From Woodstock, the two kings, accompanied by a number of justices, including William FitzRalph, Bertran de Verdun and William Basset, undertook a progress north intended to reassert order and royal prerogatives and to replenish the exhausted treasury.104 Henry II not only was keeping young Henry close for reasons of security but regarded his presence as important in the process of pacification. At Lichfield, Henry II had four knights and their associates hanged for the murder of Gilbert, a royal forester, and his men: the killing of royal officers could not be tolerated. Such an example was also part of a forceful general reassertion of the king’s rights over the forest.105 Moving to Nottingham on 1 August, in the heart of the great royal forest of Sherwood but also near one of the major epicentres of the rebellion, the king impleaded ‘all the barons and knights of the country concerning his forests, and placed them all in mercy for the taking of game’.106 In vain did the justiciar Richard de Lucy show the king his own writ by which he had authorized de Lucy to make it known that woodland could be exploited and game and fish taken from the royal reserves during the course of the war without offence. Henry II had evidently made such a concession to win political support in the crisis; also, no doubt to provide royalist garrisons with a ready supply of victuals. But now the king rejected this plea out of hand, insisting that royal forests and hunting rights had been abused to his great detriment.107
The Young King continued to witness at first hand the oppressive power of the forest law as an arbitrary royal tool of fiscal extortion and political repression.108 With Henry II presiding, the justices proceeded heavily to amerce those who had violated its rigid strictures. When the court moved to York in early August, ‘the lord king sued the earls and barons and also the clergy of Yorkshire, concerning the forests and the taking of venison’, especially in connection with the great royal forests of Galtres and Pickering.109 Much of the driving force behind these measures was Henry II’s urgent need for money to recoup the massive expenditure he had incurred during the war, but there can be little doubt that the forest law was also used to punish the king’s erstwhile opponents.110 William Ferrers, earl of Derby, for example, was fined 200 marks, Robert de Mowbray’s brother Nigel 100 marks and Adam de Port, the king’s particular enemy, a still heavier £200.111 The proceedings of 1175, moreover, were only the beginning; a circuit of itinerant justices continued through the following year and the net was cast wide: fines for forest offences were recorded from twenty-nine counties and the record of the Pipe Rolls fully bears out Howden’s statement that many nobles, knights, peasants and clergy were amerced to the limits of their means by what contemporaries rightly regarded as naked extortion.112
The principal reason for the arrival of the Young King and Henry II in York on 1 August, however, was to receive the formal submission of William the Lion and to confirm the Treaty of Falaise.113 Remarkably, William had not been forced to pay a ransom, but nevertheless the political price of his freedom was high. In the great cathedral church of St Peter, the king of Scots, followed by his brother David and all their leading magnates and ecclesiastics, performed homage first to Henry II, then to the Young King, ‘saving his faith to the Lord King his father’.114 William was also forced to recognize the subjection of the Scottish Church and its clergy to both Henry II and his son, and he may have placed his lance, saddle and equipment on the high altar of St Peter’s as a further symbol of his submission.115 William’s disastrous intervention in the war had resulted in the most explicit act of feudal submission undertaken by a Scots king since the Conquest. William doubtless hoped that when Henry II died, the Young King would honour the grant of Northumberland and Cumberland he had made to him in 1173, but for the present he had to submit to the humiliation not only of having the key castles of lowland Scotland held by English garrisons, but also of having to pay for their upkeep.116 Gerald of Wales regarded Henry II’s assertion of overlordship over the Scots as a crowning triumph and the high-water mark of Plantagenet power:
Contrary to anything which had occurred before, adding so noble an increase to the English crown, he gloriously extended the boundaries and limits of the kingdom from the southern ocean to the northern islands of the Orkneys, by his powerful hand including in one monarchy the whole island of Britain as it is bounded by the ocean. We have no authentic account that anyone had ever done this before, from the time when the Picts and the Scots first occupied the northern parts of the island since the days of Claudius Caesar …117
