A mediaeval burglary

by T. F. Tout

Such tales soon made the story of the robbery common property. At last it came to the ears of the king and his ministers, then encamped at Linlithgow for the Scottish war. Thereupon, on 6 June, the king appointed a special commission of judges to investigate the matter. On 20 June, John Droxford, the keeper of the wardrobe, came to Westminster with the keys of the crypt, and then and only then did any official examination of the treasury take place. An entry was made into the crypt and the damage which had been done was inspected. The result is still to be read in an inventory of the treasures lost and the treasures found which Droxford drew up, and which may now be studied in print.

It is pleasant to say that by the time Droxford went to work much of the treasure, which had been scattered broadcast, was being brought back and that more was soon to follow. The first investigations as to where the treasure had been carried led to fruitful results. A good deal of it was found hidden beneath the beds of the keeper of the palace and of his assistant. Still more was found in the lodgings of Richard Pudlicott and his mistress. Adam the sacrist, and some of his brother monks and their servants, were discovered to be in possession of other missing articles. Altogether, when Droxford had finished his inventory, a large proportion of the articles which had been lost were reclaimed. Ultimately it seems that the losses were not very severe.

Wholesale arrests were now made. Richard Pudlicott was apprehended on 25 June, and William of the Palace soon experienced the same fate. Before long the connexion which the monks had had with the business seemed so well established that the whole convent, including the abbot and forty-eight monks, were indicted and sent to the Tower, where they were soon joined by thirty-two other persons. This time the king’s net had spread rather too widely, and the indiscriminate arrest of guilty and innocent excited some measure of sympathy, even for the guilty. The majority of the clerical prisoners were released on bail, but some half-dozen laymen and ten monks were still kept in custody. Both the released and the imprisoned culprits raised a great outcry, sending petitions to the king demanding a further enquiry into the whole matter.

The first commission meanwhile had been empanelling juries and collecting evidence. But the matter was so serious that in November a second royal commission was appointed to hear and determine the matter. The members of this second commission were chosen from among the most eminent of the king’s judges, including the chief justice of the king’s bench, Sir Roger Brabazon and the shrewdest judge of the time, William Bereford, afterwards chief justice of common pleas.

I have already indicated in outline the result of the investigations of the two judicial commissions. I have told you how juries were empanelled from every hundred in the counties of Middlesex and Surrey, and from the wards of the city of London and from Westminster. The details of the evidence are worthy of more special treatment than I can give them here, because they afford a wonderful picture of the loose-living, easy-going, slack, negligent, casual, and criminal doings of mediaeval men and women. I must, however, be content to restate the general result of the trials. Richard of Pudlicott was found guilty. Various other people, including William of the Palace, and certain monks, were declared accomplices, while Adam Warfield was shrewdly suspected to be at the bottom of the whole business. More than a year was spent in investigations, and it was not until March, 1304, eleven months after the burglary, that William of the Palace and five other lay culprits were comfortably hanged.

The great problem was how to deal with the clerical offenders without adding to the king’s difficulties by rousing the sleeping dogs of the church, always ready to bark when the state meditated any infringement of the claim of all clerks to be subject solely to the ecclesiastical tribunals. Accordingly Richard of Pudlicott, and ten monks were reserved for further treatment. Pudlicott, as we have seen, had been a tonsured person in his youth, and he probably claimed, as did the monks, benefit of clergy. It was probably now that Pudlicott nobly tried to shield his monastic allies by his extraordinary confession. His heroism, however, availed him nothing. But whatever his zeal for the church, Edward I was upon adequate occasion ready to ride rough-shod over clerical privileges, and he always bitterly resented any attempt of a culprit, who had lived as a layman, trying to shield himself on the pretext that he had been a clerk in his youth. His corrupt chief justice, Thomas Weyland, had sought to evade condemnation by resuming the tonsure and clerical garb which he had worn before he abandoned his orders to become a knight, a country squire, and the founder of a family of landed gentry. But Weyland’s subdiaconate did not save him from exile and loss of land and goods. Pudlicott’s sometime clerical character had even less power to preserve him. He also paid tardily the capital penalty for his misdeed. But it was surely his clergy that kept him alive in prison for more than two years after the date of the commission of his crime.

The Outrage at Westminster.

The fate of the incriminated clerks still hung in the balance when in the spring of 1305 Edward came back in triumph to London, rejoicing that at last he had effected the thorough conquest of Scotland. His cheerful frame of mind made him listen readily to the demands of the monks of Westminster to have pity on their unfortunate brethren, and to comply with the more general clerical desire that ecclesiastical privilege should be respected. Only a few months after the burglary, the news of the outrage on pope Boniface VIII at Anagni had filled all Christendom with horror. At the instance of Philip the Fair, king of France, and his agents in Italy the pope was seized, maltreated, and insulted. In the indignant words of Dante, “Christ was again crucified in the person of his vicar”. The universal feeling of resentment against so wanton a violation of ecclesiastical privilege was ingeniously used in favour of the monks of Westminster. Among the monks, arrested at first, but soon released with the majority of their brethren, were two men who had some reputation as historians. One of these was magnanimous enough to write, two or three years afterwards, a sort of funeral eulogy of Edward, but the other, Robert of Reading, who, in my opinion, kept the official chronicle of the abbey from 1302 to 1326, set forth the Westminster point of view very effectively in the well-known version of the chronicle called Flores Historiarum, the original manuscript of which is now in the Chetham Library. In this is given what may be regarded as the official account of Richard’s burglary. The robbery of the king of England was a crime only comparable to the robbery of the treasure of Boniface VIII, six months later at Anagni. The chronicler is most indignant at the suggestion that the monks had anything to do with the matter, and laments passionately their long imprisonment and their unmerited sufferings. He relies in substance on the story as told in Pudlicott’s confession. The burglary was effected by a single robber.