John Lackland

by Kate Norgate

1206

On December 6 the king obtained from both bishops and monks a withdrawal of their respective appeals.[508] On December 11 John de Grey was enthroned at Canterbury in the king’s presence, and invested by him with the temporalities of the See; and on the 18th the king despatched a messenger to ask for the papal confirmation of the new primate’s appointment.[509] The Pope, however, at the end of March 1206, decided that the election of John de Grey was uncanonical; on the validity of Reginald’s election he suspended his judgement, ordering the Canterbury chapter to send sixteen of their number to him by October 1, with full powers to act on behalf of all, and if necessary to hold a new election in his court. The suffragans of the province were desired to send proctors, and the king was invited to do the like.[510] The king sent three proctors;[511] the bishops seem to have contented themselves with writing a joint letter, of whose contents we know nothing, except that they had the royal approval.[512] Of the sixteen monks who went as representatives of the chapter, twelve, before they sailed, secretly exchanged a promise with the king. He pledged himself to ratify whatever they should do at Rome; they pledged themselves to do nothing there except re-elect John de Grey.[513] The assembly at Rome, originally appointed for October 1, was postponed till the last week of Advent (December 17 to 24). Then, in full consistory, the Pope, after examination, set aside the claim of the bishops to a voice in the election, and declared the monks to be the sole rightful electors; but he also set aside, as informal and void, their election of their sub-prior, Reginald; and he bade them elect, then and there, “whomsoever they would, so he were but an earnest and capable man, and above all, an Englishman.” All eyes must have turned instinctively upon the English-born Cardinal-priest of S. Chrysogonus, the most illustrious teacher of theology in his day, “than whom there was no man greater in the Roman court, nor was there any equal to him in character and learning”—Stephen Langton. Innocent was but speaking the thought of the whole assembly when he added that the monks could not do better than choose Stephen. The unlucky twelve were as willing to do so as the other four, but felt tied by their compact with the king. After some shuffling, they confessed their difficulty to the Pope. He scornfully absolved them from their shameful promise, and the sixteen monks unanimously elected Stephen Langton. The king’s proctors, however, refused to ratify the election in John’s name; so Innocent at once wrote to request a formal ratification of it from John himself.[514]

These things were done in the week following John’s return from La Rochelle to England, which took place on December 12.[515] His recent experiences had shown him that the recovery of his lost territories was by no means impossible, but that it could not, under existing political and social conditions, be achieved by means of the only forces which the military organization of his own realm could supply. Those forces must be supplemented, if not superseded, in any attempt at the reconquest of the Norman and Angevin dominions, by the employment of mercenaries on a large scale, and by an elaborate system of diplomacy, the gradual knitting together of a complicated scheme of foreign alliances. For both these purposes the first need was money; and the difficulties with which the king had to contend in his efforts to raise money were as much greater in John’s case than in that of any of his predecessors, as his need was greater than theirs had ever been.

1194–1207

The financial difficulties of the Crown had been accumulating ever since Richard’s captivity. At John’s accession the arrears of taxes were enormous. At Michaelmas 1201 arrears of all the three “scutages of Normandy” imposed under Richard—in 1194, 1195 and 1196—were due from almost every shire; hidage “for the king’s ransom” was still owing from Dorset and Somerset, and there were many arrears even of the “scutage of Wales,” which dated from 1190.[516] Some of these debts ran on as late as 1207, and some much later still. The king’s claim to these unpaid taxes, as well as to all other debts owed to his predecessor, was, of course, never withdrawn. A grotesque instance of the way in which the principle of inheritance might sometimes work in such matters occurs in the treasury roll of 1201, where two men in Devon are set down as owing a fine “because they had been with Count John”[517]—that is, because they had supported, in his rebellion against Richard in 1193, the very man for whom, as king, the fine was now claimed. The Crown had, however, no direct means of enforcing payment of either fines or taxes, at any rate in the case of the barons. Its one remedy was to seize the lands or castles of an obstinate and wilful defaulter; and this remedy was fraught with danger to the crown itself. Neither law nor custom defined the circumstances or fixed the limits of time within which a defaulter was not, and beyond which he was, liable to be treated as obstinate and wilful; in every case where the king exercised his right of seizure on this ground, therefore, the defaulter and his friends could always find a plea for denouncing its exercise as arbitrary and unjust. It seems probable that at the close of Richard’s reign his ministers may have thus seized the castles or lands of certain barons in pledge for the arrears of their dues to the crown, and that this may have been one of the grievances referred to in the demand of the barons that Richard’s successor “should restore to each of them his rights.” John’s demand for the castles of some of the barons in 1201 was in all likelihood a proceeding of the same kind, based on the same ground, and, as it seems, equally ineffectual in compelling payment; all that the king obtained was the surrender not indeed of the castles, but of some of the barons’ sons as hostages. The deadlock was probably inevitable; but every year of its continuance aggravated both the financial difficulties of the government, and the unfriendliness of the relations between the barons and the king; and this latter evil was yet further aggravated by the measures which had necessarily to be taken in order to meet the former one. Plunged as he was from the very moment of his accession in a costly struggle with France, John had been forced to lay continually fresh burdens upon that very class among his subjects who already were, or considered themselves to be, overburdened by the demands of his predecessor. The “first scutage of King John” seems to have been assessed immediately after his coronation; it appears in the Pipe Roll made up at Michaelmas 1199. In the financial year ending at Michaelmas 1201, and in every one of the five following years, there was another new scutage;[518] and these scutages were independent of the fines paid by the barons who did not accompany the king on his first return to Normandy in 1199, of the money taken from the host as a substitute for its service in 1201, of the equipment and payment of the “decimated” knights in 1205, and the fines claimed from all the tenants-in-chivalry after the dismissal of the host in the same year, as well as of the actual services which many of those who had paid the scutage rendered in the campaigns of 1202–1204 and 1206.

