A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  Henry II had established a new ‘Plantagenet’ dynasty on the English throne, destined to last for a further seven generations through to 1399. By his accumulation of an estate in France greater than that held by any ruler since Charlemagne, by his conquests in Britain, and his encouragement of law, administration and learning on a scale that could not have been imagined in the days of his ineffective predecessor, King Stephen, Henry II fundamentally altered the course of English, of French and indeed of European history. His legacy was immense and in many cases enduring. English rule over Gascony, a product of Henry’s marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, was to last for three centuries. The English crown claimed sovereignty over Ireland as recently as the 1940s, and indeed, though vigorously contested, continues to rule a part of the north of Ireland even today. The palace which Henry refurbished at Westminster, and the new courts and administrative procedures that he established there lie, even now, at the very foundations of British government and English law. More than this, in purely personal terms, Henry’s reign witnessed drama on a remarkable scale. His relations with the Church, and with his own wife and sons, formed the stuff of legend even in his own lifetime and continue to be reflected in the work of poets, playwrights and screenwriters, from the sublime to the ridiculous, from Tennyson and T.S. Eliot through to the histrionics of Katherine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter.

  Henry’s enemies in France called him ‘the red-headed one’ and ‘the little fox’, perhaps by reference to the Bible (Song of Solomon 2:15), ‘Catch for us the little foxes that ruin our vineyards’, in medieval commentary, not least in the commentary by Bernard of Clairvaux, believed to be synonymous with heretics and those who threatened the Christian faith. When asked his opinion of Henry, then still a boy, St Bernard is said to have proclaimed ‘From the Devil he came and to the Devil he will surely go.’ A legend, by no means discouraged by Henry and his sons, claimed that the counts of Anjou were descended from a she-Devil, Melusine, who was part woman, part dragon, and who vanished one day in a puff of smoke when forced to attend Mass. Other stories in circulation at his court identified him with King Herla, kidnapped by underground pygmies, by whom he was doomed to gallop about the world at the head of a wild hunt of hounds and horsemen. An ever blacker legend suggested that Henry’s father, angered with the bishop of Sées in Normandy, had commanded that the bishop be castrated and then forced to process through his cathedral city with his severed manhood carried before him in a basin. As this suggests, the early Plantagenets rather revelled in their sulphurous reputation. Told by his court confessor to calm his temper by imitating the lambs and doves of scripture, Henry replied that even lambs used their horns and doves their feathers to attack their fellow creatures: ‘By nature I am a son of wrath’, he declared. ‘And why not, when God himself is capable of such anger?’ On one occasion, at Caen in 1166, Henry is said to have grown so furious with his constable, Richard du Hommet, that

  aflame with his usual rage, he tore his hat from his head, undid his belt, hurled his cloak and the clothes he was wearing far away from him, tore the silken covering from the bed with his own hand, and began to eat the straw on the floor, as if he were sitting in a ditch.

  The Biblical sentence ‘The wrath of kings is as the roaring of a lion’ (Proverbs 19:12) was one which Henry II took very much to heart, and the lion, Richard the Lionheart’s mascot, was in the Middle Ages regarded as a bloodthirsty and unpredictable creature, very far from the cuddly make-believe of Disney’s Lion King.

