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

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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

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view these images please refer to the printed version of this book.

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 power and wealth : lesser barons and knights were becoming the mainstay of 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 fashion that he seemed to the more simple-minded to be granting everything, while to the more cautious he seemed to include perverse and intolerable conditions).’   Alexander III had deemed clauses 2, 6, 11, 13, 14, 16  that is, six of the sixteen  ‘tolerable’ : Duggan, Thomas Becket, 46.   Letters of John of Salisbury, ii, 752–5 no. 309, at 754–5 : ‘et, quod consuetudines, quae tempore meo contra ecclesias terrae meae inductae sunt dimittam, quas quidem aut paucas aut nullas aestimo.’   See p. 173 nn. 1–2 above.   C & S, 882 : ‘in capella ipsius domini regis debet fieri electio, assensu domini regis et consilio personarum regni, quas ad hoc faciendum vocaverit (the election should be conducted in the chapel of the lord king himself, with the assent of the lord king and the advice of the dignitaries of the kingdom whom he has summoned to do this)’ ; Select Charters, ed. W. Stubbs, 9th edn (Oxford 1946), 166.



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The Roman Church has long known the extent of the freedom that our ancestors had in relation to the institutions of the Church ; this we have tempered according to the rule of canonical restraint, out of respect for God and at the intervention of your prayers, in accordance with the admonitions of the venerable Al[bert] and Th[eodwin], legates of your holiness. Accordingly we have now [? for the present] granted free election to the English church. Practice did not quite match the rhetoric, as the election of John of Oxford at Woodstock in 1175 and of Peter de Leia to St Davids in 1176 (setting aside both local and general support for Gerald de Barri), and the complex manoeuvrings of the Canterbury election in 1173 and the Bury St Edmunds election in 1182 amply demonstrate ; but, at the very least, the king had been compelled to pay some lip-service to the concept of free elections, and not only to allow, but also to participate in, appeals on the matter to Pope Alexander III. Further progress towards the settlement of the outstanding issues was interrupted by the great rebellion that engulfed all parts of the ‘Angevin empire’ in 1173–4, and it was not until between late 1175 and mid 1176 that a second papal legation, conducted by Cardinal Hugh Pierleone, was appointed to deal with them. But Hugh’s position was very different from that of Albert and Theodwin. They had been sent to reconcile a penitent ; he had been requested by King Henry, and it was the king, not the cardinal, who reported the settlement to Pope Alexander. [1] We have conceded . . . that a clerk shall not in future be drawn in his own person before a secular judge for any criminal matter (de aliquo criminali ), or for any trespass (de aliquo forifacto), except the trespass of my forest,   MTB, vii, 553–4 no. 790 : ‘Novit ecclesia Romana ex longo temporis tractu quantam libertatem antecessores nostri circa institutiones ecclesiarum habuerint ; quam nos, intuitu Dei et precum vestrarum interventu, secundum admonitiones venerabilium virorum Al[berti] et Th[eodwini] legatorum vestrae sanctitatis, ad aequitatem canonicae moderationis temperavimus. Impraesentiarum itaque liberam electionem ecclesiae Anglicanae annuimus’ ; cf. Diceto, i, 367–8 ; p. 183 below with nn. 3–4. Alexander had urged free canonical elections, without royal nomination, in 1168 : MTB, vi, 505.   Howden, Chronica, i, 79. His episcopate was marked by ‘prolonged and bitter tension between the bishop and the chapter’ : EEA, vi (Norwich), pp. xxxiv–xxxvi, at p. xxxvi.   Described by Gerald himself : Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, i, 40–44.   Gervase, i, 240–44 ; Diceto, i, 368–9 ; MTB, vii, 555–7 no. 792, at 556 ; LCGF, 291–5 no. 220. Cf. R. Foreville, L’Église et la royauté en Angleterre sous Henri II Plantagenet (1154–1189) (Paris 1943), 375–7.   The Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond, ed. H. E. Butler (NMT 1949), 7, 16–24.   Cardinal deacon of S. Angelo, 1173–8, cardinal priest of S. Clemente, 1178–82 : Brixius, 62, 121 ; H. Tillmann, ‘Ricerche sull’origine dei membri del collegio cardinalizio nel XII secolo’, Rivista di storia della Chiesa in Italia, 26 (1972), 369–70.   Diceto, i, 410 ; new edn in C & S, 996.   The Forest justices were given explicit authority to proceed against clerics in the Assize of the

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and except for lay fee for which lay service is owed to me or to another secular lord. [2] I concede also that archbishoprics, bishoprics and abbacies shall not be held in my hand for more than a year, except for urgent and evident necessity concerning a cause that was not invented so that they can be held longer. [3] I concede also that murderers of clerks, who kill them knowingly or with premeditation, convicted or having confessed before my justice (coram iusticiario meo), in the presence of the bishop or his Official, shall suffer perpetual disinheritance, themselves and their heirs, of the heritage which belongs to them, in addition to the customary punishment for laymen. [4] I concede also that clerks shall not be forced to fight a duel. The fourfold repetition of the verb concedere belaboured the point that it was Henry who bestowed the privileges, and he did so ‘out of respect for the holy Roman Church and the devotion that we have and have always had for her and for you, dear father, and your brethren . . . at the instance of the discreet and wise Hugh Pierleone, cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, legate of the Apostolic See, our friend and relative’ and against strong opposition from the ‘elder (majores) and more discreet men’ of the land. On the face of it, they appear substantial. The jurisdictional immunity of the clergy, except in respect of forest offences and lay fee, was confirmed, rescinding Clarendon clause 3 for the most part ; major ecclesiastical vacancies were to be restricted to a maximum of one year ; severe secular penalties were imposed on the wilful murderers of clerks ; and all clergy were exempted from trial by combat. Contemporaries were not impressed, however. Forest (1184), c. 9 (Select Charters, 188 : ‘[the king] has given strict orders to his foresters that if they find any such [clerics] trespassing there, they shall not hesitate to lay hands upon them in order to arrest them and to secure their persons, and he himself will give them his full warrant (praecepit bene forestariis suis quod si invenerint eos forisfacientes, non dubitent in eos manum ponere, ad eos retinendum et attachiandum, et ipse eos bene warantizabit).’ This royal authorisation constituted an important exception to the general law (Si quis suadente), promulgated by the Second Lateran Council in 1139, which imposed automatic excommunication on anyone who laid violent hands upon a cleric.   This was almost certainly in response to Archbishop Richard’s plea that such murderers be punished by the secular law (MTB, vii, 561–64 no. 794), but it also reflected the action which Henry had himself taken against Becket’s murderers in 1172–3 (Vincent, ‘Murderers of Thomas Becket’, 251, 255–63). Contrary to Professor Mayr-Harting’s interpretation (H. Mayr-Harting, ‘Henry II and the Papacy’, JEH, 16 (1965), 39–53, at 44), Archbishop Richard’s rejection of the application of the ‘bis in idipsum’ principle to such murderers was hardly an example of ‘stinging sarcasm’ or indicative of his willingness to abandon Becket’s position on criminous clerks ; rather, it was a rebuttal of the arguments used by royal justices to justify their refusal to punish the guilty. As Vincent quite rightly wrote, citing English precedent for such punishment, the conciliar decree (Si quis suadente, 1139), which reserved violence against clerks to papal judgment, ‘in no way excluded the secular authorities from passing judgment of their own’ : ‘Murderers of Thomas Becket’, 255 and n. 191.



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Roger of Howden called the cardinal a ‘limb of Satan (membrum Sathanae)’ for allowing the king’s court to try clerks for breaches of the forest law (although he omitted the comment from the Chronica, compiled in the mid 1190s) ; and Ralph de Diceto, the Dean of St Paul’s, introduced the text of the king’s letter with the sarcastic comment : ‘the contents of the following short note (brevicula) reveal how much the English Church, longing for freedom, owes to him [Cardinal Hugh]’. In his opinion, Hugh’s legation was nothing less than disastrous (infausta), because he permitted clerics to be drawn before a secular judge for trespass of the forest and disputes about lay fee. One can see why. The subjection of clerics to the authority of foresters was particularly grievous, for the royal forests covered about a third of the land of England, and the Forest Law was a royal prerogative law that affected not only the hunting and trapping of wild animals but virtually every aspect of estate management in the affected areas. Specially appointed foresters with powers of arrest supervised it, and special courts, to whom all were subject, enforced it. Contemporaries had hoped for tighter limits to secular jurisdiction over clerics, not its consolidation ; yet the king’s courts retained jurisdiction over advowson, with the development of the whole barrage of procedures described in Glanvill ’s book IV : specialized writs, including a version of praecipe quod reddat, a ‘writ prohibiting a plea about an advowson in an ecclesiastical court’, and the Assize of Last Presentment (1179), with its own writs. Moreover, despite his formal concession of freedom of election, Henry retained virtual control of episcopal and major monastic appointments ; bishops and major Benedictine abbots held the territorial endowment of their churches by barony, owing the same service as secular magnates, and the king had charge of their estates during vacancies. At the same time, clerks and bishops were not only prominent in his service, but played a major rôle in the exercise of royal justice. Among the twelve key justices who shaped and administered Henry II’s law in the 1170s and 1180s were six clerics. At their head stood three bishops (Richard of Ilchester, bishop of Winchester, 1173–88 ; John of Oxford, bishop of Norwich, 1175–1200, and Geoffrey Ridel, bishop of Ely, 1174–89), supported by three clerks who became   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 105,   Howden, Chronica, ii, 86.   Diceto, i, 410.   Ibid., i, 402–3 : ‘quia praestitit auctoritatem trahendi clericos ante iudicem saecularem pro forifacto forestae, et pro laico feudo’.   Warren, Henry II, 390–95 ; cf. Dialogus, 59–60.   Glanvill, 43–53, 160–63 ; cf. J. W. Gray, ‘The Ius Praesentandi in England from the Constitutions of Clarendon to Bracton’, EHR, 67 (1952), 481–509.   See p. 178 above with n. 1.   M. Howell, Regalian Right in Medieval England (London 1962), 32–44 ; E. U. Crosby, Bishop and Chapter in Twelfth-Century England (Cambridge 1994), 39–40, 366–72, 377–8.

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bishops (Hubert Walter, bishop of Salisbury, 1189–93, archbishop of Canterbury, 1193–1205 ; Richard fitz Nigel, author of the Dialogus de Scaccario, bishop of London, 1189–98, and Godfrey de Lucy, bishop of Winchester, 1189–1204). Richard of Ilchester, John of Oxford and Geoffrey Ridel, of course, had been prominent in executing Henry’s legal and diplomatic campaign against Thomas Becket, and their elevation to the episcopate seemed to confirm the king’s triumph, despite Avranches. Surveying the evidence just cited, and much more besides, Henry MayrHarting, reacting to Charles Duggan’s demonstration of the rapid expansion of ecclesiastical jurisdiction through the 1170s and 1180s, argued that it was hard to see what Henry had lost from the judicial concessions after Becket’s death, since the mass of routine cases heard by ecclesiastical tribunals or appealed to the Curia ‘was of little concern to the king’, and he was always able to intervene in cases that concerned him. This argument confuses the institutional with the personal. It is true that Henry had no personal interest in routine ecclesiastical cases ; but he was not personally interested in the thousands of cases that came before local secular courts, either. That did not stop the relentless growth of the royal system through the Assizes of Clarendon (1166) and Northampton (1176) and the elaboration of a battery of standardised writs and processes, all operating routinely. ‘Justice is a great little earner ( Justicia est magnum emolumentum) !’ With the expansion of royal jurisdiction came the expansion of multiple sources of income : fees for writs ; fines and amercements for non-appearance or for failure to prove a case ; proffers for justice, etc. If the totality of the Clarendon programme had remained in place, there is little doubt that more and more ecclesiastical justice would equally have been drawn into the royal courts. What Henry lost was systematic   P. Brand, The Making of the Common Law (London 1992), 92–3 and nn. 73–4. The prominence of such episcopal involvement with royal justice was balanced, however, by the exclusion of bishops’ names from writs and charters relating to lay fee after 1172 : Vincent, ‘Regional Variations’, 90–91, a shift brought about (p. 93) ‘because the king himself was forced to admit more stringent limitations upon the involvement of bishops in secular justice’.   Mayr-Harting, ‘Henry II and the Papacy’, 39–40 ; C. Duggan, Twelfth-Century Decretal Collections and their Importance in English History (London 1963), esp. 146, 148–50 ; cf. idem, Decretals and the Creation of New Law in the Twelfth Century : Judges, Judgements, Equity and Law (Aldershot 1998), especially nos. I–IV.   Select Charters, 167–73, 178–81 ; Eng. trans., EHD, ii, 440–43, 444–6.   P. Brand, ‘Multis vigiliis excogitatam et inventam : Henry II and the Creation of the English Common Law’, HSJ, 2 (1990), 197–222, repr. in idem, Making of the Common Law, 77–102.   It is a matter of record that the ‘profits of justice’ grew exponentially from 1165/6 onwards : see PR 12–34 Henry II (1165/6–1188/9), under the headings De placitis, Nova placita et nove conventiones, etc. ; Dialogus, 104–05 ; cf. Carpenter, Struggle for Mastery, 233–7, In this, as in so much else, the second Henry was following in the footsteps of his grandfather Henry I : see J. A. Green, The Government of England under Henry I (Cambridge 1986), 78–94, 95–117, esp. 86–8, 100–105, and the analysis of PR 31 Henry I (1129–30) on 223–5 ; cf. Carpenter, Struggle for Mastery, 155–7.