Nevertheless, Henry II’s control of these lowland fortresses was intended less as an act of aggressive Angevin imperialism than as a safeguard against future Scottish support for any future insurrection by the Young King: only after the death of the young Henry in 1183 did Henry II feel able to relax the terms of the Treaty of Falaise.118 William’s explicit subjection to the Young King as well as to Henry II stood in marked contrast to the terms agreed later that year at Windsor on 6 October by Ruaidhrí Ua Conchobhair, king of Connacht, who claimed the high kingship of Ireland. In return for recognition of his lordship over that part of Ireland not held by Henry II or the Anglo-Norman settlers, Ruaidhrí agreed to pay tribute and became Henry’s man, but though he did so in the presence of the Young King and a great council of magnates, there was no mention of any similar pledge to young Henry. Unlike Geoffrey’s duchy of Brittany, John’s lordship of Ireland was not to be under the superior lordship of the Young King, at least not while Henry II still lived.119
The two kings seem to have spent the closing months of 1175 in the south of England, and in late October they honourably received the new papal legate, Hugo Pierleone, at Winchester. If, as Gervase of Canterbury reported, Henry II unsuccessfully attempted to use this legatine mission to gain an annulment of his marriage to Eleanor, his plans must have caused renewed tensions between young Henry and his father and their joint Christmas court at Windsor is likely to have been a fraught one.120 Despite this, it was ostensibly ‘by the counsel of King Henry his son’ that Henry II issued a new assize at a great council held at Northampton on 26 January 1176.121 The process had already begun of demolishing the castles of leading rebels, including those of the earls of Leicester, Ferrers and Norfolk, and of others such as Roger de Mowbray and Gervase Paganel.122 But in the new assize, in essence a revised and enlarged version of the Assize of Clarendon of 1166, Henry II pressed ahead with measures to reassert justice and strengthen royal authority in the wake of the rebellion, and it was not coincidental that it was promulgated at the very location that had witnessed the great ceremony of surrender of the rebel castellans to Henry II in July of 1174.123 Teams of three justices, assigned to six circuits to cover the kingdom, were instructed to receive oaths of fealty to Henry II from all men from the rank of earl down even to the unfree villeins (rustici), and any refusing were liable to arrest as the king’s enemies.124 Henry II was determined upon a universal reaffirmation of loyalty to him, and anyone who had not yet performed liege homage to the king was to do so at an appointed time.125 The names of those outlawed for refusing to stand to trial were to be reported to the Exchequer and a list sent to the king himself, which indicates that Henry II had in mind not only petty malefactors but political opponents of standing.126 The justices were to review custody of royal castles and to assess available resources for castle guard, while there was to be a careful audit of the progress of demolition of the castles of erstwhile rebels.127 Fearing lest the influence of local magnates would interfere with the effective destruction of these strongholds, the king decreed that the justices fulfil this work of security without fear or favour, on pain of being arraigned themselves.128
Beyond such immediate measures, the assize sought to address the baleful impact of the war on law and order. Harsh penalties for theft, robbery, forgery and arson were decreed for those found guilty after accusation by a jury of presentment, though in recognition that the widespread plundering of livestock was an inevitable accompaniment to the recent hostilities, these were not to apply ‘in cases of petty thef
ts and robberies which have been committed in time of war (tempore guerrae), as of horses and oxen and lesser things’.129 The war had provided ample opportunity for appropriation at the expense either of enemies or of weaker neighbours, but some had continued to take advantage of the confusion; the justices were commanded to investigate dispossessions made contrary to the assize ‘since the lord king’s coming to England immediately following upon the peace made between him and the king, his son’. They were also to undertake a thorough review of the king’s rights, including those ‘escheats, churches, lands and women’ (the latter referring to heiresses and wards) who were in the royal gift.130 Anticipating resistance in areas where the authority of erstwhile rebel lords was still strong, the assize noted that the justices should nevertheless ‘hold the assize for wicked robbers and evildoers throughout the counties they are about to traverse, for this assize is enacted in accordance with the advice of the king his son, and his vassals’.131 This was a vital clause: no one was to be let off by exploiting their loyalty to the son, and it was to be made clear to all that these measures were the agreed policy of both kings.
