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1. The Fines and Loans of the Montfortian Bishops and the Missing Fine Roll ‘in expedicione’ of 1264

In this article Sophie Ambler traces the existence of a lost roll of fines from the height of the conflict between Henry and his barons. References in existing Chancery and Exchequer documents demonstrate that a roll recording proffers of large fines for failure to undertake military service in 1264 was kept by the king at a time when the machinery of government lay in the hands of his enemies. Moreover, these fines, often to have the king’s grace, point to the crises of conscience and loyalty experienced by several of the leading ecclesiastics of the day. Sophie is an AHRC-funded student working on a doctorate on the bishops in the period of reform and rebellion, and she is supervised by David D’Avray at UCL and David Carpenter at KCL.

⁋1Thus far, the Henry III Fine Roll Project has completed the translation and publication of the Fine Rolls up to the thirty-ninth year of Henry’s reign, ending in October 1255. Considering the wealth of information the project has yielded up to this point, we can look forward with great anticipation to the publication of the rolls for what is perhaps the most important and exciting period in the reign, the period, that is, of reform and rebellion between 1258 and 1267 so closely associated with Simon de Montfort. It is with this period that this piece is concerned, although the fines to be discussed are not actually contained in the Fine Rolls. Instead, they can only be traced through the Patent, Close and Pipe Rolls, this is because the fines were originally recorded on an ancillary fine roll which has now apparently been lost; the ‘roll of fines made for services owed the king in his expedition’, the ‘expedition’ in question being the king’s military campaign between raising his standard at Oxford in March 1264 and the battle of Lewes in May. ¹ Together, these fines and other related material illuminate a decisive phase in the careers of four of the five bishops suspended from office in 1266 by Clement IV for being ‘especial favourers’ of Simon de Montfort in the rebellion against Henry III: John Gervais bishop of Winchester, Walter de Cantilupe bishop of Worcester, Richard of Gravesend bishop of Lincoln and Henry of Sandwich bishop of London. ² Both Gervais and Gravesend, as we will see, made fines recorded in the lost roll for failing to support King Henry in 1264, while all four bishops made loans to the government when it was in the hands of Simon de Montfort. Gervais and Gravesend were later, after Evesham, severely punished for their conduct.

⁋2The scholarly, reforming circle of ecclesiastics in which Montfort moved has been examined by John Maddicott, who focused particularly on the spiritual influence of Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln 1235–1253. ³ After Grosseteste’s death in 1253, Cantilupe became Montfort’s chief episcopal supporter and can be seen playing a central role in the reform movement from an early stage, when he was chosen by the barons at the Oxford Parliament of 1258 to be part of the committee of twenty-four to draft the Provisions, (the only bishop to be a part of this stage except for Fulk Basset, bishop of London, who appeared for the king). ⁴ Cantilupe had become bishop of Worcester in 1237 and thus differed from the other Montfortain bishops who all reached the bench during the period of reform and rebellion: Gravesend in the autumn of 1258, Gervais and Sandwich respectively in 1262 and 1263. That this group was firmly committed to supporting the Montfortian regime cannot, however, be in doubt as the Chancery entries for 1264 show.

⁋3On 6 March 1264, the king sent a summons to all the magnates and prelates to arrive at Oxford at mid-Lent with horses and arms to go against Llywelyn. ⁵ This came at a critical point in the hostilities between the royal and baronial parties; Louis IX had decreed in the Mise of Amiens in January that the Provisions of Oxford should be quashed but this judgment had been rejected by the barons, the Londoners, the Cinque Ports and ‘almost all the middling people of the kingdom’. ⁶ Montfort had renewed his alliance with Llywelyn and the army mustering at Oxford was probably intended to combat the earl as much as it was the Welsh prince. As shown by a Close Roll entry of 3 April, however, Gervais and Gravesend (along with several others) were ‘unwilling’ to respond and perform the service they owed the king. Therefore, all the lands they held from the king were to be seized unless they made immediate satisfaction for these transgressions. ⁷

