• Home
• Project Information
• Fine Rolls
• Style Book
• Commentary
  • Introduction to Reign
  • Introduction to Rolls
  • Originalia Rolls
  • Technical Introduction
  • Heads and Headings
• News
• Help
• Fine of the Month
• Book Publication
• Blog
• Conference
• Podcasts
• Related Papers

1. ‘The greater part of the vill was there’: the struggle of the men of Brampton against their lord. Part II: The Battle of Brampton

One of the most important features of the fine rolls is the evidence they provide for the litigiousness of individuals and communities at both ends of the social spectrum and of the favours even peasants believed they could successfully extract from the Crown. In the second and concluding part of a two-part article David Carpenter brings the details of the dispute between the men of Brampton (Hunts.) and their lord, Henry of Hastings, vividly to life. He highlights the tenacity of individual peasants, bondsmen, in clinging to and exercising their rights as tenants of the ancient demesne, and the conflicting and rapidly changing attitudes of the Crown to such tenants, to the ancient demesne itself and to the politics of the Court.

⁋1In an earlier Fine of the Month (December 2008), we considered the situation of the men of Brampton in Huntingdonshire when faced, in 1241–1242, with novel demands from their lord, Henry de Hastings, Hastings having just acquired the manor in right of his wife, a co-heiress of the last earl of Chester. In resisting such demands the men knew that they had certain advantages for Brampton had once been a manor of the king, an ‘ancient demesne manor’ to use the term now coming into use. As such, if the men, while under the king, had answered for ‘certain’ or fixed customs and services, as the Bramptonians believed they had, then these could not be changed by any subsequent lord. Hastings was sunk. ¹

⁋2The question for the men of Brampton was how best to exploit this privileged position. The example closest to hand was unquestionably that afforded by the men of next door Alconbury. Their struggle against their lord, Stephen of Seagrave, had led to the king ordering an inquiry (which came into the court coram rege in 1237) as to what services had been customary when the manor had been possessed by kings of England. ² Just how the men had begun their case we do not know, but it may well have been through the writ ‘monstraverunt’. This informed a lord that his men had shown the king that he was exacting services other than those customary when the manor had been in royal hands. If he did not cease these exactions, the sheriff would make him do so. This was certainly the writ obtained in 1236 by the men of Abbots Bromley in Staffordshire against their lord the abbot of Burton. There was, of course, little expectation that lords would comply with such injunctions or that the sheriffs would make them do so. Rather the writ prepared the way for the next stage, in which another writ, secured by the plaintiffs, summoned the lord coram rege to show why, contrary to the king’s prohibition, he was exacting the prohibited services. Alternatively, as happened in the Bromley against Burton abbey case, the writ might summon the lord into the county court. ³

⁋3Whether the first move of the men of Brampton was to bring a legal action against their lord we do not know. What is certain is that, either in tandem with or instead of such an action, they adopted another course, one neglected by the men of Alconbury. This was to go to the king at Westminster and make the fine which is the justification for this piece. The fine roll for 26 Henry III (28 October 1241–27 October 1242) thus recorded that the men of Brampton had given the king 60 marks (£40) that they might hold their lands and tenements by the customs and services in force when the manor had been in the hands of King Richard and King John, as the letters patent they had obtained testified. The sheriff, accordingly, in a writ witnessed on 10 March at Westminster, was ordered to take security for the payment of the 60 marks. ⁴ This, of course, was a writ entirely in the king’s interest designed to ensure that he got his money. But the Bramptonians also secured a second writ very much in their own interests, which appeared on the fine rolls two entries below the first. This instructed the sheriff, as before, to take security for the 60 marks, but also ordered him both to cause the letter patent to be read in full county court and ensure that the concessions it contained were ‘firmly’ upheld. ⁵ The letter patent itself, which the men wished to publicise in this striking way, was recorded on the patent roll. Here the king recited the concession outlined above to ‘the trustworthy men/probis hominibus’ of Brampton, and prohibited anyone, under pain of ‘our penalty/forisffacturam nostram’, from distraining the men to perform customs and services other than those in force under Richard and John; nor were they to be treated in any other way than in the time of those predecessors. ⁶

