Enforcers of the Magna Carta, Active 1215-1216 (Oxford Dictionaryof National Biography)

Enforcers of Magna Carta (act. 1215–1216) were a group of barons who stood in the forefront of the opposition to the increasingly tyrannical rule of King John, and were entrusted with the enforcement of the terms of Magna Carta, ‘the great charter of liberties’ as it was already known just ten years later, formally granted by him at Runnymede on 15 June 1215.

Background

Once John had been forced to acknowledge a schedule of rights and of limitations on royal action, the fundamental problem was how to ensure that he abided by the charter's rulings. A radical solution was thus proposed in clause 61 of the charter, known as the security clause (forma securitatis). In this, John conceded that ‘the barons shall choose any twenty-five barons of the realm as they wish, who with all their might are to observe, maintain and cause to be observed the peace and liberties which we have granted’. According to one source, this arrangement was to be reciprocal, for the barons would likewise redress through the twenty-five all wrongs they did the king. Any infringement of the charter by the king or his officials was to be notified to any four of the committee. If it was not rectified within forty days, the king empowered the twenty-five, ‘with the commune of the land’, to ‘distrain and distress us in every way they can, namely by seizing castles, lands and possessions’ until he made amends. The charter thus forced John to sanction nothing less than armed opposition to himself, in the guise of the legal process of distraint—the temporary seizure of goods pending redress.

Magna Carta envisaged the election of the twenty-five in the future, so their names do not appear in it. Consequently the committee's composition is known principally from the list later given by the St Albans chronicler Matthew Paris, apparently drawing on a contemporary document. Regrettably little is known about the process whereby the twenty-five were chosen. But if any ‘election’ actually took place, it was from within the rebel camp and not from the baronage as a whole, for the committee's members were drawn almost exclusively from John's active opponents. While the charter stipulated that in its judgements the committee was to act where possible with Archbishop Stephen Langton or others whom he might request to aid him, neither Langton, the elder William Marshal, earl of Pembroke, the trusted Hubert de Burgh, nor any of the more moderate royalist lords who appear in thecharter's preamble were among its members. The absence of ecclesiastics, even those hostile to John such as Giles de Briouze, bishop of Hereford, together with the survival of a memorandum listing the number of knights mustered at London by each of the twenty-five—amounting, at least on parchment, to an impressive 1187 knights—confirms the essentially military nature of the committee.

The immediate precedent for this remarkable measure very probably came from London. It is surely significant that in 1191 John, as count of Mortain, had granted a ‘commune’ with limited powers of self-government to London, which in 1200–01 is recorded as having a governing court of aldermen with twenty-five members. Possession of the city, which had opened its gates to John's opponents on 17 May 1215, was critical to the baronial position, and its political and strategic importance was reflected in the inclusion of its mayor, Serlo the Mercer (fl. 1206–1222), among the twenty-five. Moreover Robert Fitzwalter, who had been elected baronial leader and was one of the most prominent of the twenty-five, had close ties to the city, since he was hereditary commander of its militia and also lord of Baynard's Castle.

Membership

The committee's membership reflected the development of opposition to King John. Eustace de Vescy, who with Fitzwalter had been deeply implicated in a plot to kill the king in 1212, headed a distinct group of lords, dubbed ‘the northerners’ by chroniclers, including William de Mowbray, Richard de Percy and Roger de Montbegon (d. 1245), lord of Hornby in Lancashire and of several manors in Nottinghamshire and elsewhere; all of them had refused outright either to serve on the king's expedition to Poitou in 1214 or to pay scutage, claiming that overseas service ran contrary to the conditions of their tenure. Closely knit by marriage, tenure, and common interest against an increasingly rapacious Angevin administration, they and their supporters formed the predominant

element in the baronial resistance until at least January 1215. The absence from the committee of otherimportant ‘northerners’ almost certainly reflected the rising prominence of a powerful group of lords from East Anglia and the home counties in the rebellion following the collapse of John's continental campaigns in the autumn of 1214 and during the growing demand for political concessions in the early months of 1215. Some of these, like the Kentish baron Geoffrey de Say (d. 1230), Richard de Clare, earl of Hertford (d. 1217), and his son Gilbert de Clare, may well have been involved in the plot of 1212, while Geoffrey de Mandeville, earl of Essex and Gloucester (d. 1216), was already a close ally of Robert Fitzwalter, whose daughter Maud, rumoured to have been raped by King John, was his first wife. They were joined by Roger (II) Bigod, earl of Norfolk, with his son Hugh Bigod (d. 1225), Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford (though his principal holdings were in Essex), Richard de Montfichet, William of Huntingfield, and William de Lanvallei, lord of Walkern in Hertfordshire (d. 1215).

The inclusion among the twenty-five of Henry de Bohun, earl of Hereford, William Malet, lord of Shepton Mallet in Somerset, and William Marshal the younger represented a western element in the opposition, manifested in a rising in Devon and the temporary seizure of Exeter in May 1215. Similarly,the rebel presence in the midlands was demonstrated by the membership of Saher de Quincy, earl of Winchester, held estates in Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire and half of the honour of Leicester.Such regional groupings were far from rigid, however, and several of the twenty-five had holdings spanning these areas. William d'Aubigny, for example, who had close ties to Fitzwalter from at least 1203, was lord of Belvoir but also held extensive estates in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. John de Lacy was not only lord of Pontefract, but held Castle Donington in Leicestershire. John fitz Robert (d. 1241),lord of Warkworth, Rothbury, and the barony of Whalton, all in Northumberland, was also an important figure in East Anglia, as well as holding the Essex manor of Clavering.

Beyond regional affiliation, many of the twenty-five can be shown to have been linked by ties of kinship or marriage as well as by tenure. William d'Aubigny, for example, was the uncle of Robert de Ros, the lord of Wark-on-Tweed in Northumberland and Helmsley in Yorkshire, and also first cousin of Robert Fitzwalter, while John fitz Robert was John de Lacy's cousin. William de Lanvallei had married Fitzwalter's niece; William de Forz, count of Aumale in Normandy and a major landowner in Cumberland, Yorkshire, and Lincolnshire, was married to the daughter of Richard de Montfichet; bothHugh Bigod and Gilbert de Clare had married sisters of William Marshal the younger; and Henry de Bohun had married Geoffrey de Mandeville's sister. In turn, Geoffrey and his brother William were married to daughters of Robert Fitzwalter. Yet though such links could be multiplied, they were common to the aristocracy as a whole and are not in themselves evidence of political cohesion among the twenty-five. More tangibly, several of the northerners had been accustomed to stand surety for each other for the payment of fines or proffers to the king, suggesting a significant degree of solidarity. In rare instances, close ties of friendship are known to have existed, for instance between William de Forz and Robert de Ros, or between Robert Fitzwalter and Saher de Quincy, who had served together in Normandy in 1203 as castellans of Vaudreuil and were brothers-in-arms, each bearing the other's blazon on his seal. Conversely, there can have been little love lost between Geoffrey de Mandeville and Geoffrey de Say, whose rival claims to the Mandeville lands had been exploited by John. Foreseeing the potential for dissension, the charter stipulated that in case of the absences of some members or of disagreement, the majority's decision was to be binding. Beyond this, however, it is virtually impossible to recover the personal relations between the twenty-five themselves, save through their shared mistreatment at the hands of the king. Most if not all had individual grievances concerning the loss of lands or castles, the taking of hostages, the exaction of extortionate reliefs (payments for the right of inheritance), heavy fines, or royal manipulation of their debts. Many were thus united in a deep hatred of John, and all in their resolution to resist him by force if need be.

Formation

How and when this group began to coalesce is equally uncertain. It is likely that many had been amongthe barons who mustered in arms at Stamford at Easter 1215, presented a schedule of demands to the king from Brackley in late April, and on his refusal formally renounced their homage before attacking Northampton. Others, however, only declared openly for the rebels in the weeks before the negotiations at Runnymede, and it can only be said with certainty that the demand for a baronial committee was first put forward in the ‘articles of the barons’, a provisional list of negotiated concessions hammered out by 10 June—its composition may already have been decided by then. The

articles formed the basis of much in Magna Carta itself, though it is impossible to recover the part played by individuals among the twenty-five in the creation of either document. Nevertheless, the view that the barons were incapable of political thought beyond crude self-interest, and that the statesmanlike moderation and technical detail of the charter could only have been the work of Langtonand his fellow ecclesiastics, is untenable. Doubtless moderates and royalist lords played an important role, but equally several of the twenty-five, including William Malet, William of Huntingfield, John fitz Robert, and Robert de Ros had been sheriffs; Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk, was a baron of the exchequer under Richard I and served on judicial eyres; while most if not all would have gained a closeworking knowledge of law and government through involvement in local administration and by direct contact with the king and his ministers. Moreover, though it ultimately proved unworkable, the boldly innovative proposal of a limited monarchy bridled by a sworn committee of magnates acting on behalf of ‘the community of the realm’ can only have come from the opposition. No doubt some among the twenty-five, like Vescy and Fitzwalter, would have liked to see John dead or deposed, yet overall the contrast with the plot of 1212 to kill the king is striking, suggesting that more of their number wished to avert further war and, until John proved untrustworthy, achieve a modus vivendi with him.

The security clause of the charter envisaged the committee as permanent; any member who died or was otherwise incapacitated was to be replaced by another chosen by the remaining twenty-five. In reality, however, they acted together as a body for only a few months before the fragile peace erupted into civil war in September. Some of the northerners, disillusioned with the charter's moderation, allegedly left Runnymede and reopened hostilities even before negotiations were concluded, though it is unknown whether any of the twenty-five were among them. John had moved quickly to restore lands, rights, and hostages to a number of former rebels, including Eustace de Vescy, John de Lacy, Roger de Montbegon, and William de Lanvallei, who in July received custody of Colchester, although the failure of William de Mowbray's claim to the shrievalty of York showed that arbitration was taken seriously and that the twenty-five could not simply impose restitutions. The king doubtless hoped that the process of redress would cause the opposition to dissolve, but only one of the twenty-five openly deserted; the notoriously mercurial William de Forz had gone over to the king by mid-August in order to secure estates granted to him in 1214 and to add to them the Yorkshire manor of Driffield. Through July and August, however, as the country drifted towards war, the twenty-five appointed several of their number to control those shires where their influence was strongest, arrogating to themselves the powers of sheriffs and justices: Mandeville in Essex, Fitzwalter in Northamptonshire, Quincy in Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire, d'Aubigny in Lincolnshire, Lacy in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire, and Ros in Northumberland. War was now inevitable, but from their base in London some members of the committee were still attempting to issue mandates on the authority of Magna Carta as late as 30 September 1215, when a writ sent by Geoffrey de Mandeville, Saher de Quincy, and Richard de Clare, and witnessed by Robert de Vere, ordered Brian de Lisle to restore Knaresborough Castle to Nicholas de Stuteville by virtue of ‘the oath which you have given to follow the charter to the commune of the realm’.

Failures and successes

In the ensuing struggle against John elements among the twenty-five can be seen operating together, for example in the various missions sent to seek the assistance of Prince Louis of France, or in the baronial alliance with Alexander II of Scotland, and it is probable that close contact was maintained between those who formed the most determined core of the opposition. Yet the twenty-five had ceased to exist as a recognized body. Two principal factors doomed the committee to failure. First, such a limitation on royal power was utterly unacceptable to King John, and would hardly have been countenanced by Louis had he gained the throne. According to Matthew Paris, John's foreign mercenaries scoffed that he had been reduced to ‘the twenty-fifth king in England … not now a king, nor even a petty king, but a disgrace to kings’. When, in his bull Etsi karissimus of 24 August 1215, Pope Innocent III condemned the charter as ‘not only shameful and demeaning but also illegal and unjust, thereby lessening unduly and impairing his [the king's] royal rights and dignity’, he was primarily responding to the security clause. Consequently clause 61 was omitted from all subsequent reissues of Magna Carta, even by the regency council of magnates in the crucial reissues of 1216 and 1217, which were intended to win back the support of the rebels to John's young son, Henry III. Second, the fact that such an omission was never contested reflected disillusionment, even hostility, towards an unrepresentative and openly partisan committee, which had ultimately failed to gain the

confidence of many of the more moderate or loyalist barons. Even among the opposition, the inclusion of Gilbert de Clare and Hugh Bigod as well as their fathers suggested an attempt to gain disproportionate influence for these families. That there was widespread resistance to the efforts of thetwenty-five to win support is suggested by their repeated efforts to enforce compliance with the security clause.

In his representations to Innocent III John accused his baronial opponents of bad faith and failure to implement their side of the settlement, and several historians have passed a similar judgement on the twenty-five as self-interested extremists. True, they had refused to give the king written pledges of fealty, failed to evacuate London by a date agreed by treaty, and had ignored his lawful mandates. Robert de Ros, for example, refused to surrender Carlisle. One source claimed that they were so hostileto John that when the king was ill, the barons refused to come to him but instead insisted he be carriedto their assembly in a litter. Yet as leaders of the opposition they must have realized that John had absolutely no intention of abiding by the terms of Magna Carta. He had delayed the removal of trusted foreign agents like Philip Mark, although demanded by the charter, gathered rather than dismissed his mercenaries, and had sought papal annulment of Magna Carta itself. To have surrendered London or other key strongholds in such circumstances would have been folly. And while several of the twenty-five did indeed seek reparation of their own grievances, the charter stipulated that members should stand down in any suit in which they were personally involved.

The vehemence of their opposition to John makes it unsurprising that few of the twenty-five played a major role in the regency government during the minority of Henry III, but it would be mistaken to characterize them as irresponsible die-hards. In 1220, for instance, Roger de Montbegon resorted not to arms but to a royal writ to secure possession of lands that were still withheld by the sheriff of Nottinghamshire, Philip Mark, while Robert de Vere's appointment during that year as a senior justice of the bench marked an important gesture of reconciliation by the regency towards former rebels. Perhaps there was more than self-interest behind the action of William d'Aubigny, William de Mowbray, and Richard de Percy in 1222, when they came together to resist a forest eyre in Yorkshire that attempted to ignore the deforestation pledged in the charter of the forest issued in 1217. Despite all its limitations the creation of the committee of twenty-five represented a serious attempt to curb monarchical power, and as such set an important precedent for the baronial reform movement of 1258.For ultimately it had been the determination of the barons to confront the king in arms that had forcedJohn to make vital concessions and acknowledge limits to what had become an increasingly arbitrary and tyrannical kingship.

Matthew Strickland

Sources

T. Stapleton, ed., De antiquis legibus liber: cronica majorum et vicecomitum Londoniarum, CS, 34 (1846) · Memoriale fratris Walteri de Coventria / The historical collections of Walter of Coventry, ed.W. Stubbs, 2 vols., Rolls Series, 58 (1872–3) · , Paris, Chron., 3, 306, 480; 4, 393–4, 551 · Selected letters of Pope Innocent III concerning England, 1198–1216, ed. C. R. Cheney and W. H. Semple (1953) · W. S. McKechnie, Magna Carta, 2nd edn (1914) · F. M. Powicke, ‘The twenty five barons of Magna Carta’, Stephen Langton: being the Ford Lectures delivered in the University of Oxford in Hilary 1927 (1928), 207–13 · H. G. Richardson, ‘The morrow of Magna Carta’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, 28 (1944), 422–43 · C. R. Cheney, ‘The twenty five barons of Magna Carta’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, 50 (1967–8), 280–307 · J. C. Holt, The northerners: a study in the reign of King John, new edn (1992) · J. C. Holt, Magna Carta, 2nd edn (1992)

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Robert Fitzwalter, Magnate, Lord of Dunmow, Essex and Baynard's Castle, Died 1235

Fitzwalter, Robert (d. 1235), magnate and rebel, lord of Dunmow, Essex and Baynard's Castle, London,was the son of Walter fitz Robert and Matilda, daughter of Henry II's justiciar Richard de Lucy. Henry I had granted the honours of Dunmow and Baynard's Castle to Walter's father, Robert, the king's

steward, a younger son of Richard fitz Gilbert de Clare. The date of Fitzwalter's birth is unknown, as are the circumstances of his upbringing, though he may be the Robert Fitzwalter mentioned in the Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal as fighting in the Young King's retinue of over 200 knights at the great tournament at Lagny-sur-Marne in 1180.

