by Sean McGlynn
Dunbar and Haddington received similar treatment before John headed south again in the last week of January. He may have been short of supplies, as the retreating Scots had destroyed their own areas to deny John provisions that would enable him to lengthen the campaign if he so wished; Matthew Paris said John returned south due to ‘urgent necessity’. In effect, he had achieved most of his objectives and his government by punitive expedition had established his intentions. For the time being, there was little military resistance left in the North and so John could focus his attention on isolated pockets of resistance in the South. In March he began whittling away at these. But London still remained defiant.
How bad was the ravaging campaign? As ever, it is impossible to quantify such things. Of the sources closest to events, two otherwise superb ones for the war in England at the end of John’s reign actually say little. The epic vernacular poem History of William Marshal is hardly ever mentioned in relation to the 1215 campaign, as all the author offers is a cursory mention of the mercenary ‘men of Flanders, foreign knights and soldiers, who every day were set on pillage … bent … on laying waste’ the land.56 William Marshal was keeping the situation under control in Ireland at this time, which probably explains the reticence. The Old French History of the Dukes of Normandy and Kings of England is more interesting for its taciturnity. Like the History of William Marshal, it is normally a rich mine of information on the details of the war. The author’s patron fought for John, and depicts many of the war’s military encounters in great detail. But for specifics of the depredations, all he writes is that John went into Scotland ‘ravaging the land’ and that ‘he burned and destroyed the town of Berwick’.57 The chronicle concerns itself more with actual combats, and its author may well have felt that, as with the Anglo-Norman chroniclers of the Scottish wars, his patron should not be sullied by mention of sordid and base details of war against non-combatants.
Two contemporary Latin sources provide the best information. Ralph of Coggeshall was abbot of the Cistercian house at Coggeshall in Essex during the time of these events. In 1215 the war came to his monastery: royalist troops ‘entered violently’, stealing treasure and taking away twenty-two horses belonging to the Bishop of London. He is cited above in relation to the barons fleeing before John’s advance, burning, plundering and depopulating the barons’ lands, and to the sacking of Ely, where he claims no one was spared. At Ely, he reports that the soldiers inflicted ‘horrible tortures’ on men to get at their money.58 It is a short explanation that tells us so much about the nature of ravaging campaigns and why non-combatants were treated so cruelly.
By far our best source, but one treated with suspicion by many historians, is Roger of Wendover. However, as I have argued elsewhere, it is a mistake to dismiss Wendover too readily: ‘the importance of Wendover’s underestimated chronicle’ is that the author ‘excels at portraying the impact of war on society and how money truly constituted the sinews of war’.59 Wendover has suffered in the shadow of the more illustrious Matthew Paris, who based the early part of his great chronicles on copying the chronicle of Wendover. In many ways, he was ideally placed to write on the war in England. Like Coggeshall, but much more so, he was in the middle of things. His great monastery of St Albans was visited by kings, papal emissaries, bishops, counts and leading court officials. John started his campaign here in December 1215 and the abbey was plundered by both sides in the war. As prior of Belvoir, a cell of St Albans near Lincoln, Wendover was located in the crucible of events. His patron was the William of Albiny captured by John at Rochester, and used by the King to coerce the castle by Wendover’s priory to surrender at Christmas 1215. He witnessed armies marching through the Vale of Belvoir and, valuably, despite his patron’s loyalties, he was just as prepared to condemn anti-royalist forces as royalist ones. Like most medieval writers, he was, of course, prone to exaggeration, but most of his details ring true.
Wendover devotes substantial space to cataloguing ‘the various kinds of suffering endured’ by the people of England; it is rare to see in a medieval chronicle such consideration given to actions against the population, as opposed to actions between armies. Wendover recounts that, at his war council in St Albans, John resolved ‘to ravage the whole country with fire and sword’.60 In his account of the first stages of the campaign, note how the financial purpose of ravaging is made clear: the destruction of the barons’ economic base, and the extortion of money from non-combatants to supplement the troops’ wages:
Spreading his troops abroad, [John] burned the houses and buildings of the barons, robbing them of their goods and cattle, and thus destroying everything that came in his way, he gave a miserable spectacle to those who beheld it…. He ordered his incendiaries to set fire to the hedges and towns on his march, so that … by robbery he might support the wicked agents of his iniquity. All the inhabitants of every condition and rank who did not take refuge in a churchyard were made prisoners, and, after being tortured, were forced to pay a heavy ransom.61
William Longsword was doing the same in the South, where royalist soldiers were ‘collecting booty and indulging in pillage; they levied impositions on the towns, made prisoners of the inhabitants, burnt the buildings of their barons, destroyed the parks and warrens, cut down the trees in the orchards and, having spread fire as far as the suburbs of London, they took away an immense booty with them’.62 It is important to observe how, amid the seemingly wanton destruction of ravaging, that economic targets were picked out and hit.
