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BIOGRAPHYCAL UNIVERSAL LIBRARY |
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RICHARD THE LION HEART
BOOK II
RICHARD’S CRUSADE
CHAPTER I
THE YEAR OF PREPARATION
1189-1191
The headquarters of Philip and Richard had been
at Tours since their capture of that city on July 3; it was probably there that
Richard received, from a messenger despatched by
William the Marshal, the tidings of his father’s death at Chinon on the 6th and the intended burial at Fontevraud. The
night-watch round the open coffin was beginning in the great abbey church when
he reached it next evening. All endeavours to guess
at his feelings were baffled by the rigid stillness of his aspect and demeanour, broken only by a momentary shudder when he saw
the uncovered face. For a long while he stood gazing at it in silence; for a
briefer space he knelt in silent prayer. When at last he spoke, it
was to call for two of his father’s most loyal adherents, William the Marshal
and Maurice of Craon.
They came toward, and at his command, followed him, with some others, out of
the church. “So, fair Sir Marshal,” he began, “you were minded to slay me the
other day! and slain I should have been of a surety had I not turned your lance
aside by the strength of my arm. That would have been a bad day’s work!”. The
Marshal answered that his own strength of arm was great enough to drive a
lance-thrust home to its aim in spite of interference, and the issue of the
encounter was sufficient proof that he had sought only the life of the horse,
not the rider. “Marshal, I will bear you no malice; you are forgiven,” July 8
was Richard’s reply. The burial took place next morning.
As soon as it was over Richard despatched the Marshal and another envoy to England with
orders for the release of his mother, and with a commission to her authorizing
her to act as his representative until he could himself go over sea. His
choice of the Marshal for this errand was an indication of the spirit in which
he took up the rights and duties of his new position. He showed himself
gracious to all persons who had been faithful to Henry, and expressed his
intention of confirming them in their several offices and rewarding their
fidelity to the late king. He was asked to ratify a number of grants which
Geoffrey the chancellor assured him Henry had recently made or promised to
make, and he consented in every case save one, a grant of Chateauroux and its
heiress to Baldwin of Bethune, which he said must be cancelled because he had himself,
as duke of Aquitaine, granted the damsel and her fief to Andrew of Chauvigny; but he promised to compensate Baldwin. One man
only who had held high office under Henry fell under Richard’s displeasure :
Stephen the seneschal of Anjou, who was not only deprived of the castles and
the royal treasury which he had in custody for the late king, but was also
chained hand and foot and put in prison. The cause of Stephen’s disgrace is
unknown; his previous history is obscure; but the disgrace was only temporary;
within a few months he was once more free, and reinstated in the king’s
confidence and favour. On the other hand, when three
of the men who had deserted Henry and transferred their allegiance to Richard
asked for restitution of their lands of which Henry had disseised them, Richard gave it, but disseised them again
immediately, “saying that such was the due reward of traitors who in time of
need forsake their lords and help others against them”; and he treated with
coldness and aversion all, save one, who had thus acted. The exception was
John, who when he presented himself before his brother was “received with honour’’ and kindly comforted.
Richard next proceeded into Normandy. At Séez
the archbishops of Rouen and Canterbury met him, and (acting doubtless under a
commission from the legate) absolved him from excommunication. On July 20 he
received the ducal sword and banner of Normandy at the high altar of Rouen
cathedral, and immediately afterwards the fealty of the Norman clergy and
people. He then went to Gisors for a conference with
the king of France. The French historiographer-royal notes that as “the count
of Poitou’’ set foot in the great border-fortress about which he and his father
had wrangled so long with Philip, fire broke out within it, and that next day
as he rode forth the wooden bridge broke down under him and he and his horse
fell into July the ditch. The conference took place on the 22nd, between
Chaumont and Trie. Philip began by renewing his
original claim to Gisors, but waived it on receiving
an intimation that Richard still purposed to marry Aloysia.
The French king seems to have further claimed a large share of the castles and
towns which he had taken from Henry, including Chateauroux, Le Mans, and Tours.
Submission to such a demand would unquestionably have brought upon Richard, as
an English chronicler says, “shame and everlasting contempt”; indeed, he would
have been within his feudal right in refusing it entirely, on the ground that
no forfeiture on his father’s part could invalidate the grant of all these
fiefs which had been made to himself by Philip in November 1188. He consented,
however, to resign once for all his rights in Auvergne, and two little fiefs in
Aquitanian Berry that lay close to the French Royal Domain—Graçay and Issoudun; and he bought off Philip’s other
demands by a promise of four thousand marks in addition to the twenty thousand
due from Henry under the convention of Colombières. These terms Philip
accepted. Richard renewed his homage to his overlord, and they agreed to set
out on 1189 the Crusade together in Lent of the next year.
