1207–1208
John had returned to England in December 1206 buoyed by the achievements of that year’s continental campaign. The last Castilian garrisons had been driven from Aquitaine, and much booty had reportedly been captured; he had secured his hold on his wife’s county of Angoulême and recovered the southern part of Poitou. Tantalizingly, he had led a sortie north into Anjou, and for a week had held court in Angers, his family’s ancestral seat. Such was the good progress that the king and his magnates were able to celebrate during the Christmas immediately after his return.1
And yet John’s success in 1206 merely emphasized how much work still needed to be done. His newly won laurels, whilst pleasing, were little ones, and he certainly could not afford to rest on them during the two-year truce that was now in place. It had taken him months of politicking and arm-twisting to raise an army to take to Poitou and the money to sustain it. If he was going to reconquer Normandy, Maine and Anjou, he was going to need to field much larger forces for a much longer period, and that would mean raising a great deal more cash. After John’s loss of Normandy in 1204 it is possible to detect a new note of urgency in his government of England; from the start of 1207 it rose to an even sharper pitch.2
The king’s first thought was to seek financial assistance from the clergy. The English Church was still leaderless in December 1206, because the controversy over who should be archbishop of Canterbury had continued. One year earlier, as we’ve seen, John had browbeaten the monks of Canterbury into accepting his preferred candidate, John de Gray, the bishop of Norwich, on learning that some of them had secretly elected one of their own number. But in May 1206, on the eve of his departure for Poitou, the king had received disappointing news from Rome. The pope, confronted by the conflicting claims and counterclaims from both sides, and perturbed by reports of royal coercion, had cancelled Gray’s election and announced he would review the matter himself. A decision had been expected in the autumn, but so far there had been no news.3
At the start of 1207 John paid a short visit to Canterbury, perhaps rehearsing his case for cash with the local clergy. A few days later he travelled to London to meet a great council of magnates and prelates that had been summoned to assemble on 8 January, and put to them his plan. What he wanted, he explained to the bishops and abbots, was their permission to take a fixed portion of the income of every beneficed clergyman in the country. The bishops and abbots refused, possibly on the grounds that they had not been given time enough to consult, or that not enough of them were present; the king, after all, had not yet been back in the country for a month, so the council must have been called at short notice. A second council was summoned to meet in Oxford in four weeks’ time.
The Oxford council was certainly well attended. Our best-informed source, the annalist at Waverley Abbey in Surrey, reports ‘an infinite multitude of prelates and magnates’. When the demand for cash was put to the clergy for a second time, their answer was more decisive. ‘The English Church’, they replied, ‘could by no means submit to a demand which had never been heard of in all previous ages.’ According to the Waverley annalist, John then relented, ‘having taken wiser counsel’.4
In fact, the king and his counsellors had in the meantime come up with an even more ambitious plan to tax everyone in the country, clergy and laity, from the highest earl or bishop to the poorest parson or peasant. This was not wholly unprecedented, but such general taxes were still sufficiently rare to be extremely controversial. The kings of Anglo-Saxon England had levied a tax known as the geld (or Danegeld, because they used it to pay off the Vikings and recruit Danish mercenaries), and it had continued to be levied after the Norman Conquest. But the geld had been eroded by exemptions. The Norman nobility had refused to pay it, and in consequence its yield had shrunk to the point at which it was outweighed by the unpopularity of collecting it. Henry II had levied it for the last time in 1162. Since then, general taxes had been sought only in extraordinary circumstances, and only with the consent of a great council. Henry had permitted the Church to collect three aids for the Holy Land, culminating in the Saladin Tithe of 1188, which demanded ten per cent of everyone’s goods and revenue. A similar levy had been imposed by Richard I’s regents in 1193 to raise his £100,000 ransom, the rate on that occasion set at an eye-watering twenty-five per cent. This tax must go a long way to explaining why chroniclers complained about the unheard-of amounts of money that were extracted during Richard’s reign; it would also explain why, when the king tried to get a similar tax to fight Philip Augustus in 1197, he was refused. Taxation was regarded as tantamount to robbery, only to be granted in times of truly exceptional need.5
