The banners of the king

5th April is the anniversary of the Battle of Northampton in 1264, where Henry III defeated Simon de Montfort junior.

Henry had summoned the feudal host on 6 March to campaign (so he said) against the Welsh. He soon dropped this pretence and further summons on 18 March made it clear he meant to fight the Montfortians. In early April the king formally declared war by raising his dragon standard, a splendidly decorated banner with jewelled eyes and a tongue that seemed to ‘flicker in and out as the breeze caught the banner, and its eyes of sapphire and other gems flashing in the light’.

The royal host marched on Northampton, the key to control of the midlands. On sunrise on Saturday the 5th, the royal army advanced over the water meadows to attack the town from the west and southwest. They were driven on by a choir of monks singing “Vexilla Regis prodeunt”, a Latin hymn composed by a 6th century bishop of Poitiers. The first verse translates as:

“The banners of the king issue forth,
 The mystery of the cross does gleam,
 Where the creator of the flesh, in the flesh,
 By the cross-bar is hung." 

The royalist infantry, armed with ladders and hurdles, attacked the south gate. Meanwhile a flanking force led by Philip Basset and the Lord Edward made a detour to the southwest. They quickly opened a breach in the wall of the garden of St Andrew’s Priory, and there is some suspicion that the prior had been bribed to undermine the wall: certainly, he was later suspended from office by Simon de Montfort.

As royalist soldiers poured through the breach, just two men stood in their way. This was Simon junior himself and his squire, Ingram Balliol. Simon twice threw back the infantry - showing what an armoured knight could do against footsoldiers - but then lost control of his horse. Driven mad by the slashing of spurs, the beast galloped forward and flung Simon headlong into the ditch. His life was saved by Edward, who prevented royalist soldiers from dragging the stunned knight out of the ditch and shoving a knife through his visor.

Simon’s capture tore the heart out of the resistance. The walls were abandoned as the defenders threw down their weapons and fled to safety. King Henry’s men set about taking prisoners and plundering the town; a businesslike process in which little blood was spilled. Between 55-100 Montfortian knights were captured, a bitter blow to Simon senior’s cause.

The Two Eleanors

My review of The Two Eleanors of Henry III: the lives of Eleanor of Provence and Eleanor de Montfort, by Darren Baker.

The Two Eleanors of Henry III by Darren Baker is a dual biography of Eleanor of Provence and Eleanor de Montfort, respectively the wife and sister of Henry III of England (reigned 1216-72). It is an effort to focus on the lives of two high-ranking noblewomen of the era, as a welcome change from the usual male-dominated narratives. The book also casts a radically different light on the nature and motives of some of the famous protagonists of the era, notably Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester and chief driver of the reform movement in England.

Before reading this, I had noticed a few prickly reviews that complained of the difficulty of telling the two Eleanors apart in the narrative. Perceptions differ, of course, but I didn’t find it difficult to distinguish between them; any more than (for example) King Henry and his nephew Henry of Almaine. The Eleanors were alike in some respects: forceful, intelligent, a great influence on their husbands, but they led very different lives.

It is true that the Eleanors are sometimes overshadowed by their husbands in the text, but that is inevitable given the nature of the subject. Men typically wielded power - officially, at any rate - and it is easier to trace their actions. Even so, Baker quotes some remarkable letters and accounts for the women. These include a series of correspondence between Eleanor de Montfort and a stuffy cleric, Adam Marsh, who spent much of his time advising her to show humility, as a woman ‘should’, and not to argue with her spouse. Eleanor paid no attention and revelled in jewellery and expensive clothing. Neither Eleanor was afraid to clash with their husbands, and one particularly bitter row between Eleanor of Provence and Henry leaps off the page.

To his credit, Baker makes no effort to conceal the darker side of the Eleanors. Like her husband, Eleanor de Montfort was an oppressive landlord who evicted tenants and screwed down hard on the poor. Eleanor of Provence took blood money from the Jews and profited from the sale of Jewish bonds to Christians, one of the most notorious rackets of the age. She also had a tendency to appoint corrupt officials, such as Geoffrey Langley and Brother William of Tarentum, said to have ‘gaped after money like a horseleech after blood’. The appointment of Langley in North Wales proved a disaster, as his money-grubbing and efforts to shire the Four Cantreds triggered a full-scale Welsh revolt.

