The Reign of Henry IV: Rebellion and Survival, 1403-1413 1903153239, 9781903153239

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The Reign of Henry IV Rebellion and Survival, 1403–1413

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS York Medieval Press is published by the University of York’s Centre for Medieval Studies in association with Boydell & Brewer Limited. Our objective is the promotion of innovative scholarship and fresh criticism on medieval culture. We have a special commitment to interdisciplinary study, in line with the Centre’s belief that the future of Medieval Studies lies in those areas in which its major constituent disciplines at once inform and challenge each other.

Editorial Board (2005–2008): Professor J. G. Wogan-Browne (Dept of English and Related Literature) Dr T. Ayers (Dept of History of Art) Dr J. W. Binns (Dept of English and Related Literature) Dr Gabriella Corona (Dept of English and Related Literature) Professor W. M. Ormrod (Chair, Dept of History) Dr K. F. Giles (Dept of Archaeology)

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Publications of York Medieval Press are listed at the back of this volume.

Henry IV’s second Great Seal, c. 1406 (Society of Antiquaries of London). Photo: Michael Bennett.

The Reign of Henry IV Rebellion and Survival, 1403–1413

Edited by Gwilym Dodd and Douglas Biggs

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS

©  Contributors 2008 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 2008 A York Medieval Press publication in association with The Boydell Press 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 USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com and with the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York ISBN  978–1–90315–323–9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham Wiltshire

CONTENTS Preface

ix

Abbreviations

xi

Genealogy

xiv

Introduction  A. J. Pollard

1

1. Henry IV, the Royal Succession and the Crisis of 1406 Michael Bennett

9

2. ‘The Quarrels of Old Women’: Henry IV, Louis of Orléans, and Anglo-French Chivalric Challenges in the Early Fifteenth Century Chris Given-Wilson

28

3. ‘On account of the frequent attacks and invasions of the Welsh’: The Effect of the Glyn Dŵr Rebellion on Tax Collection in England Helen Watt

48

4. Managing the North in the Reign of Henry IV, 1402–1408 Mark Arvanigian

82

5. Patronage, Petitions and Grace: The ‘Chamberlains’ Bills’ of Henry IV’s Reign Gwilym Dodd

105

6. Henry IV: The Clergy in Parliament A. K. McHardy

136

7. The Rebellion of Archbishop Scrope and the Tradition of Opposition to Royal Taxation W. Mark Ormrod

162

8. An Ill and Infirm King: Henry IV, Health, and the Gloucester Parliament of 1407 Douglas Biggs

180

9. Politics and Patronage in Lynn, 1399–1416 Kate Parker

210

10. The Earl of Arundel’s Expedition to France, 1411 Anthony Tuck

228

Index

241

PREFACE Scholarship on the reign of Henry IV has experienced somewhat of a renaissance in recent years. This has been led, to some extent, by the publication in 2003 of the collection of essays Henry IV: The Establishment of the Regime. Our aim in having a second volume published was to capitalize on the resurgence of interest in the reign and, following the highly successful format adopted in Establishment of the Regime, to publish a second series of papers which shed yet more light on these turbulent and eventful years of late medieval English history. In this volume the focus is on the later stages of Henry IV’s reign, a period which has tended to be overlooked in scholarship as a result of undue emphasis placed on the process and immediate aftermath of Henry IV’s seizure of power in 1399. This, indeed, was the notable characteristic of the first volume in which contributors were drawn – rather than guided – to consider Henry’s regime in its very early stages of development. The relative neglect of the years 1403–1413 has meant that key questions about the style and record of Henry IV’s kingship, as well the consideration of important themes, events or episodes located within this period, have escaped detailed scrutiny. In particular, whilst scholars have been drawn to the question of how Henry seized power, much less attention has been paid to how he retained this power in the face of serious political and military challenges, what were the particular characteristics of his rule and how, ultimately, he succeeded in passing the throne intact to his son in 1413. The period 1403–13 was no less dramatic and challenging for Henry than the initial years of his rule: he faced a series of serious rebellions, a financial crisis, deep-seated opposition in parliament, personal ill-health and a number of serious dilemmas relating to foreign policy. The purpose of each contribution to this volume is to shed new light and/or offer significant new interpretations on these and other key aspects of Henry IV’s later years. The papers which make up this present volume are the result of a twoday symposium held at the University of Nottingham in July 2006. As with the first symposium one of our principal aims in organizing the event was to encourage as much informal debate, conversation, and discussion among the participants as possible. To this end the papers were circulated in advance of the symposium and were merely summarized in the sessions. This format left us with ample time for what became an extremely productive round-table discussion ably and expertly chaired by the three commentators, Professors Anthony Pollard, Anthony Tuck and Christopher Allmand. The editors would especially like to acknowledge the support – both finanix

Preface cial and practical – of the School of History, University of Nottingham. The members of department welcomed us with alacrity and provided a wonderful and relaxing setting in which to hold the symposium. Last and not least, we would like to thank the contributors for their fine papers, collegiality, and thoughtfulness throughout the two-day event as well as the three commentators for keeping us on task, and on time, and especially to Tony Pollard for writing the introduction to the volume. Douglas Biggs and Gwilym Dodd

July 2007



ABBREVIATIONS ‘Annales’

‘Annales Ricardi Secundi et Henrici Quarti’, in Johannis de Trokelowe … chronica et annales, ed. H. T. Riley (London, 1866) M. Bennett, Richard II and the Revolution of 1399 (Stroud, 1999)

Bennett,   Richard II BIHR Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research BJRL Bulletin of the John Ryland’s Library BL British Library, London CChR Calendar of Charter Rolls CCR Calendar of Close Rolls CFR Calendar of Fine Rolls Chronicle of Chronicle of Adam Usk 1377–1421, ed. and trans. C. Given  Adam Usk Wilson (Oxford, 1997) Chrons. Rev. Chronicles of the Revolution, 1397–1400, ed. and trans. C. Given-Wilson (Manchester, 1993) CIM Calendar of Inquisitions Miscellaneous CIPM Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem CPaL Calendar of Papal Letters CPR Calendar of Patent Rolls EETS Early English Text Society EHR English Historical Review Eulogium Eulogium Historiarum, ed. F. S. Haydon, Rolls Series 9, 3 vols.   Historiarum (1858–63) Foedera Foedera, conventions, literae, et cujuscunque generis acta publica, ed. T. Rymer (edition as cited in text) Given-Wilson, C. Given-Wilson, The Royal Household and the King’s Affinity:   Royal Service, Politics and Finance in England, 1360–1413 (London   Household and New Haven, 1986) Hardyng The Chronicle of John Hardyng, ed. H. Ellis (London, 1812) Henry IV, ed. Henry IV: The Establishment of the Regime, 1399–1406, ed. G.  Dodd and Dodd and D. Biggs (York, 2003)  Biggs Historia Thomae Walsingham quondam monachi S. Albani Historia   Anglicana Anglicana, ed. H. T. Riley, Rolls Series 28, 2 vols. (London, 1863–64) House of The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1386–1421,   Commons ed. J. S. Roskell, Linda Clark and Carole Rawcliffe, 4 vols. (Stroud, 1992) xi

Abbreviations Kirby, Henry IV J. L. Kirby, Henry IV of England (London, 1970) Knighton’s Knighton’s Chronicle 1337–1396, ed. and trans. G. H. Martin   Chron. (Oxford, 1995) LKLK K. B. McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford, 1972) ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), online version POPC Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council of England, ed. H. Nicolas, 7 vols. (London, 1834–37) PRO Public Record Office (now The National Archives), London PROME The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, ed. C. Given-Wilson et al. (Leicester, 2005), CD-Rom version Rot. Parl. Rotuli Parliamentorum, 7 vols. (London, 1783–1832) Rot. Scot. Rotuli Scotiae in turri Londonensi et in domo capitulari Westmonasteriensi asservati, ed. D. Macpherson et al., 2 vols. (London, 1814–19) Signet Letters Calendar of Signet Letters of Henry IV and Henry V, ed. J. L. Kirby (London, 1978) Somerville, R. Somerville, History of the Duchy of Lancaster, 1265–1603, 2 vols. (London, 1963)   Duchy of   Lancaster TNA The National Archives (formerly PRO), London Tout, Chapters T. F. Tout, Chapters in the Administrative History of Medieval England, 6 vols. (Manchester, 1920–33) TRHS Transactions of the Royal Historical Society VCH Victoria County History Westminster The Westminster Chronicle 1381–1394, ed. and trans. L. C.   Chron. Hector and B. Harvey (Oxford, 1982) Wylie, J. H. Wylie, History of England under Henry IV, 4 vols.   Henry IV (London, 1884–98)

xii

Introduction A. J. Pollard

In 2001 a group of scholars brought together in York by Drs Gwilym Dodd and Douglas Biggs began a revaluation of the reign of Henry IV. The proceedings of that symposium were published two years later. A similar group convened again at Nottingham on 7–9 July 2006 to continue the revaluation. The earlier gathering focussed on the early, crisis-ridden years of the reign. While the focus of the Nottingham symposium moved forward in time to encompass the whole reign, it nevertheless dwelt largely on the years in which the Lancastrian dynasty struggled to establish itself. There are several linked reasons for this. These years remain the most contentious and difficult to understand; they are more richly served by our sources; and they attract more scholarly attention. Whereas the previous collection concentrated on the establishment of the regime, both the revolution of 1399 and the struggles to survive thereafter, this volume shifts more attention to the shaping of the regime and the manner in which it operated. There is accordingly greater emphasis on administrative history, taxation and the institutional context of the turbulent politics of the decade. In this respect the revaluation is taking us back to an older tradition. Yet debate has moved on, and the issues at the forefront are not those that were dominant in the mid-twentieth century. In one respect we seem to have arrived at a new consensus that the turning point in the parliamentary politics of the reign was the collapse of Henry IV’s health in 1406. Discussion continues as to exactly what the king’s condition was and to the extent to which he was capable of attending to affairs of the realm thereafter. Michael Bennett, below, argues that following the execution of Archbishop Scrope in 1405, guilt and remorse debilitated him. This could be a condition, which today would be diagnosed clinically as reactive depression, which renders patients periodically listless and lethargic. This would not preclude the more frequently supposed stroke, but intriguingly, Henry’s guilt and remorse might have led him to believe that he could be struck down by leprosy, which, all scholars knew, was the fate that befell Uzziah for defying the servers in the



I am grateful to Professor Christopher Allmand and Professor Anthony Tuck for their assistance with the composition of this introduction.  Henry IV, ed. Dodd and Biggs.



A. J. Pollard Temple. The later, influential, reports that he suffered from leprosy drew upon this biblical exemplum. It is not inconceivable that Henry himself, being, as Bennett (pp. 16–17 and and p. 18) and Biggs (pp. 185–6) point out, under sentence of excommunication by Pope Innocent IV, travelling restlessly on penitential pilgrimage around England, and turning to St Thomas Becket for atonement, feared that this punishment awaited him. The fact of the collapse of the king’s health, mental and/or physical, is not currently disputed. Its impact on the administration and politics of the kingdom after 1405 remains shadowy and continues to dog our understanding of the Long Parliament of 1406 and the shorter and more obscure Gloucester assembly the following year. While John Roskell was confident that Henry IV was personally engaged in the debate with the Commons over the voting of supply, Douglas Biggs, argues below that the Gloucester parliament was conducted without the king’s active involvement (pp. 189–91). His part was taken by the chancellor, Archbishop Arundel, with the full backing of the Council. Repeated declarations of his intention to lead military expeditions throughout 1407, and occasional (and often unsettling) interventions later in his reign suggest a man who was either frustrated by his physical inability to give sustained attention to the affairs of the realm, or a man who was struggling to throw off his lassitude and endeavouring from time to time to re-engage. It is in these unusual circumstances that Bennett asks us to consider again the significance of the succession acts passed in the 1406 parliament. The June act settling the crown on his heirs male recalled Edward III’s entail of 1376, and may well have been passed in anticipation of an abdication. Its repeal in December and the restoration of the female line, perhaps reflecting the emergence of the Prince of Wales as a political force, gave more freedom of action to the heir apparent as well as reinstating the laws and customs of the realm. The period from 1406 to the king’s death had something of the character of a protracted succession crisis, as the Prince of Wales chafed restlessly for the power promised to him and which he knew would one day be his. Tales of his grasping the crown before his father was dead reflect the essence of their relationship. The fact of the matter is, however, that from 1406 the crown was in commission. A system of corporate kingship was forged in that year that continued, despite considerable tension, for the rest of the reign. It depended on the remarkable solidarity of the Lancastrian establishment, beginning with the royal family and extending to the senior peerage, the Episcopal bench and the royal affinity. In the circumstances of the king’s condition his supporters rallied round. None was perhaps more remarkable than Archbishop Arundel,

 

C. Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 44–6. House of Commons, I, 91–3.



Introduction who after the initial months of the reign in effect withdrew from front-line politics. But at the beginning of 1407 he stepped forward to take the reins of government as Chancellor. He may well, as Bennett suggests, have saved the regime as well as achieved a personal reconciliation of the king with the Church. The men who served Henry IV were remarkable, the Prince of Wales himself included, in their capacity ultimately to put the collective interest of the new dynasty, the crown and the realm before their personal interests and ambitions. This undoubted commitment of the political elites to the regime raises the problem of the relationships between Henry and his parliaments, especially before 1410. On this there is a rich historiographical tradition ranging from the Stubbsian notion of the Lancastrian constitutional experiment to the McFarlanite perception of conflict between crown and subject being waged on the floor of the Commons’ chamber. Interpretation has moved in recent years to the idea that a mutuality of interest existed between the crown and a block of king’s friends returned to the Commons in most parliaments which ensured that opposition there, as distinct from opposition in the realm at large, had only limited objectives, especially financial prudence and tighter control of household expenditure. These in themselves created considerable tension, but both crown and critical MPs shared the fundamental desire to preserve the regime. The settlement reached at the end of the Long Parliament of 1406, a victory for the Commons in curbing royal profligacy, validated, as Gerald Harriss has put it, the role of the Commons as loyal critics and reformers. It is one of the more remarkable traits of Henry IV, personally and of his regime, that he acknowledged loyal opposition even if he did not always tolerate it with a good grace. The papers that follow take us in greater detail into the structure of the regime. One well-established aspect is the reliance placed on household men and royal retainers, especially those drawn from the Lancastrian affinity. Mark Arvanigian re-examines the regime in the far north. He points out that until 1403 Henry had no significant personal following, either as king or as duke, in Cumbria, Durham and Northumberland. He had to rely on Percy. After the battle of Shrewsbury he was able, step by step, to dismantle Percy power. In its place he promoted his own family and duchy retainers, especially his second son John and brother-in-law, Ralph, earl of Westmorland and his associates, giving them official authority in the wardenries of the marches and on the commissions of the peace. He only succeeded in the face of considerable resistance from those formerly attached to the Percys. By 1408, however, he had established a regime in the far north, in which the new bishop of Durham, Thomas Langley, also played a key role, which was



G. L. Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England, 1360–1461 (Oxford, 2005), p. 500. But see the dissenting essay by Douglas Biggs below.



A. J. Pollard the foundation of the successful Lancastrian government of the far north and borders for three decades. Gwilym Dodd explores the operation of the regime through an examination of its administrative procedures. He carefully dissects the role and working of ‘chamberlains’ bills’ in the governmental system, some of the few records of the privy seal office which survived a fire in 1619 which are confined to a few months in 1401 and nine months of 1404–5, a mere fraction of what originally existed. The ‘chamberlains’ bills’, he argues, were designed to provide a written record of a promise to reward a petitioner who had directly, or through an intermediary, presented his request to the king orally. They are usually curt and were created in the chamberlain’s office to meet the auditing needs. While styled as petitions with the king’s endorsement they are in effect warrants instructing the privy seal to set a process of payment in motion. Although not necessarily representative of the whole process, they are particularly revealing about Henry IV’s exercise of patronage. One key aspect is that petitioners needed to show that they were owed reward for services actually rendered. The bills reveal that the king’s capacity to reward service was crucial to the early success of his regime as a means of binding his subjects to him, whether they were old servants or new; and demonstrate that the king himself was fully aware that his capacity to reward service, from whatever quarter, was vital to the creation of political loyalty. This is shown particularly in the surviving bills settling the debts of men who had served as sheriff. The documents give substance to the notion that Henry put political necessity before sound finances and case by case analysis demonstrates, in the months for which they survive, what it was that led to tension between crown and parliament over the king’s profligacy. The evidence leads Dodd to conclude that king and parliament were treading a fine line between the political necessity of safeguarding the dynasty in which they all had a vested interest and curtailing the soaring cost of the king’s administration. If the king himself did not appreciate it, members of the House of Commons insisted that he should not waste the royal patrimony on which the long-term future of the dynasty depended. The Long Parliament of 1406 saw a settlement hammered out which finally achieved a workable balance between political and financial imperatives, though it was fortunate for all that by then the regime had seen off its major challenges. Dodd confirms, therefore, the interpretation that the relationship between crown and parliament in these years, for all its tension, was essentially constructive. Douglas Biggs in his examination of the Gloucester parliament of 1407, an unusual and little explored assembly, begs to differ. This assembly was notable for having the greatest number of knights of the shires who were retainers or tenants of the crown or duchy of Lancaster, and the largest number of re-elected MPs during the reign, men who had participated in the titanic struggle of 1406 to establish curbs on royal spending and to establish 

Introduction a system of conciliar government that could operate effectively without the king’s direct involvement. Biggs, who acknowledges Arundel’s pivotal role, stresses the confrontational character of the assembly, the tempestuous and antagonistic relationship between council and Commons. That opinions were expressed frankly and tempers were frayed from time to time was no doubt the case, but it is perhaps necessary to put the tone in which business was conducted in context. This was essentially a house made up of the king’s friends and loyal critics. They were no doubt frustrated by the continuing difficulty that the council was finding in putting the royal finances on a sound footing, and they certainly objected, under considerable pressure from their constituents, to the demand for further taxation. But such an assembly was surely committed to maintaining the settlement agreed nine months earlier, however unwelcome its members found the further demands. One wonders, too, whether there might not have been an element of collusion in the manner in which the council ‘ordered’ the tax so that the Commons could assert the constitutional principle to vote supply. Once having established the principle, after all, they voted exactly what they had been asked to grant. And did Arundel really mismanage the house as Biggs proposes? He got what he wanted. This essay ensures that there is still life in the controversy over Henry IV’s relationships with his parliaments. What role the clergy other than the spiritual peers played in this and other parliaments during the reign is hard to tell. Alison McHardy takes up and explores the poorly documented and shrouded question of clerical proctors in parliament, ‘the forgotten men of English parliaments’. While the clergy had their own convocations, Canterbury often meeting at the same time as a session of parliament, in which they were asked to supply their own grants of taxation to the crown, they were still residually represented in parliament as the second estate by proctors. Besides the bishops and heads of religious houses who did not attend, proxies represented archdeacons, cathedral deans and the collective diocesan clergy. McHardy unravels as much as can be found about who these proxies were from surviving letters of appointment, revealing that those who would anyway be in attendance as civil servants, or might otherwise be in the vicinity during a session of parliamant, acted as proxies for many different clergy. What they did is almost impossible to ascertain since their actions left no record. That they could participate in debate is indicated by Thomas Haxey’s motion in 1397; and one may assume that the Newsletter sent to the Prior of Durham in 1404 was written by his proxy. Matters of considerable concern to the clergy were discussed, such as heresy and disendowment, to which they were hardly indifferent, and, since they too were being taxed frequently, the question of excessive and unwar-



C. M. Fraser, ‘Some Durham Documents Relating to the Hilary Parliament of 1404’, BIHR 34 (1961), 163–85.



A. J. Pollard ranted royal expenditure was also close to their hearts. One may reasonably suppose, therefore, although it cannot be demonstrated, that they gave full support to the ‘loyal criticism’ of the knights of the shires and burgesses. The discontent of the clergy of the northern province went beyond parliamentary criticism in 1405 when Archbishop Scrope took the field. Mark Ormrod examines how his protest concerning taxation fitted into traditions of opposition to the financial demands of the crown. He points out that in two respects the northern province had legitimate complaint. Unlike the southern province, they had not been remitted the last tax granted in the reign of Richard II, and had thus been double taxed in 1401, and the 1404 tax had been extended to usually exempt clergy. Scrope’s case was represented in terms of legitimate resistance to excessive demands. It contested the claim that there was ‘urgent necessity’ in 1404/5; it stressed the mismanagement of the realm by the crown. Thus the armed demonstration he led was cast in the traditional role of legitimate clerical resistance. His protest was presented as loyal in that it claimed that the taxation demanded by the crown would damage the well-being of the subject. The king rejected this rhetoric and took a terrible revenge. However we may interpret Scrope’s rebellion, and whatever the consequences for the king of his hot-tempered reaction, Scrope’s rebellion was, Ormrod demonstrates, firmly within an established tradition of resistance to the crown. The Welsh too believed that they were engaged in legitimate resistance. And there can be little doubt that the demand for taxation to suppress Glyn Dwr’s revolt was an ‘urgent necessity’ facing the crown in the first decade of the fifteenth century. Helen Watt’s thorough analysis of the yield from taxation, lay and clerical, in Shropshire and Herefordshire and the archdeaconries of Chester and Salop and diocese of Hereford, between 1403 and 1405, reveals that the claims by taxpayers that they could not pay because of destruction by the Welsh were genuine. Those parts bordering Wales suffered severely. No doubt the rhetoric of petitions for relief of taxation exaggerated the impact; the frequently reiterated claim that all the inhabitants had fled from devastated areas can be shown in certain cases to be untrue. It would seem that for a successful claim to the exchequer this form of words was required. However, not only did the devastating raids conducted by the Welsh cause extensive damage, but also they effectively reduced the capacity of the crown to raise revenue locally to pay for resistance to further raids. Although most damage was inflicted before Christmas 1404, exemptions granted to those who suffered extended through to the 1407 grant. Total losses to the crown from the entire tax yield were relatively small, but they were severe in Shropshire and Herefordshire.



See P. J. P. Goldberg, Richard Scrope: Archbishop, Rebel, Martyr (Shaun Tyas, Donnington, forthcoming).



Introduction Faced by the urgent necessity in Wales, which the French sought to exploit, it is not surprising that Henry IV was reluctant to become entangled in France itself. Chris Given-Wilson shows how the war with France was pursued by other means. Vitriolic challenges to combat were exchanged between Louis of Orleans and members of his entourage and Henry IV and his courtiers in 1402–1403. These challenges, one of which led to a seven-a-side passage of arms at Montendre in Gascony in May 1402, were initiated by Orleans, Henry’s one-time ally of 1399, and were part and parcel of a deliberate attempt by the duke to provoke war between the two realms, subsequently pursued in Gascony, on the marches of Calais and by intervention in Wales. The letters exchanged were not couched in the spirit of chivalric brotherhood, as had occurred earlier and was to happen later in the reign, but were hostile and abusive. The combat at Montendre, unlike Anglo-French contests between the leading champions of both realms that took place after 1406, was a substitute for war, not a sporting event. Henry IV wisely resisted the temptation to be drawn into full-scale conflict. Unusually during the later Middle Ages, for these few years, the exchange of chivalric challenges to personal or group combat was a matter of deep personal animosity fraught with implications for international relations, not a polite charade concerning the performance of deeds of arms to the honour of both kingdoms in the spirit of amity. Later in the reign the king was powerless to prevent intervention in France. Anthony Tuck revisits the earl of Arundel’s expedition of 1411 in aid of the duke of Burgundy. This expedition was mounted with the approval of the Prince of Wales and was probably against the wishes of the king. For this reason it took place under the cover of an embassy to the duke and was largely a mercenary affair financed entirely by Burgundy. The accounts of John the Fearless’s Receiver-General reveal their progress as part of the duke’s army as they campaigned around Paris against Armagnac forces in October and November. Arundel and his men served with distinction in the capture of St Cloud which forced the Armagnacs to withdraw from Paris. After this success the English mercenaries were treated with great honour by Charles VI and French nobility. They were promptly paid, well rewarded with booty and ransoms, and compensated, as custom required, for their losses in action. But the king himself was moving in the opposite direction towards an alliance with the Armagnacs, which led to the Treaty of Bourges in May 1412. The Prince of Wales and Arundel, as their private correspondence with Burgundy reveals, only reluctantly acceded. There is little doubt that the Prince continued to prefer a Burgundian alliance, notwithstanding the fact that in 1412 he was constrained by the foreign policy pursued by the king’s government. Arundel’s expedition thus had implications for the future. It laid the foundation for Henry V’s diplomacy and its success whetted the appetite of the new generation of young nobles gathering around the Prince of Wales for a renewal of war in France. 

A. J. Pollard The expedition and its aftermath also further exacerbated tensions between the Prince and his father. In the last years of the reign the consensus reached in 1406 began to fracture. The king’s health, it may be, improved for a while and he became more assertive and engaged, though his attention to business could never be sustained. In this circumstance, rivalries at the highest level, especially between Prince Henry and his brother Thomas, duke of Clarence and the king’s favourite, led to renewed political instability. While the future of the dynasty was never seriously threatened, factionalism became the dominant feature at court after 1410. It was not just at court. Kate Parker reveals how the political cross-currents of the whole reign could also create choppy water for Henry IV’s subjects in the provinces. The town of King’s Lynn was one of the larger and more prosperous ports in England, dependent particularly on trade with the eastern Baltic. Constitutionally, however, it belonged to the bishops of Norwich, against whose lordship it had long chafed. The revolution of 1399 appeared to give it an opportunity to break with the bishop and protect its trade through attachment to the new regime. Over six years a succession of mayors invested heavily in political lobbying. By 1405, Parker demonstrates, their hopes had been dashed. The town neither gained independent burghal status nor saw its trade prosper. The cost that had been incurred crippled the gild of the Holy Trinity, the organization through which the leading merchants operated. As trade worsened, the town was riven with conflict, which reached a climax in 1411 and was not finally resolved until 1416. Internal divisions were exacerbated by the conflicts and tensions at court, as one party turned to Archbishop Arundel and the other to Thomas Beaufort, duke of Exeter, who since 1405 had been lord of nearby Wormgay and Castle Acre, and through him to the Prince of Wales. Lynn survived its upheavals, but its experience after 1399 must surely have taught its citizens not to put their trust in princes, and possibly warned other towns to distance themselves from high politics. The story of Lynn’s troubles reminds us that many waves created by Henry IV’s usurpation had an effect well beyond his reign. It is perhaps unavoidable that the dramatic, action-packed early years of the reign have dominated the attention of its historians and that its later years have been overshadowed by the figure of his more famous son. These years have tended to be perceived as a prelude to his reign as Henry V. The time is perhaps now ripe to take a new look at the last few years of Henry IV’s reign without hindsight and to examine more closely the tensions that strained, but did not destroy, the regime established by him and his loyal servants. It may be that Gwilym Dodd and Douglas Biggs can be persuaded to provide the occasion in a third gathering of scholars. All who participated in the symposium in 2006 would wish to thank them for bringing them together and the University of Nottingham for its hospitality; one may hope that they and others have an opportunity to thank them again.



1 Henry IV, the Royal Succession and the Crisis of 1406 Michael Bennett

The reign of Henry IV is unique in the history of medieval England in one largely unregarded respect. From his accession until his death the first Lancastrian king was understudied by a single heir apparent. In 1399 Henry of Monmouth, then approaching the age of discretion, was acknowledged as heir to the throne and given the title of prince of Wales. In 1404 the earl of Northumberland publicly swore an oath to be a faithful and loyal liege ‘to our said lord the king and to his eldest son my lord the prince, and to the heirs of his body, and to my lords his brothers and their issue in succession and in line of inheritance to the crown, in accordance with the laws of England’. The period from 1406 until the king’s death is especially remarkable in that the English crown was subject to the earliest known statutes regulating the succession. The two statutes of June and December 1406, whose terms were well-publicized, laid down an order of succession including four named lives. The prince of Wales, a member of the council from November 1406, attained his majority in September 1407, and succeeded to the crown on his father’s death in 1413. Rather remarkably, no other adult son succeeded a royal father between the accessions of Edward I in 1272 and Charles I in 1625. It has been observed that from around 1406 the Lancastrian regime was more broadly accepted. The Ricardian cause ‘ceased to articulate a widespread discontent and became instead a vehicle for the irreconcilable grievances of a small but active rump of dissidents.’ Still, the second half of Henry’s reign was not untroubled by succession problems, albeit of a different sort. The crucial issues related to the nature of the polity and the transfer of power from father to son. Over the years there has been a great deal of scholarly



Though Henry of Monmouth may have been born as late as August 1387, the balance of scholarly opinion is that he was born on 16 September 1386: C. Allmand, Henry V (London, 1992), pp. 7–8.  Rot. Parl., III, 524.  Rot. Parl., III, 574–6, 582.  S. Walker, ‘Rumour, Sedition and Popular Protest in the Reign of Henry IV’, Past and Present 166 (2000), 31–65 (p. 64).



Michael Bennett interest in the political crisis of 1406 and the experiments in conciliar rule that it set in train. Surprisingly little notice has been given, however, to the two acts for the descent of the crown that accompanied it. For the first time the royal succession was made the subject of statute. Even more remarkably, in settling the crown in the male line, the act of June 1406 laid down an order of succession at odds with custom and common law. The decision in December to rescind this act and to re-establish the rights of the heir general, regardless of sex, underlines its novelty and its political importance. The address to the succession involved an address to a future beyond Henry IV. From 1406 onwards a major problem was to manage the transition from a king who, sometimes lacking the capacity or will to rule, would not let go, and a prince who was impatient to succeed. This paper will consider the issue of the succession in the reign of Henry IV, and examine the significance of the acts for the descent of the crown. It will necessarily set them in the context of a broader discussion of Lancastrian kingship. It will be argued that the statutory address to the succession, along with the constitutional measures that made royal authority subject to an increasing degree of conciliar and parliamentary oversight, made the Lancastrian monarchy less personal and partisan, and more public, corporate and even national. Henry’s increasingly poor health was an important factor in the politics of the second half of his reign. He had a serious health scare in June 1405 and his legs were so swollen he was unable to ride in April 1406. He suffered life-threatening strokes in spring 1408 and early 1409. It has been argued that he was physically incapacitated through 1406, and that the continual council was instituted in May to assist his kingship. In this paper it is assumed that notwithstanding Parliament’s broad support for the Lancastrian monarchy there were real concerns about governance, and a readiness to exploit the king’s weakness for political ends. At the same time the paper contends that the king’s incapacity was as much political and moral as medical, and that the critical issue in 1406 was not the king’s poor health but longstanding problems of legitimacy and governance newly compounded by the censure arising from his role in the death of Archbishop Scrope in June 1405. Needless to say, in the minds of contemporaries, and in all likelihood in the mind of the king himself, the moral and the medical were inextricably linked. Henry’s ill health was widely associated in contemporary chronicles with the usurpation of 1399 and the martyrdom of 1405. In seeking to understand the politics of 1406, it is not unreasonable to go back to 1376. It is true that there were surprisingly few people whose participation in public life stretched back to the Good Parliament. Yet it would be 

P. McNiven, ‘The Problem of Henry IV’s Health, 1405–1413’, EHR 100 (1985), 747–72 (p. 772).  D. Biggs, ‘The Politics of Health: Henry IV and the Long Parliament of 1406’, in Henry IV, ed. Dodd and Biggs, pp. 185–205.

10

The Royal Succession and the Crisis of 1406 wrong to dismiss the possibility that the events of this time were not called to mind. The author of Mum and the Sothsegger, for example, is witness to the survival of a notion that it was the responsibility of parliament to call ministers to account and criticise practices inimical to the common weal. The parallels between events in 1376 and 1406 would likewise suggest that thirty years was by no means a long time in Lancastrian politics. In Edward III’s last years there had been a similar interplay between parliamentary demands for the reform of government and anxiety over the succession. Especially significant for an understanding of the succession acts of 1406 is the revelation that in 1376 Edward III entailed the crown on his grandson Richard and his male heirs, with remainder to John of Gaunt and his male heirs. It is not known whether Edward obtained, or even sought parliamentary confirmation of the entail. If so, it would represent a direct precedent for the first act of 1406. Even if the measure were stillborn, it cannot have been wholly forgotten in Lancastrian circles. In addition to its implications for the house of Lancaster, it embodied a broadly shared prejudice in favour of descent in the male line, a prejudice shared by Richard II. The politics of the reign of Richard II bear even more obviously on the politics of the early fifteenth century. It needs to be borne in mind that in the thirty years before 1406 the personal exercise of power by the king was more the exception that the rule. On the accession of the ten-year-old Richard, a broadly based regency council had been established. The young king’s first attempts to assert himself had led to the humiliation of the continuous council of 1386–7 and the baronial junto of 1388–9. Even after his formal declaration of his majority in 1389, Richard remained dependent on the support and counsel of the duke of Lancaster. It was only from around 1392–3 that Richard began to rule as well as reign, and from 1397 he ruled in a highhanded and arbitrary, even tyrannical, manner.10 Henry of Bolingbroke’s rebellion owed much of its success to the military capacity of the Lancastrian machine.11 The revolution itself, however, depended on a broad coalition of interests and concerns that can be regarded as constitutionalist.12 There was broad

  

10 11 12

Mum and the Sothsegger, ed. M. Day and R. Steele, EETS 199 (1936), lines 1118–33. M. J. Bennett, ‘Edward III’s Entail and the Succession to the Crown, 1376–1471’, EHR 93 (1998), 580–609. Richard granted the right to bear the arms of St Edward the Confessor to his uncles and cousins in the male line but not to Roger Mortimer. In an alleged conversation about the succession around 1398 he focused on the relative merits of his cousins Henry of Bolingbroke and the duke of Aumale: Chronicles of London, ed. C. L. Kingsford (Oxford, 1905), p. 52; Bennett, Richard II, p. 139. Ibid., pp. 53–5 and ch. 6. See now D. Biggs, Three Armies in Britain. The Irish Campaign of Richard II and the Usurpation of Henry IV, 1397–99 (Leiden, 2006). M. J. Bennett, ‘Henry of Bolingbroke and the Revolution of 1399’, in Henry IV, ed. Dodd and Biggs, pp. 9–34, esp. pp. 19–25.

11

Michael Bennett acceptance of Henry’s role as Steward of England in restraining the king and reforming the kingdom. During the rising he in effect became the governor of the realm, summoning parliament, for example, in the king’s name. Still, there was an obvious need for an arrangement that offered longer-term security for the rebels. One possibility was for Richard to nominate Henry as his heir and cede him the regimen of the kingdom. In the event the rebels went for broke, deposing Richard and raising Henry to the throne. The crisis of personal monarchy was by no means a uniquely English phenomenon, and developments in France and Scotland need to be seen as points of reference for England. Edward III’s entail of the crown in 1376 may have been prompted by Charles V’s ordonnances on the succession in 1374. Though they were primarily concerned with arrangements for royal minorities, they made explicit the order of succession.13 Richard II felt some affinity with Charles VI of France, who likewise succeeded as a child and found it hard to shake off the tutelage of his uncles. A first psychotic episode in 1392 led to longer periods of mental illness during which royal authority was vested in a series of regents and councils.14 Richard, who attributed the sad state of the French king and kingdom to the machinations of the duke of Orleans, found the situation across the Channel abhorrent.15 Scotland, too, provided food for thought. In 1373 Robert II, the first of the Stewarts, entailed the crown on his eldest son and his male heirs, and then his three brothers in turn and their male heirs.16 The settlement, ratified by the Scots Parliament, seems to be the prototype of Edward III’s entail. It would assuredly have been noted by John of Gaunt.17 Though it might not have acknowledged it, the house of Lancaster had much in common with the house of Stewart. They held the stewardship of their respective kingdoms, giving them some claim to represent their respective communities. Robert II, who had served a long political apprenticeship as guardian of the realm during David II’s imprisonment in England, continue to rule as primus inter pares, exploiting and expanding his dynastic power-base and his network of magnate allies. In 1384 he was compelled to cede power to his eldest son, John earl of Carrick, who ruled as guardian of Scotland. Apparently injured in a riding accident,

13

14 15

16 17

F. Autrand, ‘La succession à la couronne de France et les ordonnances de 1374’, in Représentation, pouvoir et royauté à la fin du moyen âge. Actes du colloque organisé par l’Université du Maine les 25 et 26 mars 1994, ed. J. Blanchard (Paris, 1995). R. C. Famiglietti, Royal Intrigue. Crisis at the Court of Charles VI 1392–1420 (New York, 1986). ‘Mémoires de Pierre Salmon’, third supplement in Collection des chroniques nationales françaises écrite en langue vulgaire du treizième au seizième siècle, avec notes d’éclaircissements, vol. xv, ed. J. A. Buchon (Paris, 1826), pp. 11–13; Bennett, Richard II, p. 115. B. Webster, Medieval Scotland: The Making of an Identity (1997), pp. 96–7; S. Boardman, The Early Stewart Kings: Robert II and Robert III (East Linton, 1996), pp. 58–9. There had been consideration of Gaunt as a candidate for the succession to the Scottish throne in the 1364: Boardman, Early Stewart Kings, pp. 42–3.

12

The Royal Succession and the Crisis of 1406 the second Stewart king, who took the name of Robert III, reigned rather than ruled. The duke of Albany, his brother, governed as lieutenant of the kingdom. The king’s eldest son, the duke of Rothesay, briefly took power in 1399, but was overthrown in a coup in 1401. Albany regained control after the prince’s assassination in 1401. In their modest regal style, and in their separation of the dignity from the office, the Stewarts provided a model of kingship that was a possible outcome of the revolution of 1399. On his accession to the throne Henry IV declared his resolve to enjoy his regality as fully as his predecessors. Yet he had begun his political career as one of the lords who had destroyed the court party in 1387–8, and ultimately led the rebellion against Richard’s tyranny. His professions of readiness to take counsel, reduce taxation, and rule for the common good promised a new style of kingship. His approach was collegial, and he accepted debate and criticism in parliament in a manner unthinkable in his predecessor.18 The circumstances of his accession, however, brought problems. Perhaps inevitably he found it hard to meet the range of expectations generated by the overthrow of Richard II. The chroniclers of the revolution of 1399, so uniformly hostile to the old king, show increasing signs of reserve with respect to the new dispensation. Though he rewarded them well, Henry was unable to satisfy the Percys who rose in rebellion against him in 1403. Henry found his political base narrowing rather than broadening. The members of his household and retinue likewise expected reward for their loyalty, and, more importantly perhaps, security for the future. They pressed Henry to keep his nerve, destroy opponents, and asset-strip the church. Inevitably they provoked the sort of hostility in the nation at large that Richard II’s retinue had provoked.19 Above all, Henry was hamstrung by the weakness of his title. In 1399 he claimed the throne by hereditary right, presumably as Richard’s nearest male heir. In making reference to his descent from Henry III, he presumably sought to highlight his doubly royal lineage rather than press into service the myth that Edmund ‘Crouchback’, earl of Lancaster, and not Edward I,

18

It needs to be borne in mind that the parliaments were made up of men generally loyally to the regime. A. J. Pollard, ‘The Lancastrian Constitutional Experiment Revisited: Henry IV, Sir John Tiptoft and the Parliament of 1406’, Parliamentary History 14 (1995), 103–19; G. Dodd, ‘Conflict or Consensus: Henry IV and Parliament, 1399–1406’, in Social Attitudes and Political Structures in the Fifteenth Century, ed. T. Thornton (Stroud, 2001), pp. 118–49. 19 Philip Repton, Henry’s confessor, spoke out against the licence that Henry allowed his retainers: Chronicle of Adam Usk, pp. 136–43. Archbishop Arundel likewise appealed to the king on a number of occasions to reprimand the anticlerical members of his household. For example, John Capgrave, The Chronicle of England, ed. F. C. Hingeston, Rolls Series (London, 1858), pp. 287–8.

13

Michael Bennett was Henry III’s eldest son.20 The Lancastrian title in 1399 was literally, and metaphorically, a committee confection. It combined the fiction of Richard’s abdication, Henry’s own challenge for the crown, and the acceptance of his title by the estates of the realm. From Henry’s point of view what may have mattered most was that his claim had been vindicated by his success in arms.21 According to Adam of Usk, Henry sought to base his title on conquest. Though the Chief Justice counselled against this provocative course, Henry did not entirely give up the idea.22 He certainly won acceptance for his claim by right of conquest to the kingdom of Man following the execution of William Scrope, king of Man.23 Henry undoubtedly saw his success in arms in providential rather than merely chivalric terms.24 God had been the judge of his cause, and had found in his favour. God had approved his hereditary title, as had the estates of the realm. In this conception the legal technicalities of the matter were of lesser importance. As Henry IV struggled to establish his regime, he can be forgiven if sometimes he began to doubt that God was on his side. Even sympathetic chroniclers record assaults on his title, and relate his arguing, in a wholly undignified manner, with friars who challenged his title. Dr William Frisby told him to his face that if Richard were alive he was the rightful king, and if he were dead then Henry, as a regicide, would forfeit whatever title he had.25 A remarkable letter written by Philip Repton, his confessor, admonishing him for his rule in 1401 achieved some circulation.26 The blithe confidence, born of a conviction that through the people God had raised him to the throne, gradually 20

21

22 23

24

25 26

This myth would have given Henry the appearance of a better title to the throne than Richard himself. There is some evidence that it was actively promoted in Lancastrian circles in the late 1390s. Hardyng, pp. 353–4; Scotichronicon by Walter Bower, ed. D. E. R. Watt, vol. 8 (1987), pp. 20–1. It should be noted that Richard II seems to have regarded Henry’s bloodline positively: Chronicles of London, ed. Kingsford, p. 52; Bennett, Richard II, p. 139. Contemporaries described it as a conquest. Adam Usk wrote that Henry ‘within fifty days conquered both king and kingdom’: Chronicle of Adam Usk, pp. 60–1. See the similar comments of Thomas Walsingham in ‘Annales’, p. 250 Ibid., p. 282. The title by right of conquest is recorded in Henry’s grant of the kingdom to the earl of Northumberland in 1399: Monumenta de Insula Manniae or a Collection of National Documents relating to the Isle of Man, ed. J. R. Oliver, Manx Society IV, VII and IX (Douglas, Isle of Man, 1860–2). See M. J. Bennett, ‘English Rule Confirmed. The Isle of Man, 1389– 1406’, in The New History of the Isle of Man. Vol. 3. The Medieval Period 1066–1405, ed. S. Duffy (Liverpool, forthcoming). Walsingham marvelled at how rapidly Henry pacified and unified the realm, and saw it as ‘a clear miracle of God’; ‘Annales’, p. 250. In general, see M. J. Bennett, ‘Prophecy, Providence and the Revolution of 1399’, in Prophecy, Apocalypse and the Day of Doom. Proceedings of the 2000 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. N. Morgan (Donington, 2004), pp. 1–18, esp. pp. 16–18. Eulogium Historiarum, III, 389–94. Chronicle of Adam Usk, pp. 136–43.

14

The Royal Succession and the Crisis of 1406 gave way to a grim resignation. Richard II’s own reservations about Henry’s suitability as king, that he would oppress the church, seemed to be realised in his apparent toleration of anticlericalism and impiety among the knights in his entourage. Of course, it helped that he continued to be successful in war. His success at the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 must have seemed a final vindication of his title. At meetings in September and December 1403 the magnates publicly reiterated oaths of loyalty and obedience to Henry IV and, after his death, Prince Henry.27 In February 1404 the Lords and Commons in Parliament confirmed their allegiance to the king, the prince of Wales and the heirs of his body. The recently pardoned earl of Northumberland’s oath ‘on the cross of Canterbury to be a faithful and loyal liege’ to the king, the prince, his brothers and their issue ‘in line of inheritance to the crown, in accordance with the laws of England’, was specifically recorded.28 Nonetheless Henry IV continued to face opposition. The northern rising of 1405 lethally combined mundane grievances and an assault on the Lancastrian title.29 The defeat of the rising and the execution of Archbishop Scrope of York for his complicity in it marked a watershed in his reign. To put to death a senior and respected prelate was an awesome undertaking. Archbishop Arundel of Canterbury rode north to beg the king to show mercy. Henry’s resolve was reportedly steeled by his retainers threatening to desert him unless the death sentence was exacted. In the end the act cost him dear, not least in peace of mind. He was struck down by illness, allegedly on the day of the execution.30 For the rest of his life his capacity and confidence were undermined by his increasingly poor health. His regular expressions of intent in later years to lead armies against his foes perhaps reflect a deep-seated need to test and vindicate himself anew.31 The manner in which his illness was reported by chroniclers leaves little doubt that his sickness was seen as a reflection on the moral legitimacy of his rule. The defeat of the rising of 1405 should have set the seal on the Lancastrian 27

28 29

30

31

Rot. Parl., III, 574. The record only refers to councils held at Worcester and Westminster, but since the context makes plain that they took place before the parliament of 1404, they would seem to refer to the meetings in September and December 1403: Kirby, Henry IV, pp. 159, 161. Rot. Parl., III, 524. For general discussion, see P. McNiven, ‘The Betrayal of Archbishop Scrope’, BJRL 54 (1971), 173–213; S. Walker, ‘The Yorkshire Risings of 1405: Texts and Contexts’, in Henry IV, ed. Dodd and Biggs, pp. 161–84. Historians of the Church of York and its Archbishops, ed. J. Raine, 3 vols. (Rolls Series, 1886– 94), II, 308–9. There is documentary evidence to support the later but highly circumstantial reports that he was struck down by illness on the day of the execution: McNiven, ‘Problem of Henry IV’s Health’, pp. 747–8. In the following month he was anxious to reassure people his health was improving and to suppress rumours: J. W. McKenna, ‘Popular Canonization as Political Propaganda: The Cult of Archbishop Scrope’, Speculum 45 (1970), 608–23 (p. 612). McNiven, ‘Problem of Henry IV’s Health’, pp. 761–2.

15

Michael Bennett regime. Henry’s role in Archbishop Scrope’s death, however, fatally undermined his kingship. The king moved rapidly to present to Pope Innocent VII his account of the proceedings. He reputedly sent him the archbishop’s coat of mail as evidence of his involvement in armed rebellion. The pope was not impressed, and issued a bull excommunicating all who had counselled or agreed to the archbishop’s death, a form of words that manifestly brought Henry under the ban of the church.32 Henry was fortunate that in the circumstances of the Schism the pope was in no position to take a firm line with a monarch on whose support he depended. He was fortunate, too, that Archbishop Arundel took it on himself, in the interests of public order, not to publish the bull.33 Over the winter of 1405–6, however, few people can have imagined that they had heard the last of Archbishop Scrope, or that Henry was fully reconciled with the church and blessed by God. The popular verdict on the affair, at least in the north of England, can be gauged from the reports of miracles and the growth of a cult at Scrope’s tomb in York.34 Archbishop Arundel wrote to the canons at York late in 1405 asking them to prevent people from flocking to the tomb, at least until the reports of miracles could be properly authenticated.35 Parliament assembled on 1 March 1406 in a truculent mood. It is likely that concerns about the king’s relations with the church, even anxieties that excommunication could lead to a general interdict, added to the customary frustrations with regard to the government of the realm. The chancellor who opened parliament on the king’s behalf represented in his own person the sad state of affairs. Thomas Langley was the king’s candidate as archbishop of York. He had been elected, with indecent haste, by the cathedral chapter after Scrope’s execution. The pope refused to confirm the election, and it was all too clear that the see of York would be vacant for some time.36 The death of Bishop Walden of London in January 1406 raised the prospect of another stand-off between the crown and the curia and another protracted vacancy.37 One stroke of good fortune at this time was the capture of Prince James, the 32

33 34 35 36 37

It was reported in England that Innocent VII was greatly distressed by Archbishop Scrope’s death: Raine, Historians of York, II, 310. It is unclear whether the coat of mail was sent to Innocent or his successor: Incerti scriptoris chronicon Angliae de regnis trium regum Lancastrensium, Henrici IV, Henrici V, et Henrici VI, ed. J. A. Giles (London, 1848), pp. 47–8; An English Chronicle of the Reigns of Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI, ed. J. S. Davies, Camden Society, Original Series, lxiv (1856), pp. 33–4. Eulogium Historiarum, III, 408. For the rapid development of the cult, see McKenna, ‘Popular Canonization as Political Propaganda’, pp. 611–17. R. G. Davies, ‘After the Execution of Archbishop Scrope: Henry IV, the Papacy and the English Episcopate, 1405–8’, BJRL, 59 (1976–7), 40–74 (p. 41 n.). TNA, SC 10/43/2012; Davies, ‘After the Execution of Archbishop Scrope’, p. 53. The see was vacant from August 1404 until June 1405 when Henry, perhaps as a concession after Scrope’s execution, accepted the papal translation of Roger Walden to London: Davies, ‘After the Execution of Archbishop Scrope’, pp. 48–50.

16

The Royal Succession and the Crisis of 1406 eldest son of Robert III of Scotland. He was sailing to France to be educated at the French court. Henry grimly observed that he could teach him French quite as well. James succeeded as king on his father’s death in April 1406 but remained in captivity in England until 1424. The duke of Albany continued to rule in Scotland.38 The chronology of the negotiations between the king and the pope is a little hard to track. Even more obscure is the process by which Henry, under the direction of his confessors, set himself right with God. There is much to commend the old view that Henry himself was mightily troubled by his conscience.39 By spring 1406, pressure was almost certainly mounting on the king and his kingship. The holy season of Lent and Easter, the first since Scrope’s execution, would have represented a crucial stage on the road to reconciliation. Adding to the stress at this time, reports of miracles at Scrope’s tomb were circulating ever more widely. In April Henry wrote personally to the chapter at York instructing it not to publicise them and to divert pilgrims to other shrines.40 Around this time, too, Northumberland and his allies circulated new manifestoes claiming that Scrope had been killed because he had counselled Henry to do penance for the death of Richard II and calling for the crown to be restored to the right line.41 The parliament of 1406 that began in confusion and acrimony broke early for Easter. Henry moved to Windsor to participate in the Garter festivities. On 28 April he wrote to the council that he would have to postpone his return to Westminster. He had been suddenly afflicted in the leg, and his physicians had declared him unfit to ride.42 On the resumption of proceedings at the beginning of May, parliament returned to concerns relating to the king’s household and the government of the realm. The Speaker reminded Henry that they ‘had been promised good governance, and that the archbishop had said that the king would be advised by the wisest counsellors, who would oversee the whole government of the realm’. The king agreed to cede his authority to a council of magnates, including Archbishop Arundel, and to accept rules for the conduct of administration. He conceded that he could not attend to business as much as he would wish and was happy to be relieved of the work.43 The archbishop and his colleagues showed themselves reluctant to assume the burden, and took the opportunity to point out that

38 39 40 41

42 43

Kirby, Henry IV, p. 195. LKLK, pp. 103–4. Davies, ‘After the Execution of Archbishop Scrope’, p. 41 n. Historians of the Church of York, ed. Raine, II, 304–5; Thomas Gascoigne, Loci e Libro Veritatum, ed. J. E. T. Rogers (Oxford, 1881), pp. 229–31. For dating, see Walker, ‘The Yorkshire Risings of 1405’, p. 173. Calendar of Signet Letters of Henry IV and Henry V (1399–1422), ed. J. L. Kirby (London, 1978), nos. 588 and 1589. A. J. Pollard, Late Medieval England 1399–1509 (London, 2000), p. 56.

17

Michael Bennett they could not well serve the king and kingdom without a vote of supply.44 They recognised well enough the seriousness of the responsibilities they were being called on to assume. They were being asked to assume, in some measure, a form of regency. They were also involved in discussion relating to a new settlement of the crown. It has been argued that Henry’s ill health and indeed fears for his life best account for the crisis of 1406.45 Parliament was largely comprised of men with a strong record of service to the house of Lancaster. If the king were incapacitated, it might help explain their seeking to put the crown in commission. It was a way of saving the Lancastrian regime and, through the confirmation of the succession, securing its future. The problem is that it is by no means clear that Henry was ill for any length of time in 1406. He was briefly incapacitated at Windsor in May. Nonetheless it is reasonable to assume that on his return to the capital he participated in the important business in council and parliament. In so far as he distanced himself somewhat from proceedings, he had good reason to do so, given the lack of responsiveness from parliament to his needs. Overall, the temper of the lords and knights seems more curmudgeonly than sympathetic. Conversely, if Henry were seriously ill, he was a poor patient. The point may have been that Henry was incapacitated by more than physical ailments. He was – or was presumably assumed to be – under sentence of excommunication. England’s two largest cities lacked bishops, and there was perhaps concern about a general interdict. His authority in the English church was being undermined. Even close friends like Thomas Langley seem to have been making their own deals with Rome.46 There was perhaps never any prospect that Henry would feel obliged to replicate the public penance of Henry II after the death of Thomas Becket. Still, there was the need for some resolution of the matter, including perhaps some public act of reconciliation. The approach of Whitsuntide, the time for the final absolution of the sins of the past year, and indeed the approach of the anniversary of Scrope’s death on 8 June doubtless heightened expectations. The first succession act needs to be considered against this background. According to the parliament roll, Sir John Tiptoft, the Speaker of the Commons, introduced the issue of the succession in a petition to the king on 7 June. The petition recalled the earlier settlements and oaths. It observed that evilminded people had nonetheless ‘through false information, done their best to cause the hearts of your faithful lieges to be swayed, as a result of which numerous commotions and riots have occurred amongst your people … to the great joy of your enemies’. It asked the king to ordain a statute for the succession and to have it ‘openly published and made known to all realms’

44

Kirby, Henry IV, pp. 197–8. Pollard, Late Medieval England, pp. 55–6; Biggs, ‘The Politics of Health’, passim. 46 Davies, ‘After the Execution of Archbishop Scrope’, p. 60. 45

18

The Royal Succession and the Crisis of 1406 under the Great Seal and with the seals of all the lords and the Speaker of the House of Commons.47 The resulting statute, however, was no mere clarification of the existing arrangements. The king ordained that ‘the heredity or inheritance of our crown … shall reside with us and our male heirs issuing from our body’, and laid down an order of succession beginning with the prince of Wales and his male heirs, and his other three sons and their male heirs. The settlement in the male line was at variance with what was assumed to be the custom of the realm in relation to the descent of the crown.48 Even as recently as 1402 Henry IV’s ministers had informed the Danish government that ‘it was the English custom for the crown, in default of males, to descend to females’.49 The anomalous nature of the settlement is underlined by its replacement in December by a new act according to which the descent of the crown was vested in Henry, the prince and their heirs, regardless of sex.50 The new settlement may simply have been the product of tensions within the house of Lancaster. Like the entail of 1376, it reflected a family compact in the interests of dynastic solidarity. There was some need to take into account the interests of the wider royal family as well as the heir apparent. Henry’s daughters and sisters were already married or betrothed.51 His younger sons still lacked proper provision. In the new settlement the king publicly confirmed the prince of Wales as his heir, but the prince in turn conceded to his brothers the succession in preference to any female of his line. It was because of the adverse impact on the prince’s position, presumably, that it was specifically recorded that he was ‘wholly contented with and fully agreed to this ordinance’. From the parliamentary petition it appears that the prince’s standing was a matter of some concern. In lavishing praise on him, it affirmed that there was no one of any rank who showed more honour, reverence and obedience to his father than the prince did, and that although he sometimes made errors, he always acted with the best of intentions, and was ever ready to be overruled by council.52 It is hard to escape the conclusion that the prince had blotted his copy-book, and that his place in the line of succession had been in doubt. A professed aim of the act was the clarification of the succession in response

47 48

49 50 51

52

Rot. Parl., III, 574. The English commitment to the common law rules of inheritance in relation to women is evident in Edward I’s settlement in 1290: Foedera, II, 497; Bennett, ‘Edward III’s Entail and the Succession to the Crown’, p. 591. Royal and Historical Letters during the Reign of Henry the Fourth, ed. F. C. Hingeston, 2 vols. (Rolls Series, 1860), I, 120. Rot. Parl., III, 582. Sir John Cornwall, Henry’s brother-in-law, was urgently summoned in late April to appear before the council ‘on certain pressing matters intimately concerning the state of the king and the kingdom’: TNA, E 403/587, m. 1. The messengers were paid on 20 April 1406. Rot. Parl., III, 582.

19

Michael Bennett to ‘false information’ that had created uncertainty and division. The context would suggest that the allegations related to recent developments, not to the old issue of the legitimacy of the Lancastrian title. There was almost certainly some speculation in the spring of 1405 that the king would step down, permanently or temporarily. In negotiating for peace and a marriage between the prince and a French princess in March, Bishop Beaufort reportedly informed the French representatives that the king was planning to resign the crown on the occasion of his son’s marriage.53 In so far as the king was contemplating such a course, he may have resented the alacrity with which the prince and his allies sought to anticipate it. Possibly there were rumours that the king would vest the succession to the crown on Thomas, his second and allegedly favourite son. According to feudal tradition, the eldest son had no right to expect more from his father than the patrimony. There may have been some reflection on the precedent of William the Conqueror who settled the duchy of Normandy on his eldest son and allowed the kingdom of England to pass to his second son.54 Significantly enough, the duchy of Lancaster was specifically excluded from the tail male in June 1406, and remained vested in Prince Henry and his issue.55 Needless to say, an entail of the crown in the male line had its appeal. It is instructive that Robert II of Scotland in 1373 claimed that such a settlement would help avoid ‘uncertainty of succession’ and ‘the misfortunes and calamities which in most places and kingdoms happen … from the succession of female heirs’.56 It is tempting to regard the act as the fulfilment of a longstanding Lancastrian ambition. In 1376 John of Gaunt reputedly sought parliamentary support for a law ‘on the pattern of the French that no woman be heir to the kingdom’.57 The house of Lancaster would have been the main beneficiary of Edward III’s entail of the crown on Richard Bordeaux and his male heirs. For supporters of the Lancastrian regime a clear adoption of the principle of succession in the male line gave the best security for the future. The entail itself provided a clear framework for the transfer of power between the generations. An entail in the male line provided a firmer underpinning for the Lancastrian monarchy, especially in the next generation. One crucial point was that it made Prince Henry, after his father, the lawful heir 53

54

55 56 57

Enguerran de Monstrelet, Chronique, ed. L. Doüet-d’Arcq (Paris, 1857), I, 126; G. L. Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort. A Study of Lancastrian Ascendancy and Decline (Oxford, 1998), p. 40. Bishop Beaufort was involved in negotiations in Calais in the period 26 March to 22 May 1406, TNA, E 403/589, m. 7. According to one chronicle, King William, conscious that he had no right to the kingdom of England other than by conquest, declared that he could not leave it otherwise than to God. He did nonetheless express the hope that God would allow his second son to obtain it. D. C. Douglas, William the Conqueror (London, 1964), pp. 360–1. Rot. Parl., III, 576. Boardman, Early Stewart Kings, p. 58. Chronicon Angliae, 1328–1388, ed. E. Maunde Thompson (Rolls Series, 1857), pp. 92–3.

20

The Royal Succession and the Crisis of 1406 of Richard II. The prince himself was sentimental with respect to the former king who showed him great favour. According to an early tradition, Richard had prophesied a glorious future for the youth, and may have adopted him as his heir.58 The prince reciprocated Richard’s affection, and honoured his memory.59 Politically he presented himself as Richard’s heir, building bridges with former Ricardians like the duke of York and rebuilding the Ricardian connecton in Cheshire and Wales. The act of June 1406 laid down an order of succession that at least appeared to offer the prospect of the restoration of the crown to the right line. In the event the first succession act did not hold. In annulling it, the act of December 1406 merely declared that in excluding females it had been too restrictive.60 The only chronicler to include any detail on the acts does no more than summarise the parliament roll.61 It seems likely that the circumstances that made the settlement appear sensible changed over the succeeding months. In so far as it was designed to facilitate an early transition of power from the king to the prince it became less fit for purpose. If the king ever contemplated abdication, he clearly resolved to soldier on, even if he only reigned rather than ruled. He lingered in London through June, and in the following month embarked on a leisurely progress through East Anglia. One aim was to accompany his daughter Philippa as far as King’s Lynn, whence she was sailing to Scandinavia for her marriage to King Eric.62 The royal party included Queen Joan, two of the princes and various other notables. The tour, though, had some of the flavour of a pilgrimage. He went out of his way to visit Walsingham.63 By chance a detailed record of his time at Bardney abbey is extant. On arrival he dismounted and went down on his knees to kiss the holy cross and be blessed by the abbot. Inside the church he reverently kissed other relics, and heard two masses in the richly adorned Lady Chapel. The next day he spent time in the library perusing the collection.64 He may indeed have been seeking a cure for his earlier illness.65 He was much more obviously a penitent. In relation to ecclesiastical censure, Henry remained in a limbo. Prior to the summer recess he sought support from the peerage for his view that

58 59

60 61 62 63 64 65

Thomae de Elmham, Vita et Gesta Henrici Quinti, ed. T. Hearne (Oxford, 1727), p. 5. He organized Richard’s reburial of Richard at Westminster in 1413, prompting the observation that he showed more love for his adopted father than his real father. The St Albans Chronicle 1406–1420, ed. V. H. Galbraith (Oxford, 1937), p. 77. Rot. Parl., III, 582. Chronicon Angliae de regnis trium regum Lancastrensium, pp. 49–52. For details see Biggs, ‘Henry IV and the Long Parliament’, pp. 197–8 and 205 (itinerary). Philippa rested at Thetford while Henry and his queen made a detour through Norwich to Walsingham: Wyle, Henry IV, II, 448. John Leland, Antiquarii de rebus Britannicis collectanea, 6 vols. (London, 1770), VI, 300–1. Cf. Biggs, ‘Henry IV and the Long Parliament’, pp. 197–8.

21

Michael Bennett Archbishop Scrope and the Earl Marshal had been guilty of treason. The lords pointedly declined to commit themselves on the issue.66 Fortunately the king had greater leverage at the Roman curia. There was a growing consensus in Christendom that the rival popes should resign to facilitate a healing of the schism. Henry’s envoys to Rome proceeded by way of Paris and Avignon. Prior to their arrival in Italy, Innocent VII died, and the Roman cardinals had elected Gregory XII. The new pope was again expected to resign in the interests of union. Henry’s emissaries remained with Gregory until spring 1408.67 During this time progress was made in filling key positions in the English church. In all likelihood, too, Gregory was brought round to a more favourable view of Henry’s role in Archbishop Scrope’s death and Henry’s subsequent remorse and penance. In April 1408 he finally issued a bull authorising the bishops of Durham and Lincoln to absolve Henry. Even then, it was not published in England until December.68 The summer recess of 1406 did not bring any resolution to the political impasse in England. Parliament resumed business on 18 October, but there was little progress for the best part of the month. Far from making financial provision, the Commons petitioned the king for the Lords to be asked to investigate and declare the causes of ‘bad governance’.69 A breakthrough occurred only at the eleventh hour. A few days before Christmas the Commons granted a subsidy in return not only for the right to audit the accounts and for the acceptance of some thirty-one articles that made provision for the government of the realm until the end of the next parliament. The king was to be guided in all matters by the Council, whose powers and responsibilities were also limited and laid down. Two other measures were enacted. One was an ambitious measure against Lollards and their anticlerical fellow-travellers. It required all peers and office-holders to take the initiative in arresting and examining all who lobbied against the church, the sacraments and church property.70 The other was the revision of the succession act of June 1406. It claimed that the earlier restriction to the male line had been made in error, and reinstated the descent of the crown to the four princes and their issue, regardless of sex.71 In this final session of parliament the increasing political profile of the prince of Wales is all too evident. For some time he had been establishing his reputation as a military commander in Wales. In November he first appeared 66 67 68 69 70 71

Rot. Parl., III, 606. Davies, ‘After the Execution of Archbishop Scrope’, p. 72. The Register of Bishop Philip Repingdon 1405–1419. Vol. 1. Memoranda 1405–11, ed. M. Archer (Lincoln Record Society, 1963), pp. 135–40. J. H. Ramsay, Lancaster and York. A Century of English History (A.D. 1399–1485) (Oxford, 1892), I, 101. P. Heath, Church and Realm 1272–1461: Conflict and Collaboration in an Age of Crises (London, 1988), pp. 253–4. Rot. Parl., III, 582.

22

The Royal Succession and the Crisis of 1406 as a member of council. In the following month he led the lords in pressing for the act against the Lollards. His well-publicised role suggests that he was seeking to add ‘political and theological leadership to the generalship he had already displayed on the battlefield’.72 It seems likely, too, that the revision to the act of succession reflected his growing ascendancy. The negotiations for his marriage over the summer may have made him more conscious of the disadvantages from his point of view of the male tail. There may have been a broader acknowledgment that the June act was at variance with the laws and customs of the realm. It must be supposed that this was the view of Archbishop Arundel, who was now emerging as the dominant figure in the government. His role in another conservative measure on the succession has likewise been generally assumed. In February 1407 the Beauforts successfully petitioned for a ratification of Richard II’s act legitimising them. The ratification was duly made, but a restriction was introduced barring them from the succession.73 For Arundel and presumably for many other magnates, the crown was not in the gift of the king, still less the heirloom of a tainted branch of the royal family. The role of Archbishop Arundel in the broader political settlement of 1406 was absolutely pivotal. During the first half of the reign he had provided ballast for the Lancastrian regime, but had not been directly involved in government. The king’s execution of his fellow archbishop, notwithstanding his protestations and the king’s assurances, must have inclined him to wash his hands entirely of the Lancastrian monarchy. Immediately after the episode Arundel himself fell ill, and doubtless found the whole situation personally distressing and the fall-out in terms of papal bulls of censure and reports of miracles at York hard to manage. During 1406 it must have been evident that without his active support the king could not survive politically. In June, for example, the Commons was especially keen to ascertain that Arundel was willing to serve on the Council.74 Many people probably regarded his role as essential for the stability of the regime and the unity of the realm. Arundel himself appreciated the need for order, but a major consideration for him was the defence of the church. On a number of occasions he had used his influence with Henry to counter moves in the royal household and parliament against the liberties and property of the church.75 He must have been very concerned that an excommunicated and increasingly isolated king would be driven, in despair, to even greater dependence on his anticlerical retainers. The measures of December 1406, especially the measures against heretics and opponents of the church, almost certainly reflect his influence. 72

Heath, Church and Realm 1272–1461, p. 253. Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort, p. 40. 74 Ramsay, Lancaster and York, p. 91. 75 For example, in Arundel’s response to Sir John Cheyne in 1404: Capgrave, Chronicle of England, pp. 287–8. 73

23

Michael Bennett Archbishop Arundel apparently accepted the chancellorship with great reluctance in January 1407, and only after the king’s personal entreaties. According to Thomas Walsingham, the decision to do so was injurious to his reputation.76 Given the extent to which Arundel was able to use the office to advance the interests of the church, the chronicler’s statement can be explained only by reference to the compromise of principle involved in Arundel’s decision to support a king under censure for the death of his archiepiscopal colleague. His government was certainly able to bring a measure of stability. In the parliament that met at Gloucester in autumn 1407 he was able to keep a firm lid on debate as well as push forward with his measures against Lollardy. The defeat of the earl of Northumberland by county levies under the command of the sheriff of Yorkshire at Bramham Moor in 1408 is remarkable testimony to the robustness of the regime. During this time he was able to restore Henry to the grace of the church. In June 1407 Henry headed northwards to York. The itinerary, including visits to Beverley and Bridlington, has the appearance of ‘a pilgrimage, an attempt to atone for the murder of the archbishop.’77 Arundel’s opening sermon to the parliament in October, on the text ‘honour the king’, perhaps signalled the king’s reconciliation with the church. On 12 April 1408 the pope finally issued a bull absolving the men responsible for the archbishop’s death.78 Henry was never so completely dependent on Arundel’s moral support and spiritual counsel as during the winter of 1408–9. He suffered what seems to have been a stroke. Convalescing at Greenwich he made his will on 22 January 1409. Describing himself as ‘a sinful wretch’, he left his body to be buried at Canterbury at his colleague’s discretion.79 In choosing Canterbury rather than Westminster or Windsor, he submitted himself to the protection of Thomas Becket himself. The crisis of 1406 produced a rather more corporate version of Lancastrian kingship. The initiatives that made the exercise of royal authority subject to conciliar restraint, and insisted that the council be named in and accountable to parliament, have long been recognised as important in terms of the development of more limited and less personal monarchy. The acts of succession need to be seen in relation to them. Earlier kings had sought to lay down orders of succession, and to bind their leading subjects to support the arrangement. Edward III may have intended his entail to be ratified by parliament, and Richard II may have addressed the succession in parliament. In 1399 and 1404 the lords in parliament swore fealty to the king and his sons. Still, the acts of 1406 represent the first recorded statutes regulating the descent of the crown. Though the initiative may have come from the king and the royal family, they had the effect of affirming a broader interest in the crown, both 76

St Albans Chronicle, ed. Galbraith, p. 10. Kirby, Henry IV, p. 213. 78 The Register of Bishop Philip Repingdon, ed. Archer, pp. 135–40. 79 BL, Harley MS 293, fol. 92r. 77

24

The Royal Succession and the Crisis of 1406 in terms of the persons named as heirs and in terms of the broader political nation involved in the statute-making. Henry’s kingship was reconstituted, at least temporarily, as both family firm and public company. The corporate character of Lancastrian kingship even took symbolic form. Late in 1406 or early in 1407 a new seal was struck. Exquisitely designed, it showed Henry IV seated in the middle of a perpendicular screen under the protection of the Virgin and flanked by St Michael, St George, St Edward and St Edmund. Supporting the king, however, are the shields with the arms of Prince Henry as prince of Wales, duke of Cornwall and earl of Chester.80 An interest in enhancing the dignity of Prince Henry and in incorporating the son into his father’s kingship is evident in new titles and styles. An indenture of September 1407, for example, recorded that Rees ap Gruffydd and his cohorts made an agreement with the ‘most serene Prince Henry by the grace of God eldest son of the king of England and prince of Wales’ to serve either King Henry or Prince Henry if they come to Wales.81 Needless to say, behind this show of unity, there appears to have been a growing rift. Prince Henry’s alienation from the king and his chief minister is suggested by two incidents at the Gloucester parliament. Still occupied in the siege of Aberystwyth, Henry arrived at the end of October and took up residence in Llanthony priory. His wardrobe accounts record a visit to him by Archbishop Arundel, the duke of York and others as emissaries of ‘the greater part’ of the lords spiritual and temporal.82 In his only recorded contribution to proceedings, the prince flamboyantly went down on his knees to declare his loyalty to his father and to praise the faithful service of the much maligned duke of York.83 Originally instituted for a period of twelve months, Arundel’s ministry continued in effect until the end of 1409. Its key task was to maintain order and stability during the inevitable transfer of power between generations. The king resolutely maintained his grip on the crown. His health continued to deteriorate, but bouts of debilitating illness were interspersed with periods of activity and assertion. He grimly acknowledged the unpopularity of his rule. He issued a general pardon to his subjects so that they ‘may bear more cheerful hearts towards us and our heirs, more truly to remain in faith and love.’84 The prince, however, proved impatient for power, and perhaps only a man of Archbishop Arundel’s age and stature could have held the king’s corner against the increasing body of support for the heir apparent. Over the

80 81 82 83 84

J. Cherry, ‘Some Lancastrian Seals’, in The Lancastrian Court. Proceedings of the Harlaxton 2001 Symposium, ed. J. Stratford (Donington, 2003), pp. 19–28 (p. 20). St Albans Chronicle, ed. Galbraith, pp. 22–7 (p. 23). Wylie, Henry IV, IV, p. 229. Kirby, Henry IV, p. 217. E. Powell, Kingship, Law, and Society. Criminal Justice in the Reign of Henry V (Oxford, 1985), p. 125.

25

Michael Bennett winter of 1409–10 the prince and his allies secured Arundel’s resignation. Through 1410 and 1411 they ruled the kingdom in the king’s name. Thomas Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes, composed and dedicated to the prince in 1411, is compelling testimony to the sort of self-image that Prince Henry was cultivating.85 It was presumably at this time that Bishop Beaufort called on the king to abdicate. Prince Henry withdrew from the capital to rally support, but found himself dangerously exposed. Desperately mobilising public opinion on his behalf, Prince Henry issued a manifesto from Coventry in May 1412. He claimed that evil-minded people conspiring to alter the succession were spreading the report that he sought his father’s crown. The prince vigorously asserted his loyalty. Gathering a large company, he rode to London with great fanfare, but on arrival he sought an audience with his father, fell to his knees and, somewhat histrionically, presented his father with a dagger to kill him if he so desired.86 The stories about Henry IV on his deathbed in spring 1413 are hard to resist. He reputedly rallied briefly to find that his crown had been taken by the prince of Wales, and asked the prince by what right he had the crown since he himself had none.87 On his confessor’s urging him to repent for the usurpation and his role in the death of Archbishop Scrope, he reportedly replied that he had papal absolution for Scrope’s death but that his sons would never allow him to make restitution of the kingdom.88 Obviously such stories cannot be taken literally as records of events. They appear in later chronicles, and cannot have been based on more than hearsay. Nonetheless they almost certainly reflect stories in circulation at the time of the king’s death, if not at the time of his earlier seizures. It is possible, for example, that some elements had their genesis in the aftermath of 1405 when speculation about the state of the king’s health and soul, and about the possibility of his abdication and of the succession of his son, presumably began. Other stories about Henry IV’s death suggest that many people believed that the king had not done full satisfaction for his sins. It was reported that he intended to go as a pilgrim to Jerusalem, but instead found that his destiny was die in the Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster Abbey.89 There is the tale that his plan to be buried near the shrine of St Thomas of Canterbury was thwarted, through the intervention of the martyred archbishop of York, by bargemen throwing his corpse in the river. In this sense the period between 1406 and 1413 can be seen as a protracted

85 86 87 88 89

D. Pearsall, ‘Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes: The Poetics of Royal Self-Representation’, Speculum 69 (1994), 386–410. St Albans Chronicle, ed. Galbraith, pp. 65–7 (p. 66); LKLK, p. 110; P. McNiven, ‘Prince Henry and the English Political Crisis of 1412’, History 65 (1980), 1–16. Monstrelet, Chronique, II, 338. Capgrave, Chronicle of England, pp. 302–3. Eulogium Historiarum, III, 421.

26

The Royal Succession and the Crisis of 1406 succession crisis. The address to the succession in parliament in 1406 for the first time established a clear reversionary interest. The incorporation of the crown as a family firm rebuilt political consensus among the men who had brought about the revolution of 1399. At the same time it confirmed the right to succeed of a prince who, through his association with Richard II, offered the prospect of national renewal and reconciliation. Politically the period is very much of a piece. The polity confronted a singular problem as to whether, in the words of Peter McNiven, ‘to treat Henry as basically competent, even though afflicted by occasional bouts of severe illness, or as a chronic invalid with spells of passable health’.90 The great challenge, however, was to chart a course between a still formidable king and an increasingly ambitious king in the making. The sources for the second half of Henry IV’s reign are poor and it is difficult to obtain a clear view of the personalities and politics. What is striking is the degree to which patterns evident at the end of the reign appear to be foreshadowed in 1406. There are the first signs of the recurrent illness, evidence of some rupture in the relationship between king and prince, reports that the king was contemplating abdication, and concerns that the prince’s position in the line of succession might be under threat. The event that marks the new epoch is the execution of Archbishop Scrope. For several years at least it undermined, far more lethally than illness, the king’s political capacity and moral leadership. The succession acts of 1406 served to broaden the basis of Lancastrian monarchy, but in so doing they mapped out a future beyond Henry IV.

90

McNiven, ‘Problem of Henry IV’s Health’, p. 772.

27

2 ‘The Quarrels of Old Women’: Henry IV, Louis of Orléans, and Anglo-French Chivalric Challenges in the Early Fifteenth Century Chris Given-Wilson

The chivalric challenge and its anticipated outcome, the individual joust or multiple combat, could serve a variety of purposes in the knightly world of the later Middle Ages. Often enough the underlying intention was far from hostile: chivalry, after all, was an ideal which could help to foster a sense of supranational brotherhood among the ruling classes of warring nations, and it was far from unusual for a tournament not merely to provide the opportunity for knights to display their prowess, win renown and impress ladies, but also to double as a forum for informal or preliminary diplomatic talks, as happened on various occasions under Edward I, Edward III and Richard II. At times, however, a ‘chivalrous’ challenge was employed in a deliberately insulting manner, an expression of the desire to avenge some wilful or perceived slight inflicted upon the challenger, as when Otto, duke of Brunswick, accused Henry, duke of Lancaster, of telling lies about him in 1352. In such cases, the language employed by the challenger was generally unambiguous and shorn of the customary courtesies. During Henry IV’s reign, a number of lettres de défi were exchanged between Frenchmen and Englishmen, the most famous of which was that sent by Louis, duke of Orléans, to the English king in person in the summer of 1402, the upshot of which was a bout of correspondence between the two men which lasted over a year. The monk of Saint-Denis, Michel Pintoin, took a dim view of these exchanges: Several times have I read and thought about these abusive letters (litteras invectivas), full of provocations and outrages, and wondered whether they should be set out here in full. But since, like the quarrels of old women





For an overview of the period from Edward I to Edward III, see J. Vale, Edward III and Chivalry (Woodbridge, 1982). For Richard II’s use of tournaments to launch diplomatic initiatives, see N. Saul, The Three Richards (London, 2005), p. 95. K. Fowler, The King’s Lieutenant: Henry of Grosmont, First Duke of Lancaster 1310–1361 (London, 1969), pp. 106–9.

