False knights and true men: contesting chivalric masculinity in English treason trials, 1388–1415

AbstractThe treatment of high-status traitors in later medieval England intrigues historians, who have sought explanations for increasingly brutal penalties and analysed degrading punishments that undid the traitor's knighthood. Recent scholarship incorporates gender into this analysis, suggesting rituals of degradation feminised the traitor and thereby preserved the coherence and integrity of elite masculine identity. This article uses the framework of homosociality to expand the analysis of gender in politically motivated cases of treason where traitors were characterised as ‘false’ knights. In these cases, treason was conceived of as the corruption of knightly manhood because the potential for treason was intrinsic to chivalric values of love and loyalty through which knightly masculinity was performed. The knight and the traitor were mutually constitutive rather than oppositional gendered identities, which meant the traitor's punishment could destabilise rather than reinforce elite masculinity as embodied in the knight.Keywords: treasonexecutionsmasculinityknighthoodMerciless ParliamentRichard II AcknowledgementsA version of this paper was presented at the International Medieval Congress, Leeds, 2012, and I thank the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (ANZAMEMS) for assistance with travel funding on that occasion. I have benefited greatly from the comments of Andrew Brown, Mark Ormrod and Michelle Ann Smith on earlier drafts of this paper.Notes1 The following abbreviations are used in this article: Continuatio Eulogii: F.S. Haydon, ed., Eulogium (historiarum sive temporis), vol. 3, Chronicon ab orbe condito usque ad annum domini M.CCC.LXVI, a monacho quodam Malmesburiensi exaratum. Rolls Series 9 (London: Longman, 1863); English Chronicle: C. William Marx, ed., An English Chronicle, 1377–1461: Edited from Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales MS 21068 and Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Lyell 34. Medieval Chronicles 3 (Rochester: Boydell Press, 2003); Historia: Andrew Galloway, trans., ‘Appendix. History or Narration Concerning the Manner and Form of the Miraculous Parliament at Westminster in the Year 1386, the Tenth Year of the Reign of King Richard the Second after the Conquest, Declared by Thomas Favent’, in The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England, eds. Emily Steiner and Candace Barrington (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 231–52; Knighton: Henry Knighton, Knighton's Chronicle 1337–1396, ed. and trans. G.H. Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Morley v. Montague: M.H. Keen and M. Warner, eds., ‘A True Copy of the Roll of Proceeding in an Appeale of Treason Before the Conestable and Marshall Between Thomas Lord Morley, Appellant, and John De Montague, Earle of Salisbury, Defendant, Anno Primi Henrici Quarti’, in Chronology, Conquest and Conflict in Medieval England. Camden Miscellany XXXIV. Camden 5th series, 10 (London: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Historical Society, 1997), 141–95; PROME: C. Given-Wilson, ed., The Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, 1275–1504. 16 vols. (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005); SAC I: The St Albans Chronicle: the Chronica maiora of Thomas Walsingham, vol. 1, 1376–1394, eds. John Taylor, Wendy R. Childs and Leslie Watkiss (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); SAC II: The St Albans Chronicle: the Chronica maiora of Thomas Walsingham, vol. 2, 1394–1422, eds. John Taylor, Wendy R. Childs and Leslie Watkiss (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); WC: L.C. Hector and Barbara F. Harvey, eds., The Westminster Chronicle, 1381–1394 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).J.G. Bellamy, The Law of Treason in England in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); M.H. Keen, ‘Treason Trials Under the Law of Arms’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 12 (1962): 85–103; John Gillingham, ‘Killing and Mutilating Political Enemies in the British Isles from the Late Twelfth to the Early Fourteenth Century: a Comparative Study’, in Britain and Ireland, 900–1300: Insular Responses to Medieval European Change, ed. Brendan Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 114–34; James Bothwell, Falling from Grace: Reversal of Fortune and the English Nobility 1075–1455 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 