Blood Cries Afar (19 page)

John continued to feed his finances into war preparations, pay-rolling his mercenaries and his continental allies, chiefly Emperor Otto of Brunswick, Count Renaud of Boulogne and Count Ferrand of Flanders. In the south, the picture was not positive. His ally King Pedro of Aragon had been killed at the Battle of Muret in September 1213, and a defeated Count Raymond of Toulouse came to England at the end of the year to receive a substantial payment. But it was affairs on the border of north-east France that really mattered. Here John’s abundant war subsidies kept the French engaged in costly, wearing warfare and helped to bring over the leading princes of the region, such as the Count of Holland and the Dukes of Brabant and Limburg, to England and her allies. As one historian has noted, ‘Immense sums were poured out by the English treasury in support of these princes, and large numbers of Flemish knights were retained in the king’s service by annual pensions charged on the exchequer.’
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John’s finances had help to buy and finance an impressive coalition. Whatever the relative wealth of Angevins and Capetians, as discussed earlier in the chapter, neither side had their military ability seriously curtailed by financial constraints.

John set a date at the beginning of February for the next planned expedition to Poitou. In further readiness, he made a truce with the Welsh and enlisted the reformed church hierarchy to smooth out issues of contention in his realm. Ferrand paid homage to John in Canterbury in January 1214 where, no doubt, war plans were made. Geoffrey Fitzpeter’s fifteen years as justiciar ended with his death in October; John replaced him with Peter des Roches, the sole loyal representative of the episcopacy in England in 1210, in January. It would seem that in the middle of November John had held a war meeting in Oxford. His distrust of his barons, always strong and worsened by their defiance in the summer, was such that he ordered them to come unarmed. The domestic political situation had clearly not improved; nonetheless, despite Ralph of Coggeshall’s observation that ‘few earls, but an infinite multitude of knights of lesser fortune’ sailed with John, Turner has noted that ‘a good number of his nobility actually accompanied the King to Poitou.’
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However, this was not a sign of commitment and loyalty, Turner adding that these included ‘some who would join in the rebellion against him by the next spring’.
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John left Portsmouth on 1 February accompanied by his wife and treasure. Most of his faith was placed not in his barons, whose presence with him was as much political as military, preventing them from conspiring at home (as many of those remaining did), but in his mercenaries, the Poitevins, and his powerful allies. This was the moment John had been waiting for since 1206. Everything was now poised for a monumental and decisive clash. The gathering war clouds were about to unleash an almighty storm that broke over Bouvines, one of the single most critical battles of the entire Middle Ages.

J
ohn landed at La Rochelle on 16 February 1214. There had already been two failed attempts at a full-scale Poitevin expedition, but this time it had at last come to fruition. Now was John’s opportunity to make good the crushing losses of 1204 and to re-establish the Angevin Empire. Behind him and in his absence he had left the kingdom in the capable hands of Peter des Roches, whom he had appointed justiciar on the eve of his departure, leaving his barons grumbling at having a foreigner set over them; before him lay the alliance he had so carefully nurtured, designed to win back his lands by delivering a crushing blow to King Philip of France and the whole Capetian dynasty. The strategy was simple and sound. John’s army would apply pressure in the Poitou region, creating a diversion for the French forces in the west. Meanwhile, the main body of the coalition’s forces would move in to France from the north-east. Philip would therefore be threatened by great danger on two fronts. The scene was set for one of the most decisive battles of not only the entire Middle Ages, but of Western European history as a whole.
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John’s campaign had an auspicious beginning. Using La Rochelle as his one secure base (kept loyal to England by its trading interests), John sought to strengthen his position by control of the surrounding regions before attempting to engage with Philip. He met with immediate success. By 8 March, 26 castles and strongholds were restored to him. One siege gives a measure of his rapid advance: the Castle of Milécu, just a few miles south-east of La Rochelle, had been fortified against the Angevin King by Porteclin de Mausé; John besieged it on Sunday 2 March and had taken it by Tuesday. At Limoges, Viscount Gui, like so many of the barons of Aquitaine, offered homage to John: ‘I could not resist him or await your help,’ he later wrote to Philip Augustus; ‘for the future you may not rely on me.’
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John marched deep into Gascony and then swung north. His progress was unhindered by the Lusignans with whom he had now come to an accommodation (some fifteen years too late, it could be argued). However, one of the Lusignan brothers, Geoffrey, remained alienated, and John, maintaining his momentum, launched a short, sharp military strike against him, lasting five days in mid-May. John was buoyed by his victories and, keen to convey his potency abroad to domestic malcontents in England, he was quick to write home with his good news, which Wendover records:

