The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (18 page)

The new king had been sure that the half-Norman barons would be too proud to allow themselves to be ruled by a woman, whatever they may have said to her father. Moreover the Empress Matilda’s unpopularity had been compounded after the barons had paid her homage by her second marriage to the Count of Anjou. Although Henry I’s aim in arranging this marriage had been to make peace between Normandy and her neighbour Anjou, Anjou’s fierce and scheming counts were the hereditary enemies of the Norman barons. Stephen reckoned correctly that the combination of Matilda’s sex and her marriage to an Angevin would be more than the great Anglo-Norman magnates could stomach.

As he had hoped, all the most important tenants-in-chief as well as the increasingly powerful London merchants backed his claim, as did the supremely important figure of Bishop Roger of Salisbury. By winning over Henry’s justiciar and the organizing genius of his reign, Stephen had secured the loyalty of Henry’s network of government officials, the clerks and all the new judges. Stephen’s brother, Bishop Henry of Winchester, who had enjoyed his uncle Henry’s patronage, helped garner the support of the Church, which made his brother’s usurpation seem more legitimate. When Stephen and his soldiers arrived at Winchester after he had been acclaimed king in London, Bishop Henry played a crucial role in ensuring that the new king secured the Treasury.

Stephen had obtained mastery over a country that had recovered from the misery of war and was now enjoying unprecedented growth thanks to the trade links with the wealthy Norman Empire. During Henry I’s lifetime the king’s peace had been enforced on the country and the barons brought to heel. Peace encouraged prosperity and cultural advances: towns, the religious life and the arts had a chance to flourish. Merchant guilds and craft guilds, for cobblers and weavers, were established for the first time to set standards in trade. Guild members would have sold their goods at what became the greatest cloth fair in medieval England, Bartholomew Fair, started up in 1133. Ten years before that the London hospital we know as St Bart’s, or St Bartholomew’s, was founded. The Empress Matilda would probably have worn the new materials brought back by English Crusaders or by the merchants accompanying them from the east, such as cotton muslin. Wealthy ladies like herself would have enjoyed the increasingly elaborate patterning embroidered on cloth that merchants imported from Palestine. In Yorkshire the newly founded Cistercian order commissioned the delicate pointed arches of Rievaulx Abbey which not only reveal the influence of eastern architecture but also show that Romanesque church fortresses were no longer quite so necessary. The English were exposed through Norman links to Paris, where the monk Abelard was altering the study of philosophy with his promotion of logic, and what is often known as the twelfth-century renaissance of learning was beginning. Scholars came to England to give lectures, and continental manuscript traditions bore fruit in English monasteries like those at St Albans, Canterbury and Winchester, which began to achieve new heights in the art of illuminated books.

But under Stephen this prosperity began to falter. King David of Scotland repeatedly invaded Northumberland on behalf of his niece Matilda, bringing the years of peaceful coexistence between England and Scotland to an end. The Scottish king was finally driven out of England after his defeat at the Battle of the Standard on Cowton Moor in 1138, at the hands of the elderly Archbishop Thurstan of York, who on his own initiative had raised the northern fyrd. As an independent-minded Yorkshireman Archbishop Thurston had little time for Norman innovations. Not only did his army fight on foot in the old fashion which had been discredited by the Battle of Hastings, he went into battle displaying the banners of Stephen and three of Yorkshire’s most famous saints on a farmer’s cart to inspire his fellow countrymen. His faith in old-fashioned methods was rewarded, and his troops defeated the Scots cavalry by breaking their charge.

Although Matilda’s uncle had been held at bay, later that year civil war broke out between the empress and Stephen after the king made the mistake of sacking Roger of Salisbury. The quarrel between Stephen and Bishop Roger seems to have been born out of the sensitive king’s personal insecurities. He saw Roger of Salisbury’s family monopoly of ministerial positions–Roger’s two nephews held the bishoprics of Ely and Lincoln, while his son was the royal chancellor–as a threat to his own power. When they refused to give up some of their castles, Stephen, by confiscating their great possessions, irrevocably broke with the family whose powerful network of patronage effectively ran the government. Less than a month after Roger had been driven from office in 1138, the Empress Matilda’s half-brother Robert of Gloucester landed in England to stir up rebellion against Stephen. Gloucester was a cultivated man who was the patron of Geoffrey of Monmouth, an historian and popularizer of the Arthurian myths.