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jurisdiction over clerical crimes and misdemeanours, and systematic intervention in the church’s evolving appellate system. That did not mean that he could not intervene per voluntatem, when it suited him, just as he could intervene in secular cases which concerned him. ‘Besides the rule of law’, wrote Jolliffe, ‘there was always another rule per voluntatem.’ The importance of the Clarendon programme for Henry can be gauged from the persistence with which he clung to it until after Becket’s death. It is highly unlikely, indeed, that he would have retreated from any one of its controversial clauses, ‘if he had not been constrained, first by the consequences of Becket’s murder, then by the great rebellion of 1173–4. Only after those two serious crises, which some contemporaries saw as cause and effect, was he willing to negotiate with the Church, and in a manner inconceivable during Becket’s lifetime.’ The operative word here is ‘negotiate’. The process followed at Clarendon in 1164 was very different from that which produced the Avranches settlement and the concessions to Pierleone. In the former, he demanded sworn adherence to a schedule of customs/dignities drawn up, without consultation, by his own legal team ; in the latter the king engaged in high-level consultations, in which he was willing to work out a modus vivendi, in which there was genuine give and take between the Crown and the Church. Appeals to the papacy were admitted ; clerical immunity was recognised, with some exceptions ; and the formal requirements of canonical election were put in place. On the other hand, Henry usually got the bishops and abbots he wanted ; papal legates entered the country only with his permission ; prelates required his approval to attend papal councils ; and he could still intervene in ecclesiastical cases when he deemed that his own interests were   Jolliffe, Angevin Kingship, 57–8 ; cf. ibid., 301 : ‘The King’s will is, in the last recourse, free, uninhibited, incontrovertible. . . . If vis et voluntas were for the schoolmen the vice of royalty, they were the vital force of Angevin kingship.’   Duggan, Thomas Becket, 254 ; cf. F. Barlow, Thomas Becket (London 1986), 274 ; M. Cheney, ‘The Compromise of Avranches of 1172 and the Spread of Canon Law in England’, EHR, 56 (1941), 177–97, esp. 197.   When in July 1176 Cardinal Vivian entered England without royal licence, en route to conduct a roving legation in Ireland, Scotland, and Norway, Bishops Richard of Winchester and Geoffrey of Ely were sent to require him to give his word that he intended nothing to the detriment of the king or kingdom ; that being obtained, the king gave him safe conduct to Scotland and ordered all the abbeys and bishoprics through which he passed to receive him with the honour befitting a cardinal : Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 118. Cf. the similar promise given by the subdeacon Albert, when he was allowed to summon English clerics to the Third Lateran Council in 1179 : Diceto, i, 429, ‘praestita fidelitate de regia dignitate servanda’,   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 221.

Matthew Strickland

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

F

ew figures played such a central role in the world of Henry II as his son Henry, the Young King. From the death of his older brother William on 2 December 1156, he was Henry II’s principal heir, the object of his father’s deep affection and the linchpin of his dynastic schemes. The only post-Conquest English king to be crowned in the lifetime of his father, young Henry’s coronation in 1170 precipitated the final stages of the Becket crisis and led, though perhaps by no means inevitably, to the most acute crisis of Henry II’s reign, the great war of 1173–4. In 1183, the Young King’s support for a major rebellion in Aquitaine came close to wresting the duchy from his younger brother Richard  a situation arguably far more serious for Richard than John’s rebellion in 1193–4  and in his efforts to support his younger son, Henry II twice came within an inch of losing his life when arrows were shot at him from the walls of Limoges. But although the Young King’s death from fever at Martel on 11 June 1183 led to the collapse of the revolt, his political legacy continued to prove injurious. As John Gillingham has suggested, Richard’s inability to quell the revolt of 1183 may have seriously undermined his father’s belief in his ability to hold down the duchy, while it was Henry’s deeply rooted fear that Richard would seek to supplant him, as the Young King had tried to do in 1173–4, that led the old king to I should like to thank Professor John Gillingham, Professor Archie Duncan and Dr Stuart Airlie, who kindly read this paper in draft and made invaluable suggestions for its improvement. My thanks are also due to Professor Christopher Harper-Bill, Professor Ian Short and other colleagues at the ‘World of Henry II’ conference for their helpful comments, and to Dr Roger Smith for his encouragement to work on the subject of the Young King.   Torigni, 189, and 183 for the date of young Henry’s birth in London on 28 Feb. 1155. William had been born in 1153 (Diceto, ii, 296).   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 296. On the first occasion, when Henry had come to the city to parley with the Young King and Geoffrey, an arrow pierced his surcoat, and shortly afterwards, once the king had entered Limoges, a shot from the garrison of the citadel would have struck him in the chest had not his horse reared and instead received the lethal missile itself.



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the fatal policy of refusing formally to recognize Richard as his heir. The Young King’s death, moreover, reopened the crucial issue of the title to Gisors and the Norman Vexin, which Henry II had regained only as the dower of the younger Henry’s wife, Margaret ; Philip Augustus’ demands either for Richard’s marriage to Alice or the return of the Vexin were long to plague Richard and would prove one of the principal factors in the rapid deterioration of his relations with the Capetian king between 1189 and 1191. Yet despite the key role played by the Young King in the politics of the Angevin empire, his premature death and anomalous position as a king who reigned but did not govern robbed him of any contemporary gesta of his own, and has led to a comparative dearth of modern studies devoted to the young Henry in his own right. Until the recent appearance of Roger Smith’s important article on the acta and household of the Young King, the most detailed published biography remained the 1906 German dissertation of C. E. Hodgson, Jung Heinrich, König von England. Light has been shed on key moments in his career, such as Anne Duggan’s study of his coronation in 1170, Thomas Jones’ analysis of the war of 1173–4, and most recently, David Crouch’s stress on the importance of the Young King’s role in the developing world of the tournament. Yet more often than not the younger Henry appears only in someone else’s shadow : of Thomas Becket in the early 1160s, of William Marshal in the 1170s and early 1180s, and always, of course, in that of Henry II himself. It was perhaps only natural that in his magisterial biography of Henry II, Lewis Warren should see the Young King as falling all too short of his great father. While acknowledging that young Henry was gracious and charming with winning ways, Warren nevertheless characterised him as ‘shallow, vain, careless, empty headed, incompetent, improvident and irresponsible’.   J. Gillingham, Richard I (New Haven/London 1999), 76, 94–9.   For a detailed discussion of the rival claims to the Vexin, see L. Landon, The Itinerary of Richard I (PRS 1935), app. H, 219–34.  R. J. Smith, ‘Henry II’s Heir : The Acta and Seal of Henry the Young King, 1170–1183’, EHR 116 (2001), 297–326 ; C. E. Hodgson, Jung Heinrich, König von England (PhD diss., Jena 1906). An extensive and valuable study of the Young King is contained in the unpublished thesis by R. J. Smith, ‘The Royal Family in the Reign of Henry II’ (MA thesis, Univ. of Nottingham 1961), esp. 50–119, 120–63, while his household is also examined in R. V. Turner, ‘The Households of the Sons of Henry II’, La Cour Plantagenêt (1154–1204) : Actes du Colloque tenu à Thouars du 30 Avril au 2 mai 1999, ed. M. Aurell (Poitiers 2000), 49–62. O. H. Moore, The Young King Henry Plantagenet, 1155–1183, in History, Literature and Tradition (Columbus, oh, 1925), is less a social and political history than an examination of the Young King’s literary Nachleben.   A. Heslin [Duggan], ‘The Coronation of the Young King in 1170’, Studies in Church History, 2 (1965), 165–78 ; T. M. Jones, The War of the Generations : The Revolt of 1173–4 (Ann Arbor, mi, 1980) ; D. Crouch, Tournament (London 2005), esp. 21–7.   Warren, Henry II, 580 ; cf. 118 : ‘a charming, vain, idle spendthrift’. For an even more critical view, see K. Norgate, England under the Angevin Kings, 2 vols. (London 1887), ii, 220–21 : ‘not

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Such a verdict was in large part shaped by the hostile writings of several of Henry II’s own courtiers. For crucially, the fact that the Young King predeceased his father meant that, unlike his brother Richard, he himself was never heir to those chroniclers associated with the court such as Roger of Howden and Ralph of Diceto (to whom we may add Richard fitz Nigel in his lost Tricolumnis), nor did he inherit the patronage of ‘the most dazzling group of literary men the Middle Ages had known’. Had he done so, the great littérateurs of the Angevin court like Walter Map, Gerald of Wales or Peter of Blois might in due course have penned a fuller and more flattering picture of his deeds and character. Instead, his death left such men free to castigate the Young King for filial impiety and treachery towards their lord and to portray his premature death as a mark of divine vengeance. Thus Walter Map, writing within a month of the Young King’s death, claimed to ‘have known him as a friend and intimate’, but painted young Henry as a fallen angel, who though eloquent, handsome and courteous, had become a parricide and another Absalom : ‘Truly he left nothing unprobed, no stone unturned ; he befouled the whole world with his treasons, a prodigy of unfaith and prodigal of ill, a limpid spring of wickedness, the attractive tinder of villany, a lovely place of sin . . . the originator of the heresy of traitors . . . a false son to his father . . . the peaceful king’. Other curiales felt a similar sense of outrage at what Gerald of Wales called the Young King’s ‘monstrous ingratitude’ to his father, while subsequent writers such as William of Newburgh continued this tradition of condemnation. Yet there were other, more positive voices. To the author of the History of William the Marshal, young Henry was ‘the finest of the princes of the earth, be they pagan or Christian’, and his depiction of the Young King reflects the love and esteem in which he was held by William himself. Bertran de Born held him in high regard and on his death composed a moving planh or lament praising him as the epitome of largesse, courtesy and chivalry. Nor was it only the troubadours one deed is recorded of him save deeds of the meanest ingratitude, selfishness, cowardliness and treachery’.   Dialogus, pp. xvii–xviii, 27, 77.  V. H. Galbraith, ‘The Literacy of the Medieval English Kings’, PBA 21 (1935), 201–38, at 93.   Map, De Nugis, 282–3.   Gerald, Expugnatio, 196–7. In his Gesta Regis, i, 301–2, Roger of Howden chose to emphasize Henry II’s fortitude in his deep grief rather than his son’s faults, but when he came to rework his material in the Chronica, he inserted a clearly heartfelt excursus on the enormity of the Young King’s rebellion (Howden, Chronica, ii, 279–80 ; cf. Diceto, ii, 19–20).   Newburgh, i, 170, believed the young Henry was not only ‘an apostate to nature, but even to solemn covenants’.   History of William Marshal, i, ll. 1956–8. For the Marshal’s relations with the Young King see D. Crouch, William Marshal : Knighthood, War and Chivalry, 1147–1219, 2nd edn (London 2002), 39–55.   The Poems of the Troubadour Bertran de Born, ed. W. D. Paden jr, T. Sankovitch and P. H. Stablein (Berkeley 1986), 215–23, no. 15, ‘Mon chan fenis ab dol et ab maltraire’.



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and secular authors who voiced their approbation. If Richard of Devizes could refer in his Chronicon to Henry II’s family as ‘the confused house of Oedipus’, the annals of Winchester, which John Appleby has argued were also the work of Devizes, calls the young Henry the ‘flower and mirror of youth and generosity and the glory of all knighthood’. Robert of Torigni recorded that the death of ‘the young king, our dearest lord’, was ‘the occasion to us of deepest grief ’, not only because he was Henry II’s son, but also ‘because he was of the most handsome countenance, of the most pleasing manners, and the most free handed in his liberality of all the individuals with whom we have been acquainted’. For all his condemnation of the Young King’s rebellions, Gerald of Wales regarded him as a second Hector and a second Paris, while young Henry’s chaplain Gervase of Tilbury described him thus : He was tall in stature, and distinguished in appearance ; his face expressed merriment and mature judgement in due measure ; fair among the children of men, he was courteous and cheerful. Gracious to all, he was loved by all ; amiable to all, he was incapable of making an enemy. He was matchless in warfare, and as he surpassed all others in the grace of his person, so he outstripped them all in valour, cordiality, and the outstanding graciousness of his manner, in his generosity and in his true integrity. In short, in this man, God assembled every kind of goodness and virtue, and the gifts which fortune usually bestows on single individuals of special distinction, she exerted herself to give all together and in richer measure to this man, so as to make him worthy of all commendation. For all the hyperbole, the insistence on Henry’s qualities in such encomiae remains striking. To Lewis Warren, those who spoke well of the Young King had been blinded to his shortcomings, ‘beguiled by his fatal charm’. Yet few if any writers lamented Henry II’s passing in such a manner, and while Richard I’s death provoked an outpouring of grief for the loss of the champion of Christendom, it is worth remembering that had it been Richard who had died in 1183, he would have left a reputation as a harsh, even tyrannical ruler, as much as that of a fine warrior. Attempts to sanctify the Young King, probably sponsored by his captive   The Chronicle of Richard of Devizes of the Time of Richard I, ed. J. Appleby (London 1963), 3 ; Annales Monasterii de Wintonia, in Ann. Mon. ii, 62, ‘flos speculumque juventutis ac generositatis, et totius decus militiae’.   Torigni, 305.   De Principis Instructione, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, viii, 173–5.   Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, ed. and trans. S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns (Oxford 2002), 486–7.   Warren, Henry II, 580.   For criticism of Richard as count of Poitou, see Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 292 ; Diceto, ii, 19 ; Gervase, i, 303, 304–5. The last makes a direct and unfavourable contrast with the Young King, as,

