A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  Whether a thinker such as Anselm was ideally suited to the administration of a great church such as Canterbury is quite another matter. Even as abbot of Bec, he had struggled to supply the daily needs of his monks in food and drink, and had been so poor, at one point, that he had attempted to improvise a seal for his abbey by re-using two parts of a silver mould. The two parts being of different sizes, this experiment did not succeed. At Gloucester in 1093, Anselm had literally to be forced to accept office as archbishop, with the sick King urging on his attendant bishops to force the pastoral staff into Anselm’s hands. Shortly afterwards, Anselm did homage to the King for the lands of his archbishopric. Virtually every aspect of this process – the King’s nomination, the refusal of any voice to the monks of Canterbury Cathedral who in theory had the right freely to elect their archbishops, the insistent investiture with the pastoral staff, and the taking of homage by the King – was contrary to the new spirit of canon law which the popes, since Gregory VII, had been prepared to risk international warfare to promote. All might still have been well had Rufus done as was expected and died at the scene of Anselm’s promotion. Instead, Rufus almost immediately began to feel better.

  Far from expressing gratitude to Anselm as God’s agent who had brought about this recovery, Rufus seems to have felt only annoyance that he now had to deal with so other-worldly and conscience-ridden an archbishop. But Anselm did some things of which the King would heartily have approved. For the first time, for example, he began to emphasize the particular authority of Canterbury over not just the bishops of southern England but the whole British Church, including the bishops of Wales and, more surprisingly, those in Ireland. Lanfranc had gone to great lengths to emphasize his own superiority, termed his ‘primacy’, over the other English archbishropic at York. Anselm not only maintained this claim to primacy but assumed the right to act as papal legate in England, even though he had not as yet obtained recognition for his election from the Pope, and even though the Pope sought to appoint a legate of his own to regulate the affairs of the English Church. In all of this, Anselm’s actions ran directly counter to the most recent tendencies in papal thinking.

  The papal line was increasingly one of obedience and order, with the Church of Rome now placed at the centre of all European Churches. A chain of command extending via the archbishops to the bishops and the simple clergy, like the spokes radiating out from the centre of a wheel, with the hierarchy closest to the hub supplying commands to the order directly below, would ensure what in modern managementspeak would be termed ‘line management’. Should any of his subordinates disobey the Pope, or should the Pope himself wish to discipline those at a lower level of the chain of command, then the Pope was entitled, as Christ’s chief representative on earth and as the direct successor to St Peter, to intervene, to control each level of the structure, and if necessary to stir up the lower clergy, even to stir up the faithful laity, against bishops or archbishops who disobeyed his commands. Anselm’s vision derived from a more conservative world, in which each of the great Churches of Europe, be they archbishoprics, bishoprics or abbeys like his former home at Bec, possessed a special dignity of its own, to be handed down intact and undiminished from one generation to the next.

  Not surprisingly therefore Anselm found himself at odds both with the King and with the Pope. The result was two extended periods of exile, the first from 1097 to 1100, when Rufus granted him permission to seek counsel from the Pope in Rome, the second from 1103 to 1106 when, having fallen out with Rufus’ successor, King Henry I, Anselm once again sought direct papal advice on whether kings could or should invest bishops with their sees. The outcome was a compromise: the King might take homage from bishops for the ‘regalia’, the lands and rights that they held directly from the crown, but might not any longer invest them with their offices by granting bishops their pastoral staff and ring. Across Europe, similar compromises were reached between papal ambitions and day-to-day reality. Within an English context, what mattered far more was that Anselm’s periods of exile set a trend for future archbishops of Canterbury. Exile, even self-imposed exile, had not been a tradition of the Anglo-Saxon bishops, even though the Anglo-Saxon Church had been prepared on occasion to criticize its kings. Between 1097 and the 1240s, by contrast, at least four archbishops of Canterbury were to spend prolonged periods overseas, at odds with their king and seeking refuge either with the popes or with the King of England’s enemies in France.

  As a symbol of the increasing divorce between ecclesiastical and secular power, this is significant. It also marks the emergence of an institution still with us today. From the 1090s onwards, the kings of England either issued or deliberately withheld letters of protection for churchmen travelling outside the realm. Here we have the origins of the modern idea of the passport, without which the traveller is deprived of official protection. The question of protections or passports both for Archbishop Theobald in the 1140s and Archbishop Becket in the 1160s was to loom large as an issue in their disputes with the crown. Elections to bishoprics nonetheless continued to be tightly controlled by England’s kings, and the granting of licence for election and subsequently the acceptance or withholding of the homage of the elect was a powerful tool in royal oversight of the episcopate, still one of the prerogatives of the crown today, albeit exercised via a Crown Appointments Commission and the Prime Minister’s Office, rather than by the sovereign in person.

