The Island of Lundy and the Treaties of York (1464) and Nottingham (1484): Lordship, Sovereignty, and Politics in Fifteenth-Century International Relations

ABSTRACT

The Anglo-Scottish treaties of York (1464) and Nottingham (1484) include exceptions for Lorn (Scotland) and Lundy island (Bristol Channel) in the provisions they made for peace between the parties. The exception for Lundy allows for explorations of lordship and local privilege across the territories of the crown in the fifteenth century. In 1464, Lundy had recently passed from the control of the Lancastrian Butler family, and the exception reflects contests in the Irish Sea similar to those that led to the exemption for Lorn. In 1484, one of those negotiating was Henry, earl of Northumberland, and his contested claim to the lordship of the island explains his response to claims from other interests, interacting with the politics of Richard III’s reign and relationships with France and Brittany. Local and regional lordship could still manifest on the diplomatic stage, which was not yet the preserve of specialist servants of centralised states.

KEYWORDS:

• England
• Scotland
• Irish Sea
• Edward IV
• Richard III
• diplomacy
• lordship
• Wars of the Roses

Those who negotiated the treaty of York in 1464 between England and Scotland, providing for fifteen years’ peace between the parties, largely followed the precedent set in 1449 and the agreement made that year at Durham. One notable addition was a clause which excepted from the truce the territory of Lorn on Scotland’s west coast and the island of Lundy in the Bristol Channel – an exception which remained in place in the treaty’s successors, most notably that agreed at Nottingham in 1484 for a three-year truce, and through succeeding agreements for what in the end amounted to half a century. While there have been recent suggestions as to the reasons for the exemption for Lorn, there have been none for that of Lundy: what was it that inspired those involved to make such an exception for an island which is only 5 km long by 1 km wide, and about 450 hectares in extent, and what can the history of such a small island lordship tell us about the nature of power in relation to the crown during the late medieval period?

In the early 1460s, Scottish support for the recently deposed Henry VI of England was encouraged by the handover of Berwick-upon-Tweed and the promise of more, including Carlisle, offset by increasingly challenging threats from the forces of Edward IV, especially under the leadership of Richard Neville, earl of Warwick and his brother John, Lord Montagu. Although in January 1463 an expedition successfully relieved the siege of the Lancastrian garrison at Alnwick, the pact between Edward and the French king Louis XI made at Hesdin in October of that year removed a key foundation of the potential for future Lancastrian-Scottish success against the English. Edward’s regime had also been swift to make alliances with Scottish magnates, with an impact especially in the west: James, ninth earl of Douglas confirmed his support in the treaty of Westminster-Ardtornish in February 1462, which also drew John of Islay, earl of Ross and the Lordship of the Isles into alignment with Edward. Mary of Gueldres, the young king James III’s mother, attempted to balance the commitments made to the Lancastrians and their French backers with a realism at the increasing solidity of the new Yorkist regime, and even though she died in December 1463 and the initiative in Scottish policy passed to Bishop James Kennedy who was more directly associated with the backing for Henry and his queen, Margaret of Anjou, a treaty was made at York on 1 June 1464, committing both sides to fifteen years’ peace.¹

Fifteen years before, at Durham, on 15 November 1449, a truce between England and Scotland had seen the parties agree terms on topics such as the arrangements for individuals to pass under safe-conduct from one kingdom to the other to prosecute judicially those who had robbed or otherwise wronged them which were to become routine in subsequent treaties. This truce had come at the end of a very difficult phase of defeats for the English, in perhaps the most intense fighting since 1416-17; Henry VI himself had travelled as far north as Durham in the autumn of 1448 as the regime sought to assert control, but the Scots proved more than a match for English efforts. Most notably in a defeat in a pitched battle on the river Sark (sometimes called the Battle of Lochmaben Stone) in November 1448, English initiatives were increasingly poorly resourced and ineffective.² The keeper of the privy seal, Adam Moleyns, himself led the delegation which negotiated the terms of the truce, and although this was an agreement made in conditions of significant English weakness, and although it took until 8 June in the following year for James II to ratify the agreement, its terms stood and were renewed across the following years. In general, and specifically in relation to issues associated with the sea, these were largely reproduced in 1464, but there were some significant differences, including the clause relating to Lorn and Lundy.³ As stated in its successor in 1484, the treaty was to apply neither “to the lordship of Lorn in the kingdom of Scotland nor to the lordship of Lundy in the kingdom of England, but the lordship and island aforesaid will in no way be understood to be included in those abstentions from wars”.⁴

There has been a recent suggestion as to the reasons for the exemption made in 1484 for Lorn, a maritime territory on Scotland's west coast, on the eastern shore of Loch Linnhe and the Firth of Lorn, bordered to the north by Loch Leven, and with eastern and southern borders following the line of Loch Awe, Loch Avich, and Loch Melfort. Stephen Boardman has explained the context for Colin Campbell, first earl of Argyll’s response to the potential for conflict there, given earlier intervention in the area as a result of his involvement with John Stewart, lord of Lorn. From 1460 feuding in Lorn among the MacDougall of Dunollie kindred drew in Donald Balloch, and therefore the power of Clan Donald south, and Campbell responded. By 1484, on which Boardman concentrates, Campbell’s control was established, but war over the future of the Lordship of the Isles, he suggests, disturbed the area such that it was appropriate to exclude Lorn from the truce.⁵ No equivalent explanation has been advanced for Lundy, and a possible parallel context of noble power politics involving extensive territorial lordship with implications extending beyond the boundaries of England itself is one which has only recently begun to be explored by historians of the period. This exploration will nonetheless allow us to consider some themes in the extent and distinctiveness of lordship and local privilege and autonomy which have been developed recently,⁶ and of the ways in which power and politics operated across the North Atlantic archipelago. It will be suggested here that challenges to the analytical framework most associated with Rees Davies and Robin Frame in their work on the archipelago before c. 1340 as ultimately Anglo-centric, which are still more appropriate of what is sometimes called the “Plantagenet” model for interactions in the two centuries after c. 1340, may helpfully be addressed by decentring the English elements of those territorial complexes. This is in the face of the recent tendency to see “national shutters coming down” around England from the middle of the fourteenth century, around the crown and royal kin, an Anglo-centric parliament, nationally centralising legal and administrative machinery, and a court-centred political and elite social system. The looseness of the territorial assemblage meant Westminster and London were not necessarily preponderant in those considerations of interactions across the archipelago, and Lundy as one very small part of a “marginal” set of lordships helps to illustrate that perspective. Whatever role the intrusion of English law and institutions, the extending role of the core royal kin, and Anglo-centric networks of communications and service might have played before c. 1340, they were not necessarily dominant thereafter. This will be done in connection with a discussion of the practice of diplomacy in the period, and the degree to which it had become the preserve of specialists and servants of a centralised state.⁷

