by Dan Jones
A Cruel Master
The Plantagenets were often likened to devils: kings who wielded immense power, but who could also be unnaturally cruel. In this respect John was no different from the rest of his family. Yet even by the standards of his age, the grip that the king exerted on his realm between 1208 and 1211 was severe and overbearing. During these years, as John’s confidence soared, he exerted his royal mastery over every aspect of life in England. As he matured as a king, John not only fulfilled his dream of amassing the greatest hoard of treasure held by any king of England before him; he also extended the power of the Crown over Scotland, Wales and Ireland, ruthlessly impoverished and exiled those baronial families who opposed his rule, extorted vast sums of money from England’s Jews and – most spectacular of all – faced down the pope in a battle for supremacy over the Church.
The period of John’s cruel mastery was heralded on 15 February 1208, when an ominous sign loomed in the sky. Men and women looked up with awe and foreboding into the darkness as, according to Roger of Wendover, the moon appeared ‘first of a blood red colour, and afterwards of a dingy nature’. It was a lunar eclipse, and like all celestial signs, it had a powerful effect on the medieval mind. The eclipse was seen as a portent of evil, and within five weeks the portent was fulfilled. The church bells of England fell still, and – thanks to a fierce and lengthy argument between the king and Pope Innocent III – the realm was placed under papal Interdict.
The disagreement between John and Innocent had fairly mundane origins, but it spiralled quickly into a matter of international importance. It concerned power, precedent and pre-eminence. Its effects reached down into the lives of every man and woman and child in England.
It began in 1205 when Hubert Walter’s death, shortly after John’s aborted invasion of Normandy, left the archbishopric of Canterbury vacant. In John’s view, the archbishopric was now in his gift, and he was determined that it should go to a man of his choosing: John de Gray, bishop of Norwich, an experienced legal clerk, judge and occasional diplomat who had served as John’s secretary and lent the king money pawned against royal jewels during the retreat from Normandy.
The election protocols to Canterbury were disputed, however, and John found that he could not gift such high ecclesiastical office without a fight from the Church. The chapter of clerics at Canterbury – who claimed the ancient right to elect the new archbishop – opposed Gray in favour of their own man, the sub-prior Reginald. In December John went in person to browbeat the chapter into electing Gray. When news of this reached Rome it enraged Pope Innocent III, a dogmatic, reforming pope who believed strongly that he had ultimate sovereignty over each of Europe’s kings. He overturned Gray’s election in March 1206, rejected Reginald’s candidacy and put forward his own candidate, Cardinal Stephen Langton. The cardinal was an experienced Englishman, a theologian and scholar with a pious demeanour, a talent for writing hymns and a reforming instinct that pleased Innocent. In Rome on 17 June 1207 the pope consecrated Langton as archbishop.
When John heard that Langton had been elected as his new archbishop, he flew into a rage. He sent furious letters to Rome, dark with promises to stand up for his royal rights until his death, and threats to embargo all travel to the papacy from his ports. When this made hardly any impression upon Innocent, John expelled the monks of Canterbury from England, declared Langton an enemy of the Crown, and took the possessions of the See of Canterbury into royal custody. Innocent responded, on 23 March 1208, by placing the whole of England under Interdict.
Interdict was supposed to be a grim sentence. It forbade almost all church services from being held, effectively withholding God’s offices from an entire people. Numerous European kingdoms suffered such a sentence during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, for Interdict was a standard weapon used in any dispute between a pope and a king. Innocent himself had previously issued interdicts against both Norway and France.
The sentence was indefinite, and could last as long as the pope’s displeasure prevailed. So from the spring of 1208, a real silence descended on John’s realm, as all church services ceased. The rhythm of life was suspended. Only confession, the anointing of the dying and baptism of children were permitted. Elsewhere, church doors were boarded shut and priests sat idle. Marriages took place in porchways, and the dead were buried outside the walls of towns, in ditches by the roadside, with no priest standing by. England was placed in a form of ecclesiastical Coventry.
