Blood Cries Afar (26 page)

For David Crouch, in his recent important article on paranoia and the barons in King John’s reign, a real measure of the how critical matters were can be seen by the number of ‘corporate baronial letters suddenly flying everywhere’, arguing that ‘statements of joint baronial positions and beliefs are the most evocative symbols of crisis. Things have to be really bad to get the barons to work that closely together.’
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Already by late summer 1213, according to Ralph of Coggeshall with some exaggeration, ‘nearly all the barons of England formed an association to fight for the liberty of the Church and the realm.’
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The appeal to Church and rights of liberty was a strong one. James Holt takes a more jaundiced view of the rebels’ cause. ‘It was a rebellion of the aggrieved, of the failures’ (the two should be taken separately and include those wronged and those who lost out on patronage and advancement); it was ‘a protest against the quasi-monopoly of privilege by the King and his friends’. At its most significant it was ‘a call, not to break bonds, but to impose them … on the monarchy’.
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A highly vocal defence of the Church and liberties of the realm gave the opposition honourable and attractive ideals; while these provide convincing cover for more practical concerns, these concerns, no matter if self-serving in practice, had genuine connections with the liberties being fought for. Crouch says of the aristocracy that ‘Even under John’s ham-fisted rule it was by no means predisposed to rebel, and it took a lot to bring it to the point of resistance.’
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Rebelling against the king, even one as undeserving as King John, was not to be undertaken lightly, and many baulked at the idea. An exact rendering of who was in the rebel ranks is no easy task, not least because of the fleeting allegiances mentioned above. By May 1215, of some 197 baronies in England, only 39 had declared for the rebels; however only a similar number openly expressed their support for the king. The majority stood to one side, wishing either to avoid becoming embroiled in the conflict or waiting to see which side gained the advantage. Thus, with the arrival of the French a year later, the number of rebel barons grew in the summer to 97 but may have dramatically dropped after John’s death. The numbers in themselves do not tell the whole picture: variables are introduced by the relative wealth and strength of barons, the size of their knightly retinues and whether these retinues were largely loyal or not. This last factor is a matter of debate amongst historians. John was aware that knights might have multiple fealties (William Marshal brought the point sharply home in 1204), and sought to take advantage of this in 1212 and 1213 by summoning knights to discuss matters of the realm at a national assembly, but this has ‘never earned John any credit as one of the fathers of the English Parliament’.
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Historians have emphasised the three major regional groupings of the barons. In the north, its chief leaders were William de Forz, the Count of Aumale, John de Lacy and William de Mowbray, and Eustace de Vescy, one of John’s most implacable enemies; including Lincolnshire, this group also counted Gilbert de Gant and William d’Albini (Roger of Wendover’s patron) among their number. Contemporaries labelled the rebel barons collectively as ‘the Northerners’, probably because the seeds of rebellion had been sown there most fruitfully with resistance to service and scutage in 1213–14, but also because animosity towards John was generally at its most bitter there. From East Anglia and Essex came the most important group: Robert Fitzwalter, Lord of Dunmow in Essex; Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk; Richard de Clare, Earl of Hertford; Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of Essex; and Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford (whose lands were overwhelmingly held in Essex and Cambridgeshire). Given the number of earls, it is not surprising that this group provided the main leadership of the rebels; the soon to be established baronial council comprised no fewer than twelve men from this group. Less emphasis has been given to the western rebels, chief of whom were Henry de Bohun, Earl of Hereford; Giles de Braose (unsurprisingly), Bishop of Hereford; and William Marshal’s oldest son, also William (who had spent time as one of John’s hostages). Important recent research has redressed the neglect of this region and argued for its more significant role in the rebellion.
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From elsewhere, the chief men of note were Saer de Quincy, the Earl of Winchester with land in Northamptonshire and Cambridge, and the baron William de Beauchamp with lands in Bedfordshire.

The leadership of the rebels has not been viewed favourably by historians: Poole says that ‘the leaders do not inspire confidence’; Warren condemns Fitzwalter, the elected leader of the rebels, as ‘altogether disreputable and mischievous, rescued from ignominy only by his great fiefs, and owing his leadership to his dominating aggressiveness’. He and Eustace de Vescy were little more ‘than baronial roughnecks’.
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The Anonymous of Béthune tells the colourful story of how Fitzwalter’s son-in-law, fellow rebel Geoffrey de Mandeville, once killed a servant during an unseemly row taking place near to where the King was staying. When John threatened Geoffrey with hanging, Fitzwalter challenged the King with ‘You will not hang my son-in-law! By God’s body you will not!’ before threatening intervention with 200 of his knights. At Geoffrey’s trial, his father-in-law turned up with an estimated – but completely implausible – 500 knights.
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Fitzwalter and Saer received opprobrium for giving up Vaudreuil so easily to King Philip in 1203, but there is uncertainty over this episode. Fitzwalter clashed with John in 1210 over the rights to a priory which he ravaged, prompting the King to send troops against him and he was declared an outlaw in 1212 for his part in the assassination plot; his estates were seized and two of his castles, including Baynard’s Castle in London, were destroyed. Influential as these groupings were, regional associations were just one of the ties that bound them together. As seen above, kinship and marriage were important, as was friendship; Robert de Ros and Eustace de Vescy were brothers-in-law to the new King of Scotland, Alexander II.

But most significant ‘was their shared hatred of King John on account of personal wrongs done to them’.
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These wrongs included being denied privileges and rights; having castles, lands and offices withheld without justification; corrupted justice and extortionate fines; excessive, punitive royal debt collection; the favouritism towards foreigners; personal affronts to families and honour; exorbitant demands for failed military campaigns; and the sheer arbitrariness of a vindictive royal will. Underneath it all lay a deep and bitter resentment against the monarch. The rebellion that began in England in 1215 had been a long time in gestation, and John was its feckless father.

The peace that John and Philip had made was formulated to last until Easter 1220. While it signified military disaster on the Continent, it freed the Angevin King to focus on the dangerous unrest in his own country which, in turn, had itself been stoked further by John’s military failure. However, although clearly by far and away still the dominant military force in England with his network of royal castles and influx of mercenaries, his position was much weaker than ever before; the domestic opposition had increasingly fused into a substantial entity with a focus on personal opposition to the King.
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John tried to make amends where he could with conciliatory gestures. In November he attempted to win over the Church and Langton in particular through a charter which granted freedom and swiftness in ecclesiastical and abbatial elections; the reservations he attached to it rendered the offer less generous than it seemed and Langton remained more inclined to the rebel cause than the royal one. Overtures to the Welsh princes Llewelyn and Maelgwn failed to secure them to his side. Robert de Ros and John de Lacy were sweet-talked and substantial efforts were made to retain the loyalty of barons who were at risk of wavering.

In parallel with these emollient moves were sensible, practical ones. Knights from Savary de Mauléon were due in February and from Hubert de Burgh, Seneschal of Poitou, in March. John’s continental mercenaries, principally Poitevin in origin, were distributed to royal castles under the command of Falkes de Bréauté. Strengthening of garrisons meant not only that castles were well prepared for defence, but could also readily launch a force in the field in the locality. Increased garrison sizes were a clear indication of heightening tensions on the political barometer. When discussions between the opposing factions broke down in January, this garrisoning was stepped up further, as exemplified by Nottingham and Scarborough. In October, Nottingham Castle received 20 men, more were sent in late January and six knights were dispatched there in February. At Scarsborough at the end of March, the garrison comprised no fewer than 10 crossbowmen and 60 soldiers; within three weeks it had climbed to 13 crossbowmen, 72 soldiers and a minimum of 10 knights. Throughout autumn and winter the castles themselves underwent repairs and had their fabric reinforced: Northampton, Mountsorrel, Corfe, Winchester, Oxford, Hertford, Wallingford, Berkhamstead and the Tower of London all appear in the records as undergoing such work; that many of these were soon to see action reveals the necessity of such operations.
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The contumacious barons had also been busy. They, too, were forging and reinforcing links, aiming first at John’s principal princely enemies in Wales, France and Scotland. It was not just the Northerners who had ties with the Scottish; connections went deep and wide across the barons and the royal court as Keith Stringer has shown.
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The sixteen-year-old Alexander II came to the throne of Scotland only on 5 December 1214; he was very possibly in consideration by the barons for the title of the next king of England, four centuries before James Stuart achieved this. But the availability of Prince Louis of France, backed by the might of the newly victorious Capetian monarchy and the prospect of lands being regained in Normandy without war, proved easily the better prospect. It was this line of communication that was pursued most enthusiastically.

