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In early March 1204, Roger de Lacy readied his men for the inevitable. The previous summer, he’d been charged with the defence of Château Gaillard, the prize castle built by Richard Lionheart in the late 1190s. The fortress overlooked a strategic stretch of the Seine, just 70 km (43 miles) upstream from the Norman ducal capital at Rouen. It was designed to protect the duchy’s heartlands from French encroachment while providing a forward base for future forays into the Vexin, a territory long disputed between the Norman duke and French king. The castle’s defences were state of the art, and its site on the top of a rocky outcrop overlooking the Seine afforded much natural defence. Richard is said to have boasted that it could hold firm even if its walls were made of butter. Yet the Lionheart’s impregnable fortress was about to be taken.
The setting for these events is the early years of the reign of Richard’s younger brother and successor, John. The French king, Philip Augustus, had declared the duchy of Normandy forfeit to the Crown in 1202, and, ever since, Philip had been working to wrest control of it from John. Like his recent forebears, John was both king of England and duke of Normandy (not to mention count of Anjou and duke of Aquitaine). For an increasingly assertive French monarchy, this presented an unacceptable challenge. As duke of Normandy, John ought to be beholden to Philip; yet as king of England, he was anything but. Rouen itself lay just 145 km (90 miles) from Paris as the crow flies, making it all too easy for John to strike at Philip’s domains. By contrast, the French king would have to fight his way through Normandy then raise a fleet before he could even threaten John in England.
If Philip’s proximity to John’s continental possessions sometimes left him exposed, the reverse was equally true: these were potentially easy pickings. Indeed, John’s sprawling domains, which stretched from Carlisle to Bayonne and Cork to the Vexin, were impossible to defend on all fronts. (By contrast, Philip was rarely more than a few days’ forced march away from the Norman frontier, in the case of any trouble from his neighbour.) Despite these challenges, John’s initial defensive efforts met with success. He won a stunning victory at Mirebeau in southern Anjou in early August 1202, at which his forces captured John’s nephew Arthur, whom Philip had invested with John’s continental domains (save Normandy). With his only dynastic competitor seized, John may have hoped that peace was round the corner. But by the end of the year, he’d squandered the advantage. John’s main fault lay in his treatment of Arthur, who disappeared within eight months of the victory, under circumstances which were most suspicious. To make matters worse, John disregarded the advice of his counsellors and treated the other captives poorly, including starving twenty-two to death at Corfe Castle.1 To the French aristocracy, firmly wedded to chivalric ideals, these were crimes of the highest order.
Shocked by John’s behaviour, and increasingly aware of his failings as a king and military commander (Mirebeau would be John’s only major victory), large swathes of the Angevin and Breton aristocracy began to turn to Philip, who welcomed them with open arms. And as John failed to react, they were followed by others from Normandy. Buoyed by these successes, Philip now decided it was time to invest Château Gaillard – the key to Normandy. The castle had been entrusted by John to Roger de Lacy, a member of the main branch of the same Lacy family we met in the last chapter. Unlike his more famous Cambro-Irish relations, Roger’s lands lay exclusively in northern England, ensuring his loyalty to the mercurial John.
John was well aware of the strategic significance of the castle and soon attempted a relief. And while his overly elaborate plans for a combined land and naval assault on Philip’s forces failed, French victory was still far from assured. The castle walls held firm through the winter months, and it increasingly looked as though John would get a second chance at relief in the spring. In response, Philip now took up command of the siege in person. Initially, he attempted an assault on the castle’s south-easterly outlying fortifications – the only direction from which the castle could be directly approached. And though the French siege tower never made it to the walls, Philip’s sappers were able to bring down the tower. Over the following days, the middle and then inner wards fell.2
Philip had achieved the unthinkable. Château Gaillard was his – and Normandy free for the taking. In the coming months, French troops took Falaise, Caen and Cherbourg. And once it became clear that no relief was coming from England, the biggest prize of all followed: Rouen.3 Soon similar losses were being recorded in Anjou, Maine and Poitou, as Philip and his men rode the crest of the wave. For his part, John was left shocked by how quickly things had unravelled. In the space of less than two years, he’d gone from being victor at Mirebeau to watching powerlessly as his continental domains were dismembered. Even England was no longer secure, and he braced himself for a possible incursion there. John’s childhood nickname, Lackland (i.e. ‘the landless’), was starting to prove all too apt. It was increasingly joined by a second mocking moniker, ‘softsword’.4 For when decisive action was most required, John’s response was to dither and delay.
