The Third Horseman

by William Rosen

  Despenser was just as ambitious as Gaveston had ever been, and far more capable. He had already served in some of the highest councils of state, and was one of the relatively few English lieutenants to emerge from Bannockburn with more glory than he had going in. And he needed money. Though he had been granted the revenues from some of the manors controlled by his father, he was still deeply in debt. Once the king resolved the status of his wife’s inheritance, Despenser was able to turn toward the most valuable of Gloucester’s lands, in Wales.

  After Edward I’s Welsh conquests, the king granted the various nobles who had established their feudal manors on the border between England and Wales—the Welsh Marches—an unusual amount of freedom from royal supervision, in return for maintaining the border’s security. These “Marcher Lords,” the barons and earls of the Welsh Marches, were, as a result, none too happy about the king’s new favorite assembling a series of Welsh estates. Not only did Despenser persuade the king to grant him the largest of Gloucester’s estate—castles at Cardiff and Glamorgan, including Caerphilly, one of the strongest fortresses in Britain—but attempted to seize the rest of it from his brothers-in-law: in the words of the Vita Edwardi Secundi, “thus, if he [Despenser] could manage it, each would lose his share through trumped up accusations and he alone would obtain the whole earldom.” His aggressive empire-building, sanctioned and supported by the king, made Despenser a powerful set of enemies. One of them was Roger Mortimer, a powerful Marcher Lord, and the former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.

  Another was the queen of England.

  Like Piers Gaveston a decade before, Despenser was an enormously powerful rival to Isabella. Just as with Gaveston, Hugh the Younger’s sexual habits have produced several centuries’ worth of tittle-tattle. Most of the contemporaneous (or near-contemporaneous) chronicles, such as the Vita and the Chronographia regum francorum, are accusatory: The Vita quotes Isabella identifying Despenser as “someone [who] has come between my husband and myself” and who wanted to dishonor her “by every possible means.” But if Despenser was a new version of Gaveston, Isabella was no longer a teenage girl, which made her single-minded animus far more dangerous, as events would prove.

  Meanwhile, as if to reproach the aristocracy for their squabbling over abductions, infidelities, and false pregnancies, the rural populace of England stubbornly continued suffering from famine and other attendant miseries. Beginning in 1317, according to Thomas Walsingham’s Historia Anglicana, gangs of schavaldores (a local dialect term meaning “robbers”) terrorized Northumberland, and “robbed rustics in their homes and their neighbors in the fields, releasing their oxen from wagons and plows and killing them for their food. Indeed, they left nothing behind in the villages that seemed suitable as food, for bread, grain, cows, sheep, pigs, . . . they plundered for themselves.”

  • • •

  The food shortages that plagued England were even more destructive in the rest of the British Isles. Scottish soldiers, led by Robert Bruce’s brother Edward in a 1315 invasion of Ireland—an attempt to divert Edward’s attention from Scotland—were, by 1316, suffering from such extreme food shortages that they were destroyed as a fighting force. By 1317, at Offaly, the Scottish army “suffered from so great a famine that many of them died of hunger.” In October 1318, the Scots were finally defeated at the battle of Fochart (sometimes Faughart), and they had long since worn out their welcome among their Irish hosts. The Annals of Connacht report that when Edward Bruce died at the battle—subsequently to be beheaded, and carved into quarters, one of which would be sent to the four corners of Ireland—“never was there a better deed done for the Irish . . . in this Bruce’s time, falsehood, and famine, and homicide filled the country, and undoubtedly men ate each other in Ireland.”

  In January 1318, the Baltic froze, for the third time since 1303 (the second time was during the winter of 1307–08). This time, the rivers leading into the sea froze as well, isolating coastal cities from what is now Estonia to Denmark. King Robert, who had returned to Scotland long before his brother’s defeat, chose to wait out the brutal winter at the walls surrounding the eastern port city of Berwick, which had been the pivot point for Anglo-Scottish warfare for more than twenty years.

