Edward I

by Michael Prestwich

  Although many of the agreements made between lords and their followers were probably never put down in writing, some formal contracts have survived. The earliest dates from the end of Henry III’s reign, and was made between the Lord Edward and Adam of Jesmond in 1270, Adam promising to accompany the future king on his crusade with four knights in return for 600 marks.[144] One indenture survives from the Welsh wars, and it provides for Peter Maulay to serve with ten men-at-arms under Edmund Stafford.[145] The earliest agreement for life service dates from 1297, and in it John Segrave promised to provide a force of sixteen or on occasion twenty horse in the service of Roger Bigod when required.[146] A few other indentures, some temporary and some for life, survive from the later years of the reign.[147] These documents are sufficiently uniform in phraseology and content to suggest that there was nothing particularly novel or abnormal in the system of magnate retinues during the reign of Edward I. It has been remarked that ‘most aspects of bastard feudalism, in both temporary and permanent forms, were already developed in the reign of Edward II, and any appearance that they were very much more developed at the end of the century is largely a documentary illusion.’[148] The statement applies equally well to the reign of Edward I.

  The indentures illustrate the normal conditions under which men were taken into the service of a magnate. They and their servants would be provided with food. Aymer de Valence, Roger Bigod and Humphrey de Bohun all provided robes for their men, and the latter gave them saddles as well. Permanent retainers were usually granted land. John Segrave received the manor and advowson of Lodden in Norfolk from Bigod, while Bartholomew de Enfield obtained land worth forty marks a year in Annandale from Bohun. Temporary retainers were rewarded with money fees. Thomas de Berkeley was to receive £50 a year from Valence if he served in England, and 100 marks if abroad. In time of war he was to be paid wages at the normal rates. Like the king, Valence promised to recompense those in his retinue for any horses they lost while on campaign. Indentures might provide for service in tournaments and at parliament as well as in war.

  A valuable source for the composition of the magnates’ contingents in Edward’s wars is the record of the protections issued to those going on campaign, guaranteeing the security of their lands during their absence.[149] Many of the applications for such writs, sent in by magnates and listing their retinues, also survive. But not all of those on campaign would have protections enrolled. Morris pointed out that often only a third of the men in a given retinue would have this done.[150] However, this evidence from protections gives valuable indications of the extent of continuity in retinues from year to year. A good example is the following of Henry de Lacy, earl of Lincoln. Taking the fifty-two men who received protections to go to Scotland with him in 1307, only eighteen appear in other years as being with him. Of these, only two men, William Stopham and Nicholas Leyburn, had been given protections to go with the earl to Gascony in 1294. Of the twenty-four men who had protections to accompany Lincoln on the Caerlaverock campaign, no less than fourteen were with him at some other date. Eight had protections for Gascony, and the same number for Scotland in 1307.[151]

  The surviving account rolls for Lincoln’s estates provide further information on his household and retinue. Fees and robes for his steward and constable came out of the proceeds of the manor of Accrington: twenty marks in the first case, £7 10s. in the second.[152] The household account shows that seven sumpter horses and eight hackneys, lost in the earl’s service, were paid for. Four of the men recompensed in this way appear on the protection lists. John Stapleton was clearly retained on a short-term basis, for he was paid £20, and appears in 1306 and 1307 with protections to follow Lincoln. Richard of Arundel appears in the same lists, but as a member of another comital family, received special favours his tunics were bought for him, and his expenses in going to tournaments paid for.[153] Those permanently retained by the earl were paid fees charged on the estates: Nicholas Leyburn and his brother Robert each received £10 a year from the manor of Halton.[154] The total size of Lincoln’s regular standing retinue is suggested by the amount spent on robes. In 1305 seventeen cloths were bought for the earl and his knights at Whitsun, and a further eighteen for his men-at-arms. The robes of the bannerets of the royal household cost eight marks each, and those of the knights four marks. If Lincoln issued robes of equal value to his men, then the £79 spent on them would indicate he was responsible for clothing about two bannerets and twenty-five knights. The robes of the men-at-arms cost £60, suggesting a force of between forty-five and sixty men.[155] Obviously, such calculations must be treated extremely cautiously, but the size of retinue they point to is not implausible. Issues of hay and oats to the army awaiting embarkation at Portsmouth in 1294 show that Lincoln had with him no less than 228 horses, which must mean at least 100 cavalrymen,[156] although when he actually reached Gascony in 1296 he had only contracted to provide a force of sixty men-at-arms.[157] The paid squadron Lincoln commanded in the first Welsh war was 100 lances strong.[158]

