King John by Marc Morris

Author:Marc Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus
Published: 2015-06-27T16:00:00+00:00

10

Tyrannical Will

1210–1212

The horrific death of Matilda de Briouze and her eldest son clearly dealt a deeply damaging blow to John’s already battered reputation. News of their starvation spread through the country in the autumn of 1210 and was eventually reported in almost every chronicle. The king’s decision to put out his own version of events, ‘so that there should be an authoritative statement of the truth’, shows he was anxious to try to combat this negative public reaction. The fact that he felt it necessary to persuade seven earls and seven barons to add their seals to the bottom of the document serves only to illustrate how far his own credibility had collapsed.1

But if John was concerned about his popularity, it was only to a very limited degree, for his propaganda efforts were accompanied by no change in policy. Far from it. His expedition to Ireland in the summer, unlike his first youthful adventure there, had been a storming success. His enemies among the Anglo-Norman baronage had been driven into exile or compelled to accept humiliating new terms. New English laws and regulations had been introduced, and most of the native Irish had rushed to acknowledge him. A couple of chieftains, it is true, had refused to hand over their sons as hostages, but military pressure from the Dublin government would persuade one of them to change his mind before the end of the year. The campaign had left John vastly more powerful in Ireland than before. ‘Many hoped that because of this victory the king would make amends for the bad deeds he had done towards the Church of God and would correct his errors’, said Gervase of Canterbury. ‘But’, he added, ‘a new anger inflamed him.’2

The first to feel the force of this anger were the Jews. They had arrived in England soon after the Norman Conquest, initially settling in London, then dispersing to other towns and cities in the decades that followed. In the second half of the twelfth century, after the Church had forbidden the practice to Christians, they cornered the market in moneylending. The Crown in particular found their services useful, and extended its protection to them, but at the price of exploitation. By the middle of Henry II’s reign, all Jews were regarded as the king’s property, liable to be tallaged whenever he felt the financial need. Royal protection, however, was worth having for a minority community, only a few thousand in number, living among a deeply anti-Semitic population. The crusading fervour whipped up at the start of Richard I’s reign had led to violent attacks on the Jews in London on the day of his coronation, and pogroms against provincial Jewish communities in the months after his departure. These had culminated in March 1190, when the Jews of York, besieged in the city’s castle, committed mass suicide rather than face death at the hands of the surrounding mob.3

John had begun his reign by extending his protection to the Jews, albeit at a hefty

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.