King John, the Lusignan Affair and the Early Years
By Dr Mike Ibeji
King John's reign started badly, with disputes over his succession, and he made many mistakes in
the years leading up to the Magna Carta. He made some good moves, though, and Mike Ibeji
charts some of the highs and lows of the period.
The Lusignan affair
We should not judge John too harshly. After all, he was only doing what Richard himself had done
when he overcame his father in 1189. John was the scion of a family that thrived on
back-stabbing.
'Though John served Richard faithfully and competently during the last few years of the king's life,
he was tarred by the brush of failure.'
In those terms, his only fault was not stabbing hard enough - but it was a fault that would taint
him.
Richard pardoned him, saying: 'You are only a child who has evil counsellors.' Such
dismissiveness was the kiss of death to a man's reputation.
Though John served Richard faithfully and competently during the last few years of the King's life,
playing a significant role in the defence and expansion of Angevin territory against France, he was
tarred by the brush of failure.
When Richard was fatally wounded by a crossbow bolt at Chalus in April 1199, he named John as
his successor, but the barons debated whether to give the throne to John's nephew, Arthur of
Brittany.
The barons of Brittany, Anjou, Maine and Touraine supported Arthur, but the barons of Normandy
and England were swayed by the highly respected William Marshal to support John. When
Marshal made his choice, the Archbishop of Canterbury (granted 20:20 foresight) is reported as
saying: 'You will never regret anything in your life as much as this'.
The crisis of 1204
John can be credited with both winning and losing his inheritance at least twice over. In both cases,
the key lay with the family of Lusignan in Poitou.
'John's energetic campaigning and diplomatic moves painted his opponents into a corner.'
Engaged in an age-old dispute with the house of Angoulême over the territory of La Marche on
their borders, their support in the succession crisis of 1199 was bought by Eleanor at the price of
that territory. (The story goes that Hugh le Brun kidnapped her and demanded La Marche for her
release, but in reality Eleanor is more likely to have initiated a diplomatic mission.)
To further secure his hold on La Marche, Hugh le Brun, Lord of Lusignan arranged a marriage
between himself and Isabella, the daughter of Count Aymer of Angoulême.
The support of the Lusignans was crucial in tipping the balance of the succession dispute. By
autumn 1199, William des Roches, the leader of the Arthurian party, had made a deal and switched
camps, in return for being made Seneschal of Anjou.
The move angered John's old Seneschal, Aimeri of Thouars, who changed over into Arthur's camp.
He had backed the wrong horse. John's energetic campaigning and diplomatic moves painted his
opponents into a corner, and by 22 May 1200 he was able to negotiate the Treaty of Le Goulet
with Philip of France.
Arrogance and revolt
In this, he made several territorial concessions and agreed to pay a relief of 20,000 marks in return
for Philip recognising him as Richard's lawful heir. For making this agreement, he was cursed with
the epithet of 'John Softsword' and branded a coward, but the deal was both good and necessary,
given the state of his finances and his precarious hold on the kingdom.
'The Lusignans appealed to Philip for justice, who summoned John before his court.'
Still, it set a precedent of vassalage that would come back to haunt him.
The kings of England were always technically vassals of the kings of France, but over the
centuries the relationship had become a mere formality. This is how John will have seen it when
signing at Le Goulet, but Philip Augustus would be able to exploit the technicality in the crisis to
come.
Having successfully secured his kingdom, John almost immediately proceeded to throw it away
with breathtaking arrogance. In August 1200, he married Isabella of Angoulême, Hugh's
12-year-old fiancée. Contemporary chroniclers favour a lurid tabloid picture of mad infatuation,
but the political implications for the match were just as pressing.
John was deeply suspicious of the powerful position Hugh le Brun had built up for himself during
1199, and the marriage of Isabella was but the first in a series of manoeuvres designed to curb that
power. Rather than trying to mollify Hugh for his loss with any concessions, John confiscated La
Marche from him and gave it to Aymer d'Angoulême.
In one fell swoop, he had undone all that Hugh had worked so hard to achieve, and had given it to
his greatest rival. At the same time, he deprived Hugh's brother Ralph of the county of Eu which
Richard had given him in Normandy.
The Lusignans appealed to Philip for justice, who summoned John before his court as his vassal to
give an account of himself in autumn 1201. John refused to attend, on the grounds that the French
court had no jurisdiction over the Duke of Normandy, but Philip replied that he was summoned as
the Duke of Aquitaine, and in April 1202 declared John a contumacious vassal, confiscating all his
feoffs.
He then accepted Arthur's homage for Poitou, Anjou and Touraine, and betrothed him to his
daughter Mary. With the king of France on their side, the lords of Lusignan went into revolt.
Battle, murder and cruelty
Richard I, through careful diplomacy, had ringed Philip with Angevin allies among the princes and
nobles of France, forcing the French king to fight a war on several fronts if he wanted to fight the
Angevins.
'A rumour circulated that, drunk and possessed by the devil, John had slain Arthur with his own
hands.'
