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1. The sense of humour of King Henry III

Here David Carpenter explores the intriguing entries recorded on the fine rolls when Henry was returning from Gascony in 1243. Not surprising perhaps, given all the time that Professor Carpenter has spent with him, that he decides that Henry was fun to be with!

⁋1The sense of humour of English medieval kings is not easy to recover. The sources rarely record, in specific terms, kings either being amused or being amusing, and often leave unclear whether something is meant to be funny or not. On the fine rolls of King John, for example, an entry shows the wife of Hugh de Neville offering the king 200 chickens so that she could lie one night with her husband. Is this, as has been supposed, a joke between the monarch and his mistress, John asking how much one night back with Hugh was worth, and getting the answer a risible 200 chickens? Or is it something completely different? With King Henry III, we are fortunate in having a contemporary memorandum which states quite specifically that he is making a joke. That memorandum is found on the fine rolls. The purpose of this Fine of Month is to look at the episode and then explore other examples, or what may be examples, of Henry III’s sense of humour.

⁋2The evidence for Henry’s joke appears on a short fine roll recording business transacted by the king when he was in the Saintonge and Gascony between May and October 1242. ¹ On the dorse of the first membrane of this roll appears a later entry, one which belongs to the second half of September 1243 since it was made on the ship which was bringing Henry home from Gascony. The heading runs as follows: Memorandum that the lord king playing a joke on Peter the Poitevin in the ship, when he crossed from Gascony to England, ordered all the below written things to be enrolled, so however, that, Peter not seeing, they should be immediately cancelled. ²

⁋3The Latin for what is rendered here as ‘playing a joke on Peter’ is ‘ludendo cum Petro’. By itself, this could simply be translated ‘playing with’, and be related to any kind of game. ‘Ludus’ appears in the household rolls of King John describing his gaming at tables. ³ It is, however, almost certain that Henry was here playing a joke on Peter. The things he ordered to be enrolled, as we will see, were a series of debts which Peter was said to have incurred, hence their appearing on the fine rolls. The debts were deliberately ridiculous and the idea, I would suggest, was for Peter to look at them on the roll, and be overcome with astonishment, much to the amusement of the king and the others in the know. Henry, however, had no desire for the debts to be actually exacted by the exchequer, as they might have been if left on the fine roll, and thus he ordered them to be cancelled. They are indeed crossed through, at which point the explanatory memorandum was added. (Its appearance is consistent with it being a later addition). On the other hand, Henry wanted to get the most out of the joke so this cancellation was concealed from Peter, and the roll presumably put away out of his sight.

⁋4Before saying a word about Peter the Poitevin, and looking at his debts, a point may be made about the rolls themselves. The whole episode shows Henry’s proximity to and familiarity with them. The fine rolls, and presumably the other rolls of the chancery, together with their attendant staff, were in the king’s ship on the voyage back to England. Indeed, one writ, enrolled on the close rolls, was actually witnessed by the king on the ship. ⁴ The rolls, moreover, were the reverse of being shut away. Henry ordered the joke to be recorded on them, and clearly expected they would be out in the open so that Peter could see what had been written about him. Henry also appreciated the status of the rolls as records and hence carefully ordered the debts to be cancelled. The episode shows him very much au fait with the processes of his government. It does not prove he could read, but with other evidence showing his interest in records, it points in that direction. ⁵

⁋5There are numerous references to Peter the Poitevin in the chancery rolls between 1229 and his death and 1250. He was a layman of less than knightly status, being described as the king’s ‘serjeant’,‘serviens’. Having entered the royal service from that of Hubert de Burgh, he became responsible for taking wine due to the king by right of prise. He was also involved more generally in buying and selling wine on the king’s behalf. ⁶ His debts on the fine rolls were recorded as follows. Memorandum that Peter the Poitevin owes the king 3 m., which he received from the abbot of Margam and which the same abbot ought to have rendered to the king. Item, he owes five dozen capons for a trespass onboard ship. Item, he owes the king 34 tuns of wine for the arrears of wines which he bought to the king’s use at Mussak where he dreamed he had seen the Emperor Otto. Item, he owes the king the £100 which he promised him onboard ship on the morrow of the octave of the Nativity of the Blessed Mary. Memorandum that Peter the Poitevin is in arrears of £71 for the 71 tuns of wine that cost £142, which wines he sold by order of the king, each tun for 60s, and he ought to pay to the wine merchant all of the aforesaid money beyond the aforesaid £71, which he is to pay to the king.

⁋6Some of these debts, therefore, were conjured up from Peter’s responsibilities as the king’s buyer and seller of wine. Others related to episodes, or alleged episodes, on the ship. One of the bases for Peter’s work was Gloucester, where the king gave him a house, and perhaps this brought him into contact with the abbot of Margam. ⁷ I have been unable to identify Mussak. A Bertram de Mussak appears in the Gascon rolls and Bémont indentified the place with Mouusac-sur-Vienne, c. Isle-Jourdain. This, however, is a long way from Gascony, and it is difficult to see why Peter would go there to buy wine, when it was abundant locally. ⁸ The emperor Otto of whom Peter was said to have dreamt seems more likely to have been Henry III’s kinsman, Otto of Brunswick, than one of the Ottonian Emperors. Perhaps the dream was real and Peter had told Henry about it. The morrow of the octave of the nativity of the blessed Virgin, on which day Peter was supposed to have promised Henry £100 in the ship, was 15 September, which was probably the first day of the voyage. In the final entry, the calculations seem to work out. If Peter sold 71 tuns of wine at 60s or £3 a tun, that would bring in £213. If the wine had cost £142, that meant there was a £71 profit to the king. The rest of the money was owed to the merchant from whom the wine had been taken. The amounts involved, however, seem fancifully large and may have been part of the joke. Peter was buying at £2 a tun and selling at £3, a profit of 50%. Next year, back in England, when Peter again bought 71 tuns of wine at £2 a tun, he sold 65 of them, as the fine rolls show, for only £147 10s, or £2.26 a tun, a profit of only 7.7%. ⁹

