Blood Cries Afar (30 page)

My lord king, our war is not yet over; therefore you ought carefully to consider how the fortunes of war may turn; for if you now order us to hang these men, the barons, our enemies, will perhaps by a similar event take me or the nobles of your army, and, following your example, hang us. Therefore do not let this happen, for in such a case no one will fight in your cause.
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Savary’s self-interested pragmatism tempered John’s bloodlust. Acts of terror had their place in medieval warfare, but the nature of this civil war was not so bitter as in other conflicts: divided families could understand differences of allegiances, and even royalists could not fail to appreciate the grievances against the King. Other counsels for clemency for the same reason are occasionally depicted in medieval chronicles. In 1347, having spent almost a year besieging Calais, Edward III was in a bloody mood on taking the town and wanted the defeated garrison executed; Sir Walter Mauny successfully advised him against this for the same reason given by Savary: ‘My lord, you may well be mistaken, and you are setting a bad example for us. Suppose one day you send us to defend one of your fortresses; we should go less cheerfully if you have these people put to death, for they would do the same to us if they had the chance.’
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D’Albini and his knights, who included William of Lancaster, Osbert Gyffard, William d’Einford and others named by Wendover, were imprisoned in Corfe Castle; others, such as Thomas de Melutan, Richard Gifford and Thomas of Lincoln ended up in Nottingham. John rewarded his troops by handing over to them the sergeants for ransoms. As Wendover concludes, ‘By these misfortunes the cause of the barons was much weakened.’

Military activity had occurred elsewhere in the south-east, but we have only snippets of information for this. Royalist gains elsewhere include the slighting of Mountfitchet Castle in Stansted and the capitulation of a number of castles. The Anonymous of Béthune relates how his lord persuaded the Tonbridge garrison to hand over Gilbert de Clare’s castle to him. Here we see a common example of castle-taking: not by force, but by negotiation. Robert warned the garrison that when John had finished at Rochester, which would be very soon, his army would make for Tonbridge and that the rebel force in London would not come to its aid. The garrison and Robert came to an agreement by which the besieged were allowed to send a messenger to London; if no help would be forthcoming from the capital, the castle would be handed over peacefully. This is what transpired, and on 28 November Robert placed his troops inside.
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A similar agreement left William de Beauchamp’s Bedford Castle in de Bréauté’s hands on the same day, when Hanslope (Castlethorpe) fell to him, too. He, Bréauté and the chamberlain Geoffrey de Neville roamed freely across much of the eastern midlands.

The inability to help beleaguered rebel garrisons could only serve to undermine the resistance of such men everywhere. John was building up a dangerous momentum in the south-east that threatened to crush the opposition there. The baronial party was more secure in the north and the east as long as John was contained in the south. Although Llywylyn’s forces in Wales were holding down the forces of Ranulf of Chester and William Marshal, at the same time these earls were preventing the Welsh from making incursions into England. In the north, the teenaged Scottish king, Alexander II, failed to take the border town of Norham. But John’s army was growing daily; he even had to appoint a Templar named Brother Roger whose sole purpose was to hand out funds and expenses to troops arriving from the continent. No wonder the barons appealed to Louis with the line, ‘if only he would pack his clothes and come, they would give him the kingdom and make him their lord.’
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Negotiations between the baronial diplomatic mission and Louis entered their final phase. Saer de Quincy probably led these discussions from the English side: he was brother-in-law to Simon de Montfort, a close friend of Louis with whom he had shared the dangers of the Albigensian crusade. The barons decisively agreed not to hold any fiefs from John and made homage to Louis as their lord. The talks nearly broke down when Philip Augustus heard of the new round of negotiations between the barons and John that had begun on 9 November. If these discussions did take place, they may have been limited to Rochester Castle and the fate of its garrison. The baronial party in France did not know if this news was genuine, or whether John was up to some diplomatic skulduggery attempting to disrupt the talks. This was a perfectly reasonable suspicion: both the English and French kings had delved into the world of falsified intelligence to implicate others into their machiavellian schemes.
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Amid accusations of treacherous behaviour, the baronial party agreed to a guarantee by sending over 24 of their sons to France as hostages. As was usual in such cases, the hostages were well cared for in comfortable conditions. The crown was now Louis’s for the taking. Practicalities of an actual coronation – there was no archbishop to perform the ceremony and hence confer spiritual authority, and there was no prospect of papal blessing when John was Innocent’s vassal – were left for a later date. The first and most important step remained military success. Louis now committed himself to the baronial side and to the enterprise of England. The French had joined the war.