The baronial party is believed to have met at Bury St Edmunds in the autumn of 1214 under the guise of a pilgrimage. Here they attempted to bolster their platform of reform by appealing to Henry I’s famous coronation charter, which promised the King’s commitment to adherence to rights of custom and regulation of the correct intercourse between the baronage and the monarch. For some historians such developments point to a real attempt at reform by the community of the realm for the betterment of the crown’s subjects; for others, they merely represent a fig-leaf to cover the naked self-interest of over-mighty nobles. The cynical interpretation is probably closer to the truth, but that should not blind us to the programme of genuine reform that manifested itself with Magna Carta, no matter how self-serving the motivation behind it. The precise events leading up to Magna Carta are not known in great detail but what is has been told elsewhere. The very nature of conspiracy and surreptitious meetings inevitably mean that even the best-informed commentators of events can take us only so far. Even with the 24-hour-media coverage and information overload of the twenty-first century we still perceive only glimpses of the reality behind decisions made by governments going to war.

In the second week of January 1215 the disaffected barons met with John in London. They turned up in what seems to be a display of force and demanded that John keep true to his absolution oath taken at the time of his reconciliation with the church and uphold the ancient laws and liberties of the realm as indicated by Henry I’s coronation charter. (It is not clear whether they wished to see this reissued, or a new one drawn up.) John tallied and procrastinated, promising to give such grave matters lengthy consideration. If true to form, he would have initiated a series of one-to-one meetings with individual barons to cajole them and encourage their loyalty, thereby weakening the baronial party by desertions. Safe conduct was granted the rebels and it was agreed that their grievances would be addressed by 26 April.

The time was used by both sides to bolster their positions with appeals to Rome, where John, as a prized feudal supplicant, was more readily heard. John cynically and cleverly increased his leverage here by swearing the vows of a crusader on 4 March; by taking up the cross, he could expect, by church law, even greater papal protection. On a less spiritual propaganda level, he brought in more mercenaries from the Continent (Savary de Mauléon had now landed in Ireland) while the baronial party appealed to King Philip in France. Following the January meeting, John ordered throughout the country that the oath of allegiance to him to be pledged anew as liege homage, so that men swore to ‘stand by him against all men’, which was taken by his opponents to be ‘contrary to the charter’.
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Safe conduct letters were issued in February and April to allow for negotiations between the King’s party and the baronial one. The actions taken by John in this period are not easily interpreted. On 13 March John sent some of his Poitevin allies home, thanking them for their readiness to serve but telling them that they were no longer needed. Did this mean he was feeling confident of a favourable outcome? Or was he meeting some demands of the rebels to play for time? A week later, letters from the pope to the Archbishop of Canterbury were on their way to England, his support a vindication of John’s papal policy. These letters set forth the ‘three-fold peace terms’ (
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) wholly in support of the King. The pope took to task the clergy and episcopate (including Langton) for not mediating to the King’s advantage, condemned all conspiracy against the King on pain of excommunication, and praised John for submitting England to the Papacy. By the time this epistolary reinforcement had arrived in England in late April or early May, the situation had deteriorated dangerously.