9
On 6 December 1318, the four leading members of Edward II’s household – his steward, chamberlain, treasurer and controller of the wardrobe – formulated an ordinance for the king’s household.1 The earliest surviving English Household Ordinance dates from 1279, and the 1318 one is the second-oldest still extant. Edward’s household was divided into two main sections: the chamber, led by the chamberlain, and the hall, managed by the steward, men always of noble or knightly rank. Edward had a household of around 450 to 550 people, yet this was not the largest in the country; Thomas of Lancaster’s contained a staggering 700 members.2 Queen Isabella had her own household, of close to 200 people, and Edward paid all the costs. As he travelled through the country, finding and paying for provisions for so many people could prove burdensome. During the Great Famine in 1315, a brave cleric told Edward’s confessor that ‘the inhabitants used to rejoice to see the face of the king when he came, but now, because the king’s approach injures the people, his departure gives them much pleasure and as he goes off they pray that he may never return’.3 Edward had in August 1312 declared himself unable, owing to the ‘arduous business’ which followed Gaveston’s death, to pay for his household provisions in Kent, which included 1,000 sheep, 500 oxen, 300 swine, 1,000 quarters of wheat and 2,000 quarters of oats.4
There was an astonishing degree of hierarchy and specialisation: in the hall, for example, Edward had a knight chief usher, two sergeant ushers, two knights marshal and two sergeants marshal. He had a personal bodyguard of twenty-four archers on foot, thirty sergeants-at-arms ‘who will daily ride armed before the king’s person’, and, to provide his personal service, squires, valets or grooms and pages of the chamber. One of Edward’s chamber valets was William Warde, who received a regular sum of money from the exchequer for, mysteriously, ‘keeping a certain secret of the king in the palace of Westminster’.5 Other chamber valets were Simon Hod, Robin Dyer and Wat Cowherd, who were not, as a modern writer has imagined, lowborn men whom the king had brought to court and with whom he was ‘being promiscuous’. The ‘substantial payments’ they received supposedly as ‘hush money’ were simply the men’s wages, which the king’s staff were paid twice monthly.6
The king’s accounts of the 1320s reveal he had several dozen squires, more than thirty valets, about half a dozen pages, a steward, knights, clerks and an usher of the chamber. The valets in 1326 included two women named Anneis and Joan, wives of Roger de May and Robin Traghs who were also chamber valets, and the women received the same wages of three pence per day as the men, with presumably the same responsibilities. Edward seems to have been fond of Joan Traghs in particular: he once gave her five shillings to buy clothes and a gift of ten shillings after she gave birth to her daughter, most unusually hired her as a valet of his chamber (all great households of the Middle Ages consisted almost exclusively of men), and continued to pay her wages for forty-four days when she was away from court, ill.7 The frequent use of nicknames in Edward’s extant accounts hints at affection and camaraderie among the royal household staff. The name Thomas is often given as Thomelyn; Richard as Hick or Richardyn; Hugh as Huchon; Roger as Hogge; Robert as Robin or Hobbe; Gilbert as Gibbe or Gibon; Nicholas as Colle; Simon as Syme; Edmund (then spelt Edmon or Esmon) as Monde; Walter as Watte; William as Wille; John as Janin, Janekyn or Jack; Isabella as Sibille or Ibote; Joan as Jonete. One of Edward’s chamber valets was called Grete Hobbe, or in modern English Big Rob, and he also had servants called Litel Colle and Litel Wille Fisher.
Edward had two personal cooks and five valets to help them, and also had a ‘server and keeper of the foods for his mouth’, a squire who carved his meat and another who served him from his cup. The king used splendid knives for eating, which had silver enamelled or ebony handles, cost about twelve shillings each and had to be frequently replaced.8 His musical needs were taken care of: there would be performers to ‘make their minstrelsy before the king at all times that will please him’. The largest department was the marshalsea or stables, and Edward had, among many other servants, a man who ‘will lead to the king the horse which he will mount; and he will receive the king when he dismounts’. The Ordinance was keen to keep ‘undesirables’ away from court. Prostitutes, if caught there three times, would be imprisoned for forty days. Edward’s marshals were ordered to search the court weekly to find any people who hadn’t sworn an oath of loyalty to the king; such people were to be ‘taken and punished’. Members of the household were given the king’s permission to visit their homes on occasion – wives and families were not allowed to live at court or even to follow behind – and received sums of money between five and a hundred shillings, depending on rank, for their travel expenses.
