by Douglas Boyd
According to Alfred Richard, the nineteenth-century archivist of the départment of Vienne and therefore custodian of the charters of the counts of Poitou, Henry II had no such worries about Richard. He judged correctly that his second son would be no threat, once given a significant force, paid for from the taxes of Poitou and Aquitaine, to satisfy his vanity and lust for warfare. Starting in midsummer, Richard set out at the head of a small army, augmented by the household knights of several vassals, to punish his former supporters as cruelly as he had attacked the partisans of his father during the rebellion, tearing down their castles and spreading terror in his wake. By no means every vassal backed down on hearing of his approach. Near Agen, the powerful lord Arnaud de Bouville prepared to withstand Richard’s siege of his castle at Le Castillon de St-Puy.1 Richard ordered a battery of siege engines to be transported there and hammered away at the stout fortifications for two months before breaching them and taking prisoner thirty knights and many sergeants-at-arms, whose ransoms covered the expense of the siege. According to custom, once the castle was razed to the ground that should have sufficed, but he went further. To ensure that nothing could be cultivated there and that no one would be able to live there for years to come, he had the ground around it spread with salt, as the Romans were reputed to have done to Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War.
There were, as always in medieval warfare, interludes of gracious living. The cook was an important member of a noble household because, in that time of poor hygiene, one mistake by him could kill his employer. After a particularly memorable feast, in great good humour Richard impulsively knighted his cook, making him ‘lord of the fief of the kitchen of the counts of Poitou’ as confirmed by a charter bearing many great names as witnesses and Richard’s own as undisputed count. Arise, Sir Cook!
Richard’s war against his own vassals was prosecuted by an army of routiers – mercenaries attracted by his generous rates of pay. The rebellious barons did the same, so that mercenary fought mercenary, with the rural poor paying the heaviest price as always, when their orchards were cut down, vines torn up and crops burned. At the end of Lent 1176 Richard pursued his victorious march into the Limousin, taking Limoges after a short siege. Retiring victorious to Poitiers, he found that Young Henry had at last succeeded in escaping their father’s tyranny by pleading a need to go on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Instead, the two princes joined forces to besiege Châteauneuf, which capitulated after two weeks. Richard now had the bit between his teeth, or rather an unquenchable thirst for blood and power that led him to besiege Angoulême, in which city were many of the nobles who had fled his invasion of the Limousin. Their combined forces should have enabled a stout defence, but after six days they surrendered the city and themselves. Richard despatched Count Vulgrin III of Angoulême, Aymar of Limoges and other important prisoners under escort to Henry II in England. He sent them back to Aquitaine, where they were confined in a fortress literally ‘at the king’s pleasure’.
Both Richard and Young Henry obeyed their father’s summons to his Easter court of 1176 in England, perhaps already knowing what was afoot. In October 1175 the old king had invited the papal legate Huguet to come to Britain, where he was generously rewarded for using his legal skills to draw up a form of divorce from Eleanor, who was still holding out resolutely in her prison. Had the divorce gone through, no legal means could have prevented her regaining her dower lands and contemporary opinion was that this would have been as gross an error on Henry II’s part as when Louis VII divorced her. So it is a mystery why the king even contemplated the step. The answer may lie in his desire to marry ‘fair Rosamund’ – his mistress Rosamund Clifford – and legitimise his infant son by her, so that he could then disinherit all his sons by Eleanor. The plan, if such it was, came to naught with the child’s death and Rosamund’s retirement to Godstow convent.2
One might have thought the successful campaign in Poitou would form some kind of bond between the two princes who shared command, but they parted in some acrimony, each considering himself superior to the other. Young Henry chose to remain in Poitiers, where an increasing number of young nobles who had taken part in the rebellion of 1173–74 flocked to his standard. As before, the old king had his spies in Young Henry’s entourage, one of whom was the Young King’s vice-chancellor, Adam de Chirchedun. After a letter from him to Henry II was intercepted, Young Henry had him put on trial before a court of his followers. Their verdict was that Adam should be killed for treason but the bishop of Poitiers interceded to point out that the condemned man was a deacon of York and therefore should not be judged in a lay court. Frustrated, Young Henry instead ordered that Adam be stripped and whipped through the streets of Poitiers, then sent north to prison in Argentan, being whipped also through the streets of every town along the way. The intention, of course, was to ensure that he died without actually being executed.
