by Douglas Boyd
E m’fon hom ma terra e la m’art
E m’fai de mos arbres essart …
[I’m always in the thick of the fray. / Skirmishing and fighting, that’s my way. / They waste my lands, leave my fields burnt brown. / Now they’re hacking my trees all down …]
Although the Church protested at the worst excesses, it seems that none in the ranks of the nobility gave a thought for the suffering of the peasants, the fruit of whose labour financed their violent lifestyle. Bertran again:
E platz mi quan li corredor fan las gens e l’aver fugir.
E platz mi quan vei après lor gran re d’armatz ensems venir.
E platz mi em mon coratge quan vei fortz chastels assetjatz
e los barris rotz et esfondratz …
[I love to see the skirmishers putting the common folk to flight. / A host of armed men riding them down is a grand sight. / It warms my heart to see great castles under siege / and ramparts gaping at the breach …]
The pleasures of riding with Richard en chevauchée did not buy the loyalty of Bertran, who had as little of that quality as Richard himself. Meeting Young Henry at the old king’s Christmas court of 1182 in Le Mans, Bertran’s devious mind contrived a plan in concert with Viscount Aymar of Limoges, one of many vavasours whom Richard’s recent campaigns had alienated. After Henry II demanded that both Richard and Geoffrey do homage to the Young King, Geoffrey did so, but Richard argued that he and his older brother were equals, being both conceived in the same parents’ bed. He agreed that it was right that the older should inherit their father’s kingdom of England whose crown he wore, in theory at least, and Normandy too, but argued that it was equally right that he, Richard, should enjoy absolute authority in his mother’s lands of Poitou and Aquitaine. Choosing his moment well, Young Henry, incited by Bertran, informed his father that the lords of Poitou and Aquitaine had asked him to depose Richard and replace him as their overlord.
To ascertain the truth of this, the old king sent Prince Geoffrey into the duchy to summon the chief vassals to his court at Mirebeau, not knowing that Young Henry had instructed Geoffrey at the same time to raise an armed force there against Richard, which was not difficult, given the recent history of the duchy. Geoffrey sent this force to Limoges, where Aymar was preparing to attack those vassals still loyal to Richard. Young Henry at the same time despatched his wife Marguerite to her half-brother’s court in Paris, to beg for his support in this campaign. Unfortunately, Bertran could not resist composing a sirventès in honour of this initiative which included the names of all the chief conspirators, from which the old king realised that the intention of Young Henry and Geoffrey was to kill Richard, so that they could share out his inheritance.
Determined to nip this defiance of his authority in the bud, he took a small band of knights and rode post-haste to Limoges, where the citizens in arms attacked them until an Anglo-Norman knight recognised Henry II’s standard and called off the attack. That evening Young Henry came to plead that it was a simple case of mistaken identity, but his father would not listen, having narrowly escaped being wounded when a sword or spear pierced his clothing in the attack. Young Henry retreated into the city, with his father taking shelter in the nearby castle of Aixe-sur-Vienne. News of the attack reached Richard in Poitou, prompting his immediate departure for the Limousin with a small band of horsemen, who rode for two days and nights without rest, arriving at the castle of Gorre, 14 miles south-west of Limoges, on 12 February, to find Viscount Aymar in the act of besieging it. At the sight of them, Aymar slipped away, making good his escape thanks to the horses of Richard’s men being exhausted by the long, hard journey. Travelling more slowly in pursuit of him, they ran into a band of mercenaries in Aymar’s pay, who suffered the full force of Richard’s wrath. Many were killed in combat, others taken prisoner, executed or blinded, or deliberately drowned in the River Vienne on Richard’s orders.
Aymar departed to wreak revenge on his neighbours who had refused to join the uprising, leaving Henry II to enter the city and besiege the fortress, inside which the desperate defenders were praying for divine intervention, having no illusions about their fate if the siege proved successful. Richard camped in the suburb of St Valérie, named for the saint whose bridegroom he was. There, the cold and torrential rain made life uncomfortable and prevented the transportation of the siege engines, without which the fortress could not be taken. Instead, he and Henry II had the new bridge over the Vienne demolished, which did not prevent more mercenaries, sent by Philip Augustus at Marguerite’s request, from arriving to devastate the surrounding countryside in order to deprive the besiegers of foraging.
