1213–1214
John was determined to follow up his fortuitous naval victory at Zwin with an immediate attack on Philip Augustus. With the French king reeling from the loss of his fleet, it was the perfect moment for the king of England to put his long-planned European strategy into action. His allies in the Low Countries could keep Philip harassed and distracted in the north; John meanwhile could advance from his own territories in the south, where his position was stronger than ever. He and his existing southern ally, the count of Toulouse, had lately been joined by the king of Aragon, Peter II. The previous year Peter had fought alongside the other Christian princes of Spain at the Battle of Las Navas, and won what proved to be a decisive victory against their Muslim enemies. Now he was willing to cross the Pyrenees and help John bring about the ruin of his own most hated foe.1
But, as before, John’s enthusiasm for an expedition to Poitou was not shared by most of his subjects. As early as 10 June, while he was still in Kent, the king was ordering knights to come to Portsmouth as soon as possible, and to follow him overseas if he had already left. In the event he passed straight through Portsmouth and headed for Corfe Castle, from where at the end of the month he was able to send his half-brother William back to Flanders with a subsidy of 20,000 marks for Count Ferrand. By this point, however, it must have been clear that very few knights were willing to cross the sea with John himself, for despite the king’s anxiety to set sail, no departure took place.2
According to Roger of Wendover, the nobles refused to accompany John because he was still excommunicate, and this statement draws strong support from what the king did next. On 1 July he sent a powerful delegation across the Channel, headed by the archbishop of Dublin and the bishop of Norwich, with a message for the archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, and his fellow exiles, urging them to return to England as quickly as they could. Langton and his colleagues duly obliged, landing in Dover a week or so later and hastening to meet the king at Winchester. On 20 July, hearing of their approach, John came out of the city to meet them. In what was clearly a carefully contrived display of penance, he prostrated himself at the bishops’ feet and tearfully begged them to show compassion to him and his kingdom. They responded by raising him up and leading him to the door of Winchester Cathedral, where they chanted the fiftieth psalm (‘Have mercy on me, O God, [and] blot out my iniquity’). There, before a crowd of nobles, clergy and commoners, John was absolved. At the same moment, says Wendover, he swore on the Gospels that he would henceforth love and defend the Church and renew the good laws of his ancestors – a renewal, essentially, of his coronation oath. Langton then led the king inside the cathedral and celebrated Mass. Afterwards all the bishops and nobles joined John for a splendid and joyful feast.3
But in some cases the joy of the magnates, like the king’s tears of contrition, must surely have been counterfeit. Among the crowd at Winchester were several men who until recently had been reckoned among John’s most bitter enemies. Most notable were Robert fitz Walter and Eustace de Vescy, who had fled from England the previous year when their plot to kill the king had been unmasked. Fitz Walter, having escaped to France, had fallen in with the exiled English clergy, and convinced them that he and Vescy were being persecuted because they had championed the cause of the Church. When the pope had made his offer of absolution to John in February, one of its conditions had been that the king had to readmit both men to England and grant them his true peace. John had no option but to oblige, and fitz Walter and Vescy had returned to England in July at the same time as the bishops. The king had restored their confiscated estates while he was at Winchester, but the absence of genuine reconciliation was obvious. On 27 May, the same day he had issued letters of safe conduct for the two men, he also ordered the demolition of Vescy’s principal castle at Alnwick. (Fitz Walter’s fortress in London, Baynard’s Castle, had already been destroyed at the start of the year.)4
Despite the performances at Winchester, therefore, there was still much rancour and ill will between John and some of his leading subjects, and this became rapidly apparent in the days that followed. As soon as the festivities were finished the king hurried back to Corfe, intending to depart for the Continent immediately now that his excommunication had been lifted. Yet again, however, his magnates resisted, raising new objections. Some apparently claimed that they had been impoverished by the frequency of military service in recent years – the campaigns in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, not to mention the long weeks they had already spent in 1213 waiting around at Portsmouth and Canterbury. Others went further still, asserting that the terms of their tenure did not oblige them to serve in Poitou at all. This, according to Ralph of Coggeshall, was the particular claim of the northern barons, a group which must have included Eustace de Vescy.5
