Retainers

...surrounded by HIS retainers...

In the social system known as BASTARD FEUDALISM, members of the PEERAGE and GENTRY recruited sworn followers known as retainers to provide a particular type of service in return for monetary fees or the exercise of the lord’s influence on their behalf.

Retainers often bound themselves to a lord by a written contact known as an indenture of retainer, which normally specified the type of service to be provided and the amount of the fees or wages to be paid. The indenture was so named because it was cut along an indented line to allow a matching portion to be given to each party to the contract. Although retainers summoned to arms as part of a great magnate’s AFFINITY formed the core of many civil war armies, most retainers supplied nonmilitary service, functioning as domestic servants, household officers, legal advisors, and estate agents. Although most retainers were liable for military service in times of need, as occurred frequently during the WARS OF THE ROSES, large numbers of exclusively military retainers were often hastily recruited when a campaign or battle was imminent. For such emergencies, a magnate also usually had a number of “well-willers,” men not under formal indenture but who had enjoyed the lord’s favor and influence and who could be approached for military service. To clearly proclaim a retainer’s allegiance, especially in battle, a nobleman often supplied his retainers with a special livery (i.e., uniform) or with his personal or family BADGE. For instance, in the poem, THE SONG OF LADY BESSY, the retainers of Sir William STANLEY are described as wearing coats “as red as any blood” on which they displayed Stanley’s hart’s head badge (Boardman, p. 66).

The king also retained men for various types of service; Sir Thomas Montgomery was given a livery of crimson cloth of gold to distinguish him as one of EDWARD IV’s knights of the body (a royal bodyguard).Wearing the king’s white boar badge, RICHARD III’s retinue of household knights charged with him into the heart of the enemy force at the Battle of BOSWORTH FIELD. All indentures contained a provision that declared the retainer’s allegiance to the king superior to his allegiance to the contracting lord. However, the Wars of the Roses, being a civil conflict, forced many retainers to make difficult choices between serving their lord, whose family may have long held the allegiance of the retainer’s family, and serving the king the lord opposed— a dilemma that faced many retainers of Richard PLANTAGENET, duke of York, when the duke openly challenged HENRY VI in 1460. A man could also be retained by two lords, a circumstance that created further difficulties when one lord supported the house of LANCASTER and the other the house of YORK.

Throughout the fifteenth century, PARLIAMENT enacted numerous anti-retaining statutes in an effort to curb the abusive use of armed retainers to conduct local feuds, attack political rivals, intimidate judges and juries (a practice known as embracery), and generally cause disorder and mayhem. Edward IV’s statute of 1468 tried to define who could be retained and for what purposes, and HENRY VII’s law of 1504 prohibited retaining without royal license. Neither statute was entirely successful because kings continued to rely on their own and their nobles’ retainers to form the armies they required to fight foreign wars and suppress internal rebellions. As a result, the practice of retaining remained in use well into the sixteenth century.

Further Reading: Boardman, Andrew W., The Medieval Soldier in the Wars of the Roses (Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton Publishing, 1998); Hicks, Michael, Bastard Feudalism (London: Longman, 1995); Hicks, Michael,“Lord Hastings’ Indentured Retainers?” in Richard III and His Rivals: Magnates and Their Motives in the Wars of the Roses (London: Hambledon Press, 1991); Rowney, I.,“Resources and Retaining in Yorkist England: William, Lord Hastings, and the Honour of Tutbury,” in A. J. Pollard, ed., Property and Politics: Essays in Later Medieval English History (Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Alan Sutton, 1984).

The Peasants’ Revolt

The people were tired of having no rights and being forced to pay high taxes. On Thursday 30th May the men of Fobbing, Corringham and Stanford attacked JPs in session at Brentwood. They were led by Thomas Baker of Fobbing. Similar events occurred in Kent.

John Ball, the priestly demagogue who inspired the rebellious peasants in 1381, preaching to the rebel host led by Wat Tyler (left foreground); banners proclaim the rebels’ loyalty to King Richard II.

The Kent rebels led by Wat Tyler and the Essex rebels led by John Ball and Jack Straw rose 100,000 strong to invade London. Their demand of the king was “We will be free forever, our heirs and our lands.” Richard II agreed but then in a face to face meeting, the king had Wat Tyler stabbed through the throat and he died.

The peasants’ final stand was the Battle of Billericay on 28 June, 1381. Some five hundred peasants fled to Norsey Wood where they were slaughtered by royal troops.

