Henry II: New Interpretations

HENRY II NEW INTERPRETATIONS

Edited by CHRISTOPHER HARPER-BILL and NICHOLAS VINCENT

Henry II new interpretations

HENRY II NEW INTERPRETATIONS edited by

Christopher Harper-Bill and

Nicholas Vincent

THE BOYDELL PRESS

© Contributors 2007 The right of the contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

First published 2007 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 978-1-84383-340-6

The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website : www.boydellandbrewer.com

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Designed and typeset in Columbus by The Stingray Office, Manchester Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

Contents List of Illustrations

vii

Editors’ Preface

ix

List of Abbreviations

xi

Introduction : Henry ii and the Historians Nicholas Vincent

1

The Accession of Henry ii Edmund King

24

Henry ii and Louis vii Jean Dunbabin

47

Doing Homage to the King of France John Gillingham

63

Henry, Duke of the Normans (1149/50–1189) Daniel Power

85

Henry ii and England’s Insular Neighbours Seán Duffy

129

Henry ii, the English Church and the Papacy, 1154–76 Anne J. Duggan

154

On the Instruction of a Prince : The Upbringing of Henry, the Young King Matthew Strickland

184

Henry ii and the Creation of the English Common Law Paul Brand

215

Finance and the Economy in the Reign of Henry ii Nick Barratt

242

vi

Contents Henry ii and the English Coinage Martin Allen

257

The Court of Henry ii Nicholas Vincent

278

Literary Culture at the Court of Henry ii Ian Short

335

Henry ii and Arthurian Legend Martin Aurell

362

Index

395

List of Illustrations Henry, Duke of the Normans (1149/50–1189) Map 1 Normandy and its Neighbours in the Reign of Henry ii

88

(from D. Power, The Norman Frontier in the Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Centuries (Cambridge 2004), p. xix. Reproduced with the permission of Cambridge University Press.)

Table 1 Assizes in Normandy in the Reign of Henry ii Map 2 Assizes in Normandy in the Reign of Henry ii Figure 1 Richard du Hommet and his Descendants

105 108 113

Henry ii and the English Coinage Figure 1 Silver penny of the Awbridge type, Lincoln mint Figure 2 Silver penny of the Cross-and-Crosslets coinage, Carlisle mint Figure 3 Silver penny of the Short Cross coinage, Winchester mint, 1180

© Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Table 1

The Mints and Moneyers of Henry ii

259 261 269

276

The Court of Henry II Table 1

The most frequent witnesses to charters of Henry II

289

Editors’ Preface This volume had its origins in a conference held at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, in September 2004. While several other meetings in that year commemorated the 800th anniversary of the end of the Anglo-Norman realm, it seemed appropriate to celebrate also the 850th anniversary of the accession to the English throne of a king who, whatever view is taken of him, was undoubtedly significant in the history both of France and of England. It was to the immense delight of Christopher Harper-Bill that, between conception and realisation of the conference, Nicholas Vincent, who had been invited as a speaker, was appointed to a third chair of medieval history at Norwich. Professor Marie Therese Flanagan was unfortunately prevented by illness from presenting a paper, and we are particularly grateful to Dr Seán Duffy for providing, at short notice, an essay for the volume. Dr Jane Martindale was similarly prevented by ill health from preparing for publication her paper on ‘From the Loire to the Pyrenees’, given at the conference. For much assistance in organisation we are indebted to Rowena Burgess, research administrator of the School of History. The conviviality of the proceedings was facilitated by the cheerful efforts of the catering staff. We are grateful to Professor Sandy Heslop and Professor Carole Rawcliffe for leading excursions to, respectively, the cathedral and the Great Hospital. For his enthusiastic support of the conference, this volume and indeed of all things medieval, we wholeheartedly thank Professor John Charmley, a truly beneficent head of School. The index was compiled, with her customary efficiency and skill, by Dr Judith Everard. As always the publishers, and especially Caroline Palmer, editorial director, have been courteously and cheerfully efficient in seeing this volume to the press. Christopher Harper-Bill Nicholas Vincent

List of Abbreviations AA SS

Acta Sanctorum

Acta

The Acta of Henry II, ed. N. Vincent, J. C. Holt and J. Everard (Oxford, forthcoming)

Actes Henri II

Recueil des actes de Henri II, roi d’Angleterre et duc de Normandie, ed. L. Delisle et E. Berger, 4 vols. (Paris 1909–27)

Actes de Philippe Auguste

Recueil des actes de Philippe Auguste, ed. H.-F. Delaborde, M. Nortier et al., 6 vols. (Paris 1916–  )

AD

Archives Départementales

ADC

Caen, AD du Calvados

ADO

Alençon, AD de l’Orne

ADSM Rouen, AD de la Seine-Maritime Allen, BMC

D. F. Allen, A Catalogue of English Coins in the British Museum : The Cross-and-Crosslets (‘Tealby’) Type of Henry II (London 1951)

Ann. angevines

Recueil d’annales angevines et vendômoises, ed. L. Halphen (Paris 1903)

Ann. Mon.

Annales Monastici, ed. H. R. Luard, 5 vols. (RS 36, London 1864–9)

ANS

Anglo-Norman Studies

Antiqs. Journ.

The Antiquaries Journal

archbp

archbishop

Arch. Journ.

Archaeological Journal

ASC

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. D. Whitelock et al. (London 1969)

BAA

British Archaeological Association

BAR

British Archaeological Reports

Battle Chronicle

The Chronicle of Battle Abbey, ed. E. Searle (OMT 1980)

xii

Abbreviations

BEC

Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes

Bib. Mun.

Bibliothèque Municipale

BIHR

Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research

BL

London, British Library

BN

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France

BNJ

British Numismatic Journal

Book of Fees

Liber Feodorum : The Book of Fees commonly called Testa de Neville, ed. H. C. Maxwell-Lyte, 3 vols. (HMSO 1920–31)

Book of Walden

The Book of the Foundation of Walden Monastery, ed. D. Greenway and L. Watkiss (OMT 1999)

bp

bishop

Brand, English Coinage

J. D. Brand, The English Coinage, 1180–1247 : Money, Mints and Exchanges (British Numismatic Society Publications 1, London 1994)

BSAN

Bulletin de la Société des Antiquaires de Normandie

Burgess, Wace

Wace, Le Roman de Rou, ed. A. J. Holden, G. S. Burgess and E. van Houts (Jersey 2002)

CA

Département du Calvados

Cal. Docs. France

Calendar of Documents preserved in France . . . , i : 918–1216, ed. J. H. Round (HMSO 1899)

CCM

Cahiers de civilisation médiévale

CNRS

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

CRR

Curia Regis Rolls, 20 vols. (HMSO 1922–  )

C & S

Councils and Synods and other Documents relating to the English Church, i, part 2 : 1066–1204, ed. D. Whitelock, M. Brett and C. N. L. Brooke (Oxford 1981)

CUL

Cambridge University Library

Dialogus

De Necessariis Observantiis Scaccarii Dialogus qui vulgo dicitur Dialogus de Scaccario, ed. C. Johnson (NMT 1950)

Diceto

Radulphi de Diceto Opera Historica ; The Historical Works of Master Ralph de Diceto, Dean of London, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols. (RS 68, 1876)

Duggan, Becket Correspondence

The Corrrespondence of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1162–1170, ed. A. Duggan, 2 vols. (OMT 2000)



Abbreviations

xiii

EEA

English Episcopal Acta, 32 vols. (British Academy 1980–  )

EcHR

Economic History Review

EHD ii

English Historical Documents, ii : 1042–1189, ed. D. C. Douglas and G. W. Greenway, 2nd edn (London 1981)

EHR

English Historical Review

English Lawsuits

English Lawsuits from William I to Richard I, ed. R. C. van Caenegem, 2 vols. (Selden Society 106–7, 1990–91)

EU

Département de l’Eure

EYC

Early Yorkshire Charters, i–iii, ed. W. Farrer (Edinburgh 1914– 16) ; iv–xii, ed. C. T. Clay (Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Record Ser., extra ser., 1935–65)

Eyton, Itinerary

R. W. Eyton, Court, Household and Itinerary of King Henry II (London 1878)

Fasti 1066–1300

John le Neve, Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae, 1066–1300, revised by D. Greenway et al., 8 vols. (London 1968–  )

Foedera

Foedera, Conventiones, Litterae etc. ; or Rymer’s Foedera, 1066–1383, ed. A. Clarke et al., 4 vols. in 7 parts (Record Commission, 1816–69), i, part 1

Gallia Christiana

Gallia Christiana in provincias ecclesiasticas distributa, 16 vols. (Paris 1715–1865)

GEC Complete Peerage

Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland . . . , ed. G. E. Cokayne, new edn V. Gibbs et al., 13 vols. in 14 (London 1910–59)

Gerald, Expugnatio

Expugnatio Hibernica : The Conquest of Ireland by Giraldus Cam­ brensis, ed. A. B. Scott and F. X. Martin (Irish Medieval Texts 1, Dublin 1978)

Gervase

The Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols. (RS 73, 1879–80)

Gesta Regum

William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom, 2 vols. (OMT 1998–99)

Gesta Stephani

Gesta Stephani, ed. K. R. Potter and R. H. C. Davis (OMT 1976)

Giraldi Cambrensis Opera

Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, ed. J. S. Brewer et al., 8 vols. (RS 21, 1861–91)

Glanvill

Tractatus de Legibus et Consuetudinibus Regni Anglie qui Glanvilla vocatur, ed. G. D. G. Hall (NMT 1965)

xiv

Abbreviations

Guillaume le Breton

Œuvres de Rigord et de Guillaume le Breton, ed. H.-F. Delaborde, 2 vols. (Société de l’histoire de la France, Paris 1882–85)

Hist. ducs de Normandie

Histoire des ducs de Normandie et des rois d’Angleterre, ed. F. Michel (Société de l’histoire de France, Paris 1840)

Hist. Guillaume le Maréchal

L’Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, ed. P. Meyer, 3 vols. (Société de l’histoire de France, Paris 1891–1901)

Historia Novella

William of Malmesbury, Historia Novella, ed. E. King and K. R. Potter (OMT 1998)

History of William Marshal

History of William Marshal, ed. A. J. Holden, trans. S. Gregory, notes by D. Crouch, 3 vols. (Anglo-Norman Text Society 2002–6)

HMSO

Her Majesty’s Stationery Office

Howden, Chronica

Chronica Rogeri de Houedene, ed. W. Stubbs, 4 vols. (RS 51, 1868–71)

Howden, Gesta Regis

Gesta Regis Henrici Secundi et Ricardi Primi, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols. (RS 49, 1867)

Howlett, Chronicles

Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I, ed. R. Howlett, 4 vols. (RS 82, 1884–89)

HRH i

The Heads of Religious Houses, England and Wales, 940–1216, ed. D. Knowles, C. N. L. Brooke and V. C. M. London (Cambridge 1972)

HSJ

Haskins Society Journal

Huntingdon

Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed. D. Greenway (OMT 1996)

JEH

Journal of Ecclesiastical History

JMH

Journal of Medieval History

John of Hexham

Chronicle, in Symeonis Monachi Opera Omnia, ed. T. Arnold, 2 vols. (RS 75, 1882–85), ii, 284–332

Jolliffe, Angevin Kingship

J. E. A. Jolliffe, Angevin Kingship, 2nd edn (London 1963)

Jordan Fantosme

Jordan Fantosme’s Chronicle, ed. R. C. Johnson (Oxford 1981)

LCGF

The Letters and Charters of Gilbert Foliot, ed. A. Morey and C. N. L. Brooke (Cambridge 1967)

Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux

The Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, ed. F. Barlow (Camden Third Ser. 61, 1939)

Letters of John of Salisbury

The Letters of John of Salisbury, i : The Early Letters (1153–61), ed. W. J. Millor and H. E. Butler (NMT 1955) ; ii : The



Abbreviations

xv

Later Letters (1163–1180), ed. W. J. Millor and C. N. L. Brooke (OMT 1979) Life of St Hugh

Magna Vita Sancti Hugonis, ed. D. L. Douie and H. Farmer, 2 vols. (NMT 1962, reprinted OMT 1985)

Map, De Nugis

Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium, ed. M. R. James, C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors (OMT 1983)

MGH

Monumenta Germaniae Historica

MGH SRG

MGH Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum in usum Scholarum

MGH SS

MGH Scriptores

MN

Département de la Manche

Monasticon

William Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, ed. J. Caley, H. Ellis and B. Bandinel, 6 vols. in 8 (London 1817–30)

MRH

D. Knowles and R. N. Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses, England and Wales, 2nd edn (London 1971)

MRSN

Magni Rotuli Scaccarii Normanniae, ed T. Stapleton, 2 vols. (London 1840–44)

MTB

Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, ed. J. C. Robertson, 7 vols. (RS 67, 1875–85)

NC

Numismatic Chronicle

Newburgh

Historia Rerum Anglicarum of William of Newburgh, in Howlett, Chronicles, i, ii

NMT Nelson’s Medieval Texts Norman Pipe Rolls

Pipe Rolls of the Exchequer of Normandy for the Reign of Henry II, 1180 and 1184, ed. V. Moss (PRS ns 53, 2004)

ns

new series

OMT

Oxford Medieval Texts

OR

Département de l’Orne

Orderic

Orderic Vitalis, Historia Ecclesiastica, ed. M. Chibnall, 6 vols. (OMT 1969–80)

os

old series

Oxford DNB

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

PBA

Proceedings of the British Academy

PL

Patrologiae cursus completus, series Latina, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris 1841– 64)

xvi

Abbreviations

PR

Pipe Roll (as published by PRS)

PR 2–4 Henry II

The Great Rolls of the Pipe for the Second, Third and Fourth Years of the Reign of King Henry the Second, ed. J. Hunter (Record Commission 1844)

PRS

Pipe Roll Society

Red Book

The Red Book of the Exchequer, ed. H. Hall, 3 vols. (RS 1896).

Regesta

Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum, ed. H. W. C. Davis, C. Johnson, H. A. Cronne and R. H. C. Davis, 4 vols. (Oxford 1913–69)

Registres de Philippe Auguste

Les Registres de Philippe Auguste, ed. J. W. Baldwin, i (texte) (Paris 1992)

RHF

Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, ed. M. Bouquet et al., 24 vols. in 25 (Paris 1738–1904)

Rigord

Œuvres de Rigord et de Guillaume le Breton, ed. H.-F. Delaborde, 2 vols. (Societe de l’histoire de France, Paris 1882–85)

RO Record Office Rot. Claus.

Rotuli Litterarum Clausarum in Turri Londinensi Asservati, ed. T. D. Hardy, 2 vols. (Record Commission 1833–44)

Rot. Norm.

Rotuli Normanniae in Turri Londinensi Asservati, ed. T. D. Hardy (Record Commission 1835)

Rot. Pat.

Rotuli Litterarum Patentium in Turri Londinensi Asservati, ed T. D. Hardy (Record Commission 1835)

Royal Writs

Royal Writs in England from the Conquest to Glanvil, ed. R. C. van Caenegem (Selden Society 77, 1959)

RS Rolls Series SATF

Société des Anciens Textes Français

ser.

series

SM

Département de la Seine-Maritime

Statutes of the Realm

Statutes of the Realm, ed. A. Luders et al., 11 vols. in 12 (Record Commission 1810–28)

Torigni

The Chronicle of Robert de Torigni, in Howlett, Chronicles, iv

VCH

Victoria County History

Wace

Wace, Le Roman de Rou, ed. A. J. Holden, 3 vols. (SATF, Paris 1970–73)



Abbreviations

xvii

Waltham

The Waltham Chronicle, ed. L. Watkiss and M. Chibnall (OMT 1994)

Warren, Henry II

W. L. Warren, Henry II (London 1973)

Nicholas Vincent

Introduction : Henry II and the Historians

S

ome eight hundred and fifty years ago, a red-haired and fiercely energetic young man succeeded to the throne of England as King Henry II. Descended on his mother’s side from the Norman kings who had ruled England since 1066, and on his father’s from the Plantagenet dynasty that had held sway over Angers and the Loire valley from at least the tenth century, Henry II was vastly to extend this ancestral inheritance. By his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, he had already acquired dominion over the whole of south-western France, stretching from the Loire down to the Pyrenees. Through a process of political coercion, by the mid 1160s he was to project his authority westwards into Brittany and Wales and northwards to reseize the counties of Westmorland, Cumberland and Northumberland occupied for the previous twenty years by the kings of Scotland. In 1171, stepping into the maelstrom caused by Richard Strongbow’s conquest of Leinster, he led an expedition that was to claim Ireland and its lordship for the English Crown. Three years later, victorious in a civil war fought out against his eldest son, he obtained the right to establish English garrisons at Berwick, Edinburgh and as far north as Stirling, imposing oaths of homage upon the Scottish king. His military exploits, his political cunning and his courtly magnificence had already brought him and his family alliances with the rulers of Spain and Saxony and with the Capetian kings of France, and in due course the youngest of his daughters was to be married to the King of Sicily. So great was Henry’s reputation by the 1180s that he was to be offered the keys to the city of Jerusalem and the prospect of ruling over the city of Christ himself. Through establishing a new dynasty on the English throne, through his accumulation of an estate in France unprecedented since the time of the Carolingians, through his conquests in Britain, and though his encouragement of law, administration and learning on a scale that could not have been imagined in the days of his predecessor, King Stephen, Henry II fundamentally altered the course of English, of French and indeed of European history. His legacy was immense and in many cases enduring. English rule over Gascony was to last for three centuries,



Nicholas Vincent

English rule over Ireland as late as the 1920s and indeed over parts of Ireland, however vigorously contested, through to the present day. The palace that Henry refurbished at Westminster, and the new courts and administrative procedures that he established there lie, even now, at the very foundations of English government and English law. More than this, in purely personal terms, Henry’s reign witnessed drama on a scale that continues to fascinate not merely professional historians but a large part of the educated public. Henry’s dealings with Thomas Becket, and the archbishop’s murder at Canterbury in 1170 ; Henry’s relations with his own family, his sons, and in particular with his wife, the much mythologized Eleanor of Aquitaine, formed the stuff of legend even in his own lifetime and continue to be reflected in the work of poets, playwrights and screenwriters, from the sublime to the ridiculous and from Tennyson and T. S. Eliot through to the renaming of the municipal bus service of Poitiers as the ‘Ligne Aliénor d’Aquitaine’. The interest shown by modern historians in the reign and person of Henry II has itself deep foundations. Thanks in part to the chronicles of Roger of Howden and Ralph of Diss, recycled in the even more widely disseminated chronicles of St Albans, and thanks too to the extraordinary popularity of Peter of Blois’s letter collection, with its personal reminiscences of the King and his court, Henry II found a prominent place in most late-medieval accounts of the earlier medieval English past. Ranulph Higden, like Ralph Holinshed in the sixteenth century, relied heavily on the St Albans chroniclers and hence ultimately on Howden. The Dominican Nicholas Trivet used the earlier histories of Robert of Torigni and Gerald of Wales and the letters of Peter of Blois in a portrait that included such personally memorable details as Henry’s red hair, piercing stare and bow-legged gait, details still being rehearsed verbatim though without attribution by J. R. Green in his immensely popular Short History of the English People published in the 1870s. Modern study of the reign of Henry II, as of much of the medieval past, can be traced back at least as far as David Hume, and Hume’s portrait of Henry II itself emerged from a tradition closely controlled by the chroniclers, especially by Howden mediated via St Albans and Holinshed. To Hume, the reign of Henry II marked a significant turning point in English history : the moment at which the foreign, French kings of the Anglo-Norman era at last began to be transformed into rulers over a newly united Anglo-French realm, already tinted by the dawn of English patriotism. Henry II, according to Hume, ‘soon became, both from his distant place of residence, and from the incompatibility of interests, a kind of

  As drawn to my attention by Martin Aurell.   F. Nicholai Triveti . . . Annales, ed. T. Hog (London 1845), 32–6, citing Peter of Blois ‘Letter 66’, as in Petri Blesensis Bathoniensis Archidiaconi Opera Omnia, ed. J. A. Giles, 4 vols. (Oxford 1846–7), i, 192–7 ; J. R. Green, A Short History of the English People (London 1875), 101.



Introduction : Henry II and the Historians 

foreigner to his French dominions’. If not exactly an Englishman himself, ‘Henry was surrounded with the English gentry and nobility when abroad ; the French gentry and nobility attended him when he resided in England ; both nations acted in the government as if they were the same people, and, on many occasions, the legislatures seem not to have been distinguished.’ Prefiguring a line of argument that has only recently been rediscovered in late-twentieth-century scholarship, Hume was wary of describing Henry II’s vast dominions as a truly imperial estate, fit predecessor to the later British Empire. On the contrary, ‘The limited authority of the prince in the feudal constitution prevented the king of England from employing with advantage the force of so many states which were subjected to his government, and these different members, disjointed in situation, and disagreeing in laws, language and manners, were never thoroughly cemented into one monarchy’, a judgment remarkably close to that expressed by most modern commentators, from Michael Clanchy to J. C. Holt. Hume’s Henry was nonetheless ‘the greatest prince of his time for wisdom, virtue, and abilities, and the most powerful in extent of dominion of all those who had ever filled the throne of England’. Henry’s achievements were partly military : the conquest of Ireland and, after 1174, the imposition of overlordship on Hume’s native land : ‘The first great ascendant which England obtained over Scotland, and indeed the first important transaction which had passed between the kingdoms’. Besides wielding his sword as one of the first true architects of Britishness, Henry was also assiduous in guarding his sovereignty against both the perfidious French and the noxious machinations of Rome : ‘The usurpations of the clergy, which had at first been gradual, were now become so rapid and had mounted to such a height, that the contest between the regale and pontificale was really arrived at a crisis in England, and it became necessary to determine whether the king or the priests, particularly the archbishops of Canterbury, should be sovereign of the Kingdom.’ To this extent Becket’s murder was an inevitable and necessary step if the English were to be freed from monkish superstition and foreign rule. By contrast, whatever faults Henry laboured under were the result not so much of personal failings as of the treachery of his own family, and in particular of his wife : ‘Queen Eleanor, who had disgusted her first husband by her gallantries, was no less offensive to her second by her jealousy ; and after this   D. Hume, The History of England, new edn, 8 vols. (London 1786 ; the volume covering Henry’s reign first published 1761), i, 374.   Ibid., 464–5.   Ibid., 374.   M. T. Clanchy, England and its Rulers, 1066–1307 (Oxford 1983 ; 3rd edn 2006) ; J. C. Holt, Colonial England, 1066–1215 (London 1997).   Hume, History, i, 463.   Ibid., 448.   Ibid., 382.



Nicholas Vincent

manner carried to extremity, in the different periods of her life, every circumstance of female weakness.’ Many elements of Hume’s Henry are to be found echoed in the work of Hume’s great Whig contemporary, George, 1st Lord Lyttelton : close advisor to Frederick Prince of Wales, Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1755–6 (being perhaps the first, though by no means the last chancellor reputed incapable of counting from one to ten), poet, scholar and dedicatee of Fielding’s Tom Jones. Lyttelton’s four-volume study of Henry II, published in 1767 six years after Hume’s History, though written over a much longer period and at much greater, indeed nearsoporific length, rehearses many of the prejudices of Hume while creating an even more idealized portrait of Henry as the philosopher-prince : a king whose ‘severity was exercised only on behalf of his people and the publick weal of his realm’. According to Lyttelton (thinking presumably of the pardons extended to Henry’s sons rather than of Henry’s branding and expulsion of the Oxford heretics or the fifteen-year captivity imposed upon his rebel queen), to Henry II could be attributed ‘among the noblest acts of clemency that have ever embellished the history of mankind’. Although not perfect, Henry’s virtues were far greater than those of his grandfather Henry I : ‘Particularly those [virtues] which in a king will atone for many imperfections : a cordial love of his people, and an active benevolence towards all mankind’. If Eleanor of Aquitaine is treated more charitably in Lyttelton’s account than in Hume’s, then Thomas Becket fares far worse : ‘Guilty of a wilful and premeditated perjury . . . [Becket] was in the highest degree ungrateful to a very kind master . . . His good qualities were so misapplied that they became no less hurtful to the public weal of the kingdom than the worst of his vices.’ These then were the judgments of the eighteenth century, based in part upon a sense of Henry II’s place in the history of British imperialism, in part upon deep-seated Protestant and masculine prejudice, and in part too upon the way that Henry II’s achievements could be contrasted both to the brutalities of his Anglo-Norman predecessors and to the all too evident failings and ‘despotism’ of his Plantagenet successors. Having recently defeated the French in two continental wars, England by the 1760s could take justified pride in the achievements of Henry II : an English king who had himself outwitted an earlier King Louis and, as a result, had to some extent made good that slur against national honour embodied in the Norman conquest of 1066. Not everybody, of course, was en  Hume, History, i, 436.   For Lyttelton, see Oxford DNB ; GEC, Complete Peerage, viii, 309–11, esp. 310 n.   G. Lyttelton, The History of the Life of King Henry the Second and of the Age in which he Lived, 4 vols. (Dublin 1768 ; first published London 1767), iii, 525–6.   Ibid.   Ibid., 534.   Ibid., ii, 644–6.



Introduction : Henry II and the Historians 

tirely convinced. As noticed by Clare Simmons in her fascinating survey of the historiography of the Becket conflict, as early as 1790 the Catholic emancipationist Joseph Berington had attempted a riposte to Lyttelton’s panegyric of the king, suggesting that Lyttelton’s ‘horror of popery, which is in some a real malady, had disordered his judgment’. Thirty years later, the radical William Cobbett was to proclaim his conviction that Becket had died as a martyr to the liberties of the English people, being ‘barbarously murdered by ruffians sent from the king, and for no other cause than that he persevered in resisting an attempt to violate the Great Charter’ ; Cobbett apparently assuming here that the spirit, if not the letter of Magna Carta was already known to and disputed by Henry and Becket’s contemporaries. Something of this uncertainty as to Henry II’s greatness informed the work of Maria, Lady Callcott, who in her emetically saccharine yet nonetheless immensely popular instruction of ‘Little Arthur’, first published in 1835, expressed certain doubts about Henry II, and in particular as to whether Henry was an entirely nice man. ‘Little Arthur’ was in fact treated to two chapters on Henry : the first king of England to whom Lady Callcott extended so signal an honour and an indication of how significant Henry’s reign was by now thought to be. In the first, we are told ‘all the best things I remember’, in the second ‘all the bad’. Meanwhile ‘some things that are middling will be at the end of the good, and some at the end of the bad chapter’ : a plan of campaign still applied today to any number of undergraduate essays on Henry II. On the one hand Henry ‘was wise and learned, and brave and handsome, besides being the richest king of his time, and having the largest estates’. He soon packed off all the Norman and French knights who had come into England during Stephen’s reign, knowing (like the Duke of Wellington) that ‘English soldiers were best to defend England, and that foreign soldiers were not likely to be kind to the poor English people’. He pulled down bad castles and promoted good laws. He also brought civilisation to Ireland : a process St Patrick had begun by teaching the Irish to ‘be a little more like those in other parts of the world’, but which Henry completed by allowing Strongbow to stop the Irish kings from quarrelling with one another. This, Lady Callcott, assures us,   J. Berington, History of the Reign of Henry the Second . . . in which the Character of Thomas a Becket is Vindicated from the Attacks of George Lord Lyttelton (Birmingham 1790), p. xxi, cited by C. A. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest : History and Myth in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (New Brunswick, nj, 1990), 116. For a sophisticated analysis of Berington’s highly Cisalpine brand of Catholic apologetics, see R. J. Smith, The Gothic Bequest : Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688–1863 (Cambridge 1987), 106–10.   W. Cobbett, A History of the Protestant ‘Reformation’ (London 1824–7), 179, noticed by Simmons, Reversing the Conquest, 124.   Maria, Lady Callcott, Little Arthur’s History of England, Century Edn (London 1981 ; first published London 1835), 60.   Ibid.



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with considerable understatement even in 1835, ‘was a thing that was partly good and partly bad for England’ ; whether it was good or bad for Ireland she does not venture to declare. On the debit side, although Henry did his best to deal with a quite horrid person called ‘the bishop of Rome’, he had to contend with an archbishop named Becket, who, for entirely selfish reasons, took the bishop of Rome’s side in the dispute and ended up being killed as a result. Worse still was ‘something wrong which the king had been persuaded to do when he was very young’. Being very rich, Henry had naturally married ‘one of the richest ladies in the world, although she was very ill-tempered and in all ways a bad woman’. Having married for money rather than love, Henry was punished for his folly by discovering that this wife brought up her children very badly, ‘for she taught her children to be wicked and to rebel against their father, and there is nothing in the world so unhappy as a family where the children behave ill to their parents’. As the nineteenth century progressed, and as an awareness grew that not only Henry II’s private life but his relations with his bishops were not at all like those of Queen Victoria, so the portrait established essentially from the twelfth- and thirteenth-century chronicle accounts began to fray under scholarly scrutiny. Even by the time that Hume and Lyttelton wrote, there were other sources of information that might have been brought to bear in assessments of Henry’s reign. Peter of Blois’s complete letter collection, including not merely Peter’s personal panegyric of Henry but also his critical accounts of the court, had been in print in a variety of editions since the late fifteenth century. Much of the Becket correspondence was available in continental editions and was known at least to Lyttelton, who must take credit as the first modern scholar to print a version of Gilbert Foliot’s great diatribe against Becket, the letter ‘Multiplicem’. Thomas   Callcott, Little Arthur’s History, 62–3.   Ibid., 65–6.   Ibid., 66.   Ibid., 67–8.   Besides a rare pre-1500 edition (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale Res. C760, no date), Peter’s letters were first published by J. Merlin (Paris/Lyons 1519). Thereafter, two further editions were available to English historians, by V. Busée, Opera Petri Blesensis Bathoniensis quondam in Anglia archidiaconi (Mainz 1600), and by P. de Goussainville, Petri Blesensis . . . Opera omnia (Paris 1667).  Nearly 100 of the Becket letters were printed in John Philipps’s edition of Quadrilogus I, Vita et processus sancti Thome Cantuariensis martyris super ecclesiastica libertate (Paris 1495). Many more were made available in the edition by Christian Lupus, Epistolae et vita divi Thomae martyris et archiepiscopi Cantuariensis, 2 vols. (Brussels 1682). John of Salisbury’s letters were first published by Jean Masson (Paris 1611), reprinted at Lyons (1622, 1677). The letters of Arnulf of Lisieux were first published by Claude Mignault, Epistolae Arnulphi Episcopi Lexoviensis (Paris 1585). Foliot’s correspondence was first noticed, and a small part of it printed, by Lupus in his edition of the Becket letters (1682), although Lyttelton must take credit for the first printing of Multiplicem (cf. LCGF, pp. 21, 229–43 no. 170), whereafter a full though extremely inaccurate edition was not made available until Giles (1845).



Introduction : Henry II and the Historians 

Rymer had published various of the most important public documents of Henry’s reign, and a great many more of Henry’s charters to monasteries and cathedrals had been printed in William Dugdale’s Monasticon. Thomas Madox had explored the Exchequer evidences and had not only printed excerpts from the English pipe rolls (although he had misdated various of these), still valuable to Stubbs in the 1870s, but had at least referred to the existence of similar pipe-roll accounts for Normandy. Above all, Madox had rediscovered and reprinted the Dialogue of the Exchequer : if not the first then certainly one of the most remarkable administrative treatises to survive from the whole of the European Middle Ages. Even earlier, in his edition of the Exchequer ‘Black Book’, Thomas Hearne had printed what remains, even today, by far the most accurate edition of the great survey into knight’s fees conducted by Henry’s administration in 1166. Very little of this evidence had been used by either Hume or Lyttelton, although Lyttelton had at least read the Foedera and himself published a handful of charters and documents as an appendix to his history. Beginning in 1844 with the publication of Joseph Hunter’s edition of the first three pipe-roll accounts of Henry’s reign, and continuing thereafter with Thomas Stapleton’s splendid edition of the Norman Exchequer accounts, an awareness grew that there was a still vast body of unexplored administrative sources that might be brought into commission. Not until the work first undertaken by Madox and Hunter resumed after 1884 with the publications of the newly-formed Pipe Roll Society, was much more of this administrative, documentary evidence brought into direct commission. Nonetheless, other factors conspired to make the eighteenth-century view of Henry appear increasingly absurd. The most important of these factors was, of course, the Anglican revival, and with it a growing awareness that Becket and the twelfth-century Church could not be so easily mocked or dismissed as they had been by Hume and his contemporaries. It was this revival in high-churchmanship that indirectly brought William Stubbs to the study of medieval chronicles, and although Stubbs himself   Foedera, ed. T. Rymer (London 1704), with a further expanded edition published at The Hague (1739) prior to the definitive Record Commission edition of 1816. Monasticon Anglicanum, ed. R. Dodworth and W. Dugdale, 3 vols. (London 1655–73), afterwards amplified, with numerous editions.   T. Madox, The History and Antiquities of the Exchequer (London 1711 ; 2nd edn London 1769). For the rediscovery of the early Norman Exchequer accounts, see N. Vincent, ‘Norman Records in England and English Record-Searchers in France’, in The Record of 1204 : Archival Sources and the Loss of Normandy, ed. N. Vincent (Woodbridge, forthcoming).   Madox, History (1711), and thereafter in the 2nd edn (1769), whence W. Stubbs, ed., Select Charters and Other Illustrations of English Constitutional History, from the Earliest Times to the Reign of Edward the First (Oxford 1870 and subsequent edns).   Liber Niger Scaccarii, ed. T. Hearne, 2 vols. (Oxford 1738).   Lyttelton, History, vols. iii–iv.   PR 2–4 Henry II ; MRSN.



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played little part in the publication of Becket’s lives and letters, it was these lives and letters in the editions by John Allen Giles and later by Giles’s most bitter critic, James Craigie Robertson, that for the first time appeared to offer an entirely negative view of the reign. Whether Hume had ever read any of these Becket materials remains open to question, despite the fact that many of them were in theory available in continental editions ever since the Paris Quadrilogus published in the 1490s. Certainly, if he had read them, Hume placed no trust in such sources. ‘Throughout that large collection of letters which bears the name of St Thomas’, he wrote, ‘We find no less cant and grimace in their style, when they address each other, than when they compose manifestos for the perusal of the public.’ In short, the letters could be dismissed not merely because they were monastic and hence mendacious, but because their style was debased. The contemporaries of Keble and Newman, be they high or broad in churchmanship, were much less inclined than Hume to dismiss such evidence. Here, after all, were the authentic records of the English church, written by churchmen, discussing matters of canon law and of church–state relations that appeared all the more prescient and remarkable in an age of Catholic emancipation and looming disestablishment, when the writing of medieval history was itself becoming a favoured pursuit of clergymen, professional or distinctly amateur as the case might be. Newman and Keble’s edition of Richard Hurrell Froude’s History of the Becket conflict, which itself made extensive and scholarly use of the Quadrilogus, presented a portrait of Becket as a true, if not entirely spotless martyr and was introduced, with an eye to contemporary controversies, with the reflection that ‘The high-church party of the twelfth century endeavoured as much as possible to make common cause with the poor and destitute.’ The ensuing debate over   Vita Sancti Thomae Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi et Martyris, ed. J. A. Giles, 2 vols. (Oxford 1845–6) ; Epistolae Sancti Thomae Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi et Martyris, 2 vols. (Oxford 1846) ; MTB, ed. J. C. Robertson. For Giles’s many other editions, including those of Arnulf of Lisieux (1844), Gilbert Foliot (1845), Herbert of Bosham (1845–6), Peter of Blois (1846–7) and John of Salisbury (1848), see the full bibliography in a recent and fascinating survey of Giles’s career and writings, The Diary and Memoirs of John Allen Giles, ed. D. Bromwich (Somerset Record Society 86, 2000), pp. xii–xiii. The vast majority of Giles’s editions were swiftly pirated for republication in Migne’s PL, whence they have remained the principally-cited source for many an unwary modern historian. For Robertson’s remark (adapted from Carlyle) that Giles edited ‘as you edit waggon-loads of rubbish, by turning the wagon upside-down’, see LCGF, 22. For the ensuing controversy between Giles and Robertson, see Simmons, Reversing the Conquest, 121–2, 126–30. An interesting side-light is thrown on this dispute by The Letters of John Richard Green, ed. L. Stephen (London 1901), 144–5, where Green reports Giles’s determination to complain to the Treasury that a major source of his income would be removed were Robertson to re-edit the Becket letters for the Rolls Series.   Hume, History of England, i, 417–18.  R. H. Froude, ‘The History of the Contest Between Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Henry II, King of England’, in Remains of the Reverend Richard Hurrell Froude, ed. J. H. Newman and J. Keble, 2 vols. (London 1838–9), ii, 34, cited by Simmons, Reversing the Conquest, 125.



Introduction : Henry II and the Historians 

Becket, fought out long and hard between the supporters of St Thomas the Tractarian man of the people and those who construed him as Becket the weird Romish extremist, was still a live issue when J. R. Green came to write his Short History of England in the 1870s. Green, in spite of, or perhaps as a direct consequence of his liberal principles, could not but castigate Henry II for stooping ‘to acts of the meanest persecution’ in his attacks upon Becket and his family. For all that Henry himself continued to be regarded as ‘a rough, passionate, busy man’, a new reserve now tempered whatever praise the King might receive. All told, the rediscovery of the Becket letters and the ensuing polemical outburst, however absurd much of it may appear to modern eyes, had two direct and momentous consequences for the development of medieval scholarship. With specific reference to Henry II, it was now possible, indeed in some quarters obligatory to assert that the first of the Plantagenet kings, far from bringing law and liberty to his people, had merely reshaped the Norman Yoke to fit the necks of his own long-suffering English subjects. Thanks to the Becket evidence it was now possible to regard Henry not as England’s saviour but as a tyrant who, in Green’s opinion, had merely paved the way to the even more extreme tyranny of the reigns of Richard I and John : ‘Indirectly, and unconsciously, his policy did more than that of all his predecessors to prepare England for the unity and freedom which the fall of his house was to reveal.’ Secondly, and perhaps even more significantly, it was from their study of the Becket letters that historians such as Stubbs first came to appreciate the extraordinary literary achievements of Henry’s reign and thus to pave the way for Charles Homer Haskins and later historians to rediscover an entire ‘Renaissance’ in the twelfth century of learning and literature. Stubbs’s two lectures on ‘Learning and Literature at the Court of Henry II’, first delivered in 1878, set great store by the twelfth-century letter collections as a means of access not merely to historical facts but to the true thoughts and interests of the men and women of Henry’s time. To this extent, the discovery of mentalités, of ‘the individual’ and of the intellectual history of the twelfth century were unexpected though nonetheless highly significant by-products of the

  Green, Short History, 104.   Ibid., 101, merely modifying the remarks of Stubbs in his introduction to Howden, Gesta Regis, ii (1867), p. xxxiii, that Henry ‘must have looked generally like a rough, passionate, uneasy man’.   Green, Short History, 102, once again rephrased from W. Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England in its Origin and Development, 3 vols. (Oxford 1874–8), i, 445–6 : ‘the royal power having reached its climax, has forced on the people trained under it the knowledge that it in its turn must be curbed, and that they have the strength to curb it’.   As printed in W. Stubbs, Seventeen Lectures on the Study of Medieval and Modern History (Oxford 1887), 132–78, commenting on the letter collections at pp. 146–8.

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nineteenth-century obsession with Henry II, Becket and the struggle between regnum and sacerdotium in twelfth-century England. Stubbs’s own judgment of Henry II and his reign as a ‘constitutional’ phenomenon remained firmly grounded in the prejudices received from Hume and Lyttelton. Henry II, Stubbs inferred, for all that he was cursed with a thankless wife, loveless children and a pernicious French overlord, was to be ranked alongside Alfred, Cnut, William I and Edward I as one of the few ‘conscious creators of English greatness’. In Stubbs’s Constitutional History of 1874, Henry is ranked with Edward I and Henry VIII as ‘the first of the three great kings who have left on the constitution indelible marks of their own individuality’. Although Henry’s policy was little more than the working out of a programme for the advancement of ‘a selfish life’, and whilst ‘there was nothing in him of the hero, and of the patriot scarcely more than an almost instinctive knowledge of the needs of his people’, it was with ‘the people’ that Henry won greatest approval and in due course support in his assault upon the ‘feudal’ privileges of his barons. Echoing Hume, Stubbs allowed that Henry’s reign witnessed the first true emergence of a patriotic spirit amongst the newly assimilated Anglo-Norman population of England : ‘Norman and Englishman are now one, with a far more real identity than was produced by joint ownership of the land or joint subjection to one sovereign.’ Moreover, by training his people in law and administration, Henry forced upon the English an awareness that, in the longer term, royal power itself must be curbed. The Becket conflict was a necessary assault upon clerical immunities that ‘were destroying [the clergy’s] national character and counteracting their spiritual work’, and, despite professing his neutrality on the subject, Stubbs leaves us in little doubt as to whether he himself believed Becket to be a true defender of liberty or one of those ‘false brethren, such as the fanatic who is ambitious of martyrdom, or the hypocrite who will endure the risks of persecution provided he obtains the honour of popularity’. Admitting Henry’s ‘degrading licence’ and ‘private vices’, Stubbs nonetheless inferred that these flaws in character ‘made no mark on his public career’, even in the rebellions of the 1170s and ’80s, which to Stubbs were far more a matter of ‘feudal’ reaction stirred up by the King of France against Henry’s legal and administrative reforms than the outcome of the domestic tensions between Henry and his sons. In the end, as by Hume and Lyttelton, Henry   For Haskins and his ‘Renaissance’, see now M. A. Colish, ‘Haskins’s “Renaissance” Seventy Years Later : Beyond Anti-Burchardtianism’, HSJ, 11 (2003), 1–15.   Stubbs, introd. to Howden, Gesta Regis, ii, pp. xix–xx, xxxiii.   Stubbs, Constitutional History, i, 446.   Ibid., 447, 479–80.   Ibid., 443.   Ibid., 446.   Ibid., 461.   Ibid., 447, 476–81, 490.



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was set down by Stubbs as ‘one of the greatest politicians of his time ; a man of such wide influence, great estates and numerous connexions, that the whole of the foreign relations of England during the middle ages may be traced directly and distinctly to the results of his alliances and his enmities’. Above all, Henry was a legislator and administrator of genius, apparently self-taught although (here predicting a line of argument only recently and illuminatingly revived by Paul Hyams and James Campbell) with a programme in mind that smacked remarkably of continental precedents and in particular of those supplied by the Carolingian rulers of Francia. Had Stubbs written nothing more than his Constitutional History, his impact upon the study of Henry’s reign would still have been immense. In fact Stubbs did far more than rephrase the debates over Henry II into what passed for modern, constitutional terms. Through his meticulous edition of ten stout volumes of the principal chronicles of Henry’s reign  the Gesta Henrici (1867) attributed to Benedict of Peterborough though believed by Stubbs to be the lost ‘Tricolumnis’ written by Richard fitz Nigel, the Chronica of Roger of Howden (1868–71), the Imagines of Ralph of Diss (1876) and the Chronica of Gervase of Canterbury (1879–80)  it was Stubbs who more than any other historian of the nineteenth century paved the way to a new assessment of the first three Plantagenet kings of England. All of these chronicles that Stubbs edited had been printed by earlier antiquaries and were available to the generation of Hume and Lyttelton, but Stubbs applied entirely new editorial standards and, above all, explored the historical background both to the writers of these works and to the historical events they described, with a meticulousness that had never before been attempted. Stubbs and his fellow contributors to the Rolls Series  J. F. Dimock with his Magna Vita of St Hugh of Lincoln (1864), Robertson with his Materials for the History of Thomas Becket (1875–95), Richard Howlett with his four volumes of Newburgh, Torigni and other Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I (1884– 90)  were themselves each heavily reliant upon the work of an earlier generation of mostly clergyman editors. William of Newburgh had first been printed by H. C. Hamilton (1856) ; the chronicle of Battle Abbey by J. S. Brewer (1846) ; Jocelin of Brakelond’s Life of Abbot Samson (Camden Society 1840) by John Gage Rokewode, the intimate friend of Thomas Stapleton, editor of the Norman pipe rolls ; Walter Map’s De Nugiis Curialium by Thomas Wright (again for the Camden Society 1850), and Jordan Fantosme by Francisque Michel (Surtees Society 1840,   Ibid., 492.   Ibid., 492–5 ; cf. P. Hyams, ‘The Common Law and the French Connection’, ANS, 4 (1981), 77–90, 196–202 ; J. Campbell, The Anglo-Saxon State (London 2000), 256–7.   Howden was first printed by Sir Henry Savile (1596 ; repr. 1601). Diceto and Gervase had been printed by Roger Twysden, Historiae Anglicanae Scriptores X (London 1652). ‘Benedict’ was available in the excellent though rare edition by Thomas Hearne (1735). See in each case the introductions to Stubbs’s editions of Diceto ; Gervase ; Howden, Chronica ; Howden, Gesta Regis.

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and thereafter Paris 1844). All of these sources were available in modern editions some years before the Rolls Series was initiated, and in many cases they had already passed from Latin into English translation, or, in the case of Jocelin of Brakelond, from Rokewode’s Latin into the strange messianic Scots-German that passed for English in Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present (1843) : yet another book in which the twelfth-century was shown to have relevance to the nineteenth, and even perhaps to offer a model to Victorian legislators of how to deal with Chartists, radical riff-raff and that vexed question of the ‘Condition of England’. Others of the chroniclers, such as Robert of Torigni, had first been rediscovered and printed by an even earlier generation of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century antiquaries. Certainly, by the final decade of the nineteenth century, with the appearance of the last volume of Robertson’s Materials (1895), and the most historically important of Gerald of Wales’s treatises  the Expugnatio (1867) and the De Principis Instructione (1891)  historians for the first time could claim to have ready access to the vast majority of the chronicle and literary sources for Henry’s reign in more or less reliable modern editions. As is often the case, the completion of this great editorial enterprise occurred only after the point at which the controversy surrounding these sources had raged most fiercely. By the 1890s, historical debate had moved on from the chronicles to the administrative, and especially the Exchequer sources for the reign. The great architect of change here was another Victorian clergyman, the Revd R. W. Eyton, whose Court, Household and Itinerary of Henry II, published in 1878, was intended to establish the ‘facts, simple facts’ of Henry’s reign, by using charter evidence and the pipe rolls to plot the King’s movements and thus to establish who was and was not at court at any particular time. As explained elsewhere in this volume, although Eyton’s work was heroic and precocious, it testifies to an optimism over the possibility of establishing ‘facts, simple facts’ that owed more to Victorian than to scientific standards. As useful as Eyton’s Itinerary undoubtedly was, both in its own right and as a means of escaping from the rhetorical and   Fantosme was from the first printed in both French and modern English. For other translations, see that of the Battle Chronicle by M. A. Lower (London 1851), and most notably the whole series of twelfth-century chronicles translated by Joseph Stevenson as The Church Historians of England (London 1854–6).   Long before the edition for Howlett’s Chronicles, Torigni had first been printed at Paris (1513), and thereafter (in a version covering only the period 1138–1169) by André Duchesne, Historiae normannorum scriptores antiqui (Paris 1619), and in a good edition from the Avranches holograph manuscript in D’Achery’s Venerabilis Guiberti abbatis . . . Opera omnia (Paris 1651), for all of which, see Howlett’s introduction to Torigni, pp. lxv–ix. For earlier editions of ‘Benedict’, Howden, Gervase and Diceto, see p. 11 n. 3 above.  Eyton, Itinerary, p. iii : ‘Facts ; simple facts ; where they were accomplished ; when they were accomplished ; who accomplished them ; and what was said as to how they were accomplished at the time of their coming to pass ; these are the primary and most essential elements of pure history.’ Cf. commentary in my chapter on ‘The Court’ below.



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partisan approaches to Henry’s reign that had typified the work of earlier writers, it established not only ‘facts’ but a great number of conjectures masquerading as fact, many of which have continued to blind historians to the true extent of our ignorance of precisely those matters  the King’s court, household and itinerary  that Eyton set out to elucidate. Without Eyton’s lead, nonetheless, it is doubtful whether the emphasis in Plantagenet history would have shifted so soon or so decisively from the chronicle to the administrative sources. It was Eyton who supplied the impetus to such ventures as the publication of The Red Book of the Exchequer, which appeared in Hubert Hall’s ill-starred Rolls Series edition in 1896, and above all to the publication of the annual series of pipe rolls, printed by the newly formed Pipe Roll Society from 1884 onwards, which by 1900 had progressed as far as the Pipe Roll 21 Henry II (for the year 1174/5). In addition, having digested the many volumes of letters in the editions of Becket Materials, Peter of Blois and Gilbert Foliot, historians, not least Eyton, began to question the extent to which Henry II’s own letters and charters might throw light upon the events of his reign. Eyton made use of more than 450 of the King’s charters, carefully sifting such sources as Dugdale’s Monasticon and the unpublished Cartae Antiquae Rolls, for details of the King’s patronage, and above all for the names of places where the King was to be found and of the witnesses in attendance at his court. As Eyton himself realized, however, these 450 charters were but the tip of a far larger iceberg, suggesting the existence of several thousand as yet undiscovered charters lurking in archives across the former Plantagenet dominion. Here, in the rediscovery of the charter evidence, scholarly initiative was to pass for the first time from the subjects of Henry II’s one-time realm of England to the citizens of his former dominions in France. Before the 1830s, French historians had shown little interest in Plantagenet history. Those who had written on the subject  most notably Augustine Thierry and Jules Michelet  had tended to treat the Plantagenets as a regrettable but essentially ephemeral obstacle in the way of France’s true path to reunification and greatness. Thierry had successfully muddied the waters of Becket scholarship by asserting that Thomas Becket represented a continuation of Anglo-Saxon resistance to the Norman Conquest : as the son of a liaison between an Anglo-Saxon merchant and a Saracen princess, Becket had defended the liberties of the English people against the tyranny of a foreign king. But Henry II, in Thierry’s opinion, although an outsider in England was no less a foreigner in his continental lands, where in Poitiers, for example, ‘Quoique mari de la fille du comte de Poitou, Henri était un étranger pour les Poitevins, et ceux-ci souffraient de voir des officiers de race étrangère violer ou détruire les coutumes de leurs pays par des   See here N. Vincent, ‘King Henry II and the Poitevins’, La Cour Plantagenêt (1154–1204) : Actes du Colloque tenu à Thouars du 30 avril au 2 mai 1999, ed. M. Aurell (Poitiers 2000), 104–6.   Simmons, Reversing the Conquest, 117–22.

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ordonnances rédigées en langue angevine ou normande.’ Although a few of the French sources for Henry’s reign had already appeared in early, pre-revolutionary editions by Duchesne, and most notably in Philippe l’Abbé’s edition of the Limousin chronicler Geoffrey de Vigeois  the only major chronicle source for the entire Plantagenet dominion south of the Loire  it was not until the aftermath of Waterloo that the riches of the French archives for the first time began to be explored with an eye to their broader relevance to Anglo-French history. The enterprises of the 1820s and ’30s, most notably Léchaudé d’Anisy’s scouring (some would argue rape) of the Norman archives départementales, proved extremely useful to Eyton in devising his Itinerary and were eventually to bear fruit in 1899 with John Horace Round’s publication of an English Calendar of Documents Preserved in France, to a very large extent based upon the volumes of Léchaudé d’Anisy’s transcripts, which since the 1830s had been lodged in the Public Record Office in London but which few English historians, apart from Eyton, had thus far ventured to explore. Léchaudé d’Anisy made a further contribution to Anglo-French understanding through arranging for a French printing of Stapleton’s edition of the Norman Exchequer Rolls, valuable because, in contrast to Stapleton’s original, it is still the only edition supplied with an index, albeit a very imperfect one. Into this brief though significant thawing of Anglo-French relations there erupted an individual who was to transform not only the study of Henry II’s reign but the entire study of French medieval history. Léopold Delisle had first come into contact with the evidence for Henry II through his earliest patron, Charles Duhérissier de Gerville, a Norman aristocrat who had sought refuge in England after 1789, who thereafter had retained fond memories of his land of exile, and who had put the young Delisle to work as early as 1843 in transcribing charters of Henry II from the cartulary of Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte. Following his period at the École des Chartes, Delisle published a remarkable series of articles on Norman institutions, including a fragment of the 1184 Norman pipe roll that he had rediscovered amongst the miscellanea of the Templars in the Archives nationales and which he contributed in 1852 to Léchaudé d’Anisy’s reprinting of Stapleton’s edition of the Norman rolls. Delisle was later to claim that his entry into the   A. Thierry, Histoire de la conquête de l’Angleterre par les Normands, 3 vols. (Paris 1825), ii, 364, quoting here from the revised edition (Paris 1883), ii, 54, where the word ‘officiers’ is substituted for the anachronistic ‘magistrats’ of 1825.   Nova Bibliotheca manuscriptorum, ed. P. Labbé, 3 vols. (Paris 1657), ii, 279–342.   See Round’s introduction to Cal. Docs. France, and for Léchaudé d’Anisy in more candid detail, see Vincent, ‘Norman Records’.   Grands Rôles des échiquiers de Normandie and Magni Rotuli scaccarii Normanniae, ed. A. Léchaudé d’Anisy and A. Charma (Société des Antiquaires de Normandie 15–16 (ns 5–6), Paris 1845–52).   For what follows, see the more detailed account by N. Vincent, ‘Léopold Delisle, l’Angleterre et le “Recueil des actes de Henri II”’, in Léopold Delisle, ed. F. Vielliard and G. Désiré dit Gosset (Saint-Lô 2007), 231–57.   L. Delisle, ‘Observations sur un fragment des rôles de l’échiquier de Normandie relatif à



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Bibliothèque nationale that same year led him to take a semi-monastic vow to put aside his work on Plantagenet history, which he only resumed following his forced retirement from the Bibliothèque in 1905. In reality, throughout the period from 1852 to 1905, Delisle continued to publish widely on Norman and Plantagenet themes, most notably through his edition of the chronicle of Robert de Torigni. Nonetheless, it was undoubtedly his expulsion from the Bibliothèque, followed by the tragic death of his wife and his belief that both of these events could be blamed upon the godless and ungrateful Third Republic, that persuaded Delisle to turn back to his earlier work on Henry II. The result was Delisle’s edition of more than 800 of Henry II’s charters, supposedly concerning France and French affairs, but in reality expanded to include large numbers of charters for English beneficiaries. Delisle himself lived only to produce an Introduction to this collection, published in 1909, but the work was taken up by his former pupil Élie Berger and brought to completion in three further volumes of Latin text published between 1916 and 1927. There are problems with Delisle and Berger’s Recueil, not least the fact that it prints barely a quarter of the total number of Henry II’s charters that are now known to survive, and that it was poorly indexed, by hands other than those of its principal authors. Nonetheless, as early as his Introduction of 1909, Delisle had already put the study of Henry II’s charters and the diplomatic of his chancery on a footing a generation or more in advance of the scholarship then being devoted to the charters of William I and the Anglo-Norman kings by H. W. C. Davis and the editors of the Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum. By rights, the appearance of Delisle and Berger’s Recueil should have been followed by a great spate of French scholarly publications devoted to Henry II and his reign. In reality, and as suggested already by the peculiar circumstances in which Delisle’s Recueil was brought to birth, only those scholars willing to diverge from the principal trends in metropolitan French political, constitutional or social history were willing to engage with the Plantagenet past. Much of the best work done on the Plantagenets in France during the early and mid twentieth century  Jacques Boussard’s Le Gouvernement d’Henri II Plantegenêt (1956), which resulted from an earlier École des Chartes thèse on Henry II’s local government in Anjou, or Raymonde Foreville’s L’Église et la royauté en Angleterre sous Henri II Plantagenet, published in Paris in 1943, at a time when English archives were closed to French researchers and when any scholarship devoted to an English theme was necessarily attended by the most intense of political overtones  was written by historians whose local or political attachments inclined them to swim against the academic l’année 1184’, first published as Magni Rotuli scaccarii Normanniae de anno domini ut videtur MCLXXXIV fragmentum (Caen 1851), and thereafter reprinted in Léchaudé d’Anisy and Charma’s re-edition (1852) of Stapleton’s edition of the Norman pipe rolls : Magni Rotuli scaccarii Normanniae, pp. v–xxxii, 109–113.   Chronique de Robert de Torigni, abbé de Mont-Saint-Michel, 2 vols. (Rouen 1872–3).

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mainstream. From Haskins’s Norman Institutions to André Debord’s study of the Pays de Charente, such work has often concentrated upon local institutions at the expense of any wider consideration of translocal or transnational phenomena. Similarly, in Ireland, the pioneering work of Orpen, both on Henry’s invasion and in the edition of the Song of Dermot and the Earl, was not only intensely local in focus but rapidly overtaken by political events, leading after 1914 to an understandable but nonetheless regrettable neglect of the circumstances of the Plantagenet invasion of the 1170s, which nationalists sought to consign to the dustbin of Anglo-Irish ascendancy history, a period in Ireland’s past that was dealt a further, crippling blow by the near-total destruction of the Irish Public Record Office in 1922, only a few months after Orpen’s last volume had passed through the presses. In England, meanwhile, although the narrative framework first established by Stubbs was fleshed out by both Kate Norgate and Sir James Ramsey, and although a series of administrative studies, most notably Reginald Lane Poole’s of the Exchequer, sought to exploit the newly-published administrative sources, the focus of such studies remained intensely Anglocentric and proto-imperialist. Both Norgate and Ramsay attempted to do justice to the French dimension of Henry’s reign, and both acknowledged that he was a French or specifically an Angevin imperialist. Nonetheless, it was Henry’s imperial ambitions and the extent to which these ambitions collided with the realities of Anglo-Norman politics and English ‘constitutional’ tradition that justified the detailed attention devoted to his reign. Ironically, it was an even more exaggerated Anglocentric focus that leant weight to arguably the most interesting and certainly the most idiosyncratic approach to Henry II published by any twentieth-century English historian. J. E. A. Jolliffe’s Angevin Kingship may have paid lip-service to the continental dimension of Henry’s lordship, but in essence it represented a return to that tradition of   J. Boussard, Le Gouvernement d’Henri II Plantegenêt (Paris 1956), at pp. xi–xii, noting the book’s genesis from a 1932 École des Chartes thesis later published as Le Comté d’Anjou sous Henri Plantegenêt et ses fils (1151–1204) (Paris 1938), paying particular tribute to the academic supervision of Louis Halphen, himself previously the editor of two important volumes of Angevin chronicles. R. Foreville, L’Église et la royauté en Angleterre sous Henri II Plantagenet (1154–1189) (Paris 1943), pp. viii–ix, is similarly effusive in her acknowledgement of Halphen.   C. H. Haskins, Norman Institutions (New York 1918) ; A. Debord, La Société laïque dans les pays de la Charente, Xe–XIIe siècles (Paris 1984).   G. H. Orpen, The Song of Dermot and the Earl (Oxford 1892) ; idem, Ireland under the Normans, 4 vols. (Oxford 1911–20), with a recent and sensitive attempt at rehabilitation by S. Duffy, ‘Historical Revisit : Goddard Henry Orpen, “Ireland under the Normans, 1169–1333” (1911–20)’, Irish Historical Studies, 32 (2000), 246–59.   K. Norgate, England under the Angevin Kings, 2 vols. (London 1887) ; J. H. Ramsay, The Angevin Empire ; or The Three Reigns of Henry II, Richard I and John (1154–1216) (London 1903) ; R. L. Poole, The Exchequer in the Twelfth Century (Oxford 1912), and see also L. F. Salzmann, Henry II (London 1917).



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nineteenth-century scholarship in which Henry II had been portrayed as a rapacious and foreign king, whose rule was controlled only by his own wish and will, imposed by the threat or the reality of violence. Although buttressed by a wealth of detailed references (a great number of them miscited), and although remarkable for its refusal to take into account virtually any secondary scholarship whatsoever, Jolliffe’s portrait of Henry II was one that Thierry or Michelet would have been more than happy to endorse. It is as easy for modern scholars to sideline Jolliffe’s portrait as it was for Jolliffe’s contemporaries to draw attention to his miscitations and to deride his glorious inattention to fact. Jolliffe’s prose is broken-backed and frequently confused (there is one extraordinary sentence on page 327 of his book that runs on for nearly two hundred words without a single semi-colon). Nonetheless, Jolliffe expressed a whole series of insights that are not to be found in many another more elegant or measured account. Despite the objections of H. G. Richardson to Jolliffe’s history of the camera regis, for example, it was Jolliffe who first drew proper attention to the limitations of the Exchequer accounts as a means of calculating the totality of royal finance. In an age of meticulous, Manchester-led examination of administrative processes, it was Jolliffe who was most sensitive in his appreciation that no manner of chancery, courts or counting offices could match the significance of the King’s itinerary and of the King’s personal prejudice as a controlling factor in the history of medieval royal government. Since Jolliffe there has been only one synthetic biography of Henry II that commands anything like the same respect amongst scholars that Jolliffe continues to command. W. L. Warren’s 700-page biography of the king, published in 1973 and still in print today, may inspire more dismay than affection amongst those undergraduates forced to contend with its massive bulk, but it nonetheless continues to rank as a definitive and fluent account, at least of the principal political events of the reign. At the time of the book’s first publication, Warren was criticized by his reviewers for laying too great a stress upon England and for underplaying much of Henry II’s French inheritance ; for breaking up his narrative with an overlong and somewhat unbalanced account of the king’s dispute with Becket, leading to the impression that the Becket conflict was merely an unfortunate aberration with no fundamental or long-term consequences ; above all for burdening his readers with a text of such Brucknerian length. With hindsight, although some of these criticisms are no doubt justified, it is the extent of Warren’s achievement rather than the niggling detail of his faults that commands   J. E. A. Jolliffe, Angevin Kingship (London 1955).   See, in particular, the less than laudatory review by H. G. Richardson, EHR, 71 (1956), 447–53.   J. E. A. Jolliffe, ‘The Camera Regis under Henry II’, EHR, 68 (1953), 1–21, 337–62, reprised in Angevin England, with a savage response by H. G. Richardson, ‘The Chamber under Henry II’, EHR, 69 (1954), 595–611.   See, for example, the review by J. Le Patourel, EHR, 90 (1975), 357–60.

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attention. Warren, like Hume or Stubbs before him, may have failed to maintain complete scholarly detachment, so that his account contains far more of praise and commendation than of caveat or reproach. Nonetheless, as a synthesis of past research and as a basic starting point from which to approach Henry’s reign, Warren’s account is pretty near perfect. What remains then, if Warren’s biography is so good, for the contributors to the present volume to add to our appreciation of Henry II and his reign ? What has changed since Warren wrote that might justify a new approach to Plantagenet history ? To begin with, we now know vastly more than we did in the early 1970s of various of the key aspects of Henry’s policy, as well as of many of the figures who played out important roles at court. The edition and re-edition of texts  most notably Anne Duggan’s magnificent edition of the Becket correspondence, the completion by Christopher Brooke of the modern edition of John of Salisbury’s letters, and the ongoing publication of English episcopal Acta  have added depth and dimension to our understanding of the twelfth-century English Church, as have two remarkable biographies of Becket himself, by Frank Barlow and by Anne Duggan. Beryl Smalley had already, by the 1970s, begun to supply the protagonists of the Becket conflict with minds and intelligences as well as simple prejudice, and this rediscovery of the high-scholastic thought-world of bishops and kings has continued apace ever since, thanks in no small part to the work of John Baldwin and, most recently, of Philippe Buc. With regard to the sources, very few of the chronicles or literary works that matter most to the history of Henry’s reign are still cited from the editions that were used by Stubbs and his pupils, or in several instances even by Warren, the signal exceptions here being the four chronicles of the reign that Stubbs himself so meticulously edited. Even as this book goes to press, Egbert Türk’s French translation of the letters of Peter of Blois has appeared, enabling far easier access to one of the key writers on the Plantagenet court, and there is the prospect in the not too distant future of a complete Latin re-edition of Peter’s letters for the Corpus Christianorum. The completion of the edition of all of Henry II’s letters and charters, first proposed by Sir James Holt in the 1970s, is now grinding towards the press and should at least, whatever its scholarly merits or its contribution to our understanding of

  Duggan, Becket Correspondence ; Letters of John of Salisbury, ii ; EEA ; F. Barlow, Thomas Becket (London 1986) ; A. Duggan, Thomas Becket (London 2004).   J. W. Baldwin, Masters, Princes and Merchants, 2 vols. (Princeton 1970) ; B. Smalley, The Becket Conflict and the Schools (Oxford 1973) ; P. Buc, L’Ambiguité du livre : prince, pouvoir, et peuple dans les commentaires de la Bible au Moyen Âge (Paris 1994), with a useful summary for those unable to read French in P. Buc, ‘ “Princeps gentium dominantur eorum” : Princely Power Between Legitimacy and Illegitimacy in Twelfth-Century Exegesis’, in Cultures of Power : Lordship, Status, and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. T. N. Bisson (Philadelphia 1995), 310–28.  E. Türk, Pierre de Blois : ambitions et remords sous les Plantegenêts (Turnhout 2006).