Seven years into his reign, John had already asked for taxes on two previous occasions. In 1200, he had sought an aid to pay his relief to Philip Augustus for inheriting the duchy of Normandy. Its yield is unknown, but was probably not great. Like the geld, it was levied on units of land rather than actual income, and as such failed to tap the country’s true wealth. It was nevertheless unpopular. The Cistercians, as we have seen, protested against paying it and suffered months of persecution before finally winning their point. With altogether less success the king’s half-brother, Archbishop Geoffrey of York, refused to allow his lands to be assessed and was deprived of them as a result until he relented. In 1203 John had imposed another tax, this time on the more dubious grounds that his military tenants in England had failed to support him in the fight for Normandy. This time the assessment was based on wealth, but only on revenues, not on goods. The scant impact it made on both royal records and contemporary chroniclers suggest it may have been even less successful, raising somewhere in the region of £7,000.6
At Oxford in February 1207 John demanded something far more ambitious: a tax to be assessed on both the income and the goods of every man. To justify this demand he referred to ‘the defence of our realm and the recovery of our right’. Considering that Richard had failed to obtain consent to a similar demand during a time of war, John’s attempt to get a tax at the start of a two-year truce was ambitious, even audacious. And yet, remarkably, the request was approved by the assembled magnates and prelates. The rate, probably negotiated, was set at one shilling in every mark, which equates to 7.5 per cent. Because a mark was worth just over thirteen shillings (13s 4d), contemporaries referred to it as the Thirteenth. According to the royal writ ordering the collection, it had been granted ‘by common counsel, and with the assent of our council at Oxford’. According to Roger of Wendover, the king’s request ‘caused great murmuring among all, though they dared not contradict it’.7
The measures put in place to raise the tax were elaborate and unremitting. Assessment was made by specially appointed justices, who visited every town and parish within their particular county. Fourteen men, for example, were charged with the task in Lincolnshire. In each district, every local man had to appear before them and swear to the value of his rents and moveable goods; the justices made a record of the amount of tax due, which was then passed to the sheriff for collection. Penalties for evasion were harsh: those found guilty of making false declarations, or otherwise concealing their wealth, were to be cast into prison and have all their goods confiscated for the king’s use.8
One magnate, in fact, did dare to contradict the demand made during the Oxford council. Archbishop Geoffrey of York, who had been dispossessed for opposing the tax of 1200, strongly objected to the new demand of 1207 and excommunicated the men who tried to levy it within his archdiocese. As on the previous occasion, John reacted by seizing his half-brother’s lands and goods, prompting Geoffrey to appear before him. Perhaps remembering the successful histrionics of the Cistercian abbots in 1200, the archbishop fell at the king’s feet to appeal for grace. John, however, simply responded in kind, falling at Geoffrey’s feet, laughing and jeering, saying ‘Look, my lord archbishop, even as you do, so do I!’ Unable to gain redress, Geoffrey appealed to the pope and went into exile.9
By this point, the pope was not high on John’s list of favourite people. Early in 1207, probably around the time of the Oxford council, news had arrived in England about the outcome of the Canterbury dispute. The pope, Innocent III, had finally heard the case in December. At his request fifteen Canterbury monks had come to Rome, as well as representatives of the English bishops and the king. Innocent had begun by rejecting the bishops’ claim to have a say in the election of a new archbishop, confirming that this right belonged exclusively to the monks. This was a blow for John’s cause, but when the pope called upon the monks to make their choice, he found that they were divided among themselves, some still supporting their sub-prior, Reginald, others now favouring the king’s nominee, John de Gray. At this point Innocent intervened. Since they could not agree on either of the existing candidates, he proposed – or imposed, according to some sources – a third. The man the pope had in mind was Stephen Langton, a scholar of international reputation, lately summoned from Paris to Rome to become a cardinal, but by birth an Englishman who had begun his clerical career in York. The king’s representatives objected to this development, but were powerless to prevent it going forward. The monks, probably after experiencing a certain amount of papal pressure, unanimously elected Langton. A few days before Christmas, Innocent wrote to John to inform him of the good news.10