Further, although the treaty of 1464 and its major successor which carried forward the exemption for Lorn and Lundy, made at Nottingham in 1484, have been subject to some scholarly attention, and diplomacy more generally has been considered, there has in practice been little detailed scrutiny of interactions between this element of kingship and other aspects of political management. There is barely any account of Scottish policy in many studies of Henry VI,⁸ and little more in major recent examinations of the kingship of Edward IV and Richard III. For example, Charles Ross’s major biographies of both Edward IV and Richard III do not place significant weight on either king’s Scottish policy, presenting Edward as very reluctant to campaign in the north, and reflecting but little on the implications of the more active involvement there of noblemen such as the earl of Warwick and his kinsmen. More surprisingly given Ross’s acknowledgement of the Richard’s interests in the north of England, he tends to downplay others’ accolades for Richard’s Scottish military and diplomatic initiatives.⁹ Michael Hicks in his important recent study of Richard as The Self-Made King makes the case for the monarch’s close and purposeful oversight of policy, including foreign policy, but although the 1484 treaty of Nottingham features in that case, building on previous more specific accounts by Alexander Grant of “Richard III and Scotland”, and Tony Pollard of Richard’s government of the north of England, elements of the treaty of which this is one continue to pose important challenges to our understanding of the interactions between Richard and his leading noble supporters.¹⁰

We can address these questions by tracing the ownership of the island, and in doing so suggesting it was considered valuable by some of the more powerful men in fifteenth-century England. In particular, we will consider not just the island’s practical material resources, but also its reputation as a particularly powerful lordship of very high standing. Then in the context of the 1460s and 1480s, Lundy will be seen to illustrate the ways in which such a small island lordship that was not in royal hands could still intrude into the politics and diplomacy of England and its neighbours, suggesting the interconnectedness of developments in the Bristol Channel with Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Lundy illustrates very clearly the power of lords and lordship impacting across traditional frontiers in that environment, to an extent with the acceptance of kings but not simply at their behest.

Lundy had achieved brief prominence first as the lair of the de Mariscos, allies of the Marshals in their feud with Maurice fitz Gerald and others in the 1230s and 1240s, and then again in the dying days of Edward II’s reign as he and Hugh Despenser the younger fled from Chepstow in search of an island refuge but were driven back by storms. In narratives of these events, Lundy had an iconic status as an isolated rock beyond the reach of the laws and even the social norms of England: in Geoffrey le Baker’s account of Edward’s fall his association with Lundy was linked to the gannets of the island, known as Ganymede’s birds, and hence by extension with homosexuality. It could be that this extraordinary status was ended by Henry III’s eventual victory over the de Mariscos, a conclusion confirmed by the symbolically vain efforts of Edward and his favourite.¹¹ The clause in the treaty of 1464 suggests a need to revise this view.

In the aftermath of Edward and Despenser’s fall, Lundy passed through the hands of a succession of prominent noblemen, many with important military and naval roles: Edward III’s favourite William de Montacute, Sir Guy Brian (who served as Admiral of the West), Richard II’s half-brother John Holland, duke of Exeter, Robert Lovell (closely associated with campaigning in Wales under Henry of Monmouth), and eventually, in 1438, James Butler, earl of Ormond and of Wiltshire.¹² For Butler, with his extensive interests both in South West England and in Ireland, the waters of the Bristol Channel would have had a particular relevance. He inherited the significant Butler estates in southern Ireland in 1452 and had a ten-year grant of the lieutenancy of Ireland from May 1453; his outlook as a landowner operating across St George’s Channel was epitomised by his petition after the battle of St Albans in 1455 either to resume his place beside the king or reside on his estates in Ireland.¹³

Butler’s close alignment with the court meant that when the crisis of the confrontation between Richard, duke of York and his enemies in the court party finally came in 1459-61, Lundy’s lord James Butler was a totemic figure. His appearance, with troops who probably included Irish, French and Bretons in their number, alongside Jasper Tudor in Wales in the period immediately before the battle of Mortimer’s Cross in February 1461 suggest the importance of his role in the South West and its maritime connections via the Bristol Channel towards Ireland and France.¹⁴ Such was his reputation that even his capture, execution and attainder after the Lancastrian defeat at Towton in March 1461 did not lift the challenge that the Butlers represented to the new regime of Edward IV.¹⁵ This was the first major interruption in more than a century to a tradition of inheritance in the lordship of Lundy, but James Butler’s legacy is to be found in the immediate selection of a recipient for his lands, in future interests there, and in the provisions of the York treaty of 1464. James Butler’s brother John succeeded to the earldom of Ormond, and he successfully invaded Ireland in 1462, capturing Waterford and his family’s lands, primarily in the Irish south east in its hinterland, until defeated at Piltown in the summer of the year.¹⁶ Even then, John Butler reappeared in Ireland in 1463, making a grant at Clonmell on 7 June as of the 41st regnal year of Henry VI using the title of earl of Ormond and lord of the liberty of Tipperary, and took steps to secure his interests in his Irish lands, only finally leaving for exile, initially in Portugal, in August/September 1464.¹⁷ In the early 1460s, this made the area a potential route for invasion by Lancastrians, which was a constant subject of speculation and rumour.¹⁸ Peter Crooks has referred to the Butlers’ as a “composite lordship”, on the model of the composite monarchies now familiar in historical discussion, and one undermined by “serious structural imbalance”, but although it was relative atypical of this period it did highlight the potential for these structures to exist and the responses they might prompt.¹⁹ Brendan Smith has ably mapped how this conflict illustrated the connections between the English South West and Ireland, in particular Waterford, given the significance of the connection between the two ports for trade and wider social and cultural exchanges.²⁰ Bristol’s position as England’s second city during these years was founded in part on an active trade that included consistently large quantities of Irish foodstuffs, cloth and other materials.²¹ Lundy’s position in the midst of this channel of interaction has not hitherto been appreciated, but the question of its ownership in the early 1460s was thrown into sharp focus by the struggle which was being fought out across the south west of England, south Wales and the south west of Ireland. In practice, as we shall see, the implications of its strategic location opened wider.

Edward’s choice of a new owner for Lundy was William Neville, created earl of Kent in 1461: the island was part of a large grant of lands made on 1 August 1462. There was a continuing logic to this on two fronts: first, Neville’s new estates were focussed in the West Country, mainly otherwise being derived from those of the Courtenay family, and second he was an active military and naval commander, being made admiral in July 1462. He was raiding in Brittany and further south along the French coast that summer. William Neville had, amongst other things, played a prominent role in the military and diplomatic initiatives at the start of the reign to develop relationships with influential figures around the Irish Sea, in the Hebrides and in the north of Ireland.²² A grant of Lundy mapped naturally to this sphere of influence in the English South West and beyond into the Irish Sea.

