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Magna Carta 800th Anniversary Biographies of Surety Barons

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Magna Carta 800th Anniversary Biographies of Surety Barons

For the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, Professor Nigel Saul of Royal Holloway College, University of London created biographies of the Magna Carta Surety Barons. In 2014, he and the Magna Carta 800th Anniversary Committee generously gave permission for them to be reproduced on WikiTree.[1]

The biographies are taken from https://magnacarta800th.com/schools/biographies/the-25-barons-of-magna-carta/. References to "the Twenty Five" are to the Surety Barons.

William d'Albini

William d’Albini (d'Aubigny) was a relative latecomer to the baronial opposition cause, but one of the movement’s ablest military commanders and the leader of the defence of Rochester against King John in 1215. After John’s son, Henry III, succeeded to the throne in 1216, he showed himself a loyal supporter of the new regime.

William (after 1146–1236) was the son of William d'Albini II by his wife Maud de Senlis, daughter of Robert de Clare, the grandson of another William, known as 'Brito', and the eventual heir of the first post-Conquest lord of Belvoir, Robert de Todeni. William’s lordship was an extensive one comprising some 33 knights' fees, stretching across much of the east and north Midlands, and partly overlooked by Belvoir (Leics.) itself, dramatically sited on a ridge west of Grantham.

William was a minor at the time that his father died in 1167 or 1168 and appears to have come of age in about 1172. He witnessed charters of Henry II in England and Normandy, and from 1190 to 1193 served as constable of the castle of the Peak. For his support of King Richard against the rebellion of the king’s brother John, he was rewarded with part of the estate confiscated from the rebel, Roger de Montbegon. In 1194 he travelled to Speyer in Germany, to greet Richard on his release from captivity. Like a number of the Twenty Five, in John’s reign he embarked on the road to rebellion only reluctantly, being by upbringing and instinct a natural royalist. He had long experience of serving in royal administration locally. He served as sheriff of Rutland from 1195 to 1198, as sheriff of Warwickshire and Leicestershire from 1196 to 1198, and as sheriff of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire in John’s first year. In the 1190s and later, he acted as an itinerant royal justice and in 1211-12 he was appointed keeper of the ports in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. In February 1213, as John’s suspicions of the northern lords deepened, he served as a commissioner to look into money allegedly collected by sheriffs and other officials that never found its way into the royal coffers. His kinship to a number of the northern lords may have been a factor in his appointment.

For all his involvement with royal government under John, however, William was not entirely uncritical of the king’s policies. In 1201 he was party to a baronial confederation objecting to military service in Normandy on the grounds that it was contrary to their terms of tenure. In 1215 William threw his weight behind the baronial opposition shortly after the barons’ takeover of London in May, doing so for several reasons. Almost certainly he had grown disenchanted with the oppressive nature of John’s rule. Five years before, he had been a witness to John’s official account of the reasons for his destruction of the Braose family, thereby associating himself with the king’s actions, while at the same time becoming aware of their arbitrariness. Secondly, he is almost certain to have been influenced by the ties of kinship. He was the first cousin of Robert FitzWalter, lord of Dunmow, to all intents and purposes the leader of the rebellion, and was the uncle of another rebel, Robert de Ros, the lord of Helmsley. It may also be significant that among his knightly tenants was Nicholas de Stuteville of Knaresborough, the greatest baronial debtor to the king of all.

In June 1215 his experience and social standing ensured his appointment to the Twenty Five and from the autumn, after the renewal of war, he fought actively on the baronial side. In July, after the barons had gone their separate ways, Robert FitzWalter was writing to him to advise of a change of meeting-place for a tournament from Stamford to Hounslow Heath. John’s strategy in the civil war was to counter the baronial challenge by bringing in a force of mainly Flemish mercenaries to help re-take London. The barons, to prevent these men’s passage inland from Dover, made for Rochester, at the bridging point over the Medway, and quickly took the castle, installing William as constable. John retaliated by immediately embarking on siege operations. The castle, though ill-provisioned, was well manned, with some 95 knights and 45 men-at-arms under William’s command, and strong resistance was offered. Both sides fought fiercely. 'Living memory does not recall a siege so closely pressed or so bravely resisted', wrote the Barnwell chronicler. To eke out the meagre food rations in the castle, d’Albini ordered the sick and the wounded to be ejected, a common tactic in medieval sieges; according to the Barnwell writer again, the king had their hands and feet cut off. The turning-point in the siege came in November, when the king’s men successfully undermined one of the keep’s corner towers, bringing it down, and opening a way in. William had no alternative but to surrender, and he and his garrison were despatched to captivity at Corfe in Dorset.

Following this success, the king made his way to the Midlands, where he directed the siege of William’s castle at Belvoir. After he had issued a threat to starve William himself if the garrison held out, the latter’s son Nicholas, who was heading the defence, hastily offered his surrender. In July 1216, partly through the good offices of his wife, William agreed [on] terms with the king, offering a ransom of 6000 marks. He had handed over 1000 marks of this sum by November when, shortly after the accession of the new king, Henry III, he was released, his wife offering herself as a hostage instead. In 1223 William was permitted to pay off the balance of the ransom in easy instalments of 40 marks a year. William’s career from 1217 was that of a committed supporter of the new Minority regime. He fought on the Regent’s side at Lincoln, and his loyalty was to earn its reward in his appointment as constable of Sleaford Castle (Lincs.). In 1223 he joined the young Henry III on his campaign against Prince Llewellyn and the Welsh at Builth Wells and Montgomery. Two years after this, he was one of the group of counsellors who witnessed the final and definitive reissue of Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest.

William died on 1 May 1236 at his manor of Uffington, near Stamford (Lincs.). His remains were interred in the priory which he had founded at Newstead, just outside the village; his heart, however, was removed for separate burial at Belvoir Priory. Between 1221 and the early 1230s the future chronicler, Roger Wendover, was prior of Belvoir, a dependent house of St Albans. It seems very likely that he was indebted to d’Albini for his account of the siege of Rochester, which is full of circumstantial detail.

William was twice married. His first wife was Margery, daughter of Odinel de Umfreville of Prudhoe (Northumberland), who died sometime before 1198, and his second, Agatha, daughter and eventual coheiress of William Trussebut of Hunsingore (Yorks.). William’s heir was yet another William, who died in 1247 leaving only daughters, one of whom, Isabel, married Robert de Ros (d. 1285) of Helmsley, descendant of the lord of that name who was of the Twenty Five, so carrying the d’Albini inheritance to the Ros family.

The family of d’Albini of Belvoir is not to be confused with that of the same name based at Old Buckenham (Norfolk) and Arundel (Sussex), which held the title of earl of Arundel.

Roger le Bigod and Hugh le Bigod

The Bigods were a major East Anglian landowning family, based at Framlingham (Suffolk), who had held the earldom of Norfolk since its grant to Hugh Bigod in 1140 or 1141. Roger (c. 1143-1221) was the only son of this Hugh by his first wife, Juliana, sister of Aubrey de Vere, earl of Oxford.

Roger’s father had left him a tangled inheritance. He had repudiated his son’s mother and had subsequently married Gundreda, daughter of Roger, earl of Warwick, by whom he had two more sons, Hugh and William, for whom their mother, after their father’s death in 1176 or 1177, sought to make provision out of the family inheritance at their elder half-brother’s expense. Henry II, savouring the opportunity to gain his revenge on Hugh for his involvement in the rebellion against him in 1173-4, deliberately left the case unresolved, refused to allow the son to succeed to the father’s earldom, and confiscated the lands in dispute between the heir and the half-blood. Roger was only able to vindicate his rights on Richard I’s accession in 1189, when the earldom was granted to him on payment of the relatively low relief of one thousand marks (£666).

Thereafter Roger enjoyed a long and honourable career in royal service. He served Richard as a justice in eyre (i.e. itinerant judge) and as a baron of the exchequer. In John’s reign he took part in the defence of Normandy, and after 1206 served on campaigns in Poitou and within the British Isles. In 1215, however, he went over to the opposition, joining the rebel barons in their muster at Stamford. In part, his involvement on the rebel arose in response to the financial pressures exerted on him by the king. The scutage – money due in lieu of personal military service – that the earl owed from his many estates was so substantial that in 1211 he was driven to striking a deal with the exchequer to pay 2000 marks (£1333) for respite during his lifetime from demands for arrears and for liability to a reduced sum in future. Roger had various other grievances against the king. One at least related to litigation. In 1207, when a legal action had been brought against him in the royal courts, he objected to the chosen jurors on grounds of their likely bias, but his arguments had been ignored by the king, who ordered the case to proceed.

Roger was joined in his rebellion by his son and heir Hugh, who was already of full age, and the two stood in the forefront of the opposition in East Anglia. In March 1216 the king succeeded in taking the family’s main castle at Framlingham and put pressure on the earl by pardoning those of his followers whom he captured, while condemning those who refused to submit to forfeiture of their lands. Roger and Hugh did not return to their allegiance until after the general peace settlement agreed with Henry III’s Minority government at Kingston-on-Thames in September 1217. By April of the following year the earl had received back all his lands and titles, but, by now over 70, he was in semi-retirement and he died three years later in 1221. He was succeeded as earl by his son, another of the Twenty Five, who in 1206 or 1207 had married Matilda, daughter of the future Regent, William Marshal, earl of Pembroke. The son died in February 1225.

