Distance: 4.6 miles
Difficulty of the terrain: medium
Get the route via: Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox
Walk from Kington in nothern Herefordshire south across gently hilly countryside to Almeley, the home village of John Oldcastle, early 15th Century war hero, rebel baron and Lollard heretic imortalised as Shakespeare’s Falstaff.
The Story
Route Notes
Getting Back
Rebel, Rebel
When the Reformation was implemented in England from the 1530s onwards, it is widely known that while eastern parts of the Midlands typically embraced the new creed with enthusiasm, the more westerly parts of the region, especially the Welsh Marches were less enthusiastic.
The story regarding an earlier attempt to change the practice of Christianity, Lollardy, the name given to supporters of the late 14th Century Oxford theologian John Wycliffe, is quite different. In the decades after Wycliffe and his followers expounded an interpretation of Christian faith and religious practice which has similarities (insofar as we can reconstruct their beliefs) to, but also some differences from the reformed faith first promulgated in Germany in the late 1510s. Lollardy drew support across the Midlands, especially in Herefordshire and the Cotswolds.
One of the most prominent and controversial adepts of Lollardy was John Oldcastle. A friend of Henry V, Oldcastle’s religious views, by the early 15th Century considered a heresy, were long elided because of his closeness to the monarch. That was until from 1413 until 1417 when he was captured, Oldcastle became embroiled in a series of conspiracies, many of them with a decidedly Elizabethan character, purportedly aimed at killing the king, overthrowing the established order, and turning England into the world’s first Lollard state. Possibly one of the only other comparable figures in British history is the early 20th Century senior diplomat turned Irish republican Sir Roger Casement.
John Oldcastle was born in Almeley, a little village in northern Herefordshire, five miles south of Kington, and seven from the modern boundary with Wales, in around 1370. In terms of national courtly politics his family, while part of the nobility, was not significant, although locally in Herefordshire and throughout the Welsh Marches they were powerful. Oldcastle’s father was an MP for Herefordshire, a position which he would later take-up prior to becoming a rebel, as well as serving as a justice of the peace and High Sheriff of Herefordshire in the 1406-7 judicial year.
Oldcastle’s life is well documented for someone in the 14th and 15th Centuries, which is to say that he does appear in the record in relation to a few court cases, for instance concerning the administrative arrangements for Almeley’s parish church. However, in the main a lot of what we know about him is handed down by chroniclers, myth, or accounts written generations after his execution probably from previously oral tradition.
The established narrative of John Oldcastle’s life is that he participated in military campaigns in Wales during the 1390s and 1400s, rising to prominence as a military leader. He fought on the English side, nationality not always being a clear cut issue in places like Herefordshire during the late middle ages, and it was this experience which brought him into the orbit of the royal family. This was during the time when Owain Glyndŵr was mounting the final vaguely credible attempt to create a medieval Welsh polity outside the ambit of England. Later in his career as a soldier Oldcastle participated in an English expeditionary force to Europe in 1411 which supported the Burgundian crown against that of Armagnac, as part of the tussels during the 14th and 15th Centuries for control of France.
Oldcastle married three times. On the final occasion in 1408 to Joan of Cobham, a Baroness from Kent, meaning that having previously been a mere noble, Oldcastle entered the peerage taking up a seat in the House of Lords. Through this marriage he acquired a lot of land in Kent, including the imposing Cooling Castle near Rochester, and control of manors in Norfolk, Wiltshire and Northamptonshire.
What turned this powerful, and by the standards set by his society, highly successful man into a rebel? From the distance of over 600 years it is impossible to tell. But Oldcastle’s contemporaries and those in the generations immediately after his, it was theology mixed with fundamental flaws of character. In many regards this expresses the concerns of their own times. Oldcastle’s actions during the 1410s seem more obscure to us today than to his own time, and commentators during the Early Modern period, but are no less fascinating, and deserve to be remembered.
