PanzerKaput Goes To Barons’ War

I finished Bishop Hugh of Wells, Bishop of Lincoln to led the militant monks and arranged forces, okay he is another commander so I have choices. With him done this means that all of the 1st wave of The Barons’ War and I’m chuffed.

Hugh of Wells (died 7 February 1235) was a medieval Bishop of Lincoln. He began his career in the diocese of Bath, where he served two successive bishops, before joining royal service under King John of England. He served in the royal administration until 1209, when he was elected to the see, or bishopric, of Lincoln. When John was excommunicated by Pope Innocent III in November 1209, Hugh went into exile in France, where he remained until 1213.

When he returned to England, he continued to serve both John and John’s son King Henry III, but spent most of his time in his diocese. He introduced new administrative methods into the diocese, as well as working to improve the educational and financial well-being of his clergy and to secure the canonisation of his predecessor Hugh of Avalon as a saint in 1220. Although the medieval writer Matthew Paris accused Hugh of being opposed to monastic houses and monks, there is little evidence of the bishop being biased, and after his death on 7 February 1235 parts of his estate were left to religious houses, including nunneries.

I have finished my last two mounted knights and have nearly finished the whole first wave of my Barons’ War stuff. I have gone again for that more individual look to them as though they are minor knights, not Lords and Barons, they all had their own heraldry, even if it was in the early days of design.

I have hand painted the devices and design on the shields and horse curtains, okay they do have a real name, Caparison, but I like the name horse curtains. I wish I could say I have based them on real shields and devices but no.

Robert de Ros (c. 1182-1226/7), kinsman through marriage of Eustace de Vesci, and the son of Everard de Ros and Roese, née Trussebut, was a Yorkshire lord, the owner of extensive estates centring on Helmsley in the North Riding of Yorkshire and Wark-on-Tweed in Northumberland. He was married, at an unknown date, to Isabella, an illegitimate daughter of William the Lion, king of Scotland, and widow of Robert III de Brus.

In the early 1200s Robert is found co-operating actively with King John, witnessing a number of his charters, chiefly at locations in northern England, and in 1203 assisting in the king’s defence of Normandy, where by descent from his mother he held the hereditary office of bailiff and constable of Bonneville-sur-Touques in the lower part of the duchy. In 1205, however, a year of rising political tension, there are signs that his relations with the king were worsening, and John ordered the seizure of his lands and, apparently shortly afterwards, had his son taken hostage. Robert, a little later, recovered his lands, but an indication that he might have been interested in leaving England is given by his acquisition of a licence to pledge his lands for crusading. It is not known, however, if he ever actually did embark for the East.

In 1212 Robert seems to have entered a monastery, and on 15 May that year John handed over custody of his lands to one Philip de Ulcot. His monastic profession, however, cannot have lasted for long, for on 30 January 1213 John appointed him sheriff of Cumberland, and later in the same year he was one of the witnesses to John’s surrender of his kingdom to the pope. In 1215, as relations between the king and the baronial opposition worsened, John seems to have tried to keep Robert on his side, ordering one of his counsellors to try to secure the election of Robert’s aunt as abbess of Barking. By April, however, Robert was firmly on the baronial side, attending the baronial muster at Stamford and, after June, being nominated to the committee of twenty-five.

When war between the king and his opponents broke out towards the end of the year, Robert was active on the baronial side, forfeiting his lands as a result and suffering the capture of his son at the battle of Lincoln in May 1217. After Louis returned to France, Robert submitted to the new government and recovered most, although not all, of his lands. He witnessed the third and definitive reissue of Magna Carta on 11 February 1225. Sometime before 1226 he retired to a monastery and he died either in that year or early in 1227. At some stage he was received into the ranks of the Templars and on his death he was buried in the Temple Church in London, where a few years earlier William Marshal, the one-time Regent had been buried. An effigy in that church sometimes associated with him dates from at least a generation later.

Robert is an enigmatic individual who had close ties with Eustace de Vesci but did not openly join the rebellion until just before Runnymede. He probably felt a conflict between his sense of loyalty to his fellow Northerners and his obligation of obedience to the king.

Saer de Quincy’s career is illustrative of the complex of ties that held the English and Scottish nobilities together as part of an international chivalric elite whose interests spanned personal and regnal allegiances. The son of Robert de Quincy (d. 1197) and his wife Orabile, daughter of Ness, lord of Leuchars in Fife, he acquired English interests by virtue of his marriage to Margaret (d. 1235), daughter of Robert, earl of Leicester (d. 1190). Another member of his family, an uncle likewise called Saer, had served Henry II in Normandy in the 1180s and his son in turn, also confusingly called Saer, acquired lands in England which eventually were to descend to his namesake.