Early career

Fitzwalter, Robert (d. 1235), seal matrix, early 13th cent.

On the death of his father in 1198, Fitzwalter inherited a barony of over 66 knights' fees, which he could add to the 32 fees already brought to him by his wife, Gunnora, daughter and heir of Robert de Valognes. This combined barony made him, in the words of the Histoire des ducs de Normandie et des rois d'Angleterre, ‘one of the greatest men in England, and one of the most powerful’. In 1200 he stood surety for half the fine incurred by his brother Simon Fitzwalter for marrying without royal licence, while he himself claimed the hereditary custody of Hertford Castle in right of his wife. In August 1202 John appointed him custodian of Hertford, and in December freed him and his wife from all debts owed to Jewish moneylenders by themselves or their ancestors. Earlier in 1201 he had reached a settlement in the royal court with the abbey of St Albans over the disputed wood of Northaw, which he quitclaimed in return for land worth £10 a year.

In spring 1203, with his close friend Saer de Quincy (d. 1219), Fitzwalter was given joint command of the Norman fortress of Vaudreuil, the key to the left bank of the Seine valley. Despite its strength and abundant supplies, however, Vaudreuil was surrendered to Philip Augustus without a blow. The two men obtained a letter patent from the king, issued on 5 July 1203, stating that the castle had been

surrendered at his command and that the castellans and garrison were to be unmolested. This has generally been taken as an attempt to disguise cowardice or collusion, but as Powicke wrote, ‘the diplomatic or strategic reasons for this command were as mysterious to contemporaries as they are to us’ (Powicke, 162). The Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal and other sources indulge in an innuendo about the incident, but it is striking that the witness to John's letter was none other than William (I) Marshal himself.

The families of Quincy and Fitzwalter had long been linked, for Robert's father, Walter, and Saer (d. 1190) were half-brothers, the latter's father, also Saer, having married Maud de Senlis, the widow of Robert fitz Richard (d. 1134), and the Quincys held a fief of 1½ fees from the barony of Dunmow. In a noted demonstration of alliance Fitzwalter and Quincy each bore the other's arms on their seals. On Saer de Quincy's seal bearing his arms before he became earl of Winchester in 1206 or 1207 (or, a fess gules with a label of eight points), a small shield bearing Fitzwalter's arms (or, a fess between two chevrons gules) appears on the field beside the equestrian figure. Fitzwalter's extremely fine silver seal die, preserved in the British Museum, carries the arms adopted by Quincy after becoming earl (gules, lozenges or, or alternatively gules, seven voided lozenges or), showing that this publicized brotherhood-in-arms continued beyond the débâcle at Vaudreuil and probably until Quincy's death in 1219.

While Fitzwalter was in captivity in France his first cousin William d'Aubigny, who held half a fee of the honour of Dunmow, acted on his behalf, selling and pledging his estates to raise his ransom. Although the king did not contribute to his ransom, in 1204 Fitzwalter was nevertheless given his share of the Lucy inheritance on the death of his uncle, Godfrey de Lucy, bishop of Winchester; he doubtless desired more of it, not least the honour of Ongar which was given in custody to Geoffrey fitz Peter. Fitzwalter accompanied the king on his successful expedition to Poitou in 1206, and in October witnessed the truce made between John and Philip Augustus at Thouars. In 1207 he received the manor of Burton, Yorkshire, which he claimed as his wife's inheritance, and in 1210 was granted custody of the heir of Hubert of Anstey, a tenant of the honour of Boulogne. He again saw service with John on the Irish expedition of 1210, and was among those who attested the king's official account of his quarrel with William (III) de Briouze. Fitzwalter's eldest daughter, Matilda (or Maud), married Geoffrey de Mandeville, earl of Essex and son of the chief justiciar, Geoffrey fitz Peter, but she was dead by 1214, when King John offered his own former wife, Isabella of Gloucester, in marriage to Geoffrey. Another of Fitzwalter's daughters, Christina, married Geoffrey's brother, William de Mandeville, who became earl of Essex in 1216.

The plot against King John, 1212

A crisis in Fitzwalter's career occurred in 1212, when he was heavily implicated in a major plot against John during his planned August expedition against the Welsh. The king was to be killed, or to be abandoned to the Welsh, while a new king had been chosen in the person of Simon de Montfort, the crusader against the Albigensians. By 16 August the king had gained intelligence of the plot, and, cancelling his Welsh expedition, had demanded hostages from those barons he suspected of involvement in the conspiracy. The role played by Fitzwalter in its organization is unknown, but though the rebellion probably had considerable support among the nobility, only he and Eustace de Vescy took to flight with their families and households. Fitzwalter and nine of his associates were appealed in the county court of Essex and outlawed. Of these, William Fitzwalter, probably his brother,was archdeacon of Hereford, which suggests a link between the 1212 plot and Giles de Briouze, bishop of Hereford. Other of Fitzwalter's men were imprisoned, and his sister Alice Peche was forced to surrender her daughter and other hostages, although these were held for the king by Saer de Quincy. Fitzwalter's estates were seized, knights were sent from his fees to Poitou, while others had scutage levied on them, and in January 1213, his castles of Bennington, Hertfordshire, and Baynard's Castle were razed.

The reasons for his disaffection, which John's removal of his share in the Lucy lands in late 1210 can only have exacerbated, are variously explained. At some time during the interdict, a fresh dispute arosebetween Fitzwalter and St Albans over his rights in their cell of Binham Priory. Fitzwalter claimed that,contrary to the priory's foundation charter, the abbot had demanded hospitality for too large a retinue, had installed too many monks, and had appropriated too much revenue for the mother house. While

Fitzwalter was serving in Ireland in 1210, moreover, his close friend Prior Thomas had been replaced by the nominee of the abbot, who on specious grounds contested that Fitzwalter was not heir of the founder, Robert de Valognes. Fitzwalter thereupon laid siege to the priory and ravaged its possessions. According to Matthew Paris, John responded to the abbot's appeal by sending troops against Fitzwalter, declaring ‘by the feet of God (for that was his customary oath) that either he or Robert should be king of England’ (Gesta abbatum, 1.227). The manifestly partisan St Albans chronicler believed that John and Fitzwalter hated one another, and that the king rejoiced at this chance of avenging himself on Robert. The case came before the royal court, but unfortunately the verdict is not recorded.

Exile in France

The Histoire des ducs, written by a Fleming in John's service during 1215–16, relates that during his exile Fitzwalter told Philip Augustus that John had attempted to seduce his daughter Matilda, wife of Geoffrey de Mandeville. Found greatly embellished in the later chronicle of Dunmow, this tale, in which John poisons Matilda after her rejection of his lustful advances, resulted in a spate of poems andplays in the early seventeenth century in which Matilda becomes strangely conflated with Maid Marian. Yet if, while in France, Fitzwalter did use such a tale to justify his opposition to John, there is nothing to substantiate the allegation, and similar accusations concerning John's lasciviousness occur too frequently to invite credibility. Indeed, the Histoire des ducs itself offers a different reason for Fitzwalter's flight. When Geoffrey de Mandeville killed a squire of William Brewer in a quarrel over lodgings at Marlborough, John's vow to hang Mandeville was supposedly met by an explosive responsefrom Fitzwalter; ‘You would hang my son-in-law! By God's body you will not. You will see 2,000 laced helms in your land before you hang him’ (Histoire des ducs, 117–18). Fitzwalter pledged, however, to produce Geoffrey for trial in the royal court but, fearing its impartiality, arrived with 500 armed knights. After a further confrontation with John he and his family fled from the king's wrath to France.The billeting quarrel may well reflect an actual event that set John and Fitzwalter at odds, but the rest of the tale in the Histoire des ducs has the ring of literary epic. When in 1215 a list was drawn up of the military strength of the twenty-five barons charged with enforcing Magna Carta, Fitzwalter was credited with 50 not 500 knights [see also Enforcers of Magna Carta]. It is moreover hard to believe that John would have hanged an earl over such a matter, and the king is not known to have taken any action against Mandeville before early 1215. It is nevertheless significant that the Histoire des ducs gives a contemporary view, later echoed by Matthew Paris, of Fitzwalter as quarrelsome and impetuous, swift to resort to violence in support of his claims.

It would seem, then, that while Fitzwalter's flight in 1212 cannot be attributed specifically either to the affair at Binham or to the possible quarrel over Geoffrey de Mandeville, these incidents doubtless contributed to worsening relations with the king which culminated in his being party to conspiracy. Fitzwalter appears to have had no prior connection with Eustace de Vescy, but during his exile he was probably in contact with Giles de Briouze, Stephen Langton, and other ecclesiastics exiled as a result ofthe interdict. According to the Histoire des ducs he disingenuously led the papal legate Pandulf to believe that he and Vescy had rebelled because of the interdict and their refusal to serve an excommunicate king. His restoration was among the terms of John's settlement with the papacy, issued by Innocent III on 27 February 1213, and on 27 May letters patent granted Fitzwalter safe conduct for his return. On 19 July his lands were returned to him, two of his men were released from prison, and he received £100 in compensation for the seizure of his estates, although it is unclear whether this was a pointedly small sum or merely advance payment. The return of Fitzwalter and Vescy marked a significant reverse for John, who was forced to abandon his projected expedition to France that year. John nevertheless regarded him as a less implacable enemy than Vescy, who was personally ordered by the pope to desist from injuring the king. John tried to woo Fitzwalter during hisattempts to quell the resistance of the northern lords in November 1213: he ordered commissioners to assess his losses in Norfolk, confirmed Geoffrey de Mandeville in his inheritance and custodies, and arranged the latter's marriage to Isabella of Gloucester.

Relations with the king, and Magna Carta

Fitzwalter, however, was among those who did not accompany the king on his expedition to Poitou in 1214, and who, following the defeat at Bouvines, refused to pay scutage. The king's continuing suspicions towards him were reflected in instructions to Peter des Roches regarding the election of a

new abbess at Barking, that on no account was Fitzwalter's sister to be appointed, and his orders in June to William (I) Marshal, that the candidate of Roger (II) Bigod, earl of Norfolk, and Fitzwalter should be denied election to the abbacy of Bury St Edmunds. Nevertheless, although the focus of baronial resistance to John was shifting from the north of England to the eastern counties, Fitzwalter was not yet in open opposition, and considerable doubt has now been cast on Wendover's celebrated account of how in late November 1214 the barons, including Fitzwalter, swore on the high altar of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds to compel John to confirm the coronation charter of Henry I. It is possible he was in contact at this time with the powerful group of eastern rebels, but he was certainly at the New Temple on 22 November, when he witnessed the king's grant to St Paul's. He was again with the king in London in the second week of January 1215, when John pledged to answer baronial grievances at Easter.

Fitzwalter was now clearly to the fore of the rebel leadership. When at the end of April John refused the demands of the barons assembled in arms at Brackley, Fitzwalter was chosen as ‘Marshal of the Army of God and Holy Church’, a title intended to counter John's assumption of the cross on 4 March and to lend their own enterprise the legitimacy of a crusade. On 5 May the barons formally defied John, renouncing their homage. Wendover was mistaken in believing Fitzwalter to have been present at the baronial muster at Stamford in mid-April, for together with Geoffrey de Mandeville he joined therebel army on its march on Northampton. Lacking siege engines, however, their two-week blockade of Northampton was fruitless and Fitzwalter's standard-bearer was killed in one of the assaults. On 12 May John ordered the lands of Fitzwalter and other rebels to be seized, but on 17 May the barons transformed their strategic position by gaining control of London, which resulted in a landslide of defections. This coup doubtless owed much to Fitzwalter who had intimate connections with the Londoners not only through his participation in the wine trade but also because, as lord of Baynard's Castle, he was the city's procurator, hereditary standard-bearer, and leader of the city's militia. Havingplundered the property of the king's supporters within, he and Geoffrey de Mandeville strengthened the city's defences, demolishing the houses of the Jews for building material.

At Runnymede on 15 June Fitzwalter was named in Magna Carta among the baronial committee of twenty-five empowered to enforce its provisions. His position was acknowledged by John in a treaty directly with Fitzwalter, probably drawn up on 19 June as part of the same negotiations, which stipulated that unless John violated the charter, London would be yielded to him by 15 August. During the ensuing process of restoration John granted him custody of Hertford Castle in late June, but by this time Fitzwalter suspected that the king's partisans were attempting to seize London. When, in August, the barons sought to impose direct control over those counties where they were powerful enough, Fitzwalter was assigned Northamptonshire. By early September war had broken out, and on 17 September Henry fitzCount was ordered by John to seize Fitzwalter's Cornish estates.

Rebellion, 1215, and its aftermath

In early October, having installed a large garrison commanded by William d'Aubigny in Rochester Castle, the baronial force was halted at Ospringe by news of John's approach. On 12 October Fitzwalterheld the bridge at Rochester carrying the London–Dover road against John's initial assaults, but when the king's army finally destroyed the bridge, cutting off the rebels in the castle, Fitzwalter was forced towithdraw to London. Having pledged to William d'Aubigny, however, that they would come to his relief if besieged, the baronial forces accordingly set out from London with a force of 700 knights on 26October. But on learning at Dartford that John was hastening against them, they retreated to London, much to the scorn of the St Albans chroniclers, who depict the barons back in London as indulging in slothful luxury while their deserted comrades were battered into submission by John. Yet although Matthew Paris vilifies Fitzwalter as perjured and perfidious, it seems unlikely that the baronial forces could have defeated the king's large mercenary host in pitched battle, and, though inglorious, it was a more realistic strategy to safeguard London and attempt to save Rochester by negotiation.

By early 1216 the rebels' position had become so desperate that Fitzwalter, with Saer de Quincy, went to France to renew the offer of the throne to Philip Augustus's son Louis, an offer first made in September or October 1215. Louis's arrival on 21 May with a powerful force saved the baronial cause, and on 3 June, the day after his arrival in London, Fitzwalter and the mayor, William Hardel, led the barons and citizens in performing homage to him. While Louis reduced Kent and Sussex in June,

Fitzwalter, together with William de Mandeville and William of Huntingfield, subjugated Essex and Suffolk.

Fitzwalter remained firmly in the rebel camp after John's death on 19 October. When on 6 December 1216 Louis took Hertford Castle, some of the French, according to Matthew Paris, opposed Fitzwalter's request for its custody on the grounds that as a traitor to his lord he was untrustworthy. Louis recognized his claim, but retained the castle until the war should be over. On 30 April 1217 he was sent at the head of a powerful French force to raise the earl of Chester's siege of Quincy's castle of Mountsorrel in Leicestershire. He earned the further animus of the St Albans chroniclers when, on their march, his troops requisitioned all the abbey's victuals. Having relieved Mountsorrel, Fitzwalter reinforced the Franco-baronial army besieging Lincoln. On 20 May he and the earl of Winchester advised attacking the royalist army under William Marshal as it ascended the ridge from the River Witham to the plain north of the city, but the count of Perche and the marshal of France decided instead to retire behind the city's defences. When the royalists broke into Lincoln, Fitzwalter was takenprisoner with his son, probably Robert the younger, and held by William de Forz, count of Aumale. He avoided a heavy ransom, however, for the treaty of Lambeth (12 September 1217) not only granted Louis's English supporters absolution and a return of the lands they had held at the start of the war, but also stipulated that those still prisoners were only to pay ransom instalments up to the inception ofpeace. His release was ordered on 8 October 1217.

Fitzwalter attended a great council at Westminster held from late October to early November 1217, where with other former rebels he did fealty and homage to the king, made out a charter of faithful service on pain of disinheritance, and received writs of seisin from the chancery. In January 1218 he was among those who stood surety for John de Briouze and his brother on their release; he received custody of his own nephew, Walter Fitzsimon, in July, and witnessed the agreement whereby the great seal was not to be affixed to charters or letters patent until Henry III came of age. In November 1218, with other former rebels and Archbishop Langton, he took part in a great council which marked an important step towards political reconciliation, and he was granted remission of the scutage of 1217. In1219 he attested Saer de Quincy's exchange of the Scottish marriage portion of his newly widowed daughter, Loretta, for land in Shepshed, before both men embarked for the Holy Land on the fifth crusade. Fitzwalter and Quincy arrived at Damietta in July 1219 and took part in the siege, but Quincy died on 3 November, two days before the city fell, and was buried in Acre. His widow continued to bearboth the arms of Quincy and Fitzwalter on her seal. Fitzwalter himself returned home sick before the crusaders finally left Egypt in August 1221, probably some time in 1220, when he gained full exemptionfrom that year's carucage.