It was the same after Christmas when John’s forces progressed ‘burning the buildings belonging to the barons, making booty of their cattle, plundering them of their goods and destroying everything they came to with the sword’. John gave his commanders orders to ‘destroy all the property of the barons, namely their castles, buildings, towns, parks, warrens, lakes and mills … to finish the business with equal cruelty’.63 This is targeted economic warfare. It was not unique to this campaign, but a feature of many others. Of a later ravaging expedition in Henry III’s reign, Wendover specifies that the villages struck belonged to the enemy and that the soldiers were careful not to damage any estates where the lord was loyal to the King. This was ravaging as a disciplined weapon of medieval commanders.
There is some evidence that royalist forces were not so indiscriminate in their rampage during the winter of 1215–16. Court records reveal that one man had a hand cut off by the marshal of John’s army for stealing a cow from a churchyard. Was he a token example to impress an ecclesiastical audience? Did the theft contravene a local agreement? Was he a soldier in John’s pay? As discussed in chapter one, war provided cover for all manner of criminality, by non-combatants as well as by soldiers. Sometimes it was a genuine attempt to recoup losses incurred by the ravages of war; other times it was sheer opportunism, as judicial records of the time indicate. ‘The war was an obvious excuse for violent lawlessness, and many were disseised of their property by their more powerful and unscrupulous neighbours. One Yorkshire squire frankly admitted that he had behaved so villainously that he dared not face a local jury.’64
James Holt has warned against amplification of the atrocity stories, citing that Ripon was spared any depredations when John’s forces arrived there. There could be various reasons why Ripon itself was spared (politics or payment of protection or ‘goodwill’ money, for example); John, ever anxious for hard cash, frequently accepted cash and treasure in lieu of torching a place.
Disciplined ravaging required a strong captain imposing his will on his troops. But, as with Alexander’s Scots, there was room for intentional ambiguity: John would keep his troops, especially his mercenaries, loyal and happy only by allowing them considerable licence to line their own pockets; at the same time, their excesses had the other useful and practical effect of crushing opposition and intimidating future resistance. It is notable how the ferocity of John’s campaign resulted in many rebels flocking to him, craving forgiveness. All it took for a non-combatant to be made an
acceptable target was that he or she should be a resident in a town or on an estate owned by a baronial opponent. Most non-combatants probably did not express a voluntary allegiance either way, and even royalist sympathizers in baronial territory would be very lucky indeed to escape the depredations. As with the residents of an enemy-held town, little time was wasted on ordinary non-combatants; discrimination was reserved for men of standing. Wendover records the ordeal of ordinary people caught up in John’s ravaging campaign:
The whole surface of the earth was covered with these limbs of the devil like locusts, who assembled … to blot out every thing from the face of the earth, from man down to his cattle; for, running about with drawn swords and knives, they ransacked towns, houses cemeteries, and churches, robbing everyone, and sparing neither women nor children; the king’s enemies wherever they were found were imprisoned in chains and compelled to pay a heavy ransom. Even the priests, whilst standing at the very altars … were seized, tortured, robed and ill-treated…. They inflicted similar tortures on knights and others of every condition. Some of them they hung up by the middle, some by the feet and legs, some by their hands, and some by the thumbs and arms, and then threw salt mixed with vinegar in the eyes of the wretched…. Others were placed on gridirons over live coals, and then bathing their roasted bodies in cold water they thus killed them.
Some of these torture details may have religious origins (St Laurence, for example, was martyred on a gridiron) or bear resemblance to those depicted in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but the suffering, as Ralph of Coggeshall confirms, was real enough. Wendover then makes clear the motivating factor behind the atrocities:
The wretched creatures uttered pitiable cries and dreadful groans, but there was no one to show them pity, for their torturers were satisfied with nothing but their money. Many who had worldly possessions gave them to their torturers, and were not believed when they had given their all; others, who had nothing, gave many promises, that they might at least for a short time put off the tortures they had experienced once. This persecution was general throughout England, and fathers were sold to torture by their sons, brothers by their brothers, and citizens by their fellow citizens.65
This passage, perhaps more than any other, explains the atrocities committed by soldiers on non-combatants in medieval warfare (and other eras, too). It was all about money, about using the hollow legitimacy of war to steal from people who were deliberately, and conveniently, proscribed and thereby placed outside the laws of protection through no fault of their own. The tortures were not mindless sadism (though that undoubtedly played a part in some cases), but a means of extorting money. The worse the torture, the more the victim, and onlookers, would be terrified into giving what they had to stop further pain. Pain was the mangle that squeezed out every available drop of wealth.
