The Crusade of Henry Despenser (1383)

Whelan, Mark

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-47339-5_13

Mark Whelan⁴

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Abstract

This chapter reassesses Bishop Henry Despenser’s crusading expedition against schismatic Christians in Flanders in 1383 by placing the campaign in its European context and by drawing upon fresh material from Flemish and English archives. Rather than approach the campaign as an unusual event in the Hundred Years War, this chapter situates Despenser’s expedition more closely against the political and diplomatic context of the time, underlining how the recourse to crusade represented a plausible and understandable initiative for the pursuit of national aims in later fourteenth-century Christendom in an era of papal schism and Anglo-French animosity. The chapter then proceeds to offer a fresh assessment of the make-up of Despenser’s force, its behaviour while on campaign in Flanders, and the crusade’s reception in contemporary and near-contemporary chronicles, correspondence, and churchwarden accounts, before considering what the expedition can tell us more broadly about popular enthusiasm for the crusade and its associated conventions and motifs in the later medieval period.

The archival materials in this article I gathered while undertaking research for the project “Bees in the Medieval World: Economic, Environmental and Cultural Perspectives,” led by Dr Alexandra Sapoznik at King’s College London (Leverhulme Trust RPG–2018–080). I am grateful for her permission to use the materials here. My thanks to Bart Lambert (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) for his help navigating the archives of Bruges, to Céline Decottignies (Bisschoppelijk Archief Brugge) for permitting access to archival materials, and to Norman Housley (Leicester) for allowing me to read an unpublished paper of his on English proposals to crusade against the Irish in the later medieval period.

