Warring cousins

One of the many side-dramas of the Montfortian era in England was the bitter ongoing feud between the Lord Edward (later Edward I) and Robert de Ferrers, 6^th earl of Derby (1239-79). These men were cousins, and very alike in some ways: both were ambitious, belligerent, full of energy and willing to stoop to low methods to gain their ends. They differed in that Edward learned from his mistakes, while Robert seemed intent on compounding his.

The arms of the 6th earl

The origins of their feud are debatable. It may have stemmed from Edward’s sale of his cousin’s wardship to the queen and Peter of Savoy in 1257, though such transactions were not uncommon. Equally it may have stemmed from mere personal animosity between men who were too similar to endure each other’s presence. Whatever the case, it soon led to conflict.

Robert struck first. In 1263, when the whole of England was on the verge of civil war, he attacked and captured three of Edward’s castles. Which ones are not stated, though Robert probably focused on ravaging his kinsman’s estates in Derbyshire and the High Peak country. In early February he turned south and sacked Worcester, destroying both the town and the Jewry. On 5 March he almost had Edward cornered at Gloucester, but the latter managed to slide out of the trap by tricking Henry de Montfort into accepting a truce. Robert was so furious at Henry’s gullibility he ‘struck in his spurs’ and galloped off back to the north country.

Chartley castle

A few weeks later, after the royalist victory at Northampton, Edward went on the offensive. He blazed through Robert’s lands in Derbyshire, throwing down castles and extorting protection money from the earl’s tenants. This was part of a two-pronged campaign: at the same time Edward’s ally, Prince Dafydd of Wales, led an army of Marchers over the border to ravage the Ferrers estates in Staffordshire. Robert was in London with Earl Simon, apparently unwilling or unable to defend his lands.

The wheel of fortune took another dramatic spin at the Battle of Lewes on 14 May, where Edward and his father, Henry III, were captured. This enabled Robert to launch a counter-offensive and chase Dafydd back into Wales. He was then attacked from an unexpected quarter. In December Earl Simon summoned Robert to London to answer ‘divers trespasses’ in the king’s name. He duly turned up and was thrown into the Tower. Either Robert’s actions had got out of hand, or Simon used them as a pretext to imprison the earl and seize his lands.

After Simon’s death at Evesham in August 1265, Robert was handed an opportunity to redeem his fortunes. Both Henry and Edward were willing to take him back into the fold, and he was offered a royal pardon. For reasons that are still unclear, Robert threw the offer back in their faces and went back into rebellion. He and his allies were defeated at Chesterfield in May 1266, where Robert didn’t exactly cover himself in glory. He was discovered hiding under a pile of woolsacks in a local church, and sent to prison at Windsor in a cage mounted on a wagon.

In 1269, after three years of captivity, Robert was swindled out of his inheritance. In one of the great medieval stitch-ups, the king and his sons forced the earl to sign away his lands under impossible terms of recovery. They were granted to Henry’s second son, Edmund, who became Earl of Lancaster. This formed the basis of the great Duchy of Lancaster enjoyed by John of Gaunt, Henry of Bolingbroke et al.

In a later age Robert’s head would have decorated a pike on Tower Bridge. Instead his life was spared. After the death of Henry III and Edward’s departure on crusade, the now-landless earl mustered his followers and tried to recover his lands by force. In 1271 he briefly occupied one of his estates in Berkshire, only to be driven away by Edmund of Lancaster. Two years later he popped up again in Staffordshire and stormed Chartley Castle, one of his old strongholds.

England was now threatened with another civil war. Robert gained the support of Earl Warenne and Earl Gilbert de Clare, while his lieutenant Roger Godberd waged a guerilla campaign in the Midlands. Ferrers loyalists in the High Peak launched attacks on Nottingham, and swore an oath to kill Edward when he returned to England. The situation was rescued by the prompt action of the regents. Edmund and his colleagues Roger Mortimer and Reynold Grey raced north to crush the northern conspiracy, and in 1274 Chartley was retaken in a brutal assault that slaughtered most of Robert’s surviving followers.

The fugitive earl escaped into the wild. When Edward finally returned, the new king took a surprisingly conciliatory line. Instead of destroying his old foe, he allowed him to sue for his lands at law. Robert managed to regain the manor of Chartley (though not the castle, which was staffed by a royal garrison) and the manor of Holbrook in Derbyshire. Thus he redeemed a fragment of his inheritance, and regained a stake in the landed affairs of the realm. Robert was quiet for the rest of his days, which were short: he died of the gout in 1279, aged just forty.

