Great Tales from English History: The Truth About King Arthur, Lady Godiva, Richard the Lionheart, and More: 1

by Robert Lacey

  We might well say today that such appalling masochism was reason in itself for Thomas’s incurably prickly attitude towards the world. But in Canterbury Cathedral that evening in 1170 the monks knew they had been confronted with proof of the dead archbishop’s saintliness. Thomas had mortified his body in order to master his carnal desires. Otherworldly in this last stage of his life, Becket had moved to the ultimate dimension in the manner and place of his dying, and the monks promptly set about collecting his blood in a basin. The martyr was decked out for burial in the cathedral crypt, wearing his hair shirt below his glorious robes, and carrying his ceremonial shepherd’s staff of office.

  All Europe was shocked by the murder in the cathedral. The tale reached as far as Iceland, where it became the ‘Thómas Saga’, and in the scandalised retellings the complexity of Becket’s love-hate relationship with his former friend became simplified. Henry Plantagenet was cast as the villain. The Pope declared Thomas a saint, and ordered the King to do penance.

  In the summer of 1174, dressed for the occasion in a hair shirt of his own, Henry went humbly to Canterbury, where he spent a day and a night fasting on the bare ground beside Thomas’s tomb. Around him lay ordinary pilgrims, so the news of the royal humiliation would be publicly known and spread. The King offered himself for five strokes of the rod from every bishop present, and three from each of Canterbury’s eighty monks. Then, wearing around his neck a phial of water that had been tinctured with drops of Becket’s blood, Henry dragged himself on to his horse and rode back to London, where he took to his bed.

  ‘Canterbury Water’ became a must-buy for the countless pilgrims who flocked to Becket’s tomb in the centuries that followed. The precious pink liquid was said to heal the blind and raise the crippled, and the streets around the cathedral became crammed with souvenir stalls selling badges and highly coloured images of the martyr. The tomb itself was a stupendous sight, sparkling with jewels and hung about with the sticks and crutches of those whom the visit had revivified - a gaudy spectacle of salvation. From relative obscurity, Canterbury became one of Europe’s premier religious destinations, ranking with Rome, Jerusalem, Santiago de Compostela and the continent’s other great centres of pilgrimage.

  England took pride in its home-grown hero who so enhanced the country’s spiritual status in Christendom, and no one embraced the devotion of Thomas more enthusiastically than the royal family. Henry II’s three daughters, married to the rulers of Sicily, Saxony and the Spanish kingdom of Castile, spread the cult of the English saint with chapels, lavish wallpaintings and mosaics. The obstinate individual who had dared to defy their father was no longer a villain - he was an icon of English identity - and in later centuries even the name of this London merchant’s son became fancified. He came to be known as Thomas ‘à’ Becket.

  The prestigious new cult and enhanced tourist business were some consolation for the fact that Henry had lost his great battle with the Church. It had been a major defeat. In addition to his public penance, the King had to agree that England’s church courts should remain independent of the common law. Priests continued to enjoy the ‘benefit of clergy’ for centuries, and from a modern perspective clerical privilege might not seem a worthy cause for which to die. But the archbishop had spoken his mind. He had stood up to authority he considered unjust and he had been prepared to lay down his life for his beliefs. Goat-hair shirt or silk underpants - either way, Thomas Becket had walked the path of the hero.

  THE RIVER-BANK TAKE-AWAY

  AD 1172

  IN 1172 WILLIAM FITZSTEPHEN, ONE OF THE eyewitnesses at the death of Thomas Becket, described what you would see if you visited the bustling city of London in the reign of England’s first Plantagenet king:

  On the east stands the Tower, exceeding great and strong, whose walls and bailey rise from very deep foundations, their mortar being mixed with the blood of beasts. On the west are two strongly fortified castles, while from them there runs a great continuous wall, very high, with seven double gates, and towers at intervals along its north side. On the south, London once had similar walls and towers. But the Thames, that mighty river teeming with fish, which runs on that side and ebbs and flows with the sea, has in the passage of time washed those bulwarks away, undermining them and bringing them down . . . On all sides, beyond the houses, lie the gardens of the citizens that live in the suburbs, planted with trees, spacious and fair, laid out beside each other. To the north are pasturelands and pleasant open spaces of level meadow, intersected by running waters, which turn millwheels with a cheerful sound.