A year later, in September 1139, Matilda herself arrived in the west near Bristol. For the next ten years the English people suffered as the two parties battled it out, winning a little territory here, a little territory there, but neither side prevailing. Despite Stephen’s attempt to win popularity by abandoning the new forests created by Henry I, he had never seized the public imagination.

The only people who profited from the anarchy that ensued were the barons. As the royal government’s control of England diminished, their power expanded until their position was very different from what it had been under the first three Norman kings. None of them was interested in Stephen or Matilda winning and none of them threw his weight behind either candidate. This prolonged the war (it was to last ten years), and Stephen had to resort to importing Flemish mercenaries, which did nothing for his popularity. Over the next fifteen years hundreds of castles and fortified buildings were erected illegally. In those days, because castles were potential instruments of war, a licence for them had to be obtained from the king. They replaced the Norman manor houses as the predominant form of domestic architecture, indicating that English life at that time was lived in a state of siege. Their dungeons often concealed scenes of unspeakable suffering. Peasants were carried off there and tortured when they would not pay the extortionate new dues that the barons began to demand now that the sheriff was not there to prevent them. So many agricultural workers were imprisoned that crops began to fail all over the country: no one knew whom the barons would seize next or whose house would be set on fire to make the owner relinquish his hoard of silver. The chronicles of the time are full of lamentation. ‘They took all who had any property and put them in prison,’ reported
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, ‘and some that were once rich men went about begging their bread. They robbed churches and churchmen, and though the bishops and clergy were ever cursing them, they cared nothing for their curses. The land was all undone with their deeds and men said that Christ and His Saints slept.’

In return for their support some enterprising barons demanded a vast part of the crown lands from Stephen, which his predecessors had been at such pains to acquire. Geoffrey of Mandeville showed particular greed and joined first Stephen and then Matilda, gaining more territory each time he changed sides. Stalemate marked the struggle: Matilda’s supporters held on to the west near Bristol and Gloucester because they were the territory of her half-brother Robert of Gloucester, while Stephen’s partisans controlled London and the south-east. At last, in 1141, the stalemate was broken when Robert of Gloucester and his son-in-law the Earl of Chester captured Stephen, who was laying siege to Lincoln. When Bishop Henry of Winchester, Stephen’s own brother, declared that this was a sign from God that Stephen’s claim to the throne was illegitimate some of the most important magnates elected Matilda queen. All would have been settled had it not been for her haughty personality and the independence of Londoners.

Londoners, who were already pro-Stephen and were less than impressed by the empress’s lack of warmth, unexpectedly refused to agree to the barons’ wishes. They rose up and drove Matilda out of their city in the most humiliating way, in the middle of the night. What had appeared clear cut was once again all confusion. Bishop Henry received further supernatural guidance to suggest that the Almighty was perhaps coming round to Stephen’s claim. He changed sides and led a new rebellion to try to free the imprisoned king. Matilda remained uncrowned, and Robert of Gloucester, her brilliant commander-in-chief, was captured during a battle at Winchester, leaving her to command her own forces.

The empress not only lacked the common touch; without her brother she had no sense of tactics. She was soon on the run. Narrowly evading Stephen’s forces at Devizes in Wiltshire–disguised, it is said, as a corpse in grave clothes–she ended up besieged in Oxford Castle. In December 1142, when it became clear that her men were going to have to surrender because food had run out, she managed to escape again. In the early hours of the morning, dressed in long white robes so that she would not show up against the snow that lay thickly on the ground, she climbed out of a window and slid down a rope suspended from one of the castle towers. By a secret postern gate she and three knights left the castle compound and slipped through the enemy lines without any of the soldiers realizing that the shadowy form melting into street corners was their prey. On account of the freezing weather there was a very thick crust of ice on the River Thames and the empress was able to walk all the way along it to the safety of Wallingford.

