by Douglas Boyd
The revenues of the see of York and all the other vacant sees had been coming to the Crown in Geoffrey’s absence. So Longchamp peremptorily ordered the widowed countess of Flanders to prevent Geoffrey taking ship for England in any of her ports. His household was under no such embargo, and so were allowed to cross on 13 September, after which she shut her eyes to Geoffrey crossing alone and more discreetly on the following day. Landing at Dover in mid-morning, he was ordered by the water-guard to report to Longchamp’s sister Richeut, who was the wife of the absent castellan. Instead, Geoffrey fled to Canterbury and sought sanctuary in St Martin’s priory, where Longchamp’s men tracked him down and dragged him outside by his legs, with his head banging on the ground while he screamed excommunications on those who dared lay hands on an invested archbishop.2 Geoffrey was offered a horse to ride back to Dover, but refused to mount it on the technicality that it belonged to men he had excommunicated.
When news reached London that he had then been forced to walk 20 miles back to Dover under arrest, the bishops of England took this as an affront to their collective dignity. Prince John was hardly a friend of the Church, but took the opportunity at the council of Reading to side with them and the nobles who detested Longchamp’s rapacious demands. Knowing her youngest son well, Eleanor had foreseen this or a similar situation, and prudently obtained from Pope Celestine III the authority for Archbishop Walter of Rouen to summon Longchamp to account for his acts. The miscreant bishop of Ely was therefore summoned to the council from Windsor, one day’s ride to the east. Learning the strength of the forces arrayed against him, he turned tail in mid-journey and rode hell-for-leather to take refuge in the Tower of London.3 For this defiance, Archbishop Walter of Rouen excommunicated him.
Longchamp had ordered that the gates of London be closed against his pursuers, but the citizens ignored this, several thousand of them gathering in open ground outside the walls east of the Tower next morning, calling on Longchamp to step outside and defend himself. This he did astutely enough, warning them all in French, which most could understand, against John’s ambitions and the danger of treason if they supported him – for which they risked not only Richard’s temporal justice but also the sanctions of the Church so long as their king was on crusade.
His arguments were in vain. Two days later, meeting at St Paul’s, the Great Council listened as Archbishop Walter of Rouen and William the Marshal read letters brought back by Eleanor from Messina,4 after which they banished Longchamp and replaced him as chancellor with Walter of Rouen. Exceeding their brief, the council also conferred on Prince John the fine sounding but legally meaningless title summus rector totius regni or ‘supreme governor of the whole realm’, which purported to give him precedence over even the chief justiciar. Longchamp’s appointees were summarily dismissed so that new castellans, sheriffs and other officials could be sworn in. As its price for supporting the new administration, the increasingly powerful citizenry of London exacted a recognition of its status as a commune, entitled to elect its mayor, aldermen and other officers.
From the security of the Tower, Longchamp at first argued that surrendering his chancellor’s seal and the castles Richard had bestowed on him would be treason. He eventually gave in after long negotiation and was allowed to keep the castles of Dover, Cambridge and Hereford because they were so far apart as to constitute no collective threat. After giving his word that he would not leave England without permission, he delivered up his brothers and chamberlain as sureties and was escorted on 12 October to the same castle at Dover where his sister had imprisoned Geoffrey the Bastard.
Five days later, he abandoned his brothers to their fate, scuttling out of the castle disguised as a woman in a long green gown, a hood pulled over his face. Although this was a disguise in which his small and unimposing stature was an asset, fortune had abandoned him. Waiting on the foreshore while his servants negotiated the hire of a boat to take them all across the Channel, he was accosted and groped by a curious fisherman. His sex revealed, Longchamp was rescued by his servants, but on being questioned in English by a local woman and being unable to reply in that language, he was hustled away by a suspicious crowd and locked up in a cellar.5
The universal ridicule that greeted this escape attempt was thought sufficient humiliation for the bishop who had arrogantly even used the royal ‘we’ on occasion. Before the end of the month, Prince John gave orders that Longchamp should be allowed to leave the country. Instead of heading back to Aquitaine in disgrace, Longchamp followed the same path as the Plantagenet princes when they had fallen out with Henry: he travelled to Paris, where he was acclaimed with all appropriate ecclesiastical dignity – some said, in return for bribes.6 Perhaps bribery also had something to do with his ecclesiastical offices being confirmed by cardinals Jordan and Octavian, in the city on papal business.7 But when these two gentlemen dared set foot near Gisors, which Queen Eleanor still regarded as Plantagenet territory, she ordered the seneschal of Normandy to inform the prelates that they could travel no further without her safe conduct, which was not forthcoming. It was neatly done; in retreating towards Paris, Jordan and Octavian excommunicated the seneschal and his garrison, and placed the duchy of Normandy under interdict, but could not excommunicate Eleanor, who had avoided putting her name to any specific action for which she could be so punished.
