The Siege of Rochester

The struggle between King John and his barons turned into open warfare at Rochester Castle in 1215. Yet the story of how the fortress came to be besieged has not been fully understood, says Marc Morris.


With all the fuss being made this year about Magna Carta and its legacy, it is easy to forget that, in its original incarnation, the document sealed by King John at Runnymede was a dismal failure. Intended to heal the rift between the king and his barons, it succeeded in keeping the peace for just a few weeks. A month after it had been issued, both sides were accusing each other of failing to observe its terms and preparing for a renewal of hostilities, which began in the autumn of 1215.

The first action in that war was the siege of Rochester Castle in Kent. One of the most impressive of all medieval fortresses, Rochester’s great tower, built from 1127 and still standing today, soars to a height of 125ft. In the reign of King John it was the tallest secular building in Europe. The castle was occupied by rebels, but was soon surrounded by the king and a massive mercenary army. For seven weeks it was bombarded by missiles hurled by the king’s trebuchets, but eventually fell due the operations of his miners, who tunnelled under one corner of the tower and caused a large section of it to collapse. The defenders, reduced by hunger to eating their expensive warhorses, were soon forced to surrender. ‘Living memory does not recall,’ said a contemporary chronicler, ‘a siege so fiercely pressed and so staunchly resisted.’

Because of its importance and its spectacular conclusion, the siege has attracted a good deal of attention over the years. It has been the subject of scholarly articles, television documentaries and even a rock-opera written by Rick Wakeman, performed in the castle grounds in 1991. Most recently it has been the subject of a feature film, Ironclad (2011), high on violence but low on historical accuracy (‘Heavy metal goes medieval’ was its arresting strapline).
Revised assessment

Yet the story of how Rochester came to be besieged in the first place has not been properly understood. A neglected account by a contemporary chronicler suggests that existing narratives of events leading up to the attack on the castle require revision and that the struggle in the autumn of 1215 was a good deal more complicated than previously supposed. A revised assessment of the evidence also casts the actions of some of the principal players in a new light. In particular, it raises questions about the role of the archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, who had custody of the castle up to the point it was occupied by the rebels.

In the struggle between King John and his barons, south-east England was the crucial theatre. The barons had scored a coup in May 1215 by seizing London, a move that had forced John to negotiate at Runnymede. Once Magna Carta had failed, both sides began looking for military support from the Continent. Under the terms of the charter, John had been obliged to dismiss his foreign mercenaries at the start of the year, but in August he secretly dispatched his agents across the Channel to find new recruits, who were instructed to meet him at Dover at the end of September.

The barons were also seeking support from overseas. Their plan, now that Magna Carta was a dead letter, was a more conventional one: replace John with someone else. They offered the English crown to Louis, son of the French king, Philip Augustus. At 28 years old, Louis had plenty of military experience and could call upon the resources that would be necessary to beat John in an armed struggle.

With the king at Dover (he arrived there at the start of September) and the rebels in London, the focus fell on Rochester, which lies halfway between the two. Originally a Roman city, Rochester sits on the ancient road known as Watling Street at the point where it crosses Kent’s largest river, the Medway. Its castle had been founded soon after the Norman Conquest to dominate the city and to control the bridge that carried the road across the river. In 1215 the rebels were anxious to control the line of the Medway in order to forestall the king’s advance on the capital.

In trying to understand what happened in the autumn of 1215, we have one reliable source: John’s letters. From the start of his reign, the king’s writing office, or chancery, kept copies of his writs and charters by enrolling them. Most of these rolls have survived and are kept in the National Archives at Kew. Because the king’s letters are place-dated (e.g. ‘Windsor, 12 March 1207’), we can be certain of his whereabouts from one day to the next. John is the first English ruler for whom we can reconstruct a reliable itinerary.

For the barons, we have no comparable archive. Occasionally an odd letter or charter may help to locate a baronial leader on a particular date, but our knowledge of the king’s opponents depends mainly on the reports of contemporary chroniclers. Such writers (mostly, but not always, monks) vary in accuracy according to the quality of their sources.

The conventional narrative of how the siege began is scrambled in the second week of October. According to a chronicler called Roger of Wendover, the barons in London, seeking to prevent John from attacking the capital, decided to seize Rochester and sent for a man called William d’Aubigny, one of 25 barons responsible for the enforcement of Magna Carta. He and his men came to London and then advanced to Rochester, which they successfully occupied. Just two days later, having heard of the castle’s seizure, John arrived outside the gates and began to besiege it. Since the king’s letters show that he arrived at Rochester on 13th October, it follows that D’Aubigny must have taken possession of the castle on 11th October.

But Wendover, it seems, has given us only a partial and misleading version of the story. A much fuller account of the build-up to the siege is found in the chronicle of a writer known today as the Anonymous of Béthune. For a long time neglected by English historians, perhaps because he was writing in Flanders, the Anonymous is in fact supremely well-informed. He composed his chronicle for a Flemish nobleman called Robert of Béthune, who was one of the foreign knights who fought on John’s side at the end of his reign and therefore intimately acquainted with the king’s movements and actions.
Fixing the dates

The Anonymous begins by explaining how some Flemish troops came to Dover as requested, but discovered on arrival that John had moved inland to Canterbury. The king’s letters show that he did so on 19th or 20th September. The reason for this move, says the Anonymous, was that the king had learned that the rebels had left London and occupied Rochester. The rebels, in other words, had taken the castle almost a month earlier than Wendover had led us to suppose.

