Lionheart
Page 4
All these young people and still others were treated as Richard’s brothers and sisters by other members of the court. Life became even more complicated when statuses changed, as when Richard’s second betrothed, Princess Alais Capet, caught King Henry’s roving eye while she was still a young teenager and was forced to become one of his mistresses.
The royal family had many fortified residences but no fixed home. In those times, kings and the nobility had to be mobile in order to keep their restless vassals frightened into obedience and shows of loyalty, as well as paying up the latest tax demands. The court or curia was, then, not a place, but consisted of the king and his courtiers, wherever they might be at a given time, and Henry II’s court was even more peripatetic than most. When on the road, its members never knew where they would be sleeping in two nights’ time. They were likened by Peter of Blois, who served as Queen Eleanor’s secretary and therefore knew Henry’s habits well, to the milites Herlewini – soldiers in the army of the mythical English King Herla, who ‘in endless wandering makes mad marches without stay or rest’, any man who dared to fall out of the ranks being ‘turned to dust’.2 The simile was apt because no courtier could afford to be elsewhere when summoned by the king at any hour of the day or night, for those whom Henry had raised high could easily be cast down for a simple misdemeanour or brief absence from the court – the social equivalent of being turned to dust.
Another curialis or courtier was Walter Map, who wrote in his work Courtiers’ Gossip, ‘Saint Augustine said, “I am in time and I speak of time, and yet do not know what time is.” Similarly I am in the court and I speak of the court, yet do not know what it is.’3 As though to confuse all his retinue, Henry II would frequently announce an early start next day and then remain in bed, alone or not, until noon. This left the entire retinue of 100 or more men and women dozing beside their harnessed mounts and draught animals since before dawn. Or, he might declare the next day a rest day and then change his mind, to rise early and depart with a small bodyguard in a cloud of dust, leaving scores of riders and wagon-drivers and passengers to perform their toilet and ready themselves in panic, harnessing their animals and following as best they could. Commenting on this, Peter of Blois recorded that the king’s latest travel plans were most easily found by ‘running to the court whores, for this breed of courtier often knows the palace secrets’.4
When travelling to the various family gatherings, such as Christmas and Easter courts, Richard and the other princes and princesses too young to ride a horse were transported, wrapped in furs, with their nurses, inside lumbering barrel-roofed wooden ox-carts with leather curtains that protected them from the rain or cold. These took their place in an expanded retinue of 200-plus guards, courtiers, clerks, household servants, prelates serving as ambassadors in the hope of catching the king’s ear, plus merchants and other assorted hangers-on – all of whom literally fought for sleeping space at overnight stops after the best accommodation had been taken by the royal family. The tumultuous life of Henry’s court reflected the cataclysmic coming together of Richard’s equally strong-willed parents, whose relationship was always turbulent.
When one enters a medieval castle today, the courtyard of the keep is usually empty except for a few other visitors. Not so in Richard’s time: as wall plates projecting from the inner walls of the corps de logis often testify, lean-tos of one, two and three storeys were erected, taking up much of the space in the courtyard. The din of human voices, horses neighing and dogs barking, the clatter of hooves and clang of wheel rims, plus the hammering of armourers, farriers, wheelwrights and other craftsmen, and all the comings and goings of the court bounced off the stone walls in a ceaseless cacophony, harder on the medieval ear than in modern times when even remote areas of countryside in developed countries are rarely without the noise of road traffic, agricultural machines or aircraft that has raised our aural threshold significantly. With only the privileged able to avail themselves of the long-drop toilets, the stench of human excrement that had to be carried in pots and wooden tubs out of the keep each morning and of the animal dung that had to be removed must have made anyone with a sense of smell long to be on the road again, breathing fresh air.
