bray, earl of Nottingham – on 18 January 1388.
The Lords Appellant felt that by the end of 1387, the realm was being badly governed and the artisanal guilds, after feeling like they were the victims of Brembre’s corrupt practices and misrule of London, were more than happy to help bring about Brembre’s undoing. These petitions are therefore excellent examples that give an insight into the personal circumstances of those who experienced the turbulence of London, giving them a voice to show how and why they believed that Brembre committed treason against the king by abusing royal power to achieve his own selfish ends.
Nicholas Brembre, falseknight of London, by the said accroachment took certain persons from the prison of Newgate by night … and led them out of London to Kent, to a place called the ‘Foul Oak’, and there, accroaching to himself royal power as a traitor to the king, without warrant and process of law he caused them all to be beheadedCharges brought against Nicholas Brembre, 1388. Catalogue ref: C 65/47
The most heinous crime
The petitions highlight various grievances that London’s artisanal guilds had against Brembre and a prominent complaint that was repeated in all 15 petitions was that Brembre had accroached the king’s power. The petitions therefore mirrored the complaint that the Lords Appellant had made, for the accusation of accroaching royal power featured heavily in the Appeal for Treason. What this means is that the king’s royal power had been diminished.
In the medieval period, kings were seen as being at the top of society, ruling with God-given power, so it was unacceptable that anyone else try to take his power away and use it for themselves. In fact, the act of accroaching royal power was the most ‘hautes tresons’ during the proceedings of the Merciless Parliament, emphasising that it was a treason of the highest order and the most heinous crime against Richard II.
Adapting the allegation of accroaching royal power
The complaint that Brembre, as well as the four other Appellees – Alexander Neville, Archbishop of York, Michael de la Pole, earl of Suffolk and Chancellor, Robert Tresilian, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, and Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford – had accroached royal power also featured heavily in the Parliament roll reflecting the proceedings of the Merciless Parliament. What is special about the Guild Petitions, though, was that they made this complaint specific to the City of London.
The allegation of accroaching royal power was usually a royal or baronial accusation, for it had been used several times in the past – for example, during the Parliament in which Piers Gaveston was tried – but the guildsmen adapted it to their context to effectively argue their case against Brembre.
What the guildsmen did was equate the accroachment of royal power with the ruin of good governance and the destruction of rules that benefited the profit of the City of London. In their eyes, Brembre left London bereft of any form of moral conduct or good governance. He was the very opposite of what a good leader looked like.
His bad leadership was referred to across several petitions, such as the Goldsmiths’ Petition, the Cordwainers’ Petition, the Armourers’ Petition, the Saddlers’ Petition, and the Painters’ Petition. They described how Brembre had impinged on life in areas such as Cheapside, where he accroached royal power to himself by coming into the area with a great number of armed men, causing the great fear of all the good men of London (see footnote 1).
The Painters’ Petition and Leathersellers and Whittawyers’ Petition go one step further and emphasised how in doing this Brembre had further accroached royal power to himself by imprisoning many men of the City of London without the judgement of the law (see footnote 2). In fact the Leathersellers and Whittawyers made their complaint even more specific and argued that it was indeed many men belonging to the ‘mestiers’ of the City of London, meaning the men who were a part of London’s guild community, whose rights had been infringed by Brembre abus