Richard & John: Kings at War (66 page)

Compounding the basic tyranny was the attitude of the royal officials appointed to enforce these vicious game laws. The Chief Forester had at his command foresters and verderers - forest police, in effect - regarders (inspectors) and justices of the forest who tried offences against the Forest Laws. In return, these officials got the right to hunt animals not on the proscribed list: hare, fox, wild cat, badger, otter, marten, squirrel, but
never
deer or wild boar.
⁴⁰
Clearing and cultivating land in the Forest could be done only with royal permission, and woe betide anyone who broke the rules. A woman who dug an unauthorised ditch round her land had the land confiscated, and she had to pay £100 to get it back. Boundary lines between the royal forest and private forests had to be marked by a path, and the costs of making the path, needless to say, had to be paid by the private landowner; anyone refusing to pay was fined anyway.
⁴¹
A well-known case in Shropshire in 1209 shows John’s draconian laws in action. Venison was found in the house of a man named Hugh the Scot. He fled for sanctuary to the nearest church and confessed to the priest that he had killed a hind. Sheltered in the Church for a month, he finally made his escape dressed as a woman and presumably fled to the woods, there to end his days as an outlaw.
⁴²
Yet the most bitterly contested cases usually involved the clergy in their own right. If John was baulked in his endless quest for money, one of his responses was to use the Forest Laws against those who had ‘wronged’ him. When an extortionate demand to the Cistercians was not met with immediate compliance, John stopped the monks and their workers pasturing flocks in the royal forest, which had been a customary right for decades. The case proved that anybody could be deprived of rights and privileges in a trice, purely on John’s whim.
⁴³

The clergy had a particular general grievance, which was that John’s foresters treated them with contempt - treated them in short as they treated laymen - and that John had trampled on all the customary rights they had built up since the days of King Stephen. It was a festering grievance that, as part of the delicate trade-off between Henry II and the Vatican in the attempt to resolve the crisis over Thomas Becket, a papal legate had expressly allowed Henry II to visit the full rigour of the Forest Laws on the clergy, both secular and regular, with no exceptions.
⁴⁴
The biographer of the saintly St Hugh of Lincoln put it like this: ‘The worst abuse in the kingdom of England, under which the country groaned, was the tyranny of the foresters. For them violence took the place of law, extortion was praiseworthy, justice was an abomination and innocence a crime. No rank or profession indeed, no one but the king himself, was secure from their barbarity, or free from the interference of their tyrannical authority.’
⁴⁵
Walter Map, close enough to Henry II’s elbow to know what he was talking about, confirmed the judgement. He despised the foresters and thought: ‘they eat the flesh of men in the presence of Leviathan, and drink their blood . . . They fear and propitiate the lord who is visibly present: the Lord whom they do not see, they offend without fear. I do not mean to deny that there are in this vale of misery some merciful judges. It is of the wilder majority that I speak.’
⁴⁶
Part of the cruelty and cynicism of the foresters may derive from their own treatment by the Angevin kings. The Neville family were the hereditary chief foresters, but their relationships with Henry and John were always fractious. When Alan de Neville died, some monks asked leave to bury him. Henry replied dismissively: ‘I shall have his wealth, you shall have his corpse, and the demons of hell his soul.’ John’s chief forester Hugh de Neville did not fare much better. Based at Marlborough, he rose high in John’s favour but made his first mistake in 1210 when he allowed the bishop of Winchester to enclose a park at Taunton without the king’s permission. Suspecting Neville of having taken a bribe, John fined him 1,000 marks. Although John later let him off the payment, the rot had set in. By 1212 Neville had clearly lost favour, and it is not surprising to find him, in 1216, among the rebels against the king.
⁴⁷

