A mediaeval burglary

by T. F. Tout

The most important of these household offices was that called the king’s Wardrobe. Originally the Wardrobe was, of course, the closet in which the king hung up his clothes, and the staff belonging to it were the valets and servants whose business it was to look after them. From this modest beginning the king’s Wardrobe had become an organised office of government. Its clerks rivalled the officers of the Exchequer in their dealings with financial matters, and the officers of the Chancery, in the number of letters, mandates, orders, and general administrative business which passed through their hands.

The Wardrobe always “followed the king”. In war time, then, it was far away from London, at or near the scene of fighting. In such periods it became the great spending department, while the Exchequer normally remained at Westminster collecting the revenue of the country, and forwarding the money to the Wardrobe which spent it. For five years before 1303 the king had thrown his chief energies into the conquest of Scotland. Under these circumstances London and Westminster saw little of him. Moreover, he found it convenient to have near him in the north even the sedentary offices of government. Accordingly in 1298 Edward transferred the Exchequer, the law courts, and the Chancery to York. From 1298, then, to 1303 York, rather than Westminster, might have been called the capital of England, and the king’s appearances to the south were few and far between. The occasion of such visits was generally his desire to get money, and to make arrangements with his creditors. From such a short sojourn the king went north in the early months of 1303. Despite all his efforts it was only in that year that he was really able to put his main weight into the Scottish war.

When our burglary took place, king, court, and government offices had been removed to York for over five years. Under mediaeval conditions the eye of a vigilant task-master was an essential condition of efficiency. It followed then that during Edward’s long absence things at Westminster were allowed to drift into an extraordinary state of confusion and disorder. Affairs were made worse by the fact that even kings were not always free to choose their own servants. Thus the king’s palace at Westminster was in the hands of an hereditary keeper. There was nothing strange about this. In the middle ages such offices were frequently held by hereditary right, just as in the East everybody takes up his father’s business as a matter of religious duty. Earl Curzon once pointed out to the electors of Oldham that in India there are still hereditary tailors, who did their work very well. However this may be with tailors in the East and legislators in the West, the hereditary keeper of Edward’s palace of Westminster did not prove to be a very effective custodian of his master’s property. His name was John Shenche or Senche, and he held two hereditary offices, that of “keeper of the king’s palace at Westminster,” and also the keepership of the Fleet prison, in right of his wife Joan, who had inherited both from her father. Thus in addition to the keepership of the palace John Shenche “kept” the king’s prison of the Fleet in the city of London. As a rule, John and his wife Joan had their habitation in the prison in the City. John, therefore, employed as his deputy at Westminster an underling, a certain William of the Palace, who kept, or rather did not keep, for him the king’s palace at Westminster. However, early in the year 1303, John left his abode in the City where his wife remained, and took up his quarters in the palace. Apparently the prison was not so comfortable a place for an easy-going officer to live in as the palace. Perhaps, too, the domestic restraints imposed upon Shenche in the city were burdensome to him. Certainly gay times now ensued in the deserted palace. Soon John and William, in the absence of the higher authorities, seem to have gathered together a band of disreputable boon companions of both sexes, whose drunken revels and scandalous misconduct were soon notorious throughout the neighbourhood. One element in this band of revellers was, I regret to say, a certain section of the monks of the neighbouring monastery. For as the absence of the king and the court had left the palace asleep, as it were, so also had the monastery at Westminster sunk into a deeper and more scandalous slumber.

The enthusiasm, effort, and excitement which had marked the period of Henry III’s

reconstruction of Westminster Abbey had now died down. Mediaeval man, though zealous and full of ideas, was seldom persistent. It is a commonplace of history that when the first impulse of fervour that attended a new order or a new foundation had passed away, religious activity was followed by a strong reaction. The great period of the monastery at Westminster had been during its reconstitution under Henry III, but that time of energy had now worked itself out, and the abbey had gone to sleep. The work of reconstruction had stopped from lack of funds; the royal favour as well as the royal presence was withdrawn gradually from the abbey. Moreover, a few years earlier a disastrous fire devastated the monastic buildings, and only just spared the chapter house and the abbey church. It looks as if the monks had to camp out in half-ruined buildings till their home could be restored. All this naturally relaxed the reins of discipline, the more so since the abbot, Walter of Wenlock, was an old man, whose hold on the monks was slight, and some of the chief officers of the abbey, the obedientiaries, as they were called, were singularly incompetent or unscrupulous persons. It followed naturally that many of the fifty monks became slack beyond ordinary standards of mediaeval slackness. It was both from obedientiaries and common monks that John Shenche and William of the Palace secured the companions for their unseemly revels. There now comes upon the scene a new figure, in fact, the hero of the burglary, Richard of Pudlicott.

