by Robert Lacey
It was several hundred years before St George became fully established as England’s patron saint, and he has never been exclusively ours. Portugal regards him as its patron, as do the great Italian seaport cities of Venice and Genoa. But Richard spread himself pretty thin as well. In the course of his ten-year reign he spent just six months in England. So a king who was not English helped supply us with the saint who was not English - hybrid symbols for a mongrel race.
JOHN LACKLAND AND MAGNA CARTA
AD 1215
BEFORE HE DIED, HENRY II, THE FATHER OF Richard the Lionheart, commissioned a painting that showed an eagle being pecked to death by its young.
‘Those are my sons,’ Henry would say.
The painting hung in his palace at Winchester, and showed one of the eaglets poised on its father’s neck, waiting for the moment to peck out its eyes. That particularly vicious nestling was John, explained the old king - ‘the youngest of them, whom I now embrace with so much affection’ - and he predicted that his favourite son would one day betray him.
So it proved. Henry had four adult sons (two of whom, Henry the Younger and Geoffrey, would predecease their father), and he worried that the youngest had no inheritance. He nicknamed the boy ‘Jean sans Terre’ - John Lackland - and the fond father provoked a series of bitter family battles by trying to pare off bits of the other brothers’ inheritances to give to John. In the Middle Ages a royal family battle could be just that. In 1189 the furious Richard led an army against his ailing father so as to compel him to hand over his birthright. As he marched across France his forces were swelled by many who calculated that the old man had become a lost cause and that they had nothing to lose by rallying to the Lionheart.
‘Woe, woe,’ Henry muttered, ‘on a vanquished king!’
Just a few days from death, Henry II was compelled to surrender, asking only that he be told the names of those who had switched sides to support Richard. The old man was shown the list - and John’s name was at the head of it.
Having betrayed one member of the family, John then set about betraying another. If Richard is the Prince Charming of English history, John is the pantomime villain. No sooner had Richard left on crusade for the Holy Land in 1189, than John started plotting to steal England from him. When the news came through of Richard’s capture and imprisonment in Germany, he conspired with King Philip II of France to keep Richard in jail.
‘Look to yourself,’ Philip warned John when he discovered their plot had failed, ‘the devil is loosed!’
It was a measure of the Lionheart’s chivalry that he forgave his younger brother when he arrived back in England and John pleaded for mercy.
‘Think no more of it, John,’ he said. ‘You are only a child’ - and the King took the twenty-seven-year-old child off for a feast of freshly caught salmon.
John succeeded Richard in 1199 when the Lionheart died without legitimate offspring, and for most people their experience of the new reign was no different from the old. Nobles, townspeople, farmers - all were taxed and taxed again as John went about campaigning in an effort to hold together the extensive family lands in France. But while Richard’s military adventures had yielded romantic glory, John had little to show but defeat. Mollegladium (Softsword) became his Latin nickname according to the monkish chroniclers, who paint a disapproving picture of an idle and luxury-loving king, gloating over his jewels and spending long hours in bed.
As churchmen they were biased witnesses, since much of John’s reign was dominated by long-running conflict with the Church. In 1205 a dispute arose over the election of a new Archbishop of Canterbury, and John refused to accept the Pope’s candidate. His Holiness responded with an interdiction on the whole of England - a general ‘lock-out’ by the clergy. Churches were closed, the bells tied up and silenced. For six years the clergy held no services in church, refusing to perform baptisms, weddings or funerals. You might get the priest to come to your home privately to bless your baby or your son’s marriage, and masses with sermons were still held once a week. But these had to take place outside the shuttered churches, in the often damp and chilly churchyard. The priest might also attend deathbeds to administer the last sacraments, but after that the people had to bury their loved ones in ditches or woodlands, making do with their own improvised prayers.
If religion is the opium of the people, Britain went without its fix for six years. People were in fear for their immortal souls. Without being fully welcomed into the Church, they believed, their children could be possessed by devils; without proper burial they might not get to heaven. For a faith-based society, the years of the interdiction were a grievous and demoralising time. In the Holy Land the English had recently been numbered among God’s heroes. Now they were cast out among the goats.
