A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485
Page 19
Anarchy under Stephen?
Historical debate on the reign of Stephen has too often descended into sterile point-scoring over the extent to which this was a period of ‘anarchy’. Like ‘feudalism’, ‘anarchy’ is an anachronistic term, invented only in the eighteenth century. Lacking any sort of ‘anarchy-meter’ for the 1140s, historians have debated the relative significance of coinage, baronial castles, peace treaties and charters as if these can somehow be calibrated into a verdict for or against the ‘anarchic’. In reality, the blood libel may be a much more significant and, in European terms, easily the most baneful of the legacies of King Stephen’s chaotic reign. Two other legacies are worth mentioning, not just of Stephen’s reign, but of the interaction between Church and secular society over the first fifty years of the twelfth century.
Monastic chroniclers, most famously the compiler of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle still being written at Peterborough, tended to play up the disasters of the 1140s, writing of Stephen’s reign as the nineteen years ‘when Christ and his saints slept’. In fact, far from being a time of inactivity, this was a period when the public face of both Christ and the Church was transformed. The internecine warfare of Stephen’s reign undoubtedly left a bitter legacy of property disputes, with two or more families ever afterwards convinced that they had proper title to the same estate. Land was the chief symbol of wealth and status, and its confiscation or violent dispossession, as in the late 1130s or 40s, was all the easier to effect given that there were few major landholding families in England whose title to their land, by 1135, was more than seventy years’ old. One set of violent seizures, after 1066, only paved the way for another, after 1135.
Some of these new disputes were resolved via the law courts and the new assizes of Henry II’s reign, whose effect was principally to reward those who could prove longstanding possession. In other cases, where two or more families had longstanding claims, a resolution was more difficult. It might be achieved by political persuasion, by the King’s friendship, or by simple bribery. More often, it led to endless bitterness and litigation via the sorts of process that activate several of the more law-ridden novels of Trollope or Dickens. Jarndyce versus Jarndyce, give or take a bit of armour and quite a lot more physical violence, is easily rivalled by such cases as those of Stuteville versus Mowbray for possession of Kirby Moorside, fitz Harding versus Berkeley for the honour and castle of Berkeley, or the earls of Gloucester versus the earls of Chester for possession of Chipping Camden. All of these disputes had their origin in the reign of Stephen.
The Cistercians
For those who believed they had title to land, who were aware that such title was likely to be disputed, and who either wished to atone for their sins or to avoid interminable vendettas, one solution was to grant such land to religion. By using a disputed estate to found a monastery and by settling it with monks keen to defend their title to the land, a landholder could hope to profit from the monks’ prayers and spiritual intercessions without himself risking the costs of litigation or warfare. Hence the fact that so many monasteries were established on land encumbered with pre-existing legal disputes, and that monks were amongst the keenest and most active litigants in the king’s courts. The consequence here during the reign of Stephen, a period of particular instability in the possession of land, was the foundation of a quite extraordinary number of new religious houses, perhaps more than 180 all told in the nineteen years from 1135 to 1154, doubling the number of monasteries in existence in England.
A large number of these new foundations were Cistercian, ultimately imported from eastern France and from a revived and ascetic spirituality that had led large numbers of French monks, from around the year 1100, to seek God in the deserted places in forests and mountains. One of the earliest abbots of Cîteaux (the monastery near Dijon in Burgundy that came to symbolize and to control this new order) was an Englishman by birth, Stephen Harding, who, as a child, had been vowed to the monastic life at Sherborne in Dorset, perhaps one of those children placed in monasteries when their Anglo-Saxon fathers were disinherited as a result of the Conquest. In the later retelling of their history, it was Stephen Harding who was credited with writing the constitution of the new Cistercian order, placing each successive foundation under a meticulous system of supervision and discipline, presided over by a General Chapter of all Cistercian abbots meeting at Cîteaux in October each year. A great deal of this historical account represents later twelfth-century make-believe. In reality, it was a slightly later recruit to Cîteaux, the Frenchman Bernard, himself for thirty years abbot of Cîteaux’s daughter house at Clairvaux, who transformed the order and gave it both its intellectual and its institutional coherence. As a result, there is still much dispute as to the circumstances in which Cistercian monasticism was introduced to England, probably via the first of the Cistercian abbeys established at Waverley in the Surrey forest in 1128, thereafter demonstrating a particular affection for the high places of Yorkshire and the north, with Rievaulx and Fountains both established before the death of Henry I in 1135.
