by David Boyle
How much was 150,000 marks? The exact currency stipulated in the agreement was silver marks of Cologne, the best and most reliable in Europe. This meant that the ransom was going to amount to just over thirty-five tons of silver. In English currency, even the initial downpayment of 100,000 marks was going to be worth £66,666 thirteen shillings and four pence (though the only official currency at that stage was the penny). This was an era when sheep cost a penny and pigs cost sixpence, where footsoldiers serving abroad for the king were paid twopence a day, and where the normal annual rent for cottages was sixpence a year. At that rate of pay, it would have taken the average footsoldier just over 32,000 years to pay the ransom on his own. The value of the whole ransom, £100,000, might provide you with the purchasing power of perhaps £2 billion today. But it is impossible to work out an exact equivalent, given that government in the twelfth century was so much smaller. The 150,000 marks was about three times anything the English government had raised in any previous year — and, of course, it had to be raised over and above the annual administrative costs of the kingdom. It was as if the current British government were suddenly expected to pay a one-off fee of over a trillion pounds, or three times their annual expenditure. It might not be impossible, but it would be extremely painful.
Richard's letter to his mother of 19 April, addressed to 'his dearest mother, Eleanor, Queen of England, and his justiciars and all his faithful men in England', explained that 'our dearest Chancellor, William, Bishop of Ely' — the indefatigable Longchamp — had arranged for his release from the dungeon at Trifels. It also set out the king's instructions for raising the initial 100,000 silver marks. England's administrative machinery swung into action, with a special request from Richard to the justiciars, which they must have read with a sinking feeling, to set an example by their own generosity.
The justiciars themselves were excluded from the business of collecting the ransom. The Great Council, meeting in the firstweek of June in St Albans, assigned this task to Hubert Walter and Richard, Bishop of London, plus William, Earl of Arundel, and Hamelin, Earl Warenne. Apart from the new Archbishop of Canterbury, the other three trustees were elderly and highly respected figures. They were also three of the only members of England's ruling elite who had managed to avoid being implicated in the deposing of Longchamp as chief justiciar in 1191 — though Warenne's daughter was John's mistress at the time, which complicated matters. In recognition of the crucial role that London's financial centre would play, Henry FitzAilwin — the formidable first mayor of London — was appointed as the fifth trustee. Through FitzAilwin, the sixteen interlocked families that dominated the business of London — including the Farringdons, Bukerels, Basings, Blunts and Viels — were, in this way, drawn into the business of raising the money. When it was raised, the ransom was to be locked away in London under the seals of Eleanor and Walter of Coutances.
When Eleanor and the other trustees sat down to work out how to raise the money, the task seemed immense. It was widely believed that England had already been stripped bare by the Saladin Tithe and the heavy taxation to finance the crusade. Even the initial downpayment of 100,000 marks was a sum beyond anything that had been calculated before. They decided not to entrust the task to the exchequer, perhaps because of a conflict of interest between the demands of the ransom and the needs of the government, and set up a parallel organization called Scaccarium Redemptions or the Exchequer of Ransom.
The formidable English tax system owed its existence to Richard's father and his tireless devotion to the details of government, but the development of the new kinds of tax that were required — and which marked the future of taxation the world over — owed as much to the imprisonment of his son and the involvement of Hubert Walter's administrative wizardry.
What had once been fines for holding illegal tournaments or 'wastage of hunting' — cutting down forests illegally — became under Richard's rule simply fees paid to the government. At thesame time, the old feudal fees were still central, though cash was becoming increasingly important in the economy too. Customs like heriot — the right of the lord to take your best horse or cattle from your family in death duty — were turning into cash payments or being abandoned completely. Or merchet, paid to the lord on the marriage of your daughter. The old customs — that sowers were entitled to a basketful of the seed they sowed, or the cowherd to the first seven days of milk from a cow after it had given birth — were going the same way. It was a new economy of coins and money rather than hereditary obligation, and it was a source of some regret to those who saw the old world beginning to disappear in a welter of silver pennies and rising prices. A generation before, payment for a knight's fee — the land held by a knight in return for military duties — had been a simple matter of giving the time or, maybe, occasionally just paying the money. Now knights were being granted fractions of a knight's fee, and in practice these could only be paid for in cash. That was the background on which the trustees had to work out how to raise an unprecedented sum. They decided there were broadly five possible sources, and they decided to use all of them.
