[In the following essay, Turville-Petre maintains that William of Palerne likely was composed prior to 1361 at the command of Humphrey de Bohun for members of his retinue, who resided at two neighboring manors.]

That Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford and Essex, commissioned the alliterative poem William of Palerne at some date before 1361 is one of the few ascertainable facts about the social background of the poems of the Alliterative Revival.¹ Since, as a result, so much importance is accorded to this one nugget of information, the position is worth investigating a little more closely.

The earl's estates, like those of most great lords of his time, were scattered over a wide area, from the Welsh marches to Essex,² but it is on his estates in the South West Midlands that we should concentrate our attention, for examination of the dialect of William of Palerne shows that it was in this general area that the poem was composed.³ The Inquisition into the lands held by Humphrey at his death in 1361⁴ records that he held three manors in Gloucestershire, all situated within a few miles of the county town itself. Southam lies to the north east of Gloucester, and Haresfield and Wheatenhurst (now Whitminster) are situated close to one another to the south of the town. This pair of manors is particularly interesting, and the recently-published volume of The Victoria History of the Counties of England⁵ gives several details of them which are relevant here. About Wheatenhurst we are told that ‘the earls had no under-tenant in Wheatenhurst, which was one of their demesne manors. … It was recorded as a chief house with a courtyard in 1336.’ (pp. 291-3). This manor-house was one of those which Humprey obtained licence to crenellate in 1347.⁶ Haresfield, too, was a manor of some importance to the Earls of Hereford. The second Earl had stocked the park with sixteen deer in 1251, and there were deer there in the sixteenth century. In 1318 a private chapel was built on the manor.⁷

The evidence suggests that the Earl of Hereford with his retinue would have made periodic visits to these two neighbouring manors, perhaps while he was on his way to one of his four castles with their surrounding estates in the Welsh marches—Caldicot, Brecon, Hay and Huntingdon. Caldicot, on the Severn estuary, lies only about thirty miles from Gloucester, and was apparently a fairly large castle.⁸ Unfortunately, very little is known about Humphrey's life, for it seems that a prolonged infirmity kept him, like his elder brother John, out of the public eye.⁹ Probably he spent much of his time at his castle of Pleshy in Essex, where he died.¹⁰ A reference to Gloucester in William of Palerne was previously taken to mean that Humphrey resided thereabouts:

Preieth a pater noster priuely þis time
For þe hend erl of herford, sir humfray de bowne,
Þe king edwardes newe, at glouseter þat ligges.

(164-6)

Recently, however, it has been maintained¹¹ that the line refers rather to the magnificent tomb of Edward II at what is now Gloucester Cathedral, and this interpretation is very probable. Humphrey was not, at any rate, as intimately involved in the affairs of the West as some of his ancestors, such as the second Earl of Hereford who fought against the Welsh, was justice itinerant for Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and Herefordshire,¹² and was buried just outside Gloucester at Lanthony Abbey, of which the earls were patrons.¹³ We should remember in this connection that William of Palerne was not written principally (if at all) for Humphrey's cars, but ‘for hem þat knowe no frensche’ (5533)—presumably members of the earl's retinue established in the West Midlands. Some fifty of Humprey's associates and household servants—ranging from ‘frere William de Monkeland n’re confessour’ to ‘Davy q’est Barber et Ewer’—are remembered in his will.¹⁴ It is likely that the author of the poem, who identifies himself merely as ‘William’ (5521), was also a member of Humphrey's household at Haresfield and Wheatenhurst, or conceivably he may have been an Austin canon at Lanthony, writing at the behest of the Abbey's patron. For a small house Lanthony possessed a very large library of some five hundred books, although the catalogue drawn up at the beginning of the fourteenth century and later revised¹⁵ lists nothing that might have inspired the writer of this most romantic of alliterative poems.

Notes

1. See William of Palerne, ed. W. W. Skeat, E.E.T.S. E.S. 1 (1867), ll. 165-8 and 5529-33.

2. See G. A. Holmes, The Estates of the Higher Nobility in Fourteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1957), pp. 19-25.

3. See J. P. Oakden, Alliterative Poetry in Middle English, vol. i (Manchester, 1930), pp. 55-8.

4. Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem, vol. xi, no. 485.

5. A History of the County of Gloucester, vol. x (Oxford, 1972). For Haresfield see pp. 188 ff., and for Wheatenhurst pp. 289 ff. For Southam, which the Bohuns held of the Bishop of Worcester, see ibid., vol. viii (1968), pp. 9 ff.

6. The Complete Peerage, vol. vi, p. 472.

7. A History of the County of Gloucester, vol. x, pp. 189-91.

8. Brief descriptions of Caldicot and the other Bohun castles in Wales are given by A. H. A. Hogg and D. J. C. King, ‘Masonry Castles in Wales and the Marches’, Archaeologia Cambrensis, cxvi (1967), 71 ff.

9. Both John and Humphrey resigned the hereditary office of Constable of England on the grounds of infirmity. For John see The Complete Peerage, vol. vi, p. 471, and for Humphrey see Madden's remarks reprinted in the introduction to William of Palerne, pp. xi f.

10. The Complete Peerage, vol. vi, p. 472.

11. By C. W. Dunn in A Manual of the Writings in Middle English, fasc. i, ed. J. B. Severs (New Haven, 1967), p. 36.

12. The Dictionary of National Biography, vol. ii, p. 770.

13. For an account of the dealings between the Earls of Hereford and Lanthony Abbey see J. N. Langston, ‘Priors of Lanthony by Gloucester’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, lxiii (1942), 1-144.

14. Printed in J. Nichols, A Collection of All the Wills, now Known to be Extant, of the Kings and Queens of England (London, 1780), pp. 44-56.

15. Printed and analysed by T. W. Williams, ‘Gloucestershire Mediaeval Libraries’, Trans. Bristol & Glos. Arch. Soc., xxxi (1908), 139-78. Many of the Lanthony manuscripts are now in the Lambeth Palace Library.