We … crossed with our army to Mervant, a castle belonging to Geoffrey de Lusignan; and although we might not believe that it could be taken by assault, we, on the day after, which was the eve of Whitsun [17 May], took it by force after one attack, which lasted from early in the morning until one o’clock. On Whitsunday, we laid siege to another of Geoffrey’s castles, called Vouvant, in which was Geoffrey himself and his two sons; and when our petraries had assailed it continuously for three days so that a chance for taking it was imminent, the Count of La Marche came to us and caused Geoffrey to throw himself at our mercy with his two sons, his castle and all that was in it.

There was still more success for John. At the same time as this operation, the unfortunate Geoffrey had another of his castles besieged by Prince Louis of France at Moncontour further to the east. John led his forces there and Louis withdrew. John consolidated his agreement with La Marche and trumpeted his victories in his letter home: ‘Now, by the grace of God, we have been given an opportunity to carry our attack against our chief enemy, the King of France, beyond the Poitou. And we inform you of this so that you may rejoice in our success.’
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With his position south of the Loire now firmly reinforced, John turned his attention northwards. He made a feint towards the French army in the east and then headed northwest towards Angers, the capital of his ancestors. Just as he appeared set to encircle it after yet more gains, he made a forced march west and took Nantes in mid-June. An important seaport, Nantes could prove most useful to John in his future plans to retake Normandy from the south. Its value was emphasised by its garrison under the command of Robert of Dreux, cousin of King Philip and brother of Peter, Count of Brittany. In what both William the Breton and the Anonymous of Béthune consider a reckless move, Robert led his soldiers and some armed citizens to a bridge that lay just outside and which John’s army needed to cross. From here, he began taunting the enemy. He was soon to regret his rashness as in the ensuing combat he and between fourteen and twenty knights were taken prisoner.
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The effects of this Angevin success were soon felt downriver at Angers, the city capitulating swiftly to John on 17 June. No doubt John’s victorious progress – and that vital force of momentum – had influenced the city’s prompt surrender, but William des Roches, King Philip’s Seneschal of Anjou, had already made the decision not to defend the city. The ruined walls of Angers had not been repaired following John’s previous campaign. Instead, des Roches focused his efforts on the city’s satellite castles, which had been reinforced. This was to prove a wise move. Taking Angers had been a great symbolic and propaganda victory for John, but, like before, a hollow one: it was in his hands for just a few weeks, it could not be held by him in hindsight, as William des Roches had known with foresight.

One of Angers’s satellite castles was La Roche-au-Moine (also written as La Roche-aux-Moines). This had been constructed and recently munitioned by des Roches to guard the Nantes-Angers road from attack by the Angevin garrison of nearby Rochefort. John now directed his whole force against the new castle, a further indication of his plans to use Nantes as a naval base for the reconquest of Normandy. He also needed La Roche-au-Moine for his advance on Le Mans and then, perhaps, Paris. And if things went badly for him, the castle would cover his retreat back to the coast. A concentrated barrage began on 19 June as John’s artillery attempted to batter down the castle’s tower and walls.

The garrison’s vigorous defence was to prove fateful. The siege has received scant attention, even from French historians, despite its consequences. The silence of English historians is perhaps explained by the paucity of contemporary sources: Roger of Wendover provides the only English perspective. The Capetian version is once again related by the quill of William the Breton, never slow in seizing upon and trumpeting a Capetian victory.
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For all our knowledge of political and diplomatic history, La Roche-au-Moine shows us the importance of military outcomes in explaining so much of history; for if La Roche-au-Moine had fallen to John as quickly as had the other strongholds in the campaign thus far, subsequent events may well have turned out drastically different: the whole allied expedition of 1214 may have turned on this minor siege.

