A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  Besides his ‘Roman de Rou’ written for the King, Wace also wrote a ‘Roman de Brut’, perhaps at the prompting of Queen Eleanor. Here the emphasis shifted from Norman to old English history, with an account of how Britain itself was first conquered from a race of giants by Brutus, the great-grandson of Aeneas, himself the subject of Virgil’s epic Aeneid which had told the story of Aeneas’ exile from Troy and his foundation of the city and empire of Rome. From Brutus, according to Wace, descended a line of English kings that could be traced via Arthur to Alfred and thence to the Conquest of 1066 and beyond. Henry II, of course, was the first King of England who could claim to share in the blood not only of Rollo but of both Brutus and Arthur. Like Brutus, he also happened to be the great-grandson of another conqueror, William of Normandy. Like Brutus, exiled from Italy for accidentally killing his father in a hunting accident, Henry was a famous huntsman.

  Gerald of Monmouth

  Wace acquired his extraordinary notions of Brutus as Britain’s first king from one of the greatest bestsellers of the Middle Ages, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the King of Britain. If there was any book of history other than the Bible that all kings, all monks, and all literate Englishmen can be assumed to have read, then Geoffrey’s was that book. As is appropriate for a bestseller, Geoffrey’s was not only the most popular but probably the least accurate history of Britain ever written. Indeed, to describe it as a history rather than an outright fiction is to credit it with too great an intention to tell the truth. Geoffrey himself claimed that he had obtained his stories from a very ancient Welsh book, lent to him by Walter, the archdeacon of Oxford. This was a claim that deserves no more credit that that afforded to the memoirs of Bilbo Baggins and his nephew Frodo. Geoffrey set out to produce a narrative of early British history that could not be recovered from the Roman classical historians and that Bede himself had been unable to supply. In explaining what had happened during this great blank on the historical map, he relied in part upon a ninth-century History of the Britons attributed to a Welsh historian, ‘Nennius’, from which he derived his basic cast of characters including the Trojan Brutus. The rest he simply made up, or at least adapted out of all recognition, in the process entirely remodelling or inventing such figures as Vortigern, Hengest and Horsa, Lear and Cymbeline, Arthur, Merlin and Old King Cole.

  To a modern readership, persuaded that there ought to be a clear and uncrossable divide between history and make-believe, Geoffrey’s romancing may seem unpardonable. His motives are by no means clear, perhaps to flatter the Angevin party led by Robert, earl of Gloucester, to whom his history was dedicated, shortly before 1139, perhaps to demonstrate to an English or Anglo-Norman audience, inclined to view the Welsh as barbarians, that Wales and its ancient people could boast a history of great sophistication, as the builders of cities and the rulers of nations long before the crude Angles and Saxons had forced the Welsh into nomadic pastoralism in the far west. In the context of Plantagenet history, Geoffrey’s motives are less important than his extraordinary popularity. Henceforth there was no doubt that Brutus was to be accounted the founder of Britain. Arthur and Merlin were accepted as real historical characters. Henry II’s grandson, born to a marriage between Geoffrey, the King’s third son, and Constance, the heiress to Brittany, was named Arthur as a badge of Breton pride. Henry II’s empire, stretching from the Cheviots to the Pyrenees, could be interpreted as the rebirth of the empire of Arthur, which, according to Geoffrey’s History, had included Poitou and most of western France, and in building which Arthur had himself defeated all other powers including Rome and the armies of the treacherous perjurer Mordred (for whom perhaps read King Stephen) before vanishing into the Isle of Avalon for his wounds to be healed. From there Arthur would himself emerge, like Henry II as proclaimed by his coinage of the 1150s, as a ‘rex futurus’, a once and future king.

