by Dan Jones
Richard’s death came suddenly, and shockingly, in the spring of 1199. While commanding a siege at the castle of Châlus-Chabrol in the Limousin on 26 March, he was hit in the shoulder by a speculative crossbow bolt fired from a battlement by a man using a frying-pan for a shield. The wound was attended to by a field surgeon but went gangrenous, and by 11 April the Lionheart was dead.
Despite a marriage to Berengaria of Navarre, Richard had never had any children. He left his empire intact, his crown somewhat impoverished – and his brother John as his heir. It was a combination that would have disastrous consequences.
*1 Pipe rolls were the annual records of royal finances, kept by the Exchequer, and so called because the long documents (of parchment, made from sheepskin) were rolled up to form pipe-shapes. An almost complete run of these records exist from the mid-12th century to the early nineteenth century.
*2 A ‘carucate’ was the amount of land that could be ploughed by an eight-ox team in a year: somewhere between 100 and 120 acres.
3
Empire’s End
1199–1204
People loathed John. For all the attempts that have been made by historians to rehabilitate his reputation, any study of England’s third Plantagenet ruler must account for the fact that he was a cruel and unpleasant man, a second-rate soldier and a slippery, faithless, interfering king. It is true that at times John was no less ruthless than his brother Richard, nor any less manipulative than his father, Henry. But if his relatives shared some of his worst traits, he shared almost none of their best.
John was, it must be admitted, an excellent administrator, who knew his way around the departments of his own government, took an expert personal interest in the workings of royal justice and kept a lavish, open-handed court. But these were not the primary measures by which men of his time assessed him, and even if we allow for the fact that some of the best surviving descriptions of John were written with hindsight, by men who judged his whole life by the ignominy of its end, it is still clear that this was not a man who was considered fit for kingship.
Ralph of Coggeshall lived through John’s reign and despaired of the king, pointing out his cruelty, his small-minded viciousness, his threatening manner and his childish habits of ridiculing his subjects and laughing at their misfortunes. Ralph wrote from the distance of the 1220s, once John was dead and Magna Carta had been both agreed and reissued several times. But other, more strictly contemporary, authors agreed with him. The writer known as ‘The Anonymous of Béthune’ thought John was wicked, petty and lecherous, and he made frequent references to John’s lack of chivalry.1 The southern French poet Bertrand de Born the Younger wrote that ‘no man may ever trust him / For his heart is soft and cowardly.’2 William of Newburgh, disgusted by John’s treachery during Richard’s imprisonment, called him ‘nature’s enemy’: a man who heaped ‘infinite curses on his own perfidious head’.3 Nor was it just writers in their monasteries who despaired, although many were naturally inclined against an irreligious king who spent part of his reign unrepentantly excommunicated from the Church. John’s reputation went before him. And it was a major factor in the history of his reign.
King John, as drawn by the great St Alban’s chronicler, Matthew Paris, for his Historia Anglorum, composed in the 1250s. John occupies the bottom-left position in a royal quartet featuring his father Henry II, brother Richard, and son Henry III. John’s reputation as a tyrant was earned in his lifetime, although it has been exaggerated by posterity. In truth, John had a brilliant and flexible brain; but he was also deceitful, untrustworthy, rash, bullying and unlucky. For the most part, he was loathed.
By the time John came to the throne, in April 1199, he had already worked up quite a record for duplicity and troublemaking. Sent to Ireland in 1185 as a nineteen-year-old prince, he had offended the local lords as soon as he landed. Gerald of Wales, who accompanied John on the expedition, recalled that he treated the natives ‘with contempt and derision, [and] even rudely pulled them by their beards, which the Irishmen wore full and long, according to the custom of their country’.4 Later, John abandoned his dying father during the last war of Henry II’s reign, in 1189. He then betrayed Richard by his stirring up of armed disputes in England, during the Third Crusade. Not only did John attempt to sell the family’s lands to the King of France, but when it was apparent that Richard was going to be released from his Austrian captivity, he joined with Philip Augustus in offering to pay the Holy Roman Emperor to keep Richard locked up for longer than the agreed term. Subsequently, five years of muted loyalty to Richard, between 1194 and 1199, did very little to turn popular opinion John’s way; and when the news of Richard’s death spread across the Plantagenet lands, there were large numbers of people who objected very strongly to the announcement that his brother had been named as successor.
