Walter Mauny, 1st Baron Mauny

Drawing of the Chapel of London Charterhouse with Mauny's coat of arms and the remains of his grave, 1895

Walter Mauny, 1st Baron Mauny KG (also de Mauny or Manny ) (* around 1310; † January 14 or 15, 1372 in Great Chesterford ) was a knight from the Netherlands who served in England as a military and diplomat. During the first phase of the Hundred Years War he was one of the leading military on the British side. He founded the London Charterhouse .

origin

Walter Mauny came from the county of Hainaut , which at the time was part of the Holy Roman Empire . He was the fourth of the five sons of Jean le Borgne , the Lord of Masny , and his wife Jeanne de Jenlain . Together with his brothers, Walter was probably brought up in the household of Jean de Beaumont , the brother of Count Wilhelm I of Hainaut . In December 1327 Walter came to England as a page in the entourage of Philippa of Hainault , the count's daughter, when she met the English King Edward III. got married.

Promotion at the English royal court

At the English royal court, Mauny quickly rose to be the overseer of the queen's greyhounds . By order of the king, he was knighted ( Knight Bachelor ) in 1331 , and he received a handsome pension. In August 1332 he was a royal knight in the small army of the so-called disinherited , which invaded Scotland under the leadership of Edward Balliol and Henry Beaumont , which is a clear sign that Edward III. approved the invasion of the disinherited in Scotland. Mauny took part in the Battle of Dupplin Moor and in November 1332 captured John Crab , the famous Flemish pirate and engineer in the Scottish service, in a skirmish at Roxburgh Bridge . Mauny could later give Crab to Edward III. resell for 1000 marks . The next year Mauny was part of the English army, which invaded Scotland again. After taking part in the siege of Berwick in 1333 , he belonged to the army with which Edward III. advanced to Roxburgh in the winter of 1334 to 1335 without any notable success. For the unsuccessful summer campaign in which the king advanced unsuccessfully to Perth from July to August , Mauny recruited rods in South Wales. Mauny took part in this campaign, he also belonged to the army with which Eduard III. from June to September 1336 advanced in an impressive train to north-east Scotland, destroying Aberdeen . In the campaigns, after Jean Le Bel , Mauny gained admiration for the king because of his boldness, but little is otherwise known about his role, except that he temporarily served as the king's standard bearer during the last campaign. The favor of the king brought Mauny to growing prosperity and influence, for the king appointed him for life as administrator of Harlech Castle and sheriff of Merionethshire in December 1332 , although he apparently never visited the region, let alone held the office himself. In the next few years he was given further offices in North West Wales, so that he had almost extensive powers there like a viceroy. To this end, the king gave him large parts of the property of David Strathbogie in Buckinghamshire and Norfolk in 1335 after he had fallen in the battle against the Scots. Also Thomas of Brotherton, 1st Earl of Norfolk , an uncle of the king, promoted Mauny. He granted him a pension and appointed him Marshal of the King's Marshalsea Court .

Military during the Hundred Years War

Appointment as admiral and attack on Cadzand

When the Hundred Years War between England and France began in August 1337, Mauny was appointed Admiral of the North . With that he was responsible for the defense of all East English ports between the Thames estuary in the south and Berwick in the north. In addition, the king gave him command of the vanguard of the expeditionary army with which he wanted to land in the Netherlands. To do this, he was to escort the cargo ships with his ships that were supposed to bring English wool to the Netherlands for sale. The campaign to France was to be financed by selling this wool. At the beginning of November 1337 Mauny then set out with a fleet of 85 ships with 1,450 soldiers, 2,200 sailors, a number of important merchants and with Bishop Henry Burghersh of Lincoln and three other royal councilors. On the way to Holland , the fleet surprisingly attacked the Flemish port of Sluis , but was repulsed. On November 9th, the fleet landed on the nearby island of Cadzand . The English plundered the island for several days, killing numerous residents. A Flemish army then landed under the command of Guy , a half-brother of Count Ludwig I of Flanders , to drive away the invaders. In the bloody battle of Cadzand the Flemings were defeated and Guy was taken prisoner. Mauny himself was able to take several prisoners for which he received £ 8,000 ransom. However, his army had suffered heavy losses in the battle and the occupation of Cadzand was of no military importance. He left the island a little later, brought the ships loaded with wool to Dordrecht at the end of November 1337 and returned to England shortly afterwards.