Neville was, however, not to enjoy this position for long. He died on the Scottish border on 9 January 1463, and Edward IV then granted the island to a potentially even more powerful lord, the elder of his two surviving brothers, George, duke of Clarence.²³ Although at this point still a minor and therefore not immediately in control of these estates, Clarence was heir to the throne, and was provided with successively greater endowments through the 1460s, with lands which came ultimately almost entirely from the hands of confiscated Lancastrians. The grant of Lundy was made on 25 January 1463, only a few weeks after the death of Neville. As with Neville, this grant formed part of an endowment which had a concentration in the South West (as well as in Clarence’s case in Lincolnshire, South Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire), and therefore complemented other estates around the Bristol Channel. Clarence was also made titular head of the administration in Ireland, as Lord Lieutenant, in 1462. The territorial focus was in the South West, based in the main on former Butler, Courtenay and Montagu lands.²⁴ Once again, therefore, Lundy was part of an assemblage controlled by one of the greatest men of the realm, and especially one of the most powerful in the South West; but now the tendency for territorial concentration of lordship observed by D. A. L. Morgan and Charles Ross in their work on Edward IV’s approach to kingship and recently reemphasised by James Ross was accentuating this situation.²⁵ Further, this was territorial concentration with implications beyond the borders of England itself. As 1463 turned into 1464, as the new year saw a Scottish parliament mandating in January peace negotiations which Bishop Kennedy found no support from France in resisting, as the Lancastrians in the far north of England were destroyed in battles at Hedgeley Moor (April) and Hexham (May), and as the Neville-dominated English regime moved to respond, the specific terms of the peace were to be shaped by those who were directly involved in making it. Those negotiating the treaty of June 1464, who were led on the English side by George Neville, bishop of Exeter and his brothers Richard, earl of Warwick and John, earl of Northumberland and Lord Montagu, and on the Scottish side by Colin Campbell, earl of Argyll and Andrew de Durisdeer, bishop of Glasgow,²⁶ were therefore responding to a situation in which Lundy’s ownership had recently been transferred from the Butlers to William Neville and then on to Clarence in his minority and might yet be challenged with Butler still active in Ireland, and in conditions in which contest for control of Ireland and the Irish Sea more generally was possible. While the Nevilles were particularly well placed to understand the border contexts for the treaty, including that in the west around the Irish Sea, on the Scottish side Norman Macdougall has noted the prominence in the negotiation of Colin Campbell, who was in a good position to do the same from that perspective.²⁷

The treaty of 1464 was extended in 1465 to nineteen years’ duration. The duke of Clarence’s dominance in the English south west was increased in the division of the Warwick / Salisbury inheritance from 1471 consequent on his marriage to Isabel, one of the daughters of Richard Neville: Clarence received the properties in the West Midlands, South and South West, along with a share of those in the east of England. Under age at the point of the initial grant of Lundy, in 1466 Clarence had taken control of his affairs, although he was then only seventeen years old, and was thenceforward an active participant in the turbulent politics of the reign.²⁸ The terms of the York treaty were formally renewed in 1474 as a result of the negotiations of that year which resulted in a marriage treaty between Edward IV’s daughter Cecily and James III’s heir, Prince James, duke of Rothesay. That treaty was silent on the specifics of the clauses being renewed, however, and so while in the mood of peace which characterised the mid- and later 1470s there was no overt restatement of the special situation of Lundy or Lorn, it was continued.²⁹

On Clarence’s attainder in February 1478, the island again became the property of the crown, and, once again, little time elapsed before it was granted away. This time it was granted in isolation, however, without a group of properties to accompany it. The recipient was John Wykes, who received it on 12 March 1479 for his good service in England, Ireland and Wales, and beyond the sea, and in recompense for £115 6s. 8d. due from the king.³⁰ Wykes was by then an esquire for the body to Edward IV and close enough to the king for Edward to have served as godfather to his son Edmund.³¹ Wykes could trace his service back before Edward’s accession to the throne, and to the king’s father Richard, duke of York.³² John’s initial grants at the very start of the reign find him already an usher of the king’s chamber and took him both to the South West and to East Anglia and especially Norfolk, where he was a power in the lordship of Rising and was added to the commission of the peace from late in 1463. As such, he was a contact of the Paston family, and someone who seemed a possible support at Court in the nervous early months of the reign.³³ But his family came from Gloucestershire, where his father Thomas had been a J.P. very briefly in 1455, and John returned there on Thomas’s death in 1473, joining the bench beginning with the commission of November 1474.³⁴ Wykes’ trading activities seem to have been widespread, apparently resulting in him having been seised from a Catalan ship by hostile Genoese forces between Rhodes and Alexandria at some point, probably during Edward’s reign.³⁵

Wykes’ interests on the banks of the Severn and in and around Bristol made Lundy a logical acquisition for him. In the contested circumstances of Richard III’s accession to the throne in the summer of 1483, however, the new king’s need for the support of Henry Percy, fourth earl of Northumberland meant that Wykes’ hold on the island was short-lived. Even if, in the relative security of his later years, a king like Edward IV felt that a territory like Lundy might pass into the hands of someone who was primarily a close royal household servant, the political realities of territorial lordships across the archipelago would not long permit this. Wykes personally does not seem to have found particular favour in the new regime. He was a subsidy commissioner in Gloucestershire in the spring and summer of 1483, but other than a presence on a commission of array there in August 1484, he is not prominent in subsequent months. Having served on the commission of the peace in the county of September 1483, he was dropped from that of December 1483 and all subsequently.³⁶ The evidence also suggests that by 1484 he had taken on significant borrowing and was suffering as a result of this burden of debt.³⁷ Meanwhile, on 1 December 1483 Richard licensed Northumberland to enter a large group of properties, including Lundy.³⁸ Northumberland was a key supporter of Richard’s seizure of the throne, leading the northern military forces which backed him in the tense weeks as Richard outmanoeuvred his opponents. In return, he received generous grants of office (including that of great chamberlain of England) and land, and in particular he was supported by Richard in taking control of the Brian inheritance in the South West and South Wales, of which Lundy was part, and to which he had a claim through his mother, Eleanor, Baroness Poynings (1428-84), daughter of Sir Richard Poynings (d. 1429). Eleanor’s great-grandmother (the wife of Sir Richard Poynings, d. 1387) was Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Guy Brian (d. 1390) by his first wife.³⁹ Richard’s grant to Northumberland does not seem to have been confirmed with letters patent, but as J. M. W. Bean observed some at least of the Devon elements were effective as revenues were accounted for.⁴⁰

Part of the context for this action was the response by Richard to the rebellions of the autumn of 1483 usually associated with the duke of Buckingham, which saw many of the former servants of Edward IV rise against the new king and give their support to Henry, earl of Richmond as a possible alternative claimant to the throne. Richard’s policy was now to bring trusted, often northern-based, supporters into areas which had proved unreliable in October 1483. This was brought into sharp focus in Lundy in the form of Sir Edward Poynings, who carried the claim to the Brian inheritance passed to him by his father Robert Poynings of Maidstone, younger son of Robert Lord Poynings (d. 1446), in opposition to that of the Percies. Sir Edward’s father had been killed at the second battle of St Albans in 1461, when Edward was just an infant. His fortunes had seemed to rise with the support of the connections made via his mother’s remarriage, to Sir George Browne, a trusted courtier of Edward IV. But those connections had led him into rebellion alongside Browne in 1483, and so he was one of those who ended up in Brittany with Henry of Richmond. Poynings fled with Henry from Brittany to France in 1484, and was from then on a prominent military leader as Henry took the English throne in 1485, through Henry’s life, and further into the early part of Henry VIII’s reign. For Northumberland in late 1483 and 1484 in Lundy, there was a potential threat not just from the legacy of the Wykes claim to the island but from a direct military challenge to his grip on the Brian inheritance (whether or not in the shape of a attack into the Bristol Channel directly involving Henry of Richmond himself), and it had a Breton and French context to which we will return.⁴¹