It was, in fact, only with some difficulty that John secured his succession at all. His former dealings with Philip Augustus had been craven enough to convince the French king that John was a man who could be dominated, by aggression. (As Richard put it, John was not a man who could conquer a realm by force if there was force to oppose him.5) Philip’s judgment was correct. As soon as Richard’s death was known, the French invaded the Duchy of Normandy and Philip Augustus encouraged his allies up and down the rest of the Plantagenet dominions to rise up in rebellion. As a result, John began his reign fighting a defensive war on several fronts, and in 1200 he was forced to accept the Treaty of Le Goulet, by which he did homage to the French king and acknowledged the loss of a considerable chunk of his lands in Normandy and claims to overlordship elsewhere. The chronicler Gervase of Canterbury, commenting on John’s willingness to accept the less than favourable terms of Le Goulet, wrote that he ‘would rather achieve peace by negotiation than fight for his own terms, and because of this his enemies and detractors call him John Softsword’.6
As well as his problems with Philip, John was also troubled by the existence of a rival candidate for his lands and titles: Arthur, Duke of Brittany, son of John’s late elder brother Geoffrey. Born in 1187, Arthur had just turned twelve when Richard died. But his claim to the Plantagenet crown was considered by some, including the King of France, to be superior to John’s. Indeed, in 1190, Richard I had actually named Arthur – then less than three years old – as his successor should he die on crusade. Arthur and John were therefore direct rivals, a fact gleefully exploited by Philip Augustus. For the next three years – and indeed, for quite some time beyond – Arthur of Brittany would be a thorn in John’s side.
John had been crowned king at Westminster Abbey on 27 May 1199; but, in the manner typical of his brother, he made it a very brief visit to England. His preoccupation even after the Treaty of Le Goulet was with defending his lands from further incursions by Philip and Arthur. This required his near-constant presence on the continent. It looked very much as though England was going to experience a third successive absentee king with a chronic need for financial support. In that sense at least, it was business as usual.
Soon, however, everything would change. In August 1200 John, having secured an annulment of his first marriage to Isabel of Gloucester, took as his wife a young girl from Aquitaine called Isabella of Angoulême. That she was twelve years old was no great outrage by the standards of the day. That she was already betrothed to someone else was more problematic. Isabella’s intended was Hugh de Lusignan, and the marriage was due to draw together the two most prominent, troublesome and mutually hostile families of the Gascon South. By effectively kidnapping Hugh’s bride, John achieved the impressive feat of pushing these enemy clans into each others’ arms and giving Philip Augustus an excuse, in 1202, to launch a fresh round of punitive invasions of Plantagenet territories.
During the subsequent war, John managed to capture Arthur, during an impressive military operation at Mirebeau, in Anjou. But this was a rare success. John consistently antagonized and alienated his own allies, many of whom abandoned or turned on him. Within a year, Anjo
u, Maine, Touraine and parts of Poitou had all fallen to Philip, ripping the heart out of the Plantagenet Empire. John retreated to Normandy, taking Arthur with him. Just before Easter in 1203 Arthur disappeared, almost certainly murdered at Rouen, possibly by a drunk and angry John himself – he was said to have crushed the sixteen-year-old’s head with a heavy stone and thrown his body into the River Seine. But there was little time for John to enjoy his victory.
In the summer of 1203, Philip invaded western Normandy and laid siege to Château Gaillard, the greatest symbol of Richard the Lionheart’s muscular kingship. With Normandy falling around his ears, John was said to have gone into a paranoid decline, fearful to ride the open highways in case of attack and convinced that traitors lay all around him. Gossips said that he spent all day lying in bed with his young bride, Isabella. Whether or not this was true, in December 1203 John abandoned his duchy, sailing for England and leaving Normandy to its fate.
