attack Dartmouth and Poole. The Channel formed a watery battlefield. Domestic security remained a concern even when invasions of France were successfully under way; in 1418 Henry V’s council issued a commission of array specifically ‘for the defence of the realm while the king is in foreign parts’.47 All this country- and county-level activity meshed with more localised defensive mechanisms. One such, first appearing in the fourteenth century and ruling that the eightyeight parishes in the region around Fowey should provide 160 archers from 1 May to the end of August each year for the defence of Fowey and Polruan, may have continued in the early years of the fifteenth to play an essential role in guaranteeing the safety of the port.48 To secure local defences and shipping interests, the crown also issued instructions to Fowey’s bailiffs, ordering them, for example, ‘to arrest and keep under arrest until further order all ships and vessels in the port’. Measures of this sort were commonplace and designed to deny the French easy prizes. They also enabled control of the ingress and egress of people from the realm. In April 1415, at the height of his preparations for a campaign later made famous at Agincourt, Henry V forbade the passage of foreigners from Fowey to prevent the spread of military intelligence overseas. Since the crown also issued commands to bailiffs to seize the goods of enemy merchants landed in Fowey, to some extent these local officials enabled the government to ‘weaponise’ trade.49 In this way, Fowey was a gateway worth guarding in its own right and a key component of a national network of control and defence. Yet this is not to suggest that there existed a comprehensive grand strategy for defence of the realm.50 On the contrary, each and every one of these protective mechanisms was limited by administrative confusion and the neglect of duty. Fear of raids often prompted a mass exodus from maritime areas, reducing manpower and crippling local defences. The very fact that the government felt compelled to issue so many instructions about coastal defence stands as testament to the limitations of such commands. At times local officials themselves could neglect or ignore their duties, and in 1450 the crown ordered the arrest of the bailiffs of Fowey after they disobeyed The Unconquered Knight, A Chronicle of the Deeds of Don Pero Niño, Count of Bulna, trans. Joan Evans (1923), 115–17, 225. 47 CCR, 1413–19, p. 346; CPR, 1416–22, pp. 196–7. 48 CCR, 1377–1381, p. 388. 49 CCR, 1402–5, p. 263; 1413–19, p. 215; 1419–22, p. 171. 50 Cf. Hewitt, Organisation of War, 3–12. 46

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a direct royal command.51 With Fowey only walled on the sea coast, and perhaps not even there, this ‘garde de la mer’ was by no means completely secure.52 Henry V’s conquest of Normandy, however, freed Fowey and the south coast from French activity for fifteen years or so,53 and few royal instructions concerning defence were issued from the early 1420s until the mid-1430s. From this time onwards, however, Henry VI’s government regularly sent out orders for the array of men in Cornwall and the policing of people passing through Fowey.54 As the French whittled away England’s territories on the continent, so the king and his subjects grew increasingly apprehensive about security from sea-born attack. It is illustrative of this that in April 1451, ‘till further order’, Cornish officials were commanded to amass all available troops in the county and ‘lead them to the seacoast’.55 Despite all the activity on both sides of the Channel, French naval power recovered slowly, and there would be no return to the ‘dark days’ of the 1370s and 1380s when the realm at large had been apoplectic about enemy activity.56 It was not until 1457 that Fowey suffered from another serious raid. In that year the Seneschal de Brézé commanded a combined Norman and Breton fleet in a major assault on Sandwich, and the Bretons chose to sack Fowey on their journey home.57 The attack was long remembered. Writing in the sixteenth century, John Leland recorded that Elizabeth Treffry (née Boniface) of Fowey ‘with her men repellid the French out of her house in her housebandes absence’. That husband, Thomas Treffry, subsequently fortified the family seat at Place Manor in the town ‘with a right fair and stronge embatelid towr’ that remained ‘the glorie of the town’ even in Leland’s day.58 It may have been during Edward IV’s reign that two defensive block houses were constructed and linked by a great chain to seal off entry to the waterway at the mouth of the river Fowey.59 From all this we can see that Fowey was significant enough to be included in national defensive structures, both for its inherent value as a deep-water port and because it held a place in a pan-English network of coastal defence. At times the limitations of government policy left the port exposed to the privations of war, reminding us that the conflict undermined trade and threatened security, yet, in contrast to the late fourteenth century, there is no evidence that the residents of fifteenth-century Fowey ever petitioned the crown to complain of hardships resulting from enemy attacks.60 While the war at sea was inescapable, the conflict was by no means completely ruinous.

CPR, 1446–52, pp. 380–1; PROME, xii. 146. Leland, Itinerary, ed. Toulmin Smith, i. 323. 53 Richmond, ‘War at Sea’, 114–15; R.A. Griffiths, The Reign of Henry VI (Stroud, 1998), 178–9. 54 CPR, 1429–36, p. 473; CCR, 1435–41, p. 88. 55 CPR, 1441–6, p. 200; 1446–52, p. 480; Griffiths, Henry VI, 423–32. 56 Drake, Cornwall, Connectivity and Identity, 197–8, 203. 57 Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles, ed. James Gairdner (Camden Society, 2nd series, xxviii, 1880), 166; Oppenheim, ‘Maritime History’, 483. 58 Leland, Itinerary, ed. Toulmin Smith, i. 204; S.J. Drake, ‘The Michelstow Family (per. c.1350–c.1454)’, Oxford DNB. 59 The dating of these fortifications is debated, but there is no evidence that they were built earlier in the century. 60 Drake, “Gallaunts of Fawey”, 306–9. 51 52



Mariners and Marauders: A Case Study of Fowey 25 ‘Piracy’

For all the efforts of admirals and commissioners of array, official fleets and coastal defence were only part of Fowey’s involvement in the conflict as local seafarers actively participated in ‘piracy’. At this time, even the language employed to describe direct action at sea was ambiguous. In medieval Latin, pirata referred predominantly to a style of maritime warfare with few moral or legal overtones.61 It was only in 1536 that the government was to define ‘piracy’ as a crime, and as late as the 1660s that it began to employ the term ‘privateer’ for state-sanctioned attacks. Since both these terms have legalistic meanings, it is advisable to avoid imposing them on the fifteenth century. Violence was ubiquitous at sea during this period, for all vessels were armed; ‘the peaceful trader and vicious pirate’ were often the same person in different circumstances, and the Channel formed a lawless watery frontier.62 It followed that trade under arms was an accepted type of commercial interaction and border warfare, with mariners from across Christendom engaging interchangeably in theft and trade.63 We should therefore think of ‘piracy’ in terms of salt-water larceny, maritime predation and seagoing thievery – direct action at sea simply formed part of a system of mutual reprisal that was a way of life for medieval seafarers.64 There is plentiful evidence that Cornish sailors – and those from the wider southwest – had a penchant for maritime disorder.65 The rugged Cornish coast had a part to play here, providing many anchorages from which ships could sail forth to seize their prey. The fact that the county’s ports formed important trans-shipment stations also proved significant, bringing many rich prizes from places as diverse as the Baltic and the Mediterranean within easy reach of Fowey’s mariners. The town’s sailors were a skilled bunch who traded overseas in their own right too, providing them with the links and ability to seize vessels and sell on stolen wares. Such were the profits that could be made from salt-water thievery that leading townsmen and local gentlemen developed strong interests in this activity, often shielding ‘pirates’ from justice.66 Direct action at sea was part of the way of life for south-western seafarers and many other folk besides, making this activity in some sense akin to the ‘rieving’ and cattle rustling of the Scottish borders that the crown never brought fully under control.67 It was also the case that the war at sea itself encouraged freebooting because all enemy shipping was fair game. Rodger, ‘Law and Language of Private Naval Warfare’, 7–10. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea, 115. 63 For example, J.C. Appleby, ‘Devon Privateering from Early Times to 1668’, in The New Maritime History of Devon, ed. Michael Duffy et al. (2 vols., 1992–4), i. 90–7; C.R. Backman, ‘Piracy’, in A Companion to Mediterranean History, ed. Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita (Chichester, 2014), 172–83; F.L. Cheyette, ‘The Sovereign and the Pirates, 1332’, Speculum, xlv (1970), 40–68; T.K. Heebøll-Holm, Ports, Piracy and Maritime War, Piracy in the English Channel and the Atlantic, c.1280–c.1330 (Leiden, 2013); Marcus Pitcaithly, ‘Piracy and Anglo-Hanseatic Relations, 1385– 1420’, in Roles of the Sea, ed. Gorski, 125–45; Richmond, ‘Royal Administration’, 131–8. 64 Kingsford, Prejudice and Promise, 78–9. 65 Drake, Cornwall, Connectivity and Identity, 290–301. 66 For broader south-western disorder, see Hannes Kleineke, ‘Why the West Was Wild: Law and Order in Fifteenth-Century Cornwall and Devon’, in The Fifteenth Century III: Authority and Subversion, ed. Linda Clark (Woodbridge, 2003), 75–93. 67 Cf. C.J. Neville, ‘The Keeping of the Peace in the Northern Marches in the Later Middle Ages’, EHR, 109 (1994), 1–25. 61 62

26

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A whole variety of courts and customs sought to regulate the behaviour and violent acts of those who sailed the seas. Since the common law was ill-equipped to deal with cases of this sort, back in 1353 the crown had drafted a clause in the Statute of the Staple stipulating that if any goods seized at sea were landed in an English port the victim could, on proof of ownership, be delivered his property ‘without making other suit at the common law’.68 For the better enforcement of this legislation, in the later fourteenth century the crown developed the office and courts of the admiral. Admiralty tribunals came to dispense discretionary and flexible equity in cases concerning ‘contact made between merchant and merchant, or merchant and mariner, overseas or within the tide mark’.69 Despite the poor survival rate of their records, it is clear that these courts remained important in the fifteenth century, and one of them sat in Lostwithiel.70 It was also in this period that the chancery developed into a powerful court of equity, enjoying an extra-territorial jurisdiction.71 As a consequence, foreigners and denizens alike often called on the chancellor’s judgments in cases of seagoing predation, seeking compensation from maritime malefactors.72 If denied redress altogether by the king of the defendant’s country, frustrated litigants could then approach their own monarch to either arrest the goods of the accused’s countrymen as compensation or to request a letter of marque. Forming part of ‘marcher law’, letters of marque allowed victims to secure compensation forcibly from ‘the fellow-townsmen or subjects’ of a foreign prince.73 One example of this procedure relating to Fowey survives from 1443, when two local men, Robert Langist and Robert Drewe, received royal letters permitting them to capture Breton ships as restitution for their losses.74 Five years earlier, John le Borque and John de Moullin of Brittany had demanded compensation from the owner of a Fowey-based vessel after he had allegedly seized their ship, threatening to seek ‘letters of marque upon the said towne of Fowey’ if this was not forthcoming;75 it transpired that Sir William Bonville, the steward of the duchy of Cornwall, had himself armed and equipped the ship in question. Although letters such as these were only conceded in times of peace, professing to be concerned with private quarrels, they often covered political motives, and on the high seas, it was inevitable that crown-sanctioned reprisals of this sort often faded into violent self-help. Statutes, i. 338; PROME, v. 76–7; C.J. Ford, ‘Some Dubious Beliefs about Medieval Prize Law’, in Courts of Chivalry and Admiralty in Late Medieval Europe, ed. Anthony Musson and Nigel Ramsay (Woodbridge, 2018), 215–36. 69 Robin Ward, The World of the Medieval Shipmaster, Law, Business and the Sea, c.1350–c.1450 (Woodbridge, 2009), 29–37; T.K. Heebøll-Holm, ‘The Origins and Jurisdiction of the English Court of Admiralty in the Fourteenth Century’, in Courts of Chivalry and Admiralty, ed. Musson and Ramsay, 149–70; A.F. Sutton, ‘The Admiralty and Constableship of England in the Later Fifteenth Century: the Operation and Development of these Offices, 1462–85, under Richard, Duke of Gloucester and King of England’, in ibid., 187–214. 70 For example, TNA, C47/6/7, translated in Select Pleas in the Court of the Admiralty. The Court of the Admiralty of the West (AD 1390–1404) and the High Court of the Admiralty (AD 1527–1545), ed. R.G. Marsden (2 vols., 1892–4), i. 1–17, 149–65; Ward, Medieval Shipmaster, 40–3. 71 Mark Beilby, ‘The Profits of Expertise: The Rise of Civil Lawyers and Chancery Equity’, in Profit, Piety and the Professions in Later Medieval England, ed. Michael Hicks (Gloucester, 1990), 72–90. 72 A Calendar of Chancery Proceedings relating to West Country Shipping 1388–1493, ed. D.M. Gardiner (Devon and Cornwall Record Society, new series, xxi, 1976). 73 Rodger, ‘Private Naval Warfare’, 6–7. 74 TNA, C47/28/7/26. 75 TNA, SC8/269/13408. 68



Mariners and Marauders: A Case Study of Fowey 27

As a result of these many practices and procedures, the recorded cases of direct action at sea that have come down to us provide evidence of only a small proportion of maritime violence. Many quarrels must have been settled with no recourse to the courts, while the poor survival rate of the admiralty’s records means that several events remain unknown. More importantly, royal justice was closed to enemy seafarers.76 The crown generally had no ambition to provide redress in cases of salt-water larceny committed against enemy mariners since attacks of this sort served its ambition of harrying the foe. In turning a blind eye to such assaults, the crown accepted that ‘piracy’ formed a part of the war effort.77 The cases on record only show the excesses of direct action at sea ‒ those assaults on neutral, allied or denizen shipping ‒ with little or no evidence surviving of the many attacks launched by the English against French vessels. Throughout the conflict the crown employed a system of licensing shipmen to go to sea for the destruction of the king’s enemies, drawing these men even more fully into the royal war effort. None of this changes the fact that salt-water raiders were motivated by self-interest, nor that the sea was a lawless place, but it does show that a measure of royal policy came to underpin ‘piracy’. Such an overlap of public and private maritime warfare is most evident at the start of the fifteenth century, when England and France fought a ‘pirate war’ in the Channel.78 The French government was often served informally by men such as Guillebert de Fretin, who seized many English vessels and in 1403 led an assault on Alderney.79 In the face of such blatant challenges to England’s security, Henry IV turned to private naval syndicates, commanded by the likes of John Hawley of Dartmouth, Harry Pay of Poole, the Spicer brothers in Plymouth and Portsmouth, and Mark Michelstow in Fowey, whom he sanctioned to rove the sea to destroy enemy shipping.80 In 1402 Michelstow, whose father, Richard, had secured for his family a prominent role in Fowey by trading, raiding and serving the crown at sea, bore the title ‘admiral or captain’ of three barges based in Fowey and Falmouth tasked with ‘searching for the king’s enemies’.81 Although the royal licence under which Mark operated does not survive, another of these shipmen received one which permitted him ‘to go to sea with as many ships, barges, and balingers of war, men-at-arms and archers as he can provide for the destruction of the king’s enemies and the defence of the king’s lieges and the safety of the realm’.82 Michelstow proved to be an effective instrument of the government, and French truce conservators recorded his capture of ten of their compatriots’ vessels in 1402 alone. Although he also seized French cargoes carried in neutral vessels, Michelstow’s attacks on ships from other countries were less welcome and led to efforts by the English government to restrain him. Despite holding his commission of ‘pirate admiral’, his capture of goods belonging to merchants of Bruges and Sluys prompted demands for compensation and led to him being summoned in August 1402 to appear before the royal council.83 Further Ford, ‘Piracy or Policy’, 63–77. Chancery Proceedings, ed. Gardiner, pp. xiii, xvi–xvii. 78 Chris Given-Wilson, Henry IV (New Haven and London, 2016), 202–5; Ford, ‘Piracy or Policy’; S.P. Pistono, ‘Henry IV and the English Privateers’, EHR, xc (1975), 322–30; Sumption, Cursed Kings, 89–129; J.H. Wylie, History of England under Henry the Fourth (4 vols., 1884–98), i. 379–99. 79 Sumption, Cursed Kings, 93–4, 108–9. 80 Ibid., 89–93. 81 CPR, 1401–5, p. 133; Drake, ‘Michelstow Family’. 82 CPR, 1401–5, p. 457. 83 Drake, ‘Michelstow Family’. 76 77

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summonses ‘under pain of the king’s wrath’ followed on 19 December, for having taken ‘a great number’ of Spanish ships, and then on 11 January 1403, this time for the damage that he and his associates had inflicted upon Flemish vessels. Such reversals had little immediate effect, however, for on 12 June 1403 he was once more summoned to appear before royal commissioners to answer for his misdeeds against the Flemings. Although Michelstow’s activities against the French were essential for the realm’s security, he ruthlessly pursued his own interests too. At the same time, many English seafarers suffered from enemy attacks. In 1404, in consideration of his ‘great losses of ships and merchandise through the men of Spain’, Richard Broun of Bodmin received possession of a Spanish ship which the government had impounded in Fowey.84 There was evidently a great deal of skulduggery during this crisis in the Channel, with the men of Bruges and Flanders complaining to Henry IV about the activities of Fowey’s shipmen.85 Yet by turning a blind eye to attacks on French shipping, the crown gave its tacit approval to those who used strongarm tactics against Gallic sailors. Indeed, Henry IV’s licensing of shipmen to rove the Channel ‘for the safety of the realm’ directly harnessed the martial might of these men to the royal cause. In this way, private naval operations proved essential to Henry IV’s offensive actions against enemy commerce and coastal settlements.86 Although the ‘pirate war’ lost much of its intensity after 1403, throughout the rest of his reign Henry continued judging cases of salt-water larceny only when it suited him. In 1407, for example, John Pynell, a subject of the king of Portugal, complained that John Gascoyne of Fowey and John Mayhewe of Dartmouth had sailed to Jersey in balingers ‘with many persons arrayed in warlike manner’, and seized his vessel, goods and crew before shipping them all to Shoreham in Sussex, where they imprisoned him and his fellows for eleven days. In an attempt to secure recompense, Pynell called on the aid of his own king who wrote to Henry IV demanding restitution. In response, Henry issued a commission of oyer and terminer to investigate, but Gascoyne claimed to these commissioners – among them none other than Mark Michelstow – that the goods in the ship belonged to the king’s enemies the Bretons, not to Pynell.87 By this logic, Gascoyne’s ill-gotten gains were instead the legitimate spoils of war. Less than a month into his reign, Henry V launched an investigation to ascertain whether other merchandise seized by men of Fowey and Dartmouth was owned by Bretons, now allies of the English, or by the king’s enemies.88 If the former it was to be returned to them, but if the latter it was to be distributed among the captors; ‘pirates’ from Fowey might be by turns poachers and gamekeepers. In an attempt to control those who roved the ‘narrow sea’, parliament in 1414 passed the Statute of Truces.89 This legislation laid down that all those who broke truces and safe-conducts at sea, along with those who abetted, received or maintained such malefactors, were guilty of no less than high treason. For the better enforcement CPR, 1401–5, p. 457; cf. Wylie, Henry the Fourth, i. 393. Royal and Historical Letters during the Reign of Henry the Fourth, ed. F.C. Hingeston (2 vols., 1860–5), i. 113; CPR, 1401–5, pp. 276, 428; 1405–8, p. 62; CCR, 1402–5, p. 57. 86 Sumption, Cursed Kings, 92. 87 Chancery Proceedings, ed. Gardiner, nos. 10a–b; CPR, 1405–8, pp. 301–2, 350, 357; TNA, SC8/185/9211; Cal. Inq. Misc. vii. 350. 88 CPR, 1413–16, p. 36. 89 PROME, ix. 52–5; Statutes, ii. 178–81. In 1416 Henry conceded that letters of marque should be issued to those who suffered from breaches of truce: PROME, ix. 200–2. 84 85



Mariners and Marauders: A Case Study of Fowey 29

of this statute, the king appointed a ‘conservator of the truce’ in every port who had authority under letters patent and the admiralty to enquire into breaches. Investigations into maritime disorder followed, such as that of 1415 after Cornish and Devonian shipmen seized enemy goods that Thomas Carew had allegedly already captured.90 Three years later, the attorney of the duke of Brittany granted Thomas Treffry of Fowey, a gentleman who had a busy career as a trader, smuggler, and royal and ducal customs collector, a release, no doubt in return for a consideration, from all the claims that could be made on him for the capture of La Katerine of Tréguier.91 Even so, the relative rarity of salt-water thievery during Henry’s reign is more striking than its presence, and while this absence can partly be explained by the fact that the records of the truce conservators are sparsely preserved, it also stands as testament to the fact that Henry had succeeded in pushing the war into France. Throughout the 1420s maritime lawlessness remained comparatively subdued as the war was still being fought far from the sea, with only opportunistic small scale ‘piracies’ appearing on the record. A good example of this sort of activity comes from about 1426, when ‘robbers and wrongdoers’ from Holland supposedly seized the ship and cargo of Symon Rydoul of Bouchoir near Amiens, in Lancastrian-controlled France. After this water-borne heist, the accused sailed the vessel to Fowey and delivered the woad that it was carrying to John Smyth, a local merchant. Although Rydoul later gained letters from the chancellor stating that as he was a subject of the king Smyth should return the woad, he refused to do so. On the contrary, he allegedly ‘caused several persons unknown to take the petitioner in order to throw him in the high sea’, and after spending the whole day ‘in fear of death’ Rydoul was forced to endorse a document releasing Smyth from all manner of legal actions.92 Yet as the tide of war turned against the English in the 1430s, denizen shipmen complained that they were suffering terrible losses from rovers at sea, ‘common thieves, outlaws, and fugitives’. Although the Commons petitioned the crown in both 1429 and 1433 to relax the Statute of Truces, it was not until 1435 that the government gave way and suspended the legislation. Four years later it aimed to clarify the law of safe conduct, establishing that unless documents of this sort were enrolled in chancery, merchandise owned by friendly or neutral aliens in the holds of captured enemy vessels counted as the spoils of war. It was actually not until 1445–6 that the Statute of Truces once again came into operation, with further reforms made in 1450.93 It is no coincidence that English complaints about enemy attacks had grown ever louder through the 1430s, nor that this decade saw the rise of ‘more daring, more skilled, and probably better organised’ private naval syndicates.94 Both these developments arose because the waning of English power on the continent meant that the war was increasingly contested in the Channel. One of the most prominent maritime bandits who took advantage of these circumstances was John Michelstow of Fowey, the son of Mark. In 1431–2, John had been serving as victualler aboard the Magdalene of Plymouth when he and his crewmates captured a Breton wine-ship, the CPR, 1413–16, p. 348; 1416–22, p. 425. CCR, 1413–19, pp. 500–1. Treffry was father-in-law of Elizabeth, the heroine of 1457 mentioned above. 92 Chancery Proceedings, ed. Gardiner, no. 21. 93 PROME, x. 407–8, 464; xi. 141–2, 190; xii. 27–8, 203–4; Richmond, ‘Royal Administration’, 104–5, 122–3; Statutes, ii. 307–8, 358–9; Kingsford, Prejudice and Promise, 81. 94 Richmond, ‘Royal Administration’, 109. 90 91

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Seint Guille of Brieux, and after sailing their valuable prize back to Fowey unloaded the stolen cargo in port. It transpires that fifteen tuns of this wine had been in the keeping of one Robert Galos, whom Michelstow and his accomplices allegedly kept ‘fettered and in irons for six weeks and three days, and forced him to acquit them of the capture’.95 Another case of salt-water larceny followed early in 1434, when in his capacity as captain of the Edward, a great ship, and in conjunction with a balinger and no fewer than 200 sailors, Michelstow captured a Genoese carrack off the coast of Cape St. Vincent in Portugal. Although the crew offered no resistance, he had them ‘put ashore in Portugal in a destitute condition on the plea that they were “Sarasenes”, though they were not’. After disposing of the crew, the captors then sailed the ship back to Fowey and distributed its lucrative cargo far and wide in south-west England. Although complaints by the owners led to the crown issuing an order for restitution in September, and then for the arrest of Michelstow and three others in July 1435, salt-water larceny was a profitable business and Fowey served as one of several ports in a network of organised maritime theft that stretched along the coasts of Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and beyond.96 With the spoils of sea-borne thuggery apparent to all, many sailors from Fowey and across the south-west took their chances. In the same year, 1434, royal orders were sent to the bailiffs of Fowey to investigate the local malefactors who had supposedly seized a Burgundian vessel loaded with gold, books and many other valuables.97 In much the same vein, four years later ‘a number of rioters and wrongdoers’ in the Jenot of Fowey allegedly captured a ship belonging to John, Lord Talbot, who petitioned the chancellor requesting that Thomas Jerard of Fowey, a part owner of the ship, who ‘had condoned the capture and taken his share’, be ordered before the chancellor to make restitution,98 and John Blood of Bayonne complained that his vessel, loaded with goods owned by Irish merchants, had been driven into Fowey by a storm and ‘was there taken with the cargo by some evildoers’. Once again, however, there is a striking absence of investigations into attacks on French vessels, even though a whole network of accomplices and dependents can be shown to have benefited from the spoils of seagoing thievery, receiving maritime bandits as ‘friends’. The ubiquitous Thomas Treffry often profited from ‘piracy’ while serving as a customs collector and trusted government employee. Although in 1432 the government had appointed Treffry to investigate the theft of a Breton ship by John Michelstow, his father-in-law, Treffry himself was later sued for £100 by the London draper who was its principal victim. In the end Treffry admitted that nine pipes of wine stolen from the vessel had been carried into the cellar of his house in Fowey, and while he had handed over eight pipes to Lord Botreaux, he had kept the last for his own use.99 Such were the potential profits that seafarers from far and wide converged on Fowey, foremost among them the ‘Dutchman’ Hankyn Selander, who first appears in 1433, as one of thirteen men ‘and others’ arrested for seizing the goods of John de la Mer of Bayonne. Three years later, while operating out of Falmouth with a great ship 97 98 99 95 96

Chancery Proceedings, ed. Gardiner, nos. 29a–b. CPR, 1429–36, p. 355. CPR, 1429–36, p. 426. Chancery Proceedings, ed. Gardiner, no. 41. CPR, 1416–22, p. 425; 1429–36, pp. 219–20; 1436–41, p. 267; Chancery Proceedings, ed. Gardiner, nos. 29a–c; Cal. Inq. Misc. viii. 55.



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and two balingers, Selander allegedly seized as many as five Flemish vessels, and in 1440 he was brought to the government’s attention yet again, this time because his crewmen had supposedly captured John Loven’s ship, the Seint Fiacre of Brittany, taken away his letters of safe conduct and thrown them overboard, before robbing him of his vessel and cargo.100 Many more cases of maritime robbery were laid at Selander’s door in the coming years, for which he escaped penalty not least because he had succeeded in creating a loyal group of local associates.101 In about 1443, John Salter testified that he had travelled to Fowey to arrest a Breton ship that Selander had captured, only to be intercepted by Thomas Colan of Bodinnick with others unknown, seamen intending to murder him.102 Perhaps inevitably, in October 1444 the government ordered the sheriff of Cornwall to levy a fine of 200 marks on John or Hankyn Selander, as he had given an undertaking to present himself to chancery ‘but took no heed to appear’, and a month later the crown confiscated two of his ships, the Cristofore and the Elene, and all his possessions in part recompense for his seizure of a ship belonging to none other than the queen of France.103 Although Selander was to be summoned again, he had little care for the law and carried on capturing ships in the Channel. ‘Piracy’ provided him with a long and profitable career.104 Not to be outdone, many men from Fowey roved the Channel in the 1440s and 1450s. In 1441, the government investigated three Cornish vessels – among them Michael Caperon’s Mary of Fowey – whose crews had allegedly captured three Breton ships laden with salt, cloth and other goods valued at as much as 700 marks.105 Another case arose two years later, after John Stevens and his fellow crewmen from Fowey had taken a Breton prize at sea. Stevens claimed that ‘much against his will, he had been put in to guide [the prize to Fowey] on condition that if it were re-­ captured the whole company of the carvel would pay his ransom’. The prize was duly re-captured, but although Michael de la Mote of Bodinnick had collected the ransom money, he had allegedly chosen to keep it for himself, leaving Stevens languishing in Brittany.106 It was commonplace for captured crews to be held as prisoners until their kinsmen paid fat ransoms for their release.107 The seafarers of Fowey both profited and lost from this practice, which also shows that not every victim of ‘piracy’ was mercilessly killed – quite the reverse, in fact, for the capture and subsequent ransom of seafarers was a lucrative part of the venture. Perhaps most notoriously, in 1449 ‘wrongdoers, pirates, and robbers’ in the Edward of Polruan and the Mackerel of Fowey seized the St. Anthony and St. Francis of Barcelona. Despite the fact that the galley was sailing under letters of safe-conduct, the ‘pirates’ allegedly sailed the vessel to Fowey, broke into its hold and pillaged its cargo worth an enormous £12,000. In his petition for recompense, Francis Junyent, the master of the St. Anthony and St. Francis, claimed that those who had plundered his ship deliberately shared the proceeds of this skulduggery with CPR, 1429–36, p. 352; 1436–41, p. 373; Kingsford, Prejudice and Promise, 90–1. For example, Kingsford, Prejudice and Promise, 91; CCR, 1441–7, p. 148; Chancery Proceedings, ed. Gardiner, no. 53; Cal. Inq. Misc. viii. 173, 181, 207. 102 Chancery Proceedings, ed. Gardiner, no. 54. 103 CCR, 1441–7, pp. 244, 273–4; CPR, 1441–6, pp. 420–1. 104 CPR, 1441–6, p. 290; Kingsford, Prejudice and Promise, 91–2. 105 CPR, 1436–1441, p. 572; 1441–6, pp. 48, 78; Cal. Inq. Misc. viii. 151, 165. 106 Chancery Proceedings, ed. Gardiner, no. 60. 107 Drake, Cornwall, Connectivity and Identity, 294–5. 100 101

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folk from around Cornwall in order to have their support for the wrongful taking of the vessel. He then listed as many as seventy-six individuals who had benefited from the capture, among them leading burgesses from Fowey, powerful local gentlemen such as Sir John Colshull, and even Henry, duke of Exeter, the admiral of England.108 As certain of the very same men sat on the commissions investigating the theft, it is perhaps no surprise that the sermons of the bishop of Exeter that called for the return of the galley’s cargo under pain of excommunication fell on deaf ears.109 Thomas Tregarthen, a Cornish-born lawyer attached to Lincoln’s Inn, actually accepted a fee of five marks to help the Aragonese merchants secure the return of their property, despite the fact that he was one of the people who had received goods stolen from the galley.110 Even churchmen profited from waterborne theft: a priest named Walter Hill was identified in about 1452 as one of the owners of the Julyan of Fowey whose crew had seized the goods of the Bristol merchant Philip Mede.111 In this way, prominent townsmen and local gentry committed acts of ‘piracy’ and received its illicit gains while also being entrusted with investigating and policing such activities. Evidently ‘piracy’ was a way of life for folk throughout the far south-west. All those who engaged in maritime theft were motivated by self-interest, but it is equally clear that activities of this sort – and the policing of such acts – was tied closely to the course of the war with France. A case from 1441 makes this point. In that year, Thomas Guychard of Hennebont in Brittany petitioned the chancellor claiming that Adam Bole of Fowey had seized his vessel and its cargo of wine he was shipping to England. The allegations were formally investigated because, as Guychard contended, at that time the king was at peace with the duke of Brittany.112 In contrast to the many royal inquiries into attacks on neutral Bretons, however, there is a marked absence of recorded cases of English violence directed against French merchantmen. A rare example of an investigation of this sort dates from 1448, when the government learned how the Cornishman John Arundell of Lanherne had allegedly seized the Jaquette of Dieppe, committing this crime ‘contrary to the truces between the king and his uncle of France’.113 Yet for most of the fifteenth-century phase of the war, attacks on French vessels formed a legitimate part of hostilities. The government generally turned a blind eye to seagoing violence of this sort because it served the purpose of harrying the foe. At times it went yet further still, directly authorising shipmen to rove the sea for the defence of the realm.114 By overlooking attacks on French vessels and appointing local ‘worthies’ implicated in other acts of piracy to the commissions charged with curbing such activities, the crown was seeking to make the problem part of the solution and to make a virtue out of the necessity for direct action at sea. While none of this is to suggest that the crown enjoyed complete control over the redoubtable shipmen of Fowey, or anywhere else for Chancery Proceedings, ed. Gardiner, nos. 71a–l; Richmond, ‘Royal Administration’, 140–6; Cal. Inq. Misc. viii. 219. 109 The Register of Edmund Lacy, Bishop of Exeter, 1420–1455, ed. G.R. Dunstan (5 vols., Devon and Cornwall Record Society, new series, vii, x, xiii, xvi, xviii, 1963–72), iii. 56–8; CPR, 1446–52, pp. 312–13; Richmond, ‘Royal Administration’, 146; Kingsford, Prejudice and Promise, 94–7. 110 Chancery Proceedings, ed. Gardiner, no. 71j. 111 Ibid., no. 65; CPR, 1446–52, pp. 380–1. 112 Chancery Proceedings, ed. Gardiner, no. 50; CPR, 1446–52, p. 187. 113 CPR, 1446–52, pp. 140–1, 187; Cal. Inq. Misc. viii. 207. 114 Cf. Richmond, ‘Royal Administration’, 177–8, 180, 183. 108



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that matter, it is clear that direct action at sea was a way of life that also made an invaluable contribution to the war effort. ***

There can be little doubt that every aspect of the war at sea was interlinked. Formal fleets commanded by admirals were supported by the actions of ‘pirates’ licensed by the king, with all these seafarers sailing the ‘narrow sea’ for the defence of the realm itself. The ‘Gallaunts of Fawey’ contributed to each and every one of these activities, for the port and its residents proved essential to the crown’s stratagems. Although the discontinuous nature of the surviving evidence makes comparing different phases of the Hundred Years’ War difficult, it appears that in the fifteenth century the crown made fewer demands of Fowey than in the fourteenth, impressing fewer vessels from the port on a more episodic basis. The greatest burden had been placed on Fowey in the 1370s and 1380s, when the government regularly raised ‘cursing war fleets’ to fight in the Channel and Fowey itself was disastrously raided by a combined FrancoCastilian fleet. Yet despite such fluctuations, throughout the entirety of the long conflict Fowey – and Cornwall at large – made a major contribution to the war effort.115 The question remains as to whether the costs outweighed the benefits accruing from hostilities.116 At times the burdens of war weighed heavily on Fowey. Enemy activity disrupted commerce, as, for example, in 1400 when several armed Norman ships were said to have forced a salt-trading vessel from Fowey to turn back from its voyage.117 The act of impressing merchantmen for naval service itself disrupted trade, while seafarers could be captured and killed while employed by the crown. Yet it remains a truism that someone always makes money from war. Shipmasters and crewmen all earnt hard cash in the form of payments while impressed; in 1439 alone the government paid Fowey-based seafarers on eight transport ships as much as £184 for their services.118 These same men enjoyed a share of any prizes seized while sailing under the king’s command and others benefited financially from fitting out and supplying vessels for naval service. The illicit gains of ‘piracy’ were evidently rich enough to draw people from the whole range of Cornish society. Indeed, the increasing prominence of Fowey’s leading residents strongly implies that the spoils of war were worth having. Consider, for example, the evidence of the Michelstow family. In the fourteenth century, Richard Michelstow had become a leading townsman and a landed gentleman in no small part through his service at sea to Edward III and the Black Prince.119 His son, Mark, followed in his footsteps, becoming a prominent burgess and propertied esquire who sailed as a ‘pirate admiral’ under Henry IV’s command. In turn, Mark’s son, John, grew fat on the profits of salt-water larceny and secured a good match for his daughter, Amica, by Drake, Cornwall, Connectivity and Identity, ch. 9. Anthony Saul and J.W. Sherborne have both argued that the costs of the war weighed heavily on the maritime population, see ‘Great Yarmouth’, 110–15 and ‘Shipping and Manpower’, 165, 174–5; Maryanne Kowaleski has focused on the benefits accruing from the war at sea in ‘Warfare, Shipping and Crown Patronage’, 233–54. For the wider debate about the cost/benefits of the war, see M.M. Postan, ‘Some Social Consequences of the Hundred Years’ War’, Economic History Review, xii (1942), 1–12; K.B. McFarlane, ‘War, the Economy, and Social Change: England and the Hundred Years’ War’, Past and Present, xxii (1962), 3–13. 117 Chancery Proceedings, ed. Gardiner, no. 5. 118 TNA, E101/53/23. 119 Drake, ‘Michelstow Family’. 115 116

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marrying her to Thomas Treffry, a gentleman who enjoyed a position of pre-eminence in Fowey through trade, smuggling, ‘piracy’ and employment by the crown and the duchy. Even the family’s employees did well for themselves, and one, ‘Thomas, servant of John Michelstow’, was named as having received goods stolen on the high seas.120 All these worthies from Fowey and many other south-western power-brokers besides had interests in ‘piracy’, but it should be remembered that direct action at sea formed a legitimate part of maritime life and, at times, the royal war effort. Perhaps paradoxically, these many cases of disorder in the ‘narrow sea’ stand as testament to the skill, resources and prominence of all such men and of the town of Fowey itself. Looking back from the sixteenth century, John Leland put it best: ‘the glorie of Fowey rose by the warres in King Edward the first and the third and Henry v. day, partely by feates of warre, partley by pyracie and so waxing riche fell al to merchaundice: so that the town was hauntid with shippes of diverse nations, and their shippes went to al nations’.121

CPR, 1441–6, p. 339. Leland, Itinerary, ed. Toulmin Smith, i. 203.

120 121

HENRY V’s ARMY OF 1417 Anne Curry and David Cleverly

At the beginning of Act V of Shakespeare’s King Henry V, Chorus invites his audience to ‘brook abridgement’, in other words to tolerate omission of ‘all the occurrences, whatever chanced’ between the victory at Agincourt on 25 October 1415 and the agreement of the treaty of Troyes on 21 May 1420.1 Much is indeed omitted. Save for a passing reference by Chorus to the visit to England of the Emperor Sigismund which took place in the spring of 1416, there is no mention at all in the play of events between 1416 and 1419. Yet for the English and their king these years witnessed further substantial achievements in France. In the summer of 1416, an army of at least 7,300 men was raised which was initially intended to be led to France by the king in person but was re-directed, successfully, under the duke of Bedford, to end the French naval blockade of Harfleur.2 In the summer of 1417 an even larger army was recruited, with which Henry invaded Normandy with conquest his intention. By the summer of 1419 virtually all of the duchy was in his hands, allowing him to begin an advance towards Paris. Instead of the French uniting to resist him, their internal divisions intensified, culminating on 10 September 1419 in the assassination of John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy, by the supporters of the Armagnac faction led by the Dauphin Charles. Nine months later Henry was recognised as heir to the French throne. The road from Agincourt to Troyes was undoubtedly less direct than Shakespeare implied. While the victory made the French reluctant to face the English in battle again, it was Henry’s systematic conquest of Normandy which gave the French little choice but to negotiate both before and after Duke John’s assassination. It is important, therefore, to examine more closely the army with which Henry invaded in 1417. While this army has not been completely ignored by historians in the past,3 King Henry V, ed. Andrew Gurr (The New Cambridge Shakespeare, Cambridge, 1992), 192. In note 44 to the text Gurr comments that ‘it has been suggested that the phrase is a pun on Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham, the Lord Chamberlain who in 1596–7 ordered the change of name from Oldcastle to Falstaff in 1 H4’, raising the further possibility of a reference to a legal reference book, Robert Brook’s La graunde abridgement, first published in 1573 and reissued in 1576 and 1583. 2 Anne Curry, ‘After Agincourt, What Next? Henry V and the Campaign of 1416’, in The Fifteenth Century VII: Conflicts, Consequences and the Crown in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Linda Clark (2007), 23–51. 3 R.A. Newhall, ‘The English in Normandy 1416–1424’ (Yale Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1918), printed, without its appendices, as The English Conquest of Normandy 1416–1424. A Study in Fifteenth 1

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research linked to the project ‘The Soldier in Later Medieval England’ makes it possible to study the organisation, structure and personnel of the army in much greater depth.4 This article aims to reconstruct the army of 1417, piecing together the various sources available, including the nominal data from the surviving muster roll and protections collected during ‘The Soldier’ project.5 It has generally been assumed that the army of 1417 was smaller than that raised in 1415, which approached 12,000 paid troops in total. Our aim is to elucidate its total number and composition as well as to reassess the conclusion reached by Michael Powicke in an influential publication of 1969 that there was a lack of experience in the army of 1417, and indeed in all of the armies Henry V raised between 1417 and 1421. Powicke claimed that only thirty-one of the 177 captains indenting between 1417 and 1421 were Agincourt veterans, and that only twenty-five of them went on to serve in the armies of Henry VI. From this he concluded that ‘this absence of a sizeable corps of regular captains at the height of English achievement in France suggests a fundamental weakness in the English armies of the period’.6 Thanks to ‘The Soldier’ database, to Anne Curry’s study of the army of 1416 (an army completely overlooked by Powicke), and to additional data on the 1415 army discovered during the Agincourt 600 commemorations,7 it is possible to review the evidence with the benefit of a wider range of sources held in searchable, digital, formats.8 We can also review how easily Henry had been able to raise his army in 1417. At base, the army of 1417 was organised in exactly the same way as those of 1415 and 1416, and, indeed, most expeditionary armies raised by the English crown since 1369.9 Captains entered into a contract with the king to provide a certain number and



4



5



6



7



8 9

Century Warfare (New Haven, CT, 1924); J.H. Wylie and W.T. Waugh, The Reign of Henry the Fifth, Vol. 3 (1415–1422) (Cambridge, 1929), 50–2. Funded initially by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and directed by Professor Anne Curry at the University of Southampton and Professor Adrian Bell at the University of Reading, the project generated a database of soldiers serving the English crown between 1369 and 1453 and many publications, including a monograph: A.R. Bell, Anne Curry, Andy King and David Simpkin, The Soldier in Later Medieval England (Oxford, 2013). The database is on-line at www.medievalsoldier.org. David Cleverly first became interested in the army of 1417 when using the database for his undergraduate dissertation at the University of Chichester. The authors are grateful to Dr. Mike Warner for access to his unpublished Ph.D. thesis, supervised by Professor Curry, ‘The Army of 1415: The Retinues of Thomas, Duke of Clarence, and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester’ (Southampton Univ., 2019), which is the basis of his book The Agincourt Campaign of 1415. The Retinues of the Dukes of Clarence and Gloucester (Woodbridge, 2021). Our focus is on the army rather than other important matters concerned with the launching of the expedition, such as diplomacy, provision of equipment and shipping. The latter is a large topic on which Craig Lambert has made significant contributions, dealing with aspects of the 1417 arrangements in his ‘Henry V and the Crossing to France: Reconstructing Naval Operations for the Agincourt Campaign’, Journal of Medieval History, xliii (2017), 24–39. M.R. Powicke, ‘Lancastrian Captains’, in Essays in Medieval History, ed. T.A. Sandquist and M.R. Powicke (Toronto, 1969), 371–82 (quote at 376). Anne Curry is currently exploring all of the armies of Henry V from 1417 onwards both from the perspective of troops sent from England as also military organisation in Normandy, thanks to a Leverhulme Emeritus award for an on-line calendar of the Norman rolls. For a complete list of the retinues of 1415 see the ‘English Army’ in the Agincourt 600 section of www.medievalsoldier.org. All manuscript references are to sources in the TNA unless otherwise stated. In addition to the monograph, The Soldier in Later Medieval England, cited in note 4, see James Sherborne, ‘Indentured Retinues and English Expeditions to France 1369–1380’, EHR, lxxix (1964), 718–46, reprinted in Sherborne, War, Politics and Culture in Fourteenth-Century England, ed. J.A.



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type of troops for the length of service which the crown had laid down.10 The indentures laid down arrangements for issuing pay as well as the actual pay rates. Captains received pay at the time they sealed the indenture, and further pay was issued at the time of a muster which was carried out shortly before embarkation, in order to check that the terms of an indenture had been met.11 Since pay had to be issued in advance of the start of a campaign, the availability of ready cash to the crown was key. A tax grant from the Commons in parliament was the main source, not only to generate cash but also to secure loans on future income. For the 1417 campaign we need to look back to the parliament which opened on 19 October 1416 where a double lay subsidy was granted, three quarters of which was to be collected by 2 February and the remainder by 11 November 1417.12 Henry’s successes, and especially the rescue of Harfleur in the summer of 1416, had encouraged considerable generosity on the part of the Commons. That the Commons made their grant in full awareness of the king’s intentions to launch a new French campaign in the summer of 1417 is apparent in the parliament roll. The opening sermon given by Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, emphasised how the French had refused to come to any diplomatic settlement, with the consequence that ‘the king was forced back onto the other way of proceeding in a dispute of this nature, which is the sword’. Recalling the victory at Agincourt (of which the first anniversary was imminent), the chancellor spoke of how French intransigence had obliged the king to turn to military action in search of a peaceful resolution, following the adage ‘Let us make war so that we might have peace, for the end of war is peace’.13 While the Commons were undoubtedly generous in their grant, they also insisted that the king could not subsequently ask for the dates of collection to be brought forward, as had happened for tax grants in 1414 and 1415,14 or for any additional grant to be made. Well aware of the need for funds for a large army, the king deemed it necessary for loans to be sought on the security of the final instalment of the tax due in November 1417.15 Ample evidence survives of the major loan-raising campaign which began in the New Year, lasting right up to the departure of the army in late July 1417, with over 500 loans noted between 30 November 1416 and 29 September 1417.16 Tuck (1984), 1–28; A.R. Bell, War and the Soldier in the Fourteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2004); Anne Curry, Agincourt. A New History (Stroud, 2005), as well as Curry, ‘The English Army in the Fifteenth Century’, in Arms, Armies and Fortifications in the Hundred Years War, ed. Anne Curry and Michael Hughes (Woodbridge, 1994), 39–68. 10 Many such contracts are now gathered among the Exchequer Accounts Various (E101), in the National Archives, Kew. As M.S. Giuseppi explains, ‘a separate collection of them formerly known as “Indentures of War” and at one time preserved in the State Paper Office now form bundles 68 to 74 of this series’: Guide to the Contents of the Public Record Office (1923), 80. This new classification was made around 1918. Indentures were subsequently listed at the back of List and Index Society, Supplementary Series, ix. 11 Records of payment can be found in TNA, E404 (exchequer, warrants for issue) and E403 (exchequer, issue rolls). After the campaign there could be other accounting processes to verify the service given. Resulting documents are mainly found in E101 and also on occasion in the enrolled (Foreign) Accounts (E364). 12 Maureen Jurkowski, C.L. Smith and David Crook, Lay Taxes in England and Wales 1188–1688 (Kew, 1998), 81. The clergy were equally generous, the convocation of Canterbury voting two tenths and York one: David Wilkins, Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae (4 vols., 1737), iii. 377, 380. 13 PROME, ix. 177–8. 14 Jurkowski et al., Lay Taxes, 80. 15 PROME, ix. 179–80. 16 Jurkowski et al., Lay Taxes, 81; R.A. Newhall, ‘The War Finances of Henry V and the Duke of

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At some point in the late autumn of 1416 – probably at the parliament itself which ended on 18 November – discussions began about the size of retinues expected by the king for his proposed army. By 18 December letters under the privy seal had been sent to the nobility and gentry asking them to certify whether they would serve on the forthcoming expedition with the number of men-at-arms and archers specified in the royal letters, or else with what numbers they might supply.17 Such wording suggests that there had already been interaction between them and the king on the matter and also that suggestions for their expected retinue sizes had already been put forward by the king. This last point has often been overlooked in the study of late medieval armies, where there has been an emphasis on the numbers which nobles and gentry could raise.18 A greater degree of central direction can be seen in 1417, as also in 1415. On that earlier occasion we read of the peers agreeing to serve ‘with whatever retinue it please him [the king] to assign’.19 Royal direction and expectations are further revealed by the fact that retinue sizes generally followed a set pattern based on the social standing of the captain, as we shall see when looking at the retinues of 1417 in detail.20 Replies concerning willingness to serve on the expedition were to be returned by 12 January 1417. On 1 February another royal order went out to the sheriffs of every county in England and to the chancellor of the county palatine of Lancaster to proclaim that all lords, knights, esquires and others should appear in person on 14 February before the king and his council to make indentures for service on the campaign.21 In fact, most of those who agreed to serve entered into indentures which were dated at Westminster on 8 February.22 On the following day a proclamation was issued in London commanding all knights and esquires of the king’s retinue then in the city to come before the king’s council at Blackfriars that afternoon: this may have been an effort to encourage more to indent. We certainly find some indentures sealed in the week of 14–21 February.23 Initially, as the terms of the indentures indicate, the plan was for the troops to be at Southampton for muster on 1 May, but the date was

Bedford’, EHR, xxxvi (1921), 174. See also Antony Steel, The Receipt of the Exchequer 1377–1485 (1954), 154–8, who comments (at 155) ‘the impression produced is, in short, that all the resources of the kingdom were being strained to the uttermost in order to support the war’. 17 E403/629 for the costs of messengers, recorded under 18 Dec. The content is known from mention in the royal letters of 1 February noted below. 18 Andrew Ayton, ‘Military Service and the Dynamics of Recruitment in Fourteenth-Century England’, in The Soldier Experience in the Fourteenth Century, ed. A.R. Bell and Anne Curry, with Adam Chapman, Andy King and David Simpkin (Woodbridge, 2011), 9–59; Ayton, ‘The Military Careerist in Fourteenth Century England’, Journal of Medieval History, xliii (2017), 4–23. 19 PPC, ii. 151; Curry, Agincourt. A New History, 54, 57. 20 Curry, Agincourt. A New History, 57–8. 21 CCR, 1413–19, p. 381, printed in Foedera, ix. 433–4. For the receipt of the order in London see Calendar of Letter Books of the City of London, Letter Book I, ed. R.R. Sharpe (1909), 175. This order refers back to the earlier royal letters asking for confirmation of numbers by 12 Jan. 1417. To date we have not been able to find any other reference to the earlier letters. 22 E101/70/1, nos. 573–85; 70/2, nos. 586–609. There is one undated indenture (no. 621) and another where the date is illegible (no. 622). 23 E101/70/2, no. 611 (14 Feb.); 70/3, nos. 623 (17 Apr.), 624 (10 May), 625 (16 May), 626 (28 May), 630 (21 July). One indenture appears to have been made as late as 5 Nov. but on the same terms as the earlier indentures: E101/70/3, no. 629.



Henry V’s Army of 1417 39

moved several times. Embarkation occurred in late July,24 with the king’s formal landing at the mouth of the River Touques occurring on 1 August.25 Reconstructing the 1417 Army The army of 1415 is very well documented, having the full range of exchequer sources surviving in large quantities. Particularly useful is the survival of a roll devoted entirely to the army, on which the first payments made to captains were listed,26 which augments what we can glean from randomly surviving indentures and warrants for issue. We also have ten surviving muster rolls.27 In addition, there are several post-campaign accounts in E101 with their accompanying nominal rolls, as well as a special enrolled account for the campaign.28 Taken together, these documents allow us to trace the companies before, and sometimes even during, the campaign.29 For the army of 1416 we have no surviving muster rolls, but there is extensive recording of payments to indentees on the standard half-yearly issue roll as well as a few surviving indentures and many warrants for issue.30 The army of 1417 is much less well documented than its immediate predecessors. All that is noted on the standard issue roll for the period is an aggregated sum for wages paid from the exchequer to the treasurer of the household, Sir John Rothenhale, who became treasurer of war for the campaign.31 This suggests that, as in 1415, a special issue roll had been produced, recording payments to indentees, but no such roll is known to be extant. There are also relatively few surviving indentures, warrants and enrolled accounts compared with 1415, as we shall see. But there is one surviving muster roll which provides the bulk of evidence for the 1417 army.32 It had been correctly identified and dated by the nineteenth century. In 1850 To date we have not found any post campaign accounts which might clarify the start date of the wages. A royal letter sent to London on 9 Aug. 1417 confirms that the army was arriving in stages, since the king speaks of his own arrival ‘with alle oure subgitz ordeyned to goo with us for the ferst passage’: H.T. Riley, Memorials of London and of London Life in the XIIIth, XIVth and XVth Centuries (1868), 654. On 20 July the earl of March was commissioned as royal lieutenant on the sea to lead all the ships used in the expedition both outward and back to England: Foedera, ix. 466. Ships involved can be traced in the Norman rolls: C64/8, mm. 25d–27d, printed in Rotuli Normanniae, ed. T.D. Hardy (1835), 320–30. See also a list of shipmasters dated at Touques 12 Aug. 1417 to whom the king had granted annuities: C81/1364, no. 34, summarised in Calendar of Signet Letters of Henry IV and Henry V, ed. J.L. Kirby (1978), no. 808, and CPR, 1416–22, pp. 120–1. 26 E101/45/5. 27 Warner, Agincourt Campaign, ch. 2 and Appendix 1. 28 E358/6. In addition, there is the so-called ‘Agincourt roll’. Although a later Tudor document, it relates to actions taken in November when Sir Robert Babthorpe, controller of the royal household, delivered to the exchequer a roll containing some of the names of those with the king at the battle: Anne Curry, The Battle of Agincourt. Sources and Interpretations (Woodbridge, 2000), 408. 29 For details see ‘The English Army’ in the Agincourt 600 section of www.medievalsoldier.org. 30 For a complete listing of all who indented and the numbers they brought see Curry, ‘After Agincourt’, 23–51. The issue roll is E403/624, and the warrants for the expedition are grouped together in E101/48/10. Newhall also listed the retinues in Appendix I of his doctoral thesis, but these were not included in his book of 1924. 31 E403/630, m. 3 under 22 May, 21 June and 30 June. Newhall, English Conquest, 194, provides further detail, claiming that Rothenhale received a total of £81,374 9s. 6d. between 11 Mar. and 15 July 1417. 32 This muster was not included in the List and Index of Exchequer Accounts Various produced in 1912. A handwritten addition to the copy then kept in the Round Room of the Public Record Office 24 25

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Benjamin Williams included an outline of the roll, then housed in the chapter house at Westminster Abbey, as an appendix to his edition of the Gesta Henrici Quinti, although his summary is not without mis-readings and miscalculations.33 Listing the retinue leaders and adding up (but not giving the names of) the men serving under them, Williams calculated the total number in the roll as 7,767, made up of 1,792 lancea (i.e. lances, the term used in the roll for men-at-arms), 5,911 archers and sixty-­four men whose status was unspecified. In 1892, James Ramsey’s counting of the names from the roll (by then housed in the Public Record Office), produced a total of 7,894, comprising 1,821 lances and 6,073 archers.34 In research for his doctoral thesis of 1918, Richard Newhall counted 1,770 men-at-arms and 6,069 archers, giving a total of 7,839, and this figure was followed by William Templeton Waugh when completing the third volume of James Wylie’s Reign of Henry V which was published in 1929.35 With the benefit of modern technology, namely the entering of all the names on the muster roll into ‘The Soldier’ database, we can propose another set of figures, hopefully definitive: 1,768 lances and 6,152 archers, making a total of 7,919. Other than the first membrane, which has been spoiled by the application of gall once thought efficacious in revealing faded script, the parchment roll is in excellent condition.36 Its forty-four membranes are sewn end to end chancery style in a continuous roll but careful study reveals that it was originally made up of eight separate sections, each covering musters at a specific named location. Hands vary, as does the layout of the lists of names, revealing the different groupings. The names of the mustering officials for each location are also given.37 We can be sure, therefore, that the companies recorded in the roll were distributed over eight different locations all relatively close to Southampton, the intended point of embarkation. Troops had been similarly distributed across several locations in 1415 and 1416, a practice arising from the avoidance of over-concentrations of soldiers in any one



33 34



35 36



37

at Chancery Lane was subsequently made, giving to the muster roll the catalogue number E101/51/2 and the description ‘temp. Henry V muster of men-at-arms and archers under the duke of Gloucester, 44 membranes’: PRO Lists and Indexes XXXV (1912). E101 was an artificially created class with its origins in work done by Joseph Hunter in the early days of the Public Record Office. A partial copy of the muster roll in a nineteenth-century hand is to be found in BL, Add. MS 24704, noted in Wylie and Waugh, Reign of Henry the Fifth, 50 n. 6. This document had come to the British Museum from the collections of Charles Devon, clerk in the chapter house, suggesting he had made the part copy from the original roll: Catalogue of Additions to the Manuscripts in the British Museum in the years MDCCCLIV–MDCCCLXXV (1877). There is also a partial copy in BL, Add. MS 38525, from notes made by Robert Sanderson collected in the early eighteenth century during the compilation of Rymer’s Foedera. At a later date – although it has not proved possible to find out exactly when – the roll was correctly ascribed to 1417. Henrici Quinti, Anglia Regis Gesta, ed. Benjamin Williams (1850), 265–73. J.H. Ramsey, Lancaster and York: A Century of English History, c. 1399–1485 (2 vols., Oxford, 1892), i. 251. Wylie and Waugh, Reign of Henry the Fifth, 51 n. 13. One membrane (m. 33) is paper. Different hands are evident in each section as also a variety of terminology. For discussion of the musterers see Anne Curry, ‘Henry V’s Order of 2 June 1417 and “the Agincourt Exception”’, in Status, Identity and Authority: Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Archives and Heraldry presented to Adrian Ailes, ed. Sean Cunningham, Anne Curry and Paul Dryburgh (2021), 172–88. Only one of the musterers may have served on the campaign: Sir Robert Babthorpe certainly had letters of protection to cross to France: C76/100, m. 22; Forty-Fourth Annual Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records (Cambridge, 1883), 592.



