by David Boyle
Others on the list included Berengaria's younger brother, Fernando of Navarre, and Henry of Saxony's eldest son, Otto, who had been managing affairs in Aquitaine in Richard's absence. Otto was a favourite nephew of Richard's: Richard had made him Earl of York, made strenuous efforts to have him named heir to the throne of Scotland and would later intrigue to have him succeed Henry VI as Holy Roman Emperor. Other hostages included Otto's younger brother, William of Winchester, Richard's friend Baldwin of Bethune and Bishop Savaric of Bath. There was also the four-year-old son of a nobleman called Roger de Tosny, a cousin of the Count of Hainault, who removed the boy from Eleanor's care later as she passed through with the hostages on their way to Germany. Another hostage — this time destined for the contingent bound for Austria — was a knight called Hugh de Morville, probably the very same person who had, as a young man, kept the spectators and monks back from Canterbury Cathedral while his three friends murdered Thomas Becket. His inclusion on the list was perhaps a sign of final acceptance by English society twenty-five years later.
The negotiation to choose hostages was particularly arduous, but it became obvious quite early on what the main problem was. Longchamp's reputation as a pederast made it quite impossible forsome families to accept the idea of putting their young sons into his care. Over and over again, the same message was conveyed to Eleanor. If it was a question of daughters, they would be quite happy for Longchamp to accompany them to Germany, but since it was sons they preferred to err on the side of safety.
Longchamp headed straight back to England after the end of the Worms court meeting. It would be his first visit since the embarrassing incident with the fisherman when he was trying to escape disguised as a woman. He probably dreaded his arrival as much as his successors in the English government did, but he had been given a task to perform — and letters from the king might have been expected to smooth his reception. In the event, it was even colder than he could have anticipated.
He landed in Ipswich and spent the night in the village of Hitcham, sending a message to Abbot Samson at Bury St Edmunds that he would like to hear mass at St Edmund's shrine the next day. Longchamp must have felt that this was a suitably unthreaten-ing and low-key way of announcing his arrival, but it was not to be. Samson believed he was still under excommunication and ordered that no services should take place at the abbey in Longchamp's presence. When Longchamp reached there the next day, the priest stood motionless and silent at the altar until the miserable Chancellor had been ushered outside again.
He then set out towards London, but was refused entry to the city at the gates. A flurry of messages passed backwards and forwards between him and the justiciars, who finally agreed — along with Eleanor — to meet him in St Albans and to receive the letters from Richard. When they finally all reached the agreed spot, Richard's new government refused to give him the traditional kiss of greeting. Worse, they refused even to let him deliver his messages until he had assured the entire party that he came 'not as a justiciar, not as a legate, not as Chancellor, but as a simple bishop and messenger from the lord king'.
Richard's messages included a list of bishops and nobility he wanted to join him in Germany, and they confirmed that Longchamp had been appointed to take the hostages back there. It wasclear that something would have to be said, and Eleanor took it upon herself to say it. There were absolutely no circumstances, she said, in which she would entrust him with her own grandson — in this case, Henry of Saxony's youngest son, William of Winchester. Once Eleanor had said so, the other justiciars followed suit. There was really no way they could persuade the hostages to go if they had to go with him. For Longchamp, this was a complete humiliation. The meeting broke up without agreement, and Eleanor wrote to Richard advising him to recall his Chancellor. Some weeks later, Longchamp was making his way back down the Rhine alone. Whether as punishment or consolation, he was even relieved from his role as a hostage himself and his place was taken by a man called Baldwin Wake.
Richard may have been popular in England, but it was impossible to impose the equivalent of a 25 per cent income tax — higher even than the UK basic rate is today — on a country that had never encountered such an idea before without dissent. The contemporary chronicler William of Newburgh described how the fund-raising progressed:
The royal officers accelerated the business throughout England, without sparing anyone; nor was there any distinction made between clergy and laymen, secular or regular, citizen or husbandman; but all indifferently were compelled to pay the stipulated sum for the king's ransom, either in proportion to their substance or the amount of their revenues. Privileges, prerogatives, immunities of churches and monasteries, were neither pleaded nor admitted. Every dignity, every liberty was silent; nor had any one licence to say: 'Such, and so great am I; have me excused' . . .
The records of exactly where the money came from have disappeared, but it seems clear that the local juries charged with the task of assessing the tax that every freeman should pay had an exhausting and difficult task. The bailiffs who were then expected to collect this unprecedented tax, many of them appointed by Henry II in the massive root and branch reform of the institutiontwenty years before, must have had an even more difficult time. If individuals simply refused to pay, the bailiffs would have had some means of applying local pressure and military support that could have enforced the settlement. But if more than a handful refused, and if those refusals included anybody with any local standing and power, the bailiffs would have had no redress. For territories under the control of barons who were sceptical about the whole operation — even actively intriguing for their own reasons for John to succeed — the business of collection must have been completely impossible. We can only imagine the favouritism, the settling of old scores and the lassitude with which some of the juries must have gone about their work.
