Richard & John: Kings at War

by McLynn, Frank

  After the great allied effort in the centre, the pulse seemed to go out of their attack. The bishop of Beauvais had a surprisingly easy time of it when dealing with the allied right, doubtless helped by his good fortune when he clubbed down Salisbury, allegedly the strongest man on the field, with a mace.106 When Salisbury was captured, his back-up Hugh de Boves, who had taunted Renaud de Dammartin with cowardice, turned and fled. Ironically, it was the man de Boves had accused of cowardice who displayed the greatest military talent that day. Early in the battle Renaud had used the very effective device of drawing up his 700 pikemen into a circular formation - a primitive square - from which cavalry would emerge for sudden charges before retiring once more into the protective fold.107 As the fight in the centre became more intense and Otto called for every last cavalryman, this tactic had to be modified. Suddenly the struggle in the centre was over. The key event was the unhorsing of Otto himself. A French knight grabbed at the bridle of his horse, while another lunged at him with a knife. The first blow rebounded off the emperor’s heavy armour, but a second pierced the eye of Otto’s rearing horse; maddened with pain the steed bolted carrying Otto with it before collapsing. The great French knight William de Barres came within an ace of capturing Otto after he was unhorsed. Unhinged by this calamity, Otto lost his nerve and fled.108 His flight demoralised the imperial troops, who soon began to disengage and stream away off the battlefield. Soon the gallant Renaud and his pikemen were left to fight on alone. Although French troubadours ungallantly jeered that Renaud resisted and would not surrender only because he feared prison would be the end of his life of amatory dalliance, the truth is that he fought on courageously, his squares still bristling like porcupines, defying the French cavalry to approach them. Freed of anxiety in the centre, Philip ordered his infantry and archers to make an end of the defence. Sheer weight of numbers told; the French knights, their blood up, scythed down the Flemish pikemen to the last man, as knights were wont to do in battle with their social inferiors. Renaud was cut down and his life spared only by the rapid intervention of bishop Guérin.109

  Although a terrible experience by the contemporary standards of Western Europe - where feudal leaders liked to avoid pitched battles - the battle of Bouvines was a relatively brief affair, lasting no more than three hours. 110 But it was as decisive as such a battle could well be. The French captured 130 knights and five nobles (Boulogne, Flanders, Salisbury, Dortmund and Tecklenburg) who were taken to prison in Paris. The fate of the noble prisoners depended entirely on Philip Augustus’s personal attitude to them. Salisbury, as an honourable enemy, was released almost instantly, but the fate of Ferrand and Renaud was grim indeed. Ferrand spent thirteen years in captivity, was released only in 1227, and then died soon afterwards from disease contracted in jail. Because Philip was angry with Renaud for supposed treachery, his gallantry on the battlefield availed him nothing. He was granted his life but chained in a dungeon like a dog for thirteen years. When Ferrand was released, the French taunted Renaud by telling him he never would be; the unfortunate man thereupon committed suicide.111 The most despicable of the allied leaders, Hugh de Boves, tried to flee to England but was caught in a storm off Calais and drowned. Otto escaped but politically was finished. After his defeat all significant Germans switched their support to young Frederick, who was crowned at Aachen in 1215. Otto retired to Brunswick, impoverished, and died there of a drug overdose in 1218.112

  The greatest triumph was Philip’s. France was now the major power in Western Europe, Flanders was its appanage, and John’s ambitions to restore Normandy and Poitou to Angevin rule now seemed the merest chimera. Whether it was intrinsic French military superiority, and particularly their greater mobility, a combination of inspired moves by Philip and bishop Guérin, or simply the incompetence of Otto and the allied commanders, nobody could deny that by his victory at Bouvines Philip Augustus had established the Capetian monarchy as an unassailable institution in the western world - at any rate unless some fearsome force were to appear from the Orient. As has been well said, Bouvines was the Austerlitz of the French Middle Ages.113 Parisian university students went wild with joy and feasted, wenched and caroused for seven days and seven nights when the news reached the French capital.114 King John’s supporters like to say that he was defeated in 1214 by action-at-a-distance, that he was the hapless victim of events. But John had shown defective strategic insight. The two-front strategy was one of those grandiose plans that look fine on paper but are only practicable if the most meticulous coordinated timing is applied. This may well have been something beyond the reach of medieval technology and communications, and the question arises why John did not opt to sail to Flanders with his entire army and confront Philip there. The need to shore up Poitou is a non-starter as an answer, since if the allies had defeated Philip in a pitched battle - if they had done to him what he did to them at Bouvines - the future of Normandy and Poitou would have lain with John anyway.

