DA
187
J73
MEDIAEVAL BURGLARY
A LECTURE
DELIVERED AT THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY ON THE
20TH JANUARY, 1915
BY
T. F. TOUT, MA., F.B.A.
BISHOP FRASER PROFESSOR OF MKIHAEVAI, AND ECCLESIASTICAL HlbTOKV IN THE
UNIVERSITY- OF MANCHESTER
Reprinted from "The Bulletin of the John Rylands Library"
October, .1915
MANCHESTER: THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 12 LIME GROVE, OXFORD
ROAD. LONGMANS, GREEN & CO., 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON,
E.G., NEW YORK, BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS. BERNARD
QUARITCH, ii GRAFTON STREET, LONDON, W. MCMXVI
PUBLISHED FOR THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY AT
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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NEW YORK : 443-449 FOURTH AVENUE AND THIRTEENTH STREET
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A
MEDIAEVAL BURGLARY
A LECTURE
DELIVERED AT THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY ON THE
20TH JANUARY, 1915
BY
T. F. TOUT, M.A., F.B.A.
BISHOP FRASER PROFESSOR OF MEDIAEVAL AND ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
Reprinted from " The Bulletin of the John Ry lands Library"
October, 1915
MANCHESTER: THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 12 LIME GROVE, OXFORD
ROAD. LONGMANS, GREEN & CO., 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON,
E.G., NEW YORK, BOMBAY, CALCUTTA, AND MADRAS. BERNARD
QUARITCH, ii GRAFTON STREET, LONDON, W. MCMXVI
SEP - 6 1944
A MEDIAEVAL BURGLARY. 1
BY T. F. TOUT, M.A., F.B.A., BISHOP FRASER PROFESSOR
OF MEDIAEVAL AND ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER.
THE burglary, about which I have to speak to-night, I did not
discover by ransacking the picturesque and humorous annals of
mediaeval crime. I came across the details of this incident
when seeking for something quite different, for it happened when I was at-
tempting to investigate the technicalities of the history of the administrative
department known as the king's Wardrobe. But so human a story did
something to cheer up the weary paths of Dryasdust, and he hands
it on to you in the hope that you will not find it absolutely wanting
in instruction and amusement. Now my burglary was the burglary of
the king's treasury, or more precisely, of the treasury of the king's
wardrobe, within the precincts of the abbey at Westminster. The
date of the event was 24 April, 1 303. More precisely, according to the
chief burglar's own account, it was on the evening of that day that the
burglar effected an entrance into the king's treasury, from which, he tells
us he escaped, with as much booty as he could carry, on the morning
of 26 April. Who had committed the burglary is a problem
which was not quite settled, even by the trials which followed the
offence, though these trials resulted in the hanging of some half a
dozen people at least. But after the hanging of the half-dozen, it
was still maintained in some quarters that the burglary was committed
by one robber only, though charges of complicity in his guilt were in
common fame extended to something like a hundred individuals. And
in this case common fame was not, I think, at fault.
I wish first of all to explain the meaning of the sentence, rather
cryptic to the generality, in which I spoke of my burglary as that of
the robbery of the treasury of the king's wardrobe within Westminster
1 A lecture delivered in the John Rylands Library on 20 January, 1915.
3
4 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY
Abbey. For this purpose I must ask you to carry your minds back
to the Westminster of the early years of the fourteenth century.
Westminster was then what Kensington was in the eighteenth or early
nineteenth century, a court suburb, aloof from the traffic and business of
the great city of London. Now the twin centres of Westminster were
the king's palace and the adjacent Benedictine Abbey. The rough plan,
which I am permitted to print on the opposite page, will show the close
relation of the two great groups of buildings. It was much closer in many
ways than the relations between the Houses of Parliament, the modern
representative of the old palace, and the present abbey buildings. If
these latter largely remain, despite many destructive alterations in de-
tails, in their ancient site, we must remember that there was nothing
like the broad modern road that separates the east end of the abbey
from Westminster Hall and the House of Lords. A wall enclosed
the royal precincts, and went westwards to within a few feet of the
monks' infirmary and the end of St. Margaret's Church. The
still existing access to the abbey on the east side of the south tran-
sept through the door by which you can still go into " poet's
corner," having the chapter house on your left and Henry VII's chapel
on your right, was the portal by which immediate access to the
palace coukl-be gained through a gate in this wall. The space be-
tween the abbey and the palace wall was occupied by the churchyard
of St. Margaret's. The parish church or rather its successor still
crouches beneath the shade of the neighbouring minster. This church-
yard covered the ground now taken up by Henry VII's chapel, which
of course was not as yet in existence. In the midst of this grassy plot
stood the chapter house of the monks of Westminster, with its flying
buttresses and its single pillar supporting its huge vault, then newly
^erected by the pious zeal of Henry III.
Westminster Abbey was founded by Edward the Confessor, and
substantially refounded by Henry III, who had shown immense care
and lavished large sums on a grandiose scheme for the rebuilding of the
great house of religion which contained the shrine of his favourite saint,
in whose honour he had given his son the name of Edward. The re-
building i went on into the reign of Edward I, who was not much
inferior to his father in his zeal for the church, and was doubly bound
to honour his father's wishes and the memory of his own patron saint.
In the closing years of the thirteenth century circumstances compelled
West.
South.
A. CHAPEL OF
T l-l E PYX
B. U NDER
DORMITORY
OLD PALACE YARD
PALACE YARD
North.
~r~r^. . _ ',---40^^^ KINCSr
THAMES"' BRIDGED
East.
PLAN OF WESTMINSTER ABBEY AND PALACE.
A MEDIAEVAL BURGLARY 5
Edward I to desist from this work. The king now found himself
dragged into enormous expenses by the French, Scottish, and Flemish
wars. He was perforce turned from church-building to get men and
money for his wars.
