In His Image: Maesnée
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Surrey, 1323. In which Gabriel hides, and makes some unexpected acquaintances with opinions on family and civil war.
Sir Thomas Engayne, Gabriel, Sir Thomas Roscelyn.
maesnée [n] (Anglo-Norman, also spelt maigné, metne, meyne, mencié, etc.): family; but also, household/retinue, body of troops, or (occasionally) any crowd of strangers. Cf. Middle English meine/maignie/meneȝe.
January, 1323.
In late 1321 many of the barons of England, tired of the increasingly onerous rule of King Edward II and his favourites the Despensers, rose against him. The greatest of these barons was the king’s uncle, the Earl of Lancaster.
But that beginning is misleading. It implies direction and purpose and unity. It implies a leader.
In one of the most politically canny periods of his kingship, Edward actually headed off most of the rebellion before it could become one, while Lancaster hung around up north and held meetings and never got around to helping his potential (or erstwhile) allies. By the time Lancaster was actually in armed opposition to him (or to the Despensers, as he insisted, because who would dare march against the king to whom he’d sworn allegiance before God?), Edward had already dissuaded or terrified or imprisoned most of the lords who might otherwise have rebelled. In the end, most of the force that joined up with Lancaster were, in fact, fleeing the king’s wrath rather than standing against it, hoping that the great Lancaster’s protection would save them.
It didn’t. In March of 1322, the king’s army won a resounding victory at Burton-upon-Trent, and the tattered remnants of the baronial opposition fled north across Lancaster’s lands. They were cut off at Boroughbridge, in York, and there all the remaining ringleaders were captured. Despite everyone’s belief in his immunity, Lancaster was beheaded as a traitor, together with many other barons and knights, and still more fled the country or were imprisoned. To cap it all, Edward redistributed their captured lands liberally. In a society where community and individual identity were deeply associated with family land ownership, this had a profoundly unsettling effect - and on a country already divided and shaken by civil wars and shifting loyalties.
The rest of the year was devoted to a parliament, then a campaign against the Scots which should have gone well (according to the English) and really really didn’t (unless you were a Scot).
In early 1323, when the king had time to turn his attention back to domestic affairs and retribution, a warrant was issued from Newark for the arrest of several of the knights who had escaped after Boroughbridge and who were now at large in the land. Among them were two men who appear in very few official records and fewer chronicles: “Thos. Rocelyn, knight,” and “Thos. de Engayne” [Note]...
It was the year of our Lord 1323, in the first month, and my brother-in-arms Sir Thomas Roscelyn and I found ourselves lodged secretly in the small Surrey priory of Bermondsey. A warrant had been issued for our arrest very lately from Newark, but containing no particulars. There were many knights fleeing the king’s wrath across the land, and his sergeants obeyed him only sluggishly, as men will who are driven by fear, and not by love.
We were not the only men at that time relying on the hospitality and discretion of Prior Walter de Lutz and his fellow canons. There was another knight there, a Sir Daniel de Wanderville from the north of England, who arrived in late January. In that wretched time, few men had the luxury to ask and carry letters of introduction (we ourselves had nothing but our names and our accidental friendship with the canon James Daryngton to recommend us). But the prior was a man of charity and conscience, and was content to introduce us because he thought his brother had known this man’s father; and so, he had three guests to feed.
With the Famine barely over, and the murrain of cattle, and every man distrusting his neighbour, it can hardly have been easy on him; but when times are harsh, every man either becomes a wolf, who turns on his neighbours with vice and rapine, or he becomes a hound, who defends them to the death.
It was three days before we spoke more to this knight than the barest of courtesies dictated. In any other time, that might have seemed reticent or impolite; but times were strange, as I have mentioned, and men were wary and tired of grief.
I had not expected to see the stranger here, in our quiet shaded corner in the elbow-curve of the brook. We had come down here together, to swim and to laze in what sun there might be as we dried; but I was not sorry for the distraction.
