An excommunicated person was cast out of the company of fellow Christians and bound over to hell. Now that is debt-collection clout.
The antidote was to go on crusade, which Montfort did. And that not only lifted excommunications but cleared all debts as well.
That Jews did survive, and even prospered, under such living and working conditions as these in England during the Middle Ages is cause for awe, and deep respect for their business capabilities.
Sources
Ashe, Katherine. Montfort the Early Years 1229 to 1243. Wake Robin Press, 2010 (p. 120 and note, p. 307).
Bemont, C. Simon de Montfort. Translated by E. F. Jacob. 1930, (p. 60).
Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1232-47 (p. 185).
Shirely. Royal Letters, Vol. II (p.16).
King Lear’s Town: A Little History of the City of Leicester
by Katherine Ashe
In the so-called “dark” and “middle” ages, Leicester was not a happy place.
In 1173, by order of King Henry II, the city was besieged, razed, and depopulated as punishment for the support its earl, Robert “White-Hands,” had given Queen Eleanor (of Aquitaine) and her son, Richard the Lionheart. On Richard’s ascension to the throne, the Earl of Leicester was forgiven and rebuilt his hall. But the town recovered very slowly and sporadically, being still sparsely populated within its walls as late as 1722.
The situation was so bad that White Hands forgave any taxes the townspeople owed him. Of course, it was his fault they had suffered at all, so renouncing his taxes was the least he could do.
But Leicester had a prominent past. In the early Christian era, Leicester had been a major Roman town at the crossing of two of the most important of the Roman legions’ roads in Britain. Fine mosaic floors in costly Roman villas have been excavated near the city. Endearing objects may be seen in Leicester’s museum, such as a bowl inscribed from a centurion to his lady love.
Massive stone arches, perhaps a part of the Roman baths, still stand.
In the Middle Ages, those thick walls with their gaps served as the Jewish district, with shacks built against the walls, using the gaps as part of the shelter. Jews were not permitted to own land. But since no one owned the ancient stretch of wall and arches, the Jews remained there undisturbed—at least until the shameful incident of Simon de Montfort’s youth, when he evicted them from the city.
Montfort had no title, and no knights or henchmen at the time, so he probably didn’t accomplish that eviction single-handed. It’s most likely the people of Leicester joined in the rout, thus cancelling their debts to the Jews who were chiefly money-lenders. Similar attacks against Jews in London and elsewhere occurred and seem to have been motivated by a desire to not pay back loans, rather than for any religious reasons. Being a Jew in England in the 13th century was hazardous.
It may not be coincidence that when young Simon drove out the Jews of Leicester, his mentor, Fr. Robert Grosseteste, had just founded a refuge for homeless Jews, in London—later the site of the Public Record Office. However, the Jews Simon drove from the old Roman wall probably knew that the local priest (Dean of Lincoln Cathedral) was offering not just hospitality, but an attempt at conversion. They simply crossed the River Soar to Simon’s great-aunt’s house, where they found sympathetic shelter.
From there they spread all over England the news of their mistreatment by the would-be Earl of Leicester. It made a very bad beginning for a young Frenchman hoping to redeem an English title.
Another instance of the impact of the youthful Simon de Montfort on Leicester appears in the royal court’s legal records. The villeins of the Leicester fief brought suit against Simon for fencing their fields. He had done more than fence the fields—he had tried to persuade them away from the age-old three-field system of cultivation and toward the raising of sheep and cattle.
It may be that the depopulation of Leicester had made the three-field system too unproductive, with too many of the field rows going uncultivated. It is well to remember Montfort’s mentor again, the ubiquitous Robert Grosseteste, who had published the then most respected “modern” work on manor management.
It is unlikely Montfort ventured such a change without Grosseteste’s advice. As for the future of Leicester, woolen processing became its chief industry and remained so until after WWII.
But let’s go further back in time.
After the conquest of Britain by the Angles and Saxons and the division of Britain into the heptarchy, the “seven kingdoms,” in 753, Leicester became the capital city of the kingdom of Mercia.