The finances of England under Edward I were less elastic than under
Mr. Lloyd-George, and modern credit and banking were then in their
very infancy. Edward I, though he imposed taxes which would make
the most stalwart militarist of to-day quiver, soon found himself hope-
lessly in debt. To meet his burdens the king constantly employed
differentiated taxation, but the differentiation was calculated by rather a
different method from that in fashion nowadays. It was differentiation
according to status, not according to wealth. The clergy, who were
not expected to fight, were expected to pay more heavily than the
laymen. Let us take as an instance of how things were then done the
taxes levied in 1 294 when the fighting country districts were called
upon to pay a tenth of their moveables in taxation, and the wealthier and
more peaceful towns were asked for a sixth. From the clergy a tax
equal, I think, to a modern income tax of ten shillings in the pound,
was demanded, and it is said that when the dean of St. Paul's
heard of this unprecedented impost, he fell dead on the spot. If such
heroic efforts I mean the king's not the dean's were necessary in
1294 at the beginning of England's troubles, how much worse things
must have become by 1 303, after ten years of storm and stress ? By this
date Edward I's finances were indeed in a bad state. Historians
are only now gradually beginning to realise how embarrassed the great
king was in the last years of his reign, and how desperate were some
of his attempts to fill his exchequer.
The whole of Edward's declining years were not equally strenuous,
though his finances steadily grew worse. Before the end of the old
century Edward had got over the worst of his troubles abroad. He
therefore determined to devote himself with characteristic energy to
the conquest of the " rebel " Scots. Since therefore Scotland now
became the king's chief anxiety, Edward made his headquarters in the
north of England. In those days, where the king lived there the
machinery of government was to be found. For though England in
the thirteenth century had centralised institutions, those institutions were
not centralised in a local capital. It is true that one English city was
immensely more important than all the rest. London, in the thirteenth
6 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY
as in the eighteenth century, was, relatively to other towns, even
greater and more important than is the case nowadays. Of course
Edward I's London to our eyes would be quite a little place, but at
a time when there was, outside London, perhaps no town of more than
10,000 inhabitants and very few of that population, a city four or five
times that size was something portentous. Yet this greatness of London
was due to its commercial activity, much more than to the fact that it
was the " capital " of the country or its seat of government. In reality
there was no capital in the modern sense, for the English tradition was
that the government should follow the king. It was only very gradu-
ally that the governing machinery of the land was permanently settled
in Westminster or London. There was, however, already a tendency
towards making the great city, or rather its neighbouring court suburb,
a centre of permanent administrative offices, a capital in the modern
sense. Thus the Court of Common Pleas had been settled in London
since Magna Carta and the Exchequer, that is the department of finance,
had also been fixed there since the reign of Henry II. These were,
however, still the exceptions which proved the rule. The office of
the Chancery which was not then a law-court, but the secretarial office
of state followed the king. So also did certain branches of the
administration which depended on the court, and were intended, first
of all, to be the machinery for the government of the king's household.
In the middle ages no distinction was made between the king and
the kingdom. If the king had devised a useful machine for governing
his household and estates, he naturally used it for any other purposes
for which he thought it would be useful. We find, therefore, the
court offices of administration and finance working side by side
with the national offices, not only in dealing with household affairs,
but in the actual work of governing the country.
The most important of these household offices was that called the
king's Wardrobe. Originally the Wardrobe was, of course, the closet
in which the king hung up his clothes, and the staff belonging to it
were the valets and servants whose business it was to look after them.
From this modest beginning the king's Wardrobe had become an organ-
ised office of government. Its clerks rivalled the officers of the Ex-
chequer in their dealings with financial matters, and the officers of
the Chancery, in the number of i letters, mandates, orders, and general
administrative business which passed through their hands.
A MEDIAEVAL BURGLARY 7
The Wardrobe always " followed the king ". In war time, then,
it was far away from London, at or near the scene of fighting. In such
periods it became the great spending department, while the Exchequer
normally remained at Westminster collecting the revenue of the
country, and forwarding the money to the Wardrobe which spent it.
For five years before 1 303 the king had thrown his chief energies into the
conquest of Scotland. Under these circumstances London and West-
minster saw little of him. Moreover, he found it convenient to have
near him in the north even the sedentary offices of government. Accord-
ingly in 1 298 Edward transferred the Exchequer, the law courts, and
the Chancery to York. From 1 298, then, to 1 303 York, rather than
Westminster, might have been called the capital of England, and the
king's appearances to the south were few and far between. The
occasion of such visits was generally his desire to get money, and to
make arrangements with his creditors. From such a short sojourn the
king went north in the early months of 1 303. Despite all his efforts
it was only in that year that he was really able to put his main
weight into the Scottish war.
When our burglary took place, king, court, and government
offices had been removed to York for over five years. Under
mediaeval conditions the eye of a vigilant task-master was an essential
condition of efficiency. It followed then that during Edward's
long absence things at Westminster were allowed to drift into an
extraordinary state of confusion and disorder. Affairs were made
worse by the fact that even kings were not always free to choose
their own servants. Thus the king's palace at Westminster was in
the hands of an hereditary keeper. There was nothing strange about
this. In the middle ages such offices were frequently held by here-
ditary right, just as in the East everybody takes up his father's business
as a matter of religious duty. Earl Curzon once pointed out to the
electors of Oldham that in India there are still hereditary tailors, who
did their work very well. However this may be with tailors in the
East and legislators in the West, the hereditary keeper of Edward's
palace of Westminster did not prove to be a very effective custodian of
his master's property. His name was John Shenche or Senche, and he
held two hereditary offices, that of " keeper of the king's palace at
Westminster," and also the keepership of the Fleet prison, in right of
his wife Joan, who had inherited both from her father. Thus in
8 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY
addition to the keepership of the palace John Shenche " kept " the
king's prison of the Fleet in the city of London. As a rule, John
and his wife Joan had their habitation in the prison in the City.