It is possible that Richard found the ceaseless travel and confusion of the court harder to bear than his siblings did. Whether to protect him or for some emotional reason, Eleanor decided early in his childhood to keep him close to her as much as possible, ensuring that he was raised as a future duke of Aquitaine, to become a warrior-poet like her grandfather Duke William IX.5 Known as William the Troubadour, the latter had famously defied the Church in warfare, treating his vassals in holy orders exactly like all the others and flaunting in public his mistress, known as La Dangerosa and La Maubergeonne. After his second wife retired to a nunnery where his first wife already lived, William bore his mistress’ nude portrait on his shield – in return, so he said, for her bearing him in bed. To ensure there was no doubt what that meant, he summed up the situation in his poem Un vers convinent in terms that every fellow knight would understand:
Dos cavalhs ai a me selha ben e gen.
Bon son e adreg per arms e valen,
mas no’ls puesc amdos tener
que l’us l’autre non cossen.
[I have two purebred horses for my saddle / fine-spirited and both well trained for battle /but I can’t stable them together / for neither tolerates the other.]
Many nobles were illiterate, using clerics as secretaries to read and write for them, but Eleanor, literate herself, insisted her favourite be taught to read, write and converse in Latin, northern French and Occitan – the language spoken in the south of France. Richard learned while young to pen a witty sirventès or rhyming tribute to a girl’s beauty as an academic exercise. Other essential aspects of Richard’s education for noble twelfth-century manhood were horsemanship astride a mettlesome, highly bred destrier or trained warhorse – the name comes from the custom of the knight’s squire riding a palfrey and holding the reins of his master’s warhorse in the right hand – and how to wield, on foot and on horseback, the weapons of war, including swords, daggers, lances, axes and the mace.
Fighting with lance in the tactic that would later be called a heavy cavalry charge required split-second timing as the two sides collided. With the kite-shaped shield – the top flattened off for better visibility when held high to protect the face – protecting the knight’s left side, the wooden lance, tipped with steel, was held level across the horse’s neck, pointing slightly left so that two approaching knights each threatened the other in the same way. The first to strike his opponent generally won by killing, wounding or unhorsing him. Often, the shock of contact head-on, with both opposing knights firmly seated between the high pommel and cantle of their saddles, was such that the wooden shafts of their lances shattered. Many knights were blinded by wooden splinters penetrating their eyes.
The knightly sword at this time was not the elegant, tapering blade of later years and nothing like the elegant rapier of Renaissance times. Although pointed at the tip for stabbing lunges, this was a weapon primarily designed to be brought down onto the adversary or laterally across the body with sufficient force to cleave unarmoured flesh deeply and shatter bones. Practising with it in adolescence and using it regularly in adult life gave the warrior caste a lop-sided appearance from massive over-development of the right shoulder and arm muscles – and almost guaranteed arthritic problems in the right shoulder and arm in later life, if a man lived long enough. The broad blade, strengthened as much as a third of the way from the cross by a longitudinal rib on each side, had a flattened diamond cross-section. Although the hilt was long enough to be held in both hands when the occasion warranted, the twelfth-century sword was usually wielded one-handed, the pommel at the end of the hilt preventing it being easily struck from the wielder’s hand.
The armour worn had evolved a little from that depicted on the Norman knights in the Bayeux Tapestry. The cotte of mail was shorter, th
e skirt ending about the knees to protect the thighs from an adversary’s sword slash when on horseback, but not so long as to hinder movement on foot, if unhorsed. Mail leggings and spurred boots protected the lower leg and feet, and mail gloves for the hands. The headpiece of the cotte came up over the mouth to the level of the nose so that, with a conical helmet made from several riveted segments, complete with nasal, only the eyes and part of the cheeks were exposed, which made them a prime target. So many men suffered disfiguring facial wounds there that the new pot-helmet was introduced. This covered the whole head, with a slit to see out of and holes pierced lower down for breathing through and speaking.
It is easy to see why armour was usually donned at the latest prudent moment before combat, and not worn while travelling. So, Richard’s training was not just in the use of weapons, but also in developing the stamina and brute force required to do so for hours, wearing full armour in midsummer heat.
