A mediaeval burglary

by T. F. Tout

By T. F. Tout, M.A., F.B.A., Bishop Fraser Professor of Mediaeval and Ecclesiastical History in the University of Manchester.

The burglary, about which I have to speak to-night, I did not discover by ransacking the picturesque and humorous annals of mediaeval crime. I came across the details of this incident when seeking for something quite different, for it happened when I was attempting to investigate the technicalities of the history of the administrative department known as the king’s Wardrobe. But so human a story did something to cheer up the weary paths of Dryasdust, and he hands it on to you in the hope that you will not find it absolutely wanting in instruction and amusement. Now my burglary was the burglary of the king’s treasury, or more precisely, of the treasury of the king’s wardrobe, within the precincts of the abbey at Westminster. The date of the event was 24 April, 1303. More precisely, according to the chief burglar’s own account, it was on the evening of that day that the burglar effected an entrance into the king’s treasury, from which, he tells us he escaped, with as much booty as he could carry, on the morning of 26 April. Who had committed the burglary is a problem which was not quite settled, even by the trials which followed the offence, though these trials resulted in the hanging of some half a dozen people at least. But after the hanging of the half-dozen, it was still maintained in some quarters that the burglary was committed by one robber only, though charges of complicity in his guilt were in common fame extended to something like a hundred individuals. And in this case common fame was not, I think, at fault.

I wish first of all to explain the meaning of the sentence, rather cryptic to the generality, in which I spoke of my burglary as that of the robbery of the treasury of the king’s wardrobe within Westminster Abbey. For this purpose I must ask you to carry your minds back to the Westminster of the early years of the fourteenth century. Westminster was then what Kensington was in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, a court suburb, aloof from the traffic and business of the great city of London. Now the twin centres of Westminster were the king’s palace and the adjacent Benedictine Abbey. The rough plan, which I am permitted to print on the opposite page, will show the close relation of the two great groups of buildings. It was much closer in many ways than the relations between the Houses of Parliament, the modern representative of the old palace, and the present abbey buildings. If these latter largely remain, despite many destructive alterations in details, in their ancient site, we must remember that there was nothing like the broad modern road that separates the east end of the abbey from Westminster Hall and the House of Lords. A wall enclosed the royal precincts, and went westwards to within a few feet of the monks’ infirmary and the end of St. Margaret’s Church. The still existing access to the abbey on the east side of the south transept through the door by which you can still go into “poet’s corner,” having the chapter house on your left and Henry VII’s chapel on your right, was the portal by which immediate access to the palace could be gained through a gate in this wall. The space between the abbey and the palace wall was occupied by the churchyard of St. Margaret’s. The parish church—or rather its successor—still crouches beneath the shade of the neighbouring minster. This churchyard covered the ground now taken up by Henry VII’s chapel, which of course was not as yet in existence. In the midst of this grassy plot stood the chapter house of the monks of Westminster, with its flying buttresses and its single pillar supporting its huge vault, then newly erected by the pious zeal of Henry III.

Plan of Westminster Abbey and Palace.

Westminster Abbey was founded by Edward the Confessor, and substantially refounded by Henry III, who had shown immense care and lavished large sums on a grandiose scheme for the rebuilding of the great house of religion which contained the shrine of his favourite saint, in whose honour he had given his son the name of Edward. The rebuilding went on into the reign of Edward I, who was not much inferior to his father in his zeal for the church, and was doubly bound to honour his father’s wishes and the memory of his own patron saint. In the closing years of the thirteenth century circumstances compelled Edward I to desist from this work. The king now found himself dragged into enormous expenses by the French, Scottish, and Flemish wars. He was perforce turned from church-building to get men and money for his wars.

The finances of England under Edward I were less elastic than under Mr. Lloyd-George, and modern credit and banking were then in their very infancy. Edward I, though he imposed taxes which would make the most stalwart militarist of to-day quiver, soon found himself hopelessly in debt. To meet his burdens the king constantly employed differentiated taxation, but the differentiation was calculated by rather a different method from that in fashion nowadays. It was differentiation according to status, not according to wealth. The clergy, who were not expected to fight, were expected to pay more heavily than the laymen. Let us take as an instance of how things were then done the taxes levied in 1294 when the fighting country districts were called upon to pay a tenth of their moveables in taxation, and the wealthier and more peaceful towns were asked for a sixth. From the clergy a tax equal, I think, to a modern income tax of ten shillings in the pound, was demanded, and it is said that when the dean of St. Paul’s heard of this unprecedented impost, he fell dead on the spot. If such heroic efforts—I mean the king’s not the dean’s—were necessary in 1294 at the beginning of England’s troubles, how much worse things must have become by 1303, after ten years of storm and stress? By this date Edward I’s finances were indeed in a bad state. Historians are only now gradually beginning to realise how embarrassed the great king was in the last years of his reign, and how desperate were some of his attempts to fill his exchequer.

The whole of Edward’s declining years were not equally strenuous, though his finances steadily grew worse. Before the end of the old century Edward had got over the worst of his troubles abroad. He therefore determined to devote himself with characteristic energy to the conquest of the “rebel” Scots. Since therefore Scotland now became the king’s chief anxiety, Edward made his headquarters in the north of England. In those days, where the king lived there the machinery of government was to be found. For though England in the thirteenth century had centralised institutions, those institutions were not centralised in a local capital. It is true that one English city was immensely more important than all the rest. London, in the thirteenth as in the eighteenth century, was, relatively to other towns, even greater and more important than is the case nowadays. Of course Edward I’s London to our eyes would be quite a little place, but at a time when there was, outside London, perhaps no town of more than 10,000 inhabitants and very few of that population, a city four or five times that size was something portentous. Yet this greatness of London was due to its commercial activity, much more than to the fact that it was the “capital” of the country or its seat of government. In reality there was no capital in the modern sense, for the English tradition was that the government should follow the king. It was only very gradually that the governing machinery of the land was permanently settled in Westminster or London. There was, however, already a tendency towards making the great city, or rather its neighbouring court suburb, a centre of permanent administrative offices, a capital in the modern sense. Thus the Court of Common Pleas had been settled in London since Magna Carta and the Exchequer, that is the department of finance, had also been fixed there since the reign of Henry II. These were, however, still the exceptions which proved the rule. The office of the Chancery—which was not then a law-court, but the secretarial office of state—followed the king. So also did certain branches of the administration which depended on the court, and were intended, first of all, to be the machinery for the government of the king’s household.

In the middle ages no distinction was made between the king and the kingdom. If the king had devised a useful machine for governing his household and estates, he naturally used it for any other purposes for which he thought it would be useful. We find, therefore, the court offices of administration and finance working side by side with the national offices, not only in dealing with household affairs, but in the actual work of governing the country.