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ОглавлениеWilliam FitzOsbert, called Longbeard
The First English Agitator 1196
Authorities: Roger of Hoveden; William of Newburgh; Gervase of Canterbury; Matthew Paris; Ralph Diceto; (Rolls Series); Rotuli Curiæ Regis (Sir F. Palgrave. Vol. I.).
WILLIAM FITZOSBERT
CALLED LONGBEARD, THE
FIRST ENGLISH AGITATOR 1196
When Richard I., on his accession, picked out Hubert Walter, Bishop of Salisbury, to be Archbishop of Canterbury, he chose a prelate whom he could rely upon as his representative. Hubert had been a crusader; he was the nephew of Ralph Glanville—who sold the justiciarship to William Longchamp, Bishop of Ely, for £3,000, and followed Richard to Palestine, dying of the plague at Acre in 1191—and though a man of little learning he was a capital lawyer, a strong administrator and expert at raising money for the king.21 Hubert was no champion of the poor as St. Thomas had been, no preacher of righteousness like St. Anselm, no stickler for the rights of the Church or the liberties of the people; he was “the king’s man,” and “forasmuch as he was neither gifted with a knowledge of letters nor endued with the grace of lively religion, so in his days the Church of England was stifled under the yoke of bondage.” (Geraldus Cambrensis.)
Richard Cœur de Lion, occupied with the crusades, had no mind for the personal government of England. He depended on his ministers for money to pay for his military expeditions to Palestine. England was to him nothing more than a subject province to be bled by taxation. Both William Longchamp and Hubert Walter—to whom Richard committed the realm when he left England for good in 1194—did all that could be done to meet the king’s demands. Government offices, earldoms and bishoprics were sold to the highest bidder.22 Judges bought their seats on the bench and cities bought their charters. Crown lands already granted to tenants were again taken up by the king’s authority, and the occupier compelled to pay for readmission to his holding. Tournaments were revived, because everyone taking part was obliged to take a royal license. Even the great seal was broken by the justiciar’s authority, and all documents signed by it had to be reissued, with the payment of the usual fees (or stamp duties) for new contracts. “By these and similar inquisitions England was reduced to poverty from one sea to the other,” for more than £1,000,000 was sent to Richard by Hubert in the first two years of his justiciarship.
The only protest against the general distress came from London, and not from the aldermen or burghers, but from the voteless labouring people upon whom the whole burden of raising the city’s taxes had been thrown. Against this monstrous injustice William Longbeard FitzOsbert stood out as the spokesman of the poor of London, and died a martyr for their cause.
London’s political importance had been seen in the struggles against King Cnut and William the Conqueror. Its remarkable influence in national politics (an influence that endured to the middle of the nineteenth century) was manifest when London acclaimed Stephen as King of England in 1135. At the close of the twelfth century, London, with the civic charter it had just obtained from Richard, with its thirteen convent churches and more than a hundred parish churches within its boundaries, with its great cattle market at Smithfield and its growing riverside trade, was already prosperous and overcrowded. “The city was blessed with the healthiness of the air and the nature of its site, in the Christian religion, in the strength of its towers, the honour of its citizens and the purity of its women; it was happy in its sports and fruitful of high spirited men.” It had its darker side, but at that time “the only plagues were the intemperate drinking of foolish people and the frequent fires.”
Richard’s charter left to the citizens the business of assessing their own taxes, and in 1196 there was trouble over this matter; for in that year the city fathers decided that the large sums required by Archbishop Hubert for the king’s needs should be paid in full by the poorer craftsmen and labourers, who had no say in the matter.23
“And when the aldermen assembled according to usage in full hustings for the purpose of assessing the taxes, the rulers endeavoured to spare their own purses and to levy the whole from the poor.” (Roger of Hoveden.)
Whereupon up rose William Longbeard, the son of Osbert, and made his memorable protest against these rascally proceedings, to go down to history as the first popular agitator in England.
An exceptional man was this Longbeard, a man of commanding stature and great strength, ready witted, something of an orator and a lawyer, who “burning with zeal for righteousness and fair play made himself the champion of the poor,” holding that every man, rich or poor, should pay his share of the city’s burdens according to his means.
Longbeard was not of the labouring people himself. He was a member of the city council, though by no means a rich man. He had distinguished himself as a crusader in 1190, making the journey to Portugal against the Moors; and a vision of St. Thomas Becket had appeared to him and his fellow Londoners when their ship was beset by storms off the coast of Spain.
Longbeard was known to the king, and he was already hateful to the ruling class because he had declared that Richard was being defrauded by financial corruption of the money raised for the crown. He had also accused his brother of treason in 1194, but the case was not proved.
Richard was in Normandy in 1196, and Longbeard having banded together 15,000 men in London, under an oath that they would stick by him and each other, went to the king and laid their grievances before him. Richard heard the appeal sympathetically enough, for after all, as long as the money was forthcoming, he had no particular desire that the pockets of rich burghers should be spared at the expense of the poor, but left matters in the hands of Archbishop Hubert the justiciar. Longbeard returned to London, and with his 15,00024 workmen in revolt, bid an open defiance to the justiciar.
