In Normandy meanwhile Matilda’s cause was prospering, and Geoffrey’s campaigns in 1142–43 secured all the fiefdoms west and south of the Seine. He then took Rouen in 1144 and proclaimed Matilda and himself as Normandy’s rulers. The duke and duchess ruled their territory jointly until 1149 when it was ceded to their son, the future Henry II of England. Louis VII who, as king of France, was the vassal lord of Normandy’s dukes, authorized this arrangement. Henry succeeded his father as count of Anjou following Geoffrey’s death in 1151. At Poitiers on May 18 of the following year he married Eleanor of Aquitaine, who ruled that duchy in her own right and whose marriage to Louis VII of France had been annulled just two months previously. Although restored to his throne, Stephen’s position in England remained precarious. Henry arrived in England with an army in January 1153 and, after the sudden death in August of Stephen’s son and heir Eustace, the king agreed to a compromise: the succession rights of his surviving son William would be set aside, and Matilda’s son was recognized as Stephen’s heir. From the end of 1153 onward Henry—already count of both Anjou and Maine as well as duke of both Aquitaine and Normandy—was therefore also in effective control of England. Following Stephen’s death in October 1154 this multititled dynast was crowned king of England in Westminster Abbey on December 19.
RIGHT Geoffrey of Anjou is shown bearing a sword and shield on his tomb at Le Mans Cathedral, France.
MAINTAINING THE ANGEVIN TERRITORIES
The new king’s father, Geoffrey, had called himself “Plantagenet,” after the broom flower (Planta genista) he had adopted as his personal emblem. During the 15th century the term came to be used to describe the dynasty of English kings descended from Matilda and Geoffrey, and whose rule ended with the accession of the Tudor Henry VII in 1485. In the case of Henry II, and his sons Richard I and John I, the phrase “Angevin empire” was coined in the 19th century to describe their collection of territories that, covering the whole of western France, extended from the northern English border to the Pyrenees. Twelfth-century contemporaries did not use that term, however, and the assemblage of so many different titles owed everything to the luck of the gene pool, the accident of dynastic succession and good fortune in the chancy business of warfare. A ruler capable of maintaining his authority across such a diverse territory needed to be not just clever and tough but also lucky—as John I’s loss of Normandy, Anjou and most of Aquitaine would demonstrate.
Henry II was educated in the law and is a major figure in the evolution of England’s precedent-based common law system. The rights of the Crown he inherited in England were well defined and supported by an administration which, given a strong-minded monarch, could give a direct expression to the royal will. Unsurprisingly, Normandy was the regime’s closest parallel for efficient authority on mainland Europe. Civil breakdown during the anarchic period of Stephen’s reign had led to widespread usurpation of property, and the provisions of Henry’s measure, the Assize of Clarendon (1166), specified how 12 knights could determine legitimate rights and order redress to be made. This arrangement built on earlier provisions in Anglo-Saxon law and would become known as the jury system. Henry’s appointment of “justices” (judges) who traveled the country hearing cases elevated the Crown’s authority while limiting the obstructive powers of self-interested local nobles.
ABOVE The Martyrdom of Thomas Becket, a panel from Master Francke’s St. Thomas Altarpiece, commissioned in 1424.
Revenue was the key to the enforcement of authority, and Henry’s rigorous application of the tax called scutage, which allowed vassals to buy out their obligation of military service, enabled him to employ the mercenaries who played a major role in his army. It was Henry’s determination that the secular law of the king’s justice should predominate over Church law that brought him into conflict with Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury who had formerly been the king’s ostentatiously loyal lord chancellor. Church courts had been a continuing source of authority during the recent years of disorder in England, and they had extended their area of competence during that period. The Constitutions of Clarendon (1164) represented Henry’s attempt at restricting their powers and limiting the scale of immunities enjoyed by the clergy. A provision that clergy who had been convicted by the Church courts should then be handed over to secular jurisdiction and prosecuted in the king’s courts was especially contentious. From late 1164 to 1170 Becket was in exile in France, and his theatrical campaign against the monarch’s policies continued until knights belonging to the king’s retinue killed him in his cathedral at Canterbury on December 29. The murder undermined Henry’s authority, and the agreement he arrived at with the papacy two years later conceded the central point that clergy had a right of appeal to Rome.
* * *
THE ANGEVIN EMPIRE
1128 Matilda of England, widow of emperor Henry V and daughter of Henry I of England, marries Geoffrey Plantagenet of Anjou who succeeds (1129) his father as count.
1135 Henry I of England dies and is succeeded by his nephew, Stephen of Blois. Matilda contests the succession.
1144 Geoffrey and Matilda become duke and duchess of Normandy following a military campaign. They cede the duchy to their son Henry (1149), who is crowned king of England as Henry II (1154).
1170 Murder of Thomas Becket.
1173–74 Henry II’s sons Henry, Richard and John unite in armed rebellion against their father’s rule in England.
1188 Richard (“the Lionheart”) betrays his father and does homage to Philip II of France: the two allies invade Anjou (1189) and defeat Henry II’s army.