  As it was, a decade of diplomacy lay in ruins and hundreds of thousands of marks in subsidies had been spent pointlessly. At first John still hoped to continue the war in the west, and sent to Peter des Roches for another three hundred Welsh archers in August.115 It was probably fortunate for John that Innocent III entered the fray at this juncture. The Pope was planning a new crusade, and the last thing he wanted was further weakening of Christendom by a second Bouvines. He ordered his legate in France to bring about an urgent truce between the French and English kings, to run until 1 November 1215, pending the convening of a council to discuss a fifth crusade.116 While diplomacy slowly got under way, the euphoric Philip Augustus was advancing westward, having added the army of his son Louis to his mighty host. He got as far as Loudun when he received the submission of the Poitevin barons, led by the slippery Aimeri of Thouars. John meanwhile, seventeen miles away at Parthenay, was in another of his periods of paralysis, uncertain which way to jump, having nowhere to flee to, but knowing that either fight or flight would probably be disastrous. Once again the barons came to him and advised him that offering battle was not a realistic option, that they would not support him if he did.117 On 30 August John told the papal legate that he would agree to a ceasefire. To save face, he withdrew under cover of the truce towards La Rochelle. On 13 September, by letters patent, he pledged himself to observe whatever terms his envoys negotiated with Philip.118 The French king, for his part, was persuaded not to try conclusions with John both by personal letters conveyed to him from the Pope and, more cogently, by, it was whispered, a 60,000-mark sweetener from John.119 Finally, on 18 September, a definitive truce was agreed to run until Easter 1215, and then to be ratified for another five years.120 Early in October John sailed from La Rochelle for England, making landfall at Dartmouth. His reputation was in tatters.121 With the king stricken, the English barons saw their chance. As has often been remarked, the road from Bouvines to Runnymede was to be a short and inevitable one.

  4. The Angevin Empire after Bouvines

  18

  ALTHOUGH THE DEFEAT AT Bouvines brought John’s conflict with the barons to a crisis, it was a clash long in the making and for a long time masked by the troubles with the Vatican. A famous ‘Unknown Charter of Liberties’ was circulating in 1213-14, before John crossed to the continent, and ran as follows:

  1) King John concedes that he will not take men without judgement, nor accept anything for doing justice, nor perform injustice.

  2) And if my baron or my man should happen to die and his heir is of age, I ought to give him his land at a just relief without taking more.

  3) And if the heir is under age, I ought to put the land in charge of four knights from among the lawful men of the fief, and they with my official ought to render me the proceeds of the land without sale of anything and without releasing any man, and without destruction of park and beasts; and then when the heir comes of age I will let him the land quit of payment.

  4) If a woman is heir to land, I ought to give her in marriage on the advice of
her relatives, so that she is not disparaged. And if I give her once in marriage I cannot give her a second time, but she can marry as she pleases, though not to my enemy.

  5) If my baron or one of my men should happen to die, I concede that his money be divided as he himself willed; and if he dies intestate through war or illness, his wife or his children, or his parents and close friends, shall divide it for the good of his soul.

  6) And if his wife shall not have to leave her house for forty days, and then she shall have her dower decently, and she shall have her marriage.

  7) Furthermore, to my men I concede that they should not serve in the army outside England, save in Normandy or Britanny and this properly; and if anyone owes thence the service of ten knights, it shall be alleviated by the advice of my barons.

