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1. The battle of Lincoln (20 May 1217) and William Marshal’s ransom agreement with Nicholas de Stuteville

790 years ago the future of England hung in the balance as the forces of Prince Louis threatened to overthrow the minority government of Henry III and unite England with France. His dramatic defeat at Lincoln on 20 May to the forces commanded by the great chivalric hero, William Marshal, prevented this. Here, David Carpenter, in examining an unusual ransom agreement preserved on the Fine Rolls, shows that this celebrated triumph masked hard-nosed, personal business motives and was not quite the chivalric military endeavour it has been portrayed.

⁋1The battle of Lincoln, fought on 20 May 1217, is second only to Hastings as the most decisive in English history. When King John, in the late summer of 1215, reneged on Magna Carta, the opposition barons offered the throne to Louis, eldest son of the King of France. By the time of John’s death in October 1216, Louis held sway over more than half the kingdom. It seemed highly likely that John’s successor, his nine year old son, Henry III, would be swept from the throne, and England and France united under the same dynasty, a development of incalculable significance for the future shape of Europe. It was Lincoln which shattered Louis’ forces and ensured this would not happen. By the end of the year, the war was won, Louis had departed and Henry was seated securely on the throne. ¹

⁋2The commander of the Henrician forces on this great day was the regent, William Marshal, earl of Pembroke, a man of around seventy whose extraordinary career had brought him gigantic wealth and a reputation as ‘the greatest knight in the world’; that, at any rate, was the claim made in the life of the Marshal written within a few years of his death from information supplied by his family and friends, a work with claims to be the greatest secular biography of the middle ages. ² According to the life, the Marshal was so eager to enter the fray at Lincoln that he would have charged without his helmet had he not been restrained by a squire. ³ This episode caught the imagination of both John and Gillingham and J.C. Holt, and both used it to make wider points. ⁴ For Gillingham it reflected (a major theme in his work), the rareness of battles in medieval warfare: ‘No wonder that the old fellow was so out of practice that he forgot to put on his helmet’. ⁵ For Holt, it showed the ruthless materialism behind medieval politics and warfare for the Marshal was desperate not to miss out on prisoners and thus on ransoms: ‘There was clearly good business to be done that day in the narrow streets beneath the castle’. ⁶

⁋3Holt made this remark having commented on the ransom agreement that the Marshal forced on the great northern baron, Nicholas I de Stuteville, whom he had captured in the battle, an agreement Holt had found in the Exchequer pipe roll for 1220–21. ⁷ The purpose of this ‘fine of the month’, appropriately for May, is to publish for the first time an earlier text, indeed the one from which the pipe roll version was probably derived. This text is found on the fine roll for the second year of King Henry, which ran from 28 October 1217 to 27 October 1218. Although it is undated, it was enrolled on the first membrane amongst business for November 1217. ⁸ The fine roll text does not add any detail to that on the pipe roll, but it does cast light on the Marshal’s power and procedures during his regency. ⁹

⁋4Curiously, the fine, as set out here, fails to mention with whom it was made. It does not follow the usual form and state that it was made with the king, but equally it does not say it was made with the Marshal either. To learn that, we have to wait till a royal letter of 1224. ¹⁰ The fine is also unusual, indeed unique, in appearing on the fine rolls, there being no comparable example of a minister using them to record his private business. Whatever the precise explanation for these singularities, they certainly reflect the extent to which the Marshal, as regent, dominated the government and controlled its records. ¹¹ His agreement with Stuteville was of great importance. In varying combinations, depending on the promptitude of payment, he stood to gain either 1000 marks (that is £666 the rough equivalent of £6,660,000 in modern money) or a substantial landed estate in the Stuteville manors of Kirbymoorsoide in Yorkshire and Liddel in Cumberland. Clearly the Marshal would want a permanent record of the transaction and where more natural than on the fine rolls, which recorded agreements which he was making, if as head of the government rather than as a private individual. It may have been by pure mistake that the Marshal’s name was omitted from the Stuteville fine, but, if so, the mistake was one which reflected how familiar the clerks were with his business. They were not struck by his involvement because they knew all about it. However, there was, perhaps just one small reminder that the fine was unusual. It was customary to place in the margin beside a fine a note of the county which it concerned. In the case of the Stuteville fine the clerk wrote ‘Yorkshire’ and ‘Cumberland’. He also, before ‘Ebor'’ (Yorkshire), made quite a pronounced squiggle unlike anything else found on this first or any subsequent membrane of the roll.

