V. Chronological Errata.
The accounts given by the early chroniclers, and followed by modern historians, with respect to the movements of Edward the Second and his Queen, from September, 1326, to the December following, are sadly at variance with fact. The dates of death of the Despensers, as well as various minor matters, depend on the accurate fixing of these points.
The popular account, generally accepted, states that the Queen landed at Orwell in September—the exact day being disputed—that the King, on hearing of it, hastened to the West, and shut himself up in Bristol Castle, with his daughters and the younger Despenser; that the Queen hanged the elder Despenser and the Earl of Arundel before their eyes, on the 8th of October, whereupon the King and the younger Despenser escaped by night in a boat: some add that they were overtaken and brought back, others that they landed in Wales, and were taken in a wood near Llantrissan. Much of this is pure romance. The King’s Household Roll, which names his locality for every day, and is extant up to October 19th, the Wardrobe Accounts supplying the subsequent facts, distinctly shows that he never came nearer Bristol on that occasion than the road from Gloucester to Chepstow; that on the 8th of October he was yet at Cirencester; that he left Gloucester on the 10th, reaching Chepstow on the 16th, whence he departed on the 20th “versus aquam de Weye” and therefore in the contrary direction from Bristol. On the 27th and 28th he dates mandates from Cardiff; on the 29th and 30th from Caerphilly. On November 2nd he left Caerphilly (this we are distinctly told in the Wardrobe Accounts), on the 3rd and 4th he was at Margan Abbey, and on the 5th he reached Neath, where he remained up to the 10th. He now appears to have paid a short visit to Swansea, whence he returned to Neath, where, on the 16th, his cousin Lancaster and his party found him, and took him into their custody, with Hugh Le Despenser and Archdeacon Baldok. They took him first to Monmouth, where he was found by the Bishop of Hereford (sent to demand the Great Seal), probably about the 23rd. Thence he was conveyed to Ledbury, which he reached on or about the 30th; and on the 6th of December he was at Kenilworth, where he remained for the rest of his reign.
The Queen landed at Orwell in September: Speed says, on the 19th; Robert of Avesbury, the 26th; most authorities incline to the 22nd, which seems as probable a date as any. The King, at any rate, had heard of her arrival on the 28th, and issued a proclamation offering to all volunteers 1 shilling per day for a man-at-arms, and 2 pence for an archer, to resist the invading force. All past offenders were offered pardon if they joined his standard, the murderers of Sir Roger de Belers alone excepted: and Roger Mortimer, with the King’s other enemies, was to be arrested and destroyed. Only three exceptions were made: the Queen, her son (his father omits the usual formula of “our dearest and firstborn son,” and even the title of Earl of Chester), and the Earl of Kent, “queux nous volons que soent sauuez si auant come home poet.” According to Froissart, the Queen’s company could not make the port they intended, and landed on the sands, whence after four days they marched (ignorant of their whereabouts) till they sighted Bury Saint Edmunds, where they remained three days. Miss Strickland tells a rather striking tale of the tempestuous night passed by the Queen under a shed of driftwood run up hastily by her knights, whence she marched the next morning at daybreak. (This lady rarely gives an authority, and still more seldom an exact reference.) On the 25th, she adds, the Queen reached Harwich. Robert de Avesbury, Polydore Vergil, and Speed, say that she landed at Orwell, which the Chronicle of Flanders calls Norwell. If Froissart is to be credited, this certainly was not the place; for he says that the tempest prevented the Queen from landing at the port where she intended, and that this was a mercy of Providence, because there her enemies awaited her. The port where her enemies awaited her (meaning thereby the husband whom she was persecuting) was certainly Orwell, for on the second of September the King had ordered all ships of thirty tuns weight to assemble there. Moreover, the Queen could not possibly march from Orwell at once to Bury and Harwich, since to face the one she must have turned her back on the other. The probability seems to be that she came ashore somewhere in Orwell Haven, but whether she first visited Harwich or Bury it is difficult to judge. The natural supposition would be that she remained quiet for a time at Bury until she was satisfied that her allies would be sufficient to effect her object, and then showed herself openly at Harwich were it not that Bury is so distant, and Harwich is so near, that the supposition seems to be negatived by the facts. From Harwich or Bury, whichever it were, she marched towards London, which according to some writers, she reached; but the other account seems to be better authenticated, which states that on hearing that the King had left the capital for the West she altered her course for Oxford. She certainly was not in London when the Tower was captured by the citizens, October 16th (Compotus Willielmi de Culpho, Wardrobe Accounts, 20 Edward the Second, 31/8), since she dates a mandate from Wallingford on the 15th, unless Bishop Orleton falsified the date in quoting it in his Apology. Thence she marched to Cirencester and Gloucester, and at last to Bristol, which she entered on or before the 25th. Since Gloucester was considerably out of her way—for we are