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Henry’s reign, rank as a fit rival to Warren’s massive endeavor, weighing in as at least four fat volumes of nearly two million Latin words. The study of law and of Henry II’s legal reforms has undergone a significant revolution, thanks to the work of such writers as Donald Sutherland, R. C. van Caenegem, Paul Hyams, J. C. Holt, S. F. C. Milsom, Paul Brand and John Hudson, so that we now have a far more sophisticated idea of the purpose and the extent of these reforms in England, though not as yet, it should be noticed, of the degree to which they were applied to or originated in other parts of the Plantagenet dominion. Long gone are the days when Henry was seen as a great lawgiver for laying down ‘The Legal Principle that everything is either legal or (preferably) illegal’. Where Jolliffe could write of the Plantagenet kings as violating the customary principles of English law, we now have a far clearer idea of what those customs and laws both were and were not. Something of this legal-historical revolution, together with a far more sophisticated exploitation of the English administrative sources has informed two books, by Emily Amt and by Graeme White, on the first decade of Henry’s reign in England. Studies of the court and of court society have moved on a long way since the 1970s, and at the same time both Rees Davies and John Gillingham have transformed our understanding of English attitudes towards the Scots and the Welsh. Marie Therese Flanagan has contributed a similarly revisionist blow to old understandings of Henry II’s activities in Ireland. Our knowledge of the aristocracy, and of local power structures is now much more advanced, allowing for a revised understanding both of the supposed breakdown in public order that occurred during Stephen’s reign and   Acta, with further details in my chapter on ‘The Court’ below.   See, amongst a great wealth of literature post-Maitland, and in this instance post-Warren, especially D. W. Sutherland, The Assize of Novel Disseisin (Oxford 1973) ; R. C. van Caenegem, The Birth of the English Common Law (Cambridge 1973) ; idem, ‘Public Prosecution of Crime in TwelfthCentury England’, in Church and Government in the Middle Ages : Essays Presented to C. R. Cheney, ed. C. N. L. Brooke, D. E. Luscombe et al. (Cambridge 1976), 41–76 ; S. F. C. Milsom, The Legal Framework of English Feudalism (Cambridge 1976) ; P. R. Hyams, Kings, Lords and Peasants in Medieval England (Oxford 1980) ; J. C. Holt, Magna Carta and Medieval Government (London 1985) ; P. Brand, The Making of the Common Law (London 1992) ; J. Hudson, Land, Law and Lordship in Anglo-Norman England (Oxford 1994) ; idem, The Formation of English Common Law (London 1996) ; P. R. Hyams, Rancor and Reconciliation in Medieval England (New York 2003).   W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That (7th edn, London 1930 ; 1st published 1930), 21.  E. Amt, The Accession of Henry II in England : Royal Government Restored, 1149–1159 (Woodbridge 1993) ; G. J. White, Restoration and Reform, 1153–1165 : Recovery from Civil War in England (Cambridge 2000).   See my chapter on ‘The Court’ below. For Scotland, Wales and the question of English identity, see R. R. Davies, The First English Empire : Power and Identity in the British Isles, 1093–1343 (Oxford 2000) ; J. Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century (Woodbridge 2000).   M. T. Flanagan, Irish Society, Anglo-Norman Settlers, Angevin Kingship : Interactions in Ireland in the Late Twelfth Century (Oxford 1989).

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of the problems that faced Henry II in his dealings with earls and barons, comtes and vicomtes after 1154. There have been great advances too in the study of the material culture of the Plantagenets, of castles, coins, and the physical environment of the court. Perhaps above all, there has been a revolution, as unexpected as it is entirely to be welcomed, in Anglo-French co-operation in the writing of Plantagenet history. Not only have the French re-entered the debate in force and in numbers, but Anglophone historians have now, at long last, begun to make proper use of French archival sources. The first stirrings of this revolution occurred in 1984, only a decade after the publication of Warren’s Henry II, when a conference was organised at Font­evraud bringing together some of the leading scholars of Plantagenet history from England, France and the United States. Six years later a second conference was held, again at Fontevraud, specifically devoted to the reign of Henry II. Organised by the Centre d’Études Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale, and inspired by the enthusiasm of Edmond-René Labande and Robert Favreau, these meetings have led to a near-annual ‘colloque Plantagenêt’, organised since 1999 by Martin Aurell and held in Thouars, Poitiers, Cambridge, Fontevraud, and, in 2007, Bordeaux. Further colloques in Normandy, organised by the University of Caen, have added a northern-French dimension to this southern-French initiative. Half a dozen volumes have been printed of the proceedings of these conferences, and it is reasonable to suggest that there are few scholars of the Plantagenets from either France or England who have not either contributed to or published an important article in at least one of these volumes. Between them, Labande, Favreau, Aurell and, at Caen, Véronique Gazeau, have broken down a barrier to comprehension and cross-Channel co-operation that had bedeviled the study of   See in particular here the work of D. Crouch, The Beaumont Twins : The Roots and Branches of Power in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge 1980) ; idem, The Image of Aristocracy in Britain, 1000–1300 (London 1992) ; idem, The Reign of King Stephen, 1135–1154 (Harlow 2000) ; Judith Green, The Aristocracy of Norman England (Cambridge 1997).   See the chapters by Vincent and Allen below.   The Proceedings of these first two conferences were published as special issues of CCM, 29 (1986), 1–147 ; 37 (1994), 1–123.   Thus far published as La Cour Plantagenêt, ed. Aurell (2000) ; Noblesses de l’espace Plantagenêt (1154–1224) : Table ronde tenue à Poitiers le 13 mai 2000, ed. M. Aurell (Poitiers 2001) ; Culture politique des Plantagenêt : Actes du Colloque tenu à Poitiers du 2 au 5 mai 2002, ed. M. Aurell (Poitiers 2003) ; Cinquante Années d’études médiévales : A la confluence de nos disciplines ; Actes du Colloque organisé à l’occasion du cinquantenaire du CESCM, Poitiers, 1–4 septembre 2003, ed. C. Arrignon et al. (Turnhout 2006) ; Plantagenêts et Capétiens : Confrontations et héritages, ed. M. Aurell and N.-Y. Tonnerre (Turnhout 2006) ; and see, of course, Martin Aurell’s overview of the subject, L’Empire des Plantagenêt, 1154–1224 (SaintAmand-Montrond 2002).   La Normandie et l’Angleterre au Moyen Age : Colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle (4–7 octobre 2001), ed. P. Bouet and V. Gazeau (Caen 2003), 1204 : La Normandie entre Plantagenêts et Capétiens, ed. A.-M. Flambard Héricher and V. Gazeau (Caen 2007).



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Anglo-French history since at least the time of Lyttelton and Michelet. They have been assisted here by those English or Anglophone scholars who have themselves dared venture into the archives of Plantagenet France. Since the 1980s, a small but significant library of books and articles has appeared  by John Baldwin on Philip Augustus, by John Gillingham on the Angevin Empire, by Daniel Power on Plantagenet Normandy, by Judith Everard on Plantagenet Brittany, and by Jane Martindale on Eleanor of Aquitaine  solidly based upon French archival sources and effecting a transformation in their field quite as great and as significant as the transformations in legal, aristocratic or cultural histories already mentioned. Our intellectual map of and our understanding of the Plantagenet empire has been altered out of all recognition from that which Warren possessed, and this initiative has even extended as far south as Gascony, previously terra incognita for Henry II’s reign, where the researches of Jane Martindale and most recently Frédéric Boutoulle have begun to shed entirely new light. As to the essays presented in this volume, it is not my intention here to offer either a detailed précis or any attempt to impose some spurious uniformity of approach upon a collection deliberately commissioned for its diversity. Readers are urged do their own homework, just as the writers below have been encouraged to survey their individual fields without any particular guiding brief. Most of the chief themes of Henry’s reign are nonetheless explored here, from Edmund King’s erudite forensic study of the charter evidence for Henry’s accession as king, through to Martin Aurell’s no less erudite exploration of the political uses to which the Plantagenets put, or rather did not put the mythical figure of King Arthur. Various of these essays take the broadest of approaches to their subject, from Paul Brand’s magisterial overview of the King’s legal reforms in England, through to Jean Dunbabin’s survey of relations between Henry II and Louis VII, demonstrating that Louis was actually in a far stronger position, both in terms of his reputation and his political cunning, than English historians have sometimes been prepared to allow. Others explore previously overlooked aspects of Henry’s policy, as in Daniel Power’s highly original investigation of relations between the king and his Norman subjects, or Martin Allen’s description of Henry’s currency   J. W. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus (Berkeley 1986) ; J. Gillingham, The Angevin Empire (2nd edn, London 2001) ; J. A. Everard, Brittany and the Angevins : Province and Empire, 1158–1203 (Cambridge 2000) ; D. Power, The Norman Frontier in the Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Centuries (Cambridge 2004) ; J. Martindale, ‘Eleanor of Aquitaine’, in Richard Coeur de Lion in History and Myth, ed. J. Nelson (London 1992), 17–50 ; idem, ‘Eleanor of Aquitaine : The Last Years’, in King John : New Interpretations, ed. S. D. Church (Woodbridge 1999), 137–64.   F. Boutoulle, ‘La Gascogne sous les premiers Plantagenêts (1154–1199)’, in Plantagenêts et Capétiens, ed. Aurell, 285–317, and see also N. Vincent, ‘England and the Albigensian Crusade’, in England and Europe in the Reign of Henry III (1216–1272), ed. B. K. U. Weiler and I. F. Rowlands (Aldershot 2002), 67–97 ; idem, ‘A Forgotten War : England and Navarre 1243–4’, in Thirteenth-Century England XI : Proceedings of the Gregynog Conference, 2005, ed. B. Weiler, J. Burton, P. Schofield and K. Stöber (Woodbridge 2007).

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reforms  well known, no doubt, to professional numismatists, but unlikely to be familiar territory to the majority of historians. Allen’s essay, like that by Ian Short on literary culture or Aurell’s on the matière de Bretagne, represents an attempt to address the material or artistic aspects of the Plantagenet court. In some instances, efforts have been made to draw supposedly well-known subjects into the arena of controversy, as in my own questioning of our knowledge of the court culture of the Plantagenets, Seán Duffy’s consideration of the inevitably controversial matter of Henry II’s interventions in Ireland, viewed here as ‘but an episode in AngloWelsh relations’, or John Gillingham’s ground-breaking questioning of the extent to which ‘the tyranny of feudalism’ may have led historians to assume a particular importance for Henry’s acts of homage to the kings of France, which either took place in very different circumstances from those that previous historians have supposed or, in one very significant instance, may never have taken place at all. Equally controversial are Anne Duggan’s demonstration of the degree to which, even before 1162, Henry had already embarked upon a collision course with the jurisdiction of Church and pope, or Matthew Strickland’s attempt to question the basis of the thuggish reputation carried by the king’s eldest son, Henry the Young King. At the far extreme of speculation, Nick Barratt advances a macroeconomic explanation for the political crises of the early thirteenth century, in which the very success of Henry II’s revenue-raising activities, by increasing the money supply and the velocity of its circulation, may have laid the seeds of that monetary inflation that is reckoned to have caused such problems to Henry’s sons and successors. No comprehensive or unified picture of Henry II’s personality or regime is intended to emerge from these essays. Northern France, England and Ireland, English law and Anglo-French diplomacy are well represented here, as are the Church and certain aspects of economic and literary history. Other themes are conspicuous by their omission. We still await, for example, any detailed treatment of either law or the economy for Henry’s lands across the Channel. Given that the politics of northern France are well covered here, by Power, Gillingham and Dunbabin, it is all the more to be regretted that the politics of Poitou, Gascony and in particular of Henry’s own ancestral county of Anjou receive so little attention : at the conference from which this volume emerged, Jane Martindale delivered a typically thoughtful investigation of the politics of the south, which she was unable to submit for publication. Readers of the present volume wishing for enlightenment on southern affairs should meanwhile consult Martindale’s earlier work, referred to in the historiographical survey above, and above all should keep their fingers crossed that Martindale will soon finish what promises to be her definitive biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine. In the meantime, the present collection of essays may serve as a reminder both of how much we now know of Henry II that was unknown to previous writers from Hume to Warren, and also of how much more there still remains to discover. Historical enquiry has been transformed since the



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days of Henry II’s first true biographer, George Lyttelton. Nonetheless, shed of its panegyric and Anglocentric tone, Lyttelton’s summary of Henry II’s achievements may still stand as fitting justification for the present venture. Henry II was indeed ‘One of the greatest princes in extent of dominion, in magnanimity, and in abilities, that ever governed this nation’. It is right that the 850th anniversary of his accession should be commemorated by a collection of essays that suggest that there are many questions still to answer and many avenues still to explore in the perennially fascinating history of England’s first Plantagenet king.

  Lyttelton, History, i, preface, p. i.

Edmund King

The Accession of Henry II

H

enry, duke of Normandy, arrived in England within the octave of the Epiphany 1153, and came to church to pray the mass ‘after the manner of military men’. The clerk intoned the introit, ‘Ecce advenit dominator Dominus : et regnum in manu eius, et potestas, et imperium (See he comes, our Lord and Ruler, armed with royal power and dominion.)’, and again : ‘Grant to the king, O God, your own skill in judgement ; to the inheritor of a throne, may he be just, as you are just.’ Within the octave of the Epiphany a year later, ‘King Stephen and his new son’ (as Henry had now become) met at Oxford, by which time ‘the duke had already spent almost a year in the conquest, or rather the resuscitation, of England. There, at the king’s command, the English magnates paid to the duke the homage and fealty due to their lord, but they were to maintain the honour and faith due to the king while he lived.’ During these twelve months the accession of Henry II was settled ; settled on terms that Stephen was prepared to accept ; settled on terms that the political community of England was also prepared to accept. A conquest it was not. This was not what Henry had wanted, nor was it what most political commentators had expected. It was remarkable, said Ralph de Diceto, that the conflict was not settled by force of arms. Twice in 1153 a confrontation was set up. The first occasion was at Malmesbury in Wiltshire, perhaps in late February, when both king and duke had their key supporters with them. The second occasion was at   Gervase, i, 151–2 ; the readings in the Introit from Mal 3 : 1, Ps 71 : 1, in the trans. of R. A. Knox from my Roman Missal (London 1950), 64.   Huntingdon, 770–73 ; Gervase, i, 157.   Diceto, i, 296 : ‘evenit quod minime credebatur, dissensio regni non dirimetur in gladio’.   Gesta Stephani, 230–41 ; Huntingdon, 762–7 (making the two sieges consecutive) ; Torigni, 171–4 ; Gervase, i, 152–6.   Taking the likely nearest charters : for the king, Regesta, iii, no. 192, for Cirencester Abbey, witnessed by William d’Aubigny, earl of Arundel, Earl Simon of Senlis, William Martel, Richard de Lucy, William de Chesney ; for the duke, ibid., no. 180, for Ranulf of Chester, witnessed by Reginald, earl of Cornwall, Roger, earl of Hereford, Patrick, earl of Salisbury, Humphrey de Bohun, John fitz Gilbert, Richard du Hommet, Warin fitz Gerald, Robert de Courcy, Manasser Biset.



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Wallingford in Oxfordshire, perhaps in late July, when also king and duke were surrounded by their followers. On each occasion there was skirmishing but no more, for their followers did not wish to fight. There were yet major obstacles to a peace. Ralph de Diceto, recently appointed as archdeacon of Middlesex, evaluated these succinctly. The archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of Winchester had plans for peace, he said, plans the other bishops fully supported, but they needed the support of the magnates, full discussion and the formation of a consensus. In 1141 the bishops had resolved the succession on their own, discussing the issues behind closed doors, but they had not carried the political community with them. They had learned their lesson. A lasting settlement would need the support of the magnates (proceres). It would only be achieved by wise counsel (consilium). It required a consensus. Three simple words. If we can elucidate them, we may hope to explain the accession of Henry II. The first secure date in Henry’s itinerary, around three months after his landing, is 9 April 1153 (which was ten days before Easter). He was then at Stockbridge in Hampshire, where  as he would certainly have been aware  his mother had narrowly escaped capture and his uncle, Robert, earl of Gloucester, had been captured, on 14 September 1141. The declared business of the 1153 meeting was to attempt to resolve the dispute over Devizes castle, which Roger, bishop of Salisbury, had fortified, which the Empress had used as her main English base, and which her son retained. At this meeting Henry was conciliatory but not accommodating. He declined to return the castle, though he was prepared to consider a three-year term within which he would have recovered his rights and would then return the castle. The duke’s confidence is of some interest and was not recently acquired ; on his last visit to England, in 1149, he had told the bishop that it would be for God to tell him when he should return the castle to him. The real interest of the Stockbridge conference, however, lies in the names of those who had ridden out there on this early spring day. Henry was accompanied by a significant number of his key supporters. The bishop of Salisbury was   Diceto, i, 296 : ‘Coepiscoporum assensus non defuit, defuit procerum et consilium et con­ sensus.’   Historia Novella, 92–3 (Henry of Winchester speaking) : ‘Ventilata est hesterno die causa secreto coram maiori parte cleri Angliae, ad cuius ius potissimum spectat principem eligere, simulque ordinare.’   On the legacy of 1141, see further, E. King, ‘A Week in Politics : Oxford, late July 1141’, King Stephen’s Reign (1135–1154), ed. P. Dalton and G. J. White (Woodbridge, forthcoming).   Regesta, iii, no. 796 (this meeting is not included in the duke’s itinerary) ; ibid., p. xlvii.  R. Hill, ‘The Battle of Stockbridge, 1141’, in Studies in Medieval History presented to R. Allen Brown, ed. C. Harper-Bill, C. Holdsworth and J. L. Nelson (Woodbridge 1989), 172–7.   Regesta, iii, no. 795 : ‘quod ego adhuc proper necessitatem meam in manu mea retineo in bona sufferentia episcopi donec me Deus exemplificet quod ego ei reddere possim’.   Those who stood surety for the duke were William, earl of Gloucester, Reginald, earl of Cornwall, Earl Patrick, John the marshal, Robert of Dunstanville, and William fitz Hamo.

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accompanied by Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury and papal legate ; Henry, bishop of Winchester, brother of the king and former papal legate ; Robert, bishop of Bath, and Hilary, bishop of Chichester. These were the heavyweights of the English hierarchy, committed to Stephen, ‘whom the whole English church followed by papal decree’, yet anxious for peace, anxious to be involved in its formulation, anxious not to be disadvantaged (either individually or as a group) by its terms. They meant the duke well (they will have said). They would do right by him. And yet he must understand that their position was difficult. Henry of Huntingdon is anxious to insist that until Stephen had accepted the terms of a peace  this was a good deal later in the year  Theobald would talk directly with the king but only deal with the duke via intermediaries. It seems to have been agreed already that until there was such an agreed peace, Henry would stay away from episcopal centres, and the bishops would not attend his court. The Stockbridge text exemplifies the point made by Ralph de Diceto. The clergy were ready and they would speak with one voice. It was not just the messengers of the clergy who were quietly seeking out the duke of Normandy. Those of the magnates were doing the same. Even as the two camps confronted each other at Malmesbury, the Gesta Stephani, driving the story on, says that the king was angered at seeing his support slipping away : ‘he noticed that some of his leading barons were slack and very casual in their service and had already sent envoys by stealth and made a compact with the duke’. The one move that did make the press was that of Robert, earl of Leicester. His move, from being a nominal supporter of the king to having an active role as one of the chief counsellors of the duke, was one of the chief news stories of the spring of 1153 : ‘he began to take the duke’s part and for some time ministered to his needs’. Robert was undoubtedly one of the great men, and his practical support will have been valued, but what was no less needed at this time was steady counsel, a good head for detail and a capacity to take a broad view : in a word, statesmanship. Robert of Leicester had it. On three distinct occasions during the period of civil war, where the historian has a range of texts to evaluate  the first regarding the grants of earldoms and counties in the period 1138–41, the second the texts for what Ralph Davis has termed ‘the magnates’ peace’, and now the   John of Salisbury, Historia Pontificalis, ed. M. Chibnall (NMT 1956), 47.   Huntingdon, 770–71 : ‘ipse frequenter regi colloquens, duci vero per internuncios’.   This suggestion is made using the evidence of Henry’s itinerary, of which there is a useful map in R. H. C. Davis, King Stephen, 1135–1154, 3rd edn (London 1990), 116, and LCGF, nos. 104–6, which show Foliot sending apologies for meetings of the duke’s court on the first Sunday in Lent (8 Mar.), and on Palm Sunday (12 Apr. ; on 9 Apr. the duke had been at Stockbridge).   Diceto, i, 296.   Gesta Stephani, 234–5 : ‘cum duce missis clanculo legatis concordiae foedus inisse’.   Ibid. ; Gervase, i, 152–3 : ‘cepit partem ducis fovere eique per aliquod tempus necessaria ministrare’.



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making of a national peace  it is the document perhaps drafted for but most certainly scrutinised by Robert of Leicester that proves to be exemplary. In the second of these exemplary documents, the agreement between the earls of Chester and Leicester, the two men looked to a time when they might have to fight for, or at least supply forces to, different liege lords. In arrangements that they made with Duke Henry shortly after his arrival in 1153, they ensured that they would not. These arrangements are recorded in charters issued by the duke : interesting and valuable charters, the more so since they survive as originals. The first of these was issued for the earl of Chester : this is very likely the earliest of Duke Henry’s charters surviving from that year. When set against the grants of Stephen, last confirmed by him in 1146, two sets of differences are striking. The first is that it starts with the Norman lands. What Stephen earlier could only promise, the duke could now deliver. His grants took immediate effect and were set out in detail. To men such as Earl Ranulf, the opportunity to regain Norman estates that had been lost was not to be gainsaid. This was Henry’s trump card. There are grants also as to England, as there had been before, but in Duke Henry’s charter, at more than one point, there was noted the need for judicial process before a grant could take effect. This is the second difference. Belvoir had been granted by Stephen unconditionally ; Henry said that he would ‘do right’ to Ranulf in respect of his claim to hold it by inheritance. Henry granted Ranulf the whole fee of William Peverel, ‘unless in the duke’s court he could defend himself against charges of criminal activity and treason’. Another estate was granted unless two named individuals, seen as having a higher claim, might come to terms with the duke. One of them was Earl Simon of Senlis. It was all quite careful. And yet at this point Henry did not see his progress as likely to be uncontested. ‘To six of [Ranulf ’s] barons, whom he will name, I will give each, to hold of me, 100 librates of land, which I will acquire from the lands of my enemies.’ Those of the king’s barons who sent envoys to the duke will have been invited by the duke to attend his court. It is clear that he saw himself as holding court   The first of these is Regesta, iii, no. 437 (the grant of the comitatus of Hereford in 1140) ; the second is the Chester–Leicester convencio, still probably most accessible in F. M. Stenton, The First Century of English Feudalism, 1066–1166, 2nd edn (Oxford 1961), 250–53 (trans.), 286–8 (text), dated to 1149 in D. Crouch, The Reign of King Stephen, 1135–1154 (London 2000), 253–4 ; and now Regesta, iii, nos. 438–9, charters of 1153, discussed further below. Note also his charter of war reparations in favour of the diocese of Lincoln, dating from no later than 1147, and so starting to set what would become a trend : C. W. Foster, ed., The Registrum Antiquissimum of the Cathedral Church of Lincoln, ii, Lincoln Record Society 28 (Lincoln 1933), 16–17 (no. 324).   Regesta, iii, no. 180.   Ibid., no. 178.   Ibid., no. 180 : ‘de Belvario tenebo ei rectum quam citius potero sicut de sua hereditate’.   Ibid. : ‘nisi poterit se dirationare in mea curia de scelere et traditione’. The same phrase is found in the Empress’s first charter for Geoffrey de Mandeville, ibid., no. 274.

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from the time of his arrival. We have some indication of Robert of Leicester’s response. He did not at first come in person. He sent his son with a number of minders, who were the lay officers of his honorial court. The evidence for the meeting is a charter of Duke Henry, now in the Archives Nationales, in which he granted to the son in inheritance ‘all the land of Earl Robert, his father, in England, as Robert of Meulan, his grandfather, best and most freely held’. In Normandy he is granted the honours of Breteuil and Pacy and the stewardship of England and Normandy. We may take it that the younger Robert did homage for these lands at this point. But why exactly was it choreographed in this way ? Robert of Leicester may thereafter have come to Gloucester. Duke Henry certainly thereafter came to Leicester, where he was for the Whit feast. It may have been here that Henry issued another charter, of which we have only a calendar copy, for the earl himself. The grant to the son was suitably, somewhat pedantically corrected. Robert of Meulan was given his correct title as earl, and Sturminster (which had been given to the other twin) was taken out. And a clause was added, which thereafter becomes routine : ‘I also gave him everything that King Henry my grandfather gave him.’ The meeting of the duke’s court, at Leicester, on this major feast-day, will have been announced, and to many this will have provided the first intimation of the progress in broadening his support that the duke had made. Henry, in holding court, was making the point that he was offering ‘good lordship’. There was some financial incentive for him to do so, but his chief priority at this point was to show that he could act the part. At Bristol he appears at his most confident and expansive. He had spent a year here in 1143, ‘instructed in the first elements of learning and good behaviour’ alongside the younger sons of Robert, earl of Gloucester ; he could now thank the canons of St Augustine’s, Bristol, for their sustaining support. Here, in 1153, he is found as a party to the marriage settlement of the son and heir of Robert fitz Harding. It was drawn up in Robert fitz Harding’s house, in Henry’s presence and with his consent, while any   Among the witnesses to this charter are Robert de Vatteville, Reginald de Bordigny and Geoffrey Abbas ; for comment, see D. Crouch, The Beaumont Twins : The Roots and Branches of Power in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge 1986), 86.   Regesta, iii, no. 438.   Ibid., no. 840.   Ibid., no. 459.   Ibid., no. 439.   That there was a court held here is established not just by the meeting being on one of the three main feasts of the year, but by the clutch of charters that survives from it : Regesta, iii, nos. 104 (for Biddlesden Abbey), 379 (for Haughmond Abbey), 582 (for William Mauduit) ; N. Vincent, ‘Sixteen New Charters of Henry Plantagenet before his Accession as King (1149–1154)’, Historical Research (forthcoming), no. 15 (for Stixwould Priory).   There is an admirable treatment of Henry’s acta, from this perspective, in G. J. White, Restoration and Reform, 1153–1165 : Recovery from Civil War in England (Cambridge 2000), 46–50.   MTB, iii, 104–5 ; Regesta, iii, nos. 126, 996.



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disagreements as to its terms would be justiciable in his court. The same level of involvement, and some of the same phraseology, is found later in the year, during the siege of Stamford, where he was a party to the war reparations made by Ranulf, earl of Chester, to Robert de Chesney, bishop of Lincoln. The arrangements were made ‘in my presence and with my assent’, and there is an emphasis on due process throughout the document. There had been an initial agreement a month earlier, at the siege of Wallingford, and it is likely that it was at this time that he wrote to the abbot of Abingdon, asking for the remission of a debt owed by Peter Boterel ; the abbot ‘feared to go against these letters’ and backed off. ‘These letters’ do not survive, but many of the duke’s charters from 1153 do, and they make an interesting archive. The duke has his own voice. His charters are addressed ‘to all his friends and faithful men both Norman and English’, where both the reference to ‘friends’ and to ‘Normans’ (rather than ‘French’) are distinctive. In the circumstance these cannot be casual changes. ‘Le style ç’est l’homme même.’ Henry had nonetheless to recognise that the authority of his court was circumscribed by his authority on the ground, and, while Gilbert Foliot assured him that he was lord of the greater part of England, in fact he was not, even after the midland campaign of the early summer of 1153. The breakthrough came at Wallingford, in late July or early August 1153. This was the second occasion when king and duke came together in the same theatre of war. In terms of the war not much happened. But with the leading men of both sides close together, rapid advances   I. H. Jeayes, Descriptive Catalogue of the Charters and Muniments at Berkeley Castle (Bristol 1892), 4–6 (no. 4) ; ‘in presentia domini Henrici . . . eiusdem assensu et in presentia multorum aliorum clericorum et laicorum’ ; R. B. Patterson, ‘Robert Fitz Harding of Bristol : Profile of an Early Angevin Burgess-Baron Patrician and his Family’s Urban Involvement’, HSJ, 1 (1989), 109–22, at 113. On the authenticity of this group of Berkeley charters, see R. B. Patterson, ‘The Ducal and Royal Acta of Henry fitz Empress in Berkeley Castle’, Trans. Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 109 (1991), 117–37 ; J. C. Holt, ‘1153 : The Treaty of Winchester’, in The Anarchy of King Stephen’s Reign, ed. E. King (Oxford 1994), 291–316, at 294 n. 15, 305 and n. 58 ; Vincent, ‘Sixteen New Charters’, discussion of no. 9.   Regesta, iii, no. 492 : ‘in presentia mea et assensu meo’.   Ibid., no. 491 ; J. Hudson, ed., ‘Historia Ecclesie Abbendonensis’ : The History of the Church of Abingdon (OMT 2002), 316–17 : ‘Petrus litteris acceptis a duce Henrico ad abbatem venit, orans ut pro ducis amore sibi quod debebat condonaretur. Abbas vero litteris ducis contradicere metuens, petitioni, quamvis non ex corde bono, ad tempus tamen adquievit.’   The great majority of Henry’s charters, issued in England on this visit and generally addressed, were written by scriptor xxiii : T. A. M. Bishop, Scriptores Regis : Facsimiles to Identify and Illustrate the Hands of Royal Scribes in Original Charters of Henry I, Stephen, and Henry II (Oxford 1961), 26, 30, plate xxiii ; Regesta, iii, p. xxxv ; iv, plates xl(a), xli ; Facsimiles of Royal & Other Charters in the British Museum, i : William I – Richard I , ed. G. F. Warner and H. J. Ellis (London 1903), no. 44. Regesta, iii, nos. 104, 180, 339, 379, 459 are in the hand of scriptor xxiii, while nos. 44, 81, 90, 321, 362a, 458, 491, 492, 582, 837, 840, 962, which survive only in copies, also show his distinctive style. Here is one of the draughtsmen, if not the architects, of the peace.   LCGF, no. 104 : ‘regni Anglorum pro magna portione domno’.

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could be made towards a peace settlement. As the situation is reported to us, both king and duke found matters taken out of their hands. Certain religious persons mediated between them, and after discussions with the leading men of the duke’s army a truce of five days was agreed . . . When the duke learned of the terms agreed, which were honourable ones, he was very angry ; he complained of the loyalty of those of his friends who had accepted such terms ; but rather than break the agreement he accepted them. The king and the duke spoke personally about the need for peace. ‘This was a foretaste of the peace treaty but it was postponed to another time.’ We know that these discussions represented a key breakthrough because of the reaction of Eustace. ‘Eustace for his part, greatly vexed and angry because the war, in his opinion, had reached no proper conclusion, left his father and went out of sight of the court, and met his death from grief within a few days.’ This passage shows us that the peace had been made, and that Eustace’s expectation to succeed his father as king of England was specifically excluded by that agreement. It was Henry who was ‘the lawful heir’. ‘The terms were honourable ones’, but the first fix that we get on what those terms were  and it was these terms that would secure the accession of Henry II  comes at some point in November 1153, at Winchester. Here, at the command of both king and duke, the magnates and the higher clergy had been summoned, to offer public support to the fledgling peace and to confirm its provisions by oath. In a ceremony that would have been carefully choreographed, Duke Henry was installed in the bishop’s chair while King Stephen was seated in his accustomed place on the opposite side of the choir. We know what was said. ‘Know that I, King Stephen, appoint Henry duke of Normandy after me as my successor in the kingdom of England and my heir by hereditary right, and thus I give and confirm to him and his heirs the kingdom of England.’ In the text that we have this is in the present tense. We are told that Stephen had a weak voice, and he might on normal occasions have expected to have such a text read out for him,   Torigni, 174.   Huntingdon, 766–7 : ‘prelibatum est illud pacis negocium, sed tamen in aliud tempus dilatum est’.   Gesta Stephani, 238–9 : ‘bellum, uti aestimabat, ad effectum nequaquam processerat’. The Lincoln obituary list, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, vii, 159, gives the date of Eustace’s death as 16 Aug.   Huntingdon, 770–71, gives the place of the meeting but no date ; Torigni, 177, gives the date as (Friday) 6 Nov., but no place.   Gervase, i, 156 : ‘ut et ipsi iam initiae paci praeberent assensum et unanimiter iuramenti sacramento confirmarent’.   Huntingdon, 732–3, explaining why Baldwin fitz Gilbert rather than the king addressed the troops before the Battle of Lincoln, a scene realised in BL Arundel MS 48, fol. 168v, and reproduced in E. King, ‘Stephen (c.1092–1154), king of England’, Oxford DNB.



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but this was not a normal occasion and it may be that these were his words viva voce. Then came the matching statement from the duke, which was highly conditional, but it did involve his doing homage to the king. Then the king’s son William did homage to the duke. These were carefully balanced concessions. Stephen swore to support Henry as his son and heir, and he promised that ‘in all the affairs of the kingdom’ he would act with Henry’s advice. He himself, however, would exercise royal justice throughout the kingdom of England, ‘both within the duke’s areas and within my own’. It may be that at this particular ceremony little more was said. These were the essentials : the succession dispute had been resolved, and the current king and the future king had regularised their relationship one with another. It was important that the essentials were grasped not just by those present in the cathedral but also by those who learned of them by report. The news got around. Put simply, ‘The king adopted the duke as his son and made him heir to the kingdom.’ As it was heard in Normandy : The king recognised the hereditary right that Duke Henry had in the kingdom of England. The duke graciously conceded that the king, throughout his lifetime, should hold the kingdom, if he so wished, on the strict understanding that the king and the bishops and the other great men should swear an oath in his presence that the duke, after the king’s death, if he survived him, should have the kingdom peacefully and unopposed. The Gesta Stephani sees it rather from the point of view of the king, who ‘consented to the duke’s inheriting England after his death provided that he himself, as long as he lived, retained the majesty of the king’s lofty position’. John of Hexham says that it was agreed that the duke should ‘be accepted as heir to the kingdom after King Stephen and should defer to Henry bishop of Winchester as a father in all the business of the kingdom’. These are all valid statements, reflecting how the news was heard and interpreted within the Anglo-Norman world. It is striking how little they differ. They do not differ in their essentials because there was a consensus that Stephen had to be seen as the lawful king, if only to protect the integrity of the kingdom that he ruled, while Henry was ‘the lawful heir’. There is a contrast here with what was said about the succession in December 1135, in the relative unanimity of the chronicles, which in turn reflects the clarity of the message.   Gervase, i, 156 : ‘huius rei fama circumquaque diffunditur’.   Huntingdon, 770–71.   Torigni, 177. That Stephen was thereafter king by the duke’s concession was also the formulation of Gervase, i, 156.   Gesta Stephani, 240–41.   John of Hexham, 331.

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After their agreement had been ratified at Winchester, king and duke made their way together to London, where the duke was received ‘with splendid processions, as was fitting for so great a man’. It is from Westminster, and probably in December 1153, that a document survives that allows us to look much more closely at the terms of peace that had been agreed. The precise status of the document will merit further discussion, but it will be useful first to examine its terms. These terms may be seen as an extended commentary on the issues raised by the civil war and the lessons that had been learned from it. One clear lesson was that the magnates on both sides wanted security. This was provided by the creation of a network of homage and fealty : ‘the earls and barons of the duke’ swore homage to the king, ‘in return for the honour I have done their lord’, while (the king’s charter went on) ‘my earls and barons have done liege homage to the duke, saving their faith to me for as long as I shall live and hold the kingdom’. A series of individual relationships was being established. And a general principle. Henry had come to claim his inheritance, iure suo. There would be no disinheritance built into the peace. The duke had needed to be educated in this matter, since in charters earlier in the year he seemed to anticipate distributing baronial estates  ‘acquired from my enemies’, ‘from the first of my conquests’  with a liberal hand. It was a key to the integrity of the kingdom that the personal integrity of those who had supported and fought for either side was protected in this way. The venom in the exchange of letters between Henry, bishop of Winchester, and Brian fitz Count had been provided by the charge of a lack of faith. There were to be no further exchanges of this kind. All were now ‘faithful men’. It was one of the clearest lessons from the summer of 1141 that it would not be possible to agree a peace with Stephen and his family, if satisfactory arrangements could not be made regarding the rights of inheritance of Stephen’s sons. There were two sons at the beginning of 1153 : by the end of the year there was one. William was granted ‘all the lands that I held before I acquired the kingdom of England’ ; also ‘whatever came with the daughter of the earl of Warenne’ ; also Norwich with its castle and 700 librates of land ‘and the whole county of Norfolk’ ; also, ‘to increase my thanks and to strengthen my love towards him’, the castle and the town and the honour of Pevensey. William became Henry’s man, and it was by grant of Henry that he held all of the above. This made the point. Even so it was a most generous grant. It may be that the reason for this generosity is that we see conflated here provision that was originally intended for two sons, not one. This can only be a suggestion, but, were it to be accepted, it would have important implications for the chronology of the peace settlement. It would mean   Huntingdon, 770–71.   Regesta, iii, nos. 180 (for Ranulf of Chester, ‘de his que mihi ex hostibus meis adquisita acciderint’), 582 (for William Mauduit, ‘de terris mihi accidentibus de primis meis conquisitionibus’).  E. King, ‘The Memory of Brian fitz Count’, HSJ, 13 (2004), 75–98.



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that by the time that the king and duke met near Wallingford, the provisions for Stephen’s sons had been agreed in detail. When one then died, the provision for the survivor became lavish, but Duke Henry was persuaded to hold to it, ‘so as not to break agreements that had been made’. If provision for his family was Stephen’s highest priority, the highest priority of Henry was that he should have security, intellectual security and territorial security, for his inheritance of the kingdom. In territorial terms, the key was the custody of castles and fortifications, ‘so that the duke at my death may not in respect of these suffer loss or hindrance in his acquisition of the kingdom’ : Henry’s concern, Henry’s phrase. The particular concern was with ‘the castles that pertain to the Crown’. Only six castles and fortifications were named, but a lot of attention was given to the custody of the Norman castles of the honours given to William of Warenne, and we have seen also the tenacity with which he was holding on to the castle of Devizes. If Henry, with the benefit of hindsight, is offering us a reading of the history of his own lifetime, then never more clearly than here. This should have been done in 1135. Robert of Torigni tells us this. He does not do so directly, for Henry I was not to be criticised, but he invites us to draw our own conclusion. He tells us of Stephen’s succession. And then he goes on, and goes back, to the discord between the king and the count and the Empress before the death of Henry I. ‘There was another significant reason for this discord, which was that the king was not prepared to do fealty to his daughter and her husband in respect of all the fortifications of Normandy and England, which they required of him on behalf of their sons, who were the legitimate heirs of King Henry.’ The peace thus concluded between the protagonists needed to be sold to the wider political community. ‘Immediately, an edict went out to all regions’, says John of Hexham ; and we need not doubt it. The edict dealt with the suppression of violence, the prohibition of spoliation, the ejection from the kingdom of hired knights and archers from other nations, whilst ‘any fortifications built by individuals on their own possessions after the death of King Henry were to be destroyed’. Of all the provisions of the edict, there is the clearest evidence of this last, and it may be that the Hexham chronicler comes closest to giving its precise wording. All our witnesses emphasise that it was the castles built during Stephen’s reign that were to be destroyed. There were other provisions of the edict, though   Torigni, 128 : ‘Erat et alia causa ipsius discordiae major, quia rex nolebat facere fidelitatem filiae suae et marito eius idem requirenti de omnibus firmitatibus Normanniae et Angliae. Hoc enim requirebant proper filios suos, qui erant legitimi heredes regis Henrici.’   John of Hexham, 331 : ‘Continuo exiit edictum ab eis per omnes provincias’.   Ibid. : ‘munitionesque quas quisque in sua possessione post mortem Henrici regis construxerat dirui’ ; Gesta Stephani, 240–41, ‘castella nova diruerentur’ ; Huntingdon, 772–3, ‘castella post mortem Henrici regis in pessimos usus circumquaque constructa’. The term ‘adulterine’ is found only in Liber Eliensis, ed. E. O. Blake, Camden 3rd ser. 92 (London 1962), 372 : ‘castella adulterina diruit’ ; for the

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it is more difficult to get at their precise wording and formulation. There was certainly an order for the restoration of peace : ‘arms should be laid down and peace restored’, ‘there should be an end of violence and spoliation’. This must have stood at the head of any proclamation, before it got down to detail. John of Hexham is clear also that ‘hired knights and archers from other nations were to be ejected from the kingdom’. They epitomised violence, and they were not parties to the peace that had been made for that kingdom. Robert of Torigni says that lands were to be restored ‘to their ancient and legitimate possessors as they had held in the time of Henry, the very best of kings’. The reference back to the time of King Henry was one of Duke Henry’s main themes. All of this seems fairly clear. Problems arise when our ‘record’ source, the Westminster charter, is placed alongside these statements in the chronicles. A first problem, which has been well discussed, is that the charter does not mention the demolition of castles, the ejection of foreigners, and the restoration of the dispossessed, even though it is not in question that these were current issues. The second question, which has captured less attention, might be seen as the other side of the coin. That is, the provisions that are in the charter do not, as it were, appear in ‘the press’, notably the provision for Stephen’s son and the ‘security clause’ regarding safe custody of key castles, both of which are dealt with at length in the charter. Both problems turn on how we view the status of the Westminster charter. It is our fullest text, and it is tempting to see it as our key text also, able to reflect the business of the council at Winchester, and able to represent also what was promulgated at Westminster. As Holt puts it, the charter ‘was designed to bring peace to the land’. This may ask more of the Westminster charter than it is fair to do. To look back first of all. The Westminster charter states that Duke Henry had sworn to King Stephen a conditional homage, ‘in terms of the agreements negotiated between us, which are contained in this charter’. The phrasing seems awkward, particularly if this is a document that was being drafted from scratch. One way to make sense of this would be to suggest, as has already been done, that the terms of the peace enunciated in the public ceremony at Winchester dealt with the problems it raises, see C. Coulson, Castles in Medieval Society : Fortresses in England, France, and Ireland in the Central Middle Ages (Oxford 2003), 117–27.   Gesta Stephani, 240–41, ‘pax ubique in regno armis omnino depositis reformaretur’ ; John of Hexham, 331, ‘violentias comprimi, direptiones interdici’.   Ibid. : ‘milites conductitios et sagittarios exterarum nationum a regno eiici’.   Torigni, 177, ‘Iuratum est etiam, quod possessiones, quae direptae erant ab invasoribus, ad antiquos et legitimos possessores revocarentur, quorum fuerant tempore Henrici optimi regis’ ; Gesta Stephani, 240–41, ‘exheredati ad propria revocarentur’ (for comment on this phrase, Holt, ‘1153 : The Treaty of Winchester’, in King, Anarchy, 297).   Holt, ‘1153 : The Treaty of Winchester’, 297.   Regesta, iii, no. 272 : ‘ per conventiones inter nos prolocutas, que in hac carta continentur’.



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heads of the agreement : those which concerned the political community at large. In this interpretation, the phrase ‘in terms of the agreements negotiated between us’ would have stood on its own : there was no need to specify those agreements in this forum. There was no need, to take one example, to state publicly at Winchester, ‘The duke has confirmed the church of Faversham while other things that I have given and returned to other churches by the counsel of holy Church and my own counsel he has confirmed.’ Stephen’s wife and their son already rested at Faversham, and he would follow them. This confirmation was necessary if they were to rest in peace. This was a family matter. If there was a general statement at Winchester it would surely have been drafted somewhat differently. A variety of formulations can be found in the duke’s own charters, and that for Bermondsey priory may represent the latest thinking. ‘I concede and confirm in perpetuity all the gifts and liberties that King Henry my grandfather gave and conceded to them, in respect of which they have his charters, and in addition to this everything that has been given or sold to them in respect of which they have charters or grants of the lawful heirs.’ The promise made by the duke to the abbey of Faversham was the subject of a separate charter, as might have been presumed and is now most valuably confirmed by its discovery by Professor Vincent. This was issued at Westminster, at the same time and with substantially the same witnesses as the duke’s grant to the mother-house of Cluny. There is scope also to question whether the Westminster charter was in any sense ‘promulgated’. The charter does not contain the general provisions about castles and the restoration of property. These provisions, it has been suggested, were agreed but not promulgated, because their promulgation would have been contentious. This cannot be right. It is directly contradicted by John of Hexham. What he and the other chroniclers tell us is what was promulgated. This is the source of their information, at least in part. They tell us the terms of the pax   Ibid., no. 90 : ‘omnes donationes et libertates quas dedit eis et concessit rex Henricus avus meus de quibus habent cartas illius, insuper etiam omnia que eis data vel vendita sunt de quibus habent cartas aut concessiones rectorum heredum concedo et confirmo ipsis imperpetuum’. The itinerary in Regesta, iii, p. xlvii, lists this charter both in the spring (when it would be, along with no. 180, one of the duke’s earliest charters after his arrival) and in the autumn (where it would precede ‘the peace’ at Winchester). The involvement of the prior of Bermondsey (whose predecessor was the first abbot of Faversham), the only ‘head of house’ witnessing the Westminster charter, strongly argues for the latter date. Peter, abbot of Malmesbury, another Cluniac, was also with the duke at this time and later in London : Regesta, iii, nos. 837, 875. We are told that ‘certain religious men’ mediated between the king and the duke : Torigni, 173. We may have two of them here, makers of the peace.  Vincent, ‘Sixteen New Charters’, no. 3. This charter is witnessed additionally both by Stephen and his son and by the bishops of Rochester, Chester, Ely and Bath.   Regesta, iii, no. 206.   Holt, ‘1153 : The Treaty of Winchester’, 297 : ‘Both provisions were full of dangers ; quite apart from that, who could gauge the extent of either ? It was better to omit them from any promulgation of peace. Promises for the future were best kept general and preferably obscure.’

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between king and duke, as it applied to the succession and the government of the kingdom until the king’s death. They give us the edicts, which may have represented some form of renewal of the king’s coronation oath, and which outline the main provisions of the peace process, including the expulsion of aliens. These edicts were general, in that they named neither individual nor place, but edicts they were : they were promulgated. What was not promulgated  or rather, what we have no evidence was promulgated  were those aspects of the Westminster charter that reflected ‘the agreements negotiated between ourselves’. Some of these arrangements were highly detailed and concerned primarily the two families who had made their peace in the ceremony at Winchester. As the matter was remembered later, ‘The agreement was ratified by the swearing of oaths and the exchange of authentic documents.’ Compare the longer, but entirely sharp version of William of Newburgh. Decretum est  it was decreed that henceforth Stephen should rule unimpaired in glory and honour as lawful prince, and that Henry should succeed him in the kingdom as lawful heir. Both princes embraced this formula of peace as useful and honourable, and they expunged all previous acts of hostility between them. They buried for ever all enmity between them, and embraced each other, whilst many wept for joy. The king in fact adopted the duke as his son, and solemnly declared him his rightful successor ; the duke honoured the king as his father and lord in the sight of all. William, the king’s younger son, paid homage to the duke at his father’s command, and the duke for his part gave William his due by means of an agreement between them.   The peace was an agreement between the two men. It was an event : Regesta, iii, nos. 696 (‘post compositionem inter me et H. ducem Normannie factam’), 866 (‘post pacificationem et concordiam quam feci cum comite Normannorum’) ; Cartulary of the Abbey of Eynsham, ed. H. E. Salter, i, Oxford Historical Society 49 (Oxford 1907), 39 (‘in primo Pentecosten post factam inter regem et ducem Normannie concordiam’, possibly picking up the phrase from a royal charter now lost) ; Historia Ecclesie Abbendonensis, ii, 238 : ‘eo igitur anno quo rex Stephanus et Henricus dux Normannie federati sunt’ (also in Regesta iii, no. 13 ; English Lawsuits, ii, 326). Similarly in a variety of annals : Chronique de Robert de Torigni, ed. L. Delisle, ii, Société de l’Histoire de Normandie (Rouen and Paris 1873), 227, 235 (‘Stephanus rex Anglorum et Henricus dux Normannorum, cognatus eius, concordati sunt’) ; A. O. Anderson and M. O. Anderson, eds., The Chronicle of Melrose (London, 1936), plate 35 (‘pax Anglie reddita est pacificatis ad invicem rege Stephano et Henrico duce Normannie’) ; Tewkesbury, in Ann. Mon., i, 47–8 (‘rex S. cepit pacem’) ; Waverley, and others, ibid., ii, 236 ; F. Liebermann, ed., Ungedruckte Anglo-Normannische Geschichtsquellen (Strasburg 1879), 48 (‘concordia facta est inter regem S. et H. ducem apud Wintoniam’) ; R. R. Darlington, ed., ‘Winchcombe Annals 1049–1181’, in A Medieval Miscellany for Doris Mary Stenton, ed. P. M. Barnes and C. F. Slade, PRS ns 36 (London 1962), 130 ; Dunstable, Ann. Mon., iii, 16.   Book of Walden, 24–5 : ‘Conventione itaque sacramentis prestitis et scriptis autenticis utrinque roborata’.   Newburgh, i, 91 : ‘Willelmus autem regis filius iunior iubente patre duci hominium fecit ; dux quoque illi pactis interpositis satisfecit.’



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William of Newburgh is not saying that the terms of the agreement with William were rehearsed ‘in the sight of all’. And there is no evidence that this Westminster charter was widely copied or disseminated. The two men, Stephen and Henry, ‘embraced each other’, according to William of Newburgh. Exactly. This is the pax. This is the significance of what happened at Winchester. Behind the pax there were conventiones, agreements that offered security to Stephen himself, to his son William, to Duke Henry, and to the wider political community, until the king should die. As Holt valuably notes, ‘the most striking feature of the Westminster charter’ is ‘that it scarcely ventures at all into the future’. And yet the discussions, at Winchester and at Westminster, most certainly involved the future. Many, if not all the difficulties that we find in trying to put together our chronicle sources and our ‘record’ source would disappear if we were to think less in terms of a peace settlement and more in terms of a peace process. It was the process that allowed individuals to identify with the agreement ; it would be by means of a process that the pax made between king and duke ‘soon became a very good peace, such as there never was before’, and the accession of Henry II was secured. At Winchester, and again at Westminster, the king had agreed to act with the advice of the duke, while reserving to himself the exercise of royal justice. ‘From this time on the king and the duke were as one in their governing of the kingdom, and no discord arose between them.’ This was the report. The process here involved a progression : the promulgation and holding of regular meetings of the royal court at which both king and duke were present. Holt calculates that there were six of these between Winchester, in November 1153, and Henry’s departure for Normandy, early in March 1154. One of these meetings was at Oxford in mid January. Henry of Huntingdon, from his perspective in the East Midlands, saw this as the main occasion at which oaths were sworn. ‘There, at the king’s command, the English magnates paid to the duke the homage and fealty due to their lord.’

  The earliest copy is found in a group of legal texts of the mid 12th century : Manchester, John Rylands University Library, MS lat. 420, fol. 40v ; for comment on the manuscript, see P. Wormald, ‘Quadripartitus’, in Law and Government in Medieval Government and Normandy, ed. G. Garnett and J. Hudson (Cambridge 1994), 115–16. There is a copy also in the Red Book and in other Exchequer records.   Newburgh, i, 91 : ‘in mutuos . . . se dederunt amplexus’.   Holt, ‘1153 : The Treaty of Winchester’, 296.   ASC, s.a. 1140, 202.   Howden, Chronica, i, 212 : ‘ab illo tempore rex et dux unanimes exstiterunt in regimine regni, ita quod decetero inter illos nulla oriebatur discordia’.   Holt, ‘1153 : The Treaty of Winchester’, 307.   Huntingdon, 770–73 : ‘ibi principes Anglorum iussu regis hominium et domino debitam fidelitatem duci simul exhibuerunt’ ; cf. Winchester Annals, in Ann. Mon., ii, 55 : ‘fecerunt capitanei totius Angliae homagium predicti Henrico iussu praedicti regis’.

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The swearing of these homages did not happen just on the one occasion. It was a part of the process. And the barons swore ‘at the king’s command’. The phrase is often found at this time. It had clearly been agreed. ‘After a short while, they met again at Dunstable.’ Here was the first recorded breach between the king and the duke. It concerned decommissioning : the destruction of castles. Some had been destroyed, Henry claimed, but the king had favoured his own men and allowed them to retain their castles, which showed either his good nature or his deviousness. It was difficult, however  it was bound to be difficult  when you turned from general principles to individual cases. The legitimacy of the castle was inextricably bound up with the legitimacy of the title to the ground on which the castle was built. Any disputed title would have to be settled by due process, in the king’s court. The duke ‘regretfully let the matter pass in order not to appear to be snuffing out the lamp of reconciliation’. In fact, he had little choice but to do so. It was nonetheless reported that many castles had been destroyed, and these reports had a value in themselves. The decommissioning issue was a part of the peace process : visible, verifiable. It is not surprising that the topic was raised, for what was at issue  perhaps  was less the castles themselves than the commitment to the process, and, with the king reasserting his authority, the duke and his followers needed reassurance on that commitment. It would have been surprising, also, had some rumours not circulated that the duke’s person was in danger from ‘extremist groups’ : those unable to accept the terms agreed. After Dunstable, the court was next convened at Canterbury, where king and duke were escorted in procession into the cathedral church. Thence, during Lent, they travelled to Dover, where they held discussions with Thierry, count of Flanders. And, it was alleged, when the two men met again at Canterbury, a conspiracy was discovered, for ‘the Flemings wished to kill the duke, since they hated both him and the peace’. It was rumoured also that Stephen’s son, William, was aware of these plans. Perhaps at a meeting with Duke Henry, at the meeting place of the county court on Barham Down, he fell from his horse and broke his leg, ‘to the great distress of his followers’. Here, very much in the heartland of the house of Blois, the duke felt insecure, and he soon   There is further confirmation of this, if it were needed, in the form of words in ASC, s.a. 1140, 202 : ‘Then the count [duke Henry] was received in Winchester and in London with great honour, and all did him homage.’   It is stated in the Westminster charter that two groups, the citizens of towns and the custodians of castles in the royal demesne and the archbishops and bishops and abbots of the kingdom of England, had done homage to the duke ‘ex precepto meo’ (Regesta, iii, no. 272) ; and the duke’s grant to the wife of Richard de Canville, who was one of the witnesses to the Westminster charter, was granted ‘petitione et precepto regis Stephani’ (ibid., no. 140).   Huntingdon, 772–3 : ‘clementia vel versutia parcens’.   Gesta Stephani, 240–41 : [the duke] ‘plurima tandem castella quae regno erant impedimento subruisset’ ; Howden, Chronica, i, 213 : [the king] ‘multa obsedit castella et obtinuit et multa ex eis prostravit’.



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made for home, though only after correctly obtaining from the king permission to leave the court and cross the Channel. Avoiding (at least according to one authority) the obvious short sea crossing via Dover, he returned rather via Rochester and London. He would not set eyes on Stephen again. After this, Stephen went into the north of England. It was on this expedition, ‘around harvest-time’, that he besieged and captured the castle of Drax. Drax was the English caput of the honour of Paynel : an important baronial family that held lands in eight counties in England and had a significant estate in Normandy also. The castle was captured and then destroyed. It is the only named castle known to have suffered this fate during 1154 : one promised to so many by the terms of the peace promulgated. Its fate is the more surprising because it was almost certainly not a ‘new castle’ of the reign at all. So why was it besieged ? The answer may be found in a surviving charter of Duke Henry, which granted to Hugh Paynel his honour in Normandy ‘and the whole barony of his father both in Normandy and in England’. The duke’s ability to honour that grant with respect to England, after he had landed there and his claims had been accepted, was compromised by the grant of Drax, the English caput of the honour, to Hugh’s half-sister Alice Paynel. Alice was married to Robert de Gant, brother of Gilbert de Gant, whom Stephen had created earl of Lincoln in the late 1140s, and nephew of Robert de Gant, the royal chancellor. Certainly the Philip de Colville named as defying the king and refusing to surrender the castle was one of the knights of Robert de Gant. There was every incentive, granted the king’s close relationship to the Gant family, for him to travel by another route and pass both castle and problem by. That he did not may indicate that he had given a precise undertaking to Duke Henry that on any journey north he would require the surrender of Drax to a royal castellan, prior to a formal disposition as to the right. If such an undertaking was given, then it was honoured, and the outcome of the siege was publicised. The proclamation of the terms agreed told people what they wanted to hear. ‘There were many castles all over England each defending its own district or, to be more truthful, plundering it.’ That is William of Malmesbury’s version of   The main source for this paragraph is Gervase, i, 158. The meetings are discussed by E. Amt, The Accession of Henry II in England : Royal Government Restored, 1149–1159 (Woodbridge 1993), 84. Huntingdon, 772–3, says simply that, soon after the meeting at Dunstable, the duke received license to depart from the court and returned to Normandy. Similarly, William of Newburgh notes William’s broken leg but not in the context of any plot : Newburgh, i, 91–2.   Ibid., 94, gives the time of year. The siege is noted also in Huntingdon, 774–5 ; Howden, Chronica, i, 213 ; Regesta, iii, no. 817.   EYC, vi : The Paynel Fee, 1–7.   Regesta, iii, no. 653 ; also in EYC, vi, 96–8 (no. 19).   Ibid., 31–3.   Historia Novella, 70–71.

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a common theme, so common that by the end of the civil war, when a monk of Peterborough developed it with passionate and poetic force, it was not to be questioned. The castle was both symbol and physical manifestation of anarchy. So also with ‘the mercenary soldiers and archers of foreign nations’. Their arrival had been taken by William as a symbol of the breakdown of authority post-1135. ‘Knights of all kinds hastened to the king, as also those more lightly armed, especially from Flanders and Brittany. They were a class of men full of greed and violence.’ Some of the worse atrocities of the civil war that followed had been, and continued to be, laid at their door. They had their own code, and might fight to the last, without recourse to the easy compromises of chivalry, but no mention would be made of this. As part of the recompense to the Church for recent atrocities their removal was an easy penance. They could be despatched in short order and in round numbers : five hundred ‘foot soldiers’, drowned in the Channel by the judgement of God when Duke Henry sent them home after the siege of Malmesbury ; sixty ‘archers’ were beheaded by judgement of the same duke after the siege of Crowmarsh. No tears were shed for them. The removal of ‘this class of man’ and the destruction of castles, some of which they had garrisoned, went together as part of the process. These aspects are picked up by the chroniclers who wrote of the early years of Henry II. The process of peace merged with the process of reconstruction. Roger of Howden kept the story very simple : in 1154, Stephen demolished castles, captured Drax, and then died ; in 1155, Henry carried on the same work ; by 1156, ‘he had demolished practically all the castles that had been built in the time of King Stephen’. Gervase of Canterbury makes much of the dangers threatened by ‘the Flemish wolves’, and he takes Flemings, or rather ‘foreigners’, and castles together : ‘it was made known that all foreigners were to be kicked out of the kingdom and that all those dreadful little castles the length and breadth of England were to be levelled to the ground’. A part of Ralph de Diceto’s description of the brave new world saw Flemings, in great numbers, recalled from castles to their own fields and workshops. The repatriation of aliens represents a major theme of the chroniclers. John of Salisbury, writing early in the new reign, would be concerned to emphasise that Henry had ‘principally relied on fellow countrymen’ when he came   John of Hexham, 331.   Historia Novella, 32–3.   Gesta Stephani, 232–3.   Torigni, 173–4.   Howden, Chronica, i, 213, 215.   Gervase, i, 160–61 : ‘proposuit animo alienigenas gentes de regno propellere et munitiunculas pessimas per totam Angliam solo tenus dissipare’.   Diceto, i, 297.   There is an excellent discussion in Amt, The Accession of Henry II, 90–91.



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to reclaim his right. Stephen could be represented as ‘a foreign man’. Underlying this statement there is the claim that Henry himself was not a foreigner, rather he was the true heir to the English monarchy. A good deal of effort was devoted at this time to reinforcing this claim. The main themes can be seen being outlined when Henry was still a child. Around the time that the Empress arrived in England, in 1139, Robert of Torigni wrote that her sons were ‘the legitimate heirs to the kingdom of England, not only through King Henry, their grandfather, but also through Queen Matilda II, their grandmother : both were closely related in blood to the old kings of England’. William of Malmesbury developed the case a little more fully in the Historia Novella. Here, in 1141–2, so at least it can be argued, there was a ‘repositioning’ of the claims of the Empress ; the case being that she is not heres but successor : ‘in her alone lay the legitimate succession, since her grandfather, father and uncle had been kings, while on her mother’s side the royal lineage went back for many centuries’. William then went back as far as ‘Ecberht king of Wessex, who first drove out or subdued the other kings of the island, in the year of the Lord’s Incarnation 800’. The case was most fully developed, however, by Ailred of Rievaulx, in his De Genealogia Regum Anglorum. This work was dedicated to Duke Henry and traced his descent back to Adam, ‘father of all’. The text is valuable in that it can be dated so precisely, for it was written when Henry was not yet king but his rival Eustace was dead and he was now ‘truly the heir to England’. In that state of security the duke is advised by Ailred of his responsibilities : These are now left of this holy generation. Of [the children of ] the Empress Matilda, you yourself, most magnificent of men, duke of Normandy and   Ioannis Saresberiensis episcopi Carnotensis Policratici sive De Nugis Curialium et vestigiis philosophorum libri VIII, ed. C. C. J. Webb, ii (Oxford 1909), 52–3 : ‘ne tamen hoc alienigenae ascribant viribus suis, nostro praecipue milite nitebatur’ ; trans. as John of Salisbury, Policraticus : Of the Frivolities of Courtiers and the Footprints of Philosophers, ed. C. J. Nederman (Cambridge 1990), 121.   Policraticus, ed. Webb, ii, 50 : ‘in regno alieno regnare hominem’ ; trans. Nederman, 119.   Jumièges, ii, 240–41 : ‘Uterque enim coniunx consanguinitatem veterum regum Anglie, licet diverso modo, proxime attingebat’.   Historia Novella, pp. xxxviii, 6–7.   Ibid., 6–9.   Ailred of Rievaulx, De Genealogia Regum Anglorum, in PL, cxcv, cols. 711–38. A. Hoste, Bibliotheca Aelrediana (Steenbrugge 1962), 111–13, lists 19 manuscripts, whilst the Vita Davidis contained within it took on a life of its own : ibid., 113–14. Diceto, i, 299, has the descent.   Ailred, De Genealogia Regum Anglorum, col. 737 : ‘Angliae vero gaudemus haeredem’. F. M. Powicke, introd. to W. Daniel, Life of Ailred of Rievaulx (NMT 1950), pp. xci–xcii, dates the work between 24 May 1153, when David of Scots died, and 25 Oct. 1154, when Stephen died, but Eustace’s death in mid Aug. 1153 supplies a narrower initial date. If we then emphasise ‘vero’ in the phrase quoted we might suspect that he has news of the peace, in which that hereditary claim was recognised, in which case we might be looking at the last weeks of 1153 or the early weeks of 1154, while if we also emphasised ‘gaudemus’ we could note that the 3rd Sunday in Advent, Gaudete Sunday, fell within this period on 13 Dec. 1153.

