The second Welsh war saw Edward attempt to conduct a campaign with an army entirely paid royal wages. In April 1282 the king invited six earls and 152 others to serve for pay.[190] But his plans provoked opposition. At the council at Devizes early in April 1282 the household knight Robert Tiptoft was replaced in the command of the forces in South Wales by the earl of Gloucester. The earl of Hereford, seeing a threat to his position, insisted on his rights as Constable. Then, in mid-May, the original summonses were replaced by new ones. In these no mention was made of pay, but the tenants-in-chief were instead requested in formal feudal terms to provide their forty days service.[191] The chroniclers make no mention of what was evidently a considerable crisis, and the baronial objections to paid service can only be guessed at. Probably, if the whole army was paid wages, the king would have complete rights over all lands and castles captured, whereas if they were taken by a feudal army, they would be allocated to the man with the best claim.[192] In a paid army, the king may have had rights to booty that he would not have had were he employing unpaid feudal troops.[193] The explanation, however, may be simpler: that men of the stature of the earls of Hereford and Gloucester resented the degree of subordination implied in accepting royal pay. An earl could not with dignity accept orders from such a man as Tiptoft.
The results of this opposition to Edward’s plans were clear enough. The earl of Lincoln who had twice accepted pay before 1282 never did so again, except on his campaigns in Gascony.[194] In 1287 various magnates, including the earls of Warwick, Surrey and Norfolk accepted prests, or advances of cash, from the government; these may have been advances on wages, but more probably were simply loans to assist them in their preparations for war. There is no evidence at all to suggest that Cornwall, Hereford or Gloucester were paid for this campaign.[195] In the final Welsh war, that of 1294-5, none of the earls can be proved to have taken pay. Warwick’s army which, when based on Oswestry,[196] won the battle of Maes Moydog, was a paid force, but the name of the earl does not appear on the pay roll. Nor does that of the earl of Arundel, who later joined Warwick.[197] No pay rolls survive for the rest of the campaign, but a wardrobe account of prests contains no mention of wages being paid to any of the earls.[198]
The evidence already discussed has shown that none of the English earls received pay for the campaigns in Scotland in 1298, 1300 or 1304. Nor is there evidence for their accepting wages for any other of Edward’s summer campaigns in the north.[199] But pay was taken for the expedition which set out late in 1297. The contract arranged for the earls of Surrey, Norfolk, Hereford, Gloucester and Warwick, with Henry Percy, to serve for three months with a total of 500 horse, in return for £7,691 16s. 8d.[200] In addition the earl of Arundel with thirty-nine horse served for wages.[201] A similar contract scheme was envisaged in the autumn of 1301, but there is no evidence that it was put into effect.[202] It may be that the earls were prepared to serve under contract when the king was not present on campaign, but that they resented the subordinate position that they were put in by taking pay when Edward was at the head of the army. Furthermore, feudal service could not be performed in the absence of the king, according to the argument advanced in 1297 by Bigod and Bohun, and this shows that a distinction between campaigns when the king was present, and those when he was not, was made at this period. Edward did not go to fight in Gascony, and the earls who served there were prepared to accept wages. A further exception to the general rule that the earls were unwilling to accept royal pay must be made in the case of the Scots and Irish: the earls of Dunbar and Ulster in particular had no hesitation in serving for wages. In 1296 the earl of Ulster provided Edward with some 300 men-at-arms, 260 hobelars and 2,500 foot, and appreciable numbers of Irish troops served in Scotland in 1301 and 1303.[203]
It was only in the case of garrison service that it was common to make contracts. Castle constables would often agree to remain at their posts with a specified number of men in return for a lump sum rather than receive daily wages. For example, on 18 October 1297 an indenture was drawn up with Robert Hastang for the custody of Roxburgh castle with a force of eighteen men-at-arms, twenty crossbowmen and ninety-two archers until the following Whitsun in return for £130.[204] Interestingly, English constables on occasion received better terms than the Scots employed by Edward. In 1302 John de Kingston contracted to keep Edinburgh castle with ten men-at-arms from September until Christmas for £40, while Archibald Livingstone received only £30 for the custody of Linlithgow with a force of identical strength for the same period.[205] Often the contract system was only used to supply the cavalry forces for the castles, the infantry being paid daily wages, while there were periods, notably in the summer, when the whole garrison would be paid on a daily basis.[206] Of course, not all of the castles held by the English in Scotland were in the hands of the crown. Caerlaverock was granted to Robert Clifford in 1298,[207] and Bothwell was held by Aymer de Valence after its capture in 1301 and Inverkip by the earl of Lincoln.[208] In addition, Edward I naturally left many castles, especially in the north, in the hands of those Scotch magnates he regarded as trustworthy. Just as the field armies were composed of both paid and unpaid soldiers, therefore, so were the forces garrisoning the castles.
