James Bothwell

The management of position: Alice Perrers, Edward III, and the creation of a landed estates, 1362-1377

The role of royal mistress in the Middle Ages was mainly a passive one. Her position, her wealth, and even her fate were dependent upon the will of the king. There was, however, at least one notable exception. Alice Perrers, the mistress of Edward III, transcended her designated place early on in her career to become one of the wealthiest landowning women in later fourteenth-century England. More importantly, unlike many male royal favourites of the period, she did so primarily not through direct royal intervention but of her own initiative—making free use of the funds available to the king, but letting her own business sense determine the form their conversion into landed wealth would take. Indeed, while Perrers obviously used her position vis a vis Edward III to promote her own interests, the lands she acquired without direct royal patronage can nonetheless be shown to form the vast majority of her properties upon her forfeiture in 1377. This article examines the main features of one of the fastest, and...

'Until he receive the equivalent in land and rent': the use of annuities as endowment patronage in the reign of Edward III

This article investigates Edward III’s use of annuities for endowing a number of men promoted, or to be promoted, to the parliamentary peerage. It examines the two types of annuity Edward used–those paid through the exchequer and those paid direct from royal revenue sources–and the way he used them. Exchequer annuities are shown to have been somewhat more reliable–though, for a number of reasons, most of Edward’s ‘new men’ seem to have preferred the source-based variety. More importantly, it argues that Edward’s use of annuities was directed primarily not at bettering permanently the position of many of these men and their families, but rather towards increasing royal control–dependent, as annuitants were, upon the king’s continuing favour. Through this programme Edward III was able to influence the composition and behaviour of the parliamentary peerage to a point where his rule has become a byword for good royal/noble relations in the later middle ages.