1215: The Year of Magna Carta Ebook (19 page)

For five years after 1206 John concentrated on extending his authority within the British Isles and on raising and hoarding money. If he were ever to recover his reputation and the lost dominions he had to build up a massive war chest. By 1212 he had something like 200,000 marks (£133,333) stored away safely in royal castles such as Bristol, Gloucester, Devizes, Marlborough and Corfe. This was well over 30,000,000 silver pennies, perhaps as much as half of the total of coin normally in circulation. It was time, he decided, to recover his lost empire. He set about rebuilding the coalition he had sacrificed in 1200. Barrel-loads of silver were sent to the Low Countries and Germany. In the Rhineland it was said to be ‘raining sterling’ thanks to his largesse. A fleet and an army began to assemble at Portsmouth. But in July 1212 John’s optimistic plans were shattered by a Welsh revolt. To counter this he shifted the muster of his naval and land forces from Portsmouth to Chester. He was at Nottingham on 14 August when he learned of a plot against his life. Trusting no one, he ordered his army to disband. An Exchequer official, Geoffrey of Norwich, was arrested and died in prison. Two barons, Robert FitzWalter and Eustace de Vesci, were clearly implicated in the plot and fled abroad. From those he suspected, especially the barons and knights of the northern counties, he took guarantees of loyalty in the shape of hostages and castles. A popular preacher, Peter of Wakefield, caused a stir by prophesying the imminent end of the reign. In a bid for popular support John promised to reform abuses of power by his sheriffs and forest officials. But he continued to treat English landowners with his usual cat-and-mouse mix of bribery and coercion, and from now on he went everywhere with an armed guard of crossbowmen.

John postponed his expedition to the continent to 1213, but was forestalled by Philip who announced that he would invade England that April. As the king of France prepared for the riskiest enterprise of his reign, he decided to set his life in order. ‘The one thing for which he could justly be blamed’, wrote his chaplain, William the Breton, ‘was the fact that although he had treated his wife Ingeborg, daughter of the king of the Danes, honourably, he had not slept with her for more than sixteen years. Now that his invasion fleet was ready, the magnanimous king took her back into his grace. At this news all France rejoiced.’

To secure the backing of Pope Innocent III John decided to subject England to papal authority and pay Rome an annual tribute of 1,000 marks. At Innocent’s insistence he agreed to allow FitzWalter and de Vesci to return to England. In order to meet the threat from France, he stationed a large army in Kent from 21 April. Thus, virtually the whole baronage witnessed the ceremony at which he surrendered his kingdom to the papacy on 15 May 1213 at Ewell near Dover. For those who believed the prophet John’s reign ended here. But at least he was still on his throne on the anniversary of his coronation, 27 May, and he celebrated by having Peter of Wakefield and his son hanged.

A few days later he had even more to celebrate. With the loss of Normandy and its Channel ports to Philip Augustus, the once peaceful waters between England and France had been turned into a theatre of naval war. John had responded by continuing the work, initiated by his brother Richard, of building a war fleet and establishing a naval base at Portsmouth. The commanders of Philip’s invasion fleet discovered this to their cost when English ships, commanded by William Longsword and Count Renaud of Boulogne, caught them as they lay at anchor in the harbour of Damme. Hundreds of French ships, heavily laden with stores and the personal belongings of many of Philip’s barons, were plundered and set on fire. ‘Not since the days of King Arthur had so much booty been seen in England,’ wrote one author. And not only that: this naval victory cleared the way for John to return to France.

