The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (21 page)

Most of Henry’s laws made the country much safer for travel. The sheriff, whose office and functions the Normans had taken over pretty well wholesale from the Anglo-Saxons, while remaining the king’s financial agent in the county court, had his powers of law enforcement enhanced. To arrest a thief the sheriff could now enter anyone’s land, even if it was within the jurisdiction of the lord of the manor–a privilege hitherto limited to the lord or abbot. Sheriffs now resembled an early police force who were expected to co-operate with one another even outside their shire. Henry II also put a prison in every shire and attached a sergeant to every sheriff with the right to arrest suspects and bring them before a court and to break up fights in the village. Every citizen had a duty to raise the hue and cry if he saw a crime being committed and was required to chase after the criminal.

The reign of Henry II also saw the development of the jury trial we know today. From 1179, by the Assize of Northampton, a trial before twelve property owners could take the place of the Norman method of resolving land disputes known as the ordeal by battle. By the late twelfth century the growing numbers of trained lawyers–some of whom were being taught in the town of Oxford since being banned by Henry II from the University of Paris after 1167 when Louis VII sheltered Becket–introduced a new rationalism into the intellectual climate. The ordeal, which assumed that the miraculous intervention of God gave victory to the rightful owner, had begun to look absurd. After all, a man might simply be a stronger fighter. The new system of trial by jury made allowances for the old, for the weak and for women, and it was offered only by the king’s courts. By the beginning of the next century opinion in the Church itself rebelled against the old practice. In 1215 by a directive from the Lateran Council in Rome all priests were forbidden to have anything to do with trial by ordeal, and the custom died out soon after.

But Henry did not completely do away with all the ordeals which the Normans had introduced–indeed he produced some of his own. The ordeal by water for criminal trials was brought in in 1166. This required the accused to have his legs and arms tied before he was lowered into a vat of water blessed by the local priest. If the accused sank he was innocent, if he floated he was guilty. Another proof was the ordeal by hot iron; here, the accused was made to carry a piece of heated iron and if it made no mark then he was guilty. In general, however, for most freemen the trend was towards a more rational form of justice under the royal courts.

Henry II also gave England the new office of coroner, which still does much the same work today. Elected in the county or old shire court, the coroner was responsible for carrying out inquests on the bodies of those whose death was suspicious–if it was sudden or accidental or if there was reason to believe it had been murder. By law the coroner’s inquest had to be constituted very soon after the death, while the evidence was still fresh in the mind of witnesses.

At the time of the Conquest England had long had a fairly law-abiding population accustomed to the ancient tradition of the hundred and shire courts. Ever since the days of Cnut it had been compulsory under Anglo-Saxon law for each man to belong to a tithing for the purpose of maintaining good order. The process was refined when William the Conqueror imposed the heavy murdrum fine where a Norman was murdered and the hundred could not produce the murderer. Since the hundred might cover a very large area this became impractical, and by the end of the twelfth century a sort of self-policing known as the frankpledge was being practised in the smaller area of the tithing–that is, a community of ten men who were responsible for one another’s good conduct. The duty of the tithing was to bring any criminal they suspected before the hundred court. Under Henry II it also became one of the sheriff’s functions to make sure that every man in the shire belonged to a tithing.

Although he was incapable of devolving responsibility to his sons, Henry was a generous-spirited man full of family feeling. He had been furious with his elder sons for rebelling against him, but nonetheless decided to believe their protestations of regret and restored them to their lands. His wife, however, remained under lock and key. After he had defeated the revolt there was no question but that Henry II was the greatest monarch of the age. His daughters, moreover, were married to the most powerful kings in Christendom. The system of informal royal alliances that this inaugurated between England on the one hand and Castile (the most important country in Spain), Germany and Flanders on the other set the pattern of foreign alliances for several hundred years.

Similarly the enmity with France continued to be a main theme of English policy. In 1180 the succession of Philip II, known as Philip Augustus, to the French throne brought a far more cunning enemy of the Angevin Empire into play. The last years of Henry II were very sad ones. One of the reasons for the first rebellion against him had been the favouritism he showed towards his youngest son John, to whom he had begun making over castles which belonged to the young King Henry. Ten years younger than his nearest brother Richard, John was a short (five feet five) black-haired youth who was known as Jean Sans Terre or John Lackland because he had no obvious lands to inherit, unlike his elder brothers. He has had a very bad press down the centuries, given his odious moral character and his liking for physical cruelty, but modern historians are impressed by his administrative competence and his interest in justice.