The first of these was known as scutage. This was the levy on anyone holding land as a knight, and was traditionally in lieu of military service in time of war. Knights owed forty days a year in military support or training, and for the ransom — which was a defence of the king, after all — this was set at twenty shillings per knight's fee.
The second was an early form of income tax, which took a percentage of revenues and movable property. This tax represented the future, and had been developed by Henry's brilliant exchequer officials Nigel of Ely and his son Richard FitzNigel. The Saladin Tithe had set up mechanisms for assessing it, based on local juries who would work out what their neighbours owed. The ransom tax was set at a quarter of the annual income and a quarter of the movables of every freeman, above the rank of villein. In the case of the much poorer parish clergy, without any obvious means of earning money, it was set at a tenth.
The third source was from the churches and abbeys, which were asked to hand over all their gold and silver. Or, in the case of monastic orders that were theoretically forbidden gold and silver — like the Cistercians — the proceeds of their wool output for the year, their most substantial realizable asset. This was intended as a loan: the Exchequer of Ransom promised that all gold and silver plate would eventually be paid for, and in fact this promise was kept in 1195. Eleanor had the right to claim 10 per cent of everything that was paid towards the ransom, which she sensibly refused to exercise. But she did occasionally intervene to rescue particularly precious pieces of Church treasure — like the golden cup belonging to the monks of Bury St Edmunds, which she arranged to be returned to the abbey. Treasure from England's churches would not be taken again until the reign of Henry VIII.
The fourth source of money was a direct appeal to the loyalty of Richard's office holders at every level of society. Lists of these donors were sent regularly to the king in captivity. Even William the Lion, the king of Scots, sent 2,000 marks. It was made known that the most generous of them all had been Richard's close friend Baldwin of Bethune, his companion on the exhausting journey through central Europe, who had been arrested in Friesach but was now home again. Even the poor were asked to donate what they could. 'No subject, rich or poor, was overlooked,' wrote the chronicler William of Newburgh.
Finally, there were the financiers. Mayor FitzAilwin imposed a special tax on London for the ransom, but the bulk of this demand fell on the Jewish community, many of them among the wealthiest people — though also the most oppressed — in England.
We are in sensitive territory here. Jews had been under the 'special protection' of kings since the days of Charlemagne, but were banned from nearly all professions except moneylending, which was also forbidden to Christians under canon law. It is a myth that Jews were the only bankers in England. The Templars and Lombards were beginning to rival the Jewish bankers as financiers to the nobility, though it is hard t
o tell because most loans to the king were not included in the official balance sheets, and wereexcluded from the Pipe Rolls that recorded most of the other financial transactions of government. But there is no doubt that, despite their precarious position in society, some of the Jewish community were extremely wealthy, representing — or so it was believed — up to a third of the movable wealth of the nation.
But this was the relatively tolerant twelfth century, and the Jewish community, while not exactly integrated into society, had been involved in finance at every level, as well as their own academic and literary life. But it was a precarious tolerance, as they discovered in the terrible events after Richard's coronation, when one of the most brilliant rabbis in Europe —Jacob of Orleans — was killed after being caught up in the post-coronation massacre in London. But there was no doubt that one of the main reasons for the royal protection of the Jewish community was that princes required the services of generous bankers. When they deemed it appropriate, they also felt they had the right to exact considerably more than they would from their Christian subjects. Only a few years before, in 1185, the money owed to the richest man in England, the financier Aaron of Lincoln, was simply seized by the crown when he died. The first proceeds of this and his liquid wealth were sent over to Normandy to help in the military stand-off with Philip Augustus in February 1187, and the whole amount was lost when the vessel carrying it sank in a storm somewhere between Shoreham and Dieppe.* The danger was that, at times of economic difficulty — when popular discontent focused on the activities of bankers, as it has from time to time throughout history — it was convenient to direct that rage at the Jewish community, already the subject of such discrimination, and their opulent houses so obvious in the heart of the financial districts of most of the biggest cities.