Henry V’s Army of 1417 41

place, for the sake of peaceful relations with the local populations, as well as to facilitate victualling of both men and horses.38 The first six membranes of the roll contain the musters of troops at Chilworth (a few miles north of Southampton) under the duke of Gloucester, Lords Bergavenny and Fitzhugh, as well as Sir James Harington.39 Membranes 7 to 11 record the troops mustering under the earls of March and Salisbury, as well as Sir Hugh Luttrell. The place of muster is given as ‘Knouldonhell’, a location that has not been definitively identified but may be Knowlton in Woodlands (Dorset) or Knoll Down in Damerham (then in Wiltshire, now in Hampshire). Membranes 12 to 16 contain the musters of the companies of the earls of Warwick and Suffolk, Lords Harington and Willoughby, and six knights at a location given as ‘Wallopforth’, indicating today’s Middle, Nether and Over Wallop to the north-west of Stockbridge and close to the Wiltshire border. Membranes 17 to 20 give the musters of the companies of Lord Grey of Codnor, Sir Walter Hungerford and Sir Edward Courtenay, followed by thirty-eight men mainly recorded under only one name, who were probably servants and sumpter-men. These companies were all mustered ‘apud le Heth iuxta Lymington et Beaulieu’, the heath near Lymington and Beaulieu within the southern part of the New Forest. Membranes 21 to 25 list the companies of Lords Clifford, Bourgchier and Lovell, of five knights and four esquires. These musters took place at Tichborne Down, which is close to Alresford. The following membranes 26 to 31 cover the companies of the earl of Huntingdon and the Earl Marshal along with three knights. The location, given as the Three Mynes, remains unidentified but may be Three Legged Cross in eastern Dorset, south of Verwood, or else indicates a prehistoric site with three major barrows, probably towards the eastern edge of Cranborne Chase. Membranes 32 to 38 contain the musters of Sir John Grey of Heton, Sir Gilbert Umfraville, Sir John Cornwall, John Arundel, Lord Mautravers, and the earl of Northumberland as well as a number of smaller companies under esquires. The location here was Portsdown Hill, the high land north of Portsmouth. The final membranes, 39 to 44, contain the musters of companies under Lord Roos, Sir John Tiptoft, Sir John Radcliffe and eight other knights and one esquire, as well as companies of archers from the various hundreds of Chester. The location, given as ‘Caudernerdowne’, has eluded definitive identification but may be Candover Down, near Alresford.40 Overall, the muster roll contains the members of sixty-nine retinues, in all cases containing men-at-arms and archers largely in the ratio of 1:3, as well as a company from Cheshire made up exclusively of archers. In the case of the retinues of the duke of Gloucester and of Richard Beauchamp, Lord Bergavenny, there is a further subdivision of the lists of names into sub-retinues of men-at-arms and archers (forty-­ seven sub-retinues for Gloucester and thirty-eight for Bergavenny). This reflects Curry, Agincourt. A New History, 75; Curry, ‘After Agincourt’, 37. The largest concentrations with over 1,000 troops were at Portsdown Hill, ‘Caudernerdowne’ and ‘Wallopforthe’. 39 Henry, Lord Fitzhugh, was royal chamberlain and his company included William Redyness, carver (le carvere) and John Thorp standard bearer (le penomer), such roles being recorded next to their names. The duke of Gloucester’s company included Gloucester herald, serving with one lance and two archers. 40 We are grateful to Dr. John Chandler for ideas on identification of locations. The numbers of troops at each location varied to some degree, with the smallest group, of 638, at the heath near Lymington and Beaulieu, and the largest, 1,191, at ‘Wallopforthe’. But the care with which the distribution had been made is revealed by the fact that the range was not very great, with just under 900 at Titchbourne Down and ‘the Three Mynes’, and just over 1,100 at Chilworth, Portsdown Hill and ‘Caudernerdowne’. 38

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the common practice whereby the larger companies were made up of a multiplicity of smaller groups.41 In order to find all the soldiers needed, indentees entered into engagements, commonly called sub-indentures by historians, with others. As we shall see, two sub-indentures survive for 1417. Though complete in itself, in that there are no signs of missing membranes, the muster roll cannot be taken as listing all of the soldiers serving in the army. There are several proofs of this. The first is that there were orders to take musters at other locations than those on the roll, namely of troops under Thomas Chaucer and Thomas Wilcote junior at Worldham, which lies just to the east of Alresford, and of other troops under Sir Gilbert Umfraville at Le Doune (i.e. the Downs) between Soberton and East Meon ‘at the Three Crosses’.42 Both of these additional locations lay in Hampshire. In addition, we might have expected musters at the other locations in the area used in 1415, especially those closer to the port of Southampton: in 1415 the royal household troops, for instance, had mustered on the heath of Southampton (now the Common).43 A second proof that the muster roll does not list all of the 1417 army arises out of a study of the forty-­six surviving indentures in E101.44 In twenty-three cases out of the forty-six the indentees do not appear on the muster roll. These include a baron, Lord Ferrers of Chartley, and Sir John Grey of Ruthin, who indented to provide eighty and 120 men respectively; nine knights indenting for 224 men in total; and ten esquires indenting for 177 men in total. Together these additional retinues add a further 601 men to the 7,919 in the muster roll. There are also two sub-indentures which have found their way into the exchequer archives. Thomas Stones, esquire, indented to serve as a man-at-arms with Sir John Baskerville, providing three archers.45 We know from Baskerville’s own indenture that he had himself indented on 8 February for himself and one man at-arms and six archers.46 Therefore, Stones was actually providing half of the knight’s retinue, a good example of how companies were often made up of a number of smaller companies. The second sub-indenture also concerns a man called Thomas Stones, esquire, who contracted to serve Sir John Rothenhale as a man-at-arms with three archers.47 We can speculate that these two documents, private in nature but echoing the terms of the crown’s indentures with its captains, found their way into the exchequer records because of concern that the same man had entered into two contracts. None of the three men, Stones, Baskerville and Rothenhale, is found on the surviving For useful discussion on 1415 see Warner, Agincourt Campaign, ch. 4. CPR, 1416–22, p. 137 (8 June). This may provide a third possibility for the location of ‘Le Three Mynnes’, indicating a potential second use of a site. 43 In addition to ‘Wallopforthe’, used in both 1415 and 1417, we find in 1415 St. Catherine’s Hill near the New Forest at Christchurch, where the duke of Clarence had mustered, ‘Michelmersh’ (near Romsey), where Gloucester had mustered, Southampton Heath, Hampton Hill and Swanwick Heath. The muster places in 1416 are not known, but orders to the sheriff of Hampshire on 18 July to proclaim in various locations that troops should make their way to Southampton to be ready to sail on 25 July may provide some clues: CCR, 1413–19, p. 364, which lists Winchester, Alton, Alresford, ‘Hashunt’ (possibly Havant), Basingstoke, Stockbridge, Andover and Christchurch. 44 Newhall, English Conquest, 192, also used summaries of indentures in BL, Stowe 440, collated by John Anstis jnr, Garter, in the mid-18th century, but all mentioned there are extant in E101. 45 E101/70/2, no. 612. 46 E101/70/2, no. 606. 47 E101/70/3, no. 613. Both sub-indentures are undated but must have been made close to 8 Feb. since they also refer to a muster date of 1 May. Rothenhale, the treasurer of the war, died on 11 Aug. 1420. 41 42



Henry V’s Army of 1417 43

muster roll, another indication that the roll does not record all of the army of 1417. The two surviving sub-indentures add a further twelve soldiers to the total. In studying the armies of 1415 and 1416 warrants for issue proved extremely useful in cases where the indenture was not extant. For 1417, however, only five warrants are known to survive. In two cases they concern men for whom we also have indentures: the company of one of them, Lord Fitzhugh, is also on the muster roll, but the second, William Harleston, esquire, is not, adding a further four men to the total.48 The third warrant for issue is for Sir Gilbert Umfraville, noting a company of 240 men, but only 179 names appear on the muster roll.49 The remaining two warrants for issue concern the king’s eldest brother, Thomas, duke of Clarence, for whom there is no indenture or any company listed on the muster roll. Since his younger brother Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, is the first name on the surviving muster roll, there must surely have been a second, now lost, roll headed by Clarence, and containing other retinues assembled at other muster locations. The two warrants show that Clarence indented for two companies: the first for the service of himself, five knights, fifty-three men-at-arms and 180 archers; and the second for another sixty men-at-arms and 180 archers.50 This adds a further 480 men to the total size of the army. In total, therefore, we have evidence for 9,016 troops serving in the retinues of ninety-five peers, knights and esquires. The surviving muster roll includes 405 archers from Cheshire organised by hundred (the administrative unit in the county from which they hailed). This may not be the whole number of Cheshire archers serving, since the figure is lower than the 550 men for whom the chamberlain of Chester, William Troutbeck, received pay from the treasurer of the household, Sir John Rothenhale, as recorded on the issue roll.51 The same entry on the issue roll notes that Troutbeck was also given money for the wages of 400 archers from Lancashire. No muster survives for these troops, but they can be added to the total.52 By way of comparison, in 1416 a company of 400 archers, as well as a separate company of eight knights, thirty-two men-at-arms and 120 archers, was raised in Cheshire and paid directly from county revenues by Henry, Lord Fitzhugh: indenture E101/70/1, no. 577; warrant E404/33/217. William Harleston: indenture E101/70/3, no. 629; warrant E404/33/200. This was the indenture made on 5 Nov. 1417 but its wording indicates that it relates to the expedition. Fitzhugh appears on the muster, but Harleston does not. 49 E404/33/220 for 60 men-at-arms and 180 archers, dated 22 Feb. The warrant notes that these are in addition to others in his indenture of 8 Feb., which does not survive. But on the muster roll we find only 5 knights, 49 men-at-arms and 125 archers in his retinue, a total of 179 plus Umfraville himself. There was perhaps a separate muster for his troops which does not survive. The warrant is unusual in its wording, noting that Sir William Ryther, deputy to Umfraville, had found sureties that Umfraville, then in France, presumably on a diplomatic mission, would seal the indenture and send it to the keeper of the privy seal by 24 June. Ryther appears on the muster roll as one of the knights in Umfraville’s company. 50 Foedera, ix, 545 (dated 20 Feb. and referring to his indenture made on 8 Feb., which is noted in a warrant for issue dated 22 Feb., E404/33/219). 51 E403/627, under 11 Mar. The palatinate also contributed 3,000 marks in taxation through a mise agreed in Apr. 1416, but to be paid in three instalments: 3 May and 10 Nov. 1416, and 24 June 1417 (SC6/776/4, m. 2). Collection met with some resistance in the autumn of 1416, as discussed in Michael Bennett, ‘Henry V and the Cheshire Tax Revolt of 1416’, in Henry V. New Interpretations, ed. Gwilym Dodd (York, 2013), 178–86. 52 They were raised by Sir William Harington and Sir James Harington, with two-thirds to be mounted and one-third on foot, and were to be brought to Southampton by 10 May: DL42/17, f. 112, cited in Robert Somerville, History of the Duchy of Lancaster, Volume 1, 1265–1603 (1953), 184. 48

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Troutbeck as chamberlain. On that occasion a company of 400 archers was also raised in Lancashire.53 In 1415 companies of archers had been raised from Cheshire, Lancashire and south Wales, all areas with a direct link to the crown.54 Similarly, troops were also raised in south Wales in 1417. The receiver’s account for the lordship of Monmouth notes that in that year John Merbury, the chamberlain of south Wales and receiver of Monmouth, as well as of the other Lancastrian lordships in the region, accompanied by another official, John Russell, raised thirty men from these lordships, each with one horse.55 But this may not be the full picture of Welsh participation. It is likely that troops were also raised from the lands of the principality in south Wales. On 6 July a letter of protection was issued at Southampton for various Welshmen in the retinue of the king.56 These companies therefore add at least 835 men – more if the Cheshire contingent achieved its full size and there was further recruitment in Wales. This takes the total to at least 9,851 men. There was also recruitment of troops from Gascony, led by the Sire de SaintPée and Menauton de Saint-Marie. The latter later commented that he had served throughout the conquest of Normandy with ten men-at-arms and fifty crossbowmen.57 An early eighteenth-century copy of now lost exchequer materials suggests that Saint-Pée had a company of the same size.58 On 31 December 1416 Bayonne had been ordered to provide ships for the transport to England of both men with their troops.59 Therefore they must have crossed to France with the rest of the army, but they do not feature in the surviving muster roll. Together, these Gascon companies take the total number of troops in the 1417 army to at least 9,971, under ninety-seven peers, knights and esquires as retinue leaders. That figure is based on exchequer sources. For 1417 we do, however, have an additional, and potentially valuable, source not paralleled for any other campaign. Chronicles are usually of limited value when considering army sizes, but for some unknown reason Tito Livio Frulovisi, secretary to Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, in the 1430s, included in his Vita Henrici Quinti (written in about 1438) detailed information on the army of 1417.60 He claimed that its total size was 16,400.61 For the Curry, ‘After Agincourt’, 36 n. 71. Curry, Agincourt. A New History, 66. 55 DL29/615/9845, m. 3, cited in Adam Chapman, Welsh Soldiers in the Later Middle Ages 1282–1422 (Woodbridge, 2015), 142. A subsidy of £1,500 was also raised: Somerville, History of the Duchy of Lancaster, 184. 56 C76/100, m. 14, calendared in the Forty-Fourth Annual Report of the Deputy Keeper, 597. 57 PPC, iii. 105. 58 BL, Sloane 4601, f. 134. 59 C81/1364, no. 2, summarised in Calendar of Signet Letters, no. 794; C61/117, m. 11; Newhall, English Conquest, 191 n. 3. Menauton had been in England in 1416 but had been sent to Gascony in December to recruit 100 crossbowmen, when he was also paid for the service of 20 men-at-arms: E403/629, m. 5. 60 Titi Livii Foro-Juliensis Vita Henrici Quinti, ed. Thomas Hearne (Oxford, 1716), 31–3. There has been considerable debate on how this text related to the Vita et Gesta Henrici Quinti, often called the Pseudo Elmham, which is printed as Thomae de Elmham Vita et Gesta Henrici Quinti, ed. Hearne (Oxford, 1727). See especially David Rundle, ‘The Unoriginality of Tito Livio Frulovisi’s Vita Henrici Quinti’, EHR, cxxiii (2008), 1109–31. The Pseudo-Elmham includes none of the numbers and names given by Tito Livio. However, the First English Life of Henry V, ed. C.L. Kingsford (Oxford, 1911), which drew on Tito Livio as well as Monstrelet’s chronicle and the reminiscences of the earl of Ormond, generally repeated the figures found in the Vita Henrici Quinti while translating them into English and making some errors. 61 ‘qui armati secum in Galliam ad militum sexdecim milia quadringentos proficiscuntur’ (Vita Henrici Quinti, 31). The size of the fleet is given as 1,500 ships. 53 54



Henry V’s Army of 1417 45

nobility he provided a breakdown of retinues: the duke of Clarence with 240 menat-arms and 720 archers; the duke of Gloucester and the earls of March, Warwick, Salisbury and the Earl Marshal each with 100 men-at-arms and 300 archers; the earl of Huntingdon with forty men-at-arms and 120 archers and the earl of Suffolk with thirty men-at-arms and 120 archers. The companies of thirteen other captains are also given, totalling 506 lances and 1,580 archers, with the following breakdown: Talbot with 100 lances and 300 archers; Grey with sixty lances and 180 archers; Fitzhugh perhaps with the same numbers as Grey;62 Clifford with fifty lances and 150 archers; Bergavenny with fifty and 120;63 Mautravers and Willoughby each with forty and 120 (although Willoughby’s archers numbered only 100 in one version of the text); Edward Courtenay, Bourgchier and Harington with thirty and ninety each; Ferrers of Chartley with twenty and sixty, Roos with ten and thirty; and Lovell with just six and eighteen. Eleven of the thirteen were barons, the others, Mautravers and Courtenay, being knights banneret. In Livio’s view, therefore, the two royal brothers provided 1,360 men, six earls provided 1,880, and the thirteen others of high rank 2,090. For all of these companies Livio also gave the breakdown of numbers of men-at-arms and archers. Where possible, therefore, we can compare his figures with what we have ascertained from the muster and financial records. Generally, we find an exact match or only marginal differences. Any variation is easily explained, as it was not uncommon for indentees to exceed slightly or else under-achieve the numbers for which they had contracted. Such alignment indicates that Livio’s figures are credible, supporting James Ramsey’s suggestion that Livio ‘derived his figures from the indentures’.64 Whether he actually had access to the original indentures or other financial records cannot be proved. More likely, the duke of Gloucester was the source of his information. Livio omits mention of Henry, earl of Northumberland, whose troops appear on the muster roll. Although the earl is not listed on the roll in person, he was certainly present in Normandy by 27 October 1417 when we find on the Norman rolls an order to take the muster of his men.65 Unique to Livio is the mention of 400 troops under Gilbert, Lord Talbot, for whom no financial or muster record survives. It is justifiable, therefore, to add his troops to the total drawn from the muster and financial records, taking it to 10,371, under ninety-eight retinue leaders. For the duke of Clarence’s retinue we have evidence from the exchequer records of only 480 men. This seems low, given that in 1415 the duke, as the king’s eldest brother and heir to the throne, had the largest company of all, at 960 men. Livio’s information that the duke had 960 men in 1417 is therefore extremely significant, although the fact that the size and composition of his company is identical to that of 1415 leaves open the possibility of conflation on Livio’s part. Adding in a potential 480 further men under Clarence takes the total size of the army to 10,851. Livio did not limit his details to the nobility but moved on to ‘the nobles of the chivalric order and the most strenuous knights’, although here he provided only total numbers and no names.66 He cites the total of retinue leaders as seventy-seven, although this is given as eighty-seven Given as 150 archers in one version of the text of the Vita Henrici Quinti. Given as 50 men-at-arms and 150 archers in The First English Life, 79. 64 Ramsey, Lancaster and York, i, 251; Newhall, English Conquest, 192 n. 17. 65 C64/8, m. 20d; Hardy, Rotuli Normanniae, 357–8. 66 Vita Henrici Quinti, 32: ‘Post hos veniunt equestris ordinis nobiles strenuissinique milites septem et septuaginta cum lanceis noningentis quinquies quadraginta, sagitariis vero duobus milibus et octingentis, duobus et quinquaginta quid militum virum singuli duxerint qui longum esset penitus obmutavi’. 62 63

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in some texts of the Vita. Under their command he placed 945 lances67 and 2,852 archers, a total of 3,797 troops. Livio’s wording is not easy to interpret since the expression ‘strenuissimi milites’ could be taken to imply ‘militarily distinguished soldiers’ rather than exclusively dubbed knights, suggesting he is lumping together knights and esquires as retinue leaders. But it would seem that he did have detailed information at his disposal, since in the next sentence he explained that ‘I shall omit what each knight/soldier individually brought with him, as it would be thoroughly long-winded’.68 To gain some idea of the knights and esquires leading retinues in the army, we can return to the muster and financial records. There we can identify forty-five knights leading retinues totalling 3,407 men (in addition to Sir Edward Courtenay whose retinue Livio included amongst the peers).69 For esquires, we can identify twenty-four leading retinues with 334 men in all.70 Overall, therefore, we know of sixty-nine knights and esquires who indented for the campaign, with 3,741 men under their command. Livio spoke of seventy-seven leaders with 3,797 men. Whilst not identical, the figures are close. Furthermore, it is clear that not all retinues are to be found in the muster roll or surviving financial records. There are two other sources we can use to show that other knights and esquires led retinues on the campaign. These are chancery enrolments, the Treaty (or French) rolls (TNA, C76), and the Norman rolls (TNA, C64). In the Treaty rolls are enrolled the letters of protection and letters of attorney which men going on campaign might take out to protect their landed interests during their absence. Taking the period from 8 February, when indenting started, to the departure of the army in late July, we have 276 entries relating to the campaign. In some cases, the captain under whom a man was serving is noted. In other cases, the recipient is described as being in the retinue of the king, or else has no retinue leader given. These men can be considered captains who indented to bring their own retinues. By checking these names against those found in the muster and financial records, we can add a further nine retinue leaders to create a total of 107, although we cannot know how many men they had in their companies. Eight were knights, including Charles de Beaumont, the alfaraz of Navarre, who had served in 1415 with sixteen men.71 The ninth was Thomas Beaufort, duke of Exeter, for whom we have no other evidence for his leading a retinue for the campaign. In 1415 Beaufort had indented for a company of 400 men,72 and at the time of the 1417 campaign he was still captain of Harfleur, although he returned to England from time to time. He also held the post of admiral. It seems very likely that references in antiquarian sources to payments to him in 1417 for himself, five knights banneret, eighteen knights, 236 men-at-arms and 780 archers relate to his garrison of Harfleur,73 but there remains an outside possibility that he also indented for a company for the expedition. Given as 900 in The First English Life, 79. ‘quid militum virum singuli secum duxerint quia longum esset penitus obmutavi’ (Vita Henrici Quinti, 33). 69 Of these 34 appear in the muster with their retinues totalling 2,980 men, and 11 only in the financial documentation, with a further 300 men. 70 Of these 15 are in the muster with 222 soldiers, with a further 9 retinue leaders revealed in the financial records with 112 men. 71 E404/31/319; E101/44/30, no. 2, m. 1; 45/5, m. 5d; 45/21, m. 15. 72 E404/31/278; E101/45/5, m. 1. 73 BL, Stowe 440, f. 41. 67 68



Henry V’s Army of 1417 47

The Norman rolls were a new series of chancery enrolments begun by Henry V for the administration of the duchy of Normandy.74 The rolls contain many names of English knights and esquires active in, and reaping reward from, the conquest and occupation which the campaign of 1417 achieved. Newhall pointed out their possible value as a guide to men who must have crossed with the army but who are not found in the muster or financial records.75 Taking the roll which covers the first eight months of the campaign from 1 August 1417 to 21 March 1418,76 we find a number of knights whose presence is not otherwise documented in the expeditionary army. These include Sir William Bourgchier, Sir Ralph Cromwell, Sir John Godard, Sir Henry Hussey and Sir John Rothenhale, treasurer of the king’s household. In terms of esquires, for instance, Richard Wydeville and William Fitzharry were also active in Normandy but not present in the muster or other financial records. However, we need to bear in mind that such men may have served in someone else’s retinue, including that of the duke of Clarence for whom no muster survives, rather than entering into their own indenture with the crown for the campaign. Hussey, Cromwell and Godard certainly had links with Clarence in 1415 and later.77 Livio concluded his discussion of the numbers in the 1417 army by commenting that ‘carpenters and divers craftsmen paid by the king to the number of a thousand set out with the king … the rest were servants to the king or other individual soldiers or hired with a small band by the king, as many as completed the first tally of soldiers, 16,400’.78 The financial records give some further clues. The issue rolls record payments on 29 April 1417 to Gilbert Kymer, a physician retained by the king for the expedition, as well as £1,000 for the wages of craftsmen to accompany it.79 Thomas Morstede and William Bradwardine, the king’s surgeons, also received letters of protection.80 Both on the issue rolls and in the foreign accounts we also find evidence of recruitment of miners from overseas.81 A significant absence from all the surviving sources, however, is the royal household. We know that in 1415 the officials and servants of the household served in person and with small retinues (often themselves and three accompanying archers, or multiples thereof), combining their role in supporting the king with a military function. They would most certainly have been present in 1417 – we have letters of protection in the treaty rolls or references in the Norman rolls to a number of these men – but a more detailed investigation into the membership of Henry V’s household lay beyond the scope of this paper. Overall, therefore, we can conclude that there were at least 107 men who indented for the campaign, with at least 10,851 men in their various companies. There are Anne Curry, ‘The Norman Rolls of Henry V’, in People, Power and Identity in the Late Middle Ages. Essays in Memory of W. Mark Ormrod, ed. Gwilym Dodd, Helen Lacey and Anthony Musson (2021), 265–82. 75 Newhall, English Conquest, 192 n. 17. 76 C64/8, printed in full in Hardy, Rotuli Normanniae. 77 See index to Warner’s study of Clarence’s retinue in Agincourt Campaign. 78 ‘Reliqui vero fuer regi famulantes vela lii singuli milites vel cum parvo numero per regum conducti’ (Vita Henrici Quinti, 33). 79 E403/630, m. 2. See also E403/627, m. 11 under 11 Mar. for ropes for machines and lifting guns. 80 The duke of Clarence had also engaged a surgeon for the campaign, John Love alias Severell of Salisbury, leche, but he may not have actually served since on 12 May his protection was revoked because Love was said to be tarrying in the city of London: CPR, 1416–22, pp. 124–5. 81 E403/630 under 15 July for the payment of 16 miners under Peter Loward; E403/631 under 4 Oct. for Nicholas Swyr and 20 foreign miners, going from London to Southampton on 21 July. 74

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obvious lacunae, especially members of the royal household and the individuals and small groups mentioned by Livio. Both types had been important elements of the army of 1415, with even the staff of the royal kitchens expected to serve in person and with accompanying archers. In 1415 over 500 indentees can be traced, although some indented jointly with an accompanying band of archers, usually in the ratio of 1:3 or occasionally 1:2.82 Even for the army of 1416 we have evidence of 165 indentees and that was a campaign which the king did not lead in person. In 1417 the king was present and therefore we would expect a much larger number of indentees. The figure of 107 is too low, indicating that there are significant gaps in the surviving material. As for the total size of the army, we must treat 10,851 as a minimum.83 Livio’s figure of 16,400 appears rather high, but was inclusive of craftsmen and other support staff. Participants in the 1417 Army From the evidence as a whole on those leading companies in the army of 1417, we can draw some important conclusions. The first is that there is no evidence of declining participation in the war from what we might term the military classes. Of the thirty-six peers summoned to the parliament of October 1416, where initial plans for the campaign were laid, twenty-two served in the 1417 army with a likely total of 5,525 men if the duke of Clarence’s higher number is accepted. The army of 1415 had seen twenty-six peers in service with 5,243 men, that of 1416 twenty-five peers with 3,785 men, the lower figure on that occasion reflecting the reduced number of archers as a result of the 1:2 ratio for naval service.84 As for knights, we can trace from the muster roll of 1417 thirty-six knights leading retinues, to which we must add a further nine evidenced by surviving indentures, as well as a further nine potential retinue leaders from the evidence of letters of protection. The resulting total of fifty-four is comparable to the fifty-seven of 1415 and the fifty-one of 1416, especially when we know that there are gaps in the data for 1417. We can trace from the muster roll an additional sixty-two knights within retinues of others, plus a further fifteen mentioned in indentures, which suggests at least 131 knights on the campaign.85 As for esquires, twenty-three can be shown from the muster and indentures to have led companies, but adding in the evidence of protections could take the total to thirty-seven, and we are certainly missing evidence of esquires in the royal household. While the indentures for 1417 suggested that a third of the archers within retinues should be foot archers, the muster suggests this may not have been implemented, since only in one case – that of Sir Hugh Luttrell – are mounted and foot archers distinguished from each other.86 These are detailed in ‘The English Army’ in the Agincourt 600 section of www.medievalsoldier.org. Newhall also tried to calculate a total, proposing 2,221 men-at-arms and 7,794 archers under 83 captains, and also noticed that royal household troops were missing: English Conquest, 193, 204. 84 1415: 3 dukes, 9 earls, 14 barons indented; 1416: 2 dukes, 7 earls, 16 barons indented; 1417: 2 dukes, 7 earls, 13 barons indented. 85 Whilst in general the number of knights was decreasing in later medieval England (Bell et al., Soldier in Later Medieval England, 55) there had been a good number of dubbings following the Agincourt campaign. 86 E101/51/2, m. 33. Luttrell was appointed lieutenant of Harfleur on 20 June 1417: Forty-Fourth Annual 82 83



Henry V’s Army of 1417 49

Some men indented in 1417 to supply the same numbers as in 1415. Such was the case for Sir Walter Sandes who indented on both occasions for the service of himself alongside two men-at-arms and nine archers. The surviving muster for 1417 suggests that he had managed to find an additional archer since ten names are listed.87 But other indentees saw a marked increase in the numbers for which they indented. This is particularly notable in the case of the earls and barons and meant that the numbers they provided were considerably larger than earlier. In 1415 nine earls and fourteen barons had provided 1,890 and 1,193 men respectively. In 1417 seven earls and thirteen barons provided 2,234 and 1,971 men respectively. In terms of specific examples, in 1415 Thomas Montague, earl of Salisbury, indented for 120 men, including three knights, in 1416 for 240 men including seven knights, and in 1417 for 400 men including three knights.88 Notable increases are also seen in the size of the retinues of the earl of March, the Earl Marshal, Robert, Lord Willoughby, and Lord Bergavenny.89 Such figures reveal the numbers expected by the king, with all cases reflecting the customary ratio of one man-at-arms to three archers. For an earl 400 was generally expected; for barons we see banding from twenty-four to 240, with the higher figures being expected of the older more militarily experienced peers; for knights eighty to 120 might also be expected; but for esquires numbers were much lower. In terms of the recruitment effort, we should also recall that other troops were recruited earlier in the year, including forces to serve at sea under Sir John Mortimer with 149 other men-at-arms and 300 archers; Sir Thomas Carew from Dartmouth with 315 and 632; the Sire de Castillon with 149 and 300.90 Furthermore, on 26 February the earl of Salisbury indented to muster on 19 March six men-at-arms and eighteen archers of the 400 troops for which he had indented on 8 February.91 These were to be sent as reinforcements for Harfleur, where they were to serve until 1 May, before being reintegrated into the earl’s retinue for the main campaign. On 27 February further reinforcements for Harfleur were arranged when Sir John Pelham indented for his own service for one quarter, along with seven men-at-arms and sixty archers, also to muster on 19 March.92 There was a third company for this endeavour under Sir John Popham. Although no indenture survives the service is revealed by the order issued on 1 March for the muster of all three companies.93 Popham had indented for the main expedition on 8 February for his own service along with nine men-at-arms and thirty archers.94 Neither Popham nor Pelham feature on the Report, 597. Virtually all of the men-at-arms of his 1417 retinue are found serving under him in 1418 in the garrison of Harfleur: E101/48/19. 87 E101/69/5, no. 435; 45/5, m. 7; E404/31/349. 1417: E101/51/2, m. 34; 70/2, no. 609. Unfortunately, we cannot carry out a direct comparison of the names of his soldiers as no muster survives for 1415. 88 E404/31/174; E101/45/5, m. 5d; 45/21, m. 40; 1416: E101/48/10, no. 143; E403/624, m. 4; 1417: E101/51/2, m. 10; 70/2, nos. 618, 619. 89 Earl of March 220, 300, 402; Earl Marshal 200, 240, 400; Lord Willoughby 90, 90, 161; Lord Bergavenny 60, 150, 206. In these examples the three figures relate to 1415, 1416 and 1417 respectively. References for 1415 are to be found on medievalsoldier.org/Agincourt600, for 1416 in Curry, ‘After Agincourt’, Appendix, and for 1417 in Table 1 below. 90 E403/627, m. 29 under 27 Feb.; 629, m. 10 under 3 Mar. 91 E101/70/2, nos. 618, 619. They may have crossed in late May based on the evidence of the issue rolls, where payments are noted under 24 and 25 May: E403/630. 92 E101/70/2. 93 CPR, 1416–22, p. 74. 94 E101/70/1, no. 574.

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surviving muster roll for the campaign and may therefore have already been in France. The earl of Salisbury, however, did muster in person with three knights, ninety-four men-at-arms and 325 archers: 423 men in total.95 Since this is close to the numbers for which he indented on 8 February we must assume that the advance party for Harfleur had returned to England in time to cross again with the main army. We can approach the question of continuity of service in a more systematic manner than has ever been possible before thanks to computer-assisted analysis. In this exercise we have used the muster records for 1415 and 1417 in ‘The Soldier’ database as well as indentures and financial records which give details of those who led retinues in 1415, 1416 and 1417.96 Restricting ourselves to those indenting in 1417 to lead retinues, we can show that 57% had also indented in 1416 and 63% in 1415 (see Table 1). Around 80% of the leaders of 1417 had led companies previously. This is radically different from the 17.5% advanced by Powicke and which he used to support the argument that the army of 1417 was lacking experience. The revised figures suggest an altogether different set of conclusions. A lack of experience was not a problem in this expedition, especially when we bear in mind that some who indented in 1417 had served in someone else’s retinue on previous campaigns. Comparison of the names of knights shows that 58% of the knights in the 1417 army had previous experience of serving as knights. At least 30% had served on the 1415 campaign. Examination of the indentures for 1416 show that 22% of the knights of 1417 had served as retinue leaders, but this number is only a minimum: since there is no muster for the 1416 army we need to add those knights who served within other retinues. Taking our comparison forward we can see that at least 33% of the knights of 1417 continued to serve into the 1420s. Again, such figures are significantly higher than Powicke’s findings. Furthermore, they can only be a minimum. We need to bear in mind that some who served as esquires in 1415 had been dubbed knights by 1417. For example, John Clifton served as a knight in the 1417 campaign. While no knight of that name appears before 1417, a John Clifton served as an esquire in the 1415 campaign. What makes it likely that this was the same individual is the fact that in both 1415 and 1417 John Clifton served in the retinue of the earl of Suffolk. Widening the comparison to include all individuals with the same name would increase the evidence of repeat service. In numerical terms, of course, the nobles and knights formed a comparatively small group within the overall army. As a consequence of this, because of the high degree of supporting evidence for high status individuals, it is relatively easy to identify instances of service for the same individual. For the rank and file this is more problematic. The campaign immediately preceding 1417 was that of 1416, but the lack of a muster roll makes it impossible to know which men-at-arms and archers served in both years. With the survival of a good number of muster and retinue rolls for 1415 we can endeavour to make a comparison. Although the two campaigns were only two years apart, however, we cannot assume that the occurrence of the same name in both campaigns represents the same individual. There are too many occurrences of different individuals with the same name within the records for this to be reliable. Instead, the process we adopted was to identify unique, and therefore E101/51/2, m. 9. Only leaders of retinues with greater than three members were investigated, but this approach includes over 99% of the troops in the lists.

95 96

1415

1415, 1416

1416

1415

1415

1415, 1416

Baskerville, Sir John

Beauchamp, Sir Walter

Bergavenny, Richard, Lord

Blount, Sir John

Bourgchier, Hugh Stafford, Lord

Bourgchier, Sir William

Butiller, John esquire

Brounflete, Henry esquire

1415

1415

Arundell, Sir Richard

Bourghop, John esquire

1415, 1416

Arundel, John, Lord Mautravers

Previous indentures

48 (12+36)

126 (self +1 knight +41+83)

119 (self +28+90)

240 (self +4 knights +57+178)

163 (self +1 knight +49+112)

88 (self +19+68)

159 (self + 39+119)

Muster E101/51/2

12 (self +2+9)

8 (self +1+6)

16 (self +3+12)

8 (self +1+6)

80 (self +19+60)

161 (self + 5 knights +35+120)

Indenture/warrant numbers in 1417

E101/70/1/584

E101/70/2/594

E101/70/1/579

E101/70/2/606

E101/70/1/581

E101/70/2/604

Indenture/warrant reference

120 (30+90)

170 (50+120)

160 (40+120)

Livio

The numbers given are of men-at-arms plus archers. Indentees of the status of esquires are included in the number of men-at-arms. Those of higher status (earl, banneret, knight) are specified.

Table 1: Evidence of Indented Companies in the 1417 Army

1415

1415, 1416

1415, 1416

1415, 1416

1415

Clarence, Thomas, duke of

Clifford, John, Lord

Clux, Sir Hartung van

Cornwall, Sir John

Courtenay, Sir Edward

240 (self +4 knights +55+180)

1415, 1416

Fitzhugh, Henry, Lord

275 (self +4 knights +61+209)

1415, 1416

Fiennes, Sir Roger

50 (self +9+40)

80 (self +19+60)

1416

Ferrers of Chartley, Edmund, Lord

120 (self + 1 knight +28 +90)

damaged

240 (1 earl +1 banneret +5 knights +53+180)

40 (self +9+30)

8 (self +1+6)

32 (self +9+22)

121 (self + 30+90)

174 (self +1 knight +51+121)

15 (self +2+9 +2 gunners)

200 (self +2 knights +47+150)

Muster E101/51/2

Indenture/warrant numbers in 1417

Felbrigge, Sir Thomas

Elmden, Sir William

1415, 1416

Chaucer, Thomas esquire

Previous indentures

Table 1: Evidence of Indented Companies in the 1417 Army (continued)

E101/70/1/577 E404/33/217

E101/70/1/580

E101/70/2/591

E101/70/1/582

E101/70/2/622

E404/33/219*

E101/70/3/625

Indenture/warrant reference

240 (60+180)

80 (20+60)

120 (30+90)

200 (50+150)

960 (240+720)

Livio

1415, 1416

1415

1415

1416

1415, 1416

1415

1415

1415

1415, 1416

1415, 1416

1415, 1416

1415, 1416

Gloucester, Humphrey, duke of

Gra, Sir John of Ingelby, Lincs.

Granson, Sir William

Grey of Codnor, Reynold, Lord

Grey of Heton, Sir John

Grey of Ruthin, Sir John

Grisely, Sir John

Harington, John, Lord

Harington, Sir James

Harington, Sir William

Harleston, William esquire

Hastings, Sir Richard

Here, John

1416

Fitzjames, Richard esquire

7 (1+3 +3 gunners)

32 (self +7+24)

40 (self +9+30)

81 (self +19+61)

116 (self +2 knights +27+86)

11 (self +1 knight +1+8)

155 (self +37+117)

225 (self +4 knights +56+164)

8 (self +1+6)

14 (self +1+12)

321 (5 knights +91+225)

4 (1 +3)

4 (self +3)

8 (self +1+6)

120 (self +29+90)

160 (self +1 knight +38 +120)

8 (self +1+6)

8 (self +1+6)

E101/70/3/629 E404/33/200

E101/70/2/596

E101/70/2/590

E101/70/2/608

E101/70/2/595

E101/70/3/624

 

 

120 (30+90)

240 (60+180)

400 (100+300)

1415, 1416

1415, 1416

Merbury, Nicholas esquire

Mountenay, William esquire

Neville, Sir John

1415, 1416

March, Edmund, earl of

166 (self +1 knight +42+122)

5 (1+4)

402 (self +7 knights +92+302)

87 (self +1 knight +18+42+25 foot archers)

1416

Luttrell, Sir Hugh

14 (3+11)

1415

1415

Legh, William

190 (self +9+180)

Loward, Peter esquire

1415

Leche, Sir Philip

24 (self +5+18)

1415, 1416

Laurence, Sir Robert

175 (self +39+135)

1416

1415, ?1416

Huntingdon, John, earl of

246 (4 knights +57+185)

Lovell, William, Lord

1415, 1416

Hungerford, Sir Walter

8 (self +1+6)

58 (12+46)

1415, 1416

Holland, Sir John

Muster E101/51/2

Leyhun, Thomas

1415, 1416

Hodilston, Sir William

Previous indentures

Table 1: Evidence of Indented Companies in the 1417 Army (continued)

40 (self +9+30)

80 (self +1 knight +18+60)

21 (self +5 +15 crossbowmen)

24 (self +5+18)

20 (self +4+15)

160 (self + 39 +120)

240 (self +3 knights +56+180)

24 (self +5+18)

Indenture/warrant numbers in 1417

E101/70/2/586

E101/70/3/623

E101/70/3/630

E101/70/2/605

E101/70/2/611

E101/70/1/583

E101/70/1/573

E101/70/2/599

Indenture/warrant reference

400 (100+300)

24 (6+18)

160 (40+120)

Livio

Robessart, Sir John

46 (self +12+33)

86 (self +19+66)

80 (self +19+60) 40 (self +9+30)

60 (10+50 crossbowmen)

Saint-Pée-de-Nivelle, Juan d'Amezqueta, sire de

1415

60 (10+50 crossbowmen)

40 (self +1 knight +8+30)

Saint-Marie, Menauton de

45 (self +1 knight +7+36)

12 (self +2+9)

1415, 1416

1415

1415, 1416

Radcliffe, Sir John

160 (self +39+120)

Roos, John, Lord

1415, 1416

Porter, Sir William

40 (self +9+30)

12 (self +2+9)

1416

Popham, Sir John

8 (self +1+6)

(1415), 1416

1415, 1416

Pilkington, Sir John

86 (self +19+66)

8 (self +1+6)

Rokeby, Sir Thomas

1415, 1416

Phelip, Sir William

8 (2+6)

80 (self +19+60)

1415

Peryent, John esquire

16 (self +3+12)

96 (self +19+76)

1416

Peche, Sir Nicholas

12 (self +2+9)

Rochefort, Sir Ralph

1415, 1416

Osbaldeston, Sir John

374 (1 knight +86+287)

400 (self +5 knights +94 +300)

8 (self +1+6)

1416

Northumberland, Henry, earl of

415 (self +5 knights +96+313)

Robessart, Thierry esquire

1415, 1416

Norfolk, John, earl of (Earl Marshal)

BL, Sloane 4601 f. 134

PPC, iii. 105

E101/70/1/585

E101/70/2/601

E101/70/1/578

E101/70/2/603

E101/70/2/597

E101/70/2/600

E101/70/1/574

E101/70/2/592

E101/70/2/602

E101/70/2/588

E101/70/1/576

40 (10+30)

400 (100+300)

Muster E101/51/2

1416

1415, 1416

1416

1415, 1416

Stapulton, Sir Brian

Steward, John esquire

Suffolk, William, earl of

Swillington, John esquire

1415, 1416

Ursflete, Sir Gerard

86 (self +19+66)

179 (self +4 knights +49+125)

1415, 1416

131 (self +1 knight +28+101)

Umfraville, Sir Gilbert

1415, 1416

Tiptoft, Sir John

43 (self +9+33)

4 (1+3)

1416

Thorpe, Sir Edmund

19 (5+14)

8 (2+6)

120 (self +5 knights+24+90)

24 (self +5+18)

31 (self +7+23)

Tirwhit, Sir William

1415, 1416

Talbot, Gilbert, Lord

Swinbourne, William esquire

1415, 1416

Shirley, Sir Ralph

80 (self +19+60)

240 (60+180, inc. 2 knights)

120 (self +2 knights +27 +90)

16 (self +312)

120 (self +5 knights +24 +90)

16 (self +3+12)

80 (self +19+60)

1416

Seyntlow, John esquire

4 (1+3)

12 (self +2+9)

13 (self +2+10)

1415

376 (94+282)

Sandes, Sir Walter

423 (self + 3 knights +94+325) 20 (self +3+16)

1415, 1416

Indenture/warrant numbers in 1417

Salvain, Sir Roger

Salisbury, Thomas, earl of

Previous indentures

Table 1: Evidence of Indented Companies in the 1417 Army (concluded)

E101/70/2/587

E404/33/220*

E101/70/2/621

E101/70/2/607

E101/70/1/575

E101/70/2/598

E101/70/2/589

E101/70/2/609

E101/70/3/626

E101/70/2/618, 619

Indenture/warrant reference

400 (100+300)

120 (30+90)

400 (100+300)

Livio

8 (self +1+6)

*A further indenture dated 8 February is also mentioned. N.B. Some men who indented in 1417 served in the companies of others in 1415 and/or 1416.

