This week, we’re travelling back to the 13th century and the turbulent reign of King John to discover how a rebellion, a war in France and two sieges of Dover Castle in Kent each played their part in the king’s eventual demise. Joining us to unpick the complex plot is senior properties historian Paul Pattison, who reveals the events leading up to the sieges of Dover Castle, their role in preserving English rule and the evidence that can still be seen today.

To discover more about the history of Dover Castle or to plan a visit, go to www.english-heritage.org.uk/dover

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Now today we're in the 1200s, during the turbulent reign of King John, and the story we're about to uncover is that of rebellion, of war with France, of 2 great sieges at Dover Castle, and of King John's eventual demise.

Joining me to unpick the complex plot is senior properties historian, Paul Patterson.

We're going to talk about the Barons' War and the great sieges of Dover Castle.

But before we get into that, let's set this tumult in context.

How did the terrible King John come to the throne and what was the situation he inherited at the time?

Well, John was the youngest son of Henry II And he came to the throne on the death of his elder brother, Richard I, Richard the Lionheart.

It wasn't exactly a straightforward succession because there was a rival claimant who was Arthur of Brittany, who was the son of Geoffrey, another of John's brothers.

And so the 2 rival claimants almost came to war, but eventually ended it through negotiation with certain concessions on either side.

So it wasn't a straightforward succession at all.

But anyway, when he did come to the throne and was acknowledged as king, he inherited the throne of England and extensive lands in what is now Western France, which his father Henry II had won or inherited, and that included Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine.

So he's King of England and he's also overlord of this extensive tract of territory in what is now Western France.

Okay, and when did King John exactly come to the throne?

And I've hinted that he was a bit of a terrible king, could you describe him in some further adjectives?

Yeah, the judgment of history and even of, you know, considered modern history, if you like, is that he was a poor king.

Medieval kings had to be seen as the prominent people among equals, you know, their barons, their peers.

They had to be firm rulers, ruthless even on occasions.

They had to be generous to those that supported them.

They had to reward them with land, castles, and positions.

And they also had to be a patron of the church, because the church at this time was a powerful institution which was still ruled over by the Pope in Rome.

They also had to be diplomatic and skilled at negotiation and prepared to make concessions on occasions.

Unfortunately John had very few of these qualities in any sort of adequate measure and he basically tried to play everything to his own personal advantage at 1 time or another.

And this tended to alienate and anger even the closest of his supporters, right down from the Pope to the barons that were in the country.

So he just wasn't very good at it, effectively.

I mean, there were difficult times and loyalties among the elite came and went for personal advantage and you had to know how to play it and he didn't play it very well.

Let's get into that relationship that he did have with his barons because I think that is the 1 that really stands out in the story.

His reign was characterised as a fragile relationship with those barons.

OK, well, I've already intimated how he lacked the skills necessary to manage tricky individuals, But he compounded that by a number of things.

He presided over catastrophic military failures, the loss of Normandy, Brittany, and Anjou.

You know, his inheritance from his father was lost in warfare with Philip II of France.

That resulted in the loss of baronial property in what is now France, for instance.

He imposed excessive taxation on them to finance these wars and other things.

He used foreign officials at times and men of lower rank to collect these taxes, which was grossly offensive to those of the baronial class.

He got into conflict with the church over the respective rights of who was going to appoint senior churchmen.

This actually led to him being excommunicated by the Pope.

In fact the whole country was placed under what they call an interdict which meant the basic functions of church services and burials were suspended and that lasted for about 6 years.

So all these things added up to making him very unpopular.

He also had some personal traits which several of the medieval chroniclers allude to and so many of them do so that it's hard not to believe them.

He was regarded, for instance, as a sexual predator, and with some quite senior people who were close to him, including the daughters and wives of some of his senior barons.

And so all of this stuff coalesced into a disastrous relationship with quite a substantial number of the baronial rulers in the country.

I can hear the exasperation in your voice, almost echoing through the centuries.

And obviously that would have been felt a thousandfold by the barons who he would have supposedly had relations with.

The fact that he was muscling in on other people's women was also potentially very offensive.

Total abuse of power by the sounds of things.

So how did the barons attempt to sort of limit the power of the king and cut him down a peg or 2?

Okay, well, there are in fact conspiracies in

There's a plot to get rid of him, to kill him.

But that is discovered and foiled and very shortly afterwards John embarks on a campaign in France in 1213 and 1214 to try and recover those lands that he lost about 10 years earlier.

