The Normans and Their World

by Jack Lindsay

  William of Malmesbury stressed his continence, his moderation with food and drink, his dislike of warlike solutions, but adds, ‘We have learned from those who were well informed that he was led by female blandishments, not for the gratification of incontinency, but for the sake of issue.’ He was of middling stature, with black hair scanty near the forehead, ‘his eyes mildly bright, his chest brawny, his body fleshy; he was facetious in proper season, nor did multiplicity of business make him less pleasant when mixing in society’. Henry of Huntingdon states that he was pre-eminent for great sagacity, foresight, eloquence, success in war, and wealth; but ‘others take a different view’, seeing him as greedy, ‘since, though his wealth was great, imitating his progenitors, he impoverished the people by taxes and exactions, entangling them in the toils of informers’, as cruel, since ‘he plucked out the eyes of his kinsman the earl of Mortain in captivity, though the horrid deed was unknown till death revealed the king’s secrets’, and as wanton, ‘perpetually enslaved by female seductions’.[343] Suger of St Denis tells us that he was so scared of his chamberlains conspiring that he frequently changed his bed and increased his guards, and had a shield and sword set ready near him at night.

  He married Eadgyth, daughter of Malcolm of Scotland and Margaret (the Aetheling’s sister), in an effort to conciliate the English, strengthen his dynastic claims, and broaden the basis of his rule. Anselm had to carry out investigations to disprove the rumour that the girl had taken nun’s vows; but the charge was revived later by Stephen so as to bastardize Henry’s children, Matilda, who married the German emperor, and William, who was drowned in 1120. Having begotten this pair, Henry returned to his mistresses and Eadgyth turned to religious matters.

  By the end of a year he had received an oath of allegiance from his subjects; at Christmas 1100 the French king’s heir visited him at Westminster. But Robert was back in Normandy, relieved that Rufus’ death had saved him from meeting a huge debt. He took over all the duchy except the castles with Henry’s garrisons. He had strengthened his position by marrying a woman whose father was grandson of Tancred of Hauteville and nephew of both Robert Guiscard and Roger of Sicily. He soon found out which barons were disaffected and began building up his partisans in England. In February 1101 Flambard escaped from the Tower and joined him. (He had got the guards drunk and gone off with his aged mother and a boatful of valuables.)[344] By July Robert had his fleet mustered at the mouth of the Bresle. Henry did his best to prepare. He renewed the traditional money fief to the Flemish count, and this time we know what it entailed: aid to Henry against all men apart from the count’s French overlord; the provision of mercenaries on specified occasions — 1000 knights if England were invaded or had a serious revolt; each year the same number for Normandy and half as many for Maine, if Henry asked for them. If the count had to fight under his liege lord against Henry, he would take as small a contingent as possible, ten knights, leaving the others with their paymaster. (The treaty was renewed in 1103 and 1110.) Henry sent ships against Robert, but they deserted. Robert, outflanking the army at Pevensey, landed on 20 July at Portsmouth. But Henry had raised so large a force that when the two armies met at Alton, (Hampshire), Robert was daunted and a settlement was arranged without bloodshed. Henry kept England but paid Robert a yearly pension of £3,000; Robert took all Normandy but Henry’s castle at Domfort. Each ruler was to pardon his faithless vassals and make the other his heir. Henry did not keep his word about the pardons. He shrewdly used legal pretexts to punish one rebel after another. By Easter 1102 he felt he could deal with the strongest one, Robert of Bellême. When the latter failed to appear in the royal court, Henry marched against him, reduced his strongholds, and advanced on Shrewsbury. Robert surrendered. He and his brother lost their English honours, and Henry even confiscated the lands of the Norman monastery of Almeneches, where the abbess was Robert’s sister. (Bellême was a ‘man intolerable for the barbarity of his manners and inexorable to the faults of others’, full of craft and dissimulation, so that when those who knew him saw him affable and mild, they were terrified. ‘On account of some trifling fault of the father, he blinded his godchild, who was his hostage, tearing out the little wretch’s eyes with his accursed nails.’)

