1215: The Year of Magna Carta Ebook (14 page)

The allied army, made up of its three separate contingents under their own commanders, was more easily driven into disarray than the French under unified royal command, and it was probably the better co-ordination of the French forces that decided the outcome of a bitterly fought battle. With great difficulty Otto managed to escape, but William Longsword and the counts of Flanders and Boulogne did not. They and dozens of other nobles on the losing side were carted off as prisoners. The count of Flanders was placed in the Louvre, Philip’s newly completed great tower just outside the city walls of Paris.

The battle of Bouvines was an extraordinary event. Pitched battles such as this were very rare indeed. Although few knights were killed in battle, the king who committed his cause to battle was putting himself in jeopardy. William the Breton claimed that the allied leaders had sworn to kill Philip and had aimed their assaults directly at him. Since everyone knew that the surest way to win was to kill or capture the opposing commander, it must have felt like this. Commanders offered battle only when they were confident of the outcome, and in these circumstances their opponent was almost certain to avoid it. Philip Augustus fled from Richard I in 1194 and again in 1198, preferring the humiliation and the losses incurred in flight to the risk of total disaster that battle entailed. The standard handbook on the art of war in this period was the
De re militari
written by a late-Roman author, Vegetius. His advice on giving battle was quite simple: don’t. ‘Every plan is to be considered, every expedient tried and every method taken before matters are brought to this last extremity’. Successful commanders such as Philip followed Vegetius’s advice. Battle was too chancy. A few hours, even a few minutes, of confusion or bad luck could undermine the patient work of years. Henry II never risked one. In Europe even so famous a soldier as Richard the Lionheart only fought in one. In a long lifetime of campaigning Philip too fought only one pitched battle, the battle of Bouvines.

Yet these were all kings who went frequently to war. If they were not seeking battle, then what were they doing? Their aim was to win control of enemy territory, and first and foremost that meant capturing castles. Castles were, it was said, ‘the bones of the kingdom’. Had Philip lost Bouvines but escaped, Otto and his allies would still have faced the problem of capturing his fortresses. New and better siege-engines called trebuchets, capable of hurling larger rocks, were being brought into use at this time, but castles remained hard to take. Even after their walls had been breached by artillery bombardment, casualties in a direct assault were so high that it was rare for troops to risk it – despite the incentive of the unrestricted plunder of castle or town that, should they succeed, they were allowed by the customs of war. A better way to win a castle was to take it by surprise. Another way was to capture the enemy commander, forcing him to surrender territory and strongholds in return for his release. But the best way to capture him was to take him by surprise. This was how King William of Scotland was captured at Alnwick in 1174, taken by surprise in the absence of most of his troops. In consequence he had to hand over Edinburgh, Roxburgh, Jedburgh and Berwick to English garrisons. This was how King John himself won his greatest success, at Mirebeau in 1202, when he captured Arthur of Brittany.

There was nothing unchivalrous about taking your enemy by surprise. On the contrary, this was exactly what the heroes of romances, idealised figures, tried to do. In the
Romance of Horn
many episodes illustrate the hero’s cunning.

On another occasion Horn’s skill was to lead the enemy into a trap.

In warfare speed of movement is vital. As Vegetius put it: ‘Courage is worth more than numbers, and speed is worth more than courage.’ But, obviously, you had to know in which direction to move – as Horn’s enemies apparently did not. Good information was equally vital. If enemy forces were anywhere in the vicinity, it was crucial to send out frequent fast-moving reconnaissance patrols. They were so important indeed that the best generals, commanders such as William the Conqueror and Richard Coeur de Lion, chose to go on patrol themselves, despite the risks involved.

If there was no prospect of taking the enemy by surprise, then the tried and tested way of making war against him was to ravage his land – which meant destroying his economic resources, the fields and flocks of his people. According to Vegetius, this was the essence of war. ‘The main and principal point in war is to secure plenty of provisions for oneself and to destroy the enemy by famine. Famine is more terrible than the sword.’ The twelfth-century
Chanson des Lorrains
includes a vivid description of how it was done:

The term for this kind of raid into enemy territory was a
chevauchée
. Its purpose was well known: in the words of
The History of William the Marshal
, ‘When the poor can no longer reap the harvest from their fields, then they can no longer pay their rents and this, in turn, impoverishes their lords’. As the description in the
Chanson des Lorrains
indicates, ravaging and foraging were operations which involved the dispersal of small bodies of troops over a wide area – ‘the whole plain’. Troops so engaged were themselves highly vulnerable to attack, so once again it was essential to be well informed about enemy troop movements. Patrols had to be sent out on reconnaissance and to guard the foragers. In war a clash between opposing patrols, a dog-fight between small bands of cavalry, was the kind of fighting a knight was most likely to engage in. It was here that all his tournament practice paid off.

Even campaigns in which castles were the intended targets began with ravaging, an attack on the castle’s economic base. This is how a late twelfth-century author, Jordan Fantosme, envisaged William of Scotland invading the north of Henry II’s England as the ally of Louis VII.

The
chevauchée
alone was not enough. Ultimately wars were decided by sieges. It was in sieges rather than in battle that both archers and crossbowmen really came into their own – and sieges were many times more common than battles. When a siege was laid, some of the besiegers would entrench themselves in siege-works, but others would remain mobile. A rapid response force had to be ready to take immediate advantage of any opening created by a sortie by the defenders. The besiegers also had to send out well-armed patrols to guard their own supply lines and their foraging parties, all the more vital if the siege turned into a long drawn-out blockade intended to starve the defenders into surrender. Even this kind of struggle of attrition remained a war of movement, both in the preliminaries to siege and during the siege itself. In medieval warfare there were few pitched battles, but countless minor skirmishes in which small groups of brave men fought like teams in a tournament. William Marshal, the flower of chivalry, was an acknowledged master of this kind of war.