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Aquitaine and count of Anjou, and we rejoice now truly the heir to England. There are also your brothers, Geoffrey and William, of whom good things are heard and are hoped for. Of Queen Matilda and the pious King Stephen, there is William, count of Warenne and Boulogne. Of Henry, there is Malcolm, William and, heir to the ancestral name, David, on whose childhood may God have mercy, and may you also have mercy, since by divine favour you have been made the noble head of all of your generation. This is a remarkable passage. Ailred clearly shows a particular concern with the members of the Scottish royal house. But his vision is broader than that. Henry, though young in years, has demonstrated wisdom ; he has become the head of an extended family, and he must now take responsibility for the representatives of these royal lines. These should not be seen as the views of a cloistered scholar. Ailred had served in the household of David of Scots, and his biographer was concerned to stress how well networked he remained whilst abbot of Rievaulx. ‘All the while he was sending letters to the lord pope, to the king of France, the king of England, the king of Scotland, the archbishops of Canterbury and York and nearly every bishop of England, also to the most distinguished men in the kingdom of England and especially to the earl of Leicester.’ The emphasis placed here on Robert, earl of Leicester, as an important correspondent, when taken with what we know of the earl’s significance at this time, and taken also with the De Genealogia Regum Anglorum, suggests that Ailred’s lost letter collection will have contained much of interest on the interaction of men and ideas in the years 1153–4. Ralph de Diceto had said that the peace would require sound counsel. The Empress had been much criticised, whether fairly or not, for her failure to take counsel. It was a key part of the way that her son was presented that he would be prepared to listen to and act upon advice. The phrase runs through reports of his actions as a young adult. His knighting at Carlisle in May 1149, by his uncle David, king of Scots, followed advice and was carefully choreographed ; whilst, when he left England later in the year, he did so, ‘having received and having accepted the very best of advice’, that he should only return when his power

  Ailred, De Genealogia Regum Anglorum, col. 713 : ‘in tale aetate tanta sapientia’.   Ibid., cols. 737–8 : ‘quem totius generis tui caput nobilissimum pietas divina constituit’.   Life of Ailred of Rievaulx, 42 : ‘atque ad illustrissimos viros regni eiusdem et maxime ad comitem Leicestrie’.   Powicke, ibid., p. xlix, suggested that Ailred’s letters to Robert of Leicester might be connected with the Becket dispute, and so they might, but there was more cause to single out Robert in 1153–4 than at this later time.   Gesta Stephani, 120–21 ; John of Worcester, iii, 296–7 ; Historia Novella, 100–101 ; Huntingdon, 738–9 ; John of Hexham, 309–10.



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was more securely based. In 1151, now count of Anjou and duke of Normandy, he wished to attack the king of France, but the leaders of his forces, ‘older than him in wisdom and in years’, would not allow him to fight. All this is of a pattern with his behaviour at the siege of Wallingford in 1153, already noted, where he accepted peace terms negotiated by his supporters, though he expressed his frustration in vigorous terms. In all of this we may feel, once again, that the style was the man, and that we are not simply being presented with routine phrases from the vocabulary of good lordship. It might be argued here that Henry was showing himself as his father’s son. The takeover of Normandy in 1144 had been achieved not through conquest but through consensus, with the connivance of the French king, the mediation of the great men, the sufferance of the Church, and, not least, the support of the citizens of Rouen. All this, and the duke’s long residence in Rouen, would have reassured the Londoners that he did not share the anti-mercantile sentiments that had surfaced in 1141 and had damaged his mother’s cause. If we are to emphasise the importance of counsel, both the counsel given to king and duke and the ‘common counsel’ of the realm, which underpinned their coming to terms and was the authority for the promulgation of the peace, then we cannot ignore the individual counsellors. The continuity is impressive. In Normandy, Haskins spoke of ‘the young duke surrounded by his father’s advisers and maintaining his father’s policy’, but at the same time he noted ‘certain new names which are to rise to importance’ during the period before Henry became king

  Gesta Stephani, 214–15 (‘a suae partis fautoribus consilium accepit’), 224–5 (‘dato igitur et accepto utillimo consilio’).   Torigni, 161 : ‘principes exercitus eius, qui maturiores eo erant et consilio et aetate, non permiserunt ut cum rege domino suo congrederetur’.   Ibid., 174, quoted and discussed above, p. 30, and also by John Gillingham, below, pp. 67–8.   Newburgh, i, 39 : ‘Cum rege quippe Francorum, qui regi Stephano foederatus videbatur, prudenter colluserat, ne quid ab eo impedimenti pateretur quominus prosperaretur in iis quae inten­de­ bat’ ; Torigni, 148, 169.   Ibid., 148 : ‘cum duce concordati erant’. Cherbourg was surrendered after mediation between Geoffrey’s own men (‘comitis collaterales’) and those who spoke for the garrison : John of Marmoutier, ‘Historia Gaufredi ducis’, in Chroniques des comtes d’Anjou et des seigneurs d’Amboise, ed. L. Halphen and R. Poupardin (Paris 1913), 230.   He had resolved the dispute over the election of Arnulf, archdeacon of Sées, as bishop of Lisieux by September 1143 : Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, pp. xix–xx, 209.   Torigni, 147 ; Les Annales de l’abbaye Saint-Pierre de Jumièges, ed. J. Laporte (Rouen 1954), 62–5 : ‘Rothomagum cepit, consensu civium’ ; Regesta, iii, no. 729, Duke Henry’s grant to the citizens of Rouen in 1150–51, which confirmed an earlier grant of his father : ‘Omnes autem predictas concessiones affiduciavit G. dux Normannorum pater meus se tenere’.   Historia Novella, pp. lxxxiv–lxxxv, 86–7 ; Huntingdon, 738–9 ; Regesta, iii, no. 275, in which the Empress promises Geoffrey de Mandeville that she will come to no agreement with the burgesses of London, ‘quia inimici eius sunt mortales’.

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of England. Of particular importance would be Manasser Biset, the steward, Richard du Hommet, the constable, and Warin fitz Gerald, the chamberlain. All three were with Henry when he arrived in England in January 1153, and Manasser Biset certainly and possibly one or both of the others had accompanied him to England in 1149. There was also an important role for (again in Haskins’s phrase) ‘the clever and ambitious Bishop Arnulf of Lisieux’, who was given the office of justiciar of Normandy, ‘which his predecessor Bishop John had held under Henry I’. Arnulf ’s ambition was not of recent date : he had memories of Stephen’s court in its early years, when he was hoping for preferment, and of the papal court, where he reportedly questioned the legitimacy of Henry’s mother in the appeal of 1139, and of the Second Crusade, where reports circulated of the unfaithfulness of Henry’s wife. Arnulf certainly needed to have the skills necessary for survival at court. Geoffrey of Anjou could, by the end of his life, view Arnulf as a friend, and Henry promoted him ; ‘his long service under the Angevin duke and king had begun’. It is not remarkable that Henry relied on the counsel of those with whom he had worked closely as duke of Normandy. It is more remarkable that he would work no less closely with men who, before 1153, had been working against him. Richard de Lucy had been at Stephen’s side during the siege of Malmesbury, and he had led royalist forces from Oxford at the siege of Wallingford, yet he is a key figure in the peace, holding the Tower of London and Windsor Castle in the terms agreed between king and duke, and he would become Henry’s first justiciar. His co-justiciar was Robert, earl of Leicester, who had come to terms with Henry earlier in the year and had offered him hospitality and sound advice. Robert had been at the deathbed of Henry I and would be at the coronation of Henry II.10 Nigel, bishop of Ely, ‘at the repeated instance of Henry II, restored the knowledge of the Exchequer, which had almost perished during the long years of civil war’.11 Nigel was another long survivor, originally the treasurer of Henry I   C. H. Haskins, Norman Institutions (Cambridge, MA, 1918), 162–3.   Regesta, iii, nos. 180, 795.   Haskins, Norman Institutions, 163.   Regesta, iii, no. 667, shows him to have been at the Christmas court of 1138–9, when Theobald was appointed archbishop of Canterbury.   Historia Pontificalis, ed. Chibnall, 83–6.   Ibid., 52–3 : Gervase, i, 149 ; The Chronicle of Richard of Devizes, ed. J. T. Appleby (NMT 1963), 25–6 (a gloss : see ibid., plate facing p. xvi).   Historia Pontificalis, ed. Chibnall, 55–6 : ‘Lexoviensis autem nitebatur de eloquencia et industria negociorum, de titulo liberalitatis et nugis curialibus, quas sub facetiarum colore venustabat’.   Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, p. xxviii.   Regesta, iii, no. 192 ; Torigni, 174 ; Regesta, iii, no. 272 ; E. Amt, ‘Richard de Lucy, Henry II’s Justiciar’, Medieval Prosopography, 9 (1988), 61–87. 10  Orderic, vi, 448–9 ; Crouch, Beaumont Twins, 89–96. 11  Dialogus, 50.



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and destined to enjoy a useful role under his grandson, though there is no direct evidence of his playing any part in the making of the peace. There were others based in England who were evidently important as counsellors in 1153–4. The first layman in the Westminster charter is William d’Aubigny, now the widower of Henry I’s queen, Adeliza of Louvain, ‘a man of great eloquence’, who would be remembered as playing an important role in the peace discussions, and who would be free to exemplify the comital life under Henry II. William’s chief agent was Jocelin de Louvain, his brother-in-law, seen by David Crouch as acting as intermediary between Duke Henry and the earl. Of similar standing to Jocelin in his honour, and unlike him a witness to the Westminster charter, was Reginald of Warenne, the fixer of that formidable family, who could remember, fifteen years before, escorting his sister, now widowed, to Scotland to be married to Henry of Scots, and more recently hoping against hope for the return of his brother from the Second Crusade. There are a lot of memories here, in what is only a select list ; a lot of experience being harnessed, which previously had been held back by what one authority calls ‘a pitiable leader’. That this group of counsellors, some of whom Henry had brought with him from Normandy, others of whom joined him after his arrival, became a cohesive body who would serve the new king, often for many years, must have been in one sense an accident. The peace process was not what the protagonists wanted. Yet the lengthy discussions that necessarily preceded the peace, ‘in order to take the interests of both parties into account’, gave those involved  the higher clergy and their secretaries, the magnates and their household officers  a common purpose. Those who had negotiated the peace remained responsible for it. While the Westminster charter spoke of two regions, and while the charter witness lists seem to show us two separate courts, we can still speak of a common enterprise. Early in the new reign, in a matter-of-fact way, the chronicler of Battle Abbey speaks   It has been suggested that Nigel had an important role in drafting a ‘fourth clause’ in the coronation oath that Henry II swore in Dec. 1154, to protect the rights of the Crown : H. G. Richardson, ‘The Coronation in Medieval England : The Evolution of the Office and the Oath’, Traditio, 16 (1960), 111–202, at 159–60, 171. The emphasis on the rights of the Crown, however, can be seen in the conciliar legislation of the English Church, and might be seen as representing a clerical aspect of ‘the magnates’ peace’ : C & S, 823–4 ; E. King, ‘The Anarchy of King Stephen’s Reign’, TRHS, 5th ser. 34 (1984), 133–53, at 141–3.   Gervase, i, 154 : ‘vir eloquentissimus’.   Crouch, King Stephen, 264–5, 269–70. In Regesta, iii, no. 568, Duke Henry grants Jocelin the honour of Petworth, ‘sicut Willelmus comes Arondell et regina Adelicia ipsi illum dederunt’.   EYC, viii : The Honour of Warenne, nos. 49–50 (‘si dominus Jesus Christus dominum comitem Warennie reduxerit’) ; The Charters of David I, ed. G. W. S. Barrow (Woodbridge 1999), no. 82.   Waltham, 76–7 : ‘sic vacillaret regnum et regni status miserabili ductore’.   English Lawsuits, i, 299 : ‘secundum quod utriusque partis poscebat utilitas’. For comment, see E. King, ‘Dispute Settlement in Anglo-Norman England’, ANS, 14 (1992), 115–30, at 124.

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of Reginald, earl of Cornwall, and Richard du Hommet, the king’s constable, and Richard de Lucy and (his brother) Abbot Walter, as ‘joined together in a pact of friendship’. Such a pact might well have been made before Henry returned to Normandy in March 1154, taking Richard du Hommet with him, leaving Reginald of Cornwall responsible for his affairs in England, while Richard de Lucy remained at Stephen’s court. Early in the new reign, also, John of Salisbury in his Entheticus provides a satirical view of the group. We cannot be sure whose is the voice that states brusquely, ‘I speak of the king’s profit’ ; or who is ‘Mandroger’, ‘who boasts that he alone preserves the Crown and is the father of the laws of the kingdom’ ; or who is ‘Antipater’, who asserts that clergy and people should be governed by the same law. One member of this confederacy would serve as well as another. ‘These men’ form ‘the new court under a youthful king’, men confident of their mission : ‘from this the disgrace of the kingdom is thrown away ; from this comes its glory !’10 John of Salisbury here captures the authentic voice of the new regime.   Battle Chronicle, 160–61 : ‘amicitie federe coniuncti erant’. For discussion, see Amt, ‘Richard de Lucy’, 70–75.   Regesta, iii, nos. 22, 29, 64–5, 332, 900.   Ibid., no. 709 : ‘Comes enim Reginaldus qui in hoc et in aliis negotiis meis locum meum tenet in Anglia’.   Ibid., nos. 131, 137, 239, 258, 344, 404, 489–90, 569, 664, 696, 797, 817, 866, 896.   John of Salisbury’s Entheticus Maior and Minor, ed. J. van Laarhoven, 3 vols. (Leiden 1987) ; for discussion of the date of composition, see R. Thomson, ‘What is the Entheticus ?’, in The World of John of Salisbury, ed. M. Wilks (Studies in Church History : Subsidia 3, Oxford 1984), 287–301.   Entheticus, i, 190–91, l. 1324 : ‘de regis utilitate loquar’.   Ibid., 194–5, ll. 1363–4 : ‘qui se solum servare coronam / et legum regni iactitat esse patrem’.   Ibid., ll. 1389–90 : ‘clerum populumque / decernit similem iure tenere locum’.   This is one of the phrases used in the Battle Chronicle, 196–9 : ‘omnibus his sibi coherentibus’. The group here includes the abbot’s brother, Richard de Lucy, Robert, earl of Leicester, and Reginald of Warenne. 10  Entheticus, i, 196–7, ll. 1395–6 : ‘dedecus hinc regni vertitur, / inde decus’ ; 200–201, ll. 1463–4 : ‘nova curia rege / sub puero’.

Jean Dunbabin

Henry II and Louis VII

P

erhaps historians of the present generation are unusually well qualified to understand the atmosphere which prevailed in western Europe during the period 1151 to 1189, because, although there are obvious differences of scale, the analogies with the mature Cold War era are quite strong. In the first place, there was a long period of tension between two rival powers, occasionally exploding into conflict on one frontier or another. Then there were endless negotiations to try to defuse the tensions, initiated sometimes by one of the parties to the conflict, sometimes by apprehensive onlookers attempting to divert the protagonists’ attention to other international challenges. Thirdly, there was a host of more localised conflicts that got caught up in the maelstrom, as lesser powers strove to involve the principals in their strategies by invoking the mantra that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’. The final analogy, the unexpected and almost complete crumbling of one of the parties, is not our concern here. But inevitably it remains in our minds. The differences between the two situations are as sharp as the similarities. Whereas the Soviets and the Americans emerged from the Second World War as new rivals  two superpowers, ideologically opposed, together dominating the world yet capable of destroying each other  the situation in 1151 when Louis VII recognised the young Henry as duke of Normandy was entirely different and far more complicated. In the first place, as heir to the counties of Anjou and Maine, Henry belonged to a line that had for a long time demonstrated rather ostentatiously its loyalty to the Capetian kings. The direct descendant of five Fulks, Henry will have struck Louis VII as potentially a powerful, if somewhat demanding, ally who could at the least be relied upon to observe the proper courtesies towards his lord, and whose ambitions would be satisfied at the expense of his Breton, Chartrain and Aquitanian neighbours rather than at the expense of the royal demesne. I am grateful to Professor John Gillingham for pointing out some errors in an early draft of this paper.   On the early history of the counts of Anjou, see O. Guillot, Le Comte d’Anjou et son entourage au XIe siècle, i (Paris 1972), 1–126.

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From time to time, Henry was indeed content to play this part, most notably on his Paris visit of 1158. And it was not his fault that Angevin expansion in the traditional directions irked first Louis VII and then his son Philip Augustus more than it had their ancestors, because their own ambitions had swollen. Unfortunately for Louis, Henry more often took after his mother’s than his father’s line. His usual exemplar was not his Angevin but his Anglo-Norman grandfather, the formidable King Henry I of England. Here, from a French point of view, the omens were distinctly worrying. As king of England, Henry I had drawn on his wealth to demonstrate his easy military superiority over Louis’s father Louis VI, to conquer Normandy and to impose his authority on the border areas of Évreux and the Vexin. It must therefore have been a bitter pill for Louis VII to swallow when, in 1151, he was obliged by Count Geoffrey le Bel of Anjou to accept the young Henry’s homage for the duchy of Normandy, in virtue of his mother’s title as Henry I’s heiress. It was particularly unfortunate for Louis because the troubles in England and Normandy that had followed on the death of Henry I in 1135 had made the early years of his reign more propitious than much of his father’s reign. Although the French king had not been able to impose his preferred solution on the Norman succession  the conquest of the duchy by Geoffrey le Bel had overturned his original plan to recognise as duke his own brother-in-law Eustace, son of King Stephen  Louis had contrived to gain back control over the Vexin and to ally once more with the count of Évreux. From his point of view, the traditional balance between king and duke had been reasserted. Now the homage given by Henry in 1151, with its emphasis on hereditary right, was a fair indication to Louis that, despite the terms of the agreement (whereby he kept the Norman Vexin), the Norman border was soon to become a flashpoint again. As events were to show, Henry would be at his most uncompromising and most impervious to criticism in his determination to re-establish his control over the Vexin, which seemed to him an area crucial for the defence of Normandy. Though the situation in 1151 was potentially worrying, Louis probably did not take it very seriously. Henry was only eighteen when he became duke, and his father died later in the same year. Louis, by contrast, was a seasoned monarch   On the Vexin, see Suger, Vita Ludovici Grossi, ed. A. Lecoy de la Marche, in Œuvres complètes de Suger (Paris 1867), 55–57, 97–105 ; on Évreux, Orderic, vi, 148, 188, 228–30, 260.   Torigni, 162, noted that father and son rejoiced as they came out of the ceremony. I am grateful to Professor Edmund King for pointing this out to me. For an alternative view of what happened, clearly designed to soothe Louis VII’s pride, see D. Power, The Norman Frontier in the Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Centuries (Cambridge 2004), 108–9. On the negotiations that led to this agreement, see M. Chibnall, The Empress Matilda (Oxford 1991), 154–5.   J.-F. Lemarignier, Recherches sur l’hommage en marche et les frontières féodales (Lille 1945), 45.   On the crucial buffer zone between Normandy and France, see J. A. Green, ‘Lords of the Norman Vexin’, in War and Government in the Middle Ages, ed. J. Gillingham and J. C. Holt (Woodbridge 1984), 47–63.



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who had won prestige by going on crusade and who was beginning, by dint of clever propaganda, to box above his weight on the European scene. Besides, the new duke had clearly acknowledged that he held Normandy of Louis ; and this at a time when the rights of overlords were becoming increasingly defined. Louis probably hoped that he could teach the young man his duties. If Henry failed to perform these, Louis was prepared, as indeed he always would be, to fan family troubles, in this instance by encouraging the discontent of Henry’s younger brother Geoffrey, whose hopes of power-sharing with his more fortunate brother had been aroused by his father’s will. In a mood of self-confidence, and by way of warning to the young man, in 1151–2 Louis took advantage of Henry’s planned campaign in England to attack across the Norman frontier, supporting the cause of his old ally, Eustace, son of King Stephen. But he had to retreat when Henry rapidly brought an army up against him. Although Louis was rather slow in learning the lesson, he realised after a few more fruitless essays that military ability was not the prerogative of age and experience. He also understood that, in an armed encounter with Henry, he was likely to be the loser, because the Norman duke’s resources could be effectively harnessed to military needs with great rapidity. The French king therefore sought first a truce and then a peace. The meeting that took place in 1152 between the king and the duke on the Norman border was just the first of many face-to-face negotiations between the parties. Indeed, Louis and Henry were to meet to try to solve their problems far more often than any of their predecessors in the course of the next thirty years. On this occasion, a series of truces culminated in a more permanent peace, negotiated in August 1154. The years between truce and peace saw the period of Henry’s greatest territorial gains. In 1152 he married Eleanor of Aquitaine, very shortly after Louis VII had divorced her, and eventually forced Louis to recognise him as duke of Aquitaine : a title which Louis himself had borne most proudly. Louis’s fury at this move was compounded when, over the next decade, Eleanor bore her new husband six sons, while he himself remained sonless until his third wife Adela gave birth to Philip in 1165. The personal sense of failure this induced in Louis kept him silent for some time. But at the back of his mind he always nourished the belief that Henry’s and Eleanor’s marriage was displeasing to God, a belief to which he determined to give voice as soon as fortune turned against them. In the meantime he turned over in his mind strategies whereby he could convert his rival’s quiver  The chroniclers differed on exactly what the terms of Geoffrey’s will were. For a discussion, see Warren, Henry II, 45–6.   Torigni, 169–71.   For the importance of meeting on the Norman frontier, see Lemarignier, L’Hommage en marche, 3–8, 92–113 ; for the peace of 1154, see Actes Henri II, i, 86.   J. Martindale, ‘Eleanor, suo jure duchess of Aquitaine (c.1122–1204)’, in Oxford DNB.

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ful of sons from an advantage to a serious weakness. In the long term, this was to prove his greatest success. Louis’s plans for the future required of him both patience and guile : gifts he possessed in abundance. His immediate reaction to Henry’s marriage was, however, more practical. Foreseeing that Henry’s acquisition of the duchy of Aquitaine (an event of which Louis postponed the overt recognition for as long as possible) would lead almost inevitably to Angevin expansion in the far south, the French king rapidly married his widowed sister Constance to Count Raymond V of Toulouse in 1153. The eldest of the three sons of that marriage was for some years the heir apparent to the French throne. In the short term, Louis’s new brother-in-law was an ally worth having, because his determination to maintain his own position ensured that he would fight hard against any move by Henry to undermine him. Then Louis strengthened the southward orientation of his policy by taking as his second wife, in 1154, the daughter of the king of Castile, to build up friendship in Spain. In 1156 he journeyed to Languedoc to build up his popularity among the magnates there by granting confirmations of privileges and new concessions, particularly to the bishops of the region. These defensive moves seemed inadequate and perhaps wrongly directed when, in 1154, Henry became king of England : an office that substantially enhanced his financial and military position, and which conferred a new status that must have filled Louis with alarm. From the French perspective, the situation was even worse than it had been in Henry’s grandfather’s reign, because not only were England and Normandy reunited, but now Anjou and Maine made a corridor for Henry down to his huge new duchy of Aquitaine. In 1158, Henry was to seize the county of Nantes, the first move in the long process that eventually brought Brittany under his control. All of a sudden, Louis’s rival had achieved rule over almost all the Atlantic coast of what was to be France, and also enjoyed a crown. Furthermore, he could command an army that was, in twelfth-century terms, almost invincible. The Capetian power base by comparison suddenly looked small and poor. Louis’s carefully nurtured claims to majesty and prominence in Europe became a little ridiculous. In response to this tilt in the balance of power, Louis was in the end led to adopt typical cold-war tactics, combining diplomacy with espionage, covert support of potential rebels, and constant appeals to international public opinion. The concept of international public opinion may seem anachronistic in the twelfth century. Historians, dependent on written sources emanating from the   F. L. Cheyette, Ermengard of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours (Ithaca/London 2001), 258–9.   A. Luchaire, Études sur les actes de Louis VII (Paris 1885), nos. 366–89.   J. A. Everard, Brittany and the Angevins : Province and Empire, 1158–1203 (Cambridge 2000), 34–75.



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clergy, may be more conscious of a reasonably coherent public opinion than were contemporaries, to whom conflicting and spontaneous expressions of lay opinion were also available. A central problem in medieval history is to assess the success of propaganda in the absence, on most occasions, of appropriate evidence. But that the Capetian kings tried to wield this weapon is surely beyond doubt. Louis was following a well-established tradition in encouraging his portrayal as a most Christian king and as the defender of his realm, in particular of the church within it. More positively, he tried to project the image of a peacemaker, a good lord, a just judge, in his relations with the Angevins. In the famous words of Walter Map : I speak of what I have seen or know. While he [Louis] was a man of such kindliness and simple mildness, showing himself affable to any poor man, to his own or to strangers, that he might have been thought imbecile, he was the strictest of judges, and an executor, often with tears, of justice, stiff to the proud and to the meek not unfair. While much of this image was for consumption by his subjects, Louis was quick to capitalise on his reputation in a wider field. His crusade of 1147 had established him in the affections of the aristocrats of Outremer, who repeatedly sought his aid. Partly through luck, partly through good judgement, he was able to assert his moral superiority over Frederick Barbarossa when that emperor refused to accept the election of Alexander III to the papal throne in 1159. This was a card that strengthened Louis’s hand throughout almost the whole of the rest of his reign, and brought him from Alexander lavish recompense in terms of praise. And, as we shall see, he scored various moral victories over Henry II, both by making the most of Henry’s embarrassments and by allowing hostile rumours to circulate in Paris against him. Louis certainly enjoyed a good press. But how far good press translated into political advantage remains debatable.   See e.g. W. Berges, Die Fürstenspiegel des hohen und späten Mittelalters (Leipzig 1938), 74–6 ; E. A. R. Brown, ‘ “Franks, Burgundians and Aquitanians” and the Royal Coronation Ceremony in France’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 82/7 (1992), whole issue.   G. Spiegel, ‘ “Defence of the Realm” : Evolution of a Capetian Propaganda Slogan’, JMH , 3 (1977), 115–25 ; A. W. Lewis, ‘Suger’s Views on Kingship’, in Abbot Suger and Saint-Denis, ed. P. L. Gerson (New York 1968), 49.   Map, De Nugis, 442.   J. Phillips, Defenders of the Holy Land : Relations between the Latin East and the West, 1119–1187 (Oxford 1996), 140–49.   M. Pacaut, Frederick Barbarossa, trans. A. J. Pomerens (London 1970), 92–113.   D. Crouch, William Marshal : Court, Career and Chivalry in the Angevin Empire, 1147–1219 (Harlow 1990), 55. Gerald of Wales, Concerning the Instruction of Princes, trans. J. Stevenson (London 1858 ; repaginated facs., Felinfach 1991), div. 2, chap. 2, pp. 13–14 : ‘He [Henry] deserved to be punished by his own children, less rightfully and less lawfully begotten than was fit’.   Histoire de Louis VII, in Suger, Œuvres, ed. F. Gasparri, i (Paris 1996), 158 ; R. W. Southern, ‘England’s first entry into Europe’, in idem, Medieval Humanism and Other Studies (Oxford 1970), 147–9.

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In this regard, the story of the counts of Flanders may be judged telling. While my main focus is on the relations of Henry and Louis (with a coda about Philip Augustus), it is worth remembering that there was often a third party to their intercourse, and one who sometimes affected the outcome. The counts of Flanders, Thierry and then his son Philip of Alsace, were richer, more powerful, and more seasoned players on the international stage than other French princes. It had been Thierry’s trump card in establishing his much-disputed claim to the county of Flanders that he was on good terms both with the English and with the French king. Punctilious in fulfilling their feudal obligations to Louis, Thierry and Philip of Alsace also renewed with Henry (who was Thierry’s wife’s nephew) the treaty by which Count Robert II had bound himself to military assistance to Henry I against anyone except his lord, the French king. The counts of Flanders were landowners in England, they had commercial interests in the wool trade, and they were frequent visitors at the English court. While Thierry contrived to be on good terms with both kings until his death in 1163, the new count, Philip, was much concerned by the great access of power now enjoyed by his cousin Henry. Determined to maintain Flemish independence, for the early part of his rule he attempted to tip the balance against Henry. Both in 1167 and in 1173, he brought military support to Louis’ armies in their opposition to Henry. But after two defeats in the field, Philip resumed his father’s game of neutrality between the parties, a withdrawal of hostility for which Henry paid substantial sums. Nevertheless, Henry limited his reward to money. In the early years of Philip Augustus’s reign, the count of Flanders looked in vain to Henry for support in his attempt to impose himself on the young king ; Henry remained scrupulously impartial. By 1185, Philip of Alsace acknowledged defeat at the hands of Philip Augustus. From then until his death at the siege of Acre in 1191, he kept out of politics beyond the Flemish borders, apart from pleading with both sides to forget their differences and go to the aid of Outremer in 1187. His was the strongest voice in the chorus towards the end of Henry’s life imploring the two kings to put the interests of Christendom above their own quarrels. At least the first half of the Flemish story is worth reflecting on here, because it demonstrates the relative powerlessness of Louis’s position in the face of Henry’s ability to buy off opposition to himself. Whatever Philip of Alsace really thought about the rights and wrongs of Henry’s treatment of Becket or of his own sons or of Louis’s daughters, he had learned by 1174 that hostility to the king of England was not a viable policy for a count of Flanders. Friendly neutrality was as far as he could safely go. If this was true of a powerful figure like Philip of Alsace, it was likely to be true   Galbert of Bruges, De vita et martyrio beati Caroli boni, in PL, clxvi, col. 1046.   For the original treaty, see, Regesta, ii, no. 515. For a confirmation and extension of the treaty, see Actes Henri II, i, 374–82.   Actes Henri II, ii, 60–62.



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for others less distinguished. Louis could only count on the unqualified support of those for whom Henry was not a possible source of lordship. To return to the main story : in response to the threat posed principally by Henry’s accession to the English throne, Louis showed some ingenuity and a sharp appreciation of the power of consensus. In 1155 he issued his famous peace at the council of Soissons, attended by the duke of Burgundy and the counts of Flanders, Champagne and Nevers. Here, the king of France appeared at the head of a block of northern and eastern French princes, establishing norms for good lordship, taking the initiative in protecting the defenceless. In this, Louis was imitating the imperial peace that had been a feature of German rule since Henry IV had initiated it at Mainz in 1103. Louis thus asserted, for the first time in Capetian history, the imperium of the West Frankish monarchy, expressed in the fact that, under the terms of the peace, any plaintiff who was denied justice by his own lord might appeal to the king. If Henry’s power block was built on inheritance and marriage, Louis’s counterblock would be built on friendly alliances, a common search for political tranquillity, and the recognition of his supreme lordship. As a development from what looked like a highly successful initiative in Soissons, in 1158 Louis then tried to involve Henry himself within a comparable circle of amity. It was a shrewd move, designed to create an impression of equality between the two. In June he received the English king in Paris with great ceremony : a meeting that marked the beginning of another round of negotiations designed to find a more permanent basis for good will than the 1154 treaty. Henry there swore fidelity to Louis, and made arrangements for the marriage of his eldest son Henry with Louis’s daughter Margaret. In late 1158, Henry lavishly reciprocated the hospitality when Louis came on a pilgrimage to Mont-Saint-Michel. Optimism about a future of real friendship spread in both camps. It seemed that the tools of cold war might soon be abandoned as trust blossomed between the parties. In 1159, the test of this new friendship came. Henry II decided to launch a campaign in Toulouse to assert his wife’s inherited claims there. He gathered together what was probably the largest army of his reign, and proceeded southwards. Twice Louis attempted by negotiation to prevent his onslaught. Henry would not abandon his plan. There was only one thing to be done. Louis hastened to Toulouse to stand by his brother-in-law. This was a step that Henry had not anticipated, and with which he could not deal. It raised for him in an acute form the dilemma of his homage performed to Louis for Normandy in 1151,   Luchaire, Actes de Louis VII, no. 342.   Actes Henri II, i, 194 ; Torigni, 196–7.   See p. 54 n. 2 below.   Torigni, 198.   J. Martindale, ‘ “An Unfinished Business” : Angevin Politics and the Siege of Toulouse, 1159’, ANS, 23 (2000), 115–54.

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and also of the oath of fidelity he had given in 1158. While interpretations of each ceremony were various, Henry acknowledged that an oath of fidelity did at least require its performer to refrain from inflicting damage on his lord, if his lord had not attacked him. If Henry had besieged Toulouse while Louis was in the town, he would have set an example of perfidy to his own men. After some period of delay, in late September Henry accepted the inevitable and withdrew. This incident has perhaps too easily convinced some historians that the real weakness in the Angevin position was its clear recognition of Capetian lordship. While obviously there were some benefits in exercising lordship, its overall political advantages can be exaggerated. It is easy to underestimate the initial pressure on Louis VII in 1151 to accept homage for Normandy, Henry’s rights in which he had been distinctly reluctant to recognise ; or to minimize Henry’s advantages in military might, wealth and capacity for display, the last so well demonstrated at Mont-Saint-Michel in 1158 ; or on the other hand to underestimate the obligations of lordship. Louis was as bound to behave well as was Henry. He could not just exploit Henry’s retreat from Toulouse. He was obliged by convention (and also by a dangerous attack on the Norman Vexin) to make public acknowledgement of Henry’s loyalty and to reward it. The negotiations whereby the immediate crisis was ended required Henry to concede a one-year truce to Raymond V of Toulouse  somewhat of a face-saver, since the English king was unlikely to launch another expedition of a similar size very soon. Significantly, Henry was allowed to keep his (relatively small) gain of the county of Quercy, and no decision was made as to the rights and wrongs of the dispute over Toulouse. The terms of the peace hardly suggested an unqualified victory for Louis. And in the longer term, the French king was still under pressure to confer a favour on Henry because of his scrupulous behaviour before Toulouse. Although Raymond V had undoubtedly gained in the short term by Louis’s intervention, his gain may have seemed to him no more than a stay of execution because the truce was only for one year. It was perhaps unsurprising that, after his marriage to Constance broke up in bitterness, he abandoned his alliance with Louis and moved towards the protection of the emperor Frederick Barbarossa. In 1167 he met Henry II, by which time it was clear that the situation was changing   In omitting any reference to Roger of Howden’s contention that Henry did homage to Louis in 1155 for Aquitaine, Anjou and Maine, I follow the argument of John Gillingham, pp. 63–5, 70–73 below.   Henry had sworn to Louis in 1158, ‘I, King Henry, will safeguard the life, limbs and landed honour of the king of France as my lord, if he will secure for me as his fidelis my life and limbs and lands which he has settled upon me, for which I am his man.’ Actes Henri II, i, 195.   Cheyette, Ermengard, 260 ; Warren, Henry II, 85–7.  E.g. M. Aurell, L’Empire des Plantagenêt (Paris 2003), 18, 141–2.   See Power, The Norman Frontier, 346.  Eyton, Itinerary, 50.



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fast in Languedoc. In 1173, Raymond did homage for Toulouse to Henry and his son Richard at a splendid meeting at Limoges, where Henry showed off his other new southern allies, Humbert, count of Maurienne, the king of Navarre, and King Alfonso II of Aragon. While the wars that broke out in Languedoc in the next decade ruined much of the region’s prosperity, and Raymond’s loyalty to Henry wore thin, by the time of Henry’s death in 1189, effective French royal intervention in the south had long passed from memory. The defeat of Louis and Philip in that sphere by then seemed almost complete. No-one could at that time have foretold the total change of fortunes the Albigensian crusade was to bring. In the meantime, diplomacy in the north had created a new field on which to work out political relationships, a way in which Louis could pay back the debt he owed to Henry. Max Gluckmann, in his commentary on Evans-Pritchard’s classic study of the Nuer of the Sudan, recorded an explanation of a betrothal ceremony : ‘They are our enemies ; we marry them.’ It was a sentiment that both parties in the twelfth-century struggle would have recognised. Henry’s coronation as king of England had made his family attractive marriage material to the Capetians, who were becoming increasingly ambitious in their plans for their children. Louis had in 1158 thought an alliance desirable as part of his friendship pact. After the Toulouse affair, he needed to make a generous gesture. In May 1160, he therefore confirmed the arrangement made two years earlier in Paris. Louis’s daughter Margaret, aged three, was affianced to Henry’s five-year-old son Henry (the Younger), and part of the Vexin, the area around Gisors, was bestowed on Margaret as her dowry. Louis’s aim was to ensure long-term peace on the Norman border by settling the contentious area on the offspring of the marriage. In October 1160 the child prince Henry did homage to Louis for Normandy. The arrangements constituted a far-sighted move. The treaty marked what was probably the warmest moment in relations between the two parties. But it was destined to fail rapidly in its purpose of bringing harmony. When he made the arrangement, Louis anticipated a long period in which the children should grow to maturity before its terms could be implemented. Henry, on the other hand, almost immediately secured the approval of two papal legates and married the children in November of 1160. Louis, to his intense dismay, was faced with Henry’s immediate seizure of the Vexin, and his building of new castles across the territory. War loomed   For Raymond’s political interests, see Cheyette, Ermengard, 261–70.   On the marriage negotiations involved in these alliances, see Torigni, 247, 250 ; for the Iberian aspects, see T. Bisson, The Medieval Crown of Aragon (Oxford 1986), 36–7.   But if the controversial argument of P. Desportes, ‘Les Pairs de France et la couronne’, Revue historique, 572 (1989), 305–40, esp. 319, is accepted, then Louis’s supposed institution of the peers of France in 1179 was designed to bring Raymond back into the Capetian orbit.   M. Gluckman, Custom and Conflict in Africa (Oxford 1955), 12–13.   Actes Henri II, i, 251–3.   Torigni, 208–10.

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again, and although a peace of sorts was negotiated at Fréteval in October 1161, Louis understandably felt cheated. In 1164 John of Salisbury recorded Louis’s continuing worry about his daughter and his fear that further trouble might arise from the marriage. Henry’s stealing a march on Louis over the Vexin remained a sore point for the rest of the period under consideration. From then on, Henry regarded his gain as non-negotiable because it was in conformity with the terms of the 1160 treaty. Besides, it had belonged to his grandfather ; it should belong to him. He even claimed the whole of the county, not just the part mentioned in the treaty. But if the Vexin was crucial to Henry’s defence of Normandy, it was equally so to Louis’s defence of the royal demesne. The castle of Gisors in particular exercised a powerful grip on the imaginations of those at the French royal court. To have to surrender it long before a potential grandchild could be looked for to reduce the tension permanently on the borders was a harsh blow. Louis’s impotence in the face of Henry’s intransigence was a public-relations failure. His response probably struck his contemporaries as spineless. Even after the death of Henry the Younger in 1183, Louis’s successor Philip failed to wrest back the Vexin, despite his right to do so under the terms of the 1160 treaty. In 1186, Philip permitted his widowed half-sister Margaret to sell her rights in the Norman Vexin to Henry II, thus perpetuating the loss incurred in 1160. Some time was to elapse before the French king could right the wrong by annexing the Vexin, first in 1193 and then permanently in 1204. In the meantime, the cold war between the rivals was back in full force. Although Toulouse was the largest bone of contention between the rival kings, and the Vexin the one that gave rise to the greatest bitterness on each side, there were other, lesser issues, which became more important as time went on. Both Henry and Louis were sharp enough to see that the best way of enhancing their respective power bases was to extend their lordship into parts of France where the local power remained weak. Berry proved to be a natural magnet for their rivalry, since Louis had some control in the north and Henry acquired some in the south of the county through his marriage with Eleanor. In 1170, Henry argued that as duke of Aquitaine he should be lord of the archbishopric of Bourges. In 1177, Henry claimed, apparently with no justification whatever, that Alice was to bring with her as her dowry on her marriage to Richard the city of Bourges, an arrange  Duggan, Becket Correspondence, 71, no. 24.   Warren, Henry II, 145.   L. Landon, Itinerary of King Richard I (PRS ns 13, 1935), 225–6.   G. Devailly, Le Berry du Xe siècle au milieu du XIIIe : Étude politique, religieuse, sociale et économique (Paris/The Hague 1973), 351–416, esp. 405.   Ibid., 407.



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ment that would seriously have damaged Capetian interests. For Louis, Bourges represented both a favoured place of residence and an archiepiscopal see under his protection, as well as a buffer against Angevin lands to the south. He held on to it tenaciously, while also squeezing the count of Blois’s interests in the area. It was left to Philip Augustus, in 1187, to extend Capetian lands in Berry, and finally to secure the whole county long after Henry’s death. If the French king’s aims in Berry were initially limited to defending what his predecessors had held, and thwarting Henry’s expansionism there, in the Auvergne both Louis and Philip were more aggressive. A disputed succession to the county opened the door to Louis. He then strove to convert the protection he had offered to ecclesiastics in the Auvergne into lordship over the whole area, in defiance of what Henry saw as the ancestral rights of the dukes of Aquitaine there. Because Henry’s claims were upheld by most of the barons of the Auvergne, the Capetians were frustrated until the very end of Henry’s life. There was a story that Louis on his deathbed had asked Philip to avenge the wrong they had both suffered in the Auvergne. In the treaty concluded with Philip in 1189, Henry on his deathbed conceded lordship of the Auvergne to Philip. But Philip still faced the task of imposing that lordship by force on the barons of the region. It would be wrong to see any of these disputes as purely between the two crowned heads. Other lords, both lay and ecclesiastical, played their parts in the drama. For example, Louis VII’s intervention in Toulouse in 1159 was brought about by an appeal from count Raymond V, his then brother-in-law. But in all of them clear royal interests were involved. There was another category of disputes into which each party was drawn by the desire to embarrass the other, to show his rival in an unflattering light. In these matters, Louis and Philip had the obvious advantage over Henry, chiefly because Henry’s political affairs were far more complex than those of the French kings. Louis was sufficiently adept at the game to offer Henry very little scope to embarrass him. Warned by Mary, countess of Boulogne, that Henry ‘ceases not day or night to devise mischief against you’, he reacted swiftly to close any door of opportunity for his rival. In the early years of Philip Augustus’ reign, Henry enjoyed a fleeting moral superiority when, in 1182, he arbitrated between the young French king and Philip of Alsace, count of Flanders. But such moments were rare for him. On the other hand, Louis exploited to the full a whole series of Angevin crises, in which he intervened with skill to take what he artfully presented as the moral high ground.   Warren, Henry II, 145.   Devailly, Le Berry, 426–7.   Gerald, Concerning the Instruction of Princes, div. 3, chap. 2, p. 54.   P.-R. Gaussin, L’Abbaye de la Chaise-Dieu (1043–1518) (Paris 1962), 166–81.   Duggan, Becket Correspondence, i, 543, no. 112, n. 9.   See p. 52 n. 3 above.

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The first of these was the Becket affair. In the twelfth century, there was no way of putting down one’s enemies so effective as that of looking down on them from the height of religious impregnability. At this, Louis was a past master. If the early years of his reign had brought some serious clashes with churchmen, he had soon learned to present himself as the champion of the Church, a role in which his crusade of 1147–50 gave him immediate credibility. His father’s assistance to Paschal II and Innocent II had validated the title of ‘most Christian king’ which he increasingly used. He had himself been consecrated by Innocent II. From 1160, his support for Alexander III was almost unwavering. Initially in this regard he had no advantage over Henry, who recognised Alexander at the same time. But the Becket affair, which lasted six years and ended in the archbishop’s murder in December 1170, was to change that. As soon as Henry’s quarrel with Becket had reached its public climax at the Council of Northampton in 1164, followed by the archbishop’s flight from England, Henry wrote to Louis, giving his side of the story and imploring the French king not to extend hospitality to Becket. As late as the spring of 1166, Becket’s supporters were uncertain that any good would come from Louis. Although Louis was prepared to allow the Cistercian order to shelter the archbishop, he was cautious about throwing himself entirely on to the side of a man who did not yet enjoy full papal backing. Besides, he was at this point still observing the terms of the peace he had made with Henry at Fréteval in 1161. He was reluctant openly to follow the lead of Philip of Alsace, who had given total support to Becket. On the other hand, Henry’s treatment of Becket provided Louis with an excuse to foment the discord that Henry’s policies were producing elsewhere. Louis began to encourage would-be rebels against the Angevin to look for support in Paris, and as he saw the success of this policy, he became decisive in his advocacy of Becket’s cause. One of the more satisfying moments of his reign came in 1166 when he finally offered the fugitive archbishop refuge on the royal demesne and sustenance from the royal purse. At the same time, he encouraged the Welsh in their rebellion against Henry ; he approached the king of Scots as an ally, and he assisted the Bretons in their opposition to Henry’s repression. The success of this policy was evident even to Becket’s hitherto rather grudging friends. In a letter to Becket in 1167, Nicholas of Mont-Saint-Jacques recounted of Henry :

  Berges, Die Fürstenspiegel, 75, 76.   Actes Henri II, i, 385.   Duggan, Becket Correspondence, i, 467, no. 100 (John of Salisbury).   Ibid., 227, no. 55.   Torigni, 236–8.   Duggan, Becket Correspondence, i, 497, no. 108.



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Here, the realm of France opposes him ; there he is terrified of the Poitevins ; on one side he fears the Welsh ; on the other he is suspicious of the Bretons ; he fears even his own men and is nowhere secure. While this was hardly unbiased testimony, it conveyed a very real sense of Henry’s awareness that the coordination of opposition to him by Louis made him more open to overt criticism by the unallied. But it was a rather dangerous game that Louis was playing. Fomenting vassals against their lord set an example of bad kingship that Henry was quick to condemn. Besides, Louis had no success in the brief military campaign he undertook in Normandy in 1167. By 1168, the French king was forced to abandon his Welsh, Scots and Breton allies, which did nothing to enhance his popularity when he made a truce with Henry that did not include them. In the following four years, the pressure for a more permanent peace between the French and the English kings came from Henry. He was wearied by rebellions, anxious to establish clear arrangements about the succession to his various lands, and wanted to have Henry the Young crowned. Louis, appreciating his dilemma, determined to exploit his opportunity to the full. He encouraged the discontent of Henry the Young over the marriage arrangements made for his brother John, and insisted that no permanent peace could be negotiated that did not involve a settlement of the Becket dispute. He criticised Henry for the other rebellions he had aroused. In other words, Louis posed as justice personified, rebuking his rival for all his failings. He listened with approbation to those who condemned the Angevins as children of war in contrast to the pacific Capetians. And, as Alexander slowly came around to unqualified support for Becket, Louis increasingly resumed the traditional Capetian role as the champion of the Church, now opposing a rival who stood in serious danger of excommunication. Henry had to bring him to the negotiating table by launching attacks on his vassals from the borders of Normandy. At the peace talks held in Montmirail in January 1169, there was a real attempt to sort out all the main political difficulties of western Europe at the same time ; the major difficulties between Henry and Louis to be solved by Henry’s sons doing homage to Louis for the inheritances now promised to them ; Henry’s daughter Margaret being crowned with her husband Henry the Young, and Richard marrying Alice. Lewis Warren thought that these arrangements might have changed the face of French politics for good, had they not subsequently been sabotaged by Becket, who refused his part in the peace, and without whose assistance neither Henry nor Margaret could be crowned in

  Ibid., 623, no. 132.   Torigni, 240.   Aurell, L’Empire des Plantaganêt, 121–2.   Warren, Henry II, 497.

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accordance with tradition. Yet Louis’s commitment to peace at this time seems not to have been very strong. Admittedly, he immediately expressed his irritation with Becket for upsetting the arrangements. But shortly afterwards he forgave him and continued his hostility towards Henry. From 1170 onwards, Louis’s distrust of Henry was fanned, first by Becket’s murder, and then by the grievances of Henry’s own sons. The violent quarrels that broke out between father and sons (and among the sons themselves) naturally generated stories about the demonic origins of the Angevins. From 1169 until his miserable death two decades later, Henry was plagued by his failure to satisfy his sons’ ambitions. On every occasion, they found support in Paris, where their lord expressed his anxiety to see what he called their legitimate demands met. There was a certain irony in Louis’s having to side with his ex-wife, Eleanor, in this regard. He was reasonably discreet in his assistance ; he always offered verbal and sometimes military support ; but he did not usually take to the field himself in pursuit of the sons’ aims. The exception to this rule was during the great rebellion of 1173, when the anger of the sons against their father was supported by a number of barons in different parts of Henry’s dominion. On this occasion, Louis did act unequivocally, declaring Henry’s eldest son, Henry the Young, to be the true king, and then leading the army himself in an attempt to capture Rouen, whence he was forced to retreat hastily as Henry himself brought up an opposing army. Louis’s defeat taught him caution. His successor Philip was less inhibited. He openly assisted Henry the Young in his rebellion of 1183. After Henry the Young’s death, Philip switched his support to Geoffrey, count of Brittany, in 1186 ; and finally he allied with Richard, count of Poitou. It was at the hands of a combined assault of Richard and Philip that Henry was in the end humiliated, just a few weeks before his death in 1189. Defining the proper role for the heir to the throne has been a permanent headache in English constitutional history. But it has rarely assumed the significance that it did under Henry II, because usually there is not another external party to the dispute in whose interests it is to keep the flame of anger burning in the soul of the heir. Louis was clever in interpreting the role of an overlord in a paternalistic way : he justified his interference in terms of his duty to offer redress to those who suffered at the hands of his vassal. This was very galling for Henry. But if Henry’s sons had not been willing to accept Louis’s paternalism, the relationship would not have worked in Louis’s favour. Richard’s very different attitude towards Philip, once Henry was dead, is indicative of the highly personal quality of the   Warren, Henry II, 108–10.  Y. Sassier, Louis VII (Paris 1991), 394–5.   For an account of the 1173–4 rebellion, see J. Gillingham, Richard I (New Haven/London 1999), 41–51.   Warren, Henry II, 118.



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tie. Neither Louis nor (at least initially) Philip had the power to enforce lordship on Henry or his sons in the way in which the Angevins could enforce lordship on their own vassals. For military strength the French kings substituted kindly concern. The seeds of this concern only flourished because they fell on a soil of frustrated ambition and lack of trust. Henry’s Achilles heel lay not so much in the homage he paid to the king of France as in his inability to work with his sons and their mother. In 1164, John of Salisbury remarked ‘The French fear our king and hate him ; but so far as they are concerned, he can sleep at night.’ Frustrating though it was for Becket’s supporters, this was normally true also of the French king. Louis preferred to put diplomatic pressure on Henry, to support the military initiatives of others rather than to fight himself, because he knew what the result would be. When he forgot that lesson in the excitement of the great rebellion of 1173, it was rapidly called to his mind in the following year, by which time Henry’s complete victory over the rebels was obvious to all. Louis had to bear humiliating losses in the Vexin, in Berry, in the Auvergne, and in Languedoc. Briefly comforted by the hope that his daughters’ children would regain much that he had lost, he lived to acknowledge that this would be unlikely. In the last years of his life, he looked to papal legations and to arbitration to acquire what he believed was his right. But the 1177 peace of Ivry failed to work in his favour, either in Berry or in the Auvergne. As he lay dying in 1180, he must have felt he had no victories worth mentioning to chalk up to his credit. All his determined exploitation of Henry’s weak points had yielded no solid advantage. He was as hemmed in by his mighty neighbour in 1180 as he had been in 1156. Yet this has not been the general verdict of historians on Louis. He has been credited with a propaganda victory over the Angevins, which made it possible for his less inhibited son, Philip, to turn the tables. It is certainly true that Louis contributed much to the relatively prosperous financial situation in which Philip found himself when he became king in 1180. It is also true that at that point the French king’s reputation, both within France and in Europe, was higher than his strictly political successes deserved. Nevertheless, the real factor in the change of fortune was a change of strategy. The young Philip had no use for the patience and guile that had marked his father’s handling of the Angevin problem. A young man in a hurry, he faced in Henry an exhausted and increasingly disillusioned old man. Philip’s early successes over the duke of Burgundy and the count of Flanders gave him the confidence to launch an open attack against   Gillingham, Richard I, 123.   Duggan, Becket Correspondence, i, 71, no. 24. On p. 77 of the same letter, John of Salisbury states : ‘I fear that the French king is a staff of broken reed’ (‘baculus arundineus’, cf. Isa. 36 : 6).   Actes Henri II, ii, 60–62.   J. F. Benton, ‘The Revenue of Louis VII’, Speculum, 42 (1967), 281–344.   See Desportes, ‘Les Pairs de France’, esp. 319.

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Henry in 1186. After the death of Geoffrey, count of Brittany, he challenged Henry’s control of Brittany and threatened to invade Normandy if Richard did not retreat from Toulouse. Therefore the last two years of Henry’s reign offered a sharp contrast with almost all that had gone before. The cold war gave way to open military conflict ; a conflict that, for the first time in his life, Henry was to lose, as he also lost the loyalty of both his surviving sons, Richard and John. Like Simon de Montfort at the battle of Evesham, Henry will have looked on his lord Philip and his son Richard as they swept to victory, and reflected that they had learned their winning tactics from him. In many ways, Philip Augustus was to prove to be Henry’s, rather than his father’s, true successor on the European stage when, using his new-found financial and military power, he recreated the bonds of lordship to reflect his own desires. But, unlike Henry, he had no brothers and only one son born of a marriage recognised by the church. Contrary to all normal twelfth-century reckonings, and almost certainly without realising its significance himself, Philip was to demonstrate the value to an ambitious king of the possession of a relatively small nuclear family.

  J. Richard, Les Ducs de Bourgogne et la formation du duché du XIe au XIVe siècle (Paris 1954), 162–4 ; J. W. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus : Foundations of French Royal Power in the Middle Ages (Berkeley/Los Angeles 1986), 17–19.

John Gillingham

Doing Homage to the King of France

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ore than a hundred years ago, Ferdinand Lot drew attention to what he called the strange spectacle of Henry II doing homage to Louis VII in 1156 : ‘de voir le plus puissant souverain de l’Europe faire hommage de ses possessions continentals au roitelet de Paris’. It was, he felt, difficult to see the reasons for Henry’s condescension. This is all the more curious because we have it on the authority of one of the king’s own clerks that Henry II thought it inappropriate for a king to do homage. The announcement of the agreement made on 30 September 1174 between Henry and his three eldest sons after the end of their rebellion included the information that the Young King had wanted to do homage to his father, but his father refused to accept it because young Henry was a king (‘quia rex erat’). In the early 1970s Warren Hollister and Tom Keefe made explicit what some earlier historians had implied when they argued that by doing homage for all his continental possessions, Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine, Henry ensured that Louis did not support the claims to Anjou made by his younger brother Geoffrey and was thus able rapidly to overcome Geoffrey’s resistance. But by that same ritual Henry II became ‘England’s first crowned king to do homage to a king of France’. For Hollister, the ‘precedent-shattering’ homage of 1156 ‘marks the death of the Anglo-Norman regnum’. ‘Whereas homage to France had been an unacceptable infringement on Henry I’s authority on the I owe debts of gratitude to Jean Dunbabin and Matthew Strickland for their kindness in reading a draft of this paper ; to Ian Short for references and advice on texts in French ; to Judith Everard for a copy of her as yet unpublished itinerary of Henry II ; and to Nicholas Vincent for improved copies of some of the acta cited here.   F. Lot, Fidèles ou vassaux ? Essai sur la nature juridique du lien qui unissait les grands vassaux à la royauté depuis le milieu du IXe jusqu’ à la fin du XIIe siècle (Paris 1904), 213. In many respects this still remains the most meticulous analysis of the evidence.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 79 ; Howden, Chronica, ii, 69. Yet at the same time Henry II had no objections to Richard and Geoffrey becoming his men.   C. W. Hollister and T. K. Keefe, ‘The Making of the Angevin Empire’, Journal of British Studies, 12 (1973), repr. in Hollister, Monarchy, Magnates and Institutions in the Anglo-Norman World (London 1986), 247–71, at 268–71 ; cf. Warren, Henry II, 65.

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continent, it was the foundation of Henry II’s.’ In Hollister’s eyes, this alleged tactical ploy was a serious strategic mistake : ‘From the beginning the Angevin kings had, for their own purposes, recognized the Capetian suzerainty ; in the end it was the instrument of their undoing.’ Ever since then this has been the orthodoxy. This has been most recently expressed by David Carpenter : Henry II possessed far wider dominions than his predecessors, but far more than they, he recognised the overlordship of the king of France. Henry I had never performed personal homage to the French king. Henry II did so on several occasions, the first as crowned king in 1156. His motives were pragmatic ; in 1156 they were to shut out his brother Geoffrey, who had claims to a share of the Angevin dominions. But the result was that Henry was now restricted by the oath of loyalty he had sworn, and punishable by forfeiture of his fiefs for its breach. Under his son John, that is exactly what happened. As François Neveux put it, the homage of 1156 was ‘heavy with consequences for the future’. In this essay one of the things I shall argue is that it had no consequences, because it never happened. The homage of 1156 has been accorded such significance in part because it came to be seen as one step within a line of apparently logical and inexorable twelfth-century development that had been adumbrated by Jean-François Lemarignier in his influential book, Recherches sur l’hommage en marche et les frontières féodales (1945). In this he distinguished hommage de paix from hommage vassalique. The former was as much an act symbolising peace between equals as one symbolising subordination ; hence it typically took place on the frontier between the two rulers who were making peace  it was hommage en marche. In vassalic homage, by contrast, the homage was linked to the grant of a fief, and although it too could be performed on the frontier, increasingly often the man had to travel to the lord’s residence ; the subordination of the man to his lord was more pronounced. Lemarignier argued that there was a tendency for homage to become more vassalic in character in the twelfth century and that the kings of France began to insist that homage be done more frequently, not only whenever peace was made but also whenever there was a new lord or a new man. In combination, he argued, these two developments brought Franco-Angevin relations to the point at which, in 1202, the king of France could proclaim the confiscation of all John’s fiefs in   C. W. Hollister, ‘Normandy, France and the Anglo-Norman regnum’, Speculum, 51 (1976), 202–42, repr. in Monarchy, Magnates and Institutions, 17–57, at 50, 54, 56. As John Le Patourel put it, ‘The Norman Conquest, 1066, 1106, 1154 ?’, ANS, 1 (1979), 118, the ‘feudal’ dependence of the lands in France was the Angevin Empire’s ‘fatal weakness’.   D. Carpenter, The Struggle for Mastery : Britain, 1066–1284 (Oxford 2003), 193–4.   F. Neveux, La Normandie des ducs aux rois Xe–XIIe siècle (Rennes 1998), 525.



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France on the grounds that he had failed to keep his promise to answer charges in Philip’s court. Lemarignier’s theory of a significant shift from hommage de paix to hommage vassalique has been widely accepted. It is generally agreed that in the tenth and eleventh centuries, as Geoffrey Koziol put it, ‘the Norman dukes usually did not even perform a real homage to the kings of France, but only an hommage de paix, which symbolised a pact of alliance between de facto equals’. We might have expected that Norman dukes who were also kings of England would do no more than this. Indeed, according to William of Malmesbury, Henry I as a sovereign prince had been too proud to pay homage at all. Instead in 1120 he had his son and heir, William Adelin, do homage to Louis VI. Even that supposedly feeble king, Stephen, did not do homage for Normandy ; instead, in 1137, Louis VI accepted the homage of Stephen’s son Eustace. The first indication of the trend towards vassalic homage is said to have occurred in 1140, when Eustace did homage to the new king of France, Louis VII. By doing so he ‘conformed to the rule that homage should be renewed at the accession of a new suzerain . . . The duchy was coming to be regarded as a fief in a fuller sense, and held of the king of France. The next step in this progression was taken in 1151 when Duke Henry . . . did liege homage for the duchy and did it in Paris where his suzerain had his residence.’ The third step was then the precedent-shattering homage of 1156. According to Lemarignier, followed by Hollister, more steps followed when Henry II did homage twice more, in 1169 to Louis VII again, then in 1183 to his new suzerain, Philip Augustus. Henry, on this orthodox version of events, did homage on no less than four occasions, three times after he had been anointed king of England ; indeed in July 1189, just two days before he died, he even promised to do homage for a fifth time. After Henry II’s death the process is said to have continued. Richard is alleged to have repeated twice, first in July 1189 and again in December 1195, this time as king, the homage he had undoubtedly sworn in 1188. Then John as king repeated in May 1200 the homage he had sworn in 1193 when in rebellion against his older   J.-F. Lemarignier, Recherches sur l’hommage en marche et les frontières féodales (Lille 1945), 92–113, 122–5. His focus, however, on the frontier between Normandy and Capetian France led to some oddities, among them his curious and very cursory treatment of the meetings of kings in 1169 and 1195, ibid., 101, 107.   In his view the hommage de paix ‘solved the problem of obtaining a vassal’s loyalty by requiring none’ ; G. Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor : Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France (Ithaca, NY, 1992), 6, 155. This distinction is retained in J. A. Everard and J. C. Holt, Jersey, 1204 (London 2004), 18–19, 36.   Gesta Regum, 758 (chap. 419) : ‘hominium quod ipse pro culmine imperii fastidiret facere’.   J. Le Patourel, The Norman Empire (Oxford 1976), 220. Lemarignier, Recherches, 93, saw the homage of 1140 as ‘full application of classic feudal rules’.   Lemarignier, Recherches, 101–2, 105–7 ; Hollister, ‘Normandy, France’, 50, 55 ; Le Patourel, Norman Empire, 220. On what may have happened in 1189 and 1195, see pp. 80–81, 83 n. 1 below.

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brother. It is hardly surprising that Martin Aurell has recently estimated that the three Angevin kings submitted to the ‘somewhat humiliating ceremony of vassalage’ on about a dozen occasions. On this interpretation, although the first step in the line of development is said to have taken place in 1140, it was clearly Henry’s choices and actions that marked the crucial shift. Indeed the primary significance of Henry’s readiness to do homage and travel to his lord’s court becomes all the greater in the light of a persuasive argument recently advanced by Klaus van Eickels. He has pointed out that the only evidence for the generally accepted notion of an act of homage in 1140 is a passage in the chronicle of Gervase of Canterbury, written about half a century after the event. According to this, Eustace married Constance sister of King Louis in February 1140, received the duchy of Normandy and did homage for it to the king of France. No contemporary source mentions Eustace doing homage in 1140, although John of Worcester, Henry of Huntingdon and Robert of Torigni all referred to his marriage in that year. By contrast the homage of 1137 is well attested ; Henry of Huntingdon and, following him, Robert of Torigni both mention it, and so (though in oblique terms) does Orderic. If we turn back to Gervase’s own entry for 1137 we find nothing at all about Eustace. Indeed Gervase mentioned him for the first time under the year 1140, and the likelihood is that when he introduced the figure of Eustace to his readers he chose to add the sentence referring to Eustace’s homage for Normandy, which he knew about from his reading of Henry of Huntingdon. That he did so in a way that created the impression that it occurred in the same year as the marriage, rather than three   It was even rumoured that in 1193 he did homage for England : Howden, Chronica, iii, 204 ; iv, 94–5, 106–7, 114–15.   M. Aurell, L’Empire des Plantagenêt, 1154–1224 (Paris 2003), 138 : ‘Les trois premiers rois angevins doivent, en effet, se plier au cérémonial, quelque peu humiliant, de l’entrée en vassalité. Ils rendent ainsi une dizaine de fois l’hommage au roi de France pour leurs principautés continentales, . . . En cela, ils font preuve d’une subordination accrue en comparaison de la dynastie normande, bien plus économe en témoignages de vassalité.’   K. van Eickels, Vom inszenierten Konsens zum systematisierten Konflikt : Die englische-französischen Be­ ziehungen und ihre Wahrnehmung an der Wende vom Hoch- zum Spätmittelalter (Stuttgart 2002), 318.   Gervase, i, 112 : ‘Mense Februario desponsavit Eustachius filius regis Stephani sororem regis Franciae Lodovici, nomine Constantiam, presente matre sua regina Angliae Adeliza aliisque nobilibus viris utriusque regni in partibus transmarinis. Suscepit etiam idem Eustachius ducatum Normanniae, indeque regi Franciae fecit homagium.’   John of Worcester, iii, 284 ; Huntingdon, 720 ; Torigni, 136 ; Orderic, vi, 514 n. 6.   Huntingdon, 708 : ‘Concordiam cum rege Francorum composuit, et Eustacius filius eius homo regis Francorum effectus est de Normannia, que Francorum adiacet imperio.’ Cf. Torigni, 132 ; Orderic, vi, 482. On Orderic’s reluctance to mention the homage owed to kings of France, see M. Chibnall, ‘Anglo-French Relations in the Work of Orderic Vitalis’, in Documenting the Past, ed. J. S. Hamilton and P. J. Bradley (Woodbridge 1989), 5–19. The flaw in the line of reasoning that placed the 1137 homage at Grossœuvre was pointed out by R. Helmerichs, ‘King Stephen’s Norman Itinerary’, HSJ, 5 (1993), 94 n. 29.



