Magna Carta

by Dan Jones

  Not everyone, however, was happy, and just as we can trace to Henry II’s reign the origins of the royal system against which Magna Carta was aimed, so we can trace the first rumblings of dissatisfaction and protest to which Magna Carta responded.

  In 1163, Henry attempted to browbeat his erstwhile friend, servant and boon companion Thomas Becket, whom he had appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, into allowing the Crown to place on trial and punish ‘criminous clerks’ – churchmen who had committed crimes. This was an age that still possessed a separate system of church law, and these proposals would have been a huge invasion of secular law into ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Becket’s refusal to allow it prompted the famous breach between the two men, which ended with the archbishop’s heinous murder before the altar of Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. His quarrel with Henry stemmed from a fundamental, unbridgable divergence: the archbishop viewed the king as a tyrant, who was riding roughshod over the law, while Henry saw only that he was exercising his royal prerogatives. When Becket went into exile from England, between 1164 and 1170, he wrote a series of angry and insulting letters to, and about, the king, including one to Henry’s mother Matilda, in which he complained that ‘[Henry] is afflicting the churches of his realm beyond endurance and demanding from them unheard-of and unaccustomed things’. Cruel blows and bitter insults were being traded between English kings and the English Church long before King John’s reign. This tension would come to underpin much of what emerged in Magna Carta.

  As much as anything else, Henry II set the tone for early Plantagenet kingship – or so it would appear from the comfortable distance of his youngest son’s reign. He set out a platform of aggressive, disciplined, rigorous kingship that was highly adept at milking cash from England and channelling it to the continent. He pushed the financial and judicial power of the Crown deep into the shires. He oversaw a dramatic reduction of the military power of the major barons, for as well as razing baronial castles following the Anarchy, Henry seized huge numbers of them following the rebellion known as the ‘Great War’ in 1173–4. In 1154 the Crown held something like 35 per cent of England’s 350 castles; by the 1180s that figure had risen substantially, and by John’s reign nearly half of England’s castles were in royal hands.7

  Henry also occasionally lived up to his ancestors’ reputations for diabolical cruelty. Old family legend had it that the Angevins were descended from the devil, and there were Englishmen who saw something demonic in the character of the king. Writers hostile to Henry, such as Ralph Niger, accused him not only of demeaning the nobility of his greatest subjects, but also of being an irreligious tyrant and a slavering womanizer. Even William of Newburgh, who generally wrote kindly of Henry, recorded that in his day ‘he was hateful to nearly everyone’.8 This may have been an exaggeration, but Henry was certainly capable of a ferocity that tested the limits even of a violent age. His worst malice was shown in his treatment of Becket’s followers, hundreds of whom were stripped of their possessions, sent into exile or imprisoned in chains during Henry’s quarrel with the archbishop. Clerics who attempted to proclaim the religious penalties imposed by Becket on the king could have their eyes put out, or feet or genitals hacked off in punishment. Even messengers were not safe: a young boy who passed the king vexing letters from the pope was tortured by having his eyes gouged and being forced to drink boiling water.9 And of course, the archbishop himself was cut down, if not on Henry’s orders then at least at his unwitting instigation. These deeds would not be forgotten by the generation that followed; indeed, the murderous cruelty of the old king seemed to be the prelude to the even worse behaviour of his sons.

  Henry II died at the Plantagenet fortress of Chinon, in the Loire, during the hot summer of 1189. His later years had been made miserable by struggles with a new French king, Philip II ‘Augustus’, and wars with his impatient and rebellious children over their inheritances. His eldest adult son with Eleanor, Henry ‘the Young King’, predeceased him (as did their third son, Geoffrey), and so it was Richard ‘the Lionheart’ who was crowned King of England at Westminster Abbey on Sunday 3 September 1189. Richard would become one of the most celebrated kings in British history; he remains the only monarch to be commemorated with a statue outside the Houses of Parliament. This is ironic, for of all the kings who reigned after the Norman Conquest, Richard probably spent the least time – and took the least personal interest – in his English kingdom. His reign would see his father’s reforms and policies pushed to greater extremes. It would also see the arrival on the political stage of Richard’s controversial and deeply untrustworthy youngest brother, John ‘Lackland’, the man who would come to suffer the consequences of all his family’s misdeeds.

  *1 It was by virtue of possession of the County of Anjou that the continental holdings of Henry II and his sons Richard I and John are sometimes referred to as the Angevin Empire.

  *2 Matilda was Henry I’s only legitimate daughter, and she used the title ‘Empress’ following her marriage to Henry V, King of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor (d.1125). Stephen’s mother was Henry I’s sister Adela of Blois. Stephen and Matilda were therefore first cousins.

  *3 Regulating and stabilizing the money supply was both a mark of kingly authority and a means of combatting financial fraud. Coin clipping was seen as an especially pernicious activity: by shaving off the edges of coins, clippers could harvest the silver and mint their own, fake, coins.

  *4 ‘Feudalism’ has been a much-debated term, but its essence in this period is a hierarchical ordering of society in which a system of obligations (notably military, but also financial) existed in return for the possession of land, property and other rights. At the top of the hierarchy was, of course, the Crown, from which leading men held land as ‘tenants-in-chief’.

