The Greatest Traitor: The Life of Sir Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March (5 page)

Gaveston was hardly any older than Roger himself. Chroniclers described him and the prince as contemporaries. Since the prince was born in 1284, it is unlikely that Gaveston was born any earlier than 1281. Thus he was probably no more than twenty-four, and possibly as young as twenty-one, when he became guardian to the seventeen-year-old Roger Mortimer. He was of considerably lower rank than the young heir. He was the son of a knight called Arnaud from Gabaston in Gascony, southern France, who had fought for Edward I and who had been used as a hostage by him on two occasions. On the second of these Arnaud had escaped captivity and had fled to England, bringing with him his son Piers, who had also entered the royal household. So well behaved and virtuous did the young Gaveston appear to the king that he declared him an example for his own son to follow, and made him a member of Prince Edward’s household in 1300.

As soon as Gaveston and Edward met they became great friends. The prince, overshadowed by his father the king, was yearning to break free and to be his own man. Gaveston was witty, rude and enormously entertaining, with a Gascon accent and moreover a healthy disregard for all things old-fashioned, English and traditional. He delighted the prince, and more importantly gave him confidence, and in his company the prince grew to discover his own character. Hence the lion and the camel, the jewels and the horsemanship. The emergent frivolity of the prince in the
last years of his father’s life can be put down to the liberating influence of Gaveston. The prince declared that he loved Gaveston ‘like a brother’. His real half-brothers, Thomas and Edmund, were mere babies at this time, and unable to provide him with the close companionship he craved. Gaveston, having also lost his mother at a young age, was the perfect ‘brother’. Their shared interests gave them further common ground. That Gaveston could express his disdain for the old-fashioned nobles, insult them, and still ride out in armour and hold his own in the joust with the best of them, made Edward proud to call Gaveston his friend.

The reason why Gaveston’s name has remained famous to this day is not the extent to which the prince admired him but the nature of their relationship. Were they merely close friends or were they lovers? Did they experience physical desire for one another as well as close friendship? We do not know for certain. We do know that Edward fathered four legitimate children and at least one illegitimate son, and therefore was not repelled by heterosexual coupling. Nor was Gaveston, whose wife bore him a daughter just before he died. In addition, the present-day tendency to define sexuality largely through physical acts makes it harder to assess the erotic degree of emotional relationships in the fourteenth century. The very categorisation of Edward’s and Gaveston’s relationship is a problem, since all the chroniclers agree that theirs was a unique friendship, comparable only with that of Jonathan and David in the Bible. The problem is compounded by the fact that physical homosexual acts were socially unacceptable and thus would not have been mentioned by most chroniclers. Suffice to say that Gaveston was Edward’s best friend, the love of his life, and, in many respects, his hero.
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In 1304, when Roger’s wardship was granted to Gaveston, England had yet to make up its mind about the Gascon knight. From Roger’s point of view, Gaveston was a fine tournament fighter, and an admirable companion, but Roger wanted his freedom to enjoy his own property. The ordinary made for him and Warenne gave him some level of distinction – for example, that he could have three valets to serve him, each entitled to three changes of robes each year, and that he could maintain his favourite four horses – but this was still a far cry from his own castles, retinues of men-at-arms and authority.
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Thus it was decided between him and his family that he should buy his way out of his wardship.