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years earlier, probably mattered little so far as he was concerned. It all happened, after all, fifty years ago. But whatever was going through Gervase’s mind, the fact remains that there is no contemporary evidence for homage by Eustace in 1140. The rot  if that is what it was  was undoubtedly started by Henry II. In this paper I shall further argue that the whole notion of a line of development is a figment of the imagination of historians : just one aspect of the tyranny of feudalism, the exaggerated importance given to the notion that homage was the cement that held kingdoms together. Homage was certainly important in the twelfth century, but this was because it usually functioned as a public recognition of the rights of an heir. It is worth noting what happened within a year of Henry II refusing to accept his son Henry’s homage ‘quia rex erat’. According to the account written in the name of the old king, and read out in the presence of both kings in an assembly at Westminster in May 1175, My son King Henry . . . prostrated himself on the ground at my feet, tearfully asking me to accept his homage and fealty as I had done in the case of his brothers ; saying that if I did not, he would never be able to believe that I had remitted my indignation against him. Then I, moved by mercy and seeing that he spoke from the heart, put aside my anger against him, received him back into my grace and accepted homage and fealty from him. Here the person who wanted the homage was the man, not the lord. It was he, not his lord, who felt he had much to gain from a ritual that publicly proclaimed his right to succeed. Why should a lord accept the homage of an heir ? Once he had done so he had lost some freedom of manoeuvre : a useful card in the game of diplomacy. This is what happened in 1151 when, according to Robert of Torigni, Henry did homage to Louis VII ‘de ducatu Normanniae’. In Torigni’s eyes, Henry had been duke since the previous year when his father gave him his inheritance from  Nor indeed for a homage in February 1141, as stated in M. Pacaut, Louis VII et son royaume (Paris 1964), 42.   One major change in relations with the king of France that Henry II did initiate (and about which a book could be written, so there is no room to develop the point here) is in the frequency of ‘summit meetings’. Five such meetings are recorded during the 88 years between 1066 and 1154 ; more than sixty in the 50 years up to 1204. The sources are not good enough for us to be certain of the precise number of meetings, but there was evidently a massive change of gear, seemingly kickstarted by the exchange of ‘state visits’ in 1158 (on which see p. 74 n. 1 below).   To take just one example of comment on homage, Y. Carré, Le Baiser sur la bouche au Moyen Âge : rites, symboles, mentalités à travers les textes et les images, XIe–XVe siècles (Paris 1992), 26 : ‘Ce rituel joue de plus en plus un rôle majeur aux XIe–XIIIe siècles, car il genère la principale structure laique d’encadrement social : le réseau feodo-vassalique.’   Diceto, i, 400. Roger of Howden’s account presumably made use of this official version : Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 82–3.   This point has been well made by Van Eickels, Vom inszenierten Konsens, 312–24, 333–4.

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his mother ; he was to become count of Anjou after his father’s death, when the Angevins gave him their fealty. Evidently this admirer of Henry II did not think that the latter’s princely authority depended upon him doing homage to the king of France. It is not clear whether or not this was the first time that the duke entered royal territory in order to do homage. If it was, it may have been no more than a courtesy extended to a king who had recently been ill. But what is undoubtedly significant about Henry’s homage of 1151 is that it was done in the lifetime of his father, just as the homages of 1120 and 1137 had been, and that Robert of Torigni reported that father and son rejoiced as they returned from Paris. They had good reason to rejoice. In 1150, and indeed a few weeks earlier in 1151, Louis had been Eustace’s ally in attacks on Normandy. Henry’s homage meant that Louis publicly recognised him, and not Eustace, as the next duke of Normandy. The parallels with 1120 and 1137 are obvious. 1120 is a particularly illuminating episode, because it is clear that, having defeated Louis VI at Brémule, Henry I was in a strong position, able to force Louis VI to recognise his son, William Adelin, as the heir to Normandy rather than William Clito, Duke Robert’s son. According to the work traditionally known as the Chronicle of Hyde Abbey, Henry had wanted his son to do homage in 1114, but Louis had refused to accept it. Because he had already recognised William Clito’s claim, it would have been shameful had he done so. In 1120, he could refuse no longer, though it is striking that even after Brémule, at least according to this chronicler, Henry I had to pay him an annual pension as compensation for the shame, and the homage was performed not to Louis, but to his young son (presumably Philip, born 1116). It is significant that the assertion that Louis VI demanded homage and that Henry I, among others, refused it, relates to 1108–9, when Louis’s own succession to the throne was in doubt. The ritual that counted for something, that was worth the performance, was the public recognition of a lawful heir, whether that heir was the king or one of the king’s subjects. It was

  Torigni, 161–3.  Van Eickels, Vom inszenierten Konsens, 316, has raised the possibility that Eustace went to Paris in 1137 ; it looks as though Wace imagined that William the Bastard had been taken to Paris by his father where he became the king of France’s man : Wace, part 3, ll. 2971–6.   Liber Monasterii de Hyda, ed. E. Edwards (RS 45, 1866), 309. On the date and authorship of this work, see (pending her new edition) E. van Houts, ‘The Warenne View of the Past, 1066–1203’, ANS, 26 (2003/4), 103–21, at 110–13.   Liber monasteii de Hyda, 319 : ‘Cum rege quoque Francorum in se concordavit, censum statutum ex redditibus Anglie eidem singulis annis dare instituit, ita ut quod idem rex fidem quam Willelmo filio Roberti comitis, qui causa erat tocius discordie, fecerat irrumpere non audebat, filium suum puerum concederet Willelmo filio regis Henrici Normanniam reddere et de ea idem Willelmus eidem puero filio Regis Francorum debitam subieccionem faceret.’   Chronicon Sancti Petri Vivi Senonensis, ed. R.-H. Bautier (Paris 1979), 148 : ‘qui contra ius et fas denegabat facere hominium quod debebat et debet regibus Francorum’.



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this that was achieved in 1151, as it had been in 1120 and 1137. The author of the Historia gloriosi regis Ludovici, probably a monk of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, writing in the early 1170s, put the best gloss possible on it from the Capetian point of view. According to this account, Geoffrey and Henry went to Louis and complained about Stephen’s usurpation of England and Normandy, so Louis, wishing to see things arranged justly and according to reason, ‘sicut regiam maiestatem condecet’, invaded Normandy with a big army, captured the duchy and gave it to Henry, ‘et eum pro eadem terra in hominium ligium accepit’. In passing it should also be noted that we have no explicit evidence that Geoffrey ever did homage as duke of Normandy. Most modern authors simply assume that Geoffrey must have done. Ferdinand Lot at least discussed the question. He came to the conclusion that although no source actually mentions homage, there was no doubt that Geoffrey must have done it after he captured Rouen in 1144. His clinching argument was that, since Geoffrey did not do homage in 1151, he must have done it in 1144. But this was simultaneously to think in terms of ‘feudal law’ and to forget recent Norman history. Neither of the two previous dukes of Normandy, Henry I or Stephen, had done homage themselves, but both had been able to ensure that their eldest sons did. Might Geoffrey have been doing no more than following in their footsteps ? Both a Norman source, Torigni, and a Capetian one, the Historia gloriosi regis Ludovici, record Henry’s homage for Normandy, but say nothing about Geoffrey doing homage. As duke of Normandy, Geoffrey, like Henry I and Stephen before him, owed allegiance and loyalty to the king of France, whether or not he went through a ritual act of homage. If he had done homage in 1144, it would have changed little. Indeed Louis VII may well have preferred simply to win, as he did, the great prize of Gisors and the Vexin, and then, by not taking Geoffrey’s homage, to keep his options open.

  ‘It must therefore have been a bitter pill for Louis VII to swallow’ ; Dunbabin, p. 48 above.   On this see G. Spiegel, The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-Denis (Brookline, ma, 1978), 49–52.   Historia Ludovici VII, ed. A. Molinier (Paris 1887), 161. This version found its way into English chronicles : Ralph of Coggeshall, Chronicon Anglicanum, ed. J. Stevenson (RS 66, 1875), 12 ; Chronica Monasterii de Melsa, ed. E. A. Bond, 3 vols. (RS 43, 1866–8), i, 129–30.   Lot, Fidèles, 204. Subsequent authors simply followed Lot, e.g. J. Chartrou, L’Anjou de 1109 à 1151 : Foulque de Jérusalem et Geoffroi Plantegenêt (Paris 1928), 65. Homage is not discussed in the most recent account of Geoffrey’s takeover : D. Power, The Norman Frontier in the Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Centuries (Cambridge 2004), 392–3.   In a letter to Suger, Geoffrey referred to Louis, then absent on crusade, as his lord : RHF, xv, 494. For the general point, see Van Eickels, Vom inszenierten Konsens, 301–5, and pp. 74–5 below. Later medieval discussions indicate that a man who did homage was not expected to be any more loyal to his lord than a man who served for wages. See J. R. Major, ‘“Bastard Feudalism” and the Kiss : Changing Social Mores in Late Medieval and Early Modern France’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 17 (1987), 509–35, at 533–4.

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So far as I know all historians, myself included, have hitherto accepted as fact the notion that Henry II met King Louis at the border of Normandy in 1156 and there did homage for Normandy, Aquitaine, Anjou, Maine and Touraine. The evidence always cited in support of the belief that King Henry did homage to King Louis is a passage in the chronicle of Roger of Howden that explicitly says that he did : Anno gratie MCLV, qui erat primus annus regni regis Henrici filii Matildis imperatricis . . . Deinde in Normanniam transfretavit, et homagium fecit Ludovico regi Francorum de Normannia, et Aquitania et Andegavia et Cenomannia et Turonica, et de omnibus earum pertinentiis . . . Yet, as we see, Roger placed this act of homage in 1155, and in fact Henry spent the whole of 1155 in England. Given Howden’s reputation as a meticulous and reliable chronicler, it is perhaps not surprising that historians should have tried to retain this piece of information, while redating it to February 1156, when, as is known from the chronicle of Robert of Torigni, there was a meeting between Henry II and Louis VII. But this is not the only mistake Howden made in this part of his chronicle. He thought that in 1156 Henry returned to England. In fact Henry travelled in the opposite direction and, after crossing from Dover to Wissant in January, spent the whole year in France, in Normandy, in Anjou, and then on to Limoges and Bordeaux for Christmas. According to Howden, Louis divorced Eleanor in 1154. In fact it was in 1152. According to Howden, Stephen’s son Eustace was dead by 1148 ; in fact he died in 1153. There are so many mistakes in this part of his chronicle that it is clearly dangerous to take on trust any item of information for which there is no supporting evidence. The fact is, of course, that Howden’s reputation as a reliable chronicler is based on his coverage of the years from 1170 onwards. He entered royal service soon after Christmas 1169 and in his Gesta Regis Henrici Secundi kept a near-

  In addition to those already noted, see R.-H. Bautier, ‘Le Traité d’Azay et la mort de Henri II Plantagenêt : Un Tournant dans la première guerre de Cent ans entre Capétiens et Plantagenêt (juillet 1189)’, in his Études sur la France capétienne (Aldershot 1992), v, 17 ; Chibnall, ‘Anglo-French Relations’, 10 ; Pacaut, Louis VII, 181 ; Van Eickels, Vom inszenierten Konsens, 335, though he notes that ‘strikingly’ it is mentioned only by Howden and not by Torigni ; E. M. Hallam and J. Everard, Capetian France, 987–1328, 2nd edn (Harlow 2001), 64 ; J. Ehlers, H. Müller and B. Schneidmüller, Die französischen Könige des Mittelalters (Munich 1996), 139, 147 ; J. Gillingham, The Angevin Empire, 2nd edn (London 2001), 21   Howden, Chronica, i, 215. On the significance of his inclusion of the Touraine, see p. 72 n. 2 below.   Torigni, 186 : ‘locutus est cum rege Francorum Ludovico in confinio Normanniae et Franciae’.   Howden, Chronica, i, 215 : ‘Anno gratiae MoCoLoVI., qui erat secundus annus regni Regis Henrici filii Matildis imperatricis. Idem Henricus rediit de Normannia in Angliam.’   Another mistake was to place Richard’s betrothal to Alice in 1161 instead of 1169 ; ibid., 210–11, 213–14, 218.



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contemporary record of events. He did not turn to composing a narrative of events before Christmas 1169 until, in the 1190s, he composed his Chronica. In the case of the episodes at issue here this means he was writing some forty years after the events. Up until 1148 the Chronica is an almost  though not quite  verbatim copy of the northern Historia post Bedam, but from then until 1163 (the outbreak of the Becket dispute), he clearly had no written sources before him apart from the Melrose Chronicle. This Anglo-Scottish chronicle says nothing about Henry doing homage to Louis at any date in the 1150s. Roger himself did not mention the homage at Paris in 1151. Presumably he did not know of it, and in consequence he invented the story of Henry doing homage in 1155 because he simply assumed that homage must have been done, and the first year of Henry’s reign was the natural place in which to put it. What is clear is that on this matter Howden’s testimony is utterly worthless, except as evidence of the kind of thing someone in the 1190s who did not know of the homage of 1151 thought would have happened  though this, of course, has a significance of its own. If we subtract Howden’s testimony then there is no evidence whatever that King Henry did homage in 1155 or 1156. Indeed some that he did not. It is striking, for example, that the author of the Historia gloriosi regis Ludovici, an author who calls Henry ‘perfidus’ and refers to ‘his accustomed trickery in the manner of a deceitful fox’, never mentions such a homage, though it would have strengthened his case had he done so. If pressed we might argue that a monk writing in the 1170s was poorly informed about events in the 1150s  though he knew about the homage Henry did before he became king  but the same cannot be said of John of Salisbury. John’s service to Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury means that he was well informed, indeed often himself at the centre of the events of that decade. It is to his account of what happened in 1169 that I now turn, both for what it has to tell us about the still quite widely held belief that Henry II did homage again in 1169, and for what it implies about the alleged homage of 1156. The Becket dispute means that the Epiphany 1169 meeting between Henry II and Louis VII at Montmirail-en-Brie is an exceptionally well-recorded one,   On this, see J. Gillingham, ‘Writing the Biography of Roger of Howden, King’s Clerk and Chronicler’, in Writing Medieval Biography : Essays in Honour of Frank Barlow, ed. D. Bates, J. Crick and S. Hamilton (Woodbridge 2006), 207–20, at 212–14.   On this, see A. A. M. Duncan, ‘Sources and Uses of the Chronicle of Melrose’, in Kings, Clerics and Chronicles in Scotland 500–1297 : Essays in Honour of M. O. Anderson, ed. S. Taylor (Dublin 2000), 146–85.   Though Ralph de Diceto, who had a copy of Torigni, did refer to it. Indeed he evidently thought it was for Anjou too ; Diceto, i, 291.   Historia Ludovici, 161.   Hallam and Everard, Capetian France, 218 ; Hollister, ‘Normandy, France’, 50 ; Lemarignier, Recherches, 101 ; A. Duggan, Thomas Becket (London 2004), 150.

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described or referred to not only by Robert of Torigni and Gervase of Canterbury but also by eyewitnesses such as Herbert of Bosham, the papal commissioners, John of Salisbury and Becket himself. Inevitably most of these authors focused on the events that concerned Becket directly, but it is clear that the main purpose of the conference was to make peace between the kings. According to Stephen of Rouen, war had been declared at the end of an angry meeting at Gisors in 1167, when Louis ‘returned his homage’ to the king of England, announcing that the latter was no longer ‘his man’. By far the most detailed account of the conference at Montmirail is contained in John’s long letter to Bishop Bartholomew of Exeter, written only a few weeks later. One of the things this suggests is that, in 1169 at least, the restoration of peace via the renewal of a relationship of homage between lord and man was made publicly visible by a set of gestures different from those that accompanied the act of homage itself. John wrote, Although the illustrious English king had often and publicly sworn that he would never again return to the homage [se in hominium . . . non rediturum] of the most Christian king as long as he lived, he has listened to wiser counsel and changed his mind. On Epiphany last he came as a suppliant [supplex accessit] to the French king at Montmirail in the county of Chartres. He offered himself, his children, his lands, his resources, his treasures ; placed all under his judgement, to use or abuse as he would, to hold, to seize, give to whom he would as he liked, with no conditions stipulated or attached . . . Thus he returned to his homage [in hominium eius reversus est], with a corporal oath that he will keep faith with him as his lord, to whom he had done homage and fealty before he himself became a king [cui ante regnum suum hominium et fidelitatem fecerat], against all men, and will give him the aid and service due from a duke of Normandy to a king of France [obsequium quod regi Francorum Normannorum dux praestare debet]. On this they shook hands and embraced [dextras et oscula dederunt] . . . On the following day he produced his sons Henry and Richard : Henry did homage and fealty to the king of the French for the counties of Anjou and Maine (for the king himself remains in Count Theobald’s homage for Touraine) ; Richard did fealty and homage likewise and received the county of Poitou.   Draco Normannicus, bk II, chap. 10, l. 552, in Howlett, Chronicles ii, 680 : ‘Regem nunc hominem denegat suum.’ According to the prose summary at the head of the chapter, ‘Francorum rex ho­mi­ nium suum eidem regi reddidit’.   On the hominium debitum owed by counts of Anjou to the count of Blois, see Gesta Ambaziensium dominorum, in Chroniques des comtes d’Anjou et des seigneurs d’Amboise, ed. L. Halphen and R. Pou­ pardin (Paris 1913), 125 ; J. Boussard, Le Comté d’Anjou (Paris 1938), 70–71, 74–6. Note that Roger of Howden in the 1190s thought that Henry had done homage to Louis for the Touraine as well (see p. 70 above).   My translation is largely based on that by the editors of Letters of John of Salisbury, ii, 636–8 : ‘supplex accessit ; se, liberos, terras, vires et thesauros exponens, universa contulit in arbitrium eius



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As we see, John of Salisbury’s letter refers back to Henry II’s homage for Normandy ‘before he became king’ (i.e. in 1151), but not to an act of homage in 1155 or 1156. Why then have all modern historians taken Howden’s account of 1155/6 on trust ? Probably the conventional belief that ‘feudal ties’ were central to medieval political structures led them to assume that Henry must have done homage not just for Normandy but also, and explicitly, for his other French territories as well. French historians, for example, have traditionally placed so much weight on the notion of the lien vassalique as the force that kept France together under the king, that it is sometimes asserted that only after Henry II had done homage for Aquitaine in 1156 did the Aquitanians accept him as their lord. In fact, according to the Limousin chronicler Geoffrey de Vigeois, he had already been received ‘ut novus dux Aquitanorum’ at Limoges in the autumn of 1152. Thus although by the 1190s Roger of Howden himself evidently held the ‘modern’ assumption that Henry ‘must have’ done homage to Louis for all his lands in France, it would appear that no such consideration shaped the actions of the Aquitanians in the 1150s. At Montmirail Henry II emphatically recognised Louis VII as his lord, and did so in fulsome terms. This was part of his habitual style, a readiness to use obsequious words : a kind of deference that sometimes crossed the line between courtesy and hypocrisy. He no doubt calculated that no harm could be done by ut omnibus uteretur, abuteretur pro voluntate, retineret, auferret, daret quibus et quantum vellet pro libitu, nulla prorsus inserta vel adiecta conditione . . . Sic in hominium eius reversus est, fide corporaliter praestita quod ei tanquam domino, cui ante regnum suum hominium et fidelitatem fecerat, fidem servabit contra omnes homines eique praestabit auxilium, obsequium quod regi Francorum Normannorum dux praestare debet. Inde sibi dextras et oscula dederunt . . . Die vero sequenti filios suos adduxit Henricum et Ricardum, quorum primus hominium et fidelitatem regi Francorum fecit de comitatibus Andegavensi et Cenomanensi (nam ipse rex in hominio comitis Theobaldi pro Turonensi remanet), alter vero praestita fidelitate similiter et hominio Pictavensem recepit comitatum.’   In the case of historians long sceptical of feudalism such as myself, the reason was simply a lazy acceptance of general opinion. Luckily (and definitely more by luck than judgement), my downplaying of the significance of homage in the fall of the Angevin empire omitted all mention of 1156 ; Gillingham, Angevin Empire, 123–5.  Y. Sassier, Louis VII (Paris 1991), 272–3 ; Neveux, La Normandie, 525 ; J. Favier, Les Plantagenêts (Paris 2004), 235.   Geoffrey of Vigeois, Chronica, in Novae Bibliothecae Manuscriptorum Librorum, ed. P. Labbe, 2 vols. (Paris 1657), ii, 308.   Thus, probably in 1164, he wrote to Louis, ‘I am ready to obey your will in all things, and have decided, God willing, to cross the sea in the near future in order to serve you, where and as much as pleases you, my dearest lord, in all ways and with the utmost diligence’ ; Actes Henri II, i, 388, no. 241. This was one of a number of similar letters contained in the archive of Louis VII’s chancellor Hugh de Champfleury. On his career and these letters, see G. Teske, Die Briefsammlungen des 12. Jahrhunderts in St. Viktor Paris (Bonn 1993), 115–40, 156–60. Evidence from the late 1170s shows Henry

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calling his lord his lord, and that much might be gained. Nothing demonstrates this more clearly than Henry’s conduct during the exchange of ‘state visits’ in 1158, when he simultaneously displayed both his courtesy and his enormous wealth. In these years he achieved some extraordinary diplomatic successes, above all in persuading his wife’s former husband, Louis VII, not only to agree to the marriage between their children, young Henry and Margaret, but also to hand over Margaret to his custody. When, as a consequence of the marriage, he took possession of the Vexin in 1160, his castles were within fifty kilometres of Paris. If Louis were to have no sons, who would be the next king of France ? In this situation scrupulous observance of the courtesies made very good sense. It was of a piece with this that, in 1169, he swore to give Louis the aid and service due from a duke of Normandy to a king of France (‘eique praestabit auxilium, obsequium quod regi Francorum Normannorum dux praestare debet’). Such vague words were cheap, since the rulers of Normandy had always acknowledged that they owed some kind of service to the kings of France. Some twelfth-century voices denied this : in particular the anonymous author of the Brevis Relatio, and in passages where they followed him, Robert of Torigni and Wace, also Stephen of Rouen. It is unlikely, however, that the dukes themselves ever seriously tried continuing to address Louis in the same deferential tone ; Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 198. It is clear that many letters were written in Henry’s name which the recipients were flattered to preserve. See K. Leyser, ‘Frederick Barbarossa, Henry II and the hand of St James’, EHR, 90 (1975), 481–506.   In September 1158, Henry spent one night in Paris ; two months later Louis VII visited Évreux, Neubourg, Mont-Saint-Michel, Bayeux, Caen and Rouen. Theoretically Louis remained in his kingdom, but it is clear that he was the honoured guest being given a guided tour of the wealth of Normandy. Louis was received again as a guest, this time in England, in 1179. He undoubtedly benefitted a great deal more from Henry’s hospitality than Henry did from his. To this extent it seems necessary to quaify views such as that of Aurell, L’Empire, 142 : ‘les fréquents voyages et séjours d’Henri II et ses fils à Paris, où ils profitent de l’hospitalité du roi, témoignent du statut de courtisans qu’ils adoptent alors envers le Français’.   See Dunbabin, pp. 55–6 above.   This author, writing at Battle, 1114–20, claimed that in the mid tenth century, when the Danes freed Louis IV from captivity, it had been agreed that the count of Normandy should not owe any service for Normandy : Brevis Relatio, ed. E. M. C. van Houts, in Chronology, Conquest and Conflict in Medieval England, Camden Miscellany 34 (Cambridge 1997), chap. 16. Although this work might reflect negotiating stances adopted by Henry I leading up to his son’s homage to Louis in 1120, it constitutes a deviation from the dominant historiography from Dudo onwards, for which see P. Bauduin, La Première Normandie, Xe–XIe siècles (Caen 2004), 93. In about 1140, however, Torigni interpolated the Battle Anonymous’ words into his recension of the Gesta Normannorum Ducum : Jumièges, ii, 286. Then the same idea was taken up in the Roman de Rou : Wace, part II, ll. 3051–8. On perceptions of France in Norman sources, see B. Schneidmüller, Nomen Patriae (Sigmaringen 1987), 71–96.   Draco Normannicus, in Howlett, Chronicles, ii, 720–22. See Aurell, L’Empire, 141 ; L. Shopkow, History and Community : Norman Historical Writing in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Washington 1997), 112–14.



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to make this case. Even in the time of King Henry I of England, who ‘called no mortal man his lord’, service was owed, as is clear from the return to the Bayeux inquest of 1133 that states that the bishop owed the duke ten knights for service to the king of France. In the light of the Bayeux inquest, it is hard to see that Henry II conceded anything of moment in 1169. And precisely what outer form did the peace agreement at Montmirail take ? Henry II swore an oath to keep faith with Louis as his lord, and then the two kings shook hands and kissed. It is worth comparing this with what happened in 1174 when Henry refused to accept his eldest son’s homage. Instead, in the words of the official record of the agreement between the old king and his sons, he took an oath from him (‘sed securitatem [ac]cepit ab eo’), and the Young King gave his word ‘in the hand of the lord king his father (in manu domini regis patris sui)’. Presumably the phrase ‘in the hand [NB : singular] of the lord king his father’ relates to the king’s right hand. In other words the ritual actions of the two kings in 1174 may well have looked very similar to those of Louis and Henry at Montmirail in 1169. But this ritual is clearly different from the act of homage in which, whatever else happened, the immixtio manuum, the action of the man in placing his joined hands between the hands of his lord, was undoubtedly a central part. Is this why John of Salisbury’s language appears to distinguish between hominium et fidelitatem facere (as in the case of Henry’s sons), and the handshake and exchange of kisses of the two kings. The words used by the well-informed Robert of Torigni to describe what happened at Montmirail also seem to point in the same direction.   Thus, as Hallam and Everard, Capetian France, 57, 125, point out, William the Conqueror ‘at the same time as he failed to pay homage to the French king for the duchy, still rendered him military service’. And they observe that in general ‘the paying of homage by the princes to the king seems to have taken place more intermittently than the rendering of service, which was not dependent on it’. Cf. S. Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals (Oxford 1994), 275.   Red Book, ii, 646–7. C. H. Haskins, Norman Institutions (New York 1918), 15. Hence Suger’s description of the troops that Henry I sent to assist in Louis VI’s Auvergne campaign as ‘exercitus tributarius’ : Suger, Vie de Louis VI le Gros, ed. H. Waquet (Paris 1929), 236. In a letter to Suger, Duke Geoffrey proclaimed his readiness to perform the servitium regis, even in the absence of the king himself : RHF, xv, 494.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 79 ; Howden, Chronica, ii, 69.   Le Goff’s analysis, ‘Le Rituel symbolique de la vassalité’, in idem, Pour un autre Moyen Âge (Paris 1977), 349–420, schematises too much on the basis of later sources ; see Carré, Le Baiser, 188–214. For the earliest explicit reference to the man kneeling in homage that I have so far noticed, see p. 83 n. 1 below.   Could John of Salisbury simply have passed over in silence another scene at Montmirail, one in which King Henry not only swore an oath to Louis, shook his right hand and exchanged kisses, but also went through a rather more humbling ritual ? Very unlikely, because the principal theme of John’s letter was the way Henry’s conduct at Montmirail had tricked Louis into trusting him. If Henry had humbled himself still further this would have been grist to John’s mill. This is also true of the author of the Historia gloriosi regis Ludovici, who, although he refers to events as late as the Young King’s coronation, makes no reference to any homages done by Henry II as king.

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The two kings made peace (‘concordati sunt’), then the young Henry did homage (‘fecit homagium’) for Anjou and Brittany (explaining that he had earlier done homage for Normandy) and Richard did homage  again ‘fecit homagium’  for Aquitaine. Moreover there is a parallel between the oath sworn by Henry II in 1169 and the oaths sworn by some of his followers in 1153. According to the words of King Stephen’s charter setting out the terms of the agreement, the treaty of Winchester, made earlier between him and Henry, those of Henry’s supporters who had previously done homage (‘homagium fecerunt’) to him, King Stephen, had now sworn an oath of fealty to Stephen as to a lord. Those of Henry’s followers who had never been Stephen’s men, had now both sworn an oath and done homage. The treaty of Winchester made a clear distinction between these two groups, and Henry II in 1169 was in the same position as those who had previously done homage to Stephen, and who in consequence were only required to swear an oath when they returned to their homage. All this suggests that the restoration of peace and a return to homage would have been made publicly visible by gestures different from those that accompanied the performance of homage. It may be that here there lies a ritual expression of the distinction that Lemarignier was groping towards when he differentiated between hommage de paix and hommage vassalique. But would it not be more helpful to distinguish ‘homage’ and ‘return to homage’, i.e. adopt reasonably direct translations of contemporary terms rather than create new terms ? Thus whereas the modern term hommage de paix is always understood to represent a more equal relationship between the two principals than hommage vassalique, one of the uses of the term ‘return to homage’ is that it allows for the circumstance that some ‘returns to homage’ might have been more humiliating and symbolised by rituals more demeaning than homage. Thus the ritual by which King William of Scotland was released from prison to return to his homage in 1175 was likely to be very different from that with which Henry II returned to his homage in 1169. It may well be that the precise ritual forms both for the performance of homage and for the restoration of homage differed from case to case. The protocol at most of the meetings between the kings of France and England in this period must surely have been arranged in advance. The Becket dispute makes it very clear that carefully calibrated symbolic actions played a major part   Torigni, 240.   Regesta, iii, no. 272  : ‘Comites et barones ducis qui nunquam homines mei fuerunt . . . homagium et sacramentum mihi fecerunt . . .  : ceteri vero qui antea mihi homagium fecerunt, fidelitatem mihi fecerunt sicut domino.’   For a judicious discussion of the rituals of various sorts of homage and their beginnings, see P. Hyams, ‘Homage and Feudalism : A Judicious Separation’, in N. Fryde, P. Monet and O.G. Oexle, eds., Die Gegenwart des Feudalismus (Göttingen 2002), 13–49.   I owe this point to Matthew Strickland. See Jordan Fantosme, 22, for the homage, service and allegiance that William owed to the old king.



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in Henry II’s and Louis VII’s calculations. Thus at Fréteval in July 1170 Henry II was willing to hold Thomas Becket’s stirrup as a sign of reconciliation, but he obstinately refused to give him the kiss of peace. After all, Dudo’s famous story about what happened when Rollo met Charles the Simple at Saint-Clair-sur-Epte, as reworked by Wace in the verses commissioned by Henry II, indicates what could happen if these details had not been prearranged. Despite the obsequious language with which King Henry habitually addressed his lord King Louis, it remains the case that only once in his life is he reliably recorded as doing homage to him  and that was in 1151 before he became a king himself. By contrast he seems to have positively encouraged his eldest son to do homage  and that, no doubt, to reinforce his son’s position as his chosen heir. When young Henry was five years old he did homage for Normandy to Louis VII, his father-in-law to be, in October 1160. After doing homage for Anjou and Brittany at Montmirail in January 1169, he went to Paris in February and did homage to Philip (who was four years old at the time). All three of these homages occurred before young Henry was himself crowned king in 1170. After that date he never again did homage to a Capetian. In 1169 Richard did homage for Poitou. The homages performed to Louis VI and Louis VII in 1120, 1137, 1151, 1160 and 1169 had all been by heirs during their father’s lifetime. In other words between 1120 and 1169 every single homage was by an heir, with one possible exception, Geoffrey’s  if he had indeed done it. All the more likely that he had not. The homage of the king’s/duke’s son was not something the kings of France had to squeeze out of a reluctant prince. If anything it was the other way round. But in 1183 everything changed. According to Roger of Howden, on St Nicholas’s Day (6 December) 1183 Henry and Philip held a peace conference between Gisors and Trie, and there ‘Henry king of England swore homage and allegiance [homagium et ligantiam] for all his lands across the sea to Philip king of France, to whom he had never before wished to do homage’. This was clearly a setback. So why did he give way ? The consensus that Henry had already shattered precedent   Indeed, in autumn 1170, when Henry was at Amboise and was told that the archbishop was waiting for him in the chapel, he ordered a mass for the dead to be sung so that he did not have to kiss Thomas : MTB, iii, 115, 469. On symbolic action in the Becket dispute, see T. Reuter, Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities, ed. J. L. Nelson (Cambridge 2006), 167–90 ; H. Vollrath, ‘The Kiss of Peace’, in R. Lesaffer, ed., Peace Treaties and International Law in European History (Cambridge 2004), 162–83, at 177–82.   Wace, part II, ll. 1147–57.   Here Torigni noted that Normandy ‘est de regno Franciae’ : Torigni, 208.   Indeed according to Torigni, Henry also served as steward at the king of France’s table ; Torigni, 240–41.   Similarly David I’s son, Henry, did homage for Northumberland in 1136.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 306 ; cf. Howden, Chronica, ii, 284. It may well have been Howden who told the monks of Melrose about this reluctant homage : Chronica de Mailros (Edinburgh 1835), 92.

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in 1156 has meant that the homage of 1183 has been regarded as a matter of secondary importance only ; at most as just another indicator of the ‘feudal rule’ that homage should be renewed at the accession of a new suzerain : one more step in a process that had begun more than forty years earlier. But even if all Philip had been doing was pressing for the implementation of acknowledged custom, the question would still remain as to why Henry II so unwillingly gave way. In fact the precise context in which Howden places the homage of 1183 makes the answer plain enough  and, as with all the previous homages, it is linked with the matter of dynastic succession. At the same December 1183 peace conference Philip agreed that Henry could keep Gisors (shorthand for the Norman Vexin) on condition that he gave it to whichever of his sons married Philip’s sister, Alice. The Norman Vexin had been in Henry’s hands ever since 1160, when he had pushed through, in controversial circumstances, the marriage of his son Henry and Louis VII’s daughter Margaret. After the death of the Young King in June 1183, Philip argued that, since Gisors had been Margaret’s dowry, it should now be returned to him. In view of its crucial strategic importance this was the last thing Henry II wanted. He argued that Gisors belonged by right to the duchy of Normandy, and that any claim Louis may for a while have possessed to it, he had renounced in perpetuity at the time of the Young King’s marriage to Margaret. But Philip refused to accept this. Although the treaty of 1160 had made no explicit provision for what was to happen should the young Henry die without an heir by Margaret, it had laid down that, if Margaret died, the Vexin was to be returned to the king of France. By agreeing to the treaty Henry II had also accepted that the Norman Vexin had been Louis’s to give. So far as the appearance of right was concerned in this dispute with King Philip, Henry II was on the back foot. On the other hand he was the man in possession. In the months after June 1183, envoys went to and fro, and fruitless meeting followed fruitless meeting. One very obvious solution would have been for Margaret’s right in the Vexin to be transferred to her sister Alice, for Alice to marry Richard, duke of Aquitaine (to whom she had in any case long been betrothed), and for Richard then to do  Van Eickels, Vom inszenierten Konsens, 333–4, suggested that what lay behind Henry’s reluctance in 1183 was the old king’s reluctance to humble himself before a much younger man  on the assumption that Henry had done homage in 1156 an entirely plausible explanation.   Howden, Gesta regis, i, 306 : ‘Ita quod dominus rex Angliae daret Gisorcium cui vellet de filiis suis cum sorore Regis Franciae’.   On this, see L. Diggelmann, ‘Marriage as Tactical Response : Henry II and the Royal Wedding of 1160’, EHR, 119 (2004), 954–64.   See Torigni, 169, 318, for the claim that the Vexin as part of the duchy ‘jure antiquitatis olim fuerat regis Anglorum’ and had been ceded by Geoffrey ‘ad tempus’. Philip’s case is set out in Rigord, 77.   Actes Henri II, i, 251, no. 141 ; also printed in L. Landon, The Itinerary of King Richard I (PRS 1935), 221–2.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 304–5.



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homage to Philip for Normandy. Once again the king of England would have secured the succession by getting the king of France to accept the homage of his eldest son and heir, as in 1120, 1137, 1151 and 1160. But from Henry II’s point of view, in the particular circumstances of 1183, this traditional solution was an unattractive one. One drawback was that Margaret would have to be compensated. A second drawback would be that it entailed Alice getting married. Whether or not by this date she had become Henry’s mistress, the fact is that she had been in his custody since 1169, and he had resisted all attempts to make him turn the betrothal between her and Richard into a marriage. The gossip reported by Gerald was that she was being saved for the moment that Henry himself was free to marry again. A third drawback would be that if Richard were publicly recognised as the heir to Normandy while yet retaining Aquitaine, then Henry would be faced by a son whose power-base in the south combined with his close kinship with the king of France would bring about a dramatic change in the family dynamics : one that might tend to reduce the old ruler to the situation of a lame-duck king. Here at least Henry thought he saw an opportunity to provide for his youngest son, still John Lackland. In September 1183, he summoned both Richard and John to Normandy, and ordered Richard to accept John’s homage for Aquitaine : in effect to hand over possession of the duchy to his younger brother. Richard refused, and rode back in haste to Poitou, announcing that he would never relinquish control. Since 1175 Richard had been in charge of day-to-day management of patronage and government in Aquitaine. He knew that it was only his continued possession of power there that would prevent him being just as frustratingly dependent upon his father as the Young King had been. In ordering him to hand over the duchy Henry had miscalculated badly. But if he would not let his oldest surviving son keep Aquitaine, marry Alice and do homage for Normandy, then by what appearance of right was he to keep his own hands on the Vexin ? Could he arrange for Alice to marry John instead ? Presumably this was the possibility that was raised when, in December 1183, Philip agreed that Henry could give the Vexin to whichever of his sons married Alice. But, even supposing that Henry were not emotionally attached to Alice, it would not have been easy to make   She would have to be anyway, of course, but it was to be more than two years before Henry finally got round to making the arrangements : Howden, Gesta Regis i, 343 ; Diceto, ii, 40. For the text of the compositio made between Henry II and Margaret, with the consent and in the presence of Philip her brother, dated Gisors, 11 March 1186, see Landon, Itinerary, 225–6.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 180–81, 190–91. See J. Gillingham, Richard I (New Haven/London 1999), 5, 57, 82, 142.   Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, viii, De Principis Instructione, 232.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 307–8.  N. Vincent, ‘King Henry II and the Poitevins’, in La Cour Plantagenêt, 1154–1224, ed. M. Aurell (Poitiers 2000), 103–35, at 117–19, 128.

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John the heir to Normandy. Neither of John’s older brothers, Richard or Geoffrey, would have been happy at the prospect of seeing the youngest son promoted over their heads. But if no one was to marry Alice just yet, then on what grounds could Henry legitimately keep the Vexin ? Only, Philip must have insisted, if the old king himself did homage to the young king of France. Reluctantly Henry II steeled himself to do what he had never before done. It marked the beginning of the last phase of his reign. Having to do this reluctant homage was just the first of many setbacks. Richard was able to defeat all his father’s efforts to wrest Aquitaine from him. From now on virtually all Henry’s troubles were caused by his refusal to recognise Richard as his heir. This refusal finally brought matters to the point at which, at a dramatic confrontation at a conference at Bonsmoulins in November 1188, Richard ‘unbuckled his sword and stretching out his hands did homage to the king of France’ for all the Angevin lands in France in the presence, and against the will, of his father. For Henry worse was to come. In June and July 1189 he suffered one catastrophic defeat after another and on 4 July was forced to make peace on humiliating terms. The language of Howden’s summary of the treaty has Henry do homage to Philip again (‘iterum fecit homagium regi Franciae’) because the two kings had earlier renounced that relationship. The renunciations here fairly clearly refer to the events surrounding the chopping down of the elm of Gisors on 1 September 1188. If throwing a stick or twig (festuca) remained the archetypal gesture signifying the breaking of homage, then throwing down the great elm of Gisors was certainly quite a twig. Bur how how much weight we should put on the words ‘iterum fecit homagium regi Franciae’ is unclear. Roger himself was evidently not in the Loire valley in July 1189. Although as a royal clerk he had   Conceivably he compensated by making a gesture that emphasised his wealth, sending a great ship to Paris loaded with stags, deer and wild goats captured in Normandy and Aquitaine so that Philip could stock his newly enclosed park at Vincennes : Rigord, 34–5. Whatever Henry intended, Philippe Buc, following Rigord, interprets it as an act of deference : P. Buc, L’Ambiguïté du livre (Paris 1994), 117–18.   The words quoted are taken from Gervase, i, 435–6, the fullest account. See also Howden, Gesta Regis, ii, 50 ; Diceto, ii, 57–8.   Howden, Chronica, ii, 344–5. M. Bloch, ‘Les Formes de la rupture de l’hommage dans l’ancien droit f éodal’, Nouvelle Revue historique de droit français et étranger, 36 (1912), 141–77 ; Carré, Le Baiser, 193–6 ; Hyams, ‘Homage and Feudalism’, 34–42.   Howden, Gesta Regis, ii, 69–71. It looks as though the text of the treaty that Roger of Howden included in his chronicle was closely based on a chancery draft that, as a consequence of the king’s death, was never formally authenticated and sealed.   In the Gesta he gave neither the date nor the place of the conference. When he revised his account a few years later, he added the information that Henry, Philip and Richard met between Tours and Azai (which is accurate) and at about the time of the feast of Peter and Paul (i.e. c.29 June) which is not. Moreover, the fact that he also adds details such as thunder on a sunny day and a lightning strike between the two kings suggests that the dying king’s humiliation was already the subject of legend : Howden, Chronica, ii, 365–6.



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access to an official record of the peace agreement, it is clear that he summarised it rather carelessly. On the whole it seems unlikely that Henry did perform an act of homage at the meeting on 4 July  despite the fact that Ralph of Diceto used a form of words almost identical to Howden’s. Other accounts of the meeting, including those based on eyewitness reports, make no mention of homage. William the Marshal was there and clearly retained very vivid memories of what happened. Henry was so ill that Philip ordered a cloak to be brought so that he could sit down : ‘Sire, there is no question of you standing.’ But Henry countermanded the instruction, saying he had no wish to be seated, he just wanted to see and hear their terms. According to Gervase of Canterbury, relying on what he was told by fellow Canterbury monks who met the king at Azai either that day or the next, at the peace conference Henry had been compelled to swear a new oath of allegiance. Nor does Gerald’s version of the conference and peace terms refer to Henry doing homage. In view of the contradictory sources certainty is impossible, but just as telling as William the Marshal’s memory of King Philip’s concern for the dying king’s bodily comfort is the silence of both of Philip’s court chroniclers, Rigord of Saint-Denis and William the Breton, neither of whom wrote a word about any homage by Henry. If, just before he died, Henry had promised to do homage again, would this mean that his homage as a crowned king in 1183 had not only shattered precedent, but had also set one ? Was this the strategic mistake that played into the hands of Philip Augustus, allowing him to make demands more effectively than earlier kings of France had been able to do ? There is certainly no doubt that he was more effective. But I am inclined to doubt that this had much to do with the ritual of December 1183. A volume dedicated to the reign of Henry II is not the   According to the Gesta version, Henry had renounced (‘reddiderat’) his homage to Philip and Philip had done the same to him ‘in principio treugae’  which makes no sense. If we turn to Roger’s version of the terms of peace in the Chronica, it uses slightly different language for the renunciations of homage and dates them, as we would expect, to the beginning of the war rather than to the beginning of the truce : Howden, Chronica, ii, 365–6, ‘in principio istius guerrae quietum clamaverat regi Francie dominium suum ; et rex Francie quietum clamaverat homagium suum’. Evidently Roger had made an effort to tidy up an unsatisfactory text  which makes it dangerous to use his words as though they were an accurate rendering of an official record.   Diceto, ii, 64 : ‘Postmodum rex Anglorum hominagium fecit regi Francorum.’ Moreover Dean Ralph made essentially the same mistake as Howden’s Chronica when he gave 28 June (the vigil of the feast of SS Peter and Paul) as the date of Henry’s last conference.   Hist. Guillaume le Marechal, ll. 8941–9032.   Gervase, i, 448–9 : ‘regi Franciae novam cogeretur praestare fidelitatem’.   Gerald, De principis instructione, 286–7, 294–5.   Power, The Norman Frontier, 109 : ‘Before Philip Augustus reached adulthood it is striking how little authority the court of the kings of France wielded over the dukes of Normandy.’ D. Bates, ‘The Rise and Fall of Normandy, c.911–1204’, in England and Normandy in the Middle Ages, ed. D. Bates and A. Curry (London 1994), 35 : ‘In the 1190s Philip Augustus changed the rules by which a centuriesold game had been played.’

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place for a detailed discussion of events after his death, but it is clear that when John came to the throne in 1199 he did not recognise the force of any such precedent. In August 1199 he refused to do homage. John had been installed as duke in Rouen cathedral on 25 April. He had been girded with ‘the sword of the duchy of Normandy’, just as Richard had been in 1189. But then it looks as though things were taken a stage further. The archbishop of Rouen placed on John’s head a very regal-looking coronet : ‘circulum aureum habentem in summitate per circuitum rosas aureas’. The new duke then swore to protect the church and its privileges, to do true justice, to eradicate bad laws and institute good ones. In other words, in 1199 the duke of Normandy had first been crowned and had then sworn a coronation oath. No wonder Philip demanded a ritual response expressing the subordination of the duke of Normandy. But at the time John’s position was a strong one. In August 1199, according to the annalist of Jumièges, ‘on a single day fifteen counts came to his court, among them the count of Bar, the count of Flanders and the count of Boulogne, and they all swore an oath against the French king’. In the summer of 1199 Philip did not get the homage he wanted. But John’s political ineptitude meant that his position rapidly weakened ; he soon needed Philip’s help, and so he agreed to do homage to Philip when they met on the border and made the treaty of Le Goulet on 22 May 1200. Again it is striking that Rigord, in his account of the treaty of 1200, says nothing about homage. He did, however, summarise the terms of the marriage contract between Prince Louis and John’s niece, Blanche of Castile. These dynastic and territorial matters were evidently more important in his eyes than the homage of the king of England to the king of France. It is not, however, the case that Rigord and, following him, William the Breton, were both systematically indifferent to the question of homage. They did want to insist that Richard did homage to Philip.   Philip’s demand, ‘while understandable in the circumstances, does not look well grounded in precedent’ : Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals, 274. When King John did homage in May 1200, it may have been the first time since 1183 that a reigning king of England did homage to a king of France.   Howden, Gesta Regis, ii, 73 ; Howden, Chronica, iv, 87–8. As David Crouch noted, the installation ritual of 1199 was probably based on an ordo for 1189 : D. Crouch, The Image of Aristocracy in Britain, 1000–1300 (London 1992), 201. On this and similar rituals elsewhere, including Bordeaux, Poitiers and Limoges, see H. Hoffmann, ‘Französischen Fürstenweihen des Hochmittelalters’, Deutsches Archiv, 18 (1962), 98–109. For a downbeat assessment of these rituals, see Hollister, ‘Normandy, France’, 51–2.   Annales de l’abbaye royale de Saint-Pierre de Jumièges, ed. J. Laporte (Rouen 1954), 77 ; Howden, Chronica, iv, 93.   Howden, Chronica, iv, 114–15. For discussion of John’s loss of initiative, see Gillingham, Richard I, 335–8.   Rigord, 148. His silence here may explain why William the Breton altered Rigord’s account of John being summoned by Philip in 1202 to say that he was summoned in order to do homage for Aquitaine, Touraine and Anjou : Guillaume le Breton, 207. On the dates of Rigord’s writing and William’s rewriting, see Spiegel, Chronicle Tradition, 65–6.



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Rigord’s account of Philip demanding the return of the Vexin after the Young King’s death in 1183 is coupled with the statement that Philip demanded homage  but from Richard, not from his father. As Rigord’s decisions about what to include and what to omit imply, what counted was not the relationship of homage between the two kings as such, but their very different qualities of political leadership. And it was this that was determinative in the years after 1199, not some homage or other done by Henry II in 1183. Henry II in 1183 and John in 1200 did homage because in those years their position was weak. In the majority of cases of homage studied here, the kings of England persuaded the kings of France to accept the homages of their sons  and they were able to do so, not because their positions were weak, but because they were strong. If Richard had had a legitimate son, or if John had had one by 1200, it would have been interesting to see what happened. Biology and personal qualities mattered. Normans or Angevins or Aquitanians who objected to a duke or to his decisions could always appeal for help to the king of France. Whether or not their dukes or counts knelt in homage to the king of France, it would always be possible for the king  if he wished  to find legitimate reasons to intervene within those duchies and counties, and whether or not he could depended upon matters such as material resources and personal qualities. The one really important structural point was that Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine were in France. There was nothing specific to the later twelfth century here. In the later twelfth century, as a consequence of a cultural shift that might be called ‘From Ritual to Written Record’, the relationships between the two kings were coming to be expressed in more legalistic terms. But what was decisive in that relationship was not a gradually hardening concept of royal suzerainty. The earliest surviving texts of treaties between the kings of France and England are the eight or nine that survive for the period 1160–1200. Arranging them in chronological order does not reveal   Rigord, 77. Similarly Rigord claimed that Richard did homage at Issoudun in December 1195 (Rigord, 133), though neither Roger of Howden (Chronica, iii, 305) nor William of Newburgh (Newburgh, ii, 460–62), the latter on this episode particularly well informed, say any such thing, rather the contrary. William the Breton’s version of what happened at Issoudun is the earliest case I have so far noticed of an author (whether writing in Latin or French  for the latter I am much indebted to Ian Short) explicitly stating that the man doing homage went down on his knees : Guillaume le Breton, 199. A much earlier author, writing in English, seems to have intended the phrase on cneow (‘on knee’) as a way of characterising the relationship between Count Elie of Maine and Henry I of England : ASC, Swanton, s.a. 1110. Evidence from 16th-century France suggests that the body language of homage could undergo fairly rapid change : Major, ‘ “Bastard Feudalism” and the Kiss’, 518–20. In Chrétien de Troyes, Yvain, ed. T. B. W. Reid ( Manchester 1942), ll. 3392–401, kneeling is a part of homage, but it is done by a lion not a man. The meaning of the French in Chrétien’s Lancelot, ed. and trans. W. W. Kibler (New York 1981), ll. 3224–6, is not as clear-cut as the translation implies.   This shift is the main theme of Van Eickels, Vom inszenierten Konsens zum systematisierten Konflikt.  Nine, if we include Howden’s version of the treaty of July 1189.

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a steadily increasing definition of the French king’s rights, but rather dramatic ups and downs depending upon political circumstances. It was inevitable that from 1066 onwards the kings of France would see themselves as possessing a dignity greater than that of their brother king. Suger’s summary of relations between Louis VI and Henry I make this clear, and it was to play a part in the history of the Third Crusade. No doubt the king of England thought that a duchy or two was worth a loss in dignity. Even so, it is plain that kings of England preferred to avoid doing homage to the kings of France and avoided for as long as they could the ritual that acknowledged that lesser dignity for all to see. In 1183 it was precisely Henry II’s inability to work with Richard and Richard’s mother that meant he could avoid it no longer. Hence the precedent-shattering homage, not in 1156 but in December 1183.   Louis was superior to (‘supereminebat’) Henry king of the English and duke of the Normans, and ‘in eum semper tanquam in feodatum suum efferebatur’ ; Henry ‘regni nobilitate et divitiarum opulentia mirabili inferioritatis impatiens’ : Suger, Vie de Louis, 184. At Messina in October 1190, Philip demanded that Richard’s banners should be lowered and his own raised ‘ipsi tanquam superiori deferens honorem’ : Chronicles and Memorials of the Reign of Richard I, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols. (RS 38, 1864–5), i, 164–5.   ‘Henry’s Achilles heel lay not so much in the homage he paid to the king of France as in his inability to work with his sons and their mother’ ; Dunbabin, p. 61 above.

Daniel Power

Henry, Duke of the Normans (1149/50–1189) Geoffrey, count of the Angevins, and his son Henry  who subsequently gained the kingdom of the English  came to King Louis, and complained to him about Stephen, king of the English, showing that he was unjustly robbing them of their rights, namely the kingdom of England and the duchy of Normandy. And so, since the king wished justly and reasonably to maintain and keep each person in his rights, as befitted his royal majesty, he entered Normandy with a great army and seized it with a mighty arm, restored it to Henry, the son of the count of the Angevins, and received him as his liege man for that land.

H

istorians of the ‘Anglo-Norman realm’ might be forgiven for not recognising the Angevin conquest of Normandy from this passage of the Historia gloriosi regis Ludovici, for the more familiar Anglo-Norman sources depict the Capetian kings as relatively minor players in the great crises of the Anglo-Norman realm that followed the death of Henry I. What the quoted passage does show is the centrality of Normandy to Henry’s political career from its inception. The province gave Henry his first title and landed base ; it was the geographical and (to some extent, at least) the political fulcrum of his territories ; I am grateful to Christopher Harper-Bill for inviting me to contribute this article, to Nicholas Vincent for his help with numerous points, to Judith Everard for allowing me to consult her revised itinerary of Henry II, and to the other participants of the UEA conference for their comments. Map 1 is reproduced with the kind permission of Cambridge University Press. Map 2 was prepared by Paul Coles of the University of Sheffield’s Cartography Service, and the research for this article was generously supported by the British Academy.   Historia gloriosi regis Ludovici, ed. A. Molinier (Paris 1887), 161 : ‘Gaufridus, comes Andegavorum, et Henricus, filius eius, qui postea regnum Anglorum optinuit, regem Ludovicum adierunt et ei de Stephano, Anglorum rege, conquerentes, monstraverunt quod ipse eis iniuste iura sua auferebat, videlicet regnum Anglie et ducatum Normanie [sic]. Unde rex, volens omnes iuste ac rationabiliter, sicut regiam maiestatem condecet, manutenere et unicuique ius suum conservare, cum magno exercitu Normanniam aggrediens, manu forti eam cepit, quam Henrico, filio comitis Andegavorum, reddidit et eum pro eadem terra in hominem ligium accepit.’ For further discussion, see pp. 123–5 below.

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but it was also here that he faced the gravest threat to his power in the great uprisings of 1173–4. It is therefore not surprising that Normandy has figured prominently in studies both of Henry’s reign and of the Angevin ‘empire’. Amongst other aspects of Angevin Normandy, historians have scrutinised the structures and practices of the ducal regime ; the place of the Normans at the court of Henry II, and of Normandy and the Normans within the ‘Anglo-Norman realm’ and ‘Angevin empire’ ; the Norman Church and architecture, Norman towns, and the history of particular Norman magnates or districts. Yet there is as yet no detailed overall study of Normandy under the Angevins ; indeed, a full assessment of the significance of Henry’s reign in Norman history  and, conversely, the place of the duchy in Henry’s career  would merit an entire book. Consequently the fol  C. H. Haskins, Norman Institutions (Cambridge, ma, 1918), 123–95 ; L. Valin, Le Duc de Normandie et sa cour (912–1204) (Paris 1910) ; J. Boussard, Le Gouvernement d’Henri II Plantegenêt (Paris 1956) ; F. M. Powicke, The Loss of Normandy, 1189–1204 : Studies in the History of the Angevin Empire, 2nd edn (Manchester 1961) ; V. D. Moss, ‘Normandy and England : The Pipe Roll Evidence’, in England and Normandy in the Middle Ages, ed. D. Bates and A. Curry (London 1994), 185–95.   T. K. Keefe, Feudal Assessments and the Political Community under Henry II and his Sons (Berkeley/ Los Angeles 1983) ; idem, ‘Counting Those who Count : A Computer-Assisted Analysis of Charter Witness-Lists and the Itinerant Court in the First Year of the Reign of King Richard I’, HSJ, 1 (1989), 135–45 ; N. Vincent, ‘Les Normands de l’entourage d’Henri II Plantagenêt’, in La Normandie et l’Angleterre au Moyen Âge, ed. M. Bouet and V. Gazeau (Caen 2003), 75–88 ; M. Billoré, ‘Y a-t-il une “oppression” des Plantagenêt sur l’aristocratie en Normandie à la veille de 1204 ?’, in Plantagenêts et Capétiens : Confrontations et héritages, ed. M. Aurell and N.-Y. Tonnerre (Turnhout 2006), 145–61.   J. C. Holt, ‘The End of the Anglo-Norman Realm’, PBA, 56 (1975), 223–65 ; J. Gillingham, The Angevin Empire, 2nd edn (London 2001), esp. 72–85 ; M. Aurell, L’Empire des Plantagenêt (Paris 2003), esp. 227–39.   D. S. Spear, ‘The Norman Empire and the Secular Clergy, 1066–1204’, Journal of British Studies, 21 (1982), 1–10 ; idem, ‘Power, Patronage, and Personality in the Norman Cathedral Chapters, 911–1204’, ANS, 20 (1998 for 1997), 205–21 ; J. Peltzer, ‘Henry II and the Norman Bishops’, EHR, 119 (2004), 1202–29.   L. Grant, ‘The Architecture of the early Savignacs and Cistercians in Normandy’, ANS, 10 (1988 for 1987), 111–43 ; idem, ‘Architectural Relationships between England and Normandy, 1100–1204’, in England and Normandy, ed. Bates and Curry, 117–29.   S. Deck, ‘Formation des communes en Haute-Normandie et communes éphémères’, Annales de Normandie, 10 (1960), 207–27, 317–29 ; B. Gauthiez, ‘Paris, un Rouen capétien ? (Développements comparés de Rouen et Paris sous les règnes de Henri II et Philippe Auguste)’, ANS, 15 (1993 for 1992), 117–36, at 123, 133–5.  E.g. D. Crouch, The Beaumont Twins : The Roots and Branches of Power in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge 1986) ; J. A. Green, ‘Lords of the Norman Vexin’, in War and Government in the Middle Ages, ed. J. Gillingham and J. C. Holt (Woodbridge 1984), 47–61 ; K. Thompson, ‘William Talvas, Count of Ponthieu, and the Politics of the Anglo-Norman Realm’, in England and Normandy, ed. Bates and Curry, 169–84 ; D. Power, The Norman Frontier in the Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Centuries (Cambridge 2004).   For a brief overview, see D. Power, ‘Angevin Normandy’, in A Companion to the Anglo-Norman World, ed. C. Harper-Bill and E. M. C. van Houts (Woodbridge 2003), 63–85.



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lowing study will concentrate upon two aspects of Normandy in the four decades of Henry II’s rule there : the Norman aristocracy in the second half of the twelfth century, and Henry’s relations as duke with his Norman subjects and his Capetian lords. This survey is intended to provide a summary of the political context in which Henry exercised his rule in the duchy.

Aristocratic Power in Normandy, 1150–89 The geography of aristocratic power The course of events in the duchy during Henry’s reign was largely shaped by the territorial distribution of power there. Yet any consideration of Henry II’s Normandy must acknowledge both the riches and the poverty of the primary sources. Historians are acutely aware of how little they know about Normandy in Henry’s reign in comparison with England, and how much they know in comparison with his other continental possessions. They regret the lack of a narrative to match Orderic Vitalis’ Ecclesiastical History or the output of the contemporary ‘golden age of English historiography’, with which Robert of Torigni’s chronicle and the various Norman annals cannot compare (nor, for that matter, can Stephen of Fougères’s Draco Normannicus). Yet these works far surpass most of the historical works from the more southerly Plantagenet provinces. The evidence for the political geography and tenurial structures of the duchy demonstrates the scope and limitations of the sources. The chief text for the Norman aristocracy in Henry’s reign is the Infeudationes militum. The record of an inquest at Caen in 1172, it leaves many questions unanswered, even where its testimony can be compared with an earlier inquest concerning the bishopric of Bayeux executed under Henry I, or the later, far more extensive surveys from the reign of Philip Augustus. In the Infeudationes militum the relationship between a baron’s assessed numbers of knights (due from him to the king, and to himself ) and his power in reality is almost impossible to gauge. For quite a few barons only one or the other figure is recorded ; for some, the figures seem disproportionate to the power or significance of a particular lineage. Regional variations are difficult to assess, and in any case several of the chief barons are missing, both lay   Red Book, ii, 626–45, from which the title is taken ; Les Registres de Philippe Auguste, ed. J. W. Baldwin, i (text) (Paris 1992), 267–76 (RHF, xxiii, 693–8).   Bayeux : H. Navel, ‘L’Enquête de 1133 sur les fiefs de l’évêché de Bayeux’, BSAN, 42 (1934), 5–80 ; J. Boussard, ‘L’Enquête de 1172 sur les services de chevalier en Normandie’, Recueil de travaux offerts à M. Clovis Brunel, 2 vols. (Paris 1955), i, 193–207. Surveys of Philip Augustus : Registres de Philippe Auguste, 276–304 ; RHF, xxiii, 606–46, 705–18 ; J. W. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus : Foundations of French Royal Power in the Middle Ages (Berkeley 1986), 286–94 (with an important discussion of the 12th-century surveys as well).   For this point, cf. Boussard, ‘L’Enquête’, 205 ; idem, Gouvernement, 205. A good example is the

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Map 1 Normandy and its Neighbours in the Reign of Henry II

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and ecclesiastical. We have some idea about the procedure followed in the inquest thanks to a statement inserted by Robert of Torigni into the cartulary of Mont-

Tillières family (Red Book, ii, 631 ; Registres de Philippe Auguste, 270) ; cf. Powicke, Loss of Normandy, 353 ; Power, Norman Frontier, 200.



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Saint-Michel, where he was abbot. Each baron who came to the inquest was required to supply two breves : a sealed letter stating the number of knights owed to the king, and an unsealed letter stipulating the service owed to the baron. In the cartulary Robert also included the letters he submitted to the inquest as abbot of Mont-Saint-Michel : they contained a list of the homages that he had received since his election as abbot in 1154. The comparison between the two versions of the inquest is illuminating. The main ducal record tells us little more than that the abbot had the service of six knights in the Avranchin and Cotentin and one knight in the Bessin. By contrast, the abbot’s fuller statement covers two densely written pages of the cartulary, running to four pages in the Rolls Series edition of Robert of Torigni’s chronicle, seven pages in Léopold Delisle’s edition of the same, and two pages in the Recueil des historiens de la France edition, furnishing considerable more detail about the barony of Mont-Saint-Michel than any of the English cartae baronum of 1166. How often must historians of Normandy have wished that the unsealed lists for the other Norman baronies still survived ! Yet the lack of any such survey at all for the more southerly Plantagenet dominions demonstrates just how valuable a source the Infeudationes militum remain for twelfth-century Normandy. There has been as yet no comprehensive attempt to map the tenurial geography of Normandy ; the only detailed description, in Boussard’s Le Gouvernement de Henri II, contains some major errors concerning the distribution of aristocratic lands, although his mapping of ducal domains, whilst incomplete and inaccurate,   Torigni, 349 (Chronique de Robert de Torigni, ed. L. Delisle, 2 vols. (Paris 1872–3), ii, 296–7) ; RHF, xxiii, 703.   Red Book, ii, 626 : ‘Abbas de Monte Sancti Michaelis, servicium vi militum in Abrincensi et Co­ stanciensi [sic] et i militem in Baiocassino, quem faciunt vavassores nisi fuerint in exercitum’ (Registres de Philippe Auguste, 267, which reads ‘in Abrincasino et Constantino’). Robert of Torigni’s detailed record explains the last sentence : after listing the vavassors of Verson and Bretteville, he states, ‘Isti wavassores [sic] faciunt unum plenum militem cum equis et armis ad servitium domini Normannie’ (Torigni, 353 ; ed. Delisle, ii, 303).   Avranches, Bib. Mun., MS 210, fols. 132v–133r ; Torigni, 349–53 (ed. Delisle, ii, 296–303) ; RHF, xxiii, 703–5.   Boussard, Gouvernement, 81–99. Thus, he confused the Cotentin Mandevilles with the Mandeville earls of Essex (96–7), wrongly turned the Hommets into descendants of the Clare family (96 n.) and the Giffards into earls of Sussex (87 n.), and made the Beaumonts a branch of the counts of Évreux (93) ; more pardonably, he mistook Robert de Courcy for his brother and successor William (96 n.) and William de Vernon for his son Richard (90), and mistakenly married Petronilla de Grandmesnil to Robert II of Leicester, not his son Robert III (91). Boussard relied heavily upon Delisle’s notes in the BN but appears to have misunderstood them, wrongly attributing the mint of Abbeville to the counts of Eu (88 n.) and anticipating the Clément marshals of France as lords of Argentan by half a century (92 n.). His footnotes also show greater familiarity with eleventhcentury Norman history than with Henry II’s Normandy (e.g. treating Orbec and Brionne as under a single lord (92–3), as in the reign of Robert Curthose), but he nevertheless made significant errors concerning the eleventh-century Beaumonts (91 n.) and Montgomerys (93).