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mother Queen Eleanor, soon came to nothing, but how many other Plantagenets could boast even of a short-lived cult of miracles springing up around their cortège ? Rather, the fierce competition between the men of Le Mans and of Rouen for possession of the Young King’s body reflected a more genuine and spontaneous expression of the love felt towards him. My aim here is to approach the younger Henry through his formative years. Just as Gerald of Wales’s On the Instruction of a Prince was anything but a practical handbook for Angevin princes, so what follows is not intended primarily as a study of the nature of later twelfth-century royal childhood or adolescence per se. Rather, I shall examine what light the Young King’s early career and his training for rule sheds on the nature of Angevin kingship. An examination of his formative experiences, notably his brief but significant period in the household of Thomas Becket, the implications of his marriage as a child to Margaret, daughter of Louis VII, and what is known of his education and practical training in associative rule before and after his coronation in 1170, reveals something of the expectations of both young Henry and his father, and furthers an understanding of the growing tensions between them that twice erupted into open war. In the process, I shall suggest that the traditional image of the Young King merely as a charming but feckless tourneyer, unready, unwilling and ultimately unfit for the burdens of government, not only underestimates his capacity as well as desire for independent rule but also crucially misunderstands the significance of his tourneying activities between 1175 and 1182 both in the eyes of contemporaries and as a mechanism for political stability. Henry’s earliest years followed the normal pattern of the upbringing of royal and aristocratic boys. As early as 1156, he had been placed in the charge of a Master in a transparently indirect manner, does Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, v, 196, 198 ; De Principis Instructione, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, vii, 246–8.   Thomas Agnellus, De Morte et Sepultura Henrici Regis Junioris, in Radulphi de Coggeshall Chronicon Anglicanum, ed. J. Stevenson (RS 66, 1875), 263–73 ; Newburgh, i, 234 ; Crouch, William Marshal, 54–5.   When his entourage stopped at Le Mans en route to his chosen burial place at Rouen, the bishop and people of the city refused to allow the body to leave their city and buried it in the cathedral of St Julian, where his grandfather Geoffrey of Anjou was buried. This in turn provoked the ire of the men of Rouen, who threatened to recover the body by force, and finally, on Henry II’s orders, it was taken to Rouen. Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 303–4 ; Howden, Chronica, i, p. lxvii ; ii, 280 ; Diceto, ii, 20 ; Torigni, 306, Gervase, i, 305 ; Newburgh, i, 234 ; cf. History of William Marshal, ll. 7156–72.   On De Principis Instructione, see R. Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 1146–1223 (Oxford 1982), 69–100.   For a valuable comparative study of a very different experience of youth, see D. Bates, ‘The Conqueror’s Adolescence’, ANS 25 (2002), 1–18.   For princely upbringing in general, see N. Orme, From Childhood to Chivalry : The Education of the English Kings and Aristocracy, 1066–1530 (London 1984) ; cf. R. V. Turner, ‘The Children of AngloNorman Royalty and their Upbringing’, Medieval Prosopography, 11 (1999), 17–44.



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Mainard, though as Ralph Turner has noted, such a magister was not necessarily a cleric or even a teacher, nor it is clear to what extent, if at all, his presence implies the infant Henry’s separation from the queen’s household. Unlike his father, who is known to have studied with Peter of Saintes, a Master Matthew at the court of Robert of Gloucester, and with William of Conches, there are few if any specific details about what, when and by whom the young Henry was taught. The Angevin episcopate, however, seem to have taken a collective interest in and responsibility for the education of the king’s heir. In a letter written in 1167/8 by Peter of Blois on his behalf, Rotrou, archbishop of Rouen, informs ‘his dearest lord, the illustrious Henry’, that Although other kings are of a rude and uncultivated character, yours, which was formed by literature, is prudent in the administration of great affairs, subtle in judgements, and circumspect in counsel. Wherefore, all your bishops unanimously agree that Henry, your son and heir, should apply himself to letters, so that he whom we regard as your heir may be the successor to your wisdom, as well as to your kingdom. These remarks have sometimes been interpreted as an indication that young Henry’s education was being neglected in favour of more frivolous secular activities, but it may mean no more than that the clergy judged the prince (at twelve or thirteen still too young to participate in the tournament) to have reached an age suitable for more intensive study. John Gillingham has recently challenged long-held assumptions of Henry II as an active patron of literature and of history. Nevertheless, ‘when he came to power in the early 1150s he had some claim to be the best-educated prince in the West’, and contemporaries acknowledged his own learning ; Peter of Blois could tell the archbishop of Palermo that while William II of Sicily, who had been one of his pupils, ‘bene litteras noverit’, Henry

 R. V. Turner, ‘Eleanor of Aquitaine and her Children : An Inquiry into Medieval Family Attachment’, JMH 14 (1988), 321–36, at 325–6. To cover his expenses, Mainard received £6 per annum from the vill of Dartford, Kent (The Great Rolls of the Pipe for the Second, Third and Fourth Years of the Reign of Henry II, 1155–1158, ed. J. Hunter (Record Commission 1844), 66, 101, 180 ; PR 5 Henry II, 58).   Warren, Henry II, 38–9. On the comparatively high level of education of other 12th-century laymen, see H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles, The Governance of Medieval England from the Conquest to Magna Carta (Edinburgh 1963), 272–84.  Rotrou, archbishop of Rouen, Epistolae, in PL, ccvii, cols. 210–12 ; Peter of Blois, Opera omnia, ed. J. A. Giles, 4 vols. (Oxford 1846–7), i, 198 (letter 67) ; trans. J. Appleby, Henry II, the Vanquished King (London/New York 1962), 70.   J. Gillingham, ‘The Cultivation of History, Legend and Courtesy at the Court of Henry II’, in Writers of the Reign of Henry II, ed. R. Kennedy and S. Meechan-Jones (London 2007), 25–52. I am grateful to John Gillingham for allowing me to see a draft of this paper before publication.   Gillingham, ‘The Cultivation of History’.

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II ‘rex noster longe litteratior est’. Even if the image of Henry’s court as home to a glittering literary circle must now be treated with considerable caution, he almost certainly patronized Adelard of Bath, Henry of Huntingdon, Osbert de Clare and Ailred of Rievaulx, some of whose texts would surely have been readily available for his son’s instruction when he was deemed to be of an age to tackle them. A good education, moreover, was an Angevin family tradition ; Geoffrey le Bel had been praised by William of Conches in his Dragmaticon for his care in ensuring the good education of his young sons, while pride in comital respect for learning underpinned the famous anecdote in the Chronica de gestis consulum Andegavorum in which Fulk the Good reminded his lord that ‘an unlettered king is a crowned ass’. It would thus be surprising if Henry had in his turn disregarded his eldest son’s schooling. Even allowing for courtiers’ exaggeration of his own command of letters, he hardly needed bishops to remind him of the value of education for the practicalities of government. And these, as I shall suggest below, he was certainly keen for his son to master. Whatever the state of his subsequent education, it is doubtful that the younger Henry had been put to any serious letters before he was placed by his father in the household of his chancellor, Thomas Becket, in or possibly before 1162. It was a natural choice, given the two men’s close friendship, Becket’s key position in the kingdom’s administration and the reputation of his household as a place of education and advancement. As William fitz Stephen noted : Magnates of the kingdom of England and of neighbouring kingdoms placed their children in the chancellor’s service, and he grounded them in honest education and doctrine, and when they had received the belt of knighthood he sent some back with honour to their fathers and family, and   Peter of Blois, Opera, i, 194 (letter 66) ; Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, v, 191–2 ; W. Stubbs, Seventeen Lectures on the Study of Medieval and Modern History, 3rd edn (Oxford 1900), chaps. vi, vii.   Ibid. ; C. H. Haskins, ‘Henry II as a Patron of Learning’, Essays in Medieval History Presented to Thomas Frederick Tout, ed. A. G. Little and F. M. Powicke (Manchester 1925), 71–7 ; idem, ‘Adelard of Bath and Henry Plantagenet’, EHR 26 (1911), 515–16 ; W. F. Schirmer and U. Broich, Studien zum literarischen Patronat im England des 12. Jahrhunderts (Cologne/Opladen 1962) ; P. Dronke, ‘Peter of Blois and Poetry at the Court of Henry II’, Medieval Studies, 38 (1976), 185–233 ; E. Salter, English and International : Studies in the Literature, Art and Patronage of Medieval England (Cambridge 1988), 4–28.  R. L. Poole, Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought, 2nd edn (London 1920), 298–310 ; Warren, Henry II, 38–9.   Chroniques des comtes d’Anjou et des seigneurs d’Amboise, ed. L. Halphen and R. Poupardin (Paris 1913), 140–41.   The date of young Henry’s entry into Becket’s household is nowhere explicitly stated, but is usually taken as 1162, when Henry ordered the chancellor to take his son to England to prepare for his recognition by the magnates and possibly his coronation (Edward Grim, MTB, ii, 366). The prince would then be seven, a common age to begin such fosterage, though it is possible that he had already been placed with the chancellor.   For Becket as chancellor, see F. Barlow, Thomas Becket (London 1986), 41–73.



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retained others. The king himself, his lord, commended his son, the heir to the kingdom, to his training, and the chancellor kept him with him among the many nobles’ sons of similar age, and their appropriate attendants, masters and servants according to rank. Of what such ‘honest education and doctrine’ consisted is unknown, and it is regrettable that more is not recoverable about what must have been one of most remarkable courts of its time, in which secular and clerical interests melded, and aspirant knights and clerks vied for the patronage of the kingdom’s second most powerful individual. Becket still retained close ties to former colleagues from Archbishop Theobald’s household, but one can only speculate on the extent to which, beyond the essential training in riding, hunting and arms, his own protégés were introduced to works such as John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, completed in 1159 and dedicated to Becket himself while the chancellor was on the Toulouse expedition. For as well as much on kingship and good rule, John dwelt at length in book VI on the social and religious responsibilities of the militia saecularis, discussed the symbolic significance of the cingulum militiae, provided both classical and contemporary examples for the necessity for military discipline in armies (including a somewhat oblique discussion of campaigns against the Welsh), and revealed a knowledge of Vegetius. Henry himself, however, was still too young for such erudition, and was only to remain in Becket’s household until October 1163, when after the council at Westminster Henry II removed him as a sign of his growing displeasure towards Thomas. Yet the experience must have made a profound impression upon the boy, just as Fitz Stephen notes the young Thomas had been bedazzled by the glittering knightly life-style of Richer de l’Aigle, a friend of his father Gilbert Becket, who took him into his own household and taught him to ride and hunt. Becket’s own desire to cut the figure of a warrior meant that the military training offered to his charges was probably of a high quality and certainly imbued with a strongly competitive spirit. As Fitz Stephen recalls of the performance of his military household in France in 1161, ‘in all the army of the king of England the chancellor’s knights were always first, always the most daring, always performed excellently, as he himself taught, led and urged them on, sounding the advance and sounding the retreat on war trumpets peculiar to his army, but well known   William fitz Stephen, Vita Sancti Thomae Cantuarensis Archiepiscopi et Martyris, in MTB, ii, 22 ; M. Staunton, The Lives of Thomas Becket (Manchester 2001), 50–51.   John of Salisbury, Policraticus, ed. and trans. C. J. Nederman (Cambridge 1990), 103 ff. ; for Becket on campaign, see p. 230.   Herbert of Bosham, MTB, iii, 275 ; Barlow, Becket, 95.  Edward Grim, MTB, ii, 359–61 ; Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, ed. E. Walberg (Lund 1922), ll. 206–3 ; Garnier’s Becket, trans. J. Shirley (London 1975), 7 ; Thómas Saga Erkibyskups, ed. E. Magnússon, 2 vols. (RS 65, 1875–83), i, 30–35 ; and for Richer himself, Barlow, Becket, 19–20.

