Henry the Young King, 1155-1183

by Matthew Strickland

  14.GH, I, 36–41; Recueil, II, no. 455; Letters and Charters of Henry II, no. 1779; K. Norgate, John Lackland (London, 1902), 2.

  15.The lands, including Humbert’s claims in Grenoble and the Val d’Aosta, are detailed in GH, I, 37–8; Norgate, John Lackland, 4–5; and for Savoy see E. L. Cox, The Eagles of Savoy. The House of Savoy in Thirteenth Century Europe (Princeton, NJ, 1974).

  16.Diceto, I, 353. Following his daughter Alice’s death, Humbert did in fact bear a son by his fourth wife, Beatrice de Mâcon; see U. Vones-Liebenstein, ‘Vir uxorious? Barbarossas Verhältnis zur Comitissa Burgundiae in Umkrieg des Friedens von Venedig’, Stauferreich im Wandel. Ordungsvorstellungen und Politik in Zeit Friedriech Barbarossas, ed. S. Weinfurter, Mittelalter Forschungen, 9 (Stuttgart, 2002), 189–219, at 195.

  17.De principis, 157; Anonimi laudenensis chronicon universale, MGH SS, xxvi, 447; Peter of Blois, Epistolae, no. 113 (PL, CXIII, col. 340); Warren, Henry II, 220–1.

  18.Diceto, I, 353; Previté Orton, House of Savoy, 341 and n. 1; and J. O. Prestwich, The Place of War in English History, 1066–1214 (Woodbridge, 2004), 22, who sees the marriage proposal as ‘linked with Henry’s cautious probing in northern Italy at a time when German power and influence there had been temporarily weakened’. As Torigni, 250, noted, ‘it was not possible for anyone to go into Italy except through his [Humbert’s] lands’.

  19.Warren, Henry II, 221 argues that Raymond’s submission was the major reason why the scheme was not revived after 1173–74, despite Henry having made a down payment of 2,000 marks, and provision having been made in the treating for a second daughter to replace Alice, who had died. On Raymond’s relations with the Angevins, see Benjamin, ‘A Forty Years’ War’, 270–85.

  20.Alfonso’s brother Raymond-Berengar had inherited the county of Provence, which posed an added threat to the count of Toulouse (Previté Orton, House of Savoy, 337; Bisson, The Medieval Crown of Aragon, 37). For the growth of Raymond’s influence and the strength of his position by 1172, see Cheyette, Ermengard, 253–67.

  21.GH, I, 36: Torigni, 255. Peter, archbishop of Tarentaise, had a role in bringing about this regional peace summit, which he also used to gain support for a drive against the Cathar heretics in southern France (Previté Orton, House of Savoy, 338 and n. 4; Letters and Charters of Henry II, no. 1779 n). Walter Map, with King Henry at Limoges, was entrusted to see to Peter’s upkeep, and witnessed him performing a healing miracle in the city (Map, 134–7).

  22.See Benjamin, ‘A Forty Years’ War’, 270–85; and L. Macé, Les Comtes de Toulouse et leur entourage, XIIe–XIIIe siècles. Rivalités, alliances et jeux de pouvoir (Toulouse, 2000), 28– 30.

  23.GH, I, 36; Torigni, 255; Vigeois, 319. Diceto, I, 353, however, noted that Richard was absent from the initial meeting, so the count of Toulouse deferred his homage to the ‘octaves of Pentecost’.

  24.GH, I, 36; Torigni, 255; Vigeois, 319. As Cheyette, Ermengard, 268, notes, ‘by accepting Raymond’s oath of homage, the king implicitly renounced Eleanor’s claims and recognized him as legitimate successor to the county’.

  25.GH, I, 36.

  26.Similarly, despite the importance of his treaty with Humbert, Henry II evidently did not exert pressure on Raymond to yield to Humbert’s claims to the Dauphiné, held by Raymond’s brother Alfonso (Previté Orton, House of Savoy, 337, 339–40).

  27.Diceto, I, 353.