The king was furious – ‘exceedingly enraged’, according to Roger of Wendover, ‘as much at the promotion of Stephen Langton as at the annulment of the election of the bishop of Norwich’. In response, he sent a hot-tempered letter back to the pope, making no attempt to disguise his displeasure. It was disgraceful, he said, that Innocent had cancelled John de Gray’s election and appointed ‘a man altogether unknown to him, who had been familiar for a long time with his declared enemies in the kingdom of France’. Moreover, apart from his particular objection to Langton, there was the general principle at stake, namely that the king of England ought to have a say in the appointment of the archbishop of Canterbury; between them, the pope and the monks of Canterbury had conspired to deny John that right. Reminding Innocent that England contributed more funds to the papal treasury than any other country north of the Alps, the king vowed that he would defend the rights of his Crown to the death, and declared he would not be deterred from his intention of making John de Gray his next archbishop. For good measure, he concluded with an outright threat, saying that he would cut all communication between England and Rome if the pope did not fall in line with his wishes.11
John’s letter to Innocent was probably dispatched around mid-April, at which point the king was at Lambeth. For most of the rest of the spring, while contemplating his response, the king had been travelling between his hunting lodges in southern and midland England. Like almost all medieval monarchs, John was a keen huntsman. Hunting was the main leisure activity of the medieval upper classes: it kept them in shape; it enabled them to practise their horsemanship and hone their use of weapons; it also put food on the table. Even so, contemporary comment suggests that John was keener than most. The poet Bertran de Born contrasted the king’s passion for ‘pointers, greyhounds and hawks’ with his apparent lack of martial prowess, while the Anonymous of Béthune said that he ‘haunted woods and streams and greatly delighted in the pleasure of them’. John was not a great castle-builder, but his one original foundation was the tower he built at Odiham in Hampshire, substantial remains of which still survive. Begun in the first half of 1207, it was constructed, according to the Anonymous of Béthune, so the king could disport himself in the surrounding forests.12
The royal forest in which John hunted was not simply a reserve set aside for the king’s enjoyment. It was also a highly developed sub-branch of government, almost a state within the state. The concept of a royal forest, governed by its own law, had been introduced to England by William the Conqueror. (The word ‘forest’, introduced at the same time, derives from the Latin foris, meaning ‘outside’ or ‘apart’.) Forest law was extremely harsh. The penalty for taking a deer, established by the Conqueror, was blinding. It was also entirely arbitrary. ‘The whole organization of the forests,’ wrote Henry II’s treasurer, Ralph fitz Nigel, ‘and the punishment, financial and corporal, of forest offences, is outside the jurisdiction of the other courts, and solely dependent on the decision of the king, or of some officer specially appointed by him … What is done in accordance with forest law is not called “just” without qualification, but “just, according to the forest law”.’13
The simple solution, one might conclude, was to stay out of the royal forest; but for many people that was not an option. What had started after the Conquest as a royal hunting preserve had been massively extended during the twelfth century, chiefly by Henry II. Even as he was making the common law more accessible to his subjects, Henry was in this way extending his arbitrary power over them. By the end of his reign, the jurisdiction known as ‘the Forest’ did not apply only to the wooded or wasteland areas used for hunting, but to almost a third of all England. Land of any kind, arable or pasture, could be forest. Villages could be forest. All of Essex was forest.
Although Henry’s love of hunting was almost as famous as that of his favourite son, he had not extended the scope of the Forest merely to extend his hunting rights; he had done so for financial gain. While savage corporal punishments could still be dished out – Richard I had increased the penalty for taking a deer to the loss of eyes and testicles – it was increasingly common for offenders to face fines. The forests were policed by a range of officials – foresters, verderers, regarders – ever vigilant for infringements, all under the ultimate control of the chief forester. During John’s reign the chief forester was Hugh de Neville. Appointed by Richard in 1198, Hugh struck up a close working relationship with his new master after John’s accession. Indeed, he became one of the king’s most intimate companions, to judge from financial records that show the two of them gambling together from time to time.14
John’s initial policy towards the Forest had been to raise money by selling exemptions, allowing men to turn forest land into arable (assarting) or simply declaring that certain areas were to be ‘disafforested’. Hugh de Neville had been given a free hand to do this in 1203, when the king was in Normandy and in desperate need of ready cash, and extensive disafforestation had taken place the following year. But after his return to England in 1206, John changed tack, and decided it was time to exploit the Forest more efficiently without further diminishing its extent. Fines were raised from the Forest by periodically dispatching special itinerant justices, much like the regular justices the king sent round the country to hear common-law cases. There had been no such visitation, or eyre, since 1198, when Hugh de Neville had conducted one at the start of his term of office. But in the spring of 1207, while John was disporting himself in the forests of Hampshire, Northamptonshire and Dorset, a new eyre was launched by Hugh and his associates. They began in Cornwall, Devon, Hampshire, Northumberland, Rutland and Surrey. For the men of Cornwall this was a surprise, since in 1204 they had collectively given 2,200 marks and twenty palfreys to have their county disafforested. Hugh de Neville seems to have interpreted this as a temporary respite, for the eyre in Cornwall went ahead as normal and raised £325 in fines.15