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Notes

1.
Anonymous, The Westminster Chronicle 1381–1394, ed. and trans. L. C. Hector and Barbara F. Harvey (Oxford, 1982), 33; Henry Knighton, Knighton’s Chronicle 1337–1396, ed. and trans. G. H. Martin (Oxford, 1995), 325.
2.
On the SLME project, see http://www.medievalsoldier.org/ and notes 24–25 below.
3.
For the earliest works: George M. Wrong, The Crusade of 1383, Known as that of the Bishop of Norwich (London, 1892); Gerhard Skalweit, Der Kreuzzug des Bischofs Heinrich von Norwich im Jahre 1383 (Königsberg, 1898). For examples and further references: Kelly Devries, “The Reasons for the Bishop of Norwich’s Attack of Flanders in 1383,” in Fourteenth Century England III, ed. W. Mark Ormrod (Woodbridge, 2004), 155–65; Timothy Guard, “Opus Caritativum: Crowdfunding the Later Crusades. The English Evidence,” in Crusading Europe: Essays in Honour of Christopher Tyerman, ed. Gregory E. M. Lippiatt and Jessalynn L. Bird (Turnhout, 2019), 211–33, at 213, 220–21.
4.
Norman Housley, The Later Crusades, 1274–1580: From Lyons to Alcazar (Oxford, 1992), 248. For more detail, idem, “France, England and the ‘National Crusade’, 1302–1386,” in France and the British Isles in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Essays in Memory of Ruth Morgan, ed. Gillian Jandorf and D. N. Dumville (Woodbridge, 1991), 184–98.
5.
Christopher J. Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 1095–1588 (London, 1988), 336; Richard Vaughan, Philip the Bold (London, 1962), 28.
6.
Housley, “France,” 196. Similar comments in Tyerman, England, 333.
7.
Tyerman, England, 123. On the first issue, see Norman Housley, “Pro deo et pro patria mori: Sanctified Patriotism in Europe, 1400–1600,” in War and Competition Between States, ed. Philippe Contamine (Oxford, 2000), 221–48.
8.
For “national crusade” see examples in note 4 above, and Guard, “Opus Caritativum,” 213. For a selection of examples of “crusade” in inverted commas, see: Adrian R. Bell, “Medieval Chroniclers as War Correspondents During the Hundred Years War: The Earl of Arundel’s Naval Campaign of 1387,” in Fourteenth Century England VI, ed. Chris Given-Wilson (Woodbridge, 2010), 171–83, at 182 n. 62; Peter McNiven, Heresy and Politics in the Reign of Henry IV: The Burning of John Badby (Woodbridge, 1987), 81; George Holmes, Europe: Hierarchy and Revolt 1320–1450 (London, 1975), 47; Calendar of Select Pleas and Memoranda of the City of London a.d. 1381–1412, ed. Arthur H. Thomas (Cambridge, 1932), 36 n. 1.
9.
Tyerman, England, 336; Timothy Guard, Chivalry, Kingship and Crusade: The English Experience in the Fourteenth Century (Woodbridge, 2013), 180. For Froissart’s criticism of Despenser, see Jean Froissart, Froissart’s Chronicles, ed. and trans. John Jolliffe (London, 1967), 260. Quotation from John Wyclif: Selected Latin Works in Translation, ed. Stephen Penn (Manchester, 2019), no. 33. On Wycliffe’s criticism of the crusade, see Rory Cox, John Wyclif on War and Peace (London, 2014), 103–09.
10.
For a description of Despenser’s banners, Froissart, Froissart’s Chronicles, 261. For further discussion, Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years War III. Divided Houses (London, 2009), 498; Tyerman, England, 337.
11.
Adrian R. Bell, Anne Curry, Andy King, and David Simpkin, The Soldier in Later Medieval England (Oxford, 2013), cf. 17 and 124 where “crusade” appears in inverted commas, and 154 and 230 where it appears without.
12.
On Despenser’s diet and personal habits, see Michael Wilks, “Roman Candle or Damned Squib: The English Crusade of 1383,” in idem, Wyclif: Political Ideas and Practice (Oxford, 2000), 258.
13.
Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven, 1997), 103; Norman Housley, “Costing the Crusade: Budgeting for Crusading Activity in the Fourteenth Century,” in The Experience of Crusading. Volume One: Western Approaches, ed. Marcus Bull and Norman Housley (Cambridge, 2003), 45–59, at 54.
14.
Vaughan, Philip, 29–31.
15.
DeVries, “The Reasons,” 162–63.
16.
On Despenser’s impeachment, see Margaret Aston, “The Impeachment of Bishop Despenser,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 38 (1965): 127–48.
17.
Richard Allington-Smith, Henry Despenser the Fighting Bishop: A New View of an Extraordinary Medieval Prelate (Dereham, 2003).
18.
On clergy in military roles, see David S. Chambers, Popes, Cardinals and War: The Military Church in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe (London, 2006).
19.
Allington-Smith, Henry Despenser, 10.
20.
Saul, Richard II, 102.
21.
Chambers, Popes, 34–35. Northern prelates in England had also long commanded armies against the Scots: see Aston, “The Impeachment,” 131–32.
22.
Mark Whelan, “Between Papacy and Empire: Cardinal Henry Beaufort, the House of Lancaster, and the Hussite Crusades,” English Historical Review 133 (2018): 1–31, at 4–6; Robert N. Swanson, “Preaching Crusade in Fifteenth-Century England: Instructions for the Administration of the Anti-Hussite Crusade of 1429 in the Diocese of Canterbury,” Crusades 12 (2013): 175–96.