The first contingent of French forces had landed at the Orwell estuary by the start of December. Just as the rebel tide was at a low ebb, it now turned, carrying on it the firm hope of victory. Numbers are uncertain – perhaps 140 knights with their retinues and an unlikely total force, according to Coggeshall, of 7000 – but a sizeable division was able to make its way into London.

Louis had emulated William the Conqueror in promising followers land in England, an enticing prospect to landless younger knights. One of their leaders was the unflatteringly named William Ratsfoot.
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Their impact was, for the time being, entirely psychological, boosting morale. A French commitment had been made, with Louis promising to arrive with his main force in the new year. The French brought with them experienced, professional soldiers to match John’s; they would bring not just men, but money, supplies and vital siege equipment. But until then, the French stayed in London over winter, moaning about English beer but otherwise living comfortably and safely.

John, on the other hand, took the war to his enemies across the land with sword and fire. He wished to keep his momentum going and to make sufficient headway to render further French intervention pointless after Christmas. John travelled through Essex, Surrey and Hampshire in the first half of December, checking in on Windsor before holding a major war council in St Albans between 18 and 20 December, where the rebels were publicly proclaimed as excommunicants. Wendover (whose mother house was St Albans) writes that John ‘retired with a few of his advisers into the cloister and devised plans for overcoming his enemies’, adding, notably, that he also wished to address the question of ‘how he might find pay for the foreigners fighting under him’.
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The two were, of course, intimately linked. John took the opportunity to assess the strength of his resources and how they should be disposed. A document survives from this occasion which Stephen Church has identified as the earliest English muster roll.
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This gives us some idea of the number of knights in John’s service. It lists 47 household knights of the King, and 375 other knights. Very few of the latter were English; most were from the Low Countries. The conflict was never simply a matter of English against the French. In fact, Wendover suggests that one main reason for the crown being offered to Louis was because he was suzerain of so many of John’s troops. Church estimates this to represent half the number of knights available to John: at a total of 800 knights, easily outmatching the knights at the barons’ disposal.

A clear strategy was determined upon at St Albans and rapidly implemented.
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John split his army into two. One, under the command of Earl William of Salisbury, supported by Falkes de Bréauté, Savary de Mauléon, William Brewer (or Gerard de Sooteghem) and the Brabantine Walter le Buck, was to conduct operations in the south while keeping the rebels pinned down in London; the other, led by the King, was to march north ‘to ravage’, says Wendover, ‘the whole country by fire and sword’. This strategy deliberately left London to one side in the hope that by crushing resistance throughout the rest of the realm, the capital would feel its isolation and surrender. The flaw of this was that the richest city in the land stood defiant, and not just symbolically as it could absorb an influx of foreign troops to match John, provide resources and funds, and therefore continue the resistance against him. Was it wise to leave London? Even with hindsight it is not easy to judge the wisdom of John’s plan. A siege of London would have been lengthy, costly and dangerous. We can not claim with any certainty to know in detail the actual relative strengths of the armies now that the French were arriving; even after John’s death William Marshal and the royalists still made no move on the capital. A ravaging campaign made good sense in many ways. It was a chance to reassert the King’s power over the country and thus re-establish the machinery of governance which would bring in the revenues to fund his military machine; the plundering itself would reward his mercenaries and keep them sweet; the rebels’ resolve would be undermined by the catastrophic economic damage done to their estates; it carried few direct risks; and wavering barons and knights might be dissuaded from joining in with an inactive force stuck in a city in the south-east. But for all the chroniclers’ mocking of the rebel forces staying holed up in the capital and not venturing forth, their strategy might be vindicated by the fact that in perhaps making London too strong for John to take, they successfully gained the time necessary for French reinforcements to appear on the scene; without these reinforcements, they had little chance of victory. This arguably should have made the capital a priority objective for John. A strong investiture may have decided the war. Warren’s assessment seems a judicious one: John’s decision was ‘a typical example of his reluctance to commit himself to decisive military action: the rebellion would have collapsed had London been captured. The rebel headquarters there were the nettle that he should have grasped and uprooted without flinching … One cannot help feeling that a Richard or a Philip would have gone straight for the hardest task and sought a decisive victory.’
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This perceptive commentary encapsulates a major weakness of John as a war leader: going for the easy success. He had missed his opportunity in 1215, before the French started to arrive. If London had fallen, it is unlikely that there would have been any rebellion left for Louis to support, and no reasonable prospect of an English crown for the French Prince.