The king was naturally furious, and attempted to press ahead with the campaign regardless. If Wendover is to be believed, he may even have put to sea for a day or two, just as he had done in 1205. As on that occasion, however, the failure of his barons to follow him forced him to turn back. By the middle of August his plan to go to Poitou had been abandoned. On 17 August he wrote to the count of Toulouse, explaining that he had been prevented from sailing by contrary winds, and a few days later he sent letters to the mariners of Bristol, Wales, Ireland and the Cinque Ports, instructing them to have their ships ready to depart early in the new year.6
In the meantime John had one overriding desire, which was to take revenge on the men who had humiliated him. Towards the end of August he gathered together what Coggeshall calls ‘a great force of knights’ and set out for northern England, determined to terrorize its recalcitrant barons. News of his intention soon reached London, and the ears of Stephen Langton, who sped after the king and intercepted him at Northampton. The archbishop warned John that if he made war on his own subjects he would be breaking the oath to provide good government that he had sworn at the time of his absolution, and advised him to let the northern barons put their case in court. The king, says Wendover, angrily told Langton that this was none of his business, being a matter of secular politics, and continued his warlike advance. But the archbishop persisted in his pursuit, following the army as far as Nottingham, where he threatened to excommunicate everyone in it, apart from John, if they continued. This, according to Wendover, was enough to induce the king to abandon his plan, and to name a day for the northerners to have their hearing.7
John may have stopped short of harrying the lands of his opponents, but he nonetheless pressed on into the north, travelling as far as Durham with his military retinue, as if to demonstrate the kind of force he was capable of unleashing. He had, moreover, coercive powers at his disposal other than fire and sword. The Exchequer, with its carefully enrolled records of debt, was also a formidable weapon. Ever since resistance to military service in Poitou had reared its head in June, John had been leaning on individual knights and barons, offering to pardon their debts, or at least a portion of them, in return for a written promise to provide a guaranteed number of men. On 17 September, returning south from Durham, he stopped at Knaresborough in Yorkshire and struck just such a bargain with Hugh de Balliol, lord of Barnard Castle in Northumberland. During the previous year Balliol had been deprived of his castle, and all his other properties besides, which had then been restored to him that April. The likeliest reason for their initial confiscation is that he was suspected of being involved in the plot of 1212, and it seems as good as certain that he was among those northern lords who had refused to go to Poitou during the summer. But now, at Knaresborough, he agreed to provide John with two knights, at his own cost, to go wherever the king commanded. In return for this written undertaking, his debt to the Crown was reduced by the fairly meagre sum of eighty marks.8
Where no debts existed, of course, new ones could easily be created. Three days later, at Tickhill Castle in South Yorkshire, John imposed an even harsher deal on another northern magnate, John de Lacy. John was the son of Roger de Lacy, the hero of the siege of Château Gaillard. His father had died in October 1211, but thus far John had not received his inheritance, a massive estate comprised of five northern baronies, perhaps because he was underage. The king granted it to him at Tickhill, but imposed a colossal relief of 7,000 marks, the whole of which was to be repaid within just three years. The details of the agreement make it clear this was as much about royal fears of treachery as it was about raising money. Despite the size of the relief the king refused to hand over the Lacy castles at Pontefract and Donington to their new young lord, but nevertheless required him to pay for their garrisons. Lacy was also assured that, should he ever decide to join the king’s enemies, he would lose all his lands forever.9
