The Demon's Brood (3 page)

Fulk Nerra, Fulk the Black, is the greatest of the Angevins, the first in whom we can trace that marked type of character which their house was to preserve with a fatal constancy through two hundred years

John Richard Green
¹

A little knowledge of their ancestors helps us to understand the first Plantagenets. The earliest to make his mark was a Breton outlaw called Tertulle the Forester, half woodman and half bandit, who, in the ninth century, fought Viking invaders from a stronghold in the dense woods overlooking the Loire known as the ‘Blackbird's Nest'. Although he and his son Ingelger are semi-mythical figures, Ingelger's son Fulk the Red (
c
.870–942) certainly existed, acquiring the old Roman hill town of Angers and becoming Count of Anjou.

The savagery of the wife-burner Fulk III (987–1040) shocked contemporaries. In 992 the Black Count defeated the Bretons, killing their duke with his own hands, while in 1025 he reduced
Saumur to ashes, massacring its inhabitants after capturing its lord, the Count of Maine, by false promises. These were only the best-known victims during a saga in which he and his son, Geoffrey the Hammer, transformed an obscure county into one of the most powerful feudal lordships in France. Eastward, they conquered Blois and Tours, southward Saumur and Chinon, won by battles or sieges, held down by tiny garrisons in small stone towers – Fulk's favourite lair in old age was the tower of Durtal near Baugé.
²

Geoffrey the Hammer was succeeded by his son-in-law, Geoffrey of Gâtinais, whose heirs inherited Black Fulk's wolfish qualities. If they paid homage to the French king as overlord, the Counts of Anjou were independent of a monarch whose real authority was restricted to a small area around Paris.

Geoffrey V (called ‘Plantagenet' from his broom-flower badge) became Count of Anjou in 1129 after his father, Fulk V, left France to become King (by marriage) of Jerusalem. Geoffrey's barons thought a pleasant-mannered boy of fifteen must be easy game and so they rebelled; but he soon disillusioned them by marrying the widow of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, Matilda, who was also the daughter of Henry I, King of England and Duke of Normandy. Ten years older, a beautiful virago, she made the same mistake as the barons and tried to bully her young husband. As a result she was sent back to England. After much wrangling, her father King Henry made Count Geoffrey take her back – she was now sufficiently tamed to produce children, although after she had done her duty the couple lived apart. Henry hoped the marriage would defuse the quarrel with Anjou over the county of Maine, but when the king died in 1135 Geoffrey was contemplating invasion.

Geoffrey had matured into a tall, yellow-haired, handsome man, a fine soldier, with a taste for books rare in somebody who was not a cleric. His worst fault was self-indulgence where girls or hunting were concerned. There was a streak of the Black Count in him – any magnate who disputed his authority received short
shrift – and he was determined to preserve his son's inheritance in both England and Normandy.

It was generally expected that Matilda would succeed her father Henry I on the English throne and at Rouen. A huge personality who roared out his commands, this last Norman king had made his barons and prelates swear loyalty to Matilda after the drowning of his only legitimate son, William, in the
White Ship
. Even though they had no say in the matter, his Anglo-Saxon subjects may well have approved the succession. They knew that her mother, another Matilda (originally Edith), had been the daughter of King Malcolm of Scots and his English Queen Margaret – sister of Edgar Atheling and granddaughter of the heroic King Edmund Ironside.

Henry never forgot the example of his father William I, who had claimed to be Edward the Confessor's heir. Despite replacing the old Anglo-Saxon aristocracy by Normans, the Conqueror declared, ‘It is my will and command that all shall have and hold the law of King Edward in respect of all their lands and all their possessions.'
³
Like William, Henry took the old coronation oaths, promising to keep the Confessor's laws, and ruled through Anglo-Saxon hundred and shire courts. He gave the son who predeceased him the title ‘Atheling' borne by pre-Conquest heirs to the throne, while his choice of an English wife irked courtiers so much that they nicknamed the royal couple ‘Godwy and Godgifu'. Although the Conqueror had introduced feudalism (which, basically, meant military service in return for land tenure), by preserving pre-Conquest legal tradition, Henry hastened the transformation of Norman settlers into Englishmen.

But when Henry died in 1135, it was not a direct heir that took up claim to the throne but Stephen of Blois, Count of Boulogne, whose mother had been a daughter of William the Conqueror, hurried over to London and persuaded the council to let him take the throne. The great Anglo-Norman lords, the tenants-in-chief, rejected Matilda, partly because they did not
care to be ruled by a woman and partly because they had suffered from her husband's raids on Normandy. Stephen was even accepted as king by Matilda's bastard half-brother Robert, Earl of Gloucester, the richest magnate in England.