He may be one of the lesser known figures in medieval English history, but for drama and romance, and a vivid insight into knighthood and aristocracy in the 13th-14th Century, the story of Ralph de Monthermer has few equals.
He first appears in historical accounts as a squire of Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester and Hertford and one of the leading magnates of Edward I’s England. After the earl’s death in 1295, he fell in love with and secretly married his widow Joan of Acre, the king’s daughter. ‘When notice of such a foolish deed came to the Lord King,’ says the chronicler William Rishanger, ‘he, burning with exceeding fury, caused him to be arrested and imprisoned at Bristowe’ (Bristol Castle).
Joan got to put her case to her father in July 1297. According to John Trokelowe, a monk of St Albans, one of the leading nobles present ‘thundered into the ears of the Lord King’ that the marriage was dishonourable, as so many great men sought his daughter’s hand. Joan herself then answered: “It is not considered disgraceful or shameful for a great and powerful earl to join himself in lawful marriage with a poor woman of low rank; so, on the other hand, it is neither reprehensible nor difficult for a countess to promote an able young man.” Her answer, Trokelowe says, ‘pleased the Lord King, and thus his indignation and that of his magnates was soothed.’
Arms of Ralph de Monthermer.
Source: Wappenwiki.
King Edward subsequently ordered Ralph released from prison, and recognised his union with Joan. Within the year, Monthermer had been granted by right of marriage the title Earl of Gloucester, thereby transforming him into one of the most powerful magnates in England. He went on to provide distinguished service in the wars in Scotland, fighting at the battles of Falkirk and Bannockburn and the sieges of Stirling and Caerlaverock. A verse description of the latter conflict provides a brief resume of his experiences: ‘[He] achieved his love / After great doubts and fears / When God gave him deliverance / For the Countess of Gloucester / For whom he had endured great sufferings (...) Yet he made no bad appearance / When arrayed with his own arms / Yellow with a green eagle / His name was Rauf de Monthermer.’
Beyond the basics of the story, however, Ralph’s background remains obscure. Most modern accounts describe him as a squire of the Earl of Gloucester, but as far as I can tell no contemporary source uses the equivalent period term (armiger, scutifer, or valletus). Instead he is described by chroniclers simply as a ‘soldier’ (milite), or ‘servant’ (serviente). Even by the late 13th century, terms for men at arms, squires and military servants could be rather interchangeable, so all we can be sure about was that Ralph was not a knight; he was later knighted by the king at Joan’s request. Nor was he wealthy; Trokelowe calls him ‘a certain soldier, elegant in form but thin in substance’ (quendam militem, elegantem forma sed tenuem substantia).
Contemporary sources nevertheless provide a few clues to his origins, although not entirely straightforward ones. Walter of Guisborough calls him ‘a simple soldier named Radulph de Montermere, a native of the bishopric of Durham, who had served with [Joan’s] husband, the earl’. Rishanger introduces Ralph as ‘a simple man, in the service of lord Eymer,’ for whom Joan had ‘procured, before their betrothal, military arms’ [i.e. knighthood]. The Chronicle of Bury St Edmunds, meanwhile, says that Joan married ‘a youth called Ralph, born in the Marches, surnamed Mowhermer.’ This seems rather contradictory at first glance; how could Ralph be a native of the Bishopric of Durham and born in the (Welsh) Marches? How could he have been in the service of both Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, and Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke?
As the quotes above suggest, medieval scribes were characteristically uncertain about the spelling of Ralph’s name; it appears elsewhere as Mowhermer, Meinhermer, Moynhermer, Monte Hermerii and Monte Hermery. The man himself appears to have spelled his name Rauf de Mehermer, or so it appears in one of his own legal records. His entry in The Complete Peerage suggests a relation to an obscure Northumberland family named de Mesnilhermer. They are mentioned in the Book of Fees of c.1242 as holding the manor of Tunstall, of the Barony of Bolam. The name probably derives from Ménil-Hermei in Normandy, and the Northumberland Plea Rolls of the era provide a familiar-sounding range of spellings: Meynhermer, Meinnildhermer, Menullhereman, Meisnil Hermeri, Mesne Hermer, Mesnill Heremeri and Meysnehermer. In 1198 a William de Mesnilhermer witnessed a contract at Finchdale Priory, only a few miles from Durham. So the northern connection mentioned by Walter of Guisborough may have a firm origin; or, perhaps, Walter just knew of the Durham family and assumed a link.
But Sir Ralph also seems to have connections with another knightly family, and one closer to the Welsh Marches. The Bluets held the manor of Lackham in Wiltshire, besides other estates that included Raglan and Hinton Bluet, held of the Earls of Gloucester. A certain John Bluet is described as a cousin of Ralph de Monthermer, and successive generations of Bluets were named Ralph. Could his mother, perhaps, have been the daughter of a Bluet, and Ralph himself named for his grandfather? At least two men named Bluet, one a knight, appear in the service of Joan de Valence, Countess of Pembroke, during the 1290s. Her son Aymer de Valence, who became earl on his father’s death in 1296, often spent time with the household. He was probably at Goodrich Castle, close to Raglan, during at least one of Joan of Acre’s visits in 1296-97. So perhaps we have links here with both the Marches and with the ‘Lord Eymer’ mentioned by Rishanger? Could Ralph originally have taken service with Gilbert de Clare, overlord of his mother’s estates, and subsequently transferred his allegiance to Aymer de Valence?