Saer’s early career was spent mainly in Scotland. In the 1180s and 1190s he witnessed several charters of the Scottish kings and confirmed his parents’ grants to Newbattle Abbey, near Edinburgh, and made new gifts to the abbeys of Dunfermline and Cambuskenneth. Following his father’s inheritance of the other Saer’s lands he moved to England and entered the service of Richard the Lionheart, fighting alongside the king in 1198. In 1202 and 1203 he served with John in Normandy, being appointed with Robert FitzWalter joint castellan of the strategic Norman stronghold of Vaudreuil. In the spring of 1203 the pair, offering no resistance, surrendered the castle to King Philip of France, who was then over-running Normandy, and John in disgust refused to contribute to their ransom. There is evidence that Saer and Robert may have contracted a relationship of brotherhood-in-arms: Saer’s arms before he became earl bore a small shield bearing Robert’s arms of a fess between two chevrons, while Robert’s surviving seal carries the arms adopted by Saer after he became an earl.

In 1204 the death without issue of his brother-in-law, the earl of Leicester, brought a dramatic improvement in his fortunes, as the earl’s heirs were his two sisters, one of whom was Saer’s wife. By 1207 a partition of the family’s estates had been made, and Saer, by right of his wife, found himself taking over valuable and extensive lands in the English Midlands, the other part of the inheritance going to the second sister, the wife of Simon de Montfort the elder. In recognition of his enhanced status, Saer was awarded the title of earl of Winchester. From this time on, he was often employed in John’s service, leading an embassy to Scotland in 1212 and acting as justiciar between 1211 and 1214.

Despite his apparent closeness to John, however, he had unresolved grievances relating to properties of which he felt he had been deprived, notably Mountsorrel castle in Leicestershire, a part of his wife’s inheritance that King John had denied him. In 1215 he went over to the opposition, joining their ranks at his principal residence of Brackley (Northants.). He marched with the rebels to London and was present at Runnymede. When war erupted again in October between the king and his opponents, he and another of the Twenty Five, the earl of Hereford, headed an embassy to France to seek French assistance and to offer the crown to Philip’s son, Louis. In January 1216 he returned to England with a force of French knights, followed in May by the dauphin and his army.

Although John’s death later in the year presented an opportunity for reconciliation between rebels and royalists, Quincy remained steadfast in his allegiance to the former and their champion Louis. In the spring of 1217 he learned that his rival, Ranulph, earl of Chester, was besieging Mountsorrel, and on 30 April he and FitzWalter led an army to its relief, only to find on arrival that the siege had been lifted. They then turned east to attack the royalist-held castle of Lincoln, unaware that a royal army was coming to its relief, and under the walls of Lincoln, on 20 May, they were defeated. Saer himself was taken prisoner. In September he was released as part of the general settlement and he went on to play a respectable part in the Minority government of Henry III. In November he was a witness to the reissue of Magna Carta and issue of the Charter of the Forest.

In the spring of 1219 he embarked on crusade to assist in the siege of the Egyptian port of Damietta in the company of his son Roger, Robert FitzWalter and William, earl of Arundel. Soon after his arrival in Egypt, however, he fell ill, and he died on 3 November. In accordance with his instructions, he was buried at Acre and the ashes of his organs returned to England for interment at Garendon Abbey (Leics.), of which he was patron.

Saer’s career affords a good illustration of the role that a dispute over property could play in determining political allegiance. The same point emerges with equally clarity from other periods of instability in the Middle Ages, notably the civil war of King Stephen’s reign in the 1140s. Saer was one of the most experienced administrators in the ranks of the opposition, having served as a baron of the exchequer and a justice of the bench, and was heavily involved in the negotiations with the king that led to the making of Magna Carta.

Richard de Percy (before 1181-1244) was the second son of Agnes, heiress of the original Percy family, and Jocelin de Louvain, a younger son of Godfrey, duke of Lorraine, and brother of Adeliza, second wife of Henry I. His background and parentage are illustrative of the cosmopolitanism of the Angevin world.

Early in John’s reign Richard served on military expeditions with or for the king, but as the community of northern lords of which he was part moved into opposition to the king, so he went along with them, and in 1214 he refused to join John’s Poitevin expedition. On 26 June 1215 he was excommunicated by the pope for his disobedience, and in the following year he and other Yorkshire lords went over to Louis, the French king’s son, the leader of the baronial armies. He only returned to the king’s peace in November 1217.

Richard married, first, Alice, of unknown parentage, and, on her death, Agnes de Neville. He died in 1244, before 18 August. In his lifetime he had been a benefactor of two Yorkshire abbeys, Sawley (or Salley) and Fountains, and he specified in a grant to Fountains that, if the arrangements specified in the grant were carried out, he was to be buried in that house.

A shadowy figure, he stands out less vividly than some of the northern lords with whom he was associated.

The largest group represented on the committee of Twenty Five was not so much the hard-line barons from northern England as the leading landowners of East Anglia and the south-east. Once the movement of rebellion against John had gathered strength and spread out, it was these men who were at its head and who, after June, took the lead in enforcing the Charter. One of these home counties lords was Richard de Montfichet.