Richard was, to put it mildly, relieved when his older brother departed, heading into Normandy at the command of Henry II, to escort 11-year-old Princess Joanna across France on the first stage of her journey to Sicily, having been betrothed to its ruler William II, king of the Two Sicilies. On the second leg, through the county of Toulouse and onward, it was Richard who escorted her.
Confident of his authority after the successes in the field during 1176, Richard held his own Christmas court in the ducal palace of L’Ombreyra at Bordeaux before taking advantage of the mild winter weather to lead his Brabanter mercenaries south to attack the cities of Dax and Bayonne, taking particular pleasure in punishing those vassals – the term ‘robber barons’ described them exactly – who habitually robbed pilgrims en route to Compostela. It was with justifiable satisfaction that he afterwards informed his father that he had imposed a pax ricardi in all his possessions. As happened repeatedly, he abandoned his mercenaries to find their own way home, plundering and raping their passage through the Limousin. So insufferable were their depredations that the barons of the county led by Viscount Aymar of Limoges engaged them in a series of battles near Brive, in which, on the Sunday before Easter 1177, they killed over 2,000 of the Brabanters, including their commander.3
Having spent two years in England, Henry II now learned of an agreement between the German emperor and the pope which effectively put a stop to his plans to acquire the crown of Lombardy. He therefore crossed the Channel on 18 August 1177 with Prince Geoffrey, fully resolved to curb the freedom Richard and Young Henry had been enjoying. In Rouen, papal legate Cardinal Pierre informed him that Louis VII’s cause had been taken up by Pope Alexander III, who required that Richard be married without further delay to Princess Alais Capet, failing which she and her dowry must be returned to her father. But Alais was now sharing the old king’s bed, so he prevaricated, saying that he must first meet with Louis to talk it over.
The meeting took place on 21 September, Henry II as usual spinning out the negotiations – this time by agreeing to depart on crusade with Louis, as well as confirming that Alais would marry Richard, bringing the Berry as her dowry, and that Marguerite’s dowry was indeed the Vexin.4 If that was the devious side of his character, he subsequently showed his quality as a law-giver in complying with his bishops’ requests to make illegal in all the continental possessions the evil practice of forcing vassals and vavasours to pay the enormous ransoms due when their overlords were taken prisoner in mêlées, failing which they could be sent to prison as debtors. Under the new law, it was up to the captive to arrange payment of the ransom by mortgaging future revenue until the debt was discharged.5 This problem did not arise in England, where the mêlée was illegal.
The problem of the mercenaries raised its head again in October, when Henry II ordered Richard back to Poitou, where Count Vulgrin of Angoulême was ravaging the country with several armed bands. Richard’s seneschal Thibault Chabot had insufficient troops to put them down, so the bishop of Poitiers followed the example of Limoges the previous year and reinforced Thibault’s troops from his own fu
nds to take on the combined mercenaries at Barbezieux, near Angoulême. In the resulting battle, all but a handful of mercenaries were killed, the few survivors taking refuge in a nearby castle. That was not enough for Richard, who proceeded to wreak vengeance on Vulgrin’s vassal Viscount Aymar, taking Aymar’s fortress at Limoges by storm.
