CHAPTER 13
We will restore at once the son of Llywelyn and all the hostages from Wales and the charters delivered to us as security for peace.
We will treat Alexander, King of the Scots, in the same manner in which we will act towards our other barons of England.
Magna Carta, Clauses 58 and 59
England, in the view of English writers of the time, was ‘a land of untold riches’ where ‘no one who wanted to make money need ever die poor’. The English saw themselves as prosperous, urbanised, enterprising, peaceful and law-abiding. They admitted to only one serious fault. They were, wrote Richard FitzNigel, ‘natural drunks’. Certainly they impressed the inhabitants of other countries with their hard drinking.
‘God! how handsome Englishmen are!’ was the first thought of a French princess as she gazed at the man she was falling in love with – or that at least was what the patriotic author of a narrative poem written during John’s reign imagined she would think. The poem is the Roman de Waldef and was written in the variety of French known to scholars as Anglo-Norman. Deus! tant sunt Engleis beles genz! are the actual words. In another Anglo-Norman work composed at about the same time, its author, Chardri, compared England to a fair meadow covered with flowers, and went on:
England surpasses all the kingdoms that exist. Let me count the ways. In all pleasures and in nobility. If the women in England are well brought up, you should not wonder, for so are the knights, and all the others that follow them are valiant, courteous, and noble – except in this one respect, the great harm that drinking too much does to their fair life.
Works like this show that, by John’s reign, English patriotism could be expressed in French. Indeed the earliest known history in the French language was written in the 1130s by an author called Geoffrey Gaimar and – remarkably – it was not a history of France, but of England, the Estoire des Engleis. Figures such as Hereward the Wake, leaders of the resistance against the Norman Conquest, are portrayed as heroes of the nation. Just as today intense Irish patriotism can be expressed in English, the language of the former colonisers, so too English patriots at the time of Magna Carta could think and speak in French.
This means that the picture of England created by Sir Walter Scott in Ivanhoe is entirely wrong. According to Scott:
Four generations had not sufficed to blend the hostile blood of the Normans and Anglo-Saxons, or to unite, by common language and mutual interests, two hostile races, one of which still felt the elation of triumph, while the other groaned under the consequences of defeat.
Thanks to film and television, Scott’s portrayal of English society around 1200 as having been bitterly divided between English and Norman still lingers in the public imagination. In this scenario English freedom fighters such as Robin Hood – Scott’s Robin of Locksley – still roamed the forest, doing their best to save the poor from Prince John’s tyranny and the bullying of the Norman sheriff of Nottingham. Indeed there had been English freedom fighters in the forests and wild lands in the years immediately after 1066, but that had been – as Scott noted – four generations ago, and now there were none. Nor was there any longer, as there once had been, an ethnic divide between English and Norman. Apart from the royal family and a handful of other aristocrats, everyone who lived in England felt themselves to be English. Everyone spoke English, and everyone who wanted to be someone in culture or in politics learned to speak French as well. French gave the English easy access to a very cosmopolitan world, for in 1215 French was a fashionable language not just in Britain and Ireland but also in Spain, Germany, Italy, Sicily, Greece, Constantinople, Cyprus and Syria. Those who spoke Parisian French were proud of their ‘good’ French and mocked the Anglo-Norman dialect. For instance, they enjoyed the confusion that arose when ordering a roast dinner from the English inability to make a clear difference in pronunciation between anel, donkey, and agnel, lamb.
The mother-tongue of those who lived in this bilingual society was enormously enriched as a result of their intense familiarity with French. By 1215 French words such as ‘baron’, ‘feast’, ‘noble’ and ‘servant’ had entered the English language, and over the next two hundred years many more came in. By 1400 there were about ten thousand French loan-words in English. Chaucer, for example, used nearly five hundred words borrowed from French in the 858 lines of the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. Sometimes the old word was driven out. The word stow meaning ‘place’ for example no longer exists – except in some place-names such as Godstow, the nunnery where Henry II’s mistress, Fair Rosamund, was buried. More often both the English and French words for something continued simultaneously in use, with the English generally retaining a more common or garden sense, as in English ‘house’ and French ‘mansion’. Sometimes spelling changed. For instance the spelling of the modern word ‘queen’ comes from the French combination of letters qu replacing its English equivalent cw. Also of French origin is the convention, exasperating and confusing, of using c instead of s for the ess sound in words such as cell or circle.