Yet John’s selfish monopoly over the Forest was not exercised purely because of the pleasure principle. There was big money to be made in this area, and John knew it. Although the king had the right to exact capital punishment for infringement of the game laws, he chose wherever possible to exact fines and mulct offenders instead. Once again it was Henry II who had blazed the trail: his records show one hundred men being sentenced in Hampshire to a total of £2,093. 10s.
⁴⁸
Even apart from fines, there were rents for pannage and pasturage, the sale of privileges and exemptions and the revenue that could be raised from the sale of fresh or salted venison to favoured barons or garrisons. Wood from the Forest was another source of income. Timber was supplied for building, while licensed charcoal burners changed wood into fuel for iron-smelting, and hence for iron arrowheads, arrows, crossbow quarrels and roofing shingles. But the greatest source of revenue for John was the machiavellian process of ‘de-afforestation’. Just as the Forest could be created by arbitrary royal fiat, so it could be unmade by the same process. Charters freeing woods and manors from the Forest Laws were available at anything between 30-150 marks, depending on the value of the land. In 1204 Cornwall paid £2,000 (3,000 marks) and twenty palfreys for the disafforestment of the whole county, except for two woods and two moors, and in 1215 bought these up too for a further 1,200 marks and four palfreys.
⁴⁹
De-afforestation did not even exhaust the potential for revenue-raising. Although the wardenships of the royal forests were hereditary, they were subject to the usual feudal ‘reliefs’ and fees. Whenever an heir inherited, he had to pay John a huge fee for being ‘confirmed’ in the office - usually the fee was between 100 marks and £100. Moreover, in the case of heiresses John could sell their marriages to the highest bidder. He did well out of the de Lucy family, accepting 500 marks for a marriage in 1202, and another 900 marks and nine palfreys for the same heiress two years later.
⁵⁰
By using various means to rescind marriages already agreed and paid for, the crafty John was often able to sell the same wardship twice.

Although Richard is often indicted for being an absentee king of England, there must have been many in the land who wished that John would spend more time in France, so that he did not have the leisure to oversee the Forest so ferociously; this was yet another consequence of the loss of Normandy. Once again the moral is clear, so evident elsewhere in John’s reign and so damaging to those who would rehabilitate his reputation, that his much-touted administrative efficiency was a function of his overwhelming greed.
⁵¹
Although Magna Carta would later indict the entire Angevin attitude to the Forest, not just John’s, the Lackland monarch’s stance on the game laws affected not just the economy but the landscape itself.
⁵²
As far as the economy was concerned, it was a running sore with financial officers of the Crown that all questions about the administration of the Forest had to be referred to John or his chief forester, and even a minion as loyal as Peter des Roches chafed under this inflexible regime.
⁵³
For yeomen and local lords the main grievance was ‘the law’s delays’. The bureaucracy associated with the Forest Laws was fearsome, and the petty frustrations legion: one had to attend forest courts under the ‘guilty until proved innocent’ dispensation, even while the king acted as a fetter on economic development by preventing the cultivation of virgin land or the improvement of one’s existing plot. But what united all the critics - clergy, barons, peasants - was the perception that the Forest statutes were a travesty of real law. Henry II’s treasurer Richard FitzNigel had long ago zeroed in on this crucial issue: ‘The whole organisation of the forests, the punishment, pecuniary or corporal, of forest offences, is outside the jurisdiction of the other courts, and solely dependent upon the decision of the king, or of some officer specially appointed by him . . . The Forest has its own laws based, it is said, not on the common law of the realm, but on the arbitrary decision of the ruler; so that what is done in accordance with that law is not called “just” without qualification but only “just according to forest law”.’
⁵⁴
In a context like this, it is easy to see how the legend of Robin Hood arose.

John, like his father and like Emperor Frederick II (
stupor mundi
) but unlike his brother Richard and his son, the future Henry III, was besotted with hunting and the chase. His interest extended to all wild animals, and especially wolves, which still roamed England in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.
⁵⁵
It has been established from place-name evidence that wolves were common in Anglo-Saxon England, but the Anglo-Norman obsession with the Forest and the forest properly so-called, rapidly cut down their numbers. In the reign of Henry I there were specially designated royal wolf-hunters, who used traps partly to cut down on lupine predation against horses and sheep but also partly to swell the tally of wolf-pelts and hence the king’s prestige.
⁵⁶
Alexander Nequam’s view that wolves could be tamed and kept as dogs was very much a minority perspective.
⁵⁷
Yet hunting wolves was not a task for the unskilled or fainthearted and considerable financial inducements were necessary before England’s most dangerous animal (Man) would move systematically against the second most dangerous; the going rate under Henry II seems to have been three shillings a head for a wolf, but by John’s reign this had increased to five shillings.
⁵⁸
Where wolves were a menace to his favourite hunting grounds, as in the network of forests and hunting lodges in his beloved Dorset and nearby (Gillingham, Bere, Blackmore, Powerstock, Purbeck, Milcet, the New Forest and Clarendon), John was prepared to pay even more. In 1209 two wolf catchers were given fifteen shillings for two wolves taken at Gillingham and Clarendon.
⁵⁹
By the middle of the thirteenth century wolves were on the list of endangered species. Beavers had already become extinct by John’s reign, so that prized beaver pelts had to be imported from Scandinavia and the Baltic lands but, as if in compensation, the rabbit, originally restricted to Spain, broke out of the species cordon and reached the west and south of England by the time Richard was ascending the throne; the hare was already there, being a native of England. In John’s time rabbits were still a rarity: they do not appear as an item in a royal banquet until 1240 and continued to be a luxury food, costing four or five times as much as a chicken.
⁶⁰