Detail of a thirteenth-century fresco from the chapel of St Radegund, close to the fortress of Chinon, in the Loire. It has been identified as depicting Eleanor of Aquitaine (looking backwards), John’s supportive and powerful mother; and Isabella of Angoulême, John’s young second wife, in whose amorous embraces he was said to have languished while his Duchy of Normandy fell to the French in 1203.
By the following summer, the supposedly impregnable Château Gaillard had fallen, and Caen, Rouen and – further south – Poitiers had all surrendered. On 31 March 1204 John’s spirited but ancient mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, died, aged eighty-two. Her formidable presence had kept some order in the empire’s south, but her death prompted the King of Castile to invade Gascony. Together, all this amounted to a sudden and catastrophic collapse. Within five years of John’s accession to the throne, he had lost virtually the whole continental empire that was so painstakingly assembled and defended by his father and brother. All that remained loyal was a coastal strip of Aquitaine, around Bordeaux. And this had very pronounced long-term implications for John. For the first time in more than half-a-century, a Plantagenet King of England would be obliged to live among the English people.
4
The King in His Kingdom
1204–1205
The loss of Normandy is often described, rightly, as one of the great turning points in England’s medieval history. It was obviously a terrible military defeat for John, an illustration of his low stock as a leader and a blow to his reputation. There were also fin-ancial implications. The wealth – and thus the military power – of the King of France, Philip Augustus, had been growing steadily since the 1190s, boosted by territorial acquisitions including the rich Flemish County of Artois and the Vermandois. By sucking Normandy, Anjou, Maine and Touraine back into the orbit of the French Crown, Philip’s position grew even stronger. Under Henry II and during Richard’s early years the Plantagenet Crown had been much richer than the French Capetian royal house. Now those roles were decisively reversed.
Defeat in and ejection from Normandy therefore re-drew the political and conceptual map of Western Europe. English kings had been dukes of Normandy since William the Conqueror had stood victorious at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, and during those 148 years the two territories had become tightly bound together. Many barons loyal to the English king held lands from him on both sides of the Channel. Trade, commerce, warfare and society operated on the assumption that the realms were linked by a common ruler. There was a common Anglo-Norman aristocratic language and culture. Wrenching apart the kingdom and duchy would have profound consequences for the men and women for whom this duality was the normal order of life.
As Philip Augustus rode imperiously about Normandy, landholders were forced to come to a decision. Feudal practice did not permit a man to do homage to two vying lords, since one of the conditions of submitting to a king was to promise to serve him in war. In 1204, therefore, men with lands in England and Normandy had to make a choice – either to lay their allegiance at the feet of the English king, or to submit to France. Those who sided with John kept their English estates, but were liable to lose the land they held across the Channel. Those who decided to safeguard their Norman property were almost instantly cut off in England. Whenever John learned that one of his lords had decided to throw in his lot with Philip Augustus, he immediately ordered his English lands to be seized by the Crown and his name to be entered onto a register known as the Rotulus de valore terrarum Normannorum (‘Roll of the Values of the Lands of the Normans’).1 Some baronial families – including those of the famous knight and king’s friend William Marshal – attempted to work around feudal protocol and hold onto some or all of their lands across the new divide, but with limited success. Only a tiny minority could make such arrangements work. It may be an exaggeration to say that the loss of Normandy drove a permanent cultural wedge between two peoples divided by the Channel, for it was not until the fourteenth century and the Hundred Years War that the English and French began to regard one another as enemies and opposites. Nevertheless, the year 1204 demanded a clear choice from the Anglo-Norman nobility. Were they English subjects or not? And if so, what did that imply? The idea that England was a ‘community’ with collective rights would underpin much of the philosophy of Magna Carta in 1215; it was a feeling that was accelerated by the loss of Normandy in 1204.
England, Scotland and Wales, as drawn in the 1250s by the chronicler Matthew Paris. Hadrian’s Wall indicates the notional boundary of England and Scotland. The disintegration of the continental Plantagenet Empire in 1203–4 meant that John ‘Lackland’ had little option but to focus attention on his English kingdom. On the British mainland, in contrast with his feebleness abroad, he was determined and ruthless in enforcing his will and overawing the Welsh and Scots.