  We know a great deal about the life and personal relations of Henry and his sons, chiefly because their courts generated a quite phenomenal quantity of literature and historical writing. As this suggests, the Plantagenet court was a highly self-conscious phenomenon, perhaps as a result of its own sense of insecurity. Like many of the most outwardly confident of men, Henry was, beneath the surface, a king by no means certain of his entitlement to rule. Like each of the English, Danish or Norman kings who had ruled England since the year 1000, Henry was by no means the undisputed claimant. He had younger brothers who for a time sought a share of the spoils. He had rivals, at least to begin with, in the surviving daughter and younger son of the late king, Stephen of Blois. He was mistrusted and despised at the court of the kings of France, not least for making off with Eleanor of Aquitaine, herself freed to marry Henry only after an acrimonious divorce from the French King, Louis VII. Whilst she had still been married to Louis, wild accusations had flown, not only of Eleanor’s incest with her uncle, the ruler of Antioch in the Holy Land, but of her sleeping with Henry II’s father, Geoffrey, Count of Anjou, before ever she bedded the son. Sexual tensions were even more rampant at the Plantagenet than at the Capetian court, and once again seem to reflect the image of a king whose outward behaviour masked a very different inner reality. Henry maintained a whole harem of mistresses, not only after 1173, when Eleanor was locked away at Sarum as a potential rebel, but from long before this. He fathered a large number of illegitimate children by these mistresses, and like Henry I he did not scruple at cuckolding members of his own court. Recent research suggests that he enjoyed sexual liaisons not only with Rosamund Clifford, the most famous of his lady friends, later buried in the aristocratic nunnery at Godstow in Oxfordshire, but with Rosamund’s aunt, Ida of Hainault, and with Ida of Hainault’s own daughter, Ida de Tosny. By these last two women, mother and daughter, he fathered not only a future royal chancellor and Archbishop of York, but William Longespée, future Earl of Salisbury. This was a career of debauchery that contemporaries could only marvel at and which, in terms of rakishness, outbid even the late lamented Alan Clark.

  Like most founders of dynasties, Henry was determined to proclaim the legitimacy of his rule and to silence any detractors who might point out that, far from being the son of a king, he had been born the son of a mere count of Anjou. His model here was almost certainly Charlemagne, the greatest of all French kings yet himself sprung from a dynasty that, at the time of his coronation, was widely regarded as having usurped the French throne. In the 1160s, hurling abuse at a visitor whom he accused of being the son of a priest (priests being forbidden marriage or children), Henry was more than a little disconcerted when this visitor replied that he was no more the son of a priest than Henry himself was the son of a king. A sense of insecurity, and the desire to broadcast his own legitimacy explains both the magnificence of his court and his deliberate patronage of writers, ethnographers, historians, theologians and literary figures capable of praising his achievements. For historians, the praise offered by such men has to be carefully handled. It is shot through with irony which, now that the actors themselves are long dead, can all too easily be overlooked. Gerald of Wales, for example, one of the leading writers of the time tells us that Henry II was a lover of the humble and the poor, ‘filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich empty away’. By praising the King’s humility, yet doing so in the words of the Magnificat, a hymn of praise addressed to God himself, Gerald was surely stating one thing but implying quite another. The birth of irony, ‘that English virtue which purifies our rowdy passion’, may itself have been encouraged by the Plantagenet court, with its insistence that the King be accorded a degree of deference which courtiers themselves on occasion found unjustified or absurd. Writers such as Gerald of Wales or Walter Map who praised Henry II for his easy manners and his ability to control his temper were surely writing, tongue in cheek, of a King who everyone knew was given to rages so violent that he chewed the straw on his own palace floors.

  Far from being a place of easy manners, the Plantagenet court was a theatrical stage. Like most such stages, it was thronged by posers subject to very strict rules. Henry’s mother, Empress Matilda, had been criticized in the 1140s for her insistence that she remain seated when her barons and courtiers stood before her. After 1154, a similar deference and formality came to govern such matters as the serving of the King’s meals, the arrangements by which some people were invited to speak or dine with the King
in private whilst others were merely permitted to admire him from a distance, or the system by which English earls now witnessed the King’s charters by something approaching strict order of precedence and political favour. This was a period during which access to the King’s own person became increasingly restricted. In his palaces, such as Clarendon and Woodstock, private apartments for the King were set aside from the more public buildings. At the new hunting park in Woodstock, the garden complex known as Rosamund’s Bower may or may not have been associated with the historical Rosamund Clifford, Henry II’s mistress, but its very existence speaks of an environment in which privacy was something demanded by kings, even in a semi-public palace garden. Formalization now extended to the rough manners of the hunt. The saintly Bishop Hugh of Lincoln, in deep disgrace with the King, once approached Henry II while out hunting, seated under a tree and using needle and thread to sew up an injured finger. ‘How closely you resemble your ancestor from Falaise!’ was the bishop’s joke, intended to remind Henry of William the Conqueror’s mother and her humble origins as daughter of a tanner or tailor. The King laughed, which meant that his courtiers could laugh too. Yet even here, not only was laughter carefully policed but, to greet the King, Hugh had to force his way through a great gaggle of attendants, arranged, so we are told, in a deferential circle or ‘crown’ around the royal person.