Other Brian claimants posed a challenge to Northumberland in 1483-4. Thomas, seventh earl of Ormond was the brother of the executed James. Thomas was the third son of James, fourth earl of Ormond; after the death of his eldest brother in 1461, all of the surviving brothers were attainted by the victorious Yorkists, only for this to be overturned in 1474, at which point the older surviving brother, John, became sixth earl of Ormond. Edward IV was cautious in his handling of the restored earl, however, and John did not have Lundy or the vast majority of the Butler’s English estates restored to him. John died without legitimate offspring in 1476 or 1477, and so the earldom descended on Thomas. In Richard’s reign, Thomas had some small but significant signs of favour given him, including knighthood of the Bath at the coronation in July 1483 and membership of commissions of the peace in the South West in the winter of 1484, potentially raising worrying questions for Northumberland.⁴²

The situation was further challenged by the hostility between Richard’s regime and those of the duke of Brittany and the king of France in 1483-4.⁴³ In the latter case, Richard’s inheritance was one of peace which moved towards conflict, such that where in 1483 and the early months of 1484 there had been talk of truce and even possibly treaties of peace, by the autumn of 1484 France had become the refuge and active supporter of Henry of Richmond. Meanwhile, in Brittany, Henry’s previous refuge, a power struggle between groups at Duke Francis’ court had seen initial strong Breton support for Richmond, with finance provided for his abortive invasion of England in October/November 1483. This hostility had been overcome by English military and diplomatic efforts by the end of the following summer, as the treaty of Nottingham was being composed, and for example the duke on 20 November 1484 provided reassurance to the people of the Channel Islands by publishing the papal bull of 1481 which protected them in times of peace and war.⁴⁴ But in the meanwhile, Breton raiding in particular had had a notable impact on Bristol shipping, for one. It may be that Breton memories of a “sack of Bristol” are a little exaggerated, but significant losses to shipping do seem to have been caused.⁴⁵ Most importantly, at Michaelmas 1484, the earl of Northumberland’s receiver for the groups of properties that included the island recorded that although Lundy would normally yield £22 per annum profit, in that year no-one was living there “causa guerro” - because of the war.⁴⁶ In those circumstances, nervousness about the situation in the Western approaches and the Bristol Channel around Lundy was entirely understandable.

The existence of the Wykes interest, overlapping with those of the rival Brian claimants and the recent history of conflict in the seas around Lundy, was the close context for the negotiations of 1484 leading up to the truce concluded on 21 September at Nottingham. The treaty was made after negotiations which were primarily the initiative of James III of Scotland. Richard III was strongly and personally identified with the aggressive policy towards Scotland which had seen invasion in the last months of Edward IV’s reign and, although English allies led by the Scottish king’s younger brother Alexander, duke of Albany were ousted by James in the summer of 1483, both Albany and another dissident Scottish lord, the earl of Douglas, were supported in continuing efforts to undermine James. Meanwhile, Scottish embassies arrived in England in autumn of 1483, and again in March, April and August of 1484, seeking peace. In September, at Nottingham where the English king himself was in residence, a three-year truce was agreed, with a marriage between James III’s heir and Anne de la Pole, Richard’s niece, daughter of Elizabeth duchess of Suffolk his sister.⁴⁷ When it is recognised that one of those involved in negotiating on the English side was Henry, earl of Northumberland himself, it becomes less surprising that Lundy’s position might be recognised as it was.⁴⁸ The truce specifically was not to be considered to apply “ad dominium de Lorne in regno Scotie nec ad insulam de Lundey in regno Anglie sed dominium & insula predicta intelligentur nullo modo comprehensa in hiis guerrarum abstinentiis”.⁴⁹ As in 1464, this was a mark both of the interests of an individual nobleman and the fragility of the regime expressed in the text of a document which might otherwise be expected to articulate the relationship between sovereign monarchs representing coherent territorial and political assemblages. It may be that other aspects of the treaty, and of Richard’s government of the north of England, suggest a willingness to play a more direct personal role and to use personal servants in place of established noble interests, including the Percies in the east and middle march.⁵⁰ Still, in the part played in the negotiation by Henry Percy, and in the restatement of the exclusion of Lundy from the terms of the peace, there are clear signs of continuity with the arrangements of the past. This seems to be confirmed by the parallel treatment of Lorn, which Steve Boardman suggests was due to the interest of Earl Colin Campbell, also himself involved at Nottingham, who may have foreseen a possible need for military action there, given recent conflict across the Western Isles and into the north of Ireland affecting the Lordship of the Isles. This was down to ongoing effects of the war between Angus (Aonghas) Óg and his father, John MacDonald, earl of Ross, lord of the Isles, over the future of the Lordship. Scottish royal forces had been defeated at the Battles of the Bloody Bay (near Tobermory) and of Lagabraad early in the 1480s, as Angus drew on support across the MacDomhnaill kindred.⁵¹ That Nottingham did not straightforwardly see the interactions of sovereign monarchs representing coherent territorial and political assemblages highlights the limits of “state” diplomacy in 1484 and the ways in which semi-autonomous lordship might still find an expression in such treaties.

The exemption for Lundy continued through the following decades. The truces of 1488, 1491, 1492, 1493, and 1497 retained the references to Lorn and Lundy, and the extensive evidence for Henry VII’s detailed interest in the precise terms of the 1497 negotiation suggest this was not simply the result of textual inertia.⁵² While the immediate coincidence of so many critical factors focused on Lundy that applied in 1484 might have passed by 1488, some of them remained at issue and were even strengthened.

There was a partition of the Brian inheritance in 1488, as a result of which Lundy was restored to the Butler family in the person of Thomas, seventh earl of Ormond. The earl’s close relationship with Henry VII meant that he was summoned to parliament in his own right in England after 1485. A further powerful element of instability was added to this political mix by the king’s notable support for Sir Edward Poynings, who had returned from exile shared with the new king. In 1488, Butler’s share of the Brian lands was immediate control of Lundy and the manor of Northam in Devon, and in Dorset the manor of Lower Kentcombe, with the reversions of a group of manors in Somerset and Dorset after the death of Eleanor, countess of Wiltshire, James Butler’s second wife and widow (which followed in 1501).⁵³ Bean is clear the Butler rights were based on conveyances which were “illegal and fraudulent”, and suggests that the costs of litigation and separate deals and agreements on life-interests were part of the agreement, perhaps including the fact that Henry, fifth earl of Northumberland married one of the daughters of Countess Eleanor by her second husband, Sir Robert Spencer, not long before Eleanor’s death.⁵⁴

The Percies continued to resent the loss of Lundy, though their capacity to act was limited almost immediately after the 1488 partition when Henry, earl of Northumberland was murdered on 28 April 1489. The fifth earl achieved his majority in the late 1490s. The space occupied by Lundy and its potential claimants remained complex through that decade, especially given Poynings’ role in Ireland, where Sir Edward was appointed deputy and arrived in October 1494, to find himself immediately embroiled in the struggle between the Butlers and the Fitzgerald earls of Kildare. Ormond himself had seen his direct influence in his Irish lands diminished by his absence and that of his elder brothers during the wars of the 1460s and after, and the Butler interest was impinged upon by their junior kinsman Piers Butler acting in collaboration with their Kildare rivals. Poynings was in Ireland during the attack by Perkin Warbeck on Waterford, in July 1495, and repelled the attempt to blockade the town by sea and, under the earl of Desmond, by land.⁵⁵ In the 1490s Lundy was still the centre of a contested lordship which was open to the impacts of war and rebellion from around the Irish Sea.

