Pontefract Castle, by Alexander Keirincx, c. 1640

Leaving Nottingham immediately after his Christmas festivities, the King made his way via the bishop of Lincoln's manor of Newark-on-Trent, reaching Doncaster on January 1 (traditionally a day of festivities and gift giving, spent on the road in this exceptional year). If the details reported on the chancery roll can be trusted, there was a probe towards Doncaster as early as 31 December, meeting with a temporary halt at Eelpie Bridge, where the Great North Road crosses various tributaries of the river Idle. By Saturday 2 January the King was nonetheless eighteen miles north of Doncaster, at the castle of Pontefract, chief bastion of John de Lacy, constable of Chester, and a leading member of the baronial twenty-five. The intention was clearly to intimidate De Lacy and his fellow rebels into making peace. To this end, throughout the week, safe conducts were issued, inviting rebels to attend discussions with the King. On Sunday 27 December, letters of this kind were sent to the Lincolnshire barons Simon of Kyme, Gilbert of Benniworth and Lambert of Moulton (to last to Sunday 3 January), on Wednesday 30 December to Hugh Painel and those with him (to last to Friday 8 January), and on the following days to Maurice de Ghent, Gerard de Furnivall and William de Cressy (to the same term, with three barons serving as pledges for William, 'so that his houses be not burned provided he come to the King's peace and fealty').1 Notwithstanding these arrangements, on 2 January, Philip d'Aubigny (a Breton kinsman of the Aubigny lords of Belvoir) was granted custody of the lands of Maurice de Ghent, including the Yorkshire manor of Leeds.2 Robert Bardulf was granted safe conducts 'to discuss our peace' before 8 January, with an additional clause recognizing his status as a vowed crusader immune from harm 'by fire or other means'.3 On Thursday 31 December, three days before his arrival outside Pontefract, the King granted John de Lacy conducts to last a year from 2 January, the exceptionally generous terms here perhaps reflecting John's significance to the rebel cause.4 According to the chronicler known as the 'Anonymous of Béthune', John de Lacy surrendered Pontefract, following mediation by the earl of Chester.5 At about this time, another of the earl of Chester's men, John d'Orreby, offered three palfreys for the King's benevolence, with the earl himself standing as pledge.6

As early as 27 December, from Langar, the King had opened negotiations for the surrender of Belvoir Castle, the chief but poorly defended stronghold of William d'Aubigny, himself recently captured at Rochester. Roger of Wendover, who as one-time prior of Belvoir had privileged sources of information, claims that the King himself visited the castle on 27 December (the feast of St John the Evangelist and in all likelihood King John's own birthday), granting it in custody to Geoffrey and Oliver de Bouteville, described by Wendover as 'Poitevins', in reality from those parts of the Angoumois where John ruled by virtue of his wife, Isabella of Angoulême.7 In compliance with the arrangements made for its surrender, on 29 December, Belvoir's entire garrison of thirteen knights and twenty-eight serjeants (all of them named in the record) was to be allowed to go free, carrying away arms and harness that had previously deposited in the local Benedictine priory.8 Simon of Pattishall, the former royal justice, who seems to have made his peace with the King for the second time this year, having attended court at Northampton on 21-22 December, was promised restoration of his estates, as was Roger de Montbegon, who by 2 January, when the King was at Pontefract, had returned to fealty and been promised the restoration of his estates in seven counties.9 Later testimony confirms that both John de Lacy and Roger de Montbegon returned to fealty on 1 January, the feast of the Circumcision and in normal years an occasion for feasting and generosity at court.10 They thus became the second and third of the twenty-five barons of Runnymede (after William d'Aubigny) either to be captured or to surrender to the King. On his way northwards, the King continued to extract punitive fines from rebel manors: 100 marks each in 'tenseria' from the men of the Nottinghamshire vills of Retford and Laxton, and (independent of the King's own itinerary) 80 marks from William of Mowbray's men of Thirsk in Yorkshire, in the two last cases to guarantee against the burning of houses, payable within only a week or two.11

From Newark and Laxton, the King looked to the nearby city of Lincoln, where new bailiffs were appointed, and from where he commanded the dispatch of supplies, including a dozen hand-towels for his own personal use, a pound of cinnamon and four ounces of nutmeg.12 The dean of Lincoln transferred 50 marks to the constable of Newark, ultimately for the use of Philip Mark at Nottingham.13 Elsewhere, there were calls for military or defensive action, with the grant to Roger of Clifford the younger of custody over Hanley Castle in Worcestershire, and a command to Thomas of Erdington, issued on 30 January, to ensure the surrender and slighting of Robert Marmion's castle at Tamworth in Staffordshire, retaining in the King's hands all prisoners and equipment found there.14 Mountsorrel castle in Leicestershire, granted after Runnymede to Saher de Quincy, was ordered surrendered to the King's Flemish mercenary, Theodore (?alias Thierry) de Zottegem, and three knights were sent to strengthen the royalist garrison at Sauvey.15 There was the by now customary cluster of commands for rebel land to be transferred to royalists, and a smaller number of land grants that seem to have been related to inheritance or reward and only indirectly to the civil war.16

In East Anglia, meanwhile, the King's mercenaries continued their campaign of pillage.17 On Sunday 27 December, Savaric de Mauléon and his troops entered the Cistercian Abbey of Tilty north of Chelmsford, whilst mass was being celebrated, and ransacked the church. Further east, on Friday 1 January, the feast of the Circumcision, another Essex Cistercian house, Coggeshall, was attacked by twenty-two horsemen intent on pillage and the kidnapping of rebel clerks. From Coggeshall, they made their way northwards to Bury St Edmunds, and then to besiege the Isle of Ely to which a large number of refugees had fled. The outcome was to be a massacre, led by the mercenary captain Walter Buc.18