The Plantagenets (15 page)

But even this was limited punishment, for in the light of the greatest military victory of Henry’s career, the king was interested less in revenge than restoring regular government to his dominions. The peace at Montlouis showed Henry at his grandest and his most astute. It was the high point, perhaps, of his entire reign.

Henry Triumphant

The Henrician court of the mid-1170s was uncommonly magnificent. Henry’s victory in the Great War established him as the pre-eminent ruler in Europe. Louis VII had been roundly defeated, and in 1177 would sign a non-aggression pact at Ivry, recognizing that the French and English kings were ‘henceforth to be friends, and that each of us will to the best of his ability defend the other in life and limb’. The Plantagenet sons who would form the next generation of European rulers had been taught the lesson of patience as they waited for their inheritance, and had been put to good use across their father’s dominions, snuffing the embers of their own revolt. The king of Scots had acknowledged Henry’s supremacy in the humiliating Treaty of Falaise. In 1175 the king of Connaught, Rory O’Connor, agreed the Treaty of Windsor, which confirmed Henry as feudal overlord of most of Ireland and allowed him two years later to nominate his young son John as high king of the whole country. It seemed that none of Henry’s illustrious neighbours could compete with his mastery. Even the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa’s fortunes paled alongside Henry’s: while the king of England basked in military triumph, the emperor lost a long-running war with the Lombard League in May 1176, and felt his power in southern Europe seriously diminished.

Everyone now looked to the king of England as the greatest ruler in Europe. His court received envoys and ambassadors from all over the Christian world: from Barbarossa, the emperor of Constantinople, the archbishop of Reims, the duke of Savoy and the count of Flanders. The pope sent a legate, Cardinal Huguzon, who remained with the
king for several years and attempted to persuade Henry to support a revived European crusading movement by taking the Cross. Even William the Lion was a regular visitor to the royal court and council. Henry was called on to arbitrate disputes between the great lords of southern Europe. There were prestigious offers of marriage for his two younger daughters. His eldest girl, Matilda, was already duchess of Saxony by virtue of her marriage in 1166 to Henry the Lion. Even greater prospects now beckoned for Matilda’s sisters, as both became queens consort. In 1176 the king’s youngest daughter, ten-year-old Joan, was sent to be married to King William II of Sicily. The following year Eleanor, fourteen, was married to Alfonso VIII, king of Castile. The Plantagenets’ influence was spreading to the very ends of Europe.

If his international prestige was at its zenith, Henry also regained his authority in his own lands – and especially in England – with astonishing speed and political intelligence. The two great aims of his reign had been to secure the frontiers of his empire, and to assert and deepen his authority within the areas he ruled. The Great War had left him largely triumphant over the enemies who had harassed his borders. From 1174 his attention turned to the second aim.

The eruption of violence in 1173 had left England once again dotted with castles and fortifications occupied by the king’s enemies. Just as during King Stephen’s reign, these timber or stone garrisons with their fierce ramparts and deep ditches loomed against the skyline, proclaiming the local power of whichever lord kept them. To Henry, castles occupied without his explicit approval were affronts to his royalty. According to Roger of Howden, in 1176 Henry ‘took every castle in England into his own hand’. He expelled the castellans and placed his own men in charge. To stress the fact that this was a demonstration of his supreme public authority, rather than a partisan act of revenge, Henry forced even his own most loyal servants – including Richard de Lucy, who had done so much to win the war in England – to give up their castles. Some were destroyed, others redistributed to the great men of the land. The message was unmistakable: the authority by which the barons and bishops of England held castles and arms derived from one source only: the king.

Castles and their keepers had always been a vital matter to Henry. The Norman chronicler Robert of Torigni noted that Henry’s reign saw castles built ‘not only in Normandy but also in England, in the duchy of Aquitaine, in the county of Anjou, in Maine and Touraine’. Since the Norman invasion castles had been the ultimate symbols of military authority. Henry spent heavily on them throughout his reign – at least £21,000 on rebuilding castles in England alone. He hastened the general movement in English castle building away from timber structures towards more permanent and impregnable stone fortresses. Particularly extensive works were undertaken at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Nottingham, Orford, Windsor and Winchester. Improvements made to the stone keeps of castles in Scarborough and Bowes secured the border region with Scotland.