Framlingham castle, as we see it today, is largely the product of a rebuilding carried out by Earl Roger in Richard the Lionheart’s reign, following the partial demolition of the fabric by Henry II in 1174. It consists of a cluster of baileys set on a low eminence above a flooded mere. The inner bailey, which constituted its central space, was innovative in taking the form of an irregular-shaped curtain wall punctuated at intervals by open-backed towers, dispensing with the great tower or keep customary in Norman castles.

Henry de Bohun

Henry de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, was a member of the Essex-based family grouping brought to the rebel cause by kinship with Geoffrey de Mandeville and Robert FitzWalter. Henry’s family also held important blocks of lands in the west of England and the Welsh Marches.

Henry (c. 1175-1220) was the son of Humphrey de Bohun (d. 1181) and Margaret (d. 1201), daughter of Henry, earl of Northumberland, and widow of Conan IV, duke of Brittany. His grandmother was Margaret de Bohun, the daughter of Miles of Gloucester, earl of Hereford, one of the earliest and most consistent supporters of the Empress Matilda in the civil war of King Stephen’s reign. Margaret brought to the de Bohuns her family’s claims to the royal constableship and to the earldom of Hereford. The constable’s office had been granted to her son – Henry’s father – before 1174 and was therefore inherited by Henry himself, who used the style ‘Henry the Constable’ in a number of his early charters. Despite his youth he occasionally attested charters of Richard I and was one of the king’s sureties in negotiations with the count of Flanders in 1197.

John bestowed the title earl of Hereford on Henry in 1200, though at the same time prohibiting him from staking any claim to the generous grants which Henry II had made in a charter to his ancestor Earl Roger of Hereford. His grandmother’s advocacy had been a factor in this success, but equally significant was the fact that his mother was a granddaughter of David I, king of Scotland, and his uncle was William the Lion, a later king of the same country. Between 1204 and 1211 Henry was engaged in a lengthy dispute to establish his claim to a part of his mother’s dower lands, the valuable lordship of Ryhall in Rutland. No sooner had this dispute been settled than he found himself dragged into yet further litigation, countering a claim by the king’s half-brother, William Longespée, earl of Salisbury, to his lordship of Trowbridge (Wilts.) on the pretext of descent from an earlier owner, Edward of Salisbury. This immensely long drawn-out dispute was to lead to a sharp deterioration in his relations with King John. Longespée initiated the legal action in 1212, and Earl Henry responded by resort to the time-wasting tactics characteristic of the time, pleading illness as an excuse for absence from hearings. As such an excuse was inadmissible in this sort of case, the king took the lordship into his own hands, while allowing Longespée to levy scutage (money in lieu of military service) from its tenants. The sense of hurt which Earl Henry felt was a major factor in his support for the rebels in 1215, as John’s seizure of the lordship constituted a disseisin made ‘unjustly and without judgement’, in the wording used in clause 39 of the Charter. A further claim on his allegiance was made by the ties of kinship: his wife was Maud, daughter of Geoffrey FitzPeter and therefore sister of Geoffrey de Mandeville. By virtue of his involvement on the rebel side in 1215 he secured the restoration of the territorial lordship, although not of the castle, of Trowbridge. Letters ordering the estate’s restitution to him were among the first to be issued in 1215 in execution of the Charter. The dispute continued to splutter on, however, and a final settlement was not reached until 1229, when Edward of Salisbury’s estates were divided equally between the claimants, the castle and manor of Trowbridge itself going to the Countess Ela, Longespée’s widow.

On the death of King John, Earl Henry remained loyal to the rebel cause and he was taken prisoner with the other rebel leaders at the battle of Lincoln in May 1217. As part of the general settlement in September he made his peace with the Minority government, subsequently attending the young Henry III’s court, receiving the earl’s third penny of Herefordshire and accounting for scutage. He died on pilgrimage to the Holy Land on 1 June 1220, leaving a son and heir, Humphrey. His widow took as her second husband, sometime between 1221 and 1226, one Sir Roger de Dauntsey and succeeded in her own right to the earldom of Essex, which on her death was inherited by her son.

Earl Henry was buried in the chapter house of Llanthony priory, near Gloucester, the traditional burial place of the de Bohun family. He was succeeded in the title by his son, Humphrey, who was to live until 1275.

Earl Henry was a notable figure in the development of modern Trowbridge, as it was he who in 1200 secured from King John the grant of a market and annual fair there. From this privilege flowed the laying out of the market place along the curved line of the castle ditch, the removal of the church from the castle’s inner bailey and the construction of the present church of St James in the heart of the town. It is likely that the earl’s considerable investment in Trowbridge helps to explain his keenness to retain possession of the place in the face of William Longespée’s persistent claims.

Richard de Clare and Gilbert de Clare

The de Clares were one of the great baronial families of twelfth- and thirteenth-century England, holding wide estates in eastern and western England and beyond. For a while the senior branch, based at Tonbridge (Kent), was eclipsed in fame and fortune by a brilliant junior branch which established itself in South Wales and the Marches. Richard FitzGilbert de Clare of this branch, known to history as ‘Strongbow’, was the leader of the semi-official Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in Henry II’s reign and obtained a grant of the lordship of Leinster from the king in 1171. This cadet branch became extinct in the male line on the death of Strongbow’s son Gilbert in 1185 and the family’s estates were later taken over by the Marshal earls of Pembroke.

Richard de Clare, appointed to the Twenty Five, of the senior branch of the family, was the son of Roger de Clare (d. 1173), lord of Tonbridge, who was in turn the younger brother and successor of Gilbert II (d. 1152), to whom King Stephen had granted the title earl of Hertford in or around 1138. In the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries the earls used the title ‘of Hertford’ interchangeably with that of earl of Clare.

For over four decades until his death in 1217 Earl Richard was the effective head of the house of Clare. He does not appear to have been especially active, however, playing little part in national affairs either in the last years of Henry II’s reign or in that of Richard the Lionheart. He only emerged as a figure of political importance towards the end of his life in the crisis of John’s reign, when he was appointed to the Twenty Five, most probably in recognition less of his personal qualities than his family’s exalted standing in the realm.

Earl Richard’s greatest and most lasting achievement was to add to the already considerable wealth and landed endowment of his line. In 1189 at the beginning of Richard’s reign, in a major acquisition, he received a grant of half of the honor (or feudal lordship) of the Giffard earls of Buckingham, which had escheated to the crown over twenty years before following the death of the last earl, Walter. The Lionheart effected an equal division between Earl Richard and his cousin Isabel, daughter of Strongbow and wife of William Marshal, earl of Pembroke, both of whom claimed descent from Roesia, Walter’s aunt and wife of Richard FitzGilbert de Clare, first founder of the family.

In 1195 Earl Richard made another substantial, though less perhaps important, addition to his family’s inheritance when he obtained the feudal honor of St Hilary on the death of his mother Maud, Earl Roger’s widow. The honor, for which Richard offered £360 to the Crown, included lands in Norfolk and Northamptonshire.

The most substantial of all the additions Earl Richard made to the family estate, however, came as a result of his marriage to Amicia, second daughter and eventual sole heiress of William, earl of Gloucester. The Gloucester inheritance was a vast one, comprising over 260 knights’ fees in England and extensive lands in Wales and the Marches. The story of its partition among the three daughters and co-heiresses is long and complex. Mabel, the eldest of the three, was married to Amaury de Montfort, count of Evreux in Normandy, while Isabel, the third and youngest, was married to the future King John. Mabel’s marriage was childless and on her husband’s death her lands passed to Isabel. John, however, on becoming king, divorced Isabel so that he could marry the Poitevin heiress Isabella of Angouleme, giving his now ex-wife in marriage to Geoffrey de Mandeville, another of the Twenty Five, and charging him 20,000 marks for the privilege. After Geoffrey died in 1216 her hand was taken by a third husband, Hubert de Burgh, but she herself died in 1217, and her estates passed to Amicia and her husband, Earl Richard. Earl Richard survived Isabel by only six weeks and did not live to secure formal seisin of her estates and title. It was left to his son and heir Gilbert, another of the Twenty Five, to succeed to the vast Gloucester inheritance. Shortly after his father’s death Gilbert assumed the combined titles of earl of Gloucester and Hertford. Countess Amicia lived out her last years in retirement, probably at Clare, having been separated from her husband, for reasons unknown, since 1200.

Earl Gilbert was an active participant on the baronial side in the civil war that followed in the wake of King John’s rejection of Magna Carta. He fought with Louis and the French at the battle of Lincoln in May 1217 and was taken captive by none other than William Marshal, the Regent, whose daughter, Isabel, he was later to marry. In 1225 he was a witness to Henry III’s definitive reissue of Magna Carta. In 1230 he accompanied Henry on his expedition to Brittany, but died on the way back at Penros, in the duchy. The earl’s body was brought by way of Plymouth to Tewkesbury, where he was buried before the high altar of the great abbey. A monument, now lost, was erected to his memory by his widow.

By a strange irony, the de Clare family, like their predecessors in the Gloucester title, was to come to an end in 1314, after the death of the last earl, in the succession of three daughters and coheiresses and the partition of the family estates between them."

