Heeeeere's Johnny!
And so we bid farewell to the twelfth century. Henry the Second, having started out so well, lost the plot and declared war on his three eldest sons, then popped his clogs, the throne being claimed by the thoroughly repellent Richard the Lionheart.
Mercifully, gangrene did for Richard, leaving John in possession of England, Normandy, Anjou and various chunks of Aquitaine. While John was being crowned in Westminster Abbey, his nephew Arthur, together with Philip the Second of France and the French aristocracy combined against him and, after many battles, murders and marriages that do not concern us here, kicked John out of Northern France and back across la Manche to England. Lacking the martial skills of elder brother Richard, John's capitulation led contemporary English chroniclers to label him euphemistically "John Softsword".
Fans of the thoroughly silly Robin Hood stories know King John as a money-grubbing bad hat and that's just about the only thing in those stories that is based on fact. John declared that he would rule England with "force and will". He was the first English king to make the insane claim that he had a "divine right" to rule.
Being the gittiest of a succession of gits did little to endear him to noble or peasant alike and he taxed the trousers off everybody to raise enough money to buy himself a mercenary army with which to take back his lost French lands.
By 1214 he had extorted sufficient funds and his forces invaded Normandy, only to be promptly thrashed at the Battle of Bouvines.
When John limped back to England, his tail between his legs, he found the barons in revolting demeanour. In 1215, in council in London he tried to thrash out a compromise but the rebel barons tooled up and, calling themselves the Army of God (twats), stormed and took London. At Runnymede near Windsor, John was forced to sign a peace agreement, ceding various royal powers to the barons.
What became known as Magna Carta proposed no taxes on the barons without baronial assent and protected the rights of the aristocracy (I refuse to use the term 'nobility' as there's nothing noble about the feckers) against the crown. Contrary to popular opinion it did bugger all good for the common folk. Inevitably, within months both sides had torn it up and the First Barons' War kicked off with a big barney at Rochester Castle in Kent.
King John did pretty well in the war, booting baronial arse all over England, then stuffing the Scots and chasing them back over the border.
Desperately short of siege weapons and cash, the barons offered the English crown to French dauphin Louis the Lion, who had shedloads of both. King John tried to stop him crossing the Channel but his fleet got dispersed in a storm and Louis landed his forces unopposed in Kent in May 1216.
Between May and October of that year, England suffered under two rival kings, with disastrous consequences for Norwich Castle and the city itself. We'll deal with that in the next chapter, but first we have to kill off Johnny.
Which manner of death should we give him? Yup; the traditional death of mediæval kings: arse gravy! Travelling to the port of King's Lynn in Norfolk to organise reinforcements from the Continent, John went down with dysentery, allegedly from a surfeit of peaches. Taking a short cut across The Wash to get back to his power base he appears to have forgotten about the massive tidal surge and the royal treasury (including, legend has it, the Crown Jewels) together with much of his wagon train was lost beneath the waves.
John made it as far as Newark where he farted out his last peachy f'squirch and passed from our story.
The future Henry the Third was but a nine-year-old kid, looked after by the only decent knight in English history, William Marshal. So we have two kings again: King Louis, King Henry the Third, a bunch of rebel barons and a whole lot of mercenaries on the board. Next time, the Game of Thrones reaches Norwich and it's not pretty.
Sources:
Norfolk Museums Service and the Norfolk Archæological Society
East Anglian Archæology Vol. 132: Norwich Castle: Excavations and Historical Survey: 1978-1988: Part 1: Anglo-Saxon to c.1345: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2009
Gesta Stephani: In translation by K. R. Potter and R. H. C. Davis: Oxford Mediæval Texts: 1976
The Anarchy of King Stephen's Reign: Edmund King (ed): 1994
Norwich Castle Keep: Romanesque Architecture and Social Context: T. A. Heslop: 1994
Stephen and Matilda : The Civil War of 1139 - 1153: Jim Bradbury: 2005
The Norman Connections - Castle: Part 1: Norwich Castle: Elizabeth Shepherd-Popescu: 2010
Mediæval Norwich: ed: Carole Rawcliffe & Richard Wilson: 2004
Francis
Blomefield: An Essay Towards a Topographical History of the County of
Norfolk: Volume 3: The History of the City and County of Norwich: 1753
to 1775
The Oxford History of England: 1087-1216: From Domesday to Magna Carta: Austin L. Poole (ed): 1951
4 comments:
Is there more than one "original copy" of the Magna Carta? I thought I had visited one at Wells Cathedral in the chapter room, but photos online don't show it. Maybe it was on loan...? This was 1999, so, you know, things change.
One for the king, one each for the barons, Petrea. Of course they soon ripped it up and it wasn't until after the Second Barons' War that it was revised and rewritten as the version you know in the States. So the lovely American monument at Runnymede celebrates the wrong thing. Such is history … just one damned thing after another.
Looking at your picture of the Magna Carta, Dive, I kept expecting to see little drawings of decapitations and people being drawn and quartered, 'cuz, you know, beware of people (men, particularly) who have really tiny writing. As it turns out, according to your story, my first impression doesn't seem that far off. Day-um! Was such brutality a way of life, merely done for survival, or were they all serial killers disguised as kings and knights and such? Or did all the peaceful guys just head off to the monastery?
The peaceful folk kept their heads down and farmed the land as slaves / serfs, while the rich took everything they wanted, though as we've seen, the rich never killed one another, they just ransomed themselves off; it was the poor who got slaughtered.
The monks were as bad as the aristocracy. Pretty much nothing's changed from the bronze age through to Trump. All we can do to keep sane is point at them and laugh.
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