The Old King had regarded the Young King’s participation in the major councils and itinerant government of 1175–76 as an important aspect of the re-establishment of his own authority in the kingdom, while in turn this was a public demonstration of young Henry’s restoration as his father’s principal heir. Nevertheless, by Easter 1176 young Henry had been under his father’s close supervision for nearly a year and was beginning to chafe against such restraint. In March, he pressed his father for permission to leave England. Roger of Howden believed his stated reason was that he wanted to undertake a pilgrimage to the shrine of St James at Compostella.132 As his conduct at the siege of Drincourt in 1173 had indicated, the Young King had a particular devotion to St James, and the earlier pilgrimages of his erstwhile allies King Louis VII and Count Philip afforded ample precedent.133 Henry II, however, suspected his son’s motives, and that his request came less from genuine piety than from the bad advice of the young Henry’s counsellors who were attempting to extract him from his father’s control.134 A pilgrimage to Compostella, moreover, would take young Henry not only through Aquitaine, but further into Gascony, and run the risk of further destabilizing an area under only the loosest of Angevin hegemony, where lords such as the count of Bigorre and the viscounts of Dax and Bayonne needed little excuse to attempt to throw off ducal control.135 Henry II tried to persuade his son to abandon the idea, but when the young man could not be convinced, Henry eventually agreed, and gave the Young King permission to cross to Normandy with his household.136
The History of William Marshal, by contrast, saw young Henry’s request to leave England, made ‘upon the counsel and advice of his companions’, as stemming from boredom and a desire for chivalrous adventure through errantry.137 Young noblemen had long sought martial glory and advancement beyond their fathers’ lands, but the idea of knight-errantry was being greatly popularized in the 1170s by Chrétien de Troyes, whose Arthurian romances had at their centre the questing adventures of knightly heroes who won renown and riches through feats of arms. Chrétien’s romances, aimed precisely at the aristocratic youth of the courts of northern France, reflected, but also helped to formulate and disseminate, a burgeoning chivalric ideology. Thus in Cligès, Chretien’s second great romance written c.1176, Alexander, son of the emperor of Greece, seeks his father’s leave (and a suitable supply of treasure), in order to travel to Britain to prove himself through arms and to be knighted by Arthur himself. When his reluctant father offers to knight Alexander himself, to crown him, give him Greece and the homage of all his barons, the young man still refuses:
Many high-born men through indolence have forfeited the great fame they might have had, had they set off through the world. Idleness and glory do not go well together, it seems to me; a noble man who sits and waits gains nothing … Dear father, as long as I am free to seek glory, if I am worthy enough I wish to strive and work for it.138
The analogy here with the Young King cannot have been lost on Chrétien’s audiences, just as the coronation of Erec which concludes his first romance, Erec and Enide, called to mind young Henry’s own coronation in 1170. Such sentiments are closely echoed in the History of William Marshal, who has young Henry ask for permission to leave England in 1176 because it ‘could be a source of much harm to me to stay idle for so long, and I am extremely vexed by it. I am no bird to be mewed up; a young man who does not travel around could never aspire to anything worthwhile and he should be regarded of no account’.139 In a thought world where fame and honour required constant refreshing and reinforcement by new feats of arms, lethargy ran the risk of reproach and dishonour. ‘I can tell you in a word’, noted the History, ‘that a long period of rest is a disgrace to a young man.’140 As Philippe de Novare, also writing in the 1220s, counselled in his Les Quatre Ages de l’homme:
In his youth a man should use without laziness or delay, his prowess, his valour and the vigour of his body for the honour and profit of himself and his dependants; for he who passes his youth without exploit may have cause for great shame and grief. The young nobleman, knight or man-at-arms should work to acquire honour, to be renowned for valour, and to have temporal possessions, riches and heritages on which he can live honourably.141
