The earl and countess of Leicester were sent over to Normandy by the king’s orders, there to be shut up in company with Hugh of Chester in prison at Falaise.[738] Their capture filled the French king and the rebel princes with dismay, and none of them dared to venture upon any opposition against Henry when at Martinmas he led his Brabantines into Touraine, forced some of its rebellious barons into submission,[739] reinstated his ally Count John of Vendôme in his capital from which he had been expelled by his own son,[740] and returned to keep the Christmas feast at Caen.[741] An attack upon Séez, made at the opening of the new year by the young king and the counts of Blois, Perche and Alençon, was repulsed by the townsfolk,[742] and led only to a truce which lasted till the end of March.[743] The truce made by Richard de Lucy with the king of Scots was prolonged to the same date—the octave of Easter—by the diplomacy of Bishop Hugh of Durham, who took upon himself to purchase this delay, apparently without authority and for his own private ends, by a promise of three hundred marks of silver to be paid to the Scot king out of the lands of the Northumbrian barons.[744]

The issue proved that Hugh’s real object was simply to gain time for the organization of a general rising in the north; and in this object he succeeded. The old isolation of Yorkshire was not yet a thing of the past; and its few lines of communication with southern England were now all blocked, at some point or other, by some stronghold of rebellion. Earl Hugh’s Chester, Hamo de Massey’s Dunham[745] and Geoffrey of Coutances’ Stockport commanded the waters of the Dee and the Mersey. South of the Peak, in the upper valley of the Trent, the earl of Ferrers held Tutbury and Duffield; further to south-east, on the opposite border of Charnwood Forest, lay the earl of Leicester’s capital and his castles of Groby and Mount Sorrel.[746] By the time that the truce expired Roger de Mowbray had renewed the fortifications of Kinardferry in the Isle of Axholm,[747] thus linking this southern chain of castles with those which he already possessed at Kirkby Malzeard, or Malessart, and Thirsk;[748] and Bishop Hugh had done the like at Northallerton.[749] Further north stood the great stronghold of Durham; while all these again were backed, far to the north-westward, by a double belt of fortresses stretching from the mouths of the Forth and the Tweed to that of the Solway:—Lauder, held by Richard de Morville; Stirling, Edinburgh, Berwick, Jedburgh, Roxburgh, Annan and Lochmaben, all in the hands of the king of Scots.[750]

Between this northern belt of rebel strongholds, however, and the southern one which stretched from Chester to Axholm, there lay along the river-valleys of Cumberland and Northumberland a cluster of royal castles. Nicolas de Stuteville held Liddell, on the river of the same name. Burgh[751] stood on the Solway Firth, nearly opposite Annan; the whole valley of the Eden was guarded by Carlisle, whose castellan was Richard de Vaux,[752] and Appleby, which like Burgh was held by Robert de Stuteville for the king.[753] The course of the Tyne was commanded by Wark, under Roger de Stuteville,[754] Prudhoe, under Odelin de Umfraville,[755] and by the great royal fortress of Newcastle, in charge of Roger Fitz-Richard;[756] further north, between the valleys of the Wansbeck and the Coquet, stood Harbottle, also held by Odelin, with Roger Fitz-Richard’s Warkworth[757] and William de Vesci’s Alnwick[758] at the mouths of the Coquet and the Alne. This chain of defences William of Scotland, when at the expiration of the truce he again marched into England, at once set himself to break. While his brother David went to join the rebel garrison of Leicester,[759] he himself began by laying siege to Wark. This fortress, held in the king’s name by Roger de Stuteville—apparently a brother of the sheriff of Yorkshire—occupied a strong position in the upper valley of the Tyne, on the site of an earlier fortress which under the name of Carham had played a considerable part in the Scottish wars of Stephen’s time, and had been finally taken and razed by William’s grandfather King David in 1138.[760] William himself had already in the preceding autumn besieged Wark without success;[761] he prospered no better this time, and presently removed his forces to Carlisle,[762] where he had also sustained a like repulse six months before.[763] Carlisle, as well as Wark, was in truth almost impregnable except by starvation; and William, while blockading it closely, detached a part of his host for a series of expeditions against the lesser fortresses, Liddell, Burgh, Appleby, Harbottle and Warkworth, all of which fell into his hands.[764] His brother’s arrival at Leicester, meanwhile, seemed to have revived the energies of its garrison; under the command of Earl Robert of Ferrers they sallied forth very early one morning, surprised and burned the town of Nottingham, made a great slaughter of its citizens, and went home laden with plunder and prisoners.[765]