Contemporary historians, however, detested him. At the time the historian Geraldus Cambrensis did not mince his words about the mistake John’s doting father Henry II had made in deciding that his new possession, Ireland, might make up for John’s lack of lands. In 1185 he sent him as lord of Ireland to govern the country, though he was aged only eighteen, having tried and failed to persuade Richard to yield Aquitaine to John–the death of the young King Henry meant that Richard was now heir to Normandy and England. But he was forced to withdraw John from Ireland within the year on account of his grotesque behaviour. Paying no attention to older advisers and keeping company only with foolish young men of his own age, John failed to behave to the Irish kings with the courtesy they deserved. He pulled their long beards, which were the fashion in Ireland (an oddity to clean-shaven Normans) and granted their lands to his favourites. Despite all this, the infatuated king continued to push the cause of John, at the expense of Richard the Lionheart.

Eleven years after the first revolt of Henry’s sons in 1183, another rebellion threatened in Richard’s own Duchy of Aquitaine. The proud and restless barons there had felt Richard’s firm hand for too long. They were easily encouraged by the young King Henry and his next brother Geoffrey of Brittany to rebel against their overlord. It was a revolt which again threatened to dissolve the Angevin Empire when Toulouse and Burgundy sent aid. So dangerous was the situation that Henry II gave orders that all the barons who had taken part in the first revolt should be locked up. With the sudden death of the young King Henry from dysentery, the rebellion died away almost as quickly as it had sprung up. But the new heir to the throne, Richard, had an even more stormy relationship with his father.

The golden-haired, blue-eyed Richard was cast in a heroic mould. Attractive, generous, fiery and impulsive, he did not have his father’s brains, but he had his temper and his military flair. Though Richard was now the heir presumptive to England, Normandy and Anjou, Henry’s secret plan was to make these lands John’s. After failing to obtain Aquitaine for John, for four years Henry refused to name Richard his heir. He would not have him crowned as he had his elder brother, nor would he make the necessary arrangements to hurry up his marriage to Princess Alice of France, the sister of the young King Henry’s widow.

Henry’s refusal to treat Richard properly would lead to the beginning of the end of the Angevin Empire. It not only gave the new King of France, Philip Augustus, an excuse to begin hostilities against his over-powerful subject, the King of England. It drove a bitter Richard permanently into Philip’s camp. As will be recalled, the return to Henry II of the Norman Vexin was dependent on the marriage between Philip’s sister and the young king. This dowry was now transferred to Alice, the next sister, but Henry’s foot-dragging meant that she was still not married to Richard. When neither the Vexin nor his sister returned to France, Philip Augustus had a perfect excuse for war. Though it ended in a truce, Richard was soon responding again to the French king’s overtures.

Relations became thornier than ever between father and son on account of Henry’s behaviour over the Third Crusade, in 1189. Richard the Lionheart, as he soon became known, passionately wished to go on this Crusade to rescue the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, which had fallen to the brilliant new Muslim warlord the Kurd Saladin, Sultan of Egypt and Syria. But in such an uncertain situation he would have been foolish to depart unless and until his father named him as heir; this Henry II continued to refuse to do. Richard therefore not only publicly did homage to the French king for his lands in France but simultaneously joined with the French king to invade Henry’s Angevin holdings.

By mischance his father was in France, but did not have enough loyal English troops with him to fight on so many fronts. He ran out of gold to pay his mercenaries, who therefore deserted him. Henry’s tenants-in-chief in Maine and Anjou all went over to the victorious young kings, and he was driven out of Le Mans too. But some atavistic sentiment made him reluctant to leave his native land of Anjou for Normandy, where he would have found greater loyalty. Perhaps he was too tired to make a last stand, for he was also ill with a debilitating fever. From an old Angevin stronghold, the castle of Chinon, perched on rocky heights above the River Vienne, he was forced to come to a humiliating treaty with Philip and Richard which granted their every demand. He was so unwell when he arrived at the meeting at Colombières, shaking and trembling, that Philip offered him his cloak and suggested he sit on the grass, but the old king angrily refused.