Mention of wolves brings one by an inevitable association of ideas to sheep. Owners of sheep were among the wealthiest people in England, which was why abbeys habitually kept flocks as large as 2,000. While skins could be used as parchment and writing paper and their milk for making cheese, it was sheep’s wool that was the chief source of England’s wealth. When the abbey of Melrose in the East Riding disgorged 300 marks for Richard’s ransom in 1193, much of it was as wool (the rest being plate or cash).
⁶¹
Most of the wool was exported to Flanders where it was worked into cloth, and the English wool trade was a constant factor in Flemish politics; the Flemings’ motivation for joining the Young King in his rebellion of 1173-74 was the hope that if young Henry displaced his father he would let them have cheaper wool.
⁶²
Although the intrinsic interests of Flanders may always have been opposed to those of the Anglo-Normans and Angevins, the Low Countries depended on the import of corn and wool from England, so had limited room to manoeuvre. The Flemings’ dependence was not absolute, since the cloth trade could (and did) in an emergency use coarser wool from northern France, Scotland and Ireland, but for the production of the finest quality cloths there was no substitute for the English strain of sheep.
⁶³
The rotation of crops practised in the agriculture of medieval England involved three courses: in the first, winter-grown crops, such as wheat and rye; in the second, spring-grown crops such as barley and oats; and in the third, the fallow period, when animals would graze. The open-field system was often used, whereby arable land was divided into three fields, one of which would be fallow at any given time.
⁶⁴
In this way, even agriculture yielded to the pastoral priority, predicated on the realisation that crops meant survival but sheep meant real wealth.

There is no evidence that John had any interest in animal husbandry, but there is controversy about the role of sheep in his economic policy and about the general trends of the economy during his reign. Two salient propositions have been advanced in support of a general thesis that the 1180s marked some kind of economic watershed. One is that the rising demand caused by a population reaching the limits of subsistence allied to the influx of new silver brought into England by the wool trade caused rapid price and wage inflation during John’s reign.
⁶⁵
The other is that the same period saw landlords beginning to produce for external markets rather than local consumption and thus starting to concentrate on wool and grain for export.
⁶⁶
Against this is the view that true economic take-off, with the accompanying inflation, occurred only after 1220. Counterbalancing a natural inflationary tendency were John’s exactions - the surpluses he extracted really were massive, and his revenue in 1211 was
six
times what he had received in 1199 - which had a deflationary effect and thus brought the economy back to something like equilibrium. Indeed, many economic historians argue that John’s fiscal policies would have been even more deflationary but for an increase in the velocity of circulation of coinage and the growth in population.
⁶⁷
This, in turn, involves the vexed question of population levels in early thirteenth-century England. Some authorities put the figure as low as two and a half million, but it is probable that there were already that number of inhabitants of England at the time of Domesday Book in 1086, and that by 1215 the figure was at least three and a half million and possibly as great as five million. On this view the Black Death was the great divider. By 1300 England had a population of six million - as many as in the eighteenth century - but in the years 1377-1540, plague and pestilence held the numbers at Domesday levels.
⁶⁸
Summing up on economic trends during John’s reign, it is probable that the switch to a market economy was more gradual than the ‘1180 watershed’ school contends, and that there was too much uncertainty in the years 1199-1216 for a smooth switch to production for export markets; this is to leave on one side the debate about whether inflation is always the prime motor of an economy. The sagest conclusion is that John’s economic problems did not come from inflation but from the tax burdens he imposed to build up a war chest.
⁶⁹
As the economic historian John Bolton (arguing that economic take-off occurred
after
John’s death) has commented: ‘Henry III’s military ineptitude, indeed his general ineptitude and resistance to royal exactions in his reign, may have been just what an uncertainly expanding and commercialising economy needed.’
⁷⁰