Rank and status dominated everything, including what kind of material people wore and what they ate. All food and drink including a gallon of ale per day was provided for free, though nobody below the rank of squire was entitled to eat roast meat but had to make to do with the boiled kind. Higher-ranking servants also received candles or a torch for their chamber and a pitcher of wine. The servants received clothing or livery as part of their wages, usually given out twice a year at Christmas and Pentecost, and the lower ranks also received four shillings and eight pence annually for shoes. The livery was usually colour co-ordinated, and the overall effect must have been colourful and vibrant. From 8 July 1315 to 7 July 1316, Edward spent £627 on clothes for his household. He received two tunics for himself in April 1316, comprising six ells of scarlet (expensive woollen cloth) with two ells of yellow cloth for sewing leopards, his heraldic arms, on them, and more scarlet for making bags.9 He also received sixteen ells of green medley (dyed in the wool cloth) to make two sleeved tunics and two tabards. Green cloth lined with miniver was also given to the queen, their son Edward of Windsor, the king’s sister Elizabeth and his nieces Eleanor and Margaret.10 In November 1322, Edward purchased twelve ells of black and vermilion medley, at sixteen pence per ell, to make doublets (courtepies) for the squires of his chamber.11 He paid twenty-one pounds to the London draper Simon Swanland in December 1325 for medley cloth for his carpenters and forty marks for forty cloths to make elbow-length cloaks for his chamber valets. Two pages received blue cloth at a cost of six shillings in April 1326 for tunics ‘in the style of Gascony’.12 Thomas of Lancaster, at Christmas 1313, gave azure cloth to the knights of his household, medley to his clerks and mi-parti (cloth divided vertically in two colours) to his squires, and the following summer gave the knights yellow cloth, the clerks red medley and the squires striped cloth.13
The day after the Ordinance was issued, Edward turned his attention to the important business of his elder son’s marriage, and wrote to Count William of Hainault to arrange a marriage between young Edward and the count’s eldest daughter, Margaret – not her sister Philippa, who did marry Edward III in 1328, as has often been assumed.14 Edward also asked the pope to issue a dispensation for Edward of Windsor and Margaret to marry, as they were second cousins, both great-grandchildren of Philip III of France, and in November 1319 once again raised the issue, this time naming William’s daughter as Sibilla, which was either an error – his careless clerk addressed the count as Robert – or a reference to another daughter who died young.15 Edward spent the entire period from 9 January to 21 July 1319 in York, except for a few days at nearby Kirkham Priory in early April. The Flores reports that Queen Isabella gave birth to a daughter, Joan, while at York this year; no other source mentions this, however, and it is unlikely that a royal child could be born and leave no traces in the historical record – no funerary arrangements, for example.16 It is probable that the author confused the date of birth of their daughter Joan of the Tower, who was born in 1321.
