• 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 peasants of Rothley in Leicestershire, the Templars and King Henry III

In the latest in a series of articles concentrating on the tenurial relationships between the peasantry, the Crown and mesne landlords, David Carpenter here marshals more evidence from the Fine Rolls to examine how the tenants of the manor of Rothley in Leicestershire attempted to obtain the status afforded to tenants of ancient demesne, and how, ultimately, they were thwarted as Henry succumbed both to the influence of powerful individuals and the complexities of his own temperament.

⁋1As the Henry III Fine Rolls Project makes more and more rolls available, the remarkable light they shed on peasants of ‘ancient demesne’ manors is becoming increasingly apparent. These were peasants who enjoyed special privileges as a result of living on manors which had once been the king’s. Earlier Fines of the Month have shown how the peasants of Mansfield in Nottinghamshire and Brampton in Huntingdonshire made fines with the king both to exploit their privileged position and secure other favours. ¹ The fines thus reveal how these peasants had access to the royal court, knowledge of the concessions they could obtain there, and the financial resources to buy them. Until the project, such fines had been completely unknown since, revealing no genealogical information, they had been excluded from the 1830s edition of excerpts from the rolls. The present Fine of the Month is a variant on this theme. The peasants of Mansfield and Brampton were seeking protection from lords to whom the king had granted their manors. Those of Rothley in Leicestershire, on the other hand, aspired to hold their manor direct from the king and it was the king with whom they ultimately came into conflict when he decided to grant the manor instead to the order of the Templars. The ensuing law case raises important legal issues, and gives a fascinating insight into the king’s abilities at the start of what historians have called his ‘personal rule’. Having reviewed the case, one may well feel that Henry has to face the charge of being both tyrannical and simplex, this at the very time in 1234 when, having dismissed Peter des Roches as his chief minister, he was supposed to be embarking on a new course of just and lawful rule. ² The chief justice of the court coram rege at this time was the celebrated judge, William of Raleigh, the effective author of the great book on the laws and customs of England which goes by the name of Bracton, and he too has at least questions to answer about his conduct. ³

⁋2The manor and soke of Rothley have long attracted the attention of historians, and have recently been the subject of a University of Leicester doctoral thesis by Vanessa McLoughlin, which is both available on line and is forming the basis for three major articles in the Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society. ⁴ Some of the material used in this ‘Fine of the Month’ was set out in a paper on the descent of the manor by George Farnham which appeared in the Leicestershire Transactions for 1921–22. Farnham, however, made no use of the fine rolls, pipe rolls and plea rolls and thus missed the most significant parts of the story, a story which thus appears here for the first time. ⁵

⁋3To put the fine of the men of Rothley into context, a word about the property’s previous history may be helpful. Domesday Book shows that Rothley had been in the king’s hands both in 1066 and 1087. ⁶ By the thirteenth century the estate consisted of the vill of Rothley itself and thirteen attached hamlets whose men owed rents and services to the lord and attended his court, these hamlets being within what was called Rothley’s ‘soke’ or jurisdiction. ⁷ The desire of the Norman and Angevin kings to provide patronage for servants and supporters meant they were very ready to alienate royal manors, sometimes on a temporary basis, sometimes permanently. Rothley was no exception. In 1196 King Richard gave the estate to his brother John, the future king, a £47 deduction being made from the county farm to which Rothley’s revenues had previously contributed. ⁸ Since £47 was the rough equivalent of the annual income of three knights, this shows how valuable the property was. On John’s accession in 1199, he gave Rothley to John de Harcourt, Ranulf de Vili and Geoffrey de Luttrell. ⁹ Harcourt forfeited his share in 1204 for siding with the king of France at the time of the loss of Normandy, but was restored in 1215, an annual deduction of £35 being made from the county farm for his portion. ¹⁰ Harcourt, however, did not hold the property long since he died in 1219 at the siege of Damietta during the fifth crusade, on his death bed leaving £10 in Rothley (assigned in its soke hamlet of Baggrave) to the Templars, a grant which the minority government of Henry III decided to uphold. ¹¹ This was the beginning of the interest of the Templars in Rothley, an interest which was to have a disastrous impact on the ambitions of the men. Harcourt’s son, Richard, meanwhile seems to have succeeded to the remaining £25 worth of land, only for it to be resumed by the king in 1221, and then granted in 1225 to Joan, wife of Llywelyn the Great, who was also Henry III’s half sister. (She was an illegitimate daughter of King John.) ¹²

