by Ed West
As a result, the day Richard’s reign started became set as the date on which anyone who could establish they owned land on that day could confirm it was theirs by right, since often disputes about ownership went deep into the past to a time when no one could remember. So July 6, 1189, is officially the start of legal memory, or ‘time immemorial.’
Walter is considered one of the best administrators the country ever had, responsible for creating a system of government we all depend on, but no one remembers him; only the man who ran around the Middle East arguing over flags.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Stealing from the Rich
At the heart of the conflict that led to Magna Carta was money, and the Crown’s relentless thirst for more of it. Around half of its clauses relate to financial disputes, and this had as much to do with Henry II and Richard I as it did with John.
The royals were not exactly the villains of the piece either; no doubt some barons missed the good old days of the Anarchy when local aristos could just do whatever they liked in their neighborhood. Others recognized the need for taxation but wanted it carried out more fairly.
There were other wider economic problems; the late twelfth century saw a big increase in inflation, partly because huge amounts of silver had been discovered in Switzerland in the 1160s. (And as with the dollar today, sterling was so respected that fake sterling mints were all over western Europe.) This inflation also encouraged people to keep records in order to stop getting ripped off.
Richard openly extorted money from nobles, one way being through forcing them to pay a fee to inherit their father’s land, the ‘reliefs’ that were mentioned in Henry I’s charter. This was the custom but the royals often charged absurd amounts, and then changed their minds when it wasn’t enough. In 1193, one Staffordshire landowner agreed to pay 200 marks to succeed to his family estate; but the following year it was increased to 300.1 Roger Bigod, the earl of Norfolk, was forced to pay 100 marks to protect his family against arbitrary seizure of his land. Then, for no reason whatsoever, the figure was increased to 700 marks. It was a shakedown on a massive scale.
The king’s sheriffs were particularly very unpopular because they raised money for the Crown, but also took a cut, and so they had an incentive to squeeze as much out as possible. It is not surprising then that when the Robin Hood legend emerged, a sheriff should be cast as the villain, but who exactly the myth was based on is hard to tell. John had appointed one Ralph FitzStephen as forester of Sherwood, a position that allowed him to seize anything illegal within the forest, while another man, Sheriff of Nottingham Philip Marc, is named in Magna Carta as one of the foreign villains the barons want expelled, so he probably wasn’t popular either. Other possible inspirations include Brian de Lisle, chief forester of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, chief justice of the forest in the early 1220s, and sheriff of Yorkshire in the 1230s; and Reginald De Grey, the sheriff of Nottinghamshire, who was pursuing rebels against Henry III’s government in 1266–7.
The very first ‘Robert Hod’ (as he was identified) is mentioned in June 1225 in York, and by the 1260s it had become a sort of nom de plume for rural ne’er-do-wells. The Robin Hood legend was first written down by William Langland in the 1370s, but it was certainly around in the thirteenth century. If there was anyone who it was even loosely based on, he would have probably been active toward the end of Henry III’s reign in the 1260s; this was the period after the Second Barons’ War when the country was in a state of lawlessness. Among the outlaws of this period was Adam Gurdon, a Hampshire man who, according to an improbable legend, was tracked down by the future Edward I, who took him on in single combat and was so impressed by his courage he spared his life.2 The first Robin Hood stories refer to ‘King Edward,’ and tradition linking the outlaw to John when the Lionheart was away on crusade only dates from the sixteenth century, and was widely popularized by Walter Scott in the nineteenth. (In fact, Nottingham, or Snottingham as it was originally called—after a Mr Snot, which means wise in Old English—was the most pro-John city during his rebellion against Richard.)