Parliament opened on 6 May 1319 at York. Hugh Audley and his wife Margaret audaciously claimed the earldom of Cornwall as Margaret’s inheritance from her late husband Piers Gaveston, a claim parliament refused, on the grounds that the lands which Edward had granted to Gaveston had been revoked.17 On 2 and 12 June, Edward sent letters to Haakon V of Norway regarding debts which the Norwegian king owed to eight English merchants, unaware that Haakon had died on 6 May.18 The king appointed his barber Laurence Elmham custodian of the royal forest of Galtres in Yorkshire, also granting him permission to appoint a deputy, as he was unable personally to perform his duties owing to his attendance on the king. Elmham claimed in 1330 to have served as Edward’s barber for twenty-six years, though in 1325/26 a man called Henry is named as such in the king’s chamber account.19
In November 1318, Edward had summoned men to muster at Berwick-on-Tweed, to besiege the port and take it back into English hands from Robert Bruce, who had seized it the year before. The campaign should have begun on 10 June 1319, but on 22 May, it was postponed until 22 July.20 Although on 20 July Edward asked the two archbishops and all the bishops of England to pray for him on his way to Scotland, he didn’t arrive at Berwick until 7 September, spending the whole of August in and around Newcastle.21The necessity of retaking the vital port of Berwick meant that even the earl of Lancaster co-operated with Edward for once, and the earls of Pembroke, Surrey, Arundel, Hereford, Atholl and Angus also joined the king. The nineteen-year-old Thomas of Brotherton, earl of Norfolk, attended, and Edward knighted his half-brother on 15 July.22
Predictably, the siege was unsuccessful. Despite the importance of capturing the port, the Vita implies that Edward decided to attack only on the spur of the moment.23 Given such a slapdash approach – no one had even thought to bring siege-engines – it is hardly surprising that the attack failed.24 Edward ordered a simultaneous attack by land and sea, and although his force ‘almost scaled the wall in the first assault delivered with great fury … the inhabitants regained their courage and defended themselves with spirit’.25 Edward kept himself amused during the siege, and paid his minstrel ‘King’ Robert and two musicians sent to him by his brother-in-law Philip V of France for playing before him, ordered hunting dogs sent from Wales, and had two of his falcons brought from London. The falcons were named Damory, after his friend, and Beaumont, after his French cousin Henry Beaumont, and had probably been gifts from these men.26 His father had in 1305/06 owned falcons called Blanchepoune, Skardebek, d’Engayne, Durham and Parson.27
As a decoying tactic, James Douglas and Thomas Randolph, earl of Moray, led an army into England and reached as far south as Boroughbridge, near York. According to a captured Scottish scout, there was a plan to seize Queen Isabella, who was staying at a small manor of the archbishop of York, either Brotherton or Bishopthorpe.28 The queen hastened to York, from where she escaped by water to the safety of Nottingham. A mortified Edward later gave her jewels and other gifts in consolation.29 The Vita points out that ‘if the queen had at that time been captured, I believe that Scotland would have bought peace for herself’, and accuses the earl of Lancaster, almost certainly falsely, of plotting with the Scots to capture his niece in exchange for £40,000.30 Perhaps to divert attention from himself, Lancaster in turn accused Hugh Despenser, though Despenser hardly had any compelling motives for wishing the queen to be taken hostage either, and this may represent Lancaster’s awareness that Despenser, placed close to the king by the barons a few months before, was not nearly as malleable or safe as he had thought.31 The fact remained, though, that someone had betrayed the queen’s whereabouts to the Scots, and the culprit was probably a knight named Edmund Darel.32
On 12 September, the Scottish force defeated an English army hastily cobbled together by Edward’s friend William Melton, archbishop of York, near the village of Myton-on-Swale.33 So many clerics died – Lanercost says 4,000, with another 1,000 who drowned in the Swale – that the battle became known as the Chapter of Myton.34 The abbot of St Mary’s in York later founded a chapel in the village, ‘in honour of the Transubstantiation and the flesh and blood of Our Lord’, to pray for the souls of the men who died.35 News of this latest military disaster reached Berwick on 14 September 1319, and the earl of Lancaster left the port two days later, though whether to protect his lands, to cut off the Scots’ retreat or out of disgust with Edward is not clear.36 Hugh Despenser, an enthusiastic letter-writer, told the sheriff of Glamorgan that
