King John, wardship and taxing heiresses

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king_john_stag_3231934bThe loss of his empire presented King John with a problem – well several to be honest.  However to pare them right down they could be viewed thus: John’s barons expected him to trounce the French as big brother Richard was wont to do; he needed money to do this but his revenue had been slashed on account of him loosing vast tracts of land.  In order to trounce the French John needed money to pay his army but he no longer had the wherewithal to raise the revenues.  Therefore John had to get creative in his taxation.

One of John’s wheezes was inheritance tax.  Technically England was a feudal society which meant that all the land belonged to the king and thus when a baron died the land reverted to the crown – except of course that wasn’t the way it worked in real life.  John, however, decided that actually that was exactly how it worked.  Take John de Lacy for example. He expected to inherit his father’s Honour of Pontefract in 1213 – which he did ultimately do but not until he’d coughed up to the tune of 7,000 marks – and let’s not forget that John had been using the estate for himself during de Lacy’s minority.

At least John was an adult male.  If you were a woman or a minor then things became even more fraught.  John paid special attention to so-called feudal custodies.  if the king was at the top of the feudal pyramid he was effectively responsible for widows and orphans – particularly if they came with a juicy price tag. He claimed the right to dispose of them in marriage and to grant their custody where he saw fit- not necessarily to their family but to the person who would pay most to get their hands on the person of the heiress and her estates.  A wealthy widow or young heiress became an excellent way of rewarding his loyal servants not to mention filling the royal coffers.  An heiress was also an excellent way of providing for illegitimate Plantagenet sprigs.  William Longsword, John’s half-brother, was famously married to the Countess of Salisbury.

John’s own son, Richard, was married off to Roese de Dover bringing him Chilham Castle.  Her story is typical of what could befall an heiress.  Her father was Fulbert de Dover who held the Barony of Chilham.  When Fulbert died, Roese was too young to marry so the custody of the castle and its estates along with Roese reverted to the crown. John decided to marry her off to his own son – Richard FitzJohn. This meant that the estates and the family name were passed, along with the bride, to the king’s son. It is probable that Roese’s age upon marriage was about thirteen. We know that Roese or Rohese had children – there were at least two daughters- Isabel who married into the Berkeley family and Lorette who married a Marmion.  How Rohese felt about the Barony of Chilham passing into Richard Fitzjohn’s hands or even her own marriage to him is not recorded.

What we do know is that rights of wardship and marriage were so valuable, according to to Turner, that justices were given instructions to keep their eyes out for stray widows and heiresses. Turner goes on to look at the accounts.  During the reign of Henry II the average levy on an heiresses wedding was 101 marks.  By the time of King John the value had more than tripled. Peter de Maulay paid 7,000 marks to marry Isabella of Thornham who was the heiress to the Barony of Mulgrave. This fine was huge and what makes it even more remarkable is that according to Ralph of Coggeshall it was Maulay who had killed John’s nephew Arthur of Brittany – under which circumstances you’d have thought John would have offered a cut-price bride.

It wasn’t always hopeful grooms who made the highest bid.  Sometimes widows paid a fine to the king to avoid remarriage.  The Countess of Aumale is one such example.  In fact, John realised that he was on to such a good thing that he also started fining male heirs who were wards of the crown when they got married which was a new practice as up until that point feudal custom hadn’t fined males – so at least you could argue that King John offered equal opportunities to heirs and heiresses alike! It was undoubtedly true that wardship was a lucrative income for the crown. Fryde goes so far as to describe the fines John imposed as ‘extortionate.’

No wonder then that wardship is mentioned in Magna Carta.  As well as issues about caring for the estates of minors rather than milking them dry clause six states that “heirs shall be married without disparagement” – i.e. no marrying heirs off to their social inferiors.  The same clause also states that the family of the ward to be married off should be notified once the deal is done.  Clause seven of Magna Carta deals with widows stating that they were to have their dower and their inheritance without the king taxing it and furthermore in clause eight no widow was to be married off against her will…all of which rather suggests that one way or another King John rather overdid income from  feudal custodies.

Fryde, Natalie. Why Magna Carta: Angevin England Revisited.

Turner, Ralph: (1994)  King John, England’s Evil King. Longman

A pair of blue eyes

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Richard_III_of_EnglandWhilst half-watching the Hairy Bikers and knitting a polar bear tonight I learned that everyone with blue eyes is descended from a common ancestor who lived between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago. This led me to the Internet and to this post – the contents of which definitely predate 1066 but I was fascinated by what I read even if it turns out to be old news much of the material i read dated from 2008.