⁋4The corresponding fines made by Gervais and Gravesend do not appear in the Fine Rolls for 1263–64 or 1264–65. ⁸ Instead we know of the bishops’ fines firstly through mentions in the Patent Rolls in the summer of 1264. It is in this context that their failure to obey Henry is shown in contrast to their vigorous support of Montfort. In two entries of 10 July and 20 August, Montfort (now back in control of the Chancery after his victory at Lewes) pardons Gravesend and Gervais 500 and 600 marks respectively for the fines they had offered the king for the ‘remission of the king’s rancour’ against them for their failure to perform military service. In return, as the Patent Roll entries make clear, Gravesend had lent the king (in reality Montfort) £100 for ‘his urgent affairs’, whilst Gervais had lent 120 marks. ⁹ Later, in September, the bishop of London (in conjunction with Richard de Mepham, archdeacon of Oxford) likewise lent 200 marks ‘for the king’s urgent affairs’, being promised repayment from the first monies arising from the ecclesiastical tenth. ¹⁰ The Patent Roll entry records that the whole of Gravesend’s loan went in to the wardrobe, along with part of that of Gervais (the rest the bishop had paid directly to a certain merchant for the king’s wine). Unfortunately the surviving wardrobe accounts enrolled on the pipe rolls cover too long a period and are too general to provide any more chapter and verse. ¹¹

⁋5The unusual nature of these transactions is matched by the desperate circumstances in which they were undertaken. Although Montfort had won a military victory at Lewes in May, his position was in no way secure. Queen Eleanor had gathered a sizeable mercenary army in Flanders and from July was preparing an invasion. In response to Montfort’s inspiring proclamation (a showcase for his demagogic talents) ‘such a multitude gathered together against the aliens that you would not have believed so many men equipped for war existed in England’. ¹² The loans made by the bishops between July and September were thus shoring up the regime at a critical time, and may well have gone to support the army gathering in Kent. In acting as they did, the bishops were following in the footsteps of Walter de Cantilupe of Worcester, who had lent 400 marks ‘for the most urgent affairs of the realm’ back in September 1263, during the last moments of Montfort’s 1263 regime. (In the following month Henry III was to assert his independence.). ¹³ Next year, it was on 7 July, at the very moment Montfort at St Paul’s was sending out his great proclamation rallying the country against invasion, that Cantilupe borrowed 200 marks from Florentine merchants in London, thus securing funds with which he could sustain the regime in its crisis. ¹⁴ Finally, in December, when the king and Montfort were at Worcester, he made another loan, for £40, to support the king’s household, a loan which this time does appear in the wardrobe accounts as well as the Patent Rolls. ¹⁵

⁋6Gervais of Winchester, as far as the evidence goes, only arrived on the political scene when he became bishop of Winchester in 1262. Nicholas Vincent has referred to him as a ‘lukewarm supporter of the rebellion’ and it is true that he appears less frequently than the others as a representative of the reforming regime. ¹⁶ Before 1264 Gervais seems to have been in favour with the king; when an epidemic struck the royal court in France in September 1263, it was Gervais, along with the bishop of Salisbury, who the king insisted should celebrate the feast of Edward the Confessor in his absence. ¹⁷ Within a year of Henry’s letter, however, Gervais was in Boulogne along with Cantilupe and Sandwich telling the papal legate that it was right that the king’s councillors should be chosen for him, and that these councilors should be English. ¹⁸ Although we cannot know every step that brought Gervais to Boulogne, the entries for 1264 surely reveal a crucial period in his journey. Henry, it seems, had every reason to expect Gervais to respond to his call to appear at Oxford at mid-Lent 1264. Gervais did indeed appear (around 25 March) but not with horses and arms to join the royalist force but as a representative of the baronial party, alongside Cantilupe, Sandwich and Stephen of Bersted, bishop of Chichester. The bishops offered terms of peace, to be sure, but terms which involved the removal of all aliens and the king governing through natives. ¹⁹ One can imagine Henry’s consternation, and his sense of betrayal would explain the size of the fine that Gervais was forced to offer for his failure to send forces to the royal muster.

⁋7The very fact of this fine, however, and of that made by Gravesend, does make an important point about both the attitudes of these bishops and the general situation before Lewes. Clearly the two bishops had not cut all their links with the king. Although they had allied themselves to Montfort’s cause, they were still prepared to offer money to secure the king’s grace and prevent their estates being seized. Quite probably they did not expect relations between the two sides to deteriorate to the point of open battle. It was, after all, as a negotiator for peace that Gervais acted at Oxford in March, however unpalatable the terms being offered. Perhaps some compromise could be reached, and that was bound to leave the king with much of his power. If there was a war, there was no reason to think, given the size of his army, that the king would lose it. Thus, although they were unwilling to give the king military aid against Montfort, they offered fines to Henry because they believed that his threat of the confiscation of their lands was a very real one, itself a testimony to the king’s power. The outcome of Lewes was to change everything fundamentally. As the author of the Song of Lewes (probably a friar in the entourage of Stephen of Bersted) was to write, God had provided victory to Montfort, whose ‘deeds test him and prove him truthful’. ²⁰ This must have been the greatest encouragement possible to their support of the earl. In this light the turn of their support and the size of their loans are readily comprehensible.