the Scots had entered his [Edward’s] land of England with the prompting and assistance of the earl of Lancaster. The earl acted in such a way that the king took himself off with all his army, to the great shame and damage of us all. Wherefore we very much doubt if matters will end so happily for our side as is necessary.37
Once again, relations between the king and his powerful cousin deteriorated, thanks in part to the actions of Edward’s favourites, and the Bridlington chronicler also claims that some people deliberately fostered dissent and conflict between Edward and Lancaster, falsely reporting Edward’s words to the earl and vice versa.38 Although relations between the two most powerful men in the kingdom were, prior to the siege, outwardly amicable, Edward proved what was really on his mind by ominously announcing, ‘When this wretched business is over, we will turn our hands to other matters. For I have not forgotten the wrong that was done to my brother Piers.’39 Edward had not forgiven Lancaster for Gaveston’s death, and still had vengeance in mind. Gaveston remained in his thoughts, as always, and seven years after his friend’s death, he paid for a turquoise cloth to cover his tomb.40
Trokelowe says that Edward lay in wait for the Scots at Newminster, a Cistercian priory near Morpeth in Northumberland, and Edward’s itinerary does indeed place him there on 19 September, but they eluded him by returning to their homeland by the western route.41 By this time, Hugh Despenser had become close to Edward; the king promised to make his chamberlain keeper of the castle once Berwick fell. He also promised with his ‘usual foolishness’ to make Roger Damory constable of the town, thus presumptuously handing out favours he hadn’t yet won.42 Although Edward had consented to send Damory away from him the previous year, the knight evidently still remained high in the king’s affections, and the Flores calls Edward’s friends – presumably referring to Damory and Despenser – ‘despicable parasites’.43
Thomas Randolph and James Douglas invaded England again at the beginning of November 1319, laying waste to much of Westmorland and Cumberland and returning to Scotland with ‘a very large spoil of men and cattle’.44 Therefore, Edward granted powers on 1 December to several men including Hugh Despenser to make a truce with Robert Bruce.45 On this day, according to the Sempringham annalist, ‘there was a general earthquake in England, with great sound and much noise’.46 Robert Bruce confirmed a truce on 22 December, to run until Christmas 1321; it may have been Edward’s frequent truces, at least in part, which led the Flores to condemn his notorious infamy and cowardice and declare that the king was a slave to idleness.47 On 8 January 1320, John XXII republished the bull of excommunication against Bruce for his murder of John ‘the Red Comyn’ and his uncle in 1306.48
Edward spent Christmas 1319 at York, having invited the warden and thirty-two scholars of King’s Hall, his foundation at Cambridge, to join him. Most of them arrived late, on 28 December, and one joined in an assault by the prior of the Dominicans of Pontefract on a William Hardy and was left behind in disgrace when the scholars returned to Cambridge.49 The king remained at York for New Year, and gave Queen Isabella expensive jewels and other gifts.50 Parliament opened on 20 January 1320, and perhaps the attendees saw the ‘wonderful eclipse of the moon of many various colours’ on the morning of 26 January, as recorded by the Sempringham annalist.51 Edward told his magnates that he had arranged to meet his brother-in-law Philip V at Amiens on 9 March, in order to perform homage for Gascony and Ponthieu, and ‘because time was getting on and the way was long, he could not remain there to complete all the business concerning the said parliament, if he wished to speed on his way’.52 His half-brother Edmund of Woodstock, now eighteen and a first cousin of Philip V and Queen Isabella through his mother Queen Marguerite, was sent to Paris to arrange a safe-conduct for the king, and on 19 February Edward informed Philip that he would meet him at Amiens, and sent out commissioners to find lodgings for him in the town.53 After parliament, Edward set off for London. On his way through Pontefract, Lancaster’s retainers once again jeered at him, and Isabella, from the safety of the castle.54 This time, however, Edward sensibly ignored – though certainly didn’t forgive – this discourteous behaviour. The king and queen arrived in London on 16 February 1320, where the mayor and other senior officials of the city met them at Kilburn.55