John FitzRobert

John FitzRobert (c. 1190-1240) held estates distributed across two regions of England, the far north along the Scottish border, and East Anglia and Essex. He accordingly had ties with the two main, but largely separate, groups of barons who rose in opposition to King John in 1216.

John’s ancestors had a long tradition of service to the Angevin monarchy. His grandfather Roger FitzRichard through his military prowess had earned the favour of Henry II, who in 1158 granted him the castle of Warkworth in Northumberland and a few years later the castle and feudal honor of Clavering in Essex. John’s father, Robert, who came of age in 1191, served as sheriff of Northumberland in 1203 and received various grants of manors from John in 1204 and 1205. Robert was a man of wealth and made numerous additions to the great castle at Warkworth which are still visible in the castle’s fabric today, notably the Carrickfergus tower and the western part of the south wall.

John, who succeeded his father in 1212 [NB the date may be 1214], took over from the latter his established position in northern society, numbering among his associates Eustace de Vesci, William de Mowbray and Peter de Brus. However, he also spent time in East Anglia, where his great-grandfather had acquired estates through his marriage to a daughter of Roger Bigod, earl of Norfolk, and his father had strengthened the family’s position further by an almost equally valuable marriage to the daughter of the Norfolk landowner, William de Chesney. In 1213 and 1215 John served as sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk.

Understandably, in the light of his and his family’s long tradition of royal service, John was a relative latecomer to the baronial cause. It was nonetheless a tribute both to his high standing and the strength of his ties in northern society that he was chosen one of the Twenty Five. After the renewal of hostilities in the autumn of 1215 he joined his associates in waging war against King John, but after the baronial defeat at Lincoln in May the following year he was among the earliest to offer submission to Henry III’s Minority government. He served as sheriff of Northumberland from 1224 to 1227.

John married twice, his first wife, whom he wedded in about 1218, being Ada de Balliol, through whom he acquired the lordship of Barnard Castle in County Durham, and his second wife Cecily de Fontaines. [This is a slip: John married once, to Ada de Balliol, who survived him: Cecily de Fontaines was Ada's mother.] When he died in 1240, Matthew Paris, the chronicler of St Albans Abbey, wrote: ‘In this year died John FitzRobert, a man of noble birth and one of the chief barons of the northern provinces of England’.

Robert FitzWalter

Robert FitzWalter (d. 1235) has as good a claim as anyone to being regarded as the leader of the baronial opposition to John, styling himself in letters ‘Marshal of the Army of God’. An enigmatic personality, by turns shifty, querulous, conspiratorial and high principled, he played a major part in the events of 1215 and so contributed substantially to Magna Carta becoming part of the fabric of English political society.

Robert was born around 1180, the son of Walter FitzRobert, lord of Dunmow (Essex) and Baynard’s Castle, London, and Matilda, daughter of Henry II’s justiciar, Richard de Lucy. Robert’s grandfather, another Robert, the king’s steward, was a younger son of Richard FitzGilbert de Clare, a relationship which meant that Robert himself had ties of cousinage with greatest baronial family in Essex and Suffolk and another family involved in the rebellion of 1215. When he succeeded his father in 1198, Robert inherited a barony of over 66 knights’ fees, to which he could add another 32 fees brought to him by his wife Gunnora, daughter and heiress of Robert de Valognes. The combined barony made him, in the words of the Histoire des Ducs de Normandie 'one of the greatest men in England and one of the most powerful'.

The most controversial episode of Robert’s early life was one in which he was involved with Saer de Quincy, later earl of Winchester, and a fellow member of the Twenty Five. The pair had been entrusted with the command of the castle of Vaudreuil in the Seine valley, a key point in the defence of Normandy against the French. In 1203, however, they surrendered the stronghold to King Philip and his forces without striking a blow, provoking accusations of cowardice and even of collusion with the enemy. The episode is a mysterious one, and it is not at all clear what lay behind the men’s move. On 5 July the pair obtained letters from the king saying that the castle had been surrendered at his command and that the castellans and garrison were to be unmolested. Robert and Saer were to remain close allies. Robert’s later use of the Quincy arms on his heraldic seal indicates that the two had become brothers-in-arms, a chivalric relationship signifying mutual assistance and protection in the field and the sharing of any of the profits of war afterwards.

Robert’s relations with John came to a crisis point in 1212. Again, what lies behind the story is obscure, and we have only the uncertain testimony of the chroniclers to guide us. According to the St Albans and Dunstable writers, as John was mustering an army at Chester for an expedition against the Welsh, word reached him of a plot on his life, causing him suddenly to abandon his plans and instead march north to crush the sources of insurrection there. Apparently the two ringleaders were Eustace de Vesci and Robert FitzWalter, both of whom then fled the realm, in the latter’s case to France. What lay behind Robert’s disaffection is not clear. The chroniclers’ explanations appear scarcely to go to the heart of the matter. According to Wendover at St Albans, the cause of the problem was a quarrel between FitzWalter and his own abbey over his rights in their dependent house of Binham Priory, in which he felt let down by the king. FitzWalter alleged that, contrary to the priory’s foundation charter granted by his wife’s ancestor, the abbot of St Albans had demanded excessive hospitality, had installed too many monks and had taken far too much revenue; worse still, during FitzWalter’s absence with the king on service in Ireland, he had installed a new abbot. FitzWalter responded by laying siege to the priory, provoking the king, on the abbot’s appeal, to send troops against him. Whether or not events unfolded exactly as the chronicler records, the episode hardly seems important enough to justify a plot on the king’s life. Another source, the Histoire des Ducs de Normandie offers alternative explanations for FitzWalter’s flight. According to one story, told apparently by the Englishman to the French king, the former was resentful that John had attempted to seduce his daughter Matilda, the wife of Geoffrey de Mandeville, while, according to another, more plausible account, he was angry that John had threatened to hang de Mandeville for killing an esquire at court, threatening 'You’ll see 2,000 knights in your land before you hang him!'. Perhaps of greater relevance than either of these stories is the matter of his ties with the Braose family, who were bitter enemies of John. FitzWalter’s brother Walter was archdeacon of Hereford and thus an associate of Giles de Braose, bishop of Hereford, brother of William de Braose, whom John in a venomous feud had driven from the realm.

In 1213 Robert and his fellow conspirator, Eustace de Vesci, were both reconciled with the king, and restored to their lands, as part of the general settlement John negotiated with the Church. Robert’s relations with John remained testy, however, and he did not accompany the latter on his expedition to Poitou in 1214; nor did he contribute to the scutage levied to defray the costs of the expedition. Wendover, the St Albans writer, records that he attended the celebrated meeting at Bury St Edmunds in November 1214, at which the barons swore to compel the king to confirm the coronation charter of Henry I. By early 1215 the signs are that he was moving to the forefront of the baronial leadership. In January he was present at the barons’ meeting with the king at which John pledged to answer their grievances at Easter. By the end of April, after John had refused satisfaction, he took up arms with the other eastern lords and somewhere between Stamford and Northampton linked up with the Northerners, who were making their own way south. On 5 May, probably at Brackley, the rebels formally defied John, renouncing their oaths of homage, and chose Robert FitzWalter as their leader. After the fall of London Robert was involved in strengthening the city’s defences, demolishing the houses of the Jews for building material. At Runnymede after the making of the Great Charter he was named to the committee of Twenty Five. On 19 June he was named first among the barons with whom John made a treaty laying down that unless he violated the Charter, London would be yielded to him by15 August.

FitzWalter’s main priority in the war that followed King John’s rejection of Magna Carta in the autumn was to ensure the retention of baronial control of London. In October, to prevent an assault by the king’s mercenary force on London, he and his allies seized Rochester Castle, placing William d’Albini in charge of its defence. As soon as the king laid siege to the castle, however, and in the process destroyed the bridge over the Medway, FitzWalter was forced to withdraw, judging that he would be the loser in any confrontation with the royalists. Early the next year, with the king quickly regaining the military initiative, FitzWalter and his comrade-in-arms Saer de Quincy travelled to France to seek the help of the French king’s son, Louis, to whom they offered the crown. Louis landed at Pegwell Bay on 21 May, and on 3 June, the day after his arrival in London, FitzWalter and the mayor, William Hardel, led the barons and citizens in performing homage to him.

FitzWalter remained firmly in the rebel camp in the wake of John’s death in October 1216, and in April 1217 led the relief of the earl of Chester’s siege of de Quincy’s castle at Mountsorrel (Leics.). Once the earl had withdrawn his men, he and his French allies turned east to Lincoln to assist in their siege of Lincoln Castle, which was being held for the king. On 19 May, however, a royalist relieving force under the Marshal arrived, and there was a difference of opinion in the baronial camp over how to respond. FitzWalter is reported to have advised an attacking strategy, but he was overruled, and the barons, playing for safety, withdrew into the walled city. The decision turned out to be a terrible misjudgement. The royalists found a way in, routed their opponents, and virtually the whole of the baronial leadership were taken prisoner. FitzWalter regained his freedom under the terms of the general settlement negotiated at Kingston in September, and he was at large again by the following month. He attended a great council held at Westminster at the end of October at which the former rebels performed homage and fealty to the king. In 1219 he and his old partner Saer embarked on the Fifth Crusade and took part in the siege of the Egyptian city of Damietta. After his return to England he actively involved himself in the politics of the Minority, evidently reconciled to the court, and witnessed the final and definitive reissue of the Charter on 11 February 1225. He died on 9 December 1235 and was buried in Dunmow Priory. His elder son Robert, who had fought with him at Lincoln, had predeceased him, and his heir was a minor, Walter, the son of his second marriage to Rohese.

