William’s biography gives us details about how warfare and tournaments were conducted in the mid- to late 12th century, as well as aristocratic behaviour and customs. In the summer of 1167 William was knighted to participate in a battle between the forces of Henry II and Louis VII. Although William distinguished himself in the battle of Drincourt, he lost his horse and was too busy fighting to capture any horses or equipment himself. After the battle when the knights and commanders were feasting, the Earl of Essex teased William for not taking any booty, and William’s lord declined to replace his horse to teach William the vital lesson that warfare was as much about taking prisoners and plunder as anything else. This reminds us that warfare in the 12th century was certainly violent and dangerous, but it was also a business proposition and method of making money.35 For the participants, the dividing line between battles and tournaments was very fine and often non-existent.
That may have been acceptable to the aristocrats, but for everyone else warfare was horrifyingly brutal. The point of medieval warfare was to lay waste the opponent’s land rather than to seek pitched battles. Destroying or seizing villages, crops, animals and supplies and slaughtering the peasants who worked the land strengthened the attacking army, weakened the opponent and undermined his right to rule. Although I have highlighted the growing administrative sophistication of the 12th century, fundamentally lordship was about providing protection, and a lord who couldn’t protect his people was no lord at all.36
Even in a civil war or revolt where each side hoped ultimately to control the land being ravaged, the method of war was the same. As Count Philip of Flanders was said to have advised, ‘This is how war is begun: such is my advice. First destroy the land.’ Or as a 15th-century commentator put it more colourfully, ‘War without fire is like sausages without mustard.’37
Here is the central myth of chivalry: the overtly Christian ceremony of knighting, the splendid trappings, decorated armour, deeds of valour for fair ladies and elaborate code of courtesy to other knights existed alongside – indeed, to disguise – the principal occupation of knights. This was to wage war, but since pitched battles were rare, ‘waging war’ meant pillaging and burning the countryside and murdering peasants. The aristocracy believed that if they followed this code of conduct between themselves, their appalling behaviour to non-nobles was simply an unfortunate side effect of war. The tension between ideal and reality would reach its breaking point in the Hundred Years War in the 14th and 15th centuries, with the participation of non-nobles in battles and consequential increase in the number of deaths, as well as the development of artillery that had to be operated by professionals and killed indiscriminately with no regard for rank. Although the aristocracy continued to participate in warfare, by the 15th-century knightly pageants and ceremonies had been definitively detached from actual warfare.
In the 12th century, when these ideals and contradictions were still being created, William Marshal was undoubtedly the embodiment of the perfect knight and became the 12th-century version of a millionaire sporting superstar. William’s adventures in tournaments provide us with snapshots of 12th-century life as evocative as the images in the misericords of medieval cathedrals. At a tournament in Maine, William was attacked by five knights and managed to defeat them, but his helmet was turned around by a blow and he had to retire to have it rearranged. In an episode fit to inspire an Arthurian romance (and which in fact is very close to a scene in Chrétien de Troyes’ Lancelot), William overheard two other knights questioning the identity of the knight who had fought best, only to realise they were talking about him when they recognized the device on his shield.38 At a tournament in Champagne, William fought so well that he was awarded the top prize, but when the judges looked for him to make the award he was discovered with his head on an anvil while a blacksmith tried to remove his mangled helmet with tongs.39
This devotion to tournaments was not incompatible with military service, and early on William became embroiled in a feud that would haunt the Angevins for decades. In 1167 the turbulent Lusignan brothers led a revolt of Poitevin barons and William, now in the household of his uncle Earl Patrick of Salisbury, went to Poitou to assist in the operations against them. Henry II quickly subdued the castle of Lusignan and left Eleanor of Aquitaine under the protection of Earl Patrick while he went to meet Louis VII. Guy and Geoffrey Lusignan ambushed Eleanor and Patrick as they rode outside the castle one day, and although Eleanor escaped, the unarmed Earl Patrick was treacherously stabbed in the back and killed. William rushed to avenge his uncle but was also overcome after being attacked from behind. The Lusignans earned William’s undying enmity for killing his uncle – and worse, the representative of their feudal lord – and compounded the insult by holding William captive without treating his wound, though William sufficiently charmed one of the ladies in the Lusignan household for her to send him bandages in a hollowed-out loaf of bread. Fortunately for William, Eleanor ransomed him and rewarded him generously for his loyalty and courage.40
On the strength of his military ability and friendship with Eleanor, in 1170 William was made Young King Henry’s tutor in chivalry and head of his household knights. William’s friendship with Young Henry gives us an insight into the life of the heir to the throne under a strong monarch, and how confining and frustrating the experience can be. Young Henry, despite being crowned as co-monarch with his father, was given no authority of his own in any of the Angevin domains.
