Leicestershire · membrane 7
Placita Corone
Pleas of the Crown, at Leicester
A stealth heist game. England, 1347.
Iuratores presentant quod in nocte proxima ante festum Sancti Michaelis…
The jurors present that on the night before Michaelmas, six felons, one armed as a knight, one with a bow, one tonsured like a clerk, a woman who sold ale, a pardoner with his letters and one who dug, broke the granary of the manor of Donington and carried off they know not what. Whither they went, the jurors know not.
Et villata non levavit hutesium nec secuta est. Ideo in misericordia.
The hayward says he blew his horn. The township says it followed the hue as far as the Leicester road. The jurors say otherwise. Therefore the township is in mercy.
Catalla nulla. Postea habuerunt cartam de perdonacione.
They had no chattels. Afterwards they had a charter of pardon.
Note on the record
You run that company: a knight, an archer, a clerk, an alewife, a pardoner and a sapper, after the Folvilles, Leicestershire gentry who robbed, ransomed and murdered in the 1320s and 30s and were mostly pardoned for it.
Each job is one manor, the first the real house at Donington-le-Heath. By the Statute of Winchester (1285), whoever hears the hue must follow it. The village is the alarm. Leave before it sounds, and before the township is fined for letting you go.
A slip sewn to the roll, in a later hand
“Of the company that robbed the granary at Donington in the year before the great dying, I have three accounts. They agree on nothing but the horn.”
And one heard the cry, and will follow it. One letter when there is news. Nothing else.