A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  With no legitimate son to succeed him, and with no children born to a second marriage hurriedly arranged in 1121, Henry was forced to entertain alternative strategies for the succession. The outcome in the longer term was to provoke civil war. On the one hand he promoted at his court his nephew Stephen of Blois, a grandson of William the Conqueror, already recognized as Count of Mortain in south-western Normandy and as lord of the English honours of Lancaster and Eye (in Suffolk), who in 1125 married the heiress to the immensely well-connected county of Boulogne. Stephen was an affable man, now in his mid-thirties. He had escaped the disaster of 1120 only by divine providence, having been prevented by a sudden attack of diarrhoea from joining his cousin on board ship. Even so, Stephen was not even the first-born son of his father, the Count of Blois, having two elder brothers, the first perhaps an idiot, the second a capable if dull representative of his line. Even if Stephen began to harbour ambitions for the English throne, his hopes were surely dashed in 1125 when the emperor Henry V died, leaving his childless widow, King Henry’s daughter Matilda, to return to England. As a widowed empress (a title which she now adopted and used to the end of her life, forty years later, despite the fact that she had never been crowned or recognized as such by her late husband) Matilda commanded enormous prestige. In 1127, she was betrothed to the fourteen-year-old heir to the county of Anjou, Geoffrey Plantagenet (whose name perhaps derived from the broom plant used as a family device, adopted in memory of a golden flower which the Pope had bestowed on one of Geoffrey’s ancestors). At the same time, Henry I had Matilda proclaimed as heir to his lands both in England and Normandy, Stephen of Blois vying with Robert, Earl of Gloucester for the honour of being the first to swear an oath to uphold this settlement.

  The marriage between Matilda and Geoffrey proved tempestuous. Despite a reconciliation in 1131, a second series of oaths that Matilda would be recognized as Henry’s heir, and the birth of a son, named Henry in honour of his grandfather, in 1133, daughter and father quarrelled, in the months immediately before Henry I’s death, to such an extent that Matilda was not at her father’s deathbed. Henry himself died after a meal of lampreys, a particularly disgusting sort of eel-like parasite with a cylindrical toothed mouth, accustomed to sucking the blood of other aquatic creatures. Henry I’s lampreys supplied an apt metaphor, to those looking for such things, that it was the luxury and parasitical greed of the Conqueror’s sons that would prove their downfall.

  Stephen of Blois, despite his earlier oaths to recognize Matilda, now seized his opportunity. Like Rufus in 1087, or Henry I in 1100, he happened to be in the right place at the right time, in a position to make a dash for the English coast and coronation. Whereas Rufus and Henry had made first for the royal treasury in Winchester, Stephen could rely on his younger brother, Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester since 1129, to manage affairs in the old West Saxon capital. Instead, recognizing the increasing significance of a new capital city, Stephen made his way to London. Having, like Henry I before him, offered a charter of good government, promising to limit the extension of forest law and to allow free elections to the English bishoprics, he was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 22 December 1135, exactly three weeks after the death of his uncle, the late King. Across England as a whole, Henry I’s former subjects responded to the news of his death with a wholesale slaughter of the King’s deer and the breaking down of newly erected forest fences: a clear sign that Henry I’s administration of the forests was resented and oppressive.

  All now seemed set for a repetition of the faits accomplis of 1087 and 1099. Stephen secured papal approval for his coronation, and bought off his elder brother with a promise of money. When the Scots invaded the northern counties and seized Carlisle and Newcastle, the Welsh rose in rebellion, and Baldwin de Redvers, a former servant of Henry I, fortified Exeter castle on behalf of Empress Matilda, Stephen reacted with laconic affability. A peace was agreed with the Scots. The garrison of Exeter, besieged for three months, had no sooner surrendered than they were allowed to go free. Apparently, Stephen believed that he commanded such vast resources and had so many friends and allies at his disposal that he could afford to be magnanimous. This was a disastrous miscalculation. The velvet glove of Rufus or Henry I had proved effective precisely because it concealed a massive iron fist. Stephen lacked the requisite ruthlessness. A characteristic story, told much later but nonetheless relevant to the events of the 1130s, describes Stephen’s siege of the castle of Newbury in Berkshire. When the castellan, the former Marshal or chief adjutant of Henry I, refused to surrender, Stephen seized his five-year-old son as a hostage, threatening to execute the boy should the castle not be delivered up. The garrison ignored this threat, even when the boy was displayed on a siege catapult, and the King, far from executing his young hostage, was later found in his flower-strewn pavilion playing at knights with the boy, using dolls made of straw.