I loved Thomas fiercely, close as any brother; but we had argued twice lately, and I knew that as soon as we were alone he would begin it again. He insisted that the wisest course was to flee England and join Sir Roger Mortimer of Wigmore (whom he knew well) on the continent, arguing that if we could get there we should be well placed to take back the lands and goods that were ours when the time came; and that, in any case, we were doing ourselves no good by sitting here. I, on the other hand, had reasons to remain, hopeless as they appeared.
Brothers ought not abandon brothers, even if they are themselves abandoned.
In any case, the king’s favourites, the Despensers, were now stronger than ever, the great Earl of Lancaster was dead, the rising against the Despensers crushed, and what man with all his faculties could hope that a disgraced Marcher baron could do better? My friend was dear to me, and he always spoke with passion and determination that did him credit; but the days of honour and chivalry were dead, and I feared he was merely seeking another great banner to which he might attach his blind and fading hopes. And besides, it is one thing to follow the king’s cousin to put down malicious barons who hold too much sway over the king, and quite another to march openly against the king himself behind the banner of a knight of the Welsh marches.
And yet, the country was diseased. The political state of it was unnatural, contrary to the laws of God and man, and we saw daily proof of it in the sickness of the land, in the hunger of dying men and beasts, in the bright flash of iron drawn by brother against brother. Perhaps God wanted us to set it right.
My brother-in-arms hailed the stranger, and he replied, calling us “Sir Roscelyn” and “Sir Engayne.”
Thomas denied the names, all irony: “The king, in his majestic wisdom, has taken the lands and maesnée of those names from us: we are now, moun cher sire, only Sirs Thomas and Thomas.”
If only Thomas would not joke like that. About that.
(For my part, “Sir Engayne” was my uncle, until last September; and then it was my father for half an hour, I hear, as he guarded my uncle’s body from the axes of the Scots, as the king’s glorious campaign dissolved into mayhem; and now it must be my brother John, who did not choose a side, not even the side he must have known was right.)
At least no man could deny us our knighthood, or the names by which God had accepted us as His.
“Join us in the water,” Thomas invited.
“No,” the knight replied, drawing out the vowel so that the word sounded almost English, although of course we all three were speaking French. “I’m too old for naked ragerie and riotte in January creeks. You kids go freeze your pert little bew-scheres off - I’ll wait.”
We did, and he did, with his face tipped up toward the light of the sky and the Heavenly King whose example the earthly one did not know how to follow.
When we were done, I lay on the muddy grass and Thomas in the crook of an oak to dry.
We did not speak. Among men such as us, some words are unnecessary. We were all three of us at the lowest turn of Fortune’s wheel, crushed under it. We did not have to speak of the war to know whose side he had fought on - his presence here was enough. He had risen against the unjust favourites who dominated a doting king (contrary to custom and nature) and he had failed - at Boroughbridge, or at Burton-upon-Trent, or earlier. Perhaps his lord had been cowed out of the fight before he had quite declared himself, and the king had issued warrants for some of his followers in revenge; or perhaps he was (had been) a Marcher lord, beaten into submission before he could join forces with the king’s uncle of Lancaster (or flee to him for protection, the coward in my head tried to whisper).
It didn’t matter now. Whatever blows he (or we) had struck, or felt, he had lost friends and name and brothers and lord to death, and to betrayal. As had we all in that land, at that time.
At last, I asked, “Daniel. Not a common name. Something on your mother’s side?”
“Nah, the lions’ sweetmeat. The name’s all mine, Thomas son of Nicholas.”
My friend Thomas, whose father was named for Peter the rock, laughed without amusement. “That’s right. Thomas’ father named his first son after his uncle, and his ancestors before him, and the Baptist, and the Evangelist. Then he named my brother here for the man who doubted.”
It was an old and bitter joke between us, old with a year of civil war and flight and dishonour, but my heart warmed as it always did when he claimed me with that word.
“Yeah, well. Guess my father was a little more... creative.”
There was a curl of the lip there like a private joke, but my friend was preoccupied by something else in the stranger’s words.
