HistoryExtra Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast 2025-02-20T16:55:05.000Z https://www.historyextra.com/people/king-john/feed/atom Professor David Carpenter <![CDATA[Henry III and the Magna Carta that mattered]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/magna-carta-1225-henry-iii-why-important-king-john/ 2025-02-20T16:55:05.000Z 2025-02-20T16:19:13.000Z February 2025 marks the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. But wait – surely we already commemorated that milestone in 2015?

Certainly, on 15 June that year, the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, the archbishop of Canterbury, prime minister David Cameron and assorted dignitaries gathered at Runnymede. At the meadow by the Thames between Windsor and Staines, they celebrated the charter King John had sealed there exactly 800 years earlier.

That document, sealed under duress from rebel barons and famously subjecting the king to the law and promising justice to all, is widely lauded today as a milestone in the establishment of English law.

Yet the fact is that, in the centuries after 1215, the term Magna Carta was hardly ever used for John’s document. Rather, that was the name given to the charter issued nearly a decade later by King John’s son, Henry III, at Westminster on 11 February 1225.

The Magna Carta issued by Henry III in 1225

Although Henry’s charter was based on his father’s, the earlier iteration was usually called simply the ‘Charter of Runnymede’. So when, in 1297 and 1300, Henry’s son Edward I confirmed Magna Carta, he meant the charter of 1225 – and the same was true of all later confirmations. Indeed, though most of its provisions have since been repealed, those chapters that remain on the statute book of the UK today are from the 1225 version.

So how did the Charter of Runnymede in 1215 become Magna Carta in 1225?

Abandoned promises

At the end of 1215 any progression beyond the Charter of Runnymede would have seemed unlikely, for it appeared to be a failure without a future – quashed by the pope, at the king’s behest. It had also, in effect, been abandoned by the rebel barons. Having failed to hold the king to its terms, they had taken another route: they deposed John and offered the throne to Louis, eldest son of the king of France.

Louis came to England in May 1216, on a wave of support – but said nothing about the charter. Under his benevolent rule, he doubtless assured his supporters, it would be quite unnecessary. It was John’s death during the night of 18/19 October 1216 that transformed the situation.

Forces of Louis VIII of France besiege La Rochelle in 1224

The minority government of his nine-year old son, Henry III – led by regent William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, and the papal legate Guala Bicchieri – was in a desperate situation. Louis controlled much of England. The only way forward seemed to be to accept what John had rejected and Louis was ignoring.

So on 12 November 1216, a new version of the charter was issued in Henry’s name. The most controversial and radical provisions of the Charter of Runnymede were omitted, but the great bulk remained in place. This concession had its effect.

Though there were no immediate desertions from Louis’ side, at the decisive battle of Lincoln in May 1217 (when forces loyal to Henry III defeated an army supporting Louis), the rebel barons hardly fought very hard. None were killed; most simply surrendered. With a revised version of the charter accepted, they could believe their cause was won.

The baronial victory was confirmed by the peace settlement at the end of the war. Louis abandoned his claim to the throne and returned to France. In return, the minority government restored the rebels to their lands and, in November 1217, issued a new and improved version of the charter, accompanied by an entirely new charter regulating the running of the royal forest. It was at this point that the term Magna Carta (‘Great Charter’) was first introduced, referring not to its grandeur but to its size, to distinguish that physically larger charter from the smaller Charter of the Forest. Those two charters would now always be linked together.

With both in place, why might further changes be needed in 1225? Because the 1217 charters remained problematic. How could they be trusted when issued by a king only 10 years old and lacking his own seal? Instead they bore the seals of the legate and the regent.

There was another problem. Might it not be claimed that the charters were invalid, having been extracted from the king by rebellion? At a council meeting in 1223, that point was made by one of John’s most rebarbative old minsters, William Brewer.

Two years later, the chance arose to put these problems right, thanks to a crisis overseas. In 1224, Louis – now king of France – overran the county of Poitou. Far to the south, Gascony seemed likely to fall as well. A gigantic effort would be needed to save the English king’s one remaining continental possession – and for that, he needed money.

With no reserves of treasure, the government knew that those vital funds could come only from a tax levied on the whole kingdom. They knew, too, that such a tax could never be collected unless sanctioned by a great council – the kind of assembly soon to be called parliament.

How to secure such consent? The answer was for the king to concede, in return for the tax, new versions of Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest – versions that put right the deficiencies of their predecessors.

Once again, the exigencies of the continental empire played a central part in the history of Magna Carta. The loss of Normandy and Anjou in 1204, and the heavy taxation designed to fund their recovery, had been a turning point on the road to the charter of 1215. Similarly, the loss of Poitou in 1224 led directly to the Magna Carta of 1225. However, while John failed to recover his continental possessions, the great tax of 1225 did save Gascony, which remained in English hands until 1453.

Doing the deal

Two men above all were responsible for negotiating the deal that led to the 1225 charters, though acting from very different motives. They were the justiciar Hubert de Burgh, head of government since the death of William Marshal in 1219, and the archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton.

For cautious, pragmatic de Burgh, the charters were simply a practical necessity. For Langton, one of the great biblical scholars of the age, they responded to deeply held ideas about the need for rulers to be limited by the law. The texts of both charters, crafted by Langton and de Burgh, had new preambles and new conclusions designed to address the anxieties mentioned previously.

In the preamble, the king (now aged 17) was said to act “of his spontaneous and good will” – a statement not found in the 1216 and 1217 charters, nor indeed in John’s Charter of Runnymede. At the end of the new charters now hung Henry’s own seal, introduced in 1218. It showed him on the front crowned and enthroned, and on the back mounted, armoured and brandishing his sword – images that encapsulated the majesty of kingship.

The conclusion to these revised charters also rebutted the charge that they had been extracted from the king by force. Rather, they stated, in return for his concessions everyone in the kingdom had granted him a 15th part of their movable property – essentially, a 15th part, by value, of their agricultural produce and farm animals. Producing some £40,000, roughly three times the king’s current annual revenue, this was the tax that saved Gascony.

The charge of coercion was thus laid to rest. Magna Carta and the Forest Charter were the result of a freely entered bargain between king and kingdom. The consensual nature of the new documents was further demonstrated by lists of those who had witnessed and, thus, affirmed the granting of the charters – unlike earlier iterations, which had no witness lists to speak of.

All the good and great of the land witnessed the charters, whatever their stance in the civil war. The witness list was headed by Archbishop Langton, 11 bishops and 20 abbots. Then came Hubert de Burgh, followed by nine earls and 23 magnates. Sensing the significance and novelty of this certification, the copy of the charters made soon afterwards at Cerne Abbey in Dorset set out the witness list in beautifully elaborate fashion, and inscribed the place and date of issue in great capital letters.

Inclusivity statement

Langton, responding to ideas about how just rule should benefit the whole community, also did something to make Magna Carta more inclusive. The concessions in the charters of 1216 and 1217, like those in 1215, had been made only to people who were free – thus excluding the unfree peasantry who made up the largest part of the population. In 1225, this changed. The statement that the concessions had been made to the free remained, but it was qualified – indeed, contradicted – by the new preamble in which these concessions were granted to “everyone in the kingdom”. Likewise, in the conclusion, everyone was said to have agreed the tax in return for which the charters were granted.

Langton moved decisively to bring in the church full-square behind the new charters. In 1215, he had felt unable to excommunicate those who contravened John’s charter, in part because it was clearly the product of rebellion. When the charters of 1216 and 1217 were issued, Langton was out of England; now, with the new versions clearly consensual, he and his fellow bishops sentenced to excommunication all who breached them. This set a precedent, and further sentences of excommunication were promulgated in 1237 and 1253, the latter with great publicity and with circulation of the texts.

Churchmen could profit as much as laymen from many of Magna Carta’s provisions but, in particular, they treasured the very first chapter, which guaranteed the freedom of the church. How right Langton had been to add it into the charter at Runnymede.

Strengthened in these ways, the 1225 texts became the final and definitive versions of Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest – but they were not without flaw. Despite acting “of his spontaneous and good will”, Henry was not yet 21 when issuing the charters, and therefore underage; this defect had to be put right in a proclamation of 1237.

More serious was the fact that the charters set out no constitutional means of enforcement. The 1215 document had given 25 barons the power to enforce its provisions, but the barons were omitted from the subsequent versions, with nothing put in their place. Though the sentences of excommunication elevated the status and publicised the texts of the 1225 charters, their practical effect is unclear. Not surprisingly, there were constant complaints that the charters were being broken.

The complaints had an element of truth, but some key chapters of Magna Carta were obeyed. The inheritance tax demanded from earls and barons, which sometimes ran into hundreds and thousands of pounds before 1215, was set at just £100. For the most part, widows of barons and knights were not forced into remarriage. Justice was no longer openly sold. The Forest Charter saw substantial areas removed from the royal forest. In general, the rule of Henry III was far less abrasive and extortionate than his father’s.

The texts of the charters also became widely known and, thus, sank deep roots into English society. Copies were made by religious houses, magnates, ministers, knights, freemen and lawyers. Of the various versions, that of 1225 was easily the most copied.

When the 1217 charter featured, it was often amended in the light of the 1225 changes, thus including from the preamble the king acting of his “spontaneous and good will” and, from the conclusion, him making concessions in return for the tax.

Those examining the texts – and marginal annotations bear witness to intensive study – could see that Magna Carta was far more than just a baronial document. Chapters such as those regulating the levying of fines and the running of local government benefited wide sections of society. The Great Charter would never have survived had that not been the case.

What’s in a name?

By the end of the 13th century, Magna Carta was firmly established at the heart of the English polity and was well set for its long later history. Yet, on that point, one question remains: how and when did the Charter of Runnymede take centre stage and become universally known as Magna Carta?

In the early 17th century, when the lawyers Selden and Coke saw Magna Carta as a bulwark against Stuart tyranny, it was still the charter of 1225 to which they appealed; they hardly mentioned John at all. William Shakespeare himself, in his King John, made no reference to the charter.

The change came in the next century, thanks to lawyer William Blackstone. His seminal work, The Great Charter, published in 1759, printed for the first time an authentic text of the 1225 Charter under the heading ‘Magna Carta Regis Johannis’. His introduction, too, referred continuously to the ‘Great Charter’ of King John.

Blackstone, it seems, was unaware that the word Magna had originally referred simply to the physical size of the 1217 and 1225 charters compared with the Charter of the Forest; he understood it to mean ‘great’ in terms of status, and thus thought it very much applicable to the charter of 1215 – the parent, as he showed, of Henry III’s later Magna Carta. (Blackstone also printed authentic texts of the 1216, 1217 and 1225 charters.)

Blackstone’s terminology stuck. In Bishop Stubbs’ hugely influential Constitutional History of England, published in the 1870s, John’s charter is called “The Great Charter” or Magna Carta. Likewise, JC Holt’s classic book Magna Carta, first published in 1965, was essentially about the charter of 1215.

In many respects, this seems absolutely right. Without John’s charter, as Blackstone showed, the Henrician versions would never have existed. And yet the charter of 1225, consensual in a way its predecessors were not, placed Magna Carta on new and firmer foundations. The charters of 1215 and 1225 should always march together.

This article was first published in the February 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]> Spencer Mizen <![CDATA[King John: life of the week]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/king-john-life-of-the-week-podcast-nick-vincent/ 2024-10-28T13:28:09.000Z 2024-10-08T06:00:53.000Z King John has a terrible reputation. He's best known as the monarch who broke the terms of Magna Carta, lost Normandy to the French and committed numerous acts of unspeakable cruelty. Here, in conversation with Spencer Mizen, Nicholas Vincent considers if John really was as bad as all that - or if, indeed, he was even worse.

]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[How King John helped bring about a political miracle in medieval England]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/england-politics-magna-carta-parliament-law-courts-taxation/ 2025-08-12T13:24:14.000Z 2024-08-07T20:02:44.000Z Good. But could do better. That was the message that the English people conveyed to their all-conquering monarch at the height of the Hundred Years’ War. In 1358, England’s great warrior-king Edward III asked parliament if he should accept a peace treaty he’d negotiated with the French, following a series of dramatic military victories.

Parliament emphatically advised the king to fight again. Too much blood had been shed and too much treasure expended. The French, MPs declared, were not offering enough.

For Edward’s distant predecessor King John, such a scenario would have been unthinkable. Then, at the dawn of the 13th century, there was no notion of shared national enterprise around foreign policy. The English king’s lands in France were a matter for the king alone – not for the community of the realm expressing its will through parliament. The people, if they had been courageous enough to venture their opinions to John, would have been told – not so politely – to keep their noses out.