The armies that were sent to fight in Gascony and Flanders do not fit into the same pattern as those that campaigned in Wales and Scotland. Men who were prepared to serve at their own expense against the Welsh or the Scots in a cause they approved of had no desire to join in unpopular campaigns abroad. Opposition to service on the continent had been frequent and vociferous since the reign of Richard I. It had been an element in the struggle of the baronage against King John, and one of the grievances of the Marshal and Constable in 1297 was that Edward I wanted them to serve overseas. In 1294 Edward issued a strictly feudal summons to raise an army to defend Gascony against the designs of Philip IV.[209] The inclusion of the king of Scotland and several Scotch magnates in this summons did much to provoke the revolt against English suzerainty in the following year, but surprisingly there is no direct evidence of the English baronage resenting the summons. Morris assumed that, although they were couched in feudal terms, the writs ‘cannot but have been mere invitations to professional soldiers to raise cavalry for the king’s pay’.[210] This seems highly unlikely. Certainly the abbot of Ramsey did not interpret his summons in this way, for he actually sent men to the muster to perform his service for him.[211] The Treasurer was appointed to accept fines from those ecclesiastics and women who preferred to commute their service.[212] There clearly were difficulties in enforcing the demand for service, for on 17 August the muster which had been ordered for 1 September was postponed until the end of the month.[213] It looks very much as if it never actually took place. Miss Chew assumed that it was cancelled because of the news of the Welsh revolt,[214] but as it was not until 15 October that the seriousness of the situation in Wales became apparent to the government,[215] this argument is not convincing. It is much more likely that opposition to a feudal levy involving service abroad had compelled Edward to abandon his plans before the news of the Welsh revolt came through.
The army that was sent to Gascony in October 1294 was composed entirely of paid men. Fourteen magnates, headed by the king’s brother Edmund of Lancaster, were granted on 10 October a liberate writ of £1,983 6s. 8d., as a loan with which to prepare themselves and their men for the expedition.[216] Such advances were not normally accepted by men not serving for pay, and this case was no exception. Edmund contracted to serve for a year with 140 men-at-arms in return for 4,000 marks. The earl of Lincoln was to receive 2,000 marks.[217] Later in the war, different rates were in force. By 1298 Lincoln was being paid 1,000 a year for sixty men-at-arms, or twenty-five marks per man, while Edmund of Cornwall with 150 men was contracted at a rate of £2,000 a year, which works out at twenty marks per man.[218] Other troops in Gascony were paid wages on a daily basis, and it appears that even the Gascons recruited locally were paid wages. Not all the English baronage welco
med paid service in Gascony. In 1295 nineteen barons were ordered to set out there, but several of them proved uncooperative. Edward accordingly sent a vicious letter to the Exchequer, asking that their lands be harshly distrained, and that they be persecuted in every conceivable way. The debts that these men owed to the crown were impressive; the earl of Arundel, for example, owed £5,232, and William de Vescy £1,019. In the normal way, such debts were allowed to run on for years: the threat of collecting them was sufficient to force the dissident barons to abandon their stand, and they dutifully set off for Gascony.[219]
The opposition to service, both paid and feudal, in Gascony seems slight in comparison with the resentment aroused by the king’s plan of fighting on two fronts in 1297, with one army in Flanders and one in south-western France. At the Salisbury parliament early in the year the king proposed a feudal summons, and that the Marshal and Constable should lead one army in Gascony, while Edward himself launched the attack in the Low Countries. The plan was opposed on two grounds. Firstly it was claimed that the Marshal and Constable should accompany the king on campaign. Secondly, the old argument that there was no obligation to serve overseas was revived. The climax was the famous scene between Edward and Roger Bigod the Marshal when, to the king’s saying, ‘By God, sir Earl, either you go or you hang’, Bigod retorted, ‘By the self-same oath, sir King, I shall neither go nor hang’. In the subsequent struggle the king was forced to withdraw the idea of a feudal summons, and an alternative form of summons invented by the government met with little success.