  8) And if a scutage should be imposed in the land, one mark of silver will be taken from a knight’s fee; and if a greater army shall be needed, more will be taken by the advice of the barons of the realm.

  9) Then I concede that all the forests which my father, and my brother, and I have afforested, shall be disafforested.

  10) Then I concede that knights who have their grove in my ancient Forest, shall have their grove henceforth as to their dwellings and as to clearance; and they shall have their forester; and I only one who protects my beasts.

  11) And if any of my men shall die owing to the Jews, the debt shall not gain interest while their heir is below age.

  12) And I concede that no man shall lose life or limb for Forest offences.1

  The Unknown Charter is clearly a draft drawn up by a baron or baronial clerk trying to imagine the concessions that could be wrung from John; although the exact phraseology leaves something to be desired, and the switch from third to first person shows it is not an actual Charter, it provides a lucid account of the magnates’ chief grievances: feudal reliefs, wardship and marriage, feudal military service and scutage, the operation of the Forest Laws. The barons were sick of having to attend Forest courts to hear the adjudication of a Forest Law they detested; they were sick of John’s requirement that so many civil suits could be heard only in his presence; they were sick of his interventions between themselves and their vassals; and in general they were sick of the man himself and his arbitrary acts of tyanny.

  John’s return from La Rochelle in October 1214 plunged him immediately into a sea of troubles. Alongside the blow to his prestige from the unravelling of his ‘Grand Alliance’, particular animus had been aroused by the high-handed actions of his justiciar Peter des Roches, a man detested as much for his foreign provenance as his financial exactions. 2 Yet these two issues merely exacerbated an already tense situation. In May at La Rochelle John promulgated writs for the collection of scutage of three marks per fee from all tenants-in-chief, royal demesnes, vacant bishoprics and lands in royal wardship.3 The northern barons who had previously refused to serve in France now refused to pay, alleging that the terms of their feudal tenure made them exempt from foreign service.4 The claim has universally been held invalid, as fiefs in northern England were no different from those elsewhere and, in any case, if there had been such a precedent, no Angevin king would ever have been able to campaign on the continent in defence of Britanny, Normandy, Anjou, Poitou, Aquitaine or anywhere else. John quite clearly had precedent on his side, but the fact that the barons were prepared to trail their coat on such a flimsy pretext shows they had had enough of John’s money-grubbing, greed and general corruption, to say nothing of the lustful lunges the king made in the direction of their wives and daughters. Roger of Wendover suggested that the breakthrough moment for the barons came when Archbishop Stephen Langton held a secret conference with them in autumn 1213 and revealed to the ignorant the precise royal obligations laid on a monarch by Henry I’s coronation charter.5 It was clear from all they read and heard that John’s system was a miasma of financial extortion and corruption.

  Shortly after John’s return, the barons met at Bury St Edmund’s under the pretence of making a pilgrimage there and swore on the high altar that they would force John to sign a new charter like Henry I’s, guaranteeing their key demands.6 They then presented a document to the king which he promised to consider ‘in the New Year’; when they pressed him again for an answer on the feast of the Epiphany (6 January 1215), he again stalled and said his considered reply would be ready by Easter.7 It seems that the new charter was almost wholly concerned with feudal reliefs, wardships, marriages and debts to the Crown, which suggests that the original grievance about foreign service was a feint, to pin John down so that they could then present the demands over the things that most seriously concerned them. The barons had in effect lured John into a trap: by providing him with the ‘straw man’ argument about exemption from foreign service, which John leaped on eagerly as it was so easy to refute, they had embroiled him in their secondary but most profound argument: that all discussion about foreign service was predicated on the assumption that the king was acting justly over, say, reliefs and wardships, and it was precisely this point that they were now disputing.8 In response John tried the old trick used by William the Conqueror to stifle opposition to his plans for the conquest of England in 1066: he held individual interviews with each of the barons and tried to bribe, browbeat or otherwise suborn them from the general cause. He asked for a written promise that the interviewee would never again demand such ‘favours and liberties’ from him or his successors. Doubtless primed as to John’s likely tactics, the barons stood firm, with just three of them (the earl of Chester, the bishop of Winchester and William Brewer) prepared to break rank.9

