by Angus Donald
The history of King John’s rule is a perfect example of this serendipity. And it is no accident that writers from William Shakespeare to Walter Scott have been entranced by the tragedy of his life. John started his reign with an empire that stretched from the Pennines to the Pyrenees, and with the majority of the barons of England and Normandy prepared to support him. He had won the crown bloodlessly and, at Le Goulet in May 1200, he had signed what might have been a lasting peace treaty with his greatest enemy, Philip II of France. Four years later, John had lost Normandy and the bulk of his continental possessions; fifteen years later he was humiliated by his rebellious barons and forced at Runnymede to sign a charter guaranteeing their liberties. A year after that, England was invaded by a French army and John was hounded to an early death by his many enemies both domestic and foreign.
John seems to have been a deeply unpleasant man: deceitful, cruel, lazy, lustful, high-handed, suspicious. His character clearly inspired distrust and loathing in those around him, and his life should be a lesson in how not to govern a medieval empire. But he was also capable of flashes of brilliance, such as at Mirebeau, when his lightning march south at the end of July 1202 completely surprised his enemies and utterly shattered their forces. In fictionalising this extraordinary victory, I may have done John a disservice. The king deserves a lot more credit for this victory than I have granted him, for it suited me in terms of narrative to ascribe his inspired generalship to my hero Robin. But the truth is that, in one brilliant stroke, worthy of his dead older brother the Lionheart, King John ended up capturing his chief rival, Duke Arthur, and almost all his enemies in the south. If he had only capitalised on his stunning success, the world would have been a very different place today. But he did not. He vacillated after the victory at Mirebeau, and one could make a fairly good case for saying that his treatment of the prisoners he took there, many of whom were deliberately starved to death in English prisons, was the prime cause for the defection of his Norman barons to Philip’s cause and ultimately the loss of Normandy itself.
The storyline I have used for the death of Arthur, Duke of Brittany, is based on conjecture and tradition but little verifiable history. No one truly knows exactly what happened to him after his capture at Mirebeau on 1 August 1202, but we do know that John had him imprisoned at Falaise Castle under the guardianship of Hubert de Burgh. According to a Ralph of Coggeshall, a contemporary chronicler, John ordered two of his servants to mutilate the duke at Falaise but Hubert de Burgh intervened. The following year Arthur was transfered to Rouen and he vanished in April 1203. One account has it that John, when he was drunk and possessed by the Devil, killed him himself in the dungeons of Rouen and threw his body in the Seine. I have invented Hugo and Humphrey but John certainly would have had people around him of that ilk who would be prepared to do his dirty work. And it seems to me unlikely that he would have got actual, rather than metaphorical, blood on his hands.
The presumed death of Duke Arthur caused a huge scandal, which was cleverly exploited by Philip of France to his advantage, and afterwards the defections by the Norman barons increased in number and pace. If John was prepared to murder his own nephew, they reasoned, he would not scruple to deal dishonourably with any of them. In short, he could not be trusted.
As more and more of his vassals went over to the other side, John was forced to lean heavily on his mercenaries. As long as he paid them well, they could be trusted to hold Normandy for him. Robin’s role as a soldier-for-hire is based on an infamous mercenary captain called Lupescar (‘The Wolf’), who was reviled by the aristocracy not only for his low birth but also his men’s depredations on the Norman people he was supposed to have been protecting. John evidently did not care: indeed, he took protection money from the Abbess of Caen after Lupescar’s men despoiled her lands. In fact, John was wrong to trust his mercenaries: Lupescar was later tasked with holding Falaise Castle, after Hubert de Burgh had been dispatched to Chinon, and he surrendered it without a fight to Philip’s army after the fall of Château Gaillard.
The disastrous river attack below Château Gaillard in the autumn of 1203 was ill-conceived and overambitious, although I doubt it failed as a result of treachery. William the Marshal led a force of knights overland from Rouen to attack the French camp on the west bank of the Seine; the same night, a strong force of mercenaries, with a convoy of seventy barges of food, sailed down river to attack the bridge of boats. However, the leaders of the waterborne assault – they were led by a pirate named Alan, incidentally – miscalculated the power of the river, which was running against them, and as a result they arrived some time after the Marshal’s attack had been beaten off. The French were alert and ready, and lining both banks of the Seine and the bridge in great numbers, and they wrought destruction on the convoy and thousands of pounds of food and castle stores were destroyed or captured.