Old resentments died hard among the medieval aristocracy. Robert’s heir, John Ferrers, spent his life lobbying unsuccessfully for the return of his father’s estates. Perhaps to get him out of the kingdom, Edward II made John seneschal of Gascony and packed him off to govern the duchy. This proved a disaster as John deliberately ill-treated the Gascon nobility in order to cause trouble for the king. Even Philip IV of France, no friend to the Plantagenet regime, was moved to declare:

“The said John de Ferrers, we learn, behaves thus because just as the late king of England disinherited the said John’s father, so he wishes to disinherit his and our son Edward II, but may this enterprise, with God’s help, not succeed; but, if it is true, let him perish in his iniquity”.

Philip’s wish came true. The Gascon gentry had a straightforward method of dealing with oppressive outsiders, and arranged to have John murdered. He died of ‘noxious poison’ in 1312, the luckless son of a luckless father.

Sent home to think again

In 1266, while civil war was still raging in England, a much more obscure conflict blew up on the southern borders of Gascony. This region had long been a bone of contention: the duchy of Gascony was held by the Plantagenet king-dukes of England, but the kingdoms south of the Pyrenees had their own designs on it. In 1244 Theobald ‘the Troubadour’ of Navarre had attempted to invade Gascony, but was sent packing by the English seneschal, Nicholas de Molis.

Almost twenty years later, Theobald’s successor Theobald II decided to have another go. He was handed the opportunity by Henry III’s distractions in England and Wales, though Theobald arguably left it a bit late. The ideal time to invade Gascony was in 1264-5, when Henry was Simon de Montfort’s captive. After the battle of Evesham in August 1265 Henry was a free man again, though he still had plenty of work to do in England.

Over the winter months of 1265, Theobald worked on luring the nobles of southern Gascony away from Henry’s allegiance. Many of these nobles had blood ties to the royal families of Navarre and Castile, and their loyalty to the English regime was always suspect. In December 1265 Theobald gained the homage and fealty of the Count of Comminges and the Count of Astarac. He also intrigued with the ever-troublesome Gaston VII Moncada, Viscount of Béarn. In return for supporting his claim to the county of Bigorre, Theobald persuaded Gaston to betroth his daughter Constance to the king’s brother, Henry the Fat. Henry’s nickname suggests he wasn’t exactly love’s young dream, but then Constance didn’t have much say in the matter.

In the summer of 1266, even as Henry laid siege to Kenilworth in England, the Navarrese launched their invasion. Theobald’s army laid siege to the castle of Lourdes (pictured), strategically placed to guard the seven valleys of the Lavedan in the Pyrenees. Meanwhile his partisans clashed with Henry’s supporters in the sea-port of Bayonne. The lord Arnaud-Guillaume, another Gascon noble with Navarrese connections, opened the gates of his castle of Grammont to the enemy.

 

The situation was rescued by the king of France, Louis IX, whose intervention forced the warring parties to agree to a truce on 19 December. Jean de Grailly, a Savoyard knight in the Lord Edward’s household, also played an important role. Jean had been permitted to settle in Gascony in 1262, and in February 1267 he negotiated a new marriage contract between Constance and Henry of Almaine, the English king’s nephew. This effectively severed Gaston de Béarn’s alliance with Navarre, and sent King Theobald home to think again.

 

 

That guy's got a squint

Detail of a miniature of the Comte de Bar and his men invading Champagne in summer 1297 on behalf of Bar's father-in-law, Edward I. Taken from the Grandes Chroniques de France, compiled between the 13th-15th century.

The image is probably late 14th century, as Bar's men are wearing the style of armour from that time. In 1297 they would have worn much less plate and bucket helms instead of visored helms. As for the sabatons and gorgets and pauldrons, don't even get me started. The droit de seigneur is upside down, the jupons clash with the haketons, the grass is too green, the sky is a funny colour, and that guy fourth from the right has got a squint. Unacceptable. Up with this sort of thing I put will not.

The League of Franche-Comté (2)

The League of Franche-Comté (2)

On 8 February 1297 Adolf of Nassau, King of Germany, assembled the nobles of Burgundy at Koblenz. These were Jean de Chalon-Arlay and his associates, those men who had refused to accept the count of Burgundy’s sale of his inheritance to the king of France, Philip le Bel. Instead they were loyal to the Holy Roman Empire and wished to hold their fiefs direct from Adolf.

Adolf rewarded his followers with lands taken from those Burgundians loyal to France. The count of Bar, Henri III, was given the fief of Guyot de Jonveille, and those confiscated from Jean de Bourgogne as far as Conflans in the châtellenie of Vesoul. In revenge Philip confiscated Bar’s townhouse in Paris and gave his lands in France to Charles of Valois. Tit-for-tat.