  28.GH, I, 41. Geoffrey le Bel, for example, had granted them to his second son, Geoffrey (Recueil des chroniques de Touraine, ed. A. Salmon (Tours, 1854), 136; Torigni, 163, noting that Geoffrey received four castles.

  29.Diceto, I, 353; and for John’s education at Fontevraud, Church, King John, 4–5. John was born in late 1166 or early 1167, or perhaps in December 1167 as recorded by Torigni, 233 (Lewis, ‘The Birth and Childhood of King John’, 161–3; Church, King John, 1).

  30.GH, I, 41.

  31.Ibid.

  32.For the text of the treaty, GH, I, 36–9.

  33.See K. H. Krüger, ‘Herrschaftsnachfolge als Vater–Sohn-Konflikt’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien, 36 (2002), 225–40; and B. Weiler, ‘Kings and Sons: Princely Rebellions and the Structures of Revolt in Western Europe, c.1170–c.1280’, Historical Research, 82 (2009), 17–40, especially valuable for a comparison of the Young King’s rebellion with those of Henry (VII) of Germany against Frederick II in 1234, and of the Infante Sancho against his father Alphonso X of Castile in 1282.

  34.The Obituaire de Saint-Serge spoke of this conflict as ‘bellum illud execrabile quod contra patrem sum per annos fere VII subsequentes impie gessit’ (Recueil d’annales angevines et vendômoises, ed. L. Halphen, Paris, 1903, 107). Nevertheless, Bachrach, ‘Henry II and the Angevin Tradition of Family Hostility’, 118–25, in providing a detailed analysis of the conflicting accounts of the sources, suggests that this was probably a heated but non-violent dissensio which in later chronicles became exaggerated into open war. By contrast, Fulk le Réchin could write in his own chronicle that Geoffrey ‘contra suum etiam patrem guerram habuit in qua mala multa facta fuerunt, unde postea valde penituit’ (Fragmentum historiae andegavensis, in Chroniques des comtes d’Anjou, 235).

  35.Guillot, Le Comte d’Anjou, I, 117–18.

  36.C. W. David, Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy (Cambridge, Mass., 1920), 17–41; W. M. Aird, Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy (c. 1050–1134) (Woodbridge, 2008), 60–98.

  37.Diceto, I, 355–66.

  38.Suger, Vie de Louis, 82; idem, Deeds of Louis, 62. Robert the Pious’ son Hugh, for example, had gone into exile following a quarrel with his father (Fulbert of Chartres, Letters and Poems, ed. F. Behrends, Oxford, 1976, 101).

  39.Wace, Roman de Rou, ll. 10141–2, 10149–6: ‘William, Henry’s son, gave and spent generously and dwelt with his father, who loved him very much. He did what his father asked and avoided what his father forbade. The flower of chivalry from England and Normandy set about serving him and had great hopes of him.’

  40.W. M. Aird, ‘Frustrated Masculinity: The Relationship between William the Conqueror and his Eldest Son’, Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. D. M. Hadley (Harlow, 1999), 39–70; idem, Robert Curthose, 62–83; and V. L. Bullough, ‘On Being a Male in the Middle Ages’, Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. C. A. Lees (Minneapolis, 1994), 31–43. As Orderic, III, 98–9, has Robert ask William, ‘What am I to do, and how am I to provide for my dependants (clientes)?’ For a discussion of Robert’s expectations of succession, E. Z. Tabuteau, ‘The Role of Law in the Succession to Normandy and England’, Haskins Society Journal, 3 (1991), 141–69, and G. Garnett, Conquered England: Kingship, Succession and Tenure, 1066–1166 (Oxford, 2007), 163–9; idem, ‘Robert Curthose – the Duke who Lost his Trousers’, ANS, 35 (2012), 213–44.

  41.GH, I, 41.

  42.WN, I, 170; trans. EHD, II, 370.

  43.Memorials of the Church of SS Peter and Wilfrid, ed. J. T. Fowler, 3 vols (Surtees Society, 1882–1888), I, no. cxlii; Early Yorkshire Charters, ed. W. Farrer and C. T. Clay, 12 vols (Edinburgh, 1914–1965), I, no. 123; Eyton, 170; English Episcopal Acta, XX. York, 1154–1181, ed. M. Lovatt (Oxford, 2000), Appendix II, no. 1.