Afterwards, back in his bed at the castle of Chinon, the king scanned the names of the rebels whom Philip and Richard demanded should now do homage to Richard as their liege lord instead of to himself. When at the top of it he saw the name of his beloved son John he turned his face to the wall and was heard by his courtiers to cry, ‘O John! John!’ Then he said dully, ‘Let things go as they will. I no longer care for anything in this world.’ He died three days later. In his last agony he was heard by those about him to mutter, ‘Shame, shame on a defeated king.’

In his palace at Winchester, Henry had commissioned a painting which to him summed up the last years of his life with his sons grown up: three young eagles were attacking their parent bird, while a fourth was standing on his neck ready to peck out its eyes. It proved all too prescient.

When he was dead he was borne through the rolling Angevin hills to the Abbey of Fontevrault, where you can still see his tomb. Beside him lies Queen Eleanor. Enemies by the end of their lives, they were united in death. But although (as one historian has said) Henry was a lion savaged by jackals, so great were his achievements that many of the methods of justice and government that he designed endured for eight centuries. His superb bureaucracy ensured that England continued to flourish for some time after his death, despite the worst efforts of his two careless sons.

Once he had assumed the throne Richard’s behaviour underwent a marked change. One chronicler reported that when he approached his father’s body at the start of the funeral procession the corpse started to spew blood from its nostrils as a sign that the murderer of the dead man was near by. But Richard was a man transformed. He fell into paroxysms of grief, punished all those who had rebelled with him except his mother, whom he released from prison in Winchester, and rewarded his father’s most loyal supporters, including William Marshall who had once challenged him to single combat on behalf of the old king. His close relationship with Philip Augustus would shortly become one of bitter enmity.

As far as Richard the Lionheart was concerned, the single most important event of his day was the fall of the Christian Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem to Saladin, the new Muslim warlord ruler of Syria. A Kurd from Mesopotamia (today Iraq), Saladin the Great was overlord of much of the Middle East and was in the process of expelling all the Latin or western European settlements from Palestine.

Palestine, as the cradle of the world’s three most important monotheistic faiths, was and is a land of great religious significance. By strange coincidence the tiny city of Jerusalem was the site of many of their separate revelations. It was the scene of Christ’s death, just as Palestine was the scene of his life, and contained the Holy Sepulchre, site of his tomb in the rock. On the very same spot as the Holy Sepulchre were the ruins of the destroyed Temple of Solomon, sacred to the Jews. It was also believed that it was there that Abraham had been narrowly saved from sacrificing Isaac by seeing a ram in the thicket. And the same piece of ground was believed by Muslims to have been the very spot from which Mohammed was taken to Heaven. In honour of Mohammed, the Dome or Mosque of the Rock had been built by Muslims–who were the country’s most recent conquerors.

The triumphant First Crusade of 1095–9, which had been launched to liberate the Holy Land, had established the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem as well as the counties of Edessa, Tripoli and Antioch under an Angevin relation of Henry II named Count Baldwin. Since Henry was the head of the Angevin family, on the fall of Jerusalem the Patriarch Heraclius arrived in England on a special mission to implore him and his many armies to liberate the city. But Henry remained unconvinced. For all his religious devotion, mounting a Crusade was a lengthy, dangerous and extremely expensive business. In his view the Angevin Empire was not in sufficiently good shape to be left without a ruler. Since 1166 there had already been a tax for the Crusades of a penny in the pound for every freeman; in response to the patriarch, Henry now imposed the severe Saladin tax or tithe, one-tenth of all freemen’s personal goods to raise money for the Crusade.

This action failed to satisfy contemporary opinion, which would have liked the king to lead a Crusade but did not wish to pay the Saladin tithe. In the end the majority of the Crusaders would go off as private citizens. It was what one historian has called an ‘armed pilgrimage’, in return for which Pope Urban II promised spiritual indulgences to smooth the way to heaven. The Crusades were the closet thing to a mass movement in the intensely religious middle ages. At a time when Bible stories were the only universal literary stimulus, liberating the places where Christ had passed his life–Bethlehem, Nazareth, Canaan, Galilee, Mount Calvary–had an almost unbearable emotional resonance.

Richard Coeur de Lion was no more immune from the lure of the great Crusade adventure than the next man, especially as his chief calling was to be a soldier of great strategic brilliance. He had honed his military skills in reducing the powers of the wild southern barons of Aquitaine, and he believed that he could be particularly useful at avenging the honour of the Christian west after the Second Crusade, to liberate Edessa and led by the French and German armies, had ended in disaster. Perhaps, too, like many a Crusader he had a yen to see the world.

