Blood Cries Afar (17 page)

Three weeks after his success at Montauban, John was back at Niort, near La Rochelle, with Savary de Mauléon. It was at this juncture that Aimery de Thouars, no doubt taking note of Montauban and John’s seemingly committed military efforts, decided that the Angevin monarch now offered more favourable prospects than the Capetian one and so aligned himself once more with John. In so doing, he delivered northern Poitou back into John’s hands. Boosted by his improving fortunes an emboldened John raided into Anjou; when he could not procure boats for a crossing of the Loire, in a demonstration of determination, he forded it, much to the amazement of one chronicler. He ravaged his way back to his ancestral home of Angers, which he took on 8 September. He set up court here for a week, then moved even farther north to La Lude and back over the next five days. His intention was probably to send a minatory message to contumacious and rebellious vassals; but the message immediately following Angers was more equivocal: he destroyed at least parts of the city – Rigord says ‘totally’ – and quitted it hastily.
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It was a clear statement of force, but also one that said he was not staying. As John moved back south to Thouars, Aimery attacked Brittany.

Philip’s response to John’s operations was measured but decisive. In spring he had already moved into Brittany, reaching Rennes and taking Nantes. With him was William des Roches and the royal heir, Prince Louis, gaining valuable experiences of warfare while still just a teenager. The French King’s march on Angers in September was enough for John to head for safer ground south. Philip pursued him to Thouars and besieged him there. The campaigns of 1205–6 have received little attention from the chroniclers, and the siege of Thouars even less. However, a troubadour, apparently writing at the time of the siege, has left us a song in which he calls on Savary de Mauléon, ‘a good knight at the quintaine’, and his comrades-in-arms to defend ‘your fortress’.
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Philip’s forces ravaged Aimery’s lands in front of his eyes while his siege machines kept up the pressure on the town.

The campaign had ground to a halt and so, on 26 October, a two-year truce was arranged. The terms reflected the new state of affairs brought about by John’s expedition. The truce recognised that for Poitou, the land north of the Loire, just retaken by the French, fell under Philip’s control, while that to the south, just won by John, fell to English rule. Many historians consider this a very positive result for John: Poitou was substantially back in Angevin hands and he had ‘succeeded in securing his position from Poitou to the Pyrenees’.
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Nor should it be forgotten, as it often is, that John had also regained the Channel Islands.
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But in reality these was only very modest recoveries, as if a football team losing 6–0 at half-time comes back to score a goal and goes on to lose the mach 6–2 at full-time. John made no demands on Normandy, Brittany, Maine, Anjou and the Touraine. In fact, John did not even sign the truce personally. The evening before the truce was confirmed, he had slipped back to La Rochelle. It may seem surprising that Philip went along with the truce – after all, he was at Thouars with a large army – but he was keen, as always, to consolidate and secure. As Warren nicely puts it: ‘He was still digesting Normandy and wanted time to complete his meal.’
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John, meanwhile, had to ruminate on his next steps. He had plenty of time to do so. He left La Rochelle in December and returned to England. It would be another seven years before his army was back in France for a fully fledged campaign to recover his lands.

As with so many truces, Thouars did not last. Philip broke it and by the summer of 1207 was ravaging Aimery’s lands across the Loire; by 1208 the Viscount and John’s stalwart Savary de Mauléon were his prisoners.
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However, the political map of Poitou changed little. This period saw a distinct lull in the Angevin-Capetian conflict, as both kings preoccupied themselves with other matters. The launch of the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathar heretics in 1209 (preparations had begun a year earlier) meant a sizeable portion of French soldiers went south to fight in the Languedoc.
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Philip himself was still digesting Normandy, seeing to the realignment of his great fiefs in his kingdom as a result of this; while Brittany, Champagne and Auvergne were at the forefront of those aligning themselves with Philip, Flanders and Boulogne led those who looked across the Channel to John as a way of maintaining greater independence.
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Both John and Philip were deeply immersed in ecclesiastical and diplomatic matters as we have seen, attempting to forge or repair important political relationships as their circumstances dictated with the pope, Emperor and subjects, and all with a mind to the future Anglo-French conflict. Philip took the opportunity to initiate an extensive fortification programme, which included Paris, and went on occasional campaigns to slap the wrists of recalcitrant barons.
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John, on the other hand, was involved with military expeditions on a grander scale (not including a muster in 1208 which was probably prompted by an invasion threat). These should not detain us long, but they are worthy of brief discussion as they reveal the threat posed by his enemies on the Celtic borders of the British Isles and they provide context for their roles during the French invasion. They also reveal that John had greater martial accomplishments here than abroad, and that he did not lack anything in the form of military experience.

