When Richard I., on his accession, picked out Hubert Walter, Bishop of Salisbury, to be Archbishop of Canterbury, he chose a prelate whom he could rely upon as his representative. Hubert had been a crusader; he was the nephew of Ralph Glanville—who sold the justiciarship to William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely, for £3,000, and followed Richard to Palestine, dying of the plague at Acre in 1191—and though a man of little learning he was a capital lawyer, a strong administrator and expert at raising money for the king.[21] Hubert was no champion of the poor as St. Thomas had been, no preacher of righteousness like St. Anselm, no stickler for the rights of the Church or the liberties of the people; he was “the king’s man,” and “forasmuch as he was neither gifted with a knowledge of letters nor endued with the grace of lively religion, so in his days the Church of England was stifled under the yoke of bondage.” (Geraldus Cambrensis.)
Richard Cœur de Lion, occupied with the crusades, had no mind for the personal government of England. He depended on his ministers for money to pay for his military expeditions to Palestine. England was to him nothing more than a subject province to be bled by taxation. Both William Longchamp and Hubert Walter—to whom Richard committed the realm when he left England for good in 1194—did all that could be done to meet the king’s demands. Government offices, earldoms and bishoprics were sold to the highest bidder.[22] Judges bought their seats on the bench and cities bought their charters. Crown lands already granted to tenants were again taken up by the king’s authority, and the occupier compelled to pay for readmission to his holding. Tournaments were revived, because everyone taking part was obliged to take a royal license. Even the great seal was broken by the justiciar’s authority, and all documents signed by it had to be reissued, with the payment of the usual fees (or stamp duties) for new contracts. “By these and similar inquisitions England was reduced to poverty from one sea to the other,” for more than £1,000,000 was sent to Richard by Hubert in the first two years of his justiciarship.
The only protest against the general distress came from London, and not from the aldermen or burghers, but from the voteless labouring people upon whom the whole burden of raising the city’s taxes had been thrown. Against this monstrous injustice William Longbeard FitzOsbert stood out as the spokesman of the poor of London, and died a martyr for their cause.
London’s political importance had been seen in the struggles against King Cnut and William the Conqueror. Its remarkable influence in national politics (an influence that endured to the middle of the nineteenth century) was manifest when London acclaimed Stephen as King of England in 1135. At the close of the twelfth century, London, with the civic charter it had just obtained from Richard, with its thirteen convent churches and more than a hundred parish churches within its boundaries, with its great cattle market at Smithfield and its growing riverside trade, was already prosperous and overcrowded. “The city was blessed with the healthiness of the air and the nature of its site, in the Christian religion, in the strength of its towers, the honour of its citizens and the purity of its women; it was happy in its sports and fruitful of high spirited men.” It had its darker side, but at that time “the only plagues were the intemperate drinking of foolish people and the frequent fires.”
Richard’s charter left to the citizens the business of assessing their own taxes, and in 1196 there was trouble over this matter; for in that year the city fathers decided that the large sums required by Archbishop Hubert for the king’s needs should be paid in full by the poorer craftsmen and labourers, who had no say in the matter.[23]
“And when the aldermen assembled according to usage in full hustings for the purpose of assessing the taxes, the rulers endeavoured to spare their own purses and to levy the whole from the poor.” (Roger of Hoveden.)
Whereupon up rose William Longbeard, the son of Osbert, and made his memorable protest against these rascally proceedings, to go down to history as the first popular agitator in England.
An exceptional man was this Longbeard, a man of commanding stature and great strength, ready witted, something of an orator and a lawyer, who “burning with zeal for righteousness and fair play made himself the champion of the poor,” holding that every man, rich or poor, should pay his share of the city’s burdens according to his means.
Longbeard was not of the labouring people himself. He was a member of the city council, though by no means a rich man. He had distinguished himself as a crusader in 1190, making the journey to Portugal against the Moors; and a vision of St. Thomas Becket had appeared to him and his fellow Londoners when their ship was beset by storms off the coast of Spain.
Longbeard was known to the king, and he was already hateful to the ruling class because he had declared that Richard was being defrauded by financial corruption of the money raised for the crown. He had also accused his brother of treason in 1194, but the case was not proved.