The two sides now agreed to exchange their two most important prisoners of war, Robert of Gloucester and Stephen, and the war continued up and down the country. But Matilda’s cause was now a rather halfhearted one, particularly since Londoners had prevented her from being crowned. With the death of Robert of Gloucester in 1148 much of her support faded away, and she swept back to Normandy, never to return. Stephen remained nominally King of England, though he controlled very little of the country that the Norman kings had subjugated. The Welsh were invading the lands of the marcher lords, and the north of England was the fiefdom of King David of Scotland. So the anarchy continued even though the war was over.

In 1153, however, the arrival of the empress’s son Henry of Anjou to demand his mother’s throne signalled a new era for England. He captured Malmesbury, and his cause was given an additional fillip by the support of the Earl of Leicester, which meant that Henry held the whole of the midlands. Although Stephen had not been defeated unequivocally, he was by now tired of so much warfare. On the recommendation of his advisers he agreed by the Treaty of Wallingford in that year that he would rule until he died, but that Henry was to succeed him. Stephen’s son Eustace was paid off with considerable lands.

Although he was only twenty-one years old at the beginning of his reign in 1154, Henry II would be one of England’s greatest kings. He was a worthy representative of the twelfth-century renaissance, a period of startling innovation and growing self-confidence, when there was a sudden explosion of written sources, of histories, biographies and political treatises. Much of the framework of English national law that Henry II set up has lasted down to the present day.

In 1154 the country was still reeling from the disorder of Stephen’s reign. But Henry’s vigorous supervision saw to it that by the end of the decade England was once again being run along the well-oiled lines of his grandfather Henry I. Supporters of both his mother and Stephen, such as Roger of Salisbury’s nephew Nigel, Bishop of Ely, were willing to sink their differences in order for the bitterness of civil war to end. The Curia Regis began to function again; itinerant justices dared to venture out of their homes. Above all, Henry’s aim was to limit the power of the barons so that the sort of destructive anarchy which the country had experienced would never be visited on England again.

In fact Henry II was not a man any baron would wish to trifle with. Not only was he in the fierce, energetic mould of the Norman kings and possessed of a powerful personality, thanks to his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine he also ruled the whole of western France from the Loire to the Pyrenees on the borders of Spain, as well as Normandy and Anjou, inherited from his mother and his father respectively. (Eleanor had brought him Aquitaine, Poitou and Auvergne.) The new king of England was thus the greatest monarch in western Europe. No baron was going to argue when he ordered that the 1,115 illegal or ‘adulterine’ castles be pulled down, given that Henry could call on an unlimited number of soldiers from his vast continental possessions to do the job for him. Although England was not the largest part of his possessions it was the most important because it gave him a crown. This meant he outranked all his tenants-in-chief on the French continent. It also made him the feudal equal of the King of France. Though technically Louis VII was Henry’s overlord for Normandy and Anjou, the French king ruled an area that was not even one-eighth the size of what the English king held in France.

Henry’s most pressing task was to restore order to England and reduce the power of the barons to what it had been in the past. He brought the royal power back to the level his grandfather had known by leading military expeditions against the Celtic borderlands of the country, Wales and Scotland. Although Gwynedd remained independent, most of the Welsh princes once again did homage to the English king as overlord, and the English marcher lords resumed their old territories. The ancient separation between Welsh and English Christianity was done away with when the Welsh bishops agreed that the Archbishop of Canterbury should head their Church too. Henry’s first cousin Malcolm IV of Scotland, meanwhile, had to return Northumbria to England and was made to do homage to him as his overlord. Henry strongly impressed the official class of England by his firm measures. All foreign soldiers, like the Flemish mercenaries Stephen had used who were still at large in rapacious bands, were packed off to their countries of origin, and all the crown lands Stephen had granted away were restored to royal control. The king insisted on spending time travelling from county court to county court ‘judging the judges’, as one chronicler put it; this would result in a complete shake-up of the legal system.