Money is a dominant theme. Everyone is out to get it, especially the Montforts. I have never been a great fan of Simon and his hair shirt, but hadn’t realised quite how grasping and deceitful the man was. He and his wife attempted to sabotage the Treaty of Paris, one of the great peace agreements of the age, simply to pressure Henry to satisfy outstanding claims for cash. Simon also comes across as a crude bully who routinely threatened opponents in council with physical violence. He betrayed and undermined Henry on several occasions, planted an agent in Rome to secretly work against the king, and generally pursued his own self-interest at all times. So much for Saint Simon.

Baker also deprives Simon of his greatest glory i.e. his alleged status as the founder of parliamentary democracy in England. This honour actually belongs to Eleanor of Provence. In 1254, while Henry was abroad, the queen presided over the first democratic mandate in England. This was over a decade before Simon’s famous assemblies, an inconvenient fact that appears to have been brushed under the carpet.

If I have a criticism, it is that the first third of the book is a little slow. This is partially due to the youth of the protagonists: Eleanor of Provence was only 12 when she married Henry, and naturally had little influence until she matured. Simon, meanwhile, is little more than a hopeful foreign adventurer angling for a rich bride. Henry’s reign itself is a bit of a grind for the first decade, as the young king struggles to assert himself and has to cope with the machinations of his nobles, including the remarkably unpleasant Richard Marshall. The pace picks up from about 1235 onwards, when the personalities of the two duelling couples really come into their own. The most interesting figure at this early stage is Blanche of Castile, the formidable queen of France, who effortlessly unpicked Henry’s attempts to forge dynastic alliances in France. A biography of Blanche would be most welcome.

The climax is reached in the great power-struggle of the reform period, when Henry and Simon (and their wives) ended up at daggers drawn. This was a tragedy on a personal as well as national level, as two couples who had known each other for decades ended up as bitter enemies. Their problems are exacerbated by the rise of Henry’s heir, a wayward tyro named Edward Longshanks. For a king who would have no favourites, Edward was surprisingly malleable at this stage, dragged about by various factions in his pursuit of independence. His infatuation with Simon caused his parents endless heartache, until the scales fell from his eyes when Queen Eleanor was almost killed by a mob in London, stirred up by Montfortian sympathizers. The slaughter of Evesham - more of a mass execution than a battle - lumbered Edward with a blood-feud, though he did his best to reconcile Simon’s widow and her children.

Overall this is an epic tale, recounting four extraordinary intertwined lives, and how their successes and failures wrought permanent changes in England. It ends on a slightly melancholy note, with both Eleanors relegated to the background in their declining years. Perhaps the author could have made a little more of Eleanor de Montfort’s last significant decision, the marriage alliance with Prince Llywelyn of Wales, although the consequences of that might easily fill a separate book. The Two Eleanors does a fine job of shining an overdue light on two fascinating and powerful - in the true sense of the word - medieval noblewomen.

The Two Eleanors on Amazon US

The Two Eleanors on Amazon UK

Adam Gurdun (continued)

The tale of Sir Adam (continued)

After his traumatic experience on the Poitou campaign in 1242, Adam Gurdun had a better time in Gascony a decade later. The duchy was in chaos, thanks to Simon de Montfort’s mismanagement as seneschal and the revolt of Gaston, vicomte de Béarn. This caused neighbouring princes to cast greedy eyes upon it, in particular Alfonso the Wise, King of Castile. After he succeeded his father, Ferdinand, in 1252, Alfonso renewed his dynastic claim to Gascony.