  Having to some extent established his authority over the Church, and with the battles of Tinchebrai and later Brémule promising him victory in his succession dispute with his brother and his nephew, King Henry I in theory ranked amongst the richest and most powerful Kings in Christendom. His patronage and his silver were sought by monks from as far away as Toulouse and the Holy Land. He was recognized to be a far-better-educated man than either his father or his elder brothers had been, certainly capable of reading and writing. His cruelty – in the 1090s he had personally pushed a rebellious Rouen merchant from one of the city’s highest towers, henceforth known as ‘Conan’s Leap’, and he was known for blinding and mutilating prisoners, especially those convicted of offences against forest law – came to rival the sophisticated sadism of the Byzantine emperors of the East, but was tempered with a respect for English law. Henry himself had succeeded to the throne only after issuing a so-called ‘coronation charter’ which, in a standard political manoeuvre, sought to blacken the reputation of the previous king, William Rufus, in order to emphasize Henry’s own good rule. Henry promised henceforth not to keep churches vacant or to seize their revenues during vacancies, not to charge excessive or unreasonable fines from his barons when they came to inherit their lands (a payment known as a ‘relief’), not to marry off heiresses without their consent, and to restore the good laws of King Edward the Confessor together with whatever legal reforms William the Conqueror had made with the assent of his barons. The fact that Edward the Confessor had not issued any sort of law code did not prevent Henry’s contemporaries from inventing such a code and, although the King kept the promises of his coronation charter more in the letter than the spirit, for example by filling poor bishoprics almost immediately but leaving such great cash-cows as Canterbury or Durham vacant for prolonged periods, the charter itself was significant not only as the first written promise by an English king to obey the higher authority of the law, but as a step on the road towards curbing the absolute sovereignty of kings, intruding law and justice as principles even higher than the personal authority conferred upon kings by God.

  During Henry’s reign, the apparatus of royal government, if not newly invented, for the first time begins to emerge from the confusion and translucence of the historical record. This is thanks in part to the survival of a far larger number of the King’s letters and charters than survive for his predecessors, almost 1,500 compared with the 500 of his father and elder brother, but above all due to the preservation of two unique documentary records. The first is a Pipe Roll, or annual summary of the King’s
income and expenses, covering the year 1130. Known as a Pipe Roll because its large parchment sheets were originally rolled up and stored in a pipe, it is the earliest survivor of a series of such rolls that would originally have stretched back to the occasion when the King’s Exchequer or accounting office first began to keep written records of its dealings with the individual officers, the sheriffs of the twenty-six or so English counties, responsible for collecting and disbursing the King’s ordinary revenues.

  The Exchequer itself, which may already have been in existence from the reign of Rufus, was named from the chequered cloth, literally the chess-board, that was used as a simple sort of abacus for the calculation of receipts. As this implies, Henry’s court was a place of some learning and sophistication, capable of grasping the usefulness of such exotic devices as the abacus or the astrolabe, recently imported from the Arab world, addicted to what had originally been the Persian game of chess, itself a training not only in military strategy but in manners and maths. The 1130 Pipe Roll reveals something of Henry’s wealth, since it appears to show the King in receipt of at least £23,000 in cash from the English counties, itself only a small and uncertain proportion of the King’s overall revenues, incalculable from the surviving records but undoubtedly including revenues from Normandy, from the shadier aspects of bribery and the sale of justice, and in large part from the profits and tribute of war. Even so, at £23,000, Henry I’s ordinary income was a great deal higher than that recorded for any king of England for the next forty years.

  Besides the Pipe Roll we also have a report, entitled ‘The Constitution of the King’s Household’ which purports to list the chief offices of the King’s establishment, from the chancellor and treasurer down to the bakers who baked the King’s pastries and the huntsmen and kennel keepers who cared for his hounds and his sport, remunerated not just in money but in wine and candle ends. The combination here of candles and alcohol should remind us that, unlike the households of more humble Englishmen, the King’s was an establishment that functioned even after darkness fell. Something of the murkier side of these night-time activities emerges from the fact that, besides fathering two legitimate children by his first wife, Margaret, a direct descendant of the Anglo-Saxon kings, Henry I was also father to at least twenty-four illegitimate children, sired on a number of women, many of them high-born ladies recruited from the immediate vicinity of the King’s hunting lodges at Clarendon and Woodstock. Henry’s lechery rivalled that even of such later royal Casanovas as Henry VIII or Charles II, and, like Charles, in the 1670s, Henry did his best to promote his children both to high office and, in the case of the girls, to prestigious marriages, where possible to the leading families on the frontiers of his dominion. In this way two of the King’s illegitimate sons, both named Robert, were promoted, in one case as Earl of Gloucester with control over the border region of Glamorgan and the greatest of the West Country fortresses at Bristol, in the other as a Devon landholder with eventual control over the hundred knights’ fees of the honour of Okehampton.

  These promotions themselves suggest that, within a generation of the events of 1066, Henry I was hard put to maintain the loyalty of those families first granted lands by William the Conqueror but now inclined to forget from whom their rewards had first flowed. Much of Henry’s warfare in France was directed not merely towards the resolution of his succession dispute with his elder brother, Robert Curthose, but for the eradication of Robert de Bellême, son of William the Conqueror’s loyal servant Roger of Montgomery, now attempting to establish himself as an independent power on the frontiers between Normandy and Anjou. In turn, the need to buy new supporters of his own led the King to confiscate the estates of those he could not trust, to grant away a significant proportion of the estates that had once been held by his father, and to reward a series of newcomers, newly promoted at court. The Welsh Marches were used for the promotion of families, such as the Clares in Ceredigion or Brian fitz Count (illegitimate son of the Count of Brittany) in Abergavenny, licensed to acquire what land they could get by conquest from the native Welsh. To similar ends, a community of Flemings was installed in Pembrokeshire rather as English government in the seventeenth century was to install lowlands Scots in Ulster, as a guarantee against native resistance.

