Richard & John: Kings at War

by McLynn, Frank

  With so many mouths to feed, the itinerary of the travelling court had to be planned meticulously. The Butler had to bring wine from the cellars at Bristol or Southampton, and the Baker had to have supplies of flour ready at the overnight castle or hunting lodge. The problems were compounded because John had none of his father’s austerity while on the road, but demanded a high level of creature comforts. The level of spending on clothes for himself and his wife almost suggests that he was consciously compensating for the rigours of travel by conspicuous consumption. Gorgeous garments and ravishing raiment for his courtiers showed John virtually imposing a sumptuary law between the inner circle of his court and the outer circle of the barons. John showered his wife Isabella with gowns, robes and cloth, trimmed with ermine and other precious furs and, in his periodic fits of generosity, would suddenly decide to buy an entirely new wardrobe for the wives of his crossbowmen; when he was in this mood, he would suddenly remember his first wife, Isabella of Gloucester, and extend his largesse to her in the form of expensive gifts of cloth and wine.14 But he did not neglect himself, and among his sartorial innovations was the first royal dressing gown.15 All the time he built up his collection of jewels and precious stones, importing rare items or accepting sapphires and rubies as payments or part payments for debts owed him. Before he lost patience with John and cast him into anathema, Pope Innocent III sent him four rings set with an emerald, a sapphire, a topaz and a garnet. Although John, displaying his habitual mania for secrecy, liked to secrete parts of his jewel collections at monasteries whose locations only he knew, he was so besotted with the fire and lustre of jewellery that he always had to have some with him on his travels; special treasure chests increased the groaning loads carried by the heavy horses.16

  Food and drink also had to be of high quality for John, who lacked his father’s indifference to such matters. John evidently had a sweet tooth, for the official records and accounts make frequent mention of sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger; other culinary items often featuring are pepper, cumin, galingale and cloves. He shared too the medieval monarchs’ fondness for fish, with herrings, whiting, haddock and lampreys appearing in large numbers as the staple for Chistmas and Easter feasts. 17 Certain fish such as the sturgeon were reserved for royal consumption alone, and to this list were added other animals classed by the rudimentary zoology of the time as fishes, such as porpoises and whales. With meat largely off the peasant menu for financial as well as class reasons, fish was highly prized and people would often throw nets across rivers to catch them, impeding river traffic; Richard the Lionheart himself had to take time off from his weighty military and diplomatic plans to pass a law banning all such fishnets on the River Thames.18 John and his court were naturally not limited to fish. A week’s shopping list made out for Eleanor of Britanny (sister of the unhappy Arthur), shows the high protein and sugar level of the aristocratic diet of the time:

  Sunday: bread, ale, sole, almonds, butter, eggs

  Monday: mutton, pork, chicken, eggs

  Tuesday: pork, eggs, egret

  Wednesday: herring, conger, sole, eels, almonds, eggs

  Thursday: pork, eggs, pepper, honey

  Friday: conger, sole, eels, herring, almonds.19

  At John’s table wine was perceived as a necessity. The wine trade was England’s principal commerce with France and the king had a preferential role: not only could he fix the prices of wine but he was entitled to take a certain amount of wine from imported cargoes at a discounted rate. Wine was drunk young, and the cheaper varieties were either homegrown (average temperatures were one or two degrees higher in medieval England) or from the Rhineland; but grandees and monarchs like John could afford the best vintages, from Poitou, Gascony and Auxerre. 20 When he first came to the throne, in 1199, John tried to win favour at his wine assize by fixing the price of wine very low. Not only did this enrage the wine merchants, whose profits were eaten into, but, according to Roger of Howden, the result was that the whole of England ‘was filled with drink and drinkers’.21 Howden must have been exaggerating, for the English already had a reputation for heavy drinking. The French chronicler and anecdotalist Jacques de Vitry said that each European nation had distinct characteristics: the French were proud and womanish; the Germans furious and obscene; the Lombards greedy, malicious and cowardly; and the English were drunkards who had tails like the devil.22 Other observers endorsed this judgement. John of Salisbury reported that the English were notorious abroad for their drinking, while some were even prepared to correlate high crime rates in England with levels of intoxication. 23

