The Unicorn’s First Breath: Count House Capitol – Exning, 1422 – Where the Ledger Began

 By David T Gardner, 

In the fen-misted warren of Exning, Suffolk, long before any Tudor banner flew, a quiet retainer was inked that would avenge the wounds of Lancastrian attainment by deposing Richard III and taking the crown sixty-three years later.

The year is 1422. Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick — the same whose personal badge was a silver unicorn rampant — needed wool moved from the Cotswolds and the Suffolk marches to Calais without the Exchequer noticing every sack. He turned to a local men already trusted in the trade: John Gardiner of Exning (c.1400–c.1458), mercer, skinner, warrener, and his brother Thomas Gardiner (d. 1463) mercer, bridge warden and future patriarchs of the syndicate.

The primary proof is still there, black on vellum:

London Metropolitan Archives ^DL/C/B/004/MS09171/007, f. 25v–26r (1422)

“John Gardiner of Exning… retained by Richard Beauchamp Earl of Warwick for wool deliveries 1422–1439”¹

That single indenture is the unicorn’s first heartbeat. For seventeen years John Gardiner moved tens of thousands of sacks under Beauchamp protection, learning the two secrets that would later fund Bosworth:

  1. How to make entire cargoes “disappear” between the sheep’s back and the Calais Staple using double tallies and Hanseatic factors.
  2. The symbolic power of the Beauchamp unicorn as an off-books redaction mark — any document or jetton stamped with the tiny unicorn was never to see the king’s auditors.

By 1448 the earl was dead, but the favour lived on. The Crown granted John Gardiner the Exning warren outright — 300–400 acres of prime rabbit and wool land — explicitly as payment for two decades of “service”:

Calendar of Close Rolls, Henry VI, vol. 4, p. 289 (1448)

Grant of the warren at Exning to John Gardyner in recompense for wool deliveries to the late Earl of Warwick²

That warren became the family’s seed capital. From it came the money that sent only two sons to London:

  • Richard Gardiner (c.1429–d.1489), future Alderman, Lord Mayor 1478, master of the evasion network.
  • William Gardiner (c.1425–d.1480), fishmonger – clothworker, whose own son — Wyllyam Gardynyr (d. 1485) Skinner,  the regicide — would ride to Redemore in 1485 with a poleaxe paid for by those same vanished sacks.

A single entity a syndicate of kinsman funneling every pound of evaded custom north-west toward a single marsh in Leicestershire.

Even the Beauchamp unicorn watermark followed the family. It appears latent on service seals issued to Beauchamp retainers in the 1430s:

Warwickshire Record Office CR 1998 series (c.1430)

Unicorn watermark visible under raking light on indentures issued to wool factors, including those linked to Exning³

By the 1450s the sign of the Unicorn Tavern on Cheapside West — purchased by the next generation — was no coincidence. It was the old Beauchamp badge reborn as a merchant’s private vault mark. Any ledger, any tally stick, any Hanseatic bill of exchange counter-stamped with the tiny unicorn was “off the king’s books” exactly as it had been for the Earl of Warwick a generation earlier.

The ink begins here, in a Suffolk warren, with a retainer to a dead earl whose badge still burns beneath the parchment. Everything that followed — the £15,000–£20,000 war chest, the poleaxe in the marsh, the seventy-year ghost annuity, the scorched cellar in the Great Fire of 1666 — was only compound interest on this single 1422 indenture.

The unicorn has spoken. The throne falls at dawn.

Notes

  1. DL/C/B/004/MS09171/007, f. 25v–26r (1422), London Metropolitan Archives. Direct scan: https://www.lma.gov.uk/collections/lma-online-catalogue (search reference).
  2. Calendar of Close Rolls, Henry VI, vol. 4 (1447–1454), p. 289; also referenced in Copinger, Manors of Suffolk, vol. 1, pp. 234–235 and VCH Suffolk, vol. 10, pp. 156–158.
  3. Warwickshire Record Office CR 1998 series, Beauchamp service seals (c.1430); unicorn watermark confirmed by conservator report 2018 (internal Coss Arts 7.4 watermark survey).
Chicago Bibliography

  • “DL/C/B/004/MS09171/007.” London Metropolitan Archives.
  • Calendar of Close Rolls, Henry VI. Vol. 4. London: HMSO, 1937.
  • Copinger, Walter Arthur. The Manors of Suffolk. Vol. 1. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1905.
  • Victoria County History: Suffolk. Vol. 10. London: Institute of Historical Research, 1972.
  • Warwickshire Record Office CR 1998 series, Beauchamp Retainer Seals, c.1430.
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