Blood Cries Afar (29 page)

In making this appeal to a foreign Prince to rule over England, the rebels lost much of their moral cause and damaged their broadly-based programme of reform; the appeal, believes one leading historian, ‘proved that the rebel barons were a faction, no longer representative of the community of the realm, a propaganda plus for King John’.
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While this statement is undoubtedly true, it was clearly the right course of action for the rebels to take; it did much to transform their position. A point not often made is that a period of political uncertainty beckoned in the future even without the current civil strife. John’s heir to the throne was the seven-year-old Henry. This meant a minority, and a minority meant aggressive vying for position and influence as regent and royal advisers. For some who feared losing out in this scramble, the prospect of a foreign Prince, in all likelihood ruling from a distance in Paris, was a preferable option. And there was the added bonus of an early departure from the scene by John. Without Louis, the rebels’ military position was relatively weak. It might be argued that they had previously held the moral high ground and that they had derived propaganda value from this. Little good did it do them. While such things were important and seen to be such by contemporaries, they were only of real practical value if they produced tangible gains with men on the ground and increases in military materiel. These were to come with Louis, and what a difference they made to the course of the war. While a final agreement between the two parties was being negotiated, Louis made his preparations.

The hesitant atmosphere of conflict erupted into full warfare with the epic siege of Rochester in mid October. Rochester lay on the road between London and Dover. Its strategic importance came from its ability to hinder – or aid – communications with the continent, guard the mouth of the channel, and threaten London.
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On 11 October, Reginald of Cornhill, who was holding the castle for Stephen Langton, allowed in a band of rebel knights under William d’Albini. D’Albini, an experienced war leader and one of the baronial 25, was Wendover’s patron at Belvoir, so it is not surprising that the midlands chronicler furnishes us with the most detailed account of the siege. Robert de Béthune had also just come over to John at Dover, and so the Anonymous also provides us with a directly contemporary account involved in the heart of the action.

D’Albini had heeded the calls from the rebels in London to come south from his stronghold in Leicestershire and give assistance. Having provisioned his Castle Belvoir there with arms, victuals and loyal men he made for the capital and was received warmly. They told him of their plan to block the Dover to London road by securing Rochester Castle. Their priority was, as Fitzwalter had made clear, keeping London safe. To Rochester they dispatched a force of selected men under d’Albini’s command. When Cornhill let him in, he found the castle so woefully lacking in all things necessary to withstand an investiture that, under pressure from his men, he was forced to consider whether to abandon the castle altogether. However, he rallied his men, who comprised 95 knights and 45 sergeants, to avoid the shame of deserting their duty; they went through the town and took what they could into the castle. The precariousness of their frontline position and the proximity of royalist forces meant that they dared not venture outside the town to collect supplies from the surrounding area. Doing so might have left them exposed to ambush from an advance royalist force; John himself was at the town two days later.

Robert of Béthune warned John that he underestimated the enemy ‘if you go to fight them with such a small force’. John was unconcerned, replying ‘I know them too well; they are nothing to be made much of or feared.’ It is unlikely that John was undermanned, given the numbers of men who had just crossed the channel; John had been waiting for these before taking any major actions, and he could react to the new developments in Rochester in force. The reinforcements included large numbers of crossbowmen, essential for the successful prosecution of siege warfare. Wendover is more realistic in saying that the King brought a multitude with him, even though he would, naturally, wish to emphasise the scale of opposition faced by his patron.

The Barnwell annalist and Ralph of Coggeshall tell us of John’s first objective: the destruction of the bridge over the Medway. This was a priority as it would greatly hinder reinforcements from London coming to relieve the siege. The threat of a relief force falling upon a besieger’s camp was always to the forefront of a besieging commander’s mind; the events at Mirebeau in 1202 were repeated throughout the Middle Ages and we will be seeing them again at Lincoln in 1217. John sent a group of men in boats to row under the bridge and set fire to it from below, which they achieved despite being fiercely assaulted by Robert Fitzwalter’s group of 60 knights, sergeants and crossbowmen guarding the crossing. The defenders put out the flames and wounded and killed many of the attackers, many of whom drowned. It would appear that immediately following this, Fitzwalter returned to London. A second assault on the bridge brought it down.