Death and reputation

Fitzwalter remained active in political affairs in England until his death, clearly reconciled with the new regime. Following the siege of Bytham in January 1221 he stood surety for his former captor, the count of Aumale, while a force of his knights took part in the Montgomery campaign of September and October 1223, against Llywelyn. In December Fitzwalter stood with the king and Hubert de Burgh against the earl of Chester, Falkes de Bréauté, and other dissident castellans during the resumption of royal castles, and that same month the king sent his father's old enemy a gift of game. When on 11 February 1225 he witnessed Henry III's third confirmation of Magna Carta and the charter of the forest, he must have felt his earlier actions well vindicated. In June 1230 he was among those assigned to hold the assize of arms in Essex and Hertfordshire. He died on 9 December 1235, at what must have been a considerable age, and was buried before the high altar of Dunmow Priory. He was the ancestor of the powerful baronial Fitzwalter family. His elder son, Robert, who had fought with him at Lincoln, had predeceased him; his heir was Walter (d. 1258), a minor, the son of Fitzwalter's second marriage, to Rohese. Christina, his daughter from his first marriage and wife of William de Mandeville, inherited her mother's barony.

Fitzwalter's close involvement with the rebellion of 1215–17 and with Magna Carta has ensured his prominence, but historians have been sharply divided in their assessment of him. To Tout, Fitzwalter was ‘the first champion of English liberty’ (DNB), and prefigured Simon de Montfort. Others, like Norgate and Painter, reacting against this naïve idealism, dismissed him as a haughty, selfish, but ultimately cowardly, feudal grandee, ready to obstruct justice by private warfare and to cloak treason

with a series of makeshift justifications. Yet, given John's harsh and arbitrary rule, the king's opponents had little option save for conspiracy or armed rebellion, particularly after 1213 when Innocent III fully supported John. To see Fitzwalter falling short of the qualities of a great constitutional statesman is to be as anachronistic as Tout. He may have fought in large part to avenge personal wrongs and to regain lost rights, but he played an important role in sustaining the resistance which resulted in Magna Carta. Although Fitzwalter was resolute in his opposition to John, his participation on crusade and his conduct during Henry III's minority belie the image of a turbulent malcontent. Matthew Paris had little cause to praise Fitzwalter, but the final verdict is best left to him. He ‘could match any earl in England; valiant in arms, spirited and illustrious, endowed with many possessions, generous, encompassed by a multitude of powerful blood relatives and strengthened by numerous relatives in marriage’ (Gesta abbatum, 1.220–21).

Matthew Strickland

Sources

Paris, Chron., vols. 2–3 · Gesta abbatum monasterii Sancti Albani, a Thoma Walsingham, ed. H. T. Riley, 3 vols., pt 4 of Chronica monasterii S. Albani, Rolls Series, 28 (1867–9), vol. 1 · F. Michel, ed., Histoire des ducs de Normandie et des rois d’Angleterre (Paris, 1840) · T. D. Hardy, ed., Rotuli litterarum clausarum, RC, 1 (1833) · T. D. Hardy, ed., Rotuli litterarum patentium, RC (1835) · Ann. mon. · J. C. Holt, Magna Carta, 2nd edn (1992) · J. C. Holt, The northerners: a study in the reign of King John, new edn (1992) · D. A. Carpenter, The minority of Henry III (1990) · G. Henderson, ‘Romance and politics on some medieval English seals’, Art History, 1 (1978), 26–42 · S. Painter, The reign of King John (1949) · J. H. Round, ‘King John and Robert FitzWalter’, EngHR, 19 (1904), 707–11· F. M. Powicke, The loss of Normandy, 1189–1204: studies in the history of the Angevin empire, 2nd edn (1961), 162, n. 219 · K. Norgate, John Lackland (1902) · J. C. Holt, ‘Feudal society and the family inearly medieval England, III: patronage and politics’, TRHS, 5th ser., 34 (1984), 1–25, esp. 21–2 · P. Meyer, ed., L'histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, 3 vols. (Paris, 1891–1901)

Likenesses

silver seal matrix, BM [see illus.]

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Eustace de Vescy, Baron, Lord of Alnwick, born circa 1169/70 – died 1216

Vescy [Vesci], Eustace de (1169/70–1216), baron, lord of Alnwick, Northumberland, the son of Williamde Vescy (d. 1183) and Burga, daughter of Robert (III) de Stuteville, lord of Cottingham, Yorkshire, came of age in 1190. He was charged a relief of 1300 marks for his barony, which consisted of 36½ feesin Northumberland and Yorkshire. He married Margaret, the illegitimate daughter of William the Lion, king of Scots, and half-sister of Alexander II of Scotland; at Richard I's second coronation on 17 April 1194 he witnessed a royal charter in favour of his father-in-law.

At the end of 1194 Vescy was at Chinon in France with Richard I. He was one of the guarantors of the treaty between John and Renaud, count of Boulogne, on 13 August 1199. In the same year, probably later, he was sent to William the Lion of Scotland to promise him satisfaction of his rights in England; he witnessed his homage on 22 November 1200, and on 10 April 1209 was sent to meet William the Lion on his visit to England. He served King John on his expedition to Ireland in the summer of 1210. In December 1207 Vescy was pardoned of a 300 mark amercement assessed in his plea against Richard de Umfraville concerning custody of an heir.

Accused along with Robert Fitzwalter of conspiring against John in August 1212, Vescy fled to Scotland. The tale of John's attempted seduction of his wife, and the trick played on him of substituting another woman in the royal bed, which first appears in William of Newburgh, is scarcely credible, and bears some resemblance to similar stories of the king's lecherous designs on others, for example, Robert Fitzwalter's daughter. Vescy was outlawed and his lands seized; but after John's submission to the pope he was forced to invite Vescy back on 27 May 1213, although orders were sent on the same day to cripple his power by destroying his castles at Alnwick and Malton. On 18 July 1213 he was one of the recipients of John's pledge to make restitution to those persons who had suffered

damages during the interdict, and his lands were restored to him the next day. In 1213 Vescy was one of six northern barons who refused to participate in John's projected Poitevin expedition, and the next year he refused to pay scutage for the campaign. On 5 November 1214 Innocent III warned him to remain loyal to the king in his disputes with the barons. He was one of the most prominent of the northern barons who led the movement to impose Magna Carta on John. He was closely associated with another Yorkshire rebel, Robert de Ros (d. 1226/7), and both were among the twenty-five appointed to see Magna Carta carried out. He was one of nine barons whom the pope excommunicatedby name in September 1215. On 3 May 1216 Vescy went to John seeking reconciliation. After Louis of France landed he accompanied Alexander II of Scotland on his way to do homage to the Capetian prince. On their way in late August 1216 they laid siege to Barnard Castle, co. Durham, belonging to Hugh de Balliol, and, approaching too near, Vescy was shot through the head by an arrow. His lands were confiscated and handed over to royal allies. He left a son, William (d. 1253), who came of age in 1226.

Ralph V. Turner

Sources

I. J. Sanders, English baronies: a study of their origin and descent, 1086–1327 (1960) · Pipe rolls · Chancery records · The letters of Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) concerning England and Wales, ed. C. R. Cheney and M. G. Cheney (1967) · Rogeri de Wendover liber qui dicitur flores historiarum, ed. H. G. Hewlett, 3 vols., Rolls Series, [84] (1886–9) · Memoriale fratris Walteri de Coventria / The historical collections of Walter of Coventry, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols., Rolls Series, 58 (1872–3) · R. Howlett, ed., Chronicles of the reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I, 4 vols., Rolls Series, 82 (1884–9), vols. 1–2 · L. Landon, The itinerary of King Richard I, PRSoc., new ser., 13 (1935) · J. C. Holt, Magna Carta, 2nd edn (1992)

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William de Mowbray, Baron, Born circa 1173 – died circa 1224

Mowbray, William de (c.1173–c.1224), baron, was the eldest son of Nigel de Mowbray (d. 1191) and Mabel (d. c.1219), probably the daughter of William de Patri, and the grandson of Roger (I) de Mowbray. He had two or three brothers and a sister. Mowbray was described in the Histoire des ducs de Normandie as being as small as a dwarf but very generous and valiant. He had livery of his lands in 1194 on payment of a relief of £100, and was immediately called upon to pay a sum nearly as large as his share of the scutage levied towards King Richard's ransom, for the payment of which he was one of the hostages. He was a witness to the treaty with Flanders in 1197.

When Richard I died, and John delayed to claim his crown, Mowbray was one of the barons who seizedthe opportunity to fortify their castles and whose support for John was most in doubt. But, like the rest, he was induced to swear fealty to John by the promises which Archbishop Hubert Walter, the justiciar Geoffrey fitz Peter, and William Marshal made in his name. He apparently served John frequently in military campaigns for he received acquittance from most of the scutages of the reign. When William de Stuteville renewed the old claim of his house to the forfeited family lands in the possession of the Mowbrays, thus ignoring the compromise made by his father with Roger (I) de Mowbray, and Mowbray supported his suit by a present of 2000 marks to the king, John and his great council dictated a new compromise. Stuteville had to accept nine knight's fees and the manor of Brinklow, Warwickshire, in full satisfaction of his claims, and the adversaries were reconciled at a country house of the bishop of Lincoln at Louth on 21 January 1201.

In 1215 Mowbray was prominent among the opponents of John. With other north-country barons he appeared in arms at Stamford in the last days of April. When Magna Carta had been wrung from the king, he was appointed one of the twenty-five executors, and as such was specially named among thoseexcommunicated by Innocent III [see also Enforcers of Magna Carta]. During the struggle he pursued family claims to hereditary control of York Castle; the castle was entrusted to his care on 19 June 1215 but in the long run his claims were not satisfied. Mowbray was taken prisoner in the battle of Lincoln in 1217, and had to surrender the manor of Banstead in Surrey, which had formed his mother's marriage portion, to Hubert de Burgh as ransom. His other lands, which had been confiscated, were restored to him in early October 1217 when he made peace with Henry III's government. Three years

later, in January 1221, Mowbray was summoned to help capture Skipsea, one of the strongholds of William de Forz, count of Aumale (with Mowbray, one of the twenty-five executors of Magna Carta), who had gone into rebellion once again.

Mowbray is said, in the sixteenth-century recension of the ‘Progenies Moubraiorum’ (Dugdale, Monasticon), to have married Agnes, a daughter of William d'Aubigny, earl of Arundel, of the elder branch of the d'Aubigny family, but contemporary records mention only a wife named Avice. He had two sons, Nigel and Roger (II). Mowbray founded the chapel of St Nicholas, with a chantry, at Thirsk, and was a benefactor of his grandfather's foundation, Newburgh Priory, where, on his death in Axholme about 1224, he was buried. He was succeeded by his elder son, Nigel, who died childless in 1228, and then by his younger son, Roger (II), who came of age only in 1241 and died c.1266. This Roger's son, Roger (III) (d. 1297), succeeded to the barony and was the father of John (I) de Mowbray.

James Tait, rev. Hugh M. Thomas

Sources

J. C. Holt, The northerners: a study in the reign of King John, new edn (1992) · Rogeri de Wendover liber qui dicitur flores historiarum, ed. H. G. Hewlett, 3 vols., Rolls Series, [84] (1886–9) · Chronica magistri Rogeri de Hovedene, ed. W. Stubbs, 4 vols., Rolls Series, 51 (1868–71) · D. E. Greenway, ed., Charters of the honour of Mowbray, 1107–1191 (1972) · Dugdale, Monasticon, new edn, vols. 5–6 · Chancery records (RC) · Pipe rolls · F. Michel, ed., Histoire des ducs de Normandie et des rois d’Angleterre (Paris, 1840) · Curia regis rolls preserved in the Public Record Office (1922–), vol. 1 · Rymer, Foedera · C. Roberts, ed., Excerpta è rotulis finium in Turri Londinensi asservatis, Henrico Tertio rege, AD 1216–1272, 1, RC, 32 (1835), 113

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Richard de Percy, Baron, born before 1181 – died 1244

Percy, Richard de (b. before 1181, d. 1244), baron, was the second son of Agnes (d. c.1202), heir of the original Percy family, and Joscelin de Louvain (d. 1180), a younger son of Godefroi, duke of Lower Lorraine, and brother of Queen Adeliza, wife of Henry I. Besides his elder brother Richard de Percy had two brothers and four sisters. He first appears in the pipe rolls in 1181. Some time in or before 1198 Percy's elder brother, Henry, died, leaving a son, William de Percy (1191x3–1245), to whom Joscelin de Louvain's lands passed, but when Agnes de Percy died c.1202, Richard, probably taking advantage of the fact that King John had inherited the kingdom in preference to the son of a dead olderbrother, was able to claim her lands. He also obtained a small part of the lands of his aunt Matilda, the other heir to the Percy lands, when she died c.1204, although in an apparent compromise between the claims of uncle and nephew the bulk of Matilda's lands went to William de Percy, who in 1214, shortly after he came of age, claimed Richard's lands. This sparked an ongoing legal battle, punctuated by short-lived settlements, that lasted until 1234, when a more permanent settlement was made.

Richard de Percy served frequently on royal expeditions early in John's reign but he was one of the northern barons who began the struggle which ended in the signing of Magna Carta by refusing to accompany the king to France in 1214. On 7 May 1215 he and some others made an attempt to treat with the king; one of the twenty-five executors of Magna Carta, he was excommunicated by Innocent III by name on 26 December [see also Enforcers of Magna Carta]. In 1216 he and other northern barons reduced Yorkshire to the obedience of the dauphin, Louis of France. On 11 May 1217 Henry III granted Percy's lands to his nephew William, but they were restored by the king on Percy's submission on 2 November.

Percy helped to besiege Ralph de Gaugi in Newark Castle in 1218, and was one of three barons charged with the destruction of Skipton Castle in 1221; he served on campaign with the king in 1224 and 1230. In 1236 he appears among the witnesses of the confirmation of the charters. Percy generally maintained a low political profile in Henry III's reign, but in 1237, when in the parliament the barons prepared to deliberate apart on the king's demands, Gilbert Basset suggested to the king that he shouldsend some of his friends to attend the conference. The words caught the ear of Richard de Percy, and he indignantly cried, ‘What did you say, friend Gilbert? Are we foreigners then, and not friends of the king?’ (Paris, 3.381–2).

Percy married first Alice, of unknown parentage; on her death he married Agnes de Neville. He had a son, Henry, who must have been illegitimate since Percy's heir was his nephew William. Percy died in 1244, before 18 August. During his lifetime, he made gifts to the priory of St Lô in Rouen, Sallay Abbey,and Fountains Abbey, to which he gave Litton and Littondale in return for £100 a year for life; if arrangements specified in a grant to Fountains were carried out, he was buried in that house.

W. E. Rhodes, rev. Hugh M. Thomas

Sources

J. C. Holt, The northerners: a study in the reign of King John, new edn (1992) · W. Farrer and others, eds., Early Yorkshire charters, 12 vols. (1914–65), vol. 11 · [M. T. Martin], ed., The Percy chartulary, SurtS, 117 (1911) · Chancery records · Paris, Chron. · Rogeri de Wendover liber qui dicitur flores historiarum, ed. H. G. Hewlett, 3 vols., Rolls Series, [84] (1886–9) · Pipe rolls · W. T. Lancaster, Abstracts of the charters and other documents contained in the chartulary of the Cistercian abbey of Fountains, 2 vols. (1915) · Curia regis rolls preserved in the Public Record Office (1922–) · D. M. Stenton, ed., Rolls of the justices in eyre … Yorkshire in 3 Henry III, 1218–1219, SeldS, 56 (1937) · J. Parker, ed., Feet of fines for the county of York, 3: from 1218 to 1231, Yorkshire Archaeological Society,62 (1921) · C. Roberts, ed., Excerpta è rotulis finium in Turri Londinensi asservatis, Henrico Tertio rege, AD 1216–1272, 2 vols., RC, 32 (1835–6)

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Gilbert de Clare, Fifth Earl of Gloucester, Fourth Earl of Hertford, born circa 1180 – died 1230

Clare, Gilbert de, fifth earl of Gloucester and fourth earl of Hertford (c.1180–1230), magnate, was the son of Richard de Clare, earl of Hertford (d. 1217), and his wife, Amicia (d. 1225), one of the three coheirs of William, earl of Gloucester. On the death of his father he succeeded to the two comital titles and inherited the honours of Clare and Tonbridge and also the vast Gloucester estates, including the lordships of Glamorgan and Gwynllŵg on the Welsh march. He also inherited the estates of his grandmother, Maud de St Hilaire, and a half of the honour of Giffard from his father, who was one of the coheirs of Rohese, daughter of Walter Giffard, earl of Buckingham.