Richard of Pudlicott began life as a clerk, but abandoned his clergy for the more profitable calling of a wandering trader in wool, cheese, and butter. England’s economic position in those days reminds us of the state of things now prevailing in Argentina or Australia, rather than that in modern industrial England. She had little to sell abroad save raw materials, especially wool, which was largely exported to the great clothing towns of Flanders. This traffic took Pudlicott to Ghent and Bruges in 1298, when Edward I had allied with the Flemings against the king of France. But his trading adventures were as unsuccessful as the king’s military efforts in Flanders. Moreover, after the king’s return to England, Pudlicott had the ill luck to be among those merchants arrested as a surety for the debts which Edward had left behind him in the Low Countries. This unceremonious treatment of an alien ally is a method of mediaeval frightfulness which may be recommended to our alien enemies, but Edward’s credit was so bad that we can hardly blame the Flemings for leaving no stone unturned to obtain payment of their debts; whether they succeeded I do not know. Before long Richard escaped from his Flemish gaol, leaving his property in Flanders in the hands of his captors. Nursing a grievance against the king, and with dire poverty facing him, he took lodgings in London, where, like many bankrupts, he seems to have generally had enough money to indulge in all the personal gratifications that he had a special mind to practice. It seems that in the pursuit of his disreputable pleasures, Pudlicott was brought into contact with John Shenche, William of the Palace, and the other merrymakers, lay and ecclesiastical, in the lodge of the king’s palace of Westminster. He had a specious excuse for haunting Westminster Hall. He was—he says himself—seeking a remedy in the king’s courts for the property he had lost in Flanders. How he could find one, when these courts were at York, I cannot say. But, as we shall see, many of Pudlicott’s personal statements are difficult to reconcile with facts. However, Edward himself soon came to Westminster, but withdrew after a short stay, leaving Pudlicott unpaid.

We have seen how near was the palace to the abbey, and how the palace keeper’s monastic friends formed a living bridge between the two. One result of these pleasant social relations was that the Abbey of Westminster soon became familiar ground to Pudlicott. One day, when disturbed at the hopelessness of getting his grievances redressed by the king, he wandered through the cloisters of the abbey, and noticed with greedy eyes the rich stores of silver plate carried in and out of the refectory of the monks, by the servants who were waiting on the brethren at meals. The happy idea struck him to seek a means to “enable him to come at the goods which he saw”. Thus the king’s foundation might, somewhat irregularly, be made to pay the king’s debts. Pudlicott soon laid his plans accordingly. The very day after the king left Westminster, Pudlicott found a ladder reared up against a house near the palace gate. He put this ladder against one of the windows of the chapter house

; he climbed up the ladder; found a window that opened by means of a cord; opened the window and swung himself by the same cord into the chapter house

. Thence he made his way to the refectory, and secured a rich booty of plate which he managed to carry off and sell.

Pudlicott’s success with the monks’ plate did not profit him for long. Within nine months—and we may believe surely this part of his not too veracious tale—the proceeds of the sale of the silver cups and dishes of the abbey had been eaten up. No doubt the loose life he was living and the revels with the keepers of the palace involved a constant need for plentiful supplies of ready cash. Anyhow by the end of 1302 Richard was again destitute, and looking out for something more to steal. It was, doubtless, dangerous to rob the monks any more, and perhaps the intimacy which was now established between him and his monastic boon companions suggested to Richard a more excellent way of restoring his fortunes. His plan was now to rob the king’s treasury, and his success seemed assured since, as he tells us, he “knew the premises of the abbey, where the treasury was, and how he might come to it”. How he profited by his knowledge we shall soon see, but first we must for a moment part company with Pudlicott’s “confession,” which up to now I have followed with hesitation. But for the next stage of our story it is plainly almost the contrary of the truth. Before we can with advantage explain why we can no longer trust his tale, it would be well for us to state what this treasury was and how it could be got at.