⁋7Henry’s joke at the expense of Peter the Poitevin seems of a fairly mild variety. Once Peter knew the truth one can imagine him joining in the laughter. He was certainly not in disfavour for when he fell ill at Winchester on getting back to England, Henry paid his expenses. ¹⁰ The episode suggests Henry’s close and relaxed relations with those in his immediate entourage even, when they were of fairly low social status. Another glimpse into this atmosphere is provided by an earlier entry on the chancery rolls, which we may suspect is a joke, suspect because there is this time no statement to that effect. In 1237 Henry III issued the following letter which was enrolled on the patent rolls. An English translation of the rather wordy and repetitious Latin might run: King to William de Peretot greeting. Know that we have granted and given you full power of cutting the hair of the clerks who are of our household and familia, who have long hair and nourish their locks, and to tonsure their curls. And so we instruct you that you diligently pursue this power we have granted you in this due manner concerning cutting the aforesaid locks and tonsuring their curls, so that we do not have to apply the scissors to your own locks. Witness myself at [King’s] Cliffe, the second day of September.

⁋8This letter seemed so extraordinary to the editor of the patent rolls (Mr J.G. Black of the PRO) that, almost uniquely, he gave the original Latin, rather than calendaring it in English. ¹¹ As the letter implies, William de Peretot was himself one of Henry’s household clerks. He is found both at court and carrying out a variety of duties in the provinces. Only a month before he had been given custody of the vacant abbey of Muchelney. ¹² It may well be that Henry thought the hair of his clerks needed cutting, but the terms in which he empowered William to do the job seem deliberately funny: the elaborate way in which the locks and curls are described, the threat to take the scissors to William’s own hair, and the use of a portentous letter patent to grant full power not for some weighty matter like negotiating a treaty but for acting as a barber. Again, as in the case on the fine rolls, Henry’s knowledge of the workings of government stands out. He understood the concept of ‘full power’ and how letters patent were used to confer it.

⁋9There were of course men at Henry’s court deliberately employed to make him laugh, namely his jesters, ‘istriones’, several of whose names appear in the chancery rolls. They were not necessarily men of low status since two of them are also described as knights, but the humour associated with them seems to have been of a rather basic, physical kind. One of the knight jesters was Fortunatus de Luka. When, in 1256, Henry made a special visit to see the Roman Baths at Bath, he ordered Fortunatus to be thrown in. We know this because Henry then gave him a new robe to replace the one damaged by the dipping. ¹³ Damage to robes of jesters seems an occupational hazard. When Henry was in Gascony in 1254, a new set of robes were given to his jester, John de Blaye, ‘in recompense for the robes which the king tore to pieces’. ¹⁴ These episodes may have born some resemblance to an incident Matthew Paris witnessed in 1252, much to his disapproval. While exercising in the orchard at St Albans, Henry and his entourage were entertained by the jolly japes of Geoffrey de Lusignan’s Poitevin chaplain, jester rather than priest, Paris thought, who pelted them with apples and turf and squirted the juice of grapes into their faces. ¹⁵

⁋10Of course, it may be that far from being involved in some kind of push me pull me game with John de Blaye, Henry was angered by his daring remarks, and tore his robes to pieces accordingly. Here, of course, one is reminded of the story of the Italian friar, Salimbene. ¹⁶ He tells how one day Henry’s jester cried out ‘Our lord king is like unto the lord Jesus Christ’. Henry was delighted but made the mistake of asking for more information. ‘Because our lord was as wise at the moment of his conception as when he was thirty years old; so likewise our king is as wise now as when he was a little child’ came the reply. Henry was furious and ordered the jester to be hung, although the king’s servants merely told him to go away until the royal wrath abated. Salimbene told this tale to illustrate Henry’s ‘simplicity’, and probably it is entirely apocryphal. Still, if Fortunatus de Luka, came from Lucca in Italy (as the chancery roll indexes suggest), that might create a link with Salimbene who had lived in the city. ¹⁷

⁋11Henry’s humour, therefore, ranged from slapstick with his jesters to the more sophisticated jokes found on the fine and patent rolls. One final example of an attempt to make Henry laugh comes firmly into the latter category. Like the debts Henry imposed on Peter the Poitevin, the humour turned on stating as sober facts things which were in reality absurd. In a letter to King Henry III, Queen Margaret of France declared that she was hastening the arrival of her sister to England, lest the king should decide to marry someone else, perhaps, she hinted, the countess of Gloucester. The letter always puzzled historians until its date and significance were brilliantly grasped by Margaret Howell. ¹⁸ It is in fact a joke. Written in October 1265, it concerns Queen Eleanor’s return to England after her period of exile during the regime of Simon de Montfort. The suggestion that she should hurry lest Henry marry another was, of course, deliberately farcical. Margaret knew Henry well and must have been confident he would find it funny. ¹⁹ It is a good indication of the king’s sense of humour and fits well with Henry III’s teasing of Peter the Poitevin on the ship coming home from Gascony.

⁋12Henry III had no purpose in encouraging laughter other than to enjoy himself, but one naturally wonders about its effects at court and wider impact. Matthew Paris, as we have seen, thoroughly disapproved of what he saw at St Albans, although that was partly due to the jester/priest being a foreigner, on whom Henry had just bestowed a rich living. ²⁰ Within the king’s immediate entourage, the effect may have been more positive. It was fun being in the company of King Henry III.