For three weeks longer Richard stayed in
Normandy, winning all hearts by his gracious and affable demeanour. On August 12 he went to England. Landing at Southampton or
Portsmouth, he was received two or three days later with a solemn procession at
Winchester by his mother and the chief nobles and prelates of the land. As the
archbishop of Canterbury had previously returned from Normandy, the
coronation might have taken place immediately, had the new king desired it.
But, unlike every other king of England since the Norman conquest, Richard was
in no haste to be crowned. There was no need for haste; he had no rival; he
had, in England, no enemies; and he had made for himself a host of friends by a
proclamation which during the last five weeks “honourable men” sent out by Eleanor according to instructions from him had been publishing
and carrying into effect in every county. All persons under arrest for offences
against Forest Law were to be discharged; those who were outlawed for a like
cause were permitted to return in peace. Other persons imprisoned “by the will
of the king or his justiciar,” not “by the common law of their county or
hundred, or on appeal,” were also to be discharged. Persons outlawed “by common
law without appeal by the justices” were to be re-admitted to peace provided
they could find sureties that they would come up for trial if required;
prisoners detained on appeal for any shameful cause were to be released on the
same terms. All persons detained “on appeal by those who acknowledged
themselves to be malefactors” were to be set free unconditionally. Malefactors
to whom “life and limbs” had been granted as approvers were to abjure and depart
from the king’s land; those who without the concession of life and limbs had
of their own free will accused others were to be kept in custody till further
counsel should be taken. The ordinance concluded by requiring every free man of
the realm to swear fealty and liege homage to the new lord of England, “and
that they will submit to his jurisdiction and lend him their aid for the
maintenance of his peace and justice in all things.” We cannot ascertain how
far Richard was justified in the insinuation conveyed in this ordinance, that
the administration of criminal law in Henry’s latter days had been marked not
only by undue severity, but also by arbitrary interference on the part of the
Crown or its officers with the rights and liberties of Englishmen. The most
philosophic historian of the time, William of Newburgh, evidently thought that
however Henry might have erred on the side of rigour,
Richard at the outset of his reign erred no less in the opposite direction. “At
that time,” says William, “the gaols were crowded
with criminals awaiting trial or punishment, but through Richard’s clemency
these pests came forth from prison, perhaps to become bolder thieves in the
future.” But the people in general were delighted to welcome a ruler
who seemed to them bent upon outdoing all that was good and undoing all that
they considered evil in the government of his predecessor.
From Winchester Richard was moving on by
leisurely stages towards London when a report of a Welsh raid made him suddenly
turn towards the border, with the intention of punishing the raiders; but
Eleanor, who perhaps better understood the danger of plunging unnecessarily
and unwarily into a Welsh war, called him back, and as usual he obeyed her. On
September 1 or 2 he was welcomed with a great procession in London; on the 3rd he was crowned at Westminster.
Three contemporary writers, one of whom actually assisted in the most sacred
detail of the ceremony, tell us how at its outset Duke Richard was solemnly and
duly elected by clergy and people; how he took the threefold oath, to maintain
the peace of the Church, to suppress injustice, and to promote equity and
mercy. After receiving the threefold anointing and being clothed with the
symbolical vestments of the kingly office, he was adjured by the Primate not to
assume it unless he were fully minded to keep his vow; he answered that by
God’s help he did intend so to do. He then took the crown from the altar and
handed it to the archbishop, and the archbishop set it on his head. Richard’s
coronation is in one way the most memorable in all English history, for it is
the occasion on which the form and manner of crowning a king of England were,
in every essential point and in most of the lesser particulars, fixed for all
after-time.
