David
What this covers here is the Revolt of the Count of Omale because in 1220 he stormed out of the court in the middle of the night. The reason was he had been ordered to surrender the castle at Bizon. So what you've got here, which really begins the story, is you've got an order to the Count of Omale to have faith in what Robert de Rupont and Jeffrey de Nevill tell him, on the part of the king. Basically they are trying to begin negotiations with him, they are trying to reel him in, say "There-there, come on, its not as bad, you've got to give up Bizon but you know there will be compensation". He makes a big stand or his garrison makes a big stand at the castle and what we've got here is an actual letter to our old friend, or to his grandson, William de Ferrers, Earl of Derby, summoning him to come to the army. This is the actual letter sent by the king. First of all is a tremendous sort of angst about the behaviour of the Count of Omale, it says for his "mulitplicase and manifestoc excessor", his greater manifest excesses, we are "vehementer perterbarma", we are very disturbed. And then it says, and this is what's so interesting, it doesn't say "come with your 60 knights, come with your feudal military service", all it says is "come with all the force you have with you".

Bettany
So Earl Ferrers took his knights to proceed by them. The castle remains are now on private land but David and I got permission to visit them to get a feel for the siege.

David
The key thing to remember about the siege is that the garrison was so small, it was only 13 knights and I don't think they would have been able to put up a great resistance for very long. In particular they wouldn't have been able to defend that outer line of walls. So I suspect those outer walls of the moat were crossed very quickly and so here, very very early on, you would have got established great siege engines, huge trebuchets which hurled great stones and boulders at the castle. So I think the 13 knights holed up in the keep on the top of that mott there must have had a hell of a time, rafters and walls crashing down on top of them, so I'm not surprised they gave up after a week.

Bettany
What happened to them when they were defeated?

David
Well that's very interesting. They were actually more or less let off - the garrison wasn't hung and that was, in a sense, a bad precedence in that it meant that rebellion could possibly take place without punishment. A lot of people in the government thought that and the old crusty Bishop of Bath said that if the garrison at Bizon had lost their heads, we would never have had the siege of Bedford castle three years later. So it's swings and roundabouts.

Bettany
And the castle itself?

David
Ah well, the siege did for it and that's all that's left.

Bettany
Preston Manor in Brighton is now council run and open to the public. But it once belonged to the Bennet Stanford family. Dominic and Rupert are discovering that although he wasn't strong physically, Vere was brave, possibly to the point of madness. He used to dodge shells. Just for the hell of it. In April 1916 however he experienced his first gas.

Rupert
It says "we were all recovered from our slight gassing". It was really bad, his helmet broke as he put it on so he would unravel his other one. "I also had very bad headaches for the rest of the week", so he was obviously affected by them. It also says that this gassing put his lungs into the condition fit to pick up the TB germ.

Dominic
We haven't any mention this incident with the gas mask. It's possible that either of those two can be explained because he was writing to his parents.

Rupert
Perhaps he had taken a great wound, he'll say that you know …. Its only a scratch.. and perhaps a slight gassing is a serious attack.

Dominic
Yeah I know … just one thing in here … "We are dreadfully busy at the present and things are at bit hard" , he says. But I mean to say you know he might have been trying to cover up even being badly gassed or that to give your gas mask to your sergeant is possibly not the action of being a good officer, because if you put yourself in mortal danger then you can't lead your men and so on.

Rupert
Exactly - its throwing away responsibility and playing with it.

Bettany
So is it likely that a respected officer, Captained 1916, acting Major in 1917, would have risked his life in this way? Dominic and Rupert are going to look up his file at the Public Record Office.

Army recruitment maybe friendly in the market square in Aylesbury, but the truth is we haven't always liked our army. The brutality of Cromwell's forces had quite a lot to do with that. Hostility became so great that in 1689 the Mutiny Act made it illegal for anyone, including the King, to raise an army in peace time without parliamentary consent.

Sir Michael
There was the perception that if the monarch was able to raise and maintain a standing army, this was going to be a threat to the liberties of England, and the kind of parliamentary representative government which was beginning to emerge then. So, there was as very sound reason why the King should be mistrusted and not allowed to raise an army. Given that England was an island, it obviously did have a perfected navy and that's another story, but there was no need for a standing army and the suspicion of a standing army remained absolutely basic to the English mind set.

Bettany
One alternative to a standing army was the militia.

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Content last updated: 03/04/2006

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