5 - Edward III's Enforcers: The King's Sergeants-at-Arms in the Localities

Summary

The king's sergeants-at-arms have, by and large, been overlooked by late medieval English historians; what attention they have attracted has focused firstly on their function as the king's bodyguard, and secondly on the infamous role they played in the reign of Richard II. So far as the former is concerned, the Household Ordinance of 1318 prescribed that there should be thirty sergeants, each one armed, equipped with three horses and resident at court. Four of them were to sleep outside the king's chamber at night, and the remainder within earshot in the hall; when the king travelled, all were to precede him on horseback. It is clear from their actions during Richard's reign, however, that in practice their fulfilment of these stipulated duties was compromised by their being sent away from the king into the localities on various commissions. It is their performance of these local commissions that has really brought them to the notice of historians, for it was this that gave rise to their infamy. The deeply unpopular sergeants John Legg and Richard de Imworth, the former a tax-collector and the latter the governor of the Marshalsea prison, were both targets of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. In 1387 the king used his sergeants in a vain attempt to raise forces against the Appellants, and one of them, Thomas Usk, was consequently executed by the Merciless Parliament. In 1390, 1394 and 1397, Parliament complained that the sergeants, more numerous than hitherto and allegedly extorting money by colour of their office, were oppressing the shires, and during Richard's tyranny from 1397 the sergeants were, according to Tout, ‘ubiquitous’ in the localities as agents of the closest royal control, collecting money, requisition- ing ships and men, serving on local commissions, ‘and in all sorts of ways … [interfering] with the course of local administration and justice'. Given- Wilson has shown that in the period before the tyranny one of them at least, Richard de Markly, routinely performed similar functions in the shires.

But without the lure of infamy to draw historians, the sergeants-at-arms’ local activities have remained otherwise hidden; in short, where they pro- voked little complaint we have overlooked them. This essay will make a start at redressing that omission by exploring the role the sergeants played in the rule of Edward III in the counties.