Lionheart

by Douglas Boyd

  8. Pipe Roll 7 Richard I, pp. 261–2.

  9. J.H. Round, Geoffrey de Mandeville (London: Longmans, 1892), p. 138.

  10. Roger of Howden, Chronica, Vol 3, p. 248.

  11. Also known as Longuespée. Some of his charters recorded in the cartulary of Bradenstoke Priory mention comitissa Ida, mater mea, which confirmed his birth to Countess Ida of Norfolk.

  12. Pipe Roll 6 Richard I, pp. 1–27, 213.

  13. Roger of Howden, Chronica, Vol 3, p. 251.

  14. Meyer, Guillaume le Maréchal, Vol 3, p.134.

  15. Ibid, Vol 3, p. 137.

  16. J. Gillingham, ‘William the Bastard at War’, in Anglo-Norman Warfare, ed. M. Strickland (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1994), p. 204.

  17. Ralph of Diceto, Opera Historica, Vol 2, p. 117.

  18. Ibid, Vol 2, p. 120.

  19. Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings, p. 206.

  20. Richard, A., Histoire, Vol 2, p. 293.

  21. Powicke, The Loss of Normandy, p. 102.

  22. Ralph of Diceto, Opera Historica, Vol 2, p. 119.

  23. Roger of Howden, Chronica, Vol 3, p. 257.

  20

  Good King Richard

  Eleanor’s court at Poitiers had never recovered from Henry’s purge of 1174, and she no longer had the energy to revive the great audience hall beside the Maubergeonne Tower where Berengaria held her lonely and inconsequential court when not in her own territory further north in Maine.1 The haven to which Eleanor retired in order to distance herself from the turmoil of the world was the monastery/convent to which Henry had sought to consign her. As her first father-in-law Louis VI had installed his chancery and war office in St Denis, so she betook her modest court to Fontevraud, midway between the Channel coast and the Pyrenees. On her way to Mass each morning, she walked over the permanent inhabitants of the abbey church and past Henry’s tomb with its effigy showing his restless hands stilled at last and quietly holding the sceptre of state.

  Fontevraud’s several thousand religious and lay inhabitants of both sexes, ruled by the abbess, included an upper stratum of noble ladies whose husbands had tired of them or found a more advantageous match, plus those who had chosen to put the Peace of God between themselves and a society that used their bodies, titles and possessions as the disposable filling in the sandwiches of treaties and alliances. To this elegant society Eleanor came as a natural queen regardless of the worldly titles she claimed. She remained at Fontevraud while Richard held his Christmas court in Rouen, but she was kept up to date by a stream of clerical and lay visitors from all over Europe.

  It is said that not long after that, while hunting in Normandy, Richard was recognised by a hermit who lived in the forest, who reminded him of the destruction of Sodom and warned him to give up his forbidden pleasures before the hand of God struck him down.2 Shortly after, at Easter 1195 he fell seriously ill and took this as a divine warning to change his lifestyle and acquire some merit in the afterlife, the crusader’s absolution being only retroactive. Although still as avid for taxes as ever, and as brutal against those he considered to have transgressed against him, he also started to perform good works like feeding the starving poor and compensating some religious communities for the treasures that had been seized to pay his ransom.3

  Hostilities broke out again when Philip Augustus defied a truce and advanced within 12 miles of Rouen, forcing a swift removal of Princess Alais to Caen and thence from one fortress to another as the tide of battle ebbed and flowed. She was now 34, an age by which most women of the time were dead. Having been handed over to Henry as Richard’s betrothed when a 9-year-old girl, she had never known freedom and was a stranger to her own family. Under the Treaty of Louviers, signed in January 1196, Philip gave back all the territory recently gained from Richard in return for the Vexin.4 He also recovered Alais and married her off to Guillaume de Ponthieu, whose strategically important domains lay between Normandy and the territory of Richard’s ally Baldwin of Flanders. With that, Alais disappeared from history, after spending a lifetime captive in the gilded cage of a family that despised her as she was used and abused in turn by Henry, Eleanor and Richard.

