Feudal Lords
After four years inside a cell barely large enough to stand in, a door is opened and a young woman steps out into the light of the Hertfordshire woodland. She had been concealed there by Roger, a hermit whose small enclosure at Markyate had become first her refuge, then her world. She had entered as Theodora, a merchant’s daughter from Huntingdon, who had renamed herself Christina as a sign of her covenant with God. She emerged a woman of recognised spiritual authority, whose reputation would spread through the courts and abbeys of England. The priory she established would be supported through gifts of lands, including two forest clearings a few days ride away in Warwickshire.
Christina’s story is remarkable. Her determination to honour a private vow of chastity against the combined pressure of family, episcopal authority and arranged marriage had driven her into years of hiding, first with a recluse at Flamstead, then with Roger at Markyate. The cell Roger offered her was, by her biographer’s account, confined, yet for a woman who had sought enclosure from the beginning, it was also, at last, a place of peace. When Roger died, she inherited his hermitage rather than abandoning it, took his place as the community’s anchor, and drew other women around her. In 1145 Markyate Priory was formally established, dedicated to the Holy Trinity, and sometimes known simply as ‘Holy Trinity in the Wood.’
Roger de Mowbray was drawn into Christina’s orbit as so many magnates were, for reasons that were practical as well as pious. There is a possibility that the hermit Roger who sheltered her was Roger d’Aubigny, a kinsman of the very Mowbray line that would later endow the priory she founded, present at both the beginning and the flowering of Markyate. Whether or not the threads connect so neatly, the spiritual significance of Mowbray’s generosity is clear.
Roger de Mowbray was a figure of considerable scale. He inherited the vast honour of Mowbray from his father Nigel d’Aubigny, and his benefactions extended to some twenty religious houses. His arms Gules, a lion rampant Argent, were among the earliest heraldic bearings in England. He was also a man of turbulent loyalties, who joined a rebellion against King Henry II, was twice captured on crusade, and was ransomed at ruinous cost. His piety and his recklessness were, in their way, the same quality: a readiness to stake everything on a cause. It was Roger who made the founding grant of Diddington and Kinwalsey to the nuns of Markyate, endowing the priory with Warwickshire lands that would sustain it, in modest fashion, for decades.
The priory was never prosperous. A manor was a landed estate conferring rights to rents, labour, game and local court revenues, at once a source of income and something that could be sold when times were hard. But Diddington and Kinwalsey were small, remote hamlets. The nuns leased these lands to William de Arden around 1190, and then sold both manors outright to his son Hugh around 1231 for thirty marks. The assets were going, piece by piece, and by 1290, the priory’s position had become desperate enough that the nuns petitioned Parliament directly, stating that if required to pay all their debts they could not continue to live.
The Arden family held deep roots in Warwickshire, their name taken from the forest itself. Their ancestor Thurkill of Arden had been a pre-Conquest sheriff of the county who secured his position by accommodation rather than resistance, and his descendants held the shrievalty on many subsequent occasions. The male line carried forward through centuries, and through one of the family’s daughters the Ardens would eventually give Shakespeare his mother, Mary Arden, and through her the forest setting of As You Like It.
The manor of Hampton-in-Arden passed into Arden hands around the middle of the twelfth century, through a series of transactions within the Mowbray fee, and the family consolidated their grip across the following generations. By the mid-thirteenth century their holdings were taking the form of distinct manors: Hampton, Knowle, Balsall, Diddington, Nuthurst, Solihull, Grafton, Wootton and Kinwalsey - each a named estate with its own identity, even as they remained bound together under a single lordship. The Ardens of Hampton used equestrian-type seals with no identifiable heraldry at this time. By 1251, Sir Hugh de Arden had secured something more than tenure: a grant of free warren, a weekly market on Tuesdays, and a fair on the eve, feast, and morrow of St Luke. A fair was not granted to a hamlet. Knowle had become a place of trade and assembly in its own right, perched on its ridge above the forest, no longer an isolated dependency of Hampton.
In April 1276 William de Arden died. His estate passed to his brother Richard and to his widow, recorded variously as Agnes or Agatha. Richard was non compos mentis, of unsound mind from birth, the condition the law termed idiocy to distinguish it from madness acquired in later life. He could inherit but could not govern, and a jury would have been empanelled to establish his incapacity before the Crown assumed wardship. Medieval law was careful in such cases: an idiot’s lands were held without waste or destruction, his maintenance provided for, his person placed with a guardian. The Church saw such men as innocents under God’s protection; the law saw them as wards of the Crown. Richard could do little about either view.
In July 1276 the dower portion was assigned to William’s widow for her lifetime. In doing so, Knowle was recognised as a manor in its own right for the first time - its separation from Hampton not the product of deliberate planning, but of circumstance pressing upon inheritance.
When Agnes died, Richard passed into the wardship of Eleanor of Castile, Queen of England. The Crown’s custody of those unable to govern their own affairs carried with it control of their lands but the Arden family were not about to relinquish their manors of Knowle, Diddington and Kinwalsey.
Next: Eleanor of Castile
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