On this day in 1276, Sir John Deyville paid 578 marks to ‘Peter Beset or to the abbot of St Mary’s York’. In exchange he gained the right to recover his Yorkshire manor of Thornton-on-the Hill in Yorkshire. This sum was roughly equivalent to £400.
An surviving illustrated cover of ‘A Gest of Robyn Hode’.
John was a former Montfortian rebel who had caused enormous damage and loss of life in the civil wars. He had acted as Simon’s viceroy in northern England, occupying York in defiance of Henry III. He and his followers had roved all over England, burning towns as far afield as Scarborough, Sheffield, Lincoln and Canterbury, among other places. They also waged guerrilla warfare against Henry’s son, Lord Edward, attacking his Italian creditors on the Great North Road between London and York. At Lincoln they destroyed the Jewish quarter, slaughtering the Jewish population and burning the records of Christian debts. Their own debts, needless to say.
John finally submitted in 1267, and was forced to pay a series of redemption fines to the queen, Eleanor of Provence. The payment to St Mary’s bears a striking parallel to an early Robin Hood ballad, The Gest of Robyn Hode, in which the outlaw entertains an impoverished knight. Robin takes pity on the knight and lends him the £400 he needs to redeem pledged lands from the abbot of St Mary’s, York. Such a contract was unlikely after 1279, after which restrictions on lending were imposed on religious houses by the Statute of Mortmain.
Illustration of Sir Richard.
In later versions of the legend the ‘poor knyghte’ acquires a name, Sir Richard Atte Lee or Sir Richard of the Lea. This was because two separate manuscripts, recording the deeds of Robin Hood, were stitched together to form a single narrative. Thus, it may be that Sir John was the origin of the nameless character of the ballad cycle.
There was nothing romantic about his fate. John spent the remainder of his days encumbered with debt, as the new king, Edward I, used a system of fines and rewards to keep the former rebel in line. He was regularly summoned to do military service in Wales, offsetting his pay against outstanding debts. A military man to his boots, and probably a poor estate manager, John was also required to sell off lands to his acquisitive neighbours. Inevitably, this whittled away their power and status.
Statue of Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest.
After a lifetime of violence, Sir John Deyville died in the early 1290s, apparently of natural causes. That was not the end of the family’s brutal legacy: his kinsman, Jocelin Deyville, would earn notoriety as a bandit in the turbulent reign of Edward II, ravaging Yorkshire at the head of a band of outlaws dressed as ‘white friars’.
The Deyvilles had finally overstepped the mark: along with other northern rebels, Jocelin was drawn and hanged in chains at York. Afterwards the family dwindled into obscurity, only leaving a dim echo (perhaps) in the poor knight of England’s most enduring legend.
David Pilling is the author of the Robin Hood series. The latest is
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