The court festivities lasted three days, and the
manner in which they were conducted presented a marked contrast to the rough,
careless, unceremonious ways of the court of Henry II. The banquet each day was
as stately and decorous as it was lavish and splendid. Clergy and laity were
seated apart, and the former had the place of honour,
being at the king’s own table. Richard had further emphasized the
solemnity of the occasion by a proclamation ordering that no Jew and no woman
should be admitted to the palace. Notwithstanding this, certain Jews did present
themselves at the doors on the evening of the coronation-day with gifts for the
king. The courtiers of lower rank and the people who crowded round robbed them,
beat them, and drove them away; some were mortally injured, some slain on the
spot. The tumult reached the ears of the king in the banqueting-hall, and he
sent the justiciar and some of the nobles to suppress it; but it was already
beyond their control. A great wave of anti-Jewish feeling swept through the
city; before morning most of the Jews’ houses were sacked; and the number of
persons concerned in the riot was so large and public feeling so strongly on
their side that although some of them were arrested by Richard’s orders and
brought before him, he found it impossible to do justice in the matter, and
only ventured to send three men to the gallows—one who in the confusion had
robbed a Christian, and two who had kindled a fire which burned down a
Christian’s house. For the rest he had to “condone what he could not
avenge.” He tried, however, to prevent further disturbances of the same kind by
sending into every shire letters commanding that the Jews should be left in
peace and no one should do them wrong; and so long as he remained in England
these orders were obeyed.
The new king had now to make provision for
his Crusade, and for the carrying on of the government of England after his
departure. There was no reason to anticipate any difficulty in the latter half
of his task; but the other half of it presented a very serious cause for anxiety—the
want of money. The Angevin treasury was empty; the ducal revenues of Normandy
and Aquitaine were not large enough, at the best of times, to furnish more than
a very insignificant surplus for purposes external to the two duchies.
Richard’s first act on reaching Winchester had been to cause an exact account
to be taken of the contents of the royal treasury. We have no trustworthy
statement of the result; but it evidently proved quite inadequate to supply his
needs. The twenty-four thousand marks due to Philip, the cost of equipping and
maintaining his own followers and of fitting out a transport fleet, were only a
part of those needs; there was another part which from Richard's point of view
was incalculable and, almost unlimited. A great effort for the deliverance of
Holy Land had been in contemplation throughout western Europe for nearly five
years; the form in which it had been originally projected was that of an
expedition to be led by the Angevin king of England as head of the elder branch
of the royal house of Jerusalem, and composed chiefly of his subjects, although
since then circumstances had so altered and the scheme had so widened out and
developed that he was now only one of several monarchs who were to lead their
respective contingents as portions of one great army. From 1184 onwards crowds
of Englishmen of all ranks had taken the Cross; most of them—very likely
including the English-born count of Poitou—without counting the cost, in any
sense of that word. Theoretically, the undertaking being not a national but a
personal and voluntary one, each Crusader was responsible for his own equipment
and expenses and those of his tenants or other followers. The king, however,
seems to have at once recognized that if the English (or Angevin) contingent
was to take such a share in the Holy War as befitted its leader’s rank among
the sovereigns and his kingdom’s rank among the powers of Christendom, he must
carry with him a large reserve fund for the maintenance of the whole force
under his command in a state of efficiency on a service of which no one could
forecast the requirements, the difficulties, or the duration. As we read the
after-story, indeed, we are almost led to credit him with a presentiment that
his war-chest was destined to become the war-chest of the whole crusading
host. At any rate, his most pressing anxiety was to fill the chest, and—since
he expected to leave Europe in the spring—to fill it as quickly as possible. He
might impose a special tax, or more than one; a tallage,
or “donum” or both at once. But these would take many months to collect, and
would bring in, probably, scarcely enough to be worth collecting, from his
point of view; while his subjects, who were, or considered themselves, already
hard pressed by the financial administration of Henry, would have felt or at
least resented such taxes as an additional and oppressive burden. Richard
adopted quicker and easier methods.
Among the crowds who had taken the Cross in a
moment of enthusiasm there were many whose zeal had cooled during the months or
years of waiting, and who would now gladly be relieved of the obligation to
fulfil their vow. There was also among them a much larger number of officers of
the English court and government, and of other men belonging to the classes from
which such officers were usually taken, than could well be spared from the work
of administration at home. Accordingly, Richard had asked and obtained from
Pope Clement letters patent granting release from their vow to all persons whom
the king should appoint to take part in the safe-keeping of the realm during
his absence. Naturally such release was conditional on compensation being made
to the crusading cause by all who were thus transferred from the service of the
Cross to that of the Crown, since they had taken the former upon themselves and
the latter was not compulsory; and this compensation necessarily took the form
of the payment to the king of a sum which could only be fixed in each case by a
bargain between him and the payer. From this it was not a difficult step for
the king to make similar bargains with men who had not taken the Cross, but
were suitable for and ambitious of office in England, and able to pay for it.