By the high summer, two things were becoming clear. One was that the money was failing to pour in nearly as fast as was expected, and the other was that there was a political price to pay. This was obvious to anyone, especially in the cities, and came in the form of frustration — not so much at the obvious inequalities (that belongs to later in history) but rage at the corruption at the top, as the great landowners colluded with juries to decide what people should pay and then wriggled out of payments themselves. Or extracted their own payments from their tenants. It was anger that seems to have overlooked the role of their absent king, but focused on his ministers and barons. This is the pattern you find in the Robin Hood legend, set at this time, which retains a reverent attitude to the law and extends a poignant hope towards the king, who would return like Odysseus to Ithaca or Christ to the temple — cleansing and righting wrongs. T love not man in all the world/ so well as I do my King,' says Robin in an early version of the ballad.
This attitude was deepened by the news that John had forged a copy of the royal seal, imposed a swingeing tax on his own tenants in the name of the Exchequer of Ransom, but had kept the money himself.
This mounting rage was not directed at the social system. It was aimed at the behaviour of lords and landowners, not at their existence. It was a fury that was stoked by the attitude of the Church, as they handed over their precious plate and chalices for melting down. Some of their wealth was not just luxury for the government to take as it pleased; it was holy relics without price. Abbot Samson dared the exchequer to take any of the jewels off the shrine at Bury St Edmunds, where Longchamp had recently been dismissed. 'The fury of St Edmund can reach those who are absent and far away,' he warned. 'Much more will it strike those who are present and desire to strip his shirt from him.'
Peter of Blois wrote to his old friend the Archbishop of Mainz complaining about the effects of the ransom. The Germans, he said, 'Those children of perdition, were levying a treasure that would not be drawn from the royal exchequer, but from the patrimony of Christ, the pitiful substance of the poor, the tears of widows, the pittance of monks and nuns, the dowries of maide
ns, the substance of scholars, the spoils of the Church.'
There was particular trouble in York, where Richard's half-brother Archbishop Geoffrey was demanding that his canons contribute a quarter of their incomes, although the original demand had been for only a tenth. They refused and accused him of trying to undermine the freedom of the Church. The argument became confused with disputes over the appointment of the new Dean of York, three candidates for which seem to have been appointed at the same time.* When he heard about the squabble, Richard asked Geoffrey to visit him in Germany to discuss the issue face to face, but as soon as he had set out on the road, the canons launched a protest about the ransom money, stripping the altars, silencing the bells and locking York Minster. Geoffrey turned straight round and ordered them to open it again.
Similar tensions were emerging all over the country. There were also demagogues emerging in the cities. One of these was William FitzOsbert, a social reformer and campaigner against 'royal extortion', characterized by his magnetic style and his long flowingbeard, who began making long speeches under St Paul's Cross, castigating the city leaders for their oppression of the poor. It was the tax on income imposed on London for the ransom by the new mayor that particularly enraged him. His regular harangues from outside the cathedral gathered momentum in the following months until, two years later, London erupted with an uprising of small traders and artisans under his leadership. When this collapsed a few hours later, he took refuge in the church of St Mary-le-Bow, from where Hubert Walter had him dragged out, tried and hanged. The evidence is contradictory, but it is possible that he was hanged in chains from a tree at Tyburn, now Marble Arch, which would have made him the first of tens of thousands to be put to death at that spot over the next six centuries. Wherever it was, splinters from his scaffold were treasured as holy charms.*
One of the problems was that the biggest moneylenders, just as the Jewish community feared, were being forced to pay considerably more than was comfortable, and to loan more to the Exchequer of Ransom. That meant they were often forced to call in their loans, and simple self-preservation meant that these were the ones to people furthest down the social hierarchy. When small landowners were losing their land or their homes because they could not afford to pay back loans that were not even due, you had a recipe for widespread social rage and misery. And although there were many Christian moneylenders, the whole business of the ransom seems to have accelerated the spread of anti-Semitism in England.
Sometimes the only option for indebted landowners who had lost their estates was to escape into the forests, traditionally set aside for the king for hunting. In times of political or economic difficulty, the forests increasingly became the gathering place for the dispossessed, for bands of armed poachers and other outlaws, for younger sons who could not be supported at home, for ordinary thieves, heretics and millenarian fanatics. Forests were dangerous places, dark and mysterious havens of magic and gloom where you might risk enchantment by the little people, or face the jaws of a monstrous worm or even — if you were very lucky — catch a glimpse of King Arthur and his knights riding through the trees by torchlight.*
The great outlaws of the age all spent time in the forests. Eustace the Monk, for example, went from being a traditional outlaw in the forest to an admiral helping the French invade England. And Fulk Fitzwarin from the Welsh marches — whose full-scale rebellion was to set the scene for the signing of the Magna Carta a generation later — was enraged by favours shown to his local rivals and also ended up in the forest.† Fulk had actually been brought up in the royal court and was a friend of Richard's, and he invented his own style of banditry, attacking only property that belonged to John.
