Richard & John: Kings at War (67 page)

John’s lust for money and his personal interventions always had a distorting economic effect even when, on paper, his projects were commendable. A very good example is provided by his attitude to urban development, and once again we see him continuing traditional Angevin policies. Between 1066 and 1235 more than 125 towns were founded in England. A miscellaneous list produces the following: Arundel, Boston, Chelmsford, Devizes, Egremont, Harwich, Hull, King’s Lynn, Morpeth, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Okehampton, Portsmouth, Reigate, Salisbury, Truro, Uxbridge, Watford and Yarmouth (Isle of Wight). This was the most important historical era for new towns and cities until the Industrial Revolution. Between 1180 and 1230 fifty-seven new towns were founded, many of them in John’s reign.
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John’s most famous creation was Liverpool, on an empty site on his own demesne. The letter patent, creating this new borough, was issued on 27 August 1207. All who took up the king’s offer of plots of land in the new town were exempt from labour services and many tolls, dues and other taxes, and were allowed to have their own ovens and handmills, instead of having to use the feudal lord’s for a fee; additionally, John undertook to build a castle and a chapel.
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There was no largesse or generosity about John’s actions. He liked to found new towns so that he could tax them. Although the initial privileges seemed generous, the burghers soon found that there were hidden snags. All markets and fairs, which arose naturally if the settlement was a success, required a royal charter, which had to be paid for; and there were further fees payable for the enfranchisement of serfs (villeins) or for the renewal of charters. Moreover, John liked to found his towns on the coast so that they could function as ports and thus be subject to import and export duties. He always valued his royal right of prise and preemption, which gave him first choice of all luxury imports and a free gift of wine; additionally he could charge fees for licences given to foreign merchants.
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In 1203-04 John found a new means of getting revenue, by setting customs duties at one-fifteenth the value of imports. He collected over £2,000 from Newcastle, Hull, Boston, Lynn (King’s Lynn) and Hedon alone; Boston paid 15.7 per cent of the total uplifted and Lynn paid 13.1 per cent as against the 16.8 per cent paid by London, the 14.3 per cent by Southampton and the 13.3 per cent by Lincoln.
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These ports were all close to the great medieval fairs and the areas that produced most wool and wheat. John’s experiment with urbanisation can thus be seen as barefaced exploitation, but at least one expert warns against a machiavellian interpretation, on the ground that the king rode a commercial wave but did not create it.
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The rise of towns encouraged fairs and markets. There were only two markets in Oxfordshire when Domesday Book was compiled but a dozen by the 1220s. The requirement that markets had to be held on different days in different towns created a circuit, allowing merchants to buy in one place and resell in another, thus avoiding some of the tolls and taxes the new towns tried to impose on their trade.
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The growth of fairs encouraged foreign merchants to visit England, stimulated rural enterprise and encouraged the wider use of coinage in the countryside. Silver coins were starting to become widespread in John’s reign, as the money supply increased; this was a ‘spin-off’ of the discovery of new silver-bearing ores in the 1160s, in the Alps, in Tuscany and above all in Germany, near Meissen.
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Towns created entirely new social sectors: merchants, goldsmiths, clothworkers, weavers, shoe-makers, tanners, bakers, butchers. Forming themselves into guilds, some of these trades became so powerful that they were virtually independent of town authorities, which in turn caused jealousy and resentment, so that boroughs tried to deprive weavers, in particular, of their civil rights.
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Yet for all the new groupings that emerged, England under John remained an overwhelmingly rural and agricultural society, with nine-tenths of the population living in the countryside. The steepness of the social pyramid can be appreciated from one simple statistic: in a population of some four million in John’s reign, there were only twenty earls, two hundred barons and 5,000 knights.