Two days earlier Henri had received subsidies from his father-in-law, Edward I, brought by the bishop of Coventry and Jean de Berwick. He was therefore a key member of the Anglo-German-Burgundian alliance against the French. On 6 May, he gave to Guillaume de Remoiville, one of his vassals, the land of Maxey-sur-Vaise on the express condition that Guillaume fought the king of France.

To read and write

Could medieval kings read and write? It seems likely they could read, but writing was for clerks.

For instance in July 1282 Eleanor of Provence, the queen dowager, asked her son Edward I to listen to a draft message to the king of France and amend it if he wished. The relevant part of her message read:

“Nos avoms fet feire une letre depar vos la quele nous vo envoions et voz prioms, que vos la vuillez oir, si ele vos plest, facez la seler, et si non, voillez commander, que ele soit amendee a vestre plesir.”

(‘We have had a letter made on your behalf which we send to you, and we pray that you should wish to hear it. If it please you, have it sealed; and if not, may you wish to command that it be amended to your satisfaction’)

From this it appears that the king would listen to a letter - presumably read out by a clerk - and then order the content to be amended, if he thought it appropriate. It has been argued that kings had basic literacy, but the process of letter-writing was generally beneath them. God’s representative on earth did not lick his own postage stamps.

The earliest known example of the handwriting of a medieval English king is a code written by Edward III - ‘pater sancte’ - on letters sent to the pope in 1330 (above).

Slave girls

Today is the (probable) anniversary of the death of Prince Llywelyn ap Gruffudd in December 1282. Rather than go through the murky deed all over again, it might be worth rewinding a couple of generations.

In 1222 Llywelyn ab Iorwerth - Llywelyn the Great - asked Pope Honorius III to abolish the custom in Wales that illegitimate children could inherit just as if they were legitimate. Further, the prince asked that the pope would confirm Llywelyn’s statute that his son Dafydd, ‘by his legitimate wife Joan, daughter of the late king of England’, would succeed him in all his possessions.

Llywelyn’s original petition is lost, but several responses from the pope survive. The archives at Vatican City contain the pope’s final judgement:

“To the nobleman Lord Llywelyn of North Wales. Bringing about from us the attached petition. Certainly your petition showed that since some detestable custom or rather corruption has developed in the land subject to your authority - as evidently the son of the slave girl could be the heir together with the son of the free woman and illegitimate sons could obtain the inheritance just as the legitimate - you [Llywelyn] and your Lord Henry, illustrious king of the English, beloved sons of Christ, have agreed in harmony and also further with the intervening authority of our beloved sons, our venerable brother Archbishop Stephen of Canterbury…that Dafydd your son, who from Joan the daughter of Clementia and the king of England, your legal wife, should succeed in receiving your inheritance by right in all your possessions.”

Llywelyn’s elder son, Gruffudd, was thus condemned as ‘the son of the slave girl’ and barred from inheritance. Far from being a slave, his mother was in fact the daughter of King Reginald of Man. This was all swept aside by Llywelyn the Great, in his desire to get rid of his first wife and marry into the Plantagenets: one might draw comparisons with the behaviour of his eighth great-grandson, Henry VIII.

Gruffudd’s son was the aforesaid Prince Llywelyn, killed near Builth in 1282 by his kinsmen, the Mortimers. The decision of his grandfather Llywelyn the Great to change the inheritance laws in Wales meant that Llywelyn ap Gruffudd was the son of a legally declared bastard and the grandson of a woman condemned as a slave by the Holy See. The Mortimers, on the other hand, were legitimate heirs via the female line of Llywelyn the Great’s son, Dafydd, who died without issue in 1246.

Whether or not the rules of succession influenced the rules of engagement near Builth in December 1282 is speculation, but it’s something else to throw in the mix.

A gentle romance

Extract from the new WIP (that's Work in Progress, hem hem). And it's all kicking off in Ireland in 1275.

"The noise and the confusion was enough to drive a man mad. Screaming horses, shouts and orders and curses and whimpers of pain, clattering blades, the swirl of pipes and blast of horns. Wounded and crippled men lay in pools of blood and dung and piss. Others tried to crawl to safety, dragging shattered limbs or spouting blood from gory stumps. An English squire, still a boy, his nose hanging from a strip of skin, stood over his weeping master and fought off all comers with a broken spear. A galloglass knocked him down and plunged his axe into the squire's chest, shattering every rib in his body. A dying horse rolled in its guts, limbs flailing, its piercing shrieks horrible to hear. Two galloglass squabbled over the boots of a dead knight, then fell on each other with daggers drawn, teeth bared, spitting curses. One killed his rival with a stab to the eye and stole his purse. He was still counting out the handful of copper pennies when an English mace crushed his skull from behind..."