23.
The chronicle accounts are listed in Wilks, “Roman Candle,” 272.
24.
Bell et al., The Soldier, 17; http://www.medievalsoldier.org/dbsearch/ (accessed 5 June 2020).
25.
The data for Despenser’s campaign collected in the SLME database awaits a detailed study. For now, see Bell et al., The Soldier, 17, 124, 135–6, 154, 194, 230–1, and James Magee, “Sir William Elmham and the Recruitment for Henry Despenser’s Crusade of 1383,” Medieval Prosopography 20 (1999): 181–90.
26.
Aston, “The Impeachment,” 135–40.
27.
Housley, “Costing the Crusade,” 54–56.
28.
Wilks, “Roman Candle,” 271–72; Cox, John Wyclif, 106–07.
29.
Lesley Coote, “The Crusading Bishop: Henry Despenser and His Manuscript,” in Prophecy, Apocalypse and the Day of Doom: Proceedings of the 2000 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Nigel Morgan (Donington, 2004), 39–51.
30.
Ibid., 49–51. See also Lesley Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs in Late Medieval England (York, 2000), 152–53.
31.
Adam of Usk, The Chronicle of Adam Usk, 1377–1421, ed. and trans. Chris Given-Wilson (Oxford, 1997), 14–15.
32.
Anonymous, The Westminster Chronicle, 30–33.
33.
For what follows, Wilks, “Roman Candle,” 254–57; Aston, “The Impeachment,” 132–35.
34.
For further discussion of the situation in the 1370s and 1380s, see Gwilym Dodd, “English Politics and the Hundred Years War,” in The Hundred Years War Revisited, ed. Anne Curry (London, 2019), 1–32, at 18–21.
35.
For more detail, Chambers, Popes, 24–52.
36.
Ibid., 33.
37.
Froissart, Froissart’s Chronicles, 253.
38.
Rory Cox, “The Hundred Years War and the Church,” in The Hundred Years War Revisited, ed. Anne Curry (London, 2019), 85–11, at 93.
39.
Laura Crombie, “A New Power in the Late Fourteenth-Century Low Countries: Philip the Bold’s Planned Franco-Burgundian Invasion of England and Scottish Alliance, 1385–1386,” History 101 (2016): 3–19, at 3–7. For a comprehensive narrative, see Sumption, The Hundred Years War, 456–89.
40.
Crombie, “A New Power,” 5–6.
41.
Tiago Viúla de Faria, “Tracing the ‘chemyn de Portyngale’: English Service and Servicemen in Fourteenth-Century Portugal,” Journal of Medieval History 37 (2011): 257–68, at 261–63.
42.
Sumption, The Hundred Years War, 487–89.
43.
The bulls are described in Anonymous, The Westminster Chronicle, 30 n. 1. For more on indulgences, see note 51 below.
44.
Housley, The Later Crusades, 248.
45.
Chambers, Popes, 34–35.
46.
Housley, The Later Crusades, 249.
47.
Ibid., 248.
48.
Elizabeth Matthew, “Henry V and the Proposal for an Irish Crusade,” in Ireland and the English World in the Late Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Robin Frame, ed. Brendan Smith (London, 2009), 161–75 (for the petition, 170); Whelan, “Between Papacy and Empire,” 20–23. Regarding earlier calls among English communities in Ireland for a crusade against the Irish, see Maeve Brigid Callan, The Templars, the Witch, and the Wild Irish: Vengeance and Heresy in Medieval Ireland (Dublin, 2015), 209–12. A forthcoming work by Norman Housley will also enrich our understanding of this topic.
49.
Tyerman, England, 338.
50.
Aston, “The Impeachment,” 133–34.
51.
See, for example, the phrasing of the bull in Wykeham’s Register, ed. Thomas F. Kirby, 2 vols. (London, 1896–99), 2:206. Contemporary interpretations of the spiritual benefits contained in the various bulls varied, such as the belief in one chronicle that the crusading bulls only granted the same spiritual privileges as those going on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. See Anonymous, The Westminster Chronicle, 30–31. For further discussion of the bulls, see Aston, “The Impeachment,” 132–33.
52.
Aston, “The Impeachment,” 131–32.
53.
Ibid., 37.
54.
For a full account, see Aston, “The Impeachment,” 134–40; Tyerman, England, 333–36.
55.
Calendar of Patent Rolls. Richard II A.D. 1381–1385, ed. Deputy Keeper of the Records (London, 1897), 261; Tyerman, England, 335.
56.
Tyerman, England, 334–35; for further discussion, see Cox, John Wyclif, 104–05.
57.
Knighton, Knighton’s Chronicle, 324–25.
58.
Ibid., 324–25; Froissart, Froissart’s Chronicles, 254; for these sums of money in context, see Guard, “Opus Caritativum,” 219–21.
59.
On this willingness, see Guard, “Opus Caritativum,” and Jonathan Harris, “Publicising the Crusade: English Bishops and the Jubilee Indulgence of 1455,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 50 (1999): 23–37.
60.
Guard, “Opus Caritativum,” 220–21.
61.
Bell et al., The Soldier, 230.
62.
Ibid., 230.
63.
Tyerman, England, 339–40.
64.
http://www.medievalsoldier.org/dbsearch/ (accessed 5 June 2020). To replicate my results, enter “Despenser, Henry le (d. 1406) bishop of Norwich” into the “captain” search box and the year “1383” into both the “year from” and “year to” search box.
65.
On Elmham, see Magee, “Sir William Elmham.”
66.
Bell et al., The Soldier, 230 (Table 6.5).
