1215 and All That

by Ed West

  William de Briouze had been a loyal follower of John, and was involved in capturing Arthur, but he had also refused or delayed paying money he owed the king and may even have used violence against royal officials who demanded it. However, the amount John asked for was vast and unaffordable. And when John’s men came to their castle demanding a hostage, Mrs. de Briouze made a terrible mistake. ‘With the sauciness of a woman,’ says the chronicler Roger Wendover, she refused to hand over a child, saying, ‘I will not deliver up my sons to your lord, King John, for he basely murdered his nephew, Arthur.’ As a general piece of advice to medieval wives: if your husband’s boss has murdered his nephew in a drunken rage, best not to bring it up in an argument.

  The de Briouzes all fled to Ireland, and in pursuit John launched an armada of seven hundred ships from west Wales, with eight hundred knights ready to be transported across the Irish Sea for his vindictive campaign. Meanwhile, the de Briouze family lands in Wales and were harried by John’s sheriff of Gloucester.11 After John’s forces had besieged a castle they were staying in, Matilda and her son William fled to Scotland where they were captured by a local warlord, Duncan of Carrick, who was distantly related to John through his great-grandfather Henry I. The king had Matilda and her eldest son William locked up and left to die in Corfe Castle, Dorset, and in an especially gruesome twist their bodies were found together, with bite marks on the son’s cheeks where his starving, crazed mother had tried to eat him. The elder William fled to France where he died not longer after.

  Things like that tended to tarnish John’s reputation, and he issued an unusual sort of press release ‘so that there should be an authoritative statement of the truth.’ It wasn’t so much an apology or explanation as a warning ‘to demonstrate the utter ruin awaiting those who cross the king.’12

  Over this William Marshal, who had links with de Briouze, further fell out with the king, who took him for a traitor and so held his son hostage and confiscated his castles. However, that year the king’s representative in Ireland, Meiler FitzHenry, of ‘dark complexion, with black eyes and a stern, piercing look,’ whose father was also one of Henry I’s bastards, attacked Marshal’s lands while he was in England, and John told Marshal about the news ‘with a laugh,’ clearly being behind it. There followed a mini-war between Meiler and Marshal’s people, with twenty people killed at the settlement of New Ross, but eventually the heroic former tournament champion won. The King was ‘not amused at all,’ but Marshal remained in Ireland, keeping his head down.

  In 1209, John became so paranoid that he decided to make everyone come to Marlborough castle to swear allegiance to him. Gervase of Canterbury wrote of the event in September: ‘All the men in England, rich and poor and middling, aged fifteen and upwards, came together at Marlborough on the king’s orders, and there they swore fealty, both to the king and to his son, Henry,’ who was now two years old. At the end of the ceremony, John gave a kiss of peace to the Crown, which according to one historian was ‘one of the earliest air kisses to be recorded in English history.’13

  Now tax went up by 300 percent, a policy that unsurprisingly wasn’t very popular; John also went to Oxford to meet barons and demanded ‘scuttage,’ or ‘shield tax,’ the payment of money by barons as a substitute for doing military service in defense of Normandy. Yet many Anglo-Norman aristocrats no longer had lands across the Channel, and saw little reason why they should bother helping.

  No means of raising revenue were left untapped; King John even sold immunity from lawsuits at the shire courts, demanded scuttage for nonexistent battles, and added ‘gracious aids’ (i.e., taxes) on personal goods.

  In 1210, John announced a fine of £44,000 from the country’s small Jewish community, and also took to torturing Jews to raise money, taking a tooth a day out of one Bristol resident until he handed over a vast fortune of £6,666—the poor man gave up after the seventh. The century saw increased persecution of England’s Jewish population, which had always relied on the protection of the monarch against the Christian majority, who were often heavily indebted to Jewish moneylenders. Popular hysteria was partly fueled by the growth of a genre of conspiracy theory in which Jews ritually murdered Christian children. The rumors were started by cretinous peasants in 1144 with a story that a boy called William, had been abducted and killed, although it later transpired he didn’t exist. After William, various other similarly nonexistent boys went missing, and the position of the Church also hardened. From 1218, all Jews had to wear a badge, and four years later Jews were banned from employing Christian women or building any new synagogues. In 1244, Jewish books were burned and the Dominican order took to actively persecuting Jews, who were also expelled from different towns after popular petitions.