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The historical records do not show John in any way interested in the plight of this vast majority of faceless toilers, the nuances of local custom, the relation of freemen to villeins, or the complexities of land tenure and the virgate (peasant smallholding). The lot of the peasant in thirteenth-century England was, to use the classic Hobbesian formulation, ‘nasty, brutish and short’. Surviving on strips of land while they owed feudal labour service to the feudal lord, the wretched of the earth would have impinged on John only as objects of curiosity when they occupied their minimal leisure hours with wrestling, cock-fighting, bull-baiting or (in the winter) skating on frozen lakes and meadows.
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One important group he could never ignore, if only because relations with the Church occupied so great a part of his reign, was the religious. When John came to the throne there were around seven hundred monasteries and convents, housing some 10,000 monks and 3,000 nuns. The period from the death of William the Conqueror to the accession of John was the golden age of monasticism, with more religious houses founded than at any other time - nine a year in the middle of the twelfth century.
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At the time of the conquest monasticism based itself on the rule of the Benedictines, which meant taking vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. In theory, no monk could own private property, have sex or raise any objection to severe discipline from a superior, including corporal punishment. The trade-off was security, the opportunity to gluttonise and the access to vast communal wealth. Monks were recruited as oblates - children ‘offered’ to the religious life by their parents, or as adults with a real or alleged vocation. For a family man to enter the contemplative life meant abandoning his wife and family to strangers. What most impressed contemporaries was the plethora of regular clergy. There were monks properly so called, following the rules of St Benedict, and there were ‘canons’ who followed the precepts of St Augustine and were more evangelical and prepared to engage with the world.
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There was also a reformed order of Benedictines, the Cistercians who were, as it were, Marxist-Leninists to Benedict’s Marx: that is to say, they accepted the basic rules of the Benedictines but added variations and refinements of their own.
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It was only after John’s death that the neat tripartite division into monk, canon and nun was further complicated by the addition of friars, members of the newly founded Franciscan and Dominican orders. Most contemporaries distinguished the regular clergy by the colour of their clothes. Thus the black monks were the Benedictines, the white monks the Cistercians, the black canons the Augustinians, the white canons the Premonstratensians, the black nuns Benedictine sisters and the white nuns female Cistercians. After the arrival of the Franciscans and the Dominicans there were, additionally, Grey Friars and Black Friars respectively.
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Although monasticism was supposed, by definition, to be other-worldly, the great religious houses became economic and even political powers in the areas they dominated. The orthodox Benedictine establishments swam most sturdily into John’s ken, based as they were at Winchester, Canterbury and Westminster Abbey. The chronicler Jocelin of Brakeland, a monk of Bury St Edmund’s, reveals that the day-to-day concerns of the Benedictines were more worldly than they should have been: promotion, relations with the abbot, and relations with the civil authorities or with bishops.
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Both Richard and John had problems with the Benedictines, and in dealing with these turbulent monks Richard proved himself a notable diplomat and negotiator.
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The Cistercians lacked the pride and snobbery of the Benedictines, being prepared to take in ‘lay brothers’ (uneducated auxiliaries) to do the heavy labour on their estates and in general opting for a more austere lifestyle than the Benedictines. Mariolatry was their unique selling pitch, and a successful one, for it was to the Cistercians that would-be novices tended to gravitate. The growth of the Cistercians in the twelfth century was spectacular. Their showpiece monasteries were the great foundations at Fountains Abbey and Rievaulx in Yorkshire and Waverley Abbey in Surrey.
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I have referred, semi-facetiously to the Cistercians as Marxist-Leninist, but there was something seriously communistic about their cell-like organisation. Every Cistercian abbey had a mother house, which in turn would have a mother house and so on, until the end of the chain was reached with headquarters at Cîteaux in Burgundy. It was the austerity and other-worldliness that impressed potential temporal benefactors and, before his clash with the papacy, John was an admirer of the order; he himself founded a Cistercian house at Beaulieu in Hampshire and, when locked in conflict with Philip Augustus, felt the need to justify himself to two leading Cistercian abbots.