The first twenty years of Henry II’s reign saw the considerable expansion of the Angevin Empire–that is, the empire of Anjou–with the acquisition of Brittany and of the overlordship of Toulouse; he also obtained the submission of the Irish kings. Despite his Norman ancestry Henry’s character owed just as much to his father Geoffrey, who had made the counts of Anjou a rising power in what is now France. By 1144 Geoffrey of Anjou had brought enough of the Duchy of Normandy under his sway to have become its duke by conquest. But because his son Henry had a legal claim to it through his mother, all government business tended to be done in the name of his son. Thanks to his father’s interest in education Henry II was one of the best-educated princes of the day, exposed to the finest European learning. Fond of verse and reading, he was also interested in philosophy and, though not a lawyer himself, he absorbed the advances in the law being made at the new universities on the continent and applied them to England. His father being the Count of Anjou, Henry II was the first Angevin king of England, but after his son John lost Anjou Henry’s descendants became known as the Plantagenets.

Henry II combined in his person the best and worst sides of his genetic heritage. He had the cunning Angevin mind with its flair for diplomacy, as well as the Angevins’ violent temper, and this was allied to the forcefulness of the dukes of Normandy. In addition to the education his father had provided he had also responded well to the training in statecraft he received from his uncles King David of Scotland and Robert of Gloucester. In sum Henry II was one of the most formidable men ever to sit on the English throne, a marvellous warrior and a great statesman. Physically he took after the Angevins, being slightly thick set with famously muscled calves because he was in the saddle so much, and he had a square, lion-like, ruddy-complexioned face. When he was irritated, which was much of the time, the chroniclers noted, his eyes seemed to flash lightning.

Henry’s vast inheritance from his father, the Angevin Empire, brought its own problems. Much of his energies and those of his sons would be inextricably bound up with a battle with the King of France for mastery of French territory. To begin with the King of France controlled only a very small area round Paris, but the struggle would end with the loss of the northern empire to France at the beginning of the thirteenth century when the Angevins found a worthy opponent in the French king Philip Augustus.

But the empire also brought great advantages to England, as it led to the establishment of close relations between England’s southern ports, London, Bristol and Southampton, and the equally busy Angevin entrepôts of Bordeaux, Rouen and La Rochelle. English merchants were able to import at advantageous rates the French wine and salt which were the preservatives and therefore the great commodities of the middle ages. Water was too dangerous to drink until the purification techniques developed in the nineteenth century, so wine or beer was the drink of choice, small beer being drunk by all classes throughout the day from breakfast onwards. Although vines were grown in southern England during the middle ages, England’s ownership until the mid-fifteenth century of Aquitaine and her great region of Bordeaux gave rise to a tradition of the English drinking Bordeaux that was perpetuated until the Napoleonic Wars (when Britain’s ally Portugal temporarily replaced France as the main source of British alcoholic beverages).

Ruling such a great empire needed a man of tremendous energy prepared to travel long distances, for what gave the disparate parts of the Angevin Empire their strength and unity was the figure of the king. Fortunately, Henry was suited to the task; he was consumed by curiosity and was famous for his lack of pomp and his indifference to his surroundings. The whole court might find themselves wandering lost in an unknown forest while the king galloped ahead. ‘Frequently in the dark,’ remembered Peter of Blois, ‘we would consider our prayers answered if we found by chance some mean filthy hut. Often there were fierce quarrels over these hovels, and courtiers fought with drawn swords for a lodging that it would have disgraced pigs to fight for.’

Henry’s addiction to hunting, shared with so many Normans, meant that much of the king’s business was done in the country, although with the establishment of permanent law courts at Westminster London was becoming the seat of government. The king was perpetually busy, and his astonished courtiers observed that he never sat down except to eat, and even then he bolted his food. He found it so hard not to be doing things that he used to draw pictures all through the Mass which as a devout Christian he heard every day. Priests deputed to say the royal Mass were chosen for the speed with which they could get through the service, for everyone dreaded Henry’s rage.

One of the king’s first appointments in England was his elevation to the chancellorship of a talented and charismatic secretary in the household of the Archbishop of Canterbury named Thomas à Becket, the son of a Norman merchant in London. Becket’s natural brilliance and sharp debating skills, which had marked him out when he was only a page, had been honed not only by legal studies in Theobald’s household but by being sent to study Roman and canon law at the University of Bologna in Italy. Since then he had been entrusted by the archbishop with many important missions abroad, having shown himself to be a clever and energetic diplomat.