Everything that the Anonymous goes on to say reinforces this dating. He describes how John fortified Canterbury against attack, but then heard that the rebels were just ten miles away and fled back to Dover. The king’s itinerary shows that he did briefly return to Dover on September 22nd. When he subsequently learned that the rebels had withdrawn to Rochester, says the Anonymous, John recovered his courage, returned to Canterbury and then travelled to an unidentified place called ‘Antonne’. Again, the king’s letters show that he did indeed travel beyond Canterbury in the last days of September, moving 35 miles west to arrive at Malling by the end of the month. While at Antonne, Anonymous says, John received the news that many of his Flemish troops had been shipwrecked and drowned in a storm on September 26th, a date confirmed by other sources. Some Flemings, however, caught up with the king at this point and their arrival raised his spirits. He returned to Canterbury to take their homages, says the Anonymous, and John’s itinerary shows that once again the chronicler is correct: the king was back at Canterbury on October 5th. Four days later he set out towards Rochester, to arrive outside its walls on October 13th.

The match between the Anonymous’ description of John’s movements and the king’s recorded itinerary shows the chronicler must have been right to claim that the rebels had occupied Rochester in mid-September. But who had occupied it? The Anonymous supposed it was William d’Aubigny, who held it for the duration of the subsequent siege, but a likelier answer is provided by another chronicler, Ralph of Coggeshall. Coggeshall explains how the castle was secretly entered by the leader of the barons, Robert fitz Walter, self-proclaimed ‘Marshal of the Army of God’. He goes on to explain how, having occupied Rochester, fitz Walter beat off an attack by the king’s forces, who were attempting to isolate the castle by destroying the bridge across the Medway. As it is clear from the other accounts that D’Aubigny held the castle for the duration of the siege, historians have puzzled over Coggeshall’s description of fitz Walter’s involvement, even to the extent of dismissing it altogether.
Mysterious journey

Once we realise that the castle was occupied in mid-September rather than mid-October, as the Anonymous describes, Coggeshall’s testimony becomes credible. It would explain why King John ordered the seizure of fitz Walter’s lands on September 17th. It also explains the king’s mysterious journey from Canterbury to west Kent at the end of the month. In travelling to Malling, John had crossed the North Downs and moved to the upper reaches of the Medway. He had crossed the river, perhaps fording it at nearby Aylesford, for Malling lies a mile or so from the river’s western bank. This was almost certainly the moment at which John’s forces launched the attack on Rochester Bridge described by Coggeshall, who says that they approached from the London (i.e. western) side of the river. Their plan was to burn the bridge down, but fitz Walter and his men extinguished flames and forced the king’s men to flee, killing or wounding many of them as they fled.

At what point, then, did fitz Walter leave the castle and switch places with William d’Aubigny? It seems likely that Roger of Wendover was probably right that this happened on October 11th, just two days before John’s arrival, for on this point he was well-informed: Wendover was head of Belvoir Priory in Leicestershire and D’Aubigny was lord of Belvoir Castle. The chronicler, it is clear, is telling D’Aubigny’s version of the story. It therefore comes as no surprise that Wendover fails to mention that fitz Walter had already held Rochester for three weeks and foiled an attempt by John’s forces to destroy its bridge. D’Aubigny was greatly embittered against fitz Walter and the other baronial leaders because, once the siege was underway, they failed to ride to his aid (despite having sworn on the gospels that they would do so, according to Wendover). In D’Aubigny’s version of events there was no room for anything that would reflect well on Robert fitz Walter.
Reputation restored

The occupation of Rochester in mid-September thus makes sense of all the chronicle accounts and partially restores the tarnished military reputation of Robert fitz Walter. It also raises questions about the culpability of Archbishop Langton. The archbishops of Canterbury had controlled Rochester since the early 12th century on the understanding that it would be surrendered to the king if necessary. In 1215 John made two attempts to persuade Langton to hand the castle over, first in May and again in August, but on both occasions his request was refused. Coggeshall makes it clear that there was much heated argument about Canterbury’s rights versus those of the king, but only Roger of Wendover makes the allegation that Langton was directly involved in the castle’s surrender to the rebels, adding ‘God knows why’. Historians have been quick to point out that Wendover must be in error, for the archbishop left England for Rome in mid September, three weeks before the date given by Wendover himself for D’Aubigny’s arrival at Rochester on October 11th.

But since we now know that the castle had been occupied by Robert fitz Walter almost a month earlier, this puts Langton very much back in the frame. Did the archbishop,
as his parting shot before leaving for the Continent, secretly abandon his long preserved neutrality and instruct Rochester’s keeper to admit the rebels? Wendover apart, the other chroniclers were more circumspect, reporting that the king was angry at Langton because of his failure to surrender the castle to royal agents. John himself, lacking any clinching evidence of the archbishop’s complicity, had to stick to the same line. In a letter to his justiciar, Hubert de Burgh, written soon after Rochester’s fall, the king described Langton as ‘a notorious and bare-faced traitor, since he did not render up our castle of Rochester to us in our great need’.

Yet the king clearly believed that Langton’s sin was not simply one of omission. ‘Inquire with care from your prisoners’, he ordered Hubert, referring to Rochester’s captured rebel garrison, ‘whether they acted on the archbishop’s advice, and have a diligent inquiry made to see if you can find the letters that he sent to the barons and others at the time of the rebellion against us.’ John was a notoriously suspicious man, inclined to believe the worst of everyone and quick to see treachery and conspiracy around every corner. But a better understanding of the seizure of Rochester Castle in 1215 suggests that on this occasion, his suspicions may not have been entirely without foundation.

Marc Morris is a medieval historian specialising in kingship and aristocracy. His latest book is King John: Treachery, Tyranny and the Road to Magna Carta (Hutchinson, 2015).

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