However, by 1202, many of these allies had either gone on crusade or been won over to Philip's
side, leaving John isolated and alone.
On the plus side, John still retained the loyalty of William des Roches, who agreed to support him
in return for a say in the fate of Arthur. Also, thanks to Eleanor's skilful diplomacy, a reconciliation
had been patched up with Aimeri of Thouars, though John still treated him with suspicion.
So John had no international allies but, apart from Poitou and Brittany, his internal territories were
secure. As John raised an army in Normandy to counter Philip, Arthur and the Lusignans managed
to trap Eleanor in the castle of Mirabeau, from where she sent a plea to her son for aid.
In a lightning strike worthy of Henry II, John sped south to surprise the rebels unprepared outside
Mirabeau on 31 July 1202. Not a single rebel escaped.
At a stroke, John had captured over 200 knights and all the leaders of the rebellion, including
Arthur and Hugh le Brun. Yet once again, he threw it all away by taking things too far. Flushed
with success, he dismissed the pleas of William and Aimeri, and treated his captives most cruelly ensuring that 22 noblemen died of harsh conditions.
Worst of all, John was implicated in the murder of Arthur of Brittany. A rumour circulated that,
drunk and possessed by the devil, John had slain Arthur with his own hands and thrown him into
the Seine.
The truth is almost impossible to ascertain, but it is significant that Matilda, the wife of William de
Briouze, captor of Arthur at Mirabeau, refused to hand her sons over to John as hostages on the
grounds that he had murdered his own nephew - for that, John eventually hounded them both to
death.
John withdraws
Livid at their exclusion from power, and horrified by John's excesses, William and Aimeri rebelled.
John now saw enemies on all sides, and his paranoia was exacerbated when, travelling to rescue
his queen, he discovered the nobles he had stayed with defecting as soon as he went on his way.
'Bewildered by John's apparent helplessness, they explained it away in terms of riotous living and
debauchery with his wife.'
His last hope of shoring up his flagging position was to relieve Richard's great fortress of
Chateau-Gaillard, the key to Normandy, which Philip was besieging. However, his plan of attack
was over-complicated and the attempt failed.
In its wake, the Norman barons, tired of the authoritarian tendencies of Henry II and his sons, and
wooed by the lavish land grants of Philip Augustus, deserted John in droves. John had no option
but to withdraw from Normandy in December 1203. His detractors portrayed this as fecklessness.
Bewildered by John's apparent helplessness, they explained it away in terms of riotous living and
debauchery with his wife: John, they said was bewitched by Isabella. In reality, he was paralysed
by betrayal.
On 1 April 1204, Eleanor of Aquitaine died, and all the lords of her domain rushed to pay homage
to the Capetian court of Philip. In August, Philip visited Poitiers in a triumphal procession. He did
not conquer Aquitaine, it was given to him. The only area to hold out was Gascony, defended by
the Archbishop of Bordeaux.
Master of the British Isles
John is best remembered not for the loss of France, but for signing the Magna Carta. Yet it would
be wrong to see Magna Carta as a sign of weak kingship. On the contrary, it was the exact
opposite.
'John's successes in Wales, Scotland and Ireland contrast sharply with his failures in France.'
It was a direct consequence of the Angevin collapse in France, for it was prompted by the
ever-increasing tax demands imposed by the king in his efforts to finance his French expeditions.
Throughout, we must not forget that John's thinking was not dominated by England, but by
France.
John's successes in Wales, Scotland and Ireland contrast sharply with his failures in France, and
were driven by his own obsessive fears for internal security. These were fuelled by the
cancellation of his first planned expedition to France in 1205 and the failure of the second in 1206,
due to lack of support from the English barony.
In 1205, John accused William Marshal of treachery, when he discovered that the earl had sworn
liege-homage to Philip for the lands he held in Normandy.
Marshal was not the only baron torn by the conflict of loyalties created by cross-Channel
ownership. Their reluctance to endanger their lands by warring against Philip, coupled with the
indifference of the rest of England's barony to cross-Channel affairs, was a giant stumbling block
to John's plans.
A new kingdom
By 1207, John had decided to do something about the great barons in England. The likes of
William Marshal and William de Briouze had huge territories in the Welsh Marches, and also in
Ireland, where Hugh de Lacy and his brother had taken advantage of the lack of adequate royal
authority to expand their influence greatly.
'He imposed humiliating terms and annexed the area of North Wales known as the Four Cantrefs.'
At the same time, he set about streamlining the administration and legal system of his kingdom, to
make it easier to extract finances. It is no coincidence that John's reign sees the start of a coherent
system of Chancery records. Every penny counted.
John started with Wales. Removing Marshal and de Briouze from their offices on the borderlands,
he replaced them with trusted mercenary captains like Gerard d'Athée. He went on to hound de
Briouze in particular, until de Briouze followed Marshal's prudent course and fled to Ireland
(given John's overt hostility towards Matilda de Briouze, the most likely explanation for this
persecution is her claims about Arthur).
