Still Chester and his friends persevered in their efforts to undermine the position of the Justiciar; and some of them were equally desirous of undermining that of the Primate. These now despatched two messengers to Rome, ostensibly to report to the Pope on the state of affairs in England. The Archbishop, suspecting mischief, compelled these envoys before they sailed to swear to him and some of his suffragans that they “would attempt nothing prejudicial to the King and the realm”—the actual meaning of the oath being, they were given to understand, that they were not to ask for a legate.[964] This, however, was precisely what they did. Urged one way by their entreaties and another by Stephen’s protests and his assurances that no legatine intervention was needed to preserve peace in the land, Honorius at last decided to send not a legate, but merely commissioners; further tidings from England induced him to abandon even this project.[965] At a council in London on 21st–23rd April,[966] the Archbishop with tears implored the barons to agree together in peace for the public good.[967] Chester and all others who had been at strife with the Justiciar yielded to this appeal; the kiss of peace was given and accepted on both sides, and the King, “willing to forget past injuries,” received into his peace and favour all who had offended against him, “hoping,” as he wrote to the Pope, “to receive from all and singular such effectual counsel and aid as they in their necessities are entitled to expect from us.”[968]
There was urgent need of peace at home; for strife was raging in Ireland, and grave danger was hanging over Poitou. Geoffrey de Marsh had, as we have seen, formally resigned the Justiciarship of the Irish March in October, 1221;[969] but he had contrived to hamper his successor, Archbishop Henry of Dublin, by retaining some at least of the rolls and other records necessary for the Justiciar’s official work in his own hands till July, 1222, if not later still.[970] Some months before this the return of Hugh de Lacy gave token of trouble to come. In John’s reign Hugh had been Earl of Ulster, and his brother Walter Lord of Meath; both had incurred forfeiture and exile in 1214. Walter’s reinstatement had been ordered by John on 6th July, 1215,[971] but Geoffrey de Marsh—who was appointed Justiciar on the same day—never carried out the order; in November, 1221, Archbishop Henry was bidden to do so without further delay.[972] Hugh, driven by the Albigensians from his place of refuge on the Continent, had then recently come under a safe-conduct to England.[973] Thence he seems to have gone into Wales. Some lands which he had held under his brother, and those which formed the dower of his wife, were restored to him on 27th December, 1222.[974] In the spring of 1223 he went to Ireland without the King’s leave.[975] There he stirred up so much mischief that in June the English government, after an ineffectual attempt to induce his brother Walter and the Earls of Chester, Salisbury, and Gloucester to undertake the custody of his lands for five years,[976] deemed it advisable to establish throughout the English dominions in Ireland a new system of provincial government by seneschals who, under the supreme authority of the chief Justiciar, should be “both willing and able to guard against the King’s damage, and manfully make war against his enemies when necessity should arise.”[977] John Marshal, who in February had been sent as assistant justiciar to help the Archbishop,[978] now received the custody of the territories of Cork, Des, and Desmond, with their castles;[979] Richard de Burgh (Hubert’s brother), who already held the honour of Limerick, was named seneschal of Munster and constable of Limerick castle;[980] William de Serland was appointed seneschal of Ulster.[981] Walter de Lacy, who since 1215 had been steadily loyal to the English Crown, was in England; but his men in Ireland gave shelter and support to his rebel brother, under whose command they committed grievous “excesses” on the King’s land, harrying and burning, and slaying or putting to ransom the men of the King.[982] In one of his raids Hugh nearly reached Dublin, and the Justiciar-Archbishop, taken at unawares, was forced to buy of him a truce till next summer.[983] Before it expired, a singular compact was made, in the early spring of 1224, between the King and Walter de Lacy. In consideration, on the one hand, of Walter’s faithful service, and on the other, of his legal responsibility for the misdoings of the men of Meath, it was agreed that the King should hold one of Walter’s English castles and one of his Irish ones—Ludlow and Trim—for two years from Easter (14th April); that Walter should go to Ireland “and fight to the uttermost of his power, with the King’s help, against the men who had done these things”; that when he should have thus won back control over his own lands, the King should hold them for a year and a day, “and after that there shall be done to Walter concerning them whatever the King’s court shall decide.” Meanwhile Walter was to have free use of Trim castle for the purposes of this war against his own men.[984] The trouble which Hugh had stirred up, however, was evidently felt to require, above all things, the presence in Ireland of a military leader, instead of an ecclesiastic, as the chief representative of the Crown. On 23rd April Earl William of Pembroke and Leinster was married to his promised bride, the King’s nine years old sister Eleanor;[985] within a month he sailed for Ireland to enter upon his duties as chief Justiciar in Archbishop Henry’s stead.[986]