  FitzStephen wrote this description as a prologue to his life of Becket. He wanted to explain the background from which his hero had sprung and, as a fellow Londoner, he was clearly proud of England’s largest city, which he praised for its Christian faith, for the wholesomeness of its air - and for its ability to enjoy itself.

  At Easter, they make sport with tournaments on the river. A shield is firmly tied to a stout pole in midstream and a small boat, rowed with the current by many oarsmen, carries a young man standing in the bows, who has to strike the shield with his lance. His object is to break the lance by striking the shield and keeping his footing. But if he strikes it and does not splinter the lance, he falls into the river, and the boat goes on without him.

  When the great marsh along the northern walls of the city is frozen, crowds of young men go out to amuse themselves on the ice. Some run to gather speed, and slide along the ice with feet apart covering great distances. Others make seats of ice shaped like millstones, and get a group of others who run in front of them, holding hands to drag them along. Sometimes they go too fast, and all fall flat on their faces. Others more skilled in ice sports fit the shin-bones of beasts to their feet, lashing them to their ankles, and use an iron-shod pole to propel themselves, pushing against the ice. They are borne along as swiftly as a bird in flight.

  If England had had a tourist board in the twelfth century William FitzStephen would surely have been employed to write its brochures. A man of strong opinions, he contended that the men of London were famous for their honour and the women for their chastity. He produced no evidence to back up these claims, but he did describe a city with at least one facility that sounds both modern and convenient:

  Moreover there is in London on the river-bank, amid the wine sold from ships and wine cellars, a public cook-shop. There daily you can find the seasonal foods, dishes roast, fried and boiled, fish of every size, coarse meat for the poor and delicate for the rich, such as venison and various kinds of birds. If travel-weary friends should suddenly call on any of the citizens, and do not wish to wait until fresh food is bought and cooked and ‘till servants bring water for hands and bread’, they hasten to the river-bank, where everything that they could want is ready and waiting . . . Those who desire to fare delicately need not search to find sturgeon or guinea-fowl . . . since every sort of delicacy is set out for them here.

  RICHARD THE LIONHEART

  AD 1189-99

  JUST ONE ENGLISH KING HAS BEEN ACCORDED the honour of a statue outside the Houses of Parliament - Richard Coeur de Lion, the Lionheart, who sits magnificently on horseback, larger than life, wearing chain mail and brandishing his great sword over the car park between the Commons and the Lords. Richard is England’s muscular hero king - our only ruler to have been captured and flung into a foreign dungeon - and it is not surprising that he has generated some fairytales. While in jail, according to one medieval legend, he had a love affair with the daughter of the German king who had captured him - to the fury of her father, who decided to stage an ‘accident’. He gave orders for a lion in his private zoo to be starved for a few days, then to be allowed to ‘escape’ into Richard’s cell. Hearing of the plan, the distraught princess begged her lover to flee, but Richard asked her instead for forty silk handkerchiefs. These he bound around his right forearm, and thus protected, when the beast broke into his cell, he thrust his arm down the lion’s throat. Reaching inside its chest to tea
r out the heart, Richard strode to the Great Hall and flung it, still beating, on to the table in front of the astonished king. He then proceeded to sprinkle salt over the pulsating flesh and ate it with great relish - the Lionheart in deed and name.

  Two years before he succeeded his father Henry II in 1189, Richard had sworn to ‘take the Cross’ - that is, to go on crusade - and his crusading oath defined almost everything about him. For a hundred years, Christian Europe had been consumed by the compulsion to clear Palestine of the Muslims, who controlled access to Jerusalem, Bethlehem and the other sites sacred to Christians in the Holy Land. The crusaders believed they possessed the one and only true faith, and that they were fighting in a just cause when they destroyed non-Christians. If they risked their lives in battle they increased their chances of going to heaven - a crusade was a pilgrimage with bloodshed added. Throw in a dash of vengeance and a call to liberation involving a simply identified but distant place: here were the eternal constituents for self-righteous homicide.