On 17 April 1320, the pope canonised Thomas Cantilupe, bishop of Hereford, who had died in August 1282. This was due in part to the efforts of Edward himself, who wrote to Clement V and John XXII half a dozen times between December 1307 and January 1319, asking them to canonise Cantilupe.56 The two archbishops and all the bishops of England asked Edward to be present at the ‘translation of the holy body’ in Hereford Cathedral on 14 June 1321, and he responded, ‘It pleases the king to be there.’57Edward was at Lambeth on the day of Cantilupe’s canonisation, when, according to the Sempringham annalist – who had a fondness for recording the weather – ‘about midnight, there were frightful thunders heard, with lightning, and immoderately high wind’.58Sometime in 1320, the king provided further proof of his eccentricity by taking possession of a cottage within the precincts of Westminster Abbey, which he called Borgoyne, Burgundy. According to the disapproving Westminster chronicler the Flores, he jokingly took to calling himself ‘king of Burgundy’ rather than ‘king of England’. The Flores goes on to comment that Edward’s occupation of the cottage, which had a large garden, ditches encircling it and its own keeper, was ‘not without sacrilege’.59 Later in his reign, Edward spent a few days there on occasion, shunning his more luxurious accommodation, while most of his household lodged in more conventional locations at Westminster or at the Tower. The king said farewell on 17 May to the archbishop of Vienne, a papal nuncio who had come to England to negotiate with the Scots at Bamburgh, and gave him a pair of silver dishes and a silver-gilt basin, ‘chased and enamelled, with ewer’, worth seven pounds and ten shillings.60 The earl of Gloucester’s widow Maud died sometime in 1320, taking her motives for faking a three-year pregnancy to the grave, and her dower lands were divided out among her late husband’s sisters and their husbands, making Hugh Audley, Hugh Despenser and Roger Damory richer by about £900 each per year.
Edward finally sailed from Dover to France on 19 June 1320, with, among dozens of others, Queen Isabella, Donald of Mar, Hugh Despenser, Roger Damory, the teenaged William Montacute, son of Edward’s dead friend of the same name, and John Hastings, nephew and co-heir of the childless earl of Pembroke. Pembroke’s wife Beatrice of Clermont-Nesle, who died later that year, accompanied Queen Isabella, while Pembroke himself remained in London as keeper of the realm.61 Roger Damory was still in Edward’s favour, but as events later in the year would prove, he was losing his position to the king’s ruthless young chamberlain, Despenser. At Amiens, Edward stayed in the house of one Peter du Garde, and later paid him ten marks in compensation for ‘all damage to his dwelling’ caused during his stay. The king’s chapel was placed in the house of John le Mouner, his offices in the house of Sanxia, the storeroom for his kitchen in the house of Margaret, and the passage between his chamber and chapel in the house of William le Mouner. Edward paid Peter le Peyntour a shilling and sixpence to paint shields of the king’s arms in the streets of Amiens, ‘in order to make known where the king’s liveries were’, and four pounds to a master carpenter to repair ‘damage done by carpenters and others in the state rooms’ of the court.62
On 29 June, Edward met Philip V at Amiens and did liege homage before the high altar of the cathedral. In 1259, Edward’s grandfather Henry III had signed the Treaty of Paris with Louis IX, which had finally ended the many decades of military conflicts between England and France over the English kings’ lands in France, but which inadvertently created new tensions by including many clauses which were vague or could be interpreted in different ways.63 Three or four days after the ceremony, during a meeting between the two kings and their councils, Philip’s advisers decided that some of the concessions which Edward was prepared to make were inadequate, and demanded that he take an oath of personal fealty to the French king as well. A clerk of Edward’s, an eyewitness, gave this account of what followed: ‘And when some of the said prelates and nobles leaned towards our said lord [Edward] and began to instruct him, our said lord now turned towards the said king [Philip] without having been advised,’ and announced,
We well remember that the homage which we performed at Boulogne [in 1308] was done according to the form of the peace treaties made between our ancestors, after the manner in which they did it. Your father [Philip IV] agreed to it, for we have his letters confirming this, and we have performed it already in the same fashion; no one can reasonably ask us to do otherwise; and we certainly do not intend to do so. As to the fealty [oath] we are certain that we should not swear it; nor was it ever asked of us at that time.
