A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  Many of the families which by 1200 could claim Norman descent no longer possessed much by way of Norman land. Those marooned in England after 1204, like the Welsh in nineteenth-century Patagonia, wore their Normannitas as a proud badge of nobility, but in France itself they would have been laughed at as the most Anglicized of country cousins. Only at very top of society, chiefly amongst the royal family and in the case of half a dozen of the twenty or so earls, were there individuals with significant holdings on both sides of the Channel, still uncertain by 1200 as to whether their principal interests lay in Normandy or in England. The earls of Chester, taking their title from their vast estate in the east Midlands, yet also major landholders in the Avranchin and the Bessin regions of Normandy, might hesitate after 1204 as to where their best interests lay. Families such as the Bohons or the Chesneys, with only small inherited estates in Normandy but vast resources in England, could have few doubts as to whether they should stay in France or accompany King John into ‘exile’.

  As for the Plantagenet dominions further south, from La Rochelle to the Pyrenees, still in King John’s hands after 1204, Henry II had never attempted to create Anglo-Poitevin or Anglo-Angevin baronies, to bring his southern subjects into direct contact with England or to bind together his empire in the way that William the Conqueror had bound England to the lords of Normandy, by granting them significant English estates. As a result, the southern French never thought of themselves as in any way of mixed English descent. On the contrary, England to them represented a major source of wealth and, at least through to the 1240s, of administration that was effective without being excessively predatory. The south had been spared the worst excesses of warfare or oppressive government after 1154. By contrast, ever since the 1080s, Normandy had served as a battlefield, disputed first between the sons of the Conqueror, thereafter between King Stephen and the Plantagenets, finally between the Plantagenets and the Kings of France. War weariness, and an active hatred for the King’s mercenary soldiers, especially for the Flemings, perhaps helps to explain the growing Norman disaffection with King John. As early as 1174, during the civil war against Henry II, Flemish mercenaries had been singled out as particular objects of hatred, being massacred in their hundreds by the population of East Anglia in what amounted to an anti-Flemish race riot.

  Unfortunately for the men of Poitou and Gascony, after 1204 prepared to remain loyal to King John, a similar xenophobia marked their reception in England. After 1204, it was the French exiles introduced to court, in particular the former mercenary captains from southern Anjou, compromised by their previous service to the Plantagenets, granted refuge in England, used by King John and later by Henry III as a means of maintaining contacts with the lost Plantagenet domain, who bore the brunt of a backlash in England against ‘aliens’. The greatest of these exiles was Peter des Roches, a clerk native to the Touraine (the region of the city of Tours), in 1205 elected bishop of Winchester, one of the richest sees in Europe, thereafter chief patron both of Frenchmen at the English court and of dreams of continental reconquest. By his enemies, Peter was branded a ‘Poitevin’, not because he or the majority of his friends were natives of Poitou but because Poitou’s fissile baronial politics had become a byword for treachery and double-dealing for at least the past fifty years. As one of the King’s chief ministers, from 1214 onwards, Peter was dogged by rhetoric in England against the ‘aliens’. Ironically enough, this was rhetoric itself first stirred up in the 1190s by the French-born King John, in an attempt to discredit William Longchamps, the French-born minister of Richard I, left in charge of England whilst Richard himself was absent on crusade. Many of those who afterwards were responsible for spreading anti-alien rhetoric were themselves either of French birth or closely linked to France. There is no one so good at deriding the faults of others as one who fears that these are faults shared between critic and criticized.

  Finally, as in all modern debates from which statistics and the spirit of Karl Marx are never far distant, it has been argued that, by 1200, Philip of France was far richer than the King of England and therefore ideally placed to seize the Plantagenet lands. The argument here depends upon comparison between the English and Norman Pipe Rolls and the one surviving budget that we have for French royal income and expenditure. The debate has proved interminable and hotly contested, since not only is it impossible to arrive at agreed totals for these accounts, but it will never be possible to establish how great a proportion of royal income was audited in writing. More significant than these statistical wranglings is the fact that, from the 1160s onwards, England underwent a significant period of inflation. The cost of paying a knight’s wages more than doubled. The causes here are uncertain: perhaps monetary inflation brought about by the release into the economy of significant new supplies of silver, from the mines of Cumbria perhaps, and above all from the Harz mountains of Germany.

  Most English landlords could respond fairly effectively to the crisis. Their estates, previously leased for a fixed annual ‘farm’, were brought back into direct demesne management, with the lord now taking the full profit of his lands. The King could not respond so easily. His estates in the English counties were traditionally managed by local sheriffs, for a fixed county farm payable at the Exchequer. As the real value of these farms began to dwindle through the effects of inflation, and as the sheriffs therefore pocketed an ever greater sum in profits over and above the fixed rent that they were obliged to pay at the Exchequer, the King could try to increase the county farms or to charge the sheriffs additional annual rents, known as increments. King John even attempted an experiment in direct management, by which sheriffs no longer paid a farm, keeping all excess profits for themselves, but were paid an annual allowance by the Exchequer, in return being expected to account for all profits, not merely for their traditional fixed farms. Neither measure succeeded. Courtiers and the great men necessary for the effective government of England baulked at serving merely as paid bailiffs, or at abandoning so large a proportion of the profits that they now received from local government. In the meantime, inflation bore down upon the King’s revenues, placing John in an ever weaker financial position, both in respect to the King of France and to his own English barons.