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to everyone in the battle’. Young Henry had accompanied the chancellor to Normandy that year, and so may even have witnessed Becket unhorse the French knight Enguerrand de Trie in single combat and take his horse, during a confrontation with Capetian forces between Trie, Courcelles and Gisors. Memories were still fresh of the extravagant largesse demonstrated on Becket’s famous embassy to Paris in 1158 to negotiate young Henry’s marriage to Louis’s daughter Margaret, when the chancellor travelled ‘with about two hundred of his household on horseback with him, knights, clerks, stewards, servants, esquires and sons of noblemen serving him in arms’. His military exploits on the Toulouse campaign had been equally showy, and Fitz Stephen claimed that his military household had numbered 700 knights. In hostilities on the Norman border in 1161, Fitz Stephen again insists that ‘besides 700 knights of his own household’ he had 4,000 infantry paid for forty days and another 1,200 stipendiary knights, who each received ‘three shillings to take care of horses and squires, and all these knights sat at the chancellor’s table’. In ascribing such a vast military household to Becket, Fitz Stephen was almost certainly exaggerating ; in 1159 and 1161, it is more probable that the majority of these knights were royal troops, whether levied by knight service or as stipendiaries, serving under the chancellor’s overall command, rather than in his personal retinue. Nevertheless, all this was a striking model of lordship, conspicuous display and chivalric bravura. It is hard not to see the Young King’s own prodigal expenditure on the tournament circuits of northern France in the 1170s and early 1180s as a conscious attempt to emulate or even surpass Becket’s magnificence. At the tournament at Lagny in 1179, for example, the History of William Marshal noted that the Young King not only retained two hundred knights in his retinue, but also paid for the retinues brought by the fifteen knights banneret who had joined his mesnie, costing him  or rather his father  a staggering £200 a day. Perhaps too he looked back with a mixture of envy and resentment to the fact that a chan-

  Fitz Stephen, MTB, iii, 35 ; Staunton, Lives, 58.   Fitz Stephen, MTB, iii, 35 ; Staunton, Lives, 58.   Fitz Stephen, MTB, iii, 29–33 ; Staunton, Lives, 55.   Fitz Stephen, MTB, iii, 33 ; Staunton, Lives, 57. On the campaign itself, see J. Martindale, ‘“An Unfinished Business” : Angevin Politics and the Siege of Toulouse, 1159’, ANS, 23 (2000), 115–54.   Fitz Stephen, MTB, iii, 34–35 ; Staunton, Lives, 58..  Even at the great battle of Brémule in 1119, Orderic estimated that the total force of Henry I’s knights had been 500 (Orderic, vi, 236–7). One may compare Fitz Stephen’s remarks to Newburgh’s accusation that William Longchamp, another parvenu chancellor seeking to reflect his new found prestige in the size of his retinue, went on progress in 1190–91 with a thousand horse or more (Newburgh, i, 333–4).   History of William Marshal, ll. 4750–85, 5073–95 ; Crouch, Tournament, 24–5. Cf. Diceto, i, 428, who notes of this period that Henry ‘in conflictibus Gallicis, in expensis profusoribus, transegit triennium’.



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cellor had lived in greater splendour than the king’s eldest son who was himself a king ; in 1182, Henry II had promised his son the service of one hundred knights in his familia, in addition to his allowance, but what was this in comparison to Becket’s great retinue ? Young Henry did, however, have one great opportunity to reprise the sumptuousness of Becket’s embassy of 1158, when in late 1179 he attended the coronation of Philip Augustus at Reims. Robert of Torigni notes that not only did Henry II send lavish gifts of gold silver and ‘the results of his hunting in England’, but that the Young King, ‘attended by a large retinue of knights’, had, on his father’s orders, ‘brought with him such provision for the journey that he accepted free quarters from no-one, either on the road thither or during the festival’. In the ceremony itself, he bore the great gold crown and held it over the boy Philip’s head, while his own recent mentor in arms, Count Philip of Flanders, bore the sword of state. For Becket himself, wardship of the king’s heir had been not only an honour but a crucial political opportunity. As Graeme White has noted in his study of the early years of Henry’s reign, if Henry II had fallen prey to war or disease, Eleanor would certainly have exercised a degree of power as queen mother and regent. But Becket would also have been in a very strong position of influence in the ensuing minority. An instructive parallel can be drawn with a subsequent chancellor, William Longchamp, who for similar reasons was anxious to support Richard’s nomination of his nephew Arthur as his heir in October 1190 against the interests of Count John, and who attempted to gain the support of the Scottish king William the Lion towards these ends should Richard die on crusade. Becket had not been beyond manipulating his royal ward for his own ends. Lindsay Diggelmann has recently demonstrated how skilfully Henry II had laid his plans and then manipulated the events of 1160 to regain the Vexin through the child marriage of young Henry to Margaret. But it is still possible that, as Kate Norgate suggested, it was Thomas who pressed for the infants’ marriage in order to win back

  Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 291.   Torigni, 287 ; Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 242–3 ; Diceto, i, 438–9 ; and MRSN, i, 71 for the conveying of some of the gifts.   G. J. White, Restoration and Reform, 1153–1165 : Recovery from Civil War in England (Cambridge 2000), 6–7.   Newburgh, i, 335 ; Landon, Itinerary of Richard I, app. E, 197–8. Landon’s statement, ibid., 197 n. 4, that Longchamp ‘could have had no personal interest in taking a step which would raise prematurely the question of the succession in its most acute form’ is less convincing than Newburgh’s own scepticism of the chancellor’s claim that in undertaking the embassy he was merely acting on Richard’s orders.   L. Digglemann, ‘Marriage as a Tactical Response : Henry II and the Royal Wedding of 1160’, EHR 119 (2004), 954–64.

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the favour he had lost by opposing King Henry’s marriage of Matilda, abbess of Romsey and heiress to the county of Boulogne, to Matthew of Flanders. Whatever Becket’s role, the wedding of the two children at Neubourg on 2 November 1160 was a triumph of political expediency over the principles of canon law. Though it secured Angevin possession of the Vexin, so early a marriage was to have profound repercussions on the young Henry’s life. Whereas his father had married one of the greatest heiresses of France at the age of nineteen, and his brother Richard was to remain unmarried until his thirty-fourth year in 1191, young Henry found himself wed at the age of five. After their marriage, Margaret was probably returned to the custody of those into whose safekeeping Henry II had placed her in 1158 ‘ad custodiendum et nutriendum’, and it is not clear at what age the couple subsequently began to cohabit. But the child marriage had surely pre-empted that subsequent crucial transition, highlighted by Duby as a fundamental shift in status of a nobleman, from a iuvenis, the unmarried youth, to a vir, a man with wife and fief. Though Bertran de Born was to call young Henry ‘the guide and father of youth’, he was in this sense neither a ‘youth’ nor a bachelor, unlike William Marshal and many of the knights in his mesnie. The resulting ambiguity of his status was sensed by contemporaries. The author of the History of William Marshal felt obliged to comment on the fact that he was crowned before he was knighted, while his limited authority was even proclaimed in the unusual design of his seal ; not only is it merely single-sided, but it depicts the younger Henry without a sword, a key symbol of authority. As late as 1179, Ralph of Diceto reflected the perception of his continuing tutelage by remarking that on his return to England, his father restored the possessions he had taken from him ‘although the Young King was still under age (adhuc minoris aetatis)’  and this when he was twenty four. Probably from 1170, when he was crowned, and at the very latest from 1172, when Margaret was crowned with him at Winchester on Louis’s insistence, young Henry was obliged to provide for his wife in a suitably regal style. Yet he was never  Norgate, England under the Angevins, i, 469–71. For Thomas’ opposition to the match, see Bosham, MTB, iii, 328 ; cf. Torigni, 246.   Diggelmann, ‘Marriage as a Tactical Response’, 954–64.   Diceto, i, 303 ; Torigni, 197.   G. Duby, ‘Youth in Aristocratic Society : Northwest France in the Twelfth Century’, in Duby, The Chivalrous Society, trans. C. Postan (London 1977), 112–22.   Poems of Bertran de Born, 218–19, no. 15, ‘de joven eras capdels e paire’.   History of William Marshal, ll. 2112–22 ; Smith, ‘Henry II’s Heir’, 306 and n. 3. Gervase, i, 239, by contrast believed that Henry II had knighted his son immediately before the coronation, though it seems unlikely that the author of the History would completely fabricate such a significant event. The conflicting testimony is discussed by Smith, ‘The Royal Family in the Reign of Henry II’, 60–62.   Diceto, i, 428.   Torigni, 254 ; Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 31.



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to enjoy control of her dower lands in his own right, nor, it seems, did Margaret ever benefit from the generous dowry assigned to her at the time of their marriage negotiations. Not only did this add urgency to Henry’s demands from his father for lands of his own, whose revenues could sustain his queen and his household, but his marriage brought him more easily within the sway of his father-in-law Louis VII, by whom he was effectively manipulated in and beyond the crisis of 1173–4. It is little wonder that in 1177 Henry II was extremely anxious when Margaret, heavily pregnant, returned without his knowledge or permission to her father’s court, for Capetian control of a Plantagenet heir would have posed a threat potentially as grave as Arthur’s flight to Philip Augustus’s court in 1196. Henry demanded from Louis her immediate return, together with the handing over of the remaining territories of the Vexin which had been promised as her dower, and to back his ultimatum he summoned a great host from England and Normandy. The Young King’s own role in this affair is hard to discern, but relations with his father were still strained, and it may well be that he had sanctioned Margaret’s departure in order to gain leverage against Henry II. As it was, however, William, their only recorded child, died in infancy at Paris in June 1177. When Margaret again returned to Paris in 1183, it was explicitly on the Young King’s instructions, though again this may have been as much an attempt to keep her out of Henry II’s control at a time of mounting hostility with his brother Richard and his father as an expression of young Henry’s displeasure at her alleged adultery with William Marshal. That young Henry seems to have believed the accusations against the Marshal enough to banish him from his entourage, suggests that Henry’s marriage to Margaret was, or had by then become, an unhappy one, although one of his last acts in 1183 was to implore his father to see that she was provided for. The extent of the Young King’s own fidelity is still harder to gauge. For Duby, sexual licence and ‘a propensity for luxury and concubinage’ was a hallmark of ‘youth’, while as a group the iuvenes promoted the praise of adulterous love in courtly literature. Given his extended period of ‘errantry’, to say nothing of his   Torigni, 196 ; Continuatio Beccensis, ibid., 318. By contrast, in 1182, Henry II assigned her only an allowance of 10 li. an. per day.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 168–9. Margaret had been with her husband at his court at Argentan at Christmas 1176 (Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 131), but little is known about the circumstances of her return to France.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 122–3. Henry II had kept Margaret in his custody during the crisis of 1173–4, moving both her and Queen Eleanor to England from Normandy in 1174 (Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 72 ; Torigni, 263).   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 177.   Ibid., 296. For the affair, History of William Marshal, ll. 5109–960 ; Crouch, William Marshal, 47–51.   Torigni, 306 ; ‘Chronica Gaufredi coenobitae monasterii sancti Martialis Lemovicensis ac prioris Vosiensis coenobii’ (Vigeois), RHF, xviii, 220 ; Smith, ‘Henry II’s Heir’, 322, no. 21.   Duby, ‘Youth in Aristocratic Society’, 115, 120–22.

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good looks, charm and generosity, it would be surprising if the Young King did not pursue a similar lifestyle. Yet despite the conviction of clerical critics that the tournament was a hotbed for licentiousness and adultery, the History of William the Marshal is remarkably discreet about any sexual dimension of post-tournament entertainments  beyond the courtly niceties, dancing and feasting  in which the Young King, his mesnie and the Marshal may have indulged. Conversely, unlike Henry II or Richard, young Henry was never himself criticized for adultery, nor is he known to have sired any bastards. If Henry II had had his way, the young Henry would not just have been married as a young child, but also crowned. It is probable, as Anne Duggan has argued, that the papal letter Quanto per carissimum, which ordered Roger of York to crown the young Henry whenever he should wish it, is dateable to 1161, when the archbishopric of Canterbury was still vacant. According to Edward Grim, one of the main reasons that Henry II sent Becket as chancellor back to England in 1162 was ‘especially to gain the fealty and subjection of all to his son, then to be crowned and sworn in as king’. The same year, the Pipe Roll records that a crown and other regalia were made for the young Henry. Henry II’s haste was almost certainly due to a desire to avoid the fate of the house of Blois, which had effectively lost the throne of England, once the papacy had blocked Stephen’s attempts to crown his eldest son Eustace. Though the Young King’s eventual coronation is often seen as a striking innovation by Henry II, it is worth emphasizing that he did not create the idea of associative kingship in post-Conquest England : he was merely the first monarch to achieve the coronation of his eldest son in his lifetime, succeeding where Stephen had failed. As it was, plans for the corona  A similar propriety is shown by Crouch, Tournament, 105–9, in his discussion of what he neatly terms the ‘après-tournoi’. For the tournament as a sink of moral depravity, see J. R. V. Barker, The Tournament in England, 1100–1400 (Woodbridge 1986), 72 ; M. Keen, Chivalry (New Haven/London 1984), 95–6.   Heslin, ‘The Coronation of the Young King’, 168–74, where the case for alternate dates of 1167 and 1170 are discussed but rejected.  Edward Grim, MTB, ii, 366, trans. Staunton, Lives, 62 : ‘Cancellarium quoque misit in Angliam pro diversis negotiis, et praesertim ut filio suo, iam tunc coronando in regem, fidelitatem et subiectionem acciperet ab universis, et iuraretur in regem’.   PR 8 Henry II, 43 ; Barlow, Becket, 67–8.   John of Salisbury, Historia Pontificalis, ed. M. Chibnall (London 1956), 83–6 ; D. Crouch, The Reign of King Stephen (Harlow 2000), 245–7.   For Capetian practice, on which both Stephen and Henry were doubtless drawing, see A. W. Lewis, ‘Anticipatory Succession of the Heir in Early Capetian France’, AHR 83 (1978), 907–28 ; idem, Royal Succession in Capetian France : Studies on Familial Orders and the State (Cambridge, ma/London 1981). The Young King’s distinctive seal, used from 1170 as associate king, may well have been based on French royal seals ; see W. de Gray Birch, ‘On the Seals of King Henry the Second, and of his Son the so-called Henry III’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature, ns 11/ii (1876), 37 ; Smith, ‘Henry II’s Heir’, 305–6.