John, therefore, employed as his deputy at Westminster an underling,
a certain William of the Palace, who kept, or rather did not keep,
for him the king's palace at Westminster. However, early in the year
1 303, John left his abode in the City where his wife remained, and
took up his quarters in the palace. Apparently the prison was not so
comfortable a place for an easy-going officer to live in as the palace.
Perhaps, too, the domestic restraints imposed upon Shenche in the city
were burdensome to him. Certainly gay times now ensued in the
deserted palace. Soon John and William, in the absence of the higher
authorities, seem to have gathered together a band of disreputable boon
companions of both sexes, whose drunken revels and scandalous mis-
conduct were soon notorious throughout the neighbourhood. One
element in this band of revellers was, I regret to say, a certain section
of the monks of the neighbouring monastery. For as the absence
of the king and the court had left the palace asleep, as it were, so also
had the monastery at Westminster sunk into a deeper and more
scandalous slumber.
The enthusiasm, effort, and excitement which had marked the
period of Henry III.'s reconstruction of Westminster Abbey had now
died down. Mediaeval man, though zealous and full of ideas, was
seldom persistent. It is a commonplace of history that when the first
impulse of fervour that attended a new order or a new foundation
had passed away, religious activity was followed by a strong reaction.
The great period of the monastery at Westminster had been during
its reconstitution under Henry III, but that time of energy had now
worked itself out, and the abbey had gone to sleep. The work of
reconstruction had stopped from lack of funds ; the royal favour as
well as the royal presence was withdrawn gradually from the abbey.
Moreover, a few years earlier a disastrous fire devastated the monastic
buildings, and only just spared the chapter house and the abbey
church. It looks as if the monks had to camp out in half-ruined
buildings till their home could be restored. All this naturally re-
laxed the reins of discipline, the more so since the abbot, Walter
of Wenlock, was an old man, whose hold on the monks was slight,
and some of the chief officers of the abbey, the obedientiaries, as
A MEDIAEVAL BURGLARY 9
they were called, were singularly incompetent or unscrupulous persons.
It followed naturally that many of the fifty monks became slack be-
yond ordinary standards of mediaeval slackness. It was both from
obedientiaries and common monks that John Shenche and William of
the Palace secured the companions for their unseemly revels. There
now comes upon the scene a new figure, in fact, the hero of the
burglary, Richard of Pudlicott.
Richard of Pudlicott began life as a clerk, but abandoned his
clergy for the more profitable calling of a wandering trader in wool,
cheese, and butter. England's economic position in those days reminds
us of the state of things now prevailing in Argentina or Australia, rather
than that in modern industrial England. She had little to sell
abroad save raw materials, especially wool, which was largely ex-
ported to the great clothing towns of Flanders. This traffic took
Pudlicott to Ghent and Bruges in 1 298, when Edward I had allied
with the Flemings against the king of France. But his trading
adventures were as unsuccessful as the king's military efforts in Flanders.
Moreover, after the king's return to England, Pudlicott had the ill
luck to be among those merchants arrested as a surety for the debts
which Edward had left behind him in the Low Countries. This
unceremonious treatment of an alien ally is a method of mediaeval
frightfulness which may be recommended to our alien enemies, but
Edward's credit was so bad that we can hardly blame the Flemings
for leaving no stone unturned to obtain payment of their debts ; whether
they succeeded 1 do not know. Before long Richard escaped from his
Flemish gaol, leaving his property in Flanders in the hands of his captors.
Nursing a grievance against the king, and with dire poverty facing
him, he took lodgings in London, where, like many bankrupts, he seems
to have generally had enough money to indulge in all the personal
gratifications that he had a special mind to practice. It seems that in
the pursuit of his disreputable pleasures, Pudlicott was brought into
contact with John Shenche, William of the Palace, and the other merry-
makers, lay and ecclesiastical, in the lodge of the king's palace of
Westminster. He had a specious excuse for haunting Westminster
Hall. He was he says himself seeking a remedy in the king's
courts for the property he had lost in Flanders. How he could find one,
when these courts were at York, I cannot say. But, as we shall see,
many of Pudlicott's personal statements are difficult to reconcile with
10 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY
facts. However, Edward himself soon came to Westminster, but
withdrew after a short stay, leaving Pudlicott unpaid.
We have seen how near was the palace to the abbey, and how
the palace keeper's monastic friends formed a living bridge between
the two. One result of these pleasant social relations was that
the Abbey of Westminster soon became familiar ground to Pudlicott.
One day, when disturbed at the hopelessness of getting his grievances
redressed by the king, he wandered through the cloisters of the abbey,
and noticed with greedy eyes the rich stores of silver plate carried in
and out of the refectory of the monks, by the servants who were waiting
on the brethren at meals. The happy idea struck him to seek a means
to " enable him to come at the goods which he saw **. Thus the king's
foundation might, somewhat irregularly, be made to pay the king's debts.
Pudlicott soon laid his plans accordingly. The very day after the king
left Westminster, Pudlicott found a ladder reared up against a house near
the palace gate. He put this ladder against one of the windows of the
chapter-house ; he climbed up the ladder ; found a window that opened
by means of a cord ; opened the window and swung himself by the
same cord into the chapter-house. Thence he made his way to the
refectory, and secured a rich booty of plate which he managed to carry
off and sell.
