At the Battle of Evesham (4 August 1265) the army of Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, was annihilated and his body dismembered, his head, testicles, a hand and a foot taken as trophies by his enemies. So ended the ‘first English revolution’, which began in 1258 when a cadre of barons and bishops seized control of government from King Henry III and established a ruling council. This article considers the treatment of Simon’s remains, which has not yet been investigated: beyond macabre curiosity, anomalously traumatic acts of violence require explanation. The (deliberate) killing of noblemen subverted centuries of chivalric ransoming culture, but can be explained in part by the need to eliminate recalcitrant enemies of the Crown at a time when judicial executions of noblemen were not practised. Meanwhile, the slide to intra-noble lethal violence was beginning across Europe, with the increasing application of crusade vows and benefits to European war causing the geographical and mental boundaries of military ethics to collapse. The treatment of Simon’s body was not normal among the Anglo-French aristocracy and so was as shocking to contemporaries as it is to us, if not more so. Indeed, the taking of body parts from enemy dead has never been a normal act in warfare (contra the human tendency to call to mind well-known examples and infer trends), and so anthropologists have investigated the making of such ‘dark trophies’ as a cultural act. The Evesham case thus merits a historical-anthropological approach, which identifies the specifics of the act and locates it within the culture of its agents.

Crucial evidence comes in material produced by Simon’s cult. He was never canonised but, in the decades following his death, was considered by many to be a martyr and saint. As his body took on thaumaturgical significance, his body parts became relics, objects of veneration for devotees. The monks of Evesham Abbey, guardians of Simon’s torso and one hand, hosted pilgrims. Meanwhile, a distinct manifestation of Simon’s cult emerged in the eastern Anglo-Scottish borders. Its thaumaturgical focus was one of Simon’s feet, rescued from the battlefield and presented to Alnwick Abbey by its patron, John de Vescy, one of the few Montfortians to survive Evesham. Simon’s cult was nurtured by a small network of religious houses in the region, generating an extraordinary expression of devotion in text: an attempt to trace the biographies of Simon’s body parts. This forms the centrepiece of the Opusculum de nobili Simone de Monte Forti (‘A little work on the noble man Simon de Montfort’), preserved in the chronicle of Melrose Abbey. Its evidence enables investigation of the treatment of Simon’s remains. The discovery of how and why this tract was written must come before its use as evidence for the events of 1265. In itself, however, it offers a window onto the shared devotional and intellectual interests of those who produced it.

This article, then, has three parts. It begins by revealing how the Opusculum was researched and sponsored and, in so doing, roots Simon’s Anglo-Scottish cult in the sense of regional historicity shared by the collaborators who worked on the tract, which bound their thirteenth-century present to seventh- and eighth-century Northumbria. It then deploys the Opusculum in a fine-grained investigation of the Evesham dark trophies. In the process, our geographic focus switches to another borderland region: the Welsh Marches. It was the marcher lords who set upon Simon’s body, in order to send trophies to recipients in the Marches and Wales. Their actions were guided by a set of customs that belonged to their own socio-military culture surrounding the treatment of enemy dead. The final part explains why the marchers applied their dark trophy custom to the earl of Leicester. In order to uphold his regime in the face of marcher opposition, Simon attempted the takeover of the Marches and agreed their cession to the Welsh. The treatment of his body was thus a marcher response to an egregious attack on the marcher lordships themselves. This finding calls attention to the Battle of Evesham as critical to the history not only of England’s constitution but also of the political structure of the Atlantic Archipelago.