Both Gilbert de Clare and his father were among the twenty-five barons appointed to carry out Magna Carta in June 1215, and both were excommunicated by Innocent III at the beginning of 1216 [see also Enforcers of Magna Carta]. After the death of John, Gilbert sided with Louis of France, but after the battle of Lincoln he was reconciled with the royalists led by William (I) Marshal, earl of Pembroke, who had married him to his daughter Isabel in 1214. Earl Gilbert's public career was framed by the minority of Henry III. He played only a secondary role, his prominence being secured more by his landed status and family marriage connections than by any particular desire or capacity for leadership.In February 1225 he was present at the confirmation of Magna Carta at Westminster. Two years later he sided with Richard, earl of Cornwall, in his quarrel with the king, demanding a renewal of the forest acts and ascribing all the faults of the government to Hubert de Burgh. About May 1230 he attended Henry III abroad on his expedition to Brittany, but died there at Penros on 25 October 1230. He seems to have made his first will before starting on this campaign on 30 April 1230 at Southwick, and his second, just before his death, on 23 October. His body was conveyed to Plymouth, and thence, by way of Cranborne, to Tewkesbury Abbey, where he was buried before the great altar on the Sunday following St Martin's day, in the presence of an ‘innumerable gathering’ (annals of Tewkesbury, Ann. mon., 1.76). He was a great benefactor of Tewkesbury Abbey during his lifetime, and bequeathed it a silver cross and the ‘wood of Mutha’. His widow Isabel set up a memorial stone dated 28 September 1231. In the course of the same year she married Richard, earl of Cornwall. Isabel died on 17 January 1240, and was buried at Beaulieu. Her heart, however, was brought to Tewkesbury by the prior in a silver gilt casket and interred before the great altar.

Gilbert and Isabel had three sons: Richard de Clare (1222–1262), William (1228–1258), and Gilbert (b.1229); and two daughters: Amicia (1220–1283), who in October 1226 was betrothed to Baldwin de Revières; and Isabel, born on 2 November 1226, who married Robert (V) de Brus of Annandale.

The lordship of Glamorgan became the true centre of Earl Gilbert's power and priorities. His greatest energies were spent in military efforts, still incomplete at his death, to secure territorial control of the Welsh uplands. His major opponents were first Morgan Gam, lord of Afan, and, after Morgan's capturein 1228, Hywel ap Maredudd, lord of Meisgyn and Glynrhondda.

T. A. Archer, rev. Michael Altschul

Sources

M. Altschul, A baronial family in medieval England: the Clares, 1217–1314 (1965) · M. Altschul, ‘Glamorgan and Morgannwg under the rule of the de Clare family’, Glamorgan county history, ed. G. Williams, 3: The middle ages, ed. T. B. Pugh (1971), 45–72 · J. B. Smith, ‘The lordship of Glamorgan’, Morgannwg, 2 (1958), 9–37 · D. A. Carpenter, The minority of Henry III (1990) · I. J. Sanders, English baronies: a study of their origin and descent, 1086–1327 (1960) · Ann. mon., vols. 1, 2 · Paris, Chron.

Likenesses

memorial stone, Tewkesbury Abbey

Wealth at death

wealthy

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Roger Bigod, Second Earl of Norfolk, born circa 1143 – died 1221

Bigod, Roger (II), second earl of Norfolk (c.1143–1221), magnate, was the only son of Hugh (I) Bigod, earl of Norfolk (d. 1176/7), and his first wife, Juliana (d. 1199/1200), sister of Aubrey (III) de Vere, earlof Oxford. After repudiating his first wife, Hugh married Gundreda (d. 1206×8), daughter of Earl Roger of Warwick, and with her had two further sons, Hugh (d. c.1203) and William. Roger (II) Bigod married Ida, of unknown parentage, with whom he had four sons, Hugh (II) (d. 1225), William, Ralph, and Roger, and two daughters, Mary, who married Ralph fitz Robert, and Margery, who married William of Hastings.

The accession of Roger (II) Bigod to his father's estates provides a stunning example of how a medievalking could profit from family squabbles among his higher aristocracy. When Hugh Bigod repudiated his first wife in favour of Gundreda and then produced two more sons with his name, he brought upon his first son a dispute over the inheritance which would muddy the waters for over twenty years after his death. No sooner had Hugh been placed in the ground at Thetford Priory, than Gundreda, like the wicked stepmother of legend, asserted the claim of her first son by Hugh, confusingly also named Hugh, to certain of her late husband's estates which, she claimed, had been acquired during his lifetime and which he had bequeathed to Hugh as was his right. Never a man to miss an opportunity tokeep his barons in check, Henry II took possession of large parts of Bigod land in Norfolk and refused to recognize Roger's claim to the earldom, which his father seems to have lost in 1174.

The roots of this antipathy towards the Bigod family go back to Hugh's participation in the revolt of 1173–4 against Henry II, which resulted in the destruction of Framlingham Castle, seemingly the Bigod caput, and the lasting enmity of the king. When Hugh died in 1176 or 1177 and Gundreda pushedher son's claims to part of the Bigod inheritance, Henry II felt no compunction in making Roger (who was by this time already of age) feel extremely uncomfortable by allowing the case to continue unresolved, refusing to allow him the earldom of Norfolk, and confiscating these disputed lands. It is a true testament to the fear that a powerful magnate like the earl of Norfolk could engender in a twelfth-century king that, despite the fact that Roger himself had remained faithful during the rebellion of 1173–4 and can be found in the king's service before 1176, Henry II still felt the need to take advantage of Roger's little local difficulty to hold him in check.

The saga of the claims of Gundreda and Hugh to a part of Roger's inheritance was to dog the earl until 1199. There was one light on the horizon, however. The accession of Richard I in 1189 brought Roger

(II) back into royal favour. The new king bestowed upon Roger the long-awaited earldom of Norfolk for the relatively paltry sum of 1000 marks. From that moment on circumstances improved for the newly belted earl. He can be found with the king on a regular basis before Richard embarked on crusade, and he supported the interim government throughout the difficult years of the king's absence.It seems that Roger (II) also had a part to play in Richard's release from captivity and was in Germany when Richard's freedom was secured. At Richard's second coronation in 1194 Bigod was one of four earls given the privilege of carrying the silken canopy that covered the king. He was a baron of the exchequer between 1194 and 1196, and also served as a justice on eyre and coram rege during Richard's reign. And he had the hereditary stewardship of the royal household returned to him. Roger (II) also found time to serve in Richard's armies on the continent. The conclusion of more than twenty years' squabbling with his half-brother, Hugh, in 1199 for a settlement of an estate held of the earl, worth a scant £30, merely served to set the seal on a thoroughly successful reign for Bigod. It was at this point, also, that Bigod set about rebuilding Framlingham Castle, much improved from the structure destroyed in 1176, in stone and in the ‘new fashion’. The castle as it stands today is mostly from this date.

The story of a successful and loyal king's earl continued well into the next reign. Bigod was present at John's coronation on 27 May 1199, and was dispatched thence to the king of Scots, to bring him to John for the performance of homage. He seems to have executed his military duties to John in Normandy and was one of the earls who was in constant attendance upon the king. He went to Poitou in 1206 and can be found on the royal campaigns in Scotland (1209), Ireland (1210), and Wales (1211). Despite this record of service Earl Roger joined the rebel side in the civil war that marked the end of King John's reign. Financial pressure may have been a reason. The scutage due on some 160 knights' fees, which the earl came to hold by the end of his life, was liable to be heavy, so much so that in 1211 Bigod struck a bargain with the king to pay 2000 marks (£1333 6s. 8d.) for respite during his lifetime from demands for arrears, and for being allowed to pay scutage on only 60 fees in future. He was pardoned 360 marks of this debt, but paid the substantial sum of 1340 marks in 1211 and 1212. Nor was this the only way in which John showed himself less than favourable towards the earl. In 1207 one William the Falconer brought an action against Bigod at Westminster, but when the earl objected to the chosen jurors on the grounds of their likely bias, his arguments were ignored by the king, who ordered that the case proceed. Both Earl Roger (now probably over seventy) and his son, Hugh Bigod (d. 1225), were later named as being among the committee of twenty-five set up by Magna Carta to control the king, for which they were both declared excommunicate by Pope Innocent III (r. 1198–1216) in December of that year [see also Enforcers of Magna Carta].

John's irritation at Bigod's defection and the subsequent events illustrate clearly how the king intended to bring his magnates to heel. After a lightning campaign in the north, during which he effectively reduced his opponents there to submission, John returned to East Anglia, also a centre of resistance. Judging from John's actions in March 1216, Earl Roger was the linchpin in this resistance to the king. Framlingham Castle was quickly invested, and equally quickly taken. The king then sent letters of safe conduct to Bigod in an attempt to bring him into line. Meanwhile John systematically stripped the earl of his followers in the area by pardoning those captured and returning to them seisin of their properties, while declaring those who refused to submit disseised of their lands. But, despite these tactics, Roger and Hugh Bigod remained in rebellion, and indeed did not return to the loyalist fold until after the treaty of Kingston (though before the treaty of Lambeth) in September 1217. By April 1218 Bigod had received back all his lands and titles and withdrawn into semi-retirement, rarely appearing in the royal records before his death some time before 2 August 1221. He was succeeded as earl by his son Hugh (II) Bigod, who was of age at the time of his father's death, and who in 1206 or 1207 married Matilda, daughter of William (I) Marshal (d. 1219). Their children included Roger (III) Bigod, earl of Norfolk, and Hugh (III) Bigod, the baronial justiciar.

Earl Roger (II) Bigod made a number of religious benefactions during his long life. He continued the family tradition of patronizing Earls Colne Priory, Essex, and the abbeys of Wymondham, Norfolk, andRochester, Kent. He made grants to monasteries at Bungay, Suffolk, Carrow, Norfolk, Hickling, Norfolk, Leiston, Suffolk, and Sibton, Suffolk, as well as to the two cells of Rochester at Felixstowe, Suffolk, and at Harwich, Essex. All these grants mark him as a conventionally pious man of his age. Roger (II)'s period as earl of Norfolk was clearly a success, notwithstanding his being on the wrong side in the civil war against King John. His father, Hugh (I), had ended his life in disgrace and

bequeathed a legacy to Earl Roger of Henry II's enmity and an inheritance dispute. By the time that Earl Roger himself died, the Bigod lands were secured and indeed probably expanded. Framlingham Castle was rebuilt, and, despite falling to the king's forces in March 1216, it did not suffer the same fate as its predecessor but remained the family caput until the eventual demise of the family in 1306. Moreover, Earl Roger left his son an undisputed inheritance.

S. D. Church

Sources

S. A. J. Atkin, ‘The Bigod family: an investigation into their lands and activities, 1066–1306’, PhD diss.,U. Reading, 1979 · R. A. Brown, ‘Framlingham Castle and Bigod, 1154–1216’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology, 25 (1951), 127–48; repr. in R. A. Brown, Castles, conquest and charters: collected papers (1889), 187–208 · Pipe rolls, 13–14, 16 John; 2 Henry III · R. V. Turner, Theking and his courts (1968), 108 · W. Stubbs, ed., Select charters and other illustrations of English constitutional history, 9th edn (1913), 164 [repr. with corrections, ed. H. W. C. Davis (1921)]

Wealth at death

£162 3s. 4d.—knights' fees in Norfolk and Suffolk: Atkin, ‘The Bigod family’, 178; Pipe rolls, 13–14, 16 John, 177

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Robert de Vere, Third Earl of Oxford, died 1221

Vere, Robert de, third earl of Oxford (d. 1221), magnate, was the third surviving son of Aubrey (III) de Vere, the first earl (d. 1194), and of his third wife, Agnes of Essex (b. 1151, d. in or after 1206). Little is known of him before 1207. Before his father's death in 1194 he attested several charters to monastic houses founded by the de Vere family, but his name does not appear on any charters issued by his elder brother Aubrey (IV), the second earl, and rarely on those of others. Before Michaelmas 1207 Robert married Isabel de Bolebec, the aunt and namesake of Aubrey (IV)'s wife, who had died childlessin either 1206 or 1207. The pipe roll of 1207 states that the first instalment of Isabel's fine for not beingcompelled to marry was in fact paid by her new husband, Robert de Vere. Isabel the niece had been theheir to the Bolebec estate, based upon Whitchurch in Buckinghamshire. Her own heirs were her two aunts, and Robert's marriage was clearly a de Vere strategy to retain control over at least half the Bolebec lands. It may also have recognized Robert as heir apparent to the earldom of Oxford. Despite two marriages Earl Aubrey failed to father a legitimate heir, and he was also predeceased by his next brother, Ralph. Robert and Isabel had one child, Hugh, later fourth earl of Oxford.

Robert de Vere succeeded his brother in October 1214. King John charged him 1000 marks for his relief and a wardship, but may not have confirmed him in the earldom and hereditary master chamberlainship; de Vere attested a royal charter issued in London on 15 January 1215 without a title. Earl Aubrey had been numbered among King John's cronies, but Robert de Vere joined the rebellion against John, one of six known rebel leaders who were descendants of his grandparents Aubrey de Vere and Alice de Clare and part of a large group whose holdings were predominantly in the eastern counties. The relief was high for a baronage of moderate extent such as de Vere's, but his primary grievance may have been John's withholding of the earldom. He attended the assembly of barons at Stamford in April 1215, and was named by Roger of Wendover as one of the principal promoters of discontent. The king must have agreed; he ordered that de Vere's lands be seized in mid-May, along with the estates of several others on Wendover's list. While de Vere was among the rebels at Runnymede, his role in the negotiations for Magna Carta is impossible to reconstruct. By 23 June the king had recognized him as earl of Oxford, for on that date the sheriff of Oxfordshire was ordered to pay Earl Robert the comital percentage of judicial fines from that county. The earl was one of the twenty-five barons elected to oversee the implementation of Magna Carta [see also Enforcers of MagnaCarta]. The fact that he attested writs issued to implement their judgments could indicate that he was deeply involved in rebel counsels, but the wavering course of his allegiance in 1215 and the years immediately following could equally well show that he was principally moved by external pressures. He was excommunicated by Pope Innocent III, and in late March 1216 John captured Oxford's primarycastle at Hedingham, Essex, after a three-day siege. The earl was granted safe conduct to seek the

king's forgiveness, yet within months he had offered his homage to Prince Louis of France at Rochester. After John's death Earl Robert recovered his lands, and he formally made his peace with the new regime in October 1217.

By 1220 the earl of Oxford was serving as an itinerant justice, and he presided in the curia regis in 1221; political considerations may have lain behind his judicial employment, but he may also have become conversant with the common law in his capacity as a landowner and local magnate. He patronized the Essex houses of Hatfield Broadoak Priory and Tilty Abbey, Osney Abbey in Oxfordshire,and the hospitallers. When the earl died, shortly before 25 October 1221, he was buried in the Benedictine priory of Hatfield Broadoak, although Earls Colne Priory was the traditional burial place of the de Vere family. His effigy rests in the parish church at Hatfield, where it was moved after the dissolution. Its shield differs from those of all other de Veres in that the silver mullet in the first quarter was borne not on a field gules, but on one of France ancient. No account explains these anomalies. Countess Isabel obtained the guardianship of their son, who was a minor, and his estates, which she exercised for approximately ten years. She died on 3 February 1245 and was buried at the Dominican friary in Oxford. Earl Hugh died in December 1263.

