Tacticians gave considerable thought to new ways of waging this kind of war – how to breach castle walls and how to make castles more impregnable. The first Norman castles had been wooden structures built on a mound (motte) surrounded by an enclosure (bailey) within encircling ditches, ramparts and palisades. The timber structure at the centre of the complex was soon replaced by a square stone keep (or donjon). It was several storeys high to make scaling difficult, and its entrances were protected by stout doors, narrow passages and drawbridges.
Determined assailants countered by ‘escalade’, climbing ladders laid against the wall while archers supplied covering fire. This was hazardous since the defenders retaliated by hurling down rocks, combustible material and other missiles. If the besiegers had the leisure for a lengthy campaign they might erect towers from which soldiers could fire arrows over the defences and that might even be wheeled up to the castle, providing protection for the soldiers until they were close enough to climb over the ramparts. An opposite approach to going over the walls was going under them. Sappers attacked the stonework either to break into the building or to undermine the walls and bring them down. The ultimate means of attack – again if time allowed – was simply to blockade the castle, preventing food and water getting in and thus starving the inhabitants into surrender.
The security of Henry II’s crown was largely based on studding his kingdom with castles placed in the keeping of men he could trust and making sure that potential troublemakers did not have castles. A great lord, by maintaining a group of castles in an area, could make himself master of it and defy the king. Hugh Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, was such a lord. Castles at Framlingham, Bungay and Norton enabled him to be almost the independent ruler of much of East Anglia. In 1157 Henry stripped Bigod of his castles and restored Framlingham and Bungay in 1165 only on payment of a huge fine. The king studied carefully the technology of castle building and was an enthusiastic builder and modernizer of defence works. He devoted a considerable part of the royal revenue to maintaining about a hundred castles in England, and during his reign he spent more than £20,000 on construction and reconstruction. Dover Castle alone – so vital to a king with cross-Channel interests – cost more than £7,000 to refurbish using the latest technology.
The story of Henry the castle builder is well illustrated by the history of Orford Castle in Suffolk, which, in its day, was the most formidable such structure yet built. When Henry restored Framlingham Castle to Earl Bigod in 1165 he simultaneously began work on a new royal stronghold just 11 miles away at Orford. The new building was sited with two objectives: it formed part of the coastal defences, and it was a safeguard against any future displays of disloyalty by Bigod and his supporters.
The design of Orford Castle was revolutionary. Like earlier structures, the keep stood on a motte and was surrounded by a curtain wall, but the keep itself was of a shape not before seen in England. One drawback of the old square keep was that it was vulnerable to sappers at the angles of the walls where defenders found it difficult for their missiles to be effective. Orford was built to a circular plan with three projecting square towers. The base of each tower was of an extra thickness. Any sappers attempting the formidable task of breaching the walls were now much more vulnerable to attack from above. The success of this concept is proved by the fact that Orford was never subjected to a siege.
It was completed just in time to play an important role in the war of 1173–4. When Hugh Bigod was again tempted into rebellion he welcomed Robert de Beaumont’s invasion. But Beaumont’s troops had to make landfall well to the south at Walton, near Felixstowe, where Bigod had a castle, and he gave Orford a wide berth as he travelled to Framlingham to link up with his ally. The impregnability of Henry’s new stronghold denied the rebels complete control of East Anglia. After the war Henry did not repeat the mistake of allowing Bigod to keep his castles. They were all surrendered to the king, and Framlingham was razed to the ground. But it was not just the rebels who lost the symbols of their territorial power. According to the chronicler Roger of Howden, the king took every castle in England into his hand and, removing the castellans of the earls and barons, put in his own custodians. Several castles were destroyed and, for decades after the war heaps of rubble demonstrated the powerlessness of the barons against a strong king.
1174–82
Henry loathed civil war. He remembered only too well the devastation it had caused in Stephen’s reign. War was expensive, it took a large toll in human lives and it made good government impossible. For these reasons and also because he wanted to be reconciled to his sons, he behaved leniently towards the rebels. He laboured hard and long to bring about a cessation of hostilities.
On 8 September Louis and young Henry agreed terms with the king, but Richard continued his resistance. Only when Henry appeared with an army before the gates of Poitiers, Richard’s headquarters, did the recalcitrant son submit to the inevitable. By the terms of the settlement, sealed at Falaise in October, prisoners were released, properties restored and few punishments exacted. Hugh Bigod and Robert de Beaumont were deprived of their castles and not immediately restored in blood. William the Lion had to pay handsomely for his liberty. In December, by the Treaty of Falaise, he was obliged to do homage publicly to Henry at York and to surrender five of his Scottish castles. Only Eleanor did not share in Henry’s well-calculated forgiveness. He kept her at his beck and call, ordering her to appear with him for ceremonial occasions. Her restrictions were somewhat eased after 1184, when Henry and his sons were partially reconciled, but she did not regain her independence until Henry’s death in 1189.