  The result of such clemency was a mounting series of crises, as Stephen gradually became aware that something more forceful was required from him. An expedition to Normandy in 1137 failed to prevent an invasion of the duchy by Geoffrey of Anjou. It should be remembered here that Stephen, with his connections to Blois and his army of Flemish mercenaries recruited via the county of Boulogne, was no more a natural friend to the Norman barons than Geoffrey and his Angevins. In the following year, troubled by the oaths to his half-sister Matilda that he had signally failed to respect, Robert, Earl of Gloucester, the greatest of Henry I’s illegitimate sons, rose in rebellion at Bristol. A second Scots invasion was only narrowly defeated at the Battle of the Standard fought near Northallerton in August 1138, led on the English side not by the King but by the Count of Aumale, William ‘the fat’, assisted by a rag-tag militia apparently recruited by the Archbishop of York, parish by parish for national defence. Even then, Northumbria and Newcastle were definitively ceded to the Scots.

  Stephen’s response, like that of many weak men, was intended to appear decisive, but in fact seemed merely tyrannical. When the Pope in 1139 failed to absolve him from the oaths previously sworn to Matilda, adjourning any decision rather than pronouncing a firm verdict, Stephen arrested three of the English bishops, Roger of Salisbury, the former justiciar of Henry I, and his two nephews, Alexander, bishop of Lincoln and Nigel, bishop of Ely. The move was intended to calm rumours of rebellion. In reality it merely turned the Church against Stephen, who could now be portrayed as a tyrant as well as a usurper and perjurer. Even the King’s brother, Henry of Blois, wavered in his loyalty.

  All of this came, almost literally, as a Godsend to the Empress Matilda, who landed in England in the autumn of 1139 and who, rather than being attacked in Sussex, where she had established herself, was granted safe-conduct to join her half-brother Robert at Bristol. Demonstrating all the subtle idiocy that one associates with modern masters of warfare, Stephen apparently reasoned that it was better to concentrate his enemy’s forces in one location, rather than have them spread out across southern England. The bringing together of Matilda and Robert was the tipping point after which there was no real hope of peace so long as either Matilda or Stephen lived. Bristol henceforth was an impregnable Angevin fortress, and, for the first time in English history, Robert began to use Welsh mercenaries from his Glamorgan estates, ‘a dreadful and unendurable number of Welshmen’ as the contemporary Deeds of Stephen puts it, as a key element in war.

  It would be tedious to pursue the individual campaigns of the ensuing civil war. In essence, 1141 proved a year of wonders. First, King Stephen was taken prisoner in battle at Lincoln in February, and consigned to prison at Bristol. The Empress Matilda was installed as ‘Lady of England’ but then alienated the Londoners through her haughtiness and her insistence upon remaining seated whilst her subjects appeared before her. In the subsequent flight from London and then Winchester, Robert, Earl of Gloucester was himself taken prisoner by an army mustered by Stephen’s queen. An exchange of prisoners, in which both the King and Earl Robert were released, in effe
ct placed Stephen back on the throne within a year of his imprisonment.

  Thereafter, England itself became divided between a series of campaigning fronts, the most bitterly contested lying along the Thames valley from Oxford to the outskirts of London. Normandy went its own way, finally conquered by Geoffrey of Anjou, who in April 1144 was installed as duke. Gloucestershire and Bristol served as the chief Angevin redoubt in England, with the local financier Robert fitz Harding, himself of Anglo-Saxon descent, as banker to the Empress and her party. Robert fitz Harding, an Englishman, followed shortly afterwards by the Flemish financier William Cade, deserves to rank as the first state banker in English history, founder of a line of ill-omen yet supplying a necessary service at a time when royal income had dwindled to unsustainable levels. Stephen himself held out in London, with London and the counties of Essex and Kent sufficient to supply his financial needs despite his loss of nearly everything else. Both parties issued their own coins, as did the Scots at Carlisle and Newcastle and a number of magnates and earls, including the bishop of Winchester in the south.