The question was merely one of money. The lands to which Roger was directly heir (just his father’s and grandmother’s estates, since his mother and Joan’s grandfather and mother were all still alive and in possession of their lands) amounted to about £700 per year, less the £120 mortgaged to Geoffrey de Geneville. That left Gaveston with the remaining £580 for
at least another three years while Roger was under twenty-one, a staggeringly large income for a man who was not even a knight. Thus Gaveston was unlikely to relinquish the wardship cheaply. He settled for 2,500 marks, or £1,666 13s 8d, probably the equivalent of the family income (excepting the mortgage) over three years.
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The amount is put into perspective by the fact that at this time the daily allowance of a knight on active service was just 1s, a skilled carpenter might earn 4d, and an unskilled labourer earned no more than 2d per day. If we are right in saying that the 2,500 marks was the rough equivalent of three years of Roger’s income, we can assume that it was paid before much of those three years had elapsed. Possibly it was paid before the end of December 1304, when Roger was granted the right to pay back his father’s debts to the Exchequer at the rate of £20 per year.
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Roger would have come of age in March 1308, and so it is likely that the period of approximately three years on which the fine paid to Gaveston was assessed fell at some point in early 1305 at the latest. It must have been paid before 16 May 1305, as Roger’s guardian and the executor of his father’s will, Walter de Thornbury, granted some land in Stratfield Mortimer on his behalf on that date, with no reference to Gaveston.
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It was not until the following year, however, that he was given full control over his estates.

By the time he bought his freedom to enjoy his inheritance, Roger had been married for about three years. He had a son and heir, Edmund, named after his own father in accordance with the family custom, and a daughter, Margaret, named after his mother.
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More children – in fact at least ten more – followed.
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This fact alone suggests the marriage was a highly satisfactory one: in order to remain regularly pregnant by her husband, Joan would have needed frequently to travel with Roger when he was summoned to attend Parliament, or to attend the king, only remaining behind in times of actual combat. This represents a high level of companionship sustained over many years, a situation by no means universal in the early fourteenth century. It is likely that Joan returned to the family estates as each confinement drew near, but, even so, the fact that they had twelve surviving children in less than twenty years, and that she travelled with her husband at least twice to lawless Ireland, points to a relationship which was much closer than most among the medieval nobility. No previous generation of the family had managed to produce such a brood. It suggests that they are an example of that rarity – a mutually beneficial, secure medieval partnership.
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We do not know for certain where Roger was at any point in 1305, but given the evidence of the ordinary for his accommodation as a royal ward, he was still probably in the king’s household at the beginning of the year,
watched over by Walter de Thornbury. Since over subsequent years Roger would show a greater enthusiasm for being at court than on his own estates, there is every likelihood that he remained with the king throughout the year. Walter de Thornbury showed a similar propensity for remaining at court. Either way, there is one assumption which is safe to make about Roger at this time, and that is that he took part in tournaments. Within a short while he had risen to prominence as a tournament fighter, and this was the one sure way of attracting the king’s attention.
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For the early fourteenth-century tournament was not the mere chivalric parade it came to be in later years; then, it still resembled the original show battles of the thirteenth century, in which men very often died. In 1241 more than eighty knights had been killed in a single tournament. The Round Table tournament which Roger’s grandfather had held at Kenilworth and the king’s Round Table tournament in 1284 were pitched fights in which, although edged weapons were blunted, men fought all the more viciously to conquer their opponents. Several of Roger’s family had been killed tourneying, including one lord of Wigmore in 1227. In addition to the wounds wrought by weapons, men were trampled to death, crushed, suffocated or broke their necks. But champion knights could make themselves famous and comparatively wealthy, paying only a few marks to enter and display their skills to the audience and judges. It was probably in this way that Roger drew attention to himself as a fighter and convinced the king that he deserved to come into his inheritance sooner rather than later.

