by Ed West
Beer at the time would have been absolutely disgusting, close to the texture of porridge as it wasn’t until the fourteenth century that hops were introduced from the Low Countries, after which the drink would have first resembled what we now think of as beer. Not even the most daring hipster has ever tried to recreate thirteenth-century ale as a statement of irony or quirkiness. Without hops, the beer also went-production off very quickly, and so large-scale brewing was not possible, most of it being done in houses; it didn’t matter as people drank it very quickly just to blot out life.
Wine, meanwhile, which was transported in 252-gallon wooden casks at the time, mostly came from southwest France, with English wine-production disappearing due to climate change, but even the stuff consumed by the royal family was grim. Peter of Blois wrote of the wine at Henry’s II court that it ‘turned sour and moldy, thick, greasy, stale, flat and smacking of pitch.’ He said: ‘I have sometimes seen great lords served with wine so muddy that a man must need [to] close his eyes and clench his teeth, wry-mouthed and shuddering, and filtering the stuff rather than drinking it.’20
Not that most English people cared about the quality. As early as the eighth century, St. Boniface had mentioned the national problem with drink, including among clergy, calling it ‘a vice peculiar to the heathens [Vikings] and to our race, and that neither Franks, Gauls, Lombards, Romans nor Greeks indulge in.’ Few things change. Richard FitzNigel, Bishop of Ely and head of the treasury at the time of Henry II, said the English were ‘natural drunks,’ and court rolls from the period are full of tragicomic misadventures involving ale, illiterate peasants, and agricultural instruments. Twelfth-century writer William of Malmesbury said of the English that ‘Drinking in parties was an universal practice, in which occupation they passed entire nights as well as days.’
Jacques de Vitry, a theologian and cardinal who lived in Paris at the end of the twelfth century, described ‘the distinctive characteristics of each nation: the French were proud and womanish; the Germans furious and obscene; the Lombards greedy, malicious, and cowardly; and the English were drunkards and had tails.’* The Franciscan Salimbene noticed that it was the Englishman’s habit always to drain off a beaker of wine, saying ‘he bi a vu’ (I drink to you), implying that his friend must drink as much as he, and he ‘taketh it exceedingly ill if any do otherwise than he himself hath taught in word and shown by example.’21
In this period, England went through one of its periodic booze epidemics, so that ‘the whole land was filled with drink and drinkers.’ By the end of the century, 354 drinking establishments were in London, and everyone drank heavily, although they did so among their own class—the wealthy drank in inns, the middle ranks in taverns, while at the bottom of the social ladder there were the alehouses, where violence was almost guaranteed.
At ‘church ales’ money was raised for the upkeep of the parish by hosting marathon boozing sessions in which parishioners were encouraged to drink as much as possible. These events could go on for three days, and after a certain time bachelors who were still able to stand were allowed to drink for free. Weddings were also extremely drunken, so much so that in 1223 Richard Poore, Bishop of Salisbury, was forced to make a proclamation that marriages must be sober, and ‘celebrated reverently and with honor, not with laughter or sport or at public potations or feasts.’ Not that churchmen were much better, especially as they did much of the brewing. Cistercian monks at Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire produced 1,100 gallons (five thousand liters) of ale every week, both for consumption and sale, and fitting in with medieval stereotypes some clerics were inebriated quite often. A chronicle composed at Ely cathedral recalls a priest so drunk he could barely walk, but who after trying to perform Mass vomited and defecated in front of the congregation.
The worst drink-related incident occurred in 1212 when London Bridge burned down after a ‘Scot-ale,’ with up to three thousand charred or drowned bodies turning up on the banks of the river the following morning. Scot-ales were bring-your-own-bottle events where ‘the highest credit was accorded to him who made the most of his fellows drunk and himself emptied the largest tankards.’22 Inevitably, this combination or rancid alcohol and ill-judged horseplay often ended badly.
Leading the way in this national drinking marathon was King John, who even by the standards of the time was pretty exceptional all the same, keeping an estimated 180,000 gallons of wine at his disposal, which some might say was a slight hint of alcoholism. John’s butler was personally responsible for ensuring a tun (240 gallons) or two of wine was waiting for him at his next stop, wherever he was.
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* This supremacy lasted up until the eighteenth century when a British officer by the name of George Washington started a war in 1756, the year 1759 being seen as the start of the British era.
* The idea that Englishmen had tails was apparently quite common on the continent and supposedly went back to St. Augustine who arrived in 597 to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxons. He found they fastened cows’ tails to the back of their clothes because they thought it looked good. And so as punishment for this vanity, they and their descendents were doomed to always have tails. That’s why I’m writing this on a special chair.
CHAPTER TEN
John vs. God
As the youngest son, John, may originally have been destined for the Church, and had his elder brothers not gotten themselves killed, he might have stayed there, although it cannot be said he would have been a very conscientious cleric. At the age of one, he was sent to an abbey to live with monks but was eventually found to be woefully unsuited to the life of prayer and reflection. However, he did retain a love of books throughout his life; and indeed, in 1203 when he should have been worrying about Normandy falling to the French, he had his library sent across to him so he could spend some time reading.