It was also unimaginable during John’s reign that other matters that parliament routinely considered in Edward III’s day – issues such as how much tax people paid, and the way in which law and justice was dispensed to the masses – might be a matter of nationwide debate.

English state transformed

Yet the 150 or so years between John’s reign and Edward’s victories over the French witnessed the utter transformation of the English state. This extraordinary period saw the introduction of a system of national taxation by consent, and the advent of the forum that approved that tax: parliament. It saw the legal system grow exponentially and a network of royal officers being appointed across the land.

It saw striking advances in military organisation, including the professionalisation of the army. And, of course, it saw the introduction of Magna Carta, which established the much-cherished principle that the king was subject to the same law as his subjects.

Edward III, shown in a 15th-century miniature, sought parliament’s agreement before striking a treaty with the French (Photo by incamerastock/Alamy Stock Photo)

Today we think of the 13th and 14th centuries as a period of protracted warfare and plague. It was undoubtedly both those things. But it was also the period that laid the foundations for many elements of the English, and by extension British, state as we know it today. So why did this transformation happen? And who were the main drivers behind this change?

When John became king in 1199, it is doubtful that he gave any thought to these grand questions of statehood. That’s partly because the concept of the state as we know it did not exist. But it’s mainly because John had far more urgent concerns occupying his in-tray. He had to fend off a rival claim to the throne of England from his nephew Arthur, and he had to get to grips with a major assault launched by his great French rival, King Philip II.

English losses in France

Philip was determined to assert himself, and that meant seizing lands held in France by John. Those English possessions stretched far across France, from Normandy in the north to Aquitaine in the south-west – a block much larger than the territory directly controlled by the French king.

Unfortunately for John, Philip was not only hugely ambitious but also vastly capable, and in 1204 the French king seized the jewel in the English crown, Normandy, shortly followed by many of the other English territories in France.

The key moment in this English debacle was the loss of Château Gaillard, Richard the Lionheart’s extraordinary defensive system on the cliffs of the Seine at Les Andelys. Richard had declared that the walls of this mighty castle could hold out against the French even had they been made of butter. John’s manifold deficiencies as both a king and a military commander proved his older brother decisively wrong.

The loss of Normandy in 1204 was a shattering blow. But it was also a turning point in English history: for it prompted a chain reaction that would lead to Magna Carta. Determined to regain his territories, John returned to England to regroup. Over the following decade, he raised vastly more money in England than any of his predecessors, money he used to build continental alliances and fund a new military expedition to France.

Funds flowed into the royal coffers through fines levied by the king on members of the nobility. These were extorted with threats, violence and the sale of justice to the highest bidder – and triggered a wave of resentment across the realm.

John is rightly seen as one of England’s cruellest kings. According to one chronicler, he violated the wives and daughters of his nobles; in the words of another, he roasted French prisoners of war on tripods and gridirons. The unfairness and brutality of all this was not lost on England’s barons, who, as the wealthiest subjects, bore the brunt of John’s impositions.

King John and Magna Carta

If the common law – which since 1166 had offered all men and women cheap access to royal justice – dictated that the barons could not abuse, bribe and extort their fellow countrymen without facing legal action, then why, they asked, should the king be allowed to do it?

And so, when John’s ambitions to regain lost territory came crashing down with military defeat in 1214, his opponents in England lost no time in demanding change. In Magna Carta, literally the ‘Great Charter’, they attempted to put an end, one by one, to all the questionable practices of their king. While John fought the rebels with all his might, his death in 1216, and the accession of his son as Henry III during a civil war that showed little sign of leading to any lasting settlement, meant that no government could hope to move forward in peace without compromise.

That compromise was the confirmation of Magna Carta. By placing kings under the same law as their subjects, Magna Carta made it impossible for future monarchs to raise money for war arbitrarily. Doing so would bring political crisis, as Henry III discovered when, in an echo of his father, he began to threaten the landed property of his barons.

It soon became abundantly clear that if the king wanted to defend his lands, he would have to find a new way of raising the money he required – one that involved accessing his subjects’ wealth in a legitimate manner. It was this imperative that led to the introduction of a national system of taxation by consent – and, in the 1230s, the emergence of the body that would grant (or refuse) such consent: parliament.

Birth of the English parliament

Parliament took its name from the French Parlement, ‘the place of discussion’, and true to that name, it soon became an arena for national debate on all areas of public policy. It was initially the exclusive domain of the very rich and powerful. But, by the end of the 13th century, a wider cross-section of the population was contributing to that debate.

In 1258, when political crisis erupted in the face of Henry III’s unpopular foreign and financial policies, demands were made that angry knights, as well as disaffected barons, should be represented. This broader social representation was extended again during the reign of Edward I. In the 14th century, parliament came to consist of Lords and Commons, just as it does today – the latter elected to represent all the localities in the country.

Under Edward, a partnership was established with parliament that led to repeated grants of taxation to support the king in wars in Wales, Scotland and France. This practice – of the crown co-opting the resources of the realm to royal military imperatives – led to a developing sense that foreign policy was not merely dynastic but national, in the interests of the entire country.

By the time Edward I’s grandson Edward III was striding across Europe with aplomb in the mid-14th century, his subjects in parliament were fully engaged in consultation with the king, his ministers and judges on all aspects of national government. National taxation, approved by parliament, produced predictable and reliable war finance that enabled England to professionalise its army under Edward I and particularly Edward III.

This enabled England to punch well above its weight internationally until the mid-15th century, most especially in the first half of the Hundred Years’ War with France. The battle of Crécy in 1346 and Poitiers in 1356 respectively saw the English destroy the French field army and capture the French king, John II.

At the naval battle of Sluys in 1340, thousands of French soldiers drowned, fleeing English men-at-arms and archers charging across their decks. This was the English realm in its military pomp, producing arguably the country’s most significant naval triumph until the battle of Trafalgar in 1805.

“How do we know that French knights are braver than English knights?” asked a jester of his master, the French king Philip VI, in the aftermath of Sluys. When Philip failed to provide an answer, the jester gave the sardonic reply: “Because English knights are afraid to jump into the sea.”

England's legal system

Government, too, was growing increasingly sophisticated. The common law was in such demand that the courts struggled to keep up with the volume of business. The people of England were clearly hungry for the impartial, enforceable and centrally recorded justice provided by this ever-growing national legal system.

Kings added to the pressure themselves because they regularly commissioned nationwide enquiries into crime and corruption. Edward I created so much legislation during his 35-year-reign that he was later called the English Justinian, after the famous law-giving Roman emperor.

Such extensive legislating required a new professional cadre of judges, attorneys and justices of the peace. Government co-opted so many of the king’s subjects into its work that it is estimated that, by the mid-14th century, some 40 per cent of male house-holders were involved in some way – as sheriffs, jurors, constables, military recruiters, purveyors of supplies and tax collectors.

England was hardly alone in all of this. Rapidly evolving ideas about the authority of the king as lawgiver were mirrored across Europe. Monarchs from Louis IX of France to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II embarked upon vast legislative programmes. In Iberia, Alfonso X of Castile ordered the compilation of law codes into a document, La Siete Partidas, that remains celebrated today.

Charles III and Queen Camilla at the state opening of parliament, 2023. The seat of British democracy grew into a force to be reckoned with in the late Middle Ages (Photo by Arthur Edwards - WPA Pool/Getty Images)

The 13th-century rediscovery in Europe of Aristotle’s work added another flavour to this. Influenced by the ancient Greek philosopher’s ideas, writers began to see government as a force for good, not simply a necessary evil. Kings and their subjects eagerly embraced these ideas, both to claim power and to demand accountability.

Yet not all nations experienced this thirst for power and accountability in the same way. In England, the quest for the common good was put under intense pressure by conflict and mass death. War in France and across the British Isles drove political change – and brought with it significant disorder.

In the early 14th century, during a break in hostilities, demobbed soldiers formed armed bands that marauded across England, leaving a trail of outrages in their wake. That prompted one of the biggest enquiries into crime that had yet taken place in England – the so-called ‘trailbaston’ commissions.

Black Death and Peasants’ Revolt

Pandemic also shattered society’s sense of security. The Black Death, which first hit England in 1348 and re-appeared in several waves, killed at least 40 per cent of the population, forcing government to intervene to regulate the labour market. The Statute of Labourers of 1351 sought to constrain wage growth and labour mobility, as workers exploited their scarcity to demand higher pay and move to better paid jobs.

Those in the upper echelons of society were clearly disturbed by this new thirst for social mobility. We can see this in the Sumptuary Law of 1363, which stipulated that the lower orders should not dress in clothes above their station. Such enforced restraint was hugely controversial, and the combination of a surprisingly buoyant economy and fierce opposition meant that the laws were widely ignored.

What no one could ignore, however, was the crisis that struck the economy in the early 1370s. The fall-out from the financial downturn – caused by a collapse in prices, for reasons historians do not fully understand – was long and ultimately bloody.

In the immediate aftermath, peasants experienced a double whammy of the sudden enforcement of earlier labouring legislation and the imposition of the first poll tax. Anger and resentment simmered away until, in 1381, they exploded in the popular uprising known as the Peasants’ Revolt.

It took the authorities just a few months to put down the revolt, but not before the rebels had chopped off the heads of two of the most powerful men in the land – the archbishop of Canterbury and the lord high treasurer – and reduced the Savoy Palace, John of Gaunt’s opulent residence on the Thames, to a smouldering ruin. At the height of the uprising, the king himself – Richard II – felt compelled to ride out to Smithfield to listen to the rebels’ demands.

Richard II survived his encounter with the peasants but it was a mere stay of execution. Like John before him, Richard was a weak, negligent and ultimately tyrannical ruler. And like John, his reign ended in ignominy, deposed by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke in 1399. Yet there was a crucial difference – one that signals just how far the tectonic plates of the English state had shifted over the two centuries between the reigns of these hapless rulers.

John’s downfall occurred in the midst of a chaotic war in which a tiny cadre of the most powerful men in the land sought to limit the power of the king on behalf of ‘the community of the realm’. When Bolingbroke ousted Richard II, he presented deposition articles for the approval of a packed parliament of Lords and Commons gathered from across the kingdom.

Where John had failed his dynasty, Richard had failed the entire English nation.

Caroline Burt and Richard Partington are medieval historians at the University of Cambridge, and the authors of Arise, England: Six Kings and the Making of the English State (Faber & Faber, 2024)

This article was first published in the September 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]> Dr Marc Morris <![CDATA[Your guide to King John, the monarch who issued Magna Carta]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/king-john-facts-life-death/ 2023-11-01T14:43:58.000Z 2022-05-19T13:29:36.000Z King John is generally remembered as the villain from the tales of Robin Hood, and the man who was forced to issue Magna Carta. But was he really as bad as legend would have us believe? And what was it about his reign that provoked his subjects to demand such sweeping political reform?

King John: key dates & facts

Born: Around Christmas 1166, or possibly 1167 Died: 18/19 October 1216 Reigned: King of England for 17 years, from 27 May 1199 until his death Coronation: 27 May 1199, Westminster Abbey Parents: Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine Spouses: Isabella of Gloucester and Isabella of Angoulême Children: Five legitimate children, including Henry III, King of England, Richard of Cornwall and Joan, Queen of Scotland, plus several illegitimate children Succeeded by: Henry III

How John became ‘John Lackland’

John was born around Christmas 1166, or possibly 1167. The uncertainty exists because he was the youngest of the eight known children of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, and consequently not regarded as all that important. His father was the most powerful ruler in Europe – King of England, Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou (all by inheritance), and Duke of Aquitaine thanks to his marriage to Eleanor.

Henry’s intention was that this vast empire would be divided after his death, and he designated each of his three older sons as heirs to its different provinces. There was initially no such provision for John, which led to his contemporary nickname ‘Lackland’.

A few years later, when Henry added Ireland to his domains, John was groomed to succeed him there. When the teenaged John finally visited Ireland in 1185, however, he acquitted himself badly, alienating both the native Irish and recent Anglo-Norman settlers.

King John in Ireland: the making of a medieval monster

"It was in Ireland that King John revealed himself as a monster," writes Nicholas Vincent, as he charts the course of the medieval king's descent into evil...

King John. (Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images)

Rebellion against Richard the Lionheart

John’s reputation could have recovered from his youthful misadventures in Ireland; it was his behaviour in the decade that followed that did lasting damage.