Perhaps the most striking thing about this deal is that it was by no means unique. By the autumn of 1213 John’s income had fallen sharply from its six-figure peak.10 During the previous year he had attempted to pacify his critics by reducing the demands of his sheriffs and foresters, and lately the peace he had made with the pope had obliged him to return all the Church’s confiscated property. Yet the imminent prospect of a renewed assault on Philip Augustus meant his hunger for cash was greater than ever. Such was his need for both money and military service, and his desire to control particular individuals by threatening to call in their debts, that John began demanding such massive sums from his magnates almost as a matter of routine. During the summer of 1213, for example, Thomas de Moulton, who had previously been imprisoned in Rochester Castle for failing to pay his debts, promised 1,000 marks so that his new wife, a widow, could have custody of her daughters, while William fitz Alan offered 10,000 marks to inherit his father’s medium-sized barony in Shropshire. From 1213 onwards, the king was exploiting his rights of lordship harder than ever, imposing the heaviest fines of his reign.11
The same day that John was at Tickhill (20 September) saw the arrival in England of another papal legate, Nicholas of Tusculum. The king had requested the presence of a legate back in May, at the time of his submission to the pope, and Innocent had been happy to oblige. Since John had made England a papal fief, he had been transformed from a pariah into the pope’s most cherished son. From that moment on, Innocent’s attitude towards John had become, and would remain, not merely supportive but indulgent. The king, for his part, was content to continue cultivating this response. A few days after welcoming Cardinal Nicholas in London, he repeated his submission to the pope in St Paul’s Cathedral, presenting the legate with a charter sealed with gold to be preserved forever in the papal archives.
Nicholas had come to England to help repair relations between John and his senior clergy, lately returned from exile. By the time of his arrival they were already at loggerheads over the issue of the interdict, which still remained in force. The king wanted it to be lifted immediately, but the bishops wanted first to address the question of the damages they had suffered during the past five years. Back in May John had paid a token £8,000, and in July, at the time of his absolution, he had promised to make good all their losses by the following Easter, with a guaranteed 15,000 marks by Christmas. This seemed very reasonable to the newly arrived legate, who was following his master’s instructions to be as helpful to the king as possible. The English bishops, however, set little store by such promises and guarantees, and stood their ground. The interdict would be lifted only once they had been compensated in full.12
Since agreement at this initial meeting proved impossible, a second council was summoned to meet in one month’s time. When it convened at Wallingford at the start of November, there was still no resolution: John simply repeated his earlier offer, which the bishops again rejected as inadequate. What made the Wallingford council significant was not the ongoing dispute with the clergy, but the appearance of the northern barons who had refused to serve in Poitou; 1 November, it seems, was the date that had been set for their hearing. Happily, in this instance a reconciliation was achieved. Thanks, we are told, to the intervention of the legate, the archbishop of Canterbury, the other bishops and the other barons, the king gave the kiss of peace to the northerners, and accepted that they should enjoy the ‘ancient liberties’ he had sworn to uphold at the time of his absolution. On the same day, the king instructed the Exchequer not to enforce the agreements to provide military service he had been imposing on individual barons since the summer. It was probably also at this moment that John summoned a new council of knights and barons to meet him in Oxford in two weeks’ time.13
This peace, however, did not last for more than a few days. Promises on both sides were not kept, says the Dunstable annalist, and certainly in the king’s case we can see that this was true. On 4 November he ordered an inquiry into the damages of the Norfolk estates of Robert fitz Walter, suggesting he was trying to appease his principal opponent in East Anglia and part him from the northern barons. Then, on 7 November, John showed his true colours, instructing the sheriffs to cause all those knights who had been summoned to the council at Oxford to come armed, while ensuring that the barons came unarmed. Clearly the king was planning to end the dispute by force, or at least the threat of it. Presumably this council met on 15 November as ordered, for John was indeed in Oxford on that date. But presumably also his opponents, having learned of his bad faith, stayed away, and returned to their estates in the north.14
