CHAPTER IV
KING JOHN
1206–1210
Sed processu temporis mollities illa in tantam crudelitatem versa est, ut nulli praedecessorum suorum coaequari valeret, ut in sequentibus patebit.
Gerv. Cant. ii. 93.
The first business wherein John had an opportunity of exercising the free kingship which he had, as he said, acquired by the death of Hubert Walter, was the appointment of Hubert’s successor. Immediately after Hubert’s funeral the king spent six days at Canterbury.[502] He “talked much and graciously with the monks” of Christ Church about the choice of a new archbishop, and even hinted that one might be found in their own ranks. At the same time, however, he took possession of a valuable set of church plate bequeathed by Hubert to his cathedral;[503] and before leaving Canterbury he issued orders that the election of the primate should be made on November 30 by the monks and the bishops of the province conjointly.[504] A party in the chapter at once resolved to vindicate its independence both against the bishops, whose claim to share in the choice of their metropolitan was always opposed by the monks, and against the king, whose prerogative of designating the candidate to be chosen was in theory regarded by monks and bishops alike as uncanonical, though in practice they had been compelled to submit to it at every vacancy for a hundred years past at the least. The younger and more hot-headed members of the chapter privately elected their sub-prior Reginald, enthroned him at dead of night, and hurried him off to seek confirmation from the Pope, pledging him to secrecy till the confirmation should be secured.[505] The older and more prudent brethren evidently connived at these proceedings without taking part in them. Their policy was to consent to Reginald’s election after the fact, if the Pope’s sanction of it could be obtained; but if this were refused, they could repudiate the election as a matter in which they had had no share. The convent was, however, unlucky in its choice of a champion. Reginald was no sooner across the sea than he began to announce himself publicly as “the elect of Canterbury,” and even to show the credentials which he had received from his brethren for the Pope. Of course this news soon reached England, and caused a great commotion in high places there. The bishops, indignant at being tricked out of their share in the election, despatched an appeal to Rome. The monks sent a counter-appeal;[506] but to them the wrath of the king was far more terrible than the wrath of the bishops, or even the possible wrath of the Pope. Long before the appeals could be decided, they sent to John a deputation charged with a communication containing no allusion whatever to Reginald, but simply requesting that the convent might be permitted to choose for itself a pastor. John received the deputies graciously and assented to their request; then, taking them aside, he “pointed out to them that the bishop of Norwich” (John de Grey) “was attached to him by a great intimacy, and the only one among the prelates of England who knew his private affairs,” wherefore it would be greatly for the advantage of king and kingdom if he became archbishop—a consummation which the king begged the deputies would do their utmost to secure. He sent back with them some confidential clerks of his own to assist them in this task, and dismissed them with a promise of bestowing great honour on their convent if it were accommodating in this matter. The result was an unanimous election of John de Grey by the chapter of Christ Church.[507]
On December 6 the king obtained from both bishops and monks a withdrawal of their respective appeals.[508] On December 11 John de Grey was enthroned at Canterbury in the king’s presence, and invested by him with the temporalities of the See; and on the 18th the king despatched a messenger to ask for the papal confirmation of the new primate’s appointment.[509] The Pope, however, at the end of March 1206, decided that the election of John de Grey was uncanonical; on the validity of Reginald’s election he suspended his judgement, ordering the Canterbury chapter to send sixteen of their number to him by October 1, with full powers to act on behalf of all, and if necessary to hold a new election in his court. The suffragans of the province were desired to send proctors, and the king was invited to do the like.[510] The king sent three proctors;[511] the bishops seem to have contented themselves with writing a joint letter, of whose contents we know nothing, except that they had the royal approval.[512] Of the sixteen monks who went as representatives of the chapter, twelve, before they sailed, secretly exchanged a promise with the king. He pledged himself to ratify whatever they should do at Rome; they pledged themselves to do nothing there except re-elect John de Grey.[513] The assembly at Rome, originally appointed for October 1, was postponed till the last week of Advent (December 17 to 24). Then, in full consistory, the Pope, after examination, set aside the claim of the bishops to a voice in the election, and declared the monks to be the sole rightful electors; but he also set aside, as informal and void, their election of their sub-prior, Reginald; and he bade them elect, then and there, “whomsoever they would, so he were but an earnest and capable man, and above all, an Englishman.” All eyes must have turned instinctively upon the English-born Cardinal-priest of S. Chrysogonus, the most illustrious teacher of theology in his day, “than whom there was no man greater in the Roman court, nor was there any equal to him in character and learning”—Stephen Langton. Innocent was but speaking the thought of the whole assembly when he added that the monks could not do better than choose Stephen. The unlucky twelve were as willing to do so as the other four, but felt tied by their compact with the king. After some shuffling, they confessed their difficulty to the Pope. He scornfully absolved them from their shameful promise, and the sixteen monks unanimously elected Stephen Langton. The king’s proctors, however, refused to ratify the election in John’s name; so Innocent at once wrote to request a formal ratification of it from John himself.[514]