Neither the sale of public offices nor the yet more general practice of requiring
payment for royal grants of land, privileges, and benefits of any
kind—including confirmations by a new king of grants made by his predecessors—was
condemned, in principle at least, by the ordinary code of political morality in
Richard’s day. He might fairly argue that men who desired any of these things,
and had means to pay for them, ought to be made to contribute as largely as
possible to the Treasury for the furtherance of the Crusade; and he accordingly
set himself to drain, as it seemed, to the uttermost all these sources of
revenue. “He deposed from their bailiwicks nearly all the sheriffs and their
deputies, and held them to ransom to the uttermost farthing. Those who could
not pay were imprisoned.” He “induced many persons to vie with each other in
spending money to purchase dignities or public offices, or even royal manors.”
“All who were overburdened with money the king promptly relieved of it, giving
them powers and possessions at their choice.” “Whosoever would, bought of the
king his own rights as well as those of other men.” “All things were for sale
with him—powers, lordships, earldoms, sheriffdoms, castles, towns, manors, and
suchlike”; or as Roger of Howden sums it all up, “the king put up to sale everything
that he had.”
The part of these proceedings which chiefly perturbed Richard’s counsellors, it seems, was his reckless alienation of Crown demesne; in his passionate eagerness to pile up treasure for the Crusade he was, they considered, stripping himself of his proper means of living as a king should live at home; it was as if he did not intend, or did not expect, ever to come home again at all; and when some of them ventured on a remonstrance he answered, “I would sell London if I could find a buyer for it.” He was in fact in a mood to, almost literally, sell all that he had and give it to the Crusade. The means which he employed to raise money undoubtedly served their purpose; and they seem to have neither provoked any general discontent nor inflicted any hardship on the people, or even upon more than a very few individuals. The chronicler who speaks of a wholesale “deposition” and “ransoming” of the sheriffs has considerably exaggerated the king's treatment of those officers. In the first place, all sheriffs were always liable to be ‘"deposed” at any moment, since they were always appointed to hold their office “during the king’s pleasure.” At Richard’s accession there were in England twenty-eight sheriffs; two of these had each three counties under his charge, seven had two counties each. When Richard’s redistribution of offices was completed, six shires were by a special grant to John withdrawn from the royal administration altogether; seven or eight shires remained or were replaced under their former sheriffs; five sheriffs were transferred to shires other than those which they had previously administered; four—perhaps more—went on the Crusade; all the rest seem to have been employed in some other capacity under the Crown. In all likelihood most, if not all, of these men had taken the Cross and their “ransom” was no more than they were justly bound and could well afford to pay. One case does indeed present a different aspect. Ranulf de Glanville, at this time sheriff of Yorkshire and Westmorland, was also, and had been for nine years, Chief Justiciar of England. He had taken the Cross in 1185. One chronicler asserts that Ranulf was now “ stripped of his power,” put in ward, and set free only on payment of fifteen thousand pounds to the king. According to other authorities, however, he asked to be relieved of his functions that he might fulfil his vow. He is said to have had also another motive for his resignation : “ he was of great age, and saw that 1189 the new king, being a novice in government, was wont to do many things without due deliberation and forethought”. Behind these words there may lurk a partial explanation of Richard's seemingly harsh and extortionate treatment of the Justiciar. It is possible that the king realty wished to retain Ranulf's services as his pcegerent in England, and persuaded or coerced him into commuting his vow for that purpose, but that' Ranulf, when he had seen a little more of his new sovereign’s ways—which were indeed not likely to meet with the approval of statesmen who had grown old under Henry II—preferred to sacrifice the money as the price of Richard's consent to his departure. That the sacrifice was, after all, not a ruinous one may be inferred from the fact that it left him still able to make his expedition independently of the king, for he died at Acre seven months or more before Richard's arrival there. Two Chief Justiciars were appointed in his stead, of whom one, William de Mandeville, was a trusted and faithful friend of King Henry, and the other, Bishop Hugh of Durham, was a kinsman of the royal house and a man of long experience in politics, untiring energy and ambition, and great wealth, with the surplus of which he was quite willing to purchase release from his vow of Crusade and as many other benefits as Richard cared to bestow on him. Several other high offices, both in Church
and State, had to be filled anew, some from causes altogether beyond the king's
control, some in fulfilment of his promise to carry into effect the grants
which his father had left uncompleted. There were five vacant bishoprics,
besides the metropolitan see of York. This last Henry had destined for his son
Geoffrey the Chancellor; to Geoffrey Richard gave it, and thereby the
chancellorship was vacated. Two men vied with each other as candidates for this
important post; both offered large sums for it; Richard in this instance showed
that his choice of men was not governed by his thirst for money, by accepting
the lower bid of the two, because it was made by a man whom he knew and
trusted; and the person who received the largest share of grants out of the
royal domain received them absolutely free. That person was John. Henry had (or
was said to have) expressed the intention, of endowing John with the Norman
county of Mortain and four thousand pounds’ worth of
land in England. As soon as Richard was by investiture as duke of Normandy
legally able to make grants in that duchy, he put John in possession of
Mortain. The heritage of the late Earl of Gloucester had been
promised, with the hand of his heiress, to John ever since 1176; Richard
secured it for him by causing the marriage to take place a fortnight
after the brothers reached England. Within the next month the king
further bestowed upon John a number of escheated honours and other lands to the gross annual value of some five or six hundred pounds.
