At the earliest possible moment an effort was made to revive the working of the Exchequer. Its records were for some time previous to the end of the war in the possession of Louis, and were restored only on the conclusion of peace in the middle of September;[406] the session seems therefore to have been appointed for Martinmas,[407] instead of Michaelmas which was the customary date. Before Martinmas came, however, it was found, apparently, that some of the sheriffs could not get their accounts ready by the appointed day; and ultimately they seem to have been allowed to bring them up at various times from November, 1217, till a fortnight after Easter, 1218.[408] The accounts thus rendered were those for the first half of the seventeenth (fiscal) year of King John, from Michaelmas, 1214, to Easter, 1215; in other words, the last fiscal half-year completed before the outbreak of war between the barons and the King.[409] For the second half of that year, and for the whole of the two succeeding years up to Michaelmas, 1217, no accounts were ever rendered or demanded; the first Pipe Roll of Henry III is the roll of his second year, from Michaelmas, 1217, to Michaelmas, 1218, and it contains no mention of arrears.[410] This arrangement was both practical and equitable. The accounts for 1215–1217 must in many cases, through no fault of the persons responsible for them, have been in a confusion impossible to disentangle; some of the shires had been entirely in the possession of the King’s enemies; to many of the sheriffs and other Crown bailiffs the King must have been really more in debt than they were to him. With a budget thus restricted and a treasury thus exhausted the Marshal had to carry on the King’s government and pay the indemnity which he had promised to Louis.

“Our faithful Earl William the Marshal has bound himself to the Lord Louis on our behalf, under no small penalty, to the payment of ten thousand marks, for the boon of peace between Louis and ourself”—such is the official statement made, a year later, in a letter written in Henry’s name to the Pope.[411] This amount was independent of the sums due to Louis, according to the terms of the treaty, from towns and individuals who had made agreement with him on condition of a financial aid or tribute which they had not yet paid; the aggregate of these latter sums appears to have been reckoned at something between five and seven thousand marks.[412] On 23rd September letters patent were issued ordering that these debts should be paid without delay to Louis’s Marshal, William de Beaumont.[413] For the receipt of the indemnity Louis appointed as his attorneys two merchants of S. Omer, Florence (or Florentinus) “the Rich” and his son William. This appointment seems to have been made for the joint convenience of Louis and Henry. Louis apparently wanted six thousand marks sterling paid down, and received them from Florence and William, who themselves supplied the amount on a promise made to them on 23rd September in Henry’s name that half the sum thus advanced should be repaid to them on All Saints’ day and the rest at Candlemas; a part of the first instalment of repayment was to be made in fells and wool; if these were not duly delivered Henry was to pay Florence and William an additional sum of five hundred marks sterling “for the profit of that merchandise.” If the whole debt to the two merchants were not paid at the term appointed, Count Peter of Brittany and Robert of Arène were authorized by the King, the Earl Marshal, and the royal Council to seize and hold on behalf of Louis “any goods belonging to the King and his realm that they could get, to the value of the amount due,” until it was paid.[414] A letter from the Marshal in his own name to the King of France at once illustrates the scrupulous honesty for which he had long been renowned, and shews that he doubted the possibility of fulfilling these promises to Florence. “If,” he writes, “our agreement with Florence be not kept, we desire and grant that you assign all the land which we hold of you to Florence and his son till the whole debt and interest due to them shall be discharged, saving only our service to you for the said lands.”[415] His doubts were justified; eleven months later the debt to Florence and William still amounted to no less than two thousand one hundred and fifty marks.[416] To bring it down to this he had had to borrow more than five hundred marks in the King’s name from various merchants of Ireland, Wales, and England, and several hundred more from other individuals, and to lend nine hundred marks out of his own purse;[417] and the financial straits of the Crown are further illustrated by the fact that the total of wool required for the first instalment of repayment to Florence had had to be made up by seizing several sacks belonging to individual merchants at Northampton fair, one of whom did not receive compensation till the end of November, 1218, while another had to wait for it till the middle of February, 1219.[418] It seems to have been originally proposed that the whole indemnity should be paid by S. Andrew’s day, 1217;[419] but this was manifestly impracticable. The account with Louis was in fact not closed till 1219 at the earliest, for the last five hundred marks needed to wipe out the debt were lent to Henry by Gualo’s successor in the legation, Pandulf.[420]