The tactic succeeded. After a two-week siege surrounded by scorched earth, Henry II withdrew to find better foraging elsewhere, leaving a garrison in the monastery of St Augustin to protect the townsfolk from any reprisals by Young Henry. Hardly had he departed than he learned that Young Henry was exacting revenge, and returned to drive him back into the fortress. The Young King was now desperate. His allowance from Henry II had not been paid since the beginning of the revolt, so he was forced to borrow from the citizens of Limoges to pay his soldiers, who would otherwise have deserted his cause. This money swiftly being exhausted, he turned to looting churches and monasteries of their treasures, finally reaching the shrine of Rocamadour – today among the six most visited sites in France – not to pray but to steal its treasure.
It seemed to his contemporaries an obvious example of divine retribution that he fell gravely ill there on 25 May and took to his bed in the town of Martel, where he was tracked down by the bishop of Cahors and other churchmen, who found the Young King preparing himself for death, ready to confess and receive communion. Despite all Young Henry’s defiance, the old king was distraught at the news. Deterred by his counsellors from going in person to the deathbed scene, he sent instead Bishop Bertrand of Agen and Count Rotrou of La Perche. As proof that they came from Henry II, they brought a precious ring said to have belonged to Henry I, which Young Henry would recognise. The Young King kissed it, begged forgiveness of Christ and all the saints, dictated to the clerics a plea that his father would pardon not only him but also all the barons who had joined his revolt, and died on 11 June at the age of 27. Since his vow to go on crusade was unfulfilled, his faithful companion William the Marshal swore to go in his stead – and did.
The funeral cortège was a sorry sight, most of Young Henry’s supporters being terrified to confront the old king. The few knights who did accompany the corpse lacked even the money to buy food until a valuable horse was sold en route. Even so, one man had also to pawn his boots for food. Papal legates, who had tracked the old king down with letters from the pope threatening excommunication if the fighting were not stopped immediately, found their role overtaken by news of Young Henry’s death, relayed to Richard in the act of besieging the castle of Aixe, where the old king had taken refuge a few months earlier.
At the abbey of Grandmont, where the knights in the cortège sought to delay putrefaction in the midsummer heat by having the Young King’s body disembowelled, the bishop of Limoges refused permission for the entrails to be buried because Young Henry had died excommunicate for the crime of stealing ecclesiastical property. Only after the prior of Grandmont promised that he would ensure the old king made full retribution were the entrails buried and the rest of the corpse packed in salt and spices for despatch to Le Mans for eventual burial at Rouen in fulfilment of Young Henry’s deathbed wishes.
With the Young King dead, Aymar surrendered and was pardoned, leaving Bertran de Born to take refuge inside the stout walls of Autafòrt. When Richard arrived with Alfonso of Aragon to besiege the castle with siege engines sent by Henry II from Limoges, Bertran held out just one week before begging for mercy. His punishment was to see the castle awarded to his brother Constantin, whom he had previously swindled out of his half-share in it. Escorted to Henry II to be punished for fomenting the rebellion, Bertran instead moved him to tears by reciting two planhs
he had composed during the siege of Autafòrt as an insurance policy:
Si tuit li dolh e’lh plor e’l marrimen
e las dolors e’lh danh e’lh chaitivier
qu’òm anc auzis en est segle dolen
fossen emsems, semblaran tuit leugier
contra la mòrt del jove rei engles …
[If the sadness of all the grief and tears / the pain, suffering and misery / that afflict a man in a hundred years / were added up, they would weigh / less than the death of the Young English King …]
The ploy worked so well that the old king undid Richard’s award of Autafòrt to Constantin and ruled that the two equally bellicose brothers should share the property equally – a recipe for disaster. Satisfied that the power of the barons had been broken, he returned to Normandy, leaving behind the devastated tracts of the Limousin.
