Blood Cries Afar (32 page)

Wendover corroborates Coggeshall’s similar but briefer account of the sacking of Ely. Here churches and even the cathedral were plundered, the latter being spared torching by handing over nine marks of silver. Stephen Ridel was dragged from the cathedral and lost all his possessions – including horses and books – and avoided torture only by handing over 100 marks.
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Pain was the mangle that squeezed out every drop of wealth. John’s winter expedition actually served a secondary purpose beyond the purely military one that was hardly less vital: he needed the campaign as a means of paying his troops and keeping them in his service. Wendover is explicit about this: ‘so that … by robbery John might support the wicked agents of his iniquity. All the inhabitants of every condition and rank who did not take refuge in a churchyard were made prisoners, and, after being tortured, were forced to pay a heavy ransom.’
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It was not just for oppressive taxes, as is often thought, that the Barnwell chronicler famously labelled John as ‘a pillager of his own people’; that is exactly what he was.
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It has been suggested that these atrocity stories have been exaggerated by biased chroniclers. Support for this view lies in some legal records. For example, a jury statement from 1228 reveals that Ripon was spared any depredations by John’s army.
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There could be various reasons for this, such as local politics and strategy, or an understanding of some form of payment of ‘goodwill’ or protection money (
tenseria
). John was always on the lookout for hard cash; as Poole notes: ‘wanton destruction was not John’s method of revenging himself on rebels; he preferred to extort money by the threat of despoiling them.’
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We have seen how York and Beverley handed over £1000 to John for protection; Retford and Melton Mowbray gave 100 marks; Laxton gave £100 and Thirsk paid 800 marks so as to not have their houses torched. Other evidence shows that a soldier of John’s army faced the equivalent of a courts martial and had a hand amputated for the theft of a cow from a churchyard. But important as such records are, perhaps some historians make too much of them, relieved as they are to have some official documentation quantifying some aspect of history. It is worth reiterating here Colin Richmond’s wise words: ‘The records of government are all very well, but on issues that matter they do not tell the truth. In fact, they seek to obscure it.’
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As I have shown elsewhere, medieval chroniclers were often very close to the fighting with first-hand reports of what happened corroborated by many different eyewitnesses. We have only to look at the war in former Yugoslavia, the Sudan and Congo to know that atrocities are always committed in time of war.
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One of the worst charges Wendover directs at the royal soldiers is that of ransacking cemeteries. This was actually common in medieval warfare. Bodies were often buried with valuables which were worth the effort of digging up. The bodies themselves had value: they could be ransomed back at half the price of a live hostage. Recent corpses might also have nutritional value. In 1317 a Scottish invasion of Ireland coincided with the Great Famine. Foraging was very poor. A chronicle relates that the soldiers were ‘so destroyed with hunger that they raised the bodies of the dead from the cemeteries’.
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Both Ralph of Coggeshall and Roger of Wendover had first-hand knowledge of John’s winter campaigning; Wendover’s accounts are especially valuable for their detail of noncombatant sufferings.

The campaigns in the north and south ensured that John’s men were not only paid in wages, but also received bonuses in kind. Plunder, extortion and stealing from helpless civilians was easy money; the license to do so was an attractive recruitment encouragement. This was not simply wanton destruction, but destruction with a two-fold purpose. As well as recompensing troops, ravaging destroyed the economic base of the rebels, undermining their ability to wage war. The destruction was not random but precisely targeted at John’s enemies (just as they targeted royal and loyalist lands). All the chronicles tell of how the barons’ lands were attacked, but Wendover, the most well-placed to comment, is the most explicit.

Spreading his troop’s abroad, [John] burned the houses and buildings of the barons, robbing them of their goods and cattle, and thus destroying everything that came in his way, he gave a miserable spectacle to those who beheld it … burning the buildings belonging to the barons, making booty of their cattle, plundering them of their goods and destroying everything they came to with the sword.