  To be fair to John, he was not a religious bigot, and had no interest in persecuting heretics—he only did it out of sheer greed and a more general lack of humanity. In fact, he also persecuted Christian clergy from 1210 demanding the Cistercians hand over a load of cash, because they were known to be rich. Some houses, such as Meaux Abbey in Yorkshire and Waverley Abbey in Surrey, had to close because of the fines John imposed. In Norfolk, Jews and Cistercians were seen going together door-to-door begging for food.

  The dispute with the Church was only resolved when the King of France threatened to invade, with the Pope’s support. John was now in a terrible pickle, but Marshal rescued him by getting twenty-seven Irish barons to swear an oath of loyalty saying that they were ‘prepared to live or die with the king and that till the last they would faithfully and inseparably adhere to him.’ Marshal was recalled to England, and suggested making peace with the Pope. He was cynical about the Vatican, and his History was scathing about the corruption there, saying that envoys to Rome only had to come with the relics of St. Gold and St. Silver, those ‘worthy martyrs in the eyes of Rome.’ Peter of Capua, the papal legate, was, in Marshal’s view, ‘incredibly adept in the arts of trickery and subterfuge’ with a face ‘more yellow than a kite’s claw.’

  John used the money he had amassed to start wars with the Welsh, Irish, and Scots, invading each country between 1209 and 1210. In August 1209, he had marched to Scotland with thirteen thousand Welsh foot soldiers, fifteen hundred English knights, and seven thousand crossbowmen and Brabantine mercenaries from the Low Countries, who were notorious for their cruelty. Scotland’s feeble, elderly King William agreed to pay 15,000 marks ‘for having the king’s goodwill’ and gave his two daughters over to John as hostages, as well as his fourteen-year-old son Alexander, who John could marry to whomever he wanted as long as it wasn’t to someone of lowly status.

  He also turned against Llywelyn the Great of Wales, despite his being married to John’s illegitimate daughter, Joan (not to be confused with his other daughter, Joan), because of his alliance with de Briouze. In July 1210, John invaded the country and the bishop of Bangor refused to meet him because he was excommunicated, so John burned the city down and had the churchman seized in his cathedral. In a rather unmanly way, Llywelyn sent his wife to sue for peace, as he was ‘unable to bear the king’s cruelty.’ The Welsh leader had to pay a huge price for defeat, with everything east of the Conwy surrendered to England ‘forever.’ A single line from the annals of Margam Abbey in Wales describes what happened to those Welshman in John’s hands: ‘Twenty-two of the noblest and strongest in arms were starved to death in Corfe Castle, so that not one of them escaped.’

  John was pretty good at fighting battles against weak Celtic mountain warlords, but when faced with anything harder he caved in, and this is what soon happened.

  ____________

  * Fans of British comedy will of course recognize this behavior from Edmund Blackadder.

  † He is literally a saint, and is one of the few genuinely sympathetic figures of the period, saving the Jews of Lincoln from a massacre.

  * The last big Oxford university fight was in 1389 between English and Welsh scholars, the former shouting ‘War, war, sle, sle, sle, the Welsh doggys and
her whelps and ho so looketh out of his howese, he shall in good sorte be dead.’ Cambridge also had numerous brawls, including major incidents in 1261, 1381, and 1417, when the scholars ‘armed in a warlike manner, caused great terror to the mayor, by laying in wait to kill him and his officers.’

  * Most curiously, Bacon predicted in 1250 that one day ‘by the figurations of art there be made instruments of navigation without men to row them, as great ships to brooke the sea, only with one man to steer them, and they shall sail far more swiftly than if they were full of men; also chariots that shall move with unspeakable force without any living creature to stir them. Likewise an instrument may be made to fly withall if one sits in the midst of the instrument, and do turn an engine, by which the wings, being artificially composed, may beat the air after the manner of a flying bird.’