In his writs of summons to the Oxford meeting, the king had said that he wanted to speak with four knights from every county about ‘the business of our kingdom’. Whatever this was, it no doubt included the preparations for the rescheduled expedition to Poitou. John intended to depart at the start of February 1214, and already his officials at Portsmouth were busy fitting out his fleet, converting ships to carry horses and amassing foodstuffs and armaments. The king was determined to press ahead, despite the continued opposition in northern England, and the dismal news from southern France. In September King Peter of Aragon had crossed the Pyrenees, expecting to join forces with John as planned, but in the event found only Raymond of Toulouse and his local allies. Together they had set out to besiege the town of Muret, just outside Toulouse, but had been engaged in battle by the crusading army of Simon de Montfort and obliterated. King Peter was killed during the fighting and Raymond forced to flee into exile. In December he arrived in England, penniless and powerless, now a liability rather than an asset. John was left more reliant than ever on his allies in the Low Countries. In January the count of Flanders crossed the Channel and did homage to him at Canterbury.15
The king was as impatient as ever to leave.16 Over Christmas he had persuaded more men to promise military service by offering them better deals, reducing the number of knights they were required to provide in exchange for the reduction of their debts. When he arrived at Portsmouth towards the end of January, he found that he had an army that was tolerably large. Few earls had turned out, but most had sent substitutes to fight on their behalf. The king also had, in the words of Ralph of Coggeshall, ‘a vast number of soldiers of lesser fortune’, and ‘a countless treasure of gold, silver and precious stones’. This was no exaggeration. In the previous weeks the king’s castle treasuries had disgorged their long-hoarded contents, to supply a war chest of around 200,000 marks. And some of the northern barons, such as John de Lacy, heavily leant on the previous autumn, had also turned out. The hardcore among them, however, including Eustace de Vescy, had stayed at home, defiant and unpacified. The king had no choice but to depart without them. On 2 February he put to sea, taking with him his queen, Isabella, and their younger son, Richard. Bearing in mind the rumours of 1212, it must have seemed advisable not to leave both his sons in the same place.17
A little less than a fortnight later, after being delayed on the Isle of Wight for several days by adverse winds, John and his fleet sailed into La Rochelle. Having disembarked his troops on 15 February, he spent the next three weeks establishing control over the surrounding countryside, waiting to see which nobles would recognize his authority, and which ones would need reminding. The lord of nearby Millescu, just fifteen miles from La Rochelle, refused to do so, and as a result his castle was subjected to a two-day siege until it surrendered on 4 March. A few days later the king sent letters to every magnate in England announcing this minor triumph, along with the news that a total of twenty-six castles and fortifications had been recovered since his arrival. ‘By the grace of God’, he wrote, in separate letters dispatched the same day to the burgesses of every English town, ‘we have already begun to expedite our affairs to the joy and gladness of our friends, and to the confusion of our enemies.’18
On 9 March John set out on a more major excursion, leading his army eastwards through his wife’s county of Angoulême, and continuing into the region known as the Limousin. After three weeks he had travelled more than 200 miles and reached the town of La Souterraine on the frontier with the kingdom of France, where on Easter Sunday (30 March) he received the homage of the count of the Périgord. Four days later he entered the city of Limoges and received the reluctant submission of its viscount, Guy of Limoges, who swore loyalty to him as his ‘natural lord … against all mortal men’. Guy promptly sent a terse letter to Philip Augustus, pointing out that he had previously done homage to the French king ‘for the defence of my lands’, but that John had been able to enter them with impunity, ‘with so many men that I could not resist him, nor wait for your help’.19
This message probably reached Philip fairly quickly, for news of John’s progress had prompted the French king to raise an army and make his way south. By April he had reached Châteauroux, close to the border with the Limousin: at one stage he was less than fifty miles away from John’s forces. According to Philip’s chaplain, William the Breton, his approach caused his opponent to scurry off southwards, but the truth was that John had already obtained all the submissions he wanted, and Philip had done nothing to stop him. During the following fortnight the English army retraced its steps in the direction of La Rochelle, and then marched south to assert John’s authority in Gascony. Here they met a more pugnacious opponent in the shape of Simon de Montfort, who had destroyed the king’s southern allies the previous September. John advanced up the River Garonne as far as La Réole, but when he sent troops further along the river to recover Marmande, Montfort and his army attacked them, provoking a speedy withdrawal. This was not the battle that the king had come to fight, and this marked the end of his advance into Gascony. By 22 April he was back at La Rochelle, planning his next move.20