Richard was possibly drawn into the rebellion against John by his kinship ties with other rebel barons. His grandfather, Gilbert, had married Aveline de Lucy, the aunt of the rebel leader, Robert FitzWalter, and further back still, William, the first holder of the Montfichet barony, had been married to Margaret, daughter of Gilbert de Clare, earl of Hertford, forebear of two other members of the committee. Richard’s own sister was to marry William de Forz, yet another member. It is by no means clear, however, how kinship ties fitted into the matrix of baronial motivation alongside such other factors as personal grievance and questions of political principle. Quite possibly, their principal role was simply to reinforce decisions already made.

Richard (after 1190–1267) was the eldest son of Richard de Montfichet (d. 1203), a servant of Richard the Lionheart, and his wife Millicent. He was a descendant of William de Montfichet (d. before 1156), whose barony of Stansted Montfitchet (Essex) comprised nearly fifty knights’ fees, and from whom he inherited a claim to the custody of the royal forests in Essex, forfeited by his grandfather, probably for his part in the uprising against Henry II in 1173-4. The younger Richard came of age before 1214 and in that year served on King John’s failed expedition to Poitou in western France. Shortly afterwards, however, he is found on the rebel side, perhaps in the hope of recovering the rights forfeited by his family under Henry II, perhaps too as a result of the pull of the kinship ties already mentioned. On 21 June 1215, just six days after the king had given his assent to Magna Carta and by which time he had probably been named to the Twenty Five, he secured restoration to the custody of the forest of Essex, once held by his ancestors.

After the papal annulment of Magna Carta and the renewal of civil war, Richard remained in the rebel camp and was captured at the battle of Lincoln in May 1217. In the following October, after the French withdrawal, he returned to the royal allegiance and recovered his lands and rights, including custody of the Essex forests. He was to be a witness to two of Henry III’s reissues of Magna Carta, the first in 1225, the authoritative reissue, and the second in 1237. In 1244 he was a baronial representative named to consider the king’s request for a grant of taxation and so probably had a hand in drafting the remarkable scheme of government reform of that year recorded by Matthew Paris in his chronicle. From 1242 to 1246 he served as sheriff of Essex and Hertfordshire.

Richard was married at least twice but left no male heir and on his death in 1267 his estates were partitioned among the children and grandchildren of his three sisters. Living to over 70, he was the longest-lived and last surviving of the Twenty Five Barons of Magna Carta.

Among his estates was to be numbered the manor of Wraysbury in south Buckinghamshire, on the banks of the Thames immediately facing Runnymede and Old Windsor. It is not recorded what role, if any, Wraysbury played in the events of June 1215.

Roger de Montbegon (c. 1165–1226) was another of the group of hard-line opponents of King John referred to by contemporaries as ‘the Northerners’. Roger was the son of Adam de Montbegon and his wife Maud, daughter of Adam FitzSwain. His family held the barony of Hornby in Lancashire and other estates in Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire and the West Riding of Yorkshire.

In Richard I’s reign Roger had been a close supporter of John, then count of Mortain, joining him in his rebellion against the king during the latter’s imprisonment in Germany, and suffering temporary forfeiture of his estates as a result. In 1199 he offered 500 marks (about £333) to John, by now king, for the marriage of Olivia, widow of Robert FitzJohn, whom he shortly took as his wife. In the new reign Roger found himself in receipt of fewer favours than he had expected, and as early as 1205, when trouble was brewing in the north following John’s loss of Normandy, he was suspected of disaffection. Not surprisingly, he had many ties of association with other northern malcontents, notably Eustace de Vesci and William de Mowbray, to both of whom he stood surety for the repayment of debts to the king. In 1214 he was one of four members of the future Twenty Five who from the start resisted payment to the king of tax in lieu of military service in Poitou – the others being de Vesci, Mowbray and Richard de Percy. In the wake of John’s rejection of Magna Carta and the outbreak of civil war he was active on the baronial side but managed to avoid involvement in the baronial defeat at Lincoln. With de Percy, he made his peace with the new regime in August 1217.

Roger spent much of the next three years engaged in a bitter struggle for the recovery of his Nottinghamshire manors of Clayworth, Oswaldbeck and North Wheatley. Throughout the process he faced stubborn opposition and delaying tactics from the sheriff of Nottingham, Philip Mark, a former ally of John and a possible real-life model for the sheriff of Nottingham of the Robin Hood ballads. Roger himself, however, proved overbearing, and determined to get his own way. In 1220 he was accused of holding onto stock which he had seized ‘contrary to the king’s peace and the statutes of the realm’. A decision on his right to present a deputy to represent him in a duel was postponed since he was, in the court’s words, ‘a great man and a baron of the lord king’. When the Nottinghamshire court insisted on holding onto some of his own stock which had been distrained, he withdrew from the court exclaiming that, if it would not restore that stock, he would see to it himself. The constable of Nottingham then asked him three times ‘by the counsel of the court’ that he should return to hear the consideration of the court. This he refused to do. It was said in the court that if he had not been a great man and a baron of the king ‘his person might well have been detained for so many transgressions’. Roger, for all his involvement in the campaign to subject royal authority to the law, was not so keen on application of the same idea in his own case.