He now dealt energetically with the inevitable lawlessness that had broken out during the war. In January 1176 he issued the Assize of Northampton, which was basically a reaffirmation of the Assize of Clarendon. ‘This assize,’ it was declared, ‘shall hold good for all the time since the assize was made at Clarendon down to the present and henceforth during the lord king’s pleasure, with regard to murder, treason and arson and with regard to all offences … except minor thefts and robberies which were committed in time of war, as of horses, oxen and lesser things.’ Henry believed that strengthening royal justice, limiting the freedom of the barons and providing for the greater wellbeing of all his subjects were all bound up together. More powers were granted to the king’s circuit judges (justices in eyre – that is, travelling judges). In ecclesiastical matters Henry clawed back some of the rights he had forfeited in the wake of the Becket affair.
Henry had yet to forge a comprehensive and lasting peace treaty with Louis VII. The French king was in no hurry to accept the dominant position that Henry had achieved in Europe by war and diplomacy, and in the summer of 1177 Henry decided to force the issue. He summoned all his barons to meet him with their military levies and to be ready to sail for Normandy. At the same time he proposed a meeting with Louis to settle all outstanding issues between them. The message could not have been clearer. The result was a conference at Ivry on the border of Normandy in September 1177. It was chaired by a papal legate under instructions from Pope Alexander III to enlist the support of the two kings for a new crusade. The resulting Treaty of Ivry stated:
We wish all men to know that we are now and intend henceforth to be friends, and that each of us will to the best of his ability defend the other in life and limb and in worldly honour against all men. And if anyone shall presume to do either of us harm, I Henry will aid my lord Louis, king of the French, against all men to the best of my ability, and I Louis will aid Henry, king of the English, as my vassal and liegeman … we mutually agree that henceforth neither of us will make demands upon each other’s lands and possessions and rights as they now stand.4
It was a triumph for Henry, although the ageing Louis was tired of dynastic conflict and was concentrating his efforts in handing over to his son, Philip Augustus, a realm at peace.
Henry now enjoyed the status of senior statesman of Europe. He acted as arbiter in dynastic and territorial d
isputes, such as that between the kings of Castile and Navarre (1177). In 1176 his youngest daughter, Joanna, was married to the king of Sicily, the last of a system of alliances that connected the Plantagenets to several of the royal and ducal houses of Europe. After the death of Louis VII in 1180 the rival factions at the court of the young Philip Augustus both looked to Henry for support.
In the years of peace, when his prestige was at its height, Henry concentrated on completing the overhaul of royal administration. In 1177 he ordered the sheriffs to carry out a survey of all lands held by the king’s tenants-in-chief (principal landholders). This placed on record the names of all such tenants and the services and payments they owed the crown. In 1178 the king reorganized his royal council (the curia Regis), the body of advisers drawn from the barons, senior ecclesiastics and courtiers who sat with the king, wherever he was, to make policy and to hear ‘plaints’ (appeals for royal justice brought by subjects). The political and judicial functions of the curia had for some time been diverging, but Henry formalized this tendency by directing that five members should remain at Westminster to hear all judicial cases. This was the origin of the Court of King’s Bench, the highest law court in the land. The Assize of Arms of 1181 ordered every freeman to equip himself with weapons and military equipment appropriate to his station for the defence of the realm, but at the same time Henry encouraged the development of scutage, the commutation of payment in lieu of military service. By these means the king intended to have troops at his disposal when needed while at the same time demilitarizing the baronage and increasing royal revenue. One outcome of all these measures was the introduction of property tax, for military liability was measured by every subject’s annual landed income.
One measure of the impact of Henry II’s administrative and legislative reforms is the quantity of paper they generated. From this time official records began to be kept more diligently. The regular visitation of the justices in eyre to arbitrate in local disputes encouraged all landholders to have transactions documented so that they could be produced in evidence. Important documents were written on parchment on vellum ‘rolls’, which could be conveniently and securely stored. Most important in recording the rights and responsibilities of the king and his subjects were the court rolls, which were produced for every tribunal, from the manorial court to King’s Bench. Of particular importance to the government were the Exchequer rolls. The Exchequer was the department of the king’s household that dealt with money. It handled the collection and administration of royal revenue and all judicial matters concerning finance. The details of its workings have been preserved in one of the most remarkable books of the period, the Dialogus de Scaccario (Dialogue concerning the Exchequer). Composed towards the end of the reign by Richard Fitz Neal, treasurer to the Exchequer, it took the form of a discussion between a master and a disciple.
1183–9
The sons of the ageing king were impatient for power and jealous of each other. Their continued opposition to their father marred his later years and ensured the break-up of his empire. Young Henry aspired to the complete overlord-ship of all Angevin lands. Richard was intent on independent control of his dukedom of Aquitaine. Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany, had ambitions he was careful to keep concealed. One chronicler described him as ‘a hypocrite in everything, a deceiver and a dissembler’5. The youngest, John (14 in 1183), was never going to be content with the remote kingdom of Ireland.
In February 1183 Geoffrey egged on his eldest brother to grab Aquitaine in league with some of Richard’s disaffected barons. They hoped to distract the king by rekindling civil war, but Henry had done too well his work of bringing the great English magnates to heel, and the new conflict remained a family affair. It was all the more bitter for that. When Henry arrived before the walls of Limoges to reason with his sons Young Henry ordered archers on the walls to fire at his father. The king settled to besiege Limoges while Richard furiously harried the rebel barons in a hideous orgy of revenge. The brief war ended when Young Henry died of dysentery (11 June).