Yerde, John

4 (1+3)

161 (self +1 knight +38+121)

Willoughby, Robert, Lord

Willyngton, John esquire

85 (self +19+65)

West, Sir Reynold

1415, 1416

402 (self +3 knights +96+302)

Warwick, Richard, earl of

E101/70/2/593

160 (40+120)

400 (100+300)

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unusual, names in the 1415 campaign and then examine the sources for the same names in that of 1417. Since the names selected were unusual, there being only one individual with that name in the army of 1415, the occurrence of that name in the 1417 campaign is likely to be the same individual. In brief, the processing sequence was as follows. All the currently identified sources for the army of 1415, including protections, resulted in a list of 13,000 names, but some men were mentioned more than once since they could appear in a muster roll as well as a sick list and a retinue roll. Multiple occurrences of the same individual were then removed, leaving a file of identified individuals. For the 1415 campaign this process yielded a list of 9,015 names. The exercise was repeated for the army of 1417, resulting in a list of 8,014 named individuals from the muster and protections. The list of participants in the army of 1415 was then further analysed to identify all names which were shared by more than one individual. These names, which were held by two or more people, were then discounted. The final 1415 list for comparison consisted of 5,061 unique names which could be checked against the 1417 list.97 A total of 807 of the unique 1415 names matched those of the 1417 army. This represents slightly less than 16% of the 1415 army serving again in 1417. Examining the figures for men-at-arms and archers shows a minor difference between the two, with a figure of 17% for the menat-arms and 14% for the archers. Such figures are not dissimilar from those discovered by Adrian Bell in his comparison of the rank and file of the armies of 1387 and 1388.98 He found that 15% of the men-at-arms in 1387 also served in 1388, with the corresponding figure of 16% for the archers. There is a distinct pattern, therefore. The most senior figures, the retinue leaders (peers, knights and esquires), had the greatest levels of previous experience, followed by the knights serving as retinue leaders or in other retinues, then the menat-arms, and finally the archers. Nobility and knights were likely to serve across a number of campaigns, reinforcing their expected function in society. This reduction in experience going down the ladder of status was also found by Bell. It is important to remember that he was able to compare armies in succeeding years. Had we been able to know the names of those in the army of 1416 we might have discovered a higher rate of continuity for the rank and file than he found for 1387–8. Even so, the relatively low rate of repeat service in both the 1387–8 period and the 1415–17 period for rank-and-file would suggest that the pool of potential soldiers for service to the English crown was considerable, and that it was possible to find new men for new campaigns. We can test these examples with specific case studies. For the Earl Marshal we can show that fourteen (33%) of his forty-nine knights and men-at-arms in 1415 were also with him in 1417, including three men who had been invalided home with him from the siege of Harfleur. But as he raised a company of ninety-nine men-at-arms in 1417, twice as many as in 1415, the proportion of those who had served with him two years earlier was only 14%. Sir Thomas Rokeby, who had served within the Earl’s company in 1415, instead indented directly with the king in 1417 for a How confident can we be that, given the size of the sample, the same percentages apply to the entire army? The application of confidence intervals to the data shows that, given the results from the 5,061 names, one can be 95% confident that the number of soldiers for the entire army of 1415 serving again in the army of 1417 falls within the range of 15.2 to 16.4%. 98 Bell, War and the Soldier, 99–101. The term esquire used in Bell’s comparison equates with the generic term man-at-arms. See Bell et al., Soldier in Later Medieval England, 103–5. 97



Henry V’s Army of 1417 59

retinue consisting of himself, two men-at-arms and nine archers. That said, this was only one fewer man-at-arms than Rokeby had provided to the Earl Marshal in 1415 and the same size company as he had indented for with the crown in 1416.99 Since for the duke of Gloucester we have muster rolls for both 1415 and 1417 a direct comparison can be made – a task which has been undertaken by Michael Warner.100 Of Gloucester’s forty-eight sub-captains of 1415 who were still alive in 1417, eighteen (38%) served under the duke in 1417. But only twenty-nine men-at-arms and forty-­two archers from the duke’s 1415 company can be found serving under him in 1417, producing continuity rates of 32% for men-at-arms and 15% for the archers. Interesting results are also revealed by looking in detail at the Cheshire archers, specialist companies of which were recruited in both 1415 and 1417. They were not raised by indenture, but by the crown’s local officers in the palatinate. The surviving muster roll names 196 Cheshire archers.101 They were paid directly by William Troutbeck, the chamberlain, whose accounts show payments to 247 archers,102 some fifty-one more than on the muster roll.103 They were grouped under sixteen captains, although for some no captain’s name was given. In the surviving muster roll of 1417, the Cheshire archers, 405 in all, are listed by hundred with no captains named.104 A comparison of the names between 1415 and 1417 shows very little commonality. Only 20 archers of 1415 appear to have served in 1417 (10.3%), an even lower rate than for archers in the 1417 army as a whole. But there is some variety. Within the retinue of Sir Thomas Grosvenor in 1415, 21% served again in 1417 although distributed across a number of hundreds; for Robert de Davenport the rate was 33% but all serving together in the Macclesfield hundred group. Amongst the archers of John Honford in 1415, three individuals went on to serve in the 1417 campaign, also in the group from Macclesfield hundred. The three appear as adjacent names in the 1415 roll, strongly suggesting that they were linked somehow, even if simply by standing next to each other when the muster was taken. All three went on to serve in the Macclesfield hundred contingent in 1417, and by then one of them, Thomas Catlif, seems to have recruited another member of his family, William Catlif. While sharing a surname is not sufficient evidence of a close family relationship, where two participants share a name and are also designated as senior and junior, it is not unreasonable to assume the individuals were closely related, presumably father and son. Although there were no doubt instances of fathers and sons joining as a family group where the identifiers senior and junior are not used, examining the instances where they are employed can be used as an indicator of the wider population. In the rolls for 1415 we find fourteen instances of kinsmen enlisting together, where the identifiers senior and junior are provided. The figure for 1417 is forty instances, an increase of 186%. This suggests a possible increased interest in the war by family groups of different generations, keen to share in a campaign of conquest. We can also detect other forms of continuity of service which point the way to possible future investigations. In his research on Norfolk participation in the war, BL, Harley 782, f. 75v; 1416: E101/69/8, no. 540; E403/624, m. 5; 1417: E101/70/2, no. 601. Warner, Agincourt Campaign, 168–70. 101 Shropshire Archives, 6000/48. We are grateful to Tony Carr for this reference. The same names appear on the account of the chamberlain of Chester, William Troutbeck: SC6/774, mm. 3d–4d. 102 Curry, Agincourt. A New History, 66. 103 SC6/774, mm. 3d–4d; E403/624, m. 3; 629, m. 12. 104 Macclesfield 97, Nantwich 41, Northwich 63, Bucklow 107, Broxton 32, Wirral 18, Eddisbury 47. 99

100

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Philip Caudrey has noted several cases where those serving in 1415 under local leaders who had subsequently retired simply moved to retinues of other local knights and gentry. Thus, Leonard Strange, who had served as a man-at-arms under Sir Thomas Erpingham in 1415, was in the company of Sir Edmund Thorpe two years later. Alongside him was Robert Shelton whose brother had served in the retinue of Sir Simon Felbrigge in 1415. For the de la Pole earls of Suffolk we also see men such as Sir Thomas and Edmund Charles who had accompanied Earl Michael in 1415 serving in 1417 under Earl William.105 Launching the Campaign Our study of numbers indicates that Henry V was able to raise a large army in 1417. Behind this success lay not only the size of the pool of potential soldiers in England but also the efforts of the retinue leaders in recruiting to the contingents which the king required. Yet it is clear that the king had to negotiate with such leaders. The victory at Agincourt had given him a boost, not least in accessing taxation. For those who had led retinues in 1415, however, there remained the problem of outstanding pay from that campaign. Henry had not been able to pay wages in cash to all captains for the second quarter. Some held jewels as security for payment, under indenture terms that required the king to make redemption by 1 January 1417.106 It is apparent that to raise an army in 1417 Henry had to make efforts to clear up such matters still outstanding from 1415. A number of actions to this end between November 1416 and March 1417 can be detected. On 19 November 1416 Sir Robert Babthorpe, controller of the royal household, submitted to the exchequer eighteen prests and a roll recording some presences on the campaign.107 Three weeks later, on 6 December, sheriffs were ordered to summon to the exchequer all those holding jewels as payment for their service in 1415 so that the king could repay them.108 Outstanding issues none the less persisted. On 6 March 1417 the minutes of the council record decisions taken by the king concerning pay which remained due for service in 1415.109 Clarification was given on the formal start and end dates of the 1415 campaign as well as on deductions for those who fell during its actions. Not all companies had been able to return to England from Calais in a timely manner because of the lack of shipping. A question arose as to whether they should be allowed pay for the whole of the second quarter or for just eight days after the king’s return to England. Unsurprisingly the king now decided that the allowance should only be for eight days. Such decisions reflect issues which had coloured the terms of the indentures made for the 1417 campaign and which reveal that the king had needed to make some concessions. Captains were mindful of the debts still owed for We are grateful to Dr. Caudrey for these observations which are based on his use of E101/45/3, m. 1; 46/24, m. 3; 51/2, mm. 13, 30. In a talk given by him at Norwich cathedral in 2015, linked to the Agincourt 600 commemorations, he also made an interesting observation that it was the younger generation of Norfolk men who were involved, although some had cut their teeth on the 1415 campaign. 106 Jenny Stratford, ‘“Par le special commandement du roy”. Jewels and Plate Pledged for the Agincourt Expedition’, in Henry V. New Interpretations, ed. Dodd, 161, 165. 107 Curry, Battle of Agincourt. Sources and Interpretations, 407–8. Babthorpe acted as a musterer in 1417 at ‘Le Doune’. 108 CCR, 1413–19, p. 373, printed in full in Foedera, ix. 416. 109 PPC, ii. 225–7, translated in Curry, Battle of Agincourt. Sources and Interpretations, 448–9. 105



Henry V’s Army of 1417 61

their earlier service, and of the various difficulties which had arisen as a result of the way they had been paid on that occasion. In 1415 they had requested six months’ pay in advance of the campaign, but the king had not been in a position to make this possible.110 Instead, the first quarter’s pay was issued in two instalments, the first at the sealing of the indenture, the second at the muster, with jewels often granted as security for the pay for the second quarter. By contrast, the 1417 indentures gave captains three months’ pay at the time of the sealing of the indenture, with the following three months’ pay given to them at the time of the muster. It would seem, therefore, that the king was disabused of repeating his ploy of 1415, not surprisingly when the non-redemption of jewels was an issue at the very time that recruitment for the new campaign was being sought. Royal jewels were not used in 1417 in lieu of cash wages. Rather, they were used instead to secure loans raised to fund the campaign.111 The Commons had made a generous tax grant, but without the loan campaign it would have been difficult to ensure the ready cash needed to pay the required six months’ wages in advance of embarkation, which he had to guarantee his captains on this occasion. Whilst at base the 1417 indentures followed the terms of those of 1415, both envisaging service of twelve months, we see new clauses in those of 1417 which suggest negotiation and compromise, as well as reflections on what had caused problems two years earlier.112 Clarification was this time given on what shipping costs the king would allow for the troops, their equipment, victuals and horses. Indeed, the actual numbers of horses for the captain and each of the categories of troops under his command were specified in each indenture. The king also agreed to pay wages until shipping for the return journey was delivered, for as many days as they would need for their return. The quid pro quo was that their return should be completed within eight days of such shipping being provided, and that the captain did not deliberately delay his return voyage. A new clause was added giving protection to the indentee should any lands in England fall to him during the campaign. Such lands were not to be retained by the escheator but be delivered to the man’s attorneys after due process. In other words, the crown was not to gain profit at the indentee’s expense. Any need to pay homage for such lands was also to be respited until after the campaign ended, and no assize was to be granted against anyone who had crossed in the expedition. Henry had to accommodate the interests of those whom he wished would serve. But there is no denying his ambition for the campaign as well as his desire to avoid problems which had occurred in 1415. A further change in the indentures was aimed at protecting royal interests. To the terms of 1415 was added a requirement that the war captain should ensure that if anyone in his company took a prisoner he should report it to the constable and marshal within eight days, giving the name and status of the prisoner. For gains of war, takers were also obliged to provide a report on the Curry, Agincourt. A New History, 54–7. On 14 June Thomas Chitterne, keeper of the king’s jewels, was authorised to deliver jewels as pledges to those who had lent the king money: CPR, 1416–22, p. 107, printed in full in Foedera, ix. 461. For an example, see E101/70/2, no. 628 recording the redemption by the crown at Michaelmas 1427 for a jewel with the image of St. George which had been given to William Hungerford of Essex, who had lent £20 for the campaign. 112 For comparative purposes see a typical 1415 indenture in Curry, Battle of Agincourt. Sources and Interpretations, 436–8. The indenture of John, Lord Roos for the 1417 campaign has been chosen at random and is presented in the Appendix below. 110 111

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nature, quantity and value of goods seized. Such additions suggest the crown feared a repeat of the fraudulent activity of 1415 which had diminished its rightful income from ransoms and gains of war. In 1415 captains had been ordered to provide themselves and their companies with three-months’ worth of victuals. Although further victuals had been brought in to Harfleur after its capture, a shortage of foodstuffs had been apparent, and was no doubt a factor in Henry’s decision to cut the campaign short and return to Calais overland as quickly as possible.113 To avoid a repeat of this problem for the 1417 campaign indentees were ordered to take enough victuals for six months.114 Furthermore, this order was issued in mid-February, giving considerably more time for the assembly of foodstuffs than in 1415, when the order for three-months’ provisions had gone out as late as 24 July, less than a month before embarkation. Henry and his advisors had learned from past experience. There was inevitable slippage, much to Henry’s annoyance.115 The indentures of 8 February had envisaged a muster at Southampton on 1 May, but the date was subsequently moved to 10 May and then, in mid-March, to 28 May.116 Postponement here was linked to the calling of a council at Reading to discuss both the possibility of involvement of the duke of Brittany in the campaign and other matters concerning the expedition.117 Henry was in Reading by 7 May. Three days later he sent out an appeal for a loan, probably to the city of London, noting that he had paid his troops for one quarter but as yet did not have enough for the second quarter’s pay promised at the point of embarkation.118 By 1 June the king had moved to Salisbury, his mind firmly focused on the launching of the expedition. Muster locations had already been decided upon, as is clear from a royal order of 2 June where he asked for proclamation to be made at these locations concerning proofs for the right to bear coats of arms.119 An order of 7 June indicates that Friday 4 June had been assigned as the date for musters. By then the king had moved to Bishops Waltham. His order of that day commented that very few had turned up at the muster points by the appointed date, ‘which astonished the king and made him very angry’.120 The sheriffs of Hampshire, Dorset and Wiltshire were therefore ordered to proclaim that the lords, knights, menat-arms and others who were to sail with the king to France should be at their muster point by the following Friday (11 June), having failed to turn up the previous week. Curry, Agincourt. A New History, 68, 111–12. Calendar of Letter Book I, 174; E403/629, m. 10, costs of messengers under 15 Feb. 115 Such slippage also relates to the provision of shipping, the organisation of which began around the time of the making of the indentures. 116 E403/629, m. 10, under 17 Mar., when messengers were sent out to inform captains of that revised date. A letter to one of the royal dukes suggests 20 May: BL, Cotton Cleopatra F III, f. 161, cited in Calendar of Signet Letters, no. 804. See also PPC, ii. 230–1. 117 E403/629, under 18 Mar., messages sent to lords spiritual and temporal to be at Reading at a certain date ‘pro avisamento et consilio pro adventu ducis Brittanie et aliis materiis in expeditionem intenciones Regis’. 118 Calendar of Signet Letters, no. 805. The name of the recipient is missing. The city lent 4,000 marks on 8 Mar., to be repaid out of income from the wool subsidy: Calendar of Letter Books I, 176. The indenture (E101/70/3, no. 625) of Thomas Chaucer was sealed at Reading on 10 May, no doubt being convenient for his south Oxfordshire base. 119 CCR, 1413–19, p. 433, from C54/267, m. 15d, printed in Foedera, ix. 457, and translated in Curry, ‘Henry V’s Order of 2 June’, 187–8. 120 CCR, 1413–19, p. 433. See also an order to the sheriffs of London of 6 June, when the king was at Beaulieu, to proclaim that all soldiers as well as masters and sailors going on the expedition hasten to Southampton: Calendar of Letter Book I, 175. 113 114



Henry V’s Army of 1417 63

All found lingering in these counties after 7 June were to be arrested. We do not know precisely when the musters were actually taken. The surviving muster roll is undated and to date no issue roll or post campaign accounts have been located which might have clarified the formal start date at which the wages for the second quarter were distributed. Henry paid a brief visit to Southampton where ships had been instructed to gather between 20 and 23 June, but otherwise divided his time between Titchfield Abbey and Bishop Beaufort’s palace at Bishop’s Waltham.121 The expedition was poised to sail on 25 July when the duke of Bedford was appointed keeper of the realm in the king’s absence.122 On the following day Henry was aboard his ship off Portsmouth.123 On 1 August 1417 he landed in France. It is apparent from the intentions concerning muster dates that Henry had wished to start the campaign earlier, yet it is revealing of his intelligence and his consummate skills in political communication that he turned the late arrival to his advantage. By the time he landed in Normandy, he had developed a coherent strategy to use his actual landing date of 1 August, the feast of St. Peter ad Vincula, as the symbolic beginning of a new period in Anglo-French relations. Throughout the ensuing years this date was used as the defining date of legal memory in Henry’s dealings with the Norman population. As would-be duke of Normandy Henry was bent upon releasing the Normans from their French chains. To this end, his army of 1417 served him exceptionally well, being large enough to allow captured places to be garrisoned effectively and to permit sieges to be laid against others. It was undoubtedly led by many experienced and committed captains and commanders. As far as we can tell, most of the retinue leaders who engaged to serve for the twelve months of the indentures fulfilled their contracts. The Norman rolls indicate that many continued in royal pay as the conquest expanded. Some of the rank and file – although it is difficult to know how many – followed their lead. ‘The Soldier’ database allows us to see many who crossed in 1417 and who continued in service in France for several decades to come. One example must suffice here: Peter Basset, who served alongside other members of his family as a man-at-arms in the retinue of the Earl Marshal in 1417, and who continued in service in various garrisons and companies in Normandy and Maine until at least December 1437. Intriguingly, he is associated with the writing of a chronicle of the Anglo-French wars for Sir John Fastolf.124 A suggestion can be advanced, therefore, that the army of 1417 marked a major influx of men into the French wars, a good number of whom were to commit the rest of their lives to the preservation of Henry V’s conquest. In this respect, therefore, it was the 1417 army which had a much greater impact on English military participation than that of 1415.

Reconstruction of his itinerary has been undertaken using all chancery enrolments. CCR, 1413–19, p. 435, printed in full in Foedera, ix. 475. 123 Calendar of Signet Letters, no. 806. 124 E101/51/2, m. 27. For his career see Anne Curry and Remy Ambühl, A Soldiers’ Chronicle of the Hundred Years War: College of Arms Manuscript M 9 (Woodbridge, 2021), ch. 1. 121 122

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Anne Curry and David Cleverly APPENDIX Indenture of John, Lord Roos for the Campaign of 1417

TNA, E101/70/1, no. 585 Cest endenture entre nostre souverain seigneur le roy dune part et Jehan Sire de Roos dautre part temoigne que le dit sire est demorer devers notre dit seigneur le roy pur lui server par un an entier en un viage que mesme notre seigneur en sa proper personne ferra si dieu plaist en son royaume de France commencant le dit an le jour ouquel les dit sire et sa retenue seront a la meer prestz pur y faire leur moustres. Et avra le dit sire avec lui en dit viage pour le dit an entier dys hommes darmes dont lui mesme et un chivaler et le remenaunt esquiers et trente archiers [inserted above line: de lesquelx archiers] sera le tierz a pie et les autres a cheval preignant le dit sire gages assavoir pour lui mesmes quatre souldz ̸ pur le dit chivaler deux souldz \ pur chescun des ditz autres hommes darmes dousze deniers et pour chescun des dits archiers sys deniers le jour outre lesqueux gages prendra le dit sire sibien pur lui mesmes come pour les ditz autres homes darmes regard accustumez assavoir selonc lafferant de cent marcs pur trente hommes darmes le quartier desqueux gaiges et regard sera le dit sire paiez pur lui et sa dicte retenue a la fesance de ceste endenture pur le premier quartier du dit an et de semblables gages et regard sera mesme le dit sire paiez pur lui et sa dicte retenue pur le second quartier quant il avra fait le moustre de ses gens au port du meer ou ils doient eskipper. Et sera tenu mesme le dit sire destre ovec sa retenue bien montez armez et arraiez come a leur estatz appartient au port de la ville de Southampton le premier jour de mai prouchain venant prest pour y faire la moustre de sa dicte retenue devant tiel ou tieux come il plerra a notre dit seigneur le roy a ce limiter et assigner en quel port avra le dit sire alors pur lui et sa dicte retenue et leur harnois et victuailles eskippeson as coustages de nostre seigneur le roy et aussi pur certain de nombre de chivaulx en maniere qensuit. Cestassavoir le dit sire pour seize de ses propres le dit chivaler pur sys chacun esquier pur quatre et chacun archer a cheval pur un. Et apres leur arrivaill es parties pardela sera le dite sire tenu de faire les moustres de ses ditz gens devant cellui ou ceux comme sera ou seront par notre dit roy a ce limitez et assigner toutes les fois que mesme le sire sera a ce deuement guerniz ou requis. Et par un moys avant la fyn du dit premier demy an sera le dit sire garniz sil ovec sa dicte retenue doit servir notre dit roy pur mesme le tierce quartier du dit an ou noun. Et en cas quil plerra a mesme notre seigneur le roy davoir le service du dit sire et de sa dicte retenue pur le tiers quartier adonques pur ycel tiers quartier ferra notre dit seigneur le roy au dit sire pur lui et sa dite retenue agreement par tiel maniere qil se devra resonablement contenter. Et semblablement sera fait touchant le darrain quartier dan susdit. Et sil aveigne qen la compagnie de notre dit seigneur le roy le dit sire passera as dictes parties de france come dessus et en retournant en le royaume dangleterre deinz le dit an ou apres en la compagnie de mesmes dit seigneur le roy sera tenuz a ses coustages de pourvoier au dit sire et a ses dits gentz retournantz ovec lui de reskippeson et de eux faire paier aucune gages comme dessus iusques a tant que leskippeson a eux soit deliveree et apres pur atant des jours come leur busoigneront pur leur retour en Engleterre dedenz le terme de oyt jours apres que leur eskippeson a eux ainsi sera deliveree pur retourner en le royaume dengleterre dessusdit en cas toutes voies que le dit sire apres tielle reskippeson a lui deliverees ne face voluntarie delay de son repassage. Et sil aveigne que de par mesme



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notre seigneur le roy le dit sire avaunt son passage de la meer soit contremander il sera tenuz pur ycelle somme a faire service a mesmes notre seigneur le roy es tielles parties que lui plerra avec a tantz gentz darmes et archiers come dessus selonc lafferant des gages accustumez es parties ou ils seront de par mesme notre dit seigneur le roy assignez. Et avra le dit sire tous les prisoners si aucuns en dit viage seront par lui ou ses gentz prises forprises le roy son adversaire et roys dout qils soient et filz des roys ses adversaires de france et aussi lieutenantz et chieftains aiant poair du dit adversaire lesquelx demorerent prisoniers devers notre dit seigneur le roy et pur lesqueux ferra il reasonable agreement au celui ou ceux qui les avoient pris. Et avec ca avra notre dit seigneur le roy sibien le tiers partie des gains du dit sire come la tierce de les tierces dont les gentz de sa retenue seront a lui respoignantz de leurs gaignes de guerre en dit viage come des gaignes des prisoners monoie tout or ou argent et joialz et aussi proies tieux que ne seront ordene pour le vitaillement del host excedantz la value de dys marcs prises en mesmes le viage et noun dautres choses de lesqueles tierces ainsi dues au roi notre dit seigneur sera le dit sire tenuz de responder a lui en son Echiquer par le serment du dit sire ou del executours de son testament en son noum et non autrement pourveue toutvoies qen droit des prisoners et autres gaignes de guerre queux en dit viage seront prises par aucunes de la retenue du dit sire il ferra le preignant certifie as conestable et mareschal ou a lun des eux denz huit jours procheins apres telles prises faictes du nom ou des noms de tiel prisoner ou prisoners et de leur estat suivant come il les purra cognoistre et aussi de la nature et quantitee des gaignes de guerre et de la value dycelles par bone estimacion et ce sur peine de forfaire a notre dit seigneur le roy les prisoners et gaignes susditz. Et veut et grant notre dit seigneur le roy quen cas que aucuns terres ou tenements deviengnent droiturelement au dite sire en engleterre par quelconque maniere reasonable pour le temps quil ensi sera en la service de notre seigneur le roy pardela tieux terres ou tenements pur defaute domage ou fraude ou aucun autre service personele ne soient retenuz en la main du roy par de ses eschetours ou aucuns autres ses ministres ainz par due process eut affaire en la chancellerie soient delivrez as attornez du dite sire a faire eut son profit saunz contradict ou impediment de nully et soient les foiautees et homages respitez tanque a la venue dicelle sire en engleterre. Et ne voet mye notre dit seigneur le roy que de sadicte viage durante aucune assise speciale ou generale sera grauntee contre aucun qui passera ovec lui en le dit viage susdit. En temoignance de quele chose a la partie de ceste endenture demorant devers notre dit seigneur le roy le dit sire ad mys son seal. Donne a Westmonstre le viij fevrier lan du regne du roy notre dit seigneur quart. Translation This indenture between our sovereign lord the king on the one part and John Lord Roos on the other bears witness that the said Lord Roos is retained with our lord the king to serve him for a whole year in an expedition which our king intends to make in his own person, if it pleases God, to his kingdom of France, the year to begin the day on which the lord and his retinue are at the sea ready to make their musters. The said lord should have with him on this expedition for the whole year ten men-at-arms, including himself and one knight, with the rest esquires, and thirty archers of which one third shall be foot and the rest mounted, taking as daily wages for himself four

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shillings, for the knight two shillings, and for each of the other men-at-arms one shilling and for each archer six pennies, also being paid for himself and the other men-atarms the usual regard according to the rate of 100 marks for 30 men per quarter. The wages and regard should be paid for the first quarter at the making of the indenture, and for the second quarter at the point he makes the muster of his men at the seaport from which they should sail. He undertakes to be with his retinue, well mounted, armed and arrayed as is appropriate for their rank, at the port of Southampton the first day of May next following, ready to make muster of his retinue before whoever the king is pleased to appoint in that port. Lord Roos shall have for himself and his retinue and their equipment and victuals shipping at the expense of the king, and for a specified number of horses as follows: sixteen horses of Lord Roos, six for the knight, four for each esquire, and one for each archer. After their arrival overseas he is obliged to make muster of his men before whoever the king appoints every time he is warned or required to do so. A month before the end of the first half year he shall be advised whether he should with his retinue serve the king for the third quarter of the year or not. And in the case that it pleases the king to have the service of Lord Roos and his retinue for the third quarter, then our king shall make agreement with him in such a way that he ought to be reasonably satisfied, and similarly concerning the fourth quarter of the year. If it happens that Lord Roos passes in the company of our lord the king into France, as above, and returns to England within the year or later in the company of the king, the king shall be obliged at his own cost to provide for Lord Roos and his men returning with him shipping for the return, and also to pay any wages until such time as the shipping is delivered to them and beyond for as many days as they need for their return to England within the space of eight days after their return shipping is delivered to them, so long as that, once this shipping has been delivered, Lord Roos does not of his own volition delay his return. If it happens that Lord Roos is countermanded by the king before his passage overseas, he is obliged for the same sum to give service to the king with as many men-at-arms and archers as above according to the customary wage rates in the region where they are assigned to go by the king. Lord Roos shall have all prisoners if any are taken in the expedition by him or his men except the enemy king and any other kings whosoever they be, and sons of the kings of his enemies of France, and also lieutenants and chieftains who have authority from the enemy, who shall remain prisoners of the king but for whom the king shall make reasonable agreement with the person or persons who captured them. Our lord the king shall also have the third part of the gains of Lord Roos as well as the third of thirds of the gains of war which his men are responsible for making during the expedition, whether gains of prisoners, money, both gold and silver, or jewels and booty other than that ordered for the victualling of the host, exceeding the value of 10 marks, taken in the expedition and not otherwise. Lord Roos is obliged to account for these thirds due to the king in his exchequer on his oath or the oath of his executors of his will and in his name, and not otherwise, provided that, with regard to the right in prisoners and other gains of war taken by his retinue in the expedition, he ensures that the taker makes certification, to the constable and marshal within eight days after the taking, of the name or names of such prisoner or prisoners and their status as far as they can know it, and also the nature and quantity of gains of war and the value of the same by fair estimation, under pain of forfeiture to the king of the same prisoners and gains. The king wills and grants that, in the situation that any lands or tenements fall by right to Lord Roos in England



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through any reasonable cause during the time he is in the service of the king overseas, that such lands and tenements by default, damage or fraud or any other personal service be retained in the hands of the king by his escheators or any other royal officials, and that by due process in the chancery they should be delivered to the attorneys of Lord Roos to his profit without contradiction or impediment by anyone, and that fealty and homage should be respited until the coming of Lord Roos to England. Nor does the king wish that during his expedition any special or general assize be granted against anyone who has passed overseas with him in the expedition. In witness of these things this part of the indenture, to which Lord Roos has attached his seal, remains with our lord the king. Given at Westminster on 8 February in the fourth year of the king’s reign. The seal of Lord Roos is attached.

‘GET OUT OF OUR LAND, ENGLISHMEN’: FRENCH REACTIONS TO THE ENGLISH INVASION OF 1512‒13 Charles Giry-Deloison

Get out, English, of our lands; Get out faster than at an amble.1 The words are those of Laurent Desmoulins, a priest from the diocese of Chartres, who wrote them, in anger, in a long poem entitled La Folye des Angloys,2 in reaction to the English invasion of France in June 1513. The context was the renewed English aggression after nearly forty years of peace between the two countries, lasting since the truce of Piquigny had been signed between Louis XI and Edward IV on 29 August 1475.3 In November 1511 Henry VIII joined the Holy League, a European alliance directed against France and comprising Spain (King Ferdinand II), Venice and the papacy (Pope Julius II), which had been formed at the pope’s instigation in the previous month, on 9 October. The Swiss joined it in May 1512, while Emperor Maximilian sat on the fence for a whole year before following suit in April 1513 as part of the League of Malines which was signed on 5 April, and after Venice had left the Holy League to join France in accordance with an agreement concluded at Blois on 23 March. The Holy League was the outcome of the complex and quickly shifting political situation in Italy since the late fifteenth century. In December 1508 Julius II had convinced Maximilian, Ferdinand II and Louis XII to join him in an alliance (the League of Cambrai), officially against the Turks, but secretly against the republic of Venice which was not only occupying papal territories and those of the duchy of Milan that Louis XII wanted to regain (Bergamo, Brescia and Cremona), but was also at war with Maximilian over territories in northern Italy to which the emperor laid claim. But after Louis XII’s victory against the Venetian armies at Agnadel on 14 May 1509, the pope, fearing the growing power of the French in northern Italy, decided to make peace with Venice and turn against France’s allies and interests in Vuydez, Angloys, hors de noz terres; Vuydez plus viste que le pas. In Recueil de poésies françoises des XVe et XVIe siècles, morales, facétieuses, historiques, ed. Anatole de Montaiglon (13 vols., Paris, 1855), i. 253–69, quote at 269. 3 See Charles Giry-Deloison, ‘France and England at Peace, 1475–1513’, in The Contending Kingdoms. France and England 1420–1700, ed. Glenn Richardson (Aldershot, 2008), 43–60. 1 2



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the peninsula. In response, in the spring of 1511, the king of France declared war on the pope and proceeded to capture Bologna (a papal stronghold) in May and summoned a schismatic General Council of the Church to be held in Pisa in November to depose Julius II. Immediately after his accession in April 1509 Henry VIII had sworn to wage war on the French king to reconquer his French inheritance,4 but the League of Cambrai had deprived him of a powerful ally on the continent and, under the pressure of his more cautious councillors, he had to agree to renew peace with France on 23 March 1510. So when, in early 1511, the League of Cambrai broke up and Louis XII made it known that he intended to depose the pope, Henry saw his chance to join in an enterprise which could bring him glory and put him on par with his forebears – most of all with Henry V – who had ruled over large parts of France. Julius II and Ferdinand II both understood how to manipulate the English king. On 17 November at Westminster, as he was joining the Holy League, Henry signed a separate treaty of offensive alliance with his father-in-law Ferdinand, by which the two monarchs agreed to launch a combined Anglo-Spanish attack on Gascony from the north of the kingdom of Aragon in the following spring. Ferdinand’s interests lay in the adjacent Navarre over which he – falsely – claimed that his marriage of 1505 to Germaine de Foix gave him right of inheritance, and also in southern Italy, two regions where he was in more or less open conflict with Louis XII. An English attack on Gascony would oblige the French to send troops there, thus distracting them from Navarre and Italy and opening possibilities for Ferdinand’s advance. It was in this regard that the treaty of Westminster stipulated that Ferdinand would defend the pope in Italy. No doubt, Ferdinand had easily lured Henry into the project: article 3 of the treaty stipulated that Gascony belonged to him by right, for Gascony was a province the English had ruled on and off for three centuries ever since Henry II had acquired it by marriage in 1152, and its conquest would be Henry’s first step in repossessing a large chunk of ‘la France anglaise’ and bringing back the ‘dual monarchy’ of the 1420s. But the expedition would be far more costly and complicated than crossing the Channel from Dover to Calais: it necessitated control of the sea route from Southampton to San Sebastian, which the treaty of Westminster conferred upon the English (at least with regard to the waters between Dover and Brest), and victuals and transport for the English armies from San Sebastian to Bayonne, which was to be their main target, for which it had been decided the Spaniards would be responsible. Of course, it also implied a good understanding between the English expeditionary force and the Spanish armies and their respective commanders. The equation was complicated by the fact that Ferdinand clearly appeared to have his eyes on the kingdom of Navarre, whose king, John III, in spite of having assured Ferdinand of his neutrality, had entered into collaborative discussions with Louis XII. Therefore, the risks of failure were great, but little if anything could deter Henry. The renewal of the Franco-Scottish alliance in May 1512 certainly did not. Julius II was even more explicit: on 20 March 1512 a papal bull deprived Louis XII of his kingdom and conferred it upon Henry, albeit under the condition that the French king was defeated.5 Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. J.S. Brewer et al. (28 vols., 1864–1920) [hereafter Letters and Papers], i. no. 5 (ii). 5 J.J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (1968), 33–4; C.S.L. Davies, ‘“Roy de France et roy d’Angleterre”: The English Claims to France, 1453–1558’, in L’Angleterre et les pays bourguignons: relations et comparaisons (XVe–XVIe s.), ed. Jean-Marie Cauchies (Neuchâtel, 1995), 127. 4

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That the young king (Henry was only 20) was eager to show off his military skills and capacities to all had been clearly apparent in early 1511 when he dispatched a small force of archers to the Low Countries to help Maximilian against the duke of Guelders, and then in May he sent Lord Darcy with a more substantial force of 1,000 men to Cadiz to accompany Ferdinand to north Africa to fight the Moors. If the expedition to the Low Countries was a success, that to Cadiz was a disaster: Darcy arrived to discover that Ferdinand had changed his mind and was no longer going to cross the Mediterranean, so he had to head back to England just sixteen days after landing.6 Thus, Henry decided to go to war, and in person. When parliament assembled on 25 January 1512 he told his rather sceptical council that the English fought far better under the command of their king and, furthermore, that by leading his armies himself he would ‘create such a fine opinion about his valour among all men that they would clearly understand that his ambition was not merely to equal but indeed to exceed the glorious deeds of his ancestors’.7 On 8 April Sir Edward Howard was made admiral of the fleet and put in command of eighteen ships with orders to attack French vessels in the Channel and harry the coasts of Brittany.8 A second army, under the leadership of Thomas Grey, marquess of Dorset, with Thomas, Lord Howard, as his second in command, was to sail to Spain and to cross the Pyrenees into France.9 Finally, in mid-April, Henry sent Lancaster herald, Thomas Wall, to Louis XII in Blois, to declare war on France.10 With no French navy to oppose him, Sir Edward Howard rapidly took control of the Channel, capturing as many foreign ships as he could and launching devastating inland raids around Brest. Then, on 10 August, the English attacked the French fleet assembled outside Brest at the point of Saint-Mathieu. Though there was in effect no real winner, and neither side surrendered or fled, the Bretons and French were shocked by the circumstances in which they lost one of their principal vessels, La Cordelière, the favourite ship of Louis’ queen-consort Anne of Brittany, which, under her captain Hervé de Portzmoguer, had put up a fierce defence against the Regent, captained by Thomas Knyvet. The masts of the two ships became entangled and when La Cordelière exploded both vessels went down, drowning the thousand or more men on La Cordelière.11 There were no further encounters between the two fleets and Admiral Howard remained in control of the Channel until the end of the naval campaign in October. The land army sailed from Southampton on 3 June and disembarked in Spain six days later. Dorset quickly realised that the lodgings, supplies and transport (horses and carts) promised by King Ferdinand were not there. Furthermore, as had happened in 1511, Ferdinand had changed his mind. As soon as he had learnt of the death of Gaston de Foix at the battle of Ravenna (on 11 April), he had decided 8 9

Charles Cruickshank, Henry VIII and the Invasion of France (Stroud, 1990), 4. Denys Hay, The Anglica Historia of Polydore Vergil, A.D. 1485–1537 (1950), 197. Letters and Papers, i. nos. 1132–4. Ibid., nos. 1126–7, 1147. 10 Wall arrived on 22 April: ibid., nos. 1157, 1169. 11 ‘Le capitaine Primauguet, Breton, capitaine de la Cordelière … ayant attaché la Régente d’Angleterre, qui estoit la principale nef des Anglois, jetta feu, de sorte que la Cordelière et la Régentre furent bruslées et tous les hommes tant d’une part que d’autre’, in Mémoires de Messires Martin et Guillaume du Bellay, ed. Victor-Louis Bourrilly and Fleury Vindry (4 vols., Paris, 1908–19), i. 28–9. Guy Le Moing says there were approximately 950 sailors and soldiers and 300 guests on board: La Sainte Ligue et la guerre franco-anglaise (1512–1514) (Paris, 2011), 54. The battle scarred the French and, a century or so later, was still recalled by French chroniclers. See e.g. Pierre de Bourdeille, abbé de Brantôme, Œuvres complètes, ed. Ludovic Lalanne (11 vols., Paris, 1864–82), vii. 315. 6 7



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to conquer Navarre before venturing into France, with the result that Navarre fell under Spanish control by 26 July and Ferdinand was proclaimed its king on 21 August. Dorset had refused to join him, and the English had to content themselves with the conquest of the undefended French border town of Saint-Jean-de-Luz and burning neighbouring villages, including Spanish ones. Although in early September Ferdinand did write to Dorset that he was now prepared to invade Gascony, by then the English soldiers were unwilling to fight and made it quite clear that they intended to go home. Rising tensions among the English troops and the failed attempt of their captains to convince them to stay in Spain over the winter resulted in their return to England in November.12 So even though the naval campaign had been quite successful, the Gascon expedition was a total failure and an embarrassment for Henry VIII on the international scene. It was because the Gascon expedition failed that he decided soon after to launch another invasion of France, but this time focused on the northern provinces, using Calais as a base. As before, the principal campaign was to be on land, but control of the Channel needed to be secured. The English navy was once more put under the command of Sir Edward Howard, but this time French forces were ready, for Louis had ordered his admiral, Prégent de Bidoux, to bring four of his galleys from the Mediterranean to Brest, where they arrived in the autumn of 1512.13 As expected, in the following spring hostilities started at sea. On 22 April, Prégent de Bidoux and his galleys attacked several English ships off Brest and succeeded in sinking one and dispersing the rest.14 Three days later, Howard decided to go with four small rowing boats to seize Prégent’s galley, but when he jumped onto the vessel, his own boat drifted away. Finding himself surrounded by the French soldiers he threw himself overboard and drowned.15 Howard’s body, recovered on the 28th, was embalmed and Prégent sent his armour to Louis XII’s daughter, Princess Claude, and his whistle of command to Queen Anne, requesting to be allowed to keep his heart.16 The death of the admiral at the battle of the Blancs-Sablons was hailed by the French as a great victory and resented as another humiliation by Henry VIII. Shortly after the fleet returned to Portsmouth, the king ordered Howard’s brother, Thomas, For the Gascon enterprise see Neil Murphy, ‘Henry VIII’s First Invasion of France: The Gascon Expedition of 1512’, EHR, cxxx (2015), 25–56; Le Moing, La Sainte Ligue, 25–72. 13 Mémoires de Messires … du Bellay, i. 28–9; Peter Martyr’s letter dated 3 September 1512, in Alfred Spont, Letters and Papers Relating to the Wars with France, 1512–1513 (1897), no. 32. 14 ‘Upon Ffrydaye, the which was the 22 th day of Aprill, 6 galyes and 4 foysts came through parte of the Kynges navie, and there they sanke the ship that was maister Compton’s, and strake through oone of the Kynges new barkes, the which sir Stephyn Bull is capiteyn of, in 7 placys, that they that was within the ship hade much payne to hold her above the watre’: Captain Edward Echyngham to Thomas Wolsey, 5 May 1513, in Spont, Letters and Papers Relating to the Wars, no. 76. 15 ‘And when my lord [Edward Howard] saw the galye couth not comme to hym agayne, the boy [an English sailor] saide he sawe hym take his whistill from aboute his neck, and wrap it together, and hurlid it in to the see, and thus he lost the sight of my saide lorde Admyrall’, ibid. 16 ‘J’ay prins peine de faire pescher les mors, et ay tant fait que je l’ay trouve … M.M. le Grant Maistre [Olivier de Coetmen] et de Laval [Guy XVI de Laval] ont este d’oppinion de faire embaulmer le corps jusques a tant qu’on sache le bon plaisir du Roy et de la Royne comme ilz veullent qu’il soit enterre, et ainsi sera fait. Et m’a promis M. le Grant Maistre de me faire venir incontinent l’apoticaire ores lendemain soubdainement, et l’ay fait ouvrir et vuider, et mettre du sel en attendant le baulme, et ay fait mettre le corps a part embaulme de baulme artificiel que avoys. M. ledit millort Havart estoit grand seigneur, comme ilz disoient. Se c’est le plaisir du Roy et de la Royne que je retienne le cueur par devers moy, j’en feray leur profit, je leur en supplie tres humblement’, Prégent de Bidoux to Florimond Robertet [?], 28 April, in ibid., no. 72. 12

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to prepare another naval force to return to Brittany, but contrary winds confined him in port for several weeks.17 On 6 June, English troops started to land at Calais and a week later the vanguard slowly moved into French territory and laid siege to the small cathedral city of Thérouanne on the 23rd. Henry himself arrived in Calais on 30 June, left there on Thursday 21 July with the main force and marched towards Thérouanne which he reached on 4 August.18 The march was a hazardous expedition, with the French regularly launching assaults even while the slow-moving vanguard was still in the relative security of the Calais Pale: ‘All the way the French cavalry harassed the column, everywhere making treacherous attacks, yet keeping at a distance to avoid a battle because they were inferior in numbers.’19 Though the sources are rather contradictory, there seem to have been two notable encounters: the first, on 22 July when a French force from Boulogne appeared close to Saint-Tricat (about six miles from Calais) where Henry had spent the night, but retreated when the earl of Northumberland’s men marched towards them;20 the second of more consequence. The French had been shadowing the English for several days through the forest (‘lurkyng in the woodes viewing the kyngs conduit & order as he passed’) and, on 27 July, they came within cannon range near Tournehem-sur-Hem (about fifteen miles from Calais).21 Henry, who according to Edward Hall ‘desired nothyng but battaile’,22 took command, and the English finally won the day, mainly due to their superior artillery and the timely arrival of some cavalry.23 Bayard and Fleurange believed that the French were initially in a stronger position because they had the horses the English lacked and should, therefore, have charged the enemy. Bayard blamed the French commander, Louis de Hallwynn, seigneur de Piennes, for the failure as he refused to engage the English, arguing that Louis XII had ordered him not to do so.24 Once the French retreated the English army advanced. The next day the master carpenter George Buckemer and his aides went back to retrieve the ‘St. John the Evangelist’, one of the twelve heavy guns (or ‘Twelve Apostles’ as they were Le Moing, La Sainte Ligue, 103–16. Hall’s Chronicle Containing the History of England … to the End of the Reign of Henry the Eighth, ed. Henry Ellis (1809), 543. 19 The Anglica Historia of Polydore Vergil, 211. See also Edward Hall’s slightly different version: ‘All the countrey of Arthois and Picardie fortefied their holdes, and made shewes as the English army passed, but thei durst not once assaile them’, Hall’s Chronicle, 538. 20 Hall’s Chronicle, 540–1, where Saint-Tricat is named Seutreyca. 21 ‘Dornaham’ in the Diary of John Taylor, in Letters and Papers, i. no. 2391; ‘Dornahan’ in Hall’s Chronicle; ‘Dornome’ in The Chronicle of Calais, in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII to the Year 1540, ed. J.G. Nichols (Camden Society, xxxv, 1846), 13. Cruickshank, Henry VIII and the Invasion of France, 36–8, deduced that there were two encounters near Tournehem, the first on 25 or 26 July, the second on the 27th, but the French and English sources do not seem to confirm this. 22 Hall’s Chronicle, 541. 23 Ibid., 541–2; The Chronicle of Calais, 13; Robert Macquéreau, Chronique de la Maison de Bourgogne de 1500 à 1527, in Chroniques et mémoires relatifs à l’Histoire de France, ed. J.A.C. Buchon (Orléans, 1875), livre 2, p. 29. 24 Robert de la Mark, seigneur de Fleurange, Histoire des choses mémorables advenues du reigne de Louis XII et François Ier … depuis l’an 1499 jusques en l’an 1521, ed. Joseph-François Michaud and Jean-Joseph-François Poujoulat (Paris, 1838), 38; Mémoires du chevalier Bayard, dit le chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, ed. Alexandre-Claude Bellier-Duchesnay and Jean Bouchet (Paris, 1786), 342: ‘mais le dict Seigneur de Piennes disoit: Messeigneurs, j’ay charge sur ma vie du Roy nostre maistre, de ne rien hazarder, mais seulement garder son pays’. 17

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known) which had fallen into a ditch during the march from Ardres to Tournehem.25 While they were hoisting it back onto the lane, a group of French soldiers assaulted and slew them before returning with the ‘St John the Evangelist’ to Boulogne. The French then attempted to seize another gun (the ‘redde gonne’) that the English had lost on the 27th, and a bloody skirmish ensued when the English, hearing of the fate of Buckemer and his men, set out to retrieve it. They fended off the enemy and were able to bring the gun back to their king the following day.26 On 12 August, a few miles outside Thérouanne, Henry VIII met his ally Emperor Maximilian. The only real engagement was the so-called ‘Battle of the Spurs’ in the early hours of the 16th, when English and imperial forces pursued a small band of French cavalry through the fields between the villages of Guinegatte and Bomy, capturing some high-profile French noblemen and soldiers – notably Louis d’Orléans, later duke of Longueville,27 René de Clermont d’Anjou,28 Jacques de Chabannes, seigneur de La Palice,29 and the chevalier Bayard (Pierre Terrail) and many others.30 The French were attempting to revictual Thérouanne, the plan being to gallop up to the walls and throw sides of bacon and gunpowder into the ditches so that the besieged inhabitants could rush out and pick them up at night.31 It is not clear whether they were able to reach the city or failed to do so (even the French sources are not in agreement on this point),32 but in any event the French army was Hall’s Chronicle, 541: ‘Howbeit, by negligence of the carters thy mistoke thy waye a greate Curtail called the Ihon Euangelist, was overthrowen in a depe ponde of water and coulde not quickly be recovered. The kyng heryng y his enemies approched, levyng the gonne (because the master carpenter sayde thy he would shortely way it out of the water) set forward his hoste.’ See also Ferry de Croy’s letter to Margaret of Austria, duchess of Savoy, dated 29 July, Négociations diplomatiques entre la France et l’Autriche durant les trente premières années du XVIe siècle, ed. A.J.G. Le Glay (2 vols., Paris, 1845), i. no. 167. 26 Hall’s Chronicle, 542–3; The Chronicle of Calais, 13; The Anglica Historia of Polydore Vergil, 211; ‘Account of Henry the Eighth’s Expedition into France, A.D. 1513’, Archaeologia, xxvi (1836), 475; Mémoires de Messires … du Bellay, i. 17; Fleurange, Histoire des choses mémorables, 39; Mémoires du chevalier Bayard, 343; Macquéreau, Chronique de la Maison, ii. 30. Fleurange and Bayard say that the gun was seized by the French and sent to Thérouanne; John Taylor sets the recovery of the great gun on the same day (26 July) that it was lost; Cruickshank places the incident between the two encounters near Tournehem that he notes. 27 Then known as the margrave de Rothelin as he did not succeed to the dukedom until 1515. While a prisoner in England, he took an active part in the negotiations for the marriage of Princess Mary and Louis XII. 28 Vice-admiral of France. 29 Steward of the king’s household (grand maître de France). 30 The anonymous Flemish author of ‘Van den Fransoysen die gefangen und doit sint umbtrent Terewain’, says that Adrien Brimeu, seigneur d’Humbercourt, Antoine de la Fayette and Aimard de Prie, seigneur de Brye, were also taken prisoner, and that Jean d’Amboise, seigneur de Bussy d’Amboise, lost his life and Jacques, bâtard de Vendôme, seigneur de Bonneval, was wounded: Bulletin historique de la Société des antiquaires de la Morinie [hereafter BHSAM], ix (1894), 410–12. A few more prisoners of lesser status are named in ‘Account of Henry the Eighth’s Expedition’, 476; see also Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, ed. Rawdon Brown et al. (38 vols., 1864–1947) [hereafter CSP Venice], ii. no. 294. 31 ‘Portans chacun Albanois [Germans] sur le col de son cheval un costé de lard et de la poudre à canon, lesquels devoient donner jusques au bord des fossez de la ville et jetter ledit lard et pouldre en lieu où nos gens à la garde de leur arquebouzeire et artillerie le peussent seurement retirer dedans la ville’, Mémoires de Messires … du Bellay, i. 29–33. See also Fleurange, Histoire des choses mémorables, 40. 32 Du Bellay thought they did, Mémoires de Messires … du Bellay, i. 32; Fleurange says they did not, Histoire des choses mémorables, 40, and so does Macquéreau, Chronique de la Maison, ii. 36, while Bayard seems to imply that they failed to reach the walls, Mémoires du chevalier Bayard, 345. On 17 25

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taken by surprise. Maybe out of fear of the English archers or because the gendarmes had been told by their captains not to engage the enemy,33 or, according to Martin du Bellay, because they had stopped to drink and take off their armour,34 they retreated in great haste towards their camp further south at Blangy-en-Ternois, leaving the townspeople to starve. Whatever their reason for fleeing, the French made full use of their spurs: ‘and because spurs proved more useful than swords, it was named the Day of the Spurs’.35 With no prospect of any further succour, Thérouanne surrendered on 23 August and the defending troops were allowed out with their arms and banners and to march to the French camp. The inhabitants were given assurances that their lives would be spared; some left with the soldiers, others stayed.36 Two days later, the emperor and king made their ceremonial entry into the city and on the 27th Henry let Maximilian dispose of it.37 The decision was taken to raze Thérouanne to the ground,38 save for the cathedral, the episcopal palace and the surrounding houses of the canons.39 Some accounts state that Thérouanne was also destroyed by fire,40 although, according to Laurent de Gorrevod,41 the objective was to reduce it to a August, Henry VIII wrote to Margaret, archduchess of Savoy, and regent of the Netherlands for her nephew Charles of Burgundy, a report of the encounter and said that his armies stopped the French before they were able to revictual Thérouanne, Négociations diplomatiques, ed. Le Glay, i. no. 168. 33 ‘… tous les Capitaines François déclarèrent à leurs gens d’armes que ceste course qu’ils faisoient estoit seulement pour rafraischir ceulx de Theroiienue & qu’ils ne vouloient aulcunement combatre. De sorte que s’ils rencontroient les ennemis en grosse trouppe, ils vouloient qu’ils retournassent au pas; & s’ils estoient pressez du pas au trot, & du trot au galop; car ils ne vouloient rien hazarder’, Mémoires du chevalier Bayard, 345; Cruickshank, Henry VIII and the Invasion of France, 104; Le Moing, La Sainte Ligue, 153. 34 Mémoires de Messires … du Bellay, i. 34. 35 ‘… et parce que les esperons servirent plus que l’espée, fut nommée la journée des esperons’, Mémoires de Messires … du Bellay, i. 34. 36 ‘Ceulx de la ville demeurent leurs corps et leurs biens saulves, et ceulx qui s’en sont voulu aler avec les François s’en sont alez par saufconduyt avec leurs biens. Les autres habitans qui sont demeurez en la ville feront le serment au roy d’Angleterre, et les traictera comme ses subjectz’, Laurent de Gorrevod to Margaret of Savoy, 23 August, Négociations diplomatiques, ed. Le Glay, i. no. 171; Mémoires de Messires … du Bellay, i. 35. 37 ‘Le roy d’Angleterre estoit content de fere de la ville de Therouenne ce qu’il plairoit à l’empereur’, Laurent de Gorrevod to Margaret of Savoy, 27 August, Négociations diplomatiques, ed. Le Glay, i. no. 174. See also Macquéreau, Chronique de la Maison, ii. 36: ‘il fu conclud que tout ce que l’empereur avoit dict, seroit faict, présents les capitaines, sans y rien differer’. 38 On 30 August Henry wrote to Margaret of Savoy to say that he agreed with Maximilian’s decision, Letters and Papers, i. no. 2213. 39 Mémoires de Messires … du Bellay, i. 3. See also Cruickshank, Henry VIII and the Invasion of France, 106–7; Le Moing, La Sainte Ligue, 131–55; Charles Giry-Deloison, ‘Les conflits du premier XVIe siècle: Guinegatte (16 août 1513), Thérouanne et Hesdin (13 avril–18 juillet 1553) et Saint Quentin (10 août 1557)’, in Le Nord – Pas-de-Calais. Un champ de bataille de l’Europe, ed. Stéphane Curveiller and Alain Lottin (Lillers, 2015), 87–93. 40 ‘The King gave Terrouenne to the Emperor whose men burnt it, all except the church’, Brian Tuke to Richard Pace, Tournai, 22 September 1513, Letters and Papers, i. no. 2290; ‘the unhappy place was almost entirely destroyed by fire’, The Anglica Historia of Polydore Vergil, 215. These events are confirmed by John Taylor who wrote in his diary: ‘Having blown up the fortifications of Therouenne, by gunpowder, the camp removed on the 6th September. As the city belonged to the House of Burgundy, Lord Talbot promised it to the emperor, whose soldiers cruelly destroyed it by fire’, Letters and Papers, i. no. 2391. 41 Laurent de Gorrevod (c.1470–1529) was a Savoyard nobleman in the service of Margaret of Savoy for whom he undertook several diplomatic missions. In 1518 he received licence from Charles V to send 4,000 black slaves to America.



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village.42 In November, having learnt that the French were threatening to rebuild its fortifications, Henry VIII wrote to Margaret of Savoy to say that she could have the remains of the city burnt down.43 Meanwhile, on 5 September,44 he and Maximilian had headed for a second French city, Tournai, lying about sixty miles east of Thérouanne, on the border of the Low Countries and in the opposite direction to Picardy and Paris, the logical route Henry should have taken in order to recover his French inheritance. As Polydore Vergil remarked, ‘By having thus taken the city [Thérouanne] King Henry had cleared the way for himself to Artois and Picardy, the adjacent enemy territories’.45 According to Paolo da Laude, the ambassador of the duke of Milan accompanying Maximilian, after the capture of Thérouanne Henry wanted to lay siege to Boulogne but Maximilian refused to do so.46 There were probably several reasons why Henry wanted to turn his forces on Boulogne: this was the stronghold from where French soldiers had raided a food convoy before Ardres on 27 June, killing many Englishmen and obliging their commanders to flee to Guînes,47 and had attacked the Pale on 1 August, held Fort Nieulay (on the outskirts of Calais) for a couple of days,48 and again triumphed on the 4th at Bonningues.49 Furthermore, Henry needed to be back in England before winter set in and stopped all campaigning, and Boulogne was on the way home. Logistically, it would be easier to keep the town under English control; it would strengthen his hold on the territories between Calais and Thérouanne and allow for an easier resumption of warfare the following spring. No doubt the king was also aware that the French were reinforcing the principal towns on the road to Paris (notably Abbeville, Péronne and Amiens) and that Louis XII was in Amiens with his armies.50 Any foray into Picardy would meet with far greater resistance than the march on Thérouanne and, in September, time was not on Henry’s side. For his part, the emperor had no interest in Boulogne and a lot to gain if the English joined him in taking Tournai, particularly if Henry left him to deal with the fate of the city and to annex it to his grandson’s possessions. Clearly, as many believed, Maximilian had the upper hand over Henry.51 The inhabitants of ‘Que l’on la fera raser et que l’on en fera ung villaige’, Laurent de Gorrevod to Margaret of Savoy, 19 August; ‘l’empereur a depesché à tous çoustez à ceulx de Flandres et d’Artois, voisins de Therouenne, pour fere venir force maçons et paysans pour démolir ladite ville de Therouenne; et croy qu’il y viendront de bon cueur, et que l’on en fera ung beau villaige’, same to same, 27 August, Négociations diplomatiques, ed. Le Glay, i. nos. 169 and 175. 43 ‘Nous entendons que les François sont délibérez de, en toute dilligence, faire refortiffier et mettre en estât nostre ville et cité de Therouenne, qui pourra faire grant destourbier en l’advenir aux subjects de nostre cousin et beau-frere le prince de Castille vostre neveu, ainsi que bien l’entendez … Et si vous advisez que besoing soit, pour plus grande sceurté en l’advenir, de faire iceulx gens de guerre mectre le feu et brûler entièrement ladite ville, affin que lesdits François n’y facent plus leur repaire ne demeure’, 28 November, Négociations diplomatiques, ed. Le Glay, i. no. 181. 44 Letters and Papers, i. no. 2245. See Charles Cruickshank, The English Occupation of Tournai 1513– 1519 (Oxford, 1971) and idem, Henry VIII and the Invasion of France, 117–62. 45 The Anglica Historia of Polydore Vergil, 215. 46 Letters and Papers, i. no. 2233. 47 Hall’s Chronicle, 538–9; Mémoires de Messires … du Bellay, i. 18; Diary of John Taylor. 48 The Chronicle of Calais, 13–14; Cruickshank, Henry VIII and the Invasion of France, 53–5. 49 ‘The iiij. of August the Frenchemen cam to the vyllage called Bonyngs within the English pale in the morninge, and there toke dyvars prisonars, with all the cattayll, and othar pilferye’, The Chronicle of Calais, 14. 50 This was a largely shared opinion in France, CSP Venice, ii. no. 308. 51 See, for example, ibid., no. 322. It is also very likely that it was Maximilian who was behind the sudden change of route the English fore- and rear-wards made once they met at Marquise, 10 miles from Boulogne, on 17 June. According to The Chronicle of Calais, 11, they ‘lay ij. or iij. nights [at 42

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Tournai had also quickly understood that their city was at risk of siege once king and emperor had finished with Thérouanne. On 12 July the governing body of the city52 had warned their fellow citizens of the danger and taken defensive measures.53 While Henry and Maximilian slowly made their way to Tournai via Lille, the city tried to negotiate with Margaret of Savoy, then with the emperor, but to no avail. The siege began on 16 September but, though impressive, the city was poorly defended,54 and within seven days its rulers entered into negotiations with the assailants. The Tournaisians were hoping to surrender to the emperor, as becoming part of the Low Countries would undoubtedly facilitate their commercial relations with the towns there with which they traded.55 That Maximilian wanted to keep Tournai (preferably intact) is apparent from an order Margaret had given in the name of Maximilian and her nephew Duke Charles of Burgundy on 3 September forbidding her subjects to attack the Tournaisians or disrupt their commerce.56 But the English refused to countenance this, on the grounds that Henry was king of France and that the city, being French, could only surrender to him.57 So, on 23 September, Tournai capitulated to Henry VIII,58 who, contrary to the emperor’s expectations, decided to keep it, installed a garrison of English soldiers and appointed an English governor, Sir Edward Poynings, and an English bishop, Thomas Wolsey.59 Henry left Tournai on 13 October and made his way home.60 The 1512–13 war against France thus ended. Peace was made the following year on 7 August 1514,61 and Henry’s sister, Mary, married the ageing Louis XII in Abbeville on 9 October.62 Tournai was to remain Marquise], and no Frenchemen came to them, and they wente almoste to Boloyne, and then returned and went to Terwen [Thérouanne]’. See also: ‘These two lordes [George Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury and Charles Somerset, Lord Herbert] thus embattailed remoued the xvii. daie of June to Sandisfelde [Saint-Inglevert], and on the xviii. daie thei came to Margison [Marquise], on y farre side of the water, as though thei would haue passed streiglitly to Bulleyn [Boulogne], but they thought otherwise, for the nexte daie thei tooke another waie.’ Hall’s Chronicle, 538. 52 The city was governed by four colleges (prévôts et jurés; mayeurs et échevins; évardeurs; doyens et sous-doyens), Adolphe Hocquet, ‘Tournai et l’occupation anglaise (1513–1519)’, Annales de la Société historique et archéologique de Tournai (new series, v, 1900), 309–10. 53 Ibid., 359: ‘On vous fait assavoir que Mess, les quatre consaux de ceste ville et cité advertis de la descente de grans nombre d’Englois, anchiens ennemis du Royaulme de Franche et que plusieurs seigneurs des pays voisins et grans nombre de gens avec qu’eulx se sont mis et joints avec et en l’ayde desdicts Anglois, lesquelz ensemble ont mis le siège devaut la ville de Thérouenne … obvier aux entreprinses que on poroit ou volderois faire sur ceste, sa ville et cité [of the king of France], et pourveoir à la garde, deffence et tuition d’icelle, ont par manière de édit et statut fait et ordonné ce qu’y s’ensuit.’ 54 ‘La crainte et désolation de ceux de la ville quy nestoient guaires proveux de pouldres ne d’artilleries, ne de gens pour en tirer et aussy que les affus de l’artillerie de la vile estoient tant vieulx que à chascune fois qu’on tiroit ung baston, les affus et bendes de fer se rompoient’, Anonymous, ‘Le siège des Angloys devant la ville et cité de Tournay, ensamble le traictié quy par ce sen ensievyt faict en septembre xcv xiij’, in ibid., 371. 55 ‘Ledit Empereur insistoit et avoit insisté l’avoir [Tournai] pour luy et comme sienne … nous sembloit de prime fache que c’estoit celuy à quy debvions besoingner et que toujours l’avions ainsy entendu’, ibid., 380. 56 Ibid., 360–2. 57 ‘Il n’estoit de présent question sy ladicte ville se renderoit à l’Empereur ou non, mais au Roy [Henry VIII], lequel Roy de France la demandoit comme membre dudit Royaulme’, Anonymous, ‘Le siège des Angloys devant la ville’, in ibid., 380. 58 Ibid., 397–403. 59 Ibid., 405–6. 60 Ibid., 407; Cruickshank, The English Occupation of Tournai, 139. 61 Foedera, vi (1), 64–8. 62 Charles Giry-Deloison, ‘“Une haquenée … pour le porter bientost et plus doucement en enfer ou en paradis”: The French and Mary Tudor’s Marriage to Louis XII in 1514’, in The English Experience



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English until the treaty of London of 4 October 1518,63 and the city was handed over to the French commissioner Gaspard de Coligny, marquis de Châtillon, on 8 February 1519.64 ***

The battles of the two campaigns of 1512–13 on sea and land were immediately recorded by French poets, some anonymous, some identified: Germain de Brie, Guillaume Crétin, Laurent Desmoulins, Humbert de Montmoret, Valerand de La Varanne, Guillaume Piel and Pierre Vachot. Most of these were minor poets, often clergymen, a few of whom meddled in politics, but about whom little is known today. Laurent Desmoulins (d. c.1525), a priest from the diocese of Chartres, was the author of an allegorical dream about the disorders of clergymen (Cymetière des malheureux, 1511) and of a translation of a lamentation on the death of Anne of Brittany by Germain de Brie (1514).65 The known verses by Valerand de La Varanne, a neo-Latin poet born in Abbeville (in northern France) and active in the early sixteenth century, are poems about Joan of Arc (De Gestis Joannae Virginis Francae egregiae bellatricis) and Louis XII’s marriage.66 Humbert de Montmoret (d. c.1525) was a Benedictine monk at the monastery of Vendôme, a historian and poet mainly known for his epic poems and his series of short political and religious compositions (silvae).67 Two are only known for a single surviving work: Guillaume Piel (otherwise Guillermus Pielleus or Gulielmus Pielleus), a neo-Latin poet from Tours, for a poem on the expulsion from France of the English and Spaniards (which he said he wrote in less than forty days);68 and Pierre Vachot for his long poem on the events of 1513: La Deliberation des trois estatz de france sur lentreprinse des Angloys et suysses.69 Germain de Brie and Guillaume Crétin were probably the most well-known of the group. De Brie (c.1490–1538) studied law first in France and then in Italy, where he mixed in humanist circles, met Erasmus and became a protégé of Louis d’Amboise, the bishop of Albi. While in Rome with the bishop he embraced an ecclesiastical career and was given the office of archdeacon of d’Amboise’s diocese. Two years after returning to France in 1510, he entered the service of Queen Anne as her secretary and was appointed almoner to Louis XII. In Paris, de Brie set up a wide network of correspondence and friendship with leading Italian and French humanists, playing an important role in Erasmus’s République des lettres. He wrote in France c.1450–1558: War, Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange, ed. D.I. Grummitt (Stroud, 2002), 132–59. 63 Foedera, vi (1), 151–4. 64 Cruickshank, The English Occupation of Tournai, 227–65. 65 ‘Desmoulins (Laurent)’, in Dictionnaire des Lettres françaises. Le XVIe siècle, ed. Michel Simonin (Paris, 2001), 346–7; Eugène de Lépinois, Notice sur Laurent Desmoulins, poëte chartrain (Chartres, 1858). 66 ‘La Varanne (Valerand de)’, in Dictionnaire des Lettres françaises, 702, 1158. 67 Bellorum Britannicorum a Carolo Francorum rege, eo nomine septimo (Josse Bade, Paris, 1512); on the Hundred Years War, Bellum Ravenne (Hémon le Fèvre, Paris, 1513); on the battle of Ravenna won by the French in April 1512, Duodecim Silvae (Hémon le Fèvre, Paris, [1514]); Humbert de Montmoret, Germain de Brie, Pierre Choque. L’incendie de la Cordelière. L’écriture épique au début de la Renaissance, ed. and trans. Sandra Provini (La Rochelle, 2004), 17–18; ‘Montmorain ou Montmoret (Humbert de)’, in Dictionnaire des Lettres françaises, 858. 68 ‘Pielleus (Guillermus)’, Dictionnaire des Lettres françaises, 943. 69 ‘Pierre Vachot’, in Anthologie poétique française du XVIe siècle. Tome I: Poèmes choisis, ed. Maurice Allem (Paris, 2014), 105–6.

