Terry Jones' Medieval Lives (28 page)

This was his trump card, and he used it effectively. He established courts in various parts of the country and was the first king to grant magistrates the power to judge civil matters in the name of the crown. This is when the first written legal textbook was produced, the basis of English common law. Henry also introduced trial by jury, making the population participate in his own legal authority.

He extended this legal authority into the lands of his magnates and over the Church – a challenge that the Church was determined to resist and which led to Henry's terrible conflict with Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury. He used the authority of the law to demolish castles that had been built without royal permission during the civil war. And, as he preferred to hire troops rather than rely on the ‘loyalty' of barons, he substituted a tax – scutage – for the nobles' obligations of military service. To make this work, he established effective record-keeping.

Kingship was now not quite so personal. Henry had created a legal and administrative structure that was probably more effective than armed force in holding his kingdom together. It was, in many ways, a return to the kind of rule that had existed before the Conquest: rule by consent of the people, within a framework of recognized traditional law. (Actually it was rule by consent of the free people. Villeins were not part of this deal; being unfree, they had very limited legal rights, just as in Anglo-Saxon times the slaves did not have rights or power.)

But although this was notionally kingship under law, there was no institutional check on royal power. Henry was simply a consummate politician, dealing with the art of the possible. The crown was still his personal property, and he was free to choose which of his heirs should succeed him. His eldest surviving son, Richard, was not his first choice.

Which brings us to the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

GOOD KING RICHARD I

Richard was born in Oxford but he was essentially French, brought up in Aquitaine at the court of his mother, Eleanor. Henry gave Aquitaine to him, but intended to make his younger brother, John, King of England. This may have been because of Richard's quite appalling reputation in Aquitaine, where he committed rapes and murders. That was how they justified a major uprising against his rule: ‘He seized and raped the wives, daughters and relatives of free men, and when the violence of his lust had been quenched, handed them to his soldiers to use.'
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However, Richard wasn't going to let John have England and, with the help of Philip II of France, he defeated his father in 1189. Henry, a broken man, died shortly afterwards and Richard took possession of the English crown.

It is not really clear why he bothered. He arrived for his coronation with the idea of picking up as much money as he could to finance a crusade, but unable to speak any English. The leaders of London's Jews came to his court bearing valuable gifts, but as Jews were not allowed there they were beaten up and there were general anti-Jewish riots. Richard, profoundly disturbed at the idiocy of attacking the people who could give him what he needed, left the country soon afterwards and was not seen again in England for years. He detested the place and declared he would sell it off to anyone who was prepared to buy it.

The passion to wage war in the Holy Land was sweeping Europe like a virus. Men who resisted joining up were humiliated and given gifts of wool as if they were women. Priests stirred up anti-Muslim hysteria. A persuasive visual aid was a picture of a mounted Saracen knight trampling on the Messiah's tomb in Jerusalem while his horse urinated on it.

It was Richard's role as a crusading Christian warrior that made him a hero during his reign and a legend for centuries afterwards.

The Great Warrior, however, failed to recapture Jerusalem from the ‘infidel' Saladin. Travelling back from his crusade through Germany (alone and in disguise), Richard was captured and spent two years in prison. Having the IQ of a Good King, he was apparently unable to figure out why this was happening:

No one will tell me the cause of my sorrow

Why they have made me a prisoner here.

Wherefore with dolour I now make my moan;

Friends had I many but help have I none.

Shameful it is that they leave me to ransom
,

To languish here two winters long.

His mother eventually managed to prise the money for his ransom out of the loyal English, whose country was impoverished for years as a result, and in 1194 Richard returned to England to try another coronation – he left again straight afterwards, never to return. He spent even more of his overtaxed country's revenue on building a state-of-the-art castle north of Paris: Chateau Gaillard. It cost £12,000, more than any other defensive building for centuries. It was undermined and captured by Philip II of France six years after being completed.

By that time Richard was dead. He was killed in 1199 while attacking a small fortified building in Chalus, which was defended by a few men who had no hope of holding out. Richard, having forgotten to put his armour on, rode up to its wall and was promptly shot with a crossbow. During his ten-year reign he had spent a grand total of six months in England.

Now how does a man like that end up being a Good King, except through the power of propaganda?

MEDIEVAL SPIN DOCTORS

We can clearly see the way chroniclers adjusted their view of the past in the manuscript of Ralph of Coggeshall's chronicle, which was written during the reigns of Richard and his successor, John. The first section dates from around 1195, when Richard was alive, and praises him with enthusiasm. The man is the ‘unique mirror of all the kings of the Norman race'. The next section was written in a different ink after John had come to the throne. Now Richard has become a quite different kind of king – grasping (Coggeshall says no previous king had imposed such heavy financial demands on his kingdom), menacing, threatening his own petitioners, ferocious towards everyone.

No age can remember, no history can record any preceding king, even those who reigned for a long time, who exacted and received so much money from his kingdom as that king exacted and amassed in the five years after he returned from captivity.

John, the new king, was a very different figure, a king whose ‘heart was full of the spirit of counsel and piety'. During Richard's lifetime, Coggeshall had been writing very critically about John, but those criticisms are not to be found in the manuscript of his chronicle now. We only know that he wrote them because another chronicler, Roger of Wendover, copied them out before Ralph had a chance to cover his tracks. Once John was on the throne, Ralph carefully erased his criticisms of the new king and filled in the blank space with new historical details – the sacking of a chancellor, the consecration of a bishop.
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Of course, once John was out of the way he became a Bad King and, by contrast, Richard was restored as a Good King.

LIMITING ROYAL POWER

The Magna Carta, which dominated the later years of John's reign, did not and could not create any new institutional check on royal power. It was essentially a supplement to the coronation oath, stating the king's intention to uphold good laws, and spelt out what some of those good laws were.