The king now had to make new provisions for the division of his lands, and this inevitably stirred resentment among his surviving sons. He required Richard to relinquish Aquitaine to John, and when he refused John conspired with Geoffrey to wrest the province from Richard by force. A raid in August 1184 only provoked Richard into an attack on Brittany. When all the king’s attempts to reconcile these differences failed, the chronicler Roger of Howden reports that Henry ‘gathered a large army to wage war on his son Richard’6 in April 1885. Now Henry found a use for his discarded wife. Just as Queen Eleanor had allied with her boys 12 years earlier, so now Henry forced her to act in concert with him against them. He demanded that Richard yield to his mother her own inheritance of Aquitaine in return for assurances that Richard would succeed to all his father’s lands. It seemed that, at last, all was settled.
But misfortune continued to dog the dynasty. John, who had been sent over to Ireland to be crowned and to stamp his authority on the island, returned in December 1185 having wasted a great amount of money, stirred up a great deal of resentment and failed to win the acceptance of the Irish barons. In the following July Geoffrey was killed in a jousting accident. The future of the Angevin dynasty now lay in the hands of John, widely regarded as a graceless wastrel, and Richard, who, according to the chroniclers, was a mindless brute for whom politics was a matter of terrorism and bloodshed. Geoffrey’s death had further complicated international affairs because Philip Augustus of France demanded the guardianship of his infant son. Discord between the two kings was put on hold in October 1187 when, in response to an appeal from Pope Urban III, they agreed jointly to mount a crusade. All Christendom had been shocked by the news that the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem had been conquered by the Muslim leader, Saladin. Advance contingents were mustered and despatched to the Holy Land while Henry and Philip Augustus imposed a new tax, the Saladin tithe, to pay for a full-scale expedition. This was bitterly resented, and Henry faced the prospect, after many years of internal peace, that his English barons might, once more, rise against him. Meanwhile, the peril of Jerusalem failed to push into the background the three-way conflict of Henry, Philip Augustus and Richard.
After months of alternate fighting and negotiation the three met at Bonmoulins in November 1188. Gervase of Canterbury tells us that: ‘On the first day they were sufficiently restrained and discussed calmly. On the following day they began little by little to bandy words. On the third day, however, they started to quarrel and so sharply countered threats with threats that the knights standing about were reaching for their swords.’7 Richard demanded assurances that he would succeed to Henry’s throne, but the king refused. Perhaps he feared to contemplate his own demise. Perhaps he genuinely could not decide what was best for his empire. Perhaps, as Richard suspected, his father intended to replace him as heir with his favourite son, John. Whatever the truth, the end result was that Richard publicly transferred his allegiance from Henry to Philip Augustus.
Desultory fighting continued until the following summer, when Richard and his ally besieged Henry in Le Mans, his birthplace. Henry and a small retinue escaped, leaving behind a burning town. By July he was at Chinon in the Loire valley. Near there, sick in body and depressed in mind, he met his adversaries. The French king presented a humiliating list of demands. Listlessly Henry assented. He returned to Chinon and there received a list of all the great men who had defected to Richard. At the head of the list was that of his other son, John. That was, for him, the last straw. He stopped fighting the fever that was raging through his body and, on 6 July 1189, he died.
RICHARD I AND JOHN 1189–1216
During the reigns of Henry II’s two turbulent sons England became an offshore kingdom, increasingly separated from the rest of the Angevin empire. Richard reigned for ten years (1189–99) but spent no more than six months in England during all that time. A brave and skilful leader in battle, he was also immersed in the ideals of chivalry as ex
alted by the poets and singers who attended the court of his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Contrary to the enduring legend of ‘Richard the Lionheart’, there was another side to his character: he could be cruel, short-tempered, ruthless and, quite possibly, homosexual. His brother John was given lands on both sides of the Channel but had no share in the government of the country, which he resented. He tried to oust Richard’s officials from power, but it was not until Richard lay dying that he nominated John as his heir.
The dukes of the continental Angevin lands refused to recognize John, and his 17-year reign (1199–1216) saw him lose his grip on these territories. By the time of his death the continental possessions owned by Henry II had been lost to the king of France, and the failure of Henry’s sons to keep their inheritance intact led to the emergence of England as a separate nation state.
1189–91
‘England is cold and always raining.’ That was Richard’s opinion of the island that formed part of his inheritance. He had no interest in it, save as a source of revenue. His two passions were Anjou and crusading. By the time of his accession Richard had vowed to go on a crusade to the Holy Land, and his chief concern was to gather an army to recover Jerusalem from the Saracen conqueror Saladin, who had taken the city in 1187. He raised taxes, granted charters, sold offices of state and even demanded huge payments from those already in office to retain their positions. For 10,000 marks he released King William of Scotland from his oath of fealty. By these and other measures Richard was able to raise an army of 8,000 mounted and foot soldiers and a hundred ships.
The Plantagenets: The Kings That Made Britain Page 3