Pudlicott's success with the monks* plate did not profit him for
long. Within nine months and we may believe surely this part of his
not too veracious tale the proceeds of the sale of the silver cups and
dishes of the abbey had been eaten up. No doubt the loose life he
was living and the revels with the keepers of the palace involved a
constant need for plentiful supplies of ready cash. Anyhow by the
end of 1302 Richard was again destitute, and looking out for some-
thing more to steal. It was, doubtless, dangerous to rob the monks
any more, and perhaps the intimacy which was now established
between him and his monastic boon companions suggested to Richard
a more excellent way of restoring his fortunes. His plan was now to rob
the king's treasury, and his success seemed assured since, as he tells us,
he " knew the premises of the abbey, where the treasury was, and how
he might come to it ". How he profited by his knowledge we shall soon
see, but first we must for a moment part company with Pudlicott's " con-
fession," which up to now I have followed with hesitation. But for
the next stage of our story it is plainly almost the contrary of the truth.
11
Before we can with advantage explain why we can no longer trust
his tale, it would be well for us to state what this treasury was and how
it could be got at.
Let us begin with the word treasury. In the fourteenth century
treasury meant simply a storehouse, or at its narrowest a storehouse of
valuables. To us the " treasury ' is the government department of
finance, but under Edward I the state office of finance was the Ex-
chequer, which, as we saw, was located normally at Westminster, but
since 1298 at York. When at Westminster the Exchequer had a
" treasury " or storehouse there also, yet in its absence it is not likely
that it kept either valuables or money at Westminster. But side by side
with the state office was the household office of finance, the Wardrobe,
and, though the wardrobe office was itinerating with the king, it still kept
a " treasury " or storehouse at Westminster, and this, for the sake of
greater safety, had been placed for some years at least within the pre-
cincts of the abbey. From the monastic point of view, it was doubt-
less an inconvenience that nearness to the royal dwelling compelled
them to offer their premises for the royal service. Accordingly, kings
not infrequently made demands upon the abbey to use its buildings.
Thus the chapter house became a frequent place for meetings of
parliament, and at a later time it was used and continued to be used
till the nineteenth century, for the storage of official records. In the
same way Edward secured the crypt underneath the chapter house
as one of the storehouses of his Wardrobe. When the crypt was first
used for this purpose I do not know, but records show us that it was
already in use in 1291, at which date it was newly paved. It was
not the only storehouse of the Wardrobe. There was another " treasury
of the wardrobe " in the Tower of London, but this was mainly used
for bulky articles, arms and armour, cloth, furs, furniture, and the like.
Most of what we should call treasure was deposited in the Westminster
crypt, and we are fortunate in having still extant a list of the jewels
preserved there in 1 298, the time when the court began to establish itself
for its five years' sojourn in the north. In 1 303 jewels and plate were
still the chief treasures preserved there. Some money was there also,
notably a store of "gold florins of Florence," the only gold coins
currently used in England at a time when the national mints limited
themselves to the coinage of silver. But I do not think there could have
been much money, for Edward's needs were too pressing, his financial
12 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY
policy too much from hand to mouth, for the crypt at Westminster to
be a hoard of coined money, like the famous Prussian Kriegsschatz
at Spandau, which, we now rejoice to learn, is becoming rapidly
depleted. Whatever its contents, Edward estimated that their value
was 100,000, a sum equivalent to a year's revenue of the English
state in ordinary times. Unluckily mediaeval statistics are largely mere
guess-work. But the amount of the guess at least suggests the feeling
that the value of the treasures stored in the crypt was very considerable.
The crypt under the chapter house is one of the most interesting
portions of the abbey buildings at Westminster. It is little known
because it is not, I think, generally shown to visitors. I am indebted
to the kindness of my friend, Bishop Ryle, the present dean, for an
opportunity of making a special inspection of it. It is delightfully com-
plete, and delightfully unrestored. The chief new thing about it seems
the pavement, but the dean's well-informed verger told me that it was
within living memory that this pavement had replaced the flooring of
1 29 1 . Numerous windows give a fair amount of light to the apartment ;
though the enormous thickness of the walls, some thirteen feet, it was
said, prevent the light being very abundant, even on a bright day. The
central column, the lower part of the great pillar from which radiates
the high soaring vaults of the chapter house above, alone breaks the
present emptiness of the crypt. Considerable portions of the column are
cut away to form a series of neatly made recesses, and there are recesses
within these recesses, which suggest in themselves careful devices for sec-
reting valuables, for it would be easy to conceal them by the simple
expedient of inserting a stone here and there where the masonry had
been cut away, and so suggesting to the unwary an unbroken column.
I should not like to say that these curious store-places already
existed in 1303 ; but there is no reason why they should not.
Certainly they fit in admirably with the use of the crypt as a treasury.
One other point we must also remember about the dispositions of
this crypt. There is only one access to it, and that is neither from the
chapter house above nor from the adjacent cloister, but from the church
itself. A low, vaulted passage is entered by a door at the south-east
corner of the south transept of the abbey, now for many centuries the
special burial place for poets, eminent and otherwise. This passage
descends by a flight of steep steps to the crypt itself, and the flight
originally seems, I am told doubtless as another precaution against
A MEDIAEVAL BURGLARY 13
robbery to have been a broken one suggesting that a steep drop, pre-
sumably spanned by a short ladder, further barred access to the crypt.
We must remember, too, that this sole access to the treasury was within
a few feet of the sacristy of the abbey. The sacristy was the chapel
to the south of the south transept, and communicating with it where the
sacrist kept the precious vessels appropriated to the service of the altar.
Altogether it looks as if the crypt were originally intended as a store-
house for such church treasure as the sacrist did not need for his im-
mediate purposes. From this use it was diverted, as we have seen, to
the keeping of the royal treasures. Nowadays the sacristy is called
the chapel of St. Faith and is used for purposes of private devotion.
We must not forget the close connexion in our period of the sacristy
and the crypt. The connexion becomes significant when we remember
that among Pudlicott's monastic boon companions at the pal ace- keeper's
lodge was the sacrist of the abbey, Adam of Warfield.
Pudlicott had made up his mind to steal the king's treasure.