RaGena C. DeAragon

Sources

Pipe rolls · Paris, Chron., vols. 2, 5 · GEC, Peerage, new edn, 10.208–13 · H. Hall, ed., The Red Book ofthe Exchequer, 3 vols., Rolls Series, 99 (1896) · D. A. Carpenter, The minority of Henry III (1990) · Seventh report, HMC, 6 (1879) · The itinerary of John Leland the antiquary, ed. T. Hearne, 9 vols. (1710–12) · T. D. Hardy, ed., Rotuli litterarum patentium, RC (1835) · W. Camden, Remains concerning Britain, ed. J. Philipot and W. D. Gent, 7th edn (1674); repr. (1870) · C. Roberts, ed., Excerpta è rotulis finium in Turri Londinensi asservatis, Henrico Tertio rege, AD 1216–1272, 1, RC, 32 (1835), 74

Archives

BL, Cotton MSS · BL, Harley MSS · BL, Stowe MSS · Bodl. Oxf., Rawl. MSS

Likenesses

effigy, parish church, Hatfield Broadoak, Essex

Wealth at death

see Hall, ed., Red Book

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Richard de Montfichet, Baron, born after 1190 – died circa 1267

Montfichet, Richard de (b. after 1190, d. 1267), baron and forest administrator, was the eldest son of Richard de Montfichet (d. 1203), an important servant of Richard I, and his wife, Millicent. He was a descendant of William de Montfichet (d. before 1156), whose barony of Stansted Montfichet comprisednearly fifty knights' fees, and from whom he inherited a claim to the custody of the royal forests in Essex, forfeited by his grandfather Gilbert de Montfichet (d. 1186/7), probably for his part in the rebellion of Henry, the Young King, in 1173. The younger Richard de Montfichet was about ten years old at the death of his father and was sold in wardship to Roger de Lacy, constable of Chester, in returnfor a proffer of £1000 which seems never to have been paid. In 1210 his wardship was resold to his mother for a fine of 1100 marks paid in full within a year. Montfichet had come of age by 1214, when heserved on King John's expedition to Poitou, but shortly afterwards he joined the rebel barons, perhaps in the hope of recovering the rights forfeited by his family under Henry II, perhaps also because of his close kinship to the baronial leaders Robert Fitzwalter and Richard, earl of Clare. His grandfather Gilbert had married Avelina de Lucy, Robert Fitzwalter's aunt, while William de Montfichet, the first baron, had been married to Margaret, daughter of Gilbert de Clare, first earl of Hertford (d. 1152).

On 21 June 1215, at the field of Runnymede, Montfichet was restored to custody of the forests of Essex once held by his ancestors. At the same time he was one of the twenty-five barons appointed to enforcethe observance of Magna Carta, promising the service of thirty knights. His lands were confiscated,

and Montfichet himself was taken prisoner at the battle of Lincoln in May 1217. In the following October he returned to loyalty and recovered his lands, including his hereditary custody of the Essex forests, which he retained for the remainder of his life. In 1225 he witnessed the reissue of Magna Carta, and in 1230 he sailed on the king's expedition to Brittany. Despite a brief eclipse under the regime headed by Peter des Roches, he was admitted to sit as a baron of the exchequer in 1234, and in 1237 witnessed a further confirmation of Magna Carta. He was appointed chief justice of the forests fornineteen southern counties in 1236, and from 1242 to 1246 served as sheriff of Essex and Hertfordshire. One of the baronial representatives appointed to consider the king's demand for a subsidy in 1244, he probably had a share in drafting the remarkable scheme of reform of that year, recorded by the chronicler Matthew Paris. At some time before October 1252 his custody of the Essex forests was challenged in the king's court by the chief forester, Robert Passelewe, but Richard was restored to office in hereditary fee. Throughout the political storms of the 1260s he remained active as forester, apparently without compromising himself with either the royalist or the Montfortian party. He died late in 1267, the last survivor of the baronial twenty-five of 1215.

Although Montfichet had been married at least twice, to Alice (fl. 1217), and later to a woman named Jousa or Joyce who outlived him, he left no issue, so that his estates were partitioned among the children and grandchildren of his three sisters. Shortly before his death, with royal assent, he conveyedhis hereditary custody of the Essex forests to Thomas de Clare, son of the earl of Gloucester and Hertford, a distant kinsman. Richard de Montfichet's coat of arms, or, three chevrons gules, a label of five points azure, derived from the Clare arms, is recorded by Matthew Paris and on Richard's seal.

Nicholas Vincent

Sources

Chancery records · Pipe rolls · Paris, Chron. · I. J. Sanders, English baronies: a study of their origin and descent, 1086–1327 (1960) · W. Farrer, Feudal Cambridgeshire (1920) · L. C. Loyd, The origins ofsome Anglo-Norman families, ed. C. T. Clay and D. C. Douglas, Harleian Society, 103 (1951) · J. C. Holt, Magna Carta, 2nd edn (1992) · L. Landon, The itinerary of King Richard I, PRSoc., new ser., 13 (1935) · D. J. C. King, Castellarium Anglicanum: an index and bibliography of the castles in England,Wales, and the islands, 2 vols. (1983) · Sir Christopher Hatton's Book of seals, ed. L. C. Loyd and D. M. Stenton, Northamptonshire RS, 15 (1950) · W. R. Fisher, The forest of Essex (1887)

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William of Huntingfield, Landowner, died in or before 1225

Huntingfield, William of (d. in or before 1225), landowner, was the son of Roger of Huntingfield (d. c.1203). They held knights' fees of several baronies in the king's hand, notably seven fees of the honourof Eye, including the manor of Huntingfield, Suffolk, which supplies William's toponym; other fees were held of the honour of Lancaster, the honour of Henry of Essex, and the honour of Freiston.

William entered King John's service in September 1203 as temporary custodian of Dover Castle duringHubert de Burgh's absence; he surrendered his son and daughter to the king as hostages. He was an itinerant justice on the eastern circuit of the eyre of 1208–9 and sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, 1209–10. During the interdict he had custody of the abbey of St Benet of Hulme, Norfolk, and of the property of his brother Roger, a cleric. He sent knights on John's expedition to Ireland in 1210, and he accompanied the king in 1214 on his expedition to Poitou, where he was a leading witness to royal charters. Following his return from France he witnessed the king's grant of liberties to the English church in November 1214.

The next spring William turned against the king, and joined the rebel barons at Stamford in Easter week 1215. He had ties with the rebel leader Robert Fitzwalter (d. 1235), a fellow East Anglian landholder, and with another rebel, Oliver de Vaux, who was lord of his Lincolnshire lands as second husband of Petronilla de Craon. Like some other rebels William had offered speculative fines to the king for favours, though King John pardoned him of 100 marks of his father's debt in 1203. In 1205 he offered four palfreys and a falcon for royal confirmation of the manor of Stokes, Norfolk, and in 1206 he made an offering for custody of the land and heir of Osbert fitz Hervey, another East Anglian knightand royal justice. William paid £80 on behalf of Isolda Biset in 1211, obtaining in return custody of her son William and of one of her manors. Also in 1211 he offered the king six ‘beautiful Norwegian hawks’

for having his widowed daughter's dower lands and the right to her remarriage.

Following the baronial defiance King John ordered that William's lands be seized on 12 May 1215. In June 1215 William was named one of the committee of twenty-five charged with enforcing Magna Carta. In February 1216 the king handed over custody of William's castle at Frampton to Nicola de la Haie, hereditary sheriff of Lincolnshire: after the civil war she was accused of having seized chattels of his to a value in excess of £270. William joined William de Mandeville and Robert Fitzwalter in extending rebel control over East Anglia in 1216 after the landing of Louis of France. Shortly before John's death, however, the king took vengeance, ravaging William's property in the region. William was taken prisoner by royalist forces at Lincoln in May 1217, and in September two of his knights came before the royal agents seeking his ransom. In November 1218 he was present at the great council that issued regulations restricting use of the great seal during Henry III's minority.

William died before October 1225, leaving as heir a son, Roger of Huntingfield (d. 1257), and a daughter, Alice, who had been married to a Lincolnshire knight, Richard de Solariis (d. c.1211).

Ralph V. Turner

Sources

Pipe rolls · Chancery records (RC) · H. C. M. Lyte and others, eds., Liber feodorum: the book of fees, 3 vols. (1920–31) · H. Hall, ed., The Red Book of the Exchequer, 3 vols., Rolls Series, 99 (1896) · Rogeri de Wendover liber qui dicitur flores historiarum, ed. H. G. Hewlett, 3 vols., Rolls Series, [84] (1886–9) · The historical works of Gervase of Canterbury, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols., Rolls Series, 73 (1879–80) · CIPM, vol. 1 · T. D. Hardy, ed., Rotuli litterarum clausarum, RC, 2 (1834), 83b

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Henry de Bohun, First Earl of Hereford, Magnate, born circa 1175 – died 1220

Bohun, Henry de, first earl of Hereford (c.1175–1220), magnate, was the son of Humphrey (III) de Bohun (b. before 1144, d. 1181) and Margaret (d. 1201), daughter of Henry of Scotland, earl of Northumberland, and widow of Conan (IV), duke of Brittany. He was identified in 1185 as a minor, aged ten, in the custody of his grandmother, Margaret de Bohun (c.1121–1196/7), daughter of Miles of Gloucester, earl of Hereford. She was administering his estates in 1187, but he had been given control of his own lands by 1190. He attested a number of her charters and accounted for relief for her lands in1197. The elder Margaret brought to the Bohuns her family's claims to a royal constableship and to the earldom of Hereford. The office of constable had been granted to her son, Humphrey (III) de Bohun by1174 and was inherited by Henry de Bohun, who styled himself ‘Henry the constable’ in a number of his early charters. Despite his youth he occasionally attested charters of Richard I and was one of the king's sureties in negotiations with the count of Flanders in 1197. He married Maud or Matilda (d. 1236), the daughter of Geoffrey fitz Peter, earl of Essex, and sister and heir of William de Mandeville, earl of Essex. Charters issued to Llanthony Priory by Henry, as earl of Hereford, indicate that their son,Humphrey (IV) de Bohun, was born after 28 April 1199.

King John created Bohun earl of Hereford by charter on 28 April 1200, explicitly prohibiting him, withBohun's acquiescence, from making any claims by virtue of a charter issued by Henry II to his ancestorRoger, earl of Hereford. His grandmother's determination was a factor in this process of restitution, but his political significance also owed much to the fact that his mother was a granddaughter of David I, king of Scots, and that, in 1199, the king of Scots was his uncle, William the Lion. Between 1204 and 1211 he was engaged in a long dispute to establish his claim to part of his mother's dowry lands, the estates and twenty fees of the lordship of Ryhall, Rutland. Relations between King John and Earl Henry deteriorated in 1212 when William (I) Longespée, earl of Salisbury, laid claim to Bohun's honour of Trowbridge. The king assumed control of the honour, but allowed Earl William's agents to levy scutage from its tenants. In protest Bohun joined the rebels against the king, and was one of the twenty-five barons appointed to ensure that Magna Carta was observed [see also Enforcers of Magna Carta]. His lands were seized by the crown in June 1215, and he secured the restoration of his honour, although not of Trowbridge Castle, later in the year.

On John's death Earl Henry remained loyal to Louis of France, and was taken prisoner at the battle of Lincoln on 20 May 1217. He made peace with the new government, attending the court of the young Henry III, receiving the third penny of Herefordshire, and accounting for scutage. He died on pilgrimage to the Holy Land on 1 June 1220; the transfer to his son, Humphrey, of his responsibilities and eventually his lands was in hand before Michaelmas 1221. His widow married Roger of Dauntsey, of Dauntsey, Wiltshire, between 1221 and 1226, and in 1227 succeeded to the earldom of Essex, which was eventually also inherited by her son Humphrey.

David Walker

Sources

Calendar of the fine rolls, 22 vols., PRO (1911–62) · L. Landon, The itinerary of King Richard I, PRSoc., new ser., 13 (1935) · L. Landon, ed., The cartae antiquae: rolls 1–10, printed from the originalin the custody of the master of the rolls, PRSoc., 55, new ser., 17 (1939) · D. Walker, ed., ‘Charters of the earldom of Hereford, 1095–1201’, Camden miscellany, XXII, CS, 4th ser., 1 (1964), 1–75 · W. Farrer and others, eds., Early Yorkshire charters, 12 vols. (1914–65), vol. 4 · G. W. S. Barrow, ed., Regesta regum Scottorum, 2 (1971) · W. H. Hart, ed., Historia et cartularium monasterii Sancti Petri Gloucestriae, 3 vols., Rolls Series, 33 (1863–7) · D. M. Stenton, ed., Pleas before the king or his justices, 1198–1212, 3, SeldS, 83 (1967) · T. D. Hardy, ed., Rotuli chartarum in Turri Londinensi asservati, RC, 36 (1837) · The historical works of Gervase of Canterbury, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols., Rolls Series, 73 (1879–80) · Chronica magistri Rogeri de Hovedene, ed. W. Stubbs, 4 vols., Rolls Series, 51 (1868–71) · Paris, Chron. · J. C. Holt, Magna Carta (1965), appx 7 · GEC, Peerage, new edn, 6.457–9 · private information (2009) [D. Richardson]

Archives

Bodl. Oxf., MS Dugdale 17

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William Malet, Baron, Lord of Curry Mallet, born circa 1175 – died 1215

Malet, William (c.1175–1215), baron, lord of Curry Mallet, Somerset, an honour of twenty-two and a half knights, was the descendant of Robert Malet (d. before 1156), first holder of the barony, and the son of Gilbert Malet (d. 1194). He married Alice, the daughter and coheir of Thomas Basset of Headington, Oxfordshire. He accompanied King Richard on crusade and landed at Acre in June 1191. In 1196 he paid a fine and relief of £150 for his inheritance.

Malet was appointed sheriff of Dorset and Somerset at Christmas 1209, after the men of the two shires had offered King John a large fine to have someone resident in the shires other than William Brewer astheir sheriff, and he served until Michaelmas 1212. By 1212 he was in financial difficulties with the king, and by 1214 owed 2000 marks, which remained unpaid in 1221, although he had made an agreement in 1214 to serve King John with ten knights and twenty soldiers in Poitou in exchange for cancellation of his debt. In 1215 Malet took a prominent part on the rebel side in the struggle between John and the barons. He joined the confederacy of the barons at Stamford in Easter week, and was oneof the twenty-five barons subsequently elected to guarantee the observance of Magna Carta [see also Enforcers of Magna Carta]. For the part which he took in the events of that year he was personally excommunicated by the pope, together with thirty other barons.

Malet appears to have died before 20 December 1215, for on that date his estates are known to have been in the possession of his son-in-law, Hugh de Vivonia, his estate having been divided between three daughters: Mabel, who married first Nicholas Avenel and second Hugh de Vivonia (d. 1249) of Chewton, Somerset; Helewise, who married first Hugh de Poyntz (d. 1220), a tenant of the honour of Gloucester (who joined Malet and his own father in the rebellion, and was a prisoner in Bristol Castle in July and August 1216), and second Robert de Mucegros (d. 1253/4), a prominent servant of Henry III; and Bertha, who died unmarried before Easter 1221.

Ralph V. Turner

Sources

I. J. Sanders, English baronies: a study of their origin and descent, 1086–1327 (1960) · Pipe rolls ·

Chancery records · GEC, Peerage · L. Landon, The itinerary of King Richard I, PRSoc., new ser., 13 (1935)

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William Marshal, Fifth Earl of Pembroke, born circa 1190 – died 1231

Marshal, William (II), fifth earl of Pembroke (c.1190–1231), magnate, was born in Normandy, the eldest son of William (I) Marshal, earl of Pembroke and regent of England (c.1146–1219), and his wife Isabel de Clare (d. 1220). In 1205 King John, unworthily doubting the elder William's loyalty, demanded his eldest son as a hostage, and a hostage he remained until 1212, by which time the king was in urgent need of the Marshal's support.

In the great crisis of his reign King John enjoyed the unswerving loyalty of the elder William, but his son aligned himself with the baronial opposition, possibly as a family insurance policy, and appeared in arms with the barons at Stamford in February 1215; he was later one of the twenty-five barons appointed to enforce the terms of Magna Carta [see also Enforcers of Magna Carta]. These proved unacceptable to both sides, and in the civil war that followed the younger William joined Prince Louis of France and was appointed marshal of his army. Though active in the field on the barons' behalf, he avoided any hostile confrontation with his father. Denied possession of Marlborough, once held by his paternal grandfather, John Marshal, by Louis he changed sides, capturing Winchester and Southampton for the royalists and Marlborough for himself, and fought in the decisive battle of Lincoln on 20 May 1217.

