Donations to the Knights Hospitaller in Britain and Ireland, 1291-1400

Rory MacLellan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000291964
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Donations to the Knights Hospitaller in Britain and Ireland, 1291-1400 is the first study of donations to the Knights Hospitaller throughout England and Ireland during the late-thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

The book demonstrates that patrons donated to both military and non-military orders for much the same reasons, particularly family connections or the desire for spiritual benefit, rather than an interest in crusading. Such a conclusion has important implications for the treatment of the military orders by scholars of medieval religion, who traditionally have either overlooked these orders entirely or relegated them to a subfield of crusade studies rather than treating them as a full part of mainstream religious life. By reincorporating the military orders into mainstream religious history, discussion will be furthered in a range of fields and debates, such as ecclesiastical landholding, lay-church relations, the role of women in religion, and the processes of the Reformation. By focusing on the period 1291 to 1400, the book considers the impact of the loss of the Holy Land in 1291; the subsequent diffusion in crusade activity to the Baltic and Spain; the intensification of the order's career as English royal servants in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland; and the Hospitallers' crusade to Rhodes in 1309-10.

This book will appeal to scholars and students of the Hospitallers, as well as those interested in medieval Britain and Ireland.

1
Crusading, knighthood, and charity

Donations to the English Langue, 1291–1400

The 160 surviving donations to the langue range from grants of entire manors and hundreds of acres of land to gifts of just a halfpenny of annual rent. The Hospitallers appealed to all levels of society across Britain and Ireland in this period. Of those patrons whose background is known, there were six royal donors, three nobles, one archbishop, three bishops, at least eighteen knights and gentry, a prior, four chaplains, one vicar, four clerks, a bailiff, eight burghers, and one shepherd. Of the 137 donors, seventeen (12.4 per cent) were women.¹ Most donations to the order related to England; only twelve were in Ireland, three in Scotland, and six in Wales. This disparity can partly be explained by England’s greater wealth increasing the potential pool of donations; the loss of archival sources in Scotland and Ireland in particular, the negative reception the order received from many Welsh and Irish, and the dramatic fall in grants from Scots after war with England broke out in 1296 are also important factors to consider.²

1 For comparison, from 1350 to 1540, twenty per cent of the gentry and freemen who left bequests to nunneries in the diocese of Norwich were women: Oliva, The Convent and the Community, p. 176, Table 14.

2 The order’s patronage and reception in these three countries is the focus of Chapter 2.

Seventy per cent of donations can be dated to the period 1291–1350, and sixty-one per cent of those came before 1315. Several factors played a role in this drop in donations later in the fourteenth century. England’s wars with France from 1337 and recurring conflicts with Scotland, Edward Bruce’s invasion of Ireland in 1315–18, a cooling climate, the Great Famine of 1315–17, the Black Death from 1346 to 1351, and unrest in the Scottish Highlands in the 1380s and 1390s all caused economic and population damage to Britain and Ireland, draining the pool of potential donations, particularly in the second half of the century.³ Changing fashions of patronage in the late medieval period saw different outlets for religious expression like chantry chapels and collegiate churches supplant old orders like the Hospitallers.⁴ Finally, from 1279, donations to the Church in England, Wales, and Ireland were curtailed by the Statute of Mortmain. This statute, enacted in November 1279, prohibited the granting of land and property to religious institutions. The overlord of a monastery could not claim the wardship of an underage heir, charge an escheat should there be no heirs, or claim a relief upon a tenant succeeding to the property, as religious houses were not individuals but corporations and so could not die, hence mortmain, or ‘dead hand’.⁵ The statute did not end religious patronage. Donations continued to be made, with patrons now having to pay the Crown for a licence to make their grant, the first of which was granted in May 1280,⁶ though the cost and bureaucracy of securing such permission did serve to curtail donations. Mortmain legislation has even been blamed for all but terminating the patronage of the Hospitallers, something that was clearly not the case, as these 160 grants show.⁷ Grants did fall, but patronage of the order did not cease entirely or even nearly.

3 For an overview of the effects of these events on the economy and population of Britain and Ireland, see Michael Brown, Disunited Kingdoms: People and Politics in the British Isles 1280–1460 (Harlow, 2013), pp. 121–38. For Bruce’s invasion of Ireland, see James Lydon, ‘The Impact of the Bruce Invasion, 1315–27’, in Art Cosgrove (ed.), A New History of Ireland: Volume II, Medieval Ireland 1169–1534 (Oxford, 2008), pp. 275–302. In Hampshire, Essex, and Halesowen, Worcestershire, there was a ten to fifteen per cent drop in population from 1316 to 1318, likely due to the famine: William Chester Jordan, The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (Chichester, 1996), p. 118. The Black Death caused even greater economic damage. In just 1348–9, seventy-six per cent of the 768 known chief tenants in eleven Hampshire manors died: Paula Arthur, ‘The Black Death and Mortality: A Reassessment’, Chris Given-Wilson and Nigel Saul (eds.), Fourteenth Century England VI (Woodbridge, 2010), p. 61. Scotland also suffered major economic losses and a drop in population due to these two crises as well as further famine in the 1330s and plague in 1362: Katie Stevenson, Power and Propaganda: Scotland 1306–1488 (Edinburgh, 2014), pp. 165–71. The English colony in Ireland lost between twenty-five and thirty-five per cent of its population to the Black Death, damage that was exacerbated by further outbreaks of plague in 1357, 1361, 1370, 1373, 1382, and 1384: Kevin Down, ‘Colonial Society and Economy’, in Cosgrove, Medieval Ireland, pp. 449–50. In Wales the Great Famine, coupled with a rebellion in 1316, greatly affected the country’s Cistercian abbeys, with Neath, Llantarnam, and Aberconwy losing tenants and suffering decreased production. In north Wales the crown’s revenues fell by thirty per cent: Jordan, The Great Famine, pp. 84–5.