  As Robert of Normandy proved incapable of controlling the duchy, Henry set out cautiously and astutely to supplant him, gaining supporters, sending in agents, harbouring exiles, and using all his diplomatic skill to isolate the duke. In the end a pitched battle (a rare thing in those days) was fought in September 1106 at Tinchebrai with decisive victory for Henry. Edgar the Aetheling was among the prisoners and was at once pardoned. Henry proceeded to subordinate Brittany and beat back the French, thus enlarging his territory. A second French war was provoked by his nephew Theobald of Blois, who ambushed and seized a friend of King Louis. Henry defeated Louis at Brémule, and though Louis again invaded Normandy, Henry did well from the peace negotiated by Pope Calixtus II at the council of Rheims (October 1119). His influence reached from Flanders to Anjou, and he controlled Boulogne, Brittany, Bellême and Maine. His nephew ruled Blois and Chartres.

  But the drowning of his one legitimate son on 25 November 1120 in the wreck off Harfleur did much to break down his system. His rivals were stirred up afresh: Fulk of Anjou, back from the east, demanded the return of Maine and began a revolt in 1123; other revolts stirred in Normandy itself. Despite his military and diplomatic measures, which even drew the emperor Henry V into invading France and marching on Rheims, his scheme was defeated by the rallying of the people to Louis. His second marriage was childless. He resorted to getting the barons and bishops to accept Matilda as his heir. But there was a portent of trouble when his nephew Stephen of Blois successfully challenged his (Henry’s) bastard Robert of Gloucester for precedence in taking the oath. The French king retorted by calling on his barons to support William Clito’s claim to Normandy, by marrying William to his wife’s half-sister, and by enfeoffing him with the Vexin and its castles. But Baldwin IV was murdered on 2 March 1127 as he prayed in a church at Bruges, and several claimants for Flanders appeared. William Clito belonged to the senior line; and when Louis VI marched into Flanders, the barons and most towns accepted William as count. But he became unpopular through his opposition to the interests of the merchant class, and had to fight various rivals including Stephen of Blois. Louis intervened and Henry then invaded France. William Clito died of a wound near the end of July 1128. Thierry of Alsace, grandson of Robert le Frison, became the strongest claimant and was recognized as count; Henry could now scheme for an alliance of Flanders, Normandy and Anjou. To settle his uneasy relations with Anjou, he proposed to marry Matilda to the heir there, Geoffrey Plantagenet. But Matilda, a wilful woman of twenty-six, disliked marrying a lad ten years younger; the English barons had not been consulted; the Norman barons abhorred the idea of an Angevin overlord; the French king feared the alliance, especially when Thierry of Flanders married William Clito’s divorced wife, Sybil of Anjou. Geoffrey soon threw out his overbearing wife Matilda; Henry tried once more to arrange for her to be his heir, then decided to send her back to Geoffrey, who had asked for her return. On 5 March 1133 she bore a son, later Henry II of England; next year she bore a second son. When Geoffrey demanded the homage of the Norman barons and was refused, he made war on Normandy. In the midst of this confused situation Henry died on 1 December in the forest of Lyons, having eaten too many lampreys after a hard day’s hunting.

  He left a number of difficult problems for his successor. By marrying Matilda to the count of Anjou he had greatly provoked the French king; for the combination of Normandy, Anjou, Maine and Touraine was something that French rulers had long dreaded. At the same time he increased the distrust of Anjou and Blois for one another, since Theobald and Stephen of Blois were both first cousins of Matilda. Stephen had on his side the advantage that his wife was grand-daughter of Margaret, sister of Edgar the Aetheling. So he combined in his ancestry both the Norman and the English royal lines. But Hen
ry had done his best to ensure that Matilda would be accepted as his heir. She had to face the great obstacle that she was a woman, and it was unprecedented for a woman thus to succeed her father. At first the position was indeed unclear: whether her claim was to be vested in herself or to pass through her to her husband — though he might resign in favour of his son. For the barons to ignore her claim after an act of homage was to commit perjury, the very sin imputed to Harold by William I. Stephen’s only good way round her claim then was by means of papal approval; and this approval Stephen got. The barons in Normandy wanted to recognize Duke Theobald IV of Blois and Champagne, but it was Stephen, the younger brother and the greatest landowner in England, who crossed the Channel quickly with a few resolute knights. Pushing aside the garrisons of Dover and Canterbury, he entered London. The Norman trading interest there seems to have supported him, and he had a powerful friend in his brother, Henry of Blois, bishop of Worcester, through whom he gained the castle and treasure at Winchester and a quick coronation from the primate. Theobald archbishop of Canterbury, made no resistance.