The very first thing, therefore, to be laid before and sanctioned by the Great Council of the realm when at the end of October, 1217, it was once more gathered round the sovereign in his capital city, was a scheme of taxation for the year. This consisted of a scutage of the ordinary amount—two shillings on the knight’s fee—a tallage, a hidage, and a carucage. These taxes were imposed, as had been the practice in the time of Henry II, in the full council of the barons.[421] The formal imposition of the scutage must have taken place on the very day of Henry’s entry into London, 29th October, or at latest on the following morning. This tax was avowedly destined for the payment of the indemnity.[422] It was obviously for purposes connected with finance that an inquisition concerning the King’s demesne lands had been ordered in September;[423] and on 9th November, commissioners were despatched to assess the tallage on these demesnes, and to make searching inquiries about escheats and about all lands “into which there is no entry except through the sheriffs or bailiffs and without due warrant,”[424] and to seize all such into the King’s hand.[425] At the same time the King’s justiciars in Ireland were directed to lay a “tallage and efficacious aid” upon the cities, towns, and royal demesnes in that country, and to “beg of the Kings of Connaught and Thomond and the other kings in Ireland, and of the barons and knights who held in chief of the King, such an efficient aid that the King should evermore be thankful to them”; and they were further exhorted to send the money thus collected to England with all possible speed.[426]

The first judicial eyre of the new reign seems to have been held very soon after the second issue of the Charter, and to have had for one of its objects the administering of the oath of fealty to the King’s subjects in general. To one district, at least, there went six justices itinerant before whom the knights and other free men swore that they would keep the peace of the Church, the King, and the realm, and would help and defend all persons who were willing to keep it likewise; that they would obey all “reasonable” commands of the King, and uphold the royal rights, and hold the good laws and customs of the realm; that if any man should presume to contravene the same, they would at the bidding of the King and his council come together faithfully in force and amend the matter to the utmost of their power; that “neither for hatred, nor favour, nor fear” would they fail to keep their fealty; that they would do and receive justice according to the reasonable customs and laws of England; that no previous or subsequent oath should hinder their observance of all these things; and that “in all these things they would support the Marshal.”[427]

The various dependencies of the English Crown had next to be secured. Alexander of Scotland had taken advantage of the troubles in England to seize the town and castle of Carlisle. As early as 23rd September, 1217, the Marshal peremptorily demanded restitution of these and of the other lands and the prisoners taken by Alexander during the war; and at the same time he bade the prelates and magnates of the North, if Alexander did not immediately comply with the demand, give the sheriff of Cumberland their “efficient aid and counsel” in forcing him to do so.[428] Alexander seems to have yielded at once. The Marshal had a hold over him; the English honour of Huntingdon, which the Scot Kings had held since 1136 and which they dearly prized, was in the hand of King Henry. On 6th November an escort was ordered to meet Alexander at Berwick on S. Andrew’s day and bring him “to speak with us and do to us what he ought to do.”[429] The meeting seems to have taken place on 17th or 18th December at Northampton;[430] on the 19th Alexander, having done his homage, received seisin of his English lands,[431] and a safe-conduct till Candlemas Day for his journey home.[432]

Far more troublesome and dangerous vassals than the Scot king were the native princes of Wales. In ancient times Wales had been divided into three kingdoms: Gwynedd, answering roughly to the modern counties of Flint, part of Denbigh, Carnarvon, Anglesey, and the western part of Merioneth; Powys, stretching from the mouth of the Dee to the river Wye, and including, besides the southern part of what is now Denbighshire and the eastern part of Merioneth, the present shires of Montgomery and Radnor; and Deheubarth, which included, besides the remaining shires of the modern South Wales, the district of Monmouth as far east as the Wye. These three kingdoms had been separate and independent, although a sort of overlordship or primacy seems to have been recognized as appertaining to the Kings of Gwynedd. By the end of the twelfth century Gwynedd was the only one of these three States which remained purely Welsh in population and government. The whole of Deheubarth and the greater part of Powys were dotted over with Norman castles, every one of which was the capital of a lordship held by a baron of Norman or English race, owning allegiance to no one save the English King.[433] Neither these “marcher lords” nor their sovereign, however, had made any real progress towards conquering the country or its people; they were, so to say, detachments of a feudal host encamped here and there in a foreign land, and surrounded by a native population which still maintained its own customs and laws and recognized no authority except that of its own hereditary chieftains. Between the two peoples there was a bitter racial and national feud; but the relations between the Norman lords marchers and the Welsh princes varied greatly. It was not for the interest of the former to quarrel unnecessarily with their Welsh neighbours at any time; and when they themselves chanced to be in rebellion against their own sovereign—as was the case with some of them, notably with the great house of Breuse in south-eastern Wales, in the latter years of John’s reign—they naturally found it convenient to make alliance with the native rulers of the land. These, on the other hand, were often at feud among themselves, and did not scruple to make use of the marchers’ aid against one another when it suited them, though at other times they were ready to make common cause against the common enemy.