  In keeping with the clause in the Treaty of Messina that had caused so much trouble, Richard confirmed his nephew Arthur of Brittany as his heir, but when he ordered Geoffrey’s widow Countess Constance to bring her son to Rouen, she was imprisoned by the second husband Henry II had imposed on her, Earl Ranulf of Chester. Hastening to his nephew’s rescue, Richard found that he had been spirited away to Paris and was being brought up in Philip Augustus’ household with crown prince Louis. For Prince John, this seemed to augur well and gave him hope that he must now be recognised as heir to the whole Plantagenet Empire by default. He kept a low profile nonetheless – as well he might, having had his estates restored to him the previous year on condition of good behaviour.

  The widespread misery and suffering north of the Channel was made worse by Archbishop Hubert Walter attempting to satisfy the insatiable king by imposing a scutage on tenants-in-chivalry, or knightly tenants. He also introduced a new tax of 2 shillings per carucate for the socage or civil tenants, which translates as a swingeing imposition, a carucate being the extent of land a team of oxen can plough each season. Every freeman was also assessed as owing a quarter of the value of his personal property. The money-less Cistercian and Gilbertian monasteries forfeited wool-clippings from their flocks of sheep, and the great churches had to surrender the treasures that had not already been seized for payment of the ransom. A tallage tax was also levied on towns and the royal demesnes, as assessed by Hubert Walter’s travelling justices.5 This was the third time in his brief reign that Richard squeezed the fiscal resources of his island realm ‘until the pips squeaked’: first for the failed Third Crusade, second for his ransom and now to finance his wars in France.

  One in-built problem, as in many countries today, was the corruption of the officials collecting the taxes. Abbot Robert of Caen persuaded Richard that something like half the tax money was never handed over by the collectors, and that a strict audit of their accounts would double the revenue without further legislation being required. Sent to London in April 1196, he set about his task by summoning the sheriffs of every county to suffer a complete audit of their accounts. This was an open insult to Archbishop Hubert Walter’s authority and the zeal with which he had been serving the king. It may be coincidence that the abbot was taken ill while dining with Hubert Walter and died five days later. William of Newburgh drily commented that ‘those persons who had dreaded his coming sorrowed not at his going’.6

  It was not only in the country that dissent was growing. The emerging class of tradesmen and artisans in London also thought that they had to bear an unfair share of the burden of taxation and were seething with discontent. Life for them had become so grim that a charismatic crusader knight and London magistrate named William fitz Osbert took it upon himself to champion their cause, preaching passive resistance to the excessive impositions placed upon them, all the while protesting his loyalty to the king, so that he could not be accused of treason. In the fifth book of William of Newburgh’s Historia Rerum Anglicarum the chronicler treads a delicate path, disparaging fitz Osbert to demonstrate his own loyalty to the Crown. A sort of bourgeois Robin Hood, fitz Osbert claimed to be the saviour of the poor and declared that he would ‘divide the humble from the haughty and treacherous … and the elect from the reprobate, as light from darkness’.7 Drawn by this rhetoric, his supporters were said to number 52,000 in London alone and rumour had it that they had accumulated secret caches of weapons, and intended breaking into and robbing the houses of the rich to compensate themselves for the burden of taxation.

  Aware that he had made himself vulnerable, fitz Osbert went about surrounded by a bodyguard of followers. That spring, he travelled to Normandy to lay before Richard the plight of the urban poor who were bearing an unfair share of the crippling burden of taxes, and also to protest his personal loyalty. He plea
ded his case so well that Richard let him depart the court freely but, to seasoned courtiers who had served under Henry II, there was an odour of Becket’s demise in the air. Richard’s hands were seen to be clean but, after fitz Osbert’s return to England, Hubert Walter as chief justiciar ordered his arrest one day in mid-Lent when the former crusader’s self-appointed bodyguard was elsewhere.

  After one of the archbishop’s officers was killed in the arrest, fitz Osbert and some followers took refuge in the London church of St Mary le Bow, claiming sanctuary but also prepared to defend themselves vigorously. To force them out, Hubert Walter ordered the church to be set on fire. When fitz Osbert emerged, choking from the smoke, he was stabbed in the belly and arrested. Within days, he was convicted, ‘drawn asunder by four horses’8 and hanged at Tyburn with nine companions, his followers subsequently digging out so much ground beneath the gallows for souvenirs that they had to be kept at bay by armed soldiers.