On his father's death in 1219 Marshal succeeded him as earl of Pembroke and marshal of England, and on his mother's death in 1220 succeeded to the lordships of Leinster and Netherwent. The Clare lands in Normandy passed by agreement to his younger brother Richard Marshal. A major problem faced by the government during the minority of Henry III was regaining for the crown or their rightful owners castles seized and retained by royalists during the civil war. Among the castles held by the earl were Fotheringhay and Marlborough. The return of Fotheringhay to John the Scot, earl of Huntingdon, was desirable to promote good relations with Scotland. The Marshal ignored orders to surrender Fotheringhay in 1219 and 1220 until events in Wales forced his hand. The peace of Worcester in 1218 had established Llywelyn ab Iorwerth as the king's bailiff, during his minority, of Cardigan and Carmarthen. Llywelyn promised to restore to marcher lords lands they had lost since 1215, but when in1220 he stripped Rhys Gryg (one of the lords of the Welsh principality of Deheubarth) of two lordships,he disposed of them as he pleased. Then, alleging that the Marshal's tenants, with help from Leinster, had attacked their Welsh neighbours, he launched a savage attack on Pembrokeshire, capturing Narberth and Wiston castles and burning the town of Haverfordwest. To buy peace, the men of Pembroke were forced to promise not to repair the captured castles and to surrender lands to be held by Llywelyn on the king's behalf. William now demanded that the justiciar, Hubert de Burgh, should release his men from their obligations and assure them that Llywelyn had acted without royal authority. The answer was a new demand to surrender Fotheringhay. Eventually receiving the desired letters from the justiciar, the Marshal quietly gave up the castle.

In 1214 the marriage arranged in 1203 between the younger William Marshal and Alice, daughter of Baldwin de Béthune, count of Aumale, finally took place; but Alice soon died, probably in 1216. In 1221the justiciar and the papal legate, Pandulf, in order to avoid the Marshal's making a foreign match and to attach him to the justiciar's party, proposed that he should marry Eleanor (1215?–1275), the youngersister of Henry III. The marriage took place on 23 April 1224 and the Marshal surrendered Marlborough, a small price for a royal bride. Up to 1226 the Marshal remained a close ally of Hubert deBurgh.

In March 1223 Llywelyn suddenly attacked and captured the castles of Kinnerley and Whittington in Shropshire, and was consequently caught on the wrong foot by William Marshal, who attacked him in south-west Wales. A truce between the two was due to end on Easter Sunday (23 April). On 15 April the Marshal landed near St David's with an army from Leinster, and on Easter Monday, with a nice observance of the rules worthy of his father, attacked and took Cardigan. Two days later he took Carmarthen. Llywelyn sent an army south under his son Gruffudd, who burned Kidwelly and awaited attack. The Marshal appears to have had the better of the ensuing battle, before proceeding to strengthen the defences of Carmarthen and starting to build the immensely strong castle of Cilgerran.

Attempts to reconcile the Marshal and Llywelyn having failed, the justiciar sent a large force of cavalry to the Marshal's help, enabling him to consolidate his gains, which included the castle and lordship of Kidwelly. Wisely, the Marshal secured two Welsh allies, Rhys Mechyll and Cynan ap Hywel, grandsons of the Lord Rhys of Deheubarth. Southern Ceredigion was overrun and given to Cynan. In September the justiciar with a large army occupied the lordship of Montgomery and established a castle on a new site. Llywelyn made peace in October, surrendering Kinnerley and Whittington, ceding Montgomery tothe king, and accepting the fait accompli in the south-west. It was conceded that Welsh lords should regain lands they had held lawfully. Cynan ap Hywel ultimately surrendered southern Ceredigion to Maelgwn ap Rhys, and was compensated by the Marshal with the commote of Ystlwyf (Oysterlow) and the eastern commote of Emlyn. The earl retained the western commote as his lordship of Cilgerran, while in November 1223 he was granted the custody of Cardigan and Carmarthen. In south-west Walesthe Marshal had effectively restored the status quo of 1215, and enabled the lords of Cemais, St Clears, Laugharne, Llansteffan, and Kidwelly to resume possession.

Following his successes in south-west Wales in 1223, William Marshal's attention switched to Ireland in 1224. The immediate occasion lay in the claim of Hugh de Lacy to the lordship of Ulster, of which hehad been deprived by King John in 1210. Failing to negotiate its restoration, Lacy returned to Ireland late in 1223 to seize it by force, supported by his half-brother William and by many of the tenants of Mide, though not by his brother Walter, lord of Mide. William Marshal was appointed justiciar of Ireland on 2 May 1224, and crossed to Waterford in June. Basing himself on Dublin he besieged Trim, the principal castle of Mide, and sent a force to relieve Carrickfergus. Hugh de Lacy's alliance with the Ó Neills was countered by alliance with the Irish lords of Connacht, Thomond, and Desmond. Trim fellin August, and Hugh was eventually forced to submit, Walter de Lacy regaining control of Mide. Surprisingly, Hugh was generously treated and was restored in Ulster in 1226.

Another awkward issue for William Marshal in Ireland lay in the de Burgh claim to Connacht. This hadoriginated in the gift of Connacht which Prince John, as lord of Ireland, had made in the 1190s to William de Burgh, the brother of Hubert de Burgh, the future justiciar of England. However, in 1215 John as king made simultaneous grants of Connacht to Cathal Ó Conchobhair and William de Burgh's son Richard. Cathal was succeeded in possession of Connacht by his son Áedh, who aided the Marshal during the Lacy rebellion. A plan to support Richard de Burgh's claim against Áedh was strongly opposed by the Marshal, who was consequently replaced as justiciar by Geoffrey Marsh in June 1226. He had to return to Ireland in 1227 to persuade his tenants of Leinster to surrender royal castles to Marsh. He continued to support Áedh Ó Conchobhair, and lost the custody of Cardigan and Carmarthen as a further mark of the justiciar's displeasure.

In 1228, apparently considering that it was now time to compel Llywelyn to make good his promises of restoring march lands taken in 1215, Hubert de Burgh led a large army into the commote of Ceri. The Marshal was among the earls summoned to the army, but nothing is known of his part in a campaign which was a miserable failure, memorable only for the capture by the Welsh of William (V) de Briouze, and for the nickname, Hubert's Folly, which was given to a new castle started by the justiciar but abandoned within a month. A French campaign based on Brittany, aimed at recovering lost Angevin lands, was planned for 1229, but had to be postponed for a year. With twenty knights the Marshal sailed on the expedition in May 1230. Henry III received little save promises from the fickle lords of Poitou on a march from Nantes to Bordeaux and back. The Marshal, who conducted raids into Normandy and Anjou, was one of the few to come out of the campaign with any credit.

While he was a prisoner of Llywelyn in 1228–9, William de Briouze had started a love affair with Llywelyn's wife Joan. In 1230, while visiting Llywelyn's court, Briouze's adultery was discovered and hewas hanged, leaving no male heir to the Briouze marcher lordships. Their custody was entrusted to William Marshal, who, still overseas, deputed the task to his steward of Netherwent. Then in November 1230 Gilbert de Clare, lord of Glamorgan, died in Brittany, leaving his eight-year-old son Richard as his heir. The justiciar undertook the care of the Clare lordships. Finally, William Marshal returned to England for the wedding of his widowed sister, Isabella, to Richard of Cornwall (1209–1272), but died suddenly on 6 April 1231 in London. He had been the master of a huge accumulation of lordships in southern England and Ireland, as well as in south Wales and the Welsh march. Within a year the three most powerful marcher lords of south Wales had died, giving Llywelyn an opportunity which he promptly seized.

William (II) Marshal was buried on 15 April beside his father in the Temple Church. Undoubtedly a good administrator and soldier (he was a notable builder of castles, responsible for Carlow in Leinster, and for Cilgerran and much of Chepstow on the Welsh march), he did not display the statesmanship of his father. Nevertheless, his successful campaign of 1223 secured for the south-western marches a period of comparative security which lasted until the late 1250s. In Pembrokeshire he granted three charters to Haverfordwest. Leinster, where he continued his father's work, bringing in new settlers, founding boroughs and new castles, and fostering religious houses, enjoyed a period of stability and peace under his rule.

Because there were no children of William (II) Marshal's marriage to Eleanor, his heir was his brother Richard, who was killed in 1234 when in rebellion against Henry III. As part of the subsequent reconciliation between king and rebels, Richard's brother and heir Gilbert Marshal, seventh earl of Pembroke (d. 1241), was permitted to succeed to the earldom of Pembroke. Although in the years 1234–5 Gilbert received many marks of royal favour and held important posts in Wales, he was never fully trusted and there was much in his behaviour to antagonize the king. When Llewelyn died in April 1240 Gilbert and his brother Walter Marshal, eighth earl of Pembroke (d. 1245), were quick to resume hostilities in south-west Wales. Walter recaptured Cardigan, lost to the Welsh in 1231, but Gilbert's scheme to force Maelgwn Fychan to hold southern Ceredigion as his vassal was soon frustrated by the king. In June 1241 Gilbert was killed in a riding accident at an unlicensed tournament at Dunstable. After some delay Walter was admitted to the earldom. He served in the army which went to Gascony in1242, but although his Pembrokeshire tenants were active in the Welsh war which broke out in 1244, Walter does not seem to have taken part in person. He had fallen ill by July 1245 at Goodrich and died on 24 November, to be followed about a month later by his younger brother Anselm Marshal (d. 1245) who was never admitted to the earldom of Pembroke. All five Marshal brothers died without legitimatechildren and their massive inheritance was subsequently divided between the representatives of their five sisters and coheiresses. Among the families which benefited, then or later, were those of Bigod, Clare, Ferrers, Mortimer, Bohun, Cantilupe, Valence, and Hastings.

R. F. Walker

Sources

GEC, Peerage, new edn, 10.358–77 · D. A. Carpenter, The minority of Henry III (1990) · D. Crouch, William Marshal (1990) · R. F. Walker, ‘Hubert de Burgh and Wales, 1218–32’, EngHR, 87 (1972), 465–94 · P. Meyer, ed., L'histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, 3 vols. (Paris, 1891–1901) · R. R. Davies, Conquest, coexistence, and change: Wales, 1063–1415, History of Wales, 2 (1987) · J. E. Lloyd, A history of Wales from the earliest times to the Edwardian conquest, 2 (1911) · J. Lydon, ‘The expansion and consolidation of the colony’, A new history of Ireland, ed. T. W. Moody and others, 2: Medieval Ireland, 1169–1534 (1987), 165–204 · G. H. Orpen, Ireland under the Normans, 4 vols. (1911–20), vol. 2 · Rogeri de Wendover liber qui dicitur flores historiarum, ed. H. G. Hewlett, 3 vols., Rolls Series, [84] (1886–9), vol. 2 · T. Jones, ed. and trans., Brut y tywysogyon, or, The chronicle of the princes: Peniarth MS 20 (1952) · Chancery records

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Saer de Quincy, Earl of Winchester, died 1219

Quincy, Saer de, earl of Winchester (d. 1219), magnate, was the son of Robert de Quincy (d. 1197) and his wife, Orabile, daughter of Ness, son of William, lord of Leuchars in Fife. About 1190 he married Margaret (d. 1235), daughter of Robert de Breteuil, earl of Leicester (d. 1190), with whom he had five sons and three daughters. His eldest son, Robert, predeceased him in 1217, leaving only a daughter with his wife, Hawise, daughter of Hugh, earl of Chester, who was passed over in the succession to the earldom of Winchester in favour of her uncle, Saer's second son, Roger de Quincy.

Quincy's career before c.1190 is obscure. In the 1180s and 1190s he witnessed several Scottish royal acta and confirmed his parents' grants to Newbattle Abbey, near Edinburgh, also making new gifts to the abbeys of Dunfermline and Cambuskenneth. Most English references to Saer de Quincy between c.1160 and 1192 relate to his uncle, who was one of Henry II's familiares, served him as castellan of Nonancourt in 1180–84, and died in 1190, and his son, also named Saer, who accompanied Henry, the

Young King, to the court of Louis VII of France and joined his rebellion against Henry II in 1173. This younger Saer was dead by 1192, whereupon his estates in six English counties passed to his uncle, Robert.

It was following his father's inheritance of these properties that Quincy entered English public life. In 1197 he was in France, and was present with Richard I at Roche d'Orval in August 1198. On Richard's death in April 1199 Quincy acknowledged John's succession. In October 1200 he was sent to escort William the Lion, king of Scots, to Lincoln, and was present at the ceremony on 22 November when William renewed his homage for his English estates. In 1202 Quincy accompanied the king's army to Normandy to confront Arthur, duke of Brittany, and his ally, Philip Augustus of France. Quittances in 1202 and 1203 of debts due to the king and to Jewish moneylenders may represent rewards for service.Quincy was appointed joint castellan with Robert Fitzwalter of the strategic Norman stronghold of Vaudreuil. In the spring of 1203 they offered no resistance to Philip and surrendered Vaudreuil, an action which earned universal contempt. John displayed his disgust by refusing to contribute to their ransom.

The death in 1204 of Quincy's brother-in-law, Robert de Breteuil, earl of Leicester, brought a dramatic change of fortune. Robert's heirs were his sisters Amice, wife of Simon de Montfort (d. by 1188), and Margaret, Quincy's wife, and until the partition of the inheritance was settled Quincy was given custody of the earldom and appears also to have exercised the office of steward of England which had been held by the earls. An equal division of the lands, ratified in 1207, was made between Quincy and Montfort. The settlement awarded the title of earl of Leicester and the office of steward to Montfort, but Quincy's enhanced status was given formal recognition by his creation as earl of Winchester. Quincy's new social position brought added political importance. In the summer of 1209 he accompanied the embassy sent to resolve the diplomatic crisis that had resulted from the Scots' demolition of the English fortification at Tweedmouth. It was probably at this time that his long-running dispute with St Andrews Cathedral priory over the patronage of the church of Leuchars was resolved. Certainly he appears to have been at his castle of Leuchars in April 1209, when he received John's protection for a vessel that he was taking from there to Lynn. In the summer of 1210 Quincy served in John's Ulster campaign. He was possibly the unnamed commander of a force sent in 1211 to assist the Scots to crush the rising of Guthred mac William in Ross. He was again in Scotland on John's business in March 1212. This period saw the peak of his career in royal service: between 1211 and 1214 he acted as a justiciar, sat as an auditor in the exchequer in 1212, and in the same year was an ambassador to John's nephew, the emperor Otto IV, whose assistance was sought against France and the papacy. On 15 May 1213 at Dover, Quincy attested John's surrender of his crown to Innocent III. Some of his men may have been involved in the naval victory at Damme on 30 May, as John later instructed delivery to Quincy of a galley captured by them in Flanders. In January 1215 he witnessed the reissue of the king's charter of ecclesiastical liberties, and on 4 March was one of the nobles who took the cross with John.

Despite this apparent closeness to John, Quincy had unresolved grievances concerning property of which he felt he had been unjustly deprived, most notably Mountsorrel Castle in Leicestershire, and was associated closely with the first stirrings of rebellion. He travelled to Scotland and in early April 1215 was at the court of Alexander II, where he joined an influential group urging Scottish interventionin England. Before the end of April he joined the dissident barons at his principal residence, Brackley in Northamptonshire, and marched with them to London. Quincy was named as one of the twenty-five barons chosen to enforce John's observance of the rights conceded in Magna Carta [see also Enforcers of Magna Carta]. When civil war erupted in October 1215 he and Henry de Bohun, earl of Hereford, headed a baronial embassy to France to seek French assistance and to offer the crown to Philip's son, the dauphin Louis. On 9 January 1216 he returned to England with a force of French knights, followed in May by the dauphin and his army.