As for Philip, he now faced perhaps the greatest dilemma of his reign to date. Around the same time that John had sailed from England, his half-brother, the earl of Salisbury, had left for the Low Countries, to marshal the coalition of counts and dukes that John had been constructing and subsidizing for the past three years. While the French king hovered at Châteauroux he must have received disturbing reports from northern France of the kind that eventually reached Roger of Wendover, who describes how Salisbury’s forces ravaged Philip’s territory in the cruellest manner, sparing not even the women and children. Towards the end of April, the king rose to the bait and made the momentous decision to divide his army. Several hundred knights and a few thousand infantry were to remain in the south under the command of his son and heir, Louis, in the hope of checking John’s progress. The remainder followed Philip as he hurried north to resist his other foes.21
This was, of course, exactly the reaction John had been counting on. Having spent two months ensuring his lands in the south were secure, he was now ready to advance north into Anjou and recover the lost heartlands of his father’s empire. With only a small French army to oppose him, the king could feel confident of success. Before he embarked upon it, however, there was one final matter to attend to in Poitou, and that was the Lusignan family, whose allegiance he had forfeited in 1200 by his fateful decision to marry Isabella of Angoulême. John appears to have agreed a truce with them very soon after his arrival, no doubt hoping that, as other southern lords submitted, the Lusignans would eventually be persuaded to do the same. But by the middle of May the truce had expired and the family remained defiant, and so at that point John marched his army to Mervent, forty miles north-east of La Rochelle, a castle which belonged to Geoffrey de Lusignan. ‘Many might not believe it could be taken by assault’, said the king in another newsletter to England, before describing how his troops had done it in the space of a single morning. From Mervent he moved a short distance to Vouvant, another of Geoffrey’s castles, into which the lord and his sons had retreated, and for three days he subjected it to a relentless battering with his siege engines. He was about to order another direct attack when Geoffrey’s nephew, Hugh de Lusignan, arrived.22
As the man who had been set to marry Isabella before John abducted her, Hugh de Lusignan had the greatest cause for ongoing resentment, yet during the previous weeks he had evidently entered into negotiations with the king and discussed the terms on which he and his family might submit. John was prepared to grant him large amounts of territory – all of Saintonge and the neighbouring isle of Oléron – until they could be replaced by other lands in Anjou once it had been recovered. To further sweeten the deal, the king offered the betrothal of his infant daughter Joan* to Hugh’s namesake son, and conceded that she would be handed over immediately to the Lusignans’ custody. It was the kind of generous compensation package that ought to have been proposed to the family fourteen years earlier, and it now succeeded in bringing them to heel. With Hugh’s intervention, Geoffrey de Lusignan surrendered his castle at Vouvant and sought John’s mercy. By this combination of stick and carrot, the king induced his former enemies, the most powerful barons in Poitou, to join his side. On 25 May Hugh and Geoffrey, together with Hugh’s younger brother Ralph, did homage and fealty to him, and two days later the transfer of land was sealed. John sent jubilant letters back to England, describing his triumph and looking forward hopefully to the future. ‘Now by the grace of God we have the opportunity to attack our main enemy, the king of France, beyond Poitou,’ he wrote, ‘and we tell you this that you may rejoice at our success.’23