John gave his commanders orders to ‘destroy all the property of the barons, namely their castles, buildings, towns, parks, warrens, lakes and mills … to finish the business with equal cruelty’. William Longsword was doing the same in the south, where royalist soldiers were collecting booty and indulging in pillage; they levied impositions on the towns, made prisoners of the inhabitants, burnt the buildings of their barons, destroyed the parks and warrens, cut down the trees in the orchards and, having spread fire as far as the suburbs of London, they took away an immense booty with them.
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Note the very specific targets, such as warrens and orchards. Wendover later gives accounts of attacks where anti-royalist forces ‘observed one good rule’ of only attacking the King’s people and places and even individual houses within villages.
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Armies could be very well disciplined, following ordinances for troops in the field. Even Scottish troops, feared for their seemingly unbridled savagery, proved themselves capable of such restraint, closely adhering to the command not to trouble the English clergy and only to ravage the land of King John and his supporters as they made their remarkable march to Dover later that year.

Such widespread ravaging was to be a major feature of the war that continued for the next year and a half. It was about to become a lot worse.

For all of John’s success, real or superficial, he was racing violently against time. This spurred him into frantic action, the speed of which may give an illusion of efficiency. The second tranche of French troops had arrived in London on 7 January, revealing the limitations of the Earl of Salisbury’s movements in the south. Another 100 knights under the command of the marshal Gautier de Nemours reinforced the London garrison, making a total of 240 French knights present in England. With them came 140 crossbowmen (40 of whom were mounted), infantry and war materiel. Forty-one ships were involved in the operation.
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Louis had indicated that he would appear in England in person by the end of January, but delays in his preparations required that this date be postponed. To encourage the rebels he sent over a number of messengers and men at the end of February, just as John was approaching Bedford. Louis sent his promises of his own arrival on Easter Sunday and warned his English supporters to be wary of false intelligence, hinting that this may be fabricated by John’s side. It was important for Louis to give hope to the rebels: if they despaired and came to terms with John, as many were doing, then Louis’s greatest asset in England would be lost, and with it the prospect of a successful invasion.

The psychological impact made by these French troops provided a real morale boost to the rebels who, in addition to John’s almost totally unimpeded march north and back south again, had also to suffer at the end of February the imminent prospect of their public excommunication, along with their French allies. The actual physical impact on the war was initially very limited. In fact, the French first drew blood against one of their key English allies. While carrying out joint military training exercises in the form of a tournament, a French knight called Acroce-Meure tilted with a partially armoured Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of Gloucester and Essex, and accidentally inflicted a mortal wound in his stomach.

John did not waste time and in early March, not letting up his momentum, continued his attempts to fully reassert his authority in the kingdom with his troops operating on the Welsh border and, crucially, in the south-east. Immediate triumph came at Framlingham on 12 March, which simply opened its gates to him, despite being a very strong castle. This was very satisfying to John as it was the chief castle of Roger Bigod whom, says the Anonymous of Béthune, the King ‘greatly hated’. The Earl entered into talks with the King; John gave the castle to Savary de Mauléon. On 14 March John was besieging Colchester with a large army, reports Ralph of Coggeshall; this castle gave signs of resistance and had been reinforced with French troops. After some days (John was there until 24 January) the garrison agreed to terms of surrender: the English troops were to be held ransom while the French were to be free to return to London. Coggeshall tells how John reneged on his promise: while the French were allowed through his lines, the English garrison were shackled in chains and imprisoned. When the French reached London they were met with deep suspicion: the English barons charged them with betrayal and wondered how their fate was so different to their English comrades. Such was the fervid atmosphere there were even threats of a mass hanging of the French. Instead, they were imprisoned and their fate was to be decided by Louis when he came. So far the practicality of French involvement had been a disaster: one dead earl and a capitulation that caused massive distrust.

Hedingham followed on 28 March, after John had been there three days. This was the seat of the Earl of Oxford, Robert de Vere. According to the Anonymous, after his loss the Earl swore allegiance to John, but never kept his vow and ‘broke it like the traitor he was’.
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Earl Richard of Clare asked John for safe conduct to his court about this time, indicating that more desertions to him – real or feigned – were taking place. The Earl’s lands had been given to the Anonymous’s patron, Robert of Béthune. John bolstered his position at Hedingham by the distribution of plunder from his winter campaign, an act which further secured the service of the thousands of mercenaries he had in his employ.