Role in the campaign from 1338 to 1339

As an admiral, Mauny was primarily responsible for bringing together a fleet with which the army of Edward III. was able to translate to Brabant in July 1338 . He himself took part in the campaign with a retinue of ten knights, 33 squires and 50 archers. Two of his brothers from Hainaut also took part in the campaign with their entourage. After the troops had passed through, Mauny was replaced as admiral. From Brabant, however, the king first traveled to Germany in order to win allies. The campaign to France therefore began after a long delay in September 1339. Mauny now absolutely wanted to excel in battle. While the king was marching with his army from Valenciennes to Cambrai , he and 50 men undertook a raid against the unfortified city of Mortagne . Mauny had the city looted and partially burned down before retreating again. When the king began the siege of Cambrai on September 20, 1339, Mauny bribed the commander of the nearby castle of Thun-l'Évêque , which he was able to conquer. During the next two months Mauny took part in the destructive raid of the English army through the Cambrésis and the Thiérache . On the last night of the raid, on October 22, 1339, Mauny led small groups of scouts against the French lines at Buironfosse . They killed sentries and attacked small groups of French soldiers before the English army withdrew to the north and disbanded the next day. After the siege ended, on November 11th, one of Mauny's brothers captured near Cambrai was lynched by angry citizens when he was brought into town.

Role in the campaign of 1340

In 1340 Mauny took part in the second campaign of Edward III. to the Netherlands, where he fought on June 24th in the Battle of Sluis . While the English army besieged Tournai in vain from July 26th to September 25th 1340 , Mauny undertook a series of destructive raids into the towns and villages of Tournaisis and the adjacent regions, where he made rich booty. When the king had to call off the siege due to lack of funds, Mauny was one of Edward III's confidants when he was detained in Ghent by his creditors under humiliating circumstances . Mauny lent the king, who was in dire straits, about £ 4,000. He was one of the king's eight companions when he fled Ghent and fled the Netherlands in a small boat. At sea she took on a ship that brought her to England. On November 30, 1340, Mauny was one of the king's small entourage when the king landed by boat at the water gate of the Tower of London without notice and blamed his ministers for his failure in the middle of the night.

Role in the War of the Breton Succession

In October 1341, Edward III appointed. Mauny together with Robert d'Artois as the commander of the English army, which should support Johann von Montfort against the French aspirant Karl von Blois in the War of the Breton Succession . This plan was changed in February 1342 when the king wanted to send not one but three English armies to Brittany within four months. Mauny was appointed sole commander of the first of these armies, which was supposed to cover the landing of the other two armies as the vanguard. However, since he did not initially get enough ships to cross his troops, Mauny did not reach Brest until the beginning of May, six weeks later than planned . With 34 men-at-arms and about 200 mounted archers, he had received only half of the troops originally planned. At that time, Karl von Blois had already conquered most of Brittany and pushed back the supporters of Johann von Montfort. Mauny's only notable success was a raid to Finistère , where he was able to make Hervé de Léon , the deputy of Charles of Blois in Brittany, and other valuable prisoners. Even if the chronicler Jean Le Bel describes the successes of Mauny in a dramatic, but not realistic report, his expedition was a failure. Around the end of June 1342 he concluded an armistice with representatives of Karl von Blois and returned to England. Edward III. was angry at the conclusion of the ceasefire, which he immediately invalidated. Although Mauny retained the king's favor, he never again received an independent command.

In October 1342 Mauny returned with that of Eduard III. commanded the English main army back to Brittany. He was given the dangerous job of exploring the fortifications of Vannes and took part in the subsequent siege of the city, which had to be called off in January 1343.

Campaign in south-west France, capture and role in the siege of Calais

In August 1345 Mauny, along with the Earl of Pembroke and James Audley, was one of the subordinates of the army with which Henry of Grosmont landed in Gascony , which was then owned by the English kings. The English attacked French positions in the Périgord and the Garonne and defeated the French at Bergerac and at the Battle of Auberoche . The successful campaign secured English rule in southwest France. In the conquered La Réole , Mauny found the grave of his father, who had been murdered more than 20 years earlier on his way back from a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela . He had his father's body transferred to the Franciscan settlement of Valenciennes in Hainaut, where he was finally buried. In 1346 Mauny was one of the commanders of Aiguillon when the city was besieged for four months by Duke John of Normandy . Mauny led several risky raids from the city, and when the Duke finally broke off the siege on August 20, 1346, Mauny was the leader of the troops that were the first to plunder the abandoned camp of the besiegers. The Duke had promised Mauny safe conduct because Mauny had waived the ransom for one of his friends. With this promise, Mauny set out with 20 companions from south-west France at the end of August 1346 to join the English king's army which had invaded northern France. Despite the promise of free conduct, he was taken prisoner at Saint-Jean-d'Angély . When Henry of Grosmont found out about the capture, he moved against the city and was able to capture it on September 22nd. However, Mauny had already escaped from custody with two companions. He was captured again at Orléans in early October and taken to Paris, where he was imprisoned in the Louvre . When Edward III. learned of this, he had the prison conditions of French prisoners tightened. Mauny was then released a little later and was able to join the English army that was now besieging Calais . He played an important role in the long siege. In July 1347 a total of 326 soldiers belonged to his entourage, including 19 knights and 91 squires. After the King, the Prince of Wales and the Earls of Lancaster and Warwick, he had the largest retinue in the English army. At the end of July 1347 he was a member of the delegation that briefly negotiated with the commanders of the French army that had been deployed to relieve the city. When these negotiations failed and the French gave up attempting to relieve the city, the Calais garrison asked Mauny to negotiate the surrender of the city. When the king wanted to have the defenders executed, he openly campaigned in favor of the defenders, who were ultimately pardoned by the king.

Walter Mauny's coat of arms as a knight of the Order of the Garter

Service as diplomat and administrator

After 1347 Mauny no longer only served the king as a military, but increasingly also as an administrator, judge and diplomat. He was a member of several court committees in England, including a member of the Privy Council . From 1348 he was invited to every parliament , so that he is considered Baron Mauny . He was a regular member of the committee that received petitions. Due to his origin from Brabant, where he still had contacts, he had a significant influence on relations with the Netherlands. He was a member of the English embassies that negotiated with envoys from France and Flanders in Calais and Dunkirk in November and December 1348. In March 1349 he was again the English envoy in negotiations with French envoys in Guînes . In 1351 he tried on behalf of Eduard III. unsuccessful in Hainaut to end the hook-and-cod war between the Dowager Empress and Countess Margarethe von Hainaut and her son Wilhelm von Holland.

Fights in the 1350s and role at the royal court

Mauny's military career after 1347 is less well documented. Apparently he didn't take part in as many campaigns as before. According to the chronicler Froissart , he took on January 2, 1350 with Eduard III. participated in a battle at the gates of Calais and on August 29, 1350 in the Battle of Winchelsea , but there is no further evidence for the information. Mauny certainly took part in the raids that the English undertook in the summer of 1351 from Calais to Picardy and Boulonnais . In the next few years Mauny only took part in campaigns that were led by the king himself and in which he then had to take part due to his rank at the royal court. In 1355 he accompanied the king on a train to Artois and Picardy. On his return he served as the king's spokesman at the opening of parliament in November 1355. He briefed the members of parliament on the diplomatic and military events of the past eighteen months. In early 1356 Mauny commanded the vanguard of the English army, which was to recapture Berwick from the Scots. He organized a brief but energetic siege of the city, whereupon the Scottish garrison had to surrender after a few days. In the great campaign of the Prince of Wales in France that year, however, he did not take part. He is said to have consulted with the king when the news of the victory of the English in the Battle of Poitiers and the capture of the French King John II, the former Duke of Normandy, reached him.

