The year is 1400. In the quiet fields surrounding the manor of Brattleby, the rhythm of the agricultural year continues much as it has for centuries. The villagers, tenants of their lord, are governed by the seasons: the spring ploughing, the summer hay-meadow, the autumn harvest. Yet, beyond the familiar landscape of Lincolnshire, the kingdom of England is gripped by a profound and dangerous uncertainty. A new king, Henry IV, sits upon a throne seized by force, while the deposed Richard II languishes in a northern castle, his fate a dark secret. For the great noble families of the realm, this is a moment of acute peril. Every allegiance is a gamble, every decision fraught with consequence. The foundation of their power—land, title, and lineage—has never felt so fragile.
This article explores the precarious nature of aristocratic power at the turn of the fifteenth century, a period when a single misstep, a poorly chosen alliance, or the unpredictable wrath of a king could bring a dynasty, centuries in the making, to utter ruin. Using the dramatic usurpation of 1399 as our lens and drawing on the fate of one prominent Lincolnshire family, we shall see how the great wheel of fortune could elevate a man to the pinnacle of power or cast him down into attainder, exile, and death, sending shockwaves that would be felt even in the tranquil manors of our own county.
The Bedrock of Power: Land and Lineage
To understand the fragility of noble power, we must first appreciate its source. Since the Norman Conquest of 1066, power in England was synonymous with land. William the Conqueror had systematically replaced the Anglo-Saxon elite with his own followers, granting them vast estates in return for military service and loyalty. This feudal compact was codified in the Domesday Book of 1086, a monumental survey that laid bare the new reality: all land was ultimately held from the king.
In Lincolnshire, the Domesday survey reveals this new order in stark detail. The entry for Brattleby (Bratelbie) records that the manor was held by the powerful Abbot of Peterborough, a major ecclesiastical magnate. The Abbot possessed "4 carucates of land taxable. Land for 4 ploughs... a church and a priest, and 1 mill rendering 2 shillings, and 40 acres of meadow." This detailed accounting was not merely administrative; it was a statement of ownership and obligation, a direct link in the chain of authority stretching from the peasant farmer in Brattleby all the way to King William on his throne.
Over the succeeding three centuries, this system evolved. Great baronial families—the Mowbrays, the Percys, the Nevilles, the de la Poles—solidified their holdings through strategic marriages, royal favour, and ruthless ambition. Their power became hereditary, passed from father to son, creating dynasties that often controlled entire regions. Lincolnshire itself was a patchwork of lordships held by families whose names resonated across the kingdom. They built castles, endowed monasteries, presided over local justice, and raised armies for the king's wars in France and Scotland. To the common person, their authority seemed as permanent as the landscape itself. Yet, it was contingent upon one critical relationship: their bond with the Crown.
The Royal Hand: A King’s Favour and a King’s Wrath
The king was the fount of all honour and the ultimate landlord. A baron's relationship with his sovereign determined his fate. Royal favour could bring grants of new manors, lucrative wardships (the right to control a minor heir's estate), profitable marriages for one’s children, and high office at court. Royal displeasure, however, could be catastrophic.
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the turbulent reign of Richard II (1377-1399). Initially a boy-king who heroically faced down the Peasants' Revolt in 1381, Richard grew into a monarch with a powerful, and many would say tyrannical, conception of his own authority. He believed in the divine right of kings, a theory that placed his will above the law and beyond the challenge of even his greatest subjects.
In the late 1390s, Richard systematically moved against those he perceived as threats. In 1397, he took his revenge on the Lords Appellant, a group of magnates who had humbled him a decade earlier. He had the Earl of Arundel executed, the Earl of Warwick exiled, and his own uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, murdered at Calais. These were acts of shocking brutality that sent a tremor of fear through the aristocracy. Any nobleman, no matter how powerful, could be next.
The defining act of Richard’s tyranny came in 1399. His cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Hereford (and son of the immensely powerful John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster), had been exiled following a dispute with the Duke of Norfolk. When John of Gaunt died, Richard II committed an unprecedented and deeply alarming act: he confiscated the entire Lancastrian inheritance, disinheriting Bolingbroke and seizing for the Crown lands and properties that were the bedrock of England’s wealthiest dynasty.
For the landholding class, this was an existential threat. If the king could arbitrarily dispossess the Duke of Lancaster, the principle of hereditary right, on which their entire status and wealth depended, was meaningless. What was to stop him from doing the same to any one of them on a whim? A landowner in Lincolnshire, observing these events from afar, would have understood the terrifying implication: centuries of careful estate-building and loyal service could be undone by a single royal decree.
A Kingdom in Crisis: The Usurpation of 1399
It was against this backdrop of fear and instability that Henry Bolingbroke acted. In early July 1399, while Richard II was on campaign in Ireland, Bolingbroke landed with a small band of followers at Ravenspurn on the Yorkshire coast. His declared aim was simple and legally justifiable: to reclaim his rightful inheritance as Duke of Lancaster.
