Richard the Lion Heart

by Kate Norgate

For three weeks longer Richard stayed in Normandy, winning all hearts by his gracious and affable demeanour.[374] Aug. 12 On August 12 he went to England.[375] Landing at Southampton or Portsmouth,[376] he was received two or three days later with a solemn procession at Winchester by his mother and the chief nobles and prelates of the land.[377] As the archbishop of Canterbury had previously returned from Normandy,[378] the coronation might have taken place immediately, had the new king desired it. But, unlike every other king of England since the Norman conquest, Richard was in no haste to be crowned. There was no need for haste; he had no rival; he had, in England, no enemies; and he had made for himself a host of friends by a proclamation which during the last five weeks “honourable men” sent out by Eleanor according to instructions from him had been publishing and carrying into effect in every county. All persons under arrest for offences against Forest Law were to be discharged; those who were outlawed for a like cause were permitted to return in peace. Other persons imprisoned “by the will of the king or his justiciar,” not “by the common law of their county or hundred, or on appeal,” were also to be discharged. Persons outlawed “by common law without appeal by the justices” were to be re-admitted to peace provided they could find sureties that they would come up for trial if required; prisoners detained on appeal for any shameful cause were to be released on the same terms. All persons detained “on appeal by those who acknowledged themselves to be malefactors” were to be set free unconditionally. Malefactors to whom “life and limbs” had been granted as approvers were to abjure and 1189 depart from the king’s land; those who without the concession of life and limbs had of their own free will accused others were to be kept in custody till further counsel should be taken. The ordinance concluded by requiring every free man of the realm to swear fealty and liege homage to the new lord of England, “and that they will submit to his jurisdiction and lend him their aid for the maintenance of his peace and justice in all things.”[379] We cannot ascertain how far Richard was justified in the insinuation conveyed in this ordinance, that the administration of criminal law in Henry’s latter days had been marked not only by undue severity, but also by arbitrary interference on the part of the Crown or its officers with the rights and liberties of Englishmen. The most philosophic historian of the time, William of Newburgh, evidently thought that however Henry might have erred on the side of rigour, Richard at the outset of his reign erred no less in the opposite direction. “At that time,” says William, “the gaols were crowded with criminals awaiting trial or punishment, but through Richard’s clemency these pests came forth from prison, perhaps to become bolder thieves in the future.”[380] But the people in general were delighted to welcome a ruler who seemed to them bent upon outdoing all that was good and undoing all that they considered evil in the government of his predecessor.[381]

From Winchester Richard was moving on by leisurely stages towards London when a report of a Welsh raid made him suddenly turn towards the border, with the intention of punishing the raiders; but Eleanor, who perhaps better understood the danger of plunging unnecessarily and unwarily into a Welsh war, called him Sept. 1, 2 back, and as usual he obeyed her.[382] On September 1 or 2 he was welcomed with a great procession in London;[383] on 1189 the 3rd he was crowned at Westminster.[384] Three contemporary writers, one of whom actually assisted in the most Sept. 3 sacred detail of the ceremony,[385] tell us how at its outset Duke Richard was “solemnly and duly” elected by clergy and people; how he took the threefold oath, to maintain the peace of the Church, to suppress injustice, and to promote equity and mercy.[386] After receiving the threefold anointing and being clothed with the symbolical vestments of the kingly office, he was adjured by the Primate not to assume it unless he were fully minded to keep his vow; he answered that by God’s help he did intend so to do. He then took the crown from the altar and handed it to the archbishop, and the archbishop set it on his head.[387] Richard’s coronation is in one way the most memorable in all English history, for it is the occasion on which the form and manner of crowning a king of England were, in every essential point and in most of the lesser particulars, fixed for all after-time.