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tion in 1162 had to be put off due to the worsening relations between Henry and Becket, even though in 1164 John of Salisbury claimed that Henry’s ambassadors had tried to get the pope to crown young Henry in person, in order to circumvent the archbishop’s authority. The planned coronation nevertheless raises the issue of Henry II’s attitude to royal ceremony. Henry II had worn his crown, as probably had Eleanor, at the Whitsuntide court at Bury St Edmunds in 1157 and again outside Lincoln in 1158, but after a similar crown-wearing at the Easter court at Worcester the same year, both king and queen laid their crowns on the altar, vowing never to wear them again. Chroniclers like Ralph of Diceto understood this as a pledge to renounce all future wearing of the crown, but the act was more likely to have represented a thank-offering of specific items of regalia. As Marjorie Chibnall has shown, the Empress Matilda was able to gift the abbey of Bec with, among others, the great gold crown used by Henry II at his coronation in 1154. But though it is certainly an exaggeration to regard royal ceremony as ‘repugnant to a man of Henry’s impatient and informal temperament’, it is possible that, from the early 1160s, Henry had intended to use his eldest son as the primary vehicle for Angevin regal display, replacing Becket, who, as chancellor, had excelled himself in providing the pomp and circumstance that Henry normally eschewed. The splendour of the Young King’s coronation in 1170 was a profound enunciation of the sacrality of Angevin kingship as much as a rejection of Becket’s prerogative to perform the ceremony, while in 1172, at a time of crisis in the wake of the archbishop’s murder, young Henry’s second coronation with Margaret performed a similar function. The Young King’s exalted status was further highlighted by Henry II’s insistence on serving his own son at the coronation banquet, though the story recorded by Matthew Paris that at the feast the younger Henry commented that as the son of a king, his dignity was greater than that of his father, who was merely   MTB, v, 100 ; Letters of John of Salisbury, ii, 10–11.   Chronicle of Battle, 174–5 ; PR 3 Henry II, 107, recording the sum of 22s. ‘for carrying the crowns to St Edmunds’ ; Howden, Chronica, i, 216 ; Newburgh, i, 117–18.   Diceto, i, 302 n. 1 : ‘coronam suam super altare posuit, nec ulterius voluit coronari’. This at least was Diceto’s interpretation in MS Cotton Claudius E iii (MS B), which Stubbs regarded as the earlier of the two principal texts. In Lambeth MS 8 (MS A), however, which may have been a corrected copy, Ralph was more equivocal, simply stating ‘nec ulterius coronatus est’. My thanks to John Gillingham for drawing my attention to this.   M. Chibnall, The Empress Matilda (Oxford 1991), 189.   Appleby, Henry II, 58–9 ; cf. Warren, Henry II, 77, 78, 80, 207, 244–5 ; and for an excellent discussion of the wider context, see 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.   Gervase, i, 219–20. Richard’s response to his brother’s pretensions was to refuse him homage in 1183, arguing that there should be no distinction in rank between children of the same parents (Diceto, i, 18–19).

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the son of a count, must be treated with caution as part of an extended reflection on God’s vengeance on both Henries for ignoring Becket’s right of coronation. Nevertheless, it is possible that, to stress his sacrality, the Young King was anointed with the oil of chrism rather than the usual oil of catechumens, and certainly when in 1174, in the wake of his rebellion, the younger Henry offered to perform homage to his father, Henry II initially declined to accept it ‘because he is a king’. Conversely, the clear threat that the Young King came to pose to Henry’s own authority after 1173 made it expedient for the Old King to reinforce his own dignity ; Torigni remarked that at Henry II’s Christmas court of 1178, at which the Young King, Richard and Geoffrey were all present, ‘scarce at any other festival (except at his own coronation, or that of his son, the younger king) had he so many knights in his retinue’. But, strikingly, evidence for his use of royal ceremony in the latter stages of his reign seemingly comes into sharper focus only once the Young King was dead and Henry II was alone in his regal authority. Thus, at a great Christmas court at Guilford in 1186, the earls of Leicester and Arundel as well as Roger Bigod served at the king’s table, performing the duties, notes Howden, ‘that pertained to them in the coronations and solemn feasts of the kings of England’, while at Pentecost 1188 Henry is known to have had the laudes sung before him. This renewed stress on his royal status may very possibly have been Henry’s own reaction to his unwilling and unprecedented homage to Philip in December 1183, a homage that John Gillingham has argued was not only his first to Philip, but his first as king-duke to the king of France. Although his planned coronation in the early 1160s was postponed, the young Henry was nonetheless associated with many key acts of government, while during his father’s absences he continued to provide a visible royal persona. Thus at the council convened at London in May 1162, it was to the young Henry that the venerable bishop of Winchester, Henry of Blois, presented his petition that Becket be appointed as archbishop, and the young prince formally consented. Thereafter, he was present with ‘the almost countless crowd of great men and nobles of the realm’ to witness Becket’s consecration at Canterbury. On Henry II’s return   Matthaei Parisiensis, Monachi Sancti Albani, Historia Anglorum, ed. F. Madden, 2 vols. (London 1877), ii, 353.   Diceto, ii, 20 ; D. Knowles, The Episcopal Colleagues of Archbishop Thomas Becket (Cambridge 1951), 154 ; Smith, ‘The Royal Family in the Reign of Henry II’, 59.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 79 ; Warren, Henry II, 245. For a less favourable view of Henry serving his son at table, doubtless written with hindsight of the 1173–4 rebellion, see the poem in Howden, Chronica, ii, 4 n. 3.   Torigni, 276.   Howden, Gesta Regis, ii, 3 ; PR 34 Henry II, 19 ; Eyton, Itinerary, 286–7.   Howden, Gesta Regis, ii, 306 ; on the issue of homage, see John Gillingham’s contribution to this volume.  Edward Grim, MTB, ii, 367 ; Bosham, MTB, iii, 185.   Bosham, MTB, iii, 188–9 ; Staunton, Lives, 66.



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to England in January 1163, the young Henry had received the homage and fealty of the barons and knights of the kingdom, and subsequently that of Malcolm IV of Scotland. It is probable that he was with his father and Becket at the translation of Edward the Confessor’s relics at Westminster in October 1163, and at the consecration of Reading Abbey on 19 April 1164 ; if so, Henry II had been careful to link his son with these two acts deeply imbued with dynastic symbolism. Reading Abbey housed, in Herbert of Bosham’s words, the ‘glorious mausoleum’ of Henry I, but, perhaps more poignantly for the younger Henry, it was where his elder brother William, who had died aged only three, was buried at the feet of Henry II’s grandfather. More certainly, he was present (though not yet nine years old) at Clarendon in January 1164, when Henry issued the Constitutions, and the document itself was careful to note that ‘this record of the aforesaid customs and privileges of the Crown’ was drawn up ‘in the presence of the lord Henry, and of his father, the lord king’. As heir, the young Henry could not but be directly involved with such crucial issues, just as at Avranches in 1172 he was to swear with his father to the agreement formulated with the papal legates. Conversely, when in 1173–4 he attempted to block his father’s ecclesiastical appointments, he protested to the pope that these were ‘contra ipsius voluntatem et assensum’. This direct association with his father’s government was the most fundamental element in the instruction of a prince, intended as an apprenticeship for future kingship. As such, it can hardly be coincidental that from 1164, the young Henry’s new magister was William fitz John, a royal familiaris who significantly is known to have been an itinerant justice hearing pleas in Yorkshire and eight shires in the south-west between 1158 and 1161. In a similar manner, his youngest brother John would subsequently be entrusted to the tutelage of the justiciar Ranulf de Glanvill as his magister. During these years, he was presumably instructed in the   Torigni, 216, 218.   Torigni, 221 ; Bosham, MTB, iii, 260–61.   Torigni, 189.   Gervase, i, 178–80 ; MTB, v, 71–9 ; EHD, ii, 770, no. 126. It went on to urge that the ‘many other great customs and privileges’ not here recorded should be kept safe ‘for holy Church and for our lord the king and his heirs and the barons of the realm’.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 33.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 69 ; Howden, Chronica, ii, 58–9 ; Smith, ‘Henry II’s Heir’, 314, no. 1.   Warren, Henry II, 285 and n. 3. White, Restoration and Reform, 153 and n. 105, 184, 187. He is named as a royal justice along with other ‘wise men’ of Henry II’s court by the Abingdon chronicler in describing the abbot’s case against Thurstan fitz Simon (Chronicon Monasterii de Abingdon, ed. J. Stevenson, 2 vols. (RS 2, 1858), ii, 186–7).   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 7, 304–5, 307–8. John appears in Glanvill’s care by 1182, and was still with him in 1188. In 1170, when Henry II believed himself to be dying, he had ordered the Young King to look after John, then aged only three or four, in his own household, but it is uncertain how long, if at all, he remained with his brother after the king’s recovery. For John’s early years, see K. Norgate, John Lackland (London 1902), 3–11 ; A. W. Lewis, ‘The Birth and Childhood of King

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working of the judicial and financial systems of England and Normandy. Little can be recovered of this process, but a charter of William de Mandeville recording an exchange of land with Roger fitz Richard, dated by Round to 1170, was drawn up at Winchester ‘ad Scaccarium coram domino Rege Henrico filio regis Henrici secundi et baronibus suis’. Describing this same gathering, William of Canterbury names William de St John, William fitz Audelin, Hugh de Gundeville and Ranulf fitz Stephen as young Henry’s tutores, and St John appears as the most frequent witness to the Young King’s writs in Henry’s period as nominal regent from late June 1170, when his father left the kingdom, until late 1172. As Roger Smith has noted, however, the predominance of Henry II’s familiares in the witness lists of his son’s charters in this period, coupled with the fact that many are only either homologues or confirmations of his father’s charters, strongly suggests that the Old King kept a tight hold on his actions. When in 1173 the young Henry fled to France, it was only with his privata familia, slipping away under cover of darkness from ‘his ministers, whom his father had deputed to his service’. Although his own household men emerge more clearly in witness lists post 1175, the events of 1173–4 ensured that the Young King was never to regain his position as regent in England. If such was the young Henry’s ongoing training in government, what of his other education meanwhile ? Famously, in 1170, William Marshal, who had come into the service of Queen Eleanor, was made the Young King’s tutor in arms and, for much of the next thirteen years, he was to remain in this role as a mentor and ‘lord and master of his lord (sire e mestre de son seignor)’. By the Marshal, as well as by other knightly companions, the Young King would have been schooled in the chivalric and courtly virtues expected of the prud’homme. Philip of Flanders

John : Some Revisions’, in Eleanor of Aquitaine, Lord and Lady, ed. B. Wheeler and J. C. Parsons (New York/Basingstoke 2002), 159–75.   J. H. Round, ‘A Glimpse of the Young King’s Court (1170)’, in idem, Feudal England (London 1909), 503–8. Similarly, a grant was made by William fitz Ralph to the monks of Newport ‘coram Rege Henrico filio Regis Henrici et baronibus suis’ at Woodstock, probably in early 1171, and William de St John and William fitz Audelin again appear in the witness list (G. H. Fowler, ‘Henry FitzHenry at Woodstock’, EHR 39 (1924), 240–41).   William of Canterbury, MTB, i, 108–9 ; Smith, ‘Henry II’s Heir’, 299 n. 1.   Ibid., 298–9, 301.   Torigni, 255–6.   F. West, The Justiciarship in England (Cambridge 1966), 33–4 ; Smith, ‘King Henry’s Heir’, 298–300.   History of William Marshal, ll. 1864–966, 2634 ; Crouch, William Marshal, 36–49. The History, l. 6908, has the dying Henry call William ‘beal mestre’.   On the reception of such ideas, see D. Crouch, ‘Loyalty, Career and Self-Justification at the Plantagenet Court : The Thought-World of William Marshal and his Colleagues’, in Culture politique des Plantagenêt (1154–1224), ed. M. Aurell (Poitiers 2003), 229–40.



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would become an important mentor for him from 1173, and Bertran de Born perhaps had pretensions to play a similar role. But in the years following Henry’s removal from Becket’s household, very little is known about any continuing instruction in letters. In either 1167 or 1168, another letter from Rotrou of Rouen penned by Peter of Blois had warned the king that his son’s application to the liberal arts was being harmed by an excess of martial sports, and the tendency has been to take such remarks at face value. To Galbraith, the Young King was the least educated of Henry’s boys : ‘All his sons were more or less literate, except perhaps the eldest, the young Henry, whose patronage of the tournament suggests a misspent youth.’ Other historians have agreed with this view, no doubt influenced by the History of William the Marshal, from which it is easy enough to gain the impression that the Young King did little else than participate in a constant round of tourneys in the 1170s and early 1180s. Walter Map, in his famous description of Henry II’s education and linguistic skills, had remarked that ‘he had a skill of letters (litteratus) as far as was fitting or practically useful’. By contrast, Map lamented, young Henry was ‘non litteratus’  in the sense of not being a man of letters  but emphasized, as did other contemporaries, his powers of speech and persuasion. He was clearly adept at courtly discourse, which implies some formal training ; such articulate expression (‘eloquentiae flora’) and rhetorical skill were important kingly qualities, as Archbishop William of Tyre noted in his praise of Baldwin III, king of Jerusalem (1143–62). Baldwin was also fond of reading and of conversation with men of letters, while William noted with evident approval that the king particularly enjoyed listening to histories and the deeds of noble kings and princes, an interest no doubt fostered by the great historian himself. William of Tyre’s comments serve as an important reminder that at the courts of Henry II and his sons histories like those of Wace, Benoît or John of Marmoutier, which praised the deeds of their Norman or Angevin ancestors, were as much didactic as entertaining, holding up models of rulership and military command. In this context, it can be no accident that in his Roman de Rou, written in its surviving form after the siege of Rouen by Louis VII and the Young King in 1174, Wace maintains a discreet silence over the closely analogous rebellions of   G. Gouiran, ‘Bertran de Born : Un Maître pour les princes Plantagenêt ?’, ibid., 129–41.   PL, ccvii, 210–12 ; Peter of Blois, Opera, i, 197–201, no. 67.   Galbraith, ‘The Literacy of Medieval English Kings’, 93.   Thus, for instance, Turner, ‘Eleanor of Aquitaine and her Children’, 327, has noted in regard to Rotrou’s admonition that ‘certainly the young king’s career indicates that the fear was justified, for the code of chivalry weighed more heavily with him than did the classics’.   Map, De Nugis, 476–7, 278–9, 282–3.   Willelmi Tyrensis Archiepiscopi Chronicon, ed. R. B. C. Huygens (Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis 63–63a, Turnhout 1986), ii, 714–15 (bk 16, chap. 2) ; trans. E. A. Babcock and A. C. Krey, A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, 2 vols. (New York 1943), ii, 138.