The word ‘jester’ did not originally mean a fool with a quick wit, a bladder and a talent for prat-falls; it was derived from the Latin gesta, meaning the deeds of great men in warfare, and described the courtier with a better than good memory who could recount those deeds in detail as entertainment for a noble court. On both sides of his family, Richard was descended from the Norsemen who had settled Normandy by bloody conquest, forcing Charles the Simple, king of the Western Franks, to constitute it a duchy and cede legal title in 911 to its first duke, Rollo the Viking, in return for him paying homage as Charles’ vassal.
A Norse boy of earlier generations would have repeatedly heard the sagas of Viking heroes whose manhood was epitomised by their willingness to die on the field of battle. So Richard was entertained again and again with accounts of deeds of prowess in the First Crusade, when Godefroi de Bouillon had leaped from the platform of a Frankish siege tower onto the battlements of Jerusalem and led the way for a handful of knights who hacked their way through living flesh and blood to the Damascus Gate, which they opened to allow the mass of Christian soldiery to pour into the city and massacre every Muslim, Jew and eastern Christian living there. The crusaders’ chaplain recorded with sanctimonious delight how the whole Temple platform was awash with blood and bodies of the slain were piled so high that they reached to the knee of a mounted knight. Only the richest were saved for ransom, pending which they were used as slave labour to remove and dispose of the thousands of corpses. Five months later, celebrating the Feast of the Nativity in the mosque, renamed templum domini by the knights of Christ, all the incense in Israel could not mask the stink of decaying flesh that assailed the nostrils of the worshippers. This was not ancient history, for Richard’s own paternal great-grandfather Count Fulk V of Anjou had been crowned King of Jerusalem in 1131 and worn that crown until 1143. The lesson for Richard was that no less would be expected of him when he reached man’s estate.
At the Christmas court of 1164, held at Marlbrough, 6-year-old Richard and the other princes and princesses may have been eyewitnesses to one of Henry’s famous rages, directed against Thomas Becket. Since being made archbishop by Henry, the former model chancellor had become an increasingly difficult vassal. In particular, he had refused to recognise the Constitutions of Clarendon – a set of laws introduced by Henry to reduce the power of the Church and abolish certain ecclesiastical privileges. Leaving England clandestinely, Becket had, with assistance from Louis VII, reached Rome before Henry’s emissaries could get there and enlisted the support of Pope Alexander III in his dispute with the king.
Learning this on Christmas Eve, Henry went literally berserk, after which, whether eyewitnesses or not, the whole court walked softly, fearing to attract the attention of the king until he was in a calmer mood. This was certainly not the case the following day, when Henry invoked the Germanic principle of Sippenhaft to banish from the island realm everyone related to Becket, however vaguely. A total of 400 men, women and children, innocent of everything but some connection with the renegade archbishop, were forcibly shipped to Flanders and there abandoned in midwinter, homeless and without money or food, possessing only the clothes they were wearing. Prince Henry, who had been brought up in Becket’s household during the years when he was Henry’s chancellor, regarded the dispute as one more reason to hate his manipulative father.
NOTES
1. Richard, A., Histoire, Vol 2, p. 132.
2. Map, De Nugis, pp. 13–15.
3. Map, De Nugis, p. 248.
4. R. Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings (Oxford: OUP, 2000), p.140.
5. The dukes of Aquitaine were known also by their numbers in the succession to the county of Poitou. For simplicity, their ducal numbers only are used in this book.
4
The 15-Year-Old Duke
It has to be said that Richard and his male siblings were an unlovable lot, judged by any modern standards. Henry II was reputed to have had a mural painted in Windsor Castle representing himself as a dying eagle being attacked by four eaglets. If that is true, it was a remarkable prophecy of the end of his life. A truer visual simile of his attitude as a father would have shown him as a huntsman holding four hounds on intertwined leashes, he curbing them at every turn and them continually snapping and snarling at each other, waiting only for a chance to bite the hand that held them.