These things were done in the week following John’s return from La Rochelle to England, which took place on December 12.[515] His recent experiences had shown him that the recovery of his lost territories was by no means impossible, but that it could not, under existing political and social conditions, be achieved by means of the only forces which the military organization of his own realm could supply. Those forces must be supplemented, if not superseded, in any attempt at the reconquest of the Norman and Angevin dominions, by the employment of mercenaries on a large scale, and by an elaborate system of diplomacy, the gradual knitting together of a complicated scheme of foreign alliances. For both these purposes the first need was money; and the difficulties with which the king had to contend in his efforts to raise money were as much greater in John’s case than in that of any of his predecessors, as his need was greater than theirs had ever been.
The financial difficulties of the Crown had been accumulating ever since Richard’s captivity. At John’s accession the arrears of taxes were enormous. At Michaelmas 1201 arrears of all the three “scutages of Normandy” imposed under Richard—in 1194, 1195 and 1196—were due from almost every shire; hidage “for the king’s ransom” was still owing from Dorset and Somerset, and there were many arrears even of the “scutage of Wales,” which dated from 1190.[516] Some of these debts ran on as late as 1207, and some much later still. The king’s claim to these unpaid taxes, as well as to all other debts owed to his predecessor, was, of course, never withdrawn. A grotesque instance of the way in which the principle of inheritance might sometimes work in such matters occurs in the treasury roll of 1201, where two men in Devon are set down as owing a fine “because they had been with Count John”[517]—that is, because they had supported, in his rebellion against Richard in 1193, the very man for whom, as king, the fine was now claimed. The Crown had, however, no direct means of enforcing payment of either fines or taxes, at any rate in the case of the barons. Its one remedy was to seize the lands or castles of an obstinate and wilful defaulter; and this remedy was fraught with danger to the crown itself. Neither law nor custom defined the circumstances or fixed the limits of time within which a defaulter was not, and beyond which he was, liable to be treated as obstinate and wilful; in every case where the king exercised his right of seizure on this ground, therefore, the defaulter and his friends could always find a plea for denouncing its exercise as arbitrary and unjust. It seems probable that at the close of Richard’s reign his ministers may have thus seized the castles or lands of certain barons in pledge for the arrears of their dues to the crown, and that this may have been one of the grievances referred to in the demand of the barons that Richard’s successor “should restore to each of them his rights.” John’s demand for the castles of some of the barons in 1201 was in all likelihood a proceeding of the same kind, based on the same ground, and, as it seems, equally ineffectual in compelling payment; all that the king obtained was the surrender not indeed of the castles, but of some of the barons’ sons as hostages. The deadlock was probably inevitable; but every year of its continuance aggravated both the financial difficulties of the government, and the unfriendliness of the relations between the barons and the king; and this latter evil was yet further aggravated by the measures which had necessarily to be taken in order to meet the former one. Plunged as he was from the very moment of his accession in a costly struggle with France, John had been forced to lay continually fresh burdens upon that very class among his subjects who already were, or considered themselves to be, overburdened by the demands of his predecessor. The “first scutage of King John” seems to have been assessed immediately after his coronation; it appears in the Pipe Roll made up at Michaelmas 1199. In the financial year ending at Michaelmas 1201, and in every one of the five following years, there was another new scutage;[518] and these scutages were independent of the fines paid by the barons who did not accompany the king on his first return to Normandy in 1199, of the money taken from the host as a substitute for its service in 1201, of the equipment and payment of the “decimated” knights in 1205, and the fines claimed from all the tenants-in-chivalry after the dismissal of the host in the same year, as well as of the actual services which many of those who had paid the scutage rendered in the campaigns of 1202–1204 and 1206.