Apparently, according to the University of Denmark once upon a time everyone had brown eyes. Then a gene mutated. A couple or so generations later and bingo – blue eyes. How do we know this?  Essentially the study looked at the genes of folk with blue eyes in Denmark and then expanded their study across the globe. They had expected the gene responsible for eye colouring to be similar in all their blue-eyed samples but they weren’t just similar they were identical. The gene is called HERC2. This not only means that somewhere along the line that everyone with blue eyes is related but that because the mutation hasn’t changed at all its still fairly recent – ten thousand years (the end of the last ice age) is recent in gene terms. Further study has revealed that blue eyes must have originated somewhere in the Balkans as this is where most people have blue eyes – 99%, dropping to 75% in Germany.

I had to dig deep into my memories of school biology lessons but essentialy if I’ve remembered right we have two sets of genes – one from each parent. Brown eyes are the dominant colour so in order to have blue eyes (blue being the recessive gene) you need to have been given a matching pair of blue genes (that may be a very bad pun but I know what I mean) by each parent hence the first person with the mutation didn’t have blue eyes and nor did their children. The blue eyes would have occurred when two people carrying the recessive blue gene both gave that particular gene to their child.

A prehistoric skeleton unearthed in Spain in 2006 and written about extensively in Nature is recorded as the ‘first’ blue-eyed person. The Independent also notes that the man had lactose-intolerant genes, which means that he lived before the period when farming had become a normal way of life. It must have been pretty startling for the Mesolithic man’s parents when they produced a baby who had eyes that were blue rather than brown like everybody else’s.

There are two theories as to why blue eyes spread through the population – the first is that blue-eyed Mesolithic man was hot-stuff and consequentially there was a rash of blue eyed babies who in their turn went on to have many blue-eyed babies. More prosaically there is a theory that the gene which produces blue eyes also helped to prevent eye disease in cold dark northern climates because, very simplistically, blue eyes contain less melanin so let more light in.

Just to finish on a note that draws me firmly post-1066- analysis of King Richard III’s skeleton revealed him to be blue eyed (and probably blond in his childhood) which means that if like me you have blue eyes you can claim to be very distantly vaguely related to him.  Equally, you can also claim to be related to Cameron Diaz and Frank Sinatra.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/revealed-first-ol-blue-eyes-is-7000-years-old-and-lived-in-a-cave-9086310.html (accessed 6/10/2015 @ 22:36)

http://www.livescience.com/9578-common-ancestor-blue-eyes.html (accessed 6/10/2015@22:41)

King John’s sons

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king_john_stag_3231934bThe Plantagenets, unlike the Tudors, were prone to having huge families.  Today we tend to remember only the off spring that gained the throne for themselves or stood out from the rest of the crowd – usually by doing something fairly dramatic.

Most people with an interest in history will probably be able to say that King John had a son called Henry. Henry was born in 1207 meaning that he became king at the tender age of nine.  He was crowned in Gloucester Cathedral with one of his mother’s, isabella of Angouleme, circlets on account of his father having lost the crown jewels in The Wash prior to popping his clogs. Henry was fortunate in having the loyalty of William Marshal who helped the young king negotiate his way through invasion by the French and the barons remaining stroppy for a prolonged period of time – John had the First Barons’ War, Henry experienced the Second Barons’ War. It was during Henry’s reign that Simon de Montfort rebelled- effectively starting the aforementioned Barons’ War.  Henry sought to model himself on Edward the Confessor rather than his own father but sadly seems to have had some very similar problems both at home and abroad.

Less well known is the fact that two years after Henry’s  birth John and Isabella produced Richard – as in ‘the spare’ to go with the heir.  Richard became the Count of Poitou in 1225 but gave it back in 1243.  He was also the Earl of Cornwall, the King of Germany (he was elected to this title and only visited the Rhineland four times – no where else in Germany was very keen on him) and the King of the Romans.

Henry’s generosity to his brother cannot be underestimated.  The lands he gained with his Cornish title made him extremely wealthy – not that it stopped the brothers squabbling.  Richard rebelled against Henry on at least three occasions. In addition to the land that his brother gave him Richard also benefited from marriage to Isabella Marshal, the daughter of William Marshall.  After Isabella’s death following childbirth Richard went on to marry Sanchia of Provence who was the sister of Eleanor – conveniently married to big brother Henry. It was partly because of Eleanor’s influence that Richard found himself with the title king.

Richard spoke English at a time when most of the nobility were still only speaking French – not yet having grasped that King John had lost huge swathes of land over the Channel and that ultimately, despite various interludes in the various wars that would punctuate the Medieval period that they were not going to get it back and they certainly weren’t going to be successful during the reign of Henry III.

He went on the sixth crusade, fought against Simon de Montfort (he’d not been impressed when his sister Eleanor was married off to Simon) and managed to get himself taken prisoner after the Battle of Lewes. The story of the de Montfort link doesn’t get any happier. Ultimately Eleanor’s sons would murder one of Richard’s sons in revenge for Simon de Montfort’s death. Richard died in 1271 and was buried in Hailes Abbey of which he was a patron.