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several epitaphs for Queen Anne, translated works by St. John Chrysostom (c.345– 407), one of the Fathers of the Greek Church, and sustained a long and acrimonious dispute with Thomas More who had ridiculed his Chordigerae.70 Guillaume Crétin (c.1460–1525) was chaplain and treasurer of the Sainte-Chapelle of Vincennes and then of that of Paris (from 1504 to1512) and almoner to Louis XII in 1514. He too was close to the French humanist circles and wrote numerous court poems, lamentations and elegies, along with epistles with political overtones; and was considered by his contemporaries (Clément Marot in particular) as a major poet. Crétin was particularly outraged by French military defeats and produced two lengthy poems: one on the ‘Battle of the Spurs’, the other on the disaster of Pavia (Apparition du Maréchal sans reproche, 1526).71 At least twelve poems were composed in 1512–13 to record events in the war between France and England, or more precisely, the English aggression: • The Gascon expedition (June‒November 1512): Guillaume Piel, De Anglorum ex Galliis fuga et Hispanorum ex Navarra expulsione Opus, no place (Antoine Bonnemère, 3 February 1512 [1513]).72 • The loss of La Cordelière (10 August 1512): Germain de Brie, Chordigerae navis conflagration (Josse Bade, Paris, 15 January 1513);73 Humbert de Montmoret, Fratris Humberti Montismoretani Herveis, … Bellorum britannicorum a Carolo, Francorum rege, eo nomine septimo, in Henricum, Anglorum regem, foelici eventu, auspice puella franca, gestorum prima pars, continens bellum cravantinum, bellum brossimericum, bellum vernolianum et bellum aurelianum (Josse Bade, Paris, 27 January 1512 [1513]).74 Marie-Madeleine de la Garanderie, ‘Germain de Brie’, in Contemporaries of Erasmus. A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation. Volume I: A–E, ed. P.G. Bietenholz and T.B. Deutscher (Toronto, 1985), 200–2. It was in Thomae Mori Epistola ad Germanum Brixium: qui quum Morus in libellum eius, quo contumeliosis mendacijs incesserat Angliam: lusisset aliquot epigrammata (Richard Pynson, 1520) that More, finding de Brie’s glorification of Hervé de Portzmoguer’s exploits rather exaggerated, criticised the poem. 71 ‘Crétin (Guillaume)’, in Dictionnaire des Lettres françaises, 310–11; The Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance, ed. Gordon Campbell (Oxford, 2003), 202. 72 BNF, RES M–YC–851 (2). Inventaire chronologique des éditions parisiennes du XVIe siècle d’après les manuscrits de Philippe Renouard, ed. Brigitte Moreau (4 vols., Paris, 1972–92), ii. 154, no. 429, mentions two other copies, one at the BL (under Gulielmus Pielleus, G. 5944), the other at University Library, Durham. 73 BNF, RES M–YC–68 and RES M–YC–671. Inventaire chronologique, ii. 177, no. 519 mentions four other copies, two at the Bibliothèque Mazarine, Paris (4° A 11743–6 and 4° A 11625–2 [Res]), one at the Bibliothèque de l’École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, Paris (Masson 0043) and one at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC. There is also another slightly different copy in the Bibliothèque Mazarine (4° 11399–4), Inventaire chronologique, ii. 177, no. 520. In addition, there is one copy of a 1514 edition by Matthias Schürer at the BL: Germanus Brixius, Chordigeræ nauis conflagration. Ex secunda recognition (Strasburg, Matthias Schürer, 1514) (11403.b.37). De Brie dedicated his poem to Anne of Brittany on 23 October 1512, then had it printed by the humanist printer, Josse Bade. It is possible that he drew upon Humbert de Montmoret’s own poem on la Cordelière, to compose his Chordigerae: Humbert de Montmoret … L’incendie de la Cordelière, ed. Provini, 14–15. 74 BNF, RES M–YC–166. Inventaire chronologique, ii. 136, no. 363 mentions eight other copies: two in France, at Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris (4–BL–1985/21) and Musée Condé, Chantilly (XI–G– 025); four in England (two at the BL, one at University Library, Cambridge, and one at Corpus Christi College, Oxford); one at the Koninklike Bibliotheek, The Hague; and one at the University Library, Bern. I have only found one copy at the BL (G. 9971), and there is only one mentioned in the Short70



French Reactions to the English Invasion of 1512‒13 79 • The death of Sir Edward Howard (25 April 1513): Anonymous, Ballade en maniere de deploration que fait ung Angloys sur la mort de milort Havart, no place or date.75 • The English invasion of June 1513: Laurent Desmoulins, La Folye des Angloys, composée par maistre L. D.;76 Pierre Vachot, La deliberation des trois estatz de France sur lentreprise des Anglois et Suisses (Simon Troude, Paris, 1513);77 and probably the anonymous Le Courroux de la Mort contre les Angloys, donnant proesse et couraige aux Francoys.78 • The ‘Battle of the Spurs’ (16 August 1513): Guillaume Crétin, Invective sur l’erreur, pusillanimité et lascheté des gens d’armes de France a la journee des Esperons.79 • The siege, capture and destruction of Thérouanne (23 August 1513): Anonymous, Complainte de Thérouene;80 Anonymous, Voici la complainte que les Franchois firent de la ville de Thérouenne, que les Anglois ardirent en l’an 1513.81 • The capture of Tournai (23 September 1513): Laurent Desmoulins, Le dépucellage de la ville de Tournay. Avec les pleurs & lamentations obstant sa défloration;82 Valerand de La Varanne, Urbis Morini post eversionem querimonia ad Joachinum Genelicium.83



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title Catalogue of Books printed in France and of French Books printed in other countries from 1470 to 1600 now in the British Museum (1924), 234. There is also another copy at the BNF (RES G–2809) from a different publisher: Fratris Humberti Montismoretani Herveis (Hémon le Fèvre, Paris, n. d. [1513]); Inventaire chronologique, ii. 198, no. 625 mentions two other copies of le Fèvre’s edition, in University Library, Cambridge and the Folger Shakespeare Library. The translation by Pierre Choque of de Brie’s Chordigerae navis conflagration for Anne of Brittany remains only in manuscript: Le combat de la Cordelière, BNF, naf 28882. For these three accounts of the loss of La Cordelière, see Humbert de Montmoret … L’incendie de la Cordelière, ed. Provini. Recueil de poésies françoises, vi. 95–6. BNF, RES–Y–4013, no place or date. According to the entry in the catalogue of the BNF, it might have been published in Paris by Simon Troude, but it is not mentioned in Inventaire chronologique; Recueil de poésies françoises, ii. 253–69. BNF, RES 8–LB29–41. Inventaire chronologique, ii. 225, no. 738 also mentions another copy at the Bibliothèque Mazarine (8° 35481 [Res]). Recueil de poésies françoises, iii. 247–60, gives a slightly different title but no indication of publisher or where it is held: La deploration des trois Estatz de France sur l’entreprise des Anglois et Suisses, Paris [1513]. There is another edition at the BNF with a slightly different title: La Deliberation des trois estatz de france sur lentreprinse des Angloys et suysses, Paris, veuve de Jean I Trepperel et Jean Jehannot [1513], BNF, Rothschild–4 (9, 69); Inventaire chronologique, ii. 225, no. 737. There are two copies at the BNF, both undated and probably published in Paris: RES–YE–3009 and RES–YE–3774; Recueil de poésies françoises, ii. 77–86. There is also one copy at the BL: Le courroux de la mort contre les angloys donnant proesse & couraige aux Francoys (C.59.g.2). Guillaume Crétin, Œuvres poétiques, ed. Kathleen Chesnay (Geneva, 1977), 203–10. BHSAM (3ème année, 3ème livraison, 1854–5), 260–6. Ibid., 204–9. BNF, RES–YE–3823, no place or date. There is another edition at the BL (C.107.aa.10.): Le depucellage de tournay compose par L. D. (François Fradin, Lyon [1513]). Ernest Prarond, ‘Trois poèmes de Valerand de La Varanne, poète latin du XVIe siècle: L’Épithalame

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These works raise several questions that are very difficult to answer. For whom were they intended? Were they widely circulated? Did they meet with any success? Did they have any impact?84 It should be noted that four were written in Latin (De Anglorum ex Galliis fuga; Fratris Humberti Montismoretani Herveis; Chordigerae navis conflagration; and Urbis Morini post eversionem), and eight in French. One of those in Latin (Chordigerae navis conflagration) was immediately translated into French but remained in manuscript format. This is understandable as it was about the loss of Anne of Brittany’s flagship, La Cordelière, and Pierre Choque, Brittany king-of-arms,85 felt compelled or was asked to put it into French in her honour and so she might read about the exploits and the courage of Captain Hervé de Portzmoguer and the fate of his men. It is also significant that the principal events (be they victories or defeats) were recorded in works published just a few weeks afterwards, so that the news could circulate as fast and as widely as possible, the French might rejoice or mourn accordingly, and the memory of the events should not be lost, however painful or traumatising they might be. In a few of these poems (La Folye des Angloys, Le Courroux de la Mort and Invective sur l’erreur) there is a strong sense of urgency – the imperative to rid the country of the English threat – and also of fear, that only words written in the immediate aftermath of a disaster can convey.86 The number of remaining copies of the poems in French and foreign libraries and the number of editions87 would tend to indicate that some of these works met with a degree of success, regardless of the language in which they were published. We know of the existence of eleven copies of Humbert de Montmoret’s Herveis, eight of Germain de Brie’s Chordigerae navis conflagration, eight of Pierre Vachot’s La deliberation des trois estatz de France, three of Guillaume Piel’s De Anglorum ex Galliis fuga and three of the anonymous Courroux de la Mort.88 Furthermore, there were two editions of Chordigerae, the first issued in January 1513, the second in 1514, and maybe two different runs of the first edition, as the Bibliothèque Mazarine holds two non-identical copies. There were also two Parisian editions of Herveis (one produced by Josse Bade, the other by Hémon le Fèvre),89 at least two editions of Pierre Vachot’s work with two different titles ‒ one produced by Simon Troude, the other by the widow of Jean I Trepperel and Jean Jehannot,90 and two of Le depucellage de la ville de Tournay under two slightly different titles, the first probably produced in Paris, the second in Lyon by François Fradin.91



84



85



86



87

90 91 88 89

pour le mariage de Louis XII, de l’Excellence de la vertu, Plaintes De la ville de thérouanne’, Bulletin de la Société d’émulation d’Abbeville, iv (1888), 84. See Charles Giry-Deloison ‘France and Elizabethan England’, TRHS, xiv (2004), 223–42 for similar questions about the production and circulation of French books on England and English affairs, in France in the late sixteenth century. Pierre Choque served Anne of Brittany and then Louis XII. As Brittany king-of-arms he wrote a narrative of the journey of Anne de Foix to Venice and an account of the funeral of Queen Anne (1514). One does not find this in the different mémoires, histories and chronicles written often many years after the events of 1512–13: Hall, Vergil, Bayard, du Bellay, Fleurange, Macquéreau, The Chronicle of Calais. For the books, particularly the four anonymous ones, not mentioned in Inventaire chronologique or in the Short-title Catalogue of Books printed in France, I have consulted the catalogues of the following libraries: BL, BNF, Arsenal and Folger Shakespeare. See above, notes 72–5, 77–9. See above, note 74, and Inventaire chronologique, ii. 177, nos. 519–20. See above, note 77. See above, note 82.



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It is quite clear that such well-known printers and booksellers as Josse Bade, Simon Troude, the widow of Jean I Trepperel and Jean Jehannot in Paris, François Fradin in Lyon or Matthias Schürer in Strasburg would not have agreed to print and sell these booklets if they had not thought that there was a market for them. This is confirmed by the fact that these works were printed and sold not solely in Paris but also in two other important publishing centres, Lyon and Strasburg. Considering the relatively poor quality of the booklets (crude gothic typeset, reused woodcuts, non-folioed pages, printed on rag paper) they were undoubtedly destined for a popular market and could not have been sold for more than a few sous. Unfortunately, we do not know their print run, nor how many were sold. As for the question of impact, it is extremely difficult to ascertain if they met their objective. Those poems which recorded a French defeat called upon the honour, the courage, the loyalty and the reputation of the French, and often, on more glorious pages of national history, required them to shed aside their divisions, pick up their arms and throw the English out of France: Noble Frenchmen, for which you are renowned, / I beg you all to love your prince, / or your fate is not worth an onion, … / Loyal Frenchmen, I beg you … / be bold, in heat or rain; / grind your teeth, like men of prowess, / and make sure they do not oppress / your country the noble French kingdom; … / I beg you, behave valiantly … / by showing them a spark of fire.92 O French nation, where is the pomp / that by the sound of the trumpet you achieved throughout Italy / in times past? … / Above all good reputation must be kept. / Will you let the eagle fly so low, / nearly trampling the fleurs de lys? / Will you allow this country to be terrified? … / Or do you think you are gracious captains, / wise, subtle, strong, powerful and valiant? … / Your appetite seems to be wiped out, … / All are defeated who do not want to defend themselves.93 Kind Frenchmen, do you remember the name / of the good king St. Louis, very good-natured, … / Take example from him, I pray you; / immediately you will win the war / against the tailed-king, your adversary.94 It is quite likely that these poems did not contribute – or at least very little – to raising the spirits of the French, and no one in authority ever referred to them, but they did bring to a wide and popular audience the consequences of the Anglo-French conflict Le Courroux de la Mort, 79–81: Nobles Françoys dont avez le regnon, / Je vous supplye, aymez tous vostre prince, / Ou vostre fait ne vault pas ung oignon, … / Loyaulx François, à vous je vous suplie … / Soyez hardis, face chaleur ou pluye; / Gri[n]ssez les dens, comme gens de proesse, / Et gardez bien qu’ilz ne facent oppresse / Au noble royaulme françois, vostre pays; … / Je vous supplie, portez-vous vaillamment … / En leur monstrant estincelle de feu. 93 Crétin, Invective sur l’erreur, 205–6: O nation francoise, ou est la pompe / Que a son de trompe obtins par toute Italle / Le temps passe? … / Le bon renom sur tout se doibt garder. / Laisserez vous l’aigle ainsi bas voller, / Jusques a fouller le champ des fleurs de lys? / Souffrerez vous ce pays affoller? … / Ou pensez vous capitaines gentilz, / Sages, subtilz, fortz, puissans et vaillans? … / Voz appetitz semble estre aneantiz, … / Tost est batu qui ne se veut deffendre. 94 Le Courroux de la Mort, 80: Gentilz Françoys, vous souvienne du tiltre / Du bon roy saint Loys, très debonnaire, … / Prenez à luy, je vous prie, exemplaire; / Incontinant vous gaignerez la guerre / Contre le roy coe, vostre adversaire. For ‘coue’, see below, n. 122. 92

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and the risks of letting the English return to France. No doubt they also served to voice the exasperation and fear of their authors. ***

All the texts that are related to the 1513 war in northern France share common themes: the fear the French had of the English soldiers; their enemies’ extreme and pointless violence; the disgraceful and abject morals and physical traits exhibited by the English; the need for the French to regain their composure; France should not be under English rule; and the French forces’ final victory. In July 1512, Andrea Badoer, the Venetian ambassador in London, writing to inform his brother that George Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, would command the English army sent to Spain, had remarked that in France when babies cried they were quietened by being told that the Talbots were coming, in reference to the devastating raids of John Talbot in the 1430s and 1440s.95 Although Guillaume Crétin, enraged by the haste in which the French cavalry fled at Guinegatte, told the French soldiers that they ‘trembled under sting’ (a reference to the English arrows),96 generally French authors were understandably reluctant to mention openly the fear the English armies aroused amongst the French population. Only Germain de Brie and his translator Pierre Choque do: The Armorican shore, and the neighbouring populations and towns / have been frightened by the news of the arrival of the English on all sides. / Already abandoning their own houses and their native country / (so much terror had shaken the spirits of everyone) / women and men trembling with their children were getting ready.97 Against your [Louis XII’s] towns everyone organises himself / your subjects their wives and children / all waiting for your benevolent help / for they have already left their houses / and they are all tired of overwhelming fear.98 But, for the others, the words they use and the images they summon to describe the behaviour of the soldiers, all echo the feeling of terror in the population: I, Thérouanne, highly renowned city … / abandoned to the disloyal English … / nothing is equal to my sickness on earth … / They have looted churches and monasteries, … / ravished girls, broken ornaments, chandeliers, / cellars and well-furnished bedrooms.99 CSP Venice, ii. no. 185; Letters and Papers, i. no. 1310. Crétin, Invective sur l’erreur, 205: Vous tremblez soubz dardz. 97 Humbert de Montmoret, …, ed. Provini, 101: Du rivage armoricain, et les populations et les villes voisines / Avaient été effrayées par la nouvelle de l’arrivée des Anglais de tous côtés. / Déjà, à délaisser leurs propres maisons et leur pays natal / (Tant la terreur avait ébranlé les esprits de tous) / Se préparaient femmes et hommes tremblants avec leurs enfants. 98 Choque, Le combat de la Cordelière, f. 26: Contre tes villes chascun son cas ordonne / Dont tes subgects leurs femes et enfans / Ton bon secours estoient tous attendans / Car leurs maisons ilz avoyent ia laisses / Et de grand peur ilz estoient tous lasses. 99 Voici la complainte que les Franchois, BHSAM, 205–6: Moi Thérouenne, cité très renommée, … / Habandonnée aux Anglois desloiaux. / Rien n’est égal à mon mal sur la terre … / Ils ont pilliet églises et moustiers, … / Filles ravies, ornements, candeliers, / Rompu céliers et chambre bien garnie. 95 96



French Reactions to the English Invasion of 1512‒13 83 In the year fifteen hundred and thirteen, / the English with the emperor / came with so many people / that it was a great horror, / showing there their fury.100

Some of the titles, such as Le depucellage de la ville de Tournay. Avec les pleurs et lamentations obstant la defloration, La Folye des Angloys or Invective sur l’erreur, pusillanimité et lascheté des gens-d’armes de France a la journee des Esperons, convey the fear of the English, playing on different registers: dépucellage (deflowering) and defloration explicitly refer to the dishonour and trauma young women are threatened with; Folye implies that the English are mad and therefore uncontrollable and dangerously unpredictable; lascheté (cowardice) means that the French soldiers (gens-d’armes) are too frightened of the English to fight them. Many years later, at the end of the sixteenth century or in the early seventeenth, recalling the events that led up to the marriage of Mary Tudor and Louis XII in 1514, Brantôme remarked ‘for in those days when one talked of the English entering France, it seemed that it were all the devils’.101 What appears to have marked the French the most and profoundly shocked them is the extreme, systematic and indiscriminate violence of the English soldiers which, in many cases, they considered as also pointless when it was applied to territories they had already conquered. For many, the impression was that the English only came to destroy the country: ‘exhorting them to make war and distress / on the climate of France and on its goods’.102 The year that England which aspires to be rich / deployed halberds, pikes and bows, / wanting to destroy the country of the Picards, / to deliberately pillage their goods, / and to tear everything down to the last pillar … / in this beautiful park, which was perfect / everything was destroyed.103 Interestingly, it is not so much the violence against the population that most of the texts insist upon but the systematic destruction of goods, chattels and buildings – particularly religious ones – and the ensuing desolation: ‘You have entered and ruined cities; / Minsters, churches, well-built monasteries, / are flung down and burned by you’;104 ‘Horses, mares, all my goods are taken, … / vileness done to Mary’s church; / everything from the sanctuary despoiled … / all soiled it cannot be used again’;105 ‘Sacrilege has been done and many thefts … / reliquaries of the bodies of male and

Complainte de Thérouene, BHSAM, 265: En l’an treize et quinze cent, / Lenglés avec l’Empereur / Vindrent avec tant de gens / Que che fust grand horreur, / Démonstrant là leur fureur. 101 Brantôme, Œuvres complètes, ii. 368, n. 4: Car de ce temps quand on parloyt des Angloys entrant en France, il sembloyt que ce fussent tous les diables. 102 Desmoulins, La Folye des Angloys, 253: Les exhortant faire guerre et destresse / Sur le climat de France et sur ses biens. 103 Vachot, La deploration des trois Estatz de France, 247, 250: L’an qu’Angleterre, qui se vante riche estre / A desployé halebardes, picques, arcs, / Cuidant destruire le pays des Picars, / Deliberée le bien d’iceulx piller, / Et tout razer jusques au dernier pillier … / En ce beau parc, qui estoit parfait, / Fust tout deffait. 104 Desmoulins, La Folye des Angloys, 257: Tu t’es admis, et destruire citez; / Moustiers, eglises, monastères bien faitz, / Sont mis an bas et brulez par tes faitz. 105 Voici la complainte, 206: Chevaux, jumens, tous mes biens sont pris, … / Fait vilainie à l’église Marie; / Car despouilliet du tout le sanctuaire, … / Toute souillyé on n’en porroit plus faire. 100

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female saints / have been stolen’;106 ‘From us plunder and steal our belongings’;107 ‘When the proud and sacred bodies / of the city already mentioned / and the English were out, / was ransacked and thoroughly burnt, / torn down and devastated’.108 Of course, that is not to say that human life was considered less important, but it is possible that, because Henry VIII and the emperor were present, the soldiers were forced to behave slightly better. Certainly, orders were repeatedly given in the English camp not to kill and plunder the local populations. These orders seem to have been respected on the whole, although several grave incidents did occur. On 25 and 26 July, according to John Taylor, Ardres was nearly consumed by fire and German soldiers burnt villages nearby; Henry VIII had three Germans hanged.109 Then, when Henry set up camp near Aire-sur-la-Lys after leaving Thérouanne, two English soldiers were hanged for having caused havoc in the town on 29 August.110 Around the same time ‘diverse Englishmen tarried in Tyrwyn [Thérouanne] when the kynge was past for pillage & fyred certayne houses’.111 It is also true that the inhabitants of Thérouanne who chose to were allowed to leave their city freely, and that those of Tournai negotiated to have their lives and goods left unharmed when they handed the keys of the city to Henry. It should be also noted that some towns negotiated with Henry to be spared from exactions in exchange for providing supplies for his armies.112 Therefore, it is quite possible that on this occasion the English soldiers committed far fewer crimes than they had done during the 1512 campaign along the coast of Brittany, when Sir Edward Howard, the lord admiral, ‘set his men in an ordre, and passed in the countrey seven myles, burnyng and wastyng tounes and villages’,113 and in Gascony when ‘Thenglishemenne perceivyng that the Frenchemen would not tary, went to a good toune called sainct Ihon de Luce [St-Jean-de-Luz], and brent, robbed and killed the inhabitauntes, and so from thence spoiled diverse other villages, aboute the borders of Guyan’.114 For their part, none of our authors describe such scenes.115 It is probably Laurent Desmoulins who is the most explicit: ‘How many murders have been committed by you? / How many girls have been taken by force? / How many people are killed and Desmoulins, La Folye des Angloys, 257: Sacrilèges as faitz et larcins maintes, … / Les reliquaires de corps sainctz et de sainctes / As fait ravir. 107 Vachot, La deploration des trois Estatz, 257: A nous piller et rober nostre avoir. 108 Complainte de Thérouene, 265: Quant les fiertes et saints corps / De la cité ja nommée / Et les Anglois furent hors, / Fut pilliez et bien bruslée, / Abatus et désolée. 109 Diary of John Taylor. No other chronicle mentions this. Macquéreau recalls what appears to have been another incident while Henry was still at Calais: some English and German soldiers burnt down Nielle and two other towns (‘quand le roy estoit à la ville de Callaix, se parterent pluiseurs saudoyers de Saint-Richart, accompagniés du capitaine du chasteau de Calaix, lesquels tirerent par devers la ville de Ghinnes, et allèrent à Ardre, où ilz bruslerent dès le soir Nyelle, et le lendemain au partir bruslerent Stenbergue et Gueswatre’), Chronique de la Maison, ii. 28–9. 110 Diary of John Taylor. 111 Hall’s Chronicle, 552. 112 The Anglica Historia of Polydore Vergil, 211: ‘Thereafter there hastened to Henry from every direction the envoys of the neighbouring cities, who offered to provide ample supplies for his army if only the soldiers would refrain from any unfriendly act. Henry thanked them and replied that no one from a friendly city would suffer damage from his soldiers.’ 113 Hall’s Chronicle, 532. 114 Ibid., 531. 115 Though de Brie and Montmoret (and Choque) do give gory descriptions of the battle opposing Portzmoguer to the English, with heads decapitated, bodies cut open, seas red with blood and piles of dead Englishmen. 106



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made destitute? / How many widows are laden with burdens and reduced / to poverty by your foolish enterprises?’;116 while the author of the Courroux de la Mort writes ‘Who [the English] would gain noble France / and all the French on my scales / deem worthy of death … / It is quite true that we [the English] wish / to truly put the French into your [Death’s] hands’;117 and the anonymous author of Voici la complainte: ‘Girls and boys and my treasures seized … / Girls ravished … / I had to eat horses.’118 All authors devote many lines to depict the abject moral and physical traits of the English, using a vocabulary that belongs to the realm of bestiary, thus turning the English into vile animals, as if by doing so they exorcised the fear and hatred the English aroused. To all of them, the English are felons, traitors, thieves, false, cowards, fat debauchees, gluttons, perverse, mad, foul, bad and despicable; they are like wolves and bedbugs: ‘O felonious people, all full of outrage, / that you want to have the lands of others / Your heart is fanatical, full of rage’;119 ‘Their treason is all evil, / diabolical, full of malevolence / Their maliciousness is worse than Cerberus / and Satan, to do us grievance’;120 ‘… the false English, / robbing wolves, perverse and spiteful … / Go, infect, gluttons, stinkers, bedbugs, / ‘Godons couez’, that never may I see you! / Felons, tyrants, damned, robbing, kidnapping wolves / for you are so hideous and hateful, / that when I see you my heart has no joy’.121 ‘Godons couez’ referred to the legend that the English were born with tails. This legend was sufficiently wellknown by the 1410s, at least in Normandy, for Olivier Basselin (d. c.1418) to be able to write in two separate drinking songs: ‘Du pays de France ils sont tous déboutez: / Il n’est plus mot de ces Engloys couez’ [From the country of France they are all chased: / there is no more word of these tailed English]; and ‘Ils ont une longue coue’ [They have a long tail].122 No doubt to boost their readers’ confidence and pride in time of defeat, and because memories of the days of the ‘France anglaise’ were still vivid, all the authors insisted upon the fact that the English had no right to the crown of France, that Desmoulins, La Folye des Angloys, 263: Combien de meurtres par toy ont esté faitz? / Combien de filles par force ont esté prises? / Combien de gens sont tuez et deffaictz? / Combien de veuves portent fardeaux et faitz / De povreté par tes folles emprises? 117 Le Courroux de la Mort, 78, 83: Qui gagneroient la noble France, / Et tous Françoys en ma balance / Mettroyent comme dignes de mort. Il est bien vray que nous avions desir / En vos mains rendre les François voiremment. 118 Voici la complainte, 206, 208: Filles et fils et mes trésors ravitz, … / Filles ravies … / Mangier chevaux il m’a falut faire. 119 Desmoulins, La Folye des Angloys, 254: O gens felons, remplys de tout oultraige, / Qui tenemens d’autruy voullez avoir / Vostre cueur est forcené, plain de rage. 120 Vachot, La deploration des trois Estatz, 258: Leur traïson est du tout malefique, / Diabolique, plaine de malveillance; / Leur faulceté pire que Cerberique / Et Sathanique, de nous faire grevance. 121 Le Courroux de la Mort, 80, 82–4: … les faulx Anglois, / Loups ravissans, pervers et despiteux, … / Allez, infectz, gloutons, puans, punais, / Godons couez, que jamais ne vous voye! … / Felons, tirans, maulditz, loups ravissables / Car vous estez si hydeulx, detestables, / Quant je vous voy, mon cœur n’a point de joye. 122 Louis du Bois, Vaux-de-Vire d’Olivier Basselin, poète normand de la fin du XIVe siècle (Caen, 1821), 172, 177; Antoine Le Roux de Lincy, Recueil de chants historiques français, depuis le XIIe jusqu’au XVIIIe siècle (2 vols., Paris, 1841–2), i. 300. The legend went that men from Kent were born with tails as a punishment for having murdered Thomas à Becket: Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable Revised & Enlarged, ed. I.H. Evans (1959), 884–5; see also A.G. Miller, ‘“Tails” of Masculinity: Knights, Clerics, and the Mutilation of Horses in Medieval England’, Speculum, lxxxviii (pt. 4), (2013), 958–95. Du Bois writes that the English were called ‘coue’ because they wore pony-tails in contrast to the Normans, Vaux-de-Vire d’Olivier Basselin, 173. 116

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France would never be under English rule again and that the French would always be victorious, even though French soldiers might not have distinguished themselves by their bravery (notably, according to Guillame Crétin, at the ‘Battle of the Spurs’):123 Since to do all evil one sees the English move / against the French. By the faith one owes to God, / they will do their duty to resist them … / to chase from these happy lands / these false English and barbaric Swiss.124 But who moves you to want to seize / the fleur de lys with no right to it? … / But is it not madness to want to acquire / by hard war a country where one has nothing?125 Are you trying to really overcome the strength / of the brave Frenchmen that no one overcomes? Do you think that you will take their country by force / even though you have how many soldiers? / But no, for none has ever tamed them.126 In other words, as Pierre Vachot wrote: ‘For France is the cemetery of the English’.127 In that respect, the success of Humbert de Montmoret’s Herveis and Germain de Brie’s Chordigerae navis conflagration, which glorified Hervé de Portzmoguer’s courage, may be due to the pride – and relief – to read some positive news about the French (though, in this instance, Bretons). It would be interesting to know what reception the anonymous Ballade en manière de deploration que fait ung Angloys sur la mort de milort Havart received, since it mocked the English and their king: ‘Cry, cry, cry, by all devils, / cry loudly, come drops to your eyes; / all England cries, … / Ha, King Henry you are truly pitiful’.128 Some poems also implicitly regret that the king of France (Louis XII) did not confront the English armies before Thérouanne and Tournai were seized, laying the responsibility of the defeat not solely on the conduct of the French soldiers: ‘You [English] would have been defeated if the Most Christian / king had wanted to unleash the armies on you’;129 ‘King Louis has good intentions / soon to put good remedy to it [the loss of Tournai], / I know well his true opinion, / to this need all must help me’;130 ‘The porcupine [Louis XII] is so strong and terrible, / when he becomes Octovien de Saint-Gelais had used similar arguments in October 1492 when Henry VII landed in Calais, see Giry-Deloison, ‘France and England at Peace’, 51. 124 Vachot, La deploration des trois Estatz, 257, 260: Puisqu’à tout mal on voit Anglois mouvoir / Contre Françoys. Par la foy qu’à Dieu doibz, / De resister contre eulx feray debvoir … / A deschasser de ses pays eureulx / Ses faulx Anglois et barbarins Suysses. 125 Desmoulins, La Folye des Angloys, 254: Mais qui vous meut de vouloir entreprendre / Sans aucun droit dessus le Lys acquerre? / Mais n’esse pas folye vouloir acquerre / Par dure guerre pays où om n’a rien? 126 Ibid., 256: Cuyderoys-tu bien surmonter la force / Des preux Francoys que onc nul ne surmonte? / Croyrois-tu bien leur pays gaigner à force, / Combien qu’ayes gendarmes par renforce? / Nenny, car nul jamais ne les dompta. 127 Vachot, La deploration des trois Estatz, 257: Car France est cymitière aux Anglois. This theme is also taken up by the anonymous author of Le Courroux de la Mort, 81: En commun dit, France est leur cymetière (‘In common language, France is their cemetery’). 128 Ballade en manière de deploration, 95: Plory, plory, plory, d’par tout dyabl, / Plory bin fort; veny goutte à vos yeux; Tout Angleter plory … / Ha, King Henry, sa ty bin le piteux. 129 Desmoulins, La Folye des Angloys, 258: Deffait feusses, si le très chrestien / Roy eut voulu sus toy lascher les armes. 130 Voici la complainte, 209: Le roi Louis a bonne intention / De en brief y mettre bon remède, / Je 123



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angry it is a marvellous sight; / in all his dealings he is prompt and swift / his enemies he puts in perilous ways’.131 Laurent Desmoulins, Guillaume Crétin, Pierre Vachot and all the others very clearly touch upon the question of national identity. All the poems oppose the English to the French, using the symbols of the two kingdoms (the leopards and the fleurs de lys) but also by stressing moral qualities and, occasionally, physical traits: the English are barbarians, vile and cruel, the French always good and noble. In the Invective sur l’erreur, Crétin writes of the ‘nation françoise’, of the ‘françoys heritage’. He opposes the ‘fleurs de lys’ to the ‘leonceaulx, lyeppars’. In La deploration des trois Estatz de France the ploughman says ‘De France suys’ [I am of France]. Of course, the epic poems of de Brie and Montmoret that glorify the courage of Hervé de Portzmoguer, hold Henry VIII – a tyrant and perfidious king according to Montmoret – responsible for the war, for he ‘changes a saintly peace into a cruel hatred’, which, furthermore, is unjust.132 Nevertheless, one must take into account that all the poets mentioned here came from north of the Loire, that is to say from the heart of the French monarchy, or else lived in territories that had regularly been devastated by foreign armies. So, of course, it would be interesting to see what Frenchmen from regions where the English were little known thought about them. Similarly, at least in Gascony, the reputation of the English may not have been so bad. William Knight, who represented Thomas Wolsey during the English campaign in Spain in 1512, reported to his master that ‘a great part of the gentlemen of this region came to him [Thomas Grey, marquess of Dorset] and swore fealty to Henry’. Grey also received a report that many of the Gascon nobles favoured Henry’s cause and would support an English invasion. Furthermore, the bishops of Bayonne and Dax agreed to incite their flocks to support the English.133 In other words, the notion of national identity is a complex one, particularly as we do not know how the French responded to these poems. Yet, national pride and identity were a reality amongst the European armies which, for the most part, were composed of soldiers from different countries. On many an occasion disputes would flare up between two ‘nations’ within an army, often ending in the loss of lives. On 13 August 1513, when Henry’s army was encamped near Aire-surLys, for some unknown reason an altercation erupted between the German contingent and the English soldiers. The riot got quickly out of hand and left many dead on both sides before order could be restored.134 Even more seriously, in 1509, an Italian soldier in the army of the League of Cambrai had killed a French one and a pitched battle ensued in which 300 French died.135 *** congnoi bien sa vraye opinion, / A che besoin il faut que checun mede. Le Courroux de la Mort, 84–5: Le porc-espic est si fort et terrible, / Quand il se fume c’est chose merveilleuse; / En tous ses faitz est prompt et exercersible; / Ses ennemys mect en voie perilleuse. 132 De Brie, Chordigerae, in Humbert de Montmoret, …, ed. Provini, 101: Change une sainte paix en haine cruelle. 133 Letters and Papers, i. nos. 1239, 1327. 134 Hall’s Chronicle, 549: ‘Monday the xiii. daye of August by infortune, with oute any cause knowen, there fell a greate debate betwene the Almaynes of the kynges felde and Thenglyshemen, in so muche that they fell to fyghtynge and many men slayne’; John Taylor says it happened on Assumption Day (15 August), Diary of John Taylor, Letters and Papers, i. no. 2391. 135 M.H. Smith, ‘Émulation guerrière et stéréotypes nationaux dans les guerres d’Italie’, in Les guerres d’Italie. Histoire, pratiques, représentations, ed. Danielle Boillet and Marie-Françoise Piéjus (Paris, 2002), 161. 131

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All these poems belong to literary genres that were very popular throughout Europe in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries (lamentations, historical poems, and epic writings),136 and also to the anti-English French literature born of the savage fighting, systematic plunder and scorched earth tactics of the Hundred Years War, and exacerbated by the treaty of Troyes of 1420. In the early fifteenth century, Jean de Montreuil (1354–1418), one of the first French humanists, was the champion of French ‘nationalism’, depicting the English as the ‘natural enemies’,137 and setting the trend of a vigorous anglo-phobia that Robert Blondel (c.1380–c.1460),138 Noël de Fribois (d.c.1468),139 Gilles le Bouvier (1386–c.1455)140 and others fuelled throughout the following decades. Many of the themes developed by these authors were taken up by those writing in 1513, thus ensuring a remarkable continuity to the ideological frame in which Anglo-French relations evolved. The words of Laurent Desmolins, ‘Sans aucun droit dessus le Lys acquerre?’, echo, half a century later, those of Jean de Montreuil: ‘The subjects and inhabitants of the kingdom of France, from the greatest to the least, do not want, will never want – God forbid – to be under the lordship of the English’.141 And all those writing in 1512 and 1513 reiterate Gilles Bouvier’s assertion that ‘This [English] nation of people are cruel and bloodthirsty’.142 Similarly, they systematically referred to the English as ‘godons’, a nickname coined at the end of the fourteenth or early fifteenth century (no doubt mocking the swear-word ‘goddam’ used by the English soldiers), to derogatively designate them. The continuity of the vocabulary from Olivier Basselin to Guillaume Crétin, Pierre Vachot and the others is exceptional. If the poems of 1513 give the impression that fewer crimes were committed by the soldiers on both sides than previously, this was only a lull. The campaign of 1523 in northern France, the renewal of war in 1543 and the siege of Boulogne in 1544 all brought back scenes of horror.143 For example, on 7 March 1543, a monk from St. Omer wrote that the English captured five men from Boulogne, cut their tongues out and sent them back, proceeded to kill thirteen women, and then, a few days later, besieged the church of Audinghen indiscriminately killing all those – men, women and children – who had taken refuge there. The letter goes on to detail further atroci See Humbert de Montmoret, …, ed. Provini for a literary analysis of Montmoret’s and de Brie’s poems on the loss of La Cordelière; and see also Smith, ‘Émulation guerrière’ for Italian lamentations. 137 A toute la chevalerie (1406–12), Traité contre les Anglais (1413–16); Jean de Montreuil, Opera, ii: L’œuvre historique et polémique (Turin, 1975); iii: Textes divers, appendices et tables, ed. Nicole Grévy-Pons, Ezio Ornato and G. Ouy (Paris, 1981). 138 Des droits de la couronne de France, La Complaincte des bons Françoys; Robert Blondel, Œuvres publiées d’après les manuscrits originaux avec introduction, notes, variantes et glossaire, ed. Alexandre Héron (Geneva, reprint, 1974). 139 Abregé des croniques de France (c.1459), ed. Kathleen Daly and Gillette Labory (Paris, 2006). 140 Gilles Le Bouvier dit Berry, Le livre de la description des pays, ed. Ernest-Théodore Hamy (Paris, 1908), 119. 141 Desmoulins, La Folye des Anglois, 254; Montreuil, Opera, ii. 178: Les subgiez et habitans du royaume de France, du plus grant au plus petit, ne vouldrent oncques, ne vouldront ja – Dieu les en gart – estre soubz la seignorie des Angloiz. 142 Le Bouvier, Le livre de la description des pays, 119: Icelle nation de gens sont cruelz et gens de sang. 143 See Neil Murphy, Conquest, Colonisation and Imperial Monarchy, 1544–1550 (Cambridge, 2019), 18–65. For the violence committed during the 1522 English campaign in northern France, see idem, ‘A “Very Fowle Warre”: Scorched Earth, Violence and Thomas Howard’s French and Scottish Campaigns of 1522–3’, War in History (June 2020). For discipline during the French 1513 campaign, see Cruickshank, Henry VIII and the Invasion of France, 85–92. 136



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ties not only committed by the English but also by the French, in what seems to have been an horrific endless spiral.144 Nevertheless, by the end of the sixteenth century, when Elizabeth I came to assist the king of France, Henri IV, against Spain and her French Catholic allies, the stereotype of the English being the ‘natural enemies’ of France seems to have died down, replaced by an equally strong anti-Spanish feeling.145 This is certainly what Brantôme seems to imply when he wrote ‘in those days’ when describing the hatred the French felt towards the English in 1514, as if such feelings were no longer held in the late 1580s.146 Similarly, his description of the atrocities committed by the English soldiers against the local population in 1544 seem to refer to a bygone area of Anglo-French relations: ‘As soon as a poor Frenchman fell into their hands, one could not talk of mercy, for his life was leaving; and some took pleasure in taking heads and planting them on the end of their lances and pikes, and to parade them, following the fashion of Moors and Arabs’.147 By 1632, in northern France, a region that had seen and suffered so much from English incursions, ‘godons’ had lost any connection to English soldiers: it had come instead to designate thieves and thugs.148

BHSAM (4ème année, 4ème livraison, 1855–6), i. 2, 123–4. Myriam Yardeni, ‘Antagonismes nationaux et propagande durant les Guerres de Religion’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, xiii. no. 4 (1966), 273–84, esp. 282. 146 See above, n. 101. 147 Brântome, Œuvres, vi. 18: Qu’aussitost qu’un pauvre François estoit tumbé entre leurs mains, il ne falloit parler de mercy; car la vie s’en alloit; et se plaisoient quelques-uns à prendre leurs testes, et ficher au bout de leurs lances, picques, et en faire leurs parades, à la mode des Mores et Arabes. 148 Alain Lottin and Laurence Delsaut, Sentences criminelles de la gouvernance de Lille 1585–1635. Étude, documents et dessins du registre 12120 des Archives municipales de Lille (Arras and Lille, 2012), 181. 144 145

ENCOUNTERING THE ‘DUCHE’ IN MARGERY KEMPE’S LYNN Susan Maddock

The launch in 2015 of the England’s Immigrants 1330–1550 online database has given fresh impetus to research into the presence of aliens – people born outside the realm – in late medieval England.1 Some recent studies have taken up a challenge set half a century earlier by Sylvia Thrupp, in a pioneering analysis of the first alien subsidy of 1440.2 She advocated examining particular communities, and tracing individuals within them, in order better to understand the extent and pace of integration of first-generation immigrants, noting that the alien subsidy records ‘require to be collated with town records and with court records of all kinds’. Inevitably, this is a path largely dependent on the survival of local records, and the authors of recent studies of alien communities in London, Great Yarmouth and Exeter have all been able to exploit urban archives of exceptional quality.3 Among common threads which have emerged are the varying dynamics of the relationships between resident aliens and the enfranchised citizens or freemen, between freemen and other, non-­ alien, inhabitants, and between alien craftsmen and their English counterparts. In fifteenth-century Exeter, for example, aliens were admitted to the freedom and thereafter were eligible for civic office; in Great Yarmouth they were excluded altogether (in practice, if not formally) from a narrowing community of burgesses.4 Aliens faced increasing levels of regulation and restriction during the fifteenth century, but their experience of exclusion was also one shared, in part, with other non-burgess town dwellers. This is particularly evident in London, where some guild ordinances explicitly placed aliens together in the same category with other, non-alien, incomers England’s Immigrants 1330–1550 database https://www.englandsimmigrants.com [accessed Nov. 2020]. Related publications are listed at https://www.englandsimmigrants.com/page/publications [accessed Nov. 2020]. 2 S.L. Thrupp, ‘A Survey of the Alien Population of England in 1440’, Speculum, xxxii (1957), 262–73. 3 Matthew Davies, ‘Aliens, Crafts and Guilds in Late Medieval London’, in Medieval Londoners, ed. E.A. New and Christian Steer (2019), 119–47; C.D. Liddy and Bart Lambert, ‘The Civic Franchise and the Regulation of Aliens in Great Yarmouth, c.1430–c.1490’ and Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘The Assimilation of Aliens in Late Medieval Exeter: A Prosopographical Analysis’, both in Resident Aliens in Late Medieval England, ed. W.M. Ormrod, Nicola McDonald and Craig Taylor (Turnhout, 2017), 125–43 and 163–79. 4 Kowaleski, The Assimilation of Aliens’, 170; Liddy and Lambert, ‘The Civic Franchise’, 139–40. 1



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to the city.5 Similar factors were at play in Lynn, where measures specifically targeted at aliens were introduced during a period of recurring tension between different levels of urban society as a whole. In early fifteenth-century Lynn, as in Great Yarmouth, the immigrant community was dominated by people described as ‘Duche’. This problematic label, which is commonly, but perhaps confusingly, rendered into modern English as ‘Dutch’, was attached to ‘a wide range of people from the Low Countries and north-west Germany’,6 but in Lynn it was also applied to immigrants from the eastern territories settled by Germans in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. One point worth noting at the outset is that the number of aliens living in fifteenth-century Lynn appears to have been relatively low. In 1440, just forty-eight individuals are recorded in the England’s Immigrants database as resident in Lynn, and five of those lived outside the borough boundaries in the parish of South Lynn (although they may have resided within the town walls, which encompassed the northern, and more urban, part of the parish). This is the same number as in Great Yarmouth, although fewer than Ipswich (sixty-three), but is dwarfed by the 136 recorded in Boston, Lynn’s twin port on the opposite side of the Wash, and, indeed, by the ninety-seven at Exeter (also a port town, but with a smaller population than either Lynn or Boston).7 This essay first sets the context by sketching aspects of Lynn’s development, trading patterns and immigrant communities up to the close of the fourteenth century; and providing an introduction to the sources used, including a series of local assessments for alien fines which predate the national subsidy returns. A survey of forty aliens identified as resident at Lynn during the decade 1421–30 examines the extent of evidence about their nationality, their occupations, and their distribution across the borough. The alien shoemakers, who constituted the largest single occupational group, are compared with their English counterparts and examples of hostility between them set in the wider context of urban conflict. The concluding section reviews what the evidence tells us about the alien community and its interactions with other groups in early fifteenth-century Lynn. Lynn Episcopi, now King’s Lynn, was a town dominated by its merchants, perhaps to a greater extent than any other in England.8 A post-Conquest new town, founded on a marshy estuary in the late eleventh century, it developed into one of the half-dozen biggest ports in England by 1204, the year of its first borough charter.9 Immigrants from the continent were part of its social makeup from an early phase: a man called John Estreys – an Easterling or Eastlander – was well enough established there by the mid twelfth century to act as witness to a charter granted by Lynn’s overlord, the bishop of Norwich,10 while later Eastlanders, identified as Estreis or Estrensis, appear frequently in borough records throughout the thirteenth and early Davies, ‘Aliens, Crafts and Guilds’, 136. W.M. Ormrod and Jonathan Mackman, ‘Resident Aliens in Later Medieval England: Sources, Contexts and Debates’, in Resident Aliens in Late Medieval England, ed. Ormrod et al., 18. 7 Figures extracted from England’s Immigrants 1330–1550 database. 8 Susan Maddock, ‘Society, Status and the Leet Court in Margery Kempe’s Lynn’, in Town Courts and Urban Society in Late Medieval England, 1250–1500, ed. Richard Goddard and Teresa Phipps (Woodbridge, 2019), 209. 9 Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘Port Towns: England and Wales 1300–1540’, in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 1, 600–1540, ed. D.M. Palliser (Cambridge, 2000), 477. 10 English Episcopal Acta VI. Norwich 1070–1214, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill (Oxford, 1990), 100; D.M. Owen, The Making of King’s Lynn: A Documentary Survey of Lynn (Oxford, 1984), 473. 5 6