Precisely how and in what circumstances these abbeys were subjected to specifically ‘Cistercian’ customs remains a controversial, though in many ways less significant fact than their encouragement of a new spiritual discipline in which contemplation and the deliberate imitation of Christ were paramount impulses. Not surprisingly, the humanity of Christ loomed large in Cistercian thinking, and in particular the relationship between Christ and his mother, the Virgin Mary. All Cistercian houses, at least from the 1120s onwards, were dedicated exclusively to the Virgin Mary and, although Bernard himself disapproved proved of such Marian devotions as the feast of the Conception of the Virgin Mary, it was the Cistercians who did most to broadcast the cult of the human Christ, bound by love to his human mother. At almost exactly the same time that the Jews of Norwich were being accused of crucifying a twelve-year-old boy in cruel imitation of the crucifixion of Christ, Ailred of Rievaulx, the greatest of the English Cistercian writers and himself of impeccable Anglo-Saxon descent, was composing a treatise on ‘Jesus at the Age of Twelve’, deliberately emphasizing the humanity of the infant Christ as a model to those seeking the life of prayer.
As with most religious reformers throughout the ages, there were paradoxes and a tinge of hypocrisy to Cistercian spirituality. Ailred of Rievaulx might have sought a life of poverty and a deliberately spartan diet, but he himself was of high birth and he owed his promotion as abbot to his contacts with the Scots royal court where he had served as steward. The Cistercians, as at Rievaulx, might seek out the deserts of the world, but they swiftly transformed such places into a machined landscape for the generation of cash. The sheep runs of north Yorkshire were treasure trails from which came the wool, itself sold according to new and sophisticated credit arrangements, to merchants prepared to stake large sums of money as advance payment for the next year’s crop. Although, in the 1150s, the Cistercian General Chapter stepped in to forbid monks from acting as middle men, from buying up the wool crop of surrounding farmers and selling it on at a profit, the practice by no means disappeared. Large-scale sheep-farming and the futures market in wool remained especially Cistercian enterprises.
As late as the 1320s we learn from the notes kept by an Italian named Pergoletti, wool buyer for the Florentine merchant house of the Bardi, that it was from such Cistercian abbeys as Tintern and Abbey Dore in the Welsh Marches that the best and most expensive raw wool was to be purchased. At £18 the sack of twenty-six stone, the best Cistercian wool was priced at more than three times the value of wool to be had from lower quality suppliers. The whole Cistercian enterprise, from the monks’ sheep runs to their massive and well-stocked barns (the barn of Beaulieu Abbey at Great Coxwell in Oxfordshire being a particularly magnificent example), from their artificial water courses to their industrialized structures of prayer, was a monument not just to asceticism but to the pursuit of virtue through the profits of hard work. In Wales in particular, the Wild West of tw
elfth-century Britain, it was the Cistercians who brought commercialized agricultural practices to valleys previously farmed according to very different pastoral traditions. All of this within a century of the Norman Conquest, and in the 1140s, in the midst of a brutal civil war that might be supposed to have consigned England to a dark age of violence and ‘anarchy’.
Like a lot of religious ascetics, Ailred of Rievaulx had difficulties with human sexuality. According to his chief biographer, who clearly thought of Ailred as a potential saint, he used to immerse himself for hours in a cold bath, placed in a secret chamber under the house of the novices, in order that he might master the Devil’s urges and so that he might ease the symptoms of the kidney stones with which he was plagued, some of them the size of beans, requiring recourse to his bath up to forty times a day. Rather like the High Church reformers of the nineteenth-century Oxford movement, the Cistercians were sometimes suspected of being distinctly unmanly in their celebration of the spiritual love between man and man. In reality, they were belligerent supporters of Christian warfare. St Bernard of Clairvaux was at the forefront of crusading rhetoric and one of the first patrons of the Templar knights, themselves introduced to England during the reign of Stephen. Nonetheless, a story told by the court wit Walter Map, said to have drawn laughter from King Stephen’s successor, Henry II, related how St Bernard had prayed for a miracle, seeking to restore life to a young monk who had recently died. Bernard threw himself on the boy, with prayers and entreaties, but when Bernard got up, the young monk, being still dead, did not. ‘That is odd,’ said Walter Map, ‘because I have often heard of older monks throwing themselves on boys, but when the monk gets up, generally the boy does too.’
Henry II
In the aggressively heterosexual humour of Henry II’s court we perhaps see yet another response to the pathetic affability of Stephen’s reign. Testosterone-charged masculinity is often a feature of conquering or restored monarchies, be it in the rampant Norman stallions of the Bayeux Tapestry or the notorious womanizing of King Charles II. Just as the bloodshed at Hastings was still wet to the touch in 1135, so the confusions and disputes of the 1140s further dented the already tarnished reputation of England’s kings. To Henry II, determined to rule in a very different way, the reign of Stephen was something to be struck from historical memory. After 1154, Henry II’s new regime chose to look back to the circumstances of the reign of Henry I, Henry II’s grandfather, deliberately consigning the intervening period to oblivion, described as the ‘shipwreck’ of Stephen’s reign (with deliberate reference, perhaps, to the White Ship disaster of 1120).
We can see this in Henry II’s approach even to the tombs of his ancestors. Henry I’s resting place, at Reading Abbey in Berkshire, was richly endowed by the new king. Faversham, where Stephen was buried, was effectively ignored. A vast ground plan, laid out by Stephen was never completed and the abbey’s lands, grudgingly confirmed by Henry in accordance with his promises to the late King, led to no great prosperity. We can see precisely this same contempt for Stephen even in the timing and arrangements for Henry II’s coronation.
Stephen died in October 1154. Henry waited almost two months before crossing to England. The date he chose for his crossing, the night of 7–8 December, was the vigil of the feast of the Conception of the Virgin Mary, a feast day intimately connected to English identity, sacred to the memory of the mother of Christ, herself ‘the star of the sea’ and the patron of all mariners. When he next returned to France, it was for a crown-wearing in Rouen cathedral on 2 February 1156, the feast of the Virgin Mary’s Purification, and it was on 14 August, the vigil of the feast day of the Virgin’s Assumption, that he crossed to Normandy again in 1158.
Meanwhile, on his first landing as King, Henry did not immediately seek coronation at Westminster. Instead, he waited until Sunday, 19 December, the 4th Sunday in Advent, precisely the same day of the liturgical calendar on which Stephen himself had been crowned in 1135. The symbolism was obvious. The coronation of 1135 had been a mistake, to be re-enacted nineteen years later more or less to the day, now with the rightful claimant rather than a usurper installed on his grandfather’s throne.
