Lionheart (41 page)

The main reason why Richard’s avarice had spiralled out of control was his decision to replace the castle of Gisors, forfeited to Philip Augustus. Under the terms of the Treaty of Louviers in January 1196, both monarchs agreed that neither would fortify a limestone spur dominating the Seine Valley above the town of Andely, but Richard had no intention of respecting that undertaking. He tried to buy the spur and adjoining land, which belonged to the see of Rouen, from its Archbishop Walter. Well understanding the strategic importance of the site, two-thirds of the way from Paris to Rouen, where an impregnable castle could blockade river traffic between Paris and the sea and effectively deter any drive by Philip Augustus along the Seine Valley into Normandy, the archbishop held out for a high price in compensation for the revenues that would be lost and the damage that had been sustained to ecclesiastical property in the recent fighting.

Castle building almost always displaced existing populations and disrupted the economic life of the area, such as food production and markets. Throughout the construction, quarries had to be opened up and operated; masons and other skilled artisans had to be hired from elsewhere; a local labour force had to be impressed; the new chapel might disturb existing parish demarcations; vineyards and fields were ruined and forests cleared – as at Bures, where Henry’s rebuilding had required the felling of 1,000 mature oaks. So, the archbishop’s demands were not unreasonable.

As usual in any prolonged negotiation, Richard’s patience ran out before an agreement was reached and he began construction anyway atop the limestone spur standing almost 300ft above the river. The Pipe Rolls recording the expenditure for the work list all sums disbursed to quarrymen, masons, carpenters, smiths, diggers who hacked out the rock-cut ditches by hand, carters who transported the supplies to the castle and all the other skilled and unskilled workers. Since the rolls contain no mention of an architect or master mason being paid, it is possible that Richard laid out the ground plan and directed the work himself. Certainly he paid many visits to hurry the work along, in case Philip made a surprise attack before it was completed. Inevitably, many workers died in accidents during construction; the first deliberate spilling of blood occurred when three of Philip Augustus’ soldiers who had been taken prisoner were thrown to their deaths from the top of the walls in retaliation for a massacre of Welsh mercenaries in which they had taken part.

In an attempt to win Pope Celestine III’s intercession in his negotiations with Richard, Walter of Rouen set out for Rome in November 1196, obliging Richard to despatch a delegation led by William Longchamp to plead his case at the papal court. Longchamp died en route while passing through Poitou early in February 1197 – unmourned by anyone in England except his brothers and his close friend, Richard’s chaplain Milo.
⁹
This left Bishop Philip of Durham and Bishop Guillaume of Lisieux to continue to Rome and make Richard’s case there. Walter of Rouen had meanwhile issued an interdict against the duchy of Normandy which prohibited church services from being performed; contemporary chroniclers described unburied corpses lying in the streets of Norman towns. Richard defied the interdict, which was not lifted until April 1197 after he had done a deal with Walter of Rouen, ceding to him two manors and the port of Dieppe as part of the purchase price for the land.

Letters signed by Richard when at his new castle bore the mention
apud bellum castrum de rupe
– at the fine castle on the rock. In
la langue d’oïl
or northern French it was called Château Gaillard or Bold Castle. At the same time, the walled town of Petit Andely was built on the riverbank below. Because of complications in the work and Richard’s haste, costs rocketed, and were eventually said to have totalled something in the region of £20,000, spent in less than two years. This was more than twice the total expended on castles in England during his reign.

The design of Richard’s ‘Bold Castle’ is similar in some respects to the Angevin treasure castle at Chinon, built by Henry II half a century earlier, which also stands on a promontory overlooking a riverside town, but this one was far more ambitious. It had three
enceintes
or walled baileys separated by dry moats. In the outer baileys were the stables, blacksmiths and armourers’ forges, carpenters’ workshops and storage space to stock all the food and other supplies necessary to withstand a prolonged siege.

The castle incorporated all the latest improvements in fortifications that Richard had seen on the crusade and in Germany, especially the concept of concentric fortifications that had impressed him in the east. The gates were protected by towers on either side, from which attackers could be enfiladed, thus eradicating the blind spot immediately outside each gate. Earlier castles in Europe had
hourdes
or temporary wooden shielded platforms erected, jutting out from the top of the walls in time of war, from which archers could shoot down on attackers approaching the walls. These were vulnerable to missiles fired by siege engines. Château Gaillard was among the first to improve on this idea: its towers had a projecting top floor provided with machicolations or gaps in the masonry floor through which the defenders could shoot more safely. Virtually all the walls were curved so that the missiles fired by siege engines would tend to ricochet off instead of shattering the masonry, as happened with flat walls.

The plan of Château Gaillard drawn by the nineteenth-century architect Viollet-le-Duc (plate 33) shows the innermost bailey and keep at the top or north-western end with the outer bailey at the bottom or south-eastern end. It is pentagonal and has five towers spaced along the wall, three of which are at the corners. The middle bailey is an irregular polygon whose walls are protected with many towers, the idea being to enfilade any attackers at the base of the walls. After little more than a year, the castle was nearly finished, causing Richard to boast of his ‘beautiful one-year-old daughter’, which he swore could never be taken, even if its walls were made of butter.

In England, Hubert Walter had resigned his temporal offices in humiliation after the abbott of Caen’s audit, but was not long absent from the corridors of power, introducing a law establishing one uniform system of weights and measures throughout England, which was to last 800 years until Britain went metric in the last years of the twentieth century. For many years, Richard was credited with being a great lawgiver on account of some excellent and long-lasting legislation enacted during his reign, but these laws were enacted in his absence from the country, largely by Hubert Walter. Among his other laws was a requirement that, on his fifteenth birthday, every male must swear to uphold the law, to neither commit crime nor be accessory to it, and must join the ‘hue and cry’ pursuing malefactors in support of sheriffs and their officers. In their absence, every citizen was entitled to make ‘citizens’ arrests’.