  Henry I had built up royal power in quite a different way from that of William and Rufus. Though he was involved in wars from 1109 until his death in 1135, the main characteristics of his reign were the extension and strengthening of the administrative, fiscal, and legal systems. Though in part he was driven by the need to finance his continental schemes and ventures, the bent of his mind was towards such tasks. He and his officers, who were often drawn from professional classes of low birth, did their best to extend the centralized rule of law. But their motive was profit, and in fact there was much legal and financial oppression. Thus, Henry created great areas of ‘forest’ subject to special laws, and increased his revenue from the host of fines inflicted for special offences. In effect he drove the system to its limits and ensured trouble for his successor. In his Charter of Liberties he insisted on concessions to the under-tenants, which the magnates were not to take advantage of:

  To the knights who do service with hauberks for their lands, I concede their demesne ploughs exempt of all taxes and all works by my grant, so that, relieved of a great burden, they may furnish themselves so well with horses and arms that they may be properly equipped and prepared for my service and for the defence of the kingdom.[345]

  Such provisions gave him the loyalty of the poor knights, which could be used against the magnates. Florence of Worcester tells us how in 1101 the ‘common knights’ of his bishops stayed loyal to him against the rebellious magnates. In a discussion after Bellême’s revolt in 1102, the latter declared it would be dangerous to draw up a peace which left Henry in too strong a position. At news of this ‘three thousand rustic knights’, pagensium milites, protested and warned the king of the lords’ measures. Henry in fact continued Rufus’s policy, but without its boisterous note and its irreligious side and with a consistent drive of greed. The Peterborough Chronicle complained in 1124 that ‘the man who had any goods was deprived of them by harsh gelds and harsh lawcourts’. The same accusations were made against other kings trying to carry out a centralizing policy: Philip Augustus in France, Henry the Lion in Germany; but that does not disprove charges of brutality and injustice. Eadmer gives an account of the merciless methods used by Henry’s agents in collecting the monies needed to pay for his wars:

  They showed no regard for piety or pity; but as persons coming from England assured us, extortion, frightful and cruel, beat down like a raging storm upon all. Then you might see, so they reported, those who in fact had nothing to give, driven out from their cottages or the doors of their houses torn away and carried off, and themselves left open to be plundered of everything. Or their paltry bits of furniture would be taken and they reduced to abject poverty, or at any rate ground down and tormented with some form of wretchedness or another. But against those who seemed to have everything, certain new and carefully thoughtout forms of confiscation were applied and in this way, as they dared not institute a suit in their own defence against the king of the land, their possessions were taken and they themselves plunged into serious hardship.

  He adds that many similar practices were used by both Rufus and William; he is perhaps exaggerating, as an aggrieved ecclesiastic, but there must have been much violent and overbearing behaviour by the tax collectors.

  *

  Under Stephen the inner conflicts of the Anglo-Norman state, partly masked and held down in the phases of conquest and consolidation, began to emerge and threatened to destroy it; his reign therefore deserves a closer attention than those of Rufus or Henry I. The government was still at root a personal matter: the system imposed by a strong king to maintain his position as overlord of the barons, master of the armed forces, and controller of the main revenues of the kingdom. There was little government machinery to carry on by itself, so the failure of the direct male line after Henry I was liable to beget a crisis in the situation of England and Normandy.

  The crisis duly came, speeded and intensified by Stephen’s character and attitudes. He lacked the drive for supremacy that in different ways had dominated William and his two sons. He saw himself as a feudal noble with a primacy over the others, but essentially acting on a contractual basis; he did not assert his position as overlord to whom the tenants-in-chief had to pay homage. Hence his stress on the elective principle in the kingship: a stress also necessitated by the fact that he had stepped over his elder brother in grasping the crown. The nobles thus came to look on their relation to him as feudal in the simple sense: something that they could terminate if he went beyond what they regarded as the limits of his role. He took the same attitude to the church as to the barons; when it declared that he had broken his contract, he merely sent an envoy to plead his case. Matilda on the other hand stood firm on the hereditary principle, as if the kingdom was a bit of property that her father had the right to bequeath as he wished. She had no hope of making an effective claim unless she had a party of English nobles supporting her; and as Stephen’s methods went on increasing discontent and disorder, such a party did in fact form. From 1137 her half-brother the earl of Gloucester was working on her behalf.

