ABSTRACT
The career of Sir John Hawkwood was by any account an extraordinary one. 1 The second son of Gilbert de Hawkwood, a tanner and minor landowner at Sibil Hedingham near Colchester in Essex, under the terms of his father's last will and testament (made a few days before his death in July 1340) he was to receive 20 pounds and 100 solidi, ten quarters each of wheat and oats, a bed, and sustenance for a year, apparently in the family home, where the young John appears still to have been living. 2 When he died nearly fifty-four years later, in March 1394, at a great age and possibly an octogenarian, he had for some years been captain-general of the army of the Florentine Republic. Given a costly state funeral, he was buried in the Duomo in Florence, where an elaborate marble monument, which had been designed when he was alive, was painted in fresco on the wall above his tomb. The monument itself was never built, since in 1395 Richard II requested that Hawkwood's body be returned to England, a request granted by the Signoria, although they wrote to the king: 'we hold that it is reflected glory on us and on our people to keep the ashes and bones of the late brave soldier, and most remarkable leader Sir John Hawkwood who, as commander of our army, fought most gloriously for us, and whom at the public expense we interred honourably in the principal church of our city'. 3 The bones and ashes were thus finally returned to his native land and laid to rest in the church at Sibil Hedingham, where a chantry was founded by some of his friends, and it is one of the ironies of history that, while the effigies on his tomb there have long since vanished, he remains to this day commemorated in the church of Santa Maria del Fiore, in a fresco by Uccello, which in 1436 replaced the earlier painting of him by Taddeo Gaddi and Giuliano d'Arrigo.
