The Greatest Knight

by Thomas Asbridge

  THE LAND OF ‘STRIFE AND DISORDER’

  William Marshal was born in England around 1147, at a time of unrest. The kingdom was in the grip of a ruinous, fifteen-year-long conflict, as King Stephen struggled to resist his cousin Empress Matilda’s attempts to seize power. Both possessed strong claims to the realm, so the country was divided in its allegiance and spiralling towards anarchy. One medieval chronicler described this as a period of ‘great strife [and] disorder’, in which England was ‘plagued by war . . . and the law of the land was disregarded’. Great swathes of the landscape were left scarred and ravaged, such that one could ‘go a whole day’s journey’ and yet find only empty villages and untilled land. Amid such desolation, the ‘wretched people died of starvation’. One contemporary admitted that in these years many ‘said openly that Christ and his saints were asleep’.

  Yet for all the chaos and horror of this era, there were those who prospered during the civil war. With the collapse of crown authority, local warlords were left in many regions to impose some semblance of order, and this power was often abused by the predatory and the unscrupulous. One such was William’s father, John Marshal, a nobleman of middling rank, with a lordship centred in England’s West Country. By birth, John was not English (or Anglo-Saxon), but a French-speaking Norman. Back in the tenth century, his Viking ancestors – known then as the ‘Northmen’ – had settled in a region of northern France that came to be known as Normandy (literally ‘the land of the Northmen’). They embraced some of the customs of their new homeland and even adopted French, or Frankish, names, but remained warlike and land-hungry. In 1066, their leader William, duke of Normandy – William ‘the Conqueror’ – led an invasion force across the English Channel and scored a stunning victory at the Battle of Hastings. This Norman triumph left England’s last, short-lived Anglo-Saxon king, Harold Godwinson, and the cream of his ruling nobility, dead on the field. In its wake, William assumed the crown of England, while retaining control of Normandy. An Anglo-Norman realm was forged, and it was in this cross-Channel world that William Marshal would be raised.

  In some respects, 1066 marked a decisive break with the past. William the Conqueror established a new and enduring royal dynasty, and England’s ‘native’ peoples suddenly found themselves the subjects of foreign invaders. King William I distributed land north of the Channel to some 150 Norman warlords and officials, and together they pacified the realm through brute force and threw up an extensive network of imposing castles to secure their authority. John Marshal’s father – Gilbert Giffard (literally meaning ‘Gilbert Chubby Cheeks’) – was one of these early Norman settlers, who came to England during the first wave of conquest or in its aftermath. By the time of William I’s great Domesday survey of landholding in 1086, Gilbert held territory in the western county of Wiltshire. He also served as the royal master-marshal, an ancient military office, traditionally associated with the care and maintenance of the king’s horses, which over time developed into an administrative post, largely concerned with the day-to-day running of the court.

  When taken in context, the advent of the Normans was not as jarring as it might first appear. In a later era, Britain would be seen as an unconquerable island realm: William Shakespeare’s inviolate ‘sceptre’d isle’, the ‘fortress built by nature [against] the hand of war’. But in the early Middle Ages, England seemed fatally prone to invasion. Through the centuries preceding 1066, the Anglo-Saxons (themselves the successors of earlier Celtic and then Roman invaders) had faced repeated waves of Viking incursion and settlement that left much of northern England in Norse hands. A period of direct Viking rule eventually was witnessed under Cnut of Denmark in the early eleventh century, only for the brief reinstatement of Anglo-Saxon kingship, before William the Conqueror’s arrival. As a result, the cultural, ethnic and linguistic identity of the ‘English’ was far from uniform, and the notion that the Normans crushed an otherwise untrammelled, pure-bred Anglo-Saxon society has little basis in reality.