By the time Henry II died in 1189, two of his sons had predeceased him, enabling the eldest survivor, Richard, to inherit their father’s empire in its entirety. Richard I almost immediately departed on crusade – earning the nickname ‘Lionheart’ – and during his absence, John stirred up discontent in England and conspired with the king of France, Philip Augustus, to attack Richard’s lands on the continent.

When John heard the news that his brother had been taken prisoner on his return journey and was being held hostage, he threw caution to the wind and came out in open rebellion, telling people that Richard was dead.

To attack the lands of an absent crusader was regarded as despicable, and chroniclers at the time were scathing. They condemned John as a “light-minded youth” and branded his alliance with Philip Augustus “a pact from Hell”. In opposing his own brother, said one writer, John had broken “the laws of nature” and thus became “nature’s enemy”.

Richard was eventually ransomed and returned in 1194 to crush his brother’s rebellion. In the years that followed, John recovered some of his lands, but his reputation remained permanently tarnished.

Read more about Richard the Lionheart

 

King Richard I, aka Richard the Lionheart. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

King John’s accession

In the spring of 1199, Richard was struck in the shoulder by a crossbow bolt as he besieged the castle at Châlus and died from gangrene a few days later. His sudden and unexpected demise triggered a succession crisis, for he had fathered no legitimate children. John was one possible candidate to replace him, but he had a rival in the shape of his nephew, Arthur – the son of his older brother, Geoffrey, who had died in 1186.

The barons of England and Normandy favoured John, but those in Brittany and Anjou preferred the 12-year-old Arthur, who also received the backing of Philip Augustus. After a military standoff that lasted several months, the French king agreed to abandon Arthur and acknowledged John’s right to the entire inheritance, although he demanded the recognition of his superior lordship for the continental lands, and payment of 20,000 marks (£13,333).

King John’s marriages

Immediately after making peace with Philip Augustus, John set out to get married for a second time. His first marriage, celebrated at the start of Richard’s reign (and probably at his brother’s insistence) had been to a woman named Isabella of Gloucester, and had not been a success: she was not crowned with him in May 1199 and their marriage had been annulled by the end of the year.

In the summer of 1200, reportedly at the suggestion of Philip Augustus, John married another Isabella, the daughter and only heir of the count of Angoulême. The acquisition of her lands promised to strengthen John’s position in Aquitaine, so from that point of view this new match made good sense. Politically, however, it was a disaster, because Isabella was already betrothed to a powerful lord named Hugh de Lusignan.

Isabella of Angouleme, queen consort of King John

The reason their wedding had not been celebrated was probably because Isabella was younger than 12, the minimum age the church would permit. John was apparently not bothered by this prohibition and pinched Hugh’s bride-to-be from under his nose.

How King John lost the Angevin empire

The consequences of John’s marriage to Isabella were catastrophic. Hugh de Lusignan and his supporters in Aquitaine rebelled against him and then, after John attempted to strike back, appealed for justice to the French king.

Philip Augustus, delighted for an opportunity to demonstrate the overlordship that his rival had recently admitted, demanded John attend his court in Paris to receive judgement. John refused and the two kings went to war, with Philip again advancing Arthur as John’s replacement.

John scored an early victory in this renewed struggle in August 1202 by capturing Arthur and many of his supporters at Mirebeau, but he was unable to convert it into a peaceful settlement. The fighting continued and, in desperation, the king tried to solve the problem by making his nephew disappear. Soon after his 16th birthday, at Easter 1203, Arthur vanished from his captivity in Rouen Castle, almost certainly murdered on his uncle’s orders, as contemporaries claimed.

His death only made matters worse. A few weeks later, Philip Augustus launched a massive invasion of John’s territories. Anjou fell immediately and Normandy surrendered the following summer, along with the northern part of Aquitaine. Apart from a couple of castles that held out until 1205, the entire northern half of John’s continental empire was lost.

The emergence of ‘bad King John’

John’s treatment of Arthur quickly became notorious because it disregarded a long-established taboo on political killing. In the 12th and 13th centuries, nobles sought to capture their enemies during conflicts, imprisoning them afterwards or releasing them in return for ransom. John, by contrast, repeatedly violated this rule.

King John hunting on horseback (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

In February 1203, shortly before Arthur’s death, the king had ordered more than 20 of the nobles captured at Mirebeau to be taken to Corfe Castle in Dorset, where they starved to death. Later in his reign, other prisoners suffered the same fate – most notably Matilda de Briouze, who died of starvation in a royal dungeon along with her son, William. Such incidents explain why multiple chroniclers described the king as cruel. “He was a very bad man”, wrote the Anonymous of Béthune, “more cruel than all others”.

Contemporaries also condemned John for his lack of mettle. When he made peace with Philip Augustus on disadvantageous terms in 1200, some people took to calling him ‘Soft-sword’. In 1203, he abandoned Normandy without a fight, and this tendency to run away from danger was a repeated feature throughout his career. “No man may trust him”, sang the southern troubadour, Bertran de Born, “for his heart is soft and cowardly”.

The other main charge levelled against John was lechery – specifically, that he preyed on the wives and daughters of his barons. While this is more difficult to prove, personal animosities against the king may explain why certain men, who lacked other obvious motives, fought against him with such implacable fury in the later part of his reign.

Was King John a bad king?

 

King John’s financial extortions

The fundamental complaint against John was financial. Having lost his ancestral lands in France, the king laboured furiously to fund a campaign of reconquest. To this end, he taxed previously exempt groups, such as the Cistercians, and demanded massive sums from his nobles in return for having their inheritances.

He sold justice on an industrial scale, imposing punitive fines for trivial offences, and extracted more money than ever before from his Jewish subjects, imprisoning and torturing them until they paid up.

When the pope, following a row about the appointment of the Archbishop of Canterbury, placed all of England under interdict, John retaliated by seizing all of the Church’s land. This gave an immense boost to his income, albeit at the spiritual cost of excommunication.

As a result of all these expedients, the king’s annual income rocketed from around £25,000 at the start of his reign to a peak of £145,000 in 1211.

King John’s defeat in France

With his war-chests sufficiently full, John launched his continental campaign in early 1214. The king’s own army advanced into French territory from the south, while his allies in the Low Countries – purchased at great expense – invaded from the north. The plan was to compel Philip Augustus to divide his forces.

To that extent, it was successful, as the French king dispatched his son, Louis, to confront John’s army. But as this force approached, John hastily retreated and left the struggle to be decided by his northern allies. In July, Philip clashed with this army at Bouvines, near Lille, and won a great victory. At a stroke, John’s dreams of reconquest were dashed. In October he sailed back to England, his funds exhausted, accompanied by the spectre of defeat.

John’s financial extortions had generated widespread opposition, and on his return he was confronted with demands for reform. The king dodged and delayed throughout the winter, but in the spring of 1215 his opponents lost patience and rose in arms against him. When they seized London in May, John was forced to negotiate.

King John and Magna Carta

In June, the two sides met at Runnymede, near Windsor, where they thrashed out an agreement. Magna Carta, as it soon became known, was a lengthy and wide-ranging promise by John that he and his heirs would rule better in future. Many of its provisions were uncontroversial enough to be included in later reissues, but its original enforcement clause, which effectively allowed the barons to make war on the king if he infringed the charter, was intolerable.

King John seals Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215, as his barons watch on

John probably had no intention of honouring Magna Carta in any case, and secretly asked the pope to annul it. By September 1215, the king and his barons were once again at war.

The first round of this final war went to John. In the autumn, he pummelled the rebel garrison at Rochester Castle into submission and throughout the winter he burned the estates of his enemies across the country.

Read more about Magna Carta

 

Illustration of King John ripping up Magna Carta

How did King John die?

In the spring of 1216, an army of Frenchmen landed in Kent led by Philip’s son, Louis, whom the rebels had invited to take John’s crown. As with their previous encounter, John responded by running away, leaving Louis and his army to occupy London and the south-east of England.

The situation was resolved when John died from dysentery at Newark Castle on the night of 18/19 October 1216. According to the chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall, many people had “dreadful and fantastical visions” of the king that night, the implication being that John had been dragged off to suffer the torments of hell.

A 13th-century manuscript depicting the rumor that King John had been poisoned

John was succeeded by his nine-year-old son, Henry III, whose regents – notably William Marshal – defeated Louis’s supporters in battle in battle and persuaded them to depart by paying off the French prince. They also wooed English rebels back into the fold by reissuing Magna Carta, stripped of its more controversial clauses.

In this way, the great charter became John’s lasting legacy – a document that ensured his oppressions would not be repeated by future rulers, and which continues to symbolise the rights of the subject against the power of a tyrant.

]]> Professor David Carpenter <![CDATA[1215: Magna Carta]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/turning-points-1215-magna-carta/ 2023-10-08T14:05:41.000Z 2021-12-27T07:05:56.000Z The year of Magna Carta, 1215, when an English ruler was first subjected to the law, has resonated down the ages as a landmark in Britain’s constitutional history. The Charter itself still lives. Its most fundamental chapters remain on the Statute Book of the UK as barriers to arbitrary rule. They condemn the denial, sale and delay of justice, and forbid imprisonment and dispossession save by lawful judgement of one’s peers (social equals), or the law of the land.

The Charter was negotiated at Runnymede between 10 and 15 June 1215, with King John riding down each day from Windsor, and the barons encamped in their tents across the meadows beside the Thames. On 15 June, John, tricky to the end, refused more concessions and simply sealed the Charter – “take it or leave it” – thereby cleverly keeping the names of the 25 barons who were to enforce its terms out of the document, this because they had still to be chosen. John hoped the Charter would become no more than a toothless symbol of his generosity to the kingdom; the barons hoped that its terms would be rigorously enforced and indeed extended. The result was civil war.

By September, John had got the pope to quash the Charter. That month, the opposition barons deposed John and offered the throne to Louis, eldest son of King Philip II of France. He came to England in May 1216 and by the time of John’s death in October controlled more than half the kingdom. In the north Alexander II of Scotland had gained Carlisle, and was making good his claims to Cumberland, Westmorland and Northumberland. In Wales, Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, ruler of Gwynedd, had swept through the south and taken the royal bases of Cardigan and Carmarthen.

Yet John’s dynasty survived, and with it, paradoxically, the Charter. Its implantation into English political life was the work of the minority government of John’s son, Henry III, who was only nine on his accession. Magna Carta was also a British document. Both Alexander and Llywelyn had been with the rebels from the start, and both benefited from the Charter’s terms, terms which acknowledged “the law of Wales” and invoked for the Welsh, as for Alexander, the principle of judgement by peers. Ultimately, as Wales and Scotland became part of a United Kingdom, their peoples too were embraced by the Charter’s protections. The Charter, however, was no panacea. Since the clause setting up the 25 barons was left out from post-1215 versions of the document, it had no constitutional means of enforcement. It said nothing about how the king’s ministers were to be chosen, patronage distributed and policy decided, major holes which defined the political battleground of the later middle ages.

Yet the Charter made a profound difference. It clamped down on various sources of revenue. Henceforth the “relief” or inheritance tax paid by an earl or baron was to be £100, not the thousands of pounds sometimes demanded by John. It facilitated the spread of the common law and made justice less open to bargaining or bribery. It gave the gentry concessions they could exploit to make the running of local government more acceptable. Above all it asserted a fundamental principle: the king was subject to the law, the law Magna Carta had made. As a result arbitrary rule became more difficult and resistance to it more legitimate.

