Blood on the palace floor

Most people - history bods, anyway - have heard of Robert de Bruce’s murderous assault upon his rival John Comyn in a church at Dumfries in 1306. Not so many know of a (roughly) similar incident that occured several decades earlier, in the very presence of the King of England at Westminster.

The link between the two incidents is John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey. Warenne is best-known as the defeated English general at Stirling Bridge in 1297, although he had a long and eventful career before that date. In the 1260s he played an important role in the suppression of the Disinherited rebels in England; his brutal efficiency in this respect inspired one historian to dub Earl Warenne the ‘big stick’ of royal policy, employed to crush naysayers.

In a world of violent and grasping magnates, Warenne was unusually belligerent. The Hundred Rolls, a monumental record of local government corruption, record the oppressive treatment of the tenants on his vast estates. He terrorized the people on his manors in Yorkshire, and in Sussex indulged in a vicious private war against Sir Robert Aguillon, who had risen high in the favour of Henry III. Much of this was run-of-the mill baronial nastiness, but in 1268 Warenne went a step too far.

Earl Warenne's home of Lewes Castle

At this point Henry’s heir, the Lord Edward, was trying to recruit nobles to accompany him to the Holy Land. Many of the English barons preferred to concentrate on their private feuds than embark on the risky voyage. This was especially true of Warenne and Henry de Lacy, the young Earl of Lincoln. These two entered into a petty row over some pasture land, which threatened to flare up into civil war when both men started to raise troops. The crisis fizzled out, but the restless Warenne got into another row with Alan de la Zouche.

It was the usual scuffle over competing land rights, but this time Warenne decided to settle the affair personally. When the two men appeared before the king, in the crowded hall of Westminster, Warenne ripped out his sword and attacked Alan and his son. He then cut his way out of the hall, seized a horse from the royal stables and galloped off to his castle at Reigate. The injured men were left lying in a pool of blood, no doubt while shocked gasps echoed among the ancient rafters and Henry had apoplexy. Or perhaps he didn’t. He had been forty years in this game, after all, and men of violence doing awful things in front of him was nothing new.

Even so, Warenne could not be allowed to simply get away with it. The king dispatched Edward in hot pursuit, and the prince quickly surrounded Reigate with an army. Edward took the initiative in negotiating the terms of Warenne’s surrender, which was considered an offence to the royal dignity. Hardly surprising, since it had taken place in the presence of the king and his sons.

Stirling Bridge

The earl’s punishment was severe. He was ordered to pay a fine of 10,000 marks and a barefoot walk of penance from Temple to Westminster. The fine was eventually relaxed: he only paid 1850 marks of it before his death in 1304, with 6800 still outstanding. He was helped by his friends in high places, including Henry of Almaine and Gilbert de Clare, who closed ranks and swore the assault on Zouche was not premeditated. Warenne’s victim lasted long enough for Warenne to make his peace with the crown on 4 August, only to die six days later. His son Roger, who had also suffered Warenne’s murderous wrath, survived and inherited his father’s estates.

The blow to Warenne’s prestige and future freedom of action was severe, however. He remained under a cloud during the reign of Edward I, who made regular use of financial penalties as a ‘carrot and stick’ tactic of controlling his nobility. His grandfather King John had adopted a similar policy, except John used it as a means of destroying his nobles: Edward preferred to re-assimilate them, on the understanding that he could release the Sword of Damocles at any time.

She-bears

On 15 May 1266 (I’m late, as usual), the Disinherited barons under Robert de Ferrers, 6^th Earl of Derby, suffered a bad defeat at Chesterfield in Derbyshire. It was more of an ambush than a pitched battle, in which the rebels were attacked as they lay in camp outside the town. Some of them were even confident enough to go off hunting in the woods, and were thus taken completely by surprise.

The royalist army was led by Henry of Almaine, Henry III’s nephew, and his lieutenants Earl Warenne and Warin of Basingbourne. Warin was the chap who raised his helm at the battle of Evesham and delivered a speech to the royalist knights, just as they were on the point of breaking:

“Again, traitors again,

And remember how vilely ye were brought to the

ground at Lewes,

Turn again,

And think that the power is now all ours,

And we shall,

As if they were nought,

Overcome them to a certainty.”

Earl Ferrers was a sickly fellow. He had inherited the family curse of gout, and on the day of battle was lying flat on his back in his pavilion, having his blood let. This was a common remedy for gout, though one imagines the treatment was worse than the malady. His comrades Sir John de Eyvill, Henry Hastings and Baldwin Wake had led the hunting party into the forest, to chase after deer with spear and bow.

A pleasant time was being had by all, then, but not for long. As soon as word of the northern conspiracy reached London, Henry of Almaine had raced north to deal with the threat. Whatever their faults, all the Angevins could move at speed when they wanted to, and his army arrived near Chesterfield at dusk after a forced march.

The royalists attacked at once. Ferrers’s men scattered, while the earl himself fled into Chesterfield - trailing blood and stained bandages - and took refuge in a church. The only serious resistance came from John de Eyvill and his fellows, who stormed back from the woods and hurled themselves at the enemy. John was knocked off his horse by a royalist knight, Gilbert Haunsard, but climbed aboard a spare:

“With a lance he brought a knight at the first onset down;

Yet he broke through the host, and wounded many a one.”