Within three more months he added the gift of six whole counties, with the
entire revenues and profits of every kind which they were wont to render to the
Crown, and the control of all administration and justice within their limits.
Of all Richard’s administrative arrangements
this was unquestionably the most imprudent and dangerous; it is indeed almost
the only one which can be clearly seen to have produced disastrous results.
When its motive is realized, however, criticism is almost disarmed; for
Richard’s act was not the spontaneous throwing away of an extravagant fraternal
benefaction, or of a wholly needless bribe to a brother to whom he owed
nothing and from whom, had he let him remain “Lackland,” he could have had
nothing to fear. It was simply a literal and exact fulfilment of Henry’s latest
design for completing his provision for John by endowing him with lands in
England to the value of four thousand pounds a year. This ill-advised project
of Henry’s might perhaps have been less unwisely carried out in some other way,
such as the bestowal of a number of small estates scattered in various parts of
the realm, instead of this solid block of territories with so much political,
influence and power attached to their possession; but the only safe mode of
dealing with it would have been to ignore it altogether. Rickard’s share of
responsibility in the matter amounts simply to this, that he—in his father’s
lifetime a disobedient son— carried loyalty to his dead father’s wishes beyond
the limits of worldly wisdom and sound policy.
Some of Richard’s administrative arrangements
and appointments were made in a great
council held in the middle of September at Pipewell in Northamptonshire, others at various times within the
next three months. Early in October the king spent a week in London; thence he
went to Arundel and afterwards to Winchester. He had meanwhile sent John with
an armed force—which the Welsh called “the host of' all England”—against Rees
of South Wales, who had laid siege to Caermarthen castle. It was to John’s interest that there should be peace with Rees, since
the honour of Gloucester included a large piece of
Welsh territory. Accordingly John and Rees made an agreement between
themselves, and Rees, with an escort furnished him by John, came to Oxford in
the hope of a meeting with the king; but Richard would not go to meet him.” For
Richard the chief gain from this expedition against Rees was that it enabled
him to collect from those tenants in chivalry who did not personally take part
in it a “Scutage of Wales” which helped to finance the expedition to Holy Land.
Early in November envoys from France brought letters
from Philip setting forth that he and his barons had sworn on the Gospels to be
at Vezelay ready to start on the Crusade at the close
of Easter (April 1, 1190), and begging that Richard would take an oath to the
same effect. Richard exacted from the envoys an oath “on the King of France’s
soul” that this pledge should be fulfilled on the French side; then he called a
great council in London and there caused one of his chief counsellors to take a
like oath on his behalf in presence of the Frenchmen. After this the king went
on pilgrimage to S. Edmund’s on the festival of its patron saint. Soon
afterwards he was at Canterbury, making peace between the archbishop
and the monks, who had long been at strife. The settlement was
destined to be only temporary, but for the moment it was a triumph both of
Richard’s kingly power and of his personal tact; the dispute had been a scandal
which had baffled Henry II, and a legate sent by the Pope to deal with it had
landed at Dover on November 20 (when Richard was at S. Edmund’s), but had been
by Eleanor’s order forbidden to proceed inland, his mission having no sanction
from the king. Richard, however, wanted to make use of him for two other
purposes: the confirmation of Geoffrey’s election to the see of York, and the
raising of an Interdict laid by Archbishop Baldwin on John’s lands in
consequence of the marriage of John and Isabel of Gloucester, who were cousins
within the prohibited degrees. Accordingly the legate was entertained at
Canterbury for two nights; he did what the king desired of him and then
departed out of the realm.
