[226] Knighton (R.S.), ii., 42, 44, 109.
[227] The Scots themselves had found out long before this who were their most formidable enemies. Sir James Douglas had been accustomed to cut off the right hand or put out the right eye of any archer whom he could catch.
[228] Compare the interesting case in Gross, “Office of Coroner,” p. 74. Two conscripts, on their way to join the army, chanced to meet at Cold Ashby the constable who was responsible for their being selected; they ran him through with a lance and then took sanctuary. It is significant that they were not hanged, but carried off to the army; the King needed every stout arm he could muster.
[229] Tournaments not infrequently gave rise to treacherous murders and vendettas, as in the case of Sir Walter Mauny’s father (Froissart, Buchon., i., 199). Compare also the scandal caused by the women who used to attend them in men’s clothes (Knighton, ii., p. 57). Luce, however, very much overstates the Royal objections to jousts (pp. 113, 141). He evidently fails to realize what a large number of authorized tourneys were held by Edward III.
[230] Froissart, Globe, 94-97.
[231] Denifle, “La Désolation des Eglises,” etc., vol. i., pp. 497, 504, 514. Two pages from English chroniclers are almost as bad as any of the iniquities printed in Father Denifle’s book, viz. the sack of Winchelsea (Knighton, ii., 109) and Sir John Arundel’s shipload of nuns from Southampton (Walsingham, an. 1379; told briefly in “Social England,” illd. ed., vol. ii. p. 260).
[232] Cf. Knighton, ii., 102.
[233] Green, “Town Life,” i., 130. “At the close of the 14th century a certain knight, Baldwin of Radington, with the help of John of Stanley, raised eight hundred fighting men ‘to destroy and hurt the commons of Chester’; and these stalwart warriors broke into the abbey, seized the wine, and dashed the furniture in pieces, and when the mayor and sheriff came to the rescue nearly killed the sheriff. When in 1441 the Archbishop of York determined to fight for his privileges in Ripon Fair, he engaged two hundred men-at-arms from Scotland and the Marches at sixpence or a shilling a day, while a Yorkshire gentleman, Sir John Plumpton, gathered seven hundred men; and at the battle that ensued, more than a thousand arrows were discharged by them.”
[234] Ed. Luce, i., 213, 214; cf. 312.
[235] Mrs. Green, l. c., i., 131.