  Hunting itself was increasingly ritualized. Anglo-Saxon huntsmen had driven their deer towards a ‘hay’ or enclosure, where they could be killed in relatively large numbers. By the late twelfth century, the hunt had instead become a mounted affair, the ‘chasse par force’, in which a single deer would be hunted across open country until eventually brought down by the hounds. The deer would then be ritually butchered or ‘unmade’, a procedure described in a number of the English hunting manuals. If a stag, its testicles and penis would be removed and hung on a forked stick, used to collect together all of the most prized tit-bits and later carried at the head of the homeward procession. The beast was then skinned, split from the chin down to the groin, the legs flayed and the feet cut off, with the skin itself now used as a blanket for the subsequent division of the trunk and as a convenient bag in which to carry home the antlers and the meat. That this was indeed the bloody ritual of the twelfth-century hunt is suggested by the fact that deer bones, when found by archaeologists, almost invariably come from the less-prized hind legs distributed amongst the huntsmen, very rarely from the shoulders or front parts which were reserved for the lord and his guests. Henry II’s eldest son was thus making a particularly bold statement when he appeared before the Pope’s representatives at Domfront in 1169, with the gruesome hunt trophies still dripping blood, and his huntsmen sounding their horns in a very secular and testosterone-charged declaration of Plantagenet machismo. Henry II was equally devoted to hawking, yet even the world of falcons and falconry was governed by a new formality, with particular birds being assigned to particular levels of society, an eagle for an emperor or a king (leading Richard I of England into trouble in Sicily, in the 1190s, when he observed peasants hunting with an eagle and assumed it must be stolen), a peregrine falcon for an earl, a kestrel (fairly useless in hunting terms) for a servant, and so forth.

  Henry’s own insecurities and the novelty of his claim, as son of the Count of Anjou, to the throne of England, contributed to a new cosmopolitan formality that penetrated far down the English social order. So much so, indeed, that it has been suggested that it was during Henry’s reign, or at least in the second half of the twelfth century, that the clearly divided orders or castes of society transmitted from earlier centuries – earls and knights, freemen and villeins – began to yield place to a more variegated and potentially fluid system of social class. Before the BBC abolished such things, accent used to be one of the principal badges of social class. There are signs at Henry II’s court that there was already a distinctive court or upper class accent. The court comprehended a great babble of languages, which would have rearranged themselves with giddy haste as the King shuttled between the far north of England and the most southerly of his dominions in Aquitaine and Poitou. Walter Map tells us that the King understood ‘all the languages used from the French Sea [i.e. the Channel] to the river Jordan’, but spoke only Latin and French. Even so, the King could apparently distinguish between a peasant and a nobleman on the grounds of accent alone, and on one occasion is said to have treated with deliberate contempt the ravings of a petitioner who addressed him in Welsh. Wace, in his history of the early dukes of Normandy, written at Henry II’s request, took it for granted that a duke wishing to masquerade as a peasant would need to disguise not only his appearance but his speech. Contemporaries remarked on the Burgundian accent of Bishop Hugh of Lincoln, and the court, at the prompting of the cruel but witty Walter Map, openly laughed at the attempts made by the King’s English-born illegitimate son, Geoffrey Plantagenet, to speak ‘Marlborough’ French.