The nature of the fines is recorded on the rolls of the Exchequer. Men were fined for hunting without the king’s permission, or for attacking royal foresters. The foresters themselves were fined for laxity in carrying out their duties. A woman in Nottinghamshire paid 100 marks to recover land that had been confiscated because she had made a ditch without permission. The wide variety of offences was nothing new, but the eyre launched in 1207 was unquestionably more searching and more punitive than its predecessors. The total raised by Neville’s previous eyre – which ran from 1198 to 1201, and was described by Roger of Howden as ‘a torment to the men of the kingdom’ – was £3,700. By the time the eyre launched in 1207 had finally run its course, it had raised £8,700.16
On 23 June 1207 John visited Odiham, either to initiate the building of his new castle there or to inspect its early progress. It must have been around this time that he received letters from Pope Innocent, sent from Rome four weeks earlier.17
The pope was not happy. He had not liked the tone of John’s response. (‘We wrote to you meekly and kindly, requesting and exhorting, but you wrote back to us insolently and impudently, as though threatening and expostulating.’) Nor did he think much of the king’s objections to the newly elected archbishop of Canterbury. John’s claim that Stephen Langton had lived among his enemies and was ‘unknown’ to him was rejected as ‘paltry’. If that really was the case, asked the pope, why had John written to Langton congratulating him on his promotion to the cardinalate? Innocent was similarly dismissive of the king’s complaint about the lack of royal consent. Regardless of the procedural irregularities alleged by John’s envoys, the fact was that the pope had plenary authority in this matter. Nothing could now impede Langton’s advancement, and the king should not suppose otherwise. Matching threat with threat, Innocent concluded by warning John not ‘to fight against God and the Church in this cause for which St Thomas [Becket], that glorious martyr and archbishop, recently shed his blood’.18
This letter gives us some insight into the character and motivations of Innocent III. Elected in January 1198, he had come to the papal throne at an exceptionally young age. His predecessors in recent decades had all been old men, appointed in their sixties, seventies and eighties, and thus had served for only a few years before their deaths. Innocent by contrast was thirty-seven or thirty-eight at the time of his election – three or four years younger than Richard I, whose rule had briefly overlapped with his own, and only six or seven years older than John. His early appointment to the most senior role in the Church gives some indication of how highly others thought of his abilities. A distinguished lawyer as well as an accomplished theologian, he was brilliant, quick-witted and abrasive, and came to power determined to assert papal authority to the full. The papacy had been asserting its supremacy on spiritual matters since the mid-eleventh century, at which point it had embraced the ideals of an earlier monastic reform movement. No pope, however, had pushed papal supremacy as hard as Innocent. He was, in his own words, ‘less than God, but greater than Man, judge of all men and judged by none’. Having appointed Langton, he explained in his letter, ‘we could not desist without loss of reputation or peril to our conscience’. Innocent was not a man for compromise.19
But nor was John. Aside from an Angevin temperament which made it unlikely that the king would back down, there was a clash of principles. The problem with Innocent’s response was that it did not consider (or did not consider important) that, for John to desist, he would suffer a loss of reputation, and even peril to his own conscience. Part of the sacred oath that the king had sworn at his coronation was a promise, introduced by Henry II, to safeguard the rights of the Crown, and one of those rights was a say in the appointment of bishops.20
But by the time John received this letter, Innocent had already acted. On 17 June, without waiting for any further response from England, the pope personally consecrated Langton in the Italian city of Viterbo, fifty miles north of Rome. If his envoys travelled at lightning speed, it is just possible that news of this could have reached the king by 11 July. Equally there was enough in Innocent’s letter for John to realize that this outcome was inevitable. Either way, on that date the king reacted, proclaiming that anyone who acknowledged Langton as archbishop would be considered a public enemy, and ordering two knights – Fulk de Cantilupe and Reginald of Cornhill, the sheriff of Kent – to expel the monks of Canterbury from England. Four days later these men, accompanied by a band of armed attendants, carried out their task. According to Wendover they entered the monastery with drawn swords, calling the monks traitors to the king and swearing that they would burn the monastery down if its occupants did not leave immediately. Thirteen monks lying in the infirmary were too sick to move, but the remaining sixty-four left at once, fleeing across the Channel to Flanders, where they found refuge at the abbey of St Bertin.21