The clerk continued, ‘And then the king of France turned to the men of his council, and none of them could say anything to contradict the response of our said lord.’64 Edward’s fluent and angry defence, spoken spontaneously without the benefit of any advice, reduced them to stunned silence, and the question of fealty was quietly dropped. As his remarks here show, Edward was an articulate and persuasive speaker and could think on his feet, and the Scalacronica calls him ‘amiable in conversation’ – as well as, uniquely, ‘wise’ and ‘gentle’.65
Edward held a banquet in Amiens on 8 July, in a tent or pavilion, and gave the large sum of twenty pounds to the minstrels who performed there.66 He and his retinue left the following day, made their way along the River Somme, and visited Abbeville, the capital of his county of Ponthieu, which he had granted to Isabella. The royal couple sailed from Wissant on 22 July, and the mayor and citizens of London rode out to meet Edward in early August: ‘Dressed in clothes appropriate to their office, they greeted him in fine style.’67 Edward’s twenty-year-old half-brother Thomas of Brotherton, earl of Norfolk, went to the king at Langley in mid-August to ask advice about his marriage.68 King Jaime II of Aragon had proposed his daughter Maria, widow of Pedro of Castile, as Norfolk’s bride, but in August 1321 reported that Maria had decided to become a nun and he did not think he would be able to change her mind.69 Norfolk married instead, at an unknown date perhaps in 1321, Alice Hales, daughter of the coroner of Norfolk: a decidedly odd choice for a man who was son and brother of kings of England and nephew of a king of France. Edward wrote on 27 August 1320 to the king of Cyprus, his distant cousin Henri de Lusignan, asking him to protect three Dominican friars going to preach to the ‘Saracens’, and on 14 September ordered ‘five pieces of silk, embroidered with birds’ to be laid on the body of the recently deceased countess of Pembroke at the conventual church of Stratford, London.70
Parliament opened at Westminster on 6 October 1320, and it was probably around this time that Edward and Queen Isabella conceived their fourth child Joan, who was born on 5 July 1321. Edward’s son Edward of Windsor, earl of Chester, was summoned to this parliament for the first time, although he was not yet eight years old. After his eloquent defence to the king of France, Edward proved once again that he was more capable than many commentators have given him credit for. The chronicler Nicholas Trevet wrote that Edward ‘showed prudence in answering the petitions of the poor, and clemency as much as severity in judicial matters, to the amazement of many who were there’.71 Of course, the ‘amazement’ makes clear how uninterested and uninvolved Edward usually was. The opening speech of parliament said that Edward had summoned it ‘in his great desire and wish to do all the things which concern a good lord for the benefit of his realm and of his people’. Edward’s behaviour and demeanour at the October 1320 parliament excited more comment. Thomas Cobham, bishop of Worcester, wrote approvingly, albeit condescendingly, in a letter to Pope John XXII,
Besides, which, Holy Father, your devoted son, our lord the king, in the parliament summoned to London bore himself splendidly, with prudence and discretion, contrary to his former habit rising early and presenting a nobler and pleasant countenance to prelates and lords. Present almost every day in person, he arranged what business was to be dealt with, discussed and determined. Where amendment was necessary he ingeniously supplied what was lacking, thus giving joy to his people, ensuring their security, and providing reliable hope of an improvement in behaviour.72
Cobham’s letter demonstrates that Edward was, for once, showing an interest in his duties and in his realm, and also prove that he could be wise, patient, judicious, merciful where necessary, and eloquent. But then, his subjects already knew that he had ability; it was just that, usually, he chose not to bother, as Cobham’s letters also amply demonstrate. Edward II’s problem was not lack of ability. It was lack of interest. On rare occasions, he chose to exercise his talents. Most of the time, he didn’t.
Edward had finally, thirteen years after his accession, learned how to be a king. But 1320 would prove to be the highest point of his reign. The day after parliament ended, he took the step which would lead inexorably to the outbreak of civil war the following spring and the exile of his friends the Despensers.