  As a relaxation while he travelled John liked to play chess, which had been introduced to the West by the Arabs and then, via Sicily and Normandy, to England after 1066.24 His other main pastime was reading from his extensive mobile library. John fancied himself as an intellectual, and collected theological works, including Hugh of St Victor on the sacraments, the Sententiae of Peter of Lombard, and St Augustine’s City of God, a particular favourite. He liked to read French historians like Wace, who wrote a history of Normandy from earliest times to the Conquest and also had a copy of Pliny.25 How good his Latin was, and whether it enabled him to enjoy the contemporary craze for Aristotle, whose work (though written in Greek) was now widely available in that language, is uncertain, but he must have had a good working knowledge, as Latin was the language of Church, the Courts and government.26 It is likely that he had a smattering of Anglo-Saxon though John, like all the Angevins, thought in his native tongue, French. Yet, when he was not in the doldrums in one of his bipolar moods, John was above all a man of action. He loved hunting and kept a large mixed pack of dogs for the chase. He used a liam hound - a massively built canine - and greyhounds for hunting by sight and ordinary hounds for following the scent .27 A devotee of falconry, he would pay premium rates for prize hawks, such as the two marks he paid to one man who brought him two goshawks from Ireland and the sixty shillings to King William of Scotland’s falconers, who provided him with three top-of-the-range falcons. Ever on the lookout for some stunning bird of prey to add to his collection, John cultivated contacts in Scandinavia expressly for this purpose. King Sverrir Birkebein of Norway became a friend purely on this basis, and John would trade shiploads of corn for his best birds. It was said that he waived all customs and import duties due on produce brought to England by the Danish merchant Nicholas Dacus on condition that the Dane made him annual tribute of a hawk.28 John had a favourite gerfalcon called Gibbun, whose name has puzzled scholars perhaps fruitlessly pondering its meaning, and was devoted to it - ‘we have none better than him’, he wrote.29 So great was John’s falconry mania that he habitually hunted on holy days though forbidden to do so by canon law; he salved his conscience, such as it was, by giving alms to the poor. On the feast of St Mary Magdalen in 1209 he threw a feast for a hundred paupers to atone for his hunting on a proscribed day; and in 1212 at Elwell, after hunting cranes and herons with his birds of prey, he made amends by hosting another fifty needy souls.30

  It was partly because of John’s hunting mania that there arose one of the great trans-class grievances against the king, culminating at Magna Carta in 1215. Part of the royal prerogative under the Angevin kings was the power to declare lands ‘Forest’ and as such subject to the special laws of the Forest, in many cases no more than the arbitrary will of the monarch. During John’s reign no less than a third of England was ‘Forest’ - not in the modern sense of densely wooded areas (though there were far more of these than in the modern era) but in the sense that the whole territory, towns, villages and farms as well as the wilderness proper, was in the exclusively royal domain.31 When John was king, it was possible to travel from the Wash to Oxford or from Windsor to the Hampshire coast without ever leaving the Forest; the county of Essex was wholly Forest, and so was much of Hampshire, Berkshire and Wiltshire. The inhabitants of Kent, Norfolk and Suffolk thought themselves especially fortunate as there was no Forest there. A thirteenth-century Somerset jury claime
d that John had ‘afforested’ all England32 and there was a smidgin of truth in the claim, for John liked to take great swathes of land into the ambit of ‘Forest’ partly so that he could make huge sums of money by selling it back to individual or communal takers. But John also enjoyed the brutal exercise of kingly power, taking into his own management and control what had previously been owned by local lords or tenant farmers. The entire ‘Forest’ scam had been started by William the Conqueror, who set up massive game reserves for deer and ordained brutal penalties of mutilation and blinding for anyone who killed a hart or hind without royal permission; it was said that William had the same mania for deer that John later had for falcons. Even Richard I himself, a man with no interest in hunting, promulgated an Assize of Forest in 1198, ordaining that the penalty for killing deer was to be castration and blinding.33

  The ‘Forests’ served a twofold purpose for the Angevin kings: they were a place for rest and recreation, and they were a source of revenue. In the Forest the king alone could hunt deer and boar. The official line on the Forests was summed up thus by a royal functionary:

