Richard & John: Kings at War (59 page)

Naturally there is much merit in this ‘structural’ argument but there has been in recent years a tendency to push it too far. The relative strengths and weaknesses of the Angevins and Capetians can be debated, if inconclusively, but the logic of historical process cannot explain or excuse the contingent actions John took in Normandy, unless we accept the quasi-Marxist argument that the ‘privatisation’ of John’s realm was happening because feudal relations in general were already weakening and being replaced by a money economy. On this view, there might well be a correlation between the rise of a cash nexus and the rise of John’s personal retainers, the ‘knights bachelor’, and his consequent detachment and alienation from his barons.
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But it is very difficult to see how any overarching historical process can excuse or mitigate John’s egregious stupidity in farming out large sections of Norman administration to his mercenary captains. It is true that Richard had introduced the practice in exceptional circumstances, but John made it the norm throughout his francophone empire. The idea of an administrative cadre being headed by bloodthirsty buccaneers in itself suggests why Normandy was lost; Philip may have used mercenaries but he never made them senior civil servants. Among John’s appointments were Martin Algais as seneschal of Gascony, Gérard of Athée as seneschal of Touraine and Brandin in the same office in La Marche.
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John openly declared about Algais: ‘Know that the service of Martin Algais we esteem more highly than the service of any other person.’
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The most controversial of all such appointments was that of Lupescar aka Louvrecaire (‘The Wolf’) to a Norman bailiwick. The most rapacious of all John’s profit-obsessed mercenary captains, Lupescar alienated great swathes of Norman society by his barefaced rapacity. The abbess of Caen was reduced to paying John protection money to ensure that Lupescar did not despoil the abbey’s estates further, after he had siphoned off vast chunks of the estate as his own personal rents.
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The lupine depredations of Lupescar became a black legend in Normandy, to the point where William Marshal’s biographer recorded the following judgement: ‘Do you know why King John was unable to keep the love of his people? It was because Lupescar mistreated them and plundered them as if he were in enemy territory.’
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Things reached the pass where John had to bind his Norman barons with an oath that they would defend and protect the hated Lupescar in return for his own pledge to rein him in; left to themselves, the barons would gladly have killed The Wolf.
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It is difficult to overstate the reign of terror unleashed throughout the Angevin empire when John foolishly let these mercenary captains off the leash. The routiers swarmed over the land like locusts, preying on all and sundry without distinction of rank: neither churches nor monasteries nor even large towns were safe from their depredations.
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It was fortunate for John that the mercenary leaders never made common cause, or they might have posed the threat to his kingship that the Praetorian Guard did to the Roman emperors. Too greedy, self-centred and blinkered to cooperate, these thugs led atomic existences, each in his sphere of influence with his band of desperadoes. Their non-parochial ambitions were largely directed at each other: Richard’s favourite routier captain Mercadier was assassinated in the streets of Bordeaux by a henchman of Brandin, and one is tempted to see this murder of Richard’s right-hand man by one of John’s minions as a kind of transference of sibling wishes from younger to elder brother.
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A weak ruler, John never kept an iron grip on these unruly elements, as Richard always had. Mercadier summed up thus his service for Richard: ‘I fought for him loyally and strenuously, never opposed his will, was prompt in obedience to his commands, and because of this service I gained his esteem and was placed in command of his army.’
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But in John’s reign the routier captains were not just subject to only the most nominal suzerainty from the centre, but they demanded, and received, all kinds of special privileges and perquisites: special protection for their booty which was almost sacrilegious in the quasi-sacramental status it gave to ill-gotten goods; the right to keep and ransom their own prisoners; the right to govern their castles and estates according to their own lights rather than in accordance with local laws and customs.
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Whereas Richard had valued Mercadier because of his military talent, John liked the company of routier captains like Martin Algais precisely because they were cruel and nihilistic and shared his contempt for religion and the normal feudal regulations that bound a liege lord to his vassals; John wanted all the rights of an overlord but none of the duties. It is hard not to be pleased that the biter was often bit; the detestable Lupescar, a psychotic thug with no redeeming graces, repaid the multiple benefits he had received from John by deserting him and surrendering Falaise to Philip in 1204.