The younger William Marshal (c. 1190–1231) was the eldest son of William Marshal (d. 1219), the future Regent, and his wife Isabel, heiress of the line of de Clare earls of Pembroke.

For seven years from 1205 William was detained in King John’s custody, a hostage for his father’s good behaviour, only regaining his freedom in 1212, when John needed the latter’s support. In the crisis of 1215 John enjoyed the unswerving support of the elder William but his son threw his lot in with t he opposition, perhaps partly as a result of the experience of his youth, perhaps in part as a family insurance policy. He joined the barons in their muster at Stamford in the spring, and in June was named to the Twenty Five. In the civil war that followed John’s rejection of the Charter he fought on the baronial side, and after Prince Louis’ arrival, was named marshal of his army. Although active in the field, he took care to avoid any direct engagement with his father. A failure to secure satisfaction on a matter of personal concern, however, led him to change sides. He was keen to secure restitution of the great castle and lordship of Marlborough in Wiltshire, which had been held seventy years before by his grandfather, John Marshal. When Louis denied him this, he reverted to the royal allegiance. He then fought actively for the new regime, capturing Winchester and Southampton for the royalists and Marlborough for himself, and contributing to the great royalist victory at Lincoln.

On his father’s death in 1219 he succeeded him as earl of Pembroke and marshal of England, while on his mother’s death in the following year he succeeded to the lordships of Chepstow in South Wales and Leinster in Ireland. William ranked as one of the richest men of his day. Nonetheless, among his portfolio of properties were some to which other important magnates laid claim, principally those of Fotheringhay (Northants) and Marlborough itself. Over the next five years the Minority government’s attempts to resume these, and assign them to new owners, were to form a major thread in the political life of the day.

A claim to Fotheringhay was entertained by John the Scot, earl of Huntingdon, someone whom the Minority government was keen to satisfy him in the interests of better relations with Scotland. For nearly two years the Marshal steadfastly refused to give way. In 1220, however, his hand was forced when Llewellyn of Wales attacked his lordship of Pembroke, and he was in need of the Minority government’s assistance. When the justiciar, Hubert de Burgh, came to his aid, he quietly relinquished control of Fotheringhay.

His eventual surrender of Marlborough was brought about by a different means. In 1214 William had married Alice, daughter of Baldwin de Béthune, count of Aumale; Alice, however, had died in 1216. In 1221 the justiciar and the papal legate together came up with the proposal, designed to secure him to the justiciar’s party, that he take as his second wife the king’s sister, Eleanor. The marriage eventually took place in 1224, and the Marshal, as a small price to pay for a royal bride, surrendered Marlborough.

Once these property matters were sorted out, William proved himself an active champion and supporter of royal authority, fighting against the Welsh in 1223 and in Ireland in 1224. In 1230 he joined the king on his expedition to Brittany, to challenge the French, conducting raids in the direction of both Normandy and Anjou.

At the beginning of 1231 he returned to England for the wedding of his widowed sister, Isabella, to the king’s brother Richard, earl of Cornwall. However, he died suddenly in London on 6 April. Nine days later he was buried by the side of his father in the Temple Church, London, where one of the celebrated group of early effigies is presumably his.

Both of William’s marriages were childless, and his heir was his next brother, Richard, who died without issue in turn, and was succeeded by the next brother Gilbert. In 1241 Gilbert was killed in a tournament accident at Dunstable and, again being childless, was succeeded by the next brother again, Walter. He too being childless was succeeded by the last in the brood of brothers, Anselm. When Anselm died also without issue in 1245, the line of Marshal earls of Pembroke came to an end, and the vast inheritance was partitioned between the representatives of their five sisters and coheiresses. Among the families which benefited, either then or later, were those of Bigod, Clare, Ferrers, Mortimer, Bohun, Cantilupe, Valence and Hastings.

Geoffrey de Mandeville, another of the east of England rebels, was the son and heir of Geoffrey FitzPeter, earl of Essex, long-serving justiciar to both Richard and John, by his first wife Beatrice, daughter of William de Say and eventual heiress of the Mandeville earls of Essex. By virtue of the family’s ancestral connection Beatrice’s children styled themselves Mandevilles.

Geoffrey’s first marriage was to Maud, daughter of Robert FitzWalter, another important Essex landowner and the man who was to be effective leader of the baronial rebellion against John. Robert once sprang to the defence of his son-in-law when the latter killed a serving man in a dispute over lodgings at court and John threatened to hang him, declaring ‘By God’s body, you will not hang my son-in-law, you’ll see two hundred lanced knights in your land before you hang him!’ When the king put the case up for trial, FitzWalter appeared in court with two hundred knights.

