John Lackland

by Kate Norgate

Six weeks later the king of Scots made his submission. Summoned to meet his overlord at Lincoln on November 21, William the Lion this time did not venture to disobey the summons; both kings reached Lincoln on the appointed day. Next morning John, in defiance of an old tradition which forbade a king to appear in regal state within the walls of Lincoln, went to the minster and offered a golden chalice at the altar of S. John the Baptist. Thence he proceeded to his colloquy with William “on the top of the steep hill” outside the city. There, amid a group of prelates and barons, and “in the sight of all the people,” William performed his homage, and swore on Archbishop Hubert’s cross that he would be faithful to John against all men, “saving his own right.” Then, and not till then, did he venture again to demand, “as his right and heritage,” the disputed counties. A long discussion ended in an adjournment of the question till the next Whitsuntide; which of course meant that it was to be put off indefinitely. On the morrow (November 23) the king of Scots set out on his homeward journey, while the king of England helped with his own hands to carry to its last resting-place in Lincoln minster the body of the only man among his father’s old friends for whom he seems to have felt a real liking, though he turned a deaf ear to his counsels—S. Hugh, who had died in London a week before.[332] Soon after Christmas John was at Lincoln again, quarrelling with the canons about the election of Hugh’s successor.[333] He and his young queen afterwards made a progress through the north, almost up to the Scottish border,[334] and back through Cumberland to York, which they reached at Mid-Lent (March 1, 1201). At Easter (March 25) they “wore their crowns” at Canterbury.[335]

1201

Meanwhile, open hostilities had begun between John and the Lusignans; and so far as can be made out from the scanty evidence available, it seems to have been John who began them. A French historian of the time asserts that the castle of Driencourt in Normandy, which belonged to Ralf of Lusignan as count of Eu in right of his wife, was seized by John’s orders while Ralf was in John’s service in England.[336] It is certain that John, on March 6, 1201, issued letters patent to Hugh of Bailleul and Thomas of St. Valery authorizing them to attack Ralf’s territories at the close of Easter and “do him all the harm they could,” and promising that they should never be compelled to make good any damage which they might inflict upon him; while on the same day one William “de Kaev” was despatched on a mission to the inhabitants of Driencourt and of the whole county of Eu to make arrangements for mutual security between them and the king, without reference to their count.[337] Two days later John summoned all his faithful barons, knights, clerks, burghers, and other tenants of the county of La Marche “to come to his service, and do to him what they had been wont to do to his predecessors.”[338] In other words, he claimed the direct ownership of the county, to which his father had indeed been entitled by purchase from the late Count Adelbert and by the homage of its tenants, but of which Henry had never been able and Richard had never even tried to take possession, and which Hugh of Lusignan had now held for more than twenty years. If their oath of liege homage to John had hitherto restrained Hugh and Ralf from giving vent to their anger at John’s marriage, it restrained them no longer now. They at once laid a complaint against John, for unjust aggression and spoliation, before the king of France as lord paramount of Aquitaine.[339] Ralf formally renounced his allegiance to John,[340] and Hugh, with all the forces that he could muster, invaded Poitou, where, as usual, he found plenty of allies ready to join him.[341] The most important of the Poitevin barons, indeed, Almeric of Thouars, was won over to John’s side by the diplomacy of Eleanor; but the danger appeared so great that both Eleanor and Almeric besought John to come over and deal with it in person as soon as he possibly could; and at the end of April the count of Angoulême and John’s other friends in the south proposed sending Almeric to confer with John in England.[342]

John meanwhile was summoning the earls and barons of England to meet him at Portsmouth at Whitsuntide (May 13), ready with horses and arms to accompany him over sea. The earls held a meeting at Leicester, and thence unanimously sent him word that they would not go with him “unless he gave them back their rights. For the king, following ill counsel, was demanding their castles of them; and beginning with William of Aubigny, he demanded of him the castle of Belvoir. William satisfied him by giving him his son as a hostage, and thus kept his castle.”[343] Notwithstanding their protest, the barons brought their forces to Portsmouth on the appointed day, equipped for a campaign, and each man provided with the money needful to cover his expenses during the usual term of service in a feudal host. This, and nothing more, was precisely what John wanted them to do: “He took from some of them the money which they would have spent in his service, and let them return home.”[344] The ready money which he thus obtained was a more useful and safer weapon for his purpose than the host itself would have been, and no pretext was left for the discussion of inconvenient questions. The king immediately despatched William the Marshal and Roger de Lacy, each at the head of a hundred mercenaries, “to check the assaults of his enemies on the borders of Normandy.” At the same time he appointed his chamberlain, Hubert de Burgh, warden of the Welsh marches, with another hundred soldiers under his command, and sent the bishop of Chester to William the Lion with a request that the term fixed for answering his demands might be extended to Michaelmas.[345] Having taken these precautions to secure England from attack, John again crossed the sea; on June 2 he was at Bonneville.[346]

At the announcement of John’s intention to return, Philip had either compelled or persuaded the Lusignans to suspend hostilities in Poitou.[347] A period of negotiation followed; Philip remonstrating with John about his conduct towards the Lusignans, and urging him to make them restitution; John, in his turn, remonstrating with Philip for his constant aggressions and his interference with the internal affairs of John’s duchies. Several personal interviews seem to have taken place between the kings;[348] before the end of June the treaty of Ascension-tide 1200 was confirmed; and on the last day of that month John, by Philip’s invitation, went to Paris, and was there lodged and entertained for several days in the royal palace, which Philip vacated for his convenience.[349]