⁋4There is much, of course, which one would like to know about how the Bramptonians secured their letter patent. Was a delegation sent to Westminster and, if so, did it see the king in person or just a minister or ministers? Perhaps a favourable hearing was facilitated by the king’s exasperation with Henry de Hastings: in October 1241 he had been stopped from taking anything from Brampton wood beyond that needed for his hearth when he personally visited the manor. ⁷ More certainly doors must have been opened by the money on offer, £40 being double the annual income of a knight, and the rough equivalent of £400,000 today. That the villagers could promise and quickly pay such a sum is eloquent testimony to their wealth: an initial payment of £25 was recorded in the pipe roll of 1242–43, and further payments saw the debt finally extinguished in the roll of 1244–45. ⁸

⁋5Why then did the Bramptonians go to the length of purchasing their letter as opposed to simply beginning a legal action against Hastings via a writ of monstraverunt. The writ after all, since it was probably already one de cursu, would have cost virtually nothing compared with the letter patent. ⁹ The letter patent, moreover, did no more than affirm what was already the law. As monstraverunt itself showed, a lord of a once royal manor was not entitled to services other than those which had obtained under the king. The letter also paralleled the writ in ordering the sheriff to see that the customs in force under the king were observed. Part of the reason for the Bramptonian’s conduct may take us back to the men of Alconbury for the fact was that their action against Stephen of Seagrave had been a disaster. In the court coram rege in May 1237 they had acknowledged that they were `villeins’ and ‘bondmen of the king’, who, at the will of Henry II, Richard and John had answered sometimes for money, sometimes for services, and had given heriot and merchet. Accordingly the judgement was that Seagrave could enjoy a like position, and the men were amerced for a false claim. ¹⁰ Against this background, it is not surprising that the Bramptonians thought it as well to secure a letter patent which clarified and solidified their position. That letter did not state specifically that they enjoyed ‘certain’ customs and services under Richard and John, as opposed to holding simply at the king’s will, but that surely was the implication. If, after all, their customs and services were unfixed, then an order to maintain them as under Richard and John, was pointless, or pointless as far as the men were concerned. There was also an advantage to the Bramptonians in having their position proclaimed in the county court since that might be, perhaps was already, the forum for a legal action over their status.

⁋6In all this it is plausible to think that the Bramptonians also drew on another exemplum, which brings us to the remarkable parallel between their actions and those of the men of Mansfield in Nottinghamshire. Mansfield, as we have seen, was another ancient demesne manor which had ended up in the hands of Henry de Hastings and been subject to his aggressive lordship. Just how the men reacted to this challenge we do not know, ¹¹ but we do know how they responded to the novel demands of an earlier lord, namely the king’s household knight, Adam de St. Martin, when he was given the manor in 1217. Two years later, in January 1219, the men fined with the king in 20 marks to be allowed to hold their lands in the same way as they had under King John, and under King Henry III before the grant to St. Martin, not being distrained to perform services other than those which had been customary. Accordingly the sheriff was ordered to let the men hold their land on those terms, preventing St Martin from vexing them in any way. ¹² Clearly this fine is similar to that made later by the men of Brampton. The main difference, apart from it naming the culprit lord, is that it did not secure an accompanying letter patent, but here too the men of Mansfield could give a lesson to those of Brampton. This was because they too had made fine for a communal concession from the king when, in 1227, they had offered 5 marks to have a charter granting them the right to hold a weekly market. ¹³ We have no evidence of contact between the men of Mansfield and the men of Brampton, but given they shared the same lord, faced the same problems, and enjoyed the same ancient demesne status it is hardly fanciful to think that it took place. In that case, it was surely from Mansfield that the Bramptonians drew their modus operandi.