1215 in context

Scotland, England and Wales were very different societies, but each nation showed the influence of the Norman Conquest

The island of 1215 was one of contrasts with profound differences in social structure between the uplands of Wales and Scotland and lowland England. Hence the way the English, living in nucleated villages, and eating bread, product of their great corn-growing fields, could stigmatise the Scots as bare-buttocked highlanders and ridicule the Welsh as dwellers in dispersed settlements, who consumed nothing but milk and meat. Yet, in many ways, the peoples of Britain were becoming more alike. The structure of dioceses and parishes, and the houses of Benedictine and Cistercian monks, had spread through the island. The Scottish nobility had been transformed in the 12th century by the kings’ establishment of Anglo-Norman aristrocrats, men of chivalric outlook. The castles, cavalry, armour, seals and documents of the Welsh rulers show how they had been influenced by their Anglo-Norman neighbours. Royal government in Scotland, however, was comparatively decentralised. Wales was divided between competing princes. Only in England was the power of the ruler so insistent and intrusive as to provoke demands for restraints. The grievances dealt with in Magna Carta had a long history. Many were the product of the way kings since the Norman Conquest had manipulated the judicial process and exploited the rights and revenues which came to them from the new tenurial structures introduced by the Norman Conquest. Already in 1100 Henry I’s Coronation Charter dealt (unavailingly) with the issues of relief, widows, and wardships of children later tackled in Magna Carta. This was why the 1100 Charter was brought out again by the opposition to King John. John’s Angevin predecessors were also to blame. His father, Henry II (r1154–89), had extended the royal forest, antagonising wide sections of society. John’s brother, Richard I, between 1194 and 1199, had placed novel financial burdens on the country.The need for money to preserve the continental empire against the power of the king of France was a constant problem facing these kings. Another was that the great landed base brought to monarchy by the Norman conquest had slowly been eroded as land was given away to reward followers. As a result, kings had to exploit other, more politically sensitive, sources of revenue. Of course, the Angevins gave as well as took; they had developed immensely popular legal procedures which lay at the heart of what was later called “the common law”. These were the assizes which the Charter sought to extend not restrict. But here too was a problem, for the new procedures turned on due process of law. No free man was to lose his possessions “unjustly and without judgement”. The year 1215 was the moment when society turned on the king and demanded that he obey his own rules. Early in his reign John suffered two blows, first a rapid inflation for which he was blameless, and then, in 1204, the loss of Normandy. Thereafter he spent “ten furious years” trying to raise the treasure to get Normandy back. The treasure went in an abortive military campaign in France of 1214. The grievances remained and produced Magna Carta.

When the king became a sitting duck

In 1214 John’s long planned campaign to recover his continental empire had ended in disaster with his allies decisively defeated at Bouvines. John returned to England a sitting duck, his treasure spent. Suspicious and untrustworthy, a womaniser and a murderer, he was loathed by many of his barons. His huge financial exactions over several years had antagonised the wider political community. By early 1215 a large group of barons, many from the North, where his rule had seemed particularly severe, were in league, and were demanding reform. They were abetted by Scotland’s King Alexander and Llywelyn of Wales.

John played for time and summoned a council to meet at Oxford towards the end of April. Instead the barons met in arms at Stamford in Lincolnshire, from where on 5 May they renounced their allegiance to the king, the beginning of civil war. The war was transformed within a fortnight by the Londoners letting the baronial rebels into the city – its walls and wealth protected the baronial cause, and made any quick royalist victory impossible. Yet baronial victory too could not be quick. John retained his castles, many commanded by ruthless military experts. Shrewd use of patronage meant he also retained the loyalty of some of the greatest barons. So the result towards the end of May was a truce and the start of the negotiations which ended with the Charter at Runnymede.

The Charter was the product of the way John and his predecessors has ruled since the Norman Conquest. It also reflected the nature of early 13th-century English society, in part through its omissions. Take the place of women in the Charter. They certainly appeared, for important clauses secured for baronial widows their dowers and inheritances and protected them from forced re-marriage by the king. The clause reflected that baronial women did have property rights: they could inherit land; they received as dower a portion (usually a third) of their husbands’ lands on his death. The clause had a real effect and the 13th century was graced by large numbers of baronesses who spent years as widows controlling extensive lands.

Yet the Charter did nothing to alter the inequalities between men and women. Women only inherited in default of brothers. They virtually never held office, and, for all their influence behind the scenes, played virtually no public part in politics. No women featured in the list of those who had counselled John to concede the Charter. The clauses in the Charter itself were designed not to liberate women, but to protect their male children from having their mothers’ property carried off by second husbands.

Peasants oppressed – no change there then

Even less privileged were the peasants. They made up perhaps 75 per cent of the population, half of them “villeins” which meant they were legally unfree. Peasants featured in the Charter – the stipulation that sheriffs should not force men and villages to work on bridges dealt specifically with their predicament. So did the clause which laid down that fines imposed on villeins were to be reasonable and assessed by men of their neighbourhood. To no one, John promised in one of the most famous clauses, would he sell, deny or delay justice. But there lay the rub, for it was the law itself which made half of the peasantry unfree, leaving them excluded from the king’s courts and at their lords’ mercy in anything concerning the terms on which they held their lands. The Charter did nothing to alter this. Indeed, the protection it did afford peasants was exclusively against the oppressions of royal agents. They were protected from the king so that they could be exploited all the better by their lords.

Against its meagre concern for women and peasants, the Charter catered abundantly for the great players. It gave freedom to the Church (holding over a quarter of England’s land), and re-iterated John’s promise that bishops and abbots could be elected free from royal interference, thus dealing with a major grievance. The church was to play a key part in publicising John’s charter and in supporting the later versions of Henry III. London as we have seen, was the great baronial base. Its population early in the 13th century was perhaps as high as 40,000, making it Britain’s largest city. The Charter protected the privileges of all the kingdom’s cities and boroughs but London’s alone were mentioned by name, and it received an additional promise that it should be free from arbitrary taxation.

Most striking of all was the Charter’s treatment of the knights. In the 1200s there were about 5,000 of them in England’s counties, the backbone of local government. One contemporary chronicler, Ralph of Coggeshall, averred that all the barons who remained loyal to John were deserted by their knights, an exaggeration but it shows the flow of the tide. The charter laid down that the king’s judges hearing assizes in the counties were to sit with four knights of each county, elected in the county court, a testimony both to the self-confidence of the knights and their determination to control the workings of justice in the localities. Another clause empowered 12 knights in each county, again elected in the county court, to investigate and abolish the evil practices of the king’s local officials. The zeal with which the knights went about their work was a major factor in John’s decision to abandon the Charter.

Above all, the Charter met the grievances of the earls and barons. There were around a dozen earls in the early 13th century, and 100 to 200 barons. Tiny numbers, but they controlled a large part of the country’s wealth, and had mostly been in rebellion. Not surprisingly, they stamped their mark on the Charter’s early clauses, making it very much a baronial document. Thus chapter two, as we have seen, fixed the relief of earls and barons at £100. Chapter four protected baronial lands from exploitation by the king when they were in his hands during the minority of an heir. Chapter 14 vested the power to consent to taxation in the hands of a largely baronial assembly. Indeed, only the greater barons, lay and ecclesiastical, were to receive individual letters of summons to it. The implication was that the earls and barons, commanding the allegiances of their tenants, could answer for the realm.

The Charter thus reflected the structures of power in English society. It was also the product of ideas. The king should govern lawfully for the good of his people. He should only punish individuals having obtained a judgement of their peers. A king who defied these principles could be regarded as a tyrant, and might be restrained or even deposed. By 1215 such concepts had a long pedigree and were commonplace amongst John’s opponents. They were sharpened and refined by the archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, an internationally famous academic, who played a key role in brokering the 1215 settlement, and in supporting the Charter thereafter. It was these ideas, enshrined in the Charter, which formed its essential legacy, a legacy first for England, and ultimately for the United Kingdom as a whole.

History facts: 1200–1249

£130,000: John’s treasure in 1213 £202 a year: the average baronial income 1160–1220 £15-£20 a year: the 3xpected income of a knight 1216–72 1 penny: minimum daily wage for a labourer in the 13th century

Key years: other important events in the first half of the 13th century

1204 – John loses Normandy. Normandy was finally conquered by Philip II of France (his successful siege of Chateau Gaillard marked the end of John’s rule). This was a pivotal event in European history – now the cross-channel Anglo-Norman state was over. King and barons, like everyone else, would be born and live only in England. They had far more time for the affairs of Britain. The English conquest of Wales in the 1280s and near conquest of Scotland around 1300 was the result.

1216– Llywelyn dominates Wales. Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, the ruler of Gwynedd, established his dominance over native Wales. His vision was of a principality in which he alone did homage to the king of England while the other native rulers did homage to him, in effect as prince of Wales. Two years later, in the Treaty of Worcester, Llywelyn’s territorial conquests and practical (if not theoretical) supremacy were recognised by the king of England.

1217 – The throne is secured for John’s son. Two victories, the first at Lincoln, the second at sea off Sandwich, secured the throne for John’s son, Henry III (below). Prince Louis, eldest son of Philip II of France, resigned his claims and returned to France. Had a French king ruled England, the political structure of Europe would have developed on incalculably different lines.

1221 – The friars move in. The first Dominicans arrived in England, soon followed by the Franciscans. By c 1300 there were more than 100 Dominican and Franciscan houses in Britain. With an emphasis on poverty, preaching and university study, they transformed the religious life of the island. A sermon by an educated preacher now became an everyday part of town life.

1225 – Magna Carta is re-issued. In 1216 and 1217 the minority government of Henry III had reversed John’s policies and issued new versions of Magna Carta. In 1225, yet another version was issued in return for a great tax which saved the dynasty’s continental possessions in Gascony. The 1225 version of the Charter became definitive, the one confirmed by subsequent kings, clauses of which are on the Statute Book today.

1236 – A strong queen emerges. Henry III married Eleanor of Provence, laying the foundations for a remarkable resurgence of queenly power. No queen consort had played a role in English political life since Eleanor of Aquitaine in the 1160s. Eleanor of Provence, made of far sterner stuff than her indulgent husband, changed that. Supporting, and supported by, her relations from Savoy, whom Henry established in England, she was a central figure in the politics of the reign.

1237 – The Treaty of York. Alexander II of Scotland resigned claims to the northern counties of England which Scottish kings had pursued for 200 years. In return he gained substantial territory in Tynedale. He consolidated the Anglo-Scottish peace (it lasted from 1217 to 1296), and was free to concentrate on the conquest of Galloway, where he had taken armies in 1235 and 1236, thus extending the reach of the Scottish state.

1240 – The end of a great Welsh leader. This year marked the death of Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, justly called in his own lifetime Llywelyn the Great. His death ushered in a period in which the king of England recovered his power in Wales. But Llywelyn’s vision of a Welsh principality under a single native ruler, the prince of Wales, was to be realised, if only for the ten years between 1267 and 1277, by his grandson.

1249 – Scotland loses King Alexander. King Alexander II of Scotland (who had come to the throne aged 16 in 1214) died on an expedition to wrest lordship of the isle of Man and the Hebrides from the king of Norway. The expedition summed up the way Alexander had re-orientated Scottish kingship. It would expand not south into England but north and west. The acquisition of Man and Hebrides was ultimately achieved by his son, Alexander III, securing Scotland’s western borders. Together they had constructed a state strong enough to resist English attempts at conquest.

More turning points in British history

Read next: 1295: Edward I consolidates English rule Go back: 1171: The English invasion of Ireland

Part six in our 20-part series looking at decisive moments of the last 1,000 years in British history explores 1200–1249

This article was first published in the August 2006 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Is 15 June 1215 the true date of Magna Carta? Two historians debate]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/magna-carta-when-signed-date-king-john-debate/ 2024-12-27T17:44:56.000Z 2021-06-15T05:02:00.000Z The sealing of Magna Carta was a turning point in British constitutional history, but are we marking its anniversary on the correct date? Was it really sealed on 15 June 1215? Two historians debate...

Yes, it is – Professor David Carpenter

The date 15 June seems fixed by Magna Carta itself. King John ends the Charter by stating that it has been “given by our hand in the meadow which is called Runnymede between Windsor and Staines on the 15th day of June in the 17th year of our reign”.

This conclusion appears in all four surviving originals of the 1215 Magna Carta, and in the letter issued by Archbishop Langton and his fellow bishops setting out and guaranteeing the final text. The “given by the hand” formula is standard in royal charters: it indicates the day and place on which the ‘giver’ – either the king or a chancery official – authorised the drawing up and sealing of the charter in question, perhaps indeed by handing the final draft to the clerk who was going to write it out. King John, therefore, authorised the writing out and sealing of Magna Carta at Runnymede on 15 June 1215.

That all seems clear enough, yet distinguished historians have argued that the 15 June date is nothing more than “fictitious”. In their view, it took several more days for the details of the charter to be hammered out, and it was not till 19 June that John authorised its issue. If they are to be believed, we should not be celebrating the anniversary of Magna Carta on 15 June.

The argument for a later date for Magna Carta was propounded by Sir James Holt in both the first and second editions (1965/1992) of his magisterial book Magna Carta. His opinions have not gone unchallenged. In a paper in 1996 and in my own book Magna Carta, recently published in the Penguin Classics series, I have sought to vindicate the 15 June date. The debate, however, continues.

In their introduction to the third edition of Holt’s Magna Carta, which appears this year, George Garnett and John Hudson – two of Holt’s former pupils – have revived and reinforced his arguments. Garnett and Hudson are formidable historians. Their arguments are powerful, and need to be taken very seriously. Everyone, moreover, would agree that the evidence permits differences of view, and prevents absolute conclusions.