⁋4This then was the situation in 1230 when the men of Rothley made their move. An entry in the fine rolls, undated but coming between writs issued at Westminster on 27 and 31 January, recorded that the men of the vill were giving the king £20 in return for a charter conceding them the vill at a fee farm of £10 blanch per annum. This was to be rendered to the king by the hand of the sheriff of Leicestershire in return for all services, save tallage. ¹³ The purpose of this entry was simply to record the debt so that it could be placed on the orginalia roll, the copy of the fine roll which was sent to the exchequer informing it of the money it had to exact. When it received the roll, the exchequer copied the debt onto the list of money which the sheriff of Leicestershire had to collect (called ‘the summonses’). It also added the debt to the Warwickshire-Leicestershire section of the pipe roll (the record of the annual audit of the money owed the crown), where it appears, like all new fines, under the heading ‘nova oblata’, ‘new offerings’. ¹⁴

⁋5Alongside this note of the debt, another entry on the fine rolls recorded a writ issued ‘for the men of Rothley’ as the marginal annotation put it. The writ was witnessed by the king at Westminster on 31 January, addressed to the sheriff of Leicestershire, and designed to see that the terms of the charter were indeed implemented. It thus parallels the writ secured by the men of Brampton in 1242 for the implementation of the letter patent which they had just obtained. The Rothley writ set out the terms of the charter more fully than the earlier note. ¹⁵ The concession was to the men of Rothley and their heirs who were hold the vill with its demesne, woodland and mill ‘for ever’ (in perpetuum) from the king and his heirs at the farm of £10 blanch a year. The men were also to have the assarts in the vill, which they had previously held from the king, in return for rendering 22s. annually. The sheriff was ordered to permit the men to hold the vill in peace on these terms. The charter itself was copied onto the charter rolls. ¹⁶ It was issued from Westminster on 1 February and recited the concession much as in the writ to the sheriff, though describing both the vill and the men as the king’s (‘hominibus nostris’, ‘villam nostram’) and adding that £10 blanch was the ‘due and ancient farm’, and that the 22s. was what the men had previously rendered for the assarts.

⁋6The social structure of Rothley, which helps to explain some of the background to the fine, is fortunately revealed in a custumal of around 1260, which has been analysed by Vanessa McLoughlin. ¹⁷ The vill was a large one with eighty-four peasant tenants, as against forty-seven recorded in Domesday Book. The rise in the population seems to have been largely one of toft and small holders, with the number of more substantial peasants remaining static: the twenty-eight peasants in 1260 who held thirty-one virgates seem to match the twenty-nine villani who had been there in 1087. ¹⁸ This pattern of population rise is, of course, found elsewhere (Brampton is an example) and seems a sure reflection of land shortage. As for the status and services of the peasants, an earlier survey of 1235 described them as ‘custumarii’ which implies they were unfree but held by customary services. Since those services seem to have involved very light labour obligations and low rents, the men in that respect were well off. ¹⁹ There were, however, considerable divisions between the peasants in terms of wealth and land. It may be that the whole community acted together to secure control of the vill. On the other hand, perhaps the richer peasants wanted control to keep their inferiors in place. At the very least, as elsewhere, it was probably the former, who were the leaders, and the driving force behind the fine. The £20 offered were paid off in two installments recorded in the pipe rolls of 1230–31, and 1231–32, a sign both of the peasants’ resources and organization. ²⁰

