The Ploughman After the Broken King

Rokele, de la Haye, Robin Hood, and the Arthurian Witness

There are moments in this work when the sword does not disappear.

It changes shape.

First it is a crusader sword.Then it becomes a prison key.

Then it becomes a forest bow.Then it becomes a ploughshare in a field.

Then it becomes the old question of Arthur:

What is power for?

This scroll begins after the fall of the Temple.

Not because every name here is Templar.

Not because every road leads to a secret order.

But because the collapse of the Templars leaves behind a question England cannot escape:

Who has the right to hold sacred power?

The Temple had been a house of vows, money, land, discipline, pilgrimage and sword.

In England, Edward II did not begin by rushing to condemn the Templars.

The English suppression came under heavy pressure from the wider papal and French machinery.

The captured Templars were first held in castles around the country;

those in London were later ordered to the Tower, and the trials did not begin until 1309.

Among those tried in London was William de la More, Grand Commander of the Templars in England.

(Historic Royal Palaces)

William de la More matters here because he stands at the English death-edge of the Temple.

The name itself already belongs to one of our chambers.

de la More.

de la Mare.

The pool.

The moor.

The water-field.

The custody-line.

In the older scroll, William de la More stood as the man who would not confess. A figure held in the Tower.

A man inside the machinery of accusation. A man whose body becomes evidence that the Temple did not simply vanish.

It was broken, seized, judged and absorbed.

Then something stranger happens.

The king who lived through the breaking of the Templars becomes a prisoner himself.

Edward II’s reign collapses.

By the 1320s, the king’s world is dominated by the Despensers, especially Hugh Despenser the Younger.

Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer move against that regime, invade England in 1326, and the king is captured.

Hugh Despenser is executed.

Edward is taken to Kenilworth, forced from power in January 1327, and the young Edward III becomes king while Isabella and Mortimer rule through him.

English Heritage gives the essential fall: Isabella allied with Mortimer, they attacked England in September 1326, and Edward II and Despenser were captured in South Wales in November.

(English Heritage)

So the shape is brutal.

The king who had seen the Temple held now becomes the held one.

The custodian becomes the captive.

The man who ruled a kingdom becomes a body moved between castles.

And this is where Berkeley Castle enters.

Berkeley is not just a prison in this story.

It is the chamber of broken custody.

Edward II is placed under guard there.

The official story places his death at Berkeley in September 1327, though modern debate continues around how secure the death-story is and whether the official account hides more than it reveals.

A recent summary notes that he died while under house arrest at Berkeley, with natural death reported at the time; Ian Mortimer has challenged the accepted view, arguing that the evidence is not as secure as tradition suggests.

(World History Encyclopedia)

This uncertainty matters.

Not because we need to solve the death of Edward II here.

But because the uncertainty itself shows the wound.

A king’s body had become politically explosive.

If he lived, he could be rescued.

If he was rescued, he could be restored.

If he was restored, Isabella and Mortimer could fall.

If he died, the regime became safer.

If the death was unclear, the story itself became a prison.

And in that moment, names appear.

On 1 August 1327,

Thomas, Lord Berkeley was appointed to arrest a group accused of coming to Berkeley Castle with armed force “to plunder it” and refusing to join the king’s Scottish expedition.

The named group includes Stephen Dunheved, Thomas Dunheved, Thomas de la Haye, Peter de Rokele, Henry de Rihale the friar preacher, Roger atte Watre and others. (edwardthesecond.blogspot.com)

That is the hinge.

Peter de Rokele.

Thomas de la Haye.

Standing together in the Berkeley field.

Not as a proven bloodline.

Not as a neat family alliance.

Not as a claim we should force.

But as names in the same armed custody-crisis.

The official wording says plunder.

But the deeper context is Edward II’s imprisonment, the Dunheved rescue-current, and the attempts to reach the captive king.

The Piers Plowman Electronic Archive identifies Peter de Rokele as William Langland’s grandfather and says he was directly involved in the 1327 raid attempting to free Edward II from Berkeley Castle. (piers.chass.ncsu.edu)

So the line is strong enough.

Rokele and de la Haye are not random echoes here.

They stand together at the gate of the broken king.

This is not the old de la Haye chamber of Nicholaa holding Lincoln Castle against siege.

It is not yet proven as her direct blood-line. But it belongs to the same symbolic language: custody, castle, loyalty, contested authority, the body of power held behind walls.

