1192.] TRUCE. RICHARD'S CAPTIVITY. 319 At the first words of messengers from the besieged, Richard determined to go to the relief of the Christians in the citadel. The French refused to be again under his command; but the Templars and Hospitallers, with soldiers of all nations, retraced their steps; and Richard embarked with many knights in his fleet of galleys, and arrived after some delay in the harbour of Jaffa. He found the citadel surrendered to the Turks. But the king, without waiting for the land-forces, threw himself into the water, and with a small band of followers recovered the castle. He then boldly encamped outside the gates, having amongst his two thousand men only ten who were mounted. A great body of Turkish cavalry attacked this small force of bowmen and spearmen. Their ranks were unbroken by the clouds of horse; for the spearmen fixed the butts of their lances in the sandy earth, and with the pointed shafts made a fence of steel against the light-armed Turks; whilst the archers discharged their arrows from the arbalasts. Richard and his ten knights scattered the Saracens wherever they rushed. The large-hearted courtesies of chivalry had extended to the Mussulman leaders, amongst the other refinements of the eastern races. Saphadin, the brother of Saladin, sent Richard during the fight two noble horses, requesting him to accept them. From the morning sun to the setting sun Richard had fought against great odds. That day's terrible toil was followed by fever. His true friend, Saphadin, was at hand, to arrange an armistice. A truce for three years was finally determined on; by which the pilgrims were to have free access to Jerusalem. Some of the Turkish chiefs proposed to take vengeance on the Christians who were in their power. Saladin preferred honour to revenge. The great Curdish soldier, the magnanimous and wise Saladin, died within six months of this truce. He had a higher notion of the duties of a sovereign than the Richard. whose courage he admired. "Spill no blood," he said to his son, "for it will one day reach thy head. Preserve the hearts of thy subjects by loving care, for they are entrusted to thee by God." Richard sailed from Acre on the 9th October. The solitary ship in which he had embarked was detained a month by contrary winds before he reached Corfu. Here he hired three coasting-vessels to take him and twenty companions to Ragusa. They landed in the guise of pilgrims; but the lavishness of the king was so little in keeping with his assumed character, that his real rank was soon suspected. The impatient adventurer, with a single attendant, rode day and night, till he arrived in the neighbourhood of Vienna. He rested at a little village, whilst his companion went out to buy food. The person of this attendant was known to one who had been with the duke of Austria in Palestine; and this knowledge led to the captivity of Richard. Leopold of Austria had been scorned by Richard at Acre; and he was also brother-in-law to Isaac of Cyprus. His mean soul had the gratification of a cowardly revenge; and he sent Richard a prisoner to the castle of Tyernsteign. The terrible Richard was now in worse hands than those of Saracens. The duke of Austria sold his captive to the emperor of Germany, and the emperor was ready to sell him again to the highest bidder. He kept Richard safely chained in a castle in the Tyrol. His imprisonment was made known to Europe by a letter from the emperor to the king of France. In England, the people were faithful to their captive king. Prince John was in open hostility to his brother. He surrendered to Philip some portions of the 320 RICHARD COMES TO ENGLAND. [1194. continental dominions of Richard, and did homage to him for the rest. He returned to England with a band of mercenaries, and proclaimed that the king had died in prison. But the prelates and barons were firm; and the schemes of John were overthrown. Philip invaded Normandy, but with very partial success. Longchamp, the deposed chancellor, was the first to make any active exertions for the deliverance of Richard; and he succeeded in bringing him before the diet of the empire at Hagenau. An investigation of the charges against the king took place; but he defended himself with such spirit, that his chains were struck off, and the amount of ransom was the only question in dispute. It was some months before a sufficient instalment of the amount required—a hundred thousand marks-could be raised by taxation in England; and even then the emperor negotiated with John for a bribe to detain his brother. The treaty was finally accomplished. When the king of France knew that this game of state-craft and treachery was at an end, he wrote to John, "Take care of yourself, for the devil is let loose." After a captivity which, Hoveden says, lasted one year, six weeks, and three days, the king of England was delivered to his mother, Eleanor. He hastened on his way to Antwerp; and after a long delay in navigating the river, and by contrary winds, reached England for a short sojourn. Richard had been absent more than four years from the land of which he was king. According to a letter of Pope Celestine to the prelates of England, "Richard, the illustrious king of the English, having assumed the cross, and prepared himself for avenging