John led his army from St Albans on the evening of 20 December to unleash devastation across his own kingdom and put fear into the hearts of his own people. Christmas 1215 ushered in an eighteen-month period of warfare that was the worst England had experienced since the anarchy of King Stephen’s reign over half a century before.
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The new year would see civil war become a national one. The French were coming.

J
ohn and his advisers had made their war plans at St Albans just a few days before Christmas. The new year saw the plans executed with maximum force. When the King divided his army into two and set his men loose on his land, he knew that he had to achieve significant military gains, even victory, before Louis set out from France with his main force to transform the rebels’ position. Although the plan was arguably flawed – the rebel stronghold of London was deliberately left until a later date in the hope that a victorious military expedition would leave it isolated and ready for surrender – the winter campaign of 1215/16 witnessed John demonstrating urgent and focused energy against his enemies, for which some historians have praised him. The campaign revealed the destructive power of the King as nothing had before.

While John made his way northward with as many as 400 knights (predominantly Flemish), his southern army made its move in the south-east. This force was under experienced leadership. William Longsword, Earl of Salisbury and John’s half-brother, had been released from captivity in France following his capture at Bouvines, by means of a prisoner exchange with the high-ranking Robert de Dreux. Although he had failed to keep London out of rebel hands, he had chased the rebels away from Exeter in the south-west. With him was the notorious mercenary commander Falkes de Bréauté, a loyal (and well-paid) officer of John and heartily detested by the barons. Successful in his operations the preceding autumn, his approach to warfare was as ruthless as it was coldly professional. Accompanying them were Savary de Mauléon and the mercenary Walter Buck. Their orders were to contain the main rebel force in London, deprive them of supplies and reassert royal authority outside to the immediate north and east of the capital. They followed their orders with efficiency and, even though resistance was limited, brutality.

While the garrisons of Windsor, Hertford and Berkhamstead patrolled close to London, attempting to ensure that no troops came out and no supplies went in, Salisbury’s and de Bréauté’s forces ravaged and quickly subdued Essex, Hertfordshire, Middlesex, Huntingdon and Cambridgeshire by mid-January, and drove the rebels at Bury St Edmund’s back to a temporary refuge on the Isle of Ely. The chronicles speak of serious destruction and brutality: everywhere the royalist forces seized booty, forced money tributes from towns and people and burned the barons’ estates. The inhabitants of London could see – as the marauding soldiers meant them to – the smoke from burning land around the capital; a suburb was attacked. The retreating rebel forces were pursued to Ely and the city sacked and put to fire. Ralph of Coggeshall wrote: ‘[T]hey made great slaughter, as they did everywhere they went, sparing neither age, nor sex, nor condition, nor the clergy.’
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The Earl of Salisbury managed to afford the women of the city some protection from Walter Buck’s rampaging Brabançon mercernaries, but Coggeshall reports how people were horribly tortured to give up their valuables and reveal where they had been hidden. Abbot Ralph had no sympathy with the soldiers; they had just raided his Cistercian monastery and seized 22 horses from his stables. The Barnwell chronicler informs us that those who could fled to London, an indication that the royalist blockade was not secure.
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