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Trade, Treason, and the Murder of Janus Imperial

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Paul Strohm
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Extract

The written record begins with the discovery of a body and the supposition of an unsolved crime. “It happened,” in the laconic words of the coroner's inquest, “that a certain Janus Imperial of Genoa lay slain.” The murder had occurred the night before, on August 26, 1379, in St. Nicholas Acton Lane, before Imperial's London residence. Arriving to view the body, the coroner and sheriffs gathered a jury from among men of Langbourne and adjacent wards and set about to determine how and in what way this foreign merchant met his death.

The jury's inquest was only the first step in an inquiry that would ultimately involve the mayor of London, the court of the king's bench, a second jury, the king and his council, and Parliament itself. So, too, did questions of motive and interest spool out from this seemingly random act to embrace the ambitions of London's mercantile elite, vicissitudes of royal finance, and the future and locus of the international wool trade. Starting with an apparent insufficiency of evidence, this investigation eventually found itself knee-deep in pertinent information, plausible motives, and likely suspects. Although it finally stumbled to a sort of stopping point, it never really achieved a satisfactory end.

The original investigation offers suggestive analogies to the task of historical reconstruction. The would-be historian is, like the crime's contemporaries, challenged to arrange known details into a coherent narration—and, as new elements emerge, into revised renarrations. The historian's location outside the crime's own participatory pattern is one of weakness and strength.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , January 1996 , pp. 1 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1996

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References

1 Unless otherwise identified, all the Imperial documents are cited from the splendid collection and edition of Sayles, G. O., Select Cases in the Court of King's Bench, Selden Society, vol. 88 (London, 1971), pp. 14–21, 40–41Google Scholar. English translations are based on those of Sayles, though with occasional light modification.

2 Ibid., p. 16.

3 Ibid.

4 Bernard William McLane notes of earlier fourteenth-century trial juries that “jurors generally may have had a ‘live and let live’ policy toward accused killers, especially in cases where the homicides were alleged to have been the unexpected outcome of an argument or a fight that had begun in a tavern or some other public place” (McLane, Bernard William, “Juror Attitudes toward Local Disorder,” in Twelve Good Men and True, ed. Cockburn, J. S. and Green, Thomas A. [Princeton, N.J., 1988], pp. 36–64Google Scholar). On jury leniency, see also Green, Thomas A., Verdict according to Conscience (Chicago, 1985), pp. 3–102Google Scholar.

5 Sayles, p. 17.

6 Both Newgate and the first trial venue of St. Martin-le-Grand were enclaves of royal justice within the City (Cam, Helen, “The Law-Courts of Medieval London,” in her Law-Finders and Law-Makers in Medieval England: Collected Studies in Legal and Constitutional History [London, 1962], pp. 92–93Google Scholar), and the Tower was, of course, such a precinct adjacent to it. The crown gained control of felony and treason cases prior to 1400, and once a case was declared treasonous in nature the jurisdiction of the king's bench was absolutely forgone (Powell, Edward, Kingship, Law, and Society [Oxford, 1989], pp. 49–50, 54–55Google Scholar). Even though no record of a complaint to the king's council survives, an additional precedent for royal involvement is the responsibility of the king's council to receive complaints of injury to foreign subjects; on the role of the council in such cases, and its close collaboration with the king's bench, see Beardwood, Alice, Alien Merchants in England (Cambridge, Mass., 1931), pp. 86–104Google Scholar.

7 This was not, according to J. W. Post, an unusual circumstance in itself (Post, J. W., “Jury Lists and Juries in the Late Fourteenth Century,” in Cockburn, and Green, , eds., pp. 67–68Google Scholar). But it is indicative of the atmosphere surrounding the case.

8 Sayles, p. 20.

9 Ibid., p. 21. Post comments that persons acquitted by juries may be remanded in custody for a wide range of reasons. Such mundane matters as fees to be paid or peace bonds to be assured might entail a temporary return. But persons might be remanded for longer periods of time by justices unhappy with a jury verdict, on grounds as general as “bad repute.” “Justices,” he adds, “may have felt entitled to use remand in custody as a punitive sentence” (Post, pp. 76–77). In view of the open-endedness of the confinement, this may presumably be considered such a case.

10 Kirkby and Algor were switched from Newgate to the Tower between September 27 and March 3 (Sayles [n. 1 above], p. 18), from the Tower to Nottingham Castle on June 24, 1380 (Calendar of Close Rolls [CCR], 1377–81, p. 389), and from Nottingham to Northampton on November 29, 1380 (CCR, 1377–81, p. 412).

11 Hamil, Frederick C., “The King's Approvers,” Speculum 11 (1936): 238–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Rolls of Parliament (RP), 3:75Google Scholar.

13 For the text of the Statute see Statutes of the Realm (London, 1810), 1:319–20Google Scholar. For a discussion of its provisions, as they touch on the present case, see Bellamy, J. G., The Law of Treason in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), pp. 180–81Google Scholar.