John might not have even believed in God, and certainly treated oaths in a way that suggests not. He apparently did not take Holy Communion after childhood, nor did he receive it at his coronation, which was considered shocking for the time. He openly ate meat on Fridays and hunted on feast days, blatantly breaking religious rules. Like his father, he found attending church unbelievably boring and he didn’t even pretend to make an effort. On one Easter Mass, when the very holy St. Hugh of Lincoln was giving the homily, John sent the bishop three notes telling him to hurry so he could go to lunch. During services he was forced to attend, he’d take out a gold coin at collection time, ostentatiously play with it, then put it back in his purse.* In another example of his not-very-great respect for religion, when his half brother Archbishop Geoffrey of York visited in 1207 to appeal against a heavy tax, the cleric threw himself at John’s feet. John then threw himself at Geoffrey’s feet in return and cried ‘Look, Lord Archbishop, I’m doing just what you did!’ Then he laughed his head off.
The only cleric he had any respect for, indeed the only person who seemed to bring out any humanity in the man, was the saintly Hugh of Lincoln,† who the king admired so much he sat by him on his deathbed and helped carry his coffin; John founded Beaulieu Abbey in the New Forest in his honor—but that was something of a blip. And while John might have been an nonbeliever, he wasn’t entirely rational, and wore a jewel around his neck that he was convinced would bring him victory in France, which it didn’t.
Having made enemies everywhere, the king now fell out with the Church over the choice of Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1205, Archbishop Hubert Walter passed away following a fever caused by an infected carbuncle (people died of the strangest things back then). John is supposed to have cried in delight ‘By God’s feet! Now for the first time I am king and lord of England.’1
He wanted his crony John de Gray to be given the post, but Pope Innocent III insisted on Stephen Langton, who turned out to be a formidable and influential figure in the Magna Carta story, and an unsung hero of English liberty; he was, however, blatantly unsuited to the job, his main claim being that he was the Pope’s former tutor. To intellectu
al circles Langton was a great choice, being a figure of theological distinction; John, however, did not move in intellectual circles. On top of this, Langton had taught at Paris for twenty years and John had become extremely hostile to anything French. He refused the nomination.
Despite the king’s insistence, the Pope appointed Langton anyway, and so John declared that anyone who recognized the appointment was a public enemy.
In June 1207, after the Pope had consecrated Langton, the king responded by sending notorious mercenary crossbowmen to Christ Church, Canterbury, to intimidate the monks; as a result most fled abroad.2
The papacy, in response, issued an interdict, under which all Church services in the country were suspended; church bells were not rung, and Christian marriages could not be properly made. For John, not an especially pious man, this was about as much of a punishment as a parent threatening to stop taking their child to church.
And for the king, it also had the added bonus that he could collect the revenue from all the churches, a huge amount of money. Then John confiscated all clerical assets on the grounds that they weren’t doing their jobs, and imprisoned the priests’ mistresses and demanded cash for their return; obviously, as he well knew, the clergy didn’t want to make a big fuss about this and most simply paid up. For the common people, although baptisms and last rites were still performed, Mass had to be practiced outside, as priests wouldn’t cross the picket line. As a result of the interdict, people were buried in ditches and church piss-ups had to be done in the porch rather than inside the building. Marriages continued, sometimes at church doors, but there were no wedding Masses. Still, though the king wasn’t popular, there was not a single protest about Mass not being said during the interdict, which suggests that most people weren’t that bothered about it either; they probably regarded it as a chance to get another hour’s drinking in. In fact, there was such enthusiastic support for John’s anti-clerical policy that he had to issue ‘instructions that anyone who did or spoke evil against the religious or secular clergy was to be hanged to the nearest oak tree.’3 On the other hand, one story recounts how John met by the road some officers who took away a man who had murdered a priest, at which point the king ordered him to be freed because ‘he has killed one of my enemies.’4
There’s some anecdotal evidence that many people didn’t seem to have been that serious about religion at the time; one preacher, Alexander Ashby, complained that at the solemn moment of the Mass when ‘the priest prayed silently before consecrating the Eucharist, a hubbub of gossip and joking commonly broke out among the congregation.’
The interdict had one long-lasting effect, however. England’s first university, Oxford, had originated around 1100, growing out of two monastic settlements at nearby Woodstock. But in 1209, fighting broke out between locals and students after one of the latter was accused of murdering a local woman. The townies couldn’t find him so the mayor put three fellow students in jail and ‘after a few days . . . these clerks were led out from the city and hanged’—lynched effectively. As a result, many scholars left the city, but because of the interdict many of the clerics who ran the university had already fled Oxford and, with the atmosphere decidedly hostile, they decided not to bother returning and instead relocated to a small town to the east in the middle of a bog—called Cambridge.5
Such students vs. locals conflict was common in the Middle Ages, and by today’s standards absurdly violent, brawls often ending in multiple fatalities. Overall, more than two hundred incidents of murder and serious violence occurred at Oxford university between 1209 and 1399.6 A few years after the 1209 incident, there was trouble when the mayor of Oxford ordered all ‘Lewd Women then in Gaol’ to be expelled from town. It was all, apparently, the fault of ‘French students whose infamous Lust had engag’d them in their Quarrels, and by haunting Stewes and Brothels, had contracted the foul Diseases.’ This led the Pope’s representative in England to visit the town and ‘hither to reform the Corruptions of the Place.’ The students went to see the legate to complain but were rudely told to go away by the porter ‘in his loud Italian voice,’ which seemed to annoy them further, so they forced their way in. A fight broke out and a cook who had thrown boiling water over one of the students was killed.