John’s reaction was worthy of his father. At first he was angry: hearing of the Interdict was said to have sent him nearly mad with rage, blaspheming and cursing at the presumption of popes, swearing by God’s teeth that he would pluck out priests’ eyes and clip their false tongues. Yet John was also a pragmatist, and the day after the Interdict was proclaimed, royal officers swept England, seizing clerical property in the king’s name. Barns and parks, fields and fishponds: all were taken by John’s agents, leaving the English clergy not just idle, but impoverished. Sheriffs and administrators were put into place to manage the property in the king’s name, and county committees were appointed to assess clerical wealth and pay the clergy a small living allowance during their time out of work. Two weeks later he started permitting dispossessed clergy to buy back their property, on onerous conditions. Clergy who wished to have their lands and property free from direct royal interference were forced to hand over extremely large portions of their revenues to the king.
By these ingenious methods, John collected vast sums from the English Church during the five years of its estrangement from Rome, and enjoyed himself while doing it. Perhaps his most inventive scheme was to take hostage and ransom back his clergy’s illicitly taken wives, concubines and mistresses. Since plenty of churchmen had babies in their houses, it was a price that many of them had no choice but to pay.
It seemed that the sentence that was intended by Innocent to put the fear of popes into King John had in fact swelled the royal wealth. Yet one did not laugh in the face of the pope with impunity. The personal cost to John of his amused disregard for the Interdict was the most severe that the Church could apply to him. On January 1209 Innocent began proceedings to excommunicate him. By November of that year the sentence had been passed. It was now not only John’s kingdom but the king himself who was officially exiled from the Church.
To excommunicate a king was a very severe sentence, since it tacitly encouraged other Christian kings to attack England without fear of papal condemnation. Yet excommunication – a fate that even Henry II had avoided after Becket’s murder – seemed to do little to discountenance John. No invasion came. The worst that happened was a mass exodus of the English bishops, many of whom went into exile overseas. And even this was hardly a burden on John’s kingship – as bishoprics and abbacies fell into vacancy, so their profits reverted to the Crown.
So another sentence passed lightly over John’s head. After a while the only real effect of the Interdict and excommunication was a moderate inconvenience to ordinary Englishmen and a massive financial penalty on the English clergy. John’s income from the Interdict amounted to something in the region of 20,000 marks a year, perhaps as much as three times what was raised by the Saladin tithe of 1188.
As the Interdict crisis established John’s temporary supremacy over the Church, he was also vigorously exploring other ways to impose himself on others of his neighbours and subjects. At Christmas time in 1209–10 he turned his attention on the Jews. Since as a people the Jews held a monopoly on moneylending, they were a very small but extremely rich group within England. They were also, legally, the king’s personal chattels, and it was only by royal protection that they could live and work. John tapped their wealth initially with a tallage of 66,000 marks – a vast sum which was extracted with extreme prejudice. Throughout England, Jews of both sexes were persecuted. According to the chronicler Walter of Coventry, Jews were ‘seized, imprisoned and tortured severely, in order to do the king’s will with their money; some of them after being tort
ured gave up all they had and promised more …’
None of this was conceptually new. Previously, in 1187, Henry II had taken a quarter of the Jews’ chattels for a crusading fund. After Richard’s coronation, mobs whipped up by crusading fervour had burned and plundered London’s Jewry, leaving its inhabitants slaughtered in the street. But even by the standards of the day, John’s measures were harsh. He made heavy demands on individual Jews, and backed up the demands with horrible violence. In Bristol, one Jew refused the king’s demands. He was imprisoned and his jailers began smashing his molars out. According to Roger of Wendover: ‘the king ordered his agents to knock out one of [the Jew’s] cheek-teeth daily, until he paid ten thousand marks of silver … after they had for seven days knocked out a tooth a day with great agony to the Jew, and had begun the same operation on the eighth day, the Jew … gave the said sum to save his eighth tooth, even though he had already lost seven.’