67.
For more examples: ibid., 136, 154, 231; Magee, “Sir William Elmham,” 182–86.
68.
Magee, “Sir William Elmham,” 182.
69.
Sumption, The Hundred Years War, 498.
70.
Vaughan, Philip, 28.
71.
Anne Curry, “Disciplinary Ordinances for English and Franco-Scottish Armies in 1385: An International Code,” Journal of Medieval History 37 (2011): 269–94, at 286.
72.
Tyerman, England, 337.
73.
Anonymous, The Westminster Chronicle, 44–45.
74.
For analysis of the issue in Hungary, see Norman Housley, Crusading and the Ottoman Threat, 1453–1505 (Oxford, 2012), 107–19.
75.
The following narrative draws heavily upon Sumption, The Hundred Years War, 493–510 (with an annotated campaign map on 499).
76.
Despenser’s reasoning is discussed in DeVries, “The Reasons”; Sumption, The Hundred Years War, 498–500.
77.
Knighton, Knighton’s Chronicle, 326–27.
78.
Sumption, The Hundred Years War, 507–08.
79.
Sumption, The Hundred Years War, 508. Plans to send reinforcements are discussed in Aston, “The Impeachment,” 142.
80.
Anonymous, The Westminster Chronicle, 32–33.
81.
William A. Pantin, “A Medieval Treatise on Letter-Writing, with Examples, from the Rylands Latin MS. 394,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 13 (1929): 326–82 (on the monks of Westminster, see 364).
82.
Anonymous, The Westminster Chronicle, 38–39.
83.
Ibid., 40–41.
84.
Quoted in Tyerman, England, 336.
85.
See, for example, Knighton, Knighton’s Chronicle, 325–29.
86.
Curry, “Disciplinary Ordinances,” 286.
87.
Bruges, Bischoppelijk Archief, Sint-Donaas, 6, G 2 [Kerkfabriek Rekeningen], 1384, fol. 6v. As this source is unpublished, the original text is provided here in full: “De altera capellaniarum domine Archesiensis de terris de Zoutecote nichil, quod anglici interfecerunt isto anno fere totum populum in territorio iuxta Zoutecote, et maior pars populi que remansit pre penuria extra pateram recessit, ceteri qui remanserunt in patera sicut ita pauperes quae non hunc unde solvetur, et sic dictas terras noluit ascensare.” I have expanded contractions and inserted punctuation.
88.
Ibid., G 2, 1387, fol. 4r, compared with G 2, 1376–82, fol. 53v (for the income in 1380–81). The accounts were rendered in the pound of Paris.
89.
Sumption, The Hundred Years War, 498.
90.
Rémy Ambuhl, Prisoners of War in the Hundred Years War: Ransom Culture in the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2013), 161. For an account of the killing of the herald, see Froissart, Froissart’s Chronicles, 261.
91.
Sumption, The Hundred Years War, 508–09. On the participation of an Austrian knight in the campaign of 1383, see Werner Paravicini, Adlig Leben im 14. Jahrhundert. Weshalb sie fuhren: Die Preußenreisen des europäischen Adels (Göttingen, 2020), 101–02.
92.
Sumption, The Hundred Years War, 509.
93.
Robert Douglas Smith and Kelly DeVries, The Artillery of the Dukes of Burgundy, 1363–1477 (Woodbridge, 2005), 68–71; Crombie, “A New Power,” 6.
94.
Crombie, “A New Power,” 16–19.
95.
For the entire affair, see Aston, “The Impeachment.” For more recent analysis: Katharina Behrens, Scham—zur sozialen Bedeutung eines Gefühls im spätmittelalterlichen England (Göttingen, 2014), 41–43.
96.
On Despenser’s career in later life, see Allington-Smith, Henry Despenser, 114–34.
97.
Tyerman, England, 336.
98.
See note 9 above.
99.
Guard, “Opus Caritativum,” 221–23. Cases where indulgences were sold in England on behalf of individuals who had suffered while on crusade are explored in Robert N. Swanson, “Tales to Tug at Purse-Strings: Publicizing Indulgences in Pre-Reformation England,” in Freedom of Movement in the Middle Ages: Proceedings of the 2003 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Peregrine Horden (Donington, 2007), 123–36.
100.
On Gaunt’s crusade and for further references, see Tyerman, England, 338–39.
101.
On the proposal of 1421, see Matthew, “Henry V,” 161–75.
102.
Ibid., 169. For the request, see Henry F. Berry, ed., Statutes and Ordinances and Acts of the Parliament of Ireland. King John to Henry V (Dublin, 1907), 564–67, with the quote at 566.
103.
For the jibe, Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, 152. On the latter, see Guard, “Opus Caritativum,” 221–23.

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Queen Mary, University of London, London, UK
Mark Whelan

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School of History, Classics & Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
Mike Carr
Department of History and Archaeology, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece
Nikolaos G. Chrissis
School of History, Classics & Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
Gianluca Raccagni

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Whelan, M. (2024). The Crusade of Henry Despenser (1383). In: Carr, M., Chrissis, N.G., Raccagni, G. (eds) Crusading Against Christians in the Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47339-5_13

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