John was back in Lambeth when he issued these orders, but by the time they were carried out he was en route to Winchester, perhaps to visit his queen, who was resident in Winchester Castle during the latter part of the year. The king’s relationship with Isabella, the girl he had married seven summers earlier, is almost completely obscure. He was at least twenty years her senior, so their interests are unlikely to have overlapped, to begin with at any rate. After her coronation in October 1200 John had treated Isabella like the child she was, sometimes taking her with him on his travels, other times leaving her to stay at a favourite royal residence such as Marlborough, but certainly not entrusting her with any political power, and not even any land. This meant she was entirely reliant on the king’s handouts, and royal financial records show she received a steady stream of necessities and luxury items. One of the men particularly concerned with attending to her needs was Reginald of Cornhill, the aforementioned sheriff of Kent. In 1207 he sent her, among other things, a gilded saddle and harness, three different-coloured hoods, a hundred yards of fine linen, two tablecloths, four towels, half an otter skin and a belt. Other entries show Isabella received clothes and equipment for her chaplains and payment for the keepers of her greyhounds.22
The financial records also suggest that, in one respect, the queen’s domestic arrangements may have been unusual, in that she seems to have been lodged, at least for some of the time, in the same place as John’s ex-wife. After their divorce in 1200 the king had continued to maintain Isabella of Gloucester, supplying her with goods and money on a scale that almost rivalled that of her replacement. Winchester Castle seems to have been her chief residence, and in 1205 and 1206 the expenses of the two Isabellas were recorded as if they were staying together under the same roof.
What this signifies about John’s relationship with the two women is anyone’s guess. It would take a considerable imaginative leap to suggest that he was keeping his former wife, now in her mid-forties, as a mistress, given that he had apparently not wanted to marry her in the first place. At the same time, the king’s lack of legitimate children by 1207 suggests that he may not have been sleeping with his teenage queen, despite Wendover’s scurrilous claim that John had idled in bed with her while Normandy was being lost. The king had several bastard children, such as Geoffrey, who led troops to Poitou in 1205, but they were all too old to have been fathered during his second marriage, and possibly even during his first. Gifts to women who might have been his mistresses do figure in royal financial accounts, but not until later in his reign. Despite what appears to have been an unusual ménage at Winchester, if we base our conclusions on evidence rather than hearsay, we have to entertain the alarming possibility that, during the early years of his marriage, John may have been both faithful and chaste.23
If the latter was ever the case, however, it was no longer so by 1207, for that year the queen became pregnant. She must have conceived at the start of the year, during the festivities at Winchester that had followed the king’s jubilant return from France. At some point after March the older Isabella left Winchester for alternative lodgings at Sherborne, and as the time of the queen’s confinement approached, John’s visits to Winchester became more frequent. In July and August he interrupted his ceaseless round of hunting to pay four visits, and he was back there by the end of September, in time for the birth of the child that arrived on 1 October. To what must have been general rejoicing, it was a boy, christened Henry after his paternal grandfather. At last, at the age of forty, John had a legitimate heir. His dynasty was meant to continue. It was a sure sign of God’s favour.24
Unfortunately John was still very much out of favour with God’s principal representative on earth. Innocent III had reacted with surprising calmness when he had heard about the king’s violent expulsion of the monks of Canterbury towards the end of August. True, he had immediately ordered the bishop of Rochester to excommunicate Reginald of Cornhill, Fulk de Cantilupe and all others who had carried out the attack on Church property. But when he wrote about John himself, the pope did so more in sorrow than in anger. With God as his witness, he explained that he really loved John, his ‘very dear son in Christ’, with the most sincere affection. Indeed, the affection he had shown to the king in the past was such that it had damaged papal relations with other princes (an allusion to Philip Augustus). And yet, despite this consistent love and kindness, John was ungrateful, and had followed foolish advice.