Insofar as it is possible to tell from a distance over more than 600 years it seems that Oldcastle never made any real attempt to disguise his Lollard sympathies. In 1410 he is known to have written to Hussite leaders in what is now the Czech Republic in an expression of international solidarity with them and their expression of their anti-icon, anti-clerical views. The same year the English Parliament debated and considered passing a wide ranging anticlerical law. From the distance of over 600 years it is impossible to know which MP initially promulgated this legislation but it is popularly thought to have been Oldcastle.
In truth the middle ages was rather more tolerant of dissenting views on religious matters than is popularly imagined. If anything it was later time periods during the early modern, and first part of the modern period, in Europe, which were more intolerant and repressive. As such, when Wycliffe and his followers at the University of Oxford first began expounding their theology in the 14th Century it was not initially recognised as heresy, though by the 1400s their views were considered, so. In contrast to popular depictions of the Middle Ages those who espoused religious beliefs that differed from those of the established church could be tolerated, and typically if they did face official challenge and sanction, were offered the chance to recant. Failure to do so at that point would likely result in punishment, up to and including death by being burnt at the stake, a punishment whose prevalence tended to increase at times of general social uncertainty and strife.
Oldcastle’s name in connection with potential heresy and alternative views on Christianity, outside those of the established church, first enters the surviving record in 1410, when parishes on his Kent estates were upbraided for unlicensed preaching. This was probably nothing to do with him, but three years later in 1411, a raid upon a bookshop on London’s Paternoster Row, uncovered a Lollard text whose prior ownership could be traced back to Oldcastle. The matter of a peer of the realm being mixed up in hersey appears to have been taken to the royal family.
Henry V, Oldcastle’s friend, had just taken the throne, and he requested that he handle the matter informally. Oldcastle was approached and quietly asked that he explain his association with Lollardry and recant any heretical views that he possessed. To this Oldcastle refused, proclaiming himself a loyal subject in secular matters but unwilling to bend when it came to his faith. Following months of back-and-forth, he was eventually arraigned before a court. Oldcastle refused to attend his hearing, only doing so, when compelled to on 23rd September 1413 by a royal writ.
In a deposition submitted to the court as to what his personal faith consisted of, Oldcastle in line with Lollard theology, affirmed all of the basic tenants of Catholic Christianity, like the supreme authority of God, Jesus’ divinity, and centrality of the sacraments and penance. What he refused to accept was that bishops and priests had a significance in religion and doctrinal interpretation above that of the laity, and he wrote harshly against the use of icons and statutes in churches and their use in parts of worship and religious instruction condemning them as “idolatry”.
At his trial which took place on 25th September John Oldcastle was found guilty of heresy. So severe was his willful deviation from standard church teaching deemed to be, that he was sentenced to death. Though as was typical, especially for a convict of high standing, the baron’s execution by burning was stayed for 40 days upon the orders of the king to allow him time to recant and be stayed. Oldcastle was remanded in the Tower of London, the kingdom of England’s most forbidding fortress.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given his past form, Oldcastle managed to find a way to escape the Tower of London on 19th October. He was aided by William Fisher, a Smithfield based parchment maker and a committed Lollard. A fact illustrating how Wycliffe’s formulation of a reformed faith attracted those who were relatively lowly but connected to education and the sharing of information, Oldcastle escaped from the fortress.
Following his escape Oldcastle hid in William Fisher’s house in Smithfield then on the very edge of London. Throughout the autumn of 1413 there was a major crackdown on Lollardy across the country. The authorities arrested many of the religious movement’s known leaders and prominent sympathisers, locking them up in the Tower of London. As the situation for the dissenting creed’s tendency worsened, wealthy Lollards, so slightly later accounts tell us, began secretly pooling their funds to buy military equipment and recruit mercenaries. Their hope being that attack would prove the best form of defence and that they would be able to seize power and proclaim their reformed religion the faith of the land.
From his hideout on the edge of London Oldcastle co-ordinated these plans. The intention was that on the 9th January 1414 the Lollards and their hired hands who hoped to attempt to seize power in a coup d’etat assembled at St. Giles’ Fields, now in Camden, and then on the northwestern edge of London, as well as at the Urasteleyre on the Hoop inn in Smithfield.