⁋7Having secured their letter patent on or around 6 March, we can imagine the Bramptonians bearing it home in triumph and treasuring it up, perhaps in the village church. Their self-confidence may well explain the great confrontation which was now to come, a confrontation which, with pardonable exaggeration, we may describe as ‘the battle of Brampton’. This takes us back to Henry de Hastings. If he had irritated the king in 1241 by wasting Brampton wood, he was soon back in favour thanks to his willingness, miles strenuus that he was, to take part in the cherished expedition to Poitou. Accordingly, on 19 March 1242, less than a fortnight after the concession of the Brampton letter patent, the king, while making a pilgrimage to Bromholm to pray before its relics of the Holy Cross, informed the sheriff of Huntingdonshire that since Hastings was accompanying him on the expedition, he was to be allowed a ‘reasonable tallage’ from the men of Brampton. ¹⁴ What followed next is best given in the words of those who held the subsequent inquiry in June 1242.

⁋8‘They say also that the bailiffs of the sheriff came to Brampton to make Henry [de Hastings] have a tallage from them [the men] by order of the lord king. And since they [the men] refused to give a tallage, the bailiffs took their cattle. And then the men of the same vill came and pursued them with hue and cry back to Huntingdon and took from them the aforesaid cattle with axes and staves. But they do not know their names because the greater part of the vill of Brampton was there’. ¹⁵

⁋9On the face of it this violent reaction of the Bramptonians (the judgement was indeed that they had acted ‘violenter’) seems misplaced. After all the king had sanctioned the tallage, and had done so in fairly normal circumstances. He was tallaging his own demesnes and it was quite usual, on such occasions, for him to permit favoured individuals, holding ‘ancient demense’ manors, to take a tallage for themselves. Hastings’ participation in the Poitevin campaign was the best possible reason for such a concession. Yet it may be that the men of Brampton were unaware of this background, and felt that Hastings was trying to take a tallage on his own authority. Indeed, was this to be one of a series of annual tallages like those he was imposing at Mansfield? If the Bramptonians feared that, their angry reaction becomes completely understandable.

⁋10The battle of Brampton presumably took place in late March or early April 1242 and, if so, we may wonder whether the villagers’ letter patent ever received its ceremonial reading (in English as well as Latin?) in ‘full’ county court. The most appropriate occasion for that would have been the great session of the court held at Huntingdon after the close of Easter but since Easter was late in 1242 (Easter Sunday fell on 20 April), by that time one can hardly imagine the sheriff being very compliant with his men still recovering from their beating up by the Bramptonians. For the next stage in the quarrel, as far as is known, we have thus to move on to the inquiry which the sheriff was ordered to bring before the justice, Roger of Thirkleby, at Huntingdon on the Friday after Trinity Sunday, that is on Friday 20 June, by which time the king was in Poitou. Unfortunately there appears no evidence as to the initiative which led to these proceedings, although they may have resulted from rival offers for (unspecified) inquiries – 10 marks from the Bramptonians and 5 marks from Hastings – recorded in the pipe roll for 1243–1244. ¹⁶

⁋11The inquiry, which we have already drawn on a good deal, covered both the conditions in the manor under the king’s predecessors and also the affray we have dubbed ‘the battle of Brampton’. ¹⁷ It was carried out by twelve named men, supposedly ‘knights and others’, men who, given their status, may well have sympathised more with Hastings, outsider though he was, than with the Brampton peasants. Certainly the inquiry stated unequivocally that there was only one free man in the manor – William fitz Ralph who held his land for 6s a year. ¹⁸ This was not in itself disastrous if, whatever their personal status, the men had held, under the king, by fixed (and acceptable) customs and services, since these Hastings would have to uphold. But here too the verdict was less than satisfactory. The jurors said that under Henry II, before the manor was leased to the men, the land had been held ‘in villeinage, sometimes at money, sometimes through villein customs at the will of the king’. To be sure, the jurors also specified the money rent – 5s a virgate – and said the services involved ploughing, weeding and various carriages, but the emphasis on the will of the king showed there was nothing fixed about the rent or the labour. The further statement that the villagers owed heriot and merchet – classic proofs of unfreedom – was equally damning. As with the men of Alconbury, the Bramptonians thus seemed akin to those ancient demesne tenants who, according to Bracton, held by ‘villein and uncertain services…and do whatever they are bid’. ¹⁹ Conceivably it was because they feared such a verdict that, in their letter patent, the men of Brampton appealed to the customs in force under Richard and John rather than under Henry II. When it came to Richard and John, the inquiry ran through the tale we have already told – how Richard had continued to lease the manor to the men at the £20 a year in force latterly under Henry II; how he had then given it to Lambert of Cologne, before leasing it again to the men for £30; and how John has then increased the farm to £50 before giving the manor to Earl David. As for the customs and services of the men during these periods of lease, the jurors said no more than that they could not discover whether John took heriot and merchet, though they added that, if he did not, this was by his permission and not as a result of the agreement by which the men held the manor for an annual £50. They also said John tallaged the manor when he tallaged his other demesnes.