These remarks, written on 27 August, were addressed not to the king himself, but to the bishops of London, Worcester and Ely, a trio seemingly selected because they had acted as papal agents in the past and did not owe their advancement to John. They were instructed to visit the king and remonstrate with him, urging him to accept Stephen Langton as archbishop and to readmit the monks of Canterbury. If he refused to do so, they were to impose an interdict, which meant that there would be no church services. The English clergy would effectively go on strike.25
The three bishops cannot have received these instructions until the autumn, and probably did not approach John until 19 October, when all three can be placed in his company by their appearance as witnesses to a royal charter. The king, who had been in Westminster the previous week, was back in Winchester by this date, perhaps dandling his three-week-old son. According to the Waverley annalist, the bishops approached him tearfully and on bended knee. According to Wendover, John reacted furiously, threatening to confiscate all the clergy’s estates, and adding for good measure that he would send any Roman clergy in his realm back to their master with their noses slit and their eyes put out.26
Although Wendover has almost certainly sensationalized his account, there is no doubt that the king refused the bishops’ request. It is also equally clear that, despite his refusal, the bishops chose not to impose the interdict. This may have been because they feared the consequences. Alternatively, it may have been because they, more so than Innocent, were better able to gauge the mood in England. By the autumn of 1207 John can hardly have been a popular ruler. His government was becoming ever more oppressive. The Forest eyre, as we have seen, had squeezed a great deal of money out of people of all ranks. The general tax known as the Thirteenth had squeezed a great deal more. By the time its yield had been checked at the end of September, it had brought in over £60,000.
Harvesting money on this scale was obviously unpopular. In Lincolnshire men had attempted to evade the tax by depositing their wealth in religious houses. In Warwickshire the evasion was such that the assessment had to be repeated in late May. Some men had refused to pay outright and suffered the harsh penalties threatened at the start of the year. The Exchequer rolls show several individuals imprisoned and others fined. Ruald fitz Alan was deprived of Richmond Castle for refusing to swear to the value of his goods and fined 200 marks. The abbot of Selby was fined forty marks and two palfreys for non-payment, and the monks of Furness lost two of their manors and some of their goods. As these examples imply, much of the resistance to the tax seems to have arisen in the north.27
And yet, when it came to choosing between the king and the pope, it seems that most people were on the side of the king. The annalist at Margam Abbey in south Wales, a source deeply hostile to John, nevertheless reports that, on this matter, all the laity favoured the king, and almost all the clergy. Whether because John’s propaganda was more effective, or because of historical precedent, it was clearly felt that the king ought to have a say – the final say, even – in who was archbishop of Canterbury. The archbishop was, after all, not simply a clergyman but a political figure of the foremost importance, whose estates put him on a par with the greatest magnates in the country.28
The fact that the Church held vast estates was an added incentive for a cash-hungry king to prolong the dispute. John had already deprived the archbishop of York of his lands in 1207 and driven him into exile before he did the same to the monks of Canterbury. He was also holding the estates of the bishop of Chichester, who had died in August, and those of the bishops of Exeter and Lincoln, both of whom had died the previous year, no doubt keeping their positions vacant as a way of demonstrating his mastery over the appointment process.29 The bishops of London, Worcester and Ely, knowing the king far better than the pope did, must have realized that his threat to seize the lands of every clergyman in the country was unlikely to be an idle one. After their unsuccessful interview with John in October, they temporized by asking Innocent to clarify the nature of the interdict they were to impose. Did it apply to all religious communities? Did it apply to Wales?
