There were few places in England where the sight of the royal train was not familiar. For the motives {104} mentioned above, the Court’s journeys were incessant. The royal itineraries that have come down to us throw a flood of light on this continual need of movement. The itinerary of King John shows that he rarely passed a month in the same place, most frequently he did not even remain there a week. Within a fortnight he is often found at five or six different towns or castles.97 The same with Edward I, who, as we have seen, would change his abode three times every fortnight.98
And when the king moved, not only was he preceded by twenty-four archers in his pay, receiving threepence a day,99 but he was accompanied by all those officers whom the author of “Fleta” enumerates with so much complacency. The sovereign took with him his two marshals, his outer marshal (forinsecus) who in time of war disposed the armies for battle, selected the halting-places on his journeys, and at all times arrested malefactors found in the virgata regia, that is to say, within twelve leagues around his dwelling;100 and his inner marshal (intrinsecus), who guarded the palace and castles, and cleared them as much as possible of courtesans. He collected from every common harlot (meretrice communi) four pence by way of fine the first time that he arrested her; if she returned she was brought before the steward, who solemnly forbid her ever to present herself at the dwelling of the king, queen, or their children; the third time she was imprisoned and the tresses of her hair were shorn off; {107} the fourth time one of those hideous punishments was resorted to which the Middle Ages in their brutality tolerated; the upper lip of these women was cut off, “ne de cætero concupiscantur ad libidinem.”101 There was also the chamberlain, who took care that the interior of the house was comfortable: “He has to arrange decently for the king’s bed, and to see that the rooms be furnished with carpets and benches;” the treasurer of the wardrobe, who kept the accounts; the marshal of the hall, whose mission it was to eject unworthy intruders and dogs,—“non enim permittat canes aulam ingredi,”—and a crowd of other officers.102
Overtopping all the rest, there was, moreover, the king’s seneschal or steward, first officer of his household, and his great justiciary. Wherever the king went the apparatus of justice was transported with him; when he was about to start the steward gave to the sheriff notice of the place where the Court would stop, in order that he might bring his prisoners to the town where the prince was to be stationed.103 All the cases amenable to the jurisdiction of the justices in eyre were then determined by the steward, as the king’s justiciary, who prescribed, if necessary, the judicial duel, pronounced sentences of outlawry, and judged in criminal and civil cases.104 This {108} right of criminal justice even accompanied the king abroad, but he only exercised it when the criminal had been arrested in his own royal place of abode. One such case happened in the fourteenth year of the reign of Edward I. This sovereign being at Paris, Ingelram de Nogent came into his house to steal, and was caught in the act. After some discussion it was acknowledged that Edward, by his royal privilege, should remain judge in the matter; he delivered the robber over to Robert Fitz-John, his steward, who caused Ingelram to be hung from the gibbet of St. Germain-des-Prés.105
For a long time the chancellor himself, and the clerks who made out the writs, followed the king on his journeys, and Palgrave notes that frequently a strong horse was requisitioned from the nearest convent to carry the rolls;106 but this custom came to a close in the fourth year of Edward III, when the Chancery was permanently established at Westminster.
The tribunal moving on, a crowd of suitors moved with it. No matter though they were not inscribed on the rolls, they followed without losing patience, as gulls follow the ship, hoping that something may come their way. Parties with a lawsuit, petitioners of every kind, women “of ill life” (de fole vie), a whole herd of individuals with no one to vouch for them, persisted in escorting the prince and his courtiers. They quarrelled among each other, robbed by the way, sometimes committed murders, and, as may be imagined, did not contribute to render the news of the king’s arrival welcome to his subjects.
In the ordinances of his household, Edward II enumerates and deplores all these abuses; he orders that masterless men who follow the Court shall be put in irons for forty days on bread and water, and that the women of ill life shall be likewise imprisoned and branded with a {111} hot iron; he forbids his knights, clerks, squires, valets, grooms, in short, all who accompany him, to bring their wives with them, unless these have any post or employment at Court, this host of feminine beings increasing the chances of trouble. He also limits the number of persons who should accompany the marshal, which had, as will happen, increased little by little beyond all bounds. His ordinances, like so many others in the Middle Ages, were conspicuous for their wisdom, their minuteness, and their prompt decay.
Justice did not travel only in the king’s suite. She was peripatetic in England, visiting the counties in the company of the royal itinerant judges and going from hundred to hundred with that governor, military chief, police magistrate, financial agent, the sheriff, a functionary of great local, and sometimes tyrannical, power, appointed and dismissed at will by the king during certain periods, elected at others.
Both kinds, at fixed times, were on the move and caused a considerable portion of the inhabitants to leave their work, take to the road and be on the move too, in order to come to the court that was to be held. Both kinds put before the jurors a number of questions which the twelve men had to answer under oath, some of those questions being obviously quite uncomfortable to reply to.