⁋12At the end of all this, the judgement, seems hardly surprising for the men were placed in mercy for a false claim. ²⁰ What precisely they had claimed the record does not say, but presumably it was, as in their petition of 1265, to be sokemen and to hold their lands ‘by concessions and services due and accustomed’ as under the king’s predecessors. The editor of the close rolls for 1265–66, where the answer to the petition appears, thought that ‘concessiones’ here was a scribal mistake, presumably for ‘customs’. ²¹ But remembering the inquiry’s denial that the men’s freedom from heriot and merchet derived from an agreement with King John over the farm, it seems quite likely that the men claimed that new terms and conditions were conceded by John, and perhaps also by Richard, when the manor was leased; hence again the appeal to the position under those two kings.

⁋13The other half of the judgement concerned Hastings himself. He was to remain ‘in peace’ and to enjoy the same seisin as the predecessors of the king when they had held the manor. No distinction was thus made between Henry II and his sons, so the men’s appeal to the customs in force under Richard and John, seems to have fallen on deaf ears. Indeed the letter patent is nowhere mentioned in the plea. It seems to have availed the Bramptonians nothing. Had then it all been in vain? The answer is not quite for the judgement concluded with a rider. Hastings, it was said, could ‘do at his will, as the foresaid kings had been able to do, as concerning demesnes, woods, meadows, mills, save this that he shall not tallage the men of the foresaid manor save when the king tallages his manors and demesnes.’ If the men feared that Hastings was hoping to levy annual tallages (as perhaps indeed he was), they may well have regarded this stipulation as a great victory. There was also perhaps some comfort to be had from the preceding statement that Hastings could do his will as to the manor’s demesnes, woods, meadows and mills, for what conspicuously was not said was that he could do the same with respect to the men’s services. He and the men were thus thrown back on what had been in force under the predecessors of the king, but here the inquiry, later than Henry II, had said nothing about what those services had been. If the implication was that, as under Henry, they were up to the king to determine, this was not actually stated save for the remark about heriot and merchet under John. There was here, then, still something to play for. And one final point. While the inquiry said there was only one free man in the manor, it vouchsafed nothing specific about the status of everyone else. The Bramptonians were not described as ‘villeins’ and ‘bondmen of the king’. Much less did they actually acknowledge that this was their condition, as had the men of Alconbury.

⁋14The final part of the judgement dealt with the battle of Brampton. Here there was no consolation for the men. They had used violence against the sheriff and were thus in mercy for trespass (pro transgressione). What was more, four named men, who had actually appeared before the judges, were committed to gaol for the transgression. These were John Kechel, John le Sire, Elyas Nolly and Hugh de Mynill. In the record they are described as ‘quattuor exilles transgressoribus’. The editor of the printed roll placed a ‘sic’ after ‘transgressoribus’ presumably thinking it should have been ‘transgressores´, agreeing with ‘exilles’, the meaning being that the four transgressors were in some way exiled from the village. Had they perhaps been forcibly removed by Hastings and the sheriff? If so, neither the removal nor the gaol can have been permanent, at least as far as John Kechel was concerned for, as we will see, he re-emerged later in the 1240s to lead the villagers in their fight. Indeed, the fact that he appears first of the four in 1242 suggests he was already the leader at the time of the battle. That he was a man of Brampton is implied in subsequent references to ‘John Kechel and other men of Brampton’. There is also a tantalising reference to him in the Hundred Roll survey of the manor in 1279 where a Peter de Rokebi is said to hold one cottage from ‘the tenement of John Kechel’ and one cottage from the fee of the lord (John de Hastings). In all, Rokebi held twenty-eight acres of land and five acres of meadow for a rent of 18s. 7d. so if Kechel had once held this property (which is not however stated) then he was amongst the most substantial men in the village, just the sort of person one would expect to emerge as leader. ²²