55–86.2 On punishment generally, Esther Cohen, ‘Symbols of Culpability and the Universal Language of Justice: the Ritual of Public Executions in Late Medieval Europe’, History of European Ideas 11 (1989): 407–16. On punishment for treason in England, Danielle Westerhof, ‘Deconstructing Identities on the Scaffold: the Execution of Hugh Despenser the Younger, 1326’, Journal of Medieval History 33 (2007): 87–106; Danielle Westerhof, Death and the Noble Body in Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2008), Chapters 5 and 6; Fionn Pilbrow, ‘The Knights of the Bath: Dubbing to Knighthood in Lancastrian and Yorkist England’, in Heraldry, Pageantry and Social Display in Medieval England, eds. Peter Coss and Maurice Keen (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002), 195–6, 215–16; Katherine Royer, ‘The Body in Parts: Reading the Execution Ritual in Late Medieval England’, Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques 29 (2003): 319–39.3 Keen (‘Treason Trials’, 88–91) makes the point that chronicle accounts in particular may not always have been completely accurate, but they provide important insight into how contemporaries understood the process of trial and punishment to work.4 Keen ‘Treason Trials’; Bothwell, Falling from Grace, 76–8; Westerhof, Death and the Noble Body, 121–3.5 On the knighting ritual, Hugh E.L. Collins, The Order of the Garter, 1348–1461: Chivalry and Politics in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 201–3; Pilbrow, ‘Knights of the Bath’, 202–6. Standard histories of chivalry discuss the traitor as the knight's opposite. See for example, Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Richard W. Barber, The Knight and Chivalry (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1995); Richard W. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).6 Bothwell, Falling from Grace, 64–6, notes that in England, hanging, drawing and quartering marked the offender as ignoble, while simple beheading was a privilege of nobility.7 See n. 2. Also useful is Claire Sponsler's examination of Jean Froissart's account of the execution of Hugh Despenser the Younger: C. Sponsler, ‘The King's Boyfriend: Froissart's Political Theater of 1326’, in Queering the Middle Ages, eds. Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 143–67. However, Sponsler focuses on the structure of Froissart's narrative rather than providing a broader historical analysis of treason. On alternatives to execution in an earlier period, Klaus Van Eickels, ‘Gendered Violence: Castration and Blinding as Punishment for Treason in Normandy and Anglo-Norman England’, Gender and History 16 (2004): 588–602.8 Westerhof, ‘Deconstructing Identities’, 103.9 A growing body of scholarship uses the concept of homosociality to examine medieval masculinities. Particularly useful for the Anglo-French context are Ruth Mazo Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Derek G. Neal, The Masculine Self in Late Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Katherine J. Lewis, Kingship and Masculinity in Late Medieval England (New York: Routledge, 2013); Kim M. Phillips, ‘Masculinities and the Medieval English Sumptuary Laws’, Gender and History 19 (2007): 22–42; M.J. Ailes, ‘The Medieval Male Couple and the Language of Homosociality’, in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. D.M. Hadley (London: Longman, 1999), 214–37.10 Phillips, ‘Masculinities’, 24–6.11 R.W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity. Rethinking the Concept’, Gender and Society 19 (2005): 832.12 Neal, Masculine Self, 38–44, quote at 42.13 Neal, Masculine Self, 44.14 Christopher Fletcher, Richard II: Manhood, Youth, and Politics, 1377–99 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 26–50. Using a range of Middle English texts, Fletcher demonstrates (35–6, 50) the term ‘manly’ and its cognates were used in reference to knightly performance in particular, so that ‘manly’ and ‘manhood’ denoted not just any male in contrast to women and children, but adult men of high social status.15 In these cases, the alleged crimes generally included accroaching or usurping the king's power, a more ambiguous offence than other types of treason defined in statute such as armed rebellion or false coining. On accroaching: Bellamy, Law of Treason, 11–12.16 On this point, David Crouch, The Birth of Nobility: Constructing Aristocracy in England and France: 900–1300 (Harlow: Longman, 2005), 56–89; Maurice Keen, Chivalry, 28–33; M.H. Keen, ‘Some Late Medieval Ideas About