John’s substantial army was augmented by the Rochefort garrison, under the command of Paies de Rochefort, a brigand knight in the best tradition of the robber baron. The French defenders of La Roche-au-Moine were soon under attack, but fought valiantly against John’s onslaught. As was common with those hard-pressed by investiture, the defenders cannibalised their surroundings, dismantling whatever they could find, including beams and wooden supports from houses, to hurl on their attackers. William the Breton then offers another of his revealing, intimate observations of warfare. A crossbowman by the name of Enguerrand, a huge brute of a man well-deserving of his appellation ‘Monastery-breaker’ (perhaps suggesting he was one of Rochefort’s men), advanced up to the castle ditch under the protection of a large mantlet shield carried by a youngster. Each day from behind this shield Enguerrand shot bolts at the garrison with impunity, causing great consternation. A French crossbowmen by the name of Pons came up with an idea to meet this threat. He attached one end of a long, thin piece of rope to a bolt and the other to a fixed point next to him. He shot the crossbow bolt directly into the mantlet where it embedded itself. He pulled the rope towards him and dragged both it and the boy into the moat. Enguerrand, left defenceless and exposed, was immediately struck down by a fatal hail of arrows as he attempted to withdraw. John was enraged by this setback and by Pons’s demonstration of delight at the success of his ruse. According to William the Breton, Pons called out: ‘Get away from here, King, and leave us in peace, for fear that you will meet a similar death.’
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Apparently John did withdraw a little to direct the assault from a safer distance; he (and no doubt Pons, too) would have remembered the manner of his brother’s death from a crossbow bolt at Châlus Chabrol in 1199. John then erected gallows (a typical siege practice of his) to intimidate the garrison: if they did not yield immediately he would grant them no quarter. But the garrison fought on. However, after a fortnight’s intense combat had taken its toll, with the garrison exhausted and deprived of sleep, the defenders were brought to the point of surrender. But help was on its way.

At the end of April, Philip Augustus and his host had been at Châteroux on the borders of Berry and Poitou. Faced by enemy advances on two fronts – John from the south-west, the coalition allies under Otto from the north-east – he split his forces: he led his army to meet the allies, while his son, Prince Louis, went to Chinon to meet the threat of John. With Louis went the experienced general Henri Clément, the marshal of France. Philip knew this division of forces was risky but he had little choice other than to react exactly as the coalition wanted him to. If he concentrated entirely on the danger emanating from the Low Countries, John would have a relatively free rein in regaining his lost southern territories; but if Philip focused on John, he left the way open from Flanders to Normandy and Paris.

The French king, intending to reinforce his army by feudal and municipal levies on his way northwards, left Louis with a substantial force: William the Breton’s figures put this at 800 knights, 2000 men-at-arms and 7000 infantry, to which were later added the 4000 men under William des Roches and Aimery de Craon, the veteran warrior and respected commander. This may be an inflated figure, but essentially Philip was mobilising his kingdom in a war of dynastic – even national – survival.

Louis was at Chinon when he heard of the dangerous predicament of the garrison at La Roche-au-Moine. Hesitant to act precipitously as he was outnumbered and acutely aware of the combined peril to the Capetian monarchy, he sent to his father for instructions. The French crown was extremely fortunate that the garrison at La Roche-au-Moine held out long enough for a reply to reach Louis. When it came it was decisive: raise the siege. (The Anonymous of Béthune attributes the decision to Louis on heeding the advice of Clément.) The order was informed by political and military awareness. If the English advance was not checked increasing numbers of barons from the Loire would defect to the Angevin cause in a reverse of the tide that flowed to the Capetians during the conquest of Normandy; Philip was acutely aware of the power of momentum. And for once during the campaign John was pinned down. Since landing at La Rochelle his movements had been intentionally erratic to keep Philip guessing while simultaneously assessing the extent of Capetian strength since his return to Poitou. After Philip’s move towards the north-east, John had continued to confuse Louis with his movements by never staying at one place for any length of time. Now that had changed. John had set himself squarely before La Roche-au-Moine, so much so that from here he summoned not only fresh horses, but also his wife, children and treasure. Louis had a firm target and clear instructions for his military objective. He prepared his troops and advanced on John.