Richard & John: Kings at War (68 page)

In general John continued in the direction first posted by his father in the area of legal and administrative reform. In his reign we can see in inchoate form a public prosecution service, the growth of a legal profession, a system of circuit judges - the so-called ‘eyres’ or visitations by between two to nine royal judges - and a Court of Common Pleas at Westminster. The scope of the eyres was all-embracing: they heard pleas dealing with tenancies, wardships, criminal cases, the sale of land, the sale of wine, the election of coroners, taxes, local dues and loans made by Jewish moneylenders.
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New legal procedures or assizes had been instituted to deal with cases where a landowner had been illegally dispossessed or an heir wrongfully disinherited (the famous assize of novel disseisin and mort d’ancestor).
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Yet it would be a mistake to think of John as a medieval Solon or Lycurgus. Although he was something of a barroom lawyer himself, with a taste for the pettifogging pedantry of the law, his main interest was always money. During his reign ten baronies passed from brother to brother and, in adjudicating in these cases, John made himself richer by an average ‘fine’ of 1,575 marks per case, with the colossal figure of 10,000 marks being his highest fee.
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As one student of his methods has caustically remarked: ‘Smallholders’ petty pleas held little interest for John, apart from the revenues that they generated.’
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Nonetheless, in his own mind John was sincerely interested in law courts and the administration of justice. He had authoritarian views which he attempted to validate by reference to the works of St Augustine.
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The other reason for scepticism about John’s commitment to justice was that he was keen on the traditional ordeals and wanted them to continue. It was only when Pope Innocent III, at the Fourth Lateran Council, forbade the clergy to take part in these procedures that they began to wither away. Settling disputes by ordeal was supposed to involve an appeal to God, who would see that the innocent party prevailed. Ordeals were of two kinds: bilateral, where the litigants or their champions fought duels or mini-battles; and unilateral, where the accused submitted to the ordeal by iron or water.
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The ordeal by iron meant that the accused had to walk an agreed number of paces holding a heated iron; the hand was then bound and inspected after three days; innocence or guilt was determined by how well the hand was healing. The ordeal by water (never used against women, allegedly for reasons of sexual decorum) meant being thrown into cold water in a lake, pool or pit; if the accused sank, he was innocent, but if he floated he was guilty. Two-thirds of those who underwent the ordeal emerged not guilty. In Launceston in 1201 fifteen cases involving twenty-seven individuals were decided by ordeal, and the system was widespread in John’s reign; John oddly saw the ordeals as a way of boosting royal power.
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But it was John’s old adversary Innocent III who dealt the death-stroke to his primitive method of deciding guilt or innocence. Since the ordeals had to receive ecclesiastical sanction (the iron, for instance, was blessed and consecrated) in line with the theory that God would decide the outcome, the participation of priests was essential to the system. This was, in sum, a form of punishment that hinged on theology, and at the Lateran Council in 1215 Innocent and his learned doctors (more than a thousand bishops and abbots attended the conclave) knifed through to the essential fallacy of the ordeal. The theological basis of ordeals was that God was required to work a miracle on each occasion but, since a miracle is a free act of God unless automatically triggered by the sacraments, the blasphemous logical entailment must be that the ordeal was a sacrament. Innocent’s prohibition of ordeals followed, and churchmen everywhere obeyed it.
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Summing up on John and justice, one may be sceptical as to this particular monarch’s real commitment to the principle. John’s defenders tend to make three main points: the barons lost out under his system but the social classes below them did well; corrupt courts and judicial venality were not a serious problem until the reign of Henry III; and it was now clear that minor tenants could win lawsuits against the gentry.
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Sometimes John’s over-eager apologists lurch into outright hyperbole: ‘there is no doubt that his royal duty of providing justice was discharged with a zeal and a tirelessness to which the English common law is greatly indebted’
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is one such judgement. But against these points are three even weightier. One is that John’s energy and intervention in legal and administrative matters was a consequence of his control-freak paranoia; he could not trust anyone, he could not delegate so (as he saw it) his finger had to be in every pie. Moreover, it was a contingent fact that feudal custom in England allowed a king to regulate the lives of his tenants-in-chief (and hence his subjects in general) more closely than a French monarch could.