The pope, responding on 19 November, indicated that he was starting to lose patience. He issued a short clarification of the terms of the interdict – yes, it applied to everyone, even the Welsh – and forbade any further delay. With it he dispatched a separate letter to the English bishops, chiding them for their inactivity (‘It has come to our hearing that some of you have been tepid and remiss in the matter of the archbishop of Canterbury’), ordering them to put aside fear and to prepare themselves for persecution. He also attempted to open up a new front by addressing another letter to the nobles of England, telling them, ‘You should regulate your loyalty to your earthly king so as never to offend your heavenly king.’ In view of John’s opposition to God, they should not give him their support. John’s mind was sick, explained Innocent, and the pope was his doctor. The king would one day be grateful to them all for administering his medicine, however bitter it seemed on the way down.30
Innocent’s letters must have reached England shortly after Christmas 1207 or early in the new year of 1208. John had spent the days before Christmas inspecting his new castle at Odiham and celebrated the feast itself at nearby Windsor. It seems unlikely that any of the lay magnates he mixed with during the festive period would have remonstrated with him over his behaviour, but presumably at some point after receiving the pope’s stern mandate the bishops of London, Worcester and Ely must have repeated their efforts to persuade the king to change his mind.31
To their surprise, perhaps, John now seemed inclined to do so. On 21 January he sent the three bishops a letter, indicating that he was willing to obey Innocent on the matter of Canterbury. Simultaneously, as a conciliatory gesture, he removed Reginald of Cornhill and Fulk de Cantilupe as custodians of the Canterbury lands and replaced them with less offensive agents. There was, however, a proviso. In return for John’s compliance, the pope would have to undertake to preserve the king’s ‘rights, dignity and liberties’. In other words, John seems to have indicated that he would accept Stephen Langton, provided that he was given a cast-iron guarantee of his right to approve all future episcopal elections. His letter was witnessed by seven earls and three other leading barons, a clear display of magnate solidarity in riposte to Innocent’s attempt to set the baronage against the king.32
Whether or not they passed this message on to the pope, the bishops were sufficiently encouraged to delay until they were joined in March by a papal emissary in the shape of Master Simon Langton, younger brother of the controversial archbishop. Master Simon, as his title suggests, was also a clerk and a scholar, and understood precisely what was at stake. When he appeared before the king at Winchester on 12 March, he made it clear that, when it came to the Canterbury election, there was no room for manoeuvre. ‘When we spoke to him about safeguarding our dignity in this matter,’ wrote John, ‘he said he would not do anything about it unless we placed ourselves entirely at his mercy.’ This was in a letter to the men of Kent, issued two days later, explaining why the negotiations had failed, and telling them to listen to Reginald of Cornhill’s account of the meeting. The excommunicate sheriff was once again placed in charge of the Canterbury estates. The attempt to conciliate was over.33
On Sunday 23 March, in every church in England, the interdict was proclaimed. Henceforth there were to be no church services. Mass would not be performed. Marriages would not be celebrated in church. Confession would not be heard, except in the case of the dying. The dead could not be buried in consecrated ground. Church bells were rung for the last time that Sunday, and were not to be sounded again until the king surrendered.34
John had known this was coming and had made sure his retaliation was ready. The following morning, as the interdict began, his agents moved in to seize the goods and lands of every clergyman in the kingdom. In every parish four men were appointed to lock up and guard the Church’s barns. At the same moment, the king appears to have let it be known that it was effectively open season on the clergy. ‘Religious men and other ordained persons of any kind,’ said Roger of Wendover, ‘when found travelling on the road, were dragged from their horses, robbed and basely ill-treated by the king’s followers, and no one would do them justice.’ This sounds like typically sensational stuff from Wendover, but its essential truth is confirmed by a writ issued by John three weeks later, forbidding laymen from abusing clerics, on pain of being hanged from the nearest oak. That the king felt obliged to issue such strong counter-measures suggests that in the short term the clergy must have suffered many assaults at the hands of their lay neighbours.35
In the long term it was obviously impossible for the king to occupy and manage the lands of every churchman. After a short while many were able to strike a deal whereby they received their lands back in return for a fine – but only as custodians, allowed to take an agreed portion of the revenues for their sustenance and paying all the profits to the king. John also found a mischievous way to make even more money out of the clergy by seizing all their mistresses and girlfriends and holding them to ransom. Since clerics were supposed to be celibate there could be no official objection to this underhand move. Moralists had to reserve their criticism for those churchmen who rushed to pay for the release of their lovers.36
There is no sign that the laity were in any way bothered by the interdict or by the king’s reprisals against the clergy. Some lay magnates, indeed, were given custody of confiscated Church land, and probably allowed to keep the profits for themselves.37 Nevertheless, John may well have been troubled by Innocent’s attempt to turn his nobility against him. At a time when men were already expressing their dissatisfaction about the general oppressiveness of his government, the idea that the pope might absolve them of their loyalty altogether must have been a disturbing one. According to Roger of Wendover, once the interdict had been imposed, the king was sufficiently worried that he sent out agents to those magnates of whom he was suspicious and demanded hostages from them in the form of their sons or nephews. At length they came to the home of a nobleman called William de Briouze and made this demand, but before he could answer, his wife, Matilda, responded on his behalf. ‘I will not deliver up my sons to your lord, King John,’ she told the royal messengers, ‘because he basely murdered his nephew, Arthur, whom he ought to have taken care of honourably.’38