For centuries the English had shared Britain with other peoples and other kingdoms. This had not prevented one of Henry II’s courtiers, Walter Map, referring to Britain as ‘the English island’ and ‘our island England’, though he was by no means the first and certainly not the last to confuse the identities of England and Britain in this typically English fashion. In the west there were the people of Wales, proud of their descent from the Britons against whom Julius Caesar had fought. At any one time there were usually several Welsh princes in Wales, rulers of old kingdoms such as Gwynedd, Powys and Deheubarth. There was only one king of the Scots, but his authority did not reach as far as the Scandinavian and Irish peoples of Caithness, Argyll and the Isles, where virtually autonomous chiefs held sway under the loose overlordship of Norway. It was not until 1266 that the king of Norway sold his rights over the kingdom of Man and the Western Isles to the Scottish Crown in the ‘closing down sale’ that marked the end of the ‘Viking period’ of Scottish history. And it was not until 1469 that the Scottish Crown acquired possession of Orkney and Shetland.
During the course of the twelfth century the English came to look upon the Celts with new, condescending eyes. Writing in the 1190s both the dean of St Paul’s, Ralph of Diss, and the Yorkshire historian William of Newburgh referred to the Welsh, Irish and Scots as barbarians. By this time their views of the Scots were a little old-fashioned: according to the English historian, William of Malmesbury, King David I of Scotland (1124–53) had offered tax-breaks to his subjects if they would learn ‘to live in a more civilized style, dress with more elegance and eat in a more refined manner’ – they had, in other words, to be more like the English. By 1200 economic development and the foundation of new towns such as Berwick, Edinburgh, Stirling, Perth, Glasgow and Aberdeen by the Scottish kings meant that Lowland Scotland had in fact come to look very much like England. But the Welsh, the Irish-speaking Highland Scots and, still more, the Irish themselves continued to be classified – and vilified – as primitive, savage and immoral. They were, for instance, often accused of being addicted to adultery and incest. Welsh and Irish marriage law allowed divorce, remarriage and marriage with cousins. So, too, had English marriage law in earlier centuries, but no longer. Now Celtic marriage customs seemed, to English and continental European eyes, a licence for wife-swapping and every kind of sexual immorality.
Also, while in Lowland Scotland there was just one king, in Ireland and Wales there were many kings and princes, fiercely independent rulers who fought among themselves with what seemed, to English eyes, stomach-turning brutality. Irish and Welsh kings and princes appeared to have no compunction in the open way they killed, blinded and castrated their rivals, especially their own kinsmen. By contrast King John could not deal with his nephew and rival, Arthur of Brittany, in the same fashion. If he was responsible for his nephew’s death – as he probably was – he carried out secretly what he knew he could not possibly do openly. The rumour that he was to blame decisively damaged his reputation in the crucial years when he lost control of Normandy and Anjou.
Gerald de Barri accompanied the young Prince John on his expedition to Ireland in 1185, and used his experiences to write two remarkable and hugely influential books on Ireland and the Irish. He painted a picture of Ireland as a country rich in natural resources but undeveloped owing to the lack of industry of the natives, as a land of gold and rain-forests, where the savages whiled away their lives in war, sex and laziness, an Eldorado awaiting colonisation by enterprising and clean-living Englishmen. He envisaged a ladder of evolution of human societies with Ireland still on the bottom rung.
Mankind usually progresses from the woods to the fields, and then from fields to settlements and communities of citizens, but the Irish have not advanced at all from the primitive practices of pastoral farming. They scorn to work the land, have little use for the money-making of towns and despise the rights and privileges of civil society.
It is noticeable how much weight Gerald and other contemporary observers gave to towns and the market economy. They associated towns with a civilised lifestyle, and claimed to be civilised themselves.