But the jewel that glittered brightest among all of Henry’s castle-building projects was at Dover, at the head of the soaring white cliffs that overlooked the sea approach to England from north-west France. Where once had stood an Iron Age hill-fort, William the Conqueror had erected an earth-and-timber fortress. Henry’s massive reconstruction of his great-grandfather’s castle took twelve years to complete and cost nearly £6,500: more than two-thirds of the total expenditure on English castles during the final decade of his reign. When Louis VII visited England for the first time, for a four-day expedition to Becket’s shrine in August 1179, Dover castle was the first piece of England that the French king and his companion Philip count of Flanders saw. Before they left, Henry proudly took his guests on a tour of the building works. Louis was by now a frail 59-year-old, and Henry must thoroughly have enjoyed guiding his old adversary around the magnificent fortification. An imposing wall overlooked the cliffs and the sea approach, and work was beginning on a massive stone keep that would stand comparison with the great castles of his continental empire: the Angevin fortresses at Loches, Loudon, Montbazon, Montrichard and Beaugency, and the great Norman works at Falaise, Caen and on the border with France.

Castle building, however, was just one part of a wider drive on Henry’s part to extend his authority in the 1170s. For besides being a
soldier, Henry was an astute, legal-minded politician. As the military face of England was overhauled, now he also drove forward a decade of legal revolution that would influence the government of England for generations to follow.

Henry’s greatest piece of legislative work before the Great War had been the Assize of Clarendon, decreed in February 1166. Its legislation brought the whole system of English criminal law beneath overarching royal control. Norman rule had seen justice served by a patchwork of local courts and jurisdictions that answered variously to the king, his barons and the Church. Now, in response to what Henry had seen as the lawlessness of the 1160s, the ultimate responsibility for dealing with robbery, homicide, theft and the harbouring of criminals was given to royal sheriffs and justices. Baronial and ecclesiastical courts still existed, but they were superseded throughout England by the king’s law. A standard procedure for dealing with crime was introduced. Criminals were to be rooted out through juries of presentment – empanelled bodies, usually of twelve men, who were required to tell the sheriff or justice under oath all the crimes that had been committed in their local community. The suspects were then tried by the ordeal of water – a ghastly ritual in which the accused was tied up and immersed in a pond, river or lake. To sink was a sign of innocence, to float a sign of guilt, which would be punished by mutilation (cutting off the convict’s right foot), banishment or death. A guilty man’s possessions would revert to the Crown.

Under the Assize of Clarendon, royal sheriffs were awarded the right to investigate crimes wherever they needed, regardless of whether this crossed into great lords’ private jurisdictions. ‘Let there be no one, within his castle or without his castle … who shall forbid the sheriffs to enter into his court or his land,’ said the Assize. This was a truly revolutionary measure, for with it the hand of royal justice reached, or aimed to reach, into every corner of England. The king’s law now clearly trumped all other jurisdictions. Legally and judicially, Henry had declared himself master of his own realm.

In 1176, this idea was more symbolically important than ever, and in January the Assize of Northampton reissued, modified and
strengthened the laws that had been made a decade earlier at Clarendon. The disruption caused by the Great War had led to increased disorder and crime. Punishments were therefore made harsher: those sentenced to mutilation would now lose their right hand as well as their right foot; those who survived the ordeal of water but were still notoriously suspected of felonies were banished regardless. To bring justice to the people, Henry and his advisers divided England into six judicial circuits, or eyres, and royal judges began a tour of the whole realm, designed both to restore England to order by punishing evildoers and criminals, and to establish the king’s law as the final and ultimate form of public authority. Crimes were investigated retrospectively to ensure that the royal justices could punish, in the words of the assize, ‘all offences … except minor thefts and robberies which were committed in time of war, as of horses, oxen and lesser things’.

