EIGHTEEN
As the autumn of 1192 became winter, the trickle of crusaders returning to Normandy became a flood. From them, Eleanor heard tales of Richard’s derring-do, his physical strength and peerless bravery in Outremer. But she was not fooled. Contradicting all the boasts of valour and victories was the undeniable failure of this crusade, so like what she had witnessed first-hand fifty years before. The alibis for this sounded to her ears remarkably like those used by the spin-doctors on the Ile de la Cité after Philip’s return, except that now it was the underhand tricks of the Franks and Germans and the poulains that had prevented the lionhearted king of England and his brave vassals from triumphing over the Saracen.
But where was the King? she asked again and again. The replies were confusing. Richard was known to have left the Holy Land in a fast galley that would have made better time than the pilgrim round ships transporting lesser travellers. After making landfall at Corfu at the end of October, his galley had been seen nearing the friendly Norman harbour of Brindisi.1 From there, all was mystery.
On land, the homebound crusaders had travelled by whatever means of fortune they could find; commandeering or buying the best horses available, Richard should have made far better time. Yet everywhere Eleanor saw crusaders picking up the pieces of their shattered lives while Joanna’s and Berengaria’s households waited for him to join them in Rome to share what should have been a triumphal return. Her constitutional status undefined, Eleanor returned to England to keep an eye on bishops Walter of Rouen and Hugh of Durham and the other justiciars. Her Christmas court of 1192 was not a happy one, for John’s partisans were not alone in whispering that the king was dead.
There are several partial accounts of Richard’s return journey. According to his chaplain Anselm, as reported by Ralph of Coggleshall, they set out for Marseilles with Baldwin of Béthune, his clerk Philip and the Templars. After stopping in Cyprus – a safe enough haven for a few days – Corfu was reached a month after leaving Acre.2 Across the straits lay Brindisi and the short route home, unfortunately barred by the armies of the German Emperor, alienated both by the Treaty of Messina and by the insult to his vassal Leopold of Austria at Acre.
Richard decided that the best course was to sail around the tip of Italy and land in southern France. Putting in to an Italian harbour that may have been Pisa,3 he learned that in avoiding one enemy, he was sailing into the trap set by another. Eager to avenge himself on Richard for the humiliation suffered at the hands of Otto of Brunswick, Count Raymond of Toulouse and his allies were defying the Peace of God by setting ambushes all along the French Mediterranean littoral. The alternative of landing on what is now the Costa Brava and heading west to Navarre meant crossing Aragonese territory – a risky business for the son-in-law of Sancho the Wise. Richard therefore back-tracked all the way down the coast of Italy to Corfu, where he hired two Romanian pirate galleys for 200 silver marks to escort him northwards up the Adriatic.4
All three vessels were stranded by a storm on the coast of Istria, near modern Trieste – a stretch of territory held by vassals of Leopold of Austria.5 Disguised as pilgrims, the small party asked the local overlord Count Mainerd for safe-conducts under the Peace of God.6 This granted, they pressed on with Richard disguised as a rich merchant despite the many Austrian crusaders able to identify him by his height, red hair, warrior’s mien and natural arrogance that ill suited the role of a smooth-talking merchant. A Norman from Argentan living in those parts recognised him, but refused to betray the crusader duke of his homeland even for the high reward offered.7
Trusting in speed, Richard made a horse-killing ride of over 200 miles in three days, during which he escaped from two ambushes by sacrificing eight Templar knights the first time and six more on the second occasion, before being immobilised by malaria in the village of Ganina near Vienna. Betrayed by the boastfulness of a German-speaking boy he had brought along with him8 and too weak to mount a horse, he was brought to bay in a sordid tavern, disguised as a scullion. Sick and with only a handful of companions, he still had the Plantagenet swagger and refused to surrender until Duke Leopold of Austria left his Christmas court in Vienna to accept Richard’s sword9 and order him nursed back to health in conditions both fittingly luxurious and extremely well guarded.
