Foundation

by Peter Ackroyd

  Another sign of restlessness and upheaval became evident as a result of the king’s exactions. The citizens of London believed that they were being unfairly and even perniciously taxed, and their complaints were taken up by William Fitz-Osbert or William the Beard. He grew his hair and beard long in token of his Saxon ancestry. He was styled the ‘advocate of the people’, and at St Paul’s Cross argued that the rich should bear the burden of war finance. 52,000 Londoners were said to have supported him, but the authorities in the city hunted him down. He killed the officer sent to arrest him and fled to sanctuary in the church of St Mary-le-Bow, where after four days a providential fire forced him out. He was stabbed by the son of the officer whom he had killed but, while wounded, he was arrested and dragged at the tail of a horse to the gallows at Tyburn. His associates then proclaimed him to be a martyr and the chain that bound him to the gallows was the source of miraculous cures. The gallows itself was venerated, and so great was the press of people taking the bloody earth from the spot where he had died that a large pit was created.

  Richard I never did come back to the land he ruled but did not love. He died from a gangrenous wound while fighting in Limousin, and on his deathbed he decreed that his heart should be interred in the cathedral at Rouen and that his body should be lowered into the tomb of his father within the abbey church of Fontevrault. So much for England.

  And then there was one. John, the youngest of the sons of Henry II, had survived. He is one of the most interesting kings in English history, primarily because of his infamous reputation. He rivals Richard III in being considered the most ‘evil’ of the nation’s kings. In truth John and Richard were no more vicious or cunning than many other more lauded sovereigns; they were perhaps unfortunate, however, in the chroniclers who chose to write about them. The two monastic chroniclers of John’s reign, successively Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris, were uniformly hostile. Shakespeare of course, more than any other, defined the image of John to posterity; his were wholly dramatic, but wildly exaggerated, versions of the events to be related here. Enter King John, breathing stage fire.

  The early life of John has already been glimpsed, disloyal to his father and to his brothers. Yet he was still a Plantagenet, and the sacred blood of the family mattered. Henry II appointed him to be ‘Lord of Ireland’, but he proved himself to be unequal to the task; his youthful pride and folly alienated him from the native leaders of that country. He was given manors and castles all over the Angevin Empire, and he was in charge of the administration of six English counties that paid their taxes directly to his own exchequer. In Richard I’s absence he created a court of his own, in England and in Normandy, which the more devious or ambitious magnates attended. He was the rising son.

  Yet he was not the only claimant to the throne. Richard I had nominated Arthur of Brittany as his successor, as we have seen, and the twelve-year-old nephew was a real threat to John’s inheritance. The barons of Anjou, one element of the Angevin Empire, already supported the boy. Aquitaine was in the balance. The English and Norman magnates, cautiously and suspiciously, supported John. Although he could not be considered English, he was at least more English than the Breton Arthur. On hearing of his brother’s death John hurried to Normandy, therefore, where he was consecrated duke in the cathedral of Rouen; then he sailed to England where he was crowned king at Westminster in the spring of 1199. It had taken him just a month to assert his power.

  He was some 12 inches (30 centimetres) shorter than Richard, and he may have suffered in implicit comparison with his brother and with his father. Certainly he grew up in a court filled with rivalries and suspicions of a more than usually bitter nature, with brother pitted against brother and brothers rising against their father. It is not surprising, therefore, that he gives the impression of being a wary and distrustful king. He went about armed and with a bodyguard.

  He was not without humour, albeit often of a perverse kind. When he and his horse floundered in a marsh near Alnwick in Northumberland, he devised a suitable punishment for the men of that town who had not maintained the highway; he ordered that every newly created townsman should, on St Mark’s Day, pass through that slough on foot. The custom was still being observed in the early nineteenth century. When the pope placed the country under excommunication, the king ordered that the mistresses of all the priests should be held in captivity until their clerical lovers ransomed them. It was an interesting punishment. There is another intriguing memorial of his reign. Among the legal rolls, then being composed in unprecedented numbers, is one stating that ‘the wife of Hugh de Neville gives the lord king two hundred chickens that she may lie one night with her husband’. The import of this is unclear, but it may mean that the lady was one of the king’s paramours and that she was asking to return briefly to her marital bed. The three incidents reveal that side of medieval life where jocosity and cruelty are allied.

  King John was capable of violent anger, like his Plantagenet antecedents. When some monks at Faversham occupied their church, to prevent him from installing the superior he had chosen for them, he ordered the entire monastery to be burned down; nobody obeyed him, and he relented. Monarchs, male and female, have always had bad tempers; it is an aspect of their power.

  An element of cruelty, or of ruthlessness, is evident in the first years of his reign. Arthur of Brittany had fled to the court of the king of France in order to shield himself from his uncle’s far from avuncular intentions. In 1202, however, John found him. Both of them were on military campaign in France, fighting over the Angevin lands. The king of France had allotted them to Arthur, whereas John considered them to be his proper inheritance. Arthur, now fifteen, had been besieging his grandmother – Eleanor of Aquitaine – in the ancient castle of Mirebeau, near Poitiers in west-central France. The spectacle of grandson threatening grandmother throws further light on the behaviour of the Plantagenet family.