  The so-called ‘Prophecies of Merlin’, which Geoffrey included in his book, spread even more widely than his History, being as eagerly consulted in France or Italy as in England. To people desperate for knowledge of the future, in many cases convinced that it would not be long before Christ came again, any such foreknowledge demanded careful scrutiny. Henry II himself had horoscopes cast for him in the late 1140s, in the hope that this might enable him to predict the movements of King Stephen. The astrolabe, sometimes said to have been introduced to England by Adelard of Bath, himself attached to the Angevin party and with credentials to be regarded as England’s first experimental scientist, was itself used not merely to map the movement of the stars and planets, but so that such movements could lead to the more accurate prediction of future events.

  In much the same tradition as other prophetic writings, from the Roman Sybil via Nostradamus to the modern horoscope, Merlin-Geoffrey’s prophecies succeeded in being portentous whilst avoiding all inconvenient detail. Thus ‘The feet of those that bark shall be cut off’ could be interpreted as an echo of William I’s treatment of those who had mocked him at Alençon in the 1050s, or as a prediction of Norman forest law, with its insistence that the front claws of any dogs within the forest be excised so as to prevent them worrying the game. ‘The eagle of the broken covenant’, supposed to paint Albany with gold and to rejoice in her third nesting, was widely identified as Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry II’s queen, whose favourite son, Richard, was her third-born, and whose wealth and treachery were notorious. Henry II even commissioned a painting in his apartments at Winchester, after the great family rebellion of 1173–4, showing himself as an eagle torn apart by its rebellious and sharp-taloned brood. As for such fancies as the three-branched tree sprouting from the Tower of London, built, according to Geoffrey, long before the arrival of the Normans, or the hedgehog loaded with apples that would hide in Winchester’s underground passages, the deeper the mystery the more profound and significant its meaning. Just as irony can be said to have been invented at Henry II’s court, so perhaps was the later English delight in nonsense.

  The idea of Arthur as the once and future King, resting in Avalon until summoned back into history, was to a large extent an embellishment of Geoffrey’s account, first found in the work of poets and fabulists towards the end of the twelfth century, most notably Chrétien de Troyes and the various Grail romances. Such figures as Joseph of Arimathea were now stirred into the already rich soup of British myth. Even so, before 1200, there were Bretons and Welshmen who claimed that Arthur would come again, to rescue them from English subjection. By the 1240s, cashing in on such mythologies and on much else besides, the monks of Glastonbury in Somerset began advertising themselves as custodians not only of the remains of Arthur (a large skeleton with a head wound being produced as evidence of his identity), but of the relics of St Patrick, apostle of the Irish, the tomb of Joseph of Arimathaea, and even of the Holy Grail itself, now increasingly although by no means exclusively identified as a cup from which Christ had drunk at the last supper. Like Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Glastonbury monks were the most appalling mythomaniacs. Even so, their claim that Arthur had been buried in their cemetery and that his body had been rediscovered as the result of a real, historical fire in the late 1180s, was not without political significance. If Arthur lay dead and buried at Glastonbury, then the last hopes of the Welsh for political independence were surely dashed.

  Not everyone believed Geoffrey of Monmouth. William of Malmesbury was mystified by Geoffrey’s claim to have discovered previously unknown sources. Forty years later, the Yorkshire monk William of Newburgh declared openly and indignantly that Geoffrey was a liar toadying to the cowardly Welsh. Even so, in the twelfth century as today, the legends of national identity do not necessarily have to be believed in order to work their spell. It is perhaps not surprising that many of the most potent myths of Englishness and English imperialism have emerged from the fringes of England itself and from artists themselves on the edges of England or the English establishment, from Bede writing at Jarrow on the far fringes of the north, via Geoffrey of Monmouth or the Cha
nnel Islander Master Wace, to the Anglo-Indian Rudyard Kipling or Edward Elgar, that Catholic, petit-bourgeois son of the Welsh Marches. For present purposes, what is significant is that writers such as Geoffrey of Monmouth had already tinted England’s twelfth-century Renaissance with distinctively English pigments. It was upon this basis that the writers in and around the court of Henry II built their reputations.