The new king more than made up for his father’s reluctance to expose his lands to the dangers of his absence on the Third Crusade. In the ten years of his reign Richard I visited England only twice–first to be crowned, and second to raise money. He had none of his father’s interest in good government or in eradicating corruption. The office of sheriff was openly put up for sale in every county; by paying Richard 10,000 marks the Scottish king William the Lion was allowed to annul the Treaty of Falaise. The new justiciar of England, William Longchamp, the Bishop of Ely, was a long-term official of the Angevin civil service, but in the new climate it was rumoured that he had purchased his office. Richard himself joked that he would have sold London itself if he could have found a buyer. Nevertheless the great administrative structures set up by Henry II proved their worth: England was governed very successfully without a king during all those years of the Lionheart’s absence.

Despite this southern Frenchman’s cavalier treatment of precious institutions and his evident lack of interest in the country, there has never been a King of England who arouses quite such enthusiasm as Richard. Somehow the gaiety and generosity of his character, his devil-may-care spirit and his endless adventures continue to blind many to the less attractive sides of his nature. At the beginning of his reign his easy gesture of granting a general amnesty to all those in prison, particularly those who had been prosecuted for the forest laws, has endeared him in popular myth ever since, linking him indissolubly with that mythical prince of forest thieves Robin Hood and hinting at the insubordinate native British desire to sympathize with the rebel. But it was under this great warrior that there began the worst persecution of the Jewish community in English history, after a mob had attacked Jewish leaders attending Richard’s coronation.

After their expulsion from Israel by the Romans towards the end of the first century, the Jewish people dispersed round the world, an event known as the Diaspora. In twelfth-century England, whose population was about two and a half million, the Jews were a tiny minority of perhaps 5,000 individuals who tended to be mobile traders, merchants and moneylenders. Their skill in finance meant that they were one of the medieval equivalents of banks for European governments, and they were protected by the post-Conquest Norman and Angevin monarchs who relied on them for loans and taxed them at will. They lived in a separate quarter in towns, and spoke Hebrew among themselves. They were noted for their different foods, taboos and religious rituals, which were far more strictly observed 900 years ago than they are today.

Jesus Christ, the founder of the Christian Church, was the most famous Jewish man in history, while the Apostles and Disciples whose writings Christian scholars argued about were converted Jews. But during the Crusades, when the papacy was preaching an armed campaign against unbelievers of all kinds, parish priests were encouraged to attack Jews from the pulpit. The Christian Church began to dwell on the old belief that the Jewish population of Jerusalem more than a thousand years before had elected to crucify Christ. The parish priest also told his congregation that the practice of loaning money for interest was the sin of usury–even though this was secretly engaged in by Christian moneylenders, and is of course standard banking procedure today.

Until the Crusades the average English person had very little to do with the Jews, apart from those in the merchant fraternity, though there was a Jewish presence in most important southern English towns as well as York. But the need for money to finance a Crusade changed relations between the two communities. For the first time landowning knights who wished to go on crusade needed large amounts of cash. The quickest way of finding it was to raise mortgages on their land, and the best people for cash tended to be Jewish moneylenders, who could tap their overseas contacts to offer extra liquidity. Inspired by religious enthusiasm the Christian knights borrowed immense sums which they often were scarcely in a position to repay.

Although anti-Jewish feeling had been growing for the past century, since the start of the Crusades, concrete manifestations of it began at Richard the Lionheart’s coronation. Anti-Jewish prejudice was increased by the handling of the interest on the Crusaders’ debts. Knights would return from the Crusades to be told that the interest rate had changed in their absence. If it unexpectedly rose to say 50 per cent on a loan or higher, which it not infrequently did, a small landowner who could not service his debt would find that half his land passed to his creditors. Cash poor, used to a feudal rural life and a barter economy, the Crusaders had no understanding of interest and compound interest. They were aware only of the apparently unfair use of it to make money.

And it was on the Jewish rather than the Christian moneylenders that the Christian English knights vented their ire. As a minority the Jews became a scapegoat for the improvidence of small landowners, who had forgotten that if they borrowed money they would have to pay it back. Inevitably, when the day of reckoning came, Crusaders resented having to sell land to pay off their debts.