⁋7There was nothing particularly novel about the fine made by the men of Rothley, men of royal manors having long made comparable offers. ²¹ They thus freed themselves from the direct attentions of the sheriff (if it was he who was running the manor), and removed the threat of increased customs and services. Even without fines, it had long been the practice to lease royal manors to their men. ²² The fact that the men of Rothley were to answer for what was called ‘the ancient farm’ of £10 blanch suggests that they may well have answered for it before in that way, in which case, since the pipe rolls preserve no record of them having done so, they presumably paid the farm to the sheriff who accounted for it within the overall farm of the county. ²³ Perhaps they had continued to answer for the same ancient farm under the Harcourts and the wife of Llywelyn. Nonetheless, the men of Rothley were still securing a very major concession. The vill was indeed to be held at ‘the ancient farm’, which meant the king had abandoned any attempt to make any extra money. To do that either by imposing an increment above the ancient farm, or by getting accounts for all the issues of the manor was common policy around this time, and indeed had been specifically permitted by the 1215 Magna Carta. ²⁴ The concession was also ‘in perpetuum’, not simply for a term of years (as in other cases), so the king could never increase his revenues, or indeed, if he abided by the concession, grant more than the farm of the manor to anyone else. ²⁵

⁋8In these circumstances a fine of £20 does not seem very large for such a concession, being only twice the annual value of the ancient farm. How were the men able to strike such a bargain? It is just possible we can find an explanation. When the delegation from the vill (if such it was) arrived at Westminster in January 1230, it found a great council in session, one called to discuss, amongst other things, the king’s forthcoming cross-channel expedition. As a result the Rothley charter, along with others issued at this time, was attested by an impressive consortium of magnates including the bishops of Bath, Durham and Carlisle, the earls of Kent, Chester and Gloucester, the count of Aumale and a large group of leading curiales. ²⁶ Amongst this group one name stands out, that of Stephen of Seagrave. ²⁷ He both knew Rothley intimately and was close to the king. Seagrave itself, Stephen’s ancestral home, is only four miles from Rothley. Indeed at the time of Domesday Book, although no longer in the thirteenth century, it was part of Rothley’s soke. ²⁸ In 1230 itself Stephen was sheriff of Leicestershire, which perhaps explains the charter’s insistence that Rothley’s farm should be paid through the hands of the sheriff, not that is, direct to the exchequer. Seagrave was also a senior justice of the bench at Westminster and, in January 1230, the keeper of the king’s escheats (the letter of appointment being enrolled on the fine rolls). ²⁹ He and the Chancellor, Ralph de Neville, bishop of Chichester, were soon to be appointed joint regents during the king’s absence overseas. ³⁰ On 28 January 1230, only three days before the Rothley charter, Stephen had secured a charter for himself (one affirming and enhancing his possession of the royal manor of Kineton in Warwickshire). ³¹

⁋9Stephen of Seagrave, therefore, may well have been the person through whom the men of Rothley secured their charter, perhaps extracting a considerably higher price for his services than did the king. But this still leaves a problem, one which readers may perhaps have appreciated. For how was the grant of Rothley to its men supposed to square with its possession by Joan, the wife of Llywelyn? Joan, it will be remembered, had been given Rothley in 1225. Since her portion was valued at an annual £25, whereas the men answered annually merely for £10 blanch, it would seem that Joan possessed not merely the vill, like the men, but also part of the soke as well. She also seems to have enjoyed a larger share of the assarts since the sheriff gave her 40s. a year for these whereas the men were only to answer for an annual 22s. ³² Joan’s tenure was during the king’s pleasure but although removed in 1228 (as a writ enrolled on the fine rolls shows) she quickly recovered possession and was still there when the vill was granted to the men. ³³ The solution to this potential conflict, perhaps intended from the start, was that, while she remained in possession, the men should give their farm for the vill and their rent for the assarts to Joan, as perhaps they had been doing already. The first step in authorizing this arrangement came in April 1230, two months after the concession to the men, when the bailiffs of Rothley were told to answer to Joan for the farm of the vill. ³⁴ Then in July 1233 a writ was sent to the exchequer which cleared the men of the debts they owed the king for the farm between Easter 1230 and Easter 1231, they having given the money to Joan instead. ³⁵