⁋15Although Kechel’s importance is clear, the precise course of the dispute after 1242 is much less so. A general and partisan overview was given by the men themselves in 1265. Here they did refer to their letter patent, complaining that Hastings had vexed them contrary to its terms. Consequently a ‘contention’ was moved in the king’s court and although a ‘sentence’ was given for the men, Hastings (and his successors) used force to prevent it being fully executed, as a result of which the men were reduced to poverty. ²³ None of this is necessarily untrue but no substantive record of legal proceedings survives later than the inquiry of 1242. That action soon recommenced, however, is plain for in the pipe roll of 1244–45, in the nova oblata section, the men owed 15 marks to have an inquiry, a sum they paid off in the roll for the following year. ²⁴ Then, in 1247, John Kechel himself makes his triumphal re-appearance, and here we go back to the fine rolls. An undated entry, which comes between writs issued at Oxford on 28 April and Woodstock on 30 April, recorded that ‘John Kechel and other men of Brampton’ had given 20 marks so that the plea they had against Henry de Hastings might be committed to the bishop of Winchester and John Mansel to determine. ²⁵ It is surely reasonable to believe that Kechel had come to court in person to make this fine, and that he had met there with the bishop of Winchester and John Mansel. The former was certainly at court and the latter quite probably so. ²⁶ Kechel had chosen his judges wisely, testimony to how well informed this peasant was. Mansel was one of Henry’s leading councillors, yet a man of humble origins with a reputation as a conciliator and broker. ²⁷ The bishop of Winchester was, of course, none other than William Raleigh, the former chief justice of the court coram rege and effective author of the great book on the laws and customs of England which goes by the name of Bracton. Raleigh must have been known to the Bramptonians because he presided over the court coram rege at the time of the Alconbury case in 1237, and although the men of Alconbury had lost, perhaps they felt Raleigh had been sympathetic. At the very least, as Bracton showed, Raleigh was a man who believed strongly in due legal process. ²⁸ With the support of Raleigh and Mansel, Kechel was thus able to see off any opposition to the commission from Henry de Hastings although, believe it or not, Hastings himself was at court at this time. ²⁹ He was not, however, in favour. Only a month before the king had freed the men of Mansfield from the annual tallages he had tried to impose. ³⁰ Then, in May 1247, the king, perhaps fed up with all the trouble in the manor, initiated proceedings to remove Hastings from Brampton altogether (as he had already removed him from Mansfield), this through implementing the exchange mentioned in the original grant of the manor to Earl David. ³¹

⁋16Such a removal and the return of the manor to royal hands would have been sweet indeed for the Bramptonians but alas it never took place. Nor, as far as is known, did Raleigh and Mansel ever sit in judgement on the case. Perhaps for that reason the men did not immediately pay their 20 mark fine for the commission. Indeed, in September 1248, they secured a letter to the sheriff of Huntingdon (another new revelation from the fine rolls where it was recorded) telling him to respite the demand for the fine till fifteen days after Michaelmas, in the meantime returning the livestock he had seized in an effort to secure payment. ³² Litigation, however, continued in the court coram rege: in the Michaelmas term of 1249, by order of the king, a day was given there to Kechel and the other men of Brampton, plaintiffs, and to Hastings, defendant ‘concerning a plea wherefore he disseised etc’ which sounds as though Hastings had been trying to disseise his recalcitrant tenants of their properties. ³³ Next year, things had moved on again because an inquiry between Hastings, on the one side, and Kechel and the men of Brampton, on the other, which had been due to come before the judge Henry of Bath, was now, the king decided, to come before his own person in the octave of Trinity, a striking indication of his personal interest in the case. ³⁴ Disappointingly, the rolls for the court coram rege for the Trinity term of 1250 do not survive and the king’s order is, in fact, the last we hear of proceedings. When or indeed whether, between 1242 and 1250, a verdict was given in favour of the men, as they alleged in 1265, is unknown.

