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The Coterel gang (also Cotterill, Floruit 1328 – 1333) was a 14th-century armed group that flourished in the North Midlands of England. It was led by James Coterel—after whom the gang is named—supported by his brothers Nicholas and John. It was one of several such groups that roamed across the English countryside in the late 1320s and early 1330s, a period of political upheaval with an associated increase in lawlessness in the provinces. Coterel and his immediate supporters were members of the gentry, and according to the tenets of the day were expected to assist the crown in the maintenance of law and order, rather than encourage its collapse.
Basing themselves in the peaks of Derbyshire and the heavily wooded areas of north Nottinghamshire (such as Sherwood Forest) the Coterels frequently cooperated with other groups, including the Folville gang. Membership of the Coterel gang increased as its exploits became more widely known; most of the new members were recruited locally, but others came from as far away as Shropshire. Despite repeated attempts by the crown to suppress the Coterels, their criminal activities increased; by 1330 they had committed murder, extortion, Kidnapping, and ran protection rackets across the Peak District. They do not seem to have ever been particularly unpopular with the populace, and the secular and ecclesiastical communities provided them with supplies, provisions and logistical support.
Possibly their most famous offence took place in 1332. A royal justice, Richard de Willoughby, was despatched to Derbyshire to bring the Coterels to justice, but before he could do so, he was kidnapped by a consortium composed of both the Coterels' and the Folvilles' men. Each gang had encountered him in his professional capacity on previous occasions, and probably wanted revenge on him as much as they wanted his money. This they also received, as Willoughby paid 1,300 marks for his freedom. This outrage against a representative of the crown led King Edward III to launch a royal commission into the troubled area to bring the Coterels to justice and restore the King's peace. In the event, many gang members were arraigned, but all but one were acquitted; the Coterel brothers themselves ignored their summonses and did not even attend.
The King was politically distracted by the outbreak of the Second War of Scottish Independence; this provided him with the opportunity to recruit seasoned men to his army while appearing to solve the local disorder. As a result, most of the Coterel band received following service abroad or in Scotland, and James, Nicholas and John Coterel all eventually had profitable careers. Modern scholars tend to agree that the activities and members of 14th-century groups such as the Coterels provided the basis for many of the stories later woven around Robin Hood in the 15th century.
In 1322 Lancaster had rebelled against Edward and his favourites, but had been defeated and executed. One of the Coterel brothers and their later allies from the Bradbourne family were also involved, so it is likely, says the historian J. R. Maddicott, that there was a political dimension to the band's activities as part of general opposition to the King. The gang at least thrived on the political chaos of the last years of Edward II's reign and the early years of that of Edward III. This was an exceptionally lawless and violent period, says the historian Michael Prestwich, "where a quarrel over a badly cooked herring could end in violent death, as happened in Lincoln in 1353".
Members of their own family were "contrariants"—opposed to the Despensers and Edward II—but this did not prevent the Coterel brothers stealing from members of that party whenever the opportunity arose. For example, after the Battle of Boroughbridge in 1322—when the contrariant nobles fought Edward II and lost—the Coterels ambushed fleeing survivors of the losing side, and robbed them of horses and armour. On another occasion they stole "a quantity of silver plate", only to be ambushed themselves by a small force of Welsh people who in turn relieved them of their loot.
