Danial Jarrahi Wrote In a Note To The  International Relations Think Tank: Throughout King John’s reign, his financial exigency constituted a continual crisis that complicated his conflicts with Philip Augustus of France, with the Church and with his barons. Costs of warfare had crept upward steadily throughout the last half of the twelfth century, and the financial burden of fighting to defend Plantagenet lands in France had become heavier following Richard Lionheart’s return from German captivity in 1194.

Written by: Danial Jarrahi  British Studies MA Student, Faculty of World Studies (FWS), University of Tehran

Continuing Financial Crisis

IRTT:Throughout King John’s reign, his financial exigency constituted a continual crisis that complicated his conflicts with Philip Augustus of France, with the Church and with his barons. Costs of warfare had crept upward steadily throughout the last half of the twelfth century, and the financial burden of fighting to defend Plantagenet lands in France had become heavier following Richard Lionheart’s return from German captivity in 1194.

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Because of inflation increasing the price of John’s already costly wars, plus perhaps his own extravagance, his government’s inadequate sources of revenue created a fiscal crisis. A key source of funds was the royal demesne, the royal family’s own estates, but they were under the sheriffs’ often inefficient and corrupt administration.

King John needed a new source of income, a general levy on all classes that would tap the kingdom’s resources effectively. In most of Western Europe, general taxation had vanished with the collapse of the Carolingian Empire, and one of the last, an Anglo-Saxon land tax, had disappeared by the mid-twelfth century. The Church’s concern for funding crusades revived interest in general taxation, and in 1188 Henry II’s preparations for a projected expedition to Palestine included the so-called Saladin tithe, a percentage of the value of the goods of those not embarking on the crusade. When huge sums of money had to be raised to pay Richard Lionheart’s ransom in 1193, his agents in England demanded a quarter of the kingdom’s moveable wealth. The levy for Richard’s ransom resembled both a ‘gracious aid’, a baronial obligation, and a tallage falling on the peasant farmers of the king’s own lands and the inhabitants of royal boroughs, though broader in application. John followed this precedent of general taxation with another percentage tax on personal property, a seventh in 1203.

The English barons were losing interest in their ruler’s overseas possessions, however, and they could see no benefit for themselves in his ambitious military plans. When John returned from France in the autumn of 1214, not only had he suffered defeat, but he had emptied his treasury. His insolvency in the months before Magna Carta weakened his hand in handling the rebel barons, and his poverty partially explains his indecision in dealing with militant barons’ demands in the spring of 1215.

John’s Barons and Their Discontents

Mutual mistrust characterized King John’s relations with his barons, and his inability to win their loyalty contributed to his loss of Normandy and his lack of success in recovering his lost French lands. While John’s suspicious nature and personal vendettas against individual barons added to his problems, the very nature of Angevin government made predictable a rebellion early in the thirteenth century.

 Magna Carta 1215 (part 1)

 Magna Carta 1215 (part 2)

King John’s failure to enlist the devotion of his baronage contributed to his other failures, for it was still a formidable force, though weakened by Angevin innovations. Barons with their armed men and castles were capable of challenging royal control of the countryside with military force, and any monarch needed to keep them contented if his realm was to remain peaceful. Although many barons had grievances against the king, only a minority, most with personal grievances, was goaded into taking up arms against John in the winter of 1214–15.

Early-thirteenth-century English barons and knights had more interest in improving and enlarging their estates than in performing military service owed to the king as a condition of holding their lands. Baronial reluctance to perform service overseas had increased, since few English barons any longer held cross-Channel lands that would have motivated them to join John in defending Normandy. The baronage showed even less enthusiasm for projected expeditions to Poitou, and the king had to abandon Poitevin campaigns planned for 1205, 1212 and 1213.

Undoubtedly the major factor in John’s troubles with his barons was his insistence on increasing their contributions to royal revenues and their resistance to any change in their traditional obligations. John abandoned the general levy on moveable goods after 1207, finding it easier to manipulate his perquisites of lordship, insisting on rigorous enforcement of the services and financial obligations by which the barons held their estates. By 1208 and 1209, John’s aggressive use of the feudal incidents was surpassing his predecessors’ practice, and because he was directly involved in the details of fund-raising, many barons blamed him for entangling them in debt. As the leading living authority on King John and Magna Carta characterizes the 1215 baronial opposition, ‘It was a rebellion of the king’s debtors’. Most of the northern barons who would join the rebellion were deeply in debt to the king or to the Jews, although it was not only northerners who fell into debt.

Numerous baronial complaints against King John concerned his refusal to abide by custom in their disputes with him, and the rolls of cases from his reign record frequent payments to speed, smooth or otherwise alter the course of justice. The royal court opened and closed to litigants at his will, and John could revoke barons’ cases for personal hearing before him. Despite an appearance of venality, the king’s common law courts attracted more and more suits by ordinary free men, often involving small plots of land, that were settled by juries, providing a standard of justice that the people found acceptable. It is one of the paradoxes of John’s reign that the common law courts were achieving a high standard of justice at the same time that the barons’ cries against their failure to secure justice from the king were rising in volume.

English barons responded to the political and social changes of the twelfth century by reasserting their special position in the kingdom. They were versed in the custom of the realm, by which they meant the good old law of Edward the Confessor and Henry I, not the Angevin kings’ innovations, and they considered themselves its defenders. Traditional lord–vassal relationships taught them fundamental notions of good governance. They learned from their experience as lords that a free man had privileges denied to the unfree, at the least protection from extralegal punishment, and they knew that no free man should be dispossessed of land or goods except by a lawful judgement in his lord’s court in which his fellow free tenants participated. While some precepts of Roman and canon law influenced them, their ideal of good government was largely an idealized version of an eleventh-century great baron’s court, with the king surrounded by high officials chosen from among his great men, governing by their counsel and sharing with them the duty of giving judgement. Although the Angevin kings’ expansion of royal authority had threatened the barons’ power, that power was not broken, and the barons could hope to achieve their ideal through armed revolt.