4 The proportion of monastic houses in England and Wales whose patronage was held by laymen declined greatly in the late medieval period, dropping by more than a third c.1300 to the Dissolution: Karen Stöber, Late Medieval Monasteries and Their Patrons: England and Wales, c. 1300–1540 (Wood-bridge, 2007), p. 28, Figure 1.1. In the late medieval period, collegiate churches and chantries were particularly popular amongst Scottish and English knights: Katie Stevenson, Chivalry and Knighthood in Scotland, 1424–1513 (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 119–30; David Crouch, The Image of Aristocracy in Britain, 1000–1300 (Hoboken, 2005), pp. 240–4.

5 The standard study is Sandra Raban, Mortmain Legislation and the English Church 1279–1500 (Cambridge, 1982). The Statute was introduced to Ireland later than England but was enforced there by 1301: ibid., p. 29, n. 1. The Scottish Crown does not appear to have enacted any mortmain legislation.

6 CPR, Edward I 1272–81, p. 372.

7 Marcombe, Leper Knights, p. 48.

Petitions and public displays were amongst the main methods by which the langue secured these donations. Innocent II had given the Hospitallers the right to enter every parish church once a year and ask for alms.⁸ Three fifteenth- and sixteenth-century scripts used for such visits survive, but these speeches are aimed at recruiting for the order’s confraternity, whose members made smaller annual payments, often in cash.⁹ They do not call for the one-off donations of rights and property that this study focusses on, though a few charters do claim that they were made at the instance of one of the brethren and may represent the results of these annual visits.¹⁰ Having a captive audience for the order’s clerks to extoll the crusade or the privileges of confraternity, as these surviving appeals do, would likely go a long way towards raising awareness of the Hospitallers and eliciting donations.¹¹

8 Riley-Smith, Knights of St. John in Jerusalem and Cyprus, pp. 376–8.

9 ‘exhort ther parochians to be bredern and sustern of the frary of Saint John and to give ther subsidie therto ones in the yere as is accustomed’: BL, Sloane Ch. xxxii, 15. See also BL, Sloane Ch. xxxii, 27; TNA, E 136/6/70. For a study of these three texts, see Rory MacLellan, ‘Hospitaller Confraternity Scripts, Crusading, and the English Reformation, c.1440–1537’, Historical Research, Vol. 92, No. 256 (May 2019), pp. 445–57. For discussion of the confraternity in Britain and Ireland, see O’Malley, English Langue, pp. 94–8.

10 See below, pp. 121–22.

11 The captivity of the audience may have been sometimes more literal than figurative. A late fourteenth-century Wycliffite tract complained that the order’s clerks would prevent services from starting until they had first proclaimed their privileges and called for alms: Remonstrance against Romish Corruptions in the Church, ed. Josiah Forshall (London, 1851), pp. 59–60. This text was ascribed by its editor to John Purvey (d. 1414), a Lollard, but there is no evidence to support this attribution: Anne Hudson, ‘John Purvey: A Reconsideration of the Evidence for His Life and Writings’, Viator, Vol. 12 (1981), pp. 373–5.

Processions may have also played a role in encouraging patronage. There is no record of any prominent displays by the langue’s brethren in the fourteenth century, but the thirteenth-century chronicler Matthew Paris recorded the very public journey of a band of Hospitallers in 1237:

[t]he Hospitallers’ brother Prior Theodoric [de Nussa], a most refined knight of the German nation, was sent to the Holy Land along with the knights, a mercenary company (familia stipendiaria), and no small amount of treasure. After arranging all that they had to, they proceeded elegantly from their house of Clerkenwell, which is in London, through the middle of the city and towards the bridge, with about thirty shields displayed, spears lifted, and their banner before them, in order to offer a blessing to all those watching. The brothers, with heads bowed and hoods lowered, commended themselves to everyone’s prayers.¹²

12 Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, ed. H. R. Luard, Rolls Series 57, 7 vols. (London, 1872–84), iii, p. 406.

The prior had led his fully armed men on an eye-catching procession through the centre of London en route to the crusade, an intentional choice that highlighted the order and its work in the East. The Hospitallers may have conducted a similar, though unrecorded, procession in 1397 when Prior Walter Grendon took fifty knights with him to Rhodes.¹³ Acts like these drew attention to the order and directly tied it to ...