  Bruce’s troops had been fitfully besieging the town, and the English garrison ensconced in Berwick Castle, for three years. Because of Berwick’s location—on the Scottish border, without access to its own hinterlands—the town could not be easily supplied by land.* With Bruce’s raiders operating nearby, Berwick was vulnerable even in years when harvests were good; and after the two lost harvests of 1315 and 1316, Scottish and English farms had no grain to sell at any price. And not just grain: even if the waterlogged fields could be mowed, the grass couldn’t be turned into hay.* Grass needs to be dry to serve as provender for ruminants like cattle and sheep; and by 1316, the sun hadn’t shone consistently in much of Britain and northern Europe for nearly two years. As each rain-soaked spring was followed by a failed harvest, which was in turn succeeded by bitterly cold winters, cattle and sheep died in droves. Bolton Priory counted three thousand sheep in its herd in 1316; by 1317, there were only 913.

  The obvious solution was to supply the city by sea. Or would have been, if the town’s ability to import food by sea hadn’t been severely limited by the destruction of the port facilities during the vicious punishment that Edward I had visited on Berwick in 1296. Ships from Gascony bound for Berwick were regularly captured not just by Bruce’s privateers, but also pirates from England, the Low Countries, and even the cities of the eastern Baltic. Those that weren’t jettisoned their cargoes within sight of the Scottish coast. By 1318, Berwick had been slowly starving for two years.

  The result was what always happens in a siege: a substantial black market; accusations of speculation and profiteering; and, perhaps inevitably, conflict between garrison and townsfolk, as both began living on starvation rations. As the English soldiers were forced to eat their own horses, the cavalry saw its mounts dwindle from more than three hundred to fewer than fifty.

  It took until April 1318 before the forces of King Robert “captured” the town. Peter of Spalding, one of the town’s leading citizens, was a distant relation to Robert Keith, the marischal of Scotland and King Robert’s general commanding the besieging forces. Spalding got word to the marischal that he would find the city gates open when he next had the watch, and, on April 1, Berwick’s inhabitants, suffering from a combination of two years of famine and siege, welcomed Bruce’s soldiers into their town. The English garrison continued to resist for another three months, but surrendered Berwick Castle on June 18 to James Douglas, whose father, William, had surrendered it to the English twenty-two years before.

  The spring of 1318 marked a dramatic improvement in the fortunes of nearly everyone in western Europe. The harvest of 1317 was a rich one, and with supplies of everything from wheat and barley to milk and wool increasing, prices fell enough that even the rural peasantry could afford to feed itself. Isabella’s brother had become King Philip V of France in 1316, and two years later had not only reconciled with his wife Jeanne after her conviction-by-association in the Tour de Nesle affair but, after another disastrous attempt to conquer Flanders by his brother, Louis X, in 1315, was close to a peaceful resolution of the conflict with the Flemings.* Robert Bruce, despite his setback in Ireland, had finally taken Berwick, and his position was unquestionably stronger in 1318 than it had been at any time since Bannockburn.

  Predictably, the outlier in this litany of good news was the luckless king of England. In June 1318, he was still challenged by the increasingly formidable earl of Lancaster; his wife was becoming an independent power in her own right; and his chief counselor, Hugh le Despenser the Younger, was proving to be more adept at making enemies than even Gaveston at his worst—and, because of his closeness to the king, Despenser’s enemies were de facto Edward’s as well. In the zero-sum game of royal politics, the growing strength o
f everyone surrounding the king made his relative weakness even more obvious.

  Even the king’s piety, which no one doubted, had a hapless cast to it. Edward spent years, beginning in 1317, pursuing the Holy Oil that had supposedly accompanied his favorite saint, Thomas Becket, to his exile in France in 1164. The legend of the oil—that it would anoint the fifth king to follow Becket’s nemesis, Henry II, who would then recover the Holy Land—obsessed Edward, partly because he was, in fact, the fifth king, and partly because he was, also in fact, remarkably credulous. He sent knights on missions to discover the oil’s whereabouts and (after believing, wrongly, that it was in papal hands) dozens of entreaties to Pope John XXII. Rejected by the pope, and realizing that the legend was nothing more, he was compelled to forego his hoped-for anointing, and apologize to his closest advisers for his gullibility.