Richard’s eldest brother Prince Henry grew up to be a vain but popular playboy, surrounded by a coterie of flattering admirers attracted by his open-handed generosity when he was in funds, which was never for long. When able to break away from the – to him – boring round of governance with his father’s court, his main leisure interest lay in the tournaments. At that time, they were not the ordered ritual they later became, with noble ladies watching two knights charging at each other along separated tracks, each endeavouring to unseat the other with his lance. That was dangerous, but the mêlée of the middle twelfth century was far more so, with two teams of heavily armed mounted knights setting upon each other with whatever weapons they liked in a lethal forerunner of tag wrestling. The mêlée began on an agreed signal, usually in an open space in or near a town, but continued with pursuers chasing their opponents for miles across the countryside, damaging crops and property and riding down anyone unwise enough to get in their way. An unhorsed knight could expect to be deliberately ridden down, or hacked at with sword, mace or axe until literally clubbed and/or stabbed to death. Limbs and sometimes heads were lost to blows from opponents’ swords; limbs and skulls were crushed by maces and shattered by axes. If overwhelmed by one or more opponents, a knight could surrender to save his life, but was then a prisoner with his horse, arms and armour forfeit, and would be released only after payment of a ransom calculated in accordance with his rank and wealth.
The noble troubadour Bertran de Born, joint castellan of the castle of Autafòrt in Périgord, gained most of his wealth from plunder and ransom. He loved the whole tournament scene:
Bela m’es pressa be blezos
coberts de teintz vermelhs e blausd’entresens e de gonfanos
de diversas colors tretaustendas e traps e rics pavilhos tendre
lanzas frassar, escutz trancar e fendre
elmes brunitz, e colps donar e prendre …
[The mêlée, with its thousand charms: / shields vermillion and azure / standards, banners, coats of arms / painted in every bright colour, / the pavilions, the stands, the tents, / shattered lances, shields split and bent, / blows given, taken, helmets dented …]
For Young Henry, the mêlée was a source of steady income, thanks to having the mightiest warrior in Europe on his team, William the Marshal, who reputedly took 103 knights prisoner in a single year.
At Montmirail on 6 January 1169 Henry II went through the motions of sharing out his empire among his sons. Under this, Eleanor gained permission to cede title to the county of Poitou and duchy of Aquitaine to her favourite son, whereupon 12-year-old Richard performed homage by swearing fidelity to Louis VII. Young Henry, who was married to Louis’ daughter Margueri
te, did the same for Maine and Anjou, after which Louis gave his consent, as feudal overlord of the continental possessions, to the betrothal of Prince Geoffrey to Countess Constance of Brittany. Geoffrey was smaller in stature than the two eldest princes and of a swarthy complexion. He had the best brain of the four and, since he was unlikely to accede to the throne, would have made a successful cardinal, had his father been prepared to allow him to escape his paternal domination. Having a lawyer’s gift for words, Geoffrey was able to make black seem white and could always talk round even those who already had good reason to mistrust him. The son whom Eleanor regarded as the runt of her second litter was John. A full 12 inches shorter than Richard when fully grown, he lacked Geoffrey’s intellect, Richard’s undoubted courage and Young Henry’s popularity. Their father made most use of him to annoy and worry his older brothers by conferring on John gifts and possessions that had been promised to the others – and were later taken away again.
The whole elaborate charade of Montmirail was Henry’s way of manoeuvring Louis into handing over 9-year-old Alais Capet, who was now formally betrothed to Richard. Her dowry, the region of central France still known today by its feudal name Berry, lay between Aquitaine and Burgundy and had long been coveted by Henry for strategic reasons. During the meeting at Montmirail, Louis again tried to reconcile Henry and Becket, whom Henry agreed to meet face-to-face for the first time since Becket’s furtive departure from Sandwich in a humble rowing boat four years previously. Becket, however, was at his most obstreperous and not even his own counsellors were surprised when Henry stormed away from the meeting, exasperated.1