Ironically despite not getting on particularly well with his brother Richard, John named three of his sons Richard – a legitimate one and two illegitimate ones.  One of them was called Richard FitzJohn of Dover.  He became Baron of Chilham in Kent.  John cannily married this son off to an heiress called Roese who was conveniently a ward of the crown.  The third Richard became constable of Wallingford Castle.

Another son Oliver died during the Siege of Damietta (somewhere in modern Egypt) during the sixth crusade in 1219 – this particular royal bye-blow was carted home and buried in Westminster Abbey.There was also an Osbert, a Geoffrey, an Odo and a Henry who seems to have had a complex relationship with King John – “Henry, who says he is my son but who is truly my nephew”… leaving historians trying to calculate birth dates and whether it was possible that the Young King, Geoffrey or even the Lionheart himself could have fathered him. There was also a John who may have been a knight but equally might have been a clerk somewhere in Lincoln or possibly London depending on which source you refer to! Interestingly history knows more about John’s illegitimate daughter Joan because John married her off to Llewelyn the Great and because of her role as a negotiator between her husband and father.

One fact is very clear John fathered more illegitimate children than any other Plantagenet king except Henry I and seems to have provided for them- a fact which surely must be accounted a positive aspect of John’s complex character. Henry III recognised his brothers in that many of them held government posts – the Plantagenets recognised that a royal brother was to be trusted only if he couldn’t make a claim on the crown himself. However, and as always somewhat frustratingly, very often history knows little more than their names.

Joan, Lady of Wales

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siwanJoan was the natural daughter of King John. She is known as Joanna, Joan of Wales, Lady of Wales or Siwan to the Welsh.

She was born in about 1191 but history isn’t entirely sure who her mother was. It may have been Clemence Pinel but this information is gleaned from a sentence in the Tewkesbury Annals. Or it may have been Clemence wife of Nicholas de Verdun. This later is circumstantial evidence based on Henry III placing his niece in Clemence de Verdun’s care (http://plantagenesta.livejournal.com/53309.html)

We do know that Joan was brought up in Normandy and that in 1205 John arranged her marriage to Llywelyn the Great. This according to Morris was a mark of John’s favour to the Welsh prince. The pair were married the following year in Chester when Joan was fifteen. Joan bore at least one son and one daughter to Llywelyn – maybe more.

The marriage was certainly important for the peace of Wales. In 1210 there was a bit of a misunderstanding with Llywelyn having a bit of a rebellion whilst his father-in-law was in Ireland. The result was that John collected men and resources and proceeded to invade North Wales where his men promptly began to starve. John had to withdraw- presumably covered in embarrassment. He returned later in the year – and burned Bangor.

Joan was sent to have a chat with her father. Everything East of Conwy was handed over to John along with thirty hostages but Llywelyn remained at liberty and in possession of Snowdonia.

Inevitably the peace was short-lived which wasn’t terribly good news if you happened to be one of the thirty hostages. By 1212 open warfare was raging along the Welsh border. Chroniclers make it clear that John arrived in Nottingham on the 14 August where he made himself at home by having twenty-eight of the Welsh hostages hanged on account of the failings of their countrymen. Then he sat down for a meal – as you do.

If coffee had been available it would have been at about the coffee and mint stage of the meal that a letter arrived from Joan warning her father that there were traitors in the midst of his court and that his life was in danger if he went ahead with his planned invasion of Wales. In the event of a battle he would have a nasty ‘accident’. This was the second note of the evening. The first one had arrived shortly before from the King of Scotland containing a similar message.

Rumour ran a-mock. The chroniclers of the time became carried away by every bit of gossip available from the rape of the queen to invasion by the French. Sticking to facts- John cancelled his invasion of Wales; ensured the safety of four-year-old Prince Henry; sent all his barons home and then sent politely worded notes to the men he suspected demanding hostages flushing out two conspirators in the process.

In April 1226 Joan obtained a papal decree from Pope Honorius III, declaring her legitimate on the basis that her parents had not been married to others at the time of her birth. This did not give her a claim to the throne.

Unfortunately this respectability, which came in part from her impact in keeping the peace between Wales and England, came to rather an abrupt end in 1230. Joan was caught alone in her bedroom with William de Braose, 10th Baron of Abergevenny, a Norman lord.  Bad enough to be found in a compromising position but De Braose was hated by the Welsh, who called him Black William.

De Braose had been captured by the Welsh in 1228 and then ransomed. Llywelyn and de Braose had used the time to arrange the marriage of de Braose’s daughter Isabella to Llywelyn’s only legitimate son and heir, Dafydd. So when William visited during Easter 1230 there were no raised eyebrows. However, when William turned up in Joan’s bedroom in the dead of night – more than eyebrows were raised. Llywelyn raised a gibbet in his backyard and strung de Braose up. It didn’t stop the pre-arranged wedding going ahead in 1231 – you couldn’t make it up.