FitzWalter can easily come across as an unsavoury figure - haughty, aggressive, petulant, unsubtle, unpredictable, motivated more by personal grievance than concern for the common good. Like others among the Twenty Five, he used political quarrel as a vehicle for the pursuit of family claims. Much of his time was spent in trying to recover Hertford Castle, to which he had a tenuous claim through his wife. At the same time, however, he was resolute in his opposition to John, and his involvement in the crusade and support for the Minority government belie his image as a turbulent malcontent. Matthew Paris, the St Albans chronicler, was no admirer of his, and yet penned a generous obituary on his death. FitzWalter, he said, could ‘match any earl in England: valiant in arms, spirited and illustrious … generous, surrounded by a multitude of powerful blood relatives and strengthened by numerous relatives in marriage’. Matthew’s tribute reminds us just how important blood ties were in bringing together and sustaining the opposition of 1215. Yet the many enigmas that surround Robert highlight for us the sheer difficulty of determining baronial motivation from a distance of eight hundred years.

William de Forz

William de Forz (Fortibus) (1191x6–1241), holder of the Norman title of count of Aumale, was a mercurial personality whose apparent self-interestedness and frequent changes of allegiance raise questions, difficult to answer, about the balance of personal ambition and concern for the common good in the motivation of the medieval aristocracy.

Forz was the son of the wealthy Aumale heiress, Countess Hawise, a much married lady, by her third husband, the Poitevin naval commander, William de Forz, who died in 1195. He came to England, probably from Poitou, in 1214, and in September or October of that year secured possession of the English lands of his mother’s inheritance on the condition that he married Aveline, daughter of Richard de Montfichet. In this way he was brought into contact with another lord to be chosen one of the Twenty-Five. William’s English lands consisted principally of the honours of Holderness and Skipton in Yorkshire, Cockermouth in Cumberland, and lands in Lincolnshire around Barrow-on-Humber in the north and Castle Bytham in the south.

In the spring of 1215, perhaps as a result of his links with Mountfitchet, he joined the baronial opposition to King John and after the meeting at Runnymede was nominated to the Twenty Five. By August, however, he had changed sides, returning to the king’s allegiance, and he accompanied John on his punitive expedition to the north of England in December. He deserted John a second time in June 1216 but had returned to royal service by the autumn, after Henry III’s accession, and attested the reissue of Magna Carta in November.

In the course of the civil war from 1215 William acquired many lands, some of which belonged to the Crown, which the Minority Government was keen to recover from him. He surrendered most of these properties in or before May 1220, but clung onto Castle Bytham in Lincolnshire, to which his family had an ancestral claim. At the end of 1220, apparently annoyed at being passed over for the appointment of seneschal of Poitou and Gascony, he rebelled against the Minority Government, suddenly left court to garrison Bytham, and then, faced with the ravaging of his lands, fled to the north of England, where he took refuge at Fountains. The Government treated him remarkably leniently, and he and his men were pardoned.

In his later years Forz was employed on a range of diplomatic and military business for the king, treating with the Holy Roman Emperor at Antwerp in 1227 and accompanying Henry III on his expedition to Poitou in 1230. In the spring of 1241 he set out for Jerusalem, but died on the way. His wife, Aveline, was buried at Thornton Abbey, but his own burial place is unknown.

At the village of Castle Bytham, north of Stamford, the enormous earthworks of the castle still tower over the streets to recall the most turbulent episode of this man’s enigmatic career.

William de Hardell

Just one member of the Twenty Five was represented in the list in an official capacity, and that was the Mayor of London, William Hardel. His inclusion affords proof of the key role which London had played in the rising that brought King John to the negotiating table in 1215. London was by far the largest and most important city in England by the early thirteenth century, a major centre of national and international trade, and the country’s social, political and economic capital in all but name. The moment when the Londoners opened their gates to the rebels, lending them their support and, perhaps more crucially, their money, constituted a turning point in the struggle between King John and his opponents, indicating to the king that he was in danger of losing his kingdom and that it was time to compromise. The Londoners’ reward for their backing of the rebellion came in clause 13 of the Charter, which said, albeit without much precision, that the city was to have all its ancient liberties and free customs both by land and by water. On 19 June, four days after the making of the Runnymede pact, the barons, realising that their control of London was their trump card, made a treaty with the king which used its return as a tool to secure his compliance with the new agreement. The treaty laid down that the barons were to continue to hold London, and the Archbishop of Canterbury the Tower, until 15 August, by which time the oaths to the Twenty Five were to be exacted throughout the realm and the king was to meet all claims against him to the restoration of rights and property. If all this was carried out by 15 August, then the capital and the Tower were to be restored to him. In the event, the conditions were not met, and city and fortress remained in the barons’ temporary guardianship.

The mayor of London, with whom the barons began their negotiations in the spring of 1215, was one Serlo the Mercer. Later in the year Serlo was replaced by the new Mayor, William Hardel, who had served as sheriff in 1207-8, and who headed a vintner dynasty with holdings in Vintry and Bishopsgate Wards. On the baronial side the lead in the negotiations was probably taken by Robert FitzWalter, the self-styled ‘Marshal of the Army of God’, who was lord of Baynard’s Castle in the City, and therefore in some sense a Londoner himself. Serlo and William and their fellow merchants remained steadfast in their support for the rebel cause in the war to come. When Prince Louis landed in England in May 1216, he made the decision to head straight for London. Serlo and four other citizens, all office-holders, when approached, personally raised the sum of 1,000 marks (about £666), which they supplied for his use. On 2 or 3 June in St Paul’s churchyard the citizens, led by FitzWalter and Hardel, rendered homage to the French prince. In the wake of the settlement negotiated at Kingston in September the Londoners returned to the royalist allegiance.

The Hardels themselves were at the peak of their prosperity in the early thirteenth century. By Edward I’s reign they were in decline, and the bulk of their property had been acquired by Gregory de Rokesle, a wealthy goldsmith and vintner. There was a high turnover in the elite in medieval London and great mercantile dynasties rarely flourished for long.

William de Huntingfield

William de Huntingfield was another of the group of East Anglian landowners who were active in the opposition to King John. He had connections with Robert FitzWalter, the main rebel leader and one of the Twenty Five, and with another rebel, the Lincolnshire knight, Oliver de Vaux. He held seven knights’ fees of the honor of Eye in Suffolk, including the manor of Huntingfield, from which he took his name, and several knights’ fees of other baronies, including that of Lancaster.

William entered King John’s service in 1203 as temporary custodian of Dover Castle, and acted as an itinerant justice on the eastern circuit in 1208-9 and as sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk in 1209-10. He sent knights on John’s expedition to Ireland in 1210 and served in person with the king in 1214 on his failed venture to Poitou. The signs are that by instinct and upbringing he was a natural royalist.

It is not surprising, then, that he was a latecomer to the opposition, turning against John only in 1215 and joining the rebels at their muster at Stamford in Easter that year. Like others, he may well have been moved by a sense of financial grievance, as he had offered speculative fines for favours, which had left him indebted, although John had offered some respite. After being appointed to the Twenty Five, he joined Robert FitzWalter and William de Mandeville in asserting rebel control over East Anglia and in offering assistance to Louis of France after his arrival in England. Like Richard de Montfichet, he was captured at the battle of Lincoln in May 1217, and in September two his knights came before royal agents to negotiate his ransom.

William died before October 1225, leaving as his heir his son, Roger (d. 1257), and a daughter Alice, widow of the Lincolnshire knight, Sir Richard de Solars.

John de Lacy

John de Lacy, the constable of Chester, was a member of one of the oldest, wealthiest and most important baronial families of twelfth- and thirteenth-century England, with territorial interests distributed widely across the counties of the north Midlands and north.

John (c. 1192-1240) was the eldest son and heir of Roger de Lacy, constable of Chester (d. 1211) and his wife, Maud de Clere. He was a minor at the time of his father's death and did not enter into possession of his lands until September 1213. Like a number of the rebels, he was a young man at the time that he became involved in the revolt. Although a natural royalism is suggested by his decision to join John on his expedition to Poitou in 1214, he nurtured a sense of grievance against the king owing to the terms on which he was granted possession of his father's estates. The de Lacy inheritance was a highly valuable one, comprising more than a hundred knights' fees, together with the baronies of Pontefract (Yorks.), and Clitheroe, Penwortham, Widnes and Halton (Lancs.). John, when he permitted the young heir to enter, therefore exacted his price. He insisted that the latter offer a massive fine of 7000 marks repayable over three years, in the meantime handing over to a royal keeper his chief castles of Pontefract (Yorks.) and Castle Donington (Leics.), to be garrisoned by the king at Lacy's expense on pain of confiscation should the latter rebel.