Before Twelfth Night Eleanor learned from travellers from Paris of a letter received by King Philip, according to which her son was a prisoner of the very man he had insulted at Acre. Henry Hohenstaufen’s letter to Philip ended, ‘inasmuch as he is now within our power, and has always done his utmost for your annoyance and disturbance … we have thought proper to notify your nobleness … knowing that the same is well pleasing to [you]’.10
Immediately Eleanor charged the abbots of Boxley in Kent and Robertsbridge in Sussex, to travel to Germany and find out where Richard was being held.11 On the same mission went Bishop Savaric of Bath, who was related to the emperor.12 Returning from a trip to Rome, Bishop Hubert Walter, a nephew of the late Ranulf de Glanville, changed course and also headed eastwards.13 The indefatigable William Longchamp, who claimed to have seen the original letter in Paris, scuttled after them to see what he could find out.
Eleanor was only restrained from taking horse and ship for Germany herself because she did not trust John and Philip once her back was turned. Instead she used diplomatic channels, reminding Celestine III that both Richard and his father had supported him when the Pope was but a cardinal and enlisting the help of princes and prelates in the cause of a crusader protected by the Peace of God. That she had been right not to absent herself in a search that could better be carried out by others was proven when John sneaked across the Channel and demanded fealty of the Norman barons with the backing of Philip, their common overlord, on the grounds that Richard was as good as dead already.14
The reply was a resounding vote of no confidence in him at Rouen, where poor Alais was still a prisoner, so he set up court in Alençon until lack of enthusiasm there too compelled him to flee to the safety of Paris. There Philip humoured his pretensions to be duke of Normandy in return for the undertaking to marry Alais after divorcing his wife of three years, Isabelle of Gloucester, on the grounds of their widely known consanguinity.15
Seizing the moment, Philip invaded the Vexin, taking Gisors and demanding the surrender of Rouen and the release of his half-sister.16 Unimpressed by the numbers and equipment of the small Frankish force, the earl of Leicester retorted that he had no orders from King Richard to hand over his hostage, but if the king of the Franks wished to sample Norman hospitality, he only had to cross the drawbridge alone.
With no desire to be taken hostage and traded for Richard, Philip swore to return and exact revenge for the insult17 before providing funds for John to hire a small army of Flemish mercenaries, with whom to invade England at the end of Lent. Sir John Harington’s epigram had yet to be penned: ‘Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.’ But the dilemma on both sides of the Channel was an old one. If Richard died in captivity, who would be considered loyal, and who a traitor?
Eleanor reasoned that to imprison John might provoke open conflict with his many partisans and that a better course was to neutralise him by ensuring that crown officers in the channel ports – reinforced by a fyrd raised from local men who well remembered the excesses of King Stephen’s Flemings in south-east England – arrested any mercenaries who dared set foot ashore and frightened the others away back to Flanders.18
Meanwhile, in Germany there was a political tug-of-war over who should have the most ransomable prisoner in the world, Duke Leopold claiming priority both because it was his banner that had been insulted at Acre and he who had taken Richard’s sword. As his suzerain, the emperor reminded him that ‘duke of Austria’ was a courtesy title;19 for a count to hold a king prisoner was contrary to feudal custom, and therefore Richard must be handed over to him.20
Leopold’s injured dignity might have inclined him to forego a ransom for the pleasure of letting his unrepentant captive die mysteriously in some unidentified castle, never mind what blast of anathema came from Rome. However, at a meeting in Würzburg during February 1193, they came to terms: against the promise of 20,000 marks from the eventual ransom, Leopold’s captive was brought from the castle of Dürnstein, west of Vienna, and transferred into imperial custody at Ratisbon and then Würzburg.
Less than three months after the emperor’s letter had been received in Paris – on Palm Sunday, 21 March 1193 – Eleanor’s two emissaries tracked Richard down at Ochsenfurt, on his way under escort to the emperor’s Easter court at Speyer. Either Longchamp beat them to it, or he arrived soon afterwards.21 They found him restored to health and in relatively high spirits, having charmed all his guards and their masters with his bluff good humour, his versifying and prowess at all things knightly.