Meanwhile the king’s representatives in the south were not idle. Knowing however that he was powerless to rescue the north, Richard de Lucy made an attempt to draw off in another direction the forces both of the Scot king and of his brother by laying siege to David’s castle of Huntingdon.[766] Huntingdon had been held ever since 1136 either by the reigning king of Scots or by one of his nearest kinsmen, in virtue of their descent from Waltheof, the last Old-English earl of Huntingdon and Northampton, through his daughter Matilda, the wife of King David. In each case, however, the fief seems to have been held not as an hereditary possession but by a special grant made to the individual holder for his life. The house of Northampton, sprung from an earlier marriage of the same Matilda, were thus enabled to maintain a claim upon it which had never been entirely barred, and which Earl Simon of Northampton now seized his opportunity to urge upon the king.[767] Henry answered that Simon might keep Huntingdon if he could win it;[768] thus securing for Richard de Lucy his support and co-operation in the siege, which began on May 8.[769] Three days before this, however, a severe blow had been dealt at the northern rebels. The king’s eldest son Geoffrey, who a year before had been appointed to the bishopric of Lincoln, gathered up the forces of Lincolnshire, led them into Axholm and laid siege to Kinardferry. Robert of Mowbray, who was commanding there, seeing his garrison threatened with the want of water, slipped out to seek aid of his friends at Leicester, but was surrounded and made prisoner by the country-folk at Clay.[770] On May 5 Kinardferry surrendered; after razing it, Geoffrey marched northward to York; here he was joined by the forces of the archbishop and of the shire; with this united host he took Mowbray’s castle of Malessart,[771] closely menaced that of Thirsk by erecting a rival fortification at Topcliff, and having intrusted the former to Archbishop Roger and the latter to William de Stuteville, marched back to Lincoln in triumph.[772] His victory was scarcely won when a new peril arose in East-Anglia. Three days after Pentecost some three hundred Flemish soldiers, forerunners of a great host with which Count Philip of Flanders had sworn to invade England at Midsummer on behalf of the young king, landed at the mouth of the Orwell.[773] Hugh Bigod, whose truce with the king’s officers, made when he dismissed his other Flemish troops in the preceding autumn, expired four days later, at once received them into his castles.[774] For a whole month, however, no further movement was made save by the garrison of Leicester, who after the close of Whitsun-week made a successful plundering raid upon the town of Northampton.[775] On June 18 Hugh Bigod and his Flemings marched upon Norwich, took it by assault, committed a vast slaughter of men and women, and finally sacked and fired the city.[776] They seem to have returned to Framlingham by way of Dunwich, which was still a flourishing seaport, of sufficient wealth to tempt their greed; but its stout fisher-folk met them with such a determined front that they were compelled to retire.[777]

Richard de Lucy was all this while busy with the siege of Huntingdon. Provoked apparently by a vigorous assault which he made upon it at midsummer,[778] the garrison set fire to the town; Richard then built a tower to block their egress from the castle, and left the completion of the siege to the earl of Northampton.[779] For himself it was time once more to lay down the knightly sword and resume that of justice. While the justiciar’s energies were absorbed in warfare with the barons, the burgher-nobles of the capital had caught from their feudal brethren the spirit of lawlessness and misrule, and London had become a vast den of thieves and murderers. Young men, sons and kinsmen of the noblest citizens, habitually went forth by night in parties of a hundred or more, broke into rich men’s houses and robbed them by force, and if they met any man walking in the streets alone, slew him at once. Peaceable citizens were driven in self-defence to meet violence with violence. One man, expecting an attack, gathered his armed servants around him in a concealed corner, surprised his assailants in the act of breaking into his house with crowbars, struck off with a blow of his sword the right hand of their leader Andrew Bucquinte, and raised an alarm which put the rest to flight. Bucquinte was captured and delivered next morning to the justiciar; on a promise of safety for life and limb he gave up the names of his accomplices; some fled, some were caught, and among the latter was one of the noblest and richest citizens of London, John Oldman,[780] who vainly offered five hundred marks of silver to the Crown to purchase his escape from the gallows.[781] The revelation of such a state of things in the capital apparently drove Richard de Lucy and his colleagues almost to desperation. They had already sent messenger after messenger to intreat that the king would return; getting however no certain answer, they now determined that one of their number should go to Normandy in person to lay before him an authentic account of the desperate condition of his realm.[782]