⁋5Another puzzle with the Stuteville fine concerns the process by which it got onto the pipe roll. Periodically, throughout the year, the clerks sent copies of the fine roll to the exchequer so that it could enter the debts on the pipe roll (the annual record of money owed the crown), and set in train the process of collection. ¹² Thus only three entries beneath the Stuteville fine there is a note stating that whatever was contained above in the roll had been sent to the exchequer, that is sent on the originalia roll, as the copy of the fine roll was called. There is, however, no sign of the Stuteville fine in the pipe roll for 1218-1219, the first after the war for which there was a Yorkshire account, although other new fines do appear there. ¹³ Either the clerk drawing up the originalia roll had known perfectly well that the fine had been made with the regent and not the king, and had thus left it off, or, if it had gone on, the exchequer itself had left it off the pipe roll for the same reason.

⁋6This, however, was not the end of the story. In the next pipe roll for which there is a Yorkshire account, that for 1220–21, the Stuteville fine suddenly appears under the ‘new offerings, nova oblata’ heading, the usual place for fines entering the roll for the first time. ¹⁴ One can only suppose that in the attempts, after the Marshal’s death in 1219, to sort out his financial dealings with the crown, the suggestion was made the Stuteville ransom should actually have gone to the king. Either it was now sent to the exchequer on the originalia roll, or, if already there, the exchequer decided to act upon it. There were two alternative ways of doing this. One was to demand that the Marshal’s executors account for the ransom, as they accounted for all the rest of king’s revenue (including some ransom payments) which had come into his possession. ¹⁵ The other, the course adopted, was simply to demand that the Stutevilles themselves pay the ransom to the king. The result was that they found themselves in the ridiculous position of having to pay the fine twice over, once to the king and once to William Marshal. Not surprisingly, Nicholas de Stuteville II, who had now succeeded his father, protested before the king and the council and secured, in May 1224, a letter declaring that the fine had indeed been made with the Marshal, not the king, and ordering that it be removed from the rolls of the exchequer, which accordingly was done. The fact that the letter also concluded by telling the exchequer to quitclaim the Marshal of any demand for the fine suggests that it had indeed thought of exacting it from his executors. ¹⁶

⁋7How far, after all this, the ransom was ever paid to the Marshal, we do not know. By June 1219, Nicholas II had assigned Liddel to his under age nephew Eustace (son of his deceased elder brother) and then apparently assigned the custody to William de Valon’, which was perhaps a measure both to raise money and protect the property. It may also be significant that when Nicholas succeeded his father, probably soon after the end of the war, there is no evidence that he paid a relief (that is an inheritance tax) to the king. Certainly the fine rolls where such a payment would be recorded are silent on the matter. Did the Marshal arrange this so there was all the more money for himself? ¹⁷

⁋8The letter of May 1224, as if to justify the fact that the Stuteville ransom was the Marshal’s, had added that all those taken at Lincoln had fined ‘for their delivery’ with their captors. ¹⁸ This makes a wider point. The Marshal was far from alone in doing good business on that May day. Indeed, the whole aim in the battle seems to have been to capture rather than kill noble opponents, despite the fact, as we have seen, that the whole future of the kingdom was at stake. At the battle’s climax, when the Marshal confronted the commander of Louis’ forces, the count of Perche, he sought not to kill him but to seize the reins of his horse and thus drag him off to captivity. No doubt some of the grief felt by the Marshal at the count’s death was due to the loss of what would have been a fantastic ransom. That death was both accidental, due to a chance blow through the eye piece of his helm, and completely untypical. ¹⁹ Indeed the count was the only magnate who died in the battle, whereas one contemporary source lists forty-seven who were captured. ²⁰ What to do with these captives also dominated subsequent events. At the conclusion of the battle, some urged an advance on London, others the relief of Dover where Louis himself was besieging the castle. The Marshal decided differently. Before rendezvousing at Chertsey, everyone should go away with their prisoners, and place them in safe custody, the purpose of course being to make quite sure of future ransoms. ²¹ Thus the war stopped for business.

