by Dan Jones
John’s loss of Normandy, however, profoundly changed an Anglo-Norman status quo that had existed for nearly 150 years. Forced to decide whether they wished to keep their lands in England or in Normandy, most barons made a choice in 1204 and threw in with one king or the other. They ceased almost overnight to become Anglo-Normans; and pledged their allegiance either as English subjects or French. The Channel became a divide, rather than a causeway between kingdom and duchy. A few great lords, like William Marshal, came to private arrangements with both kings for the security of their lands in either kingdom. They were in an equally ambiguous position: some had done homage to Philip for their Norman lands, and John for their English. It was impossible to go to war with either lord without betraying their promise to the other.
So when John arrived in Portsmouth to inspect his marvellous fleet in 1205, he found his English barons unwilling to come with him and fight. There was a furious argument at Porchester castle between John and Marshal. The king accused Marshal of acting treasonably in coming to terms with Philip Augustus; Marshal gave a grand speech in which he presented himself as betrayed by the king, and warned his fellow barons that the king planned to disinherit him, and ‘will do [the same] to all of you once he becomes powerful enough’.
Even if the rest of the barons had been prepared to trust in John’s character as a general, they now were deeply unswayed by the prospect of fighting either for Norman lands in which they had no interest, or against a lord (in Philip) whose wrath was potentially as great as John’s. As the mood turned sharply against setting out for the French coast, Marshal and Hubert Walter begged the king not to cross the Channel. Walter listed some practical reasons: Philip was massively more wealthy and militarily stronger; John had precious few safe-houses on the Continent and was relying on an alliance with Poitevins, who were a naturally treacherous race; the king should not leave England undefended when Philip’s nobles had designs on invasion themselves; and England had no heir should John meet his end on the battlefield.
It amounted to a mass mutiny, in the most humiliating circumstances imaginable. The whole invasion force at Portsmouth was now useless, for without the barons who were to provide leadership and their own private resources, there was no hope of retaking Normandy. John was beside himself with rage. The king put to sea for a couple of days, sailing up and down the coast in the fruitless hope that he might shame or persuade the barons into changing their minds. It was to no avail. Salisbury’s expedition from Dartmouth successfully crossed the Channel to reinforce the garrison of La Rochelle, but for the most part all the preparations of 1205 had come to nothing. Across the Channel Philip went about his business, going merrily into territories that his father could only have dreamed of visiting. The fall of Chinon and Loches in the summer meant that the whole of Touraine was now in French hands. It had been another disastrous year.
A Stay-at-Home King
Even if it would scarcely have been possible to repeat the fiascos of 1204 and 1205, it is still to John’s credit that in 1206 he experienced an upturn in his fortunes. Instead of being cowed by the failure of his Norman invasion, John adjusted his sights. He spent the winter of 1205 sending chests of treasure to various potential allies across the Channel, and the spring of 1206 touring the north of England attempting to personally charm the barons of Yorkshire, Cumberland, Cheshire and Lancashire into supporting his military endeavours. In April 1206 another large expedition set off from England, this time aiming for the site of Salisbury’s 1205 mission: Poitou. John was at the head of it, and he was supported far more strongly by the barons he had either bribed or coaxed into following him. Arriving in La Rochelle in June, he led an army around the lower coastal regions of France, recovering parts of Aquitaine. He regained the Saintonge, strengthened his hand in his wife’s county of Angoulême, and reversed the gains that Alfonso VIII had made in Gascony. Towards the end of summer, the king allied himself with a powerful Poitevin baron, Aimery de Thouars, and marched north towards Anjou. Here they received word that Philip II – who had preferred to assure himself that Normandy was secure rather than concerning himself about Aquitaine – was raising an army of his own. Not willing to let a whole summer’s gains be undone by defeat, John backed away, and in October 1206 agreed a two-year truce with Philip.
It had been a moderately successful campaign. Still, though, the fact remained that the Plantagenet dominions ruled over by John amounted to England, the Channel Islands and a reduced coastal rump of Aquitaine – a mere slice of the great territories he had inherited. He was a king of England who, unlike the two monarchs he succeeded, would be forced to remain in his kingdom. As John learned to rule England, the realm discovered what it meant to have a characteristically restless, aggressive Plantagenet king permanently in its midst.
They found him a busy overlord. John wanted to know his kingdom intimately, and he was always on the move. This was not entirely novel, for itinerant travel was a matter of kingly necessity and very few areas of the English countryside could accommodate a king and his vast court for long. But even by royal standards, John was a restless traveller. He rarely stayed anywhere for more than a few days. He picked his way from royal castles and hunting lodges, to palaces and manors, resting awhile before moving immediately on.