The loss of Normandy weighed heavily on John and the English. As important as the financial and strategic losses (which were considerable) was the psychological and ideological blow this represented. Good kings were meant to defend and expand their domains; a loss on this scale could not be countenanced. In an era in which divine providence was believed to guide current events, there could be no clearer sign of God’s wrath. The cause did not take long for contemporaries to identify: John’s treatment of Arthur and the other captives of Mirebeau. Having sown the wind, John was reaping the whirlwind.
This was not the first time since 1066 that Normandy and England had gone separate ways. The Conqueror had placed the duchy in the hands of his eldest son, Robert Curthose, leaving England to his second, William Rufus. And though the two were reunified by Henry I in 1106, the duchy remained distinct from the English crown and repeatedly backed rival members of the royal family, including William Clito (the son of Curthose) and Henry fitz Empress (as Henry II was initially known). Still, it was not a rival member of the Anglo-Norman royal family who’d set up shop in Rouen now, but the king of France. The likelihood of England and Normandy falling conveniently back into the hands of the same ruler was slim at best. Further complicating matters were the responses to these developments on both sides of the Channel. Both John and Philip now insisted on absolute loyalty. The latter dispossessed barons loyal to John of their holdings in Normandy, while John did the same to the English lands of those who plumped for Philip. Only the powerful William Marshal managed to avoid such a fate, and he paid the price for compromise with many years in the political wilderness.5
Language and culture also had a part to play in this estrangement. Though settlement after 1066 had ensured that the English ruling elite had much in common with its Norman counterpart, as families put down roots, differences started to emerge. Those on the northern side of the Channel came to identify as English, even when they remained for the most part culturally and linguistically Norman. And by the later years of the twelfth century, we start to see national stereotypes re-emerging. In French (and Norman) eyes, men such as the Marshal or Roger de Lacy had long since gone native. They were not expatriate Normans, but Englishmen, with all the cultural baggage this entailed. Language served to divide as well as unite here. For though the English barons continued to speak French, their increasingly distinctive Anglo-Norman dialect earned derision in France. (The long history of Parisian linguistic haughtiness starts here.) Normandy and England were increasingly two nations divided by a shared tongue.
Political circumstances also conspired to make the estrangement much greater following 1204 than it had been in 1087 or 1150, when the duchy was temporarily separated from the English crown by the succession disputes occasioned by the Conqueror’s death and the Anarchy. In the years after 1066, most leading aristocrats held estates on both sides of the Channel. It was in their interest that amicable relations between the regions prevailed. Over time, however, there was a tendency for families to consolidate their holdings, passing Norman and English lands to different branches of the family, or selling off lands in one region to invest in the other. These trends were especially strong among the middle and lower aristocracy. By the time of John’s reign, it was only the greatest barons, such as William Marshal and Hugh de Lacy, who continued to have interests spanning the Channel.6 There were now few with a vested interest in maintaining the Conqueror’s cross-Channel empire; and for many, it was an unwelcome distraction.
So while John’s problems were of his own making, they uncovered deeper fault lines within the Angevin empire. Detangling English interests from mainland Europe proved no simpler in the early thirteenth century than at any other time in history. Political interests pulled John’s government in opposite directions. Honour demanded that he seek restitution of his lost domains; yet such efforts were bound to prove unpopular, particularly if (as was the case) they were unsuccessful. In response to these travails, John came to rely ever more on a small cadre of continental associates, comprised of men who’d lost out through Philip’s annexations – men such as Gerard d’Athée, Engelard de Cigogne, Philip Mark and Peter des Roches. These men owed John complete loyalty and were fully committed to the restoration of his (and their) lands. But if this neatly got around problems of allegiance, it only exacerbated domestic tensions. Most of these figures came from the Touraine, south of Normandy, and their primary interest lay in the restoration of these domains rather than the duchy itself, where the interests of the rest of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy lay. The influence of these ‘aliens’, as they were known, was therefore deeply resented, reinforcing particularist sentiment within the English aristocracy.7
It was with the support of these new favourites that John launched a first attempt to regain his lost lands in 1205, but opposition in England prevented him from sending a large force. A more substantial expedition directly under royal command followed in 1206. This succeeded in regaining Poitou, before turning south to Gascony – the only continental holding John had retained intact. Here he was able to see off the threat from Castile to the south. Buoyed by these successes, John now struck at Anjou. But when Philip raised a large French force, John retreated back south, and the result was a stalemate.8 During the following years John was largely occupied with affairs in the British Isles, as baronial unrest in Ireland and ongoing disputes with the pope and the archbishop of Canterbury kept him from campaigns on the continent. When he finally returned in force in early 1214, it was as part of a grand alliance with the German emperor, Otto IV. Otto was John’s nephew and had his own reasons for wishing to curtail French political ascendancy, which threatened his (far from secure) grasp on the imperial throne. The plan was for a two-pronged attack, with John marching north and east from Poitou to meet Otto, supported by the earl of Salisbury, William Longespée.