The name “Leicester” derives from “Legre-caestre.” Lyger, or Legre, was the old name of the River Soar, which encloses two sides of the old city. If King Lear is not to be looked upon merely as mythical, then Leicester was the site of his castle.
There is a mysterious conical mound with a door set in it on the castle grounds. A fairy hill? My inquiries when I was there only gained the answer, “It was where m’lord kept his wines.” Well, that too—probably.
In 874, Leicester fell to the Danes. Its Roman walls protecting its perimeter (not the walls of the baths that became the Jewry) were destroyed, and the city became incorporated in the Danish “five boroughs,” which included Nottingham, Lincoln, Derby, and Stamford.
In 920, Ethelfloeda, the daughter of King Alfred, succeeded in raising an army and driving the Danes from Leicester, Derby, and Nottingham. She caused the Roman walls to be rebuilt, with an assortment of stone and Roman tiles cemented together with an extraordinarily sturdy mortar that adhered in clumps, making any subsequent reuse of the building materials all but impossible.
City and castle walls were knocked down and rebuilt regularly in medieval times. The Palestinian castle at Caesaria was disassembled and reassembled with every passing phase of Moslem or Christian crusading success. To not be able to reassemble the cut stones of a city or castle wall was an unusual and serious problem.
After Ethelfloeda’s death at Castle Tamworth in 922, Leicester passed back and forth between the Anglo-Saxons and the Danes, resulting in further demolition—no longer repairable thanks to Ethelfloeda’s mortar.
In 1068, the Saxon Earl Edwin of Coventry and Leicester (grandson of the minimally covered Lady Godiva of Coventry and Leicester—one always hopes that notable ride was in summertime) surrendered and did homage to William the Conqueror. Leicester passed to William’s follower Hugh de Grantmesnil as Norman governor.
After William’s death, Hugh supported Robert of Normandy, rather than William’s heir, William Rufus, or his brother Henry. When Henry succeeded as Henry I, Hugh retired to a monastery in France, and the king created his friend, Robert de Beaumont, the first Norman Earl of Leicester. After him came Robert de Bosso, who enjoyed the earldom for fifty years.
Then there was Robert “White Hands.” His son and heir, Robert FitzParnel, died without heirs and the inheritance of the earldom of Leicester passed to Father White Hands’ surviving sisters. One of those ladies was Margaret, the Countess of Winchester, the very one who welcomed the fleeing Jews—she already had complaints of her own against her grand-nephew for putting up his fences and encroaching on a corner of her lands. But Margaret only got twelve of the seventy-eight fiefs belonging to the earldom.
The other sister, who inherited the earldom’s titles and sixty-six fiefs, was the mother of Simon de Montfort Pere, the crusader and harrier of Albigensians. There was a prediction, in his time, that the people of England would rise up and elect Simon de Montfort their king. The crusader announced he would “never set foot in a land given to such prophecies.” And he never did.
Chartres window has roused a great deal of confusion regarding the arms of Simon, the Earl of Leicester, whose blazon, as depicted by his friend Matthew Paris in his Chronica Majora, shows a two-tailed, red lion rampant on a white ground—suitably differenced from
his father white-lion-on-red arms as a younger son’s would be.
Simon Pere might have been disappointed if he had claimed his titles. Of those sixty-six fiefs, sixty were held by the knights whom the earl was expected to lead in battle. Most of those knights paid no rent, giving military service instead, although one of them was compelled, in lieu of rent, to deliver to the earl each year a single red rose. (This has echoes of Beauty and the Beast, but it’s true. One wonders how commonly acceptable a single rose was for the clearing of a debt. There were certain advantages to living in the Middle Ages.)
Simon de Montfort’s son and namesake, after the father’s death and the family’s relative bankruptcy, not only set foot in England, but did everything he could to gain the titles.