Mean and mild

Two starkly contrasting views on Edward I's actions in Scotland.

"By a piece of cold-blooded cruelty which shows Edward in a singularly unattractive light, he had refused to accept the garrison's surrender, even after it surrendered unconditionally, until the castle had been bombarded for a day by one of his new engines, the 'Warwolf'...the king's meanness of spirit and implacable, almost paranoiac hostility were not shared by his subjects."

"It would be wrong to think of him [Edward] acting in Scotland as a mere tyrant, if by tyrant we mean a ruler whose arbitrary whims are law, who pays no regard to local feeling and opinion, or for whom cruelty towards his subjects had become settled policy. If we look at the situation in 1304 as it appeared to Edward, we must in fairness admit that his attempted settlement was fair and statesmanlike. How many kings or governments emerging as the victors of long and bloody wars in the seventeeth, eighteenth or nineteenth centuries treated their vanquished foes as prudently and leniently as Edward treated the Scots in 1304 and 1305?"

What seems odd about the above is that both judgements come from the pages of the same book, and from the same author, GWS Barrow. One minute Edward is a mean, paranoid loony tune, the next he's a mild and statesmanlike ruler who could have taught Bismarck a thing or two. Now that's what you call dividing opinion.

The Great Thingy

On this day in June 1215, King John was compelled to put his seal to the Great Charter by a bunch of democratically-minded barons. Yep, those barons - they were always giving it to the poor.

 Here, Messers Sellar and Yeatman remind us of the meaning of this momentous thingy, from 1066 And All That.

Author interview

Today I am interviewed by Dan Moorhouse on his website, SchoolsHistory.Org. I talk about my new novella, Longsword (IV) The Hooded Men as well as my thoughts on history and life as a writer in general. My piercing shafts of insight and stupendous witty brilliance are not to be missed, along with my humility.

Interview with David Pilling

Adam's last stand

In the summer of 1301 Edward I embarked on another grand attempt to move his drinks cabinet six inches closer to Stirling. His plans for the campaign were much more ambitious than previous efforts. Rather than one army marching into Scotland, two would invade at once. The king himself would advance from Berwick, while a second host under the nominal command of Prince Edward (but in practice the Earl of Lincoln) marched from Carlisle. The idea was to crush the Scottish field army in a pincer movement.

The military summonses were issued in February and March and the musters fixed for 24 June. It seems barely credible that Adam Gurdun would be called up yet again: after the siege of Caerlaverock in the previous year he had returned to Hampshire, where he might have expected to enjoy his few remaining years in peace. But there he is on the writ, summoned to join the muster of the king’s army at Berwick on the Nativity of St John the Baptist (24 June). The writ insists that Adam must serve in person, which is intriguing. A knight of his advanced years - he was probably about 85 at this point - could hardly be expected to do very much. No doubt his experience was useful, or perhaps King Edward simply liked the company of old friends. Along with Earl Warenne and the Earl of Lincoln, Adam was one of a dwindling band of survivors from the Montfortian era.

The campaign itself was not very eventful. The king’s army marched from Berwick along the line of the Tweed and reached Coldstream on 21 July. From there Edward advanced to Peebles via Kelso and Traquair. By the end of August he had reached Glasgow, where preparations were made for an attack on Bothwell Castle. He wanted the ‘chief honour of taming the pride of the Scots’ to go to his son, advancing from Carlisle, but the Scots refused battle. Instead the main Scottish army withdrew beyond the Forth, though there was some skirmishing around Ayr and Turnberry. On 2 September the king received the good news that his son had taken Turnberry Castle, and oblations were given in thanks at Glasgow Cathedral.


Adam performed his final military service at the siege of Bothwell in September 1301. This was one of the greatest of Scottish castles, with a large circular donjon, possibly modelled on that at Coucy in Picardy. A great movable siege tower, called Belfry, was dragged up a corduroy road from Glasgow and covered with thick hides as a protection against fire. The assault led to Bothwell’s surrender on 21 September and the English army disbanded at Dunipace on 29 September. The siege tower was then dragged up to Stirling, but no assault took place as King Edward, due to French pressure, agreed to a truce in January 1302.

The truce was only temporary, but it marked the end of Adam’s military career. After fifty-nine years of service, a period of outlawry and eight major campaigns, he was finally allowed to go home and rest.