Warfare with Scotland, Wales and Ireland was nothing new for English kings. Rulers in these countries were ever ready to take advantage of their neighbour’s monarch when his attentions were engaged elsewhere. The Auld Alliance between France and Scotland, cemented to increase the discomfiture of England at times of war, was very ‘auld’ indeed, and will be seen to be operating effectively at this time. When John’s battle with the Papacy left him with but one representative of the episcopate in England (Peter des Roches; John de Gray was made justiciar of Ireland in 1210), Scotland offered a ready refuge for the bishops that exiled themselves from his kingdom. Fall-out with some of his barons in 1208–9 had resulted in a bitter conflict between the monarch and the powerful William de Braose, who fled to Ireland where he joined up with William Marshal, still out of favour since refusing to go on the 1206 Poitevin expedition. William the Lion, King of Scotland, perceived an opportunity to cause trouble here, as did Philip Augustus.
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In August John went north with an imposing army and William, knowing that John was ‘prone to all kinds of cruelty’ submitted and was forced to come to humiliating and costly terms.
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This left John free to deal with Ireland, where the de Lacys led the anti-John faction. (By now, William Marshal was once more back with John.) Again, a show of overwhelming force by John was enough to quell trouble: he took with him some 800 knights and 1000 infantry – a clear sign that invasion fears had abated in England now that Scotland had been forced to come to terms. This show of strength limited actual resistance; even at Carrickfergus the garrison of the well prepared and strongly fortified castle ‘behaved like cowards’, writes one contemporary, and opened their gates to John.
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This campaign is often hailed as an outstanding success for John, but Sean Duffy argues persuasively that the view ‘that the 1210 expedition was an out-and-out triumph needs to be considerably modified’.
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However, the Irish barons were to remain at least predominantly loyal during 1215–17. John’s crassness almost inevitably revealed itself in Ireland, when he laughed at a native king who rode bareback, thus causing offence to the Irish. Such inappropriate behaviour had more serious implications when directed against his own barons.

With John in Ireland, the Welsh got up to some serious mischief, Llewelyn the Great (as he was to be later known) instigating, says one Welsh chronicler, ‘cruel attacks on the English’ as he attempted to make inroads in south Wales.
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John acted in the summer of 1211 with another large English army precipitating another full-scale retreat by the enemy: Llewelyn made a strategic withdrawal to Snowdonia. However, John’s campaign did not go smoothly and had to be abandoned when his army ran out of supplies and famine sapped the host’s strength. A second, more thorough expedition set forth in July: more men, more supplies and more engineers to build castles. Llewelyn agreed to harsh terms.

It was at this moment that John has been deemed master of the British Isles. The Barnwell annalist observed, in a well-known passage: ‘In Ireland, Scotland and Wales there was no one who did not bow to the nod of the King of England, which, as is well known, was the case of none of his predecessors.’ But the annalist also goes on to say: ‘And he would have appeared happy indeed, and successful to the height of his desires had he not been despoiled of his territories across the sea, and under the ban of the Church.’
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His achievements were in fact decidedly mixed. Ireland was a partial success, Scotland was rendered quiescent for a few years, and Wales took up arms again in 1212. Serious as these threats had been, they were not comparable to the one posed by Philip Augustus’s France; victories against princes, subjects and a comparatively weak and impoverished Scottish monarch offered no indications of a similar outcome against the ever-growing power of his Capetian opponent. But that was what he had planned for 1212.