His cause resonated powerfully with the northern nobility, who were deeply unsettled by Richard’s actions. The two most powerful men in the north, Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and Ralph Neville, Earl of Westmorland, swiftly pledged their support. As Bolingbroke marched south, his army swelled. Noblemen who had feared Richard’s tyranny now saw an opportunity to secure their own positions by backing a man who championed the principle of hereditary right.
Every baron in England was forced to make a choice that would define his family’s future. To remain loyal to a king who was absent and increasingly seen as a tyrant was a huge risk. To join a returning exile in an act of open defiance was arguably even greater. For a Lincolnshire baron, the decision was acute. Bolingbroke’s own vast estates included the Honour of Bolingbroke in their county; he was, in effect, a local magnate. His path took him through the heart of the region, and his call for support could not be ignored.
When King Richard returned from Ireland, he found his kingdom had slipped from his grasp. His support evaporated. He was cornered in Wales, surrendered to Bolingbroke at Flint Castle, and taken to London as a captive. In September, a parliament was convened. Bolingbroke, his ambition having grown from reclaiming his duchy to seizing the crown itself, laid claim to the throne. Richard II was formally deposed on grounds of tyranny, and on 13 October 1399, Henry Bolingbroke was crowned King Henry IV.
The wheel of fortune had turned. Richard’s loyalists were now traitors to a new regime. The king’s favourites—men like Sir William Scrope, Earl of Wiltshire, and Sir John Bussy, a prominent Lincolnshire knight and Speaker of the Commons—were summarily executed without proper trial. Their lands were forfeit. For those who had backed Henry, the rewards were immense. For those who had hesitated or supported Richard, the future was terrifyingly uncertain.
A Lincolnshire Baron's Gamble: The Cautionary Tale of Lord Bardolf
To witness the brutal mechanics of this fragility, we need look no further than the story of Thomas Bardolf, 5th Baron Bardolf of Wormegay. Lord Bardolf was a significant magnate whose family, while based in Norfolk, held extensive and valuable lands across Lincolnshire, including the manors of Ruskington and Caythorpe. He was a man of high standing, a veteran of the French wars, and a peer of the realm whose family had been summoned to Parliament for over a century.
Initially, Lord Bardolf made the correct choice. He supported Henry Bolingbroke’s accession, attended Henry IV’s first parliament, and appeared to be a loyal member of the new establishment. He understood, as did all his peers, that a new king needed to be supported if the realm was to have stability.
However, Henry IV’s throne was far from secure. He was a usurper, and his reign was immediately plagued by rebellion. In 1400, a group of Richard II’s former allies, the "Epiphany Rising," attempted to assassinate him. In Wales, Owain Glyndŵr declared himself Prince of Wales, sparking a national uprising that would occupy English forces for a decade. But the most dangerous threat came from the very men who had put Henry on the throne: the Percy family.
Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and his fiery son, Sir Henry "Hotspur" Percy, felt they had been inadequately rewarded for their pivotal role in the usurpation. They also had policy disagreements with the king over the war in Scotland and the ransom of prisoners. In 1403, Hotspur rose in rebellion, only to be defeated and killed at the Battle of Shrewsbury. The elder Percy was pardoned, but the grievance simmered.
It was into this volatile situation that Lord Bardolf stumbled. For reasons that remain debated by historians—perhaps a sense of frustrated ambition, a genuine belief that Henry’s rule was illegitimate, or simply the pull of old alliances—Bardolf chose to gamble. In 1405, he joined a new conspiracy orchestrated by the still-disaffected Earl of Northumberland and Richard Scrope, the Archbishop of York. Their plan was to divide the kingdom between themselves and Owain Glyndŵr.
This was a catastrophic miscalculation. The rebellion was swiftly crushed by the king’s forces under the Earl of Westmorland. Archbishop Scrope was captured and, in an act that shocked Christendom, executed for treason. Lord Bardolf and the Earl of Northumberland, however, escaped and fled to Scotland.
For Lord Bardolf, this was the end. In the parliament of 1406, he was formally declared a traitor and attainted. Attainder was the ultimate legal weapon of the medieval state. It meant the complete destruction of a man’s legal and political existence. He was stripped of his title, his lands, his honours, and all his worldly goods, which were forfeited to the Crown. Crucially, the attainder also created a "corruption of blood," meaning his children could not inherit from him. In a single parliamentary act, the entire Bardolf dynasty was effectively erased from the English nobility. The centuries of accumulation, the carefully managed estates in Lincolnshire and Norfolk, were gone.