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fourteenth centuries. Others who settled in Lynn during its early period of rapid growth came from Scandinavia, Scotland, northern France and elsewhere in northern Europe, as well as eastern, central and southern counties of England. Together, they formed the ‘Great Guild’ – the merchant guild of Lynn, and its largest religious guild, dedicated to the Holy Trinity – and became the founding burgesses of the new borough.11 Lynn’s thirteenth-century mayors, for example, included men named Belvaco (Beauvais), Hispannia (Épaignes), St. Omer and Thurendeyn (Trondheim). Siglaf Susse of Gotland seems to have been the last in this line of foreigners who settled and prospered in the town as merchant-burgesses: he entered the merchant guild in 1306 and became a burgess before 1314.12 Susse died between 1325, when one of his ships was still trading to Norway, and 1330.13 During his lifetime, merchants from Gotland and Norway were being supplanted in Lynn by Hanseatic merchants from the Baltic, and by the late fourteenth century Lynn was beginning to specialise in trade with Prussia and Danzig (now Gdansk) in particular.14 During the same period, the borough’s resident community of merchant-burgesses ceased welcoming foreigners like Susse into its midst. This change was doubtless influenced by the national shift in political and cultural attitudes towards aliens as much as by changes in patterns of trade, while the commercial privileges which merchants of the German Hanse enjoyed in Lynn, confirmed (after a period of conflict) by the mayor and burgesses in 1310, would have reduced the incentive for them to seek permanent residence in the town.15 From the middle of the fourteenth century onwards, any new foreign names which appear among records of Lynn residents are of craftsmen and servants rather than merchants like Susse. Among the earliest was a weaver called Walter Flemmyng, who was presented to the borough’s leet court in 1346 for having failed to join a tithing, and in 1352 Hankyn Flemmyng, a porter, was presented for leaving refuse on Baxters Bridge.16 The name Estreis and its variants had disappeared almost entirely by this time: its last occurrence was in 1333, when Eborard Estrens was presented in Chequer ward for breaches of the assize of ale and selling wine with an unsealed measure.17 The first recorded appearance in Lynn of a person described as ‘Duche’ dates from 1375, when Hankyn Docheman was presented to the leet court for depositing household refuse in, or next to, the Purfleet in Chequer ward.18 Hankyn Ostirlyng, amerced only four years later for the same offence and also as a seller of both English ale and continental beer, was almost certainly the same man. In the same year (1379), Owen, Making of King’s Lynn, 295–313: this transcript of a thirteenth-century list of members of the merchant guild of Lynn has errors and omissions, but suffices to demonstrate the ‘multifarious origins of the trading community of Lynn’. 12 King’s Lynn Borough Archives [hereafter KLBA], KL/C 5/1; CCR, 1313–18, p. 90. 13 CPR, 1324–7, p. 95; The Red Register of King’s Lynn, ed. Holcombe Ingleby (2 vols., King’s Lynn, 1919–22), i. 158. 14 Stuart Jenks, ‘Trade and Relations between Lynn and the Hanse in the Middle Ages’, in Essays in Hanseatic History: The King’s Lynn Symposium 1998, ed. Klaus Friedland and Paul Richards (Dereham, 2005), 98–100. 15 W.M. Ormrod, Bart Lambert and Jonathan Mackman, Immigrant England, 1300–1550 (Manchester, 2019), 12–14; Hansisches Urkundenbuch Band II, ed. Konstantin Höhlbaum (Halle, 1879), no. 170, pp. 74–5. 16 KLBA, KL/C 17/4–5. 17 KLBA, KL/C 17/3. 18 KLBA, KL/C 17/9. 11



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a Henry Esterlyng was also selling both ale and beer, as were six other men in the town and two women.19 After a gap of eleven years, leet rolls from 1391 and 1394 identify two sellers of ale and beer as ‘Duche’: John Bakker and Simond Duchesshe. Bakker may have been related to the Hanseatic merchant, John Bakker, whose ship, the Mary of Danzig, arrived in Lynn on 6 July 1396, carrying goods belonging to himself and another Hanseatic merchant: six barrels of beer, in addition to pitch and tar, steel, linen, ‘chalon’ yarn and fish.20 Customs accounts for Lynn and Boston in the 1380s and 1390s show that Bakker’s cargo was typical: beer arrived at both ports in the Wash in ships from the Baltic, along with iron, pitch and tar, boards, furs, linen, canvas, wax, fish and various wooden wares, from bowls to trestle tables.21 A taste for imported continental beer, as opposed to English ale, had developed very early in Lynn, more than a decade before the earliest sales of imported beer were documented in London.22 Seven men are first recorded as selling beer in Lynn in 1359, among them a Lynn merchant engaged in the Baltic trade called John Kempe,23 and beer was still being imported into Lynn with other goods from the Baltic in 1402.24 This continuity, in combination with the disappearance of the term ‘Easterling’, suggests that at least some of Lynn’s ‘Duche’ residents from the late fourteenth century onwards were immigrants from Prussia, rather than from the Low Countries or north-west Germany. The John Kempe of Lynn who was selling imported beer in 1359 was the future father-in-law of medieval Lynn’s best-known townswoman, Margery Kempe, whose Book provides an invaluable personal perspective on attitudes to the ‘Duche’.25 Born around 1373, Margery was the daughter of one of the town’s leading merchant-­ burgesses, John de Brunham. Around 1393, she married John Kempe junior, but, after having fourteen children, she persuaded him to agree to her leading a chaste life of religious devotion. Her Book is written in English, and much of the text passed through the head and hand of an Englishman whose grasp of English had been compromised by living in German-speaking Europe – this was almost certainly Margery’s son, also called John Kempe, who had settled in Danzig – before being rewritten and expanded in 1436 by an unnamed English priest in Lynn. A shorter second section, which mainly describes Margery’s last journey abroad, by ship to Danzig and back over land in 1433, was written down by the same priest in 1438. She was last recorded in Lynn in 1439.26 Margery encountered people she describes as ‘Dewche’ or ‘Duche’ not only in ‘Danske in Duchelond’, where she enjoyed ‘ryth good cher’, but also in Canterbury, near Jerusalem, in Rome and at home in Lynn, where her widowed ‘Dewche’ daughter-in-law lived with her for eighteen months before returning to Danzig.27 In none of these instances can her use of these words be positively linked with the Low Countries, through which she passed more than once, although the Book does tell us very little about those episodes, even about her first KLBA, KL/C 17/8/6. N.S.B. Gras, The Early English Customs System (Cambridge, MA, 1918), 439–40. 21 Ibid., 435–52, 526–53, 595–601; S.H. Rigby, The Overseas Trade of Boston in the Reign of Richard II (Lincoln Record Society, xciii, 2005), passim. 22 J.M. Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England (Oxford, 1996) 79–80. 23 KLBA, KL/C 17/6. 24 Gras, Early English Customs System, 555–6. 25 The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. S.B. Meech and H.E. Allen (EETS, original series, ccxii, 1940). 26 Ibid., 358–9. 27 Ibid., 29, 67, 82, 84, 95, 97–8, 225, 231. 19 20

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and longest stay in Zeeland, at Zierikzee, in 1413. The text of the whole Book contains nine references to ‘Duchelond’ or ‘Dewchlond’, eight to people described as ‘Dewche’ or ‘Duche’ men or women, and two to ‘Duche’ or ‘Dewch’ as a language. Unsurprisingly, several quotations from the Book are cited in the relevant entries in the Middle English Dictionary.28 Turning to more conventional archival sources, the mainly national ones accessible through the England’s Immigrants 1330–1550 database are of greatest value for the period beginning in 1440, the year of the first alien subsidy, but the borough of Lynn has two earlier series of records which name alien residents in the fifteenth century. These are near-annual memoranda of ‘fines’ – individually assessed sums of money in exchange for a concession, rather than the financial penalty implied in modern usage – imposed on the more prosperous aliens for licences to trade, beginning in 1421, and the records of the leet court, from which some earlier entries have already been cited. Both require some explanation of their character and coverage. The annual leet court for the borough belonged to the bishop of Norwich, but was administered by borough officials. It represented the lowest level of policing and local government, dealing with trading offences, public health risks, and anti-social behaviour. In each ward, two ‘headboroughs’ were tasked with making enquiries as to offences and public nuisances in their part of the town and then presenting them to the court. The resulting records are the most socially inclusive to survive from late medieval Lynn, and reflect a process which applied to immigrants equally with the indigenous English. Three consecutive rolls for the years 1425–7, for instance, name 1,300 people, which is equivalent to a third, at least, of the adult population of the borough. The series is far from complete, but between 1400 and 1434 there are nine complete (or almost complete) leet rolls, for the years 1400, 1403, 1404, 1422, 1425–7, 1430 and 1434, and incomplete rolls are extant from 1416 and 1420.29 No later rolls survive for the fifteenth century. The fines imposed on aliens trading in the borough were set more or less annually by the mayor and burgesses from 1421 to 1466, and are recorded in the borough’s hall rolls and books.30 Thanks to an especially conscientious – or risk-averse – common clerk named William Asshebourne, who kept exceptionally detailed records of town business from 1408 to 1424, the genesis of this regime is well documented. At a congregation in the guildhall on 8 January 1421, a group of merchants complained that aliens living in the town were undermining their business and robbing them of their profits, making a mockery of the town and borough of Lynn. They asked for this to be remedied through annual fines to be paid by aliens as a contribution towards the maintenance of the borough. In response, the mayor ordered the twenty-­seven common councillors (three from each of the nine wards) to compile lists of the tradespeople in their wards.31 The lists of tradesmen – no women were included – were copied out by Asshebourne in his record of the hall meeting held a few days Middle English Dictionary, ed. R.E. Lewis et al. (Ann Arbor, MI, 1952–2001): online edition in Middle English Compendium, ed. Frances McSparran et al. (Ann Arbor, 2000–18), http://quod.lib. umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/ [accessed Mar. 2020]. 29 The Duke of Norfolk’s archives at Arundel Castle [hereafter ACM], MD 1478 (leet roll, 1400); KLBA, KL/C 17/13–22 (leet rolls, 1403–34). The court records and procedures are described more fully in Maddock, ‘Society, Status and the Leet Court’, 200–10. 30 KLBA, KL/C 6/5; 7/2–4. 31 KLBA, KL/C 6/5, rot. 4d. 28



Encountering the ‘Duche’ in Margery Kempe’s Lynn 95

later, on 27 January.32 Across the whole borough, 124 men were named, and against each name was written the phrase ‘from fine this year’ (de Fine hoc anno). However, a sum of money is entered against only eighteen names, all but five of whom were aliens. Conversely, of fifteen aliens named, all but two were assessed as being in a position to pay sums ranging from 20d. to 20s. Clearly, the town’s governing body had decided to target those alien inhabitants who were thought to be prospering at the expense of the burgesses, but, at the same time, they seized this opportunity to put pressure on better-off indigenous traders to take up the burgess-ship. This explains why the majority of the 124 names appear to be of English inhabitants whom the councillors believed were in a position either to purchase their freedom or to pay for a licence to buy and sell. One of the five men named in New Conduit ward, William Costyne, a chapman, was noted as owing nothing for a licence because he had already become a burgess, and at least twenty more of the non-aliens on the list would do so eventually, most within the next year or two. John Colville of North End ward was assessed at 40s., precisely the same sum as the fee for purchasing burgess-ship, and a few months later, on 14 July, was duly admitted by purchase.33 Confirmation of this policy is provided by the existence of another list of potential burgesses, recorded on 3 April 1422: this includes many of the same English names, but excludes the aliens entirely.34 At this period, albeit by an unwritten rule, the franchise was not generally open to aliens, although an exception was made in at least one instance, described below. Just over two weeks later, on 17 February, a special session was held in the guildhall by the mayor alone, supported by the common clerk and the sergeant at mace. Twelve aliens who practised trades in Lynn were summoned in turn to be interviewed by the mayor in order to fix a settlement which would permit them to keep their shops open during the year beginning the previous Michaelmas (29 September 1420). Ten of the twelve had already been assessed on 27 January, but were presumably either unhappy with the decision made then (although seven of the nine assessments remained the same) or wanted to negotiate payment by instalments (this was agreed in four instances), while the two men who had not been named previously must have been identified as potentially eligible after that date. They bring the total number of aliens assessed in 1421 to seventeen. The level of compliance with this new regime appears to have been high: only one alien is recorded as resisting: a Duche broker, or dealer, called Albryght Broun refused to pay the 13s. 6d. at which he was assessed in January.35 He was given three days’ grace to reconsider, and may have used that time to move out of town, as he disappears thereafter from both leet and hall records. These assessments made in 1421 were precedents for a procedure which continued until 1466, when a last tranche of fines imposed on aliens was entered in one of the hall books.36 The list made in January 1421, however, is uniquely valuable because it is the only one arranged by ward. This not only enables us to see the distribution of alien artificers across the borough at that date, but also facilitates the identification of individuals in the more numerous entries relating to aliens in the leet court records, all of which share that arrangement. Fortuitously, the first decade in 34 35 36 32 33

KLBA, KL/C 6/5, rots. 5d–6d. KLBA, KL/C 6/5, rot. 15d. KLBA, KL/C 6/6, rot. 20. KLBA, KL/C 6/5, rot. 7. KLBA, KL/C 7/4, p. 231.

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which fines were levied on aliens also has the highest concentration of surviving leet records: the 1422 roll lacks only a small final section; those for the years 1425, 1426, 1427 and 1430 are all complete. This makes it possible to construct a richer picture of resident immigrants in the town from 1421 to 1430 than for any other decade in late medieval Lynn. Other boroughs had similar policies towards non-burgesses trading in their towns, but assessments for compositions with them are rare survivals, and the Lynn ones, relating exclusively to aliens, may be unique.37 The table of ‘Resident Aliens at Lynn, 1421–30’ [Table 1] logs all the aliens who can be identified with confidence as residing in Lynn at some point during those ten years. The criteria for inclusion are that a person should be positively identified as an alien, either by description (such as ‘Ducheman’), by having been subject at least once to an alien ‘fine’, or from an entry in the England’s Immigrants database, and that he or she is recorded as resident in Lynn at least once between 1421 and 1430. The entire series of alien fines and medieval leet rolls, however, have been searched for entries relating to these forty people, and the date spans in the column of ‘aliens’ names, descriptions and dates recorded’, a few of which extend well outside the 1420s, reflect this search. To guard against accidental exaggeration, the table does not include people bearing names which look alien, but who are not explicitly identified as such, and who may be descendants of first-generation immigrants. William Asshebourne, the borough’s assiduous common clerk, is again helpful in our understanding of this. The list of names from Chequer ward in his record of the hall meeting on 27 January 1421 contains eleven men, two of whom have similar surnames (or bynames): William Gresmon and Peter Gressemon.38 William Gresmon is described as ‘Duchemon’, but no sum was set against his name, presumably because he was considered to be too poor. Peter Gressemon’s name is written immediately under William’s, and is also followed by ‘Duchemon’, but Asshebourne’s pen has struck through that word. Peter was, nonetheless, one of the few denizen traders assessed for a fine, at 3s. 4d., so was thought to be better off than William. Indeed, Peter became a burgess of Lynn by purchase, at the usual fee of 40s., only a few months later, on 4 August, and that entry states that he was William Gresmon’s son.39 Peter was not alone in being a second-generation member of an immigrant family who became a burgess. Another example is James Nicholasson alias Patynmaker, who was described as ‘born in England of an alien father’, when he took out letters of denization in 1413. He may have begun by following his father’s trade, but he was a merchant by 1395, when he was admitted as a burgess.40 His father is likely to have been the Nicholas Patynmaker who was living in New Conduit ward in 1375; his mother, Katherine, was English, and James was born in Lynn.41 Given the relatively small numbers, it is important to eliminate as far as possible A list of privileges of freemen of Canterbury, c.1430, states that freemen ‘may exercise a craft and open windows without leave, whereas others must make agreement and come to terms with the chamber of the said city’: English Historical Documents Volume 4, 1327–1485, ed. A.R. Myers (1969), 569. Rolls of fines paid by non-freemen trading at Gloucester from 1380 to 1482, include ‘foreign’ non-residents, but not aliens: ‘Medieval Gloucester: Trade and Industry 1327–1547’, in VCH Glos., Volume 4, the City of Gloucester, ed. N.M. Herbert (1988), 41–54. 38 KLBA, KL/C 6/5, rot. 6. 39 KLBA, KL/C 6/5, rot. 16. 40 CPR, 1413–16, p. 138; Red Register, ed. Ingleby, ii. 12. 41 KLBA, KL/C 17/9; D.M. Owen, William Asshebourne’s Book (Norfolk Record Society, xlviii, 1981), 69–70 [a very summary calendar of KLBA, KL/C 10/2]. 37



Encountering the ‘Duche’ in Margery Kempe’s Lynn 97

the double counting which could result from the imprecise manner in which some individuals were described. Four are identified only by description: a ‘Ducheman Taylour’ living in a tenement belonging to Isabel Brunham (Margery Kempe’s mother or stepmother), assessed at 3s. 4d. in 1425; the ‘alien boulter living next to John Tylneye’, assessed at 20d. in 1429; the ‘cordwainer in Purfleet Street having a tall wife’, assessed at 20d. in 1429 and 1430; and the ‘tailor living next to John Monesson’, assessed at 3s. 4d. in 1430.42 In theory, the cordwainer and tailors, at least, might be the same individuals as others of those trades, but the fact that members of the borough’s governing group, which included ward representatives sitting as common councillors from 1418 onwards, were unable to recollect – or, perhaps, to pronounce – a name suggests that these unnamed men were not among the better off and longer-standing residents, such as John Monesson himself (a tailor recorded in Chequer ward from 1426 to 1442), whose names appear year after year. The most arresting feature of the table is the concentration of aliens in a single ward. Two-thirds of those who can be linked to a particular location lived in Chequer ward, an area extending some 660 feet from north to south and a similar distance from east to west. This partially mirrors the pattern in Great Yarmouth, where the ‘Duche’ were also concentrated in one area close to the quayside, although in Yarmouth they were at the southern end of the town, further away from the market place and parish church.43 In the much larger and more populous urban areas of Bristol, York and London, alien residents appear to have been more widely distributed, but were also much more numerous and practising a wider range of occupations than in Lynn.44 In London, Matthew Davies found that northern European craftsmen – the group which corresponds most closely with Lynn’s alien community – were drawn to cheaper, less central areas.45 That is not the case in Lynn, since Chequer ward was one of the wealthiest parts of the town.46 An explanation for this lies in the town’s peculiar geography and settlement pattern. As the maps of late medieval Lynn show, the developed area of streets inside the boundary of the borough was concentrated along the ‘Great River’: the eastern boundary followed the line of an ancient sea bank,47 but inside the town walls most of the eastern half of Lynn retained an open, even pastoral, character until the nineteenth century. The land available for settlement was, however, expanding westwards throughout the medieval period as a result of both natural changes and the deliberate deposit of sand and other materials.48 As the river-line shifted, the owners of properties along streets adjoining the river gradually gained enough new ground on what had originally been quays on the west side of their streets to build new houses there and let out their old ones to tenants. The timing of this shift along the Chequer, in particular, seems likely to have coincided with the influx of foreign craftsmen in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Aliens were not entitled to own property, so renting was their only option. KLBA, KL/C 7/2, pp. 119, 241, 289. Liddy and Lambert, ‘The Civic Franchise’, 130–1. 44 Ormrod et al., Immigrant England, 234–40. 45 Davies, ‘Aliens, Crafts and Guilds’, 131, 133. 46 Maddock, ‘Society, Status and the Leet Court’, 207, 218–19. 47 Helen Clarke and Alan Carter, Excavations in King’s Lynn 1963–1970 (Society for Medieval Archaeology, 1977), 432–4. 48 Trevor Ashwin and Alan Davison, An Historical Atlas of Norfolk (Chichester, 2005), 80–1. 42 43

Maps of late medieval Lynn. The shaded version (above) shows the locations of the nine wards, with the names they acquired in the early modern period: the medieval wards or constabularies were identified only by the (frequently changing) constables’ names.



Encountering the ‘Duche’ in Margery Kempe’s Lynn 99

The width of the street which would later be known as the Chequer was set out at fifty feet in late thirteenth-century episcopal licences to settle and build on its west side, on plots extending a further 270 feet from the street to the great river.49 A little over a century later, a royal licence for the acquisition by St. George’s guild of a site for its new guildhall in the Chequer in 1406 describes a tenement on the east side of the street and a quay opposite the tenement, on the west side.50 The guildhall was built on the ‘quay’ on the west side of the Chequer, suggesting that the building of new houses fronting the west side of that street was still in progress as late as the early fifteenth century. This does not mean that all the immigrants in Chequer ward necessarily lived along the east side of the Chequer itself: the William Gresmon discussed earlier, for example, had a house on the west side of Mercer Row. Although immigrants in this period could not be owner-occupiers, many did live as independent householders in rented tenements, and a distinction between householders and non-householders was a key feature of the national tax on aliens.51 In Lynn, twenty-five householders and eighteen non-householders were taxed in the first subsidy, in 1440.52 While the leet records do not identify householders explicitly, the single most common category of offence presented to the court was leaving household refuse or other waste in public streets, quays or fleets, and these imply that the person presented was the householder. On this basis, at least twenty of the forty aliens recorded as resident in Lynn between 1421 and 1430 were householders, and probably more, as not all householders were reported for refuse offences. All the alien non-householders taxed in Lynn in 1440 are described as servants, and servants in general are very poorly documented. If a similar ratio of servants to householders existed in the 1420s, it would be prudent to assume that at any one time, in addition to the alien residents named in the table, there would also have been up to twenty aliens living in the town as servants. Of the individuals named in Table 1, John Baudryk, alternatively named John Patynmaker, and sometimes also described as ‘Ducheman’, is of particular interest, because he appears to have been the only alien who was admitted as a burgess of Lynn between the early fourteenth and late fifteenth centuries.53 Born in Antwerp, he first appears in Chequer ward in 1416, among those presented to the leet court as a beer-seller and for leaving household waste on a common water-gate, while his wife, Alice, was reported to have been the victim of an assault by Marion, the wife of another alien, Bowne Ducheman, a cordwainer.54 In 1421, he was living in Sedgeford Lane ward, but from 1422 to 1434 is recorded in Trinity Hall ward.55 There he rented a dwelling on the west side of Briggegate from Robert Gyle, a hosier and burgess KLBA, KL/C 50/507, 508 (deeds to two adjoining tenements in an unnamed street identifiable as the Chequer from tenants’ names in a sequence matching a ‘Newland’ survey, c.1279); Elizabeth and Paul Rutledge, ‘King’s Lynn and Great Yarmouth: Two Thirteenth-Century Surveys’, Norfolk Archaeology, xxxvii (1978), 92–114. 50 KLBA, KL/C 57/41. 51 Ormrod et al., Immigrant England, 6. 52 England’s Immigrants 1330–1550 database. Five people resident in South Lynn, which lay outside the borough, have been excluded. 53 As already mentioned, Siglaf Susse of Gotland became a burgess before 1314; James Johnson, a shoemaker and Ducheman, was admitted in 1489–90: A Calendar of the Freemen of Lynn, 1292–1836 (Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society, 1913), 37, 69. 54 KLBA, KL/C 17/16. 55 KLBA, KL/C 6/5, rot. 6; 17/13, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22. 49

No. of aliens

2

0

1

0

3

Ward

North End

Kettlewell

Paradise

Jews Lane

New Conduit

Martin Ducheman tailor 1425; Peter Hardwareman 1427–36; Christopher Lanternmaker tenant of Thomas Worsted 1427–8

0

Arnald Orgynmaker 1427–9

0

William Conyng tailor Ducheman 1421; Roger Ducheman 1425–6

Aliens’ names, descriptions and dates recorded

Table 1. Resident Aliens at Lynn, 1421–30

1

0

0

0

2

Duche: nationality unknown

0

0

0

0

0

Duche: nationality identified

0

0

0

0

0

Not Duche: nationality identified

2

0

1

0

0

Not Duche: nationality unknown

1 hardwareman; 1 lanternmaker; 1 tailor

0

1 organ-maker

1 tailor; 1 not stated

Occupations

22

3

1

1

7

40

Chequer

Trinity Hall

Sedgeford Lane

Stonegate

Unknown

Totals

James Arnaldesson [born Schiedam] cordwainer 1421–36; unnamed ‘bulter’ living next to John Tylneye 1429; John Ducheman tailor tenant of Thomas Belleyeter 1425; unnamed Ducheman tailor tenant of Isabel Brunham 1425; James Johan shoemaker 1421; William a skinner in Damgate 1429–30; Bartholomew Taylour Ducheman 1429–32

Johan van Levin/Loveyn [Leuven] deychmon weaver 1421

John van Lyne [Leiden] weaver 1421–34

John Bawdryk/Patenmaker Ducheman [born Antwerp] admitted burgess of Lynn 1428; in Sedgeford Lane in 1421, but Trinity Hall from 1422, 1421–40; Joan Beerbrewer Duchewoman 1424-31; William Beerbrewer 1416–21

Gerard Boterman 1400–31; John Braban Ducheman 1421–2; Albryght Broun broker Ducheman 1416–21; William Brows/ Bruce [born Gouda] cordwainer 1421–48; William Combe cordwainer 1426–50; unnamed cordwainer with a tall wife in Purfleet Street 1429–30; Bowen/Baldwin Dochemon cordwainer 1416–34; Hugh Ducheman 1426; Matthew Ducheman 1426; James Gerard/Gerardson/Cordewaner Ducheman 1416–41; John Gerard/ Gerardson cordwainer Ducheman 1421–6; William Gresmon Ducheman 1400–26; Deryk Haburdassher Ducheman 1416–25; Godfrey Johnsone cordwainer Ducheman 1422–31; Lodewyk Johnsone scourer Ducheman 1427–43; John Monyson/Monson/ Mundesson tailor [born Meerhout] 1426–42; Matthew Nicolasson Ducheman lanternmaker 1426–7; William Rose shoemaker Dochemon 1421; John Selonder Ducheman tailor 1403–34; John Symkynnison/Flemyng 1425–7; Godfrey Taylour Ducheman 1422; unnamed tailor living next to John Monessone 1430

20

3

0

0

1 Duchewoman

13

1 Brabanter;1 Fleming; 1 Hollander

1 Hollander

4

0

5

1 Hollander

1 Brabanter 0

0

1 Brabanter 0

1 Brabanter; 1 Zeelander

11

3

0

0

1

4

2 cordwainers/ shoemakers; 1 boulter; 1 skinner; 3 tailors

1 weaver

1 weaver

2 brewers; 1 patten-maker

1 broker; 1 ‘butterman’; 8 cordwainers/ shoemakers; 1 ‘greaseman’; 1 haberdasher; 1 lantern-maker; 1 scourer of clothes; 4 tailors; 4 not stated

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of Lynn, keeping a succession of animals which created public nuisances either by straying onto the street or from their dung: a cow in 1425, a goat in 1426, and a cow, boar and sow in 1430. By 1430 he had also taken up brewing for sale outside his household. The fines for which he was assessed between 1421 and 1428 ranged from 6s. 8d. up to 20s. by February 1428, suggesting that he was becoming increasingly prosperous, and at a hall meeting on 21 April 1428 the town’s governing body agreed in principle that John Patynmaker alias Baudryk should be allowed to enter into the liberty for a payment of £4.56 No mention was made of his being an alien, despite his being required to pay twice the usual sum of 40s., and the record of his admission, on 5 May, is similarly coy, simply noting the fine as £4 without explanation. His status as an alien is confirmed by his taking of the oath of fealty in 1436, and he was still alive in 1440, when his name appears in a list of burgesses, although he appears to have escaped assessment for the first alien subsidy in the same year.57 Unlike Baudryk, four men in Table 1 are identifiable in the 1440 subsidy return: John Monyson or Mundesson, tailor, and three cordwainers, William Brows, William Combe and James Gerardson. All four were householders and long-term residents of Chequer ward; all four were subject to the borough’s alien fines over an extended period. They also represent the two dominant trades among Lynn’s immigrant community in the first half of the fifteenth century: ten of the forty resident aliens were shoemakers; nine were tailors. John Monyson or Mundesson, the tailor, first appears in Chequer ward as a seller of ale and beer (most craftsmen, whether English or alien, sold ale or beer in addition to practising their specialist trades), as well as for leaving rubbish, in 1426 and 1427; in the latter year he was also amerced 2s. for keeping a brothel and supporting prostitutes in his house.58 His antisocial activities clearly tried the patience of the ward headboroughs: in 1430 they presented him as a nightwalker and eavesdropper, a dice player, a harbourer of prostitutes and thieves, for having been frequently presented for these offences without mending his ways, and for failing to appear at the leet court.59 His amercement, 6s. 10d., was the second highest in Chequer ward that year. The last extant leet roll, 1434, has a similar catalogue of offences, for which he was amerced 4s.: harbouring and supporting thieves and dishonest persons, as a result of which affrays broke out at night, in addition to his usual sales of ale and beer and for refuse.60 His assessments for alien fines, like his amercements in the leet court, were set at levels which suggests his tailoring and ancillary enterprises were doing well: first recorded in 1428 at 6s. 8d., he paid the highest sum, 26s. 8d., in 1431. Thereafter there was a gradual decline to 3s. 4d. in 1442, and he had died by 1447, when his widow, evidently also an alien, was assessed at 40d.61 In none of these records is he described as ‘Duche’, but the list of men taking the oath of fealty in 1436 identifies him as a Brabanter, born in Meroute.62 He was taxed as a

58 59 60 61 62 56 57

KLBA, KL/C 6/5, rot. 6; 7/2, pp. 178, 190, 193. CPR, 1429–36, p. 560; Calendar of Freemen, 301. KLBA, KL/C 17/18, 19. KLBA, KL/C 17/21. KLBA, KL/C 17/22. KLBA, KL/C 7/2, 3. CPR, 1429–36, p. 583.



Encountering the ‘Duche’ in Margery Kempe’s Lynn 103

householder in the 1440 alien subsidy, but, unlike the three cordwainers, there is no mention of his having an alien servant.63 William Brows (variants of his name include Brounce, Brouns, Brouse and Bruce), cordwainer, was one of the twelve men interviewed by the mayor on 17 February 1421, when he agreed to pay 6s. 8d. for a licence to buy and sell.64 Thereafter, he appears in every list of aliens subject to fines until 1448, but his assessment rose from 6s. 8d. to 10s. in 1429 and to 13s. 4d. in 1433, reaching a peak of 16s. 8d. in 1436. Thereafter, it declined again: back to 13s. 4d. in 1437; to 10s. in 1441; 6s. 8d. in 1447 and only 12d. in 1448.65 These changes suggest that his business was already well established in 1421, but still growing; by 1448 it looks as though Brows was at the end of his career, and he may have died by 14 May 1449, the date of the first list of fines in which his name does not appear. Leet records show that he was in Chequer ward by 1422, when he was presented for selling ale against the assize and for depositing waste.66 In 1425, he was amerced the relatively substantial sum of 2s. for making and selling shoes made of crude leather supplied by a tanner from Wisbech, as well as for waste and regrating ale.67 He was still said to be making shoes from unsuitable leather in 1426.68 In none of these entries is he described as ‘Duche’, and he must be the William Brous, born in Tregowe (Gouda) in Holland who took the oath of fealty in 1436, although that record also notes him, presumably in error, as a resident of South Lynn.69 In 1440, he is named as William Brouns, shoemaker, from Holland, and his live-in alien servant, John, was taxed as a non-householder.70 William Combe first appears in leet records in 1426 as William Coome Ducheman, amerced 18d. for selling shoes made of all kinds of skins, for waste, and for keeping a common brothel in his house in Chequer ward.71 The following year, he was retailing both ale and beer, again in Chequer ward, although by 1434 he had moved to Trinity Hall ward.72 He was first assessed for a fine in 1428, at 3s. 4d., and is named in every list thereafter up to 1450.73 Like William Brows, his highest assessment was 13s. 4d., but Combe’s career had more than one peak: he paid this sum most years from 1433 to 1436, and again in 1447. Also like Brows, Combe had an alien servant in 1440: a man named Henry Frese.74 The third shoemaker is James Gerard or Gerardson, alternatively known as James Cordewaner, James Shoemaker and James Ducheman. He was presented to the leet court for dumping household waste in Chequer ward in 1416 and 1422 and also as an ale-seller in the latter year.75 In the next five surviving leet rolls, he was named successively as James Gerard Ducheman (1425), James Gerardson cord-

Owen, Making of King’s Lynn, 458. KLBA, KL/C 6/5, rot. 7. 65 542 KLBA, KL/C 7/2, 3. 66 KLBA, KL/C 17/13. 67 KLBA, KL/C 17/18. 68 KLBA, KL/C 17/19. 69 CPR, 1429–36, p. 555. 70 Owen, Making of King’s Lynn, 458. 71 KLBA, KL/C 17/19. 72 KLBA, KL/C 17/20, 22. 73 KLBA, KL/C 7/2, 3. 74 Owen, Making of King’s Lynn, 458. 75 KLBA, KL/C 17/13, 16. 63 64

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wainer (1426–7), James Shomaker (1430) and then again as James Gerard (1434).76 He appears either as James Cordewaner or as James Ducheman every year in the fines assessment from 1431 to 1441, assessed at between 6s. 8d. and 16s. 8d.77 The first alien subsidy in 1440 also records him as James Ducheman, and names his alien servant as Richard Pers.78 Neither James Gerardson nor William Combe are recorded as taking the oath of fealty in 1436, which suggests that their place of origin lay beyond the Low Countries. The ten immigrant cordwainers of whom we have records between 1421 and 1430 were not only practising the dominant trade among Lynn’s resident aliens; they were also even more densely concentrated in Chequer ward than other alien craftsmen. As the table of cordwainers at Lynn, 1421–30 [Table 2], shows, the aliens outnumbered the English in that ward. Across the borough as a whole, however, there were almost three times as many English as immigrant shoemakers, the majority of them based either in Kettlewell ward, which was Lynn’s main industrial zone, or in one of the other eastern wards north of the Purfleet. As with the table of resident aliens, the dates against the cordwainers’ names indicate the years of the earliest and latest records in which their names have been identified. Some of these English artificers had found a new political voice in the previous decade, and were in the process of acquiring a heightened status which could have affected their attitude to their immigrant rivals. Most of the twenty-seven indigenous cordwainers never became burgesses of Lynn, but eight did, five of them (Nicholas Chirche, John Cokfeld, John Draper, William Wesenham and John Wottone) in unique circumstances in 1412–15.79 Nicholas Cotte and John Kyngestone purchased their burgess-ships in 1431 and 1440, and William Connesby was also a burgess by 1440.80 During a period of internal conflict lasting more than a decade, but at its most intense between 1411 and 1416, better-off artificers in Lynn found common cause with some merchant-burgesses who were outside the ruling elite, campaigning against what they considered high-handedness and financial maladministration by five mayors who had been in office from 1399 to 1406, together with the merchant guild’s alderman in those years (Margery Kempe’s father, John de Brunham).81 A reformist mayor was elected in 1411, and on 27 August 1412, two days before the next election, 112 artificers were admitted as burgesses on a single day without the normal procedures or committing themselves to pay the purchase fee of 40s. More followed, and in all more than 150 artificers entered the liberty between 1412 and 1415, which may very nearly have doubled the total number of burgesses. A radical new constitution was introduced in 1412, then abandoned in 1416, but longer-lasting reforms followed. From 1418, the mayor’s council of twenty-four jurats was supplemented by a common council of twenty-seven burgesses, a forum which gave a political voice, and political experience, to a wider circle of burgesses, both merchants KLBA, KL/C 17/18–22. KLBA, KL/C 7/2, 3. 78 Owen, Making of King’s Lynn, 458. 79 Ibid., 395. 80 Calendar of Freemen, 39, 44, 301. 81 Two recent narratives and assessments of this period of conflict in Lynn are by Anthony Goodman, Margery Kempe and Her World (Harlow, 2002), 35–48, who notes the involvement of well-to-do artificers in riots and disturbances several years earlier, and Kate Parker, ‘A Little Local Difficulty: Lynn and the Lancastrian Usurpation’, in Medieval East Anglia, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill (Woodbridge, 2005), 115–29. 76 77

No.

0

9

1

6

Ward

North End

Kettlewell

Paradise

Jews Lane

—

—

—

—

Alien cordwainers, 1421–30

Table 2: Alien and English Cordwainers at Lynn, 1421–30

John Cokfeld 1391–1424 William Connesby 1421–40 John Kenston 1425–7 John Kyngestone 1430–50 Thomas Morys 1420–1 John Reymes 1422

Andrew Cordwanere 1421

Nicholas Alday 1434 William Brigge 1427–30 Robert Cordwaner 1422–5 Richard Fysshere 1422–34 Thomas Grym 1426 John Morynge 1422–34 John Sayer 1425–7 William Wesenham 1400–34 John Wytton/Wottone 1412–27

—

Indigenous cordwainers, 1421–30

No.

0

9

1

6

Ward

North End

Kettlewell

Paradise

Jews Lane

—

—

—

—

Alien cordwainers, 1421–30

Table 2: Alien and English Cordwainers at Lynn, 1421–30 (concluded)

John Cokfeld 1391–1424 William Connesby 1421–40 John Kenston 1425–7 John Kyngestone 1430–50 Thomas Morys 1420–1 John Reymes 1422

Andrew Cordwanere 1421

Nicholas Alday 1434 William Brigge 1427–30 Robert Cordwaner 1422–5 Richard Fysshere 1422–34 Thomas Grym 1426 John Morynge 1422–34 John Sayer 1425–7 William Wesenham 1400–34 John Wytton/Wottone 1412–27

—

Indigenous cordwainers, 1421–30

3

13

2

1

0

2

37

New Conduit

Chequer

Trinity Hall

Sedgeford Lane

Stonegate

Unknown

Totals

10

James Arnaldesson 1421–36 James Johan 1421

—

—

—

William Brows 1421–48 William Combe 1426–50 Bowen/Baldwin Ducheman 1416–34 unnamed cordwainer with a ‘tall wife’ in Purfleet Street 1429–30 James Gerardson Ducheman, 1416–41 John Gerardson Ducheman 1421–6 Godfrey Johnsone Ducheman 1422–31 William Rose Ducheman 1421

—

27

—

—

John Skulthorpe 1416–34

Nicholas Cotte alias Palmer 1422–40 John Godyng 1416–30

Thomas Botkysham 1403–30 Simon Burmond 1425–41 Nicholas Chirche 1412–36 John Draper 1412–34 Walter Helgey 1430–4

John Aylmere 1404–26 Martin Cordwaner 1422–5 Richard Sweetman 1430

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and artificers. Lynn had always been a town created by and for merchants: artificers – weavers, cordwainers, tailors, mercers, drapers, goldsmiths, bakers, butchers and so on – could become burgesses by purchase, but they had not been equal in status: only a merchant-burgess would be considered for any of the higher civic offices, let alone the mayoralty. By 1436, however, Lynn had its first mayor who was not a merchant-burgess in the traditional mould.82 Of the five indigenous cordwainers who became burgesses in 1412–15, four (John Cokfeld, John Draper, William Wesenham and John Wottone) were among the 112 men admitted on 27 August 1412.83 The fifth, Nicholas Chirche, was admitted at an unrecorded date in the next year or so, but he was no less of an activist. He and John Draper were among forty-nine artificers bound by king’s bench in 1416 in the sum of forty marks to keep the peace, following a popular revolt in October 1415 against the crown’s imposition as mayor of Thomas Hunte, a man associated with the old regime.84 Chirche participated in most of the annual elections to the common council between 1419 and 1436, while Cokfeld, Draper and Wesenham are all recorded as electors at least once.85 In a further sign of their determination to raise the status of the artificers, Nicholas Chirche, William Wesenham and John Wottone were among seventy-three artificer-burgesses who came into the guildhall on 18 January 1425 to put their case to the mayor for equality with the merchants. Negotiations were put in hand, and a few days later the mayor persuaded the twenty-four jurats to agree to a new form of admission for the apprentices of artificers. Henceforth, they were to have the right of admission as burgesses after the satisfactory completion of their terms and without paying a fee: a privilege which had always been taken for granted by merchants and their apprentices.86 This change was much more than a formality, or a financial saving for apprentices who wanted to become burgesses: it was a grudging recognition of at least nominal equality for a class of men described by one rich merchant in 1412 as ‘cobblers, tailors, etc.; unfit people, twenty of them not worth a penny’.87 We may appear to have strayed from the alien cordwainers, but the involvement of some of their English counterparts in the agitation and occasional violence of the turbulent years from 1411 to 1416, fueled by a sense of grievance and entitlement, may help to explain why at least one of the five cordwainers who became burgesses in 1412–15 might not only feel resentful of his immigrant rivals, but take direct action. This was John Draper, one of the cordwainers living in Chequer ward, where alien cordwainers were among his neighbours. On 9 August 1424, he was summoned to the guildhall because he had been heard boasting that all the shoemakers of the German language (de lingua Theutonica) living in the town of Lynn would be outlawed at his suit for both felony and treason. He admitted that he had, indeed, started a lawsuit in London with this intention, and claimed that three other men were involved. He named them as Simon Burmond (another cordwainer in Chequer ward), Robert Walsokyn (described in the hall book as a shoemaker, but leet records, 1422– Maddock, ‘Society, Status and the Leet Court’, 211–12. List of burgesses admitted, 1412, in KLBA, KL/C 39/48. 84 Goodman, Margery Kempe, 44–5; CPR, 1413–16, p. 411; TNA, KB 9/188, rot. 9. 85 KLBA, KL/C 6/4–6; 7/ 2, 3. 86 KLBA, KL/C 7/2, pp. 31–3. 87 KLBA KL/C 6/3 m. 2. These words ‘Sutores taillours etc. inhabiles, xxti non de valor unius denarii’ were reportedly spoken by John Wentworth to the bishop of Norwich. 82 83



Encountering the ‘Duche’ in Margery Kempe’s Lynn 109

30, show that he was a glover based in Sedgeford Lane ward) and a shoemaker called Sutton from South Lynn, which lay outside the borough’s jurisdiction.88 The sergeant at mace was despatched to fetch Burmond, who was interrogated by the mayor and swore on the gospels that he knew nothing about the matter. He was kept in custody while Walsokyn was similarly sent for. He, too, declared under oath that he had never been consulted, but, after being made to swear a second time, confessed that he did have some knowledge of the affair. After Walsokyn had left, Burmond was brought back. This time, he was made to answer questions with John Draper present: he finally admitted that he was involved and had perjured himself by denying it. The mayor then took the two aside into a separate chamber and extracted a confession that Draper and the others had acted out of malice. After much discussion, the congregation decided that Draper, Burmond and Walsokyn must provide guarantees that they would comply with whatever the mayor and community ordered. Draper was to be bound in the sum of £40, the others £20, and they and their pledges went to the mayor’s house that afternoon to seal their obligations in writing. Draper and his accomplices were also ordered to ride to London at their own expense to withdraw the lawsuit and ensure that the German shoemakers were indemnified against prosecution.89 No trace of a suit initiated by Draper has been found in records of the court of king’s bench nor in the court of common pleas, and it seems likely that he was bluffing.90 Nonetheless, the mayor and his colleagues clearly took his claim seriously, and were determined to protect the town’s reputation. The terms of the sealed bonds of obligation are not stated, but they must have been formulated with a view to preventing any recurrence of similar behaviour in future, because, almost four years later, Draper was in prison and his £40 bond was cited as the reason. His wife came to the guildhall in 1428 to plead for her husband’s release, and offered the names of three fellow cordwainers as pledges for Draper’s future compliance, but her plea failed: perhaps the names she suggested were less than reassuring, as they included Nicholas Chirche and Simon Burmond; the third was John Skulthorpe. Not until 1429 was her husband set free, after Draper himself sent a note from prison begging for his liberty and promising not to harass or behave maliciously towards any member of the community.91 This unusual episode is an extreme example of anti-immigrant sentiment in Lynn; it is harder to judge whether the occasional complaints about substandard workmanship by alien shoemakers had a xenophobic component. The established procedure for dealing with trading offences was by presentment to the annual leet court, and the example of William Brows, who sold shoes made from leather supplied by a dodgy tanner, has already been mentioned. Three other alien cordwainers from Chequer ward (William Combe, James Gerardson and Godfrey Johnsone) were also presented in the mid-1420s for selling shoes made of substandard leather. No English cordwainers are named for similar offences in the same period, nor indeed in any of the surviving leet rolls but one. Undated, but from the early 1360s, that particular record has an exceptional number of presentments of tanners, cordwainers and glovers for

90 91 88 89

KLBA, KL/C 7/2, p. 82. KLBA, KL/C 7/2, pp. 82–3. TNA, KB 27/652–3 (Easter and Trin. 1424); CP 40/654 (Trin. 1424). KLBA, KL/C 7/2, pp. 204, 207, 241.

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sales of inadequately tanned leather, suggesting that the headboroughs had been instructed to target the leather-working industries that year.92 From the early fifteenth century, the leet court’s role in maintaining trading standards was increasingly supplemented by regulations imposed on an ad hoc basis by the mayor and community. In 1419, a complaint was made about an alien cordwainer named Gerard Broun: the single leet entry for him, in 1416, describes him as a ‘Ducheman’ and shows that he was living in Sedgeford Lane ward.93 Broun was summoned to the guildhall because he had been accused by indigenous leather-­dressers of making shoes out of horse-hide. He arrived holding a written text – perhaps because he was not fluent in English, or was wary of being caught out – which William Asshebourne copied into the hall record: Reverent sire and maistre, I, Gerard Broun, Cordwaner, declare befor ʒowe and alle good men þat there as I am acused be men of my Crafte þat I shuld have maket schon of horsledere in desceyt of þe Kynges peple agayn þe ordinance of þe Craft. Sire hereto I answere þat I made neuer noon but, sire, þer come to me a preest of Norway þat sang messe atte seinte Margareteʒ of Lenne and preyed me þat I shuld by to hym ij hors hides to make of [them] i gret male [a bag or pouch] and so I dede and whan I hadd boght hem he preeyd me leve and make no male, but þat I shuld of þat on[e] hyde make vj peyr Shon and þan men of my Craft said to me þat I shuld be blamed if I made any. And so I lefte and made noone. And, sire, I have had seruauntʒ, hired men, let hem be sworn and charged if ever I made any. And also I have made shone to Thoresby, Ploqet, John Brekerope and to John Bury. Let be enquered of hem if þe shon were not able. I wil be redresset as ʒe will awardyn in alle degree.94 The four men named by Broun as satisfied customers were all burgesses of Lynn: John Thoresby and Thomas Ploqet were also constables of their wards (Trinity Hall and Stonegate) and among the twenty-four jurats, while John Brekerope was a common councillor. Thoresby was present in the hall that day, but Ploqet and Brekerope were both absent, and although Gerard agreed to submit to the judgment of the mayor and community, a decision was deferred because there were not many burgesses present and to enable the six pairs of shoes made from horse-leather to be searched for. Sadly, no further mention was made of the matter in the hall roll, so the outcome is unknown. The overwhelming majority of immigrants recorded as living in Lynn in the early fifteenth century were men. Many of them, like James Nicholasson’s father, married English women, mirroring the experience of Margery Kempe’s son, who settled in Danzig and married a Duche woman. The forty resident aliens recorded at Lynn between 1421 and 1430 [Table 1] include only one woman: Joan Beerbrewer Duchewoman, in Trinity Hall ward. She first appears in the list of alien fines in 1424, when she was assessed at 13s. 4d. – twice as much as any of the six men subject KLBA, KL/C 17/7. KLBA, KL/C 17/16. 94 KLBA, KL/C 6/4, rot. 15. 92 93



Encountering the ‘Duche’ in Margery Kempe’s Lynn 111

to fines that year.95 Given that William Beerbrewer, also in Trinity Hall ward, was assessed at 20s. in the previous (and first) list, in 1421, and then disappears from the records, it is likely that Joan was William’s widow, and that she had been in the town since at least 1416, when William was amerced a substantial 8s. 8d. at the leet court for brewing and selling ale.96 If he died between 1421 and the next assessment for fines (February 1424), and Joan took over as his widow, that would explain her entry at such a high level. She continues to appear among the aliens fined for a few more years, paying 10s. in 1425 and 1428, 13s. 4d. in 1429, and 6s. 8d. in 1430 and 1431.97 Inexplicably, given that she was brewing and selling ale or beer, she is not mentioned in the surviving leet court rolls, except in 1425, when she was presented for assaulting a man named William de Hull and drawing blood.98 ***

Great Yarmouth’s Duche inhabitants have been identified by Christian Liddy and Bart Lambert as overwhelmingly from the Low Countries,99 but the picture is much less clear in Lynn. The use of ‘Docheman’ and ‘Easterling’ as alternative ways of describing one man (the Hankyn Docheman alias Ostirlyng mentioned earlier) in the 1370s, combined with the disappearance from records written after 1379 of the word ‘Easterling’, suggests that ‘Duche’ or ‘Doche’ may simply have replaced it in Lynn as a term to describe German-speaking people from the Baltic region. ‘Easterling’ did recur, but not until almost a century later, when a guildhall memorandum of 1476 refers to the ‘merchants of the Hanse called Easterlings residing at Lynn in the Steelyard there’.100 In Margery Kempe’s lifetime, Germans from the Baltic were known in Lynn, albeit not exclusively so, as ‘Duche’ and Margery’s own son, much of whose education must have taken place in Danzig, was said to have written in a blend of both languages (‘neithyr good Englysch ne Dewch’).101 The close association between ‘Danske’, ‘Pruce’ and ‘Dewchelonde’ in her Book also suggests that the resonance of the word ‘Duche’ at Lynn was much closer to ‘Deutsch’ than to the modern ‘Dutch’. While the ‘Duche’ label eludes unambiguous definition, we can draw some definite conclusions about the nature of Lynn’s alien community during Margery Kempe’s lifetime. In a change from the town’s initial centuries of rapid growth, when merchants from overseas were able to settle and flourish in Lynn, overseas immigrants from the mid fourteenth century onwards were artificers and servants, arriving mainly from northern continental Europe. Shoemaking and tailoring were the dominant trades among them, and most of those who were householders took up residence in the streets closest to the river, especially in Chequer ward, rather than in streets where the majority of English craftsmen were based. There were occasional tensions over trading standards and practices, but when they escalated to outright hostility the borough authorities clamped down firmly. As in Yarmouth, the alien craftsmen shared with their indigenous counterparts the 97 98 99

KLBA, KL/C 7/2, p. 44. KLBA, KL/C 6/5, rots. 6–7; KL/C 17/16. KLBA, KL/C 7/2, pp. 54, 119, 178, 241; 7/3, f. 7v. KLBA, KL/C 17/18. Liddy and Lambert, ‘The Civic Franchise’, 130. 100 KLBA, KL/C 7/4, p. 357. 101 Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Meech and Allen, 4. 95 96

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status of outsiders in relation to the borough’s governing group. In Lynn, this had consisted entirely of the wealthiest merchant-burgesses – men like Margery Kempe’s father – until a wave of protests brought about constitutional changes in the first quarter of the fifteenth century. By 1425, the number of burgesses had dramatically increased, a common council provided a new entry point into town government, and there was at least nominal equality of opportunity among those willing and able to become burgesses. Having ceased to enjoy exclusive access to power, the merchants were less tolerant of other commercial operators whom they regarded as failing to pull their weight: hence the shifts in policy towards artificers in general and aliens in particular. Artificers who had newly taken on the obligations of burgess-ship are likely to have had a similar sensitivity towards non-burgesses whom they saw as taking unfair advantage of opportunities to trade in the town. In this context, the targeting of the most successful alien craftsmen for financial contributions to the common purse was a measure likely to appeal to all burgesses, merchant and artificer alike, and it appears not to have been resisted by the overwhelming majority of aliens. Having already, however reluctantly, opened the franchise more fully to the town’s English artificers, the borough’s governing elite was also prepared to admit as a burgess at least one who was a first-generation immigrant artificer – John Baudryk the patten-maker – albeit at twice the usual fee. Lynn’s merchant-burgesses had already become accustomed to drinking Duche beer, letting houses to Duche craftsmen and, unless Gerard Broun was bluffing, buying shoes from Duche shoemakers. They also, by 1428, felt able to extend the rights and obligations of burgess-ship to a Duche craftsman who had prospered in their town.

‘C’EST LE BEAULTÉ DE CASTILLE ET D’ESPAIGNE, QUI LE SOLEIL CLER D’AUSTRICHE ACCOMPAIGNE’: JEAN MOLINET MAKES THE HABSBURGS BURGUNDIAN Catherine Emerson

Jean Molinet wrote three poems to celebrate the births of two children in the Habsburg family, Lienor (born in July 1498) and Charles (in February 1500), the eldest children of Philippe le Beau, duke of Burgundy. The three poems, La Nativité Madame Lienor, La Tres desirée et prouffitable naissance de Charles d’Austrice, and Sur la nativité Monseigneur le Duc Charles, form a series of three in the author’s Faictz et Dictz in the edition produced by Noël Dupire, but were not placed together in this way in the manuscripts on which the edition was based.1 Dupire’s decision to group Molinet’s poems by genre places this group of occasional poems in the same category, while the nature of occasional poetry makes their dating and arrangement in chronological order very straightforward, creating a series in the modern critical edition. Read together, the three poems present a view of Habsburg wealth depicting the new-born infants primarily as inheritors of Classical Antiquity, the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament respectively. This wealth is not only cultural, but also territorial and linguistic, as the poet situates the birth of each child in the context of popular rejoicing in the lands ruled by her or his father. Molinet does this whilst using poetic strategies that are recognisably Burgundian to present continuity between the pre-1477 Valois regime and contemporary Habsburg rule. In so doing, he suggests that Habsburg government is a natural development for those territories and that the birth of these children represents a fulfilment of a divine plan that brings to an end the trauma of 1477. At the time, the events of 1477 in the Burgundian Netherlands must have seemed to mark a cataclysm in the established political order of the region. From its origins in the gift of the duchy by Jean II, king of France, to his son Philippe in 1363, four generations of Valois dukes had, by conquest, marriage and good fortune, built a Jean Molinet, Les Faictz et Dictz de Jean Molinet, ed. Noël Dupire (3 vols., Paris, 1936–9) i. 347–61. Manuscript references are given in Dupire’s footnotes. His base manuscript, A, Tournai, 105, was destroyed in shelling in 1940. According to Dupire the poems were written on ff. 9v, 132v and 206v of the A manuscript, and on ff. 43v, 45 and 4 of manuscript B (Arras 692). The latter does not appear to be the same manuscript as Arras, Bibliothèque Municipale 619, a sixteenth-century manuscript which presents a different recension of Molinet’s poems.