The instability of the position grew with the age and childlessness of the seventh earl of Ormond. It is worth noting that later resolutions of the Brian inheritance included the grant on 17 March 1511 by Thomas Butler of the manor of Northam in Devon (with other property including lands in Lower Kentcombe (Dorset)) to Anne, daughter of the fourth earl of Northumberland and wife of William, later earl of Arundel, for life, with reversion to her brother the fifth earl of Northumberland. As we have seen, Northam was a property normally paired with Lundy, and so it appears to have been a deliberate decision at this point not to grant the island back to the Percies, although the evidence suggests they continued to claim it during the rest of the decade.⁵⁶ Thomas died in 1515 leaving two daughters, Anne and Margaret, and they partitioned his estates in 1518. Lundy was in the group of properties that went to Anne, and the island passed to her son, George St Leger.⁵⁷ When the Anglo-Scottish treaty of Perpetual Peace was concluded in January 1502, the reference to Lundy was dropped.⁵⁸ The particular circumstances of 1464 and 1484 and their aftermath had now passed, and English foreign policy was less likely to pay heed to the diversity of local conditions and the pressures on individual powerful subjects of the crown: the impact of interactions of Butler and Percy and their like was less evident. Even after it had stopped being the subject of international treaties, however, Lundy continued to illustrate the status that could be held by a small but powerful island lordship. A few decades later, Sir John Eliot was able to expound at length on the island lord’s right of fortification, and David Cressy has recently ably summarised succeeding centuries in which the island the remained invisible to whatever extensions there might have been to English and British legal and administrative structures and cultures, by land and sea.⁵⁹

The events of 1464 and 1484 are a corrective to views of late medieval diplomacy and the foreign policy behind it as already straightforwardly “national” and consolidating the emerging polities of Western Europe.⁶⁰ The forces operating through that diplomacy could still represent as much a response to the concerns of particular noblemen. Anne Cardew considered the men who were appointed during the second half of the fifteenth century as commissioners and ambassadors to negotiate on Anglo-Scottish treaties and truces.⁶¹ She observed that they fell into four categories: magnates, churchmen, officials of central government, and land-holders of gentry rank. The involvement of churchmen could mean local dignitaries being engaged, but more likely they were from further afield; Cardew observed that there was usually at least one churchman on an embassy, as well as one central government official. There was also a prominent role for leading gentry families from the border region and, in the Scottish case, from further afield too, in the English occasionally from men from Yorkshire. Numbers ranged widely, from the examples of Richard, earl of Warwick and Richard Fox commissioned alone in 1461 and 1497 respectively, to the sixteen commissioners from Scotland who entered England on embassy in 1486. But Cardew’s analysis cannot but point up the importance of magnates, especially the wardens of the marches. While she says that others were generally included only in “adding stature to an embassy”, the consistent presence of major noblemen like Percy and Campbell in 1464 and 1484 could be a shaping influence. The concerns expressed in diplomacy were therefore reflective of something much closer to a more loosely structured form of multiple kingdoms and sovereign lordships, on the model argued by Steven Ellis.⁶² This was an assemblage subject to conflicting and contradictory pressures for and against more central control, as Gwilym Dodd has suggested for Wales and Ireland through the prism of the Westminster parliament.⁶³ Diplomacy and foreign policy could be responsive to the situation of an island held by an individual lord who was not a member of the royal kin and which was no more than 450 hectares in extent. Nor was it negotiated and formed by people who were already simply “state” or “national” agents, albeit of a dynastic entity.⁶⁴ A search for a national foreign policy, its relationship with some form of economic policy, and even the potential “role of public opinion in determining foreign policy”, have sometimes led to judgements that English kings “failed to understand the general determinants of a foreign policy”.⁶⁵ The agreements made at York and Nottingham and their successors, and the place of Lundy within them, suggest even in the late fifteenth century those who negotiated treaties knew all too well how complex was the field of potential conflict they sought to regulate.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to His Grace the Duke of Northumberland for permission to cite from manuscripts held in his archives at Alnwick Castle and to his archivist Mr Christopher Hunwick for his generous assistance.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tim Thornton

Tim Thornton completed undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at Oxford, the latter a DPhil on Cheshire, 1480-1560, under the supervision of Chris Haigh. Author of a number of books and articles on late medieval and early modern political history, he is a Royal Historical Society prize winner (David Berry prize, Alexander prize proxime accessit). He is currently Professor of History and Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Huddersfield.

Notes

1 Kew, The National Archives of the United Kingdom [hereafter TNA], E 39/2/25 (largely illegible – for the contents, to which scholars in the 18th century had access, see below, n. 3); D. Macpherson, J. Caley, and W. Illingworth, eds., Rotuli Scotiae in Turri Londinensi et in Domo Capitulari Westmonasteriensi Asservati (2 vols, London: Record Commission, 1814–19) [hereafter Rot. Sc.], 2: 411–13; Thomas Rymer, Foedera, 3rd ed. (10 vols, The Hague: apud Joannem Neulme, 1739–1745), 5ii: 113, 119, 121, 124; Joseph Bain, Grant G. Simpson, and James D. Galbraith, eds., Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland Preserved in the Public Record Office (5 vols, Edinburgh: H.M. General Register House, 1881–1986), 4: nos. 1341, 1350; Charles Ross, Edward IV, 2nd ed. (New Haven CT and London: Yale University Press, 1997), 46–62; Annie I. Dunlop, Life and Times of James Kennedy, Bishop of St Andrews (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1950), 215–23; C.L. Scofield, The Life and Reign of Edward the Fourth (2 vols, London: Longmans, Green, 1923), 1: 207, 214, 250–3, 287-8, 290–311, 320-6, 329–30, 333–8; Ian Petre, ‘Donald Balloch, the “Treaty of Ardtornish-Westminster” and the Macdonald Raids of 1461–3’, Historical Research lxxxviii (2015): 599–628, esp. pp. 618–19; Norman Macdougall, James III, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2009), 45–57.

2 Ralph Flenley, ed., Six Town Chronicles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), 123–5; C. Macrae, ‘Scotland and the Wars of the Roses: The Diplomatic Relations of England and Scotland, 1435–1485’ (DPhil diss., University of Oxford, 1939), 127–30, 454–60; G.L. Harriss and M.A. Harriss, eds., ‘John Benet’s Chronicle of the Years 1400 to 1462’, in Camden Miscellany, XXIV, Camden Soc. 4^th ser., ix (1972), 151–233, at p. 194; J.A. Giles, ed., Incerti Scriptoris Chronicon Angliae de Regnis … Henrici IV, Henrici V, et Henrici VI (London: D. Nutt, 1848), p. 35; N.H. Nicolas, ed., Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council of England (7 vols, London: Record Commission, 1834–7), 6: 65–6; Joseph Stevenson, ed., Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Wars of the English in France during the Reign of Henry the Sixth, Rolls Ser., 22 (2 vols in 3, London: Longmans, 1861–4), 1: 491; Foedera, 5ii: 9–19 (3 Apr 1449); Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland, 4: 245–8. R.A. Griffiths, The Reign of Henry VI: The Exercise of Royal Authority, 1422–1461, 2nd ed. (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), 408–11, offers a brief summary of this period of extreme English weakness in relations with Scotland, and Michael H. Brown, ‘War, Marriage, Tournament: Scottish Politics and the Anglo-French War 1448–1450’, Scottish Historical Review lxxxxviii (2019): 1–21, provides a context in western European politics. For extensions to the truce, see Foedera, 5ii: 32–8, 47–52; Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland, 4: 250–2, 254–6.

