1215: The Year of Magna Carta Ebook (8 page)

A year or two later, William might have added a third plague: a rash of muggings and murders were carried out by gangs of youths, often the sons of rich citizens such as the Bucuinte family, a thoroughly respectable city dynasty – despite their name, which means ‘greasy mouth’. As these well-heeled robbers grew in confidence, they broke into the houses of the wealthy and looted them. On one occasion they even used crowbars to break into a stone-built house, but this time a well-armed home owner was waiting for them. Their leader John Old, reputedly one of the city’s ‘richest and noblest’ citizens, was hanged for his part in this wave of violent street crime. News stories such as this may well have encouraged a Winchester author, the monk Richard of Devizes, writing in the 1190s, to adopt a view of London very different from FitzStephen’s.

After this list, some of it borrowed from the Roman poet Horace, his advice is predictable if prosaic: ‘Do not live in London.’

Like nearly all the major towns and cities in England, London ‘belonged’ to the king. But such was its wealth that at times even he had to bid for its support. By 1200 the Crown had conceded a considerable degree of self-government to the city: from 1191 it was administered by a mayor and aldermen. The first mayor of London, Henry FitzAilwin, remained in office from 1191 until his death in 1212. Where London led, other cities and towns followed. Winchester had a mayor by 1200, Exeter by 1205, Lincoln by 1206, Barnstaple, Oxford, Lynn, York, Northampton, Beverley, Bristol, Grimsby and Newcastle-upon-Tyne by 1216. In 1215, in political trouble, John tried to win the city’s support by giving ‘his barons of the city of London’ a charter confirming their liberties, and adding the right to elect a mayor every year. But only ten days later the city opened its gates to the rebels against him, and then besieged the Tower. It was the loss of his capital city that persuaded the king he must negotiate.

Little of the London and Westminster of 1215 can still be seen today. Westminster Abbey – in which John, like all his predecessors since the last Anglo-Saxon king, Harold, had been crowned – was rebuilt by his son Henry III. None the less, despite all the destruction and rebuilding that has taken place over the centuries there are some amazing survivals, none more so than the great monuments of the first two Norman kings: the White Tower, built by William the Conqueror, and Westminster Hall, built by his son, William Rufus. North of the Alps these two were the most impressive buildings of their kind to be raised since the fall of the Roman Empire. Unfortunately little of the rest of the medieval palace of Westminster survived the great fire of 1834.

Some parts of a few churches remain. Of the priory and hospital of St Bartholomew’s, the choir of the church still stands. The Temple Church was dedicated in 1185 by the Patriarch of Jerusalem, come to England to beg King Henry II to go to the aid of the Holy Land, sore beset by Muslim forces led by Saladin, one of Islam’s greatest champions. It was in this church that William Marshal, regent of England after King John’s death, was buried in 1219. There is also the crypt of St Mary-le-Bow, the scene of a controversial incident in 1196. A London citizen, William FitzOsbert, known as Longbeard, led a protest movement against the unfair distribution of taxation. One contemporary described him as ‘the champion of the poor’, but according to another,

Although, said this author, he kept a list of the names of 52,000 supporters, there was no mass rising when the king’s chief minister, the justiciar Hubert Walter, sent officers to arrest him. Longbeard killed one and then fled for sanctuary to St Mary-le-Bow, accompanied by a number of friends who refused to desert him. Hubert’s troops set fire to the church and Longbeard was forced out. After a rapid trial in the Tower of London, he and nine friends were tied to horses’ tails, dragged to Tyburn and hanged. The justiciar’s disregard of sanctuary shocked some, and all the more since he was archbishop of Canterbury. Soon Longbeard was looked upon as a martyr. The gibbet was secretly removed and venerated as a sacred relic; the earth below it was believed to have healing powers, the place of his death became a shrine. Hubert sent troops to disperse those who watched over it, imprisoned others and set an armed guard there. He also spread scandal: it was alleged that Longbeard had polluted the church of St Mary-le-Bow by having sex there with his concubine and that – even worse – he had invoked the aid of the devil when it became plain that no help could be expected from God. Longbeard’s adherents claimed that these reports were lies, but the embryonic martyr’s cult withered away – a victory for government news management.