  Alliances between individual barons were negotiated and committed to writing, in an attempt to limit warfare in the localities. Even so, many dozens of temporary castles were built. At least two of the greatest earls in England, Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of Essex and Ranulf, Earl of Chester, were arrested at Stephen’s court, even though in theory under safe-conduct. Although few if any barons were killed in combat, the fear of treachery became near universal. The death of Robert, earl of Gloucester in 1147, and the refusal of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Theobald (yet another monk of Bec), to crown Stephen’s eldest son as King during his father’s lifetime, in effect brought stalemate to both parties. This was resolved only by the emergence of Henry Plantagenet, the son of Geoffrey of Anjou and Empress Matilda, as leader of the Angevin party. Geoffrey’s death in 1151 brought Henry enthronement as Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou. His marriage, the following year, to Eleanor, only three weeks earlier divorced from the French King Louis VII, brought him the entire duchy of Aquitaine stretching from the Loire to the Pyrenees. Probably at this time, or shortly afterwards, Henry began to issue coins on which he proclaimed his title as ‘Henricus rex futurus’, ‘Henry the future king’.

  In 1153, he returned to England determined upon a final showdown. In the midst of negotiations and threats, Stephen’s son Eustace died, some said poisoned by the monks of Bury St Edmunds where he had recently stayed. Like many accusations of poisoning, this cannot be taken at face value. Sudden deaths, often within a few hours of dining, were frequently attributed to poison when other causes should be sought: heart attack, stroke, or, in the case of intense stomach pains, acute appendicitis, for which there was neither diagnosis nor cure. The death of Eustace nonetheless opened the way to a final peace. For the rest of his lifetime, Stephen would retain his title and authority as King. Henry of Anjou would be acknowledged as his heir. The barons of England would swear homage to both men. The King’s younger son, William of Warenne, would be compensated with a vast estate, which Henry would guarantee to respect just as he would respect the greatest of Stephen’s grants to the religious, most notably Stephen’s foundation of a new abbey at Faversham, where the King himself intended to be buried.

  Stephen was approaching sixty. None of the post-Conquest kings of England had so far lived beyond that age. Even so, death came more suddenly for Stephen than was expected. Staying with the monks of Dover, from where he hoped to conduct negotiations with Flanders, Stephen was suddenly seized with violent stomach pains and a flow of blood, ‘as had happened to him before’, remarks a local chronicler, clearly anxious to avoid the sorts of accusations of poisoning that had been levelled at Bury St Edmunds a year earlier. Stephen died on 25 October 1154. Anglo-Norman kingship, which for the past ten years had not even been Anglo-Norman but Anglo-Flemish-French, died with him.

  King Stephen and his reign have provoked an unusual degree of attention from modern historians. Since the Second World War, whilst Rufus has attracted only one biographer, and most medieval English kings only two, there have been at least five full-scale biographies of Stephen as well as a whole series of related studies, down to and including the work of Ellis Peters and her tales of the twelfth-century monastic detective, Brother Cadfael. It is as if, afraid of being accounted dull, English historians have emphasized the eccentric and the extraordinary reign of Stephen, albeit with a comfortable sense that they themselves are lucky not to have lived through such interesting times. For the history of England, and the wider story of Britain, does this period of warfare and confusion have any deeper significance?

  It has been suggested that Stephen’s reign mattered chiefly because it ushered in a new and more secure sense of the ownership of land. Barons and knights whose inheritances had previously lain at the disposal of the King were now able to ensure that land passed from father to son with no real possibility of upset. In reality, although a firm legal basis for the possession of land (what lawyers would call ‘seisin’) and for its inheritance developed only after the 1150s, in terms of possession and the practicalities of inheritance nothing much had changed. For reasons only loosely related to politics, dictated far more by a desire to secure the financial profits of justice, the kings of England after 1154 began offering legal procedures (established by enactments known as ‘assizes’) whereby their subjects could stake a claim, quickly and without undue quibbling, to land that had recently been seized from them, or to land in which they claimed ancestral right. If Stephen’s reign did not usher in a new approach to landholding did it perhaps draw a decisive divide between England and Normandy? Once again, there is little to suggest that this was so. In the decade after 1144, it is true, the King of England had no real authority in the duchy, but then this was equally true of Henry I before 1106. Moreover, after 1144, as under Henry I, the breach proved only temporary. The families divided by the civil war of the 1140s were very rapidly reunited, and Normandy passed together with England into the hands of Henry II.