Only a fragment of one of Longbeard’s speeches has been preserved, a solitary specimen of popular oratory in the twelfth century.25
Taking a passage from the prophet Isaiah for his text: “Therefore with joy shall ye draw water from the wells of the Saviour” (Isaiah xii, 3), the agitator delivers his message.
“I am,” he saith, “the saviour of the poor. You the poor, who have endured the hard hands of the rich, draw ye from my wells the waters of sound doctrine, and this with joy, for the time of your visitation is at hand. For I will divide the waters from the waters, and the People are the waters. I will divide the humble and faithful from such as are proud and froward. I will divide the just from the unjust, even as light from darkness.”
For a time Longbeard was too strong for the justiciar. Archbishop Hubert had no force at his disposal for the invasion of London, for a battle with Longbeard and his league.
At a great gathering of citizens, held in St. Paul’s Churchyard, the justiciar’s men sent to arrest Longbeard had been driven out of the city with violence. All that Hubert could do was to give orders for the arrest of any lesser citizens found outside London, and two small traders from the city actually were taken into custody at the town of Stamford on Mid-Lent Sunday, 1196, under this authority.
But the aldermen grew more and more frightened at Longbeard’s bold speeches and his big public meetings, and weakness and cowardice began to demoralise the league. The people, who had risen for “liberty and freedom,” fell away from their leader, and FitzOsbert was left with a comparatively small band to face the anger of the justiciar.
Backed up by the city fathers, Hubert’s officers again attempted to seize the agitator. Longbeard, hardly pressed, snatched an axe from one of his assailants—a citizen named Godfrey—and slew him; and then retreated, overwhelmed by numbers, to take refuge in the church of St. Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside. There was a right of sanctuary in this church, a right not to be denied to the commonest felon.
But what were rights of sanctuary to the justiciar—bent on hunting his prey to the death? He commanded Longbeard “to come out and abide by the law,” and gave orders to his men that, failing instant obedience, he was to be dragged out.
Longbeard’s answer was to climb up into the church tower, and thereupon Hubert ordered the tower to be set on fire, and this was done. And now the only chance of life for William Longbeard and his followers was to cut their way through the host of their enemies and make a bold rush for safety. It was a remote chance at the best, but sooner that than to perish in the burning tower.
At the very church door Longbeard was struck down—some say by Godfrey’s son—and his little company were quickly slain or taken prisoners. Loaded with chains, the once bold advocate of the poor of London, now badly hurt, was at once haled off to the Tower. Sentence was pronounced without delay of the law, William, the son of Osbert, was to be dragged to the elms at Tyburn and there hanged in chains.
A few days later—it was just before Easter—the wounded man was stripped naked, tried to the tail of a horse and dragged over the rough stones of the streets of London. He was dead before Tyburn was reached, but the poor broken body, on whom the full vengeance of the rich and mighty had been wreaked, was strung up in chains beneath the gallows elm all the same. Bravely had Longbeard withstood the rulers of the land in the day of his strength; now, when life had passed from him, his body was swinging in common contempt. And with him were nine of his followers hanged.
So died William, called Longbeard, son of Osbert, “for asserting the truth and maintaining the cause of the poor.” And since it is held that to be faithful to such a cause makes a man a martyr, people thought he deserved to be ranked with the martyrs. For a time multitudes—the very folk who had fallen away from their champion in the hour of battle and need—flocked to pay reverence to the ghastly, bloodstained corpse that hung at Tyburn, and pieces of the gibbet and of the bloodstained earth beneath were carried off and counted as sacred relics. All the great, heroic qualities of the man were recalled. He was accounted a saint. Miracles were alleged to take place when his relics were touched.
Then the dead man’s enemies were aroused, an alleged death-bed confession was published, wherein Longbeard was made out to be a sorry criminal. Not the least of the offences laid to his charge was that a woman, who was not his wife, had stood faithfully by the rebel, even when the church was on fire.
The times were rough. It is probable that Longbeard, crusader and fighting man, had sins enough to confess before death took him. But his traducers were silent as to these sins in the man’s lifetime. They waited until no answer could be given before uttering their miserable libels against the one courageous champion of the poor.
Longbeard had roused the common working people to make a stand against obvious oppression and injustice—there was the head and front of his offending, there was his crime; earning for him not only a felon’s death, but the loss of character, and the branding for all time with the contemptuous title “Demagogue.”
Yet in the slow building up of English liberties William FitzOsbert played his part, and laid down his life in the age-long struggle for freedom, as many a better has done.
In 1198, two years after the death of Longbeard, Hubert was compelled to resign the justiciarship. His monks at Canterbury, to whom the Church of St. Mary, in Cheapside, belonged, and who had no love for their archbishop,26 indignant at the violation of sanctuary and the burning of their church, appealed to the king and to the pope, Innocent III. to make Hubert give up his political activities and confine himself to the work of an archbishop. In the same year a great council of the nation, led by St. Hugh of Lincoln, flatly refused a royal demand for money made by Hubert.
Innocent III. was against him, the great barons were against him, and Hubert resigned. But he held the archbishopric till 1205.