All forests which have been afforested in our time shall be disafforested at once
.

Magna Carta, Clause 47

D
uring King John’s lifetime nearly a third of England was forest. Only three counties, Norfolk, Suffolk and Kent contained none. It was possible to travel from the Wash to the Thames at Oxford, and from Windsor to the Hampshire coast without once leaving the forest. The whole of Essex was forest. But the fact that the whole county – towns, villages, farms, the lot – was so designated means, of course, that at that time the word ‘forest’ meant something quite different from what it does now. Some forest then we would recognise as such, the Forest of Dean, for example, or Sherwood Forest. Knaresborough Forest was described as ‘a vast and terrifying solitude’. Such places were the refuges of outlaws – the ‘Greenwood’ of Robin Hood – and the homes of hermits. Here too were the last retreats of animals that were gradually being hunted to extinction, such as the wild boar and the wolf. And there were some tracts of forest, in this sense of the word, in Essex. No fewer than twenty-five wild boars and twelve feral cattle were recorded as having been taken in the county between 1198 and 1207. In law the wild boar was reserved for the king, but the wolf was regarded as vermin. King John offered five shillings for a wolf’s head as an incentive to engage in the life and death struggle which the historian Robert Bartlett describes as ‘the fight between human beings and wolves, England’s fiercest and second fiercest mammals’.

But much of the forest was ordinary inhabited countryside. By declaring an area of land to be forest, the king created a royal monopoly over the management and distribution of resources previously enjoyed by local lords and tenant farmers. This process had started with the Norman Conquest. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, William the Conqueror ‘set up great game-reserves and he laid down laws for them. Whosoever killed hart or hind was to be blinded. He forbade hunting the harts and the boars. He loved stags so very much, as though he were their father.’ Condemning human beings to death or mutilation for the offence of killing wild animals seemed appalling to most thinking people, but ever since the Norman Conquest the kings of England had gained a reputation for tyrannical behaviour and nowhere more so than in the measures they took to protect their forests. William of Newburgh criticised Henry I for punishing poaching as severely as homicide. But in the Assize of Woodstock, a royal ordinance issued at Woodstock, one of his favourite hunting lodges, Henry I’s grandson, Henry II, announced that in future forest offences would be punished not just by fines ‘but by full justice as exacted by my grandfather’. The Assize of Forest, promulgated on Richard I’s authority in 1198, set the penalty for killing deer as removal of the offender’s eyes and testicles. According to the author of the
Histoire des ducs de Normandie
, in John’s reign the deer felt so safe that when approached they merely ambled gently away. The records of forest courts suggest that in fact kings were much more interested in taking their subjects’ money than their lives or body-parts. So lucrative, indeed, were the profits of forest justice that later kings continued William I’s practice of declaring large tracts of land as forest. Henry II did this on a vast scale and by the end of his reign, 1189, the royal forest had reached its maximum extent.

A forest administration was established under a Chief Forester and his deputies. There were the foresters and verderers, officers responsible for policing the forest and attending forest courts; there were the regarders, who made inspections of the forest. All were supervised by the justices of the forest, who were sent round the country on ‘forest eyres’ to try offenders against forest law. Hunting without permission was forbidden. Dogs kept in the forest were ‘lawed’: three claws were cut off the fore paw so that they could not chase game. Clearing and cultivating land in the forest could be done only with permission – particularly exasperating in an age of rising population. A perpetual rent had to be paid to the crown for newly cultivated land. When one woman had an unauthorised ditch dug around her own land, it was confiscated, and it cost her a hundred marks to buy it back. (A mark was worth two-thirds of a pound, i.e., 13s 4d, or about 67p.) The right of local farmers to pasture their animals in the forest was strictly controlled and could be withdrawn at will. When the Cistercians offended King John he ordered his foresters to keep out their flocks and herds. In 1200 twelve Cistercian abbots prostrated themselves at the king’s feet, begging him to allow their animals back in.

A landowner could chop down a tree so long as it was for his own use, and not for sale, but even then he had to be careful not to overstep the mark. According to Henry II’s treasurer, Richard FitzNigel, ‘If a man standing on the stump of an oak or other tree, can see five other trees cut down around him, that is regarded as “waste”. Such an offence, even in a man’s own woods, is considered so serious that even an officer of the Exchequer cannot be excused but will have to pay a fine proportionate to his means.’ If an offence occurred and no offender could be identified and prosecuted, a whole community might find itself in trouble and forced to pay a fine. Whenever a king was in need of cash, he sent round another forest commission. In 1175 Henry II raised over £12,000 by this means alone – and that at a time when the total royal revenue audited by the English Exchequer rarely exceeded £20,000 a year. Forest officials were vilified, and it was taken for granted, apparently even by Henry II himself, that his Chief Forester, Alan de Neville, would go to hell. Lesser forest officials were also unpopular – but would themselves be in trouble if they did not do their job to the satisfaction of the justices of the forest. Even according to Richard FitzNigel, in forest justice it was not possible to say that something was truly ‘just’, but only that it was ‘just according to the law of the forest’. Clearly this kind of justice was not thought of as just at all. When Henry II died, his widow, Eleanor of Aquitaine, ordered that everyone held in prison for a forest offence was to be freed at once, and that everyone outlawed for forest offences was pardoned.