The other taxes levied during these years were a carucage in 1200[519]and a seventh of moveables in 1204.[520] But all the while arrears went on accumulating, and year after year a budget had to be made up by devices of the most miscellaneous character. The accession of a new king could, of course, easily be made a pretext for selling confirmations of existing rights and privileges, and John availed himself of this pretext to the uttermost of his power at the earliest opportunity—that is, on his visit to England in 1201. During that time nobody in England seems to have felt secure of anything that he possessed till he had bought it of the king. Individuals of various ranks bought the sovereign’s “peace” or his “goodwill”;[521] the cities of Winchester and Southampton and the county of Hants each gave him money “that they might be lovingly treated”;[522] Wiltshire gave him twenty pounds “that it might be well treated.”[523] The citizens of York offended him by omitting to welcome him with a procession when he visited their city, and to provide quarters for his cross-bowmen; he demanded hostages for their future good behaviour, but afterwards changed his demand to a fine of a hundred pounds.[524] The sale of offices went on as of old;[525] while the sale of charters to towns, which under Richard was already becoming a remarkable item in the royal accounts, was a transaction of yet greater frequency and importance under his successor.[526] On the other hand, John’s treasury rolls contain many notices of persons who owe the king money “which he has lent them.” These loans from the king to his barons and other subjects were probably made chiefly in the hope of securing the fidelity of the borrowers. In one way or another the speculation must have been in most cases a paying one for John. The privilege of claiming interest in hard cash for a loan was indeed reserved exclusively for the Jews, and not shared even by the king; but he could take from his debtors ample security on their lands or castles, or by means of hostages who were usually their sons or other young members of their families, and whom it was of the greater importance for him to hold in his power as his relations with the barons grew more strained year by year.
In 1206 the tension had reached such a point that John did not venture to impose a scutage of the full amount—two marks on the knight’s fee—which had been usual since his father’s time, but contented himself with twenty shillings.[527] In 1207 he evidently dared not attempt to levy any fresh scutage at all. Nor was a carucage likely to prove either less unpopular or more productive; for the agricultural interest of the country was in a state of extreme depression, owing to a long succession of bad seasons; while the taxation of moveables was an expedient which seems to have found, as yet, but little favour with either the people or the government. John now put forth a suggestion which was, so far as we can see, a novelty in English finance. He “held a council in London on January 8, and there requested the bishops and abbots that they would allow parsons and others holding ecclesiastical benefices to give to the king a fixed sum from their revenues.”[528] Neither in equity nor in policy was the idea a bad one. While the military tenants and the socage tenants had each their own peculiar burden—scutage in the one case, carucage in the other—the beneficed clergy, as such, had never yet been subjected to taxation. The king might well argue that it was time for them to take their turn in making a special contribution to the financial needs of the State; and the argument was sure to meet with the approval of the laity. The prelates, however, were unwilling; and the question was adjourned to another council, in which “an infinite multitude” of ecclesiastical and temporal magnates came together at Oxford on February 9.