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The second is the simple and incontestable point that John’s main interest in the legal and administrative sphere was always the raising of money; the more unsuccessful he became in foreign warfare and diplomacy, the more frenziedly he taxed and mulcted. It may not be quite an example of Santayana’s definition of fanaticism - redoubling efforts when one has lost sight of the aim - but it is heading along that way. Thirdly, the much-lauded extension of jury trials in England turned out to be a function either of John’s lust for the fees payable in royal courts or, more directly, Innocent III’s ban on ordeals, which caused a reflex switch to jury trials in the years 1216-17.
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There is certainly no justification in domestic policy for the new revisionism of ‘good King John’.

16

RELATIONS BETWEEN THE VATICAN and sovereign nation-states in modern history are simplified by the stark fact that the Church of Rome is a spiritual power dealing with temporal lords. In the Middle Ages there was no such simple contrast. The Church was itself a temporal power and the higher clergy were major players in the politics of the day in all western societies. As the titanic struggle between Henry II and Becket had shown, the apparently straightforward matter of a nomination to a vacant archbishopric could set in train events that convulsed kingdoms. It was in his dealings with the Church that John most clearly revealed himself a true son of Henry II. All the kings of England since 1066 wanted a situation where, to use Walter Bagehot’s terms, the papacy was merely the ‘dignified’ aspect of the Church in England while the monarch was the ‘efficient’ aspect, the real power. In other words, they were prepared to acknowledge the Pope’s nominal position as eccesiastical overlord, but wanted all the real decisions about preferment to bishoprics and other high offices to be in their own hands.
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The
locus classicus
of this tendency was Henry II’s ‘Constitutions of Clarendon’, adopted in 1164, which attempted to exclude papal authority by recognising the pontiff’s suzerainty ‘saving only the king’s royal rights and liberties.’
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This proviso contained so many exceptions and opt-outs that the basic acceptance of papal authority was rendered meaningless. One of the more notorious utterances by Henry was that reported to the Pope by the Young King during his rebellion: Henry told the monks of Winchester in 1173: ‘I order you to hold a free election, but I forbid you to elect anyone except Richard my clerk, archdeacon of Poitiers.’
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Henry had learned after the martyrdom of Becket and the failure of his conflict with Rome that it was wisest not to confront the papacy head-on. Richard the paladin had no quarrel with the Church so long as it did not impede his martial glory. The foolish John, however, allowed a relatively trival slight to his dignity to escalate into a full-blown crisis with one of the most determined popes of the Middle Ages. Although some historians have tried to commend John for his ‘patriotism’ and ‘defence of England’ and made him a kind of forerunner of Henry VIII, the truth is that John miscalculated badly and then redoubled his efforts when he had lost sight of his aim. It was John in typical mode, exhibiting all the bad-tempered despotism which was characteristic of him. Comparisons with Henry VIII may be more apt than some of his uncautious modern admirers would care to admit.
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A charitable view might be that John was unlucky in that his reign almost exactly coincided with that of Pope Innocent III, whose pontificate is widely regarded as the apogee of both the spiritual and temporal power of the Roman see. Innocent presided over the birth of the Franciscan and Dominican movements, held the famous fourth Lateran Council in 1215, and adjudicated between rival emperors in Germany, deposing Otto IV. The Latin conquest of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade (1204) destroyed his Christian rivals in the East, while his ruthless extirpation of the Albigensian heresy in south-western France eliminated the radical threat in the West. John’s relations with the papacy had been brittle from the very beginning. Innocent III was exasperated with both John and Philip Augustus, because their dispute over Normandy impeded his plans for a fourth Crusade.
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Nonetheless, as long as the German imperial throne remained vacant and the succession undecided (that is to say, until about 1207), Innocent treated John with remarkable indulgence. Despite John’s despotic policy towards the Church, Innocent allowed him considerable leeway, not interfering when the bishops of Normandy and Aquitaine authorised the annulment of his first marriage; this was in pointed contrast to the Pope’s martinet attitude when Philip Augustus discarded his wife Ingeborg of Denmark.
