Lionheart (19 page)

So what were they eating, that day at Richard’s coronation feast in Westminster Hall? A fair idea can be gained from the wedding feast half a century later of Henry III’s daughter Margaret and King Alexander III of Scots, when the food available, the manner of cooking and people’s eating habits were pretty much the same. Detailed planning of this feast began in early summer, with beasts being purchased in July to be pastured and fattened for slaughter shortly before the festivities on 26 December 1251. At the same time, orders were given for the killing of 300 red and fallow deer, their carcases to be salted immediately. In August, 100 tuns – about 25,000 gallons – of wine were ordered. In October, sheriffs of the northern counties were ordered to supply 7,000 hens and seventy boars and vast quantities of game birds, rabbits and hares. In November another 100 boars and 1,000 more roe, fallow and red deer were ordered, as were vast quantities of rice, sugar and almonds. Forest wardens were ordered to collect huge quantities of charcoal produced in the forests, for most cooking was done over charcoal blown into a red heat with simple wood and leather bellows whose basic design has not changed in a thousand years. Fish ordered in December included 60,000 herring, probably salted, 1,000 unsalted cod, 10,000 haddock and 500 conger eels. Other fresh fish were kept alive until the last moment in the royal stew pond. No less than 68,500 loaves of bread were baked for the guests.
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At Richard’s coronation, ale may have been available at the lowest tables – the monks of Westminster consumed 80,000 gallons annually – but most guests would have been drinking white and red wine imported from La Rochelle, although chronicler William of Malmesbury considered that some English wine produced at this time during the medieval warm period, when vineyards stretched as far north as Norwich, was excellent.

The new king and his most important guests had armchairs, but the majority sat on benches at long trestle tables and were served with one dish placed between each ‘mess’ of four guests, who then helped themselves from it. Some idea of behaviour can be gleaned from early medieval books on etiquette, which advised guests not to whisper to each other, lest they be accused of slander, not to pick one’s nose or spit on the table, but to use the floor – also not to belch into a neighbour’s face, lick the plate clean, throw half-eaten food back onto the serving dish, snatch a tasty morsel from a neighbour’s hand or wipe one’s greasy hands on the table cloth.
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Ceremonial was important, with the
plats de résistance
being carried in to the accompaniment of music played on wind instruments. These dishes would include, in addition to the stuffed boar’s head celebrated in the famous carol, swans and pheasants cooked and reclad in their skins to resemble live birds. Since the skins were raw, this defied the basic rule of kitchen hygiene, never to allow contact between cooked and uncooked animal products, but it did impress the guests. Each needed his own knife to cut pieces of meat and stab other tasty morsels, plus a spoon for the liquid courses. Forks for use at table were known in Italy, but had not yet reached northern Europe.

In addition to the musicians – Richard had a good ear and enjoyed both singing and listening to music, so only the best would do for him – entertainment during the second course would have included tumblers and mummers. At the end of the meal, the waferers served delicate sweet wafers, candied fruit and other delicacies, and doubled as after-dinner joculators telling ribald jokes for the amusement of the all-male company. Richard had banned women and Jews from the guest list.

The latter had been permitted to settle in England by William the Conqueror because of their usefulness as a source of loans in a time when lending at interest was forbidden to Christians, and also for the taxes that could be wrung from them. Because, as incomers, they fit nowhere else in feudal society, they were under the direct protection of the monarch. A few intrepid representatives of the community therefore attempted to curry favour by bringing gifts for their new overlord to Westminster Hall. However, they were turned away so roughly that it was rumoured to be an expression of the king’s ill-will. This, in turn, sparked a pogrom in which men, women and children were killed and homes ransacked. The restoration of order produced exactly three culprits who were hanged – one for theft from a Christian during the riots and two others because they had set fire to Jewish property and accidentally burned down adjacent Christian homes.

