A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  In England the Plantagenets were kings but in Normandy, Aquitaine or Anjou they remained merely dukes or counts, in theory subject to the kings of France. Even so, there is no doubt that it was rulers such as Charlemagne or the imperial Arthur that Henry II sought to emulate. It was by comparison with the Roman emperors of antiquity that contemporaries sought to describe his reign. In so far as a system of government could be imperial in the twelfth century, with orders transmitted from a central intelligence at the wandering royal court to the furthest flung proconsuls of the Scots or Spanish frontiers, then Henry II’s was an ‘imperial’ system, capable of functioning in the king’s absence, lacking the focus or mythology that the Romans had invested in the city of Rome, yet with an empire-wide system for the levying of taxation and troops, and with at least some sense that London, and the royal palace just down the river at Westminster, were now the hub of a much mightier cross-Channel enterprise.

  It was in the royal palace at Westminster that Richard fitz Nigel imagined himself sitting at the start of his Dialogue of the Exchequer, itself celebrating an office of government, the Exchequer, now permanently resident at Westminster, in regular communication with the other Exchequers established at Caen in Normandy and, after the 1170s, in colonial Dublin. It was in Westminster Abbey that the King was crowned, and it was there too that Henry II presided over the translation and reburial of the relics of his sainted ancestor, Edward the Confessor. London, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, had first been founded by Brutus and christened ‘New Troy’ only a few years after the foundation of Rome. It was renamed in honour of King Lud, an entirely mythical descendant of Brutus, said to have surrounded the city with walls and innumerable towers in the time of Julius Caesar. With fewer legendary elements than Geoffrey of Monmouth, a remarkable ‘Description’ of the city by William fitz Stephen, from the reign of Henry II, also celebrated London as a city superior, not just a rival, to Paris or Rome. As described by William, London’s teeming market places, public cook-shops, bear-baitings, water-sports, jewels brought from the Nile, gold from Arabia, great houses for the rich and philosophical debates for poor scholars, excelled even the commerce, games and learning of imperial Rome. By the 1160s, England was already developing not so much as a confederation of equally significant provinces but as a Londonland, its subordinate localities radiating outwards from one over-mighty hub. In some senses, these subordinate localities spanned the Channel, with the port and the markets of London as significant to the merchants of such regional capitals as La Rochelle or Rouen as they were to the herring fishermen of Yarmouth or the wool farmers of Herefordshire. By the 1170s, the merchants both of Rouen and of Cologne already maintained private harbours and halls for themselves within the city of London: the first, but by no means the last of the great multinational corporations to have set up business there.

  Eleanor of Aquitaine

  As for the King’s personal relations, and in particular his relations with his wife, although biographies of Eleanor continue to be published on a near annual basis, full of the most detailed and lurid of imaginings, we actually know remarkably little about Eleanor the woman. In popular mythology she is presented as the patron of poets and troubadours, presiding over a court of love in which damsels swooned and knights performed their chivalric errands. As for known facts, Eleanor certainly rebelled against her husband in 1173, and as a result spent most of the next sixteen years, through to Henry’s death, under house arrest at Sarum. However, to judge from the surviving Pipe Rolls of the Exchequer, her captivity was a comfortable one. Far from her household being packed with troubadours and poets, her own charters and their witness-lists suggest that she was surrounded by a polyglot household of Poitevins and Anglo-Normans, above all by chaplains and clerks, with liturgical celebrations and prayer being perhaps her keenest concerns. It was with a psalter in her hands, not a harp or a sword, that she is shown in her remarkable tomb effigy at Fontevraud.

  Meanwhile, liturgy and Eleanor’s ‘prison’ at Sarum sat very nicely together, since it was in the compact square mile of Sarum, with its castle and cathedral jostling for superiority on their chalk hill, that there grew up one of the greatest of liturgical inventions, the Sarum Rite: an elaborate series of services, prayers and ritual processions, mapped out according to the dimensions and physical arrangements of Sarum’s old cathedral, adopted, after 1200, as the standard non-monastic liturgy for most of southern England, even after the canons of Sarum had decamped from their white hill to the valley of the Avon at Salisbury. Eleanor was already using Sarum as a residence and its cathedral archives as a place to deposit her own private deeds as early as the 1150s, long before she was sent into ‘captivity’ there.