⁋10All this shows that the men had indeed got control of the vill and were answering for the farm and the assarts. Indeed so much was acknowledged in a charter of April 1231 which now assigned the men’s rents from the assarts to the canons of Croxton. ³⁶ The men must, therefore, have hoped their tenure would continue when, in June 1231, hostilities with Llywelyn led to Joan being finally stripped of Rothley. True, the sheriff of Leicestershire, still Stephen of Seagrave, in a writ recorded on the fine rolls, was ordered to take Rothley into the king’s hands and keep it safe. But, with luck, this would merely mean the men could now answer for the farm to the king through the hand of the sheriff, as laid down in their charter. ³⁷

⁋11Alas it was not to be, at least on any long term basis, for the aspirations of the men of Rothley were now to be decisively thwarted. On 6 July 1231, while at Reading, the king issued a charter which granted ‘the king’s part of the manor of Rothley’ with the advowson of the church to the Templars in free alms. ³⁸ The pipe roll evidence shows that this was a grant of Joan’s portion of Rothley for which the annual £25 had been deducted from the county farm. ³⁹ The reason the king was making this award, the charter declared, was because he had entrusted his body to the Templars for burial, which meant that he wished to be buried in the Temple church in London. ⁴⁰ There appears to be no evidence as to why Henry wished to lie with the Templars but quite probably he was influenced by the burial in April 1231 in the Temple Church of his brother in law, William Marshal earl of Pembroke. Henry, as he put it in a letter, ‘vehemently lamented’ the Marshal’s death, and probably attended his funeral. ⁴¹ It is possible indeed that the re-building of the choir of the Temple Church, if it can be dated to the 1230s, was to create a fitting home for the king’s body. ⁴²

⁋12It would have been natural for the king to make a donation to the Templars in these circumstances, but in fastening on Rothley, he was surely responding to the Templars’ own wish, the order, as we have seen, having already acquired part of the soke. The question, of course, arises as to how the charter giving the vill to the Templars, like the earlier grant to Joan, was meant to relate to the charter giving the vill to its men. Both charters were given by the hand of the chancellor, Ralph de Neville, and although Stephen of Seagrave was now away from court (he was on eyre in Yorkshire), both were witnessed by the treasurer of the exchequer Walter Mauclerc, the justiciar Hubert de Burgh, and the king’s steward, Godfrey of Crowcombe. ⁴³ The men themselves, of course, must have argued that the arrangement should be the same as that previously in force, with them now answering to the Templars just as they had previously answered to Joan. Both the writ ordering the sheriff to put the Templars in seisin of the part the king had held in the manor and that ordering the men to answer to the Templars (sint intendentes et respondentes), as before they had answered to the king, were compatible with such an interpretation. ⁴⁴ Perhaps for a little while that was indeed how matters worked out, helped both by the men paying in the whole of their £20 fine between Michalemas 1230 and Michaelmas 1232, ⁴⁵ and the continuing protection of Stephen of Seagrave. Having succeeded Hubert de Burgh as justiciar in September 1232, it may well have been Seagrave, at court at the time, who secured the writ of 13 July 1233 which led to the men being excused the farm from Easter 1230 to Easter 1231 on the grounds that it had been given to Joan. ⁴⁶ Perhaps too he was behind the writ which the exchequer issued a week later instructing the sheriff of Leicestershire to cease demanding the farm of the manor, since whatever the king had in the manor had been given to the Templars. ⁴⁷ The men, therefore, were now free to give their farm to the Templars without having it demanded also by the king.

⁋13If, however, this was the arrangement in the first years of the Templars’ tenure, it was soon destroyed by their determination to secure complete control of the property. If the king was content with £10 blanch from the vill of Rothley in perpetuity, the Templars most certainly were not. They seem, however, to have acted carefully, sensitive both to the political situation and the need to act lawfully. ⁴⁸ Thus they only moved after the fall of Seagrave in May 1234, and, instead of simply taking the vill from the men, they persuaded the king to bring a legal action against them. This appeared in the court coram rege at Kempton in July 1234. The plea roll recorded that the men of Rothley had been summoned to show the king ‘by what warrant they hold the manor of Rothley, whence they say that they hold that manor at fee farm from the king, and whence the Templars, who hold that in free alms by gift of the king, complain that the foresaid men wish to do nothing for them.’ The men went on to say that they held ‘by gift of the king by his charter’ but they admitted they did not have the charter with them, though adding, in explanation, that they had had no summons and no original writ had come, presumably here referring to a writ to begin the quo warranto proceedings. The men were, therefore, given another day coram rege in three weeks time when they were to produce their charter. An original writ was also to come to them. At the appointed day, however, only one of the Rothleyans turned up and he did not have the charter so the sheriff was now ordered to distrain the men to appear with their charter on 16 August. ⁴⁹