Informed of John’s latest treason, Richard again laughed off the idea of his weakling brother usurping the throne with or without Philip’s help. He did, however, dispatch Hubert Walter back to England with a letter appointing him archbishop of Canterbury. It was from him that Eleanor learned on 20 April that her beloved son was alive and in good health. In the country there was twofold rejoicing, both that Richard was alive and that Longchamp was not the new primate.
At the time of Archbishop Hubert’s departure, the royal prisoner had not been accorded an interview with the emperor, although imperial court gossip was that a sum of 100,000 marks would be asked for his ransom. While Eleanor and the justiciars waited for confirmation of this, they used the news that Richard was alive to defuse the unrest John been stirring up during the period of uncertainty. In this, her constitutionally ambiguous position made her the ideal intermediary; while John might not have consented to surrender his castles to the justiciars, he did agree to hand over to her Windsor Castle, Wallingford and the Peak – on the understanding that they were to be returned to him if Richard were not, for whatever reason, released.
At Speyer the Emperor was more resistant to Poitevin eloquence than Richard’s previous captors.22 Arraigning his hostage before the Easter court, he charged him with a long list of crimes, including the murder of Conrad of Montferrat – a close relative of Duke Leopold. Vastly outnumbered, Richard’s entourage included Bishop Savaric of Bath, the abbots of Boxley and Robertsbridge, plus his chaplain and Longchamp. His superior competence in Latin had enabled him on more than one occasion to mock Hubert Walter, who was famous for the grammatical errors he made constantly, sometimes with hilarious results.23 Confident in his own eloquence, Richard represented himself in Latin as the epitome of knighthood on the greatest of all chivalric enterprises, convincing many of Henry’s vassals that he was indeed the incarnation of the knightly ideal.24
At the end of his speech, Richard knelt in submission before the Emperor – and burst into tears! It was a gift he had. Bowing to the mood of the assembled nobles, Henry Hohenstaufen lifted his vanquished prisoner to his feet and led him to share the dais. As to the ransom, however, the sum of 100,000 silver marks or £66,000 was confirmed as the price of Richard’s freedom. He was to be released when 70,000 marks had been paid, with 200 noble hostages demanded as surety for the balance. This covered retribution for the failure of his brother-in-law Henry the Lion of Saxony to support the imperial design, plus a compensation for the insult suffered by Leopold that would provide a handsome dower on the marriage of his son. The son’s bride was a part of the price: she was to be Eleanor’s granddaughter Eleanor of Brittany, whom Richard had already offered to Al-Adil in compensation for Joanna’s stubborn refusal to marry him.25
In addition, the emperor’s relative Isaac Comnenus, who was still imprisoned in Cyprus, was to be released. His daughter, held hostage by Joanna and Berengaria in Rome, was to be restored to him. And lastly, 50 galleys and 200 knights were to be furnished for use in the war with Tancred in compensation for the Treaty of Messina having prejudiced the Empress Constance’s rights to Sicily.
On Maundy Thursday,26 the eve of Good Friday, Richard’s chaplain left for England with the ransom demand and a letter from him to Eleanor informing her that Longchamp had been the one who stage-managed the all-important interview with the emperor. The amount was there for all to see in ink on parchment: she was required to oversee its collection and to note carefully how much every baron contributed, so that the king would know how much gratitude he owed each one … or not. The justiciars were, of course, to give a good example by their own generosity.
Eleanor got to work immediately,27 appointing five assessors to oversee the ransom collection: Hubert Walter, Bishop Richard of London, the earl of Arundel, the earl of Surrey and Henry fitz Ailwin, the first mayor of London, whose citizens learned they were to contribute at roughly the same rate as barons paying a quarter of their annual rents and revenues and the knighthood, each fee being assessed at twenty shillings.
To amass the ransom from a country impoverished firstly by Henry’s Saladin tithe and all the other crusading taxes, required the sanctions of the Church. Formally installed as archbishop of Canterbury on 30 May 1193, Hubert Walter informed the bishops of the realm that they were responsible for collecting the tax from their clergy, those priests who lived on tithes being required to contribute a tenth of their income. Charged with a fourth part of their wealth, the canons of Geoffrey the Bastard’s cathedral at York refused to pay, despite every abbey and cathedral having to plunder its treasury for jewels and gold – in return for which promissory notes were given, payable after the king’s return. Even the moneyless abbeys of the Gilbertians and St Bernard’s Cistercians, who owned no gems or precious metal, were obliged to give a whole year’s clip of wool from their flocks.28
Having no idea of the real value of money, Richard naturally assumed that whatever sum was demanded for his release would rapidly be paid in the same way that knights defeated in tournaments were ransomed according to their wealth and rank. Since he was the noblest and wealthiest monarch in Christendom, he could hardly expect to be assessed more modestly. It was therefore the duty and privilege of his subjects to pay up.
To prevent his golden tongue gaining even more supporters, the Emperor placed him in close confinement at the grim fortress of Trifels29 until Longchamp succeeded in obtaining his removal to more relaxed surroundings at Hagenau. He then departed with his master’s blessing for England, to assemble the hostages to be held as surety. With spring giving way to summer, Richard was soon again being treated more as guest than prisoner in Hagenau, where the imperial court spent Pentecost. Sharing something of his musical skills, the Emperor even indulged him in some of the rhyming contests at which Richard had excelled in his youth at Eleanor’s court in Poitiers.
The constant stream of prelates passing between the Angevin possessions on both sides of the Channel and Richard’s various places of detention in Germany, had given him in the eyes of the German nobility more ‘the prestige of an imperial statesman … than the forlorn dignity of a suppliant’.30 The emperor’s plan to meet Philip in June 1193 was therefore postponed. Incensed by the emperor’s failure to consult him since the original letter, Philip wanted a share of the ransom to compensate for the insults he had suffered at Richard’s hands. In return, he offered the archbishop of Reims as mediator in the dispute between Henry Hohenstaufen and his disaffected bishops, on condition that Richard stayed right where he was. Meeting Philip at midsummer in Lorraine, the emperor pondered how much an alliance with his neighbour the king of the Franks was worth against the money represented by the ransom.31
Confident that he would soon be released, Richard was allowed to write to all and sundry, his captors having no objection if it would speed up the collection of the money. Nor did they prevent the armour Richard had worn in the Holy Land from being taken by Admiral Stephen of Turnham to London for exhibition as an eloquent reproach to his subjects who had not emptied their purses.32
Berengaria was a singular omission from her husband’s address book, but Eleanor was greeted by the distant prisoner as his ‘dear mother’ and also formally as ‘by the Grace of God, Queen of the English’. He even wrote to the Old Man of the Mountains in faraway Syria, requesting him as chief of the sect of Assassins to confirm that it was his men who had killed Conrad of Montferrat.33 Predictably, a mysterious reply was received, which Richard waved before the emperor, claiming complete exoneration.
In England, the ransom trickled in; it did not flow. This was partly due to the corruption of the unsupervised collectors working outside the normal Exchequer system, many of whom were afterwards accused of diverting much into their own pockets. As and when each bullion train arrived in London, the gold and silver and precious objects were locked away in St Paul’s Cathedral under heavy guard, in sacks sealed with Eleanor’s own seal and that of Archbishop Hubert Walter. The first levies having proven largely insufficient, she ordered a second, and then a third, lambasting the tardy and the niggardly. Nor was it any easier to milk the impoverished continental possessions.
