Lionheart (40 page)

N
OTES

1.
  William of Newburgh,
Historia Rerum Anglicarum
, Vol 1, p. 402.

2.
  Roger of Howden,
Chronica
, Vol 2, p. 202.

3.
  
L’Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal
, ed. P. Meyer (Paris: Société de l’histoire de France, 1901), Vol 3, p. 134.

4.
  J. Choffel,
Richard Coeur de Lion … et l’Angleterre cessa d’être normande
(Paris: Lanore/Sorlot, 1985), p. 237.

5.
  Roger of Howden,
Chronica
, Vol 3, p. 203.

6.
  Roger of Howden,
Chronica
, Vol 3, p. 202.

7.
  Pipe Roll 5 Richard I, pp. 44, 69.

8.
  Pipe Roll 7 Richard I, pp. 261–2.

9.
  J.H. Round,
Geoffrey de Mandeville
(London: Longmans, 1892), p. 138.

10.
  Roger of Howden,
Chronica
, Vol 3, p. 248.

11.
  Also known as Longuespée. Some of his charters recorded in the cartulary of Bradenstoke Priory mention
comitissa Ida
,
mater mea
, which confirmed his birth to Countess Ida of Norfolk.

12.
  Pipe Roll 6 Richard I, pp. 1–27, 213.

13.
  Roger of Howden,
Chronica
, Vol 3, p. 251.

14.
  Meyer,
Guillaume le Maréchal
, Vol 3, p.134.

15.
  Ibid, Vol 3, p. 137.

16.
  J. Gillingham, ‘William the Bastard at War’, in
Anglo-Norman Warfare
, ed. M. Strickland (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1994), p. 204.

17.
  Ralph of Diceto,
Opera Historica
, Vol 2, p. 117.

18.
  Ibid, Vol 2, p. 120.

19.
  Bartlett,
England under the Norman and Angevin Kings
, p. 206.

20.
  Richard, A.,
Histoire
, Vol 2, p. 293.

21.
  Powicke,
The Loss of Normandy
, p. 102.

22.
  Ralph of Diceto,
Opera Historica
, Vol 2, p. 119.

23.
  Roger of Howden,
Chronica
, Vol 3, p. 257.

20

Good King Richard

E
leanor’s court at Poitiers had never recovered from Henry’s purge of 1174, and she no longer had the energy to revive the great audience hall beside the Maubergeonne Tower where Berengaria held her lonely and inconsequential court when not in her own territory further north in Maine.
¹
The haven to which Eleanor retired in order to distance herself from the turmoil of the world was the monastery/convent to which Henry had sought to consign her. As her first father-in-law Louis VI had installed his chancery and war office in St Denis, so she betook her modest court to Fontevraud, midway between the Channel coast and the Pyrenees. On her way to Mass each morning, she walked over the permanent inhabitants of the abbey church and past Henry’s tomb with its effigy showing his restless hands stilled at last and quietly holding the sceptre of state.

Fontevraud’s several thousand religious and lay inhabitants of both sexes, ruled by the abbess, included an upper stratum of noble ladies whose husbands had tired of them or found a more advantageous match, plus those who had chosen to put the Peace of God between themselves and a society that used their bodies, titles and possessions as the disposable filling in the sandwiches of treaties and alliances. To this elegant society Eleanor came as a natural queen regardless of the worldly titles she claimed. She remained at Fontevraud while Richard held his Christmas court in Rouen, but she was kept up to date by a stream of clerical and lay visitors from all over Europe.

It is said that not long after that, while hunting in Normandy, Richard was recognised by a hermit who lived in the forest, who reminded him of the destruction of Sodom and warned him to give up his forbidden pleasures before the hand of God struck him down.
²
Shortly after, at Easter 1195 he fell seriously ill and took this as a divine warning to change his lifestyle and acquire some merit in the afterlife, the crusader’s absolution being only retroactive. Although still as avid for taxes as ever, and as brutal against those he considered to have transgressed against him, he also started to perform good works like feeding the starving poor and compensating some religious communities for the treasures that had been seized to pay his ransom.
³

Hostilities broke out again when Philip Augustus defied a truce and advanced within 12 miles of Rouen, forcing a swift removal of Princess Alais to Caen and thence from one fortress to another as the tide of battle ebbed and flowed. She was now 34, an age by which most women of the time were dead. Having been handed over to Henry as Richard’s betrothed when a 9-year-old girl, she had never known freedom and was a stranger to her own family. Under the Treaty of Louviers, signed in January 1196, Philip gave back all the territory recently gained from Richard in return for the Vexin.
⁴
He also recovered Alais and married her off to Guillaume de Ponthieu, whose strategically important domains lay between Normandy and the territory of Richard’s ally Baldwin of Flanders. With that, Alais disappeared from history, after spending a lifetime captive in the gilded cage of a family that despised her as she was used and abused in turn by Henry, Eleanor and Richard.