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is thought-provoking. Boussard’s commentary upon the Infeudationes militum is also insightful. The inquest led him to conclude that Angevin Normandy had two main sorts of territorial organisation : the baronies, which the early dukes had created for their leading subjects, and the newer bailliages, where ducal domains were clustered and which were populated by more lowly knights owing their services directly to the duke, whom the baillis would lead to join the army of Normandy when it was summoned. This is a tempting thesis, but it gives too fixed a meaning to the term ‘barony’ in the twelfth century and is also based upon a reading of the eleventh-century history of Normandy that has long since been abandoned ; nor does it make allowance for the fact that some magnates held lands in the bailliages. Nevertheless, Normandy did have strong regional contrasts, and Boussard’s assertion that in Henry II’s reign the bailliages did not include most of the great lordships deserves further consideration here. The lands of the lay aristocracy appear to fall into several main regional patterns. In southern Normandy from the Avranchin to the Seine, we find quite territorially compact lordships, including the counties of Mortain and Évreux, the lordship of Breteuil, the lands of the Talvas family around Alençon and Sées, and smaller lordships such as l’Aigle, Ivry, Moulins-la-Marche and La Ferté-Macé ; these tended to diminish in size the further east one goes. Similar compact lordships can be found along the northeastern border at Eu, Aumale and Gournay, and in the valley of the River Risle at Pont-Audemer, Montfort, Brionne and Beaumont-le-Roger. The intrinsic power they conferred is undoubted : at Aumale, Count William (d.1179) was described after his death as ‘the ruler and lord of all that land’, and Henry of Anjou remained insecure as long as Count Waleran of Meulan held the four main Risle lordships. Elsewhere in Normandy, baronial landholdings appear to have been more scattered : in the Pays de Caux, for example, the fiefs of the families of Giffard, Mandeville, Warenne, Mortemer, and Leicester (Breteuil), were intermingled ; a similar pattern is apparent in the northern Cotentin for the fiefs of Vernon, Saint-Sauveur (later Taisson), La Haye-

  Boussard, ‘L’Enquête’, 197 (map) ; idem, Gouvernement, endpapers (maps), 84–7 (details of domains).   Boussard, ‘L’Enquête’, 198–204.   For instance, the bailliage of Caux included properties belonging to the counts of Aumale, the earls of Leicester and Warenne, and the lords of Longueville (Giffard), Auffay and Gournay, amongst others.   Power, Norman Frontier, 223, following Rouen, Bib. Mun., Y 13, fol. 81r, an act of 1217 that refers to a charter of Count William ‘qui tunc temporis tocius terre illius rector erat et dominus’.   Crouch, Beaumont Twins, 29–30, 69–78.   J. Le Maho, ‘L’Apparition des seigneuries châtelaines dans le Grand-Caux à l’époque ducale’, Archéologie Médiévale, 6 (1976), 3–148 ; L. C. Loyd, Origins of some Anglo-Norman Families, ed. C. T. Clay and D. C. Douglas (Leeds 1951), 48–9.



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du-Puits, Hommet and Bohon, amongst others, or in the northeast Hiémois for the fiefs of Grandmesnil and Montgomery. As Boussard surmised, the origins of these patterns lay deep in the history of Normandy, but like Domesday tenures in England they continued to have a lasting impact upon the politics of the duchy long after their original context had been superseded. For Boussard they went far to explain the geography of revolt in Normandy in 1173–4, which he regarded as primarily a marcher uprising, but such an interpretation belittles the connection between many rebels and the Young King’s court and household. However, Henry II’s harsher actions against his barons were executed almost exclusively in the regions of compact baronies, while the bailliages recorded in the exchequer roll of 1179–80 mainly corresponded to the area of mixed lordships, except where Henry had made substantial seizures  as at Mortain, Alençon or Gorron and Ambrières. Several other points about the Norman aristocracy stand out. Firstly, a striking proportion of the leading secular lords were English earls, including Leicester and Chester, whose entries are recorded in the 1172 survey, and Gloucester, Arundel, Warenne and Essex, who made no return. The Norman holdings of other English earls such as Richard fitz Gilbert (Strongbow), Hugh Bigod and William de Roumare were also not negligible. All the comites in Normandy with continental   RHF, xxiii, 608–12 ; Registres de Philippe Auguste, 278–9, 281–2 (Grandmesnil). For the Montgomery fiefs in this region, see Boussard, Gouvernement, 92–3 ; K. Thompson, ‘The Pre-Conquest Aristocracy of Normandy : The Example of the Montgomeries’, Historical Research, 60 (1987), 251–63 ; idem, ‘William Talvas’, 173 ; G. Louise, La Seigneurie de Bellême, Xe–XIIe siècles, 2 vols. (Flers 1992), esp. i, 389–412.   Boussard, Gouvernement, 477 n. 5 ; Power, Norman Frontier, 398–401.   Red Book, ii, 626–7, 644–5 (Registres de Philippe Auguste, 268, 276). Gloucester : RHF, xxiii, 610–11 (Carentan, Torigni), 618, 619, 716 (Sainte-Scolasse) ; Registres de Philippe Auguste, 283–4 (Évrecy) ; Earldom of Gloucester Charters, ed. R. B. Patterson (Oxford 1973), esp. nos. 1, 6 ; Navel, ‘L’Enquête de 1133’, 15–16, 40. Arundel (Aubigny) : ibid., 16, 20, 27, 36, 53 ; Actes de Philippe Auguste, ii, no. 903 ; RHF, xxiii, 611 ; H. Legras, ‘Un Fragment de rôle normand inédit de Jean sans Terre’, BSAN, 29 (1914), 21–31, at 25, no. 23 ; Loyd, Origins, 7. Warenne (chiefly Bellencombre and Mortemer-sur-Eaulne) : RHF, xxiii, 613, 621, 643 ; Registres de Philippe Auguste, 278, 288–9 ; ADSM, 20 HP 5 (Louvetot, cant. Bellencombre, cne. Grigneuseville) ; Honors and Knights’ Fees, ed. W. Farrer, 3 vols. (London/Manchester 1923–5), iii, 300 ; EYC, viii, passim ; Powicke, Loss of Normandy, 347. The Warennes’ interests in Flanders, notably at Saint-Omer, were substantially revived during Henry II’s reign : see E. van Houts, ‘The Warenne View of the Past’, ANS, 26 (2004 for 2003), 103–21. Essex (Mandeville) : see pp. 93, 96 below.   Fitz Gilbert (Striguil) : D. Power, ‘The French Interests of the Marshal Earls of Striguil and Pembroke, 1189–1234’, ANS, 25 (2003 for 2002), 199–224, at 201–3. Lincoln (Roumare) : 3 or 4 knights in ducal service, 14 in his own. Hugh Bigod failed to make a return in 1172, but in 1204 his son Roger’s lands in Normandy were worth at least 240 li. ang. p.a. (Actes de Philippe Auguste, ii, no. 797) ; these included his lands in the Pays d’Auge but probably excluded others in the Bocage and near Caen (Loyd, Origins, 14–15, 32). The earls of Salisbury had lands at Rogerville and Sandouville (SM, cant. Saint-Romain-deColbosc) : BN, MS lat. 5425, p. 78 (act of Earl William Longuespée for Saint-Wandrille) ; The

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titles  Évreux, Eu, Aumale, Mortain, Sées, Ponthieu, Meulan and Dammartin  also had significant interests outside the duchy, sometimes as great as or greater than their Norman lands. In this respect earls, counts and countesses in Normandy had a transregional outlook much as their Plantagenet masters did. The 1172 survey recorded the services of only two of these counts : Robert of Meulan and John of Sées. The Norman lands of the count of Meulan were concentrated in the Risle valley, the eastern Évrecin and the Cinglais. Count John of Sées represented the junior branch of the Talvas dynasty, the erstwhile lords of Bellême, the weight of whose power lay in the Saosnois region of northeast Maine, especially after Henry stripped John of the Alençonnais in 1166. The county of Ponthieu had effectively passed to the senior branch of the Talvas family in the 1150s, although this branch retained some land near Dieppe and had revenues elsewhere in Normandy, and until his death in 1171 Count William Talvas retained overall authority over the Talvas lands in Ponthieu, Normandy and Maine. Of the three Norman counts who made no answer to the inquest in 1172, the count of Évreux held great lordships in the Île-de-France at Montfort-l’Amaury and Rochefort ; the counts of Aumale and Eu both had very substantial English lands. So, in theory, did the count of Mortain, although the honours of Mortain were in royal hands from 1159 onwards. The count of Dammartin held Alizay near Rouen, and near the end of his reign Henry granted the important ducal town of Lillebonne to the count’s eldest son Reginald. Countess Ida of Boulogne, the granddaughter of King Stephen who married Reginald in the reign of Richard I, was already

Cartulary of Bradenstoke Priory, ed. V. C. M. London, Wilts. Rec. Soc. 35 (Devizes 1979), nos. 643–4 (cf. no. 503). David Crouch has plausibly suggested that they had acquired these lands through a Tancarville marriage before 1135 (D. Crouch, William Marshal : Court, Career and Chivalry in the Angevin Empire, 1147–1219, 2nd edn (London 2002), 23 n.). Edward II of Salisbury (d. by 1130) endowed the Tancarville abbey of Saint-Georges-de-Boscherville from Rames (now Rame, cant. Saint-Romain-de-Colbosc, cne. Gommerville), but he had apparently acquired this property through marriage to Adeliza de Rames and it passed to his daughter Leonia d’Étouteville (ADSM, 13 H 253 ; EYC, ix, 48–50 ; see p. 95 n. 3 below), whereas the earls were descended from his elder brother Walter (who was also the father of William Marshal’s mother Sybil).   Crouch, Beaumont Twins, esp. 64–79.   For this dynasty in the 12th century, see Thompson, ‘William Talvas’ ; Power, Norman Frontier, passim.   Layettes du Trésor des Chartes, ed. A. Teulet et al., 5 vols. (Paris 1863–1909), i, no. 291, and RHF, xxiii, 718 : Saint-Aubin-le-Cauf near Dieppe. Norman Pipe Rolls, 28 (MRSN, i, 38–9) : rents from the mills of Varreville (cf. p. 114 n. 3 below).   J.-N. Mathieu, Recherches sur les premiers comtes de Dammartin (Paris et Île-de-France, Mémoires, no. 47) (Paris 1996), 54–6 ; Vincent, ‘Les Normands’, 88. For ducal rights at Lillebonne, see MRSN, i, 67, 68 (1180) (Norman Pipe Rolls, 48, 49), 156–7 (1195). For Alizay (eu, cant. Pont-de-l’Arche), see ADSM, G 1458, an agreement between Count Aubry de Dammartin and the archbishop of Rouen (Jan. 1200). Count Aubry was buried at Jumièges, very close to Lillebonne, in Sept. 1200.



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holding substantial revenues in the Pays de Caux in 1179–80. Chambois near Exmes, although often in ducal hands, notionally belonged to the counts of Vermandois. There is plenty of evidence that the English earls identified strongly with Normandy, notwithstanding their English titles. The Norman inheritance of William de Mandeville, earl of Essex, was allegedly worth about 400 livres angevins, and he worked to build up his estates in the Argentan region, partly by purchase, partly by grants from Henry II or from the count of Flanders, at whose court he had grown up. Mandeville, who also had hereditary estates in the Pays de Caux, added greatly to his interests in Upper Normandy by marriage in 1180 to the countess of Aumale, a match contracted with Henry II’s blessing. To the Walden chronicler, William de Mandeville was an Englishman dwelling amongst foreigners, defending the Norman frontier castles of Henry II ; to the earl himself, however, Normandy was anything but a foreign land. Of the other comites, the involvement of the earls of Leicester and Chester in Norman affairs needs no description here ; Waleran of Meulan chose to be buried at Saint-Pierredes-Préaux (1166), Simon de Montfort in Évreux Cathedral (1181), and Aubry of Dammartin at Jumièges (1200). Yet the fact remains that, in contrast to England, Maine, Anjou, and Aquitaine, the greatest landed power in Normandy belonged to dynasties whose main interests lay outside the province ; amongst the Plantagenet dominions, only in Ireland and Brittany did the leading noble families have comparable external interests.   Norman Pipe Rolls, 65–6 (MRSN, i, 90) : 550 li. p.a., drawn from the vicomtés of Caux, Fécamp, Montivilliers, Harfleur, Étretat and Bernouville.   Power, Norman Frontier, 213–14 ; see n. 4 on this page.   CRR, vii, 110–11 : in 1214 Geoffrey IV de Mandeville alleged that Earl William’s honours had included lands worth £100 (sterling) in Normandy, but it is unlikely that this included all the earl’s acquisitions.   Chambois (or, cant. Exmes) and Avenelle (cant. Exmes, cne. Orméel) : Power, Norman Frontier, 50, 213–14 ; M. Billoré, ‘Le Château, enjeu de pouvoir en Normandie, sous le règne des Plantagenêt’, in Cinquante Années d’études médiévales : A La Confluence de nos disciplines ; Actes du Colloque organisé à l’occasion du Cinquantenaire du CESCM, Poitiers, 1er–4 septembre 2003, ed. C. Arrignon et al. (Turnhout 2005), 165–87, at 174–5. The earl received Chambois from Philip of Flanders, who held it in right of his wife, Countess Isabella of Vermandois. ADO, H 1418, H 1768, H 1824, and BN, MS lat. 11059, fols. 30r, 30v : acts concerning his acquisitions, possessions and gifts around Survie (cant. Exmes) and Fresnay-le-Samson (or, cant. Vimoutiers). See also PRO, DL 25/722, and RHF, xxiii, 640 (Beuzeval, CA, cant. Dozulé) ; Actes Henri II, ii, no. DCCLVII (Reviers, CA, cant. Creully) ; ADC, H 727 (act of Geoffrey III de Mandeville, d. 1166, concerning fiefs in the Bocage). For Earl William’s Flemish upbringing, see Book of Walden, 44, 80.   Diceto, ii, 3 ; Power, Norman Frontier, 284–5. For the roots of the Mandevilles and their English tenants in Petit-Caux, see RHF, xxiii, 640 ; Loyd, Origins, 36, 48, 57, 60–61, 75, 91.   Book of Walden, 60 ; Keefe, Feudal Assessments, 114–15.   Crouch, Beaumont Twins, 79 ; Power, Norman Frontier, 331–2 ; Chartes de l’abbaye de Jumièges, ed. J. J. Vernier, 2 vols. (Rouen and Paris 1916), ii, no. CCXVII.

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If we move below the level of the comites, however, a very different picture emerges. The interests of the families of secondary rank were concentrated in the duchy, although most also had some English possessions. They appear to have been a relatively cohesive, fairly endogamous group. Robert of Torigni recorded numerous marriages between such families as Montfort-sur-Risle, Creully and Patric ; other alliances linked the houses of Courcy (the ‘Norman’ branch), Taisson, Fitz Erneis and Paynel, and those of Vernon, Tancarville, La Haye and Hommet. Their loyalty to Henry II was not always assured : Richard fitz Count, son of Earl Robert of Gloucester, who had caused much trouble for Henry in the early 1150s, helped to suppress the great revolt twenty years later, when the names of Tancarville, Patric and Montfort were prominent amongst the rebels against the king of England. Nevertheless, members of these lineages were prepared to hold the great offices of the duchy, such as the constables Richard and William du Hommet, the chamberlain William de Tancarville, and the seneschals Robert du Neubourg and Robert and William de Courcy. The records of ducal judicial proceedings such as assizes and other meetings of the curia regis show many of this rank participating actively in ducal affairs. The Anglo-Norman connection Were the aristocratic ties between Normandy and England strengthening or weakening during Henry’s reign ? It has been clearly established, most comprehensively by Emily Tabuteau, that a great many of the Anglo-French families had fallen into a continental and an insular branch long before 1135, and the wars of ensuing succession inevitably undermined the cross-Channel ties further. Others reduced their cross-Channel interests after Henry II reunited England and Normandy in 1154. After the death of Richard de la Haye about 1169, the initial division between his three daughters did not separate their Norman from their English lands ; but in the reign of Richard I a new division between the three heiresses awarded the English barony of La Haye to the eldest daughter Nicola   Torigni, 262, 269 (ed. Delisle, ii, 48, 58) : marriages of Richard fitz Count of Creully (d. 1176) to a sister of Robert de Montfort, and of their daughter to Enguerrand Patric.   An act of Robert VI fitz Erneis (d. 1217 × 1220) describes him as the nepos of Ralph (IV) Taisson, and his father Robert V fitz Erneis (fl. 1173) as the son of Rohese de Courcy (Gallia Christiana, xi, instr., cols. 333–7) ; Actes Henri II, ii, no. DCCL, 394, calls Robert V the nepos of William de Courcy (seneschal of Normandy). Ralph Taisson’s sister Cecily married Fulk Paynel before the mid-1190s (L. Delisle, Histoire du château et de sires de Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte (Valognes 1867), 35 n.) and Ralph himself married Matilda, daughter and heiress of Enguerrand Patric, in 1195–6 (Loyd, Origins, 76).   Power, Norman Frontier, 526–7.   Torigni, 161, 180–81, 256–7, 259–60 (ed. Delisle, i, 254, 286–7 ; ii, 36, 38–9, 42–4) ; Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 51.  E. Z. Tabuteau, ‘The Role of Law in the Succession to Normandy and England, 1087’, HSJ, 3 (1991), 141–69.



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 the defender of Lincoln Castle in 1217  whereas her younger sisters divided their father’s Norman lands between them. Between 1171 and 1181 Richard de Vernon of Harlaston ceded his Norman property at Radepont, near Les Andelys, to Henry, lord of Le Neubourg, in return for lands in Berkshire, ending the Norman connections of this particular Vernon family. Yet we also find trends in the opposite direction. By the reign of Henry I the Étouteville (Stuteville) family had split into primarily ‘English’ and ‘Norman’ branches ; but under Henry II the marriage of Robert d’Étouteville to Leonia of Salisbury greatly revived the English interests of the ‘Norman’ branch, and Robert sought to make good his wife’s claims to other English lands. Henry II himself sometimes rewarded Norman servants with English lands, or vice versa. John de Subligny, who apparently had no English lands before entering King Henry’s service, received manors in Cornwall and Somerset. William Marshal was promised the hand of Isabella of Striguil, who had inherited modest lands in Normandy together with much more substantial claims that her energetic husband proceeded to make good in the reigns of Henry’s sons. The new cross-Channel connections of the Étoutevilles, Sublignys and Marshals had vitality, for they outlasted the ‘end of the Anglo-Norman realm’ by   Ancient Charters Royal and Private Prior to A.D. 1200, ed. J. H. Round (PRS 1888), no. 55 ; CRR, xiv, no. 1155 ; Rotuli de Dominabus et Pueris et Puellis de XII Comitatibus (1185), ed. J. H. Round (PRS 1913), 12 ; I. J. Sanders, English Baronies : A Study of their Origin and Descent (1086–1327) (Oxford 1960), 109. Nicola’s sisters were Gila (or Egidia), wife of Richard du Hommet, and Isabella, wife of William de Roullours. For Nicola, see L. J. Wilkinson, ‘Women as Sheriffs in Early Thirteenth-Century England’, in English Government in the Thirteenth Century, ed. A. Jobson (Woodbridge 2004), 111–24. She maintained connections with Normandy until 1204 through her husbands : the first, William fitz Erneis (d. 1178), was from a prominent Norman family and a Norman rebel in 1173 (Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 46), and the second, Gerard de Camville (d. 1215), also had lands in Normandy (Loyd, Origins, 24). See also p. 114 n. 3 below.   Historical Manuscript Commission : The Manuscripts of his Grace the Duke of Rutland, K.G., preserved at Belvoir Castle, 4 vols. (HMSO, 1888–1905), iv, 21–2 (confirmation of Henry II) : half of Basildon (Berks.) and Ashampstead (cf. VCH Berks., iii, 449, 458–60). For Richard de Vernon of Harlaston, whose family was distinct from the lords of Vernon and Néhou, see Honors and Knights’ Fees, ii, 276–7 ; D. Power, ‘Les Châteaux de la Normandie : défenses Plantagenêt ou résidences aristocratiques ?’, in Cinquante Années d’études médiévales, ed. Arrignon et al., 149–64, at 158. Henry du Neubourg retained Cottesmore (Rutland) and Stoke Edith (Herefs.), with which he warranted the cession of half of Basildon and Ashampstead ; he also retained the other half of these two Berkshire manors.   EYC, ix, 41–3, 48–55 ; Loyd, Origins, 84 ; K. Thompson, ‘L’Aristocratie anglo-normande et 1204’, in La Normandie et l’Angleterre, ed. Gazeau and Bouet, 179–87, at 185. The Norman branch had retained the manor of Stratfield Saye (Hants.) ; Leonia was lady of Rame (see p. 91 n. 4 above ; cf. RHF, xxiii, 643 ; Le Maho, ‘L’Apparition des seigneuries’, 21, 128) and a descendant of Edward of Salisbury.   Domesday Descendants : A Prosopography of Persons occurring in English Documents, 1066–1166, ii : Pipe Rolls to Cartae Baronum, ed. K. S. B. Keats-Rohan (Woodbridge 2002), 726 ; J. A. Everard, Brittany and the Angevins : Province and Empire, 1158–1203 (Cambridge 2000), 83–5, 211–12.   Power, ‘French Interests’, 200–206.

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several decades. Even some new links that did not survive the wreck of Angevin fortunes in 1204 testify to the continuing renewal of the Anglo-Norman connection under Henry II. As custodian of the Norman Vexin castles, Earl William de Mandeville appointed his cousin and household knight Henry de Vere, son of the earl of Oxford, as constable of Gisors, where he was involved in a notorious border clash with a neighbouring French garrison in 1186. During his service in the Norman Vexin, Henry married Matilda, the youngest of three coheiresses of Baudemont and Cailly, acquiring half her inheritance in Suffolk and the Roumois. Henry de Vere himself had no previous Norman connections  Katherine Keats-Rohan has proved beyond doubt that the Vere earls had originated in Brittany  and outwardly he conforms to the stereotype of the English intruder in Normandy under the Angevins. Yet, but for the fall of Normandy, it is likely that his marriage would have established a Vere line of lords of Cailly. In the absence of a comprehensive survey of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy, it is impossible to know whether the connections between the two countries were in serious decline during Henry’s reign. Norman lordship and service What was Norman lordship like ? Few studies have examined the ways in which Norman lords exercised their domination over lesser landowners and peasants. Both the extent of customary rights over economic resources and the balance between ducal and seigneurial justice and fiscal exactions need much more systematic investigation. It is possible that Norman lordship over the peasantry was weaker than in England. Most Norman peasants seem to have been free ; their   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 354–5 ; Diceto, ii, 44 ; Book of Walden, 82, 179.   Powicke, Loss of Normandy, 334–5 ; Power, Norman Frontier, 486. As well as half of Mutford (Suffolk), in Richard I’s reign Henry and Matilda held some of her father’s Norman lands, including at La Haye-Gonor (SM, cant. Clères, cne. Bosc-Guérard-Saint-Adrien) : ADSM, 2 H 63, no. 3 ; BN, MS lat. nouv. acq. 1801, fol. 83r–v. By 1199 Matilda (d. c.1231) had remarried to the Norman curialis Reginald de Bosco (d. 1217 × 1223), with whom she held her Norman lands thereafter ; meanwhile, her son by Henry de Vere acquired all her English inheritance, but after his death some at least of his English lands were regarded as terre Normannorum (Book of Fees, 135–6, 392 ; CRR, xvi, no. 1452), presumably because his heirs for them (i.e. on his mother’s side) were the Norman heirs of Cailly. GEC, Complete Peerage, x, app. J, p. 117 n. d, distinguishes three men called Henry de Vere in the late 12th century, but most probably there were only two : Henry, son of Aubrey II de Vere (first earl of Oxford), constable of Gisors, knight of William de Mandeville, and husband of Matilda de Cailly ; and Henry, son of Aubrey II de Vere’s brother Robert, known usually to contemporaries as Henry fitz Robert (cf. VCH Northants., iii, 156).   K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, ‘William I and the Breton Contingent in the Non-Norman Conquest 1060–1087’, ANS, 13 (1991 for 1990), 157–72, at 170–71.   For a rare example, see Crouch, Beaumont Twins, 99–195 ; these subjects were also addressed in a number of Lucien Musset’s articles.



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relations with their lords were defined chiefly in terms of customary rents, and although lords did exercise justice over their hospites and homines, their chief control was over a restricted number of economic resources, especially mills and millingrights. The importance of such revenues accords with Mathieu Arnoux’s conclusion that Normandy had an exceptionally high level of monetarisation in the Angevin period. By contrast, although baronial lordship over lesser landowners was probably stronger in Normandy than in England, it was much more feeble in extent than in some neighbouring parts of France : although many Norman lordships were more compact than their English equivalents, they were also relatively small in size by French standards. In Brittany, Anjou, Maine or Poitou magnates such as the lords of Fougères, Montsoreau, Mayenne or Thouars controlled vast territories with little interference from above or from neighbours ; in Normandy, no lords wielded such power and authority. Their fortified residences, though lavish when compared with earlier Norman castles, were modest by comparison with baronial fortresses elsewhere in France or in parts of England, and it is likely that many of the more impressive were built only by ducal licence, as a sign of Henry’s favour. The relative weakness of Norman lordship may explain why many Norman lords set such store by their English manors. The material aspects of the relationship of the king of England with the lords of Gournay were defined not only by the impressive Gournay lordships in northeast Normandy but also by the fate of the manors of Wendover, Houghton Regis and Bledlow. After Henry took Bonsmoulins from Richer de l’Aigle in 1158, the chief focus of their relationship was land in Dorset and the rape of Pevensey. We can only speculate whether the size of these manors, their extractable monetary wealth, or their higher level of social control were what made the English lands so attractive, since so few estate surveys survive from twelfth-century France ; most probably it was a mixture of all three. Even greater magnates in northern France valued English lands : the counts of Perche and the dukes of Brittany, despite holding entire French counties, worked hard to retain and enlarge their English property, as did many of the lesser French counts and the magnates of Brittany.   M. Arnoux, ‘L’Événement et la conjoncture : hypothèses sur les conditions économiques de la conquête de 1204’, in 1204 : La Normandie entre Plantagenêts et Capétiens, ed. A.-M. Flambard-Héricher and V. Gazeau (Caen 2007), 227–38, at 229–30. I discuss lordship in Angevin Normandy in D. Power, ‘Le Pouvoir seigneurial en Normandie (XIIe–XIIIe s.)’, in Seigneuries dans l’espace Plantagenêt (1150–1250), ed. M. Aurell and F. Boutoulle (forthcoming).   See esp. Billoré, ‘Le Château, enjeu de pouvoir’ ; also Power, ‘Les Châteaux de la Normandie’.   Power, Norman Frontier, 355–7.   K. Thompson, ‘The Lords of Laigle : Ambition and Insecurity on the Borders of Normandy’, ANS, 18 (1996 for 1995), 177–99.   K. Thompson, Power and Border Lordship in Medieval France : The County of the Perche, 1000–1226 (Woodbridge 2002), 164–89 ; Everard, Brittany, 38, 128, 135, 158, 163 ; idem, ‘Lands and Loyalties in

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The Norman knightly classes are far better documented by the end of Henry’s reign than at any time before, thanks to the explosion of charter production associated with the rise of the reformed religious orders in the twelfth century, although this evidence remains relatively neglected  even more so for the vavassors and sergeants who formed the lowest ranks of Norman landowners. The knights appear forming cohesive local communities that the magnates ignored at their peril, and there are numerous examples of their choosing to side against their lords during political crises. Few of the knights of Mortain or the Chester fiefs in the Avranchin joined the uprising of 1173, when the earl of Chester and the claimant to Mortain, Count Matthew of Boulogne, were both siding with the Young King. In the second half of the twelfth century knights began to use the seigneurial title over individual villages much as their lords did over castles, although this process reaches its fruition early in the following century, and like their social superiors they also appear to have been introducing aids and tallages. They clearly had extensive rights over churches and tithes, but they depended even more heavily than their lords upon control of mills : the word ‘ban’ and its derivatives had many meanings elsewhere in France, but in Normandy they were used chiefly in the context of milling, and the charters of the lesser aristocracy lay particular stress upon these rights. The family of Bastard, which held land at Savigny-le-Vieux from the lords of Fougères, gradually ceded most of its property to the nearby abbey of Savigny, but at each stage the mills and molta played an important part in the compensation provided by the monks. For such people, service to the duke was often a welcome alternative source of power and wealth : lesser barons and knights were becoming the mainstay of princely power in the duchy, a process that is clearest in the time of Richard, John and Philip Augustus but can also be seen as early as the reign of Henry I. Henry II himself appears to have appreciated the value of such servants. It was therefore inevitable that many of the more powerful knights would acquire several lords, seek seneschalcies or other offices from neighbouring magnates, or enter ducal service. Since fewer rewards must have been available to loyal knights compared to earlier Norman generations glutted with the wealth of England, offices and pensions were probably the chief reward that they could expect, although there Plantagenet Brittany’, in Noblesses de l’espace Plantagenêt (1154–1224), ed. M. Aurell (Civilisation Médiévale XI ) (Poitiers 2001), 185–97.   Power, Norman Frontier, 276, 401.  E.g. BN, MS lat. 5464, I, no. 6 (Thomas de Saint-Jean, near Évreux, c.1180), mentioning ‘auxilio militari et maritali priorum filii mei et filie mee’. Évreux, AD Eure, H 672, no. 4 (Roger Payn du Bois-Gencelin, 1196), mentioning his ‘new tallage’ (‘talleio novello’).  Rouen, Bib. Mun., Coll. Leber 5636, no. 4. See my forthcoming article, ‘Inheritance Customs, Lordship and Power in Twelfth-Century Northwest France’.  E.g. Thompson, ‘William Talvas’, 180 ; Power, Norman Frontier, 76–9, 283.  E.g. Thompson, ‘William Talvas’, 179–80.



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was an active aristocratic land market by Henry’s reign. The most successful magnates in Normandy were probably those who used cash gifts and money-fiefs, or else lands in England, to buy support. The most fascinating source of all is an account roll of Earl William de Mandeville rediscovered by Nicholas Vincent. It ends with a long list of cash gifts to his men, in both sterling and angevins, which are probably annual pensions or money-fiefs drawn from his Norman and English lands ; it also reveals that the earl was trying to integrate his Anglo-Norman estates with those of his wife, Countess Hawise of Aumale. In general the great Norman landowners appear relatively feeble, more constrained by princely power and with smaller lordships than other French magnates. In times of crisis the Norman landowners often found themselves pitted against each other, and as the duchy came under pressure from the Capetian monarchy in the late twelfth century, its aristocracy proved poorly united, pulled in different directions by the diverse traditions of the Norman regions. Yet in times of ducal weakness many Normans did successfully take common action. Orderic describes three such occasions during Henry II’s infancy. In December 1135 the funeral procession of Henry I from Lyons-la-Forêt to Rouen, which allegedly comprised twenty thousand men, included the earls of Gloucester, Warenne and Leicester, the counts of Perche and Meulan, and probably also the archbishop of Rouen and bishop of Évreux, on whose authority the funeral rites took place. In the same month occurred the well-known assembly at Le Neubourg, when the initial election of Theobald of Blois as duke of Normandy was overturned in favour of his brother Stephen. The third occasion occurred during Lent 1141, in the wake of King Stephen’s capture at Lincoln, when those whom Orderic describes as the ‘princes of the regions’ gathered at Mortagne in nearby Perche to debate their response to the crisis. Half a century later, during the crusade and captivity of Richard I, the Norman magnates also showed themselves well capable of taking a lead in their own affairs in the absence of their duke. The seneschal and magnates of Normandy negotiated vigorously with Philip Augustus between Gisors and Trie in January 1192, and the following year they were equally robust in their dealings with the attempts of Count John of Mortain to take over the   For some examples, see Power, Norman Frontier, 285–6.   BN, MS lat. 548, fol. 34r ; for discussion, see Power, Norman Frontier, 284–5 and n. 131, notably for the earl’s cultivation of the senior line of the Bisets, whose lord in Normandy he had become through his marriage. Another recipient of a pension, Hugh Torel, was Earl William’s sergeant in his lands near Argentan (ADO, H 1768 ; BN, MS lat. 11059, fol. 30r–v).   D. Power, ‘King John and the Norman Aristocracy’, in King John : New Interpretations, ed. S. D. Church (Woodbridge 1999), 117–36.   Orderic, vi, 448–50. Hugh de Gournay, William de Roumare, Robert de Sigillo, Robert de Vere and John Algason may also have been present.   Ibid., 454. Torigni, 128 (ed. Delisle, i, 200), states that the Normans summoned Theobald, who met them first at Rouen, then at Lisieux.   Orderic, vi, 548 (‘principes regionum’).

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Angevin lands in France, confronting him when he landed in the duchy and inviting him to a conference at Alençon that he declined to attend. Most of these gatherings of prominent Norman lords worked in the dukes’ favour, but that was not always true. The burial of Count Simon of Évreux in 1181 brought together most of the great barons from southeast Normandy, but although it was attended by the ducal bailli of Nonancourt, Saher de Quency, it primarily took place in a regional context distinct from the ducal court. In April 1203, as revolts broke out across the duchy against King John, a gathering at Vire of Norman magnates, including Earl Ranulf of Chester and Fulk Paynel, aroused the king’s suspicion : he dashed to the castle and took hostages from the main participants, which appears to have defused the situation, but it is significant that the embattled king of England had regarded this unlicensed assembly as a challenge to his authority. Individual barons often appear aloof from ducal affairs. On one occasion, for instance, we find William Patric, lord of La Lande-Patry in the Passais and Le Mesnil-Patry near Bayeux, holding his own Easter court. Such detachment may help to explain the active participation of William and his three sons in the rebellion of 1173–4, although that event could equally signify that the Young King’s court held some attraction for this important baronial lineage.

Henry II and the Normans These examples of Norman assemblies bring us to the question of the relations between Henry II and the Norman aristocracy. According to Judith Everard’s revised itinerary, Henry spent about thirteen years of his thirty-five-year reign in Normandy, to which we should add the years spent as the heir of Geoffrey and Matilda and as duke before December 1154. As Nicholas Vincent has pointed out, though, the king’s presence in the duchy alone tells us little, given its geographical location within the Angevin dominions. Thomas Keefe emphasised Henry’s close co-operation with many of his great magnates on both sides of the Channel ;   Howden, Gesta Regis, ii, 236 ; Howden, Chronica, iii, 187, 204.   Power, Norman Frontier, 331–2.   Rot. Norm., 96 (11 Apr. 1203). John de Préaux, William du Hommet, and Ralph Taisson (the last two respectively constable and seneschal of Normandy), may also have been implicated in some way, for the king took hostages from them as well. The king required the earl of Chester to surrender the castle of Semilly, which he had entrusted to him in 1201, but it was restored on 8 May (Rot. Pat., 1, 7, 28–9).   Liber Controversiarum Sancti Vincentii Cenomannensis, ed. A. Chédeville (Paris 1968), no. 87 : act of Ralph de la Lande[-Patry] for the abbey of Saint-Vincent du Mans, sealed by his lord William Patric, performed ‘in festivitate paschali curie domini Willelmi Patric’ (1164 × 1172). For the Patrics, see ibid., nos. 35, 95, 250, 318 ; Enguerrand Patric, William’s successor, may have attended the great Christmas court at Caen in 1182 (see pp. 120–21 below).  Vincent, ‘Les Normands’, 78–9, 87.



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by contrast, Maïté Billoré has stressed the oppressive character of Henry’s rule in Normandy. Demonstrations of Henry’s forceful dealings with elements in the Norman baronage are easy to find. The king exercised his will in the marriages of AngloNorman barons by virtue of their English lands, and was almost certainly doing so for Norman barons with no English lands as well : there appear to have been almost no marriages between Normans and French during his reign, and the king attempted to influence the marriages of those families that already possessed lands on both sides of the Franco-Norman frontier. The extent of Henry’s attention to marriage practices is demonstrated by one of the first entries in the Norman exchequer rolls, which shows that the lands of a royal sergeant near Bayeux had been confiscated because his daughter had married without the king’s consent. Henry held a number of surveys to recover lands by inquest, and the Norman exchequer rolls reveal that his officials worked hard to do the same at a local level. The king repeatedly took baronial castles into his hands ; in particular, in the first part of his reign he seized a series of castelries along the southern frontiers of the duchy between the Norman Vexin and the Pays de Dol  in other words, in precisely those regions where lordships were most compact. Most of these confiscations formed part of what David Bates has described as a ‘continuum of instability’ along the southern frontier : the structural rivalry between the dukes and their barons or neighbours dated back, at Alençon, Ivry and Mortain to at least the early eleventh century, and at Gisors, Moulins-la-Marche, Ambrières and Gorron (and arguably at Dol and Combour) to the reign of William the Conqueror. Yet apart from the sheer systematic nature of his actions  confiscating twenty-two major fortresses in nine years, the vast majority in these same marcher regions  Henry’s particular contribution was the far-reaching   Keefe, Feudal Assessments, 102–15 ; Billoré, ‘Y a-t-il une “oppression” ?’. In 1997 the late Professor Keefe expressed his belief to me that Henry mistrusted the Norman barons from as early as 1152–3, when he first encountered sedition in his duchy ; compare his more hesitant comments in this regard : T. K. Keefe, ‘Henry II’, Oxford DNB, xxvi, 434–49, at 435–7, 444. Certainly Richer de l’Aigle and Hugh de Gournay, who opposed Henry in 1152, were restored to some sort of favour by the 1160s, although both were treated as rebels by royal officers in England in 1173–4 ; conversely, the families of Meulan and Ivry, discomfited in 1153, were probably still out of favour when they joined the great revolt (Power, Norman Frontier, 354, 356, 399–400).   Ibid., 233–41.   Norman Pipe Rolls, 2 (cf. p. ix) : ‘Hamo Pincerna r.c. de xlix s. et viij d. de exitu terre Willelmi de Vals servientis regis que est in manu regis quia filia eius cepit maritagium sine assensu regis’ (correcting MRSN, i, 2). Perhaps Vaux-sur-Aure (ca, cant. Ryes).   D. Bates, ‘The Rise and Fall of Normandy, c.911–1204’, in England and Normandy, ed. Bates and Curry, 19–35 (phrase at 23) ; C. Potts, ‘The Earliest Norman Counts Revisited : The Lords of Mortain’, HSJ, 4 (1992), 23–35 (Mortain). See Power, Norman Frontier, passim.   Moulins, Bonsmoulins (1158) ; Mortain, Le Teilleul, Cérences, Tinchebray (1159) ; Gisors, Neaufles, Château-sur-Epte (1160) ; Ambrières, Gorron, Châteauneuf-sur-Colmont, Dol (1162) ; Combour

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enhancement of the fortifications themselves. Paradoxically, in the process he made the sites themselves more attractive, exacerbating the problem : the most famous, Gisors, was far more desirable in 1189 than 1089, so that its loss in 1193 was a much greater blow to Richard the Lionheart than it had been to Robert Curthose a century earlier. Yet Henry’s role in Norman history was not only one of princely oppression. Roger of Howden observed that ‘King Henry of England, providing for his honour and the security of his realm in all ways that he could, appointed his justices and governors whose fidelity and prudence he trusted, in Normandy and his other lands overseas.’ Even as we brush aside Roger’s courtier’s zeal we should remember that many of the institutions and practices of Capetian Normandy effectively began or took firm root in Henry’s reign, including the exchequer, assizes, standardised writs, recognitions, and possibly even the hearth-tax fouage. Although stronger fiscal institutions may not have been appreciated by the Normans, many will have benefited from more rigorous provision of justice. While exercising his rights and authority as duke, Henry came into contact with the Normans in a variety of ways : as fount of justice and lawmaker ; as patron ; as exactor of taxes ; and as leader and prince. The complexities of Henry’s relationship with his duchy are largely due to the conflicting demands of these different roles, which will be explored below. Justice The confirmation of ecclesiastical properties was the most ubiquitous manifestation of ducal authority and the most comprehensive testimony of the extent of ducal authority. The Acta of Henry II project has uncovered many Norman acts not published in the Delisle–Berger edition, extending the parts of Normandy mentioned in royal confirmations to include the lordship of Gournay and the county of Évreux, for instance. But active use of the various ducal courts by the Normans was more uneven in its distribution. The evidence is fragmentary, and there is a grave danger here of basing arguments upon silence ; nevertheless, (1164) ; Alençon, La Roche-Mabile, and Fougères (1166). Confiscated fortresses in the heart of Normandy included Coutances (1157) and the castles of Waleran of Meulan, presumably Pont-Audemer, Montfort, Brionne and Beaumont-le-Roger (1161).   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 198 (Easter 1178) : ‘Itaque Henricus rex Angliae honori sui et regni sui securitati modis omnibus quibus potuit providens, iustitias suos et rectores, de quorum fidelitate et prudentia confidebat, in Normannia et in caeteris terris suis transmarinis.’   For a tentative redating of the introduction of fouage to Henry’s reign, see Power, Norman Frontier, 37–8.   Acta, nos. 163, 830 : Paris, Archives Nationales, JJ 155, fols. 224v–225v, no. 375 (general confirmation for the abbey of Beaubec) ; PRO, C64/17, m. 7 (confirmation of a grant of Count Simon of Évreux to Évreux Cathedral). Both transcripts were kindly provided by the Acta project.



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there are strong signs that the core areas of ducal power were where the Normans had greatest recourse to the ducal courts, particularly around Caen, Bayeux, and Rouen. Conversely, in some areas, especially many of the frontier districts, recourse to the ducal courts was much rarer. In those regions Henry’s regime appears to have enjoyed fewer positive signs of legitimation by his subjects. From Henry’s reign we have evidence for four sorts of ducal courts : the local courts of viscounts or baillis ; in the king’s presence during his journeys around Normandy ; the Exchequer in Caen ; and the assizes. The most ubiquitous were the local courts held by ducal officials, typically the vicomte, constable or bailli. Not surprisingly, the business brought to these was almost exclusively local, and the the exchequer rolls reveal them to have been very domain-based in distribution. Where there were no centres of ducal power, such as in the far north-east of the duchy, there was unlikely to be a local ducal court. Henry’s seizures of the southern castelries enabled the baillis to bring routine ducal justice into those districts ; it receded again from districts where local seigneurs recovered their castles in the reigns of Henry’s sons. A small number of cases are recorded as taking place in the presence of the king himself. There are no examples of cases heard before Queen Eleanor, in contrast to the neighbouring province of Maine, although she was briefly regent of Normandy in 1170. It is difficult to generalise about such cases. A third forum was the Exchequer court. I have found only eight recorded cases that are definitely from Henry’s reign, although another eleven could also date from the decade before his death. It is unclear how much of the considerable legal business recorded in the exchequer rolls took place at Caen or locally, although its appearance on the baillis’ returns suggests the latter. The exchequer court seems to have been still relatively unimportant in Henry’s reign, although it was probably rapidly growing in significance at the time of his death, like the exchequer as a whole, and by 1186 acts performed at the exchequer were being recorded in rolls.   For more detailed discussion of ducal courts under the Angevins (to 1204), see Power, Norman Frontier, 40–66 ; idem, ‘Les Dernières années du régime angevin en Normandie’, in Plantagenêts et Capétiens, ed. Aurell and Tonnerre, 163–92, at 170–75.   Power, Norman Frontier, 31–4, 46–7.   D. Power, ‘The Stripping of a Queen : Eleanor of Aquitaine in Thirteenth-Century Norman Historical Tradition’, in The World of Eleanor of Aquitaine : Literature and Society in Southern France between the Eleventh and Thirteenth Centuries, ed. M. Bull and C. Léglu (Woodbridge 2005), 115–35, at 116–17.   Power, ‘Les Dernières Années’, fig. I, table I, nos. 1–5, 15–17 ; perhaps also nos. 6–14, 43 (but no. 44 did not in fact take place at the Exchequer), and BN, MS lat. 10086, fols. 114v–115r (Grands Rôles des échiquiers de Normandie, ed. A.-L. Lechaudé d’Anisy, 2 vols. (Paris 1845), i, 200), although most of these probably date from the reign of Richard I.   Sées, Bibliothèque de l’Évêché, Livre blanc de Saint-Martin de Sées, fol. 42bisv (ed. with errors in Valin, Le Duc de Normandie, 278–9, no. XXV).

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Finally, throughout the reign a significant number of cases were heard before the king’s justices (see Table 1 and Map 2). It is impossible to quantify the recorded assizes precisely, since the evidence comes almost entirely from charters ; quite a few mentions are undated, and sometimes the source does not specify whether the action took place in assizes or a local ducal court. Nevertheless, the table gives at least forty mentions of assizes from Henry’s reign as well as another possible seven : these forty-seven examples represent at least thirty separate occasions, twenty-seven of which certainly took place during Henry’s reign. That equates to a little less than one recorded assize per year. We can compare that to a total of between sixteen and twenty-two from the reign of Richard I and a dozen or more from John’s short reign in Normandy. The location of local ducal courts depended heavily upon where the duke had castles or major domains ; the exchequer was fixed at Caen, the administrative centre of the duchy, and the great majority of exchequer cases until 1204 concerned property from the surrounding region. The assizes, by contrast, concern a large part of the duchy and are a more widespread demonstration of the place of ducal justice in Norman society. Those collected in Table 1 took place in fourteen places. Several of these are mentioned only once, and the overwhelming majority were at Rouen (up to nine cases) or Caen (up to thirteen cases). Other venues included Argentan, Bayeux and Drincourt, all centres of ducal power, and the baronial castles of Montfort-sur-Risle and Longueville-sur-Scie, although both were then in ducal custody. The only assize in this list that certainly took place at a baronial estate was at Carentan, a property of the earl of Gloucester, in 1155. Admittedly, most of these cases involved at least one religious house and are known only from ecclesiastical muniments, but there is no reason to suppose that they poorly reflect the business of the assizes as a whole. In the mid thirteenth century the great custumal known as the Summa de legibus in curia laicali depicted the various Norman courts as organised into a clear hierarchy. In Henry’s reign, and possibly into the reign of Philip Augustus in Normandy, this hierarchy of courts may have   Table 1, nos. 1–26, 29–31, 33–7, 39–44 ; probably no. 27, and possibly nos. 28, 32, 38, 45–7. The details provided here differ slightly from those in Power, ‘Les Dernières Années’, since they incorporate research executed since the completion of that article.   Power, ‘Les Dernières Années’, table II, fig. IV ; in addition, BN, MS lat. 11055, fols. 175r–176v, nos. 499, 506, 508 ; fol. 185r, no. 552 ; ADC, H 7748, fol. 35v (poorly ed. in Grands Rôles, ed. Lechaudé, i, 202) ; Rot. Norm., 117–18 ; Cartulaire de l’abbaye bénédictine de Saint-Pierre-de-Préaux (1034– 1227), ed. D. Rouet (Paris 2005), 356, no. B126.   Avranches, Carentan, Domfront, Sées, Caudebec, Saint-Wandrille and Jersey.   In 1189 Longueville came to William Marshal in right of his wife Isabella of Striguil, and no more assizes are recorded there until 1231 (RHF, xxiv, p. i, Preuves de la préface, no. 88).   Table 1, no. 7.   Coutumiers de Normandie, ed. E.-J. Tardif, 2 vols. in 3 (Rouen/Paris 1881–1903), ii, 145, c. LV, § 1. In general, see R. de Fréville, ‘Étude sur l’organisation judiciaire en Normandie au XIIe et XIIIe siècles’, Nouvelle Revue Historique de Droit Français et Étranger, 36 (1912), 681–736.



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Table 1  Assizes in Normandy in the Reign of Henry II The numbers correspond to the location of the property concerned on Map 2. The corresponding sources are listed at the end of the table. No. Date

Location of assizes Location of property concerned

1 Dec. 1154 × 8 Apr. 1157 2 1154 × 1159 3 1154 × 1159 4 1154 × 1159 5 1154 × 1164 6 1154 × 1164 7 1155 8 1155 9 4 Oct. 1155 10 1155 × 1158 11 22 Nov. ; 1155 × 1162 12 1156 × 1172

Bayeux ?

Bayeux ; Forest of Vernay (ca, cant. Balleroy)

Avranches Rouen Rouen ? Rouen Rouen Carentan Domfront Rouen Caen Rouen

Vains (mn, cant. Avranches) Rouen (sm) meadows de Abapalmis (at Rouen, sm ?) Brucourt (ca, cant. Dozulé) Coudray (eu, cant. l’Êtrépagny) Sainte-Mère-Église (mn, ar. Cherbourg) Saint-Pair-sur-Mer (mn, cant. Granville) Dampierre-Saint-Nicolas (sm, cant. Envermeu) Thaon (ca, cant. Creully) Le Sap (or, cant. Vimoutiers)

Bayeux

13 1157

Caen

14 1157

Caen

15 1157 × 1189 (c.1180 ?)

—

Noyers-Bocage (ca, cant. Villers-Bocage) ; Les Gistots (cant. Isigny, cne. Sainte-Marguerited’Elle) ; Mondrainville (cant. Tilly-sur-S.) ; Montsecret (or, cant. Tinchebray) ; Frenesia (Frênes, cant. Tinchebray ?) Cinq-Autels (ca, cant. Bretteville-sur-Laize, cne. Fierville-Bray) Eventhot (probably Le Bingard, mn, cant. Coutances, cne. Muneville-le-Bingard) Forêt de Fécamp (sm, ar. du Havre) ;

16 1159 × 1161 17 1161 × 1164

Caen ? (in the king’s court) Bayeux

18 1164 19 1166 × 1189 20 1171

Caen — Bayeux ?

Le Tilleul, Sainte-Marie-au-Bosc, Villainville, La Poterie-Cap-d’Antifer (sm, cant. Criquetotl’Esneval) Bourg-Saint-Étienne (ca, cne. Caen) Cristot (ca, cant. Tilly), Franqueville (cant. Caen, cne. Saint-Germain-la-Blanche-Herbe ?) Livry (ca, cant. Caumont-l’Éventé) ? Avenelle (or, cant. Exmes, cne. Omméel) Bretteville-l’Orgueilleuse, Putot-en-Bessin (ca, cant. Tilly-sur-Seulles)

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Daniel Power Table 1 (cont.)

No. Date

Location of assizes Location of property concerned

21 1172 × 1183

Rouen

Londinières (sm, ar. Dieppe)

22 1176 × 1178

Montfort

Trouville-la-Haule (eu, cant. Quillebeuf )

23 s.d. (late 1170s ?) Montfort

Neuville-sur-Authou (eu, cant. Brionne)

24 Jan. 1177

Caen

Surrain (ca, cant. Trévières) ; Thaon (see no. 10)

25 1178–9

Drincourt

bailliage of Drincourt (Neufchâtel-en-Bray, sm, ar. Dieppe)

26 c.1178 × 1189

Caen or Bayeux ? Cahagnes (ca, cant. Villers-Bocage), La Ferrière-au-Doyen (cant. Le Bény-Bocage), Courvaudon (cant. Aunay-sur-Odon)

27 c. 1178 × 1189

Longueville

Équiqueville (sm, cant. Envermeu, cne. SaintVaast d’Équiqueville)

28 c. 1178 × 1200

Caen (in the king’s court)

Anglesqueville (mn, cant. Montebourg, cne. Saint-Martin d’Audouville)

29 1179–80

Jersey

Jersey

30 1180

Argentan

Quillebeuf (eu, ar. Bernay)

31 16 Nov. 1180 × Caen (in the Jul. 1181 king’s court)

Rouen (sm)

32 1182 × 1200

—

Saint-Mards-sur-Risle (eu, cant. PontAudemer, cne. Saint-Mards-de-Blacarville)

33 20 Jan. 1183

Caen

Villons-les-Buissons (ca, cant. Creully)

34 1183

in assizes (at Caen ?)

Caen (ca) ?

35 1183–4

Drincourt

Drincourt (sm) ?

36 1184

Saint-Wandrille

Flipou (eu, cant. Fleury-sur-Andelle)

37 1184

Caen

N.-D. de Théville (mn, cant. Saint-PierreÉglise)

38 1184 × 1198

 ? (then in the king’s court at Argentan)

Montgaroult (or, cant. Écouché)

39 1185

Caen

Carpiquet (ca, cant. Tilly-sur-Seulles)

40 1185 (?)

Longueville

Étretat (sm, cant. Criquetot-Lesneval)

41 1186

Rouen

Sompting (Sussex)

42 30 Jan. 1187

Bayeux

Lison (ca, cant. Isigny-sur-Mer)



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No. Date

Location of assizes Location of property concerned

43 1187

Caen

Loucelles (ca, cant. Tilly-sur-Seulles)

44 1187

Sées

La Ferrière-Béchet (or, cant. Sées)

45 1187 × 1193

Caudebec

Brionne (eu, ar. Bernay)

46 1187 × 1201

Argentan

Médavy (or, cant. Mortrée)

47 1188 × 1192

Rouen

Brémule (eu, cant. Fleury-sur-Andelle, cne. Gaillardbois-Cressenville), La Mésangère (cne. Mesnil-Verclives), Le Roule (cant. Lyons-laForêt, cne. Le Rosay)

Sources 1 Actes Henri II, i, no. XXXVIII (Antiquus Cartularius Ecclesiae Baiocensis, i, no. 35). .       2 Actes Henri II, i, no. CLIII. 3 Actes Henri II, i, no. CLIII. 4 Actes Henri II, i, no. CLIII. 5 Cartulaire de Saint-Pierre-de-Préaux, 233–4, no. B21 (C. H. Haskins, Norman Institutions, 325 no. 6). 6 Mémoires et notes pour servir à l’histoire du département de l’Eure, ed. A. Le Prévost, 3 vols. (Évreux 1862–9), i, 551–2 ; Actes Henri II, intro., 455. 7 Torigni, 333 (ed. Delisle, ii, 241) ; Haskins, Norman Institutions, 165. 8 Torigni, 333–4 (ed. Delisle, ii, 241–2) ; Haskins, Norman Institutions, 165. 9 BN, MS lat. 17759, fol. 78r–v. 10 Haskins, Norman Institutions, 323. 11 Haskins, Norman Institutions, 218 n. 93. 12 Actes Henri II, i, no. CCCXXXV. 13 ADO, H 3912 (Haskins, Norman Institutions, 165 and n. 55). 14 Torigni, 339–40 (ed. Delisle, ii, 251–2) ; Haskins, Norman Institutions, 165. 15 ADSM, 13 H 164 : ‘in curia regis coram baronibus et iusticiis’. 16 Actes Henri II, i, no. CLIII. 17 ADC, H 1883 ; Valin, Le Duc de Normandie, 270, no. XVI ; cf. Haskins, Norman institutions, 216. 18 ADSM, 16 H 14, fol. 286v. 19 Études critiques sur l’abbaye de Saint-Wandrille, ed. F. Lot (Paris 1913), no. 101. 20 Actes Henri II, i, no. CCCV. 21 Actes Henri II, ii, no. DLXXXVI. 22 Valin, Le Duc de Normandie, 271–2, no. XVIII ; Chartes de l’abbaye de Jumièges ii, no. CXV (cf. i, no. XCV) ; Haskins, Norman Institutions, 327–8 (App. H, no. 10), 334 no. 2. 23 ADE, H 91, fol. 88v, no. IV ; Haskins, Norman Institutions, 334 no. 3. 24 Antiquus Cartularius Ecclesiae Baiocensis, no. XCV (Actes Henri II, intro., 347 ; Haskins, Norman Institutions, 334 no. 1). 25 Norman Pipe Rolls, 41 (MRSN, i, 57). 26 H. G. Richardson, ‘A Norman Lawsuit’, Speculum, 7 (1932), 383–92 ; M. Arnoux, Des Clercs au service de la Réforme : Études et documents sur les chanoines réguliers de la province de Rouen (Turnhout 2000), 359–62. 27 Valin, Le Duc de Normandie, 273–4, no. XX (Haskins, Norman Institutions, 335 no. 9) : Isabella (of Meulan), countess of Pembroke (the date of whose death is unknown). 28 Inventaire sommaire des Archives Départementales de la Manche, Série H, i, ed. M. Dubosc (Saint-Lô 1866), 34 (H 212, destroyed in 1944). 29 Norman Pipe Rolls, 19 (MRSN, i, 26) : ‘[Ricardus Burnulfi] r.c. de .xx. li. quia fecit concordiam de juditio ferri sine assensu justic’.’ 30 Chartes de l’abbaye de Jumièges, ii, no. CXXVIII. 31 Actes Henri II, ii, no. DLXIV (Cal. Docs. France, no. 303). 32 Cartulaire de Préaux, 333–4, no. B102. 33 Charters and Custumals of the Abbey of Holy Trinity, Caen, part 2 : The French Estates, ed. J. Walmsley (Oxford 1994), 112–13 (Cal. Docs. France, no. 432 ; Actes Henri II, ii, no. DCXXXVIII ; Haskins, Norman Institutions, 334 no. 7). 34 Charters of Holy Trinity, Caen, 128–9 ; Actes Henri II, intro., 349 ; Valin, Le Duc de Normandie, 276, no. XXII ; Cal. Docs. France, no. 437. 35 Norman Pipe Rolls, 84 (MRSN i, 116–17). 36 ADE, III F 393, 473–4 ; Mémoires de l’Eure, ed. Le Prévost, ii, 111 (Haskins, Norman Institutions, 335 no. 10). 37 BNF, MS lat. 10087, 149, no. 474 (Haskins, Norman Institutions, 335 no. 11). 38 ADC, H 6510, fol. 7r, no. 21. 39 Charters of Holy Trinity, Caen, 129–31 (Haskins, Norman Institutions, 335 no. 12). 40 Actes Henri II,

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Meulan

ii, no. DCLI (Haskins, Norman Institutions, 335 no. 12a). 41 Rouen, Bibl. Mun., Y 51, fol. 81v (Cal. Docs. France, no. 140 ; Haskins, Norman Institutions, 335 no. 14). 42 Antiquus Cartularius Ecclesiae Baiocensis i, no. 240 (Haskins, Norman Institutions, 335 no. 13). 43 BL, Add. Ch. 67578 (BNF, MS lat. nouv. acq. 1428, fol. 18 ; Haskins, Norman Institutions, 335 no. 15). 44 Sées, Bibl. de l’Évêché, Livre blanc de St-Martin de Sées, fols. 118v–119r (Haskins, Norman Institutions, 335 no. 16). 45 Études critiques sur Saint-Wandrille, no. 114 (Haskins, Norman Institutions, 336 no. 26). 46 BN, MS lat. 11055, fol. 176r, no. 506. 47 ADSM, 14 H 232 (Haskins, Norman Institutions, 335 no. 16a).

Bellême 44

46

ay

Ambrières nt mo

ol

Co u e s n o n

Pontorson

Mont-StMichel

8

Jersey 29

en ne

Domfront

en n

Mortain une

S él

AVRANCHES 2

Gavray

COUTANCES

e

r

14

Carentan

7

28

Cherbourg

37

Alençon

19

Argentan 38

12

Vire

18 26

St-Lô

1 12 42

Falaise

13 26

5 10,24 33 17 20 16,34 Caen Troarn 12 39 17 43

BAYEUX

1 24

C

Map 2  Assizes in Normandy in the Reign of Henry II

re

11

Moulins SÉES

l’Aigle

Bernay

Av

I to n

Breteuil

Verneuil

Eur

e

Nonancourt

Dreux

Ivry

Vernon Vaudreuil 45 23

Pont-Audemer Ri Montfort sl e

ÉVREUX

re

36

LISIEUX

40

15

0

0

Location of assizes

Location of property at assizes (see Table 1) 3

Vi

Carentan

Approximate border of Normandy, 1161-93

CHARTRES

Mantes 47

47

ll de

An

3,4,31

ROUEN

30

Lillebonne

32

22

Caudebec

St-Wandrille

Longueville 15

25 miles

6

Gournay

Aumale 25,35

Drincourt

21 ét

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functioned effectively only in the Bessin and along the route corridor towards Falaise and Argentan. Elsewhere, for both genuine and fictitious pleas, parties used assizes and local courts, but the Exchequer court was not used much by litigants from Upper Normandy, and assizes seem rarer in the more remote parts of the duchy. Some large geographical gaps are visible for all these courts, particularly in the frontier regions but also other districts such as parts of the Cotentin, and the effectiveness of all ducal justice appears to have been conditioned heavily by what domains were in ducal hands  and hence by aristocratic power. Ducal patronage Apart from the provision of justice, other elements in the give and take of ruler and ruled include services, especially military ; reward and patronage ; and the gatherings at which the prince assembled his subjects. Much could be said about military service, which was, after all, the raison d’être of the Infeudationes militum of 1172. Henry relied heavily upon the exercitus Normannie for his continental campaigns, particularly in the first half of his reign, but its leading members are identifiable only for the campaigns of 1173, and even then we have far fewer names for those Normans fighting for Henry than for his Norman opponents. The patronage of Henry II in Normandy, encompassing his endowments of churches and fostering of Norman towns as well as lay beneficiaries, deserves a separate study. To rule his duchy he depended upon a small army of officials, and although many of the most prominent of them came from England it is probable that the majority were of Norman origin. Their duties ranged from the baillis and constables upon whom ducal power depended to the sergeant Baldric fitz Gilbert whom the king allegedly appointed as custodian of the Rouen brothels. No doubt these men (and women) derived much of the reward for their service from the profits of office-holding, but Henry’s enrichment of his loyal supporters reveals much about his adept use of the limited resources at his disposal. Amongst the king’s most substantial gifts were his grants to Richard du Hommet, his constable in Normandy, from the honour of Giffard. Richard is a classic case of a ‘new’ man with ‘old’ blood. He was apparently descended in the male line from the great Bishop Odo of Bayeux, and through his mother from an earlier line of

  See the campaigns of 1158, 1159 and 1164 : Torigni, e.g. 196–8, 201–3, 206, 223 (ed. Delisle, i, 311–14, 318–22, 326, 353).   See esp. Torigni, 255–61 (ed. Delisle, ii, 35–46) ; Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 45–7, 51–2, 56–8 ; Jordan Fantosme, 11–19 (ll. 135–239).   For a summary of senior ducal officials in 1179–80, see Powicke, Loss of Normandy, 68–76.   Actes de Henri II, i, no. CCXII (1156 × 1162), ‘custos meretricum publice venalium in lupanari de Rothomago’. This act, known from copies in the registers of Philip Augustus, is treated as suspicious by Acta, no. 954, largely because of its peculiar details such as the one quoted here.

