. . . and of course religion. I should’ve squeezed religion into that headline. You couldn’t separate it from politics back then. It permeated everything.

The murder in question happened in 1337, in London, when a priest, John Forde, was killed on a busy street by a group of men who slit his throat and stabbed him in the stomach, and that’s the loose end of a tangled strand of yarn, so keep hold of it and let’s see if we can’t do some untangling.

Irrelevant photo: begonia

The coroner, the sheriff, and the jury

Right after the murder, the coroner and sheriff were called and they did what they were programmed to do: gather an investigative jury–usually 12 local men but that could go as high as 50. For this murder, they gathered 33, signaling that it was a high-profile case. 

Juries generally included witnesses, community members, and people who claimed to know something about what had happened. They all had to be men and of good social standing, and their first job was to figure out the cause of death: was it unnatural (slit throat? yeah, probably), and had a felony had been committed (a fair bet)? 

Juries also interviewed witnesses, examined the body, and considered suspects and motives. Combine that with juries being made up of people who knew something about the incident or thought (or claimed or were told) they did and you’re likely to find that the story a jury put together was colored by local gossip and the interests of local and professional communities. Predictably enough, jurors weren’t immune to pressure or political convenience. 

This particular jury identified a set of suspects and said there’d been a longstanding feud between Forde–that’s the priest, remember, who was now extremely dead–and the wealthy and aristocratic FitzPayne family. Sorry: make that wealthy, aristocratic, and powerful, so although a suspect’s possessions were supposed to be confiscated and held in safekeeping, this jury swore blind that they had no idea where to find these well-known, powerful people, and also that at least one of them had no belongings to confiscate.

According to the coroner’s report, “The jurors found that there had been a long-standing dispute between Ella, the wife of Sir Robert FitzPayn, and John Ford. Ella hence persuaded Hugh Lovell, her brother, Hugh Colne and John Strong, latterly her servants, Hascuph Neville, a chaplain, and John Tindale, to kill him. Accordingly, on the preceding Friday after Vespers, they waylaid John Ford as he walked up Cheapside, opposite the junction with Bread Street, and Hasculph.”

The background

Ella (or Ela; to promote inconsistency, I’ll spell it both ways) was married to Robert FitzPayne (or Payn; and Forde is sometimes Ford; listen, spelling was a liquid at the time and in the interest of making life difficult some of the spelling’s have been modernized some of the time)–

Where were we? Ella was married to Robert FitzPayne, and back in 1332 someone had denounced her to the archbishop of Canterbury for having sex with “knights and others, single and married, and even with clerics in holy orders.” 

Mind you, we have no way of knowing who she had sex with and whether. My default setting is to be skeptical about sexual accusations against women. It was–and to a lesser extent still is–a cheap and easy way to wreck a woman’s reputation, at a time when reputation (especially a woman’s) was all-important. And all it boils down to is horror at the idea of a woman having unsanctioned sex. 

The only man named as her lover in the accusation was the priest, John Forde.

By way of punishment, the church–which had the power to punish its members–banned her from wearing gold, pearls, or precious stones; she was also to donate some whopping sum of money to monastic orders (to be used, at least in theory, for the poor); and by way of public shaming, every autumn for seven years she was to walk the length of Salisbury Cathedral barefoot, carrying a four-pound candle to the altar.

To all of which she apparently said, “Oh, yeah, how you gonna make me?” because a second letter claimed she’d abandoned her husband and was hiding in Rothermere, and had been excommunicated. 

Forde, who hadn’t gone into hiding, doesn’t seem to have been punished. 

The background to the background

Ah, but it all goes back further than that, to 1322, when Ella, John, and Robert were indicted by a royal commission for conspiring with a gang of extortionists to raid a Benedictine priory. 

Robert? You remember him. Her husband. He was lord of the nearby castle, Stogursey. 

The lot of them smashed up the priory’s gates and buildings, felled trees, raided the quarry (stone, you may be aware, is heavy, which argues for a fair number of people being involved here), then drove 18 oxen, 30 pigs, and 200 sheep back to the castle and held them for ransom.

Do you get the sense that aristocrats thought of themselves as untouchable?

This was in the period leading up to the Hundred Years War between England and France, and the priory they raided was an outpost of a French abbey. If you wanted to attack a French-aligned abbey, this wasn’t a bad time to do it. 

Even so, what’s a priest doing in the middle of that? Well, his church was on the FitzPayne family’s estate and they could well have been its patrons, leaving him torn between the church, which had authority over him, and the FitzPaynes, who might have had a more immediate power. But that’s guesswork.

This all happened at a time when the archbishop was trying to police the morals of the aristocracy and gentry, and he might have read Forde’s involvement in the raid as signaling that his loyalty to the church was coming second to his more worldly loyalties. Exactly how that connects to the archbishop sentencing Ella to public humiliation ten years later is anyone’s guess, but it’s hard not to draw a line from one dot to the other and label it Retribution.

It’s also hard not to draw a line between Ella being denounced to the archbishop–presumably by Forde, since he went unpunished although he was the only lover named in the complaint–and Forde’s murder. Let’s label that line Retribution as well.

It might be good, though, to remember that a lot of guesswork went into those last paragraphs. 

The archbishop died in 1333, at which point he drops out of the story, and for four years everything went quiet, at least as far as we can tell from this distance in time. Then four years later, Ela (presumably) had Forde killed. 

Manuel Eisner, who (along with multiple other people) created a wonderful website called Medieval Murder Maps, speculates that she was taking revenge for the humiliation the archbishop imposed on her–or at least tried to impose. He cites the public nature of the killing, saying it was designed to remind people who was in control. 

“Where the rule of law is weak,” he said, “we see killings committed by the highest ranks in society, who will take power into their hands.”

And at the end of that strand of yarn?

Only one man was indicted for the murder, and predictably enough he was one of the servants–and even that was five years after the murder. As far as we can tell, everybody else went on with their lives.

It’s worth repeating that we have no idea whether Ela slept with any of the men she was accused of being involved with. She was denounced and the church handed her a penance. That’s all we know. Even before the invention of the printing press gave the world sleazy newspapers, a sex story about a woman was sure to sell copies.

And with that out of the way, go explore the website. It’s wonderful.