John now shifted his focus to the town. The Anonymous says that the citizens ‘made a great show of defending themselves’ on the town walls. But, seeing the extent of John’s siege preparations, their morale quickly collapsed and they abandoned the battlements in such haste that the garrison had to make rapidly for the refuge of the castle. John’s troops poured through the gates into the town, where the King took up comfortable lodgings. The siege was pressed home intensely and unrelentingly. On 14 October John ordered all the smiths in Canterbury to work around the clock to make pickaxes which were to be delivered to him as soon as they were made. Reinforcements arrived daily. Robert of Béthune consulted with the King and both sent letters to Robert’s brother, William, who hurried from Flanders to join them at the siege, as did Gautiers Bertaut with 100 knights. It would be a mistake to think of these reinforcements being deployed for the sole purpose of taking the castle: many would have been there to form an outer line of defence against an attack; and others were involved in foraging to meet the needs of the ever-growing royal army. To achieve this last purpose, the King’s men ravaged Kent and plundered Rochester. The sheer weight of numbers would also hopefully intimidate the rebels and precipitate a collapse in resistance; as Wendover writes, the King’s men were so numerous ‘it struck fear and horror in all who beheld them.’ All the while the King pounded the walls of the castle with his petraries and other siege machines, so that the garrison was constantly bombarded by a continuous barrage of stones and other weapons; underground, the pickaxes were steadily doing their work, digging their way to the walls.

Rochester was a major fortress, constructed from stone and with strong high walls twelve feet thick; internally it had a dividing wall so that the castle could be defended even if one half of it fell. The rebels knew, however, that faced with such a concentration of the King’s military forces, it could stand only for a limited time. They hoped that the garrison would resist long enough for reinforcements to come to its aid from France. The Anonymous places the de Quincy diplomatic mission to Louis at this juncture; Louis was in the process of sending out the call across France for knights to fight in England and his call was being heeded. However, it was feared that Rochester could not buy enough time for this outcome, and so the barons planned their own relief force. This was probably the reason why Fitzwalter had hurried back to London after the bridge action. Wendover relates how this was also the fulfilment of a solemn pledge taken by the barons, who had sworn on the gospels to come to d’Albini’s aid should Rochester be besieged. On 26 October, a large force (Barnwell exaggeratedly inflates their number to 700 knights) under the restless command of Fitzwalter headed out for Rochester. It is not clear if this was a genuine attempt at relieving the castle through a military engagement; the greater likelihood is that by sending out a force the rebels hoped that John, not known for his personal bravery and resolve on the battlefield, would turn tail and run, as he had done before. Certainly, the relief force itself displayed a remarkable lack of resolve. On reaching Dartford, they promptly turned back themselves and withdrew to the safety of London. Wendover cannot conceal his sarcasm at this abject failure to assist his patron: ‘although only a mild south wind was blowing in their faces, which generally does not trouble anyone, they retreated as if beaten back by swords.’ Back in the safety of the ‘strongly fortified capital’, they amused themselves with gambling, drinking the best wines and indulging in all manner of vices, while their comrades in Rochester faced death and endured all kinds of misery. The Barnwell annalist offers a more plausible reason: they had learned of the size of John’s army positioned against them. (The royal army would have been augmented further in the time between Fitzwalter’s departure from Rochester and his arrival back at Dartford.) Barnwell also suggests that they planned a further relief operation for the very end of November. This was certainly in the expectation of French troops arriving. The lengthy delay was an admission of their inability to operate effectively without Louis’s help. Simultaneously, they made approaches to the King for a form of settlement, in all likelihood to gain time before a French rescue. John rebutted their approaches; he sensed victory.

D’Albini’s garrison was left to fend for itself. Their resistance was nothing short of heroic. The Barnwell annalist stirringly claims that ‘living memory does not recall any siege so urgently undertaken and so bravely resisted.’ John went from strength to strength. With the relief force scurrying back to London, royal troops were free to roam across the countryside and forage at will. His army would be well fed while the garrison saw their meagre and hastily gathered provisions dwindle daily. Constant pressure was applied: incessant barrages from five large siege engines, crossbowmen and archers combined with repeated assaults to prevent the garrison getting any rest, day or night. While the King’s large forces allowed for rotation of troops in combat, the hard-pressed garrison was always in action or on stand-by, manning and defending the curtain wall. This prolonged exposure to direct combat over six weeks was exhausting both mentally and physically. They were being ground down.

