Blood Cries Afar (27 page)

Delay did not suit the barons. The circumstances approaching the pre-arranged meeting of 26 April to settle issues were increasingly discouraging. They knew in early March that they had lost any hope of papal support or even papal ambiguity and they did not wish to see the impact of this support for John grow to their disadvantage. They wished to provoke John into action that would be characteristically unmeasured and so unite baronial opposition against him. They were well aware of John’s deliberate policy of procrastination and vacillation, the latter designed to throw out mixed signals and stir up uncertainty among the barons not yet fully committed against him. On 13 April another meeting was held with some of the barons at Oxford, possibly to set the agenda for the forthcoming conference. In further readiness, the barons mustered at Stamford in arms and in great force. Wendover puts their number at ‘two thousand knights, other cavalry, sergeants and infantry, armed with various equipment’.
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Wendover, displaying a rare anti-baronial moment, calls this gathering a ‘pestilence’, possibly affected by the hindsight of the bloodshed that was to follow. Among the five earls and 40 barons present he lists Robert Fitzwalter, Eustace de Vescy, Robert de Ros, Saer Earl of Winchester and Geoffrey de Mandeville. This show of strength was designed both as an insurance policy and to intimidate the King at the imminent meeting (although for some historians the barons’ intent by this time was solely military). But this long heralded conference, arranged in January, never took place.

John permitted smaller scale talks to continue, but buoyed by his papal backing, he was confident that he, rather than the barons, could set the agenda. He sent Langton to clarify the baronial demands at Brackley, near Northampton, a day after the scheduled but cancelled meeting. The barons were guided by Langton’s coherent political reform programme that held broad appeal, but as Painter has observed and as we have discussed above, there was more to it than this: ‘The leaders of the baronial party were the king’s personal enemies. Their chief object … was to avenge old injuries real or fancied and to secure their private rights – lands, castles, and privileges that they felt John or his predecessors had deprived them of.’
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They set out in detail the laws and ancient customs of the kingdom that they expected to see verified and, says Wendover, ‘declared that, unless the King immediately granted them and confirmed them with his own seal they would, by seizing his castles, lands and possessions, force him to give sufficient satisfaction’. On hearing these demands, John’s sarcastic comment was: ‘Why do these barons just not ask for my kingdom?’ Sarcasm turned quickly to rage and he swore that he would not enslave himself by granting the barons their demands. He refused to be pacified by Langton or William Marshal and had his uncompromising reply sent back to the rebel camp. Their immediate response was to openly defy the King by 5 May, by breaking their homage to him (
diffidatio
), and to reaffirm Fitzwalter as their leader, but now in a clearly military capacity, as ‘Marshal of the army of God and the Holy Church’. The storm had finally broken and the war had begun.

With occasional truces, the war was to last over two years. Its first military operation was launched by the barons against Northampton Castle directly following their act of defiance. John, in typically uncommitted fashion, had tried to step back from the brink with an appeal for arbitration on 9 May which revealed admission of wrongs that needed righting; this was immediately rejected and followed up with a royal writ two days later commanding his sheriffs to seize the lands and chattels of the rebels. While this served to strengthen the opposition against him, he countered this to some extent by granting their possessions to his own supporters, thereby encouraging royalist loyalty. The rebels meanwhile had begun their two-week siege of the major royal castle of Northampton. The castle held out under its mercenary captain Geoffrey de Martini because the barons, though arrayed splendidly for war, had no siege machinery at this early stage; they had hoped that Henry de Braybrooke, Sheriff of Northampton and predisposed to the rebel side, might have been able to persuade the garrison to surrender. But John’s defensive measures had been intensified during April: Bristol, Salisbury, Norwich, Oxford and London had their defences strengthened; William Marshal had supervised the garrisoning and readiness of royal castles throughout the country; and men had been brought in from Poitou and Flanders. From the latter came Robert of Béthune, patron of the anonymous chronicler who furnishes us with such valuable information about the war. We know little of the action that took place at Northampton, but among the dead was Robert Fitzwalter’s standard bearer, shot through the head with a crossbow bolt. With the resistance clearly set to hold, the rebel force moved on to the lesser fortress of Bedford Castle, held by William de Beauchamp, which did open its gates to them.