14 RP, 3:75.

15 Sayles, p. 18.

16 Fryde, E. B., Studies in Medieval Trade and Finance (London, 1983), p. 305Google Scholar; Ruddock, Alwyn A., Italian Merchants and Shipping in Southampton, 1270–1600 (Southampton, 1951), pp. 40, 46Google Scholar.

17 RP, 3:48.

18 Walsingham, Thomas, Historia Anglicana (London, 1863), 1:408Google Scholar.

19 Ibid., p. 449.

20 CCR, 1377–81, p. 389.

21 For a summary of his career, see Thrupp, Sylvia, The Merchant Class of Medieval London (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1948), p. 361Google Scholar.

22 Calendar of Plea and Memoranda Rolls, ed. Thomas, A. H., 1:281Google Scholar; Calendar of Letter-Book H, ed. Sharpe, Reginald R., p. 218Google Scholar.

23 Sayles, p. 41. p. 40; Public Record Office (PRO), C54/218/8d; CCR, 1377–81, p. 244. Imperial's actual titles are given as ambassiator and sindicus (or official advocate). The Genoese pled that the ship had been taken unlawfully and unresisting by English subjects (or, as the rolls put it, “per ligeos nostros”) and offered to post an indenture pending a demonstration that their assertions were true. The entry does not name the English subjects who were to profit from the seizure but does suggest that (consistent with the pattern of conflicting loyalties emerging in this case) the crown was to receive a share.

24 Rich, E. E., “The Mayors of the Staples,” Cambridge Historical Journal 4 (1932): 120–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Lloyd, T. H., The English Wool Trade (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), p. 251Google Scholar.

26 PRO, E122/71/4.

27 PRO, E122/71/9.

28 Carus-Wilson, E. and Coleman, Olive, England's Export Trade (Oxford, 1963), p. 49Google Scholar.

29 Lloyd, pp. 252, 226.

30 Power, E., The Wool Trade in English Medieval History (Oxford, 1941), pp. 97–103Google Scholar; Lloyd, pp. 225–26.

31 RP, 3:48.

32 Far from being a matter of indifference to the wool-rshipping Londoners, the rise of the cloth-making industry in southwestern England may be supposed their greatest nightmare. For a trade in finished woolens would foster a competition for domestic raw materials and would challenge the very Continental cloth-making industries which provided the foreign demand for the raw English product. The centrality of Southampton to a Genoese-English cloth trade is tellingly chronicled by E. B. Fryde (n. 16 above, pp. 346–47):

At the time when the Genoese were beginning to use Southampton as their chief harbour in England an English woollen industry capable of manufacturing for export was developing in the south-western region for which Southampton provided one of the best outlets. The Genoese specialized in the distribution of alum, dyes and other chemicals indispensable to the textile industry …. In March 1372 a Genoese ship called Christopher landed at Southampton 52 bales of woad, 26 of alum, 20 of madder and 6 of brazil. These were only the small beginnings of a trade that grew steadily …. Gradually the Genoese and other Italians also became interested in exporting some of the cloths produced in the hinterland of Southampton.

In 1379, this two-way trade in cloth-making chemicals and finished woolens existed mainly as a threatening possibility; by 1381–82, the death of Imperial notwithstanding, it had become a reality.

33 Sayles (n. 1 above), p. 41.

34 Not only (in the terms of detective fiction) is it Kirkby who “takes the fall,” but the record suggests that he might have been everybody's pigeon all along, recruited as an acceptable sacrifice from both the city's and the royal council's point of view. Kirkby's last hope was a plea of clerical standing and request for an ordinary, but that recourse was both anticipated and blocked as early as the January–February 1380 parliamentary confirmation of treason, when the framers went out of their way to declare that, since the crime was treason, no one involved in it should be permitted to enjoy benefit of clergy (“en quel cas y ne doit allouer a nully d'enjoier privilege de Clergie” [RP, 3:75]).

35 Sayles, p. 41.

36 On the subject of investigative procedure, assignment of responsibility, and diffuse enjoyment, see Žižek, Slavoj, Looking Awry (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), pp. 48–66Google Scholar. Readers of Žižek will recognize my broad indebtedness to his treatment of these concepts.

37 Calendar of Plea and Memoranda Rolls, 1377–81, p. 114.

38 Calendar of Letter-Book H, p. 218.

39 The Appeal is printed in A Book of London English, 1384–1425, ed. Chambers, R. W. and Daunt, M. (Oxford, 1931), pp. 22–31Google Scholar.

40 Pamela Nightingale has argued that the mid- and late-1370s were a time in which a hegemonic body of London capitalists still operated in relative harmony. According to her analysis, the groups that would eventually separate as the Brembre and Northampton factions in and after 1381 still cooperated across a broad front in the 1370s, as when they. joined their influence in the parliament of 1376 to win concessions for the Calais staple (high on the agenda of the wool merchants) and for the London franchise (important to the lesser guildsmen and domestic traders). She regards the interim period 1376–81 as one in which the different agendas of the two groups had begun to emerge, but in which an attitude of mutual conciliation and a political common front still prevailed (Nightingale, Patricia, “Capitalists, Crafts, and Constitutional Change,” Past and Present, no. 124 [1989], pp. 16–36Google Scholar).

