The story of Coventry

by Mary Dormer Harris

The murmur about another name greater than that of John Ball had also reached the citizens. Lutterworth is scarcely fifteen miles distant from Coventry, and if we may judge by the tale of subsequent troubles and persecutions, there were many followers of Wickliffe within the city.[204] William Swynderby, who had preached to crowds in the Lollards' chapel at Leicester, being forsaken of his friends because he had recanted rather than face martyrdom, left that place and so came to Coventry in 1382.

HIGH STREET, COVENTRY

There he tarried nearly a year, making many converts, but being forced by the clergy to depart, he vanished into the fastnesses of the forest beyond the Malvern Hills and there hid from his persecutors many years.[205]

Nevertheless the Wickliffite tradition must have persisted after his departure, for in Oldcastle's day the city had become a centre for the issue of Lollard books.[206] Nicholas Hereford, collaborator in Wickliffe's version of the Bible, is also associated with Coventry, where—after 1417—he died.

His was a life of strange vicissitudes, for having endured imprisonment in a papal dungeon at Rome, and "grievous torment" in the archbishop's castle of Saltwood, Kent, he abandoned Lollardry, recanted at Paul's Cross, and rising to important position in the Church, learned to persecute those of his ancient faith. In later years he entered into the solitude and silence of the Carthusian monastery at Coventry and so vanished from our sight.[207]

The foundation-stone of the church of this very monastery had been laid in 1385, by that champion of orthodoxy, Richard, King of England, who, in the hearing of the mayor and other notables promised to be the founder thereof and bring the work to completion.[208] After the Dissolution this house passed into the hands of the Lincoln family; the arms of Edward Clinton, Earl of Lincoln, are painted in one of the rooms of the still existing house. Part of the Prior's lodging remains, and in one room a portion of a large fresco of the Crucifixion reveals the figure of Christ from the knees downwards sprinkled with fleur-de-lys. Two years later Richard again visited the city what time Chief-Justice Tressilian, the "hanging judge" of the Peasants' Revolt, and the court of King's Bench,[209] sat therein, and bestowed on the mayor the right to have the civic sword borne before him by an officer. The MS. Annals say that in 1384 the mayor, John Deister, had forfeited this right, and that the sword was borne behind him, "because he did not justice." The Leet Book, however, makes John Marton mayor in this year,[210] and indeed the Annals have come down to us in a state of sad corruption.

Maybe these frequent royal visits were not always welcome. A court of justice accompanied the King wherever he went, for the steward and marshal of the household had jurisdiction, superseding other authority of shire or borough, over an area of twelve miles to be counted from the King's lodging.[211] Before setting forth the steward gave notice to the sheriff of the place wherein the King proposed to sojourn, so that prisoners might be brought thither for trial at the household officers' court, a practice so little popular that rich and powerful towns purchased the chartered privilege, whereby the mayor became steward and marshal of the household. This right Coventry obtained in 1451. Kings, when they came to the city, were usually lodged at the Priory, though there was a quasi-royal residence, first occupied by the Mohauts, at Cheylesmore; but the vast retinue found shelter within the town. At the command of the marshal the doors of the principal folk of the place were marked with chalk, and the dwellers there found they had to accommodate some member of the royal party. There was a certain price to be paid for the advantages of situation as a great thoroughfare town between London and the north-west, and a manorial relationship to the Princes of Wales.

The most memorable sojourn of this vain, beautiful, decadent king, Richard II., within the city took place in 1397 when Coventry witnessed the preparations for the duel between Henry Bolingbroke and Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk. The splendour of royal and knightly accoutrements at this meeting must have dazzled the sober townsfolk, and perhaps they shared in the bewilderment of the Court at the strange vacillation of the King, who, when all preparations were made, forbade the duel to take place. Holinshed[212] tells of the "sumptuous theater" on Gosford Green wherein the lists were made ready for the combat; and wherein too, after the combat had been stayed, the two adversaries sat two long hours waiting until the King's pleasure should be known. When sentence of banishment was pronounced and leave-takings over, "the duke of Norfolk departed sorrowfullie into Almanie, and at the last came to Venice, where he for thought and melancholie deceased"; for Harry Bolingbroke, however, whose sentence was not like his adversary's, for life, but for ten years, many active days remained. Gosford Green, where this scene was enacted, is still a green, and as yet unbuilt on. The ruins of Caludon Castle, where Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, passed the night before the meditated encounter with Bolingbroke, are still visible from the highway leading from Stoke to Leicester, but of Baginton Castle, where his adversary slept, scarcely more than the foundations remain. Richard was lodged in a tower belonging to Sir William Bagot, about a quarter of a mile without the town. Sir William, who with Bushy and Greene acquired such unenviable notoriety as creatures of Richard II., lies buried in Baginton church, where a monumental brass of rare workmanship, now placed immediately under the rafters of the chancel roof, once marked the place where he was laid.