These perceptions helped people feel comfortable with their invasions of Wales and Ireland. They were confident that they were introducing a morally better, economically more advanced and socially more sophisticated way of life to the natives. Soon after their conquest of England, Norman ‘marcher lords’ to whom William I had given estates in the ‘marches’, as the frontier zones were known, invaded Wales, occupying the more fertile parts, the coasts and river valleys, especially in the south. They built castles and towns such as Chepstow, Monmouth, Cardiff, Brecon and Pembroke, and filled them with English settlers. The biographer of King Stephen wrote: ‘They vigorously subdued the natives, imposed law upon them in the interests of peace, and made the land so productive that it could easily have been thought to be a second England.’ In his mind this was just as well since he saw native Wales as ‘a country of wood and pasture, abounding in deer and fish, milk and herds, a land which breeds men who fight against each other like animals’. As far as the English were concerned, the Welsh did not change. In Gerald’s words, ‘they ate very little bread and paid no attention to commerce, shipping or industry.’ English commentators undoubtedly exaggerated the extent to which the economy of Celtic peoples, including the Welsh, relied upon pastoral farming, but the fact remains that they continued to exaggerate, and in consequence looked down upon their neighbours. It was with this attitude that, towards the end of the thirteenth century, Edward I embarked on the final conquest of Wales.
Soon after his accession to the throne of England, Henry II discussed plans for an invasion of Ireland. He may even have received a bull from Pope Hadrian IV granting him Ireland, on the grounds that the Irish were not good Christians, and they needed a decent, upright king like Henry to go in there and set them straight. Hadrian IV, whose original name was Nicholas Brakespeare, was an Englishman, the only one ever to sit on the throne of St Peter. In fact this papal bull, known from its opening word asLaudabiliter, might have been a forgery; scholars still argue the point. Forgery or not, it undoubtedly reflected views current in twelfth century Rome. In the event King Henry changed his mind and it was not until years later, after an Anglo-Norman magnate, Richard de Clare, better known as Strongbow, answered an appeal for help from an Irish king, Diarmait Mac Murchada of Leinster, that English soldiers first entered Ireland in force. This was in 1169, known in Irish history as ‘the year of destiny’. Two years later Henry II came to Ireland with an army and an armada of four hundred ships. When the English invaded Ireland or Wales, they came with the military resources of a much more highly industrialised power behind them. In terms of armour, arms and ammunition – crossbow bolts and arrowheads – they were able to out-produce any Welsh or Irish ruler many times over.
From the moment of Henry’s arrival he acted as though he were the lord of all Ireland, come – he claimed – to stop the Irish slaughtering each other. Most of the more powerful Irish kings submitted to him. Henry kept the most important ports of Dublin, Waterford and Wexford for himself, and handed out Irish estates to his followers. In 1177 he designated his son John as king of Ireland, and asked Pope Alexander III to provide a crown. It never arrived, but John assumed the title ‘Lord of Ireland’ and actually visited the country in 1185 – his first political command. English courtiers became great landowners in Ireland, although some never went there, remaining absentee landlords. English – and a few Welsh and Flemish – settlers, farmers, craftsmen, traders and labourers did, however, cross the Irish Sea. In the south and east of Ireland, from Cork to Carrickfergus, where most of the immigrants settled, a massive change in the man-made landscape occurred: villages, mills, bridges and new towns were built. The countryside here became anglicised and, on the whole, permanently so. The Irish were pushed back into uplands and bogs, the poorest areas. As William of Newburgh, writing in the 1190s, remarked: ‘This marked the end of freedom for the Irish, a people who had been free since time immemorial. They had not been conquered by the Romans, but now they fell into the power of the king of England.’
According to Gerald de Barri, the Irish kings and chiefs who came to the Christmas dinner Henry II gave at Dublin in 1171 were made to eat crane, a bird they had never before thought of as a delicacy. It was a demonstration of the nouvelle cuisine that identified the French-speaking English as members of a cosmopolitan west European civilisation. The Italian pope, Alexander III, wrote to the Irish clergy expressing joy at hearing that the ‘unlawful practices of a barbarous and ignorant people were already beginning to decrease’. In 1210 King John sent a book of English law to Ireland: justice in his lordship was to be administered according to the rules of the Common Law. For a while it even seemed possible that the Irish themselves might become anglicised, just as the Lowland Scots had been. In Gerald’s language the Irish would be made to learn to ‘conform to a better way of life and enjoy the benefits of peace’. ‘Let them eat crane’, as Henry II might have said. Intermarriage gave some cause for hope of assimilation. Aristocrats such as Richard de Clare and Hugh de Lacy married daughters of Irish kings. The Irish came under pressure to learn French. In the 1220s an English Cistercian abbot, after a tour of inspection of Irish Cistercian monasteries, recommended that no one should in future be received into the order in Ireland unless they had learned how to speak either French or Latin.