⁋14On 16 August, by which time the king was at Abingdon, the men now appeared, and were all placed in mercy for their earlier default. They did, however, present their charter, which, as the plea roll said, ‘testifies that he [the king] gave them that manor to hold to them and their heirs for £10 blanch and for 22s for a certain assart. And that charter was made in the year of his reign fourteen.’ ⁵⁰ The crux of the case had now been reached. Essentially the men were asking the king to uphold the charter he had granted to them as against the charter which he had granted to the Templars. The correct procedure in such cases was clear. The king’s justices could not sit in judgement on royal charters for only the king could interpret his own acts. ⁵¹ This did not mean, however, that the king had carte blanche and could do whatever he wished, overturning charters whenever he found them inconvenient. No, in interpreting his charters, he was expected to act in a lawful fashion. If a charter had been properly granted by himself or his predecessors he was bound to uphold it, unless there was some very good reason to the contrary. If charters were in conflict, as in the Rothley case, then he was bound to consider, in proper fashion, which was the more valid. ⁵² If the king did not act like this, then no royal charters could be trusted and no man’s property was safe. The king, placing himself above the law, would essentially be a tyrant.

⁋15These issues had been raised in acute form in 1233 in a cause célèbre which provides the legal and political background to the Rothley affair. In a case coram rege in the January of that year Gilbert Basset had been summoned to show by what warrant he held the manor of Upavon in Wiltshire, a manor, which so the king had heard, King John had granted to Peter de Maulay. In his defence, Gilbert produced Henry III’s charter of 1229 which granted the manor to him and his heirs, and asked Henry to uphold it. Henry, however, refused and instead gave the manor back to de Maulay, although he could produce no charter or anything else to show that his tenure was other than at the king’s will. ⁵³ The decision was political, for Maulay’s patron was none other than Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester, who, having ousted Hubert de Burgh the year before, now utterly dominated the king. Henry’s dispossession of Basset could thus be portrayed as an act of arbitrary dispossession clean contrary to Magna Carta, and it produced an explosion. Basset was both a substantial magnate in his own right, and also a leading associate of Richard Marshal, earl of Pembroke. His case did not stand alone because around this time, punishing enemies and rewarding friends, des Roches got the king to overturn the rights embodied in no less than thirteen royal charters and one letter patent. ⁵⁴ The country seemed to face tyranny, and a tyranny made all the worse by the fact that des Roches and some of his closest associates (like de Maulay) were foreigners. The result was a civil war and in the spring of the following year the collapse of the des Roches regime. At a great council held at Gloucester in May and June 1234, Henry was brought back to a course of just and lawful rule. Upavon was returned to Gilbert Basset with the king acknowledging that he had dispossessed him ‘by our will’, which meant (in this context) unlawfully. ⁵⁵ Other similar injustices were righted with the king, in the court coram rege, publicly confessing his faults: he had disseised Eustace de Stuteville ‘by his will without summons and without judgement’; ⁵⁶ contravening the terms of his own charter he had taken Cheddar wood from the bishop of Bath ‘by his will unjustly’. In the latter case, he pronounced ‘with his own mouth’ the judgement which restored the bishop. ⁵⁷