  Other families newly promoted by Henry I ranged from the scions of great French noble houses such as the Beaumont twins, Henry and Robert, earls or counts respectively of Warwick and of Meulan to the south-east of Paris, down to the humbler level of such families as Clinton (whose name derived not from Normandy but from Glympton in Oxfordshire), Chesney and Clifford. Contemporary moralists, remembering the corruption that Roman historians had attributed to the rise of ‘new men’ untutored in the proper ways of patrician society, tended to dismiss such figures as ‘risen from the dust’. In reality, they were all of them relatively well born, even when their immediate ancestry is uncertain, recruited from amongst the branches of families long established at court, each such family tree being populated by an entire host of lesser members twittering and pecking at one another for promotion in the King’s service. For more than thirty years, Henry I proved a canny and careful patron of such men. In the process he not only encouraged the first emergence into the historical record of families that were later to gain even greater prominence in English (or in the case of Clinton, American) history, but promoted the development of specific court offices, as justiciar or vice-regent (an office held in effect by the former royal chancellor, Roger, bishop of Salisbury), and as treasurer (deputed to Roger’s nephew, Nigel, bishop of Ely). These, amongst the first great offices of state, speak of a government that was becoming increasingly bureaucratized even though still entirely dependent upon the King’s personal favour.

  Henry also sent justices into the English counties to dispense royal law at a local level. The intention here was not to do good so much as to be seen to do good. As the principal authority for the regulation of disputes the King could hope to collect the fines and profits that inevitably arose when justice was done. Office as justice, then as in the eighteenth century, was an extremely lucrative one, and we have letters of a slightly later date, in which the King’s travelling justices, by then known as justices ‘in eyre’, boast of the sums that they had collected for the King but fail to mention the bribes and douceurs that we can assume they collected for their own private profit. Bribery, like corruption in general, is one of the most persistent aspects of medieval government yet also notoriously difficult to quantify. The house historian of the abbey of St Albans, for example, tells us that his abbot paid over £100 to the King, in the twelfth century a very large sum of money, for the confirmation of the abbey’s rights. No mention of this sum appears in the corresponding royal account rolls which in this respect are often no more informative than the accounts of Enron or Elf-Aquitaine as a means of assessing total income or expenditure.

  Virtually everyone in royal employment, from the sheriffs down to the most humble of estate bailiffs was involved in syphoning off as much as they possibly could from royal revenue for private gain. The extent to which the proceeds of the agricultural harvest disappeared before ever being entered in written accounts is impossible to quantify but in all likelihood rivalled the extraordinary levels, more than 50 per cent of production, that came to typify the late Soviet economy of Russia. Judges in particular, those expert delayers of the law, had an especially evil reputation. A vision of Hell, reported in 1206 by an Essex farmer named Thurkel, listed the punishments inflicted upon a lawyer and former justice of the Exchequer, forced by demons to swallow and then to vomit red hot coins in an endless cycle of pain. At St Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury, as late as 1314, the monks drew up proposals on how best to influence the King’s justices with weekly distributions of bread, wine and ale, firewood, straw for their horses and regular invitations to dinner. Such gifts were regarded as perfectly normal, well below the level at which accusations of bribery or undue influence might have been triggered.

/>   Stephen and Matilda

  Henry I, despite his wars in France and on the frontiers with Wales, achieved peace in England in all but the first two years of his reign. Peace, however, did not spell an end to the disputes over succession that had dogged English kingship since at least the time of Aethelred. Henry’s legitimate son and heir, William the Aetheling, was the first member of the ruling dynasty since 1066 to have had the blood of both King Alfred and the dukes of Normandy flowing in his veins. Marriages arranged between William and a daughter of the Count of Anjou and, even more prestigiously, between William’s sister Matilda and the German emperor Henry V, appeared to promise not only stability on Normandy’s troubled southern frontier but the merging of the bloodline of the kings of England with that of the greatest rulers in Christendom. That neither marriage prospered was judged by some contemporaries to have been due to the blood of the Conqueror still tainted by the violence of 1066. William the Aetheling was drowned, in 1120, attempting, after what seems to have been an especially drunken party, to race his father back across the Channel. Embarking on one of the greatest of the court’s transports, the White Ship, from the port of Barfleur in Normandy, William’s vessel struck a submerged rock and sank, taking with it not only the heir to the kingdom but a large number of courtiers, including the Earl of Chester. The sole survivor left to tell the tale was a drunken Rouen butcher who had been carousing with his social superiors when the ship went down. With shades of the modern morality of news gathering, this butcher was regarded as beneath contempt by the chroniclers, who nonetheless hung on his every word when it came to the details of the disaster.