Magna Carta

by Dan Jones

  A silver penny, from 1205–7 and minted in Winchester. It bears the name ‘Henricus’, as did all pennies up until the reign of Edward I, but it shows the goggle-eyed King John staring out. John liked money. During the decade 1204–14 he stockpiled vast wealth, particularly in the form of silver pennies held in his castles. He was almost certainly richer, for a time, than any English king before him.

  John attempted to invade France in the early summer of 1205, and then in 1206. Neither mission was successful. In the first instance, the English barons refused to turn out in support of the king’s invasion fleet, and in the second John was kept firmly at bay by the armies of Philip Augustus and had to settle for a two-year truce. Yet the Plantagenet king never gave up believing that he was obliged – perhaps even destined – to one day return to the lands he had lost and reclaim them. The consequences of this urge for revenge and restoration would be very severe, both for John and for the English kingdom in which he was now so firmly stuck.

  5

  Interdict and Intimidation

  1206–1212

  The ten years that followed the loss of Normandy saw John achieve a form of mastery over England and the British Isles that, although brief, was scarcely bettered by any medieval king after him. Hobbled in France as he may have been, John made it his business to stamp his authority over Wales and Scotland, to plunder and command the English Church, and to impose his will on the barons under his authority. If he did not exactly make himself popular or well-loved he nevertheless grew into his role as a fearsome lord. By the end of the first decade of the thirteenth century, the chronicler Walter of Coventry could write that ‘in Ireland, Scotland and Wales there was no man who did not obey the nod of the King of England – a thing, which it is well known, had never happened to any of his forefathers’.1 For a time, at least, John was supreme. But beneath the mastery, he was continuing to amass serious problems.

  The area of policy that earned John the most infamy among the monastic chroniclers of his day was that of his relations with the pope. Across Western Christendom, kings were engaged in a grand struggle with the papacy to mark out the extent of their control over the Church – an argument that frequently focused on the issue of ecclesiastical appointments. Kings claimed the right to appoint bishops in their own kingdoms, but popes were seldom happy to allow this and reserved their right to confirm appointments – or veto those that displeased them. Just such a debate blew up in 1206 between John and the formidable, bloody-minded Pope Innocent III.

  On the death of Archbishop Hubert Walter, John had instructed the monks of Canterbury to elect as his successor the king’s candidate, John de Gray, Bishop of Norwich. When Innocent learned of this he decided to act; he condemned Gray’s appointment and had the Canterbury monks elect instead an Englishman by the name of Stephen Langton. This slight to John’s royal majesty would have been enough on its own to offend and irritate the king. It was made worse by the fact that Langton was a star theologian of the University of Paris, who therefore belonged to a distinguished intellectual circle that had included the prolific writer John of Salisbury (1120–80) and Henry II’s ill-fated archbishop, Thomas Becket. Both of these men had been, at various times, intensely critical of the Plantagenet family and their dealings with the Church, so Langton was hardly a promising candidate for a peaceful co-existence between Church and state. Nevertheless, Innocent secured his election at Canterbury and consecrated Langton personally at Viterbo, north of Rome, in 1207.

  John’s rage at being thwarted was always spectacular. He was not cowed by the fact that his opponent in this instance was God’s anointed vicar-in-chief. In response to Langton’s consecration, John seized all the lands belonging to Canterbury and threw the monks who had dared defy him out of England. Yet, he had met in Innocent a more than worthy opponent. The pope was a reformer, a crusader and a strict clerical authoritarian. He was an unbending believer in Roman supremacy, who disliked any shows of wilfulness by mere princes. So, in response to John’s heavy-handed behaviour, in March 1208 Innocent laid an Interdict on England.

  An Interdict was a severe sentence. It forbade all church services, effectively placing the souls of everyone affected by it into limbo. Marriages could not be consecrated, baptisms could not take place and the dead could not be buried with the usual Christian rites. The bells of England’s churches fell silent. The mass went uncelebrated. This was a punishment felt far beyond the household of the king who had invited it. Indeed, if there was one man in England who was entirely unbothered by the Interdict, it was John.