  At the moment when Christianity was securing its greatest ever hold over the hearts and minds of Europe - its mastery carved into the stone of the continent’s great cathedrals - non-believers were being seen by ordinary Christians as deeply threatening. Richard’s accession was marked by England’s first violent persecution of a minority group in the name of religion, when the Jews living in London and a number of other towns were attacked. The Jews had come to England with the Normans. They were a means by which the Normans financed their warfare, and they provided banking services to the rest of the community. They lent money on which they charged interest to merchants, landowners and also to the Church - many of England’s great cathedrals and monasteries were built with money lent by the Jews.

  But dependency provoked resentment among those who had borrowed, and they seized on the foreigners’ unfamiliar costume, diet and other non-Christian practices as an alibi for taking revenge. Killing the lender was also a simple way of removing the debt. At Lynn in Norfolk and Stamford in Lincolnshire it was members of the local establishment - gentry and knights - who led the plundering of Jewish property. In York many of the several-hundred-strong Jewish community barricaded themselves inside the castle tower, whereupon they were besieged not only by rioters but by the sheriff’s men who were supposed to protect them. Fearing their wives and children would be raped and mutilated, they killed them, then set fire to the tower and killed themselves.

  To his credit, Richard tried personally to stop the anti-Semitic atrocities and made sure that the perpetrators of the York attack were punished. But when he arrived in Palestine on his crusade the following year, he showed no mercy to the Muslim infidels that he encountered.

  In June 1191 he landed with his army at the port of Acre, which crusaders from several European countries had been besieging to no avail. Immediately, his powerful personality and his well organised forces gave him effective command of the attack. The city surrendered within five weeks. It was one of the great and rare triumphs in the two-hundred-year history of European crusading, establishing Richard as a solid-gold hero throughout Christendom. But when he felt that the Arabs were being slow in implementing the surrender agreement, he had no hesitation in parading 2700 hostages in front of the city and then having them slaughtered.

  It is the folk-memory of such killings that has led Osama bin Laden and Arab leaders such as Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi to describe modern Western invaders of the Middle East, particularly Britain and America, as ‘crusaders’. They see a direct connection, and they view the modern state of Israel, sponsored and so heavily supported by America, as the West’s revenge for the failure of its crusades. In the Middle Ages the Arab inhabitants of Palestine generally extended more tolerance to Christians - and to the small number of Jews then living there - than the Christians were prepared to show to them. Saladin, the Kurdish leader of the Muslim forces, was conspicuous for his gallantry, entertaining enemy leaders with courtesy and generosity - though his soldiers, like the crusader armies, were ultimately held together by religious fanaticism. Muslims who died in this jihad, or holy war, were promised instant entry to heaven.

  In his sixteen months of campaigning, Richard failed to capture his main goal, Jerusalem. But he did secure Acre and a strip of territory that provided a toehold for Christian influence. And when it came to hand-to-hand combat, he proved himself a royal Rambo: ‘With no armour on his legs, he threw himself into the sea first . . . and forced his way powerfully on to dry land’, according to one account of how the Lionheart relieved the town of Jaffa in August 1192, showing no mercy to his opponents. ‘The outstanding king shot them down indiscriminately with a crossbow he was carrying in his hand, and his elite companions pursued [them] as they fled across the beach, cutting them down’.

  Richard’s fame as a warrior owed as much to his organisational skills as to his bravery. Thanks to the care he took with the logistics, the English were the best-supplied, fed and watered of all the crusader armies. Before he left London, the King had arranged the manufacture and delivery of sixty thousand horseshoes - most from the iron forges of the Forest of Dean - along with fourteen thousand cured pig carcasses from Lincolnshire, Essex and Hampshire. He seldom let sentiment obstruct practicality. In England he had been presented with an ancient and mighty sword found in Glastonbury and said to be King Arthur’s Excalibur. But when he reached Sicily Richard exchanged the mythical weapon for four supply ships. The Lionheart was so busy creating his own legend he had no need of anyone else’s.