La Réole

All this left Henry III with no choice but to sail to Gascony in person to sort out the mess. Adam was once again summoned to go with his king overseas. Alongside him were the likes of Ralph Bakepuz, a Derbyshire knight who would later fight against Henry’s army at Chesterfield; Humphrey de Bohun, destined to perish in the squalor of a dungeon at Beeston Castle after the battle of Evesham; Hamo Lestrange, who would marry the heiress of Beirut and die in the Holy Land; Fulk Fitzwarin, who would drown in a muddy pool at the Battle of Lewes; Roger Mortimer of Wigmore, whose successors would murder the Prince of Wales, depose Edward II and nearly depose Edward III. An interesting bunch, though I personally wouldn’t have them round for tea.

The duchy of Gascony

In August 1253 the royal fleet sailed up the Gironde to Bordeaux, the chief city of Gascony. Like his father, King John, Henry could soldier when he was in the mood. He fought a determined and energetic campaign, though it took months to reduce the towns and castles of the lower Garonne and Dordogne. The diehard rebels, most of them bitter enemies of Montfort, shut themselves up behind the walls of La Réole (pictured above). Henry deprived the rebels of their allies by negotiating treaties with King Louis of France, the lord of Albret, the Counts of Comminges and Armagnac, and Gaston himself. The lords of Albret in particular would remain steadfastly loyal to the Angevin regime for decades, until they were alienated by Edward II and the rise of Piers Gaveston. 

Civil war, gout, and rebel earls...

Robert de Ferrers, 6th Earl of Derby (1239-79), was one of the strongest - and strangest - characters in a period of English history stuffed full of dynamic, larger-than-life personalities. He tends to get a bit overlooked or dismissed in the histories, so I thought I’d shine a flashlight on him for this post. 

Ferrers' ancestors were among the original mob of land-hungry Normans who came over with the Conqueror in 1066. The centre of their power was in Derbyshire, though it wasn’t until the early 13th century that they really started to piece together a mighty chunk of territory in the north and midlands. Despite their wealth, they were an unlucky family in some ways: the males suffered from hereditary gout, a debilitating and embarrassing disease for noblemen required to take active roles in war and politics. Robert’s father William, the 5th Earl, suffered so badly from the malady he had to be carried everywhere in a litter. In an age when only condemned men travelled in litters, this was a severe humiliation. The final insult came in 1254 when his litter overturned on a bridge and tipped him into the river. He did shortly afterwards of injuries sustained in the fall.

Ferrers, only fifteen when his father died, was left in a difficult position. Too young to inherit, the wardship of his estates was handed over to his cousin Lord Edward, Henry III’s eldest son and future Edward I. Edward promptly sold the wardship to his mother, Eleanor of Provence, and Peter of Savoy for the handsome sum of 6000 marks. The sale effectively mortgaged his kinsman, body and soul, until he was old enough to do homage and take possession of his lands. When Ferrers finally came of age in 1260, he encountered further difficulties. His mother’s dowry ate up most of his income, while he also had to provide for his younger brother William, his wife Mary, and his kinsman Edward, who retained some of the Ferrers estate after the earl came of age. There were also debts to pay, inherited from the previous earl. Ferrers was left with a stipend of just £100 a year to run one of the largest estates in England and sustain thousands of dependants.

Peveril Castle in Derbyshire

His money woes, allied to his wild and ungovernable nature, drove Ferrers to violence. Shortly after coming of age he attacked Tutbury Priory, a religious house his family had been patrons of for generations, and partially destroyed it. He also encouraged his tenants to illegally hunt beasts inside the Derbyshire forests, as well as commit assaults and robberies against his neighbours.

In 1263 Ferrers fell in with the baronial reform movement, keeping company with Simon de Montfort and Richard de Clare, Earl of Gloucester. After de Montfort’s return to England in April 1263, as the leader of an armed rising against Henry III, Robert swung into action. In May and June of that year his forces were active on the southern marches of Wales, seizing the ‘Three Castles’, as they were called, that belonged to the Lord Edward. His long-running rivalry with the prince was the defining feature of Ferrers’ life: “of no-one was Edward more afraid”, wrote the chronicler Robert of Gloucester.