3 TNA, E 39/92/21. Detailed discussion of the text of these treaties is provided by George Ridpath, The Border History of England and Scotland, Deduced from the Earliest Times to the Union of the Two Crowns, ed. Philip Ridpath (London: T. Cadell and A. Donaldson; Edinburgh: J. Balfour; Berwick: R. Taylor, 1776), 409–11, 429–31. This discussion is reproduced in the 1848 ed.: (Berwick: printed by C. Richardson), 282–4, 296–7. George Ridpath had access to a legible version of the now heavily damaged 1464 text. Audrey M. C. Mitchell, ‘Ridpath, George (1716?–1772), Church of Scotland Minister and Historian’, in [H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds.,] O[xford] D[ictionary of] N[ational] B[iography (60 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)]. There is extensive analysis of the Anglo-Scottish treaties from the 1450s to 1502 in A.A. Cardew, ‘A Study of Society in the Anglo-Scottish Borders, 1455–1502’ (PhD diss., St Andrews University, 1974), 258–81, but she does not take account of the 1464 text, working only from the damaged original in TNA (p. 258, n. 1); studies relying on this thesis, such as Alexander Grant, ‘Richard III and Scotland’, in A. J. Pollard, ed., The North of England in the Age of Richard III (Stroud: Sutton, 1996), 115–48, esp. pp. 141–5, therefore tend to discount the impact of the 1463–4 negotiations.

4 See below, n. 49.

5 Steve Boardman, The Campbells, 1250–1513 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 2006), 184–7 (Lorn crisis, 1460s), 224–30, esp. p. 228 (1480s and treaty of Nottingham); idem, ‘The Tale of Leper John and the Campbell Acquisition of Lorn’, in Edward J. Cowan and R. Andrew McDonald, eds., Alba: Celtic Scotland in the Medieval Era (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000), 219–47, esp. pp. 233–45; Macdougall, James III, 60; see below, p. 33.

6 R.R. Davies, Lords and Lordship in the British Isles in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); R.A. Houston, ‘People, Space, and Law in Late Medieval and Early Modern Britain and Ireland’, Past & Present ccxxx (2016): 47–89; Anthony Musson, ‘Jurisdictional Complexity: The Survival of Private Jurisdictions in England,’ in The Laws' Many Bodies: Studies in Legal Hybridity and Jurisdictional Complexity, c1600–1900, ed. Seán Patrick Donlan and Dirk Heirbaut (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2015), 109–26; Tim Thornton, Cheshire and the Tudor State, 1480–1560 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000); Matt Holford, Andy Green, and Christian D. Liddy, ‘North-East England in the Late Middle Ages: Rivers, Boundaries and Identities, 1296–1461’, in Regional Identities in North-East England, 1300–2000, eds. Adrian Green and A.J. Pollard (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007); Christian D. Liddy, The Bishopric of Durham in the Late Middle Ages: Lordship, Community, and the Cult of St. Cuthbert (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2008).

7 R.R. Davies, The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093–1343 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Robin Frame, The Political Development of the British Isles, 1100-1400, new ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Seán Duffy and Susan Foran, eds., The English Isles: Cultural Transmission and Political Conflict in Britain and Ireland, 1100–1500 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013); Peter Crooks, David Green, and W. Mark Ormrod, eds., The Plantagenet Empire, 1259–1453: Proceedings of the 2014 Harlaxton Symposium (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2016); Simon Egan, ‘Richard II and the Wider Gaelic World: A Reassessment’, Journal of British Studies lvii (2018): 221–52; S.G. Ellis, ‘From Dual Monarchy to Multiple Kingdoms: Unions and the English State, 1422–1607’, in The Stuart Kingdoms in the 17^th Century: Awkward Neighbours, eds. Allan I. Macinnes and Jane Ohlmeyer (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002), 37–48; idem, Tudor Frontiers and Noble Power: The Making of the British State (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Brendan Smith, ‘The British Isles in the Late Middle Ages: Shaping the Regions’, in Ireland and the English World in the Late Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of Robin Frame, ed. Brendan Smith (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 7–19.

8 E.g. Bertram Wolffe, Henry VI (London: Eyre Methuen, 1981), makes only a passing reference to Scotland, on p. 221, in the chronological coverage of the majority of his reign; see Tim Thornton, ‘Wales and the Crisis of the Lancastrian Monarchy, 1456-9’, Welsh History Review xxvii (2015): 459–78, for comments on Scotland in the historiography of the 1450s.

9 Ross, Edward IV, 45–63; Charles Ross, Richard III, 2nd ed. (New Haven CT and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 194: ‘It can scarcely be said that Richard III conducted his relations with Scotland with much ability or discretion’.

10 Michael Hicks, Richard III: The Self-Made King (New Haven CT and London: Yale University Press, 2019), 338–41; Grant, ‘Richard III and Scotland’; A.J. Pollard, North-eastern England during the Wars of the Roses: Lay Society, War and Politics, 1450–1500 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 355–63.

11 F.M. Powicke, King Henry III and the Lord Edward: The Community of the Realm in the Thirteenth Century (reprint as single vol.; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 740–59; David Crouch, ‘Earl Gilbert Marshal and his Mortal Enemies’, Historical Research lxxxvii (2014): 393–403; Seymour Phillips, Edward II (New Haven CT and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 511; The Chronicle of Geoffrey le Baker of Swinbrook, trans. David Preest; introduction and notes by Richard Barber (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012), 22; Richard Sharpe, ‘Geoffrey Le Baker’s "Aves Ganymedis", Lundy Island, and Alexander Neckam’, Notes and Queries n.s., xxxi (March 1984): 31–6.

12 John Thomas, ‘A History of Lundy from 1390 to 1775’, Transactions of the Devonshire Association cx (1978): 113–54, at pp. 113–15; Myrtle Ternstrom, Lords of Lundy (Cheltenham: M. S. Ternstrom, 2010) (both suffer from partial understanding of their sources at points).

13 C[alendar of] P[atent] R[olls], 1452–61, 102; G.E. C[okayne], The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, Extant, Extinct or Dormant, ed. Vicary Gibbs, new ed., 14 vols. in 15 (London: St. Catherine Press, 1910–98) [hereafter CP], 10: 128; John Watts, ‘Butler, James, 1^st Earl of Wiltshire and 5^th Earl of Ormond (1420–1461)’, ODNB, 9: 149–51; Griffiths, Reign of Henry VI, 747.

14 Griffiths, Reign of Henry VI, 871; ‘A Short English Chronicle’, in James Gairdner, ed., Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles: With Historical Memoranda by John Stowe, the Antiquary, and Contemporary Notes of Occurrences Written by him in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, Camden Society, n.s., 28 (1880), 76–8; William Worcestre, in Itineraries, ed. John H. Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 202ff; H.T. Evans, Wales and the Wars of the Roses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915), 139.

