09-06-2025
‘Brazen' 688-year-old murder of medieval priest solved. ‘Thirst for vengeance'
In 1337, a priest named John Forde walked down a busy street in London where he was ambushed and killed in broad daylight as crowds milled about.
Now, researchers at the University of Cambridge have solved the brazen murder, believed to have been carried out at the request of Ela Fitzpayne, an English noblewoman with a 'thirst for revenge,' according to a study published June 6 in the peer-reviewed journal Criminal Law Forum.
Researchers called Westcheap, where Forde was killed, London's 'commercial and ceremonial heart.' It was also 'London's most prominent homicide hotspot,' researchers said, adding that Forde's killing ranks among 'one of the most extraordinary events' to take place there.
On May 3, 1337, Forde ran into a fellow priest who 'distracted' him with friendly conversation before four men, all with connections to Ela Fitzpayne, attacked him, according to a June 5 news release from the University of Cambridge.
One slit his throat with 12-inch dagger and two others stabbed him 'in the belly with long fighting knives,' according to the study.
Researchers said Forde's murder was instigated Fitzpayne who had been publicly denounced by the Archbishop of Canterbury for having 'sexual affairs 'with knights and others, single and married, and even with clerics in holy orders,'' including Forde, while she was married, according to the study.
Forde's complicated connections to Fitzpayne
Records suggest Forde, who was also accused of being in a gang with Fitzpayne and her husband, may have been the one to inform the archbishop of her dalliances, experts said.
Forde 'went from being in Ela Fitzpayne's crime gang and possibly her bed, to a player in her denouncement,' according to the release.
'The archbishop imposed heavy, shameful public penance on Ela, which she seems not to have complied with, but may have sparked a thirst for vengeance,' researcher Manuel Eisner said, per the release. 'Not least as John Forde appears to have escaped punishment by the church.'
In an effort to 'publicly humiliate' Fitzpayne for her supposed affairs, she was ordered to take 'barefoot walks of shame across Salisbury Cathedral,' and pay large sums of money to the clergy and the poor, experts said.
Experts said 'the brutal show of strength' on Westcheap that day may have served to remind 'the clergy of the power of the nobility, and that Ela Fitzpayne doesn't forget or forgive,' according to the news release.
'A woman in 14th century England who raided priories, openly defied the Archbishop of Canterbury, and planned the assassination of a priest,' Eisner said, summing up Fitzpayne's legacy. 'Ela Fitzpayne appears to have been many things, including an extraordinary person,' he said.
Ford's was one of 355 unsolved homicides documented by the Medieval Murder Maps project — a database created by the University of Cambridge that visualizes spatial patterns of 14th-century killings in London, Oxford and York, according to the study.
The Cambridge news release and the Medieval Murder Maps project lists the year of Forde's killing as 1337, while the study says it occurred in 1336.