As late as the end of May 1215 Lacy was still assumed to be on the king's side. However, with the fall of London he threw in his lot with the rebels and was present at Runnymede and named to the Twenty Five. Thereafter he veered opportunistically between the rebel and royalist camps. On New Year's Day 1216 he submitted to the king, agreeing to terms which shed remarkable light on the latter's own attitude to the Charter imposed on him at Runnymede. Lacy was obliged not only to submit to the king personally but also to renounce the cause for which he had been fighting. In the words of the submission 'If I have sworn an oath to the king's enemies, then I will not hold to it, nor will I adhere in any way to the charter of liberties which the lord king has granted in common to the barons of England and which the lord pope has annulled'. Through the imposition of such terms, John was hoping to kill off the charter at birth. Although ostensibly entering into the terms of his own free will, Lacy was probably agreeing to a formula devised by the king's clerks. Precisely the same wording is found in the charter of submission of Gilbert FitzReinfrey, who likewise made his peace in January 1216.

In May 1216 Lacy was still at the king’s side, but by the time of the latter's death at Newark in October he was in rebellion again. He was probably active on the rebels' behalf for much of 1217, but appears not to have been present at the baronial defeat at Lincoln. He submitted and was readmitted to fealty in August, a time when a good many rebels submitted to the new king. In the following month he was ordered to oversee the restoration of Carlisle Castle by the king of Scots. By now, however, his thoughts were now turning to the crusade, and in May 1218 he embarked for Damietta in Egypt with his overlord, Ranulph, earl of Chester. He did not return to England until August 1220. In 1225 he was witness to the definitive reissue of Magna Carta and in the following year he served as a king's justice in Lincolnshire and Lancashire. Following Ranulph's death in 1232 he was allowed to inherit one of the earl's titles, that of the earldom of Lincoln, as the son-in-law of the earl’s sister, Hawise.

Lacy died on 22 July 1240 and was buried near his father in the choir of the Cistercian abbey of Stanlaw (Lancs.), his bones being moved to Whalley, when the monks transferred there in the 1290s. He left a widow, Margaret, daughter of Roger de Quincy (d. 1217), eldest son of Saer de Quincy, earl of Winchester (d. 1219), another of the Twenty Five. Margaret died in 1266 and was buried in the Hospitallers' church at Clerkenwell, London.

William de Lanvallay

William de Lanvalei III (d. c. 1216), lord of Walkern (Herts.) was a member of a family of curialist administrators that had risen to prominence under Henry II and who owed much of their wealth to their years of service to the Crown and the opportunities for enrichment which these offered. It is a mark of King John’s mismanagement of the nobility that he should have so alienated such a man that he ended up on the baronial side in 1215.

William was the grandson of the founder of the family fortune, William de Lanvalei I, a Breton whom Henry II appointed as his first seneschal, or administrator, of Rennes after his takeover of the duchy of Brittany in 1166. William served in the office for five years, crossing to England in 1171 or 1172 to become the king’s castellan of Winchester and serving thereafter in a variety of capacities in the king’s English administration. Probably as a result of his royal connections, William was awarded the hand in marriage of Gunnora, daughter and heiress of Hubert de Saint Clair, through whom he gained possession of the barony of Walkern, created for Hubert’s father, Hamo, in 1120 from the escheated lands of Eudo Dapifer (Eudo the Steward). William I died in 1181/2, leaving a son William II, who died in 1204, and was in turn succeeded by William III, the member of the Twenty Five, a minor on his father’s death.

Like most thirteenth-century aristocratic families, the Lanvaleis had various claims to lands and offices which they pursued as and when opportunity and circumstance afforded. William’s father had brought a suit in the king’s courts against Hugh de Beauchamp over the manors of Eaton Socon and Sandy (Beds.), to which he laid claim by descent from his mother as successor to Eudo Dapifer, who had held the manors in 1120. Hugh appears to have lost possession of the manors for a time, as Gunnora was briefly in possession, but the Lanvaleis failed to establish a lasting title. William III’s own interest was rather in securing control of the royal castle at Colchester, again by right of descent from Gunnora. In Henry II’s reign the castle had been held by the justiciar Richard de Lucy, but the Lionheart had apparently granted it to William’s father, and he and his widow held it until 1209. In that year it was apparently lost to the family.

William accompanied John on his expedition to Poitou in 1214 and was present at the truce concluded with the French king in September. It is impossible to trace the path by which he made his way into the baronial camp, but for him, as for others, the ties of kinship must have played a part. He was related to none other than Robert FitzWalter, the baronial leader, through his wife’s mother, who was FitzWalter’s niece. His own mother, moreover, was sister-in-law of Geoffrey FitzPeter, which made her the aunt of another future rebel, Geoffrey de Mandeville. William can thus be seen as belonging to the wide east of England network which was increasingly dominant in the baronial movement as it spread from its northern heartland.

In July 1216, probably at a meeting of the council at Oxford, William secured a grant of custody of Colchester castle, for which he had striven for so long. He died shortly afterwards, leaving as his heir a daughter Hawise, who became the ward of Hubert de Burgh, the future Justiciar, and was married by Hubert to his John, to whose family the barony passed.

It is tempting to associate the fine Purbeck marble effigy of a knight in the south aisle of Walkern church (Herts.) with this William, as lord of the manor. It shows the commemorated in a mail hauberk, a surcoat and a pot-style tournament helm. The effigy is one of a group of elegantly designed figures which includes three of the famous Temple Church effigies. On stylistic grounds the effigy can be dated to c. 1240-50, close enough in time to make William a possible candidate. The equally fine effigy of King John in Worcester Cathedral was not commissioned until the mid 1230s, some twenty years after the king’s death. One reason for associating the effigy with William is that he was the last of his direct male line, and the commissioning of an effigy in such cases was a way of keeping the family name alive. Yet it is important to say that the identification cannot be considered certain. The Lanvaleis were patrons of St John’s Abbey, Colchester, by right of descent from the founder Eudo Dapifer, and in an age when monastic burial was popular with the nobility it may well be that he was interred there. William’s grandfather, William I, had made a grant to the abbey ‘cum corpore meo’ (‘with my body’) implying that he desired to seek burial there. Unfortunately little remains of the abbey, and there is no documentary evidence which sheds light on burials within its walls. If the effigy at Walkern is not William de Lanvalei’s, it is probably that of his son-in-law, Sir John de Burgh.

William Malet

William Malet (c. 1175-1215) was one of the sizeable group of rebel barons who were heavily indebted to King John, making the revolt of 1215 in some sense a debtors’ revolt.

William, the lord of Curry Mallet in Somerset, was the descendant of Robert Malet (d. before 1156), first holder of the barony, and the son of Gilbert Malet, who died in 1194. In 1196 he paid Richard the Lionheart a fine and relief of £150 to enter into his inheritance.

William’s early career, characteristically for someone of his background and upbringing, had been in royal service. He had accompanied Richard the Lionheart on crusade from 1190 and he had taken part in the siege of Acre in 1191. He was appointed sheriff of Somerset and Dorset by King John in 1209 after the two counties had petitioned to have someone local as their sheriff instead of the courtier William Brewer, and he served in the office until 1212. By this latter year he was running into financial difficulties, although the precise cause of his problems is not clear, and by 1214 he was owing the king as much as 2000 marks (about £1333). In 1214 he entered into an agreement to serve with the king in Poitou with ten knights and twenty other soldiers in return for the cancellation of his debt. In 1215 he went over to the barons, joining the confederacy at their muster at Stamford in Easter week, and in June was appointed to the Twenty Five.

Malet appears to have died only months afterwards in December 1215, for by that time his estates were in the possession of his son-in-law, Hugh de Vivonia. He left three daughters between whom his estates were divided: Mabel, who married first Nicholas Avenel and then Hugh de Vivonia (d. 1249) of Chewton (Somerset); Helewise, who married first Hugh Pointz (d. 1220), an associate of Malet in the rebellion, and second Robert de Mucegros (d. 1254), a future servant of Henry III; and Bertha, who died unmarried before 1221.

Geoffrey de Mandeville

Geoffrey de Mandeville, another of the east of England rebels, was the son and heir of Geoffrey FitzPeter, earl of Essex, long-serving justiciar to both Richard and John, by his first wife Beatrice, daughter of William de Say and eventual heiress of the Mandeville earls of Essex. By virtue of the family’s ancestral connection Beatrice’s children styled themselves Mandevilles.

Geoffrey’s first marriage was to Maud, daughter of Robert FitzWalter, another important Essex landowner and the man who was to be effective leader of the baronial rebellion against John. Robert once sprang to the defence of his son-in-law when the latter killed a serving man in a dispute over lodgings at court and John threatened to hang him, declaring ‘By God’s body, you will not hang my son-in-law, you’ll see two hundred lanced knights in your land before you hang him!’ When the king put the case up for trial, FitzWalter appeared in court with two hundred knights.

Maud (Mandeville) died without issue and was buried in Dunmow priory (Essex). In January 1214 Geoffrey took as his second wife Isabella, third daughter and coheiress of William, earl of Gloucester, and the divorced ex-wife of King John. The match appears to have been forced on Geoffrey unwillingly, and to add to the probable sense of annoyance he felt, he was made to pay for his wife, and to do so heavily. Ever desperate for money, John charged Geoffrey a ruinous fine of 20,000 marks (about £13,666), this to be paid in four instalments each of 5,000 marks, the last to be handed over in Michaelmas 1214, with the proviso that the king might resume Isabella’s lands if the payments were to fall into arrears. The first instalment of the sum was set to be paid before the king set sail to Poitou in February 1214, a date entirely unrealistic, and when Geoffrey failed to meet it, the king ordered the sheriffs to put in hand measures for resumption. By August, however, Geoffrey was evidently beginning to give satisfaction, and John ordered delivery to him of his wife’s honor of Gloucester.