In keeping with the clause in the Treaty of Messina that had caused so much trouble, Richard confirmed his nephew Arthur of Brittany as his heir, but when he ordered Geoffrey’s widow Countess Constance to bring her son to Rouen, she was imprisoned by the second husband Henry II had imposed on her, Earl Ranulf of Chester. Hastening to his nephew’s rescue, Richard found that he had been spirited away to Paris and was being brought up in Philip Augustus’ household with crown prince Louis. For Prince John, this seemed to augur well and gave him hope that he must now be recognised as heir to the whole Plantagenet Empire by default. He kept a low profile nonetheless – as well he might, having had his estates restored to him the previous year on condition of good behaviour.

The widespread misery and suffering north of the Channel was made worse by Archbishop Hubert Walter attempting to satisfy the insatiable king by imposing a scutage on tenants-in-chivalry, or knightly tenants. He also introduced a new tax of 2 shillings per carucate for the
socage
or civil tenants, which translates as a swingeing imposition, a carucate being the extent of land a team of oxen can plough each season. Every freeman was also assessed as owing a quarter of the value of his personal property. The money-less Cistercian and Gilbertian monasteries forfeited wool-clippings from their flocks of sheep, and the great churches had to surrender the treasures that had not already been seized for payment of the ransom. A
tallage
tax was also levied on towns and the royal demesnes, as assessed by Hubert Walter’s travelling justices.
⁵
This was the third time in his brief reign that Richard squeezed the fiscal resources of his island realm ‘until the pips squeaked’: first for the failed Third Crusade, second for his ransom and now to finance his wars in France.

One in-built problem, as in many countries today, was the corruption of the officials collecting the taxes. Abbot Robert of Caen persuaded Richard that something like half the tax money was never handed over by the collectors, and that a strict audit of their accounts would double the revenue without further legislation being required. Sent to London in April 1196, he set about his task by summoning the sheriffs of every county to suffer a complete audit of their accounts. This was an open insult to Archbishop Hubert Walter’s authority and the zeal with which he had been serving the king. It may be coincidence that the abbot was taken ill while dining with Hubert Walter and died five days later. William of Newburgh drily commented that ‘those persons who had dreaded his coming sorrowed not at his going’.
⁶

It was not only in the country that dissent was growing. The emerging class of tradesmen and artisans in London also thought that they had to bear an unfair share of the burden of taxation and were seething with discontent. Life for them had become so grim that a charismatic crusader knight and London magistrate named William fitz Osbert took it upon himself to champion their cause, preaching passive resistance to the excessive impositions placed upon them, all the while protesting his loyalty to the king, so that he could not be accused of treason. In the fifth book of William of Newburgh’s
Historia Rerum Anglicarum
the chronicler treads a delicate path, disparaging fitz Osbert to demonstrate his own loyalty to the Crown. A sort of bourgeois Robin Hood, fitz Osbert claimed to be the saviour of the poor and declared that he would ‘divide the humble from the haughty and treacherous … and the elect from the reprobate, as light from darkness’.
⁷
Drawn by this rhetoric, his supporters were said to number 52,000 in London alone and rumour had it that they had accumulated secret caches of weapons, and intended breaking into and robbing the houses of the rich to compensate themselves for the burden of taxation.

Aware that he had made himself vulnerable, fitz Osbert went about surrounded by a bodyguard of followers. That spring, he travelled to Normandy to lay before Richard the plight of the urban poor who were bearing an unfair share of the crippling burden of taxes, and also to protest his personal loyalty. He pleaded his case so well that Richard let him depart the court freely but, to seasoned courtiers who had served under Henry II, there was an odour of Becket’s demise in the air. Richard’s hands were seen to be clean but, after fitz Osbert’s return to England, Hubert Walter as chief justiciar ordered his arrest one day in mid-Lent when the former crusader’s self-appointed bodyguard was elsewhere.

After one of the archbishop’s officers was killed in the arrest, fitz Osbert and some followers took refuge in the London church of St Mary le Bow, claiming sanctuary but also prepared to defend themselves vigorously. To force them out, Hubert Walter ordered the church to be set on fire. When fitz Osbert emerged, choking from the smoke, he was stabbed in the belly and arrested. Within days, he was convicted, ‘drawn asunder by four horses’
⁸
and hanged at Tyburn with nine companions, his followers subsequently digging out so much ground beneath the gallows for souvenirs that they had to be kept at bay by armed soldiers.

The bishops of the realm were horrified at Hubert Walter’s excess. His own chapter, whose property the church in question was, had long voiced disapproval of him and placed this act of sacrilege at the head of the list of his other misdoings to be attached to an indictment they were preparing for the pope requesting that the archbishop be divested of his ecclesiastical offices.