Battle of Chesterfield

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The Battle of Chesterfield was a minor battle in the final stages of the Second War of the Barons in England . It took place on May 15, 1266 between a group of the disinherited , the remaining supporters of Simon de Montfort , and a royal force.

Due to the decisive defeat in the Battle of Evesham , the reform party around Simon de Montfort had already lost the dispute with the king in August 1265. Simon de Montfort, the leader of the Reform Party, had died in the battle. The brutal repression against his followers by King Henry III. however, drove the remaining supporters of the Reform Party to desperately continue their struggle. In large parts of southern England, the supporters of Montfort, often driven from their estates, the so-called disinherited ones, formed gangs who lived on robbery and plunder.

On May 15, 1266, Henry of Almain , a nephew of the king, led a royal force against a group of the disinherited in Chesterfield . The attackers used covered wagons as cover for their attack on the city, which was being defended by the disinherited. The fight raged in the streets of the city, a rebel group from Brampton holed up in the walled churchyard. The bitter struggle continued until after dark and ended with a victory for the royal troops. The leader of the disinherited, Robert de Ferrers , was captured. The surviving disinherited, including Baldwin Wake , Lord of Chesterfield, joined the remaining rebels in the Isle of Ely .

The victors punished the losers according to the degree of their resistance to the king. If they wanted to get their land back, they had to raise the equivalent of their land five times if they had resisted particularly fiercely. The participants in the Chesterfield Battle ("qui fuerunt apud Chrestrfeud in bello") were explicitly named.

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Remarks

  1. ^ The Star: Date set for the Battle of Chesterfield celebration. Retrieved June 30, 2015 .
  2. ^ Matthew Strickland: Against the Lord's anointed: aspects of warfare and baronial rebellion in England and Normandy, 1075–1265 , in: James Clarke Holt, George Garnett, John Hudson: Law and Government in Medieval England and Normandy. Essays in Honor of Sir James Holt , Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 56–79, here: p. 65.