In 1209 John was singled out personally by the Pope for excommunication - a total rejection by the Church, even worse than interdiction, and a badge of shame that condemned him to hellfire and damnation. Every bishop but one left the country, and in the end John caved in. He accepted the Pope’s candidate as Archbishop of Canterbury and the interdiction was lifted in mid-1214. But when England suffered military disaster that summer, the humiliation could not help seeming like the judgement of God. John had already lost control of Normandy to the King of France, and the French victory at Bouvines on 27 July 1214 made the loss final.
Softsword had something of the snake about him. It was not unusual for a medieval king simply to eliminate rivals, as John had done early in his reign when he imprisoned the son of his late brother Geoffrey - Arthur, who was never to be seen again. But when John later heard that a noblewoman had been gossiping about Arthur’s disappearance, he had the culprit jailed with one of her sons and left them both to starve to death. The King gave the impression that he did not know how to play fair, that he would not hesitate to ride roughshod over anyone who crossed him. This, combined with his military failure, the church interdiction and his unrelenting tax demands, set the stage for the momentous and historic events of 1215.
In January of that year, a group of disgruntled barons who had gathered for the Christmas court called for the restoration of their ‘ancient and accustomed liberties’. They seem to have been thinking of the sort of contract promising better behaviour on the part of the monarch that Ethelred the Unready had struck with his nobles and bishops in 1014. These ideas had been repeated by William the Conqueror’s two sons, William Rufus and Henry I, when, in 1087 and 1100 respectively, they were canvassing for support after their throne-grabbing gallops to Winchester. It was Henry’s coronation charter that now provided John’s critics with a model.
In the spring of 1215 the barons decided to act. Assembling at Stamford in Lincolnshire, they started marching south, gathering support along the way. On 17 May sympathisers welcomed them to London, and their occupation of the city seems to have persuaded John to come to terms. After some preliminary discussions, the two sides met in the middle of June to negotiate on the banks of the Thames near Windsor in a meadow named Runnymede - literally, the ‘soggy meadow’ - and the result of several days’ hard bargaining was the famous Magna Carta and a rather optimistic declaration of peace.
History has romanticised the Great Charter as the far-reaching document that established the people’s liberties, when in many respects its purpose was scarcely grander than to protect the rights of the rich warrior landowners who were fed up with being so heavily taxed. The barons were certainly not fighting for the rights of the often downtrodden labourers, the serfs and villeins who worked on their estates (‘serf’ from the Latin word servus - ‘slave’ or ‘servant’; ‘villein’ from villa - the country house that owned them). But, willy-nilly, the rights for which the barons fought had a universal application.
‘No free man shall be seized, imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, exiled or ruined in any way . . .’ read clause 39, ‘except by the lawful judgement of his peers and the law of the land.’ Here was a call for fair play and justice that would resonat
e in later years - and the following clause backed it up: ‘To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.’
Other clauses regulated feudal landholding and inheritance, guaranteed towns their freedoms, and gave merchants the right of free travel. A start was made on reforming the hated laws that protected the royal hunting forests (see pp. 112-13), and a serious attempt was made to check abuses of power by local officials. Clause 35 set up the first countrywide system of standardised weights and measures - a bonus to trade and to all consumers.
All through the last days of June 1215, the clerks at Runnymede scribbled away furiously, making copies of the charter to be taken and read out in every shire of the land. Magna Carta was the first written document limiting the powers of the king to be backed up by practical enforcement. A watchdog council of twenty-five barons was set up to make sure the king obeyed the charter, and a commission of twelve knights in each county was charged to look into local abuses of the law.
It was the watchdog council that proved the snag. John refused to accept that a non-royal body should infringe his sacred power, while several of the twenty-five barons started to throw their new-found weight around. By the autumn, England was engulfed in civil war. The following spring Philip II of France sent an army under his son Louis to help the barons - if the English could invade France, why not vice versa? - and John spent the last months of his reign tramping the country in a vain attempt to quell the rebellion.