Although from the 12th century onward knights would often emulate Arthurian romances in their tournaments, in 1182 William and Young Henry’s relationship mimicked the story of Lancelot in deadly earnest. A rumour spread through the court that William and the Young King’s wife Margaret were lovers, and William fell out of favour. On learning of the rumours, William offered to fight all comers over three days to prove his innocence, but like Lancelot, no one dared to challenge him.41
The Great Revolt: 1173–1174
Despite his important, though neglected, status as an early knight errant, Young Henry is most remembered by modern historians for the revolt against his father in 1173–74 in which he allied with Louis VII and was joined by his mother and brothers. The origins of the revolt were complicated. Henry had married Young Henry to Margaret of France and engaged Richard to her sister Alice (these were Louis VII’s daughters by his second wife), and Geoffrey had married Constance the heiress to Brittany, but Henry needed a bride for his youngest son John. He arranged a marriage for John to the daughter of the Count of Maurienne, who ruled an alpine territory between Provence and Piedmont, in the hope that John – who was already called ‘Lackland’ because all his father’s lands had been apportioned between his other brothers – might inherit the county.
The Count was happy for an alliance with the greatest monarch in Europe, but he rightly questioned what lands John would bring to the marriage. Henry decided to give John the castles of Chinon, Loudon and Mirebeau (which were traditionally allocated to Angevin younger sons like Henry II’s brother Geoffrey42), but failed to take into account that the castles already belonged to Young Henry, and the Young King refused to relinquish them to his brother. Henry angrily insisted, and Young Henry, infuriated by this proof of how little power he, a crowned co-monarch, actually wielded, rose in revolt against his father and fled to Louis VII in whom he was sure of finding an ally.
Tellingly, Young Henry drew his brothers Richard and Geoffrey into his revolt, revealing that Young Henry was not the only one frustrated by Henry’s refusal to share any of his power. William the Lyon of Scotland invaded northern England, and many Anglo-Norman barons also rebelled in what seems to be a massive reaction to twenty years of Henry’s administrative reforms and codification of royal rights and privileges at the expense of the aristocracy. It is no surprise that Louis VII and William the Lyon chose to support Henry’s sons, as they could hope for rich pickings on the Angevin borders if the revolt succeeded. The most shocking element of these events to contemporaries was that El
eanor of Aquitaine also decided to join her sons against her husband, and began the journey from Poitou dressed as a man so she could slip past her husband’s troops to join her son in Paris. She was captured, and would remain imprisoned intermittently until Henry II’s death in 1189. Contemporaries were shocked by Eleanor’s action, and Ralph of Diceto declared that in a search through ancient and modern history he found more than thirty examples of sons rebelling against their fathers, but never of a queen rebelling against her husband.43
We have seen other women sidelined, imprisoned, exiled to convents and deprived of their rights. Yet in Eleanor’s story, this is not the end. She was incarcerated and marginalized for fifteen years, but she lost none of her desire to rule or her will to endure. Eleanor survived her failed marriage to Louis and the scandal of the Second Crusade, which would have destroyed anyone else, and instead married the mightiest king in Europe and acted as co-ruler. Why she chose to rebel isn’t known; she may have wanted her sons to have more of a role in ruling the Empire, or she may have believed their triumph would also allow her more power. Regardless, she failed in the rebellion, but was only eclipsed for a time before returning and becoming more powerful than ever.