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Robert Curthose against his father. Rather, he emphasizes the virtues of Henry I’s loyal son William Aetheling, who ‘did what his father asked and avoided what his father forbade’, gathering the flower of English and Norman knighthood around him. Wace has much to say about Henry I himself, whose iconic position in Henry II’s own conception of his kingship is well known, but who must also have been a role model par excellence held up to the younger Henry by his father and by Henry II’s courtiers. That his great-grandfather’s exploits were still commonly related is suggested both by the anecdotes included in Map’s Courtiers’ Trifles and by John of Salisbury’s passing remark in his Policraticus concerning Henry I’s triumph at Brémule, ‘how he crushed and put to flight the King of the Franks in a heated battle I intentionally fail to mention lest the repetition of wellknown events become tedious, because his victory is often mentioned and many witnesses exist in both kingdoms who were present at the battle’. It is perhaps unlikely that the young Henry had gained the kind of precocious learning displayed by the Beaumont twins at Henry I’s court, but he could nonetheless attract into his own service intellectuals of the stature of Ralph Niger and Gervase of Tilbury. Gervase, who thought highly of the Young King (‘excellentissimus rex junior’), later informed his subsequent patron Otto IV that he had written a ‘Book of Entertainments’ (Liber Facetiarum) ‘at the command of my lord your uncle, the illustrious king of England, Henry the Younger’. He had planned, moreover, to compose another book in recognition of his kindness. This was to be divided into three sections, and was to contain a description, at least in brief, of the whole world, and its division into provinces, naming the greater and lesser sees. Then I intended to add the various marvels of each province. The Young King’s premature death had prevented Gervase from offering this second book to him, but it formed the basis of the work he presented to Otto as the Otia Imperialia. Gervase also notes that Master Ralph Niger ‘that learned man of our time’ was ‘a fellow courtier (concurialis) of mine in the service of my lord the Young King’. The presence at his court of two such eruditi of international reputation suggests a more rounded picture of the younger Henry and his intellectual interests than that simply as the leader of a mesnie of sport-obsessed youths. That we glimpse little or nothing of this aspect of the Young King’s life from the   Wace, Roman de Rou, ed. G. S. Burgess (St Helier 2002), ll. 10149–61.   Map, De Nugis, 436–41, where he also refers to Henry I’s triumph at Brémule ; Policraticus, trans. Nederman, 118–19 (bk VI, chap. 18).   William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, ed. and trans. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom, 2 vols. (Oxford 1998), i, 734–7 ; D. Crouch, The Beaumont Twins : The Roots and Branches of Power in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge 1986), 7.   Otia Imperialia, 14–15.   Ibid., 186–7.



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History of William Marshal is perhaps because, as David Crouch has noted, the Marshal himself was comparatively poorly educated compared to other laymen he worked with in government and showed little interest in literary patronage. By contrast, in the final court scene in Erec and Enide, perhaps composed in or shortly after 1170, Chrétien de Troyes deliberately stresses the link between the liberal arts and ideal kingship by describing how Erec’s magnificent coronation robe was embroidered with allegorical figures of Music, Geometry, Arithmetic and Astrology. Whether or not the scene is, as has been suggested, an allusion to Henry II’s Christmas court at Nantes in 1169, Chrétien’s implication here was that even if the ruler himself was not a ‘philosopher king’ (for the young Erec had as yet revealed little beyond his prowess as a knight), then at least such arts, and those skilled in teaching them, should form an integral part of the court of a civilized  and successful  king. Some of these clerks and magistri, moreover, might be young men of an age with the Young King himself : Gervase of Tilbury, for example, was probably born c.1150–52. As Duby reminds us, there was a clerical as well as a knightly dimension to ‘youth’, and clerks competed in the households of the great for favour and influence through literary skills and intellectual accomplishment just as much as their secular counterparts did through prowess in arms. We know all too little about the role of Ralph Niger at the Young King’s court, but he had been a partisan of Becket and, like Gerald of Wales, was to grow bitterly hostile to Henry II. His second chronicle contains a vehement denunciation of the king, for which his continuator felt obliged to apologize, explaining that Niger had been exiled by Henry, though at what date and for what reason he does not say. Gerald Flahiff showed, however, that this exile was not linked to the Becket quarrel, and it may be that his denunciation and banishment was the result   Crouch, William Marshal, 6, 23–8.   Chrétien de Troyes, Erec et Enide, ed. J.-M. Fritz (Paris 1992), ll. 6673–747 ; Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances, trans. W. W. Kibler (London 1991), 119–20.   B. Schmolke-Hasselmann, ‘Henri II Plantagenêt, roi d’Angleterre, et la genèse d’Erec et Enide’, CCM, 24 (1981), 241–6 ; G. S. Burgess, Chrétien de Troyes : Erec and Enide (London 1984), 97–8, 100–101.  Richardson, ‘Gervase of Tilbury’, 105–6. He may have been even younger : Otia Imperialia, p. xxvi.   G. Duby, ‘The Culture of the Knightly Class : Audience and Patronage’, in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. R. L. Benson and G. Constable with D. Lonham (Harvard 1982), 248–62 ; cf. A. Putter, ‘Knights and Clerics at the Court of Champagne : Chrétien de Troyes’s Romances in Context’, in Medieval Knighthood V : Papers From the Sixth Strawberry Hill Conference, 1994, ed. S. Church and R. Harvey (Woodbridge 1995), 243–66.   For Niger, G. B. Flahiff, ‘Ralph Niger : An Introduction to his Life and Works’, Medieval Studies, 2 (1940), 104–26 ; L. Smugge, ‘Thomas Becket und König Heinrich II in der Sicht des Radulfus Niger’, Deutsches Archiv, 22 (1976), 572–79.   Radulphi Nigri Chronica, ed. R. Anstruther (London 1851), 169–70.

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of his support for young Henry, just as Gerald of Wales’s retirement from court after 1194 may well have been connected to his impolitic support for Count John during Richard I’s crusade and captivity. Such literati did not, of course, simply provide scribal services or works of entertainment and erudition ; they served as experts in canon law, envoys and diplomats to courts such as those of Louis VII and the papal curia, and drafted appropriate documentation. In 1173, for example, a long letter was sent to Alexander III on behalf of the Young King, justifying his rebellion, in particular citing his father’s continuing abuses towards the Church, while promising to repeal some of the old and bad customs contained in the constitutions of Clarendon. This was the work of one or more of the ecclesiastics in his circle, and of someone seemingly prepared to forge a writ of Henry II to demonstrate the old king’s uncanonical interference in elections. Becket’s former clerical supporters must have viewed the Young King not only as a focus of resistance against Henry II’s perceived persecution of the Church and as the tool of God’s vengeance, but as a fruitful source of future patronage. It was such men who had a vested interest when in 1173, the younger Henry objected to the election of Richard, prior of Dover, to the archbishopric of Canterbury, and to other key ecclesiastical appointments made by his father, because they had been made without the Young King’s consent. When, in 1174, the elect of Canterbury and Reginald, elect of Bath, reached the curia, they found the younger Henry’s ‘nuncios’, with those of Louis, already there and putting up a stiff, though ultimately unsuccessful resistance to their consecrations. In this context, could the long and damning list of Henry’s abuses of government in Ralph Niger’s chronicle have been based on a more expansive list of grievances, drafted to legitimize and rally support for the Young King’s opposition to his father ? More certainly, a man of the political calibre of Arnulf of Lisieux had come under Henry II’s suspicion for   Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 65.   RHF, xvi, 643–8 ; Smith, ‘Henry II’s Heir’, 314, no. 1. For discussion of this letter, R. Foreville, L’Église et la Royauté sous Henri II Plantagenêt (1154–1189) (Paris 1943), 378–84.   C & S, 958 n. 2. As the editors note of this supposed writ, ‘no doubt it represented Henry II’s intention ; we cannot feel any confidence that the essential reference to Richard of Ilchester occurred in a genuine writ’. Both sides, however, could play the propaganda war ; the letters by Peter of Blois on behalf of Archbishops Richard of Canterbury and Rotrou of Rouen censuring the Young King for his rebellion and reprimanding Eleanor for her disloyalty were surely not mere scholastic exercises in rhetoric but intended for wide dissemination, especially, no doubt, to Rome (Peter of Blois, Opera, i, 141–5, no. 47 ; 110–13, no. 33 ; ii, 93–5, no. 154).   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 69 ; Gervase, i, 243–51 ; Torigni, 256–63 ; Diceto, i, 368–91 ; Smith, ‘Henry II’s Heir’, 318, no. 11 ; John of Salisbury, Opera Omnia, in PL, cxcix, 368–71 ; LCGF, 295–6 ; The Letter Collections of Arnulf of Lisieux, trans. C. P. Schriber (Texts and Studies in Religion 72, Lewiston, me, 1997), 171–4, no. 2 :28. Howden, Chronica, ii, 58–9, adds the name of Master Berter of Orléans to those clerks representing the Young King at the Curia in 1174.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 69.   Radulphi Nigri Chronica, 167–9.



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being a partisan of the Young King in 1173, as also had William, formerly abbot of Reading, but now archbishop of Bordeaux. The paradox of Henry II’s careful provision for his succession was that it was his very grooming of the Young King for future kingship that fuelled his eldest son’s growing frustration and led to his demands for direct government over part of Henry’s dominion. The circumstances of the Young King’s coronation in relation to the final tragic stages of the Becket dispute are well known, but the coronation, on 14 June 1170, also marked the first of a series of key events that led to the outbreak of rebellion in 1173. Anointed, crowned and having received the homage of the magnates and of King William the Lion and his brother David, the young Henry must have felt that this act marked the end of his period of tutelage and minority. Such an impression was reinforced when, soon after, Henry II sailed to Normandy, leaving the Young King in England with permission to make ‘omnes rectitudines et justicias’ by means of the seal newly made for him. Only a month later, Henry II fell grievously ill at La Motte-de-Ger near Domfront ; despairing of his life, he not only ordered his body to be buried at Grandmont, but restated the territorial divisions to be made between his sons, confirming those made at Montmirail the year before. Young Henry was to receive England, Normandy, Anjou and Maine, and Henry II entrusted John into his care ‘ad promovendum et manutenendum’. It is worth pausing to consider a counterfactual question. What if Henry, then thirty-seven, had succumbed to his illness, as his father Geoffrey had done aged only thirty-nine ? Becket’s murder would probably not have occurred, Henry II himself would have been praised for his foresight in having his eldest son crowned just in time, not condemned for it, and the Young King would, as his father had intended, have become the head of the Angevin family. Henry, of course, did not die. But rumours had spread that he was dead, and, for two tense months in August and September 1170, the Young King must have expected to attain sole rule. We cannot know whether his feelings on hearing of his father’s recovery were feelings of joy, relief or disappointment. But a striking indication of his eagerness to rule is provided by Torigni’s description of the Christmas court held in the winter of 1171 at Bur near Bayeux, when Henry II was absent in Ireland. As Abbot Robert noted, ‘as he now, for the first time, held his court in Normandy, he was anxious that the festival should be celebrated with great magnificence’.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 51 n. 4 ; C. P. Schriber, The Dilemma of Arnulf of Lisieux : New Ideas versus Old Ideas (Bloomington, in, 1990), 113–15.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 49.   Heslin, ‘The Coronation of the Young King’, 165–78.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 6 ; Torigni, 246.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 6–7.   Torigni, 253. The gesture is particularly significant if, as it seems, the younger Henry’s

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If his father was sending back propaganda letters about his success in Ireland, the younger Henry was demonstrating his independence and separate political identity ; not browbeating the Normans or exacting taxes but wooing them with his largesse. It was surely at this great court, also attended by his brother Geoffrey and leading Breton lords, that men secretly rehearsed their grievances against Henry II, most recently his inquest that year into the extent of royal demesne in Normandy lost since 1135  a retrenchment that Torigni believed had almost doubled his revenues from the duchy. The name William subsequently given to his son in 1177, his intimate association with the tournament circuit operating on the borders of the duchy and his final wish to be buried in the cathedral of Rouen may well be other manifestations of the Young King’s attempts to cast himself in the mould of a Norman duke. Subsequently, his second coronation in August 1172, this time with his wife Margaret, added pressure for him to obtain lands for his direct rule. Small wonder, then, that he objected so vociferously when, in order to clinch the proposed marriage of John to the daughter of Count Humbert of Maurienne, Henry II attempted to bestow Chinon, Loudun and Mirebeau on John, taking them from a partrimony from which the young Henry as yet had nothing. ‘He took it badly’, as Howden notes, ‘that his father did not wish to assign him any territory where he could dwell with his queen.’ His inability to make grants of his own is revealed in his surviving acta, where even charters in favour of monastic foundations are only confirmations of those of his father. If William the Marshal remained technically a ‘youth’ into his forties, it was principally because his lord, the Young King, did not have any lands with which to enfeof him or others in his service. In studying the closely analogous case of the rebellions of Robert Curthose, Bill Aird has spoken of the ‘frustrated masculinity’ of an eldest son seeking to gain not only martial glory, but lands that could support his knights and other followers in suitable state. The ensuing tensions between father and delegated powers in Normandy were less extensive than in England (Smith, ‘Henry II’s Heir’, 307–8). Nevertheless, at Christmas 1172 he held a separate court at Bonneville, while Henry II and Eleanor held their Christmas festivities at Chinon (Torigni, 255).   Torigni, 252.   Ibid., 251.   For the Maurienne match, see Warren, Henry II, 117–118, 221.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 177.   Smith, ‘Henry II’s Heir’, 297 and n. 3, 301–2 ; cf. Turner, ‘The Households of the Sons of Henry II’, 51–2.   Duby, ‘Youth’, 113.   W. Aird, ‘Frustrated Masculinity : The Relationship between William the Conqueror and his Eldest Son’, in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. D. M. Hadley (London 1998), 39–55. Robert’s rebellion was cited by Ralph of Diceto among his long list of exempla of rebellious sons against their fathers with which he begins his account of the war of 1173–4 (Diceto, i, 365) ; cf. C. W. David, Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy (Cambridge, ma, 1920), 18.