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lords of Le Hommet-d’Arthenay near Saint-Lô ; but he owed his position within the duchy to the favour of Geoffrey of Anjou and Henry Plantagenet  whose constable he had become even before Henry’s coronation  and an advantageous marriage. The constable showed his gratitude to his Angevin master by his leadership of the Norman forces in Brittany in 1164 and at the siege of Verneuil in 1173, shortly after his son William had helped to defeat Ralph de Fougères and the earl of Chester at Dol. Early in his reign Henry II granted him 50 librates of land at Stamford (Lincs.) and another 15 librates at Duddington (Northants.). During the great rebellion he augmented these grants by conferring the whole town and castle of Stamford upon him, together with the adjacent manor of Ketton (Rutland). These were royal domains, and some of Henry’s other domain   Thomas Stapleton (MRSN, ii, pp. clxxx–clxxxvii) argued that Richard was descended from Bishop Odo, as the son of a Robert nepos episcopi and the heiress of an earlier Hommet family ; cf. Rotuli de Oblatis et Finibus in Turri Londinensi Asservati, ed. T. D. Hardy (Record Commission 1835), 199–200. K. Major, The Registrum Antiquissimum of the Cathedral Church of Lincoln VI, Lincoln Rec. Soc. 41 (Lincoln 1950), 181–6, argued that Robert might have been the nepos of another bishop, cast doubt upon the marriage between Robert nepos episcopi and the putative heiress of William du Hommet (and indeed upon the very existence of the earlier Hommets), and believed that the constables’ lineage could be linked to Le Hommet only from 1142–3 (see next note). However, D. Bates, ‘Notes sur l’aristocratie normande’, Annales de Normandie, 23 (1973), 7–38, at 33–7, accepts Stapleton’s theories on the basis of an act  not known to Major  for the Hommet foundation of Saint-Fromond : it expressly refers to Robert as nepos Odonis episcopi and shows him making grants near Le Hommet to the priory, and it identifies Richard the constable as a nepos of William du Hommet (fl. 1066 × 1083). See L. Musset, ‘Les Origines du prieuré de St-Fromond : Un Acte negligé de Richard II’, BSAN, 53 (1955–56), 475–88, at 484 ; cf. Bates, Regesta, no. 92, for the earlier family of Le Hommet. Robert Curthose had given Le Hommet to Roger fitz Richard (d. after 1130), head of the Clare dynasty in Normandy, in c.1090 (Jumièges, ii, 228), presumably after the extinction in the male line of the first Hommet dynasty.   Regesta, iii, p. xxxvii. The earliest mention of Richard du Hommet reveals him despoiling the bishopric of Bayeux (Papsturkunden in Frankreich, ns ii : Normandie, ed. J. Ramackers (Göttingen 1937), no. 14, dating it to 1138 × 1142 ; Antiquus Cartularius Ecclesiae Baiocensis (Livre noir), ed. Abbé V. Bourrienne, 2 vols. (Rouen/Paris 1902–3), i, no. CXCV, with the more accurate date of 1142–3). It is tempting to believe that Richard rose to prominence as an agent of Geoffrey of Anjou’s subjugation of Lower Normandy and exploited Geoffrey’s favour to reconstitute the long-dispersed Hommet inheritance.  Richard’s marriage, perhaps in the early 1140s, to Agnes, daughter and later coheiress of Jordan de Saeio and Lucy de Remilly (or d’Aunay), is mentioned in an act of his grandson William de Semilly (ADC, H 727, ed. in G. Le Hardy, Étude sur la baronnie et l’abbaye d’Aunay-sur-Odon (Caen 1897), 272–5, no. 12). As well as a share of the Norman honours of Sae (probably Sey, MN, cant. Montmartin-sur-Mer, cne. Quettreville), Aunay and Remilly, Agnes’ inheritance included Kirtlington (Oxon.) : VCH Oxon., vi, 221–2 ; EYC, vii, 31–5. Two of her brothers, Gilbert and Peter, were still alive in 1151 and 1154 respectively (Regesta, iii, nos. 29, 810). The usual identification of William de Say, brother-in-law of Geoffrey de Mandeville, as another of Agnes’s brothers poses problems, although he was certainly her kinsman.   Torigni, 223 (ed. Delisle, i, 353) ; Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 51 ; Jordan Fantosme, ll. 164–7, 188–93.   PR 2–4 Henry II, 24, 40–41 ; Book of Fees, i, 195–6 ; Actes Henri II, ii, no. CCCCLXVI : ‘cum omnibus



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gifts to the constable were only temporary, but many of his rewards came from recently acquired escheats. In 1164–5 Richard du Hommet received property in Buckinghamshire that had been confiscated from Ralph de Fougères, and two manors, Princes Risborough (Bucks.) and Sheringham (Norfolk), that formed part of the honour of Earl Walter III Giffard, who had just died without direct heirs. By autumn 1174 the king had also granted two other Giffard estates, Maisy in the Bessin and the haia of La Luthumière near Cherbourg, to the constable, and between 1174 and 1179 he gave him three more : Auppegard near Dieppe, the basis for many of the Hommets’ pious endowments, and the Buckinghamshire manors of Lower Winchendon and Whaddon. Henry’s lavish distribution of Giffard honours to Richard du Hommet implies that he had no intention of reviving the Giffard earldom or honouring the claims of its collateral heirs. After Henry II’s death the division of Walter Giffard’s lands between his cousins Earl Richard de Clare and Isabella of Striguil, wife of William Marshal, would form one of Richard I’s chief acts of patronage as he secured his throne. Yet Auppegard, Maisy, Princes Risborough, and Sheringham remained with Richard du Hommet’s many descendants, who, bloated by royal pertinenciis castelli et burgi’ (at Caen, witnessed by Richard elect of Winchester, i.e. 1 May 1173 × c. 6 Oct. 1174). Henry was in England, c. 8 July – 7/8 Aug. 1174, but at Poitiers on 23 Sept. ; he returned to Normandy for the treaty of Falaise some time in October. His son William inherited Duddington in 1179–80 (PR 25 Henry II, 60 ; PR 26 Henry II, 81), but lost the 50 librates at Stamford early in 1204 (PR 6 John, 62 : 25 li. paid for half a year). See E. Amt, The Accession of Henry II in England : Royal Government Restored, 1149–1159 (Woodbridge 1993), 22, 61, 116–17, 127, for Richard du Hommet’s activities in England at the beginning of Henry’s reign ; ibid., 158, 160, for these first gifts of English lands. For the king’s patronage of the Hommets, see now Acta, nos. 1329–32, and notes ; I am grateful to the editors for allowing me to consult the new edition.   PR 11 Henry II, 23 ; N. C. Vincent, ‘Twyford under the Bretons, 1066–1250’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 41 (1997), 80–99, at 82, believes that this was Twyford, restored to Ralph de Fougères by 1167 (PR 13 Henry II, 110).   PR 11 Henry II, 25 ; cf. Actes Henri II, ii, no. CCCCLXVI (Acta, no. 1330). For Henry’s acts concerning Princes Risborough, a mere six miles from the caput of the Giffard honour at Long Crendon, see p. 112 n. 3 below.   Actes Henri II, ii, no. CCCCLXVI. Maisy, Calvados, cant. Isigny-sur-Mer, cne. Grandcamp-Maisy ; La Luthumière, MN, cant. Valognes, cne. Brix. For the Hommets at Maisy, see also MRSN, i, 7 (Norman Pipe Rolls, 5) ; ii, pp. clxxxiii–clxxxiv ; Actes Henri II, ii, no. DCCLVII, 409 ; The Cartularies of Southwick Priory, ed. K. A. Hanna, Hants. Rec. Soc., 2 vols. (Winchester 1988–9), ii, 19–21, 112–15 (III 55, 58, 324–8).   See the king’s regrant of these properties to William du Hommet c.1180 (Actes Henri II, ii, no. DXLIX). Auppegard : ibid., no. DCCLXVIII, at 422, 426, 427 ; MRSN, i, 59 (Norman Pipe Rolls, 43) ; Chartes du prieuré de Longueville . . . antérieures à 1204, ed. P. Le Cacheux (Rouen/Paris 1934), nos. XXIV, LXIX–LXXIII. Auppegard, SM, cant. Bacqueville ; Longueil, cant. Offranville. Lower Winchendon (half-manor) and Whaddon : PR 21 Henry II, 56 ; PR 22 Henry II, 27 ; Book of Fees, ii, 1404 ; VCH Bucks., iii, 436.   For a recent consideration of this partition, see Power, ‘French Interests of the Marshal Earls’, 203–6.

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gifts and several good marriages, had sufficient resources to establish four main lines by 1220 (see Figure 1). In that year, the court of the Norman exchequer heard a dispute over Auppegard between the senior line and heirs of a cadet branch, the lords of Remilly-sur-Lozon and Maisy, at which the then constable of Normandy produced an act of Henry II in his ancestor’s favour. The senior line had also augmented its possession by acquiring the honour of La Haye through marriage, no doubt under the auspices of Henry II. A third branch was descended from Richard du Hommet’s second son Enguerrand, who received Princes Risborough from his father with Henry II’s consent and confirmation. Enguerrand inherited his maternal grandmother’s honour of Aunay-sur-Odon and bolstered his Norman lands further by marrying the heiress of Semilly (no doubt also through Henry II’s favour) ; it is therefore not surprising that Risborough ultimately became one of the terre Normannorum, although Enguerrand’s son and grandson retained this English manor for much of the period before 1244. A fourth line, the Hommets of Cléville, took Sheringham, which it preserved after 1204 by deciding, after some wavering, to remain in England. Meanwhile, the Hommet half of Winchendon formed the dowry of William du Hommet’s daughter Agnes when she married the Lincolnshire baron Baldwin Wake, and through another   Recueil des jugements de l’Échiquier de Normandie au XIIIe siècle, ed. L. Delisle (Paris 1864), no. 293 : William (II) du Hommet, constable of Normandy, claims Auppegard from the wife of John de Brucourt, daughter and heiress of Enguerrand du Hommet of Remilly. Cf. ADC, H 912 (act of John de Brucourt as Enguerrand’s successor, 1235) ; for the Brucourts as lords of Maisy, see Cartularies of Southwick Priory, ii, 113–14 (III, 325–6).   See pp. 94–5 above, p. 114 below. Lucy, wife of William the constable (d. c.1206), remains unidentified, but may have been a sister of Henry du Neubourg : see Cartularies of Southwick Priory, ii, 23 (III, 72).   MRSN, ii, pp. clxxxiii–clxxxiv ; Red Book, ii, 537 ; Book of Fees, i, 21, 464, 468 ; ii, 875, 896, 1405 ; VCH Bucks., ii, 261–2 ; W. B. Stevenson, ‘England and Normandy, 1204–59’, 2 vols. (PhD diss., University of Leeds 1974), ii, 428–30. Oxford, Bodl. Lib., MS Dugdale 39, fol. 72r : William de Semilly confirms the grant of the church of Risborough by Walter Giffard, earl of Buckingham, to Crendon Park (Notley Abbey). Enguerrand’s son William I de Semilly recovered Risborough during the Magna Carta war, when his son William II was in the royal garrison at Oxford ; in 1226 the latter used Henry II’s act for Richard du Hommet as his warrant for Risborough, together with another of Henry’s acts (now lost), confirming Richard’s grant of Risborough to his son Enguerrand (grand­ father of William II de Semilly), ‘Domino Rege vidente et concedente’ (CRR, xii, no. 2333).   MRSN, i, pp. clxxxiii–clxxxiv ; Powicke, Loss of Normandy, 336 (Cléville, CA, cant. Troarn) ; Stevenson, ‘England and Normandy’, ii, 425–7 ; Recueil des jugements, no. 145. Oxford, Bodl. Lib., MS Dugdale 39, fol. 73r : John du Hommet, son of Jordan du Hommet, confirms the gift of the church of Sheringham by Earl Walter Giffard to Notley ; interestingly, his seneschal was called Peter d’Auppegard (s.d.).   MRSN, ii, p. clxxx ; VCH Bucks., iv, 119, noting that in 1234 Hugh Wake, grandson of Agnes, granted his half to Notley Abbey for £16 p.a. The other half of Winchendon had formed part of the Giffard honour but had never come to the Hommets, and Notley Abbey had secured both halves by 1234 : ibid., 119 ; Book of Fees, ii, 1404 (cf. 881 for Winchendon as libera elemosina of Earl Walter Marshal, 1242–3) ; Rot. de oblatis, 242, 271–2 (dispute between Notley and Agnes Wake, 1205). Cf.

Agnes = Richard du Hommet*  d. 1180 Roger du H. de Beaumont (Auppegard, Whaddon, ½ Winchendon, archbp of Dol (1161–4) (-le-Richard) Sheringham, Princes Risborough)

?

William du Hommet  fl. 1066 × 1083

Lucy = Jordan Robert = dau. d’Aunay de Say nepos episcopi (de Remilly) fl. 1133

child (John ?)

John du H. lord of Cléville fl. 1203–16 (Sheringham)

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William II du Hommet* dau.  fl. 1220 Baldwin III Wake Clemence  d. 1252 William II de Semilly Lucy = Richard de Grey d. 1240 ? = John de Brucourt d.1213 = Ranulf  d. 1232 d. 1242 d. after 1260 ↓ lord of Codnor (claimed Auppegard, 1220) ↓   fl. 1220–42 (½ Winchendon)   earl of Chester (Risborough) d. 1266 × 1271   (Auppegard, Maisy) | (Auppegard, 1200–1204) | Hugh Wake  d. 1241 William III de Semilly (sold Winchendon, 1234) (lost Risborough in 1243) *  royal constable / constable of Normandy ↓ ↓

Gila de = Richard du H. Jordan  d. 1218 Enguerrand du H. Agnes  d. by 1233 Agatha  d. after 1218 William I de Semilly la Haye d. c.1199 bp of Lisieux lord of Remilly (½ Winchendon) = William de Fougères d. by 1223 (Risborough) d. c.1197 d. 1220   = Baldwin II Wake      d. 1187 (Auppegard)     d. 1205 = dau. of Nigel de Mowbray     .

Lucy = William I du Hommet*  d. c. 1206 Enguerrand du H. Jordan du H.  d. 1192 = Hawise (du Neubourg?) (Auppegard, Maisy, Whaddon, d. 1180–81 constable of Sées, de Crèvecœur d. 1180 × 1189 ½ Winchendon) (Risborough) lord of Cléville       = Cecily de Semilly







A number of junior members of this family have been omitted, notably in the Semilly branch and among the children of William I du Hommet. The localities named in small capitals indicate the descent of Giffard properties granted by King Henry II. The table shows the emergence of four main lines among Richard’s descendants by c.1220 : Hommet, Remilly-Auppegard, Semilly-Risborough and Cléville-Sheringham. Odo  d. 1097 bishop of Bayeux

Figure 1 Richard du Hommet and his Descendants (simplified)

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daughter, Agatha, wife of William de Fougères, Auppegard briefly came to her daughter Clemence and her husband, Earl Ranulf of Chester. The significance of these arrangements extends beyond the history of one especially favoured curial family. In order to preserve the integrity of the estate, a younger son did not normally expect to father legitimate children unless sufficient material provision could be made for him. This was usually achieved through a profitable marriage ; but while the Haye and Semilly alliances undoubtedly boosted the Hommets’ wealth and standing, their fecundity and prosperity owed much to Henry II’s gifts from the Giffard escheats. The Hommets continued to benefit from royal favour after Henry’s death : Richard I allowed Richard, heir of William the constable, to recover two ducal estates in the Cotentin, worth over 400 livres angevins, in the face of rival claims, while Jordan du Hommet, lord of Sheringham and Cléville and probably also constable of Sées, became King Richard’s constable on the Third Crusade. Even in Henry III’s reign the descendants of Richard du Hommet continued to benefit from royal favour. The failure of the Marshals and Clares to recover Princes Risborough in the 1220s, when William II de Semilly was wavering between French and English allegiance, Oxford, Bodl. Lib., MS Dugdale 39, fol. 68v : Agnes, daughter of William du Hommet, with assent of her son Baldwin Wake, grants a messuage at Winchendon to Notley (1205 × 1213).  Vincent, ‘Twyford’, 88, 96 ; cf. 82, where he notes that the Hommet–Fougères marriage (before 1186) resolved their rival claims to Twyford (Bucks.). Ranulf held Auppegard from 1199 or 1200 ; it presumably reverted to the Hommets in 1204 and subsequently passed to the Remilly branch (see p. 112 above).   The Robert du Hommet and his son Peter who appear in the Cotentin in the early 13th century were presumably more distantly related to the royal constables (BN, MS lat. 10087, p. 128, nos. 366–8 ; RHF, xxiii, 611 ; Recueil des Jugements, no. 175).   Pouppeville (MN, cant. Sainte-Mère-Église, cne. Sainte-Marie-du-Mont) and Varreville (SaintGermain-de-Varreville or Saint-Martin-de-Varreville, cant. Sainte-Mère-Église). In Aug. 1189 Richard I, then still only duke, gave 300 li. ang. to Richard II du Hommet and his wife Gila de la Haye and the remainder to the latter’s sister Nicola de la Haye and her husband Gerard de Camville ; but in June 1190 he granted the whole of both properties to Gila and Richard, as Gila’s inheritance (Ancient Charters, no. 55 ; MRSN, ii, clxxx ; L. Delisle, ‘Notice sur les attaches d’un sceau de Richard Cœur de Lion’, BEC, 3rd ser. 4 (1853), 56–62 ; cf. p. 95 n. 1 above). King Stephen had given these estates, once held by Bishop Roger of Salisbury, to the abbey of Saint-Lô (Cartulaire de Saint-Lô, ed. M. Dubosc (Saint-Lô 1878), no. III), but Henry II had transferred them first to a certain Richard Druel (Actes Henri II, i, no. XXXIV ; cf. ii, no. DCXCI, and no. DCCXXXV for his general confirmation to the abbey of Saint-Lô, which retained some rights at Pouppeville), then to Richard de la Haye (d. c.1169), father of Gila and Nicola. In 1179–80, when they were in ducal hands again, the farm of Pouppeville was worth 220 li. ang., that of Varreville 200 li. (Norman Pipe Rolls, 28 ; MRSN, i, 38–9) ; neither appeared in later exchequer accounts.   F. Vielliard, ‘Richard Cœur de Lion et son entourage normand : Le Témoignage de l’Estoire de la Guerre Sainte’, BEC, 160 (2002), 5–52, at 23–4, disputes Ambroise’s appellation of Jordan as ‘constable of Sées’, arguing that such an office never existed and that the poet had ‘Say’ in mind, but a royal constable appears at Sées in 1175 (Sées, Bibliothèque de l’Évêché, Livre blanc de Saint-Martin de Sées, fol. 13r).



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almost certainly testifies to royal protection. The grants to Richard and William du Hommet reveal much about Henry II as fount of patronage. The king was both generous and parsimonious to his constables of Normandy : generous, because they received substantial grants at his hands ; parsimonious, because most were made from a recent escheat and in disregard of the claims of Walter Giffard’s collateral kin. Henry had been in this particular giving vein long before 1173. Even before his accession to the English throne he had promised the English lands of Enguerrand, brother of Count William of Aumale, to Ranulf of Chester, and of Richer de l’Aigle to William of Blois. For their part, the Hommets benefited from royal patronage to help the numerous hangers-on in their train : the most notable were Bertrand de Verdun, the erstwhile ward of Richard du Hommet, who would become one of the king’s most important servants in England, Normandy and Ireland, and presumably also Roger du Hommet, whom Henry II succeeded in promoting to the archbishopric of Dol in 1161, but the appointment of lesser ducal officials such as Jordan du Mesnil, who appears as ‘seneschal’ (constable) of Domfront under Richard I, can also be attributed to Hommet influence. Another aspect of Henry’s patronage in Normandy was his gifts to outsiders, both prominent and obscure. He alienated a substantial ducal domain when he conferred Lillebonne upon Reginald de Dammartin near the end of his reign. Various men from Courtenay in the Gâtinais were established in Normandy.   CRR, xi, no. 2207 ; xii, nos. 1692, 2333 ; xiii, nos. 607, 1414 ; VCH Bucks., ii, 261–2. Risborough escheated to the English Crown after the death of William II de Semilly (c.1242). Whaddon, confiscated from William du Hommet in 1204, briefly came to William Marshal the elder in 1217 (Rot. Claus., i, 310), but was mainly held by the earls of Arundel until 1242, when it came to the prominent courtier John fitz Geoffrey (Book of Fees, i, 19 ; ii, 1374, 1404 ; VCH Bucks., iii, 436).   Regesta, iii, no. 180 : the property, Higham (Ferrers, Northants.), lay in the honour of Peverel and was held by Count Simon of Northampton and Enguerrand. The act implies that Enguerrand, who had probably offended Henry in Normandy, could still redeem himself in the duke’s eyes ; see Power, Norman Frontier, 395–6.   Regesta, iii, no. 272. See Edmund King’s contribution to this volume.   M. S. Hagger, The Fortunes of a Norman Family : The De Verduns in England, Ireland and Wales, 1066–1316 (Dublin 2001), 34, 38–40, 199, 208–9, 228 ; Everard, Brittany, 68, 73.   Paris, Archives Nationales, L 979, no. 81 : act of William I du Hommet concerning Marigny (MN, ar. Saint-Lô) witnessed by Jordan du Mesnil, seneschal of Domfront (1192 × 1204). Presumably the Jordan de Mesnillo Amato (Le Mesnil-Amey, cant. Marigny) who stood surety for William the constable before Mich. 1198 (MRSN, ii, 476), and who held land at Maisy, no doubt by gift of the constables : Cartularies of Southwick Priory, ii, 112–13 (III 324).   See p. 92 above.   For Reginald de Courtenay, who married Henry II’s cousin Matilda, coheiress of Okehampton (Devon) and Le Sap (Orne, ar. Argentan), see N. Vincent, ‘Isabella of Angoulême : John’s Jezebel’, King John, ed. Church, 165–219, at 201–2. A Robert de Courtenay accounted for the ducal bernagium in the Pays de Caux in 1180 and 1198, and he or another Robert held a fief of the honour of Grandmesnil in 1204–5 : MRSN, i, 67 (Norman Pipe Rolls, 48) ; ii, 467 ; Registres de Philippe Auguste, 277. One

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Robert de Poissy was probably introduced to Normandy from the Île-de-France through Count Simon of Évreux, whose steward he was, but he was soon rewarded by Henry II with one of the valuable mills of Rouen and probably with the lordship of Hacqueville in the Norman Vexin as well. The count’s gift had potentially strengthened the connections between his fiefs in France and Normandy, so Henry’s largesse may have been intended to bind Robert more closely to the Angevin dynasty. Henry also used gifts in England for the sake of defending his duchy. Robert de Poissy received lands in Northamptonshire. Characteristically, the king used escheats as rewards, in this case the honour of Peverel. In the spring of 1174, during the great revolt, Enguerrand de Fontaines, seneschal of Ponthieu, and William Mauvoisin, lord of Rosny near Mantes, both received English lands : presumably they were amongst the French barons whom Henry had secretly won over with bribes, or so Robert of Torigni believed. The promotion of outsiders in Normandy was a practice as old as the duchy itself, and would be continued by Henry’s sons. A more novel practice was the regular use of cash gifts from the revenues of Normandy, sometimes given as fiefs, to woo French nobles such as Robert of Dreux and Peter de Courtenay, the brothers of Louis VII. This, too, would become a regular practice under Henry’s sons. Once again, only a comprehensive study of Henry’s activities in Normandy can reveal who profited from, and who lost out as a result of, his favour. It seems or more men called William de Courtenay appear in Normandy in 1172 and 1203 (Red Book, ii, 644 ; Registres de Philippe Auguste, 276 ; Rot. Norm., 67, likewise concerning bernagium).   Norman Pipe Rolls, 56 (MRSN, i, 77) ; Red Book, ii, 643 (Registres de Philippe Auguste, 275). Hacqueville had previously belonged to Everard, lord of Breteuil-en-Beauvaisis (d. 1148) : Le Grand Cartulaire de Conches et sa copie : transcription et analyse, ed. C. de Haas (Conches 2005), no. 339 ; cf. nos. 337, 340, for a later Robert de Poissy at Hacqueville ; it is unclear how and when it came to Robert (I) de Poissy.   Power, Norman Frontier, 209, 290–91, 404, 512 : Nobottle (Grove) and Blisworth (Northants). See also BL, Cotton Tiberius E.v, fol. 123v, and Oxford, Bodl. Lib., MS Top. Northants. C.5, p. 401 : letter of Robert de Poissy (1148 × 1166), concerning a grant to St James’s Abbey, Northampton, concerning property at Stoke Bruerne (see VCH Northants., v, 380).   PR 20 Henry II, 3 ; Torigni, 263 (ed. Delisle, ii, 50). See Power, Norman Frontier, 403 n.  E.g. the Beauvaisis knight Gerald de Fournival (Everard, Brittany, 101–2, 140 ; EYC, iii, nos. 1267, 1277, 1279–1280, 1294–1298) ; William de Cayeux, a leading baron of Ponthieu (Power, Norman Frontier, 425–6, 456) ; the Poitevins Ralph de Lusignan and William de Fors, who married the countesses of Eu and Aumale respectively (S. Painter, ‘The Houses of Lusignan and Châtellerault, 1150–1250’, Speculum, 30 (1955), 374–84, at 379 ; GEC Complete Peerage, i, 353–4) ; and the Flemish nobleman Baldwin de Béthune, the next count of Aumale (ibid., 354) ; cf. Hist. Guillaume le Maréchal, i, ll. 5879–922, 8609–16, 8651–8, 9395–468, for his previous career in the Angevin dynasty’s military households.   Norman Pipe Rolls, 41 (MRSN, i, 57) : 100 li. as the king’s gift to Peter de Courtenay from the prévôté of Caen. Rot. Chart., 58 : 400 li. ang. p.a. at the Caen exchequer to Robert I of Dreux (1150 × 1184).   Power, Norman Frontier, 403–4.



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clear, however, that few of the greatest magnates in Normandy were major beneficiaries of Henry’s largesse. Legitimation and consultation So far some of the more tangible expressions of the relations between Henry and the Norman aristocracy have been examined. Yet we can consider those relations from another perspective : the legitimation of Angevin rule. Some magnates rarely witnessed royal acts, attended assizes, or rendered account at the Norman exchequer ; furthermore, there was a close correlation between the leading Normans of the 1172 inquest, the partisans of Henry the Young King, and those Normans who failed to witness more than one or two royal charters. Nevertheless, the few occasions when such men did attend showed that they ultimately accepted ducal authority, even if sometimes their attendance was more or less under duress. Conversely, they might also invoke the aid of the ducal regime when it suited them. When Count John of Sées, a target of Henry’s wrath in 1166 and a leading rebel in 1173–4, departed on the Third Crusade, he asked Richard I’s seneschals of Normandy and Maine to ensure that his eldest son did not remove the comital seneschals without good cause : an anxiety about his heir’s unreliability for which the recently deceased Henry II would surely have had some sympathy. What were the benefits of attending ducal gatherings ? Sir James Holt has emphasised the reciprocal nature of the Domesday Inquest and Salisbury Oaths in 1086, and the Infeudationes militum of 1172 may have had a similar function, simultaneously demonstrating the barons’ submission to their duke (who was absent from the inquest itself ) and his guarantee of their lands ; the preservation of the baronial breves in the ducal treasury also offered similar protection of their tenants’ title. Seen from this perspective, the absence of so many prominent curialists from the 1172 inquest is more explicable, for their good relations with the king made it less important to ensure their attendance, whereas the participation of barons whom Henry mistrusted was in itself an act of submission to his authority. Another parallel between Domesday and the Infeudationes militum may be drawn. Stephen Baxter has shown how Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester exploited the Domesday Inquest to secure his church’s rights over contested property, ensuring that the cathedral chapter’s claims were recorded in Domesday Book

 Vincent, ‘Les Normands’, 84–5.   See pp. 120–21 below for the enforcement of attendance at the Christmas court of 1182.   ADC, F 5047 (1189–90).   J. C. Holt, ‘1086’, in Domesday Studies, ed. J. C. Holt (Woodbridge 1987), 41–64.   For the breves, see p. 89 above. Robert of Torigni dated the inquest before the ducal justices at Caen to 8 Sept. 1172, when Henry II was in Brittany (Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 31).

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as accepted fact. Likewise, the evidence of the Infeudationes militum cannot be taken on trust, as the process could be manipulated by a party in order to secure confirmation of contested rights. The lost submissions made by the duchy’s lay and ecclesiastical barons in 1172 may have similarly served to confirm their power and to ensure that the king did not make greater demands for military service in the future, at a time when the Angevin monarch was becoming accustomed to embroiling Norman armies in his far-flung dynastic ambitions. Courts, ceremonies and assizes in the duchy also need to be viewed in terms of ‘assembly politics’. The composition, purpose and rituals of early-medieval assemblies have received extensive scrutiny in recent years. In political cultures that were terrified of open rift, ritual and ceremony were ways of defusing tension and demonstrating public ‘consensus’. Much less attention has been given to assembly politics in the central Middle Ages, despite frequent contemporary references to rulers seeking the ‘counsel and consent’ of their prominent subjects. In part this may be due to the greater specificity of assemblies : a great Christmas court was very different in character and function from assizes before a handful of ducal justices. Yet both great and local meetings were a crucial aspect of the political culture of Angevin Normandy, and the festivals did as much as judicial proceedings to reinforce ducal authority. The royal court’s Christmas feast at Bur-le-Roi in 1171 is best known for the dinner attended by 110 knights all called William ; but more significant is the chronicler’s statement that, ‘Since Henry the Young King was holding his first court in Normandy, he wanted a magnificent festivity to be celebrated.’ Whatever the frivolities of the Young King’s circle, the political purpose of the court was deadly serious. Since the early history of Normandy its rulers had often convened their mag  S. Baxter, ‘The Representation of Lordship and Land Tenure in Domesday Book’, in Domesday Book, ed. E. Hallam and D. Bates (Stroud 2001), 73–102, at 81–93.   See esp. J. Nelson, Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe (London 1986) ; T. Reuter, ‘Assembly Politics in Western Europe from the Eighth Century to the Twelfth’, in The Medieval World, ed. P. Linehan and J. L. Nelson (London 2001), 432–50 ; Political Assemblies in the Earlier Middle Ages, ed. P. S. Barnwell and M. Mostert (Turnhout 2003). For a more critical view, see P. Buc, The Dangers of Ritual : Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton 2001).   Important exceptions include J. Everard, ‘Aristocratic Assemblies in Brittany, 1066–1203’, in Political Assemblies, ed. Barnwell and Mostert, 115–31, and, for a contrasting Imperial context, T. Reuter, ‘‘The Medieval German Sonderweg ? The Empire and its Rulers in the High Middle Ages’, in Kings and Kingship in Medieval Europe, ed. A. Duggan (London 1993), 179–211, esp. 182–200. G. Koziol, ‘England, France, and the Problem of Sacrality in Twelfth-Century Ritual’, in Cultures of Power : Lordship, Status and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. T. N. Bisson (Philadelphia 1995), 124–48, notes the divisive or even farcical nature of many Anglo-Norman attempts to cohere the political community through solemn ritual.   Torigni, 253 (ed. Delisle, ii, 31).   Ibid. : ‘Henricus rex junior . . . quia tunc primum tenebat curiam in Normannia, voluit ut magnifice festivitas celebraretur.’ His father spent that Christmas in Dublin.



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nates to deliberate the affairs of the duchy, and, as we have seen, Norman barons were also very capable of organising their own assemblies, especially in times of ducal difficulty. Even Henry II, whom Walter Map depicts as unusually hostile to pomp and formality, summoned a number of major assemblies in Normandy during his reign, and he was usually accompanied by large groups of magnates, courtiers and prelates. We have little record of the activities conducted at these events, or of their composition, but it was inevitable  given Normandy’s geographical position  that the greater gatherings there were attended by Henry’s subjects from across his dominions. The witness-lists of his charters show that he was generally accompanied by numerous non-Normans, but lay and clerical leaders of Norman society are nonetheless very prominent. When Henry fell ill at the relatively remote castle of Motte-de-Ger, between Domfront and Mortain, in 1170, the Gesta Regis Henrici records that he was accompanied by ‘bishops, counts and barons’ ; the chief business of the gathering was, of course, the prospective division of Henry’s lands amongst his sons. The following year, he gathered his barons at Argentan to deliberate with them concerning the proposed expedition to Ireland, and Henry’s absolution at Avranches in September 1172 was accompanied by a council of the Norman Church hierarchy under the presidency of the Roman cardinals  a few weeks after the Caen inquest before his justices that produced the Infeudationes militum. Such great gatherings naturally drew the attention of chroniclers, but it is likely that the Normans played a proportionally greater part in the many smaller gatherings that served to reinforce and restate Henry’s authority there. When the king of England crossed to Wissant near Boulogne in February 1187, he was escorted through southern Flanders and Ponthieu by the counts of Flanders, Blois and Guînes ; but when he entered Normandy at Aumale, he was met by his sons Richard and John, the archbishop of Rouen, William de Mandeville  then iure uxoris count of Aumale  as well as many other bishops, counts and barons drawn from the king’s familiares. While the composition of most of Henry’s assemblies in Normandy is poorly documented, we are quite well informed about two of his Christmas courts there. At Bur-le-Roi in 1170, just before the murder of Thomas Becket, Henry was attended by, amongst others, Earl Robert III of Leicester, William de Mandeville, the Anglo-Norman baron Engelger de Bohon, the English baron and official Saher de Quency, Richard du Hommet, and the French baron William Mauvoisin, who was purportedly a kinsman of Count Eudo of Brittany ; but it is only on account of the ensuing fatal events that we know that they and the archbishop’s   See pp. 99–100 above.   Map, De Nugis, 488–94.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 7.   Torigni, 252 (ed. Delisle, ii, 29).   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 31–4.   Ibid., ii, 5.

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four assassins  of whom probably only one, William de Tracy, had significant Norman interests  were present. At least as it is described by Becket’s English hagiographers, the Christmas court of 1170 had a decidedly English or AngloNorman rather than Norman flavour. The second well-documented Christmas court took place at Caen in 1182 and is best known for three distinct reasons : the renewed rifts within the Angevin dynasty that would lead to the Young King’s ill-fated second revolt and death the following year ; allegations against William Marshal of adultery with the Young Queen ; and William de Tancarville’s insistence upon his right as ducal chamberlain to perform the ceremonial washing of the king’s hands, in order to purge himself of malicious accusations. Our source for the Tancarville story, Walter Map, relates, The Christmas feast was proclaimed with much heralding to be kept by the lord king at Caen. So a great concourse of people assembled, strangers and natives alike, chief of whom were the king and his son, that admirable King Henry, and a third Henry, the duke of Saxony and Bavaria (then an exile), our king’s son-in-law, Count Richard of Poitou, who now reigns, his brother Duke Geoffrey of the Bretons, and many bishops, with a provinceful of counts and barons. Robert of Torigni states that over a thousand knights attended, and the king forbade all barons from holding their own courts, insisting that they should attend his court instead ; the History of William Marshal regarded it as the greatest assembly of Henry’s reign, stating that it was proclaimed in advance from Brittany and Gascony to the Rhine. A memorandum transcribed into the cartulary of La Trinité at Caen provides the names of seventy-nine men and one woman who attended an assize at Caen on 20 January 1183. By then the king and his sons had departed in early or mid January for Le Mans, Angers and the last drama of the doomed Young King’s life, but the author of the memorandum explicitly associated the assize with the recent Christmas court. Amongst those present were many of   MTB, iii, 127–30 ; F. Barlow, Thomas Becket (London 1986), 235–7. For the murderers’ origins, lands and status, see N. Vincent, ‘The Murderers of Thomas Becket’, in Bischofsmord im Mittelalter : Murder of Bishops, ed. N. Fryde and D. Reitz (Göttingen 2003), 211–72. William de Tracy held sizeable lands on the borders of Normandy and Maine (Actes Henri II, ii, nos. DLVI–DLVII). Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 14, states that the bishops of Normandy subsequently came to console the king at Argentan after he had learned of Becket’s death there.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 291–5 ; Hist. Guillaume le Maréchal, i, ll. 5693–840 (cf. 5127–490, for preceding accusations against its hero) ; Map, De Nugis, 488–94.   Ibid., 488. My translation differs slightly from that of the published edition.   Torigni, 304 (ed. Delisle, ii, 117) ; Hist. Guillaume le Maréchal, i, ll. 5698–710.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 291–5 ; for the young king’s second revolt and death, see 296–304. Everard’s itinerary places Henry at Angers on 23 Jan.   See Table 1, no. 33 : record in the cartulary of La Trinité de Caen, dated at the octaves of St



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the great Norman and Anglo-Norman nobles, including recent rebels such as the counts of Meulan and Eu, Enguerrand Patric and William de Tancarville as well as men like the seneschal William fitz Ralph, Henry du Neubourg, Walkelin de Ferrières and Ralph Taisson who had proved much more loyal to Henry II, along with several Norman prelates. However, the bulk of the witnesses were either local landowners from the Bessin, most of them associates of the abbess of La Trinité at Caen, the plaintiff in the dispute, or else Angevin officials of Norman origin ; and there were many significant absentees from amongst the Norman nobility. The magnetic presence of the king had departed, drawing away most of the non-Norman participants in the Christmas court and no doubt some prominent Normans as well, leaving a somewhat less distinguished, almost exclusively Norman group to continue the conduct of the duchy’s routine affairs. As the events at Caen in 1182–3 show, the king’s courts and assemblies sometimes failed miserably to foster unity amongst his subjects, for, like the courts of contemporary literature, they were riven by losengiers (deceivers) and mensongiers (liars) ; but they also often served an important legal function, whether or not the king was present in person. An inspired paper of Jean Yver, which has perhaps not received its due, sought to recover Angevin ‘legislation’ in Normandy not only from the chronicle records of Norman assemblies but also from the clauses of the first Norman custumal, the first part of the Très Ancien Coutumier. From the chronicle evidence Yver identified the decisions or royal commands issued at twelve Norman assemblies between 1155 and 1188. He envisaged these meetings as solemn gatherings, sometimes in the duke’s presence, at other times under the auspices of ducal baillis or justices, but in all cases with legislative authority. Our view of the legal culture of Henry’s court has altered significantly since Yver wrote. Nevertheless, his paper is still of great interest when assessing the culture of Henry’s court, as his assemblies can be fitted more generally into the prevailing political culture. In 1162 Henry summoned the ‘bishops, abbots and barons Hilary, at Caen, 1182, ‘quo tenuit rex curiam suam ibidem ad Natale cum duce Saxon[ie]’. Those named were 78 male witnesses, the defendant Robert son of Richard de Scrotonia, and Joanna, abbess of La Trinité de Caen.   The bishop of Bayeux and the abbots of Saint-Étienne de Caen, Fécamp and Saint-Séver. Other magnates present included Hugh de Gournay, Henry de Tilly and Philip de Creully.   These included John de Subligny, Bertrand de Verdun, Hamo Pincerna, Doon Bardolf, Richard d’Argences and Ralph l’Abbé.   Hist. Guillaume le Maréchal, i, e.g. ll. 5152, 5420, 5722, 5849, 6419–54.   J. Yver, ‘Le Très Ancien Coutumier de Normandie, miroir de la législation ducale ? Contribution à l’étude de l’ordre public normand à la fin du XIIe siècle’, Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis, 39 (1971), 333–74.   Ibid., 368.   For the implications for Normandy of the debates since the 1970s concerning English legal change under Henry II, see P. R. Hyams, ‘The Common Law and the French connection’, ANS, 4 (1982 for 1981), 77–92 ; Power, Norman Frontier, 144–7.

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of the whole of Normandy’ to Rouen on the first Sunday of Lent (25 February), levied complaints against the Norman bishops and their servants as well as the ducal vicomtes, and ordered that the canons of the Council of Lillebonne of 1080 should be maintained. This gathering was followed on 11 March by a ceremony of a very different kind, but one that served to bolster Henry’s power just as much as the reiteration of his authority over the Norman Church : he went to Fécamp, accompanied by Cardinal Henry of Pisa and four Norman bishops, to reinter the bodies of his ancestors Dukes Richard I and Richard II. For a man renowned for his dislike of ceremony and his incessant travelling, this seems remarkably like a stage-managed royal progress, proclaiming the importance of his descent and showing him as the friend of the Church as well as its master. Just as those present often came from across the Angevin ‘empire’, the legal and political significance of Henry’s assemblies in Normandy frequently extended far beyond the duchy. At Verneuil in September 1177, immediately after establishing a lasting peace with Louis VII and making provision for the Holy Land, Henry issued the famous ordinance concerning debts throughout his Continental lands, attended by many magnates of his regnum. According to Roger of Howden, the king did so as a pious act at the entreaty and petition of the Grandmontine Order. Henry then sent out letters of summons to ‘the counts and barons of Normandy’ to meet him at Argentan on 9 October with horses and arms, to remain with him in his service : events in Poitou and Berry were then his utmost concern, and the army which he took to Aquitaine immediately afterwards was most probably largely composed of these Normans. The council at Verneuil was therefore one component of a much larger search for order within the Angevin Empire : the context in which Henry regulated debts also included his relations with the king of France, the entreaties of the Grandmontines (in whose house Henry was then hoping to be buried), the state of Aquitaine and Berry, and the defence of Christendom. Yver was struck by the preremptory language in which the chroniclers described Henry’s proclamations and the Très Ancien Coutumier noted the precepts of Norman custom, expressed in phrases such as ‘Let no one be so bold’ (nemo   Torigni, 212 (ed. Delisle, i, 336).   This must be the occasion when Cardinal Henry (of Pisa) visited Fécamp with the ‘most glorious and illustrious king Henry of the English’ and the bishops of Évreux, Lisieux, Bayeux and Avranches, on the feast of the martyrs and bishops SS Flavianus and Contestus, 1162 (identified as 11 March in Torigni, ed. Delisle, i, 336–7) : Rouen, Bib. Mun., Y 51 (Fécamp Cartulary), fol. 41v (incomplete text).   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 194 : ‘intuitu Divini amoris, et prece et petitione Bonorum Hominum de Grandi Monte motus, statuit . . . coram multis aliis comitibus et baronibus regni sui, ne quis pro debito domini, res hominis capere praesumeret . . . Hoc statutum et consuetudinem statuit dominus rex, et teneri praecepit in omnibus villis suis, et ubique in potestate sua ; scilicet in Normannia, et Aquitania, et Andegavia et Britannia, generale et ratum.’



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audeat ). He appears to have overlooked the contrast in the chroniclers’ language between the Norman assemblies that the king attended and those convened in his absence. At Falaise at Christmas 1159, according to the Annals of Bec, Henry ‘ordained laws’ requiring that any accusation by a judge or rural dean should be supported by local testimony. Describing the proclamation concerning debts made at Verneuil mentioned above, Roger of Howden stated that Henry ‘instituted’ this ‘statute and custom’ throughout his potestas, which he specified as Normandy, Aquitaine, Anjou and Brittany. When the king was absent, however, we find the proceedings described in consensual terms. At the assizes of Domfront in 1155, the right of a baron to bring a judicial duel from an outlying property to his chief manor ‘was decided by the consideration of the court’, and at an assembly of the barons of the Bessin, Hiémois, Cotentin and Avranchin at Caen in 1157, a donor’s residual right over alms was ‘determined’ (diffinitum). Such phrases reinforce the impression that the Norman barons were capable of acting as an autonomous community. They also suggest that their gatherings differed significantly in function and character from the assemblies to which their duke summoned them and which outwardly legitimised Angevin rule.

Henry, Duke of the Normans, and the King of France Through displays and commands, Henry wished to impose his authority upon his Norman subjects, and his insecurity was not due to his sons or more recalcitrant barons alone. Another important factor was the changing role of the king of France. The passage from the Historia gloriosi regis Ludovici quoted at the beginning of this article depicts the Angevin conquest as the consequence of a judgement of Louis VII’s court. The narrator goes on to depict Angevin–Capetian relations in terms of suit of court : ‘Although Henry had been made duke of Normandy by the king, he grew proud beyond measure and defaulted from justice towards his lord, King Louis.’ He then claims that Louis’s invasion of Normandy in 1153 forced Henry to sue for peace, ‘for in no way could he resist the most

 Yver, ‘Le Très Ancien Coutumier’, 344–6, 363–5, 368.   Torigni, 327 (ed. Delisle, ii, 180) : ‘leges instituit ut . . . De causis similiter quorumlibet ventilandis instituit ut . . .’. See Haskins, Norman Institutions, 219–20, 329–32.   See p. 122 n. 3 above.   Torigni, 333 (ed. Delisle, ii, 241) : ‘consideratione curie regis adiudicatum est’. Ibid., 339–40 (ed. Delisle, ii, 251–2) : ‘diffinitum in plenaria curia regis, utpote in assisa ubi erant barones iiii. comitatuum Baiocasini, Constantini, Oximini, Abrincatini’. See Table 1 and Map 2, nos. 8, 14. Both examples are from Robert of Torigni’s additions to the Mont-Saint-Michel cartulary.   In general, see Power, Norman Frontier, 108–12, and the sources there cited.   See pp. 85–6 above.

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mighty king Louis’ ; the duke feigned penitence ‘in imitation of a deceitful fox’ and promised not to ‘raise the heel of pride’ against his lord again. Louis’s unlooked-for intervention in the Angevin conquest of Normandy in 1144 has generally attracted little historical attention. Although Robert of Torigni mentions that Louis entered Normandy with Thierry of Flanders just as Geoffrey completed the subjugation of Normandy, in his account the roles of the French king and Flemish count were secondary to the main drama being played out between the count of Anjou and the remaining supporters of Stephen of Blois. Yet if we had lost all narratives except the Historia Ludovici, written at Saint-Germaindes-Prés around the time of the Young King’s revolt, we would get the impression that Henry had acceded to his grandfather’s duchy thanks to Capetian justice and arms. We may scoff at the absurd pretensions of the monk of Saint-Germain-desPrés  until we remember that Philip Augustus overthrew the Angevin regime when Henry’s son John likewise defaulted from justice in the king of France’s court. Nor do we need to regard the claims of the Historia Ludovici as anachronisms from the 1170s, for Suger, the initial author of the work, could easily have described the events in 1144 in the same way, and Orderic Vitalis had described Louis VI’s belated endorsement of Stephen’s succession to Normandy in similar terms. The weight Louis’s claims deserved is signalled by Geoffrey’s readiness to cede the Norman Vexin to Louis. The ‘Hyde’ or ‘Warenne’ chronicle, redated to the late 1150s by Elisabeth van Houts, shows that the legal claims of the king of France over the duke of Normandy were a real concern amongst Anglo-Norman lords a few years after Henry’s accession ; while Wace was in no doubt that the French unremittingly harboured sinister designs upon Norman territory. After his accession to the duchy Henry must have found the pretensions of   Historia gloriosi regis Ludovici, 162 : ‘Porro videns versutus ille Henricus, dux Normannorum, quod potentissimo regi Ludovico nullatenus resistere posset, ad similitudinem dolose vulpis convertit se ad refugium solite fraudis. Siquidem fingens se humiliatum esse, ut quoquomodo amissa recuperaret, falso asserebat quod contra dominum suum regem superbie calcaneum deinceps non elevaret.’   G. M Spiegel, The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-Denis : A Survey (Brookline, ma/Leiden 1978), 50–52, dates it to 1170 × 1174.   Radulphi de Coggeshall Chronicon Anglicanum, ed. J. Stevenson (RS 66, 1875), 136.   Orderic, vi, 482. For Suger’s ideas, see J. du Quesnay Adams, ‘The Regnum Francie of Suger of Saint-Denis : An Expansive Île-de-France’, Historical Relections, 19 (1993), 167–88 ; but see also L. Grant, Abbot Suger of St-Denis : Church and State in Twelfth-Century France (London 1998), 10–19, 117–21. For Suger’s criticism of Stephen’s accession in his section of the Historia Ludovici, see Suger, Œuvres, i, ed. and trans. F. Gasparri (Paris 1996), 160–62.   For the theory that Geoffrey ceded the entire Norman Vexin in 1144, rather than merely Gisors, see Power, Norman Frontier, 392.  Van Houts, ‘The Warenne View’, 110–14.   Le Roman de Rou de Wace, ed. A. J. Holden, 3 vols. (Paris 1970–73), i, 3–5 (Chronique Ascendante, ll. 6, 45–69).



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Louis and his circle particularly dangerous, as the king of France rallied Eustace of Boulogne and the younger Geoffrey of Anjou to his cause : hence his mistrust of defectors and waverers in Normandy in 1152–3. His suspicions could well have been compounded by the participation of several prominent Norman magnates in Louis’s crusade : they included Hugh de Gournay and Waleran of Meulan, both of whom suffered from Henry’s displeasure at this time, and William de Warenne, King Stephen’s last important supporter in Normandy before its fall but, conveniently for Henry, a victim of the Turkish ambush at Laodicea in 1148. This may help to explain Henry’s harsh treatment of those whom he distrusted in Normandy in 1152–3. After over twenty years of victorious campaigns, in contrast, Henry could be more relaxed : he had shown that, even if the claims of the kings of France were intensifying, their intrigues with dissident Norman barons or Angevin princes were entirely traditional and he could crush them just as his ancestors had. Later in his reign Henry II willingly arranged for Louis to offer his formal protection to Henry’s continental lands while the latter was in England : the king of France promised to go to the defence of the Angevin lands if Henry’s baillis requested his aid. ‘Thus was King Henry of England providing for his honour and the security of his realm in every way he could,’ wrote Roger of Howden. Henry’s own failure to recognise the underlying power and claims of his Capetian lords led him to give crucial help to Philip Augustus in his wars with the count of Flanders in 1180–81, a conflict whose importance for the French kingdom is perhaps underestimated by historians relying primarily upon the English chronicles. The ideology permitting Philip’s ultimate victory over the Angevins was circulating in the French court throughout Henry’s reign in Normandy, but it would take a new, young and eager king of France to expose the weakness of the Angevin position in the face of these latent Capetian claims from 1183 onwards. Conclusion There can be no doubt that Henry did much to antagonise the Normans in his long reign as duke, and although Normans such as Gerard Talbot, Robert de Troisgots, Roger Torel and Baldwin de Vernon were prepared to fight for him in his last days, his death must surely have brought a collective sigh of relief across the duchy. Within months Richard the Lionheart had made a number of   Torigni, 161, 165, 169–70 (ed. Delisle, i, 253–4, 261, 268–9).   Historia gloriosi regis Ludovici, 159 ; RHF, xvi, 495–6 ; Crouch, Beaumont Twins, 65–76 ; D. Gurney, The Record of the House of Gournay, 4 vols. and suppl. (London 1848–58), i, 111.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 198 (1178).   A. Cartellieri, Philipp August, König von Frankreich, 4 vols. in 5 (Leipzig 1899–1922), i, 95–121.   Hist. Guillaume le Maréchal, i, ll. 8357–70, 8544–84, 8865–9. Gerard Talbot and Robert de Trois­ gots : ibid., iii, 59–60 ; Chartes de Longueville, no. XXXIV ; Powicke, Loss of Normandy, 356–7. Baldwin, eldest son of Richard, lord of Vernon : Power, Norman Frontier, 527. Roger (d. c.1231), lord of La

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valuable concessions to Norman nobles ; many reversed Henry’s confiscations, and these would continue as the rivalry of Richard I and John with Philip Augustus in­tensified. The rapid spread of the Becket cult in Normandy, traced by Raymonde Fore­ ville, also tells its own story. Whatever the Normans’ attitude to Becket in his lifetime, he became as much a martyr for them as for the English. We can point, for example, to the two minor landowners from the Pays de Caux who made significant grants of alms to the murdered saint within a couple of years of his canonisation, with both grants witnessed by Ralph de Varneville, the king’s chancellor ; or to the monk of Savigny who sent a vast collection of relics to the abbey of Troarn, all of them attributed to biblical figures or early Christian saints except for ‘the blood and vestments of Saint Thomas the Martyr’. Although the archbishop of Rouen had been one of Henry’s most reliable supporters during the Becket crisis and Robert of Torigni all but passes over Becket’s martyrdom, it is frequently mentioned in thirteenth-century Norman annals, and the duchy furnished its fair share of his early miracles. Becket’s sanctity was also celebrated at Bucaille near Les Andelys and constable of La Ferté-Bernard in Maine in 1189 : Évreux, AD Eure, H 1023, H 1024 ; D. J. Power, ‘Between the Angevin and Capetian Courts : John de Rouvray and the Knights of the Pays de Bray, 1180–1225’, in Family Trees and the Roots of Politics : The Prosopography of Britain and France from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century, ed. K. S. B. Keats-Rohan (Woodbridge 1997), 361–84, at 376–7.  R. Foreville, ‘Le Culte de Saint Thomas Becket en Normandie : Enquête sur les sanctuaires anciennement placés sous le vocable du martyr de Canterbury’, in Thomas Becket, ed. R. Foreville (Paris 1975), 135–52 ; many of the recorded examples date from the later Middle Ages, while we can only speculate about the origins of others, such as the ‘elemosina que dicitur Sancte Thome Canthuariensis’ recorded in 1332 at Brix (MN, cant. Valognes), once the home of the Brus family (Pouillés de la province de Rouen, ed. A. Longnon (Paris 1903), 315).   Histoire du prieuré du Mont-aux-Malades-lès-Rouen, ed. P. Langlois (Rouen 1851), no. 14 : William l’Aiguillon grants the church of Saint-Aubin de Beuzevillette (SM, cant. Bolbec) ‘to God and to Blessed Thomas, a new martyr for Christ’ and the priory of Le Mont-aux-Malades at Rouen, which Henry II himself had refounded in Becket’s honour ; also witnessed by William de Saint-Jean, seneschal of Normandy (1173 × 1176). C. de Beaurepaire, ‘Recueil des chartes concernant l’abbaye de St-Victor-en-Caux’, Société de l’Histoire de Normandie : Mélanges, 5 (1898), 333–455, at 393–5 : William Pasnagius founds the priory of Saint-Thomas-sur-Scie (SM, cant. Tôtes, cne. Saint-Maclou de Folleville), ‘in honore omnipotentis Dei et Beate ipsius genitricis sanctique Thome martiris atque pontificis’ (1173 × 1175). Ralph, bishop of Lisieux from 1181, was then archdeacon of Rouen.  R. N. Sauvage, L’Abbaye de Saint-Martin de Troarn (Caen 1911), 389–90, no. XVII (s.d.). Sauvage infers from the ancient relics that it dates from shortly after the sack of Constantinople.  E.g CUL, MS Ii.vi.24, fol. 16v, compiled at a Norman abbey (probably Valmont or Fécamp) in the 12th century and revised at La Trinité de Caen before 1257 ; Rouen, Bib. Mun., Y 200, fol. 78r, compiled at Saint-Gilles de Pont-Audemer, 1234, publ. in Holt, ‘The Anglo-Norman Realm’, 224–5.   William of Canterbury, MTB, i, e.g. 207, 214–16, 232, 248–50, 256–7, 274–5, 278–80, 289–90 ; but note that many of the continental miracles occurred in Artois and Flanders, which lay closer to Kent (e.g. 249–50, 264–7, 269–70, 280–83).



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one remove : his associate Laurence O’Toole (Lorcán Ua Tuathail), archbishop of Dublin (1162–80), who had died at Eu and was buried in the Augustinian abbey of Notre-Dame d’Eu, was eagerly venerated by the canons from 1186 when his body was discovered to be uncorrupted. Even if we accept Keefe’s argument that Henry himself encouraged Becket’s cult from 1174 onwards, its immediate popularity in the duchy points to the appeal of a figure who had steadfastly resisted Henry’s authority to his death. For his part, Henry may never have acquired a deep devotion to the duchy in the way his son Richard later did. An act of Henry proclaimed : ‘The burgesses and knights of Saumur in my time have built a wooden bridge across the Loire, for the salvation of their souls. When I came to Saumur I was delighted to see such a splendid achievement, and thanked the knights and burgesses.’ Henry’s own feelings seem visible in this passage, unusually transcending the tight constraints of diplomatic. It is disputable whether he ever expressed as much delight over the achievements of the Normans, although he certainly devoted great interest to his own royal works in Normandy. Nevertheless, Henry II was not later remembered in Normandy as a tyrant. On the contrary, as with many overbearing rulers, his reign became, if not a golden age, at least a benchmark for good and true custom (in Capetian Normandy), and a significant number of Norman barons, knights and townspeople were prepared to serve him and benefited from his patronage. Henry’s portrayal in the many thirteenth-century vernacular prose histories of the dukes of Normandy and kings of England tells us much about his reputation in after times. It is true that these texts do not celebrate him as they did Henry the Young King, Richard the Lionheart or, in some examples, Eleanor of Aquitaine. The only colourful story pertaining to Henry emphasises his cunning. In October 1160 Henry gained Gisors by taking it from the Templars, who were holding it in trust under the terms of the Angevin–Capetian pact of the previous summer. In one of the estoires, the basic details have been juggled : Henry tricks Louis’s men by entering the town in

  L. Grant, Architecture and Society in Normandy, 1120–1270 (New Haven/London 2005), 82–3.   T. K. Keefe, ‘Shrine Time : King Henry II’s Visits to Thomas Becket’s Tomb’, HSJ, 11 (2003 for 1998), 115–23. This seems confirmed by Henry’s refoundation of the priory of Mont-aux-Malades in Becket’s honour (see p. 126 n. 2 above).   Actes Henri II, i, no. CCXXVI : ‘Sciatis quod burgenses et milites Salmuri, pro remedio animarum suarum, in tempore meo, fecerunt pontem Salmuri ligneum super Ligerim. Ego vero Salmurum veniens, super opere tam bono letatus, predictis militibus et burgensibus gratias egi’ (unusually dated, to 1162).   See esp. Torigni, 209–10 (ed. Delisle, i, 331–2) ; Grant, Architecture, 33–4, 67–8.  E.g. Recueil des jugements, nos. 14, 122, 294, 310.   For Eleanor in Norman vernacular prose histories, see Power, ‘The Stripping of a Queen’.   Torigni, 208 (ed. Delisle, i, 329) ; Actes Henri II, i, no. CXLI.

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disguise as a Templar with his men, all ‘well armed under their capes’. The same text describes in detail the siege of Rouen in 1174, claiming that ‘Even the ladies of the town carried stones and boiled water and pitch to throw down upon their enemies’, and relates that Henry died of a blood disorder that developed as he fled through the night following the destruction of Le Mans. These texts do not depict Henry in negative terms. They chiefly remember him as a great, if troubled, ruler and as a patriarch ; all pay particular attention to his various territories and to the dynastic links that his daughters’ and grandchildren’s marriages established, as well as to the troubles that Henry’s offspring caused him. For the authors of the thirteenth-century estoires of the dukes of Normandy, Henry was prosaic but powerful, a dynast but not a tyrant. I shall leave the final words to one such Norman vernacular history : Henry son of Empress Matilda was crowned after King Stephen’s death without opposition. Most wisely did he hold his land and dispense justice . . . He held Anjou, Touraine and Maine through his father, the kingdom of England and the duchy of Normandy through his mother, and Aquitaine, Gascony and Poitou through his wife Eleanor, in good peace.   CUL, MS Ii.vi.24, fol. 98v, ed. in P. Meyer, ‘Notice sur le manuscrit II,6,24 de la bibliothèque de l’université de Cambridge’, Notices et extraits, 32/ii (1886), 37–81, at 70 : ‘Puis avint que un jor entra en Gisorz li roi Henri come s’il fust templiers ; e estoient si home bien armé soz les chapes. E quant furent enz, si mistrent fors cels qui le gardoent au roi de France, e prirent le chastel.’   CUL, MS Ii.vi.24, fol. 99v (Meyer, ‘Notice’, 71) : ‘Les dames meïsmes de la vile portoient les pierres e boilleent l’eve e la poiz a geter sor les enemis.’   CUL, MS Ii.vi.24, fol. 100r (Meyer, ‘Notice’, 72) : ‘La nuit fu mult deshaitiez, e dient que il fu sancmellez’ ; another Norman history (ibid., fol. 43v) states that Henry ‘se sancmella del corot’. The best known of these texts, by the Anonymus of Béthune, noted this diagnosis but believed that Henry II had caught a chill after overheating during his flight to Chinon : Histoire des ducs de Normandie et des rois d’Angleterre, ed. F. Michel (Paris 1840), 84. Hist. Guillaume le Maréchal, i, ll. 8959–92, 9084–103, gives a similar but far more detailed description of Henry’s symptoms, including spreading paralysis and blood clots.   CUL, MS Ii.vi.24, fol. 42r : ‘Henri fiz Maheut l’emperiz fi coronez enpres la mort li roi Est’. sanz chalenge qui mult fu sage de terre tenir, e de fere iustise. . . . e ot en bone pes de par son pere Angou et Toreigni [sic], e le Maine, e de par sa mere l’emperiz le regne d’Engleterre e la duchee de Normendie [sic], e de par Alienor sa femme Aquitaingne, e Gascoigne e Peitou.’

Seán Duffy

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n the inimitable words of the inimitable John Gillingham, ‘No view of Henry II in the first half of his reign is more misleading than one which sees him as a peace-loving, stay-at-home king.’ As an unapologetic devotee of chronicles and related genre, Professor Gillingham was no doubt persuaded to such a view by prolonged exposure to the observations of men like Gerald of Wales. It was, after all, Gerald’s belief that power such as that attained by Henry II had never previously been wielded by any king of England, not since the Norman Conquest, not even since the Anglo-Saxon invasions : [Henry] triumphed over realms remote and alien, which pertained to none of his predecessors, from the arrival of the Normans, or even of the Angles. Crossing the deep sea, he visited Ireland with a fleet, and gloriously subdued it. Scotland also he vanquished, capturing its king, William. And, adding to the English Crown an increment so noble beyond precedent, he remarkably extended the kingdom’s limits and boundaries, from the ocean on the south to the Orkney islands on the north, with powerful grasp including the whole island of Britain in one monarchy. As Gerald states, nowhere are Henry’s ‘peace-loving, stay-at-home’ attributes less in evidence than in his dealings with England’s insular neighbours. Let us glance first at Scotland. The Scottish claim to what is now northern England was, of course, one of the great issues in diplomatic relations between the two countries throughout the twelfth century and beyond. In the aftermath of the death of Henry I, King   J. Gillingham, ‘The English Invasion of Ireland’, in Representing Ireland : Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534–1660, ed. B. Bradshaw, A. Hadfield and W. Maley (Cambridge 1993), 24–42 ; repr. in idem, The English in the Twelfth Century : Imperialism, National Identity, and Political Values (Woodbridge 2000), 145–60, at 158 n. 65.   Gerald of Wales, De Principis Instructione ; I have used the translation in A. O. Anderson, Early Sources of Scottish History : A.D. 500 to 1286, 2 vols. (Edinburgh 1922), ii, 294–5.   See, for example, J. Green, ‘Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1066–1174’, in England and her Neighbours : Essays in Honour of Pierre Chaplais, ed. M. Jones and M. Vale (London 1989), 53–72.

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Stephen had arrived in England to find himself facing a rebellion, and Orderic Vitalis noted the way in which the opposition to Stephen fused with the opportunism of England’s nearest neighbours, in the following terms : The most powerful of the rebels recklessly steeled themselves to resist, and entered into an alliance with the Scots and Welsh and other rebels and traitors, bringing down ruin upon the people. The Welsh territorial gains appear as startlingly instantaneous, while from Scotland King David mac Maíl Coluim (i.e. son of Malcolm III) led a destructive raid on the north of England, the alleged savagery of which produced quite the most extraordinary outburst of vitriol from English chroniclers ; news of it even reached Ireland where the annals describe it as ‘the devastation of the north of England by the men of Scotland, who carried off countless captives, and numerous spoils’. Despite losing heavily at the battle of ‘the Standard’, David was for most of the remainder of his reign de facto ruler of much of northern England, including Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland, and at least part of Lancashire, and it is interesting that this too is acknowledged by spectator Irish annalists in the various titles they bestow upon him at his death in 1153 : the annals of ‘Tigernach’ call him king of Scotland and England (‘‰í Alban & Saxan’) ; the ‘Cottonian’ annals have ‘‰í Alban & B‰etan’, which a late translation of the ‘Annals of Clonmacnoise’ renders ‘king of Scotland, Wales, and the borders of England, the greatest potentate in these parts of Europe’. King David’s achievement, in this regard as in so many others, was striking. The problem was : how to sustain it ? Roger of Howden tells us that when the future King Henry II, as a sixteen-year-old youth, was knighted by David at Carlisle in 1149, the honour was conferred only after Henry had

  Orderic, vi, 494.   The Annals of Loch Cé : A Chronicle of Irish Affairs from A.D. 1014 to A.D. 1590, ed. and trans. W. M. Hennessy, 2 vols. (London 1871), i, s.a. 1138.   See J. Green, ‘Aristocratic Loyalties on the Northern Frontier, c.1110–1174’, in England in the Twelfth Century, ed. D. Williams (Woodbridge 1992), 83–100 ; idem, ‘David I and Henry I’, Scottish Historical Review, 75 (1996) 1–19 ; K. J. Stringer, The Reign of Stephen : Kingship, Warfare and Government in Twelfth-Century England (London 1993), 28–37 ; idem, ‘State-Building in Twelfth-Century Britain : David I, King of Scots, and Northern England’, in Government, Religion, and Society in Northern England, 1000–1700, ed. J. C. Appleby and P. Dalton (Stroud 1997), 40–62.   I presume that the Bretan of the original refers, however, to the Brittonic peoples of southern Scotland and northern England, rather than to Wales.   ‘The Annals of Tigernach’, ed. W. Stokes, Revue Celtique, 16 (1895), 374–419 ; 17 (1896), 6–33, 119–263, 337–420 ; 18 (1897), 9–59, 150–97, 267–303 ; repr., 2 vols. (Felinfech 1993) ; ‘Annals in Cotton MS Titus A. XXV’, ed. A. M. Freeman, Revue Celtique, 41–4 (1924–7) ; The Annals of Clonmacnoise, being Annals of Ireland from the Earliest Period to A.D. 1408, ed. D. Murphy (Dublin 1896), all s.a. 1153.



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first sworn on oath that, should he become king of England, he would hand over Newcastle and the whole of Northumbria to him [David], and allow him and his to possess in peace and without challenge forever all the land that lies between the River Tweed and the River Tyne. William of Newburgh similarly records that Henry gave security that he would never deprive David’s heirs of any portion of the lands that had passed from England to the dominion of that king. That was then. But following King David’s death and the accession of his own twelve-year-old grandson Máel Coluim (Malcolm IV), the Scots position was considerably weakened. And so, when Henry in due course became king of England and young Máel Coluim came to perform homage for his English lands in 1157, Henry unceremoniously took back the northern counties and re-established the border as it had been in the days of his grandfather, Henry I. In doing so, he broke the oath he had taken in 1149, but it had surely been wishful thinking on the part of the Scots to imagine that it would ever have been otherwise, that Henry’s oath was anything more than an empty promise. Insult was added to injury within a year when, after a second meeting between Máel Coluim and Henry at Carlisle in 1158, ‘they returned without having become good friends’, according to Howden, who adds, ‘so that the king of Scots was not yet knighted’. At this stage it is perhaps pointless to speculate as to whether it was in his capacity as earl of Huntingdon or humbled king of Scots that in 1159 Máel Coluim travelled to France to serve with King Henry against Louis VII. King Máel Coluim may have been prepared to do so for no better reason than to persuade the English king to put him out of his misery by conferring knighthood on him, something that duly occurred, apparently at Périgueux in Aquitaine. But if, to Máel Coluim’s mind, there was a subtle distinction between military service performed for his English earldom as opposed to his kingdom, it was certainly lost on his compatriots, many of King Máel Coluim’s own earls and barons furiously rounding on him when he returned to Scotland after Henry had dispensed with his services.   Howden, Chronica, i, 211.   Newburgh, i, 70 ; Warren, Henry II, 181–2 ; Green, ‘Anglo-Scottish Relations’, 53–72 ; W. E. Kapelle, The Norman Conquest of the North : The Region and its Transformation, 1000–1135 (London 1979), 141 ff. ; I. Blanchard, ‘Lothian and Beyond : The Economy of the “English Empire” of David I’, in Progress and Problems in Medieval England : Essays in Honour of Edward Miller, ed. R. Britnell and J. Hatcher (Cambridge 1996), 23–46 ; R. Oram, David : The King who Made Scotland (Stroud 2004), 121–44, 167–89.   See A. A. M. Duncan, The Kingship of the Scots, 842–1292 : Succession and Independence (Edinburgh 2002), 71–3.  Eyton, Itinerary, 46.   ‘Chronicle of Melrose’, in Anderson, Early Sources, ii, 244.

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Máel Coluim’s first public humiliation at Henry’s hands had taken place at Chester in the summer of 1157, just before the Welsh also found themselves up close and personal with this not very peace-loving, stay-at-home king. As Lewis Warren rather harshly put it : ‘The Welsh had to be taught that the hay-making days of King Stephen’s reign were over, and there was again in the land an authority that was intolerant of disorder.’ Henry had been on the throne not much more than two and a half years when he engineered a pretext for invading Gwynedd  apparently to assist Cadwaladr, one of the sons of the late Gruffudd ap Cynan (d. 1137), in securing his rightful inheritance from the best-known of Gruffudd’s sons, Owain Gwynedd  in reality a replication of the demand made of Máel Coluim IV : English recovery of every inch of ground lost (literally and metaphorically) since the death of Henry I. Despite a near disaster at the hands of Welsh ambushers, Henry got his way : Owain submitted, performed homage, and ceded both hostages and hard-won land. Almost exactly a year later Henry’s target was Rhys ap Gruffudd (the Lord Rhys) of Deheubarth : he had been more successful than Owain Gwynedd in winning back territory from the marcher barons, precisely because the latter had previously made so much more headway in South Wales than the North, and for Rhys the price of peace was correspondingly higher : the glorious recovery of lands and the triumphant capture of castles that the South Welsh had accomplished in the two decades that followed Henry I’s demise were stopped dead and undone. In both Scotland and Wales Henry had demonstrated that he could turn back the clock, and that the commencement of his reign presaged a restoration of Anglo-Norman pre-eminence throughout Britain. In striving to effect such a restorative programme, Henry was but doing his duty, and his Scottish and Welsh policies in these early days must be viewed as essentially conservative. It is his outlook on Ireland that gives us the first glimpse in an insular setting of the ‘relentlessly expansionist’ Henry, the man about whom Ralph of Diss (later recording his death) felt compelled to remark that, in life, he had never been content with all the lands he possessed, but now must make do with just a few feet of earth. Henry was crowned on 19 December 1154. Just over nine months later, at Michaelmas 1155, the new king came to Winchester, and held a council at which, according to Robert of Torigni : He deliberated with his magnates about the conquest of the kingdom of Ireland (de conquirendo regno Hiberniae) and the grant of it to his brother   Warren, Henry II, 161.   J. E. Lloyd, A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Conquest, 2 vols. (London 1911), ii, 490–500.   Ibid., 506–7.   The phrase occurs in J. Gillingham, The Angevin Empire, 1st edn (London 1984), 29.   Diceto, ii, 65.



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William ; but since his mother the empress opposed it the expedition was postponed for the time being (intermissa est ad tempus illa expeditio). Warren seems to have doubted that such a council ever took place, but Marie Therese Flanagan has drawn attention to a charter of the count of Eu, the dating clause of which reads ‘at Winchester in the year in which a conquest of Ireland was discussed (apud Wincestriam eo anno quo verbum factum est de Hibernia conquirenda)’. There certainly was a council at Winchester, and Ireland’s conquest was certainly debated there ; the only question concerns the role of Henry. Warren, having cast doubt on the very existence of the meeting, proceeds to speculate that, if it did take place, Henry is unlikely to have promoted the scheme for an Irish conquest ; rather, he suggests, Henry turned down a proposal to that effect made by another, the obvious candidate being Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury (smarting at the recent papal sanction for the independence of the Irish church), and on this latter point, specifically regarding Canterbury’s enthusiasm for royal intervention in Ireland, Flanagan concurs. The latter is a sensible interpretation, fully justified by the available evidence and the contemporary context. But Lewis Warren lets Henry off the hook much too easily. Robert of Torigni does not suggest for a moment that Henry opposed the plan for an Irish conquest ; on the contrary, he is unequivocal in stating that it was Matilda who took this stance, and the most plausible reading of Torigni, and of the wording of the count of Eu’s Winchester charter, is that the specific purpose for which Henry convened the 1155 council was to consider a conquest of Ireland, that he himself was therefore an advocate (doubtless with the backing of some or all of the many prelates of the English church present), that he proposed to lead an expedition in person to Ireland, but that in the end, apparently following his mother’s advice, he decided to defer such an enterprise until a later date. A decade was to pass before we find evidence of Henry taking the opportunity to secure a possible entrée into Ireland (when, in 1165, he or his agents enlisted naval support from the Irish port-towns for a projected conquest of Wales). Partly perhaps because of this lengthy vacillation (if such it was) it is generally assumed that Henry had no long-term interest in conquering Ireland ; that, whatever his youthful dalliance with such a prospect, when he turned his mind to the management of his existing ‘empire’ Ireland sank rapidly below the horizon,   Torigni, iv, 186.   Warren, Henry II, 195–6.   M. T. Flanagan, Irish Society, Anglo-Norman Settlers, Angevin Kingship (Oxford 1989), 38–41, 305–7.   See, for example, M. Holland, ‘Dublin and the Reform of the Irish Church in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, Peritia, 14 (2000), 111–60.   Annala Uladh : Annals of Ulster ; otherwise, Annala Senait : Annals of Senat : A Chronicle of Irish Affairs, ed. and trans. with notes by W. H. Hennessy and B. MacCarthy, 4 vols. (Dublin 1887–1901), s.a. 1165.

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and that when eventually he got to make his expeditio to Ireland he did so almost with reluctance. Lewis Warren held this view strongly, but then he also believed that Henry had no great interest in Wales either. Gerald of Wales, on the other hand, had no doubt of the attraction that both countries held for the English king (Gerald makes the point in one of his works that the only thing that had cooled the king’s ardour for an out-and-out conquest of Wales in 1163 was that he was tricked into believing it to be a wasteland unfit for humans). Far from being uninterested in Wales, Henry, as we have seen, had invaded Gwynedd in the summer of 1157, and had been on the point of invading Deheubarth in the following summer when Rhys ap Gruffudd spared him the trouble by submitting. There then ensued an absence on the Continent until Christmas 1162, but by early spring Henry was back on the campaign trail, having reopened hostilities in Wales, where he captured the Lord Rhys and brought him as a prisoner to England. Rhys was soon liberated in body, but Henry had a more sophisticated incarceration in mind for him, as for the Welsh in general, and indeed for the Scots. At the start of July 1163, Henry was at Woodstock, and there, according to Ralph of Diss, Máel Coluim king of the Scots, Rhys prince of the South Welsh, Owain prince of the North Welsh, and five of the greater men of Wales did homage to the king of England and to his son Henry. Robert of Torigni adds that Máel Coluim was compelled to surrender as a hostage his brother David, as a surety of his good behaviour. But if this ‘dictatorial attitude’ (the phrase is Lewis Warren’s) was intended by Henry to put paid to bothersome insubordination, his judgment proved poor. In reaction to Henry’s imperiousness, the Lord Rhys ap Gruffudd broke out in rebellion in the following year at the head of a major drive against the marcher barons of South Wales ; this spread throughout Wales, and leadership was later assumed by Owain Gwynedd. Owain too, as we have seen, had done homage to Henry in July 1163 but, as has been demonstrated by Huw Pryce, he thereupon adopted the title ‘prince’. This was probably by way of stressing his pre-eminence in relation to the other Welsh kings, but it is possible that Owain was happy just to put Henry’s nose out of joint, and it proved a successful stratagem : Thomas Becket wrote to Pope Alexan-

  Warren, Henry II, 150, 161, 169, 198–200. See esp. 206 : ‘Ireland was a commitment that Henry entered upon reluctantly, tried to discharge cheaply, and hoped to get rid of.’   Warren, Henry II, 161 ; Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, vi, 81–2 ; Lloyd, History of Wales, ii, 513.   Diceto, i, 311.   Torigni, iv, 218.   Warren, Henry II, 168.



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der III warning about ‘the Welsh and Owain, who calls himself prince, because on account of this the lord king is very moved and offended’. By the autumn of 1164, Owain Gwynedd was in open rebellion, the Welsh annals were speaking of an uprising of ‘all the Welsh’ who had ‘united to throw off the rule of the French [i.e. the Anglo-Normans]’, and Henry was planning a campaign to repress what was in effect a national revolt against English overlordship. A letter from an unknown writer to Archbishop Becket at this juncture informed him that Henry was afraid to attack the Welsh until he had made peace with Flanders and France, lest they should take advantage of his absence. Well might he have worried. As part of his strategy of defiance of Henry, Owain made contact with Louis of France, a diplomatic channel through which he sent at least four letters to the Capetian court and received two or more replies. In the first of these documents, written perhaps in the winter of 1164–5, Owain offered to place himself and his possessions at Louis’s will, and asked him to consider him ‘amongst your faithful and devoted friends ( fideles et devotos amicos)’. In a slightly later dispatch to King Louis’s chancellor, Owain asked him to provide support ‘vis-à-vis the king [Henry] and to assist our side (versus regem foveatis, et partem nostram . . . iuvetis)’. As there is no mention in this letter of Henry’s 1165 summer campaign against the Welsh, merely a sense that it was imminent, it probably dates from the first half of 1165. The final letter of Owain to survive, dating from the winter of 1165–6, is the most interesting. In this, calling himself ‘prince of Wales’, he informs the French king that ‘difficulties are all around me at present’, and continues : Preceded by no evil deeds of mine, in the past summer the king of England has waged against me the war which, as is known to you, he has planned for many days with the harshness of his tyranny. But when in the conflict the five armies of our side came together, thanks be to God and you, more of his men fell than mine. He then states that Henry plans another campaign the following Easter, asks Louis ‘whether you are resolved to wage war against him, so that in that war I may both serve you by harming him according to your advice and take vengeance for the war he waged against me’, and explains that ‘I have no way of evading his snares unless you grant me advice and help.’ Owain’s fear that Henry II would come against him once more proved unfounded, as the English king crossed over to Normandy in March 1166, and did   H. Pryce, ‘Owain Gwynedd and Louis VII : The Franco-Welsh Diplomacy of the First Prince of Wales’, Welsh History Review, 19 (1998), 1–28, at 4, 21–2 ; Diceto, i, 311 ; MTB, v, 49.   See, for example, Brut y Tywysogyon, or The Chronicle of the Princes : Red Book of Hergest Version, ed. and trans. Thomas Jones (Cardiff 1955), s.a. 1165.   MTB, v, 174.

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not return to Wales until 1171, and even then he was en route to Ireland. In the meantime, the Welsh prince had captured Basingwerk and in 1167 had crossed the river Clwyd and, with the assistance of the Lord Rhys, had taken and destroyed the castles of Rhuddlan and Prestatyn, so that he had full possession of Tegeingl as far as the estuary of the Dee. To the extent that this was made possible because Henry was not able to campaign against Owain while he himself was at war with Louis and other enemies, Owain Gwynedd can be said to have obtained what he hoped for from his contact with the French king. Of course, Louis was not at war with Henry out of compassion for the prince of Gwynedd, but neither is it the case that the latter was entirely incidental to that war : when the two kings held peace talks in July 1168, John of Salisbury tells us that there were envoys of ‘the kings of Wales’ present on the occasion, and that they ‘promised aid to the French king and offered him hostages’ and left his court ‘under an obligation’. Here we have the Welsh offering aid to the king of France, presumably to continue his war with Henry, and if they gave hostages and departed ‘under an obligation’ some sort of alliance must have been operative. Ongoing hostility towards the Welsh on Henry’s part is apparent from his instruction, late in 1169, that all Welshmen were to be expelled from the schools of England, while further Welsh contacts with the French may lie behind a prohibition of the same date against any Welsh person, cleric or lay, who might land (‘applicuerit’) in England without royal licence. Henry’s expedition to Wales in 1165 was a massive undertaking, ‘prepared with surpassing thoroughness’, as Lewis Warren put it, because evidently Henry ‘intended to settle the Welsh problem once and for all’. And, in seeking to leave nothing to chance, the fleet of Dublin was recruited by Henry, presumably to harass his Welsh opponents from the west. According to the Irish annals, the Dublin fleet served in Wales for a full half-year. The Welsh Brut chronicles have a different story, which looks more plausible. About September 1165, after a disastrous start to his campaign (which was becoming something of a habit), Henry moved his host to Chester. And there he encamped many days, until ships from Dublin and from the other towns of Ireland came to him. But since that number of ships was not sufficient for him, he rewarded the ships of Dublin with much wealth and sent them back to their land. And he himself and his host returned a second time to England.   Lloyd, History of Wales, ii, 519–20.   Letters of John of Salisbury, ii, no. 279.   Pryce, ‘Owain Gwynedd and Louis VII’, 12 and n. 35.   Warren, Henry II, 163.   For a detailed account of the expedition, see P. Latimer, ‘Henry II’s Campaign against the Welsh in 1165’, Welsh History Review, 14 (1989), 523–52.   Annals of Ulster, s.a. 1165.   Brut : Red Book of Hergest Version, s.a. 1165.



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This appears to have been the first occasion since the Norman Conquest of England that troops from Ireland were used (or intended to be used) in the army of the Anglo-Norman kings. And it is of no little interest that the Welsh chronicler believed that it was the failure to enlist naval support in sufficient magnitude from Ireland that caused the collapse of Henry’s Welsh offensive. In the past, the Welsh had been led to expect, in their struggles against Welsh rivals and Anglo-Norman trespassers, solidarity from the Irish and from the ‘Ostmen’ ruling the towns founded by the Vikings (principally, Dublin, Wexford, and Waterford and, further west, Cork and Limerick). That the Ostmen and their Irish overlords were prepared now to join forces with Henry’s army of conquest is a poor reflection on their loyalty to former friends, to say nothing of any pangs of sympathy one might  in retrospect, and quite anachronistically  have expected them to feel for the long-suffering Welsh. It just might, on the other hand, indicate that, even as early as 1165, Henry II had entered into terms of alliance, if not secured bonds of fealty, with the Irish overlord of the Ostman fleets of Dublin and Leinster, a man with whom he would later become rather better acquainted : King Diarmait Mac Murchada. Be that as it may, the presence of the Ostman fleets off Wales in 1165 is proof that either they or their Irish masters were more than willing to partake in an expedition, the purpose of which was, so the Welsh thought, the subjugation if not the very annihilation of the entire populace of Wales. How ironic, then, that within five years, all three east-coast Ostman towns, first Wexford, then Waterford, and finally Dublin itself, had themselves fallen to Anglo-Norman arms : a revolution in which the primary role was played by men from Wales. The fact is that, in many respects, the English irruption into Ireland was but an episode in Anglo-Welsh relations. Having embarrassingly failed to surmount the united Welsh resistance to his expedition of 1165, Henry sailed off to the Continent, leaving the marcher barons to cope as best they could in the face of the Welsh revanche. Few royal gestures were made in support of indigent marchers, even those of royal blood : during Henry’s earlier Welsh expedition in 1157, Henry fitz Henry, the bastard son of Henry I by the ubiquitous Nest (Nesta), daughter of Rhys ap Tewdwr, was killed in Anglesey. Although he possessed a small estate at Narberth and Pebidiog in Pembrokeshire, fitz Henry’s young family were in a precarious position, and it is no surprise to find the best known of them, Meiler, in the vanguard of the famous Bannow Bay landing in Ireland in 1169 : a pivotal moment in the history of English involvement in the affairs of Ireland. Robert, son of Stephen the constable of Cardigan Castle, was the most important of the resident barons in Ceredigion and Cemais, half Welsh because Nest was his   See Flanagan, Irish Society, 76.   Brut : Red Book of Hergest Version, s.a. 1165.   Lloyd, History of Wales, ii, 499.

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mother too. But when Rhys ap Gruffudd overran most of Ceredigion in 1164–5, he demolished Cardigan Castle and captured and imprisoned fitz Stephen. By the summer of 1169, when Robert too embarked for greener pastures in Ireland, it followed three years spent languishing in the Lord Rhys’s prison, and Gerald of Wales tells us that Rhys only freed him on the express condition that he take part in the Irish invasion. By now, as castle after castle and cantref after cantref fell to the Welsh, the marcher grip on Wales loosened and prospects were bleak. As Sir John Lloyd characteristically put it : ‘The defeat of the king [in 1165] had inspired the Welsh of all Wales with new hope and courage and in like measure had discouraged and depressed the foreign garrison.’ When one has nothing, one has nothing to lose. Ireland was an untried frontier, and Anglo-Welsh barons who, a generation earlier, might have let the opportunity pass them by, because Henry I was their shield and protector, now felt abandoned to their fate by a king whose concentration seemed focused elsewhere, and so they needed little persuasion to see a future for themselves in the land beyond St George’s Channel. When Henry decided he would intervene in person in the Irish situation, he travelled through South Wales in the autumn of 1171, and he and Rhys made their peace, the author of Brut y Tywysogyon implying that Henry knew it was a political imperative. During Henry’s expedition to Ireland, which lasted exactly six months, the Irish remained quiescent, and many of their kings, although not the high king Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair, submitted to him, no doubt in the hope of securing his protection against the aggression of the invaders. But, of course, Henry’s motives in going to Ireland were no more admirable than those of the land-grabbing marchers. Although the bishop of Coutances issued a charter in 1172, describing the year as that in which Henry II was ‘pacifying Ireland’, this is an exceptional interpretation of events. In the second of his two great books on Ireland, Expugnatio Hibernica, Gerald of Wales calls Henry quite simply ‘Hibernie triumphator’. The verse chronicle of the invasion usually known as The Song of Dermot and the Earl, a source very loyal to the king, tells us that Henry ‘planned to cross the sea and conquer Ireland (e Yrlande conquester)’. Roger of Howden tells how, when the king disembarked from his ship, becoming the first king of England to set foot on Irish soil, a white hare leapt out of the bushes and was imme  Lloyd, History of Wales, ii, 518–9.   Gerald, Expugnatio, 28–31.   Lloyd, History of Wales, ii, 519.   Brut : Red Book of Hergest Version, s.a. 1171.   Actes Henri II, i, 583.   Gerald, Expugnatio, 98–9.   The Song of Dermot and the Earl, ed. G. H. Orpen (Oxford 1892), ll. 2579–82 ; for a new edn, lacking, however, Orpen’s invaluable annotations, see The Deeds of the Normans in Ireland, ed. E. Mullally (Dublin 2002).



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diately captured and offered to the king ‘as a sign of victory (in signum victoriae)’. Victories, like conquests, are what one obtains over one’s enemies. The other great north-of-England chronicler of the age, William of Newburgh, although conforming to the contemporary view of the Irish as barbarians, was clear that the invasion marked the end of Ireland’s freedom, and he seems to have had a certain sympathy for this people who had been free, as he puts it, since ancient times, whom even the Romans had not conquered, as if they had some sort of innate right to their freedom, but were now under English rule ; to him, Henry II ‘subjugated’ the Irish. Gerald, for his part, felt obliged to refute what he called the ‘vociferous complaints that the kings of England hold Ireland unlawfully’, and in a section of his Expugnatio Hibernica that he entitled ‘A commendation and defence of [Robert] fitz Stephen, the earl [of Striguil, Richard ‘Strongbow’ de Clare] and the king’, he states : Fitz Stephen and the Earl cannot in any sense be classed as mere robbers, as far as Leinster is concerned. Both rest their claims on the same legal position, for they both acted within the law in restoring Diarmait [Mac Murchada, king of Leinster] to his lands, the one because he had taken an oath of allegiance to him, and the other because he had married his daughter . . . The remaining princes of Ireland immediately made a voluntary submission to Henry, and thus conferred a legal claim that is beyond dispute. So . . . it must be clear from the above that in entering Ireland, the English were not guilty of injustice such as is foolishly attributed to them by the ill-informed. There can hardly have been any reason for Gerald to make such remarks unless he was writing at a point when an awareness of the unfairness of the English invasion of Ireland had come to light. It would appear, therefore, that not all contemporaries were convinced that Henry II had a legitimate claim to Ireland. Ralph Niger contrasts the way Henry conquered Ireland by force to what he sees as the lawful succession of Strongbow in right of his wife, while one of Becket’s early biographers, William of Canterbury, writing in 1173–4 (and admittedly not an unbiased source), roundly condemns Henry’s actions in Ireland on several occasions, and has the Martyr perform miracles on several soldiers killed or wounded for their sins in participating in the king’s Irish expedition : one had died, he says, because ‘without cause they had disturbed their defenceless neighbours, a nation, however uncultured and barbarous, which was nevertheless a practitioner of the faith and observer of the Christian religion’ ; another had attacked (‘impugnaverat’) Ireland along   Howden, Chronica, ii, 29.   Newburgh, i, 16, 165–6, 168.   Gerald, Expugnatio, 148–9.   Ibid., 228–31 (my italics).

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with King Henry, but ‘because no one doubts that the King of Heaven punishes injustice’, he was struck down with leprosy in Ireland ; yet another suffered dire pains in his head for ‘harassing Ireland by hostile invasion’. If English and Anglophile writers could bring themselves to write in these terms about the actions of their king, it is no surprise that one of the Myrddin (Merlin) poems in the Black Book of Carmarthen seems to have Henry II (i.e., the fifth Anglo-Norman king of England) in mind when it lists Five chieftains from Normandy, the fifth crossing the salt sea to invade the peaceful homesteads of Ireland. He will cause war and confusion there. But, of course, the contemporary sense of grievance was primarily an Irish phenomenon. It, no doubt, lay behind the decision of the high king of Ireland, Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair, to enter negotiations with Henry II in 1175 that led ultimately to the Treaty of Windsor. This seemed to safeguard the high king’s position. Although the formal text of the treaty does not acknowledge Ruaidrí as high king, referring to him only as king of Connacht, his overlordship of all the country is confirmed, and in return he agrees to pay Henry an annual tribute in cow-hides, which he can levy throughout the island except for those parts in English hands (Meath, Leinster and east Co. Waterford). A Connacht-based annalist reports the good news in triumphal terms : Cadla Ua Dubthaig [archbishop of Tuam] came out of England from [Henry] the son of the Empress, having with him the peace of Ireland, and the kingship thereof, both foreigner and Irish, to Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair, and to every provincial king his province from the king of Ireland and their tributes [payable] to Ruaidrí. The reference to ‘the peace of Ireland’ is an indication of the Irish perception that the freedom from strife, such as it was, that had prevailed in Ireland before the invasion had been interrupted by the latter, and that the Treaty of Windsor would restore it. It was to be a vain hope. The treaty had been concluded in October 1175, but its terms were adhered to for barely six months. In the following April, a large army from Dublin, pre  Radulphi Nigri Chronica : The Chronicles of Ralph Niger, ed. R. Anstruther, Caxton Soc., 13 (London 1851), 92 ; MTB, i, 180–81, 364, 378, 457, 507.   Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin, ed. A. O. H. Jarman (Cardiff 1982), no. 17, ll. 32–5 : ‘Rac offin pimp penaeth o nortmandi. / Ar pimhed in myned dros mor heli. / y oreskin iwerton tirion trewi. / Ef gunahaud ryuel a difissci.’   This is my reading of the treaty as preserved in Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 102–3, and Howden, Chronica, ii, 84–5 (the text is repr. in Flanagan, Irish Society, 312–3) ; I differ from earlier interpretations that would have the conquered parts of Ireland excluded entirely from Ruaidrí’s authority, not merely for the purposes of tribute-collection.   ‘Annals of Tigernach’, s.a. 1175.



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sumably with official endorsement, penetrated as far as Armagh in the heart of Ulster, a province intended to be free from encroachment under the treaty, and the annals tell us that 500 of them were killed by the forces of Airgialla defending their kingdom. Only a matter of months later, in the early weeks of 1177, another army left Dublin under the command of John de Courcy, this time bound for Downpatrick, capital of Ulaid, a kingdom that this fabled warrior proceeded to conquer for himself. There is not the slightest evidence that the high king of Ireland betrayed his commitments under the treaty of Windsor, and yet Henry was here wilfully reneging on it with barely the blink of an eye (unless we are to assume that his objections to these gross infringements have gone unrecorded). Roger of Howden has a confused story, which he places before 1177, to the effect that ‘Monoculus’, king of Limerick (Ua Briain of Thomond, North Munster), who had done homage to Henry II for it, was slain, and a powerful relative then invaded the kingdom of Limerick, gained possession of it, and ruled with a strong hand, ‘acknowledging no subjection to the king of England, and refusing to obey his officers, because of their faithless conduct and the evils they had inflicted on the people of Ireland, who did not deserve it’ ; he adds that the king of Cork (Mac Carthaig of Desmond, South Munster) ‘and many other wealthy persons of Ireland’, rebelled against the English king and his officials at this time. Notwithstanding the confusion in his account, Howden’s admission that Ua Briain and Mac Carthaig went into rebellion against Henry because of the ‘faithless conduct’ of English officials, and the ‘evils’ they had inflicted on the Irish, stands up to scrutiny. This disaffection, a feature of Irish life from the early 1170s onwards, was not, of course, confined to Ireland. We have seen that representatives of the Welsh were at the French court in July 1168, offering help and hostages in order to keep Anglo-French hostilities alive, but so too were the envoys of King William of Scotland. William had succeeded his brother Máel Coluim IV as king in 1165, and his accession certainly made a difference. He visited Henry II in Normandy in 1166, but we do not know what transpired between both kings, other than that later that year we hear of King Henry, at Caen, ‘vigorously debating the matter of the king of Scotland’ and branding his own constable of Normandy as a traitor for daring to speak in the Scots king’s favour ; we know little more of the precise cause of Henry’s anxiety, but the fact that, in a well-known vignette, he flew into   Ibid., s.a. 1176.   See S. Duffy, ‘The First Ulster Plantation : John de Courcy and the Men of Cumbria’, in Colony and Frontier in Medieval Ireland, ed. T. Barry, R. Frame, K. Simms (London 1995), 1–28.   Howden, Chronica, ii, 135.   See Gerald, Expugnatio, 136–7, 148–9. Cf. Flanagan, Irish Society, 257–8.   MTB, vi, 458 ; see also A. A. M. Duncan, Scotland : The Making of the Kingdom (Edinburgh 1975), 228. Professor Duncan has seen in King William’s collusion with Louis ‘the beginning of the “Auld Alliance” ’ (at 230).

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a rage, tore off all his own clothes, and, ‘sitting as on a dung heap, started chewing pieces of straw’, must surely indicate some peculiarly grave disquiet. In 1168, Bishop Arnulf of Lisieux wrote to Becket, informing him that King Henry was anxious to conclude an agreement with Louis so that he could return to England to crush the audacity of the Welsh ; but he adds, interestingly, that what Henry especially feared was that they would be joined by the Scots and the Bretons, as prophecy foretold. Nothing may have happened at that point, but in 1173 William did invade England, ‘having learned how greatly the king of the English laboured in Normandy’. In fairness to him, King William first sent envoys to Henry offering his loyalty and assistance in return for the counties of northern England that Henry had taken from Máel Coluim in 1157 ; only when this offer was rejected did he throw in his lot with those rebelling behind the standard of Henry’s son, the young King Henry, who was in a more generous frame of mind. King William’s offensive on England was an opportune assault, designed to take full advantage of Henry’s greatest cross-channel crisis when his sons joined forces against him, in league with his bitterest foe, Louis VII of France. Now, almost certainly, there was no contact between the Scottish invaders of England (at their most active in the several months leading up to William’s capture at Aln­ wick in July 1174) and the leaders of the Irish counter-offensive taking place at the same time. But a couple of points are worth making. More than one source stresses that William’s invading force was not just of southern Scots. It was made up of ‘highland Scots whom they call brutes (montanos Scotos quos brutos vocant) and the Gallovidians’ ; they were, we are told, ‘a host of barbarians’, a phrase usually reserved for the Scots of the Highlands and Islands. Most interestingly of all, Jordan Fantosme’s contemporary verse chronicle begins its list of the contingents making up William’s army with the statement that ‘from Ross and from Moray a great army has been summoned’ : a region which had very strong associations with Ireland. Later he declares : ‘That miserable race (La pute gent), on whom be God’s curse, the Gallovidians, who covet wealth, and the Scots who dwell   MTB, vi, 72, and see p. 311 below.   Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, no. 42.   Newburgh, trans. in Scottish Annals from English Chroniclers, AD 500–1286, trans. A. O. Anderson (London 1908), 248.   Jordan Fantosme, 24–5.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 45 ; Howden, Chronica, ii, 47.   See Green, ‘Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1066–1174’, 69–71 ; M. Strickland, ‘Securing the North : Invasion and the Strategy of Defence in Twelfth-Century Anglo-Scottish Warfare’, ANS 12 (1990), 177–98.   ‘Gesta annalia’, in Johannis de Fordun Chronica Gentis Scotorum, ed. W. F. Skene, 2 vols. (Edinburgh 1891–2), i, 262 ; ii, 257–8 ; Gerald, De Principis Instructione, in Anderson, Early Sources, ii, 284.   See, for example, R. A. McDonald, ‘Treachery in the Remotest Territories of Scotland : Northern Resistance to the Canmore dynasty, 1130–1230’, Canadian Journal of History, 33 (1999), 161–92 ; R. D. Oram, ‘David I and the Scottish Conquest and Colonisation of Moray’, Northern Scotland, 19



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in Albany (E li Escot qui sunt en Albanie) have no faith in God, the son of Mary ; they destroy churches and indulge in wholesale robbery’. The chronicle’s most recent editor translates ‘qui sunt en Albanie’ as ‘who dwell north of the Forth’, which seems a reasonable inference. Jordan is consistent in seeing the Scots host as comprising two groups : one, Highlanders and Gallovidians, the other, Lowlanders with their French and Flemish allies. In fact, at one point in his story King William refers to these as ‘both our armies’, and states : ‘Let us set our Scots [Highlanders] to harrying the sea coast, leaving not a house nor a church standing ; also we shall let the men of Galloway go in the other direction into the heart of Odinel [de Umfraville]’s country killing off all the men. Meanwhile we [i.e. the other army] shall go to Alnwick and lay siege to the castle there.’ Elsewhere Jordan describes a section of William’s army as ‘detestable people’ who cannot be ‘made to refrain from devilries’, and ‘running around like very devils’. That Jordan had in these references a particular kind of Scot in mind, one not from the Lowlands (who were presumably quite similar to northern English troops), is suggested by his reference to the Scots retreating ‘en lur terre salvage’ and also by his description of Scotland as ‘Escoce la salvage’. Clearly Jordan knew that there were different kinds of Scots, and in these instances he is talking about that particular kind of Scottish warrior who inhabited the northern and western parts of the country. With this in mind, it may just be of relevance that the army which Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair assembled in Ireland that summer to halt the encastellation of Meath seems also to have had a component from the Scottish Highlands or the Isles. The Song of Dermot lists the northern kings who accompanied him, and among them is a certain Mac Scilling, who appears to have been the leader of a Scottish fleet that aided the northern Irish king, Muirchertach Mac Lochlainn, in 1154, whom a late Scottish source identifies as a bastard son of Somerled of Argyll. If there were Scotsmen aiding in Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair’s army of resistance, they were, ironically, more than outmatched by the contribution of the new English settlers in Ireland to the defeat and capture of William of Scotland. The Song of Dermot and the Earl has an important account of the campaign, as follows :

(1999), 1–19 ; S. Duffy, ‘Ireland and Scotland, 1014–1169 : Contacts and Caveats’, in Seanchas : Essays presented to Francis J. Byrne, ed. A. P. Smyth (Dublin 2000), 346–56.   Jordan Fantosme, 52–3.   Ibid., 127.   Ibid., 101, 121.   Ibid., 49, 55, 63.   Song of Dermot, ll. 3238–79.   See ‘The Book of Clanranald’, in Reliquiae Celticae, ed. A. Cameron, 2 vols. (Inverness 1892–4), ii, 148–59.

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Seán Duffy At this time there was, as you know, a great war, Throughout all England ; For the rich king of Scotland Was at war with the English king . . . He thought by their war To ravage all England, While the son of the Empress Warred against his son in Normandy.

When the sister invasion to William’s, that from the Continent by the earl of Leicester and his Flemish mercenaries, collapsed in defeat near Bury St Edmunds, the Song of Dermot was of the view that ‘They were discomfited in this manner / By the aid of Leinster (par le succurs de Leynestere) ; / And by the might of the Irish (par la force des Yrreis) / The field remained with the English.’ It goes on to state, And in his turn within that month The king [of Scotland] was taken and conquered. And the barons of Ireland (les baruns de Yrlande), Who were in this brawl, All passed over to Normandy, And told the news to the King, How the Flemings were slain And the king of Scotland taken. It is extraordinary how the Song, apparently based on an account of the events supplied by the late King Diarmait Mac Murchada’s own latimer  a native Irishman, who participated in many of the events it so accurately relates  should describe those forces from the new colony who fought at Bury as ‘the Irish’ ; this was a phrase reserved at this early stage for the native Irish, except by those unable to distinguish between the two races. It suggests the possibility that levies of Irish troops from the newly conquered areas of Leinster accompanied the English barons. If so, it is a good indication of how Henry’s conquest of Ireland added almost overnight to the complications of Scotland’s already complex relationship with Ireland. Much the same is true of the Welsh situation. Following the death of Owain Gwynedd in 1170, developments in Ireland must have appeared secondary to his squabbling sons, to the extent that they do not appear to have taken advantage of Henry II’s own domestic turmoil in 1173–4, and one of them, Dafydd, actually secured in marriage at this point the hand of Henry’s half-sister Emma, il  Song of Dermot, ll. 2950–61.   Ibid., ll. 2968–79.   See J. Long, ‘Dermot and the Earl : Who Wrote “the Song” ?’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Aacademy, 75 (1975), 263–72.



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legitimate daughter of Geoffrey of Anjou, along with the manor of Ellesmere in Shropshire. He may be the David said by Roger of Howden to have been on the king’s side in 1173, along with an ‘Evayn’ who may be Owain Cyfeiliog of Powys. The Lord Rhys of Deheubarth now took over as the leading figure in the Welsh polity and, having been appointed by Henry on his return from Ireland as his ‘justice of South Wales’, maintained loyalty to Henry II throughout the crisis, even sending his son Hywel Sais to join Henry’s forces in France. In the following year, Rhys himself participated, along with a large force, in besieging the rebel stronghold of Tutbury near Derby. We know that large numbers of Welsh soldiers were recruited for this and Henry’s earlier continental wars, Rhys supplying a force of a thousand in 1174, and they would presumably have required the blessing of their respective Welsh lords before partaking in such ventures. But, contrary to Warren’s assessment that the Welsh in general at this time responded ‘to Henry II’s liberality with loyalty’, others clearly did not. When Rhys attended the famous conference with Henry II at Gloucester in 1175, the large contingent of Welsh lords who accompanied him included those ‘who had been in opposition to the king’, and they are listed as the lords of Elfael, Gwerthrynion, Maelienydd, Senghenydd, as well as Morgan ap Caradog ab Iestyn of Glamorgan, Seisyll ap Dyfnwal of Gwent Uwch-Coed, and Iorwerth ab Owain of Gwynllŵg. The latter two certainly had cause for disaffection. In 1172, when Henry II had just returned from Ireland, and was at Usk proposing peace talks with the Welsh, Seisyll and others had set off to meet him but had been ‘seized through treachery by the king’s men’ while under a safe-conduct, and Iorwerth’s son Owain had been murdered. The result was that Iorwerth and his other son Hywel ‘and many others, in no way trusting the king, ravaged the king’s territory as far as Hereford and Gloucester, slaying and burning and plundering without mercy’. When Henry’s sons rebelled against him in 1173, Iorwerth ab Owain of Gwyn­ llŵg and his son Hywel were, not surprisingly therefore, among those who took advantage. Their actions were motivated in part by their bitter recent experience   Diceto, i, 397–8 ; A. J. Roderick, ‘Marriage and Politics in Wales, 1066–1282’, Welsh History Review, 4 (1968), 3–20, at 14.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 51 ; Lloyd, History of Wales, ii, 551–3.   Warren, Henry II, 167.   Brut : Red Book of Hergest Version, s.a. 1173.   Diceto, i, 384 ; Lloyd, History of Wales, ii, 544.   Howden, Gesta Regis, ii, 40, 46, 50 ; Howden, Chronica, i, 282. See Warren, Henry II, 167.   Warren, Henry II, 167 ; cf. J. Gillingham, ‘Henry II, Richard I, and the Lord Rhys’, Peritia, 10 (1996), 225–36, at 227.   Brut : Red Book of Hergest Version, s.a. 1172.   For the Gwynllŵg revolt, see Lloyd, History of Wales, ii, 545–6.

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at the hands of the marchers but they also had longer-term goals. The cantref of Gwynllŵg lay in upland territory to the west of the Usk, in the southeast marches between Morgannwg and Gwent. Prior to the Norman settlement of the area it may have stretched as far east as the Usk, thirteenth-century tradition having it that the commote of Edeligion on its eastern flank was in Gwynllŵg rather than Gwent. The establishment of the earldom of Hereford soon after the Conquest, and construction of the castles at Chepstow and Monmouth, saw a rapid overrun of Gwent as far as the Usk, and, by the time of Domesday, settlement had traversed the Usk, and a castle had been constructed at Caerleon. The latter, since the 1130s, had rapidly acquired the enchanted associations given to it by Geoffrey of Monmouth, but to the lords of Gwynllŵg it was theirs, and they were intent on its recovery. Theirs was a family with a noble past, and they were held in high esteem among the Welsh. Iorwerth’s brother Morgan (d. 1158) was the last man to style himself king in Morgannwg ; he had slain Strongbow’s uncle, Richard fitz Gilbert de Clare, lord of Ceredigion, in the great Welsh revolt that had broken out in 1136 soon after the death of Henry I and had gone on to dominate Gwent during Stephen’s reign and beyond. John Gillingham has even plausibly argued that Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniae may preserve a reflection of these events. Morgan had also conquered for his dynasty the lordship and castle of Usk as well as Caerleon. But, not long before his departure for Ireland in 1170, Strongbow had annexed both from Iorwerth ab Owain, and when Henry II, en route to Ireland in 1171, confirmed his forfeiture of Caerleon, Iorwerth waited until the king was well out of sight near Pembroke before laying siege to the castle along with his sons Owain and Hywel and his nephew Seisyll ap Dyfnwal of Gwent Uwch-Coed. This siege proved unsuccessful, and Henry ordered that Caerleon be provisioned so that it could withstand further attacks, but undoubtedly it was but a matter of time before the settling of scores recommenced. The Welsh annals openly associate the Gwynllŵg insurrection with Henry’s continental war, their report for 1173 stating that the uprising took place ‘while the kings were contending beyond the sea’. Gerald goes a step further and connects it also with the fruitless onslaught on England by the Scots king William : Hywel, the son of Iorwerth of Caerleon, attacked the neighbourhood and destroyed the whole area. A little later Henry II, king of the English,   J. Evans, ed., Liber Landavensis (Cardiff 1893), 247 ; W. Rees, ‘Medieval Gwent’, BAA Journal, ns 35 (1930), 189–207 ; cf. P. Courtney, ‘The Norman Invasion of Gwent : A Reassessment’, JMH, 12 (1986), 297–313, at 301.   D. Crouch, ‘The Earliest Original Charter of a Welsh King’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 36 (1989), 125–31, at 126 ; Brut : Red Book of Hergest Version, s.a. 1136. It may even have been Iorwerth himself who killed Earl Richard ; see Lloyd, History of Wales, ii, 471.   J. Gillingham, ‘The Context and Purposes of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain’, ANS, 13 (1991), 99–118.   Lloyd, History of Wales, ii, 540–41.



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captured the king of Scotland and so restored peace to his own realm. As a result Hywel had good reason to fear that Henry would be free to take vengeance on him for the war which he had waged . . . [But Meilyr the soothsayer assured him :] ‘You need not fear the king’s anger . . . One of his cities, the noblest which he possesses across the Channel, is being besieged by the king of the French. He will be forced to put aside all other preoccupations and to cross the sea without losing a moment.’ But the rebellion of Iorwerth and Hywel, if obliquely related to the Scottish invasion, had a much closer correlation to contemporary events in Ireland. As Rees Davies pointed out of the events of an earlier reign, ‘instability in any part of the Norman dominions, Wales included, could easily threaten the security of the whole’. After 1169, that included Ireland. The 1173 insurgents in both Wales and Ireland were stimulated by the same impulse. The purpose of the Irish offensive was to overturn some of the recent successes of English opportunists there : successes personified by Strongbow, sometime earl of Striguil and Pembroke, now ruler of Leinster. And so we find the king of neighbouring North Munster, Domnall Mór Ua Briain, attacking Strongbow’s garrison in Waterford (a Munster city, after all, but being administered by the new lord of Leinster), while a disinherited grandson of Diarmait Mac Murchada revolted against his new uncle by doing battle with the English settlers in Leinster. But what is significant is that Strongbow was also the target of the Welsh rising. On 21 July, Iorwerth and Hywel regained the castle of Caerleon that Strongbow had seized from them in 1170. The culmination of their campaign, in mid-August 1173, saw the insurgents sweep as far as the very walls of Chepstow, the principal castle of the lordship of Striguil. When the tide turned against Iorwerth and Hywel, it was Strongbow’s men who seized the castle of Usk from them, and when Henry II intervened to produce a settlement, Strongbow was ordered to hand back to them the main bone of contention, Caerleon. Soon afterwards, Strongbow established a Benedictine nunnery at Usk, which may well have been in thanksgiving for his victory over the Gwynllŵg rebels.   Giraldus Cambrensis [Gerald of Wales], The Journey through Wales and the Description of Wales, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth 1978), 119–20.  R. R. Davies, ‘Henry I and Wales’, Studies in Medieval History presented to R. H. C. Davis, ed. H. Mayr-Harting and R. I. Moore (London 1985), 133–47.   ‘Annals of Tigernach’, s.a. 1173.   Lloyd, History of Wales, ii, 546 n. 50.   For these events, see R. R. Davies, Conquest, Coexistence, and Change : Wales, 1063–1415 (Oxford 1987), 275 ; Flanagan, Irish Society, 157 n. 88 ; R. A. Brown, ‘Royal Castle-Building in England, 1154–1216’, EHR, 70 (1955), 353–98, at 359–60.   T. Wakeman, ‘On the Town, Castle and Priory of Usk’, BAA Journal, 10 (1855), 257–65. Marie Therese Flanagan, Irish Society, 125 n. 56, has suggested that this may have been done under the influence of his wife Aífe, whose father founded several nunneries in Ireland.

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In the aftermath of these revolts, Henry II sought to regularise his relations with the respective native leaders. King William of Scotland, following his capture at Alnwick, had been forced to agree to the humiliating terms of the treaty of Falaise in 1174, becoming the liege man of the English king for both Scotland and his lands south of the border, handing over numerous nobles as hostages, and his most prestigious castles to host English garrisons, and consenting to the Scottish church being made subject to that of England (just as, three years earlier, at a council at Cashel, Henry had presided over a similar subordination of the church of Ireland). The Scots prelates and nobles swore fealty to Henry at York in the following year, while King William and Gille Brigde, lord of Galloway, attended a council held by Henry at Feckenham near Worcester in October 1176, and the Scots king also attended another council at Winchester the following July, in preparation for a proposed, but aborted, campaign in Normandy. A modus vivendi, after a fashion, was worked out with the Welsh at a council held at Gloucester in June 1175, and with the Irish in the abovementioned Treaty of Windsor that October. Two further conferences with the Welsh took place in May 1177, the first at Geddington at which some of their leaders swore fealty to Henry, and a larger event at Oxford at which almost all the Welsh rulers assembled to offer their fealty. The ‘Irish question’ was also dealt with at Oxford, Henry abandoning any pretence of interest in making the Windsor treaty work. In place of the high-kingship of Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair, Henry’s youngest son John would henceforth rule the country, while a new programme of exploratory land-grants would potentially double the size of the colonised territory. These grants had the effect, presumably intentional, of reinforcing the ascendancy in Ireland of Welsh marcher barons : Desmond (or South Munster) from Cork to the Kerry coast was to be divided between Robert fitz Stephen of Cardigan and Miles de Cogan from the Vale of Glamorgan, while that part of Thomond (North Munster) centred on Limerick was given to Philip, brother of William de Briouze of Abergavenny, Brecon and Builth. At the same time Hugh de Lacy and William fitz Audelin were respectively given custody of Dublin and Wexford, and the Irish annals capture something of the menace that came with this change in policy in recording of this year : ‘Three fleets of Saxons arrived in Ireland, that of Hugh de Lacy to Dublin, William fitz Audelin to Wexford, and Philip de Briouze to Waterford’. It is difficult to see these developments doing other than further souring relations. Roger of Howden records under the year 1179 that an Irish embassy was  E. L. G. Stones, ed., Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1174–1328 : Some Selected Documents, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1970), 1–5.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 126, 177–8, 180.   See Warren, Henry II, 201–2.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 159, 162.   ‘Annals of Tigernach’, s.a. 1177.



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sent to Henry II to complain of the unjust and violent treatment the people of Ireland had received at the hands of the king’s officials. An obit of St Lorcán Ua Tuathail, archbishop of Dublin at the time of the invasion of Ireland, who died at Eu in Normandy in November 1180, says that he was at that moment ‘making peace between the king of England and the Irish’. The archbishop may have been in Normandy acting as an envoy of King Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair. But Ua Conchobair’s troubled relationship with Henry II, as far as the Irish annalist quoted above was concerned, amounted to a war between the English king and all the people of Ireland. Indeed, it would appear that the Irish believed that something like a continuous state of warfare had existed between them and the invaders from the earliest stage. And they were not alone. In 1180, the pope appointed the Roman subdeacon Alexis as his legate in Ireland, Scotland and the Isles, and he declared that part of his mission was ‘pro pace reformanda inter illustrem regem Angliae et Ybernienses’. It may have been a sincere belief on Henry’s part that knighting his youngest son John in 1184, in preparation for his installation as king of Ireland in the following year, would help to resolve this problem, but, as is well known, this assessment by Henry of what was required to restore peace in Ireland was devastatingly flawed. For one of those Welsh lords who attended the Gloucester council of 1175, it provided quite the opposite of a modus vivendi. Seisyll ap Dyfnwal of Gwent Uwch-Coed was, as noted above, treacherously captured in 1172 but nevertheless was present at Gloucester in 1175, and yet within a matter of weeks he was assassinated at Abergavenny, along with his wife and seven-year-old child, and many of his chieftains ; the result was that, as reported in the Brutiau, ‘none of the Welsh dared place their trust in the French’. Publicly at least, Henry II disapproved of this deed and punished the lord of Abergavenny, William III de Briouze, for his involvement in it. Yet his punishment  as John Gillingham put it, ‘Some punishment !’  was not loss of life, limb, or liberty, or even loss of office, but the loss of an office he had been anticipating. One can sense where Henry’s sympathies lay, and indeed Gerald, while accusing de Briouze of failing to prevent the murders and the sheriff of Hereford of engineering them, proclaims Henry their auctor. In the poisoned atmosphere that this murderous affair spawned, further bloodshed   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 221.   Miscellaneous Irish Annals (A.D. 1114–1437), ed. S. Ó hInnse (Dublin 1947), s.a. 1181.   See J. F. O’Doherty, ‘St Laurence O’Toole and the Anglo-Irish Invasion’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 50 (1937), 449–77, 600–635 ; 51 (1938), 131–46 ; Aubrey Gwynn, ‘St Lawrence O’Toole as Legate in Ireland, 1179–1180’, Analecta Bollandiana, 68 (1950), 223–40 ; Flanagan, Irish Society, 260–61.   Ibid., 262.   See Seán Duffy, ‘John and Ireland : The Origins of England’s Irish Problem’, King John : New Interpretations, ed. S. D. Church (Woodbridge 1999), 221–45.   Brut : Red Book of Hergest Version, s.a. 1175.   Gillingham, ‘Henry II, Richard I and the Lord Rhys’, 229.

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was unavoidable : the kinsmen of Seisyll ap Dyfnwal wreaked their revenge on de Briouze in 1182 by sacking Abergavenny Castle, while the sheriff of Hereford in question, Ranulf le Poer, was slain by them shortly afterwards, and de Briouze himself almost captured, when the men of Gwent Uwch-Coed descended upon them as they were constructing a castle at Dingestow near Monmouth. Another of those who attended the Gloucester conference and who swore fealty to the English king at Oxford was Cadwallon ap Madog of Maelienydd, but by 1179 he too had been treacherously ambushed and murdered while returning from Henry’s presence and under his safe-conduct ; again, those who killed him were punished, but not, apparently, for the act of murder, but rather for their offence against the king’s honour in disregarding his grant of safe-conduct. In these circumstances, one can imagine that even the famed détente between Henry and Rhys ap Gruffudd of Deheubarth would come under strain, and John Gillingham has convincingly pieced together the evidence of their inconstant relationship. In November 1183, the earl of Gloucester and lord of Glamorgan died. Henry’s youngest son, John, was betrothed to the heiress, and the lordship of Glamorgan was retained in royal hands. By then, it seems, Henry had also purchased the lordship of Gower. By the end of 1183, therefore, Rhys knew that the distant overlordship of Henry II was to be replaced by direct royal rule in Glamorgan, and, perhaps of even more immediate concern, a royal presence in Gower that would put the whole Carmarthen Bay area under the English king’s shadow. At this point Henry spent another two-year absence from England dealing with filial and other problems, and, although the evidence is patchy, it seems that Rhys was happy to take advantage of the opportunity. During 1183–4, as well as noting assaults beyond the Vale of Glamorgan at Cardiff Castle and as far east as Newport in Gwent, the well-placed Margam annalist reports attacks on the local castles of Kenfig and, of more strategic importance, at Neath, the gateway to the Gower peninsula. A siege engine was used in the latter assault, which suggests an assailant of both resources and resourcefulness, such as Rhys, rather than the limited Glamorgan forces of Morgan ap Caradog. Neath was saved by a force of knights dispatched by sea to its rescue, and considerable royal expenditure was required to bolster the physical defences of the arc of castles from Neath to Rhymni to Newport. Roger of Howden is usually a reliable guide in these matters, and he describes how, when Henry eventually re-crossed the Channel, he   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 288–9.   Diceto, i, 437–8 ; but cf. Lloyd, History of Wales, ii, 567.   For the suggestion that Morgan was responsible, see J. B. Smith, ‘The Kingdom of Morgannwg and the Norman Conquest of Glamorgan’, in Glamorgan County History, iii : The Middle Ages, ed. T. B. Pugh (Cardiff 1971), 37–8 ; for Rhys, see Gillingham, ‘Henry II, Richard I and the Lord Rhys’, 229–30.   Lloyd, History of Wales, ii, 572.



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gathered the army of England to advance into Wales to attack Rhys and his accomplices who in the last two years had ravaged the king’s land and killed his men ; in fear and under safe conduct Rhys came to Henry at Worcester and swore . . . to return the lands and castles which he had taken by force of arms while the king was away’. Rhys met Henry at Worcester in July 1184, and that should have settled whatever distrust existed between both sides, but evidently it did not, for the Welsh prince subsequently refused to hand over the hostages he had promised. The refortification of castles in the region continued apace, and Gillingham has reminded us that it was probably no coincidence that Gerald of Wales was recruited as an advisor on Welsh affairs at this point ; in his autobiography, written many years later, Gerald boasted of how, during Henry’s reign, he had ‘single-handedly . . . turned aside not a few of Rhys’s great armies from the king’s land, which the prince was preparing to invade’. Throughout these years, the explicit loss of sovereignty spelt out in humiliating terms in the treaty of Falaise was resented by the Scots laity and actively opposed by its churchmen. The English chronicler William of Newburgh, in describing the treaty’s aftermath, captures something of the contemporary venom. He states that ‘the towns and boroughs of the kingdom of Scotland are inhabited by the English’, and, he adds, ‘the Scots hate them, so they killed as many of the English as they could’. And when, eventually, the king of Scots managed to wrench his realm free from the Angevin grasp in a deal done with Richard I, shortly after Henry II’s demise, the Chronicle of Melrose (not noted for its anti-English sentiment at this point) tells us that ‘by God’s grace he worthily and honourably removed [Henry’s] yoke of domination and of servitude from the kingdom of the Scots’. To the end, Henry was concerned, or at least feigned concern, about an ongoing threat from both north and west : he is said, for example, to have refused to go on crusade in 1185 only because he needed to defend his kingdom from the ‘barbaric Welsh and Scots’. And after his favourite son John presided over a diplomatic disaster in Ireland that same year, his sleepless nights, if he ever experienced such, must have multiplied. But by this stage Henry’s legacy was secure. The na  Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 314 (Gillingham’s translation).   Ibid., i, 317 ; Howden, Chronica, ii, 290.   Brown, ‘Royal Castle-Building in England’, 359–60.   Gillingham, ‘Henry II, Richard I and the Lord Rhys’, 231.   See, for example, Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 112, 117.   Newburgh, i, 186.   Anderson, Early Sources, ii, 323.   Diceto, ii, 8, 34.

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tive Welsh chronicle, for instance, writing of Henry’s plans for Wales a full two decades earlier, in 1165, had expressed the belief that he planned ‘to carry into bondage and to destroy all the Britons’. That Henry fell embarrassingly short of expectations on the occasion, and never again mounted a comprehensive military campaign against the Welsh, did not prevent the English chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall from asserting in his obit of Henry II that he ‘conquered the Welsh, always rebels of the kings of England, and at last subjugated the unwilling’, although, in fairness, Ralph was candid enough to concede that this had not been achieved ‘without great loss of his leading men and expenditure of his army’. Three-quarters of a millennium later, the late Lewis Warren, in his great and sympathetic biography of Henry, put forth a more benign interpretation. Acknowledging the unevenness of Henry’s Welsh successes, Warren nevertheless contended that ‘if he built nothing enduring in Wales . . . to have held in check the dogs of war was no mean achievement’. One must conclude from this that either Professor Warren doubted  and justifiably so  Ralph of Coggeshall’s claim that Henry ‘conquered the Welsh’ and ‘subjugated the unwilling’, or he believed that what Henry ‘built’ in Wales had been achieved without recourse to the ‘dogs of war’. To assert the latter, however, is to gainsay the import of the concluding words of Coggeshall’s obit of Henry : ‘Moreover, a large part of Ireland was subdued both by him and his barons’, a feat accomplished (as its many witnesses attest) by both the threat and the reality of war. Perhaps, therefore, it is fit to conclude, as we began, with the words of Gerald of Wales ; not someone on whose opinion Lewis Warren was willing to place much trust, but who knew Henry II rather more intimately than we, at this remove, can ever hope to do. When Gerald was writing the dedication to his first Irish work, Topographia Hibernie, he naturally emphasised the significance of Henry’s unprecedented conquest of Ireland ; and he naturally also, in summoning up the words that would best depict its dedicatee, sought to flatter : Your victories challenge the boundaries of the world. You, our Alexander of the West, have extended your hand from the Pyrenees to the westernmost limits of the Ocean. Even Ireland, for long untouched by the incursions of foreign nations, has now at last been subjugated by you, most invincible king, and by your intrepid courage. The terror of your name and the threats of your attacks have sent your renown blazing through the world.   Brut : Red Book of Hergest Version, s.a. 1165.  Ralph of Coggeshall, Chronicon Anglicanum, ed. J. Stevenson (RS 66, 1875), 25–6.   Warren, Henry II, 169.   Quoted (my italics) in J. Gillingham, ‘Conquering Kings : Some Twelfth-Century Reflections on Henry II and Richard I’, in Warriors and Churchmen in the High Middle Ages : Essays presented to Karl Leyser, ed. T. Reuter (London 1992), 163–78 ; repr. in J. Gillingham, Richard Coeur de Lion : Kingship, Chivalry and War in the Twelfth Century (London 1994), 105–18, at 116.



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How, therefore, does one invoke a language that will be music to the ears of the great Henry fitz Empress ? It is by making known to the world the ‘terror’ of Henry’s name and the ‘threats’ of his attacks. Perhaps it is true that Henry’s dogs of war were more often leashed than unleashed, but none of England’s insular neighbours could be allowed to forget for long their rabid ferocity.

Anne J. Duggan

Henry II, the English Church and the Papacy, 1154–76

T

he preponderant historical opinion of Henry II’s relations with the English Church and with the papacy is easily summarised as reasonably amicable, apart from the Becket crisis, which represented an aberration from the broad accommodation that characterised the relationship between the regnum and the sacerdotium. Based very largely on the highly tendentious arguments advanced by Gilbert Foliot, bishop of London, in his open letter to Becket, Multiplicem nobis of September 1166, the general historical consensus is that it was Thomas Becket who destroyed the harmony of the English kingdom by his arrogance and lack of moderation. Gilbert had painted a very rosy picture of the pre-Becket situation : The kingdom gave devoted and holy service to the priesthood ; and the priesthood very strongly supported to good effect every command of the king. The two swords were exercised in the Church, serving the Lord Jesus with devoted service. They did not oppose one another or, taking opposite positions, challenge one another. There was one people and, as it is written, ‘with one pair of lips’, zealous in pursuing sins, rejoicing in the vigorous eradication of vices. The peace of Church and kingdom consisted in this : each cherished the other with reciprocal favour and were joined in a unanimous will. In fact we were hoping and looking for an increase of graces with your promotion, and see, from that moment, everything was turned upside down because of our sins. . . . A man of your prudence should have ensured that the disagreements gradually arising between the kingdom and you did not grow too serious, that the tiny spark did not flare up into so great a fire, to the ruin of many. It was managed differently, and from   Warren, Henry II, 400, 453, 455–6, 459, 490, 514 ; E. Türk, Nugae curialium : Le Règne d’Henri II Plantagenêt, 1145–1189, et l’éthique politique, Hautes Études médiévales et modernes, 28 (Geneva 1977), 8, 22–3, but see D. Carpenter, The Struggle for Mastery (London 2003), 203–04.   Cf. Gen. 11 : 1, ‘erat autem terra labii unius et sermonum eorumdem’.



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causes too numerous to list, disagreements were multiplied, indignation was inflamed, and hatred firmly entrenched. Gilbert Foliot’s depiction of the genesis of the crisis, which Beryl Smalley memorably called ‘a tissue of half-truths and inconsistencies’, requires substantial adjustment. There is indeed considerable evidence of co-operation between Henry and the papacy, with judicial appeals to the Curia, appointment of judges delegate, including Archbishop Theobald himself, and the papacy co-operating with the king. Innocent II, for example, had not countenanced the attacks made on the Empress Matilda’s legitimacy at the Second Lateran Council of 1139 ; Eugenius III had, at Theobald’s request, presented by Thomas Becket, refused permission for the coronation of Stephen’s son Eustace in 1151 ; and Alexander III’s legates had authorised the marriage of the infant Margaret of France to Henry II’s son Henry in 1160  an arrangement that enabled the English king to take immediate control of Margaret’s dowry, the Norman Vexin. Yet there were clouds on the horizon  clouds considerably larger than a man’s hand  long before Thomas Becket was made archbishop of Canterbury. At the end of January 1156, Pope Adrian IV inserted a highly critical comment on Theobald’s policy into a mandate for the blessing of the abbot of St Augustine’s Canterbury. It read, It has come to our notice by common report that the right of appeal is so smothered by you and the king of England that no one dares to appeal to the Apostolic See in your presence or his . And he went on to say,

  Duggan, Becket Correspondence, i, 498–537 (no. 109), at 506–7 : ‘Regnum sacerdotio devotum sancte prestabat obsequium, et sacerdotio firmissime fulciebatur ad bonum omne regis imperium. Exercebantur in ecclesia gladii duo, devoto Domino Iesu famulantes obsequio. Nec sibi stabant ex adverso, nec tendentes in contraria, repugnabant alterutro. Unus erat populus, et ut scriptum est “unius labii”, studens peccata persequi, gaudens vitia fortiter eradicari. Hec regni fuit et ecclesie pax : alterna sic gratia fovebantur, et unanimi voluntate iungebantur. In vestra vero promotione gratiarum sperabamus et expectabamus augmenta, et ecce peccatis exigentibus ilico turbata sunt universa . . . Oportebat itaque vestram providisse prudentiam, ne dissensiones inter regnum et vos paululum in inmensum excrescerent, ne de scintilla tenui in multorum perniciem tantus ignis exsurgeret. Actum secus est, et ob causas quas enumerare longum est, dissensiones adaucte sunt, inflammata est ira, et odium fortiter obfirmatum.’   B. Smalley, The Becket Conflict and the Schools (Oxford 1973), 182. For her critical assessment of Foliot, who ‘threw the mantle of piety over compromise’, see ibid., 167–86.  Raised by Arnulf of Lisieux : see p. 158 n. 5 below.   Gervase, i, 150, ‘Dominus siquidem papa litteris suis Cantuariensi prohibuerat archiepiscopo, ne filium regis, qui contra iusiurandum regnum usurpasse videbatur, in regem sublimaret. Hoc autem factum est subtilissima providentie et perquisitione cuiusdam Thomae clerici, natione Londoniensis ; pater eius Gilebertus, mater vero Mathildis vocabatur.’