In June John ordered his army to sail with him to Poitou. But, as in 1205, the magnates refused to go, and the expedition had to be postponed again. Some northern barons, led by de Vesci, claimed that, as tenants-in-chief of England, they did not owe military service in Poitou. This group, increasingly prominent in the opposition, came to be known as ‘the Northerners’. In February 1214 John disembarked at La Rochelle while William Longsword took an army to Flanders where he was joined by Otto IV and by the counts of Flanders and Boulogne. The strategy was a good one. A two-pronged attack from the south-west and the north-east was to force Philip to divide his forces. But John was gambling. Failure abroad could only add to the opposition he faced in England. Hence, the reports he sent back to England made the most of every success he achieved. In one he triumphantly announced that his old enemies the Lusignans had decided to submit. In reality he had persuaded them to change sides by making them an offer they could hardly refuse. He granted them the rich land of Saintonge and the strategic Isle of Oléron off the western coast of France, and he betrothed his daughter Joan to Hugh de Lusignan’s son – also called Hugh. (It was this selfsame younger Hugh who, six years later, would marry his fiancée’s mother, Isabella of Angoulême.) The extraordinarily high price John paid for Lusignan support in 1214 did at least mean that he could advance into Poitou and beyond. On 17 June he entered Angers unopposed.

Only two weeks later he was in flight. All it had taken was for Prince Louis of France to bring an army to close quarters for John to beat a hasty retreat. His version of events was that he had been betrayed by the Poitevins, and it might well be true that they were reluctant to risk life and limb for him. Despite this humiliation he had at least managed to keep his western army intact and so prevented the French from reuniting their forces. Unfortunately for John, this strategic success counted for nothing when his allies engaged Philip Augustus in battle at Bouvines on 27 July 1214 and were disastrously defeated. In the opinion of the author of
The History of William the Marshal
, forcing Philip to stand and fight had been a terrible mistake. Philip was now free to join his son and confront John in Poitou. All John could do was to sue for terms. On 18 September the two kings agreed on five years’ truce. Allegedly it cost John 60,000 marks.

When he returned to England in October 1214 his coffers were empty. Moreover, the reforms he had promised in 1212 and 1213 resulted in a huge drop in royal revenue. His income in 1214 came to less than half of the amount collected in 1212; his days as a wealthy king were over. The battle of Bouvines had been decisive. Its political consequences were far-reaching in the Holy Roman Empire (Germany and Italy) as well as in France and England. Had John’s troops and allies won, he would have returned to England in triumph, ready to launch a new expedition to reconquer his ancestral lands in France and punish those barons who had refused to help his war effort. Now he was in no position to do either. The gamble of taking the war to France while he was facing unrest in England had failed. In the words of the historian Sir James Holt, ‘The road from Bouvines to Runnymede was direct, short, and unavoidable.’

To the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, barons, justiciars, foresters, sheriffs, stewards, servants and all his officials and faithful subjects, greetings
.

Magna Carta, 1
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A
t the heart of royal government was the king. ‘Kings are like God to their subjects,’ wrote Henry of Huntingdon, ‘so great is the majesty of this earth’s highest, that people never weary of looking at them, and those that live with them are looked upon as being above the rest of mankind. No wonder crowds of women and children rush to gaze at them, so too do grown men, and not only men of a frivolous type.’ Kings gave their subjects plenty of opportunity to gaze. They were constantly on the move, travelling incessantly, criss-crossing their dominions. This enabled them to return the gaze, to keep an eye on local officials, to hear complaints or requests from the local aristocracy and clergy. In this way many of the king’s subjects, in many different places, got a direct sense of their ruler’s will and personality.

John’s father, Henry II, had put together a much larger empire than any earlier king of England. He was as much at home in Bordeaux, Poitiers, Angers, Le Mans, Caen and Rouen as he was in Winchester or London. Indeed, until John lost control of Normandy and Anjou in 1203–4, Henry and his sons spent more time on the roads of northern and western France than they did in England.

After 1204 John acquired more houses in England. By 1215 he had over fifty residences, castles, palaces and hunting lodges – about twice as many as his father and brother. He spent plenty of money having them extended and refurbished, and he moved rapidly from one to another, rarely staying more than two or three days in one place. During the king’s absences – which, for many of his residences, was virtually all the time – his houses were looked after by a keeper, usually paid a penny a day, although keepers of the more important palaces were paid substantially more. At Westminster he was paid over £10 a year, while the keeper of the house and park at Woodstock received a salary of £15.