But Becket became more than just Henry’s chancellor. As a foreigner the young king needed information about England, and this was supplied by the articulate Thomas. They became boon companions, spending most of their time together. Contemporaries noted how extraordinarily close they were. For a decade the two men–Thomas was some ten years older–ruled almost like brothers, with Thomas taking a starring role in defending the ancient rights and lands of the crown and as chancellor supervising every royal instruction or writ. Henry relied on Thomas for everything, to an almost excessive extent, as they ate every meal together and romped and wrestled more like boys than king and minister. On one occasion Henry rode his horse into Thomas’s hall and jumped over the table to sit and dine with him. One writer said, ‘Never in Christian times were two men more of a mind. In Church they sat together, together they rode out.’ Unlike the king, who was always rather plainly dressed, perhaps because he was rarely to be seen off a horse, the ambitious Thomas à Becket was known for his love of display and heavily embroidered cloaks. Although Henry liked to puncture pretension in anyone else, it amused him in Thomas.

The chancellor was as full of ingenious ideas as the king. He probably encouraged Henry to rely on the increasingly widespread custom of scutage, or shield money (from
scutum
, the Latin for shield), the payment of two marks in lieu of knight’s service by those of his tenants-in-chief and their vassals who could not spare the time to fight. Henry was forever having to wage wars to maintain his territories in France, where they were threatened by the meddling activities of the French king Louis VII, who was uncontrollably jealous of his too powerful vassal. It was much easier to depend on the skills of professional soldiers paid for with the shield money. Moreover, to a ruler anxious to reassert royal authority, scutage had the additional advantage of diminishing the military power of the barons. Becket himself enjoyed fighting just as much as the king, and in 1159 he was on his charger at Henry’s side as his master attempted to subjugate the county of Toulouse. Becket’s subtle mind may also have dreamed up a marriage treaty between the daughter of the King of France and Henry’s eldest son as a means of obtaining for England the coveted Vexin region, midway between Rouen and Paris. Certainly it was he who conducted the negotiations. Since the bride and groom were six months and four years old at the time, Louis VII assumed that the event would not take place for at least ten years, although the baby princess went to live at the court of Henry II. But to Louis’ rage a couple of years later in 1160 the children were married to one another, now aged six and two, and the Vexin thus once more became part of Henry’s empire.

Thomas grew enormously wealthy as Henry granted him the revenues of many religious foundations. When he was sent as ambassador to negotiate the transfer of the Vexin, his equipage was so magnificent that all the French ran out to see it. One thousand knights accompanied him, and 250 pages sang verses to his glory and waved banners. Priests rode two by two alongside the relics from his own chapel which accompanied him; behind them monkeys rode on the saddles of the horses bearing gold for the French king.

In 1162 Archbishop Theobald died. The infatuated king decided that the magnificent Thomas, whose views were so close to his own, should controversially (since he was not an ordained priest) be appointed head of the English Church, namely Archbishop of Canterbury. At the same time he would remain head of the king’s Chancery. Like all rulers of the time Henry had been dissatisfied by what seemed the increasingly aggressive demands of the Church. Thomas à Becket might have been the Church establishment’s candidate for the chancellorship, but during his eight years in office he had completely identified with the king when it came to collecting taxes imposed on the Church for royal wars. The appointment seemed to be a master stroke which would bring the Church more tightly under royal control.

The years of anarchy and the weakness of the crown had enhanced not only the power of the barons but also the position of the Church. When the king’s writs to the shire court had more or less dried up, Church courts had taken their place. By the time of Henry II Church lawyers had been drawing into their courts all aspects of ordinary life, and had begun to argue that cases involving debt belonged to them. Church lawyers appealed to Rome in ever increasing numbers about property, as opposed to the spiritual issues their courts were intended for. In addition these lawyers were using their expertise to boost the revenues of the Church so that its income was now greater than the king’s.

The success of the Church in expanding its power had been aided by the activities of a group of Englishmen at Rome, including John of Salisbury, the political philosopher and Becket’s future biographer, and Nicholas Breakspear, who became Pope Adrian IV in 1154. The twelfth century was internationally the great century for the development of law and these men were among those leading the advance of canon law. Like Thomas à Becket, John of Salisbury had become a member of Archbishop Theobald’s household, and under his influence a more thorough legal training began to be offered to clerks throughout the country.