Most of the gang against whom proceedings had been attempted were found to be legally vagabonds, and the sheriff postponed the hearings three times before giving up. Sir Roger de Wennesley, Lord of Mappleton, was then dispatched to arrest them on 18 December that year. De Wennesley was a "sworn enemy" of the Coterels, having stabbed one of their relations—and Coterel gang associate—Laurence Coterel to death in March the same year. De Wennesley was, supposedly unable to locate the gang, who were then declared in March 1331. One commentator says their outlawry "seems to have inspired them to expand the range of their criminal behaviour". Soon after de Wennesley's failed commission, the Coterels kidnapped John Staniclyf, a Tenant farmer of de Wennesley's. They refused to release Staniclyf until he swore an oath never to oppose the Coterels again, and he was forced to pay a Binding over of £20 to ensure his compliance. panorama, Derbyshire, where the band headquartered occasionally while on the run]]
The Coterel gang were the subject of multiple throughout their short career, and committed at least two murders as well as and around the Peak District, running protection rackets, and generally involving themselves in the feuds of their neighbours. Until mid-1331 the group had made a name for themselves by committing extreme acts of violence; it seems that from then they made it a policy to avoid violence where possible and concentrate on more financially profitable schemes. They became particularly involved in extortion, and Hanawalt has described their technique as being refined: they possessed "such an evil reputation for extortion that they only had to send a letter threatening damage to life, limb, and property in order to extort money". This was the gang's method with the mayor of Nottingham, to whom they wrote demanding £20—"or else". They used the indenture system: one half of the indentured contract was sent to the victim with the demand, and the sum demanded was to be paid to whoever arrived at the appointed time bearing the other half of the indenture. This seems to have been a particular speciality of two members, William Pymme of Sutton Bonington and Roger Sauvage, and one of the bearers they used in 1332 to carry such a letter to William Amyas, a wealthy Nottingham ship owner, was Pymme's mother. In direct imitation of royal justice, they demanded tribute from the local populace; William Amyas was told that, if he failed to comply, "everything he held outside of Nottingham would be burned". On another occasion they went, mob-handed, to the house of Robert Franceys, where they forced him to hand over £2; Fraunceys, so a chronicler wrote, was sufficiently scared by his experience that "he left his house and did not return for a long time". A Bakewell man, Ralph Murimouth, was forced to hand over £5.
They did all this with apparent immunity. In 1331 the gang kidnapped Robert Foucher of Osmaston (whom they knew would soon be wealthy, as he was due to be granted some local parkland). One of their most notorious acts was not extortion, but another kidnapping—that of Sir Richard Willoughby, a royal justice, whom they captured in 1332.
The distribution of the ransom took place in one of Sir Robert Touchet's manors at Markeaton Park; Touchet was a prominent Midlands landowner, and was probably the Coterels' chief patron. With his brother, Edmund Touchet—who was parson of nearby Mackworth—he knew and approved of the Coterel scheme. These men, who provided the gang with material assistance when it was required, were an exemplar of the kind of support the Coterels enjoyed locally. The kidnapping of Willoughby was not merely a local outrage, but, says the historian John Aberth, for the crown it was "an unprecedented assault on the dignity of its bench and the authority of its law". In Derbyshire, there was a "widespread lack of sympathy" for the judge.
A jury of presentment, composed of men from the hundreds of Wirksworth and Appeltree, sat in September 1332, and claimed that the gang was known to collaborate with Robert Bernard, backed by the Chapter of Lichfield Cathedral. This commission documented the Coterels' activities minutely, and, Anthony Musson says, it is "a tribute to the functioning of the judicial machinery" of the county in the midst of a severe break down in order that it was able to do so.
The Coterels received a strong degree of support from among the regional public generally and the gentry and churchmen particularly. Within Lichfield Cathedral, apart from Robert Bernard, there were seven canons including John Kinnersley, who were all later accused of being supporters of the Coterels and of providing James with "protection, succour and provisions". There was, comments Bellamy, "no lack of worldly knowledge in the Lichfield cloisters": Kinnersley was James Coterel's legal [[receiver|Receivership]] on multiple occasions. The Cathedral chapter supported the gang even after its activities had become the subject of an official investigation. It seems probable that the chapter directly employed them several times, for instance, for the robbing of the vicar of Bakewell, and to collect [[tithe]]s. The Cathedral chapter's support for Coterel was instrumental in protecting him from arrest. Also among the Coterel's local supporters was the [[Cluniac prior]] of [[Lenton|Lenton Priory]], Nottinghamshire, who on at least one occasion gave them advance warning of an intended [[trailbaston commission|Trailbaston]] led by Richard de Grey. Similar support was received from the [[Cistercian|Cistercians]] house at Haverholme.
