Between 1387 and 1392 a local poaching war embroiled the countrymen of the West Riding of Yorkshire in a feud with officials administering the forests, chases, and parks of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, uncle of King Richard II. Gaunt, who at the time was campaigning in Spain for a crown of his own, possessed the “finest collection of hunting preserves in England.” They were administered like the royal forests, for the palatine authority of Lancastrian lands set them in a class apart. Gaunt was uncle also of Edward of Norwich, and it was for Gaunt's grandson that Edward wrote The Master of Game. It is said that Gaunt hunted the last wolf in England. And it was for Gaunt of course that Chaucer wrote The Book of the Duchess, with its evocation of the chase of the forloyne and the Knight-in-Black's lost hart/heart, to memorialize the “Deeth of Blaunche the Duchesse.” The Lancastrian hunting liberties were under siege until Gaunt returned from Spain in 1390, and it was still two years more before the killing was finished.

Poaching with a Vengeance

This event, which evoked a commission of oyer et terminer in June 1390 “touching treasons, felonies, murders, homicides, robberies, insurrections and other offenses in John, Duke of Lancaster's lordship and liberty of Knaresburgh and in the forest and chase thereof,” came to be known as the Northern Rebellion of Sir William Beckwith. As J. G. Bellamy has described it, this unrest was neither a reverberation of the Peasant Revolt of 1381 nor a matter of Lollard dissent, but a “feud of the old sort” conducted by Lancastrian ministers and allowed to persist during John of Gaunt's absence in Spain. According to the Westminster Chronicle, Beckwith had lain claim to a bailiwick or wardenship in the chase of Knaresborough “hitherto held by his ancestors.” But Sir Robert Rokely, constable of Knaresborough castle and master-forester of the chase, awarded the office to a man from across the border, as it were, and Beckwith, embittered and vindictive, retaliated with private war on the authors of his disparagement.

Beckwith attacked first the Lancastrian steward, then his rival in office, Sir Robert Doufbygging. He moved in the company of a considerable following or gang to whom plenty of disaffected people in the neighborhood lent their sympathy and support.