A yet graver peril than that which disturbed the King’s “land of Ireland” was that which threatened his “land of Poitou.” The truce with France had just expired on Easter day, 14th April.[987] Ever since the previous October the English government had known, from the lips of Louis himself, that he was only awaiting its expiration to assemble his host for the conquest of Henry’s remaining continental territories; yet to meet his attack they seem to have made no preparation, except a final effort to secure the support of Hugh of Lusignan. On 15th January it was proposed to satisfy the claims of Hugh and Isabel by granting to them, in compensation for Isabel’s lost dower-lands in Normandy, the Stannaries in Devonshire and the revenues of Aylesbury for four years from the ensuing Easter; for the arrears due to Isabel since her second marriage, three thousand pounds of money of Touraine, to be paid within three years from Easter; and for their claim to Niort, one hundred marks annually (“although Niort is not worth that sum a year,” adds her royal son or his minister) to Isabel for life. If the King of France should invade Poitou within the four years, Hugh was to have “a reasonable aid” for the defence of Henry’s land; and in case of Isabel’s death Hugh was to keep for the same period the lands which he already held, except what he had “taken in the King’s service”[988] and the custody of the castle of Mausy, which had been for some time past in dispute between Henry and Hugh, and which Henry reserved to himself.[989] A modified form of these proposals was accepted by Hugh at the end of March. The annual sum promised in compensation for Niort was doubled; the three thousand pounds Tournois for arrears were to be all paid up at Whitsuntide of the current year; there was no express mention of Mausy, but it was conceded that Hugh and his wife, or the survivor of them, should keep for four years from Easter whatever they were seised of on S. Andrew’s day last past; whether this definition would or would not include Mausy does not appear.[990] Hugh was to swear that he would serve the King faithfully; and the Pope was to be requested to enforce, if necessary, the keeping of this agreement.[991] In accordance with it, Hugh was on 8th April asked to seize for Henry, as soon as the truce should be ended, the lands of a certain man “who was with the King of France.”[992] About the same time the sheriffs throughout England seem to have been ordered to seize into the King’s hand all lands held by Normans and Bretons—meaning, probably, such as had lands on both sides of the sea and were by reason of their continental possessions subjects of the French King. To this order, however, it was soon found advisable to make some considerable exceptions.[993] At the eleventh hour Louis suddenly offered to prolong the truce for ten years.[994] On 28th April—a fortnight after Easter—three envoys were sent from England to speak with him about prolonging it for four years.[995] He seems to have given them an audience, in presence of his Council, on 5th May;[996] but the negotiations were unsuccessful. Louis’s proposal had been prompted by a desire to free his hands for another expedition against Toulouse, where the Albigensians were again in the ascendent, and the Pope was anxious for the intervention of the French King.[997] The reason for the English counter-proposal is plain. In a little over four years Henry must needs be acknowledged as of full age in every respect; it was not right that after that time his hands should be tied by an engagement of such importance made while he was still in some sense a minor; if the truce was to be renewed, it must be only until his coming of age. Louis, however, insisted upon ten years or nothing.[998] On 15th May, therefore, Henry by letters patent announced that his truce with France was ended, and bade the chief English seaport towns make their ships ready for service at call, detain all vessels which should enter their harbours, and suffer none which were there to go out without his special leave.[999]
