Chaucer's People by Liza Picard

Author:Liza Picard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Pardons

The royal power to pardon may evoke a compassionate sovereign embracing his sinful subjects. The reality was rather different. Pardons could bring welcome additions to the sovereign’s treasury. Following the example of the pope and his ‘jubilee year’ in 1300 (see p. 12), Edward III issued a general royal pardon in 1362, to mark his fiftieth birthday. He did it again in 1377, to mark the fiftieth year of his reign. It covered every offence except treason, murder and rape. It was well worth its going rate, 18s 4d for each pardon, which brought in a very useful sum of over £2,000.

General pardons also came in useful to bolster the royal expeditionary army. An offender who was pardoned on condition that he enlisted in the army in France may well have arrived there, but many happy malefactors simply came straight home again and resumed their lives of crime. So blatant did this become that the Commons protested at the grants to ‘well-known thieves and common murderers’.

After the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 there were huge numbers of pleas for pardons. If you had been spotted taking part, you were definitely wise to apply for one; but even if you had taken no part in the rebellion, some spiteful neighbour might bear false witness against you, so it was as well to be forearmed. John Creyk petitioned for pardon in 1383, because his name was on the list of those to be excluded from the general pardon. He said that he had been ‘maliciously’ indicted of involvement in the rebellion by his enemies. He duly got his pardon. As the rebellion died down, at least 3,500 people applied for a pardon. The going rate was between 20 and 30 shillings. Two people paid £40 each. The price steadied at 16s 4d, and by 1382, a year after the outbreak, the market had collapsed and pardons were given away free.

In 1385 John de Felsted, usher of the royal exchequer, petitioned for pardon through another man, Adam Ramsey, John being held in prison and unable to act for himself. His petition told how he had been instructed to guard the door of the exchequer against a certain chaplain who had gone mad and was wandering around Westminster Hall. When John stopped him, the chaplain ‘beat John severely with a staff’. John drew his dagger to fend off the madman, in self-defence. John got his pardon. His case was unusual in that he relied on one individual, perhaps a friend, to forward it to the authorities. There were other cases where just one individual, of a humble status, forwarded a friend’s petition. Alice Walleran, ‘a poor woman’, interceded for a friend in 1383. ‘Roger, a soldier of Calais’, interceded for a friend in 1386.

But if you could interest some powerful magnate, you stood a better chance. Henry of Grosmont, as earl of Derby (see Appendix A), gave his name to nearly a hundred applicants in the year 1345 alone, mostly as part of a general pardon to his troops.

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