Maud (Mandeville) died without issue and was buried in Dunmow priory (Essex). In January 1214 Geoffrey took as his second wife Isabella, third daughter and coheiress of William, earl of Gloucester, and the divorced ex-wife of King John. The match appears to have been forced on Geoffrey unwillingly, and to add to the probable sense of annoyance he felt, he was made to pay for his wife, and to do so heavily. Ever desperate for money, John charged Geoffrey a ruinous fine of 20,000 marks (about £13,666), this to be paid in four instalments each of 5,000 marks, the last to be handed over in Michaelmas 1214, with the proviso that the king might resume Isabella’s lands if the payments were to fall into arrears. The first instalment of the sum was set to be paid before the king set sail to Poitou in February 1214, a date entirely unrealistic, and when Geoffrey failed to meet it, the king ordered the sheriffs to put in hand measures for resumption. By August, however, Geoffrey was evidently beginning to give satisfaction, and John ordered delivery to him of his wife’s honour of Gloucester.

In the light both of his grievances against John and of his family ties with Robert FitzWalter, it is not surprising to find Geoffrey on the rebel side in 1215. In June he was named to the Twenty Five and, when the barons parcelled out the government of the country in the autumn, he was assigned responsibility for Essex.

He met his death by accident in a tournament with a French knight in London in February 1216, and was buried in Holy Trinity priory, Aldgate.

William Malet (c. 1175-1215) was one of the sizeable group of rebel barons who were heavily indebted to King John, making the revolt of 1215 in some sense a debtors’ revolt. William, the lord of Curry Mallet in Somerset, was the descendant of Robert Malet (d. before 1156), first holder of the barony, and the son of Gilbert Malet, who died in 1194. In 1196 he paid Richard the Lionheart a fine and relief of £150 to enter into his inheritance.

William’s early career, characteristically for someone of his background and upbringing, had been in royal service. He had accompanied Richard the Lionheart on crusade from 1190 and he had taken part in the siege of Acre in 1191. He was appointed sheriff of Somerset and Dorset by King John in 1209 after the two counties had petitioned to have someone local as their sheriff instead of the courtier William Brewer, and he served in the office until 1212. By this latter year he was running into financial difficulties, although the cause of his problems is not clear, and by 1214 he was owing the king as much as 2000 marks (about £1333). In 1214 he entered into an agreement to serve with the king in Poitou with ten knights and twenty other soldiers in return for the cancellation of his debt. In 1215 he went over to the barons, joining the confederacy at their muster at Stamford in Easter week, and in June was appointed to the Twenty Five.

Malet appears to have died only months afterwards in December 1215, for by that time his estates were in the possession of his son-in-law, Hugh de Vivonia. He left three daughters between whom his estates were divided: Mabel, who married first Nicholas Avenel and then Hugh de Vivonia (d. 1249) of Chewton (Somerset); Helewise, who married first Hugh Pointz (d. 1220), an associate of Malet in the rebellion, and second Robert de Mucegros (d. 1254), a future servant of Henry III; and Bertha, who died unmarried before 1221.

William de Lanvalei III (d. c. 1217), lord of Walkern (Herts.) was a member of a family of curialist administrators that had risen to prominence under Henry II and who owed much of their wealth to their years of service to the Crown and the opportunities for enrichment which these offered. It is a mark of King John’s mismanagement of the nobility that he should have so alienated such a man that he ended up on the baronial side in 1215.

William was the grandson of the founder of the family fortune, William de Lanvalei I, a Breton whom Henry II appointed as his first seneschal, or administrator, of Rennes after his takeover of the duchy of Brittany in 1166. William served in the office for five years, crossing to England in 1171 or 1172 to become the king’s castellan of Winchester and serving thereafter in a variety of capacities in the king’s English administration. Probably as a result of his royal connections, William was awarded the hand in marriage of Gunnora, daughter and heiress of Hubert de Saint Clair, through whom he gained possession of the barony of Walkern, created for Hubert’s father, Hamo, in 1120 from the escheated lands of Eudo Dapifer (Eudo the Steward). William I died in 1181/2, leaving a son William II, who died in 1204, and was in turn succeeded by William III, the member of the Twenty Five, a minor on his father’s death.

Like most thirteenth-century aristocratic families, the Lanvaleis had various claims to lands and offices which they pursued as and when opportunity and circumstance afforded. William’s father had brought a suit in the king’s courts against Hugh de Beauchamp over the manors of Eaton Socon and Sandy (Beds.), to which he laid claim by descent from his mother as successor to Eudo Dapifer, who had held the manors in 1120. Hugh appears to have lost possession of the manors for a time, as Gunnora was briefly in possession, but the Lanvaleis failed to establish a lasting title. William III’s own interest was rather in securing control of the royal castle at Colchester, again by right of descent from Gunnora. In Henry II’s reign the castle had been held by the justiciar Richard de Lucy, but the Lionheart had apparently granted it to William’s father, and he and his widow held it until 1209. In that year it was apparently lost to the family.