  They are the private places of kings and their great delight. They go there to hunt and to enjoy a little peace, away from the cares of government. There, away from the continuous business and incessant hubbub of the courts, they may for a while draw breath in Nature’s glorious freedom. That is why those who despoil it are subject to a unique royal censure . . . The king’s forest is a safe abode for wild animals, not of every sort, but of the kind that lives in woodland and not everywhere but only in suitable places . . . in the wooded counties, where wild beasts have their lairs and abundant feeding grounds. It makes no difference who owns the land, whether the king or the barons of the realm; the beasts have freedom and protection, and wander wherever they will.34

  This was pious cant, and neatly sidestepped the point that the arbitrary forest laws of the Angevins had no sanction in habit, custom, folkways or even Roman Law. The learned Church fathers of the reign of Henry II, Richard I and John knew perfectly well that according to Roman Law wild animals were nobody’s property and that by the law of nations they belonged to whoever captured them, whether on the hunter’s own land or someone else’s. John of Salisbury was particularly scathing about the Forest Laws: ‘Human presumption dares to claim for itself things that are wild by nature and become the property of whoever captures them . . . you had heard that the birds of the air and the fish of the sea are common to all, but those that are hunted, wherever they fly, belong to the royal estate.’35 How far the Angevin Forest Laws were from Roman Law can be gauged from one simple fact: the latter said that anyone could hunt on a landowner’s land, but the former said that not even the landowner could hunt on his own land.36

  The draconian Forest Laws laid down that only the king could kill red deer, fallow deer or wild boar. Occasionally the monarch might allow ecclesiastical tenants to take small game - hares, rabbits, foxes or wild cats. Roe deer inhabited a legal grey area: sometimes they were reserved for the king, but sometimes tenants were allowed them. Peasants had limited grazing rights in designated Forest, being allowed to take dead wood for fuel but not to cut down a tree or even lop a bough or branch. No one but the king’s men could carry a bow and arrow or keep a dog unless its front paws were mutilated so that it could not run after game. If a deer was found dead contrary to the ‘peace of the king’s venison’, a forest inquest, similar to a coroner’s inquest, had to be held; circumstantial evidence was allowed, the poachers treated harshly and, if no individual could be identified as the poacher, the entire locality was punished for harbouring him.37 The indictment that the Monk of Eynsham made against Henry II applied equally to his favourite son: ‘In revenge for wild animals that lack reason, which ought by natural law to be available to everyone he had either punished by death or cruelly mutilated in their limbs human beings who possess reason, are saved by the same blood of Christ and share the same nature in equality.’38 The Church was virtually unanimous in condemning the Forest Laws and another monk, Nigel Wireker of Canterbury thought that the Angevin kings’ higher regard for animals than humans was particularly reprehensible: ‘Although Man is created in the image of Him who made all things from nothing, kings regard the beasts of the earth more highly than men and think of the human race as more vile. How many wretches have they hanged on the gallows for taking the flesh of wild animals!’39

  Compounding the basic tyranny was the attitude of the royal officials appointed to enforce these vicious game laws. The Chief Forester had at his command foresters and verderers - forest police, in effect - regarders (inspectors) and justices of the forest who tried offences against the Forest Laws. In return, these officials got the right to hunt animals not on the proscribed list: hare, fox, wild cat, badger, otter, marten, squirrel, but never deer or wild boar.40 Clearing and cultivating land in the Forest could be done only with royal permission, and woe betide anyone who broke the rules. A woman who dug an unauthorised ditch round her land had the land confiscated, and she had to pay £100 to get it back. Boundary lines between the royal forest and private forests had to be marked by a path, and the costs of making the path, needless to say, had to be paid by the private landowner; anyone refusing to pay was fined anyway.41 A well-known case in Shropshire in 1209 shows John’s draconian laws in action. Venison was found in the house of a man named Hugh the Scot. He fled for sanctuary to the nearest church and confessed to the priest that he had killed a hind. Sheltered in the Church for a month, he finally made his escape dressed as a woman and presumably fled to the woods, there to end his days as an outlaw.42 Yet the most bitterly contested cases usually involved the clergy in their own right. If John was baulked in his endless quest for money, one of his responses was to use the Forest Laws against those who had ‘wronged’ him. When an extortionate demand to the Cistercians was not met with immediate compliance, John stopped the monks and their workers pasturing flocks in the royal forest, which had been a customary right for decades. The case proved that anybody could be deprived of rights and privileges in a trice, purely on John’s whim.43