  *5 A mark – which was a unit of calculation rather than physical coinage – was held to be worth 13 shillings and 4 pence, and therefore two-thirds of £1.

  *6 The chief point to remember regarding lawmaking at this time is that it was the era before Parliament and before statutes; laws were made by kings and their counsellors; other laws and customs existed at local levels, while the Church stiffly maintained its aloofness from secular laws, seeing its own ecclesiastical law as answerable to the pope – a cause of tensions that exploded in Henry II’s conflict with Thomas Becket.

  *7 Under the system of compurgation, a defendant who could find sufficient neighbours to swear to his innocence would walk free. The Assize of Clarendon abolished this.

  2

  War and Taxes

  1189–1199

  Richard I’s heart, leonine as it was, never truly lay in England. Today it can be found in Normandy, at Rouen Cathedral, where the mummified remains of the organ (removed from his body at death) have collapsed into a pile of greyish-brown powder, mingled together with grains of frankincense, daisy, mint and myrtle, the substances that were used to preserve it. But in the prime of Richard’s life, this heart throbbed with a lust for warfare and adventure, which was fulfilled on battlefields from western France to the plains of the Holy Land.

  Although Richard was born in Oxford, his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, raised him as a prince of the wild French South. He subsequently spent most of his adult life outside England and tended to return only when he was truly desperate for money. Nevertheless, the absent Lionheart’s grand military ambition would have a profound effect on the realm that gave him his crown, and this most un-English of kings would have his own part to play in the history of that most English of documents, Magna Carta.

  Like many of the boldest young men of the age, Richard I was a crusader. He was crowned less than a week before his thirty-second birthday, by which time he had already taken the cross and promised solemnly to make his armed pilgrimage to ‘Outremer’, as the Christian lands in the Middle East were then known. The Third Crusade had been called as a response to the fall of Acre and Jerusalem to forces under the great Muslim sultan Saladin. It galvanized princes across Europe, includi
ng the French king, Philip Augustus, and the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa. The King of England had no intention of being left behind.

  ‘The son, becoming greater and greater, enlarged the good works of his father, while the bad ones he cut short.’ Such was chronicler Roger of Howden’s initial assessment of Richard’s succession to the English crown.1 But it is largely a piece of flattery from a writer who had close connections at court and who travelled extensively with his king about the Holy Land. It is true that Richard, like Henry II, promised at his coronation to protect the liberties of the English Church and to provide justice to his subjects. However, as Howden reports in a more truthful phrase, once the king was crowned and had taken oaths of allegiance from all his nobles, he ‘put up for sale everything he had’.2 Crusading was a dazzlingly expensive business, and Richard drained his new realm for everything it had. As hired ships were loaded with thousands of salted pig carcasses, horseshoes, arrows and other provisions necessary to fight a long war far from home, so the king’s leading subjects were exploited by every means available. Castles, offices, lands and lordships were effectively auctioned off to them in a frenzy of selling before the king set sail. Henry II had designed a slick system of government that could raise money efficiently and operate in the king’s absence. Richard drove the machine with single-minded vigour.

  A wholly imaginary scene, from the Luttrell Psalter (early fourteenth century), in which Richard the Lionheart (left) jousts with his ‘Infidel’ enemy Saladin. Richard’s insatiable need for money to pay for his adventures – to fight in the Holy Land, to pay his ransom and to make war in France – put great strain on English finances and encouraged abuses of the system in order to raise the vast wealth the king demanded.

  The pipe rolls of Richard’s reign point to 1190 as a year of impressive financial exaction.*1 A special tax known as the Saladin Tithe had been levied across the Plantagenet Empire to help pay for the costs of crusading. This was supplemented with a year of intense royal fundraising through the regular channels of government. Whereas £22,000 was the regular royal in-come shown on the pipe rolls of Henry II’s later years, in 1190 Richard managed to extract £31,089 from his realm – a jump of close to 50 per cent.3 The bulk of this rise came from two sources – the profits of justice and the exploitation of Richard’s feudal rights as king. The former included fees charged for access to royal courts via writs, the sale of official positions (including most of England’s shrievalties – the office of sheriff) and the confirmation of charters that had been previously granted by Henry II. On top of this, the king imposed heavy feudal levies on his barons in the form of payments they had to make for permission to marry, to inherit or to exercise wardship over under-age heirs. The crusade inflation on these payments was sharp, and it must have been with some relief, as well as excitement, that England bade farewell to its energetic and zealous new ruler when he left Dover in December 1189, two months after his coronation, on his heroic quest to destroy the Infidel armies who were polluting Jerusalem with their unholy presence. He would be gone for more than four years.