28

‘The Quarrels of Old Women’ (contencionum anilium), their consequences were negligible, the reader will have to make do with this brief summary.

Others, however, apparently less certain that their consequences were indeed ‘negligible’, took rather more notice of these letters. Enguerrand de Monstrelet transcribed them into his chronicle, and they were also copied into the register of the French parlement. Several English chroniclers commented on them, Henry IV’s council and parliament expressed outrage at the affront to the king’s honour, and the ill-feeling to which they gave rise threatened to become a serious sticking-point in the negotiations to preserve the everprecarious Anglo-French truce. The aim of this paper is to investigate these letters both within the context of Anglo-French chivalric challenges at this time and against the background of the war that dared not speak its name which characterised relations between England and France during the reign of Henry IV. The latter, fortunately, is a subject upon which historians on either side of the Channel have tended to disagree only on matters of detail. Henry IV, it is usually said, was keen to preserve what he could of the 28-year truce negotiated by Richard II and Charles VI in 1396; the successive dukes of Burgundy, Philip the Bold (d. 27 April 1404) and John the Fearless, were of like mind – at least partly because the prosperity of Flanders’ cloth towns still largely depended on the regular flow of wool imports from England. Had Charles VI himself enjoyed fewer mentally unbalanced moments, he may well have pursued a rather more hostile line against England; as it was, with the French king’s ‘absences’ becoming ever more frequent as his reign progressed, that role fell to his younger brother, Louis, duke of Orléans – who, it is generally agreed, was the person principally responsible for the sharp deterioration in 

 



Chronique du Religieux de Saint-Denys 1380–1422, ed. M. Bellaguet, 6 vols., Documents Inédits sur l’Histoire de France (Paris, 1841), III, 61; see also Chronographia Regum Francorum, ed. H. Moranvillé, 3 vols. (Paris, 1897), III, 229 (also written at SaintDenys): ‘in order to avoid prolixity, these letters will not be included here, and also because nothing worth recalling to mind resulted from them (nichil recolatione dignum inde secutum est)’. See below, p. 35. See for example BL, Add. MS 30,663, fols. 288–90, 291–3, 294–309; Royal and Historical Letters during the Reign of Henry IV, ed. F. Hingeston, 2 vols., Rolls Series (London, 1860), I, 170–4, 214–23, 339; M. Nordberg, Les ducs et la royauté: Etudes sur la rivalité des ducs d’Orléans et de Bourgogne 1392–1407 (Uppsala, 1964), pp. 116–28; PROME, parliament of January 1404, item 3 (Rot. Parl., III, 522), and Appendix, item 1; F. C. Wilson, ‘Anglo-French Relations in the Reign of King Henry IV of England, 1399– 1413’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, McGill University, 1973), pp. 200, 208–9. Foedera, VIII, 310, 348. See, for example, the tone of the letter which he wrote from Paris on 2 October 1406, in which he described the English king as ‘ille qui modo regimini Angliae occupat’, and promised help to the English people if they rose up and restored the English kingdom to its ‘rightful heirs’: BL, Add. MS 30,663, fols. 277–9.

29

Chris Given-Wilson Anglo-French relations during the early years of Henry IV’s reign. This was, of course, only one of many issues upon which Louis found himself at odds with the Burgundian dukes: at the heart of their rivalry lay the struggle for control of the resources of the French monarchy, but in foreign affairs too, on practically every issue that mattered at the French court – the ending of the Schism, Franco-Italian (especially Milanese) relations, the struggle between Wenzel of Bohemia and Rupert of Bavaria in the German Empire – their interests and policies were generally opposed. Given these circumstances, it might be thought careless of Louis to have made an enemy of the English king too, especially since at the outset of Henry’s reign the signs were that relations between the two men had never been better. They had, after all, signed a personal alliance in Paris on 17 June 1399 in which they swore ‘pure and sincere love and affection’ towards each other for evermore and promised to come to each other’s help in times of trouble against any third party whatsoever, excluding certain named persons such as their respective sovereigns. Later, facing criticism within France for having thereby abetted Richard II’s demise, Louis would declare that he had had no idea in June 1399 that Henry had been planning to depose Richard, and the question naturally arises as to the extent to which his later hostility to Henry was occasioned by his embarrassment at having been the (allegedly) unwitting instrument of the downfall of Charles VI’s son-in-law, and the need that he might thus have felt to polish up his anti-English credentials (and thus his political credibility) in the eyes of the French people. Yet his remorse was not, apparently, instantaneous. According to one French chronicler, Louis and his uncle, the duke of Berry, sent some of their followers to attend Henry IV’s coronation on 13 October 1399; what is more, Henry later claimed that, following his coronation, Louis sent one of his knights to England to tell him that he wished to maintain their friendship – although, according to Henry, this was something which Louis wished to keep secret from the other French lords.10 Whether this is true or not, there can be little doubt that growing Anglo-





 10

Their rivalry has been extensively documented: see, for example, Nordberg, Les ducs et la royauté; E. Jarry, La vie politique de Louis de France, Duc d’Orléans (Paris, 1889); R. Vaughan, Philip the Bold (London, 1962); R. Vaughan, John the Fearless (London, 1966); B. Schnerb, Jean Sans Peur: Le Prince meurtrier (Paris, 2005); R. Famiglietti, Royal Intrigue: Crisis at the Court of Charles VI, 1392–1420 (New York, 1986). Chrons. Rev., pp. 28–30, 109–14; for their friendship, see also Jean Jouvenel des Ursins, ‘Histoire de Charles VI, Roy de France’, in Choix de chroniques et mémoires sur l’histoire de France, ed. J. A. C. Buchon, Panthéon Littéraire (Paris, 1838), pp. 323–573 (p. 407). Chronique de la Traison et Mort de Richart Deux Roy Dengleterre, ed. B. Williams (London, 1846), pp. 74–5. See below, p. 35. There appears to be no documentary evidence to confirm the truth of Henry’s claim: cf. S. Pistono, ‘Henry IV and Charles VI: The Confirmation of the Twenty-eight-Year Truce’, Journal of Medieval History 3 (1977), 353–65 (p. 356).

30

‘The Quarrels of Old Women’ phobia during 1400 and 1401 would have made any such personal friendship difficult for Louis to sustain. Rumours of the murder of Richard II, followed by the prolonged and acrimonious tussle over the return of Louis’ sister, Queen Isabelle, and her dowry, which was only resolved in July 1401 – though by no means to French satisfaction – whipped up a storm of antiEnglish feeling in France.11 As the monk of Saint-Denis put it, The French … had conceived an implacable hatred of the English on account of the execrable murder of their king and the disgraceful expulsion of their queen, the daughter of the king of France; yet, because they did not dare to attack them openly lest they be seen as breakers of the truces which had been agreed, they sought an honourable pretext to avenge these intolerable injuries.12

And the most apposite ‘pretext’, as the chronicler explained, was the chivalric challenge. From the summer of 1400, once the Anglo-French truce had been renewed, Louis was certainly sponsoring and very probably encouraging the young braves in his household to challenge the English. Charles de Savoisy, who jousted with the celebrated English champion Sir John ‘Green’ Cornewall at York in July 1400, was his chamberlain; Oger de Nantoillet, who fought a passage of arms with an English esquire later that year, was the duke’s esquire; so too was Hector de Pombriant, who received permission to cross to England with fifteen followers to challenge various Englishmen during the winter of 1400–1401.13 However, the passage of arms which really stirred the imagination of the French was that which took place between seven Frenchmen and seven Englishmen at Montendre in Gascony in May 1402. As the monk of Saint-Denis made clear, it was Louis of Orléans who was behind this challenge: all seven of the French combatants were his servants (sibi assidue familiariter), and their aim was to demonstrate ‘how superior French knights were to English, and thus which nation deserved to be considered better in war’.14 A herald was duly despatched to England, Henry IV granted

11

12 13

14

C. Taylor, ‘ “Weep thou for me in France”: French Views of the Deposition of Richard II’, in Fourteenth-Century England III, ed. W. M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 207– 22. Chronique de Saint-Denys, III, 34. For Pombriant and Savoisy, see S. Pistono, ‘The Diplomatic Mission of Jean de Hangest, Lord of Hugueville, October 1400’, Canadian Journal of History 13 (1978), 193–207 (pp. 195–6); for Savoisy, see also Foedera, VIII, 151, and ‘Annales’, p. 333. For Nantoillet, see BL, Add. Charters 48 and 49, which record the payment of 120 écus from Orléans to the heralds who attended the joust. (I am grateful to Philip Morgan for telling me about this document.) Cf. also CPR, 1399–1401, pp. 353 (Pombriant), 352 and 356 (Savoisy). For this episode, see Chronique de Saint-Denys, III, 30–34, and Leroux de Lincy, ‘Chansons historiques des XIII, XIV et XV siècles’, Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 1 (1839–

31

Chris Given-Wilson the seven English knights permission to accept the challenge, and on 19 May 1402 they were led on to the field at Montendre by the king’s cousin the earl of Rutland (although he did not participate in the combat). The French hero was the Breton lord Guillaume du Chastel, lord of Chateauneuf near St-Malo, one of Orléans’ chamberlains and a man who, as we shall see, delighted in goading the English. Because they feared him especially, the English tried to isolate and overpower Chastel first, but he was more than equal to the task, repaying their blows with interest while continually taunting them with ‘the ignominious death of their King Richard’. Eventually, after one of the English knights was killed, the others surrendered, subsequently making their way back to England ‘covered in shame and confusion’. The victors, meanwhile, were led in triumph to Paris, where they were showered with praise and granted 1,000 francs each by Charles VI; Christine de Pisan later composed three ballads in their honour, claiming that, inspired by the duke of Orléans, they had vanquished English pride and restored French honour, and urging the ladies of the court to bestow their favours on France’s new heroes.15 The monk of Saint-Denis, never a man to succumb to unrestrained joy, did not fully share his countrymen’s enthusiasm for the exploits of Chastel and his comrades: ‘Wise men’, he declared (his customary formula for the expression of his own opinion), ‘disapproved of this combat as contrary to reason, and as confirming the view commonly held by foreign nations that France surpasses all other kingdoms in pride.’ But neither Louis of Orléans nor Guillaume du Chastel cared for such words of caution: emboldened by success, their reputations burgeoning, they now set their sights higher, and within three months of the triumph at Montendre Orléans’ herald was once again making his way across the Channel, this time bearing a personal challenge from his master to the English king. Chastel, meanwhile, sent a similar letter to Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland and constable of England, challenging him to take part, along with Henry IV, in the proposed AngloFrench combat. Orléans’ letter was dated 7 August 1402 and addressed Henry by his royal style: Tres hault et puissant prince, Henry roy d’Angleterre.16 While this was not,

15

16

40), 359–88. Jean Jouvenel des Ursins, ‘Histoire de Charles VI’, pp. 412–13, said that it was the English who challenged the French, but as the monk of Saint-Denis made clear, it was probably the other way round. The ballads are printed in Leroux de Lincy, ‘Chansons historiques’, pp. 379–82; the first was addressed to Orléans, the second to the seven French combatants and the third to the ladies of the court; cf. also Jarry, La vie politique, p. 285; Anglo-Norman Letters and Petitions from All Souls Ms. 182, ed. D. Legge (Oxford, 1941), no. 391. Orléans’ first two letters, and Henry’s responses, are printed in La Chronique d’Enguerran de Monstrelet, ed. L. Douet-d’Arcq, 6 vols., Société de l’Histoire de France (Paris, 1857), I, 43–66. Waurin copied them from Monstrelet, and translations (under the date 12 August, though 7 August is probably right) can be found in Chroniques de

32

‘The Quarrels of Old Women’ of course, quite the style which Henry himself preferred – that of ‘king of England and France, and lord of Ireland’ – it is difficult not to think that he must have been pleasantly surprised by it, for the official view at the French court throughout his reign was that he was not the rightful king of England but a usurper, and it was generally as ‘Henry of Lancaster’ that Charles VI and his servants addressed him. It was doubtless the substance of Louis’ request, however, which determined the style of his address: it was honour, he went on to explain, that he sought, and he could think of no more fitting way to acquire it than by meeting Henry, on a day to be mutually agreed, with one hundred knights and esquires on each side, who would fight until one party forced the other to surrender, whereupon the losers would become the prisoners of the winners. Each side would be armed similarly, without any hidden or unsporting weapons (such as arrows or poison), and neither side was to have recourse to invocations or lucky charms. Louis would wait at Angoulême, so he said, and suggested that Henry make his way to Bordeaux or thereabouts, whereupon they could agree a day and a place for the combat to be fought. Although there was nothing insulting in the language of Louis’ letter, both contemporary chroniclers and modern historians seem to be agreed that he had acted at best rashly, and more probably in a spirit of deliberate provocation. The monk of Saint-Denis, for example, commented that, even though Louis had been careful not to infringe the truce, there were various people in France who, while admiring his audacity, thought the letter imprudent and feared that it might lead to a renewal of war between the two kingdoms, ‘especially since it is common for abusive words to be mixed in with invectives’.17 Most recently, Bertrand Schnerb has argued that Henry’s ‘brutal’ response was occasioned by the fact that ‘he was under no illusions as to [Louis’] intentions’.18 There was at any rate no mistaking the tone of the king’s response, which was dated 5 December 1402 from London. He began by expressing grant merveille at the fact that Louis had written to him, not only because there was an Anglo-French truce in place, but also because of the personal alliance which the two men had concluded at Paris in June 1399. No lord, he went on, whatever his estate, ought to challenge someone with whom he had a personal alliance or friendship; nor could Henry, as a king, consider accepting a challenge except from ‘someone who was of similar estate and dignity to

17 18

Jean de Wavrin 1399–1422, ed. W. Hardy and E. Hardy, 6 vols., Rolls Series (London, 1887), II, 65–85. Chronique de Saint-Denys, III, 56–8. Schnerb, Jean Sans Peur, p. 158: ‘La réponse d’Henri IV, qui ne se méprenait pas sur l’intention de son correspondant, fut brutale.’ Cf. also Nordberg, Les ducs et la royauté, p. 115; Jarry, La vie politique, p. 285; Wilson, ‘Anglo-French Relations’, p. 179.

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Chris Given-Wilson ourselves’. He had therefore decided to ‘quash and annul’ their 1399 alliance (a copy of which he enclosed with his response). As to his coming to France, Henry did indeed intend to do so as soon as he could, at which point he would gladly ensure that Louis would receive a fitting answer to his challenge; he concluded by advising Louis better to know his place in future, and to take more care of his seal and his promises than he had done hitherto. This letter reached Orléans on 1 January 1403. He is unlikely to have been surprised by Henry’s answer, for by this time he would almost certainly have seen the reply which Henry Percy had sent to Guillaume du Chastel.19 Chastel’s original letter does not seem to have survived, but Percy’s reply indicates that he must have formally challenged the latter, as constable of England, to take part on Henry’s side in the combat which Orléans had proposed, assuring him that, if he did so, Chastel would take part on Orléans’ side. (Percy’s role in helping to topple Richard II was well-known, as was that of the earl of Rutland, who was similarly vilified in France.) Percy’s response was as brutal as Henry’s, and it is likely that they were coordinated: describing Chastel’s proposal as ‘profane’, ‘wicked’ and ‘ridiculous’, he reminded him that Henry was an anointed king who recognised no superior on earth except God, and that, in challenging him, Orléans, ‘whom the hand of the Lord has placed in an inferior rank, … pollutes the honesty of knighthood and the royal blood which he claims’. Moreover, Percy went on, he was far too busy protecting the northern marches against the Scots simply to drop what he was doing at Chastel’s bidding: if Chastel wished to meet him in combat, then he should make his way to ‘your comrades of Scotland’, where ‘you will behold the quivering sword of our office, which we wield against your execrable vow and your accomplices’. Whether Chastel replied to this is not known. Orléans, however, was certainly not prepared to let matters rest. His second letter to Henry, dated 26 March 1403, again (rather surprisingly) addressed him as ‘king of England’, but otherwise cast aside any pretence at chivalric courtesy. After pointing out that he was himself the son and brother of a king (which Henry, of course, was not), Louis accused Henry of being a usurper and declared that, if Richard was indeed dead, then ‘God knows by whom’. He claimed to have

19

See Appendix I. On the basis of its references to Scottish affairs, Percy’s reply is likely to have preceded the battle of Homildon Hill, which was fought on 14 September 1402. Chastel had presumably written to him at the same time as Orléans had written to Henry, that is, in early August. There are two surviving copies of this letter, in BL, Add. MS 24,062, fol. 140v, and Oxford, All Souls College, MS 182, fols. 71r–v. My thanks are due to Philip Morgan and Kris Towson respectively for references to them. Philip Morgan commented that in the letter Percy’s ‘language is redolent of the earl’s own self-image as the biblical warrior and defender of the kingdom, Mathathias’ (P. Morgan, ‘Henry IV and the Shadow of Richard II’, in Crown, Government and People in the Fifteenth Century, ed. R. Archer (Stroud, 1995), pp. 1–31 (p. 23)).

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‘The Quarrels of Old Women’ had no idea what Henry was planning to do when he made his alliance with him in June 1399, but that in view of Henry’s falsity it would no longer be an honourable thing for Louis to be allied to him. As to Henry’s claim to royal status, he went on, it was clearly not divine grace which had elevated him to his present position, and it was quite likely that before too long God would bring him down again; and as to Henry’s claim that he had always preserved his honour, ‘enough is known by all countries’. He concluded by declaring that anyone in his position would feel honour-bound to uphold the quarrel of Richard’s former queen, Isabelle, after the ‘rigour and cruelty’ which Henry had shown towards her, and that this was something which he would willingly prove against Henry in either single or multiple combat if given the chance. The remaining two letters exchanged by Henry and Louis were simply abusive. Henry’s second letter, dated 30 May 1403,20 began by stating that although he felt no obligation to respond to Louis, he would do so since it was a matter which concerned his honour. If Louis was implying that it was Henry who had killed Richard, he declared, then he was lying, and would be as often as he repeated the charge. Nor was it true that Louis had been ignorant of Henry’s intentions in June 1399, but he had allied himself with Henry because of the hatred that he bore towards the duke of Burgundy (the architect, on the French side, of the twenty-eight-year truce). It was also at this point that Henry reminded Louis of the knight whom he had secretly sent to Henry after he became king, informing him that he wished to maintain their friendship. Henry denied treating Isabelle harshly or defrauding her of her dower, as could be proven by reference to the acquittance which he had received from Charles VI. Louis, he declared, had acted more unworthily and disloyally to his kinsfolk than Henry ever had towards his, and he still hoped that one day he would have the chance to meet him in combat to prove these points, but he suspected that Louis would not dare to do so, but would instead behave like ‘the hireling shepherd … who, when he sees the wolf coming, abandons his sheep and takes to flight’. The last letter in this series was written by Louis on 14 October 1403. It was also enrolled in the record of the French parlement, apparently at Louis’ request, although he might not have appreciated the comment scribbled in the margin by the greffier, who described it as ‘verbose and windy, without consequence or prudence’.21 Louis now addressed the English king as ‘Henry of Lancaster, despoiler and wrongfully regent of the kingdom of England’ (ravissant et regent indeument ou royaume d’Angleterre) and pointed out that, 20 21

The letter itself is not dated, but the date is given in Orléans’ reply: BL, Add. MS 30,663, fol. 281. ‘He littere verbose et ventose, absque fructu et discretione’: F. Lehoux, Jean de France, duc de Berri, 3 vols. (Paris, 1968), II, 523 and n. 8. The letter does not seem to have been printed in full, but there is a copy in BL, Add. MS 30,663, fols. 281–6.

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Chris Given-Wilson unlike Henry, he himself had arrived at the station he held in life ‘neither by tyranny, nor by homicide, nor by violence’. With respect to Richard II’s death, everyone knew that it was Henry who had killed him: ‘Where is his life? Where is his body? Does not God know? Does not the world know? … If he is alive, then let him go free; and if he is dead, then it was you who did it.’ Henry’s attempt to cause dissension between Louis and his ‘most dear and beloved uncle, the duke of Burgundy’ was simply a malicious attempt to make trouble. And, once again, Louis reiterated his loyalty to Charles VI and to ‘my niece, my lady the queen of England’, declaring himself to be Isabelle’s ‘champion, to uphold and preserve her true right and her just quarrel’. Probably wisely, Henry did not respond to this letter. However, matters did not end there. Less than a month later, he received another letter, this one from Waleran of Luxembourg, count of Ligny and St-Pol. In 1380, after five years in English captivity, Waleran had married Maud Holand, the halfsister of Richard II, and he clearly felt his kinship to the deposed English king keenly. His letter, dated at Luxembourg castle on 9 November 1403,22 was addressed to ‘Henry of Lancaster’ and stated that, because of the love and affinity which he bore to Richard II (of whose death ‘you are notoriously guilty’), and the shame and injury which the former king’s overthrow had inflicted on his descendants, Waleran intended to devote himself to avenging Richard in any way and in any place that he could ‘by land or sea, always outside the kingdom of France’. It was, he emphasised, for the reasons which he had given, ‘and not otherwise because of the things done or to be done between [the king of France] and the kingdom of England’ that he had chosen to act in this way – in other words, he wished to make it clear that his quarrel with Henry was, as the monk of Saint-Denis put it, a question of ‘personal enmity’,23 and not intended to infringe the Anglo-French truce. This last point was significant – as was his rider that he would seek his vengeance ‘always outside the kingdom of France’ – for although Waleran was undoubtedly acting with the knowledge and support of Orléans (from whom he accepted a pension of 6,000 livres tournois in July 1404),24 he was a vassal of the duke of Burgundy and must have been aware that what he proposed was contrary to Burgundian interests. Henry declined to reply in writing to this letter, merely remarking to the messenger who brought it that he ‘took little account of it’, and that his master would soon have his work cut out defending himself and his lands.

22

23 24

For the date see Lehoux, Jean de France, II, 524 and n. 1. Following Monstrelet, it has often been dated to February 1403, but Lehoux’s November fits much better with the other known facts of the case. It is printed in Chronique d’Enguerran de Monstrelet, I, 67–8. Chronique de Saint-Denys, III, 116–18. Nordberg, Les ducs et la royauté, p. 127.

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‘The Quarrels of Old Women’ Waleran’s immediate response was to make an effigy of the earl of Rutland25 – already humiliated at Montendre, and widely vilified in France as having betrayed Richard II in 1399 – which he had some of his men secretly suspend upside down, with its arms reversed, from a gibbet outside the walls of Calais one night. Moreover, he kept his word. In early December he raided the Isle of Wight, although he was soon forced to withdraw, ‘covered with eternal opprobrium’ according to the monk of Saint-Denis.26 In late February 1404 the English garrison at Calais took its revenge by systematically ravaging the count’s lands in Picardy,27 but a month or so later Waleran once again assembled a fleet and threatened the Isle of Wight, although on this occasion he sailed away without even landing. His raid may well have been planned to coincide with Guillaume du Chastel’s descent on Dartmouth in April 1404, although in Chastel’s case matters turned out even worse, when he ‘rashly and impetuously’ ventured too far inland ahead of his followers and was run through with a sword, dying of his wounds.28 The English government took no little pleasure in these minor successes against those who had insulted their king: in September 1404, they wrote to the lords of the French Grand Conseil telling them to warn the count of St-Pol that if he dared to attack England again he would surely meet with the same divinam justiciam as Chastel.29 Not that this deterred Count Waleran: goaded, or at any rate unchastened, by his humiliations during the winter of 1404 – and, so it was said, per ducem Aurelianensem litteraliter excitatus30 – he launched further attacks on Calais (20 April 1405) and Marck (20 May 1405), though to little effect. According to the monk of Saint-Denis, he ‘covered himself with eternal shame by his ignominious flight’ from Marck, where his armour, pennon and siege-weapons were seized by the English; Monstrelet added that he was shortly afterwards relieved of his command in Picardy, much to his chagrin.31 Thus, following the Anglo-French combats of the years 1400–1402 and the challenges issued by Orléans and Chastel in the summer of 1402, Duke Louis and 25 26

27 28

29 30 31

Rutland had in fact succeeded his father as duke of York in 1402. Foedera, VIII, 342–3. Chronique de Saint-Denys, III, 118–20. Monstrelet also commented that several of the lords who accompanied him were fed up because of the waste of money involved: Chronique d’Enguerran de Monstrelet, I, 68. Chronique de Saint-Denys, III, 120; Chronique d’Enguerran de Monstrelet, I, 92; J. Wylie, History of England under Henry the Fourth, 4 vols. (London, 1884–98), I, 395–6. There are a number of more or less detailed descriptions of his death: see Chronique de Saint-Denys, III, 170–6, for whom he died a hero’s death; Chronographia Regum Francorum, III, 226, 234; The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham, ed. and trans. J. Clark and D. Preest (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 330–1; The Great Chronicle of London, ed. H. Thomas and I. Thornley (reprint, Gloucester, 1983), pp. 85–6. BL, Add. MS 30,663, fol. 308. Chronographia Regum Francorum, III, 250–5. Nordberg, Les ducs et la royauté, pp. 126–7; Chronique de Saint-Denys, III, 258; Chronique d’Enguerran de Monstrelet, I, 100–106.

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Chris Given-Wilson his followers seem to have abandoned the lettre de défi as a way of provoking the English and their king, and resorted instead to direct action (claiming, all the while, not to be infringing the truce, which, while it remained theoretically in operation throughout this period, was frequently honoured less in the observance than in the breach). From 1406 onwards, however, it is clear that chivalric challenges were once again being issued from the French side, and as far as can be gathered these were more genuinely ‘chivalrous’ than insulting in their intent. Among those involved, at any rate, were three men whose commitment to the chivalric ideal certainly could not be questioned: Jean de Werchin, sénéchal of Hainaut and baron of Flanders, born in 1374; Jean, count of Clermont and (from 1410) duke of Bourbon, born in 1380; and Jean de Grailly, vicomte of Castelbon and (from 1412) count of Foix, born in 1384. All three were closely associated with Louis and took a prominent part in his campaigns against the English in Gascony and elsewhere between 1403 and 1406,32 and all three issued challenges to English knights to meet them in combat in the course of 1406–7. Werchin, a knight errant described by the monk of Saint-Denis as la fleur des braves and by one modern historian as ‘the original Don Quijote’, was probably the most celebrated jouster of his time.33 In June 1402, he announced his intention to travel to Santiago de Compostella and issued a public challenge to any knight or esquire who wished to do combat with him en route, with Orléans acting as judge; in 1404 he issued another general defiance for a period of seven years. Soon after this, however, he turned his attention towards England and English knights: on 7 August 1407 he challenged Sir John Cornewall (Henry IV’s brother-in-law) to a passage of arms, four knights

32

33

Werchin, for example, joined the count of La Marche’s expedition to Falmouth in support of the Welsh in the autumn of 1404, while Clermont and Foix both campaigned in Gascony in 1404 and were present at the sieges of Blaye and Bourg in the winter of 1406–7. For Clermont, who in 1402 had made a personal alliance with John the Fearless but four years later also became the vassal of Orléans, see Nordberg, Les ducs et la royauté, p. 128; Chronique de Saint-Denys, III, 354–6; Wylie, Henry IV, III, 75–6; Schnerb, Jean Sans Peur, pp. 119, 122; Chronique d’Enguerran de Monstrelet, II, 156–8. Jean de Foix, despite his family’s long tradition of allegiance to the English, had shown himself from the start to be more Francophile in his sympathies, although whether this was with or without his father’s blessing is a question still not really resolved: in July 1405, Henry IV was under the impression that Jean had defected to the French camp against his father’s will, but according to Vale he had more confidence in Archambaud’s loyalty to the English cause at this time than the facts warranted (M. Vale, English Gascony 1399–1453 (Oxford, 1970), p. 52; cf. also Dictionnaire de biographie française, XIV, 197–8). For Werchin, see W. Paravicini, ‘Jean de Werchin, sénéchal de Hainaut, chevalier errant’, in Saint-Denis et la royauté, ed. F. Autrand, C. Gauvard and J-M. Moeglin (Paris, 1999), pp. 125–44; and J. Grenier-Winther, Le Songe de la Barge de Jean de Werchin, Sénéchal de Hainaut, CERES, Rara et Inedita 12 (1996), in which all the letters discussed in this paragraph are printed (for the quotes see pp. xvi–xviii).

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‘The Quarrels of Old Women’ a side, with the kings of England and France acting as judges; in November 1408 he followed this up with a letter to Henry IV asking to be allowed to challenge a member of the Order of the Garter or, failing that, any ‘knight of renown’, in the presence either of the king himself or of the prince of Wales. The English king, mistaking Werchin’s purpose, thought that he had offered to take on all the knights of the Garter simultaneously, and advised him to start by being a little less heroic and challenging them one at a time. Eventually, in June 1409, Werchin got his wish when he and John Cornewall met in combat, firstly before John the Fearless at Lisle, and then before Charles VI in Paris. Unfortunately for the two gladiators, on each occasion they were at the last minute prevented by order of the king from actually jousting; undaunted, they crossed to England in July to take part in an eight-a-side tournament at Smithfield (one combat per day) between Hainaut and England, with the former led by Werchin and the latter by the earl of Somerset. The English won by seven to one, with Werchin himself suffering defeat at the hands of Somerset. It was the only time when he is known to have been discomfited, and it was his last combat in the lists. Six years later, he was killed at Agincourt.34 Jean de Clermont first really made a name for himself in the autumn of 1404 when, aged twenty-three, he set off to liberate the Limousin from its ‘detestable servitude’ to the English and succeeded in recovering thirtyfour strongholds in the space of six weeks. Being a young man, commented the monk of Saint-Denis, he promised much for the future,35 and indeed he was soon to be found back in Guyenne, where, early in 1406, he teamed up with Archambaud, count of Foix, and Bernard, count of Armagnac (both, like Clermont, pensioners of Orléans) to capture several more outposts and even threaten Bordeaux before allowing themselves to be bought off. It was later this same year, on 6 July 1406, that Clermont sent a letter to Thomas of Lancaster, Henry IV’s second son, challenging him to personal combat. Although written and sealed by Clermont, this challenge was in fact issued jointly by him and Jean de Foix (eldest son of Count Archambaud). The two counts, together with six other ‘knights and esquires, gentlemen of renown and of arms and without reproach’, challenged Prince Thomas and any other seven similarly irreproachable knights or esquires on the English side to meet them in a combat a oultrance at a time and place to be agreed, before mutually-

34

35

Paravicini, ‘Jean de Werchin, sénéchal de Hainaut’, pp. 132–5. The chroniclers took a good deal of interest in these jousts: see especially The Brut or Chronicles of England, ed. F. Brie, 2 vols., EETS (1906–8), II, 369–70; Great Chronicle of London, p. 87; Chronique d’Enguerran de Monstrelet, II, 5–6; for comment see Schnerb, Jean Sans Peur, pp. 501–2, and Wilson, ‘Anglo-French Relations’, pp. 358–62. Vale, English Gascony, p. 48; Wylie, Henry IV, I, 387; Chronique de Saint-Denys, III, 206–8; Monstrelet, in Chronique d’Enguerran de Monstrelet, I, 94, was similarly positive about Clermont’s achievements in Guyenne in 1404.

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Chris Given-Wilson chosen judges and with mutually-agreed weapons. The aim, said Clermont, was for all concerned to win honour and renown, and more specifically to ‘deliver’ him and Jean de Foix from the vows which they had sworn, ‘for love of our ladies’, to wear certain chivalric tokens on their persons until such time as liberation might prove forthcoming.36 It is interesting, moreover, to see from Clermont’s letter that he had apparently already heard that Thomas had expressed an interest in ‘delivering’ him from his vow. In other words, this was not a challenge sent out of the blue, but rather the formalization in writing of some earlier, more informal, approach. What is more, Thomas did later formally accept this challenge, for on 28 February 1410 Henry IV issued a letter saying that his second son had been asked by ‘our dear cousin’ the count of Clermont to respond to certain points of arms; that Thomas in turn had asked the king to be allowed to do so; and that as a result the king was granting a safe-conduct to Clermont, three hundred of his servants and their horses and equipment to come to England pour les ditz pointz d’armes accompliers.37 Whether Jean de Clermont ever followed Werchin across the Channel to joust with Prince Thomas is unclear (given the lack of confirmatory evidence, it seems unlikely), but Anglo-French combats were certainly being planned and in some cases taking place once again by the second half of Henry IV’s reign. In March 1406, Sir Walter Hungerford was granted an annuity of 100 marks by Henry IV partly for long service and partly for having recently performed deeds of arms with a knight of France at Calais ‘to the honour of us and of our kingdom’;38 in early December 1409, three English champions (Sir Gilbert Umfraville, Sir John Oldcastle and the esquire Roger Rambur) jousted for three days against three French champions (Georges de la Trémoille, Antoine de Craon and Jacques de Montenay) at Lille;39 and in April 1412, the English king issued simultaneous safe-conducts for Jean Carmin (or Kerneau, or Carneau) and Tanneguy du Chastel to come to England to do combat with Sir Richard Arundel and Sir John Cornewall respectively. Both were wellknown jousters who had taken part in a combat with Werchin at Valencia in 1407; Carmin was also a member of the eight-man Hainaut team assembled by Werchin in July 1409, while Tanneguy du Chastel was the brother of Guillaume, the hero of Montendre rebuffed by the earl of Northumberland in

36

37 38 39

See Appendix II: the letter is in BL, Add MS 18,840, fols. 1r–v. There is probably another copy of this letter in Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale n.a.fr. 1167, fols. 65–6, but I have not seen this (it is referred to in Grenier-Winther, Le Songe de la Barge de Jean de Werchin, p. vi). Foedera, VIII, 626. Foedera, VIII, 436. Schnerb, Jean Sans Peur, pp. 505–7.

40

‘The Quarrels of Old Women’ 1402 and slain at Dartmouth two years later; Tanneguy was thus a man with family as well as national honour to vindicate.40 As far as can be gathered, it was almost always from the French (or, more specifically – at least until 1407 – from the Orléanist) side that Anglo-French challenges to combat originated during the reign of Henry IV.41 This was partly, for Louis, a way of harnessing and giving a clear direction to the chivalric ardour which had manifested itself among some of the younger generation of nobles at the French court since the early years of Charles VI’s reign. This véritable fièvre chevaleresque, as it has been termed, was both a backlash against Charles V’s distaste for chivalric excess and a conservative reaction to the more aesthetic pursuits of the great princes of the blood such as the dukes of Anjou, Berry and Burgundy. Chivalry was à la mode at the French court in the early fifteenth century, and it was towards Orléans that men with a serious desire to win renown tended to gravitate.42 Yet Louis’ encouragement and employment of the chivalric challenge also, and principally,

40

41

42

Leroux de Lincy, ‘Chansons historiques’, p. 383; Jean Jouvenel des Ursins, ‘Histoire de Charles VI’, p. 419; Schnerb, Jean Sans Peur, pp. 502–3; Paravicini, ‘Jean de Werchin, sénéchal de Hainaut’, p. 131; Foedera, VIII, 729 (safe-conducts for Carmin and du Chastel, April 1412); Foedera, VIII, 591 (safe-conducts to Jean de Chalons and Jean de Carneau, June 1409); Chronique de Saint-Denys, IV, 656–8; Wilson, ‘Anglo-French Relations’, p. 443. Despite the outbreak of civil war in France in 1410–11, the fact that Carmin was Burgundian while Chastel was fiercely Armagnac seems not to have proved an impediment to their plans. According to Jean Jouvenel des Ursins, ‘Histoire de Charles VI’, p. 443, however, an Englishman called Hayman challenged the Frenchman Guillaume de Bataille, one of the heroes of Montendre, in 1409, claiming that Bataille had acted dishonourably seven years earlier. There is also the evidence of BL, Add. MS 21,357, which includes a number of Anglo-French challenges from this period, one from 1399, at least one from the early years of Henry VI’s reign, and some others the dates of which are not certain: one from John Cornewall to ‘the knights of France’ (fol. 4) and another from John Hartwell also to ‘the knights of France’ (fol. 5). These may date from Henry IV’s reign, but if so they are probably from the latter part of the reign. This manuscript is discussed by S. Anglo, ‘Financial and Heraldic Records of the English Tournament’, Journal of the Society of Archivists 2 (1962), 183–95. I am grateful to Rémy Ambuhl for alerting me to this manuscript. D. Poirion, Le poète et le prince: L’évolution du lyrisme courtois de Guillaume de Machaut à Charles d’Orléans (Paris, 1965), pp. 28–37; P. Contamine, La noblesse au royaume de France de Philippe le Bel à Louis XI (Paris, 1997), pp. 182–5; Paravicini, ‘Jean de Werchin, sénéchal de Hainaut’, pp. 125–44. There was a vogue for founding Orders of Chivalry among the French nobility at this time, as both Jean de Clermont and Jean de Foix did. The (undated) statutes of Jean de Foix’s Order of the Golden Dragon can be found in BL, Add. MS 18,840, fols. 3–4; the statutes of Clermont’s order, the foundation of which on 1 January 1415 was celebrated with a great tournament at Paris, are printed in Choix de pièces inédites relatives au règne de Charles VI, ed. L. Douetd’Arcq, Société de l’Histoire de France (Paris, 1863), pp. 370–4; for the tournament on 1 January 1415, see Leroux de Lincy, ‘Chansons historiques’, p. 384.

41

Chris Given-Wilson stemmed from his desire to defy the English and their king and to vindicate his royal family’s honour – a substitute for the outright war which, had he had the freedom to do so, he may well have preferred to wage. Men in search of a master, a master in search of men, he and his followers found a common cause in the quest for honour and a yearning for revenge against the English. The seven-a-side tournament at Montendre provided them with a degree of satisfaction, but in the end it seems only to have encouraged the victors to over-reach themselves. For Louis himself, the sequel to Montendre was embarrassing to say the least: his fruitless provocations were widely criticised in France, so that rather than ‘acquiring honour’ he was simply left looking foolish. For Anglo-French relations more generally, the consequences were also unfortunate: at a time of growing cross-Channel tension, the shared ethos and sense of class solidarity which knit together the international chivalric fellowship had the potential to act as a restraint on the belligerence of nationalism. Before 1402 and after 1406, when cross-Channel challenges were both issued and accepted, it is more than likely that they also performed the secondary function of providing opportunities for informal parleying.43 But for three or four years following the littera invectiva of 1402, the customary Anglo-French knightly dialogue fell into abeyance, and with it the opportunities which might arise at the intersection of chivalry and diplomacy. The fact that these years also witnessed a relentless escalation of Anglo-French hostilities, even if in the end the threatened descent into full-scale warfare did not materialise, is surely not coincidental.

Appendix I London, British Library, Add. MS 24,062, fol. 140v; Oxford, All Souls College, MS 182, fols. 71r-v (in footnotes, A = All Souls MS; B = British Library MS)

Transcription Nos Henricus P.44 comes Northumbrie, constabularius Anglie etc.,45 literarum vestrarum per vos, dominum W. dominum de Castro, nuper nobis directarum recensito tenore, concepimus quod, in recepcione vestri ordinis

43 44 45

See the comments of Wilson, ‘Anglo-French Relations’, pp. 358–62, 417, 443. Omitted in B Omitted in A

42

‘The Quarrels of Old Women’ militaris, votum vovistis Deo et domino nostro ac46 Sancto Georgio, ipsos in quantum in vobis est vestre vane glorie et prophani propositi ausu nephario invocantes in testes, domini nostri conquerendi mucronem quem iure officii nostri constabularii Anglie nos habere et gerere reputatis, ad quem titulum non habetis;47 diemque et locum ad hunc actum desperatos revera prefigitis, quibus iuxta fantasiam vestram ponitis et putatis dominum nostrum H. regem Anglie et Francie cum duce48 vestro Aurelianensis debere ad particulare certamen cum certarum gencium numero et forma taxatis mutuo convenire. Sed49 quia dominum nostrum regem Anglie et Francie sacra regia unccione linitum sublimitatisque50 prerogativa precipua inter ceteros reges catholicos decoratum, non recognoscentem in terris superiorem preter Deum, dux prefatus, quem manus Domini in gradu inferiori constituit, nec dignatus est ad tante dignitatis apicem sublimare, particulare postulat ad certamen; recto intuentes oculo clare conspicimus51 quod dux ipse seipsum degenerat contaminatque honestatem milicie et suum regalem sanguinem quem pretendit. Et licet nostri Regis animus, omni spreta ficcione, aviditate exardescat nimia operandi que dux vester verbis offerre presumit, tamen proceres et gentes regni Anglie suis totis operantur viribus ne rex noster se52 preparet ad tale certamen inconveniens incautumque, dissonans sue regie magestati. Hinc est prout putant plures; in dictis litteris vestris diem et locum modumque conveniendi desperatos, ut predicitur, prefigitis, de quibus tractare viros strenuos non deceret. Verum quia, ut credimus, vestre liquet noticie quod nos, cum ceteris domini nostri53 Regis deputatis, habemus custodiam et regimen marchiarum Anglie versus Scotos, et in illis partibus ad deffensionem regni Anglie Scotorumque rebellionem reprimendam cum nostris militibus actibus militaribus indies54 insudamus, a quibus vestrum ad nutum nobis absentandi facultas in exteris partibus non occurrit, et iura militaria vos appellantem artant appellati iusticie tramite sequi forum; decet ergo vos, ne vestri videamini voti ruptor, accedere ad colligatos vestros Scocie, et cum veneritis, renunciate nobis, et, divina favente clemencia, precibus Sue matris cum Sancti Georgii advocati nostri55 auxilio, vobis in illis partibus dabimus obviam personalem, nostrique officii mucronem vibratum videbitis, quem

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Omitted in A ‘Ad … habetis’ omitted in B ‘domino’ in A ‘Set’ in A ‘sublimitatumque’ in A ‘conspiciunt’ in B Omitted in B Omitted in B Omitted in A Omitted in A

43

Chris Given-Wilson contra vestrum nephas votum vestrosque complices defendemus. Datum London56 etc. Translation We, Henry [Percy], earl of Northumberland, constable of England, etc, having examined the contents of your letter recently sent to us by you, Lord W[illiam], lord of Castro, have understood that, upon your receiving the order of knighthood, you made a vow to Our Lord God and to St George, invoking them as witnesses, insofar as you can do, to the wicked audacity of your vainglory and your profane proposal to challenge the sword of our lord which you know that we possess and wield by right of our office of constable of England, to which you have no right; and you have assigned in advance an entirely ridiculous time and place for doing this, at which, in accordance with your fancy, you have arranged and reckon that our lord H[enry], king of England and France, along with your duke of Orleans, must meet together for a certain combat, accompanied by a set number and sort of specified persons. Yet, because our lord the king of England and France has been anointed with the holy royal oil, and distinguished with special prerogatives of superiority among the other catholic kings, not acknowledging any superior on earth except God, the aforesaid duke, whom the hand of the Lord has placed in an inferior rank, having not deigned to elevate [King Henry] to the height of such dignity, summons him to a certain type of combat; yet we, observing with a clear eye, can see manifestly that the duke himself debases himself and pollutes the honesty of knighthood and the royal blood which he claims. And although the disposition of our king, spurning any kind of falsehood, would burn with an excess of desire to undertake whatever your duke presumes to offer with words, nevertheless the lords and people of the kingdom of England will do everything in their power to prevent our king from equipping himself for such an unbefitting and untimely combat, so inappropriate to his royal majesty. This is what many people reckon; in this letter of yours, you have fixed in advance a time and place and manner of meeting which, as already noted, are utterly ridiculous, things which it does not befit worthy men to concern themselves with. It is, however, well known to you, we believe, that we, together with others appointed by our lord king, have the wardenship and rule of the marches of England towards Scotland, and we toil daily in acts of war with our knights in those parts for the defence of the kingdom of England and the suppression of the rebellion of the Scots, from which matters the possibility of absenting ourselves to foreign parts at your beckoning does not arise; the laws of war, moreover, restrict you, as the appellant, from approaching the court of the appellee as a means to justice; it is fitting, therefore, lest you be seen to be a breaker of your

56

Omitted in B

44

‘The Quarrels of Old Women’ oath, for you to make your way to your comrades of Scotland, and when you come, announce it to us, and, if divine mercy favours us, through the prayers of His mother, with the help of our advocate St George, we shall meet you in person in those parts, and you will behold the quivering sword of our office, which we wield against your execrable vow and your accomplices. Dated [at London], etc.

Appendix II London, British Library, Add. MS 18,840, fols. 1r-v Transcription Aux puissant prince, messire Thomas de Lancastre grant senescal dengleterre, je, Jehan de Bourbon, conte de Clermont, pansant que vous estes et que vouldries tousiours estre desirant dacomplir faiz honourables, vous fay savoir que na pas long temps moy estant ou service de mon souverain seignur le roy en sa duchie de Guienne, et mon compaignon messire Jehan de Foys, visconte de Chatillon, avec moy, pour le tres grant desir que nous avions et avons davancer noz corps en bonne renomee par le mestier darmes, empreismes et vouasmes pour lamour de noz dames de porter sur nous une rondelle, un bracelet et un solleret de fer jusques a ce que nous eussions trouve de votre part qui nous vousist delivrez de notre veu. Et pour le tresentier desir que nous avons den estre delivrez, jay charge et prie plusours gentilz hommes tenans vostre parti de le faire savoir a la court de votre seigneur avant que aucune escripture en aix voulu faire. Sy est ainsi que de nouvel iay sceu que ce est venu a votre cognoisance et que vous me vouldries volentiers delivrez de mon dit veu, pourveu que vous sceussies quelles sont les armes de lemprise, et pource pansant le desir qui doibt estre en vous men delivrissiez, et le veiul plus et desirreroye estre par vous que par nul autre, en vous faisant savoir que nous serrons viii, cest assavoir nous deux, se Dieu nous gard dessoyrie, acompaigniez de vi aultres chevaliers et escuiers, gentilz homes de noms et darmes et sans reproche; et au dessus jusque au nombre qui sera accorde entre vous et nous se plus nombre y voulez, qui a laide de Dieu et de Notre Dame et de monsieur Saint Michel, Saint Jehan et Saint Loys, vous acompaigne de tel nombre de gentilz hommes de nomz et darmes et sans reprouches, vous combatrons iusques a oultrance, pour estre prinsonniers les uns des aultres et pour donner chacun a son compaignon une des pieces dessusdittes dor, lequel quil vous plaira, car tel est mon veu; en telz harnois et telz bastons de guerre comme par les commis ordonnez a ce par vous et nous sera advisie. Et pour ce que je panse que mon souverain seigneur le roy ne aucune de mes aultres seigneurs de son sang nacepterez 45

Chris Given-Wilson a juge, ja soit ce que raison me contraint de les plus desirez que nul aultres, je vous offre, affin qe la chose ne demeure, que ce soit devant le roi des Romains et de Behame, ou en marche devant les roys Despaigne et de Portingal, pour ce que lun tient notre parti et lautre le votre, ou devant le duc de Hollende, lequel de ces trois parties vous vouldriez eslire et qui le vouldra accepter, a tel jour et place convenable comme par celuy qui sera esleu nous sera donne. Sy vous prie de moy faire savoir soubz le seel de voz armes tost votre entencion, hault et puissant prince. Le Dieu damoure vous daint joye de celle que vous ferriez. Escript et seelle du seel de mes armes a Clermont, le vi jour de juillet, lan mil cccc et vi. Translation To the mighty prince, my lord Thomas of Lancaster, high steward of England, I, Jean de Bourbon, count of Clermont, considering that you are and would always be desirous of performing honourable deeds, wish you to know that recently, while I was in the service of my sovereign lord the king in his duchy of Guyenne, together with my companion my lord Jean de Foix, vicomte of Chatillon, on account of the very great desire that we had and have to acquire renown for ourselves through the practice of arms, undertook and vowed, for love of our ladies, to wear a circlet, an arm-guard and a legging of iron until such time as we shall have found [someone] of your party who is willing to deliver us from our vow. And because we have a very great desire to be delivered from it, I charged and begged several gentlemen adhering to your party to let this be known at the court of your lord before I was willing to set any of this down in writing. And now I understand that this has come to your knowledge, and that you are willing to deliver me from this vow of mine, provided that you know what are to be the arms for this undertaking, and considering therefore the desire which must be in you to deliver me from it, and that it is something which I wish and desire to be done by you rather than by any other person, this is to inform you that there will be eight of us, that is to say us two, provided that God preserves us henceforth, accompanied by six other knights and esquires, gentlemen of renown and of arms without reproach. And if you want there to be more, there can be, up to such number as shall be agreed between you and us, who, with the help of God and of Our Lady and of my lord St Michael, St John and St Louis, will fight you, accompanied by a similar number of gentlemen of renown and of arms and without reproach, until defeated, one side to become the prisoners of the other and to give, each to his companion, one of the golden objects mentioned above, whichever of them you want, for that is my vow; with whatever equipment and whatever weapons of war shall be decided upon by the representatives appointed by you and us to do this. And because I think that neither my sovereign lord the king nor any of my other lords of his blood will agree to be the judge, even though reason suggests to me that they would be more desirable than anyone else, I offer to you, in order that the 46

‘The Quarrels of Old Women’ matter should not be postponed, that it should be held before the king of the Romans and of Bohemia, or else on the march before the kings of Spain and of Portugal, since one adheres to our side and the other to yours, or before the duke of Holland, whichever of these three parties you wish to choose and who wishes to accept it, at a suitable time and place to be decided for us by whichever of them is chosen. And I pray you, high and mighty prince, to let me know under the seal of your arms what you intend to do. May the God of love grant you joy in whatever you do. Written and sealed with the seal of my arms at Clermont, on the sixth day of July in the year 1406.

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3 ‘On account of the frequent attacks and invasions of the Welsh’: The Effect of the Glyn Dŵr Rebellion on Tax Collection in England Helen Watt

Introduction … in England … even harsher taxes than usual were imposed on the clergy and the people; and no wonder, for they were hard pressed to hold their own in the wars against France, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and Flanders, and were also, as a result of the war, deprived of sixty thousand pounds of revenue which they used to receive from Wales.

These are the words of Adam Usk who provides a contemporary record of the rebellion of Owain Glyn Dŵr, which broke out in 1400 and lasted for around nine years. His stark account of the problems posed to the English government by the rebellion emphasises its effect on taxation and even puts a figure on the amount of such revenue lost to the crown in 1404 from Wales as a result. An examination of any actual erosion of taxation claimed to have been caused by the effects of the revolt could reveal just how effectively the Welsh extended the war zone to the English border counties; more importantly, it could also reveal whether any shortfall in taxation revenue was caused by genuine hardship, reflecting specific acts of destruction, or whether the rebellion was used as a convenient pretext not to pay.



I would like to thank Professor A. H. Pryce and Ms Nia M. W. Powell for their very helpful comments on the draft, Professor R. W. Hoyle for his suggestions, Dr W. R. M. Griffiths and T. Wales for reading the draft and for their contributions, and Gideon Brough for correspondence regarding his current research into military aspects of the rebellion: ‘Diplomatic and Military Relations between Wales and France in the Medieval Period’ (on-going Ph.D. thesis, University of Wales: Cardiff). I would also like to thank my colleagues in the Editors’ Room at The National Archives, Drs R. Cock, P. R. Dryburgh, M. L. Holford, and particularly Dr J. S. Mackman, for all their assistance. The quotation in the title appears in Exchequer records of lay tax collection for Shropshire, such as E 179/166/36, as the excuse for which allowances on accounts were sought.  Chronicle of Adam Usk, pp. 176–7.  For a discussion of similar questions recently raised with regard to the English border with Scotland in the fourteenth century, see C. Briggs, ‘Taxation, Warfare, and the

48

The Glyn Dŵr Rebellion and Tax Collection Several other explanations for loss of revenue are possible, including such underlying causes of hardship as bad weather, poor harvests or providing manpower and supplies for the army to fight the Welsh. Tax evasion may simply account for any problems, all the more so since there were clearly sympathisers of Glyn Dŵr in the English border areas. However, historians since Adam Usk, including the late Professor Rees Davies, in his major study of the rebellion, have corroborated much of the chronicler’s account of the devastating and persistent effects of the conflict on society and the economy. The peak of the rebellion between 1403 and 1406 has moreover been seen as ‘the most devastating experience of destruction that Wales has suffered as a country’. Given that English central government records, particularly those of taxation, do indeed contain claims of hardship in the English counties closest to Wales ostensibly caused by the rebellion of Owain Glyn Dŵr, could those records be used to show that the revolt had a similar effect there as well? Financing the counter-rebellion Even if Adam Usk’s figure for lost revenue is wildly exaggerated, there is no doubt that the king’s financial situation in 1404 was deplorable and that taxation was also extremely heavy. No fewer that eight grants, including some novel taxes, were made in that year, payable by both clergy and laity, in a desperate attempt to raise enough funds to cover a multitude of expenses besides the rebellion, and counteract some unforeseen financial losses. Furthermore, the cost to the king of the Welsh and other campaigns has been described as ‘a burden of military expenditure with which no English monarch had been faced since the end of Edward I’s reign’. However, the Commons were apparently reluctant to subsidise measures to put down a revolt taking place in areas not under the jurisdiction of Parliament, leaving the king little option but to finance the counter-rebellion himself. This was an especially vexed question for Henry IV; as the largest landowner in Wales at the time, he drew much of his income from lands there as duke of Lancaster, and as Marcher lord of, for example, Brecon. However, monies from all sources were



   

Early Fourteenth Century ‘Crisis’ in the North: Cumberland Lay Subsidies, 1332–1348’, Economic History Review 58 (2005), 639–72 (p. 641). W. Rees, South Wales and the March 1284–1415 (Oxford, 1924), pp. 269–80; Sir J. E. Lloyd, Owen Glendower/Owen Glyn Dŵr (Oxford, 1931); R. R. Davies, The Age of Conquest: Wales 1063–1415 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 443–65; G. Williams, Renewal and Reformation: Wales c.1415–1642 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 3–30; R. R. Davies, The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr (Oxford, 1995). Davies, Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr, p. 281. Kirby, Henry IV, pp. 127–8 (expenses, p. 128; losses, p. 127). E. F. Jacob, The Fifteenth Century 1399–1485 (Oxford, 1961), p. 30. Davies, Age of Conquest, p. 457.

49

Helen Watt not enough to fund the necessary campaigns, as is shown by his detailed and carefully-worded request for the forced loan of 1405 from the laity: Since all the moneys forthcoming both from the tenths and fifteenths granted by the laity … and from the tenths granted by the clergy … together with many other sums from the king’s own moneys, have been wholly expended to meet the unwonted pressure of the divers wars, he has at present no noteworthy sums wherewith to pay the wages of the men at arms and archers.

His request to the clergy for the same loan is terser: ‘[The king] is short of money … Unless a loan can be raised in three weeks he cannot make the necessary arrangements’.10 The Prince of Wales, after his first appointment as lieutenant in Wales in 1403, found himself in a similar situation; as his Welsh income diminished, amounts forthcoming to him from the Exchequer had to be increased and other income sought.11 The complex interplay between these two main sources of revenue has been explored by Rhidian Griffiths in a detailed analysis of Exchequer records, and the Prince’s plight neatly summed up: ‘The paradox of the situation was that Henry [Prince of Wales] could not recover his patrimony from the hands of the insurgents by means of patrimonial revenues.’12 The king did not only have to raise funds to fight the rebels in Wales, but he was also obliged to defend the English border with Wales, vulnerable to attacks at any point along it at any time, a difficult and expensive task. A paradoxical situation similar to that of the Prince of Wales could be found in the fact that some collectors of central government taxation in border areas of Cheshire, Shropshire and Herefordshire claimed not to be able to levy all or some of the dues granted to the king by Parliament and Convocation. The excuse given was damage caused by the very rebellion the taxes were raised to defeat, and because the inhabitants of the affected areas had fled ‘on account of the frequent attacks and invasions of the Welsh’.13



CFR, 1399–1405, p. 318. Signet Letters, p. 192, no. 939. 11 Among these sources of income was the prince’s mise of 1401. Some levies in crown lands in Wales during the Middle Ages known as ‘subsidies’ appear to have been made to coincide with non-parliamentary grants in England, perhaps in order to widen the scope of taxation in time of need. This mise may have been timed to coincide with the feudal aid to marry the king’s eldest daughter, Blanche, also in 1401. A later example is the subsidy levied in 1417 in Carmarthenshire and Cardiganshire at the request of Henry V to finance the French wars, approximately concurrent with the forced loan raised for this purpose in England. 12 R. Griffiths, ‘Prince Henry, Wales and the Royal Exchequer, 1400–1413’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 32 (1985), 202–15 (p. 206). 13 E 179/166/36, these claims are further discussed below. 10

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The Glyn Dŵr Rebellion and Tax Collection The raid as a form of warfare The rebels employed a kind of guerrilla warfare, including lightning raids, ‘so as to bring all things to waste that the English should not find strength nor resting-place in the country’.14 Professor Davies called these ‘deliberate acts of economic warfare’, precisely because their results included destruction of property, payment of ransoms and buying of truces.15 These attacks have much in common with the ‘chevauchée’, a raid deep into enemy territory employed by the English in France during the Hundred Years War, aimed at creating as much destruction as possible to civilian property, such as crops, houses and mills, while avoiding many of the risks and much of the expense of pitched battles.16 This type of warfare aimed to challenge the duty of the king to protect his people from the enemy, and so to undermine his legitimacy and authority in those areas affected.17 The economic effects of the raids were several; the attackers gained booty in goods and ransoms, reducing the means of livelihood of the attacked, and causing them to divert time and expense into defending themselves. The affected communities would then be reluctant to pay taxes for defence to a king seen not be defending them adequately; their losses due to the raids might also make them unable, or state that they were unable, to pay those taxes.18 The English were thought to have learned this type of warfare from the Scots who, following a well-worn route, carried out cross-border raids year after year in the early fourteenth century and afterwards, causing much damage.19 The paths of the Scots in and out of England may be traced, and local chronicles sometimes provide corroboration of the havoc wreaked on buildings, crops and other property, also mirrored in tax records. In his examination of the taxation of Cumberland, Briggs has correlated details of attacks on specific places and claims of inability to contribute or collect taxation on account of those attacks, in order to discover whether there was any truth in those claims. Although it is difficult to interpret the situation in Cumberland simply from information on taxation, and although a decline in revenue from taxes in the area may be explained by a more complex set of circumstances

14

15 16 17 18 19

Davies, Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr, p. 278; Williams, Renewal and Reformation, p. 16, citing Sir John Wynn, History of the Gwydir Family, ed. J. Gwynfor Jones (Llandysul, 1990), p. 51. Davies, Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr, p. 234. C. Allmand, The Hundred Years War: England and France at War c.1300–c.1450 (Cambridge, 1988), p. 15. Ibid., p. 55. Ibid., p. 56. C. McNamee, The Wars of the Bruces: Scotland, England and Ireland 1306–1328 (East Linton, 1997), p. 251; see maps 4–8 and 10 for the routes of raids, 1307–22; A. J. Macdonald, Border Bloodshed: Scotland and England at War 1369–1403 (East Linton, 2000) and Briggs, ‘Cumberland Lay Subsidies’, pp. 639–72.

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Helen Watt than Scots raids alone, it is clear that exemption from taxation was gained there on a large scale, on the pretext of those raids.20 Since the English army had for generations included Welsh archers and foot soldiers, and since Owain Glyn Dŵr himself had experience of serving in a border garrison, taking part in an English raid into Scotland, his first-hand knowledge of raiding and its purposes could clearly be put to use in Wales and across its borders during his revolt to challenge the authority of Henry IV.21 Naturally enough, damage was not caused only by the Welsh, as English forces also left a trail of retaliatory burning and plunder in Wales.22 Although there are similarities between the situation on the Scottish border and that on the Welsh, there are also some differences. Briggs suggests that the northern border counties were not fully integrated into the English tax system in the mid-fourteenth century, when successive exemptions for damage caused by Scots raids were granted.23 However, at the time of the Welsh rebellion, this could not be said of Shropshire and Herefordshire, the English border counties apparently most affected, since they had been taxed regularly since 1334 and before, and they were not given any exemptions from lay taxes as a result of the revolt. Although Parliament sometimes heard complaints about sporadic invasions of those counties by the hostile Marchers or Welsh, the series of claims under consideration arose specifically in response to the rebellion, although such requests persisted for long after the revolt had died out.24 Local sources do not provide such consistent evidence for the paths of Welsh border raids as they do for those of Scots border raids, although the first and best-documented such raid can be traced from Owain’s residence at Glyndyfrydwy on 16 September 1400, sweeping east via Rhuthun, Denbigh, Rhuddlan and Flint, then along the border with Cheshire to Hawarden and Holt, turning south via Oswestry and Felton along the border with Shropshire, before ending near Welshpool on 24 September, where the Welsh forces were defeated by the English.25 Nevertheless, details of known Welsh attacks will be examined in conjunction with the records of

20 21 22

23 24

25

Briggs, ‘Cumberland Lay Subsidies’, pp. 665–9. Davies, Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr, pp. 24, 146–7. For well-known reports of damage to Strata Florida Abbey and its lands caused when Henry IV made his headquarters there in 1401, see Lloyd, Owen Glendower, p. 43; for a complaint of such damage by the royal army in the lordship of Whittington in 1403, see CPR, 1401–1405, p. 381. Briggs, ‘Cumberland Lay Subsidies’, p. 668. For examples of such invasions, see SC 8/107/5303, and PROME, parliament of 1399, item 137 (Rot. Parl., III, 441). For a small allowance made on the account of the collectors of two fifteenths and tenths of 1417 for various places in Shropshire, showing that the rebellion was still being accepted as an excuse for non-collection several years after it had ended, see E 179/166/59. Select Cases in the Court of King’s Bench, ed. G. O. Sayles, 7 (London, 1971), pp. 114–17.

52

The Glyn Dŵr Rebellion and Tax Collection taxation, to attempt to correlate raids with claims of inability to pay in their aftermath. The destructive nature of Welsh raids Referring to that great destruction and slow recovery which occurred across almost all Wales and into the English border counties in the wake of these raids, Professor Davies stated that ‘many statistics, of greater or lesser reliability, can be culled from the records to drive home this point’.26 Of these statistics, most are drawn from surviving early fifteenth-century financial records both of crown lands in Wales and the Marcher lordships, such as ministers’ accounts of the lordships of Oswestry and Chirk, neighbouring on Shropshire.27 These reveal a striking drop in revenue as a direct result of the effect of the revolt there.28 Although the study of those lordships mentions briefly lay tax documents for Shropshire as a source of evidence for destruction in the English border counties, records of central government taxation may not perhaps be considered the most obvious place to search for such information, and do not appear to have been fully exploited in this regard.29 Despite the fact that Professor Davies also stated that ‘the evidence of the destruction wreaked during the revolt can be amassed; but … can never be adequately assessed’, the tax records may perhaps go some way towards providing evidence from which an assessment, however partial, of such destruction in English border counties may be attempted.30 During the reign of Henry IV, a large number of taxes were granted, but there was also a rising trend in exemptions from taxation. This highlights another paradox in the state of royal finances; the king desperately needed to raise money from taxation, but found it increasingly necessary to forego some of the proceeds. Dr Kido, in his overview of English government finance for this period, notes exemptions for various reasons, including enemy attack, erosion by the sea and depopulation of towns.31 He also identifies two parliamentary petitions for exemption from Shrewsbury relating to the Glyn Dŵr rebellion, but for a much more extensive and detailed picture of exemptions and allowances claimed for action by this particular enemy, the surviving records of lay and clerical taxation must be consulted.32 These documents 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Davies, Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr, p. 280. Ibid., pp. 215–16, and Rees, South Wales and the March, pp. 273–80. Ll. O. W. Smith, ‘The Lordships of Chirk and Oswestry, 1282–1415’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1970), pp. 376–433; also appendices 6–12, pp. 446–59. Smith, ‘The Lordships of Oswestry and Chirk’, p. 399, n. 1; the documents mentioned are E 179/16/48 and E 179/166/55. Davies, Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr, p. 280. T. Kido, ‘English Government Finance, 1399–1413’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1965), ch. 2 (55–94), pp. 80–2. The parliamentary petitions appear in PROME, parliament of 1406, item 23 (Rot. Parl., III,

53

Helen Watt show that wholesale exemptions were gained from clerical taxation, and that allowances were made from lay taxation following Exchequer or Parliamentary petitions. They also record Exchequer investigations into the veracity of these claims through local inquisitions, and the resulting amounts allowed on the collectors’ accounts; amounts so allowed may then be compared with amounts payable by individual tax units, generally listed in records of clerical tenths and lay fifteenths and tenths.33 Since the contributions usually made by each tax unit were fixed (with periodic revisions) for clerical taxation in 1291 and for lay taxation in 1334, any shortfall in expected crown revenue during the reign of Henry IV specifically caused, or purporting to have been caused by the Glyn Dŵr rebellion, may be quantified.34 Claims for exemption from taxation and petitions for allowances on tax collectors’ accounts were nothing new at the time, and recurring excuses also included livestock disease and natural disasters.35 In the early years of the reign of Henry IV, it would not have been surprising if such claims had been made, because indications of the possible effects of bad harvests on the economy at the time are reflected in the high price of wheat in England in 1401–3, reaching levels unprecedented in the previous twenty-five years and not seen again for twenty years.36 These increases may be explained by the fact that the summers from 1399 and afterwards were known to have been very wet indeed, causing bad harvests.37 Extreme weather conditions also hit

33

34 35

36 37

597) and PROME, parliament of 1407, item 51 (Rot. Parl., III, 618–19) and are discussed below. The TNA Exchequer records consulted are listed in note 46 and Appendix I below. See Taxatio ecclesiastica Angliae et Walliae auctoritate P. Nicholai IV circa A.D. 1291 (1802); A. K. McHardy, ‘Clerical Taxation in Fifteenth-Century England: The Clergy as Agents of the Crown’, in The Church, Politics and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century, ed. R. B. Dobson (Gloucester, 1984), pp. 168–92 (pp. 169–70); G. Williams, The Welsh Church from Conquest to Reformation (Cardiff, 1976), pp. 58–61; The Lay Subsidy of 1334, ed. R. E. Glasscock (British Academy, 1973); M. Jurkowski, C. Smith and D. Crook, Lay Taxes in England and Wales 1188–1688, Public Record Office Handbook 31 (Kew, 1998), p. xxxi. The Welsh dioceses had contributed to papal and other taxes since the late twelfth century and were re-assessed in 1291, but Wales was not generally included in lay taxation until after the Acts of Union of England with Wales, 1542–6, although other forms of levy, including the mises and subsidies noted above, were regularly collected there by the king and marcher lords alike. See Appendix II, Tables A and B below, for details of amounts remitted. For instance, the reasons why taxpayers of Montford in Shropshire contributed only part of their assessment towards the ninths of 1340 were land lying fallow, a murrain of sheep and destruction of most of their corn by flooding of the river Severn; see Nonarum inquisitiones in curia scaccarii temp. Edwardi III (Record Commission, London, 1807), p. 183. T. H. Lloyd, The Movement of Wool Prices in Medieval England, Economic History Review Supplement 6 (1973), pp. 46–7. Adam Usk himself mentions a sudden jump in the price of wheat in late September 1401, see Chronicle of Adam Usk, pp. 144–5; Kirby, Henry IV, p. 127. A writ of 12 January

54

The Glyn Dŵr Rebellion and Tax Collection Henry IV and his troops in early 1402 when they went from Shrewsbury to North Wales; such freak storms may also have occurred in the nearby border counties and so have decreased taxpayers’ means of contribution.38 It is noticeable that claims for damage were made explicitly on account of the Welsh raids, not the bad weather or poor harvests. However, set against this background, the raids may have been even more devastating and some were presumably timed to cause maximum impact by coinciding with the harvest. The first attacks of the rebellion in 1400 occurred in late September, and it is easy to imagine that the rebel forces might have trampled crops awaiting harvest, or destroyed or plundered barns full of harvested grain. Food stocks for the coming winter would therefore have been depleted, as would seed to be sown the next year, causing a ripple effect of problems for following growing seasons, including a rise in prices. Raids solely for booty also took place; in 1402, Owain Glyn Dŵr is supposed to have harried the Rhuthun area for livestock ‘to replenish his depleted stocks in the mountains’.39 The English burgesses of the Northern Principality sent the Prince of Wales a detailed account of damage caused by the rebels, itemising numbers of houses burned in the towns and head of livestock taken, mostly bulls, cows and calves, but also horses, mares and sheep, which would clearly be of value to the rebels.40 The pool of goods and manpower in the border communities may have been diminished still further, through the raising of troops and supplies for the English army; Cheshire in particular was hit hard in this regard, providing troops both for Henry Percy and for the Prince of Wales.41 At the Battle of Bryn Glas, the Welsh defeated a sizeable county levy from Herefordshire and when the Prince of Wales was appointed lieutenant in Wales, he was given powers to array men of the counties of Shropshire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire for defence against the rebels, as it would surely be most convenient to raise troops of local men for this purpose.42 The men of each township would therefore have been absent on military service, and unable to pay their taxes. If the Welsh raids had severely diminished the livelihood, and so the ability to pay taxes, of those dwelling in their path, they had fulfilled their economic purpose.

38 39 40 41 42

1402 to the chancellor of the county palatine of Lancaster mentions the lack of grain everywhere in the realm and the persistence of thunder and rain storms: PL 14/156/4, no. 7. I am very grateful to Dr Sean Cunningham for knowledge of this document. Davies, Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr, p. 109. Ibid., pp. 106–7. E 163/6/38, undated, temp. Henry IV. A. D. M. Phillips and C. B. Phillips, A New Historical Atlas of Cheshire (Chester, 2002), p. 37, map b. Davies, Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr, p. 107; CPR, 1401–1405, p. 216.

55

Helen Watt Exemptions from clerical taxation In 1402, the king was obliged to grant the lay inhabitants of the northern border counties exemption from dues, including taxation, on account of attacks by the Scots, among other reasons.43 It is clear from instructions given in grants of clerical taxation from around that time onwards, that similar exemptions were granted to the clergy on account of the revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr, so providing a legitimate excuse for inability to collect clerical taxes. From the late fourteenth century onwards, such grants comprised exemptions for certain groups, such as poor nuns, but from the half a clerical tenth granted in 1403 by the convocation of the Province of Canterbury, until the tenth granted to Henry V in 1421 also by the Province of Canterbury, all such grants included exemptions for benefices in Wales and the March which had been destroyed.44 The Exchequer was to accept the relevant bishops’ certificates of exemption ‘without any orders from the king’ and even though requests for exemption might quickly become ossified, evidence from records of the Exchequer suggests that, during the reign of Henry IV, requests on grounds of damage caused by the rebellion were still taken at face value.45 The resulting amounts allowed are mostly included in the enrolments of accounts of clerical tax collectors, sometimes along with detailed lists of the benefices to which the allowances relate.46 The relevant sums may therefore be extracted from the records and tabulated.47 The benefices concerned are situated in the diocese of Coventry and Lichfield, in the archdeaconries of Chester, in Cheshire, and Salop, in Shropshire, and in the diocese of Hereford, in the archdeaconries of Salop, also in Shropshire, and Hereford, in

43

SC 8/22/1090. A. McHardy, ‘God AND Caesar: The Clerical Burden’, paper given at the ‘Taxes and Taxpayers in England, c.1200–1700’ conference held at The National Archives, 26 October 2002; see CFR, 1399–1405, p. 123 for an example. 45 CFR, 1399–1405, pp. 225, 309. An example of a copy of a bishop’s return to the Exchequer of exempt benefices may be found in Registrum Roberti Mascall, Episcopi Herefordensis, transcribed J. H. Parry, Canterbury and York Society 21 (London, 1918), pp. 20–2. I am grateful to Gideon Brough for bringing this to my attention. 46 The documents consulted are: E 159 (King’s Remembrancer), and E 368 (Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer), Memoranda Rolls, States and Views of Account, for the reign of Henry IV; E 179, Records of Clerical Taxation; those containing information on exemptions on account of the rebellion (apart from straightforward compoti) are: E 179/15/78, petition, one clerical tenth, 1406, Archdeaconry of Salop, and E 179/15/91, petition, one and a half clerical tenths, 1407, Archdeaconry of Chester, both in the Diocese of Coventry and Lichfield, and E 179/30/18, compotus, with list of exemptions, one clerical tenth, 1404, Archdeaconries of Salop and Hereford, Diocese of Hereford; E 359/18, Account Roll, Clerical Tenths, and E 359/20, Account Roll, Clerical Subsidies (details of rotulets in which accounts for each tax are found appear among details of each tax grant in the E 179 database, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/e179, now the main means of reference to series E 179). 47 See Appendix II, Table A below. 44

56

The Glyn Dŵr Rebellion and Tax Collection

Tax units affected by the Glyn Dŵr rebellion.

Herefordshire.48 The benefices lie in a swathe along the border of Wales and the Marches, vividly illustrated when plotted on a map of the region.49 In the archdeaconries of Chester and Salop (C & L), allowances commence with the grant of 1402, pre-dating provisions for such exemptions in tax grants. This strongly suggests that their inclusion in the grants was led by 48

The abbreviation ‘archdeaconry of Salop (C & L)’ will be used to distinguish that archdeaconry from the archdeaconry of the same name in the diocese of ­Hereford. 49 See Map above.

57

Helen Watt Chart A. Allowances for Destruction: Clerical Taxation

Percentage of collection due

30 25 20

Chester

15

Salop (C & L) Salop & Hereford (H)

10 5

/1

2

11

&

&

/1 10 14

,2

14

07

/1

06 14

14

3

2 &

2 /1

&

2 /1 /2 04 14

14

04

/1

/1

&

/1

3 &

03 14

,2 /1 02

14

14

01

/1

,2

&

3

0

Grants of clerical tenths and instalments

demand, after hardship had been experienced. In the diocese of Hereford, however, allowances on account of the rebellion first appear with the grant of 1404, perhaps indicating that hardship was not experienced there until slightly later. Other allowances, such as those for poor religious, appear to have been made in that diocese, but at least in the archdeaconry of Salop (C & L), allowances for damage caused by the revolt proved to be the only source of loss of taxation.50 In all cases, allowances on account of the revolt persist until the last grant of the reign, but they were not made for every place in each grant. For example, in the archdeaconry of Chester, allowances were made for four benefices in 1402, rising to eight in 1406, before dropping back to six in 1411; a very similar pattern is found in the archdeaconry of Salop (C & L) where eleven benefices were involved in 1402, fifteen in 1406, and ten in 1411. Within the pattern in this archdeaconry, some benefices do not appear consistently; for example, Prees is included in all grants except those of 1403 and the first grant of 1404, which may tie in with reports of a specific attack which came to light during enquiries into the accounts of lay tax collectors’ accounts, as noted below.51 These irregularities might lend some support to the argument for genuine need for allowance, rather than allowance as a matter of course. What is clear is that there was an overall peak in numbers of places included in allowances for the grants of 1406 and

50 51

See E 179/30/18 for allowances for various reasons in the diocese of Hereford. The attack is noted in an inquisition of 11 Jan. 1406; E 368/177, States and Views of Account, Easter term, 1404, rots. 257d, 258–258d.