But fighting the Welsh for King Henry III accomplished little for him. It was when he fell in love with the King’s sister, who was a nun, and entered into a secret and hasty marriage with her—followed by a successful effort at bribing the Pope to lift the nun’s vows—that King Henry finally granted Simon the title Earl of Leicester and its companion honor, Steward of England.
A few decades later, much to Henry’s chagrin, the people of England did elect Simon de Montfort to be their king. Luckily for Henry, he refused the Crown.
With Simon’s death at Evesham, and the stripping from his sons of all of their claims of inheritance in England, Leicester passed to the Crown and became a bonus for royal relatives, enjoyed by a series of Lancastrians until John of Gaunt’s heir ascended the throne as Henry IV.
The earldom then remained in the Crown’s keeping again until Queen Elizabeth’s favorite, Robert Dudley, was granted the title in 1564.
With the fall of Dudley from royal favor, Leicester went back to the Crown—to be lobbed like a tennis ball out to the Sidney family in 1618, where it bounced happily for the next hundred and fifty years before a royal serve sent it to Thomas Coke. Strangely, Coke’s descendants didn’t receive the earldom after his death in 1795, but it was lobbed back to them in 1837, and has remained with the Coke family ever since, the Seventh Coke Earl of Leicester receiving the title in 1994.
Leicester’s chief industry, from the time of Earl Simon on, was the processing of wool. Prior to WWII, a major business was the lindsey-woolsey works, where a sturdy fabric of wool and linen was manufactured. During the war the factory was taken out of private hands for the war effort.
In recent years, Leicester has blossomed as an academic center, with Montfort University perhaps the largest and fastest growing educational institution in England. Earl Simon, whose statue is one of four ringing the base of the town clock, would be pleased.
Sources
Hollings, James Francis. Roman Leicester. The Literary and Philosophical Society, 1851.
Nichols, John. History and Antiquities of the Town and County of Leicester. 1795.
Staveley, Thomas. History and Antiquities of the antient Towne and once Citte of Leicester, MS. 1679 .
Stenton, F.M. “Documents Illustrative of the Social and Economic History of the Danelaw,” British Academy 347 (1920).
Thompson, James. History of Leicester from the Time of the Romans to the End of the Seventeenth Century. 1849.
Throsby, John. History and Antiquities of the Town of Leicester. 1791.
Miniature Cathedrals: England’s Market Crosses
by Deborah Swift
There is a wonderful market cross at Kirkby Lonsdale, a town near to where I live, where I sometimes go to shop or enjoy a pot of tea with friends. Seeing it made me curious to find out about other market crosses which are wonderful examples of miniature architecture, reflecting their time and the style of the day.
The primary purpose of wayside crosses was to remind the traveller that he was there but for the Grace of God:
for this reason ben Crosses by ye waye that whan folke passynge see the Crosse, they sholde thynke on Hym that deyed on the Crosse, and worsyppe Hym above all thynge
—Wynken de Worde, 1496
In Norman times crosses were often put up to define boundaries, particularly of a place of sanctuary. Within a mile of St. Wilfrid’s church in Ripon a man was safe, no matter what crime he had committed. Crosses were therefore erected on each of the five major roads leading into the town to show the boundaries of the sanctuary.
However, as time went on, these crosses developed a more secular use as landmarks, meeting places, and points of trade. They also became places where punishment was meted out under the eye of God as represented by the cross. Stocks and pillories are often to be found at their bases. In Oakham, the market cross, used to trade butter and other produce, has its stocks right up next to the cross.
In Wales, the market cross was used to hang the heads of foxes and wolves captured in the vicinity as well as to punish thieves—foxes and wolves being considered a type of thief. A reward was offered for the capture of a wolf which was the same price as that of the reward for a robber; dog foxes were worth 2s 6d and vixens 1s 6d as late as the middle of the nineteenth century. Examples of these crosses can be seen at Eglwyscummin and Amroth.