  The bishops of the realm were horrified at Hubert Walter’s excess. His own chapter, whose property the church in question was, had long voiced disapproval of him and placed this act of sacrilege at the head of the list of his other misdoings to be attached to an indictment they were preparing for the pope requesting that the archbishop be divested of his ecclesiastical offices.

  The main reason why Richard’s avarice had spiralled out of control was his decision to replace the castle of Gisors, forfeited to Philip Augustus. Under the terms of the Treaty of Louviers in January 1196, both monarchs agreed that neither would fortify a limestone spur dominating the Seine Valley above the town of Andely, but Richard had no intention of respecting that undertaking. He tried to buy the spur and adjoining land, which belonged to the see of Rouen, from its Archbishop Walter. Well understanding the strategic importance of the site, two-thirds of the way from Paris to Rouen, where an impregnable castle could blockade river traffic between Paris and the sea and effectively deter any drive by Philip Augustus along the Seine Valley into Normandy, the archbishop held out for a high price in compensation for the revenues that would be lost and the damage that had been sustained to ecclesiastical property in the recent fighting.

  Castle building almost always displaced existing populations and disrupted the economic life of the area, such as food production and markets. Throughout the construction, quarries had to be opened up and operated; masons and other skilled artisans had to be hired from elsewhere; a local labour force had to be impressed; the new chapel might disturb existing parish demarcations; vineyards and fields were ruined and forests cleared – as at Bures, where Henry’s rebuilding had required the felling of 1,000 mature oaks. So, the archbishop’s demands were not unreasonable.

  As usual in any prolonged negotiation, Richard’s patience ran out before an agreement was reached and he began construction anyway atop the limestone spur standing almost 300ft above the river. The Pipe Rolls recording the expenditure for the work list all sums disbursed to quarrymen, masons, carpenters, smiths, diggers who hacked out the rock-cut ditches by hand, carters who transported the supplies to the castle and all the other skilled and unskilled workers. Since the rolls contain no mention of an architect or master mason being paid, it is possible that Richard laid out the ground plan and directed the work himself. Certainly he paid many visits to hurry the work along, in case Philip made a surprise attack before it was completed. Inevitably, many workers died in accidents during construction; the first deliberate spilling of blood occurred when three of Philip Augustus’ soldiers who had been taken prisoner were thrown to their deaths from the top of the walls in retaliation for a massacre of Welsh mercenaries in which they had taken part.

  In an attempt to win Pope Celestine III’s intercession in his negotiations with Richard, Walter of Rouen set out for Rome in November 1196, obliging Richard to despatch a delegation led by William Longchamp to plead his case at the papal court. Longchamp died en route while passing through Poitou early in February 1197 – unmourned by anyone in England except his brothers and his close friend, Richard’s chaplain Milo.9 This left Bishop Philip of Durham and Bishop Guillaume of Lisieux to continue to Rome and make Richard’s case there. Walter of Rouen had meanwhile issued an interdict against the duchy of Normandy which prohibited church services from being performed; contemporary chroniclers described unburied corpses lying in the streets of Norman towns. Richard defied the interdict, which was not lifted until April 1197 after he had done a deal with Walter of Rouen, ceding to him two manors and the port of Dieppe as part of the purchase price for the land.

  Letters signed by Richard when at his new castle bore the mention apud bellum castrum de rupe – at the fine castle on the rock. In la langue d’oïl or northern French it was called Château Gaillard or Bold Castle. At the same time, the walled town of Petit Andely was built on the riverbank below. Because of complications in the work and Richard’s haste, costs rocketed, and were eventually said to have totalled something in the region of £20,000, spent in less than two years. This was more than twice the total expended on castles in England during his reign.