Things looked bleak for Henry, yet he divided his enemies and easily defeated them one by one. Contemporary gossip said the revolt was Henry’s punishment for Becket’s death, and indeed Henry chose this moment to do formal public penance, going barefoot to Becket’s shrine where he was publicly scourged and begged the saint’s forgiveness.44 It certainly worked, since almost immediately William the Lyon was captured as he attacked Alnwick Castle and was forced to perform homage to Henry, not only for his English possessions, but also for Scotland. Rather than shocking Henry into giving his eldest son and co-ruler more responsibility, this comprehensive victory merely confirmed Henry in his opinion that sharing power was too dangerous, and the Young King gained no advantage from the failed revolt. Legend said that the troubadour Bertran de Born stirred Young Henry to revolt, and this severing of the father from the son inspired Dante with one of his most arresting images: he depicted Bertran in the eighth circle of hell carrying a lantern made of his own severed head, suspended by the hair.45 To the ever spiteful Gerald of Wales, the revolt was God’s punishment of Henry for marrying another man’s wife.46
If the sudden collapse of the revolt showed Becket’s forgiveness of Henry II after his public penance, it seems the saint wasn’t completely mollified: in 1179 Philip Augustus, the god-given sole heir to the throne of France, was dangerously injured in a hunting accident and seemed likely to die. His father Louis VII, although himself dying, dragged himself across the Channel to Becket’s shrine and beseeched the saint, whom he had known personally, to save his son. Philip duly recovered and was crowned a month later, and would go on to cause Henry’s downfall and destroy the Angevin Empire.47
After Eleanor’s imprisonment, Henry openly acknowledged his mistress Rosamund Clifford, through whom Henry himself becomes a figure of folklore and has his moment as pantomime villain. Like most of the aristocracy in the Middle Ages, he took mistresses and had no shame in his adultery, despite the condemnation of clerics and the opprobrium heaped on women such as Eleanor if they were suspected of the same. Henry had at least two bastard children: Geoffrey, who became Archbishop of York, and William Longsword who became Earl of Salisbury.48
However, Rosamund Clifford was said to be Henry’s great love, because after her death in 1176 he erected a splendid tomb for her in the convent at Godstow in front of the high altar. The tomb was still being treated with reverence in 1191 when St Hugh of Lincoln, appalled that a king’s mistress should be openly venerated in a church, ordered that the tomb of this ‘harlot’ be moved outside.49 Gerald of Wales in his malicious account of the revolt says that Henry, ‘… attributing his success like another Pharaoh not to divine mercy but his own strength, hardened his heart and returned incorrigibly to his usual abyss of vice, or rather, to an even worse one, since, going downhill things can only deteriorate. And to mention only one thing, omitting the rest, he imprisoned Queen Eleanor his wife as punishment for the destruction of their marriage; his adultery, previously hidden, now became open and blatant, not with a “pure rose” rosa munda, falsely and frivolously named, but rather with an impure one.’ Gerald’s scorn was not reserved for Henry alone, since he couldn’t resist also alluding to Eleanor’s behaviour in Palestine during the Second Crusade, rejoicing in the unhappiness of her children and then offhandedly accusing her of adultery with her father-in-law Geoffrey Plantagenet as well.50
As for Rosamund, her mention in contemporary sources testifies to her importance, but later legend would run riot in much the same way it did with Eleanor of Aquitaine, and the two women would be drawn into each other’s legends. Rosamund’s name was a gift to authors, since rosa munda means ‘pure rose’ in Latin, though freer translations would also call her the ‘rose of the world’ (rosa mundi). The scene was set in Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon of the early 14th century, in which – apparently purely based on his imagination since no earlier source can be found for this tale – he accused Henry II of ‘misusing’ Rosamund and locking her in a labyrinth at Woodstock to hide her from Eleanor.51