To prevent anti-Semitic riots spreading to Normandy and Anjou, messengers were despatched across the Channel expressly forbidding this in the name of Richard, by the grace of God, king of the English, duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, count of Anjou and Poitou. The idea of a country as such was still not clear in most people’s minds; a king was therefore described as the ruler of the people in his territory. Philip Augustus was thus
rex francorum
– king of the French – not of the land mass that is modern France, of which the German emperor ruled the eastern third. In the remainder, Richard owned many times more land, albeit nominally as a vassal of Philip, than did Philip himself. Nor did language provide a definition of statehood: in the north-west of Philip’s realm, people spoke Celtic Breton; in the north-east, Germanic Flemish; in the southern half of the land mass people spoke Occitan, which was closer to Castilian Spanish than the language of the Franks.

In Richard’s England everything was for sale. He is reputed to have said, ‘I would sell London if I could find a buyer.’
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Even if this attribution is apocryphal, it expresses well his state of mind, for on 6 December he did sell two towns – Berwick and Roxburgh, which had been annexed by Henry – back to William of Scotland for £10,000, including a release from vassalage to the English crown.
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Henry II’s experienced administrators found themselves required to repurchase their offices in competition with anyone else who wished to turn a handsome profit in exercising them, as was the custom of the times. Even that doyen of knighthood William the Marshal jumped on the bandwagon and bought himself the sheriffdom of Gloucestershire for the knock-down price of 50 marks. The wholesale dismissal of experienced administrators left the country in chaos. On 17 September, to squeeze out of him a fine of £15,000 of silver, Richard removed from office and threw into prison 77-year-old Ranulf de Glanville, who had been Henry II’s chief justiciar for nine years and effectively his regent during the frequent absences of the old king from England. He was only stopped from ordering Glanville’s execution by the intervention of Eleanor, whose chief gaoler Glanville had been
ex officio
, yet who recognised him as corrupt but astute
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The old man was ruined anyway and had to take advantage of the fiscal immunity granted to crusaders by swiftly departing for the Holy Land, where he died at the siege of Acre.

To govern the administration of justice, Glanville was replaced by two mutually distrustful justiciars. Bishop Hugh of Durham had governed much of northern England for Henry II and now bought the earldom of Northumberland, which caused Richard to jest that he had magicked a new earl out of an old bishop.
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William de Mandeville, earl of Essex, was also appointed justiciar under a dispensation of Pope Clement III, which allowed men essential for government to remain at home without sin when the crusaders departed.

Money flowed in from all directions. The bishop of Ely had died intestate, so Richard confiscated his entire estate, including 3,000 marks in coin. Another source of easy money was in the sale to the highest bidders of the many rich heiresses, like Isabel of Striguil, whom Henry II had kept for years as wards so that he could control their assets. Whereas his father had ruthlessly kept in check rebellious barons by destroying any adulterine castles, in the space of these few weeks he was in England Richard undid several decades of Henry II’s prudent governance by selling building permits to any baron who could pay the price. It is not possible to know exactly how much money was raised in the turmoil of these weeks, since most of the sums were paid directly to Richard and only appear on the Pipe Roll records if the purchaser needed time to pay. The sub-prime mortgage bubble of the twenty-first century was foreshadowed in the hundreds of manors that passed into the hands of the Church under mortgages that could never be redeemed.

Some opportunists will profit from any situation, however dire. One who did at this juncture was a strange character called William Longchamp, who had been Richard’s chancellor in Aquitaine. Knowing nothing of the English, their customs or their language, Longchamp paid £3,000 to become the king’s chancellor and bishop of Ely despite the bishop of Bath offering £1,000 more for the office. It would seem then that past supporters of the new king had preferential treatment in the general scramble for power. Being entrusted as chancellor with the seal necessary to validate every document of state, Longchamp raised the fee for affixing this in order more swiftly to recover his outlay in buying the chancellorship. Given three castles and the Tower of London to look after, he spent an immense sum of well over £1,000 during one year on restoring and re-fortifying it.
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To his see centred on the recently built cathedral at Ely his generosity was confined to the gift of some relics, including what were supposedly a few teeth from the head of St Peter.