The campaign started off well, with John retaking much of Anjou in late spring. But progress stalled when he invested the castle of Roche-au-Moine, ten miles south west of Angers. By early July, he and his army were back at La Rochelle, chased by a French force under the command of Louis, the eldest son of Philip Augustus. All hope was then lost when Otto’s forces (including the battalion led by Earl William) were decisively defeated by Philip and the main French army at a close-fought battle at Bouvines in south Flanders. The days of Angevin ascendancy in northern France were over.9 For John, this was the last in a long line of foreign policy failures. Domestically, it was a total disaster. As one modern historian has put it, ‘the road from Bouvines to Runnymede was direct, short and unavoidable.’10
John’s English barons had been plotting against him for years. After the humiliating defeat at Bouvines, this tipped over into open rebellion. By autumn, plans were being laid. The following year, civil war erupted, spearheaded by a group of northern magnates, who now found support across wide swathes of the south. When the rebels took London in late spring, John’s hand was forced. On 15 June, he famously came to Runnymede, where he acceded to most of the baronial demands in the document which came to be known as Magna Carta (Latin for ‘the great charter’).11 For John, this was humiliation. Yet what he may have lacked in military prowess, he more than made up for in cunning. By agreeing to the rebels’ demands, he was able to retake the initiative. And within weeks of the charter having been issued, John had had it annulled. Scarcely had the ink dried on the copies than it became a dead letter. John would not, however, have long to enjoy his victory. The rebels now found support from Alexander II of Scotland and Philip Augustus. By spring 1216, the latter’s son Louis had landed in England and joined the rebels. The flames of revolt were spreading fast when John himself died that October – an act which may, paradoxically, have saved his realm from foreign conquest once more, for the young Henry III, John’s heir, and his regents proved much more popular (and ready to compromise) than his father.
It is, in any case, an enduring irony that England’s most iconic constitutional document should owe its existence to such continental entanglements. As befits the context, Magna Carta itself is a thoroughly European (and Norman) document. It reveals similarities with the Statutes of Pamiers, a similarly programmatic set of customs issued by Simon V de Montfort for his domains in southern France in December 1212. Simon’s family hailed from the Franco-Norman frontier and he’d (briefly) been earl of Leicester, so many in the baronial party would have known of this precedent.12
In the longer term, the loss of John’s continental domains did not so much dismantle the Angevin empire as reconfigure it. With Normandy, Anjou, Maine and Poitou gone, the political ambitions of his successors were now directed towards control of their immediate neighbours within the British Isles. It was in Wales, Scotland and (in particular) Ireland that they were able to make good losses elsewhere.13 The effect of these gains, however, was further to entrench the divide between England and Normandy. Till 1204, it had been possible to be both Norman and English; this was no longer so.
There were implications for Normandy as well as England here. In the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Normans had claimed – with some justification – to be unique among the peoples of northern France. They alone were the descendants of Viking Northmen, an identity proudly announced by their ethnic designation. They remained politically distinct and tended to identify as French only in linguistic and cultural contexts – in the address clauses of royal charters or in major overseas expeditions, such as the crusades. With Philip’s conquest, this all changed. Now the Normans were little different from the Angevins and Poitevins. Norman identity was slowly submerging into French identity.
The loss of Normandy in 1204 may not, therefore, have caused the political and cultural rift between the duchy and the English realm, but it did ensure that this would be permanent. For some time, the Anglo-Norman aristocracy had been identifying as English; now, there was no going back. New conquests would come, but the resulting empire would be an emphatically English one.14 There would be no more empires of the Normans. Or would there?