  There is one further reason to attribute particular significance to Stephen’s reign. It witnessed the first real outbreak of xenophobia and the hatred of foreigners permitted since the conquest of 1066. Xenophobia was to become one of England’s greatest exports: an expression of national identity that could be channelled through public violence, the destruction of foreign property and, in extremes, the murder of foreigners. The St Brice’s Day massacre of 1002 supplied only a foretaste of the pogroms yet to come. Under Stephen there were two incidents that suggest a growing unrest over national identities. The first was the mistrust expressed towards Stephen’s Flemish mercenaries, and in particular against his mercenary captain William of Ypres. The community of Englishmen, since 1066 unable to vent more than eighty years of frustrations over the compromises forced on it by accepting Norman lords, was perhaps all the readier to seek scapegoats in other communities, with the Flemings and the Welsh high on the list of potential victims. Anger over Henry I’s harsh government had already been expressed through the deliberate destruction of forests and the killing of deer. Perhaps the Welsh and the Flemings came to represent an alternative target of attack, regarded as less than civilized and in extreme cases as less than entirely human.

  Anti-Semitism: William of Norwich

  One other incident of Stephen’s reign supports this suggestion. Like the deer of the forest, the Jews of the greater cities were in theory placed directly under royal protection. In 1144, according to later and highly unreliable testimony, rumour spread that a twelve-year-old boy named William, apprenticed to the skinner’s trade in the city of Norwich had been lured into the house of a Norwich Jew where he was ritually tortured and crucified, his agony lasting from the Tuesday in Holy Week until Good Friday. Thus far, the story depends very much upon an identification between William of Norwich and the infant Christ, and should remind us that the twelfth century was an age in which Christ and his sufferings were viewed in increasingly human
terms. William’s body was then disposed of in woods to the south of the city, where it was discovered by a local forester, keen to ensure that no one illegally gathered timber from the bishop’s wood. After a procedure that is described in baffling and highly improbable detail, the Jews were accused in the bishop’s synod but bribed the local sheriff, John de Chesney, to grant them refuge in Norwich Castle. The body itself was dug up and reburied in the cathedral precincts by the cathedral’s monks. Lacking any obvious saint of their own, the monks were anxious to supply themselves with a potentially miracle-working cult. The cult itself took several years to promote, and William’s body had to be exhumed and ceremonially reburied no less than three further times, in April 1150, July 1151 and April 1154, before miracles became widely reported, set down in a long account of events and miracles by the chief guardian of the shrine, a man named Thomas of Monmouth. What is particularly significant here is that Thomas accused the Jews of a conspiracy that reached from one end of Europe to another, controlled by a line of Jewish princes living in Narbonne in southern France, by whom the Jews were committed to the annual sacrifice of a Christian boy-child in deliberate and mocking emulation of the crucifixion of Christ.

  This is the first known appearance of the so-called ‘blood libel’, the idea that the Jews were ritually committed to the kidnapping and murder of Christian boys, a vile accusation that in certain unsavoury quarters even today still poisons relations between Christians and Jews. After the Norwich incident, the very next appearance of the blood libel also comes from England, from Gloucester, where in the 1160s another young boy, named Harold, was likewise said to have been done to death by Jews. The chief church in Norwich market place, dedicated to St Peter, was a dependency of Gloucester Abbey, which no doubt explains the connection. From Norwich and Gloucester, the libel spread far and wide, to France, and thence to most parts of Europe, where it came to form one of the cornerstones of European anti-Semitism. For present purposes, what is particularly interesting about this great British export is that, in origin, it seems to have been both anti-foreign and anti-royal. The King’s sheriff was amongst the villains of the piece. Most of those involved in disclosing the ‘truth’ or in finding healing at William’s shrine bore unmistakably English names. Even William, despite his Norman Christian name, was of sound Anglo-Saxon birth, descended from what seems to have been an extensive, well-heeled, and at this time still just-about tolerated family of priests.