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1. The Excommunication of Beatrice de Faye

The role, or agency, of aristocratic women in the thirteenth century is an issue often explored in Fines of the Month. Here, Stephen Church, Professor of Medieval History at the University of East Anglia, gives a fascinating account of the attempts by one such woman to assert herself against a husband determined to use every tactic in the book to discredit and ultimately divorce her, including bringing the stigma of excommunication upon her.

⁋1The heroine of this Fine of the Month was born Beatrice of Turnham sometime around the year 1200. She was the youngest of five daughters of the long-serving royal household retainer, Stephen of Turnham, and his wife, Edeline (or Odelina), herself the daughter and granddaughter of royal servants. When we meet her in the fine rolls in 1241, Beatrice was deep in a struggle to save herself from the ignominy of being divorced at the instigation of her third husband, Hugh de Plessetis. Although we cannot be certain how the case ended, it is clear that Beatrice was not a passive victim of Hugh’s determination to rid himself of his unwanted wife. On the contrary, she refused to take easily the affront of Hugh’s petition for a divorce. Hugh was forced to pay dearly for his ambitions and Beatrice actively fought her husband in the struggle for the marriage.

⁋2But before I delve more deeply into the events that marred the end of Beatrice’s life, I first want to sketch out what is known of Beatrice up to 1241. Beatrice’s story is one of a much-married heiress, whose life, in microcosm, represents the lives of many women in the upper stratum of English society in the years that spanned the first half of the thirteenth century. ¹ Beatrice’s maternal grandfather, Ranulf de Broc, and great-grandfather, Oin Purcell, had held in succession the serjeanty of usher of the king’s chamber, with special responsibility for the prostitutes of the court; and Ranulf had also held the royal marshalsea. ² When Beatrice’s mother had married Stephen of Turnham, sometime late in the reign of King Henry II, she brought to him this serjeanty along with the majority of the landed wealth that Stephen would enjoy. ³ Stephen served successively in the households of Henry II, Richard I, and John, and under John, he regularly had care of the king’s young wife, Isabella, and their elder son, the future Henry III, when they stayed at Winchester, as well as of Eleanor of Brittany, King John’s niece. ⁴ Presumably, therefore, it was at Winchester that Beatrice and her four sisters spent their early years in the company of members of the royal family. It must have been an extraordinarily privileged childhood.

⁋3The five Turnham girls were all of marriageable age by the time of their father’s death, sometime between 1213 and 1214. Each had a husband when they petitioned the king for a share in their inheritances. ⁵ Their statuses as heiresses made them very desirable in the marriage market. ⁶ The girls married well. Beatrice herself, who was perhaps the youngest of the five daughters, ⁷ married Ralph II de Faye, the son of Ralph I de Faye lord of Faye-la-Vineuse in Poitou, ⁸ sometime before 6 March 1214 (when Peter des Roches was ordered to allow Ralph seisin of certain escheats which belonged to land which he held in right of his wife). ⁹ Ralph, like his late father-in-law, seems to have been a household official, ¹⁰ who had, in 1212, held key roles in Angoulême with, amongst others, Geoffrey de Neville the king’s chamberlain. ¹¹ His father, Ralph I, sometime in the mid 1150s, had been promoted in England by Henry II and given the manor of Bramley, Surrey. ¹² His lands were confiscated in 1173, according to an entry in the Book of Fees, as a result of his actions in the war between Henry II and the Young King; by the early 1190s, he was dead. ¹³ Beatrice’s Ralph (who had recovered the manor by the grant of King John in 1199), therefore, must have been considerably older than his young wife at the time that they were married. ¹⁴ Ralph II de Faye was dead by the end of April 1223 having remained steadfastly loyal to the royalist cause throughout his life. ¹⁵