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John cared nothing for most other people, so one should not expect from him any great interest in social class or the social composition of England, beyond the function of the population as fruit to be squeezed dry. Given that his domestic record was as dismal as his showing in foreign affairs, his apologists are forced back on the defence of last resort: that his administration and legal system were peerless. Part of the defence is sound. John’s reign sees the burgeoning of official records and archives to an unprecedented degree, so that historians are able to follow the king’s actions on a virtually day-to-day basis. It was in his time that the Chancery adopted the system of enrolling copies of all letters and charters issued under the rubric of Charter Rolls, Close Rolls and Patent Rolls.
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Hubert Walter, chief justiciar and bureaucrat par excellence is usually given the credit for this reform, but we should remember that many of his reforms were already well under way while Richard was on the throne, so that John simply continued the tradition of efficient central administration instead of initiating it. John’s justiciar Peter des Roches was also in this tradition of bureaucratic modernisation.
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There is truth in the assertion by one of John’s modern defenders that the personality of John is writ large on the records that survive.
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The efficiency of the civil service was an aspect of John’s desire for control. The Angevin administrative and legal system worked perfectly well without royal intervention and could survive a monarch’s lengthy absence - how else could England have been governed under Richard, who spent almost his entire ten-year reign out of the country? - but a ‘hands off’ approach was not John’s way. He wanted to direct from the centre and to be seen to be doing so.

John stood at the apex of a legal and administrative pyramid. Immediately below him were the chancellor, in charge of Chancery, and the justiciar, the supreme law officer.
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Next in line came the sheriffs (shire-reeves), the chief agents of the Crown in local government, at the head of the fiscal, judicial, administrative and military organisation of the shires, and thus each analogous to a governor under an imperial or federal system. Sheriffs accounted to the Exchequer twice yearly for the shire revenues, executed the king’s orders, mobilised the local militia, and presided over the shire court. Originally most sheriffs had been barons, but gradually a class of professional administrators arose to take their place. At the beginning of his reign John had 46 sheriffs, of whom seventeen were barons, twelve knights, and the rest professional royal officers and administrators.
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The trick in appointing sheriffs was to ‘balance the ticket’ - to appoint men with sufficient standing locally to be able to exercise authority but not with so much local power that they became unbiddable and unaccountable. The office of sheriff had originally been hereditary, but Henry II put a stop to that with his 1170 Inquest of Sheriffs. Competition for the office was intense, and kings were paid high prices for the position, but the quid pro quo was supposed to be that, once in office, sheriffs could recoup from the local population far more than they had paid out. Henry found out exactly what kind of surplus the most rapacious sheriffs were extracting and began the move towards professional royal administrators.
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In 1204 John added a refinement to the system by moving away from fixed twice yearly payments due from the sheriffs to a percentage share of all they had uplifted, which increased his revenue from the shires by 30 per cent.
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Since under the old system abuses had been frequent and the sheriffs mostly venal and corrupt, the reforms instituted by Henry and John, using professional civil servants rather than local magnates, secured both better government and higher revenues. Another innovation, begun under Longchamp, was to stop sheriffs becoming entrenched in one locality by sending them out on circuit.
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John also increased the professionalisation of the lower administrative ranks: the sergeants, something like modern chiefs of police, and the bailiffs, in charge of the divisions of the shires known as the hundreds. A new class of local coroners was set up, investigating murder, manslaughter, foul play and sudden death. An embryonic form of a modern legal system can be discerned and even more so in John’s highlighting of the jury system. Juries were originally bodies formed solely by royal prerogative, and jury trial was unavailable to lords using the normal, private feudal courts. Since the jury system dispensed rapid justice and was preferable on a number of levels to the old system of ordeals and penalties, more and more people were encouraged to bring their disputes into royal courts.
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Since a mass of litigation had previously been dealt with in local or feudal courts, the new inflow of cases into royal courts made the legal system more subject to central control - exactly what John wanted. The other beneficial aspect of jury trial for John was that it generated revenue. From the beginning of his reign, defendants could opt for jury trial, but on the strict condition that they paid the necessary fee. John, in short, enlarged the scope of royal jurisdiction at the expense of feudal courts, simply to make more money.
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