Blood Cries Afar (14 page)

For France and England, relations with the Papacy were determined as much by the domestic scene as by the international one, and it is the former that now requires some attention here. Philip Augustus’s troubles were of a personal nature. Most rulers of Christendom had run-ins with Rome but, as the eldest daughter of the Church, France and her kings had fewer than most (though these were often serious). The Ingeborg affair caused a severe rupture. In 1193, when nearly 28 years of age, Philip married the eighteen-year-old daughter of the previous King of Denmark and sister to the current one, Cnut VI. Her dowry included 10,000 marks and, as mentioned above, the prospects of a large navy and a claim to the English throne. If Philip’s motives for marrying Ingeborg were political, his motives for rejecting her after their wedding night can only be supposed. Temporary impotence has been given as one reason. His attachment to his mistress, Agnes of Méran, and the Danish King’s alliance with Otto IV certainly prevented any reconciliation. Philip asked his bride to return to Denmark; she refused. The Gallican church granted Philip his divorce, but Rome reversed the decision and clerical opinion within France was split. Intimate details emerged from the royal couple: Ingeborg claimed that the marriage had been consummated; Philip that it had not. In 1196 he married his mistress (her father had close Hohenstaufen connections), further distancing himself from Rome. Philip refused to succumb to papal pressure with the result that Innocent placed France under interdict from January to September 1200. Philip’s treatment of Ingeborg was cruel and vindictive: he kept her imprisoned until 1213 with few comforts and denied her material and spiritual solace. Even Philip’s encomiastic biographers, Rigord and William the Breton, sided with the rejected queen (and with Rome). Only with the death of Agnes in 1201 was there room for more substantial conciliatory measures. Philip finally released Ingeborg and accepted her back in court in 1213. The date is significant: it was the year of a planned invasion of England and Philip wanted Denmark and the Papacy on his side.

Philip was largely successful in resisting papal interference in domestic matters of state: in 1203, when attacking Normandy, he refused point blank to obey the pope’s orders to make peace with John (had he done so history may have been very different). Forceful as he was, Innocent was not heavy handed in his dealings with Philip. His decretal of April/May1204,
Novit ille
, sent to the episcopacy in France, laid out his powers to intervene not as a temporal overlord (
ratione feodi
) but as a moral leader
(ratione peccati
). In effect, this marked papal acknowledgement of Philip’s increasing power. The letter was written when Normandy was on the point of total collapse and after Philip’s understandable refusal to acquiesce to the papal nuncio’s instruction to settle a truce with England.
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The same year, the Papacy repeated its request for French help against the Cathar heresy in the south of France. A French-led crusade began in 1209; in 1215, Crown Prince Louis joined the expedition. In 1210, Innocent was also seeking Philip’s help against Otto IV. By 1213, a number of factors had improved Philip’s hand. Most of Toulouse, the centre of the heresy, had been subjugated; Philip had smoothed over relations with the Papacy over the Ingeborg affair; a new understanding began with Denmark; his ally Frederick Hohenstaufen was elected as King of the Romans in December 1212; and King John was embroiled in his own serious difficulties with Innocent: all contributed to make 1213 a propitious year for an invasion of England.