William accompanied John on his expedition to Poitou in 1214 and was present at the truce concluded with the French king in September. It is impossible to trace the path by which he made his way into the baronial camp, but for him, as for others, the ties of kinship must have played a part. He was related to none other than Robert FitzWalter, the baronial leader, through his wife’s mother, who was FitzWalter’s niece. His own mother, moreover, was sister-in-law of Geoffrey FitzPeter, which made her the aunt of another future rebel, Geoffrey de Mandeville. William can thus be seen as belonging to the wide east of England network which was increasingly dominant in the baronial movement as it spread from its northern heartland.

In July 1216, probably at a meeting of the council at Oxford, William secured a grant of custody of Colchester castle, for which he had striven for so long. He died shortly afterwards, leaving as his heir a daughter Hawise, who became the ward of Hubert de Burgh, the future justiciar, and was married by Hubert to his John, to whose family the barony passed.

It is tempting to associate the fine Purbeck marble effigy of a knight in the south aisle of Walkern church (Herts.) with this William, as lord of the manor. It shows the commemorated in a mail hauberk, a surcoat and a pot-style tournament helm. The effigy is one of a group of elegantly designed figures which includes three of the famous Temple Church effigies. On stylistic grounds the effigy can be dated to c. 1240-50, close enough in time to make William a possible candidate. The equally fine effigy of King John in Worcester Cathedral was not commissioned until the mid 1230s, some twenty years after the king’s death. One reason for associating the effigy with William is that he was the last of his direct male line, and the commissioning of an effigy in such cases was a way of keeping the family name alive. Yet it is important to say that the identification cannot be considered certain. The Lanvaleis were patrons of St John’s Abbey, Colchester, by right of descent from the founder Eudo Dapifer, and in an age when monastic burial was popular with the nobility it may well be that he was interred there. William’s grandfather, William I, had made a grant to the abbey ‘cum corpore meo’ (‘with my body’) implying that he desired to seek burial there. Unfortunately little remains of the abbey, and there is no documentary evidence which sheds light on burials within its walls. If the effigy at Walkern is not William de Lanvalei’s, it is probably that of his son-in-law, Sir John de Burgh.

I have finished a couple of local barons in John Babington, with the red dots on the shield and Henri de Grey, with the blue stripes on his and their bannermen. That means I have nearly painted the whole of the first wave of The Barons’ War and I have just two mounted knights to do and all done. I think I now have enough to start playing with, lol, until Robin Hood comes that is, lol.

This is all my completed and painted miniatures for my Barons War, which is basically the complete first wave minus a couple of mounted knights. I am quite shocked with the number painted and I am normally a slow painter and these have grabbed my imagination and I am loving it.

Next up is Robin Hood and crew and levys.

I have finished more of the backbone of my Barons War force the Spearmen and Bowmen. I love these sculpts from Paul Hicks as though these are rank and file really they are so full of character and are a dream to paint. I have again gone for the more muted tones for the palette to contrast against the more brighter palette of the knights.

John de Lacy, the constable of Chester, was a member of one of the oldest, wealthiest and most important baronial families of twelfth- and thirteenth-century England, with territorial interests distributed widely across the counties of the north Midlands and north.

John (c. 1192-1240) was the eldest son and heir of Roger de Lacy, constable of Chester (d. 1211) and his wife, Maud de Clere. He was a minor at the time of his father’s death and did not enter into possession of his lands until September 1213. Like a number of the rebels, he was a young man at the time that he became involved in the revolt. Although a natural royalism is suggested by his decision to join John on his expedition to Poitou in 1214, he nurtured a sense of grievance against the king owing to the terms on which he was granted possession of his father’s estates. The de Lacy inheritance was a highly valuable one, comprising more than a hundred knights’ fees, together with the baronies of Pontefract (Yorks.), and Clitheroe, Penwortham, Widnes and Halton (Lancs.). John, when he permitted the young heir to enter, therefore exacted his price. He insisted that the latter offer a massive fine of 7000 marks repayable over three years, in the meantime handing over to a royal keeper his chief castles of Pontefract (Yorks.) and Castle Donington (Leics.), to be garrisoned by the king at Lacy’s expense on pain of confiscation should the latter rebel.

As late as the end of May 1215 Lacy was still assumed to be on the king’s side. However, with the fall of London he threw in his lot with the rebels and was present at Runnymede and named to the Twenty Five. Thereafter he veered opportunistically between the rebel and royalist camps. On New Year’s Day 1216 he submitted to the king, agreeing to terms which shed remarkable light on the latter’s own attitude to the Charter imposed on him at Runnymede. Lacy was obliged not only to submit to the king personally but also to renounce the cause for which he had been fighting. In the words of the submission ‘If I have sworn an oath to the king’s enemies, then I will not hold to it, nor will I adhere in any way to the charter of liberties which the lord king has granted in common to the barons of England and which the lord pope has annulled’. Through the imposition of such terms, John was hoping to kill off the charter at birth. Although ostensibly entering into the terms of his own free will, Lacy was probably agreeing to a formula devised by the king’s clerks. Precisely the same wording is found in the charter of submission of Gilbert FitzReinfrey, who likewise made his peace in January 1216.