  Richard’s reputation in his day (and ever since) was founded on his peerless brilliance as a military leader. He had a good crusade, fighting his way through Sicily, conquering Cyprus and arriving in splendour in Outremer, just in time to participate in the last stages of the successful siege of Acre. Once the city fell, Richard reinforced Jaffa and Ascalon (Ashkelon today, in Israel) and secured a three-year truce with Saladin, during which time unarmed Christian pilgrims were granted safe access to Jerusalem. By the time he left the Holy Land in October 1192, Richard was famous across the known world and had made himself the object of admiration by Saladin. Unfortunately, he had also made some powerful enemies among his Christian allies, and on his way back to Europe Richard was shipwrecked off the north-east Italian coast, captured by Duke Leopold of Austria and sold to the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry VI, who jailed him at Trifels Castle, high in the mountains of what is now south-western Germany. The price of his freedom was a vast ransom of 150,000 marks (£100,000) – roughly the price of another crusade – which had to be raised in a matter of months. For the second time in less than five years, England was bled to pay for the adventures of its charismatic ruler.

  That England paid Richard’s ransom at all was down to the efforts of the level-headed and loyal men whom the king had placed in charge of England’s government during his absence. They included William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely; Walter of Coutances, Bishop of Rouen; and Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury. They were directed by the king’s ‘much-beloved’ mother, Eleanor, now in her late sixties but still a regal force of nature.4 Together, they worked Europe’s diplomatic channels, found hostages and ships when these were demanded by the king’s captors, levied a 25 per-cent tax on income and movables, requisitioned a whole year’s supply of wool from England’s Cistercian abbeys, and followed up Richard’s personal request for English churches to send ‘the whole of the gold and silver’ that they kept, which he promised to return on his release.5 Astonishingly, 100,000 marks – two-thirds of the ransom – was raised within a year, and on 4 February 1194 Richard was released, quite literally into the arms of his mother. He returned to England on 13 March, wore his crown in a ceremony at Westminster Abbey a month later and went on a rapid tour of his kingdom. Then, on 12 May 1194, he put to sea at Portsmouth, leaving to defend Normandy and the rest of his continental possessions from attack by King Philip Augustus. Another round of expensive military campaigning loomed. As it turned out, Richard would have five years’ more fighting ahead of him. As it also turned out, he would never see his kingdom again.

  The distinctive remains of Château Gaillard, set in an imposing position overlooking a branch of the Seine in Normandy. It was constructed under King Richard in 1196–8 to protect the approaches to Rouen, becoming the strongest Plantagenet fortress in the duchy. It was supposed to be unconquerable – yet within a decade, John would lose it to the French after a six-month siege. The ramifications of defeat in Normandy would be the root of many of John’s problems in 1215.

  Between 1194 and 1199 Richard performed some mighty military deeds. During his crusade and captivity, his continental lands had been sorely depleted, mainly thanks to the efforts of his feckless brother John. Although John had been bribed to stay out of England during the king’s absence – being granted a massive income from the revenues of six English counties and the Royal Duchy of Lancaster, as well as the continental title of ‘Count of Mortain’ – he had ignored orders, entering the country and provoking armed confrontations with Richard’s officials, and trying to seize control of government for himself. Then, when his English machinations had faltered, John had gone over to the continent, where he allied himself with the French king and agreed to grant away Richard’s most strategically important lands and mighty castles in return for Philip Augustus recognizing him as rightful ruler of Plantagenet holdings in France. Magnanimously, if not wisely, Richard forgave John almost immediately on his release in 1194 – and then set about his war with France. The result was a long and bloody series of campaigns, merely to restore his lands to their condition and extent as inherited from Henry II.

  Richard’s sphere of operations stretched from the Vexin, a hotly disputed portion of land on the border between Normandy and the lands directly controlled by Philip Augustus, to Brittany, Berry, Poitou and Limoges. Costly alliances were made with men like Richard’s former captor, Emperor Henry VI, as well as Baldwin, Count of Flanders, and a large number of other noblemen whose borders touched France. An extraordinary military supply chain was set up, connecting Portsmouth with the Norman castle-towns along the Seine, culminating in a magnificent fortified palace at Les Andelys, known as Château Gaillard, which was built at massive expense (at least £12,000, or half a year’s English royal income) in just two years, between 1196 and 1198. The war was fought on land and from the sea, and it provided men like William Marshal, one of the most famous knights of t
he age, with a wealth of anecdotes and tall-tales to tell their grandchildren.6 And it was supremely successful. By January 1199 Richard’s enemies had been beaten into submission on every front and he was planning seriously to go east once again for the Fourth Crusade proposed by a new pope, Innocent III.

  Another look at Richard’s accounts shows us that England paid handsomely for this long process of restoration and reconquest. Analysis of the pipe rolls has shown that during the period 1194–8 the average revenue taken from England was nearly £25,000, peaking in 1196 when £28,323 went through the books.7 Once again, the processes of justice, the king’s feudal rights and taxation (such as scutage) were exploited to scoop money out of England for use across the Channel. And there were innovations, too. In 1198 the king levied a ‘carucage’ – a new land tax, initially assessed according to the size of estates as recorded in Domesday Book.*2 This raised £1,000 and appears to have been unpopular, since Richard’s officials were obliged to investigate and punish with fines numerous instances of avoidance. In the short term such measures brought Richard the means with which to cow Europe with his untouchable military brilliance. In the long term, however, problems were starting to build, which would surface years later with Magna Carta.