At Richard I’s coronation banquet the arrival uninvited of the most important members of the Jewish community with splendid gifts seems to have been the spark for the shameful conflagration that swept England. The mass of London’s citizenry–many of whom were smaller merchants in debt to Jewish moneylenders–as well as the smaller barons turned on the Jews. They drove them out of the banqueting hall, severely injuring many of them in the process. The king and his soldiers made an attempt to halt them, but the mob swarmed towards the Jewish quarter, hanging its inhabitants and burning their houses. Afterwards not enough was done by the king to seek out and punish the rioters.

This probably encouraged people up and down the country to turn on Jews in the towns, inventing lies about their customs. During the autumn and winter there were massacres at Norwich, Stamford, Lincoln, Bury St Edmund’s and elsewhere. It was at York, however, that the worst outrage took place, when 500 Jewish men, women and children who took refuge in the city’s castle against a band of armed men were attacked with the aid of the warden’s retainers. Many committed suicide, and those who did not were slaughtered where they stood. Their murderers were motivated not only by ethnic hatred, but more sinisterly by a desire to wipe out the great debts they owed the Jews. Many of them were the men-at-arms of important local families. They had been instructed to go straight to the Minster, where the Jews had deposited the bonds which Crusading families had given them for debt, and burn them all. They did so in a large bonfire in the Minster. At a stroke huge debts were wiped off many of the Crusaders’ estates.

Although the perpetrators of the massacre at York were sternly punished by William Longchamp, the justiciar, the Jewish communities never recovered their former confidence, or indeed their wealth. They remained in England for another hundred years, continuing to be protected as moneylenders by the crown until, in another fit of Christian religious enthusiasm, Richard’s great-nephew Edward I expelled them in 1290.

Though England had been left with excellent regents in William Longchamp and the king’s mother Queen Eleanor, the long absence of Richard in Palestine meant that the good order of the country was soon threatened. The opposition was headed by his brother John and the great barons themselves. They resented the power of the justiciar Longchamp. Like many of those who served the Angevins, Longchamp was a man of natural ability who had not sprung from the baronial classes. In the treacherous and scheming John the barons found a perfect foil for their plans. A struggle against the royal administration involving parts of the country in civil war began shortly after Richard the Lionheart left the country. Despite John’s nickname of Lackland, the king’s brother now ruled much of south-west England. He had been left in charge of it by Richard, who had a low opinion of John’s military abilities and no interest in his compensating cunning.

Richard was careless in most things and, though his legacy to England was a series of useful alliances encircling the Angevin Empire, he generally believed force to be the superior of diplomacy. As the French and English armies travelled east to the Holy Land he chose to ignore a new hostility in his old comrade, the French king Philip Augustus, who resented his new position as head of the Angevin Empire. Far from conciliating him, the English king had not only failed to marry Princess Alice but insulted the French by substituting an alliance with the kingdom of Navarre in northern Spain to protect the empire’s southern tip. At Messina in Sicily, where the French and Angevin imperial troops were gathering on the last leg of their journey to Palestine Richard publicly repudiated Princess Alice and married the beautiful Princess Berengaria of Navarre, yet continued to hold on to the Vexin.

In the Holy Land, Richard’s outstanding qualities as a military tactician aroused the envy of his fellow monarchs. For over two years they had been besieging without success the Latin citadel of Acre, formidable on its promontory. On the plain below its towering yellow battlements stretched the armies of Christendom and row after row of tents. On the heights above them were Saladin’s armies, whose presence was causing the Crusaders’ supply of food to dwindle: the besiegers were besieged.

In contrast to the European heavy armour which gave many Crusaders sunstroke in the intensely hot weather, the Syrians’, or Saracens’, headpieces were not hot metal but turbans in bright colours which protected them from the sun. The Christian west’s military advantage over the Muslim east lay in the crossbow–but it availed them very little on the Third Crusade: Saladin was on home territory, and his men were used to desert conditions. They had supply lines to the interior, better horses (the swift Arab breed then unknown to Europe) and a lighter sword, the curved scimitar, which could find its target more quickly than the unwieldy three-foot-long weapon used by the Crusaders. In contrast to Saladin’s armies, most of the Crusaders were in very poor health. An epidemic had raged through their poorly situated camp with its bad drainage, killing many, including such important figures as the Archbishop of Canterbury and Ranulf Glanvill.