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The cumulative effect of economic, social, political, and military strains in fourteenth-century England is seen most graphically in the Peasants’ Revolt (1381). It was exceptional in its intensity, length, and broad appeal, but not in its fundamental character, which was revealed in other conspiracies and insurrections in the years that followed. Widespread violence was sparked off in 1381 by yet another poll tax, this one at 1s. a head, three times the rate of 1377 and 1379. People responded with evasion, violence towards the collectors and the justices who investigated, and, ultimately, in June 1381, with rebellion. Agricultural workers from eastern and south-eastern England were joined by townsmen and Londoners; the grain and wool-growing countryside of East Anglia had felt the full impact of the contraction and dislocation of the economy and the social contradictions of an increasingly outmoded feudal society. Moreover, the rebels were disillusioned by the political mismanagement of the 1370s and the recent dismal record in France, and they feared enemy raids on the coast. Although heretics played no major role in the rebellion, radical criticism of the doctrines and organization of the English Church predisposed many to denounce an establishment that seemed to be failing in its duty.

Pressure on the government and an appeal to the new king (‘With King Richard and the true-hearted commons’ was the rebels’ watch-word) held out the best hope for remedy of grievances, and the populace of London offered a pool of potential sympathizers. The rebels accordingly converged on London from Essex and Kent (where Wat Tyler and a clerical demagogue, John Ball, emerged as leaders). They threw prisons open, sacked the homes of the king’s ministers, ransacked the Tower, and tried to frighten Richard II into making far-reaching concessions which, if implemented, would have broken the remaining bonds of serfdom and revolutionized landholding in Church and State. But the rebellion was poorly planned and organized and more in the nature of a spontaneous outburst of frustration. By 15 June the rebels had dispersed to their homes.

The Accession of Richard II

The crisis entered a new phase when King Edward himself died in June 1377. He was succeeded by the Black Prince’s only surviving son and heir, Richard II (1377–99), who was ten years of age. England was faced with the prospect of only the second royal minority since 1066 and the first since 1216. On the latter occasion there had followed a period of political turbulence centring on the young Henry III; a similar situation developed after 1377 and played its part in precipitating the Peasants’ Revolt (1381) in eastern and south-eastern England. A series of poll taxes was imposed during 1377–80 to finance the war. These taxes were at a rate higher than was usual and the tax of 1379 was popularly known as ‘the evil subsidy’. They sparked off violence in East Anglia against the tax-collectors and the justices who tried to force compliance on the population. But what turned these irritations into widespread rebellion was the prolonged dislocation of unsuccessful war, the impact of recurrent plagues, and the anticlerical temper of the times. Hopes of remedy placed by the rebels in the young King Richard proved to be vain, though he showed considerable courage in facing the rebels in London during the summer of 1381.

The Battle of Radcot Bridge

Richard was still only 14, and the aristocratic rivalries in the ruling circle continued, not least among the king’s uncles. This and the lack of further military success in France damaged the reputation of the council that governed England in Richard’s name and even affected the king’s own standing in the eyes of his subjects. Richard, too, was proving a self-willed monarch whose sense of insecurity led him to depend on unworthy favourites reminiscent of Edward II’s confidants. As he grew older, he naturally wanted to expand his entourage and his household beyond what had been appropriate for a child. Among his friends and associates were some who were new to the ranks of the aristocracy, and all were generously patronized by the king at the expense of those (including his uncle Gloucester) who did not attract Richard’s favour. In 1386 Parliament and a number of magnates attacked Richard’s closest associates and even threatened the king himself. With all the stubbornness of the Plantagenets, Richard refused to yield. This led to further indictments or appeals of his advisers by five leading ‘appellant’ lords (the duke of Gloucester, and the earls of Warwick, Arundel, Nottingham, and Derby, the king’s cousin), and a skirmish took place at Radcot Bridge in December 1387 when the king’s closest friend, the earl of Oxford, was routed. At the momentous ‘Merciless Parliament’ (1388), the king was forced to submit to aristocratic correction which, if it had been sustained, would have significantly altered the character of the English monarchy. Once again, the pressures of war, the tensions of personal rule, and the ambitions of England’s magnates had produced a most serious political and constitutional crisis. The institution of hereditary monarchy emerged largely unscathed after a century and more of such crises, but criticism of the king’s advisers had reached a new level of effectiveness and broader sections of opinion had exerted a significant influence on events. These were the political and personal dimensions of more deep-seated changes that were transforming England’s social and economic life in the later Middle Ages

Cely Letters and Papers

The letters and papers of the Cely (or Sely) family, a series of documents describing the lives and business activities of a family of LONDON wool merchants in the 1470s and 1480s, are primary sources of information on English society and the English economy at the end of the WARS OF THE ROSES.