THE FOUNDATIONS OF A DYNASTY,
1154–1189
The Plantagenets
Henry II
The red-haired and fiercely energetic young man who succeeded to the throne of England as King Henry II was the son of Empress Matilda, daughter of Henry I of England. On his father’s side, he was descended from the counts of Anjou, the Plantagenets, who had held sway over the city of Angers and the Loire valley from at least the tenth century. It was this paternal inheritance that historians have in mind when they assign the label ‘Plantagenet’ or ‘Angevin’ to Henry and his successors. Henry II was vastly to extend his ancestral inheritance. Contemporaries greeted him as the fulfilment of a prophecy, attributed to Edward the Confessor, in which the green tree of England would only flourish again once the split parts of its trunk were rejoined. As the grandson of Queen Matilda, the wife of Henry I and a direct descendant of the Anglo-Saxon kings, Henry II was the first ruler with the blood of Alfred flowing through his veins to have sat on the English throne since 1066. Certainly, Henry did his best to emphasize his own kinship to Edward the Confessor, ensuring the official papal canonization of Edward and the translation of his relics to a new shrine in Westminster Abbey in 1163. The feast day assigned to the Confessor was 13 October, the eve of the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings. Like the reign of King Stephen, Harold Godwinson was to be airbrushed from historical memory. Meanwhile, Henry II was equally keen to stress his kinship to the Norman dukes, in 1162 at Fécamp presiding over the reburial of the bodies of dukes Richard I and Richard II, the grandfather and great-grandfather of William the Conqueror, in new and elaborately carved stone sarcopha-guses almost certainly provided at Henry’s expense.
By his marriage to Eleanor, heiress to the duchy of Aquitaine, Henry had already, two years before he became King of England, acquired dominion over the whole of south-western France, stretching from the Loire down to the Pyrenees. Through a process of political coercion, by the mid-1160s he was to project his authority westwards into Brittany and Wales, and northwards to seize back the counties of Westmorland, Cumberland and Northumberland occupied for the previous twenty years by the King of Scots. In 1171, stepping into the maelstrom caused by the conquest of Leinster by an army of freebooting marcher barons commanded by Richard ‘Strongbow’, Earl of Pembroke, Henry led an expedition that was to claim Ireland and its lordship for the English crown. Three years later, victorious in a civil war fought out against his eldest son, he obtained the right to establish English garrisons at Berwick, Edinburgh and as far north as Stirling, imposing oaths of homage upon the Scots King. His military exploits, his political cunning and his courtly magnificence had already brought him and his children alliances with the rulers of Spain and Saxony and with the Capetian kings of France. In due course, the youngest of his daughters was married to the King of Sicily. So great was Henry’s reputation by the 1180s that, in the desperate days before the Battle of Hattin in 1187 (the first great defeat for the crusader kingdoms in the Holy Land), he was offered the keys to the city of Jerusalem and the prospect of ruling over the place of Christ’s own crucifixion and resurrection.
Henry died in 1189, still undecided as to whether he would fulfil his crusading vows. He was succeeded by his eldest surviving son, Richard I, who almost immediately embarked for the East, conquering Sicily and Cyprus on the way and in July 1192, if not quite achieving the reconquest of Jerusalem, lost to Saladin and Islam since 1187, was said to have caught a glimpse of its glittering roofs. Richard’s chief lieutenants, though not the King himself, fulfilled their vows of pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre under safe conduct from Saladin. In the Holy Land, Richard recaptured the port of Acre and fortified the coastal cities, ensuring the survival of Christian rule there for a further hundred years. Returning to England via Austria, he was kidnapped near V
ienna, sold by the Duke of Austria to the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry VI, and ransomed for the extraordinary sum of £100,000, literally a king’s ransom, raised from English taxes. The money went to pay for the German conquest of southern Italy, itself one of the greatest of European military adventures. Far from bankrupting the English, it was followed by yet further financial exactions, intended to guarantee Richard’s lands in France against conquest by his one-time friend, now his most bitter rival, the French King Philip Augustus. Richard died aged only 41 in 1199, still defending his French dominions, campaigning south of Limoges. Within a few years he had already acquired his nickname as ‘the Lionheart’, later explained by reference to an incident said to have occurred during his captivity in Germany. Seeing his gaoler’s daughter menaced by a lion, and with nothing more substantial to protect him than forty silk handkerchiefs, he is said to have reached down the creature’s throat and plucked out its still beating heart, which he then proceeded calmly to salt and eat. Quite what a lion, or forty silk handkerchiefs, were doing in the vicinity was never satisfactorily explained, although legend stated that the lion was sent by the German emperor specifically to eat Richard. The legend, however, and the speed with which it developed, supplies clear proof of Richard’s European-wide reputation.