There may well have been a Robin of Loxley or Robert of Huntingdon, a dispossessed earl who had fallen foul of forestry officials, fighting against the Crown following Henry III’s seizure of lands. But he probably wasn’t very nice and most likely focused mainly on taking from the rich rather than redistributing it. And Robin Hood in the original story didn’t prance around in green tights, but is portrayed as a maniac who hacks off an enemy’s head at one point. It was only in the Victorian era, during a period of romanticism about the medieval period and rural life (popular among people who were safely far away from its ghastly reality) that Robin Hood as romantic outlaw really took hold; at the time, the story was popular among a certain type of yeoman who glorified stories about one of their own terrorizing the authorities, but most people viewed outlaws in basically the same way we would see a mugger hanging around your local park.
Partly the reason was that crime during this period was, by modern standards, absurdly high, with London having an annual murder rate between thirty-six and fifty-two per one hundred thousand compared to Britain’s current national level of one in one hundred thousand.1 Fourteenth century Oxford had an annual homicide rate of one hundred per one hundred thousand people, which is roughly twice the current level for Baltimore or Detroit.4 For all the romantic notions that medieval villagers had a sense of community by living near to family and friends, the rates at which they murdered one another suggest that they weren’t too pleased about it.
Because of logistics and the lack of crime detection, wrongdoers were rarely brought to justice. To take one example, in Northumberland in 1279, there were forty-three accidental deaths and seventy-two murders in a region that probably had only a few thousand people; just three of the murderers were caught, one was imprisoned, one was fined, one got out of it by pleading Benefit of Clergy, and the rest escaped, presumably to become outlaws.
Coroners’ rolls are full of tales of horrific roadside crimes, including beatings, muggings, rapes, and murders by outlaws, none of whom had the slightest intention of giving to the poor. Travelers could expect to be attacked with knives, arrows, poleaxes, or any instrument sharp or blunt enough to cause injury. One unfortunate was dragged to a churchyard and had his toes cut off. Another, Nicholas Cheddleton from Marston, Staffordshire, was ‘going along the King’s highway with linen and cloth and other goods,’ when he was ambushed by a group of thieves intent on murdering him. Cheddleton struck one over the head with a staff and killed him. He was found not guilty.
The political message of Robin Hood came much later, and in the Victorian period he became a figure of English resistance against French Norman rule, before evolving into an antiglobalization pseudo-commie and most recently a sort of disillusioned Iraq war veteran.
However, there were certainly movements suggesting discontent and figures during the twelfth century who did fight against the rich; at one point, London’s poor and disillusioned, of which there were many, were moved to agitation by one ‘William long beard,’ a charismatic speaker who ‘plotted great wickedness in the name of justice, a conspiracy of the poor against the rich. With his fiery eloquence, he inflamed both the poor and the moderately well-off with a desire for limitless freedom and happiness and with a hatred for the arrogance of the rich and noble which he painted in the blackest colors. At public meetings, he proclaimed himself the king of the poor, and their savior,’ and also called himself the ‘advocate of the people’; at St. Paul’s he argued that the rich should bear the burden of financing the Crusade. In those days, of course, the authorities rather looked down on this sort of agitation, and it ended badly for the humble soldier—who was, in reality, a university-educated Anglo-Norman with the embarrassingly aristocratic name William Fitz Osbert, but who chose to play down his origins and instead grew his hair and beard long in tribute to his Saxon ancestry.5
In 1196, Fitz Osbert and his nine associates took sanctuary a
t St. Mary-le-Bow in the city but had to flee after the authorities set fire to the church.* It’s a sign of how brutal these times were that the man who did this was the Archbishop of Canterbury. Fitz Osbert killed an officer who tried to arrest him but was caught. Afterwards he was bound to horses’ tails and ripped to pieces, then dragged to Tyburn, west of London, where he and his men were hanged in chains.† He claimed to have a following of fifty-two thousand supporters ready to back him with an uprising, but that figure turned out to be something closer to the region of zero.
However, his fans said he was a martyr, and miracle cures were associated with the site of his death, where there soon developed a large pit after people had dug up the earth to take home as souvenirs.
Richard inevitably gets himself killed
On returning home, Richard held a ceremony in Winchester in April 1194, making everyone repeat their homage to him; he then left almost immediately to return to fighting, this time in France, where Philip now had the backing of the Pope. However, the French king ran away, and again four years later had to be rescued from a river as his knights were drowned.
