Richard & John: Kings at War (58 page)

John spent Christmas of 1203 at Canterbury, and the rest and security seem to have enabled him to recover his nerve. Early in the new year he met his barons at Oxford and outlined the options.
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Eastern Normandy had passed out of his control, though there were glimmerings of hope elsewhere. Château-Gaillard still held out - and while it did so Rouen was safe - and Chinon under Hubert de Burgh, Loches under the mercenary captain Gérard of Athée, and the powerful garrison at Tours provided beacons of light for the Angevin cause. John argued strongly that a major expeditionary force was needed and for that he required money, taking the opportunity to chide the barons for their tightfistedness hitherto. Now John announced a new war levy via ‘scutage’ or shield-money, the process whereby feudal landholders paid a lump sum to an overlord for military service owed and then reclaimed the amount from their knights.
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Since most magnates in England held their land in return for military service, they could not avoid scutage, which on this occasion was levied at a rate of two and a half marks for every knight they would otherwise have to bring into the field. John topped up the scutage income with a plethora of new or amended taxes: tallage uplifted from towns; a 7 per cent tax on all mercantile goods in ships in English ports; privileges, prerogatives, titles and lifetime concessions sold off to the highest bidder.
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The universal mulcting irrestistibly recalled Richard and the ‘Saladin tithe’ but that had been for the ‘noble’ purpose of expelling the heathen from the Holy Land, while these latest taxes were designed merely to recoup territories a wiser and better king would not have lost in the first place. John’s hopes of reconquest rose, and on 6 March he gave detailed orders for the transport of animals - dogs, horses, falcons as well as prey like deer and boar - for the hunts he proposed to hold in France.
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By a choice irony, on this very date the situation in Normandy reached the point of no return when Château-Gaillard fell. Philip Augustus was not a military natural as Richard had been; but time proved that he was a stayer, capable of learning from more talented men and absorbing lessons learned at Acre and elsewhere. By 1203 he had become as much a master of siegecraft as the Lionheart. The defenders contested every inch of ground tenaciously, but Philip’s sappers and miners over the months gradually succeeded in weakening the castle walls; the English made the mistake of countermining, hoping to frighten off the French burrowers, but this simply made the foundations even more tottery. When he was convinced that the wall was seriously undermined, Philip brought up his most massive trebuchet and hurled gigantic boulders at it until it collapsed. Vicious hand-to-hand fighting ensued until the weary English survivors in the citadel, by this time reduced in number to 156, finally surrendered.
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The news of the fall of the ‘impregnable’ Château-Gaillard sent shock-waves across the Angevin empire; the reaction in Normandy was closer to panic. It now seemed distinctly possible that Rouen might fall before John could get his relieving army over the Channel. Efforts were switched to building up an enormous granary and storehouse of provisions in the Norman capital, so that it could not be starved out. Within its strong walls and triple fosse, John’s faithful lieutenant Peter de Preaux remained confident he could hold out until John’s new army crossed over from England, for there were already enough supplies to feed the garrison for a year and Rouen, unlike the other towns in Normandy, really did owe its wealth and prosperity to the special favours received from John; since its burghers had nowhere to go but down under any new dispensation, they were immune to the virus of turncoating sweeping across the duchy.
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John allowed himself to relax and lay plans for a huge counteroffensive, using Caen and the Cherbourg peninsula (hitherto unravaged by the war) as his launch-pads. Meanwhile John tried to exhaust all his diplomatic options, even forlornly sending to Germany to see if there remained any Rhineland lord who had not left on crusade. He placed many of his hopes on papal intervention, and fortuitously a papal legate was in England, charged with the very task of achieving a ceasefire between Angevins and Capetians. In the second week of April a high-powered delegation (including William Marshal, the archbishop of Canterbury, the earl of Leicester and the bishops of Norwich and Ely) accompanied the nuncio on a visit to Philip in Paris. Philip was affability itself but he would not be budged on his main demands: John must hand over Arthur and surrender all his continental claims.