58

The Glyn Dŵr Rebellion and Tax Collection 1407, perhaps as a result of a slightly earlier crisis, but suggesting a peak of hardship at around that time. This obviously coincides with the peak of amounts of tax lost during the reign. The overall percentage of revenue lost from affected collections over the reign is quite small, around 3.75% in the archdeaconry of Chester and 7.25% in the diocese of Hereford, but rising to 17.75% in the archdeaconry of Salop (C & L). However, the percentage lost from each individual grant was in many cases much higher; in the archdeaconry of Chester, this ranged between 2.5% and 7%, and in the diocese of Hereford between 7.5% and 15% per collection. Once again, in the archdeaconry of Salop (C & L), the total lost for each grant shows a much bigger variation, rising from 8% in the grant of 1402, to 27% in the grants of 1406 and 1407, dropping to 18% for the remaining two grants of the reign. This would have made quite a dent in the revenue expected to have been collected for these grants in those dioceses. Allowances from lay taxation If clerical tax grants during the reign of Henry IV gave rise to exemptions from payment as a matter of course, lay grant preambles for the same period show that such exemptions were never the norm. Commissions to collect all six grants of lay fifteenths and tenths made to Henry IV include the clause ‘that no-one be spared’; this applies to all subsequent grants until that of the half fifteenth and tenth made to Henry VI in 1432, before a reduction for impoverished towns was introduced in 1433. Although some groups were traditionally exempt from payment of fifteenths and tenths, such as the ‘barons’ of the Cinque Ports, these were exceptional.52 If others not already exempt by royal pardon, such as the burgesses of Melcombe Regis in Dorset, required exemptions or allowances on grounds not specified in individual tax grants, they would clearly have to pursue these individually with vigour on each occasion.53 The tax on newly granted lands of 1404 may have excluded lands in the marches of Wales, but the one grant of lay taxation to make specific exemptions on account of damage caused by the rebellion comparable with those found in clerical tax grants was that of the experimental subsidy of March 1404. This tax was extended to some possessions normally excluded, such as those of the bishopric of Durham, to maximise income, but exemptions

52

J. F. Willard, Parliamentary Taxes on Personal Property, 1290 to 1334 (Cambridge, MA, 1934), pp. 110–29; Jurkowski et al., Lay Taxes, p. xxx. 53 CIM, 1399–1422, pp. 196–7, no. 368; the petition of the burgesses of Melcombe Regis in Dorset for a renewal of an earlier royal grant of exemption from payment of the fifteenths and tenths, on account of poverty, is rehearsed in a commission of February 1408 and resulting inquisition. Numerous petitions for exemption for the burgesses of Melcombe Regis may be found in TNA series SC 8.

59

Helen Watt Chart B. Allowances for Destruction: Lay Taxation

Percentage of collection due

40 35 30 25

Shropshire

20

Shrew sbury

15

Herefordshire

10 5 0 1401 (1)

1402 (1)

1404 (2)

1406 (1)

1407 (1.5) 1410 (1.5)

Grants of lay 15s & 10s and num bers of 15ths & 10ths

included ‘lands and tenements burnt, wasted and destroyed by enemies and rebels in the counties of Salop and Hereford adjacent to Wales’.54 This is an extraordinary concession in an extraordinary grant, clearly acknowledging that, by this date, disruption caused by the rebellion had spread to parts of England and that some financial loss would be expected as a result. The various collectors from Shropshire, Shrewsbury and Herefordshire made concerted efforts to obtain allowances on their accounts on the grounds of damage and destruction there caused by the Glyn Dŵr rebellion. The procedure they had to follow was more complex than that of their clerical brethren and involved presenting a petition for allowance to the Exchequer, so initiating the mechanism for holding local inquisitions into their claims. Five such inquisitions are extant for Shropshire, for the grants of fifteenths and tenths of 1404, 1406 and 1407, and two for Herefordshire, for the 1402 and 1404 grants.55 A further inquisition for the 1404 grant for Shrewsbury, taxed separately from the county, appears to have been taken, but was not acted upon, perhaps on the instructions of Lord Furnivall, the treasurer, himself, so requiring a new commission to be issued.56 54

CFR, 1399–1405, p. 252. The inquisitions are found among the ‘States and Views of Account’ in the Memoranda Rolls; full details are given in Appendix I below, together with details of corresponding documents in series E 101, King’s Remembrancer: Accounts, Various, and E 179, Records of Lay Taxation; also consulted was E 359/19, Account Roll, Lay Fifteenths and Tenths (the E 179 database also contains details of rotulets containing accounts for each tax). See also Appendix II, Table B, for amounts allowed. 56 This is mentioned in E 368/177, States and views of account, Easter term 1405, rot. 259, but no inquisitions have been located. 55

60

The Glyn Dŵr Rebellion and Tax Collection Surviving investigations for the two counties provide detailed information on the specific places involved, the examination of the claims and the resulting amounts allowed. The townships forming lay tax units in Shropshire for which allowance was claimed are conspicuous in that they lie in almost the same band as those benefices claiming exemption from clerical taxes, that is, along the whole of the western edge of the county in Bradford, Pimhill, Ford, Purslow and Chirbury hundreds.57 In Herefordshire, the area concerned was mostly confined to the south-western borders, largely because other places along the northern and western boundaries were in the hands of Marcher lords, not taxed by central government at that time.58 The distribution of these places appears to follow closely the various roads in and out of both counties, reaching as far as the towns of Shrewsbury, Hereford and Ludlow, suggesting routes which may have been taken by the rebels, or indeed the royal forces marching to meet or pursue them. As mentioned above, when claiming allowance on their accounts, the tax collectors used a twin formula of destruction and depopulation to describe places said to have been attacked by the Welsh. This was presumably in the hope of presenting the Exchequer with a cast-iron excuse for inability to collect all the monies assessed on some townships, such as Whitchurch (Album Monasterium), in northern Shropshire:59 From Whitchurch which used to be taxed £8 18s they answer nothing because the aforesaid monastery is totally burnt and destroyed and the tenants of the aforesaid monastery have fled from the area on account of the frequent attacks and invasions of the Welsh there rising up against the king and his allegiance. And because they did not find or could not have found any goods or chattels of the aforesaid tenants there as they say upon their oath and this they are ready to prove in whatever [court] etc.60

57

See Map, p. 57. These areas consisted of the lordships of Wigmore, Huntington and Ewyas Lacy; see Davies, Age of Conquest, map 10, p. 393. 59 Whitchurch formed part of the lordship of Blakemere, among the possessions of the Le Strange, then of the Talbot family, the lordship taking its name from the manor house situated about one mile from Whitchurch. For studies of the lordship, see A. J. Pollard, ‘The Family of Talbot, Lords Talbot and Earls of Shrewsbury in the Fifteenth Century’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Bristol, 1968), especially pp. 359–60 for details of the effect on the estate of the destruction of Whitchurch and environs in 1404; also A. J. Pollard, ‘Estate Management in the Later Middle Ages: The Talbots and Whitchurch, 1383–1525’, Economic History Review 2nd series 25 (1972), 553–66; for medieval household accounts of Blakemere, see Accounts of the Stewards of the Talbot Household at Blakemere, 1392–1425, trans. and ed. Barbara Ross, Shropshire Record Series 7 (Keele, 2003) and for a further study of the medieval lordship, see Francesca Bumpus, ‘The “Middling Sort” in the Lordship of Blakemere, Shropshire, c.1380–1420’, in Social Attitudes and Political Structures in the Fifteenth Century, ed. T. Thornton (Stroud, 2000), pp. 202–19. 60 The original document, E 179/166/36, probably dating from some point after 25 December 1404, the date of the collection to which it relates, reads: ‘De Albo Monasterio 58

61

Helen Watt This formula was used with regard to the rebellion in several other contexts besides central government taxation, and generally appears to have provided the authorities with a complaint they could not dismiss lightly.61 In the case of tax collectors, the Exchequer officials had to consider whether such places had actually been burned, destroyed and so left empty, usually before the date of the collection to which the claims related, or before the date of the relevant tax grant, and whether those places were still destroyed and empty at the time of any inquisition, or not. If so many places had been destroyed, forcing the inhabitants to leave their homes and abandon their livelihood, the effect on the surrounding area would indeed have been devastating, bringing everyday life to a standstill, apparently for several years.62 There are one or two instances of such flight, although these do not relate to communities of lay people, however, an examination of the results of the inquisitions might provide a means to assess the likelihood or otherwise of the collectors’ claims.63 For Shropshire, the inquisition into the first collection of the grant of 1404 appears to give the most detailed information. Held in January 1406, the enquiry was to discover which places had been burned before the date of the quod ad viij li xviijs solebat taxari nichil respondent eo quod monasterium predictum combustum & destructum est totaliter et tenentes monasterii predicti fugierunt extra patriam propter frequentes accessus & invasiones Wallicorum ibidem insurgentium contra Regem & legeanceam suam Et pro eo quod nulla bona seu catalla tenentium predictorum ibidem invenerunt seu invenisse potuerunt ut dicunt super sacramentum suum Et hoc parati sunt verificare qualitercumque [cur’] &c’. The use of the word ‘monastery’ may have arisen out of confusion over the Latin form of the place-name found here; the word ‘town’ is used in the petition for the same grant, at E 179/166/37: ‘villa de albo monasterio’ / ‘tenentes ville predicte’. 61 For instance, the same excuses were given for inability to collect an instalment of the Prince of Wales’s mise in 1403 in parts of Cheshire and Flintshire, because ‘the aforesaid townships were destroyed by the rebels … burned and no-one stayed there for fear of the aforesaid rebels’; see Messham, ‘The County of Flint’, p. 18, citing from SC 6/775/4, m.2 and SC 6/775/5, m. 2: ‘villate predicte … per rebelles destruuntur … comburuntur et nullus in eisdem moram trahit pre timore rebellium predictorum’. This wording also compares with similar excuses found in documents relating to Wales, for example, a late fifteenth-century account roll for the lordship of Ogmore, Glamorgan, in which revenue was stated to have been lost ‘because many tenants fled from the area and their tenements were burnt and destroyed by the Welsh rebels’, Smith, ‘Lordships of Chirk and Oswestry’, p. 393, n. 2, citing J. Beverley Smith, ‘The Lordship of Glamorgan’ (unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Wales, 1957), p. 332. However, these excuses contrast with those found elsewhere for revenue lost because tenants were rebels, Smith, ‘Lordships of Chirk and Oswestry’, p. 394, note 2, citing Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, Chirk Castle Group D, 55, Ministers’ accounts, lordship of Chirk, 1402–3. 62 I am very grateful to Professor A. J. Pollard for his suggestions on this point. 63 See Ross, Accounts of the Stewards of the Talbot Household, p. 56, for an example of a monk being forced to flee his house in Wales (presumably because it had been damaged). The English parson of Hanmer in Flintshire is known to have fled during the rebellion, presumably back home; see Messham, ‘The County of Flint’, p. 19.

62

The Glyn Dŵr Rebellion and Tax Collection first collection, 25 December 1404, and were still empty, just over a year later. The results show that places were divided between those burnt before that date, and from which the tenants had fled (closest to the county boundary), even adding places not mentioned in the original claims, and those not burnt before then, but standing empty (further east, towards the central part of the north of the county). Further details are given, apparently pinpointing individual attacks; Prees had not been burnt before 25 December 1404, but on 11 April 1405, and four places in Pimhill hundred, on 19 September 1405. Although yet another group of places had not been burnt at that time, they had been standing empty since then. All these claims were allowed; therefore this inquisition seems to be suggestive of Welsh attacks in 1404 and 1405, of which repercussions were still being felt at the time of enquiry in 1406. Two subsequent investigations, for the second collection of the 1404 grant and the grant of 1406, were less detailed, and took place in 1408 at a greater distance in time from the collections to which they related, suggesting a slowing down in the rate of Exchequer business, if nothing else. They were also to discover which places had been destroyed before 25 December 1404 and the dates of the relevant collections, 24 June 1405 and 14 February 1407. The list of places for which allowances were made in each of these is identical, and very similar to that of the previous enquiry. These results might suggest that perhaps the further away in time from any attacks, the more the claims they investigated were allowed without question, but by 1412, when the inquisition into collection of tax granted in 1407 was finally held, any ossification of such claims may have been halted. This inquisition was to discover which places had been burnt before the first collection of the grant, due on 2 February 1408, and were still destroyed at the time of enquiry; the results show that claims for destruction in several places were not allowed, and that tax was still owing on the collectors’ account accordingly. The places said not to have been destroyed mostly appear to correspond with those in Bradford and Pimhill hundreds, in the north of the county, stated to have been empty from 19 September 1405, and it is suggested that the tenants had returned home and could have paid their tax by February 1408, approximately two and a half years later. However, allowances were still made for a core of townships in those hundreds, mostly those which were said to have been burned. For Herefordshire, the inquisition into collections of the grant of 1402 was held in 1405, nearly two years after the final collection of the grant, and was to examine the situation in 1402–3. Claims were allowed for some places in Stretford and Webtree hundreds, in which the tenants were said not to be resident, but not for others in Wormelow hundred, which were said to have been burned and empty, but to which tenants had returned after 1402–3 and paid their taxes. The collectors’ claims for the grant of 1404 met with similar mixed success; the relevant inquisition was held in 1406, only seven months after the last collection to which it related, and referred to the period 63

Helen Watt 1404–5. However, a much wider area was involved than for the grant of 1402, perhaps suggestive of new attacks, covering all the places taxed in Webtree and Wormelow hundreds and stretching a remarkable distance towards the Gloucestershire border.64 Even though some claims were disallowed for the same reasons as before, this suggests that repercussions of the revolt may have been far-reaching, if only in the short term, unless the effects of previous difficulties were still being felt. At the very least, more tax collectors may have been jumping onto the bandwagon to try and gain exceptions. Taken at face value, the results of these enquiries show certain characteristics which might suggest that the Exchequer did not simply rubber-stamp the collectors’ petitions, and that these may have contained at least a grain of truth. The results vary quite markedly between the two counties and over time, and also between different areas of the same county; in Shropshire, there may have been some variation in the success of allowances for places in Bradford and Pimhill hundreds as noted above, but allowances were made consistently for all places in Ford and Chirbury hundreds in all enquiries. Also, allowances were not always made for the full amount assessed on each place; at least in Herefordshire only part of the amounts due for the fifteenth and tenth of 1402 could not be collected.65 On the other hand, there are certain aspects of the inquisitions which may clearly have affected the outcome; one such feature is the length of time which could elapse between date of the collection in question and the date on which the relevant inquisition was held.66 At some point previously, the relevant places may have been destroyed or deserted, but by the time of enquiry, the inhabitants were said to have returned and could have paid their taxes, so that some of the initial claims were no longer valid. This gives a hint of refusal to pay, rather than inability, although the local people may still have been suffering hardship on their return if they had ever actually left. However, delays also often appear to have been caused by the length of time taken by the collectors to attend the Exchequer to have their account heard in the first place.67 The very fact that 64

Although the reports of a stand-off in 1405 between the Welsh forces with their French allies, and the English army under Henry IV as far into England as Worcestershire have been thrown into doubt (see Davies, Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr, p. 194), ongoing research by Gideon Brough forming part of the Ph.D. thesis noted above, may lead to confirmation of this meeting. Claims for damage in the areas of Herefordshire highlighted by the 1404 tax grant include claims for tax collections made in 1405, which may have arisen through damage caused by the Welsh and French on their way west and north, thereby also perhaps lending some weight to this otherwise discredited event. 65 See amounts noted in the inquisition in E 368/177 rots. 212d–212, compared with amounts listed for the same townships in Webtree hundred in Lay Subsidy of 1334, pp. 127–8; for example, only 24s 4d out of £2 8s 9d could be collected in Wormbridge and associated townships. 66 For example, the inquisition into claims for allowance from the lay grant of 1407 was not held until 1412; see Appendix I below. 67 For example, an entry in E 159/182 among the communia for Michaelmas term 1405

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The Glyn Dŵr Rebellion and Tax Collection some claims failed, not because there had not been destruction or because the inhabitants had not fled, but because there had only been partial destruction, and desertion for a short time, might lead to the conclusion that at least some disruption had actually taken place.68 Also, the earliest Shropshire inquisition appears to contain such specific and varied information, especially in giving dates for attacks by the Welsh, in response to the tax collectors’ claims that it is difficult to imagine that this was complete fabrication. What seems to emerge from all the scenarios in these inquisitions is that fear of attacks on property and means of livelihood was a potent weapon in the armoury of the Welsh rebels when mounting raids into England. The English then complained that they had to flee from such terror. Even if they went into hiding for just a short time, then the Welsh tactics had proved successful. However, what better way for the English to claw back some money for compensation or regeneration on returning home than to gain an allowance for unpaid tax? The rebellion may simply have provided a handy excuse for non-payment, and does seem to have been accepted as such, but a possible clue as to what lay behind the claims might be found in a petition to Parliament made by the people of Shropshire in 1410. They requested a remission from the farm of the county, which could not be raised because of the Welsh rebellion, during which a large part of five hundreds close to the Welsh marches were said to have been ‘degastez, destruit, disenhabitees’, and from which no profit could be found until they were relieved and re-inhabited.69 Although they were not asking for remission of tax in this instance, the notion of the need for relief found here might also be applied to tax collection.

shows that the sheriff of Shropshire had been ordered to distrain against the collectors of the two fifteenths and tenths of 1404 (payable on Christmas Day 1404) for not appearing to have their account heard on three occasions during 1405. However, they only suffered penalties in 1406, when their manors were seized and two were thrown into the Fleet prison. Further days in Easter, Trinity and Michaelmas term 1406 were then given for them to appear, after which, in late 1406, their property was distrained again, and further writs sent to the sheriff. 68 The wording of the 1412 Shropshire inquisition is as follows: ‘… all other townships and hamlets were in the aforesaid sixth year partly burned and destroyed in various places by the aforesaid Welsh rebels And the tenants of the same townships and hamlets left and fled the area for a short time in the aforesaid sixth year But afterwards in the same sixth year, the same tenants … returned and lived there and paid the amount of two fifteenths and tenths well and faithfully’ (‘… omnia alia ville et hameletta in anno sexto predicto in parte combusta fuerunt et destructa per diversa loca per rebelles Wall’ predictos Et tenentes eorundem villarum et hamelettorum exierunt et fugierunt extra patriam illam per modicum tempus anno sexto predicto Set postea eodem anno sexto ijdem tenentes … reversi fuerunt et ibidem commorati fuerunt et summam de duabus xvis and xis predictis … bene et fideliter solverunt’); E 368/181, States and Views of Account, Easter term, rot. 245. 69 PROME, parliament of 1410, item 6 (Rot. Parl., III, 636–7).

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Helen Watt In examining the amounts allowed on lay tax collectors’ accounts, an overall pattern very similar to that of clerical taxation emerges; whereas the sums allowed for Herefordshire and Shrewsbury only amount to 2.25% and 6.76% of the total to be collected for the reign, this compares with 18.5% of the total to be collected for Shropshire. In Herefordshire, the amount lost per collection was only 2.5% in 1402 and 7.25% in 1404, but for Shropshire, 29% was allowed in 1404, rising to the surprisingly large figure of 33.5% in 1406, before tailing off to 11% in 1410. Together with £47 allowed on the account of Shrewsbury tax collectors, noted below, the overall deficit from taxation during the reign on account of the rebellion from both counties is just under 11%. If not wholly un-anticipated, this would surely have been most unwelcome. Even though Shropshire, the largest inland English county, only contributed £644 12s ¼d (around 1.75%) to the £37,000 received from one lay fifteenth and tenth in England, any loss from the expected revenue, especially at this time of conflict, must have had its effect.70 A peak of claims also appears to have been reached in the grants of 1406 or thereabouts; again, this may reflect a backlash from earlier problems. Also, although the king faced financial ruin in 1404, he would have lost a large proportion of the expected tax revenue from Shropshire and Shrewsbury in 1407. Therefore, the accounts of these tax collectors might provide a picture in miniature of the difficulties faced by the king after 1404. Shrewsbury Parliamentary petitions There does not appear to be any direct evidence that the Shropshire tax collectors sought extra reinforcement of a request for allowance.71 The collectors for Shrewsbury, however, went through an elaborate procedure to ensure success. In their case, it may have been thought necessary or expedient to 70

Shropshire’s contribution included £94 0s 6¼d (just over 0.25%) for Shrewsbury and its suburbs; Herefordshire contributed £437 5s 11d (just over 1.25%); Lay Subsidy of 1334, pp. 122, 249, 257. 71 A search of TNA series SC 8 and PROME has been made, with no results. However, one document, a plea on behalf of the tax collectors in Shropshire, tantalisingly refers to a schedule annexed, containing their grievances, but this schedule is unfortunately no longer extant (SC 8/141/7023). Although this document is undated, the script may suggest a date in the fifteenth century. It is endorsed ‘soit baille a Roi’ (let it be sent to the king) and was therefore intended for the king’s consideration; one conjecture might be that the lost schedule referred to the collectors of the fifteenths and tenths for the reign of Henry IV. However, other such documents have already been found to relate specifically to claims for difficulties in tax collection on account of lawlessness in Shropshire relating to the grant made to Henry V in 1413, and not on account of the rebellion (SC 8/23/1130, SC 8/23/1146–SC 8/23/1148, C 1/69/168), therefore, its relevance here must remain uncertain for the time being. I am very grateful to Dr Shelagh Sneddon, of the SC 8 ‘Medieval Petitions’ project based at the University of York, for discussing these documents and drawing my attention to those for the reign of Henry V.

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The Glyn Dŵr Rebellion and Tax Collection obtain an order from the king to secure allowance, the very procedure stated in the clerical documents to be unnecessary. These efforts may imply that remission was desperately needed and could not be obtained at all or as quickly by any other means. The Shrewsbury collectors initially petitioned the Exchequer for an allowance of £5 8s 1½d from each of the two collections of the grant of 1404 for places in the suburbs of the town.72 However, as noted above, there is a suggestion that the process of holding local inquisitions may have been unnecessarily delayed or frustrated in their case. This presumably explains why they also subsequently took petitions to the Parliaments of 1406, and of 1407 in Gloucester.73 The first of these petitions was for exemption from any future taxes for a similar amount, for the suburbs mentioned above, while those places were in ruins, having been burned down by the Welsh rebels.74 The second plea went much further, in requesting exemption from any tenths granted during the rebellion, not only on account of the destruction of those suburbs, but also for multifarious other reasons.75 Some of these may sound a little far-fetched, such as a loss of armour in 1398, but they include the destruction of part of the town, perhaps to protect it from further damage from the rebels at the time of the battle of Shrewsbury, which in Shropshire would presumably have been a watershed for destruction wreaked by both sides. Nevertheless, the Shrewsbury petitioners also stated that the town’s taxpayers had very creditably contributed more than 400 marks towards taxation since the Coventry Parliament of 1404; their payments can indeed be verified from surviving Exchequer records.76 However, if they had paid their dues so successfully, this still raises the question of why a remission was required. Damage sustained by the town may even have been exaggerated, as suggested by a royal grant of 1446 to the town’s burgesses.77 However,

72

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74 75 76 77

These were stated to be Frankville, Newton, Meole Brace, Newbold, Edgbold and Shelton, and Monk Meole, although in the particulars of account for the tenths, the suburbs of Shrewsbury are normally given as Shelton, Hencott, Sutton, Meole Brace, Newton, Edgebold and Meole (see Lay Subsidy of 1334, p. 257). Their attempts can be verified from payments for their travelling expenses to Gloucester, recorded in the relevant Bailiff’s accounts for Shrewsbury. I am very grateful to Dr Maureen Jurkowski for this reference, taken from notes made by her from Shrewsbury: Shropshire Archives, Shrewsbury Borough Records, 3365/355. See I. R. Abbott, ‘Taxation of Personal Property and of Clerical Incomes, 1399 to 1402’, Speculum 17 (October 1942), 471–98 (p. 478), for details of expenses paid to tax collectors of towns by the towns themselves; also A. R. Myers, Crown, Household and Parliament in Fifteenth Century England (London, 1985), p. 8. PROME, parliament of 1406, item 123 (Rot. Parl., III, 597). PROME, parliament of 1407, item 51 (Rot. Parl., III, 618–19). See Appendix II, Table B below. Kido, ‘English Government Finance’, p. 82; H. Owen and J. B. Blakeway, History of Shrewsbury, 2 vols. (London, 1825), I, 204, n. 2; CPR, 1441–1446, p. 411; however, it was

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Helen Watt their hard-won exemption might have been a reward for loyalty, in compensation for the townspeople’s hardship after the battle of Shrewsbury, similar to that made to the loyal inhabitants of Mortimer-held Ludlow in 1405.78 Since neither petition received an immediate response, the town’s case for exemption was evidently put to the king’s council, and on 28 February 1408 a pardon of £47 was gained, practically all the third collection of the most recent grant of one and a half fifteenths and tenths.79 In effect, this award equates to a remission of the amount originally requested spread over all seven of the statutory collections of fifteenths and tenths between 1404 and 1407, and more besides, perhaps to cover contributions towards the November 1404 subsidy on lands. The long delay in gaining this allowance shows how much time and trouble, not to mention expense and persistence, the town was willing to invest in the process. Maureen Jurkowski has suggested that one of the Parliamentary petitions may have been promoted by David Holbache, a Welsh lawyer who, despite anti-Welsh ordinances, held several administrative offices for the crown.80 These included that of auditor of the accounts of the treasurers of war, the officials who handled the proceeds of the experimental subsidy of March 1404, and he would therefore have had knowledge of allowances made in that grant for damage caused by the rebellion. He had also been steward of the town and lordship of Oswestry and, in 1407 and 1409, commissioned with others to audit the murage accounts of Shrewsbury. He would also have been well-acquainted with the results of rebel attacks in the region and aware of an urgent need for funds, including funds for rebuilding, all the more so since it appears from his petitions to Parliament that his own property was hit by the rebels as well.81 He was never a supporter of Glyn Dŵr, and would perhaps have been eager to right the wrongs caused by the rebellion in Shrewsbury and environs.82 As Member of Parliament variously for both Shrewsbury and Shropshire between 1406 and 1417, including representing the shire at the Gloucester parliament of 1407, he would indeed have been

78

79 80 81

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still understood that Owain Glyn Dŵr had burned the suburbs of Shrewsbury, and perhaps if the townspeople had not put up a good defence at that particular time, more of the county would have suffered damage by the Welsh. SC 8/198/9852 and CPR, 1401–1405, p. 485. For other royal rewards paid out of taxation, see payments made to two of Henry IV’s supporters, Lancashire tax collectors, who had suffered losses at the battle themselves; CPR, 1401–1405, pp. 254, 257. CPR, 1405–1408, p. 414. M. Jurkowski, ‘The Arrest of William Thorpe in Shrewsbury and the anti-Lollard Statute of 1406’, Historical Research 75 (2002), 273–95 (p. 291); CPR, 1405–1408, p. 351. CPR, 1405–1408, p. 341; CPR, 1408–1413, p. 146; Williams, Renewal and Reformation, p. 12; Welsh Biography On-line, available via the National Library of Wales’s website at www. yba.llgc.org.uk. Williams, Renewal and Reformation, p. 6.

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The Glyn Dŵr Rebellion and Tax Collection an experienced and influential advocate for the Shrewsbury petitions, if the normal process of Exchequer inquisitions had gone awry.83 Actual attacks or exaggerated claims? The tax officials, therefore, were prepared to go to great lengths to gain recompense for hardship they claimed had been caused by Welsh raids. As Professor Davies notes, ‘there is a wide range of evidence from the western halves of Cheshire, Shropshire and Herefordshire of the great damage inflicted by the rebellion’.84 From the outbreak of the rebellion in 1400 to its collapse in 1409, events took place which may have caused the disruption claimed by the tax collectors. The early hostilities in 1400 included the burning of Hawarden in Flintshire and Eccleston and Pulford in Cheshire, some of the very places for which allowances were claimed by the clerical tax collectors in the archdeaconry of Chester.85 After the battle of Bryn Glas on 22 June 1402, Leominster was fortified against invasion; just west of the town lies Staunton on Arrow, one of the places in Herefordshire for which allowance was made from the tax of 1402. Since the distance between the battlefield and Staunton on Arrow is only approximately 10 miles, it is easy to imagine that the conflict may have had repercussions in that area.86 Shortly after this, in early 1403, the borders of Shropshire and Cheshire were also clearly under pressure from the rebels, as royal orders were given to defend Shropshire and ‘resist the rebels of Wales who increasingly harass the king’s loyal subjects from day to day’, and the Prince of Wales also gave orders to keep watches in Cheshire and Flintshire.87 After the battle of Shrewsbury on 21 July 1403, there were fears that the Welsh forces were still about to invade Shropshire and Cheshire, and the townspeople of Shrewsbury had to find armaments, including arrows and shot and gunpowder for guns, including ‘on the day when Owen was at the town’.88 However, it was from Herefordshire that Richard Kingston’s well-

83 84 85

86 87

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Welsh Biography On-line. Davies, Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr, p. 281. Messham, ‘The County of Flint’, p. 11. It may also be significant that the incumbents of Hawarden and Pulford, as well as Dodleston, also in Cheshire, were among rebels pardoned for their part in the battle of Shrewsbury in July 1403; CPR, 1401–1405, p. 264. Davies, Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr, p. 109. Signet Letters, p. 40, no. 97 of 1 January 1403; The Thirty-sixth Annual Report of the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records (London, 1875), appendix II, no. 1, Welsh Records, pp. 211, 261, entries for March and June 1403. Shrewsbury, Shropshire Archives, Shrewsbury Borough Records, 3365/354.

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Helen Watt known letter came, giving details of an actual invasion.89 Some damage to the English border counties must have occurred in 1403, as by March 1404, the grant of the extraordinary subsidy acknowledges destruction in those areas, and by April 1404, Cheshire justices had heard the indictment of Welsh marauders, one of whom claimed to have taken part in burning of towns in Flintshire and Shropshire, saying ‘why should I deny it’, with a bravado which might give a ring of truth to his testimony.90 Further attacks must also have taken place in 1404, as by June, it was the turn of the inhabitants of Herefordshire to petition the council for help against a horde of Welsh rebels who had entered Archenfield, burning houses, killing people, taking prisoners ‘to the great dishonour of the king and damage to the county’.91 Places claimed in both lay and clerical tax records to be ruined also included Baschurch in Shropshire, where the vicar reported that the church had been destroyed by fire, so that he was granted a licence in October 1404 to celebrate divine service elsewhere.92 As noted above, places for which Shropshire lay tax collectors claimed allowances include Whitchurch, in the lordship of Blakemere. An investigation of surviving records for this estate shows that the Welsh raided it in 1404, with damage there extending to key buildings such as the mill, which did not function for the next five years.93 However, the household accounts of the Blakemere stewards for 1401–2 already reflect some effects of the rebellion in recording such items as wages of retainers for the Welsh war.94 Had any further accounts survived between 1402 and 1410, they might have provided a possible source for evidence of local difficulties in supplying that household throughout the revolt. By 1409–10, bailiff’s accounts for the estate contain large amounts of arrears of rents which were subsequently cancelled, showing difficulties caused by the actions of the Welsh.95 In 1405, fears of invasion were renewed, both regarding Herefordshire and Shropshire: the Prince of Wales wrote to the king asking for more men 89

90 91

92 93 94 95

CPR, 1401–1405, p. 285, 10 Aug. 1403; Messham, ‘The County of Flint’, p. 14; Deputy Keeper’s 36th Report, p. 534; Royal and Historical Letters during the Reign of Henry IV, ed. F. C. Hingeston, 2 vols. (Rolls Series, 1860–1965), I, 155–93 (September 1403). Messham, ‘The County of Flint’, p. 17. POPC, I, pp. 223–5, 10 June 1404; their report was soon corroborated by the Prince of Wales, giving the king further news of the fifteen-day-long Welsh raid; ibid., p. 229, 25 June 1404. R. W. Eyton, Antiquities of Shropshire, 12 vols. (1860), X, 140. Pollard, ‘Estate Management in the Later Middle Ages’, p. 560, and ‘The Family of Talbot’, pp. 359–60. Ross, Accounts of the Stewards of the Talbot Household at Blakemere, p. 62. Ibid., pp. 173–4; see for example Shrewsbury, Shropshire Archives, Bridgewater estate records, 212/Box 86, rolls 5–8, for accounts, 1409–10, for Marbury, part of that estate, which show that arrears of rent were still outstanding for the period 1404–8 (compared with very small amounts or none from the period 1390–4). I am very grateful to Dr Philip Morgan for his suggestions on these records.

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The Glyn Dŵr Rebellion and Tax Collection to resist the rebels, who were in Builth, planning to enter Herefordshire and the marches.96 The earl of Arundel was ordered by the council to stay at Oswestry to safeguard the marches of Wales from rebel activity.97 In the same year, the abbot of Shrewsbury gained exemption during his life for the abbey from collection of tenths other than in the diocese in which it lay, also claiming hardship on account of damage to the abbey’s possessions by the Welsh rebels, clearly in order to save the trouble and expense of being coopted to carry out this task by the bishop of a neighbouring diocese.98 Other religious houses such as Aconbury, close to Hereford, were also making claims of destruction.99 In August 1405, the worst fears of invasion were realised when the French landed at Milford Haven to join forces with the Welsh, at a time when the king was extremely short of money to counter them. Remembering this alliance, the inhabitants of Shropshire made an urgent plea for aid to the council in April 1406 as they feared destruction of their goods by the Welsh rebels. They stated that so much damage had occurred in that county that a third of it had been laid waste and that the people had fled elsewhere in the country to support themselves, which echoes claims found in relation to taxation.100 Also in April 1406, Lord Burnell obtained a royal licence to grant the advowson of Rushbury to Buildwas Abbey, whose possessions were said to have been damaged by the Welsh, presumably before that date, causing interruption to religious observance and hardship to the monks.101 As the abbey site is much further east than most places mentioned as having been attacked by the Welsh, this might seem improbable. However, one hamlet in the suburbs of Shrewsbury, claimed by the town’s lay tax collectors to have been destroyed, was Meole, or Monk Meole, so-called because it formed part of the manor of Meole held by Buildwas Abbey.102 If this comprised the possessions claimed to have been damaged, then the destruction there may indeed have contributed to the monks’ hardship. The lay tax grant of 1407 was made for several purposes, including ‘the rebellion in Wales’ and ‘alliances made between Welsh and enemies of Scotland, France and Brittany’, showing that even in its later stages, the Welsh rebellion was still thought to justify large amounts of money to counteract it. Evidence of later attacks is 96 97 98 99 100

101

102

Royal and Historical Letters, II, 18–20, 27 Jan. [1405]. POPC, I, 246–7, 7 Feb. 1405. CPR, 1405–1408, p. 22; See McHardy, ‘Clerical Taxation’, p. 172. Wylie, Henry IV, II, pp. 8–9 (CPR, 1405–1408, p. 50, patent of 7 Sept. 1405). POPC, II, 77–8; this letter has been variously dated to 1403 and 1404, but I tend to agree with Gideon Brough that it may in fact date from 1406, as it refers to the Welsh and the advent of their allies, the French, who landed in 1405. Owen and Blakeway, History of Shrewsbury, I, 201, where it is stated that the advowson was granted by Lord Burnell in 1407, although he obtained the relevant licence in 1406 (CPR, 1405–1408, p. 192). Lay Subsidy of 1334, p. 257.

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Helen Watt also manifested in the petition presented by the people of Herefordshire at the Gloucester Parliament of 1407, complaining that Welsh rebels and others had also arrived in the county, committing crimes such as hostage-taking and robbery.103 Some sources also tell of a raiding party sent into Shropshire as late as 1409, causing extensive damage at the tail end of the rebellion, which might account for persistent claims for destruction, which all these details of attacks appear to support.104 Loyalists or rebels? The inhabitants of the English counties affected by raids may not simply have been victims of raids, and so unable to pay their taxes. On the contrary, they may have been in collusion with the rebels and more likely to be unwilling to contribute. Owain Glyn Dŵr himself had close connections with the marches of Herefordshire, and given his ambitions under the so-called ‘Tripartite Indenture’ to carve out a much-enlarged Wales from parts of the English border country, and under the ‘Pennal Letter’, to create greatlyenlarged Welsh dioceses, perhaps the Welsh felt that they were re-claiming their own territory.105 Another consideration is the strong Welsh influence in parts of Shropshire and Herefordshire; this is evident in the large number of Welsh place-names found in those areas.106 The Welsh population there is still noticeable in the number of Welsh personal names found in tax records over a hundred years later.107 The Welsh language also persisted in some parts of Herefordshire until the eighteenth century; given all these factors, it seems very likely that there might have been strong support for the rebel cause there.108 Significantly, the counties concerned bordered on Marcher lordships, not all of whose lords were loyal to the crown; these include the lordships of Wigmore and Ewyas Lacy held by Edmund Mortimer.109 He was captured by Owain Glyn Dŵr, and later sided with the Welsh, bringing rebel allegiance ever closer to England, and making these districts likely flash-points for rebel activity. Collusion with the rebels was known to have taken place; in 1402, a

103 104 105 106

107

108 109

PROME, parliament of 1407, item 41 (Rot. Parl., III, 615). Owen and Blakeway, History of Shrewsbury, I, 206. W. Rees, An Historical Atlas of Wales from Early to Modern Times (Cardiff, 1951), plate 52 and p. 47, figure iv. B. G. Charles, ‘The Welsh, their Language and Place-names in Archenfield and Oswestry’, in Angles and Britons: O’Donnell Lectures, ed. H. Lewis (Cardiff, 1963), pp. 85–110. See The Lay Subsidy for Shropshire 1524–7, ed. M. A. Faraday, Shropshire Record Series 3 (Keele, 1999); Herefordshire Taxes in the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. M. A. Faraday (Chippenham, 2005), pp. 35–139. I am very grateful to Dr W. R. M. Griffiths for information regarding the Welsh population of Herefordshire. Rees, Historical Atlas, plate 49.

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The Glyn Dŵr Rebellion and Tax Collection commission was issued to enquire into reports that various men of Herefordshire had taken grain, victuals and armour to Wales for the rebels, contrary to royal orders.110 The lands of rebels in the borders were also forfeited and granted away, including lands in Shropshire said to be ‘situated on the frontier of the Welsh rebels.’111 Even such lands sometimes came attached with claims of damage by the Welsh; Ellesmere and Hamptonwood showed a nil return for a surplus of issues between 1404 and 1412, because the lands were ‘waste, burned and destroyed by the Welsh rebels’.112 Rebels from these areas were not only found among the laity; in the Welsh diocese of St David’s, neighbouring on Herefordshire, large proportions of clerical tenths could not be collected in the archdeaconry of Brecon, in such border benefices as Hay, because churches had been burned, or because many rectors were rebels.113 Anti-Welsh ordinances and statutes of 1401 and afterwards banned trade with the Welsh, and these orders might have had a detrimental effect on the economy of areas traditionally involved, except that they were clearly regularly flouted. As far afield as Barnstaple, a former mayor was accused in 1404 of having sent supplies to Owain Glyn Dŵr.114 In Cheshire, the Prince’s council also heard complaints of continued trade between Cheshire men and Welsh rebels with intermediaries in the marcher lordships of Bromfield and Yale, and Dyffryn Clwyd; the absurd situation also arose there in which the rebels were found to have been selling their own cattle to the local men, together with cattle stolen from those very men!115 If there were sympathisers in the border counties, the loyalty or otherwise of tax officials in those areas might also be questionable. One royal servant, Thomas Barneby, chamberlain of North Wales, was known for his corruption

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111 112 113

114 115

CPR, 1401–1405, p.135, 17 Aug. 1402; see also CPR, 1405–1408, p. 65; CPR, 1401–1405, pp. 438–9, for grants of pardons in 1403 and 1405 to rebels of Shropshire and Herefordshire, including rebels from the Mortimer lordships of Ewyas Lacy and Ewyas Harold. CPR, 1401–1405, p. 212; C 66/369, 4 Hen. IV, Part II, m. 34. The original document reads: ‘super frontera rebellium … Wall’ … scituata’. Signet Letters, p. 53, no. 172, 30 Nov. 1403; ibid., p. 55, no. 178, 31 Dec. 1403; SC 6/967/15. E 368/175, States and views of account, Easter term 1403, rots. 289 and 288d; exemptions from the third instalment of the grant of 1401 included amounts for benefices whose incumbents were said to be rebels and for benefices which were said to have been destroyed; also E 368/181, States and views of account, Michaelmas term 1408, rot. 215, more than £26 was claimed out of a total of just under £37, for benefices including Hay and others on the border with Herefordshire, for the first instalment of the grant of 1402; in E 159/185, among the communia for Michaelmas term 1408, they appear to have been entirely exempted from the second and third instalments of the grant, following an inquisition at Hereford on Monday, 29 July 1409; E 368/175, rots. 289d and 288d. North Devon Record Office, Barnstaple Borough, B1/441. Messham, ‘The County of Flint’, p. 18; Deputy Keeper’s 36th Report, pp. 340, 534.

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Helen Watt and sometimes-doubtful loyalty; however, he was an individual whose services the king could not do without, and he was only dismissed in the next reign.116 Although several Shropshire tax collectors can be traced as men of substance (jurors, burgesses, witnesses to deeds, justices and sheriffs), most, if not all, were presumably loyal.117 Those on the side of the English crown include at least three Welsh officials in Shropshire, David Holbache, and two of the tax collectors, Rhirid de Middleton and Gruffuth Sowdeley or de Southley.118 Richard Fonsell, one Herefordshire collector of the fifteenth and tenth of 1402, may be the only identifiable rebel among the tax officials. An individual of this name was the subject of an inquisition post mortem of 1403 in which he was described as a rebel in Henry Percy’s party, and an adherent of Owain Glyn Dŵr.119 If this individual and the tax collector are one and the same, then it is tempting to conclude that he may have been less than trustworthy in his office. He might even have diverted funds to Percy, and the date of the inquisition, 23 November, might suggest that he died with him at Shrewsbury. Can’t pay or won’t pay? However, the Exchequer systems themselves may also have proved to weaken the tax collectors’ claims and that general inefficiency of tax collecting and accounting compounded problems of a shortfall in revenue from taxation. The collection in 1401 of the aid to marry the king’s eldest daughter, Blanche, seems to have been particularly problematical, possibly indicative of unwillingness or refusal to contribute. The Shropshire collectors do not seem to have made any returns, perhaps because they claimed not to have received their commission to collect; they were still being pursued by the Exchequer

116

R. A. Griffiths, ‘The Glyn Dŵr Rebellion in North Wales through the Eyes of an Englishman’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 22 (1967), 151–68. 117 Shropshire tax collectors for the grant of 1401 include Thomas de Hynton; this may be the Thomas Hinton of whom little is known apart from his tenure the in vill of Hinton, held of the lordship of Blakemere. In 1402, they include Griffin Wareyn, lord of the manor of Ightfield near Whitchurch; allowances on tax collectors’ accounts included amounts for the townships of Ightfield and Calverhall, said to be empty before Christmas 1404; it seems unlikely that local tenants of this kind would side with the Welsh. They may have wished to avoid payment of taxes, but they also may have seen the need to alleviate any hardship in the area; see Bumpus, ‘The “Middling Sort” in the Lordship of Blakemere, Shropshire’, p. 218. 118 Davies, Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr, p. 225 (Middleton); Ross, Accounts of the Stewards of the Talbot Household, p. 47 (Southley, as a retainer of Lord Furnivall). 119 CIM, 1399–1422, pp. 136–7, 262; CPR, 1401–1405, p. 316. However, a ‘Richard Fontell’ does appear in a later entry in E 159/185, among the communia for Michaelmas term 1408, which might throw this theory into doubt.

74

The Glyn Dŵr Rebellion and Tax Collection in the first year of the reign of Henry V.120 In Wales, the rebellion did lead to refusal to pay rents; in 1401, the Prince of Wales reported that some of his tenants in South Wales were deliberately refusing to pay their dues and debts because they anticipated a new rebellion.121 Failure to pay such rents, again on the strength of fear of attack, might be regarded as one more success in the economic warfare caused by Welsh raids. Other claims of destruction by the Welsh Tax collectors were not the only officials to present the Exchequer with excuses for non-collection as a result of the rebellion; sheriffs and escheators did the same. In 1405, the former sheriff of Shropshire was allowed a reduction of £40 in his farm owing to destruction by Welsh rebels; the tax collectors had specified destruction in five hundreds of the county, but the sheriff claimed damage in six, adding Condover hundred to the list of places said to have been devastated by the Welsh.122 Contemporary or near contemporary corroboration of the tax collectors’ claims may also be supported by evidence from inquisitions post mortem for the English border counties, and these might also point to slow recovery afterwards. Some of the very lands claimed by Shropshire tax collectors to have been destroyed are themselves the subject of such enquiries. In 1403, Yockleton, Shelve, and Wentnor were described as being in the borderlands and suffering raids by the Welsh, frequently causing damage there.123 Nearly thirty years later, the same manors were again assessed at a reduced value on that account, because they were still in a state of devastation.124 Similar evidence is available for Myddle in Shropshire, in 1403 described as ‘almost wasted by the Welsh rebels’, although this does not appear to have passed into folk memory, as no mention of it is made in the famous seventeenth-century local history.125 However, in 1413–14, the bailiff’s arrears there were more than double the amount they had been in 1395–6,

120 121

122 123 124 125

Jurkowski et al., Lay Taxes, p. 73; E 159/187, among the communia for Trinity term 1411; E 159/190, Exchequer writs, Michaelmas term 1413. Davies, Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr, p. 105; see also p. 120 for an account of the pragmatic Welshman of Kidwelly who took a lease in 1404 from St Mary’s Abbey, Leicester, with a stipulation for release from payment of rent if rebels destroyed the district. Signet Letters, p. 81, no. 329. CIPM, 1399–1405, pp. 330–1, 967–8. CIPM, 1427–1432, pp. 393–4, 488; pp. 424–5, 529. CIPM, 1399–1405, p. 320, 943; R. Gough, The History of Myddle, ed. D. Hey (Harmondsworth, 1981). Reliable or not, the often-formulaic proofs of age may still have a ring of truth about them in this case, as some places mentioned overlap with places earmarked for exemption by Herefordshire tax collectors a few years earlier. For example, in 1430, memories of the rebellion include the destruction of Chanstone by fire during a sudden Welsh raid; CIPM, 1427–1432, p. 480, 598.

75

Helen Watt which might also suggest difficulties of some kind in the area during that period.126 An alternative explanation might be that although the rebellion’s impact on economy and society in Wales and the Marches was severe, it was not the only cause of decline, as it may have given added impetus to several trends already in progress, such as a downward spiral of the economy.127 If true of Wales, this may also have been true of border areas; indeed, Professor Pollard states that similar trends are apparent in those areas, and particularly in Whitchurch.128 Conclusion In assessing the extent of damage caused by the revolt in England reflected in tax and other records, certain pitfalls of those records arise. English lay tax particulars of account were often copied one from the other without revision. Therefore, claims for damage and decay caused by the rebellion, which may have occurred at the time, might persist until many years later.129 Ministers’ accounts and rentals also often suffer in this way, and evidence from 1448 in such records for the lordship of Newport shows that claims for damage to property caused by the rebellion might not even have held much water at the time.130 Details from Inquisitions post mortem appear to corroborate the tax collectors’ claims, yet the results of such enquiries have also been shown to be unreliable in some cases for a variety of reasons, including the survival of conflicting evidence, and the desire of jurors or commissioners to influence their outcome.131 Problems with dating the Cheshire inquisitions concerned with events of the rebellion have also led to uncertainties over their interpretation.132 The lay tax collectors’ claims also rest on verdicts of local inquisitions, which may also require cautious treatment. Dr Kido doubts the veracity of exemptions from taxation, unless a series spanning a number of years had

126 127 128 129 130

131

132

Shrewsbury, Shropshire Archives, Bridgewater Estate Records, 212/Box 14. R. R. Davies, Lordship and Society in the March of Wales 1282–1400 (Oxford, 1978), pp. 426, 465–6. Pollard, ‘Estate Management in the Later Middle Ages’, p. 560. The Marcher Lordships of South Wales 1415–1536: Select Documents, ed. T. B. Pugh (Cardiff, 1963), p. 162. Ibid., p. 163; damage to property in Caerleon was said in 1448 to have occurred during the rebellion, even though that property was in decay by 1402. However, further evidence from 1402 shows that the same houses had already been demolished to facilitate new building, and allowance had been made on the account for them since the late fourteenth century. R. F. Hunnisett, ‘The Reliability of Inquisitions as Historical Evidence’, in The Study of Medieval Records: Essays in honour of Kathleen Major, ed. D. A. Bullough and R. L. Storey (Oxford, 1971), pp. 206–35, p. 206. Messham, ‘The County of Flint’, pp. 11–12.

76

The Glyn Dŵr Rebellion and Tax Collection been sanctioned by government enquiries. Even then, he suggests that the inquisitions themselves might mask the real reasons for grants of exemptions; this is pertinent, for as noted above, the real reasons for the claim of the Shrewsbury tax collectors may be obscure. Whatever the vagaries of the sources, the fact that such similar evidence emerges from them tends to reinforce the notion that extensive damage on account of the rebellion took place in the English border counties as well as in Wales. Destruction of property and dislocation of everyday life appears to have occurred there at the time and lasted for some years afterwards, mirroring the situation found in many ministers’ accounts from crown lands in Wales and Marcher lordships. Furthermore, hardship claimed by the king’s subjects in those border counties culminated in grants of exemptions and allowances from taxation, specifically on account of the rebellion. It is even more telling that royal permission was given to make truces, notably to the people of Shropshire in 1404, and to the abbot of Dore Abbey in Herefordshire in 1405. Professor Davies saw these truces as a testimony to the success of the economic warfare employed by the Welsh during the rebellion.133 This success may, however, be tempered by other forces at work, such as natural disasters, general trends in the economy and tax evasion, as suggested above. Hardship might also have been caused by the rebellion at the time, but recovery might have been achieved more quickly than the evidence suggests. Nevertheless, the records of taxation and other sources contain such an accumulation of claims for damage in the English border counties on account of the rebellion as to be strongly suggestive of the success of the rebellion there, at least at its height. The argument that cross-border raiding by the Welsh caused much havoc and destruction on the margins of Cheshire, Shropshire and Herefordshire, as well threatening the king’s authority and finances, may be summed up by a final word from Adam Usk: My heart trembles when I think of this dire blow against English rule inflicted by Owen; backed by a force of thirty thousand men who would issue forth from their caves, he seized castles everywhere throughout Wales and the march … and burned the towns. What more can I say?134

133

POPC, I, 236, c. 30 Aug. 1404; CPR, 1405–1408, p. 65; Davies, Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr, p. 235. 134 Chronicle of Adam Usk, pp. 160–1.

77

Grant

E 179/166/47, Compotus, referring to pardon of 28 Feb. 1408 relating to 3rd collection; see CPR, 1405-1408, p. 414

E 179/166/28, Particulars of account

1407, One and a half fifteenths & tenths

Two Inquisitions, both 11 Apr. 1412, E 368/181, Easter term 1409, rots. 248d, 249d, 245

E 179/166/48, Commission Inquisition, 7 Apr. 1408 E 368/179, Easter term and inquisition 1407, unnumbered rot. (contemporary rot. 18)

1406, One fifteenth & tenth

E 101/512/12, Petition for allowance, 1st & 2nd collections

Memoranda Rolls

Herefordshire

Inquisition, 16 Jan. 1406, E 368/178, Michaelmas term 1406, rot. 259

E 179/166/65, Petition for allowance (1st collection); E 101/512/12, Petition for allowance (2nd collection)

Records of Lay Taxation, etc.

E 179/166/36, Particulars of account; E 179/166/37, Petition for allowance; E 101/512/12, Commission to hold inquisition (1st collection); E 179/166/40, Commission and inquisition (2nd collection) Two Inquisitions, (a) 11 Jan. 1406, E 368/177, Easter term, 1404, rots. 257d, 258–258d (1st collection); (b) 7 Apr. 1408, E 368/179, Hilary term 1407, unnumbered rot. (2nd collection)

Shrewsbury Records of Lay Taxation, etc.

1404, Two fifteenths & tenths

Memoranda Rolls

Shropshire

Inquisition, 10 Oct. 1405, E 368/177, Michaelmas term 1404, rots. 212d, 212

Records of Lay Taxation, etc.

1402, One fifteenth & tenth

Date and Type

Exchequer enrolments of inquisitions and associated lay tax documents containing references to claims for allowance on tax collectors’ accounts owing to the Glyn Dŵr rebellion

Appendix I

3.75%

40 15   4

758 17   3¾

  36 02 08¾

  72 05 05½

134 00 4¼

  277 02 05¼

  831 07 03¾

  831 07 03¾

  554 04 10½

  831 07 03¾

  554 04 10½

  277 02 05¼

  831 07 03¾

Amount payable, £sd   831 07 03¾

418 10 10½

*

  62 18 05†

125 14 05¼

  65 15 01

  98 14 06

  65 08 05¼

*

*

Amount allowed, £sd *

%

  7.25%

  7.5%

15%

11.75%

11.75%

11.75%

Archdeaconries of Salop and Hereford, Diocese of Hereford

17.75% 5819 11 02¼

18%

   6 08 02

4%

  2 04 00

18%

  19 14 06

108 08 02¼

3%

  4 08 00†

27%

  29 16 06¾

108 08 02¼

7%

10 12 00

27%

  19 17 08½

7%

  7 01 04

25%

  27 00 00

108 08 02¼

6%

21%

  15 06 08

  9 02 00

18%

   6 18 09¼

  36 02 08¾   72 05 05½

  8%

%

   8 18 00

Amount allowed, £sd *

108 08 02¼

3.5%

2.5%

%

Amount payable, £sd 108 08 02¼

Archdeaconry of Salop, Diocese of Coventry and Lichfield

  3 10 08†

2

  3 17 04†

Amount allowed, £sd *

Archdeaconry of Chester, Diocese of Coventry and Lichfield

Amount payable, £sd Date and Type 1401, One and a half   153 10 08¼ clerical tenths 1402, One and a half   153 10 08¼ clerical tenths 1403, Half a clerical     51 03 06¾ tenth 1404, Subsidy3 &   102 07 01½ one clerical tenth 1404, One and a half   153 10 08¼ clerical tenths 1406, Subsidy4 &   102 07 01½ one clerical tenth 1407, One and a half   153 10 08¼ clerical tenths 1410, One and a half   153 10 08¼ clerical tenths 1411, Half a clerical     51 03 06¾ tenth Total: 1074 14 9¾

Grant

A: Allowances for Destruction by Welsh Rebels in Clerical Tax Collectors’ Accounts during the Reign of Henry IV1

Appendix II

141 00 11¼

141 00 11¼

11%

18.5% 705 04 08¼

  825 17 07½   90 01 07†

4404 13 03

814 12 10¾

141 00 11¼

33.5%   94 00 07½

29%

  94 00 07½

27%

184 15 04¾

318 10 03¼

%

Amount payable, £sd   94 00 07½

  825 17 07½ 221 05 07¾

  550 11 06

1101 03 03

*

  550 11 06

5

Amount allowed, £sd

Amount payable, £sd   550 11 09

Shropshire

*

*

47 00 00

47 00 00

*

Respite 10 16 03 (presumably included in award below) *

Amount allowed, £sd

Shrewsbury

  648 13 10½

  648 13 10½7

  432 09 02

  864 18 04

  432 09 02

  6.75% 3459 13 07

  33%

%

Amount payable, £sd   432 09 02

73 08 01½

63 02 06

10 05 07½

*

*

*

6

Amount allowed, £sd

Herefordshire

  2.25%

  7.25%

  2.5%

%

* In these instances, no relevant information has been discovered, either because the account was clear, in surplus, or because other allowances were made or amounts were outstanding, but apparently not relating to the rebellion. This applies to Tables A and B. † In these instances, information for the entire grant is incomplete, mostly because amounts were outstanding on the account for one or more instalments, but no evidence has yet been discovered that these relate to the rebellion. This also applies to both Tables A and B.

1406, One fifteenth & tenth 1407, One and a half fifteenths & tenths 1410, 1 One and a half fifteenths & tenths Total:

Date and Type 1401, One fifteenth & tenth 1402, One fifteenth & tenth 1404, Two fifteenths & tenths

Grant

B: Allowances for Destruction by Welsh Rebels in Lay Tax Collectors’ Accounts during the Reign of Henry IV

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

Tables A and B were compiled using the records listed in the text and Appendix I. See also Abbott, ‘Taxation of Personal Property’, pp. 482–7, for details of the collectors’ accounts for the grant of 1401. In cases where two archdeaconries (for example Chester and Stafford) accounted together, only the standard amounts payable for each relevant archdeaconry for each grant have been included here. Although Convocation was held in 1413 at the end of Henry IV’s reign, a further grant of one clerical tenth was not made until after his death. Details of that grant are therefore not included here, although evidence that allowances on account of damage by the Welsh was still being sought exists in TNA series E 179 and in the account and memoranda rolls. The account roll entry shows no evidence of payment, but refers to one of the memoranda rolls for the first year of the next reign; however, no further evidence for this account has yet been found. The clerical subsidy account roll at E 359/20, rots. 1–1d, does not appear to show claims for allowance from the subsidy for any of the areas under consideration. The roll at E 359/20, rots. 2–2d, does not show any evidence of difficulties in payment of this subsidy for the relevant areas; however, an entry for the Archdeaconry of Cardigan in the diocese of St Davids states that inability to collect the subsidy in that archdeaconry had been certified to the Exchequer, citing destruction of all the benefices there as the reason (rot. 2d). The account for the first instalment of this grant was clear; although most of the amount owing was paid by 1402 (see Abbott, ‘Taxation of Personal Property’, p. 479), the collectors were still being called to account by an Exchequer writ of Michaelmas term, 1413 (E 159/190). The account for the first instalment was quit, and for the second instalment showed the sum of £120 outstanding. This has been noted as not having passed through the Exchequer; £90 was used for the defence of Builth Castle, and the remaining £30 to repay part of a loan made to the king by the citizens of Hereford for an expedition to Wales, probably that of 1401 (see Abbott, ‘Taxation of Personal Property’, p. 479, n. 4). This and the similar amount for the next grant are for both Herefordshire and the city of Hereford.

4 Managing the North in the Reign of Henry IV, 1402–1408 Mark Arvanigian

On 25 September 1403, an urgent and quite revealing meeting of the king’s council took place within the precincts of Durham Priory. Chaired by Ralph Neville of Raby, earl of Westmorland and the king’s brother-in-law, the meeting was partly a post mortem on the failed Percy rebellion, culminating in the battle of Shrewsbury, and partly a planning session. Westmorland himself had become, over the previous half-decade, a figure of great national importance; already possessed of a talent for service and sharp political acumen, his marriage to John of Gaunt’s daughter, Joan Beaufort, had brought him into the royal family and its inner circle, making him a formidable figure indeed. Present also were other important Lancastrians, among them Earl Ralph’s brother Thomas, Lord Furnival; the bishop of Durham’s palatine steward, Sir Ralph Eure; the Northumberland sheriff, Sir John Mitford; and Westmorland’s own son-in-law Peter, Lord Mauley, recently wed to Maud Neville, the earl’s daughter from his first marriage to Margaret Stafford. Called in the wake of the king’s victory the prior July over the Percys and their fellow conspirators at Shrewsbury, the group took as its most immediate concern the surrender of the Percy castles in Northumberland, and the effective decommissioning of the senior Henry Percy’s power base in the region, which had been constructed over the preceding three decades and more. Modern scholars, taking their cues in part from contemporary chroniclers, have portrayed the Percys as near-mythical figures in the far north, ascribing to them the singular ability to earn and maintain the fierce loyalty of the region’s shire knights. In the event, this process of decommissioning in Northumberland would take nearly three further years to achieve, as Percy retainers, ensconced as captains of strategic fortresses across the Scottish frontier, consistently stood firm against the king’s men – indeed, remark-



The single most important tenant in the palatinate of Durham, Westmorland, held his lordship of Raby and Staindropshire, comprising the south Durham portion of his lands there, as a free tenant of Durham Priory. Neville holdings in the palatinate are detailed in Ralph and John Neville’s inquisitions post mortem, respectively, found in DURH 3/13, fols. 110 and 228d–232d.  POPC, I, 213–14 and 217.

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Managing the North ably so. Only with the appearance of a rather large royal artillery train in 1406 did their resolve meet a severe test, and cause them to yield. Yet if the near-term goals of the 1403 Durham council were not immediately met, its larger import has nonetheless been overlooked. Not only did those present at Durham that day ultimately achieve for Henry IV what his predecessor had never enjoyed – lasting and reliable control over the far northern reaches of his realm – the council meeting itself was also emblematic of the shift toward the new king’s employment of his own, private retainers in the management of his kingdom. In recent years, the novelty of Henry IV’s use of the great affinity he inherited from his father, John of Gaunt, to bolster his kingship has been the subject of some discussion. Several scholars have argued that this was an important key to his achieving the throne, and many have now turned to the question of its import during the reign itself. Chris Given-Wilson shed ample light on the workings of the Lancastrian affinity within the king’s household in the reign of Henry IV, demonstrating that the household was largely an extension of Henry’s Lancastrian cohort. Douglas Biggs and Simon Walker have further considered the Lancastrian origins of several of the new king’s administrators and justices, and have argued that Henry’s ‘plantation policy’ of royal administration in the shires, was an important step in realizing political success. Still further, Helen Castor has shown the willingness of all three Lancastrian kings to employ old retainers in the localities, a common practice confined to no particular part of the kingdom. Henry IV’s greatest political and administrative asset was the unusually extensive and attentive private retinue assembled over the years by his father, one that Henry himself employed with success throughout his reign. This was in evidence in the king’s policy toward the north following the Shrewsbury campaign: in re-configuring the political hierarchy of the region, the king made good use of old retainers, friends and family to fill the vacuum of leadership left in the wake of the Percy risings. As Gaunt’s heir, Henry was the greatest private landowner in England, yet for all his wealth and private power, he faced as king a problem quite similar to that of his predecessor: how to govern England’s most northerly parts without holding private estates there. Even the great Lancastrian patrimony did not extend readily into the far north, be it the North Riding of Yorkshire or the four most northerly counties: Durham,



Wylie, Henry IV, II, 256. Given-Wilson, Royal Household.  D. Biggs, ‘Henry IV and his Justices of the Peace: The Lancastrianization of Justice, 1399–1413’, in Traditions and Transformations in Late Medieval England, ed. D. Biggs, S. D. Michalove and A. C. Reeves (Leiden, 2002), pp. 59–80.  H. Castor, The King, the Crown, and the Duchy of Lancaster: Public Authority and Private Power, 1399–1461 (Cambridge, 2000), esp. pp. 25–31.  See for example J. M. W. Bean, ‘Henry IV and the Percies’, History 44 (1959), 212–27. 

83

Mark Arvanigian Northumberland, Westmorland and Cumberland. Richard II had attempted to resolve this by re-creating something like the old earldom of Chester under his allies, the de Veres. Henry’s solution borrowed this general approach of indirect governance, though it also differed in several important ways, and achieved a great degree of success. This essay will consider whether the council held at Durham in September, 1403, was partly the execution of the king’s blueprint for northern governance, resting upon two important underpinnings: the (public) authority wielded by the royal wardens of the marches toward Scotland, and the more traditional and very tangible landed (private) power wielded by the marcher lords in that region. In this case, Henry made great use of Ralph Neville’s personal, private standing as a northern territorial magnate, which the king reinforced by investing him with immense royal authority – formal and informal. This in turn mirrored Henry’s own use of private assets in the execution of royal governance, though this time using the Neville circle as a kind of royal surrogate in the far north, supplanting and extending its authority to fill the vacuum left by the absence of the Percys. This essay will therefore necessarily take up the question of the Percy insurrections against Henry IV as a reaction against the king’s consistent policy of curtailing their authority, both in the Scottish and Welsh marches. It will further examine the shift away from a royal strategy centered around them in these regions in favour of the Neville-Lancastrian nexus, with its many appurtenances. While Henry IV’s northern strategy was laid particularly bare after the aborted rebellion of Archbishop Richard Scrope of York in the summer of 1405, it was nonetheless already in good evidence in the wake of the battle of Shrewsbury in the summer and early autumn of 1403. Scholars of the reign of Henry IV might well consider locating the fall of the house of Percy at the events of 21 July, 1403 – the date of the defeat of Henry ‘Hotspur’ Percy, son of the earl of Northumberland, by royalist forces on a battlefield outside Shrewsbury – rather than a later one. Amongst modern historians, the Shrewsbury campaign has been most recently analyzed by Philip Morgan. Indeed, as he points out, events leading up to the battle are quite well known through the accounts of contemporary chroniclers; the longest narration of events comes from Trokelowe, and is broadly similar to that of Walsingham. The defeat of Hotspur and Worcester by royalist forces marked the end of Percy influence in English politics for more than a decade – at least directly.10 Though absent from the battle itself,



P. J. Morgan, The Battle of Shrewsbury, 1403 (Stroud, 2003). ‘Annales’, pp. 361–70; Historia Anglicana, II, 257–8. 10 The second earl of Northumberland was not fully restored to his lands and titles until well after the death of Henry IV, in 1416, as his son sought the release of the second earl from veritable Scottish imprisonment, to shore up his northern border; Christopher Allmand, Henry V (New Haven, 1997), p. 371. 

84

Managing the North Northumberland had clearly been in collusion with his son and brother. His attempt to reach the battle was thwarted only by the intervention of royalist forces, led by the king’s brother-in-law Ralph Neville, and Robert Waterton, a knight of the body and steward of the duchy of Lancaster, who was also at the time serving as the constable of Pontefract castle, where Earl Henry would subsequently be held.11 So, the fall of the Percys at Shrewsbury was also largely underwritten by the king’s private retainers and adherents, loyal to him not simply as king but also as the heir to the Lancastrian ducal title. Lancastrian retainers were increasingly being promoted strategically to shire office throughout the country, whether as sheriffs, justices of the peace or other positions.12 Yet this process should properly be seen as an extension of the efforts of John of Gaunt in the 1390s to extend the scope of Lancastrian influence, when, as Simon Walker has outlined in some detail, he undertook the recruitment of men of substance throughout England to serve his domestic politics aims and those of his family.13 Shrewsbury was therefore Henry IV’s best opportunity to be rid of the burden of managing the Percys and their interests. On 11 August 1403, the earl of Northumberland, having been deterred from the field of battle, was summoned from his stronghold at Warkworth (Northumberland), where he had lately taken up residence, to attend the king at York.14 We cannot know precisely the content of their meeting, but its implications are quite clear: in return for a full hearing before the Commons in the upcoming parliament, Northumberland was to renounce the actions of his son and brother, his grievances against the king, and his offices in the far north. Indeed, that process was already underway. Among the first steps taken after Hotspur’s defeat was the stripping of his father of all royal offices and commissions, including his wardenship of the march, along with custody of his castles in Northumberland.15 Most important of these were the coveted Percy captaincies of Berwick and Carlisle, the seats of power for the march wardens, east

11

Kirby, Henry IV, p. 158. D. Biggs, ‘The Reign of Henry IV: The Revolution of 1399 and the Establishment of the Lancastrian Regime, 1399–1413’, in Fourteenth Century England, I, ed. N. Saul (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 195–210; S. Walker, ‘Yorkshire Justices of the Peace, 1389–1413’, EHR 108 (1993), 281–313. 13 S. Walker, The Lancastrian Affinity, 1361–1399 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 117–18 and appendices. 14 The Chronicle of England by John Capgrave, ed. Francis Hingeston, Rolls Series (1858), p. 283; Annales Henrici Quarti, pp. 371–72. 15 See for example CPR, 1401–1405, p. 252. An analysis of this period along the border is provided by R. L. Storey, ‘The Wardens of the Marches of England towards Scotland, 1377–1489’, EHR 72 (1957), 593–615. 12

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Mark Arvanigian and west; these were revoked on 6 August and granted to the king’s young son, John of Lancaster, and the earl of Westmorland, respectively.16 In some ways, however, these dramatic events obscure the long decline of the relationship between the Percys and the government. It seems quite likely that Henry IV had been engaged for some time in a larger effort to diminish Percy authority in the borders which, ironically, drew its inspiration from an approach tested by Richard II. The grants of land, title and royal authority to Ralph Neville, a great local rival, cut at the heart of Percy aspirations – just as it had years before when John of Gaunt took similar measures.17 Whether, as Peter McNiven has argued, Percy aspirations centered around a quasi-regal northern dominion – like the one conceived by the tripartite indenture with Mortimer and Glyn Dwr – or simply a greater sway over regional events, remains an open question.18 What is not in doubt here is the existence of those aspirations. From the moment of their victory at Humbleton Hill right through the royal grant to them of the vast Douglas estates in southern Scotland (granted on 2 March 1403), the Percys grew daily more independent in the Scottish borders, perhaps even to the point of conducting an almost independent foreign policy.19 It has been debated whether their actions from early 1403 forward were either part of a royal plan to facilitate the reconquest of Scotland, or an independent Percy act designed to mask Hotspur’s preparation for a rebellion in Wales.20 In either case, the family seems to have conceived of something greater for itself. In spite of this, in March 1403, the Percys were granted the bulk of the estates of the earls of Douglas in southern Scotland – curious in the context of a relationship with the king which had faltered over the disposition of the (significant) Humbleton Hill prisoners.21 Henry had long taken the position that promotion of their local rivals, seen most recently in his grant of Roxburgh castle to the earl of Westmorland in 1402, could mitigate the effects of Percy aggression in the north.22 On its face, the Douglas grant was one of uncommon generosity: after all, Henry had created no new titles or made a grant of any significant estates since his coronation. Yet there is a context in

16

17 18 19 20 21 22

CPR, 1401–1405, pp. 258 and 324. There was no question of Prince John being an active participant at fourteen years of age, and he duly relied on the Neville affinity for assistance. M. Arvanigian, ‘Henry IV, the Northern Nobility and the Consolidation of the Regime, 1399–1403’, in Henry IV, ed. Dodd and Biggs, pp. 117–38. A full discussion of this question can be found in P. McNiven, ‘The Scottish Policy of the Percies and the Strategy of the Rebellion of 1403’, BJRL 62 (1979–80), 498–530. McNiven, ‘Scottish Policy of the Percies’, pp. 510–12. Laid out in A. Macdonald, Border Bloodshed: Scotland, England and France at War, 1369– 1403 (East Linton, 2000), pp. 157–8. Rot. Scot., II, 163–4. It is discussed in some detail in McNiven, ‘Scottish Policy of the Percies’, pp. 504–6. Rot. Scot., II, 161; Storey, ‘Wardens of the Marches’, p. 603.

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Managing the North which the grant of the Douglas estates (including the long-disputed Jedforest) can be more easily understood.23 First, the grant was likely a necessary recognition of the startling character of the Percy victory at Humbleton Hill, which had resulted in a large cache of important prisoners and had set the stage for their well-known public friction with the king at Westminster.24 In addition to being a grand gesture, the Douglas lands may also have been something of an inducement, one that had the advantage of costing the crown nothing to make. These estates lay entirely outside of English-controlled territory, and were thus not part of the normal calculus necessarily employed by the crown in the consideration of any patronage. The quarrel over Jedforest was an old one, and the importance of its resolution to the Percys was well known.25 The Percys had the grant of Jedburgh and Jedforest dating from the 1330s, and had actually occupied the land physically for much of the fourteenth century. It helped form the back story for their long-running feud with the earls of Douglas, which itself was by now a very real complication in Anglo-Scottish affairs. By attempting to settle the matter in this way, Henry IV was probably trying to mute the persistent Percy criticisms of his northern policy, and allay their pleadings for funds, which had lately grown more vociferous as their sphere of operations had by that time grown to include Wales.26 It may also have been the king’s hope to forge something of northern buffer zone out of this long-disputed territory in southern Scotland. From this perspective, Hotspur’s expedition into the Scottish lowlands in the spring of 1403, culminating in the siege of Cocklaw castle, was a precarious first step in claiming his newly-granted lands.27 The castle itself was to be surrendered to Hotspur should a relieving Scottish force fail to appear by 1 August, a proposition which must have seemed a good bet to Hotspur. In the event, however, the stout resistance of local people combined with the renewed interest of the duke of Albany in the matter halted the English advance.28 More interestingly, the expedition was undertaken without much in the way of royal support; Henry paid nothing

23

24

25

26 27 28

A. Tuck, ‘Richard II and the Border Magnates’, Northern History 3 (1968), 27–52 (p. 43); A. Grant, ‘The Otterburn War from Scottish Point of View’, in War and Border Societies in the Middle Ages, ed. Anthony Goodman and Anthony Tuck (1992), pp. 30–64 (pp. 33–9). A. Dunn, The Politics of Magnate Power in England and Wales, 1389–1413 (Oxford, 2003), pp. 100–2; M. Arvanigian, ‘The “Lancastrianization” of the North in the Reign of Henry IV, 1399–1413’, in Reputation and Representation in Fifteenth-Century Europe, ed. D. L. Biggs, S. D. Michalove and A. C. Reeves (Leiden, 2004), pp. 9–38 (p. 15). J. M. W. Bean, ‘The Percies and their Estates in Scotland’, Archaeologia Aeliana 4th series 35 (1957), 91–9. Its literary legacy is explored in Xavier Perret, ‘An Annotated Text of “The Hunting of the Cheviot,” with a French Rendition’, English Studies 86 (2005), 1– 39. POPC, I, 152–3; Dunn, Politics of Magnate Power, p. 102. ‘Annales’, pp. 360–61. POPC, I, 206–7; CPR, 1401–1405, p. 183.

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Mark Arvanigian for the Cocklaw siege, and little in the way of wages to those present.29 It seems that his general approach was to spur the Percys to take action of their own volition and in pursuit of their own interests – and with the use of their own resources. Whether to mitigate the progress of the Percys in their campaigning in Scotland or to spur it forward, King Henry actually embarked upon a summer campaign in the Scottish lowlands in July 1403, but was diverted by the Percy rebellion itself and forced to turn back toward the Welsh march.30 Whether he was therefore in part responsible for precipitating the revolt of 1403, or whether it came in spite of the king’s best efforts to assuage Percy grievances, it was certainly connected to his own northern policy – the broad outline of which was in place from his 1399 coronation onward. Thus, if the grant of the Douglas lands was meant as a palliative, it was a failure. Hotspur likely realized from his aborted expedition there that claiming his new lands, if possible at all, would prove costly and time-consuming. For his part, the king continued to withhold payments to the Percys for services rendered in Wales and the Scottish border, though the records show that he was not entirely bereft of funds, as some have suggested.31 For example, Anthony Steel has shown that, while the king certainly suffered some shortfalls in income in the early days of the reign, there is reason to think that this poor condition was starting to abate. Though fragmentary, the account for Michaelmas, 1402, shows a slight increase in cash receipts, a reversal of earlier trends.32 While Henry certainly borrowed considerable sums in poor financial years (a fairly standard practice), he actually convinced the Commons to assent to a tax in seven different years – a considerable achievement for a king who was not at war, and which belies his reputation for combative parliaments.33 The passage of a royal tenth in 1403 meant that he probably had at his disposal sums sufficient to make a significant contribution to the Percy effort in Scotland that spring; he did not do so. Thus, whether from an old dispute over money owed to them, or from their own rising expectations about the assembly of a political dominion on the fringes of England, the two Percys assembled followers at Shrewsbury, hinting at least at a certain amount of forethought in their planning. The events of that spring may actually have been necessary to demonstrate to all parties, particularly the 29 30 31

32 33

E 403/576, the issue roll for April 1403, contains no mention of specific remuneration, even though this kind of specific payment is quite normal in the accounts. Kirby, Henry IV, p. 155. See, for example, Kirby, Henry IV, pp. 126–9; K. B. McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford, 1972), pp. 93–6. Interestingly, McFarlane himself concedes that Henry’s income likely did not dip below £75,000 in any year after 1402, belying his overall thesis in favour of chronic financial troubles. A. Steel, ‘Receipt Roll Totals under Henry IV and Henry V’, EHR 47 (1932), 204–15 (pp. 211 and 213). LKLK, p. 95.