Centuries later, historians placed one of the most famous outlaws of all time in this period of English history: a limbo time without a monarch and with increasing resentment of the power of the wealthy. By the time Sir Walter Scott was writing Ivanhoe before 1819, he was able to conjure up a tale in which Robin Hood and his outlaws sided with a mysterious knight in disguise who turned out to be Richard himself, hurrying to undo the wrongs imposed on the country — and on the Jewish community in particular — by John, his allies and the evil Templars.
The true identity of Robin Hood has never been discovered. We know that his first mention in literature was in 1377 in William Langland's classic Piers Plowman, in which a drunken priest criticized himself for knowing the rhymes of Robin Hood better than he knew his prayers. The legend itself is much older than that. The ttrouvère Adam de la Halle wrote a song in the 1260s called 'Jeu de Robin et Marion'. By then the legend must have been so widespread that many people — and not all of them criminals — were nicknamed 'Robinhood'.
Unfortunately for those of us who would prefer our legends to be based on solid fact, there is little evidence to date Robin Hood's activities to the period of Richard's imprisonment. That, however, was the consensus in the seventeenth century, thanks partly to the work of the Scottish historian John Major, who explained that Robin Hood would 'allow no woman to suffer injustice'. 'The robberies of this man I condemn,' he wrote. 'But of all robbers, he was the humanest and the chief By then, Robin was said to have been born in 1160 in Loxley — in Yorkshire or Nottinghamshire or possibly even Warwickshire — and called Robert Fitzooth. He was also supposed to have used the title, perhaps ironically, of the Earl of Huntingdon. He died, so the story goes, at Kirklees Monastery on 18 November 1248 at the age of eighty-seven. In 1690 his gravestone was still in what had been the monastery grounds, with an almost indecipherable inscription — in spelling unknown to antiquarians — that said:
Hear undernead dis laid stean,
Laiz Robert earl of Huntingtun.
Near archir ver az hie sa geud
And pipl kauld im Robin Heud.
Little John was supposed to have been exiled to Ireland, though there was also a grave claimed to be his in Hathersage in Derbyshire.*
Doubts about this story emerged when it became clear that Robin's complex genealogy had actually been invented by the antiquarian William Stukeley in 1746 and that, underneath the Kirklees gravestone, the earth had not actually been disturbed. Most of the stone disappeared in the nineteenth century, despite Victorian railings, because the navvies working on the Yorkshire & Lancashire Railway believed that fragments from it could cure toothache.
Since then, a series of possible candidates for Robin Hood have been culled from the legal records. The most promising was a fugitive in the Yorkshire assize roles for 1225—6 called Robert Hod or Hobbehod, who may also have been the outlaw Robert of Wetherby, who was eventually hanged. The man who hunted him down, Eustace of Lowdham, had been deputy sheriff of Nottingham and later became the sheriff. There was also a Robert FitzOdo from Loxley, who was stripped of his knighthood in the 1190s. The sheriff of Nottingham from 1209 to 1224, Philip Mark, was known for his own robberies, false imprisonments and seizure of land.
Oddly enough, the real Earl of Huntingdon in the period of Richard's imprisonment was the brother of William the Lion, the king of Scots. David, Earl of Huntingdon, took part in Richard's coronation and shortly afterwards married the sister of Ranulf, Earl of Chester. This is a peculiar coincidence because the fourteenth-century poem Piers Plowman talks about 'the Rymes of Robyn Hood and Randolf Erl of Chestre'. There are no mentions of the earl in official records at all while Richard was away, which may mean he was also on crusade. And in fact, David was actually outlawed in 1212, accused — quite correctly — of taking part in a plot to kill John, and he sided with the barons against the king in 1215.
But all this is some way from the Robin Hood of legend, the gentleman thief, kind to women, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. Modern commentators believe the original was either an entirely mythical figure of fertility — a cross between Robin Goodfellow and the Green Man, pricking the pride of pompous aristocrats by playing practical jokes — or an outlaw perhaps at the beginning of the thirteenth century, or possibly both.
But the consensus is for an early date to allow the legends to grow up enough for Robin Hood, Maid Marian, Little John and the rest to take the absolutely central role they did later in English culture.
But even if Robin Hood was not a historical figure at all, it was an intelligent guess to lodge him in legend in the uncertain period of doubt and heavy taxation during Richard's imprisonment. Heis a cultural figure who belongs to a period of outrage — when the old feudal obligations were disappearing, and the lure of silver coins was drawing the ambitious away to the cities, where money seemed to be flooding into the pockets of the new urban traders, and punitive taxation was impoverishing the small farmers, while it was accumulated by the rich and powerful. The tenacity of a Robin Hood legend set in the 1190s, subtly siding with the absent king against the corrupt forces trying to take his place — lodged in the royal forests and outside the corrupted law — says more about the way that period was regarded in the seventeenth century than it does about Robin Hood himself, but there is an element of truth in it. People were prepared to pay the ransom, but as long as everyone paid — and not everybody was paying. Robin Hood is a story about the drift of money from farmers to merchants, and a hero — living in the territory of the wounded king, in the murky upside-down world of the forests — who was prepared to do something about it.