  The events of 1204, culminating in Philip Augustus’ acceptance of the surrender of Rouen, the ducal capital, had an enormous impact not upon the future history of Normandy, now united to the French crown, but on England. One consequence, pregnant with future significance, was the construction of an English fleet of royal galleys, at least fifty ships, powered by oarsmen rather than sail, built for speed, to overtake and seize ships dependent upon the wind, to police the shipping lanes, to impound contraband and to take prize from enemy merchantmen. Some of the technology here may have been devised in the 1190s to assist Richard’s warfare on the Seine, including the importation of shipbuilding techniques from Bayonne, in the far south of Plantagenet Aquitaine, and the construction of a major new naval base at Portsmouth. Even so, King John has some qualifications to be accounted the true founder of the Royal Navy, created in direct response to the loss of Normandy and the transformation of the Channel from a vector of communication into a bulwark against the threat of French invasion.

  Another, even more significant consequence of the loss of Normandy was the arrival in England of a King now determined to amass the sort of treasure necessary to launch a reconquest of his lost continental estate. At the time, no one was aware that the breach between England and Normandy would prove permanent. King John, like the French friends whom he brought with him into exile, was determined to regain his lost lands. By the very nature of things, most barons owed money, often very considerable sums of money, to the King. What mattered was not how much was owed but the terms for its repayment. Just as today, men and women are happy to negotiate mortgages for vast sums of money that they would be quite incapable of financing if the entire sum had to be repaid over a matter of months or a few years, so in the Middle Ages debts to the crown could
be repaid over decades or even centuries without the debtor being forced into bankruptcy. John not only increased the levels of debt that burdened his barons, but in certain cases, and in a deliberate attempt to ruin the debtors, demanded summary payment of the money owed. It was in this way, for example, that he turned against William de Braose, at one time amongst his closest cronies, ruined, perhaps for disclosing the true fate of Arthur of Brittany. William was forced into exile in Ireland. His wife and children were supposedly starved to death in Windsor Castle.

  The King’s ‘Fine Roll’, the list of payments negotiated with the King, was on occasion transformed into a clubland wagers book, with men offering bizarre payments for favour or grace: ‘the wife of Hugh de Neville offers 200 chickens to lie one night with her husband’, ‘Robert de Vaux offers five of the best riding horses so that the King might stop talking about the wife of Henry Pinel’, and so forth. England, previously governed at a distance by absentee kings who passed much of their lives across the Channel, now had a King in permanent residence, travelling the country, eyeing up the profits and, if the chroniclers are to be believed, the daughters and wives of his barons. The experience was not a happy one. Debauchery and adultery had been characteristics of English kingship since at least the time of Henry I. Where Henry I or Henry II had managed to bed the wives and daughters of their barons with a minimum of complaint, however, John once again merely stirred up ill feeling. Where Henry II’s reputation had been salvaged despite the murder of a sainted archbishop, John was incapable of living down even the disappearance of Arthur, his unloved Breton nephew.

  Archbishop Langton

  After 1206, what another king might have handled more lightly, an attempt to intrude a royal candidate into the archbishopric of Canterbury developed into a full-scale standoff between the King and the Church, with the Pope seizing the opportunity to discipline a Christian ruler he had long had in his sights, insisting not only that John’s candidate for the archbishopric withdraw but that the monks of Canterbury accept a complete outsider, Stephen Langton, as leader of the English Church. Langton was an Englishman, born to a minor family of Lincolnshire knights. At one time he had been associated with the household of Geoffrey Plantagenet, Henry II’s illegitimate son. He had gained his reputation, however, and had passed most of his life since the 1180s not in England but in Paris, as a commentator on the Bible and as one of the most famous masters of the Paris schools, the first and the greatest of all universities established north of the Alps.

  Reading Langton’s Bible commentaries today, one is struck, first and foremost, by their vast, still unpublished and probably unpublishable length, secondly, by their determination to interpret absolutely everything in scripture, from Hebrew names, to the significance of the creatures in Noah’s ark, through to the hyacinth fringes with which the Jews were enjoined to trim their clothes, according to Langton, as a symbol of the blue of the heavenly kingdom. Langton was clearly a great teacher. Like many great teachers, he was also something of a bore, fond of the sound of his own voice, hammering home sentence after sentence of his own opinions into the unformed but perhaps rather over-stuffed minds of his students. Langton’s Bible commentaries are also shot through with a deep distrust of monarchy in general, and of Plantagenet monarchy in particular.