There were special laws forbidding the charging of interest over 43 per cent, though most people were paying between 10 and20 per cent a year. This was still a sizeable sum and there had also been an explosion of borrowing in the years leading up to the ransom, as many people borrowed small sums — sometimes for pilgrimages, sometimes to go on crusade — often from their local abbey, though often actually managed on their behalf by experienced Jewish financiers. The anti-Semitism stirred up at the time of Richard's coronation was partly the result of religious mania before a crusade, but partly — especially in the case of the outrage in York — fuelled quite deliberately by minor aristocratic families who were heavily in debt. The culmination of the 1190 murders in York was the ritual burning of the debt bonds in the nave of York Minster, lit with a flame from the candles on the high altar.
It seems likely that a special tax of 3,000—5,000 marks was earmarked as the Jewish contribution to the ransom — for the time being. Richard's companion from the shipwreck, Philip of Poitou, escorted the wealthiest Jewish financiers of Winchester to London, presumably to help them lend further large sums. There may also have been a special tax on gold, which would have hit the goldsmiths and early bankers particularly hard. It was a dangerous moment for them. They had to be seen to be playing their part in raising the ransom. But if they were forced to pay too much, and found themselves having to call in loans as a result, the riots of 1189-90 might be unleashed again on a wider scale, and the whole focus of frustration at the enormous tax burden would be directed at them.
The major administrative burden of the ransom fell on the bishops in the case of raising the money from the clergy, and on the sheriffs for everyone else, along with their usual duties of revenue collection, writs, juries, prisons and arranging for visits by the justices. But the engines of English administration were soon grinding away. The local juries were meeting, and the bailiffs were at work. Soon the accounts of the ransom payments — long since lost — must have been recorded on pipe rolls, sewn together at the head like the great roll of the exchequer. The ransom office organized itself in parallel to the exchequer, using a great cloth in theform of a chess board — a form of abacus — across which sheriffs from every county were expected to justify their accounts.
These accounts were also recorded using tally sticks, nine inches of wood — usually hazel — with the big numbers recorded in different sized and shaped notches on one side, and the small numbers in the same way on the other. Once the sum was agreed, the tally stick was split in two, then half was given to the sheriff as a receipt and half kept as evidence of payment, with the name written across the break so that it would match if ever it had to. One reason why England was better able to afford the ransom than contemporaries might have expected was that — for the first time in history — it was beginning to suffer the first signs of serious inflation. The replacement of all those feudal customs and obligations with silver pennies, and the unprecedented flood of coinage from all over the world to pay for English exports, had meant that there was beginning to be too much money in circulation chasing too few goods — the classic recipe for rising prices. It was the only region of Europe that was affected in this way. Since the 1160s, in the lifetime of the king, some agricultural prices had risen by about 130 per cent. Oxen, which had cost three shillings in the 1170s, were now priced at double that. Wheat was over two and a half times as expensive. Knights were now paid twice what they had received a generation before.
The English were encountering this phenomenon for the first time and had little idea what was causing the prices to rise. But for landlords who were receiving fixed rents from their tenants — as many of them were — this was about to be a serious problem. Increasingly and inexorably, their incomes were beginning to dwindle compared to the prices they had to pay. Nearly everyone else in this overwhelmingly rural society was producing food of some kind, and their incomes were rising, and then being gobbled up by rising rents. This burgeoning inflation would be the great driver of the process that was also ending feudal payments in peppercorns or crops, and demanding higher and higher rents in cash, and it would continue for over a century. With rising prices, rising rents and loans called in to pay for the ransom, it was also adangerous period for those small artisans and farmers on whom the burden of the ransom would eventually fall.