For most of the fourteen weeks Richard spent in England, he was chasing money all over the prosperous southern half of the realm, travelling as far north as Warwick and Northampton, holding a Great Council of bishops and barons at Geddington, and covering the country as far west as Marlborough and Salisbury to squeeze from office-holders and property owners money owing to the Exchequer of Receipt – the term comes from the checked cloth spread over the table on which tax payments were counted. On 19 November 1199 he was at Bury St Edmunds, celebrating the feast of the martyred East Anglian king who had given his name to the town. Apart from selling offices and property in a nationwide auction, the new ‘king of the English’ showed little interest in the administration of his realm. It was Eleanor who responded to the arrival of the persistent Cardinal Agnani at Dover on 20 November, ostensibly to arbitrate in a monastic dispute at Canterbury but in defiance of Richard’s known wishes. She ordered Agnani to remain where he was in Dover until the king should decide what to do with him.
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On 27 November the court arrived in Canterbury, processing grandly through the Westgate and into a city that had been much enriched by the cult of St Thomas Becket, whose shrine was visited by tens of thousands of pilgrims each year. After two days of negotiations with Archbishop Baldwin and the monks of the community, Richard gave both sides what they wanted. Only then did he summon the cardinal from Dover, and made the point that he could solve the problems of his kingdom without interference from Rome. Agnani was a wily man who drew up a deposition stating that the monks had been obliged to give way to Baldwin under threats from Richard, so that the accord was invalid. Prince John saw in this a chance of having the interdict on his lands, due to his marriage to Isabel of Gloucester, lifted. Agnani, sniffing the winds of change, and perhaps flattered that the king’s brother showed him more respect than did the king, complied.

One important person was immune both to crusading fever and the reorganisation of society caused by Richard’s tax gathering, but not to the need for wealth. Queen Eleanor, who was to act as regent with the support of the two justiciars during Richard’s absence, required an income appropriate to her new station – and perhaps some compensation for all those years spent as Henry II’s prisoner. Not only had she retaken control of her dower possessions, but she also persuaded Richard to bestow on her the lands and income allotted by Henry I and Stephen of Blois to their queens, to cover the necessary expenditure of their households.
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At her discretion, she could also levy the traditional ‘queen geld’ at the rate of 10 per cent on all fines payable to the king.

With her long political experience, she must have known that Philip Augustus, Henry’s long-term enemy who had been Richard’s bosom friend of yesteryear, would return from the crusade – if he survived – intent on revenge for the humiliation and wrongs both political and personal inflicted on him by Henry. Knowing her sons as she did, she was also able to guess that Philip and Richard’s joint leadership of the crusade would not bind them as brothers, but lead to a permanent rift between them. History was to prove any such fears justified: the acrimony between the two rulers during the crusade resulted, a few years after her death, in Richard’s successor John losing Normandy to Philip Augustus in the long process of erosion of the empire that Eleanor and Henry had made, ending in the English defeat at the Battle of Castillon in July 1473 and the surrender of Bordeaux to the French in October that year.

So much for the enemy without. As to the enemy within, capable of every betrayal himself, Richard at first insisted that Prince John must accompany him to Outremer so that he could not mount a coup either in England or in the continental possessions during his brother’s absence, but Eleanor fought this on the grounds that it was unthinkable to risk both sons dying in the Holy Land and thus putting up for grabs the whole Plantagenet Empire. So John was heavily bribed to behave in his brother’s absence. His hunger for power and riches might have been sated by Richard granting him the castles of Ludgershall, Marlborough, the Peak, Lancaster and Bolsover, the honours of Peverell and Wallingford, the town of Nottingham and the whole of Derbyshire, plus lesser properties and honours.
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To these he later added the counties of Devon, Cornwall, Somerset and Dorset, together constituting a greater single block of territory in England than had been granted to anyone else since the Conquest. Instead, these possessions made John dangerously powerful and impoverished the Exchequer considerably, since he did not have to account to the Crown for the taxes he levied in his possessions.
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