  The design of Richard’s ‘Bold Castle’ is similar in some respects to the Angevin treasure castle at Chinon, built by Henry II half a century earlier, which also stands on a promontory overlooking a riverside town, but this one was far more ambitious. It had three enceintes or walled baileys separated by dry moats. In the outer baileys were the stables, blacksmiths and armourers’ forges, carpenters’ workshops and storage space to stock all the food and other supplies necessary to withstand a prolonged siege.

  The castle incorporated all the latest improvements in fortifications that Richard had seen on the crusade and in Germany, especially the concept of concentric fortifications that had impressed him in the east. The gates were protected by towers on either side, from which attackers could be enfiladed, thus eradicating the blind spot immediately outside each gate. Earlier castles in Europe had hourdes or temporary wooden shielded platforms erected, jutting out from the top of the walls in time of war, from which archers could shoot down on attackers approaching the walls. These were vulnerable to missiles fired by siege engines. Château Gaillard was among the first to improve on this idea: its towers had a projecting top floor provided with machicolations or gaps in the masonry floor through which the defenders could shoot more safely. Virtually all the walls were curved so that the missiles fired by siege engines would tend to ricochet off instead of shattering the masonry, as happened with flat walls.

  The plan of Château Gaillard drawn by the nineteenth-century architect Viollet-le-Duc (plate 33) shows the innermost bailey and keep at the top or north-western end with the outer bailey at the bottom or south-eastern end. It is pentagonal and has five towers spaced along the wall, three of which are at the corners. The middle bailey is an irregular polygon whose walls are protected with many towers, the idea being to enfilade any attackers at the base of the walls. After little more than a year, the castle was nearly finished, causing Richard to boast of his ‘beautiful one-year-old daughter’, which he swore could never be taken, even if its walls were made of butter.

  In England, Hubert Walter had resigned his temporal offices in humiliation after the abbott of Caen’s audit, but was not long absent from the corridors of power, introducing a law establishing one uniform system of weights and measures throughout England, which was to last 800 years until Britain went metric in the last years of the twentieth century. For many years, Richard was credited with being a great lawgiver on account of some excellent and long-lasting legislation enacted during his reign, but these laws were enacted in his absence from the country, largely by Hubert Walter. Among his other laws was a requirement that, on his fifteenth birthday, every male must swear to uphold the law, to neither commit crime nor be accessory to it, and must join the ‘hue and cry’ pursuing malefactors in support of sheriffs and their officers. In their absence, every citizen was entitled to make ‘citizens’ arrests’.

  In 1197 Hubert Walter found the time to travel
to Normandy to serve as Richard’s peripatetic envoy, settling disputes with prelates and even arranging a truce with Philip Augustus. In November he was back in England, charged by his king to send 300 knights for twelve months’ service in the continental possessions or money sufficient to purchase the services of 300 mercenaries for twelve months. At a Great Council held in Oxford early in December he proposed to the assembled Anglo-Norman barons and bishops that they should furnish these men from their own resources, but the scheme foundered on the old argument that the obligations of the English vassals were to support the king of England in England and not across the Channel.

  Shortly afterwards, Hubert Walter forced a reassessment of all the arable land in England for the purpose of taxation using his newly standardised land measurements. Before the commission charged with enforcing that had concluded its task, however, the youngest cardinal ever to be elected pope began a rule of nearly two decades in Rome under the name of Innocent III. This vigorous and intelligent 37-year-old started as he meant to go on. Among the first of his acts was the restoration of the old prohibition on members of religious orders holding secular office. Hubert Walter immediately resigned the title and functions of justiciar and remained without secular responsibility until, after Richard’s death, he accepted the post of chancellor under John, to the general relief of the barons, since he alone could restrain the new monarch’s excesses. In this, he succeeded so well that, on hearing of the archbishop’s death in 1205, John was to say, ‘Now at last I am truly king.’10

  The confinement in Germany had slightly moderated Richard’s arrogance that had made him so many enemies before and during the crusade. It was there too that he first became Good King Richard,11 winning the hearts of most of the emperor’s vassals who met him. For this reason, they approached him now to resolve the knotty problem of succession when Henry Hohenstaufen died suddenly in Messina on 28 September 1197, shortly after releasing Richard from the oath of fealty given under duress at Mainz.