Medieval soldier database

A fantastic online research source has recently become available, thanks to the Arts & Humanities Research Council working in conjunction with the Universities of Reading and Southampton. It's called the Medieval Soldier Database and is an online listing of medieval soldiers that served in the English army between the late 14th to 15th century. 

The original muster rolls have been transcribed, and it is possible to search under the following categories: first name; surname; status; military rank; captain name; commander; year; activity and reference. 

The database is designed to act as part of a study into soldiers in late medieval England. It  is also great fun and very user-friendly. I entered my family surname into the 'Search' section, hoping to find evidence of ancient Pillings tearing up the battlefields of Agincourt etc, but sadly nothing came up. It seems that my innate cowardice and complete lack of martial skill are hereditary!

Others may have more luck. Check out the link below and go play!

Database

The prince and the outlaw

Following on from my recent posts on Sir John Deyville, this is about Sir Adam de Gurdon, another unjustly forgotten figure of the Baron's Wars, and his dealings with the future Edward I.

Coat of arms of Sir Adam de Gurdon

Sir Adam was a minor country knight, the Lord of Selbourne in Hampshire and Bailiff of Alton. He sided with Simon de Montfort during the wars of the 1260s and probably fought at the Battle of Lewes, where the royalists were defeated and Henry III taken prisoner along with his son, the Lord Edward. He seems to have avoided being present at the slaughter of Evesham in 1265, and like many of the surviving rebels his lands were stripped from him by the vengeful King Henry. This left the 'Disinherited' with little option but to carry on fighting.

It was now that Adam made his brief cameo in history. He became the leader of one of the outlaw bands that plagued England in the aftermath of Evesham, and set up camp near Alton Pass in Hampshire. The pass was the main route from London to Southampton, so the outlaws could prey on travellers making their way between the capital and the south coast.

It seems that Adam made a serious nuisance of himself, so much so that the Lord Edward decided to deal with him in person.

Edward led a division of royal troops in a head-on attack against the rebel camp near Alton Pass, which was guarded by timber barricades. The barricades were quickly stormed, and a vicious hand-to-hand struggle broke out in the woods. The prince and the outlaw knight met in the thick of the fighting and engaged in single combat.

Medieval knights getting stuck into each other. Quite literally.

Unlike his rather cowardly portrayal in Braveheart, Edward was an accomplished knight, whose height and length of limb gave him an advantage over most other men in a fight. After a hard scrap he beat Adam to his knees and accepted the outlaw's surrender. Adam's men were not so lucky, and most of them were hanged on trees. 

There is a pretty story that Edward raised Adam up, greeted him as his friend and comrade, and sent him as a present to his wife Eleanor at Windsor. This doesn't sound much like old Longshanks, and sure enough the truth is slightly different. Adam was loaded down with chains and sent as a prisoner to Farnham Castle and then Guildford. He was finally sent to the dungeons at Windsor, where, Edward quipped, he could keep the captured Earl of Derby company.  

Despite his hard words, Edward had no intention of punishing Adam further. There were only a finite number of armed knights in England, and the future king needed bellicose men like Adam and Sir John Deyville on his side.

Thus Adam was soon released and restored to his estates. For the rest of his long life (he died in 1305) he remained loyal to the crown, and served as a justice of the forest and commissioner of array, as well as doing military service in Wales and Scotland.

His fate is testament to Edward's gift for inspiring loyalty in former enemies, and a corrective to the modern image of Edward I as an utterly merciless tyrant: mercy, as the king well appreciated, can be useful as well as admirable.

Sir John Deyville - Part Two

Sir John was an unpopular house guest

The baronial defeat at Evesham seems to have brought out John's inner arsonist. First he had to contend with the victorious Lord Edward, who had wooden bridges built so he could approach John's camp at Axholme. In December 1265 the two sides made peace at Bycarr's Dyke in Nottinghamshire, but treaties meant little in those days. Within a few months John and his followers were on the loose again.

Their first target was Sheffield, where they made a great slaughter of the inhabitants and burned the town and castle to the ground. John then rushed to join Robert Ferrers, the Earl of Derby, who was mustering a new army at Chesterfield in Derbyshire. True to form, he sacked and burned more towns and villages on the way.

As the highest-ranking of the surviving rebels, Ferrers was the natural replacement for De Montfort. Unfortunately, he was little more than a selfish freebooter, and lacked the mental and physical capacity to fill the dead man's boots: he suffered from hereditary gout, and had to hobble everywhere on crutches.