⁋9According to the chronicler, Roger of Wendover, the victors of Lincoln, to shame their defeated opponents, described the battle as a ‘tournament’, ²² yet in the lack of noble casualties, it was not very different from the general course of warfare in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. ²³ The ‘introduction of chivalry into England’ after 1066 (to quote John Gillingham), ²⁴ with ransoms underpinning the new fail safe form of fighting, made Lincoln and other engagements very different from what has rightly been called the ‘killing match’ of Hastings. ²⁵ The point is well made by the reaction to the battle of Evesham in 1265, where Simon de Montfort, and many other nobles were deliberately killed. It seemed not a battle at all but a ‘murder’. ²⁶ The same chivalric forms of conduct spilled over into politics in general where it was almost unheard of for a fallen minister or rebellious magnate to be executed. King John, for all his grisly reputation, executed not one of the many nobles he captured during the civil war. What a contrast to the late medieval and Tudor age.

⁋10This picture of a civilized society should not be carried too far, however. Chivalry did not extend to the lower classes, many of whom, including women and children, perished in the sack of Lincoln after the battle. ²⁷ It was also, even in dealing with noble opponents, perfectly compatible, as Gillingham has shown, with trickery in warfare and ruthlessness in business. ²⁸ That last fact, and the paradox to which it points, is brilliantly brought out by Holt, in his comment on the Stuteville fine, a comment, quoted here in full as testimony and tribute to a great historian writing at his very best:

⁋11‘Nicholas de Stuteville was captured at this battle and had to provide a ransom of 1,000m. He was to pay it at four terms, 250m. at mid Lent, 1218, and the same sum at Whitsun, on 1 August, and 10 November. The gages were his manors of Kirby Moorside and Liddell. If he failed to keep the first term then he was to surrender 50 librates [pounds worth] of land from these manors. If he failed to keep the second term he was to surrender another 50 librates, and so on for the remaining two terms. If the two manors could not yield an income of £200 then the deficit was to be made up from his other lands. These refinements of financial torture might have been envied by King John in his heyday. But they were not the work of one of his familiars, of a Robert de Vieuxpont or a Philip of Oldcotes. Their author and Nicholas’s captor was that paragon of feudal virtue, William Marshal. We may suspect that William’s urgent, almost helmetless rush into the fray at Lincoln was inspired by other things besides a quixotic gallantry and a desire to taste once more the joys of his youth. There was clearly good business to be done that day in the narrow streets beneath the castle’. ²⁹

2.1. C 60/9 Fine Roll 2 Henry III (28 October 1217–27 October 1218), membrane 8

2.1.1. 8

⁋1[No date]. Yorkshire. Cumberland. Nicholas de Stuteville has made fine by 1000 m. for his ransom, to be rendered at four terms, namely 250 m. at mid-Lent in the second year, 250 m. at Pentecost following, 250 m. at St. Peter in Chains and 250 m. at Martinmas in the third year, namely so that if he does not keep the first term, he has bound his manors of Kirkbymoorside and Liddel under this form, that if he does not keep the first term, 50 librates of land are to be forfeited from the said manors. Similarly, if he does not keep the second term, 50 librates of land are to be forfeited from the same manors. Similarly, if he does not keep the third term, 50 librates of land are to be forfeited in the same manors. Similarly, if he does not keep to the fourth term, 50 librates of land are to be forfeited in the same manors. If the said two manors do not suffice to make good 200 librates of land, he will supplement the default from his other manors. Robert de Stuteville and Walter of Sowerby have mainperned for this fine in that if he does not keep a term, all of their lands are to be forfeited. ³⁰