Parliamentary Scrutiny of Royal Ministers and Courtiers in Fourteenth-Century England: the Disgrace of Sir John Atte Lee (1368)

Parliamentary Scrutiny of Royal Ministers and Courtiers in Fourteenth-Century England: The Disgrace of Sir John atte Lee (1368)

W. Mark Ormrod

For many generations historians have struggled with the nature and sig- nificance of the trial of Sir John atte Lee, the disgraced steward of Edward III’s household, in the Westminster parliament of 1368. The case failed to find a place in the post-medieval historiography of the English ‘state trial’, and, with the notable exception of the work of John Bellamy, has been given only passing reference in modern political analyses of the reign of Edward III.1 One reason for this neglect is the imperfect coverage of the 1360s both in medieval sources and in modern scholarship: notwithstand- ing G.L. Harriss’s meticulous study of fiscal politics, the nature both of English government and of parliamentary business during the nine years of peace following the treaties of Brétigny and Calais of 1360 has still to be fully explicated.2 In comparison with the great set pieces around the

1 the fact that Lee was not a peer and was not made subject to the law of treason largely account for the absence of his case from W. Cobbett, T.B. Howell and T.J. Howell, Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanours from the Earliest Period to the Present Time, 34 vols (London, 1809–1826). Twentieth-century scholarship focused on the theme of ‘state trials’ chiefly in relation to the reigns of Edward I and Edward II: State Trials of the Reign of Edward I, ed. T.F. Tout and H. Johnstone, Camden Society, 3rd series 9 (London, 1906); Records of the Trial of Walter Langeton, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, 1307–12, ed. A. Beardwood, Camden Society, 4th series 6 (London, 1969); P. Brand, ‘Edward I and the Judges: The “State Trials” of 1289–1293’, in P.R. Coss and S.D. Lloyd, eds, Thirteenth Century England I (Woodbridge, 1986), pp. 31–40. The present study owes a considerable debt to J.G. Bellamy, Robin Hood: An Historical Inquiry (London, 1985). For other considerations of Lee’s case in the context of the politics of the 1360s, see T.F. Tout, Chapters in the Administrative His- tory of Mediaeval England, 6 vols (Manchester, 1920–1933), 3: 259; 4: 161–162; W.M. Ormrod, The Reign of Edward III: Crown and Political Society in England, 1327–1377 (London, 1990), p. 30. 2 g.L. Harriss, King, Parliament and Public Finance in Medieval England to 1369 (Oxford, 1975), pp. 466–508. The official records of the parliaments of 1357, 1358 and 1360 and 1361 are all lost: The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, ed. and trans. P. Brand, A. Curry, C. Given-Wilson, R.E. Horrox, G. Martin, W.M. Ormrod and J.R.S. Phillips, 16 vols (Wood- bridge, 2005), 5: 130–134 (hereafter PROME). Commenting on the dearth of chronicle writ- ing in this part of Edward III’s reign, John Taylor described the period c. 1362–c. 1376 as ‘almost a lacuna in our history’: J. Taylor, ‘The Development of the Polychronicon Continu- ation’, English Historical Review 76 (1961): 20–36 (p. 20). 162 w. mark ormrod king’s attempts to have Archbishop John Stratford answer for his conduct of the early French war in the parliament of 1341, and of the commons’ impeachment of the members of Edward’s court covine in the celebrated Good Parliament of 1376, the trial of Lee may seem a mere side-show.3 By neglecting the case, however, scholarship has also failed to observe that it arguably represents a pivotal moment in the change, over the course of the fourteenth century, away from a model of parliamentary trials initiated from above by royal fiat and towards those precipitated by formal process and/or political pressure brought from below. Deciding which way the evidence of Lee’s case falls in this respect is thus not simply a means of defining the trial’s place within legal history but also, more expansively, of measuring the nature of Edward III’s political authority at the moment when he re-embarked on the war with France in 1369. Before embarking on a detailed account and analysis of Lee’s case, it is necessary to understand some of the broader context in which it was set and some of the reason why at least a portion of the polity might have been inclined in 1368 to fixate on what was in many respects a relatively minor corruption scandal within the ranks of the royal household. The reasons lie in the very nature of peacetime politics and the lack of other opportunities through which the king’s subjects might actually challenge the course of royal policy. For quarter of a century before 1360, Edward III had made a veritable art-form of the politics of war. He negotiated skillfully with parliament to secure the enormous funds he needed for his military enterprises and, in return, offered carefully-judged but suitably generous statutory concessions.4 The politics of reciprocity certainly did not draw to a sudden or complete end in 1360. Edward was forced to undertake the delicate task of extending extraordinary indirect taxation, previously collected only during periods of active war, into peacetime conditions. This generated the extraordinary spectacle of the 1362 parliament where, in return for a renewal of the wool subsidy at half the wartime rate, the king celebrated his fiftieth birthday by graciously conceding four highly visible and far-reaching statutes: the guarantee of parliamentary control over the indirect taxation of wool; the Great Statute of Purveyance; the

3 R.M. Haines, Archbishop John Stratford: Political Revolutionary and Champion of the Liberties of the Church, ca. 1275/80–1348 (Toronto, 1986), pp. 278–327; G. Holmes, The Good Parliament (Oxford, 1975). 4 M. Powicke, Military Obligation in Medieval England (Oxford, 1962), pp. 182–212; Harriss, King, Parliament, pp. 356–465; R.C. Palmer, English Law in the Age of the Black Death, 1348–81: A Transformation of Governance and Law (London, 1993).