The issue that stirred the barons to demand this document was the sheer cost of maintaining the royal machine, especially the royal machine at war. John and Richard had both tried to meet this by massive increases in feudal dues and legal charges, and most of the Magna Carta is an effort to reverse these. When the rebellious barons complained of John's ‘tyranny' – in other words, that he was ruling without paying attention to the law – they were not necessarily referring to law as we understand it. They held privileges, literally ‘private laws', that were granted by the king, and the royal administration had vastly increased the cost of these. The price of relief from an obligation to the crown had risen from £100 to £6666.

But other clauses – such as, ‘In future no official shall place a man on trial upon his own unsupported statement, without producing credible witnesses to the truth of it' and ‘We will appoint as justices, constables, sheriffs, or other officials, only men that know the law of the realm and are minded to keep it well' – show that the barons firmly held the view that the kingdom operated under laws that bound the king himself as well as everyone else.

There was, in short, a notion of proper kingship, and the Magna Carta tried to spell out what this meant.

The core problem of kingship was to establish the mechanism by which good rule could be enforced. To some extent, this was supposedly the role of the Church. Certainly, from the eleventh to the thirteenth century it could occasionally bring a monarch to his knees, and lower. Henry II had to prostrate himself at the altar in Canterbury cathedral and accept flogging as penance for the killing of Archbishop Becket. There was also the danger of unleashing rebellion, and ultimately of being deposed and killed. But in the end all this came down to a mechanism of popular (or at least baronial) consent.

THE DANGERS OF DEMOCRACY

The idea that such consent should be formalized democratically was regarded as quite simply wrong. We seem to believe that regularly offering the adult population the chance to elect a political party to govern them is self-evidently the ideal political system. This is a very recent opinion. Even John Stuart Mill, so often taken to be the philosopher of democracy, warned against ‘the tyranny of the majority'. This was a danger that was well understood in the Middle Ages. This is why Dante included democracy as one of the despotic systems from which monarchy protects the people:

It is only when a monarch is reigning that the human race exists for its own sake, and not for the sake of something else. For it is only then that perverted forms of government are made straight, to wit, democracies, oligarchies, and tyrannies, which force the human race into slavery (as is obvious to whosoever runs through them all) . . .

The same arguments against ‘democracy' are echoed in Chaucer:

For the truth of things and the benefit thereof are better found by a few folk who are wise and full of reason, rather than by a great multitude of people in which every man shouts out and prattles on about whatever he wants.

For monarchy to function well it was necessary for the monarch to internalize the law – he had to be as stern a judge of his own acts as he was of the acts of others. This was the difference between a strong, all-powerful monarch and a tyrant. If a king ruled in the interests of his people, he was a rightful ruler. If he ruled in his own interests, however, he was a tyrant. In the fourteenth century Marsilius of Padua, the one-time rector of the University of Paris, wrote:

A kingly monarchy, then is a temperate government wherein the ruler is a single man who rules for the common benefit, and in accordance with the will or consent of the subjects. Tyranny, its opposite, is a diseased government wherein the ruler is a single man who rules for his own private benefit apart from the will of his subjects.

At the heart of government was the duty of obedience to the king. This was seen as the source of all peace, honour and prosperity in the realm, and it was the king's job to ensure that obedience to him would be rewarded. The primary function of government was to enable people to lead peaceful and secure lives, and a strong central monarchy was understood to be essential to that as individual barons had no commitment to the common good and would plainly, if left alone, tear the country to pieces. The danger to good government came less from a king who was too powerful than from one who was too weak and could not dominate the barons or win their support.

Henry III and his son Edward I managed to rule effectively, but the next inheritor of the throne, Edward II, failed completely. He was deposed finally by the barons, and the kingdom was taken over by his wife and her lover in the name of his son, the 15-year-old Edward III. This was not a rebellion against tyranny; it was against incompetence. Edward II alienated all his potential supporters by his passionate commitment to unpopular favourites and his complete failure as a war leader.

Edward III grew to manhood with a clear understanding of the difficulties faced by an under-age king, and celebrated his emergence as an adult by seizing and then hanging his mother's lover. But by the time he came to his deathbed his son, the Black Prince, was dead and the succession passed to another child: his ten-year-old grandson Richard.

BAD KING – RICHARD II

Historians mostly agree that Richard II was a bad lot. ‘Vain', ‘megalomaniacal' ‘narcissistic', ‘treacherous', ‘vindictive', and ‘tyrannical' are among the most common epithets applied to him. Quite a few historians – for good measure – also mark him down as ‘mad'.

Thus the
Oxford History of England
describes how his actions after 1397 ‘suggest a sudden loss of control, the onset of a mental malaise. If Richard was sane from 1397 onwards, it was with the sanity of a man who pulls his own house down about his ears.'
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He must have been vain – after all, wasn't he the first English monarch to commission a lifelike portrait of himself? And talk about a megalomaniac – why, he made everyone call him ‘Your Majesty' instead of plain old ‘sire' and forced people to bow the knee to him.

As for his vengeful streak, historians have only to point out how he suddenly turned on three of the greatest nobles in the land in 1397 – he exiled the Duke of Warwick, executed Richard Earl of Arundel and had Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, murdered.

But it may be that modern historians have been too ready to believe everything bad about Richard – even things that never happened. For example, part of the evidence for Richard's insanity always used to be an incident in which a friar came before the King and accused John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster, of plotting against the King's life. The friar was so insistent that Richard ordered the Duke to be put to death straight away. But wiser counsels stayed his hand, whereupon Richard threw a tantrum, tossing his cape and shoes out of the window and began to act like a madman.