Much of the silver was paid in the form of treasure that was melted down into ingots, but a sizeable proportion came in silver coins. These could have been from anywhere in the world, but were mainly the new silver pennies instituted by Henry II's mint master Isaac the Jew, who was immortalized rather unflatteringly as a character in Sir Walter Scott's novel Ivanhoe*These standard coins were made of 92.5 per cent pure silver, known later as 'the ancient right standard of England', which survived until the 1920s. Each coin, even in Richard's reign, carried a simple picture of a bearded monarch and the legend HENRICVS. They were reliable and widely copied around Europe.
As this money poured in all over the country, under the watchful eye of Eleanor and her officials, it was making its way by cart under armed escort to London. From there it was taken to St Paul's Cathedral, where it was put into massive chests and locked in the crypt — the venue for London's triannual folkmoot in bad weather — near the tomb of Ethelred the Unready, under heavy guard, and sealed with the seals of Walter of Coutances and Eleanor herself It was yet more recognition of the financial status of London.
St Paul's was not quite the unusual choice it might seem, because, as one of the largest buildings in the world, it was the social, political and administrative centre of London. The St Paul's Cross outside the cathedral, with its banks of seats around it, had been the venue for the Folkmoot that had decided the fate of Longchamp in 1191. The bell towers at the west end of the cathedral were used as prisons. The vaults alongside those which held the chests of silver were rented out, one to a local carpenter, another to a wine merchant. Behind the high altar, the jewels on St Erkenwald's tomb were supposed to cure eye problems andwere used for that purpose. The foot of the first prebendary of Islington, sculpted on the base of one of the main pillars, was the standard measure of twelve inches used by the city. The nave above the silver
— still unfinished — echoed to the sound of hundreds of conversations and the clack of hurrying feet as the city did its business. The font was becoming used as a counter for settling debts. There were drunkards sleeping on benches by the door of the choir. One pillar near the great west door was used by people looking for work. The south aisle of the nave was used by moneylenders, the north aisle for selling horses, and the central nave was known as the venue for gossip.* Old St Paul's was already the third cathedral on the site, and was considerably larger than the later building by Sir Christopher Wren, and it was what it had traditionally always been: the beating heart of London.†
But while the silver was mounting up, there remained the question of the hostages whom Richard had agreed to provide -initially 200 of them — both to the emperor and to Leopold in Vienna. Eleanor had been asked to take particular responsibility for their recruitment and dispatch to Germany. If the records of how the money was raised are now sparse, that is nothing to the silence that has descended over the difficult business of persuading the leading families of the land to send their sons as hostages for the remainder of the ransom. After all, hostages could not just be chosen at random from the population. They had to be worth something themselves, should it come to the point that the king's ransom was not forthcoming. The bitter disputes, the refusals and the appeals that must have taken up so much of Eleanor's time have nearly all but disappeared from the pages of history.
We know that Eleanor set out her decision about how to proceed at the Great Council meeting in Ely. Here it was decidedin more detail which great families should send their sons, and how the resulting appeals would be heard. In the event, the final agreement at Worms stipulated that Richard would have to find only sixty hostages for the emperor and seven for Leopold, which was more achievable. The decision was taken, probably by Eleanor, that it would make political sense for the list to be headed by the two most eminent people in the government, the chief justicier and the Chancellor — then still Walter of Coutances and William Longchamp. This was probably also a ruse to persuade Longchamp to stay abroad longer, knowing that his reappearance would almost certainly cause trouble. If it was, it was less than effective, because Richard had already sent him back to England with messages and instructions that he should accompany the chosen hostages to Germany.