The magic foot of Saint Simon

In late 1266, while Henry III was struggling to put down rebels in East Anglia, a fresh revolt blew up in distant Northumbria. Unable to go himself, Henry sent his heir the Lord Edward to deal with the rising.

Alnwick Castle

The ringleader was John de Vescy, lord of Alnwick. Vescy had been one of Simon de Montfort’s phalanx of bachelor knights, who followed him about like a latter-day Praetorian Guard. At the bloodbath of Evesham in 1265, where Montfort was hacked to pieces, Vescy managed to escape with one of his beloved master’s severed feet. He returned to his northern fastness and donated the foot to a local priory. The grisly object was placed inside a silver shoe, of all things, and worshipped as a relic with magic healing properties. It was noted that this ‘foot of incorruption’ exhibited a wound, either made by a hatchet or a sword.

Vescy entered into a pact with certain other northern barons. According to the chronicler Thomas Wykes, they swore that each would adhere to the other and thus, being reliant on mutual aid, restore their lands seized by the king. In reality Vescy’s followers may have not had much choice in the matter. It is possible to trace at least two of them, Henry de Bilton and William de Lisle, both tenants on the Vescy estates. As such they were obliged to obey their lord and offer him ‘mutual aid’, whether or not they wanted to.

He may have recruited some allies from north of the border. The Meaux Chronicler in East Yorkshire mentions Scots among the Alnwick garrison. This seems inexplicable, as England and Scotland were not at war at this time. Perhaps Vescy hired a few wandering Scottish mercenaries; alternatively, the Yorkshire-based chronicler was unable to tell the difference between Northumbrians and Scotsmen!

Edward raced north to contain the revolt. A true son of the Devil’s Brood, he marched with the same breathless speed as Henry FitzEmpress or the Lionheart: one of his followers, Richard Clifford, recalled in later years the prince’s army marching ‘day and night continuously with horses and arms’. On the way he raised the militia of the northern counties, a ‘large multitude of fighters’, and then pressed on towards Alnwick.

The arms of John de Vescy

Vescy chose to retreat inside his stronghold. The usual tactic was to throw a garrison inside a castle and remain outside with a flying column to try and break the siege lines, but Vescy found himself bottled up inside four walls. Perhaps Edward moved too quickly for him. Few details survive of the siege that followed, except for the curious tale of William Douglas and Gilbert Umfraville, Earl of Angus.

While the siege was in progress, Edward was approached by Angus. The earl accused Sir William Douglas, known as Longleg for his height, of being a traitor. Angus asked Edward to confiscate Douglas’s manor at Fawdon and give it to him: it just so happened that Douglas was one of the earl’s tenants.

Edward agreed, provided Douglas was convicted by a jury. At the trial, held at Boulton in Northumberland, the accused was cleared of all charges. The enraged earl sent his retainers to seize Douglas’s goods at Fawdon. When the court ordered him to give them back, Angus went a step further. He and his lieutenant, John Hirlawe, raised a hundred riders of Redesdale, for centuries a notorious den of thieves, and set them on Douglas and his family. William and his wife and children were dragged about from place to place, tortured with fire, and his son William junior sliced through the neck with a sword. He survived and was known afterwards, appropriately enough, as William le Hardi (the Hardy).

A Border Reiver in silhouette

A second trial was held in October, where Angus denied all the above. He seemed in remarkably good humour, and asked the jurors when all of this was supposed to have taken place. When they gave him a date - 19 July - he smiled and pointed out ‘there were many days in a week’. The jurors lost their bottle and acquitted Angus of his misdeeds. Poor old Douglas was found guilty of false accusation and sentenced to a brief term in prison.

None of this was any help to John de Vescy. In the summer of 1267 he surrendered to Edward, who pardoned the lord of Alnwick and his followers. How the castle fell is something of a mystery. John Fordun, writing decades later, states that Edward took it by stealth. Perhaps he had a spy among the garrison, as he did in Hampshire and other rebel headquarters. The northerners expected to be punished, and the prince’s mercy took them by surprise. Edward took the sting out of the revolt by permitting the rebels to recover their lands, though for a price. John de Vescy later had to find 3700 marks, borrowed from an Italian creditor, to redeem his lordship.

This brief northern revolt is a footnote in the story of the Montfortian wars, but contains much of interest. Students of the Border Reivers may be intrigued to find the lancers of Redesdale, a notorious ‘riding surname’ of the Tudor era, very much alive and kicking several hundred years earlier. It seems you can’t keep good men down, or bad ones either.

 

 

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.