The Age of Chivalry (16 page)

Henry II embarked on a series of wars aimed at establishing vassal states that would operate as buffer zones on his territories' frontiers. Welsh princes were unco-operative in this regard, and the two most significant of them—Rhys ap Gruffudd, who ruled the kingdom of Deheubarth in the southwest, and Owain Gwynedd, who ruled in the north—joined forces to defeat Henry's army at the Battle of Crogen, fought in the country's northeast in the summer of 1165. But Henry learned from his mistakes. Since a projected invasion of Ireland was going to be launched from the coast of Deheubarth, the king entered into a form of alliance with Rhys: the prince's authority over the rest of Wales was recognized, and Rhys became a vassal of England's king.

Henry met with greater success in Ireland, a country whose provincial kings had been battling each other for the dignity of high king and where Norman institutions, including a very patchy form of feudalism, began to spread as a result of military intervention by the English Crown. In 1167 Henry recognized Dermot of Leinster and allowed him to recruit English and Welsh mercenaries in his struggle for supremacy. The successes enjoyed by the newly arrived knights in establishing their own power bases in the island discomfited Henry, who wanted to imprint his own regal stamp on a fast-evolving situation. He therefore led personally the major military expedition that landed at Waterford in October 1171, following which most of the island's native princes caved in and paid homage. The institution of a lordship of Ireland—a fiefdom in the king's gift—was a cornerstone of family policy, and Henry had originally intended his younger brother William, Count of Poitou, to be the beneficiary of a conquest of Ireland. The count died young, however, and Henry's son John was made lord of Ireland by the king in 1185. John's visit to the island in that year, though brief, established his unpopularity, and in subsequent decades Norman authority in Ireland dwindled to cover the area of the Pale that surrounded Dublin.

In 1173–74 Scotland's King William I (“the Lion”) launched two invasions of Northumberland—a territory seized for Scotland by David I during
Stephen's reign but regained for the English Crown in 1157. After being captured at the end of 1174 William had to swear fealty to Henry, and the establishment of English garrisons in Edinburgh and along the border meant that southern Scotland was under the control of the English. This situation lasted until 1189, when Richard I ceded authority in the region to William in return for the money he needed to take part in the Third Crusade.

Normandy was Henry's core territory on the European mainland, and his tactics along its borders were similar to the ones he adopted in Ireland and on the English frontiers within Britain. Brittany was in the middle of a succession dispute in the 1150s after Duke Conan III's disinheritance of his son Hoel, and Henry initially supported the reigning duke, Conan IV, who was Hoel's nephew. In 1166 he arranged the betrothal of his seven-year-old son Geoffrey to the duke's daughter, and he then forced Conan's abdication. Henry thus became, in effect, the ruler of Brittany, though it was never his fiefdom. In the face of serial rebellions by the Breton nobility, he installed loyal aristocrats who built up his authority within the duchy.

The marriage to Eleanor made Henry duke of Aquitaine—a title he held as the successor to her first husband, Louis VII. By the same token he became duke of Gascony, a territory to the southwest that had been part of Aquitaine since the early tenth century, but whose awkward terrain required careful management. The county of Toulouse lay to Aquitaine's southeast and was a vast area whose many fortified towns impeded the progress of the army launched by Henry from Poitiers in 1159. He returned with
another army in 1161 and then left his local allies, who included King Alfonso II of Aragon, to continue the struggle on his behalf. In 1173 Count Raymond V eventually yielded and decided to pay homage to Henry, though the vassalage was not enforced very rigorously.

Henry's tortuous relations with the French Crown were a constant theme of his career. King Louis was constantly trying to subvert Henry's position: he had been a supporter of King Stephen of England, and he gave comfort, as well as refuge, to Thomas Becket during the archbishop's exile. His own position was, however, precarious. Not only did Louis lack Henry's material resources, but until the birth of the future Philip II in 1165 he also lacked a male heir. Five years earlier, Louis had succumbed to English pressure and agreed to the marriage of his daughter Margaret to Henry's second son, the younger Henry, when she was two and he was five. Philip's birth removed the prospect of a united English-French Crown, however. In retaliation, Henry made a claim to the Auvergne and Bourges, where he conducted major military campaigns in 1167 and 1170 respectively. Once crowned king, however, it was Philip who would be Henry's nemesis, by taking advantage of his sons' disloyalty.

L
EFT
An equestrian statue of Richard I (“the Lionheart”) stands outside the UK Houses of Parliament
.

Henry II was a consistently expansionist ruler but also a dynastically minded one. He therefore allowed his sons to have their own titles: Henry the Younger was crowned king in 1170; Richard became duke of Aquitaine in 1172; Geoffrey became duke of Brittany in 1181; and in 1185 John was attempting to exert his authority as lord of Ireland. Henry the Younger's request that he be allowed to rule part of his father's territories was denied by Henry. But his son could count on the support of both Richard and Geoffrey, and the three combined to attack their father in the civil war of 1173–74. Eleanor, by now estranged from her husband, took Henry the Younger's side and was for a while imprisoned as a result. The rebel also had the support of his father-in-law,
Louis VII of France. Henry survived that challenge, only to be confronted by the implacable Richard, whose rule in Aquitaine turned out to be a particularly rough form of military administration.

