Edward II: The Unconventional King by Kathryn Warner

Author:Kathryn Warner
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Amberley Publishing
Published: 2014-10-12T23:00:00+00:00

12

Tyranny, Miracles and an Escape

The year 1322 marked the beginning of Edward II’s tyranny. The Vita comments, ‘The harshness of the king has today increased so much that no one however great and wise dares to cross his will … the nobles of the realm, terrified by threats and the penalties inflicted on others, let the king’s will have free play … whatever pleases the king, though lacking in reason, has the force of the law.’1 The Brut says at the time of Boroughbridge, ‘So much unkindness was never seen in England before,’ and ‘The land was without law, for Holy Church had no more reverence than it had been a brothel’ – though in fact the author doesn’t blame Edward for the lawlessness, and Sir Thomas Gray, author of the Scalacronica, considered that ‘the commons of his [Edward’s] time were wealthy and protected by strong laws’.2 Whether the common people of England suffered under a higher crime rate in the 1320s than at any other time in the fourteenth century is doubtful; it was the land-owning class who were victims of the Despensers and their greed. Despenser treated the widows of Contrariants and other vulnerable women cruelly, imprisoning, for example, Elizabeth Comyn for a year until she handed over some of her lands to his father and himself. At his trial in November 1326, Despenser was even accused of torturing a ‘Lady Baret’ by breaking her limbs until she went insane – presumably a reference to Joan Gynes, widow of Stephen Baret, a Contrariant executed in 1322.3 As Despenser was perfectly willing to force widows to grant him their lands but is not known to have been a sadist who had people tortured for fun, his motive must presumably have been to gain control of Joan’s lands. In 1324, however, her three manors were in Edward’s hands, not Despenser’s.4 The charge of torture against Despenser sounds too specific to have been completely invented, yet it is extremely odd that neither Joan nor any of her family later petitioned Edward III for restitution, and even stranger that none of the contemporary chroniclers noticed such a horrific act; the alleged torture is not mentioned anywhere. They might have ignored the torture of a lowborn woman, but never a highborn one. Whatever happened between Despenser and Joan, the story of her broken limbs and insanity is likely to be, at best, a gross exaggeration at a time when all the ills of the 1320s were being heaped on one man’s head.

Edward granted the peninsula of Gower, ownership of which had begun the civil war in the first place, to Hugh Despenser, and Despenser subsequently forced his sister-in-law, Roger Damory’s widow Elizabeth de Burgh, to give up her valuable lordship of Usk (worth £770 a year) in exchange for the peninsula (worth £300 a year), nastily ordering his men to ‘strip Gower for our profit’ before handing it over to her. Using quasi-legal methods, he deprived her of Gower as well in 1324.5

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.