It was scarcely conceivable that Louis would make any attempt upon England before he had secured Poitou; we should therefore naturally have supposed that the ships thus collected were required for the transport of troops to assist Savaric de Mauléon in the defence of that country. The only troops actually sent, however, consisted of about a hundred knights and an unspecified number of men-at-arms[1000] commanded by Richard de Gray and Geoffrey de Neville,[1001] and destined to reinforce the garrison of La Rochelle.[1002] This force appears to have sailed at the end of May or in the first days of June.[1003] It was despatched “by the advice of the magnates of England”[1004]—that is, of the council which had been assembled in London for the reconciliation of Hubert and his opponents. That council then dispersed under orders to meet again at Northampton,[1005] on the octave of Trinity Sunday,[1006] 16th June, “for the purpose”—so Henry himself wrote to the Pope—“of giving us (the King) counsel and rendering us aid for the defence of our land in Poitou.”[1007] The nature of the proposed “aid” cannot be determined with certainty from the King’s words; they might stand either for personal assistance in the field, or monetary aid instead of service, or for both. The question about the obligation of military service beyond sea was still unsettled; and from the expressions used by some writers of the time we should gather that the ostensible purpose for which the barons were summoned to Northampton was merely to concert measures for the preservation of the King’s transmarine dominions.[1008] It is however scarcely credible that if the King and his ministers really desired to consult further with the barons about this most urgent business, the council actually assembled in London should not have been detained there for that purpose, instead of being dismissed for seven weeks and then reassembled elsewhere in the middle of June to discuss a matter which ought in fact to have passed from the stage of consultation to that of action by the middle of May. According to Falkes, on the other hand, the summons was for a muster of the host in arms.[1009] A statement made some years later by Hubert seems to confirm this version of the story,[1010] and we shall see from the sequel that the majority, if not all, of the barons went to Northampton attended by their followers in arms. There is, however, reason to believe that, if not in the mind of the young King himself, at least in that of his chief adviser, Poitou was not the real or at any rate the first destination of the host.
The changes in the custody of royal castles and wardenships ordered early in the year seem to have been effected without serious difficulty or delay, except with regard to one castle,[1011] Plympton. The King claimed the custody of Plympton on the ground that it formed part of the honour of Devon, which had belonged to the late Earl William of Devon, or “of the Isle” (of Wight), as he was sometimes called, father of Baldwin de Rivers, whose widow, Margaret, was the wife of Falkes de Bréauté. Falkes and Margaret had been married during Earl William’s lifetime, in 1215;[1012] but William {1215–1218} was very unwilling to give his daughter-in-law and her new husband seisin of the dower-lands to which she was entitled as Baldwin’s widow, and her claims were still unsettled when he died in September, 1217.[1013] They were settled at last by the regent Earl Marshal, on 30th March, 1218, when “the honour of Plympton, with the castle of Plympton, and all the land which belonged to the Earl of the Isle in Devonshire,” was by royal letter patent granted to Falkes and Margaret “as the same Margaret’s dower.”[1014] On 16th February, 1224, Henry transferred the custody of the Earl’s castles in Hampshire and of all the lands which had been his, “except his lands in Devon and the castle of Plympton,” to Waleran the German.[1015] So far as we know, Falkes complied with this order. On 13th March he was informed by letter patent that the King had committed Plympton castle (“which,” wrote Henry, “was given into your keeping by the elder William Marshal when he was governor of ourself and our realm”) to Walter de Falkenberg, and if Falkes were unwilling to deliver it to Walter, he must come to London at Mid-Lent (21st March), and deliver it there to the King in person.[1016] Falkes seemingly declined to deliver it at all, on the plea—for which, as has been seen, he had an excellent warrant—that he held it not in custody for the Crown, but as part of his wife’s dower. On 21st March the King wrote again, expressing his astonishment that Falkes had not made the expected delivery, and bidding him make it to Walter at once; “for,” wrote the King, “we are certain that that castle is the head of the Earl of Devon’s honour in Devonshire, and for that reason your wife neither can nor ought to have it in dower. If, however, she has less than she ought to have in dower of the land of her former husband, we will make up what is due to her according to the custom of our realm; but if she has more than she should have, we will have it measured according to justice.”[1017] The tone of these letters suggests that the King and his advisers, though determined to carry their point, were conscious of having undertaken a somewhat formidable task in committing themselves to a dispute with Falkes.