John moved north immediately, his army now swelled by the Lusignans and their followers. His next target was Brittany, and in particular the city of Nantes, which controlled the lower reaches of the River Loire, and could thus open up a new supply route from England for the next phase of operations. After the ‘disappearance’ of Arthur in 1203, the nobles of Brittany had decided that the duchy should pass to his younger half-sister, Alice (the daughter of Arthur’s mother, Constance, by her third marriage); in 1213 Philip Augustus had arranged for Alice to be married to his cousin, Peter of Dreux, who from that point had become Brittany’s new duke. John was well placed to tempt Peter as he had done the Lusignans, for earlier dukes of Brittany had also been earls of Richmond, and the king now offered to restore this valuable inheritance. At the same time, he was able to threaten Peter, for besides bringing his queen and some of his children on campaign, John had also brought his niece, Eleanor – Arthur’s younger sister. Eleanor had been captured with her brother at Mirebeau in 1202 and held captive in England ever since. Clearly she had a better claim to Brittany than anyone, and her presence in John’s entourage implied that the king might be inclined to enforce it if the current duke refused to co-operate.24
In the event Peter was neither tempted nor cowed. When John’s forces approached Nantes in early June, its French garrison rode out and attacked them. This proved to be a foolhardy move, for the king’s army was superior in number and won an easy victory, capturing around twenty French knights, including Peter’s brother, Robert. But despite this loss Nantes refused to surrender, and Peter rejected John’s attempts to win him over. The capture of his brother, however, may have persuaded the duke to accept a truce, for the king was now content to leave Brittany and continue his advance. In the second week of June he moved eastwards along the Loire, taking much plunder as he went, and on 17 June he entered Angers, the chief city of his Angevin forefathers.25
This must have been a jubilant moment, at least for John and his supporters, but any celebration of victory would have been premature. Angers was easy to take because it had no defences – John had destroyed its walls and castle at the start of his reign in the struggle against Arthur. But this meant it was also impossible to hold: the king had recovered the city during his previous campaign in 1206, but abandoned it after only a week on learning of the approach of Philip Augustus. Until John’s arrival in 1214, Angers was held by his sometime supporter, latterly his enemy, William des Roches, who had served as seneschal of Anjou since his defection to Philip in 1202. Knowing that he could not hope to defend the city against an assault, des Roches had withdrawn his forces to a more secure location. Ten miles to the south-west, on high ground above the north bank of the Loire, he had spent the intervening decade constructing a castle known as La Roche-au-Moine (today La Roche-aux-Moines, outside the town of Savennières). It was here that the seneschal left some of his men to reinforce the garrison, before riding off in search of help.
Determined to maintain the momentum of his campaign, John left Angers the day after his arrival and placed La Roche-au-Moine under siege. His mood was clearly confident. On 19 June, camped before the castle’s walls, he ordered his officials in the south to send all his treasure up to the Loire, along with his wife and children. In spite of his failure to take Nantes, the king was moving his base of operations north to support his advance into Anjou. His confidence must have been bolstered by the decision at this moment of at least one Norman magnate, possibly six, to seek guarantees of the king’s goodwill against his arrival in Normandy. Clearly John was not alone in imagining that the total recovery of his lost empire was imminent.26
The same thought must have been weighing heavily upon the mind of Philip Augustus’ son, Louis, left in the south to counter John’s advance. Since his father’s departure in April, Louis had apparently caused his opponent little trouble, his only reported activity an unsuccessful siege of one of Geoffrey de Lusignan’s castles. At twenty-six years old, Louis did not lack either military experience or boldness, but he did lack manpower: according to every report, the forces under his command were fewer than those following John. As his enemy advanced into Anjou, however, the situation was becoming critical, and Louis realized that something must be done. He and his men had based themselves at Chinon, just over fifty miles east along the Loire Valley from La Roche-au-Moine. When he heard that John was besieging the castle (perhaps from William des Roches, who joined him at Chinon), he sent messengers to his father asking for instructions, and Philip replied that the siege should be raised. At the start of July, Louis and his army set out.27
By this point John had been besieging La Roche-au-Moine for almost a fortnight, his frustration clearly beginning to mount. According to William the Breton, he had ordered a gallows to be erected in view of the castle walls, and threatened to hang the garrison if they continued to resist. The defenders were apparently on the point of surrender when, on 2 July, the king was advised of Louis’ approach, and informed by his scouts that the French army was significantly smaller than his own. John, says Roger of Wendover, was emboldened by this intelligence, and ordered his troops to ready themselves for battle.28