  As for her more personal tastes, she may have had a fondness for chestnuts – there is an entry in the 1159 Pipe Roll recording three shillings’ worth of chestnuts brought to her from Warwickshire – and she certainly spent a small fortune on clothes. But the only literature that she is known to have commissioned was in Latin or Norman-French, not in the southern French or Provencal language of the troubadours, and it was devoted to works of piety or history rather than to courtly love. After the death of Henry II in 1189, when Eleanor was free to do as she liked, and when for a period she acted as one of the great powers behind the throne of her favourite son, the absentee King Richard, she seems to have devoted particular attention to endowing prayers for the commemoration of Henry, referring to her late husband in affectionate and respectful terms that call into question the received opinion of their marriage.

  In so far as personal relations were crucial to public policy, and given that the King’s wars were precisely that – his own private affairs albeit backed by the full majesty and clout of a nation in arms – Henry II’s dealings with his wife and children are of more than merely trivial concern. Contemporaries wrote of the Plantagenets as a particularly dysfunctional family, suffering from something approaching sick-dynasty syndrome. From 1170, it was a family rarely at peace with itself. Henry’s refusal to make a permanent division of his estates, or to entrust his four surviving sons with any real authority led to the great civil war of 1173–4. Thereafter, it was rebellions, by the eldest of these sons, Henry the ‘Young King’, and later, after the Young King’s death, by Richard, that marked the chief political turning points of the 1180s. Even so, in the longer term, of far greater significance than these personal vendettas was the wider question of England’s place in France. Under Henry II, the question was not so much whether the French King, Louis VII, would threaten the Plantagenet lands, but whether the Plantagenets themselves might swallow up the whole of France. The Seine valley as far east as Mantes, within forty kilometres and almost within sight of the modern Eiffel Tower, was now in Plantagenet hands. Paris itself was increasingly a frontier city, encircled to the north, west and south by Henry II and his allies. After 1189, all of this changed. First, and as a result of his detention in Germany, King Richard lost the easternmost parts of Normandy. Then, in the five years after his accession in 1199 through to the final collapse in 1204, Richard’s brother, King John, lost all but a small part of the former Angevin ‘empire’. By 1204, Normandy, Anjou, Maine, Touraine and the northern parts of Poitou were under Capetian rather than Plantagenet rule. The modern kingdom of France was built upon King John’s failures and defeat. From 1204 onwards, only Gascony and the far south, those regions least governed and least visited by previous Plantagenet kings, were to remain under Plantagenet control. Like a bright meteor, briefer even than the imperial system established by Charlemagne, Henry II’s ‘empire’ returned to the darkness whence it came.

  FROM RICHARD I TO HENRY III,

  1189–1272

  Richard I and John

  A younger son, spoiled by his mother, intimidated by his father, King John had shown signs of unpleasantness from early youth. In 1185, aged just eighteen, he been sent to rule Ireland, where he outraged the Irish kings by laughing at them and pulling their long red beards. In the 11
90s, whilst Richard was abroad, John stirred up rebellion in England. For this he was pardoned: ‘Forgive him, he is merely a boy’, had been Richard’s verdict. At the time, John was already twenty-seven years old. After 1199, a chain of violence and treachery led directly from his coronation to the loss of his continental estate. Shortly after being crowned, John divorced his first wife in order to marry a southern French heiress, Isabella of Angoulême. Despite the fact that Isabella was perhaps only eight years old, John seems immediately to have consummated the marriage. A local baron, to whom Isabella had previously been betrothed, was so outraged that he rebelled. He was joined in rebellion by the King’s fifteen-year-old nephew, Arthur of Brittany, the son of John’s elder brother Geoffrey, who had died in 1186. Many had argued, even in 1199, that as the son of an elder brother, Arthur, the nephew, had a better claim to the English throne than John, the wicked uncle. In 1202, John decisively crushed Arthur’s rebellion, following a lightening raid on the fortress of Mirebeau just south of the Loire. Arthur himself was taken prisoner together with a large number of his supporters.

