1215: The Year of Magna Carta Ebook (30 page)

The siege of Rochester Castle showed King John at his most determined. For seven weeks he remained there, taking personal charge of operations. To prevent the defenders being reinforced from London, his first action was to break down the bridge over the Medway. It made tactical sense, but if he intended a decisive march on London, it was questionable strategy. The city of Rochester fell almost immediately, allowing John’s troops to stable their horses in the cathedral just below the castle walls. The castle itself was strongly garrisoned and proved a much tougher nut to crack. On 14 October he sent orders to Canterbury. All the smiths there were to work day and night making pickaxes for his miners. He brought up his siege artillery, five stone-throwing machines with which to batter the castle’s walls. Day and night they kept up a bombardment. After a breach had been made in the outer walls and the bailey captured, all that remained was the great tower keep.

On 25 November John sent a writ to the justiciar: ‘Send to us with all speed by day and night forty of the fattest pigs of the sort least good for eating so that we can bring fire beneath the tower’. His miners dug under the tower in the south-east corner of the keep, and bacon fat was used to fire the pit props that shored up its foundations. The tower cracked and fell outwards. (When it was rebuilt, the original rectangular turret was replaced by the cylindrical one that can still be seen today.) Despite this the defenders within the keep continued to fight, withdrawing behind an interior cross-wall. Not until their food was all gone did they surrender, on 30 November. ‘No one alive’, wrote the Barnwell chronicler, ‘can remember a siege so fiercely pressed and so manfully resisted.’ John set up a gallows and declared his intention of hanging the garrison that had delayed him for so long. But Savari de Mauléon told him that hanging brave knights would only mean that the rebels would do the same to any prisoners they took, and the result would be that no one would dare to remain in the king’s service. In the event John hanged only one crossbowman, a man who had previously served him, and by whom he felt personally betrayed.

While John was detained in the south-east corner of England, his enemies enjoyed a free hand elsewhere. In Wales Llywelyn ap Iorwerth captured no less than seven castles in just three weeks, including Carmarthen, one of the traditional strongholds of the English Crown in Wales. Eleven other Welsh princes joined him in what was virtually a triumphal progress. In the north things went just as badly for John. Alexander II of Scotland was awarded possession of Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland by judgement of the Twenty-Five; the Northerners with estates in those counties did homage to him. In December an advance guard of 140 French knights and their followers, several thousand in all, arrived at last in London. But for John the situation on England’s borders now took priority over any thoughts of an attack on the rebel capital. He divided his forces: one army group was to keep a check on his enemies in London; the other followed him north.

As he advanced his routiers laid waste the lands of his enemies, burning crops, destroying woods and orchards, seizing livestock. Towns and villages were burned down – or had to pay the king protection money to escape this fate. As a demonstration of military might it was impressive and some rebels decided to submit – among them John de Lacy, lord of Clitheroe and Pontefract, constable of Chester. He had to take an oath: ‘I will not in any way hold to the charter of liberties which the lord king has granted to the barons of England as a body and which the lord pope has annulled.’ The Yorkshire rebels retreated before him, taking refuge with Alexander II. Swearing that ‘by God’s teeth, he would run the little sandy fox-cub to earth’, John invaded Scotland. On 13 January 1216 he captured Berwick, Scotland’s biggest town. He launched raids into the Scottish lowlands, then turned south again – but not until he had burned Berwick to the ground, setting fire with his own hand to the house in which he had lodged. In March he moved into East Anglia, and captured Colchester from the rebels. For the last three months he had held the military initiative. But his government had broken down; no money was forthcoming from the Treasury. His army commanders and the constables of his castles had to collect the money to pay their troops by whatever means they could.

The king’s implacable enemy, the chronicler Roger of Wendover, witnessed this campaign and gave a vivid description of the methods employed by John’s mercenaries.

No doubt Wendover exaggerated. None the less, the sheer destructiveness of John’s campaigning methods was no way for a ruler to win the love of his people. A number of rebels had submitted, but their most important leaders held firm. Although he badly needed a decisive success before Louis’s arrival tipped the balance against him, John made no attempt to recapture London. Meanwhile the French advance guard did nothing to inhibit his ravaging of his own kingdom – or so it seemed to many of the English victims of their king’s wrath. According to one contemporary, the French troops stayed safely in London throughout the winter, thoroughly enjoying themselves until their wine ran out and they had to endure the discomfort of drinking beer.

Louis’s army of invasion disembarked at Sandwich on 22 May 1216. With commendable foresight and efficiency John had mustered both land and naval forces in the right place and at the right time to repel the invasion, but when the French appeared he rapidly retired to the comfort of his chambers at Winchester. This left Louis free to join his friends in London. On 2 June the citizens, led by their mayor and Robert FitzWalter, swore allegiance to him in a ceremony in St Paul’s churchyard. On 6 June Louis left London, heading for John at Winchester, but by then the king was already on his way westwards, to Wiltshire and Dorset where he stayed for over three weeks at Corfe, one of his favourite castles. After standing siege for ten days the defenders of Winchester received John’s permission to surrender to Louis. At this point some of the earls who had hitherto stayed loyal to John changed sides, including even his half-brother, William Longsword, earl of Salisbury. It was said that this was because the king had taken advantage of William’s absence in a French prison to make an attempt on his wife. More likely, William and his peers were not impressed by the way John had abandoned Winchester to its fate.