  44.JF, ll. 21–2, ‘Reis de terre senz honur ne set bien que faire: nu sout li juefnes curunez, li gentilz de bon aire’.

  45.JF, ll. 17–20.

  46.Wace, Roman de Rou, ll. 67–69.

  47.Luchaire, Louis VI le Gros, no. 4; Orderic, VI, 54–5 and n. 3; ibid., IV, 264, n. 1.

  48.Guillot, Le Comte d’Anjou, I, 117 and n. 528; Orderic, VI, 68, n. 1.

  49.As Torigni, 243, noted, on Thierry’s death in 1168 he was succeeded by Philip, ‘who had now long ruled that county, as his father frequently made the journey to Jerusalem’. Flanders had had a long tradition of such associative rulership. Robert, son of Robert I le Frison, for example, had been associated with the governance of Flanders from 1086 to his father’s death in 1093 (C. Verlinden, Robert I le Frison (Antwerp and Paris, 1935), 136–7).

  50.For Barbaross
a’s successful policy of delegating power to his sons, U. Schmidt, Königswahl und Thronfolge im 12. Jahrhundert (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna, 1987), 195–224; F. Opll, Friedrich Barbarossa (Darmstadt, 1990), 166–70; P. Csendes, Heinrich VI (Darmstadt, 1993), 35–73; and see now the important study by A. Plassmann, ‘The King and his Sons: Henry II and Frederick Barbarossa’s Succession Strategies Compared’, ANS, 36 (2013), 149–66. I am grateful to Alheydis Plassman for sending me a copy of this paper before publication.

  51.Gesta Stephani, 208–9.

  52.The Charters of David I, ed. Barrow, 5, who notes that from c.1135 David exercised ‘genuinely joint kingship’ with his son Henry. From 1107 to 1124, during the reign of his brother Alexander I, David himself had been granted a great appanage in southern Scotland, encompassing much of Lothian and Cumbria north of the Solway, by his brother King Edgar (R. Oram, David I. The King Who Made Scotland (Stroud, 2004), 59–72).

  53.D. Matthew, The Norman Kingdom of Sicily (Cambridge, 1992), 49, 52–3, 165. When in 1182 the Young King’s sister Joanna had given birth to a son, Bohemond, his father King William II invested him with a golden sceptre as duke of Apulia as soon as he had been baptized, but the child seems to have died in infancy (Torigni, 303). William’s successor, Tancred, likewise invested his son Roger with the duchy of Apulia and subsequently had him crowned as co-ruler in his lifetime (Matthew, Norman Kingdom of Sicily, 165–6, 288).

  54.Norgate, Angevin Kings, II, 190.

  55.Guernes, l. 6149; Garnier’s Becket, 163; below, 219.

  56.Norgate, Angevin Kings, II, 191, ‘to place his mother’s duchy and his father’s counties in other hands – to reduce them to the rank of under-fiefs, keeping for himself no closer connection with them than a mere general overlordship – would have been, in principle, to renounce his birthright; while in practice it would probably have been equivalent to complete abdication, as far as his continental empire was concerned’.

  57.As Orderic has William tell Robert, ‘My son, you ask the impossible. By Norman strength I conquered England: I hold Normandy by hereditary right, and as long as I live I will not relax my grip on it’ (Orderic, III, 98–9).

  58.JF, ll. 81–2.

  59.Gillingham, The Angevin Empire, 12.

  60.Orderic, VI, 444–5; HH, 254–5; Torigni, 128; Chibnall, Empress Matilda, 60–2.

  61.William of Tyre, Bk 7: 13–14.