  The prisoners were in most cases later ransomed or released, with John apparently taking great delight in the formulation of passwords and secret codes by which he could communicate with their gaolers. Arthur, by contrast, simply vanished. The most likely explanation is that he was murdered, either by John in person or by a subordinate, perhaps by the King’s French captain Peter de Maulay, following a drunken dinner. His body, it was alleged, was thrown into the Seine but later dredged up in the nets of fishermen and buried in secret ‘for fear of the tyrant’. Be that as it may, Arthur’s disappearance supplied a pretext for appeals by the barons of northern France to their feudal overlord, the Capetian King Philip Augustus. The combination in Arthur’s story of youth, abduction, murder and a body thrown into water neatly encapsulated themes familiar from the cults of other child martyrs and must have heightened the sense of outrage against King John. Kings in the past, such as Henry I with Curthose or Henry II with Eleanor of Aquitaine, had incarcerated their brothers or wives. They did not, however, stoop to murder within the royal family.

  In 1203, Philip invaded Normandy. Rather than stay and fight, John took ship from Barfleur to Portsmouth, landing on 6 December 1203. After him came whatever could be salvaged from the Plantagenet treasure trove, including a portion, but from the historian’s point of view sadly only a small portion, of the archive previously used for the government of northern France. One hundred and thirty-seven years after Duke William had landed at Pevensey to do battle at Hastings, and forty-nine years (almost to the day) since Henry II had crossed to be crowned as the first of England’s Plantagenet kings, John’s landing only a few miles up the English coast threatened to sever the last of England’s ties to Normandy. Within sight of Normandy and a day’s sailing from the nearest English port, only the Channel Islands remained under English rule, pearls dropped from the necklace of the Norman empire, havens for wreckers and pirates: England’s medieval, and rather chilly, Tortuga.

  The loss of Normandy was not entirely the fault of King John. A large burden of guilt might be attached to his elder brother. Lionhearted though he may have been, even in the East Richard had experienced almost as much military failure as success. His captivity in Germany, itself the product of his recklessness and refusal to placate the ego of the Duke of Austria, placed him in the same tradition as the feeble King Stephen, captured and ransomed fifty years before. Henry II had been absent from England for several years at a stretch, without this leading to civil unrest. Richard, by contrast, through his promotion of his former chancellor, William Longchamps and his failure to take decisive action against his brother John, left his realm in the care of regents who were quite incapable of working with one another, let alone of containing the threat of civil war. Money was Richard’s sole concern on the eve of his departure, to such an extent that he was prepared to sell off valuable rights over the King of Scots that his father had won, boasting that he would sell London itself if the price were right, leaving the Jews to carry the blame for the financial hardships to which his policies contributed, leading in turn to the most notorious pogrom in English history.

  Within a few weeks of Richard’s departure, a gang of local thugs forced the Jewish population of York first to seek refuge within the royal castle, and then, when the tower where they were sheltering seemed doomed to fall, to commit suicide, as Christian witnesses saw it, in deliberate and gruesome re-enactment of the suicide pact of the Zealots at Massada in 71 AD. The period of a crusade was always a time of danger for the Jews, as with the allegations involving St William at Norwich in 1144, in the midst of another crusade, when once again those unable to make the journey to the East in person may have turned against a local ‘eastern’ population as a means of sating an unsatisfied craving for military glory. Even so, never before had royal administration shown itself so powerless to protect the Jews. When order was eventually restored in England, it was at the hands of ministers such as Walter of Coutances, Hubert Walter and William Marshal, all of whom owed their first promotion at court not to Richard but to his father, a far better judge of character and a far better manager of men. William Longchamps, Richard’s own favourite, was meanwhile forced to flee from England dressed as a washerwoman, pursued across Dover beach by a local sailor outraged to learn that the object of his amorous attentions was a man in drag.