1189 Henry II dies and is succeeded by Richard.
1199 Death of Richard I, who is succeeded by his brother John.
1204 A French military offensive drives the English out of Normandy, Anjou and most of Aquitaine.
1215 Supported by a French army, the English baronage launches a military offensive against John, who dies (1216) while fleeing from rebel forces.
* * *
THE STRUGGLES OF HENRY II
Henry II embarked on a series of wars aimed at establishing vassal states that would operate as buffer zones on his territories’ frontiers. Welsh princes were unco-operative in this regard, and the two most significant of them—Rhys ap Gruffudd, who ruled the kingdom of Deheubarth in the southwest, and Owain Gwynedd, who ruled in the north—joined forces to defeat Henry’s army at the Battle of Crogen, fought in the country’s northeast in the summer of 1165. But Henry learned from his mistakes. Since a projected invasion of Ireland was going to be launched from the coast of Deheubarth, the king entered into a form of alliance with Rhys: the prince’s authority over the rest of Wales was recognized, and Rhys became a vassal of England’s king.
Henry met with greater success in Ireland, a country whose provincial kings had been battling each other for the dignity of high king and where Norman institutions, including a very patchy form of feudalism, began to spread as a result of military intervention by the English Crown. In 1167 Henry recognized Dermot of Leinster and allowed him to recruit English and Welsh mercenaries in his struggle for supremacy. The successes enjoyed by the newly arrived knights in establishing their own power bases in the island discomfited Henry, who wanted to imprint his own regal stamp on a fast-evolving situation. He therefore led personally the major military expedition that landed at Waterford in October 1171, following which most of the island’s native princes caved in and paid homage. The institution of a lordship of Ireland—a fiefdom in the king’s gift—was a cornerstone of family policy, and Henry had originally intended his younger brother William, Count of Poitou, to be the beneficiary of a conquest of Ireland. The count died young, however, and Henry’s son John was made lord of Ireland by the king in 1185. John’s visit to the island in that year, though brief, established his unpopularity, and in subsequent decades Norman authority in Ireland dwindled to cover the area of the Pale that surrounded Dublin.
In 1173–74 Scotland’s King William I (“the Lion”) la
unched two invasions of Northumberland—a territory seized for Scotland by David I during Stephen’s reign but regained for the English Crown in 1157. After being captured at the end of 1174 William had to swear fealty to Henry, and the establishment of English garrisons in Edinburgh and along the border meant that southern Scotland was under the control of the English. This situation lasted until 1189, when Richard I ceded authority in the region to William in return for the money he needed to take part in the Third Crusade.
Normandy was Henry’s core territory on the European mainland, and his tactics along its borders were similar to the ones he adopted in Ireland and on the English frontiers within Britain. Brittany was in the middle of a succession dispute in the 1150s after Duke Conan III’s disinheritance of his son Hoel, and Henry initially supported the reigning duke, Conan IV, who was Hoel’s nephew. In 1166 he arranged the betrothal of his seven-year-old son Geoffrey to the duke’s daughter, and he then forced Conan’s abdication. Henry thus became, in effect, the ruler of Brittany, though it was never his fiefdom. In the face of serial rebellions by the Breton nobility, he installed loyal aristocrats who built up his authority within the duchy.
The marriage to Eleanor made Henry duke of Aquitaine—a title he held as the successor to her first husband, Louis VII. By the same token he became duke of Gascony, a territory to the southwest that had been part of Aquitaine since the early tenth century, but whose awkward terrain required careful management. The county of Toulouse lay to Aquitaine’s southeast and was a vast area whose many fortified towns impeded the progress of the army launched by Henry from Poitiers in 1159. He returned with another army in 1161 and then left his local allies, who included King Alfonso II of Aragon, to continue the struggle on his behalf. In 1173 Count Raymond V eventually yielded and decided to pay homage to Henry, though the vassalage was not enforced very rigorously.
RELATIONSHIPS WITH THE FRENCH
Henry’s tortuous relations with the French Crown were a constant theme of his career. King Louis was constantly trying to subvert Henry’s position: he had been a supporter of King Stephen of England, and he gave comfort, as well as refuge, to Thomas Becket during the archbishop’s exile. His own position was, however, precarious. Not only did Louis lack Henry’s material resources, but until the birth of the future Philip II in 1165 he also lacked a male heir. Five years earlier, Louis had succumbed to English pressure and agreed to the marriage of his daughter Margaret to Henry’s second son, the younger Henry, when she was two and he was five. Philip’s birth removed the prospect of a united English-French Crown, however. In retaliation, Henry made a claim to the Auvergne and Bourges, where he conducted major military campaigns in 1167 and 1170 respectively. Once crowned king, however, it was Philip who would be Henry’s nemesis, by taking advantage of his sons’ disloyalty.
LEFT An equestrian statue of Richard I (“the Lionheart”) stands outside the UK Houses of Parliament.