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The insistence that Arthur’s sister Eleanor (whom John had, paradoxically, treated well) also be handed over must have struck a sour note, for John had just lost another Eleanor - his mother. She died at 80 on 1 April 1204, already foreseeing the loss of Normandy. Richard had always been her favourite son, but she had also performed for John tasks that went way beyond the call of either maternal or queenly duty.
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Faced with the prospect of a gruelling siege of Rouen, Philip revealed his true intelligence. He simply turned away and left it to stew, instead concentrating on targets on the periphery of Normandy. He reasoned that if all the rest of Normandy were lost, it would be futile for Rouen to try to stand alone, an Angevin oasis amid a wilderness of enemies. He marched up the River Risle and took Argentan; the next objective, Falaise, birthplace of William the Conqueror, resisted half-heartedly for a week then capitulated. Caen then surrendered without a fight, and barons and nobles flocked in from all sides to worship the rising sun and pay their homage to the new conqueror.
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Meanwhile in the west his Breton allies swept over Mont St Michel and Avranches; the Bretons and the French then converged and mopped up the Cherbourg peninsula.
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With most of Normandy in his hands, Philip then allowed himself a leisurely progress through Lisieux, bound for Rouen. The Rouenais were now surrounded and pondered their options; it was one thing to be the jewel in the Angevin crown and to receive all the trading and financial privileges that went with that status, but what happened if there was no longer an Angevin ruler to protect them? If they were to salvage anything from the wreck, the burghers had to look to their own salvation and make what terms they could with the new dispensation. Philip piled on the pressure by granting ‘most favoured’ status to towns already conquered, which raised the possibility that Rouen, once top of the heap, would soon be the bottom-most. Peter de Preaux, seeing how the minds of the civilians were working, sent frantic messages to John, saying that without the swift advent of a relieving army, he stood no chance.
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To save destruction from mangonels and the barbarities that would accompany a sack of the city, on 1 June 1204 de Preaux came to sensible terms with Philip: it was agreed that if John did not come to his aid in thirty days, his duties to his feudal lord would have been fully discharged and an honourable surrender could follow. Peter de Preaux wrote to John again, stressing the urgency of his situation. John sent back one of his cavalier messages, that everyone should do what ever seemed best. It was
sauve qui peut
. De Preaux saw no point in prolonging the misery and surrendered on 24 June, a week before the deadline.
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Philip spent August and September mopping up Angevin fortresses in the Loire, adding Niort, Tours, Amboise, Saumur, Poitiers, Loudun, Montreuil and Parthenay, plus the fortresses of Loches and Chinon, to his victorious tally.
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The entire duchy of Normandy, save only the Channel Islands, was lost to the English crown.

Why did John lose Normandy so spectacularly, when his father and brother had easily held their own against the French? The proximate cause was the epidemic of treachery that beset him, with literally dozens of barons going over to Philip; one scholarly study lists thirty-eight names, while admitting that they are the tip of an iceberg.
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Many of the most important magnates changed allegiance once it became clear that John had murdered Arthur, including Count Amaury of Evreux, Hugh of Gournai, Peter of Meulan and Guy of Thouars. The contemporary chroniclers were quite clear in their own minds that John was unable to resist Philip’s incursions or relieve besieged castles because he could not trust his own Norman vassals.
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Treachery, then, had both an objective and subjective aspect: objectively, it robbed John of vital resources and fighting men, while subjectively it increased his tendency towards paranoia and left him paralysed, unable to take any firm decisions as he could never be certain who were the men he could truly rely on. The situation in Normandy in 1203-04 was overwhelmingly John’s own fault: he had no natural powers of leadership or charismatic personality, he could not enthuse men and make them work for greater purposes than immediate self-interest, and he had the aura of a loser - ‘John Softsword’ was a tag that did a lot of damage - in clear contrast to Richard, who always had the psychological advantage over his enemies of appearing to be invincible. John could be tough, ruthless and even cruel, but he could not inspire love, admiration or devotion, he was liable to panic when the going got tough, and his risk assessment was poor, doubtless heavily influenced by his ‘bipolar’ oscillation between hypertrophied optimism and black pessimism. William Marshal’s poet biographer put the issue very clearly: ‘The Normans were not asleep in the day of the Young King. Then they were grain but now they were chaff, for since the death of King Richard they have had no leadership.’