1

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multilingual political unit that some commentators have regarded as a state.2 As well as the historical centre of the duchy around Dijon, the dukes of Burgundy controlled territory in the north, including Luxemburg and Brussels, and extending as far as Amsterdam. This meant that in some places their overlord ‒ the ultimate source of authority in their lands ‒ was not the king of France but the Holy Roman Emperor. This might have been a weakness in their position had it not been for the astonishing wealth of the dukes of Burgundy, derived from the natural resources of their territories, the trade of the northern towns, and the craft skills of the inhabitants. As a consequence, dukes could wield considerable political power and conduct a lifestyle which was lavish by the standards of the day. The penultimate Valois duke of Burgundy, Philippe le Bon, in particular, was a significant patron of art, architecture, music and literature. His library, containing multiple illustrated and illuminated manuscripts, now forms the core of the manuscript collection of the Belgian National Library.3 In this way, the duke not only enjoyed the fruits of his power during his lifetime, but assured its reputation for years to come. This situation changed abruptly in 1477 when Philippe’s only legitimate child and successor, Duke Charles (referred to in English consistently as ‘the Bold’, but variously in French as ‘Le Téméraire’ or ‘Le Hardi’) was killed at the battle of Nancy.4 A more or less constant aim of Charles’s policy had been to strengthen his position in relation to the kingdoms around him, primarily by attempting to unite disparate territories and create a contiguous Burgundian zone. The risks inherent in this offensive strategy were perhaps only fully revealed when the duke was killed, leaving only his twenty-year-old daughter Marie to succeed him. Charles had not been expected to meet his death at Nancy, and his intimate servant Olivier de La Marche reported that many people actually denied that he had died, indicating the extent to which the news came as a shock: ‘aucungs ont voulu dire que le duc n’estoit pas mort à celle journée, mais si fut’.5 The period that followed has been aptly called by Eric Bousmar a ‘grave crise politique et militaire’.6 Since the duchy of Burgundy itself was an apanage, that is to say a personal gift from the French crown to a family member, it could not be inherited by a woman. France could not therefore recognise Marie as Charles’s heir, and the king, Louis XI, reclaimed the historically Burgundian territories, also making military incursions into those northern territories where he was overlord. Bousmar reminds us that this crisis was The leading work of scholarship which takes this approach remains Richard Vaughan’s four-part history, first published in 1963–73 and reissued with updated scholarly apparatus in 2002. The first volume in the series, Philip the Bold: The Formation of the Burgundian State (Woodbridge, 2002), sets the tone for Vaughan’s approach, which the author summarized in his administrative history of the period, Valois Burgundy (1975). For a review of current scholarship, see Frederik Buylaert, ‘Constructing and Deconstructing the “State”: The Case of the Low Countries’, Low Countries Historical Review, cxxxii (2017), 75–9. 3 The Library of the Dukes of Burgundy, ed. Bernard Bousmanne and Elena Savini (Turnhout, 2020). 4 For a discussion of the French titles used to refer to Duke Charles, see Jean-Marie Cauchies, ‘Charles de Bourgogne: Hardi ou téméraire?’, in his Louis XI et Charles le Hardi: De Péronne à Nancy 1468– 1477: Le Conflit (Brussels, 1996), 147–59. 5 Olivier de La Marche, Mémoires, ed. Henri Beaune and Jean d’Arbaumont (4 vols., Paris, 1883–8), iii. 240. ‘Some people have wanted to suggest that the duke did not die on that day, but it was the case.’ All translations are my own unless stated otherwise. 6 Eric Bousmar, ‘Duchesse de Bourgogne ou “povre desolée pucelle”? Marie face à Louis XI dans les chapitres 45 et 46 des Chroniques de Jean Molinet’, in Jean Molinet et Son Temps, ed. Jean Devaux, Estelle Doudet and Élodie Lecuppre-Desjardin (Turnhout, 2013), 97–113, at 97. 2



Jean Molinet Makes the Habsburgs Burgundian 115

deepened by the fact that many of the duke’s leading military men had been taken captive at Nancy and some chose to ally themselves to France following Charles’s death, including the duke’s own half-brother, the man who has come to be known as Anthony, Great Bastard of Burgundy. The fact that Bousmar describes these decisions as ‘defections’ tells us something about the position from which most Burgundian historiography has been written. This is principally the result of the stance taken by contemporary writers, many of whom, including several attached to the court, notably Olivier de La Marche and Jean Molinet, remained in attendance on Charles’s daughter Marie. It is true that Philippe de Commynes made the transition from the Burgundian to the French court, but he did so before Charles’s death and scholars are still debating whether he really viewed it as a passage from one natural lord to another (as he presented it) or whether he only said this to disguise his treason.7 Whatever Commynes himself felt, there is no doubt that those remaining with Marie ‒ and subsequent historians of Burgundy who have been influenced by their accounts ‒ saw it as a betrayal. The extent of that influence can be seen in the way that scholars such as Jelle Haemers refer to ‘les nobles demeurés loyaux’ [the nobles who remained loyal], a remark that fails to recognise the extent to which loyalty might well be divided in a transnational environment.8 Both Haemers and Bousmar agree that Jean Molinet’s Chronique is a key source for exploring this traumatic period of Burgundian history, but both stress as fact that the work is part of the propaganda of the ruling class who opted to stay with Marie. Bousmar is right to point out that, while the political crisis of 1477 was real, Molinet’s work is best understood if we consider it as propaganda for the ruler ‒ in this case Marie. By accentuating the degree to which her territories were experiencing political turmoil, he justifies her position, describing her vulnerability after her father’s death in possibly exaggerated terms. As Molinet presents it, Marie’s chosen solution, marriage to Archduke Maximilian of Austria ‒ the future Emperor Maximilian I ‒ can be explained and justified by the immediacy of the military threat to her territories as well as by the number of potential suitors courting her as the heiress. Molinet’s decision to stress Marie’s vulnerability, which he does especially by drawing on courtly motifs of damsels in distress, is instrumental in creating this image of crisis. The three poems by Jean Molinet examined here should certainly be read in this context. The birth of a healthy daughter, and still more the birth of a healthy son, was of crucial importance to anyone like Molinet who had lived through the period of uncertainty following the death of Marie’s father, since it secured the dynasty. The first two poems, La Nativité Madame Lienor and La Tres desirée et prouffitable naissance de Charles d’Austrice in particular can be read as companion pieces. They appear on adjacent folios in the earliest edition, of 1531, and presumably in manuscript B.9 While the first poem draws primarily on Classical references and the second on the Hebrew Bible, motifs from both sources are intertwined in each Joël Blanchard, ‘Commynes n’a pas “trahi”: pour en finir avec une obsession critique’, Revue du Nord, clxxx (2) (2009), 327–60. 8 Jelle Haemers, ‘Autour de Jean Molinet. La mémoire collective à la cour habsbourgeoises et l’alternative des élites urbaines en Flandre (XVe–XVIe siècles)’, in Jean Molinet, ed. Devaux, Doudet and Lecuppre-Desjardin, 22–44, at 43. 9 Jean Molinet, Les faictz et dicts de feu de bonne memoire Maistre Jehan Molinet (Paris, 1531), ff. 80, 81. For manuscript B, see note 1 above. 7

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poem and the poems share a metrical form (decasyllable huitains, rhyming abaabbcc) that suggests that they should be viewed as a pair. By contrast, the third poem, Sur la nativité Monseigneur le Duc Charles, in octosyllable huitains, has a distinct metrical structure and, as will be shown, a different linguistic pattern. All three, however, present the new-born as a part of a divine plan foretold in Classical and Biblical texts. By the time that Molinet wrote these occasional poems, he had been in the service of the forebears of the baby princess and prince for nearly forty years.10 He had served the children’s great-grandfather, Duke Charles, as indiciaire ‒ official historiographer ‒ and had also served other relatives, including their father, Philippe le Beau, and their aunt, Margaret of Austria, in a variety of capacities, some more directly literary, others more administrative. His career was therefore one that had started under the Valois dukes and had been shaped by their attitude to artistic patronage. The position of indiciaire had been created by Duke Philippe le Bon as part of a conscious effort to create a distinctively Burgundian historiography. The use of the neologism to designate the Burgundian historiographer appears to have been calculated to draw a distinction from the historiography of France, while at the same time establishing a role with parallels to the French history written in Saint Denis in terms of its access to documentation and its status as official history.11 Molinet had been engaged as secretary to the first holder of the post, George Chastelain, whom he succeeded on Chastelain’s death in 1475. He, in turn, was succeeded by his nephew, Jean Lemaire des Belges under the patronage of Margaret of Austria, and the title was given to other men within the Burgundian Habsburg court.12 In this way, the tradition of history writing that had been started under the Valois dukes was perpetuated under the successor regime. From the 1480s, Molinet’s role was officially defined by an oath that he was obliged to swear to Maximilian as a condition of his ongoing employment. This oath required him to record the feats and achievements of Maximilian’s predecessors and noteworthy events of the present day.13 Claude Thiry has argued that this tradition of retaining an official historiographer in itself explains why occasional poetry was such a prominent feature of Burgundian literature both before and after the death of the last Valois duke: the interest in history made writers more concerned to celebrate what they considered to be historical events.14 There are also other cultural factors that predisposed the Burgundian court to such activities, not least of which are the institutions of literary competitions that we find in the urban culture of the Burgundian Netherlands during and after the Valois period. Urban societies, often devotional confraternities, would organise periodic celebrations in their own town and compete with other societies in competitions between towns. Both these activities were necessarily occasional in nature. Paul Zumthor regards the urban activity as a product of the court culture, but there is no need to see the influence as unidirection-

Jean Devaux, Jean Molinet, indiciaire bourguignon (Paris, 1996). Graeme Small, ‘Chroniqueurs et culture historique au bas Moyen Âge’, in Valenciennes aux XIVe et XVe Siècles, ed. Ludovic Nys and Alain Slamagne (Valenciennes, 1996), 271–96. 12 Devaux, Jean Molinet, 26–7. 13 Noël Dupire, Jean Molinet: La Vie, les œuvres (Paris, 1932), 20. 14 Claude Thiry, ‘La Poésie de Circonstance’, in La Littérature française aux XIVe et XVe siècles, ed. Armin Biermann and Dagmar Thillman-Bartylla (Heidelberg, 1988), 111–38, at 119. 10 11



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al.15 Adrian Armstrong has pointed out that ‘writing in the Burgundian Netherlands is a transcultural activity: it is informed by interactions between cultures, languages and communities, which it in turn helps to shape’.16 Armstrong considers that this influence is particularly strong in poetry and it means that we can certainly talk about a literary culture in the Burgundian Netherlands that is not simply a court culture or an urban one. A striking feature of this tradition, both under the Valois dukes and later, is the extent to which authors are verbose and to which this verbosity is fuelled by multilingualism. Inhabitants of the Burgundian territories under the Valois dukes spoke French and Dutch and in some areas German. In addition, many educated writers were familiar with church Latin, which provided an additional lexical resource. Multilingualism was valued in authors. Olivier de La Marche praised George Chastelain for being ‘prompt en trois langages’ [‘with a ready answer in three languages’], a phrase that, as Estelle Doudet has pointed out, actually referred to the three administrative languages of the Burgundian Netherlands ‒ French, Dutch and Latin ‒ whilst alluding to the three sacred languages of Latin, Greek and Hebrew.17 But it was a rare writer in the Burgundian Netherlands who never went fishing in the pool of the languages of adjacent regions to expand their own vocabulary. As I have said elsewhere, however, this fishing was not done indiscriminately because the different languages had different social values.18 In francophone texts, Dutch was most frequently used to give local colour when discussing matters that were specific to the region, whereas Latin was used ‒ as it was also in Dutch-language matrix texts ‒ often where the author wanted to indicate a devotional context. Many writers in both French and Dutch used Latin lyrics – often the texts of well-known prayers or hymns ‒ as the basis for macaronic poems. Molinet did this in other contexts and Sur la nativité monseigneur le Duc Charles adopts a similar strategy, albeit in an unusual way, because it does not take a single text as its basis, which is what we usually see. Rather than interspersing lines from a single Latin lyric with French text that reflects and amplifies the lyric, Sur la nativité monseigneur le Duc Charles draws on a variety of Latin sources. La Nativité Madame Lienor also contains a switch between French and Latin, but in a much more restrained manner. This earliest of the three poems does not contain repeated switches between the two languages across the extent of the poem; its single linguistic shift occurs when it presents one line of Latin at the beginning of the second stanza: Comme a Phebo Phebe lumen capit, Soulas, respit, force et jocundité, L’archiducesse a l’archduc inclit Qui l’embellit prent lume et nous produit Fruict qui bien duit a nostre utilité, Paul Zumthor, La Masque et la lumière. La Poétique des grands rhétoriqueurs (Paris, 1978), 16–22. Adrian Armstrong, ‘Introduction’, in The Multilingual Muse: Transcultural Poetics in the Burgundian Netherlands, ed. Armstrong (Oxford, 2017), 1–11, at 2. 17 La Marche, Mémoires, i. 14; Estelle Doudet, Poétique de George Chastelain (1415–1475). Un cristal mucié en un coffre (Paris, 2005), 121. 18 Catherine Emerson, ‘“Gescryfte Met Letteren Na Elcxs Geval Gegraueert En Oic Dyveerssche Ymagyen”: Uses of Code-Switching in Dutch and French’, in The Multilingual Muse, ed. Armstrong, 42–53. 15 16

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Car enfanté nous a grant clareté C’est le beaulté de Castille et d’Espaigne Qui le soleil cler d’Austriche accompaigne.19 This stanza, which I have taken as basis of the title for this essay, is worth examining in some detail because it illustrates both the extent to which Molinet’s world had changed since the days of the Valois dukes and the way in which his practice remained rooted in the habits developed during that period. The use of Latin and its reuse in a rare cognate ‘prent lume’ is typical of Burgundian poetic language. So too is the regional variant ‘le beaulté’ in the penultimate line. The unstressed final vowel of the feminine article making it indistinguishable from the masculine article is typical of the Northern French dialects of the Burgundian Netherlands. The abaabbcc rhyme scheme is one that typifies Molinet’s occasional poetry and that of his predecessor as indiciaire, George Chastelain.20 Typical too is the dense rhyming structure of the poem and specifically its rime batelée where the final syllable of odd lines rhymes not only with the final syllable of other odd lines but also with the fourth syllable of the following even line. In the fourth and fifth lines this produces a cluster of rhymes ending -it (inclit, embellit, produit, fruict, duit) which is echoed by a similar cluster of rhymes ending -té in the lines that follow (utilité, enfanté, clareté, beaulté). The result is an accumulation which resonates with vitality. A similar acoustic device is deployed with even greater intensity in the final stanza where the syllable gar- recurs no less than fifteen times. Molinet prie a Dieu qui tout regarde, Qu’il sauve et garde en vergiers et en gars, Roy, archiduc, espouse, fille et garde Leur avant garde, armee, arriere garde Et sauvegarde et flegars et esgars, Maisons, hangars, bigudes et biggars Garchons et gars et, en nous regardant Dieu soit leurs corps et leurs armes gardant.21 This is a Burgundian poem in the sense that it perpetuates the poetics of Valois Burgundy. At the same time, it draws attention to the new political reality by stressing the binational heritage of the new-born, the beauty of Castille and Spain, lit by the light of Austria. This comment draws attention to the extension of transnationalism and multilingualism in the Habsburg Netherlands. Marie’s marriage to Maximilian Molinet, Faictz et Dictz, i. 347. As a Phebo Phebe lumen capit/ pleasure, relief, strength and joy/ so the archduchess from the illustrious archduke/ takes luminescence from him, making her more beautiful and producing/ for us a fruit that is suitable for our use/ because she has delivered for us a great light/ It is the beauty of Castille and of Spain/ accompanied by the clear sun of Austria. 20 For an examination of this rhyme scheme in Burgundian poetry see, Yvonne Leblanc, Va Lettre Va. The French Verse Epistle 1400–1500 (Birmingham, 1995), 100–2. 21 Molinet, Faictz et Dictz, i. 351. A literal translation of this passage struggles to reproduce the effect but the following is an attempt to render both the meaning and the phonetic content: Molinet prays to God, who everything regards/ that he saves and guards, in groves and gardens/ king, archduke, spouse, daughter, and guards/ their vanguard, army, rear guard/ and safeguards their garnishes and regards/ houses, hangars, beer halls and beggars/ bodyguards and blackguards and as us regards/ that God should be over their body and soul a guard. 19



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has introduced a new level of political complexity to the region that has now become centrally involved in imperial politics and shared rulership with Spain. This new political reality was not without its consequences for the artistic culture of the region as well as for the ruling classes. Whereas Valois Burgundy had preserved cultural ties with France, the Habsburg Netherlands were more distinct and while of course texts did still travel, there is evidence that the francophone literature of the Valois court had a reduced readership outside the francophone nobility residing in the Habsburg Netherlands. Graeme Small has shown that the work of George Chastelain in particular was read by a very limited social circle of nobles associated with the Habsburg court after Charles le Téméraire’s death, and the same is probably true of Molinet’s.22 Certainly, Molinet’s historiography did not find an audience in the early years of the print age, with only his poetic works existing in early printed editions.23 These changes to the cultural place of the Netherlands were accompanied by social ones: the Habsburg heritage was, if anything, even more complex and certainly more multilingual than Valois Burgundy had been, with a reduced proportion of French speakers, an increase in the importance of German and the addition of Spanish as a language of Habsburg administration. In this context, Molinet’s use of lexical abundance reflects the very nature of the heritage of the children whose birth he celebrated. All three occasional poems use rare dialectal forms and borrowings from languages other than French to enrich the vocabulary of the poem. Two of them include whole lines in Latin. One of these, Sur la nativité Monseigneur le duc Charles, is fully macaronic, alternating, though not entirely regularly, quotations from devotional sources in Latin with French text reflecting on the significance of the birth of the new prince.24 Several of the words in these poems are made from French, Dutch or Latin roots and are quoted from this and from no other source by the Dictionnaire du moyen français. ‘Harouget’, which appears in the poem La Nativité Madame Lienor, ‘Propet, tost prest, rouget et harouget’ [elegant, prepared, reddish and lively], has only two attested examples in the dictionary, and both are from Molinet’s works and both occur in collocation with ‘rouget’.25 In the first of the two poems celebrating the birth of Prince Charles, diminutives of finger and foot ‘doichon’ and ‘piechon’ are used to designate the extreme smallness of the new-born, and these too are the only examples of the words cited by the dictionary. It is unlikely that Molinet actually made these words up, since they are created on the basis of existing words (doigt, pied and harouge, meaning hasty), with common diminutive suffixes. Nevertheless, in both poems, rare words ‒ or rare diminutive forms of common words ‒ have been used in series of enumerations that emphasise the virtuosity of the poet and the linguistic and cultural richness of the territories governed by the dynasty. Variety of vocabulary and acoustic density signify the wealth of Habsburg Burgundy. Sometimes Molinet makes direct reference to political diversity in his use of enumeration as when he portrays Lienor’s birth being heralded by Graeme Small, George Chastelain and the Shaping of Valois Burgundy: Political and Historical Culture at Court in the Fifteenth Century (Woodbridge, 1996). 23 Catherine Emerson, ‘La (non-) réception de Molinet: l’ouvrage de l’indiciaire à l’âge de l’imprimé’, in Jean Molinet, ed. Devaux, Doudet and Lecuppre-Desjardin, 217–26. 24 Molinet, Faictz et Dictz, i. 359–61. 25 Dictionnaire du Moyen Français (1330–1500), http://www2.atilf.fr/dmf/ (consulted December 2020). 22

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Leaux subjectz, Flamens, Wallons, Frisons Et Brabanchons …26 or when he depicts the celebrations in Charles’s native Ghent Chescun s’atacque a criier en son thois: ‘Vive Charles d’Austrice et les Ganthois!’27 The use of ‘thois’, more usually ‘thiois’, here is significant, because it points to the multilingualism of the Habsburg Netherlands, using a word descended from a presumed root *teuta, meaning tribe, from which both Teutonic and Deutsch are descended. Molinet uses it here, in a modified form to rhyme with ‘Gantois’ to designate the Germanic roots of the vernacular Dutch spoken in Ghent. Thiois is not a term used in modern French, but it is still attested in Belgian dialects of the language, which is understandable, given that these are among the varieties of French which have most contact with Germanic dialects. Molinet’s use may therefore be a conscious use of a regional term to denote both acceptance by the Dutch-speaking community and by the French speakers of the Low Countries who use regionally specific varieties of French when they refer to their Dutch-speaking compatriots. This adds a further layer of linguistic complexity to an acclamation of the prince’s birth which is already multilingual. (Molinet states that it is made in Dutch but reports it in French.) By linking this multilingualism with the multinational political identity of the state, Molinet further underlines the diversity of the territories that the prince is destined to inherit. The two poems that celebrate Charles’s birth also incorporate text that point to a wealth of cultural heritage, embodied in the first case by a series of proverbial sayings which form the last line of many stanzas, including such gems as L’or est de l’oeul le gracieux repas. [Gold is a feast to the eye] Paisible amour met jus guerre et discorde. [Peaceful love puts down war and discord] A coeur vaillant il n’est riens impossible. [To a worthy heart, nothing is impossible] A dur fait on d’ung vieux cocq ung faisant. [It is hard to make a pheasant from an old cockerel]28 Most of these aphorisms stress the peace and prosperity of the new duke’s territories and, in so doing, they play a double role because they both tell the reader about the qualities of the country and they embody the wealth of which they speak, demonstrating the store of folk wisdom which forms part of the new duke’s heritage. Similarly, the second poem celebrating Charles’s birth takes an unconventional approach for a Burgundian macaronic poem in that, rather than presenting a single Latin text, such as the Pater Noster, that supplies the embedded material (an approach that Molinet Molinet, Faictz et Dictz, i. 350. Loyal subjects, Flemings, Walloons, Friesians and Brabançons. Ibid., 358. Each person cries out with force in his tongue/ Long live Charles of Austria and the Ghenters. 28 Ibid., 352–8. 26 27



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uses elsewhere), this poem presents a patchwork of Latin citations, mainly from prayers and motets, all of which refer to motifs of light and of advent, allowing the poet to present the arrival of the new child as an event with transcendental significance. As an example of the technique, let us consider this stanza, which casts the child’s mother as the Virgin of the Gospel according to Luke, using references to passages from Isaiah and the intercessions of the Pater Noster: Ecce ancilla domini Nourrit nostre enfant qui sera Pater futuri seculi Et bonne paix entreterra; Pays perdu nous revenra; Filius datus est nobis, D’or et d’argent nous pourvenra Pro debitoribus nostris.29 The opening line of the stanza ‘Ecce ancilla domini’, is taken from Luke, 1:38, at the moment that Mary accepts her role as virgin mother of the son of God. The Latin line that follows, however, is found in the book of Isaiah (9:6), in a passage that, like the one from Luke, is traditionally read at advent in a series of passages interpreted as announcing the coming of Jesus. That verse begins ‘Filius datus est nobis’, which is the next Latin line in the stanza. Molinet has reversed the order in which the two phrases appear in order to make better sense in his bilingual poem. The final Latin phrase, ‘pro debitoribus nostris’ is not from either of his two advent scriptures, but is a common phrase in a number of prayers, including the Pater Noster. The entire stanza is a patchwork of devotional texts with an advent theme, that implicitly claim that the birth of the child Charles is an event of comparable significance to that of the coming of Jesus. Such a comparison, which might strike a modern observer as grandiose, was entirely in keeping with the political discourse of the day, which frequently figured arrivals, and particularly the arrival of a ruler into a city, as a manifestation of the coming of Christ.30 The entry of a new prince or princess, king or queen, into a city would often be greeted with shouts of ‘Noël’, and celebrated with Biblical texts relating to advent or Palm Sunday. In this context, Molinet’s use of advent texts to celebrate the birth of a child to the ducal family taps into an established current of political discourse. In this celebration of Charles’s birth, Molinet once again uses a variety of sources to build up a message with regard to the child that has been born, but also to point to the breadth of his own mastery of text and the wealth of sources he has to draw on. His lavish use of words and of citation illustrates the abundance and wealth into which the child is born while the poet’s use of loan words, rare words and neologisms illustrates the enrichment of the family. At the same time, we should note that although in each of these poems Molinet pays lip service to the presence of Spain and Austria in the celebration of the birth of these children, Spanish is absent from them, Ibid., 361. Ecce ancilla domini/ feeds our child who will be/ Pater futuri seculi/ and will maintain peace/ and lost land will return to us/ Filius datus est nobis/ and will supply us with gold and silver/ pro debitoribus nostris. 30 Gordon Kipling, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph (Oxford, 1998), 25–8. 29

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even as the poet celebrates the children’s Spanish maternal heritage. In his selection of languages, and particularly in his preference of Latin as a high-status language for macaronic verse, Molinet continues the cultural habits of the poetic culture of the previous regime, as if the intervening political disruption had had no effect. We might speculate on his reasons for doing this. It is uncertain as to whether Molinet had any familiarity with German. It appears that he spoke Dutch and may have been able to understand German, perceiving it as a variety of the same language,31 but it is, however, unlikely that he was confident in the language, and we can conclude that he also did not speak Spanish, so limited himself to mentioning this heritage while lacking the linguistic capacities to develop the theme. Another possible reason for the absence of German and Spanish in these poems was that his patrons ‒ or the poet himself ‒ wanted especially to claim legitimacy for their government in the Netherlands by perpetuating the artistic forms that characterised this region. In this regard, we should note that the nationalities portrayed celebrating Lienor’s birth ‒ Flemings, Walloons, Friesians and Brabançons ‒ were all groups that had already been united under the Valois dukes. Whether Molinet himself regarded this as his only audience, or whether his patrons instructed him to address only these people, we cannot know, but it is clear that Molinet’s poetry is only really concerned with the politics and poetics of this region. Artistically and linguistically he speaks to Burgundians in their language and minimises the disruption of the new regime by behaving as if he was still operating under the old order. Rather than representing the court as it had become, Molinet used poetic form to represent the court as he would like it to be, namely a continuation of Valois Burgundy.

Catherine Emerson, Olivier de La Marche and the Rhetoric of Fifteenth-Century Historiography (Woodbridge, 2004), 109.

31

MAGNA CARTA IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGES, c.1320–c.1520 Nigel Saul

In the fullest and most stimulating recent review of Magna Carta’s role in the legal and political life of late medieval England, Anthony Musson has argued powerfully for the continued importance of the Charter as a source of protection for the individual in the two-and-a-half centuries from 1215.1 In the late Middle Ages, Professor Musson argues, the Charter attained the status of pre-eminent statute of the realm, regularly proclaimed in the county courts, repeatedly cited by litigants claiming redress on the tenor of its clauses, and symbolically placed at the head of the legislative canon in the books of statutes which lawyers compiled to aid them in their work. For any litigant drawn into actions for which its clauses provided either legal support or rhetorical justification, Professor Musson continues, Magna Carta had an immediate significance both as a source of law and as evidence of historic authority. At the same time, he adds, the Charter’s continuing relevance was affirmed by a series of statutes passed in Edward III’s reign – the so-called six statutes – which both glossed the Charter’s meaning and, in some cases, significantly extended its provisions and enlarged the constituency to which those provisions applied. An altogether different view of the Charter’s late medieval significance has been taken by some other recent writers, notably Ralph Turner and Christine Carpenter, who both see it as becoming an anachronism by the fifteenth century, made obsolete by changes in society and overtaken by new priorities in disputes between kings and subjects. According to Professor Turner, Magna Carta ‘had slipped into the shadows of high politics by the mid-fifteenth century [and was] to remain [there] until the seventeenth century’.2 In his estimation, while the lawyers and landowning class looked to its clauses for vindication of their property rights, most people were more concerned with confronting economic change and curbing endemic lawlessness than with preserving constraints on royal power. According to Professor Carpenter, who takes a similar line, albeit one less rhetorically expressed, once the Charter’s limits on royal power were accepted by kings, the Charter itself ‘largely disappeared as an Anthony Musson, ‘Magna Carta in the Later Middle Ages’, in Magna Carta. The Foundation of Freedom, 1215–2015, ed. Nicholas Vincent (2014), 86–101; idem, ‘The Legacy of Magna Carta: Law and Justice in the Fourteenth Century’, William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal, xxv (2016), 629–64. The latter article draws very extensively on the evidence of the series of Ancient Petitions in TNA. 2 R.V. Turner, Magna Carta Through the Ages (Harlow, 2003), 112.

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active element in English politics’, in 1399 cited only as part of the condemnation of such kings as Richard II ‘who bucked the trend by abusing or overriding the law’.3 In the opinion of Professor Nicholas Vincent, a third authority on the period, and one broadly in agreement with Professor Turner, while the Charter’s celebrity undoubtedly increased in the late Middle Ages, its precise historical meaning faded as people cited its clauses in the cause of self-protection rather than out of a sense of the common good.4 To this sceptical line of thinking, Lord Sumption has recently lent his support in an essay in which he argues that Magna Carta sank into irrelevance in the late medieval and Tudor periods, and that it owes its present iconic status entirely to its seventeenth-century rediscovery by Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke, who saw in its assertion of due process a useful means of countering what he conceived as the absolutist leanings of James I.5 How are these two essentially differing viewpoints to be reconciled? Although it is fair to say that both groups of writers would probably agree that at some stage in the late Middle Ages Magna Carta ceased to be a living document, the difference between their positions is still considerable. One obvious way of bringing them together would be to say that there are actually two quite separate questions involved here: the first, the matter of whether or not the Charter was a document of practical value to litigants in their suits in the courts, and the other that of whether or how far it constituted an effective constraint on the exercise of arbitrary royal power. It might be argued that, while the Charter quickly became obsolete in one capacity, it nonetheless for some time continued to fulfil its purpose in the other. To take our first point first: the Charter’s value to litigants. On the ample evidence of the plea rolls and petitions to the king, there can be little doubt that an appreciation of the Charter’s importance was fully embedded in the legal consciousness of the nation well into the fourteenth century. Professor Musson cites the illuminating example of a Suffolk litigant, Robert de Thorp, who in the course of a lengthy petition to the council in the 1320s pleaded several distinct ‘points’ of the Charter and concluded by seeking remedy ‘according to law and according to points of the Great Charter’.6 There is also the case, likewise from the first quarter of the fourteenth century, of one Thomas de Fynmer who, although he did not refer to Magna Carta as such, accorded it legislative standing when he said that it was ‘ordained by statute that no man be ousted from his free tenement’.7 It is also worth remembering that regular proclamation of the Charter by sheriffs in meetings of the county courts ensured that knowledge of the document was widely disseminated both across the country and between classes.8 There may well be merit in Professor Musson’s suggestion that the Christine Carpenter, ‘Magna Carta and English Liberty, 1215–1500’, in Lincolnshire’s Great Exhibition: Treasures, Saints and Heroes, ed. Nicholas Bennett (2015), 48–63, at 61–3. 4 Nicholas Vincent, Magna Carta. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2012), 89. 5 Jonathan Sumption, Law in a Time of Crisis (2021), ch. 3, ‘Magna Carta Then and Now’, in particular pp. 36‒8. 6 Musson, ‘Magna Carta in the Later Middle Ages’, 89, and ‘The Legacy of Magna Carta’, 635–6; Rotuli Parliamentorum (6 vols., Record Commission, 1783), i. 419. On this case, see also Faith Thompson, Magna Carta. Its Role in the Making of the English Constitution, 1300–1629 (Minneapolis, MN, 1948), 41. 7 TNA, SC8/206/10292. Note also the wording of a petition of Sir John de Wardieu of Bodiam (Suss.), c.1330: ‘qe par la commune ley le corps de nulli ne doit ester pris ne ses terres ne ses chateux seisez en la mein le Roi s’il ne soit par veroy cause’: Rotuli Parliamentorum, ii. 396. 8 Faith Thompson, The First Century of Magna Carta: Why it Persisted as a Document (Minneapolis, 3



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enigmatic call by the peasant rebels in 1381 for ‘no law but the law of Winchester’ should be taken as a reference to the Charter. The idea gains weight when we bear in mind Wat Tyler’s demand that ‘all should be free and of one status’.9 If there is evidence that the Charter was still appreciated by litigants and petitioners for justice well into the late Middle Ages, it seems equally clear that it remained fundamental to the compact between king and subjects whereby the exercise of royal authority was curbed and constrained. On no fewer than forty-four occasions between Edward III’s reign and Henry V’s the Charter was reissued, usually in response to petitions from the parliamentary Commons, and often in return for a grant of taxation to the king. In political crises it was almost invariably to the Charter that critics and opponents of the king looked for both precedent and justifications for their demands in the name of the common good. In 1341 Archbishop Stratford, Edward III’s one-time chancellor, appealed to the Charter in his war of words with his former master over the claim of disgraced royal servants such as himself to ecclesiastical immunity from the jurisdiction of the secular courts. In his letter to the king sent in January Stratford warned him against violating the Charter, ‘which’, he said, ‘you are bound to keep and maintain by the oath made at your coronation’; and at his trial a few months later in his capacity as a spiritual peer he successfully established the principle of the right of peers to be tried only by their fellow peers in parliament.10 The Charter was also to figure prominently in the thoughts of those who in the most severe crises of the period sought institutional means by which to curb royal authority. In 1310–11 Magna Carta was to occupy a key place in the Ordinances, the body of reforms imposed on Edward II.11 Two important articles (6 and 38) acknowledged that the Charter bound the monarch, demanding that it be kept ‘in all its points’ and that either the Ordainers or the next parliament clarify any points which remained ‘doubtful or obscure’. In another clause (31) the Charter was made the standard for legislation, with statutes to remain in force ‘provided that they are not contrary to the great Charter or the Charter of the Forest’; and, if in conflict with the Charters, they were to be ‘held for nought and utterly undone’. In yet another clause, the Ordinances acknowledged the recognition of London’s liberties in the Charter, all customs since Edward I’s coronation being abolished as ‘contrary to the Great Charter and contrary to the liberty of the city of London’ (ordinance 11). In the reigns of the first three Edwards the Charter’s authority was likewise to be invoked by the not inconsiderable army of pamphleteers who inveighed against what they saw as the crown’s all too frequent abuse of its prerogative powers. In one anonymous text, the Monstraunces, which dates from the late 1290s, the author vehemently denounced the king’s novel exactions as violations of ‘the points of the Great Charter’, while in another, the pseudo-law book known as Fleta, the king was warned that extensions to the right of prise, or purveyance, constituted a breach of the terms of the Charter. Violations of the Charter’s terms by the purveyors were to be denounced again in the 1330s by William de Pagula in his Speculum Regis Edwardi Tercii.12 MN, 1925), ch. 4; Magna Carta, ed. David Carpenter (2015), 434–5. Musson, ‘Magna Carta in the Later Middle Ages’, 90. 10 Thompson, Magna Carta. Its Role in the Making of the Constitution, 81–4. 11 Statutes, i. 157–67; English Historical Documents, 1189–1327, ed. Harry Rothwell (1975), 527–39. 12 These examples are taken from C.J. Nederman, ‘The “apparitional” Magna Carta in the Long 9

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That the Charter was to remain a living document in the minds of critics of kings to the end of the fourteenth century is apparent from the use made of it in the deposition proceedings against Richard II in 1399. In the articles drawn up to justify his removal from the throne, Richard was at several points accused of breaches of the Charter. In clause 27 it was alleged that, contrary to the Charter’s stipulation ‘that no free man should be arrested or imprisoned unless by judgement of his peers or by the law of the land’, the king had yet hauled liegemen before the court of chivalry, where they were not tried according to processes of common law. In clause 29 it was further alleged that, when clerks impleaded in the ecclesiastical courts had sought to outwit their opponents by obtaining writs of prohibition from chancery and the chancellor had refused these, the king had over-ruled his minister, authorising the writs, in contravention of the liberties of the Church as approved in chapter 1 of the Charter. That Richard was deemed guilty of violating chapter 1 is also implicit in the charge in clause 22 that he had ordered the impressment of Church property for use in his expedition to Ireland in June 1399.13 All this evidence from the deposition articles has long been recognised by scholars. What has not been appreciated until recently, however, is that a decade before the deposition a close interest had been taken in the Charter by the Lords Appellant, the baronial opposition to King Richard. As a result of one of the most remarkable discoveries made by Professor Vincent and his team working on the recent Magna Carta project, it is now clear that the idea of a committee of baronial enforcers, along the lines of the Twenty-Five of the Charter, was one of the ways of constraining the king which had been entertained by the Appellant hard-liners in their campaign against the king in 1387 and 1388. The key evidence for the claim is to be found in a portfolio of documents transcribed into a register of Llanthony priory, Gloucester, around the time of the opposition rising.14 The documents, which include transcripts of both contemporary and historic importance, consist of the following: on folios 121v–123, a copy of the statute appointing the ‘continual council’ of 1386, in the form in which it was issued in letters to the sheriffs on 1 December that year; on folio 123 an incomplete transcription of the ‘Carta de Rounkemede’ as it is termed – the 1215 Magna Carta – consisting of the opening address, chapters 1 and 2 and, crucially, the security chapter (chapter 61); next, on folios 123v–124, what the heading calls the ‘false indictment made by the duke of Ireland and others against the duke of Gloucester and other faithful nobles at Nottingham on 25 August 1387’, a document which turns out to be a copy of the questions put to the judges that month; next again, on folios 124v–125v, an abbreviated copy of the king’s letters of 19 November 1386 appointing the ‘continual council’, as recorded on the statute roll, with the names of the earls of Warwick, Nottingham and Derby by a sleight of hand interpolated among those nominated; and, finally, after a general procuration given to Prior William de Cheriton, on folios 125v–129v, a copy of the appeal of treason brought by the Fourteenth Century’, in Fourteenth Century England, XI, ed. David Green and Chris Given-Wilson (Woodbridge, 2019), 109–28. 13 Chronicles of the Revolution, 1397–1400. The Reign of Richard II, ed. Chris Given-Wilson (Manchester, 1993), 179–81. 14 TNA, C115/78, ff. 121v–125v (115v–119v in the old numbering of the folios in the volume). In what follows I have cited the more recent numeration. For a lengthier discussion of these documents, see Nigel Saul, ‘Magna Carta and the Politics of the Reign of Richard II’: http://magnacarta.cmp.uea. ac.uk/read/feature_of_the_month/Mar_2015_2 (accessed Oct. 2020).



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Appellants against the king’s favourites in the Merciless Parliament. The documents were all entered into the register in the time of Cheriton’s priorate in the late 1380s. The fact that they were transcribed together suggests that whoever assembled them saw a connection between them all. The background to the assembling of the portfolio is to be found in the political difficulties which the Appellants faced in the last weeks of 1387 and early months of 1388. In November 1386 a ‘continual council’ had been appointed in parliament for twelve months with a brief to curb King Richard’s expenditure, and in the autumn of 1387, as its term of office drew to a close, both king and barons began rallying their supporters for what each side saw as the trial of strength to come. Three of the lords who had been involved in the appointment of the council – Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester, and the earls of Arundel and Warwick – protected themselves by bringing an appeal of treason, a personal prosecution, against the king’s leading counsellors, notably Robert de Vere, duke of Ireland, and Michael de la Pole, earl of Suffolk;15 and shortly before Christmas, they were joined by the earls of Nottingham and Derby. To eliminate the danger posed by de Vere and his force of Cheshire archers, the allies – the Appellants, as they were by then known – mobilised their retinues, and one of these under the command of Henry of Derby routed de Vere’s men in the field at Radcot Bridge in Oxfordshire. The problem which the Appellants then faced was how to consolidate and uphold their triumph. As far as possible they wanted to act within the bounds of the law. One possibility was to revive the old ‘continual council’ of 1386, investing it with authority for a fresh term and creating a body on the lines of the council imposed on Henry III in June 1258: and the fact that the commission establishing the continual council was transcribed twice over in the register of Llanthony priory suggests that the lords may have given serious thought to this. In the end, however, setting the idea aside, they placed their faith instead in the appeal of treason, a device which had the attraction of solving the problem of excess royal power by eliminating all those around the king to whose presence they objected. At the beginning of January 1388, on the Appellants’ initiative, writs were issued for the summoning of a parliament, to convene at Westminster on 2 February. Although, at the time that the assembly opened, only one of the accused, Nicholas Brembre, the mayor of London, was present to stand trial, all the defendants were found guilty, and their non-entailed lands seized and taken into royal custody. In the spring a group of the secondary objects of the Appellants’ anger was hauled before the assembly and dealt with by the administratively easier process of impeachment. By 1 June the business of parliament was done, and the assembly was dissolved. After so thorough a cleansing of the Augean stables of the court, the Appellants were much concerned that their ruthlessness might expose them to the danger of a royalist revanche once the king had recovered power. To guard against this possibility, they inaugurated a country-wide programme of oath-taking. On 20 March, after the prosecutions by appeal, they arranged for the members of both parliamentary houses to swear a solemn oath affirming their backing for the five lords, while simultaneously arranging for the sheriffs to exact the same oath from the leading county gentry and townsmen. A couple of months later, when the session ended, they went through the same process again. All those present, both lords and commons, made The Westminster Chronicle, 1381–1394, ed. L.C. Hector and B.F. Harvey (Oxford, 1982), 186–212.

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their way to Westminster Abbey, where they swore to uphold the acts and judgments of the parliament; and again, simultaneously, the sheriffs were required to exact the same oath in their bailiwicks. On both occasions, the sheriffs were ordered to make a return to the Appellants listing all those who had taken the oath and those who had refused. One complete return survives to the March oath, that for Lincolnshire, two to the June oath, for Sussex and Leicestershire.16 What has so far been given little attention is the question of where the Appellants got the idea of their great oath-taking programme from. No obvious precedent for it was to be found in the early fourteenth-century baronial reform movement in which both sides took such interest, that of Edward II’s reign. Certainly, there was a precedent of sorts in the nationwide oath-taking inaugurated in Henry III’s reign by the baronial reformers after their dramatic seizure of power in 1258. There is no evidence, however, that this initiative, ill-reported as it was even at the time, was known a century later; indeed, to judge from the silence of the sources, it appears to have been completely forgotten.17 Now that we are apprised of the portfolio of documents in the Llanthony register, however, we can say with some confidence that it was to a much earlier source that the Appellants looked for inspiration: it was to Magna Carta. What had happened in the summer of 1215 was that, to ensure local co-operation with the Twenty-Five, the barons had provided for the exaction of oaths from ‘anyone in the land who wished to take an oath to obey the orders of the Twenty-Five’. Thanks to a recent discovery by Nicholas Vincent, we know that at least in Kent this programme of oath-taking was put into effect. In a cartulary of St. Augustine’s abbey, Canterbury, a letter is transcribed, written in the names of Robert Fitzwalter and the earls of Clare, Essex, Norfolk and Winchester, and addressed to the local sheriff, informing him that four knights would be sent to Kent to receive on behalf of the earls and their colleagues the oaths due to be sworn according to the king’s letters.18 There can be little doubt that it was the ambitious oath-taking programme envisaged under chapter 61 of the Great Charter which was the model for the programme set in motion by the Appellants in the spring and summer of 1388. The originator of the remarkable initiative was probably Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester, a leading member of the Appellant coalition, and patron of Llanthony priory by virtue of his marriage to Eleanor de Bohun, descendant of the house’s founder, Miles, earl of Hereford. Duke Thomas, although residing principally at Pleshey in Essex, a property brought to him by his wife, and one which had the advantage of proximity to London, is nonetheless known to have paid frequent visits to Gloucestershire, and in July 1381 he was active in suppressing an insurrection in the town of Gloucester itself. On that occasion, as an account of the episode records, he was staying at the priory, and he and his wife were received into its confraternity.19 What is likely to have happened is that in late 1387 or N.E. Saul, ‘The Sussex Gentry and the Oath to Uphold the Acts of the Merciless Parliament’, Sussex Archaeological Collections, cxxxv (1997), 221–39. 17 Joshua Hey, ‘Two Oaths of the Community in 1258’, HR, lxxxviii (2015), 213–29. 18 Magna Carta, ed. Carpenter, 382–3. 19 Richard Holt, ‘Thomas of Woodstock and Events at Gloucester in 1381’, BIHR, lviii (1985), 237–42. Duke Thomas is also likely to have stayed at the priory on visits to his estates in south Wales and the marches. In the 1380s he undertook extensive works at his castle of Caldecot, near Newport, inserting a magnificent set of domestic apartments into the gatehouse: John Goodall, The English Castle (New Haven and London, 2011), 334–5. 16



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early 1388 the Appellants, faced with the problem of how to guarantee the permanence of their achievements, initiated searches of monastic archives for documents from earlier political crises which could shed light on what they might do in the present. At Llanthony the search was most probably undertaken by Prior Cheriton or someone working for or alongside him, and the discovery that he or they made was of a draft of the 1215 Great Charter with its revolutionary security clause. Gloucester and his allies must have read the provision with a mixture of joy and surprise. Quite possibly, they toyed with the idea of setting up a committee along the lines of the Twenty-Five themselves. If they did so, however, as we have seen, they quickly dismissed the idea. Instead, they settled on the nationwide exaction of oaths, and twice, in the spring and the summer of 1388, they actually carried through such a programme. With hindsight we can see that the Appellants’ resurrection of the security provisions in chapter 61 of the 1215 Magna Carta and the allegations of King Richard’s breaches of the Charter in the deposition articles were to be the swansong of the late medieval afterlife of the Charter. In the years after 1400 the Charter passed, in Professor Turner’s words, ‘into the shadows of high politics’.20 The Charter and the Charter of the Forest were confirmed by Henry IV on his accession in 1399 and twice more in 1407 and 1411, and were to be confirmed on the Commons’ initiative in 1401 and 1402 as well.21 After Henry IV’s reign, however, the Charters are documents heard of only infrequently. The tradition of periodic royal confirmations drew to a close in the middle years of Henry VI’s reign.22 In the 1470s, in his treatise on the Governance of England, Sir John Fortescue did not so much as mention the Charters once. The Great Charter was to remain a document of primary importance to the common lawyers, a number of whom wrote commentaries on it for the benefit of Inns of Court students without in any way highlighting its constitutional importance.23 In forested areas such as Nottinghamshire the Forest Charter was to have a certain afterlife as a guard against oppressive local officialdom.24 As documents designed to constrain royal power, however, in the years after 1422 the Charters together passed from the useful part of the constitution to the ornamental. Why was this? What changes had occurred to consign them to this oblivion? Turner, Magna Carta, 112. Statutes, ii. 120, 159, 166; PROME, viii. 125, 177, 326‒9, 419, 516. 22 Although the last confirmation to be enrolled on the parliament rolls was in 1423, it has recently been found that a volume of Statute Nova records one final confirmation in the parliament of 1450–1: Paul Cavill, ‘Preaching on Magna Carta at the End of the Fifteenth Century: John Alcock’s Sermon at Paul’s Cross’, in The Fifteenth Century, XV: Writing, Records and Rhetoric, ed. Linda Clark (Woodbridge, 2017), 169–89, at 186, n. 150. 23 Selected Readings and Commentaries on Magna Carta, 1400–1604, ed. J.H. Baker (Selden Soc., cxxxii, 2015). As the editor notes, ‘Magna Carta was [treated as] no different in kind from the other statutes which were studied, much of it confirmatory of the common law, some of it obsolete, some of it amended or overtaken by later statutes, and some even to be rejected as meaningless or void … The liberties of the individual are not prominent in the readings’: ibid., p. vii. 24 So much is indicated by a note which prefaces an early fifteenth-century volume dealing with Sherwood Forest: Memorandum, the charter of the forest is under patent in the hands and custody of Lord Ralph Cromwell; the charter of liberties is under patent in the hands and custody of Nicholas de Strelley; and the perambulation of the forest of Sherwood made in the time of Henry III is under patent in the hands of William Jorce (J.C. Holt, ‘Rights and Liberties in Magna Carta’, in his Magna Carta and Medieval Government (1985), 203–15, at 214–15). In other words, two of the three documents mentioned were to do with the Forest. 20 21

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To some extent, the reason is to be found simply in the well-known phenomenon, to which Nicholas Vincent has drawn attention, of the documents’ increasing obsolescence over time.25 Magna Carta was an early thirteenth-century document which offered early thirteenth-century solutions to early thirteenth-century problems. Inevitably, as new problems arose, and old ones receded into the past, so it had less and less of relevance to say to people. In the eyes of those concerned to control the unsatisfactory kings of the late Middle Ages, one of its major weaknesses was its failure to place any restrictions on the king’s ability to appoint counsellors and dispense patronage. In the late Middle Ages it was precisely the king’s prerogative power to choose his own counsellors that was to be the greatest source of political argument and debate. To the problems raised by the favour which Henry III gave to the Lusignans, Edward II to Gaveston and the Despensers, and Henry VI to Suffolk and his clique, the Charter offered little or no solution. Nor did the protection which it extended to landowners against the feudal exactions of the crown assure it a continued political relevance. By the fourteenth century landowners were solving the problem of how to safeguard family interests in the event of an heir’s minority not by appeal to the Charter but by resort to the enfeoffment-to-use. The matter to which the Charter devoted more space than any other, namely the feudal lordship of the crown, had by the late fourteenth century largely ceased to be a serious political issue. Yet to say that the Charter was becoming obsolete does not by itself explain why its name, still so resonant in the fourteenth century, should have echoed so much less after 1400. As early as the 1250s and 1260s, in the turbulent middle years of Henry III’s reign, baronial reformers had been going well beyond its terms in their plans for the reform and redirection of royal government. In this sense, it can be said that within no more than half-a-century of its making the Charter was already being well overtaken by events. Yet, as we have seen, right up to the end of the fourteenth century the Charter still meant something to actors in the arena of high politics. The real question is what happened to the Charter in the period after Richard II’s death in 1400. The first, and perhaps the most important, factor is to be found in the changed political circumstances of the fifteenth century, which saw all the usual problems productive of political complaint – local disorder, the levying of taxation and so on – meshed with an entirely new element in political life: dynastic uncertainty. In this sense, Henry of Lancaster’s usurpation of the crown in 1399 changed everything. Because the new king was a member of a collateral royal line and was not the deposed king’s direct heir, the way was opened to an entirely new way of framing and articulating political discontent. From now on, a challenge to royal authority could be justified not merely on grounds of the king’s personal inadequacy but in terms of his lack of dynastic legitimacy. Whereas earlier political oppositions had been confined, as the barons of Magna Carta had been, to achieving change by constraining and controlling the king, their successors could achieve the same by challenging his title and replacing him with a new aspirant. In this way, the long tradition inaugurated by the security clause of Magna Carta and sustained through such enactments as the Provisions of Oxford and the Ordinances was brought to an end in Vincent, Magna Carta. A Very Short Introduction, 89: ‘the charter’s celebrity increased even whilst its precise historical meaning faded from memory’. See also Magna Carta, ed. Carpenter, 443: ‘The inadequacy of the Charter was … apparent by the end of Henry III’s reign.’

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1399 with the deposition of Richard II. Henceforth, the place which had been taken by the machinery of constitutional restraint could be taken instead by a challenge to the monarch’s title. In the parliamentary justifications offered in 1461 for Henry VI’s deposition, and two decades later for the depositions of Edward V and Richard III, Magna Carta was not mentioned once. On each occasion, the indictment of the fallen ruler centred not on an alleged breach of England’s fundamental law but on the ineligibility of the ruler’s blood. In 1215 Magna Carta itself had been brought into being largely as a result of the absence of a plausible alternative candidate to the malevolent King John. Two centuries later, when there was such a candidate waiting in the wings, resort to the Charter could be dispensed with. There was a second change, however, which contributed something to the Charter’s marginalisation in the fifteenth century, and it was this. Throughout the fourteenth century the meaning of Magna Carta had been regularly glossed or, in some cases, enlarged by the crown in responses given to the Commons’ petitions in parliament. In the fifteenth century, however, this was no longer to be the case. The tradition of parliamentary modification and renewal of the Charter slowly but inexorably drew to a close. The change is most strongly noticeable in the second half of the century. Until about 1450 parliamentary petitioners were still regularly including appeals to the Charter in their pleas for redress from the crown. In 1415, for example, the men of Sandwich petitioned against a commission to punish some of the town’s seamen for piracy on the grounds that it was a contravention of the Charter’s provision that no one be judged except by common law.26 In the period to 1450, the Charter’s provisions were also intermittently invoked by the magnate class when seeking historic justification for the privileges of their order. In 1442, following the arrest and summary trial of Eleanor Cobham, duchess of Gloucester, at their request the terms of chapter 29/39 of the Charter were extended to accord ladies of high estate the right to trial before the lords and judges in parliament.27 It is precisely this kind of active engagement with the Charter, still just about alive in the Lancastrian period, which came to an end in the second half of the century. After the accession of the Yorkist kings in 1461 the mood of the Commons changed dramatically, with members henceforth more subdued in the face of a confident and reinvigorated royal authority. The volume and importance of the parliamentary legislation approved went into decline, and a greater share of such legislation as was passed was initiated by the crown rather than the Commons.28 Perhaps the most striking measure of the collapse in MPs’ independence is found in the willingness of successive assemblies from 1459 to acquiesce in the passing of Acts of Attainder which condemned those named in them as traitors and disinherited their heirs without any verdict by a court of common law. In the late fifteenth century the crown was pressing right up against the outermost boundaries of what could be considered legally acceptable under the terms of the Charter. And yet little or no resistance was offered to these assaults by the Commons. Such submissiveness begs the question why. The answer is almost certainly to be found in the crown’s recourse to the time-honoured practice of packing – that is to say, of fixing the return of royal retainers and so securing compliance with royal wishes. Clear evidence of a policy of packing is afforded by the returns to the parliament of 1478, which was summoned to bring PROME, ix. 125–6. Statutes, ii. 321–2. 28 C.D. Ross, Edward IV (1974), 341. 26 27

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about the attainder of the duke of Clarence. Of the 291 known members of this assembly, no fewer than fifty-seven, or roughly 20 per cent of the total, had close ties with the king and the central government, with at least forty-three of these being active members of the royal household.29 In Cornwall almost all the election returns appear to have been tampered with. In counties where direct royal influence was weaker, the king’s magnate allies exerted themselves on his behalf, no fewer than seven of Lord Hastings’s men being returned in the Midlands. Quite possibly, efforts of comparable effectiveness had been made to influence elections to the previous parliament, that of 1472–5, which was summoned to provide finance for the king’s anticipated invasion of France. In this assembly thirty-nine royal servants were present in the Commons, comprising some 14 per cent of the total, the majority of them again members of the household. If it is remembered as well that the king and his ministers could manage and direct parliamentary proceedings through the election of a compliant Speaker, then it becomes easier to understand how the assemblies of the period could have bowed to the royal will and shown so little inclination to legislate. In the 1830s Henry Hallam was to observe that Edward IV’s reign was the first in our history in which not a single enactment was made which had the effect of increasing the liberty or security of the subject.30 In the twin processes of royal manipulation of elections and the careful management of parliamentary proceedings there may be found at least part of the reason why. While it is thus evident that the parliamentary Commons were losing interest in the Charter in the fifteenth century and that those who petitioned them were appealing less often to its terms, that is not to say that petitioners who had once looked to the Charter with hope were now abandoning their age-old quest for right. Quite the contrary: they were as zealous as ever in their appetite for justice. It is rather that in the fifteenth century they sought to achieve their ends by a quite different means. Instead of, as they once had, placing their hopes in the Charter, they now turned to the chancellor. Where Magna Carta had once been the panacea for the multitude of ills facing petitioners, in the late Middle Ages that place was now taken by the equitable jurisdiction of chancery. The great attraction of the chancellor’s jurisdiction in the popular view was that its processes were free from all the procedural pitfalls and formalities of the common law. No original writ was necessary to bring a case, as actions were initiated by informal bill of complaint; pleading was relatively informal, because there was no jury; and evidence could be taken by either deposition or interrogation. Moreover, there was no limitation to law terms: the court was open the year round.31 All these advantages made it possible for the chancellor’s court to provide swift and inexpensive justice for the poor and disadvantaged. A useful measure of chancery’s rapidly growing jurisdiction is afforded by the figures for the expansion of its business. Between 1387 and 1426, the first period for which petitions to the chancellor are calendared, some twenty cases a year came to the chancellor’s attention. Between 1432 and 1443, during Bishop Stafford’s term of office, over 130 cases did so, while between 1461 and 1465, the first Yorkist years, the figure was nearly twice that, and between 1485 and 1500 twice that again.32 While it would 31 32 29 30

Ibid., 343. Henry Hallam, View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages (new edn., 3 vols., 1860), iii. 198. J.H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History (4th edn., 1981), 103–4. Nicholas Pronay, ‘The Chancellor, the Chancery, and the Council at the End of the Fifteenth Century’, in British Government and Administration. Studies presented to S.B. Chrimes, ed. Harry Hearder and H.R. Loyn (Cardiff, 1974), 87–103, at 88–9.