  Some of the greatest of these writers were themselves either Welsh or connected with the Welsh Marches. Gerald de Barri, generally known as ‘Gerald of Wales’ or ‘Gerald the Welshman’, dedicated one of his histories to the future King Richard, and undoubtedly accompanied another of Henry II’s sons, John, on his 1185 expedition to Ireland. Gerald played a somewhat shady role in the public presentation of Henry II’s entire Irish venture, since it was Gerald who was chiefly responsible for the transmission of a papal letter, known as ‘Laudabiliter’ (‘Praiseworthily’) from its opening word, supposedly issued by Pope Adrian IV, himself a native of St Albans and the only Englishman ever to have sat on the papal throne. According to Gerald’s version, ‘Laudabiliter’, issued in 1155, only a year after Henry II’s accession as King, granted Henry papal approval for an invasion of Ireland. The invasion itself was delayed until 1172 when, in the aftermath of the murder of Thomas Becket, and perhaps in an attempt to gain favour with the Church, Henry II landed at Waterford and spent nearly six months in Ireland, claiming to act for the good of the Irish and in particular for the reform and regulation of the unruly Irish Church. It was during this expedition that the King in all of his outgoing letters and charters for the first time began to use the title Henricus Dei Gratia rex (‘Henry King By God’s Grace’): a clear sign that Henry and his advisers were aware that the alteration of a couple of words might have considerable consequences for the King’s reputation.

  ‘Laudabiliter’ supplied justification for Henry’s conquest of Ireland, presenting it as a papally approved venture, for the benefit of religion. But the text as we have it was almost certainly tampered with, or even written by Gerald of Wales. It is not set out in the standard rhyming prose of other papal letters, a sort of ‘Rupert Bear said take a care or we may think your letters stink’ sort of language, intended to advertise the Pope’s learning and magnificence. Furthermore, we have another papal letter from the late 1150s, undoubtedly genuine, beginning ‘Satis Laudabiliter’ (‘Praiseworthily enough’), addressed to the King of France, congratulating him on his proposal for a joint expedition with Henry II against the Islamic powers of Spain, but just as politely refusing papal support. It seems that the Irish ‘Laudabiliter’ was originally a similar sort of letter to ‘Satis Laudabiliter’, praising the intention behind Henry’s proposals to invade Ireland but nonetheless cautioning against them. Gerald of Wales thus acted as a sort of semi-official court forger, tampering with the Pope’s correspondence and in the process supplying one of the chief justifications for the English invasion of Ireland, an event with major historic consequences still very much with us today.

  Gerald was a complicated character, his grandmother a Welsh princess, his father an Anglo-Norman baron. He was brought up as a younger son in Wales, where his earliest memories were of building castles on the sandy beaches, painfully aware that he himself was destined not for a military but for an ecclesiastical career. From the twelfth century onwards, denied the possibility of marriage by papal ‘reforms’, the clergy had to find other outlets for their sense of masculine pride. Learning and writing were undoubtedly one such outlet. Even so, mistrusted as a Norman in Wales, as a Welshman in Normandy and as a Paris-trained intellectual at the English court, Gerald never achieved the status or rewards that he believed were his due. His writings include some of the earliest and most fascinating ethnographical portraits of the Welsh and the Irish, spiced with reflections on tribal identity, on the way in which barnacles hatch into geese, and the other natural wonders of the west, not least the Welsh skill in singing, ‘not in unison like the inhabitants of other countries, but in many different parts’. In later life, denied promotion to the bishopric of St David’s, Gerald grew bitterly critical of Plantagenet rule, greeting a French invasion of England in 1216 as the dawn of liberty after an iron age of tyranny. As this suggests, although to some extent patronized at court, like many others of the Plantagenet ‘court’ writers, Gerald was a far from conventional courtier.

  Walter Map, for example, although his witticisms and tall tales were appreciated at court, joked not only about Frenchmen and effeminate monks but about Henry II’s resemblance to the demonic King Herla. John of Salisbury, a Parisian intellectual and theologian, at one time employed as a diplomatic agent in Henry II’s negotiations over Ireland, published the first full-scale treatise on secular government to have been written since the fall of Rome, yet remained profoundly critical of kings, not least for their addiction to the idiot bloodshed of the hunt. The sense of technical mastery conveyed in John’s writings, and his delight in using the rediscovered classical past to explore more modern facets of humanity is also to be found in the ‘Dialogue of the Exchequer’, composed by Richard fitz Nigel, Henry II’s treasurer and son of the former royal treasurer, Nigel, bishop of Ely, arrested at the court of King Stephen in 1139. The ‘Dialogue’ (so-called because it takes the form of a debate between a master and his student) was intended to explain the technical workings of the King’s Exchequer, how the money was received and accounted, how the chequered cloth was used, and how the many tens of thousands of silver pennies were assayed for their silver content. In an age of flat silver pennies, without the milled edges later introduced by Isaac Newton, the clipping of coin was both a common and a viciously prohibited phenomenon, punished as early as the 1130s by blinding and castration. In the Channel Islands, where French customs applied, false moneyers were boiled in a pot, thereby re-enacting the horrors that they themselves had committed in melting down the King’s coin. There is a record of just such a brew-up on the Island of Jersey in 1304.

  Technology in peace and war

  The processes of the Exchequer and the royal mint should remind us that this was an age of technological as well as of literary innovation. A charter issued by Henry II towards the end of his reign is one of the earliest English documents to refer to windmills, a new means of harnessing the power of nature, now added to the more traditional technology of water mills. Fulling mills, driven by water, in which paddles replaced the agency of human feet in pounding, scouring and thickening cloth, had appeared in England within only a few decades of the Norman Conquest. Wooden machinery – hoists, tread-wheels, windlasses and cranes – was essential not only for the building of the great cathedrals but for England’s trade, with cranes essential to the loading and unloading of ships in ports such as London or Southampton. At Canterbury, even in Becket’s lifetime, the Cathedral’s monks invested in a system of hydraulic pipes and aqueducts, intended to bring in a supply of clean fresh water from a spring more than a thousand yards away. What is remarkable here is not only that this plumbing was completed, and was still in working order three centuries later, but that two plans of it were drawn up before 1170 and inserted in an illustrated book of the Psalms (a ‘Psalter’). Celebrating the most recent technological advances as works of God, these constitute two of the very earliest maps to survive from medieval England. Their survival in a Psalter suggests a closer proximity than we might suppose between science and monastic prayer.

  In the King’s wars his soldiers now used crossbows, which by the 1220s were being imported for the royal household from one particular Genoese merchant, himself in regular contact with the workshops of Saracen Damascus. Worked by ratchets and cogs, and capable of firing a bolt with great force, the crossbow was so effective a weapon, and seemed to offer its users so unfair an advantage, that there were attempts by church councils entirely to ban it. King Richard I died from wounds inflicted by a crossbow bolt that pierced his armour as he was reconnoitring a siege. Ratchets and cogs were also crucial to the development o
f the first mechanical clocks which appear in England rather later, by the 1280s. A particularly massive early example, unique for the fact that it is still in working order, is preserved in Salisbury Cathedral.

  With the clock, in the twelfth century worked by water, later by mechanical means, came the possibility of accurately measuring the hours and hence of man achieving mastery over time itself. Machines, from the astrolabe to the crossbow, were now integral to royal government. Their very expense invested them with the sort of awe that today is reserved for such wonders of the modern state as the stealth bomber or satellite intelligence. Furthermore these were innovations which, with few exceptions, the Church and church leaders were happy to endorse. One of the earliest treatises on optics and the properties of the rainbow was written by Robert Grosseteste, former master in the schools of Oxford, bishop of Lincoln after 1235. Grosseteste was also responsible, as editor rather than translator, for the transmission into western Europe of much of the work of Aristotle, previously preserved in the Arab world but unexplored by western Europeans unable to read Greek. Before the fourteenth century, Greek in England was used chiefly for the consecration of churches, when the consecrating bishop was expected to trace out the Greek alphabet on the church floor. The bluffing that must have taken place on such occasions, by clerics entirely ignorant of Greek, poses intriguing questions about the honesty of England’s bishops.