The Peace Treaty that ended the civil war of 1266

Kenilworth Castle was besieged by the royalists for months in 1266 without success. The walls of the Great Tower (on the right) are 17 feet thick and almost 100 feet high. By the standards of the 13th century this fortress was impregnable to all weapons except starvation.

Robert de Ferrers, Earl of Derby, was put before a court by King Henry III at Windsor later in 1266. As everyone expected he was found guilty of high treason, sentenced to death and all his lands and estates confiscated. The lands were handed over to Edmund, second son of King Henry III who was also given the title of Earl of Derby.

However, that was not the end of things. Although the rising in Derbyshire had been put down by the Battle of Chesterfield, other rebels were still in the field. One such group was holed up in the powerful Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire. Prince Edward marched on Kenilworth himself, but the castle proved impossible to capture by assault. Edward settled down to starve the rebel garrison into surrender before moving on to Ely and Axholme, where other rebel forces were holding out.

 

But in August the Church decided to take a hand. As was usual in the middle ages, it was the Church that sought to bring peace between kings and barons, which sought to ease suffering during famines or outbreaks of disease and, as at Kenilworth, to stop bloodshed by finding a mutually agreeable solution to a violent quarrel. The Pope himself had sent a legate, Cardinal Ottobuono Fieschi, to try to halt the fighting between King Henry III and Simon de Montfort. By the time the legate arrived Simon was dead, but he was able to open talks between Edward and the rebels inside Kenilworth.

Fiescki persuaded Edward and the rebels to appoint representatives to meet under his chairmanship and under the protection of the Church to try to thrash out terms. Edward said he would wait until 1 November, but if no agreement were reached by then the siege would begin again. A deal was finally struck at the very last minute, on 31 October. The agreement, soon dubbed “the Dictum of Kenilworth” proved to be the template by which peace was made by all the rebels and the king. It was subscribed to by Ferrers of Derby from his prison cell.

Under the terms of the Dictum of Kenilworth, the rebels were to be restored to their titles and estates on condition that they paid a hefty fine. Those who had supported the rebellion without marching to war had to pay a fine equivalent to twice the annual income from their estates. Those who had gone to war had to pay five times their annual income, Leaders, such as Derby, had to pay seven times. The money had to be paid immediately and since no medieval nobleman had that sort of money lying about it meant that the rebels had to borrow the money to pay their fines. The loans were then paid back over coming years out of the rents and other income.

It was a clever agreement on Edward’s part, but only one section of the overall peace deal. Edward was wise enough to recognise his father’s faults and had some sympathy with the aims of the rebels, though not with their means. He also knew that he would soon be king himself and that he would have to rule over these people. By imposing on the rebels a hefty fine he allowed them to keep their dignity, titles and estates - all the things that made life worth living for a medieval nobleman - but condemned them to years of penury. So long as the former rebels were paying over a large proportion of their income to repay the debts, they would not have enough money left to fund a rebellion.

Edward also made sure that many of the demands of the rebels were met once the fighting was over. Parliament met regularly, the king was subject to the law of the land and nobles were given a prominent role in the affairs of state. He laid the foundations that made England a united and powerful kingdom for more than a century, when another foolish king made a mess of things.

Derby agreed to the Dictum of Kenilworth, but he was not to enjoy its benefits. Prince Edmund kidnapped him and held him prisoner until he had agreed to hand over his lands. Edmund then used the estates as collatoral to raise funds to recruit an army and take it on crusade to the Holy Land. When Derby got free, Edmund had gone. Derby spent most of the rest of his life trying to get his lands back. He tried legal actions and he tried grabbing them by force, but it was not to be. In 1275 he managed to get back his mother’s dowry lands on the grounds that they had been left in trust to Derby’s children and so did not really belong to him and could not be confiscated. After Derby’s death in 1279 his widow extracted a cash payment from Edmund in lieu of some other estates.