Heartened by the cardinals’ support, Longchamp denied his own excommunication in England, excommunicating everyone there who had taken sides openly against him – with the exception of Prince John. Geoffrey the Bastard, in turn, excommunicated his own suffragan, the bishop of Durham, and Walter of Rouen escalated matters by placing Longchamp’s diocese of Ely under interdict. Even the bishops of England were unable to agree unanimously as to who had the right to excommunicate whom in these circumstances, which would have been comic if these religious spats were not taken seriously by the mass of the population.
The period of Advent leading to Christmas of 1191 thus saw entire counties in the Plantagenet domains on both sides of the Channel denied the sacrament. Church bells had been removed and laid on the ground and the statues laid on the floor of churches; weddings could not be celebrated; the dead had to be temporarily buried in unconsecrated ground, to be reburied in churchyards after the eventual lifting of the sanctions. The man at the centre of all this anguish had the nerve to attempt to enlist Eleanor in his capacity as Richard’s appointee, but without success. At Rouen, where she was staying at the time to govern Normandy, she refused to meet Longchamp on the grounds that it was not permitted for a Christian to eat, drink or have any dealings with an excommunicate. Instead, she went straight to the top, appealing successfully to Pope Celestine to undo the chaos due to his cardinals’ espousal of Longchamp’s cause.8 Visiting the diocese of Ely a few months later, she had Walter of Rouen lift the interdict under which the population was suffering.9
She was, however, still at Bures holding court for Richard’s Norman vassals when Philip returned to Paris at the end of December. Holding his delayed Christmas court in Fontainebleau, he was hailed a hero of Christendom, much as his father had been after returning from Outremer in 1149. Since Eleanor knew all too well the true story of the failed Second Crusade, this hardly impressed her, although she may have been amused by an alibi dreamed up by Philip’s spin-doctors on the Île de la Cité that the fall of Acre was down to him; and that his illness on crusade was caused by poison introduced into his food or drink by those enemies whose repeated treachery had eventually forced him to flee the Holy Land.10 As to who might have engineered this, there was only one answer acceptable on the Île de la Cité: who would seek so to injure a Christian monarch dedicated to the salvation of the Holy Sepulchre, if not the ‘crusading brother’ responsible for so many other woes of the House of Capet?
It is hard to see what benefit Philip derived from his sufferings and humiliation on the crusade, apart from some kudos for having obeyed the pope’s call to travel to the Holy Land and there risk his life. On his
return to Paris on 27 December 1191 he prostrated himself before the altar of the royal abbey of St Denis, adding to the holy relics revered there a curious collection he had brought back with him, including a stone which was said to have been used in the lapidation of the martyred St Stephen by a mob egged on by St Paul when still Saul of Tarsus, an alleged sample of the three kings’ incense, a reputed finger of John the Baptist and the manger from ‘Judean Bethlehem’. One can only wonder whether people like Philip – who was not a credulous believer like his father Louis – considered such objects to be genuine or whether they pretended to do so, either for the benefit of the unlettered hoi polloi and/or as a quid pro quo for the political and military support of their bishops.