  The Norman colonisation of England proved to be remarkably successful. The Conqueror and his followers found a wealthy land, renowned for its natural resources and ripe for exploitation. More than one-third of the British Isles remained heavily wooded, but England boasted in excess of seven million acres of cultivated farmland in the late eleventh century, tended by a predominantly rural population of around two-and-a-half million people. A period of climatic change also saw the average temperature rise by about one degree centigrade, increasing agricultural yields (and even allowing vineyards to be planted in middle-England). For the ruling elite, at least, this was a time of plenty. A semblance of political continuity was also maintained after King William’s death in 1087, as he was succeeded by two of his sons, William Rufus (1087–1100) and Henry I (1100–35).

  It was during this latter reign that John Marshal began his career, gradually accumulating status, land and wealth. By 1130, John was in his twenties and had succeeded to the master-marshalcy, for which privilege he had to pay a fee of forty silver marks to the crown – quite a sum, given that an annual income of around fifteen marks would allow a noble to live in considerable comfort. The position brought no great power in or of itself, but marked him out as one of the great officers of the king’s household. He had oversight of four under-marshals, a group of royal ushers, the keeper of the king’s tents, even the supervisor of the royal fireplaces. More importantly, John had a degree of access to the king and his leading barons, which allowed him to curry favour and seek reward. He owned a cluster of houses close to the royal palace and castle in Winchester, as well as small parcels of land dotted across south-west England, but his prized family estate, which came to be known as Hamstead Marshall, lay in a verdant swathe of the Kennet valley, close to the border between Berkshire and Wiltshire. Around this same time, John secured himself a decent marriage to a minor Wiltshire heiress named Adelina, with whom he fathered two sons, Gilbert and Walter. So far his achievements had been unremarkable, his progress piecemeal. But John Marshal’s day was about to dawn, because the peace of the realm had already begun to unravel.

  THE DESCENT INTO ANARCHY

  On the night of 25 November 1120, William Ætheling – the seventeen-year-old heir to the throne of England – threw a raucous, wine-soaked party. A throng of young, well-heeled nobles had joined him aboard a fine newly fitted vessel, the White Ship, moored in the harbour at Barfleur, in Normandy. Notable among the revellers were William’s half-siblings, Richard and Countess Matilda of Perche, as well as his cousin, Stephen of Blois (the man who, years later, would order William Marshal’s execution). As the alcohol flowed, even the crew and oarsmen partook, and an atmosphere of drunken merriment and youthful exuberance took hold. When a group of clerics arrived to bless the vessel with holy water they were driven away with contemptuous shouts and mocking laughter. Earlier that day William’s father, King Henry I of England, had set sail from Barfleur intent on crossing the Channel. Boisterous calls now went up on the White Ship for a race to be undertaken. Surely this sleek craft could outpace the king’s vessel, beating him to the English coast? As hasty preparations for the departure were made, some seem to have thought better of this folly and disembarked, among them Stephen of Blois, apparently complaining that he was afflicted by diarrhoea. The great contemporary chronicler of this era, William of Malmesbury, described how the crowded White Ship was ‘launched from the shore, although it was now dark’ adding that ‘she flew swifter than an arrow, sweeping the rippling surface of the deep’.

  Within minutes disaster struck. Inebriated and inattentive, the steersman misjudged his course out of the natural harbour and the princely craft crashed at speed into a jutting rock exposed by the low tide. Two planks in the starboard hull shattered and the White Ship began to take on water. In the confusion that followed, William Ætheling was bundled on to a rowing boat and looked set to escape, but the despairing wails of his half-sister Matilda prompted him to turn back and attempt a rescue. As it drew up alongside
the foundering White Ship, William’s small craft was quickly overladen by those clambering for safety and capsized. The young prince and all his peers drowned, ‘buried’, as William of Malmesbury put it, ‘in the deep’.

  It was later said that the White Ship’s captain, one Thomas FitzStephen, managed at first to swim away from the sinking vessel. But when he realised that his royal passengers had been lost, Thomas gave himself up to the cold water. Only two men survived the first horrors of this catastrophe by clawing their way up the White Ship’s mast to reach the yardarm – one was a minor nobleman, Geoffrey son of the viscount of Exmes, the other a butcher from Rouen named Berold. As the terrified screams of those below eventually died down to silence, both struggled to cling on to their desperate perch. Hours passed. The night was clear and frosty, and eventually Geoffrey lost his grip, plunging down to be swallowed by the sea. Berold alone, dressed in a commoner’s sheepskins, saw the dawn and was rescued by fishermen; one survivor to tell the tale of this calamity.

  William of Malmesbury would conclude that ‘no ship ever brought so much misery to England; none was ever so notorious in the history of the world’. This dread-laden pronouncement was born out of bitter experience, for the chronicler lived through the decades that followed, witnessing an end to the stability of King Henry I’s reign and England’s descent into disorder. All of this, so William of Malmesbury believed, could be traced back to William Ætheling’s sudden and untimely demise. The sinking of the White Ship was so calamitous because it deprived Henry I of his only legitimate male heir. The king had never had a problem fathering offspring – he sired more than twenty children – and his voracious sexual appetite prompted one contemporary to conclude that he was ‘enslaved by female seduction’. Though two perished on the White Ship, many of the king’s illegitimate issue prospered, chief among them his eldest bastard son Robert, who was gifted the earldom of Gloucester.

  But there was no real prospect that Robert would inherit England’s crown. Illegitimacy had not always been a bar to succession and power. Henry I’s own father, William the Conqueror, was bastard born, yet became duke of Normandy and, in 1066, England’s anointed monarch. During recent decades, however, a reforming Church had sought to tighten the strictures governing marriage, and proven legitimacy became paramount. Henry I’s union with Edith of Scotland (who could herself trace her lineage back to the Anglo-Saxon kings of Wessex) produced only a boy and a girl, William and Matilda, and the king focused his grand dreams for peaceful dynastic succession upon the former. Young William came to be styled with the ancient Anglo-Saxon title ‘Ætheling’ in honour of his royal heritage and status as heir designate. He was to be the king who finally united the bloodlines of Normandy and Anglo-Saxon England.

  When the White Ship sank and William drowned, these designs came undone. Nonetheless, the spiral into civil war that followed Henry I’s own eventual demise, at the age of sixty-seven, on 1 December 1135, was not inevitable. Despite first appearances, England had no track record of clear, unchallenged succession; nor was there a fixed tradition of eldest sons inheriting the crown. England’s recent kings had actually come to power through force of arms and speed of action, not unassailable right. Henry I himself stole England and Normandy from his elder brother, Robert Curthose, and then promptly imprisoned his sibling for the best part of thirty years. In fact, it would not be until the early thirteenth century that a king of England was succeeded by his first-born son, and even then the process was fraught and fragile. William Ætheling’s accession was supposed to break this mould, yet the sequence of events initiated by his death might still have been halted. The real problem was that after 1135 neither of the two leading claimants to the throne possessed sufficient strength or sustained support with the realm to secure a lasting hold over England.

  The claimants to the crown

  One candidate was Henry I’s sole surviving legitimate child, his forceful and ambitious daughter Matilda. It was to her that the king eventually turned after the sinking of the White Ship, declaring Matilda his heir in early 1127, and again in 1131, forcing oaths of recognition for her claim from his leading nobles. But in the medieval world, power and military might were inextricably linked. This was the age of the warrior-king, in which a monarch was expected to lead and command armies in person, and as such, the simple fact of Matilda’s gender was a significant, though not insurmountable, impediment. She was also viewed as an outsider by many Anglo-Norman nobles. Wed as a young girl to Emperor Henry V of Germany, she had grown up in the imperial court, speaking German and learning the manners and customs of a foreign land. The union earned Matilda the right to assume the title ‘empress’, but produced no offspring.

  Her second marriage to Geoffrey ‘le Bel’ (‘the Fair’), the dandyish count of Anjou, was a strictly political union – though the couple did produce three sons in relatively short order – but the match was viewed in a dim light by many. Anjou was Normandy’s longstanding rival; its people, the Angevins, were seen as a savage and shifty bunch, with an unhealthy appetite for indiscriminate violence and rapacious looting. It was little wonder then that Matilda struggled to press home her claim to England in 1135. She remained the unfamiliar empress, hampered by her sex and tainted by association with an Angevin, who most suspected might try to steal the crown for himself. The timing of her father’s death also left her at a disadvantage, as Matilda was then around eight weeks pregnant with her third child.