  † The crusade was most famous for the response the leader gave when told lots of people they were massacring at Beziers would be Catholic rather than heretical Cathars: ‘Kill Them All, God will know his own.’ Between 7-15,000 civilians were killed in the massacre which, in fairness, was not the Church’s greatest moment.

  * Matilda is perhaps most famous in the public mind as the subject of the bestselling romance novel Lady of Hay, in which she is reincarnated in the twentieth century and works in publishing.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Northerners

  John was a monster, and possibly unhinged. However, in medieval times people would generally go along with the king, however mad or rapacious he was, as long as he kept winning battles, and unfortunately John wasn’t very good at this.

  By the summer of 1212, such was his unpopularity that the king had to hurry back from Wales to deal with rumors of a plot of his death. In his paranoia, he summoned six knights from every county to attend Court, ironically a procedure that would become one of the barons’ demands in the following decades and eventually form the basis of the House of Commons. The king concluded that Eustace de Vesci and Robert Fitzwalter—a major landowner in Essex—were planning to murder him; it had been rumored that the king wished to seduce Fitzwalter’s daughter and this may have been a motive. Whether they were planning his death or not, he now made them his enemies, and the men fled to France and Scotland respectively. Fitzwalter and John had another old score to settle; Fitzwalter’s son-in-law Geoffrey de Mandeville had killed a servant of William Brewer, one of John’s officials, in a brawl over lodgings while they were in the king’s entourage. When John proposed hanging him (quite reasonably, really), Fitzwalter threatened to raise an army of two thousand knights to defy the monarch.

  The king became increasingly deranged, developing a lifestyle that would have been familiar to Stalin or Saddam Hussein. He refused to sleep outside of a royal castle, although as he had acquired some fifty of them, this made his paranoia easier. He never spent more than three days in the same building, terrified that his barons might betray him, which to be fair they probably would, but he still put enormous sums into having these residences maintained. Although the king was a late riser, sleeping until almost midday, he’d arrange for his baggage train—loaded with gallons of wine—to go on before first light.

  Because of his paranoia, and the fact that he had so many people locked up in various dungeons, John developed a complex code to be used when he wished orders to be carried out. In fact, it was so complex he sometimes forgot the right passwords himself. (A dilemma many in the twenty-first century would sympathize with.)

  That year, while on tour in the north, John was told that a hermit called Peter of Wakefield, ‘a fanatical rustic who lived on bread and water,’ prophesized that he would not make his fourteenth anniversary in charge, and so John had him arrested, along with his son.1

  In the summer in Cornwall, two of the king’s underlings, Alan de Dunstanville and Henry de la Pomeroy, were given special commission as ‘knights of the king’s private household’ to report of anyone spreading rumors of the king’s death.2

  The following year, the king made peace with the Church, ending the feud on the feast of the Ascension, the only concession being that he symbolically gave the Pope the kingdom so that he could rent it back every year (this, the English Treasury continued paying for another century and a half). The six-year interdict had been hugely profitable for John, and after it was over he agreed that compensation should be paid to all the dioceses he had drained of money. However, he fixed the sum at an absurdly low level and then paid up only a third of the amount.

  After years of rinsing the Church of money, John was the richest King of England who ever lived; he celebrated his fourteenth year of rule that autumn by putting Peter of Wakefield and his son to death, the amateur mystic being torn apart between horses (it’s fair to say John could be prickly about criticism).

  And so, richer than ever and master of Britain, at the end of 1213 John went to meet some of the rebel barons, who had become known as the Northerners, a supposedly conciliatory gesture although part of the aim of bringing his whole entourage was to show his might. On November 1, he met them at Wallingford in Oxfordshire where he made promises about upholding liberties, promises that he clearly had no intention of keeping. A week later, he called all the barons to come to Oxford unarmed, while his knights turned up with weapons. It was a sort of thirteenth-century equivalent of a Bond villain throwing his killer shark a lump of meat in front of his guests.