assured that her aim was to make a straight and rapid course to Bristol—why did she go there at all if the King were at Bristol? But we know he was not; he had then set sail for Wales. Her object in going to Bristol was probably twofold: to capture Le Despenser and Arundel, and to stop the King’s supplies, for Bristol was his commissariat-centre. A cartload of provisions reached that city from London for him on the 14th (Note 2.) (Rot. Magne Gard., 20 Edward the Second, 26/3), and his butler, John Pyrie, went thither for wine, even so late as November 1st (Ibidem, 26/4). Is it possible that Pyrie, perhaps unconsciously, betrayed to some adherent of the Queen the fact that his master was in Wales? The informer, we are told by the chroniclers, was Sir Thomas le Blount, the King’s Seneschal of the Household. But that suspicious embassage of the Abbot of Neath and several of the King’s co-refugees, noted on November 10th in terms which, though ostensibly spoken by the King and dated from Neath, are unmistakably the Queen’s diction and not his, cannot be left out of the account in estimating his betrayers. From October 26, when the illegally-assembled Parliament, in the hall of Bristol Castle, went through the farce of electing the young Prince to the regency “because the King was absent from his kingdom,” and October 27th, which is given (probably with truth) by Harl. Ms. 6124 as the day of the judicial murder of Hugh Le Despenser the Elder, our information concerning the Queen’s movements is absolutely nil until we find her at Hereford on the 20th of November. She then sent Bishop Orleton of Hereford to the King to request the Great Seal, and he, returning, found her at Marcle on the 26th. It was probably on the 24th that the younger Despenser suffered. On the 27th the Queen was at Newent, on the 28th at Gloucester, on the 29th at Coberley, and on the 30th at Cirencester. She reached Lechlade on December 1st, Witney on the 2nd, Woodstock on the 3rd. Here she remained till the 22nd, when she went to Osney Abbey, and forward to Wallingford the next day. (Wardrobe Accounts, 20 Edward the Second and 1 Edward the Third, 26/11.) She was joined at Wallingford by her younger son Prince John of Eltham, who had been awaiting her arrival since the 17th, and losing 3 shillings at play by way of amusement in the interim (Ibidem, 31/18). By Reading, Windsor, Chertsey, and Allerton she reached Westminster on the 4th of January (Ibidem, 26/11).
I have examined all the Wardrobe Accounts and Rolls likely to cast light on this period, but I can find no mention of the whereabouts of the two Princesses during this time. Froissart says that they and Prince John were delivered into the Queen’s care by the citizens of Bristol; which is certainly a mistake so far as concerns the Prince, whose compotus just quoted distinctly states that he left the Tower on October 16th (which fixes the day of its capture), quitted London on December 21st, and reached Wallingford on the 24th. He, therefore, was no more at Bristol than his father, and only rejoined his mother as she returned thence. The position of the royal sisters remains doubtful, as even Mrs Everett Green—usually a most faithful and accurate writer—has accepted Froissart’s narrative, and apparently did not discover its complete discrepancy with the Wardrobe Accounts. If the Princesses were the companions of their royal father in his flight, and were delivered to their mother when she entered Bristol—which may be the fact—the probability is that he sent them there when he left Gloucester, on or about the 10th of October.
VI. The Order of Sempringham.
The Gilbertine Order, also called the Order of Sempringham, was that of the reformed Cistercians. Its founder was Gilbert, son of Sir Josceline de Sempringham; he was Rector of Saint Andrew’s Church in that village, and died in 1189. The chief peculiarity of this Order was that monks and nuns dwelt under the same roof, but their apartments were entered by separate doors from without, and had no communication from within. They attended the Priory Church together, but never mixed among each other except on the administration of the Sacrament. The monks followed the rule of Saint Austin; the nuns the Cistercian rule, with Saint Benedict’s emendations, to which some special statutes were added by the founder. The habit was, for monks, a black cassock, white cloak, and hood lined with lambskin; for nuns, a white habit, black mantle, and black hood lined with white fur. There was a Master over the entire Order, who lived at Sempringham, the mother Abbey also a Prior and a Prioress over each community. The Prior of Sempringham was a Baron of Parliament. The site of the Abbey, three miles south-east from Folkingham, Lincolnshire, may still be traced by its moated area. The Abbey Church of Saint Andrew alone now remains entire; it is Norman, with an Early English tower, and a fine Norman north door.
But few houses of the Gilbertine Order existed in England, and those were mainly in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. The principal ones—after Sempringham, which was the chief—were Chicksand, Bedfordshire; Cambridge; Fordham, near Newmarket; Hitchin, Hertfordshire; Lincoln, Alvingham, Bolington, Cateley, Haverholme, Ormesby, Newstead (not the Abbey, which was Augustinian), Cotton, Sexley, Stikeswold, Sixhill, Lincolnshire; Marmound and Shuldham, Norfolk; Clattercott, Oxfordshire; Marlborough, Wiltshire; Malton, Sempringham Minor, Watton, and Wilberfosse, Yorkshire.
The Gilbertine Order “for some centuries maintained its sanctity and credit; afterwards it departed greatly from both.”