The manger is perhaps the most blatant fake, in that the time Philip had spent in the Holy Land should have given him sufficient knowledge of its geography to know that the founding prophet of Christianity would not have been born in Judea, but in Galilean Bethlehem. The place name bet lechem simply means ‘house of bread’ in Hebrew, and five miles to the west of Nazareth, where His family were known to have lived in Galilee, was a place with that name, which was possibly the home of Miriam, the mother of the prophet. Almost certainly, she would have gone there to give birth, because her own mother lived there and it was known from the gospels that the family was not well liked in Nazareth.11
Philip Augustus took to travelling with a reinforced bodyguard and ordered his vassals to reinforce their fortifications, as though under a real and present threat from Normandy and Anjou. Suspecting this might be his preparation for a pre-emptive strike, Eleanor in turn ordered similar precautions on her side of the unsettled frontier. On 20 January 1192 Philip met the constable of Normandy near Gisors, showed him the settlement with Richard brokered by the count of Flanders in Messina and demanded the return of Alais with the castles that constituted her dowry. The constable replied that he had no authority from Richard to do this, and Philip retired with the threat that he would be forced to gain by force of arms the legitimate entitlement he could not obtain by negotiation.12 Elsewhere, the succession of Flanders gained him much of Artois, the Amiénois, Vermandois and Beauvais. Having lost so many of his father’s chief vassals to disease and combat during the crusade, he was determined that their successors would see him as a strong suzerain when they came into possession of their lands.
It was about this time that Eleanor learned Prince John was intending to do homage to Philip Augustus and assembling a small army of mercenaries, with whom to invade Normandy alongside a Frankish force – and, with Philip’s approval, be declared the new duke of Normandy after annulling the marriage to Isabel of Gloucester and marrying Alais.13 Eleanor could have withdrawn to the safety of Poitou and Aquitaine, but her instinct was to attack fast. Prince John may have believed that Philip would install him as duke of Normandy and then quietly retire, but Eleanor had no illusions that Frankish incursions would stop there; having transgressed against the Peace of God once, Philip would have nothing to lose by moving against all the other Plantagenet possessions, province by province.
To nip the trouble in the bud, she moved with the same speed for which Henry II had been famous, defying the elements in yet another winter crossing of the Channel. Landing at Portsmouth, she did not head for nearby Southampton, where Prince John was assembling his forces, rightly reasoning that he was no threat at all, if deprived of the sources of his wealth. She therefore convened in Windsor, London, Oxford and Winchester a series of meetings of the Great Council.14 The magnates had stood aloof from John’s collusion with Philip after being promised by him that their own fiefs in Normandy would be safe. Showing that she had nothing to learn from the bishops when it came to arguing the dialectic, Eleanor invoked the Peace of God that protected Richard and his possessions while he was still on crusade and gave them a foretaste of his wrath when their rightful king returned and called them to account for their actions in his absence.
This redoubtable woman old enough to be their mother – in some cases, their grandmother – literally put ‘the fear of God’ into them, after which they agreed to threaten John with the confiscation of all his extensive English possessions, should he cross the Channel and join forces with Philip. Sulkily, he dismissed his mercenaries and retired to his castle at Wallingford. Eleanor’s political coup was a masterly and bloodless solution to a situation that could have cost thousands of lives. Or so it seemed, until the game was changed by the reappearance on the board of a piece everyone had thought out of play: Longchamp crossed to Dover and, safe within its castle, declared himself still bishop of Ely and chancellor. Baffled, the magnates now sought to invoke Prince John’s powers as the nominal ‘supreme governor’ to rid themselves of Longchamp once and for all, but Richard’s frustrated and sulky brother demanded a higher price for his cooperation than the £700 in silver which – so he said – Longchamp had offered to pay for his support.15
In the Holy Land, many of the crusaders whom Richard had brought with him were dead from one cause or another, with the more prudent survivors already heading homeward, in many cases financially ruined and with their health broken. Enmeshment in the internecine politics of the Latin Kingdom weakened the military effect of those who remained, although both sides in the conflict had their fanatics. The sufi believed that dying in battle with the Christians gained them a ticket to paradise; what has been called ‘the cult of martyrdom’ in the Christian military orders likewise encouraged heroic, although militarily useless, self-sacrifice. By now even the Templars and Hospitallers, whose orders existed for no other reason than to protect pilgrims and fight the Saracen, were divided on the course to be followed.