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be misleading to suggest that chancery constituted a system entirely apart from the common law – in reality it complemented it – it was nonetheless a characteristic of the chancellor’s jurisdiction that its procedures allowed him the freedom to dispense with the rules of the regular courts and to consider individual cases on their merits. In other words, the chancellor and his court were at liberty to consider matters ‘according to equity and conscience’ – or, as Chancellor Stillington put it in 1469, ‘a man shall not be prejudiced by mispleadings, or by default of form, but according to conscience’.33 The implication of this for Magna Carta’s place in the English legal system was that an area of jurisdiction was opened up which had the effect of marginalising it, and doing so in two ways. In the first place, the Charter counted for less than it had as a source of justice and a beacon of hope to the disadvantaged; and, second, the procedures and processes employed in chancery were altogether different from those of the common law, which the Charter had regulated. If we were to go further, we might suggest that chancery’s procedures, with their strong emphasis on ‘equity and conscience’, had far less in common with English common law than with the parallel system, growing in influence in England at this time, of the civil law. If we are right in supposing that the chancellor’s expanding jurisdiction played some role in the Charter’s decline, and if we are right too in seeing part of the chancellor’s appeal being his use of procedures akin to those of the civil law, this was an ironic turn of events given the role that civilian ideas had played in shaping the Charter in the first place. The very idea of equitable jurisdiction as a way of offering redress to plaintiffs was after all little more than an extension of the duty placed on the king in the Charter to do right and avoid delay in the remedying of injustice. The twin ideas of right and law which had been articulated in the Charter were together embodied in the Latin word ‘ius’, a term itself deeply rooted in the Roman tradition.34 The influence of Roman law can be detected quite specifically in chapter 20 of the Charter, which affirmed the principle of proportionality in the levying of fines and amercements, the word ‘delictum’, employed here for ‘offence’, being a term derived from Roman imperial law.35 It is a strange turn of events that the ideas derived from Roman law which had fed into the Charter were to have the effect two centuries later of opening up approaches to the seeking of right which would undermine the Charter’s centrality in English political life. It is an outcome, however, which flowed naturally from the chancellor’s initiative in offering swift and inexpensive justice in accordance with the terms of Magna Carta chapter 40. Whether or how far Roman or civil law precepts were actually employed in chancery judgements is a question that is very difficult to answer, given the loss of so many of the court’s records. What can be said without doubt, however, is that an increasing proportion of chancery’s staff had been trained in the civil law. Until approximately the beginning of the fifteenth century the majority of chancery clerks and masters had been men without a university training who had risen through the ranks by learning on the job. As late as the 1450s, among those who were graduates, only one had a higher degree, that of Master of Arts, and none of the eleven masters had a legal training.36 Around mid-century, however, and more particularly in the Quoted by Christopher Allmand, ‘The Civil Lawyers’, in Profession, Vocation and Culture in Later Medieval England. Essays dedicated to the memory of A.R. Myers, ed. C.H. Clough (Liverpool, 1982), 155–80, at 157. 34 J.C. Holt, Magna Carta (2nd edn., Cambridge, 1992), 117–18. 35 Vincent, Magna Carta. A Very Short Introduction, 63. 36 Pronay, ‘The Chancellor, the Chancery, and the Council’, 90. 33

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Yorkist period, a change took place, from a clerical to a largely legal personnel. By the beginning of Henry VII’s reign the majority of masters were graduates in civil law. At least seven, and probably nine of the group were trained civilians, and no fewer than four were doctors. By the end of the fifteenth century, it had become the crown’s policy to recruit to the masters’ grade directly from the ranks of the university civilians, and not from the clerks of the second grade.37 This development should be seen in the context of the more general rise to prominence of the civilians in the personnel of Church and State in the late Middle Ages. Of the forty Englishmen who were promoted to bishoprics between 1485 and 1529, all but four of them graduates, as many as twenty-four were lawyers, most of them civil lawyers. In the early sixteenth century all the most important members of the episcopal bench, men such as John Alcock, John Morton, Richard Fox, William Warham, Cuthbert Tunstall and Stephen Gardiner, were experts in Roman jurisprudence.38 The civilians’ prominence was equally evident among the wider body of graduate clergy, amongst whom the proportion trained in civil law had risen steadily over the previous two centuries. All the chancellors who held office from the 1460s were either civilians or theologians who had reinvented themselves as civilians in the course of their careers.39 The sharp rise in the number of civilians in government is a development with a significant bearing on the later history of Magna Carta because civil law was a system which generally favoured the elevation of princely power as a force for the common good. To this extent, the question raised earlier of whether or how far specifically civilian doctrines were applied in chancery is a matter of lesser import than the fact that the civilians were by their training naturally inclined to think in terms of the raison d’état. At least a few of their number had studied in those parts of Europe where civilian doctrines provided the underpinning for increasingly authoritarian approaches to government. Peter Courtenay, for example, bishop of Exeter and later of Winchester and Henry VII’s first keeper of the privy seal, had studied at Padua in the early 1460s, at a time when the dominant figure in the law faculty there was Antonio de’ Roselli, a keen theoretical exponent of the power of princely rulers.40 Courtenay’s contemporary, John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, a leading lay supporter of the Yorkist regime, had likewise studied at Padua and was to become notorious for his ruthless upholding of royal interests and his resort to the ‘law of Padua’ in treason trials.41 The natural instinct of the civilians, especially of those familiar with the social and political systems in which the civil law had originated, was to promote the assertion of royal power to achieve better and more effective government.42 This attitude of general support for royal authority contrasts sharply with the outlook of the bishops and senior clergy in the time of King John and, indeed, in the thirteenth century more generally. In this period, while there was admittedly no Ibid., 90–2. S.J. Gunn, Early Tudor Government, 1485–1558 (Basingstoke, 1995), 16–18. For civilians in government, see T.A.R. Evans, ‘The Number, Origins, and Careers of Scholars’, in History of the University of Oxford, II. Late Medieval Oxford, ed. J.I. Catto and T.A.R. Evans (Oxford, 1992), 530–1. 40 Gunn, Early Tudor Government, 16–17. 41 Oxford DNB, ‘Tiptoft, John, First Earl of Worcester’. 42 For useful discussion of this point, although approached from a different perspective, see John Watts, ‘“New Men”, “New Learning” and “New Monarchy”: Personnel and Policy in Royal Government, 1461–1529’, in Political Society in Later Medieval England. A Festschrift for Christine Carpenter, ed. Benjamin Thompson and John Watts (Woodbridge, 2015), 199–222, esp. 217. 37 38 39



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shortage of bishops with strong ties to royal government – in John’s reign Walter de Cornhill at Coventry and John de Gray at Norwich, stand out – there were also bishops who either by training or instinct were inclined to challenge and question royal authority; and these were not necessarily only the monks and scholars.43 It is worth remembering that as a group in the years to 1215 the episcopate had been united by their experience of one thing above all – the Interdict and the difficulties which John’s quarrel with the pope had occasioned for the Church. Almost all of the bishops had fled into exile with Stephen Langton, the archbishop of Canterbury, and had lived near or alongside him in what must have become a closely-knit group. In July 1213, after their return, four of their number, with Langton presiding, were participants in the ceremony at Winchester in which John tearfully prostrated himself in a ritual admonishing of the kind described in the Book of Kings.44 The four included the perhaps somewhat unlikely figures of William de Ste Mère-Eglise, of London, and Eustace of Ely, who had both in the past been active royal clerks.45 Evidently the two men, for all their royalist inclinations, had been influenced by Langton’s thinking. Langton himself, in the course of his exegetical studies, had devoted much thought to the question of whether or how far a ruler’s subjects were obliged to obey him when he was ruling unjustly.46 Under Langton’s influence, the idea became embedded in English thirteenth-century episcopal culture that the bishops should reprimand and correct a ruler when he erred. Thus in 1279 Archbishop Pecham, after encountering resistance to his reforming legislation from some royal clerks, had ordered Magna Carta to be posted in all cathedral and collegiate churches and the same to be done annually thereafter.47 Twenty years later, his successor, Archbishop Winchelsey, was to be active in his support for the baronial opposition to Edward I and Edward II, resisting royal demands for taxation and championing the reissue of the Charters.48 For all these reasons – the increasing obsolescence of the Charter, the changing political discourse of the late Middle Ages, the manipulation of parliament by the king, and the rise of the equitable jurisdiction of chancery – the Charter, in the mid-fourteenth century still a living document, was after 1400 increasingly consigned to the margins of political life. To say this is not to call into question either the Charter’s symbolic and honorific importance, which remained, or its role in the training of lawyers, which was still considerable. It is, however, to suggest that there was a gradual weakening of the compact between king and subjects, forged at Runnymede, of which Magna Carta stood guarantor. By the beginning of the sixteenth century an increasingly powerful monarchy, buttressed by a system of courts dispensing equity justice, a system about which Magna Carta said nothing, was able to triumph over dissenters and those which it considered a threat to the ruling For an analysis of the background of the bishops in post in 1215 and later, see Marion Gibbs and Jane Lang, Bishops and Reform, 1215–1272 (Oxford, 1934, repr. 1962), Appendix C. 44 Magna Carta, ed. Carpenter, 279. With Langton at Winchester were Giles de Briouze, bishop of Hereford, William de Ste Mère-Eglise, bishop of London, Eustace, bishop of Ely, and Hugh de Wells, bishop of Lincoln. I am grateful to Dr. Sophie Ambler for advice on John’s bishops. 45 Oxford DNB, ‘Ste Mère-Église, William de’; ‘Eustace (d.1215)’. 46 J.W. Baldwin, ‘Master Stephen Langton, Future Archbishop of Canterbury: The Paris Schools and Magna Carta’, EHR, cxxiii (2008), 811–46. 47 D.L. Douie, Archbishop Pecham (Oxford, 1952), 98, 113. 48 J.H. Denton, Robert Winchelsey and the Crown, 1294–1313. A Study in the Defence of Ecclesiastical Liberty (Cambridge, 1980), 172, 184, 194, 254, 261. 43

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dynasty. The growth of this assertive ‘new monarchy’, if it may so be called, was in large measure a response to the instability which had disturbed English political life in the second half of the fifteenth century and which led to calls for the enhancement of central resources.49 The system of checks and balances, which Magna Carta had helped to create, was beginning to break down. To this background, perhaps it may not altogether be an overstatement to talk about the end of the ‘Magna Carta state’ in England in the late fifteenth century.

John Watts, The Making of Polities. Europe, 1300–1500 (Cambridge, 2009), 416.

49

THE BUSINESS OF THE SOUTHERN CONVOCATION IN 14621 Paul Cavill

Our knowledge of what went on in the church councils of the provinces of Canterbury and York in the fifteenth century is patchy. There were no equivalents to the parliament rolls and the statute rolls, which provided official records of the proceedings and the legislation of a parliament. Most of what is known derives from bishops’ registers, and these have been combed by Gerald Bray for his multi­ volume edition Records of Convocation.2 The entries in episcopal registers were, however, skewed towards the procedural elements of convocation: principally, the relaying of writs of summons, the certification of elections, and the collection of subsidies. Hence these entries tell us more about things done before an assembly had met and after it had concluded than about what had happened during its meeting. For day-to-day reporting of the business of the southern convocation, we are reliant chiefly on the registers of the archbishops of Canterbury, whose assembly it was. The extensiveness of the entries varied not only between successive meetings but also between archbishops. The register of Henry Chichele (1414–43) is much more informative than that of Thomas Bourgchier (1454–86), the longest-serving archbishop of the fifteenth century.3 Only three of the thirteen meetings held under Bourgchier were recorded in the archbishop’s register: the convocations of 1460–1, 1463 and 1481–2.4 This discrepancy may have influenced modern assessments of how the business of convocation changed over the century. Eric Kemp observed that ‘In the second half of the fifteenth century although judicial and legislative acts still occurred from time to time taxation again resumed its dominance’.5 In the first half of the I should like to thank Pembroke College, Cambridge, for research funding and Michael Reeve for his advice. 2 Records of Convocation, ed. Gerald Bray (20 vols., Woodbridge, 2005–6). The sixth volume covers the convocation of Canterbury between 1444 and 1509. 3 The Register of Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1414–1443, ed. E.F. Jacob (4 vols., Canterbury and York Society, xlii, xlv–xlvii, 1937–47), iii. 1–288. 4 Registrum Thome Bourgchier, Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi, A.D. 1454–1486, ed. F.R.H. du Boulay (Canterbury and York Society, liv, 1957), 77–150. The editor suggests that entries relating to other convocations may have been lost (p. xxv). 5 E.W. Kemp, Counsel and Consent: Aspects of the Government of the Church as Exemplified in the History of the English Provincial Synods (1961), 115. 1

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century, several major issues – the confrontation with lollardy, the re-establishment of papal authority after the schism, and the countervailing effect of the conciliar movement – had engaged convocation to an extent that they would not have done later on. Bourgchier himself made taxation more important to convocation’s business by reviving the practice of an archbishop obtaining a ‘charitable subsidy’ from his clergy.6 In the crown’s eyes, taxation had always been the reason for calling convocation into being.7 From 1435 until the end of the century, every assembly was summoned in response to a royal writ; an archbishop of Canterbury did not convoke a church council on his own initiative again until 1509. Introducing the convocations of Edward IV’s reign, Professor Bray has remarked that ‘church business became less significant whilst the granting of subsidies remained constant, giving the latter relatively greater preponderance in the acts’.8 Yet the impression that taxation became more prominent also reflects how little the available sources tell us about the other activities of convocation. The southern convocation of 1462, the first to be summoned in Edward’s reign, exemplifies this point. No record of its meeting was entered in Bourgchier’s register. While bishops’ registers imply that taxation was the sole business of this assembly, additional sources reveal that much else was discussed. This supplementary evidence suggests that convocations continued routinely to deal with other matters in the second half of the century. The southern convocation of 1462 confirms the importance of the assembly to the crown as a source of revenue. Edward IV’s first parliament had met in November and December 1461 and then been prorogued until 6 May 1462, when it was dissolved, without having made a grant of taxation. The king’s absence was the reason given in the letters patent to Archbishop Bourgchier that ordered him to dissolve the parliament.9 A meeting of convocation, by contrast, did not require the king’s presence. On 4 June 1462, Edward ordered Archbishops Bourgchier and Booth to summon the convocations of Canterbury and York. The southern convocation met at St. Paul’s cathedral on 21 July. It gave the king a half-tenth and was then prorogued on 2 August. Reconvening on 8 November, it gave the king a second half-tenth and was then dissolved on 24 November.10 On 2 November, between the two sessions of convocation, Edward granted the clergy a ‘charta de libertatibus clericorum’. The last great royal concession to the English Church, this charter has recently been investigated by Daniel Gosling, who regards it as a bid for support in response to the landing of Margaret of Anjou in northern England late in October.11 The charter was a response to the gravamina of the clergy’s representatives assembled in convocation. A reciprocal relationship between the granting of the charter and of the half-tenths may have existed. Perhaps the second half-tenth expressed the clergy’s gratitude to Edward for his charter.

6



7



8 9



10 11

F.R.H. du Boulay, ‘Charitable Subsidies granted to the Archbishop of Canterbury, 1300–1489’, BIHR, xxiii (1950), 157–64. Maureen Jurkowski, ‘The History of Clerical Taxation in England and Wales, 1173–1663: The Findings of the E 179 Project’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, lxvii (2016), 55–8. Records of Convocation, ed. Bray, xix. 115. PROME, xiii. 66–7. Records of Convocation, ed. Bray, vi. 121–40. D.F. Gosling, ‘Edward IV’s Charta de Libertatibus Clericorum’, in The Fifteenth Century XVI: Examining Identity, ed. Linda Clark (Woodbridge, 2018), 83–103, esp. 86–7. The charter is printed in an appendix (99–103.).



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The principal source for this convocation is Register N of Canterbury cathedral priory.12 Bray’s edition identifies this source as the ‘main account’, but does not print all of it.13 Appendix 1 below transcribes the omitted portion and notes the other part. Entered into four folios of the register were five texts relating to two convocations held under Edward IV. The fifth text concerns the convocation of 1472 and consists of supplications made by its lower house to its upper house (Appendix 1.5).14 The other four texts relate to the convocation of 1462. The first of these is the most important (Appendix 1.1). The preceding two folios are blank and the document has no title or date. The text consists of a preamble and four sections. The preamble states that the complaint is being made on behalf of the convocation of Canterbury to the king, lords and commons of the realm. Four grievances follow, which concern: 1) the arrest and indictment of clergymen by secular officers; 2) an act of parliament purporting to exempt ‘great trees’ from liability to tithes; 3) the offence of praemunire; 4) clerical exemption from secular jurisdiction. The first three grievances correspond in substance and in order to the three points of Edward’s charter. Therefore, these clerical gravamina were almost certainly the basis for the king’s charter. Most likely, they were drawn up in this form in the first session of convocation in July and August. Prior deliberation may have fed into their drafting. In the preceding convocation, that of 1460–1, the lower clergy had prepared several unidentified articles, about which the bishops undertook to approach the king.15 Moreover, several bishops had proposed excommunicating publicly royal officers and jurors who falsely accused clergymen and also anyone who sued writs of praemunire against them. The problem had been brought home when a member of convocation was himself arrested by the sheriffs of London. The tithing of ‘great trees’ had also been discussed, with the statute being read aloud.16 Even so, it remains highly probable that this document was finalised in the convocation of 1462. A comparison of this petition with the royal charter reveals the extent to which the king responded to the clergy’s grievances. The petition described problems, but did not always propose solutions, and what was granted did not exactly reflect what had been sought. The charter’s terms allowed for future revision, and at the next convocation in 1463 a committee would be appointed to propose amendments, seemingly with a view to obtaining confirmation in the next session of parliament.17 The first grievance concerned the indictment and arrest of clergymen, which was decried as against divine and human law. Tolerating such infringements of the Church’s liberties was noted to contravene the coronation oath, which Edward had recently taken.18 The charter replied that clergy so detained were to be transferred Canterbury Cathedral Archives, CCA-DCc/Register/N, ff. 261–264. Records of Convocation, ed. Bray, vi. 121 n. 358. The texts printed by Bray had previously been noted in Registrum Thome Bourgchier, ed. du Boulay, pp. xxxv n. 3, 108 n. 1. 14 This text is followed in the register by the well-known speech delivered in the parliament of 1472–5 in support of the king’s French campaign: Literæ Cantuarienses. The Letter Books of the Monastery of Christ Church, Canterbury, ed. J.B. Sheppard (3 vols., RS, lxxxv, 1887–9), iii. 274–85. 15 Registrum Thome Bourgchier, ed. du Boulay, 93; Records of Convocation, ed. Bray, vi. 115–16. The chronology of this convocation is sufficiently unclear that either Henry VI or Edward IV could have been meant. 16 Registrum Thome Bourgchier, ed. du Boulay, 85–8; Records of Convocation, ed. Bray, vi. 108–11. 17 Gosling, ‘Edward IV’s Charta’, 102; Registrum Thome Bourgchier, ed. du Boulay, 108; Records of Convocation, ed. Bray, vi. 157. 18 A king swore to ‘kepe the privilegis of lawe canon and of holy chirch’: Registrum Thome Bourgchier, 12 13

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to the jurisdiction of their ordinary, who would judge them. This concession proved difficult to realise. In the convocation of 1463, Bourgchier would be asked to write to the king seeking the release of particular clergymen in accordance with the charter. It was on account of this request that the charter was entered into the archbishop’s register.19 The clergy’s second grievance denounced the ‘pretended’ statute of 1371 that had claimed to exempt ‘great trees’ from liability for tithes.20 Defence of this act was described as heresy, and thus the law ‘should be wholly deleted from the statute book’. Since a royal charter could not annul an act of parliament, the king offered a different remedy: licence to disregard any attempt to enforce the statute through writs of prohibition and praemunire. The third grievance concerned another ‘pretended’ statute, that of praemunire itself.21 Since the makers and users of this statute were automatically excommunicated, some kind of remedy was stated to be required quickly. The charter conceded that no case begun in a church court within the realm should lead to prosecution under the statute. It therefore confined praemunire to its original sense as the offence of suing outside the realm over matters determinable within the realm. As Dr. Gosling points out, clergymen were the principal users of the statute in that sense: so, although collectively the clergy could not admit the fact, as individuals they may not have minded the continuing protection against external litigation that the act afforded.22 Unlike the three preceding grievances, the petition’s fourth grievance was omitted from the charter. This omission is not surprising, for the request was fundamentally incompatible with the English legal system. The fourth grievance attempted to reassert what in canon law was called the privilegium fori: that is, the principle that the clergy should be under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Church, in civil as well as in criminal matters.23 The notion of jurisdiction being determined by reason of personal status (ratione personae) conflicted with the English divide by reason of subject-matter (ratione materiae). The only concession to the canon-law position concerned felonies, through the so-called ‘benefit of clergy’, which the charter’s first article addressed. The request for the privilegium fori therefore appears a piece of wishful thinking. It was undermined by the frequency with which clerics sued each other in secular courts, although according to the petition the privilege should apply even when a clergyman was willing to appear before the secular forum. That such a request was nevertheless made strengthens Richard Helmholz’s observation that the ideal of the privilegium fori was not ‘wholly dead in England’.24 Maybe the clergy thought it important to restate what the law ought to be, even if there was scant hope of that position being attained. This grievance, like the others, was presented as a pastoral issue, because offenders against the privilege were, in theory, automatically excommunicated. It might tentatively be suggested that a meeting of convocation called the privilege to mind. After all, the clergy were so assembled because of their

21 22 23 24 19 20

ed. du Boulay, 61 (coronation oath of Richard III). Ibid., 102–7; Records of Convocation, ed. Bray, vi. 152–6. 45 Edw. III, c. 3 (Statutes, i. 393). 16 Ric. II, c. 5 (Statutes, ii. 84–6). Gosling, ‘Edward IV’s Charta’, 92–3. The major study is R.H. Helmholz, The Ius Commune in England: Four Studies (Oxford, 2001), ch. 4. Ibid., 221.



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predecessors’ objection ‘racione fori’ to appearing before a secular court, the high court of parliament, to be taxed alongside the laity.25 Six other items of business can be identified in the convocation of 1462. Five of them appear in the same source, Register N of Canterbury cathedral priory. Two are pieces of provincial legislation known as ‘constitutions’.26 The first constitution, Quamvis sacris canonibus, forbade the practice of arresting people in church (Appendix 1.3). The reference to St. Paul’s cathedral may imply that it had been prompted by a particular incident, perhaps even during the meeting of convocation. The second constitution, Quamquam in hoc catholico, regulated clerical dress (Appendix 1.4). The lower clergy had raised the issue during the previous convocation.27 Their concern was paralleled in parliament, which had discussed lay dress in 1461 and would legislate on the subject in 1463. The drafting of the statute appears to have been overseen by the chancellor, Bishop Neville, who was also active in convocation.28 Some cross-fertilisation of rule-making seems a possibility: for instance, ‘bolsters’ (shoulder pads) were forbidden to laypeople not of gentle status and to the clergy entirely. At the end of this second constitution in Register N either the scribe himself or the text that he was copying observed that ‘Those constitutions are not yet published: therefore I ask you whether they are seen by many’.29 Publication occurred at the next convocation in 1463. These two laws were the only constitutions to have been recorded in Bourgchier’s register.30 They also comprise two of the three constitutions known to have been enacted during his archiepiscopate. Three further items of business were decrees concerning the observance of saints’ feast days. According to the account in Register N, they were made by Archbishop Bourgchier on 24 November, the final day of the convocation (Appendix 1.2). The first decree sought to resolve doubts about how to observe the commemoration of St. Thomas Becket. The saint was henceforth to be commemorated if possible weekly on Tuesdays (the day of his martyrdom). The second decree established that St. Frideswide’s deposition should be kept as a lesser double feast (festum minus) on 19 October.31 The third decree established that St. Etheldreda’s translation should be celebrated in the same manner two days earlier, on 17 October. The entry in Register N suggests that the second decree had led to the third being made. The request to establish a lesser double feast for Frideswide originated with ‘certain Oxford men’. It had already been accepted in the convocation of 1434, when Frideswide had been described as the university’s ‘special advocate’.32 Bourgchier agreed on condition that the same was done for Etheldreda. Both Anglo-Saxon princesses, the two saints made a pair. Perhaps, as a former bishop of Ely, Bourgchier was drawn to Etheldreda as the see’s patron saint. Maybe establishing a double feast for her seemed an equivalent The Register of Walter de Stapeldon, Bishop of Exeter (A.D. 1307–1326), ed. F.C. Hingeston-Randolph (1892), 122; J.H. Denton, ‘The Clergy and Parliament in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries’, in The English Parliament in the Middle Ages, ed. R.G. Davies and J.H. Denton (Manchester, 1981), 88–108. 26 The term ‘constituciones’ was described as a synonym for ‘statuta’ in Sir John Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum Anglie, ed. S.B. Chrimes (Cambridge, 1942), ch. 15, pp. 36–7. 27 Registrum Thome Bourgchier, ed. du Boulay, 92; Records of Convocation, ed. Bray, vi. 114–15. 28 The Fane Fragment of the 1461 Lords’ Journal, ed. W.H. Dunham (New Haven, CT, 1935), 25; PROME, xiii. 108–11. 29 Canterbury Cathedral Archives, CCA-DCc/Register/N, f. 263. 30 Registrum Thome Bourgchier, ed. du Boulay, 108–11; Records of Convocation, ed. Bray, vi. 157–9. 31 The different levels of feasts are explained in Register of Henry Chichele, ed. Jacob, i. p. cxlv. 32 Ibid., iii. 256. 25

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honour for the province’s other university, Cambridge, which lay in the diocese. The text in Register N ends with the comment ‘But whether publication thereupon has presently been made is not known to me’.33 Formal approval may not have occurred for some time, since in the convocation of 1472 the lower clergy asked that the two feasts be observed.34 The two feasts were confirmed in a constitution issued by Bourgchier in 1481. The only known text of this constitution was discovered by Donald Logan in a canon-law formulary (Queen’s College, Oxford, MS 54).35 This is the third of the three constitutions enacted under Bourgchier to have been identified. The final item of business is recorded in a different source, which is transcribed in Appendix 2 below. Two copies have been found, both in volumes of the constitutions as arranged by William Lyndwood in his Provinciale (1430). One volume is held in the Bodleian Library, the other at Longleat House. The Bodleian copy consists of a continuation of Lyndwood’s arrangement. The final constitution in the Provinciale (Archbishop Stratford’s Quamquam ex solventibus) is succeeded by two additional constitutions in the same hand: Archbishop Chichele’s Cum propter nimiam prorogacionem (1439) and Archbishop Walden’s Splendor paterne glorie (1398).36 Then a new scribe entered Bourgchier’s constitution of 1462 about clerical dress (Quamquam in hoc catholico). This constitution is followed by an itemised list of seven pieces of business transacted in the same convocation.37 Six of these have been discussed already: the king’s grant to the clergy (item 1), the two constitutions about arrests in church and clerical dress (items 2–3), and the three decrees concerning saints’ commemorations (items 5–7). That the text of the constitution about clerical dress is part of the same document appears from the identification of it as being ‘above written’. Edward IV’s grant is described as being in the form of letters patent rather than a charter.38 It is said to be in the keeping of the chancellor, Bishop Neville. In the Longleat manuscript, the same text appears, containing the constitution about clerical dress and the description of the convocation’s activities.39 Unlike in the Bodleian manuscript, here the text is separated from Lyndwood’s constitutions by a commentary on the Regulae Juris written by the English canonist Thomas Chillenden (d.1411).40 One piece of business has not been noted already: ‘the articles of the general sentence were elaborated there and reduced into a new form and order’ (item 4). The previous convocation may shed some light on this matter. The publication and enforcement of sentences of excommunication had been under discussion in 1460–1.41 An entry in another volume of Lyndwood’s constitutions relates directly to this item of business. The manuscript belonged to Roger Walle, who had been Canterbury Cathedral Archives, CCA-DCc/Register/N, f. 262. Records of Convocation, ed. Bray, vi. 214. 35 F.D. Logan, ‘Archbishop Thomas Bourgchier Revisited’, in The Church in Pre-Reformation Society: Essays in Honour of F.R.H. du Boulay, ed. C.M. Barron and Christopher Harper-Bill (Woodbridge, 1985), 171–3, 185–6. The text is also printed in Records of Convocation, ed. Bray, vi. 279–81. 36 Bodl., MS Rawlinson C. 664, ff. 70–71v. 37 Ibid., ff. 72–73. 38 This description may explain why the grant was enrolled on the patent rolls, instead of on the charter rolls: Gosling, ‘Edward IV’s Charta’, 85, 99–103. A perception of the grant as merely letters patent might have contributed to the clergy’s difficulty in obtaining its observance. 39 Longleat House, Warminster (Wilts.), MS 35, ff. 207–208. I am grateful to the marquess of Bath for permission to consult and quote from this manuscript. 40 Ibid., ff. 187–206. 41 The issues are explained in Registrum Thome Bourgchier, ed. du Boulay, pp. xxxii–xxxvi. 33 34



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archdeacon of Coventry since 1442, and by virtue of his office received a personal summons to convocation. Walle wrote a note against the constitution that provided the text of the general sentence, Archbishop Langton’s Auctoritate dei patris (1222). His note stated that a correction had been made to that constitution in the convocation of 1460.42 This amendment inserted the phrase ‘seu in speciali siue in genere’ into a denunciation of people who maliciously accused others of a crime, thereby defaming them among their neighbours.43 At the end of Walle’s volume is an extract from a vernacular general sentence, which cited the constitution and incorporated the inserted phrase, translating it as ‘specially or generally’.44 Perhaps this amendment was confirmed and reissued in the next convocation in 1462. Walle himself was one of the many absentees from its second session in November, but presumably did attend the first session.45 Based on this evidence for the assembly of 1462, several general observations about the later fifteenth-century convocation suggest themselves. The first is that successive assemblies returned to the same topics. The convocation of 1462 seems to have picked up where its predecessor left off. Subsequent convocations were preoccupied with trying to get Edward IV’s charter implemented. Deliberation led to decrees, and decrees led to constitutions, eventually. A high degree of continuity in membership, much greater than in parliament, may partly account for this revisiting of subjects.46 Secondly, a significant proportion of the business of convocation has been lost to us because no formal record was kept. Very little of what went on in his convocations was entered into Archbishop Bourgchier’s register. Taxation was the only kind of business guaranteed to leave documentary traces, and so its prominence has been accentuated. Indeed, the itemised list of convocation’s activities in 1462 omits to mention the granting of the two half-tenths (Appendix 2). Thirdly, the means of publicising the decisions of convocation warrant scrutiny. The two comments in Register N indicate a contemporary awareness of the importance of publication (Appendix 1.2 and 1.4). The procedure was that the archbishop wrote to the bishop of London, as dean of the province, who then communicated with other suffragans.47 The rarity with which such ephemeral mandates were entered in episcopal registers may account for the obscurity of convocation. Nevertheless, we might also wonder about the effectiveness of this method of dissemination. Fourthly, a partial explanation for our ignorance of later fifteenth-century convocations may have been the consequence of Lyndwood’s work becoming the standard way of presenting provincial legislation, both in manuscript and from the 1490s also in print.48 The work’s non-chronological arrangement made it difficult to update. Subsequent legislation ‘Correcta erat ista constitucio in conuocacione celebrata in ecclesia sancti pauli die martis proximo post festum sancte crucis Anno domini Millesimo Quadringentensimo sexagesimo’: Shrewsbury School, MS 8, f. 83. I am grateful to Shrewsbury School for permission to consult and quote from this manuscript. 43 The phrase was inserted between the words ‘crimen’ and ‘imponunt’: William Lyndwood, Provinciale (Oxford, 1679), 347. 44 Shrewsbury School, MS 8, f. 106. 45 Records of Convocation, ed. Bray, vi. 137. The grant of the second half-tenth recorded the names of absentees because they were required to pay their contributions early. 46 The majority of the lower house comprised ex officio members rather than elected representatives: Records of Convocation, ed. Bray, xix. 251. 47 The text of the constitution of 1481 derived from Bourgchier’s mandate to Bishop Kempe: Logan, ‘Archbishop Thomas Bourgchier Revisited’, 185–6; Records of Convocation, ed. Bray, vi. 279–81. 48 Ian Forrest, ‘English Provincial Constitutions and Inquisition into Lollardy’, in The Culture of Inquisition in Medieval England, ed. M.C. Flannery and K.L. Walter (Cambridge, 2013), 47–8, 59. 42

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was thus literally marginalised. A contemporary annotation to an existing constitution made in another manuscript of the Provinciale reinforces this point. It stated that one of Archbishop Bourgchier’s convocations had enacted a constitution requiring the presence of a parish priest at the making of wills.49 But even on a subject of such general applicability, no such constitution has yet been found.50 Fifthly and finally, in the second half of the fifteenth century convocation was not reduced to being a tax-raising body, but rather continued to range over the Church’s affairs. We may conclude that we know about only a fraction of what went on in these assemblies. APPENDICES Abbreviations and contractions have been expanded. Capitalisation has been modernised, the use of the letters u and v standardised, and minimal punctuation added. 1.1. Clerical gravamina (undated): Canterbury Cathedral Archives, CCA-DCc/ Register/N, f. 261. Ex parte sacrosancte synodi sive convocacionis cleri Cantuariensis provincie sancteque matris ecclesie eiusdem provincie presertim et eciam tocius sacre ecclesie Anglicane atque cleri eiusdem regie celsitudini precibusque51 dominis atque communitati huius nobilissimi regni cum omni ea qua decet reverencia: ad exaltacionem catholice fidei sacrosancte matris ecclesie immunitate et libertatibus contra iura et iusticiam atque sanctorum patrum sacrosanctos canones et decreta indies lesis vulneratis dampnabili et violatis in animarum quam plurimum grande periculum et dicte sancte matris ecclesie preiudicium non modicum et gravamen ut in sequentibus clarius et plenius continetur pro salubri et congruo remedio consequendo exponitur et intimatur: In primis flebili insinuacione monstratur ac cum cordis anxietate et dolore conqueritur ecclesia ipsa in suis suppositis cum Rachaele52 plorans non consolata intro53 omnes filios suos quia non exauditur, nam licet per sacros canones et per determinacionem sancte matris nostre ecclesie Romane ex qua fidem recipimus in qua stamus seu stare deberemus sit divinitus constitutum, ordinatum, peritum et sanccitum quod quicumque viri seculares clericos indictantes et eos incarcerantes in publica custodia vel privata in vinculis (licet sine lesione) ipso facto sunt excommunicati, in quam eciam incurrunt ipso iure concensientes dantes auxilium, consilium et favorem. Quid tamen quod dolenter refertur novus abusus in regno Anglie molevit et dampnabili accrevit quod vicecomites ceterique officiarij seculares iuridiccionis54 atque ministri ‘conclusio w[illemi] quod sufficiunt duo testes in vltima voluntate sine presencia proprii [presbyteri] Sicut dotis Sed hodie requiritur eius presencia secundum constitucionem editam per dominum Bovc[hier] iam Cantuariensem Archiepiscopum’: Cambridge University Library, Peterborough Cathedral, Dean and Chapter Library, MS 9, f. 46. This annotation referred to the gloss on ‘probatis’: Lyndwood, Provinciale, 174g. 50 Presumably the constitution followed the tenor of an archiepiscopal mandate of 1455 to the same effect: Registrum Thome Bourgchier, ed. du Boulay, 23–5. 51 Probably ‘proceribusque’ was intended. 52 Jeremiah 31:15. 53 Possibly ‘inter’ was intended. 54 Sic for ‘iurisdiccionis’. 49



The Business of the Southern Convocation in 1462 145

eorum clericos, rectores, vicarios et capellanos in ipsorum cessionibus, inquisicionibus et curijs procurant indictari et sepius accusari et sic auctoritate laicali capiuntur huiusmodi clerici et multipliciter vexantur tam in personis quam in bonis contra iura divina et humana et contra libertates ecclesiasticas, ad quarum observacionem quilibet rex in sua primaria coronacione tactis sacrosanctis Dei evangelijs personaliter iuratur: provideatur ad laudem Dei et honorem sancte matris ecclesie et in remedium animarum censuris ecclesie in hac parte dampnabili involutarum et censuris huiusmodi ut supra exprimitur ipso iure et facto execrabili et perniciosissime illaqueatarum de oportuno remedio ut talia amodo decetero nullatenus perpetrentur. Item cum decime ex precepto Dei lege Moyseica, evangelica et canonica in signum universalis dominij Dei nostri Deo et ecclesie reddi et fideliter persolvi precipiantur ut quicumque ex humo producitur et a terra separatur inde decima integre dare, adeo iubetur (dicitur) tamen in hoc nobili regno pretensive statutum fuisse contra iura novi et veteris testamenti de grossis et magnis arboribus etatis viginti annorum vel ultra nullo modo fore decimandum Deo et ecclesie circa quas minus quam circa fructus agrorum, laborum et expensarum impenditur. Cum ergo hoc statutum pretensum sit erreneum determinacioni ecclesie, iuri divino et humano contrarium, et si pertinaciter (quod absit) defendatur heresim conteneat manifeste, placet ordinare ut de libro statutorum penitus debeatur55 cum nec omnes principes spirituales vel temporales huiusmodi statutum defendere valeant salva fide. Item exponitur et intimatur ut supra cum amaritudinibus et cordum doloribus quod in hoc nobili regno fuit et est editum quoddam pretensum statutum quod si aliquis impetraverit et prosecutus fuerit seu impetrari et prosequi fecerit in curia Romana vel alibi aliquas litteras apostolicas vel processus et illa detulerit infra regnum Anglie et usus fuerit eijsdem,56 impetrantes, deferentes et utentes et omnes de concilio eorundem sunt extra proteccionem et eorum corpora attachiari et capi ac bona sua omnia et singula confiscari debeant in maximam enervacionem libertatis ecclesiastice et iurum Romane ecclesie et Anglicane, unde omnes huiusmodi statutum statuentes et illud observari facientes et secundum illud indicantes sunt a sacrosancta Romana ecclesia ipso facto et iure excommunicati. Quare ob reverenciam Dei et sancte matris ecclesie nostre et pro salute animarum Christifidelium in hac parte cotidie et assidue delinquencium provideatur de oportuno remedio et celeri in hac parte restitucione, ne diucius in hac parte excecati per huiusmodi sentenciam excommunicacionis iuris extra ecclesie communionem ulterius remaneamus, in qua quidem infirmitate timetur per maxime ne magna pars huius regni incaute toxicata subiaceat, quod quid velamen cecitatis cordis nostri auferre dignetur a nobis altissimus Deus ipse. Item cum nec volens nec invitus clericus valeat sibi laicum constituere iudicem, sic quoque clericus clericum ad vetitum examen coram iudice seculari tam in civili causa quam in criminali derelicto suo iudice ecclesiastico trahere expresse prohibetur, contrarium facientes tanquam violatores ecclesiastice libertatis de iure sunt reputandi et censendi. Iudices tamen seculares huius nobilissimi regni (et si in hac parte A mistake for ‘deleatur’. Sic for ‘eisdem’.

55 56

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sint de iure iudices incompetentes clericos) tam convenire clericos quam conveniri a clericis coram eis in causis tam civilibus quam criminalibus varijs modis et formis artant, cogunt et astringunt in manifestam lesionem et violacionem ecclesiastice libertatis sentenciam excommunicacionis maioris in et contra taliter delinquentes ipso iure et facto auctoritate universalis ecclesie in hac parte latam dampnabiliter incurrendo, unde petitur ex parte ecclesie fore ordinandum et statuendum ut huiusmodi clerici ad suos iudices ecclesiasticos in huiusmodi causis (ut essent iuris et libertatis ecclesie ventilandis, placitandis et determinandis) remittantur causis huiusmodi coram iudicibus suis ecclesiasticis libere prosequi et defendere per iudices seculares nullatenus impediantur. 1.2. Archiepiscopal decrees (1462): Canterbury Cathedral Archives, CCA-DCc/ Register/N, ff. 261v–262. Dominus Thomas Cantuariensis archiepiscopus, tocius Anglie primas et apostolice sedis legatus anno Domini millesimo quadringentensimo sexagesimo secundo vicesimo quarto die mensis Novembris in plena convocacione in ecclesia Sancti Pauli Londoniarum residens, nonnullis de observacione commemoracionis Sancti Thome martiris hesitantibus et interrogantibus, decrevit eandem commemoracionem si congrue fieri poterit servari in die Martis singulis septimanis si vacaverit vel alia feria proxima vacanti sub eadem feria qua commemoracio de festo loci observatur, nisi ubi fuerit alia tres commemoraciones et tunc alternis septimanis cum commemoracione synodali debent observari. Demum cum quidam Oxonienses instanter petebant quod festum Sancte Fredeswyde cum novem leccionibus celebraretur, dictus dominus Cantuariensis libenter hoc annuerium profitebatur si festum Sancte Etheldrede cum novem leccionibus celebrie haberetur. Et consequenter de fratrum suorum et cleri in dicto consilio presencium voluntatibus et assensu decrevit dictum festum Sancte Etheldrede in vigilia Sancti Luce evangeliste et festum Sancte Fredeswide proximo die post dictum festum Sancti Luce evangeliste cum novem leccionibus de communi unius virginis non martiris celebrari. Sed an inde postmodum facta fuerit publicacio michi ignoratur. 1.3. Provincial constitution Quamvis sacris canonibus against arrests in churches (1462): Canterbury Cathedral Archives, CCA-DCc/Register/N, f. 262. The title, which relates to this constitution and the next constitution, is incomplete: ‘Constituciones edite in consilio provinciali in ecclesia Sancti Pauli anno Domini millesimo quadringentensimo’. The constitution was published in the convocation of 1463 and entered into the archbishop’s register: Registrum Thome Bourgchier, ed. du Boulay, 108–9; Records of Convocation, ed. Bray, vi. 157–8. 1.4. Provincial constitution Quamquam in hoc catholico concerning clerical dress (1462): Canterbury Cathedral Archives, CCA-DCc/Register/N, ff. 262v–263. At the end of the text, it is remarked that this constitution and the previous constitution have not yet been published: ‘Iste constituciones non sunt adhuc publicate: ideo rogo vos ne videantur a multis’. The constitution was published in the convocation of 1463 and entered into the archbishop’s register: Registrum Thome Bourgchier, ed. du Boulay, 109–11; Records of Convocation, ed. Bray, vi. 158–9.



The Business of the Southern Convocation in 1462 147

1.5. Supplications of the lower clergy in convocation (1472): Canterbury Cathedral Archives, CCA-DCc/Register/N, ff. 263–264. The title states: ‘Supplicaciones cleri facte prelatis in convocacione incipienti vicesimo tertio Januarii anno Domini millesimo quadringentensimo septuagesimo duo et finita vicesimo duo Februarii proximo sequenti celebrata in ecclesia Sancti Pauli Lond’ super certis reformacionibus habendis ut sequitur’. The body of the text is printed in Records of Convocation, ed. Bray, vi. 211–14. 2. The document begins with the provincial constitution Quamquam in hoc catholico concerning clerical dress (also Appendix 1.4): Bodl., MS Rawlinson C. 664, f. 72; Longleat House, MS 35, f. 207. The account of the convocation follows: Bodl., MS Rawlinson C. 664, ff. 72v–73; Longleat House, MS 35, ff. 207v–208. The text below is based on the Bodleian manuscript. The Longleat manuscript was checked against it. In convocacione prelatorum et cleri celebrata London’ in ecclesia Sancti Pauli per reverendissimum in Christo patrem et dominum dominum Thomam Bouchier divina permissione Cantuariensem archiepiscopum anno Domini millesimo quadringentensimo sexagesimo secundo impetrate fuerunt littere patentes domini regis de et super tribus articulis: videlicet, quod clerici non subiciantur iudicio seculari, quod decime solvantur grossarum arborum, et quod judices ecclesiastici non inquietentur aut impediantur in causis per brevem de premunire. Iste littere obtente sunt et sigillate et remanent cum domino cancellario. Item edita est constitucio de non arrestando aliquo in ecclesia per officiarios et ministros temporales et de non extra habendo eum in tempore divinorum sub pena excommunicacionis. Item edita est constitucio suprascripta de habitu et vestitura clericorum et servientium eorundem. Item elaborati sunt ibidem articuli generalis sentencie et in novam formam ac ordinem reducti. Item decretum est de commemoracione Sancti Thome debere fieri septimanatim in locis ubi habentur due commemoraciones, in alijs vero locis vicissim et alternatim cum commemoracione sinodali. Item decretum est deposicionem Sancte Frideswide debere celebrari per totam provinciam sub forma festi novem leccionum de communi unius virginis et non marteris vel cum proprio servicio si habeatur. Item decretum est translacionem Sancte Etheldrede celebrandam esse in vigilia Sancti Luce evangeliste ut festum novem leccionum de communi unius virginis non martiris. Expliciunt constituciones provinciales secundum compilacionem Willemi Lynwode cum alijs novellis constitucionibus decretis etc.57

This explicit appears only in the Bodleian manuscript.