After the debacle at the bridge of boats, the fort on the Isle of Andely and the town of Petit Andely swiftly fell to the French, and their surviving inhabitants – many hundreds of them, possibly as many as two thousand – fled up the hill to the protection of Château Gaillard. Roger de Lacy let them inside; it was his duty as their lord to do so. But it quickly became clear that the French were here to stay and that the citizens of Petit Andely were eating through the castle’s provisions at an unsupportable rate. As related in this novel, the first batch of the Useless Mouths were ejected from the castle in November and, being mostly old and feeble, they were allowed to pass through the enemy lines. Likewise with the second group of non-combatants. But the tragedy of the third and final group of Useless Mouths is one of the most heartbreaking tales in history. Many hundreds of them were forced to spend the icy winter of 1203–4 on the bare slopes below the castle, where most died of exposure and starvation, watched over grimly by Roger de Lacy and their compatriots in the castle. Many did indeed sink to cannibalism and, when Philip returned to Château Gaillard in February of the new year, and took pity on them, the survivors gorged on his largesse with fatal consequences.
The methods Philip used to take Château Gaillard are largely as I have described, and in the same sequence. A causeway was built, at great cost to French life, leading up to the outer bailey and a belfry was used to attack its battlements. Later a cat was also used to undermine the walls and, doubtless after much bloody heroism, the outer bailey fell. The defenders then retreated to the middle bailey. Very soon afterwards, and perhaps the same day, the French, led by a man named Bogis, got into the chapel of the middle bailey (or possibly via the latrine below) through a window carelessly left open; and the opportunistic French let their compatriots in to the heart of the castle by dropping the retractable bridge between the middle and outer baileys.
Once the middle bailey was lost, Philip’s artillery concentrated its destructive power on the inner bailey with its extremely strong D-shaped bastions, and again mining proved invaluable in bringing the walls down. I have no evidence that a counter-mine was dug by the defenders but that was a recognised thirteenth-century response to the threat of mining and does not seem unlikely to me. After the fall of the castle, some commentators claimed that a traitor had been inside the castle plotting its downfall – for how else could the mightiest castle in Christendom fall? And I seized on this idea as a useful plot device. I do not know if there really was a traitor inside Château Gaillard but in the treacherous climate of the times, with knights and barons frequently swapping sides, it seems entirely possible. However, Sir Joscelyn Giffard, Tilda Giffard and Sir Benedict Malet are all fictitious.
The letter that King John sent to Roger de Lacy is real – although I have delayed its arrival at the castle for dramatic effect. The king wrote in November 1203, thanking Roger de Lacy for his good and faithful service and telling him to persevere in defying the French if possible but also saying that if he could not hold out any longer he should follow the orders of John’s deputies in Rouen. It is clear from the letter that John was not planning to come to the castle’s
aid. Indeed, he and his household departed for England before Christmas 1203 and never returned.
King John lost Normandy for many reasons but, I believe, mainly because he lost the trust and respect of his own barons. If his barons had loved him or respected him in the way they did his elder brother Richard – who knows, perhaps Normandy would still be a possession of the English crown today. But then England, and the UK as a whole, and the world, come to that, would be a vastly different place. With the loss of so many of his continental territories, John and his royal heirs and successors were forced to think of themselves as primarily kings and queens of England, rather than rulers of a vast French-speaking empire in which England was but one part. You could argue that cutting the royal continental links isolated the English and made England an independent entity. You might argue that it was the making of England. Indeed, if King John had not lost Normandy, perhaps all of us who live in the UK might now be speaking French.
Angus Donald,
Tonbridge, Kent, March 2014
Acknowledgements
Many people have helped me in the making of this book, far too many to mention here, but I would like to take this opportunity to thank a small number of them who have been particularly helpful.
I owe a great debt of gratitude to Ed Wood, my very talented editor at Sphere, and his colleague Iain Hunt, a copy-editor with a light but sure touch, who between them have helped me knock this book into shape with almost no pain at all for its author. I’d like to thank my brilliant and hardworking agent Ian Drury, and his colleagues Gaia Banks, Lucy Fawcett and the rest of the team at Sheil Land Associates for their unflagging support for the Outlaw Chronicles. David Stevens deserves praise for befriending me and showing me around some of the more interesting parts of Rouen. And I really ought to thank the young and keen French history student whom I met on a visit to Château Gaillard in 2012, who took me through the various attacks on the castle in some detail, and in very rapid French, and whose name I wrote down on a scrap of paper and subsequently lost. Merci bien, monsieur.
The people I owe the greatest debts to are the historians whose work I read and re-read, whose conclusions I adopt as my own and whose hard-won history I use as the clay for my Robin Hood stories. For anyone wanting to read more about King John and the battles for Normandy, I heartily recommend W. L. Warren’s King John, Sean McGlynn’s Blood Cries Afar and F. M. Powicke’s Studies in the History of the Angevin Empire. I would also recommend anyone who loves medieval castles to visit Château Gaillard, an hour’s drive south-east of Rouen. It’s a bit tumbledown now but enough of it remains for a visitor to marvel at the thickness of the walls and its commanding position above the Seine valley, and perhaps to imagine Robin and Alan standing on the battlements and looking down at their enemies below.