(Incidentally, I did wonder whether his name might relate to Gilbert de Clare’s manor of Merthyr Mawr, on the coast of Glamorgan. The place is spelled as Martelmaur in the earl’s inquest post mortem, and elsewhere as Merthirmimor and Matthelemaur; the similarity is tempting, but the consistent ‘hermer’ ending of the Northumberland family’s name, and the note in Guisborough, would seem to weigh more heavily!)
The Complete Peerage claims that Monthermer was 63 at the time of his death, in April 1325, which would have made him 35 or so when he married Joan in 1297. The reference provided is the Itineraria of the 15th Century antiquarian William Worcester, page 81 in the Naismith edition of 1778. That particular edition, however, has only the note “1325: Radulphus Monthermer comes Gloucestriae obiit… in conventu Sancti Francisci apud Sarum sepelitur.” The original manuscript (now available online) does not feature the ellipsis: nor does it appear to mention an age of death.
More contemporary sources, meanwhile, describe Ralph as a youth or young man (iuvene) at the time of his marriage to Joan. The Latin term was rather elastic, but probably would not have been used to describe a man in his mid thirties. Perhaps, then, de Monthermer was somewhat younger than that. Without a firmer source for his date of birth or age at death, however, we cannot be sure.
A suggestion, this time repeated in the Dictionary of National Biography, that Ralph was of illegitimate birth also appears to rest on dubious foundations. The source is a note in the Annales Londienses about the funeral of John de Warenne, Earl of Surrey, in 1304. Those attending include: Comes Gloucestriœ, J. Bastard qui dicitur, Radulfus Heanmer, comes de Warewyk et dominus Hugo de Veer, Henricus de Percy, cum eorum militibus interfuerunt. But the ‘J. Bastard so called’ is a separate person to the Earl of Gloucester who precedes him in the list, and was probably an illegitimate son of John de Warenne himself.
Monthermer’s distinctive arms, or à l'aigle de vert, membres et becquez de gules, appear in several heraldic rolls of the period, and were adopted as part of the arms of his descendants. The Complete Peerage mentions that the same arms were borne by the Lyndsey family of Northumberland, although they do not appear on earlier rolls and may postdate Monthermer. The Mesnilhermers do not appear to have left any record of their own device. The Bluets, however, seem to have changed their arms c.1297 to a red spread eagle, sometimes with two heads, on gold. Could the newly-ennobled Ralph de Monthermer have adopted a variant of his mother’s family arms? By c.1312 a Walter de Bluet was using three green spread eagles and a chevron on a gold field, although by then he could have been adapting the arms of his famous relative.
From these scraps, it might be possible to reconstruct a speculative background story for Ralph de Monthermer. He was perhaps born around 1270, and would therefore still be a ‘young man’ when he married Joan. His father was named de Mesnilhermer and came from a Northumberland family holding lands in the Bishopric of Durham; he moved south and took service with the Earl of Gloucester, marrying the daughter of one of the earl’s tenants, Ralph Bluet. Their son was named for his maternal grandfather, and when he came of age, he too entered the service of Earl Gilbert, as a ‘simple soldier’, or man at arms in the mighty de Clare retinue.
Ralph might first have encountered the earl’s young wife Joan of Acre during his service with Gilbert de Clare, although presumably from a distance. At some point, he seems to have transferred to the retinue of Aymer de Valence, son of the other great magnate of the southern Marches, the Earl of Pembroke. Later, he rejoined the household of the Countess of Gloucester, now a widow. Joan requested that Ralph be knighted by her father the king, and soon afterwards the two of them were married in secret.
The marriage, or at least the betrothal, may have happened by January 1297. On the 29th of that month the Calendar of Close Rolls records an order, drafted at Castle Acre in Norfolk, “to take into the king’s hands for certain reasons… all the lands, goods and chattels of Joan, countess of Gloucester and Hertford, in England and Wales and in the marches of Wales.” The king’s official is warned “not to omit to do this as he loves himself and his things and wishes to escape the king’s wrath, certifying the king without delay as to how he has executed this order.”
Edward, however, does not seem to have believed that his daughter was legally married at this time. On March 16th he was still trying to arrange a match between the widowed countess and Amadeus, Count of Savoy. Only in late July, during a trip to St Albans to try and reach an agreement with his own rebellious barons, did the king finally accept the facts. The first Parliamentary Writ referring to Ralph de Monthermer as Joan’s husband is dated July 31st. Two days later, both Ralph and Joan did homage to the king at the royal palace at Eltham, and were pardoned and granted possession of their lands and titles in return (as Rishanger says) for the service of fifty soldiers in Flanders, “and the Lord King afterwards loved him very much.”
Whatever the truth might be about the origins of Ralph de Monthermer, he was certainly an able man, skilled in warfare and presumably very charismatic too. He was also, of course, very lucky. His romantic escapade with the king’s daughter could very easily have come to a sudden and bloody conclusion. He perhaps owed his survival to Joan’s powers of persuasion, and her courage in confronting her wrathful father and his arrogant nobles. But the situation in the kingdom at that precise moment may have helped too: with King Edward facing an uprising by his most powerful magnates, the chance to place the Earldom of Gloucester in the hands of a relative nobody, a young man who owed his marriage and his life to the king’s good graces, and with no connection to the great houses of the nobility, must have weighed heavily in Monthermer’s favour. He would go on to repay that favour in full, up to and beyond his wife’s death in 1307, remaining to the end a stalwart defender of both Edward I and Edward II. But that, of course, is another story.