This temporary pacification was effected by a promise on John’s part that the quarrel between him and the Lusignans should be tried and settled fairly in his court as duke of Aquitaine.[350] Towards the end of July he went to Chinon; there he spent the greater part of the next six weeks,[351] and it was probably there that he summoned the Lusignans to the promised trial. But meanwhile the Lusignans had discovered that the trial which he designed was something wholly different from that which Philip had demanded on their behalf. John, before he left England, had determined to appeal “the barons of Poitou”—that is, no doubt, the Lusignans and their friends—on a general charge of treason against his late brother and himself, and challenge them to ordeal of battle with a number of champions specially chosen for the purpose. This project was perfectly legal; the ordeal of battle, though it was beginning to be discountenanced by public opinion under the influence of the Church, was still recognized as a lawful method of deciding upon a charge of treason. But a simultaneous challenge to so large a number of men, and men, too, of such high rank and personal distinction as the Lusignans and their allies, was a startling innovation upon feudal tradition and practice, and unwarranted by historical precedent. Moreover, there was in the scheme another feature which would make it doubly offensive to the barons concerned. The champions against whom they were called upon to prove their loyalty are described as “picked men, practised in the art of duelling, whom the king had hired and brought with him from his dominions on both sides of the sea.”[352] That is, they were professional champions—men who made a business of hiring themselves out to fight the battles of any one who either could not or would not fight in his own person, but who could afford to pay for an efficient substitute. Such hired champions, of course, in every case represented the person who hired them; in the present case they would have represented the king; yet nobles like the Lusignans, two of whose brothers had been, no less than John himself, crowned and anointed sovereigns, could not but feel it an intolerable insult to be challenged, even in a king’s name, by creatures such as these. The accused barons all alike refused to come to John’s court, “saying that they would answer to no one save to their peers.”[353] It seems that on a fresh remonstrance from Philip, John again consented, or pretended to consent, to a trial such as they demanded; but he was very unwilling to fix a day; and when he did fix one, he refused to give the defendants a safe conduct, without which, of course, they would not stir from their homes.[354]

1201–1202

Again Philip intervened, and again John promised redress. This time apparently Philip deemed it advisable to require security for the fulfilment of the promise. The security which he asked for, however, was more than John could reasonably be expected to give; it seems to have been nothing less than three of the most important castles in Normandy—those of Falaise, Arques, and “Andely,” that is, Château-Gaillard. In December John summoned Archbishop Hubert over from England, and sent him to “make his excuses” to the French king;[355] and Hubert so far succeeded that after Christmas John was able to venture into Aquitaine. Early in February 1202 he met the king of Navarre at Angoulême, and made with him a treaty of close offensive and defensive alliance.[356]

It was arranged that John and Philip should hold a conference—seemingly on March 25—at Boutavant. John, it appears, kept, or at least was ready to keep, the appointment; but Philip either was or pretended to be afraid of venturing into Norman territory, and would not advance beyond Gouleton. Thither John came across the river to meet him.[357] No agreement was arrived at. Finally, Philip cited John to appear in Paris fifteen days after Easter,[358] at the court of his overlord the king of France, to stand to its judgement, to answer to his lord for his misdoings, and undergo the sentence of his peers. The citation was addressed to John as count of Anjou and Poitou and duke of Aquitaine;[359] the Norman duchy was not mentioned in it. This omission was clearly intentional; when John answered the citation by reminding Philip that he was duke of Normandy, and as such, in virtue of ancient agreement between the kings and the dukes, not bound to go to any meeting with the king of France save on the borders of their respective territories, Philip retorted that he had summoned not the duke of Normandy but the duke of Aquitaine, and that his rights over the latter were not to be annulled by the accidental union of the two dignities in one person.[360] John then promised that he would appear before the court in Paris on the appointed day, and give up to Philip two small castles, Thillier and Boutavant, as security for his submitting to its decision. April 28 passed, and both these promises remained unfulfilled.[361] One English writer asserts that thereupon “the assembled court of the king of France adjudged the king of England to be deprived of all his land which he and his forefathers had hitherto held of the king of France”;[362] but there is reason to think that this statement is erroneous, and derived from a false report put forth by Philip Augustus for political purposes two or three years later.[363] It is certain that after the date of this alleged sentence, negotiations still went on; “great and excellent mediators” endeavoured to arrange a pacification;[364] and Philip himself, according to his own account, had another interview with John, at which he used all his powers of persuasion to bring him to submission, but in vain. Then the French king, by the advice of his barons, formally “defied” his rebellious vassal;[365] in a sudden burst of wrath he ordered the archbishop of Canterbury—evidently one of the mediators just referred to—out of his territories, and dashing after him with such forces as he had at hand, began hostilities by a raid upon Boutavant, which he captured and burned.[366] Even after this, if we may trust his own report, he sent four knights to John to make a final attempt at reconciliation; but John would not see them.[367]

The war which followed was characteristic of both kings alike. Philip’s attack took the form not of a regular invasion, but of a series of raids upon eastern Normandy, whereby in the course of the next three months[368] he made himself master of Thillier, Lions, Longchamp, La Ferté-en-Braye, Orgueil, Gournay, Mortemer, Aumale and the town and county of Eu.[369] John was throughout the same period flitting ceaselessly about within a short distance of all these places;[370] but Philip never came up with him, and he never but once came up with Philip. On July 7 the French king laid siege to Radepont, some ten miles to the south-east of Rouen. John, who was at Bonport, let him alone for a week, and then suddenly appeared before the place, whereupon Philip immediately withdrew.[371] John, however, made no attempt at pursuit. According to his wont, he let matters take their course till he saw a favourable opportunity for retaliation. At the end of the month the opportunity came.