A weightier matter was settled in that same
council at Canterbury. Shortly after the accession of Henry II to the English
crown the Scot king Malcolm had done homage to him “in the same manner as his
grandfather had been the man of King Henry the First.” What were the precise
grounds and conditions of the homage due to the sovereign of England from the
rulers of the composite realm which was generally known as Scotland, but would
have been more correctly termed North Britain—whether that homage was due for
the whole realm, consisting of the Highlands (or “Scotland” properly so
called), the Lowlands, and Galloway, as well as for the lands which the Scot
kings held in England, or only for the last three, or even for the English
lands alone—was a question which both parties had for many generations found it
prudent to evade by the use of some such formula as the one adopted in 1157.
But in 1175 Malcolm’s brother and successor, William the Lion, having invaded
England and been made prisoner, purchased his release by definitely becoming
Henry’s liegeman “for Scotland and all his other lands,” promising that all his
barons should likewise do liege homage to Henry, and that his, own heirs and
the heirs of his barons should do the same to Henry’s successors, and giving up
to the English king the castles of Roxburgh, Berwick, Jedburgh, Edinburgh, and
Stirling, with an annual payment from the Scottish Crown revenue for their
maintenance. Edinburgh was given back to William in 1186 to form part of the
dower of his wife, Henry’s cousin Ermengard of
Beaumont. In the summer of 1188 some abortive negotiations concerning the
restoration of the other castles to the Scot king took place between him and
Henry. According to one account, Henry attempted to levy the Saladin tithe for
the Crusade in Scotland as well as in his own dominions; William refused to
permit this, but offered to give five thousand marks instead of the tithe if
his castles were restored to him; this, however, Henry “would not do.” Another version of the story is that William
spontaneously began negotiations by offering four thousand marks for the
castles; that Henry answered “the thing should be done if William would give a
tithe of his land” for the Crusade and that the Scot king was willing to do
this if he could obtain the consent of his barons, but they refused
emphatically, so the project came to nothing. It is not likely that Henry
imagined himself to have by the settlement made in 1175 finally disposed of the
question about the homage. A settlement which had been forced upon William the
Lion when he was powerless in the English king’s hands could not possibly be
final on such a matter; he, or the Scot kings after him, would be certain to repudiate
it at the first opportunity; and the opportunity came in autumn 1189 when he
was summoned to the English court to do homage to Henry’s successor. It was
imperatively necessary for Richard to 1189 secure William’s homage before
setting out on the Crusade. To go without having done so would have been to
leave northern England without any safeguard against invasion and ravage during
his absence. He himself had neither time nor means to spare for an expedition
against Scotland. Had William chosen to delay indefinitely—as more than one of
his predecessors had done—his appearance at the English court, he could easily,
and probably with impunity, have put Richard in a very awkward position. Most
likely he would have done so but for Richard’s tact in turning the difficulty.
Overlord and vassal agreed upon a bargain which was in all likelihood more
profitable to both parties than the one proposed a year before could ever have
been to either of them. William covenanted to give Richard a lump sum of ten
thousand marks; Richard quitclaimed “all customs and agreements which King
Henry extorted from William by reason of his capture, so that he shall fully
and completely do to us what his brother Malcolm King of Scots rightly did to
our predecessors and what he ought rightly to do”; he renounced the liege
homage of William’s men and restored all the charters given to Henry by William
when he was Henry’s prisoner; and he undertook to do to William “whatsoever
our predecessors rightly did and ought to have done to Malcolm according to a
recognition to be made by four English nobles chosen by William and four
Scottish nobles chosen by ourself”; to Dec. 5 make good any encroachments which
had taken place on the Scottish Marches since William’s capture; to confirm any
grants made to William by Henry; and finally, that William and his heirs for ever should possess his English lands as fully and
freely as Malcolm had possessed or ought to have possessed them.