⁋17Matters were now, in fact, to take an entirely new turn for Hastings himself died in or shortly before August 1250. ³⁵ John Kechel’s reaction was immediate and forceful: he took away (‘asportavit’) three houses which Hastings had in the manor. ³⁶ Just why the houses were targeted we do not know; perhaps they were seen as symbols of lordly authority; perhaps they were new and encroached on the tenements of the villagers. Whatever the reason, if the villagers hoped that Kechel’s action heralded a new dawn, they were grievously mistaken. Their next lord was someone far more in royal favour than Hastings for it was none other than the king’s Poitevin half-brother, Geoffrey de Lusignan! ³⁷ In January 1250 he received the manor during the minority of Hastings’ heir. It did not take long for Geoffrey to sort the villagers out, doubtless because they no longer had a sympathetic ear at court. In July 1251 an agreement was reached and recorded on the close rolls – the records were now emphatically working for the lord not his tenants. ³⁸ The men of Brampton were to give Geoffrey 20 marks. They also undertook to rebuild the hall and the great grange in the manor and restore the three houses taken away by Kechel. It looks as though the hall, where the manorial court presumably sat, and the grange, where the lord stored his corn, had also been damaged in what may have been a general uprising after Hastings’ death. At the same time as the agreement, a writ was issued to the sheriff ordering him to assist Geoffrey’s bailiff, a local man Richard of Lymage, in restoring the houses. By another writ he was to put the bailiff in possession of the lands and chattels of Richard Nolly, nativus of Brampton, who had fled the manor, presumably a kinsman of the Elyas Nolly who had been one of the exiled transgressors back in 1242. ³⁹ Nor was this all for John Kechel and the other men of Brampton had to fine with the king in 40 marks for their transgression, presumably the transgression in removing the houses and damaging the hall and grange. Naturally the king soon gave the 40 marks to Geoffrey himself. ⁴⁰

⁋18Resisting their lords between 1242 and 1251 had been an expensive business for the men of Brampton, the recorded cost alone in the various fines and penalties being some 165 marks. There may well have been mixed feelings about whether it had all been worthwhile. On the one hand, the petition of 1265 stated that the ‘sentence’ in favour of the men had not been executed ‘in full’ which implied it had been executed at least in part so something was gained, perhaps freedom from annual tallages. ⁴¹ On the other hand, the men had still said they had been reduced to poverty by the actions of Hastings and of his eldest son, the reference here being to Henry de Hastings junior, who finally entered his inheritance in 1256. The men tactfully did not mention the king’s half-brother, Geoffrey de Lusignan, although he had doubtless been just as bad. Indeed, he acted just like Hastings senior in wasting Brampton wood with the consequence that it was taken from him by the forest judges who toured Huntingdonshire in 1255. ⁴² If this meant Geoffrey was under a cloud, the men, as far as is known, did nothing to exploit the situation by bringing a legal action against him. Nor did they move against Henry de Hastings junior, unless, that is, actions featured on the now lost Huntingdonshire eyre roll of 1252, or on the lost records of the bench and court coram rege between 1254 and 1258. But the silence of the 1265 petition suggests such actions did not get very far. Perhaps the men of Brampton had learnt a lesson.