The court festivities lasted three days,[388] and the manner in which they were conducted presented a marked contrast to the rough, careless, unceremonious ways of the court of Henry II. The banquet each day was as stately and decorous as it was lavish and splendid. Clergy and laity were seated apart, and the former had the place of honour, being at the king’s own table.[389] Richard had further emphasized the solemnity of the occasion by a proclamation ordering that no Jew and no woman should be admitted to the palace. Notwithstanding this, certain Jews did present themselves at the doors on the evening of the coronation-day with gifts for the king. The courtiers of lower rank and the people who crowded round robbed 1189 them, beat them, and drove them away; some were mortally injured, some slain on the spot.[390] The tumult reached the ears of the king in the banqueting-hall, and he sent the justiciar and some of the nobles to suppress it; but it was already beyond their control.[391] A great wave of anti-Jewish feeling swept through the city; before morning most of the Jews’ houses were sacked; and the number of persons concerned in the riot was so large and public feeling so strongly on their side that although some of them were arrested by Richard’s orders and brought before him, he found it impossible to do justice in the matter,[392] and only ventured to send three men to the gallows—one who in the confusion had robbed a Christian, and two who had kindled a fire which burned down a Christian’s house.[393] For the rest he had to “condone what he could not avenge.”[394] He tried, however, to prevent further disturbances of the same kind by sending into every shire letters commanding that the Jews should be left in peace and no one should do them wrong;[395] and so long as he remained in England these orders were obeyed.

The new king had now to make provision for his Crusade, and for the carrying on of the government of England after his departure. There was no reason to anticipate any difficulty in the latter half of his task; but the other half of it presented a very serious cause for anxiety—the want of money. The Angevin treasury was empty;[396] the ducal revenues of Normandy and Aquitaine were not large enough, at the best of times, to furnish more than a very insignificant surplus for purposes external to the two duchies. Richard’s first act on reaching Winchester had been to cause an exact account to be taken of the contents of the royal 1189 treasury.[397] We have no trustworthy statement of the result;[398] but it evidently proved quite inadequate to supply his needs. The twenty-four thousand marks due to Philip, the cost of equipping and maintaining his own followers and of fitting out a transport fleet, were only a part of those needs; there was another part which from Richard’s point of view was incalculable and almost unlimited. A great effort for the deliverance of Holy Land had been in contemplation throughout western Europe for nearly five years; the form in which it had been originally projected was that of an expedition to be led by the Angevin king of England as head of the elder branch of the royal house of Jerusalem, and composed chiefly of his subjects, although since then circumstances had so altered and the scheme had so widened out and developed that he was now only one of several monarchs who were to lead their respective contingents as portions of one great army. From 1184 onwards crowds of Englishmen of all ranks had taken the Cross; most of them—very likely including the English-born count of Poitou—without counting the cost, in any sense of that word. Theoretically, the undertaking being not a national but a personal and voluntary one, each Crusader was responsible for his own equipment and expenses and those of his tenants or other followers. The king, however, seems to have at once recognized that if the English (or Angevin) contingent was to take such a share in the Holy War as befitted its leader’s rank among the sovereigns and his kingdom’s rank among the powers of Christendom, he must carry with him a large reserve fund for the maintenance of the whole force under his command in a state of efficiency on a service of which no one could forecast the requirements, the difficulties, or the 1189 duration. As we read the after-story, indeed, we are almost led to credit him with a presentiment that his war-chest was destined to become the war-chest of the whole crusading host. At any rate, his most pressing anxiety was to fill the chest, and—since he expected to leave Europe in the spring—to fill it as quickly as possible. He might impose a special tax, or more than one; a tallage, or “donum,” or both at once. But these would take many months to collect, and would bring in, probably, scarcely enough to be worth collecting, from his point of view; while his subjects, who were, or considered themselves, already hard pressed by the financial administration of Henry, would have felt or at least resented such taxes as an additional and oppressive burden. Richard adopted quicker and easier methods.

Among the crowds who had taken the Cross in a moment of enthusiasm there were many whose zeal had cooled during the months or years of waiting, and who would now gladly be relieved of the obligation to fulfil their vow. There was also among them a much larger number of officers of the English court and government, and of other men belonging to the classes from which such officers were usually taken, than could well be spared from the work of administration at home. Accordingly, Richard had asked and obtained from Pope Clement letters patent granting release from their vow to all persons whom the king should appoint to take part in the safe-keeping of the realm during his absence.[399] Naturally such release was conditional on compensation being made to the crusading cause by all who were thus transferred from the service of the Cross to that of the Crown, since they had taken the former upon themselves and the latter was not compulsory; and this compensation necessarily took the form of the payment to the king of a sum which could only be fixed in each case by a bargain between him and the payer. From this it was not a difficult step for the king to make similar bargains with men who had not taken the Cross, but were suitable for and ambitious of office in England, and able 1189 to pay for it. Neither the sale of public offices nor the yet more general practice of requiring payment for royal grants of land, privileges, and benefits of any kind—including confirmations by a new king of grants made by his predecessors—was condemned, in principle at least, by the ordinary code of political morality in Richard’s day. He might fairly argue that men who desired any of these things, and had means to pay for them, ought to be made to contribute as largely as possible to the Treasury for the furtherance of the Crusade; and he accordingly set himself to drain, as it seemed, to the uttermost all these sources of revenue. “He deposed from their bailiwicks nearly all the sheriffs and their deputies, and held them to ransom to the uttermost farthing. Those who could not pay were imprisoned.”[400] He “induced many persons to vie with each other in spending money to purchase dignities or public offices, or even royal manors.”[401] “All who were overburdened with money the king promptly relieved of it, giving them powers and possessions at their choice.”[402] “Whosoever would, bought of the king his own rights as well as those of other men.” “All things were for sale with him—powers, lordships, earldoms, sheriffdoms, castles, towns, manors, and suchlike”;[403] or as Roger of Howden sums it all up, “the king put up to sale everything that he had.”[404]