Richard’s phrase about the conditions of
release which Henry had extorted from the king of Scots seems to indicate a
consciousness that his father had, in forcing upon the caged Lion of Scotland
terms of such abject submission, taken a somewhat dishonourable advantage of the lucky combination of accidents—for it was really nothing
more—which had placed William at his mercy. But policy, as well as chivalry,
had a share in Richard’s agreement with his royal vassal. Ten thousand marks,
paid down in a lump and almost immediately, was probably a much larger
contribution than could have been obtained from a country so poor as Scotland
without some very substantial concession in return. The retention of the
castles was quite unnecessary to the security of England; it must inevitably be
a source of constant irritation to the Scots, and thus tend to endanger rather
than to safeguard the tranquillity of the border;
and the restitution of them was the only real sacrifice which the treaty
involved. Richard’s charter is most cautiously worded; he renounces nothing
except the direct homage of the Scot king’s subvassals and the explicit mention of Scotland by name in William’s own act of homage on
this occasion. The former would have been extremely difficult to enforce at the
moment, and of very little practical value. As to the latter point, the form of
words chosen by Richard involved no recognition of the Scottish claim to a
partial independence, and no renunciation or abatement of the English claim to
the overlordship of all North Britain. It left Richard and his successors quite
free to re-assert that claim explicitly at any future time, and to re-assert it
as based not on a concession wrung from a helpless prisoner in 1175, but on
their acknowledged right to “all” that William’s predecessors “had done and
ought to have done” to the predecessors of Richard in virtue of a series of
agreements going back from Henry II and Malcolm III to Eadward the Elder and Donald IV; for the English theory on the subject was that those
ancient agreements included, or involved, the homage of the Scot kings to the
kings of England for the whole realm of Scotland. The Scottish view was, of
course, different; but these divergent views were of little practical
consequence so long as no necessity arose for expressing them in words or
carrying them out in action; no such necessity had yet arisen, and none was
destined to arise for another hundred years. A formula capable of this double
interpretation was thus the only kind of formula on which the two parties could
agree; and the point of immediate importance was that they should agree so that
the Scot’s homage should be done and done quickly, not delayed indefinitely or
altogether refused at the eleventh hour. It was done at Canterbury on December
5.
On the same day Richard proceeded to Dover;
about a week later he went to Normandy. He kept Christmas in great
state, “but,” adds a poet-chronicler, “there was little singing of gestes’’; Richard, who usually revelled in that kind of entertainment, was now too busy and in too grave a mood for
minstrelsy. On December 30 he and Philip, after holding a conference at the Gué St. Rémi, issued a joint
proclamation setting forth their arrangements for going together on the Crusade
and for the safety and mutual protection of each other’s subjects and dominions
during their absence, and bidding all their Crusader subjects either to precede
them or be ready to set out with them from Vezelay within the octave of Easter (March 25-April 1, 1190). By the middle of January,
however, both kings had discovered that they could not be rfady by April. The date of departure was again postponed to S. John the Baptist’s
day; and at a third conference held in the middle of March the delay was
further prolonged to the octave of that festival. Richard meanwhile had made a
visit to Aquitaine ; on February 2-4 he was at La Réole,
on February 12 at Londigny on the border of the
Angoumois and Poitou, moving back towards Normandy to meet certain
persons whom he had summoned thither from England soon after Candlemas. One of
the two men whom he had appointed as joint chief justiciars, William de
Mandeville, had died on November 14. For a time, it seems, the king put no one
formally into Mandeville’s place, and thus left Hugh of Durham legally sole
chief justiciar; but he gave the custody of the Tower of London, which usually
appertained to that officer, to the chancellor, Bishop William of Ely, whom he
also, before leaving England, intrusted with one of
the royal seals to carry out the king’s orders in the realm, thus making him
virtually independent of Hugh. In February, however, the king
summoned his mother, his betrothed, his brothers John and Geoffrey (the archbishop-elect
of York), Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury, and seven bishops, among whom were
Hugh of Durham and William of Ely, to join him in Normandy. “And when he had
taken counsel with them, he appointed his chancellor, Bishop William of Ely,
chief justiciar of England, and granted to Bishop Hugh of Durham the justiciarship from the river Humber to the Scot king’s
border.” He also made both his brothers
swear that they would not enter England for three years “from that hour” except
by leave from him. At the end of March or early in April he sent the new chief
justiciar, William of Ely, back to England to prepare things necessary for him—that
is, for the king—and for his journey.
The chief item in this commission was the
requisitioning of a supply of horses; William took for the king’s use from
every city in England two palfreys and two additional sumpter horses, and from
every manor of the king’s own one palfrey and one sumpter horse. These horses
were March doubtless shipped across to Normandy, being, it seems, April for the
use of the king and his immediate companions, who, together with his
continental followers, were going overland with Philip to meet the English
fleet at Marseille. Immediately on reaching England Richard had set about
collecting a transport fleet, by sending his bailiffs to all the seaports of
England, Normandy, Poitou, and his other lands to choose for him the largest
and best of all the ships they found there and the fittest to carry heavy burdens.