Nobility’, in idem, Nobles, Knights, and Men-at-Arms in the Middle Ages (London: Hambledon Press, 1996), 187–208; Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence, 111–31, 189–91.17 On this approach to gender, see Neal, Masculine Self, 124–7.18 See n.16.19 Keen, Chivalry, 149–51.20 For a detailed survey of this debate across a range of primary sources, see Westerhof, Death and the Noble Body, 33–56. Cf. Keen, Chivalry, 152–60.21 This was a common theme in chivalric literature: Stephanie Trigg, Shame and Honor: a Vulgar History of the Order of the Garter (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 127–35.22 Karras, Boys to Men, 21.23 Lynn Staley, Languages of Power in the Age of Richard II (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 51–7. Cf. Rosemary Horrox, ‘Service’, in Fifteenth-Century Attitudes: Perceptions of Society in Late Medieval England, ed. Rosemary Horrox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 61–78.24 Chris Given-Wilson, The Royal Household and the King's Affinity: Service, Politics, and Finance in England, 1360–1413 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 1–74; W.M. Ormrod, Political Life in Medieval England, 1300–1450 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), 19–21; M.A. Hicks, English Political Culture in the Fifteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2002), 43–52, 101–4. David Starkey provides a succinct overview of the problematic ‘politics of intimacy’ in relation to the chamber: David Starkey, ‘Introduction: Court History in Perspective’, in The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses To the Civil War, eds. David Starkey and others (London: Longman, 1987), 1–24 (13).25 Ailes, ‘Medieval Male Couple’; Mathew Kuefler, ‘Male Friendship and the Suspicion of Sodomy in Twelfth-Century France’, in Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages, eds. Sharon A. Farmer and Carol Braun Pasternack (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 145–81.26 M.H. Keen, ‘Brotherhood-in-Arms’, in idem, Nobles, Knights, and Men-at-Arms, 47. For this practice in fourteenth-century England, Richard Firth Green, ‘Palamon's Appeal of Treason in the “Knight's Tale”’, in Letter of the Law, eds. Steiner and Barrington, 106–7.27 Collins, Order of the Garter, 24. On homosocial love as a core value of the Garter, Trigg, Shame and Honor, 108–16.28 Joel T. Rosenthal, ‘The King's “Wicked Advisers” and Medieval Baronial Rebellions’, Political Science Quarterly 82 (1967): 595–618. Klaus Oschema, ‘The Cruel End of the Favourite. Clandestine Death and Public Retaliation at Late Medieval Courts in England and France’, in Death at Court, eds. Karl-Heinz Spiess and Immo Warntjes (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2012), 171–95, analyses chronicle tropes about unworthy favourites and their illicit inversion of social and political order, although he does not explicitly address gender.29 Hicks, English Political Culture, 56–7; Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence, 194–6; Pamela Nightingale, ‘Knights and Merchants: Trade, Politics and the Gentry in Late Medieval England’, Past and Present 169 (2000): 36–62. Hicks (117) notes the particular disdain amongst the landed nobility for ‘trade’.30 Anthony Goodman, The Loyal Conspiracy: the Lords Appellant under Richard II (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971); Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), Chapters 8 and 9.31 ‘ … qe entierement eux lui firent de tout a eux doner soun amour et ferme foi et credence, et haier ses loiaux seignours et lieges’: C. Given-Wilson, ed., ‘Appeal of Treason’ in ‘Richard II: Parliament of 1388, Text and Translation’, in PROME, vol. 7, Richard II 1385–1397, ed. C. Given-Wilson, 83–98, article 1.32 ‘ … en oustauntz le roi de soun devoir countre soun serement et les couers des grauntz seignours et de poeple de lour seignour liege, encompassaunt de esloigner le couer nostre seignour le roi des peres de la terre’: PROME, vol. 7, Richard II 1385–1397, ed. Given-Wilson, 85, article 4.33 ‘ … magis sibi placit gubernari per falsissimos proditores quam per suos nobiles et dominos regni sui fidelissimos amatores’: WC, 218–19.34 Recent studies differ on Favent's motivations and intended audience, but agree his Historia is a valuable eyewitness account. Cf. Clementine Oliver, Parliament and Political Pamphleteering in Fourteenth-Century England (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2010); Gwilym Dodd, ‘Was Thomas Favent a Political