An even more unpopular task was the naming of the hostages who would serve as surety until the entire ransom had been paid. Longchamp, more tactful than in the past,34 had returned from Hagenau not as chancellor and justiciar, but as bishop of Ely – a loyal servant of the Crown, whose duty was to concert with Eleanor the selection of the noble hostages. This was a matter she pushed forward energetically in the hope that it would cause the families of those selected to find some wealth they had omitted to declare, for the greater the amount raised, the fewer the number of hostages to be delivered. Yet she refused to entrust to Longchamp her own grandson William of Winchester, son of Henry the Lion of Saxony. Many other families also refused their sons on the grounds that the bishop of Ely was not a fit person to have the care of boys; they sent their daughters instead.
During all this time Eleanor had to keep her eye on John, who was forbidden to leave England and had all his incoming mail from Paris intercepted. She was also haranguing the pope at a distance for what she considered his lukewarm support. Her secretary, Peter of Blois, now archdeacon of Bath, was famous for his witty puns and epigrams. In accusing Celestine III of keeping the sword of St Peter in its sheath and failing three times to send papal intermediaries, he punned that the legates had been leashed and not loosed upon the emperor: in succinct Latin, they had been potius ligati quam legati.
Complaining that, if her son had been rich, they would have come running to be rewarded by generosity, Eleanor signed herself not ‘Queen by the Grace of God’ but ‘Queen of the English by God’s anger’.35 As duchess of Aquitaine, she was also not above including a thinly veiled hint that the Cathar heresy so widespread in the south of France would be allowed to flourish there unchecked if the papacy did not earn her gratitude.36
Double standards indeed for Eleanor, who had herself turned away cardinals Agnani, Jordan and Octavian when it suited her. And what more could the pope do? He had excommunicated Duke Leopold for laying hands on a crusader and threatened Philip with excommunication under the Peace of God if he took advantage of Richard’s captivity. He had even waved the threat of interdict over England, should the ransom not be forthcoming. With vast Church possessions at risk in Germany and Henry Hohenstaufen having large forces still in Italy, he could not force the emperor to do anything.
In Midsummer 1193 Richard was moved yet again – this time to Worms on the Rhine, where his charm earned him the liberty to order his falconer and favourite birds sent out from England, with a consignment of clothes and utensils for his personal use. At a five-day plenary court, the emperor weighed all the possibilities in the light of Philip’s representations and confirmed that the royal prisoner would be released against sureties when two-thirds of the ransom had been brought to Germany at his risk in transit. The bad news was that the amount was to be increased by 50 per cent – the extra 50,000 marks being in lieu of Richard’s direct help in the campaign against his ally Tancred. The number of hostages was increased accordingly.
Henry Hohenstaufen seems to have been in two minds about Richard’s claim that he had persuaded the German bishops to end their long dispute, but the change of episcopal policy was due to Celestine’s urgings on his behalf. In addition, Richard was responsible for a reconciliation between the houses of Hohenstaufen and Saxony, with Henry the Lion being offered the emperor’s cousin Constance as bride for his son, a nephew of the royal captive.
It was probably at Worms that Richard composed a sirventès addressed to his half-sister Marie de Champagne sometime towards the end of 1193 expressing his impatience with the pace at which his subjects were getting the money together.
Ja nuls hom pres non dira sa razon
adrechament, si com hom dolens non
mas per confort deu hom faire canson
Pro n’ay d’amis, mas paure son li don
Ancta lur es, si per ma resenzon
soi sai dos yvers pres.
[No prisoner can put his case for long / without self-pity making it sound wrong / but still for comfort he can pen a song. / My many friends offer little, I hear. / Shame on them all if they leave me here / unransomed for a second long year.]
The emperor having addressed a letter to the magnates of England on 20 December confirming that he had set 17 January as the day for the release of his ‘dear friend Richard’,37 the dear friend summoned the archbishop of Rouen and Eleanor to join him at Speyer for Christmas with all the money so far collected, so he could be sure both it and the hostages would all be handed over by the due date. Before leaving England with an impressive retinue and large escort, Eleanor appointed Archbishop Hubert Walter chief justiciar on Richard’s instructions, which made him the indisputable ruler of the country in her absence or until the king should return.