Just before his death in 1183 Henry the Younger had joined a local Aquitainian revolt against Richard, who then rejected his father's demand that he should yield the duchy to John. Geoffrey of Brittany had joined his brother Henry in attacking Richard in Aquitaine, and would do the same in combination with John, although they were no match for the Lionheart, whose military prowess crushed their forces with ease. Geoffrey's animosity toward his father led him at the same time to plot with Philip II of France. Although Geoffrey's death in 1186 removed an important prospective ally, Philip soon found another one: in 1188 Richard paid homage to him for all the lands that Henry II held in France as a vassal of the French Crown. In the summer of the following year the two allies invaded Anjou, the heartland of the Plantagenet dynasty, and overran both Maine and Tours. Henry was defeated in battle and died in 1189 in the knowledge that John, too, had joined the alliance against him.

KINGS OF ENGLAND 1100–1272

HENRY I

(1068/9–1135)

r. 1100–35

STEPHEN OF BLOIS

(1096–1154)

r. 1135–54

HENRY II

(1133–89)

r. 1154–89

RICHARD I

[“the Lionheart”]

(1157–99)

r. 1189–99

JOHN I

(1167–1216)

r. 1199–1216

HENRY III

(1207–72)

r. 1216–72

The loss of Normandy and of Anjou to the armies of Philip II occurred in 1204 during John's reign as king, and a triumphant Capetian dynasty forced the retreat of English forces within Aquitaine to the region of Gascony, which remained loyal. Despite his reputation as a calamitous king, many of John's achievements recall his father's preoccupations. He quarreled with the papacy and refused its nomination of Stephen Langton as archbishop of Canterbury, although he eventually submitted after an eight-year struggle in 1213. Just as Henry had done, John involved himself closely with the workings of the justice system, and he was an efficient administrator as well as a keen raiser of revenue. But the loss of his dynasty's continental possessions at the start of his reign affected the exercise of John's authority in England, and the English baronage voiced their resentment at being taxed as they would never have done during Henry II's reign. The list of demands contained in the
Magna Carta
presented to John at Runnymede on June 15, 1215 represented a rejection of his father's style of strong and centralizing kingship. Having signed under duress, the king obtained the pope's permission to break his word, and he was defeated in the two-year civil war that followed—waged in part by a French army invited in by the English baronage in order to support their cause. John's reign had seen the entire dissolution of his father's assemblage of territories, and his own failures had also dealt a blow to the style of kingly authority exercised by Henry II. Both in England and in France, the future lay with the cause of national monarchies whose dynasties exercised their power within established frontiers—rather than across areas as geographically separate, politically disparate and culturally diverse as the territories of the “Angevin empire.”

The story of the outlaw Robin Hood, who evades the established order by escaping to the forest where he lives with his band of “merry” men, is an enduring part of English folklore. Robin's escapades are first recorded in literary form in ballads whose earliest manuscripts date from the 15th century, and which are set in the England of one or two centuries earlier
.

Robin springs to life in this literature as an anti-clericalist, a skilled archer, and an opponent of the sheriff of Nottingham. The notion that Robin was a supporter of Richard the Lionheart and that he was driven out of society during the misrule of Richard's brother John while the king was on the Third Crusade, is a 16th-century addition to the fable. Robin's portrayal as the earl of Huntingdon, an aristocrat down on his luck, is similarly post-medieval; in the original 15th-century verses he is described consistently as a yeoman. The ballads form part of a wider cultural tribute to Robin the English hero. May Day celebrations in late medieval England frequently involved revelers dressing up as Robin and his companions, and plays about his exploits were often performed during these springtime festivities. It was through these dramas that the figure of Maid Marion was added to the Robin Hood literature.

No historical figure has been identified as the original Robin Hood, and the ballads that portray him are works of literature, not of biography. Hood's social views do nonetheless cast a sharp light on some medieval English attitudes. Although the balladeers describe a Robin who is on the side of the down-trodden, there are in fact no examples in this early literature of his “giving to the poor,” and the peasantry is mostly significant by its absence from the Hood ballads. The forms of courtesy observed by Robin's followers when they kneel before him in acknowledgment of his authority follow medieval notions of precedence and honor. The fact that they carry swords, not staffs, indicates that they are, like Robin, yeomen, and the literature presents them as the backbone of the nation. Robin's qualities of courtesy, politeness and piety are seen as the consensual virtues that enable a society or kingdom to hang together. These contrast with his enemies' mean-spirited materialism and selfishness.

There was a ready appetite for the Hood ballads among the tiny minority of England's population that was literate and, therefore, influential, and the legend was particularly popular in gentry households. It may well be, therefore, that the medieval literary tradition that invented Robin Hood reflects the governing order's idealization of the English virtues and of the personal values that will promote a sound and just social order.