Although he was not quite nineteen, on 9 April 1306 Roger was endowed with full possession of all the estates he inherited from his father and which he held directly from the king.
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He thus became Lord Mortimer of Wigmore and inherited the barony of Wigmore, with its castle, manors, towns and estates. He also inherited the castle, town and barony of Radnor, the castle and one third of the town of Bridgewater in Somerset, three castles in the Welsh cantred of Maelienydd, and the town of Presteigne in Wales. He became lord or overlord of hundreds of manors and estates scattered across the counties of Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Herefordshire, Huntingdonshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Shropshire, Somerset, Suffolk, Wiltshire, Worcestershire and Yorkshire.
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Added to these lands and titles, he stood to inherit through Joan her estates in Gascony, the barony of Meath and the Liberty of Trim in Ireland, including Trim Castle, and half the lordship of the town of Ludlow. Last but by no means least he stood to gain possession of Ludlow Castle. This was the grandest castle on the Welsh Marches, only a few miles from his own seat at Wigmore. Joan’s Irish
estates would in time be added to the Irish lands of his grandmother, who had died in 1301, and which he now also inherited. These included the lordship of the honour of Dunamase. He might not have been an earl, but his ancestry, background and estates placed him in the front rank of the baronage, and his marriage made him as wealthy as several men of higher rank.

The first purpose of the baronage, however, was not to amass wealth but to fight. On the very day that Roger came into his inheritance he received a summons to serve in the king’s army in Scotland, and for this purpose to assemble his men at Carlisle on 8 July. The time of war, to which he had been bred and trained, had come.

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Not long after the summons was issued, a second writ from the king was sent out announcing that all those who had not yet received the honour of knighthood, and who were the holders of a knight’s fee (a feudal estate normally worth £40 or more a year), were to come to London to be knighted on Whitsunday, 22 May. For Roger, the opportunity to receive such an honour so early in his career was not to be missed, especially as chivalric displays were relatively uncommon and the number of men actually dubbed was small. Even his warrior uncle, battle-scarred after thirty years’ fighting, had not yet been dubbed. Thus both Roger and his uncle set out for Westminster at the beginning of May 1306.

A huge number of men had responded to the announcement, of which 267 were accepted. The excitement was great indeed; never in England had so many knights been dubbed at a single occasion. It seemed these new knights would form the basis of a war band, a new court of the Round Table. They were treated with great respect, being allowed to camp in the grounds of the Temple church, the London centre of the Knights Templar. When the precinct of the Templars’ house was full of tents and pavilions, the order was given to pull down the precinct wall and to cut down all the fruit trees in the adjacent gardens. Fifty carpenters set up huge canvas pavilions for the lords and ladies to sleep in and other tents to act as bathing and robing chambers. All their provisions were supplied from the prince’s household. The old guard was making way for the new. Roger’s generation of knights was about to come of age.

On the 22nd a huge crowd gathered along the way from the Temple to Westminster Abbey, cheering and waving, all hoping to see the new knights of England as they passed to the ceremony. So many struggled to get a view that people had to clamber on each other’s shoulders or climb on to garden walls. At the same time the prince, wearing full armour, knelt
in the secure silence of the palace chapel. The king, watched solemnly by a few of his oldest and most trusted lords, touched the royal sword to Prince Edward’s shoulders. When he stood up, his father girded him with his sword and belt, and the old Earl of Lincoln and the war-scarred Earl of Hereford knelt down to fasten his spurs. He was thus made a knight, and given the lordship of the Duchy of Aquitaine. It was a solemn moment, but it preceded an occasion of even greater gravity: the prince was now to go to the abbey and convey the honour of knighthood to the new chivalry of England.

Such was the noise, chaos and crowding in the abbey church that no one could silence the lords and their men. Eventually war horses were brought in to drive a path to the altar. Then the ceremony began. A mass was sung by the abbey monks, and two by two the knights were called forward from the throng. After about thirty names the clerks called for
Rogerus de Mortuo Mari de Wigmore
and
Rogerus de Mortuo Mari de Chirk
, as they were called in Latin. They went forward, washed their hands in silver bowls, and were sprinkled with holy water by attendant priests. Solemnly they made their vows of knighthood: to uphold the Church, the Crown and the order of knighthood itself, to spare the life of a vanquished enemy who pleaded for mercy, to respect women and to live chastely. Then each was touched by Prince Edward with the royal sword, was girded with a belt and sword, and received his spurs. Before that moment they had merely served their king; now they were knights with a higher purpose.