As time went on, the cross grew a roof, and the covered areas beneath the crosses were used for trade, particularly after the Reformation, when people were unsure whether they were still to be used as “places of worship” or whether these old monuments would be against the edicts of the King. But even as early as 1337, the market cross at Norwich was large enough to house a chapel and four shops—the early equivalent of the modern shopping mall!
The finest of these is at Chichester. Built in 1501, it is octagonal in shape, features eight flying buttresses with matching arches, and above it the pinnacle is a lantern spire, originally lit at night. Salisbury has a similar one but hexagonal. It is known as the Poultry Cross, presumably because poultry was sold there. There are other examples at Leighton Buzzard and Shepton Mallet.
One of the most famous “preaching crosses”, ones from which open air sermons were delivered, was Paul’s Cross, erected in the early 13th century near the wall of old St. Paul’s, London. Before it was pulled down in 1641, it was the scene of many historic events—mayors were elected under its shadow, heretics excommunicated there, and in 1588, the first news of the Armada’s defeat was announced from it to the public. Today few preaching crosses remain, except the Black Friar’s Preaching Cross in Hereford and the one at Iron Acton Gloucestershire.
In 1643, under Puritan rule, Parliament passed an act ordering all crosses in churches, chapels, and churchyards to be taken away, as “Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry”. This led to the destruction of many fine crosses including Charing Cross in London, although stones from this cross were later used to make the pavements in front of the Palace of Whitehall.
Enterprising sympathisers who wanted to retain their connection with the cross also made souvenirs by cutting and polishing the stone and using it as knife handles. This is the period that interested me when writing The Gilded Lily, which features some Puritan characters alongside the libertines of London.
My explorations into these crosses led me to explore what are known as “The Eleanor Crosses”, twelve crosses erected between 1291 and 1294. This became a whole separate interest, quite apart from the research I was doing for my books, and you can find out more about these beautiful monuments on my blog.
Relic in the Valley: St. Martin’s at Cwmiou
by Judith Arnopp
At the time of the crucifixion, when darkness swallowed the world, a great earthquake struck the Vale of Ewyas, ripping a chunk from the side of the mountain above Cwmiou.
Today, nestled among ash, alder, and beech, the church of St. Martin seems to erupt from the undergrowth, the gravestones heaving and swaying in waves of bending grass. From the top of the graveyard, where the ancient stones stagger like an old man’s teeth, it looks as if the church has come to life and is lumberin
g off down the hill. And the feeling of disorientation does not end when you push open the heavy oak door and step inside.
The silence swallows you, the aroma of mildew and a thousand years of Christian faith seep from yellow internal walls that twist and buckle like a living thing, making your feet run off of their own accord as you progress along the Welsh flag-stoned aisle. As your brain battles to make sense of the odd angles, it is uncannily like being aboard ship. I expect you are wondering why.
The name “Cwmiou” or “Cwmyoy” translates as “the valley of the yoke” and refers to the shape of the mountain above, which resembles an oxen’s yoke.
The nature of the geology of the Honddu valley has caused the land to slowly shift and slide, and it is this land slippage, upon which the church was built, that has endowed St. Martin’s with its matchless charm.
There are no right angles at St. Martin’s. The tower lurches north (5.2” out of perpendicular), while the chancel arch and east window tilt alarmingly to the right. Consequently, it confuses the mind, confounds the senses—but there are other reasons besides this for visiting.
The church itself is a simple structure, consisting of nave, chancel, tower, and porch, dating from the 13th to 16th centuries. An original 15-16th century window bears some wonderful scrollwork, and a small stone stairway in the chancel leads to the remains of a rood loft, which was destroyed during the Reformation. (Just a little drive up the road at St. Issui’s church at Patricio there is a superb example of a 15th century rood loft and screen that you should really not miss if you ever make this journey.)
19th century restoration work saw some of the windows at St. Martin’s replaced, and it is believed that the plaster ceilings were removed at that time, but some examples of the original survive in the porch. To prevent further slippage, the church is now buttressed at the west end and large iron stays were added in the 1960s.
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