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Nonetheless, John’s apologists both ancient and modern, have always clung to the consoling argument that Normandy was already effectively lost to the Angevins before John ever ascended the throne, though naturally they disagree on the reasons.
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For some, the rot had already set in during the reign of Henry II; for others, Richard is the villain, for having allegedly impoverished Normandy.
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But the most influential argument is that, in ways largely unexplained, Philip Augustus became much more powerful financially than the Angevin empire in the decade of the 1190s. The best research, however, fairly conclusively establishes that Capetian resources had
not
overtaken those of the Plantagenets by 1202-03; it is conceded that Philip’s revenues had increased but not by nearly enough to provide a decisive advantage over John. As the historian V.D. Moss points out: ‘King John was almost certainly extracting more revenue from Normandy than King Henry II did in 1180.’
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The more ingenious defenders of John therefore concede that Philip had no significant advantage in economic and financial resources overall, but that he was able to employ the principle of concentration of force: he was able to deploy his energies much more effectively in the war zone of Normandy, which was geographically contiguous to the kingdom of France; clearly no Angevin ruler could harness all the wealth of Aquitaine and England purely to defend Normandy.
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Moreover, once Normandy was lost and its resources started accruing to France, Philip’s local superiority became even more pronounced, making the prospect of a campaign of reconquest chimerical. Yet even the concentration of force argument relies heavily on the hidden premise that Richard really had bled Normandy dry, and this too has been effectively contested. The allegation rests on economic naivety. As the most careful student of the loss of Normandy has shown, vast sums of money from England and the king’s creditors were spent in Normandy, so that if anywhere was being bled dry it was England. And taxation and war-spending lavished on projects like Château-Gaillard were not a one-way drain on Normandy’s resources, since the extra employment and income thus generated in turn stimulated the Norman economy.
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The great historian of Richard’s reign, John Gillingham, has made two further crucial points. A direct comparison of the resources available to John and Philip might just, on the concentration of force argument, show that Philip had greater power in Normandy, on the basis that the wealth of England and Aquitaine could not be
entirely
mobilised to defend Normandy. But such a comparison would be unreal, ignoring as it does the clear and obvious fact that Richard in 1198-99 had powerful allies on Philip’s eastern flank (in the shape of the German princes and Baldwin of Flanders), and that the
combined
resources of this coalition easily outweighed Philip’s.
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The overwhelming consensus of all the most reliable contemporary chroniclers was that in 1198-99 Richard was richer than Philip.
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Even if, for the sake of argument, we accept the proposition that in 1203-04 John had inferior resources to Philip’s, this could only be, as a matter of pure logic, because he had alienated the allies Richard cultivated so assiduously, so that they departed on crusade and deprived John of the Angevin’s second front. Gillingham’s second argument in effect turns the ‘concentration of force’ thesis on its head. If it is accepted that it is not just a question of resources, but the
direction
and deployment of those resources, then we can easily appreciate that in 1197-98 Richard both outspent Philip in buying key allies but also won the propaganda war by being more generous.
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In short, even if we exclude the factors of treachery and mercenaries from the count against John, we discern a clear pattern of a successful Richard and failing John that has nothing whatever to do with revenues, resources or structures. It is surprising that the financial argument purporting to favour John has been given so much consideration, for Richard’s position in Normandy in 1194 was far weaker than John’s ten years later, as vast amounts of money had to be diverted from the war zone to pay the huge ransom in Germany. 1194 comes into the picture in another way, for it was John’s willingness to surrender most of upper Normandy to Philip in January that year which so alienated many of the Normans and led to the fracturing of the duchy, with ducal power only really strong thereafter in the central and western areas, from Rouen to the Cotentin.
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In the propaganda war between Richard and Philip Augustus, Richard was always the winner, and indeed in the late 1190s Philip was widely regarded as an oppressive ruler.