At this second meeting the bishops of both provinces gave it as their final answer that “the English Church could by no means submit to a demand which had never been heard of in all previous ages.”[529] The only approach to a precedent for it, indeed, had occurred in 1194, when Archbishop Geoffrey of York, eager to collect money for Richard’s ransom, had asked the canons of his cathedral chapter to give for that purpose a fourth part of their revenues for the year, with the result that they accused him of “wanting to overthrow the liberties of their church,” and shut its doors in his face.[530] Between the council in London and that at Oxford, Geoffrey and John, who had been more or less at variance ever since the latter’s accession, were formally reconciled;[531] John therefore probably counted upon Geoffrey’s support of his scheme, and he may have hoped that the suffragans of Canterbury, having no metropolitan of their own to lead them, would not venture to stand out against the northern primate and the king with the barons, for once, at his back. But what Geoffrey had himself asked of his own chapter as a special favour to Richard in a wholly exceptional emergency, he had no mind to give leave for John to claim from all the beneficed clergy of his province as a matter of right, and under entirely different circumstances. The king was prudent enough not to press his demand; but it may be doubted whether the lay barons agreed with the Waverley annalist in deeming its withdrawal a proof that he “had taken wiser counsel,” since he substituted for it a demand for a thirteenth of the moveable goods of every layman throughout the realm.[532] This they had no excuse for refusing. “All murmured, but no man dared contradict,”[533] except Geoffrey of York. He, it seems, claimed exemption for laymen holding lands of the Church, or at least of his cathedral church. His protest, however, was disregarded; whereupon he excommunicated all spoilers of the Church in general, and of the province of York in particular, and then withdrew over sea,[534] to spend the rest of his life in exile.
Thus for the next eight years the vast diocese of York was practically without a chief pastor and the province without a metropolitan, while the temporalities of the see were in the hand of the king. As for Canterbury, John had answered the Pope’s request that he would ratify the election of Stephen Langton by a flat refusal to accept as primate a man of whom he declared that he “knew nothing, save that he had dwelt much among his enemies”;[535] and when on June 17 Stephen was consecrated by Innocent,[536] the king seized the estates of the Canterbury chapter, drove the monks into exile,[537] and proclaimed that any one who acknowledged Stephen as archbishop should be accounted a public enemy.[538] In August Innocent bade the bishops of London, Ely and Worcester threaten the king, if he continued obstinate, with an interdict upon his realm, and hinted that this might be followed by a papal excommunication of John himself.[539] Negotiations went on throughout the winter, but without result,[540] and on Passion Sunday, March 23, or Monday, March 24, 1208, the interdict was proclaimed.[541] It seems that notice of the intended date of its publication was given about a week before, and that the king at first answered this notice by ordering all the property of the clergy, secular or monastic, to be confiscated on Monday, March 24; but that he immediately afterwards decided to anticipate, instead of returning, the blow, and caused the confiscation to be begun at once.[542] For him the opportunity was a golden one. The interdict enabled him to put the whole body of the clergy in a dilemma from which there was no escape. They held their property—thus he evidently argued—on condition of performing certain functions: if they ceased from those functions, their property was forfeit, just as that of a layman was forfeit if he withheld the service with which it was charged. The logical consequence in either case—from John’s point of view—was confiscation; difficult and dangerous to enforce on a wide scale against laymen, but easy and safe when the victims were clergy. The barons made no objection to a proceeding which would fill the king’s coffers without drawing a single penny from their own; the chief justiciar himself, Geoffrey Fitz-Peter, earl of Essex, had no scruple in acting as custos for the Crown of all the Church property on his own estates, which were scattered through thirty-one counties, and also of the revenues and goods of the Templars throughout all England.