  While all this was unfolding, in June 1318, a deranged man, the son of a tanner, appeared in Oxford, claiming to be the true king, swapped in the cradle for Edward. He declared that Edward “was not of the blood royal, nor had any right to the realm, which he offered to prove by combat with him.” The man, John of Powderham, who evidently resembled the king, claimed that, as an infant, he had been attacked by a royal sow, which had bitten off his ear, and that his nurse, fearing for her life should her carelessness become known, switched him with the son of a carter. Edward had the man arrested, and, apparently attempting to make light of the whole thing, greeted him at Northampton saying, “Welcome, my brother,” to which the imposter replied, “Thou are no brother of mine.” At this, Edward’s common touch deserted him, and John of Powderham was tried and tortured into confessing that the devil had appeared to him in the guise of a housecat, had seduced him, and compelled him to his imposture. With his admission that he had committed not only treason but sorcery, he was sentenced to be hanged and burned.*

  Had John of Powderham attempted to impersonate Edward I, his outcome would have been the same. But his effect would have been very different. No one would have accepted him as evidence that Longshanks was a weak and ineffectual king; but, given the succession of embarrassments experienced by his son—from Gaveston to Bannockburn to Berwick, to say nothing of the famine—the English nobility were all too ready to wonder about Edward II. Most notably, the episode was a crisis for Isabella, who was “troubled beyond measure” by John of Powderham—not the validity of his claim but the readiness of her subjects to believe in him, which sowed a seed of doubt in her husband that would germinate for the next nine years.

  At the same moment that his authority was being undermined by a madman, the king, via the earl of Pembroke, was negotiating at great and tedious length the Treaty of Leake with Lancaster and his allies, which, among other things, provided for a standing council to advise the Crown, its composition more or less evenly divided by the king’s supporters, and Lancaster’s. The treaty wasn’t ideal, but it did allow Edward to turn his attention northward, and Edward, whose one consistent objective as king had always been the preservation of his father’s Scottish conquests, began laying the groundwork for a new expedition, requesting a tax to pay for it, and calling for a parliament that would authorize it to be held in May 1319.

  If, however, the king believed that a new year would bring a change in his fortunes he was, as so often, mistaken. In the Easter season of 1319, the cattle brought to market day in the town of Sussex started dying. Edward, who commissioned the Saint Mary’s Psalter in order to style himself as Joseph in the Book of Genesis, was, like Pharaoh in the Book of Exodus, ruling a land afflicted with a great murrain.

  • • •

  Plagues of cattle, or murrains—a generic term for pastoral disease, from the Latin for death, mori—are as old as pastoralism itself. The Kahun Petrie Papyrus from 3000 BCE Egypt records the deaths of bulls with labored breathing, inflamed gums, and swollen necks. A similar plague seems to have occurred in Ireland around 2048 BCE, and in Egypt in 1300 BCE, the latter of which was easily the most famous in history, the fifth plague of Exodus 9:3: a “very grievous murrain . . . throughout all the land of Egypt” (though one that affected only Egyptian-owned cattle, and spared those of the Hebrews). In 29 BCE, Virgil, in the third book of the Georgics—the greatest poem ever written on animal husbandry, not that there is much competition—refers to a “piteous season” when

  Every tribe of cattle, tame or wild, it swept to death . . . when the fiery thirst had coursed through all the veins and shriveled the hapless limbs, in its turn a watery humour welled up and drew into itself all the bones, as piecemeal they melted with disease.

  Severus Sanctus Endelechius, the fourth-century author of the morbidly titled De Mortibus Bovum (On the Deaths of Cattle) describes a plague that accompanied the Hun invasions in which “cattle died of a plague all over Europe.” Other outbreaks are recorded from ninth-century “Germany” (at the time, eastern Francia), tenth-century Ireland, and eleventh-century Florence.