But the Lusignans, along with several other Poitevin barons, refused. According to Wendover they claimed they were ill-prepared for a pitched encounter. William the Breton suggests they were reluctant to fight Louis because he was the son of the French king, and Philip was their ultimate overlord. It would be surprising if John, when he received their homage in May, had not obliged the Lusignans to swear loyalty to him ‘against all mortal men’, as he had done a month earlier in the case of Guy of Limoges, so there is much to be said for Wendover’s description of their behaviour as treacherous. Whatever excuses they tendered, their refusal to obey the king at this crucial moment depleted his strength and caused his confidence to evaporate. ‘In great annoyance’, says Wendover, he ordered his army to abandon the siege of La Roche-au-Moine and retreat.29
As always in such circumstances, those on horseback were able to get away quickly. John’s next datable appearance, five days later, is at Mauzé-sur-le-Mignon, over a hundred miles south of the Loire, only a short distance from La Rochelle. But such haste meant that the king had to abandon everything in his camp: his siege engines, pavilions, clothes, money and valuables, all of which were plundered by La Roche-au-Moine’s garrison. It also meant abandoning his infantry, and the other slow-moving elements of his army, who were left to fend for themselves against Louis’ troops, and who drowned in large numbers as they tried to escape across the river. Having killed as many of the fugitives as they could catch, the French army recovered all the territory in the region that John had lately invaded, reoccupying Angers and throwing down the new defences that the king had begun to construct.30
This was clearly a disaster, and John knew it. As soon as he reached La Rochelle on 9 July, he sent letters to his leading subjects in England. ‘Know that we are safe and well,’ he began, ‘and that everything, by the grace of God, is prosperous and happy with us.’ But the rest of the letter belied this upbeat opening, as the king all but begged those earls, barons and knights who had remained at home to join him in Poitou as quickly as possible. Those who did so, he promised, would earn his permanent gratitude, and anyone who suspected that he bore them any ill will could rest assured that their coming would remedy this.31
For John to reach out to the likes of Robert fitz Walter and Eustace de Vescy suggests that his situation was indeed desperate. But despite this rather craven appeal, the fact remained that all was not yet lost, for the war was not yet over. Even if his letter to England elicited no response, he still had adherents holding out in their castles on the Loire, and he could still hope to draw on the support of the barons of Poitou, who were summoned to a new muster at Niort on 27 July. Most of all, he still had his grand coalition of allies in the north, poised to attack Philip Augustus. It did not matter if John failed to recover any territory, so long as he could keep Louis occupied and the French forces divided. The earl of Salisbury could land a crushing blow on Philip Augustus that would render the recent setback at La Roche-au-Moine redundant.32
Four hundred miles away in Flanders, the king’s half-brother was almost ready to commence his attack. Although he had been conducting raids into French territory throughout the spring, rallying all the members of the coalition for a major invasion had taken longer than anticipated, and at the start of July they were still awaiting the arrival of the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto IV. At last, however, Otto mustered his forces from the Rhineland and, around 23 July, linked arms with Salisbury and his companions at Valenciennes, about thirty miles south-east of Lille.33
The delay of his opponents had given Philip plenty of time to marshal all the military strength he could find to resist them. The problem, from the French king’s point of view, was that it was still insufficient. Estimates of the size of medieval armies are always hazardous, but it seems clear that the combined forces of the coalition were bigger, possibly by as much as forty per cent. Philip therefore had good reason to be cautious as he marched his army northwards. William the Breton portrays him as eager for combat, but it may be that he was actually intending to shadow the movements of his enemies, hoping that they would eventually run into logistical difficulties and be forced to retire. When the two armies unintentionally came within ten miles of each other on 26 July, the French king, then at Tournai, decided this was too close for comfort, and set out early the next morning for Lille, eighteen miles to the west.