A king imprisoning a fair maiden in a labyrinth is simply too good a story to resist, and innumerable variations of the legend followed. Later writers would elaborate Rosamund’s prison into a garden maze, a tower in a labyrinth or in Thomas Delaney’s Ballad of Fair Rosamund, ‘… such a bower / the like was never seene. / Most curiously that bower was built, / of stone and timber strong; / an hundred and fifty doors / did to this bower belong: / And they so cunninglye contriv’d, / with turnings round about, / that none but with a clue of thread / could enter in or out.’52 All agreed that the reason for Rosamund’s imprisonment was Eleanor’s hatred for her, since Henry truly loved and wished to protect her. At the end of Delaney’s ballad Henry must go to France to put down the rebellion of his eldest son, and Eleanor ‘with envious heart’ goes to Woodstock, tricks the knight guarding Rosamund into leaving the labyrinth, wounds him and seizes the ‘clue of twined-thread’ that will guide her to her victim, where she forces Rosamund to drink poison. Delaney was quite restrained since later authors accused Eleanor of variously tearing out Rosamund’s eyes, offering her a choice between drinking poison or being stabbed and, most luridly, stripping Rosamund naked, roasting her between two fires then letting her bleed to death in a hot bath.53
Philip Augustus and the Angevin Heirs
The revolt of 1173–74 had been the first real crisis of his reign, but Henry faced a new enemy in his final years: in 1180 Louis VII died and his fifteen-year-old son Philip became sole king of France. Philip had been crowned in 1179, attended by Young King Henry, ‘who humbly held one side of the crown on the head of the king of France, as a sign of the submission he owed him’, according to Rigord of St Denis.54
Louis suffers by comparison with his son, for Philip was the most successful medieval king of France and would be called Philip ‘Augustus’ in his own lifetime. The monk Rigord, who wrote Philip’s biography, said Philip deserved this title even by 1193 since he had so ‘augmented’ the size of the royal demesne by taking over Vermandois and many other lands55, but he would go on to conquer most of the Angevin continental territories, whereas Louis had always failed in his military endeavours (including the Second Crusade), and failed as a husband to Eleanor only to see her marry his bitterest rival. Eleanor’s gibe, quoted by William of Newburgh, that Louis was more like a monk than a king56 characterizes him, yet this conceals the fact that he and his father Louis VI laid the groundwork for Philip’s successes by consolidating and ordering the French domains, and despite Louis’s failures in his opposition to Henry II there was never any question that France itself was more secure during his reign. Perhaps a more fitting tribute is Walter Map’s story that Louis, as an old man, could sleep alone in a wood without attendants because he was so beloved by his people. What other
king could do this, Map asked?57
Henry II seems to have expected, and it seems an obvious plan to us, that his sons would take over the management of portions of his empire and work together to assist in its rule. Yet this is precisely the opposite of what happened, and in large part this was due to Henry’s own actions. In the aftermath of the great rebellion of 1173–74, Richard became Duke of Aquitaine in his mother’s right, and despite his youth gradually brought the rebellious southern lords to heel. Even the next son, Geoffrey, had been invested as Duke of Brittany in 1180 (with Chrétien de Troyes’s Arthurian romance, Erec et Enide, specially written for the ceremony, performed as part of the celebration).58
This was in stark contrast to Young King Henry, who was a crowned king yet had no power whatsoever, making him increasingly unhappy with his lack of personal authority, and he searched for a solution. He asked Henry II to give him Normandy as his own province, but his father refused. In 1182, Richard faced a major rebellion in Aquitaine and Young Henry dutifully joined his father to quell the revolt, but his contact with the rebels suggested an interesting possibility: perhaps Aquitaine might be the arena for his ambitions, if he could only take it from Richard. This was a high-risk strategy since Henry II might choose to intervene on either side, but Young Henry received encouragement from his brother Geoffrey and a provocation from Richard.
Angevin Dynasties of Europe 900-1500 Page 16