He taxes the barons excessively in order to finance that.

Anyway, it ends in a failure and he comes back to England in October

And at this point the barons have had enough and they present him with something called the Charter of Liberties.

Which was a series of clauses which were initially drawn up for the coronation of Henry I earlier in the 12th century and at that time presented to the king and agreed to.

So it was agreement about levels of taxation, about who had the right to appoint officials, about not indulging in selling appointments to individuals, all this kind of thing, which can be summed up as the hereditary rights of the barons in their relationship to the king.

He sees it as an attempt to control his power, which in effect it was.

And am I right in saying that is that kind of like a precursor, an early form of what was later to come, which was the Magna Carta, the Great Charter?

From this initial presentation in October 1214, John holds a series of meetings reluctantly and he plays a delaying game as well.

He doesn't want to talk about this, but he's not in a great position and eventually he has to.

And so it comes to a head when he meets the barons and they present another document which is an enhancement of the Charter of Liberties and they call it the Articles of the Barons and this is at Runnymede in June 1215.

It's an expanded version of the earlier Charter of Liberties and it's a pretty comprehensive list of the things that they wanted him to sign up to in their relationship with him.

And this is Magna Carta version 1, is that right?

At that time it was called the Articles of the Barons and it is first called Magna Carta about 2 years later.

And am I right in saying that he does sign it, but his quill is hovering over the page shall we say.

Yeah that's in fact what happened but I think he was of bad faith he had no intention of honoring it and in fact some warfare had already begun by that time a month earlier.

I suppose he was under duress as were they because the barons were laying siege to some of his castles at the time, and he was in the process of sending royal officials to confiscate baronial lands.

So the context of the meeting in June at Runnymede is soured already and they're almost, well certainly John is almost going through the motions and I don't think he had any intention of honouring and I think they knew it.

I'm getting the sense then that King John was very much on the back foot in this context, There was a lot of violence going on and he had to sign this to kind of placate them really.

I'm not sure whether he was on the back foot, but he wasn't in a great position.

I mean, Fighting had already begun, but I don't think anybody wanted full-scale warfare.

So it was a kind of a double game they were playing.

But in the end, both parties recognized that no compromise was possible, I think.

And as soon as it had been signed, the game was up really.

So the peace was very kind of brief, really.

Well, eventually it goes on all the way through to about August 1217.

So, you know, from effectively begins in May 1215 and carries on till August 1217, so over 2 years.

And this I think is where things get a little bit more interesting and a bit more complex.

I understand that France, or at least French lands and French influence, political influence, starts to come to the fore.

And in fact, the earlier conspiracy that I talked about in 1213 to get rid of John had involved Philip Augustus, the king of France.

And so immediately after the Runnymede agreement is not honored, the barons appeal to Philip Augustus and his son Louis the Dauphin for assistance and they are, well, Philip Augustus is pretty reluctant to get involved at this stage but his son is more willing and I think Philip Augustus turns a blind eye to what his son's doing.

What it results is that there is a promise of military aid from France in aid of the barons.

And this is where France sees its opportunity?

I think there's a chance that they think they can take the crown of England and that's exactly the game.

And the English barons, or at least the English barons were on the side of limiting the power of the king, they were willing to go through with that.

There were however some loyal ones too, it wasn't all 1 sided.

So the fighting starts in earnest after the meeting at Runnymede in May and it goes all through the autumn of 1215.

1 of the big events is the siege of Rochester, which ends in October.

And then John embarks upon a campaign in the north and East Anglia, where what we can call the rebel barons for now are concentrated, where their lands are.

And his strategy is to devastate their lands and their castles and limit their ability to wage war upon him.

That goes on all through the winter of 1215 to 1216 and it's not until May 1216 that Louis lands with a French army at Sandwich in Kent to help the Barons.

Yes, what happens is that John initially goes to meet them and to fight them at Sandwich, but he takes flight probably because he saw the size of the forces that were arrayed against him.

And effectively his opposition more or less collapses and he flees across Southern England, initially to Winchester and then to the castle at Corfe.

Meanwhile, Louis is taken in triumph, entering London on June the 2nd, and he's pronounced king.

He's not crowned, but he's actually pronounced king by the barons.

So if you were a normal person on the streets at that point, you think it's all over for King John.

So how does John regroup and come back into the fight?

There's this flight as I mentioned across southern England further to the west.

Louis after being in London then goes after him but abandons the chase and then instead goes back towards London and the south east and begins 2 big sieges of the 2 important royal castles at Windsor and Dover.

So at this stage, John himself is nowhere to be seen while these 2 big sieges begin.

And then he goes north through the western counties, through Gloucester and Bristol and Worcester and Hereford, gathering support.

That's what he does in the first instance.

Meanwhile, the royal castles around England are fighting their own little sieges with the forces of the Barons and Louis, so the war continues.

Okay, let's talk about this situation then towards Dover.

So where is the pseudo-King Louis at this point?

After initially chasing John into the West Country, across the south of England, he then returns towards London.

And then, having begun the siege of Windsor, he comes to the south-east and begins the siege of Dover in July

Dover's important because it guarantees his communications with France and reinforcements and supplies and all the rest of it.

So it's pretty important to take Dover Castle.

But Dover Castle is a mighty fortress, isn't it?

Can you describe what it would have looked like at this point?

Would it be similar to what we see today?

But What had happened is during the reign of his father, Henry II, the castle had been very drastically rebuilt.

So the great keep, the great tower that's still there today, was built in the 1180s, along with the inner bailey and its strong ring encircling walls and towers.

And a start had been made on the outer bailey as well.

Part of that was built in stone but part of it was probably still in earth and timber form.

But by any standard it was still a very formidable obstacle to take.

What did the French, and I presume the defecting barons, try to do to get into the castle?

Well, any medieval siege was a combination of trying to persuade those inside to give up, And if that didn't happen, then obviously to break in.

So Dover Castle is in a pretty strong position.

If you think of it as a big triangle on a very tall hill, the base of the triangle is the white cliffs, which are unscalable.

And the other 2 sides of the triangle are very steep until you get to the northern end where there's a narrow neck of land which connects to higher ground beyond, and that's the vulnerable part of the castle, and that's where the French concentrated their attack.

And so what they do is that they concentrate siege engines, you know, stone throwing engines and arrow throwing engines in that location.

And they start to bombard the outer defenses, the Barbican, which is an earthwork.

And so they also build things like siege towers, we know that, and they employ miners to start to undermine the Barbican.

They break into the Barbican by undermining it and then proceed to try and get into the main part of the castle through the main north gate.

Miners are set to work again, and 1 of the towers of the north gate is collapsed by their activities, and the French actually break into the inner belly of the castle.

But by a pretty stout and heroic defence, the defenders, who were led by someone called Hubert de Boer, succeed in pushing the French out and making the breach good.

You know, it's a real classic tale of medieval siege warfare.

How long did this take, up until punching through?

They do give us some detail, but they're brief.

The whole siege lasts from July 1216 through to October 1216, so it's quite a long time.

But you probably remember that a substantial chunk of that time is spent in negotiation and parley and trying to starve them out rather than continuous fighting.

So the actual periods of continuous fighting are probably short and sharp, lasting several days each, perhaps.

The people in the castle, Dover Castle, have held their ground and they've managed to sort of plug that hole.

But I understand there will be a second siege of Dover Castle at some point in the future.

I suspect that the French forces don't want to sit outside through the whole winter and so a truce is made.

But obviously that the fighting elsewhere goes on So the war isn't over.

And meanwhile, John had kind of entered the fray again, and he'd moved from the West country back into East Anglia and had started attacking the castles and lands of the rebel barons there again.

So this is end of 1216, towards the end of 1216, September-October, where John is campaigning in East Anglia.

In effect, I think what we have in the whole warfare is a stalemate because he actually needs 1 side or other to have a decisive victory and there hasn't really been 1.

King John doesn't die by the sword as I understand it.

Well, whether you can describe it as ordinary or not, but it's certainly of natural causes definitely.

I mean, he's been flying over the country at an incredible rate from place to place.

We think he dies of dysentery at Newark on 18th October

So it's a pretty horrible way to go, but he does go out of natural causes rather than battle.

And this introduces in effect a total stalemate because if you think about it, there is far less reason for the barons now to be at war and actually siding with what was effectively a foreign power in a civil war when the main perpetrator of the causes of the war is dead.

What happens now is that there is a true stalemate and some barons begin to come back to the side of the English crown.

And this is compounded by the fact that John's young nine-year-old son is crowned in Gloucester Cathedral as King Henry III 10 days later on the 20th of October 1216 he is crowned and William Marshall the great medieval knight becomes his regent and the complexion of the conflict starts to change and you know the the momentum starts to swing gently the other way.

But the French haven't gone back to France, have they?

And is this when they launch a second attempt on Dover Castle?

Yes, we get into 1217, so, you know, the fighting does continue on and off throughout the winter of 1216 into 1217.

And then Louis is fighting in several places, including in the north of England and in the south of England.

Dover was critical again because he does need reinforcements, he needs more soldiers and he needs more supplies.

And so he comes south again to Dover and begins a second siege.

And Dover being in the key position to dominate those communications, he begins a second siege of the castle in May

That went on until August 1217, round about the 24th.

It's another big affair and we know from contemporary accounts that this time he attacks the same area because it's the only 1 possible to attack and he surrounds the northern end of the castle, the North Gate and the spur, with a series of what are called fortresses and these are probably like 45 platforms with siege engines on them.

And these siege engines begin slinging great stones at the castle walls in another attempt to break in.

And they include an engine called a trebuchet that you might have heard of, which is a massive great stone-throwing engine, and it has the great name of the malvoisin, or the bad neighbour.

And so for quite a few weeks, these engines are bombarding the castle, attempting to break away in.

But again, it's not successful and the garrison hauled out.

At this point did the French turn heel and go back to France?

Do they realise they've lost at this point?

Slightly earlier than the conclusion of the siege at Dover, they had suffered a defeat at Lincoln, again in May

at the hands of William Marshall, Henry III's regent.

And then in August, on the 24th of August 1217, towards the end of the Dover siege there's an attempt to reinforce Louis' forces by a fleet with soldiers and equipment coming from France.

Hubert de Beur, who is the guy who is defending Dover Castle, goes out with another fleet and meets the French fleet off the coast at Sandwich and the French are defeated in a huge sea battle which effectively means that the war cannot be carried on by Louis and his French soldiers And so that's the event, this battle at Sandwich, that finally decides the outcome of the war.

It's quite an unusual character who leads the French fleet.

He was actually a Frenchman, and at some point, clearly, he'd been in monastic orders.

But I think early on in life, he'd turned to another occupation, which was piracy.

And he'd established himself as a very successful pirate or privateer in the English Channel operating out of a base in Sark in the Channel Islands and he'd actually been on the English side for quite a long time.

But during this conflict, I guess because he thought his purposes would be better served on the French side, he offered his services to the French again and so led the French fleet.

He's captured aboard 1 of the ships and rough justice is very quickly meted out to him by the English and they basically put his head on the rail of the ship and cut it off immediately.

So treacherous his behaviour was considered to be.

GW Interesting as well that naval supremacy wins out and that becomes a hallmark I think of the people who live in the British Isles, don't they, as history wears on.

And, you know, we underestimate the power of sea power at this time.

I mean, kings generally didn't keep fleets in the sense of a Royal Navy that emerged later.

But what they did do in times of war is they would commission merchant shipping because merchant ships were effectively used as warships so this was a makeshift fleet and sea battles were fought like land battles.

Ships came together, soldiers jumped onto the other ship and fought it out hand to hand and that's exactly what happened in this instance.

What a fascinating and tumultuous sort of few years in southern England at that point.

Over 2 years of fairly continuous warfare.

It's typified by castle sieges going on all over England, because that's how the country was held and how it was dominated by garrisons in castles, and so it was important for 1 side or other to keep taking these castles.

There are very few pitched battles, Most of them are sieges.

The young Henry III then goes on to rule England.

Does he have a long life and a long reign?

Initially he is under a regent because he's not of age, but eventually he does come of age and he rules until 1272, so it's an enormously long reign.

And that includes, incidentally, a second civil war in the 1260s, the Second Barons' War, but that's another story.

I'm dying to know now whether he was like his father, King John.

When we consider all of those complex series of events, interference from France and, you know, rebelling barons, how crucial was Dover Castle as that important fortress in the corner of Southeast England, that key to England in a way.

Well exactly, the key to England, which was a phrase that was coined not long afterwards actually, and it was in reference to this series of events.

So it was a very important fortress and its secret lay in the fact that it dominates the shortest crossing of the channel from 1 side to the other.

And so in medieval terms, wars could only be fought if you had and maintained sufficient lines of communication, sufficient forces and sufficient supplies.

And Dover Castle was 1 of those places which, you know, held the key to a successful campaign.

And so the failure to take it did influence the course of the war, there's no doubt about that.

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Episode 72 - The First Barons' War and the Great Siege of Dover Castle