After the attempts of Edward III. had failed to negotiate an armistice with the captured French king, he sent Mauny to the Netherlands in the spring of 1359 to recruit troops for a major campaign to France with which the English wanted to defeat the French for good. Mauny succeeded in recruiting an estimated 1,500 soldiers in Hainaut and the neighboring principalities, whom he led to Calais in the autumn of 1359. There, however, the soldiers mutinied and wreaked havoc in the city while they waited for the English army to arrive. When the British Army finally arrived in Calais, the king took in before the start of the campaign Mauny Garter on. Then Mauny accompanied the king in the unsuccessful siege of Reims from December 1359 to January 1360 and in the following Chevauchée in the east and south of Paris. Mauny himself commanded advances into the suburbs of the French capital. Because of his diplomatic experience and because of his good contacts with the French, he then belonged to the English delegation that negotiated the Peace of Brétigny agreed in May 1360 . In October 1360 he testified to the confirmation of the peace by the English king in Calais. When the French King John II was released on November 1st, he gave Mauny and three other knights of Edward III's household as gifts. with generous gifts. After the conclusion of the peace treaty, Mauny continued to belong to Edward III's immediate entourage, with the exception of 1361, when he made a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, and 1364, when he stayed in Hainaut for a long time. In the 1360s he had increasingly closer contact with John of Gaunt , the king's third son. When the war with France broke out again in 1369, Mauny, who was around 60 years old, accompanied John of Gaunt on his campaign of devastation in Picardy.

Others

Heir to Hainaut and marries Margaret Marshal

Mauny had become a wealthy man from the spoils of the looting and the ransom money from his prisoners. In Hainaut he had inherited the Jenlain dominion south of Valenciennes from his mother . When he and Count Wilhelm II of Hainaut had belonged to the besiegers of Tournai in 1340, the Count had enfeoffed him with Wasnes . After his older brothers were killed in the Battle of Warns in 1345 , he finally inherited the family estates near Masny with several castles. The English king rewarded his services with possessions in Calais and Gascony. In late 1353 or early 1354 Masny had married the widowed Margaret Marshal , the daughter of his old liege, Thomas of Brotherton. Margaret was a cousin of the king and a wealthy heiress, but with the marriage they temporarily incurred the displeasure of the king, whom they had not asked for permission to marry. Margaret Marshal's legacy was also controversial, so Mauny had to go through numerous lawsuits to get it.

Foundation of London Charterhouse

In the last two years of his life, Mauny implemented the idea of ​​founding a monastery, which he had been pursuing for a long time. As early as 1349 he had leased a plot of land north of the city wall of the Smithfield district of London from St Bartholomew's Hospital . Mauny temporarily planned to found a collegiate monastery there, but the property was initially used as a cemetery for victims of the plague epidemic from 1349 . Therefore Mauny had a small chapel built there. Bishop Michael Northburgh of London, who had previously been Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal at the royal court, then proposed to Mauny the establishment of a Charterhouse , in which he also wanted to participate. Northburgh died in 1361 and in his will he donated £ 2,000 for the establishment of the Charterhouse. After lengthy negotiations with Northburgh's executors and the General Chapter of the Carthusians in England, Mauny bought the property from St Bartholomew's Hospital in November 1370 and founded the London Charterhouse on March 28, 1371. The cemetery chapel became the first chapel in the monastery, and construction of the convent buildings began shortly afterwards . When Mauny died, the facility was still under construction.