  Unfortunately no other household accounts like those of the earl of Lincoln survive. But the size of retinues can be determined from other sources. A contract between the government and five earls, together with Henry Percy, for service in Scotland in the winter of 1297-8 shows that Norfolk was to have no less than 130 men-at-arms with him. The smallest retinue was that of Warwick, with only thirty.[159] A list of those with Roger Bigod in 1295, presumably in Wales, indicates that he was accompanied by Hugh le Despenser with ten knights, presumably on a short-term contract, and by Thomas de Berkeley with his son Maurice and six men. The list continues with the names of fourteen knights, twenty-three men-at-arms, and five valets. There were seven clerks in the household, the total strength of which was about sixty cavalry.[160]

  Aymer de Valence was the most important magnate who was prepared to accept royal pay in the later years of the reign. In 1298 he had forty-nine cavalry with him, according to the horse lists,[161] of whom twenty-five had protections.[162] In 1306-7 no less than forty-six men had protections to go to Scotland with Valence.[163] He was then the commander of a small army, and as such it was natural that he should attract many men to his banner who did not usually serve under him. The account book for the campaign shows that from May to July 1306 he had a squadron of two bannerets, fifteen knights and thirty-seven men-at-arms. During the winter he served under contract with 100 horse for £1,000.[164] The fact that Valence always served for pay suggests that he was not rich enough to afford a large permanent retinue. The evidence of the protection lists certainly supports this hypothesis. Only Roger Inkpen and his son appear regularly in his following.

  Inkpen’s association with the Valence family went back to 1294, when he had acted as royal counsel in an important case between William de Valence and the bishop of Worcester.[165] He was almost certainly Aymer’s steward, for he had been previously employed in this capacity to look after the Cornish estates of Edmund of Cornwall. A Berkshire man, this post had led to his becoming sheriff of Cornwall. His financial expertise is demonstrated by his appointment, along with Hugh Cressingham, to audit the accounts of Amesbury priory. In 1297 he is found going to the Exchequer to draw the annual fee due to Valence, his lord. Inkpen was more violent than might be expected of such a professional administrator. He was indicted for a series of crimes for which he received a pardon in 1303, at Valence’s request. His most notable victim was an even more criminal fellow steward, Adam Stratton.[166]

  The rolls of protection reveal that a lack of continuity in personnel was common in the retinues of most magnates. The tendency for men to serve under different lords in several campaigns is well illustrated by Baldwin Manners, who appeared in 1300 with John Botetourt, in 1306 with Lincoln, and in the last year of the reign with the prince of Wales.[167] No names appear in the retinue of Henry Percy more than once, but that other great figure of the northern marches, Robert Clifford, obviously had the power of inspiring loyalty. The author of the Song of Caerlaverock st
ated that had he been a girl, he would have given himself, heart and body, to Clifford.[168] Of the men who had protections to accompany him in 1301, all but one served with him at some other time.[169] The most outstanding of Clifford’s knights was Bartholemew Badlesmere, who served with him in 1303 and again at the end of the reign. When Clifford died in 1314 Badlesmere, along with Warwick and Percy, became an administrator of his property.[170]

  The average size of the retinues provided by the ordinary bannerets is indicated by the household records. The horse rolls of the Caerlaverock campaign show that thirteen was the normal number, and this average is confirmed by the details of wages.[171] The Falkirk horse lists provide the similar figure of fifteen.[172] But these of course were the retinues of bannerets accepting wages from the crown; it is probable that men who served at their own expense were wealthier, and so would have had larger followings.