⁋4Beatrice’s second marriage was to another aged widower and royal servant, Hugh de Neville, chief justice of the forest under Richard and John and, between 1224 and 1229, for Henry III, too. ¹⁶ Hugh’s first wife, Joan, was dead by 1224, though the earliest reference to Hugh’s marriage to Beatrice is in April 1230 ¹⁷ . Beatrice was still acting in her own capacity in September 1226 when she put in her place Richard of Frobury (Frobury, Hampshire, was where her mother had held land) ¹⁸ in a suit against her brother-in-law, Thomas de Bavelingham, for a debt of 25 shillings that he owed to her. ¹⁹ She was pursuing another case in February 1227 through the same attorney against a certain William de Capella for services withheld in her holdings in Turnham, Kent. Four of the five sisters seem to have held an interest in this manor, which suggests that their father’s toponym reflected his place of origin. ²⁰ And by September 1227, she was still being associated with her late husband’s brother, John, in a suit for rental arrears in Chiddingfold, Surrey. ²¹ The marriage to Hugh de Neville presumably took place, therefore, between September 1227 and April 1230. Beatrice continued to litigate after her marriage to Hugh right up until the time of Hugh’s death in 1234, when she received £20 of dower land in South Stoke, Sussex. ²²

⁋5Having been widowed for a second time – in what must have been her mid-thirties – Beatrice agreed to contract a third marriage to yet another royal servant, Hugh de Plessetis. He is an enigmatic man in the sources. Someone of that name was associated with John de Plessetis (the future earl of Warwick) in the 1220s. ²³ But this Hugh de Plessetis was dead by 6 August 1231, when his executors were given authority to use his chattels and crops on his shared manor of Chalgrave in Oxfordshire for the execution of his testament. ²⁴ Beatrice’s Hugh, it seems likely, was the justice in eyre in Surrey, Kent, Hampshire, and Sussex in 1235, where he was associated with William of York, William de Insula, and Ralph of Norwich; ²⁵ he also seems to have been a major tenant of Earl William de Warenne and was perhaps related to John de Plessetis, the earl’s steward. ²⁶ Quite when Hugh and Beatrice married is unclear, for the first we hear of them occupying the married state is when we are informed that the divorce between the two was under way. ²⁷

⁋6The documents that were produced as a result of the divorce proceedings make it plain that Beatrice did not take her dismissal by Hugh either lightly or easily. Beatrice mustered her forces to make the divorce extremely difficult indeed, despite the fact that the odds were stacked against her. Beatrice’s husband, for example, would have expected to have control over all aspects of his wife’s life, including the use of physical correction, such as tying down and the withholding of food, should he have deemed it necessary. He also had rights over his wife’s property, including the dower lands that she had brought with her to the marriage, which she had received as a result of outliving her two previous husbands. ²⁸ It was these lands that Hugh sought to use against his wife, evidently attempting to force Beatrice into accepting the inevitable by starving her of the funds she needed to live out her existence and to fight her case. The first notice we have of Beatrice and Hugh’s marriage and divorce comes on 18 May 1240 when a writ was raised by the king’s officers to the sheriff of Sussex and another to the sheriff of Surrey ordering them to allow Beatrice the dower lands of her late husbands Hugh de Neville and Ralph de Faye in Sussex and in Surrey while the divorce case continued ‘lest in the meantime Beatrice be reduced to beggary’. ²⁹ Hugh de Plessetis was playing dirty. But the fact that Beatrice had managed to have this writ issued shows that she must have been using her contacts at court to plead her cause with the king. Beatrice was not simply supine in this affair. Her track record of litigation, which I outlined earlier on in this essay, makes it clear that Beatrice was a practiced litigator who needed no husband to guide her through the ways of the court. She was certainly litigating in her own right, as any widow might, during her first period of widowhood after the death of Ralph de Faye, and her family connections meant that she could get the royal court onside, even though the ecclesiastical court would turn out to be a harder nut to crack. ³⁰