The fun ended for Richard in 1199 when he decided to invade his province of Limousin, in southern France, over a fairly trivial sounding affair: one Achard of Chalus had discovered buried treasure, which apparently included a gold medal showing a Roman emperor and family sitting around a golden table, along with lots of gold coins. Achard refused to let Richard have it, and so the Lionheart besieged the castle, which was defended by only forty men, of whom only two were knights, but who had doggedly refused to surrender.6
With characteristic flair and recklessness, King Richard jumped about outside the castle mocking the defenders, until one of them, a teenaged cook, managed to hit him in the shoulder. The wound festered and he died, magnanimous and heroic even in his last breath, asking that his assassin, a poor peasant, be released unharmed (as it was, the orders were ignored and the poor teenager was flayed alive).
Richard, always his mother’s favorite, died in her arms—word had been sent after his wound became infected—although according to his supporters the king was still romancing women even on his gangrene-ridden deathbed (which must have been really pleasant for them). He expired after a week of agony, and while his heart was cut out and interred in Normandy, his bowels were buried in Aquitaine as a statement of that country’s betrayal of him, as he saw it.
Richard’s major legacy is that he took the Norman emblem of two gold lions and added the lion of Aquitaine, using for the first time in 1198 the famous three-lions motif, which has since been associated with cheery and cultured English visitors around Europe since. He also first adopted the phrase Dieu et mon droit—‘God and my right’—as a battle cry and password, and it was used by later kings to symbolize their (highly dubious) claim to the French throne. Today it is still the motto of the royal family, as well as appearing on the masthead of many institutions such as The Times and Daily Mail. He’s also one of only two English kings to have the honor of being listed as an artist on Spotify, the other being Henry VIII.
During his first trip away, Richard had named Geoffrey’s infant son Arthur of Brittany as heir, but forced to choose between the now adolescent nephew and John, the leading figures opted for the latter. Marshal in particular was against Arthur becoming king, stating that he ‘has treacherous advisors about him and he is unapproachable and overbearing.’ In contrast, the main argument for John was that he was ‘a known quantity even if a terrible one.’7 But as Hubert Walter told Marshal: ‘You’ll never regret anything in your life so much as you will this.’ He wasn’t far wrong, and the dispute between Arthur and John would soon be resolved, in a not entirely amicable way.
The Crusades rather fell apart after this. Henry VI of Germany launched a fresh one in 1197 and died almost immediately upon arrival. Then in 1204, the crusaders reached fresh heights of stupidity when on their way to the Holy Land they decided to sack Constantinople, the largest Christian city in the world, after being dragged into one of the Byzantine Empire’s vicious power struggles. The Fifth Crusade was even less successful; an attempt to conquer Jerusalem in 1217 led only to the capture of a drinks pot believed to have been used at the wedding of Cana, where Jesus turned water into wine, ‘the one and only concrete result of this futile campaign’ although crusade leader King Andrew of Hungary, ‘who acquired the relic, was as delighted with it as if he had captured Jerusalem itself.’8 Something like a third of the thirty-two thousand crusaders who traveled east for the adventure died for this great achievement.
The most insane of all was the so-called ‘Children’s Crusade’ of 1212, when thirty-thousand (even the most conservative estimates suggest ten thousand) kids descended on Marseilles in the belief that God would deliver Jerusalem to the Christians ‘only if they became children,’ taking a Biblical passage way too literally. Most were under twelve, many were begging, and some died on the way; they reached the port city hoping and expecting the sea would divide before them which, alas, it didn’t.
Luckily, two merchants turned up, with the entirely trustworthy-sounding names Hugh the Iron and William the Pig, promising to take them to the Middle East, and so the children got onto the ships and they all set sail—and were never heard of again. Years later, however, one or two survivors turned up recounting that they all had all been sold into slavery, and some eighteen of them had ended up being killed in Baghdad for refusing to renounce Christianity. All in all having a crusade comprised entirely of children wasn’t the most sensible of ideas.