[220] Although the council felt that Edward was putting himself in considerable danger by going abroad without sufficient funds,[221] he set sail from Winchelsea on 22 August. The constitutional crisis had deprived him of a feudal host; he was accompanied merely by a small army composed of paid troops, mostly loyal members of his household. Even if promotions made on the campaign are included, there were fewer bannerets in the whole army in 1297 than were in the household battalion alone in 1298. But, rather surprisingly, there were some unpaid cavalry on the Flanders campaign. Antony Bek, one of Edward’s staunchest supporters at this time, had about thirty men-at-arms with him. William Hotham, archbishop-elect of Dublin, the earl of Athol, Hugh le Despenser, Bartholomew Badlesmere, Robert de Mohaut and John de Hastings all served voluntarily with smaller retinues. The Treasurer, Walter Langton, does not appear to have been paid for the followers he brought with him.[222]
In 1277, 1282, 1300, 1303 and 1306 the tenants-in-chief of the crown provided their due quotas of feudal service in response to a royal summons. If this picture of armies composed partly of paid troops and, notably in the case of Wales and Scotland, partly of magnates serving voluntarily at their own expense, is correct, where do these strict feudal quotas fit in, and why did Edward summon them?
A radical reduction in the number of troops obliged to muster in response to a feudal summons had taken place in the course of the thirteenth century. The old structure of knights’ fees, created in the Conqueror’s reign and brought up to date by Henry II in 1166, had been intended to provide the crown with the service of over 5,000 knights. It is unlikely that there ever were enough knights in England to perform this full feudal service: Henry II and his sons on several occasions demanded only a fraction of the total owed by the tenants-in-chief. As the equipment of knights became more elaborate, and better horses were required to carry the increased weight of armour, so the cost of knighthood rose sharply and fewer men were able to afford it. The duties and obligations of a knight were, of course, by no means confined to the field of battle. In the thirteenth century these men carried a vast burden of local administrative work, sitting on juries, acting as commissioners of all sorts, and serving as sheriffs, coroners and escheators. The onerousness of such duties meant that many men were anxious to avoid becoming knights. The result was that the number of men of this class was small. In Essex in 1295 there were only twenty-four fit for active service, and it has been estimated that about this time there were only some 1,250 in the whole of England. Although it was decided, probably in 1230, that for the purpose of a feudal muster the formally dubbed knight could be equated with two sergeants-at-arms, who would be heavily armed and mounted, it was impossible in the thirteenth century for a full-scale feudal muster on the twelfth-century assessment of knights’ fees to take place. A further difficulty was that in many cases the tenants-in-chief were finding it hard to get their own sub-tenants to provide service.[223]
The solution to these problems was a radical reduction in the size of the feudal quotas. The process by which this was achieved is a mysterious one, but seems to have been a gradual one of negotiation with individual tenants-in-chief. There was no standard formula adopted to reduce the old quotas: the new were rather established on the basis of a reasonable, if low, assessment of the number of men a lord could be expected to provide. For the most part the new levels of service were established by the time of the Welsh campaign of 1245, although it was possible for the abbot of Abingdon to produce his full service of thirty knights as late as 1266.[224] In some cases the new quotas were so small that magnates actually provided larger contingents than they were legally obliged to. The earl of Winchester appeared with ten knights for the Welsh campaign of 1245, although only bound to attend with three and a half.224 On the old assessment he had owed sixty-six.2[225] The reductions might be very startling. Hugh de Courtenay was due to provide ninety-two knights on the old system, but by Edward I’s reign his quota of service was only three.[226]