John replaced the power vacuum left by the Marcher lords with local Welsh princes, most
especially Llywelyn ap Iorweth (Llywelyn the Great), to whom John married his illegitimate
daughter.
However, when Llywelyn tried to extend his power into South Wales, John invaded in 1211 and
slapped him down. He imposed humiliating terms, and annexed the area of North Wales known as
the Four Cantrefs, installing Gerard d'Athée and two other mercenary captains into the southern
marches.
It didn't work. Llywelyn rebelled again in 1212, but this time John was too concerned elsewhere to
deal with him. Once again, the Welsh survived because the king did not consider them important
enough.
Power and taxes
The same was not true of the Scots, nor of de Briouze. In 1209, John responded to danger from the
Scottish king, William the Lion, by threatening to invade. The Scottish king submitted completely,
offering liege homage and a 15,000 mark fine. This left John free to pursue de Briouze and the
other barons into Ireland.
'Even John's barons began to fear personal ruin through the Exchequer's operations. '
In 1210, he invaded Ireland with a fleet of 700 ships carrying his feudal host and a force of
Flemish mercenaries. In a two-month campaign, he cowed the Hiberno-Norman barons,
dispossessing de Briouze (who fled into exile) and the Lacys, and accepting hostages from
William Marshal and the Irish kings who submitted to him.
He appointed churchmen as justiciars, to counterbalance the native barony, and installed a royal
treasury in a new stone castle at Dublin. This curbed the private power of Norman barons in
Ireland, and kept the peace there until well into the 13th century.
By 1211, John was in a very powerful position within England. He had curbed the major barons,
and had instituted various reforms designed to tighten his administrative hold on the kingdom.
Thanks to Henry II, this hold was already strong; but inflation and social change had been eroding
the king's finances throughout the 12th century.
By the time John came to power, the situation had become acute, and the crisis in continental
Europe meant that more and more money was haemorrhaging out of the country to feed his
foreign wars.
John's tight personal hold on the legal and administrative reins of power were as much driven by a
need to raise money as they were by his personal obsession with the minutiae of government. Like
all the Angevins, he accepted bribes, imposed fines on litigants, extorted payments for succession
to baronies and profited from his feudal privilege of wardship and marriage.
The most pernicious practice had been the levying of scutages (shield duty) in lieu of military
service, and under John this became an almost annual tax.
He also levied two general taxes (the 13th of 1207 and the infamous 7th of 1203), introduced
customs duties and reformed the system of farming out sheriffdoms to make it more profitable.
Nor was he averse to imprisoning people for defaulting on their payments. One Thomas of
Moulton bid 500 marks plus 300 marks per year for the sheriffdom of Lincolnshire.
When he fell behind on his payments, he was imprisoned in Rochester Castle and fined a further
1,200 marks for false statements and default. Even John's barons began to fear personal ruin
through the Exchequer's operations.
The use and abuse of power
The bitterness engendered by these exactions fostered resentment among both peasant and noble
alike, giving rise to the myth of the noble outlaw, best known through the legends of Robin Hood.
'The outlaw outwits the authorities in pursuit of justice for himself or for others.'
The original legends place Robin firmly in the north, around the areas of Barnsdale and Sherwood
Forest, though whether this was one widely travelled outlaw or two separate men is not known. He
had entered popular mythology by the mid-13th century, and we find outlaws like William
Robehod in a court roll of 1261 being given his alias.
The historical Robin (or Robins) probably lived during the reign of King John, and parts of his
legend are reflected in the stories of other historical outlaws. Most interesting of these is that of
Fulk fitz Warin, a childhood friend of John's, who was deprived of his lands in Whittington and
went into outlawry for three years between 1200 and 1203. He was then pardoned, only to rebel
again in 1215.
Fulk's legend exactly matches Robin Hood's in certain stories, as does that of another known
outlaw, Eustace the Monk.
They are all clearly drawing on a shared mythology, in which the outlaw outwits the authorities in
pursuit of justice for himself or for others.
The role of the outlaw has clearly changed since Henry II's day. Then, they were vilified as evil
men, whom the king hunted down and eliminated. Under John, however, the bad guys are the king
and his officers, and the outlaws hiding out in the forests are the heroes. They show that people
felt the law was being abused by those in power, turning those who had put themselves outside the
law into popular heroes.
Find out more
Books
King John by WL Warren (1961)
King John by Ralph V Turner (Longman Medieval World Series, 1994)
The Angevin Empire by John Gillingham (Hambledon, 1994)
The Formation of the English Common Law by John Hudson (Longman Medieval World, 1996)
Robin Hood by JC Holt (Thames & Hudson, 1993)
The Outlaws of Medieval Legend by Maurice Keen (1987)
The Political Development of the British Isles by Robin Frame (Clarendon Press, 1995)
About the author
Dr Mike Ibeji is a Roman military historian who was an associate producer on Simon Schama's A
History of Britain.