At the same time as reforming criminal law, Henry pushed royal justice to the heart of civil law. When word came back from his justices out on eyre that land dispossession was as great a problem as crimes against his subjects themselves, Henry decided to introduce a system by which land disputes could be quickly and easily settled by appeal to the royal law. The assize of
novel disseisin
put this into action. It allowed for royal justices to question a jury about contested lands. They asked whether a plaintiff had been unjustly
disseised
(i.e. dispossessed) of a piece of land; if the jurors found that he had, then the justices decided whether it was the defendant in the case who was to blame. The losing party in the case was
amerced
– penalized with damages – for the loss he had caused.

In twelfth-century England, land was power, and arbitrating land disputes between his greatest subjects was a vital function of the king himself. Now, in theory, all the land in England could be protected, contested and recovered simply by purchasing a writ from the king’s chancery. This would begin an action of
novel disseisin
, ultimately managed by the local sheriff. The writ was short and formulaic. The thirteenth-century legal writer Bracton recorded that devising the wording of the writ had caused Henry and his counsellors many sleepless nights. If this was true – and it has the ring of truth about it
– then it was with good reason. Royal law and royal officials were now indispensable to the functioning of political landed society not only when the royal magnates came into contact with the court, but every day, at county level. Moreover, one of the king’s most important roles, from the perspective of his barons, was devolved to a simple bureaucratic machine. Disputes could be settled by an application to chancery, rather than an appeal to the king in person – an invaluable development, given the vast size of the Plantagenet dominions, and Henry’s penchant for travelling around them relentlessly and at speed.

In 1178 the royal council (or
curia regis
) was reorganized. Instead of following the king wherever he went, hearing appeals for justice as they travelled, five members of the royal council were appointed to remain at Westminster, to hear legal cases full-time. This effectively became England’s supreme court and would, in time, become known as the Court of King’s Bench. The legal machinery of England was established, independent of King Henry II but exercising his full authority (and generating handsome fees for its services as it did so).

By 1179, further writs governing land law were available, and yet more of the king’s traditional, personal legal role had devolved to a chancery mechanism.
Darrein presentment
established rights over appointments to Church benefices.
Mort d’ancestor
settled disputes over inheritances. The writ
de recto
, or ‘writ of right’, allowed lesser men who felt they had been denied justice by their local lord’s private court to appeal to the royal court over his head. This writ had existed for some time, but now it too became formulaic and invested the sheriff as the leading authority for ensuring that justice was done at a county level. It all amounted to the start of a revolution in royal government.

So, as Henry settled the Plantagenet dominions after the throes of the Great War, England was slowly transformed. The castles that dotted the landscape, either occupied by the king’s servants or licensed by him for use by barons, became potent symbols of the royal monopoly on military power in general. The Assize of Arms of 1181 encouraged the development of scutage – payments made by magnates in lieu of supplying troops and military service, which helped to further
demilitarize the English barons. In the shires of England, the fingers of royal justice were suddenly everywhere. The power of the Crown was rooted firmly, deep into English society. From those roots it would flower in the most extraordinary ways in years to come.

In February 1182 Henry, preparing to celebrate his forty-ninth birthday, held a great council at Bishop’s Waltham in Hampshire, where he announced that he had made his will. It was firmly non-political. He made bequests to the Knights Templar and Hospitaller. He left 5,000 silver marks to the religious houses of England and 1,000 silver marks to those of Anjou. Two hundred gold marks were left to assist with the dowries of poor virgins in Normandy and Anjou. He commanded his four sons – Henry, Geoffrey, Richard and John – to cause his will ‘to be firmly and inviolably kept; and whoever shall oppose or contravene it, may he incur the indignation and anger of Almighty God, and mine and God’s malediction’.