In John’s reign London was far from being the only centre of international trade. The king imposed a duty on goods entering and leaving the country, and the records of customs revenue for 1203–4 from the ports of the south and east coasts – all that survive – show that 17 per cent of the total came from London, 16 per cent from Boston, 14 per cent from Southampton, 13 per cent each from Lynn and Lincoln, 7 per cent from Hull, 4 per cent from York and 3 per cent from Newcastle. (The rest came from a number of other ports.) These statistics are intriguing. Although they certainly underestimate London’s share of the trade, it is striking none the less to discover just how busy ports such as Boston, Lynn, Hull and Newcastle – all new towns – had become.

The prominence of east-coast ports on this list reflects the rise of another new phenomenon: the international fair. For three or four weeks every year after Easter the little country town of St Ives in Cambridgeshire, for instance, was transformed into a major commercial emporium. Wooden stalls were set up; the front rooms of town houses were rented out as shops; cart parks were full to overflowing. Quite extraordinary quantities of food and drink, oats and hay were brought in to provision the influx of buyers and sellers and their horses. This was the ‘great fair’ of St Ives. People came here not only from all over eastern England, but also from overseas – from Flanders, Brabant, Norway, Germany and France. Many English towns enjoyed the right to hold an annual fair, but most served a local or regional market and lasted for only two or three days. The ‘great fairs’ which developed in the later twelfth century at Boston, Winchester, Lynn and Stamford as well as at St Ives were different. They lasted for several weeks. The fair held around St Giles’s church outside the walls of Winchester lasted for sixteen days beginning on 31 August. They were open for business to all comers, free from the restrictions of trade that towns normally imposed to protect their own merchants and shopkeepers. This made them very attractive to foreigners of all sorts, including those who came from overseas. This enabled English producers of, say, wool and cloth to trade directly with foreign importers without going through London middlemen. St Giles’ Fair was worth £100 or more a year to its lord, the bishop of Winchester, and a businesslike bishop such as Peter des Roches often got royal permission to extend it by a week – to the irritation of the townspeople.

Another distinctive feature of the towns of 1215 was the presence in them of a number of Jews. So far as is known no Jews lived in Anglo-Saxon England. After 1066 French-speaking Jews from the flourishing community of Rouen crossed the Channel and some settled in London. The modern street name Old Jewry serves as a reminder of the medieval Jewry, not a ghetto in the strict sense of the word but a synagogue and a cluster of properties belonging to Jews, situated close to the busiest market in England, Cheapside; the Jewish cemetery lay outside the city walls, at Cripplegate. By 1215 there were small Jewish communities in at least twenty other English towns, the most important being in York, Lincoln, Canterbury, Gloucester, Northampton, Cambridge and Winchester. In total there may have been approximately 5,000 Jews in England, and until 1177 their bodies, no matter where they had lived, had to be brought to London for burial. In that year Henry II gave permission for Jews to create cemeteries outside the walls of every city in England. The cemetery at York, at a site still called Jewbury, was excavated in the 1980s, and the evidence recovered suggests that a community of about 250 had lived there.

In practice Jews were restricted to one economic activity: money-lending. With interest rates set at a penny, twopence or, occasionally, threepence per pound per week (i.e. 22 per cent, 44 per cent or 66 per cent per annum) this brought them great profits and, at times, even greater unpopularity. A Norwich monk, Thomas of Monmouth, accused the Jews of Norwich of the ritual murder of a young boy called William. His book on the subject launched the ‘blood libel’ against the Jews that was to leave a terrible scar on subsequent European history. William became a saint, much like the thirteenth-century boy ‘martyr’ ‘Little St Hugh’ of Lincoln. As a small, wealthy, exclusive and culturally distinctive minority, the Jews needed protection. The abbey of Bury St Edmund’s had borrowed large sums from Jewish, as well as from Christian, money-lenders – this was in the feckless days before Samson became abbot – and in consequence when danger threatened the Jews, they were allowed to take shelter within the abbey – much to Jocelin of Brakelond’s dismay.