In February 1264, after some skirmishing and renewed war on the marches, Ferrers’ army descended on Worcester. The town was stormed, and the Jewish quarter sacked, with many Jews murdered or kidnapped by his troops. The earl deliberately stole bonds recording Jewish loans he had taken out and carried them off to his castle at Tutbury - a neat way of wiping out one’s debts. He then advanced down the Severn to Gloucester, where he hoped to snare Edward. To his fury, a truce made by Henry de Montfort allowed Edward to slip away to his father at Oxford, ravaging Ferrers’ lands en route. The gloves were now off between the two noble kinsmen, who embarked upon a series of brutal tit-for-tat raids. In March Edward harried his enemy’s lands in Staffordshire, stormed Chartley Castle, and in the following month razed Tutbury and extorted protection money at swordpoint from the earl’s tenants.

After Edward’s capture at the Battle of Lewes, Ferrers was able to respond in kind. His forces overran Edward’s castles in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, captured the castle of Fotheringhay in Northamptonshire, and in late June seized the prince’s chief stronghold, Peveril Castle in Derbyshire. Flushed with his successes, Ferrers then swept west at the head of twenty thousand horse and foot, seized Edward’s base at Chester and routed an army of Welsh troops under the command of Dafydd ap Gruffydd. By now his fearsome reputation preceded him: “they did not dare to come against the earl in battle,” a chronicler wrote of Dafydd’s men, “and so fled....when it came to the pursuit, he killed up to a hundred of them, and captured others; and only one of his men was wounded.”

Ferrers’ days of glory were numbered. Simon de Montfort himself was nervous of his violent and unpredictable ally, and wanted the power base of Chester for himself. He soon cooked up a scheme to nullify the earl. Displaying a typical lack of political cunning, Ferrers accepted de Montfort’s summons to London, where he was promptly arrested on various trumped-up charges and thrown into the Tower. With few friends among the English nobility, Ferrers was powerless to prevent de Montfort stripping away the assets he had only recently made his own. Thus the vicious circle was complete: Edward had robbed Ferrers, Ferrers had robbed Edward, and now Ferrers was robbed by de Montfort.

The victor didn’t have long to enjoy his spoils. In August 1265 Edward pulled off a spectacular reversal of fortune and smashed the de Montfort clan in two bloody engagements at Kenilworth and Evesham. Simon himself was hunted down by a specially chosen death-squad and his body mutilated on the field at Evesham. Perhaps surprisingly, the vengeful prince took no action against Ferrers, still cooling his heels in the Tower. In December the prisoner was released and allowed to buy a pardon for 1500 marks and a gold cup studded with gems. Despite his hatred of Edward, Ferrers was too important to be done away with: he was popular among his tenants in the north midlands, and the ageing King Henry needed his money and support in the region.

Edward I

Dame Fortune had chosen to smile on Ferrers. His response was to spit in her eye. In the spring of 1266 he joined a new band of rebels in the north, headed by Baldwin Wake and John de Eyvill, a rough northern baron described as ‘the bold d’Eyvil, a canny and hardy warrior.” This new baronial coalition ravaged the northern and eastern counties of England in an orgy of fire and sword and rampant bloodletting. They made their base, like so many Robin Hoods, in the greenwood at Duffieldfrith in Derbyshire, close to Ferrers’s chief stronghold at Tutbury. 

Ferrers’ decision to go back into rebellion has baffled historians. He is generally assumed to have acted out of sheer greed and stupidity, but that seems a little unfair. Efficient roughnecks like John de Eyvill wouldn’t have accepted a fool for a leader, and Ferrers and his allies may have had valid causes for complaint. King Henry was still hanging on to their lands, even though they were supposed to have been returned the previous year. For the barons, raised and trained to settle every dispute with the sword, there could only be one response.

Henry’s response was to send an army racing north to quash the rebellion. The rebels were ambushed at Chesterfield and their forces scattered. John de Eyvill escaped to carry on the fight, but Ferrers was quite literally caught with his pants down: he was being bled for his gout when the royalists attacked, and had to stagger away and hide under a pile of woolsacks in a nearby church while his enemies looked for him. In the end he was betrayed, locked up in a cage and carted south to Windsor. No matter what they did, his family just couldn’t stay out of carts.