⁋16Against this background, it certainly behoved Henry to act lawfully in the Rothley case, which, on the face of it, meant upholding the charter granted to the men. It was after all earlier in date than the Templars’. It also, for what that was worth, had the more impressive witnesses – three bishops and four earls as against one bishop and one earl. ⁵⁸ But Henry did not do this. Instead he refused to uphold the men’s charter ‘and so’, the record of the case, concluded ‘the charter has been returned to the lord king’. ⁵⁹ The men had simply surrendered it. Henry offered two grounds for his decision. The first must rank as one of the most extraordinary statements he made during the course of his long reign, indeed one of the most extraordinary ever made by a king of England. It certainly seems on a par with his letter of 1260 in which Henry announced that he was returning to England because the king of France had told him it was dishonourable not to do so. ⁶⁰ The reason Henry gave was that when the charter was granted in the fourteenth year of his reign ‘he was then under age, infra etatem’. Now by no stretch of the imagination was this true. Henry was born on 1 October 1207. He had entered full power and begun to issue charters in January 1227 when he was aged nineteen years and a few months. If occasional doubts were raised about these charters because he was still under age, there could be none after 1 October 1228 when he became twenty-one. ⁶¹ By the time he granted the charter to the men of Rothley in February 1230 he was aged twenty-three years and four months. In making his claim Henry can neither have been forgetting the date of the charter, nor disingenuously pretending that it had been granted earlier than it had, for the fact that it had been issued in his fourteenth year was clearly stated in the case. ⁶² Indeed, Henry quite specifically declared that he was ‘then’ under age. What was he thinking of? The only suggestion I can make is that he was alleging that at the time of the grant, he was still very much in the power of Hubert de Burgh and other ministers (like Seagrave), and thus for practical purposes was still under age, or at least treated as if he was. ⁶³ That he was prepared to confess as much, in the process making himself look ridiculous, hardly says much for his sagacity and sense of regality. This seems a clear example of the ‘simplicity’ about which contemporaries so often complained. ⁶⁴

⁋17Henry’s second reason was a better one, though linked to the first. ‘He was under age and deceived’, the deception evidently being possible because of his tender years. Unfortunately the record does not reveal how the king claimed he was misled although there may be a hint in the case’s conclusion: ‘and so the charter has been returned to the lord king, and since all our rustici are of the lord king.’ The unfree status of peasants, which is what rustici implies, may then have been part of the alleged deception, Henry now saying that, at the time of the charter, he believed them to have been be free men. Alternatively it may simply have been an additional reason why the men were to surrender their charter, the view being that the unfree were incapable of holding such a concession. Curiously enough the men of Rothley do not seem to have been blamed for what had happened. Having surrendered their charter they were treated with consideration, the £20 they had given for it being returned, or at least an order being made to that effect. One wonders, in fact, whether someone else was blamed, the most likely candidate, apart from Hubert de Burgh, being, of course, Stephen of Seagrave. Dismissed from the justiciarship in May, he was now in deep disgrace. Indeed he was soon himself summoned coram rege to answer the charge of obtaining various grants from the king by deception, this by concealing their true value. ⁶⁵ Given the bargain obtained by the men of Rothley, under-valuation may have been a factor in their case also.

⁋18The king’s claim that he had been deceived, if true, was justification for abrogating the men’s charter. Yet it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that Henry had made up his mind to give the manor to the Templars, and was simply dredging up any excuse for doing so. In 1230 Henry still had Hubert as his chief minister but was perfectly capable of asserting his own will. ⁶⁶ When he granted the charter, one suspects that he was not bothered one way or the other about the precise status of the men, any more than were the chancellor who gave the charter and the array of magnates and ministers who witnessed it. The statement now that the men were rustici was ex parte and not tested during the case. If it meant that the men held by whatever services the king might decide, this was contradicted by an inquiry the following year which described them as customary tenants, who, if they had no protection under the common law, then at least had the expectation that they would continue to hold by whatever services were customary in the manor. ⁶⁷ Whether or not such men could hold a charter from the king conceding them their manor at farm in perpetuity was at least an open question. The men of Rothley were surely entitled to feel that the king had acted dishonorably towards them, and perhaps downright unjustly. That the king was able to quash the charter so easily was, of course, because he was dealing with peasants. He acted very differently, around this time, when the charters were held by those higher up the social scale like the bishop of Bath. As was so often the case, principles of right and justice did not operate in a political and social vacuum. They were far more likely to be invoked, and invoked successfully, by magnates and ministers than by those lower down the social scale.