Despite his uninspiring presence, the army Ferrers gathered at Chesterfield was a formidable one, especially when joined by John's Yorkshiremen and a band of Lincolnshire men led by Baldwin Wake. A royalist army led by Henry III's nephew, Henry of Almain, raced north to crush them, and fell on the rebels as they lay encamped outside the town. What followed was a sort of medieval Battle of the Somme, as both sides slugged it out for hours amid mud and torrential rain and steadily darkening skies.

By nightfall the rebel lines were shattered. John escaped into the forest - "The bold Deyville to the woods and fields", as one chronicler had it - while Ferrers fled into the town and hid under a pile of woolsacks in a church. He was betrayed by a woman whose lover he had hanged, clapped in chains, and carted off south to imprisonment at Windsor.

The Disinherited were now reduced to the garrison at Kenilworth Castle and a few scattered bands of outlaws. Never dismayed, John galloped back to Axholme, rallied his surviving followers and immediately led them out again. They stormed Lincoln and Norwich, burning and looting in the old style. At Lincoln they deliberately targeted the Jewish quarter, murdering and abducting Jewish moneylenders and burning deeds containing lists of Christian debtors. John owed a great deal of money to the Jews, and this was one way of rubbing out his debts.

A medieval illustration of Jews being attacked by Christians

He then threw himself into the Isle of Ely in Cambridgeshire, Hereward the Wakes's old stronghold, and established a fortified camp among the reeds and fens. The chronicler Robert of Gloucester noted that:

"Sir John Deville and others, that disinherited were,
Took the castle of Ely, and held them fast there..."

From there his men raided the surrounding area. Cambridge was only spared because the burghers paid John danger money, and he wrote a letter exhorting the people of the town to join the rebellion. Many flocked to his banner, including a townsman named Robert Hood and another local man named Jean de Petit (John the Little).

In despair at the ruinous state of England, the papal legate Ottobuono attempted to mediate with the rebels in Ely and Kenilworth. They rejected his peace terms and replied that they regarded their cause as just: they proclaimed their loyalty to the King, to the Provisions of Oxford, their religious faith, and invoked the memory of Simon de Montfort. It seems that despite his talent for mass destruction, John had certain principles at heart.

Principles or no, his nest of rebels had to be dealt with. A royal force advanced on Ely, only to find that John's men had dodged past them and were bearing down on London. The rebels torched several Hertfordshire towns on their way to the capital, and arrived at Southwark on 11th April 1267. Here they were met by the forces of the young Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, who had thrown in his lot with the cause of the Disinherited.

Earl Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, known as Gilbert 'the Red' for his shock of red hair

For two months the capital was a rebel camp, and from his base at Southwark John took the opportunity to rob and pillage to his heart's content. He even smashed his way into Westminster Palace and carried away the goodies within, including the doors and window frames. The King declared John to be his chief enemy, and his excommunication was publicly renewed at St Paul's on Good Friday.

The occupation of London ended when, against John's wishes, Gloucester secured a royal pardon on the 15th June and agreed to quit the city. John and his followers could not hold out on their own, and on the following day they were granted a truce. On the 18th June the King re-entered his capital in triumph.

Incredibly, considering the widespread damage and loss of life he had caused, John was granted a royal pardon at St Paul's, "for the sake of peace", and allowed to go free. The remainder of his men at Ely were soon forced to surrender by the Lord Edward, who smoked them out by ordering the reeds in the fens to be set alight. Kenilworth had already surrendered after an epic siege, and so the revolt of the Disinherited was all but over.

Though his rebel past was not held against him, John remained encumbered by debts for the rest of his life, and the King and his successor, Edward I, seem to have been careful to keep him in a state of near-penury. Edward was not one to ignore a man of such destructive talents, and several times employed John as a knight banneret in Wales. As well as obligatory military service Edward employed a clever series of financial alleviations and demands - carrot and stick - to keep the aging war-dog at heel.

Sir John Deyville died in the early 1290s, no doubt worn out by a life of riding about at great speed and setting fire to things. A hard man in a hard time, medieval chroniclers were surprisingly fond of him: to Henry Knighton he was 'a canny fellow and a doughty warrior', Pierre Langtoft described him as 'bold and valiant', and the unknown author of the contemporary Song of the Barons referred to "Sir John Deyville who never liked treason or guile." Even more recent writers such as E.F. Jacob and Maurice Powicke have praised the old brute's influence and character.

Hopefully these two articles have shed some light on a virtually-forgotten figure of the Baron's Wars. Simon de Montfort is still popular today, and the general trend is to praise him to the rooftops as the founder of modern parliamentary democracy. It's worth remembering that De Montfort's brief power and success were propped up on the armoured shoulders of men like Sir John Deyville, whose only use for a ballot paper would be to set fire to it...