On 6 January 1194 they arrived in Cologne. On 17 January at Speyer she was informed that her son’s release was to be delayed after all, an alternative offer having been received from Paris. Philip was bidding 50,000 marks and John 30,000 marks if Richard were kept prisoner until Michaelmas – by which time they hoped to have possessed themselves of the continental Plantagenet assets. Alternatively, they offered monthly instalments of £1000 so long as Richard was held captive. On learning of this, the Great Council deprived John of all his possessions, in addition to which he and his chief partisans were excommunicated. Under Hubert Walter’s guidance the council also denounced Longchamp to the pope in a letter heavy with all their seals, which was to be shown first to Richard in Germany so that he would know what they thought of his ex-chancellor.
At Mainz on 2 February 1194, Eleanor’s joy at seeing her son for the first time in three and a half years was tempered by an unpleasant surprise on learning that Philip had raised the French offer to 100,000 marks, with another 50,000 from John – a sum equivalent to the whole ransom from England – if Richard were handed over to them or held in Germany for another year.38
Seeking a counter-counter-offer, the Emperor showed the letters to her and Richard. Whatever the barons and bishops of England thought of Longchamp, he still enjoyed the king’s favour and was one of the spokesmen who addressed the imperial court in Eleanor’s presence that day, pointing out that Philip and John had no chance of amassing the colossal sums, totalling many times the annual taxation income of the whole of France, even if they did manage to conquer and plunder Normandy and the other Angevin continental possessions.
The political complication for Henry Hohenstaufen was that, if he allowed Richard to walk free he would lose the French support in the dispute with his bishops at a time when the English were hardly going to love him. He therefore demanded that Richard admit he held England as a vassal of the emperor.39 The king’s advisers were horrified, but what did it matter to Eleanor if he thus changed allegiance from Capet to Hohenstaufen? As to an annual tribute demanded, what was a promise of that worth to a son of Henry of Anjou?
On 4 February, Richard was at last released after swearing fealty to the emperor and declaring with his customary eloquence that he held his possessions on both sides of the Channel as a vassal of the Emperor, to whom he would pay a yearly fee of £5,000. Doffing his bonnet, he placed it in the emperor’s hands, signifying that he renounced his vassalage to the house of Capet. One last requirement was that the archbishop of Rouen, who had played a leading part in the negotiations, should be left behind as a hostage.
Learning that his enemy was free, Philip managed to get a message to Prince John in England, warning him that ‘the devil was loose’. In terror, John fled the country and took refuge in Paris.40 Given the unrest he had fomented in England during the crusade and the long captivity, it was Richard’s nature to hurry home and punish those who had committed treason. Only Eleanor’s influence can have persuaded him to the roundabout but statesmanlike route they followed, spending a weekend with the bishop of Cologne, staying with the duke of Louvain in his castle at Antwerp, and stopping at Brussels and many other places to make and confirm alliances that might one day be useful on this, the eastern flank of Philip’s realm.
At Antwerp, the faithful Stephen of Turnham welcomed Eleanor and his king aboard the Trenchemer, from which they trans-shipped to a larger vessel at the mouth of the Schelde for the night and back to the faster Trenchemer for the Channel crossing next day. Fearing the patrols which Philip was suspected of having set to intercept them,41 they weighed anchor in the evening, landing at Sandwich ‘at the ninth hour of the day’ on 12 March.42 Six weeks after leaving Speyer, they rode from there to give thanks at Becket’s tomb in Canterbury Cathedral and spent the night in Rochester Castle.
This may have been Eleanor’s way of giving the citizens of London time to deck with banners and bunting the city that had contributed a sizeable share of the ransom. To the ringing of all the bells in London, Richard was led in procession to St Paul’s, now empty of its treasures. Agents of the emperor come to oversee payment of the balance outstanding had expected to find a country on its knees after all the exactions.43 Hardship there was in the country, but the pace of business in London made them comment that the ransom had been set far too low.
