Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 39.djvu/224

 131-2 to arrest Percy for permitting the death of Gaveston, and, on 15 Aug., in conjunction with the sheriff, to take the city into the king's hands if necessary (ib. pp. 468, 477 ; Fœdera, iii. 173, Record ed.)

From 1314 the Scottish war again absorbed Mowbray's attention. There was not a summer from that year to 1319 that he was not called out to do service against the Scots (Rep. on Dignity of a Peer). It is not quite certain, however, that he was the John de Mowbray who was a warden of the Scottish marches in the year of Bannockburn, and one of four ' capitanei etcustodes partium ultra Trentam ' appointed in January 1315, on the recommendation of a meeting of northern barons at York (, i. 126 ; Letters from Northern Registers, pp. 237, 247-8 ; Registrum Palatinum Dunelmense, ii. 1034). This may have been the Scottish John de Mowbray who was also lord of Bolton in Cumberland, and fought and negotiated against Bruce, meeting his death at last in the defeat of Balliol at Annan in December 1332 (Rot. Parl. i. 160, 163 ; Chron. de Lanercost, pp. 204, 270 ; Chron. de Melsa, ii. 367 ; Fœdera, ii. 474 ; cf., Hist. Angl. ii. 194-7).

In this year, 1315, Mowbray was reimbursed for the expense to which he had been put for the defence of Yorkshire when he was sheriff by a charge of five hundred marks on the revenues of Penrith and Sowerby-in-Tyndale (, Baronage, i. 126). Next year he was ordered to array the commons of five Yorkshire wapentakes for the Scottish war. and in 1317 was appointed governor of Malton and Scarborough (ib.) But three years after this the damnosa hcereditas of his wife in Gower involved him in a dispute with the king's powerful favourites, the Despensers, which proved fatal to him and to many active sympathisers of greater political prominence. It appears that his father-in-law, William de Brewes, had at some date, of which we are not precisely informed, made a special grant of his lordship of Gower in the marches of Wales to Mowbray and his wife, who was his only child, and their heirs, with remainder to Humphrey de Bohun, earl of Hereford and lord of Brecon, the grandson of one of the coheiresses of an earlier William de Brewes (ib. pp. 182, 420 ; cf. Cal. of Pat. Rolls, 1327-30, p. 248). But the king's greedy favourite, Hugh le Despenser the younger, was desirous of adding Gower to his neighbouring lordship of Glamorgan, and when Mowbray entered into possession without the formality of a royal license, he insisted that the fief was thereby forfeited to the crown, and induced the king to order legal proceedings against Mowbray ( in Chronicles of Edward I and Edward II, ii. 254-5). Hereford and the other great lords-marcher whose interests were threatened by Despenser upheld Mowbray's contention that the king's license had never been necessary in the marches. Despenser scoffed at the law and customs of the marches, and more than hinted that those who appealed to them were guilty of treason (ib.) The situation, which was strained in the October parliament of 1320, became acutely critical in the early months of 1321. The discontented barons withdrew to the marches, and on 30 Jan. the king issued writs to twenty-nine lords, including Mowbray, forbidding them to assemble together for political purposes (Rep. on Dignity of a Peer, App. p. 302). In March they entered and harried Glamorgan. The writer of the ' Annales Paulini' (Chronicles of Edward I and Edward II, i. 293) adds that before the final breach the Earl of Hereford persuaded the king to allow him to enter into a contract with De Brewes to take possession of the fief in dispute, for the benefit, as he said, of his nephew, the Prince of Wales. A later and less trustworthy version of these events makes De Brewes, who, though 'perdives a parentela,' was 'dissipator substantise sibi relictæ,' sell Gower three times over to Hereford, to Roger Mortimer of Chirk, jointly with his nephew, Roger Mortimer of Wigmore and to Hugh le Despenser (, p. 107, followed by, i. 159).

Mowbray was summoned to the parliament of July 1321 which condemned the Despensers to exile (Parl. Writs, n. ii. 163-8 ; Rep. on Dignity of a Peer, App. p. 308). He received a pardon on 20 Aug. along with Hereford and the other leaders of the triumphant party (ib.) But the king took up arms in the autumn, on 12 Nov. forbade Mowbray and others to assemble at Doncaster, and in January 1322 brought the Mortimers to their knees, while the northern barons still lingered over the siege of Tickhill (ib. p. 310). Mowbray took part in this siege, and his men did much damage in the neighbourhood (Rot. Parl. i. 406, 408, 410, cf. p. 406). He accompanied the Earl of Lancaster in his southward march, and in his retreat from Burton-on-Trent to Boroughbridge, where the battle was fought, on 16 March, in which Hereford was slain, and Lancaster, Mowbray, and Clifford captured by Sir Andrew Harclay (Gesta Edwardi de Carnarvon in Chronicles of Edward I and Edward II, ii. 74). On 23 March, the day after Lancaster's trial and beheading at Pontefract, Mowbray and Clifford, condemned by the same body of peers, were