This was a measure of the cruelty to which John could sink. The next year he began his most notorious vendetta of all: the hounding of the de Briouze family. This was a pursuit that united all of John’s instincts and policies: his thirst for wealth, his interest in establishing direct royal power over the Celtic fringe of Britain, and his fierce hostility towards some of his richest and greatest subjects.
William de Briouze was a baron of ancient Norman stock, whose royal links stretched back to the Conquest. His wife Matilda was also of noble lineage. Together, they built up the Briouze line into one of England’s greatest families, and established a power base in the Welsh Marches, where they shared an important role with men like William Marshal, earl of Pembroke, in keeping the native Welsh subdued and English power strong.
William had been near many of the important events of Richard and John’s reigns. He had served at Châlus during the campaign in which the Lionheart was killed. He had been a near-constant companion to John during the early years of his reign. John had farmed out Welsh policy to William and men like him, granting them baronies in Wales and the Marches and encouraging them to expand their lands through military conquest. Briouze had been granted landed rights around Limerick in Ireland, and paid a handsome yearly fee for the right to pursue an inheritance there. The family also held property in Surrey, Hertfordshire and Devon and two valuable priories seized under the Interdict. Briouze’s second son had been appointed bishop of Hereford. The result was that after a decade of John’s reign, Briouze was a very significant baron, who had acquired vast tracts of land, and many wardships, castles and manors. He had also acquired secrets, and his closeness to the king in Normandy in 1203 meant that he was probably one of the few who knew what had really happened to Arthur of Brittany.
By 1208, John had started to see Briouze less as a valuable servant and powerful subject who had been well rewarded, and more as a potential troublemaker who was providing less than his financial due to the Crown. In the course of his career William had, like most other barons, run up huge debts to the Crown. He had accrued large feudal fines and fees in exchange for his titles and inheritances, amounting to well over £3,000, payable in instalments to the royal exchequer. In March 1208 John began calling in the debt in its entirety.
According to Roger of Wendover, John’s demands for repayment were accompanied by demands for hostages. When royal messengers were sent to collect them from the Briouze family home, William’s wife Matilda, ‘with the sauciness of a woman’, sent the royal messengers packing with the shrill cry that John had done away with Arthur and would most likely do the same for her sons. According to Wendover, Matilda shouted that the king had ‘basely murdered his nephew … whom he ought to have kept in honourable custody!’
This was, to say the least, impolitic and it earned the Briouze family John’s undying rancour. For the next three years he foreclosed on the family’s debts and began to remove them from office and positions. In a public letter later written to justify his actions, the king explained to the realm that he was pursuing the family ‘according to the custom of England and the law of the exchequer’, but it was a campaign of sustained legalized malice. William de Briouze was sacked as bailiff of Glamorgan and replaced by a foreign mercenary John had brought back from the Continent. Castles at Hay, Brecon and Radnor were taken back into royal hands. On the pretext of recovering debt, John allowed mercenary soldiers to raid Briouze lands; he compounded the misery by sending the Briouzes a bill for the expense. The Briouzes attempted to retaliate by attacking the castles that the king had seized for them, but that simply put them further outside the law. John made life so dangerous for them that in early 1209 the family was obliged to flee across the Irish Sea, where they took refuge in Leinster with William Marshal.
Marshal was the earl of Pembroke, but he and John had never really been able to work with one another. Since his quarrel with John in 1205, Marshal had been out of favour with the king, and he was now one of a number of exiles from John’s court who, by the end of 1209, were living in Ireland. Marshal welcomed the Briouzes with all his chivalrous kindness, and others followed the example. There was widespread sympathy for Briouze on the island, and his family was sheltered by various of the great lords there, who attempted to keep him safe until peace could be made with the king in England.
