Henry IV (98 page)

In neighbouring Nottinghamshire, the most influential figure during the first seven years of the reign was the widely respected Sir Thomas Rempston, steward of the royal household and long-time comrade-in-arms of the king, but following his drowning in 1406 the king's knight, Sir Richard Stanhope, cut loose and began a campaign of intimidation against his neighbours in the north of the county. As with Philip Courtenay in Devon five years earlier, people feared for their lives and limbs if they crossed Stanhope, and although he was removed from the county bench in 1407 this marked only the briefest of checks to a promising criminal career. The incident that brought his activities to a head was a riot following a failed attempt to arbitrate in a property dispute between two gentlemen of the county. Stanhope and five other knights from Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire were committed to the Tower of London on 24 October 1411. Most of them had connections, some close, with Prince Henry, who showed more willingness than his father to discipline his retainers. However, they did not remain in prison for long. Stanhope was released in November and pardoned six months later for any riots or felonies he had committed before December 1411.
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It was rare for leaders of county society to spend more than a few weeks in prison.

Shropshire probably experienced a higher level of disorder than any other English county during Henry IV's reign, owing partly to Welsh raiding and partly to the emergency measures needed to repel the infiltrators.
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By far the greatest magnate in the county was the earl of Arundel – lord of Oswestry, Shrewsbury, Chirk, Clun and much else besides – and the king's policy was in effect to entrust its defence to him. This gave his retainers such as John Wele, captain of Oswestry and Shrewsbury castles, Richard Lacon, captain of Clun, and the brothers Robert and Roger Corbet of Moreton Corbet a more or less free hand to plunder the countryside for manpower and provisions as well as to make theoretically treasonous pacts with the rebels. By 1409, many of the county's inhabitants were suffering less from the depredations of the Welsh than from those of the earl's followers. One who certainly did was William Banaster of Hadnall. Banaster was from an old county family on a declining social trajectory, his public service now restricted to holding the escheatorship
early in the reign and occasional appearances as juror or commissioner.
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Although he had acted as a feoffee together with his near neighbours the Corbet brothers in 1407, his connections with the Arundel affinity were tenuous, and within another year he and the Corbets had fallen out badly over their respective claims to lands in nearby Astley. According to Banaster, on 13 June 1408 Robert and Roger Corbet with a group of armed followers broke into his meadows and trampled his crops with their horses. This was followed by an attack with five hundred armed men on Hadnall manor and an attempt to ambush and kill Banaster as he rode back from Oswestry.
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In April 1409 the parties agreed to submit their quarrel to the earl of Arundel's arbitration, but this failed after Roger Corbet and eighty of his men ‘prepared for war’ began terrorizing Banaster's tenants and laid siege for three hours to Hadnall manor, so terrifying his wife that she lost the child she was carrying. One of his servants was killed, another wounded, a third had his house destroyed. Arbitration by Arundel was once again proposed, this time successfully, and on 19 December 1409 the earl and his council delivered their award, but it was not so much a victory for justice as for the earl's retainers. Every one of Banaster's allegations was met either with the response that, according to the earl's information (presumably from the Corbets), Banaster and his servants had also been guilty of using force, ‘so that his riot should be set against the other’, or a straightforward denial by the Corbets and eleven oath-helpers ‘by their faith and with their hands raised’. No compensation or even apology was offered. Banaster, ‘out of reverence for my said lord’, accepted the award, although he probably had little option.
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The Corbet brothers were above him, both on the social scale and in the estimation of the earl. Robert and Roger were both ‘esquires of the earl of Arundel’, and Robert became sheriff, JP and MP for Shropshire. They would be among the earl's foremost supporters in the more serious dispute which broke out in 1413 when John Talbot, Lord Furnivall, began to threaten his dominance in the county.
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Until then, however, Arundel and his servants could do more or less as they pleased. The fact that the earl was also Prince Henry's retainer doubtless further emboldened his men, although once he became king, the prince took firmer action. The summer of 1414 saw the arrival of the King's Bench at Shrewsbury, with the duke of York presiding. Shropshire, declared Chief Justice Hankford, was ‘rife with homicides and rapes far more than other counties of England’ and Henry V was ‘deeply concerned about its correction and improvement’. The fact that a kinsman of the Corbets, Sir Robert Corbet of Hadley, was now sheriff did not save them: they, John Wele, Richard Lacon and others were hauled before the council at Westminster in August, briefly imprisoned, and only released after their master, the earl of Arundel, gave pledges for their good behaviour.