Nicholaa de la Haye had shown one version of custody: disciplined guardianship.

Berkeley shows another: custody as danger.

If Lincoln asked, “Who can hold the castle for the realm?”

Berkeley asks, “Who holds the king, and by what right?”

That is why Thomas de la Haye matters.

A de la Haye name is standing in the rescue-current, not comfortably beside the new regime.

And Peter de Rokele matters even more.

Because from the Rokele shadow comes the next answer.

Not another castle.

Not another raid.

Not another armed company.

A poem.

A dream.

A ploughman.

The family trail is careful but powerful.

The manuscript tradition behind Piers Plowman names Stacy / Eustace de Rokayle as father of William de Langlond, the man said to have made the book called Piers Plowman.

A Cambridge Companion summary gives the note: Stacy de Rokele was father of William Langland, of gentle or noble birth, living at Shipton-under-Wychwood as tenant of Lord Spenser. (Cambridge University Press & Assessment)

Trinity College Dublin’s MS 212 is central here.

It contains one of the earliest and best C-text versions of Piers Plowman, and the attribution of the poem to William Langland derives from this manuscript. (Trinity College Dublin)

So the generational pattern becomes astonishing:

The grandfather, Peter de Rokele, appears in the armed rescue-field of Edward II.

The father, Stacy de Rokayle, stands as a gentle-born figure tied to Shipton-under-Wychwood and the Despenser land-world.

The son, William Langland, is remembered as the maker of one of medieval England’s greatest moral dream-visions.

This does not mean Piers Plowman is a secret confession about Berkeley.

It does not mean every line of the poem hides Edward II.

But the atmosphere is impossible to ignore.

A family-shadow touched by a captive king, a broken regime, Despenser land, and dangerous loyalty gives way to a poem about Truth.

Not truth as opinion.

Truth as a living demand.

In Piers Plowman, the dreamer goes to sleep in the Malvern Hills and sees a field full of folk.

A tower above.

A dungeon below.

Human society in between.

The whole world becomes a moral landscape.

Kings.

Priests.

Workers.

Beggars.

Merchants.

Lawyers.

False reward.

Corrupt speech.

Hunger.

Sin.

Conscience.

Reason.

Truth.

The poem does not answer broken power with fantasy escape.

It answers with labour.

With ploughing.

With repentance.

With the search for Do-Well, Do-Better, and Do-Best.

And at the centre of that answer stands Piers.

Piers the Plowman.

Not a crowned king.

Not a knight in armour.

Not a bishop in a palace.

A worker in the field.

This is the turn.

After the Temple falls, after the king is captured, after castles become prisons and custody becomes corruption, the field speaks.

The sword has failed.

So the plough appears.

But the poem does something else too.

It remembers Robin Hood.

In Piers Plowman, the figure Sloth admits that he does not know his Paternoster properly as the priest sings it, but he knows the rhymes of Robin Hood and Randolph, Earl of Chester. Visit Nottinghamshire identifies this as the earliest written reference to Robin Hood tales, usually dated to the later fourteenth century. (Nottinghamshire)

That line is thunder.

The people know outlaw songs better than prayer.

That is not just comic detail.

It is a wound.

Formal religion has failed to teach the soul.

Official law has failed to carry justice.

The church speaks, but the people remember the forest.

So Robin Hood enters the scroll not as a children’s legend.

He enters as popular memory.

A folk-answer to broken authority.

If Piers is the field truth, Robin is the forest truth.

Piers ploughs.

Robin hides.

Piers labours in the open field.

Robin moves beneath the leaves.

Piers asks what salvation means in a corrupt world.

Robin asks what justice means when the sheriff is corrupt, abbeys are greedy, and the poor are crushed.

That is why the forest matters.

The forest is not just where an outlaw can hide.

In medieval England, the forest is a royal space.

A controlled space.

A place of deer, hunting, fines, foresters, law, privilege and Crown claim.

Robin living in the forest means he lives inside the king’s claimed world, but outside the king’s corrupted officers.

He becomes illegal inside a legal landscape.

Outlawed, but somehow truer than the law.

That is the paradox.

When law becomes crooked, justice goes into the trees.

And beside Robin stands John.

Little John.

Again, we must be careful.

Little John is not proven to be a deliberate John the Baptist figure.

But symbolically, in the world we are building, his role is too strong to ignore.

John the Baptist is wilderness, water, repentance, witness and the voice outside official religious power.

