Richard & John: Kings at War

by McLynn, Frank

  Although Richard is often indicted for being an absentee king of England, there must have been many in the land who wished that John would spend more time in France, so that he did not have the leisure to oversee the Forest so ferociously; this was yet another consequence of the loss of Normandy. Once again the moral is clear, so evident elsewhere in John’s reign and so damaging to those who would rehabilitate his reputation, that his much-touted administrative efficiency was a function of his overwhelming greed.51 Although Magna Carta would later indict the entire Angevin attitude to the Forest, not just John’s, the Lackland monarch’s stance on the game laws affected not just the economy but the landscape itself.52 As far as the economy was concerned, it was a running sore with financial officers of the Crown that all questions about the administration of the Forest had to be referred to John or his chief forester, and even a minion as loyal as Peter des Roches chafed under this inflexible regime.53 For yeomen and local lords the main grievance was ‘the law’s delays’. The bureaucracy associated with the Forest Laws was fearsome, and the petty frustrations legion: one had to attend forest courts under the ‘guilty until proved innocent’ dispensation, even while the king acted as a fetter on economic development by preventing the cultivation of virgin land or the improvement of one’s existing plot. But what united all the critics - clergy, barons, peasants - was the perception that the Forest statutes were a travesty of real law. Henry II’s treasurer Richard FitzNigel had long ago zeroed in on this crucial issue: ‘The whole organisation of the forests, the punishment, pecuniary or corporal, of forest offences, is outside the jurisdiction of the other courts, and solely dependent upon the decision of the king, or of some officer specially appointed by him . . . The Forest has its own laws based, it is said, not on the common law of the realm, but on the arbitrary decision of the ruler; so that what is done in accordance with that law is not called “just” without qualification but only “just according to forest law”.’54 In a context like this, it is easy to see how the legend of Robin Hood arose.

  John, like his father and like Emperor Frederick II (stupor mundi) but unlike his brother Richard and his son, the future Henry III, was besotted with hunting and the chase. His interest extended to all wild animals, and especially wolves, which still roamed England in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.55 It has been established from place-name evidence that wolves were common in Anglo-Saxon England, but the Anglo-Norman obsession with the Forest and the forest properly so-called, rapidly cut down their numbers. In the reign of Henry I there were specially designated royal wolf-hunters, who used traps partly to cut down on lupine predation against horses and sheep but also partly to swell the tally of wolf-pelts and hence the king’s prestige.56 Alexander Nequam’s view that wolves could be tamed and kept as dogs was very much a minority perspective.57 Yet hunting wolves was not a task for the unskilled or fainthearted and considerable financial inducements were necessary before England’s most dangerous animal (Man) would move systematically against the second most dangerous; the going rate under Henry II seems to have been three shillings a head for a wolf, but by John’s reign this had increased to five shillings.58 Where wolves were a menace to his favourite hunting grounds, as in the network of forests and hunting lodges in his beloved Dorset and nearby (Gillingham, Bere, Blackmore, Powerstock, Purbeck, Milcet, the New Forest and Clarendon), John was prepared to pay even more. In 1209 two wolf catchers were given fifteen shillings for two wolves taken at Gillingham and Clarendon.59 By the middle of the thirteenth century wolves were on the list of endangered species. Beavers had already become extinct by John’s reign, so that prized beaver pelts had to be imported from Scandinavia and the Baltic lands but, as if in compensation, the rabbit, originally restricted to Spain, broke out of the species cordon and reached the west and south of England by the time Richard was ascending the throne; the hare was already there, being a native of England. In John’s time rabbits were still a rarity: they do not appear as an item in a royal banquet until 1240 and continued to be a luxury food, costing four or five times as much as a chicken.60

  Mention of wolves brings one by an inevitable association of ideas to sheep. Owners of sheep were among the wealthiest people in England, which was why abbeys habitually kept flocks as large as 2,000. While skins could be used as parchment and writing paper and their milk for making cheese, it was sheep’s wool that was the chief source of England’s wealth. When the abbey of Melrose in the East Riding disgorged 300 marks for Richard’s ransom in 1193, much of it was as wool (the rest being plate or cash).61 Most of the wool was exported to Flanders where it was worked into cloth, and the English wool trade was a constant factor in Flemish politics; the Flemings’ motivation for joining the Young King in his rebellion of 1173-74 was the hope that if young Henry displaced his father he would let them have cheaper wool.62 Although the intrinsic interests of Flanders may always have been opposed to those of the Anglo-Normans and Angevins, the Low Countries depended on the import of corn and wool from England, so had limited room to manoeuvre. The Flemings’ dependence was not absolute, since the cloth trade could (and did) in an emergency use coarser wool from northern France, Scotland and Ireland, but for the production of the finest quality cloths there was no substitute for the English strain of sheep.63 The rotation of crops practised in the agriculture of medieval England involved three courses: in the first, winter-grown crops, such as wheat and rye; in the second, spring-grown crops such as barley and oats; and in the third, the fallow period, when animals would graze. The open-field system was often used, whereby arable land was divided into three fields, one of which would be fallow at any given time.64 In this way, even agriculture yielded to the pastoral priority, predicated on the realisation that crops meant survival but sheep meant real wealth.