“Was?”
The knight paused, as if he had taken himself by surprise with his admission, then confirmed, “Was. Won’t be seeing him again. What about you two fine young chevaliers? What’s the next stop on this little chevauchee?”
“A strategic retreat, mounsyre,” Thomas replied in kind, “circling back around the enemy’s position and retreating across the water to the main body of our maesnée.” (I said nothing, although he looked to me for objection.) “And yourself?”
“I? Nothing so fine. I came here to think. To stop for a while, before I get back to doing what I have to do.”
He spoke like a man telling a light story, but with a weariness in his eyes that I thought I understood.
“There are no paths of honour left here,” I agreed. “Only a few of lesser dishonour.”
We were all silent a moment; but suddenly I felt words welling up inside me like blood in a slashed throat, like the babble and tears of the mystic I had seen once in Devonshire, whose words were said to come either from God or His Enemy. Silence, which had sat heavy on my tongue for months, was suddenly out of my reach.
“Brothers turn on brothers and men on their lords and lords on their men and friends against their vows. Men start fires in villages, kill, and rape, and forherȝian, and þurȝrennen. And their lords say nothing to stop them - how should they, when their king does not? Are we the only men who remember the great tales of warfare and chivalry in the days of King Arthur? The times are degenerate - there is no taking of prisoners, no honourable ransoms to win a young man prestige and gold. No honour to it, no glory here. Brother against brother, and knights slaughtered dishonourably on the field and off it. Even when the Round Table fell, when felawe turned against felawe and Gawain took up arms against his dearest friend Lancelot, it was for love of his brother.”
My words ran dry as abruptly as they had begun, and I was struck, too late, with dread. I was no politician, not like my uncle. Who was to say that this man was a victim of circumstances and not a sergeant of the king listening to my treachery, my blasphemy? But then, we were already dead men, if we were found, with all the justices in the land cowed by the king’s victories - I could say what I liked.
It was only my soul in danger, after all.
But the other knight only sighed, and looked up at the trees.
“There’s a shitload of amazing and develli ugliȝ things done for that. Families, huh? Wander away for a year or two and they slam the door in your face; but soon as you don’t deserve forgiving they’re suddenly there, no questions asked. Rubbing forgiveness in your cleppyng face.”
Thomas made a scathing comment about his own father that I had heard many times before, then, in the silence that followed, he looked at me. I knew what he asked, and I considered it, then I nodded.
“Monsyre, come with us across the sea. Help us to set this right.”
The stranger looked surprised; then he laughed. “No. The things that I have to set right can’t be done with a sword.”
“You don’t wear one,” I noted - unusual in any knight, certainly in one fleeing the law.
“Yeah, well.” He grimaced. “Nothing takes the joie du fer out of you like drawing it against your own brother, then getting percid on it. That was the last time. Never again - not against my brothers, not against anything with a human soul.”
It was a fine resolution, and I admired it. And I felt pity - John and I had used our fists often enough, but to draw cold iron was another affair entirely.
“You should go to him,” I said at last. “If you can.”
“I can’t,” he confessed, like a man in grief. “Not to him. But I have a younger brother, one I never really knew before I left my father’s house...” He looked at me, and then he smiled. “Sir Roger Mortimer of Wigmore will invade, Sir Thomas. He will invade with the Queen and her son and the good will of the land on his side. When that happens, go find your brother, yeah? Little brothers grow up, and they can become... wonderlich. Can put their older brothers to shame.”
Once more, there were no words in my mouth; but that was nothing unusual, in those months.
I nodded instead.
“Just don’t expect too much too quick,” he added, with the lightness that reminded me of Thomas, who jokes when he is most serious. “That can be pretty damn hard to forgive.”
---
We spoke little more that afternoon, but sat in silence, watching the sun track slowly towards the west. He excused himself, before it disappeared behind the trees; and Thomas turned to me and kissed me like a brother. As John used to do, when we were young.
When we returned to the priory, the stranger was gone, no leave taken of any man but his host.