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Managing the North Percys, the irreparable rift that existed between themselves and the crown. Henry had no intention of paying them the sums owed, nor was he likely to empower them with further monies in the pursuit of their quest for lordship in Wales and Scotland; indeed, his policy was to curtail these at every available opportunity. As such, their demise can as easily be laid at the feet of Henry’s coronation throne, or the gates of Cocklaw castle, as it can the field of Shrewsbury. But to what extent were the Percys actually dependent upon the far north for their influence, and to what extent was it among their great pre-occupations? Bean and McNiven have argued strongly that the Scottish border lands were the Percys’ alpha and omega – in spite of their Yorkshire roots. After all, they had provided them with a source of power and influence that allowed them to delineate themselves from the rest of the baronage. Alistair Macdonald likewise sees the rise of the Percys in terms of a vacuum of border leadership during the dark days of the 1380s, when the region was in very real danger of collapse; their unique combination of significant estates and military experience, along with the authority of royal border offices being invested in them, led to two decades of Percy dominance thereafter.34 Anthony Tuck has taken a moderate position, and seems reticent to grant them the mystical powers afforded them by others.35 Cynthia Neville acknowledges their critical role in managing the region’s legal and decision-making apparatus, particularly where these intersected with cross-border issues requiring adjudication, negotiation, and/or co-operation.36 Still further, Andy King has argued that the Percy family had no special hold whatever on the Northumberland gentry, as is apparent in the events of 1403 and 1405, respectively. Relative parvenus in Northumberland, King believes that it was instead the Percys who required the weight and resources of royal office – including that of the march wardens – to attract a following amongst the region’s landed elite. Without any special historical stature, the patronage provided to the local gentry by the wardens’ salaries looms large in helping them attract a following, and is consistent with the character of Percy disaffection after Humbleton Hill, which emphasized their financial neglect at the hands of the crown.37 Perhaps the far north should best be seen as part of a larger nexus of Percy 34

Macdonald, Border Bloodshed, pp. 92 and 107. Most recently in A. Tuck, ‘The Percies and the Community of Northumberland in the Later Fourteenth Century’, in War and Border Societies in the Middle Ages, ed. Tuck and Goodman, pp. 178–95. 36 C. J. Neville, ‘Scotland, the Percies and the Law in 1400’, in Henry IV, ed. Dodd and Biggs, pp. 73–94; and more fully in Violence, Custom and Law: The Anglo-Scottish Border Lands in the Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh, 1998), passim. 37 POPC, I, 178–9; A. King, ‘ “They have the Hertes of the People by North”: Northumberland, the Percies and Henry IV, 1399–1408’, in Henry IV, ed. Dodd and Biggs, pp. 139–159. 35

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Mark Arvanigian influence, given that they were traditionally a Yorkshire family, and had only relatively lately come to power in the Welsh march and Northumberland. Already lord of Anglesey and Beaumaris, Hotspur was granted most of the important royal offices in the Welsh march and north Wales shortly after 1399,38 a packaging of the great Mortimer lordship of Denbigh, which included the castles of Chester, Flint, Conway, Denbigh and Caernarvon.39 The grant was affirmed in March of 1402, when Henry IV styled him ‘king’s lieutenant’ in the region after making a similar grant to his uncle, Thomas Percy, earl of Worcester, in south Wales. Both Anthony Tuck and Andy King have affirmed the notion that Percy influence in Northumberland lacked depth, but neither take issue with the fact that the family consistently and successfully recruited servants from amongst its gentry. Several of these men eventually found their way into service in Wales.40 Emblematic of this intermingling of Hotspur’s resources was the case of the prominent Northumbrian knight William Swinburne, a relatively new Percy retainer who became steward and receiver of Denbigh and constable of Beaumaris. Swinburne seems not to have had deep roots in Percy service, but equally was quite willing to follow Hotspur to Wales in search of opportunity.41 Other Percy retainers followed suit in the service of their lord. The Northumbrian John Harding’s assurance that he fought with Hotspur at Shrewsbury confirms this, indicating that a triangle of resources, information and manpower did indeed move to and from the Welsh march and Northumberland, in the service of Percy interests.42 Nonetheless, in the final act of mutiny against the crown, Hotspur did not put his father’s Northumbrian retainers in the awkward position of rebellion.43 He instead drew his principal strength from elsewhere, calling on his father Earl Henry to provide support from Northumberland. In addition, Welsh recruiting was likely more feasible with the addition of Hotspur’s uncle, Worcester, to the Welsh scene, eliminating any potential royal counterbalance to Hotspur’s aggressive recruitment in south Wales. In March of 38 39

40

41

42 43

CPR, 1399–1401, p. 155. An example of Hotspur’s judicial role and lordship can be found in SC 6/1233/9. Rees Davies has outlined the English push into north Wales, the success of which led to Sir Henry Percy’s receipt of these royal grants. See Davies, The Revolt of Glyn Dwr (Oxford, 2001), pp. 102–4. A. Tuck, ‘The Percies and the Community of Northumberland in the Later Fourteenth Century’, in War and Border Societies in the Middle Ages, ed. A. Goodman and J. A. Tuck (New York, 1992), pp. 178–95. Hotspur received lordship of Denbigh, valued at over £1,000 per annum and formerly held by the earl of March, on 6 November 1399: CFR, 1399–1405, pp. 38–9. Other grants to him can be found in CPR, 1399–1401, pp. 37, 155 and 158; CCR, 1399–1402, pp. 437–8. For a summary of Swinburne’s career and the grant of Denbigh, see King, ‘ “They have the Hertes” ‘, pp. 140–1. Davies, Glyn Dwr, p. 184, cites E 101/49/9, showing the activities of messengers and the consistent movement of information between Northumberland and north Wales. Harding, p. 351; King, ‘ “They have the Hertes” ‘, pp. 145–6.

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Managing the North 1402, the earl of Worcester was named to the lieutenancy of south Wales for the second time in a decade, signaling an increasing reliance by the crown on the Percys in Wales more generally, mirroring their use in the Scottish march.44 This appointment coincided with improved English fortunes in Wales,45 as Earl Thomas had spent the bulk of 1401–2 campaigning there on the king’s behalf, by all accounts executing his duties admirably in this familiar territory.46 Hotspur could thus more easily conceive of raising his rebellion in Cheshire in the summer of 1403, rather than the ostensibly-more obvious Northumberland or Cumberland.47 Hotspur clearly thought that his own power base and that of his uncle, in their positions as justiciars and lieutenants in north and south Wales, respectively, was sufficient to support this.48 Perhaps Henry IV’s pattern of issuing patronage to the Percys, only to diminish its value by supporting potential regional rivals, is best seen in the creation of a unified Welsh command under the Prince of Wales in March, 1403.49 This flew especially in the face of renewed Percy hopes in Wales, and the command was supported with assets on the ground; the prince was granted the lordship of Anglesey, which was revoked from the younger Henry Percy, though clearly the men of north Wales themselves contested this.50 Further evidence of this pattern of patronage came with the new appointments made in late 1402, three of which were surely meant to undercut still further Percy independence in Wales. The establishment of a command for the young Thomas, earl of Arundel, who became something called ‘king’s lieutenant for the borders of north Wales’, covering everything 44

45

46 47 48

49 50

CPR, 1401–1405, p. 53. Worcester had earned his earldom by serving Richard II in a similar capacity between 1390 and 1395. He was supported in his estate by several grants made to him in prior decades; these are summarized in list form in CPR, 1399–1401, p. 110. Though south Wales was indeed familiar ground, it has nonetheless been argued recently that, on this occasion, Worcester’s commission was an exile of sorts from the royal household for its former steward, who may never have been fully trusted by the new regime. See M. Arvanigian, ‘Henry IV, the Northern Nobility and the Consolidation of the Regime’, in Henry IV, ed. Dodd and Biggs, pp. 117–38 (p. 128). SC 6/1202/17 and SC 6/1185/4 for Worcester’s accounting of Swansea and Denbigh, respectively. Hotspur’s inroads into north Wales coincided with Worcester’s management of south Wales, hinting at a certain synergy in their endeavours. Davies, Glyn Dwr, p. 182. For this see P. J. Morgan, War and Society in Medieval Cheshire, 1277–1403, Chetham Society 3rd series 34 (Manchester, 1987), pp. 211–19. The younger Percy was made lord of Anglesey on 12 October 1399. A few weeks later, he was made justiciar of north Wales and Chester (CPR, 1399–1401, p. 37), and had the attendant English fortresses there transferred to him by royal writ (CPR, 1399–1401, p. 158). CPR, 1401–1405, p. 216. For the account of the prince’s controller in Wales, John Spenser, for the years 1403–1405, see E 101/404/24. CPR, 1401–1405, p. 330, tells of the costs incurred by the prince for the rescue of Beaumaris by sea, and the settling of the costs thereof upon the men of the city of Chester.

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Mark Arvanigian from Holt in Denbigh to Wigmore in Herefordshire, was one of these. In addition, a similar grant was made to Edmund, earl of Stafford, in south Wales, extending from Wigmore to Chepstow in Monmouthshire. The third of these was the grant of Carmarthen, Cardigan and Pembroke to the king’s close friend, Richard, Lord Grey of Codnor.51 It is astonishing that in spite of these grants to trusted royalists (Arundel had even been in the company of Bolingbroke and his uncle, Archbishop Arundel, in French exile), Hotspur was still able to raise a substantial force quickly from Cheshire and Wales in the early summer of 1403. This drew very few men from Northumberland and fewer still, it would seem, from his nearby Yorkshire estates.52 Henry seems even then to have recognised the extent of the Percy threat, which he sought to undercut in Wales as he had done in the Scottish borders. Instrumental in the king’s rise in 1399, the Percys must have been aware of Henry’s view of them as dangerous and in need of taming; this explains the handling of the Humbleton prisoners and the grant of Roxburgh to the earl of Westmorland in 1402, and places the king’s mistrust to that date at least, and probably earlier.53 It was therefore the lack of royal support for their designs in both Wales and the northern march that ultimately moved the Percys to revolt, a motive that long predated, but which was clearly exacerbated by, events of the spring/summer of 1403.54 Opportunity came only with the adoption of the Mortimer royal claim as their own (Hotspur was of course married into the Mortimer family), and the alignment of these with native Welsh interests, made manifest in 1402 with the marriage of Edmund Mortimer to Owain Glyn Dwr’s daughter.55 In the event, however, their attempt to link their far-flung enterprises failed when it mattered most.56 Glyn Dwr failed to arrive on the scene at Shrewsbury, and the forces of the crown were well prepared to repel Northumberland’s (belated) attempt to join his son and brother shortly after. This division of Percy forces, and the effective containment of the earl of Northumberland are emphasized and thought to have been critical by contemporary chroniclers

51 52 53

54 55 56

CFR, 1399–1405, p. 142; Kirby, Henry IV, pp. 142–3. Davies, Glyn Dwr, p. 184, argues that the men of Cheshire formed the backbone of Hotspur’s army. For the dispute over prisoners, see CPR, 1401–1405, p. 213. The argument for an earlier anti-Percy policy by the king can be found in Arvanigian, ‘ “Lancastrianization” of the North’, passim. These events are considered from the Welsh perspective at some length in Davies, Glyn Dwr, p. 182 and esp. pp. 184–6. Historia Vitae et Regni Ricardi Secundi, ed. George Stow (Philadelphia, 1977), p. 175; Continuatio Eulogii, p. 398. The implications of this arrangement, and the relationships between the Glyn Dwr, Mortimer and Percy families is considered in Davies, Glyn Dwr, pp. 178–80.

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Managing the North in their retelling of events.57 Both John Capgrave and Thomas Walsingham report that Northumberland was intercepted on his march southward toward the Welsh march by two of Henry IV’s agents, Robert Waterton, the steward of the duchy of Lancaster, and Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland, the king’s brother-in-law.58 Failing to link with the other conspirators, Northumberland turned back for Warkworth, probably by way of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in an attempt to access the customs house there.59 He was at Warkworth not longer than a few days before being summoned south to York to attend King Henry, who duly stripped him of the infrastructure which had made his hegemony in the far north possible: his castles and offices.60 Yet none of this was ad hoc. The fall of the Percys was as much the result of a conscious royal policy of limiting their power as it was their own ravenous appetite for power. What, then, was to be the royal alternative to Percy power in the marches, and how was it to be exercised? The management of the Scottish border lands was critical to Henry, as it had been to his predecessors, though he would also maintain a healthy preoccupation with the dangers posed by the native Welsh.61 Here it seems that the Welsh march provided Henry a useful exemplar for use elsewhere. Most recently a traditional stronghold of the Mortimer and de Vere families, in the reign of Richard II the Welsh march had most often been managed by one or another of those families through a kind of royal proxy, a kind of unofficial restoration of the ancient earldom of Chester. Bolingbroke’s usurpation brought this to an end – particularly with respect to the Mortimer earls of March, whose superior technical claim to the throne of England remained an obvious sore point to the king throughout his reign. Henry had turned to the Percys for their military experience, allowing Worcester to reprise his role of the early 1390s in south Wales, and Hotspur a command in Chester. Yet their 1403 rebellion and collusion with Glyn Dŵr left the king without a ‘natural’ manager in the region, an alternative to the Mortimers that might marshal both local support and royal backing in the face of native unrest, of the kind which was so in evidence with the men of Flint in 1403. Here, the king chose to rely on young Prince Henry, making him Prince of Wales after the fashion of the Black Prince. This achieved decidedly mixed results, as Glyn Dwr’s rebellion festered, remaining a principal distraction for the crown even during times of great strain elsewhere. In fact, Henry was on his way into Wales when he received news of Arch57 58 59 60 61

T. Rymer, Foedera, Conventiones. Literae etc., 3rd edn, ed. G. Holmes, 8 vols. (London, 1740), VIII, 319. Capgrave, Chronicle, p. 283; T. Walsingham, The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham, 1376–1422, ed. J. Clark and D. Preest (Woodbridge, 2005), p. 402. Historia Anglicana, p. 258; Continuatio Eulogii, p. 397. T. Walsingham, Chronica Monasterii St. Albans: Ypodigma Neustriae, Rolls Series (1876), p. 402. Rees Davies considers it fair to describe all of Wales as being in revolt in 1403, Glyn Dwr, p. 114.

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Mark Arvanigian bishop Scrope’s rebellion in the summer of 1405, causing him to abandon his Welsh campaign on 23 May, departing instead for Hereford before striking out for York and the north-east instead.62 The king had perhaps misread the degree of dissatisfaction with him afoot in the north. Indeed, the north had proved something of a problem for Henry IV since the start of the reign, in spite of his own northern roots and personal holdings which stretched into Yorkshire.63 The region provided him with a good part of his support in 1399, and with many of his core supporters during the early years of his reign.64 In fact, though much of this support from barons and magnates alike came from Yorkshire, the far northern border shires were another matter altogether, much less easily managed by the new king. For Henry, as for Richard II, this was precisely the justification for allowing the Percys great latitude there. Yet Henry ended this practice by employing the Lancastrian affinity and its allied branches – a kind of loose network of service and association – under the leadership of his brother-in-law, Westmorland, to replace Percy management of the region. Practically speaking, the Neville circle acted as a cognate to the larger Lancastrian affinity, and Earl Ralph as a surrogate for the royal will. The Lancastrian well ran deep throughout much of the north; the networks of retainers and servants elucidated by Castor, Walker, and Biggs most recently has confirmed that this was a formidable political organisation. Nonetheless, direct Lancastrian influence only rarely extended into England’s three most northerly counties, Cumberland, Northumberland and Durham, and when it did it required the force of royal backing, as when John of Gaunt was made royal lieutenant in the marches in the 1380s.65 Yet royal (Lancastrian) authority was exercised in these places following the demise of the Percys, through indirect means. Richard II had certainly resorted to this sort of indirect rule in the Scottish march, and had tried a series of alternatives to Percy rule there, often preferring a truce with Scotland to a Percy-defended border, as in the latter-1390s. Indirect rule by the crown was formalized through office holding, and of these, the march wardens were the single great emblematic expression of indirect royal governance, in that they were an acknowledgment of the region’s otherwise ungovernable character.66 How did this coalesce on the ground? The answer lies in the condition and 62

Kirby, Henry IV, p. 185. Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, passim. 64 Brown, ‘Reign of Henry IV’, pp. 8–12; updated and extended in Biggs, ‘Reign of Henry IV’, pp. 198–200 and 202. 65 John of Gaunt’s Register, 1379–1383, ed. E. C. Lodge and R. Somerville (Royal Historical Society, 1937), II, nos. 891–4; Storey, ‘Wardens of the Marches’, pp. 596–7. For hostility over the appointment, see Walsingham’s own attitude expressed in his Chronicon Angliae, p. 328; and in Tuck, ‘Richard II and the Border Magnates’, pp. 39–41. 66 Macdonald, Border Bloodshed, p. 131; A. Grant, Independence and Nationhood: Scotland, 1307–1469 (Edinburgh, 1984), p. 44. 63

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Managing the North character of Lancastrian (as opposed to royal) loyalty. As Walker and Castor have shown, the distinction between Lancastrian and royal assets in Henry IV’s reign is mainly an issue for historians; it is not clear that it was recognized at all by contemporaries. Yet Lancastrian power, in the (private) sense was an important factor in English public policy, insinuating itself often into the larger polity sometimes with great effect, as in the case of Henry IV’s own usurpation.67 Lancastrian loyalty – often formed over generations in prominent knightly families and later powerfully expressed in institutions like Henry IV’s continual council and county courts – was in some areas ensconced in the fabric of local landed communities, helping for example to soften local accommodation to the new regime after 1399.68 The shire communities might also serve as potential wellsprings of resistance, as demonstrated by the difficulties Richard II faced after his reshuffling of the higher nobility in 1397 and in the resistance to Lancastrian measures taken in the countryside after 1399.69 Simon Walker has confirmed that the degree to which the duke of Lancaster could exert influence in a given region was closely related to the extent of his personal holdings there, and those of his retainers.70 Beyond this of course lies the question of cohesiveness in local affinities. As Hicks, Bean and others have argued, understanding the depth of loyalties as a qualitative matter is an elusive, but critical, problem.71 At the local level, of course, interpersonal associations and affiliations determined the degree to which faction and community were bound together, and it was the particular genius of Gaunt especially that he was able to “delegate” responsibility for such regional cohesion to surrogates working beyond the expected scope of his own personal reach, such as the Neville/Latimer circle in the north in the 1380s.72 Henry IV inherited this working matrix; loyalty and fealty gained

67

68 69

70 71

72

Castor, Duchy of Lancaster, pp. 18–19. Castor herself notes that relatively little attention has been paid to this dichotomy between private and public by modern historians, perhaps because the distinction is theirs, and not one that was of much interest to contemporaries. For the composition and operation of Henry’s early councils, see G. Dodd, ‘Henry IV’s Council’, in Henry IV, ed. Dodd and Biggs, pp. 95–116; Kirby, Henry IV, pp. 75–85. Saul, Richard II, pp. 381–4; Walker, ‘Yorkshire Justices’, passim; S. K. Walker, ‘Rumour, Sedition and Popular Protest in the Reign of Henry IV’, Past and Present 166 (2000), pp. 31–65. John Leland has recently argued the Henry IV’s was a reactionary movement opposed to the novelty of Richard II’s approach to governance, particularly with respect to his treatment of landed society; J. Leland, ’1399: A Royal Revolution Reversed’, Essays in Medieval Studies 21 (2005), pp. 63–79. Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, passim; A. Goodman, John of Gaunt: The Exercise of Princely Power in Fourteenth Century Europe (1992), pp. 78–81. A general study useful principally for its descriptive character is J. M. W. Bean, From Lord to Patron: Lordship in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, 1989), pp. 72–84; M. Hicks, Bastard Feudalism (London, 1995). Simon Walker has described Lancastrian loyalty in John of Gaunt’s affinity: Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, pp. 94–116.

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Mark Arvanigian new dimensions, as the duchy became intermingled with the royal dignity, and as allies and retainers like the Nevilles extended the affinity into new regions.73 The balance of this paper will explore the operation of one such cognate group, the affinity of Ralph Neville, first earl of Westmorland, during the critical period of consolidation that followed the battle of Shrewsbury. Much of the year following the Durham council of September 1403 was spent by its participants shoring up support in the north, attempting to gain control of Percy fortresses in Northumberland, and working to maintain the king’s rule in the region. Henry departed the region almost immediately after his August confrontation with Northumberland at York, apparently leaving explicit commissions for his men. Earl Ralph and his brother, Thomas, Lord Furnival, were first and foremost to secure the surrender of the Percy fortresses in Northumberland.74 To this end, Furnival received the grant of numerous Percy properties, along with others forfeited by their most prominent followers. These were begun almost at once, as in the December, 1403, confiscation and re-granting of the Northumberland estates and rents of the late Bertram Monboucher, Hotspur’s knight.75 Others followed soon after. Lord Furnival was soon rewarded with high office, when the king granted him the treasury of England and a seat on his continual council in December, 1404.76 For his part, Henry Percy remained unmoved. In some ways, Henry IV found his hand forced, as the Commons vocally called for Percy’s reinstatement and the king’s reconciliation with him in the spring, 1404, parliament. Yet despite his parliamentary pardon and his public reconciliation with Westmorland and the king, Northumberland remained a sustained problem for royal officials in the north, evidenced by the many unsuccessful attempts to dislodge his military bases in the region.77 And while it may seem that the king went to ridiculous lengths to reconcile with a clear traitor, perhaps overstepping good sense in the name of near-term peace, it is nonetheless true that behind the scenes Henry IV was working tirelessly through subordinates to undercut the remaining vestiges of Percy power.78 Key to that effort, Ralph Neville was named ‘defender against the king’s enemies’ in Westmorland and Cumberland during the Durham council of September, 1403, and less than a month later he and two of his closest retainers, the lawyers John Conyers and William Gascoigne, were named commissioners of oyer et terminer for Yorkshire, Northumberland, Cumber-

73 74 75 76

77 78

Arvanigian, ‘A Lancastrian Polity?’, pp. 141–2 and passim. POPC, I, 213–14. CFR, 1399–1405, p. 238. Kirby, Henry IV, p. 258. The fact that he held the post until his death in 1407 – a relatively lengthy term of office – may well indicate an aptitude for the position, particularly given the challenges of managing this king’s finances. Dunn, Politics of Magnate Power, pp. 121–8. PROME, parliament of January 1404, item 18 (Rot. Parl., III, 525).

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Managing the North land and Westmorland. As such, they heard the charges of treason brought against all those who had risen with the Percys to that date.79 Already a commissioner of the peace in all three ridings of Yorkshire since August, 1403, this extended still further Earl Ralph’s dominion, effectively, as a royal legate to the whole of the north, touching all aspects of the crown’s business, legal and otherwise.80 Moreover, in June, 1404, Westmorland chaired another such commission, this time for the purpose of dealing with certain malefactions in south Yorkshire; the importance of this is indicated by the inclusion, with Gascoigne, of Sir Thomas Erpingham and his associate, Sir John Curson, and Richard, Lord Grey of Codnor. Erpingham, as A. L. Brown and others have noted, was primarily a soldier, irrespective of his newfound status in Henry’s government. Yet he was also a longtime Lancastrian, Henry’s close friend and a comrade-at-arms.81 Grey of Codnor was also a friend of the king and a rising star in Lancastrian circles. Now in his mid-twenties, he was coming into his years, and in his first great command had replaced Thomas Percy as the king’s admiral of the north and east on 20 April 1401; he would soon be named chamberlain of the royal household, in 1404.82 Curson was a Norfolk knight who participated in the revolution of 1399 on Bolingbroke’s side, and he continued in royal service throughout the king’s early years; he participated in all of the negotiations between the king and the earl of Northumberland after the battle of Shrewsbury. A. L. Brown thought him fairly typical of the knights of the shire who had served Bolingbroke from the start: trusted by the king in a variety of capacities, he was an occasional councilor after 1401, and a regular one by 1404.83 Further, Curson’s must have been an interesting perspective on events of the day, in that he had had an older connection, dating from the 1390s, to Thomas, Lord Bardolf, one of the Northumberland’s chief co-conspirators in his mischief-making after the death of Hotspur.84 William Gascoigne, of course, is a character well-known to historians from Shakespeare and elsewhere. A Yorkshire esquire of great ability and one-time chief steward of the duchy of Lancaster, he rose to the position of chief justice of King’s Bench in 1400, one which he held for the balance of the reign. His brother, Richard, seemingly a man of a greater military constitution, brought members of his own retinue to join Bolingbroke in 1399, and received a fee

79 80 81 82 83 84

CPR, 1401–1405, pp. 287 and 361. CPR, 1401–1405, p. 284. Brown, ‘Reign of Henry IV’, pp. 16–17; T. E. John, ‘Sir Thomas Erpingham’, Norfolk Archaeology 35 (1973), 96–109. Grey of Codnor became Henry’s household chamberlain in 1404: Given-Wilson, Royal Household, p. 72; Biggs, ‘Reign of Henry IV’, p. 202; Kirby, Henry IV, p. 113. A.L. Brown, ‘The Commons and the Council in the Reign of Henry IV’, EHR 79 (1964), 1–30 (pp. 8–9). House of Commons, II, 719–20.

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Mark Arvanigian for doing so.85 Like his brother, William was a Yorkshireman, and though he received no fee of retainer from John of Gaunt, he was certainly associated with Ralph Neville by the mid-1390’s, and became increasingly influential thereafter: from this initial Neville connection, he moved seamlessly into Lancastrian service. Steward of Pontefract by 1391, Gascoigne went on to serve on the bench for the and West Ridings for many years. Indeed, his unusual tripartite appointment to the Yorkshire commissions of assize, gaol delivery and the assize, when combined with his standing as CJKB and relationship with the king and Westmorland and his numerous ad hoc commissions, gave him formidable standing in the Lancastrian north. It is little surprise, then, that he was one of two royal servants named as a ‘special advisor’ by the king at the Commons’ behest in 1405.86 In all, and in spite of the best efforts of the Commons and the Percys, Henry’s closest and most trusted group of supporters remained either ‘old Lancastrian’ – their careers in service stretching back to John of Gaunt’s tenure as duke – or more recently-arrived partisans like William Gascoigne and John Conyers of Durham, who became Lancastrians through their service to the earl of Westmorland in the north.87 The uncertainty over Henry Percy’s status carried on uneasily into 1404, though certain provisions were made by the crown for dealing with his activities. Northumberland had already lost custody of his castles in a nominal transfer of authority during his meeting with the king of 11 August, 1403.88 Moreover, he relinquished the office of constable of England, one that he had held since 1399 but which was now granted to the king’s son, John; the prince also became warden of the east march – at the tender age of fourteen.89 The question of Prince John’s ability to perform any of the duties given to him in the north was answered as moot two weeks after he gained the constabulary, when his father dispatched an embassy to treat for peace with the Scots, led by the reliable Sir Ralph Eure and Sir Henry Fitzhugh – a move meant also to bolster the standing of the young march warden, it would seem.90 In the March parliament of the following year, Westmorland was among the two magnates named by the king as an especially close advisor, with John Beaufort, earl of Somerset, the king’s half-brother. This has been somewhat overlooked by scholars, but when combined with other evidence from the period, 85 86 87 88

89

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Chrons. Rev., p. 253; House of Commons, III, 161–2. Walker, ‘Yorkshire Justices’, pp. 102–3; Somerville, Duchy of Lancaster, I, 373; POPC, I, 262. Brown, ‘Reign of Henry IV’, pp. 16–17; Given-Wilson, Royal Household, p. 287. Northumberland County History, 15 vols. (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1893–1940), V, 36–42. A valuable short narrative of the process of bringing Percy partisans in Northumberland to heel can be found in King, ‘ “They have the Hertes” ‘, pp. 146–51. Kirby, Henry IV, p. 158; LKLK, p. 74; CPR, 1401–1405, p. 324; the entry also details the loss of other Percy lands, control of which was distributed to other Lancastrian officials. Foedera, VIII, 332.

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Managing the North it is an indication that the king’s Beaufort family was becoming ever-more eminent.91 Somerset and Westmorland remained prominent councilors and trusted members of the king’s inner circle in subsequent years, and continued to witness charters, though this ceases to be a good source of evidence for judging proximity to royal government after 1403/4 due to the small number of charters issued.92 Brown insists that Westmorland was principally in the north throughout, but his presence was obviously required in the two 1404 parliaments, the first of which lasted at least twelve full weeks, and in any event his interests were likely being looked after by his old comrades, Roos and Willoughby, by his retainer William Heron, Lord Say, and perhaps most obviously by his brother, Lord Furnival. The council therefore remained a bastion of close Lancastrian loyalists, and in the absence of the Percys, the Neville/Beaufort contingent if anything grew stronger after Shrewsbury.93 By the end of June, Westmorland was back in Carlisle, this time in the company of his son, John, witnessing the deeds of arms of his retainer, Sir Thomas Grey of Wark, who with Richard de Ledes had challenged two Scottish knights to a joust.94 Grey’s father, Thomas, had also been in Neville employ in the march, gaining the castle of Wark from Lord Ralph in 1396, and Earl Ralph subsequently retained the younger Thomas Grey for life in August of 1404, purchasing for him also the constabulary of Bamburgh.95 One week later Westmorland received a grant of £2,800 for his maintenance of the west March and Roxburgh, to be drawn from the customs of London, Bristol, Newcastle, Kingston and elsewhere,96 which was, in fact, a second draw for this purpose. He had the previous March received another grant of £3,000 to be drawn half from the customs of Kingston, with the balance to come from those of London and Southampton.97 The king’s willingness to provide these considerable funds (albeit in the usual promissory form) when he had consistently denied similar amounts to the Percys, is quite revealing. Westmorland continued to head up commissions of the peace (as in November, 1404), which in the five most northerly counties were consistently comprised

91 92 93 94 95

96 97

PROME, parliament of January 1404, item 37 (Rot. Parl., III, 530). Brown, ‘Reign of Henry IV’, p. 11; D. Biggs, ‘Royal Charter Witness Lists for the Reign of Henry IV’, EHR 119 (2004), 407–25 (pp. 417–20). Kirby, Henry IV, pp. 166–72. CPR, 1401–1405, p. 410. ‘Private Indentures for Life Service in Peace and War, 1278–1476’, in Camden Miscellany XXXII, ed. M. Jones and S. Walker, Camden Society 5th series 3 (1994), no. 100. For the Bamburgh grant, see CPR, 1401–1405, p. 412. This was later vacated in favour of Richard Arundel in 1408, and Andy King has speculated that it was the result of a falling out between Neville and Grey: A. King, ‘The Rise and Rise of the Grays of Heaton, c.1296– c.1415’, in North-East England in the Later Middle Ages, ed. C. D. Liddy and R. H. Britnell (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 57–73 (p. 70). CPR, 1401–1405, p. 408. CPR, 1401–1405, p. 372.

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Mark Arvanigian of Lancastrian partisans and retainers.98 Yet his participation was unusual in another way. In the main, magnates and great barons were doing less of this kind of work, not more, and Henry is widely known to have preferred gentry men for such tasks anyway.99 Ralph Neville’s consistent participation highlights the king’s seriousness in dealing with the north, and his great trust in the extended Neville/Lancastrian circle there. Thus, the general pattern of royal policy in the north was already fully manifest by early 1404; in sum, it amounted to the consistent use of patronage to expand the purview of loyal Lancastrians, under the general direction of the earl of Westmorland.100 Earl Ralph’s winter of 1405 was spent in the north, shoring up his personal holdings through the property market and the conveyance to use, which he hoped would allow him to sequester his family lands in the hands of his Beaufort children. In these years, he regularly conveyed estates to retainers and friends, which were then reissued for his use and that of his wife, Joan, and the heirs of their bodies.101 Typical of these was the 1404 conveyance of the earl’s great Yorkshire lordship of Sheriff Hutton, his base of operations for nearby York, to his retainers Thomas Greene and John Morton.102 He also continued to serve the crown in a variety of capacities. In early March, he was commissioned to treat for peace with the Scots, and in late April, 1405, two months after the enrollment of this and other land transactions by the crown, he led a commission to bring to justice any remaining Percy supporters in Northumberland. This was a concerted effort by all of the king’s officers in the north, including the sheriff of York, Thomas Rokeby, and the steward of Durham, Ralph Eure, as the crown also sought to eliminate their remaining support in Yorkshire.103 Efforts in Yorkshire proved more successful than those in Northumberland. In June, the king ordered Westmorland and the young Prince John, in their capacities as wardens of the marches, to take possession of Northumberland’s castles and holdings in the borders. A week later, the king summoned his supporters in the north to meet him at Newcastle, as he had heard that Percy was still at Berwick.104 By the time the king reached the north, the rebellion had been quelled by Westmorland, who apparently

98 99

100 101

102 103 104

See for example Walker, ‘Yorkshire Justices’, pp. 313–14; these figures are well in line with those of the nation, discussed in Biggs, ‘Reign of Henry IV’, pp. 208–9. CPR, 1401–1405, pp. 520 and 521. The trends are discussed in Walker, ‘Yorkshire Justices’, p. 100. For a further discussion of the trends specific to Henry IV’s reign, see Biggs, ‘Lancastrianization of Justice’, pp. 59–80. Arvanigian, ‘Landed Society and the Governance of the North’, passim. These issues, and especially the rise and subsequent development of the foeffment-touse, along with their relationship to landed society more generally, are discussed at length in J. M. W. Bean, Decline of English Feudalism, 1215–1540 (New York, 1968), pp. 104–79. VCH North Yorkshire, II, 177; CPR, 1401–1405, p. 470. Foedera, VIII, 394 and 399. Foedera, VIII, 400.

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Managing the North through cunning succeeded in disarming the rebels after narrowly avoiding capture himself.105 The events surrounding the rebellion of Thomas Mowbray and Archbishop Scrope are well known to historians – as is the seminal role of the earl of Westmorland in its suppression.106 Northumberland failed to join his forces with those of the other conspirators, once again cut off by royalist forces led by Ralph Neville. With that, the rebellion was effectively ended.107 Yet Henry’s nominal redistribution of Percy lands, particularly those in Northumberland or Cumberland, remained of little value so long as two factors remained unchanged: continuing hostilities between England and Scotland, and the freedom of Henry Percy. Yet now, in his attempt to reformulate his policy toward Scotland after 1405, the king found himself free of certain prior constraints, perhaps most notably that he was no longer obliged to take account of Percy hawkishness, and could concentrate instead on a diplomacy which might help to secure his rule in other ways.108 Thus, in September 1405, Westmorland was granted leave to treat for peace with the Scots, and in February, 1406, Robert Umfraville led another peace delegation across the northern border seeking a comprehensive truce.109 In March 1407, Umfraville, Sir Ralph Eure, and Sir John Mitford were again commissioned to treat for peace with the Scots – indeed, not only the Scottish king, but with any Scottish noble acting under their crown’s authority.110 With the effective re-ordering of the north, peace seems to have moved to the forefront of Henry’s Scottish agenda. To ensure this, Henry sought to make peace with former enemies and provided several Northumbrians of a more independent character with important new roles in his government. John Mitford, for example, had been an occasional diplomat to the court of Scotland; Henry elevated him to the position of lieutenant to the constable of Bordeaux sometime before 1409, confirming the king’s willingness to put Northumbrians to work elsewhere in his diplomatic corps, apparently without mistrust.111 In April of the following year, Westmorland and Prince John, in their capacities as wardens of the marches, were again commissioned to treat for peace with the Scots.

105 106

107

108 109 110 111

‘Annales’, p. 400. For a detailed narrative, see Dugdale, Baronage, pp. 274–5; E. F. Jacob, The Fifteenth Century, 1399–1485 (Oxford, 1961), pp. 59–64. An analysis of the character of the revolt is found in C. Valente, The Theory and Practice of Revolt in Medieval England (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 216–22 and 227–36. A contemporary account can be found in Continuatio Eulogii, III, 405–7. The contemporary accounts of Scrope’s revolt are similar enough to allow for a single narrative to stand in for the rest. McNiven, ‘Scottish Policy of the Percies’, pp. 529–30. Foedera, VIII, 418. Foedera, VIII, 479. Foedera, VIII, 597.

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Mark Arvanigian Interestingly, it was in that same month that the Neville and his men spent time in Northumberland rooting out the last of the Percy adherents, a task that occupied much of the earl’s time and energy after Scrope’s rebellion. The commissions of 1407 bear this out: in late August, Prince John and Earl Ralph were empowered by the king to assess the situation in the four most northerly counties, and array the king’s subjects as necessary to put down any further threat posed by Northumberland and his supporters. In addition, they were quickly thereafter named to a commission of oyer et terminer for the four counties, on which they served with William Gascoigne, who had become Henry’s chief justice, Sir Ralph Eure, and the Neville associates Richard Redman and Thomas Rokeby, sheriff of York.112 Thus, they were empowered not only with the king’s sword, but also became the official arbiters of his justice.113 This group was still assembled when, in April 1408, the crown commissioned them, with Westmorland’s retainer Robert Conyers and others, to entreat the remaining Percy supporters in Northumberland to make peace with the king, and seek their return to the political community.114 All of this belies, to some degree, the assertion that in the borders, Percy support was shallow; the evidence from this period would seem to indicate that something like the opposite was true in the county of Northumberland.115 Yet with support drawn from the Neville faction, the crown had actually re-arranged the power structure of the north over just a few years. The withdrawal of the Percys from that power structure offered this opportunity, around the stout figure of Ralph, Lord Neville, and the king obliged. Indeed, Westmorland and his circle profited greatly from the failure of Scrope and Percy in 1405. Principal among them was Westmorland himself, who was granted the whole of the honour of Cockermouth in Cumberland for life, following its forfeit by the earl of Northumberland.116 Through this grant – previously held by the elder Henry Percy from his marriage to Maud Lucy – Westmorland in a stroke became the greatest landowner in the northwest, and simultaneously strengthened his hold upon the wardenship of the west march and Carlisle – one that his heirs would strengthen still further.117 The Neville circle also benefited from Scrope’s rebellion in Yorkshire. In late June, the Neville retainer John Morton was made warrener of Ripon, at the forfeiture of the Archbishop himself, a post which Morton dubiously claimed already to have purchased from Archbishop Scrope.118 Earl Ralph’s yeoman Robert Burley gained the Ripon lands of Sir John Fitzrandolph, an

112 113 114 115 116 117 118

E 210/11151; CPR, 1405–1408, p. 432. CPR, 1405–1408, p. 359. CPR, 1405–1408, p. 405. Foedera, VIII, 520. CPR, 1405–1408, pp. 50 and 69. R. L. Storey, The End of the House of Lancaster (London, 1966), ch. 5. CPR, 1405–1408, p. 19.

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Managing the North esquire of the archbishop, and in July, John Burton, another of Westmorland’s yeomen, received (with John Lamb, a chamber knight) the Yorkshire lands of Nicholas Tempest, a Percy retainer, in West Walton.119 A few weeks later, yet another Neville retainer, Roger Thornton, received the grant of the manor of Akholme from the crown.120 Beyond engineering these simple grants, Earl Ralph increasingly provided other forms of good lordship to his men. In 1405, he provided letters of attorney for Richard Landinette and Richard Dowen that they might receive lands in Ridall,121 and in early 1406 did the same for Richard Burgess and John Southwell of York, in their dispute with Richard Kirkenney.122 He simultaneously continued employing the foeffment-to-use, to execute the long-term objective of disinheriting his first (Stafford) family in favour of his cadet, Beaufort children.123 The earl also was concerned with extending his influence into the far north-east. In August, 1405, Robert Umfraville, who had lately become a Neville client, was granted the castle and manor of Langley in Northumberland, signaling the further encroachment of the Nevilles into that county. In June, 1407, Westmorland gained license from the king to grant his manor of Eastburn in the North Riding, along with the attendant 300-plus acres of arable land in Bugthorpe, to Sir Henry Vavasour – formerly in Percy employ – as a means of retaining him for service.124 Vavasour was an important figure in Northumberland, and his support there undoubtedly smoothed the transition to Neville governance. Fully ensconced in the north, Neville now withdrew formally from the king’s council in 1406, leaving his interests principally in the hands of his brother, Lord Furnival, the king’s treasurer and a regular councilor.125 The need for Ralph Neville to be in London at court – competing for influence in the north, by attempting to gain grants of land and office – had effectively ended with the fall of the Percys, and he was the great beneficiary of their demise in the years immediately following. Perhaps this essay should finish where it began: in the palatinate of Durham. In the 1380s John Neville of Raby, Ralph’s father, had been a regular attendee of the bishop of Durham’s temporal council, for which he received a considerable fee.126 By contrast, no such payments were ever made to Earl

119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126

CPR, 1405–1408, pp. 35 and 42. CPR, 1405–1408, p. 19. E 326/3089. E 326/1362. E 210/690. CPR, 1405–1408, p. 333. POPC, I, 295. Furnival remained Henry’s treasurer, and a regular member of his council, until his death in 1407. In 1385, Bishop Fordham paid John Neville 50 marks, ‘retenti de consilio Domini Episcopi’. Bishop Hatfield’s Survey, ed. William Greenwell, Surtees Society 29 (1856), p. 267.

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Mark Arvanigian Ralph; he never attended the palatine council on a regular basis.127 That absence was a product of circumstance and geography. Regular attendance at the king’s council made being in Durham somewhat difficult, and between 1399 and 1403 Westmorland was indeed a fairly regular member of the royal council, and very rarely in the north at all.128 More important, though, was his own rise in status, which came with a higher horizon and a wider vision, politically. These ambitions were fed first by Gaunt in the 1390s, then by Henry IV, who through lands and offices in Northumberland, Yorkshire, and especially the north-west, created a veritable royal legate in the region. Even after the Percy revolts, when Earl Ralph had successfully transferred his London duties to his brother, Furnival, he still stayed aloof from the Durham temporal council. His had eclipsed his ancestors and expanded away from his traditional spheres of influence in Durham and North Yorkshire. He was critical to the king’s governance of the north, and was elevated to a position there which remained unchallenged until the re-establishment of the Percys in the reign of Henry V.

127

This is based upon the fact that no moneys were paid to the Nevilles for expenses incurred while in attendance at the bishop’s council, nor indeed for any other reason. See, for example, Durham University Library, Archives and Special Collections, Church Commission, Bishopric, 189809. Of course, it is possible that Westmorland attended these gatherings while absorbing the costs incurred himself, although I find this unlikely. 128 Brown, ‘Reign of Henry IV’, pp. 12–14.

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5 Patronage, Petitions and Grace: the ‘Chamberlains’ Bills’ of Henry IV’s Reign Gwilym Dodd

In the treatise on court ceremonial known as the Ryalle Book, its author, possibly John Hampton, usher of Henry VI’s chamber, let slip a fascinating detail about court life under the first two Lancastrian kings in the moments that were not dominated by formality, ceremony and etiquette. According to these reminiscences, after dinner, when Henry IV and Henry V did not ‘keep state’, they would have a cushion laid on the cupboard – or sideboard – of the Great Chamber, and there they ‘wold lene by the space of an houre or more to ressaue [receive] billis and compleynts off whomesoeuer wold come’. The picture of the king being made comfortable whilst attending to the more mundane or routine business of kingship is as vivid as it is rare. It was, perhaps, its very ordinariness which made the king’s audience of his subject’s requests a subject which aroused little interest or comment by contemporary writers. And yet, receiving bills was clearly a regular, timeconsuming – and demanding – part of a king’s duties: when he was not holding court, his evenings were spent meeting the unrelenting demand of his subjects to be given gifts, favours or some other act of royal grace that would improve their personal circumstances. The extract from the Ryalle Book shows to good effect how hard working a king in this period could be. This discussion considers the mechanisms that underlay the scene described in the Ryalle Book. In essence, it is about the bills that were presented to the king – in this case Henry IV – on a day-to-day basis in the relative privacy of his chamber, away from the more ‘public’ and better known (in modern historiography) petitionary forums of the council and parliament. The aim is to look more closely at what lay behind the presentation of these bills, and in 

The Antiquarian Repertory, ed. F. Grose, 4 vols. (London, 1807–9), I, 314. For the dating and context of this treatise, see D. Starkey, ‘Henry VI’s Old Blue Gown: The English Court under the Lancastrians and Yorkists’, The Court Historian 4 (1999), 1–28 (esp. pp. 12–13).  In this discussion I use the terms ‘bill’ and ‘petition’ interchangeably. I have discussed the meaning of the terms in some detail in G. Dodd, Justice and Grace: Private Petitioning and the English Parliament in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford, 2007), p. 1, n. 2.

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Gwilym Dodd so doing to shed further light on one of the most important ways for kings to display the quality of their rule: namely, the degree to which they listened and responded to the needs and aspirations of their subjects. Since many of the bills presented to the king – perhaps the majority – sought an act of favour, the discussion is also more broadly about the distribution of royal patronage. In the last part of the paper the particular circumstances of Henry IV’s reign and the way these affected the king’s attitude toward the conferment of royal grace is addressed, but the principal focus of the discussion considers what can be learnt more generally about the roll of bills in medieval government, and in the processes which governed the distribution of patronage, by using the reign of Henry IV as a case study. As such, the discussion seeks to question some of the basic assumptions which underpin broader approaches to the history of late medieval politics and government – approaches which have their methodological foundations embedded in the work of K. B. McFarlane in the 1950s and 1960s. McFarlane was instrumental in shifting modern historiographical focus away from institutions and the administrative systems employed within them, to the investigation of people and their ideas and personal motivations. It is neither possible nor desirable, McFarlane asserted, ‘to write the history of institutions apart from the men who worked them’. This is true; but by the same token it can be asserted that it is neither possible nor desirable to write the history of human activity without considering the institutions and administrative systems which shaped this activity. Fundamentally, this paper is underpinned by an assertion that the functioning of government relied as much on a common set of administrative procedures and processes as it did on interpersonal relationships and clientage networks. To understand the particular characteristics of late medieval English government we ought to be asking not just the ‘who’ and ‘why’ questions, but also ‘how’ and ‘what’. How did the king’s subjects approach the monarch in order to obtain favour or special dispensation? How central was the written petition or bill to this process? What sorts of issues did the king deal with personally (and what issues were handled by other bodies, such as his council and parliament?). How were the decisions taken on solicitations to the king transferred into real action? And, perhaps the key issue to be addressed in this paper: how were the actions of the king and his suitors shaped by the particular needs of late medieval administration and bureaucracy? The reign of Henry IV lends itself particularly well to this kind of ‘administrative’ history because the sources showing how requests and favours 

For an appraisal of McFarlane’s contribution to scholarship, see E. Powell, ‘After “After McFarlane”: the Poverty of Patronage and the Case for Constitutional History’, in Trade, Devotion and Governance: Papers in Later Medieval History, ed. D. J. Clayton, R. G. Davies and P. McNiven (Stroud, 1994), pp. 1–16.  K. B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford, 1973), p. 280.

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Patronage, Petitions and Grace were processed by the crown are amongst the best of any period in the late Middle Ages. The reign also has the advantage of case-studying a king who appears to have distributed his largesse in a very even-handed and judicious manner: many of the conclusions reached here can, with only small adjustments, be applied to a broader canvass of kingship and government across the late Middle Ages as a whole. Indeed, it is worth acknowledging from the outset that patronage never became the source of political controversy under Henry IV, as it had done under Edward II and Richard II, and would later do under Henry VI, because of the concentration of royal favours into the hands of a small group of courtiers. Henry’s distribution of patronage was determined by a political imperative to maintain as wide a base of sympathy for the new Lancastrian regime as possible and it is a measure of his success in this regard that criticism between 1399 and 1412 was concentrated almost exclusively on the issue of the cost of the king’s generosity – contemporaries apparently saw little wrong with who received royal favour. My purpose in writing this essay is also to focus specifically on the king’s role in responding to his subject’s requests for favours. This is an important point to make because by the start of the fifteenth century a considerable burden of responsibility in making grants, providing licences and offering special dispensation was shouldered by the king’s ministers, primarily the treasurer and chancellor. Something of the extent of the mandate enjoyed by these officers to respond to the solicitations of the king’s subjects independently from the king has been shown to good effect in an important discussion by J. A. Tuck on the activities of the treasurer under Richard II. Although more work is needed to establish the degree to which royal grace was delegated by the king to his officials, in this discussion the focus lies with the king himself, to establish the extent and nature of the burden shouldered by the king personally in meeting the demands of his subjects. The principal source for the discussion is TNA series E 28 – the so-called Exchequer: Treasury of the Receipt: Council and Privy Seal Records. The series has sometimes been described as ‘chamberlains’ bills’ because the bulk of the collection comprises petitions which have the name of one of the king’s chamberlains inscribed in the lower margin to act as authorization for the endorsement. The unnecessarily convoluted name given to the series disguises a provenance to the documents which is actually very straightforward: for the most part, these were petitions which had been granted by the king and had been forwarded to the privy seal for action. The ‘E’ prefix and ‘exchequer’ designation are therefore misleading: the contents of E 28 would be more accurately described as pertaining to the office of the privy 

See A. L. Brown, ‘The Commons and the Council in the Reign of Henry IV’, EHR 79 (1964), 1–30 (pp. 18–19).  J. A. Tuck, ‘Richard II’s System of Patronage’, in The Reign of Richard II: Essays in Honour of May McKisack, ed. F. R. H. Du Boulay and C. M. Barron (London, 1971), pp. 1–20.

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Gwilym Dodd seal, since this is where the petitions ended up after writs had been made on their contents. As a collection of documents, which originated at the very heart of the late medieval state, the contents of E 28 have been surprisingly overlooked in recent historiography. They have been used on a piecemeal basis, especially by modern biographers of Henry VI, but they have not been the subject of more detailed scrutiny in recent decades. We thus continue to rely on the single article written by A. L. Brown in 1964 on the authorization of letters under the Great Seal.10 This was a fabulous piece of administrative analysis – perhaps one of the most important since the war – but it was necessarily constrained in the detail it could provide on E 28 by Brown’s desire to consider all ways which led the Great Seal to be moved. My intention is to develop and expand on some of the important conclusions reached by Brown. The series of chamberlains’ bills is of such importance for Henry IV’s reign, and for exploration into the workings of medieval government in general, that a proper investigation into the nature and historical context of this set of records is long overdue. The rather indifferent use made of the series E 28 can be partially attributed to the incomplete nature of the archive. Historians’ efforts to find out what mechanism led to privy seal warrants being issued to chancery and exchequer have been severely hampered by the destruction of the greater part of the archives of the medieval privy seal office (and signet seal office) in 1619, when they were kept in the Banqueting House at Whitehall. Although there are indications that the practice of signing bills off by the royal chamberlain began in 1370s, during the dotage of Edward III, hardly any examples survive which predate 1399.11 This means that it is virtually impossible for historians to illuminate the inner workings of medieval government before the reign of Henry IV. Even in the fifteenth century, chamberlains’ bills have survived in a rather haphazard and irregular way. In Henry IV’s reign, there are just two short periods when we appear to have a relatively intact run of records; namely, July–October 1401 and October 1404 – August 1405. The 

 

10 11

Their attribution to the exchequer appears to have originated in the early eighteenth century when the privy seal archive had passed into the custody of John Anstis who had been charged by the House of Lords in 1719 to make a calendar of these records together with exchequer material: A. L. Brown, ‘The Privy Seal in the Early Fifteenth Century’ (unpublished D. Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1954), pp. 9–10. R. A. Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI (Stroud, 1981); J. Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge, 1996). Though see G. Dodd, ‘Henry IV’s Council, 1399–1405’, in Henry IV, ed. Dodd and Biggs, pp. 95–115. In this discussion I considered the small minority of bills or petitions in E 28 which recorded the names of council members on their dorse. A. L. Brown, ‘The Authorization of Letters under the Great Seal’, BIHR 37 (1964), 125– 56. W. M. Ormrod, The Reign of Edward III: Crown and Political Society in England 1327–1377 (London, 1990), p. 118, n. 142; W. M. Ormrod, Political Life in Medieval England, 1300–1450 (Basingstoke, 1995), p. 20.

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Patronage, Petitions and Grace clustering of surviving material into discrete chronological blocks is symptomatic of the fact that privy seal records were kept in files, of which only a small selection appear to have been saved from the flames in 1619. Of course, the privy seal office did not just receive chamberlains’ bills; it also received letters authorised by the king through his signet seal, now classified as TNA PSO 1. Interestingly, signet letters also survive in notable quantities from the late fourteenth century onwards which suggests that they were kept together with the chamberlains’ bills and perished along the same lines in the conflagration of the early seventeenth century. There is no reason to doubt that at one time there existed a full set of both chamberlains’ bills and signet letters which had been sent into the privy seal office dating back well into the fourteenth century,12 but these have now been irretrievably lost and any meaningful quantitative analysis of the administrative burden carried by a late medieval English monarch must, by the nature of the surviving archives, focus on a Lancastrian king.

I We come, then, to one of the key questions relating to governmental process: to what extent did the written petition form the basis of the king’s dealings with his subjects? Our ability to judge the contribution of petitions to the dynamic of government depends either on the survival of the petitions themselves or on a record being made of the petitionary origins of a decision taken by the king. Unless a petition accompanied a writ, warrant or letter, it was rare indeed for the clerk to make a note of the mechanism that lay behind it. The point is important because there were many routes along which decisions taken by the king could be transmitted through government: only one of these used a petition, endorsed by the chamberlain, as the means of explicitly conveying the king’s wishes. The problem is compounded by the fact that what determined how decisions were translated into action (and how these decisions were then recorded) was not a rigid set of administrative guidelines but, very often, the particular circumstances in which the king found himself. The complexity of the system is set out in Figure 1, at the end of discussion, which shows the different modes available to the king to authorize letters out of chancery (a similar diagram would show an equivalent process if the exchequer, rather than chancery, lay at the end of the paper trail). Chamberlains’ bills followed route C, but they were clearly not the only 12

In 1386, Richard II ordered the removal of all privy seal records from Edward III’s reign (petitiones, billas, waranta, indentures et alia memoranda …) into the custody of the keeper of the rolls of chancery in the Tower of London: H. C. Maxwell-Lyte, Historical Notes on the Use of The Great Seal of England (London, 1926), p. 29.

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Gwilym Dodd means of conveying royal instructions. By the fifteenth century, the privy seal office acted as a vital conduit for internal government communication, but a significant proportion of information passing between the king and chancery (and other departments) bypassed the privy seal office and was sent direct to the chancellor (route A in Figure 1). This usually occurred when the king and chancellor were in close proximity and the king could hand over his warrant in person.13 There are large numbers of so-called ‘direct’ or ‘immediate’ warrants in TNA series C 81: the vast majority take the form of bills (i.e. petitions) with instructions from the king to give effect to their contents.14 This format should come as no surprise. If the king had wished to convey his orders in a written form other than an endorsed bill he would presumably have utilized the privy seal office and/or his signet seal. So far so good. A problem arises, however, in that the warranty note per ipse Regem, which was issued on chancery enrolments as a result of direct warrants, far exceeds the number of conceded petitions which followed route A and (the other type of direct warrant) the signet letters which followed route E.15 So, whilst it is possible to say that a good proportion of chancery instruments originated from a petition, this leaves a majority which could have been prompted by other means, such as a straightforward verbal order from the king. In these cases, it is clearly not possible to say how much – or little – initiative sprang from supplicants soliciting royal favour. The problems are compounded by the fact that the destruction of the greater part of the signet seal office archive in the fire of 1619 means that it is not possible to determine the extent to which signet seal letters were prompted by petitions, whether the letters were sent to the chancellor directly (route E) or to the keeper of the privy seal (route D). (Signet letters were sent to the chancellor when the latter was separated from the king, and when the instructions were routine or relatively unimportant;16 they were sent to the keeper of the privy seal when the king was out of personal contact with the keeper and he needed to convey instructions of a more formal character.)17 The situation thus parallels 13

14 15

16

17

Brown, ‘Authorization of Letters’, p. 142. For more detailed context, see Maxwell-Lyte, Historical Notes, ch. 5 (especially p. 148 for examples of cases handed straight to the chancellor from the king). See C 81/1394–1531. Brown calculated that just 178 of the original warrants (i.e. signet letters or conceded petitions) survive for 363 letters patent warranted per ipsum regem between September 1404 and September 1405; he identified just 31 out of 177 enrolments in the close rolls: ‘Authorization of Letters’, p. 142. For useful background on the use of (and controversy surrounding) the signet seal, see Signet Letters, Introduction, pp. 1–11. The volume brings together all extant signet letters sent to both the keeper of the privy seal and the chancellor in the first decades of the fifteenth century. Brown, ‘Privy Seal’, pp. 32–5 and idem, ‘Authorization of Letters’, pp. 136–7, 140. Brown based this assertion on a survey of signet letters which showed, for the most part, that they had been written when the king was perambulating in the localities. This impres-

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Patronage, Petitions and Grace the uncertainty surrounding chancery instruments in that it is not possible to establish what the prevailing method of communication was between the king and his signet office. The chamberlains’ bills thus represent only a small proportion of the requests which the king received. In themselves they do not provide any basis to measure either how heavy the king’s administrative load was or how important the petition was in beginning government process. To a great extent, the second of these questions can only be answered on the basis of inference.18 The arguments are finely balanced each way. Brown’s opinion was that no matter how an instruction was eventually conveyed through government, the petition predominated as the principal method of initiation.19 For Brown, it was not the nature or content of the instruction which determined whether it was sent as an endorsed petition, a signet letter or direct warrant, but the context in which the original request was made: one way or another, everything began as a written request. The hugely important implications of this assertion appear to have escaped notice in modern historical writing, for the logical corollary of Brown’s view is that late medieval English government, and the king in particular, functioned for the most part devoid of any capacity – or desire – to be pre-emptive and pro-active. Government was essentially ‘consumer led’: it was driven overwhelmingly by the demands and ambitions of individuals seeking their own personal advancement by soliciting the favour of the king. It is a bold line to argue given the large gaps in the archives which have just been outlined. Perhaps it overlooks the fact that government did not just respond to the needs of individuals: it also required proactive intervention on a more general level in the shires. In this respect, several historians of the fifteenth century have argued forcefully for the idea that it was not the formal written supplication but an informal dialogue between the crown and its agents in the localities – primarily local officeholders and local lords and nobles – which accounted for the main share of information flowing towards the crown about local conditions and problems.20 It is interesting in this respect to note that the series of chamberlains’ bills are for the most part devoid of requests by the king’s subjects for annuities or local office which suggests that the sorts of decisions which enabled local men to become the king’s representatives in the sion is confirmed by scanning the place names recorded in Signet Letters, where very few can be seen to have been located at Westminster. 18 The discussion by James Bothwell on the distribution of patronage by Edward III, which reaches no firm conclusion on this point, nicely illustrates the complexity of the question: J. S. Bothwell, Edward III and the English Peerage: Royal Patronage, Social Mobility and Political Control in Fourteenth-Century England (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 29–31. 19 A view echoed shortly after by Tuck, ‘Richard II’s System of Patronage’, p. 4: ‘The importance of the petition in medieval government can hardly be over-emphasized: patronage as much as justice was founded upon it.’ 20 J. Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 78–9, 97–8.

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Gwilym Dodd shires depended much more on the good word of a well-connected patron or the designs and plans of the king himself and his advisors. But in other regards, and particularly where the distribution of the king’s largesse is concerned, it is difficult to avoid the force of Brown’s hypothesis. Two factors can be cited in support of this view. In the first place, a survey of all the extant chamberlains’ bills presented between October 1404 and May 1405 shows that the vast majority had been conceded by the king when he was resident in the capital – either at the Palace of Westminster or in the Tower of London. The only exception occurred in the early run of bills dating to October and November, which were assigned to Coventry. This was at the time of parliament, when the king was surrounded by his chief ministers who had removed themselves from the capital to attend to the business of the meeting. The unmistakable correlation of chamberlains’ bills to the movements of the king and his officers provides firm evidence to support the view that the privy seal was only mobilized by a chamberlains’ bill when the king and keeper were close at hand (route C in Figure 1). Presumably, there was no need to have signet letters written out when verification – or clarification – of the contents of a petition could be fairly easily obtained by direct communication between the privy seal office and the chamberlain. The point is this: that unless we are to suppose that the king was presented with written requests from suitors only when he was in the capital, petitions must have been routinely and extensively used to access royal grace when the king was also in the provinces, but that these written supplications were kept by the secretary of the signet office (and subsequently lost) once a signet letter had been issued on its contents. The process is clearly spelled out later in the fifteenth century when the council proposed a series of measures to guide Henry VI in his dealings with bills: ‘it is þought þt all billes whanne the King of his goode grace hath graunted þeim be deliv[er]ed to his secretary and l[ett]res to be conceived upon theim directed under the signet to the Keper of the prive seal and from þens under the prive seel to the Chauncell[e]r of Englande’.21 On occasion, a petition accompanied a signet letter, but this seems to have occurred only when it was considered easier to transmit the king’s intentions via the supplication itself.22 Ordinarily, the letter on its own was sufficient. The bills and letters were thus alternative systems designed to achieve the same end: to authorize the privy seal office into issuing warrants for action in chancery or the exchequer. A comparison of the content of the bills and letters shows that there was no distinction in the subject matter conveyed in both types of document: chamberlains’ bills and signet letters were both utilized above all to respond to the huge demand

21 22

POPC, VI, 319. Eg. Signet Letters, no. 219.

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Patronage, Petitions and Grace for advancement, reward, protection, licence, pardons and redress from the king’s subjects. The second factor relates to the form of the chamberlains’ bills themselves. It would be easy to assume that the underlying purpose of a written supplication was for the petitioner to set out his/her case in the best possible light in order to obtain a positive outcome to the request. This, surely, was axiomatic of petitioning in general. Certainly, it was the norm for the majority of petitions contained in the series ‘Ancient Petitions’ (TNA SC 8), which were presented for the most part in a parliamentary context. In fact, in the course of the fourteenth century, the trend was for parliamentary petitions to increase in length as supplicants sought to increase their chances of a successful outcome by adding extra detail and background information. Many chamberlains’ bills, by contrast, were brief, to the point of being curt. In many cases, no attempt was made to justify or explain why the petitioner sought to obtain the king’s grace: they simply recorded the two basic details needed to respond to the request – who was petitioning and what they wanted. Some bills even omitted the formality of a proper address to the king, beginning directly with the plea itself. The following two examples, which date to the period of the Coventry parliament of 1404, typify this type of request.

(1) E 28/15 (16 October 1404) Le Roy ad grante A nostre tresexellent tresgraciouse et tresredoute Seignour le Roy Supplie humblement vostre povere liege William de Hasilhurst de Knottisford de luy grauntier une chartre de pardon de vostre habundant grace pur toux maners des felonies et trespasses par luy devaunt ses heures factiez ou parpetrez et les utlagaries pur y celles causes devers luy pronunciez pur dieux et en oeure de charitie Richard Seignour de Grey    Lettre eut feut facte a Coventre le xvj iour doctobr lan etc sisme (2) E 28/15 (5 November 1404) Le Roy ad grante Plese a nostre tresredoute et tresgracious Seignour le Roy de donier & grauntier a Richard Leveson de Wolvernehampton xij keynez pur maeremme pur aparellere de sez meisons apprendre en le Foreste de Kynvare pur dieu et en eovree de charite. Richard Seignour de Grey  Lettre eut feust facte a Coventre le quint iour de Novembre lan sisme

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Gwilym Dodd The brevity of such requests could simply indicate that the supplicants did not wish to waste space on superfluous verbiage; but a more likely explanation is that the underlying function of these short petitions was not in itself to convince the king of the deserving nature of the supplicant’s request, but to record the basic outline of the case for essentially administrative purposes. In other words, these bills were written to serve practical, rather than rhetorical, ends. They owed their existence above all to the underlying need of the crown to create a paper trail in which decisions taken by the king were most efficiently transmitted, authorized and archived through official endorsements added to a supplication. The lack of explanation in these bills almost certainly indicates that the decision on the case had already been made, or at least was not necessary because it had been reached as a result of more informal (unrecorded) discourse. According to the author of the Ryalle Book, the king received the petitions of any of his subjects whomsoever could come, which suggests that petitioners were normally expected to appear at court in person to make their requests, and may even have presented their requests orally in the first instance.23 But, crucially, a formal, written supplication was still required in order to provide the means for the crown to prompt the machinery of government into action. Thus, it was for bureaucratic, rather than for political or social reasons, that we should consider the written petition to have been pre-eminent as the means for individuals to mobilise the crown on their own behalf. For this reason we should not be too surprised to find some of the most senior and powerful political figures of the period seeking favour from the king by having a formal petition written out and submitted for consideration. There were few individuals more influential under Henry IV than the king’s own chief chamberlain, John Beaufort, earl of Somerset; yet even he was obliged to put into writing a request for the repayment of 1,000 marks which he had borrowed from Richard Whittington to finance the king’s expedition to Scotland in 1400.24 In this case, the bill is rather more expansive than the examples given above, as it sets out the background and purpose of the original loan. The details were presumably felt to be necessary to record the reasons for the crown’s subsequent grant; but they may also have served Somerset’s interests by having the crown’s obligation set out in writing. This further highlights the advantages to having requests put into writing, for it ensured that the recorded details of a case were accurate and authentic, which was important for both the petitioner and the crown.25 Somerset’s bill

23

Antiquarian Repertory, I, 314. E 28/17 (24 January 1405). The bill was authorised by the king’s under-chamberlain, Richard, Lord Grey. Chamberlains’ bills are not ascribed piece numbers, so in this discussion they will be identified within their files by the date of their endorsement. 25 A point that has been made in relation to requests for pardons by N. D. Hurnard, The King’s Pardon for Homicide Before AD 1307 (Oxford, 1969), p. 35. 24

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Patronage, Petitions and Grace also provides a good illustration of how a supplicant’s proposed resolution to a complaint or request could be taken up and transformed into instructions once the crown had added its endorsement. In this case, the earl suggested that the king should repay him by assigning him revenue from the wool subsidy levied in London. The petition even specified the collectors who the crown should approach in order to make this arrangement. On the same day that the petition was presented, a warrant was duly issued by the privy seal instructing the exchequer to make the allowance (though it is interesting that Somerset was granted only half the sum which he was owed).26 From the point of view of the crown, the bill could thus serve two useful administrative purposes: it recorded the background to a grant or concession; and it could provide the basis for action by outlining how the crown should proceed on its contents. Almost certainly, it was not just whether petitions would be successful, but how the crown should respond to a petition, which formed the basis of negotiation and consultation before many bills were written up. By any measure, this made the bill an extremely efficient administrative mechanism for the crown to employ. If, then, many petitions were not petitions, as such, but substitutes for warrants, this raises the question: how were decisions taken informally? What factors could influence the outcome to a request, if the petition itself was not intended to do the persuading? It is here that we must acknowledge the possibility that intercession by a third party could be key in securing a positive outcome. Intercession, by its nature, is mainly hidden from the official records; but its prevalence is hinted at by the matter of fact way it was mentioned in the ordinances of 1444, which aimed to regulate the way in which supplicants could approach Henry VI for a royal grant. The first clause stipulated: ‘Furst of any lorde of his Counsaill or othir or any man aboute his [par]sone … and be immediat labor or to the Kyng for þexpedicon of any bille for an othir p[ar]sone that he subscribe himselfe in the said bille so that it may be knowen at all tymes by whoose meanes and labour everi bille is’.27 The purpose of this ordinance, it should be noted, was not to end or curtail the practice of mediation on the behalf of a supplicant; it was to introduce a measure of transparency to the system at a time when Henry VI’s ability to make sound judgements was beginning to come under serious doubt.28 Similar circumstances account for measures included in the thirtyone articles enacted in 1406 when Henry IV was suffering from one of his

26

E 404/20/129. POPC, VI, 317. 28 For background, see J. L. Watts, ‘The Counsels of King Henry VI, c. 1435–45’, EHR 106 (1991), 279–98 (pp. 295–8); and idem, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship, pp. 213, 255–6. Although the names of a number of ‘sponsors’ were recorded on bills in subsequent years, the practice does not appear to have taken off and this measure, together with the Ordinances in general, appears to have been quickly forgotten. 27

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Gwilym Dodd recurring bouts of ill-health.29 Article 3 specified that the king should send to his council the bills of any ‘persons in the entourage of the royal person of our lord the king, or others who sue to him, [who] try to sway the king’s mind to meddle in any quarrels’.30 It aimed to tackle the one really significant danger in the intercessionary process whereby intercessors might seek to enhance their own private interests by subverting or impeding the natural course of justice. That intercession retained a legitimate role in government process was tacitly acknowledged in article 9 of the thirty-one articles which stated that ‘all the familiars dwelling in his [Henry IV’s] household, that no single one of them, on pain of grievous penalty, should presume to submit or present, on his own behalf or for any other person, any supplication to our said sovereign on any day of the week other than those specified above [i.e. Wednesdays or Fridays]’.31 Here, the point was not whether the members of the king’s entourage should, or should not, exploit their position to intercede on the behalf of others (or indeed, to submit requests for their own purposes), but that they should do so at the right time of the week! Intercession, per se, was accepted as a normal and regular part of political life. Only when a king was considered unable to discern (or incapable of discerning) the importunities of unscrupulous sponsors of requests, did intercession become a cause for concern; but even here it was a case of regulating rather than banning it. In the one source which reveals something of the nature and extent of intercession in the Middle Ages – royal charters of pardon – this point is shown to good effect. Recent research has demonstrated that a remarkably wide range of different intercessors were called upon by supplicants who wished to secure a pardon, but that the main burden fell upon those nobles and prelates who were politically active and/ or who frequently came into contact with the king.32 These were the type of individuals identified in the ordinance of 1444 as being of the king’s counsel or otherwise about his person. Thus, it was not the case that intercession was tolerated by the governing elite: intercession was an important aspect of what the governing elite did. Mediation on the behalf of a supplicant was an act of good lordship. It validated the intercessor’s position in the social and political hierarchy. From the king’s point of view, the good word of an influential patron provided him with the necessary ‘counsel’ to arrive at a correct and proper judgement. In a period when the measure of integrity was to a

29

For background, see P. McNiven, ‘The Problem of Henry IV’s Health’, EHR 100 (1985), 746–72 (pp. 759–1). For a recent analysis of the political context of 1406 see D. Biggs, ‘The Politics of Health: Henry IV and the Long Parliament of 1406’, in Henry IV, ed. Dodd and Biggs, pp. 185–205. 30 PROME, parliament of 1406, item 69 (Rot. Parl., III, 586). 31 Ibid., item 75 (587). 32 H. Lacy, ‘The Politics of Mercy: The Use of the Royal Pardon in Fourteenth-Century England’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of York, 2005), Appendices 5i, 5ii, 5iii.

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Patronage, Petitions and Grace large extent determined by status and position, the intercession of someone close to the king was not a hindrance but an aid to his rule. There are, unfortunately, few insights into the identity of intercessors under Henry IV, but it would be safe to assume that the most frequent mediators were the people who were closest to the king, both politically and socially. The social qualification is important because the evidence of the charters of pardon indicates that it was not just individuals closely involved in government who were called upon to act as intermediaries: aristocratic women, for example, also predominated.33 Under Richard II, Queen Anne was the most prolific of all the known mediators.34 It is significant also to see that some of Richard II’s knights and many royal servants of lower rank were called upon by petitioners who wished to secure the king’s grace. Surveying the calendared patent rolls of Henry IV’s reign between 1401 and 1408, the following individuals are recorded as intercessors and may be taken to be representative of the sorts of people who fulfilled this role at the time: John Drayton, king’s esquire; Henry, earl of Northumberland; Joan de Beauchamp, lady of Berevenny; Henry, Prince of Wales; Herman van Mekerne, king’s esquire; Ralph, Lord of Greystock; John Stanley, king’s knight; Richard, earl of Warwick; Thomas of Lancaster (the king’s second son); Henry Bowet, archbishop of York; Queen Joan; and John of Lancaster (the king’s third son).35 All this points to the likelihood that a large number of supplicants, and possibly the vast majority, first solicited the support of well-placed intermediaries before then submitting their requests formally to the king for consideration. It may even have been through the connections of powerful patrons or royal servants that supplicants first learned of the availability of offices, benefices, wardships and so on which they were later to petition for. Such behind-thescenes brokerage would almost certainly have been an important facet of

33

Ibid., Appendix 5i. The names of intercessors were not usually recorded on bills, but a handful recording these details survive from the 1390s in E 28/3. They were: Robert Braybrooke, bishop of London (who interceded on behalf of John Wyk on 15 April 1392); Thomas Auklay (on behalf of Joanna Bonde on 22 April 1392); John Waltham, bishop of Salisbury (on behalf of Robert Stephen on 25 April 1392); Edward, earl of Rutland (on behalf of Philip Ruold on 27 April 1392); and Harry Berkham (on behalf of Richard Fordham on 1 May 1392). These were all bills requesting charters of pardon. I have not been able to establish the identity of Auklay and Berkham, which usefully illustrates the value that was attached to sponsorship even when intercessors did not possess high social or political status. For further discussion of intercession in Richard II’s reign, see Tuck, ‘Richard II’s System of Patronage’, pp. 15–19. 34 For discussion of the role of queens as intercessors, see J. C. Parsons, ‘The Intercessionary Patronage of Queens Margaret and Isabella of France’, in Thirteenth Century England VI: Proceedings of the Durham Conference 1995, ed. M. Prestwich, R. H. Britnell and R. Frame (Woodbridge, 1997), pp. 145–56. 35 CPR, 1401–5, pp. 100, 161, 261, 330, 414; 1405–8, pp. 38, 160, 219, 431, 433, 435, 459.

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Gwilym Dodd what can be termed the ‘court life’ of the period.36 Wherever the king went, the people who attended him or who had access to him – whether these were formal members of his household or government, or whether they belonged more loosely to the political and social elite – would have been subject to the solicitations of suitors hoping to give their requests additional kudos by gaining their sponsorship and endorsement. Of all the individuals, besides the king, who were capable of determining the outcome to a petition, the king’s chamberlains – i.e. the chamberlain of England (or chief chamberlain) and his under-chamberlain (or chamberlain of the household) – were undoubtedly the most important.37 Petitions were first scrutinized by one of the chamberlains before they were passed on to the king for consideration. The chamberlains were effectively the ‘gatekeepers’ to the royal person, controlling who could, and could not, gain access to the reserves of royal patronage.38 As such, they played a crucial role in determining the scope and form of the king’s interaction with his subjects. Some indication of the power exercised by the chamberlain is provided by an account given to the Good Parliament of 1376 by Sir Roger Beauchamp, chamberlain to Edward III, who had been given a supplication by Alice Perrers asking to have Sir Nicholas Dagworth recalled from Ireland.39 Beauchamp took exception to the content of the request – on the grounds that it contravened orders given by the council – and refused to have it passed to the king. On this occasion the king intervened and overruled his chamberlain because he happened to overhear Beauchamp and Perrers discussing the matter, but the episode provides clear evidence of the kind of discretionary power the chamberlain possessed to discard any supplication which he did not deem suitable for the king’s ear. Such an influential role in facilitating the king’s personal rule inevitably drew the chamberlain into the firing line when the distribution of patronage became the source of political controversy,40 but even in less disrupted periods there was a keen awareness of 36

37 38

39

40

Two of the most stimulating recent discussions on the ‘court’ in the late medieval period are G. L. Harriss, ‘The Court of the Lancastrian Kings’ (pp. 1–18) and J. Watts, ‘Was there a Lancastrian Court?’ (pp. 253–71), both in The Lancastrian Court: Proceedings of the 2001 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. J. Stratford (Donington, 2003). For background, see Given-Wilson, Royal Household, pp. 71–3, and Tuck, ‘Richard II’s System of Patronage’, pp. 5–6. Rosemary Horrox has pointed out that no household official or courtier was ever accused of totally blocking access to the king, though it is probably true that the chamberlain could make it very hard for lower status suitors to access the king if he did not wish them to: R. Horrox, ‘Caterpillars of the Commonwealth? Courtiers in Late Medieval England’, in Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England: Essays Presented to Gerald Harriss, ed. R. E. Archer and S. Walker (London, 1995), pp. 1–15 (p. 9). PROME, parliament of October 1377, item 42 (Rot. Parl., III, 13). This incident is discussed in a broader consideration of the king’s chamberlain by Given-Wilson, Royal Household, pp. 72–3. As demonstrated by the fate of a number of fourteenth-century chamberlains of the

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Patronage, Petitions and Grace his role in government. In 1399 the Commons included the office of chamberlain amongst the senior ‘professional’ offices of government in a request that these individuals should not ‘take from any of our lord the king’s lieges any commission, present or gift of any kind’ when discharging their duties.41 Possibly, this request reflected concerns resulting from the specific circumstances of Richard II’s reign, but equally it may have reflected an awareness that this office carried a great responsibility, both to the king and to the king’s subjects. Under Henry IV, just three men shouldered the principal burden of this position: John Beaufort, earl of Somerset, who acted as chamberlain of England from 1399 to 1410; Sir Thomas Erpingham, who was under-chamberlain between 1399 and 1404; and Richard Grey, lord Grey of Codnor, who was under-chamberlain between 1404 and 1413. Apart from the obvious fact that these individuals were amongst the staunchest supporters of the new Lancastrian regime,42 it is their length of service that really stands out. This places these men very firmly into the mould of the king’s most senior, trusted and experienced advisors.

II What factors influenced whether a supplicant approached the king in his ‘court’ and not in the more formal petitionary institutions of parliament and the council? Was the type of request presented in these latter contexts determined by practicalities and convenience, or were there recognized limitations on matters which the king could dispatch independently of his advisors, which made parliament and the council the more appropriate forum? Conversely, were there matters that were best left for consideration by the king outside parliament and the council? A clue is provided in a petition presented by the Commons in the parliament of 1399 in which the MPs complained that the king’s subjects delivered petitions to the king ‘in relation to their affairs, some to protect their lives, some to protect their estates, for which they are not able to have a reply’.43 The wording of the request is otherwise innocuous but for the fact that the response specified that petitioners should ‘sue to the household: Hugh Despenser, the younger (executed); William Latimer (impeached); Simon Burley (executed); William Scrope (executed). Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford, chief chamberlain, died in exile. For a list of the chamberlains appointed up to 1399, see Tout, Chapters, VI, 45–50. 41 PROME, parliament of 1399, item 99 (Rot. Parl., III, 433). 42 For bibliographical details on these individuals, see the following entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), on-line version: G. L. Harriss, ‘Beaufort, John, marquess of Dorset and marquess of Somerset (c.1371–1410)’; S. Walker, ‘Erpingham, Sir Thomas (c.1355–1428)’; and C. L. Kingsford, ‘Grey, Richard, fourth Baron Grey of Codnor (c.1371–1418)’, rev. R. A. Griffiths. 43 PROME, parliament of 1399, item 149 (Rot. Parl., III, 444).