  Inheriting an entire programme of ecclesiastical prejudice, Langton believed that kingship was an unpleasant compromise, imposed upon the Jews of the Old Testament in punishment rather than reward: ‘I gave you a King in my wrath’, as God is said to have threatened (Hosea 13:11). Unlike the kings of France, who tempered privilege with justice and who took their counsels from the Church – a sensible exception for Langton to make, given his own residence in Paris – the kings of England, murderers of the sainted Archbishop Becket, ruled by the sword and according to the arbitrary traditions of the Exchequer, failing to heed the injunctions of scripture or to accept a written code of laws equivalent to the Old Testament book of Leviticus for the guidance and instruction of kings. The English themselves, in Langton’s writings and sermons, are presented as a nation of drunks, hardly deserving a better king or the liberty which was the privilege of the French.

  Drink had already been mentioned in William fitz Stephen’s description of London as the greatest of English vices and, together with fire, the most severe of threats to London itself. In July 1212, as the result of a rowdy drinking contest or ‘scotale’, at the height of Langton’s dispute with the King, drink and fire did indeed combine with horrendous ferocity to burn the suburbs south of the Thames, from Lambeth to Bermondsey. One contemporary, noting that the flames had spared London Bridge and hence had allowed many people to escape, concluded that God was in the process of testing the English. Conventional sin had been purified by the waters of Noah’s Flood. Only the unnatural vices of Sodom, or now of London, he concluded, could have persuaded God to attempt purification by fire. Even in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, English ‘binge drinking’ exacted a heavy toll. Modern politicians who hold forth against the demon drink might care to remember that drunkenness, and the expression of moral outrage against it, is an English tradition even older than Parliament.

  Papal Interdict

  Neither Langton’s opinions nor his long residence in the capital city of Philip Augustus, the new conqueror of Normandy, endeared him to the Plantagenet King John who did his best to exclude Langton from England. The result was a standoff between Church and King in which England was placed under papal interdict from 1209 onwards, effectively prohibiting the population from receiving the sacraments of the Church or burial in consecrated ground. Interdict was a blunt weapon, and there is plenty of evidence that, in England, it was implemented in ways more subtle than such bluntness ideally required. Ceremonies were still held in churches. The King himself maintained some sort of liturgical observance at court, taking baths, for example, before each of the major festivals of the Church, distributing lavish alms and perhaps instituting, at Knaresborough in 1210, the very first distribution of royal Maundy money: a tradition maintained to the present day.

  With the majority of the English bishops fled into exile, John was able to confiscate a vast quantity of ecclesiastical property and wealth. If we add to this the taxes and exactions which John received from the barons, the proceeds of lands confiscated from Normans who after 1204 had remained behind in Normandy, perhaps the greatest influx of lands to the crown between the Conquest of 1066 and the Dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s, and the savings made now that English silver was no longer required to pay for the defence of Normandy itself, then John emerges as easily the richest king in English history, master of a vast war chest, intended to pay for armies and alliances in France.

  Peace with the Church, War with France

  Throughout the period of interdict, although in theory an excommunicate, John was in regular contact with other European powers – the counts of Flanders and Toulouse, the kings of Aragon and Navarre, even the Almohad rulers of North Africa – bent upon launching a multi-pronged attack against Philip Augustus for the reconquest of the Plantagenet lands north of the Loire. In 1213, in what deserves to be remembered as the first great naval victory in English history, John’s galleys launched a lightening raid on the French fleet stationed off Damme, the port of the city of Bruges, putting paid to what were said to have been plans by Philip for an invasion of England. In the same year, John made his peace with the Church, recognizing Langton as archbishop, allowing the return of the exiled bishops and sending for a papal legate to assist in the settlement of differences. Financial compensation and a lifting of the Interdict were not forthcoming even then, and, in the final analysis, John repaid only a fraction of the money that he had milked from the Church. Nonetheless, with a papal legate to support him in England, John was now able to embark upon his long-anticipated campaign of reconquest in France. Two great armies were launched against Philip, one commanded by John moving northwards from Poitou, the other commanded by the German empe
ror and John’s illegitimate half-brother, William Longespée, Earl of Salisbury, moving southwards from Flanders. The result was a catastrophe for King John. On Sunday, 27 July 1214, the northern army was destroyed by Philip at the Battle of Bouvines, as significant a date in the history of France as the day of Hastings had proved in England. John himself was brought to a stand-still in Poitou, from where he was forced to slink back ignominiously into England.

  John already had an evil reputation as an adulterer, a murderer, a liar and a malicious persecutor of his foes. His murder of Arthur of Brittany and his supposed condemnation of women and children to death by starvation were now matched by failure in war as the very gravest of his crimes. In an age in which people believed that God’s support alone could secure military victory, failure in war could only be accounted a sign that a king had been abandoned by God. If God had abandoned him, then might not King John’s barons make common cause with the Almighty?

  Rebellion

  It was in these circumstances that a baronial coalition began to emerge. Calling themselves ‘The Army of God’, although by others described as the ‘northerners’ from the attachment of several of them to estates in Yorkshire and the north, this was a closely knit conspiracy, many of its members cousins or brother-in-laws, with particularly close associations to the great baronial house of Clare. Their hope was either to persuade the King to reform his government or, in the ultimate extreme, to force him from his throne.