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When Philip Augustus triumphed in Normandy, however, the Pope washed his hands of the affair and instructed his Norman bishops to follow law, custom and their consciences. This de facto acceptance of the Capetian conquest of Normandy rankled with John and it may have been a factor in his later attitudes to the papacy. Even before this, though, John had been marked down in the papal book as a man with despotic tendencies. Once crowned king in 1199, John continued the feud he had waged as ‘lord of Ireland’ against John Cumin, archbishop of Dublin; having once before driven him into exile, he repeated the medicine in 1203, drawing from Innocent a stinging rebuke and a warning that if he did not readmit Cumin, he would place John’s lands under papal interdict. But Cumin was just the tip of an iceberg. John offended the Pope over a range of arbitrary actions and preferments, pogroms and persecutions, in Normandy, Limoges, Poitiers, Lincoln and Winchester.
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While John was locked in conflict with Philip Augustus over Normandy, he could not afford a fight on another front and was compelled to accept unwelcome papal orders and decrees, but John, secretly fuming at the insult to his ‘honour’, bided his time and awaited a suitable opportunity to retaliate.

It was the death of Hubert Walter in 1205 that was the precipitant to a decade of battle with the papacy. Whether John secretly loathed and resented Walter, and suspected him of being too friendly to Philip Augustus, as some of the chroniclers allege, is still a subject on which scholars debate.
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Yet of Hubert’s talents as a bureaucrat there can be no reasonable doubt; after all, it is due to him that we possess a swathe of documentation for John’s reign unavailable for the Richard era: chancery documents, charter, patent and close rolls; the appearance of official archives as an aid to administration is almost entirely due to Walter.
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A master of administrative efficiency, he introduced set tariffs for fees and fines, invented the oath of peace, the office of coroner and much else. He regulated the fees payable at the Chancery for the issue of documents under the Great Seal - a process that had degenerated into a financial racket in Richard’s times, with exorbitant tariffs almost inevitably engendering elaborate forgeries.
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He was a great civil servant, but as archbishop of Canterbury was scarcely in the Thomas Becket mould. The monks of Canterbury complained to the Pope that he was far too obsessed with affairs of state to be an efficient or even credible primate. He was no respecter of religious punctilio or even the rights of sanctuary, and on one notorious occasion gutted the Church of St Mary-le-Bow to smoke out a would-be Robin Hood named William FitzOsbert and his nine companions; seized as they made their fuliginous exit, the alleged rebels were bound to horses’ tails and dragged to Smithfield, where they were hanged in chains.
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Hubert Walter was also a venal and extortionate man, who extracted large sums of money for private purposes as well as for the exchequer, and was not over-scrupulous about how he raised the cash. It is certain that he died owing £1,000 - an enormous debt for the thirteenth century.
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Nonetheless a new archbishop of Canterbury had to be appointed, and according to canon law the electors were the monks of Christ Church; usually the country’s bishops also had a say in who was to be head of the English Church. The situation was complicated by tensions between secular and regular clergy in early thirteenth-century England, largely on the grounds that the monastic orders had departed from the vows of their founding fathers in favour of money-making and involvement in worldly pursuits; the Cistercians were a particular butt of criticism.
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Yet it was virtually axiomatic that no archbishop could be elected who did not have the king’s approval. Foreseeing that hotheads among the monks might precipitate a crisis by holding a snap election, John sped to Canterbury and persuaded the chapter to postpone their choice for six months (until December 1205). Meanwhile both the king and the monks separately lobbied the Vatican.
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After consultation with the bishops, John sent envoys to Innocent III with instructions to use all means (diplomacy, cajolery, bribery) to persuade the Pope simply to order the monks to fall in line with his wishes, which were that his friend and confidant John de Gray, bishop of Norwich, should be the next metropolitan. Historians are divided about Gray. For some he is no more than a sycophant and yes-man: ‘He was a man of purely secular interests - a competent captain and efficient civil servant. There was no man in England whom John trusted so completely and so consistently as he did John de Gray.’
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For others, he was a lesser version of Hubert Walter but still one whom the monks would have been wise to accept, as he was easy-going and would have given them what they wanted.
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But John’s action in sending secret agents to Rome played into the hands of the die-hard faction among the Christ Church monks. Angered by the king’s intrigues they chose their subprior, Reginald, on the understanding that the choice required papal sanction, and sent him to Rome under an oath not to reveal his provisional election unless Innocent III seemed to be bending to the lobbying of John’s agents.