Unfortunately those who saw the Welsh and Irish as uncivilised were all too likely to treat them with contempt. Gerald reported that when John landed at Waterford in 1185
he treated the Irish of those parts, though they had been loyal to the English, with disdain and derision, pulling them about by their beards which in accord with the native custom they kept long and flowing. They then went to the court of the Ua Brain king of Limerick and gave him and Ruaidri Ua Conchobair of Connacht a full account of their experiences. They reckoned that these small injustices would be followed by greater ones . . . and so they took common counsel to resist, to guard their ancient freedoms even at risk of their lives.
Because the English saw the Welsh and Irish as bloodthirsty barbarians, they were inclined to treat them far more brutally than they did their enemies on the continent. When the Irish king, Tigernan Ua Ruairc of Breifne, was killed in 1172 – treacherously assassinated by the English, according to Irish annals – his head was sent as a gift to Henry II and his body displayed, hung by the feet, in Dublin. In 1175 Seisyll ap Dyfnwal of Gwent, his wife and seven-year-old son were among the Welsh victims of a massacre at Abergavenny. In 1165 Henry II cut off the noses and ears of the daughters of Welsh princes whom he held hostage; he blinded and castrated their brothers. This atrocity signalled the end of his aggressive policy towards the Welsh. From now on he left the marcher lords to make their own way in Wales.
In the early years of his reign John continued his father’s policy, content with the Crown’s loose overlordship over both marcher barons and native rulers; his struggle to retain his ancestral lands in France gave him more than enough to do. But he exploited any opportunities that came his way. He supported Maelgwyn ap Rhys of Deheubarth in his feud against his own kindred and obtained Cardigan in return. He clearly favoured the English incomers. In 1200, for example, he gave William de Briouze licence to conquer all he could from his Welsh enemies. But he did not go out of his way to dethrone Welsh princes. Indeed he acknowledged the rising star of Wales, Llywelyn ap Iorwerth of Gwynedd, even recognising him as prince of North Wales by treaty in 1201 and then giving him his illegitimate daughter Joan in marriage. One consequence of John’s loss of Anjou and Normandy was that from 1206 onwards he was able to give more time and energy to extending the power of the English Crown within the British Isles – a shift in emphasis that English historians have often applauded.
In 1208 John arrested Gwenwynwyn, prince of Powys, and refused to release him until he had handed over twenty high-ranking hostages. In 1209 he threatened to invade Scotland. King William of Scotland was ill, in no position to resist, and he was forced to accept the humiliating terms of the treaty of Norham. He had to pay John £10,000, hand over thirteen noble hostages and send his two daughters to the English court for John to arrange their marriages. All of this rankled still in 1215. Although by then William was dead, his son Alexander II (1214–49) supported the rebel barons and received his reward in Magna Carta.
Clause 59. We will treat Alexander, King of the Scots, concerning the return of his sisters and hostages and his liberties and rights in the same manner in which we will act towards our other barons of England, unless it ought to be otherwise because of the charters which we have from William his father, formerly King of the Scots; and this shall be determined by the judgement of his peers in our court.
When John turned against his old friends the Briouzes, they fled to their estates in Ireland. John ordered his justiciar there, John de Gray, bishop of Norwich, to arrest them. But Gray was unable to carry out his orders; they were sheltered by the most powerful English landowners in Ireland, William Marshal, lord of Leinster, Hugh de Lacy, earl of Ulster, and Walter de Lacy, lord of Meath. Faced by this defiance John decided on an expedition to Ireland. A 700-ship armada was assembled. William Marshal prudently crossed the Irish sea, met John at Pembroke and submitted, providing hostages as a guarantee of his future good behaviour. But the Lacy brothers and the Briouzes were still recalcitrant. John’s army landed at Crook in June 1210 and in a whirlwind nine-week campaign defeated the Lacys and captured Matilda de Briouze and her older sons.