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Gwilym Dodd chamberlain and to the council’. The chamberlain was never ordinarily or formally a king’s councillor, so he and the council were being put forward as mutually exclusive entities. The inference is that petitions affecting the wellbeing of supplicants (above all financial?) ought to be directed towards the king, via the chamberlain, whilst those relating to land (above all legal?) should be reserved for consideration by the council including, one presumes, the council in parliament. That contemporaries envisioned a reasonably distinct line of demarcation separating what might conveniently be described as matters of royal ‘grace’, from matters of ‘state’, comes out more clearly in the reign of Henry VI, in the late 1430s, when the minority council took steps to encourage the young king to take on more of the burden of government.44 The councillors’ intention was for Henry VI to involve himself in all aspects of government, but the particular foibles of this king created an artificial environment in which he discharged only those aspects of his duties which absolutely required his input – matters which pertained specifically to the royal prerogative – leaving everything else to his council. In practice, this meant that whilst the king actively and willingly engaged in making grants to his subjects, he left the principal burden of dispensing justice and other matters of state policy to his council. This, in essence, defined the fault line between matters of ‘grace’ and matters of ‘state’. In many ways it was (and is) an artificial distinction, because the exercise of grace was also required in the sphere of justice, but it was indicative of a set of assumptions by contemporaries, and by Henry VI himself, about what activities the king should be left to discharge by himself and what activities required the wider participation of the political community. The dispensation of justice, particularly where the crown was not an interested party, needed broader counsel; the distribution of patronage was purely a matter for the royal prerogative. We need not delay too long in showing how the time of the council and parliament (and latterly, chancery) was taken up considering matters which required the exercise of equitable jurisdiction: a strong tradition of scholarship has built up showing how these institutions fulfilled a critical role in providing a form of flexible justice to the king’s subjects which was not otherwise available to them through the common law courts.45 By Henry IV’s reign, parliament had developed into an extraordinary court which catered, in particular, for the disputes and grievances brought by members of the

44 45

For this, and what follows, see Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship, pp. 131–5. For the most recent consideration of parliament as provider of justice, see Dodd, Justice and Grace. On the council see J. F. Baldwin, The King’s Council during the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1913), esp. ch. 11. Chancery developed into the court of equity par excellence in the course of the fifteenth century, but its functions and purpose were rather different from parliament and the council which operated more closely within the sphere of royal activity: see T. Haskett, ‘The Medieval English Court of Chancery’, Law and History Review 14 (1996), 245–313.

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Patronage, Petitions and Grace political elite; and the council’s more or less continuous existence throughout the year meant it picked up many cases which did not require the public scrutiny offered by parliament.46 Once again the person of John, earl of Somerset, the king’s chamberlain, is useful in highlighting further points of distinction between these more formal institutions and the king’s ‘court’. In the parliament held at Coventry in October 1404 Somerset presented a petition in which he asked the king, with the ‘assent of the lords spiritual and temporal and of the commons’, to have a £1,000 annuity to maintain and support his estate.47 This petition was clearly much more a matter for royal grace than an appeal for parliamentary adjudication, but what the earl was asking for was also very clearly of a different order to the contents of the bill which he presented to the king a few months later, when he asked to be reimbursed the money he had spent on the expedition to Scotland. It was the magnitude of Somerset’s request, and therefore its financial impact on the crown, as well as more generally the bearing it had on relations between the crown and nobility, that presumably obliged him – and the king – to have the petition presented in parliament and not in the privacy of the king’s chamber. This is a useful illustration to show that there was no simple correlation between ‘public’ matters of state and the ‘private’ conferment of royal grace: the distribution of grace became a matter of state policy – or, to put it more crudely, of ‘public interest’ – when it had a discernible impact in shaping or changing the political community. We should avoid regarding this as a limitation or curtailment of the king’s powers. This was a system founded on a set of conventions which had developed over many years and no doubt Henry IV, no less than his subjects, accepted it unquestioningly as the correct way of doing things. Almost certainly most kings saw the benefits of deferring decisions on important matters to broader consideration, not least because it gave the eventual outcome a greater sense of legitimacy and authority. The point is effectively illustrated by the existence within the series E 28 of a sub-collection of bills which had been considered by the council. Such cases can be identified by a distinctive form of endorsement which listed the names of those councillors who had been present when the petition had been dispatched. That the king sent bills to his council in this way demonstrates the value which he placed on sharing the responsibility for some decisions. In general, this seems to have occurred when the particular expertise of council members could help the king reach a more informed decision on a case, or occasionally, when a bill raised an issue that was especially sensitive politically. It may well have been a combination of both these factors which explains why a bill presented by Henry Percy, earl of Northumber46

For examples of ‘judicial’ cases brought before the council, see Select Cases before the King’s Council 1243–1482, ed. I. S. Leadam and J. F. Baldwin, Selden Society 35 (Cambridge, 1918). See also the discussion in Baldwin, King’s Council, pp. 262–306. 47 PROME, parliament of October 1404, item 25 (Rot. Parl., III, 550).

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Gwilym Dodd land, asking for the payment of the wages due to him for service as warden of the Western March was deferred by the king to his council on 5 November 1404.48 Henry’s councillors would presumably have been able to verify how much the earl was owed, as well as provide more general guidance on the advisability of offering back-payment to a nobleman who had subsequently taken up arms against the regime. A large proportion of bills deferred by the king to his council also related to decisions or actions which the king and council had previously agreed on. One example includes a petition from John Chaundeler, clerk, who had been appointed ‘par ordinance de vous tressage consail’ to be Treasurer for the king’s eldest daughter, Blanche.49 Chaundeler claimed to have personally met some of the costs of Lady Blanche’s journey to Cologne and subsequent marriage to Louis of Bavaria, and now petitioned the king to have an allowance out of the exchequer. The king granted the petition; but the case was referred to the members of the council, apparently for consultative purposes only, where it received their approval.50 Other examples of cases involving both the king and council include two petitions presented, on separate occasions, by Robert Markele and John Brigge in March 1405. Both cases were forwarded by the king to his council for advice. Markele claimed to be owed wages for a period of forty days service as a result of an assignment given to him by the king and council at Worcester to send ships from English ports of the Admiralty to West Wales;51 and John Brigge petitioned to have the wages of paid of the garrison of Bishopcastle, in the Welsh Marches, because he had met these expenses himself since his appointment as guardian of the castle by the king and his council.52 The second petition was granted by the king ‘par avys de son consail’.53 Enough has been said, then, to suggest that the subject matter of the chamberlains’ bills was limited. Surveying all bills dating to the period between

48

49 50

51 52 53

E 28/15 (5 November 1404). Henry IV’s refusal – or inability – to pay the debts which Northumberland had incurred in his capacity as warden of the western march had been a primary factor in the quarrel between the king and earl which eventually led to the Percy rebellion of 1403: see J. M. W. Bean, ‘Henry IV and the Percies’, History 44 (1959), 212–27. E 28/16 (9 December 1404). The endorsement recorded the fact that a writ had been sent to the treasurer, barons and exchequer to make account with the supplicant for all the expenses he had incurred in the name of Lady Blanche. The action was recorded as having been ‘par ordinance & comandement du Counte de Som[er]s’, though below this the phrase ‘P[ar] avis de Messs’ was recorded, with a list of royal councillors (the chancellor, Henry Beaufort, bishop of Lincoln; the treasurer, Henry Bowet, bishop of Bath and Wells; the guardian of the privy seal, Thomas Langley, dean of York; Matthew de Gournay; Arnold Savage; and John Norbury). E 28/19 (5 March 1405). E 28/19 (14 March 1405). Interestingly, on this occasion the council was recorded to have included the earl of Somerset, who presumably co-ordinated the transmission of the case to the council.

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Patronage, Petitions and Grace November 1404 and May 1405, it is apparent that hardly any of them raised matters requiring the king’s arbitration. In one of the few examples which has come to light in this period – a case brought before the king by the abbot of Reading in February 1405, in which the abbot made complaint against the inhabitants of the town of Reading who claimed common passage along a river adjoining the abbey’s lands – it is significant that the abbot asked that the king should merely order an enquiry into the affair, before going on to suggest that once the findings were known the case ought then to come before the king or his council where judgement on the matter should be reached.54 It is also apparent that very few chamberlains’ bills were presented in the interests of communities, such as towns, corporations, counties, hundreds or (notwithstanding the bill presented by the abbot of Reading) ecclesiastical institutions. This suggests that the sorts of issues raised by communities, in relation to their rights, privileges and governance were, once again, much better suited to an environment more formally geared for wider consultation, such as the council or parliament. The bills presented to the king, by contrast, came overwhelmingly from individuals who wished to enhance or restore their own personal circumstances. There is not the space, or need, to describe in detail all the different types of bill contained in the series E 28. A large proportion of these bills were, in any case, of a relatively routine nature, typically asking the king for a pardon (usually for a felony) or for the ratification of a supplicant’s rights or privileges. There is nothing obvious to distinguish these cases from the more run-of-the-mill requests received by the king’s ministers. Their existence probably denotes the widespread belief that only the king, in person, could provide adequate satisfaction to his subjects. The overlap of routine business had limits, however, for it is noticeable that there are very few requests for wardship, custody and marriage in the series E 28, it being recognized that these cases ought ordinarily to be handled by the treasurer.55 For the present purposes the most interesting petitions handled by the king were those which required a more tangible act of royal grace. These cases covered a huge variety of subject matter and were presented from an equally wide range of supplicants. In each case the supplicant was granted their request. Examples include a request from a group of Welsh merchants to be given licence to trade in Bristol and Gloucestershire without impediment from the king’s ministers;56 a request of Sir Thomas Clanvowe (a royal knight) to be given two casks of Gascon wine;57 and the petition of William Hewys, parson of the church of Wippingham in the Isle of Wight to have the presentation of

54

E 28/18 (16 February 1405). Tuck, ‘Richard II’s System of Patronage’, pp. 4, 7–8. 56 E 28/16 (4 December 1404). 57 E 28/18 (24 February 1405). 55

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Gwilym Dodd the church of Wippingham which pertained to the royal desmesne.58 Some petitions had an air of opportunism about them. A good example is the petition of Robert Scot who asked to be granted the goods and chattels which had been forfeited into the king’s hands by John Wattes after the latter’s conviction for the death of John Drayton.59 The inclusion of a clause pledging the supplicant to pay ten marks for this act of grace, and the king’s straightforward assent to the proposition, may indicate that the petition had been written out after the terms of the grant had already been decided. On a rather different scale, but of the same ilk, was the petition of Sir John Arundel who asked to be granted the castle and town of Merke (near Calais) because of the old age and infirmity of the present incumbent, Sir John Croft of Dalton. Arundel claimed that Croft’s condition prevented him from serving the king effectively overseas, a claim which evidently hit the mark as possession of the outpost soon transferred to the petitioner.60 Other petitions highlighted the competitive nature of gaining the king’s favour. A petition presented by William Swynbourne in February 1405, for example, attempted to wrest control of three manors in Kent which had been granted to Thomas Holgill and Thomas Lathe, servants of the king and members of his household, in November 1404.61 Holgill and Lathe tried their best to retain possession of the manors, evidently by presenting a petition of their own to the king on an earlier occasion, but Swynbourne had the upper hand and the manors were transferred into his hands on the authority of the royal endorsement written on his bill.62 One of the most striking features of the chamberlains’ bills is the predominance of requests from men who were in the crown’s service. To an extent one might expect to see this concentration of royal servants given that, as we have seen, the chamberlains’ bills tended only to be utilized when the king was staying in the capital and his government was close by. But the trend is rather more compelling than the circumstances of the bills might in themselves suggest. Amongst the more interesting examples was the petition presented jointly by Dawe Alienore and Thomas Hatfield, valets of the king’s chamber

58

E 28/15 (19 October 1404). E 28/15 (20 October 1404). 60 E 28/18 (7 February 1405). For the subsequent grant, see CPR, 1401–5, p. 488. 61 E 28/18 (20 February 1405). 62 The manors had originally been granted to Holgill and Lathe on 8 November 1404 (CFR, 1399–1405, p. 280). They were then ‘committed’ to Swynbourne on 18 December, but in light of his petition several months later he was evidently not given possession of them at this point (CFR, 1399–1405, p. 278). Curiously, the day after Swynbourne’s petition had been granted on 20 February 1405, and the grant recorded in the fine rolls (CFR, 1399–1405, p. 302), a letter patent was issued revoking the original commitment of the manors to Swynbourne in December (CPR, 1401–5, p. 494). However, since the letter was issued on the authority of the chancellor and made no reference to Swynbourne’s recent request, it appears that this letter was superseded by royal commandment. 59

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Patronage, Petitions and Grace of parliament (vadletz de v[ot]re chamber du p[ar]lement) and John Lincoln, servant (garcion) of the ‘said chamber’.63 The three men requested to have the king’s ‘regard’ for the service they had rendered in the recent parliament held at Coventry, in a similar way to the rewards they appear to have received after past assemblies. Petitions were also presented by servants of the king’s chamber, apparently in an attempt to improve the sleeping arrangements there: one, from Thomas Dalhowe, valet and messenger of the chamber, went so far as to give the precise specifications of the bed he wished to have as a gift from the king (providing a good example, perhaps, of a request which had already been negotiated before the bill was written out); and a second, presented three days later by William Swober and William Wordyll, pages of the chamber, asked to be granted a bed so that the supplicants would be able to sleep by the door to the king’s chamber.64 Between December 1404 and February 1405 there were other petitions from William Loveney, keeper of the great wardrobe;65 John Fuller, valet purveyor of the king’s bakehouse;66 Henry Filongley, sergeant of the king’s scullery;67 Richard Weston, one of the king’s valet porters of the household;68 Roger Needwode, valet of the king’s kitchen;69 and, shortly before he fell foul of William Swynbourne’s ambitions, Thomas Holgill, clerk of the accounts of the king’s household.70 The predominance of petitions from individuals either employed or closely connected to the crown substantiates a more general point about the way in which a large proportion of patronage was distributed in the late medieval period. In general, it can be said that chamberlains’ bills requiring the dispensation of royal grace were presented overwhelmingly by supplicants who had a proven track record of loyal and effective service to the king. Holgill’s petition is typical in this respect: his request, to be given the positions of coroner of the marshalsea and clerk of the market, was presented to the king on the grounds that he deserved some form of reward in recognition of the long service he had given to the crown.71 The timing of the request, in rela-

63 64

65 66 67 68 69 70 71

E 28/16 (4 December 1404). E 28/18 (8 and 11 February, 1405). Dalhowe’s specifications were: a bed with a cover; a canopy and three curtains made of worsted cloth; a pair of blankets; a pair of bed sheets; a mattress and a canvas covering [un Canevas] – and all this for the ‘refreshment of his poor estate’. E 28/16 (6 December, 1404). E 28/16 (22 December 1404). E 28/17 (6 January 1405). E 28/17 (13 January 1405). E 28/18 (13 February 1405). E 28/18 (1 February 1405). Holgill’s petition was also, evidently, presented in an attempt to sabotage the chances of John Warbilton from gaining the same offices: Holgill claimed that Warbilton’s tenure would be in express disinheritance of the king and his heirs for all time (expresse disheritance de vous & voz heirs pur toutz iours).

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Gwilym Dodd tion to the service performed, is the key point here: for the most part, supplicants approached the king to obtain a financial grant, an office or something more specific like wine or a bed, only after they had demonstrated from their actions that they deserved such a favour. In practical terms, this often placed individuals at a distinct disadvantage. Take, for example, the petition of John Brigge, who had been assigned by the king and his council to be guardian of the castle of Bishopcastle in the Welsh marches for six months with six men-at-arms and thirty archers.72 Brigge explained that he and his men had served for this time entirely at their own cost and he now asked the king to instruct his barons and chamberlains of the exchequer to reimburse them this expenditure (at a rate of 12 pence for the men-at-arms, and 6 pence for the archers). Similarly, in March 1405, John Croft presented a bill to the king in which he outlined the service he had given to the king as one of his ambassadors to Flanders, in July and November 1403, and November 1404.73 As with Brigge, Croft’s petition to the king stemmed from the fact that, as he put it, these commissions had been performed ‘at his great cost and labour without wages or regard yet received in this matter’ (a ses g[ra]ntz costages & t[ra]vaill saunz gages our regarde unqore preignant en cell p[ar]tie). Often, ‘patronage’ was simply ‘back payment’ for service rendered: it was not so much the king providing favours or gifts, as it was the crown settling up on a financial or moral obligation it owed to an individual. This provided a powerful means to regulate the flow of requests passing before the king’s eyes. Clearly, the distribution of patronage was not a free-for-all, open to anyone who could persuade the king that they deserved special consideration: rather, it was based on a much more easily measurable yardstick defined above all by the quality and effectiveness of the suitor’s record of service.74

III For the crown, this created an extremely favourable set of circumstances: it placed the onus on the king’s subjects, rather than on the king, to prove that their petitions were presented for a legitimate and deserving reason. Moreover, as we have seen with the earl of Somerset, who was reimbursed only half the sum of money which he had paid out of his own pocket to Richard Whittington in support of the king’s expedition to Scotland, it also meant that the crown could negotiate for itself a very propitious settlement once a service had been performed. But for the system to work the king

72

E 28/19 (14 March 1405). The king granted this petition with the advice of his council. E 28/19 (28 March 1405). 74 For useful discussion on this point, see R. Horrox, Richard III: A Study in Service (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 3–5. 73

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Patronage, Petitions and Grace had always to preserve the possibility that service would be rewarded, or if a suitor’s needs were not adequately met this time, that the possibility remained that he would enjoy the king’s benevolence in the future. This is why, if we look very carefully at the controversy surrounding Henry IV’s distribution of grants and gifts, there was never any question that the general supply of reward to the king’s subjects should be cut off completely. Everybody understood that without patronage government could not function. Article 8 of the thirty-one articles of 1406 began with the assertion that ‘it is a most honest and necessary thing that any lieges of our said most sovereign lord the king who wish to sue to him should have their petitions heard …’.75 In the demands put forward by the Commons in the first half of the reign, their target remained, consistently and narrowly, grants from the king whose effect was to reduce the amount of revenue that might otherwise be available to spend on the household.76 These included grants of wardship, marriage, lands, tenements, escheats, services, franchises, customs and annuities. On the other hand, the Commons explicitly upheld the king’s right to continue to make grants of offices, corrodies, bailiwicks and vacant benefices – grants which the Commons felt the king ‘could not retain for his own use’.77 The crucial difference was that whereas the former grants constituted a direct imposition on the royal patrimony and were wholly financial in nature, the latter were not so directly concerned with revenue, at least to the extent that the crown could readily divert the income from such grants into its own coffers. But, even allowing for the concession that grants could be made of offices, corrodies and benefices, the Commons’ attempt to delineate the scope of Henry’s distribution of patronage still created a political problem of immense magnitude. Arguably, this was not just a question about the indignity of encroaching upon the royal prerogative; for Henry, at least, there were more practical issues about preserving the crucial balance between service and reward. Until 1406, Henry side-stepped the issue by appearing to agree to the substance of the Commons’ petitions, but framing the crown’s response in such a way as to allow for the possibility that grants drawing upon the royal patrimony could still be made.78 The number of signet letters sent to 75

PROME, parliament of 1406, item 74 (Rot. Parl., III, 587). PROME, parliament of 1401, item 115 (Rot. Parl., III, 478–9); parliament of 1402, item 31 (Rot. Parl., III, 495); parliament of January 1404, item 10 (Rot. Parl., III, 523–4); parliament of October 1404, item 14 (Rot. Parl., III, 547–8); parliament of 1406, items 72–3 [items 6 and 7 of the thirty-one articles] (Rot. Parl., III, 586–7). 77 PROME, parliament of 1406, item 74 (item 8 of the thirty-one articles) (Rot. Parl., III, 587). 78 For example, in 1401, the king promised to ‘abstain within reason’ from making such grants or gifts, ‘saving to himself at all time his liberty’; and in 1402, he promised to ‘refrain from making any such gifts himself, except to those who deserve them as seems proper to the king and his council’ (see note 76 for references). 76

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Gwilym Dodd the privy seal office which made monetary concessions to suitors after the Coventry parliament of October 1404 (which ostensibly placed the authority for making such grants firmly into the hands of parliament), is further testimony to the king’s determination to resist serious encroachment on his prerogative powers.79 This stubbornness has sometimes been portrayed as the act of a wilful and foolhardy king, unable to control his desire to shower favours on his subjects and unaware of the implications that his extravagance could hold for his regime; but in reality Henry’s obstinacy almost certainly derived from a deep-seated conviction of the importance of retaining the ability to supply a respectable volume of largesse to the population. As the financial backers of the regime, the Commons’ priority was understandably dominated by a concern to see their money spent on the clear-cut, short-term defence needs of the crown, but for Henry a crown that was able to live ‘of its own’ was without doubt far less desirable than a crown that preserved its ability effectively to reward loyalty and service. In asking why this should have been the case, one cannot avoid making a direct connection between the provision of material reward and the creation of political loyalty. Henry’s truculence, in the face of such overwhelming criticism and opposition, is surely to be explained by an anxiety that political support for his regime was fickle, and that if the flow of patronage dried up, sympathy for the Lancastrian cause would soon disappear also. This rather flies in the face of recent scholarship which has sought to downplay the McFarlanist idea that patronage provided the underlying basis for royal authority.80 But this scholarship addresses the subject in only general terms and is, by and large, preoccupied with the distribution of royal largesse in the specific context of the king’s relations with his nobles. It also fails to account for the particular circumstances of Henry IV’s rule, where the connection between royal power and the common interest had become markedly ambiguous and where, as a result, the king could not rely on a natural residue of loyalty to carry him through difficult times. The revisionism of McFarlane’s ideas rests on the supposition that contemporaries were motivated by more than individual ambition and material gain. Again, this is probably true in a general sense, but it may not quite fit the circumstances of Henry IV’s reign, where the king faced the incalculably difficult task of bringing the greater part of the political community on side in light of his illegal seizure of power. Kings who succeeded to the throne by natural succession could deploy grants and favours in a relatively benign way, as a means of facilitating day-to-day

79

Henry circumvented the terms of the act of resumption simply by asserting that grants were made ‘notwithstanding any ordinance or proclamation to the contrary’: see, for example, Signet Letters, nos. 467, 468, 472, 479, 482, 483, 484, 486 etc … 80 Powell, ‘After “After McFarlane” ‘, pp. 5, 12–13. For a more recent summary, see C. Carpenter, The Wars of the Roses: Politics and the Constitution in England, c.1437–1509 (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 43–4.

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Patronage, Petitions and Grace government; but in the context of usurpation the distribution of patronage acquired a much sharper political edge as it was very often the only effective means for a deposer to generate a vested interest in his regime.81 Even if we are to suppose that the majority of men with no previous connections to the house of Lancaster before 1399 very quickly accepted and embraced Henry Bolingbroke’s rule, we should not dismiss the possibility that Henry himself had rather less than a wholehearted conviction in the good intentions of his subjects. He had only to look at the example of his one-time staunchest ally and supporter, Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, to see how shallow political support could be if the flow of rewards and offices (and influence) was not considered by the recipient to be sufficient or appropriate.82 Indeed, if Henry had an unusually cynical perspective on what underlay political loyalty, this may in part have derived from his own actions in 1399 when, it could be argued, in seizing the throne he had placed self-interest over and above a concern for the stability of the realm or a respect for the inviolability of royal status. The events of 1399 had demonstrated that Henry’s loyalty to his sovereign had limits; we should not be too surprised to find that this outlook underpinned some of his basic assumptions about the key to political success once he, himself, became king. When expressed in these terms, it could be argued that in comparison to the men returned to parliament as MPs, Henry had a much more pragmatic understanding of what really mattered to ensure the survival of his regime. The key to survival for this first Lancastrian king was not only the creation of a formidable Lancastrian military force through the widespread distribution of annuities, but also, arguably, the fostering of an underlying sense of goodwill in the broader population and the creation of a culture of aspiration in which men who were not previously committed Lancastrians looked to serve the king and his government. This could only realistically be achieved by retaining in the minds of these men the possibility that their loyalty and service would be appropriately rewarded. Without the ability to distribute the crown’s resources in this way, Henry would not have been able to offer incentives to individuals to manage the shires on the king’s behalf, to defend the kingdom’s borders, to lend money or to provide more formal service in either government or in the king’s affinity. Some of these considerations are very effectively illustrated by the collection of petitions presented at various points between November 1404 and May 1405 by men who had accumulated large personal debts as a result of their period in office as sheriff. They petitioned the king to have these debts cleared as a matter of royal grace. Some of these sheriffs were men whose position was owed overwhelmingly to the new regime: they were committed ‘Lancastrians’. Sir Thomas Chaworth is a 81

Rosemary Horrox offers a much more exhaustive consideration of the role played by patronage for a usurper king in her study on Richard III. 82 Bean, ‘Henry IV and the Percies’, passim.

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Gwilym Dodd case in point: he only came to prominence as a man of political weight after the deposition in 1399.83 On 30 January 1405 he presented a bill asking for the remission of debts to the value of 100 marks (these had been incurred during the period when he had been sheriff of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire between November 1403 and October 1404) and, to strengthen his case, he reminded Henry that since the king’s ‘very gracious arrival in England’ (a euphemism commonly employed at this time to refer to Henry’s seizure of power) he had served him honourably in England, Scotland and Wales to his great personal cost and ‘without any fee or other regard’ from the king.84 The king could have ignored this petition, on the justifiable grounds that it was a sheriff’s responsibility to collect sufficient revenue from the fee farms over which he controlled. This would undoubtedly have saved the crown money; but what would it have cost in terms of political support? The king had to be seen to be acting as a good and fair-minded lord if he expected his subjects – even his staunchest supporters – to rally to his cause at times of political emergency. This was a fundamental aspect of the reciprocity upon which government and administration in this period was founded. The same imperative applied – perhaps with even greater force – to those petitions presented by ex-sheriffs who were already men of some importance in the shires when Henry came to power, and whose service the regime solicited precisely because it needed their co-operation to keep local government running. John Mitford, Sir Richard Redmayne and Richard Clitheroe, who each petitioned to have their shrieval debts written off, could be classified in this way.85 Each had a track record of administrative service to the crown under Richard II, and each was a leading member of local political society. Could the crown realistically have ignored the requests for grace from such men, whilst at the same time expect to attract a wider basis of support in the localities over and beyond the dye-in-the-wool Lancastrians who formed the nucleus of the king’s affinity? The crown had to reach out and bring exactly this type of man into the fold, and, arguably, it could only do so by adopting a very flexible and accommodating approach to its expenditure. Henry’s choice, though difficult, was nevertheless quite straightforward. Either he was significantly to cut the volume of expenditure on patronage in accordance with the Commons’ wishes, but in doing so seriously weaken the ground base of support for the regime; or he was to continue to use the revenue of the crown to reward or create incentives for service, but in doing so bring the full weight of parliamentary frustration and anger down

83

He was made knight of the royal body in 1401. For biographical details, see House of Commons, II, 533–36. 84 E 28/17 (30 January 1405). 85 E 28/15 (30 October, 1404) – Mitford; E 28/15 (3 November, 1404) – Redmayne; E 28/16 (11 December, 1404) – Clitheroe. For biographies of these men, see House of Commons, II, 744–6; II, 183–87; I, 598–602.

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Patronage, Petitions and Grace upon his shoulders. Henry chose the latter option no doubt because, as recent scholarship has shown,86 he understood that the mutual interest which existed between himself and the Lancastrian MPs packed into parliament was sufficiently strong to ensure that the ‘opposition’ he faced in the assembly would have only limited objectives. Henry may not have enjoyed the advantage of natural succession, but the extent to which the parliamentary agenda was geared towards safeguarding his position on the throne placed him at a distinct advantage in comparison to many of his predecessors and successors: almost certainly Henry could push parliament further than any other king without seriously jeopardizing his authority. And crucially Henry was astute enough to realize this. Until 1406, the king’s strategy of exploiting his MPs’ priority to ensure the security of the regime by consistently voting taxation (a large part of which Henry then promptly spent on non-extraordinary costs) was highly successful, but the end result of the Long Parliament was a complete reversal of royal policy: all assignments from the exchequer came to an end, and virtually all grants that made demands on royal finances ceased.87 It was a development which revealed the seriousness of Henry’s deteriorating health, for most certainly it was not something that Henry would have countenanced had he been fully in control. Henry would not have welcomed the unprecedented restrictions on royal spending imposed by the terms of the thirty-one articles, but in 1406 he was not in a position to argue and his incapacity required him, at last, to submit to the views of the parliamentary community.88 It was, perhaps, fortuitous that the parsimonious agenda of the Commons was finally allowed to prevail only after the regime had confronted, and seen off, the series of rebellions in the first half of the reign.

86

See, in particular, G. Dodd, ‘Conflict or Consensus: Henry IV and Parliament, 1399– 1406’, in Social Attitudes and Political Structures in the Fifteenth Century, ed. T. Thornton (Stroud, 2001), pp. 118–49 (esp. p. 141). 87 See Brown, ‘Commons and Council’, p. 23, fn. 2; A. Steel, The Receipt of the Exchequer, 1377–1485 (Cambridge, 1954), pp. 94–5. 88 I therefore place a slightly different emphasis on the proceedings of this parliament from remarks I have made on the subject previously (‘Henry IV’s Council’, p. 108), and from the views of Douglas Biggs, who has downplayed the extent of political dissension in the assembly by focussing on Henry’s ill-health (see, ‘The Politics of Health: Henry IV and the Long Parliament of 1406’, in Henry IV, ed. Dodd and Biggs, pp. 185–205, esp. p. 186). Henry’s failing health was the central determinant of the outcome to this session, but this did not necessarily make for a settlement which the king readily endorsed. I would argue that Henry’s illness gave the political community an opportunity to press reforms on him that would not ordinarily have received his consent. For similar outlooks, see McNiven, ‘Problem of Henry IV’s Health’, p. 764; A. J. Pollard, ‘The Lancastrian Constitutional Experiment Revisited: Henry IV, Sir John Tiptoft and the Parliament of 1406’, Parliamentary History 14 (1995), 103–19 (p. 114).

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Gwilym Dodd * The chamberlains’ bills thus open out new ways of understanding the mechanisms and political forces which lay behind the distribution of patronage in the late medieval period. Many of the points covered in this discussion have a broader application which extend well beyond the immediacy of Henry IV’s reign. Close scrutiny of the chamberlains’ bills, and the administrative system of which they were part, reveals an efficient but also a highly bureaucratized system of government. It has been suggested that the written petition predominated as the means to enable individuals to approach the king and access his grace directly. This almost certainly reflected the complexity of government at this time and the need to ensure both the accountability and authentication of decisions that were passed from one department to another. It is not possible, using the chamberlains’ bills alone, to estimate the volume of petitions which the king had to deal with on a day-to-day basis. Chamberlains’ bills are, by their nature, a highly selective source: they not only represent only those cases which the king handled in close proximity to his government, they also comprise only those cases presented in this context that were successful, having been passed on to the privy seal office for action. We will never know the extent to which the king was inundated with requests which were ultimately rejected. But a survey of all the actions which the king had a part in, and which were enrolled in the chancery rolls, suggests that Brown’s estimation of at least a half dozen petitions coming before the king every day may not, on reflection, be too wide of the mark.89 The chamberlains’ bills demonstrate in very clear terms how a considerable proportion of the king’s time was spent, even in the early fifteenth century, dealing with matters which were really of concern only to the individual supplicant himself. Government had become more sophisticated, as royal authority was delegated to the king’s ministers, but the evidence of the chamberlains’ bills demonstrates that the early fifteenth century was still overwhelmingly an age of personal kingship, where the king was expected to give his attention to the minutiae of an individual’s personal circumstances and where the king’s subjects, for their part, still had an opportunity – and still had an expectation of being able – to access the royal will directly. The degree to which a late medieval king was accessible, and accessed, by his subjects was indeed remarkable. If anything, the increased sophistication and bureaucratization of government enhanced rather than diminished this access. Part of the sophistication undoubtedly lay in the flexibility of the processes which allowed the decisions of the king to be transmitted between the officers of the crown along a number of different and complementary routes: no matter where the king was or what he was doing the business of ruling a kingdom continued uninterrupted. Medieval English government developed 89

Brown, ‘Authorization of Letters’, p. 154.

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Patronage, Petitions and Grace in order to accommodate rather than to hinder the insatiable appetite of the king’s subjects to secure acts of royal grace. In consequence, it was probably a rare thing for a king to enjoy any prolonged period of respite from these demands. The highly specialized nature of the chamberlains’ bills hinders any proper appraisal of the extent to which the direction of medieval government in overall terms was determined by the petition – by ‘consumer demand’. Without a doubt, a large proportion of government action was prompted by requests, but it is a moot point whether this surpassed the initiative of the king and his advisers as the primary determinant of royal policy. One suspects that in certain matters, such as decisions on appointments to key local offices or the distribution of annuities, the issue was decided rather more as a result of strategic planning at the centre than by the ad hoc solicitations of men from the localities. But what of Henry IV himself? The broad outlines of Henry’s experience in dealing with the supplications of his subjects and sending them along various administrative channels to result in concrete action were much like those of any other king’s experience. But it is fair to say that Henry, more than other monarchs, had a particularly difficult set of circumstances to reconcile. Henry was caught between two diametrically opposed agendas, made so much sharper by his precarious position as a usurper king: on the one hand, he needed to be seen responding to the concerns of the political community by preserving his patrimony and replenishing the royal coffers; on the other hand, successful and effective government depended on a steady flow of grants and gifts to reward service and loyalty. In 1406 the political community gained the upper hand by imposing an outright ban on financial rewards, but it is doubtful whether this could ever have been sustained in the long term: the distribution of patronage could never, as a general rule, be seriously constrained without generating a whole new set of potentially more dangerous political problems. Henry may have placed overriding emphasis on this principle, but the irony is that he would probably have been the first to scale down the volume of requests for grants and offices had he felt able to do so. It was Henry, after all, who in 1402 limited the times when suitors could approach him with their supplications to only two days a week – Wednesdays and Fridays. This was in order to preserve, as he put it, his own ‘peace and quiet’.90 For a man more used to the active and relatively carefree life of an internationally renowned jouster, having to deal with the humdrum drudgery of a constant flow of requests from hopeful suitors probably came as an unwelcome surprise in 1399 (after all, the Commons did have to remind him to set up the necessary apparatus to deal with such petitions in his first

90

Foedera, VIII, 282. A similar stipulation was made in article 8 of the 31 articles, which stated that ‘on the other days of the week our said lord the king can better please himself’, PROME, parliament of 1406, item 74 (Rot. Parl., III, 587).

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Gwilym Dodd parliament).91 But his insistence on maintaining the flow of patronage to his subjects in the face of such vehement opposition shows how deeply held his conviction was that it was this, rather than financial solvency, that provided the key to his survival.

91

PROME, parliament of 1399, item 149 (Rot. Parl., III, 444). The underlying cause of the problem would seem to have been Henry’s failure to appoint a chamberlain to receive petitions: the earl of Somerset was not appointed until 7 November 1399, over a month after the reign had begun. For more discussion of the way in which Henry’s noble background affected his style of kingship, see Dodd, ‘Conflict or Consensus’, pp. 132, 137–8.

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Patronage, Petitions and Grace Figure 1.  The Administrative Routes from the King to Chancery

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6 Henry IV: The Clergy in Parliament A. K. McHardy

In the autumn of 1399 the English people deposed their king. They were old hands at this; not for the first, nor for the last, time, the English shocked their neighbours by the way they treated the Lord’s anointed. It was because they were such experienced deposers that the English political class knew the correct formalities; how to construct the process so that it would have the maximum durability, and be least open to challenge. The moral is: if you want to know how to get rid of your ruler, ask an Englishman. So we should pay particular attention to the well-documented procedure of deposition. The ‘Manner of King Richard’s Renunciation’ tells us that on 28 September 1399 ‘the following people were … sent to King Richard who was then in the Tower of London: the archbishop of York and the bishop of Hereford for bishops’, then two earls, two barons, two knights, finally ‘Master Thomas Stow and Master John Burbach, doctors’, along with the notaries who would record the proceedings. The next evening another representative group went to the Tower: the duke of Lancaster, two earls, ‘a large number of other barons, knights and esquires’, with the two archbishops, one bishop, ‘the abbot of Westminster, the prior of Christchurch Canterbury, and various other spiritual clerks’. The act of renunciation was witnessed by the same additions of the abbot of Westminster and the prior of Christchurch Canterbury. The conclusion to be drawn from this account is that for such an important event the whole community of the realm had to be involved, and that included bishops, heads of religious houses, and members of the lower clergy – in this case Burbach and Stow. It is a point we do well to remember when discussing the politics of this period, and the working of parliament in particular, and it serves as sufficient reason for examining the clerical element in parliament during Henry IV’s reign. The results of such enquiry are uneven, for there is abundant mate

A draft of part of this paper was read at the Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo in May 2006. Thanks are due to Douglas Biggs for his help in arranging this, and those who commented or questioned afterwards, especially to Robert Swanson for his help and suggestions. Christopher Allmand and Helen Lacey helped with identifications, and Pat Crimmin gave valuable advice and asked shrewd questions as the final version was being written.  Chrons. Rev., pp. 162–4.

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The Clergy in Parliament rial about some aspects of the quest, but the sources are silent about others. Nevertheless, even posing the questions is a valuable exercise, reminding us of the distinctiveness of the late-medieval political scene, for in the early fifteenth century parliament operated within a religious framework; in a modest way it still does. Parliament commenced with an oration, which was almost always given by a bishop or by the archbishop of Canterbury. It was a quasi sermon, and the orator prefaced it with a biblical text. Exceptions to this rule are interesting. In 1399 the address was given by Thomas Arundel, who, on the day in question, 6 October, was neither chancellor nor archbishop, though he had been both in the past, and was to be both again – indeed, he was restored to the archbishopric within the life of that parliament. He took as his text I Maccabees 6. 57 Incumbit nobis ordinare pro regno, which could be translated as, ‘It’s our job to rule the realm.’ In 1399 Arundel was in a Maccabaean mood, evidently identifying Henry Bolingbroke with the Jewish resistance leader, because his mandate to pray for the new king – a piece of pure political propaganda issued before his restoration to Canterbury – described Henry as ‘like a second Maccabaeus’ (velut alterum Machabeum). In 1401 the opening orator was again unusual: neither the chancellor nor the archbishop but a layman, William Thirning, chief justice of the Common Pleas. But members were not deprived of religious discourse, because Sir Arnold Savage the Speaker twice strayed into ‘sermon territory’, first when he likened parliament’s three estates (king, lords and commons) to the Trinity, and on the final day of the meeting, 10 March, when he launched into an extended metaphorical speech in which he likened a meeting of parliament to a celebration of the Mass. It is also a fact which is well known but imperfectly remembered, that matters ecclesiastical took up an important part of parliament’s time. There might be the passing of new legislation (the statute De Heretico Comburendo of 1401 is a notable example in this reign), or consideration of proposed legislation even when no law was enacted (such as the Lollard Disendowment Bill, probably in 1410), or modification of previous legislation on ecclesiastical



Dr Nick Palmer, MP for Broxtowe, tells me that both Commons and Lords still begin each day with prayers.  Issued Lambeth 16 Oct. 1399, forwarded by the bishop of London 25 Oct., and executed by Guy Mone bishop of St David’s on 2 Nov., The Episcopal Registers of the Diocese of St. David’s 1397 to 1518: I (1397–1407), ed. F. R. Isaacson, Cymmrodorion Record Series 6 (1917), pp. 132–6.  PROME, parliament of January 1404, items 32, 47 (Rot. Parl., III, 528, 533); A. K. McHardy, ‘De Heretico Comburendo, 1401’, in Lollardy and the Gentry in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Margaret Aston and Colin Richmond (Stroud, 1997), pp. 112–26 (p. 115).

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A. K. McHardy matters. In this reign there was discussion of the church’s role in public life, and – a staple of parliamentary business in this reign as during the previous century – the petitioning of parliament by clerics, mainly the members of ecclesiastical corporations. A long list of such cases could be compiled from the Rolls of Parliament and the artificial record class of Ancient Petitions. Such parliamentary work should not be considered irrelevant to a volume on the politics of Henry IV’s reign, for much of this effort related to the most basic concerns of the régime: security and finance. Several individually prominent politicians who were key players were clerics too, whether they supported the new king or opposed him, and just because they were political figures does not mean that they should be regarded as if they were purely secular politicians, for they operated within a theological thought-framework. However, this paper is not essentially concerned with those who did make the headlines, but with the many other clergy who attended parliament, or who had the right to do so, and who formed the undergrowth, or background, of parliamentary life. The representatives of the clergy are the forgotten men of English parliaments. Yet the clerical element was, in theory, considerable. The clerical peers were the twenty-one bishops, and the parliamentary abbots; by 1400 there was a conventional list of twenty-seven of these. The lower clergy consisted of the cathedral deans or priors, and one representative of their chapter. The clergy of each diocese were to send two representatives, and all the sixty archdeacons were supposed to attend. In theory, therefore, there could have been 192 clerical members of parliament. The neglect of this potentially large and actually powerful element in the national assembly is remarkable. The reasons for this neglect are several: the fact that the clergy did not form a distinct estate but were contained within the two lay houses (in contrast to continental assemblies); their tax granting right being exercised elsewhere; the reluctance of many who were individually summoned actually to attend in person; and, as a group, their comparatively low profile in political events. In addition, the fact that the clergy were not reimbursed for their costs out of public funds but either paid for



Ibid., pp. 112–26; Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford, 1988), pp. 114–16; about the Statute of Provisors, 1401, 1407, PROME, parliament of 1401, item 26; parliament of 1407, items 37–8 (Rot. Parl., III, 458, 614–15).  For example, alien priories in Wales and the order of Citeaux, both 1401: PROME, parliament of 1401, items 18, 19 (Rot. Parl., III, 457)), and payment to the pope, Rot. Parl., III, 616 (PROME, parliament of 1401, item 43 (Rot. Parl., III, 465)).  See PROME and TNA series SC 8 (‘Ancient Petitions’).  St Augustine’s (Canterbury), St Alban’s, Ramsey, Peterborough, Crowland, St Benet Hulme, Colchester, Malmesbury, Gloucester, Cirencester, Reading, Selby, Westminster, Waltham, Thorney, St Mary’s (York), St Edmundsbury, Abingdon, the Prior of St John of Jerusalem, Shrewsbury, Bardney, Hyde, Glastonbury, Evesham, Battle, Winchcombe, and the Prior of Coventry: A. M. Reich, The Parliamentary Abbots to 1470, University of California Publications in History 17 (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1941), p. 350.

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The Clergy in Parliament themselves, or were financed by their constituents, forms a serious barrier to discovering which clerics actually went to parliament. Contemporaries, however, were well aware of their importance, as the opening scene reminds us. So when we talk of the political community we must include the clerical peers who were called by individual writs (the bishops and the parliamentary abbots), and the lower clergy summoned indirectly through the praemunientes clause,10 (the deans and archdeacons who attended as individuals, and the elected representatives of the clerical constituencies: the cathedral chapters and the diocesan clergy). Proctors, or proxies, were not only sent as representatives by chapters and diocesan clergy, but they were also sent as substitutes by many of those –whether clerical peers or commoners – who should have attended but who declined, or were unable, to attend in person. It is with the proctors appointed to represent the clergy of all kinds that this paper is chiefly concerned. The numbers of clergy, out of this theoretical total of 192, who attended any particular parliament, are difficult to calculate. In practice there were probably always many fewer, since pluralism, the personal exemption of aged clerical peers, the widespread collaboration between deans and chapters to use the same proctor, and the tendency to choose as representatives those who were attending parliament in another capacity, all reduced the size of the clerical contingent. Even discovering whether a particular individual attended is not straightforward. Clerical peers, like their lay counterparts, were particularly unwilling attenders, and only when an abbot was named as a trier of petitions can we be certain that he was really there.11 With bishops the situation is theoretically somewhat better because, where a register survives, we can construct an itinerary to show if the individual was likely to have been present in parliament.12 But the lower clergy, both the individuals, and the proctors for the groups of lower clergy, are the most elusive of all the clerical groups.13 All these circumstances mean that we when we investigate ‘the clergy in parliament’ we must do so mainly by considering their proctors, since there is abundant evidence about the appointment of these men.

10

The praemunientes is so-called because of its first word, meaning ‘warning’. The writ of summons to parliament ordered the bishop to attend, but he was also to warn certain others in his jurisdiction that they should attend. It is the force of the warning, as opposed to ordering, which historians have disputed. 11 J. S. Roskell, ‘The Problem of the Attendance of the Lords in Medieval Parliaments’, BIHR 29 (1965), 153–204 (pp. 174–5). 12 During a vacancy the keeper of spiritualities was summoned and could attend or send proctors, as happened in 1406 while the archbishopric of York was vacant: SC 10 43/2127. 13 J. H. Denton and J. P. Dooley, Representatives of the Lower Clergy in Parliament 1295–1340 (Woodbridge, 1987); A. K. McHardy, ‘The Representation of the English Lower Clergy in Parliament during the Later Fourteenth Century’, in Sanctity and Secularity: The Church and the World, ed. D. Baker, Studies in Church History 10 (Oxford, 1973), pp. 97–107.

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A. K. McHardy The records of these appointments are found in The National Archives (Public Record Office) class SC 10: Parliamentary Proxies. Although in theory this is an artificial class there is no obvious evidence that these notices of appointment have been garnered from other classes within the Public Records. What is artificial, however, is that they have been organized and filed into groups of fifty, in chronological order. Ten parliaments were held under Henry IV, but the first and last have to be discounted, both for lack of material as well as for irregularities of status; the first (1399) was ‘converted’ from Richard II’s final parliament, the last (1413) was nullified by the king’s death on 20 March. Of the remaining eight meetings, seven are well represented in SC 10, and for two there are over thirty appointments of proxies. The total number of surviving appointments is 167,14 and they were issued by every kind of clergy summoned: diocesan clergy (2), cathedral chapters (36), archdeacons (6), deans (1, though many acted with their chapters), keepers of spiritualities in vacant sees (2), bishops (numerous), and, the overwhelming majority, the parliamentary abbots.15 An examination of these documents can tell us much about the workings of this section of the political community, and its relationship to the rest of civil society. Apart from the representatives of ‘constituents’ – the diocesan and cathedral clergy – the proctors were acting on behalf of men who had been summoned to attend parliament in person. So our first enquiry must consider what excuses were given for the failure to attend parliament in person. Reason for non-attendance was often not given, but when excuses were stated, they are often vague, indicating only ‘the burdens of serious business’. This was so routine a reason as not to need comment. Illness, or the weakness of age, was another reason, but was much more sparingly used, even by bishops. Thus the bishop of Winchester, William of Wykeham, who was probably nearer eighty than seventy,16 made no special mention of his age in 1401 (when the summons was to York), or 1402, but by January 1404 he was suffering from bodily infirmity and troubles (corporali molestia et infirmitate) which made his attendance impossible, and he died before the next parliament, later that year.17 Walter Skirlaw of Durham, who was also aged upwards of seventy,18 cited ‘continual imbecility of the limbs’ in 1402.19 John Burghill of Coventry and Lichfield was ill early in the reign,20 but by October 1404, when parliament was held actually on his doorstep in Coventry, he was no longer citing 14

15 16 17 18 19 20

A few appointments for convocation have strayed into this class; and some mandates are illegible, even under the ultraviolet lamp. This means that, as a politician would say, my sums don’t add up. SC 10, files 40–44. He was born c. 1324, ODNB (Partner). SC 10/40/1988; 41/2003; 42/2057. Born c. 1330: M. G. Snape, ‘Skirlawe, Walter (c.1330–1406)’, ODNB. ‘Membrorum imbecillitate continue’, SC 10/41/2012. 1401: ‘adversa corporis nostri valitudine’, SC 10/40/1986.

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The Clergy in Parliament this excuse, nor did he resurrect it.21 Parliamentary abbots too used the reason of illness, and we have several examples of eloquent excuses citing bodily infirmity,22 which in some cases were ‘notorious’. The abbot of St Mary’s York once alleged that the journey to parliament would kill him.23 Perhaps more honest was the abbot of Selby (John de Shirburn 1369–1408) who for many years had explained that the poverty of his house prevented his attendance.24 He continued to use this excuse under Henry IV, though from January 1404 his own poor health was added to the house’s penury as a reason for his inability to appear in person.25 By then he had been abbot for over thirty-five years, so this seems plausible. The excuse of poverty was dropped in March 1406, but reinstated in January 1410 by William de Pygot the new abbot, who had been elected two years previously.26 The appointment of a proctor did not always mean that the principal did not appear in person. For example, on 10 February 1406 the abbot of St Albans appointed three secular clerks to represent him, yet he himself went to parliament where he was a trier of petitions from the British Isles. The abbot was probably confused, and no wonder, for this parliament was summoned first to Coventry, prorogued to Gloucester (which was where the abbot thought it would be when he appointed his deputies), but finally met at Westminster.27 How many proctors were appointed by each principal? The writ of summons to proctors for the groups said, ‘two representatives for the diocesan clergy and one for the chapter’. In the examples of diocesan clergy, admittedly only two, the instruction was obeyed to the letter; this was Carlisle diocese in autumn 1404, and in 1410.28 Chapters were not so modest, for although in two cases, Durham and Exeter, both for the 1410 parliament, they chose only one proctor,29 in two others a chapter chose six: York in 1401, and Lincoln in 1410.30 A similar pattern is observable with the appointments by parliamentary abbots, who occasionally thought one proctor sufficient,31

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

SC 10/40/1986 (1401); 41/2035 (Jan. 1404); 42/2094; 43/2123 (1406). Glastonbury 1402, SC 10/41/2020; Hyde 1402, ‘notorious’, 41/2021; Ramsey Jan. 1404, 41/2036; Gloucester 1406, 43/2115. SC 10/42/2052, 7 Jan. 1404. From Oct. 1391, SC 10/37/1847; see also 39/1916 (Jan. 1394), 40/1952 (Jan. 1395). Jan. 1402, SC 10/41/2014. Two excuses: SC 10/41/2049 (Jan. 1404), 42/2068 (Oct. 1404). SC 10/43/2121 and 2145. SC 10/43/2101; Handbook of British Chronology, ed. E. B. Fryde, D. E. Greenway, S. Porter and I. Roy, 3rd edn (London, 1986), p. 566. SC 10/42/2084; 44/2158. SC 10/44/2159 and 2163. SC 10/40/1995; 44/2154. For the parliament of March 1406, Shrewsbury, and Winchcombe, SC 10/43/2110 and 2112. In 1401 the abbot of Malmesbury chose John Chitterne or John Thornbury, 40/1998.

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A. K. McHardy but equally rarely selected six.32 Bishops tended to think bigger, and here the palm must go to John Burghill of Coventry and Lichfield who once chose six proctors, once seven, and once nine,33 but he was run close by William of Wykeham who in January 1404 sent eight proctors.34 The overwhelming majority of appointments by all principals named between two and five representatives. When we put these figures into a chronological context perhaps what we see here is some modest inflation, because the appointment of a single proctor, though always unusual, was proportionally much greater in previous reigns. Commissions with more than three names were unusual before 1400, and the overwhelming number named two proctors. We can speculate on the reasons for this rise in numbers. The uncertainty caused by the change of monarch and the dangers to his rule may have prompted clerical parliamentarians to protect themselves by choosing more proctors. Another possibility is the amount of confusion which surrounded Henry’s parliaments, for they were remarkable for the frequency with which they were prorogued, not only from time to time, but from one place to another.35 A further complication was the relationship between parliament and convocations, especially the convocation of Canterbury province. Traditionally, Canterbury’s convocation was held immediately after the conclusion of parliament, but on four occasions (1401, 1406, 1410, 1411) the meetings of the two bodies coincided and ‘intertwined’, and this also may have prompted the appointment of more proctors simply to ensure that the principal was represented.36 When investigating the sorts of men chosen as proctors we can discern a number of distinct groups: colleagues in house or chapter; useful local clergy; diocesan and other ecclesiastical administrators; king’s clerks; and laymen. A few still remain to be identified. Perhaps the ideal proctor was a kinsman, but few were as fortunate as William of Wykeham who appointed his relative, Mr Nicholas Wykeham, in January 1404, or Richard Medford who appointed his brother Walter in 1406.37One easy answer to the question

32 33 34 35

36 37

For the meeting of Oct. 1404 in Coventry, Hyde and St Mary’s York, SC 10/42/2064 and 2074. SC 10/40/1986; 42/2094; 41/2035. SC 10/42/2057. 1401: summoned to York, prorogued to Westminster; 1402: prorogued; 1404, Jan.: summoned to Coventry, prorogued to Westminster; 1406: summoned to Coventry, prorogued to Gloucester, prorogued to Westminster; 1410: summoned to Bristol, prorogued, re-summoned to Westminster, Handbook of British Chronology, pp. 566–7. Compare the lists of meetings in Handbook of British Chronology, pp. 566–7 and 599–600, and see McHardy, ‘De Heretico Comburendo, 1401’, pp. 114–15. SC 10/42/2057; A. B. Emden, Biographical Register of the University of Oxford, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1957–9), III, 2111–12. Nicholas was one of eight named by the bishop. Walter Medford was one of four proctors, all ‘canons of our church of Salisbury’: SC 10/43/2118; Emden, University of Oxford, II, 1252–3.

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The Clergy in Parliament ‘Whom shall I send?’ was to appoint one or more colleagues. Thus, for parliamentary abbots, the traditional solution was to appoint a fellow-monk from their house, a younger, fitter man perhaps, who could both travel, and lodge at his destination, more modestly and cheaply than his superior. During the fourteenth century the characteristic commission to represent a parliamentary abbot was to a monk of the house acting with a lay clerk. During Henry IV’s reign this pattern of one monk with one secular clerk underwent a big change. There were twenty-eight commissions which included a fellow-monk, but eighty-three which named no religious. Even if we subtract the eleven commissions from monastic cathedral priors and chapters, we are still left with an overwhelming preponderance (seventytwo) which contained no religious, so that only a third (33.73%), included a colleague of the parliamentary abbot concerned. This change is paralleled by the reduction in the use of monks to deliver the proceeds, or more usually tallies, of clerical taxation to the exchequer. During the later fourteenth century monks were routinely (though not inevitably) employed to account at the exchequer for sums raised by those abbots and priors who were commissioned as tax collectors by their bishop.38 In some cases the monk who was an attorney at the exchequer was also used as a parliamentary proctor.39 But the practice of employing monks as attorneys when accounting for the proceeds of clerical subsidies became much less common during the fifteenth century; it seems to have ceased altogether in the northern province after 1400, and though monks were occasionally so employed in the southern province into the second half of the century, their appearances at this department became rare.40 This change cannot be entirely explained by those instances, few in number and in any case dating from the earlier fourteenth century, in which a monastic attorney apostasized and absconded with the money,41 but were surely the results of greater social or ecclesiastical shifts. Inevitably, with so many commissions, there were exceptions. For the

38

This observation is derived from E 359/15. These enrolled accounts for the diocese of Lincoln are set out in A. K. McHardy, ‘The Crown and the Diocese of Lincoln during the Episcopate of John Buckingham 1363–98’ (unpublished D.Phil. dissertation, University of Oxford, 1972), II, 517–25. 39 John Bedford, monk of Ramsey (Hunts.), was commissioned as proctor for the parliaments of 1379 and 1380, and was attorney for his abbot, a collector of the tenth granted May 1384, and moiety granted Nov. 1386, SC 10/33/1609 and 1636; E 359/15 mm.10, 17. John Hainton, monk of Bardney (Lincs.), was attorney at the exchequer for his abbot, collector of the 1377 grant, and was a parliamentary proctor in 1380, and, by now prior, in 1384. Elected abbot in 1385, he appointed his own proctors in 1386: E 359/15 m. 6; SC 10/33/1650, 35/1727, 36/1782; VCH Lincolnshire, 2 vols. (London, 1906), II, 103. 40 E 359/7 (York province), and sampling of nos.18, 20 and 34 (Canterbury province). 41 F. D. Logan, Runaway Religious in Medieval England, c.1240–1540 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 76–7.

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A. K. McHardy 1402 parliament the abbot of St Mary’s York included, in his commission of five men, Brother William Dalton ‘the prior of our cell of Rumburgh, our fellow-monk’42. Rumburgh, in Suffolk, was obviously much handier, and cheaper, for Westminster than was York, and the employment of the prior of a dependent cell supports Martin Heale’s recent study of such houses, which shows that their priors were usually men in mid-career who were gaining useful administrative experience, rather than troublemakers exiled from the mother house, as was previously thought.43 In the autumn of 1404 the abbot of Bardney (Lincs.) issued two commissions, the first of which contained no monastic colleague, the second included one.44 For the same parliament both the prior and convent of Durham, and the abbot of Thorney (Cambs.) issued commissions which included two of their monastic colleagues.45 In February 1406 the abbot of Shrewsbury appointed as his sole proctor his fellow-monk Brother Richard Hull, a commission both old-fashioned and eccentric, but to the same parliament the abbot of Winchcombe also sent a sole proctor, in this case a secular clerk, and this was equally unusual.46 Lest it be thought that the religious as a class were avoided we can point to times when they were useful to secular clergy. The year 1402 was such an occasion. John Dalton, archdeacon of Northumberland and official of Durham, chose as his deputies Walter Teesdale (Tesedale) monk of Durham, by permission of his prior (‘de licencia prioris sui’) along with John Belasis (Belasys) esquire, ‘on behalf of myself and my archdeaconry of Northumberland’ (‘pro me et archidiaconatu meo Northumb’). By coincidence, the prior and chapter of Durham chose the same pair;47 an economy measure may be suspected. Also in 1402 the aged Walter Skirlaw, he of the imbecility of limbs and heaviness of body, commissioned five proctors who included William Lasingby (Lasyngby). The bishop did not say so, but Lasingby was the prior of Guisborough, an Augustinian house near the northern border of Yorkshire, and on the way south for Skirlaw from Durham to the east Yorkshire manors where he spent the last years of his life. In 1405 the two men were associated with the earl of Northumberland in rebellion, Lasingby acting as an envoy making treasonous overtures to the Scots, for which he was later pardoned.48 Another category of colleague consisted of those seculars who were diocesan administrators, though they were many fewer in number than the reli-

42 43 44 45 46 47 48

SC 10/41/2018. Martin Heale, The Dependent Priories of Medieval English Monasteries (Woodbridge, 2004). 28 Sept. 1404, SC 10/42/2073; 3 Oct. 1404, 42/2079. SC 10/42/2078 and 2082. SC 10/43/2110 and 2112. SC 10/41/2013 and 2017. Wylie, Henry IV, I, 355 (Skirlaw), II, 263 (Lasingby).

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The Clergy in Parliament gious, and are more difficult to identify. However, in January 1404, Robert Braybrooke bishop of London, then almost on his death-bed – he died 28 August 1404 – commissioned his official to represent him,49 and in 1407 Mr John Loveney archdeacon of Hereford (1405–17), commissioned his official John Stanway (Stanewey) as a proctor.50 However, the church’s administrative structure meant that ‘colleagues’ could be drawn from outside the principal’s diocese, and the importance of the administrative coherence of the province of Canterbury is seen in the choice of notable ecclesiastical administrators as parliamentary proctors. Outstanding was Mr William Milton, the recipient of fourteen commissions.51 Milton was archdeacon of Buckingham, but this title, which was widely used in his commissions, conceals his importance in the affairs of the southern province. It is probably fair to describe Milton as a protégé of Thomas Arundel, of whose will he was later an executor, since it was only in 1400 that this highly educated lawyer was ordained subdeacon and deacon, by the archbishop.52 By 1401 he was Arundel’s registrar, and was also appointed to conduct a metropolitical visitation of Coventry diocese on the archbishop’s behalf in 1406–7, and made keeper of spiritualities sede vacante of Norwich (1406).53 His commissions to parliament were, however, strongly regional, coming from the abbots of Gloucester, Cirencester, Evesham, and both the prior and chapter of Worcester.54 This suggests that Milton had links with this area, which an examination of his preferments and career does not otherwise reveal. In Thomas Arundel he had a most powerful friend, so he himself was surely worth cultivating. Another associate of Arundel was the distinguished ecclesiastical lawyer and administrator Robert Hallum, who was chosen to represent the abbeys of Gloucester and St. Augustine’s Canterbury in 1402, and the chapter of Exeter in the 1404 spring parliament. Apart

49

50

51 52 53

54

Mr William Styecle (Styvecle), SC 10/41/2043. He was prebendary of Wenlocksbarn from 1395, John Le Neve, Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae V (St Paul’s London), rev. J. M. Horn (London, 1963), p. 69. SC 10/43/2131. The others were Mr John Catesby canon of Hereford, and John Stretton rector of Overbury (Ovybury), Worcs. Stanway, a bachelor of canon law, later became prebendary of Cublington, 1414–34, and dean 1430–4, both Hereford, Le Neve, Fasti II (Hereford), rev. J. M. Horn (London, 1962), pp. 5, 20. One in 1402, four in Jan. 1404, three in Oct. 1404, five in 1406, one in 1410. For what follows see Emden, University of Oxford II, 1283–4. Ibid.,1284, wrongly describes Milton as keeper of spiritualities of Coventry and Lichfield in 1406–7, but there was no vacancy then, and he was actually appointed to visit the diocese: I. J. Churchill, Canterbury Administration, 2 vols. (London, 1933), I, 334. The error derives from Churchill’s index: II, 331. 1402: Gloucester (SC 10/41/2025); Jan. 1404: Lincoln subdean and chapter, Gloucester, Worcester prior, chapter (SC 10/41/2032, 2042 and 2045; 42/2061); Oct. 1404: Cirencester, Worcester chapter, prior (SC 10/42/2066, 2077 and 2085); 1406: Gloucester, Evesham, Cirencester, Worcester prior, chapter (SC 10/43/2115, 2124, 2128, 2105 and 2111); 1410: Worcester, prior (SC 10/44/2166).

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A. K. McHardy from his learning and numerous benefices Hallum was then Thomas Arundel’s chancellor, so these too were probably shrewd commissions.55 Colleagues, that is, fellow-canons, were also used, and much more widely, by the chapters of secular cathedrals, who nearly always acted in concert with the dean, when he was present; indeed, one has to look hard to find commissions which were not addressed to ‘our fellow canons’. Some of these were to men who worked alongside the other chapter members, as did Mr William Storteford, canon residentiary of St Paul’s, a proctor in 1402,56 but the great majority of the chapter members in secular cathedrals were king’s clerks. They were the most used and most useful, not only to their capitular colleagues, but to all clergy who needed representation in parliament. When we talk of king’s clerks as parliamentary clergy we are usually57 referring to chancery clerks. More chancery clerks were chosen as proctors than were all other groups together, and the reason for their popularity was simple: it was chancery clerks who provided the secretariat of parliament, therefore they were bound to be present. A further refinement can be made by showing that the receivers of petitions to parliament were the most popular proctors of all. A small number of names appear again and again, both in the Rolls of Parliament as receivers of petitions, and in SC 10 as parliamentary proctors: Thomas Stanley, Robert Farrington, John Rome, John Roderham, John Chitterne, John Wakering, Simon Gaunstead, John Hartlepool, and John Kington. Leading the field was John Rome with a total of thirty-six commissions. Next came Simon Gaunstead with twenty-five, followed by John Chittern with nineteen. John Roderham had fourteen commissions, and John Wakering eleven. These were the only men whose surviving commissions run to double figures, but all the others were commissioned more than once. Other chancery clerks who were not receivers of petitions were also popular; we could cite Nicholas Bubwith with fifteen commissions, James Billingford with eleven, and John Prophet (nine commissions) as examples. Such men were useful to almost all groups who were called to parliament, but an interesting point about the commissions is the different ways in which their principals described them. Sometimes they had no handles to

55

SC 10/41/2025, 2031 and 2046; The Register of Robert Hallum Bishop of Salisbury 1407–17, ed. J. M. Horn, Canterbury and York Society 72 (1982), p. ix. 56 SC 10/41/2015. 57 Exceptions were Laurence Allerthorp, exchequer baron and canon of York, chapter of York, SC 10/40/1995 (1401). The future baron, Robert Malton ‘clerk of the pipe’, had five commissions: St Mary’s York, SC 10/40/1994 (1401); the bishop of Durham, and St Mary’s York (1402 and Oct. 1404), 41/2012 and 2018; 42/2074 and 2088. Roger Westwood, rector of Hodnet (Salop), abbot of Shrewsbury (1402), SC 10/41/2023, was possibly another future baron; J. Sainty, The Judges of England 1272–1990, Selden Society supplementary series 10 (1993), pp. 114–15.

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The Clergy in Parliament their name,58 sometimes they were just ‘clerks’.59 Some commissioners tried to present their proctors solely as churchmen, as did John Fordham, bishop of Ely whose choices in 1401 included: Thomas Stanley, dean of St Martin le Grand, London; Robert Faringdon (Faryngdon), canon of York; and John Rome, rector of Over (Cambs.), as well as Mr John Bernard, dean of the royal free chapel of Tamworth (Staffs.); Thomas Patesle, rector of Walpole (Suff.); and Robert de Wetheryngsete, rector of Northwold (Norf.).60 But from other commissions we know that Thomas Stanley was clerk of the rolls of chancery,61 that John Rome was a master of chancery,62 and that Faringdon, though not so described, was a receiver of petitions. Secular cathedral chapters usually described high-flying king’s clerks rather casually as ‘fellow-canons’, while others were keen to stress their links with senior men in crown service. The abbot of St Mary’s York was meticulous in describing the status of his clerical proctors, naming in 1401, Master William Waltham canon residentiary of York (who was a retired civil servant)63, Brother William Dalton prior of ‘our cell of Rumburgh’ fellow-monk, and among others, Simon Gaunstead ‘clerk del petibag’ and Robert de Malton ‘clerk of the pipe’.64 In January 1404 he chose John Rome and Simon Gaunstead, ‘masters in your chancery’, and in 1406 he named the same two, plus John Wakering ‘master or keeper of the rolls of your chancery’. He commissioned the same trio the following year.65 The point cannot be made too often or too forcefully: king’s clerks were the glue which held the political community of the realm together. It must also be admitted that not every commission is what it appears on first sight, for while it is true that some appointers knew their proctors personally, or had durable business connections, in other cases the appointments were, if not actually fraudulent, then distant and formal to a remarkable degree. We can deduce this by examining the documents. In several cases the handwriting of these commissions is suspiciously similar, if not actually the same, suggesting that the writers were king’s clerks, or men closely associated with government, probably the chancery. Perhaps the messengers who brought the writs of summons returned with instructions, written or verbal, which were later cast into ‘proper form’. There is one occasion for which

58 59

60 61 62 63 64 65

As the abbot of Malmesbury did with John Chitterne the chancery clerk in 1401, SC 10/40/1998. As the abbot of Abingdon described the two senior clerks and constant receivers of petitions John Wakering (Wakeryng) and John Hartlipool (Hertilpole), 1402, SC 10/41/2002. SC 10/40/1992. SC 10/40/1993 and 1994. SC 10/41/2030; 42/2051, 2052 and 2074; 43/2138. Formerly keeper of the hanaper, and on occasion keeper of the great seal, William was a member of the formidable Waltham clan of king’s clerks, Tout, Chapters, III, 215–16. SC 10/41/2018. SC 10/42/2052; 43/2122 and 2141.

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A. K. McHardy apparently both the draft instruction and the final form survive. For the parliament of January 1404 there survives what seems to be a draft instruction from the bishop of Exeter, whose form is distinctive on various counts: its exceptionally large size (17 cm wide, 6 cm high); the elaborate penmanship of an initial; above all, the form of words. Most of these documents are addressed to the king; more rarely they take the form of a letter patent, but this one baldly announces the proctors’ names.66 For the same parliament we also have an appointment, cast in the usual wording, and of the usual size, of the same two proctors, with the addition of John Chittern (Chytterne).67 By contrast, the abbot of Battle evidently produced at least some of his commissions ‘in house’; his 1401 commission is in a distinctive (and very attractive) hand, while that for October 1404 is not only much larger than the normal, but bears marks of folding, for transmission by messenger.68 Even more curious are the five appointments in which names were added after the document had been drawn up. In 1402, for example, the abbot of Selby appointed ‘John de Rome clerk, Peter de Crulle’, and he expected to appoint another clerk, but instead there is a line, perhaps 6 centimetres long, and then ‘John Pygot Junior clerks[sic]’. Obviously one more clerk was not forthcoming,69 for Crulle, as we shall see, was a layman. When the October 1404 commission for the abbot of St Augustine, Canterbury was written, a space was left for the names; not quite enough, however, for though there was room for ‘Roger Paternoster and Thomas Estwell’, the description, ‘clerks’, had to be interlined.70 But the writer of the abbot of Thorney’s commission in the same month left too much space, for after entering ‘Bro. Roger Uffyngton and Br. Alan de Kirketon follow-monks (confratres et comonachos nostros) and Thomas Mapilton clerk’, he evidently thought that there would be a fourth name, and in the event had to fill the space with a line some 5 centimetres long.71 A different solution was adopted in 1410 when the abbot of Bardney was appointing proctors. He knew, and so did his scribe, that he wanted Bro. William de Friskenay a fellow-monk, to be one proctor. But before his name a space was left for others. There were only two of these and the solution adopted was to write first one name, John Roderham, then leave a small gap, and then enter John Keyme, followed by another small gap. It looks as though 66

67 68 69 70

71

Nomina procuratorum Reverendi patris et domini domini Edmundi dei gracia Exon’ episcopi dominus Nicholas Bubbewyth clericus Rotulorum et Johannes Rome Magister Cancellar’ Excellentissimi in Christo principis et domini domini Henrici dei gracia Regis Anglie et Francie illustris … SC 10/42/2051. SC 10/41/2030. SC 10/40/1993; 42/2095. SC 10/41/2014. SC 10/42/2070. The hand of most of the document is possibly the one which also wrote nos. 2055 (bishop of Salisbury), 2057 (bishop of Winchester), 2058 (abbot of Bury St Edmunds). SC 10/42/2082.

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The Clergy in Parliament the scribes involved, like cheque-writers today, were careful not to leave a large enough space in which an unauthorized name could be entered.72 Space was not a problem in 1406 for the abbot of Colchester’s scribe, but the names, John Rome and John Pygot clerks, were added later in a different coloured ink.73 This leaves us wondering how those abbots who did not have close links with suitable men, king’s clerks, mainly, chose their representatives. Was there perhaps an ‘approved list’ of proctors? Or were there brokers who arranged such temporary alliances? But however the commissions were arrived at, being a parliamentary proctor did the deputies’ careers no harm at all. In the fourteenth century one answer to the question ‘Whom shall we send to represent us?’ had been to choose men of high status whose presence in parliament was guaranteed.74 There is no evidence that this happened in Henry IV’s reign, though among the proctors were a clutch of men destined for high ecclesiastical office: Henry Chichele,75 Nicholas Bubwith,76 Robert Hallum,77 Thomas Langley,78 and Simon Sydenham.79 Their ‘client base’ was notable in that they represented mainly men who were themselves already bishops. The last group to be considered were the laymen, forty-six of whom have been identified. (There are probably more, men with no title by which their estate or caste can be readily discerned.) They were used overwhelmingly by the parliamentary abbots, and very occasionally by bishops, but, with the exception of Durham’s monastic chapter, not by cathedral clergy. Several types of laymen were used as proxies. Members of parliament were one obvious choice. Thus we find Sir Thomas Aston, MP for Staffordshire, representing the bishop of Coventry and Lichfield in 1406 (as he had also done in 1404);80 Sir John Clavering, MP for Northumberland in 1406 and proctor for the prior and chapter of Durham at the same time;81 Robert Gare of York, MP for Appleby (Cumb.) in 1402, represented St Mary’s abbey York both in that

72 73 74 75 76

77 78 79

80 81

SC 10/43/2147. SC 10/43/2108. In 1384 the clergy of Colchester archdeaconry appointed William Courtenay, archbishop of Canterbury, as their parliamentary proctor, SC 10/35/1735. Representing the bishop of Salisbury in 1406, SC 10/43/2118. Bubwith’s 15 commissions were for the parliaments of 1401 (2); Jan. (6) and Oct. (3) 1404, and 1406 (4). Apart from abbots of Winchcombe (1401) and Battle (Jan. 1404) all his principals were bishops (7+ 1 keeper of spiritualities), or chapters. SC 10/41/2025, 2031 and 2046. SC 10/41/2012, 2043 and 2053; 42/2090 and 2091; 43/2123. His ‘clients’ were the bishops of London, Durham (2), Norwich, Worcester, Lichfield. Proctor for the abbot of Glastonbury in 1401, SC 10/40/1984, and in 1402 41/2020; also for Richard Medford, bishop of Salisbury in Jan. 1404, 42/2055. Sydenham was bishop of Chichester, 1429–38. SC 10/42/2094; 43/2123; House of Commons, II, 80–2. SC 10/42/2098; House of Commons, II, 578–9.

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A. K. McHardy and the succeeding parliaments;82 Sir Henry Popham, MP for Hampshire and proctor for the abbot of Hyde in October 1404,83 and Sir Thomas Rokeby, MP for Yorkshire and proctor for the prior and chapter of Durham in 1406.84 In 1407 the notable survivor, or political turncoat (Sir) John Golafre, was both MP for Berkshire and proctor for the abbot of Reading.85 There were also those whose commissions did not apparently coincide with their election to parliament, but who sat as MPs either before or after their known links with religious houses, which included St Benet Hulme (Norf.), Thorney (Cambs.), and Gloucester.86 Other local worthies who were not MPs were also appointed. The Lincolnshire houses of Bardney and Crowland had strong connections with parliamentary electors, sending Albin and Thomas Enderby, John Kyme and John Wodeborn (Wodeburn) to represent their abbots,87 while William Wygge ‘citizen of Winchester’, the abbot of Hyde’s proctor in October 1404, was mayor of Winchester two years later, and again in 1413 when he died in office.88 Among those who are as yet unidentified were probably some who were the lay administrators of monastic lands. Two examples from the previous reign show that this was at least an occasional practice; further investigation of the Henry IV material may well discover others.89 There is surely no firm division between politicians, whether parliamentary or local, and lawyers. In January 1404 the abbot of Hyde commissioned two lawyers, William Cheyney and Thomas Hornby,90 and later that year Robert Tirwhit, who was already a king’s serjeant, was commissioned by the abbot of Bardney.91 Another shrewd choice was the abbot of Malmesbury’s selection of William Westbury in 1406.92 Tirwhit and Westbury, who

82 83 84 85 86 87

88 89

90 91 92

SC 10/41/2018; 42/2052 (Jan. 1404); House of Commons, III, 157–8. SC 10/42/2064; House of Commons, IV, 113–15. SC 10/42/2098; House of Commons, IV, 228–30. Ibid., III, 199–202; SC 10/43/2134. John Alderford, SC 10/42/2060, House of Commons, II, 1921; John Herlyngton, 41/2037, House of Commons, III, 352–3; Richard Ruyhale, 41/2042, House of Commons, IV, 261–3. Albin Enderby, Crowland 1402, SC 10/41/2008; Thomas Enderby, Crowland and Bardney 1402, 41/2008 and 2022; Bardney and Crowland Jan. 1404, 42/2054 and 2056; Crowland 1406, 43/2114; John Kyme, Bardney 1410, 43/2147; John Wodeburn esquire, Bardney and Crowland Oct. 1404, 42/2073, 2079 and 2096. A. Rogers, ‘Parliamentary Electors in Lincolnshire in the Fifteenth Century’, Lincolnshire History and Archaeology 3 (1968), 41–79 (pp. 57–9, 75); 6 (1971), 67–81 (p. 77). SC 10/42/2094; Hampshire Record Office: British History Online. In Oct. 1382 the abbot of Hyde’s choices included Thomas Warn’ seneschal, SC 10/34/1687; and in 1397 Ralph Erghum, bishop of Bath and Wells, named John Fytelton ‘seneschal of our lands’ among his choices, 40/1970. SC 10/41/2047. SC 10/42/2073. He was later a justice of the King’s Bench, Sainty, Judges of England, p. 26. SC 10/43/2113.