It was for just this reason that soon after his knighting c.1178, Arnold of Ardres and his knightly companions had ‘preferred to go into exile in other places for the love of tournaments and for glory than to spend time in his homeland without warlike entertainments … so that he could live gloriously and attain secular honour’.142 By the mid 1170s, such things were most readily to be gained in the flourishing tourneying circuit of northern France, where there was ample opportunity for deeds of arms, glory, excitement and profit. In England, by contrast, Henry II had re-established his grandfather’s prohibition on tournaments, and thus it was that the Young King begged his father’s leave ‘to go over the Channel for my sport’.143 As the chamberlain of Tancarville had earlier warned his young protégé William Marshal, England was no place for a young man seeking renown through feats of arms, and anyone ‘wishing to devote his time and effort to travelling the world and tourneying was usually sent to Brittany and to Normandy to frequent the company of knights, or indeed, anywhere where tournaments were held’.144
Whether his stated reason was pilgrimage or martial sport, the Young King clearly regarded a return to the continent as restoring a considerable degree of his personal freedom. On receiving his father’s leave to cross to Normandy, he and Margaret hurried to Portsmouth, but were delayed by unfavourable winds.145 By now, Easter was approaching, so Henry II summoned the Young King back to hold court with him at Winchester, where Henry was expecting the imminent arrival of Richard and Geoffrey. He returned, but left Margaret at Porchester to mark his intention of leaving England as soon as he might. Delighting, noted Roger of Howden, in the presence of three of his sons, Henry II held a magnificent court. Even Queen Eleanor was probably allowed to attend this family reunion.146 But there was also pressing business to discuss, for once again serious discontent had arisen in Aquitaine, fomented by Vulgrin Taillefer III, count of Angoulême, and his brothers, their half-brother, Aimar of Limoges, Raymond II, viscount of Turenne, and other lords such as Echiward of Chabanais and William Mastac.147 Fuel had been added to the fires of rebellion by Henry II’s own policies, for which Richard was now paying the price. While the sons of Count William of Angoulême had been hostile in 1173–74, Henry II’s decision to keep the lion’s share of the inheritance of Reginald of Cornwall in his own hands, to give to his son John, had deprived Aimar of Limoges of a rich inheritance and forced him into the rebel camp.148
Henry II persuaded the Young King to defer his pilgrimage and to help Richard to restore peace in Aquitaine; the campaign would give his eldest son valuable military experience as well as some of the freedom he clearly craved, and direct his energies against the family’s en
emies. The Young King and Margaret sailed on 20 April from Porchester, and on landing at Barfleur they at once hurried to see King Louis, though evidently with Henry II’s permission.149 It was probably soon thereafter that the Young King and his household journeyed from the Île-de-France to Arras to visit Count Philip.150 The count gave young Henry a warm welcome, as ‘they were cousins and good friends’, and ‘took him round his castles and cities, had him stay with him, and had him honoured as the king he was’.151 Hearing that there was to be a major tournament near Ressons-sur-Matz, a town within Count Philip’s county of Montdidier and a favoured tourneying venue on the border with the Capetian lands, Philip provided the Young King and his mesnie with horses, arms and fine equipment so that they could participate.152 The author of the History noted that the Young King’s troops did well, maintaining their discipline and fighting ‘with great ferocity’.153 Although this is the first specific tournament in which the Young King is known to have participated, there is no indication here that he was a novice; it was, however, his first opportunity to engage in a major feat of arms since the conclusion of the war, and it was doubtless for this reason that, as the History notes, Henry and his companions ‘were keen to do well’.154
War in Aquitaine
Choosing not to wait for the Young King’s arrival, Richard had marched with a powerful army against the insurgents in Poitou. During his absence, Theobald Chabot, Richard’s magister militum, and John, bishop of Poitiers, had defeated a force of Vulgrin of Angoulême’s mercenaries near Barbezieux. Exploiting this success, Richard himself won a victory in open battle against a force of Brabançons between St Maigrin and Bouteville in late May.155 Moving against Aimar of Limoges, he took the castle of Aixe, which guarded an important crossing of the Vienne, then laid siege to Limoges itself, which fell to him within a few days.156 It was only after 24 June that the Young King finally joined forces with Richard, who had returned victorious from the Limousin to meet him at the ducal capital of Poitiers.157
Henry the Young King, 1155-1183 Page 34