  The way in which the cavalry was organized in retinues shows that the so-called ‘bastard feudalism’ of the later middle ages was already well established in the reign of Edward I. The crown did not, however, make much use of the possibilities such a system offered as a means of recruitment; it was not until the reign of Edward III that the normal method of raising a cavalry force was to negotiate with the leaders of retinues. To provide a complete picture of the cavalry in Edward I’s armies it is necessary to investigate the methods used to summon men for service.

  III. Cavalry Service

  The reign of Edward I is generally believed to have seen the transformation of the army from an ill-disciplined, badly-organized body into an efficient and almost professional force. J. E. Morris saw the systematic use of pay as the means by which the king converted the incoherent feudal host into the kind of army which was to prove so successful in the Hundred Years War.[173] Following Morris, Sir Maurice Powicke wrote that ‘in Edward’s time, the feudal levy became subsidiary to the paid forces, or was not summoned at all’.[174] Only Miss Chew produced a different verdict, writing of Edward that ‘the feudal levy formed the nucleus of every army he led into Wales or Scotland’.[175] The prevailing view is summarized by Michael Powicke, who regards the reign as having witnessed ‘the triumph of the paid retinues over the feudal quota’.[176] The argument is that Edward found the cavalry forces raised by the summons for the traditional forty days of unpaid service inadequate, and that he developed a system of paying his troops as a more attractive alternative.

  There are considerable difficulties in this theory. One problem is to explain why, if feudal service was so inadequate, Edward continued to issue feudal summonses right up to the end of his reign, the last being in 1306. The investigation of the paid troops of the household does not suggest that the crown was turning more and more to the use of paid troops as the reign proceeded. One way of testing the conventional view is to examine the composition of the cavalry forces for the years when the evidence is fullest, 1298, 1300 and 1304.

  For the 1298 campaign, the climax of which was the great English triumph of Falkirk, there is a source entirely independent of the royal administration. The Falkirk Roll of Arms is a heraldic document, probably drawn up for Henry Percy, which lists all the most important men present in the army.[177] The army is shown to have been divided into four battalions, and the roll lists 110 bannerets who commanded the retinues that made them up. This can be compared with the horse lists which provide details of the contingents paid wages by the crown, totalling over 1,300 men.[178] Morris noticed that only forty-eight of the men mentioned in the roll of arms also appear in the horse lists, and he drew the obvious conclusion, that the other sixty-two bannerets in the roll were not paid wages by the crown.[179] Examination of the composition of individual battalions shows, as would be expected, that most of the bannerets in the battalion commanded by the king himself were paid: of the forty-six serving in it, only eight are not named in the horse inventories. This was of course the household battalion.

  Morris assumed that the majority of the cavalry, those who do not appear on the horse lists, were unpaid feudal troops, but Denholm-Young, aware that there was no feudal summons in 1298, produced a different theory. Unjustly accusing Morris of having left out of account ‘about a quarter or even a third of the heavy cavalry’, he suggested that the troops in question were serving under contract agreements made with the king. He stated that where such a contract was made, the horses were not registered, though it is hard to see why this should be the case.[180] In support of his contention Denholm-Young cited a contract made by Henry Percy and five earls for an entirely different campaign, the winter expedition mounted in retaliation for the defeat of Stirling Bridge, which began in December 1297 and ended early in March 1298. This contract was clearly stated to be for a period of three months only, and was not renewed for the summer campaign.[181] It was a highly exceptional arrangement, entered into for a winter campaign at a time when the normal army pay office, the Wardrobe, was out of the country on the Flanders expedition.

  The most plausible explanation of the evidence about the cavalry forces at Falkirk is that while many paid troops were present, nearly all in the household battalion, the majority of the cavalry, although not serving under a strict feudal obligation, were not paid by the crown. Their commanders must have been fighting at their own expense. It may be objected that the horse inventories are not the most reliable evidence of the number of paid troops: not everyone may have taken the trouble to have their horses enrolled, and the lists may be incomplete. But a study of the documents dealing with the Caerlaverock campaign, with better evidence of the cavalry who were paid wages by the crown, confirms that much of the army was neither paid nor feudal.