Ahead of this national gathering Lollards across the country began an uprising during the final week of December 1413. This was an uneven effort, but given the limitations of communications at a time when news and messages could only spread at the speed of a horse or passage on foot, indicative of remarkable co-ordination. On the 26th December Lollards rose up across the country from Belton in northern Lincolnshire, to south Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Essex. The parish of Redcliffe on the edge of Bristol alone assembled a company of 30 rebels who departed for London. Amongst those who travelled to London for the planned day of uprising were numerous rebels from across Northamptonshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Leicestershire, giving the Lollard party a decidedly Midlands flavour. All in all more than 200 would be rebels had arrived in London by 9th January 1414.
Their intention was that from their gathering places on the northern edge of London they were travel to Eltham Palace where the king was celebrating Christmas, capture him and other leading figures in England’s government there with him and in the chaos seize power. As a substantial noble and experienced politician and soldier, John Oldcastle, so the contemporary accounts claim, was to be the head of state as regent while the rebels decided upon the form that England’s future government was to take. Their immediate plans were to imprison the king, leading nobles and senior clergy, dissolve the monastic orders and seize their property, nationalise the church, and hand over all church land to followers of the Lollard movement.
As word of what was happening across England reached King Henry public assemblies were banned on 7th January 1414 and militia companies called up. The crown assembled its forces at St. John’s Priory in Clerkenwell, then a village in London’s northern suburbs, and roughly equal distance between Smithfield and the main Lollard assembly point at St. Giles’ Fields. On the night of the 9th January 1414 the king’s forces attacked the rebels at their assembly point.
Oldcastle and several others realised that there was no realistic prospect of the Lollard’s force defeating the royal army, such was the mismatch in strength between the two sides, and immediately fled. Other Lollards did try to resist, resulting in a short struggle. After the battle 80 Lollards were captured and sent to the Tower of London. Ultimately 79 of them were sentenced to death and executed by either hanging, drawing and quartering as traitors or by burning as heretics in the subsequent months.
Following his escape Oldcastle fled to his ancestral lands in Herefordshire, and hid amongst sympathisers in the Welsh Marches for over three years. He is thought to have been involved in the Southampton Plot, another attempted Lollard rising in 1415, when he briefly came out of hiding to attempt to assemble an army along the English-Welsh border.
After the failure of his revolt in early 1414, John Oldcastle, had irrevocably shifted from a friend of the king, that Henry was willing to strive to save, to being public enemy number one. A status which he retained until November 1417 when he was finally captured somewhere in the Welsh Marches. The exact location of Oldcastle’s capture and the circumstances in which it occurred have been lost to time. Some accounts state that his capture took place in Herefordshire’s Olchon Valley, not all that far from Alemeley, in the shadow of the Black Mountains, while others that it happened in Broniarth, inside Wales. These two locations are not especially close, but all accounts agree that the capture, led by the family of Sir Griffin Vaughan, who interestingly had himself been a rebel, having participated in Owain Glyndŵr’s revolt. The suppression of which, ironically or not, had led to Oldcastle’s rise. Following Oldcastle’s arrest the Vaughan’s had their titles and lands which had been forfeited after Glyndŵr’s revolt restored to them.
Purportedly Oldcastle was grievously injured or seriously ill upon his capture. Contemporaries speculated that he would not have been taken, or at least taken alive if he had been well. His physical condition was so poor that he had to be taken to London for trial lying down in a horse and cart. On the 14th December having reached London Oldcastle’s previous convictions for heresy and treason were formally noted in a brief judicial procedure, prior to him being executed by being simultaneously hanged and burnt. Illustrations created centuries after his death tend to show him suspended from a gallows and on fire, but the record of the sentence may be reference to hanging, drawing and quartering. Either way it was an ignominious end for a previously social climbing member of the nobility, noted war hero, and close confidant of the king.