Once again, we are confronted with some contradictory evidence. Widespread torture is, I believe, wholly believable as a common practice for the reason given above. But torture is not the same as killing. Undoubtedly, many victims died from their torture, and others were killed to shock potential victims into handing over their money. But what of the tales of slaughter? John Gillingam has argued that ‘Ravaging and burning the countryside were essential ingredients of chivalrous warfare … but killing unresisting non-combatants was not.’66 Thus, as Orderic Vitalis recorded for Normandy in 1118, villagers who had been pillaged followed the raiding party ‘planning to buy back their stock or recover it somehow’.67 Despite some assertions that John’s campaign of 1215–16 exceeded even the horrors of earlier Scottish invasions, this was evidently not the case. For one thing, John was not on a slaving mission; with no slavery in England, low-level prisoners were taken for the express purposes of ransoming back or torture: if relatives were killed, who would pay the ransom? Furthermore, the role of churches as sanctuaries appears to have been more respected in this conflict than in others. The cow thief who lost his hand had committed his crime in a churchyard. Wendover says of 1216 that ‘goods were exposed for sale only in churchyards … and no one dared go beyond the limits of churches’. 68
It seems from Wendover that while people’s lives were relatively safe in churches (although one mercenary captain does strike a non-combatant dead in a church doorway), goods and possessions were not, as the monasteries at Coggeshall and St Albans discovered. The references to pillaging of cemeteries is gruesome. Graves were dug up to get at any possessions buried with the person. Even corpses had a value: their going rate was usually half the ransom of a live hostage. But both Coggeshall and Wendover refer to widespread, deliberate killing, the latter declaring that at the end of the campaign, John had ‘subdued all this country with dreadful slaughter’.69 Inevitably, many of the deaths would have been in sacked towns such as Berwick; the scale of other deaths is probably exaggerated, but there would have been substantial civilian fatalities in a major campaign of ravaging, burning of buildings and torture that extended from St Albans into Scotland and back down again, and with the main backbone of the royal army comprising chiefly of hardened foreign mercenaries. Nor do we know of individual events, where a group of pillaging soldiers may have acted mercilessly either through drink, or after a recent combat, when adrenalin and bloodlust were still high, or lashed out in inarticulate revenge for a comrade killed in the action.
The much-repeated phrase ‘sparing no one’ in medieval chroniclers may not always be as clear as it sounds: in addition to its usual meaning of ‘everyone, without exception, being killed’, it occasionally signified that no one was spared the suffering or ignominy, which does not automatically mean death. This interpretation can explain many of the seeming inconsistencies of chroniclers’ statements. Despite its scale, John’s winter campaign was not as bloody as the invasions by the Scots or the risings of the Welsh. What marks it out as so shocking is the vivid, compassionate testimony of Wendover, in which the emphasis is placed not so much on killing as on the individual sufferings of ordinary people.
Judgement on the military success of John’s campaign is mixed. The flight of his enemies; the destruction of their estates; the submission of so many rebels and their castles; and, not least, the plunder he gained with which he could satisfy his mercenaries: all were significant victories that impressed – and worried – contemporary writers. But the triumphs were, as so often with John, temporary and incomplete. Many of the northern rebels took their losses and disappeared, for the moment, over the border into Scotland. Most crucially, London survived as a rebel stronghold. John was in a strong position and, as Ralph Turner has observed, ‘If significant French aid to the rebels had not arrived, King John simply could have camped outside London and waited for their surrender.’70 But a second, powerful French contingent had arrived in London, securing their position further there as a base for Prince Louis’s expected arrival with the main force. For all the dramatic impact of John rampaging up and down the country, the campaign was a lost opportunity. Yes, the money gained kept his mercenaries together for the future conflict, and reasserting his control over the country ensured a steady flow of more income; but if the rebels themselves had been temporarily weakened, their French allies were given time to prepare, strengthen and reinforce their planned campaign, too. John might have been better off keeping his mercenaries together with the promise of spoils from the biggest prize of all: London.
It is therefore hard to escape W. L. Warren’s judgement of John’s decision to go on campaign: ‘This is a typical example of his reluctance to commit himself to decisive military action: the rebellion would have collapsed had London been recaptured. The rebel headquarters there were the nettle that he should have grasped and uprooted without flinching.’ Then, in a brilliant but damning observation that highlights just one reason from many that made John such a poor war leader, he adds: ‘[O]ne cannot help feeling that a Richard or a Philip would have gone straight for the hardest task and sought a decisive victory. John had to pay dearly for taking the course of least resistance and seeking
his ends by indirect means’.71 The price was even higher for those who fell under the wheels of his campaign juggernaut. There was a longer-term price, too: the French duly arrived in force and the war escalated, lasting for another year and a half.
The Black Prince’s Grand Chevauchée, 1355
The most famous ravaging expeditions of the Middle Ages, if not the most famous of all medieval campaigns, are those undertaken by King Edward III and his son Edward, the Black Prince, in the fourteenth century. Their chevauchées across France have become synonymous with the image of mounted soldiers riding hard and fast, pillaging and burning anything and everything in their path. But in reality, they are little different from any other ravaging campaigns: David’s invasions in 1138 and John’s campaign of 1215–16 are no less chevauchées than the ones in the Hundred Years War. In fact, the very term chevauchée is to be found in Old French sources from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries to describe the same style of warfare. The fourteenth-century chevauchées are sometimes singled out on account of their speed, but this gives the false impression that the whole operation was purely a mounted one; besides, the plunder gained – a central objective – was as much a limiting factor in the 1300s as it was in the 1100s. In 1215–16, John marched, in winter, from St Albans near London to Durham in two and a half weeks, seeing to government business along the way. The Black Prince’s Grand Chevauchée of 1355 completed a round march of nearly seven hundred miles from Bordeaux to Narbonne in just under two months. Raid, chevauchée and, sometimes, campaign are interchangeable terms.