References:

I must chiefly credit Oscar de Vill for his fine series of essays and articles on the medieval Deyville family. These include:

1) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004): 'Sir John de Deyville'

2) Medievalists' Seminar (1998): 'John Deyville'

3) Medieval Prosopography, 19 (USA, 1997): 'Deyville (or de Daiville): Origins of an English Regional family'

4) Northern History, XXXIV (1998): 'John Deyville, A Neglected Rebel'

6) Nottingham Medieval Studies, XLII (1999): 'The Deyvilles and the Genesis of the Robin Hood legend'

The bold Sir John - Part One

The extremely dangerous Sir John Deyville, doing what he did best

Sir John Deyville - or de Eyvill, D'eyville etc, the name was spelled in many different ways - is a largely forgotten Yorkshire knight who played a vital role in the rebellion of Simon de Montfort and its aftermath. He also plays an important role in my upcoming novel, Nowhere Was There Peace, so I thought it worth posting about him. John was the living prototype of the 'robber knight', a fierce and stubborn man who spent much of his life on horseback, galloping from one blood-soaked encounter to the next.

Born c.1230, John was a troublemaker from his youth. In 1248, while still a minor, he was charged with violent entry into William de Vescy's Yorkshire manor of North Anston. A few years later, in 1253, he had fallen foul of the church and was reported to be 'fleeing from county to county and afterwards beyond sea' following excommunication. Even by the rough standards of medieval barons, this was an unpromising start.

By the late 1250s, John was back in England and back in favour, and rose rapidly to power and status thanks to his alliance with the powerful Richard de Clare, Earl of Gloucester: he was named as one of the Earl's 'friends and allies' in the letter of March 1259 in which de Clare swore loyalty to the Lord Edward, Henry III's son and heir. Even so, within a few years John  was firmly in the rebel camp of Simon de Montfort, and was to pursue a spectacularly bloody and violent course in the civil wars that wracked England in the 1260s.

While Simon de Montfort was waging war against the King in the south, John stirred up trouble in the north and made life as difficult as possible for the royalists. He refused a royal command to give up his fortified manor at Hode in North Yorkshire, and in December 1263 he and a party of barons forced their way into the city of York. They 'took up their abode where they would, and spent Christmas there'. The citizens coughed up £100 to get rid of them, though not before the barons had laid waste to the abbot of York's lands in Boutham and St Mary's Street.

Following De Montfort's victory at Lewes, John was unrestrained in the north, and took advantage of the chaos to bargain for personal power and exercise his talent for destruction: in 1264 a royal officer named Peter de Percy was compensated for food and wages paid to his soldiers while chasing John and his accomplices as they rampaged through Yorkshire, burning and pillaging at will.

The Battle of Evesham in 1265, where Simon de Montfort was defeated and killed, saw a spate of noble bloodletting unknown since the Norman Conquest.

This was a taste of things to come. John was more at home with guerilla warfare than pitched battles, and for some reason was not present at Evesham in 1265, where Simon de Montfort and his army were exterminated by the vengeful Lord Edward. After the slaughter of Evesham, many of the surviving baronial rebels were intimidated enough to lay down their arms, but not John and his equally ferocious relatives. While he established a rebel camp among the watery fastness of the Isle of Axholme in Lincolnshire, his cousin Nicholas led another band of rebels in the woods of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. His younger brother Robert joined the rebels at Axholme, along with a host of lesser knights and retainers.

Without Simon de Monftort's guiding influence, these men and others like them were poised to embark on an orgy of destruction in revenge for the death of their leader and their own disgrace and disinheritance. Fire and blood will follow in Part Two...

References:

I must chiefly credit Oscar de Vill for his fine series of essays and articles on the medieval Deyville family. These include:

1) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004): 'Sir John de Deyville'

2) Medievalists' Seminar (1998): 'John Deyville'

3) Medieval Prosopography, 19 (USA, 1997): 'Deyville (or de Daiville): Origins of an English Regional family'

4) Northern History, XXXIV (1998): 'John Deyville, A Neglected Rebel'

6) Nottingham Medieval Studies, XLII (1999): 'The Deyvilles and the Genesis of the Robin Hood legend'

The Hooded Man cometh...

...but he won't be much like this. Sadly, real medieval outlaws weren't half so merry as Douglas Fairbanks and his pot of ale. 

He will be cometh-ing in my next novel, "Nowhere Was There Peace", due to be released by Fireship Press in the next few weeks. As part of the build-up to the release, I wanted to talk a little about some of the themes and characters. 

The title comes from the 15th century Scottish chronicler, Walter Bower, a canon of Inchcolm Abbey. He devoted much of his life to working on the Scotichronicon, a history of Scotland and the British Isles.

