March mafia

On 25 January 1290 Edward I issued a proclamation ordering the earls of Gloucester and Hereford to stop waging private war in Brycheiniog. A few days later, 3 February, Clare sent four of his bailiffs ‘with a multitude of horsemen and footmen’ to invade Bohun’s territory, ‘with a banner of the earl’s arms displayed’. They pillaged the land up to two leagues beyond Clare’s new castle at Morlais, built to nail down his control of the territory, killed a number of Bohun’s men and carried off goods.

It seems Clare was attempting to set himself up as a rival potentate in the March. When Edward visited Glamorgan in 1284, the earl had greeted him almost as a fellow monarch. In pure military terms Clare was by far the most powerful of the Marcher lords: he could call upon the service of over 450 knights in England and Wales. His rival Bohun, by contrast, could summon a measly twenty-six.

Clare used his feud against Bohun as a way of striking back against the king, his lifelong rival. A second raid took place on 5 June, shortly after Clare had married Edward’s daughter, Joan of Acre. The terms of the marriage contract required the earl to surrender all his lands into the king’s hands, to be restored after the wedding. Under the terms of the new arrangement, Clare’s lands would pass to the heirs of his wife’s body, not his. Thus, if he died without issue and Joan remarried, all the vast Clare estates in England and Wales would pass to the heirs of her next husband. 

Yet another raid took place in November. This was another tit-for-tat act of defiance. On 3 November Clare had conceded the king’s rights to all the revenue from the See of Llandaff; since he had previously snaffled the revenues of the bishopric during vacancy, Clare was judged to have usurped the king’s rights. Edward was tying the earl up in knots (not knights) and Clare’s response was to keep attacking Bohun, in defiance of the king’s prohibition against private war. A head-on collison loomed.

Meanwhile the Marches descended into chaos, and it seems the government struggled to keep track of who was doing what to whom. Tacked onto the end of a severely condensed abstract of the Clare-Bohun case is a mysterious reference to John Giffard, lord of Builth. This tells us that 'item placitum contra Iohannem Giffard et homines suos pro vexillis displicatis apud Gloucestriam' - the same plea against John Giffard and his men with banners displayed near Gloucester. This would imply that Giffard had led his men out of the March to attack Clare’s estates in Gloucestershire, possibly on behalf of Humphrey Bohun. There is no further reference to his actions, so it remains a mystery.