John and his comrades saw the battle was lost, and fled back into the forest. They made their way back to the Isle of Axholme, an impregnable hideout deep inside the dreary fens of Lincolnshire:

“The Deyvill escaped, bold and valiant,

Into the Isle of Axholme, where he was before.”

There was no such escape for Earl Ferrers. Not exactly a born hero, he was eventually found hiding under a pile of woolsacks in the church. His position was given away by a young woman of Chesterfield, whose lover Ferrers had allegedly hanged outside the town gates. He was packed off to prison at Windsor, where he spent the next three years cooling his heels in (probably quite comfortable) captivity. His men weren’t so lucky. At least one of the earl’s knights, Henry Ireton, was killed in the fight outside Chesterfield. Another, Robert de Wollerton, was taken and hanged on Sheene hillside. The rest scattered into the wilds of Sherwood and the High Peak, where they gathered in sullen bands and plotted revenge:

“They collected in bands in the woods, which were suitable hiding-places, and made hide-outs in various places. They were more dangerous to meet than she-bears robbed of their cubs and seized everything they wanted from anywhere.”

- the Bury chronicler

Thus England continued to slide into ruin and chaos. As the Scottish chronicler, Walter Bower, put it - nowhere was there peace, nowhere security.

 

 

 

Mercy and ferocity

The future Edward I of England had an unpromising start to his career. He was surprisingly malleable, torn between loyalty to his father, Henry III, and the rebel barons led by Simon de Montfort. At one point he was suspected of conspiring to depose the king, and his habit of oath-breaking was satirised in a Montfortian ballad, The Song of Lewes:

“He is a lion by his pride and ferocity; by his inconstantly and changeableness he is a pard, not holding steadily his word or his promise, and excusing himself with fair words.”

The nadir of the young Edward’s fortunes came at the Battle of Lewes in 1264, when his undisciplined pursuit of the Londoners lost the battle for his father. He spent a year in humiliating captivity, which gave Edward much time to ponder his mistakes. In the summer of 1265 he broke free and staged a dramatic coup that ended in the bloody slaughter of Evesham. The massacre of Earl Simon and his followers saddled Edward with fresh problems, as he was now the target of a blood-feud.

When the revolt of the Disinherited broke out, Edward was among the first to seize forfeit land and money. He wasn’t quite as rapacious as his colleague Earl Gilbert de Clare, the ‘red dog’ of Gloucester, but certainly grabbed his share. Among other lands, Edward seized the manor of Luton, once in the possession of Henry de Montfort. Henry had been cut in half by a broadsword at Evesham, and Edward wept at his funeral. He managed to wipe away his tears before taking possession of Luton just four days later.

Over the winter months of 1265, Edward came to realise two things. First, the sheer folly of the policy of disinheritance, which left half the landed class of England destitute and with no option except to fight. Second, the pressing need to reconstruct his reputation in the public eye. A prince who was perceived as faithless, one who waged war on his own people, was never going to enjoy popular support.

The first sign of his changed attitude was at Axholme in Lincolnshire, where Edward laid siege to a nest of rebel barons holed up in the dreary fens. When they eventually surrendered, he spared their lives on condition they stood trial at London. Predictably, every one of the barons broke their oath and went back into rebellion.

Edward showed the same clemency in further military operations. After he stormed the rebel-held town of Winchelsea, he spared the townsfolk on condition they abandoned their lives of piracy. As a result of his mercy, ‘great tranquillity was spread over that sea’. Nor was there any question of disinheritance. Instead the barons of the port towns were permitted to have their lands, houses and chattels, as well as ancient liberties guaranteed by the king and his predecessors.

A few months later Edward defeated the outlaw knight, Adam Gurdon, and let him live: this clemency was not extended to Adam’s peasant followers, who were hanged on the trees of Alton forest. In 1267 Edward raced north to crush the revolt of John de Vescy in Northumbria, and spared the ringleaders after he stormed their base at Alnwick Castle. John had carried the severed foot of Simon de Montfort back to Alnwick and kept it inside a silver shoe; it was said to have magic healing properties, but proved unable to repel swords and arrows.  

This policy had the desired effect. Edward’s reputation soared among English chroniclers. In place of the devious ‘Leopard’ of earlier years, he was now ‘a gallant knight who should be king hereafter’; the king’s ‘renowned first-born son’; one ‘whose mercy is always inestimable and universal’.

Edward arguably took mercy too far. He pardoned a dangerous pirate, Henry Pethun, and an outlaw named Walter Devyas. These men showed their gratitude by immediately reverting to lives of crime. Henry Pethun vanished on the high seas, never to be seen again, but Walter was finally caught on the Scottish border and beheaded for his many arsons, robberies and murders.

All of this is virtually unrecognisable from the Longshanks of popular imagination: the ruthless tyrant who brutally executed William Wallace and harried the Welsh and the Scots without mercy. The truth is that the gallant knight and the brutal conqueror existed in the same man. Much of the success of Edward’s reign was due to the calculated mercy he showed after Evesham. Men who had surrendered to him, such as Adam Gurdon and John de Vescy, served him loyally in the Welsh and Scottish wars. The king’s peculiar mixture of ferocity and mercifulness was expressed in The Song of Caerlaverock, composed in 1300:

“For none experience his bite

Who are not envenomed by it.

But he is soon revised

With sweet good-naturedness

If they seek his friendship

And wish to come to his peace”.