There was also frequent mob violence among students, including one incident of fighting between ‘Northern English and the Welsh’ on the one hand, and the ‘Southern English,’ each side flying banners, in which ‘divers on both sides [were] slain and pitifully wounded.’ Then in 1298 on the feast of St. Mathias (February 24), a fight occurred after the city bailiff was attacked by some students and it escalated so that on the following day students ‘took all the lay-folk they could find, beat them and wickedly trampled on them,’ killing one and wounding many by a church altar.
The most notorious was the St. Scholastica Day riot of 1355, in which a dispute between two students and an innkeeper led to forty-eight hours of disorder and the deaths of thirty locals and sixty-three scholars. This had started after some students had thrown their drink at an innkeeper’s face; apparently they had been served ‘indifferent wine’ at the Swyndlestock Tavern after which the vintner gave them ‘stubborn and saucy language.’ Then the town folk attacked the students, ‘some with bows and arrows, others with divers weapons,’ and fighting broke out again the following morning. The entire faculty fled after ‘some innocent wretches’ were killed and ‘scornfully cast into the house of easement’—the toilet—a deed done by ‘diabolical imps.’ Those who were injured limped away ‘carrying their entrails in their hands in a most lamentable manner.’*
Not that medieval Oxford was just about fighting; they also did some learning there. The most important of the thirteenth-century scholars was the Somerset-born Roger Bacon, who had studied at Paris before coming to Oxford in 1250. He is sometimes credited with being the first European to advocate the modern scientific method, brought from ancient Greece via the Arab world, although inevitably he ended up getting in trouble with the Church and spent much of his later years under a sort of house arrest.*
John also annoyed the Church by giving his support to the Cathars, the heretics of southern France who had developed an extremely austere religion that was anti-meat, anti-sex, and basically anti-everything fun, and who were mercilessly punished in the Albigensian crusade.† It was rumored that opponents of the monarch wanted to replace King John with the crusade’s leader, the fanatical Catholic maniac Simon de Montfort; nothing came of it, but his son would play a big part in English history. Such was John’s lack of belief that there was even an improbable story that he had sent secret messages ‘to the emir of Morocco to tell him that he would voluntarily give up himself and his kingdom and also abandon the Christian faith’ in return for an alliance. This is unlikely in the extreme, and anyway, if John was interested in converting to Islam, he certainly hadn’t read the part about abstaining from alcohol.
John promised, in 1208, that if any clerics arrived from Rome, even the Pope, he would send them back with their noses slit and eyes gouged out.7 Meanwhile, the king’s profits from the interdict of £100,000 were spent on things such as new costumes for the king’s pet lion and its keeper ‘and two thousand crossbow bolts and military uniforms.’8 The Pope did not approve, and now excommunicated John, which bothered him not in the slightest: ‘He neither feared God nor regarded man; it was as if he alone were mighty upon the earth,’ a monk in Canterbury lamented. Again in 1211, John said he’d hang Langton if he returned to England. One priest, Geoffrey of Norwich, read a letter from the Pope stating that a clergyman did not owe loyalty to anyone who had been excommunicated, so John had him wrapped in lead, killing him.9
However, the excommunication led to increasing paranoia, and on March 17, 1208, there was a muster of the fleet at London. The king ordered that all English seamen abroad should come home ‘with the threat of dire consequences if they refused his summons.’10 The following week, he ordered that all foreign ships be seized except tho
se from Denmark and Norway, the only countries he thought weren’t against him. He also ordered that all leading barons hand over family members as hostages.
Among the most unpopular things John did was to keep his barons in permanent debt to him, mostly through arbitrary taxes and payments he seemed to make up on the spot. What made him especially unpopular was the issue of inheritance, and the ‘relief’ that had to be handed over, which violated Henry I’s promise of a reasonable tax. John would suddenly announce that a baron had to pay off all his debts, leaving him effectively bankrupt overnight; if they refused, he would take a family member. In perhaps the most notorious incident, John turned against the baron William de Briouze, paranoid about his loyalty and demanding £3,500 from him as immediate payment.
De Briouze was one of the most prominent of the marcher lords, the semi-independent Norman aristocrats who controlled the border (‘march’) with Wales. William owned vast amounts of land in Normandy, Wales, England, and Ireland, while his wife, ‘Matilda of Hay’ as John called her, was an even more impressive figure, virtually ruling the border region single-handedly from her castle, and at one point fighting off a Welsh invasion; she owned twelve thousand cows, and boasted she could feed an army with them.*