Some of these he gave to certain of his familiar friends who were bound on
Crusade; some he retained for his own use, and had them loaded with arms and
victuals. The terms on which these ships were acquired seem to have
varied considerably; in some cases the Crown paid half their value, in others
the whole; a few were gifts from wealthy individuals. In addition to all these
the king already had some “smacks” in ordinary use for the transport of himself
and his treasure between England and Normandy; these were now put in repair to
fit them for a longer and more dangerous voyage. The crews and captains of the
other ships were of course taken over together with the vessels, and were paid
by the king from Michaelmas 1189. Some
time in March or early in April (1190) Richard held a council at Chinon and thence issued an ordinance for the maintenance
of discipline in the fleet, in the form of a charter which he delivered into
the hands of the archbishop of Auch, the bishop of Bayonne, Robert de Sabloil, Richard de Camville, and
William de Fors of Oleron,
appointing them justiciars over his whole navy of England, Normandy, Poitou,
and Britanny, about to sail for Holy Land. The regulations
which they had to administer were drastic. Any man who slew another on board
ship was to be tied to the corpse and cast with it into the sea; one who slew a
man ashore to be tied to the corpse and buried with it. A man convicted of
drawing knife on another or striking him so that blood flowed was to lose his
hand. If he only struck with his palm, so that no blood flowed, he was to be
ducked three times in the sea. Anyone who insulted or cursed a comrade was to
forfeit an ounce of silver for every such offence. A convicted thief was to be
shorn like a professional champion, then tarred and feathered so as to be
known, and cast ashore on the first land at which the ship touched. Another
writ from the king bade all those of his subjects who were going to Jerusalem
by sea, as they valued their lives and their return home, swear to keep these assizes and obey the justiciars of the fleet, who were further bidden to set out on the
voyage as soon as possible; which they did shortly after Easter.
The next step in Richard’s preparations for
departure was of a very different kind. Of all the country seats belonging to
the counts of Poitou the one in which for many generations they seem to have
most delighted was Talmont. The lordship of which
this castle was the head included a territory known as the Land of the
Countess, because it had formed part of the dower of the successive countesses
of Poitou ever since the middle of the eleventh century. Here, on the
sea-shore, in the wood of La Roche, and not far from the mouth of the Jard—a little stream which falls into the sea some few
miles south-east of the castle of Talmont—Richard now
founded a house of Augustinian canons. Its dedication was to our Lord and the
glorious Virgin Mary His Mother; its name was to be God’s Place, Locus Dei,
Lieu-Dieu, and its endowment consisted of the whole “Land of the Countess with
all its appurtenances, including everything that his mother, as well as
himself, had or might have in that place, with the addition of other gifts and
privileges. Eleanor had no need of the Countess’s Land, for Richard before
leaving England had granted to her, in addition to the dowry given her by his
father, the whole of that which Henry I had given to his queen and that which
Stephen had given to Maud of Boulogne. Evidently it was with his mother’s
sanction that the king now dedicated to higher uses this large share of a
cherished possession of her forefathers which was also a favourite pleasure-resort of his own. In God’s-Place at Talmont we may surely see an offering made with special intention by the offerer and his mother for his safety and welfare in his
great adventure and for the success of the enterprise on which his heart was
set.
On May 6 Richard issued, at Fontenay, a
charter for the foundation of another religious house, a small minster
dedicated to S. Andrew, at Gourfaille, in the same neighbourhood. Two days later he was at Cognac; a month
later, at Bayonne, and it seems to have been about this time that he besieged
and took the castle of Chis in the county of Bigorre and hanged its lord for the crime of having robbed pilgrims to S. James and
other persons who passed through his lands. By June 20 Richard was again at Chinon; thence he went to Tours, where he held a final
conference with Philip, and received his pilgrim’s scrip and staff from the
hands of Archbishop Bartholomew. He seems to have characteristically
proved the staff by leaning on it with all his gigantic strength, for a
chronicler adds: “When the king leaned on the staff, it broke.” Never before,
probably never again, was there seen at Tours such a muster as that of the
Crusaders who followed the banner of Richard the Lion Heart. City and suburbs
were overcrowded; there were many good knights and famous crossbowmen; and
dames and damsels were sorrowful and heavy-hearted for their friends who were
going away, and all the people were in sadness because of their valiant lord’s
departure when he and his host set out with a good courage on June 27 for Vezelay. Whether June the two kings actually kept their
tryst on the appointed day, July 1, is doubtful. Richard was certainly at the
meeting-place on the 3rd, but according to one account Philip did not arrive
till the 4th. When they did meet, they took
a reciprocal oath that they would loyally divide between them whatever
conquests they should make together, and that whichever of them reached Messina
first should wait there for the other. They spent two days at Vezelay together, and then at last the united host began
its march towards the Holy Land, the two kings riding in front and discoursing
of their great journey.
BOOK IIRICHARD’S CRUSADECHAPTER II.THE OUTWARD VOYAGE,1190
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