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The Clergy in Parliament were both en route to becoming judges in King’s Bench, also had political connections, Westbury as an MP’s brother, and Tirwhit, whose son would later become an MP, was a retained councillor of the duchy of Lancaster.93 There is, incidentally, no evidence that the king’s directive against the election of lawyers for the Coventry parliament (October 1404) either increased or decreased the number of lawyers chosen as proctors for the clergy. There is again no firm distinction between lawyers and those who were connected with the court in some way, though in this group there was a stronger military element. Men with court connections ranged from Peter de Crulle and Robert de Babthrop king’s esquires, and Robert’s brother William, who were proctors for the abbot of Selby,94 via the chamber knight John Littlebury a proctor for Crowland,95 to the conspicuously loyal high-profile household servant of the king, Sir John Pelham of Sussex, who twice acted as proctor for his neighbour the abbot of Battle,96 and Sir Thomas Skelton, chief steward of the duchy of Lancaster, a remarkable political survivor, with longestablished links to Bury St. Edmunds which were renewed in both parliaments of 1404, and in 1406.97 Using laymen as clergy’s proctors in parliament was not a new practice, nor were commissions which contained only laymen.98 The impression gained from this study so far is that the importance, or proportion, of laymen used was growing, though with the losses in this class we cannot be sure that this was so. But if it was true that more laymen were used, was this because more abbots felt the need for contacts with men in civil life, like politicians and lawyers? Was the number of suitable clerical, and especially monastic proctors, on the wane? Or was the employment of laymen with political, curial and legal connections, who were likely to be in or close to parliament anyway, simply an economy measure? In so short a reign as this it is unrealistic to look for changes and trends, but it is reasonable to enquire into local peculiarities and regional differences. One local peculiarity was in the use of language. Most letters which

93

94

95 96 97 98

House of Commons, IV, 630, 813; Sainty, Judges of England, pp. 26, 27; he was deputy chief steward, south parts, of the duchy of Lancaster, 1416–18: R. Somerville, History of the Duchy of Lancaster (London, 1953), p. 430. Crulle, Jan. 1404, SC 10/41/2049. He was possibly related to Robert Crulle, treasurer of Ireland, Wylie, Henry IV, I, 228; III, 370, but his name surely derives from Crowle, the north Lincs. manor which was part of Selby’s landed endowment. The Babthorps were proctors in 1410, SC 10/43/2145. In 1406, SC 10/43/2114; Rogers, ‘Parliamentary Electors’, p. 78; Given-Wilson, Royal Household, pp. 195–6, 208, 249. 1402, SC 10/41/2024; 1407, 43/2137; G. Dodd, ‘Henry IV’s Council, 1399–1405’, in Henry IV, ed. Dodd and Biggs, p. 102; House of Commons, IV, 39–44. Ibid., pp. 380–2; SC 10/42/2058 and 2083; 43/2129. The abbot of Gloucester commissioned the lawyers Robert Charlton and John Cassy, 6 Nov. 1384, SC 10/35/1733.

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A. K. McHardy announce the appointments are addressed to the king in the most bland and neutral of terms (‘Henrico dei gracia …’).99 But there are exceptions. ‘Magnifico principi et domino Domino suo Henrico’ wrote the abbot of Thorney (Cambs.), in 1401 and the following year, and again in January 1404.100 In 1402 the abbot of Crowland was even more effusive, addressing himself to ‘Excellentissimo principi et domino magnifico domino Henrico …’.101 They were exceptional, and those abbots seem quickly to have got over their excessive humility. The only bishop with a similar need to address the king in such grovelling terms was Walter Skirlaw of Durham who in 1406 addressed Henry as ‘Serenissimo principi ac domino suo … domino suo metuendissimo’.102 Such humility was unique on the part of a bishop, but, as we saw earlier, in 1406 Skirlaw had plenty to be humble about. More significant were the regional differences in the choice of proctors. These files point up sharply the distinction between the ‘honey pot’ cathedral chapters of Lincoln, Salisbury, and York, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, London – full as they were of prominent king’s clerks – and the less wellendowed chapters of Hereford and Exeter, which were largely ignored by the Westminster high-flyers. Here the proctors were mostly chosen from men whose names do not appear elsewhere, just as here the bishops were able to promote their own candidates as prebendaries.103 There are also regional patterns in abbatial selections. The abbot of Shrewsbury’s choices were unusual; in 1402 his proctors were two rectors, Roger Westwood (Westwode) of Hodnet (Salop) and Richard Celle of Keeston (Dyfed), while in 1406 he chose Bro. Richard Hulle, a monk of his house.104 It comes as a surprise to find that abbeys in the south-east were essentially ‘out of the loop’ when it came to parliamentary proxies. Not for them the usual choices of chancery clerks or ecclesiastical administrators of provincial standing. This distinctiveness applies to St Augustine’s Canterbury,105 St John’s Colchester,106 and Waltham Holy Cross (both in Essex).107 Not surprisingly, the biggest differences were between north and south, though for this purpose Yorkshire – that is, the chapter of York Minster, and Selby abbey – count as ‘southern’, as does the bishop of Durham. Distinctively northern were the chapter of Durham, along

99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107

A minority are letters patent which the proctors perhaps carried with them as identification. SC 10/40/1989; 41/2009 and 2037. SC 10/41/2008. SC 10/42/2099. For Exeter see SC 10/42/2097 (chapter) and 3000 (dean); 44/2163 (chapter). For Hereford see SC 10/41/2016; 43/2131. SC 10/41/2023; 43/2110. SC 10/41/2005 and 42/2070, but by 1410 he chose John Rome, among others, 43/2146. SC 10/44/2181. SC 10/42/2093.

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The Clergy in Parliament with the prior, and the archdeacon of Northumberland. Carlisle was even more distinctive; its bishop, chapter, archdeacon and diocesan clergy chose proctors who were not commissioned by anyone else, but were common to others within the diocese.108 We must also ask whether the politics of the reign had any effect upon the choice of the proctors we have been considering. One effect of the new dynasty was the return and rehabilitation of men who had served as proctors during Ricardian parliaments, but who had retreated from public life in the summer of 1397, whether from fear or discretion. An example was John Scarle, whose record as a proctor in the previous twenty years was remarkable: the recipient of twenty-six surviving commissions from five abbeys, notably Bury St Edmunds. Scarle resigned from crown service in the summer of 1397 – he knew what was coming in the September parliament – but was Henry IV’s first chancellor. York chapter’s commission to Scarle as a proctor in 1401 seemed shrewd, though Scarle was actually removed from office during that session,109 and this was his also swan-song as a proctor. Another irrepressible former proctor who reappeared was Thomas Haxey, the most high-profile proxy of all.110 After a close shave with Richard II’s temper early in 1397 the new reign and century saw Haxey’s return to parliament, representing the abbot of Selby yet again in October 1404, as well as the chapter of Lincoln and the archdeacon of Lincoln, Thomas Beckingham.111 Two years later he represented Selby for the eighth and last time, along with the chapter of Lincoln for the second.112 Though, so far as we know, Haxey never again reached the social heights as a parliamentary proctor that he had done in the previous reign, with commissions from the bishops of Lincoln and Lichfield, he was nonetheless a survivor who outlived both Henry IV and his son, dying only in 1425.113 We can most graphically illustrate the impact of politics by looking at the proctors chosen by John Burghill, the bishop Lichfield. Burghill, a Dominican and former confessor to Richard II, was one of those courtier bishops of whom Haxey so disapproved. Provided first to Llandaff in 1396, and translated to Lichfield in 1398, his enthronement that September was attended by the king who had come to the neighbourhood for the Coventry tournament. Burghill remained at least passively loyal to Richard’s memory, attending his interment at King’s Langley, the only bishop to do so. Advanced age,

108 109 110 111 112 113

The loss of the Carlisle registers after 1395 makes it hard to identify most of these. SC 10/40/1995. A. K. McHardy, ‘Haxey’s Case, 1397: The Petition and its Presenter Reconsidered’, in The Age of Richard II, ed. J. L. Gillespie (Stroud, 1997), pp. 93–114. SC 10/42/2068, 2076 and 2086. SC 10/43/2109 and 2121. SC 10/83/1872 (Lincoln 1393); 39/1944 (Lichfield 1395); A. K. McHardy, ‘Haxey, Thomas (d. 1425)’, ODNB.

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A. K. McHardy if nothing else, could have deterred him from taking part in conspiracies against the new king, for Burghill was probably about seventy by the turn of the century,114 but he evidently felt vulnerable under Henry, and we can see him using parliamentary proctors to protect himself. In 1401 his six proctors included the senior civil servants Thomas Stanley and Nicholas Bubwith, and two lawyers, one of whom was Thomas Tickhill a Yorkshireman who, although not yet retained by the duchy of Lancaster or appointed to government office, was clearly a man on the right side.115 By the next parliament Burghill had recruited not only Mr. John Prophet the king’s secretary, but Edmund earl of Stafford, a trusted companion of the king; though what might have been the start of a useful relationship was cut short by the earl’s death at the king’s side during the battle of Shrewsbury.116 Burghill, however, was persistent, and probably anxious too, and by January 1404 his nine proctors included Prophet’s nephew Master Thomas Field, a king’s clerk, commissary, diplomatic envoy and dean of Hereford, as well at John Wakering a senior man in the Chancery and canon of Wells. But the star of the group was undoubtedly Sir Thomas Rempston of Nottinghamshire. Appointed Constable of the Tower on Henry’s accession, Rempston occurs shortly afterwards as steward of the household, and is variously described by modern historians as ‘maintainer of the king’s influence in the county’, and as ‘underpinning the régime’.117 For the next parliament, which was held on his doorstep in Coventry, he commissioned Sir Thomas Aston, who not only had over twenty years of parliamentary experience, had fought at Shrewsbury, and had been treasurer to the household of Edmund earl of Stafford;118 Sir William Newport, a man conspicuously loyal to the house of Lancaster, whose first taste of parliament

114 115

116 117

118

He was born 1330 or shortly after: R. N. Swanson, ‘Burghill, John (c.1330–1414)’, ODNB. The full commission was to Thomas Stanley, Nicholas Bubwith, Walter Bullock (his vicar general) and John Abingdon clerks, Thomas Tickhill and Richard Lugge literates, our manor of Heywood 12 Jan. 1401, SC 10/40/1986. For Tickhill see S. J. Payling, Political Society in Lancastrian England: The Greater Gentry of Nottinghamshire (Oxford, 1991), p. 168; Somerville, Duchy of Lancaster, p. 453. For Bullock see Emden, University of Oxford, I, 303–4. SC 10/41/2028, dated Eccleshall, 20 Sept. 1402. The other proctors were John Prophet (the king’s secretary), Bullock, Peter de Pole and John Fynderne. The complete group was: Masters Thomas Field (Felde) dean of Hereford cathedral, John Wakeryng canon of Wells cathedral, William Neuhagh, John Oudeby and William Brynkelowe canons of our cathedral of Lichfield, and John Abyndon rector of Grendon parish church in our diocese, and Thomas Rempston knight, Nicholas Bradshawe and John Fyndern armigers, Eccleshall castle, 7 Jan. 1404, SC 10/41/2035. For Rempston see Dodd, ‘Henry IV’s Council’, and A. Tuck, ‘Henry IV and Chivalry’, in Henry IV, ed. Dodd and Biggs, pp. 70–1, 107; Payling, Political Society, pp. 42–3, 119, 121–4. For Field, see Emden, University of Oxford, II, 682–3. House of Commons, II, 80–2.

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The Clergy in Parliament this was;119 and the past and future MP for Derbyshire, Sir Roger Leche, ‘a good duchy man’ (in Professor Allmand’s words) who gave ‘years of loyal service to the house of Lancaster’ and ended his days as treasurer of England under Henry V.120 His other proxies were two senior chancery clerks, his vicargeneral, and a squire.121 He appointed a similar group in 1406, Burghill’s last known contact with political life, when he was represented by the chancellor (Thomas Langley), the keeper of the privy seal (Nicholas Bubwith), the loyal Lancastrian Sir Thomas Aston, and by Nicholas Bradshaw esquire.122 In fact, throughout Henry IV’s reign John Burghill devoted himself mainly to his episcopal duties. A combination of old age and political disgrace, we may surmise, turned his mind to matters spiritual, but he outlasted the usurper, and died in 1414. Given the wealth of evidence about the representation of the clergy in parliament the questions must be asked: After all this effort, what did the clerical proctors actually do? In other words, Why were they appointed at all? Most clerical proctors made no impact upon the record of proceedings; Thomas Haxey’s moment of celebrity in 1397 was exceptional. The question is all the more intriguing since the clergy did not grant taxation in parliament. So perhaps the question ought to be: What was the incentive for the clergy to go to parliament at all? For the clerical peers the answer was rooted in their legal and feudal relationship to the crown. Furthermore, bishops as a class had strong personal links with their sovereigns, while the parliamentary abbots evidently recognized obligations to their feudal superior even if these were more burdensome than advantageous.123 In addition, there are isolated examples of the punishments meted out to those who failed to attend national assemblies, whether clerical or secular. Thus in April 1404 William of Wykeham, bishop of Winchester, failed to attend a meeting of convocation, and Archbishop Arundel confiscated his revenues as punishment,124 and from later in the century comes evidence of what might happen to an absent parliamentary abbot. Late in Henry VI’s reign the abbot of Bury St Edmunds (Suff.) petitioned the king and council requesting that writs or letters under the privy seal be sent to the treasurer and barons of the exchequer ordering

119 120 121

122 123 124

Ibid., III, 833–4. He was subsequently knight of the shire for Staffs. in 1407, 1411 and Nov. 1414. House of Commons, III, 570–3. Nicholas Bubwith archdeacon of Dorset, John Wakering canon of Wells, Walter Bullock canon of Lichfield, Sir Roger Leche, and Nicholas Bradshaw esquire, Eccleshall castle 28 Sept., file 42/2094. Bradshaw had helped to entertain Henry at Stafford after the battle of Shrewsbury, Wylie, Henry IV, II, 60n. SC 10/43/2123. Reich, Parliamentary Abbots, pp. 293–318. Canterbury convocation met from 21 April to 6 May 1404; the Winchester revenues, ‘all fruits, rents and incomes’, were confiscated on 20 May, Records of Convocation IV: Canterbury 1377–1414, ed. G. Bray (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 257, 261, 272–3.

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A. K. McHardy them to cease their efforts to levy a £40 fine upon him for his failure to attend the present parliament. His excuse was that at the time when parliament was called he was only abbot-elect, and thus did not receive the summons.125 His petition was granted on the advice of the lords spiritual and temporal in parliament on 15 April 1454. The case was perhaps exceptional because this parliament lasted intermittently from 6 March 1453 to 16 April 1454, but the moral is surely that in the fifteenth century, as now, ignoring a government summons was expensive.126 For the deputizing proctors of the individually summoned lower clergy, and for the elected representatives of the diocesan clergy, their reason for attendance was theoretically different. Though the powers granted to their proxies were, in essence, the same, and, in theory, very wide, in practice the reason for calling the lower clergy to parliament had been to assent to grants of taxation.127 The rise of convocation as a grant-making body undermined the proctors’ importance. Once the clergy did not make their tax grants in parliament there was less reason for the crown to enforce their attendance, while the clergy as a class felt that grievances were more effectively aired in their own – grant-making – assemblies: the convocations of Canterbury and York. After 1340 the proctors’ attendance (through the praemunientes clause of the summonses to bishops) was not enforced,128 and it was once believed that no representatives of the lower clergy attended thereafter. This view is no longer sustainable,129 though after 1400 evidence that diocesan clergy elected ‘clerical MPs’, two for each diocese, is sparse. In fact, only the clergy of Carlisle diocese are known to have appointed proctors, which they did twice in this reign.130 The last time the diocesan clergy, again of Carlisle, can be shown to have appointed a proctor was in 1432,131 but the evidence of all kinds tails away shortly after. Cathedral chapters, on the other hand, continued to appoint parliamentary representatives at an unabated rate, for thirty-six such commissions survive for this reign. It was, of course, much easier for chapters to appoint representatives than for the diocesan clergy to attend elections in distant places. A lack of crown enforcement, and the

125 126 127 128 129 130

131

This must be John Bohun, elected abbot in 1453 in succession to William Babington who died earlier that year, VCH Suffolk, 2 vols. (London, 1907), II, 72. SC 8/28/1386. The writ of summons was dated 20 Jan. 1453, Handbook of British Chronology, p. 570. Denton and Dooley, Representatives of the Lower Clergy, pp. 7–9, 85. Ibid. See also the review by N. Saul, Parliamentary History 7 (1988), pp. 139–46. McHardy, ‘Representation of the English Lower Clergy’, pp. 97–107. SC 10/42/2084; 44/2158. The Records of Convocation III: Canterbury 1313–1377, ed. Gerald Bray (Woodbridge, 2005), p. 387 is probably incorrect to list the ‘Northumbria clergy’ as appointing a proctor in 1402; the appointment was made by John Dalton, archdeacon of Northumberland and Official of Durham, though the wording was unusual, SC 10/41/2017. SC 10/49/2410.

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The Clergy in Parliament absence of a defined role, explains why not all clergy, certainly not all the eligible lower clergy, answered the summons to parliament, but we are still left with the puzzle of why so many went to the trouble of complying with the summons to attend. A further complication in considering the clergy’s role in parliament is the existence of convocation, or rather, of the two convocations. It was in these assemblies, the convocations of Canterbury and York, that the clergy made their grants of taxation to the crown, as well as discussing more obviously ecclesiastical matters such as faith and discipline. From the crown’s point of view the two bodies were of very unequal value; the province of York consisted of three dioceses: York, Carlisle, and Durham. Canterbury province covered all the rest of England, and Wales. The taxable value, therefore, was overwhelmingly to be found in Canterbury, and for most of the fourteenth century the timing of the meeting of its convocation reflected this. Parliament met first, and made – so the king would hope – its tax grant, and this put pressure on the Canterbury convocation to do the same. In 1371 this pressure was more explicit; when the Canterbury convocation met on 24 April it did so knowing how much money was demanded of it, for in the previous parliament (24 February to 29 March 1371) the council asked for a grant of £100,000, making it clear that half was to come from the clergy. Both clergy and commons discussed the grant in parliament but it was in convocation that the clergy’s £50,000 had to be granted, and was.132 In Henry IV’s reign the timing was more complicated; on the first three occasions, autumn 1399, early 1401,133 and autumn 1402, parliament and Canterbury convocation ran concurrently, though the parliamentary sitting was longer than convocation’s. This was also the case in 1410, the early spring, and in December 1411. The traditional pattern, of Canterbury convocation succeeding parliament returned in 1404, twice, and 1406, but in 1407, 1408 and 1409 there was no link because there was no convocation (in 1407 there was a provincial assembly instead), and in the two following years there were meetings of the Canterbury convocation, but no parliament. For the majority of Henry’s parliaments therefore, we would expect that the clergy of at least the southern province would have gathered in London, at St Paul’s cathedral, either after the parliamentary session,134 or even during it. That there was some connection between the two bodies is suggested by the pres-

132

Handbook of British Chronology, p. 563; The Anonimalle Chronicle, ed. V.H. Galbraith (Manchester, 1927), p. 67. The clergy of York province gave £5,000 as their share of the £50,000: D. B. Weske, Convocation of the Clergy (London, 1937), p. 286. 133 Discussed in detail A. K. McHardy, ‘De Heretico Comburendo, 1401’, in Lollardy and the Gentry in the Later Middle Ages, ed. M. Aston and C. Richmond (Stroud, 1997), pp. 114– 15. 134 In 1404 parliament’s meeting at Coventry ended on 13 Nov., convocation met in London 24–28 Nov., Handbook of British Chronology, pp. 566, 599.

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A. K. McHardy ence among the appointments of parliamentary proctors of a few appointments for convocation.135 Since the clergy were bound to attend convocation it would have been, in theory, comparatively little extra effort for those of the southern province to have attended parliament as well. Another reason, beyond conservatism, may have prompted the continuing appointment of parliamentary proxies, namely the widespread use of deputies in many aspects of life. The term proctor, procurator, or proxy is an old one, for the concept of a representative or deputy originated in Roman imperial administration, and both the name and the function have proved remarkably enduring.136 In the middle ages, and later, the concept of the representative was very useful in an age of poor communications and slow travel, so it is worth recalling that the appointment of proctors was a comparatively common feature of life. These valuable men could perform routine duties such as the delivery of messages, simply turning up as a presence on particular occasions, appearing in courts, taking possession of a benefice, or raising money.137 In other words, the appointment of proctors was nothing out of the ordinary, nothing to get excited about. In late medieval England one common reason to appoint a proctor was that men going abroad felt it advisable to have a deputy chosen to represent them in their absence, not necessarily, it seems, because they were facing litigation, but ‘just in case’. The formalities of appointment took place in the royal chancery, many of those appointed were chancery clerks, and the patent rolls recorded the numerous resulting transactions. Thus men of comparatively humble origin could become the registered representatives of members of the higher nobility. Throughout Europe even kings needed proxies. For example, in 1387 when Philippa of Lancaster married King João of Portugal the ceremony was performed by proxy: ‘The archbishop explained … that by power of the king’s procuration, he was authorized to espouse personally the lady Philippa of Lancaster, in the name of don John, king of Portugal. … the ceremony was performed by virtue of the above-mentioned procuration; and the archbishop of Braganza and the lady Philippa were courteously laid beside each other,

135

SC 10/44/2185–6, for meeting of Nov. 1413. D. M. Walker, The Oxford Companion to Law (Oxford, 1980), 1004, s.vv. ‘proctor’ and ‘procurator’. 137 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), pp. 88–108 (p.103). A good selection of tasks, within a purely ecclesiastical context, can be seen in The Register of Thomas Appleby Bishop of Carlisle 1363–95, ed. R. L. Storey, Canterbury and York Society, 96 (2006), subject index, s.v. ‘proctors’. 136

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The Clergy in Parliament on a bed, as married persons should be’.138 In England, during this reign, even Henry IV used a proxy to address parliament, in 1407.139 So the question, ‘What was the point of these proctors?’ might well have puzzled contemporaries since, as has been shown, the appointment of proctors was a routine feature of many aspects of life. For those summoned to parliament by individual writ there was an obligation to answer the call to serve, whether in person or by properly constituted deputy. Parliamentarians were notoriously reluctant to come to meetings on time, but the surviving evidence gives reason to believe that the clerical peers at least were conscientious in fulfilling their obligations, though not necessarily in person, and it perhaps explains why the clergy continued to operate the machinery of appointing proctors when there is little evidence that they played a part in parliamentary proceedings. The fact is that they could play a part, and in 1397 and 1399 they actually did.140 And if there were no proctors, then there was no possibility of intervention; further, any major policy decision of parliament – excluding taxation – would be invalid without the clergy’s assent. One answer to the question of invisibility has already been indicated: that many of the proctors would have been present in parliament anyway, in another capacity, either as receivers of petitions or as members of the general secretariat and administration. A few, like the king’s secretary, the keeper of the privy seal, and the chancellor of the realm, would certainly have been in attendance, and ‘clerical proctor’ would have been the least newsworthy of the roles they played. Some other proctors of the clergy were also, and more obviously, representing lay constituents. Another response to the mystery of the invisible proctors is to point out that the numbers appearing were much smaller than the number of commissions, simply through duplication. Thus the recipients of individual summonses, like the archdeacons and cathedral deans, might also represent one or more other groups or parliamentary peers. For example, Mr Thomas Stowe, who, as dean of London, was expected to attend in person, appointed two proctors, both members of his chapter, in 1401, but was himself appointed the abbot of Evesham’s proctor.141 One man could receive several commissions for a single parliament, as happened with Thomas Scausby, clerk, who for the October meeting in 1404 was the proctor of choice for the prior and convent of Carlisle cathedral, the clergy of Carlisle diocese, the archdeacon of Carlisle

138

J. Froissart, Chronicles, Book III, chap. 56, trans. T. Johnes, 2 vols. (London, 1855) II, 221. 139 PROME, parliament of 1407, item 17 (Rot. Parl., III, 610). 140 There is no material in SC 10 for the 1399 parliament. John Burbage was an associate of Henry Beaufort; Thomas Stow, as archdeacon of both Bedford and London, would have received indirect summonses to parliament. Both men had doctorates in civil law, Emden, University of Oxford, I, 305–6; III, 1794–5. 141 SC 10/40/1996 and 2000.

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A. K. McHardy and the bishop of Carlisle.142 In 1410 he again represented the chapter, archdeacon, and the diocesan clergy.143 Those already attending parliament as part of their administrative duties might be acting as proctor for several individuals or groups, as did John Rome, for example, who had nine commissions for both the parliaments held in 1404. A number of others, whether lay lawyers or monastic substitutes for abbots, may not have been present in deliberations but could have been ‘around and about’ the meetings, on other business. The fact that principals usually appointed several substitutes did not mean that all of them actually functioned, or indeed were present in parliament, but were probably intended to cover all eventualities. If we can suggest plausible answers to the big questions about the clergy’s role and representation in parliament we can be less confident about the mechanism and procedures involved. How did these men get into the parliamentary sessions? Did they actually go in to the sessions? How were they paid? Did the initiative for appointment come from the principals or from the proxies? To many of these the answer is that we do not know. The reason for this ignorance is the lack of material. In many instances the ‘paper trail’ of transactions, if they were ever made, would not have been kept. Most of these were short-term contracts, ephemeral relationships, whose evidence was discarded – like old conference badges – once the occasion for their existence was over. There are, however, hints from the previous century of answers to some of these questions. The problem of an identity document or pass is one. The usual form of appointment was a commission to the proctors, but they seem also to have carried with them a letter patent announcing that the commission had been made, and sometimes both documents survive. This is the case, for example, of the prior of Durham’s commission of appointment of Gilbert Elvet and Thomas Billinghan to represent him in the parliament of January 1380, and a letter patent of appointment.144 Though the records of payment have in most cases been lost, some suggestions may be offered. The chapters of secular cathedrals often regarded their non-resident members as a resource to be utilized to give legal advice or represent the common interest in the wider world, and it is reasonable to suggest that being a parliamentary proctor was one obligation which non-resident prebendaries fulfilled.145 Some king’s clerks had long-standing connections with particular religious houses, and in a very few instances were rewarded with benefices. Although

142

SC 10/42/2062, 2084, 2087 and 2092. SC 10/43/2144, 2150 and 2158. 144 SC 10/33/1640–1. 145 K. Edwards, The English Secular Cathedral in the Middle Ages, 2nd edn (Manchester, 1967), p. 94. 143

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The Clergy in Parliament the examples identified so far date from the previous century it is likely that cases occurring during this period remain to be discovered.146 Examination of the part played by the clergy in parliament during this reign has shown us a subject which in part remains elusive, and offers scope for further consideration. On the other hand, there is abundant material here which can illuminate many aspects of life in this period. One is an aspect of high politics illustrating the nervousness which was the consequence of Henry’s usurpation. But there is much, too, about the ‘undergrowth’ of politics and the connections between individuals and communities, also about the way that political society and aspiration worked at local levels. Nor have our findings been purely political, for it has touched upon longer-term social and cultural changes too. The clergy in parliament may be a small window through which to view the reign of Henry IV, but it nevertheless commands a spacious view.

146

A. K. McHardy, ‘Some Patterns of Ecclesiastical Patronage in the Later Middle Ages’, in Studies in Clergy and Ministry in Medieval England, ed. D. M. Smith, Borthwick Studies in History 1 (1991), pp. 24–7.

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7 The Rebellion of Archbishop Scrope and the Tradition of Opposition to Royal Taxation W. Mark Ormrod

The rebellion of Richard Scrope, archbishop of York, in 1405 was an event of considerable significance in the political and cultural life of the city of York, of the north, and of the kingdom of England. Much of that significance, however, came after the event, through the development and management of a popular cult that commemorated an archbishop ostensibly martyred in the cause of ecclesiastical and political liberties. Rather than clouding our judgment of the short-term implications of the 1405 northern rebellion, the Scrope mythology that developed in the course of the fifteenth century can be taken as a significant phenomenon in its own right, and has indeed been the focus of a number of stimulating studies. Indeed, the present state of Scrope studies seems often to place as much emphasis on the subsequent historiographical and hagiographical construction of the saintly bishop as on the events of the rising themselves: such, perhaps, is the inevitable impact of cultural studies on more traditional approaches to medieval political history. The present contribution adopts a rather different perspective on the Scrope rebellion, one that is essentially backward- rather than forward-



J. Solloway, Archbishop Scrope, York Minster Historical Tracts 15 (York, 1927); J. W. McKenna, ‘Popular Canonization as Political Propaganda: The Cult of Archbishop Scrope’, Speculum 45 (1970), 608–23; P. McNiven, ‘The Betrayal of Archbishop Scrope’, BJRL 54 (1971), 173–213; R. G. Davies, ‘After the Execution of Archbishop Scrope: Henry IV, the Papacy and the English Episcopate, 1405–8’, BJRL 56 (1976), 40–74; S. Wright, ‘Paradigmatic Ambiguity and Monastic Hagiography: The Case of Clement Maidstone’s Martyrium Ricardi Archiepiscopi’, Studia Monastica 28 (1986), 311–42; J. Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries: Religion and Secular Life in Late Medieval Yorkshire (Woodbridge, 1988), pp. 305–15; T. French, ‘The Tomb of Archbishop Scrope in York Minster’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 6 (1989), 95–102; S. Walker, ‘Political Saints in Later Medieval England’, in The McFarlane Legacy: Studies in Late Medieval Politics and Society, ed. R. H. Britnell and A. J. Pollard (Stroud, 1995), pp. 77–106; S. Walker, ‘Civil War and Rebellion’, in An Illustrated History of Late Medieval England, ed. C. Given-Wilson (Manchester, 1996), pp. 229–47; P. Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (London, 1998); S. Walker, ‘Rumour, Sedition and Popular Protest in the Reign of Henry IV’, Past and Present 166 (2000), 31–65; C. Valente, The Theory and Practice of Revolt in Medieval England (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 216–20; S. Walker, ‘The Yorkshire Risings of 1405: Texts and Contexts’, in Henry IV, ed. Dodd and Biggs, pp. 161–84.

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The Rebellion of Archbishop Scrope looking. I shall take one strand in the demands of the York rebels of 1405 – the complaints about royal taxation – and attempt to re-think the subject in the context of a tradition of opposition to the financial impositions of the English crown. In so doing, I shall be focusing not on the question of who or what actually drove Archbishop Scrope to rebellion, or the contested issues around the relationship between this rebellion and the longer-lasting feud between the houses of Percy and Lancaster. Rather, my emphasis is on the self-conscious rhetoric of justification within the revolt once it was under way, and therefore on the choices that were made both by Scrope and by his contemporaries about how the ‘causes’ of that revolt were then articulated. The concentration on the question of taxation is justified not only in terms of the need to establish a definitive record of the fiscal exactions of Henry IV’s early regime but also because this subject is especially well represented in the extant political record of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, thus allowing for a discussion of the longer-term traditions of tax resistance, both ‘high’ and ‘low’, that may have informed Scrope’s agenda. In particular, I shall concentrate on the record of clerical taxation since it is within the political conventions that governed this aspect of royal finance that I believe we can discern important aspects of the political ideology underpinning Scrope’s demands of 1405. In so doing, I do not intend to imply that the rebellion was in itself a discernibly ‘clerical’ phenomenon, but rather that Scrope’s own leadership of the event was in part constructed within a conscious tradition of clerical resistance to the medieval English state. First, we need to establish the content of the items within the Scrope manifestos that concerned royal taxation. For present purposes I do not need to dwell at length on the issue of which version of the rebels’ demands might be regarded as the most authentic, since I am rather less concerned with what Scrope and his supporters ‘really’ said on the matter than in the way that they and contemporary reporters interpreted the claim of unjust taxation. But if we take the so-called York articles preserved by Walsingham as our starting point, we can see that there were two essential elements to the rebels’ claims about taxation: that insupportable burdens were being placed upon the clergy; and that excessive taxation was being imposed on the merchants and all the estates of the realm, with punishment demanded for those who had put the wealth of the commons to private use. The other sources which have been associated with the Scrope agenda – the version of the manifesto in the continuation of the Eulogium Historiarum, the ten articles published by Wharton and Raine, and the list of reasons for Scrope’s execution produced by Thomas Gascoigne – are essentially compatible with these statements and flesh out some of the fiscal clauses of the York articles: the continuation of

 

The most recent re-assessment is Walker, ‘Yorkshire Risings of 1405’. ‘Annales’, pp. 403–5.

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W. Mark Ormrod the Eulogium, for example, stresses the adverse consequences of that particularly baleful form of taxation, purveyance for the royal household; and the so-called Giles’ Chronicle places special emphasis on the deleterious effects of the customs and subsidies on overseas trade. The modes in which these various documents were written and/or have come down to us vary greatly, and there are clearly important distinctions to be made between their respective intended audiences: the York articles, for example, written in English and posted on the doors of the parish churches of the city, are usually assumed to be populist in tone, while the ten articles, written in Latin and now known to predate the Scrope rebellion itself, represent a kind of high clerical agenda of opposition to the Henrician regime. The variations in register might be regarded as creating problems of interpretation: as Prestwich has pointed out in relation to earlier traditions of political resistance to taxation, we may have to be somewhat chary about assuming that scholastic notions of just and unjust taxation were understood by the majority of lay people, for whom it was the impending threat and (sometimes) the sharp reality of financial liability, rather than its formal philosophical and political legitimisation, that really counted. In the case of the Scrope rebellion, however, the variety of texts on which we have to draw in constructing the rebels’ manifesto does seem to go some way to representing a number of convergent voices, clerical and lay, high political and populist. I think it may therefore be possible, and legitimate, to provide a quite expansive interpretation of the fiscal clauses within the manifesto. There are three ways in which these clauses may be read. First, they can be seen as a specific attack on the actual burden of taxation imposed by the crown in and around 1405. Second, they can be interpreted in relation to Henry IV’s statement in 1399 that he intended to rule without the undue taxation that had marred the record of his deposed predecessor Richard II. Third, they might be read in the context of longer traditions, both lay and clerical, of opposition to the principles and practices of royal taxation. The first two of these interpretations, on the adverse economic effects of taxation and the reneging on royal promises made in 1399, privilege the immediate context and short-term causes of the revolt, and have tended to be favoured by modern commentators. The third reading, about longer traditions of opposition and resistance to royal taxation, has been somewhat down-played, for reasons that I will elaborate later. I will now take these three possible read-



Eulogium Historiarum, III, 405–8; Anglia sacra, ed. H. Wharton, 2 vols. (London, 1691), II, 362–8; The Historians of the Church of York and its Archbishops, ed. J. Raine, 3 vols. (London, 1879–94), II, 292–304; Thomas Gascoigne, Loci e libro veritatum, ed. J. E. Thorold Rogers (Oxford, 1881), pp. 225–9; Incerti scriptoris chronicon de regnis … Henrici IV, Henrici V, et Henrici VI, ed. J. A. Giles (London, 1848), pp. 43–8.  See the discussion, with references, in Walker, ‘Yorkshire Risings of 1405’.  M. Prestwich, English Politics in the Thirteenth Century (Basingstoke, 1990), pp. 109–45.

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The Rebellion of Archbishop Scrope ings of the rebel manifestos and investigate their context and viability rather more closely.

I First, then, to the question of the precise tax burden imposed in the early years of the reign of Henry IV. The focus of this study is direct taxation, and even more particularly the direct taxation of the clergy. However, in light of the fact that some versions of Scrope’s political agenda set store by the implied inclusiveness of the complaint about the fiscal burden of royal exactions, I shall briefly address the question of indirect taxation before proceeding to a longer analysis of the direct subsidies granted in the years before the rebellion of 1405. The crown’s revenue from indirect taxation in the later Middle Ages came in the form of the customs and subsidies on overseas trade. The customs (the ancient custom, new custom and cloth custom) were collected permanently by the crown, as of right, while the subsidies (the wool subsidy or ‘maltolt’, and the subsidy on wine and general merchandise known as tonnage and poundage) had to be authorised in parliament and were granted for fixed periods, albeit that the maltolt had come to be granted in virtually continuous sequence since the time of Edward III. The rates on those commodities that were particularly targeted by the crown – exported wool and woollen cloth – had therefore been quite stable since the 1360s, although in 1398, when the Shrewsbury parliament granted Richard II the wool subsidy for life, a surcharge was added on wool exports by aliens. Henry IV’s first parliament was not asked for, and did not grant, the subsidy of tonnage and poundage, which had been collected continuously during the latter part of Richard II’s reign but which now fell into abeyance, representing at least implicitly a political concession at the moment of the king’s accession. In 1401, however, the subsidy was revived, at a lower rate than had been the norm in the 1390s;



N. S. B. Gras, The Early English Customs System (Cambridge, Mass., 1918); J. G. Edwards, The Second Century of the English Parliament (Oxford, 1979), pp. 19–23; W. M. Ormrod, ‘The West European Monarchies in the Late Middle Ages’, in Economic Systems and State Finance, ed. R. Bonney (Oxford, 1995), pp. 123–60 (pp. 133–6); W. M. Ormrod, ‘England in the Middle Ages’, in The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, c.1200–1815, ed. R. Bonney (Oxford, 1999), pp. 19–52 (pp. 31–3); W. M. Ormrod, ‘Finance and Trade under Richard II’, in Richard II: The Art of Kingship, ed. A. Goodman and J. Gillespie (Oxford, 1999), pp. 155–86.  PROME, parliament of 1397, item 75 (Rot. Parl., III, 368); CFR, 1391–9, pp. 205–6. For a complaint about this additional levy made in parliament in 1404, see PROME, parliament of January 1404, Introduction.

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W. Mark Ormrod and then, in 1402, it was raised to the former standard rate of 3 shillings per tun of wine and 1 shilling per pound value of general merchandise. Meanwhile, the parliament of 1399, though dispensing with the idea of a life grant of the maltolt, had authorised a continuation of the subsidy for three years at the new rates established in 1398.10 When this grant expired in 1402, the wool subsidy was duly extended for a further three years.11 By this stage in the development of indirect taxation, it had become common for the rate of the tax on wool as expressed on the parliament rolls and fine rolls to represent the ancient custom and the wool subsidy as a single package. The rates of £2 10s per sack for denizens and £3 for aliens, as recorded in the official record for 1402, were therefore actually composite figures, as the commons subsequently reminded the crown in 1404. However, by that time the Exchequer had apparently decided to exploit the ambiguity of the record of 1402 and to levy the ancient custom of 6s 8d per sack over and above the composite rates of £2 10s and £3. Although the king pardoned the distraints that had been issued on exports made between 1402 and 1404, he nevertheless cajoled parliament into granting the contested additional levy of 6s 8d as a special subsidy for a year from Michaelmas 1404.12 It is therefore evident from a re-examination of indirect taxation between 1399 and 1405 that the re-establishment of tonnage and poundage at former levels from 1402, coupled with the increase in 1404 in the total imposition on exports of wool, had the overall effect of rendering levels of taxation on overseas trade higher in the fiscal year 1404–5 than they had been at any point previously in this reign, or, for that matter, since the deeply controversial and short-lived subsidies negotiated by Edward III in the first decade of the Hundred Years War.13 If, as some of the sources for the Scrope rebellion tell us, the archbishop was concerned to represent the interest of impoverished merchants, then – to put it bluntly – he can scarcely have timed his rebellion better. The record of direct taxation in the period before Scrope’s uprising is particularly complex, and a lot of the scholarship had been somewhat confused on



10 11 12 13

Ormrod, ‘Finance and Trade’; PROME, parliament of 1401, item 9 (Rot. Parl., III, 455); parliament of 1402, item 28 (Rot. Parl., III, 493); CFR, 1399–1405, pp. 121–3, 138–40, 169– 71; 206–7, 226–8, 267–9; J. S. Roskell, ‘Introductory Survey’, in House of Commons, I, 1–160 (pp. 122–4, which contain some inaccuracies). PROME, parliament of 1399, items 36 and 65 (Rot. Parl., III, 420 and 425); CFR 1399–1405, p. 3. PROME, parliament of 1402, item 28 (Rot. Parl., III, 493); CFR, 1399–1405, p. 174. PROME, parliament of October 1404, item 9 (Rot. Parl., III, 546–7); CFR, 1399–1405, p. 272. The point is made graphically (albeit with a few inaccuracies of detail) in relation to the taxation of wool exports by E. Carus-Wilson and O. Coleman, England’s Export Trade, 1275–1547 (Oxford, 1963), p. 196.

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The Rebellion of Archbishop Scrope the details of individual levies in the early years of Henry IV.14 The position has now been fully clarified by the database of the E 179 project at The National Archives, which includes a complete listing of both lay and clerical taxes granted and collected by the English crown.15 I have set out in Table 1 the details of these various taxes for the period from 1391 to the death of Henry IV in 1413. Taking these details along with the data that I have previously calculated and published on the income that the crown derived from the direct taxation of the clergy over the whole of the later Middle Ages, we may identify a number of points about the absolute and relative amounts of money levied by Henry IV from the Church.16 First, as a basic point of quantification, while Henry IV cannot be said to have extracted anything like the kinds of money that Edward I, Edward III or Henry V were able to make from direct taxation at peak moments in the French and Scottish wars, Henry did raise the level of tax demands significantly beyond that experienced during the second half of Richard II’s reign. It is therefore quite reasonable to suppose that the taxes in question were thought to pinch. Scrope’s assertion that taxation was burdensome was certainly borne out from the record of the direct subsidies. This leads to another and perhaps more significant point, about the perception of burdensome taxation. It is evident from the detail in Table 1 that taxation in the early years of Henry IV was unusually experimental, involving a range of subsidies that modified, or temporarily replaced, the standard clerical tenths and lay fifteenths and tenths. It is a truism of fiscal history that new taxes, or modifications to existing ones, are almost inevitably interpreted at the receiving end as conspiratorial, regressive and burdensome. In what follows I shall stress particularly the record of clerical taxation in the northern province, but we should also bear in mind the degree to which influential members of the laity were affected, or thought themselves affected, by taxes such as the feudal aid of 1401, the income tax and other levies on the privileges in 1404, and the forced loans of 1402 and 1405.

14

D. B. Weske, Convocation of the Clergy (London, 1937); I. R. Abbott, ‘Taxation of Personal Property and of Clerical Incomes, 1399 to 1402’, Speculum 17 (1942), 471–98; J. L. Kirby, Henry IV of England (London, 1970), passim; A. Rogers, ‘Clerical Taxation under Henry IV’, BIHR 46 (1973), 123–44; A. K. McHardy, ‘Clerical Taxation in Fifteenth-Century England: The Clergy as Agents of the Crown’, in The Church, Politics and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century, ed. R. B. Dobson (Gloucester, 1984), pp. 160–92. 15 www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/e179/. See also M. Jurkowski, C. L. Smith and D. Crook, Lay Taxes in England and Wales, 1188–1688, Public Record Office Handbooks 31 (Kew, 1998). The details of clerical taxes as lodged in the National Archives web-based list were compiled by Dr Maureen Jurkowski in a project led by the present author and funded by the British Academy and the University of York. A handbook of clerical taxes over the period from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century is in preparation. 16 Ormrod, ‘England in the Middle Ages’, pp. 31, 39 and 42.

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½ tenth

tenth

tenth

Jan: tenth (taxable minimum to zero) tenth and subsidy on stipendiary chaplains

June: tenth (taxable minimum dropped to 10 marks)

1½ tenths ½ tenth

tenth and subsidy on stipendiary chaplains 1½ tenths

1½ tenths fifteenth and tenth 1½ tenths fifteenth and tenth ½ tenth May: tenth and 2s. in £ on exempt benefices valued over £5 Nov: 2 fifteenths and tenths Nov: 1½ tenths

tenth

tenth

½ tenth 1½ tenths (½ tenth cancelled in 1399)

½ tenth

1½ fifteenths and tenths

1½ fifteenths and tenths

fifteenth and tenth

1½ fifteenths and tenths

fifteenth and tenth

fifteenth and tenth

½ fifteenth and tenth

Lay tenths and fifteenths

½ tenth ½ tenth ½ tenth

½ tenth

Clerical taxes Canterbury province

½ tenth ½ tenth ½ tenth

Clerical taxes York province

forced loan tax on lands

Nov: tax on profits of new lands Nov: tax on lands of nobility forced loan

Mar: income tax

feudal aid forced loan

forced loan £2000 from Essex and Hertfordshire

1000 marks, N Wales penal tax on laity and clergy of London tax on selected Welsh shires

Other

Sources for Table 1 C 270/13; C 270/14; Concilia Magna Britanniae et Hiberniae, ed. D. Wilkins, 4 vols. (London, 1737); D. B. Weske, Convocation of the Clergy (London, 1937); I. R. Abbott, ‘Taxation of Personal Property and of Clerical Incomes, 1399 to 1402’, Speculum 17 (1942), 471–98; J. L. Kirby, Henry IV of England (London, 1970); A. Rogers, ‘Clerical Taxation under Henry IV’, BIHR 46 (1973), 123–44; A. K. McHardy, ‘Clerical Taxation in Fifteenth-Century England: The Clergy as Agents of the Crown’, in The Church, Politics and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century, ed. R. B. Dobson (Gloucester, 1984), pp. 160–92; M. Jurkowski, C. L. Smith and D. Crook, Lay Taxes in England and Wales, 1188–1688, Public Record Office Handbooks 31 (Kew, 1998); PROME; www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/e179/.

1407 1408 1409 1410 1411 1412 1413

1406

1405

1399 1400 1401 1402 1403 1404

1391 1392 1393 1394 1395 1396 1397 1398

Year

Table 1.  Direct Taxes Granted to the English Crown, 1391–1413

The Rebellion of Archbishop Scrope Armed with the material in Table 1, and in light of Scrope’s specific comments on clerical taxation, we ought now to compare in more detail the records of the Canterbury and York provinces in their responses to the crown’s pleas for taxation during these years. For much (though not, admittedly, all) of the reigns of Edward III and Richard II, the two provinces had tended to act in tandem, with the convocation of York often being effectively committed by the decisions and assumptions of its southern counterpart: there had been a particularly dramatic instance of this in the special subsidy of 1371, when the northern clergy had good grounds for complaining that they had been cajoled by the province of Canterbury into making a grant.17 The record between 1399 and 1403 is, however, strikingly divergent, with the York clergy making a grant of only one tenth in comparison with Canterbury’s three and a half. This discrepancy is usually and most obviously attributed to the contrasting attitudes of the two archbishops. Henry IV’s king-maker, Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, is well known for his enthusiastic commitment to the task of fiscal extraction, managing both the southern convocation and the general administration of clerical subsidies with a notable activism driven by his very public and determined support for the Lancastrian regime.18 From this, and from the record of the Scrope rebellion itself, it has generally been assumed that the lukewarm response of the northern clergy to Henry IV’s requests for subsidies is attributable to the more complicated and probably ambivalent attitude of Archbishop Scrope.19 But there were also specific grounds for grievance both by Scrope and by the tax-paying clergy of his province, concerning Henry IV’s own contrasting record in dealing with the clerical subsidies granted to Richard II by the Canterbury and York clergy in 1398–9.20 Whereas Henry, on his accession, formally cancelled the one remaining moiety of the one and a half tenths granted by the Canterbury clergy in 1398, the equivalent tenth that Richard II had secured from the York clergy (under Scrope) in May 1399 was merely put into abeyance after the deposition.21 Then, in 1402, when Henry’s coun-

17

18

19

20 21

Weske, Convocation of the Clergy, passim; W. M. Ormrod, ‘An Experiment in Taxation: The English Parish Subsidy of 1371’, Speculum 63 (1988), 58–82; W. M. Ormrod, The Reign of Edward III: Crown and Political Society in England, 1327–1377 (London, 1990), pp. 136–7 and 205; www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/e179/. R. G. Davies, ‘Thomas Arundel as Archbishop of Canterbury, 1396–1414’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 24 (1973), 9–21; R. L. Storey, ‘Episcopal King-makers in the Fifteenth Century’, in The Church, Politics and Patronage, ed. Dobson, pp. 82–98; P. Heath, Church and Realm, 1272–1461 (London, 1988), pp. 230–1. Note the way that Storey, ‘Episcopal King-makers’, p. 96 n. 29, relegates Scrope’s contribution (or, as he sees it, non-contribution) to the succession of Henry IV to a mere footnote. The discussion of clerical taxes that follows depends on material drawn from the summaries of individual subsidies found in www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/e179/. Canterbury grant of 1398: Abbott, ‘Taxation of Personal Property’, p. 480; E 359/15.

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W. Mark Ormrod cillors were looking at ways of raising additional revenue, it was decided to put the levy into commission, with the exceptional stipulation that the whole tax was to be paid in one single instalment at Michaelmas of that same year.22 The resistance that the crown encountered when it ordered the appointment of collectors of this subsidy says much for the attitude of the northern clergy in general, and not just of Archbishop Scrope, to the crown’s attempts at extracting extraordinary impositions during these early difficult years of Henry’s regime.23 Finally in this respect, we might also note what happened to clerical taxation in 1404. Both provinces were encouraged to increase the tax base by extending liability to those who were not subject to the conventional tenths levied on the basis of the Taxatio of 1291: possible target groups included the privileged (those whose benefices were valued above the taxable minimum of £10 but had special immunity), the exempt (those whose benefices were valued below the taxable minimum of £10) and the unbeneficed (those who were in major or minor orders but did not hold an office with cure of souls). The Coventry parliament of October 1404 applied additional pressure on the clergy to increase their contribution to the king’s financial demands by raising the prospect of a temporary confiscation of ecclesiastical temporalities.24 While Archbishops Arundel and Scrope both put up a strong stand against the parliamentary threat, their respective convocations evidently had little choice but to appease crown and commons in some way. In May the southern clergy plumped for a graduated tax on exempt benefices valued over £5, though in November they resisted attempts (engineered by Arundel himself) to tax the unbeneficed.25 In the province of York, however, it was decided in June to drop the taxable minimum to 10 marks and then, in November, to remove it altogether.26 This latter step was in line with what had happened to lay taxation several generations earlier, in 1334, when it had been decided to abandon any threshold of moveable wealth as a determinant of liability to taxation. The potentially regressive nature of such a move has been much remarked in relation to lay taxation over the period from 1334 to 1381, but its impact on the fifteenth-century clergy, either in the reality of tax distribution or in the perception of tax application, has been very little discussed: there is a history here that takes us back to the parish subsidy of 1371 and the poll taxes of 1377–80 and forward, beyond the Scrope rebellion, into the special subsidies on stipendiary chaplains that became a feature of clerical taxation

22

23 24 25 26

York grant of 1399 and re-imposition in 1402: Abbott, ‘Taxation of Personal Property’, p. 480; A Calendar of the Register of Robert Waldby, Archbishop of York, 1397, ed. D. M. Smith (York, 1974), p. 32; C 270/14, no. 23; E 159/179, Recorda, Michaelmas, m. 38d. www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/e179/. PROME, parliament of October 1404, item 14 (Rot. Parl., III, 547–9). Heath, Church and Realm, pp. 230–1. www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/e179/; Rogers, ‘Clerical Taxation’, pp. 132–3.

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The Rebellion of Archbishop Scrope from 1406.27 While the absence of the relevant particulars of account for the experimental northern subsidies of 1404 makes it impossible to determine the precise identity of those drawn into fiscal obligation in and around the city of York during that year, it is not unreasonable to suppose that some of the clerks who apparently participated in the rebellion of 1405 were drawn from precisely those categories of lesser clergy that had previously stood outside the customary liabilities to royal taxation and who now saw their livelihoods threatened – as much, it must be said, by the apparently hostile attitude of convocation as by the acquisitive ambitions of the crown. It is evident from this brief comparison of the tax grants made by the two ecclesiastical provinces in the period 1398–1405 that a simple contrast between the pro-Lancastrian Archbishop Arundel and a more ambivalent Archbishop Scrope is not sufficient in itself to explain the different responses made by their convocations to Henry IV’s demands for financial support. Indeed, it is tempting to wonder whether some of the northern clergy might have regarded Scrope as something of a hypocrite in apparently condoning the re-imposition of the tenth of 1399 in 1402 and the extension of the tax base in 1404, only then to claim unjust taxation in the rhetoric of his rebellion in 1405. This, however, is to ignore the other side of tax negotiation in the later medieval state: namely, the conditions and concessions that the clergy (like the laity) could extract from the crown in return for the support they offered through grants of taxation. To assess whether Scrope could really claim credibility as a critic of royal taxation in 1405, we need to go back to the tax record of the previous years and address the manner in which these aimed to preserve ecclesiastical privileges and interests in the face of apparently incessant royal demand.

II The conditions attached to tax grants in the period 1399–1405, and the justifications for rebellion preserved in the various versions of the Scrope manifesto, may be usefully addressed in the context of Henry IV’s declared aim, made at Knaresborough in July 1399 and reiterated in the southern convocation in October of that year, that he intended to abolish all taxation save in times of

27

E .B. Fryde, ‘Introduction to the New Edition’, in C. Oman, The Great Revolt of 1381, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1969), pp. xi–xxxii; McHardy, ‘Clerical Taxation’; Ormrod, ‘Experiment in Taxation’; Clerical Poll Taxes in the Diocese of Lincoln, 1377–81, ed. A. K. McHardy, Lincoln Record Society 81 (Lincoln, 1992); W. M. Ormrod, ‘The Crown and the English Economy, 1290–1348’, in Before the Black Death: Studies in the ‘Crisis’ of the Early Fourteenth Century, ed. B. M. S. Campbell (Manchester, 1991), pp. 149–83 (pp. 151–9); Ormrod, ‘England in the Middle Ages’.

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W. Mark Ormrod war or great need.28 Gerald Harriss has demonstrated that Henry’s ensuing demands for taxation were in fact all made on the basis of ‘urgent necessity’; the controversies surrounding the legitimacy of such taxes were therefore not to do with the polity’s denial that it had an obligation to respond to clear and urgent need, but with its questioning of the king’s right to extend the formal definition of necessity to cover such matters as household costs, the payment of the crown’s debts and the subsidising of other non-military royal enterprises.29 What I am particularly concerned with here is the record of Scrope’s own leadership of the northern clergy in convocation, where the case for clerical taxation was heard and discussed. This brings us back to the reasons why the York clergy diverged from their counterparts in the province of Canterbury in responding to demands for royal taxation in the years between the deposition of Richard II and the rebellion of 1405.30 The northern tenth granted in 1401 was apparently made in good faith, on the assumption that the tenth of 1399 had indeed been cancelled; so far as we know, no conditions were attached to this grant beyond a specification that the standard exemptions were to be observed.31 The dates agreed for the delivery of the two equal portions of this subsidy, in March 1402 and February 1403, not only provided justification for the resistance that the northern province put up to the revival of the 1399 tenth in 1402, but also presumably for its refusal to come in line with the Canterbury province in the autumn of 1402 and grant another new subsidy: it was a very important convention within the traditions of taxation by free consent that no new subsidy ought to be paid until an existing one was concluded.32 Furthermore, when the York clergy did make another grant, in June 1404, they specified that the king ought not to be certified of the grant, and that collectors ought not to be named, until the king had provided a guarantee of the full conditions of the grant respecting immunities and exemptions, and that (again, an important point) no other exactions could be made in the interim.33 These 28 29 30 31

32

33

Gascoigne, Loci et libro, p. 230; English Historical Documents, 1327–1485, ed. A. R. Myers (London, 1969), pp. 664–5. G. L. Harriss, ‘Theory and Practice in Royal Taxation: Some Observations’, EHR 97 (1982), 811–19. Much of the detailed referencing that supports the following discussion may be found in www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/e179/. Concilia Magna Britanniae et Hiberniae, ed. D. Wilkins, 4 vols. (London, 1737), III, 267; Abbott, ‘Taxation of Personal Property’, p. 489; Rogers, ‘Clerical Taxation’, p. 128; McHardy, ‘Clerical Taxation’, p. 179. CFR, 1399–1405, pp. 134–5, 197; C 270/13, no. 13. The principle that excluded overlapping taxation had caused some difficulties for Edward III’s government, specifically in relation to the imposition of papal subsidies, which the clergy also argued immunised them from any further royal taxation: Ormrod, Reign of Edward III, p. 138. Concilia, III, 281; C 270/14, no. 24; A Calendar of the Register of Richard Scrope, Archbishop of York, 1398–1405, ed. R. N. Swanson, 2 vols. (York, 1981–5), II, 19–20; Rogers, ‘Clerical Taxation’, p. 130. This grant is omitted from the lists in McHardy, ‘Clerical Taxation’.

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The Rebellion of Archbishop Scrope conditions were notably more stringent than the terms made in the corresponding Canterbury grant of a tenth.34 And in January 1405 when the York clergy made their final grant before the Scrope rebellion, they again insisted that the collection dates be stretched out in order that the subsidy should be treated separately from the tax of 1404, which was still in progress.35 In their grants of taxation during the first six years of Henry IV’s reign, then, the York clergy under Scrope’s leadership can be seen to have operated in a manner that was at once politically assertive but also safely within the bounds of well-established convention regarding the terms under which taxation could, and could not, be demanded by the crown. The fact that the Canterbury province, under Archbishop Arundel, had a rather different record in response to the king’s requests provides a stark reminder of the complex and shifting political conditions under which the two archbishops were working during these years. Henry IV had every reason to feel let down by Scrope some years before he wilfully put him to death. The really important point, however, and perhaps the thing that infuriated Henry most, was that the northern convocation’s opposition to royal taxation down to 1405 was founded in entirely sustainable principles that they king would have found extremely difficult to counter. In reading the Scrope manifestos’ complaints against insupportable burdens on the clergy and excessive taxation of the commons of the realm, we need to consider not merely the actual fiscal burden of these demands but also the political contexts in which the king’s requests for financial assistance were made and, in particular, the ability of the northern province, under Scrope’s leadership, to challenge ‘unsupportable’ demands for taxation with a firmness of purpose that compares favourably even with the notoriously recalcitrant parliaments of these years.

III The final section of this study re-assesses the significance of Scrope’s charges against Henry IV’s tax policies in the broader context of late medieval opposition to royal taxation. I want to resist the teleological notion that Scrope’s rebellion was some kind of staging post in a longer series of tax revolts. But I do think that the ideas expressed in the manifestos (as they have come down to us) transcend some of the temporal constraints that others have tended to impose and within which I have worked up to this point. As has often been pointed out, the whole issue of untoward taxation – the extrac-

34

Concilia, III, 279–80; Rogers, ‘Clerical Taxation’, pp. 129–30; McHardy, ‘Clerical Taxation’, p. 183. 35 Concilia, III, 281; Calendar of the Register of Scrope, II, 21–2; Rogers, ‘Clerical Taxation’, p. 132.

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W. Mark Ormrod tion of forced loans and the imposition of direct subsidies in time of peace – had been expressed forcefully in the pro-Lancastrian ‘Record and Process’ of 1399, which aimed at discrediting and de-legitimising Richard II’s regime, and which presumably provided a very obvious context in which to judge the record of Henry IV six years later.36 But in turn, of course, the ‘Record and Process’ built on a series of principles and conventions about what made for good, and bad, kingship, which in specifically fiscal terms can be traced back at least into the thirteenth century.37 Modern scholarship has been somewhat chary about seeing Scrope as the heir to and mouthpiece of these longer traditions.38 This may have something to do with the reluctance of historians these days to over-exaggerate the sense of continuity between moments of political crisis, including periodic bouts of fierce opposition to taxation, over the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries: no medievalist wants to be called Whiggish. Equally, however, the ‘new constitutional history’ has begun to teach us that we cannot truly understand late medieval political life without appreciating the ideas, values, principles and traditions that underpinned it.39 Also counting somewhat against a view that might associate Scrope with a self-conscious tradition stretching back to Becket and beyond is a deep-seated modern historiography that sees the clergy as effectively marginalised from high politics as a result of a long series of conflicts and compromises between the reigns of Edward I and Henry V.40 In particular, the clergy’s own isolationist instinct, articulated through the insistence that they ought to conduct their fiscal and political negotiations with the crown not in parliament but in convocation, is argued to have left them marginalised from the central political arena and to have rendered their own abiding concerns about the liberties of Holy Church a kind of sideshow, a rhetorical flourish alongside the substantive debates emerging in an increasingly secularised political culture.41 It is notable in this respect that the 36 37

38

39

40 41

Chrons. Rev., p. 177. For a useful general discussion see J. Dunbabin, ‘Government’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c. 350 – c. 1450, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 477– 519. Though see, for example, McNiven, ‘Betrayal of Scrope’, pp. 180–5; Storey, ‘Episcopal King-makers’; R. N. Swanson, Church and Society in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 1989), p. 108. E. Powell, ‘After “After McFarlane”: The Poverty of Patronage and the Case for Constitutional History’, in Trade, Devotion and Governance: Papers in Later Medieval History, ed. D. Clayton, R. G. Davies and P. McNiven (Stroud, 1994), pp. 1–16; C. Carpenter, ‘Before and After McFarlane’, in McFarlane Legacy, ed. Britnell and Pollard, pp. 175–206; J. L. Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge, 1996). For example, Heath, Church and Realm, pp. 189–222; Swanson, Church and Society, pp. 140–90. For example, W. R. Jones, ‘Bishops, Politics and the Two Laws: The Gravamina of the English Clergy, 1237–1399’, Speculum 41 (1966), 209–45; Ormrod, Reign of Edward III, pp. 121–44.

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The Rebellion of Archbishop Scrope chroniclers themselves tended to consider Scrope’s actions much more in the context of secular opposition to royal power: the raising of armed revolt, the direct addressing of a series of grievances to the king (through his representative Westmorland) and the specific request for a parliament at which those grievances might be discussed and remedied chimed rather more obviously with a thirteenth- and fourteenth-century tradition of baronial resistance than with the recent history of clerical opposition to the crown.42 Here again, however, it is perfectly possible to argue the case the other way around, and to see the very ghettoising of the clergy as something that both entrenched and stimulated their consciousness of a distinct clerical-political tradition. It seems valid and potentially significant, then, to offer some thoughts on the manner in which the agenda of the Scrope rebellion might be seen as part of a continuing discourse of complaint and resistance concerning royal taxation emerging out of political conventions manifested both in parliament and convocation and in popular resistance to taxation over the generations before 1405. The initial point that needs to be made in this respect is that, whether he liked it or not, Scrope was inevitably cast in a tradition that regarded it as the duty of bishops – and especially archbishops – to critique royal governance. Robert Winchelsey’s quarrel with Edward I, John Stratford’s with Edward III and Thomas Arundel’s with Richard II bred a mythology of their own, probably more widely appreciated in clerical than in lay circles, and helped to maintain the tradition that the episcopate was a self-appointed (or, as they saw it, divinely appointed) monitor of kingship.43 That tradition was especially obvious in the formal complaint made by Arundel and Scrope jointly in the Coventry parliament of 1404 against the threat of temporary confiscation of ecclesiastical temporalities as a makeshift financial palliative. It was also, of course, part of a lay tradition that held it the responsibility of the baronage to resist the king in the event that his actions and regime were deemed seriously at variance with acceptable political practice.44 These points, though obvious and general, are axiomatic to the legitimacy claimed implicitly and explicitly in Scrope’s articles: those articles are redolent with the concepts and conditions of loyal rebellion that had been such an important convention in England at least from King John’s reign. Secondly, and in rather more detail, Scrope’s agenda indicates the influence of political conventions that had developed over the course of the previous century and which were an important part of a non-violent programme of

42

Valente, Theory and Practice, pp. 217–18. M. Aston, Thomas Arundel: A Study of Church Life in the Reign of Richard II (Oxford, 1967); J. H. Denton, Robert Winchelsey and the Crown, 1294–1313 (Cambridge, 1980); R. M. Haines, Archbishop John Stratford (Toronto, 1986). 44 Valente, Theory and Practice. 43

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W. Mark Ormrod legitimate resistance to royal taxation. Study of the pattern of consent to taxation in both parliament and convocations during the fourteenth century has revealed that, while the opportunities to reject or defy outright the king’s request for taxes were few and far between, the polity and clerisy were adept at establishing conditionality in their grants of taxation.45 The relevant conditions operated on two levels: those imposed in the form of the tax and those on which some gracious consideration was requested in return for the tax.46 Conditions in the form of the tax (which have been touched on in part in the previous section) included such principles as: immunity from further taxes during the course of the grant; the reservation of the subsidy to the purposes (normally military) for which it was granted; and, for the northern shires and dioceses, the allocation of such taxes specifically and solely for the defence of the Anglo-Scottish border. Such conditions articulated certain fundamental principles about the legitimacy of public taxation and could not easily be disregarded; the crown was therefore usually content to enshrine them in the administrative arrangements set up for the collection of the relevant subsidies.47 Conditions on which the royal grace was requested were, however, a rather different matter.48 Such conditions are usually preserved in schedules of common petitions (from parliament) and gravamina (from the convocations) submitted in conjunction with the relevant tax grant and linked either directly or implicitly to it. They asked not for restrictions on the application of the tax itself but for general concessions on matters of current concern: clerical gravamina, for example, would repeatedly request such fundamental matters as the due regard for ecclesiastical liberties, the freedom of the church courts, the proper observation of the system of ecclesiastical appointments and patronage, and the immunity of the Church from royal purveyance and other prerogative charges. Neither parliament nor convocation was ultimately successful in establishing the principle that the crown was required to accept unequivocally this second category of conditions in return for payment of the relevant tax. But whereas parliament enjoyed a degree of political muscle which ensured, in times of political normality, that the crown would normally

45

G. L. Harriss, King, Parliament and Public Finance in Medieval England to 1369 (Oxford, 1975); 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), pp. 88–108; Ormrod, Reign of Edward III, pp. 121–44 and 163–70. 46 For what follows see: Harriss, King, Parliament, pp. 313–55; Heath, Church and Realm, pp. 135–8 and 209; Ormrod, Reign of Edward III, pp. 138–9. 47 See, for example, the detailed study by W. E. Lunt, ‘The Collectors of Clerical Subsidies Granted to the King by the English Clergy’, in The English Government at Work, 1327–1336, ed. J. F. Willard et al., 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1930–40), II, 227–80. 48 For what follows, see Harriss, King, Parliament; Jones, ‘Bishops, Politics, and the Two Laws’.

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The Rebellion of Archbishop Scrope agree to some concessions at least on the uncontroversial requests within the common petitions, and to have these concessions made up in statutes, the clergy’s ability to effect conditions of grace was more limited. And whereas the southern convocation was able at times – notably, in the present context, in 1399 and 1402 – to use its close connections with parliament as a means of having its gravamina taken up by the crown and securing formal statutory concessions, the northern clergy were normally much more constrained in their ability to effect remedies upon their grievances.49 It is therefore all the more notable that, in June 1404, the convocation of York, under Scrope’s direction, was able to secure, as the price of its grant of a tenth, a moratorium on the conducting of inquisitions and distraints under royal commission in relation to the lands and rights of the Church of the northern province.50 The assertiveness with which Archbishop Arundel had conducted the southern convocation’s grants of taxation in the aftermath of the revolution of 1399 can be seen, in this case, to have influenced, and advantaged, the northern clergy’s own evident determination to make political gains out of Henry IV’s desperate need for extraordinary revenue. Given the strongly legitimist tone and substance of his manifesto of 1405, it is not unreasonable to argue that Scrope’s rebellion was envisioned as an extension, by other means, of these normal principles of negotiation and traditions of exchange. It is this same clerical tradition that might be said to have made a distinct contribution to the criticisms of fiscality that feature in the Scrope manifestos and have been the focus of this present study. The emphasis on legitimacy within the rebellion is apparent in the fact that the manifestos refer not to the actual lawfulness of taxation itself but rather to its excessive nature. The idea that taxes ought to be proportional, both to the scale of the emergency for which they were granted and to the capacity of the taxpayer actually to pay them, was a very important part of medieval scholastic debate and political tradition.51 It was especially important to ‘loyal’ tax rebels in the Middle Ages, since, once parliament or convocation had accepted that the occasion for taxation existed and had been seen freely to negotiate the form of the resulting subsidy, the only possible way of justifying resistance to the resulting exactions was that those who granted them did not realise how much they would damage the economic wellbeing of the king’s subjects. This is the fundamental argument that lies at the root of the many examples of resistance to the levying of taxation that have been examined, mainly in the context of fourteenth-century peasant communities, by Hilton, Maddi-

49

Storey, ‘Episcopal King-makers’. C 270/14, no. 23; Calendar of the Register of Scrope, II, 19–20; McNiven, ‘Betrayal of Scrope’, pp. 18–15. 51 E. Isenmann, ‘Medieval and Renaissance Theories of State Finance’, in Economic Systems and State Finance, ed. Bonney, pp. 21–52. 50

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W. Mark Ormrod cott, Prestwich, Fryde and others.52 And, as a number of commentators have observed, it was hardly a difficult argument to develop specifically in reference to the inhabitants of York around 1405, in the context of the partial economic downturn that the city was then experiencing and the burdensome loans that the crown was extracting from the city around the same time.53 Given that much recent scholarship on popular revolt has emphasised the role of the parish clergy and the mendicants in formulating and articulating the grievances of the king’s lesser subjects, and the emphasis that was put in the first part of this study on the extension of the clerical tax base during the opening years of Henry IV’s reign, it would not be unreasonable to assume that a distinctly clerical tradition about proportionality was developed by Scrope and his followers in the rebellion of 1405 to legitimise a stance on which almost everyone – except the king – was agreed: that taxation was excessive and burdensome.54

IV This study has proposed a reading of the Scrope manifesto that is at once more firmly rooted in the fiscal history of the early years of Henry IV’s reign and also properly alert to the long-term political and popular resonances of tax resistance. I have tried to suggest that it is possible to read the complaints about taxation in the manifesto in a number of different registers, as reflecting and appealing to both an elite and a popular tradition of political reaction to royal taxation. I have suggested that, just as the various versions of Scrope’s agenda are clearly formulated in reference to particular audiences, high or low, clerical or lay, so do the various articulations of resistance to taxation within that agenda reflect a range of influences and traditions which can legitimately be held to include both the elite tradition about the philosophical and juridical context of taxation and a ‘low’ tradition of local resistance to the actual payment of taxes. In arguing that it is appropriate to discern all these voices signing together polyphonically on the joint hymn-sheet of the ‘York articles’, I am certainly not trying to imply that the revolt itself was neces52

R. H. Hilton, Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism, 2nd edn (London, 1990), pp. 12–17, 49–65, 79–91; J. R. Maddicott, The English Peasantry and the Demands of the Crown, 1294– 1341, Past and Present Supplement 1 (1975); M. Prestwich, ‘War and Taxation in England in the XIIIth and XIVth Centuries’, in Genèse de l’état moderne: prélèvement et redistribution, ed. J.-P. Genet (Paris, 1987), pp. 181–92; E. B. Fryde, Peasants and Landlords in Later Medieval England (Stroud, 1996). 53 Walker, ‘The Yorkshire Risings of 1405’, p. 177. 54 J. R. Maddicott, ‘Poems of Social Protest in Early Fourteenth-Century England’, in England in the Fourteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1984 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. W. M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, 1985), pp. 130–44; S. Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley, Cal., 1994).

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The Rebellion of Archbishop Scrope sarily cohesive, or indeed to suggest anything particularly revisionist about Scrope’s own involvement in the launching and leadership of the rebellion. What I hope I have done is to reveal something both about the immediate political and fiscal context of the 1405 rebellion and about what I might now be inclined to suggest as its self-conscious place within the tradition of resistance to royal taxation in late medieval England.

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8 An Ill and Infirm King: Henry IV, Health, and the Gloucester Parliament of 1407 Douglas Biggs

The Gloucester Parliament that opened on 24 October 1407 is one of the most obscure of all the parliamentary meetings of the fifteenth century. Not only did every contemporary English chronicler but one ignore the parliament and its outcomes, the only one who did mention the assembly, Thomas Walsingham, put its meeting in the wrong month: November; and in the wrong place: London. Perhaps because of this dearth of comment by contemporaries the Gloucester Parliament has, as Chris Given-Wilson notes, never received a detailed study. Nevertheless, the Gloucester Parliament has received at least passing notice by historians who have viewed the assembly within the traditional confrontational paradigm of Henry IV and his parliaments: meeting against a backdrop of fiscal and political crisis where the king and the commons found themselves locked in a political battle. William Stubbs saw this parliament, as those before it, embroiled in bitter conflict with Henry as it worked ‘under the constitutional rule of Lancaster’ to achieve important concessions for the powerful house of commons. James Wylie thought that Henry was ill during the period of the parliament, but that at Gloucester the relations between the king and the commons were adversarial. John Kirby found that in spite of the fact that the chancellor’s opening speech centered on the theme of ‘honor the king’ it took little time for the commons of 1407, to ‘resume … their usual critical course’ against Henry. Edmund Wright agreed with this general line of the commons being





   

I would like to thank the three commentators of the symposium, Tony Pollard, Christopher Allmand, and Anthony Tuck, for their kind and constructive comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and also those who attended the symposium for their comments and constructive conversation. Walsingham also noted that there was ‘almost no record of the measures taken there’, save for a ‘financial levy on the whole of the realm’, Historia Anglicana, II, 277. See also, The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham (1376–1422), trans. D. Preest with notes by J. Clark (Woodbridge, 2005), p. 358. PROME, parliament of 1407, introduction. W. Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1898 edn), III, 63. Wylie, Henry IV, III, 114–22. Kirby, Henry IV, pp. 215–18.

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An Ill and Infirm King in opposition to Henry IV, but argued that the council, who had governed the realm with financial responsibility and success since the end of the Long Parliament in December 1406, placated the opposition in the house sufficiently so that they acquiesced and provided the king with a subsidy. Peter McNiven, although he suggested that Henry’s movements and inability to personally lead a campaign to Wales earlier that year demonstrate a king in poor health, nevertheless concluded that the relationship between Henry and the commons in 1407 was adversarial. But, fortunately for Henry, the house could not stand before the titanic personality of Archbishop Arundel who dominated the proceedings on behalf of the king, brought the commons to heel, and rammed through a generous subsidy. Recent scholarship has revised many of the traditionally held historiographic views on Henry IV’s relationship with his parliaments. As Gwilym Dodd and I have demonstrated, the institution of parliament was in no way ‘a threat to the king’s position, it was [rather] a lifeline for it’.10 Henry and his supporters in the counties so skillfully managed the selection processes for MPs that his parliaments were filled with his retainers and those of his friends among the titled nobility. Indeed, over half the knights of the shire in every parliament up to and including 1407 were royal retainers, and their overwhelming presence clearly demonstrates that these parliamentary assemblies bore no malice towards the king and had no desire to drive him from the governance of the realm.11 Although they could and often did disagree with how Henry spent his money, especially the money parliament gave him in taxation, this was, as McFarlane saw, not opposition but a continued demand, sometimes successful, sometimes not, for the achievement of economy.12 In addition to the substantial numbers of royalist supporters in parliament, as A. J. Pollard and I have argued elsewhere, the king’s declining health had





 10

11

12

E. Wright, ‘Henry IV, the Commons and the Recovery of Royal Finance in 1407’, in Rulers and Ruled in Late Medieval England, ed. R. Archer and S. Walker (London, 1995), pp. 65–82 (pp. 65–7 and 81). P. McNiven, Heresy and Politics in the Reign of Henry IV (Woodbridge, 1987), p. 145. It is interesting to note that McNiven does not make mention of the Gloucester Parliament of 1407 in his article, ‘The Problem of Henry IV’s Health’, EHR 100 (1985), 746–72. McNiven, Heresy and Politics, pp. 179–84 and 186–89. G. Dodd, ‘Crown, Magnates and Gentry: The English Parliament 1369–1421’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of York, 1998), p. 61; D. Biggs, ‘The Politics of Health: Henry IV and the Long Parliament of 1406’, in Henry IV, ed. Dodd and Biggs, pp. 185–205. G. Dodd, ‘Conflict or Consensus: Henry IV and Parliament, 1399–1406’, in Social Attitudes and Political Structures in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Tim Thornton (Stroud, 2000), pp. 118–49; D. Biggs, ‘The Reign of Henry IV: The Revolution of 1399 and the Establishment of the Regime, 1399–1406’, in Fourteenth Century England, I, ed. Nigel Saul (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 195–210. K. B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford, 1973), p. 294.

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Douglas Biggs a profound impact on his relationship with the Long Parliament of 1406.13 Although Peter McNiven and other historians argue that following the Long Parliament Henry’s health improved and he returned to take an active part in the governance of the realm,14 such was not the case. A. J. Pollard and I have written that the Long Parliament of 1406 did not intend the solution that they had cobbled together to long endure.15 This supposition, however, now seems unfounded. It is clear that although the subsidy from the Long Parliament was to be collected in one installment by 14 February 1407,16 the council made a verbal promise not to come before parliament again until the spring of 1408. Thus, there can be little doubt that the political community expected councilier government to continue for some time. The thirty-one articles of 1406 even forbade Henry IV from governing his own house and even from settling disputes between his own servants. More than any other factor this strongly suggests that the king was incapable of governing, as would remain the case for the foreseeable future.17 Henry almost completely withdrew from the governance of the realm in 1407 and this meant that the political activity of the parliament had almost nothing to do with Henry personally, who was little more than a spectator. Thus, the key to understanding the political environment at Gloucester in 1407 does not lie in the relationship – conflictive or otherwise – between Henry IV and the commons, but rather rests with the relationship, usually adversarial, between the commons and the council who had governed the realm since December 1406. This article discusses the proceedings and outcomes of the parliament of 1407 through the lens of an infirm king and turns on three main points. The first point will be to consider the political position of the king himself. Throughout 1407 Henry was absent from government and spent the bulk of the year lethargically moving throughout the kingdom – usually from one pilgrimage site to another probably in search of some miraculous cure. Even when parliament met in October, Henry was marginalized. Not only did he arrive in Gloucester two days after the assembly was supposed to open, he did not attend the opening ceremonies when they did occur and, although his presence in parliament is recorded on the Parliament Roll, he took little active role in events. The second point to consider is the membership of the Gloucester Parliament. As in all previous parliaments in the reign, the membership of the

13

14 15 16 17

A. J. Pollard, ‘The Lancastrian Constitutional Experiment Revisited: Henry IV, Sir John Tiptoft and the Parliament of 1406’, Parliamentary History 14 (1995), 103–19; Biggs, ‘Long Parliament of 1406’, pp. 185–205. McNiven, ‘Henry IV’s Health’, pp. 771–72. Pollard, ‘Parliament of 1406’, p. 117; Biggs, ‘Long Parliament of 1406’, p. 202. M. Jurkowski, C. L. Smith and D. Crook, eds., Lay Taxes in England and Wales, 1188–1688 (London, 1998), p. 77. Biggs, ‘Long Parliament of 1406’, p. 201.

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An Ill and Infirm King house of commons possessed a decidedly Lancastrian majority, with over 50% of the knights of the shire being retainers of the king. But, in 1407 the lower house also contained a higher percentage of re-elected members of parliament than any other house of commons throughout the reign. The exact reasons for this high re-election rate are unclear, but perhaps they stem from the fact that the subsidy they had voted at the end of the Long Parliament was not due to expire until Michelmas 1408. The large re-election rate of Lancastrians and royalists also suggests that within the Lancastrian political community there was a distrust of councilier government. The early call for parliament, combined with the antagonisms between the council and the commons displayed throughout the sessions at Gloucester, suggest a strong sentiment in the constituencies for some continuity in government, together with a mistrust of the council and how they spent the subsidy from the previous parliament. The third and last point to consider will center on the events of the parliament itself. The lack of active participation in the proceedings on the part of the king meant that the Gloucester Parliament would be conducted in much the same way as the last sessions of the Long Parliament – in essence as an extended Great council.18 More so than in 1406, the council in 1407 tried to come to grips with the house of commons which clearly mistrusted their governance. Although Edmund Wright is correct when he argues that the council had made some strides in recovering royal finance throughout 1407,19 the fact that the council had to call parliament back into session over a year before they had promised to at the end of the Long Parliament demonstrates that in spite of their efforts they had failed in their ultimate goal. The members of the house of commons knew from the moment they received orders to select MPs that a new tax would be needed and as a group they were in no mood to be accommodating. The commons not only successfully resisted attempts by the council via the lords to determine the levels of taxation that they should pay, but also successfully resisted the forceful Thomas Fitzalan, archbishop of Canterbury, and frustrated his attempts to control, or at the very least manage, the assembly. Although the commons did eventually pay a substantial subsidy, this grant was not made without concessions on the part of the government. As Peter McNiven suggests, any discussion of Henry IV’s health is problematic,20 and any attempt to discern the exact malady that afflicted him is fraught with nearly insurmountable obstacles. Nevertheless, an ill and infirm Henry IV (whatever the exact causes or symptoms of the malady which afflicted him) and his continued incapacity, ‘was the principal single reason why domestic politics took such an erratic, unconstructive and hazardous 18

Pollard, ‘Parliament of 1406’, p. 117. Wright, ‘Recovery of Royal Finance’, pp. 66–79. 20 McNiven, ‘Henry IV’s Health’, p. 747. 19

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Douglas Biggs course’, in the last half of the reign.21 Although the king had had health problems from the beginning of his reign,22 if not before,23 the event that provoked the chronic political crisis that lasted for the last half of the reign came in July of 1405. After the summary execution of Archbishop Scrope, Henry was on the road from York to Ripon. The king paused for the night and was overcome by some sort of attack.24 The fit soon passed and Henry seemed to return to normal, but the following spring on 28 April the king suffered ‘une grand excesse’ in his arm and leg, and was so debilitated that he could not ride his horse and travel by land.25 As I have argued elsewhere, the king’s deteriorating health proved to be the catalyst for what happened in 1406 and his pilgrimage trip through East Anglia and Lincolnshire during the long prorogation of parliament in the hot summer months did little to improve his condition.26 The continual council that formed at the end of the Long Parliament took up the task of governing for Henry while he either convalesced, or died, and served as a sort of ‘collective sovereign’ until parliament next convened. The illness that forced Henry from the government of the realm in December 1406 showed no signs of improving in the New Year. Even though those who were aware of the popular medical writings of Gilbertus Anglicus might have hoped that the king’s apoplexy would have eased because it came during the dark of the moon in April 1406, they were soon disappointed,27 and Henry clearly had little impact on the governance of the realm in 1407.28 As we shall see, for much of the year he was in the countryside away from Westminster. Not only was the king away from the capital for extended periods, but the number of signet letters for 1407 demonstrate that when Henry did

21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28

McNiven, ‘Henry IV’s Health’, p. 772. ‘Annales Henrici Quarti’, in Johannes de Trokelowe … Chronica et Annales, ed. H. T. Riley, Rolls Series (London, 1866), pp. 322–3. Wylie, Henry IV, I, 458. T. Gascoigne, Loci e Libro Veritatum, ed. J. H. Thorhold Rogers (Oxford, 1881), p. 228. Calendar of Signet Letters of Henry IV and Henry V, ed. J. L. Kirby (London, 1978), p. 126. Biggs, ‘Long Parliament of 1406’, pp. 197–99 and 205. The Pharmaceutical writings of Gilbertus were widely used and were translated into Middle English in the early fifteenth century. Gilbertus argued that if one had a stroke (i.e. apoplexy) when the moon was waxing then it was incurable. If, however, the patient suffered a stroke when the moon was waning then there was some hope of recovery, Faye Getz, Healing and Society in Late Medieval England (Madison, 2001), pp. 27–31. In 1406 the new moon fell on 27 April, the day before Henry wrote to council of his ‘grande access’ (for the phases of the moon, see http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa/eclipse/phase/phases-1499. html). One good example of Henry’s non-involvement in government matters centers around the issue of paying the men who were garrisoning Calais. The troops revolted in midyear and although the council solved the problem, not one signet letter from the king in these months touches on this subject, J. L. Kirby, ‘The Council of 1407 and the Problem of Calais’, History Today 5 (1955), 44–52.

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An Ill and Infirm King communicate with the council it was sporadic. This is in marked contrast to earlier in the reign. Even as late as the summer of 1406 during an extended period of illness, Henry took an active role in governance through the use of the signet seal.29 From 1407, however, only twenty-five signet letters survive, and of these, seven were sealed during the months that parliament was in session. Thus, only eighteen letters survive from the first ten months of the year. This is the lowest total of signet letters to this point in the reign and strongly suggests that the king did not, or could not, take an active role in the governance of the realm.30 When the king did communicate with the council via means other than the Signet he appeared as a supplicant rather than as a monarch. On 22 June from Leicester Henry wrote to Arundel as Chancellor asking him to make a decision on whether to allow the Minister General of the Franciscan order to visit England.31 Another letter from 1407 further demonstrates that Henry was still not in control of his own household establishment, as he had to write to Arundel as Chancellor seeking protection for a certain woman called D. ‘We have’, Henry wrote, ‘at the importunate suit of the aforesaid D and in order to get her out of our company, promised her our said letters, if in your judgment this seems feasible, requesting that as you think best, you will let this same D have our said letters for a certain time under our great seal in due form, and we believe that you will be as weary of her company and boring persistence as we became before she would see reason.’32 The king’s itinerary for 1407, in much the same way as it had in the summer of 1406, demonstrates that his health was poor and his perambulations around the kingdom were guided by pilgrimages to places of healing and repentance. Both Wylie and Kirby not only note the snail’s pace at which Henry’s journeys progressed in this year, but also that his disease was at the heart of his rate of travel and choice of destinations.33 Several of the places Henry visited in the first months of 1407 had strong ties to Thomas Becket, martyred archbishop of Canterbury, to whom Henry was particularly attached. Merton Priory where the king visited in January was an Augustinian house that had been founded in 1117 and the place where Thomas Becket had been educated, while the Collegiate church at Beverley, where Henry stayed in September, was one of the places that the martyred archbishop had served as provost.34 Other venues that the king visited, such as Bridlington, where he stopped in 29 30 31 32 33 34

Biggs, ‘Long Parliament of 1406’, p. 193; LKLK, p. 91. Signet Letters, pp. 143–7. Royal Letters, Henry IV, II, 179–80. Anglo-Norman Letters, p. 435; Kirby, Henry IV, pp. 214–15. Wylie, Henry IV, III, 110; Kirby, Henry IV, pp. 126, 201 and 208–9. Although the surviving records of the priory do not mention the king being at Merton until 1412 when he held a great council there, Henry’s royal itinerary demonstrates that he was a frequent visitor to the priory, A. Heales, The Records of Merton Priory (London, 1898), p. 296.

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Douglas Biggs September, had deep personal meaning for Henry since he was particularly devoted to St John of Bridlington. He had visited John’s tomb upon his return from Prussia in 1391; he placed his eldest son, Henry, Prince of Wales, under the saint’s protection, and he chose Bridlington as the spot for his landing at the commencement of his triumphal return in 1399.35 Additionally striking about Henry’s itinerary for the year of 1407 is the fact that he traveled most often by water rather than by traveling over land.36 As Henry’s wardrobe accounts for 1407 demonstrate, substantial sums were paid throughout the year for the rental of boats and ships to move the household from one point to another. This movement by water offered a number of advantages. It was faster than traveling by land, and it allowed the king to move without being exposed to the populace. Royal progressions were always public affairs and the various Rotuli Viagii from the early years of the reign demonstrate that many supplicants came before the king on his perambulations about the countryside. Moving by water ensured that few supplicants would come before the king, accurate information about Henry could be tightly controlled, and the fiction of his improving health would be maintained, no matter how imperfectly. In comparison to his pre-1406 behavior, Henry spent long periods in one location before moving to another in 1407. For example, he spent five weeks at Hereford between 7 February and 8 April, and then another five weeks at Nottingham from 7 July to 16 August at a time when outbreaks of the plague raged through the Midlands.37 Another circumstantial piece of evidence suggesting the king’s ill health in this period was the fact that Henry’s household establishment also shrank markedly in size. In fact, in 1407, Henry’s household was smaller in size, and in cost, than at any other point in the reign except from 1409 to 1411, when all sources agree the king was in poor health.38 A further piece of circumstan-

35

For Henry’s itinerary in 1407, see Appendix 1. For a discussion of Henry’s landing at Bridlington in late June 1399, see D. Biggs, Three Armies in Britain: The Irish Campaign of Richard II and the Usurpation of Henry IV, 1397–1399 (Leiden, 2006), pp. 105–08 and 165. 36 It is worth noting that Henry spent several days in York in September. Exactly what he did there and why he went to the city are open questions. Certainly, miracles had already been reported at the tomb of the archbishop of York and the unfinished east end of the Minster allowed for a flow of ‘unauthorized’ pilgrims. Perhaps Henry stopped in the east end, perhaps not. Henry had been a pilgrim in the Minster in 1403 and had left a donation to the fabric of the church of 6s 8d, The Fabric Rolls of York Minster, ed. R. Richardson (London, 1859), pp. 191–3. It seems that the partial collapse of the Central Tower of the Minster did not occur until November 1407, but the king was quick to send one of his master masons to repair the damage, CPR, 1405–8, p. 383. 37 Wylie, Henry IV, III, 110. Conditions were so dire in London in late October that the government ordered both the king’s and common benches to adjourn until the Octave of St Hilary next because of the plague, CPR, 1405–8, p. 297. Supposedly, 30,000 people died in London alone, Getz, Healing and Society, p. xxv. 38 A. Rogers, ‘The Royal Household of Henry IV’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Nottingham, 1966), p. 430.

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An Ill and Infirm King tial evidence suggesting the king’s ill health was the presence of new physicians who were also brought into the royal household in 1407. Usually there was only one, and on some occasions two physicians attached to the king’s house, but it 1407 the number rose to three.39 Also, after 1407 there were few changes in the personnel of the royal household. T. F. Tout argued that frequent changes in officers are a clear sign of political tension,40 and Tout’s argument seems borne out by the turnover in Henry IV’s household before 1406.41 Alan Rogers thought that this was because household finances had been successfully reformed by Sir John Tiptoft during his eighteen months as Keeper of the Wardrobe.42 Tiptoft’s reforms were most certainly successful because of the king’s physical condition and the fact that Henry had little latitude in household affairs because of the Thirty-one Articles. Also instructive as to the king’s physical condition were three abortive attempts to summon and personally lead troops in battle. The first of these royal attempts to lead troops came on 5 February when the king was in the middle of his five-week sojourn at Hertford. Henry expressed in a letter close his desire personally to lead troops against the French either from Calais or the Aquitaine.43 However, nothing came of these royal intentions. The second of these three had its origins as early as 6 May when the king was at Windsor for the Garter Feast. A total of £10,666 13s 4d was allocated from the king’s wardrobe to the chamber,44 and £5,069 6s 8d were warranted out of the exchequer between 9 May and 12 June.45 These preparations were made more public on 1 June: while Henry was at Waltham Abbey he announced his intention to personally lead an expedition against the Welsh and set Hereford as the place for the muster, but ten days later while on the road from Waltham to Leicester, Henry sent letters to the sheriffs to hold the recruiting of men until further notice.46 Nevertheless, Wales still occupied the king’s thoughts. On 28 August while at Rothwellhaigh he granted a writ of aid to his clerk Ralph Thomas whom he had ordered to take the king’s cannon to Hereford,47 and four days later on 1 September another king’s clerk, Master Richard Courtenay, received a writ of aid to gather horses for Henry’s expedition to Wales.48 Even a threatened Scottish invasion supposedly to be led by Robert, duke of Albany himself, only moved the king to issue commissions 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

There was usually one, sometimes two. Three was unusual, Rogers, ‘The Royal Household of Henry IV’, p. 685. Tout, Chapters, III, 398. Rogers, ‘The Royal Household of Henry IV’, pp. 678–91. Rogers, ‘The Royal Household of Henry IV’, pp. 549, 550 and 678. CCR, 1405–9, p. 261. E 404/22/282, 485–87. E 403/ 591. Wylie, Henry IV, III, 106–7; CCR, 1405–9, p. 286. CPR, 1405–8, p. 339. CPR, 1405–8, p. 359.

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Douglas Biggs of array for Nottingham, York, Lincoln and Lancaster under the Privy Seal.49 The third and last aborted royal military expedition came as a result of letters patent sent from the archbishop of York’s palace at Cawood in Yorkshire on 22 September to the sheriffs ordering them to raise all those who held annuities from Edward III, Richard II, John of Gaunt, and the king and meet Henry at Evesham by 10 October and proceed to Aberystwyth by 24 October. Prince Henry had just concluded a surrender agreement with the Welsh captain there that if a relief force from Glyn Dwr’s rebels did not relieve the castle and town between 24 October and 1 November then he would surrender Aberystwyth to the English. King Henry clearly intended this force to march to Aberystwyth with him and aid the Prince of Wales in his siege there.50 As had occurred earlier in the year and in late 1406 the king’s body could not match his will and the Aberystwyth expedition was cancelled as well. Edmund Wright has interpreted the first expedition as a way for the king to recover his lost place in government, and that it was the council who actually trumped the king’s desires by cutting off the flow of money, especially because Prince Henry – who was having success against the Welsh – did not want his father’s interference.51 It seems, rather that, as in 1406, the king’s body could not match his will. It is not surprising that Henry would have wished to lead troops personally in the field. Few things could more effectively have proven his return to health and vigor.52 It is also not surprising that Henry would have chosen the occasion of the Garter Feast to announce a campaign. This chivalric event would have been attended by the most armigerous of his friends and subjects. Perhaps Henry was carried away by the moment at Windsor, but the fact that his itinerary shows him slowly moving away from the Welsh March from one pilgrimage site to another throughout the rest of the year strongly suggests that his health kept him from any such activity. In addition to his long pilgrimage, travel by water, and his abortive military expeditions, a factor equally suggestive of the king’s ill health is his insignificant role in the Gloucester Parliament. In some ways this should not surprise us as historians. Part of the final agreements between parliament and council at the end of the Long Parliament in December 1406 was that no new tax would be called for, and by extension no parliament would be called, until March of 1408. This clearly demonstrates that few in England believed that Henry would ever again return to an active role in politics. Not surprisingly, therefore, even though Henry was in Gloucester during most of the parliament of 1407, he was not directly involved in much of the politics or discussions of either the lords or the commons. The Gloucester assembly 49

CPR, 1405–8, p. 360. CPR, 1405–8, pp. 361–2. 51 Wright, ‘Royal Finance’, pp. 79–80. 52 Peter McNiven suggests a similar view, Heresy and Politics, p. 143. 50

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An Ill and Infirm King was the first parliament of the reign at which the king did not speak to the commons, their speaker, or the lords ‘with his own mouth’. Even on those occasions that the Parliament Roll records his presence, it is not likely that Henry took an active part in the proceedings. Clearly, kings were supposed to attend the parliamentary sessions and they were also supposed to be accessible to their subjects during these times to hear supplications.53 The assembly was due to open on Thursday 20 October 1407, but Archbishop Arundel had to wait four days to deliver his opening homily. The official reason for the delay entered on the Parliament Roll was that insufficient numbers of MPs, bishops and lords were present at Gloucester to conduct business. Although it is possible that the official excuse is accurate, the king’s itinerary demonstrates that he was not in the environs of Gloucester until 22 October and this strongly suggests that it was his absence, and not that of a majority of the members, that caused the delay. When parliament finally did convene on that Monday, the king was not physically present and Archbishop Arundel opened the proceedings without him. For a king not to be physically present at the opening of parliament was unusual. As king, Henry had attended the opening of every other parliament to this point in his reign, and even when the opening of the 1401 parliament had to be postponed for two days, Henry appeared on the second occasion. The only occasions on which Henry had not attended the opening of parliament or the opening of a session after a prorogation were the second and third sessions of the Long Parliament when he was ill.54 The first acknowledgement on the Parliament Roll of Henry’s presence at the assembly was on Tuesday, 25 October in the formulaic reference to the presentation of the speaker, Sir Thomas Chaucer.55 Yet no business was recorded for that day or any day for the next two weeks. As Wylie noted, the business of parliament ‘did not seriously begin for some days after the appointment of a speaker’,56 and this raises further questions about the king’s absence from the proceedings. Even though the king supposedly charged Chaucer and the house of commons on 25 October to meet daily to discuss

53

McNiven, ‘Henry IV’s Health’, p. 752. The second session of the Long Parliament was due to open on 28 April 1406, but it was delayed for two days until 30 April when, with the archbishop of Canterbury, the duke of York, and many other lords present, business began again (PROME, parliament of 1406, item 28; Rot. Parl., III, 571). The third and last session of the Long Parliament was due to open on 13 November but had to be delayed for five days, PROME, parliament of 1406, item 60; Rot. Parl., III, 580–2. For the location of Gloucester Castle and St Peter’s Abbey, see H. Hurst, ‘The Archaeology of Gloucester Castle: An Introduction’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 102 (1984), 73–128. 55 House of Commons, II, 524–32. J. S. Roskell, The Commons and their Speakers in English Parliaments, 1376–1523 (Manchester, 1965), pp. 149–50. 56 Wylie, Henry IV, III, 117. 54

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Douglas Biggs the business of the realm, it was not until 9 November, over two weeks later, that Henry received Chaucer’s protestation and business was recorded.57 Henry’s next recorded presence in parliament was 14 November when Chaucer came before the king and the lords requesting that Henry charge the lords with the keeping of the Marches and release the commons from this duty. The king’s reply was not given ‘by his own mouth’, as had so often been done in the past. Rather, his somewhat non-committal reply to Chaucer’s supplication that the king would consult with the lords on this issue was delivered by proxy. The same day a committee of lords was named to consult with the commons touching the common welfare and profit of the whole kingdom. The formation of this committee also raises questions as to Henry’s role, if not his presence, at the sessions. If indeed the king were present, as he was supposed to be, then there would have been no need for such a body to consult with the lower house.58 The last two days on which business was recorded at Gloucester were 21 November and 2 December. On 21 November the king granted both the lords and the commons the right to discuss matters of the business of the realm without his presence, which clearly demonstrates that Henry was not present for some of the last sessions of the Gloucester Parliament and probably not there during the first meetings either. It seems Henry’s last recorded appearance at parliament came on 2 December, the day the subsidy was agreed to, because it was recorded on the Parliament Roll by order of the king himself.59 Also suggestive as to the lack of Henry’s active role in the parliamentary proceedings was the length of time the parliament sat, and the role of the Prince of Wales in the proceedings. The Gloucester Parliament lasted a total of forty-four days, close to the time set out in the Modus Tenendi Parliamentum when the members could lawfully abandon the assembly if the king was not present.60 By contrast, the role of the Prince of Wales at Gloucester was less clear. He regularly attended meetings of the council in 1407, and his name is recorded at roughly two-thirds of the known meetings.61 As we have seen, government propaganda claimed that the king planned to lead an expedition to Wales to aid the Prince, but the king’s health made this impossible. The government chose Gloucester in 1407 because it was close to the Welsh March where Prince Henry could have easy access to both his forces in Wales and to parliament. The date of parliament’s opening was calculated by the government for maximum effect. In the last months of 1407 the prince was

57

PROME, parliament of 1407, items 12 and 13; Rot. Parl., III, 609. PROME, parliament of 1407, items 17 and 18; Rot. Parl., III, 610. 59 PROME, parliament of 1407, item 21; Rot. Parl., III, 611. 60 Parliamentary Texts of the Later Middle Ages, ed. N. Pronay and J. Taylor (Oxford, 1980), pp. 26 (n. 48) and 72. 61 C. T. Allmand, Henry V (New Haven, 1992), p. 40. 58

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An Ill and Infirm King besieging Welsh rebels in Aberystwyth. He intended this to be the last act in his crushing of the Welsh rebellion and took a cluster of great lords with him to increase the significance of the victory including Edward, duke of York, and Richard, earl of Warwick to deliver the coup de grâce. Outnumbered and besieged on 12 September, the Welsh agreed to surrender Aberystwyth on 1 November, less than ten days after parliament was set to open,62 if no relief force came. The prince withdrew to Hereford leaving 120 men-atarms and 360 archers to hold the siege, and remained in Hereford from 1 to 29 October.63 Undaunted, Glyn Dwr rallied his forces and relieved the beleaguered garrison at Aberystwyth probably at or near the date of parliament’s opening at Gloucester.64 The prince moved to Gloucester where he arrived on 30 October and ensconced himself at Llanthony Priory where a number of lords spiritual and temporal paid him a ceremonial visit on 28 November.65 Wylie thought this ceremony was to mark his recent coming of age, although it might just as likely have been recognition of his position in the wake of his father’s incapacity as had occurred during the Long Parliament of 1406.66 Although Prince Henry was clearly in the environs of Gloucester throughout most of the Parliament, neither his presence nor his role was recorded by parliamentary clerks. His close friend, Edward, duke of York, is not recorded as being at parliament until 14 November when he appeared as one of the lords sent to intercommune with the commons,67 and the Parliament Roll does not record Prince Henry’s attendance at parliament until 2 December, the last day of the session. On that day he rose in support of his close friend, the duke of York, whom some had apparently blamed for the failure at Aberystwyth.68 Apparently, Prince Henry left the management of the parliament at Gloucester to the Chancellor. Although by 1407 the king’s ill-health was a political reality with which the realm had to contend, the membership of the Gloucester Parliament, like those before and after it, had a decidedly Lancastrian complexion and spent its short period of existence acting as a sort of ad hoc Great council. The house of lords was, as always in Henry IV’s reign, a Lancastrian bastion. The secular lords were led by the king’s half-brother, John Beaufort, earl of Somerset; the king’s brother-in-law, Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland; Richard Neville, earl of Warwick; and Thomas Fitzalan, earl of Arundel. These peers of the realm were supplemented by the senior secular magnate, Edward of York, 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

R. R. Davies, The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dwr (Oxford, 1997), pp. 124–5. Wylie, Henry IV, III, 113 n. 3. Walsingham thought that Prince Henry took Aberystwyth but that Glyn Dwr retook it by treachery, Historia Anglicana, II, 277; Chronica Maiora, pp. 357–8. Wylie, Henry IV, III, 118 and 118 n. 1. Biggs, ‘Long Parliament of 1406’, p. 197; M. J. Bennett, ‘Edward III’s Entail and the Succession to the Crown’, EHR 112 (1998), 580–609. PROME, parliament of 1407, items 17 and 18; Rot. Parl., III, 610. PROME, parliament of 1407, item 24; Rot. Parl., III, 611–12.

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Douglas Biggs duke of York, who – in spite of a somewhat checkered past – had become one of the closest confidants of Henry, Prince of Wales. All of these had made substantial efforts in the preceding eight years to secure the success of Henry of Lancaster and his government. The only new face in the upper house at Gloucester was that of Richard de Vere, earl of Oxford, who had attained his majority the previous December.69 The sacred lords were led by the redoubtable Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, and chancellor of England. The list of bishops present at Gloucester included the king’s halfbrother Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester; the king’s close friend Thomas Langley, bishop of Durham, both of whom had loaned the king substantial sums in the recent past.70 The members of parliament who were selected by their constituencies to serve at Gloucester were, as usual, decidedly royalist in complexion. Of the seventy-four knights of the shire as many as thirty-nine, or 54%, were retained by the king under the Great Seal or the Great Seal of the Duchy, or were tenants of the Duchy of Lancaster. This strong Lancastrian support was supplemented by no fewer than thirteen knights of the shire who had direct ties to noble supporters of the house of Lancaster. Thus, the pro-royalist element in the Gloucester Parliament came to fifty-two knights of the shire, or 73% of the total. This figure represents a 9% increase over the number of royalist MPs that sat in the Long Parliament the previous year, and the number of Lancastrian retainers at Gloucester was larger than any previous parliament in the reign. This was not all. The Gloucester Parliament also saw the largest number of MPs re-elected to this point in the reign. Of the 229 known members, fortytwo, or 18%, had served in the Long Parliament.71 The percentage of re-election for knights of the shire was slightly higher. Seventeen men, or 22%, of the knights of the shire were returned to the house of commons after spending most of 1406 at Westminster for the Long Parliament. Of these seventeen MPs, ten were retainers of the king. Some of these royalist knights of the shire such as Thomas Okeover had contacts with John of Gaunt, and thus the house of Lancaster, that stretched back over thirty-five years.72 The presence at Gloucester of so many men in the house that had served during the Long Parliament of 1406 may represent one component of medieval constitutionalism: the commons looking after their own interests. The last session of the Long Parliament had achieved a modus vivendi between the commons and the council who promised not only to govern by a set of rules for the king

69

CCR, 1405–9, pp. 292 and 397–99. CPR, 1405–8, p. 342. 71 House of Commons, I, 240. 72 Gaunt retained Okeover in 1370, House of Commons, III, 863–65. Thomas was the brother of Sir Philip Okeover, S. Walker, The Lancastrian Affinity, 1361–1399 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 215, 276. 70

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An Ill and Infirm King but also promised to report to the house how they spent the subsidy that the commons had granted on the last day of the session and not to ask for a new subsidy until at least March 1408. The call for a new parliament after only eight months clearly meant another subsidy would be asked for, and the high re-election rates represent the desire of the house to look after their interests – combined with a healthy mistrust of the council. What these figures meant in real political terms is of more than passing significance. As Gwilym Dodd,73 Mark Arvanigian,74 and I have argued elsewhere,75 the Revolution of 1399 was not a revolution in terms of constitutional development as William Stubbs saw it, but was a revolution in personnel in favor of those gentlemen loyal to the house of Lancaster. Many of these Lancastrian and royal retainers had been close to John of Gaunt and to Henry himself for decades by 1399. It was these men who after Richard’s deposition populated important county offices such as sheriff and justice of the peace and escheator; served in high office; and accompanied embassies to foreign courts. In essence, it was these men who made Lancastrian governance real at the local level and they were part of the synergy of Lancastrian governance, whereby the sum of the parts was greater than the whole. It was these royalist retainers’ key role in early Lancastrian governance and their presence in the commons that made it a different body than what had been before and what would come after in the century and gave them unprecedented influence and power.76 When the king addressed the house of commons in the Unlearned Parliament of 1404 and told them that ‘kings are not wont to give account’, it was they who replied to him, ‘then their ministers must’. Indeed, they were the king’s ministers. Though not a proto-democratic body by any means, these MPs, who were Lancastrian retainers and also sheriffs, JPs, and government officers, were far too experienced to be cowed even by the likes of great churchmen like Thomas Fitzalan, archbishop of Canterbury. Thus, the key to understanding the political dynamic of the Gloucester Parliament, much like the dynamics in the last session of the Long Parliament that preceded it, have little to do with the king, and revolve around the tempestuous relationship between the council, which had been acting as a sort of ‘collective sovereign’ since the end of the Long Parliament, and the house of commons. The depth of the antagonism and mistrust between the commons and council is difficult to ascertain, but, considering that the 73

Dodd, ‘Crown, Magnates and Gentry’, p. 61. M. Arvanigian, ‘The “Lancastrianization” of the North in the Reign of Henry IV’, in Reputation and Representation in Fifteenth Century Europe, ed. D. L. Biggs, S. Michalove, A. C. Reeves (Leiden, 2003), pp. 9–38. M. Arvanigian, ‘Landed Society and the Governance of the North in the Later Middle Ages: The Case of Sir Ralph Eure’, Medieval Prosopography 22 (2001), 65–86. 75 D. Biggs, ‘Sheriffs and Knights of the Shire: The Patterns of Lancastrian Governance’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 40 (1996), 149–168. 76 See Members of Parliament, Appendix 2. 74

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Douglas Biggs Parliament Roll itself reports the row and that the Roll was written to reflect the ‘official’, royalist party line, then the antagonism between the two must have been great indeed. Quite possibly the commons were not particularly pleased at being summoned again so soon after the events of the Long Parliament. The very generous subsidy that they had granted the previous December was to last until Michelmas 1408, yet summonses had been issued for elections barely eight months since they had last met. Perhaps the large re-election rate may have to do with some county gentry who ‘smelled a rat’. Perhaps many in the political community were frustrated because 1407 was the quietest summer Henry IV had thus far enjoyed without any real threat of foreign invasion or new rebellion.77 In addition, some of the MPs, especially the speaker Sir Thomas Chaucer, would have known of the council’s reliance on large loans to make ends meet for Easter term at the exchequer. As Anthony Steel demonstrated, Easter Term 1407 saw the lowest level of actual revenue in seven years flow into the exchequer. This led the council to seek loans from Richard Whittington, by this time mayor of the staple, and other London merchants. This London consortium provided £4,000 on 9 May, followed by a further £4,000 on 12 June. A group of chancery clerks, many of whom were at the Gloucester Parliament, produced a loan of £333 6s 8d on 12 June and Ralph Neville, Earl of Westmorland, lent the government another £500. John Hende lent £2,500 more to the government and John Norbury lent £2,000 as well. The financial situation was so dire that for the first time in the reign the government sought the backing of foreign bankers to cover a portion of their debt load. The Albertini of Florence gave £1,000 directly to the government and also covered the debts from the royal household.78 If the high re-election rate and the large number of Lancastrian retainers who were government officers suggest a house that was on a collision course with the council and their governance of the realm, so too does the archbishop’s opening homily, ‘honor the king’.79 The archbishop drew his text from I Peter 2. 17, which when taken by itself is innocuous enough; as are the three reasons outlined on the Parliament Roll that Arundel gave to his audience, namely: he who honored God should be honored by his servants, he who protected his servants should be honored by them, and the servants should support the king the same way that the members of a human body support the head.80 But, the message of I Peter, chapter 2 speaks to the faithful not to

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J. H. Ramsay, Lancaster and York, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1892), I, 102. A. B. Steel, The Receipt of the Exchequer, 1377–1485 (Cambridge, 1954), pp. 95–6. Wylie, Henry IV, III, 65. 79 Both Kirby and Given-Wilson note the theme of the homily but do not contextualize it, Kirby, Henry IV, pp. 215–18; PROME, parliament of 1407, introduction. 80 PROME, parliament of 1407, item 2; Rot. Parl., III, 608. 78

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An Ill and Infirm King use their ‘liberty’ as a ‘cloak for maliciousness’ but to serve their masters.81 The chapter also speaks to the ‘good and gentle’ as well as the ‘forward’ among the audience to trust their masters, and to suffer patiently.82 Even if the faithful suffer wrong doing at the hands of their masters, they are to remain subservient, after the example of Christ. It is not only ‘thankworthy’, but ‘glorious’ to suffer so.83 Considering that Arundel and the council had summoned parliament early, and considering what they were about to ask parliament for (i.e. for a new tax well before the promised date), these were topical allusions that the archbishop would not have omitted from his sermon – especially I Peter 2. 25: that those who had been led astray by their own sins were returned to righteousness by the ‘Bishop of our souls’.84 Arundel’s homily, therefore, provides some insight into the direction the council thought the proceedings at Gloucester were likely to take. The homily not only suggests just how confrontational the last session of the Long Parliament was and how much distrust remained between the commons and the council, but also demonstrates how willing the archbishop was to use religious as well as secular authority in an attempt to bring to heel what he and the council perceived as an intractable and surly house. With both sides prepared for conflict over the issues that lay between them, conflict was not long in coming. It may indeed be that the election of Sir Thomas Chaucer as Speaker on 25 October was initially welcomed by the council.85 He had extremely close ties to the king, having served as chief butler of the royal household between 1402 and July 1407. Chaucer was also related, through his mother, to the Beaufort family and had received patronage from John, earl of Somerset, and Henry, bishop of Winchester. Chaucer had been keeper of the temporalities of the bishopric of Winchester following the death of William Wykham in 1404 until Bishop Henry had entered into the bishopric. His close ties to the Beauforts might have been responsible for his election as speaker in 1407, but Chaucer’s role as champion of the rights of the commons over and against the archbishop of Canterbury and the lords clearly demonstrates that political association with great churchmen and nobles was not necessarily the coin on which all things turned.86 The house of commons wasted little time in showing a marked distrust of 81 82 83 84

85 86

I Peter 2. 16. I Peter 2. 17–18. I Peter 2. 19–24. I Peter 2. 25. It is not surprising that Archbishop Thomas would inject himself into the context of his own sermon. As Robin Storey suggests, Arundel had done this on at least one prior occasion: when he opened parliament in 1399, ‘Episcopal King-Makers in the Fifteenth Century’, in The Church, Politics and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century, ed. R. B. Dobson (Stroud, 1984), p. 86. J. S. Roskell, The Commons and their Speakers in English Parliaments, 1376–1523 (Manchester, 1965), pp. 149–50. For a discussion of Chaucer’s career in parliament, see House of Commons, II, 524–32.

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Douglas Biggs the members of council, and were clearly concerned with how the subsidy that they had granted in 1406 had been and was being spent. Although the Parliament Roll records that business on 9 November was conducted in front of the king, the fact that the chancellor was the one who responded to the requests of the speaker suggests that the king was not actually there; or if he was, he was incapable of speaking for himself. The most significant business transacted on this day centered on the issue of the legal position of the council where Henry released the members of council from the oath they had sworn at the end of the Long Parliament. Stubbs and Kirby made little of this royal decision.87 Wylie thought it meant an end to the council’s ‘thankless task’ of governing the realm,88 and McNiven argued that it was a masterful stroke on the part of the archbishop in trumping the house and taking away from them any part in the political equation and that it had destroyed any achievement that they (i.e. the commons) had made in 1406.89 Edmund Wright went further in claiming that the king’s ‘dignity’ required the loathsome restrictions imposed upon it at the end of the Long Parliament be removed.90 Whether or not Arundel’s actions ‘swept away’ anything is a debatable point. The personnel of the council did not change for a year and more,91 and the council continued to act as it had since the Long Parliament as a sort of ‘collective sovereign’ until Parliament sat again in January 1410. It is also clear that the restrictions on Henry’s actions instituted by the Long Parliament were out of political necessity rather than any affront to royal dignity. It seems rather that absolving the council from the oath they had sworn in December 1406 was a way to trump opposition to individual councillors by removing any legal avenue members in the house might take against them. Many could remember the impeachment of Richard II’s ministers for real or imagined misgovernance dating from the 1380s,92 and probably Henry and/ or his advisers did not want those days to return. It is unknown whether the house of commons broached this possibility to Arundel when he appeared before them, or if it was whispered in among MPs in the cloisters of the Abbey, but by absolving the members of council from their oath they no longer could be held legally accountable to the agreements they had made in December 1406, even if they had been violated. Perhaps the greatest significance of the 9 November session turns on the fact that even Archbishop Arundel could neither control the commons nor 87 88 89 90 91

92

Stubbs, Constitutional History, III, 62; Kirby, Henry IV, p. 216. Wylie, Henry IV, III, 119. McNiven, Heresy and Politics, pp. 180–2. Wright, ‘Royal Finance’, p. 81. J. L. Kirby, ‘Councils and Councillors of Henry IV’, TRHS 5th series 14 (1964), 35–65 (p. 64). A. L. Brown, ‘The Commons and Council in the Reign of Henry IV’, EHR 79 (1964), 25–31 (p. 30). J. S. Roskell, The Impeachment of Michael de la Pole, Earl of Suffolk in 1386, in the Context of the Reign of Richard II (Manchester, 1984).

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An Ill and Infirm King bend them to his will. The thirty-one articles that were produced by the last session of the Long Parliament were a testament to the commons’ lack of faith in the council and the ‘governance of necessity’ that had emerged from that parliament. The large proportion of MPs who were re-elected to parliament in 1407 suggests that the mistrust of the council did not lessen greatly among the political community in the succeeding ten months. Although the Parliament Roll does not provide details of this core issue that occupied the commons on 9 November, it does reveal the power of the commons and also not very thinly veils their displeasure with the council. The council had sent to the house the person of the chancellor, the redoubtable Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury, to explain to the commons how the council had spent the subsidy from the Long Parliament. Nevertheless, the archbishop’s explanations had not satisfied the commons because the council had to take the unprecedented step of sending a written schedule to the house explaining not only the council’s actions but also assuring the lower house of the proper conduct of its members. The council’s reaction after the tempestuous 9 November session will likely always remain a mystery, but their actions demonstrate that they abandoned their desire to manage the commons. On 14 November a group of lords was sent to intercommune with the lower house. This group of lords contained of some of the most powerful English political figures of the early fifteenth century. They were led by Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury; Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester; Thomas Langley, bishop of Durham. The secular component of the committee contained the Prince of Wales’s close confidant, Edward, duke of York, along with the king’s eldest half-brother, John Beaufort, earl of Somerset, and two of Henry IV’s most trusted confidants among the baronage: William, Lord Roos, and Hugh, Lord Burnell.93 This imposing group was intended to keep the lower house in line and function as the king’s voice during the commons’s deliberations. Imposing or not, it is clear that this intercommuning could not adequately manage the commons or direct their deliberations in a manner that the council found acceptable, because on 21 November the council tried another political maneauver intended to bend the unwieldy commons to their will. On this occasion, it seems that the lords had deliberated on their own and decided to give their assent to one-and-one-half tenths from the cities and boroughs, and one-and-one-half fifteenths from the other lay folk in addition to a continuation of the wool subsidy at 3 shillings per tun and 12 pence per pound. After the upper house had decided this, the commons were ordered to send twelve of their number to the assembled lords and listen to the amount of taxation that they, the commons of the realm, were now required to vote. After these twelve MPs had been given their marching orders they returned to the house

93

PROME, parliament of 1407, items 17 and 18; Rot. Parl., III, 610.

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Douglas Biggs to try and persuade their fellows to what the lords had already decided. Not surprisingly, this rather heavy-handed tactic produced a storm of protest from the commons who argued that such treatment represented ‘manifest prejudice and derogation of their liberties’.94 The seriousness of the lower house’s protest may be gauged by two important concessions on the part of the government. The first concession was that the king and the council backed away from their previous position of demanding that the lower house assent to a level of taxation that the lords had already set for them. The second, and more significant concession, was to bestow upon the commons unprecedented liberties and power: namely the right in the present parliament and in any future parliament freely to discuss the condition of the realm and the measures needed to remedy it ‘in the absence of the king’.95 This was supplemented by the promise to allow any grant of taxation to be ‘done in the accustomed form and manner’. This last concession on the part of the council was not only a clear indication that the government did not expect Henry of Lancaster ever to return to governing the realm, but that in spite of such overwhelming political personalities as Thomas Fitzalan, archbishop of Canterbury, serving at its head, the council could not dictate policy to a house of commons that was made up of so many Lancastrian and royalist retainers who had such a vested interest in the governance of the realm. When the subsidy came on 2 December, it was a generous one: in fact, parliament granted the king one-and-one-half tenths and fifteenths together with high duties on wool and levies of tonnage and poundage.96 These grants were particularly generous, especially in light of the fact that commons had given one tenth and one fifteenth together with customs duties only the previous December and that the proceeds from this tax were to last at least until March 1408.97 Yet this subsidy was not given without substantial and novel conditions. Not only did the crown promise not to ask for new taxation until 25 March 1410, council took the unprecedented step of proclaiming that any member who wished could have this promise written down so that he could take it back to his county.98 This was a unique concession. Such a promise had never been given before in the history of Parliament and was not given again for the remainder of the Middle Ages or in the sixteenth century. Regardless of the king’s promise the grant of such a large subsidy does require some explaining. No matter how bitterly the members of the house might have complained about the government or how the subsidy they had voted was spent, the majority of them were Lancastrians, and many 94

PROME, parliament of 1407, item 21; Rot. Parl., III, 611. PROME, parliament of 1407, item 22; Rot. Parl., III, 611. 96 Jurkowski, Lay Taxes, pp. 77–8. 97 Jurkowski, Lay Taxes, p. 77. 98 PROME, parliament of 1407, item 27; Rot. Parl., III, 612. 95

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An Ill and Infirm King served as local officials. Thus, they knew better than most in the political community just how desperately a new subsidy was needed. Even though parliament might question and scrutinize how the subsidies they had voted were used the opposition to the government, as McFarlane cautioned long ago, must not be overstated.99 The events of 1407 go a long way towards demonstrating McFarlane’s usually overlooked adage: ‘when Parliament is found advocating measures which have as their object the salvation of the taxpayers’ pocket it is more reasonable to suppose that the policy was that of the taxpayer’, and ‘it is striking how much of the opposition in Parliament is inspired by taxpayers’ grievances and how many of the limitations on the Crown proposed had no other object but the achievement of economy’.100 Even though contemporaries did not find the parliament of 1407 to be particularly noteworthy, combined with the fact that the best source for the assembly is the ‘official’ government version on the Parliament Roll itself, the key issues of the assembly and the depth of the political infighting may still be discerned. Part of the antagonism on the part of the commons may have rested in the fact that the Long Parliament of 1406 had promised not to come back to the country for new taxation until 1408, but whatever the case, more MPs were re-elected to the Gloucester assembly than in any other parliament of the reign, and it seems relatively clear that the house of commons in 1407 had no love lost for the council, including its most imposing member, Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury. It is also clear that the Gloucester Parliament took place with almost complete reverence for, but almost completely without, Henry IV. The king’s health continued to be so poor throughout the year that he could not govern. The tiny number of signet letters from early in the year strongly suggests that Henry was almost completely removed from government and, from his actions and role in a series of documents created to reflect his official version of events (i.e. the Parliament Roll), he showed no signs of returning to government in any way. The 1407 assembly was the first assembly of the reign that Henry did not speak to the assembly ‘by his own mouth’, and he probably was not at most of the sessions in any case. Given this fact, Henry’s own supposed reporting of the Gloucester Parliament to a Hanseatic ambassador as an assembly that was ‘at his will’, seems little more than Lancastrian propaganda.101 With the king scarcely more than a figure-head, parliament was forced by circumstances to get on with the business of the realm. Much like the Long Parliament of 1406, the Gloucester Parliament of 1407 can be seen as sort of an extended Great council where the important men of the realm met 99

K. B. McFarlane, ‘The Lancastrian Kings’, in Cambridge Medieval History, 8 vols. (Cambridge, 1936), VII, 361–416 (p. 416). 100 McFarlane, The Nobility of Late Medieval England (Oxford, 1970), p. 294. 101 Wylie, Henry IV, III, 120; A. L. Brown, ‘Commons and the Council’, pp. 26–7, and Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort, p. 39.

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Douglas Biggs to decide what to do. And at Gloucester in 1407, much as at Westminster in 1406, it was not the king that the commons found untrustworthy but the council that governed in his name. Although Edmund Wright thought the commons ‘docile’, because the council had given them the governmental and financial stability they had sought in 1406,102 and A. L. Brown errantly thought that ‘in the parliament of 1407 the Commons were firmly put in their place’,103 it is clear from the commons’ actions that such was not the case. Although Henry himself, and his household in particular, had suffered the brunt of the commons’ collective outrage in the past,104 the events of 1407 proved that even the council could not find a magical solution to the financial problems plaguing the kingdom and had to summon parliament before they had promised in 1406, and probably before they wanted. The lower house’s distrust of the council is easily evident in their demand that the council first produce a written summary explaining how and why they expended the subsidy voted the previous December. The commons then continued on this tack by holding the archbishop of Canterbury to account personally when he found it necessary to appear before the unruly commons. The king’s releasing his councilors from the oath they took in the Long Parliament meant that no legal action could be taken against them by the commons, but it did not lessen the lower house’s mistrust of their governance. In terms of political management of the commons, Arundel’s machinations must be counted as a complete failure. Not only did his ploy to have a group of powerful lords act as a committee to speak to the commons fail, his attempt to use the house of lords to vote a subsidy that the commons would then pass produced a storm of protest that resulted in the greatest concession to any house of commons before the Civil War – the ability to conduct business on their own without the presence of the king or the lords. Indeed, it is somewhat surprising that Stubbs did not make more of this point. Even though the commons acceded to a subsidy, it was not secured without concessions that the council would rather not have given. Thus the proceedings of the Gloucester Parliament represent a further conflict between the commons and the council, and perhaps a further refinement of medieval constitutionalism. The amount and severity of conflict between the commons and the council in any subsequent parliament without a strong monarchical presence and what this would have meant constitutionally is an open question, especially since the king’s promise not to ask for any new taxation until after 25 March 1410 was put in writing and taken home by each of the members so that the

102

Wright, ‘Royal Finance’, p. 81. Brown, ‘Commons and Council’, p. 30. 104 The charges against Henry’s household establishment are well known and often recited. See Chris Given-Wilson, Royal Household, pp. 133 and 286–71; Alan Rogers, ‘The Royal Household of Henry IV’, pp. 71 and 244–9. 103

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An Ill and Infirm King promise could be ‘made known in his county’.105 Perhaps, therefore, it should not surprise us that when parliament met again, at Westminster in 1410, it was the Prince of Wales who stepped forward to manage the proceedings and not the archbishop of Canterbury.106

105

Statutes of the Realm, II, 156–7 (c. xvi). As Chris Given-Wilson notes, there is a copy of this promise contained in the Chancery documents, C 49/13/16, that was probably the Chancery original from which copies were to be made. 106 LKLK, pp. 107–8; Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort, pp. 48–51. It is probable that the antipathy between Arundel and Prince Henry, which Peter McNiven suggests did not begin until 1412, may have had its origins in the Gloucester Parliament, P. McNiven, ‘Prince Henry and the English Political Crisis of 1412’, History 65 (1980), 1–17 (pp. 1–2).

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Appendix 1 Henry IV’s Itinerary for 1407 8 Jan. Tower of London1 13–17 Jan. Merton Priory2 30 Jan. Westminster3 7 Feb. Hertford4 18 March Hertford5 30 March Hertford6 4–8 April Hertford7 23 April Windsor8 9, 12 May Windsor9 23 May Windsor10 28 May Rotherhithe11 1 June Waltham Abbey12 23/27 June Leicester13 7 July Nottingham14 8 July Nottingham15 13 July Nottingham16 1/12/16 Aug. Nottingham17 17 Aug. Newstead18 18 Aug. Worksop19 24/31 Aug. Rothewellhaigh (near Leeds)20 1 Sept. Rothewellhaigh21

1 2

3 4

5 6 7 8

9 10 11

5 Sept. York22 8 Sept. Faxfleet23 11/13 Sept. Beverley24 14 Sept. Bridlington and Kilham25 17 Sept. Doncaster26 18–21 Sept. Bishopthorpe27 22 Sept. Cawood28 29 Sept. Worksop29 30 Sept. Nottingham30 4 Oct. Repton31 10/15 Oct. Evesham Abbey32 16 Oct. Evesham Abbey33 22 Oct. Gloucester (Parliament begins 24 October)34 16 Nov. Evesham Abbey (?)35 4 Dec. Gloucester (Parliament breaks up)36 8 Dec. Cirencester37 10 Dec. Evesham Abbey (?)38 11 Dec. Gloucester39 14 Dec. Windsor40

Signet Letters, pp. 142–3. Signet Letters, p. 143. The distance from the Tower to Merton by land is roughly seven miles, although Henry could also have taken a water route to Merton from the Tower along the Thames to the river Wandle that flows into Merton. Rymer, Feodera, VIII, 464. Signet Letters, p. 144. The land distance from Westminster to Hertford by land is about seventeen miles, although Henry could have taken a water route using the Thames to the outflow of the river Lee and then up to Hertford. Wylie, Henry IV, II, 396. Wylie, Henry IV, II, 479. Wylie, Henry IV, II, 479. Wylie, Henry IV, II, 479. The distance from Hertford to Windsor by land is about thirty miles, although Henry could have taken a water route using the Lee from Hertford and the Thames to Windsor. Wylie, Henry IV, II, 479n. Signet Letters, p. 144. Wylie, Henry IV, III, 106.

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Wylie, Henry IV, III, 106. The distance from Windsor to Waltham Abbey by land is about thirty miles, although Henry could have taken a water route using the Thames and the river Lee. Signet Letters, p. 144. The distance from Waltham to Leicester is about eighty miles. As there is no water route for this portion of the journey it is clear the king made this journey by land. His health explains the slow rate of travel. Wylie, Henry IV, III, 107. Signet Letters, p. 145. Wylie, Henry IV, IV, 208. Wylie, Henry IV, II, 402; III, 109 and IV, 208. Wylie, Henry IV, III, 109. The distance from Nottingham to Newstead Abbey by land is about seven miles, although Henry could have taken a water route to the abbey along the river Lean. Wylie, Henry IV, III, 109. The distance from Newstead Abbey to Worksop is about ten miles, which Henry would have had to travel by land. Wylie, Henry IV, III, 109; Signet Letters, p. 145. The distance from Worksop to Rothwellhaigh is about forty miles and Henry would have had to travel by land. Wylie, Henry IV, III, 109. Wylie, Henry IV, III, 109. A portion of the great central tower of the Minster at York had collapsed in 1407. Perhaps out of penance Henry sent his master mason William Colchester to York to see to the repairs there, CPR, 1405–8, p. 383; CPaL, 1404–15, pp. 137–8 and 304–5. History of Yorkminster, ed. G. E. Aylmer and R. Cant (Oxford, 1977), p. 167. The distance from Rothwellhaigh to York is about tweny miles and Henry would have had to travel by land. Wylie, Henry IV, III, 109. Wylie, Henry IV, III, 109. The route of travel by land between York and Beverley via Faxfleet is so odd that Henry most certainly made this part of his journey by water, taking the Ouse down to the Humber to Faxfleet and the river Hull up to Beverley. Wylie, Henry IV, III, 109. Signet Letters, p. 145–5. Wylie, Henry IV, III, 110. Wylie, Henry IV, III, 110 and 113. Signet Letters, p. 146. Wylie, Henry IV, III, 114. Wylie, Henry IV, III, 114. Wylie, Henry IV, III, 114. Signet Letters, p. 146. Parliament was set to begin on 20 October (PROME, parliament of 1407, introduction and item 1 [Rot. Parl., III, 608]), but apparently the king was not yet at Gloucester and thus the delay until 24 October for the opening, Wylie, Henry IV, III, 114 and 117; IV, 224. Wylie claims that the king might have been at Evesham on this date but signet letters from this date given at Gloucester suggest otherwise, Wylie, Henry IV, III, 117; IV, 215; Signet Letters, p. 146. Signet Letters, p. 146. Signet Letters, p. 147. Wylie speculates on this date too that Henry was at Evesham, Henry IV, III, 121n. Wylie, Henry IV, III, 121 and IV, 7. Signet Letters, p. 147.

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Appendix 2 Members of Parliament for the Gloucester Parliament Summoned to meet on 20 October 1407

Bedford Berkshire Buckingham Cambridge Cornwall Cumberland Derby Devon Dorset Essex Gloucester Hampshire Hereford Hertford Huntingdon Kent

William Bosom1 John Worship2 John Golafre3 Edmund Spearsholt4 John Barton5 Richard Wyot6 Sir John Howard7 Sir John Rochefort8 John Chenduyt9 Richard Trevanion (1406)10 William Stapleton11 William More12 Sir Richard Strelley13 Thomas Okeover14 Sir Hugh Luttrell (1406)15 Robert Carey16 Sir Humphrey Stafford (1406)17 Ivo Fitz Waryn (1406)18 Elmying Leget (1406)19 Sir William Marney20 Sir Thomas FitzNichol (1406)21 Thomas Mille22 Sir John Popham23 William Fauconer24 John ap Harry (1406)25 Thomas Holgot (1406)26 William Parker27 Sir Thomas de la Barre28 Roger Hunt (1406)29 John Burton30 Richard Clitheroe (1406)31 Robert Clifford32

Lancaster Sir Henry Houghton 33 Sir Ralph Staveley34 Leicester John Blaket35 Robert Sherard36 Lincoln John Skipwith (1406)37 John Meres38 Middlesex Henry Somer (1406)39 William Loveney40 Norfolk Sir Edmund Thorpe41 John Wynter42 Northampton John Tyndale43 Thomas Wake44 Northumberland Sir Edmund Hastings45 Robert Harbottle46 Nottingham Sir John Zouche47 Sir Hugh Hussey48 Oxford Thomas Chaucer (1406)49 John Wilcotes (1406)50 Rutland Robert Browe51 William Sheffield52 Shropshire Sir John Cornwall53 David Holbache (1406)54 Somerset Sir Thomas Brooke55 Richard Cheddar56 Stafford Sir John Bagot57 Sir William Neuport58 Suffolk Sir Roger Drury59 John Lancaster60 Surrey Ralph Cuddington61 Robert Bussebrigge62 Sussex Sir John Dalyngrigge (1406)63 Sir John Pelham (1406)64 Warwick Sir Alvred Trussell65

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Henry Sutton66 Sir Alan Pennington67 Thomas Warcop68 Sir Walter Hungerford69 William Stourton70

Worcester Yorkshire

Sir William Beauchamp71 Richard Ruyhale72 Sir Edmund Hastings73 Sir Alexander de la Lounde74

Affiliation of Knights of the Shire with the king and Great Lords Lancastrian 39 Arundel   3 Warwick   2 Courtenay   2 Gloucester   1 Bishop of Winchester   1 Bishop of Salisbury   1 Earl of Somerset   1 Lord Willoughby   1 Lord Zouche   1    ___________ 52 knights of the shire can be considered pro-royalist

Re-election rates, 1399–140775 1399 and 1401 1401 and 1402 1402 and Jan. 1404 Jan. and Oct. 1404 Oct. 1404 and 1406 1406 and 1407

10 knights of the shire re-elected 14 knights of the shire re-elected 9 knights of the shire re-elected 11 knights of the shire re-elected 14 knights of the shire re-elected 17 knights of the shire re-elected

1

No discernible connections but his elevation as JP in 1399 may represent a Lancastrian connection. JP Beds. 1399–1407; escheator for Beds. and Bucks. from 1402–3; had helped collect the aid for Princess Blanche’s marriage in 1401 and helped collect taxation from in August 1404, House of Commons, II, 301–2. 2 A Ricardian retainer who made his peace with Henry. He was JP Beds. 1399–1407 and one of the collectors of taxation in March 1404, House of Commons, IV, 900–2. Led troops to aid Edmund of Langley, duke of York, in 1399: D. Biggs, ‘ “To Aid the Custodian and Council,” Edmund of Langley, Duke of York, and the Defense of the Realm, June–July 1399’, Journal of Medieval Military History 1 (2002), 125–144 (pp. 141–4). He was also a king’s knight retained by Henry IV, Dodd, ‘Crown, Magnates and Gentry’, p. 306. 3 A Ricardian retainer who was retained by Henry IV. Had been sheriff of Oxon. and Berks. from 1404–5; JP in Oxon. 1404–17; and tax controller in Oxon. and Berks. March 1404, House of Commons, III, 199–202.

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7 8

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12 13 14 15

16

17

18

19 20

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A member of the Merciless Parliament of 1388 and then pro-Lancastrian afterwards. Sheriff of Oxon. and Berks. 1395–96; JP Berks. 1402–4, House of Commons, IV, 412–13. Acted as an attorney for John Holand while the duke of Exeter was in Ireland in 1399, and then worked for Henry. JP Bucks. 1404–15, House of Commons, II, 138–40. Had contacts with Thomas Chaucer. JP Bucks. 1405–12; sheriff Bucks. 1410–11, House of Commons, IV, 931–33. He was also a steward for the bishop of Winchester, Dodd, ‘Crown, Magnates and Gentry’, p. 306. Had Arundel contacts though retained by Richard II. Sheriff Essex and Herts. 1400–01; JP Suffolk 1397–1408; JP Essex 1399–1414, House of Commons, III, 431–32. Brother was Sir Ralph Rochefort the great Lancastrian knight and Sir John was knighted on the eve of the coronation by the king’s own hand. Sheriff Lincs. 1400–1 and 1409– 10; Steward of Bolingbroke honor within the duchy of Lancaster 1399–1407; JP Lincs. (Holland) 1382–1407 (Kesteven) 1401–6; collector of taxation Cambs. 1404; collector of a royal forced loan 1405; controller of tax Lincs. (Holland) March 1404, House of Commons, IV, 219–21. He had an annuity from Henry IV and was an official of several duchy of Cornwall estates, Dodd, ‘Crown, Magnates and Gentry’, p. 306; House of Commons, II, 539–40. No apparent connections, House of Commons, IV, 657. Had Percy connections but was also loyal to Henry IV. JP Cumb. 1397–1422; Alanger Cumb. 1399–1400; escheator Westm. and Cumb. 1401–2, 1402–3, House of Commons, IV, 463–65. Nothing known of him prior to 1407, House of Commons, III, 775–6. No apparent connections, House of Commons, IV, 507–8. Retained for life by John of Gaunt in 1370, House of Commons, III, 863–5. Lancastrian retainer. Served on numerous royal commissions in Devon, Som., Dorset, Wilts., Hants, throughout reign. Also ambassador to France 1400 and 1403 as well as ambassador to Flanders in 1403, House of Commons, III, 655–60. A Ricardian king’s esquire and Holland retainer who rose in 1400. He probably survived 1400 and prospered because of his associations with the house of Courtenay. Numerous royal commissions in Devon throughtout the reign; JP Devon 1408–13, House of Commons, II, 495–7. Retained for life by Henry IV in 1399. Served on a substantial number of royal commissions through the reign. Sheriff Som. and Dorset 1405; JP Dorset 1389–1413, Som. 1401– 1413, House of Commons, IV, 437–9. A Ricardian retainer but had connections to Henry and remained loyal to Henry in 1399 and thereafter. Served on numerous royal commissions throughout the West Midlands throughout the reign; JP Wilts. 1405–7 and Dorset 1405–7, House of Commons, III, 84–7; Dodd, ‘Crown, Magnates and Gentry’, p. 306. A Lancastrian retainer. Sheriff of Essex and Herts. 1402–3, 1407–8; JP Essex 1404–7; Usher of the king’s chamber 1405–12, House of Commons, III, 587–9. Had Arundel connections as well as connections with Joan, Countess Hereford. Sheriff of Cornwall 1400–1, Essex and Herts. 1401–2; JP Essex 1402–13, House of Commons, III, 693–5. Possessed Arundel connections before 1399. Had served on numerous royal commissions in the West Midlands including a commission to raise forced loans in 1402; tax collector in Gloucs. Nov. 1404, House of Commons, III, 80–2. Might have possessed Courtenay connections. Served on numerous royal commissions in Gloucs. and Herefs.; escheator in Herefs. and surrounding marches 1413; JP for Herefs. 1399–1419; for Gloucs. 1404–22; tax controller Herts. March 1404, House of Commons, III, 738–9. One of John of Gaunt’s many protégés. Bailiff of the duchy of Lancaster hundred of

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King’s Somborne, Hants, 1397–1408; constable of Southampton Castle 1404–18; sheriff of Hants 1404; JP Hants 1406–7, House of Commons, IV, 115–16. Had served William Wykeham, bishop of Winchester, as bailiff of several of his manors 1401–5 and then Bishop Beaufort from 1405 until his death in 1412. He had no Lancastrian connections prior to 1399, but Henry’s accession brought him prominence and power. Served on royal commissions after 1399 in Hants; tax collector Hants 1401; JP Hants 1407–12, House of Commons, III, 62. He accompanied Henry of Lancaster to Prussia in 1390–1. He served on numerous royal commissions in Herefs. as well as adjacent areas on the Welsh March throughout the reign, sheriff of Herefs. 1400–01; escheator for Herefs. 1401, 1404–5, 1409–11. Also served as Constable of Aberystwyth 1399–1402 and joint captain of Hay and Brecon after November 1404, House of Commons, III, 299–301. Part of Mortimer affinity. JP Herefs. 1406–19; escheator for Herefs. 1407–9, House of Commons, III, 396–7. Stepson of Joan Norbury, the daughter of John Norbury one of Henry IV’s esquires and a close friend. Never served in local office, House of Commons, IV, 16–17. A Ricardian knight who made the transition into Lancastrian government and became a household knight of Henry IV. JP Herefs. 1399, Herts. 1399–1414. He served on numerous royal commissions including service on commissions to raise loans for Henry IV in 1404 and 1406, House of Commons, II, 132–5. He had contact with the Tiptoft family but no other contacts. A young man in 1407 who had yet to rise to prominence and power in the reigns of Henry V and Henry VI, House of Commons, III, 455–60. He had connections with John, earl of Somerset, but it is ‘impossible to determine the identity of this member’, House of Commons, II, 437; Dodd, ‘Crown, Magnates and Gentry’, p. 306. A Ricardian esquire retained by John of Gaunt. He had served on numerous royal commissions in Kent throughout the reign. Sheriff of Kent 1403–4; deputy treasurer of Calais 1405–6; admiral of the south and west 1406; controller of the customs and subsidies in the port of Sandwich 1407–9, House of Commons, II, 598–602. Brother of Richard Clifford, bishop of London. He served on numerous royal commissions in Kent and the south-east throughout the reign. Sheriff of Kent 1399–1400; JP Kent 1407–20, House of Commons, II, 590–2. He was a long-serving Lancastrian. He served on numerous royal commissions within Yorks. and Lancs. throughout the reign and served in many duchy offices within Lancs., House of Commons, III, 387–90. He was a long-serving Lancastrian. He served on numerous royal commissions in the north throughout the reign and also served in many duchy offices within Lancs. and Yorks., House of Commons, III, 387–80. An esquire of Henry IV’s household by 1401. He served on numerous royal commissions within Leics. and Gloucs. throughout the reign. Sheriff of Warws. and Leics. 1403–4; JP Wilts. 1410–15, House of Commons, II, 247–9. Married into the Calveley family who were Lancastrians. Held the duchy office of bailiff of Stapleford 1404–13, House of Commons, IV, 356–7. Had ties to the Copuldyk family who were Lancastrian and was also the uncle of William, Lord Willoughby. He served on numerous royal commissions within Lincs. in the parts of Lindsey throughout the reign. JP Lincs. (Lindsey) 1404–7; controller of customs and subsidies in the port of Boston 1407; helped raise a forced loan for Henry IV in 1405, House of Commons, IV, 388–90; Dodd, ‘Crown, Magnates and Gentry’, p. 306. His father had close ties to John of Gaunt. He was JP for Lincs. (Holland) 1389–1410, and for Lincs. (Kesteven) 1401–6; escheator of Lincs. 1400–1; collector of tax in Lincs. 1401 and 1404, House of Commons, III, 772–4.

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Douglas Biggs 39

40

41 42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51 52 53 54 55

He was one of the clerks of the Exchequer who rose in prominence after the revolution of 1399. Deputy treasurer of the realm to Sir John Tiptoft 1408–10 and to Sir John Pelham 1411–13; baron of the Exchequer 1407–10; chancellor of the Exchequer 1410–37; JP Middx 1407–50, House of Commons, IV, 400–4. He had been the clerk of Henry of Lancaster’s household from at least 1390. He served on numerous royal commissions throughout the reign. Sheriff of Essex and Herts. 1408–9; escheator of Essex and Herts. 1410–11, JP Middx 1404–18; treasurer of Philippa’s household on her marriage to Eric IX of Denmark 1406–8, House of Commons, III, 634–7. An associate of Thomas, earl of Worcester, who made the transition to Lancastrian rule after 1403, House of Commons, IV, 598–60. He was a long-serving Lancastrian retainer at least from the 1390s. JP Norf. 1397–1407; receiver-general of the estates of Henry, Prince of Wales, 1403–13; steward of the duchy of Lancaster estates in Norf. and Suff. 1408–13; deputy butler of Great Yarmouth and Cromer 1408–14, House of Commons, IV, 929–31. A Ricardian who made the transition to Lancastrian rule. He had been sheriff of Norhants in 1391–92; escheator in Northants and Rutland in the 1370s and 1380s, but never held local office after 1399, House of Commons, IV, 679–81. He was a king’s esquire by 1401. He was an MP for the first of three times in 1407 and did not take up service in county governance until Henry V’s reign, House of Commons, IV, 729–31. He was with Henry in Prussia 1390–91. Sheriff of Yorks. 1409–10; escheator Cumb. and Westm. 1407–8; helped raise a forced loan in the North Riding of Yorks. in 1404, House of Commons, III, 317–19. He was made Constable of Dunstanburgh Castle in 1399 and also made a king’s esquire that same year. Warden of the Eastern March toward Scotland, 1400; sheriff of Northumb. 1407–8; escheator of Northumb. 1408–9, House of Commons, III, 285–7. He was the younger brother of William, Lord Zouche of Haringworth. His return to parliament in 1407 was his first time in parliament. Although he was apparently of age in 1397 he did not take up service in county governance until 1412 and was not prominent in Northumb. until the reign of Henry V, House of Commons, IV, 940–1; Dodd, ‘Crown, Magnates and Gentry’, p. 306. He was retained for life by John of Gaunt. 1407 was the first time he had been returned to parliament. He had served on some royal commissions in Nottinghamshire but was not as active in local politics as his father, Sir Hugh Husey, had been, House of Commons, III, 464–5. He was, of course, the Speaker of the Gloucester Parliament. Chaucer was one of the most active of the king’s knights in local and national politics. He was sheriff of Oxon. and Berks. 1400–1, 1403–4; JP for Oxon. 1403–18, House of Commons, II, 524–32. Like his friend Thomas Chaucer, Wilcotes was one of the most active of the king’s retainers in local and national politics. He served as sheriff of Oxon. and Berks. 1401–2 and 1407–8; JP for Oxon. 1403–10, 1412–23, House of Commons, IV, 860–3. No discernible political connections. 1407 was his first parliament, House of Commons, II, 386–7. No discernible political connections. 1407 was his first parliament, House of Commons, IV, 350. By 1407 he was a long-serving Lancastrian retainer. He had been sheriff of Salop in 1399–1400, 1403–4, 1405–6; JP in Worcs. 1404–6, House of Commons, II, 661–3. He was a retainer of Thomas Fitzalan, earl of Arundel. He was a JP for Salop 1407–20, House of Commons, III, 393–5. He was retained for life by the king in 1404. He served on numerous royal commissions throughout the reign. He was sheriff of Som. and Dorset in the 1390s but not returned to the office after 1399. Nevertheless, he was on important commissions like the 1402

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An Ill and Infirm King

56 57

58 59 60

61 62

63

64

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66 67 68 69

70

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72 73 74 75

commission to restore good governance; JP for Som. 1389–1417 and for Dorset 1407–17, House of Commons, II, 377–9. He was a stepson of Brooke, his fellow MP for Soms. He was a violent man who did not possess any apparent political contacts, House of Commons, II, 537–8. He had been retained for life by John of Gaunt. He served on numerous royal commissions to Staffs. throughout the reign; JP Staffs. 1406–7; escheator Staffs. 1407–8, House of Commons, II, 96–8. By 1407 he was a long-serving Lancastrian knight. Nevertheless, 1407 was the first time he was returned to parliament, House of Commons, III, 833–4. He was an old Gloucester retainer who received Henry’s good lordship after 1399. He was a JP for Suff. 1401–5 and 1411–17, House of Commons, II, 803–4. He was an old Mowbray retainer who had connections with John Beaufort, earl of Somerset. 1407 was his first election to parliament. He did not begin to take up service in county governance until the reign of Henry V, House of Commons, III, 548–51. He had strong Lancastrian sympathies. He served as sheriff of Surrey 1400–1 and controller of the tax in Surrey March 1404, House of Commons, II, 706–7. He had connections with Richard, bishop of Salisbury. 1407 was his only election to parliament and he undertook almost no service in county office until after 1413, House of Commons, II, 448–9; Dodd, ‘Crown, Magnates and Gentry’, p. 306. He was an old Gloucester retainer whom Henry retained. He was sheriff of Gloucs. 1401–2; a collector of the tax in Sussex 1402; JP in Sussex 1399–1401 and 1403–8, House of Commons, II, 742–44. He was one of those men retained by John of Gaunt. He held Pevensey for Henry of Lancaster in 1399. He served as sheriff of Surrey and Sussex 1401–2; he was also a member of Henry IV’s council 1404–6; JP Surrey 1400–29, House of Commons, IV, 39–44. He was a retainer of the Beauchamp earls of Warwick. Served as sheriff of Warws. and Leics. 1402–3, JP Warws. 1407–14; escheator Warws. and Leics. 1407–8, House of Commons, IV, 664–6. He was a retainer of the Beauchamp earls of Warwick. He did not take an active role in county politics, House of Commons, IV, 535–6. Possessed no discernible political contacts, House of Commons, IV, 48–9. Possessed no discernible political contacts, House of Commons, IV, 767–8. He was a long serving Lancastrian. He served on numerous royal commissions throughout the reign. Sheriff of Wilts. 1405–6; JP Wilts. 1401–6, 1408–10, 1412–24, House of Commons, III, 446–53. He was a long-serving Lancastrian. He served as JP in Dorset 1404–4; Wilts. 1399–1413; Som. 1404–13; Cornwall 1405–13; Steward of the Principality of Wales, 1401–13, House of Commons, IV, 496–9. He was part of a collateral line of the Beauchamp earls of Warwick who was retained by Richard II and Thomas of Woodstock, duke of Gloucester in the 1390s. He joined Henry of Lancaster and became a royal retainer in 1399. He served as sheriff Worcs. 1401–2; Gloucs. 1403–5; JP Worcs. 1405–6; Gloucs. 1405–7, House of Commons, II, 161–3. He was a former Ricardian who was not high in Henry’s councils until after 1404, House of Commons, IV, 261–2. He was a long serving Lancastrian. He served as sheriff Yorks. 1409–10; escheator Cumb. and Westm. 1407–8, House of Commons, III, 317–19. He was a long-serving Lancastrian. He served as collector of taxes Yorks. (West Riding) 1406; escheator Yorks. 1407–8, House of Commons, III, 629–30. This is only a partial list of re-elections from the period 1386–1422. For the full list see House of Commons, I, 240.

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9 Politics and Patronage in Lynn, 1399–1416 Kate Parker

During World War II a manuscript book was unexpectedly returned to King’s Lynn’s archives. This volume had first been recorded among the town’s official papers in 1446 but by the nineteenth century, when the first systematic cataloguing of the archives was done and the first transcriptions and translations of their contents were published, it had disappeared. Still unpublished today, William Asshebourne’s Book comprises 129 folios of personal records and memoranda compiled by Lynn’s town clerk between 1408 and 1417. These years cover a time when the port experienced a period of protracted unrest which has interested many historians, not least because Lynn during those years has been described as the sole example of non-burgesses participating in town governance in the whole of fifteenth-century England. This article will establish the value of William Asshebourne’s Book in explaining these apparent idiosyncrasies and show how the Lancastrian usurpation precipitated internal problems within the town’s élite, and then exacerbated them as Lynn’s wealth and position attracted the attention of opposing factions within the national Lancastrian hierarchy. Modern-day King’s Lynn bears little relationship in size, status or wealth to medieval Lynn. In 1377 its tax-paying inhabitants had numbered 3,217;



  



I am grateful to Dr Stephen Church for his helpful comments on an early draft of this paper. The disputes and their context are all described more fully in K. M. Parker, ‘Lordship, Liberty and the Pursuit of Politics in Lynn, 1370–1420’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of East Anglia, 2004). King’s Lynn Corporation Archives, KL, C10/2, hereinafter cited as ‘Asshebourne’. KL, C7/3/223. Present-day King’s Lynn was Bishop’s Lynn before the sixteenth century. I have used ‘Lynn’ throughout this article to avoid confusion, since Asshebourne and his contemporaries called their town ‘Linne’ or ‘Lenne’ among themselves and still today the inhabitants think of their home as ‘Lynn’ and themselves as ‘Linnets’. A representative list would include Historical Manuscripts Commission, Eleventh Report: Appx. Part iii: The Manuscripts of the Corporations of Southampton and King’s Lynn (London,1887), hereinafter cited as HMCR, pp. xiii–xv; A. S. Green, Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1896), II, 413; J. Tait, The Medieval English Borough (Manchester, 1936), pp. 318–20; S. Rigby, ‘Government, Power and Authority 1300–1540’, in Cambridge Urban History of Britain, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 2000), I, 291–312 and 307; A. Goodman, Margery Kempe and her World (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 21–48, esp. pp. 35–6.

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Politics and Patronage in Lynn this figure has been used, variously, to estimate a pre-plague population of between 5,700 and 9,000, falling to perhaps 5,500 post 1349. In the 1334 Lay Subsidy Lynn was taxed as the eleventh richest provincial town, and the Poll Tax of 1377 suggested it was still the seventh most populous. Such bald figures do not testify to the importance of the port which had become significant in regional, national and international trade. Indeed, Lynn was important enough in national terms when Asshebourne was writing his book to warrant the attention of two kings, two princes, the dukes of Bedford and Clarence, Thomas Beaufort duke of Exeter, the archbishop of Canterbury, and four bishops of Norwich in their efforts to effect compromise and peace between its warring factions. The town had been founded in the last years of the eleventh century by the first bishop of Norwich on the edge of his estate at Gaywood, at the southeast corner of The Wash. By the end of the thirteenth century its hinterland comprised nine populous and productive counties, served through an extensive river system, as far west as Warwickshire and as far south as Bedford. In 1204 the borough had been chartered by the bishop. By then its inhabitants had already become wealthy and influential and just six months later the merchants acquired their own charter from the king, for three palfreys and 100 marks (£66 13s 4d). With two different charters it was probably inevitable that rights to control within the town were always hotly contested. Kings usually supported the bishop, but not always, and Lynn men tended to view their relationship with the crown as potential leverage against episcopal control which had become increasingly irksome. The town had been rallied against the bishop at least three times in the thirteenth century, in the early fourteenth century, and between 1349–52. His lordship was frequently resented. Within the borough power was exercised by a mayor and council of twenty-four in conjunction with the alderman of the leading merchant gild, the gild of the Holy Trinity. The gild was very wealthy and acted as the town’s bankers, supplying capital to its members to support their trading activities, but also lending large sums to the mayor and community to support their corporate endeavours on the town’s behalf. For example, its loans paid for royal tenths and other imposts, allowing personal contributions to fall into arrears and be paid back at more convenient times. It even underwrote suits against their own lord bishop. In 1377, notoriously, bishop



V. Parker, The Making of Kings Lynn (Chichester, 1970), p. 1; P. Richards, King’s Lynn (Chichester, 1990), p. 73.  H. Clarke and A. Carter, Excavations in King’s Lynn 1963–1970, Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph Series 7 (London, 1977), p. 2.  H. C. Darby, The Medieval Fenland (Newton Abbot, 1940, repr.1974), p. 15.  An overview of these events, and relevant documentary sources is given in D. Owen, The Making of King’s Lynn, Records of Social and Economic History n.s. 9 (London, 1984) (hereinafter cited as MKL), pp.1–86.

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Kate Parker Henry Despenser was attacked when he visited the town and £160 was borrowed by the community from the gild to help it successfully ride out the subsequent storm. The alderman always appointed the first four members of the twelve-strong committee electing the mayor: by custom these were not of the potentiores, the other eight members being chosen by those first four appointees from a narrower, élite group . This convenient arrangement generally produced no difficulties, for the mayor was invariably a member of the gild. Nevertheless, he was usually only elected for an annual term, whereas the alderman was elected for life, or at his pleasure, and all gild members swore obedience to him. Moreover, the alderman was in control of the money. If a conflict of interests should arise, as it did in the early fifteenth century, it was clear that the alderman could wield the greater influence. Throughout the fourteenth century a sophisticated procedure was used to elect the mayor and other officials which ensured the council included men who were not necessarily among the town’s élite. Sometime between 1395 and 1399, however, these normal procedures for electing Lynn’s internal government were altered resulting in a self-perpetuating oligarchy, very different from the former variable and more widely derived membership. By the time Henry Bolingbroke landed in Yorkshire in the summer of 1399, Lynn was led by a narrow clique of powerful and wealthy burgesses who no longer had recourse to any wider constituency in deciding borough policy. The new reign began on a wave of optimism. For nearly thirty years Henry Despenser (bishop of Norwich 1370–1406) had controlled the wealthy, sophisticated and entrepreneurial merchants as a persistent and unwelcome restraint. As has been mentioned, in 1377 he had provoked a full-scale riot against his person, apparently supported by members of the élite.10 It was widely known that there was a long-standing antipathy between the houses of Despenser and Lancaster which had persisted throughout the fourteenth century.11 Accordingly, in 1399 the town – entirely contrary to the wishes of its lord bishop and the commands of the Duke of York – threw its money and support behind the usurper, subsequently borrowing to that end over £50 from the seemingly compliant Gild.12 Envoys were sent to meet Bolingbroke at Chester, in what must have been seen as an unprecedented opportunity to exchange the inflexible control of the bishop for Lancastrian patronage.13 10

The St. Albans Chronicle 1406–1420, ed. V. H. Galbraith (Manchester, 1927), pp.139–40. R. Allington-Smith, Henry Despenser (Dereham, 2003), pp.122–3. 12 In this article the term ‘town’ will be used as it was in contemporary documents, that is to represent the borough as a political entity, such as in ‘the three rolls of petitions of the rights of the town of Lynn towards the Prussians’ (KL, C6/3) rather than sociologically to describe the general population as distinct from the oligarchy, such as persists in the phrase ‘town and gown’. 13 KL, C39/42; the usurpation meant the greatest landholdings in the county would be in future in Henry’s hands, with the acquisition of the county’s crown interests. In 1403, Henry got back four Lancastrian hundreds which Richard II had given to the duke of 11

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Politics and Patronage in Lynn At first this plan seemed to be working well: the bishop was implicated in the revolt of the Ducetti in 1400 and Lynn and the bishop’s other temporalities were confiscated.14 Henry of Nottingham, later a judge in King’s Bench but then a Lancastrian lawyer, was put in to act as town clerk, and with this close connection to the seat of power, the community embarked on a law suit against the bishop. Both King Henry and Henry of Monmouth wrote letters supporting the town in this endeavour, and the king initiated an inquiry to see if Lynn might be royal property after all.15 The community’s costs in pursuing these matters were enormous, and would have been impossible without the continued financial support of the gild. Eventually, the ‘community of Lynn’ would owe the gild £453 9s 2d loaned to underwrite the venture.16 The town’s livelihood was entirely reliant on the health of its trade: Lynn acted as an entrepôt at the mouth of one of the largest river systems in the country. It also had important trading connections with the eastern Baltic, particularly in Danzig (present-day Gdansk) where Lynn men had set up their own trading community and factory. It has been estimated that Lynn had taken over 80%–90% of Anglo-Prussian commerce, and made significant inroads into the retail trade as well.17 Henry offered the Linnets the possibility of improved trading relations with the Hanse; the king was a known Prussophile whose earlier experiences with the Teutonic Knights (the lords of Danzig) were apparently remembered fondly, and led him to describe himself as ‘eyn kint der von Pruscen’.18 When Earl of Derby he had himself sailed to Danzig from Lynn in 1390.19 It would have been easy for Lynn men to persuade themselves that by cultivating the usurper he would be able to assist them in gaining both greater ascendancy in domestic governance and increased commercial stability abroad. Within six years the plan had foundered and it must have been viewed by even the most enthusiastic proponent

14

15 16 17

18 19

York in 1397. Prince Henry retrieved Castle Rising for the duchy of Cornwall in the same year. E. L. T. John, ‘The Parliamentary Representation of Norfolk and Suffolk 1377–1422’ (unpublished M. Phil. thesis, Nottingham, 1959), pp. 21–5 and 70; H. Castor, The King, the Crown and the Duchy of Lancaster (Oxford, 2000), p. 70. A. Rogers, ‘Henry IV and the Revolt of the Earls’, History Today 18 (1968), 277–83; Wylie, Henry IV, I, 110; T. John, ‘Sir Thomas Erpingham, East Anglian Society and the Dynastic Revolution of 1399’, Norfolk Archaeology 35 (1970), 96–108 (p. 99). CPR, 1401–05, p. 67; CCR, 1402–05, p. 30; Anglo Norman Letters and Petitions, ed. M. D. Legge (Oxford, 1941), p. 45, no. 1 and p. 52, no. 8. HMCR, pp. 228–30. T. H. Lloyd, England and the German Hanse (Cambridge, 1991), p.108; MKL, p. 278; and also S. Jenks, ‘Lynn and the Hanse: Trade and Relations in the Middle Ages’, in Essays in Hanseatic History: The King’s Lynn Symposium 1998, ed. K. Friedland and P. Richards (Dereham, 2005), pp. 94–114 (p. 100). A. Tuck, ‘Henry IV and Chivalry’, in Henry IV, ed. Dodd and Biggs, pp. 55–74 (pp. 58–61 and 70); Wylie, Henry IV, IV, 9 and 74. Expeditions to Prussia and the Holy Land made by Henry, Earl of Derby, 1390–91, 1392–93, ed. L. Toulmin Smith (London, 1894), pp. 151–63.

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Kate Parker with a jaundiced eye. From the start of the new reign a state of undeclared war persisted in the North Sea between English, French and Scots seafarers, and even with the Hanseatic shipping which strove to continue trading with Henry’s enemies. The Lancastrian regime proved unable to resolve these problems: damage to the external trade networks led to diminishing income and customs’ revenue, and rebellions at home provoked by widespread political instability prompted the government to intensify taxation on what sources of revenue remained in order to fund military countermeasures.20 Lynn merchants were not alone in their disaffection: the Northern Rebellion in June 1405 was in part attributed to the support of merchants there.21 Two casualties of that rebellion had local Norfolk connections: Thomas Mowbray, the Earl Marshall, who was summarily executed at York with Archbishop Scrope, and Thomas Bardolf who escaped to Scotland with the earl of Northumberland. A leading member of the Trinity Gild, Sir John Ingoldisthorpe, had been a life-time retainer of Mowbray.22 Bardolf had only recently attained his majority and come into his estates. He had his caput at Wormegay castle, some eight miles (thirteen kilometres) south of Lynn and was the last of a local magnate family which had close connections with Lynn, members of the family being buried in its Carmelite friary. In July Bardolf’s estates were confiscated and transferred to Thomas Beaufort, duke of Exeter who, from 1403, had been Admiral of the North, naturally a position of great significance in Lynn. The written confirmation of this act is dated 7 October 1405.23 That same day a riot erupted in Lynn, continuing for three days, apparently sparked by shipments of grain being sent to Bordeaux.24 Some three hundred people were reported to have marched around the town, ringing a bell, threatening the mayor and demanding that the corn be unloaded and sold below cost. It is extremely difficult to know if this was genuinely a food riot since grain shipments through Lynn between March and Michaelmas that year had already amounted to a higher quantity than had been shipped through the port since 1304/5, or would be again until 1468/9.25 The event was the subject of a judicial inquiry in King’s Bench, and the alleged ringleaders were imprisoned in the Marshalsea, only to be released later sine die 20 21 22 23 24

25

A. Steele, ‘English Government Finance 1377–1413’, EHR 51 (1936), 29–51 (pp. 40–1). P. McNiven, ‘The Betrayal of Archbishop Scrope’, BJRL 54 (1971), 173–213 (pp. 182 and 185). KL, C5/3; John, ‘Parliamentary Representation’, p. 25. CCR, 1405–9, pp. 56–7; CPR, 1405–8, p.105. KB 27/580, Red, mm. 5, 10. This was a normal autumn activity in Lynn, the centre for the collection and shipment of corn to Bordeaux, an area specialising in wine production for the English market, and relying on these regular shipments to make up the shortfall in its local food supply, MKL, pp. 50–1. N. S. B. Gras, The Evolution of the Early English Corn Market from the Twelfth Century to the Eighteenth Century (London, 1915), appx C, pp. 289–91.

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Politics and Patronage in Lynn following a petition to parliament, each having acquired mainpernors from Norwich and Lincolnshire in the sum of 100 marks. Moreover, the recording clerk was careful to include the fact that the rout was led by a stranger (extraneo) who played a ‘tuba sufflante’, terrorising the inhabitants. Could the term denote bagpipes?26 If a connection with the exiled Bardolf, by this time in Edinburgh, were being hinted at in this otherwise completely trivial detail carefully noted by the court clerk, authorities both in Lynn and London may have been gravely concerned by the treasonable implications. Whatever may have been the truth, the result of this riot was to estrange the king from the élite in Lynn. The next summer when Henry came to Lynn to see Princess Philippa embark for her marriage to the king of Denmark, he sided with the bishop of Norwich. He reissued an ancient episcopal document, the Composition of 1309, the culmination of an earlier contretemps with a bishop of Norwich, which reiterated the most unfavourable position of the town vis à vis its lord. Further, the king added an indenture which concluded that any future actions taken against the bishop would attract a 500 mark (£333 6s 8d) fine, payable to the king, and expulsion from the town.27 The indenture is dated 11 August 1406 and within a fortnight Bishop Despenser died. By then, the efforts of the town’s leaders to displace the bishop had been brought to nothing, and all that remained were the monstrous debts. And those debts, it could be argued with the benefit of hindsight, had been incurred seeking closer ties with the king who had ruined trade, brought a well-known local family to disgrace, and executed a prince of the church without trial. Moreover, on Despenser’s death the local chapter at Norwich cathedral had speedily elected their prior, Alexander Tottington, as his successor. King Henry would have none of it, and imprisoned Tottington at Windsor until the pope, supporting the convent against the king, appointed Tottington in January 1407. After such treatment, the new bishop was unlikely to feel warm support for his king, as subsequent events show. In the meantime, the control of Lynn was given to the Admiral, Thomas Beaufort.28 Early in 1408 Thomas Bardolf died in battle with Henry’s army at Bramham Moor. Subsequently his corpse was quartered, and a portion sent to Lynn to be hung over the South Gates.29 If there had been any doubt before about the penalties for treason this must have been a chilling reminder. Thomas Beaufort had Wormegay castle converted from a life grant to an hereditable estate, and stayed there on a regular basis.30 From 1405 the estate had been managed

26 27 28 29 30

Professor Goodman has translated this as ‘trumpet’ although the word ‘tuba’ alone could suffice for this, A. Goodman, Margery Kempe and her World, p. 37. Asshebourne, fol. 13. Norwich Cathedral Church, City and Diocese, ed. I. Atherton et al. (London, 1996), p. 290. KL, C39/46; CPR, 1405–8, p. 488. Not the town’s main gates, but those leading to Wormegay. KL, C39/46; CPR, 1405–1408, p. 488; Wylie, Henry IV, IV, 302.

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Kate Parker for Beaufort by Sir Thomas Erpingham, the leading Lancastrian in Norfolk. Erpingham had gone into exile with Henry in 1397, and was at the hub of the Lancastrian nexus, but at this time he transferred his sphere of activities from the king to the household of the Prince of Wales.31 That summer the king became gravely ill, and it was feared between 19 June and 12 July that he was actually dying.32 It must have been at this point that the town decided that King Henry was unlikely to survive, and Prince Henry (represented locally by the influential Erpingham), and his allies the Beauforts, would in all probability be in charge very shortly. Under these circumstances, the enormous outlays expended would have appeared not only wasteful and negligent, but as having contributed to a serious deterioration in relationships with the bishop. Moreover, Prince Henry was a devout man who might not have looked favourably on Lynn’s overt struggles against its episcopal lord.33 It was time to effect a rapprochement with the bishop. They appointed as town clerk William Asshebourne, formerly one of Despenser’s clerks. In July 1399 Asshebourne had been accused of calling Henry lV a false traitor, saying that those who prayed for him were worthy to be hanged.34 It is hard to imagine that the town would have employed such a person in the prominent post of community clerk if they thought the king could have been persuaded to take any further interest in their struggles. Relations between town and the bishop’s familia were cool. When Asshebourne took up his new position a former colleague, William Castleacre, conjuring a metaphor from the Acts of the Apostles remarked tartly ‘Once you were Paul, now you are Saul.’35 This anecdote, recorded by Asshebourne himself, neatly encapsulates the sour relations between the bishop’s household and the town at the time. Widespread crop failure in 1408 meant that grain shipments from England were forbidden, and the local economy suffered severely. The Trinity Gild to all intents and purposes went bankrupt, the loan account for 1409 amounted to an astonishing £1213 18s 7d.36 Matters finally came to a head in 1411. In that year, as if all the foregoing had not been sufficiently devastating to Lynn’s economy, the king asked the town to supply an additional chevaunce or monetary gift of 200 marks (£133 6s 8d). The elderly mayor, Robert Botekesham, who had previously been mayor in 1403 at the height of anti-episcopal 31 32 33

34 35 36

P. McNiven, ‘Prince Henry and the English Political Crisis of 1412’, History 65 (1980), 1–17 (p. 1). Wylie, Henry IV, IV, 159. Both sides in the quarrel made sure that outsiders remained in the dark about its origins. In 1417 Henry V could admit that he had still ‘… been unable to induce the parties to compromise, negotiate and make a final agreement … or to obtain true knowledge of the cause’. CIM, 1399–1422, no. 517, pp. 289–92 (p. 289). S. Walker: ‘Rumour, Sedition and Popular Protest’, Past & Present 166 (2000), 31–65 (pp. 32–3). ‘quondam Paulus, modo Saulus’, KL, C10/2, fol. 18. HMCR, pp. 228–230.

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Politics and Patronage in Lynn action, and who unusually at this time of financial crisis was also alderman of the Gild, on 11 July petitioned Thomas Beaufort for aid in allaying it.37 Thomas Beaufort was of immense influence in Lynn: not only was he a local landowner, both at Wormegay and Castle Acre, but had been Admiral of the North for eight years, and most recently chancellor of England. On 1 August Beaufort oversaw an arrangement by which leading members of the town undertook to pay Sir John Ingoldisthorpe just £900 in instalments in reimbursement of £1,000 to be levied by him in Norfolk.38 Could Beaufort have been persuaded to use his position to extract this payment of the £100 balance from the already tainted gild member? As a former life retainer of the traitor, Thomas Mowbray, the knight could have been successfully bullied by Beaufort to bear this extraordinary cost, which would have been a most timely windfall for the cash-short leaders of the town. Botekesham died almost immediately after sealing this recognisance, leaving the town to elect both leaders of the town, the alderman and the mayor. By 12 August Edmund Belleyetter was acting as alderman. He, too, had been mayor three times before (the last time during 1399–1400) and alderman twice, but by this time was over seventy years old and in 1406 had already acquired royal letters patent of exemption from public office, when he was described as sixty-eight years old and ‘greatly broken by age’. His appointment was necessarily only a gild stop-gap. Roger Galyon was elected to the mayoralty, in controversial circumstances, later described as ‘with force and arms in manner of war … with a great multitude of burgesses and others …’.39 This description gives no hint of the wide discussion which had already taken place regarding the upcoming election. Archbishop Arundel (significantly, not Beaufort) had already written with regard to Lynn to the urban authorities of Oxford to enquire about their electoral system, possibly at the behest of the alderman, Edmund Belleyetter. (Oxford’s charter was the basis of Lynn’s own, and it had been established from 1204 that in any case of doubt clarification was to be sought there.) Their reply was no help as it described Oxford’s own system of election, different from both the old and the new proposed systems in Lynn, and in any case was only written on 29 August 1411 which was customarily the mayoral election day in Lynn.40 Very unusually Galyon had not held any borough appointments before, but he had had several crown posts in the port, and one can assume that he was personally known to Beaufort from those roles. He was to hold the office for two years, being subsequently elected for a second term. Galyon and his adherents, who for simplicity’s sake will be termed the innovators henceforward, seem to have taken the successful financial 37

Asshebourne, fol. 21v. CPR, 1409–1413, p. 240. 39 CIM, 1399–1422, p. 290. 40 KL, C4/6. 38

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Kate Parker squeezing of Ingoldisthorpe as a precedent. They now demanded that the five former mayors in post between 1399 and 1406 repay £457 19s 7d, a sum very close to that which had been loaned to the borough to pursue the policy against the bishop, £453 9s 2d. It does not seem too far-fetched to see this action as the efforts of gild members to foreclose on a huge outstanding debt, which the borough was completely incapable of repaying. This action had the added advantage of not only potentially refloating the gild, to the benefit of all gild members, within and without the town, but also distanced the current leaders of the town from those who had spearheaded the moves to sunder relationships with the bishop. More significantly still, for those who consider that the disruptions in the town were class based ructions fomented by the lower orders, Mayor Galyon was also elected alderman of the élite Trinity Gild by December 1412, and held the two posts coterminously during the period of most contentious debate.41 Galyon employed an outside auditor to go through the last twelve years’ borough accounts looking for anti-episcopal expenditure, and wherever he discerned payments for this purpose, they were crossed out and a rider added that they were disallowed because they were By the conspiracy of … [the] former mayors of the town of Lynn Episcopi on the personal decision and individual wishes of their alliance … against Henry Despenser, the late Bishop of Norwich and Lord of the same town, … without and against the consent and agreement of the burgesses and non-burgesses of the assembly of the same town, dishonestly, unjustly, inordinately and wantonly.42

The innovators were able to claim that these payments were made ‘without and against the consent and agreement of the burgesses and non burgesses’ because the Composition of 1309, which king Henry had agreed to reissue in 1406 on behalf of the bishop, stated that all financial matters had to be agreed by all three status groups within the town, i.e. the potentiores, mediocres and inferiores. It had also stated that the town government could not force a payment for the freedom of the town. As has been seen by 1399 all this had been swept aside and an unelected oligarchy had installed itself to run the town in conjunction with the mayor, still elected according to custom. This Composition of 1309, which recently had been ignored where at all possible as giving the bishop uncomfortable rights over the running of the town, suddenly became a weapon in the hands of the innovators, and an English language version was made to give it the widest circulation.43 Moreover, the wording of the denunciations on the accounts was not arbi41

KL, C6/3, m. 7. KL, C39/45; see also KL, C39/43 and KL, C39/44 where similar disclaimers are appended in the same hand. Reference to the auditor’s role occurs in KL, C39/49. 43 KL, C10/6. 42

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Politics and Patronage in Lynn trarily composed. William Asshebourne had copied into his book the ‘Judgements of Nottingham’, to which he then added his own comment ‘whence it appears the misery arose’ (unde patet dolor oriebatur). These ‘Judgements of Nottingham’ relate to the examination made for Richard II at Nottingham Castle back in 1387, concerning the actions of the Appellants against his government. Richard used them to good effect in the parliament of 1397/8 to accuse the Appellants of treason. He had had a similar problem then to that which faced the innovators later in Lynn: Richard had wanted to accuse of treason men to whom he had already given full pardons – in other words to override a previously enacted indemnity. The ruse devised by Richard’s legal team accused the Appellants of ‘an accroachment of power’ and actions ‘done without authority and against the will and liberty of the king and the right of his crown’, remarkably similar in tenor to ‘against … the … lord of the same town … without and against the consent and agreement of the burgesses and non-burgesses …’. Asshebourne copied the Composition of 1309 and the Judgements consecutively into his book, suggesting he viewed them as jointly relevant to the town’s troubles during this time. The former mayors’ opinion of these moves is embodied in testimony given to an inquiry finally convened in 1417, in which they described their opponents acting ‘to release common debts of the town, in perpetual derogation of its liberties and to the ruin of the burgesses’, and added that ‘the … good burgesses and mayors elected from of old are seriously diminished and maliciously destroyed so far as is possible’.44 It is difficult at this distance to assess the value of the demand, but one multiplier would put the sum at the equivalent of £1,750,000.45 Alternatively, at 4 pence per day, it represents 27,000 working days. Understandably, the mayors vehemently rebuffed the accusation, saying every penny had been spent in their official capacities, and counterclaimed £380 which they said had been spent on behalf of the borough from their own pockets. The need to defend this presumption, that mayors were exempt from charges incurred whilst in office, brought the support of the other members of the twenty-four, those potentiores who might have hoped to be elected mayor in the future; should this defence fail they could be held liable for any subsequently disputed expenditure. It was not necessary to have any class-based antagonisms for this ‘mayoral party’ to feel bitterly opposed to the innovators’ suggestions. It was obvious that the former mayors were not going to capitulate without a fight, and so immediately after Galyon was sworn in as mayor on 29 September 1411 he held a congregation at which it was decided to confer 44 45

CIM, 1399–1422, pp. 290–1. Using a priest’s stipend as a multiplier, averaging £17,000 p.a. in 2003 (I am grateful to the Rev. Jan McFarlane, chaplain to the Bishop of Norwich, for this information), and averaging £6 c. 1400. English Historical Documents 1327–1485, ed. A. R. Myers (London, 1969), p. 729.

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Kate Parker with Beaufort, the chancellor. The borough account reveals that on 2 October envoys were sent to speak to him at Walsingham, and thence to Sheringham, Cromer and Norwich. The Chancellor possibly had a hand in securing royal backing for the innovators, for a charter of privileges and liberties was granted in London on 10 October. Moreover, on 6 November the town received a royal mandate which reinstated the former (pre-1395) method of election of the twenty-four councillors.46 Nevertheless, the dispute seemed intractable, so they went to arbitration. On 15 December twenty-three potentiores bound themselves for £100 each, eighty mediocres for £50 each and fifty-one inferiores non burgenses for £5 11s 2d each to abide by the results of their own arbitration procedure. They empanelled eighteen men, seven potentiores, five mediocres and six inferiores non burgenses, to decide the whole matter. Barely a week after they originally sealed these submissions Thomas Beaufort was dismissed as chancellor. Henry lV and Archbishop Arundel were back in charge, and their supporters among the mayoral faction could hope for royal support. The tensions seem to have relaxed somewhat. It was only on 8 April 1412 that a member of the arbitration panel, one of the former mayors, Thomas Waterden, with two others unnamed working as a sub-committee agreed that a quorum of the arbitration panel would suffice, so long as it numbered no less than ten, because they had found it so difficult to arrange for all to meet for deliberation. The quorum included one potentior (not Waterden) three mediocres and six inferiores non burgenses. The latter have usually been assumed to be the down-trodden artisans, rebelling against the ‘unbridled’ rapaciousness of the élite.47 However, one of the six inferiores, William Hallyate, had previously worked as the bishop’s bailiff in Lynn, was also a crown appointed collector, merchant and member of the Trinity Gild.48 Another, John Tilney, was a lawyer who subsequently was employed as clerk by bishop Courtenay of Norwich (1413–1415) and by 1416 by Thomas Beaufort himself in the Court of Admiralty, becoming his lieutenant there and becoming controller of customs and subsidies in Lynn and Gt Yarmouth.49 Both Hallyate and Tilney were elected Members of Parliament for the borough in 1413. A third, John Cressingham had been involved in the 1405 riot and imprisoned in the Marshalsea, but obtained a mainpernor and was released sine die. It is obvious that in contemporary Lynn the term inferior non burgensis had an entirely different connotation from the more usually understood ‘non-burgess lower orders’. This must relate to the fact that since the Composition of 1309 the town had been unable to force the freedom on anyone working in the borough, and so those who had no incentive to 46

KL, C39/48; Asshebourne, fols. 17 and 24v. HMCR, p. xv. 48 CIM, 1392–1399, p. 39 n. 81 and p. 255 n. 17; CIM, 1399–1422, p. 290; CCR, 1392–96, pp. 338–9; CFR, 1405–1413, pp. 192–3; House of Commons, II, 275. 49 House of Commons, II, 618. 47

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Politics and Patronage in Lynn belong to the borough bureaucracy, for whatever reason, had no need to do so. Accordingly there were individuals in the town, well-educated administrators or well-heeled artisans, and even merchants, who had never been burgesses. Indeed, the main players among the innovators were either gild members or recruited by the town/gild to assist them in securing the repayment of the loans. The fact that some of them nonetheless were described in this idiosyncratic way as inferiores non burgenses may indicate a wish among the innovators to fudge matters, so as to appear to conform with the legal strictures of the Composition of 1309, whilst actually having no intention of introducing a wider democracy. The result of the arbitration of such a quorum was inevitable: the mayors were required to repay the debts and their requests for reimbursement were denied. (The constitution was amended as well although this article is not the place to elaborate on those details.) Asshebourne recorded that these new arrangements were published in May and confirmed as late as July.50 The true enormity of this result seems to have dawned on the mayoral party only slowly. Being both unwilling, and almost certainly unable, to meet the debts they were now obligated to pay up £100 each for not accepting the result of the arbitration. They travelled to London to confer with archbishop Arundel and were advised they should proceed with legal cases which would firstly prove that Galyon’s mayoralty had been illegal from the first (and therefore all his actions unenforceable), and secondly, as it was apparently obvious that Galyon was imminently to be re-elected mayor for a second term, to force him to attend court in London in the quindene of Michaelmas, so that he could not be sworn in for his second term. All these ruses failed. Then the mayoral party took up proceedings in chancery, and there the archbishop decided that they should have their day in court in November. On that occasion Asshebourne tells us Arundel himself broke the tallies (the obligations to pay £100 each) of four of the mayoral party. The decision on that occasion was that all the obligations would be rescinded, so long as the mayoral party desisted from taking out cases against the innovators ‘from the beginning of the world to the day of judgement’.51 The compromise was sealed with kisses by Edmund Belleyetter and others of the mayoral party on one side, and John Tilney, John Bilney and William Hallyate and others on the part of the innovators – in the presence of Archbishop Arundel and a throng of venerable judges, William Gascoigne, William Thirnyng, John Cockayn, Hugh Hankford, Robert Tirwhit, John Colpepir, Robert Hille and yet others unnamed.52 Asshebourne recorded the events of a congregation held afterwards, on Christmas Eve, 1412

50

KL, C2/27; Asshebourne, fols. 9v–10. KL, C6/3, m. 7v. 52 Asshebourne, fol. 35. 51

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Kate Parker On which day was read the judgement or Latin decretal by the lord king as appears in the second great volume signed by the great seal of England with green wax, by Master John Tilney, bachelor in laws, before the mayor and community, both in Latin and the mother tongue, from word to word interpreting and declaring and in the style, condition and form of sealing acquitting and handing back of the obligations etc., upon which John Spycer [one of the mayoral party] with a cheerful face signed all the agreements with his own hand.53

Roger Galyon apparently found all this very hard to bear; having failed to exact repayment on the grand scale, he foreclosed on smaller loans taken out personally from the gild by members of the mayoral party. Asshebourne recorded a very bad tempered altercation later that same evening: at length it was agreed that the loans would be repaid by the Feast of Holy Trinity in 1413, the main feast day of the gild. This is pertinent, since those same members of the mayoral faction were later to describe how on Trinity Sunday 1413 their opponents Hallyate, Bilney, Petipas and Tilney came and ‘violently and maliciously made an assault by night on the brethren of the gild’. Nothing more is known of the event. Perhaps it represents angry words from frustrated gild members over the failure of the former mayors to repay even these outstanding loans? The gild had still failed to secure the financial well being of their bank and still blamed the old mayors for causing this disaster. Besides, since Christmas Eve, 1412, when the compromise had been met ‘hillari vultu’, the political climate had changed once again. Henry lV had died on 20 March, Prince Henry had ascended the throne, dismissed Arundel, and consequently the Beauforts were once again in power. Bishop Tottington, too, had died on 28 April and was succeeded by Richard ­ Courtenay. Difficult and partisan though Tottington had been (he had overtly favoured the innovators), he was at least a known, local man. Courtenay was an unknown quantity, beyond being an aristocrat, a close friend of the new king, and presumably an intimate of the Beauforts, too. These changes provided encouragement to the innovators: John Tilney and William Hallyate attended the new king’s first parliament and were able to re-establish the new arrangements through confirmation of the ‘charter of the liberties and privileges of Lynn’.54 From then on the mayoral party decided to undermine the validity of Galyon’s decisions in the gildhall by withdrawing its support and by boycotting the general congregations and community meetings. On 29 August the innovators achieved the election of another of their party as mayor elect – Bartholomew Petipas. Within six days the town was unexpectedly visited by ‘the most dread Lord Thomas, son of the king, duke of Clarence’, the

53 54

KL, C6/3, m. 7v. KL, C6/3, m. 13.

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Politics and Patronage in Lynn supporter and favourite son of the late king, – and no friend of the new king – with his duchess and three hundred horses. This was a formidable, even intimidatory, array of power, and one which may have forced the town to recall who among them, in the recent past, had been most closely allied with this particular affinity. The answer was, of course, the former mayors. The news of this imminent event was brought to Mayor Galyon as he sat in congregation in the gildhall. As had become usual, the potentiores – with one exception – were absent. Galyon asked those present what should the town present as a gift. To which the response was given that the potentiores who ought to have been present to grant such a gift were not present …55

Those attending eventually decided to present £20 to the duke, and 20 marks to his lady. However, the problem for them all was that to maintain the dignity of the borough, the mayor and the potentiores together should welcome the visiting party and present their gifts, no division among the top echelon being admissible. Galyon was forced to meet the former mayors in ‘le Wolhous Staple’ (at the other end of town from the gildhall) to explain what was about to happen, what had been decided and to ask for their concurrence. This was a symbolic victory at least for the mayoral party who had made Galyon’s position and status entirely dependent on their good will. Nevertheless, the lobbying and politicking continued unabated. In February 1414 the mayor, Bartholomew Petipas, wrote home (probably from London) to his ‘dere and right trusty friends’. He assured them ‘atte makyng of this letter we ben in helthe of body blessed by God ne emprisoned as your adversaries han sayd in Lenne and that hegly coste our purs’. He asked for more funds, adding ‘now is the tyme to putten forthe his hond of help to have alle our Wille and ellys to perpetual schame and long durand …’. He felt their opponents’ cause was faltering ‘for meche schame is sayd of hem in the kynges hous and in London among the astates’.56 Beaufort was persuaded to write to Bishop Courtenay commending the good disposition of the town of Lynn, and begging him to be a good lord to them.57 The bishop followed this up with a letter urging them to support the Admiral, whom the king had requested to arbitrate among them.58 Beaufort wrote a week later to his ‘treschiers et enteirment bien amez’, promising that he would work with such diligence to bring peace and ‘tiel accurde’ among the factions, ‘que serra plesance au dieu et a vous tous pees et tranquillite pour tous jours’.59 The only problem was that the mayoral party had no faith in him and it seems 55

KL, C6/3, m.16. Asshebourne, fol .79. 57 Asshebourne, fol. 31. 58 Asshebourne, fol. 31v. 59 Asshebourne, fol. 30v. 56

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Kate Parker they had made their own plans for a coup at the next mayor-making only six weeks away (which once again seemed to be going the way of their opponents) involving armed intervention by the sheriff of Norfolk and various outside gentry. Unfortunately, the plan was discovered, and the innovators barricaded themselves within the town, breaking down the external bridges and successfully denying admission to the town of the armed parties outside and, because the mayoral party were in possession of the gildhall, carrying on the election of the new mayor in the Austin friary.60 The new mayor, John Lakynghith, was without doubt a potentior. Both he and another potentior, Ralph Bedingham, had been relatively neutral, attending the town congregations when others refused to do so.61 But he was old and infirm, and he died before the end of his term. Protocol directed that the Alderman, by now Robert Brunham, one of the mayoral party, should be acting mayor until election day. That August 1415, an innovator, John Bilney was elected to the mayoralty, but at Michaelmas his swearingin was to witness complete uproar and riot when the Duke of Bedford sent letters demanding that Robert Brunham should continue as mayor, despite the validity of the election process, on pain of £1,000 fines on both Alderman Brunham and mayor-elect Bilney. Asshebourne’s lively account of the occasion, penned within hours of its occurrence, puts all blame for the events on outsiders, and exonerates both mayoral party and innovators.62 Still, the town was under no circumstances prepared to accept Robert Brunham as mayor, and, according to Asshebourne, Bilney had already stated during the height of the riot that he never wanted to be mayor in the first place. So on 18 October Bedford sent a letter close to the town insisting one Thomas Hunte (potentior) would be mayor ‘any loud objection to the contrary not withstanding’. However, the king’s representative had become aware that feelings had become justifiably incensed and so a more conciliatory note was added: ‘It is not intended that this command or the execution thereof shall be made a precedent, or shall tend to disparage the said liberties and privileges in time to come.’63 This intervention by Bedford was worse than any interference they had suffered at the hands of Bishop Despenser. All that any Linnets had ever wanted was freedom of action to pursue their lives and livelihoods, preferably backed by loans from the Gild. During that winter hard lessons were learned, and a joint plan of action was concocted. A letter was sent to the king placing all the blame for the unrest on the new constitution, with no mention of debts, the lawsuits against the bishop, or even the composition

60

CIM, 1399–1422, no. 517, pp. 289–91 (pp. 290–1). KL, C6/3. 62 Asshebourne, fols. 105v–109, transcribed in MKL, pp. 395–401. 63 CPR, 1413–1416, p. 411. 61

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Politics and Patronage in Lynn of 1309.64 Henry V was not at all convinced: he noted that those innovations had been put in place, and underwritten by his father and himself, because of grave disquiet about the previous oligarchic procedures. In the preamble to the inquiry finally held the following year the king explained that he had no idea what was at the root of the quarrels.65 Nevertheless, as requested he wrote to annul the new arrangements and re-instate the time-honoured old procedures. Next, having the king’s letter to hand, the factions had to agree among themselves that this should be done. Accordingly, Asshebourne recorded that two months after receipt of the king’s letter, in August 1416, the innovators formally put their case at a meeting in the chapter house of the Austin friary. After long discussion it was decided to abandon the new procedures because they were ‘prolix and incomprehensible’.66 Later that month Asshebourne described an unimpeachably correct election before a visiting audience which included John Cays, clerk to the king’s hanaper, the prior of the priory parish church, and Edmund Oldhall, receiver of the Duchy of Lancaster in Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, who came in place of the sheriff of Norfolk who was ill. The assembly was asked no less than three times if it was agreeable to the re-instated procedures, each time with pause for any reply. It seems there was tacit agreement that an acceptable display of good governance and consensus had to be effected or their liberties might be subject to summary removal. When the election was over: … the mayor, twenty-four … and the burgesses there assembled leaped up with merry faces, as well contented and pleased with the end of the matter as with the appearance of the foresaid lord’s counsel, who all left there harmoniously in peace and tranquillity saying thanks be to God, together praising and giving thanks to God.67

The sense of relief is palpable. All the non-burgesses were excluded from the Gildhall, although over a hundred of the former non-burgesses had in the meantime taken up the freedom.68 King Henry V’s revocation of all the new arrangements and reinstatement of old customs (as agreed by themselves in the Austin friars’ chapter house) was read and accepted by all. The composition of 1309 was not mentioned. With this event, the public display of dissension in the borough ceased: the threatened loss of the town’s already limited political autonomy and independence had shocked the town into providing

64

HMCR, 1413–1416, p. 411.

HMCR, pp. 195–203. 65

CIM, 1399–1422, no. 517, pp. 289–91 (p. 289). Although this inquisition finally met in 1417 it concerns actions 1411 – August 1414, at which time, it must be assumed, the need for an inquiry was first accepted by the king. 66 Asshebourne, fol. 110v. 67 Asshebourne, fol. 114v, transcribed in MKL, p. 403. 68 KL, C39/48, Asshebourne, fol. 102.

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Kate Parker at least a semblance of public unity. In 1420 yet newer arrangements were put in place by Bishop Wakeryng, the fourth bishop of Norwich to be drawn into the matter. By this settlement a second, lower council of twenty-seven members, three from each of the town’s wards, was put in place, all subject to summary dismissal by the oligarchy. However, the desire by all influential Linnets to limit the power of the bishop over their affairs remained undiminished, and eventually in 1449 their efforts were crowned with success. Following negotiations, the town acquired ‘totum dominium ville episcopi … excepta spiritualitatibus’ for an annual rent of £140 to the bishop.69 Doubtless this action would have been impossible without the full support of the Trinity Gild, once more in financial health. At length all connection with the bishopric was severed when in 1536–7 Henry VIII took control of the former bishops’ town, renaming it King’s Lynn. Close study of William Asshebourne’s Book in conjunction with the other copious archive evidence has demystified much which has hitherto puzzled historians of Lynn’s long-running political ructions. In many ways this whole history can be seen as just the most protracted period of action against the bishop and his unwelcome lordship over the town, a prolonging of borough policy which had already lasted almost two hundred years. Despenser himself had been instrumental in welding the parties in Lynn into a potent force against him. His death in 1406 might, therefore, have seen the end of such actions. However, the usurpation which had given the five mayors the best chance to escape episcopal control, doubtless enthusiastically supported by the rest of the town, was itself the cause of widespread political instability, trade collapse, and an inexorable rise in taxation. The town became caught up in these wider issues. By 1405 widespread discontent with the new regime broke out in open revolt, leading to the catastrophe of Scrope’s rebellion and its aftermath, and subsequently to the seismic changes in Lynn’s relations with both the crown and the bishop. Bishop Tottington supported the innovators, for by so doing he could damage those mayors who had once sought to excise episcopal control in the town. Thomas Beaufort supported them too, for in so doing he championed those who had lost faith in Henry IV, and looked to Prince Henry as the new power in the land. The leader of the potent Lancastrian interests in Norfolk, Sir Thomas Erpingham, had already switched his support to the household of the prince. Meanwhile, Archbishop Arundel supported the old guard, for they had expressed their support for the new regime from its inception, and even before. Prince Henry’s distaste for Arundel was expressed in the Chancellor’s summary dismissal at Henry’s accession. Moreover, it was these uncertainties of supremacy at national level which gave comfort to first one faction then the other. Interference in the disputes by these external patrons

69

KL, C7/3/260, 267, transcribed in MKL, pp. 407–8.

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Politics and Patronage in Lynn merely prolonged the difficulties, which otherwise might have been resolved long before. Eventually, it was the resolution of these national uncertainties, with the accession of Henry V, which finally re-forged resolution in the borough, which once again reverted to its customary stance: united against all comers. A greater readiness for peace may have been assisted by the gradual improvement in the trading climate effected by the debasement of the coinage in 1411 and the psychological boost for the nation provided by the success at Agincourt.70 What seems as pertinent is that the new king’s government was strong, effective and, above all, united. It was no longer of any benefit to Beaufort to involve himself in the town’s squabbles in order to discomfort Arundel and further his own interests. The events at and following Michaelmas 1415 brought the town to its senses, and forced a closing of ranks to protect the freedoms and liberties of the borough, in particular the right to choose its own mayor. The history of the unrest in Lynn thus reflects the uncertainties of the power structures in the first Lancastrian reign, and how these were transformed by the ruthless control of patronage and influence within the second.

70

R. Britnell, The Commercialisation of English Society 1000–1500 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 182.

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10 The Earl of Arundel’s Expedition to France, 1411 Anthony Tuck

Much of this paper is based upon the accounts of the Receivers-General of John the Fearless duke of Burgundy, which are in the archives of the Department of the Côte-d’Or at Dijon. This material has been well used by historians in the past. Some of it found its way, very indirectly, into J. H. Wylie’s account of the English expeditions to France in 1411 and 1412 in the fourth volume of his History of England under Henry the Fourth. Françoise Lehoux made extensive use of it in her monumental study of John duke of Berry; while Richard Vaughan used it as the main source for his summary of the income of John the Fearless in his study of the duke. Christopher Allmand found material there for his study of Henry V. Michel Mollat provided a general survey of the material in his introduction to the Comptes Généraux de l’Etat Bourguignon, under the general editorship of Robert Fawtier, and B.-A. Pocquet du Haut-Jussé published the accounts of the Receiver-General of the Kingdom from 1418 to 1420, which are also in the Côte-d’Or departmental archives. Although the English chroniclers record the expedition, there is no information about it in the English government records, no doubt because of its mercenary nature. For this paper, however, I have used the material to throw light on the earl of Arundel’s expedition to support the duke of Burgundy in his war against the Armagnac princes in the autumn of 1411. The material in the archives provides information not just about the financing of the expedition, but also about the participants’ winnings from war, and the extent to which the duke of Burgundy displayed those characteristics of good lordship which encouraged men from England to serve him. It may well be that this expedition, and the one that followed in 1412, served to remind a new generation of nobles, knights and esquires of the profits that could still be made from campaigning in France, and, perhaps, to whet their appetites for participation in the much more substantial expeditions which Henry V was soon to lead.



Wylie, Henry IV, IV, 54–87; F. Lehoux, Jean de France duc de Berri, sa vie, son action politique, vol. III (Paris, 1967); R. Vaughan, John the Fearless (London, 1966); C. Allmand, Henry V (London, 1992); M. Mollat, Comptes généraux de l’état bourguignon entre 1416 et 1420 (Paris, 1965); B.-A. Pocquet du Haut-Jussé, La France gouvernée par Jean Sans Peur (Paris, 1959).

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The Earl of Arundel’s Expedition to France From the outset of his reign, it was evidently Henry IV’s intention to avoid becoming involved in war with France. In the early years of his reign he lacked both the financial resources and the domestic security which might have made a resumption of war possible, and his commitments in France extended no further than the defence of Calais and the retention of the loyalty of all or most of the Gascon nobility. Otherwise, it was his intention to maintain the truce with France, and it was the collapse of political stability in France, rather than a revival of the will to war in England, that brought about a change in this policy by 1411. After the death of duke Philip of Burgundy in 1404, the duke of Orléans established himself firmly in power in Paris as unofficial regent for the periodically insane King Charles VI. The increasingly bitter rivalry between Orléans and the new duke of Burgundy, Philip’s son John the Fearless, culminated in the murder of Orléans by agents of John the Fearless on 23 November 1407. Thereafter the rivalry between the two factions intensified, and acquired something of the character of a blood feud, with the Orleanists (or Armagnacs) seeking revenge on the Burgundians. As the two factions moved towards civil war in 1410, both sides came to see England as a possible source of military support rather than as an enemy to be engaged by land and sea. In April 1410 the Armagnac princes formed the League of Gien, an alliance directed against the duke of Burgundy, and in the autumn both sides had troops in and around Paris. An uneasy peace negotiated in November 1410 lasted over the winter, but by April 1411 Armagnac forces were established north of Paris, and although the city itself remained pro-Burgundian it was in effect blockaded by Armagnac forces. On 14 July the Armagnac princes issued the Declaration of Jargeau, calling for justice to be done on John the Fearless for his complicity in the murder of the duke of Orléans. The declaration was circulated widely within France, and also to towns in the Low Countries. It was intended to produce military support for the Armagnacs throughout the country, and especially, perhaps, in those areas which were pro-Burgundian in sympathy. At the same time both sides massed troops in Picardy, and the duke of Burgundy established his military headquarters at Douai, about seventy miles from Calais. Both sides now began to make overtures to England. Burgundian officials were well-practised in negotiations with the English court on commercial matters, and for John the Fearless the security of the wool trade between England and Flanders was an essential interest. In April 1411 a Burgundian esquire travelled to England on unspecified business; an English esquire came to the Burgundian court in June; and during July about 300 English 

Vaughan, John the Fearless, pp. 29–48 and 67–87. Ibid., pp. 82–4.  Ibid., pp. 87–91. 

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Anthony Tuck auxiliaries from Calais, under the command of Sir William Bardolf, joined Burgundy’s army in the Vermandois. John the Fearless was evidently well pleased with their efforts on his behalf, and in November 1411 he presented Bardolf’s wife with a necklace in enamelled gold, worth 300 francs. While Bardolf’s auxiliaries were in the field, diplomatic negotiations continued: the ‘foreign ambassadors’ whom the duke entertained to dinner at Douai on 4 August were probably from England. Neither these negotiations nor the presence of a small English force serving with Burgundy’s army could be kept secret from Charles duke of Orléans. At some point in July he wrote to Henry demanding that he should not give aid to Burgundy. The Armagnacs also put it about that John the Fearless was preparing to restore Normandy and a greater Aquitaine to Henry, and to cede to him the ports of Sluys, Dixmude, Dunkirk and Gravelines in return for military assistance from England. It is, however, possible that some negotiations took place between the English and the Armagnac princes as well as with the duke of Burgundy. These negotiations may have taken place in Bordeaux rather than Westminster, and the English administration in Gascony may have been acting on its own initiative, perhaps to safeguard the borders of the English duchy. The outcome, according to Monstrelet, was that in the late summer of 1411 Sir William Clifford, later constable of Bordeaux, took a force of 100 men-at-arms and 200 archers from Bordeaux to join the duke of Orléans in the Ile-de-France. By mid-August 1411, however, Henry IV was apparently contemplating an expedition to the continent, possibly under his own leadership. On 14 August he summoned his annuitants to muster in London on 23 September, and he ordered the Cinque Ports to provide ships and seamen to take the force across to France. The summons to his annuitants stated that the purpose of the expedition was to defend the marches of Calais and the king’s friends and allies in the adjacent parts. Henry’s intention was probably much as he stated it. The growing instability in northern France and the imminent likelihood of war in Picardy between the Burgundians and the Armagnacs posed a threat to the security of Calais, whose defence was a legitimate call on English manpower and financial resources. The duke of Burgundy, however, had more ambitious plans. He hoped that the English government could be persuaded to send a force to fight with   

 

Dijon, Archives départementales de la Côte d’Or (ACO), Accounts of the ReceiversGeneral of the Duke of Burgundy, B1570 fol. 206r. Lehoux, Jean de France, III, 241. Chronique du Religieux de Saint Denys, ed. and trans. M. L. Bellaguet, 6 vols. (Paris 1839–52), reprinted with introduction by B. Guenée, 6 vols. in 3 (Paris, 1994), IV, 474–7; Lehoux, Jean de France, III, 241. La Chronique d’Enguerran de Monstrelet, ed. L. Douet-d’Arcq 6 vols. (Paris, 1857–62), II, 202. CCR, 1409–13, pp. 166 and 240–1.

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The Earl of Arundel’s Expedition to France him against the Armagnacs, but his ambassadors found the English council divided over the wisdom of such a move. It is possible that Queen Joan may have intervened to persuade Henry to favour the Burgundian side, but Walsingham stated that Henry did not believe that the duke of Burgundy’s cause was just. He advised him to promise satisfaction to the young duke of Orléans for the murder of his father, but if the duke of Orléans persisted in making war against the duke of Burgundy, and carried the war into the duke’s own lands, then he would have a just cause and Henry would look favourably upon his request for help.10 The London chroniclers were much blunter, but made the same point: when the Burgundian ambassadors asked for military assistance, ‘the kyng wolde none men graunte hym’.11 However, the London chronicler went on to say that the Burgundian ambassadors then turned to the Prince of Wales, and he appears to have been more sympathetic. He does not seem to have shared his father’s reservations about the justice of Burgundy’s cause, though he was likely to prove impervious to the queen’s intervention. Preparations for the king’s expedition to Calais were abandoned, and the prince seems to have agreed that the earl of Arundel, one of his retainers, should raise a force which would serve with the duke, and at his expense.12 It was probably the prince’s influence, too, that lay behind the appointment on 1 September of a formal mission from England to John the Fearless. Three of the ambassadors were close associates of the prince: his chamberlain Hugh Mortimer, the bishop of St David’s, Henry Chichele, and the earl of Arundel. The other two envoys were Francis Court, the Milanese esquire who had been a long-standing friend and retainer of Henry IV, and John Catterick, a legal expert. They were authorised to open negotiations for a marriage between the prince and a daughter of John the Fearless, and to find out if the duke would offer territory as his daughter’s marriage portion, or merely money and jewels. They were also instructed to ask the duke what military help he wanted from England, whether he would conclude a formal alliance with England, and whether he would help Henry IV to recover his lands in Aquitaine.13 The English mission remained in France for several weeks, negotiating with the duke at Arras. Chichele and Carrick, and probably Hugh Mortimer, seem to have returned home on or about 17 October, having failed to conclude

10

The St Albans Chronicle 1406–1420, ed. V. H. Galbraith (Oxford, 1937), p. 60. The Great Chronicle of London, ed. A. H. Thomas and I. D. Thornley (London, 1938), p. 90; Vaughan, John the Fearless, p. 92. 12 Ibid., p. 90. 13 POPC, II, 19–24; Foedera, 3rd edn, ed. G. Holmes (London, 1740), IV(1), 196; B.-A. Pocquet du Haut-Jussé, ‘La renaissance littéraire autour de Henri V, roi d’Angleterre’, Revue Historique 224 (1960), 329–30. 11

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Anthony Tuck a formal agreement with the duke.14 Arundel, however, had evidently been accompanied on his mission by a force of 200 men-at-arms and 800 archers, who arrived at Calais on 26 September. His expedition appears to have left no trace in the English financial records: it was a mercenary force, serving the duke of Burgundy at his wages. It is uncertain how many of his troops were raised in England, or whether some of them came from the Calais garrison: Bardolf’s contingent, which had been serving with John the Fearless since July, probably now came under Arundel’s command, and amongst the captains who came from England were Sir Robert Umfraville of Kyme and his nephew Gilbert, Sir John Grey of Heton, and Sir John Oldcastle, lord Cobham. Arundel himself was under the command of the duke of Burgundy. Monstrelet believed that the force had been sent ‘by licence and authority of the king of England’, but there is no other evidence that it enjoyed the formal approval of Henry IV.15 There is no doubt, however, that it had the Prince of Wales’s approval. Not only was its commander one of the prince’s retainers, but in a symbolic gesture of solidarity he sent ten of his own archers to form part of the personal bodyguard of the duke of Burgundy. The archers served at the duke’s wages, the two principal archers being paid 50 écus each and the other eight 40 écus each for two months’ service.16 Arundel’s force arrived at Arras on Saturday 3 October ‘before my lord the duke to serve him in arms’.17 The duke received the leaders of the force honourably, and on the following day he dined with Arundel, Court, and the ambassadors of the king of England. A few days passed in preparation, and on Friday 9 October the force set out with the duke’s army towards Paris. They moved south via Breteuil, Beauvais and Gisors to Pontoise, where they halted for six days, and then on 22 October the duke and his company left Pontoise and ‘rode all through the night in arms to Paris’ via Melun.18 This midnight dash enabled the duke’s and Arundel’s forces to evade the Armagnac forces to the north of Paris, and between 23 October and 9 November the duke and Arundel remained in the city. Their position, however, was vulnerable, and the duke had yet to achieve his objective of driving the Armagnac forces from the surroundings of Paris. Accordingly on the night of 8 November the duke’s forces, with those of Arundel, left Paris and on the following day they recaptured the bridge at St Cloud from the Armagnacs and thus regained an important crossing of the Seine. According to Monstrelet, the force took St Cloud with very light casualties, and Arundel’s men acquitted themselves with distinction, capturing an Armagnac noble whom they handed over to Charles VI’s officials in return 14

ACO B1571 fol. 64v. Monstrelet II, 219. 16 ACO B1570, fol. 291r. 17 ACO B1568, fols. 12ff. 18 ACO B1568, fols. 12v–13r. 15

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The Earl of Arundel’s Expedition to France for a ransom. Walsingham suggests that once the Armagnacs had been put to flight, the English force looted the town of St Cloud and took many captives with them back to Paris.19 Both Walsingham and John Hardyng, whose source was probably Gilbert de Umfraville, describe how the duke of Burgundy – or his officials – wished to put the captives to death for treason, but the English objected. According to Hardyng, Umfraville told the duke that they ‘were not come thyther as bouchers, to kyll the folke in market or in feire’, but rather to ransom the prisoners as the law of arms required.20 The duke accordingly ransomed some of the prisoners from their English captors, in face of hostility from the Parisians who wanted them killed, and afterwards a number of them were indeed put to death. Robert Dacre esquire was paid 1,100 écus d’or for the ransom of Sire Arnoton des Bordes, a Gascon knight captured at St Cloud. The duke also paid John Stuart, a Kentish esquire serving with the earl, 1,200 écus d’or for the ransom of Sir Mansart du Bois, and 500 écus d’or for the ransom of Sir Melun de Bataille.21 However, Monstrelet says that on 12 November Sir Mansart du Bois and five of his companions (we do not know whether they included Arnoton des Bordes and Melun de Bataille) were executed at Les Halles.22 Nonetheless, the English had received their ransom money and had not dishonoured themselves by participating directly in the deaths of the prisoners. Certainly Hardyng thought that Umfraville and his companionsin-arms had acquitted themselves honourably.23 After the successful attack on St Cloud the Armagnacs withdrew from Paris, leaving John the Fearless in control of the city. His English allies were now treated with great honour. On 14 November Charles VI dined at the Louvre after hearing Mass at Notre-Dame, and ‘il receut et fis asseoir a sa table honorablement le conte d’Arondel aupres du duc de Bourgogne’.24 Three days later Arundel and John the Fearless dined with the duke of Bourbon and then had supper with the king at the Louvre. Though essentially the leader of a mercenary force, Arundel was treated as an honoured companion-inarms by the king and the French nobility.25 In return, he presented the duke with ‘une haguenee’, a horse suitable for a lady – perhaps the duchess or her daughters – to ride.26 The duke of Burgundy was not concerned merely to treat Arundel and the other leaders of the expedition as honoured equals. He displayed good lordship to the ordinary esquires and archers in Arundel’s 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

St Albans Chronicle, p. 61; Monstrelet II, 203–6. Hardyng, p. 368; St Albans Chronicle, p. 61. ACO B1570, fols. 139r–140r. Monstrelet II, 210; see also Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris de 1405 à 1449, ed. Colette Beaune (Paris, 1990), p. 44. Hardyng, p. 368. Monstrelet II, 211. ACO B1568, fol. 14v. ACO B1570, fol. 169r.

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Anthony Tuck force as well, and observed the normal obligations of a military commander towards those serving under him. When Hugh Thue, one of the earl’s archers, was wounded in the leg at St Cloud and perhaps had his horse killed under him, the duke gave him 11 francs and 5 sous to buy another horse and also to pay for his needs while he recovered from his wounds.27 Earlier, on the march south to Paris, one John Bloquelet, a member of Arundel’s force, became ill at Beauvais and remained there for forty-five days. The duke paid for a physician to visit him, for two men to look after him ‘day and night’ while he recovered, and for his horse to be looked after until he was fit to resume his place in the expedition.28 The duke also gave Thomas Wissenden, described as ‘Englishman’, 120 ecus d’or to buy a horse so that he might better serve the duke ‘et estre plus honestement en la compaignie de monsieur le duc en la guerre’. Another Thomas in the earl’s force was given 80 ecus d’or by the duke to buy a horse because he had lost two horses in coming to serve the duke.29 Compensation for lost horses, according to a carefully calculated scale of value, was of course a normal obligation on the commander of an expedition,30 but it is significant that on this expedition the duke of Burgundy rather than the earl of Arundel took responsibility for paying compensation: in this sense as in others it was a truly mercenary force. The mule and the bay horse which the duke gave to one of the archers of the Prince of Wales in early October, however, seems to have been simply a present: there is no suggestion that they were replacements for horses which had died.31 The fortunes of war did not always favour the English and the Burgundians, however: two English soldiers serving with the duke in the Vermandois campaign in the summer of 1411 were captured by the Armagnacs, and the duke gave each of them 20 écus d’or to ‘aid them in their ransom’.32 All this, of course, had to be paid for along with the wages of the force for the two months it had engaged to serve. Here too the duke showed himself a good lord, and certainly a more reliable and prompt payer than the English crown had often been to those nobles who served at its wages on campaigns in France and Scotland. Before they left Arras for Paris in early October, the duke’s Receiver-General paid Arundel 6,400 gold écus for the wages of 200 men-at-arms and 800 archers for twenty days, which probably represented a payment on account. The final payment was made on 23 November, when the duke’s war treasurer gave him 26,128 gold écus ‘in full payment of two months’ wages for

27 28 29 30

31 32

ACO B1571, fol. 111r. ACO B1570, fol. 283v. ACO B1570, fol. 241r. A. C. Ayton, Knights and Warhorses. Military Service and the English Aristocracy under Edward III (Woodbridge, 1986), pp. 71–83; M. Prestwich, Armies and Warfare in the Middle Ages. The English Experience (New Haven and London, 1996), pp. 34–5. ACO B1570, fol. 241r. ACO B1570, fol. 170r, fol. 197r.

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The Earl of Arundel’s Expedition to France 194 men-at-arms, 1,489 mounted archers and 316 foot archers’. Some of the money came from the duke’s own resources: 4,825 francs, for example, were received in November from the duke’s officials in the baillis of Chalons and Dijon.33 But much of the money had to be found by raising loans: 1750 francs were borrowed from the merchants and bourgeois of Dijon; further sums were raised from Parisian merchants, and plate and jewels worth 8,340 francs were borrowed from Louis of Bavaria, the brother of the queen of France. The Armagnacs put it about that the duke would have to levy a tax on his own domains to pay for the English force, though he obtained no aids from either his French or his Flemish subjects in 1411 and 1412, and it is likely that he repaid the loans out of the revenue of about 70,000 livres de Tours which he received annually from the French king as long as he was in control of Paris.34 An additional complication, and cost, was that all the money had to be changed into écus d’or because, as the duke’s Receiver-General somewhat irritably remarked, ‘the English would accept payment only in gold’, no doubt aware of the debasement which the French currency had undergone in the later fourteenth century.35 Thus Arundel’s force appears to have been paid promptly and in full for the two months from 26 September for which it had agreed to serve. Arundel himself and the other leaders of the expedition probably returned to England on or soon after 23 November, but some members of the expedition remained in France in the duke’s service. A group of ten esquires and twentyfour archers were still serving him at his wages in 1412,36 and the duke was evidently anxious to remain on good terms with Arundel himself, perhaps in the hope that he might at some time in the near future bring another expedition to serve him in his wars, and on 1 January 1412 he sent new year gifts to the earl.37 Arundel and his men might well have been tempted to serve the duke again. They had been well and promptly paid, and had enjoyed some of the profits of war in the form of booty and ransoms. The duke had proved a good lord, and appeared to have fulfilled the obligations of a military commander towards the men who served under him. In return, they had acquitted themselves with honour and distinction in helping the duke to attain his military objectives. The fight at St Cloud in particular attracted the favourable notice of the English chroniclers, and the outcome of the expedition may have strengthened the hand of those such as the Prince of Wales who believed that the English should continue to support the Burgundian faction in the French civil war. In the winter and early spring of 1412 it seemed that the foreign policy 33

ACO B1569, fol. 69v. Vaughan, John the Fearless, pp. 103–12. 35 ACO B1570, fols. 128r–v. 36 ACO B1571, fols. 99r–v. 37 ACO B1570, fol. 206r. 34

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Anthony Tuck which the prince had pursued during 1411, and which had involved no financial commitment from the English exchequer, would continue. Informal contact between England and Burgundy had taken place from time to time in December and January,38 and on 1 February a formal embassy from the duke arrived in London to continue negotiations for a marriage between the prince and the duke’s younger daughter Anne.39 The Burgundian ambassadors stayed in England until 4 March, and had two meetings with the king as well as a series of discussions with the prince and his brothers. However, no formal commitments were made by either side, and the reluctance of the duke to commit himself, together with his renewed ascendancy in French politics, prompted new diplomatic moves on the part of his Armagnac opponents. On 24 January the dukes of Berry, Bourbon and Orléans met at Bourges and agreed to send envoys to Henry IV proposing an Anglo-Armagnac alliance and offering to restore the duchy of Aquitaine to Henry.40 A fortnight later, on 6 February, Henry granted safe-conducts to the Armagnac envoys, but they did not set out for England until the middle of March, by which time the Burgundian ambassadors had returned home, though contacts between the two sides continued until early May. Despite the misgivings of Sigismund king of the Romans and Emperor-elect, who wrote to Henry in March 1412 urging him not to allow Englishmen to become involved on both sides in the French civil war, but instead to make peace with France, Henry was not, strictly speaking, playing a double game by negotiating with both sides at the same time.41 The Burgundian envoys had returned home empty-handed before their Armagnac rivals reached England, and there is no evidence, whatever the duke of Burgundy may have hoped, that the earl of Arundel was contemplating re-entering his service with another military force. Indeed, publicly Henry remained neutral between the two sides as late as mid-April, for on 10 April he warned Englishmen setting out for France not to become involved in internal French disputes.42 Nonetheless, the proposals that the Armagnac envoys brought with them when they eventually reached England in the middle of March proved attractive to Henry.43 They held out the prospect of the restitution to Henry of the duchy of Aquitaine and marriage alliances with members of the Armagnac families. They also offered the homage of the duke of Berry for the county of Poitou for his life, and after his death it would revert to the king of England.

38 39 40 41 42 43

Lehoux, Jean de France, III, 261. Pocquet du Haut-Jussé, ‘La renaissance littéraire’, p. 330; Foedera VIII, 713; Allmand, Henry V, pp. 54–5. Foedera IV(2), 4; Lehoux, Jean de France, III, 261. Foedera IV(2), 5; Acta Concilii Constanciensis, ed. H. Finke, 4 vols. (Münster, 1896–1928), I, 88–92; Vaughan, John the Fearless, p. 94. Foedera IV(2), 9; Lehoux, Jean de France, III, 262. Foedera IV(2), 12–15.

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The Earl of Arundel’s Expedition to France A similar arrangement was envisaged with the duke of Orléans for the county of Angoulême, while Orléans and his heirs were to hold Périgord of Henry as duke of Aquitaine. In return, Henry would be expected to send an army to serve with the Armagnac princes, who would pay the greater part of his costs. Henry would also agree not to make any alliances with the duke of Burgundy but would join with the Armagnac princes in seeking to bring the duke to justice. News of these proposals reached the court of Charles VI, dominated by the duke of Burgundy, in mid-April, and the duke began to mobilise his forces for an invasion of Armagnac territory.44 On 1 May Henry announced that he intended to lead an expedition to France in person. On 16 May he wrote to the Four Members of Flanders stating that the duke of Burgundy intended to invade Aquitaine, and warned them that they must observe the truce with England and not assist the duke.45 Finally, in a treaty ratified simultaneously in London and Bourges, the Anglo-Armagnac alliance was formally agreed.46 For Henry, restoration of his rights in Aquitaine was probably the most important consideration in his negotiations with the French factions, and it seems clear that it was a priority which the Prince of Wales did not share. On the face of it, the offer which the Armagnacs had made was one which no English king could ignore. Although they did not offer Henry sovereignty over Aquitaine, a concession they were in no position to make, the alliance offered not merely the cessation of military pressure on English Gascony from the Armagnac lords, but the re-establishment of English control over an area much greater than Henry could realistically hope to win by force of arms: in a sense, they were offering to implement the territorial clauses of the Treaty of Brétigny. Whether the Armagnac lords were sincere in their offer, however, was another matter. Their real purpose was to obtain military help from England against the Burgundians, and once they had achieved their domestic military and political objectives their willingness to implement the rest of the Treaty of Bourges would perhaps be open to doubt. The prince was probably more sceptical than his father about Armagnac sincerity, but his reservations about the Treaty of Bourges arose mainly from his concern about the damage it would do to England’s – and his own – relationship with the duke of Burgundy. He did not, of course, take part in the subsequent military expedition, and the issue seems to have led to tension between him and his father. The prince took an oath to uphold the Treaty and

44

Foedera IV(2), 12–15; J. D. Milner, ‘The English Enterprise in France, 1412–13’, in Trade, Devotion and Governance, ed. D. J. Clayton, R. G. Davies and P. McNiven (Stroud, 1994), pp. 81–101 (p. 81); P. McNiven, ‘Prince Henry and the Political Crisis of 1412’, History 65 (1980), 1–16 (pp. 4–5); Lehoux, Jean de France, III, 261–5. 45 Foedera IV(2), 12–15; St Albans Chronicle, pp. 61–4. 46 Foedera IV(2), 14–15.

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Anthony Tuck to forswear any alliance with the duke of Burgundy, but he was determined to keep his lines open to the Burgundian court.47 On 22 May he wrote a polite and formal letter to the duke, enquiring after his health and asking for news ‘de l’estat de par deça’.48 This letter reached the duke when he was encamped before Bourges in early June, and was either accompanied or followed by a letter entrusted to the prince’s chaplain Edward Moisne containing ‘certain secret information’ from the Prince of Wales.49 Unfortunately the duke received these letters just after he had had word of the letter which Henry IV had written a month earlier to the Four Members of Flanders warning them not to assist the duke in his campaign against the Armagnac princes, and his response was hostile. He expressed his disappointment at having to abandon the negotiations for a marriage alliance, and he went on to express his astonishment at Henry IV’s letter to the Four Members, in view of his great desire for friendship with the king and his family, and ‘especially with you’, i.e. the prince. On 31 May the prince and the earl of Arundel wrote to John the Fearless explaining that they could no longer continue negotiations with the duke, but unofficial contacts continued, and in September an English esquire came to the duke at Meulan ‘to tell him certain things on behalf of the Prince of Wales’.50 At the same time, a contingent of 10 esquires and 25 English archers were serving with the duke as a personal bodyguard, and it is possible that they included the archers whom the prince had sent to form a personal bodyguard for the duke in the previous year.51 The tone of both letters is regretful. The prince explained that the proposals made by the Armagnac princes had seemed too advantageous to be rejected, and that he would support and assist his father in the recovery of the English king’s hereditary rights in the duchy of Aquitaine. For his part, Arundel reminded the duke of his past service, but pointed out that he was subject to the authority of the king of England and had no freedom of action,52 and he repeated the prince’s observation that the Armagnac terms were entirely acceptable. Although these letters formally put an end to negotiations between the prince and John the Fearless, it is perhaps significant that they were taken to the duke’s camp at Bourges by a chaplain and two esquires whom the duke regarded as ambassadors from the Prince of Wales. The envoys arrived at Bourges with the letters on 24 June, and they remained in France until at least 31 July.53 It is possible, therefore, that some informal discussions between the duke and the prince’s envoys continued for some

47 48 49 50 51 52 53

Foedera VIII, 743; Pocquet du Haut-Jussé, ‘La renaissance littéraire’, p. 331. Lehoux, Jean de France, III, 271. ACO B1571, fol. 175v. ACO B1571, fol. 111v. ACO B1571, fols. 99r–v. Pocquet du Haut-Jussé, ‘La renaissance littéraire’, p. 337. Ibid., pp. 333–4.

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The Earl of Arundel’s Expedition to France time after the sealing of the Treaty of Bourges. As the earl of Arundel had pointed out in his letter to John the Fearless, the outcome of future events was uncertain, and England might once again need to negotiate with the duke of Burgundy.54 It is significant that these contacts between the duke and the prince in the months after the signing of the Treaty of Bourges appear to exclude the king. In his letter of 14 June John the Fearless had stressed his particular friendship with the prince, and, in contrast to the diplomatic correspondence of the previous year, the letters which came from England to the duke in the summer of 1412 seem to have come under the prince’s sole authority. There seems little doubt that in maintaining these contacts with the duke, and perhaps in encouraging small contingents of English soldiers to continue serving with the duke, the prince was acting against his father’s wishes and probably without his knowledge. The tension between the king and the Prince of Wales which characterised the last year of his reign was not simply a consequence of disagreement over which side in the French civil war the English should support. The decision that the prince’s younger brother Thomas duke of Clarence should lead the expedition to France in the summer of 1412 reflects not just differing views about which side in France to support, but also tensions between the two royal princes, tensions which have a wider implication for English politics in the last years of Henry IV’s reign.55 However, the relationship between the duke of Burgundy and the prince’s faction, which the duke seemed so anxious to foster and, when necessary, pay for, together with his honourable treatment of those Englishmen who served him, served to strengthen the prince’s view that English interests were best served by an alliance with Burgundy. He was to develop this view still further after he became king in 1413. For the ordinary archers and men-at-arms from England who served the duke in 1411 and 1412 the diplomatic considerations no doubt took second place behind the renewed opportunities to gain wealth and honour from military service in France with a generous patron. This lesson too was not lost on the English after 1413.56

54

Ibid., p. 337. Milner, ‘English Enterprise’, p. 95; McNiven, ‘Political Crisis of 1412’, pp. 7–12. 56 A shorter version of this paper was presented at a conference in honour of Professor Ralph Griffiths at Swansea in May 2003. I am grateful to Professor Christopher Allmand for commenting on this paper prior to publication. 55

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INDEX

Anne of Bohemia, queen of England 117 Arundel, Sir John 124 Bardolf, Lord Thomas 97 Barneby, Thomas, chamberlain of North Wales 73–4 Beaufort, Henry, bishop of Winchester 20, 26, 192, 195, 197, 219–20 Beaufort, John, earl of Somerset 98, 114, 119, 191 Beaufort, Thomas, duke of Exeter 211, 215, 217 Belleyteller, Edmund, alderman of Lynn, 217, 221 Bradshaw, Nicholas 155 Bryn Glas, battle of 69 Bubewith, Nicholas 149, 154 Burghill, John, bishop of Coventry 140, 142, 153–54, 155 Burnell, Lord Hugh 71, 197 Burton, John 103 Charles VI, king of France 29, 35, 39, 228, 232 Charles, duke of Orleans 230, 234, 238, 239 Chastel, Guillaume 34, 37 Chaucer, Thomas 189, 195 Chaworth, Thomas 129–31 Cheyney, William 150 Chichele, Henry 149, 235 Clanvove, Thomas 123 Clavering, John 149 Clermont, Jean 39–40 Conyers, John 98 Cornwall, John 31, 38–9 Crulle, Peter 148 Curson, John 97 David II, king of Scots 12 De Heretico Comburendo 137 Despenser, Henry, bishop of Norwich 212, 213, 216 Edward II, king of England 107

Edward III, king of England 11, 12, 20, 24, 28, 108, 118, 165, 166, 167, 169 Edward of York, duke of York 21, 25, 32, 37, 191, 197 Erpingham, Thomas 97, 119, 216 Eure, Ralph 98, 100, 102 Fitzalan, Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury 5, 8, 16–17, 23, 24, 25, 145, 155, 170, 173, 175, 177, 181, 192, 193, 194–5, 196, 197, 198–201 Fitzalan, Thomas, earl of Arundel 7, 91, 191, 231, 232, 234–6 Fitzhugh, Henry 98 Fordham, John, bishop of Ely 147 Galyon, Roger, mayor of Lynn 217–18, 219, 220–1, 222–4 Gare, Robert 149 Gascoigne, Thomas 163, 221 Gascoigne, William 97–8 Gaunsted, Simon 147 Glyn Dŵr, Owain 6, 72, 73, 86, 92, 93, 191 Grey, Richard, Lord Codnor 92, 97, 119 Grey, Thomas of Wark 99 Hallam, Robert 149 Hambleton Hill, battle of 86, 87, 89 Haxey, Thomas 5, 153 Henry IV, king of England: health of 1–2, 10, 18, 181–2, 183–91, 198–9 exercise of patronage 4, 126–31 seizure of the throne in 1399 11 weakness of his title 13–14 on the succession 19 corporate nature of his kingship 25 his new seal and its significance 25 death of 26 quarrel with Louis of Orleans 28–9 lands in Wales 49–50 taxation in the reign of 53–4, 59 affinity of 83–4, 95–7

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Index northern settlement of, after the battle of Shrewsbury 85–6 patronage of, to the Percy family 91–2 personal holdings of in Yorkshire 93 his day-to-day governance of the realm 105 importance of chamberlain’s bills in the reign of 108 as the ‘Second Maccabees’ 137 his promise not to impose taxation 164, 171 his crusade to Prussia in 1390 213 his visit to Lynn in 1406 215 Henry VI, king of England 105, 112, 113, 115, 120, 155 Henry of Grosmont, duke of Lancaster 28 Henry of Monmouth, Prince of Wales 3, 7, 8, 9, 20, 50, 55, 56, 70–1, 73, 75, 91, 93, 167, 201, 213, 216, 226, 227, 228, 229, 231, 239 Henry of Nottingham, town clerk of Lynn 213 Heron, William, Lord Say 99 Hoccleve, Thomas 26 Holbache, David 68, 74 Hornby, Thomas 150 Hughill, Thomas, clerk of the accounts of the royal household 124–6 Ingoldisthorpe, John 217 Jedburgh and the Jed Forest 87 Joan of Navarre, queen of England 21, 117, 231 John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster 11, 12, 20, 82, 85, 86, 94, 98, 192 John of Lancaster 100 John the Fearless, duke of Burgundy 228, 231, 234, 236, 238–9 Langley, Thomas, bishop of Durham 7, 16, 149, 192, 197 Leche, Roger 155 Louis, Duke of Orleans 7, 12, 28–9, 30–1, 32, Middleton, Rhirid, tax collector in Shropshire 74 Mitford, John 82, 101 Monboucher, Bertram 96 Morton, John 102

Mowbray, Thomas, earl of Nottingham 101, 214, 230 Neville, John, Lord of Raby 103 Neville, Ralph, earl of Westmorland 3, 82, 84, 86, 94, 96–7, 100, 103, 191, 194 Neville, Thomas, Lord Furnival 82, 96, 103 Newport, William 154 Norbury, John 194 Oakover, Thomas 192 Parliament: of 1376 (the ‘Good Parliament’) 10–11 of October 1404 67, 121 of 1406 (the ‘Long Parliament’) 9–27, 115–16, 131, 181, 182, 183, 188, 193, 196, 199 of 1407 1, 4–5, 25, 27, 72, 180–201 Pelham, John 151 Percy, Henry, earl of Northumberland 9, 17, 24, 32, 34, 43, 44, 55, 82, 85, 86, 93, 101, 121, 129 Percy, Henry ‘Hotspur’ 87, 88, 90, 91 Percy, Thomas, earl of Worcester 90–1 Petipas, Bartholomew, mayor of Lynn 223 Pisan, Christine de 32 Prophet, John 154 Pygot, John 149 Pygot, William, abbot of Selby 141, 147 Redman, Richard 102 Rempston, Thomas 154 Richard II, king of England 11, 12, 13, 15, 20–1, 23, 24, 28, 29, 31, 35, 36–7, 95, 107, 117, 164, 165, 169, 196, 219 Robert II, king of Scotland 12, 16 Robert III, king of Scotland 13 Rokeby, Thomas 100, 102 Rome, John 147, 148, 149 Roos, William, Lord 197 Savage, Arnold 137 Savoisy, Charles 31 Scarle, John 153 Scrope, Richard, archbishop of York 1, 6, 15–16, 17, 94, 101–2, 162–79 Shirburn, John, abbot of Selby 141 Shrewsbury, battle of (1403) 69, 82, 84, 85, 88, 96

242

Index Skelton, Thomas 151 Skirlaw, Walter, bishop of Durham 140, 144 Sowdeley, Gruffuth, tax collector in Shropshire 74 Stafford, Edmund, earl of Stafford 92, 154 Stanley, Thomas 154 Swinburne, William 90, 124–5 Sydenham, Simon 149 Tempest, Nicholas 103 Thirning, William, chief justice of the Common Pleas 137, 221 Thomas of Lancaster, second son of Henry IV 8, 39, 45, 46 Thornton, Roger 103 Tiptoft, John, speaker of the Commons in 1406, 18–19, 187

Tirwhit, Robert 150–1 Umfraville, Robert 101, 232–3 Vavasour, Henry 103 Vere, Richard de, earl of Oxford 192 Wakering, John 147 Waltham, William 147 Waleran of Luxemburg, Count of Ligny and St. Pol 36–7 Waterton, Robert 85, 93 Werchin, Jean de 38–9 Whittington, Richard 114 Wykeham, William of, bishop of Winchester 140, 142, 155, 195

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