1216

At the opening of Henry’s reign the native element in Wales was very distinctly in the ascendent. The old superiority, or primacy, of Gwynedd had once more become a living thing. Llywelyn ap Iorwerth had been for more than twenty years {1194–1216} extending his power over the southern and eastern principalities. He had in 1206 accepted the hand of John’s elder daughter Joan—the child, seemingly, of John’s early dissolved marriage with Isabel of Gloucester[434]—but throughout the civil war his sympathies were openly and actively with John’s enemies. In 1215 he “and the Welsh princes in general” attacked Caermarthen and destroyed the castle, and also took and destroyed most of the other castles in South Wales.[435] On the other hand, his chief rival, Gwenwynwyn, the prince of southern Powys, offered his service to John; whereupon Llywelyn, with “most of the princes,” marched into Powys and “took possession of Gwenwynwyn’s whole territory to himself” in 1216.[436] At the close of 1215 the Bishop of Hereford had died.[437] He was Giles de Breuse, the head of a family whose patrimony—comprising Radnor, Brecon, and Abergavenny in Wales, besides Totnes and Barnstaple in Devonshire and Bramber in Sussex—had been forfeited to the Crown in 1210 under circumstances which made it well-nigh impossible that confidence should ever be restored between the house of Breuse and King John. Giles had indeed, only a few weeks before his death, fined with the King for restitution of all the lands which had been his father’s;[438] but his next brother, Reginald, on succeeding to his hereditary claims, set himself to prosecute them by making common cause with the King’s enemies in Wales. Llywelyn was now at the height of his triumph, not only in Powys, but also in Deheubarth; in 1216, at Aberdovey, in his presence and obviously under his dictation, South Wales was portioned out between the four rival representatives of its sovereign house, Maelgwn and Rhys “the Hoarse” and their nephews “Young Rhys” and Owen.[439] These latter were cousins to Reginald de Breuse.[440] With Llywelyn Reginald formed a closer connexion by taking one of his daughters to wife.[441] In August, 1216, John visited the Welsh border and sought to win the support of some of the princes, and also of Reginald de Breuse, but it “did not avail him anything.”[442] Evidently they all saw in John’s extremity, and after his death in his successor’s youth and helplessness, their long-desired opportunity for revenge; and we can hardly doubt that it was a combination of Welshmen and followers of Reginald de Breuse who attacked Goodrich on the eve of Henry’s coronation. Gualo’s interdict published a fortnight later shows how clearly it was understood that Wales as a whole “held with the barons.”

Early in 12171217 the Earl Marshal wrote in the young King’s name to Reginald de Breuse, urging him to return to his allegiance and promising that if he did so, the whole of his patrimony should be restored to him.[443] Reginald however continued obstinate till the Royalist victory at Lincoln. Then he, like many others, seems to have realized that the tide had turned, and that it was time for him to turn likewise. Before Midsummer he had submitted, and he was soon reinstated in the Irish and English possessions of his father.[444] His Welsh kinsfolk promptly punished his desertion of their party; Rhys and Owen wrested from him “the whole of Builth except the castles”; Llywelyn marched upon Brecknock. Reginald however succeeded in patching up some kind of peace with his father-in-law, who thereupon turned his arms against the Flemings of Pembrokeshire, and compelled {Sept.} them all to promise him tribute and submission.[445]

1217