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In the far north, the situation was complicated by Scottish incursions and the existence of several liberties and franchises where the king's writ did not run, but the real problem here was less the presence of great affinities than the absence of them.
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The minorities of Thomas Lord Dacre (b.1387) and John Lord Clifford (b.1391), scions of two of the greatest families in Cumberland and Westmorland, respectively, diminished magnate leadership in the west march, while in the east march the prolonged resistance of the earl of Northumberland's castellans between 1403 and 1405 gave ample warning of what it might take to restore the rule of law. Following Northumberland's flight in 1405, royal power was vested in Prince John and the earl of Westmorland, but it was power without roots. The earl of Westmorland had little interest in recruiting a following in Northumberland: his efforts were focused on the North Riding of Yorkshire, especially Richmond, where he tried to build up a concentration of lands and retainers contiguous with his ancestral holdings in Durham.
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Nor did the king make any real attempt, at least for the moment, either to intrude his supporters into northern society or to reconcile former Percy retainers, with the important exception of Sir Robert Umfraville. Umfraville was a border warlord of impeccable lineage and a former sheriff of Northumberland who, despite being retained by the king
in 1402 and remaining loyal in both 1403 and 1405, had risen in the service of the Percys and continued to be employed by the earl until the latter's flight to Scotland. He was subsequently entrusted with great responsibilities: captain of several castles, chamberlain of Berwick, diplomat, admiral, and Knight of the Garter from 1408, he became a totemic figure for the English borderers.
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Yet despite his service to the crown, both his later allegiance to the second earl of Northumberland and the admiration expressed for him by the chronicler John Hardyng, who was brought up in Hotspur's household, suggest that Umfraville also continued to command the support of Percy sympathizers, and he may well have been instrumental in reconciling others such as Sir Thomas Gray of Heaton, his brother John, and John Cresswell, the recalcitrant constable of Warkworth in 1403, who in February 1409 indented to serve with Prince John at Berwick.
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Even Sir William Clifford, acting head of the Clifford affinity in Westmorland and a Percy diehard who had rebelled three times but always managed to make his peace with the king, was eventually reintegrated: pardoned his transgressions and granted the arrears of his annuity in the autumn of 1408, he was allowed in the following year to enter into the inheritance of his wife Ann (daughter of the rebel Lord Bardolf), and two days after Henry V's accession he became constable of Bordeaux.
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This more inclusive approach to former Percy adherents during the later years of the reign recognized the fact that the old earl's following could be neither dismantled nor ignored. Even Northumberland's death in 1408, it was said, merely ‘caused hatred to gain strength and greed to rise
up in the northern parts’, a picture corroborated by Prince John's letters to his father listing the ‘armed incursions, robberies, pillages, taking of prisoners, cattle raids . . . and other acts of war’ habitually committed in the county.
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The fact that two further rebellions followed the Percy meltdown in 1403 says more about the state of the north than does their successful suppression. As in Shropshire, it is difficult to distinguish between the effects of cross-border raiding and the escalation of local rivalries, but there is no doubt into which category fell the notorious feud between John Bertram and Sir Robert Ogle. The two men were brothers, descendants of an old and distinguished Northumbrian family, although Bertram, the younger, had taken his grandmother's surname, probably because it was she who had brought Bothal castle into the family. Bothal was the focus of their quarrel. Their father (also Sir Robert) had settled it on his younger son, but following his death on 31 October 1409, before he had even been buried, his elder son collected two hundred men-at-arms and archers and marched with scaling ladders and siege engines to Bothal. Arriving there at midnight on 1 November, ignoring the pleas of two Northumberland JPs who ordered him to desist before retiring in fear of their lives, Ogle besieged the castle for four days until it was surrendered. Buildings and granaries were burned, three of Bertram's servants seized, and goods and chattels to the value of £400 carried away. Robert was still occupying Bothal in February 1410 when the case came before parliament.
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He was ordered by the lords to evacuate it and appear before the council by May on pain of his life; damages were awarded and his accomplices imprisoned. This was effective in that Bothal was restored to Bertram, but in fact Ogle went almost entirely unpunished and went on to play a leading role in Northumbrian society, as did his brother.

