Magna Carta: The Birth of Liberty by Dan Jones

Author:Dan Jones [Jones, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, General, Medieval, Military, Revolutions & Wars of Independence
ISBN: 9780698186422
Google: E9BJBgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2015-10-19T23:00:00+00:00

11

England Under Siege

THE FIRST the English knew of the shipwreck was when the soldiers’ bodies washed up on the beaches. The men came first: Knights and their companions who had until recently been living in Flanders were now thrown up on a foreign shore by the cold lap of the North Sea, which carried them to Great Yarmouth, the formidable walled town famous for its herring trade, a few miles to the east of Norwich. Behind them came the corpses of their families: Women and children had been piled onto the boats with the promise of a new life and fortune. Their hopes had been violently dashed.

The soldiers had been recruited by Hugh de Boves, one of John’s most experienced military contractors. Described by the incorrigibly judgmental Roger of Wendover as “a brave knight but a proud and unjust man” (and loathed by at least one other chronicler, the Dunstable annalist), Boves had been sent to northwest Europe to help raise an army with which John could strike back against his rebel barons.1 For the most part the recruiters had succeeded: Convoys of troop carriers had been arriving in Dover from the Continent for days, and John had been present in the town to watch his hired swords disembark. But as all sailors knew, an autumn crossing of the Channel carried risks. On calm seas and with a good wind, the crossing should have taken a day. But gales blew up from September onward, and when they did, the lurch of the waves could easily overwhelm vessels better suited to hugging the coastline than to venturing into open water.

That was precisely what had happened. A storm had risen during the crossing, smashing Boves’s boats to pieces, and everyone aboard had been lost. Boves was one of the many who washed up, wet and dead, at Yarmouth. According to Wendover, “at each of the ports on that part of the sea coast there was found such a multitude of bodies of men and women that the very air was tainted by their stench.” He wrote of children who had been drowned as they slept in their cradles; once cast into the ocean, the flesh had been nibbled from their little bones by “the beasts of the sea and the birds of the air.”2

When John learned of Boves’s death, he was said to have flown into one of his temper tantrums. “He was dreadfully enraged and took no food that day but remained until the evening as if he were possessed by madness,” wrote Wendover.3 Still, this was a king quite used to seeing men around him perish, and he had more pressing concerns than a few boatloads of dead Flemings. Those who had survived the crossing composed the core of a formidable army, bolstered further by the presence of fighters from Poitou and Gascony in the south, Louvain and Brabant in the north. By the end of September the time had come for this fierce body of men to mobilize.

The key to controlling England remained the possession of London.

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