As a result of the establishment of these new quotas of service, the numbers of troops performing formal feudal military service under Edward I was not considerable. The first summons of the reign, in 1277, produced a total service of 228 knights and 294 sergeants, two of the latter being considered as equivalent to one knight. For the second Welsh war the Marshal’s roll lists only 123 knights and 190 sergeants, but there may well have been other musters not recorded in the main roll.[227] By the time of the Caerlaverock campaign of 1300 many more were sending sergeants rather than knights to do service, and most of the tenants-in-chief preferred to have their service done by deputies even if they themselves were present on the campaign. The roll of service records forty knights and 366 sergeants.[228] The rolls for 1303 show a much smaller service, composed of fifteen knights and 267 sergeants, along with about twenty lightly armed horsemen.[229] But, as in 1282, it is very likely that records of subsidiary musters have not survived. For the next campaign for which there was a feudal summons, that of 1306, two small muster rolls show service done by about twelve knights and eighty sergeants.[230] There was more commutation that year than before, but writs issued between 1314 and 1316 allowing those who had served in 1306 to levy scutage on their own lands show that almost a hundred tenants-in-chief either served in person, or made arrangements for others to do their service for them.[231] Late in 1306 accusations of non-performance of service were brought by the government against fifteen men. Five of them stated that they had appeared,[232] and it seems very likely that full and correct records of the feudal service done in 1306 were never properly drawn up. The fact that in some cases evidence that men had served in the army was given to Edward II by the Chancellor, rather than by the Constable or Marshal, whose duty it was to keep records of the performance of military service, reinforces this suggestion.
Although Edward I went on issuing formal feudal summonses almost up to the very end of the reign, it does not seem that the forces yielded by the strict quotas were of any great importance. The problem was that the quotas were quite unrealistic, being unrelated to the wealth of the men who produced them. An important royal knight like Adam de Welles owed service for only one half of a sergeanty.[233] In 1300 William de Cantilupe, banneret, was on campaign with three knights and eight sergeants for sixty days, for which he was paid. His feudal service was for one tenth of a knight’s fee, so he detached one of his sergeants for eight days to perform it.[234] Different tenants found different ways of meeting their obliga
tions. For the war of 1282 the abbot of St. Augustine’s, Canterbury, simply paid Henry de Cobham £20 to do his service for him.[235] In 1300 the bishop of Hereford arranged that William de Grandson should perform his feudal service for the sum of 120 marks. When the forty days of service came to an end, the leader of the contingent representing the bishop, Thomas de Birmingham, joined Grandson’s paid retinue.[236] In some cases the connection between the tenants-in-chief and the soldiers performing their service is clear. In 1300 one of the knights sent by Walter Langton to the muster was his brother, Robert Peverel. Of the four men doing service for Robert Chandos, two bore his surname.[237] But usually there was no way of telling whether the soldiers were the tenants of the men they were representing, or were simply hired to do the job.
Feudal levies always produced their comedy turns. In 1282 one man came to the muster carrying a side of bacon, which he ate and then promptly departed.[238] In 1300 there was an archer who came with a bow and one arrow, which he shot off on first seeing the enemy and immediately left for home. John de Langford, whose tenure committed him to serve on a horse worth five shillings, carrying a wooden stick with a sack for holding armour, cannot have been much use to the army. In 1300 he was ordered to pay a fine, but in 1303 he appeared in person.[239] Such men were hardly the normal type of those doing feudal service, and were probably regarded with amusement just as they would be now. But even if the musters did for the most part produce reasonably competent soldiers, the system of feudal service hardly created an army. It has been estimated that the cavalry was 2,000 strong in 1300;[240] less than a quarter of these were feudal, and the campaign lasted much longer than the forty days of the traditional service. The men performing their feudal service probably did not serve as a separate brigade, but were assimilated into the normal structure of the army. In 1300 Hugh of St. Philibert even managed to have himself registered as performing feudal service at the same time as he was in receipt of household pay, which was wholly improper.[241] The incident shows that he was not made to leave the household battalion during the time that he was performing his service.
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