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son were vividly expressed in the speeches Orderic Vitalis places in the mouths of Robert Curthose and William I ; to his son’s demand for direct rule of England or Normandy, the Conqueror rejoins by urging patience and warning him against the bad counsel of those ‘seditiosi iuvenes’ who had shamed Robert into making hasty and unreasoned demands on his father and lord. The parallels with the Young King are direct. For whereas some contemporaries saw the hand of Eleanor, her uncle Ralf de Faye and Louis of France behind the outbreak of the rebellion in 1173, the most immediate sources of discontent came from within the Young King’s own household. Henry II had removed Hasculf of St-Hilaire and ‘other young knights (alios equites juniores) from the counsel and household of his son (a consilio et famulatu filii sui)’, doubtless because they had been urging him to press his father for independent rule, and it was this purge that Torigni regarded as the immediate cause of the Young King’s escape from his father’s ministers and his flight via Argenteuil to Louis VII. It is not hard to imagine the powerful influence young and ambitious companions might exert on a young prince, fuelling mutual desires for advancement and glory through feats of arms, even by rebellion if need be. A summons to the Marshal in 1188 reveals that William had complained repeatedly to Henry II about lack of an adequate reward, and we can be sure he had put as much if not greater pressure on the Young King for preferment during their long association together. It is hardly surprising that the History keeps such a guarded silence over William’s role in the 1173–4 rebellion, as well as that of the Marshal’s first lord, William of Tancarville. It is equally telling that although one of the poem’s principal themes is the virtues of loyalty, nowhere does the Marshal urge young Henry to stay loyal to his father. Instead, the poet throws most of the blame on those ‘evil counsellors’ in the Old King’s familia who stirred up his resentment at his son’s lavish expenditure, and directed his ire towards certain of those in the Young King’s household accused of leading his son astray.   Orderic, ii, 357–61 ; iii, 96–112.   Diceto, i, 355.   The Young King’s familia is discussed by Meyer, Hist. de Guillaume le Maréchal, iii, pp. xxx– xxxiv ; Turner, ‘The Households of the Sons of Henry II’, 51–7.   Torigni, 255–6. The core of this group of knighly familiares, including men such as Adam d’Yquebeuf, Gerard Talbot, Robert Tresgoz and William Marshal, is revealed in the Young King’s acta, and most of them are listed by Howden as rebels in 1173–4 (Smith, ‘Henry II’s Heir’, 300 ; Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 45–6).   Compare the speech given to Robert’s friends by Orderic, iii, 96–9.  N. Vincent, ‘William Marshal, Henry II and the Honour of Châteauroux’, Archives, 25 (2000), 1–15.   Diceto, i, 371 ; Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 45. Despite the great significance of the war of 1173–4, the History of William Marshal, ll. 1971–2277, records it only briefly, and no mention is made of the chamberlain of Tancarville.   Ibid., ll. 1971–2008.

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Just as Roger Smith has noted that the Young King’s acta ‘offer us a binocular vision of a period in Henrician diplomatic’, so too the career of the Young King reveals the political tensions between two individual but closely connected royal households. The Young King’s defection to Louis in 1173 immediately placed the members of his own household in a dilemma, forcing them to declare where their first loyalties lay. Thus Richard Barre, who carried the Young King’s seal, immediately returned to Henry II and surrendered it to him. With him came other servants with the Young King’s baggage train, for young Henry had fled by night with only his closest companions. But in a characteristic gesture of magnanimity, Henry II not only sent them back to his son with his baggage with orders to serve him faithfully, but also sent silver cups, horses and rich cloth. The Young King, however, at once demanded that those who wished to stay with him should swear an oath of fidelity to him against his father, upon which several of his household officials who had been appointed by his father, such as Walter, his chaplain, Aelward his chamberlain and William Blund, his steward refused to do so, and were allowed to return to the old king. Despite the restoration of peace between father and son in 1174, the relationship between the two remained a major source of friction. In 1176, Henry II believed that the Young King’s repeated requests to go on pilgrimage to Compostela were not motivated by genuine piety but were merely a ruse ‘arising from the evil advice of his hangers-on (ex pravo adulatorum suorum consilio)’ to escape from his father’s control. Much more seriously, in the immediate aftermath of Richard’s campaign against the count of Angoulême in 1176, the Young King, while in Poitou itself, provocatively took into his household some knights from France and Normandy who in Howden’s words, ‘his father hated’, and made them his familiares. When, moreover, his vice-chancellor, Adam of Churchdown, wrote to inform the old king, the Young King had him tried for treason ; his clerical orders narrowly saved him from execution, but he was publicly scourged and then imprisoned at Argentan, until Henry II demanded he be handed over to his cus  Smith, ‘Henry II’s Heir’, 298.   For a discussion of the Young King’s household, see Turner, ‘The Households of the Sons of Henry II’, 51–7.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 42–3 ; and for the Young King’s seal, Smith,’Henry II’s Heir’, 304–6. For Richard Barre, see R. V. Turner, ‘Richard Barre and Michael Belet : Two Angevin Civil Servants’, Medieval Prosopography, 6 (1985), 25–48. The fact that, as noted by Smith, ‘Henry II’s Heir’, 301, Barre does not appear in the witness lists to confirmations made by the Young King at Woodstock and Winchester in 1170, but was present in his household by 1173, may suggest that his appointment was a direct response by Henry II to counter the disruptive influence of some of his son’s younger counsellors.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 114. Several of these men appear in the witness lists for the Young King’s grants to Canterbury, probably to be dated between Oct. 1175 and summer 1176 (Smith, ‘Henry II’s Heir’, 317–18, nos. 9, 10).   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 122.



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tody. It was against this background that Henry finally allowed his son to leave for northern France, where he remained until February 1179, busying himself on the tournament circuit. To Warren, dismissive of the Young King’s active participation in condominium with his father, this period demonstrated young Henry’s essential levity. Not only had he been ‘no more than a cipher’, but his sojourn in France between April 1176 and February 1179 occurred ‘during a critical phase in the development of English government’  he thus ‘missed’ the great reforms masterminded by his father. Despite the efforts to associate him in government, the feckless young Henry was bored by such weighty affairs, and preferred the tourney. Yet such a judgement needs substantial revision. First, it is questionable whether the Young King really was so uninterested in government as Warren believed. Rather, what is striking is the way in which the Young King appears directly linked with major policies immediately before his departure and after his return from northern France. In 1176, the appointment of justices to six regions of the kingdom was made at Northampton ‘on the advice of the king his son, and in the presence of the bishops, earls, barons, knights and his other vassals, and with their consent’, and, as Howden notes, the assize was written down ‘on the advice of his son, King Henry’. Similarly at Windsor in 1179, the establishment of the circuit for the justices in eyre was done by the magnates’ common counsel ‘and in the presence of the king, his son’. It is difficult if not impossible to ascertain the degree to which the Young King participated in the framing of, and deliberations concerning, such major acts of policy, but for this very reason it would be unwise simply to dismiss his role as nominal. Sound military and political reasons could be, and no doubt were, readily adduced by the old king for not wanting to relinquish immediate control of England, Normandy or Anjou as the heartlands of his empire, but one can hardly conclude that among these was Henry II’s realization that his son was not fit for the challenges of rule, when he had not as yet been given the opportunity to exercise such rule independently. The truth was that neither William I nor Henry II ever solved the problem of how to achieve security of succession by designating their heir without having to relinquish real power to him. Henry II had trained the younger Henry for rule but never allowed him any direct power through which he could effectively master the arts of government. The legitimacy of the Young King’s expectations, moreover, was recognised by contemporaries. As Jordan Fantosme, crucially writing without hindsight of the young Henry’s premature death, noted at the very outset of his poem concerning the war of 1173–4, ‘a king without a realm is at   Ibid., 122–3.   Warren, Henry II, 580–81.   Diceto, i, 404 ; Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 106 ; EHD, ii, 513–14 (no. 59).   Diceto, i, 238 ; EHD, ii, 514.

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a loss for something to do : at such a loss was the noble and gracious Young King’. While censuring the rebellion of Henry II’s son, Jordan is frankly critical of the old king, seeing his reluctance to share power as the real cause of strife : ‘After this crowning and this transfer of power you took away from your son some of his authority, you thwarted his wishes so that he could not exercise power. Therein lay the seeds of a pitiless war. God’s curse be on it !’ For all Robert Curthose’s complaints, William I had at least been consistent in not delegating real executive rule to any of his sons. By contrast, Henry II had allowed a substantial degree of autonomy to Richard in Aquitaine and to Geoffrey in Brittany, thereby making the Young King’s position painfully anomalous. Immediate precedent, moreover, supported his demands ; had not his own father been ceded the duchy of Normandy by Geoffrey le Bel in 1150, when he was only sixteen ? Moreover, the fact that Normandy was Henry II’s maternal inheritance goes far to explaining why the Young King, having been refused direct rule of Normandy or England, cast such envious eyes on Aquitaine, and eventually tried to wrest it from Richard by force. Henry’s wish following the Young King’s death that John assume control of Aquitaine while Richard stepped into the young Henry’s shoes, suggests he had come to regard his sons’ spheres of authority as transferable ; had the Young King been given associate rule of Aquitaine from the outset, with the intention of relinquishing the duchy to his younger brother once he had succeeded Henry II in England, Normandy and Anjou, the old king might  perhaps  have enjoyed greater success in his plans for the division of and succession to his empire. As it was, Henry chose to use his wealth to stave off his eldest son’s demands. In 1174 Henry II granted his son a revenue of 15,000 livres angevins, and in 1182, as a direct response to young Henry’s departure once more to Louis’s court, he promised in addition to pay for the expenses of a hundred knights for a year. But these were short-term and inadequate measures. What is surprising is not that the young Henry rebelled, but that, after 1174, he did not do so again until 1183 : a respite of almost a decade that stands in marked contrast to the only brief period of reconciliation between the Conqueror and Curthose following the end of his first rebellion in c.1079 until his second exile, beginning c.1083.   Jordan Fantosme, ll. 21–2, 17–20. For Jordan’s attitude to the Young King, see M. J. Strickland, ‘Arms and the Men : War, Loyalty and Lordship in Jordan Fantosme’s Chronicle’, in Medieval Knighthood IV : Papers From the Fifth Strawberry Hill Conference, ed. C. Harper-Bill and R. Harvey (Woodbridge 1992), 187–220.   Torigni, 161 ; Z. N. Brooke and C. N. L. Brooke, ’Henry II, Duke of Normandy and Aquitaine’, EHR 61 (1946), 81–9 ; J. Le Patourel, ‘Angevin Successions and the Angevin Empire’, in idem, Feudal Empires Norman and Plantagenet, ed. M. Jones (London 1984), pp. ix, 1–17.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 308.   Ibid., 291.   David, Robert Curthose, 17–41.