⁋7The grounds that Hugh had for divorce are unclear. Marriage might only be annulled for certain specific reasons, and it appears that divorce (effectively the judgment that the marriage had never been valid and had therefore never existed) was extremely rare. ³¹ Since Hugh was the driving force behind this divorce, it seems likely that it was granted on the grounds of consanguinity: one is certainly struck by the ways in which royal servants firstly had family traditions of service in the king’s court and secondly married into other families with similar traditions of royal service, so it is not impossible that Beatrice and Hugh were related in some way within the prohibited four degrees; ³² though of course we cannot rule out the chance that Hugh had accused his wife of a heinous crime, such as adultery. Whatever its cause, the case was long running. On 11 February 1241, the king was forced to reiterate his earlier order of nine months before insisting that the sheriffs of Sussex and of Surrey hand over to Beatrice her dower lands. ³³ Beatrice might have the king on her side, but Hugh de Plessetis must have been counting on his own connections to keep the king’s officers at bay and had evidently refused to give up his control of Beatrice’s dower lands. The next April, however, it had become clear that the sheriffs had managed to extract at least some of the lands from Hugh, as the sheriff of Sussex was commanded to find further lands to make up the amount of dower land that was due to Beatrice. ³⁴ Beatrice, for the moment, had at least won the battle to get hold of lands that had come to her as dower. She was not going to be forced to beg.

⁋8At a point after the April writ of 1241, Beatrice and Hugh’s case came up before court Christian (the ecclesiastical court which had jurisdiction over the case), which, it seems, was presided over by the bishops of London and of Ely. ³⁵ One of two things happened at this session, either Beatrice refused to appear before the court or she appeared and the court adjudicated against her and she refused to accept its decision. In either circumstance, the next step taken by the court is clear: it issued a sentence of excommunication for contumacy (a rare occurrence, according to Helmholz’s findings, indicating something of the nature of the divorce case and perhaps the determination of Hugh to make it happen). ³⁶ Beatrice may well have had good cause for refusing to accept the legitimacy of that particular ecclesiastical court presided over by the bishops of London and of Ely. The ordinary for Surrey was the bishop of Winchester while that for Sussex was the bishop of Chichester, ³⁷ while her Turnham lands lay in the diocese of Canterbury. ³⁸ London and Ely, Beatrice might have argued, ought not to have had jurisdiction over her. ³⁹ Hugh de Plessetis, however, was not going to let a technical point like that get in the way of his ambitions. At this juncture in this essay, it is worth citing the fine in full:

⁋9‘To the sheriff of Surrey. The king has ordered him at other times to do justice to Beatrice de Faye by her body according to the custom of England, who has been excommunicated on account of her manifest contumacy by the bishops of London and Ely. Because, as the king has truly heard, he has not yet executed the king’s command in any way, order to execute this order without delay, so that the king might impute nothing to his negligence. Order to cause Hugh de Plessetis to have full seisin of the lands that he had of the dower of the same Beatrice in his bailiwick. Order to take security from Hugh for 20 m. to the king’s use for this writ. Order to the sheriff of Sussex to cause the same Hugh to have seisin of the lands of the dower of the same Beatrice in his bailiwick’. ⁴⁰