Joan was locked up for twelve months but was forgiven and reinstated. She died seven years after her unfortunate interlude with de Braose and was much mourned by Llywelyn who died in 1240 having founded a Friary in Llanfaes in Joan’s memory.

The friary was dissolved along with all the other monastic foundations in England and Wales by Henry VIII and Joan’s burial place was lost – her stone coffin was rediscovered being used as a horse trough. Today it can be seen in Beaumaris Church.

Joan appears largely in footnotes of books pertaining to the men in her life and no doubt had she not been married to Llywelyn we would know even less about her.  As is often the way when the truth is not known fiction is given freer reign.  Sharon Kay Penman’s book Here Be Dragons develops Joan’s story and that’s where I first encountered her.

joan03

Morris, Marc. (2015) King John- Treachery, Tyranny and the Road to Magna Carta. London: Penguin

Warren, W.L. (1978) King John. London: Methuen

Joan Plantagenet, Queen Consort of Scotland

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JoanEnglandPrincess Joan was the eldest legitimate daughter of King John and Isabella of Angouleme was born in 1210. She was originally destined to marry Hugh of Lusignan. This was politically tactful as Joan’s mother Isabella should have married Hugh but John virtually stole the bride – ensuring war with France and a deeply unpopular Queen of England.

On John’s death Isabella returned to Angouleme and naturally wanted to see her daughter who was being raised in the court of Hugh X. Somehow or other Isabella ended up married to Hugh and Joan became a hostage to the return of Isabella’s dower. The Regency Council of Henry III were not very happy that Isabella had married without their permission but a princess in the hand is worth a volatile queen dowager on the loose so Isabella got her dower back and England received it’s princess which was just as well because the council were already in mid negotiation for another marriage.

Joan’s new marriage was negotiated on a promise made as early as 1209 by King John to William of Scotland that there should be a royal wedding of a Plantagenet princess to the Scottish heir to the throne- Alexander. If Joan had not been retrieved, Henry III’s other sister Isabelle would have been in the frame to become Queen of Scotland. There had also been some suggestion that a Scottish princess might have travelled south. However, the originally negotiations begun by King John had become somewhat unravelled during the Baron’s War and it probably didn’t help that Magna Carta safeguarded the rights of the Scottish king – a fact which John ignored. After John’s death Henry III’s regency council slowly regained order once more. In 1217 Alexander, now King Alexander II of Scotland made his terms with the English. He kept hold of Tynedale and there would be a royal marriage to help cement the peace. Joan and Alexander were married in 1221 in York Minster. There was a thirteen-year age gap between the happy couple – Joan being all of ten-years-old at the time.

Scotland was not a peaceful location. Alexander’s hold on the throne was threatened by a number of families with claims dating to the reign of Duncan II. One of these families – the MacWilliams- rose in rebellion once to often. It resulted in the family being hunted down – the youngest member of the family a baby girl was to have her brains dashed out on the market cross at Forfar in 1230.

The royal marriage was not without its difficulties either. Joan did not arrive laden down with loot. Alexander claimed that Joan should have come with Northumbria. The English weren’t having any of it and for the first ten years of their marriage Joan was financially dependent upon her husband. It was only in later years that Henry III gave his sister several substantial manors for life so that she had an income which didn’t go into Alexander’s coffers – but the Scots didn’t get Northumbria which caused a fair amount of grumbling and bad feeling between the brothers-in-law.

The other problem was that Joan failed to do what queens were expected to do – she did not produce an heir.

Joan died, childless, in 1238 at the age of twenty-eight during a visit to England. She’d gone on pilgrimage to Canterbury, spent Christmas at her brother’s court and then began to make plans to return to Scotland in later January 1238. Before she could do so she became ill and died. Mathew Paris noted in his chronicle that it was inappropriate for Joan to spend so much time away form Scotland – to modern eyes it looks as though Joan was not particularly happy in her marriage- but that is speculation and has nothing to do with the medieval concept of royal matrimony.

She was buried in Tarrant Crawford Abbey, Dorset rather than in Scotland by her own wish as stated in her will. Nothing remains thanks to the dissolution of the monasteries.

Alexander II died ten years later having married Marie de Coucy who duly presented him with a bouncing baby boy who was to become Alexander III.

King John’s women

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king_john_stag_3231934bKing John is rather famous for his somewhat ‘droit de signeur’ approach to the wives and daughters of his nobility. Records provide the somewhat incredible information about the woman who paid John a large number of hens to spend one night in her husband’s bed. There’s the rumour of the poisoned egg sent to the woman who spurned his advances. Church describes John as a ‘rake.’  Medieval chroniclers were rather less kind.