John's unexpected death in October 1216 opened an opportunity for reconciliation between the rebels and the royalists, but Quincy maintained his allegiance to Louis. In spring 1217 Quincy learned that Ranulf, earl of Chester, was besieging Mountsorrel, and on 30 April prevailed upon Louis to send an army commanded jointly by him, Robert Fitzwalter, and Thomas, count of Perche, to its relief. They arrived at Mountsorrel to find the siege abandoned, so turned to attack the royalist-held castle at Lincoln, unaware that the royalist army was marching north in pursuit. On 20 May at Lincoln they

were defeated and Quincy was taken prisoner. He played no further part in the civil war and was released only after the end of hostilities in September 1217, when letters were issued to the sheriffs of eleven counties instructing restoration of his lands. Moves were made to include former rebels in Henry III's government, and Quincy attended the Westminster council of November 1217 which conceded a new version of Magna Carta and granted the charter of the forest. Although he was held in high regard at the council, Quincy did not recover possession of Mountsorrel, but was compensated by the grant of the farm of Chesterton, anothermanor to which he had a claim. In March 1218 at Worcester he attested the settlement agreed with the rebels' former ally, Llywelyn ab Iorwerth.

Towards the end of December 1218 Quincy was fitting out a vessel in Galloway in preparation for his departure on crusade, and in spring 1219 he sailed for the Holy Land, in the company of his son Roger, Robert Fitzwalter, and William d'Aubigny, earl of Arundel. Soon after his arrival at

the siege of Damietta he became ill, and died on 3 November 1219. In accordance with his wishes he was buried at Acre and the ashes of his internal organs returned to England for burial in Garendon Abbey, of which he was patron. His son, Roger, did homage to Henry III in 1221 and received his father's lands, but did not gain the title of earl of Winchester until his mother's death in 1235. At the time of his death Quincy was one of the most significant Anglo-Scottish landholders of his day, and possessed properties in eleven English sheriffdoms and substantial estates in Perthshire, Fife, and Lothian in Scotland. He was a noted benefactor of the church, especially the monks of Garendon Abbeyand Brackley Hospital, and his generosity was further evidenced by acta in favour of several Scottish monasteries and a large corpus of charters to private individuals.

Richard D. Oram

Sources

G. G. Simpson, ‘An Anglo-Scottish baron of the thirteenth century: the acts of Roger de Quincy, earl of Winchester and constable of Scotland’, PhD diss., U. Edin., 1965 · S. Painter, ‘The house of Quency’, Feudalism and liberty: articles and addresses of Sidney Painter, ed. F. A. Cazel (1961), 1135–1264 · D.A. Carpenter, The minority of Henry III (1990) · W. L. Warren, King John (1961) · F. M. Powicke, The thirteenth century (1962), vol. 4 of The Oxford history of England, ed. G. M. Clarke, 2nd edn · G. W. S.Barrow, ed., Regesta regum Scottorum, 2 (1971) · CDS · A. A. M. Duncan, Scotland: the making of the kingdom (1975), vol. 1 of The Edinburgh history of Scotland, ed. G. Donaldson (1965–75) · K. J. Stringer, ‘Periphery and core in thirteenth-century Scotland: Alan, son of Roland, lord of Galloway andconstable of Scotland’, Medieval Scotland: crown, lordship and community: essays presented to G. W. S. Barrow, ed. A. Grant and K. J. Stringer (1993), 82–113 · The cartulary of Cambuskenneth (1872)· Registrum S. Marie de Neubotle (1849) · Registrum de Dunfermeleyn (1842) · D. Crouch, William Marshall: court, career and chivalry in the Angevin empire (1990) · Ann. mon. · Annals of Waverley

Likenesses

seal, BL; Birch, Seals, 6355 [see illus.]

Wealth at death

£1600 in debt to English crown · estates in eleven English counties; also three Scottish sheriffdoms

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Robert de Ros, Baron, born circa 1182 – died 1226/1227

Ros, Robert de (c.1182–1226/7), baron, was the son of Everard de Ros (d. 1182/3) and Roese Trussebut (d. 1194). He had one brother named Peter. From his father Robert inherited Roos in Holderness, from which his family received its name, and the lands the Ros family had inherited through marriage from Walter Espec, centring on Helmsley in Yorkshire and Wark in Northumberland. Robert de Ros succeeded to his father's lands in 1191, paying a relief of 1000 marks,

Saer de Quincy (d. 1219), seal [obverse]

although he may not have gained control of Wark until 1200. From his mother he inherited one-third of the Trussebut lands and the hereditary office of bailiff and castellan of Bonneville-sur-Touques in Lower Normandy, near which the Norman lands of the family lay. In the same year he was married to Isabella, an illegitimate daughter of William the Lion, king of Scots, and widow of Robert (III) de Brus.They had two sons: William, whose son Robert was first Baron Ros, and Robert de Ros, baron of Wark.

Robert de Ros, Cast from Victoria and Albert Musuem from a tomb effigy in Temple Church, London

In 1196, after a battle between the men of Philip Augustus and those of Richard I, Richard handed overto Ros's keeping Hugues de Chaumont, a wealthy knight and intimate friend of the French king. Ros imprisoned him in his castle of Bonneville, but his servant, the keeper of the castle, William d'Épinay, was bribed into conniving at Chaumont's escape. The king, angry at the loss of so important a prisoner,ordered d'Épinay to be hanged, and imposed a fine of 1200 marks on his master, although John later pardoned over 275 marks of this fine. Robert de Ros served frequently with the royal host during John's reign and on one campaign even gambled with the king, an indication of royal favour. Immediately after his accession John sent Ros and others to William of Scotland, Ros's father-in-law, to arrange an interview between the two sovereigns for 20 November 1199. In the succeeding years Roswitnessed several royal charters, chiefly at places in the north of England, but on 7 October 1203 he was again at Bonneville-sur-Touques; he seems to have been in Normandy in John's service during thelater months of that year and returned to England before 22 February 1204, when he was at York. During a time of political tension in the spring of 1205 his lands were ordered to be seized, but an order for their restoration was soon issued. It was possibly at this time that his son Robert became a hostage of the king. On 28 February 1206 he received licence, whenever he should take the cross, to pledge his lands for money to any one of the king's subjects at any time during the following three years. This permission was renewed on 26 February 1207. It is not known whether Ros took the crusading vow. He was clearly not the most reliable of men, and seems to have let another prisoner, Thomas of Beckering, escape; on 28 December 1207 he was acquitted of a fine of 300 marks for this new offence. On 10 April 1209 he was sent with others by the king to meet the king of Scotland.

In 1212 Robert de Ros seems to have entered a monastery, and on 15 May of that year John therefore handed over the custody of his lands to Philip de Ulecot. His profession cannot, however, have lasted long, for on 30 January 1213 the king committed to him the forest and county of Cumberland, while on25 February he was made one of a commission to inquire into grievances, more especially the exactions of the royal officers in the counties of Lincoln and York. He interceded with the king in favour of his suzerain in Holderness, William, count of Aumale, and succeeded in getting him a safe conduct as a preliminary to a reconciliation. On 3 October he was one of the witnesses to John's surrender of the kingdom to the pope, and was one of the twelve great men who undertook to compel John to keep his promises made in favour of the English church. During the troubled year 1214 and theearly part of 1215 he continued in John's service as sheriff of Cumberland, and on 10 April 1215 received three royal manors in Cumberland. About the same time John ordered Peter des Roches to doall that he could to secure the election of Ros's aunt as abbess of Barking, and prevent the election of the sister of Robert Fitzwalter, one of the baronial leaders.

But John failed, despite these favours, to secure Ros's adherence in his struggle with the barons. J. C. Holt has described Ros as ‘a man of curious vacillations’ and he certainly vacillated between having close ties with the king and being among the king's enemies (Holt, 25). According to Roger of Wendover, Ros was one of the chief ‘incentors of this pest’ (the baronial resistance to the king) in the meeting of the magnates at Stamford in the week following 19 April (Flores historiarum, 2.114). He was

one of the twenty-five barons elected to compel the observance of Magna Carta, and took part in the resistance to John after his absolution from his oath by the pope [see also Enforcers of Magna Carta]. In September 1215 Ros was serving as baronial custodian of Yorkshire and according to Walter of Coventry he was also custodian of Northumberland about the same time. In consequence of his continuing opposition to John he was excommunicated by Innocent IV in January 1216. After the king's successes in the north in the early part of that year, a castle belonging to Ros was one of the only two that remained in the possession of the barons in the north of England. John granted his lands to William, count of Aumale, on 27 January 1216. He was summoned to deliver up Carlisle Castle, and apparently did so, but despite negotiations then and in the following months did not return to John's allegiance. Ros helped to subdue Yorkshire for Prince Louis and continued his resistance even after John's death. His son William was captured at Lincoln in May 1217. He submitted in the autumn of 1217 and recovered his lands, although it was not until 1225 that he regained some lands in Cumberland. On 3 November 1217 he was appointed one of the escorts for Alexander, king of Scotland.In 1220 some of his men became involved in a fight with bailiffs of the sheriff of Yorkshire, who were trying to enforce one of a number of judgments against Ros for disseisin. In February 1221 he was summoned to help in besieging and destroying Skipsea Castle during the rebellion of William, count ofAumale. In 1222 he seems to have complained to the king that the king of Scotland was encroaching onEnglish territory, and a commission of inquiry was appointed.

Ros witnessed the third reissue of Magna Carta on 11 February 1225, but again retired to a monastery before 23 December 1226. He died in that year or in 1227, and was buried in the Temple Church, London. He gave the manor of Ribston, Yorkshire, to the knights templar, who established a commandery there, and gave the manor of Hunsingore, land in Cattal, and several houses in York to the same order. He founded the leper hospital of St Thomas the Martyr at Bolton (probably in Northumberland, near Alnwick).

W. E. Rhodes, rev. Hugh M. Thomas

Sources

W. Farrer and others, eds., Early Yorkshire charters, 12 vols. (1914–65), vol. 10 · J. C. Holt, The northerners: a study in the reign of King John, new edn (1992) · Chancery records (RC) · Chronica magistri Rogeri de Hovedene, ed. W. Stubbs, 4 vols., Rolls Series, 51 (1868–71) · Rogeri de Wendover liber qui dicitur flores historiarum, ed. H. G. Hewlett, 3 vols., Rolls Series, [84] (1886–9) · Memoriale fratris Walteri de Coventria / The historical collections of Walter of Coventry, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols., Rolls Series, 58 (1872–3) · Pipe rolls · Curia regis rolls preserved in the Public Record Office (1922–) · J. H. Round, ed., Rotuli de dominabus et pueris et puellis de XII comitatibus (1185), PRSoc., 35 (1913) · T. Stapleton, ed., Magni rotuli scaccarii Normanniae sub regibus Angliae, 2 vols., Society of Antiquaries of London Occasional Papers (1840–44) · A. O. Anderson and M. O. Anderson, eds., The chronicle of Melrose (1936)

Likenesses

marble tomb effigy, Temple Church, London

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John de Lacy, Third Earl of Lincoln, born circa 1192 – died 1240

Lacy, John de, third earl of Lincoln (c.1192–1240), magnate, was the eldest son and heir of Roger de Lacy, constable of Chester (d. 1211), and his wife, Maud or Matilda de Clere, erroneously identified as Matilda de Clare in a fifteenth-century chronicle. Since he was almost certainly a minor at the time of his father's death, and did not obtain possession of his lands until September 1213, John appears to have been born c.1192. His early years are obscure. The only possible reference to him before 1213 occurs in a letter of Philip Augustus, king of France, responding to an offer by a John de Lacy made in 1209 or early 1210 to foment rebellion in England and Ireland. This may, however, refer not to the seventeen-year-old John, but to the Anglo-Irish baron Walter de Lacy.

In September 1213 John de Lacy obtained possession of his father's extensive estate, comprising more than 100 knights' fees together with the northern baronies of Pontefract, Clitheroe, Penwortham, Widnes, and Halton, held by descent in the female line from the Lacy lords of Pontefract, and in the line of direct male descent as heir to the lands and office of the constables of Chester. In return for his

lands he was forced to offer a massive fine of 7000 marks repayable over the coming three years, in themeantime surrendering his chief castles of Pontefract in Yorkshire and Donington in Leicestershire, to be garrisoned by the king at Lacy's expense, on pain of confiscation should Lacy rebel. In 1214 he accompanied the king to Poitou, being restored to possession of Castle Donington in July in return for the surrender of hostages including his younger brother. He was still at court on 4 March 1215, when he took the cross at the same time as King John. On the following day he was pardoned the 4200 marks still owing from his fine of 1213.

As late as 31 May 1215 Lacy was assumed to be loyal. However, with the fall of London he threw in his lot with the rebels, being named at Runnymede in June 1215 as one of the baronial council of twenty-five, and being entrusted with command of the rebel forces in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire [see also Enforcers of Magna Carta]. Thereafter he veered opportunistically between the rebel and royalist camps. On 1 January 1216, perhaps in light of the king's capture of Castle Donington, he sought terms with John, once again surrendering his brother as hostage and repudiating all the terms of the settlement embodied in Magna Carta. In April he was restored to possession of the manor of Lytham in Oxfordshire, detached from the Lacy barony of Pontefract for much of the previous century. In May he was in Kent with the king, but he had rebelled again before John's death in October. Thereafter, with the defeat of the rebel army at Lincoln, he once again returned to the royalist camp, being readmitted to fealty in August 1217. In the following month he was commanded to oversee the restoration of Carlisle Castle by the king of Scots. However, his thoughts now turned to the crusade, and in May 1218, in company with his chief lord, Ranulf (III), earl of Chester, he embarked for Damietta.

John de Lacy's activities in the East are unrecorded, save for an award he made at Damietta for the establishment of a chapel at Pontefract in honour of the holy sepulchre and the holy cross. He did not return to England until August 1220, still following in the train of the earl of Chester. Thereafter his fortunes were linked closely to those of the earl, an alliance cemented in 1221 by his marriage to Ranulf(III)'s niece. In February 1221, during the rebellion of the earl of Aumale, Lacy was commanded to assist in the siege of Skipton Castle, and in the following year he was appointed to forest inquiries in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire. In the winter of 1223–4, together with the earl of Chester, he was among the leaders of the opposition to the justiciar, Hubert de Burgh, but made his peace with the king, attending the siege of Bedford in 1224, witnessing the reissue of Magna Carta in 1225, and assisting in the collection of the tax bestowed in return for the charter's reissue. In 1226 he was appointed a justice on eyre in Lincolnshire and Lancashire.

In 1227 Lacy served as one of the royal envoys to Antwerp in negotiations with the German princes, and in 1230 accompanied the king's expedition to Brittany and Poitou, receiving the manors of Collingham in Yorkshire and Bardsey in Lincolnshire in reward for his service. After August 1230 he helped to negotiate an Anglo-French truce. During the political crisis of 1232 he once again sided with the earl of Chester against Hubert de Burgh, in October being appointed to inquire into Hubert's escape from sanctuary and thereafter supplying one of the four knights appointed to serve as Hubert's gaolers at Devizes Castle. However, his adherence to the new regime headed by Peter des Roches was no more than half-hearted, and sprang principally from his desire to obtain royal favour at a crucial moment in his own affairs. Following the death of Ranulf of Chester on 26 October 1232, Lacy was permitted to benefit from an arrangement agreed before Ranulf's death, whereby Ranulf's title as earl of Lincoln was conveyed to Hawise, Ranulf's sister, and thence to John as Hawise's son-in-law. On 22 November 1232 John was granted the third penny of the county of Lincolnshire, and was thus created an earl. Although Ranulf's principal Lincolnshire barony of Bolingbroke was retained by Hawise (d. 1243), John acquired other portions of the Chester estate, including a share in the manor of Leeds, from John the Scot, Ranulf's successor as earl of Chester.

In autumn 1233 Lacy helped to defend the Welsh marches against the rebellion headed by Richard Marshal. The chronicler Roger of Wendover claims that John was bribed by des Roches to abandon themarshal: an allegation substantiated by the award to John of the wardship of the heir and lands of Nigel de Mowbray in return for a relatively modest proffer of 1000 marks. With des Roches's fall John none the less retained his position at court, emerging as a leading royal counsellor. In 1236 he discharged a ceremonial role at Queen Eleanor's coronation. In the following year, besides assisting in negotiations with Scotland and Wales and witnessing the reissue of Magna Carta, he was granted

custody of the earldom of Chester on the death of Earl John the Scot. His familiarity with the king, andhis purchase for 3000 marks of the marriage of Richard de Clare, heir to the earldom of Gloucester, forhis eldest daughter, Maud, are said to have been resented by the king's brother, Richard of Cornwall, leading to a threat of rebellion by Richard in 1238. Thereafter Lacy's influence at court appears to have waned, perhaps as a result of the prolonged ill health from which he is said to have suffered in his final years. He died on 22 July 1240 and was buried near his father in the choir of the Cistercian abbey of Stanlaw, his bones being moved to Whalley when the monks transferred there in the 1290s.