The practical problem was how to get access to it. If we examine
the evidence collected at the enquiry, we find that there are two dis-
crepant accounts as to how the robber effected his purpose. The one
is warranted by the testimony of a large number of sworn juries of re-
putable citizens of every ward in the city of London, of burgesses of
Westminster, and of the good men of every hundred in the adjacent shires
of Middlesex and Surrey. It is like much truthful evidence rather
vague, but its general tendency is, while recognizing that Pudlicott is
the prime offender, to make various monks and palace officers his ac-
complices. Of the latter category William of the Palace seems to
have been the most active, while of the many monks Adam 'Warfield
the sacrist was the most generally denounced. But the proved share
of both Adam and William was based largely on the discovery of
stolen property in their possession. The evidence of the juries suggests
theories as to how the crime may have been perpetrated ; it does not
make the methods of the culprits clear and palpable. But it suggests
that masons and carpenters were called in, so that some breaking in of
the structure was attempted, and in particular it suggests that the
churchyard was the thoroughfare through which the robbers removed
their booty.
Let us turn next to Pudlicott's own confession, that remarkable
document from which I have already borrowed many details, though
14
seldom without a word of warning. According to his confession,
Pudlicott, having resolved to rob the treasury, came to the conclusion
that the best way to tackle the business was to pierce a hole through
the wall of thirteen feet of stone that supported the lower story of the
chapter house. For so colossal a task time was clearly needed.
Richard accordingly devoted himself during the dark nights of winter
and early spring to drilling through the solid masonry. He attacked
the building from the churchyard or eastern side, having access thereto
from the palace. But the churchyard was open to the parish and the
thrifty churchwardens of St. Margaret's had let to a neighbouring
butcher the right of grazing his sheep in it. Now the butcher was
told that his privilege was withdrawn, and passers-by were sent round
by another path. This was a precaution against the casual wayfarer
seeing the hole which was daily growing larger. To hide from the
casual observer the great gash in the stonework, Richard tells us that
he sowed hempseed in the churchyard near the hole, and that this grew
so rapidly that the tender hemp plants not only hid the gap in the wall,
but provided cover for him to hide the spoils he hoped to steal from the
treasury. When the hole was complete on 24 April, Pudlicott went
through and found to his delight that the chamber was full of baskets,
chests, and other vessels for holding valuables, plate, relics, jewels, and
gold florins of Florence. Richard remained in the crypt gloating over the
treasure surrounding him from the evening of 24 April to the morning of
26 April. Perhaps he found it impossible to tear himself away from so
much wealth ; or perhaps the intervening day, being the feast of St.
Mark, there were too many people about, and too many services in the
abbey to make his retreat secure. However, he managed on the morning
of 26 April to get away, taking with him as much as he could carry.
He seems to have dropped, or to have left lying about, a good deal
that he was unable to carry, possibly for his friends to pick up.
Such is Pudlicott's story. It is the tale of a bold ruffian who
glories in his crime, and is proud to declare " I alone did it ". But
there was a touch of heroism and of devotion in our hero thus taking
on himself the whole blame. He voluntarily made himself the scape-
goat of an offence for which scores were charged, and in particular he
took on his own shoulders the heavy share of responsibility which be-
longed to the negligent monks of Westminster. Now as to the credibility
of Pudlicott's story, we must admit that some of the juries accepted evi-
A MEDIAEVAL BURGLARY 15
dence that corroborated some parts of it. Sworn men declared their belief
that the crypt was approached from the outside ; that masons and car-
penters were employed on the business ; that the churchyard was
closely guarded, and access refused, even to the butcher who rented the
grazing. It is clear too that the booty was got rid of through the
churchyard, and that piecemeal. There is evidence even that hemp
was sown, though the verdict of a jury cannot alter the conditions of
vegetable growth in an English winter. We must allow too that it is
pretty certain that Warfield had not the custody of the keys of the
crypt ; though he was doubtless able to give facilities for tampering
with the door or forcing the lock. Yet Pudlicott's general story re-
mains absolutely incredible. It was surely impossible to break
through the solid wall, and no incuriousness or corruption would account
for wall-piercing operations being unnoticed, when carried on in the
midst of a considerable population for three months on end. Some of
Pudlicott's lies were inconceivable in their crudity. Is it likely that
hemp, sown at Christmas- time, would, before the end of April, afford
sufficient green cover to hide the hole in the wall, and to secrete gleam-
ing articles of silver within its thick recesses ? And how are we to
believe that there was a great gaping hole in the wall of the crypt
when nothing was heard of the crime for several weeks after its per-
petration, and no details of the king's losses were known until two months
after the burglary, when the keeper of the Wardrobe unlocked the door of
the treasury and examined its contents ? A more artistic liar would have
made his confession more convincing.
What really happened seems to me to have been something like
this. I have no doubt that Pudlicott got into the treasury by the
simple process of his friend, Adam of Warfield, giving him facilities for
forcing the door or perhaps breaking a window. He remained in the
crypt a long time so that he might hand out its contents to confederates
who, as we learn from the depositions, ate, drank, and revelled till
midnight for two nights running in a house within the precincts of the
Fleet prison, and then went armed and horsed to Westminster, return-
ing towards daybreak loaded with booty. But not only the revellers
in Shenche's headquarters, but many monks, many abbey servants,
the custodians of the palace, the leading goldsmiths of the city, and
half the neighbours must have been cognisant of, if not participating in,
the crime. It speaks well for honour among thieves, that it was not
16 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY
until deplorable indiscretions were made in the disposal of the booty
that any news of the misdeed reached the ears of any of the official
custodians of the treasure.