This post, however, is about John’s official women. First came Alice of Savoy, daughter of Humbert III of Savoy. John was only seven when a marriage was arranged by his father King Henry II. Henry wanted to provide John with wealth and lands as there was none for him within the Angevin Empire at that point. The marriage would also, of course, extend the territory of the empire to include Savoy and Piemonte – a win-win situation for Henry especially as he was prepared to throw in some castles that had been promised to John’s elder brother Geoffrey but as father and son were at loggerheads Henry felt no compunction about giving them to John who was his favourite son. Alice made the journey over the Alps but died before the marriage could go ahead.

John’s next foray into matrimony was to Isobel of Gloucester. She was the granddaughter of Robert of Gloucester – the natural son of Henry I making the pair cousins, as Henry I’s legitimate daughter Matilda was John’s granny. This gave John room to divorce Isobel because the marriage should have been prohibited within the third degree of consanguinity. The divorce occurred as soon as John had sufficient power- ie when he became king- to end the marriage so Isobel who is also sometimes known as Hawise. Once again Henry had arranged the marriage to ensure that John was in a position of wealth. Isabel’s brother had died leaving Isobel and her two sisters in a position where they would inherit the title and the lands of Robert’s son William of Gloucester. Henry made arrangements that meant that Isobel got the lot and her sisters and their spouses were by-passed. Relations between the two fathers were not good. Bristol Castle which had been in the hands of Earl William was taken by Henry and just for good measure he made the earl a prisoner. The earl died whilst in captivity and Henry II realised that the money from the estates could be enjoyed without the need for any marriages to occur. The Gloucester inheritance found itself under the wardship of the king who took the money. John didn’t actually get married to Isabel until Richard I came to the throne.

And now matters get a bit peculiar to modern eyes. Once John was king he quickly arranged the annulment of his marriage. Isobel of Gloucester found herself without a husband and without her estates. She was still part of John’s establishment. His records show that he supported her household. She lived in his castles – well she had nowhere else to go as she wasn’t permitted to marry anyone else. It even looks as though John’s household was composed for sometime at least of his discarded wife and his new wife Isobel of Angouleme.

Fortune looked up for Isobel in 1214 when John needed money to try and win back his French territories. John essentially sold Isobel and the Gloucester lands with the exception of Bristol Castle to the highest bidder Geoffrey de Mandeville the Earl of Essex. Geoffrey had to find 20,000 marks to be paid in instalments…so Isobel became a sort of hire-purchase bride with a toy-boy groom.

isabella_angoulemeWoman number three was Isobel of Angouleme.   Mathew Paris the chronicler described her as a Jezobel and most of the other chroniclers are equally vitriolic. She was twelve when she was married to John who was in his thirties and he had virtually kidnapped her in order to prevent her marriage to Hugh of Lusignan. It is generally accepted that the marriage was one of the triggers that resulted in the war which resulted in John losing most of his French territories. Suffice it to say the marriage was a tempestuous one. John is purported to have been besotted by his young bride but it apparently didn’t stop John taking lovers and Isobel encouraging her admirers. The chroniclers tell some lurid tales including the tale of the man becoming a tad too friendly with Isobel and being hanged over her bed as a friendly warning. The unhappy pair were married for sixteen years. Five children were born of the marriage – two sons and three daughters.

Princess Joan was sent off to marry Hugh de Lusignan but somehow after John’s death Hugh married the mother rather than the daughter when Isobel returned to Angouleme in 1217, perhaps not surprising given that Joan was still a child. In England the regency council was not amused and stopped the queen’s pension. There was eventually a trade off. England got Joan back in 1220 whilst Isobel got her money and dower land.

Isobel and Hugh went on to have a further nine children. She died in 1246.

Church, S.D.  King John: New Interpretations

Much Wenlock Priory

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DSC_0011Huzzah – I have Internet connectivity after more than a week holding my laptop sky-high in an offering to the gods of wifi and grotty weather and I’m back to priories. Wenlock Priory was the only one in Shropshire before 1066 and it started off as a nunnery before becoming a monastery. Then somewhen in the late eleventh century Roger, Earl of Shrewsbury, re-founded the house as a Cluniac priory – very definitely for monks.

The Cluniacs like all monks followed the rule of St Benedict but their twist on the rule was that their work was related to books – writing them, binding them etc and to living a life of poverty in the midst of huge religious ornament and ceremony.

From small beginnings the monks built up land and rights. They also ensured that St Milburga, who’s bones were conveniently found as the monks started to build their own church became an important regional cult figure. During the reign of Kimg Richard the Lionheart the monks of Much Wenlock acquired the rights to administer justice within their Liberties – ie their manors.

Henry III stayed at Wenlock and gifted timber from the royal forests for the re-building of a church and lady chapel. The prior of the period Prior Humbert seems to have been popular with the king and energetic in his efforts on behalf of the priory. He was also often sent abroad on ambassadorial missions – he didn’t have far to go, just into Wales.