In the light both of his grievances against John and of his family ties with Robert FitzWalter, it is not surprising to find Geoffrey on the rebel side in 1215. In June he was named to the Twenty Five and, when the barons parcelled out the government of the country in the autumn, he was assigned responsibility for Essex.

He met his death by accident in a tournament with a French knight in London in February 1216, and was buried in Holy Trinity priory, Aldgate.

William Marshal

The younger William Marshal (c. 1190–1231) was the eldest son of William Marshal (d. 1219), the future Regent, and his wife Isabel, heiress of the line of de Clare, earls of Pembroke.

For seven years from 1205 William was detained in King John’s custody, a hostage for his father’s good behavior, only regaining his freedom in 1212, when John needed the latter’s support. In the crisis of 1215 John enjoyed the unswerving support of the elder William but his son threw his lot in with the opposition, perhaps partly as a result of the experience of his youth, perhaps in part as a family insurance policy. He joined the barons in their muster at Stamford in the spring, and in June was named to the Twenty Five. In the civil war that followed John’s rejection of the Charter he fought on the baronial side, and after Prince Louis’ arrival, was named marshal of his army. Although active in the field, he took care to avoid any direct engagement with his father. A failure to secure satisfaction on a matter of personal concern, however, led him to change sides. He was keen to secure restitution of the great castle and lordship of Marlborough in Wiltshire, which had been held seventy years before by his grandfather, John Marshal. When Louis denied him this, he reverted to the royal allegiance. He then fought actively for the new regime, capturing Winchester and Southampton for the royalists and Marlborough for himself, and contributing to the great royalist victory at Lincoln.

On his father’s death in 1219 he succeeded him as earl of Pembroke and marshal of England, while on his mother’s death in the following year he succeeded to the lordships of Chepstow in South Wales and Leinster in Ireland. William ranked as one of the richest men of his day. Nonetheless, among his portfolio of properties were some to which other important magnates laid claim, principally those of Fotheringhay (Northants.) and Marlborough itself. Over the next five years the Minority government’s attempts to resume these, and assign them to new owners, were to form a major thread in the political life of the day.

A claim to Fotheringhay was entertained by John the Scot, earl of Huntingdon, someone whom the Minority government was keen to satisfy him in the interests of better relations with Scotland. For nearly two years the Marshal steadfastly refused to give way. In 1220, however, his hand was forced when Llewellyn of Wales attacked his lordship of Pembroke, and he was in need of the Minority government’s assistance. When the justiciar, Hubert de Burgh, came to his aid, he quietly relinquished control of Fotheringhay.

His eventual surrender of Marlborough was brought about by a different means. In 1214 William had married Alice, daughter of Baldwin de Béthune, count of Aumale; Alice, however, had died in 1216. In 1221 the justiciar and the papal legate together came up with the proposal, designed to secure him to the justiciar’s party, that he take as his second wife the king’s sister, Eleanor. The marriage eventually took place in 1224, and the Marshal, as a small price to pay for a royal bride, surrendered Marlborough.

Once these property matters were sorted out, William proved himself an active champion and supporter of royal authority, fighting against the Welsh in 1223 and in Ireland in 1224. In 1230 he joined the king on his expedition to Brittany, to challenge the French, conducting raids in the direction of both Normandy and Anjou. At the beginning of 1231 he returned to England for the wedding of his widowed sister, Isabella, to the king’s brother Richard, earl of Cornwall. However, he died suddenly in London on 6 April. Nine days later he was buried by the side of his father in the Temple Church, London, where one of the celebrated group of early effigies is presumably his.

Both of William’s marriages were childless, and his heir was his next brother, Richard, who died without issue in turn, and was succeeded by the next brother Gilbert. In 1241 Gilbert was killed in a tourneying accident at Dunstable and, again being childless, was succeeded by the next brother again, Walter. He too being childless was succeeded by the last in the brood of brothers, Anselm. When Anselm died also without issue in 1245, the line of Marshal earls of Pembroke came to an end, and the vast inheritance was partitioned between the representatives of their five sisters and coheiresses. Among the families which benefited, either then or later, were those of Bigod, Clare, Ferrers, Mortimer, Bohun, Cantilupe, Valence and Hastings.

Roger de Montbegon

Roger de Montbegon (ca. 1165–1226) was another of the group of hard-line opponents of King John referred to by contemporaries as ‘the Northerners’. Roger was the son of Adam Montbegon and his wife Maud, daughter of Adam FitzSwain. His family held the barony of Hornby in Lancashire and other estates in Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire and the West Riding of Yorkshire.

In Richard I’s reign Roger had been a close supporter of John, then count of Mortain, joining him in his rebellion against the king during the latter’s imprisonment in Germany, and suffering temporary forfeiture of his estates as a result. In 1199 he offered 500 marks (about £333) to John, by now king, for the marriage of Olivia, widow of Robert FitzJohn, whom he shortly took as his wife. In the new reign Roger found himself in receipt of fewer favours than he had expected, and as early as 1205, when trouble was brewing in the north following John’s loss of Normandy, he was suspected of disaffection. Not surprisingly, he had many ties of association with other northern malcontents, notably Eustace de Vesci and William de Mowbray, to both of whom he stood surety for the repayment of debts to the king. In 1214 he was one of four members of the future Twenty Five who from the start resisted payment to the king of tax in lieu of military service in Poitou – the others being de Vesci, Mowbray and Richard de Percy. In the wake of John’s rejection of Magna Carta and the outbreak of civil war he was active on the baronial side but managed to avoid involvement in the baronial defeat at Lincoln. With de Percy, he made his peace with the new regime in August 1217.

Roger spent much of the next three years engaged in a bitter struggle for the recovery of his Nottinghamshire manors of Clayworth, Oswaldbeck and North Wheatley. Throughout the process he faced stubborn opposition and delaying tactics from the sheriff of Nottingham, Philip Mark, a former ally of John and a possible real-life model for the sheriff of Nottingham of the Robin Hood ballads. Roger himself, however, proved overbearing, and determined to get his own way. In 1220 he was accused of holding onto stock which he had seized ‘contrary to the king’s peace and the statutes of the realm’. A decision on his right to present a deputy to represent him in a duel was postponed since he was, in the court’s words, ‘a great man and a baron of the lord king’. When the Nottinghamshire court insisted on holding onto some of his own stock which had been distrained, he withdrew from the court exclaiming that, if it would not restore that stock, he would see to it himself. The constable of Nottingham then asked him three times ‘by the counsel of the court’ that he should return to hear the consideration of the court. This he refused to do. It was said in the court that if he had not been a great man and a baron of the king ‘his person might well have been detained for so many transgressions’. Roger, for all his involvement in the campaign to subject royal authority to the law, was not so keen on application of the same idea in his own case.

Richard de Montfichet

The largest group represented on the committee of Twenty Five was not so much the hard-line barons from northern England as the leading landowners of East Anglia and the south-east. Once the movement of rebellion against John had gathered strength and spread out, it was these men who were at its head and who, after June, took the lead in enforcing the Charter. One of these home counties lords was Richard de Montfichet.

Richard was possibly drawn into the rebellion against John by his kinship ties with other rebel barons. His grandfather, Gilbert, had married Aveline de Lucy, the aunt of the rebel leader, Robert FitzWalter, and further back still, William, the first holder of the Montfichet barony, had been married to Margaret, daughter of Gilbert de Clare, earl of Hertford, forebear of two other members of the committee. Richard’s own sister was to marry William de Forz, yet another member. It is by no means clear, however, how kinship ties fitted into the matrix of baronial motivation alongside such other factors as personal grievance and questions of political principle. Quite possibly, their principal role was simply to reinforce decisions already made.

Richard (after 1190–1267) was the eldest son of Richard de Montfichet (d. 1203), a servant of Richard the Lionheart, and his wife Millicent. He was a descendant of William de Montfichet (d. before 1156), whose barony of Stansted Montfichet (Essex) comprised nearly fifty knights’ fees, and from whom he inherited a claim to the custody of the royal forests in Essex, forfeited by his grandfather, probably for his part in the uprising against Henry II in 1173-4. The younger Richard came of age before 1214 and in that year served on King John’s failed expedition to Poitou in western France. Shortly afterwards, however, he is found on the rebel side, perhaps in the hope of recovering the rights forfeited by his family under Henry II, perhaps too as a result of the pull of the kinship ties already mentioned. On 21 June 1215, just six days after the king had given his assent to Magna Carta and by which time he had probably been named to the Twenty Five, he secured restoration to the custody of the forest of Essex, once held by his ancestors.

After the papal annulment of Magna Carta and the renewal of civil war, Richard remained in the rebel camp and was captured at the battle of Lincoln in May 1217. In the following October, after the French withdrawal, he returned to the royal allegiance and recovered his lands and rights, including custody of the Essex forests. He was to be a witness to two of Henry III’s reissues of Magna Carta, the first in 1225, the authoritative reissue, and the second in 1237. In 1244 he was a baronial representative named to consider the king’s request for a grant of taxation and so probably had a hand in drafting the remarkable scheme of government reform of that year recorded by Matthew Paris in his chronicle. From 1242 to 1246 he served as sheriff of Essex and Hertfordshire.