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In addition, you are in every way lukewarm and remiss in dispensing justice to those who suffer injustice, and you are said to seek the king’s favour so much and succumb to fear of him that, when we send letters to you on behalf of any one that he may have justice, he cannot secure his right through you, as we have heard from the complaints of many. So shocking is that rebuke that Christopher Brooke was inclined to dismiss it as another piece of St Augustine’s forgery ; but it is corroborated by a series of letters to the pope himself and to three leading cardinals, begging to be reinstated in their favour ; and, indeed, the legatine council over which Theobald presided in 1151, had, in Henry of Huntingdon’s colourful words, ‘gnashed its teeth (infrenduit) against the new appeals’. Further, one can detect a certain sensitivity on Theobald’s part on the question of appeals in the year following that rebuke. His use of the phrases ‘as was our duty’, ‘deferring to your apostolic majesty’, ‘to which we have to defer’, and ‘deferring to your honour, as we desire and ought’, in transmitting judicial appeals to the papal audience, seems to emphasize his co-operation, but they could equally have reflected his embarrassment ; and there are also hints that he was sometimes less than enthusiastic about the process. Two letters speak respectively of the ‘subtlety of the laws and canons’ and of the ‘skill of the advocates and the subtlety of the laws’ in a manner that suggests disquiet, despite the fact that Theobald had invited the Bolognese civilian Master Vacarius to England in the early 1140s. Even more telling are the letters written to Adrian IV about the dispute between Hugh of Dover (a local baron who was later sheriff

  Historia Monasterii S. Augustini Cantuariensis by Thomas of Elmham, ed. C. Hardwick (RS 8, 1858), 411–12 no. 42, at 412, ‘Ad notitiam siquidem nostram, fama referente, pervenit, quam ita apud te et apud regem Angliae appellatio sit sepulta, quod aliquis non est, qui in tua vel in illius praesentia ad sedem apostolicam audeat appellare . . . Accedit etiam ad hoc, quod in exhibenda iustitia his, qui iniustitiam patiuntur, tepidus sis modis omnibus ac remissus, et in tantum parti regis diceris procurare favorem, eiusque timori succumbere, quos si quando litteras tibi pro aliquo, ut suam consequatur iustitiam, destinemus, nullatenus poterit per te, sicut iam saepius ex multorum conquestione didicimus, quod suum est obtinere.’   C. N. L. Brooke, ‘Adrian IV and John of Salisbury’, in Adrian IV, The English Pope (1154–1159) : Studies and Texts, ed. B. Bolton and A. J. Duggan (Aldershot 2003), 3–13, at 11 n. 38.   Letters of John of Salisbury, i, nos. 8–11, respectively to Adrian IV, cardinals Roland and John of Sutri and Boso, the papal chamberlain. It is highly probable that the letter (no. 7) announcing his investiture of one Hugh with a prebend in London in obedience to Adrian’s mandate was written at this time, that is, mid 1156, not late 1155, with its insistence on Theobald’s ready obedience to apostolic mandates and his earlier resistance to princes.   Huntingdon, 282 ; C & S, 823.   Letters of John of Salisbury, i, 27, ‘nos ergo, ut oportuit, apostolicae maiestati deferentes’ ; i, 108, ‘cui deferre habemus’ ; i, 131, ‘vestro pro voto et debito deferentes honori’.   Ibid., i, 27, ‘secundum subtilitatem legum et canonum’ ; i, 107, ‘patronorum peritia et subtilitatem legum’.



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of Kent from Christmas 1160 to Easter 1168) and the monastery of Saint-Bertin in the diocese of Thérouanne, relating to the advowson of Chilham in Kent : We therefore entreat your highness to give orders, as it may please you, that if the monks [of Saint-Bertin] have any right on their side, they may obtain it in such a way that we do not incur the indignation of the lord king and persecution by all the nobles, who have taken offence in this matter. This was followed about six months later, December 1156 or January 1157, by a letter asking the pope to suspend the case of the monks of Saint-Bertin and that of Osbert, archdeacon of York, and any business that concerns us or the realm of England, until those messengers arrive, since they will inform your majesty on all these matters, and after hearing them you will, by God’s favour, be able to proceed with greater security and profit. These letters were written against a background of increasing royal pressure and in the context of John of Salisbury’s great disgrace (1156–7). When he returned from the papal Curia in spring 1156, John found that he had lost the king’s favour  an event that spelt career disaster, even for a clerk in the archbishop’s service. The reasons were explained at the time (summer/autumn 1156) to his closest friend, Peter, abbot of Montier-la-Celle : I alone in all the realm am accused of diminishing the royal dignity. . . . If any among us invokes the name of Rome, they say it is my doing. If the English Church ventures to claim even the shadow of liberty in making elections or in the trial of ecclesiastical causes, it is imputed to me, as   The matter of lawful ownership was extremely complicated, for the monks had received the church (or a share in it) from William of Ypres, captain of King Stephen’s mercenary troops c.1152–3, but the lordship had reverted to Hugh of Dover on William’s expulsion in 1155 : Letters of John of Salisbury, i, 259.   Ibid., i, 41 (from no. 24), ‘supplicamus ergo dignationi vestrae quatinus ea moderatione quod placebit super hoc praecipiatis ut monachi si quid iuris habent, id ita consequantur, ne nos indignationem domini regis et persecutionem omnium procerum, qui scandalizati sunt in hoc verbo, incurramus.’ For the case, see ibid., i, 258–61. Thomas Becket was later to confirm the monks’ possession in Nov. 1164, citing an earlier charter from Archbishop Theobald, ‘quam vidimus’, which itself named Hugh son of Fulbert [of Dover] as the donor : EEA, ii (Canterbury), no. 40 ; cf. A. Saltman, Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury (London 1956), 464–5 no. 240.   A special deputation to be sent in lieu of Theobald’s own formal ad limina visitation ; unfortunately, their identity has not been recovered.   Letters of John of Salisbury, i, 42 (no. 25), ‘Placeat itaque dignationi vestrae usque ad illorum adventum causam monachorum sancti Bertini et Osberti Eborac(ensis) archidiaconi et si qua nos vel regnum Angliae negotia contingunt suspendere, quoniam illi super his omnibus discretionem vestram facient certiorem et, auditis eis, ad singula, Deo propitio, tutius et utilius procedatis.’ Cf. no. 26, which makes the same request in different words.

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if I were the only person to instruct the lord of Canterbury and the other bishops what they ought to do.  The explicit nature of this explanation seems to me to exclude the reason sometimes given for the loss of the king’s favour, that is, John’s impetration of the bull Laudabiliter, which was thought to have given Adrian IV’s approval for Henry II’s planned conquest of Ireland, and which contained an assertion of papal jurisdiction over islands. Not only is the text of the bull, as transmitted by Gerald de Barri (Giraldus Cambrensis), so dubious that little reliance can be placed upon it, there is nothing in John of Salisbury’s own letters from the time to suggest that it played any part in his loss of royal favour. The agent of John’s discomfiture was the ambivalent Bishop Arnulf of Lisieux, who had been a member of the royal embassy which secured the grant and who had observed John’s intimacy with the new pope at Benevento at the beginning of the year (1156). This highly educated Norman bishop was himself in an ambiguous situation, since he had impugned the marriage of Henry’s grandparents (Henry I and Edith-Matilda) at the Second Lateran Council in 1139, and he was anxious to demonstrate his loyalty to the new king. It was in this highly fraught atmosphere (in mid 1156) that Theobald felt constrained to send Pope Adrian a written report on the state of the English Church, which its bearer, ‘your Herbert’, alleged had been stolen from him. We know about this communication only from a second letter, written in summer or autumn of the same year, whose penultimate sentence declared : ‘You should know that it is free for all to appeal, which you can realise because some who fly to you have escaped by this remedy alone.’ At that juncture, the case of Osbert of York would have been high on any list of examples.   Letters of John of Salisbury, i, 32 : ‘Solus in regno regiam dicor minuere maiestatem . . . Quod quis nomen Romanum apud nos invocat, michi inponunt. Quod in electionibus celebrandis, in causis ecclesiasticis examinandis vel umbram libertatis audet sibi Anglorum ecclesia vendicare, michi inputetur, ac si dominum Cantuariensem et alios episcopos quid facere oporteat solus instruam.’   G. Constable, ‘The Alleged Disgrace of John of Salisbury in 1159’, EHR, 69 (1954), 67–76 ; Letters of John of Salisbury, i, 257–8 ; K. Guth, Johannes von Salisbury (1115/20–1180) : Studien zur Kirchen-, Kultur- und Sozialgeschichte Westeuropas im 12. Jahrhundert (St. Ottilien 1978), 132–5.   For a critical reappraisal of Laudabiliter and its context, see A. J. Duggan, ‘Totius christianitatis caput : The Pope and the Princes’, in Adrian IV, ed. Bolton and Duggan, 105–55, at 138–52 ; idem, ‘The Making of a Myth : Giraldus Cambrensis, Laudabiliter, and Henry II’s Lordship of Ireland’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 3rd ser., 4 (2007), in press.   Letters of John of Salisbury, i, 48 ; Duggan, ‘Totius christianitatis caput’, 143.   Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, pp. xv, xxx–xxxii ; The Historia Pontificalis of John of Salisbury, ed. M. Chibnall (Oxford 1986), 84.   Letters of John of Salisbury, i, 20 (no. 12), ‘noveritis liberum esse omnibus appellare, quod ex eo vobis constare poterit quod aliqui ad vos confugientes hoc solo remedio evaserunt.’ The identity of ‘your Herbert’, who, against Theobald’s instructions, had spent more than a month with the king’s chancellor (Thomas Becket), is shrounded in mystery.



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Theobald was clearly very uneasy in 1156–7. John of Salisbury’s disgrace, which almost led to his fleeing to the security of Peter of Celle’s monastery near Troyes, was seen as a signal to the archbishop. Henry made no overt move against the man who had supported his claims since 1148 and who had anointed him king in December 1154, but he manifested his displeasure by ostracizing his principal spokesman, and it took about a year of petitioning by John’s friends, including Pope Adrian, Archbishop Theobald and Thomas Becket, to appease the royal anger. A letter to Bishop Hilary of Chichester, probably from the same period (1156–7), expresses the archbishop’s anxiety about what was going on in the royal court : Not one of our brethren or our faithful friends who are with you has seemed to care for us sufficiently to inform us of what is happening in the entourage of the king, or to warn us of events of which we are ignorant. After thanking Hilary for his ‘wisdom and foresight’, Theobald continued, Because a rather serious situation seems to have arisen, we earnestly beseech you as our brother and our most dear friend to inform us of everything that you think will be of use. . . . And the way by which you may make your absence profitable to us is this : make it your study to promote everything that may contribute to the safety of our Church. Farewell. This is the letter of a frightened man ; and Theobald was not alone in his apprehension. Slightly later, in November 1157, John of Salisbury spoke of William de Turba, bishop of Norwich, being caught between the ‘authority of the pope’ and the ‘king’s majesty’ in the matter of his dispute with Walkelin, archdeacon of Suffolk ; this was a description which might equally have been applied to Theobald himself. In the light of this evidence, what should be made of the appeals transmitted, seemingly without difficulty, to the papal court ? In fact, of the 135 letters in John of Salisbury’s first letter collection, only thirty-two are strictly speaking apostoli, letters of appeal issued by the judge from whom the appellant had appealed ; and   Ibid., i, no. 31, announcing to Peter of Celle that the storm had passed. For John’s efforts to recover the king’s grace, see ibid., nos. 27 (to Master Ernulf, Becket’s clerk) and 28 (to Becket, together with a papal letter in John’s favour).   Ibid., i, 79 : ‘Nemo siquidem fratrum aut fidelium nostrorum qui circa vos sunt tantam nostri curam visus est habuisse, ut eorum quae circa dominum regem fiunt nos certos faceret aut ignaros eventuum praemuniret. . . . Et quia articulus gravior videtur incidisse, vos sicut fratrem et amicum carissimum rogamus attentius ut nos in singulis quae expedire noveritis praemuniatis. . . . Et hic est modus quo vestram absentiam nobis facere poteritis fructuosam, si quae ecclesiae nostrae salubria studueritis procurare. Valete.’   Ibid., i, 72 : ‘hinc auctoritas apostolica inde maiestas regis’. For the Walkelin affair, see ibid., nos. 14–15.

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of those, five relate to two cases, reducing the number of cases to twenty-nine. Moreover, reconsideration of their probable dates suggests that at least nine may have been issued early, that is, during the period 1147/8–1154, before Henry II’s coronation,  and that number could be augmented by a further seven, for which there are no dating clues at all. It is possible, therefore, that as many as sixteen of the twenty-nine letters of appeal transmitted by Archbishop Theobald, that is, about half, belong to the last years of King Stephen’s reign, and two of the four letters that refer to the reception of papal judicial mandates seem to be equally early. There is, of course, a serious problem with John of Salisbury’s letter collection. It was certainly not a register of appeals, although letters to the papacy predominate ; nor was it arranged chronologically, or by genre. As we have it in the earliest manuscripts, and presumably as it left his hands for presentation to Abbot Peter of Celle soon after Theobald’s death in 1161, it has few helpful headings or addresses. Letters to the pope are generally addressed ‘domino pape’ or ‘eidem’, or

  Ibid., i, nos. 2, 4, 16 (Osbert v. Symphorian), 23–4, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 71, 72, 73–5, 76, 77, 80, 81, 83, 84, 131 (the Anstey case), 132. Of these, nos. 23–4 and 73–5 each refer to one case. For the rest, it is far from clear whether no. 82 (citing a papal mandate about the payment of tithes by Boxley) was strictly a judicial matter ; no. 3 is a notification of the appeal conveyed by no. 4 ; nos. 14 (from Theobald) and 15 (from John of Salisbury) were written in support of William of Norwich in the Walkelin case ; no. 29 (supported by John’s own no. 30) was written on behalf of William Cumin ; no. 40 (supported by John’s own no. 41) was pleading for Nigel of Ely ; no. 46 is a letter of complaint against Baldwin archdeacon of Norwich ; no. 48 is a letter of support for R., precentor of Lincoln (1154–9) ; no. 85 is a letter of support for petitions by Tewkesbury Abbey ; no. 86 is a letter of support for Nicholas, who has been deprived of a benefice by Bishop David of St Davids (likely to be early) ; no. 87 seeks papal support for Maurice, the exiled bishop of Bangor ; and no. 89 was written in support of a priest who was travelling to the Curia.   Letters of John of Salisbury, i, nos. 2, 4, 55 (Elias of Stafford, 1150–55), 56, 57, 59, 60, 62, 65.   Ibid., i, nos. 54, 58, 63, 64, 66, 80, 81.   Ibid., i, nos. 47 (which refers to a mandate of ‘Eugenius of happy memory’) and 113 (which cites ‘your mandate’) could be as early as 1154. The remaining two reports on the execution of a commission, nos. 45 and 103, are dated 1156 and 1156–61 respectively.   There are only two, both from the late-12th-century Paris, BN, MS lat. 8625, fols. 1–32, whose order of quires has been disturbed, and a derivative from it (which I date to the late 12th, rather than the early 13th, century), Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS lat. 6024, fols. 158ra–211rb, whose order reproduces the original order of the Paris MS. The much later (14th-century) CUL, MS Ii. 31, fols. 119–31, which is incomplete, contains a reordering of seventy-five letters and one fragment : see Letters of John of Salisbury, i, pp. lvii–lxi.   Ibid., i, nos. 8, 12, 14, 16, 18, 23–6, 29, 30, 45, 46, 51, 57–9, 62–4, 68, 73, 80, 83, 85–7, 89 (‘Domino pape’) ; 32, 37 (‘Ad eundem/eidem’) ; cf. Anne J. Duggan, ‘Authorship and Authenticity in the Becket Correspondence’, in Vom Nutzen des Edierens : Akten des internationalen Kongresses zum 150jährigen Bestehen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung Wien, 3.–5. Juni 2004, ed. B. Merta, A. Sommerlechner and H. Weigl (Vienna/Munich 2005), 25–44, esp. 25–6.

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nothing at all, and there are no protocols. Even the more informative heading, ‘domino pape A.’, cannot distinguish between Anastasius IV (1153–4), Adrian IV (1154–9) and Alexander III (elected 1159, but recognised in England and France only from mid 1160). The fact that Commendatio cuiusdam was addressed to a pope, has to be deduced from its contents ; and the one occurrence of ‘Domino pape Al(exandro)’ is wrong. It was this absence of the historical minutiae upon which historians rely that led the original editors, W. J. Millor and H. E. Butler (and C. N. L. Brooke, who revised the order and dating), to be somewhat conservative in their chronological attributions, so that they assigned nearly the whole dossier to post 1154. Even more significant in the present context, they held back from suggesting any dates at all for twenty of the appeal letters, which were presented in a more or less continuous sequence in the middle of the edition. If the redating suggested here is correct, we may be looking at ‘normal relations’ in the late 1140s, giving way after Henry II’s accession to an acute crisis in which Henry sought to restrict  but not prohibit  appellate contact with the papacy. Within the English Church, there is evidence of his intervention in ecclesiastical cases. The startling case between Symphorian and Osbert of York, in which the clerk Symphorian accused Archdeacon Osbert (de Bayeux) of Richmond of murdering Archbishop William of York by poisoning the chalice at Mass, had begun in Stephen’s court but, as Theobald recorded in his apostoli of 1156, ‘we just, and only just, succeeded in recalling it from the hands’ of the new king, ‘with much difficulty and by strong pressure, to the indignation of the king and all the nobles’, and, as we have seen, that case was stalled in the papal Curia, presumably because of King Henry’s displeasure. Another landmark example   See Letters of John of Salisbury, i, nos. 2, 3, 4, 21, 53, 54, 55, 56, 60, 65, 66, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 81, 84, 102, 113, 131.   Ibid., i, no. 52.   Ibid., i, no. 49.   Ibid., i, no. 108.   Ibid., i, nos. 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 80, 81, 83, 84.   This early dating has to accommodate John of Salisbury’s attendances at the papal Curia : Nov. 1149 – Feb. 1150 (Rome) ; summer 1150 (Apulia) ; Nov. 1150 – summer 1151 (Ferentino) ; spring 1152 (Segni) ; Dec. 1153 (Rome) : see Letters of John of Salisbury, i, 253–5. Allowance has also to be made for the lengthy travelling time required in the journeys to and from Italy : between a month and six weeks in each direction.   There is, indeed, an example, from Feb. or Mar. 1162, of Henry ordering the execution of a judgment given by papal judges delegate in favour of St Mary’s, Warwick, concerning parochial rights and a 30d. pension : English Lawsuits, ii, 363 (no. 402C). For Pope Alexander’s confirmation of the delegate’s judgment, see ibid., 464 (no. 402D).   Letters of John of Salisbury, i, 26 (from no. 16), ‘de cuius manibus [Henry II] vix cum summa difficultate in manu valida, cum indignatione regis et omnium procerum, iam dictam causam ad examen ecclesiasticum revocavimus.’   Osbert claimed that he had purged himself of the accusation in Pope Adrian IV’s presence, but the archbishop of York, Roger of Pont-l’Évêque, forced him to resign the archdeaconry : John



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was the Battle Abbey case (1157), in which the king insisted that Bishop Hilary of Chichester should withdraw his excommunication of the abbot and receive him publicly with the kiss of peace. Professor Vincent has demonstrated that the Battle Chronicle’s account of the bishop’s discomfiture is shot through with forgery (of documents) and fiction (in its narrative) ; nevertheless, the process took place not in an ecclesiastical council (as it should have) but in a royal council dominated by royal administrators, and it demonstrates the king’s intervention to protect a favoured institution against the obvious rights of the diocesan bishop, incidentally brushing aside a papal judgment. And there are three or four further instances of the king intervening in ecclesiastical cases by ‘prayers’, mandate or letter, in the last of which the priest of Ingatestone, in a case against the abbess of Barking relating to tithes and parochial dues, renounced his appeal to the papal audience, and presented a royal mandate. Even the king’s younger brother William of Anjou was recorded as prohibiting the knight Richard from entering into a suit about tithes in his absence. This all adds up, not so much to a policy, perhaps, but to persistent intervention (which Jolliffe long ago characterised as tending to droit administratif ), and to a degree of acceptance, willing or not, on the part of Church authorities. Particularly instructive in this regard is Archbishop Theobald’s directive to a diocGillingham, ‘Two Yorkshire Historians Compared : Roger of Howden and William of Newburgh’, HSJ, 12 (2002/3), 15–37, at 33–4.  N. Vincent, ‘King Henry II and the Monks of Battle : The Battle Chronicle Unmasked’, in Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages : Studies Presented to Henry Mayr-Harting, ed. R. Gameson and H. Leyser (Oxford 2001), 264–85, cf. Saltman, Theobald of Canterbury, 156–9. For the Chronicle’s account of the case, see English Lawsuits, ii, 310–23 (no. 360). In the light of Professor Vincent’s demonstration of the falsity of the abbey’s account, Van Caenegem’s comment that Becket’s later words ‘do not have the ring of genuinely outraged honesty about them’ (ibid., 323 n. 18) needs to be revised.   Letters of John of Salisbury, i, 91 (no. 53) : ‘Intervenientibus vero precibus domini regis, causa, antequam sententia ferretur, sortita est dilationem (But at the prayers of the lord king, before sentence was passed, the matter was postponed).’   Ibid., i, 123 (no. 78) : ‘postquam fuerat ad nos [Theobald] appellatum, fraternitas vestra sub regiae iussionis obtentu quadam inmagine iudicii iam dictum A(lexandrum) advocatione ecclesiae sancti Andreae de Ringet’ conata sit spoliare, ut in R(adulfum) Extraneum transferretur (after the appeal [from the court of Archdeacon Roger of Norfolk] had been made to us, you, our brother, under pretext of a royal command, and after the semblance of a trial, attempted to deprive Alexander of the advowson of the church of St Andrew of Ringstead, in order that it might be transferred to Ralph Lestrange).’   Ibid., i, 239 (no. 132) : ‘Rog(erius) ad nos cum litteris domini regis accedens, appellationi quam fecerat renuntiauit, et pro reverentia regii mandati petiit sibi iustitiam exhiberi (Roger approached us with letters from the lord king, renounced the appeal that he had made, and asked that out of respect for the king’s command we should grant him his just claim).’   Ibid., i, 99 (no. 58).   Jolliffe, Angevin Kingship, 43, cf. the chaps. on ‘Vis et voluntas’ and ‘Ira et malevolentia’, ibid., 50–86, 87–109.

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esan bishop, probably Walter of Coventry, in a case concerning the Augustinian monastery of Lilleshall in Shropshire : We have received a letter from the lord king in which he complains that Abbot William and his church of Lilleshall have been hardly treated by you, and asks that the case that is in train between you and the said abbot should be brought to a canonical conclusion by us. And unless you acquiesce, he will not allow you to have anything further to do with the said church. But we have persuaded the abbot to abandon all appeals, if you too are ready to do this and submit to our judgement ; and he has already on this condition renounced all appeal whether already made or yet to be made. . . . And in this way you will be able to retain the king’s favour, which is most necessary, and which you will lose altogether, if you should desire to crush a church of his by some reckless act of injustice. The nature of this case remains obscure ; but its significance in the present context is clear enough : the king, and it is likely to be Henry rather than Stephen, has intervened to prevent appeal to the papal Curia in a case concerning ‘his monastery’, and if the bishop does not ‘acquiesce’, he risks losing not only whatever rights he has over the church, but also the king’s favour. The king’s designation of Lilleshall as ‘his’ monastery implies a rather wide concept of royal proprietary rights, for the evidence of any royal involvement in its foundation is remote. The house had been colonised from Dorchester c.1143 ; and Dorchester had been established by Bishop Alexander of Lincoln c.1141, though with an additional endowment from the Empress Matilda. A more forceful prohibition of appeal was recorded by Arnulf of Lisieux’s letter (c.1157–9) on behalf of a Master Symon, ‘qui propter appellationem reclusus in carcerem ac miserabili tortus inedia’. Equally   Letters of John of Salisbury, i, 165–6 (no. 104) : ‘Suscepimus litteras domini regis quibus queritur Willelmum abbatem et ecclesiam suam de Lilleshulla a vobis male tractatam esse, petens causam quae inter vos et iam dictum abbatem vertitur, a nobis fine canonico terminari. Et nisi velitis adquiescere, non patietur quod in iam dicta ecclesia aliquid amodo habeatis. Nos autem iam dicto abbati persuasimus ut appellationi omni renuntiet, si et vos renuntiare volueritis et nostrum subire iudicium, et iam sub hac conditione renuntiavit appellationi et factae et faciendae. . . . Et hoc modo regium, qui pernecessarius est, poteritis retinere favorem, quem amittetis omnino si ecclesiam suam aliqua inprobitate volueritis conculcare.’   Cf. Henry’s confirmation of the bishop’s rights, dated Mar. or Dec. 1155 : English Lawsuits, ii, 305 (no. 359) : ‘I order and grant that Walter bishop of Coventry shall have all his liberties and customs . . . as well, peacefully and quietly as his church best had them in the time of King Edward and Earl Leofric, the builder of the church, and as a charter of the king my grandfather testifies that Bishop Robert deraigned those rights in his [the king’s] court at Portsmouth.’   MRH, 156, 164.   Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, 21 (from no. 16). According to Arnulf, the germs of contempt for the Apostolic See were already springing up in ‘those areas’ (Normandy). Only one of Arnulf ’s early letters provides evidence of a successful appeal : ibid., no. 17 (early 1159).



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interesting is Theobald’s account of the case between Ernald of Devizes and Earl Reginald of Cornwall, who was supporting his clerk Osbert, about possession of the church of Hinton : A writ from the king was likewise produced, instructing us to give the earl [Reginald of Cornwall] justice in respect of the advowson of his church [Hinton] and to restore to Osbert the church of which he had been deprived since the king’s departure and against his edict. To this Ernald replied that he held lawful possession of the church by the authority of the bishop and with the assent of the patron. But the patron (so he said) and other of his friends were so terrified by the power and by the threats of the earl, that none of them dared to appear against him in this court, or any in the kingdom, more especially since the earl and his Osbert were bringing to bear all the weight, not only of their own power, but of the king’s as well . . . The reference to ‘the king’s departure’ points to January 1156 or August 1158 as the terminus post quem ; that to the ‘edict’ suggests the royal directive that established the ‘custom of the realm’ cited by Glanvill in the late 1180s, whereby no one need answer in the court of his lord for his free tenement without a royal writ. In this and similar cases, the ‘free tenement’ in question was the right to nominate a cleric for a benefice  the right of advowson  whose exercise by lay persons caused considerable disquiet among reforming churchmen. Many laymen, indeed, were induced to transfer such patronage to religious institutions  especially the canons regular  but the problem remained ; and many of the   An illegitimate son of Henry I, he was earl of Cornwall, 1141–75.   Letters of John of Salisbury, i, 163 (no. 102) : ‘Proferebatur etiam mandatum regis, quo praecipiebamur comiti super advocatione ecclesiae suae iustitiam exhibere aut O(sberto) praetaxatam ecclesiam restituere, qua post dicessum regis contra ipsius edictum fuerat destitutus. Ad haec Ernaldus se iuste per episcopum assensu advocati ecclesiam possidere dicebat. Sed advocatus ille et alii amici eius potentatu et minis comitis (ut asserebat) adeo terrebantur, quod nullus eorum in hoc iudicio vel regno contra ipsum apparere audebat, praesertim cum comes et suus O(sbertus) non modo sua sed et regiae magnitudinis pondere in iudicio niteretur contra pauperem’. Cf. English Lawsuits, ii, 353–4 (no. 395), where the case is dated 1156–61. Osbert abandoned the case when Ernald appealed to the papal Curia, on the grounds that the church in question was not worth the expense.  Eyton, Itinerary, 16, 40. Henry’s first absence lasted from Jan. 1155 to early Apr. 1157 : ibid., 25.   That is, the writ of right, from which a more specialised writ of right of advowson was later developed : Glanvill, 148 (xii. 25), ‘Preterea sciendum quod secundum consuetudinem regni nemo tenetur respondere in curia domini sui de aliquo libero tenemento suo sine precepto domini regis vel eius iusticie capitalis’ ; cf. ibid., 137 (xii. 2–3). For the place of the writ of right in Henry II’s defence of seisin, see Royal Writs, 212–31, although Van Caenegem believed that Glanvill’s citation of ‘custom’ should be taken to mean that there was no constitutio or statutum on the matter (ibid., 224). He did, however, believe that there was a specific constitutio protecting the seisin of advowson, citing this case (ibid., 332 and n. 1). Cf. M. Cheney, ‘The Litigation between John Marshal and Archbishop Thomas Becket in 1164 : A Pointer to the Origins of Novel Disseisin’, in Law and Social Change in British History, ed. J. A. Guy and H. G. Beale (London 1984), 9–26.

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landed gentry retained their rights. What was at issue in these cases, however, was not the right of lay patronage itself  which was one of the customs more or less tolerated by the Church  but jurisdiction over any resulting litigation between competing claimants. The Hinton case was abandoned, but Raoul van Caenegem’s English Lawsuits provides evidence of similar royal action in the same period. Two writs issued in 1156 ordered Bishop William of Norwich to grant Abbot William of St Benet’s Holme the advowson of the church of Ransworth, as adjudged to him by a jury of lawful men (1156) and to assign the churches of Caistor to the same Abbot William and his knight, Alexander, on the basis of a recognition (1156). It is possible that William did not execute the first writ, for a third mandate, dated c.19 May 1157, ordered the bishop to restore Ransworth to Abbot William, if it could be shown that it was transferred to someone else’s fee without judgment. A further two writs, dated August and November 1158, ordered the same bishop to ‘do right’ to the same abbot in respect of the church of Repps. There is no hint of appeal to the papal court, but it is possible that William de Turba was intimidated : in 1157, as we have seen, John of Salisbury had spoken of William being trapped between the twin authorities of pope and king. In all four cases, the king’s authority was invoked by an abbot against his diocesan bishop in cases involving advowson or the possession of churches, and the king, in turn, invoked the archbishop’s against the bishop  ‘if you do not do so, the archbishop of Canterbury will (et nisi feceris, archiepiscopus Cantuariensis faciat)’, in a manner that made the archbishop into the king’s agent. The much more high-profile St Albans’ case (1159–63), between the great abbey of St Albans and its diocesan bishop (of Lincoln), displayed similar features. The monastery had stolen a march on Lincoln in 1156 by securing from Pope Adrian IV a large dossier of privileges and directives that confirmed its total exemption from episcopal jurisdiction ; but when that pope died and his successor Alexander III was duly recognised in England, Bishop Robert (de Chesney) made a double démarche, respectively to King Henry and to the pope, in an attempt to circumvent the privileges. The approach to the king produced a writ to the Justiciar, Earl Robert of Leicester, who summoned both parties to Winchester ; but he postponed judgment in order to scrutinize the documentary evidence. The appeal to the pope produced a commission (16 March 1162) to two judges delegate (Hilary of Chichester and William of Norwich) to inspect St Albans’s privileges, send   English Lawsuits, ii, 307–8, 309–10, 344–5, nos. 354 (Ransworth), 355 (Caistor), 359 (Ransworth), 383A–B (Repps).   See p. 159 and n. 3 above. Theobald’s own notification of an award, given in his own court, at the command of Henry II, relates to the seisin of land : English Lawsuits, ii, 351 no. 393 (1154–61).   For the virtual disappearance of the nisi feceris clause after 1172, see N. Vincent, ‘Regional Variations in the Charters of King Henry II (1154–89)’, in Charters and Charter Scholarship in Britain and Ireland, ed. M. T. Flanagan and J. A. Green (Basingstoke 2005), 70–106, at 87–90.   English Lawsuits, ii, 368–79 (nos. 408A–B).



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copies to Lincoln, and transmit to the papal court the depositions of witnesses and copies of the documents produced by both parties, so that the pope could reach a final conclusion on the matter. The bishop probably thought that by appealing simultaneously to king and pope he would secure a satisfactory outcome. The two bishops were about to go forward on the papal mandate when Henry returned from the Continent in January 1163 and, in some displeasure, summoned all the parties before him in the presence of an imposing array of archbishops, bishops, nobles, and officials, in the chapel of St Catherine at Westminster. What is interesting are the behind-the-scenes tactics of Abbot Robert de Gorron (1151–66). Supported by his relative, Richard du Hommet, he made a successful proffer of one hundred pounds for the king’s favour, before the public hearings in the king’s presence. In addition to the douceur, he was particularly astute in the way in which he presented his papal privileges, alleging that the earliest had been obtained from Calixtus II at the request of Henry I, and that the privileges granted by Adrian had not been impetrated by him : ‘they were not obtained by me or through me, indeed they were sent without my knowledge to the church of St Albans by your countryman Pope Adrian, who as we certainly know was himself born in its district’. The assertion that Henry I had requested the Calixtus bull could have been deduced from its inclusion of the phrase ‘pro charissimi filii nostri Henrici regis dilectione’ ; but if Robert of St Albans did indeed claim that he had nothing to do with securing the papal bulls, then he was telling a barefaced lie, and one, moreover, that the king should have spotted. Robert had travelled to Benevento, partly on royal business, in the company of three Norman bishops in late 1155, and he personally obtained a dossier of thirteen privileges and mandates in February 1156 ; and the obnoxious ‘mitred (cornuta)’ bull was secured, on his instructions, by two of his own relatives (his   MRH, 67 ; Gesta Abbatum Monasterii Sancti Albani : A Thoma Walsingham, . . . compilata, ed. H. T. Riley, 3 vols. (London 1867–9), i, 110–82.   English Lawsuits, ii, 373, where ‘R(obert) de Humez’ should be corrected to Richard du Hommet, the King’s constable for Normandy, and see p. 300 below.   Ibid., ii, 376 (Gesta Abbatum, i, 152–3) : ‘Abbas . . . confidenter dixit : “Domine, quae dicuntur ‘cornuta’ ad manum habemus privilegia. Sed veraciter testor, quod a me vel per me non sunt impetrata, immo a papa Adriano, indigena vestro, ecclesiae Sancti Albani, in cuius pago ipsum fuisse natum constat, me sunt ignorante transmissa.” ’   Papsturkunden in England [= PUE], ed. W. Holtzmann, 3 vols. (Abhandlungen . . . Göttingen, phil.-hist. Klasse iii 3rd ser. 33, Göttingen 1952), iii, 128–30 (no. 5), at 129.   The account of the St Albans case is as problematical as the Battle Abbey case so expertly dissected by Nicholas Vincent. Although based on 12th-century sources, the first part of the Gesta Abbatum was written by Matthew Paris in the mid 13th century, at some considerable remove from the events. Its documentary sources are generally sound, but the record of oral exchanges may be suspect.   PUE, iii, 234–54 (nos. 100–110, 112–13) : see B. Bolton, ‘St Albans’ Loyal Son’, in Adrian IV, ed. Bolton and Duggan, 75–103, at 85–95 ; A. J. Duggan, ‘Totius christianitatis caput’, 143 n. 182.

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brother Geoffrey and a kinsman, Robert), both monks in St Albans, in May 1157. If Robert of St Albans lied, King Henry willingly colluded in the deceit. In this case, Henry was swayed, partly no doubt by the proffer ; but also by the abbot’s acknowledgement that St Albans was ‘his’ abbey ; and it was his adjudication that finally settled the case : Therefore I will that henceforth the monastery of St Albans and the fifteen aforesaid churches shall be free to receive chrism for themselves and oil and blessing for their abbot and all other sacraments of the Church from whatsoever bishop they want, without any protest on the part of the church of Lincoln. To which he added : And the abbey shall forever remain free in my hand as my demesne church . . . ‘Free’, of course, meant freedom from the bishop of Lincoln. What this case demonstrates is that English ecclesiastics were ready to seek advantage over their adversaries wherever they could find it  like the York cleric Symphorian, who accused Archdeacon Osbert in King Stephen’s court, offering secular proofs, or the anonymous litigant against whom John of Salisbury complained to Adrian IV that he preached (and practised) appeal to the Apostolic See while simultaneously invoking the authority of the king or the queen, ‘so that he may escape the hands of the bishops and kindle the indignation of the king or queen’. Such ambivalence played into the hands of the king, who usually had the final say. As Henry was alleged to have said to the new archbishop, Thomas Becket, in the course of the St Albans’ case in March 1163, ‘It would not be honourable for our majesty if a case decided in our palace were to be   PUE, iii, 258–61 (no. 118), Religiosam uitam (14 May 1157), 260 (cf. Adrian IV, ed. Bolton and Duggan, 322–5, at 324–5) : ‘Videlicet ut, sicut ei per antiqua privilegia concessum est habere omnia pontificalia iura, ita et pontificalia habeat ornamenta, mitram scilicet, cyrothecas, anulum et sandalia’.   English Lawsuits, ii, 371 : ‘since the king was their special founder and patron’.   Ibid., ii, 375. Commenting on the reference to the annual census of one ounce of gold that St Albans owed to the papacy in Celestine II’s privilege, 19 Oct. 1143 (PUE, iii, 166–8 no. 43, at 167), Henry declared that ‘you were never allowed to make my church (meam ecclesiam) tributary to the Roman see without my consent, nor should the Roman pontiff have done this’.   English Lawsuits, ii, 378–9 (no. 408B), at 379 : ‘Quare volo quod decetero liberum sit monasterio beati Albani et xv iamdictis ecclesiis crisma sibi et oleum et benedictionem abbati suo et cetera omnia sacramenta ecclesie absque reclamatione Linc’ ecclesie a quo voluerint episcopo accipere’.   Ibid., ii, 379 : ‘et abbatia sicut dominica ecclesia in manu mea in perpetuum libera remanebit’.   Letters of John of Salisbury, i, 89 (no. 51). The reference to the queen’s jurisdiction suggests a date of late 1158, when Queen Eleanor exercised regency powers during King Henry’s absence overseas : Eyton, Itinerary, 40–43. Eleanor’s second regency, 31 Dec. 1159 – Sept. 1160 (ibid., 49–51), is unlikely, because of the nine-month delay in recognizing Alexander III.



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dependent on another sentence in the consistory of the lord pope.’ Once the king’s authority was invoked, it was very difficult indeed to withdraw a case from his juris­diction. My reading of the letters of John of Salisbury suggests that relations between Theobald and the court were deteriorating before the old man’s death, and that the archbishop was almost pathetically anxious to prevent any serious rift with the king. Avrom Saltman and Christopher Brooke had also seen hints of this, but they were inhibited from making a firm judgment by the insecure dating of many of John’s letters. Yet, even if we set aside the evidence of the judicial letters, something of Theobald’s diffidence can be seen in the extreme circumspection with which he handled the crisis following Adrian IV’s death. King Henry was overseas in October 1159, when news of the dual election of Alexander III and ‘Victor IV’ (7 September) reached England, and although most of the English bishops (excluding Hugh of Durham) were in favour of the man who secured by far the most votes of the college of cardinals, no action could be taken without the king’s permission. The right to decide the allegiance of the country in such circumstances had been claimed by the Norman kings ; and although Archbishop Anselm had contested it in William II’s reign, Theobald made no attempt to challenge Henry’s assertion of the same. On the contrary, Theobald confirmed in writing that ‘it is unlawful in your realm to accept either of them, save with your approval’ ; and besought him ‘to make provision in this matter’. The editors ascribe the letter to ‘early 1160’, but its reference to Theobald’s inability, by his own authority (‘auctoritate nostra’), to prevent English ecclesiastics approaching either pope, suggests that it was written before, and may even have prompted, Henry’s writ of late December 1159, which forbade any contact with the papacy until he had informed the bishops of his decision and instructed them so to manage their exercise of ecclesiastical justice that no-one should have a just cause for grievance at the denial of appeal to the Apostolic See. For his own part, not only did Henry hold off acknowledging Alexander’s legitimacy until late July 1160, a full nine months after the election in September 1159, but he took stern action against anyone who anticipated his decision. One of the examples of Becket’s skilful   English Lawsuits, ii, 374 : ‘Tunc rex . . . ad archiepiscopum Thomam Cantuariensem conversus, ait . . . “Quod dicit abbas, rationi consentaneum est. Neque enim nostrae maiestati honorificum foret, si lis in palatio nostro decisa, in domini papae consistorio iteratam praestolaretur sententiam.”’   Letters of John of Salisbury, i, 190–92 (no. 116), at 190, 191.   C & S, 837–8 : ‘Mando vobis et precipio quatinus neutri de supradictis electis assenciatis vel obediatis neque occasione huius negotii sive appellacionis Angliam exeatis, donec . . . vobis notificemus. Erit igitur discretionis vestre et studium ita iurisdictionem vestram moderare in iusticia omnibus exhibenda sive conservanda ut nullus de vobis iuste conqueri debeat neque detrimentum paciatur, ex hoc quod sibi non liceat ad sedem apostolicam appellare.’   M. G. Cheney, ‘The Recognition of Pope Alexander III : Some Neglected Evidence’, EHR, 84 (1969), 474–97, at 475–8, 484–5, 497.

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handling of King Henry’s moods, reported by William fitz Stephen, recorded two such reactions. When Archbishop Hugh of Rouen sent his nephew, Archdeacon Gilo, to instruct the Norman bishops to accept Alexander, Henry ordered the immediate destruction of the archdeacon’s houses, and when Bishop William de Passavant of Le Mans followed suit, the king issued similar orders : in both cases the Chancellor was able to protect the prelates from the king’s wrath, but the implications are clear enough. And before he gave his own adhesion, he had wrung from the legates representing Alexander in France (Henry of Pisa, William of Pavia, and Otto of S. Nicola in Carcere Tulliano) the celebration of the marriage of his son Henry to the infant Margaret, daughter of King Louis, in order to acquire control of the Norman Vexin, which was part of Margaret’s dowry. Eventually, probably in June 1160, the king did allow an ecclesiastical council to be convened in England ; but the extraordinary letter in which Theobald reported its deliberations tells us a great deal about Henry’s power in respect of the English Church and the papacy : When at your command the English Church was gathered together, the question was put for the hearing of the wise about which, in the sincerity of your faith, you had rightly deigned to consult the magnates of your realm. A great number of arguments were recited on this side and on that . . . By the grace of the Father of mercies we got so far that the truth emerged from the statements of the two parties ; for unexpected witnesses presented themselves and fortified the cause of truth by their evidence before us, and the infamous deeds of the schismatic were proclaimed to be common knowledge. On the issue before us we gave no definite judgement, since that was not permitted ; nor did we make any decision to the prejudice of the king’s Majesty, for that would have been wrong. But as was both permissible and right and in accordance with your majesty’s command, we have, God being our witness and our judge, framed our advice, which the faithful prudence of his subjects would have been bound in duty to offer to their king, even if it was not asked of them. . . . We have, as you requested, caused our advice to be sealed in the books of our conscience, which we have ordered to be opened to you by the bearers of these present, Master Bartholomew the   MTB, iii, 27–8. What stirred Henry’s anger was that the prelates had acted on the decision reached by the councils held at Neufmarché and Beauvais (late July 1160) without waiting for formal instructions from him. Arnulf of Lisieux’s early acknowledgement of Pope Alexander (late 1159 : Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, 30–33 no. 24) may have been privileged.   An action that, not surprisingly, ‘scandalised’ the French : see Arnulf of Lisieux’s justification of the dispensation on the grounds of ‘inexpugnabilis necessitas’ and ‘inestimabile bonum recompensationis’ : Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, 48 (from no. 29, addressed to the College of cardinals) ; cf. Cheney, ‘Recognition of Pope Alexander III’, 493–5.   The king had sent copies of the manifestoes issued by Alexander III and ‘Victor IV’ to England : Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, 36–7.



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archdeacon and William de Vere, your [or our] chaplain . . . We . . . beseech you . . . to receive with kindness our petitions which are in their hands. What weight Henry gave to the advice of the English Church is impossible to gauge, but the English bishops were not allowed to publish their findings until the king had made up his mind. This is clear evidence, if further evidence were needed, that Henry’s recuperation of what he believed were the rights of his ancestral Crown as exercised by his royal grandfather included the re-establishment of the Norman regime in respect of the Church, as his later (? January 1162) reissue of William I’s constitutions of Lillebonne (1080) confirmed. Contemporaneously, he had been moving forward on parallel fronts in other areas of law. Early in his reign he had issued a mandate that no person need answer for his free tenement without a royal writ. The precise formulation and date of that edict have not been established, since the decree is known only from Glanvill, but the examples of royal intervention cited above suggest promulgation as early as late 1155, before Henry’s first departure from England after his accession. Set in this context, the Becket controversy becomes less an aberration from a smooth pattern of mutual co-operation and collaboration between regnum and sacerdotium than the culmination of growing tension. There can be little doubt that by Theobald’s death, the king’s aim was to draw clearer boundaries between his jurisdiction and that of the Church, and between what should be decided in the island and what might be appealed to Rome. In the circumstances of the papal   Letters of John of Salisbury i, 216–17 : ‘Cum enim ex mandato vestro Anglorum convenisset ecclesia, proposita est in auribus sapientium quaestio super qua fidei vestrae sinceritas, ut oportuit, optimates regni vestri dignata est consulare. Lecta sunt hinc inde plurima . . . propitiante Patre misericordiarum, processum est ut ex assertionibus partium veritas eluceret cum et testes ab insperato procedentes apud nos causam veritatis instruxerint et nefanda scismatici opera praeconante fama publicarentur. Itaque secundum ea quae proposita sunt, non quide iudicatum est quia nec licuit, non statutum aliquid in praeiuducium regiae maiestatis quia nec debuit, sed quod licuit, quod debuit, quod iussio maiestatis vestrae exegit, consilium, Deo teste et iudice, formatum est quod fidelis prudentia subditorum vero principi dictare debuerat non rogata ; . . . prout praecipistis sine omni publicatione in libris conscientiae signari fecimus, quos vobis a latoribus praesentium magistro Barthol(omaeo) archidiacono et Willelmo de Ver cappellano vestro [var. nostro] iussimus aperiri. . . . Rogantes attentius ut . . . nostras quae in manibus eorum sunt petitiones benigne admittatis.’ From John’s own letter to Master Ralph of Sarre, then teaching in Reims, we know that ecclesiastics in England and France worked very hard to persuade their kings (Henry II and Louis VII) to make the right choice : ibid., i, 204–15 (no. 124). For the intervention of Arnulf, bishop of Lisieux, see Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, 38–43 (no. 28). What either hierarchy would have done if the decision had gone against their judgment is a matter for speculation.   P. Chaplais, ‘Henry II’s Reissue of the Canons of the Council of Lillebonne of Whitsun 1080 (? 25 February 1162)’, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 8 (1973), 627–34 ; repr. in idem, Essays in Medieval Diplomacy and Administration (London 1981), no. 19. Cf. F. Barlow, The English Church, 1066–1154 (London/New York 1979), 103, for Henry’s policy.   Glanvill, 148 (xii. 25).

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schism, he expected an easy victory. The conclusion of the letter in which he announced his recognition of Alexander’s papacy makes very interesting reading : Therefore I ask you very kindly and entreat you with all humility to receive me as your very own spiritual son and, if it please you, hearken to me in my petitions. Kindly receive Brother R., the bearer of these present letters, in whose mouth I have placed my affairs to explain them to you more fully, and grant assent and effect to what he says to you on my part. I am ready to obey your will and I offer myself and mine to be expended entirely according to your judgment. Witnessed by the Chancellor [Thomas], at Rouen.  Setting aside the specifics of Brother R.’s mission, which are not known, King Henry’s offer of material support (‘I offer myself and mine to be expended entirely according to your judgment’) in return for favourable treatment by Pope Alexander carries clear implications for royal–papal relations. The concept of filius proprius, his very own son, implied a particularly close relationship, in which the filius expected preferential treatment : papal acquiescence in the king’s ‘petitions’ was part of the deal. After all, his continued support of Alexander III against the imperially supported anti-pope was surely worth a few concessions. From Henry’s perspective, Alexander’s weakness was his opportunity ; and Theobald’s death in the following year (1161) was to provide another. A potentially pliant pope was to be joined by a docile archbishop, in the person of the chancellor, Thomas Becket. But, as the world knows, the scheme broke down for reasons that will be debated as long as there are historians. Thomas resigned the chancellorship, and the scene was set for the acrimonious dispute that ended only with Becket’s spectacular murder in Canterbury Cathedral’s north transept on 29 December 1170. That the dispute took so long and ended so violently owed at least as much to Henry as to Thomas : it was Henry who forced the issue by reducing the ‘customs of the realm’ to writing at Clarendon in January 1164, who demanded that the bishops swear to observe them, who insisted that the schedule be sealed ; and his methods were, to say the least, forceful. Gilbert Foliot’s description of the scene at Clarendon bears repetition (and he was a firm supporter of Henry II) :

  Actes Henri II, i, no. 139 ; Die Admonter Briefsammlung nebst ergänsenden Briefen, ed. G. Hödl and P. Classen, MGH, Die Briefe der deutschen Kaiserzeit, 6 (Munich 1983), 123–4 no. 68 ; C & S, 840–41, at 840 : ‘Vos igitur clementissime rogo, et cum omni humilitate obsecro, ut me in proprium et spiritualem filium recipiatis, et in meis peticionibus me si vobis placet exaudiatis. Latorem presen­ tium fratrem R., in cuius ore mea negotia posui, plenius vobis exprimenda, benigne suscipiatis, et his que ex parte mea vobis dixerit assensum et effectum adhibeatis. Ego ad vestram voluntatem sum paratus, et me et mea vobis expono, arbitrio vestro penitus exponenda. Teste cancellario, apud Ro­ tho­(magum).’   For a full discussion of the dispute, see A. Duggan, Thomas Becket (London 2004).



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when the princes and all the great nobles of the realm had already broken out into a very great rage, they came shouting and clanking into the room where we were sitting and, throwing off their cloaks and thrusting out their arms, they addressed us in these words. ‘Pay heed, you who scorn the laws of the realm and do not accept the king’s commands. These are not our hands that you see here, nor our arms, nor these in fact our bodies : they belong to our lord the king, and they are most ready to be directed at this very moment in accordance with his every pleasure, to avenge every wrong committed against him, to carry out his will, whatever it is. Whatever he commands will be wholly just to us, simply because it comes from his will. Withdraw your resolution ; bend your wills to his command, so that, while it is lawful, you may avoid the danger that it will soon not be possible to escape. That process left no room for compromise or accommodation between royal and ecclesiastical jurisdictions. Henry was an astute and cynical manager of men. He knew that Becket’s former royal service hung like a millstone round his neck and that the mode of his appointment, by royal fiat and against the wishes of the Canterbury monks, many of the bishops, and perhaps even of Alexander III himself, undermined his leadership of the episcopate. He also hoped that Pope Alexander’s weakness would force him along the path of dissimulation and compliance ; hence the relentless pressure applied between October 1163 and March 1164 to secure papal approbation, first for the ‘customs’, then for the Constitutions of Clarendon, then for papal condemnation of the ‘traitor’. Throughout the six years of Becket’s exile, he clung adamantly to these same customs or dignities, and his refusal to withdraw or modify them, and Becket’s refusal to accept them, undermined all efforts to resolve the dispute and restore Archbishop Thomas to Canterbury. That the king committed so much diplomatic effort to maintaining the Constitutions is a measure of their importance to his general political strategy. Whether concerned with ‘justice’ or not, he had perceived the potential of centrally-managed legal process, both as an instrument of control and as a source of regular income. The authority to summon anyone before a royal judge, or to command any seigneurial court to ‘do justice’, or to exercise a monopoly over tenurial dis  Duggan, Becket Correspondence, i, 508–11 (from. no. 109).   Suggested by Katherine Christensen, in a paper read at the Leeds International Medieval Congress (2005), on the basis of Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence’s report of the apparent delay in conferring the pallium in 1162 : La Vie de Saint Thomas le Martyr, ed. E. Walberg (Lund 1922), ll. 596–640 ; cf. J. Shirley, Garnier’s Becket (London 1975), 17–18.   For the Latin text, see C & S, 877–83 ; Eng. trans., EHD, ii, 766–70. The learned translators’ note to clause 3 (p. 768), should be compared with Duggan, Thomas Becket, 48–58.   Duggan, Thomas Becket, 124–61.

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putes or felonies, greatly enhanced the power as well as the status of the king : Clarendon (1164) was an attempt to bring ecclesiastical jurisdiction into the royal net. Its first clause summarily drew all disputes about ecclesiastical patronage into the royal court, making no exception for episcopal, clerical or monastic patronage and allowing no appeal to an ecclesiastical tribunal, whether episcopal or papal : If a dispute arises between laymen, or between laymen and clerics, or between clerics, concerning the advowson and presentation of churches, it should be tried and concluded in the court of the lord king. The deliberately ambiguous clause 3 directed that all clerical suspects answer before a royal court before appearing before an ecclesiastical court, after which they were to be deprived of the Church’s protection ; that is, subjected to secular punishment, their clerical status being set aside : Clerks accused and arraigned for any cause shall, when summoned by the king’s justice, come before the king’s court to answer there concerning whatever shall seem to the king’s court to be answerable there, and before the ecclesiastical court for what seems should be answered there ; in such a way that the king’s justice shall send to the court of holy Church to see in what manner [or on what ground] the case is there tried. And if the clerk shall be convicted or shall confess, he should no longer be protected by the Church. And clause 8 interposed the king between the English Church’s appellate structure and the papacy : Concerning appeals, if they occur they should proceed from the archdeacon to the bishop, and from the bishop to the archbishop ; and if the archbishop defaults in giving justice, [the case] must finally come to the lord king, so that by his command the dispute can be settled in the archbishop’s court, in such a manner that it should not proceed further without the assent of the lord king.   C & S, 879 : ‘De advocatione et presentatione ecclesiarum, si controversia emerserit inter laicos, vel inter clericos et laicos, vel inter clericos, in curia domini regis tractetur et terminetur.’   Ibid. : ‘Clerici retati et accusati de quacunque re, summoniti a iusticia regis, venient in curiam ipsius, responsuri ibidem de hoc unde videbitur curie regis quod sit ibi respondendum, et in curia ecclesiastica unde videbitur quod ibidem sit respondendum ; ita quod iusticia regis mittet in curiam sancte ecclesie ad videndum qua ratione res ibi tractabitur. Et si clericus convictus vel confessus fuerit, non debet de cetero eum ecclesia tueri.’ For a full discussion, see Duggan, Thomas Becket, 48–58.   C & S, 880 : ‘De appellationibus, si emerserint, ab archidiacono debent procedere ad episcopum, et ab episcopo ad archiepiscopum ; et si archiepiscopus defuerit in iusticia exhibenda, ad dominum regem perveniendum est postremo, ut precepto ipsius in curia archiepiscopi controversia terminetur, ita quod non debet ulterius procedere absque assensu domini regis’ ; cf. Duggan, Thomas Becket, 58–60. In his excellent study From Becket to Langton : The English Church, 1170–1213



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The relationship between these three clauses and the policies pursued in the period 1155–63 is self-evident. The Constitutions of Clarendon were an audacious attempt to turn occasional royal interventions in ecclesiastical affairs into unchallengeable legal process. That Henry failed to achieve all his objectives was the result of over-ambition (in trying to force through a radical programme by threat) and bad luck (in losing the initiative through the murder, by members of his court, of the archbishop of Canterbury). Finding that he was unable to bend either Pope Alexander or the sequence of papal envoys to his will  that he could neither extort approval of the customs/constitutions/dignities nor rid himself of the troublesome archbishop  he took a series of steps that compelled Alexander to authorise the very thing he (Henry) did not want : an interdict. And to avoid the interdict, he took the step, not of attaching himself to an anti-pope, but of formalising a kind of localised schism, when he issued the 1169 decrees. Usually given short shrift in the general literature, they indicate how far Henry was able to go in paralysing papal authority in England, and how far he was prepared to go. Oaths that they would not obey any papal or archiepiscopal sentences of excommunication or interdict were imposed on the entire male population of the kingdom ; anyone bearing interdict letters from the pope or Becket (contemptuously called ‘Canterbury’, without any acknowledgement of his status) was to be seized and kept in captivity until the king or his justices declared the king’s will ; no one might appeal to pope or archbishop or hear pleas on their mandate or receive any of their mandates in England : anyone who did was to be seized and held ; any bishops, abbots, clergy, or laity who observed a sentence of interdict were without delay to be cast out of the kingdom, with all their kin, taking nothing with them, and their chattels and properties were to be taken into the king’s hand. It was these measures that forced Alexander’s hand ; and he authorised the imposition of interdicts if Henry failed to make an honourable peace with the archbishop. Archbishop Roger of York’s coronation of Henry’s son (14 June 1170), against papal prohibition, was the final straw ; and it was under threat of impending interdicts on his English and Continental lands that Henry was finally reconciled in the peace of Fréteval (14 July 1170). But the ‘peace’ could not have been more unwilling ; and he made it abundantly clear that Becket remained persona non grata. Although effectively paralyzed by royal disfavour, his mere survival (Manchester 1956), 87–118, C. R. Cheney, it seems to me, underestimated both Henry II’s aims and the threat which they posed to the smooth operation of ecclesiastical jurisdiction.   C & S, 926–39, at 930–36.   They were known in the papal Curia by 19 Jan. 1170, when Alexander commissioned Archbishop Rotrou of Rouen and Bishop Bernard of Nevers to make a final push for peace, after which they were to enjoin the king ‘in delictorum suorum veniam’ to ‘cancel entirely those wicked customs [Clarendon], and especially those which he has recently added [1169] (consuetudines illas pravas, et illas maxime quas ipse de novo adjecit . . . deleat penitus)’ : MTB, vii, 200–201 (from no. 623).   MTB, vii, 212–14, 218 (nos. 629–30, 634 : 18 Feb. 1170).

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as archbishop of Canterbury was an affront to the king’s dignity. Whether or not Henry gave some kind of encouragement to the four barons who hacked Becket to death in Canterbury, the murder weakened his position, at least temporarily. The universal execration that he suffered, and the cult that he was unable to stop, forced the so-called ‘compromise’ of Avranches and the concessions to Cardinal Hugh Pierleone in 1175–6. Henry II’s reconciliation with the Church at Avranches marked the end of what one might call the overtly aggressive phase in Henry’s relations with the Church ; but whether that reflected a more conciliatory tone on the part of Becket’s successor, Richard of Dover (1174–84), or a less abrasive tone on Henry’s, remains a moot point. Yet there is no doubt that Becket’s murder had put the king on the back foot. Although his envoys had managed to avert excommunication in 1171, Henry was subject to a personal interdict that was not lifted until he had made his peace with the two cardinal legates who supervised his readmission to full communion with the Church. In the event, he did, contrary to contemporary belief, perform significant penance for Becket’s murder and subjected the four perpetrators to salutary secular penalties. The ‘Process of Avranches’ was much more than the simple ‘compromise’ described in English historiography. It was a major European event ; and the legates, no doubt acting on Alexander’s instructions, ensured that the king’s submission to ecclesiastical censure was as well publicised as the conditions of the time allowed. Not only was Henry’s purgation and acceptance of the carta reconciliationis repeated twice (at Avranches itself on   For an important re-evaluation of Richard’s role, see C. Duggan, in Oxford DNB, xlvi (2004), 697–9, which concluded (p. 699), that ‘his cultivation of Henry II’s goodwill enabled him to pursue canonical policies which consolidated the jurisdictional position of the English Church in harmony and cooperation with secular authority’. Cf. idem, ‘From the Conquest to the Death of John’, in The English Church and the Papacy in the Middle Ages, ed. C. H. Lawrence, 2nd edn (Stroud 1999), 65–116 at 93.   Albert de Morra, cardinal priest of S. Lorenzo in Lucina, and Theodwin, cardinal priest of S. Vitale : A. J. Duggan, ‘Thomas Becket’s Italian Network’, in Pope, Church and City : Essays in Honour of Brenda M. Bolton, ed. F. Andrews, C. Egger and C. M. Rousseau (Leiden 2004), 177–201, at 181, 183, 187, 192, 201. Albert, who may have taught Becket canon law at Bologna, was successively cardinal deacon of S. Adriano al Foro, 1156–8, cardinal priest of S. Lorenzo in Lucina, 1158–87, chancellor of the Roman Church, 1178–87, and finally Pope Gregory VIII, 21 October – 17 December 1187 : J. M. Brixius, Die Mitglieder des Kardinalkollegiums von 1130–1181 (Berlin 1912), 57–8, 112–13 ; B. Zenker, Die Mitglieder des Kardinalkollegiums von 1130 bis 1159 (PhD diss., Würzburg 1964), 125–9. His colleague, Theodwin, was cardinal priest of S. Vitale, 1166–79, and cardinal bishop of Porto, 1179–86 : Brixius, 66, 126, 135, 140 ; Duggan, ‘Thomas Becket’s Italian Network’, 183, 187.   A. J. Duggan, ‘Diplomacy, Status, and Conscience : Henry II’s Penance for Becket’s Murder’, in Forschungen zur Reichs-, Papst- und Landesgeschichte : Peter Herde zum 65. Geburtstag von Freunden, Schülern und Kollegen dargebracht, ed. K. Borchardt and E. Bünz, 2 vols. (Stuttgart 1998), i, 265–90 ; cf. E. M. Hallam, ‘Henry II as a Founder of Monasteries’, JEH, 18 (1977), 113–32.  N. Vincent, ‘The Murderers of Thomas Becket’, in Bischofsmord im Mittelalter : Murder of Bishops, ed. N. Fryde and D. Reitz (Göttingen 2003), 211–72.



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21 May and at Caen on 30 May 1172), but a copy was sent to the Curia and summaries were dispatched to some if not all primates in Europe. From the point of view of the English church and the papacy, the most important element was clause 3 of the carta, enjoined, like the rest, by papal authority, for the remission of the king’s sins : You [Henry II] shall neither impede appeals in ecclesiastical causes to the Roman Church nor allow them to be impeded, but they are to be made freely, in good faith, without fraud and trickery, so that the Roman pontiff may consider and terminate such cases ; but in such a way that if any [appellants] are suspect to you, they shall give security that they are not seeking injury to you or to your realm. Allowing for the king’s right to require guarantees from ‘suspect’ appellants, this virtually annulled Clarendon clause 8. That procedure would certainly have subordinated the English segment of the Church’s emerging appellate system to the royal process and stalled, perhaps fatally, the right of appeal to the papal audience. The final clause of the carta, which recorded the oath of allegiance sworn by King Henry and his son, the younger King Henry, to ‘Pope Alexander and his Catholic successors’, was directed against Henry’s astute exploitation of the schism : Out of reverence for the divine majesty, you [Henry II] have sworn all this in the presence of a multitude of people ; and your son [Henry, the Young King] has also sworn, except in respect of those matters which concern you alone [that is, the penances]. And you have both sworn that you will not withdraw from the lord pope Alexander and his Catholic successors, as long as they regard you as Catholic kings like your forebears. In addition, you have ordered your seal to be attached, so that these undertakings may remain firmly in the memory of the Roman Church.   Duggan, ‘Diplomacy, Status, and Conscience’, 272–8.   A. J. Duggan, ‘Ne in dubium : The Official Record of Henry II’s Reconciliation at Avranches (21 May, 1172)’, EHR, 115 (2000), 643–58, at 658 : [3] ‘Appellationes nec impedietis nec permittetis impediri, quin libere fiant in ecclesiasticis causis ad Romanam ecclesiam, bona fide, et absque fraude et malo ingenio, ut per Romanam pontificem cause tractentur, et suum consequantur effectum ; sic tamen ut si vobis suspecti fuerint aliqui, securitatem faciant, quod malum vestrum uel regni vestri non querent.’   See p. 173 n. 3 above.   Duggan, ‘Ne in dubium’, 658 : ‘Hoc sane coram multitudine personarum iuravistis vos pro Divine reverentia maiestatis. Iuravit et filius vester, excepto eo quod personam vestram specialiter contingebat. Et iuravistis ambo quod a domino papa Alexandro et catholicis successoribus eius, quamdiu vos sicut antecessores vestros et catholicos reges habuerint, minime recedetis ; atque, ut in memoria Romane ecclesie firmiter habeatur, sigillum vestrum precepistis apponi.’ The final sentence,

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Taken together, the two clauses were intended to secure the institutional and legal links that bound the English Church to the papacy, and the fourth was directed against the Constitutions of Clarendon : You [Henry II] shall utterly abrogate the customs that were introduced against the churches of your lands during your time, nor shall you exact them further from the bishops. Its effectiveness, however, was fatally weakened by the ambiguity of the words ‘introduced against the churches of your lands during your time’. Henry was a notoriously subtle negotiator. The phrase could be interpreted to exclude most of the Constitutions, on the ground either that they were not to the Church’s disadvantage or that they pre-dated the king’s ascent to the throne. Henry’s own gloss, ‘which I reckon to be few or none’, attached to the summary of the Avranches agreements that he sent to English bishops, suggests that he held the latter view. Such lack of precision  which may have been the diplomatic price Cardinals Albert and Theodwin had to pay for the agreement  left Clarendon’s clauses 1 and 3, on jurisdiction over advowson and criminous clerks, in limbo ; but in the aftermath of the Avranches agreement, the two cardinals were able to extract a formal commitment to freedom of episcopal and abbatial election, which represented a significant withdrawal from Clarendon’s clause 12 ; and when, in mid 1173, his own son, the young King Henry, challenged the legality of the elections, the elder king was compelled to assure the pope that he had indeed granted such freedom :

‘atque . . . apponi’, which is wanting in Robertson’s edition of the letter (MTB, vii, 518), is supplied from Howden, Chronica, ii, 37.   Duggan, ‘Ne in dubium’, 658 : [4] ‘Consuetudines que inducte sunt contra ecclesias terre vestre tempore vestro penitus dimittetis, nec ab episcopis amplius exigetis.’   Duggan, Becket Correspondence, ii, 1044–55 no. 243, at 1050–51 : ‘sic amfractus verborum (quod familiare habet) invertens, ut simplicioribus videretur universa concedere, cautioribus autem perversas et non ferendas inmiscere conditiones (so twisting the meaning of words in his usual fa