Unfortunately politics rapidly got in the way of religious life. Humbert’s successor Aymo was promoted from the priory at Bermondsey and he also did a stint as Prior of Lewes. Problematically for Aymo it wasn’t the king who made the Lewes appointment but Simon de Montfort.

Of course, during all this time the monks of Much Wenlock looked to their mother house for guidance and sent funds home to the mother abbey – which was Cluny. Indeed most of the priors of Wenlock were French. It was an alien priory. This was all fine and well while England and much of modern France were part of the same empire but it wasn’t such a good policy once the Hundred Years War kicked off and Cluny became ‘the enemy.’  Interestingly although Much Wenlock was well within the circumscribed distance of the navigable River Severn it wasn’t forced to relocate or close its gates when other sea-board alien priories were penalised for their loyalties.

Matters hadn’t been helped when the monks managed to end up in debt to a notorious money lender on account of one prior who was angling to become the Bishop of Rochester. He fiddled the books in ways that were legal but left the monks in dire straits. He sold the wool of the priory for seven years in advance – making life very difficult for his successor – but which no doubt helped to fund his bid to become a bishop. It was during this time as well that one of the monks took to the hills with a band of armed men as an outlaw.

DSC_0018Of course, the issue of being an alien priory became thornier and thornier – a local lord had to testify that the prior wasn’t in the power of the King of France and the monks were forbidden from sending money back to Cluny. Ultimately though the crown started to confiscate land from the priory and the monks found themselves torn between their loyalty to the English crown and the mother house at Cluny which still demanded their presence at chapter meetings – which they couldn’t attend. This problem eased slightly in 1378 when the Great Schism (more than one pope) occurred. The monks of Cluny supported the unofficial pope meaning that the Archbishop of Canterbury who happened to be a papal legate (the official pope) could legally take charge of the monasteries which had once looked to Cluny. After that Englishmen were appointed as priors. Roger Wyvel became prior of Much Wenlock in 1388.

The great days of Much Wenlock were over though. There may have been as many as forty monks for much of the fourteenth century but the numbers dwindled steadily thereafter and the prior had to contend with lawsuits from tenants who didn’t want to work for the monks and landowners looking to increase their own landholdings at the expense of the monks. By 1536 there were only twelve monks – even so they had a net income in excess of £400.

Today very little remains of the church but the cloisters and the chapter house yield some interesting remains. There is a rare washing fountain in the middle of the cloister and the remnant of the library. Inside the cloister interlaced tracery patterns give some indication of the splendid ornament that Much Wenlock must have once exhibited. Looking up it is possible to see the doorway that led from the dorter into the church. At Much Wenlock the monks continued to sleep in a long dormitory until virtually the end of monasticism in England and Wales – wooden paneling was a later concession to privacy.

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B Pugh (London, 1973), pp. 38-47 https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/salop/vol2/pp38-47 [accessed 5 September 2015].

Benn. Aphra Behn. Neither shaken nor stirred.

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article-1277341-09581352000005DC-485_634x528Aphra Johnson is one of England’s foremost literary ladies. She wrote plays and poems and even a book on botany but I first heard of her because she was an early novelist and spent a grim week wading through her novel Oroonoko – though to be fair Eighteenth Century Studies was by far the grimmest of the courses I followed many moons ago at university and I didn’t know the extent that she was drawing on her experiences and coming to think of it she had nothing to do with the eighteenth century!

Her own life story reads like an adventure novel. She was born near Canterbury in 1640 at Wye. Some accounts identify her father as a barber from Canterbury others identify her father as John Amis – there being a world of difference in the status of the two men.

What we can be sure of is that at that time that area was full of Huguenot refugees and Dutch emigrees. The Huguenots were famously silk weavers but the Dutch left a legacy of linen thread making – meaning that the fields of Kent weren’t necessarily full of hops but flax.
At some point Aphra travelled to Dutch Guiana or Surinam as it was then known in the company of her parents- her father had been made lieutenant-general of the colony but he died en route.

During the two years she was in Surinam, Aphra became friends with William Scot, the son of a convicted and executed regicide. It is possible that they became lovers but the evidence is sketchy.

When she returned to London in approximately 1664 she married a Dutch- or possibly German- merchant – or possibly sea captain- who seems to have promptly died of the plague leaving her somewhat financially challenged. It has also been suggested that for some reason Johan Behn may well have been a product of her imagination as no evidence of him can readily be found.

Fortunately her mother had a friend who was a groom of the king’s bedchamber called Sir Thomas Killigrew. He managed to get her an introduction at court. The next thing you know Aphra found herself working as a spy with Killigrew as her handler in Flanders and the Netherlands during the Anglo-Dutch wars (1652- 74). In part she was selected for the role because a certain William Scot was now in the Low Countries. One of Aphra’s jobs was to convince him to support Charles II – the man who’d signed the death warrant for his father. She was to offer him a pardon which proved lamentably slow in its arrival.