  John saw his falling-out with Rome in simple terms. It was an unmiss-able financial opportunity. As soon as the Interdict was pronounced, John began confiscating ecclesiastical wealth, lands and property. Some of it was ransomed back to its owners; the rest was simply used to provide income for the king. Churchmen’s mistresses were arrested and sold back to their unhappy lovers. The ample revenues of the Church were diverted straight into the royal coffers, and John’s castles and strongholds, where he stockpiled his own money, began to fill with silver at a rate of which his ancestors could have only dreamed. This was, in short, clerical extortion on a dizzying scale.

  From a thirteenth-century fresco in the Monastery of St Benedict, Subiaco, Pope Innocent III presides over the text of a 1203 papal bull donating revenues to the monastery. Perhaps the greatest medieval pope, Innocent III was a crusader, a reformer and a tireless defender of the rights of the Church against the impositions of princes. John crossed him and was punished with Interdict and excommunication, until, more worried by his barons and the French king, John engineered a rapprochement.

  In 1209 Innocent attempted to sharpen his threat against the English king by personally excommunicating him – at which point every bishop in England except for two of John’s closest allies left the realm. John shrugged it off – and with good reason. The author of the thirteenth-century financial manual known as the ‘Red Book of the Exchequer’ reckoned that the Interdict enriched John by perhaps £100,000 above and beyond his normal income – all in a matter of three years. More recently it has been estimated that around half of this sum would have come in the form of ready cash, paid not into the Exchequer but directly into John’s hands via the royal chamber.2 John’s coronation oath obliged him to protect and defend the interests of the English Church. He had done nothing of the sort, but for the three or four years that followed the Interdict it scarcely seemed to matter. John was, momentarily at least, the richest English king in history.

  If John’s plunder had been limited to the Church, then all might have still been well. But from 1207 he was increasing his extortions more generally. A tax of a thirteenth – the heaviest of his reign – brought in nearly £60,000.*1 John claimed that this tax was levied with the agreement of ‘the archbishop, bishops, abbots, priors and magnates of our kingdom’; in fact, he had taken no such advice. The levy had been conceived and agreed at a meeting with a small number of his intimates and favourites.3

  Several other very hard taxes were levied on England’s Jews, including a collective imposition of 66,000 marks in 1210. The law regarded the Jews as the king’s personal property, but affection towards his charges was nowhere to be seen in John: according to the chronicler Roger of Wendover, those Jews who would not, or could not, meet the king’s demands were beaten until their teeth fell out.*2 Meanwhile, the standard practices of Plantagenet kingship were maintained: the profits of justice kept on rising, while feudal levies and the ruthless pursuit of indebted barons also increased steeply. It was in this respect that John’s cruellest and most unpleasant side was revealed.

  Many of the English barons tasted the king’s disfavour during the first decade of the thirteenth century. In 1207 John confiscated the lands of the Earl of Leicester, accusing him of having failed to pay his debts. The East Anglian baron Roger Bigod found himself under such tremendous financial pressure as a result of the Crown’s feudal demands that he was forced to strike a deal by which, in 1211,
he paid the Exchequer £1,333 (twice the fine he was charged simply to claim his inheritance) – just to have respite from the demands for payment. In early 1214 John forced another East Anglian baron, Geoffrey de Mandeville, to agree to a monstrous fine of 20,000 marks in return for marrying Isabella of Gloucester – the king’s former wife, whom he had divorced in order to marry Isabella of Angoulême. Even by the standards of his family, these were savage financial impositions. John deliberately pushed numerous barons to the brink of bankruptcy, a state in which they became highly dependent on royal favour. And no one suffered so much as the de Briouze family, whom John hounded mercilessly, combining his mastery of the royal law with his appetite for extreme and unflinching personal brutality.