---
According to a warrant, issued the following January, Sir Thomas Engayne and Sir Thomas Roscelyn spent December and January 1322-23 safely ensconced in the priory of Bermondsey, Surrey, at which a friend of theirs was a canon. The 1324 warrant is for the arrest of the prior and “his fellow monk”, together with both knights, their friend Darynton, and several others. According to the warrant, the canons “received the said Jacominus [Darynton]... and other persons adherents of the rebels, and especially of Thos. Rosselyn and Thos. Dengayne, knights, in the priory of Bermundsey, co. Surrey, and aided them from the feast of St Nicholas 16 Edward II [6 December 1322] until Shrovetide [8 February 1323], when they permitted them to go away at the expense and mounting of the said prior.”
As the warrant was issued almost a year after the event, there was little chance of catching the knights. Although there is no record of it, their hosts, presumably, were far easier to locate.
For obvious reasons, there is no record of when and how two Sirs Thomas slipped across the Channel to the continent; but when the invasion came, they were part of it.
Sir Roger Mortimer and Queen Isabella, with the mid-teen boy who was later to be King Edward III, invaded England in late 1326, when discontent with Edward II and the Despensers was at its height. They came with all the exiled and discontented knights from England, and a small force hired from Hainault. It took little to persuade England as a whole to abandon Edward II in favour of his son. Sir John Engayne of Northamptonshire was one of those who came over to hail the prince as Edward III in 1327, and to see the former king be renamed as merely Sir Edward of Caernarfon, father of the king.
It didn’t end there, though. In 1329, the younger brother of the former Earl of Lancaster, having assumed his brother’s mantle and capitalised on his popularity as a martyr to royal oppression, emerged as leader of the baronial opposition to Isabella and Mortimer (who were now as despotic as Edward had ever been, or worse). In January of that year, Roscelyn and Thomas Engayne were among the new Earl of Lancaster’s armed forces when he marched into Bedford in open resistance - as was the new Sir John, now united with Thomas in his opposition to the misuse of royal power. Roscelyn, being one of Lancaster’s four chief adherents, personally arrested and detained the sheriff for the duration of their occupation.
This opposition was short-lived, and everyone concerned was heavily fined. Roscelyn, together with the other three chief supporters of Lancaster, was banished.
In late 1330, Edward III, with the political acuteness and personal charisma that were to mark his reign, led a lightning-fast coup against Mortimer, and removed his mother from active political power. Rather than turn against adherents of the former regime with bloody vengeance, as Mortimer and Isabella had done, and Edward and the Despensers before them, Edward III worked to reunite a jaded and wary aristocracy: to offer them, within their lifetime, the promise of a renewal of the glory and honour of the stories of Arthurian Britain.
It even worked, for a while.
One more note. The young John who inherited the estate in 1323 lived until 1360. On his death, he was succeeded by his oldest surviving son: by name, Thomas.
Note: The obscure Engayne family, on which this chapter is centred, was as hard hit by the civil wars of 1321-22 as any. Sir John Engayne, the head of the family, his brother Sir Nicholas, and possibly Nicholas’ son John, seem to have fought on the king’s side; but the name of one Thomas Engayne appears in the list of the knights banished or fled after the final Battle of Boroughbridge (March 21-22 1322). Sir John the elder and Nicholas then died in September, in King Edward’s disasterous ‘victory’ campaign against the Scots, leaving the younger John to inherit (after a lengthy inquisition) in early 1323. The one point in which I’ve departed from the verifiable historical facts is in making Thomas the brother of the younger John. He may have been - it’s possible he was the son of some unknown third brother who left no trace on the records, or perhaps even a more distant relation (although this is less likely - he seems to have had strong emotional connections with the central family lands). For obvious thematic reasons, I have decided on “brother” here.
If you want citations for any of this, google Thomas Engayne: you’ll turn up, fairly high on the list, a blog post written by me, focussing on Thomas Engayne and Roscelyn. It also quotes the text of the warrants.
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