Henry II was a consistently expansionist ruler but also a dynastically minded one. He therefore allowed his sons to have their own titles: Henry the Younger was crowned king in 1170; Richard became duke of Aquitaine in 1172; Geoffrey became duke of Brittany in 1181; and in 1185 John was attempting to exert his authority as lord of Ireland. Henry the Younger’s request that he be allowed to rule part of his father’s territories was denied by Henry. But his son could count on the support of both Richard and Geoffrey, and the three combined to attack their father in the civil war of 1173–74. Eleanor, by now estranged from her husband, took Henry the Younger’s side and was for a while imprisoned as a result. The rebel also had the support of his father-in-law, Louis VII of France. Henry survived that challenge, only to be confronted by the implacable Richard, whose rule in Aquitaine turned out to be a particularly rough form of military administration.
Just before his death in 1183 Henry the Younger had joined a local Aquitainian revolt against Richard, who then rejected his father’s demand that he should yield the duchy to John. Geoffrey of Brittany had joined his brother Henry in attacking Richard in Aquitaine, and would do the same in combination with John, although they were no match for the Lionheart, whose military prowess crushed their forces with ease. Geoffrey’s animosity toward his father led him at the same time to plot with Philip II of France. Although Geoffrey’s death in 1186 removed an important prospective ally, Philip soon found another one: in 1188 Richard paid homage to him for all the lands that Henry II held in France as a vassal of the French Crown. In the summer of the following year the two allies invaded Anjou, the heartland of the Plantagenet dynasty, and overran both Maine and Tours. Henry was defeated in battle and died in 1189 in the knowledge that John, too, had joined the alliance against him.
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KINGS OF ENGLAND 1100–1272
HENRY I
(1068/9–1135)
r. 1100–35
STEPHEN OF BLOIS
(1096–1154)
r. 1135–54
HENRY II
(1133–89)
r. 1154–89
RICHARD I
[“the Lionheart”]
(1157–99)
r. 1189–99
JOHN I
(1167–1216)
r. 1199–1216
HENRY III
(1207–72)
r. 1216–72
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JOHN—COLLAPSE OF A KING
The loss of Normandy and of Anjou to the armies of Philip II occurred in 1204 during John’s reign as king, and a triumphant Capetian dynasty forced the retreat of English forces within Aquitaine to the region of Gascony, which remained loyal. Despite his reputation as a calamitous king, many of John’s achievements recall his father’s preoccupations. He quarreled with the papacy and refused its nomination of Stephen Langton as archbishop of Canterbury, although he eventually submitted after an eight-year struggle in 1213. Just as Henry had done, John involved himself closely with the workings of the justice system, and he was an efficient administrator as well as a keen raiser of revenue. But the loss of his dynasty’s continental possessions at the start of his reign affected the exercise of John’s authority in England, and the English baronage voiced their resentment at being taxed as they would never have done during Henry II’s reign. The list of demands contained in the Magna Carta presented to John at Runnymede on June 15, 1215 represented a rejection of his father’s style of strong and centralizing kingship. Having signed under duress, the king obtained the pope’s permission to break his word, and he was defeated in the two-year civil war that followed—waged in part by a French army invited in by the English baronage in order to support their cause. John’s reign had seen the entire dissolution of his father’s assemblage of territories, and his own failures had also dealt a blow to the style of kingly authority exercised by Henry II. Both in England and in France, the future lay with the cause of national monarchies whose dynasties exercised their power within established frontiers—rather than across areas as geographically separate, politically disparate and culturally diverse as the territories of the “Angevin empire.”
ROBIN HOOD
The story of the outlaw Robin Hood, who evades the established order by escaping to the forest where he lives with his band of “merry” men, is an enduring part of English folklore. Robin’s escapades are first recorded in literary form in ballads whose earliest manuscripts date from the 15th century, and which are set in the England of one or two centuries earlier.
Robin springs to life in this literature as an anti-clericalist, a skilled archer, and an opponent of the sheriff of Nottingham. The notion that Robin was a supporter of Richard the Lionheart and that he was driven out of society during the misrule of Richard’s brother John while the king was on the Third Crusade, is a 16th-century addition to the fable. Robin’s portrayal as the earl of Huntingdon, an aristocrat down on his luck, is similarly post-medieval; in the original 15th-century verses he is described consistently as a yeoman. The ballads form part of a wider cultural tribute to Robin the English h
ero. May Day celebrations in late medieval England frequently involved revelers dressing up as Robin and his companions, and plays about his exploits were often performed during these springtime festivities. It was through these dramas that the figure of Maid Marion was added to the Robin Hood literature.
No historical figure has been identified as the original Robin Hood, and the ballads that portray him are works of literature, not of biography. Hood’s social views do nonetheless cast a sharp light on some medieval English attitudes. Although the balladeers describe a Robin who is on the side of the down-trodden, there are in fact no examples in this early literature of his “giving to the poor,” and the peasantry is mostly significant by its absence from the Hood ballads. The forms of courtesy observed by Robin’s followers when they kneel before him in acknowledgment of his authority follow medieval notions of precedence and honor. The fact that they carry swords, not staffs, indicates that they are, like Robin, yeomen, and the literature presents them as the backbone of the nation. Robin’s qualities of courtesy, politeness and piety are seen as the consensual virtues that enable a society or kingdom to hang together. These contrast with his enemies’ mean-spirited materialism and selfishness.
The Age of Chivalry Page 10