The fifteenth-century chronicle of Stanlaw credits Lacy with a first wife, Alice, daughter of the Anglo-Norman baron Gilbert de l'Aigle, who is said to have died childless and to have been buried at Norton Priory. Lacy's only certainly documented marriage occurred in 1221, to Margaret [see Lacy, Margaret de, countess of Lincoln], daughter of Robert de Quincy (d. 1217), eldest son of Saer (IV) de Quincy (who died at Damietta in 1219), and Hawise, sister of Ranulf, earl of Chester. Although in theory heir to her grandfather's earldom of Winchester, Margaret's claims were passed over in 1219 in favour of those of her uncle, Roger de Quincy, a fact that may have fuelled her husband's dissatisfaction with the regime headed by Hubert de Burgh, and which must have made his eventual acquisition of the earldom of Lincoln all the more satisfying. Margaret, who eventually succeeded to part of the Quincy estate in Dorset and to her mother's portion of the Chester inheritance, long outlived her husband. In 1242 she married Walter Marshal, earl of Pembroke (d. 1245). A wealthy widow for the next twenty years, and a member of the friendship network of Queen Eleanor, Margaret died in March 1266 at Hamstead Marshall and was buried in the church of the hospitallers at Clerkenwell. Her son from her marriage to John, Edmund de Lacy, probably born in 1230, was permitted to succeed to his father's estates in May 1248, at the age of only eighteen, and by 1255 at the latest was styled earl of Lincoln, receiving the third penny of the county. In May 1247 he married Alice, daughter of Manfred, marquess of Saluzzo, a kinsman of Queen Eleanor, and died on 2 June 1258, being buried at Stanlaw.

Besides making awards to the religious, principally of Pontefract and Stanlaw, John de Lacy issued the first surviving borough charter for the men of Rochdale. His arms are recorded on his seal as earl of Lincoln and by Matthew Paris as quarterly or and gules, a bend let sable and a label of four points argent, derived perhaps from the Mandeville earls of Essex via the marriage of Lacy's grandfather to a Mandeville kinswoman.

Nicholas Vincent

Sources

Chancery records · Chancery records (RC) · Pipe rolls · Paris, Chron. · R. C. Christie, ed. and trans., Annales Cestrienses, or, Chronicle of the abbey of S. Werburg at Chester, Lancashire and Cheshire RS,14 (1887) · Ann. mon. · GEC, Peerage, 7.676–81 · G. Barraclough, ed., The charters of the Anglo-Norman earls of Chester, c.1071–1237, Lancashire and Cheshire RS, 126 (1988) · J. C. Holt, Thenortherners: a study in the reign of King John, new edn (1992) · L. Wilkinson, ‘Pawn and political player: observations on the life of a thirteenth-century countess’, Historical Research, 73 (2000), 105–23 · Byron cartulary, Bodl. Oxf., MS Rawl. B. 460, fol. 76v · Stanlaw chronicle, BL, Cotton MS, Cleopatra C.iii, fols. 315r–318r · MS, BL, additional charter 7465 · T. D. Tremlett, H. Stanford London, and A. Wagner, eds., Rolls of arms, Henry III, Harleian Society, 113–14 (1967) · R. Holmes, ed., The chartulary of St John of Pontefract, 2 vols., Yorkshire Archaeological Society Record Series, 25, 30 (1899–1902) · W. A. Hulton, ed., The coucher book, or chartulary, of Whalley Abbey, 4 vols., ChethamSociety, 10–11, 16, 20 (1847–9)

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William d'Aubigny, Third Earl of Arundel, born circa 1174 – died 1221

Aubigny, William d' [William de Albini], third earl of Arundel (c.1174–1221), magnate, was the grandson of Adeliza of Louvain, second queen of Henry I, and her second husband, William d' Aubigny, the first earl (d. 1176). He was the son of William, the second earl, and Maud, daughter and heir of James de St Hilaire, baron of Field Dalling, Norfolk. William succeeded to the earldom of Arundel on his father's death on 13 December 1193. He was one of the seven greatest earls, holding the baronies of Old Buckenham, Norfolk, and Arundel, Sussex, and land in Normandy until 1204. King John required a fine of 450 marks in 1199 before granting him possession of Arundel Castle and its

adjoining vill. He had connections with other great families of the kingdom: his wife, Mabel, was the second daughter of Hugh, earl of Chester, and the sister of Ranulf (III), earl of Chester; his half-sister was Avelina, daughter of his mother and her first husband, Roger de Clare, earl of Hertford. He secured custody of Avelina and married her to Geoffrey fitz Peter, earl of Essex.

D'Aubigny was a favourite of King John, having fought alongside him in Normandy during Richard I's last years, and he witnessed a number of John's charters. John favoured him with pardons of debts and grants of custodies on good terms. The earl was a negotiator on the king's behalf with Stephen Langton in the summer of 1209; after witnessing the king's concession of the kingdom to the pope on 15 May 1213 he was among those sent to meet the archbishop on his arrival in England. He acted as a surety for John's observance of Magna Carta in June 1215, but following the successes of Louis of France in spring 1216, he went over to the rebel side. After the royalist victory at Lincoln the following summer he renounced his allegiance to the Capetian prince and entered the service of the young HenryIII, in July 1217. He joined other English barons on the Fifth Crusade and set sail in the spring of 1218; they were in Egypt for the siege of Damietta and its fall in November 1219. William died in Italy, near Rome, before 30 March 1221, on his way home from the crusade. He was buried at Wymondham Priory, Norfolk. His heir was his eldest son, William d'Aubigny, who died childless in August 1224 and was succeeded by his brother, William's second son, Hugh; he died without direct heirs in 1243, leaving four sisters and their descendants as coheirs.

Ralph V. Turner

Sources

I. J. Sanders, English baronies: a study of their origin and descent, 1086–1327 (1960) · GEC, Peerage · Pipe rolls · Chancery records · S. Painter, The reign of King John (1949)

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William de Forz, Count of Aumale, born 1191x6 – died 1241

Forz [Fortibus], William de, count of Aumale (1191x6–1241), magnate, raised one of the most serious threats to the stability of England during the minority of Henry III.

Parentage and inheritance

His title and lands in England and Normandy were inherited through his mother, Hawisa, countess of Aumale (d. 1213/14), a royal ward who married first William de Mandeville, earl of Essex (d. 1189); second, in 1190, Forz's father, William de Forz (or Fors; d. 1195) , a Poitevin naval commander who accompanied Richard I on crusade; and finally the Fleming Baldwin de Béthune (d. 1212). The surname Forz (used on the seals of both father and son) was derived from one of two places named Fors in Poitou. He is sometimes called ‘earl of Albemarle’, but incorrectly: he did not hold an English earldom, but, like his mother, took his title from Aumale, a small comté in north-eastern Normandy.

Nothing is known of William de Forz as a young man. After his mother's death in 1214 he came to England (perhaps from Poitou) under safe conduct, to speak with the king about his inheritance; his journey was the result of petitions by Robert de Ros (d. 1227). In September or October 1214 John gaveback to William de Forz all the lands in England of his mother's inheritance, with the proviso that he should have no receipts or profits until he had married Aveline, daughter of Richard de Montfichet of Stansted, Essex. The young man was first addressed as count of Aumale in royal charters of November 1214. His English lands consisted principally of the honours of Holderness and Skipton in the East andWest Ridings of Yorkshire, Cockermouth in Cumberland, lands in Lincolnshire around Barrow-on-Humber in the north and Castle Bytham in the south, and a number of manors elsewhere. The Norman comté was lost to the French before he inherited; he had some Poitevin lands and a connection with the Île d'Oléron.

Shifting allegiances in the civil war, 1215–1217

William de Forz arrived in England amid the ferment of northern discontent leading to Magna Carta and civil war. He may have been influenced in his political choice by Robert de Ros (a leading northernbaron), Richard de Montfichet his brother-in-law, and Fulk d'Oyry (steward for the counts and countesses of Aumale for many years), all of whom opposed King John. The count joined the rebel

barons in time to become one of the committee of twenty-five executors of Magna Carta, to which he was the second witness in June 1215 [see also Enforcers of Magna Carta]. He rapidly changed sides, however, and by August was with the king, attesting charters and being granted rebel lands. He was also admitted, at the king's command, to Scarborough Castle. When, in December 1215, King John set off on a punitive expedition to the north, Forz accompanied him; and he gained many lands in this andthe following year from the dispossessed, together with the castles of Rockingham, Sauvey, and Bytham. Although William de Forz deserted John briefly in June 1216, he returned to royal service by the autumn. At the beginning of Henry III's minority Forz was an active supporter of the young king. He sealed the reissue of Magna Carta in 1216 (and was to do so again in 1225). During 1217 he was senta stream of royal orders concerning the confiscation and restoration of lands. He was present throughout the main events of the war between the king's party and Prince Louis.

The war of Bytham

After the war successive government attempts were made to reclaim from William de Forz the additional possessions he had acquired: prisoners, hostages, lands and manors seized unlawfully (including the Edenham manor of Gilbert de Gant, the royal castles of Rockingham and Sauvey, and the castle of Bytham, Lincolnshire, whose ownership was in dispute). These moves, especially in relation to the castles, were resisted by the count, and he compounded his disobedience by taking part in a forbidden tournament at Brackley. During 1218 his daughter's intended marriage to the son of William (I) Longespée, earl of Salisbury, was broken off; the earl wrote to the justiciar Hubert de Burgh (d. 1243) disowning any acquaintance with Forz's plans. On 30 November 1219 the sheriffs of six midland and northern counties received letters listing the count's offences and warning the men of the shires not to aid him in any way. In spite of this he managed to keep the castles until May 1220, when Rockingham and Sauvey, threatened with siege, surrendered to the king in person. Bytham, however, he retained. In the south-western corner of Lincolnshire, it had been in the possession of the counts of Aumale since their arrival in England in the eleventh century, and there had been a castle there since at least 1141. It was part of, and probably the caput of, the Aumales' southern Lincolnshire demesne, but nevertheless it had been alienated to the Coleville family by William de Mandeville, earl of Essex, the first husband of Hawisa, the Aumale heir, who was William de Forz's mother. The count was granted Castle Bytham in time of war in 1215, and although in 1217 William de Coleville regained the lands outside the castle gate by legal process, the count continued to refuse him the castle and attempted for many years to overthrow the decision of council and court.

In addition to the trouble over Castle Bytham, in 1220 William de Forz was baulked in his proposed appointment as seneschal of Poitou and Gascony. He was passed over a second time at the Christmas council of 1220, and, without seeking the king's permission, he left the court at Oxford during the nightto raise rebellion in Lincolnshire. The Worcester annalist gives a number of reasons for the rebellion, and modern historians have suggested others, including the government's general resumption of former royal demesne; the central problem seems, however, to have been Bytham, and Forz's brief rebellion was known to contemporaries as ‘the war of Bytham’.

Forz unsuccessfully attacked the castles of Newark, Sleaford, and Kimbolton, but was successful in taking Fotheringhay Castle, Northamptonshire, in January 1221. He was excommunicated by the papallegate Pandulf (for the second time) and the council ordered the assembly of an army at Northampton. Forz, meanwhile, garrisoned Fotheringhay and Bytham, and from there issued letters of protection to the mayors of the cities of England, as if he were king. The royal army, collecting a number of siege engines, master carpenters, and miners, threatened his midland castles, and at the end of January 1221he went north, where most of his estates lay, and ultimately claimed sanctuary in Fountains Abbey, Yorkshire. The desperate journey to the north, including the abandonment of foundered horses, and even some of his conversation with his wife, was recorded by a government spy who rode with Forz. The government was lenient to him: although Castle Bytham was razed and its site returned to Coleville, Forz and his men were pardoned. This leniency, was, as Wendover wrote, a bad example to others. Forz was, however, in company with other barons of England, charged with scutage on his knights' fees for the campaign of Bytham against himself. He made one further attempt through the courts, in 1236, to regain Castle Bytham, but failed.

Later career, death, and legacy

William de Forz was at odds with the government again in 1223, in a group who made an armed demonstration against the Tower of London, demanding the removal of Hubert de Burgh. In 1224 his loyalty was suspected in the campaign against Falkes de Bréauté (d. 1226). His actions at this time mayhave been driven by his dislike of Hubert de Burgh, and also by his association with ‘foreigners’—other Poitevins, as opposed to the Anglo-Normans. After Bréauté's defeat, however, Forz played a more statesmanlike role in government. He received lands and favours and was sent abroad on diplomatic and military missions. In 1227 he went to Antwerp to treat with the envoys of the emperor. He went to Poitou in 1230 with the king, and then to Brittany where the barons, who were supposed to be on campaign, amused themselves ‘as though they were at a Christmas party’ (Powicke, 183). He attended the colloquium in 1237 to deal with Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, prince of Gwynedd (d. 1240); and in the same year was made custodian of the lands of the late earl of Chester (to which Forz's son had a claim).His last political involvement was in 1241, when he was twice summoned to Gregory IX's projected council against the emperor, Frederick II.

During the autumn of 1239 Forz's wife, Aveline, died, and she was buried at Thornton Abbey, Lincolnshire. In the spring of 1241 Forz set out for Jerusalem; after being unable to eat for eight days, he died on the voyage, at the end of March 1241. His place of burial is unknown. He was succeeded by his son William de Forz (d. 1260). Forz continued his family's patronage of existing religious houses, but did not make any new foundations. Almost all of his surviving charters were confirmations of earlier gifts by his predecessors or his tenants.

Forz was a man of mercurial temperament, who, in years of conflicting loyalties, changed sides more quickly than most. Both contemporaries and modern historians remark upon his turbulence, lack of resolution, and impulsiveness. The rapidity with which he was pardoned his successive offences suggests that he had some genuine grievances, perhaps connected with the threats to his inheritance posed by both King John and the regents for Henry III. In addition to the penalties he incurred through his inconstancy, he, or his officers, were incompetent administrators; free of family debt on inheritance, by 1226 he owed money to Jewish financiers and he was heavily indebted to the exchequerby 1231—these debts he left to his son. Of his many recorded lawsuits he lost all save one (which ended in a fine), and most were lost by carelessness or recalcitrance, as neither Forz nor his attorney came to court, so that the cases went by default.

William de Forz's seal depicts him on horseback, in armour and brandishing a sword; the counterseal shows his shield of arms, a cross patonce vair, both giving his surname and title as ‘De Forz Comitis Albemarlie’.

Barbara English

Sources

R. V. Turner, ‘William de Forz, count of Aumale: an early thirteenth-century English baron’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 115 (1971), 221–49 · D. A. Carpenter, The minorityof Henry III (1990) · B. English, ‘The counts of Aumale and Holderness, 1086–1260’, PhD diss., St Andrews, 1977 · B. English, The lords of Holderness, 1086–1260: a study in feudal society (1979) · G. J. Turner, ‘The minority of Henry III, pt 1’, TRHS, new ser., 18 (1904), 245–95 · G. J. Turner, ‘The minority of Henry III’, TRHS, 3rd ser., 1 (1907), 205–62 · Chancery records · J. C. Holt, The northerners: a study in the reign of King John, new edn (1992) · F. M. Powicke, Henry III and the Lord Edward: the community of the realm in the thirteenth century, 1 (1947) · W. W. Shirley, ed., Royal and other historical letters illustrative of the reign of Henry III, 1, Rolls Series, 27 (1862) · J. C. Holt, Magna Carta (1965) · R. C. Stacey, Politics, policy and finance under Henry III, 1216–1245 (1987) · R. Eales, ‘Castles and politics in England, 1215–1224’, Thirteenth century England: proceedings of the Newcastle upon Tyne conference [Newcastle upon Tyne 1987], ed. P. R. Coss and S.D. Lloyd, 2 (1988), 23–43 · Pipe rolls, 5 Henry III · Paris, Chron.

Likenesses

seal, repro. in English, Lords of Holderness, pl. 10