The Struggle for Mastery: Britain 1066-1284 by Carpenter David

Author:Carpenter, David [David, Carpenter,]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2015-05-08T16:00:00+00:00

John played for time, and postponed consideration of these matters to a council due to meet at Oxford at the end of April 1215. Yet his position continued to weaken. Offers to Llywelyn and Maelgwn did not prevent them combining with the barons. The pope remained supportive but he was distant, and Langton refused to excommunicate the dissidents. To be sure, in November 1214 John had tried to buy Langton’s support and that of the church in general by issuing a charter which promised free and speedy canonical elections to abbeys and bishoprics. But this was less momentous than it seemed. John still hoped that his candidates would be elected; he could still, under the terms of the charter, refuse his assent to elections, in which case he would retain the vacancy revenues until a successor was appointed. Langton therefore increasingly played the role, not of a supporter of the king, but of a mediator between the two sides and one largely in sympathy with baronial aims.

The opposition barons did not come to the Oxford council at the end of April. Instead they mustered in arms at Stamford in Lincolnshire and on 5 May formally defied the king. By now the original Northerners had been joined by the earls of Hereford, Norfolk and Essex, as well as the clever and charismatic Saer de Quency. John had made the latter earl of Winchester and a chief official at the exchequer, but had denied him the castle of Mountsorrel; de Quency was left an earl without a castle – almost as disastrous as a knight without a horse. Military leadership of the movement was assumed by Saer’s brother-in-arms, Robert fitz Walter, under the grandiloquent title ‘Marshal of the Army of God and Holy Church’.

The war which began on 5 May was transformed within twelve days. Despite John’s charter early in the month giving them the right to have a mayor, on 17 May the Londoners let the rebels into the city. Its financial resources were now theirs; the security of its walls theirs also. (London remained the principal baronial base until the end of hostilities in 1217.) There was no way John could now bring the war to a speedy end, especially as he was also faced by the rebellion of large numbers of knights. In part that was because knightly tenants followed their lords, something very clear in the north where baronies were compact and the tie of tenure was reinforced by that of neighbourhood. But it was also because many knights were sympathetic to the rebel cause. Ralph of Coggeshall’s statement that John’s leading supporters were all deserted by their knights was an exaggeration (the loyalist earl of Derby was remarkably successful in keeping his tenants in line), but it indicates the flow of the tide. Some knights like Thomas of Moulton and Simon of Kyme, both ex-sheriffs of Lincolnshire, were as wealthy as many barons and clearly made their own decisions to rebel. So did those from areas without

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