⁋19And so we come in conclusion to the period of baronial reform and rebellion, a period which must have posed for the men of Brampton a series of puzzling choices. The inquiries of the four knights in each county, the eyre of the justiciar, Hugh Bigod, and the special nationwide eyre commissioned in November 1259, with their promises of redress of grievances, must have been known to the men of Brampton. The men of Witley in Surrey, claiming ancient demesne status, had come before the justiciar in 1259 to complain of their lord, Peter of Savoy. ⁴³ Yet in actual fact the opportunities for the Bramptonians were limited. The four knights had power only to record complaints; their hearing had to await the justiciar or the special eyre. But Bigod only visited Huntingdon briefly in June 1259, and heard nothing from the Bramptonians or more generally from the grievances produced by the knights. ⁴⁴ The special eyre, though commissioned for the county, seems never to have got under way. ⁴⁵

⁋20The Bramptonians’ relationship with their lords sent equally mixed messages. Few in the localities can have suffered directly from the king’s foreign relatives, since their lands were of limited extent. ⁴⁶ The Bramptonians, however, were manifestly amongst the few. Such hot spots of conflict, moreover, had the potential to radiate heat over a much wider area, so that we may suspect the favours bestowed by Henry III on the Lusignans, and the arrogant behaviour of their local officials (however English) were well known in Huntingdon itself and the surrounding country. Against this background, the popular xenophobia which engulfed England between 1258 and 1265 becomes all the more understandable. Their own experiences might seem to have given the Bramptonians the strongest motive for embracing the anti-foreign movement and throwing in their lot with Simon de Montfort who was its champion. And yet, and here lay the rub, that would also mean throwing in their lot with the oppressive lord who had followed Geoffrey de Lusignan, Henry de Hastings junior, for Hastings, of course, was himself a leading Montfortian. He had joined the great earl on his return to England 1263, been knighted by him before the battle of Lewes, and had then fought beside him in the gigantic hecatombe of Evesham. If then their contacts with Geoffrey de Lusignan suggested the peasants of Brampton should be Montfortians, those with Henry de Hastings suggested the very reverse.

⁋21There was also in this one other factor, which might have swayed the Bramptonians to the royal side. Their whole position depended on the special privileges they claimed as ancient demesne tenants, and on the access to court this provided. Their royal connections were all. There is, moreover, intriguing evidence that during the period of reform and rebellion the king was aware of his obligations to such men, and sought to capitalize on them. Thus in one of his complaints against his council in 1261 he declared that

⁋22‘the king’s sokemen and tenants are more aggrieved and ill treated than others of the realm, since they have no defenders if they come to the [council which despises them] and so they depart again having achieved nothing.’ ⁴⁷

⁋23It may well be that the king was thinking here not merely of the sokemen and tenants of manors directly in his hands but also of those, like the Bramptonians, on royal manors which had passed into other hands. Is it possible indeed, that the king knew of specific cases where petitions from such men, touching the interests of leading members of the regime, had gone unheard? The king had not always been a reliable master for the men of Brampton. If he had listened to their complaints, and granted concessions, he had also, when larger matters of patronage were at stake, cast them adrift. Yet if the men were aware of the kind of sympathy evinced in Henry’s complaint in 1261, they had additional reasons for remaining loyal to his cause.

⁋24If then men from Brampton were asked ‘Daddy, what did you do in the war?’, there may well have been a variety of answers. ⁴⁸ Some, of course, probably had no choice. If Henry de Hastings came into the village intent on raising a posse, there was little alternative but to go. Once, however, the Montfortian regime had collapsed, the men bent every nerve to re-establish and exploit their royal connections. Hastings, himself, miraculously, had escaped death at Evesham, and had not been imprisoned after it. Next year he was to be the courageous and ruthless captain of the disinherited during the siege of Kenilworth. His conduct, of course, was the direct result of his own disinheritance which meant that after Evesham the Bramptonians once again found themselves under the king. ⁴⁹ This was their chance. There was alas no longer John Kechel to lead them (or at least he is no longer mentioned) but in October 1265 a delegation (or so we may imagine) found the king at Canterbury and secured a letter addressed to the sheriff and those seizing the lands of the rebels in Huntingdonshire. The very length of the letter, one of the longest on the close roll for 50 Henry III, running to a page of modern print, shows the access and the influence the men now enjoyed. ⁵⁰ The letter set out the whole story of their struggles as they had shown them to the king: the due and accustomed services they had enjoyed under previous kings, the letter patent and the subsequent ‘sentence’ which Hastings had flouted, and the consequent reduction of the men to poverty. The king evidently was moved for, ‘having compassion on the foresaid men and their state, and wishing mercifully to do them grace’, as the writ put it, (a writ for which no charge seems to have been made) he ordered the sheriff and the seizors to allow the men to hold their lands by the same customs as those in force before the contention with Hastings, this to last until the king sent one of his fideles to inquire into the truth of all these matters.