The final scene was staged that October in the misty wetlands of East Anglia, where the royal baggage train struggled to cross the four-and-a-half-mile estuary of the Nene River (then known as the Wellstream) near Wisbech on the Wash. Misjudging the tide, the King’s horses, wagons and riders were caught by the incoming waters. Jewels, gold and silver goblets, flagons, candelabra - even John’s crown and coronation regalia - all were swallowed up by the sucking eddies of the Wash. The lost jewels of King John remain undiscovered treasure trove to this day.
The King himself was already sick with dysentery. After weeks of camp-fire food, he had overeaten when entertained by the townsfolk of Lynn and, according to one chronicler, his idea of a cure was to consume quantities of peaches and fresh-brewed cider. It was one delicacy too many. Borne to the nearby town of Newark on a stretcher of branches cut from Fen willows, John Lackland breathed his last on 18 October 1216.
Furious over the indignities of the interdiction, caused by John’s refusal to do his Christian duty as they saw it, the monkish chroniclers of the time had no doubt which way his soul was headed. Hell was a foul place, wrote one, but it would now be rendered still more foul by the presence of King John. Disapproving of such moralistic judgements, ‘value-free’ modern historians have pointed to the growth of royal record-keeping during John’s reign as evidence of how efficient his government administration was - as if bureaucratic efficiency was not one of our own modern gods.
But John’s painstaking record-keeping has certainly provided us with some interesting insights into his life. The detailed inventory of what he lost in the watery East Anglian wastes included pieces of glass, which seem to have been portable windowpanes ready to be cut and fitted into the castles he visited. John was clearly a man who loved his comforts. We read in his accounts of William his bathman, paid a halfpenny a day for his services, with a few extra pence as a tip when he actually prepared a bath. The record shows us that John was unusually clean for his time - he took a bath every three weeks - while an entry describing ‘an over-tunic for when his Lordship the King gets up in the night’ reveals a further claim to distinction. John was England’s first king to be recorded as owning a dressing-gown.
HOBBEHOD, PRINCE OF THIEVES
AD 1225
WHEN THE ROYAL JUDGES ARRIVED IN York in the summer of 1225, they found that one of the cases before them involved a certain Robert Hod (or Hood), an outlaw. Hod had failed to appear in court, so the judges duly confiscated his worldly goods, valued at the sum of thirty-two shillings and sixpence, which was about what it cost in the thirteenth century to live modestly for a year. Hod, or Hood, continued to steer clear of the justice system, for his penalty remained unpaid, and it was carried forward to the ledger for the following year under the name of ‘Hobbehod’ - which could mean ‘that devil Hood’, or might have been a spelling mistake for ‘RobbeHod’.
That is the extent of the historical evidence we have for the possible existence of Robin Hood, the dashing outlaw of Sherwood Forest. But court records from Berkshire in 1261 tell us of another outlaw, this one described as ‘William Robehod’, and in the years that follow the Robehods or Robynhods proliferate in the records. Whether or not this particular bandit actually existed, his exploits were so famous that ‘Robin Hood’ became the medieval nickname for a fugitive from justice. Some outlaws chose it; others had it thrust upon them. By around 1400 a priest was complaining that people would rather hear ‘a tale or a song of Robyn Hood’ than listen to a sermon.
Robin and his Merrie Men have proved to have a timeless appeal, but in their own day they had a specific significance. You were proclaimed an outlaw if you repeatedly failed to show up at court to answer a charge. As with Hobbehod, a fugitive from the judges in 1225, your goods and chattels and any land you held were confiscated, and you would then have to take your chances outside the law. If you were captured, your death by hanging would be ordered without further trial, and if you resisted arrest anyone was entitled to kill you. To be a legally proclaimed fugitive was a perilous state of affairs, so no wonder that people’s imaginations were captured by the dream of life under the greenwood tree, where you could live according to your own laws. It was a particularly satisfying option if the forest was one of those preserved for the king’s hunting.
