On the noble class too fell the heavy consequences of the rebellions and civil wars of which they were the main supporters. If the lord died in battle his estates might pass to a minor; if he died on the scaffold they passed to the crown; or long imprisonment might thwart his best laid plans for strengthening his hold over his boroughs. The young Lord Maurice of Berkeley, for instance, was drawn into rebellion against Edward the Second, and died in prison four and a half years later. During the whole time that he held his estates he was only in freedom for four months; and his eldest son, who was imprisoned with him, was not set at liberty till some months after his father’s death.[496] Meanwhile the towns were always quick to make their profit in such times of disturbance and revolution, as for example when the Earl of Devonshire was attainted by Edward the Fourth after the battle of Towton for his support of the Lancastrian cause, and the citizens of Exeter seized so favourable an opportunity to claim the restitution of a suburb stretching down to the riverside which the earls had held to strengthen their hold on the navigation of the Exe.[497]
Nor was the lord’s position made more hopeful by the furious feuds between noble and noble which distracted the provinces in the fifteenth century, and the incessant lawsuits by which the landowners sought to mend their fortunes. In 1463 James Lord of Berkeley made an agreement with the Countess of Shrewsbury that they would have no more battles at law; for he was then sixty-nine, and she fifty-two, and neither of them since their ages of discretion had “enjoyed any three months of freedom from lawsuits.”[498] Nor did they wage their fight in the law-courts only, but carried on an open war by which Gloucestershire had been distracted since 1421, and which proved one of the most deadly of the many provincial conflicts of the fifteenth century. Appeased at intervals to break out again with renewed force, and with the usual incidents of hangings and finings and imprisonments and ransomings, it finally culminated in 1470 in a pitched battle on Nibley Green, where the Berkeleys triumphantly maintained their cause at the head of about 1,000 fighting men, and Lord Lisle, the son of Lady Shrewsbury, who led the enemy’s army, was killed. To country folk and traders this feud of the nobles carried with it, we are told, “the ill-effects and destructions of a petty war, wherein the borough town of Berkeley, for her part, saw the burning and prostration of many of her ancient houses, as her old rent which till that time was £22 by the year and upwards, and by those devastations brought down to £11 and under, where it sticketh to this day, without recovery of her ancient lustre or greatness.”[499] Such a strife was by no means singular or without parallel, and the histories of Norfolk, Yorkshire, Derbyshire, or Lancashire have their records of similar outrages. Exeter was thrown into alarm by a great fight on Clistheath in 1453 between the Earl of Devon and Lord William Bonvil where many persons were grievously wounded and much hurt done: “the occasion whereof was about a dog; but great displeasure thereby came to the city, where presently after the fight the Lord Bonvil sheltered himself, which the Earl took amiss, thinking it had been so done by the city in some displeasure to himself.”[500] The mere instinct of self-protection naturally drove the towns to detach their interests from nobles whose alliance brought disaster and ruin to simple traders, and in every borough statute after statute forbidding the inhabitants to wear the “livery”[501] of any lord whatever, testified to the determination of the towns to cut off from the great people of the country round every possibility of stirring up faction within their borders.