Just as Philip’s problems with the Papacy can be traced to a specific moment in time – his repudiation of Ingeborg – so, too, can John’s: the death of Hubert Walter, Archbishop of Canterbury, in July 1205. As one historian has noted: ‘the election of an Archbishop of Canterbury generally occasioned a conflict.’
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This is an understatement for the crisis that was precipitated by the election of Walter’s successor.
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For all his failings, John handled the ensuing crisis with tremendous skill, displaying, as he did periodically throughout his reign, a keen, if spasmodic, intelligence and understanding of affairs. The death of Walter deprived John of one of one of medieval England’s great officers of state. Gillingham judges him as ‘a resounding success. No king had a better servant’; Holt as ‘the ablest and most effective of all chief justiciars and one of the greatest royal ministers of all time’.
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John was not so generous: he celebrated Walter’s death as a liberation that finally afforded him complete authority as king. Walter’s efficacy as a minister had certainly encroached upon John’s absolute freedom of political movement, and his demise granted John an opportunity to replace him with someone more flexible. Sidney Painter believes that in John’s dealings with Innocent III, ‘the fiercely intransigent attitude of the King in this dispute can only be understood in the light of his relations with Hubert Walter’; John ‘was determined that the next primate should be a man in whom he had complete confidence and who owed him his position to his favour’.
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Unfortunately for John, Innocent supported a candidate that did not have royal approval. This was not unusual in itself, but the pope brought to his office new ideas of papal power and he wished to implement many of them in the secular world. The pope had eventually settled on Stephen Langton for the vacant see of Canterbury; John’s man was the royal
familiaris
Bishop John de Gray of Norwich. The involved election process saw many twists and turns, the two parties taking their position to the papal court. In December 1206 Innocent insisted that John agreed to Langton as archbishop. John refused and cleverly spun out negotiations until Innocent lost patience and declared an Interdict on England in 1208. John was right to reject Langton on a number of levels. Submitting to the pope on this issue would set a precedent for further papal interference and restrict the king’s vital tool of royal patronage. Roger of Wendover has left us with a favourable impression of the cleric: ‘a genuine Englishman’, ‘skilled’, discreet’ and ‘accomplished’.
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But given Langton’s later anti-royalist, pro-baronial bias, these plaudits are unsurprising. Innocent was sufficiently impressed by Langton’s intellectual work to have made him a cardinal. (Langton’s revised arrangement of the books in the Bible and his rendering of these into chapters remains with us today.) Modern historians are not unanimous in their opinion of Langton; Turner considers him to have been ‘a man of little originality, a casuist in his thoughts’; in his acceptance of the archbishopric ‘he showed little practical sense … he was either very arrogant or very obtuse’.
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The most important relevant reason for John’s refusal to accept Langton was political: the cleric’s connections with France. He had lived in Paris for years where ‘he belonged to a circle of Parisian masters with pro-French views, who contrasted the Capetians’ just rule with Angevin tyranny’.
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Events proved John’s suspicions of the papal candidate correct, the Archbishop being a foremost figure in measured anti-royalism. His ties were not just political but intimate: his brother Simon was from the hardliner section of the baronial movement, ‘a more ardent, less balanced man than the Archbishop, inclined to headstrong speech and violent partisanship’, who, as a rare fragment from French records show, had been receiving subsidies from Prince Louis from as early as 1213.
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Stephen Langton returned from exile in 1216 in the same ship that carried Louis to England for the Prince’s great campaign. When Innocent consecrated the 50-year-old Langton as archbishop in 1207, John refused him entry into England. And so began the Interdict.

The imposition of the Interdict caused some confusion among the clergy over its implementation.
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Broadly speaking, it meant the cessation of church services and restrictions of the sacraments; bodies were laid to rest in the woods, ditches and by the roadside without the services of a priest. However, much religious life continued relatively unaffected, as ‘clergy and laity learned to accommodate’ the Interdict.
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It is a slightly puzzling period for historians, as sources tell us very little indeed about the Interdict’s impact. Politically, more telling was John’s excommunication in 1209 for obduracy in the face of papal pressure. This was designed to put the King outside of Christian protection and thus remove subjects’ obligations to him. But as a spiritual measure, its currency had been devalued in Innocent’s hands by his repeated resort to it for political purposes. In Innocent’s Europe, it was almost a rite of passage for independent secular princes and it may even have encouraged some bad-boy male bonding between John and his excommunicated allies, Otto of Brunswick and Raymond of Toulouse. In theory, excommunication conveyed the threat of justified opposition to an anathematised ruler; although serious, it nevertheless depended upon the domestic political situation for efficacy. In reality, its effect in England was limited, successfully countered in many ways by John’s effective propaganda campaign across the country. One contemporary monastic annalist’s exaggerated opinion was that ‘all the laity, most of the clergy and many monks were on the king’s side’; as Turner drily and perceptively puts it, people ‘felt little excitement about the issue of free episcopal elections’.
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Another historian writes, ‘the only people really disturbed by the sentence on John … were some of the English clergy.’
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Some felt compelled to move overseas, including all but two bishops, John de Gray and the growing, soon to be towering, figure of Peter des Roches at Winchester.