  Since many of the greatest magnates, such as William Marshal, the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of Ely held aloof from the fray, the question must be posed: who were the barons who opposed John? Were they all northerners? Were they all motivated by the same considerations? It would be misleading to see the movement for the charter in 1215 as an exclusively northern phenomenon; the problem has arisen because the chroniclers used the word ‘northerners’ as a shorthand tag for baronial rebels and in turn thought of them this way because one of their prominent ringleaders was Eustace de Vesci, lord of Alnwick, now in the forefront of opposition to John alongside his former fellow exile Robert Fitzwalter, lord of Dunmow and hereditary holder of Barnard Castle in the city of London; both of them had headed the 1212 rebellion.10 Vesci and Fitzwalter had been expressly named by Innocent III as lords against whom John was not allowed to take reprisals, as part of the settlement which ended the papal interdict and excommunication. The ingenious duo of barons, who had actually planned to murder John, duped Innocent III into believing that they had fled abroad (not, as in fact they did, because the king discovered their conspiracy) because they could no longer stomach the persecutions of the Church by an ungodly king. The Pope regarded them as martyrs, accepted that his cause and theirs were one and the same, and insisted on their restoration to full wealth and honours in England as an earnest of John’s sincerity.11 The reality is that there was bad blood between both Fitzwalter and Vesci on the one hand and John on the other, and this was a long-standing affair, which had nothing to do with John’s struggle with the Church. The fact that Vesci and Fitzwalter pulled the wool over the Pope’s eyes and those of the papal legate Pandulph, has nothing to do with the core issue. Vesci’s main grievance seems to have been John’s lecherous designs on his wife,12 but Fitzwalter’s animosity was overdetermined. Some say John tried to seduce his daughter, others that Fitzwalter defied the king by bringing five hundred armed men in a show of force to a trial for murder by Fitzwalter’s spoiled and roughneck son-in-law Geoffrey de Mandeville. It is quite within the realm of possibility that John had offended Fitzwalter in both ways but he was certainly no noble rebel fighting for freedom, as in the absurd legend, but a deeply unpleasant thug with a well-documented track record for cowardice, treachery and ingratitude. 13

  Vesci and Fitzwalter, the two highest profile rebels, were profoundly rebarbative individuals, but
this in no way vindicates John nor does it affect the merits of the campaign for the Charter. Evil men may, intentionally or otherwise, support good causes, and vice versa. There were others in the Vesci/Fitzwalter mould among the barons, notably Saer de Quincy, who had collaborated with Fitzwalter in cravenly opening the gates of Vaudreuil in Normandy to Philip Augustus in 1203 and was William Marshal’s bête noire.14 Yet there were others who had good grounds for their hatred of John. Giles de Braose, bishop of Hereford, had never forgotten the dreadful fate meted out by John to his brother and sister-in-law. Nicholas Stuteville had been mulcted by John for no less than 10,000 marks as the ‘relief ’ for his inheritance. William Mowbray had even deeper grounds for hatred. John had demanded 2,000 marks to hear a case concerning his barony and had then barefacedly given judgement against him - all this in the case of a man who had spent four years in Germany as a hostage for the payment of Richard’s ransom in the 1190s.15 For some, adherence to the rebels was a simple function of family loyalty. Geoffrey de Mandeville, earl of Essex, was in the Fitzwalter orbit (only fitting, as he owed him his life), as were the other members of this extended clan: Henry Bohun, earl of Hereford, Robert de Vere, earl of Oxford and Geoffrey de Say. Since these were southern magnates, it is clear that, even if the rebellious spirit first flickered in the north, it was fanned into flame farther south. The northern faction of the rebellious barons contained few great earls, and leadership quickly devolved on the lords of East Anglia and the south.16 The rebel spirit was also very strong in John’s beloved West Country: the earl of Salisbury led an army against the men of Dorset and Devon but was forced to retreat because of his inferior numbers.17