The part of these proceedings which chiefly perturbed Richard’s counsellors, it seems, was his reckless alienation of Crown demesne; in his passionate eagerness to pile up treasure for the Crusade he was, they considered, stripping himself of his proper means of living as a king should live at home; it was as if he did not intend, or did not expect, ever to come home again at all; and when some of them ventured on a remonstrance he answered, “I would sell London if I could find a buyer for it.”[405] He was in fact in a mood to, almost literally, sell all that he had and give it to the Crusade. The means which he employed to raise 1189 money undoubtedly served their purpose; and they seem to have neither provoked any general discontent nor inflicted any hardship on the people, or even upon more than a very few individuals. The chronicler who speaks of a wholesale “deposition” and “ransoming” of the sheriffs has considerably exaggerated the king’s treatment of those officers. In the first place, all sheriffs were always liable to be “deposed” at any moment, since they were always appointed to hold their office “during the king’s pleasure.” At Richard’s accession there were in England twenty-eight sheriffs; two of these had each three counties under his charge, seven had two counties each. When Richard’s redistribution of offices was completed, six shires were by a special grant to John withdrawn from the royal administration altogether; seven or eight shires remained or were replaced under their former sheriffs; five sheriffs were transferred to shires other than those which they had previously administered; four—perhaps more—went on the Crusade; all the rest seem to have been employed in some other capacity under the Crown. In all likelihood most, if not all, of these men had taken the Cross and their “ransom” was no more than they were justly bound and could well afford to pay. One case does indeed present a different aspect. Ranulf de Glanville, at this time sheriff of Yorkshire and Westmorland, was also, and had been for nine years, Chief Justiciar of England. He had taken the Cross in 1185.[406] One chronicler asserts that Ranulf was now “stripped of his power,” put in ward, and set free only on payment of fifteen thousand pounds to the king.[407] According to other authorities, however, he asked to be relieved of his functions that he might fulfil his vow.[408] He is said to have had also another motive 1189 for his resignation: “he was of great age, and saw that the new king, being a novice in government, was wont to do many things without due deliberation and forethought.”[409] Behind these words there may lurk a partial explanation of Richard’s seemingly harsh and extortionate treatment of the Justiciar. It is possible that the king really wished to retain Ranulf’s services as his vicegerent in England, and persuaded or coerced him into commuting his vow for that purpose, but that Ranulf, when he had seen a little more of his new sovereign’s ways—which were indeed not likely to meet with the approval of statesmen who had grown old under Henry II—preferred to sacrifice the money as the price of Richard’s consent to his departure. That the sacrifice was, after all, not a ruinous one may be inferred from the fact that it left him still able to make his expedition independently of the king, for he died at Acre seven months or more before Richard’s arrival there.[410] Two Chief Justiciars were appointed in his stead, of whom one, William de Mandeville, was a trusted and faithful friend of King Henry, and the other, Bishop Hugh of Durham, was a kinsman of the royal house and a man of long experience in politics, untiring energy and ambition, and great wealth, with the surplus of which he was quite willing to purchase release from his vow of Crusade and as many other benefits as Richard cared to bestow on him.[411]