Pamphleteer? Faction and Politics in Later Fourteenth-Century London’, Journal of Medieval History 37 (2011): 397–418. I have used Andrew Galloway's translation: Historia, 231–52.35 Historia, 233, 237.36 Saul, Richard II, 171–5.37 Historia, 239–40.38 Neal, Masculine Self, 13–55, analyses this conception of ‘false’ manhood in legal cases of slander, deception and accusations of theft.39 Saul, Richard II, 157–64.40 ‘Succrevit igitur indies regi odium contra suos proceres naturales et fideles’: SAC I, 806–7.41 Knighton, 392–3.42 For example, a few pages later, the favourites are described as proditores and traditores: Knighton, 404.43 On the interchangeability of seditio and seduccio, M. Hanrahan, ‘Seduction and Betrayal: Treason in the “Prologue” to the “Legend of Good Women”’, Chaucer Review 30 (1996): 236; 240, n. 31.44 M. Hanrahan, ‘Speaking of Sodomy: Gower's Advice to Princes in the “Confessio Amantis”’, Exemplaria 14 (2002): 430.45 William E. Burgwinkle, Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050–1230 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 48–68; Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 218–25; K. Lochrie, ‘Presumptive Sodomy and Its Exclusions’, Textual Practice 13 (1999): 295–310; Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others (New York: Routledge, 2005), 23–5.46 Ruth Mazo Karras, ‘The Lechery That Dare Not Speak Its Name: Sodomy and the Vices in Medieval England’, in In the Garden of Evil: the Vices and Culture in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard Newhauser (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2005), 193–205; Mark D. Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 95ff.47 Westerhof, ‘Deconstructing Identities’, 94.48 This interpretation of sodomy has been applied to the relationship between Edward II and his favourite, Piers Gaveston: Richard E. Zeikowitz, Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the Fourteenth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 5–6; W.M. Ormrod, ‘The Sexualities of Edward II’, in The Reign of Edward II: New Perspectives, eds. Gwilym Dodd and Anthony Musson (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2006), 22–47. Cf. Ruth Mazo Karras, ‘Knighthood, Compulsory Heterosexuality, and Sodomy’, in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Mathew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 273–86.49 I use the transcription in G.A. Holmes, ‘Judgement on the Younger Despenser, 1326’, English Historical Review 70 (1955): 261–7. Translations are my own. Cf. J. Taylor, ‘The Judgement of Hugh Despenser, the Younger’, Mediaevalia et Humanistica 12 (1958): 70–7.50 ‘Et pur ceo que vous fustes tot temps desloyaut et procurant descord entre notre seignour le roi et notre treshonurable dame la roigne et entre les autres gentz du roialme si enserrez vous debouwelle, et puys ils serront ars’: Holmes, ‘Judgement’, 266–7.51 Sponsler, ‘King's Boyfriend’, offers the fullest analysis. Froissart's account is also used by Westerhof, ‘Deconstructing Identities’, and Royer, ‘Body in Parts’.52 ‘ … et par tant qu'il estoit faux de coer et traytres et que par son traytre consseil et enort li rois avoit honnit son royaumme et mis a meschief et avoit fet decoller les plus hauls barons d'Engleterre par lesquelx li royaummes devoit estre soustenus et deffendus': Jean Froissart, ‘Book I, Amiens BM, MS 486’, ed. Godfried Croenen, in The Online Froissart, eds. Peter Ainsworth and Godfried Croenen, version 1.4 (November 2012), http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/onlinefroissart (Accessed 9 August 2013), f. 5v. Translations are my own.53 ‘ … on li coppa tout premiers le vit et les par tant qu'il estoit et que on et et avoit si on le de lui et par son en Jean Froissart, ‘Book I, Amiens BM, MS 486’, ed. Godfried Croenen, in The Online Froissart, f. On this point, I with of ‘Deconstructing Identities’, n. On this interpretation of of see for W.M. Ormrod, of Edward in the Chronicles of de in and from the Middle Ages to the eds. and University Press, 1999), Sponsler, ‘King's Boyfriend’, Westerhof, ‘Deconstructing Identities’, n. version tout le vit et les tant qu'il estoit et on et du et tant avoit le la par son de Jean eds. and Froissart's of such as the Amiens and to between and Peter F. Jean and the of and in the (Oxford: Oxford University Press, was in in he presented a of his to Richard II: Andrew Taylor, et le or Richard II with a in The Vulgar Medieval and eds. and (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), Saul, Richard