  John, on receiving the news of the siege, marched with part of his army day and night; they covered 80 miles (130 kilometres) in forty-eight hours. Taken by surprise, Arthur and his forces were surrounded. The boy was delivered into the custody of John, and taken to a dungeon in Normandy; in an interview with his uncle, he was defiant. He demanded England, and all the lands bequeathed to him by Richard, apparently adding that he would not give him a moment’s peace until the end of his life. This was, perhaps, unwise. He was moved to a dungeon in Rouen, the capital of the duchy, and was never seen again.

  The more picturesque accounts suggest that John, in a fit of Plantagenet fury, ran a sword through his nephew’s body and then dumped him into the river Seine. Or perhaps he hired an assassin. No one is quite clear. The evident fact, however, is that Arthur was dead within a few months. By the spring of 1203 it was widely believed that the king was instrumental in the murder of his nephew. This event has often been interpreted in the same light as the murder in the Tower of the two princes by their uncle, Richard III; but there is really no comparison. Pope Innocent III, for example, is reported as saying that Arthur was ‘captured at Mirebeau, a traitor to his lord and uncle to whom he had sworn homage and allegiance, and he could rightly be condemned without judgment to die even the most shameful of deaths’. A fifteen-year-old was considered to be an adult.

  Although the death may have been a necessary and inevitable response by John, it helped to alienate his natural supporters in Normandy and elsewhere. Even more serious charges were levelled against him. He was severely criticized for his indolence or inactivity in the pursuit of war against the king of France. He was not acting like a king. One chronicler declared that he was sluggish, where his elder brother had proved himself to be vigorous and powerful. He became known as ‘John Softsword’. It was said that he had been enchanted by the sorcery of his wife, Isabella of Angoulême. It is more likely that he was infatuated by the power and majesty of kingship and refused to believe the worst. But the worst was happening. King Philip advanced further and further into Normandy, and the majority of John�
�s barons in that duchy defected to him. They no longer trusted the English king enough to remain loyal to him. There was soon very little left in France for John to defend. As the Angevin Empire collapsed around him, John sailed back to England. By June 1204 Philip had taken Normandy; all that remained of the duchy, in the possession of John, were the Channel Islands. Of the empire itself, only Gascony was preserved. It was the largest single blow to John during the whole of his reign.

  The severance of England from Normandy, after 150 years of union, was at a later date deemed to be a natural and inevitable development by which France steadily became aware of its national identity. It heralded the rise of a national consciousness exploited by the Capetian kings. At the time, however, it was considered to be nothing less than a calamity for the king of England. He lost much of his income, from the taxation of Normandy and Anjou and Maine, and of course he forfeited a great deal of his prestige. Yet other consequences followed. The Anglo-Norman lords lost half of their identity. Once they had lost their lands in Normandy, it became clear that they would have to concentrate on those closer to what was now ‘home’. They steadily became more English. The Channel had become the border, as it had been in the tenth century, and King John began the construction of a proper navy to defend the English shores. The king no longer possessed Normandy, and as a result he paid more considered attention to England.

  He kept the administrators from the last reign, knowing very well that the machinery of government depended upon them. It is from the beginning of the thirteenth century, for example, that we can trace the widespread use of written records as an instrument of state. Licences for imports and exports had to be drawn up; the regulations of trade had to be furnished in writing; a system of taxation had to be standardized; currency and credit had to be maintained in strict order. All this relied upon ink rather than upon custom or oral tradition. The various departments of the king’s court began the habit of creating archives. Letters began to be sent over the country, where before written communication had been confined to writs. Diaries of daily expenditure were kept and preserved. New and faster forms of handwriting developed, as monastic calligraphy gave way to what is known as ‘cursive’ script; the word comes from cursivus, the Latin for ‘flowing’. The world was going faster.

  Wars, and preparations for wars, took their toll upon the nation’s wealth in the same period. King John still entertained hopes of winning back his Angevin Empire, but for that he needed money. He was perhaps no more exacting than his brother and his father, but he was more ingenious. He discovered new ways of extracting revenue, and in 1207 levied a thirteenth part on incomes and moveable property to be paid by all classes of people; it was the first move towards general taxation. The clamour of complaint, however, was so loud that he never repeated the exercise.

  For ten years he travelled throughout his kingdom in search of money; he was restless; he was always in a hurry, generally staying in any one place for no more than two or three days. In 1205 he spent only twenty-four days in London and in Westminster. For the rest of the time he was on the road. He penetrated the far north at the end of a bitter winter; he fined York and Newcastle for not affording him an appropriately grand reception. He was looking for money everywhere. He was told, during a visit to Hexham in Northumberland, that Roman treasure was buried at Corbridge nearby; he ordered his men to dig for it, but nothing was unearthed.

  During the course of his rapid journeys, sometimes covering 30 miles (48 kilometres) a day, he evinced a particular interest in imposing justice upon his subjects. This again was largely because of his desire for revenue, but as a boy his tutor had been Ranulph de Glanville whose legal treatise has already been mentioned. There may be some connection. John declared once that ‘our peace should be inviolably preserved, even if it were only granted to a dog’.