This time the King and his sons meant to de-fang the troublesome earl once and for all. He remained in prison for three years while a scheme was hatched to strip him of all his lands and goods. Finally, in October 1269, the prisoner was offered a hopeless deal: unless he paid the sum of £50,000 inside ten days, the whole of his estate would be taken away and given to King Henry’s second son. Edmund. Ferrers could not possibly hope to find the money in such a short time. Even so his enemies took out a bit of extra insurance, just in case. On 9th July he was taken from Windsor to Chippenham, where in the presence of the Chancellor he was ordered to formally sign away his inheritance. The demand was almost certainly made with the threat of physical torture if he refused: in later years Ferrers certainly claimed as much. He had no choice but to obey, and at the end of May was released, a free man, but now landless, penniless and utterly dishonoured.

Whatever else he might have been, Ferrers was no quitter. Even a broken man may still have teeth, and he still had the loyalty of his old tenants. Shortly after his release the Midlands was hit by a staggering wave of violent crime, as bad as anything experienced in the civil war. Hundreds of armed robbers, mounted and on foot, plagued the forests and highways, attacking secular and religious persons alike, thieving and murdering with impunity. At the same time a band of ‘night robbers’ emerged from the Derbyshire woods and attacked Nottingham, smashing the timber defences and killing a number of the citizens.

Battle of Lewes

The leader of this army of footpads was one Roger Godberd, a yeoman farmer who held the manor of Swannington in Leicestershire of Ferrers. Evidently a useful bit of muscle, Ferrers had employed him in the garrison of Nottingham Castle in 1264, from where Godberd and other men rode out to commit large-scale poaching offences inside Sherwood Forest. Given the close relationship between lord and tenant, and the timing of Godberd’s revolt, it seems most likely that this new uprising was inspired by anger at Ferrers’ disinheritance. Alternatively, Godberd may simply have been acting on his master’s orders.

Ferrers himself was not idle. While the Midlands descended into anarchy, he led a band of armed men to seize and occupy the manor of Stanford in Berkhire. Stanford was one of his confiscated manors, recently given to Roger de Leyburn, the Lord Edward’s favourite crony. Leyburn had gone to the Holy Land on Crusade with his master, and his absence may have encouraged Ferrers to make the attempt. However, King Henry’s troops soon arrived on the scene and turfed him out again. Soon afterwards he suffered another blow when his ally, Roger Godberd, was finally captured inside Sherwood by royalist forces and imprisoned. Godberd was shunted about between various prisons until his trial at Newgate in 1276. Incredibly, he was acquitted of all charges and released.

Even now, Ferrers was not done. By this point he was little more than an outlaw, leading a gang of brigands in the woods and wild places of the land he had once owned. In 1273 he popped up in Staffordshire at the head of another band of armed loyalists and drove out the royalist garrison at Chartley Castle. His old rival Edward, now King Edward I, was informed that the rebels had not only seized the castle but started working the land nearby, felling timber for sale and using the mills to grind corn. Alarmed and no doubt deeply irritated by Ferrers’ stubborn refusal to go away, Edward despatched an army to retake Chartley and smoke out the men occupying it. His troops were succesful, though not without suffering casualties. Ferrers escaped, thus avoiding a probable third term of imprisonment.

After this latest setback, Ferrers switched tactics. He finally found a friend in the person of Gilbert ‘the red’ de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, and with his support tried to seek redress at law. Technically he had a good case - his disinheritance in 1269 was a monstrous injustice - but the crown had no intention of allowing the fallen earl to rise again. Almost all of his claims were thrown out of court, though in 1275 King Edward relented a little and allowed Ferrers to recover the manor (though not the castle) of Chartley and the manor of Holbrook in Derbyshire.

If this was a sop to keep the old pest quiet, it had the required effect. Ferrers spent his last years living quietly at Chartley with his second wife, Eleanor de Bohun, and their young family. Having lost the majority of his vast inheritance, he did at least suceeed in fathering a son, John, to inherit what remained. He died in 1279 at the relatively young age of forty, probably from an illness related to gout, and was buried at the Augustinian priory of St Thomas in Staffordshire. His descendents, reduced to the lower levels of the English baronage, proved remarkably enduring, and the title of Earl Ferrers has survived to this day. Hopefully the present incumbent doesn’t suffer from gout.

The Battle of Lewes, 1264

Today I'm going to talk about the famous Battle of Lewes, fought on the 14th of May 1264. The battle forms back of the backstory to my next book, Nowhere Was There Peace, shortly to be released by Fireship Press.

Much has been written about Lewes, but I want to concentrate on the fate of the unfortunate Londoners who supported Simon de Montfort against the army of King Henry III. Below is a rather good map of the battle and how it went down:

The causes of it are complex, but can be summarised thus: Henry III was something of an autocrat, and the favouritism he showed his wife's foreign relatives, refusal to compromise with his Barons and general political and military incompetence all came to a head in the 1260s. The French nobleman and Earl of Leicester, Simon de Montfort, put himself at the head of a coalition of baronial rebels. After much argument and grave wagging of beards, both sides started to gather armies in the spring of 1264.

The seal of Simon de Montfort (c.1208-1265)

By May the King's forces had arrived at Lewes in Sussex, where they camped to allow time for reinforcements to join them. Henry based his troops near Saint Pancras Priory, while his eldest son, the hard-nosed Lord Edward, commanded a force of mounted knights and men-at-arms at Lewes Castle, to the north of his father's position.

There had been no wars in England since the reign of King John, Henry's father, and the preparations for the battle seem to have been pretty messy, with both sides gathering men where they could. De Montfort only had about five thousand men, about half the number of the royalists. His army was split into four divisions: one led by himself (though he had broken his leg in an accident and had to lead from the back in a litter), one by his son Henry, another by Gilbert de Clare, and the fourth by Nicholas de Segrave.

This last division consisted of what might be fairly described as a rabble of volunteers, ill-armed London citizens who had flocked to join de Montfort's army. The King and his family were particularly unpopular in London, thanks to the severe taxes Henry imposed on the citizens and the perceived tyranny of his Queen, Eleanor of Provence, and her foreign relatives. Some time prior to the battle, the citizens had expressed their dislike of Eleanor by pelting her barge with mud and stones as it floated down the Thames. Her son Edward had never forgotten the insult dealt to his mother, and waited impatiently for his chance of revenge. At Lewes he got it.
.

Tomb of Henry III

Knowing that he was outnumbered, de Montfort tried to avoid a battle by opening negotiations with the King, who refused them. De Montfort responded by making a sudden night march from his camp at Fletching to Offam Hill, just a mile from Lewes. The royalists were surprised by this maneuver, and even more surprised when de Montfort launched a surprise attack in the early hours of the morning, attacking and routing a group of royalist troops sent out to forage for supplies.

The royal army now heaved into life. Edward moved the quickest, and led his knights in a charge straight at Segrave's Londoners, still performing an excellent impression of a hopeless rabble. Unsurprisingly, they broke and ran like rabbits before the onrushing steel-clad monsters on enormous horses, and were slaughtered as they ran. The merciless pursuit continued for several miles - Edward had allowed his savage temper and desire for revenge to get the better of him, and had left his father's left flank exposed.

Royalists and rebels get stuck into each other at the Battle of Lewes

In the absence of Edward's cavalry, the King was obliged to order his centre and right flank to advance up Uffham hill and engage the baronial forces waiting for them. Many of the royalist soldiers had no experience of warfare, and had to endure an arrow-storm as they struggled up the slope towards a line of dismounted knights and men-at-arms, all bristling with various killing tools.

Neither the King or his brother, the Earl of Cornwall, possessed much in the way of military ability. Cornwall's division was the first to crumple, his men succumbing to panic shortly after the first blows were exchanged and streaming back down the hillside. Henry's men stubbornly fought on for a while longer, but broke when they were attacked in flank and rear by de Montfort's reserves.