Little John is greenwood, loyalty, rescue, strength and the witness beside Robin.

He is not Robin.

He stands beside Robin.

He prepares, assists, corrects, rescues.

In one of the oldest surviving Robin Hood ballads, Robin Hood and the Monk, Robin goes to Nottingham for Mass, is betrayed and captured, and Little John becomes central to the rescue.

The ballad is one of the oldest Robin Hood stories, surviving from around the mid-fifteenth century, and it already places Little John in the role of loyal rescuer. (Wikipedia)

That matters.

Little John breaks custody.

Robin is held.

John rescues.

The pattern returns.

Edward II held at Berkeley.

Rokele and de la Haye in the rescue-field.

Robin held at Nottingham.

Little John becomes the breaker of corrupt custody.

The forest story remembers the castle wound in another form.

Then comes Friar Tuck.

The wild priest.

The fighting friar.

The holy man who does not behave like a settled cathedral clerk.

Friar Tuck belongs to a slightly later and more performative layer of the Robin Hood tradition than Little John, but symbolically he is immense.

In Robin Hood and the Curtal Friar, Robin meets the friar around Fountains Abbey and “wild water.”

Robin asks to be carried over the water for charity; the friar carries him, then turns the scene into a challenge and fight. (METS Editions)

This is not polite religion.

This is water religion.

Ford religion.

Testing religion.

The friar is not sitting safely in the abbey.

He is at the crossing.

Robin must enter the water-theatre.

He is carried.

Dropped.

Mocked.

Tested.

Humbled.

Then the wild priest joins the fellowship.

Here the Baptist pattern becomes stronger.

Not because the author has left us a note saying, “This is John the Baptist.”

But because the symbols gather:

Fountains Abbey.

Wild water.

A friar at the ford.

A man named John in the greenwood fellowship.

A hero tested through water.

A religious figure outside tame authority.

A crossing before fellowship.

In the old Christian pattern, John stands in wilderness beside water and calls the world to repentance.

In the Robin pattern, Little John and Friar Tuck stand within a greenwood-water world where justice must be tested outside corrupt institutions.

So the scroll can say this:

Little John may be read as playing a Baptist-

like role.

Not literal identity.

Not proof of hidden code.

But symbolic function.

He is the wilderness witness beside the forest-king.

And Friar Tuck is the wild priest at the water.

Together they create a rough green church.

Robin is its outlaw judge.

Little John is its witness.

Tuck is its fighting priest.

The forest is its nave.

The river is its font.

The king must enter disguised before he can be corrected.

That last point matters because the older Robin Hood tradition does not originally belong neatly to Richard and John as later popular versions often suggest.

The early king in A Gest of Robyn Hode is “King Edward.”

Not clearly Edward I.

Not clearly Edward II.

Not clearly Edward III.

Just Edward.

The Edward-king.

And that is perfect for this scroll.

Because after Edward I, Edward II and Edward III, England has a problem with the name Edward.

Longshanks is the law-king, castle-king, war-king.

Edward II is the broken king, captive king, Berkeley king.

Edward III is the young king who must grow out from under Isabella and Mortimer’s shadow.

So when the Robin Hood tradition brings in King Edward, it is not merely a dating puzzle.

It becomes a symbolic figure.

The Edward-king must go into the forest.

The ruler must enter the people’s myth.

The king must meet outlaw justice face-to-face.

This is where Randolph, Earl of Chester, becomes important.

The Piers Plowman line pairs Robin Hood with Randolph Earl of Chester.

Scholars debate which Ranulf/Randolph of Chester the rhyme remembered, and the safest reading is that it preserves a popular noble-song memory rather than a direct genealogy.

But for this work, the name cannot be ignored.

The Chester/Ranulf current has already run through Countess Lucy, Lincoln, Ranulf de Gernon, Tickhill, and the contested custody of castles. (JSTOR)

So now the same name-field appears in folk song beside Robin Hood.

Castle memory and outlaw memory are touching.

Chester is not only a landline.

It is a songline.

And still there is Arthur.

Arthur must remain in this scroll because Arthur asks the oldest question of the sword.

What is a knight?

Is he the king’s weapon?

Is he the guardian of the weak?

Is he noble because of blood?

Or only when corrected by humility?

The Arthurian thread comes in through two doors.