From this distance in time it is impossible to tell to what degree it was true religious conviction, versus a desire for further self-advancement, that compelled John Oldcastle to revolt against Henry V in the way he did. What does seem almost certain is that he was truly invested in and inspired by his Lollard beliefs and desire for religious reformation.
For this reason John Oldcastle up until the present day has been remembered in conflicting ways. On the one hand he is remembered as a traitor and a rebel. On the other hand, after the Reformation in the 16th Century Lollardry was recovered and remembered, rightly or wrongly, as an authentic, “homegrown” precursor to modern Protestantism. For this reason while official censure for his rebellious and treasonous acts remained, Oldcastle’s religious commitment became something admirable, even to official culture and the British state.
This ambiguity comes through in depictions of him in culture from the 16th Century up until the 20th Century. In the late 16th Century several plays were written in the 1580s and 1590s which depicted John Oldcastle in a largely sympathetic light. Though the most famous of these which is still regularly performed today, Shakespeare’s Henry V, when it came to be printed, changed his name to “Falstaff” (probably due to one of Oldcastle’s descendents the 11th Duke of Cobham being the official censor of plays), and transformed the character from the resolute, courageous, and likely charismatic, politician and soldier who existed in real life, into an almost clownish figure who is a buddy of the king’s. Such was the level of controversy that John Oldcastle continued to present nearly two centuries after his grisly death.
Route Notes
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This walk from Kington to Almeley begins from Kington town centre.
Alight the bus at the small bus station in the centre of Kington.
From here turn left and head down the access road to the town’s Co-op, and cross the car park making for a snicket lined with tall stone walls.
Turn right down the snicket and follow it until reaching the main road running east from Kington town centre.
Follow this road to the right heading out of the town to the south east crossing over the River Arrow.
On the far side of the Arrow, turn right along a lane and follow it until a bridleway waymark points to the left along a holloway.
Follow this holloway for some distance, until it peters out into a footpath, which is easy to follow.
Head uphill across pasture, and through a small copse, before heading steadily downhill across meadows to reach the side of the A4111.
Taking care, because the A4111 is busy, and traffic travels fast along it, turn right and begin walking uphill along the road.
Soon on the left there is a quiet lane running uphill which you turn along and follow. Walking along the lane you pass a scattering of houses before reaching a farm set in woodland.
Here the lane ends, and you walk through a gate, picking up a bridleway through woodland that runs at the bottom of a very deep hollowway.
You follow the wide, sometimes quite muddy track for some distance, eventually leaving the trees and coming out onto a lane beside a cottage.
Cross the lane and head down a quiet road straight ahead, past another smattering of houses, until you reach a farmyard at the bottom where the lane ends.
Walk along the track skirting the edge of the farmyard and head out into the fields along a bridleway.
Follow the bridleway straight ahead across the fields, skirting the edge of Highmoor Woods.
Soon you descend steadily downhill across open fields towards New Farm.
Walk straight through the New Farm farmyard and head down the driveway on the far side.
Here you reach the main road approaching Almeley from the west. Turn left here and follow the road into the village. As you walk you pass some woodland on the right, which covers a low hill. Amidst these trees stand the surviving remains of the Oldcastle, the site of a little castle once owned by the beguiling figure of the early 15th Century Lollard radical and traitor John Oldcastle.
Continue through the old part of the village past the parish church until you reach the main road.
Upon reaching the road turn left, heading uphill past the village pub, to reach the new part of the village where the bus stop is situated.
This is where the walk ends.
Getting Back
At the time of writing in November 2025, Almeley was served by buses every day of the week. On Sundays there are only three buses. The other days of the week there are six or seven, but they are irregularly spaced. Buses run towards Hereford in the east where there is a well served main line station with trains north towards Shrewsbury and Manchester, south towards the big towns and cities of south Wales, and north west across Worcestershire towards central Birmingham. Buses also run back towards Kington, which is a minor bus hub, with some continuing on towards Llandrindod Wells has an occasional railway service on the Heart of Wales line, east towards Shrewsbury and south towards south Wales.