  62.William I of Sicily’s son Roger had been used as a figurehead by a powerful baronial coalition in 1160–61, when they seized the king and paraded Roger, aged only nine, as his successor (Falconis Beneventi Chronicon, in Cronistie scrittori sincroni napoletani, ed. G. Del Re, 2 vols (Naples, 1845, reprinted Aalen, 1975), I, 323–5; Romualdi Salernitani chronicon, ed. C. A. Garufi (Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, Città dei Castello, 1935); The History of the Tyrants of Sicily by ‘Hugo Falcandus’, 1154–69, trans. G. Loud and T. Wiedemann (Manchester, 1998), 110–14, 230–1).

  63.Ottonis episcopi Frisingensis chronica sive historia de duabus civitatibus, ed. A. Hofmeister, MGH, SS rer. Germ. 45 (1912), VIII: 9.

  64.For his rebellion, see I. S. Robinson, Henry IV of Germany, 1056–1106 (Cambridge, 1999), 323–43, and 286–8 for the rebellion of Henry IV’s eldest son Conrad a decade earlier; G. Althoff, Heinrich IV (Darmstadt, 2006), 228–53. The comparable rebellion of Frederick II’s son, Henry (VII), in 1234–35 is discussed in detail in B. Weiler, Kingship, Rebellion and Political Culture. England and Germany, c. 1215- c. 1250 (Basingstoke, 2007), 3–11 and 53–75.

  65.Diceto, I, 236, and 363, where Ralph added that his lack of offspring was a mark of divine vengeance for his impious rebellion against his father.

  66.Orderic, III, 96–101; and for Robert’s supporters, S. L. Mooers, ‘“Backers and Stabbers”: Problems of Loyalty in Robert Curthose’s Entourage’, Journal of British Studies, 21 (1981), 1–17. Similarly, the rebellion against Geoffrey Le Bel by his younger brother Helias took place when he was still deemed a iuvenis, and was said to have been at the instigation of ‘impious men’ (Chronica de gestis consulum andegavorum, in Chroniques des comtes d’Anjou, ed. L. Halphen and R. Poupardin (Paris, 1913), 25–73, at 71; Bachrach, ‘Henry II and the Angevin Tradition of Family Hostility’, 113, n. 11).

  67.History of the Counts of Guines, ch. 92; trans. Shopkow, 125. Father and son were reconciled, with the aid of Count Philip of Flanders, with the compromise that Arnold received Ardres and some of the other property he was demanding, but accepted the nomination of Arnold of Cayeux, ‘a man learned in arms, and discreet in advice’, as his advisor ‘in tournaments and when he disposed of his possessions and as his guardian and, as it were, his teacher’ (ibid.).

  68.Torigni, 255–6, notes that the expulsions took place during Lent, which began on Wednesday 21 February. Hasculf was a lord of some standing in the county of Mortain (Torigni, ed. Delisle, II, 35, n. 7; RHF, XXIII, 697; D. Power, The Norman Frontier in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 2004), 401, 422).

  69.Torigni, 255–6, believed this was the direct cause of the younger Henry’s flight from his father.

  70.JF, ll. 378–82.

  71.Letters and Charters of Henry II, no. 1771; N. Vincent, ‘William Marshal, King Henry II and the Honour of Châteauroux’, Archives, 35 (2000), 1–15; Crouch, William Marshal, 61.

  72.HWM, ll. 1975–96.

  73.HWM, ll. 1997–2002.

  74.WN, I, 170; trans. EHD, II, 370.

  75.History of the Counts of Guisnes, ch. 96; trans. Shopkow, 129.

  76.Similarly, William of Tyre notes how the counsellors of the young Baldwin III encouraged him to reject the authority of his mother Melisende, for ‘it was unseemly, they said, that a king who ought to rule others should constantly be tied to the apron strings of his mother like the son of a private person’ (William of Tyre, Bk 16: 3, trans. Babcock and Krey, II, 140).

  77.Brut y Tywysogion or the Chronicle of the Princes (Peniarth MS. 20 Version), ed. T. Jones (Cardiff, 1952), 69. This text appears to have been translated into Welsh from an original Latin chronicle, possibly compiled in the later thirteenth century at the Cistercian house of Strata Florida (ibid., xxxiv).