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* St. Mary-le-Bow is where the expression ‘born within the sound of Bow Bells’ comes from, signifying anyone who was a true Londoner rather than a suburbanite who was just pretending. St. Mary-le-Bow is where London’s curfew sounded from, calling on everyone to go indoors for the night. And that’s why anyone who could hear it was considered a proper Londoner.
† Now in central London and next to Marble Arch Tube station. The last hanging was in 1783, at which point residents in the increasingly swanky part of west London were starting to complain that the gallows with rotting corpses wasn’t good for the area’s look.
CHAPTER NINE
Not as Bad as
Hitler or Stalin
John has gone down in history as a ‘bad king,’ but unlike his showy brother, at least he bothered to visit England, he treated the poor no worse than the privileged (equally badly), and as a borderline atheist it is not surprising that he got a bad press from the Church. On the other hand, he did beat his nephew to death in a drunken rage, so nobody’s perfect.
Pretty much every notion in history goes through some sort of revisionism, and the more you read into the past the more you realize there are two sides to the story and everything is a blur. Even in John’s case there was an attempt to do this in recent years, but it didn’t get very far; all the evidence suggests that he was in every way a terrible, terrible man. He was ‘clever, insatiably grasping and implacably narcissistic,’1 according to one modern historian, while Gerald of Wales called John ‘a tyrannous whelp’ and William of Newburgh said he was ‘nature’s enemy.’ Even one of John’s own generals conceded that he was ‘a very bad man, cruel and lecherous,’ and he was on his payroll.2 The kindest word comes from twentieth-century historian R. V. Turner, who wrote that ‘compared with Hitler and Stalin . . . John seems quite tame’—not exactly a ringing endorsement. Another historian of that period, Osbert Lancaster said of him that ‘his sole redeeming feature seems to have been that like so many celebrated criminals, he was invariably kind to his mother.’
Eleanor was forty-five when she brought John into the world, by which time his next youngest sibling was already nine, and while his mother had doted over Richard, she largely ignored John, who seems to be a classic example of the old adage that if you are treated as a child, you behave like one. But Eleanor could hardly be blamed for this, since she had been imprisoned by her husband when John was just six, which p
robably didn’t help his development into a well-rounded human being.
Like his brother, John was a boisterous young boy, and in one charming episode he was having a game of chess, which in those days was played with very heavy pieces (the game had been brought over from the Arab world by the Normans) when he lost his temper and smashed his opponent over the head with the board.3 This was no different from the behavior of any other members of his family, but John was both violent and a coward.
Already as a youngster he gave the impression of being wrong in the head; in 1185, when John had visited Ireland as its new teenaged despot, he immediately got off to a bad start by making fun of the locals’ dress sense and pulling the red beards of Irish kings who came to show him their fealty, a trick that he found immensely amusing; them less so. Having treated the Irish with ‘levity and contempt,’ he then squandered all his soldiers’ pay, much of it on prostitutes and drink during his trip to Waterford, and by the time he was ordered home he’d managed to achieve the impossible by uniting both English soldiers and Irish natives in hating him. John’s handling of Ireland was considered so ridiculous that it was reported that Pope Urban III sent the young man a peacock-feathered crown of Ireland to make fun of him.
With his short stature—he was just five feet six inches—and swarthy complexion, he was physically the opposite of his dashing brother.4 By the time of Magna Carta he had also grown bald and fat, and whatever glamour he possessed in his youth was long gone.
John’s career ‘was pockmarked by ugly instances of treachery, frivolity and disaster,’ and unlike Richard, he was never forgiving or straight in his dealings.5 His brother had been nicknamed ‘Richard yay-or-nay’ (i.e., straight answer),6 but John ignored almost every oath he took, as well as betraying both his father and brother; as soon as he became king he broke alliances with his nephew Otto of Brunswick and the Counts of Flanders and Boulogne. This was a pattern throughout his life, which was partly why Magna Carta had to come about.