  William de Briouze had been a close associate of both Richard I and John. He had served as a royal sheriff and as a justice of the Eyre. He had defended royal interests in Wales and had risked his life numerous times fighting against the insurgent Welsh. He had been at the siege of Châlus-Chabrol on the day that King Richard died and had helped smooth the path for John to succeed to the Plantagenet crown instead of Arthur of Brittany. He had been with John, at Rouen, on the day Arthur disappeared and almost certainly knew what had happened to the boy. He was, in short, an impeccably reliable baron, and as reward for his loyal service he had accrued many lands and titles in England, Wales and Ireland. Yet the obvious side-effect of acquiring lands was the financial obligation to pay the king fees for the privilege; de Briouze was therefore entirely typical of a certain high-ranking, loyal sort of English lord, in that he had been both rewarded but also placed in enormous financial jeopardy as a result of having loyally served the Crown.

  An 1895 poster advertises the cheerfully anachronistic delights of William Greer Harrison’s play Runnymede, starring the actor Frederick Warde. Here, the celebrated outlaw turns up to hammer home the demands of Magna Carta. Over the centuries, the legend of Robin Hood grew to incorporate John, a king who epitomised tyranny and oppression, as Robin’s enemy. In truth, the earliest written stories of Robin Hood name the king as ‘Edward’. John’s belated appearance dates from the sixteenth century.

  Then, in 1208, de Briouze fell out with the king. The reasons are somewhat obscure but may well have resulted from an indiscreet comment made by his wife, Matilda, concerning the suspicious circumstances of Arthur of Brittany’s death. John heard – or learned of – the comments and, typically, flew into a fury. Suddenly the vast debts incurred on de Briouze’s climb through Plantagenet favour became John’s chief weapon with which to abuse his friend. Citing non-payment of debt, John sent his men to seize the de Briouze estates. Fearing for his life, de Briouze fled to Ireland, where he was sheltered for a time by William Marshal. John continued to pursue him, leading an army across the Irish Sea, crushing those who opposed him and seizing lands as he went. He threatened military action against those who harboured de Briouze and released an open letter in which he used tightly legalistic arguments to justify his dreadful behaviour towards a loyal man and insisting that he had acted ‘according to the laws and custom of England’.4 This may have been so, but since John’s position as king allowed him to make and manipulate the law, and to enforce it prejudicially through his Exchequer, this was of little comfort to those who heard the king’s claim explained. When de Briouze’s wife, Matilda, approached the king to attempt to negotiate, John prevaricated, before taking Matilda and her eldest son as hostages and throwing them into one of his dungeons at Corfe Castle.

  William de Briouze escaped to France, where he died an outlaw and an exile in 1211. (His funeral was attended by another exile, Archbishop Stephen Langton.) But William’s fate was gentle compared to that of his family. In 1210 Matilda and her son had been starved to death on the king’s orders: it was said that when the door to their cell was finally opened they were found huddled against one another in a grotesque knot of death. The mother had died insane with hunger. Her last earthly efforts were to try and eat her child’s face.

  John’s pursuit of the de Briouze family had taken him into Ireland and Wales, which coincided with a broader policy of muscular imposition of English royal power over the Celtic lands in Britain. From 1208 he set about attacking the native princes of North Wales, first humiliating Gwenwynwyn ap Owain, Prince of Powys, and subsequently, in 1211, launching a massive military raid into Gwynedd, smashing the power of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth (Llywelyn the Great) and commanding him to forfeit everything east of Conwy to the English Crown. This period of dominance was matched across the Irish Sea. In 1210, John’s expedition in pursuit of the de Briouze family had coincided with a brutal campaign of subjection, in which Anglo-Norman and Native Irish lords alike were brought to heel, and English administrative procedures and offices were forced upon Irish territories.