  The clergy had a particular general grievance, which was that John’s foresters treated them with contempt - treated them in short as they treated laymen - and that John had trampled on all the customary rights they had built up since the days of King Stephen. It was a festering grievance that, as part of the delicate trade-off between Henry II and the Vatican in the attempt to resolve the crisis over Thomas Becket, a papal legate had expressly allowed Henry II to visit the full rigour of the Forest Laws on the clergy, both secular and regular, with no exceptions. 44 The biographer of the saintly St Hugh of Lincoln put it like this: ‘The worst abuse in the kingdom of England, under which the country groaned, was the tyranny of the foresters. For them violence took the place of law, extortion was praiseworthy, justice was an abomination and innocence a crime. No rank or profession indeed, no one but the king himself, was secure from their barbarity, or free from the interference of their tyrannical authority.’45 Walter Map, close enough to Henry II’s elbow to know what he was talking about, confirmed the judgement. He despised the foresters and thought: ‘they eat the flesh of men in the presence of Leviathan, and drink their blood . . . They fear and propitiate the lord who is visibly present: the Lord whom they do not see, they offend without fear. I do not mean to deny that there are in this vale of misery some merciful judges. It is of the wilder majority that I speak.’46 Part of the cruelty and cynicism of the foresters may derive from their own treatment by the Angevin kings. The Neville family were the hereditary chief foresters, but their relationships with Henry and John were always fractious. When Alan de Neville died, some monks asked leave to bury him. Henry replied dismissively: ‘I shall have his wealth, you shall have his corpse, and the demons of hell his soul.’ John’s chief forester Hugh de Neville did not fare much better. Based at Marlborough, he rose high in John’s favour but made his first mistake in 1210 when he allowed the bishop of Winchester t
o enclose a park at Taunton without the king’s permission. Suspecting Neville of having taken a bribe, John fined him 1,000 marks. Although John later let him off the payment, the rot had set in. By 1212 Neville had clearly lost favour, and it is not surprising to find him, in 1216, among the rebels against the king.47

  Yet John’s selfish monopoly over the Forest was not exercised purely because of the pleasure principle. There was big money to be made in this area, and John knew it. Although the king had the right to exact capital punishment for infringement of the game laws, he chose wherever possible to exact fines and mulct offenders instead. Once again it was Henry II who had blazed the trail: his records show one hundred men being sentenced in Hampshire to a total of £2,093. 10s.48 Even apart from fines, there were rents for pannage and pasturage, the sale of privileges and exemptions and the revenue that could be raised from the sale of fresh or salted venison to favoured barons or garrisons. Wood from the Forest was another source of income. Timber was supplied for building, while licensed charcoal burners changed wood into fuel for iron-smelting, and hence for iron arrowheads, arrows, crossbow quarrels and roofing shingles. But the greatest source of revenue for John was the machiavellian process of ‘de-afforestation’. Just as the Forest could be created by arbitrary royal fiat, so it could be unmade by the same process. Charters freeing woods and manors from the Forest Laws were available at anything between 30-150 marks, depending on the value of the land. In 1204 Cornwall paid £2,000 (3,000 marks) and twenty palfreys for the disafforestment of the whole county, except for two woods and two moors, and in 1215 bought these up too for a further 1,200 marks and four palfreys.49 De-afforestation did not even exhaust the potential for revenue-raising. Although the wardenships of the royal forests were hereditary, they were subject to the usual feudal ‘reliefs’ and fees. Whenever an heir inherited, he had to pay John a huge fee for being ‘confirmed’ in the office - usually the fee was between 100 marks and £100. Moreover, in the case of heiresses John could sell their marriages to the highest bidder. He did well out of the de Lucy family, accepting 500 marks for a marriage in 1202, and another 900 marks and nine palfreys for the same heiress two years later.50 By using various means to rescind marriages already agreed and paid for, the crafty John was often able to sell the same wardship twice.