Seven men and one woman bearing the surname “de Bréauté” occur in the official records of England under John and Henry III. Four at least of the men were brothers or half brothers, and Avice was their sister.[1018] A little village near Havre must have been the original home of the family, whose first member to appear in history is Falkes. Several chroniclers tell us that he was a native of Normandy.[1019] After his fall his enemies heaped scorn on his origin; he was a “serf” of the King;[1020] patronymic he had none;[1021] and his singular personal appellation was according to one account not a Christian name, but a nickname derived from “the scythe” (faus or fauc in the contemporary speech of his native land) “wherewith he had slain a knight in his father’s meadow in Normandy.”[1022] Another writer seems to have thought that it had been given to him—whether at the font or otherwise—in the spirit of prophecy: “He might well be called after the scythe, that is, after an instrument of wholesale destruction.”[1023] One of the best authorities for the history of John’s reign says that the father of Falkes was a Norman knight.[1024] In all likelihood he was some small landowner whose sons, legitimate and other, left their paternal fields and came to England, like the family of Gerard of Athée, because they preferred to live in exile under their hereditary sovereign rather than in their own land under his conqueror.[1025] Another statement concerning Falkes which lacks confirmation is that he began life as a domestic servant of the King, in the capacity of “door-keeper.”[1026] The word used is an ambiguous one; the writer apparently wished his readers to understand by it a mere menial porter; but it would equally well represent a functionary of higher standing in the royal household, whose proper title was that of usher.[1027] In February, 1207, at any rate, {1207–1214} Falkes was made keeper of something else than the palace doors—the land of Glamorgan and the honour of Wenlock on the Marches of Wales.[1028] When he received this appointment he was a “sergeant,” or man-at-arms, “of the King”;[1029] probably it was on this occasion that John bestowed on him the honour of knighthood.[1030] These wardenships were held by Falkes for seven years, and he was also during part of that time constable of Caermarthen, Cardiff, and Gower.[1031] Within the important military sphere thus assigned to him he was given the fullest freedom of action; his valour, capability, and honesty were all alike trusted implicitly by the King, who employed him also on other business such as the payment of troops and other persons and the transport of money and treasure both in England and abroad.[1032] John, like most of the Angevin counts, was an excellent judge of men, and he had quickly discerned that Falkes, “though little of stature, was very valiant,”[1033] and that moreover he was gifted with a versatile capability and a thoroughness which almost matched those of the Angevin house itself. The writers of the time, while denouncing Falkes as “a rod of the Lord’s fury”[1034] and describing him as a monster of wickedness, unanimously acknowledge that his rise from poverty and obscurity to wealth, rank, and power was due to his conspicuous military talents, his dauntless valour, and the tireless energy and fidelity with which he served his royal master.[1035] In January, 1214 {1214–1216}, on the marriage of the King’s cousin Isabel of Gloucester to the Earl of Essex, Glamorgan passed with the rest of the lands appertaining to her honour of Gloucester into the hands of her husband; and at the same time Caermarthen, Cardiff, and Gower were transferred from the keeping of Falkes to that of the Earl Marshal.[1036] The King however gave Falkes plenty of occupation and compensation elsewhere. Early in 1215 Falkes was acting as a seneschal or steward of the King’s household.[1037] Meanwhile, as constable of Wenlock, he still retained the command of an important district on the Welsh March.[1038] There he gathered round him a picked band of kinsmen and followers who in 1215 and 1216 proved the most efficient and trustworthy section of the troops that fought for the Crown against the barons and the French invader.[1039] It was but natural that his services should be rewarded by the bestowal of large grants of land taken from the King’s enemies. This was the only way in which John could furnish him with means to continue those services, and it was also a most effectual way of securing that those lands should not fall back into the hands of the opposite party. The commission of seven shires in Mid-England to his custody as sheriff was a measure of policy, amply justified by its results in the struggle with Louis after John’s death, when the garrisons under the command of Falkes formed across the realm a chain which Louis never succeeded in breaking.