Before she returned home Aphra warned her London spymasters that the Dutch were planning an attack up the Thames. Her warnings were ignored and the fleet burned on the Medway raid that saw the flagship the Royal Charles captured.

Aphra should have checked Charles II’s record for paying his staff. Back in London, where she’d managed to miss the Great Fire, she found herself in debtors’ prison and never did get paid for her work. In order to extract herself from this rather unpleasant situation she picked up her quill and started writing. She became England’s leading female writer and earned a place in Westminster Abbey. The truth, is as they say, stranger than fiction.

Of Kings and family ties…

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king-john-570Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk -whose father rebelled against Henry II and lost his title- managed to scrape his lands and his titles back from Henry II and Richard the Lion-heart despite a dispute with his step-mother and two half-brothers. He was known for his hard work as a lawyer travelling the country on the business of both kings. He is mentioned on the boarding list of noble hostages going to join Richard the Lion-heart in Captivity. Yet he appears on the Magna Carta as one of the twenty-five barons, along with his oldest son, who would ensure that John stuck to the deal that was made at Runnymede.

He got excommunicated for his pains in 1215 and it was only in 1217 that he made his peace with the guardians of young King Henry III, which must have made things difficult for his son who was married to William Marshall’s daughter. Marshall famously managed to serve his Plantagenet masters loyally from the ‘Young King’ through to King Henry III.

Bigod’s difficulties with King John were complicated by yet another family factor. William Longspee, King John’s illegitimate half-brother was Bigod’s step-son. William remained loyal to John throughout the period. One woman – Ida de Tosny, links the two men on opposite sides of the Barons’ War.

History does not tell us exactly when Ida de Tosny was born nor are we totally sure about her parents. It is generally accepted that her father was Ralph de Tosny who died in 1162 and her mother was Margaret de Beaumont.   After her father’s death she became a royal ward.

We know that she attracted the attention of King Henry II who had a bit of a reputation for seducing young women including Alice of France who was to have married Henry’s son Richard (the Lionheart). The fact that Henry was Ida’s guardian did not stop him from making her his mistress. We do not know what Ida thought of the proposition and we certainly don’t have a portrait of her.

It was only in 1979 that a letter written from William Longsword or Longspee was discovered and which identified his mother as Countess Ida pinning the position firmly on the wife of the Earl of Norfolk, Roger Bigod. Ida was married to Roger four years after William’s birth in 1176.

It was at about the same time as the marriage that Henry II granted Roger a number of disputed manors that had been confiscated at the time of his father’s rebellion but not his father’s title. Roger had to wait for that until the reign of Richard the Lionheart. History does not tell us how Ida and Roger came to be married. All we can say is that young William stayed with the royal court while Ida went with her husband to his main seat at Framlingham Castle in Norfolk.  She went on to have at least seven more children.

We cannot even say with any certainty when she died but there is no mention of her made in Roger Bigod’s will, so in all probability she died before 1221.

King Henry VI

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images-17It was possible for medieval kings to be too nice; too pious and too scholarly. Henry VI was the last Lancastrian Plantagenet king. The chaos that spiralled out of control during his reign came about, in part, because of the king’s inability to control his nobility.

In October 1421 Catherine of Valois, wife of Henry V became a mother for the first time at Windsor. Nine months later the infant boy became King Henry VI although he was not crowned in Westminster until 1429. According to the treaty that the French signed after the Battle of Agincourt the boy, following his maternal grandfather’s death was King of England, Wales, Ireland and France.

Indeed, the boy was crowned in Paris on 16th December 1431 to popular acclaim in Paris but much disgust that the English form of coronation was used rather than the French form. Unfortunately most of the rest of France wanted the dauphin, the son of Charles VI, to rule. The future Charles VII had luck on his side in the form of Joan of Arc; the death of the Duke of Bedford’s wife (Anne of Burgundy) resulted in the Duke of Burgundy changing sides; the death of the Duke of Bedford and faction politics back in England. It probably also helped Charles that Henry VI loathed bloodshed and felt that it was his Christian duty to make peace. This duly occurred in 1445 when Henry married Margaret of Anjou and handed back huge tracts of land to the French.

The Duke of Gloucester was furious but his fall from power was just round the corner. His wife Eleanor was found guilty of witchcraft. Ultimately Gloucester would be accused of treason and then found dead in his bed a couple of days later. It wasn’t long before people were whispering that ‘Good Duke Humphrey’ had been murdered and that the queen had somehow been involved.

Henry, who had no mistresses and had an abhorrence of nudity in both men and women, was unlucky in his queen. He thought she was one of the wisest people that he knew but his people never came to love her. She was French and her marriage, without much in the way of dowry, had cost them hard won lands in France. In later years she headed south with a band of ferocious northerners at her back, something that London never forgave her for.