  Henry II and Thomas Becket

  Part of Henry II’s insecurity derived from the circumstances of his accession and birth. Another part, however, was due to four men whose names have been written out of English history but who deserve to be better known. The first, Reginald fitz Urse, was a Northamptonshire baron whose father had served at the court of King Stephen, being taken prisoner with the King at Lincoln in 1141. Despite this connection with the old regime, after the death of Stephen and the accession of Henry II, Reginald had been allowed to retain his family’s recent gains, including the manor of Williton in north Somerset. The second of our quartet, Hugh de Moreville, was the son of another Hugh de Moreville, richly rewarded for his service to David, King of Scots, and after 1135 and the Scots invasion of northern England granted the town of Appleby and the lordship of Westmorland, still in the possession of the younger Hugh in the 1160s. The third, Richard Brito or Richard ‘the Breton’, was a West Country knight from Sampford Brett, close to Reginald fitz Urse’s manor of Williton. Richard entered the service of Henry II’s younger brother, William, lord of Dieppe, from whom he received a grant of land in Suffolk. Thereafter he may have gravitated to the service of the fourth of our men, William de Tracy, lord of Bradninch in Devon. William’s family, from Tracy near Vire in Normandy, had prospered in the Norman conquest of Maine and thereafter had attached themselves to the cause of King Stephen, serving as constables in Devon and acquiring the great barony of Barnstaple. Although after the accession of Henry II in 1154, Barnstaple had been restored to its rightful pre-1135 claimants, William himself was permitted to hold on to Bradninch, a subsidiary lordship, acquired at much the same time as Barnstaple, for service in Stephen’s reign.

  So far then we have a group of four knights, three of them barons, most with connections to north Devon or Somerset, three of them with histories of service to King Stephen, perhaps all of them, after the accession of Henry II, men who had good reason to curry favour with the new king. Stephen’s reign left a bitter legacy. Like many in England, after 1154, these were four men with a past, anxious to purge themselves of their too close connection to the previous regime. In December 1170, all four attended Henry II’s Christmas court in Normandy where the King is said to have thundered against the treachery and spinelessness of his courtiers (‘What miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and promoted in my realm, who fail to serve their lord treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born clerk!’). Taking these words to heart, our four men formed a conspiracy. Despite the winter weather and the potential difficulty of finding a ship, they crossed swiftly to England, before news of their departure could spread and a royal order go out for their detention.

  After an angry interview, around sunset on 29 December, almost certainly fortified with drink, determined to prove their loyalty to the King and in most cases aware that they themselves had connections with the regime of the late King Stephen which made them suspect at Henry II’s court, they burst into the precincts of Canterbury Cathedral, intending to arrest the archbishop, Thomas Becket, and to force h
im to stand trial at Henry’s court. The archbishop’s clerks insisted that Becket flee and, when he resisted, forced him bodily through the monastic cloister towards the cathedral, then in through a side door which Becket insisted be left unlocked behind him. The four knights ran after, bursting into the cathedral where the monks had just begun to sing their evening offices. ‘Where is Thomas Becket’, they demanded, ‘Traitor to King and Realm?’ deliberately employing the archbishop’s low-born nickname, ‘Beaky’ or ‘Big nose’, hinting at an entire world of social disdain that divided these four knights, would-be noblemen, from the low-born Becket.

  The archbishop replied in kind, calling Reginald fitz Urse a pimp, and physically resisting attempts to bundle him out of the church. Reginald was the first to lose control, striking the archbishop with his sword. William de Tracy struck next, then Richard Brito whose sword shattered as it passed through the archbishop’s skull and smashed into the paving stones below. Hugh de Moreville was busy holding back the press of onlookers in the cathedral nave. It was the time of evening prayer, and a large number of townspeople had gathered to listen to the singing of the monks, wafted to them from across the stone screen that divided the congregation in the nave from the monks in the choir. A clerk attached to Hugh’s household then delivered the coup de grâce, scattering the archbishop’s brains with the point of his sword, crying out as he did so, ‘This one won’t get up again. Let’s get out of here!’ By this stage, the altar where Becket had been kneeling was literally spattered with brains, bone and fragments of bone. Bellowing ‘Reaux, Reaux!’ (‘King’s Men, King’s Men!’), the four knights then fled back through the monastic cloister, as one of them later confessed, expecting at any moment that the ground would open before them and swallow them alive.