At Nottingham Castle on the night of October 19 1330 a highly dramatic, and hugely important, coup took place. This coup saw the end of the regime of Queen Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer, who together had (mis)ruled England since their equally dramatic overthrow of Edward II in 1326, and marked the beginning of the personal rule of Edward III. That night, the young king Edward, accompanied by a small group of companions, broke into Nottingham castle through the tunnels lying beneath the keep and captured his nemesis Mortimer.
Such an event has naturally attracted scholarly attention. However, the precise composition of participants of the coup , despite Caroline Shenton's attempt to establish this group with finality, in J. Bothwell (ed.) The Age of Edward III (Woodbridge, 2001), remains debateable. Whether William Bohun was at Nottingham that night seems unclear. Bohun, a younger son of a comital family, went on to become Earl of Northampton, and enjoyed a highly notable career as one of the standout generals of the Hundred Years War before his death in 1360. Bohun's creation as earl, along with that of William Montagu, William Clinton and Robert Ufford (all of whom definitely participated in the coup), has been cited as evidence for his presence at Nottingham: essentially, Edward was rewarding a group of able men who had proved their loyalty in the most extreme circumstances.
Such a connection is strengthened by the evidence of The Brut chronicle, which records William Bohun as present (p. 269). This evidence has been used by Richard Barber in his recent book Edward III and the Triumph of England (London, 2013) p. 63 n. 64 and, perhaps more importantly, by W.M. Ormrod in his entry in ODNB (although not in his Edward III (Yale, 2013). Caroline Shenton, however, has used the absence of Bohun from the pardons granted to certain participants of the coup (including Montagu, Ufford and Clinton) in its aftermath to argue that William Bohun was not present. The evidence of the pardons, then, contradicts that of The Brut, and, with the limitation that only certain participants took out individual pardons, added to the general unreliability of chronicle sources, it seems something of a toss up as to which argument over William Bohun's presence is preferred.
However, the evidence of Edward's rewards to his companions in the months following the coup may offer additional weight to the interpretation that William was not present. William Montagu, William Clinton and Robert Ufford all received substantial rewards immediately after the coup, ranging in value from £1,000 land and rent to Montagu, to 300 marks of the same to Ufford (see the text/translation entry for the November Parliament of 1330 in PROME and CFR 1327-1337, p. 204). Most importantly, Edward Bohun, William's twin brother, who received a pardon for his actions at Nottingham, also received a substantial reward of 400 marks worth of land and rent. William Bohun received no such reward. He is conspicuous by his absence from the list of rewards as well as the list of pardons. It seems highly probable that, had he been at Nottingham, he would have been rewarded along with his twin brother and the other participants. We may, therefore, concur with Shenton's argument, bolstered as it is by this additional information.
It is with this in mind that we return to William Bohun's creation as earl of Northampton in 1337. If Edward was not rewarding Bohun for his efforts at Nottingham Castle, then what was he doing? The answer to such a question, I believe, is that Edward was elevating Bohun in order to enable one part of the comital support needed for the effective prosecution of his duties of kingship, the obligations of internal peace and external defence inherent in the office of the Crown. Seeing Bohun's elevation in the light of his king's public function, rather than as a symptom of their more 'private' relationship, has implications for our view of Edward's creations of 1337, and the place of these creations in the framework of Edward's kingship, but such things do not, perhaps, belong in a blog...
Matt Raven
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