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Only someone with an even worse reputation would lose a propaganda war against the French king, and John duly obliged. William of Newburgh made the important anti-deterministic point that personal charisma could transcend resentment caused by heavy taxation, and this Richard was always able to do; John clearly was not.
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Widely perceived as a great Christian hero, Richard was given the kind of leeway never permitted to John, as Ralph of Coggleshall pointed out.
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Yet even without the uneven personality contest, John never matched Richard. V.D. Moss roundly asserts: ‘John’s failure to match Richard’s fiscal performance as duke of Normandy must carry significant weight in any explanation of the duchy’s fall.’
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Of course, financial performance and propaganda persona can never entirely be considered separately, for John’s murder of Arthur affected his revenue collection as well as his general credibility. John lost control of the eastern marches of Normandy very early in his reign, and it was because of his own weakness that he eventually lost the entire province. It was his incompetence and double-dealing that alienated William des Roches and the rest of the great Norman magnates; it was his poor showing as a monarch that led Baldwin of Boulogne and the German princes to depart on crusade instead of allying themselves with him; it was his brutal and cowardly murder of Arthur that completed the process of disgust and disillusionment.
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Add to that his morbid fear of betrayal, his tendency to panic, the objective fact that most Norman nobles did betray him, plus the depredations of his mercenaries and it is truly staggering - and certainly against any conceivable version of Occam’s razor - that historians should have sought financial and structural reasons for his failure in Normandy.
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The brutal fact is this: John and John alone, because of his vices and failings, lost Normandy. Richard would never have done so - and indeed he held the whip hand against Philip until the end of his life and was clearly winning the Normandy war. Normandy would never have become part of Capetian France while Richard was alive, which is not to say that it could
never
long-term have suffered such a fate.
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We are concerned only with Richard and John, and it is as clear as anything can be that Richard was a winner and John a loser. Nothing succeeds like success, and men knew that Richard won battles and campaigns and could therefore be followed with confidence. With John the reverse was the case.

Fully to trace the manifold consequences of the loss of Normandy would take one too far away from a dual biography of Richard and John. Among the many byways are those concerning the impact of 1204 on English law, and particularly the development of laws against treason and aliens. Under a system of divided loyalties, where barons did homage to both the duke of Normandy and the king of France under the complex system of overlapping fealty already noted, the notion of treason was both absurd and otiose, and vassals were still allowed to rebel against lords without incurring the dread charge of traitorous behaviour. This situation began to change after 1204, much more rapidly in England than in France.
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Because of divided loyalties, it was not easy to prove a charge of treason, but it started to become simpler once Philip and John were ruling distinct and non-overlapping realms. It was only much later in the thirteenth century that the French monarch St Louis insisted on an absolutely clear distinction between fealties. But the loss of Normandy did throw the issue of land tenure into sharper focus. In 1205 Philip Augustus confiscated the lands of all knights with property in Normandy who lived in England unless they returned by a given date; John retaliated by a similar order expropriating lands in England held by Norman knights who threw in their lot with Philip.
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Magnates faced a stark choice: they must decide whether their future lay in England or Normandy, for there was no halfway-house. This was a tough decision for the many barons who had lands in both countries, but at least their position was easier than that of the sub-tenants, wards, widows and others, whose feudal future depended on the judgement or whim of overlords, guardians or former husbands. At least it was possible to change one’s mind if the initial choice of lords and lands proved misguided; on payment of a suitable sum (officially a fine), barons could buy back their forfeited lands and change residences. It was only in 1244 that St Louis ended this free-and-easy system and insisted on a once-for-all choice: one must either be French or English with no backsliding.
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The only notable exception to the either-or binary land system imposed by John and Philip seems to have been the great paladin William Marshal, who retained a foot in both camps. He was allegedly given John’s permission to do homage to Philip for lands he continued to hold in Normandy, though Marshal angered John by telling him that this meant he could not make war on the French king, who was thereby a liege lord.
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It seems that the special status accorded to Marshal was resented by his less prestigious and powerful fellow-barons. The ageing Baldwin of Bethune advised John that he had been foolish to make such a concession and that he should make no further exceptions.
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