The 10,000 troops left behind by Philip Augustus under the command of Duke Hugues III of Burgundy16 were proving to be a mixed blessing because they had to be fed and equipped, for which Richard was relying on the arrival of the 200,000 bezants that had been demanded for the ransom of the garrison of Acre, and of which Philip had renounced his share for this purpose. Richard repeatedly pressured Conrad to hand over to him Philip’s hostages, but Conrad refused to obey. On 11 August an instalment of one-third of the ransom and the exchange of prisoners was offered by Saladin, but Richard rejected this because a number of the named Christian nobles were not included in this first batch. On 13 August he threatened to behead all his hostages if the full ransom were not paid swiftly. To this, Saladin replied that he would then do the same and kill all his Christian captives.
In the third week of August Richard was again living in the camp outside Acre, the better to hustle preparations for the continuing campaign, but he was up against problems. As far as he was concerned, the whole army was now under his orders, but the rank-and-file protested that they had no clothes, arms, food or water, nor horses to ride and carry their baggage on the long trek south that he proposed as the next stage in the crusade. This forced him to purchase provisions and have them loaded onto the ships that were going to accompany the thousands of men on the march. He also had to hire all the archers locally available, who were not prepared to undertake another campaign without additional payment.
In between the negotiations over the prisoners, he and Saladin exchanged gifts and small courtesies, but tension was growing. According to the pro-Richard chroniclers, on 18 August it was rumoured that Saladin had summarily beheaded his Christian prisoners. That same day, Richard launched a savage assault on the Saracen force, in which his army suffered many casualties. On 20 August, suspecting that Saladin’s delay in paying the ransom was a ploy to prevent the crusading army from moving on to its next objective, he gave orders for 2,700 of the captives to be executed outside the walls of Acre, sparing only 300 important persons for later ransom.17 Acting for the departed king of France, the duke of Burgundy did the same with all the captives entrusted to him, so that the vast majority of the soldiers of the garrison and about 300 wives and children were roped together in groups and, in open ground in full view of the Saracen encampment, attacked with swords
, lances, clubs and stones, their bellies slit open before the bodies were burned, in case gold or jewels had been swallowed.18
The scene is scarcely to be imagined: distraught parents forced to watch their children and friends killed before themselves being dragged forward to be slaughtered, the stink of blood, urine and excrement, the weeping and screams of terror and the blood-curdling groans of those not killed outright but beaten to death by executioners too exhausted to give them a clean end. Even for Richard’s soldiers, hardened by years of combat, it was tough work under the midsummer sun. Eighteen years later the Cistercian abbot Arnaud Amaury, who was leading the Albigensian ‘crusade’, was approached at the siege of Beziers by the mercenaries given the task of executing thousands of prisoners, and who pleaded with him to order an end to the killing because they were exhausted by the sheer effort of hacking and stabbing victim after victim. The lack of compunction, or any feeling of humanity on the part of the soldiers killing the garrison and civilians of Acre is summed up by the chronicler Ambroise, who refers to them as ‘these dogs who had shut themselves up in Acre and caused us so much harm’.19 In despair, the Saracens attacked, hoping to stop the killing, but were beaten off.
NOTES
1. Stubbs, W., Historical Introduction to the Rolls Series (London: Longmans, 1902), p. 227.
2. Gerald of Wales, De Vita Galfredi, pp. 382, 387–93.
3. Roger of Howden, Chronica, Vol 3, p. 144.
4. Benedict of Peterborough, Gesta Henrici, Vol 2, p. 212.
5. Gerald of Wales, De Vita Galfredi, pp. 410–11.
6. Benedict of Peterborough, Gesta Henrici, Vol 2, p. 221.
7. Stubbs, W., Ralph of Diceto, Opera Historica, Rolls Series No. 68 (London: 1876), Vol 1, p. 419.
8. Ibid, p. 420.
9. Ibid, p. 431–2.
10. William of Newburgh, Historia Rerum Anglicarum, Vol 1, pp. 266–7.