Suspicion of the crime was first excited by the discovery of frag-
ments of the spoil in all sorts of unexpected places. A fisherman,
plying his craft in the then silver Thames, netted a silver goblet which
had evidently been the property of the king. Passers by found cups,
dishes, and similar precious things hidden behind tombstones and
other rough hiding-places in St. Margaret's Churchyard. Boys
playing in the neighbouring fields found pieces of plate concealed
under hedgerows. Such discoveries were made as far from West-
minster as Kentish Town. Moreover, many other people lighted upon
similar pieces of treasure trove. Foreign money found its way into the
hands of the money-changers at London, York, and Lymm, and other
remote parts. The city goldsmiths were the happy receivers of large
amounts of silver plate, among them, I regret to say, being William Torel,
the artist-goldsmith, whose skill in metal work has left such an abiding
mark in the decorations of the abbey church. There were, too, scan-
dalous stories whispered abroad. One of them was that a woman of
loose life explained her possession of a precious ring by relating that
it was given her by Dom Adam the sacrist " so that she should become
his friend ".
Such tales soon made the story of the robbery common property.
At last it came to the ears of the king and his ministers, then encamped
at Linlithgow for the Scottish war. Thereupon, on 6 June, the king
appointed a special commission of judges to investigate the matter.
On 20 June, John Droxford, the keeper of the wardrobe, came to
Westminster with the keys of the crypt, and then and only then did
any official examination of the treasury take place. An entry was
made into the crypt and the damage which had been done was
inspected. The result is still to be read in an inventory of the treasures
lost and the treasures found which Droxford drew up, and which may
now be studied in print.
It is pleasant to say that by the time Droxford went to work much
of the treasure, which had been scattered broadcast, was being brought
back and that more was soon to follow. The first investigations as to
where the treasure had been carried led to fruitful results. A good
deal of it was found hidden beneath the beds of the keeper of the
A MEDIAEVAL BURGLARY 17
palace and of his assistant. Still more was found in the lodgings of
Richard Pudlicott and his mistress. Adam the sacrist, and some of
his brother monks and their servants, were discovered to be in possession
of other missing articles. Altogether, when Droxford had finished his
inventory, a large proportion of the articles which had been lost were
reclaimed. Ultimately it seems that the losses were not very severe.
Wholesale arrests were now made. Richard Pudlicott was ap-
prehended on 25 June, and William of the Palace soon experienced
the same fate. Before long the connexion which the monks had had
with the business seemed so well established that the whole convent,
including the abbot and forty-eight monks, were indicted and sent to the
Tower, where they were soon joined by thirty-two other persons.
This time the king's net had spread rather too widely, and the in-
discriminate arrest of guilty and innocent excited some measure of
sympathy, even for the guilty. The majority of the clerical prisoners
were released on bail, but some half-dozen laymen and ten monks
were still kept in custody. Both the released and the imprisoned
culprits raised a great outcry, sending petitions to the king demanding
a further enquiry into the whole matter.
The first commission meanwhile had been empanelling juries and
collecting evidence. But the matter was so serious that in November a
second royal commission was appointed to hear and determine the
matter. The members of this second commission were chosen from
among the most eminent of the king's judges, including the chief
justice of the king's bench, Sir Roger Brabazon and the shrewdest
judge of the time, William Bereford, afterwards chief justice of common
pleas.
I have already indicated in outline the result of the investigations
of the two judicial commissions. I have told you how juries were
empanelled from every hundred in the counties of Middlesex and
Surrey, and from the wards of the city of London and from West-
minster. The details of the evidence are worthy of more special
treatment than I can give them here, because they afford a wonderful
picture of the loose-living, easy-going, slack, negligent, casual, and
criminal doings of mediaeval men and women. I must, however, be
content to restate the general result of the trials. Richard of Pudlicott
was found guilty. Various other people, including William of the
Palace, and certain monks, were declared accomplices, while Adam
18 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY
Warfield was shrewdly suspected to be at the bottom of the whole
business. More than a year was spent in investigations, and it was
not until March, 1 304, eleven months after the burglary, that William
of the Palace and five other lay culprits were comfortably hanged.
The great problem was how to deal with the clerical offenders
without adding to the king's difficulties by rousing the sleeping dogs
of the church, always ready to bark when the state meditated any
infringement of the claim of all clerks to be subject solely to the
ecclesiastical tribunals. Accordingly Richard of Pudlicott, and ten
monks were reserved for further treatment. Pudlicott, as we have
seen, had been a tonsured person in his youth, and he probably claimed,
as did the monks, benefit of clergy. It was probably now that Pudli-
cott nobly tried to shield his monastic allies by his extraordinary
confession. His heroism, however, availed him nothing. But what-
ever his zeal for the church, Edward I was upon adequate occasion
ready to ride rough-shod over clerical privileges, and he always
bitterly resented any attempt of a culprit, who had lived as a layman,
trying to shield himself on the pretext that he had been a clerk in his
youth. His corrupt chief justice, Thomas Weyland, had sought to
evade condemnation by resuming the tonsure and clerical garb which
he had worn before he abandoned his orders to become a knight, a
country squire, and the founder of a family of landed gentry. But
Weyland's subdiaconate did not save him from exile and loss of land
and goods. Pudlicott's sometime clerical character had even less
power to preserve him. He also paid tardily the capital penalty for
his misdeed. But it was surely his clergy that kept him alive in prison
for more than two years after the date of the commission of his crime.
The fate of the incriminated clerks still hung in the balance when
in the spring of 1 305 Edward came back in triumph to London, re-
joicing that at last he had effected the thorough conquest of Scotland.
His cheerful frame of mind made him listen readily to the demands of
the monks of Westminster to have pity on their unfortunate brethren, and
to comply with the more general clerical desire that ecclesiastical privilege
should be respected. Only a few months after the burglary, the news
of the outrage on pope Boniface VIII at Anagni had filled all Christen-
dom with horror. At the instance of Philip the Fair, king of France,
and his agents in Italy the pope was seized, maltreated, and insulted.