the injuries done to the Redeemer, has therein, like a prudent man, and one who fears the Lord, considered that the cares of governing his kingdom ought to be postponed to the performance of his duty, and has left the same under the Apostolic protection." * The duty of governing his subjects being thus held by such high authority as a very inferior part of his office, it is not likely that Richard felt much compunction when he came back to an impoverished, discontented, and distracted people. The churches had been stripped of their sacred vessels; the traders had been taxed to the utmost extent of their small ability; the agriculturists had sold their scanty stocks to gather the large amount required for the king's ransom. There is a curious piece of evidence of the impatience of some of the people of London, as it showed itself in the year when Richard was set free. It is connected with the story of William Fitz-Osbert, or William with the Long Beard; and is derived from the roll of the king's justiciars. William FitzOsbert, on the 21st of November, 1194, preferred an appeal before the justices at Westminster against Richard Fitz-Osbert, his brother, which appeal he supported by his own testimony. He made oath that, at a meeting held at the stone house of Richard Fitz-Osbert, a discussion arose concerning the aids granted to the king for his ransom, when Richard exclaimed, "In recompense for the money taken from me by the chancellor within the Tower of London, I would lay out forty marks to purchase a chain in which the king and his chancellor might be hanged." Jordan, the tanner, and Robert Brand, heard this speech; and wished that the king might always remain where he then was, meaning in prison; and they all exclaimed, "Come what will, in London we never will have any other king except our mayor, Henry * Hoveden. 66 321 Fitz-Ailwin, of London Stone." The story of William with the Long Beard has been told by historians without this preliminary incident, the knowledge of which we owe to one of the most judicious of antiquaries.* The causes of the insurrection which this William headed in 1196, and in which he lost his life, are rendered clearer by this curious illustration of popular feeling ir. 1194. Henry Fitz-Ailwin was the first mayor of London, the city, prior to 1189, having been governed by a portreeve, who was an officer of the crown. But the popular magistrate appears to have been as unjust in his exactions, as the chancellor whom Richard Fitz-Osbert and his friends desired to hang. Hoveden's account is very distinct of the oppressions which were exercised in the great trading city, governed by its own magistrates and guilds. "More frequently than usual, in consequence of the king's captivity and other accidents, aids of no small amount were imposed upon the citizens; and the rich men, sparing their own purses, wanted the poor to pay every thing." For this reason, William Fitz-Osbert, in 1196, went over the sea to the king in Normandy, and demanded his protection for himself and the people." It was not of royal cupidity, but of civic corruption that he went to complain to king Richard. "He informed the king," says our good old chronicler Holinshed, "of certain great oppressions and excessive outrages used by rich men against the poor (namely the worshipful of the city, the mayor and aldermen), who in their hustings, when any tallage was to be gathered, burthened the poor further than was thought reason, to ease themselves; whereupon the said William, being a seditious person, and of a busy nature, ceased not to make complaints." This very troublesome lawyer, for lawyer he was, " sharp of wit and somedeal lettered; a bold man of speech, and sad of countenance," was a type of many a bold man of speech, who from time to time, even to this day, has asserted the equal laws of justice against "rights and privileges." Such men are generally persecuted in their generation. William of the Long Beard had a hard fate, though fifty thousand of the "common people" stood at his back. He was seized in the church of Saint Mary Bow, of Cheap, and, being first stabbed, was then hanged. He was long reverenced as "a holy man and martyr." His quarrel with the civic functionaries might have been disregarded by the nobles and prelates as a mere quarrel amongst obscure burgesses, had not Fitz-Osbert gone across the sea to appeal to Richard. For this reason Hubert FitzWalter, archbishop of Canterbury, who was the king's justiciary, interfered with the free movements of "the common people," who were to be arrested wherever they were found outside the city; and accordingly some humble London merchants were seized at Mid Lent at the fair at Stamford. We can only obtain such glimpses as this story of William of the Long Beard affords, of the condition of the cities and great towns of England at this period. In all of the trading communities there were stringent regulations for buying and selling, enforced by the universal machinery of guilds. This organisation was as complete as that of the military system of feudality; and as the lord controlled his tenant and received his fealty, and the tenant commanded his socman, and the socman his serf, so the chief of a guild ruled over Sir F. Palgrave, in his official publication of the Rolls, from which we learn that the unbrotherly denunciation of Richard Fitz-Osbert by William was not successful. + Fabyan. 822 CITIES AND GREAT TOWNS. [1194. his company, and his company over their apprentices, and their apprentices over their servants. There was perpetual watchfulness and command in every branch of industry. No one could pursue a trade to which he had not been duly trained. No one could make an article except of a prescribed size and quality. No one could fix his own price upon what he made or sold. Such a system was adapted to the times in which it grew, and in which it continued, either for protection or oppression, for many centuries. That all these laws impeded production there can be no doubt. How far they promoted the welfare of the humblest classes, defending them against extortion, adulteration, and the other manifold evils and disgraces of modern trade, is a question not so easily determined. The story, however, of William Fitz-Osbert shows that municipal rapacity may be as tyrannous as regal; and that there could be no real safety against injustice till the force of public opinion should hold all authority in its proper position of responsibility as well as power. There is a curious, though exaggerated representation of the condition of the cities and towns of England, in the chronicle of Richard of Devizes. It occurs incidentally in a popular story of a Christian boy of France, who through the artifices of a French Jew is sent to Winchester, to be there offered as a sacrifice by the Jews. The story is altogether worthless; but the exhibition of manners has an historical interest. Go not to London, says the Jew. Every race of every nation abides there, and have there brought their vices. It is full of gamblers and panders, of braggadocios and flatterers, of buffoons and fortune-tellers, of extortioners and magicians. At Canterbury people die in open day in the streets for want of bread and employment. Rochester and Chichester, mere villages, are cities only in name. Oxford barely sustains its clerks. Exeter supports men and beasts with the same grain. Bath is buried in a low valley full of sulphury vapour. Worcester, Chester, and Hereford are infested by the desperate Welshmen. York abounds in rascally Scots. Ely is putrefied by the surrounding marshes. At Durham, Norwich, and Lincoln there are none who can speak French. At Bristol, every body is, or has been, a soap-maker, and every Frenchman esteems soap-makers as he does night-men. But Winchester is the best of all cities, and the people have only one fault-they tell lies like watchmen. All this belongs to the region of fiction; but, like many other of the products of that fertile empire, there are riches to be found amongst the rubbish. It is in legend and ballad, rather than in chronicle, that we must look for the traces of the remarkable condition of large numbers of men who frequented the royal forests of England as organised plunderers, defying the just legal enactments against robbers, as well as utterly disregarding the fearful punishments denounced against those who carried bows and arrows in these forests, or "offended against the king relative to his venison." Richard landed at Sandwich on the 12th of March, 1194. On the 28th of March, the castle of Nottingham, which was held by men at arms in the interest of John, surrendered to the king. He is now ready for a short holiday. "On the 29th day of March, Richard, king of England, went to see Clipstone and the forests of Sherwood, which he had never seen before, and they pleased him greatly; after which, on the same day, he returned to Nottingham." Thierry intimates that it was something beyond the charm of * Hoveden. 1194.] OUTLAWS OF THE FORESTS. 323 woodland scenery that took Richard to Sherwood, in this early spring of 1194. The fame of the forest outlaws had, he imagines, presented an object of attraction to Richard's adventurous spirit. If the king of the crusades and the greenwood king had met, either as friends or foes, the chroniclers would not, in all likelihood, have been silent on the matter. The first distinct mention of Robin Hood is by Fordun, the Scottish historian, who wrote in the 14th century. He says, "Then arose among the disinherited the famous brigand Robert Hode, with his accomplices, whom the common people are so fond of celebrating in their games and stage-plays; and whose exploits, chanted by strolling ballad-singers, delight them above all things." Upon these ballads, adapting themselves, generation by generation, to the changes of language, rests the only historical evidence of the individuality of Robin Hood, beyond this mention by Fordun. A theory has been set up by some enthusiastic interpreters of song and legend, that Robin Hood, and Little John, and many a nameless outlaw, were great heroes who had been defeated, with Simon de Montfort, at the battle of Evesham in 1265. Others make Robin Hood to have been an Earl of Huntingdon. He is the Saxon yeoman, Locksley, of Sir Walter Scott. According to Thierry, the whole of the band that ranged the vast woodland districts of Derby, Nottingham, and Yorkshire, were the remnants of the old Saxon race, who had lived in this condition of defiance to Norman oppression, from the time of Hereward,-the same type of generous |