With Poitou and Aquitaine enjoying comparative stability, he then raced into the Berry, where there was some unfinished business that Young Henry had failed to sort out. After the death of her father while returning from crusade in 1176 and the deaths of her two brothers, who drowned in a hunting accident, a whole sweep of territory said to be worth more than all of Normandy was inherited by 3-year-old Denise de Déols. Henry II had demanded that she be handed over to him as her overlord, but she had been kidnapped by the lord of La Châtre who now, seeing Henry II’s Normans and Richard’s troops converging on his castle where the girl was kept, lost courage and handed her over without a struggle. Conducted to Chinon, Denise was then despatched to England and married to Baudouin de Revers for reasons unknown. Her husband must have been delighted, seeing his personal fortune grow overnight from a small fief on the Isle of Wight to embrace a large piece of central France including the city of Châteauroux6 and both Henry II and Richard could congratulate themselves on extending Poitevin influence further into central France, nibbling away at the lands loyal to Louis VII.
Immediately south of Déols-Châteauroux lay another feudal untidiness, in which Richard had an interest. This was the county of La Marche, so called because it lay between his lands and territory of Louis’ vassal the duke of Burgundy. Count Audebert IV had killed a knight in cold blood, after catching him paying court to the countess, whom he then sent away. When his only son died, it was taken as divine retribution for the murder, for there were no other close relatives, other than those in holy orders. After fruitlessly requesting Henry’s confirmation of his title – and nearly being locked up for this temerity – Audebert decided to atone for his sins on crusade and sell the title to his lands to Henry II. He therefore led all his vassals and vavasours to the abbey of Grandmont, where the old king was staying, and had them do homage to him and to Richard, receiving for his pains 5,000 silver marks plus twenty mules and twenty palfreys – these last to equip him for the journey to the Holy Land.7
Temporarily satisfied with these extensions of the continental possessions, Henry II decided to hold his Christmas court of 1177 in Angers, from where he had set out to marry Eleanor a quarter-century earlier. To make the point that he had returned to retake possession of his ancestral lands, he summoned more vassals than had attended his own coronation or those of Young Henry. The effect on the three older princes standing beside him as fealty was sworn by vassal after vassal was a salutary reminder that they were not the absolute lords of the territories whose titles they bore, so long as their father lived. Given the character of Young Henry and Richard, their thoughts on this occasion can reasonably be guessed.
In March 1178 Henry II was on the move again, dragging Richard with him to Normandy and taking the bizarre precaution before crossing to England on 15 July to place all his continental possessions under the protection of his feudal overlord Louis VII, which can be taken to mean that he, who never hesitated to go back on his word, nevertheless trusted Louis not to do the same thing and invade Plantagenet territory whilst he was gone.
With his father safely across the Channel, Richard rode back to Aquitaine, the pacification of which Henry had ordered him to complete. As usual, the most unrest was in the south, near the Pyrenees, where Count Centulle of Bigorre had attempted to take Dax but had himself been taken prisoner by the militia of the city. There now ensued one of those feudal negotiations that baffle the modern mind. After Richard reached Dax with a task force of knights and men-at-arms from Bayonne to punish Centulle for defying his and the old king’s authority, who should arrive but King Alfonso II of Aragon, pleading his close relationship with Centulle, begging Richard’s forgiveness and promising that Centulle would never again defy his overlords. Richard gave in and released the count of Bigorre, but only after taking possession of his two most important castles.
Interestingly, when rewarding the lords and people of Bayonne for their support, the wording of the charter made plain that it was made not only in his own name, but also that of Henry II. What could be given with one hand could be taken away with the other. Repairing to the ancient Roman capital of Saintes for his Christmas court, Richard considered how to punish Geoffroy de Rancon – the lord of Taillebourg, who had been given him asylum in 1174 to save him from his father’s wrath. Gratitude was, as Alfred Richard observed, not a quality Richard possessed. At the end of the festivities he launched an attack, first on Rancon’s castle at Pons, which held out for two months and showed no sign of capitulation. After Easter, Richard changed tack and left the siege in place, departing with part of his forces to reduce the castle of Richemond, which he tore down after only three days of siege. Emboldened by this, he attacked, took and destroyed four more castles of Rancon’s vassals before returning to Taillebourg. Alfred Richard recorded the events thus:
Richard attacked with his usual savagery. As soon as he was on the lands of the lord of Taillebourg, he tore up the vines, burned down isolated houses and laid waste whole villages, reducing the population to poverty and leaving them no alternative but to join one of the bands of routiers. Since he well knew the strong points and weaknesses of the castle from the time he had spent there, he installed his siege engines on the most vulnerable side. Geoffroy made a sortie [to destroy them], but was beaten back by Richard’s troops. In the violent combat, a horde of attackers and defenders poured through inside the walls before the gate could be closed, giving Geoffroy no choice but to retreat to the donjon. This was on 8 May. Because many of the garrison had been [killed or] taken prisoner and because provisions were short, a long defence was out of the question. So Geoffroy decided to negotiate. To avoid being taken prisoner, he yielded all his castles, especially the one at Pons. Richard had them razed to the ground, foundations and all.8
With Taillebourg taken, it was only a matter of time before the same ruthless tactics forced Count Vulgrin to yield the city of Angoulême and the fortress of Montignac, which Richard destroyed completely. The region of Saintonge now being pacified to his satisfaction, Richard dismissed his mercenaries, among them many Basques and men from Navarre, who halted outside Bordeaux on their way home to loot and burn everything outside the city walls.