  So John paid much attention to the details of administration and of justice, with a diligence quite different from the insouciance of his elder brother. If he was suspicious, he was also vigilant and curious. Most of the people had never seen their king before. Yet here he was, in the robes of state, questioning and charging and judging. His own voice was the voice of law. He loved fine gems and he glittered with jewellery. He bathed regularly and often, a practice almost without precedent in the thirteenth century. The body of the king – the flesh and blood – was sacred. Here is the essence of medieval governance.

  This was also a time of rising prices; a rapidly increasing population meant that the common resources of life became scarcer and more expensive. Financial, as well as demographic, explanations can be found. The importation of silver from the mines of eastern Germany increased the amount of money in circulation; as a result, prices rose between 100 and 200 per cent in the last two decades of the twelfth century. This is the proper context in which to see baronial rebellion and the sealing of the Magna Carta. The consequent ‘inflation’, to use a contemporary term, affected the king as much as the lords and the commons. War, in particular, had become much more expensive. The problem was then compounded by recession as the king took more and more money out of circulation in order to pay for his military ambitions. So the king was constrained at every hand; it might seem that the forces of nature were against him.

  After the collapse of the Angevin Empire in 1204 King John began to assert himself on the island of Britain. He waged campaigns in Wales, Scotland and Ireland. In Ireland he managed to impose royal government upon the feuding Anglo-Norman barons who had divided the rule of southern and eastern Ireland among themselves; John also gained the fealty of the native Gaelic kings who recognized his power. In 1209 he launched an expedition against Scotland, and forced its king to recognize him as overlord. He subdued, temporarily, the Welsh principalities; he cowed them by violence, in other words, and before the start of hostilities he hanged at Nottingham some twenty-eight Welsh boys, the sons of chieftains who had been surrendered as hostages. It was not the least, or the last, of his acts of cruelty. But the cruelty of kings worked. At the end of these campaigns a contemporary chronicler stated that ‘there is now no one in Ireland, Scotland and Wales who does not obey the command of the King of England; that, as is well known, is more than any of his ancestors had achieved’.

  Yet he struggled to control his magnates. They were not eager to fight for the restoration of the Angevin Empire, and they resented the manifold exactions he imposed upon them. He demanded huge fees for the granting of inheritances, or for the selling of wealthy heiresses in marriage. On occasions he raised his own claims to estates that had long been the property of wealthy families. A tax called ‘scutage’ was paid to avoid military service; John levied it eleven times in sixteen years. Payments in kind were also exacted. One magnate, William de Braose, paid the sum of 300 cows, 30 bulls and 10 horses for the approval of a plea. A further twist can be added to what seems to have been the king’s unremitting hatred of the Braose family. William’s failure to pay further debts led to his being driven into exile. But another fate remained for his wife and son. Matilda de Braose was one of the few people who knew what had happened to Prince Arthur nine years before, and it seems that she was talking too much; John ordered her to be arrested with her son. Mother and son were starved to death in prison.

  It was said that the king was as rapacious of wives and daughters as he was of money. They were not safe in their castles when John paid a visit. Yet, on a larger scale, the whole force of Angevin monarchy was opposed to the feudal privileges of the mighty lords. The growth of a bureaucracy, and of a central administration, curtailed their own powers to make money out of the resident population. Business was being diverted from the local honorial courts, for example, to the royal courts. They were losing money as a result. Historians look back in admiration at the increasing growth and complexity of ‘royal government’; all it meant at the time was royal exploitation. The emergence of an army of mercenaries also restricted the role of the magnates as the martial leaders of the country. Many of them still had an i
mage of their role derived from chivalric romance. They were the knights of the Round Table gathered beside their king who acted as primus inter pares. King John was not King Arthur, however, and the only Holy Grail for which he cared was gold.

  To sacred affairs, in general, he was indifferent. When the archbishopric of Canterbury became vacant in 1205, the king refused to fill it. He wanted the money from the wealthy see to be diverted to his own treasury. This was a device he had used in the past with other bishoprics. Pope Innocent III prevaricated, understanding royal sensibilities, but his patience was not inexhaustible. In 1207 he appointed Stephen Langton to the vacant archbishopric. Langton could not have been a better choice; he was an Englishman, out of Lincolnshire, but had been a superb professor of theology at the University of Paris. He was also cardinal priest of the basilica church of St Chrysogonus in Rome, and a canon of York Minster.

  John characteristically fell into a carefully staged fury. What had the pope to do with the affairs of his kingdom? He would, like his predecessors, appoint the bishops and archbishops whom he believed to be loyal. He refused to allow the pope any right to appoint an archbishop of Canterbury without royal assent. He banished from England the monks of Canterbury who had acceded to the pope’s request. He seized all the English offices held by Italian bishops. He refused to allow any papal legates to enter the country. In the spring of 1208 the pope placed the country under an interdict, forbidding any church services to be held; no sacraments, except those of baptism for the newborn and absolution for the dying, were to be performed. Matthew Paris, in his account of the interdict, illustrated the scene with a drawing of bell-ropes tied up. Sacred time was suspended.