57

INDEX Abbeville, France  75, 76, 77 Admiralty courts  26, 27 Africa 70 Agincourt, battle of (1415)  3, 4, 5, 7, 23, 35, 36, 37, 60 Agnadel, battle of (1509)  68 Aire-sur-la-Lys, Pas de Calais  84, 87 Albi, France, diocese of  77 bishop of, see Amboise Alcock, John, bishop  134 Alderney, Channel Island  27 Alfonso V, king of Aragon and Naples 8–9 aliens 90–112 shoemakers  91, 99, 101–4, 108, 109, 112 tailors  97, 100–2, 108, 111 Alresford, Hants  41, 42 Alton, Hants  42 n.43 Amboise, Louis de, bishop of Albi  77 Amiens, France  29, 75 Amsterdam, Netherlands  8, 114 Andover, Hants  42 n.43 Anjou, county of, France  5 Anne of Brittany, queen of France  70, 78 n.73, 79 n.74, 80 Anthony, ‘Great Bastard’ of Burgundy 115 Antwerp, Netherlands  8, 99, 101 Appellants (1387–8)  126–9 Aquitaine  17, 20, 21, 22 Aragon  9, 69 merchants of  32 Ardres, Pas de Calais  73, 75, 84 Aretino, Unico, alias Bernado Accolti  13 Argentine, John  14 Armagnac faction  35 Armstrong, Adrian  117 Artois, county of, France  75 Arundel, earl of, see Fitzalan John, Lord Mautravers  41, 45, 51 Arundell, John, of Lanherne  32 Sir John, of Lanherne  20 Sir Richard  51 Asshebourne, William, common clerk of Lynn  94, 96, 110 Audinghen, Pas de Calais  88 Babthorpe, Sir Robert, controller of the Household  39 n.28, 40 n.37, 60

Bade, Josse, printer  78, 80, 81 Badoer, Andrea, ambassador of Venice  82 Bainbridge, Christopher, cardinal  13 Bakker, John, ‛Duche’  93 John, Hanseatic merchant  93 Baltic, the  25, 92, 93, 111 Barnet, battle of (1471)  3 Basingstoke, Hants  42 n.43 Baskerville, Sir John  42, 51 Basselin, Olivier, song-writer  85, 88 Basset, Peter  63 Bath and Wells, bishops of, see Castello, Stafford, Stillington Baudryk alias Patynmaker, John  99, 102, 112 Alice, wife of  99 Bayard, ‘chevalier’, see Terrail Bayonne, France  30, 44, 69 bishop of  87 Beauchamp, Richard, earl of Warwick  41, 45, 57 Richard, Lord Bergavenny  41 Thomas, earl of Warwick  126, 127 Sir Walter  51 Beaufort, Henry, bishop of Winchester, cardinal  3, 4, 37, 63 Thomas, duke of Exeter  46 Beaulieu, Hants  41, 62 n.120 Beaumont, Charles de, of Navarre  46 Bedford, duke of, see John of Lancaster Beerbrewer, Joan, ‘Duchewoman’  101, 110 William  101, 111 Beere, Richard, abbot of Glastonbury  12 Bell, Adrian  58 Bellay, Martin du  73 n.32, 74, 80 n.86 Bergamo, Italy  68 Bergavenny, Lord, see Beauchamp Berners, Lord, see Bourgchier Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumb.  15 Bidoux, Prégent de, admiral  71 Bigod, Roger le, earl of Norfolk  128 bishops, registers  137, 143 Bishops Waltham, Hants  62 Blancs-Sablons, battle of (1512)  71 Blangy-en-Ternois, Pas de Calais  74 Blois, France  68, 70 Blood, John, of Bayonne  30 Blount, Sir John  51 Bodiam, Suss.  124 n.7

150

Index

Bodinnick, Cornw.  31 Bodmin, Cornw.  28 Bohun, Eleanor de, duchess of Gloucester 128 Bole, Adam, of Fowey  32 Bologna, Italy  69 Bomy, Pas de Calais  73 Bonningues, Pas de Calais  75 Bonville, Sir William  26 Booth, William, archbishop of York  138 Borque, John le, of Brittany  26 Boston, Lincs.  91, 93 Botreaux, William, Lord  30 Boulogne, France  7, 15, 72, 73, 75, 76 n.51, 88 Bourbon, John, duke of  11 Bourgchier (Bourchier), John, Lord Berners 7 Lord, see Stafford Thomas, bishop of Ely, archbishop of Canterbury, register of  137, 138, 140, 142–4 Sir William  47, 51 Bourghop, John, esquire  51 Bousmar, Eric  114, 115 Bouvier, Gilles le  88 Brabant, dukes of  8 men from  101, 102 Brackley, John, friar  3 Bradwardine, William, surgeon  47 Brantôme abbey, Perigord, Pierre de Bourdeille, abbot of  83, 89 Brekerope, John, of Lynn  110 Brembre, Nicholas, mayor of London  127 Brescia, Italy  68 Brest, Brittany  69, 70, 71 Brézé, Sir Pierre de  24 Brie, Germain de, poet  77, 78 nn.70, 73; 82, 84 n.115, 88 n.136 Chordigerae navis conflagration 78, 80, 87 Briouze, Giles de, bishop of Hereford  135 n.44 Bristol  4, 21, 22, 32, 97 Brittany  31, 32, 70, 72, 84 John, duke of  21, 29, 32, 62 Brooke, Henry, Lord Cobham  35 n.1 Broun, Albryght, broker  95, 101 Broun, Gerard, cordwainer  110, 112 Richard, of Bodmin  28 Brounflete, Henry, esquire  51 Brows, William, cordwainer  101–3, 107, 109 Bruges, Netherlands, merchants of  27, 28 Brunham, Isabel  97, 101 John de, of Lynn  93, 104, 112 Margery, daughter of, see Kempe Brussels, Netherlands  8, 114

Buckemer, George, master carpenter  72, 73 Burgundy  8, 115, 118, 119, 122 dukes of  113, 114, 116–18, 122 Burmond, Simon, cordwainer  107–9 Butiller, John, esquire  51 Cadiz, Spain  70 Calabria, Jean, duke of  10 Calais, Picardy  5, 7, 8, 14, 15, 20, 60, 62, 69, 71, 72, 75, 84 n.109, 86 n.123 marches or Pale of  2, 15, 72, 75 Caldecot, Wales  128 n.19 Cambrai, League of (1508)  68, 69, 87 Cambridge University  142 Candover Down, Hants  41 Canterbury, Kent  94 archbishops of, see Bourgchier, Chichele, Langton, Pecham, Stafford, Stratford, Walden, Warham, Winchelsey registers of  137, 138, 140, 142–4 cathedral archives  144, 146, 147 Christ Church priory, prior of, see Chillenden Register N  138–9, 141 province, convocations of  37 n.12, 137–9, 143, 144 1434 141 1460–1  139, 142, 143 1462 137–47 1463  139–41, 146 1472  139, 142, 147 1481–2 137 constitutions of  141–3 Quamquam in hoc catholico  141, 142, 146, 147 Quamvis sacris canonibus 141, 146 St. Augustine’s abbey, cartulary  128 Cape St Vincent, Portugal  30 Caperon, Michael  31 Carew, Thomas  29 Sir Thomas  49 Carpenter, Christine  123 Castello, Adriano de, bishop of Hereford and Bath and Wells  13 Castiglione, Baldassare, The Book of the Courtier  12, 13 Castillon, battle of (1453)  21 Castillon, Pons, sire de  49 Catlif, Thomas  59 William 59 Catto, Jeremy  3 Caudrey, Philip  60 Caxton, William, printer  2 Chabannes, Jacques de, seigneur de La Palice 73



Index 151

Chandos, Sir John  6 Channel, the  7, 15, 17, 19–21, 23–5, 27–9, 31, 33, 69–71 Charles, Edmund  60 Sir Thomas  60 Charles, dauphin of France  35 Charles V, duke of Burgundy, Holy Roman Emperor  8, 74 nn.32, 41, 76 Charles the Bold (le Téméraire), duke of Burgundy  3, 10, 116 Marie, daughter of  114, 115, 118 Charta de libertatibus clericorum (1462) 138 Charter of the Forest (1217)  125, 129 Chartres, France, diocese of  68, 77 Chastelain, George, historiographer 116–19 Chaucer, Thomas, esquire  42, 52, 62 n.118 Cheriton, William de, prior of Llanthony  126–7, 129 Chester, county palatine of archers from  41, 43, 44, 59, 127 chamberlain of, see Troutbeck hundreds of  41 Chichele, Henry, archbishop of Canterbury  6, 7, 137 Cum propter nimiam prorogacionem 142 Chillenden, Thomas, prior of Christ Church 142 Chilworth, Hants  41 Chirche, Nicholas, cordwainer  104, 107–9 Chitterne, Thomas, keeper of the king’s jewels  61 n.111 chivalry, court of  126 Choque, Pierre, Brittany king-of-arms  80 Christchurch, Hants  42 n.43 Church General Council of the (1511)  69 liberties of the  126 taxation of the  138, 143 churches, arrests in  141, 142, 146, 147 Clare, Richard de, earl of  128 Clarence, dukes of, see Plantagenet, Thomas of Lancaster clergy, arrests of  139 dress regulations  141, 142, 146, 147 exempted from secular jurisdiction  139 trained in civil or Roman law  133, 134 Clermont, René de, of Anjou  73 Clifford, John, Lord  41, 45, 52 Clifton, Sir John  50 Clough, Cecil  9 Clux, Sir Hartung van  52 Cobham, Eleanor, duchess of Gloucester 131 Lord, see Brooke Coke, Sir Edward, chief justice  124 Cokfeld, John, cordwainer  104–6, 108

Colan, Thomas, of Bodinnick  31 Coligny, Gaspard de, marquis de Châtillon 77 Colshull, Sir John  32 Colville, John, of Lynn  95 Combe, William, cordwainer  101–4, 107, 109 Commynes, Philippe de  2, 10, 11, 115 conciliar movement  138 Connesby, William, cordwainer  104–6 Cordewaner alias Ducheman, James  103, 104 Cornhill, Walter de, bishop of Coventry 135 Cornwall  17, 22, 24, 30–3, 132 duchy of, steward of  26 Cornwall, Sir John  41, 52 coronation oaths  125, 139, 140 n.18 Costyne, William, chapman  95 Cotte, Nicholas, cordwainer  104, 107 Council, King’s  4, 20, 23, 27, 38, 60, 62, 70, 124, 127 continual (1386)  126, 127 Courtenay, Sir Edward  41, 45, 46, 52 Peter, bishop of Exeter and Winchester 134 Coventry, bishop of, see Cornhill Cranborne Chase, Dorset  41 Cremona, Italy  68 Crétin, Guillaume, poet  77, 78, 82, 87, 88 Apparition du Maréchal sans reproche 78 Invective sur l’erreur  78, 79, 86, 87 Cromwell, Ralph, Lord  129 n.24 Sir Ralph  47 Thomas 14 Danzig, Prussia  92, 93, 110, 111 Darcy, Thomas, Lord  70 Dartmouth, Devon  21–3, 27, 28, 49 Davenport, Robert de  59 Davies, Matthew  97 Dax, bishop of  87 Della Rovere family  11, 12 Derby, earl of, see Henry IV Desmoulins, Laurent  69, 77, 84, 87 Cymetière des malheureux 77 La Folye des Angloys  69, 79 Le dépucellage de la ville de Tournay 79 Devon 30 Devon, Charles  40 n.32 devotional texts  121 Dijon, Burgundy  114 Docheman, Hankyn  92, 111 Doran, Susan  7 Dorset  30, 41, 62 marquess of, see Grey Doudet, Estelle  117

152

Index

Dover, Kent  69 Draper, John, cordwainer  104, 107–9 Drewe, Robert, of Fowey  26 Ducheman, Bowne, cordwainer  99 Marion, wife of  99 Hugh 101 Martin 100 Matthew 101 Roger 100 Duchesshe, Simond  93 Dupire, Noël  113 Earl Marshal, see Mowbray East Meon, Hants  42 Edward I, king of England  34, 125, 135 Edward II, king of England  125, 128, 130, 135 Edward III, king of England  5, 18, 33, 34, 123, 125 Edward IV, king of England  4–5, 9, 10, 12, 14, 24, 68, 132, 138, 139, 142, 143 Edward V, king of England  131 Edward of Woodstock, the Black Prince 33 Elizabeth I, queen of England  89 Elmden, Sir William  52 Ely, bishops of, see Bourgchier, Eustace, Morton England chancellors of  29, 32, 126, 132, 133 and see Neville, Stafford, Stillington, Stratford theologians 134 trained in civil law  133–4 chancery, enrolments  46, 47 Norman rolls  39 n.25, 45–7, 63 treaty rolls  46, 47 equitable jurisdiction of  26, 132–5 exchequer, issue rolls  39, 43, 63, 47 muster rolls  39, 59 king’s bench, court of  108, 109 Erasmus, Desiderius  77 République des lettres 77 Erpingham, Sir Thomas  60 Essex, earl of, see Mandeville Este, Ercole d’, duke of Ferrara  9 Esterlyng, Henry  93 Estreis (Estrens, Estreys)  91, 92 Eborard 92 John, immigrant  91 Eustace, bishop of Ely  135 excommunication  32, 142 Exeter, alien communities in  90, 91 bishops of, see Courtenay, Lacy, Neville dukes of, see Beaufort, Holand Falmouth, Cornw.  27, 30 Fastolf, Sir John  4, 5, 63 Felbrigge, Sir Simon  60

Sir Thomas  52 Ferdinand I, king of Naples  9, 11 Ferdinand II, king of Spain  68–71 Ferrara, Italy  11 Ferrers of Chartley, Edmund, Lord  42, 45, 52 Fèvre, Hémon le, printer  80 Fiennes, Sir Roger  52 Fitzalan, Richard, earl of Arundel  127 Fitzharry, William  47 Fitzhugh, Henry, Lord  41, 43, 45, 52 Fitzjames, Richard, esquire  53 Fitzwalter, Robert  128 Flanders 28 counts of  8 Flemmyng, Hankyn, porter  92 Robert, dean of Lincoln  11, 14 Walter, weaver  92 Fleta, legal tract  125 Foix, Anne de  80 n.85 Gaston de  70 Germaine de  69 Ford, C.J.  17 Fort Nieulay, Picardy  75 Fortescue, Sir John, Governance of England 129 Fowey, Cornw.  16–34 bailiffs of  23, 30 burgesses of  32, 33 Place Manor  24 Fox, Richard, bishop of Winchester  14, 134 Fradin, François, printer  80, 81 France, civil war of the ‘Public Weal’  2 invasions of (1417)  23, 35–67 (1475) 132 (1512–13) 68–89 Francesca, Piero della  10 Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor  9 Frese, Henry, alien servant  103 Fretin, Guillebert de  27 Fribois, Noël de  88 Friel, Ian  16 Froissart, Jean, Chronicles 7 Frulovisi, Titus Livius (‘Livio’)  44–57 Vita Henrici Quinti 44 Fynmer, Thomas de  124 Galos, Robert  30 Gardiner, Stephen, bishop of Winchester 134 Gascony  5, 44, 69, 71, 84, 87 Gascoyne, John, of Fowey  28 Gerard (Gerardson), James, cordwainer  101–4, 107, 109 Gesta Henrici Quinti 40 Ghent, Netherlands  11, 120 Ghinucci, Geronimo de’, bishop of Worcester 13



Index 153

Gigli, Silvestro de, bishop of Worcester  13 Glastonbury abbey, abbot of, see Beere Gloucester, duchesses of, see Bohun, Cobham dukes of, see Humphrey of Lancaster, Thomas of Woodstock herald  41 n.39 Miles of, earl of Hereford  128 Gloucestershire 128 Godard, Sir John  47 Gonzaga family of Mantua  12 Elisabetta, duchess  13 Gorrevod, Laurent de  74 Gosling, Daniel  138, 140 Gra, Sir John, of Ingelby  53 Granson, Sir William  53 Gravelines, France  15 Gray, John de, bishop of Norwich  135 Great Yarmouth, Norf.  21, 22 alien communities in  90, 91, 97, 111 Gresmon (Gressemon), Peter, ‘Duchemon’ 96 William, ‘Duchemon’  96, 99, 101 Grey, Sir John, of Heton  41, 53 Sir John, of Ruthin  42, 53 Thomas, marquess of Dorset  70, 71, 87 Grey of Codnor, Reynold, Lord  41, 45, 53 Grisely, Sir John  53 Grosvenor, Sir Thomas  59 Grummitt, David  7 Gubbio, Italy  11 Guelders, Charles, duke of  70 Guinegatte, Pas de Calais  73, 82 Guînes, Pas de Calais  75 Gunn, Steven  7 guns  47 n.79 ‘redde gonne’  73 ‘St. John the Evangelist’  72–3 ‘Twelve Apostles’  72–3 Gunthorpe, John  14 Guychard, Thomas, of Hennebont  32 Guyenne 5 Gyle, Robert, hosier  99 Habsburg family  9, 113–22 Charles, see Charles V empire of  8 Lienor  113, 115, 117, 119 Haemers, Jelle  115 Hall, Edward  72 Hallam, Henry  132 Hallwynn, Louis de, seigneur de Piennes 72 Hampshire  41, 42, 62 Hampton Hill, Hants  42 n.43 Hanse, merchants of the  92, 93 Harfleur, Normandy  35, 37, 46, 48 n.86, 49, 50, 58, 62 Harington, Sir James  43 n.52, 53 John, Lord  41, 45, 53

Sir William  43 n.52 Harleston, William, esquire  43, 53 Hastings, Sir Richard  53 William, Lord  132 Havant, Hants  42 n.43 Hawley, John, of Dartmouth  27 Helford, Cornw.  23 Helmholz, Richard  140 Henri IV, king of France  89 Henry II, king of England  69 Henry III, king of England  127, 128, 129 n.24, 130, 131 Henry IV, king of England  19, 22, 27, 28, 33, 126, 127, 129 Henry V, king of England  1–6, 19–21, 23, 24, 28, 29, 34, 69, 125 armies of 1415 35–62 1416  35, 36, 38–40, 43, 44, 48–54, 58, 60 1417 35–67 Henry VI, king of England  1, 4, 20, 24, 36, 129, 130, 139 n.15 Henry VII, king of England  8, 9, 12–14, 86 n.123, 134 Henry VIII, king of England  7–9, 12, 14, 15, 68–76, 84, 86, 87 Henry of Bolingbroke, earl of Derby, see Henry IV Herbert, Lord, see Somerset Here, John  53 Hereford, bishops of, see Briouze, Castello earl of, see Gloucester Hill, Walter, priest  32 Hodilston, Sir William  54 Holand (Holland), Henry, duke of Exeter, admiral 32 John, earl of Huntingdon  20, 41, 45 Sir John  54 Holland  29, 103 counts of  8 Holy League (1511)  68, 69 Honford, John  59 Howard, Sir Edward, admiral  70, 71, 79, 84 Thomas, Lord  70 Hull, William de  111 Humphrey of Lancaster, duke of Gloucester  3, 4, 40 n.32, 41, 42 n.43, 43–5, 53, 59 Hungerford, Sir Walter  41, 54 William, of Essex  61 n.111 Hunte, Thomas, mayor of Lynn  108 Huntingdon, earl of, see Holand Hussey, Sir Henry  47 Iberian peninsula  8, 9 indentures for military service  37–9, 42, 43, 45, 47, 50–4, 59–62, 64–7 Ipswich, Suff.  91

154

Index

Ireland  21, 126 duke of, see Vere Italy  8, 10, 15, 68, 69, 77, 81 James I, king of England  124 Jean II, king of France  113 Jehannot, Jean, printer  80, 81 Jerard, Thomas, of Fowey  30 Jersey, Channel Island  28 Jerusalem 93 Joan of Arc  77 John, king of England  131, 134 John III, king of Navarre  69 John of Lancaster, duke of Bedford  4, 35, 63 John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy  35 Johnson, James, ‘Ducheman’  99 n.53 Johnsone, Godfrey, cordwainer  101, 107 Lodewyk 101 Jorce, William  129 n.24 Julius II, pope  12, 68, 69 Junyent, Francis, ship’s captain  31 Justus of Ghent, artist  11 Kemp, Eric  137 Kempe, John, of Lynn  93 John jnr.  93 Margery (née Brunham)  93, 97, 104, 110–12 Book of   93, 111 John, son of  93, 110, 111 Kent 128 Kingsford, Charles  17 Knight, William  87 Knoll Down in Damerham, Hants  41 Knowlton in Woodlands, Dorset  41 Knyvet, Thomas, ship’s captain  70 Kowaleski, Maryanne  16, 21 n.39 Kymer, Gilbert, physician  47 Kyngestone, John, cordwainer  104–6 La Marche, Olivier de  114, 115, 117 La Varanne, Valerand de, poet  77 De Gestis Joannae Virginis Francae  77 Urbis Morini 79 Lacy, Edmund, bishop of Exeter  32 Lambert, Bart  111 Craig  16, 22, 36 n.5 Lancashire  43, 44 Lancaster, county palatine of  38 Langist, Robert, of Fowey  26 Langton, Stephen, archbishop of Canterbury 135 Auctoritate dei patris 143 languages  111, 117, 119, 122 Dutch  117, 119, 120, 122 French  114, 117–20 German 122

Greek  13, 117 Hebrew  113, 115, 117 Italian 14 Latin  13, 80, 117–22 Middle English  5 Spanish 121–2 Laude, Paolo da, ambassador of Milan  75 Laurence, Sir Robert  54 Leche, Sir Philip  54 Legh, William  54 Leland, John  18, 24, 34 Lemaire des Belges, Jean  116 Leyhun, Thomas  54 Libelle of Englysche Polycye 17–18 Liddy, Christian  111 Lille, France  76 Lincoln, bishop of, see Wells Lincolnshire 128 Livio, see Frulovisi Llanthony priory, Gloucester  128 prior of, see Cheriton register of  126–8 Logan, Donald  142 Loire, river  87 lollardy 138 Lomner, William  3 London  38, 47 nn.80–2, 93, 108, 109, 128 alien communities in  90, 97 bishops of, see Ste Mère-Eglise, Tunstall Blackfriars 38 city of  47 n.80, 62, 125 guild ordinances  90 liberties of  125 Lincoln’s Inn  32 mayor of  127 sheriffs of  62 n.120, 139 St. Paul’s cathedral  147 treaty of (1518)  77 Longleat House, Warminster, Wilts.  142, 147 Looe, Cornw.  23 Lostwithiel, Cornw.  26 Louis XI, king of France  68, 114 Louis XII, king of France  68–70, 72, 73 n.27, 75–8, 80 n.85, 83, 86 Claude, daughter of  71 Louvain, Netherlands  8 Love alias Severell, John, of Salisbury, surgeon  47 n.80 Lovell, William, Lord  41, 45, 54 Loven, John  31 Loward, Peter, esquire  47 n.81, 54 Luttrell, Sir Hugh, lieutenant of Harfleur  41, 48, 54 Luxemburg 114 Lymington, Hants  41 Lyndwood, William, Provinciale  142, 143 Lynn, Norf.  90–112



Index 155

aliens in  90–112 apprentices 108 artificers  95, 104, 108, 111, 112 Baxters Bridge  92 Briggegate 99 brothels  102, 103 burgesses  90, 92–6, 99, 101, 102, 104, 110, 112 charter 91 common councillors  94, 95, 97, 110 constitution  104, 112 cordwainers  97, 99, 101–10 franchise  90, 95, 112 guild of St. George  99 guildhall  94, 95, 99, 108–11 hall rolls and books  95, 108, 110 householders  99, 102, 103, 111 leet court and records  92–6, 99, 102, 103, 108, 110, 111 licences to trade  94, 95, 103 lists of tradesmen  94 mayors  92, 94, 95, 103, 104, 108–10 mayor’s council  104 Mercer Row  99 merchant guild  92 Purfleet, River  92, 104 Street  97, 101, 107 quays  97, 99 refuse offences  92, 99, 102 sergeant at mace  95, 109 servants  92, 99, 103, 104, 111 Steelyard 111 wards Chequer  92, 96, 97, 99, 102–4, 107–9, 111 Kettlewell  99, 104, 106 New Conduit  95, 96, 99, 107 North End  95, 99, 106 Sedgeford Lane  99, 107, 109, 110 Stonegate 107 Trinity Hall  99, 103, 107, 110, 111 Lyon, France  80, 81 Macclesfield, Cheshire  59 MacCullogh, Diarmaid  14 Machiavelli, Niccolo  10 History of Florence 14 The Prince  14 Magna Carta (1215)  123–36 commentaries on  129 Maine, county of, France  5, 63 Malines, Netherlands  8 League of (1513)  68 Mandeville, Geoffrey de, earl of Essex  128 March, earl of, see Mortimer Margaret of Anjou, queen of England  138 Margaret of Austria, duchess of Savoy  73 n.25, 74 nn.32, 36–8, 41, 75, 76, 116

Marie of Anjou, queen of France  31 Mark, Robert de la, seigneur de Fleurange  72, 73 nn.26, 32 Marot, Clément  78 Marquise, Pas de Calais  75–6 n.51 Maximilian I, archduke of Austria, Holy Roman Emperor  8, 69, 70, 73–6, 115, 116, 118 Mayhewe, John, of Dartmouth  28 McFarlane, K.B.  1, 14 Mede, Philip, of Bristol  32 Medici, Giulio de’, bishop of Worcester  13 Mediterranean Sea, the  25, 70, 71 Mer, John de la, of Bayonne  30 Merbury, John, chamberlain of south Wales 44 Nicholas, esquire  55 Meroute, Brabant  102 Michelstow, John, of Fowey  29, 30, 34 Mark  27, 28 Richard  27, 33 Middelburg, Netherlands  8 Middle Wallop, Hants  41 Milan, duchy of  9, 68 miners 47 Molinet, Jean, poet and historiographer 113–22 Chronique 115 Faictz et Dictz 113 La Nativité Madame Lienor  113, 115, 117, 119 La Tres desirée et prouffitable naissance  113, 115 Sur la nativité Monseigneur le Duc Charles  116, 117, 119 Monesson, John, tailor  97 Monmouth, lordship of  44 Montague, Thomas, earl of Salisbury  2, 41, 45, 49, 50, 56 Montefeltro family  12 Federigo da, duke of Urbino  9 Guidobaldo, duke of Urbino  10, 12, 13 Montlhery, battle of (1465)  2, 10, 11 Montmoret, Humbert de, poet  77, 78, 84 n.115, 87 Herveis  78, 80, 86 Montreuil, Jean de, humanist  88 Monyson (Mundesson), John, tailor  101, 102 More, Thomas  78 Morley, Lord, see Parker Morstede, Thomas, surgeon  47 Mortimer, Edmund, earl of March  39 n.25, 41, 45, 49, 54 Sir John  49 Morton, John, bishop of Ely, archbishop of Canterbury 134 Mote, Michael de la, of Bodinnick  31

156

Index

Moullin, John de, of Brittany  26 Mountenay, William, esquire  54 Mowbray, John, Earl Marshal  41, 45, 49, 55, 58, 59, 63 Thomas, earl of Nottingham  126, 127 Musson, Anthony  123, 124 Nancy, battle of (1477)  114, 115 Naples 9 Navarre  46, 69, 71 Nether Wallop, Hants  41 Netherlands (Low Countries)  8, 15, 70, 74 n.32, 75, 76, 91, 93, 104, 111, 113, 116–20, 122 multilingualism in  118, 119, 120 Neville, George, bishop of Exeter, chancellor  132, 141, 142 Sir John  54 New Forest, Hants  41, 42 n.43 Newhall, Richard  39 n.30, 40, 47, 48 n.83 Nicholasson alias Patynmaker, James  96, 101 Niño, Don Pero  23 Norfolk  59, 60 n.105, 128 earl of, see Bigod Normandy  5, 6, 20, 21, 24, 35, 44, 45, 47, 63, 85 Northumberland, earls of, see Percy Norway  92, 110 Norwich, bishop of  91, 94 see also Gray, Tottington nostalgia 1–15 Nottingham 126 earl of, see Mowbray Nottinghamshire 129 oath-taking programmes (1215, 1258, 1388)  127, 128 Orders of Chivalry the Garter  5, 8, 12 Knights of  6, 9–13 the Ermine  11 the Golden Spur  10 Ordinances (1310-11)  125, 130 Orléans, Charles, duke of  3–4 Louis de, duke of Longueville  73 Osbaldeston, Sir John  55 Ostirlyng, Hankyn  92, 111 Over Wallop, Hants  41 Oxford  1, 141 All Souls College  6 Bodleian Library  142, 147 Magdalen College  1 Queen’s College  142 Provisions of  130 University 141 Padua, Italy  11, 134 ‘law of’  134

Pagula, William de, Speculum Regis Edwardi Tercii 125 Paris, France  2, 35, 75, 77– 81 Bibliothèque Mazarine  80 Parker, Henry, Lord Morley  14 Parliaments  21, 125, 131, 135, 139–41, 143 1386 127 1388 (Feb.), ‘Merciless’  127, 128 1414 (Apr.)  28 1416 (Oct.)  37, 38, 48 1423  129 n.22 1429 29 1433 29 1442 131 1445–6 29 1450  129 n.22 1459 131 1461  138, 141 1472-5  132, 139 n.14 1478 131 1512 70 impeachment 127 management of  132 packing of  131 rolls of  37, 137 Speaker 132 Paston family  3 John 3 John the younger  3 Sir John  3 Margaret 3 Pater Noster  120, 121 Patynmaker, Katherine  96 Nicholas 96 see also Baudryk, Nicholasson Pavia, Italy  78 Pay, Harry, of Poole  27 Peasants’ Revolt (1381)  125 Pecham, John, archbishop of Canterbury 135 Peche, Sir Nicholas  55 Pelham, Sir John  49 Penne, William, of London  21 Percy, Henry, earl of Northumberland (d.1455)  41, 45, 55 Henry, earl of Northumberland (d.1527) 72 Péronne, France  75 Pers, Richard, alien servant  104 Peryent, John, esquire  55 Phelip, Sir William  55 Philippe the Bold (le Hardi), duke of Burgundy (d.1404) 113 Philippe the Fair (le Beau), duke of Burgundy (d.1506) 113 Philippe the Good (le Bon), duke of Burgundy (d.1467)  20, 114 Picardy  21, 75



Index 157

Piel, Guillaume, poet  77 De Anglorum ex Galliis 78 Pilkington, Sir John  55 Piquigny, truce of (1475)  68 pirates  17, 25, 28, 31, 33 Pisa, Italy  69 Pizan, Christine de, Livre des faits d’armes et de chevalerie 2 Plantagenet, George, duke of Clarence  132 Richard, duke of York  5 Pleshey, Essex  128 Ploqet, Thomas, of Lynn  110 Plymouth, Devon  21, 22, 27, 29 Pole, Michael de la, earl of Suffolk (d.1389) 127 Michael de la, earl of Suffolk (d.1415)  50, 60 Reginald 13 William de la, earl and duke of Suffolk  41, 45, 50, 56, 60, 130 political poems Ballade en manière de deploration 79, 86 Complainte de Thérouene  79, 83 n.100, 84 n.108 Le Courroux de la Mort  79, 80, 81 nn.92, 94, 85, 86 n.127, 87 n.131 Monstraunces 125 Voici la complainte  79, 82 n.99, 83 n.105, 85, 86 n.130 Polruan, Cornw.  21, 23, 31 Poole, Dorset  23, 27 Popham, Sir John  49, 55 Porcellio, poet, Feltria  11 n.54 Porter, Sir William  55 Portsdown Hill, Hants  41 Portsmouth, Hants  27, 41, 63, 71 Portugal  8, 28, 30 Portzmoguer, Hervé de, ship’s captain  70, 80, 84 n.115, 87 Powicke, Michael  36, 50 Poynings, Sir Edward, governor of Tournai 76 praemunire, writs of  139, 140 prisoners  31, 65, 66, 73 n.30 privilegium fori 140 Prussia  92, 93 Pynell, John of Portugal  28 Pyrenees 70 Quincy, Saher de, earl of Winchester  128 Radcliffe, Sir John  41, 55 Radcot Bridge, battle of (1387)  127 Ramsey, James  40, 45 Raphael, paintings  12, 13 Ravenna, battle of (1512)  70, 77 n.67 Reading, Berks.  62 Redyness, William, carver  41 n.39

Richard I, king of England  4 Richard II, king of England  124, 126, 130, 131 Richard III, king of England  131, 140 n.18 Richmond, Colin  16 Rivers, Lord, see Wydeville Robessart, Sir John  55 Thierry, esquire  55 Rochefort, Sir Ralph  55 Rodger, Nicholas  16 Rokeby, Sir Thomas  55, 58, 59 Rome  8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 77, 93 Romsey, Hants  42 n.43 Roos, John, Lord  41, 45, 55, 61 n.112, 64–7 Rose, Susan  16 William, shoemaker  101, 107 Roselli, Antonio de’, of Padua  134 Ross, Charles  11 Rothenhale, Sir John, treasurer of the Household  39, 42, 43, 47 Rouen, Normandy, cathedral  4 Runnymede, Surr.  135 Russell, John  44 Rydoul, Symon, of Bouchoir  29 Ryther, Sir William  43 n.49 Saint-Inglevert, Pas de Calais  76 n.51 Saint-Jean-de-Luz, France  71, 84 Saint-Marie, Menauton de  44, 55 Saint-Mathieu, point of  70 Saint-Omer, Pas de Calais  88, 92 Saint-Pée-de-Nivelle, Juan d’Amezqueta, sire de  44, 55 Saint-Tricat, Pas de Calais  72 saints Etheldreda  141, 147 Frideswide  141, 147 George  12, 61 n.111 John Chrysostom  78 Mary, the Blessed Virgin  121 Thomas Becket  85 n.122, 141 Salisbury, Wilts.  62 earl of, see Montague Salter, John  31 Salvain, Sir Roger  56 San Sebastian, Spain  69 Sandes, Sir Walter  49, 56 Sandwich, Kent  21, 22, 24, 131 Santi, Giovanni, of Urbino, poet  11 n.54 Savoy, duchy of  10 Scandinavia 92 Schürer, Matthias, printer  78 n.73 Scotland  19, 21, 92 Selander, Hankyn, ‘Dutchman’  30, 31 Seyntlow, John, esquire  56 Sforza, Francesco, duke of Milan  9 Galeazzo 10 Shakespeare, William, Henry V 35

158

Index

Shelton, Robert  60 Sherborne, James  16 Sherwood Forest, Notts.  129 n.24 ships Cordelière  70, 78, 80 Cristofore 31 Edward 30 Edward of Fowey 20 Edward of Polruan 31 Elene 31 Jaquette of Dieppe 32 Jenot of Fowey 30 Julyan of Fowey 32 Katerine of Tréguier 29 Mackerel of Fowey 31 Magdalene of Plymouth 29 Mary of Danzig 93 Mary of Fowey 31 Palmer of Fowey 20 Regent 70 Seint Fiacre of Brittany 31 Seint Guille of Brieux 30 St. Anthony and St. Francis of Barcelona 31 Shirborne, Robert, dean of St. Paul’s  12 Shirley, Sir Ralph  56 Shoreham, Suss.  28 Shrewsbury, earl of, see Talbot Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor  35 Sixtus IV, pope  12 Skulthorpe, John, cordwainer  107 Sluys, merchants of  27 Small, Graeme  119 Smyth, John, of Fowey  29 Soberton, Hants  42 soldiers embarkation  37, 39, 40, 61, 62 men-at-arms (lances)  23, 27, 38, 40, 41, 43–5, 48 n.83, 49–59, 65, 66 musters  40–2, 62, 63, 65 payment of  37 n.11, 47 n.81, 60 retinues  36 n.7, 38, 41–3, 45–50, 58, 60, 127 victualling  61, 62, 66 Somerset, Charles, Lord Herbert  76 n.51 South Lynn, Norf.  91, 99 n.52, 103, 109 Southampton  21, 22, 38, 40–2, 43 n.52, 44, 47 n.81, 62–4, 66, 69, 70 Spain  8, 10, 28, 68, 70, 71, 82, 87, 89 Spicer brothers of Plymouth and Portsmouth 27 Spurs, battle of the (1513)  73, 74, 78, 79, 86 Stafford, Hugh, Lord Bourgchier  41, 45, 51 John, bishop of Bath and Wells, archbishop of Canterbury, chancellor  29, 32 Stapulton, Sir Brian  56

statutes 123 act exempting ‘great trees’  139, 140 Acts of Attainder  131, 132 praemunire 140 the Staple (1353)  26 sumptuary laws  141, 142, 146, 147 Truces (1414)  28, 29 Ste-Mère-Eglise, William de, bishop of London 135 Stevens, John, of Fowey  31 Steward, John, esquire  56 Stillington, Robert, bishop of Bath and Wells, chancellor  133 Stockbridge, Hants  41, 42 n.43 Stones, Thomas, esquire  42 Strange, Leonard  60 Strasburg, France  81 Stratford, John, archbishop of Canterbury, chancellor 125 Quamquam ex solventibus 142 Strelley, Nicholas de  129 n.24 Suffolk, earls and duke of, see Pole Sumption, Jonathan, Lord  124 Susse, Siglaf, of Gotland  92, 99 n.53 Sussex  28, 128 Swanwick Heath, Hants  42 n.43 Swillington, John, esquire  56 Swinbourne, William, esquire  56 Swyr, Nicholas, miner  47 n.81 Talbot, George, earl of Shrewsbury  76 n.51, 82 Gilbert, Lord  45, 56 Sir Gilbert  12–14 John, Lord  2, 21, 30, 45, 82 taxation  43 n.51, 60, 125, 130, 135, 138, 143 of aliens  90, 94, 99, 102–4 Taylor, John, diarist  73 n.26, 74 n.40, 84, 87 n.134 Terrail, Pierre, seigneur de Bayard  72, 73 Thérouanne, Pas de Calais  7, 40, 72–6, 79, 82, 84, 86 Thiry, Claude  116 Thomas of Lancaster, duke of Clarence  6, 42 n.43, 43, 45, 47, 48, 52 Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester 126–9 Thoresby, John, of Lynn  110 Thorp, John, standard bearer  41 n.39 Robert de  124 Thorpe, Sir Edmund  56, 60 Three Legged Cross, Dorset  41 Thrupp, Sylvia  90 Tichborne Down, Hants  41 Tiptoft, John, earl of Worcester  14, 134 Sir John  41, 56 Tirwhit, Sir William  56 Titchfield abbey, Hants  63



Index 159

Torrigiani, Pietro  12 Tottington, Alexander, bishop of Norwich  108 n.87 Touques, France  39 n.25 River 39 Tournai, France  7, 75, 76, 79, 84, 86 bishop of, see Wolsey Tournehem-sur-Hem, Pas de Calais  72, 73 Tours, France  77 Treffry, Thomas, of Fowey  29, 30 Amicia (née Michelstow), wife of 30 Thomas jnr.  24 Elizabeth (née Boniface), wife of 24 Tregarthen, Thomas  32 Tregowe (Gouda), Holland  103 Trepperel, Jean I, printer, widow of  80, 81 Troude, Simon, printer  79, 80, 81 Troutbeck, William, chamberlain of Chester  43–4, 59 Troyes, treaty of (1420)  35, 88 Tudor, Arthur, prince of Wales  15 Mary, sister of Henry VIII of England, queen of France  83 Tunstall, Cuthbert, bishop of London  143 Turner, Ralph  123, 124 Tyler, Wat  125 Tylneye, John  97, 101 Tywardreath priory, Cornw.  17 Ubaldini, Pietro degli  10 Umfraville, Sir Gilbert  41–3, 56 Urbino 10–13 duchy of  9, 11 dukes of, see Montefeltro palace  9, 11 Ursflete, Sir Gerard  56 Vachot, Pierre, poet  77, 86–8 La Deliberation des trois estatz  77, 79 Vendôme abbey, France  77 Venice, Italy  68 Vere, Robert de, duke of Ireland  126, 127 Vergil, Polydore  13, 75 Verona, Guarino da, humanist  11 Verwood, Dorset  41 Vincennes, Bois de, France  2 Sainte-Chapelle 78 Vincent, Nicholas  124, 126, 128, 130 Volterra, Italy, siege of  10 Walden, Roger, archbishop of Canterbury, Splendor paterne glorie 142 Wales  44, 128 n.19 Wall, Thomas, Lancaster herald  70 Walle, Roger, archdeacon of Coventry  142, 143

Walsokyn, Robert, glover  108, 109 Wardieu, Sir John de, of Bodiam  124 n.7 Warham, William, archbishop of Canterbury 134 Warner, Michael  59 Warwick, earls of, see Beauchamp Wash, the  91, 93 Waugh, William Templeton  40 Wells, Hugh de, bishop of Lincoln  135 n.44 Wentworth, John, of Lynn  108 n.87 Wesenham, William, cordwainer  104–6, 108 West, Sir Reynold  57 Westminster  38, 67, 69, 127 treaty of (1511)  69 Westminster Abbey  40, 128 tomb of Henry VII  12 Wilcote, Thomas jnr.  42 Williams, Benjamin  40 Willoughby, Robert, Lord  41, 45, 49, 57 Willyngton, John, esquire  57 Wiltshire  41, 62 Winchelsea, Suss.  21 Winchelsey, Robert, archbishop of Canterbury 135 Winchester  42 n.43, 125, 135 bishops of, see Beaufort, Courtenay, Fox, Gardiner, Morton earl of, see Quincy Windsor castle  10, 12 College of St. George  12 canons of  12 Wisbech, Cambs.  103 Wolsey, Thomas, bishop of Tournai, cardinal  13, 71 n.14, 76, 87 Worcester, bishops of, see Ghinucci, Gigli, Medici earl of, see Tiptoft Worcester, William  4 Boke of Noblesse 5 Worldham, Hants  42 Wottone, John, cordwainer  104–6, 108 Wydeville, Richard  47 Richard, Lord Rivers  20 Wylie, James, Reign of Henry V 40 Yerde, John  57 York aliens resident in  97 archbishop of, see Booth duke of, see Plantagenet province of  137, 138 Zierikzee, Zeeland  94 Zumthor, Paul  116

CONTENTS OF PREVIOUS VOLUMES I Concepts and Patterns of Service in the Later Middle Ages ed. Anne Curry and Elizabeth Matthew (2000)

P.J.P. Goldberg Chris Given-Wilson Virginia Davis Jeremy Catto David Morgan R.A. Griffiths

Kathleen Daly Michael Jones Alexander Grant

What was a Servant? Service, Serfdom and English Labour Legislation, 1350–1500 Preparation for Service in the Late Medieval Church Masters, Patrons and Careers of Graduates in FifteenthCentury England The Household Retinue of Henry V and the Ethos of English Public Life ‘Ffor the myght off the lande, aftir the myght off the grete lordes thereoff, stondith most in the kynges officers’: The English Crown, Provinces and Dominions in the Fifteenth Century Private Vice, Public Service? Civil Service and chose publique in Fifteenth-Century France The Material Rewards of Service in Late Medieval Brittany: Ducal Servants and their Residences Service and Tenure in Late Medieval Scotland, 1314–1475

II Revolution and Consumption in Late Medieval England ed. Michael Hicks (2001)

Fast and Fast: Conspicuous Consumption and the Diet of the Nobility in the Fifteenth Century Exploitation and Control: The Royal Administration of Magnate Estates, 1397–1405 Shelagh M. Mitchell The Knightly Household of Richard II and the Peace Commissions The Earl of Warwick and the Royal Affinity in the Politics Alison Gundy of the West Midlands, 1389–99 Christopher Woolgar Alastair Dunn

T.B. Pugh Jessica Freeman John Hare John Lee Miranda Threlfall-Holmes Winifred Harwood P.W. Fleming

The Estates, Finances and Regal Aspirations of Richard Plantagenet (1411–60), Duke of York Middlesex in the Fifteenth Century: Community or Communities? Regional Prosperity in Fifteenth-Century England: Some Evidence from Wessex The Trade of Fifteenth-Century Cambridge and its Region Durham Cathedral Priory’s Consumption of Imported Goods: Wines and Spices, 1464–1520 The Impact of St. Swithun’s Priory on the City of Winchester in the Later Middle Ages Telling Tales of Oligarchy in the Late Medieval Town

III Authority and Subversion ed. Linda Clark (2003)

Keith Dockray and Peter Fleming Alastair Dunn James Ross Clive Burgess Ian Forrest Hannes Kleineke Peter Booth Frank D. Millard J.L. Laynesmith David Grummitt James Lee

Authority and Subversion: A Conference on FifteenthCentury England Henry IV and the Politics of Resistance in Early Lancastrian England, 1399–1413 Seditious Activities: The Conspiracy of Maud de Vere, Countess of Oxford, 1403–4 A Hotbed of Heresy? Fifteenth-Century Bristol and Lollardy Reconsidered Anti-Lollard Polemic and Practice in Late Medieval England Why the West was Wild: Law and Disorder in FifteenthCentury Cornwall and Devon Men Behaving Badly? The West March Towards Scotland and the Percy-Neville Feud An Analysis of the Epitaphium Eiusdem Ducis Gloucestrie Constructing Queenship at Coventry: Pageantry and Politics at Margaret of Anjou’s ‘Secret Harbour’ Public Service, Private Interest and Patronage in the Fifteenth-Century Exchequer Urban Recorders and the Crown in Late Medieval England

IV Political Culture in Late-Medieval Britain ed. Linda Clark and Christine Carpenter (2004)

Introduction: Political Culture, Politics and Cultural History Remembering Richard: History and Memory in Lancastrian England Early Plantagenet History Through Late Medieval Eyes Maurice Keen Common Law, Counsel and Consent in Fortescue’s Political Alan Cromartie Theory Benjamin Thompson Prelates and Politics from Winchelsey to Warham Religious Symbols and Political Culture in FifteenthMiri Rubin Century England Caroline M. Barron The Political Culture of Medieval London The Political Life of the Fifteenth-Century English Village Christopher Dyer The Pressure of the Public on Later Medieval Politics John Watts National Pride, Decentralised Nation: The Political Culture Jenny Wormald of Fifteenth-Century Scotland Christine Carpenter Simon Walker

V Of Mice and Men: Image, Belief and Regulation in Late Medieval England ed. Linda Clark (2005)

Jon Denton

Image, Identity and Gentility: The Woodford Experience

S.A. Mileson Alasdair Hawkyard

The Importance of Parks in Fifteenth-Century Society Sir John Fastolf’s ‘Gret Mansion by me late edified’: Caister Castle, Norfolk ‘Vostre Humble Matatyas’: Culture, Politics and the Percys A Repertory for Reinforcement: Configuring Civic Catholicism in Fifteenth-Century Bristol Caxton, the Cult of St. Winifred, and Shrewsbury ‘Ut Verus Christi Sequester’: John Blacman and the Cult of Henry VI The Problem of Labour and the Parliament of 1495 Mickey Mouse in Disneyland: How Did the Fifteenth Century Get That Way?

Jenni Nuttall Clive Burgess Anne F. Sutton Thomas S. Freeman P.R. Cavill Colin Richmond

VI Identity and Insurgency in the Late Middle Ages ed. Linda Clark (2006)

The British Isles Imagined Ethnic Identity and Political Language in the King of England’s Dominions: A Fourteenth-Century Perspective ‘Thai War Callit Knychtis and Bere the Name and the Katie Stevenson Honour of that Hye Ordre’: Scottish Knighthood in the Fifteenth Century Violence and Peacemaking in the English Marches towards Jackson Armstrong Scotland, c.1425–1440 ‘Let’s Kill all the Lawyers’: Did Fifteenth-Century Peasants Matthew Tompkins Employ Lawyers When They Conveyed Customary Land? Identifiable Motives for Election to Parliament in the Reign Simon Payling of Henry VI: The Operation of Public and Private Factors Deconstructing Cade’s Rebellion: Discourse and Politics David Grummitt in the Mid Fifteenth Century Jacquelyn Fernholz Lydgate’s Poem to Thomas Chaucer: A Reassessment of its Diplomatic and Literary Contexts and Jenni Nuttall Maureen Jurkowski Lollardy in Coventry and the Revolt of 1431 Julian and her Sisters: Female Piety in Late Medieval Carole Hill Norwich Anthony Goodman Andrea Ruddick

VII Conflicts, Consequences and the Crown in the Late Middle Ages ed. Linda Clark (2007)

Christine Carpenter Anne Curry James Ross Michael Brown J.L. Bolton Catherine Nall

War, Government and Governance in England in the Later Middle Ages After Agincourt, What Next? Henry V and the Campaign of 1416 Essex County Society and the French War in the Fifteenth Century French Alliance or English Peace? Scotland and the Last Phase of the Hundred Years War, 1415–53 How Sir Thomas Rempston Paid His Ransom: Or, The Mistakes of an Italian Bank Perceptions of Financial Mismanagement and the English Diagnosis of Defeat

‘Þe Kynges Cite’: Exeter in the Wars of the Roses Continuity and Change in the Parliamentary Justifications of the Fifteenth-Century Usurpations Identity and Belonging: Irish and Welsh in FifteenthCentury Bristol The Impact of Warfare on the Scottish Marches, c.1481–c.1513 Writing English, French and Latin in the Fifteenth Century: A Regional Perspective

Hannes Kleineke Lucy Brown Peter Fleming Anthony Goodman G.M. Draper

VIII Rule, Redemption and Representations in Late Medieval England and France ed. Linda Clark (2008)

Carole Rawcliffe Kathleen Daly Lucy Rhymer Jonathan Mackman Colin Richmond David King Anne F. Sutton Ruth Lexton

Dives Redeemed? The Guild Almshouses of Later Medieval England War, History and Memory in the Dauphiné in the Fifteenth Century: Two Accounts of the Battle of Anthon (1430) Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and the City of London ‘Hidden Gems’ in the Records of the Common Pleas: New Evidence on the Legacy of Lucy Visconti Sir John Fastolf, the Duke of Suffolk, and the Pastons Reading the Material Culture: Stained Glass and Politics in Late Medieval Norfolk An Unfinished Celebration of the Yorkist Accession by a Clerk of the Merchant Staplers of Calais Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres and the Question of Nobility Under Henry VII

IX English and Continental Perspectives ed. Linda Clark (2010)

Henry VI and the Deskilling of the Royal Bureaucracy A Twelfth-Century Honour in a Fifteenth-Century World: The Honour of Pontefract Frederik Buylaert and The Representation of Nobility and Chivalry in Burgundian Historiography: A Social Perspective Jan Dumolyn Christine Carpenter Sarah Rose

Vincent Challet Juliana Dresvina Andy King Jessica Lutkin Alessia Meneghin

Tuchins and ‘Brigands de Bois’: Peasant Communities and Self-Defence Movements in Normandy During the Hundred Years War A Heron for a Dame: A Hitherto Unpublished Middle English Prose Life of St. Margaret of Antioch in BL, Harley MS 4012 Sir William Clifford: Rebellion and Reward in Henry IV’s Affinity Luxury and Display in Silver and Gold at the Court of Henry IV Nursing Infants and Wet-Nurses in Fifteenth-Century Florence: Piero Puro di Francesco Da Vicchio and his Wife, Santa di Betto Da San Benedetto

X Parliament, Personalities and Power: Papers Presented to Linda Clark ed. Hannes Kleineke (2011)

The People and Parliament in Fifteenth-Century England ‘A Beest envenymed thorough … covetize’: An Imposter Pilgrim and the Disputed Descent of the Manor of Dodford, 1306–1481 Charles Moreton and Henry Inglose: A Hard Man to Please Colin Richmond London Merchants and the Borromei Bank in the 1430s: J.L. Bolton The Role of Local Credit Networks ‘Mischieviously Slewen’: John, Lord Scrope, the Dukes James Ross of Norfolk and Suffolk, and the Murder of Henry Howard in 1446 Carole Rawcliffe A Fifteenth-Century Medicus Politicus: John Somerset, Physician to Henry VI ‘Domine Salvum Fac Regem’: The Origin of ‘God Save Elizabeth Danbury the King’ in the Reign of Henry VI ‘Monuments of Honour’: Clerks, Histories and Heroes in Matthew Davies the London Livery Companies The East Anglian Parliamentary Elections of 1461 Hannes Kleineke Changing Perceptions of the Soldier in Late Medieval David Grummitt England Thomas More, the London Charterhouse and Richard III Caroline M. Barron A.J. Pollard Simon Payling

XI Concerns and Preoccupations ed. Linda Clark (2012)

Christopher Allmand John Milner Rhun Emlyn Peter D. Clarke Frederick Hepburn Anthony Smith Dean Rowland S.P. Harper

The English Translations of Vegetius’ De Re Militari. What Were their Authors’ Intentions? The English Commitment to the 1412 Expedition to France Serving Church and State: the Careers of Medieval Welsh Students Petitioning the Pope: English Supplicants and Rome in the Fifteenth Century The Queen in Exile: Representing Margaret of Anjou in Art and Literature The Presence of the Past: The Bokkyngs of Longham in the Later Middle Ages The End of the Statute Rolls: Manuscript, Print and Language Change in Fifteenth-Century English Statutes Divide and Rule? Henry VII, the Mercers, Merchant Taylors and the Corporation of London

XII Society in an Age of Plague

ed. Linda Clark and Carole Rawcliffe (2013) J.L. Bolton Karen Smyth Sheila Sweetinburgh Elizabeth Rutledge Samantha Sagui Elma Brenner Neil Murphy Jane Stevens Crawshaw John Henderson Samuel K. Cohn, Jnr.

Looking for Yersinia Pestis: Scientists, Historians and the Black Death Pestilence and Poetry: John Lydgate’s Danse Macabre Pilgrimage in ‘an Age of Plague’: Seeking Canterbury’s ‘hooly blisful martir’ in 1420 and 1470 An Urban Environment: Norwich in the Fifteenth Century Mid-Level Officials in Fifteenth-Century Norwich Leprosy and Public Health in Late Medieval Rouen Plague Ordinances and the Management of Infectious Diseases in Northern French Towns, c.1450–c.1560 The Renaissance Invention of Quarantine Coping with Epidemics in Renaissance Italy: Plague and the Great Pox The Historian and the Laboratory: The Black Death Disease

XIII Exploring the Evidence: Commemoration, Administration and the Economy ed. Linda Clark (2014)

S.J. Payling Christian Steer Matthew Ward David Harry Euan C. Roger Sheila Sweetinburgh Maureen Jurkowski Susanne Jenks Martin Allen Christopher Dyer

The ‘Grete Laboure and the Long and Troublous Tyme’: The Execution of the Will of Ralph, Lord Cromwell, and the Foundation of Tattershall College A Royal Grave in a Fifteenth-Century London Parish Church The Livery Collar: Politics and Identity During the Fifteenth Century William Caxton and Commemorative Culture in FifteenthCentury England Blakberd’s Treasure: A Study in Fifteenth-Century Administration at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London Placing the Hospital: The Production of St. Lawrence’s Hospital Registers in Fifteenth-Century Canterbury Were Friars Paid Salaries? Evidence from Clerical Taxation Records Exceptions in General Pardons, 1399–1450 The English Crown and the Coinage, 1399–1485 England’s Economy in the Fifteenth Century

XIV Essays Presented to Michael Hicks ed. Linda Clark (2015)

Caroline Barron Anne Curry Christopher Dyer Mark Page Gordon Mckelvie A.J. Pollard Ralph Griffiths Peter Fleming

Michael Hicks: An Appreciation Disciplinary Ordinances for English Garrisons in Normandy in the Reign of Henry V Lords in a Landscape: the Berkeley Family and Northfield (Worcestershire) Hampshire and the Parish Tax of 1428 The Livery Act of 1429 An Indenture between Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury, and Sir Edmund Darell of Sessay, North Riding, 1435 The Pursuit of Justice and Inheritance from Marcher Lordships to Parliament: the Implications of Margaret Malefaunt’s Abduction in Gower in 1438 The Battles of Mortimer’s Cross and Second St. Albans: The Regional Dimension

S.J. Payling Hannes Kleineke James Ross Anne F. Sutton Matthew Holford Karen Stöber John Hare Winifred A. Harwood

Widows and the Wars of the Roses: the Turbulent Marital History of Edward IV’s Putative Mistress, Margaret, daughter of Sir Lewis John of West Horndon, Essex Some Observations on the Household and Circle of Humphrey Stafford, Lord Stafford of Southwick and Earl of Devon: the Last Will of Roger Bekensawe The Treatment of Traitors’ Children and Edward IV’s Clemency in the 1460s Edward IV and Bury St. Edmunds’ Search for Self-Government The Exchequer Inquisitions Post Mortem Hams for Prayers: Regular Canons and their Lay Patrons in Medieval Catalonia Production, Specialisation and Consumption in Late Medieval Wessex A Butt of Wine and Two Barrels of Herring: Southampton’s Trading Links with Religious Institutions in Winchester and South Central England, 1430–1540

XV Writing, Records and Rhetoric ed. Linda Clark (2017)

Michael Bennett Julia Boffey J.L. Laynesmith John Milner Ben Pope

Tom Johnson Sarah Thomas J.M. Grussenmeyer

The Libelle of English Policy: The Matter of Ireland ‘Stories of Divers Regions and Provinces’: Some Digests of History and Geography for Late-Medieval English Readers ‘To please … Dame Cecely that in latyn hath litell intellect’: Books and the Duchess of York A Case Study in Lancastrian Service and Personal Survival: The Career of William, Lord Roos of Helmsley (c.1370–1414) Identity, Discourse and Political Strategy: Margrave Albrecht Achilles (1414–86) and the Rhetoric of Antagonism between Town and Nobility in Upper Germany The Redistribution of Forest Law and Administration in Fifteenth-Century England Well-Connected and Qualified Clerics? The Bishops of Dunkeld and Sodor in the Fifteenth Century Preaching Politics: Lancastrian Chancellors in Parliament

Dan E. Seward Paul Cavill

Bishop John Alcock and the Roman Invasion of Parliament: Introducing Renaissance Civic Humanism to Tudor Parliamentary Proceedings Preaching on Magna Carta at the End of the Fifteenth Century: John Alcock’s Sermon at Paul’s Cross

XVI Examining Identity

ed. Linda Clark (2018) Claire Macht David Lepine Des Atkinson Samuel Lane Daniel F. Gosling Simon Egan Brian Coleman Zosia Edwards Charles Giry-Deloison

Changes in Monastic Historical Writing Throughout the Long Fifteenth Century ‘Such Great Merits’: The Pastoral Influence of a Learned Resident Vicar, John Hornley of Dartford Getting Connected: The Medieval Ordinand and his Search for Titulus The Political Career of William Ayscough, Bishop of Salisbury, 1438–50 Edward IV’s Charta de Libertatibus Clericorum A Playground of the Scots? Gaelic Ireland and the Stewart Monarchy in the Late Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries An English Gentry Abroad: The Gentry of English Ireland Identity Theft in Later Medieval London Dying on Duty: A French Ambassador’s Funeral in London in 1512

XVII Finding Individuality ed. Linda Clark (2020)

Chris Given-Wilson Samuel Lane Anne F. Sutton Anthony Gross

Royal Wills, 1376–1475 Propaganda, Piety and Politics in the Fifteenth Century: Henry V’s Vernacular War Letters to the City of London, 1417–21 ‘To Be of Oon Demeanyng and Unite for the Wele of Your Self and of the Contre There’: Yorkist Plans for the Lordship of Ireland, the Last Phase A Mirror for a Princess: Antoine de la Sale and the Political Psyche of Margaret of Anjou

Alice Raw S.J. Payling

David Grummitt Deborah Youngs

Margaret of Anjou and the Language of Praise and Censure On ‘Peyne of their Lyfes … they Should no Verdit gif, but if they Wold Endite the Seid William Tresham of his Owen Deth’: the Murder of Lawyers in Fifteenth-Century England ‘Stond Horeson and Yelde thy Knyff’: Urban Politics, Language and Litigation in Late Medieval Canterbury ‘In to the Sterre Chambre’: Female Plaintiffs before the King’s Council in the Reign of Henry VII

XVIII Rulers, Regions and Retinues: Essays Presented to A.J. Pollard ed. Linda Clark and Peter Fleming (2020)

Gwilym Dodd Douglas Biggs Michael Hicks Andy King Rosemary Horrox Keith Dockray Hannes Kleineke James Ross Ralph A. Griffiths Sean Cunningham Anne Curry Michael Bennett Carole Rawcliffe Anne Curry

Tyranny and Affinity: The Public and Private Authority of Richard II and Richard III The Commission to ensure Good Governance of 11 May 1402: A Case Study of Lancastrian Counter-Propaganda A Failure in Foresight: the Lancastrian Kings and the Lancastrian Dukes The Strothers: A Tale of Northern Gentle Folk, Social Mobility and Stagnation in Late Medieval Northumberland ‘No Good unto our said King at this Time’ Contemporary and Near-Contemporary Chroniclers: The North of England and the Wars of the Roses, c.1450–1471 England, 1461: Predominantly Provincial Perspectives on the Early Months of the Reign of Edward IV Greater Landowners and the Management of their Estates in Late Medieval England Lordship and the Social Elite in the Lordship of Gower during the Wars of the Roses A Yorkist Legacy for the Tudor Prince of Wales on the Welsh Marches: Affinity-Building, Regional Government and National Politics, 1471–1502 Southern England and Campaigns to France, 1415–1453 Last Men Standing: Lancashire Soldiers in the Wars in France Northern Pride goes Before a Fall: The ‘Horrorable’ History of Adelston Attysle Professor Tony Pollard: An Appreciation

The Fifteenth Century aims to provide a forum for the most recent research into the political, social, religious and cultural history of the fifteenth century in Britain and Europe. Contributions are invited for future volumes. Draft submissions or informal inquiries should be sent to the General Editor, Dr. Linda Clark, at 18 Bloomsbury Square, London WC1A 2NS; e-mail [email protected]. Authors should submit an electronic version of their contribution, presented with double spacing throughout and with notes set as footnotes. Contributions should not be longer than 10,000 words. A style guide is available on request. Authors submitting papers do so on the understanding that the work has not been published previously. Neither the General Editor nor the publisher accepts responsibility for the views of the authors expressed in their contributions. Authors wishing to include illustrations in their articles should contact the General Editor prior to submission. It is the author’s responsibility to obtain the necessary permission to use material protected by copyright.