By now two-thirds of the English baronage had abandoned John. Even more remarkably, so had a third of his own household knights, that group whose careers, lives and fortunes were most closely tied to the king. Louis now controlled the whole of the eastern counties, except for the castles of Windsor, Lincoln and Dover and these were under siege. Alexander II came south from Scotland to Canterbury to do homage to Louis. In return Louis, as king-to-be of England, confirmed the committee of Twenty-Five’s grant of the three northern shires to Alexander. In September John at last mounted a challenge to Louis’s control of the richer part of England. He marched north-east to reinforce his garrison at Lincoln and perhaps in the hope of intercepting Alexander on his way back to Scotland. He missed the king of Scots but made the Lincolnshire countryside pay for its allegiance to a French king. ‘No one could remember that so great a conflagration had ever before been made in this part of the world in so short a space of time,’ wrote a Cambridgeshire contemporary.

At Lynn John suffered an attack of dysentery during the night of 9–10 October. According to the Cistercian Ralph of Coggeshall, it was brought on by the sin of gluttony ‘for he could never fill his belly full to satisfaction’. It looks as though he was badly frightened by the attack since when morning came he made a gift to Margaret, daughter of William de Briouze, for the sake of the souls of her parents and brother. Next day, 11 October, he left Lynn and by the evening of the 12 October he had reached Swineshead Abbey. Somewhere on that journey the baggage train got into difficulties. According to Ralph of Coggeshall: ‘Some packhorses and several members of his household were sucked into quicksand where the Wellstream meets the sea because they had set out in too much of a hurry and careless of the fact that the tide had not yet fully receded. His household effects, his relics and other contents of his chapel were lost.’ The breakdown of administration meant that no list survives of what was lost, and perhaps it was never drawn up – but the image of the mortally ill king who lost all or, far more likely, a part of his treasure in the Wash is a powerful one that has gripped the imaginations of generations of treasure hunters.

Over the next few days John’s health continued to deteriorate, but he managed to struggle on as far as Newark. There, during the night of 18–19 October 1216, he died. He had wanted to be buried in Beaulieu Abbey, which he had founded, but that was in enemy hands. Worcester, however, was still held by his men and so John asked to be buried in the cathedral there close to the tomb of one of his favourite saints, St Wulfstan of Worcester. After his servants had helped themselves to his personal effects and made off with their loot, the corpse was buried as he had requested. The effigy on his tomb was probably not made until his body was moved into a new sarcophagus in 1232, so it cannot be taken as reliable evidence of his appearance.

King John’s heir, who had been kept for safety during the last few months in the castle of Devizes, was a nine-year-old boy. Henry was anointed and crowned king at a makeshift ceremony at Gloucester on 28 October. From Louis’s point of view the accession of Henry III was a disaster. Even a child king represented a more formidable opponent than John, particularly when his council included several elder statesmen and a papal legate capable of turning a dynastic struggle into a holy war. Prevailing sentiment disapproved of depriving a boy of his inheritance – now that his father was dead there was no need to press on with so unpleasant a scheme. In any case the boy was English, and people were starting to grumble about French acquisitiveness and arrogance.

John’s death brought Magna Carta back to life. Within a month of Henry’s coronation his advisers had reissued the charter, shorn of its more objectionable clauses. In doing this the child-king’s counsellors not only ignored the pope’s attempt to annul Magna Carta but also, and more importantly, cut the ground from beneath the feet of the barons who had called in Prince Louis. In this sense, reissuing Magna Carta was a propaganda move in the struggle for control of the kingdom – and a highly effective one. If the new king would govern according to the rules as set out in Magna Carta, what point could there possibly be in supporting a foreign king? So English support ebbed inexorably away from Louis. He was forced to rely more and more on fellow Frenchmen and on reinforcements from abroad – which only added to his unpopularity. By 1217 he was forced to concede defeat and return to France.

No sooner had peace been restored than a start was made on a building universally acknowledged as one of the masterpieces of English architecture: Salisbury Cathedral. This was a new model church, using revolutionary techniques in building engineering, thinner walls, slimmer pillars, taller arches, more room for windows and, above all, more light flooding into the interior. This French style, still known as ‘Gothic’ – the name given it in a sixteenth-century sneer – had been brought to England in new work at Canterbury, Lincoln and Wells, but now for the first time it was applied systematically to a whole cathedral.

By 1218 Bishop Richard Poore of Salisbury had obtained papal permission to move his cathedral from its old, constricted site on the windy and waterless hill of Old Sarum to a new and spacious site by the river Avon. Here, on flat, open ground, there was room for one of the most ambitious projects in British and European history: the simultaneous building from scratch of an entirely new cathedral and an entirely new town. By 1219 the government had authorised the establishment of a new market on the site. In April 1220 the foundation stones of the new cathedral were laid. The bishop himself placed three, one for the pope, one for Canterbury and one for Salisbury; the earl and countess of Salisbury laid one each. The bishop and canons of Salisbury were in a hurry to build their new church, palace and houses. Donations were sought throughout England. Richard Poore was responsible for initiating the project, and was a brilliant diocesan bishop. His new set of statutes governing the clergy of his diocese was a model of its kind, and his revision of the liturgy, the Use of Sarum, traditionally ascribed to St Osmund, the first Norman bishop of Salisbury, was eventually adopted by the whole English Church. He appreciated radically minded clerics such as the Franciscans whom he invited to make a base for themselves in Salisbury. Bishop Richard’s Salisbury was the intellectual powerhouse of new ideals.