  It was on his way back from the Holy Land that he inspired the most memorable legends of all. Hugging the shore in an attempt to avoid the winter storms of the open Mediterranean, he was shipwrecked in December 1192 on the northern Adriatic coast (now Slovenia), and travelling north towards home he entered the territory of the Austrian duke Leopold with whom he had quarrelled during the siege of Acre. The English king and his companions tried to disguise themselves in hoods and cloaks as returning pilgrims, but they were captured and flung into the dungeons of Castle Durnstein, high on a crag above the River Danube.

  Richard did not spend long behind bars. As Christendom’s most famous warrior, he was a high-profile bargaining chip to be paraded by Leopold and the German emperor - the king in the fairytale of the forty handkerchiefs. But it was over a year before England came up with the 100,000 silver crowns - the equivalent of three years’ taxation - required to ransom its walkabout king, and from this captivity came both the legend of the hungry lion and the story of Blondel the royal minstrel.

  Richard was music-mad. He loved to conduct the choir in his chapel, and he composed ballads in the style of the courtly troubadours of Aquitaine, where he grew up and which he always considered his home. According to the legend, he had composed a ballad to a lady of the court with the help of Blondel, a ministrel who was devoted to him. The moment Blondel heard of his master’s captivity, he set off for Germany, singing the first line of the ballad outside every castle he passed, until finally he reached Castle Durnstein. There he heard, wafting through the bars of the dungeon, the melodious voice that told him that Richard was alive and well.

  Like the tale of the silk handkerchiefs and the lion’s heart, this story sprang up within a few decades of Richard’s death. When people later recalled the imprisonment of their crusader king they opted for fantasy, forgetting the unprecedented expense that his ransom had imposed on England. The ransom tax swelled the considerable sums already shelled out by those back home to finance his crusade, and it was followed by even heavier taxes to sustain the battles that Richard started fighting in France as soon as he got back to Europe. But as we smile, perhaps patronisingly, at the thought of these poor put-upon medievals, let us reflect on the disposal of our taxes today. In the spring of 2003 Tony Blair promised he would spend ‘whatever it takes’ to support the British troops fighting in Iraq, and, despite people’s doubts about the war, the opinion polls showed broad agreement with that particular use of taxpayers’ m
oney. Who would dare to put a price on patriotism?

  The abandonment of reason that national feeling can provoke seems the likeliest explanation of England’s fondness down the years for the warlike Lionheart - a character venerated enough to be played on the screen by Sir Sean Connery. In reality, England’s hero king did not speak English. His native language was French, and he saw himself as an Angevin, building up the French empire of his father Henry and his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine. As he lay dying in 1199, aged only forty-one, following a crossbow wound he had received during the siege of the French castle of Chalus, Richard arranged that his body, disembowelled and salted, should be sent for burial beside his parents at the abbey of Fontevrault in Anjou. As a final touch, he instructed that his famous Coeur de Lion - which turned out to be ‘of great size’ - be cut out and sent, not to England, but to Normandy.

  Yet Richard did bequeath to England an enduring emblem of the martial qualities he embodied. As the English crusaders fought in the Holy Land they often heard the French soldiers cry out to their patron saint, St Denys, and they decided they would like a patron of their own. There was a whole gallery of English martyrs they could have invoked, from St Alban to the recently canonised St Thomas of Canterbury. But none of these was warlike enough, and so they lighted on a local campaigner. St George was a Christian martyr, thought to be of Turkish or Arab descent, who had died at Lydda in Palestine around AD 303. Many centuries later, the legend that he slew a dragon to save a damsel in distress was attached to his name, together with the symbol of a striking red cross on a plain white field - and the tale evidently caught Richard’s fancy. The King placed himself and his army in the Holy Land under George’s protection.