15 Rosemary Horrox, ed., Parliament Rolls of Medieval England, xiii: Edward IV, 1461–1470 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004), Nov 1461 #17–29, esp. 22, 28.

16 David Beresford, ‘The Butlers in England and Ireland, 1405–1515’ (PhD diss., Trinity College Dublin, 1999), 177-90.

17 J.S. Brewer and William Bullen, eds., Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts (6 vols, London: Longmans, Green, Reader, & Dyer, 1867–73), 5: 445; Beresford, ‘Butlers in England and Ireland’, 194–5.

18 E.g. Brit. Libr., Add. MS 34,888, fo. 203 (Feb. 1462).

19 Peter Crooks, ‘State of the Union: Perspectives on English Imperialism in the Later Middle Ages’, Past and Present ccxii (2011): 3–42, at pp. 17–18. See also for this persistence, at least to the early 15^th century, Brendan Smith, ‘Transnational Lordship and the Plantagenet Empire: The Mortimer Lords of Wigmore, 1247–1425’, Welsh History Review xxix (2018): 27–50.

20 Brendan Smith, ‘Late Medieval Ireland and the English Connection: Waterford and Bristol, ca. 1360–1460’, Journal of British Studies l (2011): 546–65, at pp. 562–4.

21 Wendy Childs, ‘Ireland’s Trade with England in the Later Middle Ages’, Irish Economic and Social History ix (1982): 5–33; E. M. Carus-Wilson, The Overseas Trade of Bristol in the Later Middle Ages (2nd edn, London: Merlin Press, 1967); J.W. Sherborne, The Port of Bristol in the Later Middle Ages (2nd edn, Bristol: Historical Association, Bristol Branch, 1971); Susan Flavin & Evan T. Jones, eds., Bristol’s Trade with Ireland and the Continent, 1503–1601: The Evidence of the Exchequer Customs Accounts, Bristol Record Society Publications, 61 (2009); Tim Bowly, ‘“Herring of Sligo and Salmon of Bann”: Bristol’s Maritime Trade with Ireland in the Fifteenth Century’, in Roles of the Sea in Medieval England, ed. Richard Gorski (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012), 147–66.

22 CPR, 1461–7, 225; A.J. Pollard, ‘Neville, William, Earl of Kent (1401?–1463)’, ODNB, 40: 546-8; CP 5: 283–5; Scofield, Life and Reign of Edward the Fourth, 1: 254–61, esp. 258–9; Petre, ‘Donald Balloch, the “Treaty of Ardtornish-Westminster” and the Macdonald Raids of 1461-3’, 618–19.

23 CPR, 1461–7, 226–7, 454; CPR, 1467–77, 457, 529.

24 M.A. Hicks, False, Fleeting, Perjur'd Clarence: George, Duke of Clarence, 1449–78, rev. ed. (Bangor: Headstart History, 1992), 156–8.

25 Ross, Edward IV, 333–41; D.A.L. Morgan, ‘The King’s Affinity in the Polity of Yorkist England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5^th ser., xxiii (1973): 1–25; James Ross, ‘A Governing Elite? The Higher Nobility in the Yorkist and Early Tudor Period’, in Hannes Kleineke and Christian Steer, eds., The Yorkist Age: Proceedings of the 2011 Harlaxton Symposium (Donnington: Shaun Tyas and Richard III and Yorkist History Trust, 2013), 95–115.

26 Rot. Sc., 2: 410–12; Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland, 4: nos. 1337 (misdated 1463), 1341.

27 Macdougall, James III, 57.

28 Hicks, False, Fleeting, Perjur'd Clarence, 156–8, and passim.

29 Rot. Sc., 2: 445–50; David Dunlop, ‘Aspects of Anglo-Scottish Relationships from 1471 to 1513’ (PhD diss., University of Liverpool, 1988), 161–5; Macdougall, James III, 121–5. The preceding year’s truce dealt mainly with immediate issues and left much to the interaction of the wardens; Lundy and Lorn were not mentioned: Thomas Rymer, Foedera, 5iii: 34.

30 CPR, 1476–85, 155.

31 CPR, 1476–85, 37.

32 CPR, 1467–77, 437, 558.

33 Norman Davis, ed., Paston Letters and Papers of the 15^th Century (2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971–6), 1: 200, 2: 274, 277; CPR, 1461–7, 23, 123, 124, 179, 188, 568; C[alendar of] C[lose] R[olls] 1461–8, 7, 15; CPR, 1467–77, 346, 622

34 CPR, 1452–61, 666; CPR, 1467–77, 614–15; William Page et al., eds., The Victoria History of the Counties of England: The County of Gloucester (11 vols, continuing, London; Oxford; Woodbridge: Archibald Constable; Oxford University Press; Boydell & Brewer, 1907–), 10: 260.

35 TNA, C 1/75/35. On Bristol merchants’ efforts to enter the Mediterranean, see Stuart Jenks, ed., Robert Sturmy’s Commercial Expedition to the Mediterranean (1457/8), Bristol Record Society, 58 (2006).

36 CPR, 1476–85, 355, 394, 398, 560.

37 Calendar of Inquisitions Post Mortem and Other Analogous Documents Preserved in the Public Record Office: Henry VII (3 vols; London: HMSO, 1898–1955), 1: 29–30 (enfeoffment, Feb. 1484); TNA, C 241/264/60 (July 1484). The Wykes family came, for John Smyth in the early 17^th century, to represent the extremes of decline in gentry fortunes, picking rags from the London streets: John Maclean, ed., The Berkeley Manuscripts: The Lives of the Berkeleys, Lords of the Honour, Castle and Manor of Berkeley, in the County of Gloucester, from 1066 to 1618; with a Description of the Hundred of Berkeley and of its Inhabitants, Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 4 (3 vols, 1883–5), 1: 58.

38 Rosemary Horrox and P.W. Hammond, eds., British Library Harleian Manuscript 433 (4 vols, Upminster: Alan Sutton Publishing for the Richard III Society, 1979–83), 2: 39–40; cf. 1: 134 (a summary of the grant, including mention of other Devon property such as Northam, but not Lundy).

39 Rosemary Horrox, Richard III: A Study in Service, paperback ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 204–5; B.P. Wolffe, The Royal Demesne in English History: The Crown Estate in the Governance of the Realm from the Conquest to 1509 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1971), 192–3; J.M.W. Bean, The Estates of the Percy Family, 1416–1537 (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 122.

40 1484–5 Devon revenues, in Alnwick Castle, DNP: MS 97, fo. 8; 1483–4 revenues, in Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk Record Office, E3/15.53/2.1.

41 S.J. Gunn, Henry VII’s New Men and the Making of Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), passim, esp. pp. 12–13; S.J. Gunn, ‘Sir Edward Poynings, an Anglo-Burgundian Hero’, in Le Héros Bourguignon: Histoire et Épopée, eds. Jean-Marie Cauchies et al. (Neuchâtel: Centre européen d'études bourguignonnes (XIVe-XVIe s.), 2001), 157–69. Although Richmond’s expedition of autumn 1483 focused on the English Channel coast, between Poole and Plymouth, there was the constant threat of incursions across the Bristol Channel and into South Wales, eventually realised in Aug. 1485: Ralph A. Griffiths and Roger S. Thomas, The Making of the Tudor Dynasty (paperback edn, Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1993), 102, 135–43.

