Crusaders
This post deals with another very common question in my email bag: ‘My family is descended from crusaders.’ The enquirer then gives a family name and asks me to tell them more about their crusading ancestor(s).
Usually, I can’t. The person they are asking about was not from a sufficiently noble family to get noticed by the contemporary commentators. However, there are things that can be done to try and find information.
For all medieval name enquiries, a good place to start is to look the name up in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online. UK readers who are members of a council library may have free access to this through their local library service. Another great collection of material is the Victoria County History. This is still ongoing work, but many of the older volumes are available online through British History Online. Of course it helps to know which county to look at. Another good source of information is The National Archives search.
These won’t necessarily verify that the person went on crusade, but may find some family members of the required name. But how can we find out whether they went on crusade?
As many readers of this blog will know, there were no complete lists of participants on the crusades throughout most of the 12th and 13th centuries, and even when they became more organised the lists only gave the names of the leaders and significant participants (e.g. people on horseback who could be entitled to have the cost of their horse reimbursed if it was killed), so it can be very difficult to discover whether or not a certain individual went on crusade. Some surviving documents ecord loans taken out by would-be crusaders before they set out, or sales of property that they made in order to raise money. Sometimes the contemporary commentators who recorded events mentioned individuals, but the majority went unrecorded.
Crusade scholars reading this blog will already know that there are a lot of contemporary medieval accounts of the crusades, and wading through them looking for a name that contemporaries spelled in three different ways can be frustrating. Fortunately there are now many good translations of crusade chronicles, many of them published by Ashgate Publishing in their series Crusade Texts in Translation. There are also volumes published by Boydell and Brewer, such as The History of the Holy War: Ambroise’s Estoire de la guerre sainte, ed. Marianne Ailes and Malcolm Barber with a translation by Marianne Ailes (Woodbridge: Suffolk, 2003). Some of the longer medieval chronicles have no modern translation, but 19th-century translators may have translated them: for example, Roger of Howden’s chronicle, translated as The annals of Roger de Hoveden and published by Henry Bohn of London in 1853, has been republished at Felinfach by Llanerch Publishers in 1997.
Some modern scholars have put together lists of crusaders. Simon Lloyd compiled a list of the crusaders who went to the East with the Lord Edward (later King Edward I) in 1270-2 (published in English Society and the Crusade, 1216-1307 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), appendix 4). For the fourteenth century, Timothy Guard has recently published a detailed study, Chivalry, Kingship and Crusade: The English Experience in the Fourteenth Century (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2013), which includes at the end a list of all the fourteenth-century English crusaders he found during his research.
But even when you have looked in all these places, it may still be impossible to find the required names. We can go through the Calendars of the Patent Rolls, Close Rolls, Charter Rolls, etc. (now available in electronic format as well as in book form but not usually available in public libraries, alas); we can go through published collections of royal charters, monastic charters, baronial charters; local archives may have documents from local families, although many don’t go back to the middle ages. Sometimes it isn’t possible to find a name even with all of this.
However, don’t let that discourage you from trying it for yourself.