Dominating the British Isles, John was feeling increasingly confident. His nephew was now Emperor Otto IV; Renuad de Dammartin, Count of Boulogne, had sailed to England in May to pledge his service to John; following him came the Counts of Flanders, Limbourg, Bar and Louvain to voice their opposition to Philip. What was more, his war coffers were full – although he still had to pay the political price for this. The desertions weakened Philip, but should not, however, be seen as a sign of weakness: a paradox of increasing, centralised power was that the stronger the monarch became the more he provoked resistance from those who saw their own powers being encroached upon, causing those feeling threatened to seek help from foreign powers. This was also to be a feature of English politics in 1216 and up to the end of the Tudor regime.

John was now in his strongest position for nearly a decade. But it was a fleeting moment. Activity at Portsmouth in the spring and summer of 1212 was at its most intense for six years, as John’s officials and commanders made ready for the long-awaited expedition to Poitou. All across the country, John’s efficient government machine was put into operation to ensure full recruitment and provisioning for the full-scale expedition: extra money was raked in by means of the forest laws; writs were sent out across the country to summon knights; government men roamed the land to ascertain exactly the military service owed to the King. But John’s forces did not go to France; instead, they went to Wales.

Llewelyn had managed to forge an alliance with erstwhile enemies and competing princes to rise up against John.
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Roger of Wendover relates how ‘the Welsh burst fiercely from their hiding-places, and took some of the English king’s castles, beheading all they found in them, knights and soldiers alike’; they torched several towns and amassed ‘great quantities of plunder’.
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Decapitation was an almost ritualised aspect of warfare in Wales and Ireland.

Llewelyn had been spending time at John’s court and may have grown to distrust him even more; he and the Welsh princes were gravely concerned by the King’s castle-building programme and the obvious implications of this for control in Wales. Fearing this expansion of muscular English power, Llewelyn had secured a treaty with Philip Augustus around May or June. As Ifor Rowlands points out, John may well have had intelligence about this, which would explain the scale of the Welsh campaign; John feared a political alliance like the Franco-Scottish one that had loomed in 1209.
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Initially, John had sent only a small force to aid the Marcher lords, but awareness of an accord with France may have made him reconsider with a much larger force. The treaty served Philip especially well as it delayed, and ultimately prevented, English troops attacking his lands.

The army that mustered at Chester in late August was a massive one. John and his royal household had quickly but effectively ordered to the host over 6000 labourers and 2230 skilled carpenters and ditchers: he was planning not only to recapture lost forts but also a massive extension of his castle-building programme. Historians have speculated that he was on the eve of achieving in Wales what his grandson Edward I would later in the century. John was in a ruthless mood. On arriving at a second muster point of Nottingham, the first thing he did was to execute 28 Welsh hostages. Two died following castration, but most were hanged on a gibbet; the youngest was only seven. John then sat down to dinner. His dining was ruined: not by the deaths of the youths he had just ordered, but by the arrival of chilling news. In a foretaste of what was to come, Llewelyn had also been conspiring with the barons. John was informed of a plot either to kill him, or to abandon him, possibly ending in the same fate, to the Welsh. Poised to invade Wales, the whole enormous enterprise unravelled in an instant. John immediately marched north to intimidate the centres of baronial unrest there. Eustace de Vescy and Robert Fitzwalter, the chief conspirators who led the revolt against John over the next few years, fled to Scotland and France and John returned to London. This was the third major expedition John abandoned. Cancelled campaigns were not uncommon in medieval warfare, but three on this scale was telling and a waste of money painfully extracted from his subjects for no tangible ends.

The year 1212 did not get any better for John. The news from Europe was grim, too. Philip Augustus seized English ships in French ports; John reciprocated in England. His allies there were faring badly: Count Raymond of Toulouse was succumbing to the French-led Alibigensian crusade; Emperor Otto was on the defensive and Pope Innocent III had offered a counter-imperial crown to Frederick Hohensatufen, with whom Philip had now made an alliance. Whether known to John or not at this stage, the baronial discontents at home were agreeing terms of homage to Prince Louis, Philips’ heir, for when he was crowned as the next King of England. According to the widely spread prophecies of Peter of Wakefield, a mystic wondering about in the north of England, this was going to be sooner rather than later. Unfortunately for Peter, and distinctly lacking foresight, he prophesised neither the gaol sentence in Corfe Castle that John arranged for him nor his being tied to the tail of a horse, dragged to Wareham and hanged. No wonder Wendover observed that in 1212 John ‘had almost as many enemies as barons’.
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