II, de was in as by the of the Parliament he Anthony of Oxford, of and of Oxford of National Online Oxford University Press, (Accessed Cf. Saul, Richard II, and The of is but and others this to the SAC I, On the of the reference to W.M. Ormrod, ‘Knights of (2004): to a between and the is of that increasingly of the ‘Richard II in Thomas ‘ … et SAC I, For a valuable of of gender performance in this Hanrahan, ‘Speaking of On this of and Piers and King Edward II of England in Fourteenth Century England ed. Nigel (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008), by and the Medieval (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), by and M.H. Keen and M. Warner, in v. by and the between medieval chivalric and the of trial by as an elite ‘ … son a pur la et les en v. from this are my v. The of the Order of by William ed. T. Early English Text Society, Series (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, M.J. by in the Court of Journal of Legal History 29 This was the punishment although the could Pamela Nightingale, A Medieval the and the Politics and of (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), Nightingale, Medieval Fletcher, Richard II, ‘Appeal of in PROME, vol. 7, Richard II 1385–1397, ed. Given-Wilson, 2, 3, and ‘ … qu'il de le que de The of Chivalry of de and eds. Richard W. and (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), Saul, Richard II, Historia, Historia, WC, Historia, Cf. Knighton, on or on a the between and on On this see Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence, Historia, ‘ … de son WC, ‘ … de a et et la WC, ‘ … pur ceo qe le le … et a … et qe son le WC, ‘ … de per usque WC, in de la eds. and de Trigg, Shame and Honor, a et … et et Knighton, On ‘ … in WC, The of been by Edward to of the and of the Ormrod, Political ‘ … et qe nostre seignour le en en lui ad et qe de roi ‘Appeal of in PROME, vol. 7, Richard II 1385–1397, ed. Given-Wilson, article Saul, Richard II, ‘Et et de gentz … en a lui le du roi en ‘Appeal of in PROME, vol. 7, Richard II 1385–1397, ed. Given-Wilson, article Keen, ‘Treason Trials’, Knighton, Saul, Richard II, notes De under the king's to in … WC, ‘ … et le roi ‘Appeal of in PROME, vol. 7, Richard II 1385–1397, ed. Given-Wilson, article my ‘ … et qe le roi lui tout soun et qe le roi lui en soun ‘Appeal of in PROME, vol. 7, Richard II 1385–1397, ed. Given-Wilson, article Richard was also the this was into the his Chris Given-Wilson, ed., Parliament of Text and Translation’, in PROME, vol. Henry ed. C. Given-Wilson, ‘ … de ceo de de et et le et le et faux son et le v. C. Given-Wilson, ‘Richard II and the Nobility’, in Richard II: the of eds. Anthony and James (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), Saul, Richard II, notes that while is this was the of the and other Richard II by this point were such that was not For and the of its see and the of in the of and (2002): Anthony and in Henry the of the eds. Gwilym Dodd and (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2003), Collins, Order of the Garter, Pilbrow, ‘Knights of the Bath’, ‘ … et The Chronicle of ed. and trans. C. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), Cf. and the History M.J. of and the of in Henry eds. Dodd and and the Henry of England (London: Hicks, ‘The of Henry in History English Chronicle, Cf. the account in the Continuatio Recent scholarship for the on a of and English On and English Chronicle, ‘The of the Eulogium English Historical Review (2004): English Chronicle, is the term used in the Continuatio English Chronicle, This also to Henry to to the that was so as to the chivalry of the Henry of England, This of Henry as an that An English Chronicle in simple as a narrative for this English Chronicle, English Chronicle, Bothwell, Falling from Grace, Henry and the of in the of for in Henry and the … quam sibi SAC II, de sibi magis et in … magis in and John eds. and trans., Henrici The of Henry the (Oxford: Clarendon Press, On Henry use of the Garter, Collins, Order of the Garter, ‘ … in … SAC II, ‘ … et et ad regi a et Parliament of Text and Translation’, in PROME, vol. Henry ed. C. Given-Wilson, ‘ … proditores … et of in PROME, vol. Henry ed. Given-Wilson, of in PROME, vol. Henry ed. Given-Wilson, ‘Et de et de la … in of in PROME, vol. Henry ed. Given-Wilson, is a in the of at University where a uses from English treason cases to examine the in which and political were with particular to between gender, political and

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