⁋25The men seemed to have scored a great victory but those with long memories (and memories evidently were long in Brampton) knew only too well how fast the situation could change. The king might sympathise with his peasants but he sympathized even more with his courtiers. Thus it was that in November 1266, during the siege of Kenilworth, Henry gave Brampton to the Savoyard knight Imbert de Montferrand. ⁵¹ The men thus gained another foreign lord but one with whom it was possible to deal because in February 1267 Imbert leased the manor to the men at an annual farm of £80, £30 more than the lease under King John. This arrangement proved temporary. Later in the year Henry de Hastings, now restored to the king’s peace, recovered the manor in return for promising Imbert 500 marks. ⁵² The men, however, did not quite sink from sight under this renewed Hastings lordship. In the March of the following year, they were able to secure a writ, authorized by king and council, which ordered the sheriff to place in respite till Pentecost a demand for money they were alleged to owe Imbert de Montferrand, returning the cattle he, the sheriff, had seized to enforce payment. ⁵³ Hasting’s second lordship was in any case brief. He died in 1269 whereupon Brampton passed to the earls of Cornwall as keepers of the Hastings lands during the minority of Henry’s son and heir. ⁵⁴

⁋26Just how the men fared after Imbert’s departure, and how the manor was run, we do not know, although we get a last picture of the situation in the great Hundred Roll survey of 1279. ⁵⁵ There the men cannot, one assumes, have been very happy at being designated ‘bond sokemen’, a term found no where else in Huntingdonshire. The ‘bond’ side presumably meant they were personally unfree, this in distinction to the one ‘free sokeman’ in the survey, who was the successor of the freeman mentioned in the inquiry of 1242. ⁵⁶ On the other hand, ‘the sokeman’ element presumably referred to the fact that all the men answered for rents. There was no trace of labour services, and that at least must have been a consolation.

⁋27The end of the Brampton story is, therefore, something of an anti-climax. It may be that there is no more to discover, and that the men settled for their lot. On the other hand, work on the vast mass of unprinted legal and financial material from the later thirteenth century may reveal this was far from the case. Some of that material, through the great labours of Professor Robert Palmer, is made available on the University of Houston’s Anglo-American Legal Tradition website, images being found there of the rolls of the central courts after 1250, as well of the Henrician and Edwardian exchequer memoranda rolls. But, of course, this material, necessarily given the resources available, and the Herculean effort required to examine these sources in greater detail, is un-indexed, un-transcribed and un-translated. How one wishes for the day when the methods pioneered by the Henry III Fine Rolls Project can be transferred to other unedited material of the thirteenth century!

⁋28Those who live in Brampton today, or who drive past it up and down the A1, are quite unaware that it witnessed one of the great peasant struggles of the thirteenth century. The village is now the site of an airbase (as is Alconbury) and has been the subject of much modern building. Even the church is later than the conflict, being largely fourteenth century. Yet the landlady in the pub by the church can still point the way to Brampton wood, which sits on a low hill beyond the A1; the village is still surrounded by meadows; and one can still follow the route along which in 1242 ‘the greater part of the vill’ chased the men of the sheriff back to Huntingdon and rescued with axes and staves the cattle they had taken. May the battle of Brampton, John Kechel and all those who stood with him now be celebrated.