On page 355 of his work Bower writes of the pitiful state of England in the year 1266:

"Moreover all those who supported Simon in that battle were outlawed and disinherited, so that in the in following year within one week the king of England bestowed lands worth 17,560 nobles on others. The greater part of the disinherited infested the roads and streets and became robbers. Then a deadly struggle broke out between the king and the disinherited, in the course of which villages were burned, towns wrecked, whole stretches of land depopulated, churches pillaged, religious driven from their monasteries, clerics had money extorted from them and the common people were ruined. Nowhere was there peace, nowhere security..."

Bower is writing of the continuing unrest in England following the defeat and death of Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, at the Battle of Evesham in 1265. De Montfort's death was not the end of the civil wars, as the remainder of his supporters continued to hold out in the woods and wild places.

King Henry III, never the wisest of rulers, had provoked them into further rebellion by declaring that all those who had supported the Earl were to be stripped of their lands and goods. The "Disinherited", as they were termed, had little option but to snatch up their swords and carry on fighting.

The death of Simon de Montfort at Evesham. After the battle the Lord Edward, Henry III's son, had De Montfort dismembered, his head stuck on a pole and his testicles hung either side of his nose. It didn't pay to mess with Ned...

So who is the Hooded Man? I refer of course to Robin Hood, England's most famous and enduring outlaw hero. I'm not the first to suggest that the legend might have originated from the bloody and dramatic years of the Baron's Wars, in which the common people of England were given a voice in government for the first time in history (albeit a small one). 

Returning to Bower, on page 353 under the year 1266 he makes the following reference to Robin Hood:

At this time there arose from among the disinherited and outlaws and raised his head that most famous murderer Robert Hood, along with Little John and their accomplices. The foolish common folk eagerly celebrate the deeds of these men with gawping enthusiasms in comedies and tragedies, and take pleasure in hearing jesters and bards singing [of them] more than in other romances. Yet some of his exploits thus recited are commendable, as is clear from what follows..."

Bower goes on to describe 'Robert Hood' hearing Mass and then beating his enemies in battle: the inference being that the penitent man shall always be saved.

On page 357:

1266 

In that year also the disinherited English barons and those loyal to the king clashed fiercely; amongst them Roger de Mortimer occupied the Welsh Marches and John d’Eyville occupied the Isle of Ely; Robert Hood was an outlaw amongst the woodland briars and thorns.  Between them they inflicted a vast amount of slaughter on the common and ordinary folk, cities and merchants..."

Bower describes a very different Robin to the jolly outlaw hero we are all used to seeing in films and novels. This one is a 'famous murderer' who helps to inflict a great deal of damage and slaughter on the country. As such, he is rather closer to the grim reality of medieval crime than Errol Flynn. 

The chaotic state of England at this time makes a perfect setting for fiction, and the rebellion of the Disinherited provided a number of ideal characters: bellicose, fiery men like John D'Eyville, the Lord Edward, Roger Mortimer etc all appear in my novel, burning and hacking their way through the pages as they did through life. The central character, Hugh Franklin, is fictional, a stonemason's son turned government agent who has to cope with the many dangers that this era can throw at him.

And what of not-so-merry Robin? Was Bower correct, did the real-life outlaw hero really exist at this time and fight alongside the Disinherited? The historian Maurice Keen thought that the times and the context would have suited a historical Robin Hood, but lamented the fact that there is no record of anyone called 'Robert Hood' among De Montfort's followers or the Disinherited.

As it happens, Keen was wrong:


The above is an extract from a 1269 Court of Inquisitions, in which local men of Cambridgeshire accused of having supported the Disinherited were summoned to explain their actions. This 'Robertus Hod' or Robert Hood was a townsman of Cambridge, probably one of those who joined the revolt after receiving a letter exhorting them to do so from John D'Eyville, leader of the rebels encamped in the Isle of Ely.

So is this man 'the' Robin Hood? It isn't easy to say. There are many theories as to the origins of the outlaw, and it may be that he is an amalgamation of history, myth and folklore. I put forward my own ideas in Nowhere Was There Peace, but you will have to wait for the book to find out what they are... 

Zara Kuchi, artist based in West Wales

As a change from relentlessly talking about myself and my work, I thought I would talk about a friend of mine instead. Her name is Zara Kuchi and she is a fabulous artist based in my neck of the woods in West Wales. Zara's work is influenced by her love of the Welsh landscape and her Slovakian heritage, particularly the recurring 'love birds' theme that is iconic in Slovakian folklore.

Below are a couple of samples of her work and a link to her website. I thoroughly recommend you check out her stuff!





And link to Zara's website:

Linky

Guest interview...

The lovely Sharon Penman, author of Here be Dragons, When Christ and his Saints Slept, and other brilliant works of historical fiction, has interviewed me on her blog. Check it out:

Interview