John, however, was not in peaceable mood. He had no desire to be brought to an accommodation with the Briouze family. Rather, the fact that they had successfully become refugees from his law focused his mind on subjecting Ireland to stricter control by the English Crown. He would not tolerate the existence of a haven for dissenting bishops (many had fled to Ireland during the Interdict) and persecuted barons, and in the summer of 1210 he began to muster an invasion, amassing hundreds of ships at Pembroke.
News of the massive invasion fleet spread quickly across the Irish Sea. Some of the exiled barons made their peace before John arrived. William Marshal wrote that he ‘well understood what the King’s designs were, that is that his sole aim was to find an opportunity to do him harm, and without cause’. He crossed to England and submitted.
Marshal then accompanied John on his campaign in Ireland. The campaign pursued two main strategies. ‘He made and ordained English laws and customs, appointing sheriffs and other agents to govern the people of that kingdom according to English laws … After this the king proceeded in great force, and took several of the fortresses of his enemies.’ During a fearsome military progress that lasted little more than two months, John destroyed most of his enemies in Ireland and reduced the opposition to a rump.
The Briouzes were understandably terrified. Left with nowhere to hide in Ireland, Matilda and her eldest son fled from Ulster to Scotland. Yet there was no respite from John’s power. In August 1209 the king had marched a large army to the Scottish borders and imposed the humiliating Treaty of Norham on the ageing King William the Lion. Scotland was no longer a bastion of resistance. Matilda and her son were captured and handed over to the English king. William de Briouze, meanwhile, escaped to France and lived out the rest of his years as an outlaw – albeit one who now shared the full story of Arthur’s death with the horrified French court.
It was a measure of the Briouzes’ extreme fear of what fate would befall them in John’s hands that when she was captured Matilda offered the king the outlandish sum of 40,000 marks to ransom herself and escape royal custody. Yet John was not interested, for once, in promises of vast wealth – it was obvious in any case that Matilda did not have 40,000 marks to give him. She and her son were sent either to Windsor or to Corfe castle. They would not survive the year.
One of the Briouzes’ greatest crimes was knowledge. As a family they held the secret of Arthur’s death, and it was no surprise that they were terrified of meeting the same fate as the young Breton. Their concerns were well grounded. Matilda and her son never emerged from their imprisonment. Before the end of 1210 they had been starved to death in jail. It was said that when the dead bodies of mother and son were found, they were still huddled together against their c
ell wall. Matilda’s son bore tooth-marks on his body. Mad with starvation, his mother had tried to eat him.
This, then, was what happened to those who crossed King John. By the end of 1210 he had unambiguously stamped his might across virtually everyone in England. Silent church bells signified a godless realm under an excommunicate king. Toothless Jews and barons’ dead wives bore testament to John’s financial ruthlessness – a ruthlessness which had swelled the royal treasury with so much wealth that a national coin shortage was developing. In Scotland and Ireland there was awestruck respect for the might of the English Crown. In 1211, John would lead two massive armies into Wales against the dominant Prince Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, otherwise known as Llywelyn the Great. After a series of decisive victories, John imposed territorial losses and humiliating terms of peace on the Welsh. In Britain, if not in France, John appeared to be the mightiest of all the Plantagenets. As Walter of Coventry wrote: ‘in Ireland, Scotland and Wales there was no man who did not obey the nod of the king of England – a thing which, it is well known, had never happened to any of his forefathers.’ Unfortunately for John, the same fate that had abandoned his predecessors was about to desert him, too.
Beginning of the End
Peter of Wakefield was a Yorkshire hermit. He was famous in the north of England as a simpleton who ate a staple diet of bread and water, but who could predict the future. It was said that Christ had appeared to him three times: twice at York and once at Pontefract. The Saviour had taken the form of a child, held in the hands of a priest, who had said to Peter: ‘Peace, peace, peace’ and instructed him on the way to live a more virtuous life.