Richard was married at least twice but left no male heir and on his death in 1267 his estates were partitioned among the children and grandchildren of his three sisters. Living to over 70, he was the longest-lived and last surviving of the Twenty Five Barons of Magna Carta.

Among his estates was to be numbered the manor of Wraysbury in south Buckinghamshire, on the banks of the Thames immediately facing Runnymede and Old Windsor. It is not recorded what role, if any, Wraysbury played in the events of June 1215.

William de Mowbray

William de Mowbray (c. 1173-c. 1224), a landowner with Yorkshire estates centring on Thirsk and Lincolnshire lands in the Isle of Axholme, was son of Nigel de Mowbray and his wife Mabel, probably the daughter of William de Patri. In the Histoire des Ducs de Normandie he is described as being as small as a dwarf, but very generous and valiant.

There was much in William’s background and personal circumstances that can be seen, with hindsight, as pointing the way to his involvement in the rebellion against King John. His forebear, Roger de Mowbray, had taken part in the great uprising against Henry II in 1173-4, which had convulsed the whole Angevin world. He himself had become entangled in financial dealings with King John which were to cost him dearly. His problems lay in his family’s early rise to power, specifically in their acquisition from Henry I a century before of the lands of Robert de Stuteville, a supporter of Henry’s brother Robert Curthose in his failed bid for the English crown, and who had forfeited his property to Henry. In 1200 Robert’s descendant, William, reactivated his family’s claim against the Mowbrays, and in that year William offered the sum of 2000 marks (over £1300) to John to secure a judgement in the matter. When the case was brought before the king’s justices, however, it ended in a compromise, and one highly favourable to Stuteville. William was nonetheless still under obligation to pay and, like others before him, had little alternative but to borrow from the Jews. William had gambled everything on the favourable outcome of a risky legal action and had failed. It is clear that, when he embarked on rebellion against John, he had nothing to lose.

Mowbray was taken prisoner at the battle of Lincoln in May 1217, and had to surrender the manor of Banstead in Surrey, which had formed his mother’s marriage portion, to Hubert de Burgh as the price of redemption. His family never succeeded in recovering the estate.

Mowbray founded the chapel of St Nicholas at Thirsk, and was a benefactor of his father’s foundation, Newburgh priory, where, on his death at Axholme around 1224, he was buried.

Mowbray was typical those lords, particularly in northern England, who had suffered at the hands of John, felt a burning sense of grievance, and were longing for the opportunity to get their own back.

Richard de Percy

Richard de Percy (before 1181-1244) was the second son of Agnes, heiress of the original Percy family, and Jocelin de Louvain, a younger son of Godfrey, duke of Lorraine, and brother of Adeliza, second wife of Henry I. His background and parentage are illustrative of the cosmopolitanism of the Angevin world.

Early in John’s reign Richard served on military expeditions with or for the king, but as the community of northern lords of which he was part moved into opposition to the king, so he went along with them, and in 1214 he refused to join John’s Poitevin expedition. On 26 June 1215 he was excommunicated by the pope for his disobedience, and in the following year he and other Yorkshire lords went over to Louis, the French king’s son, the leader of the baronial armies. He only returned to the king’s peace in November 1217.

Richard married, first, Alice, of unknown parentage, and, on her death, Agnes de Neville. He died in 1244, before 18 August. In his lifetime he had been a benefactor of two Yorkshire abbeys, Sawley (or Salley) and Fountains, and he specified in a grant to Fountains that, if the arrangements specified in the grant were carried out, he was to be buried in that house.

A shadowy figure, he stands out less vividly than some of the northern lords with whom he was associated.

Saher de Quincy

Saer de Quincy’s career is illustrative of the complex of ties that held the English and Scottish nobilities together as part of an international chivalric elite whose interests spanned personal and regnal allegiances. The son of Robert de Quincy (d. 1197) and his wife Orabile, daughter of Ness, lord of Leuchars in Fife, he acquired English interests by virtue of his marriage to Margaret (d. 1235), daughter of Robert, earl of Leicester (d. 1190). Another member of his family, an uncle likewise called Saer, had served Henry II in Normandy in the 1180s and his son in turn, also confusingly called Saer, acquired lands in England which eventually were to descend to his namesake.

Saer’s early career was spent mainly in Scotland. In the 1180s and 1190s he witnessed several charters of the Scottish kings and confirmed his parents’ grants to Newbattle Abbey, near Edinburgh, and made new gifts to the abbeys of Dunfermline and Cambuskenneth. Following his father’s inheritance of the other Saer’s lands he moved to England and entered the service of Richard the Lionheart, fighting alongside the king in 1198. In 1202 and 1203 he served with John in Normandy, being appointed with Robert FitzWalter joint castellan of the strategic Norman stronghold of Vaudreuil. In the spring of 1203 the pair, offering no resistance, surrendered the castle to King Philip of France, who was then over-running Normandy, and John in disgust refused to contribute to their ransom. There is evidence that Saer and Robert may have contracted a relationship of brotherhood-in-arms: Saer’s arms before he became earl bore a small shield bearing Robert’s arms of a fess between two chevrons, while Robert’s surviving seal carries the arms adopted by Saer after he became an earl.

In 1204 the death without issue of his brother-in-law, the earl of Leicester, brought a dramatic improvement in his fortunes, as the earl’s heirs were his two sisters, one of whom was Saer’s wife. By 1207 a partition of the family’s estates had been made, and Saer, by right of his wife, found himself taking over valuable and extensive lands in the English Midlands, the other part of the inheritance going to the second sister, the wife of Simon de Montfort the elder. In recognition of his enhanced status, Saer was awarded the title of earl of Winchester. From this time on, he was often employed in John’s service, leading an embassy to Scotland in 1212 and acting as justiciar between 1211 and 1214.

Despite his apparent closeness to John, however, he had unresolved grievances relating to properties of which he felt he had been deprived, notably Mountsorrel castle in Leicestershire, a part of his wife’s inheritance that King John had denied him. In 1215 he went over to the opposition, joining their ranks at his principal residence of Brackley (Northants.). He marched with the rebels to London and was present at Runnymede. When war erupted again in October between the king and his opponents, he and another of the Twenty Five, the earl of Hereford, headed an embassy to France to seek French assistance and to offer the crown to Philip’s son, Louis. In January 1216 he returned to England with a force of French knights, followed in May by the dauphin and his army.

Although John’s death later in the year presented an opportunity for reconciliation between rebels and royalists, Quincy remained steadfast in his allegiance to the former and their champion Louis. In the spring of 1217 he learned that his rival, Ranulph, earl of Chester, was besieging Mountsorrel, and on 30 April he and FitzWalter led an army to its relief, only to find on arrival that the siege had been lifted. They then turned east to attack the royalist-held castle of Lincoln, unaware that a royal army was coming to its relief, and under the walls of Lincoln, on 20 May, they were defeated. Saer himself was taken prisoner. In September he was released as part of the general settlement and he went on to play a respectable part in the Minority government of Henry III. In November he was a witness to the reissue of Magna Carta and issue of the Charter of the Forest.

In the spring of 1219 he embarked on crusade to assist in the siege of the Egyptian port of Damietta in the company of his son Roger, Robert FitzWalter and William, earl of Arundel. Soon after his arrival in Egypt, however, he fell ill, and he died on 3 November. In accordance with his instructions, he was buried at Acre and the ashes of his organs returned to England for interment at Garendon Abbey (Leics.), of which he was patron.

Saer’s career affords a good illustration of the role that a dispute over property could play in determining political allegiance. The same point emerges with equal clarity from other periods of instability in the Middle Ages, notably the civil war of King Stephen’s reign in the 1140s. Saer was one of the most experienced administrators in the ranks of the opposition, having served as a baron of the exchequer and a justice of the bench, and was heavily involved in the negotiations with the king that led to the making of Magna Carta.

Robert de Ros

Robert de Ros (c. 1182-1226/7), kinsman through marriage of Eustace de Vesci, and the son of Everard de Ros and Roese, née Trussebut, was a Yorkshire lord, the owner of extensive estates centring on Helmsley in the North Riding of Yorkshire and Wark-on-Tweed in Northumberland. He was married, at an unknown date, to Isabella, an illegitimate daughter of William the Lion, king of Scotland, and widow of Robert III de Brus.

In the early 1200s Robert is found co-operating actively with King John, witnessing a number of his charters, chiefly at locations in northern England, and in 1203 assisting in the king’s defence of Normandy, where by descent from his mother he held the hereditary office of bailiff and constable of Bonneville-sur-Touques in the lower part of the duchy. In 1205, however, a year of rising political tension, there are signs that his relations with the king were worsening, and John ordered the seizure of his lands and, apparently shortly afterwards, had his son taken hostage. Robert, a little later, recovered his lands, but an indication that he might have been interested in leaving England is given by his acquisition of a licence to pledge his lands for crusading. It is not known, however, if he ever actually did embark for the East.