The other taxes levied during these years were a carucage in 1200[519]and a seventh of moveables in 1204.[520] But all the while arrears went on accumulating, and year after year a budget had to be made up by devices of the most miscellaneous character. The accession of a new king could, of course, easily be made a pretext for selling confirmations of existing rights and privileges, and John availed himself of this pretext to the uttermost of his power at the earliest opportunity—that is, on his visit to England in 1201. During that time nobody in England seems to have felt secure of anything that he possessed till he had bought it of the king. Individuals of various ranks bought the sovereign’s “peace” or his “goodwill”;[521] the cities of Winchester and Southampton and the county of Hants each gave him money “that they might be lovingly treated”;[522] Wiltshire gave him twenty pounds “that it might be well treated.”[523] The citizens of York offended him by omitting to welcome him with a procession when he visited their city, and to provide quarters for his cross-bowmen; he demanded hostages for their future good behaviour, but afterwards changed his demand to a fine of a hundred pounds.[524] The sale of offices went on as of old;[525] while the sale of charters to towns, which under Richard was already becoming a remarkable item in the royal accounts, was a transaction of yet greater frequency and importance under his successor.[526] On the other hand, John’s treasury rolls contain many notices of persons who owe the king money “which he has lent them.” These loans from the king to his barons and other subjects were probably made chiefly in the hope of securing the fidelity of the borrowers. In one way or another the speculation must have been in most cases a paying one for John. The privilege of claiming interest in hard cash for a loan was indeed reserved exclusively for the Jews, and not shared even by the king; but he could take from his debtors ample security on their lands or castles, or by means of hostages who were usually their sons or other young members of their families, and whom it was of the greater importance for him to hold in his power as his relations with the barons grew more strained year by year.

1207

In 1206 the tension had reached such a point that John did not venture to impose a scutage of the full amount—two marks on the knight’s fee—which had been usual since his father’s time, but contented himself with twenty shillings.[527] In 1207 he evidently dared not attempt to levy any fresh scutage at all. Nor was a carucage likely to prove either less unpopular or more productive; for the agricultural interest of the country was in a state of extreme depression, owing to a long succession of bad seasons; while the taxation of moveables was an expedient which seems to have found, as yet, but little favour with either the people or the government. John now put forth a suggestion which was, so far as we can see, a novelty in English finance. He “held a council in London on January 8, and there requested the bishops and abbots that they would allow parsons and others holding ecclesiastical benefices to give to the king a fixed sum from their revenues.”[528] Neither in equity nor in policy was the idea a bad one. While the military tenants and the socage tenants had each their own peculiar burden—scutage in the one case, carucage in the other—the beneficed clergy, as such, had never yet been subjected to taxation. The king might well argue that it was time for them to take their turn in making a special contribution to the financial needs of the State; and the argument was sure to meet with the approval of the laity. The prelates, however, were unwilling; and the question was adjourned to another council, in which “an infinite multitude” of ecclesiastical and temporal magnates came together at Oxford on February 9.

At this second meeting the bishops of both provinces gave it as their final answer that “the English Church could by no means submit to a demand which had never been heard of in all previous ages.”[529] The only approach to a precedent for it, indeed, had occurred in 1194, when Archbishop Geoffrey of York, eager to collect money for Richard’s ransom, had asked the canons of his cathedral chapter to give for that purpose a fourth part of their revenues for the year, with the result that they accused him of “wanting to overthrow the liberties of their church,” and shut its doors in his face.[530] Between the council in London and that at Oxford, Geoffrey and John, who had been more or less at variance ever since the latter’s accession, were formally reconciled;[531] John therefore probably counted upon Geoffrey’s support of his scheme, and he may have hoped that the suffragans of Canterbury, having no metropolitan of their own to lead them, would not venture to stand out against the northern primate and the king with the barons, for once, at his back. But what Geoffrey had himself asked of his own chapter as a special favour to Richard in a wholly exceptional emergency, he had no mind to give leave for John to claim from all the beneficed clergy of his province as a matter of right, and under entirely different circumstances. The king was prudent enough not to press his demand; but it may be doubted whether the lay barons agreed with the Waverley annalist in deeming its withdrawal a proof that he “had taken wiser counsel,” since he substituted for it a demand for a thirteenth of the moveable goods of every layman throughout the realm.[532] This they had no excuse for refusing. “All murmured, but no man dared contradict,”[533] except Geoffrey of York. He, it seems, claimed exemption for laymen holding lands of the Church, or at least of his cathedral church. His protest, however, was disregarded; whereupon he excommunicated all spoilers of the Church in general, and of the province of York in particular, and then withdrew over sea,[534] to spend the rest of his life in exile.