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.87 Similarly, given that his master had recently dispatched artillery to be used by the langue, Henry VII’s servant Sir Richard Guildford, who visited Rhodes during his pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1506, may also have been charged with seeing that his master’s gift was being properly employed.88 It is also conceivable that a royal interest in trade with or crusading against Mamluk Egypt may have lain behind the decision of John Wykes and William Brereton to use Rhodes as a base from where to visit Egypt and Syria in 1458.89Few British or Irish pilgrims who visited Jerusalem in the period between 1409and 1522 can be shown to have had a personal or family connection with the order of St John.Among those who did were Sir Alexander Seton of Gordon, who was descended from or related to a similarly named fourteenth-century Hospitaller and Reginald West, lord de la Warre.Seton not only died in the Hospital on Rhodes, but also bequeathed his movable goods to the Order, from which the Order had extracted 1700 ducats by 1451.90 Having been granted royal licence to leave England in October 1439, de la Warre had set off for the Holy Land in company with Robert, lord Willoughby but had been seized, robbed, held to ransom and otherwise mistreated somewhere in Germany before being released in the following year through the auspices of the archbishop of Cologne.91 Understandably enough, Willoughby commuted his vow soon afterwards, but de la Warre was made of sterner stuff.92 He not only appears to have proceeded to Jerusalem to fulfi l his vow upon his release, for he is to be found supplicating on behalf of a citizen of Rhodes in March 1442, but in late 1446 or 1447 he set out for Jerusalem again, bolstered by royal letters demanding the rulers of the Rhineland grant him safe-conduct.93 That de la Warre involved himself in local matters while on Rhodes is interesting and suggests that he stayed on the island longer than the few days customary for pilgrims.It seems likely that his pilgrimage was actively encouraged by the Order.Besides his possible kinship with the Hospitaller Thomas West, the family had ties with the Hospital reaching back to at least the fi rst half of the fourteenth century and the perpetuation of these can only have been encouraged by the fact that the Wests’ancestral home of Swallowcliffe abutted the preceptory of Ansty, whose incumbent, 87 Luttrell, ‘English Contributions’, p.169.88 Malta, Cod.78, f.95r–v.89 Malta, Cod.367, ff.201v, 215v; G.J.O’Malley, ‘Pilgrimage, Crusade, Trade and Embassy: Early English Contacts with the Ottoman Turks’, Crusades 3 (2004), 153–70, at pp.160–1.90 Malta, Cod.354, ff.219v–20r; Cod.363, f.217v.91 Foedera, 5/1, p.167; T.Bekynton, Offi cial Correspondence, ed.G.Williams, 2 vols (London, 1872), 1, pp.93–4.92 Cal.Papal Letters, 9, p.84.93 Malta, Cod.355, f.232v; Foedera, 5/1, p.175.178The Hospitallers, the Mediterranean and EuropeRobert Botill, was elected prior of England just before de la Warre’s departure on his fi rst expedition.94 Family ties with the Order perhaps also lay behind the decision of the 80-year-old widow Alice Skipwith, probably the sister-in-law of the long-dead turcopolier Thomas Skipwith, to undertake the Jerusalem pilgrimage in about 1439.Having reached Rhodes, she was unable to continue further, due to old age and infi rmity, perhaps because her compatriots on the island persuaded her to desist.95From the 1480s English merchants also begin to appear in the Order’s records as factors for members of the langue, or as creditors of the conventual common treasury.John Millet (or Miller) in 1487, and two members of the Shelley family and a John Thomas in 1513 appear in one of these capacities.96 The Hugh Ball who was sent to England with gifts for the king in 1515 was perhaps also a merchant.97 Given that most English merchants in the Eastern Mediterranean traded in Cretan wine or in alum, it is unlikely that many settled in Rhodes, particularly given the fuss which their export of Turkish alum to Western Europe provoked at the curia in the early years of the sixteenth century.98 Even so, it is possible that from the 1460s onwards dozens of English merchants and sailors called at Rhodes, even if only briefl y.With the possible exception of the 1450s, when references to them are fairly numerous, the British and Irish inhabitants of Rhodes and the Dodecanese cannot be proved to have constituted anything approaching a community except in the context of their service to members of the English langue.Nevertheless it is clear that persons from many parts of Britain and Ireland made their way to and settled in Rhodes and the Dodecanese, so that their presence there cannot have been regarded as in any way unusual or exotic.94 The Knights Hospitallers in England: Being the Report of Philip de Thame to the Grand Master Elyan de Villanova, ed.L.B.Larking, with a historical introduction by J.M.Kemble (London, 1857), p.8; Victoria County History of Wiltshire, 13, ed.D.A.Crowley (London, 1987), pp.178, 180–1; Complete Peerage, ed.Cockayne, Gibbs et al., 12/2, pp.517–18; O’Malley, English Langue, p.137, n.161.95 M.M.Harvey, England, Rome and the Papacy 1417–64 (Manchester, 1993), pp.108–9.Earlier pilgrimages to Jerusalem by Englishwomen are discussed in A.T.Luttrell,‘Englishwomen as Pilgrims to Jerusalem: Isolda Parewastell, 1365’, in J.Bolton Holloway, C.S.Wright and J
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