The letters, accounts, and memoranda in the collection concern the family of Richard Cely (d. 1482), who, with his wife Agnes (d. 1483), raised three sons—Robert (d. 1485), Richard (d. 1493), and George (d. 1489). The senior Richard Cely was a prominent member of the London merchant community in the 1460s, and in 1481 ran unsuccessfully for the office of sheriff of London. The Celys were wool traders, buying wool in England and shipping it to CALAIS for sale to cloth makers in BURGUNDY. Until his death, the elder Richard handled the London end of the operation— the purchase, inspection, sorting, and shipping of wool—while his sons Richard and George (mainly the latter in the 1480s) handled the Calais end of the business—the negotiation of terms for sale of the wool. After their father’s death, Richard and George continued the business as a true partnership, with Richard conducting operations in London. Besides wool, the brothers also occasionally traded in other commodities and purchased ships to engage in the carrying trade, that is, to transport the goods of other merchants. The eldest brother, Robert, seems to have been a rather unstable character who had a poor relationship with his father; he apparently dropped out of the family business and largely disappears from the correspondence after 1479.

Now found in the Public Record Office, the Cely papers survived because they were submitted to the Court of Chancery in 1489 as evidence in a court case involving a dispute over debts between Richard Cely and the widow of his brother George. The collection comprises 247 letters and over 200 other documents that cover the period from 1472 to 1488, although the bulk of the correspondence begins in 1474 and no letters have survived for 1475 and the greater part of the years 1483, 1485, and 1486. The letters shed little direct light on the politics of the period, but they are full of concerns about how political and military events might affect trade. This urban merchant perspective distinguishes the Cely collection from the other surviving family archives from the fifteenth century; the PASTON, PLUMPTON, and STONOR letters were all written from the perspective of rural, landholding GENTRY. The Celys and their correspondents had some landed interests, but their main concerns focused on London and on trade, an outlook that makes the Cely documents an important source for the social and economic history of England in the later years of the civil wars.

Further Reading: Hanham, Alison, ed.,The Cely Letters 1472–1488 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); Hanham, Alison, The Celys and Their World:An English Merchant Family of the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); selections of the Cely letters are available online through the Richard III Society Web site at <http://www.r3.org/bookcase/cely/>.

Sanctuary

Sanctuary was a right of the English Church whereby cathedrals, abbeys, churches, and churchyards could serve as places of refuge for criminals, debtors, victims of abuse, and political refugees.

In theory, a person claiming sanctuary could remain unmolested in the sanctuary precincts for forty days, after which time the person had to either stand trial for his offense or confess and swear to abjure (i.e., leave) the realm. If the latter, the offender was escorted from sanctuary to the nearest port by a local constable. If no ship was immediately available, the person had to daily wade into the sea up to his knees and cry out for passage until a vessel could be found to transport him. During the Middle Ages, certain English liberties (i.e., jurisdictions exempt from royal authority) and certain sanctuaries possessing papal or royal charters were accepted as permanent places of refuge. Although the right of sanctuary was found throughout Christian Europe, it was nowhere so widely used or so highly formalized as in England.

During the WARS OF THE ROSES, the concept of sanctuary for political offenders and political refugees was both widely applied and widely violated. Queen Elizabeth WOODVILLE fled twice into sanctuary at Westminster. From October 1470 to April 1471, during the READEPTION of HENRY VI, the queen remained unmolested at the abbey, even giving birth there to her son, the future EDWARD V. Elizabeth’s second period in sanctuary, from May 1483 to March 1484, was occasioned by the death of her husband, EDWARD IV, and the ensuing political coup of her brother-in-law, Richard, duke of Gloucester, who seized custody of Edward V to prevent the establishment of a government dominated by the WOODVILLE FAMILY. In June 1483, Gloucester either pressured or compelled Elizabeth to send her son Richard PLANTAGENET, duke of York, out of sanctuary and into the duke’s custody. The queen herself remained at Westminster until finally coaxed from sanctuary by a promise of support for her daughters, who had shared her confinement.

Several times during the wars, victors on the battlefield violated sanctuary to seize and execute losers. Edward IV had Edmund BEAUFORT, duke of Somerset, and other Lancastrian survivors of the Battle of TEWKESBURY forcibly removed from Tewkesbury Abbey. Two days after the battle, Somerset and most of his sanctuary companions were condemned and then beheaded in Tewkesbury marketplace. In April 1486, Francis LOVELL, Lord Lovell, and the brothers Sir Thomas and Sir Humphrey Stafford, adherents of RICHARD III who had been in sanctuary since the Battle of BOSWORTH FIELD in the previous August, emerged from their refuge to incite rebellion against HENRY VII. When the Staffords returned to sanctuary in May after the rebellion collapsed, Henry ordered them seized and brought out for trial, an action that resulted in the condemnation of both and the execution of Sir Humphrey. The Stafford case led to the first legal limitations on the right of sanctuary; after much debate, the Stafford judges ruled that sanctuary did not apply in cases of treason or for second offenses.

Further Reading: Gillingham, John, The Wars of the Roses (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981); Goodman, Anthony, The Wars of the Roses (New York: Dorset Press, 1981); Kendall, Paul Murray, The Yorkist Age (New York: W.W. Norton, 1962); Ross, Charles, The Wars of the Roses (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987).

Treaty of Westminster-Ardtornish, (1462)

By making EDWARD IV the ally of dissident Scottish noblemen, the 1462 Treaty of Westminster- Ardtornish sought to compel the Scottish government to abandon its support for the house of LANCASTER.

After their defeat at the Battle of TOWTON in March 1461, HENRY VI, Queen MARGARET OF ANJOU, and their chief noble supporters fled into SCOTLAND, where they were given protection by Queen MARY OF GUELDRES, who led the Scottish government as regent for her nine-year-old son, JAMES III. Allowed to use Scotland as a base for raids into England, the Lancastrians kept the northern counties in turmoil. To force the Scots to abandon his opponents, Edward IV allied himself with the Scottish king’s opponents. By the Treaty of Westminster-Ardtornish, John, the semi-independent Lord of the Isles, severed his links to the Scottish Crown and declared his allegiance to Edward IV. In return, Edward agreed to pay the Lord of the Isles a pension and to grant him northern Scotland, most of which was already under his influence, when the country was conquered by the English. The rest of Scotland was pledged to the treaty’s other signatory, James Douglas, ninth earl of Douglas, a Scottish rebel who had been resident in England as a pensioner of the Crown since 1455.

No attempt was made to put the treaty into effect, for the agreement was probably meant only to highlight the Scottish Crown’s vulnerability in northern Scotland and to convince the Scottish government to come to terms with Edward IV and expel the Lancastrian exiles. A truce was concluded in 1463, and Scotland thereafter ceased to be a safe haven for Lancastrian adventures. However, Edward IV remembered the ploy and resumed negotiations with the Lord of the Isles in 1479 when he was again at odds with the Scottish king.

Further Reading: Mackie, J.D., A History of Scotland, 2d ed. (New York: Dorset Press, 1985); Ross, Charles, Edward IV (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

Commissions of Array

A commission of array was a written grant of authority from the king to certain named individuals (commissioners) to gather all able-bodied men within a particular town or shire for military service, usually to resist foreign invasion or quell internal rebellion. The issuance of commissions of array was one of the chief methods for recruiting armies during the WARS OFTHE ROSES.

Under the Statute of Winchester, promulgated by Edward I in 1285, all men between the ages of sixteen and sixty who were fit to bear arms could be summoned annually for forty days of military service. Twice each year, royal commissioners, who were usually members of the GENTRY, were given authority under their commissions of array to inspect and report on the military readiness of the county or town in their charge. In times of military emergency, the commissioners mustered these local levies for service with the royal army. During the Wars of the Roses, the party in power used commissions of array to call men to perform their public duty to provide military service to the king, even if they lived in a region dominated by a nobleman then in rebellion against the monarch, and even if they were RETAINERS or tenants of a magnate or noble family supporting the opposition party.

Because the Wars of the Roses forced men to choose whether to obey a royal commission or the summons of an opposing magnate to whom they were attached, or, after 1461, whether to obey the commission of the Lancastrian or the Yorkist monarch, the operation of commissions of array became extremely complicated. For instance, in 1460, Richard PLANTAGENET, duke of York, having been recently declared heir to the throne by the Act of ACCORD, was governing the realm in the name of HENRY VI. To counter increasing Lancastrian activity in Yorkshire, the duke issued a commission of array to John NEVILLE, Lord Neville, who was to gather troops from York’s northern estates for a forthcoming campaign in the region. Neville raised the men as ordered, but then marched them into the Lancastrian encampment at Pontefract, where most became part of the army that defeated and killed York at the Battle of WAKEFIELD on 30 December. Those of Neville’s recruits who did not fight with the Lancastrian army probably returned home and so were also lost to York, whose campaign was troubled from the start by lack of manpower. How Neville’s men made the decision to fight against rather than for York is uncertain. Loyalty to Henry VI, local pride, Lancastrian PROPAGANDA, Neville’s presence, York’s absence, and the respect accorded a royal commissioner probably all played a part. Thanks to the clash of loyalties engendered by civil war, recruitment by commissions of array became very haphazard during the Wars of the Roses.

Further Reading: Boardman, Andrew W., The Medieval Soldier in the Wars of the Roses (Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton Publishing, 1998); Hicks, Michael, Bastard Feudalism (London: Longman, 1995).