In the indignant words of Dante, " Christ was again crucified in the
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A MEDIAEVAL BURGLARY 19
person of his vicar ". The universal feeling of resentment against so
wanton a violation of ecclesiastical privilege was ingeniously used in
favour of the monks of Westminster. Among the monks, arrested at
first, but soon released with the majority of their brethren, were two
men who had some reputation as historians. One of these was magnan-
imous enough to write, two or three years afterwards, a sort of funeral
eulogy of Edward, but the other, Robert of Reading, who, in my
opinion, kept the official chronicle of the abbey from 1 302 to 1 326, set
forth the Westminster point of view very effectively in the well-known
version of the chronicle called Flores Historiarum, the original
manuscript of which is now in the Chetham Library. In this is given
what may be regarded as the official account of Richard's burglary.
The robbery of the king of England was a crime only comparable to
the robbery of the treasure of Boniface VIII, six months later at
Anagni. The chronicler is most indignant at the suggestion that the
monks had anything to do with the matter, and laments passionately
their long imprisonment and their unmerited sufferings. He relies in
substance on the story as told in Pudlicott's confession. The burglary
was effected by a single robber.
So lacking in humour was the Westminster annalist that he did
not scruple to borrow the phraseology and the copious Scriptural citations
of a certain " Passion of the monks of Westminster according to John,"
the whole text of which is unfortunately not extant. I may say,
however, that the species of composition called a " Passion " was
particularly in vogue at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
and is mainly characterised by its extraordinary skill in parodying the
words of the Scripture in order to describe in mock heroic vein some
incident of more or less undeserved suffering. For profanity, grim humour,
and misapplied knowledge of the Vulgate the " passions " of this period
have no equal. They are a curious illustration of the profane humour
of the mediaeval ecclesiastic in his lighter moments.
The Westminster annalist did not stand alone. Other monastic
chroniclers took up and accepted his story. It became the accepted
monastic doctrine that one robber only had stolen the king's treasure,
and that therefore the monks of Westminster were unwarrantably
accused. One writer added to his text a crude illustration of how, it
was imagined, Pudlicott effected his purpose. You may see opposite
this page his rude pictorial representation of the " one robber " kneeling
20 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY
on the grass in the churchyard, and picking up by a hand and arm ex-
tended through the broken window the precious stores within. But
Pudlicott's arm must have been longer than the arm of justice to
effect this operation, and must have been twice or thrice the length of
a tall man. This same chronicler was not contented with repeating
the parallel now recognised between the sufferings of the monks of
Westminster, under their unjust accusations, and the passion of pope
Boniface, five months later, at the hands of the robbers hired by the
ruthless king of France. He must give a picture of the Anagni outrage
as well as of the orthodox version of the Westminster burglary. How
far he has succeeded, you may gather from the rude sketch figured on
the opposite page. Not only does he give us so vivid a picture of pope
Boniface's sufferings from the rude soldiery that the drawing might well
be used as a representation of a martyrdom, like that of St. Thomas of
Canterbury. His sketch of three other sacrilegious warriors, rifling the
huge chest that contained the papal treasures, skilfully suggests that
robbery was the common motive that united the outrage at Anagni to
the outrage at Westminster. He leaves us to draw the deeper moral
that the sinful desire of unhallowed laymen to bring holy church
and her ministers into discredit was the ultimate root of both these
scandals.
Edward was satisfied with his Scottish campaign ; he was be-
coming old and tired ; he was pleased to know that a great deal of
the lost treasure had been recovered ; and he was always anxious to
avoid scandal, and to minimise any disagreement with the monks of
his father's foundation. He, therefore, condoned what he could not
remedy. He soon released all the monks from prison. He even
restored Shenche to his hereditary office of the keepership of the
palace. Richard of Pudlicott alone was offered up to vengeance.
In October, 1 305, Richard was hanged, regardless of his clergy.
Affairs at the monastery of Westminster were not improved after
these events. There was much quarrelling among the monks.
Walter of Wenlock died. There were disputes as to his succession ;
an unsatisfactory appointment was made, and there was a consider-
able amount of strife for a generation. The feeling against the king
was shown equally against his son, and is reflected in the bitter
Westminster chronicle of the reign of Edward II. One result of the
demonstration of the futility of storing valuables within the precincts
A MEDIAEVAL BURGLARY 21
of the abbey was that the chief treasury of the wardrobe was bodily
transferred to the Tower of London.
Some obvious morals might be drawn from this slight but not un-
picturesque story ; but I will forbear from printing them. One
generalisation I will, however, venture to make by way of conclusion.
The strongest impression left by the records of the trial is one of the slack-
ness and the easy-going ways of the mediaeval man. The middle
ages do not often receive fair treatment. Some are, perhaps, too
apt to idealise them, as an age of heroic piety, with its statesmen,
saints, heroes, artists, and thinkers ; but such people are in all ages the
brilliant exceptions. The age of St. Francis of Assisi, of Dante, of
Edward I, of St. Louis of France, of St. Thomas Aquinas, the age
in which the greatest buildings of the world were made, was a great
time and had its great men. But the middle ages were a period of
strange contrasts. Shining virtues and gross vices stood side by side.
The contrasts between the clearly cut black and white of the thirteenth
century are attractive to us immersed in the continuous grey of our
own times. But we find our best analogies to mediaeval conditions
in those which are nowadays stigmatised as Oriental. Conspicuous
among them was a deep pervading shiftlessness and casualness.
Mediaeval man was never up to time. He seldom kept his promise,
not through malice, but because he never did to-day what could be
put off till to-morrow or the next day.
Pudlicott then is a typical mediaeval criminal. He was doubtless a
scamp, but most of the people with whom he had dealings were loose-
thinking, easy-going folk like himself. Of course there are always the
exceptions. But Edward I, with his gift of persistence, was a peculiarly
exceptional type in the middle ages, and even Edward I found it con-
venient to let things slide in small matters. Thus on this occasion
Edward began his investigation with great show of care and deter-
mination to sift the whole matter ; but when he found that thorny
problems were being stirred up, he determined not for the first time
to let sleeping dogs lie, and avoid further scandal.