⁋19But where in all this was William of Raleigh, the chief justice of the court coram rege? Raleigh, as his great book on the laws and customs of England shows, believed passionately that the king was subject to the law. He had been appointed to head the court after the fall of Peter des Roches very much as symbol of the just and lawful rule to which the king was now committed. ⁶⁸ It was under his presidency that many of the king’s injustices were being reversed by the court. He may well at this time, reflecting on the king’s failure in the Upavon case, have added to Bracton the famous passage about the barons bridling the king if he ‘without law’. ⁶⁹ Yet, here he was allowing Henry to speak foolishly and act, arguably at least, unjustly. Of course, the judgement, since it concerned royal charters was for the king to make, but Raleigh, as the chief justice of the court had surely the duty to give good counsel. He does not seem to have done so very effectively. Yet is this altogether fair? Raleigh may have pointed out to the king the difficulties of what he proposed to say and do. And in the end, did Raleigh seek to distance himself from what was done? That would perhaps explain why he allowed the king’s ridiculous statement about being under age to appear on the roll, for it demonstrated that he himself had nothing to do with the judgement. And was it Raleigh too who gave the order for the £20 to be returned to the men, almost an acknowledgement that they had been unfairly treated?

⁋20Once the case was over, there was limited consolation for the men. For all the order to that effect, there is no evidence that they ever got their money back, and the balance of probabilities is that they did not. ⁷⁰ It was not till the pipe roll of 1237–1238 that the exchequer even acquitted them of the annual farm of the manor and the rent for the assarts for which they were still being charged every year. ⁷¹ The Templars followed up their victory by establishing through a royal inquiry what exactly were their rights in the vill, and the men were ordered to perform the same customs as they had under Henry II and the king’s other predecessors as kings of England. ⁷² There was still, however, some fight in them. In June 1235 the sheriff was told to go to Rothley in person and put the Templars in possession of the assarts which the men were preventing the Templars cultivating, these being the assarts for which, as the writ said, the men had been accustomed to give the king 22s ‘by our charter which they have returned to us’. ⁷³ A little later the Templars had their position enshrined in a new royal charter. Amongst the witnesses only Hubert de Burgh and Richard fitzHugh had witnessed the original charter to the men back in 1230 although both were given by the hand of Chancellor Neville. ⁷⁴

⁋21The aspirations of the men of Rothley may also have left them rather isolated within the soke. At any rate, when in 1245 the men of the various soke hamlets reached an agreement with the Templars by which they were absolved from villein customs in return for an increase in their rents, the men of the vill itself were excluded from the deal: ‘All those who are of the body of the manor of Rothley…ought to do villein customs which before they were wont to do.’ ⁷⁵ Admittedly the labour services owed by the men were very light and their rents low, 3s. a virgate according to the customal of 1260. Yet there is some evidence that rents had increased under the Templars. At any rate the 1235 inquiry put the value of assessed rents in the vill at £5 18s. In 1260 they amounted to £7 9s. 0½d. plus an increment beyond that of £1 13s. 4d. ⁷⁶ If this really does represent a hike in the rents paid by individuals then the men had been protected neither by the custom of the manor nor by the common law. Evidently that had not felt it worth while to bring an action against the Templars via a writ monstraverunt, that action being one which enabled men of ancient demesne manors, as Rothley certainly was, to complain when their lords increased their services beyond those in force under the king. ⁷⁷

⁋22Men of ancient demesne manors had a direct line to the royal court, contacts with senior ministers, and an ability to purchase concessions from the king. The king could show a genuine concern for their welfare. Yet this only went so far. The cases of Mansfield, Brampton and Rothley all show that when someone more influential came along to whom the king wished to give patronage, then he was perfectly prepared to sacrifice his men.

1.1. C 60/29 Fine Roll 14 Henry III (28 October 1229–27 October 1230), membrane 9

1.1.1. 161

⁋1 [No date]. Leicestershire. The men of the vill of Rothley give the king £20 for having his charter concerning holding the vill of Rothley at fee farm for £10 blanched per annum, to be rendered to the king by the hand of the sheriff of Leicestershire for all services, saving to the king and his heirs the tallage of the same vill, as is more fully contained in the charter made for them. [Westminster, 27–31 Jan. 1230].