1215–1224
In 1215 John bestowed on Falkes the hand of Margaret de Rivers, a grant which should have carried with it the enjoyment of her dower-lands; but this, as has been seen, Margaret and Falkes did not obtain till March, 1218.[1040] Then the regent also granted to Falkes, to hold “until the King’s coming of age,” the custody of the person of Margaret’s young son by her first husband, and of all the lands and castles which had belonged to the boy’s late grandfather Earl William of Devon and Wight, and to which the boy himself was now heir.[1041] Thus throughout the next six years the extensive possessions of the house of Rivers were in Falkes’s hands; for practical purposes he represented that great house and was, as a contemporary says, “made equal to an Earl.”[1042] The other magnates, some of whom seem to have resented the necessity of admitting even Hubert de Burgh to social equality with themselves, naturally resented still more the intrusion into their ranks of one whom they looked upon as a mere upstart stranger. Moreover he came into collision with more than one of them through his autocratic dealing with the lands held by them in the shires under his command; and the violently abusive language in which, when his fiery temper was roused, he railed at some of the greatest men of the land and at the English nation in general, gave almost as much offence as his more substantial misdoings.[1043] The clergy and religious orders, especially the monks of the great abbey of S. Alban’s—by one of whom later historians, for the most part, have been somewhat unduly influenced in their views of men and things in the reign of John and the early years of Henry—had other reasons for detesting Falkes. Cruelty and rapacity were common, more or less, in all medieval warfare, and the spoiling of churches and monasteries was a form of ill-doing of which neither party in the civil war was altogether guiltless; but in these matters Falkes stood without a peer save John himself. His crowning outrage was committed in 1217, when in the dusk of a January morning he fell suddenly upon S. Alban’s, captured and plundered the town, carried off its inhabitants to prison in his own castles, slew a servant of the abbey at the very door of the church, and by a threat of burning down the whole place wrung from the abbot a ransom of a hundred pounds of silver.[1044] The spoil, however, went to maintain the soldiers who, if they were the fiercest and most ruthless, were also the most daring and the most uniformly successful troops in the service of the young King. They and their leader played, as we have seen, an important part in the battle of Lincoln; and whatever may have been the personal feelings of Henry’s guardians and counsellors towards Falkes, time after time throughout the early years of the minority, when a man of prompt and vigorous action was wanted for some specially awkward or unpleasant piece of work, Falkes was the man on whom they relied, and they never relied on him in vain. It was Falkes who was set to keep the King’s uncle from intruding into a royal castle of which he was not the lawful custodian. It was Falkes whom Hubert de Burgh employed to overawe the riotous citizens of London and to rid him of their dangerous leader. In their hearts, however, Hubert and Falkes were rivals, urged to secret mutual jealousy by a characteristic which, unlike as they were in other respects, was common to them both; when once they had risen to power and authority, neither of them was inclined to brook an equal.[1045] Accordingly, Falkes had joined Chester and the other discontented magnates in their effort to rid themselves of the Justiciar; and when that effort had failed, Justiciar, magnates, and King, having none of them any further use for Falkes, joined hands to rid themselves of him.
1224