Richard was now 22 years old. Travelling to England, he first made pilgrimage to the shrine of Becket at Canterbury, to cleanse his soul of all the blood he had spilled, then journeyed on to meet Henry. The old king welcomed him, confident that the violence and cruelty of Richard’s recent campaigns against his vassals must have alienated them to the point where he could safely be given the authority that went with the title of duke. Since Eleanor had never renounced her title as duchess, he allowed her to emerge from captivity to do so publicly, in Richard’s favour. Rumour had it that this indicated some kind of reconciliation between them, but she was afterwards again placed under house arrest, although possibly under less rigorous conditions as reward.
Feeling that he had not much longer to live, Louis VII decided to crown his son Philip Augustus on 15 August 1179, but the ceremony had to be delayed due to the young prince’s illness. Fearing that his son might die, Louis made pilgrimage to Becket’s tomb after being given a safe conduct by Henry II, who met him at Dover and escorted him in suitable pomp during the four days he spent in England. Philip Augustus’ subsequent recovery was yet another miracle attributed to Becket, and he was crowned in Reims Cathedral on 1 November in the presence of Richard, Young Henry and Geoffrey as his vassals for the continental possessions.
The coronation was not before time, for Louis was terminally ill and transferred power to Philip Augustus on 28 August 1180 when his son was still two months short of his fifteenth birthday. Less than three months after
wards, on 18 September, Louis VII died and his only son, Philip II Augustus, to give him his full title, became Henry II’s overlord for the continental possessions. He would prove a shrewd and cunning negotiator, quite unlike his gentle father.
Richard passed the next months in more or less continual warfare, criss-crossing Poitou and Aquitaine. In Alfred Richard’s words, he ‘ravaged the country terribly’.9 On occasion, their differences briefly put aside, he was accompanied by Henry II or Young Henry. Whenever lulls occurred, he betook himself with a small number of familiars to Talmont in the Vendée or another forest for equally bloody sport hunting deer and wild boar. Summoned to Henry II’s 1182 Christmas court at Caen, he found there his sister Matilda and her husband Henry the Lion of Saxony, exiled from Germany. They had arrived in France with a large entourage which Henry II, with his habitual parsimony, sent back to Germany so that he would not have to pay for their keep. More than a hundred of the Norman vassals and vavasours attended the celebrations. The troubadour Bertran de Born, as was his wont, grew bored with the civilities and began spreading gossip to liven things up. He was also present to enlist Richard’s and/or Henry II’s support in the long-running disputes with his brother and co-castellan of Autafòrt Castle. While some troubadours were content to compose odes to their ladies and others wrote tender romantic fantasies or moral treatises, Bertran could not resist flirting with Matilda and indiscreetly composed a risqué poem describing her bodily charms. Matilda was ‘not amused’ by this. He was on safer ground when praising combat and bloodshed as the heights of masculine virtue:
Tot jorn contendi e m’baralh,
M’escrim, e m’defen e m’tartalh