Death, burial and inheritance

Mauny died in Great Chesterford , an estate that belonged to his wife. At his death several debtors owed him a total of about £ 7,500. He also owned properties in Hainaut, eighteen English counties, Calais, Scotland and the Welsh Marches, and two merchant ships. In his will drawn up on November 30, 1371, he donated a substantial sum of money for the establishment of the London Charterhouse. He wished to be buried in a simple funeral service in the chapel of his founding, but his grave should be made of alabaster and show his coat of arms and a figure of him as a knight. Nevertheless, he was then buried in an elaborate funeral in which the king, his sons residing in England and numerous other nobles and prelates took part. But numerous poor people also took part in the funeral because, according to his will , they should each receive a penny . Mauny's wife Margaret survived him. With her he had a daughter who became his heiress:

• Anne Mauny (1355–1384) ∞ John Hastings, 2nd Earl of Pembroke

Aftermath

Mauny is considered a typical military man of his time. He fought valiantly and bravely, adhering to knightly customs. Because of his spectacular fights he was respected and admired by both the English and the French. He became a wealthy man because of the ransom money he took from the prisoners and the booty taken from the looting. From the prisoners he took between 1337 and 1340 alone, he received £ 11,000 in ransom. His deeds were spectacular, but mostly without strategic use. Sometimes they even endangered the success of the campaigns. Mauny's attempt to make prisoners as prominent as possible made it clear from Geoffroy de Charny's earlier observation that this would have rather negative military consequences. Therefore, despite his contemporary popularity, Mauny is considered a rather poor troop leader without great strategic skill. He owes his fame above all to the chronicler Jean Froissart, who also came from Hainaut. He was in England at the beginning of the 1360s, where Mauny told him in detail about his deeds and gave him a generous gift.

literature

• John A. Wagner: Encyclopedia of the Hundred Years War. Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport 2006, ISBN 0-313-32736-X , p. 213.

Web links

• Jonathan Sumption: Mauny [Manny], Sir Walter (c. 1310-1372). In: Henry Colin Gray Matthew, Brian Harrison (Eds.): Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , from the earliest times to the year 2000 (ODNB). Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004, ISBN 0-19-861411-X , ( oxforddnb.com license required ), as of 2004
• Walter de Mauny, 1st Lord Mauny on thepeerage.com , accessed March 25, 2018.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Ranald Nicholson: Edward III and the Scots. The formative Years of a Military Career . Oxford University Press, Oxford 1965, p. 80
2. ^ Ranald Nicholson: Edward III and the Scots. The formative Years of a Military Career . Oxford University Press, Oxford 1965, p. 97
3. ^ Ranald Nicholson: Edward III and the Scots. The formative Years of a Military Career . Oxford University Press, Oxford 1965, p. 181
4. ^ Adam Chapman: Welsh soldiers in the later Middle Ages . Boydell, Woodbridge 2015, ISBN 978-1-78327-031-6 , p. 176.
5. ↑ Jonathan Sumption: The Hundred Years War, Vol. 1: Trial by battle . Faber and Faber, London 1990, ISBN 0-8122-3147-3 , p. 307.
6. ↑ Jonathan Sumption: The Hundred Years War, Vol. 1: Trial by battle . Faber and Faber, London 1990, ISBN 0-8122-3147-3 , p. 361.
7. ↑ Jonathan Sumption: The Hundred Years War, Vol. 1: Trial by battle . Faber and Faber, London 1990, ISBN 0-8122-3147-3 , p. 542.
8. ↑ Jonathan Sumption: The Hundred Years War, Vol. 1: Trial by battle . Faber and Faber, London 1990, ISBN 0-8122-3147-3 , p. 556.
9. ↑ Cracroft's Peerage: Pembroke, Earl of (E, 1138-1389). Retrieved March 29, 2018 . 
10. ↑ Jonathan Sumption: The Hundred Years War, Vol. 1: Trial by battle . Faber and Faber, London 1990, ISBN 0-8122-3147-3 , p. 469.
11. ↑ Jonathan Sumption: The Hundred Years War, Vol. 1: Trial by battle . Faber and Faber, London 1990, ISBN 0-8122-3147-3 , p. 542.
12. ↑ Jonathan Sumption: Mauny [Manny], Sir Walter (c 1310-1372.). In: Henry Colin Gray Matthew, Brian Harrison (Eds.): Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , from the earliest times to the year 2000 (ODNB). Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004, ISBN 0-19-861411-X , ( oxforddnb.com license required ), as of 2004

predecessor	Office	successor
New title created	Baron Mauny 1348-1372	Anne Mauny