If it is any comfort to those gathering this year at Runnymede, I still think the most likely scenario is that John did indeed authorise the writing out and sealing of Magna Carta at Runnymede on 15 June 1215. But others may come to a different conclusion.

What, then, are the arguments against the 15 June date? The most central is that it was not till 19 June that peace was actually made between John and his opponents. On this day, it’s said that John’s opponents reentered his allegiance. This, so the argument goes, is incompatible with the charter being agreed on the 15th, for, if it was, there is an inexplicable hiatus before the peace on the 19th.

The two events must surely have been more or less simultaneous, since John would never have granted the charter to those still in rebellion against him. Magna Carta, therefore, cannot have been issued earlier than 19 June. How, then, to explain its 15 June date? Here it is worth saying that chancery practice was not set in stone. Indeed, it is possible that the date in the charter recorded not its authorization, but some other event. This is what Garnett and Hudson believe.

Their reconstruction is as follows: On 10 June, King John renewed the truce covering the negotiations, until the morning of 15 June. This created a ‘deadline’ for the reaching of some sort of preliminary deal. The deal was indeed achieved, and can be seen in a “penultimate draft of the charter” (preserved in a later copy) dated to 15 June, and “given” by John not at Runnymede, but at Windsor.

The charter was now in place, however much there was still disagreement over some details. It was this “penultimate draft” that gave its date to the charter, although negotiations continued until a final settlement was reached on the 19th. As evidence for their continuation, Garnett and Hudson cite a later copy of  the charter, which bears the date 16 June and still has detailed differences from the final authorised version.

PA-22188068-2_0_0-f699ef1

Set out like this, the arguments against 15 June seem formidable, yet I believe they can all be countered. Take the truce being prolonged on 10 June until the morning of the 15th. This seems to fit as well, if not better, with the deadline being for the charter itself to be agreed, rather than simply some sort of preliminary deal.

One also wonders why four days later, on the 19th, it was thought worth recalling, in the date of Magna Carta, what had happened on the 15th. After all, the 15th, in Garnett and Hudson’s own account, had been a day of failure; a day when it had not been possible to reach a final agreement. Debate continued over the size of the baronial inheritance tax, the scope of the chapter on fines, and the ban against John appealing to the pope.

These were important and contentious issues. In Garnett and Hudson’s scenario it took another four days before agreement could be reached. It is hard to see why, when that at last happened on the 19th, the charter was given the date of “some sort of preliminary deal” four days earlier rather than the date of the final deal itself.

It is also difficult to see how the “penultimate draft” (if indeed it was that) could have been taken as the authorisation of the final charter, thus providing another reason for preserving its date. There are significant differences between the two: on the final charter the baronial inheritance tax is raised from 100 marks to £100; the chapter on fines is widened in scope, and most importantly of all, the king is no longer banned from appealing to the pope.

There is no problem about these details having been changed on the morning of the 15th, but once they were and the charter was agreed, John must then have authorised its issue in its final form. If that authorization took place later than 15 June, why does the charter not say so? It is not as though the dating clauses in royal charters were frozen and formulaic. The place and date changed constantly. Yet at Runnymede, if Garnett and Hudson are right, the document whose text was solemnly guaranteed by Langton and the bishops, was given the correct place for its authorisation (Runnymede) but was left with the wrong date – one four days too soon. As I have said, chancery practice varied, and such a contradiction is not impossible, but no strong grounds have been advanced for thinking it took place in this case.

If, then, there remain reasons for accepting the 15 June date for Magna Carta, how does one explain the four-day delay before the peace? My explanation here is that, having accepted the charter on the 15th, the baronial leaders found it very difficult to bring the general body of barons and knights encamped at Runnymede in behind the settlement. Hence the hiatus.

Garnett and Hudson discount this hypothesis. The leaders, they point out, were not isolated, and were well able to carry their followers with them. Yet this idea is at odds with the Crowland chronicler, who says that some of the Northerners, on the pretense they had not been at Runnymede, went home and resumed the war. Evidently they were dissatisfied with the deal struck.

Indeed, so little was there coherence and consensus, that at the time John authorised Magna Carta, the barons had been unable to choose the 25 of their number who were to enforce it. As the charter makes clear, that choice was still in the future. In these circumstances, it is easy to believe that it was not till the 19thh, after indeed John had made further concessions, that peace could at last be proclaimed.

Why then was John prepared to authorise and issue the charter before the peace? Surely he would never have granted liberties to those still in rebellion against him. But in authorising the charter on 15 June, he was doing no such thing. The nearest parallel is 1216 when his son, Henry III, issued his first version of Magna Carta, although half the kingdom was in rebellion against him. Neither king was making concessions to rebels. It was only when rebels returned to the king’s allegiance that they would enjoy the liberties granted in the charter.

After the baronial negotiators at Runnymede had agreed the charter’s terms, John perhaps assumed that the peace would go through at once and without difficulty. But, deeply suspicious as he was, perhaps he also had doubts – hence the stipulation that it would only be “after the peace” that he would dismiss his mercenaries. John hoped and believed the charter would bring peace, but if it was rejected he would at least have split the baronial party, embellished his reputation as a benevolent king, and established the best possible position for continuing the war.

A possible sequence of events on 15 June is thus as follows: early in the morning (sunrise was before 5am), John moved from his base at Windsor castle to Runnymede, three-and-a-half miles away. The negotiations were concluded and John authorised, or “gave by his hand”, the final charter. If this was before noon, there was just time for the clerks to write out the charter (it reportedly took about eight hours) before the end of the day, even if they were based at Windsor rather than at Runnymede.

On the other hand, it is equally possible that finished charters did not appear until the 16th. That would certainly have been the case if the negotiations did not conclude until late on the day before.

This brings us finally to the question of why there are copies (as opposed to originals) of the charter that bear the date 16 June. Many later copies were made of the 1215 charter – they are found in monastic registers, chronicles and legal collections. Some of these copies are of the final, authorised version, while others are variants containing what seem to be material from drafts. Both types can have as a date either 15 or 16 June.

The explanation for 16 June is most probably that it was the date given to unofficial copies of the charter written up on that day. Occasionally even in official chancery practice, royal documents bore the date on which they were written, rather than the date on which they were authorised. That one copy with a 16 June date still has the baronial inheritance tax at 100 marks rather than £100 could indicate discontent with the settlement that had just been reached.

On the other hand, it is just as likely that unofficial copies were made from draft material without any precise awareness of how it differed from the final, authorised version. Whatever the truth here, variant copies with the 16 June date provide a slender basis for thinking that formal negotiations were still ongoing.

A great debt is owed to Garnett and Hudson for reviving and re-invigorating the debate over the date of Magna Carta. I hope many will be encouraged to test out the rival hypotheses. I cannot give any absolute assurance that the great and good are marking the anniversary of Magna Carta on the right day. On the balance of the evidence and argument, however, I believe that yes, they are!

David Carpenter is a professor of medieval history at King's College London, and author of Magna Carta (Penguin Classics), which came out in paperback in January. To find out more, click here.

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No, it is not – Professor George Garnett

As Jim Holt knew well from his experiences in the army during the Second World War, when you are under sustained attack it is very important to be in the right company. Redoubtable an historian though David Carpenter is, most especially of Magna Carta, it is difficult to conceive of a more formidable comrade-in-arms than Holt. In that, John Hudson [co-author of Magna Carta, 2015] and I take some comfort.

When we were invited to produce a third edition of Holt’s classic work, we decided that we would make no changes to his text, other than to correct obvious mistakes. We would confine alterations, amplifications, disagreements, and new directions to an extensive editors’ introduction. There, we would be at liberty to differ from the text that he had last revised in 1992.

Like Holt himself, we were much impressed with David Carpenter’s recent work on Magna Carta, which has, since we wrote the introduction, culminated in his massive yet immensely readable book. Unlike Holt, we were initially minded to agree with Carpenter about a central aspect of this work – his re-dating of the document itself. This might appear to be a matter of pedantic, scholarly detail; but it is not. On the question of the date depends an assessment of how negotiations proceeded in those 10 crucial days approaching midsummer 1215 – days for which the chronicle record is strikingly sketchy.

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Carpenter’s meticulously argued revision all seemed so beautifully simple: the date in the dating clause of the extant engrossments of 1215 was the date of the document, Monday 15 June 1215. When something seems simple and obvious once it has been explained, it is generally right. On this particular issue, we envisaged that we would be disagreeing with Holt in our introduction, rather than elaborating or supplementing him.

But as all historians know well, there is all the difference in the world between finding something plausible on reading it, and formulating an argument on paper. There is no better (because no more painful) way of thinking something through. At this point I should come clean, and admit that the section of our introduction about dating was written by me (though – like this response – read, criticised, and approved by John Hudson), so I must take primary responsibility for it. And the more I agonised and reformulated, the more I thought that Holt was right after all. This is why.

A charter was envisaged as the diplomatic form of the settlement in that much amended, apparently incomplete, but sealed (though undated) negotiating document now known as the ‘Articles of the Barons’. The articles takes the form of a petition, not a charter. Stephen Langton appears to have stuffed it into his pocket – or whatever passed for the archbishop of Canterbury’s pocket in the 13th century– as a souvenir after it had been superseded in the rush of events. For complicated reasons it is likely (though not certain) that this document was sealed on the king’s behalf on Wednesday 10 June, although it was quite unprecedented for petitions to the king to be sealed on the king’s behalf.

The point was to prove that the king had accepted this statement of capitula (‘heads’, though now by scholarly convention ‘articles’) of agreement, as the basis for further negotiation. The document was the work of a single scribe – very probably a royal Chancery scribe – and it was evidently the product of a great deal of previous haggling. There are no scratchings out, but the scribe left space for insertions, and he evidently laid it out in such a way as to make it easy for readers to find particular chapters quickly.

It was therefore a late draft, but designed to facilitate further work. For whatever reason, there was no time or inclination to draw up a fairer copy for sealing. Everyone was in far too much of a hurry.

Now although it is not absolutely certain that 10 June was the date of the articles, it is certain that on that day the king prolonged a truce for his opponents until the morning of 15 June. Truces were usually measured in units of whole days. That this one was not suggests that on 10 June, as the articles was probably being sealed at Runnymede, it was anticipated that something dramatic would have happened (or not) by midday at the latest on 15 June.

By inference, the purpose of the truce was to enable negotiations to proceed only up to that deadline, on the basis of the petition that the king had unprecedentedly allowed to be sealed. The reason why that particular deadline had been set so punctiliously is now irrecoverable. It may well have seemed sacrilegious to stipulate that a truce should expire on Trinity Sunday, but that would not explain why the truce should not be allowed to run for the whole of the following day. After all, the previous truce, issued on 8 June, had been set to expire at the end of 11 June. Its replacement’s expiry point on 15 June must have been agreed at Runnymede on 10 June. So must the fact that the articles twice mentioned that the envisaged agreement between the king and his opponents would be recorded in a charter.

The text of that charter, we contend, was the draft copied into a late 13th-century statute book that VH Galbraith unearthed in California in 1967. It is demonstrably a draft from June 1215, because it contains several provisions that are intermediate between those in the articles and those in the surviving engrossments of Magna Carta of 1215.

Moreover, the scribe’s minor errors reveal that he was copying unthinkingly, not confecting something new. Like those engrossments, its dating clause records that it was “given by [King John’s] own hand” on 15 June, but unlike them, at Windsor – presumably in the royal castle – rather than “on the meadow which is called Runnymede between Windsor and Staines”. We have suggested that this was the fruit of the negotiations covered by the truce issued on 10 June.

These had, in various respects, moved on from the details hammered out in the articles, and the whole draft settlement had by now been recast in charter form, as the articles had ordained. If I am right, this draft was ready by the expiry of the truce on the morning of 15 June. Stephen Langton could slip the now superseded articles into his pocket.

But if the date in a later copy is to be taken seriously, why discount the date given in all four surviving engrossments of 1215? One reason is a matter of practicality. Many of the details shared by all those extant engrossments represent further amendments to the draft text dated to Windsor on 15 June, and if I am right, probably in the morning. These details are likely to have been the subject of very intense negotiation in the following hours and days.

We know that John was at Windsor Castle to celebrate Trinity Sunday on 14 June; that he commuted to Runnymede, three-and-a-half miles away, on 15 June, presumably after lunch, and that he returned to Windsor that evening. Would it have been possible during that very busy day to have negotiated on the basis of the draft text, and agreed substantial and detailed revisions to it, to be authorised in an amended text cleared for issue by the king on the meadow at Runnymede that very same afternoon?