  The famous Song of Caerlaverock, composed by a herald, provides a list of the most important men present on the 1300 campaign in much the same way as the Falkirk Roll of Arms gives such a list for 1298. In it eighty-seven bannerets are named, and it can be shown that of these only twenty-three served for pay. The wardrobe account for the year provides an absolutely reliable list of all those in receipt of wages on the campaign, and shows that four bannerets were omitted by the author of the Song, which is hardly surprising, for he excuses himself for his inability to remember the names of all those with the earl of Lincoln.[182] It is not possible to argue that the records of the paid troops are incomplete, and that the sixty-four apparently unpaid bannerets named in the Song were in fact receiving wages from some department of the government other than the Wardrobe. For the liberate rolls, and the exchequer issue and receipt rolls make it quite plain that there was no other department being issued with funds to pay for the war in Scotland.[183] There is no record of the appointment of any paymasters for the campaign who were not responsible to the Wardrobe, nor any references to contracts of the type entered into by Percy and the earls in the winter of 1297-8.

  However, the situation in 1300 was not quite the same as in 1298, for there was a formal feudal summons issued for the Caerlaverock campaign.[184] Did this mean that the unpaid men were all doing feudal service? The roll of the Constable, which records details of the performance of service in 1300, shows that in fact only about 400 men were doing strict feudal service. Of the men named in the Song of Caerlaverock, only the earl of Gloucester, Hugh le Despenser and John Hastings served in person. The other bannerets on the campaign who owed service as tenants-in-chief merely detached members of their retinues to go through the formalities of feudal service, and it is these men who made up the quotas recorded on the roll.[185]

  For most of the campaigns of Edward I’s reign there are full details only of those men serving for pay, or performing strict feudal service. The heraldic documents available for 1298 and 1300 are exceptional. But for 1304 there are lists of the men present in the army which can be compared with the pay records of the Wardrobe.[186] These indicate that, as in 1298 and 1300, many magnates evidently served at their own expense. One document lists the bannerets and knights who were in the army in the early months of the year, when Edward was in his winter qua
rters in Dunfermline abbey. About 140 men were named, and at least 100 of them do not appear in the wardrobe account as being in receipt of wages. The other list splits up the cavalry into twenty-eight companies; out of all the company leaders named, only Robert FitzPayn, William de Rithre, William Latimer the younger and Hugh Bardolf appear on the pay lists of the household. Richard de Burgh, earl of Ulster, alone accepted wages among the seven earls on the campaign, and as an Irishman he was in a rather special position.

  How usual was it for large numbers of cavalry to serve neither for pay, nor under a strict feudal obligation? Is it likely that 1298, 1300 and 1304 were exceptional years, and that the armies raised for all the other campaigns of the reign fitted the conventional picture drawn by historians? For the first Welsh war there is evidence of unpaid, non-feudal service. The men of Cheshire were thanked for doing the service they owed, and for doing more than they were obliged to.[187] The knights and others of the counties of Shropshire and Hereford were thanked by the king for fighting ‘not by reason of any service owed to us at present, but graciously and of their own accord’. They were promised that no precedent would be made of this.[188] Such letters were not normal, and it seems that they must refer to unpaid voluntary service. Although the earls of Warwick and Lincoln commanded paid squadrons, the earl of Hereford fought what was virtually a private war with his own resources. Payn de Chaworth, in command of paid troops, was fighting near his own estates, and took no pay for himself or his personal retinue. Furthermore, it is most improbable that the magnates when performing their feudal service of forty days, would have been content to appear with the very small retinues of the formal quotas. They must have brought with them many more knights and squires than they actually registered with the Marshal and Constable, just as had been the case earlier, in 1245. It is also probable that after the end of the forty days some of the unpaid contingents remained on campaign without accepting the king’s wages.[189]