A Mediaeval Burglary

A Mediaeval Burglary by T.F. Tout

T.F. Tout's "A Mediaeval Burglary" recounts the robbery of the king's Wardrobe treasury, kept in the crypt beneath the chapter house of Westminster Abbey, on the evening of 24 April 1303 and the following two days. Tout explains that the Wardrobe began as the closet for the king's clothes and grew into a household office of finance and administration that always followed the king. Edward I had moved the Exchequer, the law courts and the Chancery to York in 1298 to pursue the Scottish war, and his finances were badly strained. In his absence Westminster drifted into disorder. The hereditary keeper of the palace, John Shenche, took up quarters there with his deputy William of the Palace and gathered a band of boon companions, including some of the monks of the slack and sleepy abbey, whose abbot Walter of Wenlock was old and weak. The hero of the affair is Richard of Pudlicott, a former clerk turned wandering trader in wool, cheese and butter. He was arrested in Flanders for the king's debts, escaped, and settled in London. Through the palace keeper's circle he came to know the abbey well. He first stole silver plate from the monks' refectory, then, when the money was spent, resolved to rob the king's treasury, which Edward valued at £100,000. The crypt had a single access from the south transept, close to the sacristy. Among Pudlicott's companions was the sacrist, Adam of Warfield. Tout compares two accounts of the crime. The sworn juries of London, Westminster, Middlesex and Surrey blamed various monks and palace officers, chiefly William of the Palace and Adam Warfield, and pointed to masons and carpenters and to the churchyard as the route for the loot. Pudlicott's own confession claimed that he alone bored through a thirteen-foot wall over the winter, and hid the hole with hempseed sown in St. Margaret's churchyard. Tout finds this incredible. He believes Pudlicott entered with help from Adam of Warfield, and that many confederates, monks, servants, palace custodians and city goldsmiths among them, took part. Suspicion arose when pieces of plate and foreign coin turned up in the Thames, the churchyard, hedgerows, Kentish Town and money-changers' hands. The king, then at Linlithgow, appointed commissioners on 6 June. John Droxford, keeper of the wardrobe, opened the crypt on 20 June and drew up an inventory, and much of the treasure was found under the beds of Shenche and William, and in the lodgings of Pudlicott and of Adam and other monks. Pudlicott was arrested on 25 June. The abbot, forty-eight monks and others were sent to the Tower, and most were later bailed. A second commission, including Sir Roger Brabazon and William Bereford, sat from November. In March 1304 William of the Palace and five other laymen were hanged. The clerical offenders raised the problem of clerical privilege. After Edward returned in triumph in 1305, and with the outrage on pope Boniface at Anagni fresh in mind, the monks were released. The Westminster chronicler Robert of Reading presented the one-robber version, and other monastic writers repeated it. Shenche was restored to his office, and only Pudlicott was hanged, in October 1305, despite his clergy. The abbey remained quarrelsome, and the chief treasury of the wardrobe was moved to the Tower of London. Tout concludes that the case shows the slackness of mediaeval people, while warning against sweeping generalisations about the middle ages.

By T.F. Tout · First published 1916 · Genre: Medieval history, Historical true crime, Microhistory · 9,307 words

First lines

The burglary, about which I have to speak to-night, I did not discover by ransacking the picturesque and humorous annals of mediaeval crime. I came across the details of this incident when seeking for something quite different, for it happened when I was attempting to investigate the technicalities of the history of the administrative department known as the king's Wardrobe. But so human a story did something to cheer up the weary paths of Dryasdust, and he hands it on to you in the hope that you will not find it absolutely wanting in instruction and amusement. Now my burglary was the burglary of the king's treasury, or more precisely, of the treasury of the king's wardrobe, within the precincts of the abbey at Westminster. The date of the event was 24April, 1303. More precisely, according to the chief burglar's own account, it was on the evening of that day that the burglar effected an entrance into the king's treasury, from which, he tells us he escaped, with as much booty as he could carry, on the morning of 26April. Who had committed the burglary is a problem which was not quite settled, even by the trials which followed the offence, though these trials resulted in the hanging of some half a dozen people at least. But after the hanging of the half-dozen, it was still maintained in some quarters that the burglary was committed by one robber only, though charges of complicity in his guilt were in common fame extended to something like a hundred individuals. And in this case common fame was not, I think, at fault.

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medieval England · Westminster Abbey · royal treasury theft · 1303 burglary · Edward I · king's Wardrobe · crypt · chapter house · Westminster palace · monastic corruption · clerical privilege · Richard of Pudlicott

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