  There is no evidence that John had any interest in animal husbandry, but there is controversy about the role of sheep in his economic policy and about the general trends of the economy during his reign. Two salient propositions have been advanced in support of a general thesis that the 1180s marked some kind of economic watershed. One is that the rising demand caused by a population reaching the limits of subsistence allied to the influx of new silver brought into England by the wool trade caused rapid price and wage inflation during John’s reign.65 The other is that the same period saw landlords beginning to produce for external markets rather than local consumption and thus starting to concentrate on wool and grain for export.66 Against this is the view that true economic take-off, with the accompanying inflation, occurred only after 1220. Counterbalancing a natural inflationary tendency were John’s exactions - the surpluses he extracted really were massive, and his revenue in 1211 was six times what he had received in 1199 - which had a deflationary effect and thus brought the economy back to something like equilibrium. Indeed, many economic historians argue that John’s fiscal policies would have been even more deflationary but for an increase in the velocity of circulation of coinage and the growth in population.67 This, in turn, involves the vexed question of population levels in early thirteenth-century England. Some authorities put the figure as low as two and a half million, but it is probable that there were already that number of inhabitants of England at the time of Domesday Book in 1086, and that by 1215 the figure was at least three and a half million and possibly as great as five million. On this view the Black Death was the great divider. By 1300 England had a population of six million - as many as in the eighteenth century - but in the years 1377-1540, plague and pestilence held the numbers at Domesday levels.68 Summing up on economic trends during John’s reign, it is probable that the switch to a market economy was more gradual than the ‘1180 watershed’ school contends, and that there was too much uncertainty in the years 1199-1216 for a smooth switch to production for export markets; this is to leave on one side the debate about whether inflation is always the prime motor of an economy. The sagest conclusion is that John’s economic problems did not come from inflation but from the tax burdens h
e imposed to build up a war chest.69 As the economic historian John Bolton (arguing that economic take-off occurred after John’s death) has commented: ‘Henry III’s military ineptitude, indeed his general ineptitude and resistance to royal exactions in his reign, may have been just what an uncertainly expanding and commercialising economy needed.’70

  John’s lust for money and his personal interventions always had a distorting economic effect even when, on paper, his projects were commendable. A very good example is provided by his attitude to urban development, and once again we see him continuing traditional Angevin policies. Between 1066 and 1235 more than 125 towns were founded in England. A miscellaneous list produces the following: Arundel, Boston, Chelmsford, Devizes, Egremont, Harwich, Hull, King’s Lynn, Morpeth, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Okehampton, Portsmouth, Reigate, Salisbury, Truro, Uxbridge, Watford and Yarmouth (Isle of Wight). This was the most important historical era for new towns and cities until the Industrial Revolution. Between 1180 and 1230 fifty-seven new towns were founded, many of them in John’s reign.71 John’s most famous creation was Liverpool, on an empty site on his own demesne. The letter patent, creating this new borough, was issued on 27 August 1207. All who took up the king’s offer of plots of land in the new town were exempt from labour services and many tolls, dues and other taxes, and were allowed to have their own ovens and handmills, instead of having to use the feudal lord’s for a fee; additionally, John undertook to build a castle and a chapel.72 There was no largesse or generosity about John’s actions. He liked to found new towns so that he could tax them. Although the initial privileges seemed generous, the burghers soon found that there were hidden snags. All markets and fairs, which arose naturally if the settlement was a success, required a royal charter, which had to be paid for; and there were further fees payable for the enfranchisement of serfs (villeins) or for the renewal of charters. Moreover, John liked to found his towns on the coast so that they could function as ports and thus be subject to import and export duties. He always valued his royal right of prise and preemption, which gave him first choice of all luxury imports and a free gift of wine; additionally he could charge fees for licences given to foreign merchants.73 In 1203-04 John found a new means of getting revenue, by setting customs duties at one-fifteenth the value of imports. He collected over £2,000 from Newcastle, Hull, Boston, Lynn (King’s Lynn) and Hedon alone; Boston paid 15.7 per cent of the total uplifted and Lynn paid 13.1 per cent as against the 16.8 per cent paid by London, the 14.3 per cent by Southampton and the 13.3 per cent by Lincoln.74 These ports were all close to the great medieval fairs and the areas that produced most wool and wheat. John’s experiment with urbanisation can thus be seen as barefaced exploitation, but at least one expert warns against a machiavellian interpretation, on the ground that the king rode a commercial wave but did not create it.75