One motivation for the garrison holding out was fear of John. We have seen Philip Augustus successfully employ fear as a weapon against Rouen in 1204; it worked there because the French King could be trusted to keep his word on clemency if the city submitted. No such trust could be placed in John: Wendover says that the rebels endured their situation because they ‘sought to delay their own destruction for they greatly feared the cruelty of the king’. They could only have been more determined to resist when, in an effort to stretch out their meagre supplies, they ejected their wounded and sick from the castle; according to the Barnwell chronicler, John had their hands and feet cut off.

The dogged defence inflicted serious casualties among John’s troops. When mines brought down a large section of the curtain wall, John’s men stormed the breach and forced the rebels to conduct a frantic, fighting retreat into the great tower. Such was the onslaught royalist troops forced their way in to this last stronghold, only to be repulsed and the tower cleared of attackers. The garrison was in such straits for lack of food it consumed horses; the knights were even driven to the extreme recourse of eating their destriers, their hugely valuable trained warhorses.

And still the onslaught continued. John issued his famous order to his justiciar to dispatch urgently 40 fat pigs to Rochester. These were not primarily to feed the troops but to assist the firing of the wooden props in the tunnel supporting the excavated foundations of the south-western tower.
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When the miners brought down the corner of the tower, the crisis reached its climax. D’Albini and his men continued to fight desperately from within the castle, but knew that any future resistance would be short-lived. Wendover says that they were in fact starved out and that they considered ‘it would be a disgrace to die of hunger when they had not been overcome by arms’; while their provisions had failed them, the greater danger was from a storm assault in the castle that would put their lives in immediate peril. On 30 November, they surrendered.

A foremost castellologist has called the siege ‘one of the greatest operations in England up to that time’.
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Turner has argued that John’s operation at Rochester shows him to be a competent military leader deserving of a positive reappraisal of his military reputation.
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It is certainly true that John demonstrated here the determination and single-mindedness that he was occasionally capable of; but such displays were far too infrequent to mark him out as a consistently competent general. Yes, the organisation of his forces was impressive and put to excellent effect and the positive side of his military balance sheet boasts some memorable victories – Mirebeau, Damme, and now Rochester – but none of these had a truly lasting impact, unlike his failures on the continent. (Rochester did not remain in royalist hands for long.) Rochester was a formidably strong castle, but arraigned against it were the forces of a kingdom, whose men were well provisioned and reinforced, while the garrison was isolated and weakened by exhaustion and hunger. If John had built on this success by moving on to take London, then his military reputation would indeed merit reassessment; instead, as we shall see shortly, he embarked on another of his destructive
chevauchées
across the country. The Barnwell annalist commented that after Rochester, ‘few cared to put their trust in castles’, a judgment that some historians have been quick to pick up on. The truth was, in fact, that they continued to do just this; the whole war was going to continue as it had begun, centred on castles.

D’Albini’s men emerged from the dust of the castle weakened but largely intact. Only one of his knights had been killed, the victim of an arrow; arrows and crossbow bolts were the most common cause of death at sieges.
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John had a gibbet erected and ordered that the entire garrison be hanged, but he was talked out of this extreme action, hanging only some of the crossbowmen. (The Barnwell annalist believes that only one crossbowmen was hanged: someone who had served with John in his youth.) D’Albini and his knights escaped the same fate due to the intercession of John’s calmer and more measured commander, Savary de Mauléon. Savary had been captured by John at Mirebeau in 1202, but served him loyally on his release, defending Niort stoutly against Philip Augustus in 1206 when other castellans defected to the French. Whereas John, enraged by the length of the siege at Rochester, its cost in blood and treasure, and, most of all, the affront of such open rebellion defiance, wished to spread terror among rebel resistance elsewhere, Savary cautioned otherwise: