The Plantagenets (27 page)

But direct taxation of the wealthy men in England was only a part of the drive to exploit the revenues of his realm. For John, the most obvious way to accrue greater profit from kingship was through the legal system. In this, he used two interlocking tactics. The first involved the simple profits of justice. When Henry II had established a deep and penetrative system of royal justice and government, by which the royal law was easily accessible throughout England, and the role of the royal sheriff was the most important position in local government, it had not been done for the pure love of administrative reform. Rather, there was a clear understanding that justice was a profitable enterprise. The royal chancery made money from selling writs. The Crown prospered handsomely from the fines and forfeitures of property that were the result of criminal convictions in the courts. The eyres that travelled the country both restored law and order and brought in a great deal of money to the Crown, and the accompanying forest eyres, which aggressively asserted the rights of the Crown over the extensive forest land that stretched across England, were pure profit-making enterprises.

A whole series of forest eyres were sent out between 1207 and 1210 as John squeezed thousands of pounds in total from counties in which forest land had been encroached, or wild beasts hunted without royal
permission. A total of £8,738 was brought in solely from forest eyres during those years – more than double what had been realized in 1198–1201. It was both a sign of the efficiency and extent to which the Crown could use justice to squeeze out profit, and a mark of John’s new-found determination to exploit his royal rights to new levels after the loss of Normandy.

The second way in which John used the law to profit was far more political, and would eventually cause him far more problems. He used it as a direct tool by which to both tax and politically control the great barons of England.

Justice in the royal courts may have been widely available, but it was also ultimately subject to the king’s discretion. To have the king’s courts launch an investigation into a private matter would attract a fee, and John was fully prepared to charge high fees. At every stage of a legal case, wealthy litigants could offer the king large bribes for favourable judgement or stay of procedures. A typical fee charged by John in 1207 was £1,000 and fifteen palfreys from one Gerard de Furneval for peace in a legal case being pursued against Nigel de Luvetot. Hundreds and thousands of pounds changed hands as litigants bid for particular outcomes to trials and actions. Not all of the proceeds of this reached the king directly – plenty was taken by his ministers – but there was a period of rapid inflation of judicial payments during John’s reign which amounted to a vast system of justice for sale. This was in some senses the way of the world, but the spiralling costs under John made it a more and more onerous system in which to operate.

Alongside this was a rapid inflation in the costs of what are now known as feudal incidents. England’s political society was built on a complex system of bonds between lords and their vassals, in a hierarchy topped by the king and his barons. In theory, the king guaranteed the internal and external safety of his subjects, and they honoured him with allegiance and customary payments for certain privileges. The most common of these payments at baronial level were for the great rituals of aristocratic family life: an eldest son knighted, a daughter married, or a son coming into his father’s inheritance. The
fines – or reliefs – paid to the king for these privileges were held to be established by custom, and the king, in swearing his coronation oath to uphold the customs of the realm, had agreed to abide by them, or to keep within the bounds of reason when deciding who should pay what.

In addition to this, a king was also able to exercise certain privileges of kingship. He could auction off an aristocratic widow or heiress to the highest bidder, or else take a payment from a widow so that she would not be forced to remarry. A child who came into his inheritance before the age of majority (twenty-one for boys) would not be allowed to control his lands; rather, the king could take charge of them himself in the form of a wardship, or else he could sell the right to control and profit from a wardship to another of his subjects.

In the course of a lifetime, a great magnate might run up a potentially massive debt to the Crown for his feudal dues. Frequently, however, this debt remained notional, and it was never fully called in by the Crown. It might be paid in instalments, or not paid at all, depending on the king’s lenience. It was instead a form of financial bond between king and subject.

John, in his mood of financial need following the loss of Normandy, saw the system of fines and reliefs as a great source of wealth and power. The generally accepted relief for inheriting the estates of an earl was £100. In some cases John charged seven times that sum. Moreover, he began to demand faster payment of debts – hundreds or thousands of pounds were now demanded in payment over a fixed schedule. The penalty for failing to make payments was the seizure of lands.

In 1207 the first major forfeiture occurred when John seized the lands of the earldom of Leicester, which had been vacant since the death of the 4th earl, Robert Beaumont, in 1204. Instead of protecting the right of inheritance through Beaumont’s daughter Amicia and her husband, John took the estates into his own hands and confiscated the revenues, citing as his reason the non-payment of debt. It might have been legally plausible, but if one of the fundamental duties of a king was to protect the property of his subjects, John had manifestly failed.

This, then, was the king that the realm of England came to know in the years immediately following John’s loss of Normandy. The systems of government did not change in any substantial way, but the demands of the king in charge of them grew very much more urgent. Nor there was any sign that they would soon abate. On 1 October 1207 the nineteen-year-old queen Isabella of Angoulême gave birth to a baby boy at Winchester castle. It was the first Plantagenet son to have been born since John himself, forty years previously. They named him Henry, after his illustrious grandfather, once lord of Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine and Aquitaine. There could have been no greater signal of John’s intentions: to raise the money he required to take back all that his own father had won. England had little choice but to follow him.

A Cruel Master

The Plantagenets were often likened to devils: kings who wielded immense power, but who could also be unnaturally cruel. In this respect John was no different from the rest of his family. Yet even by the standards of his age, the grip that the king exerted on his realm between 1208 and 1211 was severe and overbearing. During these years, as John’s confidence soared, he exerted his royal mastery over every aspect of life in England. As he matured as a king, John not only fulfilled his dream of amassing the greatest hoard of treasure held by any king of England before him; he also extended the power of the Crown over Scotland, Wales and Ireland, ruthlessly impoverished and exiled those baronial families who opposed his rule, extorted vast sums of money from England’s Jews and – most spectacular of all – faced down the pope in a battle for supremacy over the Church.

The period of John’s cruel mastery was heralded on 15 February 1208, when an ominous sign loomed in the sky. Men and women looked up with awe and foreboding into the darkness as, according to Roger of Wendover, the moon appeared ‘first of a blood red colour, and afterwards of a dingy nature’. It was a lunar eclipse, and like all celestial signs, it had a powerful effect on the medieval mind. The eclipse was seen as a portent of evil, and within five weeks the portent was fulfilled. The church bells of England fell still, and – thanks to a fierce and lengthy argument between the king and Pope Innocent III – the realm was placed under papal Interdict.

The disagreement between John and Innocent had fairly mundane origins, but it spiralled quickly into a matter of international
importance. It concerned power, precedent and pre-eminence. Its effects reached down into the lives of every man and woman and child in England.

It began in 1205 when Hubert Walter’s death, shortly after John’s aborted invasion of Normandy, left the archbishopric of Canterbury vacant. In John’s view, the archbishopric was now in his gift, and he was determined that it should go to a man of his choosing: John de Gray, bishop of Norwich, an experienced legal clerk, judge and occasional diplomat who had served as John’s secretary and lent the king money pawned against royal jewels during the retreat from Normandy.

The election protocols to Canterbury were disputed, however, and John found that he could not gift such high ecclesiastical office without a fight from the Church. The chapter of clerics at Canterbury – who claimed the ancient right to elect the new archbishop – opposed Gray in favour of their own man, the sub-prior Reginald. In December John went in person to browbeat the chapter into electing Gray. When news of this reached Rome it enraged Pope Innocent III, a dogmatic, reforming pope who believed strongly that he had ultimate sovereignty over each of Europe’s kings. He overturned Gray’s election in March 1206, rejected Reginald’s candidacy and put forward his own candidate, Cardinal Stephen Langton. The cardinal was an experienced Englishman, a theologian and scholar with a pious demeanour, a talent for writing hymns and a reforming instinct that pleased Innocent. In Rome on 17 June 1207 the pope consecrated Langton as archbishop.

When John heard that Langton had been elected as his new archbishop, he flew into a rage. He sent furious letters to Rome, dark with promises to stand up for his royal rights until his death, and threats to embargo all travel to the papacy from his ports. When this made hardly any impression upon Innocent, John expelled the monks of Canterbury from England, declared Langton an enemy of the Crown, and took the possessions of the See of Canterbury into royal custody. Innocent responded, on 23 March 1208, by placing the whole of England under Interdict.

Interdict was supposed to be a grim sentence. It forbade almost all church services from being held, effectively withholding God’s offices
from an entire people. Numerous European kingdoms suffered such a sentence during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, for Interdict was a standard weapon used in any dispute between a pope and a king. Innocent himself had previously issued interdicts against both Norway and France.

The sentence was indefinite, and could last as long as the pope’s displeasure prevailed. So from the spring of 1208, a real silence descended on John’s realm, as all church services ceased. The rhythm of life was suspended. Only confession, the anointing of the dying and baptism of children were permitted. Elsewhere, church doors were boarded shut and priests sat idle. Marriages took place in porchways, and the dead were buried outside the walls of towns, in ditches by the roadside, with no priest standing by. England was placed in a form of ecclesiastical Coventry.

John’s reaction was worthy of his father. At first he was angry: hearing of the Interdict was said to have sent him nearly mad with rage, blaspheming and cursing at the presumption of popes, swearing by God’s teeth that he would pluck out priests’ eyes and clip their false tongues. Yet John was also a pragmatist, and the day after the Interdict was proclaimed, royal officers swept England, seizing clerical property in the king’s name. Barns and parks, fields and fishponds: all were taken by John’s agents, leaving the English clergy not just idle, but impoverished. Sheriffs and administrators were put into place to manage the property in the king’s name, and county committees were appointed to assess clerical wealth and pay the clergy a small living allowance during their time out of work. Two weeks later he started permitting dispossessed clergy to buy back their property, on onerous conditions. Clergy who wished to have their lands and property free from direct royal interference were forced to hand over extremely large portions of their revenues to the king.

By these ingenious methods, John collected vast sums from the English Church during the five years of its estrangement from Rome, and enjoyed himself while doing it. Perhaps his most inventive scheme was to take hostage and ransom back his clergy’s illicitly taken wives, concubines and mistresses. Since plenty of churchmen had babies in
their houses, it was a price that many of them had no choice but to pay.

It seemed that the sentence that was intended by Innocent to put the fear of popes into King John had in fact swelled the royal wealth. Yet one did not laugh in the face of the pope with impunity. The personal cost to John of his amused disregard for the Interdict was the most severe that the Church could apply to him. On January 1209 Innocent began proceedings to excommunicate him. By November of that year the sentence had been passed. It was now not only John’s kingdom but the king himself who was officially exiled from the Church.

To excommunicate a king was a very severe sentence, since it tacitly encouraged other Christian kings to attack England without fear of papal condemnation. Yet excommunication – a fate that even Henry II had avoided after Becket’s murder – seemed to do little to discountenance John. No invasion came. The worst that happened was a mass exodus of the English bishops, many of whom went into exile overseas. And even this was hardly a burden on John’s kingship – as bishoprics and abbacies fell into vacancy, so their profits reverted to the Crown.

So another sentence passed lightly over John’s head. After a while the only real effect of the Interdict and excommunication was a moderate inconvenience to ordinary Englishmen and a massive financial penalty on the English clergy. John’s income from the Interdict amounted to something in the region of 20,000 marks a year, perhaps as much as three times what was raised by the Saladin tithe of 1188.

As the Interdict crisis established John’s temporary supremacy over the Church, he was also vigorously exploring other ways to impose himself on others of his neighbours and subjects. At Christmas time in 1209–10 he turned his attention on the Jews. Since as a people the Jews held a monopoly on moneylending, they were a very small but extremely rich group within England. They were also, legally, the king’s personal chattels, and it was only by royal protection that they could live and work. John tapped their wealth initially with a tallage
of 66,000 marks – a vast sum which was extracted with extreme prejudice. Throughout England, Jews of both sexes were persecuted. According to the chronicler Walter of Coventry, Jews were ‘seized, imprisoned and tortured severely, in order to do the king’s will with their money; some of them after being tortured gave up all they had and promised more …’