The most authoritative estimate of the time needed to copy out an engrossment of Magna Carta is eight hours, so it is inconceivable that any were ready for sealing that day on the meadow, even if we imagine that the Chancery clerks carted all their paraphernalia back and forth with them in the king’s train.

The physical impossibility of producing engrossments in the time available does not in itself preclude the agreement that afternoon to amendments to the morning’s draft. Yet despite the propensity of negotiations to accelerate towards their conclusion, and the possibility of a sudden breakthrough, it seems highly unlikely that so much could have been settled in a few hours, given the eyeball-to-eyeball nature of the wrangling which had been going on for many days.

Furthermore, another 13th-century copy of a putative draft, added to a contemporary legal collection, is dated 16 June; it shares one, and only one, of the intermediate variants of the Windsor draft. All the other variants of the previous day’s draft have been amended to the form found in the final engrossments. If the date may be trusted, and if the copy is reliable – palaeographers date the hand in which it is added to the collection early in the century, so it is a very early copy – this suggests that negotiation continued into 16 June, by which point some of the contentious provisional settlements of the previous day had been further amended.

It is difficult to conceive of circumstances in which a version antecedent to the final one should have been produced on the day after the final one had been definitively settled. But before too much weight is placed on this evidence, it needs to be repeated that the date in this copy is written in larger letters than the rest of the clause, and appears to have been inserted by a different scribe.

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The other reason for rejecting 15 June as the date on which the final text of Magna Carta was authorised is not a matter of textual detail: however far negotiations had got by that date, there was still no formal peace between the king and his opponents. They had renounced their bond of faith with John, and so were not his men. They were assembled in arms on the meadow. They would not become his men again until Friday 19 June, when the “firm peace” first predicted in a writ of 18 June (and therefore already pre-arranged by that date) was established by the renewal of homage.

There is plenty of evidence that 19 June was the day on which homage was re-done, and therefore peace renewed. It remains, as Holt argued, inconceivable that John would have authorised the issue of the charter while his enemies were, formally speaking, still at war with him (though they would also have needed reassurance that once they had renewed their homage, John would not be able to renege on the agreed charter).

The oath prescribed in cap 63 Magna Carta, to be taken by the barons as well as the king, secured the terms of the settlement. Cap 62, which provides a pardon for all beaches of peace committed between Easter 1215 and the “re-establishment of peace”, strongly implies that these oaths were sworn only after the renewal of homage. If all this is true, and the final text was authorised on 19 June, the question remains why it preserved the Windsor draft Charter’s date of 15 June, if not its place.

The answer must be that the draft charter was accepted on 15 June as the basis for the settlement. This had not happened in Windsor Castle, where the draft was written up, but at Runnymede in the afternoon, where John had accepted the articles five days before. The articles had now been reformulated as a charter, as John’s opponents had long been demanding, but the fine-tuning that remained to be done took several further days, while other contentious matters not covered by the charter  – castles, hostages, etc – were also being thrashed out.

It is striking that most of the last-minute alterations incorporated in the charter shifted the terms in the king’s favour, so he evidently had skillful negotiators acting on his behalf. When these parallel negotiations had been completed, the final version of the charter was retrospectively dated from the point at which the draft had been accepted as the basis of the settlement in the requisite charter form. The Windsor draft thus played the part of a heavily revised articles, accepted by both sides as something approaching the final terms of the settlement. Unlike the articles, it was dated.

By 15 June, negotiations had reached a stage that rendered unnecessary the renewal of the truce that had expired that morning. The retrospective dating of the final charter served to bridge the gap between the acceptance of the Windsor draft at Runnymede on the afternoon of 15 June and the final settlement – a gap during which the refinement of the terms continued.

David Carpenter himself seems to accept something of the sort, when he writes that on 15 June “[t]he Charter was now in place, however much there was still disagreement over some details”. Adamant as he is that there was no “original”, it is difficult to conceive precisely what form of charter was, in his view, “now in place” on 15 June. Nevertheless, thanks to his unearthing of numerous later copies of the 1215 charter, it may well be possible to re-construct some of the details of these intense negotiations, if some of the variations can be interpreted as evidence of intermediate drafting. As Holt wrote in 1992, “[d]raft versions of the Charter constitute the most intriguing problem of all.” But there is no space to begin that exploration here.

One of the lessons of this anniversary year is that key pieces of evidence can still come to light – a whole engrossment of the reissue of 1300 was found by Nicholas Vincent in Kent Record Office. It may well be that something else will, and that it will demonstrate either that David Carpenter is right, or that I am right, or that neither of us is right! What we should celebrate is the interest the anniversary has provoked in a type of medieval history that has been dismissed by some current historians as outdated, indeed obsolete – the sort of thing in which Victorians were interested, and which we sophisticated moderns should have moved beyond.

What we have been reminded about is how central these matters were to the way in which people thought in 13th-century England. And the current disagreement between David Carpenter and myself demonstrates that many important questions remain to be settled; that there is still much work to be done. Attempting to settle them will reveal still more about medieval political thinking and practice.

George Garnett is a professor of medieval history at the University of Oxford. He is the co-author (with John Hudson) of a revised edition of John Holt's classic study of Magna Carta

This article was first published on HistoryExtra in June 2015

]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Was King John murdered?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/was-king-john-murdered/ 2025-02-14T14:18:42.000Z 2021-04-09T08:34:21.000Z In October 1216 the king of England, travelling across country with what remained of his followers, stopped for a night’s rest at the abbey of Swineshead, deep in the Lincolnshire Fens. It had been hard going and he’d lost half of his baggage train in the treacherous fenland.

The abbey was thrown into disarray by his arrival. Its residents scrambled to find accommodation and food for the king and his men, painfully aware that King John brought civil war to their doorstep.

At the same time as the king demanded hospitality, Louis of France – attempting to seize John’s kingdom at the head of a determined force of rebel English barons – was laying siege to Dover Castle. The French prince had already received the submission of London and Winchester, and besieged the castles at Windsor and Lincoln. John had not faced him in battle, retreating north in the hope of regrouping his forces.

The abbot would hardly have wanted to host John, even in better times. The king had a reputation for unpredictable cruelty and malicious spite. It was widely rumoured that he had killed his nephew Arthur with his own hands – certainly the young prince, a rival claimant for the English throne, had died while in John’s keeping.

The king had a nasty habit of demanding hostages from his own nobles as a guarantee of their loyalty. In 1208 one noblewoman, Matilda de Briouze, had refused to hand over her eldest son for fear that he would meet the same fate as Arthur. Within two years the family had been destroyed. Matilda’s husband was outlawed and forced into exile, where he died. John arrested and imprisoned Matilda and her son, and starved them to death.

Sitting at dinner in Swineshead Abbey, John asked a wary monk how much a loaf of bread cost. No more than a halfpenny, he was told, and the king smiled humourlessly. “What good value,” he murmured. “But if I live, in half a year’s time this same loaf will cost as much as 20 shillings. I swear it.” The monk was aghast. John’s remark made no sense – or if it did, it meant famine and starvation, the ruin of his people. He stared at the king, and thought he would rather die than witness John’s threat come to pass.

The monk went to his abbot and was confessed of his sins. Then he went into the abbey garden and found a toad – the only source of poison he could think of. He pricked the toad with a brooch pin, and gathered the white fluid that oozed out of its skin into a cup. Then he filled the cup with strong ale and took it to the king, offering him the old English toast: “wassail!” Ever suspicious, John told the monk to drink first, and he did. Then John drank.

Bufotoxin, the poison produced by toads, can stop the heart or set it racing. It causes nausea, vomiting, seizures, pain and hallucinations – and death. There is no known antidote. The monk left the king and went directly to the abbey infirmary. In great pain, John demanded to know where he was and received the news that the monk had died. The king panicked and demanded that they bind up his swollen stomach. Hours later, he too was dead.

So goes the story of King John’s untimely death, as told in the Brut Chronicle of English history, written towards the end of the 13th century. As the pages of the Brut tell us, the king was remembered as a hated figure, a tyrant, the man who had been made to seal Magna Carta and then tried to annul it, denying the English their ancient rights of justice and the law.

But John’s sudden demise marked a turning point – a dramatic change in the course of the civil war between the rebel barons and the king’s supporters. Men who had despaired of John were willing to back the cause of his son Henry, who was nine years old. And when Prince Louis’ forces were defeated at the battle of Lincoln in 1217, Louis was paid to renounce his claim and return to France.

The rebels pledged allegiance to Henry III, and were forgiven. Magna Carta was reissued in the new king’s name and it became iconic in English politics, repeatedly reissued by Henry III and later kings, enforced by rebellious barons. It was a potent symbol of the limitations of royal power, the refusal of the English people ever to submit to tyranny.

The act of a hero

Without John’s death, everything might have been different. By killing his king, the anonymous monk released England from the clutches of a tyrant, and opened the way to a new settlement, a permanent shift in the balance of power between the king and his people. It was the act of a hero: bravely undertaken for the greater good.

But John wasn’t murdered. It’s true that he visited Swineshead Abbey on his last journey. But he was sick, with dysentery, and struggled on as far as Newark, where he died on the night of 18/19 October, after making a will and nominating a council to support the claims of his son Henry. One historian writing at the time said that John had made himself ill with his “pernicious gluttony”. Others, writing in the following decade, declared that John’s death was the inevitable judgment of God on his sins. But they all agreed on one thing: King John died of dysentery in Newark.

And yet when the vivid story of John’s murder at the hands of the Swineshead monk appeared in the chronicles, perhaps 50 years later, it was suddenly everywhere – in histories written in Latin, French and English; in popular stories, poems and songs. One learned Latin historian in the 14th century said that, while John had died at Newark, “popular rumour” believed otherwise, and then he told the whole tale in detail. Even the historian who knew it to be false couldn’t resist it – and many others simply presented it as fact.

A sumptuously illustrated manuscript created towards the end of the 13th century, now in the British Library, depicts the kings of England from Edward the Confessor to Edward I. In its picture of John, the king stares suspiciously at the poisoned cup proffered by a nervous monk.

John’s murder had become the defining event of his reign: the just punishment of a tyrant, and an act of national salvation, carried out by a patriotic subject.

Righteous rebels?

The success of this story is important, and revealing. That’s because it tells us just as much about the English people’s evolving attitudes towards their kings, as it does about the death of John.

Kings were anointed with holy oil at their coronation. They were God’s representatives on Earth, placed in supreme authority to rule over their subjects. When John faced his baronial opponents he was supported by the pope, who excommunicated the rebels for resisting their rightful king.

But the rebels did not believe that they were doing wrong. They had renounced their homage to John in response to his abuses – his arbitrary exactions and punishments, his manipulation of the laws to destroy those who opposed him, his refusal to accept the counsel and advice of his greatest magnates. They had offered their allegiance to Louis, an alternative claimant – a man of royal blood, married to a granddaughter of Henry II – because of their belief in the essential nature of kingship. The rebels could not envisage England without a king. But they demanded that their king uphold law and justice.

The events of John’s reign were a beginning, the start of real resistance to abuses of kingship. There had been wars before, but they had always been openly self-interested, a matter of rival claimants’ attempts to seize power for themselves. Now, for the first time, the English went to war over an idea of what English government and kingship should be.

As the 13th century wore on, this idea of kingship – authority by consent of the people, subject to the laws enshrined in Magna Carta – became embedded in English politics. Political awareness spread far beyond the royal court and the greatest nobility: people in every town, village and parish church heard Magna Carta proclaimed, and they expected the king to uphold it.

Guttering flames

In 1253 Henry III had been repeatedly denied grants of taxation by parliament, and he was forced to reassert his support of the charter. He and all the great men of the realm pronounced an oath that placed a sentence of excommunication on anyone who broke the terms of Magna Carta. Standing in a circle holding lit candles, they threw them to the ground, so that the flames guttered out and smoke rose from the floor, while bells were rung. “So let any who break this oath be extinguished and stink in hell,” they intoned. The king made his own promise: “So help me God, I will faithfully keep all these things inviolate, as I am a man, as I am a Christian, as I am a knight, and as I am a crowned and anointed king.” This pronouncement was read out in all the parish churches in England, so that everyone in the land could hear it.