The sight of John on the move would not have been wildly different from that of his father. John cared more for luxury, finery and display than Henry II had. He took regular baths in an age where this was not the general fashion, and the bachelors of his household were given to displays of courtly ostentation. Yet fundamentally the king’s household on progress was still a cavalcade of carts and packhorses, stretching out for hundreds of yards as the court rumbled through the countryside. Everything was portable: finely dressed servants carried bed linen and precious plate, heavy pouches of coin, the valuable books John enjoyed reading, and well-guarded caches of precious jewels. John’s chapel could be unpacked by the roadside, as could his dining room. The great snaking caravan train moved twenty or so miles every day, churning up muddy roads and drawing open-mouthed spectators as John called on visitors and enjoyed their generous hospitality.
John’s royal progress was a magnificent spectacle. And while its presence would have lain heavy on the shoulders of the Englishman who had to bear the burden of royal hospitality, the approach of the royal court also came with some advantages. For under John the court was not simply a travelling circus. It was also a judicial circuit.
Everywhere he went, John thought of justice. His tutor as a young man had been Henry II’s chief justice and one of the leading legal thinkers of his age, Ranulf Glanvill. As a result, John was deeply interested in the role of a king as supreme judge. He engaged with the law and sat in legal judgement with unprecedented zeal. He took a close personal interest in the smallest, meanest cases. And his law was much in demand. He travelled with professional justices in tow, and sat with them as they heard the cases that were waiting in the localities for the king’s law to arrive and decide them.
We have some extraordinary images of John’s court touching the lives of ordinary people in the early thirteenth century. The beneficiaries of his judicial intervention were many and varied. He gave reprieve to a little boy who had accidentally killed a friend by throwing a stone. He dismissed a case against a mentally deficient man who had confessed to a crime of which he was clearly innocent. He threw himself into the minutiae of cases that touched in only the slightest degree on his royal prerogative or interest. He was concerned for the plight of the poor.
All of this was highly unusual, and marked a significant departure from the behaviour of previous English kings. Henry II had been a great legalist, but he was interested primarily in devolving the judicial aspects of English kingship during his long absences. Richard, simply by virtue of the fact that he spent almost no time in England during his reign, had followed suit. By contrast, King John was fascinated by the great machine of Plantagenet law and government. He was a hands-on king – closely
involved in day-today governance and keen to intervene in person wherever he could, from disputes between the great barons to stone-throwing between boys.
Of course, John could not run government and the legal system single-handed. Hubert Walter, the archbishop of Canterbury and veteran administrative servant, had died from a septic carbuncle on his back in July 1205, and John had – according to several chroniclers – declared: ‘Now for the first time I am king of England!’ With Walter gone, the king gathered around him a new set of advisers and officials. Some were brought over from the lost continental territories. Men like Peter des Roches, Peter de Maulay, Falkes de Bréauté and Girard d’Athée were noticeable for their foreign names and manners, which reminded Englishmen that their king was not a native prince, even if he was now restricted to the realm. But there was not a wholesale takeover of government by foreigners. English-born men retained high posts, including the justiciar Geoffrey Fitz Peter, the treasurer William of Ely and the chief forester Hugh Neville.
After 1206 the overriding aim for all of those men, and for John, too, was simple. They needed to raise money. In order to regain what had been lost in France, John was going to require vast sums of cash, both to fund his own armies of mercenaries and to pay a network of continental allies to oppose Philip. It promised to be a more expensive task for John than it had been for any of his ancestors.
Both Henry II and Richard I had had an advantage in fighting their wars against the Capetian Crown: both were generally defending their lands, rather than conquering them afresh. The cost of manning Richard I’s defensive lines along the Seine and paying his allies in Germany and Flanders might have been punitive, but they were borne in part by Normandy and the rest of the Plantagenet dominions, rather than being subsidized wholly by England. This was a luxury John did not have. Any hope of the youngest Plantagenet regaining his inheritance had thus to rely primarily on his English revenues.
John set about the task of exploiting those English revenues with a vigour that was evident to all. The hostile chronicler Roger of Wendover spread stories that John was a tight-fisted man who gave lousy tips to those who helped him. This was largely slanderous, but it demonstrated the popular view that the king was a miser obsessed with scraping every penny from his subjects. For indeed, there were piles of pennies to scrape. Even after the exactions of Richard’s reign, England was a source of considerable potential wealth. As John travelled England he would have seen everywhere the signs of its prosperity. The early thirteenth century was a period of booming development in trade and industry, as well as monetary inflation originating in European silver from newly discovered mines, which had been flooding the country with coin since the 1180s.
In 1207 John made his first serious move to tap this wealth. He levied a thirteenth – a tax of one shilling in every mark – on the whole country’s movables. It raised an astonishing amount of money for the royal coffers: £57,425, or more than two years’ revenue. There had been a steady series of experiments with this sort of tax on goods, revenues, lands and property during the previous two decades, but the thirteenth was an extraordinary success, which emphasized both the wealth that existed in England and the Crown’s ability to tap into it through a well-organized system of royal administration. Although John did not know or plan it, the thirteenth was to form the model for the subsidy – the tax model on which all the regular income of medieval and Tudor England would be based.