42 CP 10: 131–2; CPR, 1476–85, 490; Beresford, ‘Butlers in the England and Ireland’, 202–12, esp. 210–12.

43 Ross, Richard III, 194–200; B.A. Pocquet du Haut-Jussé, François II, Duc de Bretagne, et l’Angleterre (1458–85) (Paris: De Boccard, 1929), ch. viii; C.S.L. Davies, ‘Richard III, Brittany and Henry Tudor, 1483–5’, Nottingham Medieval Studies xxxvii (1993): 110–26; Anne F. Sutton, ‘England and Brittany 1482–86: Politics, Trade, and War’, Nottingham Medieval Studies lxii (2018): 137–82.

44 Jersey archive, D/AP/Z/2; B. Jacqueline, ‘Sixte IV et la piraterie dans les îles Anglo-Normandes (1480)’, Revue du département de la Manche xx (1978): 197–202, at p. 199; see discussion of the dating of the bull in D.M. Ogier, Reformation and Society in Guernsey (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1996), 37, n. 119.

45 C.S.L. Davies, ‘The Alleged “Sack of Bristol”: International Ramifications of Breton Privateering, 1484–1485’, Historical Research lxvii (1994): 230–9; Sutton, ‘England and Brittany 1482–86’, 174–6.

46 Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk Record Office, E3/15.53/2.1.

47 Events leading to the truce are briefly outlined in all the major authorities on the reign: James Gairdner, History of the Life and Reign of Richard III, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1898), 174–80; Paul Murray Kendall, Richard III (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1955), 298–300; Ross, Richard III, 192–4; Hicks, Richard III, 338–41; Ranald Nicholson, Scotland: The Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1974), 508–17; Macdougall, James III, 234–5. Probably the most detailed specific account is that of Grant, ‘Richard III and Scotland’.

48 Rot. Sc., 2: 461–2, 464–6.

49 TNA, E 39/92/28; Foedera, 5iii: 150–3, at p. 152.

50 Points emphasised e.g. by Pollard, North-eastern England, 355–63; and particularly by Grant, ‘Richard III and Scotland’, 141–5. The latter’s eagerness to suggest this went so far as to include the removal of Northumberland from the wardenship of the east and middle march is cautiously but effectively undermined by the evidence presented by Hicks, Richard III, 335–6.

51 Boardman, Campbells, 224–30, esp. p. 228; see also Macdougall, James III, 178–9.

52 1488: Rot. Sc., 2: 48790, at p. 489. 1491: Rot. Sc., 2: 503–5, at p. 504. 1492: Foedera, 5iv: 50–1, at p. 50. 1493: Rot. Sc., 2: 509–12, at p. 510. 1497: Rot. Sc., 2: 526–30, at p. 527. Agnes Conway, Henry VII’s Relations with Scotland and Ireland, 1485–1498 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), 99–117; British Library, MS Cotton Vesp. C XVI, fos 118–19 (Conway, Henry VII’s Relations with Scotland and Ireland, app L, 242–4: Henry attempts to amend the 4^th, 6^th articles. James Gairdner, Letters and Papers Illustrative of the Reigns of Richard III and Henry VII, Rolls Ser., 24 (2 vols, London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1861–3), 1: 424, provides an abstract.) For commentary on this passage of negotiations, see Dunlop, ‘Aspects of Anglo-Scottish relationships from 1471 to 1513’, 183–218.

53 Beresford, ‘Butlers in the England and Ireland’, 212–19; ‘Documents Relative to the Families of Bryan, Fitzpain, Ponynges, and Others, the Coheirs of Sir Guy Bryan, K.G.’, Collectanea Topographica et Genealogica iii (1836): 250–78, at pp. 270–5; Bean, Estates of the Percy Family, 123–4; CCR, 1485–1500, 111–12, 114–15, 116–17; Gunn, Henry VII’s New Men, 211 (Poynings’ share was the Kent estates, plus three Somerset manors); CP 10: 132.

54 Bean, Estates of the Percy Family, 124–5.

55 Beresford, ‘Butlers in the England and Ireland’, 246–55.

56 Alnwick Castle, Sy: X.II.13, box 5a (Bean, Estates of the Percy Family, 125); TNA, E 326/5652 (29 Nov. 1516). It is significant for the group of treaties from 1488 that the Percies were not able to re-establish a role as clearly dominant regional magnates after 1485, esp. after the death of the 4th earl in 1489 (e.g. Ross, ‘A Governing Elite?’, 88–9), while remaining powerful and potentially resentful of this loss.

57 Granville, History of the Granville Family, 87–8; Thomas, ‘History of Lundy’, 115.

58 TNA, E 39/92/12 (Foedera, 5iv: 168–70).

59 John Forster, Sir John Eliot: A Biography, 1590–1632 (2 vols, London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1864), 2: 626–8; Roger Granville, The History of the Granville Family: Traced back to Rollo, First Duke of Normandy (Exeter: William Pollard, 1895), 174–81. David Cressy, England’s Islands in a Sea of Troubles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), ch. 2, charts the island’s distinctive position from the late 16th century.

60 For an effectively argued suggestion that the embassy was an important consolidating force in the pattern of emerging polities, see John Watts, ‘The Plantagenet Empire and the Continent: Retrospect and Prospect’, in Crooks, Green and Ormrod, Plantagenet Empire, 403–20, esp. pp. 416–20.

61 Cardew, ‘Study of Society in the Anglo-Scottish Borders’, 253–6 (quotation at p. 253); she lists those involved in her Appendix III, at pp. 422–6.

62 Ellis, ‘From Dual Monarchy to Multiple Kingdoms’; with key historiographical staging-points represented by J.H. Elliott, ‘A Europe of Composite Monarchies’, Past & Present cxxxvii (Nov. 1982): 48–71, and H.G. Koenigsberger, ‘Dominium Regale or Dominium Politicum et Regale’, in his Politicians and Virtuosi: Essays in Early Modern History (London: Hambledon, 1986), 1–26.

63 Gwilym Dodd, ‘Law, Legislation, and Consent in the Plantagenet Empire: Wales and Ireland, 1272–1461’, Journal of British Studies lvi (2017): 225–49. See also the approach of Michael Brown, ‘The Plantagenet Empire and the Insular World: Retrospect and Prospect’, in Crooks, Green and Ormrod, Plantagenet Empire, 384–402.

64 Compare the discussion of ‘extra-diplomacy’ in John M. Currin, ‘Pierre le Pennec, Henry VII of England, and the Breton Plot of 1492: A Case Study in “Diplomatic Pathology”’, Albion xxiii (1991): 1–22, and the tendency to see the role of those outside certain bureaucratic cadres as potentially pathological in e.g. R. de Maulde-la-Clavière, La diplomatie au temps de Machiavel (3 vols, Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1892–3), esp. 1: 339–80; Garrett Mattingley, Renaissance Diplomacy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973).

65 John Ferguson, English Diplomacy, 1422–1461 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), esp. introduction, quotations at pp. xviii, xxi.