Take, for example, the month of March 1207. From the first to the third of the month John was at Geddington in Northamptonshire, a royal hunting lodge. On Saturday 4 March he was at Kimbolton in Huntingdonshire, the next day at Southoe and the next at Huntingdon. On the seventh he moved to Cambridge. By 9 March he was in Newport, Essex, on the tenth at Bardfield in Essex. He spent two days at Hallingbury (also in Essex), and on the thirteenth he went through London to Lambeth, then for two days, the fifteenth and sixteenth, he was at Farnham in Surrey. He was at Freemantle in Hampshire for three days, then for another three days, the twentieth to the twenty-second, at Winchester. He spent a further three days at Clarendon and three days at Cranbourne in Dorset. He was at Poorstock in Dorset on 29–30 March and ended the month at Exeter. That month he stayed in sixteen different places. This was not unusual. He moved from one place to another around fifteen times every March, and averaged over thirteen moves a month throughout his reign. He spent only one month in England without moving, in November 1215 when he laid siege to Rochester Castle at the start of the war that followed Magna Carta.

Some of the places he stayed at in March 1207 he knew well. He visited Winchester about sixty times during his reign, Clarendon over forty times and Freemantle nearly as often. He averaged about a visit a year to Geddington, Farnham and Cranbourne. By contrast, so far as we know, he only visited Southoe, Huntingdon, Newport and Hallingbury the once, in March 1207. He sometimes expected one of his courtiers to put him up. At Kimbolton he enjoyed the hospitality of the justiciar, Geoffrey FitzPeter. At Southoe it was the turn of Saer de Quincy, newly made earl of Winchester. At Farnham, he stayed in the palace of Peter des Roches, the ultra-loyal bishop of Winchester. His love of hunting helped to keep him on the move. Geddington, Clarendon, Freemantle, Cranbourne, Poorstock were all hunting lodges – though Henry II’s building work had turned Clarendon from a lodge into a hunting palace.

The king did not travel alone. Everywhere he went he was followed by courtiers, officials, servants, traders, petitioners and hangers-on of every description. At the centre of this crowd was the king’s household. In part, this was an elaborate domestic service: cooks, butlers, larderers, grooms, tent-keepers, carters, packhorse drivers, and the bearer of the king’s bed. This meant dozens of packhorses and a baggage train of ten or twenty carts and wagons, carrying his wardrobe, tents, kitchen equipment, barrels of beer and wine, his chapel and plenty of money. Chamberlains and chamber clerks looked after the money and treasures. Then there were the household menials – laundresses, chambermaids, scullions, footmen and grooms. Household knights and officials were paid an annual fee and daily wages according to the number of days they served. When in attendance on the king they were accompanied by their own friends and servants. Then there were the men who looked after the royal hunt: the keepers of the hounds, the horn-blowers, the archers – perhaps fifty or more on the hunting staff alone.

All of this took a great deal of organisation. Harbingers had to be sent ahead to arrange billets for the night, with two of the king’s four bakers who had to make bread at the next stop. Arrangements had to be made for food and wine to be sent to the right place, or bought in the locality. King John, for example, had tuns of wine stored in fifteen castles; his butler was responsible for ensuring that a tun or two was waiting for the king wherever he stopped. It was not a case of the king’s household travelling to where the provisions were and consuming them on the spot. On the contrary, huge quantities of food and drink had to be transported to wherever the king was heading next. When they knew in advance where the royal household was going, merchants could arrange to be there with their wares. In 1207 when the king left Exeter on 1 April, he turned east again, and after brief stays at Sherborne, Gillingham, Cranbourne, Clarendon and Freemantle, reached Reading on 11 April. Hugh de Neville, the Chief Forester, was travelling with the king and Hugh’s own officials saw to it that his men and their horses were looked after. Hugh’s clerks recorded the purchase of the following items at Reading:

Household purchases had a dramatic effect on local food-stocks and prices. The arrival of the royal household always caused disruption, but it was, on the whole, good for the local economy – so long as it did not stay too long in a place without the infrastructure to support it. A letter survives in which Edward I announced that he intended to spend Easter at Nottingham, and asked that local people should be comforted by his promise to leave as fast as he had come.

In theory the king’s itinerary was planned in advance and well publicised. But events or simply the king’s mood might cause a change of plan. Then all hell broke out. One of Henry II’s courtiers, Peter of Blois, described the chaos that could occur: