Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 48.djvu/149

 January 1198 to January 1199; but, as usual, war broke out long before the latter date. Richard won a great victory over Philip near Gisors, and his own letter tells how the French king fell into the river, while Richard himself unhorsed three knights with one lance. The English chronicler glories to recount the French king's flight ‘on his old horse Morel.’ Meanwhile the Count of Flanders poured his troops into Artois and took Aire and St. Omer. John captured Neufbourg, and Merchadeus plundered the French merchants at the fair of Abbeville.

Meanwhile Hubert Walter, now archbishop of Canterbury, governed England in his absence [see ]. He was mainly occupied with arranging the ecclesiastical difficulties of Richard's half-brother Geoffrey, the archbishop of York, and with collecting money for Richard's continental warfare. During his government he introduced several constitutional innovations of great importance. The office of ‘coroner,’ though under a different name, makes its first appearance, if it does not originate in, the ‘iter’ of September 1194. A scutage was raised in 1195—a year which saw the exaction of an oath to ‘keep the peace’ from all persons above fifteen. The knights ordered to enforce this oath developed later into the modern justices of the peace. Another scutage was levied in 1196. In 1194 Richard seems to have given orders for a fresh seal to be made, probably intending the cancellation of all grants under the old one. This project was carried into execution in May 1198, when a fresh seal was made, and cancelled all grants under the old one. The same year he raised money by other means—by selling licenses for tournaments and putting all his bailiffs in Anjou and Maine to ransom. Dissatisfied with the amount of money sent him from England, early in 1196 he despatched his clerk [q. v.], the newly elected bishop of Durham, and the abbot of Caen to investigate the accounts; but this commission effected little, owing to the abbot's death (11 April). Hubert Walter felt this proceeding as a slight, and tendered his resignation, which the king refused to accept; and in the course of the same year Hubert earned great unpopularity by the severity with which he crushed the rebellion of [q. v.]—a rebellion directed against the unjust incidence of taxation. In the late autumn of 1197 (7 Dec.), when Bishop Hugh of Lincoln, speaking in the name of the church and nation, refused to grant Richard's demand for the service of three hundred knights for a whole year out of England, Hubert seized the opportunity of resigning his secular office. Geoffrey Fitz-Peter succeeded (August 1198) to the justiciarship, and held it for the rest of Richard's reign.

Meanwhile Innocent III was already attempting to reconcile the two kings and organise a fresh crusade. For two years past Fulk of Neuilli had been urging men in this direction; his envoys crossed into England, and Fulk himself chided Richard for his evil life. Then came the pope's grand appeal for a Christian combination (13 Aug. 1198) to check the Saracen successes. Cardinal Peter of Capua was sent to effect a five years' truce between the two kings, and he had apparently succeeded in this object when Philip broke the spirit of the treaty and renewed his plots with John. In the midst of this confusion, Richard was slain by an arrow while laying siege to the castle of Chaluz, where he claimed a newly found treasure from the castle's owner, a vassal of his old enemy Ademar, the viscount of Limoges (6 April 1199). With characteristic generosity he gave orders to spare the life of the archer who had shot him; but, after his death, Merchadeus flayed the man alive. His body was buried at the abbey of Fontevrault, ‘at the feet of his father,’ and his heart in ‘the faithful city of Rouen.’ There are effigies of him at both places.

Sismondi has summed up Richard's character in the words ‘a bad son, a bad brother, a bad husband, and a bad king.’ But though there is some truth in every word of this indictment, it creates an historical perspective that is entirely false. Richard was a ‘splendid savage,’ with most of the faults and most of the virtues of the semi-savage age in which he lived; and it is only those who test mediæval heroes by a modern standard that will judge him with extreme severity. We know too little about the grounds of his rebellion against his father in 1173–4 to say that his conduct there was altogether without excuse—conduct which was sanctioned by his mother and his two nearest brothers. Later on, when at war with the younger Henry and Geoffrey, he was clearly in the right, as Henry II tacitly confessed by taking up arms on his behalf; nor could he fairly be expected, after having reduced Aquitaine to submission, to meekly yield it up to his youngest brother John. Still less could he acquiesce in Henry's plans to rob him of the succession to the crown. It is hard to justify a son who wars against his father upon any plea; and yet, if sincere repentance, not merely in the first moments after Henry's death, but eighteen months later before Abbot Joachim in Sicily, could atone for this offence, Richard's conduct might earn a par-