It was not a promising start, but at least the rebels were nonetheless gaining important momentum; once they had led the crossing of the Rubicon, others followed, not least many from the younger generation of sons and nephews of the great baronies, ‘hoping’, judges the Barnwell chronicler, ‘to make a name for themselves in war’.
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With Winchester firmly under the control of his lieutenant Savary de Mauléon, John dispatched Flemish mercenaries under his brother-in-law William Longsword, ransomed back from the French, to secure London. John was looking dominant – but that all changed in a moment: the barons beat them to the capital. When messengers reached them at Bedford with news that the citizens of London were ready to support them, they rushed down to the city where, in the evening of Sunday 17 May, they found, as they had been told, the capital gates open to them in a welcoming gesture of embrace. (The Anonymous of Béthune says that the gates were shut but unguarded; the Barnwell annalist claims that the barons made use of ladders left unattended from the refortification works.) They swiftly entered the city, set up guards at all the gates, and proceeded to the next order of business without delay: they plundered the supporters of the King and the Jews, even tearing down the houses of the latter to utilise their stones in strengthening the defences. Although the Tower held out for the time being, Baynard’s Castle, the city’s second major fortress, though damaged, had for its master Robert Fitzwalter; it was his faction within the city that had helped the rebels land this most critical of prizes.

The occupation of the capital was obviously an immense and prestigious fillip for the rebels. Not only had they control of London’s wealth, large population and surrounding regions, especially Essex; it also provided a tremendous recruitment boost, especially among waverers. As Fitzwalter was to write later that year to his rebel cousin William d’Albini (also written as d’Albini, d’Aubigny and d’Aubigné): ‘You know well what a great benefit it is to you and all of us to keep the city of London, which is our refuge; and what a shame and danger it would be to us if by our own fault we lost it.’
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Its strategic value was as important as its economic and political ones, as it allowed the barons to ship in reinforcements safely from France. It remained in baronial hands throughout the entire conflict and was a major thorn in the loyalists’ side all this time. It proved a major bargaining counter in the Magna Carta negotiations that developed soon afterwards; indeed, it could be argued that its loss forced John to agreement at Runnymede.

Immured securely in London, the rebel leadership sent out letters across the land to earls, barons and knights ‘who appeared to still remain faithful to the king, though only pretending to be so’. These letters were more threatening than exhortative, as Wendover indicates: the London party ‘encouraged them with threats, as they considered the safety of their property and possessions, to abandon a King who was perjured and who waged war against his barons, to unite with them to stand firm in a fight for liberties and peace; and if they declined to do so they would be treated as public enemies, with war raged against them, their castles knocked down, their homes and building burned down, their parks, warrens and orchards destroyed’.
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This is an eternal dilemma of war: being forced to take sides. Wendover claims that the stratagem was effective, with the greater part of the undecided barons now joining them. Among this number were John de Lacy and Robert de Ros. John had wooed these to no effect; what really mattered was the military – and hence political reality – on the ground. Although Wendover is exaggerating the tide away from John, it was nonetheless real, as Coggeshall corroborates: London caused ‘many daily to go over to the army of God’. John was so shaken by the loss he ‘was besieged with terror and never left Windsor’.
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Wendover claims that the King was so abandoned, the pleas of the exchequer and the sheriff’s courts, central to royal administration, came to a halt throughout England, ‘because there was no one to make a valuation for the King or to obey him in anything’. Comments such as this serve to demonstrate how military events and momentum rapidly have an impact on politics.

The news grew worse for John elsewhere as this momentum grew for the barons. Philip Augustus was in contact with the barons, and sent over, probably without official public sanction, the naval mercenary Eustace the Monk transporting siege equipment for the rebels, much needed if they were to break John’s network of over 100 royal castles.
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Over the next month Northampton was lost (the townsfolk rose up against the royalist garrison, killing some of them) as were Lincoln, Chester and Carlisle, these last two also defecting. In Wales and Scotland, Lleywelyn and Alexander were mobilising to capitalise on the situation. Rebellion had broken out in the south-west by the second week of May under William de Montague, William Malet and Robert Fitzpain. John sent the Earl of Salisbury at the head of a Flemish force to lift the siege of Exeter there; however, his intelligence was faulty and the city had already been taken. At Sherborne Castle, Earl William heard that the rebels were prepared to meet him in ambush with knights, sergeants and Welsh archers on the road through woods that he had to take to reach Exeter; he was told that his forces would all be captured and so he returned to the King at Winchester. Here his half-brother the monarch scorned him for his lack of resolve: ‘You are not good at taking fortresses.’ The Flemish were ashamed by these words. John ordered that they make a further attempt. The Anonymous of Béthune, from whom this account comes, tells us that his master Robert was stung into oratory to encourage his men for another expedition on 24 May, declaring that he would rather take a chance ‘either to die or conquer, rather than retreat shamefully.’
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Even when informed that enemy numbers had increased so that that they were now outnumbered by an improbable ten-to-one, they were not deterred. The rebel force was actually not confident in meeting the loyalist forces: on hearing of their approach they abandoned Exeter to them and fled. We shall see in the next two chapters how troops being deployed to a siege was often enough to end the siege without engagement; for this reason it was a central strategy employed throughout the conflict.