The first door is the older Morville/Lancelot chamber, where the de Morville name appears around the transmission of Lanzelet, an early German Arthurian romance, in the Richard I hostage-world.

The second door is manuscript space.

The same Trinity College Dublin MS 212 world that carries the Piers Plowman attribution also has scholarship attached to an unrecorded fragment of the Prose Lancelot.

Medium Ævum records John Scattergood’s article on that fragment in Trinity College Dublin MS 212, and the record places Lancelot and Piers Plowman in the same manuscript context. (mediumaevum.org.uk)

Again, we do not force it.

We do not say Langland wrote Lancelot.

We do not say Rokele owned Arthur.

But we can say this:

Piers and Lancelot share manuscript air.

The ploughman and the knight are closer than they first appear.

That matters because the scroll is asking how England responds after power fails.

The Temple falls.

The king is held.

The rescue-field forms.

The poem dreams.

The outlaw sings.

The friar tests at water.

Arthur waits behind the page.

Each figure answers the same wound differently.

Piers says: truth must return through labour.

Robin says: justice must survive outside corrupt law.

Little John says: loyalty must break false custody.

Friar Tuck says: religion must return to water, testing and wild charity.

Arthur says: the sword must be corrected or it becomes monstrous.

This is why the scroll cannot be just history.

It has to be landscape.

Castle.

Field.

Forest.

Ford.

Manuscript.

Table.

Berkeley Castle is the broken custody of the king.

The Malvern field is the dream of truth.

Barnsdale and Sherwood are the green hiding places of outlaw justice.

Fountains and the wild water are the testing-ground of the priest.

The manuscript is the chamber where ploughman and Lancelot sit near one another.

Arthur’s table is the imagined repair of knighthood.

And behind it all, the Temple wound remains.

Because when the Templars fell, England did not become pure.

The problem of sacred power did not end.

It moved.

Into royal custody.

Into castles.

Into accusation.

Into Parliament.

Into dreams.

Into ballads.

Into woods.

Into fields.

Into the question of whether a sword can ever be holy without inward change.

That is where Rokele and de la Haye stand.

Not as final proof of bloodline.

Not as solved genealogy.

But as names at the hinge.

Peter de Rokele stands at Berkeley, then his family-shadow leads toward Langland.

Thomas de la Haye stands beside him in the rescue-field, carrying the old de la Haye name into another custody crisis.

The de la Haye name had once meant castle guardianship through Nicholaa.

At Berkeley, a de la Haye name appears not holding the castle, but approaching it with armed force.

That reversal matters.

The old question returns:

When is loyalty obedience?

When is loyalty rescue?

When is breaking a prison treason?

When is it justice?

This is the same question Robin Hood asks.

The sheriff says Robin is outlaw.

The people remember him as justice.

The regime says Berkeley is custody.

The rescue-current sees captivity.

The court says order.

The field dreams truth.

That is the whole chamber.

The official world names the crime.

The folk world names the wound.

Piers Plowman is not a simple political tract.

It is bigger than that.

It is a dream after broken kingship.

It is the English soul asking what remains when authority loses moral force.

The answer is not one thing.

It is a ploughman.

It is a forest outlaw.

It is a loyal John.

It is a wild friar at the water.

It is a Chester song.

It is Lancelot hidden in manuscript air.

It is Arthur asking whether the knight can be made true again.

And maybe that is why this scroll had to come after the cave beneath the Lion.

In the St Robert chamber, a knight hides from Richard’s wrath and goes down into stone.

Here, after Edward’s fall, the answer rises from field and forest.

The cave was the place where the sword was silenced.

The field is where truth begins to speak.

The forest is where justice refuses to die.

The ford is where the priest is tested.

The manuscript is where memory survives.

So the final movement is this:

When the Temple fell, the Crown took the keys.

When the Crown broke, the king became the captive.

When custody became corruption, Rokele and de la Haye appeared at the castle gate.

When the castle could not answer, the field dreamed Piers.

When prayer failed in the mouth of the people, Robin Hood was remembered.

When justice was outlawed, it went into the trees.

When the church grew fat, the friar returned to the water.

When the knightly world failed, Arthur returned as a question.

Not a solution.

A question.

What is the true king?

What is the true knight?

What is the true priest?

What is the true worker?

What is the true law?

And who has the right to hold the body of power?

The answer does not come from the throne.

It comes from below.

From the field.

From the wood.

From the water.

From the poor man’s song.

From the ploughman after the broken king.