Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [264]
It was not a fortified hill, like the old Norman founding town, nor a semi-fortified burgh, like the older Saxon foundations. It lay in a broad valley; it contained large, open spaces; it had no defensive wall, no castle keep; it was built for comfort and for trade.
To understand how it came to be there, it is necessary to go back a little.
Since the troubled reign of King Stephen, England had been, for the most part, at peace. It was a peace that had been laid by Stephen’s nephew and successor, the son of the Empress Matilda, Henry II. From his parents, Henry received a huge Angevin inheritance across the Channel so that during his long reign he ruled not only England, but Normandy and huge tracts of France as well. His wars were fought abroad, while to the island he had given peace and a strong administration, law codes and the King’s Justice founded on trial by jury. It was a legacy to England that neither his heroic but absentee son Richard Coeur de Lion, nor his younger and unlucky son John, who had lost most of the Angevin and Norman Empire, had managed to destroy. The order and peace of England was broken briefly at the end of John’s reign by the revolt of the barons that culminated in the king’s capitulation and sealing of the contract known as Magna Carta, and a short invasion of the eastern part of the island by the French king. When John died soon afterwards, it was the magnates themselves who wisely expelled the French, restored peace, and gave their support to John’s son, the pious boy king, Henry III.
With the peace at home had come prosperity: a spectacular new prosperity – the richness of medieval England – that provided magnificent new cathedrals, and stately towns.
It was founded upon two things: rising agricultural prices, from a rising population – and sheep.
The wool of England was some of the best in Europe, it was plentiful, and the merchants of Flanders and Italy, with their huge cloth business, could not get enough of it. Vast quantities of wool were exported and, for most of the time, the taxes and excise duties on it were low. In the early thirteenth century in feudal England, there was a huge capital expansion.
They were good times for most holders of land.
Above all, they were good times for the magnates.
The magnates were powerful. They allowed the monarch to rule – but only just. When a king like John found himself in the impossible position of having too little income from his feudal dues to pay for extraordinary expenses – usually wars – they resisted his efforts to raise money at every opportunity. The crisis of Magna Carta was as much the result of this natural tension as any tactlessness or wrongdoing on the part of King John. Indeed, the monarch was even short of funds with which to run his administration.
Partly for this last reason, and partly to appease the feudal vanity of these men, successive monarchs had allowed the magnates to govern huge tracts of land for them. In these great feudal domains, variously called honours, baronies or liberties, it was the magnate, acting as the representative of the king, whose courts tried all but grave offences; it was the magnates’ servants who collected the taxes and fines; indeed, in some of these areas, even the king’s own sheriff was not allowed to set foot unless the king had evidence of some major abuse of privilege on the magnate’s part. For this kingdom within a kingdom, the magnate paid the king either by knight service or fixed rents.
True, as time went on and the king’s courts grew more developed, the scope of these feudal authorities became less; but they were still sought