In King John’s own eyes, the loss of Normandy demanded revenge. He was acutely aware of what had been lost over 1203–4, and he was tormented by the sense that he had to win back the homeland and heartlands of his ancestors. For the next ten years John would do everything within his power to amass enough treasure, troops and foreign allies to return to the continent and reconquer what he had lost. But this was now a doubly difficult business. Without control in Normandy John lacked both a beachhead in northern France, from which to advance his armies, and a supply chain of fortresses along the Seine. He had also lost the duchy’s revenues. Normandy had paid for some portion of its own defence during the reigns of Henry and Richard, but now any expedition would have to be financed in full from England. So the task was enormous. Yet John was not daunted by it. Unfortunately, this single-minded obsession would lead him into a fateful trial of strength with his own barons, the consequence of which was Magna Carta.
*
In the years that followed 1204, England got to know its new king. Whereas John’s father and brother had spent very little time in their kingdom, now there was nowhere else for the monarch to go. For the first five years of John’s reign he would have been known to many of his royal subjects only from his coins, from which a wrathful cartoon face glared out, eyes popping from the thin features, with flowing locks of hair and a short beard. Now, though, John made his presence strongly felt.
Like his father, John was an irrepressibly energetic traveller. He spent his whole life on the road, his court snaking out behind him in a caravan train that was driven along at an unholy pace of up to thirty miles a day. The court never stayed in one place for more than a month, and only rarely lodged anywhere for longer than a night or two. Even before the loss of Normandy, John had shown himself inclined to visit the forgotten corners of his realm, including towns of the North like York and Newcastle, where people had previously only clapped eyes on a Plantagenet king once in a generation.2 But this was no mere tourism. John’s determination to tramp even the chilliest highways of his kingdom sprang from a deep desire to see that his government was as efficient, as wide-reaching and as profitable as possible.
Despite all the demands that had been placed on England during the earlier Plan
tagenet years, John’s realm was rich – and getting richer. Several years of acute inflation around the turn of the century wobbled, but did not seriously damage, a rapidly diversifying economy, which one recent historian has described as experiencing ‘an exceptional period of overall expansion… fuelled to a great extent by a tremendous surge in commercial activity’.3 New towns, markets and fairs were being founded at a record rate. Goods were being transported faster and further, as England’s farmers switched to horses (rather than oxen) to pull carts which were often clad in iron around the rim to prevent them from shattering on long journeys along potholed roads. An international trade in wool and cloth was beginning to boom, bringing great quantities of produce and coin in and out of the ports of the South-East.4 This was a realm from which a king fixated on fighting an expensive war of reconquest could quite reasonably decide to take his cut.
Detail from Matthew Paris’s map of Britain. Over 250 cities, towns and topographical features are named in the map. Here, London’s significance is suggested by its relatively elaborate, crenellated fortress above its name, while further upstream on the Thames is Windsor where, close by, the terms of Magna Carta would be thrashed out.
John took to his task with gusto. His methods stayed true to those of his Plantagenet predecessors – exploiting the profits of justice through the royal courts and via his rights over royal forests, maximizing his income from feudal payments, squeezing sheriffs for ever higher returns from their administration of the shires, and imposing one-off taxes such as scutage. A handsome trade was done, too, in selling exemptions from royal justice or interference: the king could, and did, sell immunity from lawsuits at the shire courts, and he charged aristocratic widows vast sums for the right to remarry the man of their choice, rather than being subjected to forced marriage. Areas defined as royal forest were subjected to special royal jurisdiction, and they produced lucrative profits through fines against those who breached the forest law – this too was subjected to John’s merciless attention. None of these measures were wholesale innovations: all had their roots in the earlier twelfth century, if not before. What made John’s reign different was the sheer scale and relentlessness with which he bled his realm. Over the course of his reign, John’s average annual income was at least £37,483 – far higher than either his father or his brother had ever achieved.5 But his need was great.