⁋8However, after Montfort’s defeat at Evesham, the bishops’ support of his cause brought them harsh financial punishment from the king now restored to power. Gervais was forced to proffer a fine of 1000 marks, Gravesend a fine of 500 marks, for having the king’s goodwill. ²¹ Entries in the Close Rolls show that both bishops began almost immediately to pay off these fines, delivering the money into the king’s wardrobe. ²² This was not an end to the Henry’s recriminations, however, and the bishops were also made to pay the fines they had offered in 1264 for their failure to perform military service. ²³ Montfort’s pardons, of course, now counted for nothing. Gravesend’s 1264 fine of 500 marks is recorded in the Pipe Roll for 1264–65 where it is stated that he had paid the full 500 marks to Nicholas of Lewknor, the keeper of the wardrobe appointed after Evesham. Gervais, however, only managed to pay 20 marks of the 1264 fine in this roll and still owed the remaining 580 marks in 1267 (although he had paid half of his new 1000 mark fine by March 1266). ²⁴

⁋9Neither the 1264 nor 1265 fines were recorded in the surviving Fine Rolls. It is now possible to explain the first omission. The entry concerning Gravesend’s fine for failure of service states that the fine was recorded ‘in a certain roll of fines made for services owed the king in his expedition’ whilst the entry for Gervais’s fine mentions its record on ‘a certain schedule attached to the roll of similar fines’, the similar fines being fines in preceding entries recorded again on a roll of fines ‘in expedicione’. Gervais’s 20 mark payment towards his fine was noted in the same schedule. It seems clear that these entries refer to the same document and that the king was keeping a separate roll that recorded the fines relating to military service, presumably begun with the Oxford muster in March 1264 and closed after his defeat at Lewes when Montfort took control of the Chancery. This presumably contained fines offered by those with whom the king had willingly made an agreement exempting them from service as well as punitive fines (like those of Gervais and Gravesend) made by those who had incurred the king’s rancour when they failed to turn up or send their service as expected. Although this separate roll appears to be lost, it might be possible to reconstruct it in part from entries in the Pipe Roll. This might well provide a new insight into the situation which Henry faced in the months before Lewes; how many were not prepared to take up arms for the king against Montfort and of whom was this group of Montfortian symapthisers composed? This would surely be a rewarding question for future research.

⁋10It seems, though, that a separate fine roll was not only used for the expedition of March 1264. One is also mentioned in the 1266–67 Pipe Roll in relation to the service of two and half knights’ fees owed by the bishop of Chichester, next to another entry in which the abbot of Battle gives a 100 mark subsidy, both of which were recorded ‘in a certain Roll of fines concerning the king’s expedition’ and many similar entries can be found in the same Pipe Roll. ²⁵ These seem to refer to the Kenilworth campaign of 1266 and show that after Evesham the king resumed the practice of recording fines relating to military service on an ancillary roll. Although by 1266 the fines are less likely to have been punitive, it would again be interesting to see if there was still any refusal of service at this late stage. The absence in the regular Fine Rolls of those fines made by the bishops for the king’s grace in 1265 is harder to explain. It is possible, considering the use of at least one separate roll, that another was used to record some of the fines made after Evesham for the king’s goodwill. Neither Gervais’s nor Gravesend’s fine of 1265 is mentioned in the Pipe Roll, and perhaps they were always intended to be paid into the wardrobe and so no record was sent to the Exchequer. If fines made by some individuals were, however, intended to be paid into the Exchequer, it would have been informed of the fact and there should be a record on the Pipe Roll. A thorough examination of the Pipe Roll for 1265-66 might provide a solution to these apparent omissions, as it has for those of 1264.

⁋11The Chancery and Exchequer entries for this period show another way in which the king’s administration managed fines. They also reveal a crucial aspect of the relationship between the bishops, the king and the Montfortian regime. Both Gervais and Gravesend had been prepared to defy the king before Lewes by refusing to support the Oxford muster, but they had still remained on terms with him and been prepared to offer large sums for forgiveness. They had not, however, actually paid any of the proffered money, with the possible exception of Gervais’s 20 marks. After Lewes, by contrast, their support of Montfort was not only moral but financial. This time they really did give money to the regime. The contrast helps to explain the extent of the king’s rancour against them, and why he refused to accept the cancellation of the fines recorded in the roll ‘in expedicione sua’. Including their loans to Montfort and his fines made with the king, Gervais had incurred liabilities of almost £1150, while Gravesend had actually spent £700. Cantilupe himself had loaned over £300. For these bishops, support for the Montfortian enterprise had been, both for of their careers and their pockets, hugely expensive.