Say What?

[stoutfellow]

I'm currently reading A Brief History of the English Reformation, by Derek Wilson, and just ran across a passage which worries me, as regards Mr. Wilson's capacities. He writes:

The house [Sir Hugh Clopton, the Mayor of London,] occupied in Old Jewry, at the commercial heart of the city, was a substantial residence called Fitzwalter House. Before the expulsion of the Jews by Edward I in 1291 it had been a synagogue. Thereafter, only the name of the street survived to testify to the fact that it had been the centre of the Jewish merchant community. Subsequently, the building was the headquarters of the Friars of the Purse, a minor mendicant order. After their suppression the house came into the hands of the mighty Robert Fitzwalter, the leader of the barons who forced Magna Carta upon a reluctant King John.

That last sentence set off alarm bells: Magna Carta was signed in 1215, and King John was Edward I's grandfather. Some checking reveals that that particular Robert Fitzwalter died in 1235, which makes the chronology Wilson gives impossible.

I assume that he meant some later Robert Fitzwalter. Unfortunately, the Friars of the Purse were apparently minor enough not to be mentioned anywhere online, and the only Fitzwalter House I can locate is in Colchester, not London.

This is frustrating. It's also a rather silly error for a historian of England to make - 1215 is one of the dates that should be at his fingertips, right up there with 1066, 1485, and 1689.