One of the points made by Bertram in his petition was that Bothal was so close to the border that a remedy by recourse to the common law was not practicable. In fact Bothal was some thirty miles from the border, but he seems to have been expressing a viewpoint widely held by Northumbrians, who in the next parliament, that of November 1411, complained that the county was ‘so far distant from the law’ that royal justices and barons of the exchequer were hardly seen there, allowing
indictments to be suppressed by royal ministers and maintenance and robbery to flourish.
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The government's response was that justices should be appointed to make enquiries ‘as necessary’, but its record in border peacekeeping was not encouraging. Justices of gaol delivery were by now visiting the county only once a year rather than twice, while the system of Marcher law built up during the fourteenth century more or less fell into abeyance following the capture of Douglas in 1402 and the collapse of Percy power between 1403 and 1405. Neither Henry IV nor Henry V showed much interest in reviving it. Only after Douglas's return in 1409 and the renewal of attacks on English garrisons were Prince John's warnings heeded and tentative moves made to revive the March days, but not until 1423–4 was the system fully reactivated.
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Meanwhile the King's Bench remained at Westminster. Not once during Henry IV's reign did it sit outside the capital, a point driven home when his son took it with him to the Leicester parliament of April 1414 and it held sessions in several Midland counties.
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Henry V's decision in November 1414 to restore Henry Percy the younger, Hotspur's son, to the earldom forfeited by his grandfather, was also in part driven by the need to restore order. As the new king was acknowledging, it was really very difficult to replace the family that had dominated north-eastern England for nearly a century.
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To these slow-burning provincial enmities, the year 1411 added a new spate of outrages closer to home. Except in the sense that it was seen as symptomatic of a more widespread malaise, the ruffianism of a Hugh Erdeswick or a Robert Ogle was, by and large, limited in its impact to the locality in which it was committed, but some crimes had the potential to embarrass the government on a wider stage. Such were those perpetrated by William Longe, the mayor of Rye (East Sussex), and Sir John Prendergast. Longe was a merchant-pirate in the tradition of John Hauley and John Brandon, and had been active in the Channel for several years,
but with the cordon of mercantile truces in place after 1407 there was less tolerance of such behaviour. Despite this, he and Prendergast had many supporters: Walsingham claimed that their attacks on Flemish and Breton fleets brought peace ‘on land and sea’, and many of those who lived along the Kent and Sussex coast saw them as heroes.
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Yet when Longe and Prendergast captured two Flemish salt ships in October 1410, they were directly challenging the authority of Prince Henry, not only because he was Warden of the Cinque Ports but also because they were jeopardizing the renewal of the mercantile truce with Flanders and the chances of a political alliance with the duke of Burgundy. English merchants trying to trade with Flanders also blamed them for their troubles.
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By the spring of 1411 the two men's defiance was threatening to provoke a diplomatic crisis. If the Anglo-Flemish truce were not renewed by 15 June, English wool and other goods in Flanders would be seized, with disastrous consequences, both for merchants and for the government's customs revenue; the Flemings, however, were demanding justice against Longe and Prendergast before renewing it. The great council of March 1411 thus ordered their arrest, but within a few days they had put to sea again with sufficient strength to seize eighteen ships within a month (sixteen Flemish, one Italian and one Prussian) before returning to Sussex to sell their plundered cargoes, one of their customers being the bishop of Chichester. The infuriated Prince Henry indicted them as traitors, called up the posses of the south-eastern shires and ordered their capture; Longe responded by sailing up the Rother to Smallhythe on 7 May and seizing a ship, the
Juliane
, said to belong to the prince himself. Four days later, with the Anglo-Flemish talks at Calais on the verge of collapse, the prince sent Admiral Beaufort to intercept the pair, with instructions to offer pardons to any of their associates who agreed to desert them.
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When Beaufort caught up with him, Longe agreed to surrender in return for immunity, but when brought to London he was imprisoned in the Tower, while Prendergast fled to sanctuary at Westminster.
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This enabled the truce with Flanders to be renewed, but the prince won few plaudits in England for taking a tough line: Walsingham expressed outrage at the treatment of Longe and Prendergast, and although he admitted the truth of some of the charges
against them he claimed that ‘all sorts of men’ begged the prince not to imprison them. This may well be true, for Prendergast was quickly released, and by May 1412 was once again raiding Normandy and Picardy and ravaging the lands of the king's old foe the count of St-Pol, this time apparently with the government's blessing. Longe secured his pardon in February 1413, a wise precaution with the prince about to come to the throne. On his return to Rye he received a hero's welcome, and three months later was elected to serve the borough in Henry V's first parliament.
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