We must not, however, build up too large a superstructure of
theory on this petty story of the police courts, plus a mild ecclesiastical
scandal. Nor must we emphasize too much or generalise too largely
from the signs of slackness and negligence shown in mediaeval trials. I
become more and more averse to facile generalisation about the middle
22 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY
ages or mediaeval man. They may, moreover, be made in both direc-
tions. On the one side we have the doctrine of our greatest of recent
scholars, bishop Stubbs, that the thirteenth century was the greatest
century of the middle ages, the flowering type of mediaeval Christianity
and so on. But on the other hand there is the contradictory generalisa-
tion of students, like my friend Mr. Coulton, who surveys the time
from St. Francis to Dante with the conviction that the so-called great
days of faith were the days of unrestrained criminality and violence.
Both these views can be argued ; but neither are really convincing.
They seem to me to be obtained by looking at one side of the question
only. A more fruitful doctrine is surely the view that ordinary
mediaeval men were not so very unlike ourselves, and that their
virtues and vices were not those of saints or ruffians, but were not wholly
out of relation to the ordinary humdrum virtues and vices that are found
to-day.
NOTES.
I. NOTE ON AUTHORITIES.
The accounts of the robbery of the king's treasury in the
Chronicles are vitiated by the obvious desire of the writers, who
were mainly monks, to minimise the scandal to "religion" involved
in the suspected complicity of the Westminster monks. This is seen
even in the moderate account originating at St. Alban's Abbey, and con-
tained in William Rishanger's Chronicle (Rolls Series), pp. 222 and
225, and also in the other St. Alban's version in GestaEdwardiPrimi y
published in the same volume, pp. 420-1. The bias is naturally at
its worst in the Westminster Abbey Chronicle, printed in F lores His-
toriarum, III. 115, 117, 121, and 131 (Rolls Series), which is more
valuable perhaps as an index of Westminster opinion than as a dis-
passionate statement of the facts. The chief manuscript of this chronicle
is preserved in the Chetham Library, Manchester [MS. Chetham No.
67 1 2]. It was certainly written by a Westminster monk, and, perhaps
after 1 302, by Robert of Reading, who undoubtedly was the author
of the account of the reign of Edward II. If Robert wrote the story of
the robbery, it should be remembered that he was one of the forty-nine
monks indicted and sent to the Tower on a charge of complicity in it.
There are useful and more impartial notices in the non-monastic Annales
A MEDIAEVAL BURGLARY 23
Londonienses in Stubbs' Chronicles of Edward I and Edward II,
I. 130, 131, 132, and 134 (Rolls Series). These date the robbery
on 2 May.
The Chronicles being thus under suspicion, we must go for our main
knowledge of the story to record sources, many of which are fortunately
accessible in print. Palgrave's Kalendars and Inventories of the Ex-
chequer, I. 251-99 (Record Commission, 1836), publishes the writs
appointing the two commissions of enquiry and the verdicts of the juries
empanelled by them. The writs are also in Rymer's Fcedera, I. 956,
959 (Record Commission). The confession of Richard Pudlicott is
printed in an English translation in H. Hall's Antiquities of the Ex-
chequer, pp. 25-8, and also in L. O. Pike's History of Crime in Eng-
land, Vol. I. The French original can be read in Exchequer Accounts,
K. R., 332/8. Cole's Records (Record Commission, 1844) prints
the indenture in which Droxford, the Keeper of the Wardrobe, specifies
the jewels lost and recovered. Some entries in the Calendar of
Patent Rolls and the Calendar of Close Rolls usefully supplement
the continuous records.
There are several fairly full modern accounts, the majority of
which are not quite satisfactory. That in Dean Stanley's Memorials
of Westminster Abbey is more eloquent than critical. H. Harrod's
article in Archaologia, LXIV. 375, " on the crypt of the chapter house
at Westminster," is valuable for its clear identification of the crypt
under the chapter house with the scene of the robbery. Equally use-
ful is J. Burtt's important paper " On some discoveries in connexion with
the ancient treasury of Westminster," published in G. G. Scott's Glean-
ings from Westminster Abbey, pp. 18-33. The two fullest
modern accounts are in L. O. Pike's History of Crime in England,
I. 199-203 and 466-7, and Hubert Hall's Antiquities of the Ex-
chequer, pp. 18-33. The latter is perhaps the better because, though
telling the story in a book dealing with the exchequer, it recognises
that the treasury robbed was the treasury of the wardrobe. There
are, however, materials for a more detailed critical narrative than has
hitherto been attempted.
II. NOTE ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS.
The two rough drawings, figured in the text, are reproduced from
f. 1 92d of a Manuscript Chronicle in the British Museum [ MS. Cotton >
24 THE JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY
Nero, D. ii.\. The first, opposite p. 19, represents the story of the
robbery of the treasury of the wardrobe " by a single robber," which
this chronicle, following the Westminster version, adopts. The second,
opposite p. 20, depicts the outrage on Boniface VIII by the agents of
Philip the Fair at Anagni, in September, 1 303. This picture of the
attack on the pope emphasizes the comparison made by the sympa-
thetic monastic writers between the scandal of Anagni and the analogous
outrage on the church by the imprisonment of the monks of West-
minster. The photographs were taken by the permission of the
Principal Librarian of the British Museum by the Artists Illustrators,
Limited.
The rough plan of Westminster Abbey and the adjoining royal
palace is taken from that published in Hall's Antiquities of the Ex-
chequer, p. 31. I am indebted to my friend Mr. Hubert Hall and
to his publisher, Mr. Elliott Stock, for permission to reproduce this.
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