The sheriff goes about the hundreds107 in his shire and holds the “view of frank pledge,” chiefly established for the maintenance of that ancient system of enforced solidarity which obliged, theoretically at least, every male {112} to belong to a particular group of inhabitants of ten or more (tithing), jointly responsible for the misdeeds of any of their number in case the culprit cannot be found, fined, jailed or hanged, according to the occasion. By degrees the old “articles of the view,” greatly varying from place to place,108 had increased in number, and the jurors had to answer as to a variety of smaller offences often duplicating the justices’ own interrogatories.109
The “turns” or “tourns” of the sheriffs might, according to the Great Charter, only take place twice a year, not oftener, because their coming occasioned loss of time and money to the sworn men and others who had to leave home and attend the court, and to the king’s subjects at whose houses these officers and their train went to lodge.110 In spite of institutions which, as we shall see, had made the very men placed under the jurisdiction of the sheriffs, bailiffs, etc. themselves the censors of these same officials, abuses were numerous, the Commons were ever complaining, and frequent statutes, one after the other, denounced corrupt practices and stopped them—for a time.111 {113}
The itinerant justices’ inquiry covered a much larger field; their “Articles of the Eyre,” or Capitula Itineris, included every imaginable misdeed from highest to lowest, from “crimen læsæ Majestatis,” above which nothing could be imagined, to fishing by means of “kidels” (weirs) or the using of nets to capture pigeons without the owner’s permit.
Coming four times a year in accordance with Art. 18 of the Great Charter, sitting in the full court of the county, growing in importance, while that of the sheriff as a judge went diminishing and the system of the frankpledge was falling into disuse, the itinerant justices submitted to the jury a ceaselessly increasing number of questions, a whole quire of them in the first half of the fourteenth century.112 They asked what crimes, what misdemeanours, what infractions against the statutes had come to their knowledge. And in these minute interrogatories at every moment came up the names of the sheriff, the coroner,113 the bailiff, the constable, of all the royal functionaries, whose conduct was thus placed under popular control. Has any of these officers, says the judge, released some robber, or counterfeiter or a clipper of coin? Has he for any consideration neglected the pursuit against a vagabond or an assassin? Has he unjustly received fines? Has he been paid by men who wished to avoid a public charge (for example, of being sworn as member of a jury)? Has the sheriff claimed more than reasonable hospitality from those in his jurisdiction, in tourns held too oft? Has he come with more than five or six horses? And {114} the juror was obliged in the same way to denounce, under his oath, the great who had arbitrarily imprisoned travellers passing through their lands, and all those who had neglected to assist in arresting a thief and running with the “hue and cry;”114 for in this society each man is by turns peace officer, soldier, and judge, and even the humbler ones, menaced by so many exactions, have their share too in the administration of justice and the maintenance of public order. Highly important were, therefore, from a social point of view, these judicial tourns, which periodically reminded the mere man that he was a citizen, and that the affairs of the State were also his affairs.115
Juries could at times, like so many other picturesque groups of inhabitants, become one of the sights of the road. If they perjured themselves or accepted bribes, they would be sent to London and be jailed in the Tower; they were to travel along, not by night, but “by clear day, in the view of all, so that the country people might see the pain and shame of those guilty men who will be thereby the better punished.”116
Or else, if that unanimity which became obligatory in the latter part of the fourteenth century had not been secured, the itinerant justices, in order to get it any way, {115} were free to place the twelve men in carts and carry them about wherever they went, until the twelve chose to agree.117
When monks came out of the cloister and travelled, they wilfully modified their costume, and it became difficult to distinguish them from the great. I saw, writes Chaucer:
But the councils are still more explicit, and do more than justify the satire of the poet. Thus the Council of London in 1342, reproaches the religious with wearing clothing “fit rather for knights than for clerks, that is to say short, very tight, with excessively wide sleeves, not reaching the elbows, but hanging down very low, lined with fur or with silk.” They made themselves conspicuous by their long beards, rings on their fingers, costly girdles, purses or bags whereon figures were embroidered in gold, knives resembling swords, boots red or party-coloured, or slashed long-pointed shoes (the Polish-born poulaine); in a word, all the luxury of the magnates of the land. Later, in 1367, the Council of York renewed the same criticisms; the religious have “ridiculously short” clothing; they dare publicly to wear those coats “which do not come down to the middle of the legs, and do not even cover the knees.” Severe prohibitions were made for the future, though on a journey tunics shorter than the regulation gown were tolerated.119
A bishop did not start on a journey without a great train; and the bishops, besides their episcopal visitations, {116} had, like the nobility, to travel to visit their lands and to live on them. On all these occasions they took with them their servants of different kinds and their followers, as the king did his court. The accounts of the expenses of Richard de Swinfield, Bishop of Hereford, give an idea of the lordly life led by well-to-do prelates. He was a bishop of some importance, and rich in proportion; many manors belonged to his bishopric; he could hold his rank as prelate and as lord, be hospitable, charitable to the poor, and spend much on requests and suits at the court of Rome and elsewhere. He had constantly in his pay about forty persons of different ranks, the greater part of whom accompanied him in his numerous changes of residence. His squires (armigeri) had from a mark (13s. 4d.) to a pound a year; his valleti, that is, the clerks of his chapel and others, his carters, porters, falconers, grooms, messengers, etc., had from a crown to eight {117} shillings and eightpence. In the third category came the kitchen servants, the baker, with two to four shillings a year; in the fourth, that of the boys or pages who helped the other servants, and whose wages greatly varied, being from one to six shillings a year. All the household was dressed alike, in striped cloth (pannus stragulatus), supplied by the bishop, besides the fixed salary. One of the most peculiar retainers of the bishop belonged to a now extinct race, and was his champion, Thomas de Bruges, who received an annual payment to fight in the prelate’s name in case any lawsuit should have to be terminated by a judicial duel.120