[543] The spoliation was indeed effected with a brutal violence which would have been impossible had there been any strong feeling against it among the influential classes of the laity,[544] and which so far outran the intentions of the king that on April 11 he issued a proclamation ordering that any man caught doing or even speaking evil to a monk or a clerk, “contrary to our peace,” should be hanged upon the nearest oak.[545] The clergy, like the Jews, were to be ill-treated by no one save the king himself. Many of them made a compromise with their spoiler; within a very few weeks five bishops, three cathedral chapters, the prior of the Hospitallers, and the heads of fourteen important monasteries, besides sundry individual priests, undertook to farm their own benefices and other property for the king.[546] The Cistercians, asserting that the privileges of their order exempted them from interdict, ceased from performing the offices of religion for a few days only, and then resumed them as usual;[547] whereupon their possessions, which had been seized like those of the other orders, were restored to them on April 4.[548]
At the same time John despatched an envoy to Rome proposing terms on which he professed himself willing to let Stephen take possession of his see; and he contrived to spin out the negotiations for six months before Innocent discovered that the terms offered were merely a device for wasting time, and that the king had never intended to fulfil them.[549] On January 12, 1209, the Pope informed the bishops of London, Ely and Worcester that he had written to John a letter of which he sent them a copy, and bade them excommunicate the king if he did not repent within three months after its receipt.[550] John upon this began a fresh series of negotiations, which kept the three bishops—who had apparently gone over sea immediately after publishing the interdict—flitting to and fro between the continent and England, without any result, for nine more months. In October they finally withdrew, but without publishing the excommunication; and by the end of the year all possibility of its publication in England had vanished, for every English bishop had fled save two, Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester, and John de Grey, bishop of Norwich, both of whom were creatures of the king; John de Grey, moreover, was now justiciar in Ireland, and the Poitevin Peter des Roches was thus left sole representative of the episcopal order in England.[551]
It was John’s hour of triumph, not over the clergy alone, but over all his subjects and vassals within the four seas of Britain. The action of the Pope and the inaction of the barons had opened a way for him to make himself “King of England” in his own sense of the words. To all outward seeming his whole time, since his return from the continent, had been devoted to mere amusement and self-indulgence. He “haunted woods and streams, and greatly did he delight in the pleasure of them.”[552] When he was not thus chasing the beasts of the forest, his yet more relentless pursuit of other prey was making havoc of the domestic peace, and rousing against him the deadly hatred, of some of the greatest of his barons.[553] But their hatred was futile; they were paralyzed partly by their own mutual jealousies, which the king was continually stirring up,[554] partly by the consequence of their selfish shortsightedness with regard to his persecution of the clergy. The interdict had placed one whole estate of the realm at John’s mercy; and the laity, having failed at the critical moment to make common cause with their clerical brethren, now found themselves in their turn without a support against his tyranny. His consciousness of power broke out in the strangest freaks of wantonness; in causing the Michaelmas session of the Exchequer to be held at Northampton instead of London, “out of hatred to the Londoners”;[555] in forbidding the capture of birds all over England;[556] in ordering that throughout the Forest districts the hedges should be fired and the ditches made by the people to protect their fields should be levelled, “so that, while men starved, the beasts might fatten upon the crops and fruits.”