NOTES
1. Alfred Richard refers to this castle as ‘Le Puy de Castillon’.
2. Recueil, Vol 17, p. 23.
3. Ibid, Vol 13, pp. 166–7, 199.
4. Ibid, Vol 13, p. 171.
5. Ibid, Vol 13, p. 172.
6. Ibid, Vol 13, p. 172.
7. Ibid, Vol 13, p. 173.
8. Richard, A., Histoire, Vol 2, p. 198.
9. Ibid, p. 205.
7
Heir to the Empire
Their employer dead, Young Henry’s mercenaries raped and plundered their way north through the Berry until stopped by a band of vigilante knights and men-at-arms known as the Pacifiques, who had sworn to protect the region against their depredations. Trapped between them and the hostile people of the Limousin, no fewer than 10,500 mercenaries were killed, as were 1,500 ‘women of ill repute’ travelling with them, allegedly bedecked in jewellery looted from churches. Nor were the Young King’s mercenaries the only curse on the land. Dismissed by Henry II, a large band of routiers under a Brabanter commander named Mercadier spent the autumn plundering their way through the regions of Périgord and Pompadour. With them, sharing the spoils, rode Constantin de Born, whose sole redeeming characteristic was that he refused to loot churches.1 Étienne de Tournay, an abbé from Paris, was travelling through this country on a mission for Henry II shortly afterwards, and reported, ‘I saw everywhere towns consumed by fire, ruined dwellings and churches burned down and destroyed, so that places previously populated by men had become the haunt of savage beasts.’2
But Richard was untroubled. It was, to the twelfth-century noble’s way of thinking, inevitable that these terrible misfortunes should befall the common people. Henry II was far more moved by Young Henry’s death than the plight of those dispossessed, bereaved and suffering as a direct result of his depredations. So Richard celebrated his victory hunting in the forest of Talmont and holding open house for those who wished to congratulate him on becoming the heir presumptive to the throne of England, his previous familia or household knights augmented by those of all degrees seeking to hitch their wagons to a new star, all unaware that he had a nasty shock in store.
After Henry restored the county of Brittany to Geoffrey, minus a number of castles which he had garrisoned to ensure Geoffrey’s good behaviour, Richard was ordered to come to Le Mans in mid-October. There he was acquainted with the old king’s wishes: that John be given Poitou and Aquitaine and do homage for them to Richard, who would then be treated as Young Henry had been, as overlord, but a king without a kingdom. This plan had two flaws: unlike his dead brother, Richard had not been crowned as successor to the throne of England; also, his character was nowhere near as amenable as Young Henry’s.
He therefore requested a couple of days to take counsel with his vassals, which Henry II could hardly refuse. Riding post-haste from Le Mans, Richard returned to Poitiers and from there informed his father than he had no intention of yielding the slightest part of his inheritance from Eleanor to John or anyone else. Having other problems on his mind, Henry equipped Geoffrey and John with a small army to launch a new war against Richard, while he faced up to Philip Augustus’ demand for the return of the dowry allotted to Marguerite on her marriage to Young Henry now that she was a widow – in particular the castle of Gisors. Replying that this was out of the question because he had given Gisors to Eleanor, Henry had his imprisoned queen brought under escort to France to play the part of châtelaine – for which she was rewarded in mid-1184 with release from Old Sarum and permission to live in Winchester with her daughter Matilda of Saxony, who gave birth there to a son christened William shortly afterwards.
Philip was not amused and forced out of Henry the grant of an annual widow’s pension of 2,750 Angevin pounds for Marguerite, as well as the promise to finally marry off Richard’s betrothed Alais to any other of his sons, since he well knew that Richard had no intention of marrying her or anyone else. As always, Henry was playing several games at the same time and now consented to pay homage to Philip Augustus for all the continental possessions, which implied that none of the three surviving princes had any rights in France, except by his consent. That done, Henry held his Christmas court of 1183 at Le Mans.
The year 1184 resounded with the sounds of battle and the lamentations of the bereaved. Roaming at will over the Auvergne and Limousin were bands of mercenaries under Young Raymond, son of the count of Toulouse.3 Other routiers nominally in the service of princes John and Geoffrey, but actually commanded by Mercadier, re-invaded Viscount Aymar’s benighted lands while Richard burned and looted his way through Brittany in between pauses for the pleasure of the hunt and devotions in favourite religious communities pursued with fervour and frequently sealed with generous gifts. Although Henry returned to England in June, fighting in the continental possessions continued until November, when he ordered the three princes to appear before him in London. Richard made sufficient show of contrition and promises of obedience at the Christmas court in Windsor to be given permission to return to Poitou, where a number of important castles were garrisoned by his father and therefore unavailable to him.
He departed within the week, before Henry could change his mind. It seems that Richard had at last realised that his previous manner of ruling his vassals was making him nothing but enemies, and that it was time to enlist some supporters. There were already a number of free towns, where feudal laws did not apply. La Rochelle was one, recently enriched by an influx of Jews, who had their own quarter in the city, after Philip Auguste expelled them from the royal domains in 1182. Richard now created others, called villes neuves or villes franches because their inhabitants were enfranchised, owing no duty except forty days’ military service each year, when called upon. One such town was Saint-Rémy on the banks of the River Creuse at the borders of Poitou and Touraine, where the only tax to be paid was a registration fee of 5 sous per inhabitant. He was also more generous when travelling, renewing ancient privileges that had fallen into disuse, allowing monasteries and convents to gather firewood in the forests, or pasture pigs on the fallen nuts. Whether his chaplain Milo was influential in this, we do not know, but his name appears on many of the charters.
Henry played a new card, summoning Eleanor from England and ordering Richard at the Easter court of 1185 in Rouen to return all his titles to his mother, failing which Henry would ride with her at the head of a large army to retake possession of Poitou and Aquitaine by force. Richard’s inclination was to refuse, but his vassals talked him out of this, which placed him, as was Henry’s intention, in the position formerly occupied by Young Henry – a prince without lands, dependent on his father’s largesse. To deflect what Bishop Stubbs called Richard’s ‘restlessness’, Henry gave him a large sum of money to hire an army of Brabanter foot- and horse-soldiers with which to punish the county of Toulouse for Young Raymond’s support of the recent revolt. Attacked on two fronts when his other neighbour, Count Guillaume of Montpellier, took advantage of the moment, Raymond’s family was forced to flee from city to city, his pleas to Philip Augustus falling on deaf ears as his cities were devastated and seventeen castles captured by the coali
tion.
Richard had no idea what this humiliation of the future count of Toulouse was to cost him on his return from the Third Crusade in 1192. On the contrary, flushed with satisfaction at what seemed the successful conclusion on the invasion, he spent the winter of 1185/86 in Bordeaux, making many gifts and signing his charters as duke of Aquitaine, no matter that he had formally renounced the title.
Prince Geoffrey had unsuccessfully sought the county of Anjou as compensation for being deprived of Brittany. Despairing of ever coming into what he regarded as his birthright, he departed for Paris, to lay his complaints before Philip Augustus, who, as always, listened sympathetically to one of Henry’s discontented sons and honoured him with a great show of feasts and tournaments. In one of these, Geoffrey was unhorsed and trampled, not quite to death but so badly that he died from his injuries on 19 August 1186. He was buried in Notre Dame Cathedral. With only two sons left to inherit the vast Plantagenet Empire and John having shown in Ireland that he could not hold two pennies together, let alone the vast spread of territory amassed by his parents on both sides of the Channel, Henry made a sort of peace with Richard, congratulating him for the successful campaign against Toulouse.
Whether Henry showed any grief at the loss of a son he had never much cared for or about is unknown. What did exercise him after the death was Philip’s demand that Geoffrey’s daughter, called Constance after her mother, be given into his keeping until she could be married – as was normal under feudal custom. Henry had no intention of allowing Brittany to pass into the hands of a husband for the girl found by Philip, but agreed to meet when he came to France after his Christmas court at Bedford. The meeting failing to find any common ground, a truce was agreed upon, to last until midsummer – the purpose of which on both sides was to prepare for an all-out war. In this, Richard came into his own.