Several other high offices, both in Church and State, had to be filled anew, some from causes altogether beyond the king’s control, some in fulfilment of his promise to carry into effect the grants which his father had left uncompleted. There were five vacant bishoprics, besides the metropolitan see of York. This last Henry had destined for his son Geoffrey the Chancellor; to Geoffrey Richard gave it,[412] and thereby the chancellorship was vacated. Two men vied with each other as candidates for this important 1189 post; both offered large sums for it; Richard in this instance showed that his choice of men was not governed by his thirst for money, by accepting the lower bid of the two, because it was made by a man whom he knew and trusted;[413] and the person who received the largest share of grants out of the royal domain received them absolutely free. That person was John. Henry had (or was said to have) expressed the intention of endowing John with the Norman county of Mortain and four thousand pounds’ worth of land in England. As soon as Richard was by investiture as duke of Normandy legally able to make grants in that duchy, he put John in possession of Mortain.[414] The heritage of the late Earl of Gloucester had been promised, with the hand of his heiress, to John ever since 1176; Richard Aug. 29 secured it for him by causing the marriage to take place a fortnight after the brothers reached England.[415] Within the next month the king further bestowed upon John a number of escheated honours and other lands to the gross annual value of some five or six hundred pounds. Within three more months he added the gift of six whole counties, with the entire revenues and profits of every kind which they were wont to render to the Crown, and the control of all administration and justice within their limits.[416]

Of all Richard’s administrative arrangements this was unquestionably the most imprudent and dangerous; it is indeed almost the only one which can be clearly seen to have produced disastrous results. When its motive is realized, however, criticism is almost disarmed; for Richard’s act was not the spontaneous throwing away of an extravagant fraternal benefaction, or of a wholly needless bribe to a brother to whom he owed nothing and from whom, had he let him remain “Lackland,” he could have had nothing to fear. It was simply a literal and exact 1189 fulfilment of Henry’s latest design for completing his provision for John by endowing him with lands in England to the value of four thousand pounds a year.[417] This ill-advised project of Henry’s might perhaps have been less unwisely carried out in some other way, such as the bestowal of a number of small estates scattered in various parts of the realm, instead of this solid block of territories with so much political influence and power attached to their possession; but the only safe mode of dealing with it would have been to ignore it altogether. Richard’s share of responsibility in the matter amounts simply to this, that he—in his father’s lifetime a disobedient son—carried loyalty to his dead father’s wishes beyond the limits of worldly wisdom and sound policy.

Some of Richard’s administrative arrangements and 1189 appointments were made in a great council held in the middle of September at Pipewell[418] in Northamptonshire, others at various times within the next three months. Early in October the king spent a week in London; thence he went to Arundel and afterwards to Winchester.[419] He had meanwhile sent John with an armed force—which the Welsh called “the host of all England”—against Rees of South Wales, who had laid siege to Caermarthen castle. It was to John’s interest that there should be peace with Rees, since the honour of Gloucester included a large piece of Welsh territory. Accordingly John and Rees made an agreement between themselves,[420] and Rees, with an escort furnished him by John, came to Oxford in the hope of a meeting with the king; but Richard “would not go to meet him.”[421] For Richard the chief gain from this expedition against Rees was that it enabled him to collect from those tenants in chivalry who did not personally take part in it a “Scutage of Wales” which helped to finance the expedition to Holy Land.

Early in November envoys from France brought letters from Philip setting forth that he and his barons had sworn on the Gospels to be at Vézelay ready to start on the Crusade at the close of Easter (April 1, 1190), and begging that Richard would take an oath to the same effect. Richard exacted from the envoys an oath “on the King of France’s soul” that this pledge should be fulfilled on the French side; then he called a great council in London and there caused one of his chief counsellors to take a like oath on his behalf in presence of the Frenchmen.[422] After 1189 this the king went on pilgrimage to S. Edmund’s on the festival of its patron saint.[423] Soon afterwards he was at Canterbury,[424] making peace between the archbishop and the monks, who had long been at strife.[425] The settlement was destined to be only temporary, but for the moment it was a triumph both of Richard’s kingly power and of his personal tact; the dispute had been a scandal which had baffled Henry II, and a legate sent by the Pope to deal with it had landed at Dover on November 20 (when Richard was at S. Edmund’s), but had been by Eleanor’s order forbidden to proceed inland, his mission having no sanction from the king.[426] Richard, however, wanted to make use of him for two other purposes: the confirmation of Geoffrey’s election to the see of York, and the raising of an Interdict laid by Archbishop Baldwin on John’s lands in consequence of the marriage of John and Isabel of Gloucester, who were cousins within the prohibited degrees. Accordingly the legate was entertained at Canterbury for two nights; he did what the king desired of him and then departed out of the realm.[427]