This period of campaigning ended with an interesting postscript in the form of two small engagements just outside of London which gave the rebels a fillip. John came close to London on 1 April when he spent the night at Waltham Abbey. According to Coggeshall, the citizens of the rebellious capital opened their gates and made ready for battle with their king; John, as was his habit, wished to avoid the risk of any such encounter, especially as he no doubt felt that the new year had gone satisfactorily so far. His leading captain, Savary de Mauléon, ventured closer to the city, perhaps reconnoitring its defences for possible weaknesses. He and his men were ambushed, suffering heavy casualties; Savary himself suffered a near fatal wound. Royalist forces – ‘pirates’, Coggeshall calls them – were also trying to blockade the Thames. The Londoners attacked them, killing, drowning or capturing 65 of them. To add to John’s displeasure, and to cast a cloud over his seeming triumph in the north, the rebels had besieged York and exacted 1000 marks from its citizens in return for a truce. These were small victories, but they proved that the rebels remained an active force and one which would be of use to Louis.

The situation at the start of April was ostensibly very favourable for John:

Only the walls of London and the prospective arrival of Prince Louis stood between the baronial party and complete destruction. Except for a few isolated strongholds all the castles of England were either razed or occupied by royal garrisons. The lands of the rebels had been thoroughly ravaged by John’s mercenary troops. Moreover the mercenary captains and the Englishmen loyal to the King had been given the custody of the states of the rebellious lords and were collecting their revenues.
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But the shadow of the small figure of Louis loomed large from the continent: ‘if it had not been for Louis of France, John could simply have sat before London until his barons made their submission.’
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From his enemies’ point of view, the situation, serious as it was, clearly dictated that they await help from France.

April was marked by high political tension, intense diplomatic activity and an atmosphere of anticipation and foreboding.
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John continued to cajole rebels over with assurances and relatively moderate sanctions. To this end, on 17 April he instructed his sheriffs to grant safe-conducts to any rebel who wished to reconcile with the King; those that remained recalcitrant were to suffer the loss of their lands by being disinherited forever. Three days previously more tangible preparations to face the French were made by his order for 21 coastal towns from Land’s End to the Wash to send all their ships to the mouth of the Thames. The French had been expected at Easter, so their arrival was threatened at any time.

John directed much energy to his diplomatic efforts. Coggeshall tells of a high-ranking delegation under William Marshal and the Bishop of Winchester travelling to Philip Augustus’s court to place pressure on Philip to forbid his son to make the expedition to England. The Papacy also mobilised its forces on John’s behalf. At Easter papal instructions to the clergy of London finally saw the full public excommunication of the rebels and their French allies in England. (According to Wendover, this public announcement had little effect, ignored as it largely was by clergy and people alike.) The pope also sent his legate Guala Bicchieri to France to act on behalf of the church and her vassal the King of England. Guala, a lawyer steeped in civil law, met with Philip and Louis at Melun on the 24 and 25 April in an eleventh hour attempt to stop the invasion.
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Here claim and counter-claim mixed unproductively as each side put forward their case as just.

The Capetian court presented a very weak case to the legate in an energetic but intellectually empty attempt at justification of their position. Louis’s hopeful claims to the throne were reiterated and backed up with the always dubious support of negative argument to show why John was not the rightful king of England. Philip opened with the traditional expression of respect from a loyal son of the Church before moving on to attack John with the argument that England never was and never would be in Saint Peter’s patrimony as John’s treachery against Richard in 1194 stripped away his legal claim to the throne and thus he had no power to give up the country without the consent of the barons; and even if his crown were legal, this was forfeited by his murder of Duke Arthur of Brittany. In fact, John’s succession was largely undisputed as Richard was unambiguous in naming him as his successor (if a little late in the day) and, as discussed earlier, John’s killing of his nephew (which Philip reminded the legate was tried in the Capetian court) was a domestic feudal matter which had no relevance to the throne of England. The following day, a knight, acting as Louis’s proctor, emphasised the Prince’s claim to the throne through his wife, Blanche of Castille, a niece of Richard through his sister Eleanor. In reality, if John was not the true king, the person with the greatest claim was Arthur’s sister, Eleanor of Brittany, safely incarcerated in one of John’s prisons.The proctor went on to list all the wrongs John had inflicted on Louis’s own lands, including the holding of prisoners without ransom.