In May 1216 Lacy was still at the king’s side, but by the time of the latter’s death at Newark in October he was in rebellion again. He was probably active on the rebels’ behalf for much of 1217, but appears not to have been present at the baronial defeat at Lincoln. He submitted and was readmitted to fealty in August, a time when a good many rebels submitted to the new king. In the following month he was ordered to oversee the restoration of Carlisle Castle by the king of Scots. By now, however, his thoughts were now turning to the crusade, and in May 1218 he embarked for Damietta in Egypt with his overlord, Ranulph, earl of Chester. He did not return to England until August 1220. In 1225 he was witness to the definitive reissue of Magna Carta and in the following year he served as a king’s justice in Lincolnshire and Lancashire. Following Ranulph’s death in 1232 he was allowed to inherit one of the earl’s titles, that of the earldom of Lincoln, as the son-in-law of the earl’s sister, Hawise.

Lacy died on 22 July 1240 and was buried near his father in the choir of the Cistercian abbey of Stanlaw (Lancs.), his bones being moved to Whalley, when the monks transferred there in the 1290s. He left a widow, Margaret, daughter of Roger de Quincy (d. 1217), eldest son of Saer de Quincy, earl of Winchester (d. 1219), another of the Twenty Five. Margaret died in 1266 and was buried in the Hospitallers’ church at Clerkenwell, London.

William de Huntingfield was another of the group of East Anglian landowners who were active in the opposition to King John. He had connections with Robert FitzWalter, the main rebel leader and one of the Twenty Five, and with another rebel, the Lincolnshire knight, Oliver de Vaux. He held seven knights’ fees of the honor of Eye in Suffolk, including the manor of Huntingfield, from which he took his name, and several knights’ fees of other baronies, including that of Lancaster.
William entered King John’s service in 1203 as temporary custodian of Dover Castle, and acted as an itinerant justice on the eastern circuit in 1208-9 and as sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk in 1209-10. He sent knights on John’s expedition to Ireland in 1210 and served in person with the king in 1214 on his failed venture to Poitou. The signs are that by instinct and upbringing he was a natural royalist.

It is not surprising, then, that he was a latecomer to the opposition, turning against John only in 1215 and joining the rebels at their muster at Stamford in Easter that year. Like others, he may well have been moved by a sense of financial grievance, as he had offered speculative fines for favours, which had left him indebted, although John had offered some respite. After being appointed to the Twenty Five, he joined Robert FitzWalter and William de Mandeville in asserting rebel control over East Anglia and in offering assistance to Louis of France after his arrival in England. Like Richard de Montfichet, he was captured at the battle of Lincoln in May 1217, and in September two his knights came before royal agents to negotiate his ransom.

William died before October 1225, leaving as his heir his son, Roger (d. 1257), and a daughter Alice, widow of the Lincolnshire knight, Sir Richard de Solars.

Just one member of the Twenty Five was represented in the list in an official capacity, and that was the Mayor of London, William Hardel. His inclusion affords proof of the key role which London had played in the rising that brought King John to the negotiating table in 1215.

London was by far the largest and most important city in England by the early thirteenth century, a major centre of national and international trade, and the country’s social, political and economic capital in all but name. The moment when the Londoners opened their gates to the rebels, lending them their support and, perhaps more crucially, their money, constituted a turning point in the struggle between King John and his opponents, indicating to the king that he was in danger of losing his kingdom and that it was time to compromise. The Londoners’ reward for their backing of the rebellion came in clause 13 of the Charter, which said, albeit without much precision, that the city was to have all its ancient liberties and free customs both by land and by water. On 19 June, four days after the making of the Runnymede pact, the barons, realising that their control of London was their trump card, made a treaty with the king which used its return as a tool to secure his compliance with the new agreement. The treaty laid down that the barons were to continue to hold London, and the Archbishop of Canterbury the Tower, until 15 August, by which time the oaths to the Twenty Five were to be exacted throughout the realm and the king was to meet all claims against him to the restoration of rights and property. If all this was carried out by 15 August, then the capital and the Tower were to be restored to him. In the event, the conditions were not met, and city and fortress remained in the barons’ temporary guardianship.

The mayor of London, with whom the barons began their negotiations in the spring of 1215, was one Serlo the Mercer. Later in the year Serlo was replaced by the new Mayor, William Hardel, who had served as sheriff in 1207-8, and who headed a vintner dynasty with holdings in Vintry and Bishopsgate Wards. On the baronial side the lead in the negotiations was probably taken by Robert FitzWalter, the self-styled ‘Marshal of the Army of God’, who was lord of Baynard’s Castle in the City, and therefore in some sense a Londoner himself. Serlo and William and their fellow merchants remained steadfast in their support for the rebel cause in the war to come. When Prince Louis landed in England in May 1216, he made the decision to head straight for London. Serlo and four other citizens, all office-holders, when approached, personally raised the sum of 1,000 marks (about £666), which they supplied for his use. On 2 or 3 June in St Paul’s churchyard the citizens, led by FitzWalter and Hardel, rendered homage to the French prince. In the wake of the settlement negotiated at Kingston in September the Londoners returned to the royalist allegiance.

