The Crusade of Henry Despenser (1383)

This chapter reassesses Bishop Henry Despenser’s crusading expedition against schismatic Christians in Flanders in 1383 by placing the campaign in its European context and by drawing upon fresh material from Flemish and English archives. Rather than approach the campaign as an unusual event in the Hundred Years War, this chapter situates Despenser’s expedition more closely against the political and diplomatic context of the time, underlining how the recourse to crusade represented a plausible and understandable initiative for the pursuit of national aims in later fourteenth-century Christendom in an era of papal schism and Anglo-French animosity. The chapter then proceeds to offer a fresh assessment of the make-up of Despenser’s force, its behaviour while on campaign in Flanders, and the crusade’s reception in contemporary and near-contemporary chronicles, correspondence, and churchwarden accounts, before considering what the expedition can tell us more broadly about popular enthusiasm for the crusade and its associated conventions and motifs in the later medieval period.