There had been legends about heroic brigands, bandits, and resistance fighters before Robin Hood, notably the stories surrounding Hereward, the Saxon nobleman deprived of his lands by the Normans. But Robin came a step or two down the social ladder from Hereward. The tales of the time described Hood as a ‘yeoman’, from the Danish word yongerman, a free peasant of the artisan class. He was a ‘yeoman of the forest’, spending his days in harmony with nature. And if the primitive philosophy of this ‘good life’ did not quite make Hobbehod a working-class hero, it could fairly be claimed that he was the original ‘green’ warrior.
Today you can visit the huge hollow oak tree in Sherwood Forest where Robin Hood and his band are supposed to have hidden from the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham. Sadly, the tree was not even an acorn at the end of the twelfth century, when legend claims the outlaw roamed the forest. King Richard was certainly in Nottingham in March 1194. He made a beeline for the town when he returned from imprisonment after the Crusades, for Nottingham had supported Prince John’s attempts to supplant him, and its castle was the last to hold out for John’s cause.
Richard instantly set up gallows in front of the castle walls, and proceeded to hang several soldiers, whose resistance may be attributed to their not knowing, or their refusal to believe, that the King was finally back.
‘Well, what can you see?’ asked Richard when at last the defenders sent envoys to negotiate. ‘Am I here?’
The garrison promptly surrendered, and the King went off to celebrate with a day’s hunting in Sherwood Forest. But there is no record of him ever meeting Robin Hood - and he cannot possibly have met Little John, Friar Tuck, Will Scarlet, Much the Miller’s son, or any other of the subsequently named Merrie Men. Maid Marion would not appear in the proliferating network of Robyn Hood ballads, masques, and morris dances until the beginning of the sixteenth century, when she was often played for laughs by a male impersonator - an early example of the pantomime dame. It was around this period, three hundred years after Hobbehod’s first non-appearance in court, that the national anti-hero’s penchant for relieving passers-by of their spare cash was finally given a serious social purpose. In all his early portrayals Robin was a sturdy rascal - jovial, maybe, but basically a rob
ber. Not until 1589 do we first read the claim that his followers ‘tooke from rich to give the poore’.
So that devil Hood finally became England’s symbol of resistance to tyranny, the archer of the green wood, daredevil justice maker, with his own programme of wealth redistribution in the days before the welfare state. Those are the noble and romantic aspects of the legend. But it is surely ironic that the national heart has been so stirred down the centuries by a man who started out a thief.
SIMON DE MONTFORT AND HIS TALKING-PLACE
AD 1265
MAGNA CARTA DID NOT VANISH INTO THE Wash with the rest of King John’s baggage in October 1216. On the contrary, his death revived the Great Charter - along with the fortunes of the monarchy. John’s heir was his nine-year-old son Henry, and the prospect of this child being in charge of England somehow purged the bitterness between Crown and barons. The country’s quarrel had been with John, and few people had welcomed the French army that had come to the aid of the rebels. It is often said that no foreign army has set foot on English soil since 1066, but from May 1216 French troops were tramping over much of south-east England, and during John’s last desperate months Louis, the son of the French king, was holding court in London.
To win over domestic opinion and help get rid of the French, who finally departed in September 1217, the young Henry III’s guardians rapidly reissued the Great Charter - in modified form. They reworded or deleted a number of clauses, removing the controversial watchdog council of twenty-five barons that had sparked the civil war, but promised that the new king would rule according to the remaining provisions. When the boy king presided over a council meeting at Westminster the following year the charter was issued again, then affirmed for a third time in 1225 when Henry, by then seventeen, had been declared old enough to play a formal role in government. So, triply restated and confirmed, the idea of a contract between king and subjects became once more the basis of rule and law. When lawyers started collating English law in later centuries they listed the 1225 version of Magna Carta as the first in the Statute Book.