  In Scotland, similar ultra-aggressive methods were pursued. In 1174 Henry II had forced William I ‘the Lion’, King of Scots, to accept the Treaty of Falaise, under which William had explicitly recognized English overlordship of his kingdom and submitted to the English king ‘as liege lord’.5 Richard had granted independence back to the Scots in his fire-sale of rights before the Third Crusade. But in 1209 John determined to make William, aged and ill, recognize the feudal situation as it had stood thirty-five years previously. He marched an army north and forced the Lion to agree to the Treaty of Norham, under which John was paid 15,000 marks and given many Scottish hostages, including William’s daughters Margaret and Isabella, whose marriages John claimed for his own sons.6 In every corner of the British Isles, it seemed that John was supreme.

  By 1212 John had done much to justify the chroniclers’ opinions that he had achieved a cruel mastery over his kingdom. He was vastly, almost unimaginably, wealthy, his castles groaning with silver. He oversaw a brutally efficient legal and financial administration with which he could crush any baron who was even merely suspected of having slighted him. He had also terrorized his neighbouring princes into submission. He appeared impervious to – even slightly amused by – the wrath of Innocent III, one of the most formidable popes ever to wear the tiara. His judicial and financial policies continued at a pace, with plans for a new Eyre to punish offences concerning the king’s forest, a scheme by which debts to the Jews would be funnelled directly into the king’s coffers, and an inquiry into feudal rights, which was intended to squeeze yet more value out of the king’s royal prerogatives.7 This was Plantagenet kingship at its most ruthlessly uncompromising. All that now remained for John was to return to France, try to destroy the armies and castles of King Philip Augustus and recover the lands beyond the Channel that had been lost in 1204.

  It was to be his undoing.

  *1 ‘Thirteenth’ – a thirteenth of the value of all portable property (‘movables’).

  *2 Wendover was writing after John’s reign, and he is generally to be treated with caution when he discusses the king’s excesses; all the same, his characterization of John’s harshness towards England’s Jews certainly reflects attitudes and memories common during the later thirteenth century.

  6

  Crisis and Machinations

  1212–1214

  Mighty as John must have felt in the spring of 1212, his problems with France remained firmly unresolved. The best part of a decade had passed since he had retreated to England from the shores of Normandy, yet still the duchy and the rest of his family’s continental lands lay under the command of Philip Augustus. This was an intolerable situation for any Plantagenet king. To leave reconquest any longer looked like extreme idleness, not least since John had enough silver stockpiled in his English castles to invade Jerusalem if he so wished. The journey to Caen, Rouen, Le Mans and the rest was hardly prohibitively far, and the mood around the rest of Europe was right. It was time for John to make his move.

  Indeed, in the spring of 1212 the potential for reconquest was growing impossible to ignore. Across Western Europe, other rulers were beginning to chafe against Philip’s bullish lordship – they included the Count of
Boulogne, the Duke of Brabant and others neighbouring France, including most prominently Otto of Brunswick, the son of John’s sister Matilda. Otto had been raised at the court of Richard I before embarking on a spectacular political and military career in Germany and Italy, which had seen him rise to become Holy Roman Emperor (as Otto IV) in 1209. These were all serious allies, and all were interested in goading the English king into open hostility with France. Thus, in 1212 John resurrected the policy, once favoured by his brother Richard, of creating an anti-French alliance to the north and east of Philip’s frontiers, all paid for handsomely with pensions and gifts to these continental friends. Then, in June, he sent out a feudal summons for an army of his own to meet at Portsmouth. Everything seemed set for an invasion. Yet it would be the moment when everything began to unravel.

  John’s problems began in Wales. His aggressive treatment of the native princes in 1211 returned to haunt him during the summer of 1212, in the form of a massive revolt under Llywelyn ap Iorwerth. John angrily ordered a couple of dozen Welsh hostages to be hanged, but he was still forced to divert his feudal muster from the South Coast of England to Chester, in the North-West. Worse followed. During the summer a hermit known as Peter of Wakefield became briefly notorious for prophesying the king’s death; in August the prophecy gained ominous substance, as John was told of a plot led by two of his barons – Eustace de Vesci and Robert FitzWalter – to kill him outright, or else betray him to the Welsh. John had always tended to be suspicious of his subjects, even those who considered themselves his friends. After this time, he would slip into near-constant paranoia.