[557] It showed itself too in acts of graver political significance. A series of orders to the bailiffs of the coast towns for the equipment and mustering of their ships and the seizure of foreign vessels, issued in the spring and summer of 1208, indicates that John was then either meditating another expedition over sea, or, more probably, expecting an attack from thence. The muster, originally fixed for Trinity Sunday, was postponed to S. Matthew’s day,[558] and the end of the matter was that John, finding he had no immediate need for the services of the fleet, “took occasion”—no doubt on pretext of some deficiency in the contingent due from them—“to oppress the mariners of the Cinque Ports with great and heavy affliction. Some he hanged; some he killed with the sword; many were imprisoned and loaded with irons”; the rest fled into exile, and it was only by giving him fines and hostages that they appeased his wrath and bought his leave to return to their homes.[559] The barons were again required to renew their homage; the demand was made literally at the sword’s point—for John’s lavish hospitality and largesse[560] filled his court with mercenaries who were quite ready to enforce his will in such a matter—and they were compelled either to submit to it, or to give their sons and kinsmen as hostages for their fidelity.[561] The king seemed indeed, as Matthew Paris says, to be courting the hatred of every class of his subjects.[562] But hate him as much as they might, they feared him yet more than they hated him; and “burdensome” as he was “to both rich and poor,”[563] when he summoned all the free tenants throughout the realm, of whatever condition, who were above the age of twelve years, to swear fealty in person to him and his infant heir in the autumn of 1209, rich and poor alike durst not do otherwise than obey him.[564]
This ceremony took place at Marlborough in September,[565] just before the final rupture of the negotiations with Langton and the bishops. A few weeks earlier John had received the submission of the king of Scots. Twice or thrice in the last two years a visit of William the Lion to the English court had been projected.[566] It took place at length in the middle of April 1209 at Bolton, whence John and William proceeded together to Norham for a conference.[567] The shelter given in Scotland to some of the bishops and other persons who fled from John’s persecution in connection with the interdict[568] supplied the English king with a pretext for demanding, once for all, security for William’s loyalty. He bade him surrender either three castles on the border or his only son as a hostage. William refused to do either.[569] John, on returning to the south, summoned his host, and in July set out to take the three castles by force. The papal excommunication was hanging over his head, and its publication was hourly expected; his troops shrank alike from his leadership and from an encounter with the Scot king, who was considered “eminent for his piety,” the champion of the Church and the favourite of Heaven, while they, being under interdict, were virtually outcasts from the Christian fold. A dexterous renewal of negotiations with Innocent and Stephen, however, staved off the excommunication and prevented the threatened desertion of the English troops;[570] and on August 4 John was at Norham[571] at the head of a great host ready to do battle with the Scots. On hearing this, William “greatly feared his attack, knowing him to be given to every kind of cruelty; so he came to meet him and offered to treat for peace; but the king of the English flew into a rage and insulted him bitterly, reproaching him with having received his (John’s) fugitives and public enemies into his realm, and lent them countenance and help against him.” At last some “friends of both realms” arranged terms which pacified John and which William dared not refuse. He sent his son {Aug. 7}, not indeed as a hostage, but to do homage to the English king “for the aforesaid castles and other lands which he held”;[572] he undertook to pay John by instalments within the next two years fifteen thousand marks “to have his goodwill”; he gave hostages for the fulfilment of this undertaking; and he surrendered his two daughters to be kept in John’s custody as his wards and married at his pleasure.[573] According to Gervase of Canterbury, one of these ladies was to be married to John’s son;[574] one of his many illegitimate sons must be meant, for though John had now two sons by his queen, the elder of them was not yet two years old, while the younger of William’s daughters was thirteen at the least.[575] All that William obtained in return for these concessions was the freedom of the port of Berwick, and leave to pull down a castle which the bishop of Durham had built over against it.[576] Of his claim upon Cumberland and Westmorland nothing further was ever heard.