⁋10This is an extraordinary fine, unique in the fine rolls so far published (in print down to 1242 at the time of writing, but to the end of the reign online). What it demonstrates is that Hugh de Plessetis was taking an active role in not simply divorcing his wife but in aiding the court in the process of bringing his wife to ecclesiastical judgment. It is possible to reconstruct something of the events that must have occurred leading up to the moment that this fine was raised because we know quite a bit about the process of excommunication and the role of the secular arm in implementing such sentences. In a remarkable piece of work published in the 1960s, Donald F. Logan exhaustively explored the process of excommunication in England. ⁴¹ He showed that by the time that Beatrice had received her sentence, the role of the secular arm in the execution of sentences of excommunication had become fully established, and that the process was clear-cut. First a sentence of excommunication could only have been issued for contumacy, which means that Beatrice must have been resisting the ecclesiastical court in order to be excommunicated in the first place, either by refusing to attend or by refusing to accept its decision. Second, that by 1241 the process by which the secular arm became involved in coercing the recusant had become bureaucratically very straightforward. If, after 40 days, the person excommunicated refused to seek absolution and to accept the medicine designed to heal his or her soul, then the ordinary (that is the bishop of the diocese in which the wayward parishioner resided) might send a letter to Chancery (a ‘signification’ from its opening word signficavit) requesting a writ to be issued to the sheriff or sheriffs in whose territories the excommunicate resided ordering them to capture and to detain the named person and hold him or her until he or she had come to terms with the court that had issued the sentence. By 1241, this writ – called the writ capiendum after the phrase de excommmunicato capiendo that is found in its form – was issued de cursu, providing the forms were correct, and so was issued by the junior clerks in Chancery without reference to higher authority. Beatrice must, therefore, have been excommunicated 40 days before such a writ had been issued – one had to be incorrigible to have a writ capiendum raised against one – and it is further clear that the sheriffs to whom that writ had been issued had not proceeded against Beatrice by taking her captive. One is therefore led to wonder if this is a further example of how Beatrice’s contacts in the higher reaches of the royal household were paying dividends. I could not find a connection between Beatrice and the then sheriff of Surrey, Gregory of Oxted, ⁴² but it would be unwise to rule one out. In any event, Gregory, who was sheriff throughout the period of the divorce case, as we have seen, had helped Beatrice to secure her dower lands which her husband Hugh had been withholding from her. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that he deliberately failed to implement the writ de capiendo because Beatrice had connections that made him unwilling (or even unable) to carry out its terms.

⁋11The fine that Hugh de Plessetis made with the king was for the not inconsiderable sum of 20 marks. Hugh was determined to have his divorce, and if the bishops of London and of Ely were unwilling to press the matter, Hugh would press it for them. The fine under discussion was enrolled under the date of 11 October 1241. The following February (1242), the sheriff of Surrey was again ordered to disseise Beatrice from her lands while she was under sentence of excommunication. ⁴³ Evidently Beatrice was still trying to hang onto the marriage in a titanic struggle of wills. After this point, something happened to stop the continued persecution of Beatrice, a point that is evident because entries in the royal records on this matter cease: either Beatrice was dead or the determination of the court Christian to agree to Hugh’s petition for divorce had been executed. The next time we hear of Beatrice de Faye, she is not the central character. The year is 1246, and her dower lands in Surrey have long been in the king’s hands and are only just being released to the Neville family. ⁴⁴ Hugh de Plessetis did not enjoy his unmarried state for long. On 17 November 1244, a fine was enrolled on the fine rolls for an order to be raised instructing the sheriff of Norfolk that there had been a determination in the king’s court that Hugh’s unnamed heir should pay his relief to the dowager countess rather than to the king and that the lands should be released to the countess. ⁴⁵ Evidently now Hugh de Plessetis was dead.

⁋12Beatrice de Faye was not a passive victim of her third husband’s determination to rid himself of his wife. She was prepared and able to litigate in court at her own instigation. She was prepared and able actively to seek out royal support for her cause. She was capable of manipulating the family connections that she had enjoyed throughout her life, and she knew how to be stubborn in the face of the law, whether ecclesiastical or secular. It maybe that she did lose her struggle to hang onto her marriage – we do not know – but we do know that her actions delayed Hugh’s plans for at the very least a year and a half, and possibly for as long as Beatrice drew breath. This descendant of a long line of royal servants was not going to be easily discarded: she did her lineage proud. And although we cannot argue from silence in the sources, it would be a suitable end to this story to imagine that whatever plans Hugh might have had were thwarted by Beatrice de Faye.

⁋13I hope that what I have achieved in exploring this particular Fine of the Month is to show that in Beatrice de Faye we have a thirteenth-century woman who, like others whose lives have recently been explored by scholars, had agency in her own right. She was not simply the appendage of her father or her husbands, and neither was she independently active only when she was widowed. Beatrice de Faye had freedom to act in a world dominated by men but by men who could not and did not ignore a woman of Beatrice’s connections and steeliness of character. ⁴⁶