Regaining Exeter was a small victory which did little to change the seismic upheavals of May and early June. John continued to play for time, granting safe conducts for negotiations, writing to the pope for help and all the while planning to build up his military resources to crush the rebels when the time was right. With the situation so fluid, it has been argued that John also wanted time to determine which of his barons were still loyal and who had deserted him. But again we see the central flaw of John’s military leadership: indecision and procrastination. His optimistic plans for recovery were always for the future rather than for the present. He responded to the loss of Normandy with an apathetic claim that it could all be recovered quickly; his continental campaigns succeeded only in retaining Gascony from the Iberian threat, not in regaining Angevin territory and hence preventing Capetian consolidation; and now he was once again failing to act decisively. Had John moved resolutely against the rebellion in its first stages, he may have prevented it gaining successes and all-important momentum. Painter suggests that he held back from easy victory ‘in order to satisfy the pope and the rest of the baronage of the correctness of his conduct.’
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However, John’s failure to meet with the baronial party on 26 April only served to confirm his unreliability to the rebels; by this stage, anyway, they had long ceased to trust him. But the appeals to the pope, as with his letter mentioned above, highlight the point made about John deferring decisive action not only to a later date, but also to external agencies rather than his own. It could easily be assumed that John’s sanguine front was a mask for a justifiable lack of confidence in his own ability to solve crises. Painter goes on to make the valid argument that a concentration of royal garrisons and mercenaries might easily have overwhelmed the rebels while in the open field, but London, Fitzwalter’s ‘refuge’, changed all that. ‘Clearly John had waited too long.’
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Instead, he concentrated on reinforcing his castles and ravaging the lands of his enemies. We have already stressed the importance of London. We shall see later how John’s failure to deal with it again reveals his lack of resolve and how this led to his military failure. It was John’s wish to gain time that led him to Runnymede and one of the most famous events in English history: the signing of Magna Carta.

In mid-June, John finally met the barons again face-to-face by the Thames halfway between the rebel camp at Staines and his castle at Windsor. Here they presented to him the ‘Articles of the Barons’, their programme of reforms, which became, with little emendation, the Great Charter. The baronial party had worked on this for months, with the help of Stephen Langton. A cerebral pragmatist, Langton was excoriated by Innocent for his involvement with the rebels and was suspended from his position as Archbishop of Canterbury by the papal legate Pandulf and summoned to Rome; he remained out of England until 1218. Three meetings between 10 and 19 June saw Magna Carta agreed upon. Central as this document is to English constitutional history (and it is still evoked in court cases today, much to the dismay of judges), it is important to keep it in its medieval context. It is not a charter of liberty in the American constitutional sense as declaimed in the Declaration of Independence, but rather a charter of liberties. The charter is dominated by financial matters relating to feudal incidents, such as reliefs, which were no longer vaguely designated to be ‘reasonable’ (the interpretation of which was very different between crown and subject), but fixed at £100 for a barony and 100 shillings for a knight’s fee. The rights of widows and minors under wardship were protected to permit volition against highest bidders. Finances are also addressed in clauses dealing with debts, tariffs and consent for scutage. The arbitrary and corrupt nature of the justice system was another primary concern for the barons, who, as we have discussed, had long suffered under exploitative fines used as much for political purposes as judicial ones. Two consecutive clauses state: ‘To no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay right or justice’; and, more famously, ‘No freeman shall be arrested or imprisoned or disseised or outlawed or exiled or in any way destroyed, neither will we set forth against him, except by the lawful judgement of his peers and by the law of the land.’ Security issues are dealt with in clauses dealing with the return of hostages and lands and castles and another calling for the removal ‘from the kingdom of all foreign knights, crossbowmen, sergeants and mercenaries, who have come with horses and arms to the detriment of the kingdom’. Both concerns over security and patronage through the presence of foreigners holding office and hence power is seen in the preceding clause which demands the removal of named alien servants of the state such as Gerard Athée, Guy de Cigogné and Geoffrey de Martingy. The conditions of the charter were designed to maximise a broad appeal; they reveal explicitly the heart of baronial protest against John’s autocratic and capricious government.
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