Richard’s gratitude to his jubilant subjects was limited to a stay of a few hours only. On 18 March he was at Bury St Edmunds – giving thanks at the shrine of one of his favourite saints, the eponymous martyred king of East Anglia – before heading north to Nottingham, where a small-scale but bitter civil war had just ended. Eleanor travelled with him all the way because he knew nothing of English or Anglo–Norman customs and sensitivities and she did not want the arrogance that had caused all his problems in Outremer to alienate his vassals who had still to make good their pledges for the unpaid part of the ransom.
After the Great Council meeting that dispossessed John, Archbishop Hubert Walter had departed at the head of an army equipped to reduce his castles with copious supplies of arrows, armour, shields, pitch and sulphur for Greek fire, plus mangonels to hurl it. Marlborough surrendered in a few days, Lancaster too. John’s castellan at St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall dropped dead from a heart attack when he heard Richard was back in England.44 But John’s castle at Tickhill was still holding out. The garrison offered to surrender if he would guarantee their lives. The king refused, but Bishop Hugh of Durham, commanding the loyalist besiegers, took it upon himself to agree terms.
Nottingham itself held out until Richard arrived there on 25 March. The defenders did not believe who he was until he donned his armour and led the assault, taking the outerworks and many prisoners, whom he hanged on a gallows erected in full view of the castle. Hubert Walter arrived with reinforcements for the besiegers’ ranks. Two days later, Hugh of Durham arrived with the prisoners he had taken at Tickhill. Within twenty-four hours, Nottingham too had surrendered and the rebellion was over.
A Great Council was summoned there, in the heart of the territory that had been loyal to John. While its members were assembling, Richard amused himself for a few days at one of Henry’s old haunts, Clipstone on the fringes of Sherwood Forest, where the hunting of stag and boar so pleased him that he compared it favourably with his own Talmont. This was the stuff of the triumphal return at the end of every Robin Hood film, although whether a meeting in some greenwood glade between a loyal outlaw and the returned crusader king – as described in the fourteenth-century Ballad of Robin Hood – actually took place, is anyone’s guess.
On Wednesday 30 March, in the hastily repaired great hall of Nottingham Castle, 72-year-old Eleanor in all her majesty as dowager queen surveyed the assembled earls of the realm and the bishops and archbishops doing obeisance to her son, whose return she had done more than anyone else to secure. But the moment of national elation and thanksgiving for the king’s salvation was brief. He was angry with his English subjects, who had paid the lion’s share of the ransom too slowly, as though the fifteen months’ imprison-ment was their fault. He wanted not their acclamations, but more money to hire mercenaries and buy equipment to repulse Philip’s advances in Normandy, where he had already taken several castles and appeared before the walls of Rouen.45
All the offices and privileges bought five years earlier now had to be bought anew. To the few protesters, he replied that while he and his heroic crusaders had faced death, all the stay-at-homes had been growing fat on the profits of war.
Those survivors par excellence, the three Longchamp brothers, were again in the ascendant. Henry, imprisoned after William’s flight to France from Dover Castle, bought the office of sheriff of Worcestershire, while Osbert was named sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk. The hated bishop of Ely offered 1,500 marks down and 500 marks annually per county to be named sheriff of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire, but was outbid for Yorkshire by Geoffrey the Bastard, who offered 3,000 marks for that county alone to ensure that William Longchamp had no authority in his see. Even Prince John’s unhappy wife, Isabelle or Hawise of Gloucester, had to pay £200 to keep her dowry lands and marriage portion.
Teams of clerks were kept busy day and night noting all this down. On the third day, Richard moved on to the question of taxation. Demands for the arrears in payment of ransom contributions were sent out. In addition, he announced his requirement that every knight in the realm should perform one-third of his knight service by crossing to Normandy with him.46 This would have produced a total force of around 2,000 knights, but the demand was more probably intended to raise the scutage paid in lieu, so that he could hire mercenaries. Here he was on thin ice for, as Bishop Hugh of Lincoln asserted in 1197, knight service was owed to the king by his English vassals for war in England, not abroad.