It was probably around midday on 27 July, roughly halfway through this journey, that Philip was warned that his enemies were pursuing him and were about to attack. This was surprising, for it was a Sunday, a day when even the most devious medieval commanders usually tried to avoid bloodshed. It was also deeply alarming, for the French army was marching in a column several miles long, and was at that moment crossing a river by means of the bridge in the village of Bouvines. The warning gave Philip just enough time to avert what could have been a disastrous ambush. Those troops that had already crossed the bridge were recalled, and those that had not were able to array themselves. As a result, they turned the tables on their pursuers, who were themselves faced with the sudden difficulty of converting their own column into a line of battle.
What followed was one of the most decisive and momentous clashes in European history. William the Breton, who was an eyewitness, devoted many pages to describing the action. It was, he said, a melee so thick that the combatants scarcely had room to swing their weapons. The silk surcoats of the knights, emblazoned with their coats of arms, were cut to shreds, so that it became difficult to distinguish friend from foe. The day was searingly hot, and the clouds of dust kicked up by the two armies added to the sense of chaos. Everywhere across the field lay horses, dead or terribly maimed, having been targeted by knights seeking to unhorse and capture their opponents. Philip Augustus was brought down by the count of Boulogne but rescued by one of his household knights, while Otto reportedly had three of his mounts killed beneath him. The number of human casualties, given that there were also thousands of infantry involved, must have been huge. ‘There was hardly anywhere’, said William the Breton, ‘that one did not find a body stretched out or a horse dying.’
Despite the confusion, it eventually became apparent that Philip’s forces were having the best of the fighting. The coalition, because they had been forced into a hasty deployment, could not make use of all their troops, and their cavalry were too disorganized. ‘I must tell you’, says the Anonymous of Béthune, ‘that they did not ride so well and in such an orderly manner as the French, and they became aware of it.’ The duke of Brabant was the first to flee, and his departure seems to have triggered a general collapse. Otto decided to retreat, abandoning his army and his imperial banner. Others fought on doggedly against dwindling odds. The count of Boulogne was surrounded and captured, as was the count of Flanders. The earl of Salisbury was clubbed from his horse by a notorious fighting cleric, the bishop of Beauvais, with such force that it shattered his helmet. He too was taken prisoner.
The Battle of Bouvines was a historic turning point. It signalled Philip’s God-given triumph over his rivals, and ensured the survival of the French monarchy. When news of their king’s victory reached Paris, the students there are said to have danced for seven days; today Bouvines is recognized as being as important in the making of France as Hastings is in the making of England. At the same time, the battle signalled the end for Otto IV, who rapidly lost ground to his rival, Frederick II.
It also marked the end of the road for King John. In early August, as yet oblivious to what had happened, he was once again advancing rapidly northwards, skirting around Poitiers, perhaps planning to attack the city of Tours. But on 6 August his advance came to a sudden halt, suggesting that he had heard the disastrous news, and registered its catastrophic implications. The project to recover the lands of his ancestors, planned for so long, and for which he had governed England so relentlessly, was over – and, despite his massive expenditure, he had almost nothing to show for it. A few hours of bloody mayhem at Bouvines had confirmed that his loss of Normandy, Brittany and Anjou would be permanent. All he could hope for now was to salvage something from the campaign’s wreckage by tightening his tenuous grip on his territories south of the Loire. In the last days of August Philip brought his army south and the two sides agreed to a two-week ceasefire. By 18 September they had agreed a five-year truce. In early October John returned to La Rochelle and took ship for England. He was not expecting a hero’s welcome.34
_______________
* Not be confused with his bastard daughter of the same name, the wife of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth.