by David Boyle
Europe at this time was still a continent of forests, monasteries and villages, where the social structure was rigidly tied to the seasons and to the duties owed by serfs on the lord's land or in military service. It was a period when coinage was still scarce and most payments were tied to these complex feudal traditions, and made in time or crops or service — with strange pre-modern measurements of acceptability. Peasants had the right to take home as much hay from the lord's land at the end of a day as they could carry on a scythe handle; a hen must be accepted as payment in tithes if it was healthy enough to be scared into jumping a garden fence.*
This was a Europe without meaningful unemployment, where serfs farmed about thirty acres each, but where all land and property was lent to them by their lord, who — theoretically at least — could marry them off to whomever he liked. It was a Europe teeming with wildlife and fish, where the forests belonged to royalty and were the subject of fearsome laws to protect the hunting in them. It also had a common culture of Christianity mixed with pagansuperstition. There were about 13,000 monks in England alone, increasingly unpopular among the laity for their failure to keep to their own principles. It was a continent where travel was dangerous and unusual for anyone who was not wealthy, relying on the endlessly patched road infrastructure laid down a millennium before by the Romans, but also where the ruling classes could still travel freely and communicate in universal Latin.
This broad culture, with the beginnings of an explosion of trade, had ushered in a new kind of civilization, because Richard had also been born at a rare moment of some tolerance and humanism that seemed to challenge those rigid medieval certainties in favour of travel, pilgrimage and debate. This extraordinary combination of awakenings and innovations seven centuries after the fall of Rome —in sculpture, history, philosophy, scholarship and literature — is known as the Twelfth-century Renaissance, but it defies definition or explanation. 'Greece had the first renown in chivalry and learning,' wrote one of Blondel's fellow trouvères, Chretien de Troyes. 'Then came chivalry to Rome, and the heyday of learning, which is now come to France.'
Why did some of the giants of European civilization — philosophers like John of Salisbury, churchmen like Abbot Suger (the originator of Gothic architecture) and Bernard of Clairvaux, writers like Geoffrey of Monmouth, historians like William of Malmesbury, architects like William of Sens, writers like Chretien de Troyes — all emerge within a generation or so? Why did the trickle of wandering scholars at the beginning of the century, and the few pioneering traders, turn into a flood to the trading centres and universities by the end? Was the emergence of pilgrimages and widespread coinage the cause or the result of the slow decline of feudal power? It is impossible to know for certain, but it is clear that one of the key figures at the start of this revolution was the extraordinary theologian and teacher Peter Abelard.
Abelard was years — maybe centuries — ahead of his time. He was the inspiration for philosophies as diverse as Protestantism and existentialism. He was also enormously influential, especially to the generation who flocked to the new universities of Europe. Small, dark-haired and sensitive, he came from Brittany, the eldest son of a knight who gave up the chance of following in his father's footsteps to be a scholar (as we will see, Blondel may have followed the same route). But there was something about him that courted controversy; he seemed quite unable to stop himself.
Abelard was a success from the moment he started teaching, in 1113, at the age of thirty-four at the monastery of Sainte-Genevieve in Paris, one of the institutions that were merging together in Richard's day as the University of Paris. Something about his trenchant contempt for authority and his revolutionary approach to theology — putting love, reason and conscience at the heart of it, rather than the old authority and discipline — drew students from all over Europe. They christened him the 'Indomitable Rhinoceros'.
His classes attracted many hundreds, who squeezed into crowded rooms to listen to him. But as a consequence other teachers in the city, who were paid by their students in those days, suffered and they conspired to drive him away. This was hardly Abelard's fault, but he was still his own worst enemy. When he went from Paris to Laon to study under the revered Anselm of Canterbury, Abelard was damning about his teacher. 'If anybody came knocking at his door in perplexity about some problem, he would go away still more perplexed,' he said. On moving instead to the monastery of Saint-Denis near Paris, home of the fearsome Abbot Suger, he took the opportunity to question the truth of their story of St Denis. When he returned to Paris a few years later — once more attracting thousands of eager students into the city — his crowd had to be accommodated on the Left Bank of the Seine, thanks to the Abbot of Sainte-Genevieve, and that is where the university remains to this day.* There he fell in love, married and had a child with the niece of a powerful member of the cathedral chapter, the famous Heloi'se, and there, as a result, some paid thugs cornered him one evening, beat and castrated him.
Abelard was not just a controversialist. There was something about his lightness of touch, his laughing contempt for pomposity, his wit and his prodigious memory — as well as that warm interest in human beings — that thrilled the generations of students who came after him. 'For by doubting we come to inquiry, and by inquiring we perceive the truth,' he said. This was a dramatically modern statement, and light of another kind. What made Abelard's thinking so revolutionary, and so contemporary for modern audiences, was his emphasis on what we intend to do: our intention is more important than whether we have broken God's law unwittingly. He refuted the idea that we have a bloodless, legal relationship with God. For Abelard, what counted was inner conviction and conscience, not feudal duties to heaven. So just as the children of serfs all over Western Europe were scraping together enough brand-new silver coins to buy their way out of feudal obligations and escaping to the newrly enfranchised towns, Abelard was rejecting the old feudal relationship with God and starting again as an individual. This was not the medieval God of dread and fear, but the God of love and reason.
He even called his book about ethics Sic et Non (Yes and No), as if Christians or vassals had any such choice. The key lay in the subtitle, Know Yourself which became the motto for the age. Abelard's teaching was like a breath of fresh air, but it was also dangerous. If conscience was important, after all, how could you tell heresy from truth? So it was hardly surprising that there was a reaction against him and his teaching. Abelard's great contemporary Bernard of Clairvaux — the main influence behind the Second Crusade — persuaded the canons to give him permission to preach at Notre-Dame in Paris. Tall, skeletally thin, with translucent skin and a shock of white hair, Bernard was a great subduer of his own and other people's flesh, and he preached a devastating sermon. There was no mention of Abelard by name, but everyone knew to whom he was referring, just as they later knew who his phrase 'hydra of wickedness' described.
The son of a Burgundian noble, Bernard was made Abbot of Clairvaux at the early age of twenty-four. His reputation was suchthat he could speak directly to the most powerful princes on earth, looking them straight in the eye. His only romantic encounter with women ended when he jumped into a pool of freezing water and waited for the excitement to die down. He really had no sympathy for a man like Abelard who allowed his name to become a byword for erotic love.* 'I would that his poisonous pages were still lying hid in bookcases, and not read at the crossroads,' he said. 'His books fly abroad . . . over cities and castles, darkness is cast instead of light . . . his books have passed from nation to nation, and from one kingdom to another people.' Bernard was horrified that the young intellectuals of Europe were flocking to Paris to breathe the free air where Abelard taught, criticizing and questioning everything. And he was appalled that, thanks to Abelard, the city was filling with students who were snobbish and superior, lording it over peasants and monks alike, breaking every taboo they could, even going so far as to dissect pigs to find out how the body worked.
A
belard came face to face with his nemesis for the last time at Whitsun 1140 in Sens Cathedral. As he walked in, prepared for the challenge of an intellectual joust with Bernard, he could see the usual crowds of students waiting, but also the professors -many of whom were still furious with him for the loss of their fee-paying pupils. Alongside them were the senior dignitaries of the Church and — in pride of place — King Louis himself It looked disturbingly like a court of inquisition. He may also have been told, as he prepared for his dramatic entry, that Bernard had taken the precaution of getting a condemnation of Abelard in advance from Pope Innocent II.
So Abelard lost his nerve, turned on his heel and fled. His appeal to the Pope fell on deaf ears: Innocent was just then lighting the fires in Rome that would burn Abelard's books. Abelard took refuge in the monastery of Cluny and died not long afterwards.'By his coming, he enriched us with wealth beyond all gold,' said Cluny's abbot, Peter the Venerable. Peter was steeped in the true Renaissance spirit of the age: he had, for example, just commissioned scholars in Toledo to translate the Koran into Latin.
When Bernard turned next on Abelard's ally Gilbert de la Porree, Gilbert was better prepared, arriving at the hearing with armed scholars and monks lined up behind him. This time, Rome reprimanded Bernard, who sent Gilbert a mollifying note suggesting that they might get together to discuss some points arising from the writings of St Hilary — and in the process laid himself open to an academic gibe. If you want a full understanding of the subject, said Gilbert, I suggest you give yourself a few years' exposure to a good liberal education. For the time being, the new academics had won.
What had divided the two great intellectual giants of the generation before Richard was partly Abelard's emphasis on the importance of God-given natural urges, such as to eat or to have sex. It might not always be right to follow those urges, he said, but it would be wrong to extinguish them altogether. Bernard, on the other hand, devoted his life to extinguishing his own urges completely, and as many of those he perceived in other people as possible. They were also divided by the key social issue of the age: what should young men aspire to? This is an issue for almost every generation, but it was especially pressing now that the practice of primogeniture — leaving the father's whole estate to the eldest son — left younger sons without a role or inheritance.
In fact, many of them spent their time carousing. Henry the Young King, for example, enraged his father in 1172 by refusing to join him for Christmas and instead inviting all the knights in Normandy called William for a feast.* They could devote their lives to tournaments, like William the Marshal and his friends — a brutal but potentially lucrative business, and forbidden by the Church. They could join the new intellectuals, the youths then flocking to universities, or they could take to the road as troubadours. Noneof these were part of Bernard's plans. He criticized the scholars for what he called their 'shameless curiosity', and urged them to flee from Paris to save their souls. Instead, he devoted his life to providing solutions that could occupy the young men of Europe in his burgeoning network of monasteries or on crusade. It was good for their souls, as he saw it, and it kept them out of trouble. Abelard seemed to be undermining his great work.
Yet, despite their differences, Abelard and Bernard were people of their own unique time, symptoms and causes of the spirit of the age. Both agreed on the importance of tolerance to Jews, though this was a controversial issue in the Church throughout the medieval period. Christ had Jewish blood, said Bernard. Both were committed to the new cult of the Virgin Mary, another idea that was reinforced by crusaders drifting home via Byzantium. Both were convinced that the core of the individual was love — the first medieval generation to think in those terms, just as the society around them was filtering ideas of romance down from translations of the Roman poet Ovid. Abelard's theology was based on the effect of the crucifixion on the conscience of individuals — 'that we may fulfil all things more by love of him than by fear'.
Both were also convinced of the importance of nature. 'You will find more things in forests than in books; the trees, the stones will teach you what the masters cannot,' said Bernard. 'Do you think that you cannot suck honey from a stone, oil from the hardest rock? Do the mountains not distil sweetness? Are the hills not flowing with milk and honey? There is so much I could tell you I can hardly stop myself.'
Bernard's vision of the crusades was to win Jerusalem for Christianity, but he also saw them as a way of occupying the energies of rich, bored young men. Yet if they survived, these young men stumbled back from the Holy Land with dangerous ideas. Maybe they had experienced the luxuries of Byzantium at first hand, or heard the ideas of the pagan Greek philosophers or Roman poets, locked away in Arab translations for a millennium and suddenly bursting into Western Europe again. Maybe they had been exposed to Arab numerals — even the revolutionary symbol zero — whichwere slowly filtering into Western Europe and would eventually allow merchants to throw away their abacuses, undertake complex business exchanges and carry out calculations on paper for all to see. Maybe they returned with their eyes opened to new ideas about love and women.
We should not try to interpret these ideas in a modern light. Women were not demanding rights or anything like them, and yet somehow the intractably male, brutal, heroic facade of European civilization was beginning to crack. This was a culture that had been based entirely on tales of warriors off to war, from Beowulf to Roland, and a religion based entirely on judgement, fatherhood and masculinity. But thanks partly to ideas from the East, and from Abelard, there was a softer spirit abroad. St Bernard had championed the cult of the Virgin; most of the delicate new Gothic cathedrals were dedicated to her in an age when — just a generation before — the only woman in the religious firmament had been Eve, complete with apple and serpent.
There were also the published love letters from Heloise to Abelard, revealing a whole new female sexual and romantic power:
God knows that I never wanted anything from you, but you yourself; desiring, not what was yours, but you alone. I did not look for the bonds of marriage nor any dowry, nor did I even consider my wishes or desires, but I endeavoured to satisfy yours, as you well know . . . I call God to witness that if Augustus, the governor of the whole world, offered me the honour of marriage and granted me the entire earth to be mine for ever, I would esteem it dearer and more noble to be called your prostitute than his empress.
There were other new ideas emerging, such as the heresy based on purity known as Catharism, which was now taking hold across the south of France and regarded men and women as equal. There was even the heretical idea, borrowed from the Gnostics almost a thousand years before, that Jesus' women disciples were closer to him than the men; that it had been the women who found him first after the resurrection, only to be relegated later by the Church. This was the root of secretive cults, not just of the Virgin Mary, but of the reformed prostitute Mary Magdalene. It was also the generation when the mysterious black madonnas began appearing in churches all over Western Europe, venerated as having special power, and it has been suggested that they were somehow linked to the Magdalene cult.
There are connections here between the feminine roots of Catharism, courtly love and the culture of the troubadours and trouvères, though these are now impossible to unravel (the black madonnas were known, and probably not by coincidence, as 'dames la trouver). But we do know that, at the heart of all these shifting ideas and moods about the female spirit, was Eleanor of Aquitaine and Poitiers, where Richard was growing up.
Something happened between Eleanor and her second husband in 1167, when Richard was ten, that was to make itself felt across Europe. It is more than eight centuries ago now, so we will never know exactly what lay behind it, but it may well have had something to do with Henry's mistress Rosamund Clifford. Rosamund was almost certainly the daughter of Walter de Clifford, who lived in Bredelais on the border between England and Wales and who joined Henry on his campaign there in 1165. Henry used to infuria
te his entourage by his failure to keep to his plans and his habit of making unscheduled stops, and one of these was probably at the Clifford castle.
Rosamund was little more than a girl then, but beautiful and compliant enough to inspire an affair with the king that would last until her death a decade later in Godstow Priory, outside Oxford. 'Fair Rosamund', as she came to be called, provided potent material for poets and chroniclers in later centuries, including tales of a secret maze in Henry's park in Woodstock and the murderous machinations of a jealous wife.* Eleanor was then forty-five, and it may have been that her formidable self-belief and awareness ofher own charms had begun to unravel a little in the face of such a youthful rival. It is hard to believe that Eleanor reacted only to the infidelity. There had been other mistresses, and she had known all about infidelity in her own extraordinary past. Maybe there was just something about Rosamund.
At Christmas 1167, at the royal palace in Argentan in Normandy, Eleanor told her husband that she wanted to go home to Aquitaine, which was then on the brink of revolt over Henry's harsh rule. To avoid open scandal, Henry escorted her to Poitiers himself, together with her entourage of sixty aristocratic women. By the following Christmas, which she spent in what had been her troubadour grandfather's palace — together with Richard and her younger children — it was clear that she was not intending to return. The next six and a half years with his mother in Poitiers were enormously influential for Richard. Aquitaine was where his heart remained, and it was to secure the southern borders of Aquitaine that he eventually — nearly a quarter of a century later — married Berengaria of Navarre. At the age of fourteen, he was installed as Duke of Aquitaine in ceremonies in Poitiers and Limoges, wearing a silk tunic and gold coronet, and invested with the ring of Limoges' patron saint, St Valerie.