  It was not an accident that the barons’ rebellion would begin in the north, as the king had been especially rapacious in this distinctive region. English kings tended to avoid the north if possible, which was even more dangerous than the rest of the country and whose politics were tied up with ancient feuds. It was a land full of tough, resolute people like Ughtred Smith of Buteland in Northumbria, who in 1249 casually pulled an arrow out of his head on the way home, ‘so that my wife may not see it, for she would perhaps grieve over much.’3 The Lionheart never went north once, getting as far as Nottingham, which was enough for him. John, however, visited the region four times in the first five years of his reign, and always to raise money; on his 1199–1200 tour around England he raised £41,000 in fines, mostly in the north. During his 1201 visit, he fined the citizens of York £100 for failing to welcome him with sufficient honor. On that same trip he also went digging for buried treasure in Corbridge in Northumberland, without luck—it can’t have been very reassuring to see the man in charge of the treasury reduced to such desperado behavior.

  With all this money, John had also managed to build a pretty good navy—the one thing John did do quite well, which may have been due to his youthful experience of running parts of the country on either side of the Irish Sea. (In addition, it was the case that, when the king of England also controlled Normandy, there was no need for a navy.) So between 1209 and 1212, for example, twenty new galleys and thirty transporters and other ships were launched at the king’s expense. In fact, England’s great adventure as a maritime power really began with John, and in particular in May 1213, at Damme in Flanders, when the English destroyed the French fleet, the first significant naval battle in English history. But even this victory was spectacularly unheroic; John’s naval force had turned up and found the entire French fleet at anchor, some 1,700 ships almost completely unattended. The English simply burned them down, stole all the treasure, and headed home—a clear, if not entirely noble victory.

  Once again, the king decided to invade France, building an alliance with his nephew Otto the emperor of Germany and the rulers of Flanders and Saxony. The scheme, which in terms of relative financial expenditure rivaled that of 1066 or the Normandy Invasion of 19444 was a massive enterprise, yet it all went terribly wrong. In July 1213, John assembled his fleet in Portsmouth, but just as in 1205, the barons refused to come with him and he ‘showed his disgust by putting to sea with his household and cruising as far as Jersey. From this futile expedition he returned within three days to take his vengeance on the barons who had thwarted him.’5

  Undeterred, he vow
ed to invade again and to raise money. In January 1214, John auctioned off his first wife to the baron Geoffrey de Mandeville for 20,000 marks, which Geoffrey couldn’t afford, and since she was too old to have kids, he probably did not want her. The amount of money was enormous, the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars today, and Geoffrey was already not a fan of John as his first wife had been Fiztwalter’s daughter. But if Geoffrey did not go ahead with the marriage, John threatened him with a loss of his whole inheritance. De Mandeville would end up joining the rebels, not surprisingly.

  The following month, February 1214, John arrived in La Rochelle on the west coast of France but retreated when the king of France’s son Louis threatened to attack, even though John had a much bigger force. John liked battles he could easily win, as in against enfeebled Welsh chieftains, but whenever there was any trouble, he fled. As the troubadour Bertran de Born sang: ‘No man may ever trust him, for his heart is soft and cowardly.’ It was this behavior that led to the great disaster at Bouvines.

  The army in France was led by the king’s half brother, William Longsword, one of Henry II’s numerous bastards, who, in the beginning, did well in Flanders. (It says something about the old king’s rapacious sexual appetites that Longsword’s mother, the countess of Norfolk, was the cousin of another of Henry II’s mistresses and the daughter of yet another.) But things soon went badly. John had formed alliances with the rulers of Toulouse and Aragon, but the latter was soon killed and the former exiled. Otto the Emperor, John’s other ally, was then caught unawares by the French and the enterprise culminated with the disaster at Bouvines in July 1214, when John’s last hope of holding onto his continental empire faded. Longsword had advised against fighting at Bouvines, but the English army charged straight at the French—and were massacred. John’s grand alliance had failed, and pretty much ten years’ worth of money went up in smoke; Longsword was captured and while he was in a French jail, John tried to have sex with his wife. When the battle was happening, John was four hundred miles away in La Rochelle, unaware what was going on.