  As government dissolved into French farce, and as the French themselves prepared to lay siege to Normandy, Richard’s only concern remained war and the means to pay for it. Even after the financing of his crusade, and even after the ransom had been raised to pay for his release from captivity, in the last two years of his reign he extorted fines from his subjects for the reissue of all royal charters previously awarded, using the entirely spurious argument that his great seal had been lost in the East, when in fact it had been mislaid for no more than a few days. Richard’s taxation, his sale of justice and his debased reputation for respecting the terms of even those privileges which he himself had granted led inexorably towards that sense of common grievance against the crown which was to cause such problems for his successor, King John. Meanwhile, by failing to produce an heir, and by leaving the inheritance to the throne open to the most unscrupulous of the claimants, he sowed the seeds of hatred between his brother, John, and his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, that was to lead to John’s murder of Arthur, and hence not only to John’s forfeiture of his French estates but to the most notorious act of Plantagenet tyranny since the martyrdom of Thomas Becket.

  Nineteenth-century historians were in no doubt that Richard was a boastful, southern French absentee, resident in England for less than three months, yet responsible for a vast wastage of English public finance. To the Victorians, Richard seemed to have the manners of a cad. His repeated public confessions of sexual misconduct, all the more terrifying because imprecisely defined, were exactly, so the Victorians thought, what one might expect of a Frenchman. In recent years there has been something of a revival in Richard’s reputation, partly because the story of his reign is such a gift to narrative historians in search of exciting stories set in exotic locations, in part, bizarrely enough, because of attempts to integrate Richard within the counter-culture of the 1960s by proposing that his sexual appetites, so publicly confessed, were homosexual. In every sense a man’s man, he could join Alexander of Macedon or Frederick of Prussia as a model of that particular queer aesthetic in which beards, battles and army boots remain the order of the day.

  In 1187, Richard is said to have shared the same bed as King Philip of France. At Messina in 1190, on his way to crusade, he stripped naked to do public penance for his unspecified sins and, on his return in 1195, having been warned by a hermit to amend his lifestyle and thus to avoid the fate of the city of Sodom, he once again did penance, so we are told, returning to the bed of his wife from which he is assumed to have strayed. Even so, none of Richard’s enemies accused him of deviant sexual practic
es, as they surely would have done had his homosexuality been widely known. In 1182, it was for his kidnap and alleged rape of the women of Aquitaine that he was criticized by the Yorkshire chronicler, Roger of Howden, and he undoubtedly fathered at least one child in southern France: Philip, later lord of Cognac. Sharing a bed was a political, rather than a sexual gesture, and it may have been the punishment, not the crimes, of the city of Sodom which inspired the hermit’s outburst in 1195. For all of these reasons, the case for Richard’s homosexuality has never been satisfactorily proved. By contrast, his part in the collapse of Plantagenet authority in France seems both well documented and undeniable.

  Such a highly personal narrative of the loss of empire has to be supplemented with other factors, political, social and economic. Ever since Henry II’s accession in 1154, indeed for much of the period since the death of William the Conqueror in 1087, it had been unclear whether Normandy and England were to be treated as two distinct entities or as an inseparable Anglo-Norman whole. Like William the Conqueror, Henry II had several times proposed to partition his continental lands amongst his sons. Purely by accident, the tensions between father and sons and the military successes of Richard had prevented such partitions from taking effect. At a more profound level, the cross-Channel entity brought into being in 1066 had been breaking apart almost from the moment of its creation. As early as the 1080s, individual Anglo-Norman families had been inclined to divide their estates in each new generation, between one branch established chiefly in Normandy, another branch in England. English and Norman national identities, far from merging, had tended towards an ever sharper divide, with myths of nationhood emerging on either side. The English, even those of Norman or Anglo-Norman descent, were said by the French to have tails. A decade after 1204, the Norman-born soldiers in the King of England’s army were claiming that their ‘Normannitas’ entitled them to occupy the front row of the King’s cavalry in battle, just as the men of Kent claimed that it was they who should take precedence over all others in the English infantry.