41 Walsingham (n. 18 above), 1:449.

42 Lloyd (n. 24 above), pp. 228–29.

43 Postan, M. M., Medieval Trade and Finance (Cambridge, 1973), p. 211CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Power tellingly observes of the Calais staple that “the king was satisfied by an arrangement whereby the Company provided the mechanism by which he could raise loans. The custom and subsidy on the export of wool was the best possible security which he could offer, and a chartered company enjoying the monopoly of the trade was a much safer source of loans than the series of firms and syndicates which had, one by one, gone bankrupt in the early years of the Hundred Years' War” (Power [n. 30 above], p. 99).

45 Opinion was, in fact, abroad in the good parliament of 1376 that the Calais staple had been a parliamentary creation in the first place, and the reinstitution of the staple in that parliament was a cornerstone of its reform agenda (Lloyd, pp. 221–24).

46 Again, Power: “The staple monopoly … narrowed the channels of export, and, in order to enable the Staplers to shoulder the enormous export tax and make the king his loans, it secured for [the growing English cloth industry] low prices in England and high prices abroad. It is not difficult to see at once that this immense margin between the domestic and the foreign prices of wool provided the most effective protection for an infant industry” (Power, p. 101).

47 Žižek (n. 36 above), pp. 48–66.

48 The ultimate intraindebtedness of English society is suggested in the fact of Algor's royal pardon, dated July 15, 1384 (Sayles [n. 1 above], p. 41), at a time when Brembre and Philipot and the other wool-merchant opponents of the royal council and justiciary in 1379 were now become Richard II's most stalwart allies, in London and possibly in the kingdom as a whole.

49 These are, according to Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C., Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London, 1985)Google Scholar, moments that reveal “the limits of society, the latter's impossibility of fully constituting itself” (p. 125).

50 RP, 3:75.

51 On the recognition of alien merchants as a financial asset, and on the reiteration of this view in statutes, petitions, and customs rolls, see Beardwood (n. 6 above), p. 39.

52 See Walsingham (n. 18 above), pp. 407–8. Walsingham's rendition offers an additional interpretative temptation, and one that might subsume all the rest: that of seeing this crime as one of those sacrificial moments of “unanimous victimage,” preferably visited on an outsider or stranger, through which a community affirms its hierarchies and values (Girard, R., “To Double Business Bound,” [Baltimore, 1978], p. 207Google Scholar). And, to be sure, I do not deny that this crime encouraged a closing of ranks within the city of London and perhaps even the nation as a whole. But, while recognizing the explicitly sacrificial language of the chronicle account, I would nevertheless draw another lesson from all these portrayals of our slain merchant. As an outsider, a foreigner, he remains a kind of “blind spot” in the record, an effectively unaffiliated individual without rights or standing, and hence a symbolic dumping ground for virtually any sort of signification any commentator wishes to place on him.

53 We need hardly be reminded that, less than two years after Imperial's death, native rivals took advantage of the disturbances accompanying the Rising to slaughter dozens, and perhaps scores, of Flemish weavers and to pile heaps of their headless bodies in the streets. Or that Beues of Hamptoun imagines its hero doing the same for the London Lombard community; in the milder fourteenth-century version he slays thirty thousand, and in the bloodier-minded fifteenth-century version we read that, in the wake of his encounter,

In euery strete men myght se
Lumbardys on hepys dede there lye,
Hedys and quarters lye in pecys
And leggis cutt of by the knees,
Hedus with helmys strayling aboute,
Handys and armes cutt oute and oute,
Dede bodyes quarterrid in thre.

Or that periodic xenophobic outbursts would follow, culminating in the next century in the anti-Italian riots of the 1450s and the forced exodus of many of London's Italian inhabitants in 1457. See Beues of Hamtoun, ed. Kölbing, E., Early English Text Society, extra ser., vol. 46 (London, 1885), p. 213Google Scholar; Ruddock (n. 16 above), pp. 25–29, 162–168.

54 RP, 3:75

55 Lopez, Robert S., “Venise et Gênes,” in his Su e giù per la storia de Genova (Genoa, 1975), pp. 35–42Google Scholar; Kedar, Benjamin Z., Merchants in Crisis: Genoese and Venetian Men of Affairs and the Fourteenth-Century Depression (New Haven, Conn., 1976), pp. 9–13Google Scholar.

56 Lopez, , “Market Expansion,” in his Su e giù per la storia de Genova, pp. 43–62Google Scholar; Kedar, pp. 1–20.

57 Carus-Wilson, E., Medieval Merchant Venturers (London, 1967), pp. 261–62Google Scholar.

58 CCR, 1377–81, p. 224; PRO, C54/218/mem. 8d.

59 Chaucer was, of course, no stranger to merchants like Imperial, having worked with several of our protagonists on the wool quay, and having in fact himself taken part in a precursor mission in 1372–73 to discuss opening English ports to Genoese tarits (Crow, M. M., Chaucer Life-Records [Oxford, 1966], pp. 32–40Google Scholar; Chaucer text is from The Riverside Chaucer [Boston, 1987]Google Scholar, Canterbury Tales, fragment 7, lines 228–33).