  However, as with all such historical epidemiology, the actual disease causing all the trouble is hard to name definitively. Throughout history, the deadliest of cattle diseases has been caused by the bacterial pathogen Bacillus anthracis; the best known may be the viral disease known variously as hoof-and-mouth or foot-and-mouth disease. But neither is very specific in its targets. Anthrax is deadly to humans as well as just about all herbivores. Aphtae epizooticae, the virus that causes hoof-and-mouth, is generally not a hazard to people, but deadly to pigs. The one that arrived in Sussex in 1319 was a different disease altogether.

  Though epidemiologists have traced rinderpest back at least nine thousand years, the first definitive appearance in Europe of the viral disease also known as steppe murrain occurred in 1223, initially in what is now Hungary, then Austria, and then Italy and Germany. That first outbreak lasted for at least three years, recurred in 1240, 1249, and 1299, and is only one of the enduring pathogens left behind by the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Unlike its close cousin, measles, rinderpest is harmless to people but deadly to cattle. Though it isn’t very hardy—it can only survive within a fairly limited range of temperatures, and is easily killed by sunlight—it still spreads wherever ruminants such as cattle, sheep, and goats are in close, indirect contact: places like the paddocks and corrals used by medieval cowherds.

  The rinderpest virus is little more than a bit of free-floating genetic code, and in order to replicate, it needs host cells. A rinderpest particle—a virion, a single strand of RNA surrounded by a protein envelope—invades a host cell, unwraps itself from its own protein shell, and hijacks the cell’s machinery to produce more of both the viral RNA and the viral protein. It then reassembles itself and signals its daughter virions to break out of the host cell to do the same thing all over again. This alerts the host’s immune system, particularly the proteins that are always present in the circulatory system, to summon cytokines, proteins shaped to latch onto invaders like rinderpest, and they, in turn, set off an alarm that summons specialized white blood cells, the B and T lymphocytes, that are designed to respond to specific pathogens: B cells have “hands” that are custom-made to hold on to the proteins of invading pathogens, while T cells puncture the invaders’ shells.

  Or they would, if rinderpest hadn’t already evolved a counterstrategy: The virus has what epidemiologists call a “core affinity” for lymphoid tissue, which means that the cells that rinderpest virions invade and take over first are the same B and T lymphocytes that are specially designed to kill them. Only after the immune system is rendered irrelevant does the virus attack its secondary target: the epithelial cells lining the walls of the host’s respiratory, alimentary, and gastrointestinal tracts.

  The result: a high fever, usually lasting two to three days, followed by anorexia, constipation, congestion, and nasal discharge—unpleasant, but not disabling. During the second phase, however, things get truly ugly. Animals develop necrotic mouth lesions, followed by enormous gastrointestin
al distress: bloody diarrhea, alternating with tenesmus—the desire to defecate, even without any material need—which results in cramping, and even muscle tearing. Diarrhea leads to dehydration. In their terminal stages, animals can no longer stand, and fall in untidy heaps, dying within days.

  But before even the first signs of disease, infected animals first shed huge quantities of the virus through tears and saliva, thus ensuring a ready supply of new hosts. The disease has been living in reservoirs of such hosts for thousands of years—the formal term is enzootic—but for not very well understood reasons, sometimes the reservoir overflows its banks, and the disease becomes epizootic: an animal epidemic.

  Which is precisely what happened in 1319, in a region that was particularly vulnerable to epizootics. For four centuries, European agriculture production and population growth had become a pyramid scheme that relied on putting more land under cultivation every year. More land meant more dependence on plows. And more plowing meant more animal power. Both horses and oxen (the generic term in Europe for castrated bulls) were used throughout Europe as plow animals; horses more productively because of an improved horse collar developed in Asia and diffused to Europe by the eleventh century, and which multiplied the load horses could pull nearly fivefold. But while horses could plow faster, oxen were much cheaper to feed; they can survive on hay, which just needs to be cut and dried, and they don’t demand oats, which need to be planted and harvested. Oxen remained the optimal choice wherever the cost of provender—hay/straw—was low, such as large demesnes and manors, where grass grew wild.* In such traditional villages, the typical plow was pulled by a team of eight oxen—a communally owned team, since only a village could afford such a capital investment. In others, horses and oxen were frequently harnessed together.