By now, Edward had managed to regather his knights and lead them back to the battlefield. There they witnessed the royalists in full retreat back to the castle and priory, closely harried and pursued by the rebels. Edward was all for launching a death-or-glory counterattack, but first tracked down his father, who persuaded him that it was better to surrender and accept de Montfort's terms. His uncle, the luckless Cornwall, was found hiding in a windmill and dragged out to taunts of "Come out, come out, you wicked miller!"

The verdict of battle was reversed in the most emphatic fashion at Evesham, over a year later, but the slaughter of the Londoners at Lewes is significant to my tale. One young stonemason's son in particular manages to escape from the field, slung over the back of a packhorse and bleeding from wounds inflicted by the swords of Edward's knights. Who is he? Wait for the book to find out...

The Jews and Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln

Life in thirteenth century England was dirty, disease-ridden and grim for everyone - even an Earl had little protection against toothache, and God help anyone who suffered a burst appendix - but one section of society had it worse than most. The Jews were a despised and exploited minority, barred from the majority of professions and tolerated for one reason only: their wealth. Moneylending, despite being perceived as glorified usury by Christians, was one of the very few livings a Jew was allowed to make in England.

The Kings of England were in constant need of cash, usually to waste on futile attempts to claw back the Angevin Empire, and the Jews were a useful source of income. If the King tried to tax his barons too heavily, the barons had the means to protest, but there was no-one to stand up for the Jews. Henry III (reigned 1216-1272) taxed them as unmercifully as any of his predecessors, and his reign witnessed a number of appalling attacks by Christians on Jewish communities.

A contemporary illustration of Jews being assaulted

It didn't take much to precipitate such attacks. Anti-Jewish propaganda was rife, one famous example being the case of Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln.

Hugh was the best known of the "blood libel" saints - Christian children whose mysterious deaths were attributed to the Jews - and just nine years old when he vanished in Lincoln on 31 July 1255. His body was discovered at the bottom of a well a few weeks later. A local man accused a Jew named Copin of having murdered the boy as part of an arcane rite and hidden the body. Copin was arrested and under torture confessed to the crime. Torture is always useful in that regard, and for good measure he was made to implicate the entire Jewish community of Lincoln. He was executed, but that wasn't the end of it.

Henry III

It was now that things got political. Six months before Hugh's death, Henry III had sold his rights to tax the Jews to his clever brother, the Earl of Cornwall. Realising his blunder, Henry compensated by making himself eligible to receive the money of any Jew implicated in a crime. The news of the murder of Hugh of Lincoln was a Godsend for the cash-strapped monarch, and ninety Jews were arrested in Lincoln and dragged to the Tower. Eighteen of them were convicted of taking part in a ritual murder and hanged. Henry duly confiscated their money and property. The rest were pardoned and released, probably because Cornwall could see his assets going up in smoke and intervened to spare their lives.

This, by the way, was the supposedly meek and mild Henry III, a good Christian and devoted family man, albeit a fairly inept king. Being a good Christian in those days meant you could be perfectly foul to anyone else and get away with it.

The story of Hugh's death quickly circulated around England, along with lurid details of what the 'evil' Jews had supposedly done to him that I won't repeat here. He became the youngest ever candidate for sainthood, and the 27th July was his feast day. However, his sainthood was never formally recognised by the Vatican and he was never included in the official roll of Catholic martyrs.

The atmosphere in Lincoln remained poisonous against Jews for decades after the death of Hugh, and the community was subjected to further attacks by the Disinherited under the command of Sir John Deyville, who I have talked about before on this blog. Deyville's reasons for attacking them were more practical: like many Christian knights, he was heavily in debt to Jewish moneylenders, and so he and his men deliberately destroyed the rolls and charters that were the only official evidence of those debts. They also murdered and abducted individual moneylenders and their families, hoping to make a fat profit by ransoming the wealthiest.

The attack on Lincoln features in my book, Nowhere Was There Peace, shortly to be released by Fireship Press. Unpleasant as it is to dwell on the suffering of the Jews in this period, I felt it should not be ignored or brushed aside. It also serves to shed an entirely different light on many of the historical figures of the time: Simon de Montfort, for instance, who like little Hugh also achieved a kind of sainthood after his death, was as infected with Anti-Semitism as any of his peers.