  Empress Matilda’s claim was supplanted by a largely unheralded candidate, Stephen of Blois. Like his cousin Matilda, Stephen was a grandson of William the Conqueror, but in Stephen’s case this ancestry was derived through the female line. His mother was the formidable Adela of Blois, daughter of the Conqueror and Henry I’s sister, a rare and remarkable woman, truly capable of wielding power in a man’s world. After the death of her husband on crusade in the Holy Land, Adela looked to secure the future of her surviving sons. One of the youngest, Stephen, was sent to his uncle King Henry I’s court in 1113, where he was granted the county of Mortain (in southwestern Normandy) and additional lands in England. In the years that followed, Stephen prospered, accruing favour and influence, earning title to further territories. By 1120, when he narrowly avoided the disaster of the White Ship, Stephen was already a leading member of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy. His status was further enhanced when King Henry I orchestrated Stephen’s marriage to the wealthy heiress to the county of Boulogne (in north-eastern France), one of England’s most valuable trading partners. Nonetheless, no one seems to have expected that he might stake a serious claim to the crown in 1135. After all, in 1127 Stephen had been one of the first nobles to swear an oath to uphold his cousin Empress Matilda’s rights.

  When King Henry I died on 1 December, that promise was put to one side. Emulating his late uncle’s example, Stephen resolved to seize power for himself. Moving with lightning speed, he crossed immediately from Boulogne to London – England’s commercial capital – securing the city’s support, most likely in return for mercantile privileges. Stephen then raced on to Winchester, the ancient seat of royal power, where his younger brother, Henry of Blois, had become bishop in 1129. With his connivance, Stephen was able to gain control of the royal treasury and then to persuade the archbishop of Canterbury, head of the English Church, to crown and anoint him king on 22 December. As 1136 began, rumour of this sudden takeover raced across England and Normandy. To most, Stephen’s position must have seemed unassailable. In the eyes of his contemporaries he was no longer an ordinary human being, but a man transformed through sacred ritual into God’s chosen representative on Earth. Doubts might be harboured about his path to power, but once Stephen had undergone the coronation, properly enacted by the Church, there could be no question that he was the rightful king of England. Empress Matilda’s cause appeared hopeless. Even her half-brother and leading advocate, Robert, earl of Gloucester (Henry I’s bastard son), was forced to grudgingly acknowledge Stephen as the new monarch.

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bsp; At first, John Marshal also offered Stephen his unreserved support, and by 1138 this show of loyalty had earned John a crucial commission: the castellany of Marlborough Castle. This was one of the most strategically significant strongholds in the West Country, positioned to control the main east–west thoroughfare between London and Bristol, and to police the open, rolling downlands of northern Wiltshire. A castellany was no permanent grant or gift; it merely empowered John to serve as custodian of Marlborough’s royal fortress. Nonetheless, it established him as one of the region’s leading figures, and further opportunities would soon follow.

  The reign of King Stephen

  The monarch who would eventually hold William Marshal’s life in his hands thus came to power in 1135. The initial position of strength enjoyed by the new king might well have been sustained, had Stephen been a more forceful character. His forebears – from Henry I back to William the Conqueror – all seized and held power through might, not inalienable right. Yet though Stephen was a man of action and ambition, and would prove competent in the field of war, it soon became clear that in other respects he lacked the requisite qualities. Looking back from the later twelfth century, the courtier and commentator Walter Map described Stephen as being ‘of notable skill in arms, but in other things almost an idiot’, adding that he was ‘inclined to evil’, while to William of Malmesbury ‘he was a man of activity, but imprudent’. The truth was that, in dealing with their subjects, successful medieval kings needed to balance a degree of ruthlessness with expedient largesse – Stephen could manage neither.