John picked up the papal gauntlet unperturbed and sensing opportunity. He does not seemed to have lain awake at night fretting over the eternal perdition of his soul; indeed, he probably slept contentedly having busied himself profitably exploiting the English church’s now weakened position. This was the real bonus in John’s tangled dealings with the Papacy during this period: he employed his dexterity to pocket a proportion of the Church’s wealth, tapping ecclesiastical resources to fill his depleted war chest. He did this chiefly through confiscation of clerical property and fines. In a creative display of humour, causing both financial and moral embarrassment, he held the mistresses of the clergy for ransom. The overall effect of the Interdict was a windfall that solved his financial concerns for years, raking in over £65,000 profit during this period of exclusion from Rome.
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By 1212, however, the deteriorating political situation and the fear of papal deposition heightened the danger of a French invasion. Philip Augustus was capitalising on support from Innocent and casting his eyes towards England; with John excommunicated, an invasion would be cloaked under the moral aegis of a crusade, just as in 1066. John was now ready to submit to the Papacy, and when he did, it was in a spectacular fashion: in May 1213 he accepted Langton as archbishop and rendered England and Ireland as papal fiefs. By putting his lands under Rome’s suzerainty and holding them as fiefs of the pope, John was placing himself under the protection of Innocent as his overlord. Any offensive action now taken by the French would be deemed an attack on Rome. Roger of Wendover is right to claim that the motivation for John’s capitulation was Philip’s preparation for invasion. As the Barnwell annalist wrote:

The King provided wisely for himself and his people by this deed, although to many it seemed ignominious and a monstrous yoke of servitude. For matters were in such extremity … there was perhaps no other way of evading the impending danger. For from the moment he put himself under apostolic protection and made his kingdom part of St Peter’s Patrimony, there was no prince in the Roman world who would dare attack him or invade his lands.
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John had taken a hugely significant step but, nonetheless, it should not be overdramatised. William the Conqueror rejected the same arrangement from Pope Gregory VII in 1080, but contemporary princes generally took a pragmatic view: Poland, Denmark, Portugal, Sweden, Sicily and Aragon were all papal fiefs. Even Richard I had temporarily paid homage for his kingdom to the Emperor as a condition of his release and captivity. Innocent was delighted by this augmentation of Rome’s power, prestige, political influence and finances. For John the results were soon to manifest themselves. In October 1213, Innocent was writing to England expressing his ‘special care and concern for our well-beloved son in the Lord, John’, that all should ‘remain steadfast in loyalty to the said king’, and warning against any instigation ‘to move a step against the king’.
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Only a few months earlier Innocent had been likening John to a ruthless, cornered foe, treacherously feigning peace.
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The King had freed himself from excommunication and now worked towards freeing England from the Interdict; this release came the following year after suitable financial recompense had been made to the injured Church in England. John had pulled the rug from under baronial opposition and Philip’s seeking of a papal blessing for his enterprise in England. His submission has been hailed as a political masterstroke.
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Certainly, John had contrived to make a virtue out of failure. But, as will be seen in the next chapter, his triumph was a short-lived one, ended by military defeat on the continent. For the time being, however, it left John in the ascendancy. In 1213, even the tide of war was to turn his way.

The subject of military service and obligation in medieval England has generated much literature. The focus of this study is on actual warfare, and so organisation for war – an enormous area that encompasses the most salient preoccupations of medieval government and economy – will be addressed here only summarily.
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From the outset, though, I should state that I do wonder how great the influence of these matters was in directly military terms. Statistics are notoriously unreliable, and their application to medieval warfare even more so, where records are fragmentary and incomplete. Figures and sums on papers do not always guarantee a clearer picture of the front line and are there for guidance.
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Soldiers fall sick, records are falsified and money designated for military spending in one sphere is siphoned off elsewhere. So often, and especially for this period, official records tell only part of the story.