To squeeze the last drops of wealth out of a country exhausted by the ransom, Richard named Longchamp chancellor once more, for who knew more than he about milking England down to its last penny? In addition to new taxes, the pre-Conquest land-tax last levied in 1162 was reintroduced. Known as Danegeld, its rate was set at two shillings for every hide of cultivated land recorded in the Domesday Book, with none of the traditional exemption for Church lands. The poor monasteries that had no precious objects to sell were ordered to surrender their wool-clip for the second year running in settlement of their assessments. The Pipe Rolls show the cost of hauling wool from the Cistercian foundations in Yorkshire to Holme in Norfolk and hiring ships to transport it to Germany.47 Among the many individual victims was William the Marshal, called on to pay four shillings for his wife’s estates in Sussex.48
The last subject on the agenda was Richard’s oath of fealty to the emperor and his undertaking to pay an annual fee to Henry Hohenstaufen. To the barons of the realm this was a shameful thing,49 to offset which it was decided that the king should be recrowned at Winchester. It was almost forty years since Henry had last held a ceremonial crown-wearing; no one could remember the ritual. So messengers sped off to Canterbury to consult the records of the ceremonial used when Stephen of Blois had been recrowned at Canterbury in 1141 to reaffirm his sovereignty after release from imprisonment by Empress Matilda.50
Resenting the delay this meant in his departure for Normandy, Richard agreed reluctantly. Knowing how quickly matters of state wearied him, Eleanor stayed close, witnessing on 8 April his charter setting out the honours due to King William of Scotland when called to the English court. A week later she was still at his side when he dined at Winchester Castle on Saturday 16 April. The following day, which was either just before or just after her seventy-third birthday, she sat in state on the gospel side of the cathedral on a specially built dais surrounded by her court of young ladies – the noble heiresses waiting to be bestowed as rewards upon those who had served the Crown well in the recent troubled times.51
Poor unwanted Berengaria was conveniently out of the way in Poitiers. Alais was a prisoner in Rouen. It was Eleanor in all her regal glory who was the only queen in England that morning when her son processed with Longchamp on his right side from nearby St Swithin’s Priory and up the aisle beneath a canopy borne by a count and three earls, one of whom was his bastard half-brother William Longsword of Salisbury, to the altar where Archbishop Hubert Walter was waiting.
Business after the ceremony included setting the ransoms for the noble prisoners taken at Tickhill and Nottingham and dispatching 10,000 marks to Germany to ransom Archbishop Walter of Rouen. Hoping to make the collection of his prisoners’ ransoms quicker than his had been, Richard authorised a considerable expenditure on fetters and chains to make sure the conditions in which they were kept were less comfortable than his in Germany.
Second seal of Richard
His habitual impatience was not helped by more bad news from France. On 24 April, less than six weeks after the landing at Sandwich, he and Eleanor arrived at Portsmouth. In the East Richard had been impressed by the manoeu-vrability of galleys, far less dependent on the wind than traditional English ships, and determined to build a fleet of them, with which to control the Channel. Portsmouth, surrounded by a wall, was to be his admiralty, shipyard and homeport where the newly constructed galleys would safely berth in a fortified harbour. With his customary enthusiasm for everything martial, he threw himself into this new enterprise, but also found time to go hunting, interrupting his sport when riots broke out between his Welsh and Flemish mercenaries, turning the half-built streets of Portsmouth into a battleground.
No sooner was everything ready than the weather changed. Chafing at the bit, Richard ignored the advice of his captains and ordered men and horses to embark on Monday 2 May. After a day and a night being driven everywhere but towards France, with the horses cooped up in their stalls suffering more and more, he abandoned the attempt and returned to land, to everyone’s great relief. The prolonged stay cost over £100 in lodgings. It was not until 12 May that the fleet of 100 vessels great and small carrying the levied English knights and the mercenary force could weigh anchor and set sail for the port of Barfleur.52
Richard’s second visit to England as king had lasted – although far longer than he wished – a bare two months. Neither he nor Eleanor would ever set eyes on the island realm again.