Money, which had flowed readily enough when the English were winning the Hundred Years War, became a problem the older Henry got. It wasn’t helped that when he achieved his majority he gave away approximately two hundred manors and insisted on spending £2,000 on endowing his colleges at Eton and Cambridge. Before long the crown was in debt to the tune of £400,000.

Inevitably the peace in France could not be sustained and before long the roads were filled with English refugees fleeing the French. It didn’t go down well with the English. Henry V, the victor of Agincourt, successful charismatic warrior king was a hard act for his son to follow. As is usual in these occurrences the people blamed the king’s ‘bad advisers’ for the king’s own failings and bad luck. In 1450 Adam Moleyns, the Bishop of Chichester, managed to get himself lynched by an angry mob in Portsmouth who blamed him for the fall of Normandy. The mob’s wrath then turned on the Duke of Suffolk who found himself on the wrong side of the law for pursuing the policies that Henry wanted him to pursue. Henry insisted that Suffolk was set free but he was forced to leave the country. It didn’t help him. Suffolk, on his way to Calais, was hijacked and beheaded.

In June 1450 Kent revolted. This was Jack Cade’s rebellion. The name Mortimer was tangled up in proceedings. People were reminded that Henry IV, our Henry’s grandfather had usurped the throne from his cousin Richard II, and that actually the Duke of York through his mother Ann Mortimer had a much better claim to the throne – it helped that he had a reputation as an effective warrior.

After the rebellion was quelled, Henry VI turned to the Duke of Somerset for guidance. The peer was very unpopular and York, who was owed huge sums of money for his work in France, felt excluded from his rightful role in government. It didn’t help that Somerset used resources in France that might have enabled York to maintain his garrisons. He returned to England from France with an army. On this occasion Henry VI had a larger and better-led army. The enmity that York felt towards Somerset and Margaret of Anjou would become progressively more bitter as did the in-fighting between the various factions which sought to gain power through the king or his wife. However, this is not a post about the Wars of the Roses.

One of Henry VI’s chaplains wrote that the king was a simple man, incapable of lying. This was not necessarily the best news for the English. Medieval kings needed guile and they needed to be strong. Henry was aware of this and perhaps it was why he chose the advisors he did. He appointed bishops, often men he knew personally and who had reputations as theologians; he administered the law diligently. He spent much of his year on progress dispensing justice.

He was also an intensely pious man. On state occasions he wore a hair shirt. Part of the role of Eton was that it should be a chantry for priests to say Masses for his soul. His end of the deal was to provide the foundation and the money to educate poor boys.

Unfortunately for Henry being a likeable man wasn’t going to help rule a country riven by faction and suffering from a dearth of ready cash due to the on-going problems in France which became much worse. At Clarendon, August 1453, Henry VI received news that his army had been defeated in Gascony. The king fell into a coma where he remained until Christmas 1454, missing his son’s birth in the process.

Leaving aside the various tooings and froings of the Wars of the Roses the Battle of Towton on 29th March 1461 was the bloodiest battle fought on English soil if the figures are correct. Henry’s men fought to the death and when the remaining men finally broke and fled they were slaughtered on the road. Those who were captured faced execution. The king and his immediate family fled to Scotland. In payment Berwick was ordered to surrender itself to the Scots. Lancastrian forces began to take over key fortifications in Northumberland but in May 1464 Henry was almost caught following Lancastrian defeat at the Battle of Hexham. By that time Margaret of Anjou and Prince Edward were in France.

Henry spent almost a year on the run hiding in the hills and moors of Westmorland and Lancashire. We know that he found a welcome at Muncaster Castle. But in June 1465 he was betrayed and taken south to London and the Tower where someone tried to assassinate him but where he was able to spend time in prayer and contemplation.

The Earl of Warwick – the Kingmaker had expected that King Edward IV would be extremely grateful for being given a crown. Edward made a bit of a fool of Warwick who was trying to arrange an advantageous foreign match by secretly marrying the widowed and impoverished Elizabeth Woodville, then proceeding to shower all kinds of goodies on her family. Warwick was not amused.

On the 6th October 1470 Henry VI discovered that he was king again on the say so of the Kingmaker who promptly married his youngest daughter off to Prince Edward having already married his oldest daughter off to Edward’s younger brother, the Duke of Buckingham (possibly known as having your cake and eating it.) After the service in St Paul’s, where he was re-crowned, Henry was rarely seen in public.

DSC_0049-47In March 1471 Edward returned and Henry was led by the hand through the streets of London by Bishop Neville in a bid to raise London’s loyal support. Edward swiftly took London, secured Henry and took him with him to Tewkesbury. After the Yorkist victory which saw the death of Henry’s son, Prince Edward, Henry was returned swiftly to the Tower where the Edward claimed he died of melancholy but in reality where the pious, scholarly, likeable and weary man was murdered by the Yorkists. He was forty-nine years old and had been on a troubled throne for thirty-nine years.

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