  The rise of towns encouraged fairs and markets. There were only two markets in Oxfordshire when Domesday Book was compiled but a dozen by the 1220s. The requirement that markets had to be held on different days in different towns created a circuit, allowing merchants to buy in one place and resell in another, thus avoiding some of the tolls and taxes the new towns tried to impose on their trade.76 The growth of fairs encouraged foreign merchants to visit England, stimulated rural enterprise and encouraged the wider use of coinage in the countryside. Silver coins were starting to become widespread in John’s reign, as the money supply increased; this was a ‘spin-off’ of the discovery of new silver-bearing ores in the 1160s, in the Alps, in Tuscany and above all in Germany, near Meissen.77 Towns created entirely new social sectors: merchants, goldsmiths, clothworkers, weavers, shoe-makers, tanners, bakers, butchers. Forming themselves into guilds, some of these trades became so powerful that they were virtually independent of town authorities, which in turn caused jealousy and resentment, so that boroughs tried to deprive weavers, in particular, of their civil rights.78 Yet for all the new groupings that emerged, England under John remained an overwhelmingly rural and agricultural society, with nine-tenths of the population living in the countryside. The steepness of the social pyramid can be appreciated from one simple statistic: in a population of some four million in John’s reign, there were only twenty earls, two hundred barons and 5,000 knights.79 The historical records do not show John in any way interested in the plight of this vast majority of faceless toilers, the nuances of local custom, the relation of freemen to villeins, or the complexities of land tenure and the virgate (peasant smallholding). The lot of the peasant in thirteenth-century England was, to use the classic Hobbesian formulation, ‘nasty, brutish and short’. Surviving on strips of land while they owed feudal labour service to the feudal lord, the wretched of the earth would have impinged on John only as objects of curiosity when they occupied their minimal leisure hours with wrestling, cock-fighting, bull-baiting or (in the winter) skating on frozen lakes and meadows.80

  One important group he could never ignore, if only because relations with the Church occupied so great a part of his reign, was the religious. When John came to the throne there were around seven hundred monasteries and convents, housing some 10,000 monks and 3,000 nuns. The period from the death of William the Conqueror to the accession of John was the golden age of monasticism, with more religious houses founded than at any other time - nine a year in the middle of the twelfth century. 81 At the time of the conquest monasticism based itself on the rule of the Benedictines, which meant taking vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. In theory, no monk could own private property, have sex or raise any objection to severe discipline from a superior, including corporal punishment. The trade-off was security, the opportunity to gluttonise and the access to vast communal wealth. Monks were recruited as oblates - children ‘offered’ to the religious life by their parents, or as adults with a real or alleged vocation. For a family man to enter the contemplative life meant abandoning his wife and family to strangers. What most impressed contemporaries was the plethora of regular clergy. There were monks properly so called, following the rules of St Benedict, and there were ‘canons’ who followed the precepts of St Augustine and were more evangelical and prepared to engage with the world.82 There was also a reformed order of Benedictines, the Cistercians who were, as it were, Marxist-Leninists to Benedict’s Marx: that is to say, they accepted the basic rules of the Benedictines but added variations and refinements of their own.83 It was only after John’s death that the neat tripartite division into monk, canon and nun was further complicated by the addition of friars, members of the newly founded Franciscan and Dominican orders. Most contemporaries distinguished the regular clergy by the colour of their clothes. Thus the black monks were the Benedictines, the white monks the Cistercians, the black canons the Augustinians, the white canons the Premonstratensians, the black nuns Benedictine sisters and the white nuns female Cistercians. After the arrival of the Franciscans and the Dominicans there were, additionally, Grey Friars and Black Friars respectively.84

  Although monasticism was supposed, by definition, to be other-worldly, the great religious houses became economic and even political powers in the areas they dominated. The orthodox Benedictine establishments swam most sturdily into John’s ken, based as they were at Winchester, Canterbury and Westminster Abbey. The chronicler Jocelin of Brakeland, a monk of Bury St Edmund’s, reveals that the day-to-day concerns of the Benedictines were more worldly than they should have been: promotion, relations with the abbot, and relations with the civil authorities or with bishops.85 Both Richard and John had problems with the Benedictines, and in dealing with these turbulent monks Richard proved himself a notable diplomat and negotiator.86 The Cistercians lacked the pride and snobbery of the Benedictines, being prepared to take in ‘lay brothers’ (uneducated auxiliaries) to do the heavy labour on their estates and in general opting for a more austere lifestyle than the Benedictines. Mariolatry was their unique selling pitch, and a successful one, for it was to the Cistercians that would-be novices tended to gravitate. The growth of the Cisterci
ans in the twelfth century was spectacular. Their showpiece monasteries were the great foundations at Fountains Abbey and Rievaulx in Yorkshire and Waverley Abbey in Surrey.87 I have referred, semi-facetiously to the Cistercians as Marxist-Leninist, but there was something seriously communistic about their cell-like organisation. Every Cistercian abbey had a mother house, which in turn would have a mother house and so on, until the end of the chain was reached with headquarters at Cîteaux in Burgundy. It was the austerity and other-worldliness that impressed potential temporal benefactors and, before his clash with the papacy, John was an admirer of the order; he himself founded a Cistercian house at Beaulieu in Hampshire and, when locked in conflict with Philip Augustus, felt the need to justify himself to two leading Cistercian abbots.88