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John’s defenders claim that Normandy was anyway slipping from the Angevin grasp by the time he came to the throne and that not even Richard could have arrested the process. This argument tends to be threefold, subdividing into what one might call political, cultural and structural aspects. The political proposition is that the dukes of Normandy, once they became kings of England after 1066, put England before Normandy, treated the duchy as an appanage of the kingdom, and took over modes of tyranny and despotism which were native to England but not to Normandy. In modern terms, we might say that the Angevin rulers had lost political legitimacy. The idea that the descendants of William the Conqueror had absorbed an allegedly Anglo-Saxon tendency towards authoritarianism, as it were by osmosis, seems a curious argument, but there was undoubtedly a widespread perception in Normandy that their rulers had become more dictatorial and had flouted many of the older Norman customs, mores and folkways. Gerald of Wales drew attention to the paradox that while they were simply dukes of Normandy, the rulers easily held their own against the French but, once they acquired the kingdom of England as well, with much greater resources, they performed far less impressively against the Capetian monarchs of France. Gerald thought that ordinary Normans had responded to the increase in despotism of their rulers by, as it were, working to rule and he put a new ‘spin’ on the hardy perennial, beloved of students of the Ancient World, that Persian slave levies could never defeat free Greeks. ‘How can they raise necks trodden down by the harshness of notorious tyrants to resist the arms and fierce courage of free Frenchmen?’
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Gerald topped up this political argument by a quite different, cultural, one. He correlated the rise of France under Philip Augustus with an artistic and intellectual renaissance based in Paris, which was by now streets ahead of Rheims or Chartres as an academic and creative powerhouse. In modern terms we might say that the France of Philip Augustus, who was consciously presenting himself as the new Charlemagne, was becoming culturally ‘hegemonic’ in all francophone areas.
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Notions like legitimacy and hegemony, which have a peculiarly twentieth-century resonance, actually work perfectly well in explaining political change in the early thirteenth century.

Yet the main argument purporting to show that the loss of Normandy should not be laid at the door of John personally is that Normandy was already becoming disaffected as early as the reign of Henry II, simply because Normans resented the continual warfare between Capetian and Angevin and the financial cost of this that they were called on to bear. Normandy was already in debt in 1194, because of the vast sums raised for the Crusade and then the ransom money paid to Germany for Richard’s release, with instalments of debts contracted for this purpose still being paid off in 1203-04. When sustained warfare began again in 1194 in Normandy, the financial exactions rose to meet its costs, but the duchy was having to run to stay in the same place, for the more revenue-yielding regions that fell to Philip Augustus’s conquest, the less the tax yield and the greater the consequent Norman expenditure on defence. Old taxes - scutage, tallage, carucage or the Norman equivalents thereof - were levied at higher rates while new taxes were introduced, on bailiwicks and towns especially. John compounded the problems by financial mismanagement, and when Philip Augustus’s military probes bit off larger and larger lumps of Normandy, the duchy managed to keep going only with the injection of funds from England.
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Normans had to endure hefty taxation as well as the horrors of war - rape, atrocity, looting, the murder of civilians and the sacking of towns - in a campaign that they increasingly thought could not be won. Everyone perceived the balance of power to be swinging in favour of Capetian France; that kingdom seemed to be almost visibly waxing while Normandy waned, and the days when a William the Conqueror could habitually defeat the king of France were long in the past. Since Philip Augustus was the rising power it made sense for both masters and men to come to terms with him and abandon John. John, on this view, was simply unlucky; neither his father nor his brother had to contend with a France with its present level of resources, and the intrinsic weakness of the Angevin empire, which had been there for fifty years for the really shrewd to discern, suddenly became apparent to everybody. John, in short, was the victim of historical inevitability.
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