In 1197 Hubert Walter found the time to travel to Normandy to serve as Richard’s peripatetic envoy, settling disputes with prelates and even arranging a truce with Philip Augustus. In November he was back in England, charged by his king to send 300 knights for twelve months’ service in the continental possessions or money sufficient to purchase the services of 300 mercenaries for twelve months. At a Great Council held in Oxford early in December he proposed to the assembled Anglo-Norman barons and bishops that they should furnish these men from their own resources, but the scheme foundered on the old argument that the obligations of the English vassals were to support the king of England in England and not across the Channel.

Shortly afterwards, Hubert Walter forced a reassessment of all the arable land in England for the purpose of taxation using his newly standardised land measurements. Before the commission charged with enforcing that had concluded its task, however, the youngest cardinal ever to be elected pope began a rule of nearly two decades in Rome under the name of Innocent III. This vigorous and intelligent 37-year-old started as he meant to go on. Among the first of his acts was the restoration of the old prohibition on members of religious orders holding secular office. Hubert Walter immediately resigned the title and functions of justiciar and remained without secular responsibility until, after Richard’s death, he accepted the post of chancellor under John, to the general relief of the barons, since he alone could restrain the new monarch’s excesses. In this, he succeeded so well that, on hearing of the archbishop’s death in 1205, John was to say, ‘Now at last I am truly king.’
¹⁰

The confinement in Germany had slightly moderated Richard’s arrogance that had made him so many enemies before and during the crusade. It was there too that he first became Good King Richard,
¹¹
winning the hearts of most of the emperor’s vassals who met him. For this reason, they approached him now to resolve the knotty problem of succession when Henry Hohenstaufen died suddenly in Messina on 28 September 1197, shortly after releasing Richard from the oath of fealty given under duress at Mainz.

Of the two contenders for the imperial throne, the infant son of Constance of Sicily was unacceptable to the German electors by virtue of his minority. Although Philip of Swabia, the late emperor’s brother, had much support in the south, he was not well thought of in the north or by the bishops of the empire. In this dilemma the hero of Christendom seemed an ideal compromise candidate to many of the northern barons and bishops of the empire, who had come to know him personally.
¹²
Henry II must have turned in his tomb at Fontevraud when Richard failed to leap at this chance to close a vice around Philip by constructing the greatest empire since Rome, comprising England, Wales, Ireland, most of France and the German empire north and south of the Alps.

Richard lacked the strategic vision, but looking after his friends and protégés was another matter. As he had used his influence in the Holy Land in favour of his nephew Henry of Champagne, so he now proposed Matilda’s son Otto of Brunswick as candidate. Otto had served Richard loyally after remaining in France when his father returned to Germany. He had even been named count of Poitou – a post for which his youth and haughty disregard for local customs and laws made him a disastrous appointment, despite Eleanor’s attempts at tutelage.
¹³

That apart, he was now a knight of proven valour, schooled in the arts of warfare by his famous uncle, and well thought of by the Church, to capitalise on which Richard borrowed 2,125 marks from a Lombard banker to grease palms that could be influential on Otto’s behalf at the papal court.
¹⁴
He also outfitted his nephew in considerable splendour for his return to Saxony. Endowed with a liberal supply of money for bribes and presents to the German electors, Otto departed with Richard’s blessing en route to Liège, then on German soil. Unwelcome there, he continued with the archbishop of Cologne to that city before leading the archbishop’s knights at the assault of Aachen, which surrendered on 10 July 1198. Within twenty-four hours he was married to the infant daughter of the duke of Lorraine, whose head was too small and whose neck too weak to wear a crown at the coronation next day.
¹⁵

To Philip Augustus, the Otto–Richard alliance was a new menace. In addition, the Church had forgiven neither his invasion of a crusader’s lands nor his violent rejection of his Danish wife Ingeborg immediately after the wedding night on 14 August 1193. Contemporaries hypothesised that he had discovered she was not a virgin, or that she was deformed ‘in her parts’ or had bad breath. Unable to plead consanguinity for an annulment, Philip eventually advanced the superficially humiliating argument that she had unmanned him. It was a clever move because admitting impotence enabled him to plead non-consummation, always grounds for annulment. Whatever the truth, she remained confined in the convent of Soissons so that he could live in sin on the Île de la Cité with his German mistress Agnès de Méranie and their children.
¹⁶

With the whole world and Heaven too against him, it seemed, Philip Augustus decided that he had nothing to lose by invading Normandy at its weakest point, adjacent to Ponthieu, the county allied to his cause by poor Alais’ body. Before they were driven back by Mercadier and William the Marshal, Philip’s forces took several castles, which he refused to return. Once again, he came within minutes of capture when a bridge collapsed under the weight of too many men and horses fleeing from their pursuers close behind. The collapse dumped him in the river, and drowned twenty of the armoured knights in his entourage.
¹⁷

Richard had taken a calculated risk in leaving his main force far behind in the heat of battle. The confusion of the skirmish at the bridge is evident from these lines in the ‘life’ of William the Marshal:

And in that place we unhorsed Mathieu de Montmorency and Alain de Ronci and Fulk de Gilerval with a single lance and kept them captive. Of the Frankish force there were captured at least 100 knights. We send you the names of the more important ones, and you shall have the names of others when we know them, for Mercadier took about thirty whom we have not seen.
¹⁸