  78.Printed in RHF, XVI, 643–8, from Paris, BN Ms. Lat. 14876, a group of letters attached to a fifteenth-century collection of works by St Bernard from Saint-Victor; calendared in Smith, ‘Acta’, no. 1; and discussed in Councils and Synods, I, 958, n. 2.

  79.RHF, XVI, 644.

  80.Ibid. On the importance of regal honour in this context, see Weiler, ‘Kings and Sons’, 20–1, and further references there cited.

  81.RHF, XVI, 644.

  82.Orderic, III, 98–9, with Book V: 10 probably written in late 1127.

  83.Gervase, II, 80.

  84.As Gerald of Wales noted, at Easter young Henry revealed ‘the evil plot, which he had long since hatched against his father under the influence of wicked men’ (Expugnatio, 120–1).

  85.GH, I, 42. N. Vincent, ‘King Henry II and the Poitevins’, La Cour Plantagenêt, ed. M. Aurell (Poitiers, 2000), 103–35, at 122. Ralph was the brother of Eleanor’s mother Aéonor de Châtellerault.

  86.Vincent, ‘King Henry II and the Poitevins’, 122–3, who notes that Ralph was the only Poitevin known to be have been granted land in England. According to a moralizing tale of Gerald of Wales, Ralph had lost his right eye in a hunting accident at Woodstock when his horse had bolted into thick briars, after he had gone hunting on Good Friday against the advice of Henry II (Gerald, Opera, II, Gemma Ecclesiastica, I. dist. 54).

  87.CTB, I, 216–17, and n. 9. Whether or not John’s words hint at Eleanor’s infidelity, at the time of writing in early August 1165 she was already heavily pregnant with her daughter Joanna, who was born at Angers in October.

  88.RHF, XII, 477; Chronicon Turonense magnum, 128.

  89.GH, I, 39; Foedera, I, 28; Eyton, 170.

  90.Matthew Paris, Chronica majora, II, 285; trans. Flori, Eleanor, 101.

  91.WN, I, 170; trans. EHD, II, 370.

  92.Vigeois,
319; GH, I, 41.

  93.The Chronicle of Melrose, ed. A. O. Anderson and M. O. Anderson (London, 1936), 40.

  94.The contradictory and confused chronology of the Young King’s flight given by Roger of Howden and Ralph of Diss is discussed by Norgate, Angevin Kings, II, 134, n. 7, who suggests that his escape from Chinon occurred during the night of 20 March. His route, however, and the timing of the stages of his journey is impossible to establish with any certainty. Diceto, I, 355, has no mention of Chinon and believed it was at Argentan than the Young King gave his father’s ministers the slip.

  95.Brut y Tywysogion (Peniarth), 69.

  96.Howden believed that having fled in the night, the young Henry’s party arrived at Alençon the next day, which by Norgate’s reckoning would be Wednesday, 21 March (GH, I. 41; Norgate, Angevin Kings, II, 134, n. 7). Even with spare mounts, however, this would have been an extraordinary, though not perhaps an impossible feat, and Howden’s chronology may well be unreliable here. That the party only travelled some 25 miles between Alençon and Argentan on their next stage, however, does suggest that they were exhausted. I am grateful to John Gillingham for this point.

  97.A journey directly north would have brought the party to Caen. It may be more than coincidence that Port-en-Bessin, held till recently by Adam de Port, lay only a few miles further to the north-west, on the coast just beyond Bayeux.

  98.R. Barber, Henry Plantagenet. A Biography (London, 1964), 168.

  99.GH, I, 42; Diceto, I, 355, who dates young Henry’s flight from Argentan to 23 March.

  100.K. Thompson, Power and Border Lordship in Medieval France: The County of Perche, c. 1000–1226 (Woodbridge, 2002), 96; Power, The Norman Frontier, 361.

  101.GH, I, 42; Torigni, 256; Diceto, II, xxxvi, n. 6.

  102.GH, I, 51.

  103.PR 21 Henry II, 47, 77, 106, 137.

  104.Torigni, 256.

  105.Torigni, 256.