The expedition ended with John on tense terms with the two most enterprising Irish kings, Cathal Crobderg Ua Conchobair of Connacht and Aedh Ua Neill, king of Cenel Eogain in Ulster. The latter’s refusal to hand over hostages was applauded by the Irish chronicler of Inisfallen, who commented, ‘The king of England came to Ireland and accomplished little’. By contrast English contemporaries were much impressed – even the king’s harshest critics – by his achievement. According to Roger of Wendover, John introduced English law and currency into Ireland, while the forfeiture of the Briouze and Lacy estates, Limerick, Meath and Ulster, added greatly to royal lands in Ireland. The process of transferring English governmental and legal institutions en bloc into a conquered country gathered pace.
Next year John launched two invasions of Gwynedd, the first invasion of Wales by a king of England since 1165. He had become alarmed by the growing authority of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, although it had been John’s own action in humiliating Gwenwynwyn of Powys that had given Llywelyn the opportunity to annex southern Powys and Ceredigion. The Welsh retreated into Snowdonia taking their livestock with them; in consequence the English army soon ran out of supplies and John was forced to call off his first invasion. The second was much better prepared and devastatingly successful. Llywelyn was forced to surrender the whole of Gwynedd east of Conwy ‘for ever’, pay a tribute of twenty thousand head of cattle and agree that if he died without any children born to his wife Joan, all his lands would revert to the king of England. As a guarantee that he would abide by these terms he had to hand over 30 hostages, including an illegitimate son of his own. This, too, was reversed in Magna Carta.
Clause 58. We will restore at once the son of Llywelyn and all the hostages from Wales and the charters delivered to us as security for peace.
In 1211 one of John’s mercenary captains, Fawkes de Bréauté, occupied northern Ceredigion for the Crown, and began to build a new castle at Aberystwyth. John was now in a much stronger position in both Wales and Ireland than any previous king of England. In the judgement of the Barnwell chronicler, there was ‘no one in Ireland, Scotland and Wales who did not obey his nod – something which, as is well-known, none of his predecessors had ever achieved’. But his apparent mastery of the British Isles was soon shown to be illusory. The oppressive programme of castle-building with which John followed up his victorious 1211 campaign provoked nearly all of the Welsh into uniting behind Llywelyn – although previously many of them had been jealous of him. John’s reaction to Welsh revolt was similar to his father’s, although where Henry had mutilated hostages, his son hanged them: no less than twenty-eight met this fate on 14 August 1212.
Measures such as these inspired yet more determined resistance. Llywelyn ap Iorwerth took advantage of the baronial rebellion against John to capture even such traditional strong-points of the English Crown in Wales as Carmarthen, making himself de factoprince of Wales. Soon after his death in 1240 men were calling him Llywelyn the Great. His grandson, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, even made the English government recognise him as prince of Wales. It took a massive display of armed power and castle-building (Harlech, Conwy, Caernarfon, Beaumaris, Flint, Rhuddlan, Aberystwyth) by Edward I (1272–1307) to conquer Wales. In 1301 the first English prince of Wales was created when Edward I bestowed that title upon his son, known from his birthplace as Edward of Caernarfon. But the policy of reducing the Welsh to the position of being second-class subjects in their own country ignited one further major revolt, that of Owain Glyn Dwr in the early fifteenth century.
In Ireland the struggle went on for much longer even than it had in Wales, partly because the English government almost always gave its claims and ambitions in France a much higher priority than it did Irish affairs. Between 1210 (John’s second expedition to Ireland) and 1395 (Richard II’s first expedition) no king of England troubled to go to the island of which he claimed to be lord. After the catastrophe of the Black Death, when up to a third of the English population died, no new English settlers came to Ireland; indeed, many crossed the Irish Sea in the other direction, returning to the relative security and job opportunities of England. In the event it would be more than four hundred years before the English could boast that they had completed the conquest begun by Henry II and John in the twelfth century.