While Fugitive, local people kept the men supplied with material support as well as information. Such peripheral supporters were always far more numerous than the gang itself, and it has been estimated that the Coterels could rely on around 150 such supporters (57 of whom were from the villages of Bakewell and Mackworth alone). Such support was not wholly based on fear, but neither did people believe that outlaws were romantic figures out to help the community; perhaps, says Hanawalt, "respect and a reluctant admiration" was the prevailing attitude of the populace. For example, Walter Aune delivered a quantity of food to them in the woods on one occasion. On another he delivered the rents from Richard le Sauvage's Stainsby Manorialism to Sauvage while the latter was hiding out with the Coterels. When the gang was hiding out in Bakewell they were brought sustenance by local man Nicholas Taddington; Taddington also showed them secret paths around the countryside. Occasionally they had to actively forage for food, and Pymme is known to have sent his servants and members of his household out for this purpose.
The Coterel gang enjoyed support within local officialdom as well, including at least six bailiffs in the High Peak area. They were supporters but not necessarily active members, and included at least seven local men who attended parliament during the decade. Another "clandestine ally" was Sir Robert Ingram, whom the Coterels had personally recruited. Ingram was a man of some importance; he was High Sheriff of Nottingham and Derbyshire between 1322 and 1323 and then from 1327 to 1328 as well as mayor of Nottingham for two terms, 1314–1316 and 1320–1324; It was Ingram who wrote to a Coterel spy (or explorator) in Nottingham Castle, William de Usfton, who was not only lord of the manor of Radmanthwaite in Nottinghamshire but also a . Ingram's letter informed the Coterels that their base in the High Peak forest had just been discovered, and thus enabled their escape. Not everyone supported them; in 1331, a petition was presented to parliament which complained about members of the gentry uniting to kidnap and kill the king's loyal officials—almost certainly an oblique reference to the Coterel gang. A jury later reported how the band "rode armed publicly and secretly in manner of war by day and night".
The Coterels were "unique to their time and location", and, suggests one scholar, symptomatic of a changing system of Retinue, in which once-firm ties to a supporting lord had become much more fluid and uncertain, with the result that some men effectively chose to operate outside the feudal system. While much of the gang warfare that plagued England in the early 14th century can be put down to the return of unemployed soldiery from the north, as contemporary chroniclers were prone to assume, organised crime such as that of the Coterels'—which does not seem to have contained this element of demobilization—were, suggest the historians Musson and Ormrod, "the product more of the disturbed state of domestic politics in the 1320s than of the crown's war policies".
Similarities have been noticed between the tales of Robin Hood and the activities of such armed groups as the Coterels, particularly in their attacks upon authority figures; the pavage imposed by Hood's gang is similar to the tribute extorted by the Coterels. The tale of Adam Bell was similarly shaped by the Coterels' and Folvilles' activities.
R. B. Dobson and John Taylor suggested that there was only a limited connection between the invention of Robin Hood and the criminal activities of the Coterels, who do not, summarises Maurice Keen, "seem to offer very promising matter for romanticization". However, contemporaries were aware of such a link: in 1439 a petition against another Derbyshire gangster, Piers Venables, complained that he robbed and stole with many others and then disappeared into the woods "like as it had been Robin Hood and his meiny". John Maddicott, on the other hand, notes an "accumulation of coincidences" between the Coterel and Folville gangs and the exploits recounted of Hood. These he lists principally as
Maddicott describes the capture of Willoughby as very much "a feat reminiscent of the world of ballads" and the gang's popularity as "close to the standing of Robin Hood and his men as folk heroes". The people who actively supported and aided the Coterels in Derbyshire, says Maddicott, were also those who, another time, were the audience of the Hood ballads. After all, he says, they did take from the rich, "even if they did not give to the poor, and if the rich were also royal officials, like Willoughby, such retribution may have seemed well deserved". David Feldman likewise describes the Coterels and their supporters as "disgruntled gentry with an eye for the main chance" who set themselves up as Robin Hood types, except, like Maddicott, Feldman reiterates that what they "robbed from the rich never reached the poor". They possessed a certain "gentrified behaviour", as it has been called, along with the more usual brutality of the gangs, which dovetail in the ballads.
Coterel's ally Robert Ingram has been proposed as the original inspiration for the sheriff of Nottingham in the Gest of Robin Hood, a late 15th-century re-telling of the tale. The close association with criminally-minded ecclesiastics and blatant outlaws such as the Coterels have also been linked to the fiction of Friar Tuck, who, whilst being a "large, merry body" was also the leader of his own "merry gang of murderers and thieves". John Maddicot has concluded that while the links between fiction and reality are strong, it is
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