The final, tragic act played out two years later. In the winter of 1408, Bardolf and Northumberland made a desperate, final attempt to invade England from Scotland. With a small force, they were confronted by the Sheriff of Yorkshire at Bramham Moor on 19 February. In the ensuing battle, Northumberland was killed, and Lord Bardolf was mortally wounded. He died shortly after being captured. As a final, gruesome warning to other would-be traitors, his body was quartered, and the pieces were displayed above the gates of London, York, Lincoln, and King's Lynn. The head was placed on London Bridge.
The Aftermath: Ripples Across Lincolnshire
The fall of a great baron like Lord Bardolf was not an abstract political event; it had immediate and tangible consequences on the ground. His forfeited lands, including the valuable Lincolnshire manors, were now in the king's gift. A usurper like Henry IV had a desperate need to reward loyalty and secure his regime. The Bardolf estates were a political windfall.
The official records, specifically the Patent Rolls, show how quickly Henry redistributed the spoils. The lordship of Bardolf’s manor at Ruskington, for example, was granted to King Henry’s own son, Thomas of Lancaster (later Duke of Clarence). Other properties were parcelled out to staunch royalists who had stood by the king, such as Sir William de Roos of Helmsley, another major Lincolnshire landowner who had proven his loyalty.
For the tenants and villagers on these manors, the fall of their old lord and the arrival of a new one would have been a deeply unsettling event. The change in lordship meant new stewards, new officials, and potentially new and more demanding expectations for rents and services. The personal, customary bonds that had connected a community to the Bardolf family for generations were severed overnight. A new lord, especially an absentee royal or a courtier, might view the estate purely as a source of revenue, lacking the long-term, paternalistic perspective of an established dynasty.
For the neighbouring gentry and landowners, such as the lord of Brattleby, the lesson was stark and terrifying. The quartered remains of Lord Bardolf displayed on the Bargate in Lincoln were a visceral reminder of the price of a failed alliance. Power was not a permanent possession. It was a temporary privilege, held in trust and constantly at risk. It confirmed the terrifying truth that had haunted the nobility since 1399: loyalty was a matter of survival, and one wrong move could mean the utter annihilation of one's house.
This cycle of forfeiture and redistribution became a defining feature of the fifteenth century. The political instability unleashed by Henry IV’s usurpation did not end with his death. It festered for decades, eventually erupting into the dynastic civil war we call the Wars of the Roses (c. 1455-1487). Throughout this conflict, the precedent set by Richard II’s deposition and the subsequent attainders was followed with brutal regularity. As the Houses of Lancaster and York fought for the throne, victory for one side meant attainder and ruin for the supporters of the other. Great families like the Beauforts, the Percys (again), the Nevilles, and ultimately the House of York itself would rise and fall on this same violent turn of Fortune's Wheel.
The quiet fields of Brattleby may have seemed a world away from the bloody battlefields and the high politics of Westminster, but the fate of the land and its people was inextricably linked to the dangerous game of thrones played by kings and magnates. The story of Lord Bardolf serves as a powerful, local illustration of a universal truth of his age: that noble power, seemingly so entrenched and formidable, was in reality a fragile edifice, liable to be swept away in an instant by the treacherous currents of royal politics.
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Sources & Further Reading
Primary Sources: Domesday Book: A Complete Translation. Penguin, 2003. (For the original entry on Brattleby). The Rolls of Parliament (Rotuli Parliamentorum). The 1406 parliament roll contains the formal attainder of Northumberland and Bardolf. Calendar of the Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office: Henry IV. H.M. Stationery Office. (Details the redistribution of forfeited lands). Walsingham, Thomas. The St Albans Chronicle: The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham*, vol. II, 1394-1422. Edited and translated by J. Taylor, W. R. Childs, and L. Watkiss, Oxford University Press, 2011. (A contemporary monastic chronicle detailing the events of the reign).
Secondary Sources: Bean, J.M.W. "Henry IV and the Percies." History, vol. 44, no. 152, 1959, pp. 212–227. Castor, Helen. Blood and Roses: The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century. Faber & Faber, 2004. (Provides excellent context for the experience of landholding families during this period). Given-Wilson, Chris. Henry IV. Yale University Press, 2016. (The modern authoritative biography of the king). Given-Wilson, Chris. The Royal Bastards of Medieval England. Routledge, 1984. (Contains details on land grants to royal family members). Hicks, Michael. The Wars of the Roses. Yale University Press, 2010. (Explains the long-term consequences of the instability of this period). Mortimer, Ian. The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King. Jonathan Cape, 2007. (A highly readable account focusing on the paranoia and instability of Henry's reign). A History of the County of Lincoln: Volume 2. The Victoria History of the Counties of England, 1906. (Provides background on landholding and manorial history in the county). Pollard, A.J. The Wars of the Roses*. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. (Excellent short introduction to the politics of the 15th-century nobility).