Two months later, Wales followed Scotland’s example. Over Wales, indeed, John’s triumph was won without the trouble even of a military demonstration on his part. The anarchy of Wales had been growing worse and worse ever since the death of Henry II. Its danger for England lay mainly in the opportunities which it afforded to any of the English barons of the border who might be treasonably inclined, for making alliances with one or other of the warring Welsh princes, and thus securing for themselves a support which might enable them to set at defiance the authority of the English crown. John himself had held the position of a border baron for ten years, as earl of Gloucester and lord of Glamorgan, and had used it for his own private ends as unscrupulously as any of his neighbours.[577] The familiarity with Welsh politics which he had thus acquired stood him in good stead when he became king. At his accession, a struggle which had been going on for two years between three rival claimants to the succession in South Wales, Griffith and Maelgwyn, sons of the late prince Rees ap Griffith, and Gwenwynwyn, son of Owen Cyveiliog, prince of Powys, had just ended in the triumph of Griffith, who, by the help of a force supplied to him by the English government, overcame both his rivals at the close of 1198. On Griffith’s death in 1200 Gwenwynwyn for a moment regained the ascendency in South Wales; but he found a new and formidable rival in the prince of North Wales, Llywelyn ap Jorwerth, who in a few years succeeded in reducing most of the South Welsh princes to dependence on himself.[578] Throughout these years John, amid all his political and military occupations on the continent, watched every vicissitude of the struggle in Wales, kept up constant relations with both parties, and balanced the one against the other[579] with a mingled unscrupulousness and dexterity for which even the Welshmen were scarcely a match, and which at last brought them all alike to his feet. In July 1202 Llywelyn promised to do homage to the English king as soon as the latter should return from over sea;[580] before October 15, 1204, he was betrothed to John’s illegitimate daughter Joan,[581] and in 1206 she became his wife.[582] In 1208 his rival Gwenwynwyn was in an English prison, whence he obtained his release by doing homage to John at Shrewsbury on October 8.[583] Llywelyn’s promised visit to the English court seems to have not yet taken place; but a year later, on the king’s return from the north, there befell, say the chroniclers, “what had never been heard of in times past: all the Welsh nobles”—that is, evidently, the princes of both North and South Wales—“came to him and did him homage,” not on the border, but in the heart of his own realm, at Woodstock,[584] on October 18 or 19, 1209.[585]
The king’s triumph was complete. The last date which had been fixed for the publication of the papal sentence was October 6;[586] the sentence was still unpublished, and the bishops who should have published it had fled. They proclaimed it indeed in France in November;[587] but John took care that no official notification of the fact should reach England, and the sentence remained a dead letter. Its existence was known and talked of all over the country, but it was talked of with bated breath. The excommunicate king held his Christmas feast at Windsor surrounded by “all the great men of England,” who sat at his table and held intercourse with him as usual, simply because they dared not do otherwise.[588] Of the fate in store for those who stood aloof, one terrible example sufficed. The archdeacon of Norwich quitted his place at the Exchequer table at Westminster, after warning his fellow-officers that they were perilling their souls by serving an excommunicate king. He was seized by a band of soldiers, loaded with chains, flung into prison, and there crushed to death beneath a cope of lead.[589] The whole body of the clergy, already stripped of their possessions, were now in peril of their lives. As the king was passing through one of the border counties he met some of the sheriff’s officers in charge of a prisoner with his hands tied behind him. They said the man was a robber, and had robbed and slain a priest on the highway: what, they asked, should be done with him? “Loose him and let him go” answered John, “he has slain one of my enemies!” Nor was his persecution limited to the clergy; the lay relatives and friends of Langton and of the other exiled bishops were hunted down and flung into prison, and their property seized for the king.[590] When he could plunder his Christian subjects no more, he turned upon the Jews. At the opening of 1210 all the Jews in England, of both sexes, were by his order arrested, imprisoned, and tortured to make them give up their wealth. It was said that the king wrung ten thousand marks from one Jew at Bristol by causing seven of his teeth to be torn out, one every day for a week,[591] and that the total sum transferred from the coffers of the Jews to the royal treasury amounted to sixty-six thousand marks.[592] Never before—not even in the worst days of William the Red—had England fallen so low as she now lay at the feet of John. “It was as if he alone were mighty upon earth, and he neither feared God nor regarded man.”[593] John seems in fact to have been one of the very few men of whom this latter assertion can be made with literal truth; and in this utter recklessness and ruthlessness lay the secret of his terrible strength. “There was not a man in the land who could resist his will in anything.”[594] The very few barons who had dared openly to resist it since his return from Poitou in 1206 were now all in Ireland; and it was Ireland that he set himself to subdue in 1210.