In the spring of 1314 the muster rolls of Nottinghamshire recorded, among hundreds of such entries, a knight of Mansfield riding north to the Scottish war. The entry is one line long. This page is about everyone the line leaves out. The tales meet the company already grown and already bound to one another. How they came to be that way is told only here.
From the Nottinghamshire muster
…Edward de Mannesfeld, chivaler, od treis hommes, mountez et armez…
(…Edward de Mansfeld, knight, with three men, mounted and armed…)
— muster fragment, Nottinghamshire, spring 1314
Muster rolls counted what the Crown paid for: men, mounted and armed. They did not count boys, and they did not count wives. The rolls were thorough. They were also wrong.
Named in the roll
Sir Edward de Mansfeld
b. 1288, Mansfield · d. 1349
The only child of a quiet man. His father carried the plain arms to Wales under the first King Edward and brought home a ruined knee and a habit of silence. He died when the boy was seven, leaving the arms, the hall, the land, and the silence. His mother, Edith, raised him alone. He held Mansfield's land by service of the Crown, in the king's own forest of Sherwood. He was knighted. In 1311 he married Cecily, the daughter of a neighboring knight. What happened at the crossing of the Bannock burn in June 1314, and what the county called him afterward, is told elsewhere in this edition. He is said to have hated the name. The county used it anyway, for thirty-five years, and mourned him by it.
In the recordthe Nottingham Roll, c. 1310 · the Clipstone Roll, c. 1326 · the Rufford account
The three men
Hugh of Skegby
b. c. 1274, Skegby · d. 24 June 1314, at the crossing
He came to Mansfield manor as a stable boy of eight or nine, and he was in the yard the day Edward's father rode home from Wales. He was too young to have marched to that war himself, but old enough to remember the man who did. When the father died, nobody asked Hugh to stay, and he did not announce that he was staying. He stayed. He grew into the manor's trusted hand, the man for horses, beasts, boundaries, and harvests, and at the last for the boy. It was Hugh who told young Edward the tales of his father by the fire, and the older tales of the greenwood besides. He was fourteen years the elder of the company and never let anyone forget it. Everything he said, he said in the flat voice of a man observing the weather. He left a wife, Sibyl, as sharp as himself, and children grown.
In the recordone of the “three men” of the muster · one of the three of the Rufford account, “slain there and not buried”
Adam of Pleasley
b. 1288, Pleasley · d. 24 June 1314, at the crossing
He was born the same summer as Edward, one village over, and the two were inseparable by the age of six. Adam invented the games. Edward won them. He grew into a heavyset, cheerful, formidable man who talked the whole length of every road in three shires, and retold every journey afterward better than it had happened. He made friends of strangers in every alehouse between Mansfield and anywhere, and defended them with his fists when required. He could not sit a horse well and did it anyway, on a long succession of bargain horses, each acquired through a deal he swore was shrewd. He left a wife and a houseful of children at Pleasley. The noise continues.
In the recordone of the “three men” · one of the three “slain there and not buried”
Roger of Blidworth
b. c. 1290, Blidworth · d. 24 June 1314, at the crossing
He was the boy from the next village, two years behind Edward and Adam. Two years is nothing at forty and a chasm at fourteen. He attached himself to the pair in boyhood and never left, and he stayed the youngest of the company forever. He was strong as an ox, sweet-natured, and willing to believe absolutely anything he was told, mostly by Adam. He was twenty-four at the crossing, and life had not yet given him one reason to be afraid. What that was worth on the day is told in the tale. He left a mother at Blidworth, and a girl he never quite spoke to.
In the recordone of the “three men” · one of the three “slain there and not buried”
Not counted
Hob
b. 1302, Mansfield manor
A foundling of the manor, with no family, no byname, and no place in any roll. Nobody remembers who first called him Hob. The name, like the boy, was simply about the manor. He was twelve in the muster spring, and he served the company as shield-boy and kit-minder. Nobody ever gave him those offices. He simply did the work. The muster counted men, so the muster missed him. It would not be the last record to do so. The tales find him at the edge of things, watching. Their headcounts do not.
In the record—
Not mustered
Cecily
m. 1311
The daughter of a modest neighboring knight, respectable and unambitious, and by the shire's unanimous opinion an uncommon beauty. The opinion was never hers. No record survives of her agreeing with it. She married Edward three years before the war, so she knew the man before the county invented the Lion. All her life she stayed devoted to the first and entirely unimpressed by the second. She bore two daughters, Edith and Maud, and she ran the hall, the stores, the servants, and the seasons while the legend grew up around the house. The keys of the hall were hers. At home, the great man fetched his own boots.
In the recordnowhere. The records were never looking in the right place.
Not recorded
A man from Warsop
A fifth man stood at the crossing. His name is not recorded, and he left before the end, which no one has ever held against him. The tale is careful to say so. This page can add nothing.