Yet no matter how earnest Henry’s promises and pronouncements, they weren’t enough to placate his persistently rebellious barons. And when opposition to his rule finally coalesced into the Barons’ Wars of the 1260s, ordinary people – far more politically active than they were at the beginning of the century – joined the cause. As the two sides squared up in an increasingly bitter conflict, the barons’ leader, Simon de Montfort, was heralded as a saviour of the English people. And when the barons defeated the king’s forces at the battle of Lewes in 1264, a long poem celebrated their victory, describing how they had “fought for England” against Henry’s tyranny and injustice.

Martyrdom of a rebel

But the rebels’ triumph was short-lived. The following year, at the battle of Evesham, the royalists exacted revenge, slaughtering Simon de Montfort and many of his supporters on the field. Such was the enmity between the combatants that Montfort’s body was mutilated and torn apart. The king’s forces then pursued and killed as many rebels as they could. One witness wrote of the slaughter of a group who had sought sanctuary in a church, remarking that the floor was so deep in blood it flowed down into the crypt.

The horrors of 1265 lodged themselves in popular memory for a very long time. As late as the following century, poems and songs lamenting the loss of Simon de Montfort were copied into manuscripts. This had not just been a struggle between powerful noblemen. Village preachers had taken up the cause and farmers and tradesmen had joined in battle alongside their lords. A few days after Evesham, villagers of Peatling Magna, a small parish in Leicestershire, attacked the royalist baggage train, accusing the party of “treason and other heinous offences because they were against the welfare of the community of the realm and against the barons”.

De Montfort was hailed as a martyr, a man who had died in a holy cause, fighting for the English people. His death was a shocking break with custom. Not since the battle of Hastings in 1066 had any great English nobleman been killed on the field of battle. Now, powerful men were putting themselves in mortal danger, dying for “the whole community of the realm”. It was the most potent of ideas, and it changed English history.

So English politics looked very different by the time the story of John’s murder appeared in the chronicles, 60 or 70 years after his death. No longer the preserve of a tiny minority of the nobility, the institution of parliament was growing in power and reach, while public awareness of matters of governance, law and justice had penetrated to every town and village in the country, to every parish church, smithy, pub and market square. The tale of John’s poisoning must have come from those places, from ordinary people, in conversations long lost to us.

It began as a rumour, was elaborated and circulated. It gained in details and in drama – and then, finally, it reached into the written record. It was a direct contradiction of known history, but was a tale too compelling to ignore, too convincing to dismiss.

When Edward II was crowned in 1308, he was made to swear a new oath to his people: “To maintain and preserve the laws and rightful customs which the community of the realm shall have chosen.” Within two months, enraged with Edward’s promotion of his favourite, Piers Gaveston, the Earl of Lincoln led the barons of the realm in a statement of their position: “Honour and oath of allegiance are more in respect of the crown than in respect of the king’s person.” If the king should fail to honour the dignity of the crown, if he appears “not to be guided by reason”, then their duty is to the crown, not to the king. Two years later, the barons added that “unless the king granted their requests they would not have him for king”, for “with the breaker of faith, faith may be broken”.

In 1327 Edward II was deposed by parliament, with the consent of “all the people”. The medal struck to mark his young son Edward III’s coronation bore a new legend: Populi dat iura voluntas: ‘The will of the people makes the law.’ The people of England had come to believe they had the right to judge their king – just as they had created, and believed, the story that one anonymous monk had judged and executed a king more than a century before.

Laura Ashe specialises in the literature, history and culture of medieval England at the University of Oxford. Her books include Richard II: A Brittle Glory (Allen Lane, 2016)

This article was first published in the July 2017 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[King John and the French invasion]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/where-history-happened-king-john-and-the-french-invasion/ 2023-10-16T13:36:06.000Z 2021-03-30T10:00:00.000Z When Richard the Lionheart was killed by a crossbow bolt in France in April 1199, a French chronicler, no friend of the English monarch, wrote: “God visited the kingdom of the French, for King Richard died.” Richard had been a feared and victorious enemy of France, and few believed that his younger brother and successor, John, would be a match for the formidable and experienced French king Philip II, known as Augustus. As an archbishop presciently despaired on hearing of Richard’s death: “What hope remains to us now? There is none, for, after him, I can see nobody to defend the kingdom. The French will overrun us, and there will be no one to resist them.” When John died in 1216, more than one-third of England, including the capital, was under French rule.

King John’s reign started out promisingly enough, helped by the relatively peaceful state of his lands in England and France (known as the Angevin empire, these extensive territories bisected France from Normandy to the Pyrenees). John had quickly come to peace terms with Philip of France, for which one English chronicler approvingly named him ‘Softsword’. Before long it was to take on a wholly derogatory sense.

Even when war did break out between England and France, John initially notched up a great triumph: in 1202 at Mirebeau he captured many of his leading enemies, the prize of which was his 15-year-old nephew, Arthur of Brittany, a claimant to the English throne and ally of King Philip. John wrote boastfully home that he “had got the lot”.

But one of John’s many weaknesses was his inability to capitalise on his successes. In a forerunner of Richard III and the disappearance of the princes in the Tower, John was almost certainly responsible for the murder of Arthur. He also seriously mistreated his prisoners, thereby alienating powerful marcher lords in Normandy. When Philip launched an all-out invasion of Normandy and Anjou, John found fewer allies on the ground than he would have liked. He did little to rally his forces and instead ignominiously left Normandy to return to England. By spring 1204 the duchy was back in French hands; John never stepped foot in Normandy again.

For the rest of his reign, John’s focus was on regaining the lands he had humiliatingly lost. This meant money – and lots of it. To fully exploit the resources of his land, John tightened up administrative processes and stamped the authority of his government on England. John’s presence in England was both a marker of his failure (the loss of his lands in France compelled him to be a stay-at-home king) and the cause of his problems in England.

John’s onerous exactions caused huge dissent among his powerful subjects. The barons, no angels themselves, understandably resented the increasingly interfering and arbitrary nature of John’s rule. The king’s inability to handle powerful men tactfully; his notorious cruelty and lechery towards them and their families; his complete lack of trustworthiness; and, most damaging of all, the complete waste of the money painfully extracted for failed campaigns in France… all these negative aspects of his reign served only to alienate ever further those not immediately within John’s circle of beneficiaries.

John’s continental allies possibly came close to achieving his long cherished plans at the battle of Bouvines in 1214. However the clash ended in victory for Philip of France, who went on to secure the Angevin territories of Brittany and Normandy. This reversal – and John’s own flight from the French in the west of France – led to open rebellion at home and the humiliation of Magna Carta in 1215.

The charter was designed to reaffirm baronial liberties and, crucially, to limit the dictatorial inclinations of the monarchy. John quickly reneged on the settlement and civil war broke out once more. The barons who rebelled called in Prince Louis of France, Philip II’s heir, to be the new king of England. In May 1216, Louis arrived at the Isle of Thanet at the head of a large army that required perhaps as many as 700 ships to transport his campaign forces and equipment. He and his allies quickly took control of half of England, siting their headquarters in London. By the summer’s end, two-thirds of the baronage declared for Louis, and King Alexander of Scotland marched all the way down to Dover to pay homage to Louis as king of England.

The situation was radically transformed by John’s death from dysentery on 19 October 1216. At a stroke, the focus of discontent for so many barons was removed and the English resistance became a concerted counter-attack. In 1217, Franco-baronial defeats at Lincoln and Sandwich sealed the occupiers’ fate. Louis came to terms at the treaty of Kingston in September and quit the country, leaving the throne of England to John’s young son, Henry III.

9 places linked to King John

 

Magna Carta memorial, Runnymede

Where one of Britain’s landmark moments is celebrated

In May 1215 the baronial party broke their homage to John and civil war broke out. John reluctantly met the rebels in June 1215, at Runnymede, situated on the Thames – halfway between his royal castle at Windsor and the rebel camp at Staines. Here he was forced to concede to the rebels’ demands as set out in Magna Carta. This was a charter of liberties affirming the rights of his subjects (especially the most powerful ones) in a document considered central to British constitutional history.

Although much of the charter is concerned with feudal and financial matters, perhaps most famously it addresses injustice: the monarch has to agree that “to no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay right or justice” and that those accused must be tried “by the lawful judgment of his peers”. The last clause was the most revolutionary: the king’s adherence to the charter was to be overseen by a council of 25 barons acting for “the community of the realm”. John never intended to honour the agreement and was soon back at war with the barons. In 1957 the American Bar Association erected at Runnymede the memorial that stands there today, bearing the inscription: “To commemorate Magna Carta, symbol of freedom under the law.”

 
 

Rochester Castle

Where a six-week siege saw the castle fall to King John

Rochester Castle, a powerful and strategic fortress that lies on the road between London and Dover, was handed over to the rebels in October 1215 and garrisoned by 140 men under William d’Albini (also written as Daubeney).

Two days afterwards they were under close siege by King John. It was an epic confrontation, with the rebels holding out for over six weeks against the massive weight of John’s national resources. A constant bombardment battered the walls but the defenders resisted bravely as they waited for reinforcements from London to lift the siege. The support never arrived and the defenders found themselves in such dire straits that the knights had to eat their war horses.

When mines brought the stone curtain wall down, the garrison rushed to the inner defences of the keep. When another tunnel brought down the south-eastern tower the garrison had no choice but to surrender. John had to be talked out of hanging the defenders en masse. The English king wasn’t to hold sway over Rochester Castle for long, for his troops were ousted by Louis of France shortly after his invasion in May 1216.

Visitors can see the replacement tower built shortly afterwards, its ‘newer’ rounded shape contrasting with the other three square towers.

 
 

Tower of London

Where Prince Louis made his base in the heart of the capital

Started by another French invader 150 years previously, William the Conqueror’s castle was a fitting headquarters for Prince Louis of France. The capital fell easily into rebel hands in May 1215. This was such a blow to John that he felt compelled to agree Magna Carta a month later. The city remained in Franco-baronial hands for more than two years, all the time representing a major humiliation for John.

Militarily, it could be argued that John should have marshalled his forces to retake the capital, for it was widely acknowledged that the French could not succeed without it. Instead, John went ravaging around the country, inflicting misery on his own people. Louis’ occupation of London was never seriously threatened until September 1217, by which time he “had little trust in the burghers of London” and thus “dared not leave the city”.

One of the least-known events of this little-known invasion is Louis’ plan in September 1217 to launch a death-or-glory charge from the city into the ranks of the surrounding enemy. Only the start of 11th-hour peace talks prevented this from happening.

 
 

Wolvesey Castle, Winchester

Where Prince Louis captured one of his primary objectives

Winchester marked the south-west frontline between royalist and French forces. It was a primary objective for Louis, who marched there in early June 1216; he was also hoping for a decisive encounter with John, but the English king withdrew, as was his custom, to safety at Corfe Castle in Dorset.

Louis entered the city itself unopposed but had to launch siege operations against its two castles. The main castle was towards the west; a smaller one, Wolvesey, owned by Bishop Peter des Roches, lay in the east and was garrisoned by John’s illegitimate son, Oliver. Following a bombardment, both strongholds surrendered on 24 June. The loss of Winchester marked a low point for John as it coincided with a tide of high-level desertions to Louis.

In March 1217 the French found themselves subjected to withering sieges; they sortied from the castle to burn and plunder the city but surrendered at the end of the month on favourable terms that granted them a safe conduct back to London.

The ruins of Wolvesey Castle, also known as Old Bishop’s Palace, are still open to the public.

 
 

The Wash, East Anglia

Where King John’s treasure may, or may not, have sunk

In the second week of October 1216, John was at King’s Lynn, one of the five most important ports in England. On 11 October, despite being ill with dysentery, he made for Lincolnshire across the Wash, a five-mile-wide estuary. At low tide this was a well-known short-cut, and it also enabled John to avoid the roads in the rebel-dominated Fenlands.

Legend has it that John’s baggage train and treasure were swallowed up here, with one chronicler reporting that “the land opened up in the middle of the waves and caused whirlpools which sucked in everything, men as well as horses, so that no one escaped”. Like John, the chronicler was on uncertain ground, exaggerating events.

While it is possible that there was some drama during the crossing, it was probably greatly elaborated as a cover for where the treasure really went: in the pockets of John’s entourage when he died a week later.

 
 

Newark Castle

Where King John died from dysentery

After having over-indulged during a feast at King’s Lynn, John fell seriously ill with what appears to have been severe dysentery. In great agony, he was hauled on a litter to Newark Castle, where he was attended by the abbot of Croxton, a monk renowned for his medical knowledge. John made his last confession to the abbot and, during a violent storm, died around midnight of 18/19 October.