In 1212 Robert seems to have entered a monastery, and on 15 May that year John handed over custody of his lands to one Philip de Ulcot. His monastic profession, however, cannot have lasted for long, for on 30 January 1213 John appointed him sheriff of Cumberland, and later in the same year he was one of the witnesses to John’s surrender of his kingdom to the pope. In 1215, as relations between the king and the baronial opposition worsened, John seems to have tried to keep Robert on his side, ordering one of his counsellors to try to secure the election of Robert’s aunt as abbess of Barking. By April, however, Robert was firmly on the baronial side, attending the baronial muster at Stamford and, after June, being nominated to the committee of twenty-five.

When war between the king and his opponents broke out towards the end of the year, Robert was active on the baronial side, forfeiting his lands as a result and suffering the capture of his son at the battle of Lincoln in May 1217. After Louis returned to France, Robert submitted to the new government and recovered most, although not all, of his lands. He witnessed the third and definitive reissue of Magna Carta on 11 February 1225. Sometime before 1226 he retired to a monastery and he died either in that year or early in 1227. At some stage he was received into the ranks of the Templars and on his death he was buried in the Temple Church in London, where a few years earlier William Marshal, the one-time Regent had been buried. An effigy in that church sometimes associated with him dates from at least a generation later.

Robert is an enigmatic individual who had close ties with Eustace de Vesci but did not openly join the rebellion until just before Runnymede. He probably felt a conflict between his sense of loyalty to his fellow Northerners and his obligation of obedience to the king.

Geoffrey de Say

Geoffrey de Say sat in the baronial camp in an uneasy alliance with Geoffrey de Mandeville, his cousin but also his rival for the inheritance of the de Mandeville earls of Essex. The competition between the two men and their families affords a reminder that there were divisions within the baronial camp as well as between the rebel barons and the king. No more than such other medieval opposition movements as the Ordainers in Edward II’s reign or the Appellants in Richard II’s were the Twenty Five of John’s reign a solid monolithic bloc unhindered by faction or rivalry.

The two Geoffreys both had a claim on the estates of another namesake, William de Mandeville, third earl of Essex, the last of his line, who had died without issue in 1189. De Say’s claim arose from his grandmother, the long-lived Beatrice de Say, the first Mandeville earl’s sister, who transmitted her rights to her son, while Geoffrey de Mandeville’s claim was inherited from his mother, another Beatrice, the wife of Geoffrey FitzPeter and daughter and eventual coheiress of William de Say II, William I’s son. Geoffrey de Say I, our Geoffrey’s father, obtained a grant of the disputed lands from Richard the Lionheart in 1189, but was unable to raise the huge sum of 7,000 marks (about £2333), which the king demanded as his price. The estates, accordingly, reverted to the king and were awarded instead to Geoffrey FitzPeter, a powerful man and later King Richard’s justiciar. FitzPeter and his wife were confirmed in their possession of the estates by a royal charter granted at Messina on 23 January 1191. The early stages of the dispute are told in a fascinating account in the Walden Abbey chronicle, The Foundation Book of Walden Monastery.

The younger Geoffrey had started his career under Richard and John fighting in the defence of Normandy and had evidently lost property there when the duchy was finally overrun by the French. As early as 1202 the duchy’s seneschal was instructed to find as much as one hundred liberates of land with which to compensate him for the losses which he had suffered.

In 1214, after his father’s death, he reactivated the family claim to the Mandeville inheritance, this time against FitzPeter’s son – Earl Geoffrey – taking advantage of his service with the king in Poitou to offer him no less than 15,000 (£10,000) marks for possession. John wrote to the justiciar in England ordering him to take advice on what might be the best course to take. No further action is recorded, and presumably the justiciar did nothing. It is no surprise, therefore, in 1215 to find Geoffrey on the rebel side, aggrieved at his failure to secure justice. In June he was named to the Twenty Five and in November he was involved alongside FitzWalter and de Clare in the fruitless negotiations with the king for a settlement. Siding with Louis and the French, he only made his peace with the royalists after the massive baronial defeat at Lincoln in May. He was not active in the politics of the Minority. In 1219 he went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and in 1223 to Santiago de Compostella, apparently in the company of Earl Warenne. He died on 24 August 1230 while campaigning with Henry III in Poitou.

Geoffrey married Alice de Chesney, whose date of death is unknown, and he left a son William, who succeeded him and lived to 1271. [The marriage to Alice de Chesney is incorrect: she was Geoffrey's mother. See Research Note on Geoffrey's profile.]

Robert de Vere

Robert de Vere (d. 1221) was a member of a comital family, based at Hedingham (Essex), which owed its rise to eminence to the patronage of the Empress Matilda in the civil war of King Stephen’s reign in the 1140s. Robert himself was the third surviving son of Earl Aubrey (d. 1194) by his third wife, Agnes of Essex, and succeeded to the title on the death of his elder brother, another Aubrey in October 1214. Sometime before Michaelmas 1207 Robert had married Isabel de Bolebec, the aunt and namesake of Earl Aubrey’s wife, who had died childless in 1206 or 1207. Isabel the niece had been the heiress to the Bolebec estate, which was centred on Whitchurch (Bucks.), and her own heirs were her two aunts. Robert’s marriage can therefore be seen as part of a de Vere strategy to retain control over at least half of the Bolebec lands. The de Veres were one of the least well-endowed of the comital families and would have been loath to allow a valuable estate to slip from their grasp.

Robert’s defection to the rebel side in 1215 provides yet another example of King John’s capacity to alienate men who should have been numbered among his natural allies. His predecessor in the title had been one of the king’s most loyal intimates and administrators. Robert was probably moved to defect in part by his resentment at the relief of 1000 marks charged for his entry into his inheritance, which was high for an estate of only moderate extent. Most of all, however, he probably nursed a grievance against the king for his failure to confirm him in the title of earl and in the office of court chamberlain, which de Veres held by hereditary right. Robert is known to have been present at the baronial muster at Stamford in April 1215 and he was named by the chronicler Roger Wendover as one of the principal promoters of discontent. He was a key figure in the East Anglian group of rebels. By 23 June, after the meeting at Runnymede, the king was evidently angling to regain his support because on that date a royal letter was issued which implicitly recognised him as earl of Oxford. By that time, however, it was too late: Robert had already been named to the Twenty Five. Towards the end of March 1216 John took possession of his castle at Hedingham after a three-day siege and the earl, who was not present, was granted a safe-conduct to seek the king’s forgiveness. Within months, however, he had defected to Louis of France and he was not to re-enter royal allegiance for good until the general settlement of the rebellion in the autumn of 1217.

Robert died shortly before 25 October 1221 and was buried in Hatfield Broad Oak priory (Essex). A century after his death, to mark the long-delayed completion of the priory church, a fine tomb effigy to his memory was commissioned, carved by the same sculptors who produced the monument to Aymer de Valence, earl of Pembroke, in Westminster Abbey. At the Dissolution, the effigy was transferred to Hatfield Broad Oak parish church, where it remains. Robert’s widow obtained the guardianship of their son, Hugh, who was a minor, and of his estates, which she was to exercise for about ten years. She died on 3 February 1245 and was buried in the Dominican friary at Oxford, nearer to her own family’s estates.

Eustace de Vesci

Eustace de Vesci (1169/70-1216) was one of the group referred to by contemporaries as ‘the Northerners’, the original hard-line leaders of the baronial resistance to King John. The son of William de Vesci and Burga, daughter of Robert de Stuteville, lord of Cottingham (Yorks.), he was lord of Alnwick in Northumberland and an extensive landowner in northern England. He was married to Margaret, illegitimate daughter of William the Lion, king of Scotland and half-sister of Alexander II of Scotland. At Richard the Lionheart’s second coronation in 1194, following his release from captivity in Germany, he witnessed a royal charter in favour of his father-in-law.

At the end of 1194 Eustace is found engaged in Richard’s service at Chinon, the great Angevin castle in Anjou, and five years later was one of the guarantors of the treaty between King John, newly succeeded to the throne, and Count Renaud of Boulogne. In 1210 he accompanied John on his expedition to attempt the pacification of Ireland. Accused in 1212, alongside another important northern lord Robert FitzWalter, of plotting against John’s life, he fled to Scotland, and his lands were seized. After John’s submission to the pope in 1213, however, he was allowed back, and a few months later he was awarded restitution of his lands, although his castles at Alnwick and Malton were destroyed. Later in 1213 in a gesture indicative of his continued defiance of the king, he refused to enlist in John’s expedition to Poitou, in south-west France, and in the following year he also refused to pay scutage (money in lieu of military service). His intense dislike of John was evidently well known to the pope who, in 1214, warned him to remain loyal to the king, since his submission to the pope regarded as a faithful son of the Church. In 1215 he was deeply involved in the military operations that led up to the making of Magna Carta, associating himself closely with a Yorkshire rebel, his kinsman Robert de Ros of Helmsley. In September he was one of a group of nine malcontent barons singled out for excommunication by the pope. Although by the following May he was seeking a reconciliation with the king, as soon as Louis, the French king’s son, took on the leadership of the baronial cause he went over to him. He met his death in late August 1216 at Barnard Castle in County Durham, where he was shot in the head by an arrow while conducting siege operations. He left a young son William, who came of age in 1226.


  1. Email to Darlene Athey-Hill: "In response to a request to use his text, he responded: "I've consulted, and yes, we are happy for you to go ahead. But please give the link to the Magna Carta 800 Committee website (my organisation) and not the magna carta Barons, which is a different organisation."




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