By far the most important protector of the Jews was the king. In legal terms they were ‘in the king’s peace’ and, as King John observed in a letter of 1203, ‘If we had given our peace to a dog, it should not be violated.’ In return kings, certainly from Henry II onwards, exacted a heavy price, regulating Jewish business dealings closely and at times taxing them very harshly. In 1210 John demanded the staggering sum of £44,000 from the Jews, employing mass arrests and other brutal measures to enforce payment. According to one author, he extracted £6,666 from a rich Jew of Bristol by removing one of his teeth every day until he paid up. Since Jews themselves were in no position to enforce payment of debts owed to them, they had to rely on royal officials to do this for them. Debts owed to Jews who died intestate were taken over by the Crown. ‘Jews are the sponges of kings’, wrote an English theologian of the time. All this meant that landowners in debt to Jews constantly found themselves caught up in burdensome financial dealings with the Crown – an obvious cause of friction between king and barons that left its mark on Magna Carta. In Clauses 10 and 11 John was forced to promise that he would deal sympathetically with the widows and children of any landowner who died in debt to the Jews.

The king, however, could not always give the Jews the protection they bought at so high a price. In an anti-Semitic riot in London in 1189 several Jews were killed, while the houses of others were plundered and burned down. Richard I punished the rioters, hanging three, and he allowed a Jew who had pretended to convert to Christianity to escape death, to return to the faith of his fathers. But after the king left England for France, with the crusade as his goal, more anti-Semitic riots and murders occurred in 1190 in Lynn, Stamford, Norwich and Bury St Edmunds. Crusades, with their reminders of Christ’s crucifixion, tended to stimulate anti-Jewish sentiment; a crusading vow was an expensive commitment and the plundering of Jews sometimes seemed an all-too-appropriate way of raising the cash. The killings of 1190 reached a climax at York. Jews took refuge, as they often did, in the royal castle, Clifford’s Tower. A mob led by some of the local gentry, crusaders among them, and urged on by a fanatical hermit, mounted an assault on it. When the Jews realised they could hold out no longer, most of the men killed their wives and children, then committed suicide. Those families who did not opt for the ancient Jewish tradition of self-martyrdom surrendered when they were promised that their lives would be spared if they accepted Christian baptism. Once they left the castle they were killed. The mob then rushed to York Minster where the records of debts owed to Jews were stored and there, in the nave of the cathedral church, they made a bonfire of them. ‘As for these people who were butchered with such savage ferocity’, said the Yorkshire historian William of Newburgh, writing in the nearby priory of Newburgh, ‘I unhesitatingly affirm that if they had truly wished to be baptised, then baptised or nor, they found acceptance in God’s eyes. But whether their wish for baptism was genuine or feigned, the cruelty of those who murdered them was deceitful and utterly barbarous.’ As far as it could – which wasn’t very far – the government punished those responsible for the York massacre, and over the next few decades Jews returned to the city until, once again, it contained one of the richest communities in England.

Anti-Semitism and religious discrimination meant that the position of the Jews remained vulnerable everywhere in Latin Christendom. Philip II of France (usually known as King Philip Augustus) began his reign in 1180 by expelling Jews from Paris and confiscating their property. When he returned from crusade in 1192 he had eighty Jews found guilty of ritual murder and burned at the stake in Brie. In 1215 Pope Innocent III at the Fourth Lateran Council in Rome decreed that Jews and Muslims were ‘to be publicly distinguished from other people by their dress’. In 1218 the council governing England on behalf of the boy-king Henry III ordered ‘all Jews to wear on the outer part of their clothing two strips on their breast made of white linen or parchment so that Jews may be distinguished from Christians by this visible badge’. This, it was argued, was to stop a person of one faith from unwittingly having sex with someone of another. A ‘certain deacon’, name unknown, certainly knew what he was doing, however, when he fell in love with a Jewish woman; he circumcised himself for her sake. He was defrocked on the orders of a Church council chaired by Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury, held at Oxford in 1222, then taken outside the city walls and burned. In practice, the pope’s rules on distinctive dress for Jews were commonly set aside in England. In return for money the king was happy to exempt individuals or communities from the obligation to wear the Jewish badge. On this and related matters his view was that churchmen ‘have nothing to do with our Jews’. Before the end of the thirteenth century, though, the Crown’s financial demands had pressed its Jewish sponges so hard that little more could be squeezed out of them. In 1290 Edward I expelled them from his kingdom, to general English applause. It was not until England had a new kind of ruler, in the shape of Oliver Cromwell, that they were allowed to return.