William de Forz (Fortibus) (1191×6–1241), holder of the Norman title of count of Aumale, was a mercurial personality whose apparent self-interestedness and frequent changes of allegiance raise questions, difficult to answer, about the balance of personal ambition and concern for the common good in the motivation of the medieval aristocracy.

Forz was the son of the wealthy Aumale heiress, Countess Hawise, a much married lady, by her third husband, the Poitevin naval commander, William de Forz, who died in 1195. He came to England, probably from Poitou, in 1214, and in September or October of that year secured possession of the English lands of his mother’s inheritance on the condition that he married Aveline, daughter of Richard de Montfichet. In this way he was brought into contact with another lord to be chosen one of the Twenty-Five. William’s English lands consisted principally of the honours of Holderness and Skipton in Yorkshire, Cockermouth in Cumberland, and lands in Lincolnshire around Barrow-on-Humber in the north and Castle Bytham in the south.

In the spring of 1215, perhaps as a result of his links with Mountfitchet, he joined the baronial opposition to King John and after the meeting at Runnymede was nominated to the Twenty Five. By August, however, he had changed sides, returning to the king’s allegiance, and he accompanied John on his punitive expedition to the north of England in December. He deserted John a second time in June 1216 but had returned to royal service by the autumn, after Henry III’s accession, and attested the reissue of Magna Carta in November.

In the course of the civil war from 1215 William acquired many lands, some of which belonged to the Crown, which the Minority Government was keen to recover from him. He surrendered most of these properties in or before May 1220, but clung onto Castle Bytham in Lincolnshire, to which his family had an ancestral claim. At the end of 1220, apparently annoyed at being passed over for the appointment of seneschal of Poitou and Gascony, he rebelled against the Minority Government, suddenly left court to garrison Bytham, and then, faced with the ravaging of his lands, fled to the north of England, where he took refuge at Fountains. The Government treated him remarkably leniently, and he and his men were pardoned.

In his later years Forz was employed on a range of diplomatic and military business for the king, treating with the Holy Roman Emperor at Antwerp in 1227 and accompanying Henry III on his expedition to Poitou in 1230. In the spring of 1241 he set out for Jerusalem, but died on the way. His wife, Aveline, was buried at Thornton Abbey, but his own burial place is unknown.

I have finished William d’Aubigny, Baron of Belvoir and another unit of Spearmen for The Barons’ War from Warhost and Footsore Miniatures & Games and I am loving this. Again I have freehand painted the shields and have painted the knights more colourfully that the average guy. Paul Hicks has done an amazing job of these and they are a complete joy to paint. I soon should have about 1000 points painted for the game.

John FitzRobert (c. 1190-1240) held estates distributed across two regions of England, the far north along the Scottish border, and East Anglia and Essex. He accordingly had ties with the two main, but largely separate, groups of barons who rose in opposition to King John in 1216.

John’s ancestors had a long tradition of service to the Angevin monarchy. His grandfather Roger FitzRichard through his military prowess had earned the favour of Henry II, who in 1158 granted him the castle of Warkworth in Northumberland and a few years later the castle and feudal honor of Clavering in Essex. John’s father, Robert, who came of age in 1191, served as sheriff of Northumberland in 1203 and received various grants of manors from John in 1204 and 1205. Robert was a man of wealth and made numerous additions to the great castle at Warkworth which are still visible in the castle’s fabric today, notably the Carrickfergus tower and the western part of the south wall.

John, who succeeded his father in 1212, took over from the latter his established position in northern society, numbering among his associates Eustace de Vesci, William de Mowbray and Peter de Brus. However, he also spent time in East Anglia, where his great-grandfather had acquired estates through his marriage to a daughter of Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk, and his father had strengthened the family’s position further by an almost equally valuable marriage to the daughter of the Norfolk landowner, William de Chesney. In 1213 and 1215 John served as sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk.

Understandably, in the light of his and his family’s long tradition of royal service, John was a relative latecomer to the baronial cause. It was nonetheless a tribute both to his high standing and the strength of his ties in northern society that he was chosen one of the Twenty Five. After the renewal of hostilities in the autumn of 1215 he joined his associates in waging war against King John, but after the baronial defeat at Lincoln in May the following year he was among the earliest to offer submission to Henry III’s Minority government. He served as sheriff of Northumberland from 1224 to 1227.

John married twice, his first wife, whom he wedded in about 1218, being Ada de Balliol, through whom he acquired the lordship of Barnard Castle in County Durham, and his second wife Cecily de Fontaines. When he died in 1240, Matthew Paris, the chronicler of St Albans Abbey, wrote: ‘In this year died John FitzRobert, a man of noble birth and one of the chief barons of the northern provinces of England’.