  Stephen was a good soldier, chivalric, and far more likeable than Rufus or Henry, Matilda or her son. His disadvantage was not weakness, but the attitudes we have outlined. At the outset he had much on his side. The church, we saw, rallied to him, largely because of his powerful brother Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester; and the high officials acquiesced, glad to see the interregnum ended. But very soon his policy of concessions was encouraging the discontented or greedy nobles and stimulating them to press for more. He increased the number of earls and found himself dependent on Flemish mercenaries; his resources began to fail him and he debased the coinage. By 1136 his weakening grip on the magnates was reflected in such events as the seizure of Norwich castle by the earl of Norfolk and the pillaging of Exeter castle by a local lord on the grounds that there was talk of the king’s death. Next year he visited Normandy and irritated or stirred up the barons there as he had done in England. A threat to northern England was bought off; he gave Cumberland to Henry, son of king David of Scotland. Such an act could only lead to further demands. When Henry asked to be earl of Northumbria also, Stephen demurred. The Scots harried the border shires in early 1138 and in the summer made an invasion; the aged archbishop of York had to take the lead in organizing resistance. The Scots were beaten at the Battle of the Standard. Yet next year Stephen, hoping to gain Prince Henry’s help against rebellious barons, handed over Northumbria after all.

  To make things worse, he upset the administration by becoming suspicious of the powerful family of Le Poer. Roger of Salisbury, justiciar under Henry I, had carried on with the office, with his son as chancellor and two nephews as treasurer and bishop of Ely, and bishop of Lincoln. Stephen now bade them surrender their castles, the last thing they wanted to do in such an uncertain situation. When they resisted they were imprisoned. But, defending themselves behind their ecclesiastical priv
ileges, they drew the church into conflict with Stephen. They had him cited at a council held in Winchester and used the threat of excommunication. He had thrown away their support; when war came, the bishop of Ely held Ely castle for the rebels.

  The ecclesiastical exponents of reform in England were now stimulated to take full advantage of the king’s difficulties. To conciliate them, he granted a charter setting out the church’s privileges and in effect abdicating from any royal control of the church: ‘Justice and power over ecclesiastical persons and all the clergy and their goods and the distribution of ecclesiastical property were to be in the hands of the bishops.’ Laymen too were to come under the church’s jurisdiction in actions dealing with the sacrament of marriage and the probate of wills. The church was brought near the point of being accepted as a self-contained corporation, free from royal controls. Nothing like this had happened before in the medieval world. For the first time the church had the full right to appoint all bishops and abbots; church councils could be held without the supervision of royal representatives; and prelates seem no longer to have been obliged to pay homage to the king — an oath of fealty sufficed. All this meant was that the pope was able to take over all the rights which the king had given up. He welcomed English bishops at Rome, and the legates whom he freely appointed controlled the church in England, not the king.

  In practice this situation also meant that the papacy was able to intrude in the political sphere and ensure that its directives were carried out there. The very existence of the kingship as an independent organization was threatened. Thus, in 1148 Stephen exiled archbishop Theobald, who had been abbot of Bec, for attending a papal council contrary to royal orders; but he had to retract at the threat of interdiction. He dearly wanted to have his own son Eustace crowned during his own lifetime; but the pope forbade him and Theobald slipped out of England so that he could not be compelled to take part in any proceedings. A new type of churchman was coming up, not at all like the lowborn servants (such as the Le Poers) who were rewarded for services by being given bishoprics. Stephen’s own brother, Henry of Blois, who had helped him so much in gaining the throne, now turned on him, perhaps offended at Theobald being made archbishop. As papal legate, he was able to wield a great measure of power in his own person; he called the council at Winchester which so embarrassed Stephen. We may add that he had built six castles for himself and had no intention of surrendering them.