Medieval chroniclers did not observe the maxim that one should not speak ill of the dead, with Matthew Paris writing: “With John’s foul deeds all England is stinking, as does hell, to which he is now sinking.” The best contemporary obituary for him was simply that “in his own end he was little mourned”. John’s heart was removed by the abbot and his embalmed body buried at Worcester Cathedral. John’s death removed Louis’ greatest asset and the royalists’ greatest liability.

 

Dover Castle

Where Louis’ plans to dominate England were dealt a fatal blow

Dover and Windsor castles were the only two strongholds in the south-east to hold out against the French during the course of the occupation, providing islands of royalist resistance throughout the 18-month invasion. Dover Castle was besieged for nearly a year (from July 1216) – in what was to be the largest and most protracted encirclement of the invasion – with interludes arising from temporary truces.

So powerful and strategically significant was this Channel fortress that it was called ‘the key to England’. Its importance is reflected in the huge resources that Louis invested in his attempts to wrest it from the royalists, applying his large stone-throwing machine ‘Evil Neighbour’ against the walls.

The castle was defended by Hubert de Burgh, with his 140 knights and other soldiers. Dover’s determined resistance cost Louis serious loss of momentum and men, as many returned to the continent after they had served their time.

Although bolstered by King Alexander II of Scotland’s homage to him at Dover in September 1216, Louis still could not make headway. French troops were also attacked from the outside, by a company of forest-dwelling bowmen under William of Kensham, who, it can be argued, is the original inspiration behind the popular Robin Hood legend.

Louis’ failure to take Dover is considered one of the single most important factors in his ultimate failure to win England. A French siege tunnel can still be seen at the castle.

 
 

Lincoln Castle

Where a major land battle left the royalists in control

Lincoln witnessed the great land battle of the invasion. Representing the northern front line, the city was taken soon after the French arrived, but the castle remained defiant under the redoubtable leadership of Nichola de Haye.

On 20 May 1217, the main royalist force under the command of the regent William Marshal and Peter des Roches arrived at the city to raise the siege. A group of crossbowmen under the notorious mercenary captain Falkes de Bréauté secretly made their way into the castle through a postern gate. These laid down a surprise barrage of fire on the French and baronial soldiers while the main body of troops burst through a city gate, pushing Louis’ men back.

The French commander, the 22-year-old Count de Perche, tried to rally his troops in the close in front of the cathedral’s west front. But when he was killed by a dagger through the eyehole of his visor, his troops fled. The greatest number of casualties was inflicted after the battle when the city was savagely sacked. Lincoln left the royalists in the ascendant, and many of Louis’ leading men and knights now prisoner.

During the civil wars of the 17th century, the castle walls were lowered. The cathedral holds one of the surviving copies of Magna Carta.

 
 

Sandwich port, Kent

Where a great naval battle saw Louis seek peace

After Lincoln, Louis’ hopes rested on reinforcements from France, provided by his wife, Blanche de Castile. Another large fleet was assembled to convey these troops over the Channel – more than sufficient for Louis to redress most of his recent losses. The fleet was under the naval command of Eustace the Monk, one of this period’s most colourful characters: a cross-dressing, farting, foul-mouthed pirate.

On 24 August some 40 English ships met the French convoy of around 80 vessels off the coast of Sandwich. There followed arguably the most important naval battle in England’s history. The English ships manoeuvred downwind of the French, and cast lime dust into their eyes, blinding the enemy. They then rammed, boarded and sunk French vessels. The end came when Eustace’s flagship was captured and he was beheaded on deck.

The French sailors were slaughtered; according to one chronicler they were “thrown into the sea as food for the fish”. After this massive defeat, Louis sought peace terms, and left England forever.

Sean McGlynn is a lecturer in history for the Open University and the University of Plymouth at Strode College

This article was first published in the May 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Magna Carta: everything you wanted to know]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/magna-carta-everything-you-wanted-to-know/ 2024-10-28T21:39:29.000Z 2020-12-13T13:00:38.000Z Professor David Carpenter responds to listener queries and popular internet search queries about the great medieval charter sealed in 1215. He discusses King John, Magna Carta’s impact on England in the Middle Ages, and the document’s 800-year-long legacy.

]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Eustace the Monk: one of medieval Europe's unholiest holy men]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/eustace-monk-holy-man-king-john-french-invasion-england/ 2025-02-14T14:27:58.000Z 2020-10-08T11:43:18.000Z Eight hundred years ago, one of the most hated men in England met a grisly end. As the battle of Sandwich – fought off the Kent coast on 24 August 1217 between the English and French navies – reached its bloody conclusion, Eustace the Monk was on the deck of his ship, vigorously swinging an oar around him as he tried to fend off his English enemies. A contemporary writer describes how he “knocked down a good number… some had their arms broken, others their head smashed in… another had his collar bone shattered”. But Eustace’s luck was about to run out. Soon he was overwhelmed by his foes – and, after attempting to escape, he was dragged on deck and decapitated.

Eustace’s severed head was fixed on a spear and paraded around the southern ports of England to reassure their residents that this fearsome pirate was finally dead. The people celebrated his bloody demise long and lustily. But why? How had a former Benedictine monk become reviled for his lust for loot and violence? And what was a  man who had once dedicated his life to the service of God doing throwing his weight behind a French invasion of England?

Eustace was born around 1170, son of Baudoin Busket, a lord of the county of Boulogne on the northern coast of France. Though Eustace started his early adult life as a knight, the call of the sea proved strong, and he soon mastered the skills of seamanship through extensive travels. According to The Romance of Eustace the Monk – a poem penned by an anonymous author who enthusiastically embellished fact with fiction – Eustace soon turned up at the Castilian city of Toledo. This was a notorious centre of black magic, where, we’re told, he learned the dark arts of necromancy in a cave. For the chroniclers, it was as if the devil himself had become Eustace’s mentor. But then something entirely unexpected happened: Eustace became a monk.

Farting, not fasting

We can’t be sure why Eustace chose to join the Benedictines at the monastery of St Samer near Boulogne. But one thing’s for sure: if ever anyone was ill-suited to the reflective life of this holy order, it was Eustace. No sooner had he joined the monastery than we’re told that he was performing “many devilish acts”. He encouraged the brothers to eat when they should have been fasting, curse “when they should have been reciting the office”, and he urged them to “fart in the cloister”. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t long before he left (or, more probably, was ejected from) the Benedictines. But from that moment on, his epithet was sealed: he would always be known as Eustace the Monk.

For all his capacity for mischief, Eustace clearly had some talent, for next he landed a job as seneschal (administrative officer) to the powerful Count of Boulogne, Renaud de Dammartin. But it seems that Eustace was soon up to his old tricks again as he was accused of financial impropriety. Fearing prison, Eustace fled and began a new career, this time as a bandit.

Taking to the forests around Boulogne, Eustace sustained himself through brigandage and a thirst for revenge against the count. Here the legend really takes off. Eustace and his men engaged in a series of outrageous escapades – robbery, lightning raids, dramatic escapes – as they pursued the former monk’s vendetta against the count.

There is very much a Robin Hood element to the tales told of Eustace, not least in the proliferation of disguises he employed. At one point in the Romance, he takes on the garb of a leper with a clapper (bell) to trick Count Renaud into giving him money as charity. He also, we’re told, bound up one of his legs to play the part of a one-legged beggar, again deceiving the count into handing money over – before promptly jumping onto one of the count’s horses and riding off “with his crutch hanging down”.

On another occasion, Eustace dresses up as a woman and approaches one of the count’s young knights. “Let me get on this horse and I will give you a f***,” he says. The knight is keen to pay for the indecent proposal, so Eustace entices him further, declaring: “I will teach you how to use your bum.” As the man lifts Eustace’s leg, Eustace “let out a fart”. Needless to say, this story ends with Eustace stealing the knight’s horse.

But there’s a dark side to these humorous tales. When Eustace captures five of the count’s men-at-arms, he cuts off the feet of four of them, telling the fifth to convey a message to the count. The knight does so and, as the chronicle wryly tells us, does “not forget his trotters”. Blacker still is the episode in which Eustace seizes one of the count’s spies – a young boy – and forces him to hang himself without even the opportunity to make his confession.

England’s cunning ally

By now, Eustace’s cunning and cruelty had earned him quite a reputation in the environs of Boulogne. Soon he would be making waves on the other side of English Channel too. For, by early 1206, he had started working for King John of England.

Eustace picked an opportune moment to ally himself with the English king, for John was in the middle of a bitter struggle to wrest the duchy of Normandy back from the French. By supporting John’s campaign, Eustace would propel himself from the forests of northern France onto the international arena.

John no doubt recognised Eustace’s maritime ability and, seeing the potential for a pirate to inflict havoc on French shipping in the Channel, gave him command of, according to one source, 30 galleys.

It wasn’t long before Eustace was using these vessels to devastating effect. His force of English, Flemish and French sailors seized Sark, one of the Channel Islands, and set up a pirate base, from where they launched a series of raids against the French seaports.

At first it seems that John and Eustace got on famously. Not only did the king grant Eustace land in Norfolk (and possibly a palace in London), he also turned a blind eye to the monk’s side-line in private profiteering. Eustace’s pirates terrorised ships of all nations in the Channel – and that included English ones. In doing so, he earned himself a notorious reputation in the ports and towns on England’s south coast – so much so that, if he wanted to land in England (to conduct business, or to visit his wife and daughter), he first had to gain a safe-conduct pass to do so.

But soon Eustace would be looking for new employment once again, because sometime between 1212 and 1214, he and John fell out. There are a number of potential reasons why their relationship hit the rocks. Money was possibly a factor. The chronicler known as the Anonymous of Béthune relates that, when Eustace failed to repay a debt of 20 marks to John, he and his wife were imprisoned. According to the Romance, the king had Eustace’s daughter, at the time John’s hostage, “burned, disfigured” and “killed”.

John’s perennial mistrust of those whom he deemed to have grown too powerful may also have contributed to the dispute. Perhaps the king was fearful of Eustace’s semi-independent position in the Channel Islands, and distrustful of his intentions. This would explain the king’s decision to order a naval assault on Sark, in which many of Eustace’s men were taken prisoner.

But the principal bone of contention between king and monk was probably Eustace’s old enemy Count Renaud of Boulogne. In 1212, the count decided to switch sides in the Anglo-French war and throw his support behind John. It appears that John welcomed him with open arms. Renaud’s lands were a huge boon to the king – assets well worth putting Eustace’s nose out of joint for.

Whatever the reason for John and Eustace’s contretemps, by early 1215 the ever-opportunistic Eustace had switched sides in the war and presented himself to the French court. Just as John had once been quick to realise the potential in employing Eustace’s talents against the French, so the French king, Philip Augustus, was keen to make use of Eustace’s knowledge of the Channel and his inside information on English military organisation. The Romance reports the first meeting between the two men: “You are not big, but small, yet you are so brave and bold,” Philip reportedly told his slippery new ally. “You know a great deal about guile and cunning and do not need a cat’s grease to help you.”

Eustace was appointed Philip’s admiral for the Channel, and now – with the war against England entering a dramatic new phase – embarked upon the most intense and spectacular military chapter of his career. In May 1216, Prince Louis, heir to the Capetian throne in France, invaded England, quickly seizing half the country and receiving the homage of up to two-thirds of England’s barons.

Eustace played a major role in the French invasion, ferrying troops and supplies across the Channel. In the spring of 1217, he was to prove his worth to the French campaign once more, dramatically breaking through an English blockade of the coastal town of Rye and rescuing Louis, who was trapped there.

Caught at sea

A few months later, Louis needed Eustace’s help once again. Having suffered a defeat at the battle of Lincoln in May 1217, the French prince found himself holed up in London, desperately needing the monk to provide the supplies and reinforcements he required to continue waging his campaign. Eustace set sail for England in August but, on the 24th, his fleet was intercepted and annihilated by the English at Sandwich – a defeat that would ultimately force Louis to return to France with his tail between his legs (for more on the battle, see our box, right).

According to the chronicler Roger of Wendover, when Eustace faced his end on the deck of his flagship, the last words he heard were: “Never again in this world, wicked traitor, shall you deceive anyone with your false promises.”

It was a fittingly bloody end to a violent life. Although the Romance focuses on his escapades as an outlaw, it was in his role as a pirate and an admiral that Eustace made his most telling impact on 13th-century Europe. It was certainly not in his role as a monk.

Dr Sean McGlynn is lecturer in history at Plymouth University. His next book is Medieval Generals (Pen and Sword) and he is planning a book on Eustace.

This article was first published in the September 2017 issue of BBC History Magazine.

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