But direct taxation of the wealthy men in England was only a part of the drive to exploit the revenues of his realm. For John, the most obvious way to accrue greater profit from kingship was through the legal system. In this, he used two interlocking tactics. The first involved the simple profits of justice. When Henry II had established a deep and penetrative system of royal justice and government, by which the royal law was easily accessible throughout England, and the role of the royal sheriff was the most important position in local government, it had not been done for the pure love of administrative reform. Rather, there was a clear understanding that justice was a profitable enterprise. The royal chancery made money from selling writs. The Crown prospered handsomely from the fines and forfeitures of property that were the result of criminal convictions in the courts. The eyres that travelled the country both restored law and order and brought in a great deal of money to the Crown, and the accompanying forest eyres, which aggressively asserted the rights of the Crown over the extensive forest land that stretched across England, were pure profit-making enterprises.
A whole series of forest eyres were sent out between 1207 and 1210 as John squeezed thousands of pounds in total from counties in which forest land had been encroached, or wild beasts hunted without royal permission. A total of £8,738 was brought in solely from forest eyres during those years – more than double what had been realized in 1198–1201. It was both a sign of the efficiency and extent to which the Crown could use justice to squeeze out profit, and a mark of John’s new-found determination to exploit his royal rights to new levels after the loss of Normandy.
The second way in which John used the law to profit was far more political, and would eventually cause him far more problems. He used it as a direct tool by which to both tax and politically control the great barons of England.
Justice in the royal courts may have been widely available, but it was also ultimately subject to the king’s discretion. To have the king’s courts launch an investigation into a private matter would attract a fee, and John was fully prepared to charge high fees. At every stage of a legal case, wealthy litigants could offer the king large bribes for favourable judgement or stay of procedures. A typical fee charged by John in 1207 was £1,000 and fifteen palfreys from one Gerard de Furneval for peace in a legal case being pursued against Nigel de Luvetot. Hundreds and thousands of pounds changed hands as litigants bid for particular outcomes to trials and actions. Not all of the proceeds of this reached the king directly – plenty was taken by his ministers – but there was a period of rapid inflation of judicial payments during John’s reign which amounted to a vast system of justice for sale. This was in some senses the way of the world, but the spiralling costs under John made it a more and more onerous system in which to operate.
Alongside this was a rapid inflation in the costs of what are now known as feudal incidents. England’s political society was built on a complex system of bonds between lords and their vassals, in a hierarchy topped by the king and his barons. In theory, the king guaranteed the internal and external safety of his subjects, and they honoured him with allegiance and customary payments for certain privileges. The most common of these payments at baronial level were for the great rituals of aristocratic family life: an eldest son knighted, a daughter married, or a son coming into his father’s inheritance. The fines – or reliefs – paid to the king for these privileges were held to be established by custom, and the king, in swearing his coronation oath to uphold the customs of the realm, had agreed to abide by them, or to keep within the bounds of reason when deciding who should pay what.
In addition to this, a king was also able to exercise certain privileges of kingship. He could auction off an aristocratic widow or heiress to the highest bidder, or else take a payment from a widow so that she would not be forced to remarry. A child who came into his inheritance before the age of majority (twenty-one for boys) would not be allowed to control his lands; rather, the king could take charge of them himself in the form of a wardship, or else he could sell the right to control and profit from a wardship to another of his subjects.
In the course of a lifetime, a great magnate might run up a potentially massive debt to the Crown for his feudal dues. Frequently, however, this debt remained notional, and it was never fully called in by the Crown. It might be paid in instalments, or not paid at all, depending on the king’s lenience. It was instead a form of financial bond between king and subject.
John, in his mood of financial need following the loss of Normandy, saw the system of fines and reliefs as a great
source of wealth and power. The generally accepted relief for inheriting the estates of an earl was £100. In some cases John charged seven times that sum. Moreover, he began to demand faster payment of debts – hundreds or thousands of pounds were now demanded in payment over a fixed schedule. The penalty for failing to make payments was the seizure of lands.
In 1207 the first major forfeiture occurred when John seized the lands of the earldom of Leicester, which had been vacant since the death of the 4th earl, Robert Beaumont, in 1204. Instead of protecting the right of inheritance through Beaumont’s daughter Amicia and her husband, John took the estates into his own hands and confiscated the revenues, citing as his reason the non-payment of debt. It might have been legally plausible, but if one of the fundamental duties of a king was to protect the property of his subjects, John had manifestly failed.
This, then, was the king that the realm of England came to know in the years immediately following John’s loss of Normandy. The systems of government did not change in any substantial way, but the demands of the king in charge of them grew very much more urgent. Nor there was any sign that they would soon abate. On 1 October 1207 the nineteen-year-old queen Isabella of Angoulême gave birth to a baby boy at Winchester castle. It was the first Plantagenet son to have been born since John himself, forty years previously. They named him Henry, after his illustrious grandfather, once lord of Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine and Aquitaine. There could have been no greater signal of John’s intentions: to raise the money he required to take back all that his own father had won. England had little choice but to follow him.