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A principal factor in explaining this period of quiescence was the existence by the 1170s of a developed tournament circuit, which acted as a vital safety valve for the frustration of young Henry and his companions as well as other ‘youth’. This brings us to the second major qualification of the traditional view of the Young King expressed by Lewis Warren : to regard time spent in tourneying or errantry as frivolous or irrelevant is surely to misunderstand the great significance placed by contemporaries on these activities by young nobleman. Errantry was, as Duby demonstrated, expected of eldest sons of the aristocracy, and to abstain from travel and martial exploits was to incur not simply ennui, but shame and a loss of reputation. On this Chrétien de Troyes and the History of William Marshal speak with one voice. ‘Long inactivity shames a young man’, pronounced the History, while in Cligés Alexander tells his father the Emperor : ‘Many high-born men through indolence have forfeited the great fame they might have had, had they set off through the world. Idleness and glory do not go well together it seems to me ; a noble man who sits and waits gains nothing.’ John Gillingham has pointed to the criticisms levelled at Henry II for neglecting judicial business in favour of the hunt, but no such criticism was directed at the Young King, for such martial games were seen as wholly appropriate to both his station and time of life. Even the normally sober Roger of Howden revealed his enthusiasm in describing the prowess of Henry’s sons in the tournament, as well as his recognition of the vital military training such sports provided. Henry II himself might well balk at the great extravagance of his son’s tournament activities, but he fully realised their value not only a means of keeping his heir occupied but of displaying the wealth and prestige of the Angevin dynasty on the international stage. As Ralph of Diceto remarked, Young King Henry, the king’s son, left England [in 1176] and passed three years in tournaments, spending a lot of money. While he was rushing all over France he put aside the royal majesty and was transformed from a king into a knight, carrying off victory in various meetings. His popularity made him famous ; the old king was happier counting up and admiring his victories, and although the Young King was still under age, his father restored   It is possible that, as suggested by Crouch, Tournament, 7, Robert Curthose and his companions engaged in tournaments during his exile from 1083 to 1087, although there is no direct evidence for this. What is certain is that a century later, the tournament had undergone significant development and appears far more widespread in northern France.   History of William Marshal, l. 2402 ; Les Romans de Chrétien de Troyes, ii : Cligés, ed. A. Micha (Paris 1957), ll. 152–8 ; Arthurian Romances, trans. Burgess, 124–5.   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 111.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 207 ; Howden, Chronica, ii, 166–7.

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in full his possessions that he had taken away. Thus occupied with knightly matters until no glory was lacking to him, he sailed from Wissant and was received with honour by the king his father . . . As the laments on his death clearly reveal, the Young Henry ‘s tourneying activities had won him an international reputation and great praise as the upholder of chivalry and largesse. For members of his household, the tourney provided the opportunity for knights such as William the Marshal and Roger de Jouy to obtain money through ransoms and the seizure of horses and arms, and perhaps opportunities for social advancement, which the young King could not as yet provide. It was, of course, easy to scoff at the contrast between Richard’s hard-fought campaigns in Poitou and the mock warfare of the tournament. As Bertran de Born remarked acidly , ‘we’ve changed lords  a jouster for a fine warrior’. But it is worth remembering that the young Henry had had little opportunity before 1176 to act as his father’s lieutenant in any major campaign ; he had been too young to participate on the Toulouse campaign of 1159 or that against the Welsh in 1164, and needed as vicegerent to remain in England during his father’s expedition to Ireland in 1171. Indeed, ironically, his first military action was to be against his father in 1173, when he took part in Philip of Flanders’ invasion of Normandy. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that although their joint forces succeeded in taking Châteauneuf-sur-Charente, the Young King’s involvement in Richard’s campaign of 1176 in Poitou was brief and unspectacular. The campaign must have served to heighten the contrast between the brothers’ respective powers ; although still acting as his father’s agent, Richard had his own military household, could command a siege train, raise knight service in his lands, hire mercenaries, and through constant campaigning with men like Theobald Chabot, his magister militum, had created an effective fighting force. Beyond the immediate members of his own household, such military resources were denied the Young King, except when they were on loan from his father. Nevertheless, the Young King’s participation in and patronage of so many tournaments acted as a mechanism by which knights from all over the Angevin dominions and beyond could come together and fight under him as a team. Speaking of the tournament between Anet and Sorel, the History of William Marshal noted that ‘from the other side of the country came the Normans and the   Diceto, i, 428. Diceto’s comments would suggest a qualification to Crouch’s view that Henry regarded his son’s activities merely as ‘wasteful and trivial’ (Crouch, Tournament, 23).   Cf. ibid., 23–6.   The Poems of the Troubadour Bertran de Born, 202–3, no. 13, ‘Rassa, tan creis e monta e poia’ : ‘nos avem camiat seignor, bon gerrier per torneiador’.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 49.   Ibid., 121.   Ibid., 101, 120–21 ; Diceto, i, 407 ; Gillingham, Richard I, 52–5.



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Bretons, who sided with them ; then there were the English, men from Le Mans and Anjou, along with the men of Poitou with their lord, the Young King’. It would be unwise to overemphasize such solidarity, which was indeed brittle, but the Young King’s retinues, bound together by his extraordinary largesse, may have represented the more acceptable face of Angevin hegemony. Moreover, by retaining knights from all over France, albeit only for limited periods of the tourneys, the Young King was but following in the steps of Anglo-Norman kings like William Rufus, whom Suger called ‘a wonderful merchant and paymaster of knights (mirabilisque militium mercator et solidator)’, and Henry I, who had attracted skilled warriors from many lands into the familia regis. As Wace noted approvingly of William Aetheling, ‘William, Henry’s son, gave and spent generously . . . the flower of chivalry from England and Normandy set about serving him and had great hopes of him’. By contrast, the failure of Louis VII or Philip Augustus to sponsor, let alone participate in, the widespread tournaments of northern France robbed them of a chance not only to gain martial prestige, but of the environment in which to foster a chivalric courtly culture such as that enjoyed by the counts of Flanders and Champagne, and by the Angevins through the efforts of the Young King. In this context, the Young King’s close association with Philip of Alsace in the period 1176–9 is noteworthy. Henry II clearly did not feel anxious about his son’s dealing with his former ally in the war of 1173–4, and may have regarded this as a means of furthering the vital political rapprochment with Flanders. Walter Map certainly regarded young Henry’s time with Count Philip as a continuing form of tutelage, noting that he ‘offered himself alone and a foreigner to Philip, count of Flanders, to learn of him (if worthy) the art of chivalry (quatinus armis instrui mereretur ab ipso), and chose him out for his lord : a wise choice, for of all the princes of these days, except our own king, he is the mightiest in arms and in the art of ruling’. Let us conclude this thematic sketch of the Young King’s upbringing with one final point. In 1173–4, Henry II’s enemies had attempted to use the young Henry as an ‘anti-king’ against his father. But by failing to give the Young King any de facto power or political responsibility, Henry II himself had unwittingly helped to create a potent counter-image of Angevin kingship. Precisely because he had not had to govern, to tax, to wage war or to disappoint men by his judgements, the Young King was highly popular, though no doubt such popularity would have dissipated soon enough had he begun to reign. As it was, Henry II’s rule appeared   History of William Marshal, ll. 2783–7.   Suger, Vie de Louis VI le Gros, ed. H. Waquet (Paris 1929), 8.   Wace, Roman de Rou, ed. Burgess, 312–13, ll. 10141–2, 10149–6.   Map, De Nugis, 278. For the Young King’s friendship with Philip, see History of William Marshal, ll. 2436 ff.

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to many as harsh and oppressive, and the Young King as the hope of a brighter future  much in the same way as many greeted Richard’s accession in 1189 as a new dawn. More immediately, the discontented lords of Aquitaine saw in young Henry the antithesis of the iron-handed Richard, and the crisis of 1183 shook the loyalty of men well beyond the duchy’s boundaries. Ironically, the Young King’s most successful campaign was to be his last. But his image as the ideal of Angevin kingship lived on. Writing in the 1220s, the author of the History of William Marshal looked to the young Henry III to emulate his uncle, while Gervase of Tilbury held him up as a model king to another nephew, Otto IV. ‘Assuredly’, Gervase wrote, ‘as he was a solace to the world while he lived, so it was a blow to all chivalry (universe milicie) when he died in the very glow of youth . . . When Henry died, heaven was hungry, so all the world went begging.’   Map, De Nugis, 280, complained of the defection of the men of Maine and Anjou during the siege of Limoges.   History of William Marshal, ll. 2693–712 ; cf. ll. 2637–92, 6873–995.   Otia Imperialia, 486–7.

Paul Brand

Henry II and the Creation of the English Common Law

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he reign of Henry II has long been regarded, and rightly, as a period of major importance in the history of English law. For most legal historians it is the period when it first becomes possible to recognise the existence of an English ‘Common Law’ : both a set of national legal institutions bringing law and justice to the whole of England, and a body of legal rules applicable over the whole or almost the whole of England. The clearest overall view of this newly emergent English ‘Common Law’ is to be found in the pages of the legal treatise known as Glanvill, which was completed, though not necessarily all written, in the final years of Henry’s reign, between 1187 and 1189. Within a few years of the death of Henry II we get the first direct evidence for the operation of the new Common Law in the earliest surviving plea-roll records of the king’s courts, the first of which dates from 1194. Our picture of the process by which that Common Law began to emerge is much less clear, since it depends on scattered and fragmentary evidence that is difficult to interpret. It is with that process of emergence that this paper will be mainly concerned. Let me start, however, by reviewing both what had been achieved and what had not been achieved by the end of Henry II’s reign. This is not meant to sound teleological, as though there was some grand plan gradually being put into effect by the king and his advisers. It is merely intended to serve as a useful heuristic device for measuring both how much had actually changed during Henry II’s reign and how much had yet to change before the Common Law took on the kind of general shape and features it possessed in the later Middle Ages and after.   Tractatus de legibus et consuetudinibus regni Anglie que Glanvilla vocatur : The Treatise on the Laws and Customs of the Realm of England commonly called Glanvill, ed. G. D. G. Hall (NMT 1965) ; hereafter cited by book and chapter. For the context of its composition and references to the earlier literature on the treatise, see P. Brand, ‘Legal Education in England before the Inns of Court’, in Learning the Law : Teaching and the Transmission of Law in England, 1150–1900, ed. J. A. Bush and A. Wijffels (London 1999), 52–6.

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Although there is some evidence for royal justices visiting more than one county and holding sessions in them as early as the reign of Henry I, there can be little doubt that the General Eyre, as a systematic arrangement for the nationwide visitation of all counties within a limited period of time by groups of royal justices possessing both civil and criminal jurisdiction and bringing royal justice to the countryside (and also with a remit to make local enquiries on the king’s behalf ) was indeed a creation of the reign of Henry II. The General Eyre as thus created continued to play an important, though gradually declining, role in the functioning of the English legal system down to the end of thirteenth century. It was not in a strict sense a single court with a continuous institutional existence. In many respects, however, it functioned as though it were such a court, with multiple divisions each possessing the same jurisdiction, but with the court itself enjoying only a discontinuous existence and mutating in shape and even in jurisdiction over time. There was no fully separate Common Bench at Westminster, no institutionally distinct central royal civil court with a nationwide jurisdiction, during the reign of Henry II. This was only to emerge a few years later, around the middle of Richard I’s reign. Its eventual emergence was, however, clearly foreshadowed during Henry’s reign, when the Exchequer at Westminster began to hear ordinary civil litigation, unconnected with royal revenue, on a regular basis. What happened about 1195 was that this part of the Exchequer’s functions came to be exercised by an institution that was visibly separate and distinct from the Exchequer, though still functioning in close proximity to it in Westminster Hall. Henry’s reign also saw the intermittent existence of a court held in the presence of the king and travelling around the country with him. This has sometimes been seen as the direct ancestor of the later court of King’s Bench. It is, however, probably more accurate to see that court as coming into existence for the first time in the early 1230s. It was only from then onwards that the King’s Bench enjoyed a continuous institutional existence, whether or not the king was in England, and also began to possess its own distinctive jurisdiction. Various characteristics distinguished the court(s) of the General Eyre and the civil-jurisdictional side of the Exchequer (soon to become the Common Bench) that had been created in Henry’s reign, and the other royal courts that were to be created later in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, from the earlier types of communal, feudal and even royal courts that had hitherto existed in England. Judgements within these newer courts were made by relatively small groups of justices who were commissioned to act by the king, as opposed to suitors  groups of local landowners with a tenurial obligation to attend court and partici  P. Brand, The Making of the Common Law (London 1992), 79–86.   Ibid., 86–9 ; P. Brand, The Origins of the English Legal Profession (Oxford 1992), 22.   Brand, Making of the Common Law, 136–7.   Ibid., 89–97.



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pate in the making of collective judgements there in accordance with the custom of the court or of the community or lordship. The royal justices who ran these new courts also required specific royal authorisation for all the business they heard. In the case of civil litigation, this took the form of a royal writ ordering the local sheriff to have the defendant summoned to appear on a specific day to answer a specific case in that court, and also instructing the sheriff to produce the writ in court on that day. In the case of criminal pleas (pleas of the Crown) it took the form of a more general authority from the king to hear pleas of the Crown in the county where the eyre was holding its sessions. No such specific authorisation had ever been required by communal or feudal courts. These new courts seem from an early stage to have kept a full written record of the business with which they dealt, although no original records survive before 1194 other than a few final concords originally in private custody. It was only later, and perhaps in deliberate imitation of the practice of the royal courts, that communal and feudal courts began to keep their own written records ; before that the court’s only ‘record’ was in the memory of its suitors. The new courts seem to have held daily sessions. In the case of the Eyre, there seem to have been continuous or almost continuous daily sessions during their visitations of individual counties ; in the case of the Exchequer, to have been daily sessions during term times, though we do not know how ordinary civil litigation fitted in to the hearing of other, specifically financial, business, which probably took a higher priority. It is only with the emergence of the Common Bench as a separate institution that we can see the new court hearing litigation on a daily basis during four terms of the year. The contrast is, however, a marked one with the practice of communal and feudal courts, for these seem only to have met for part of a day and at fixed intervals of time, never on a daily basis. The instititutional developments associated with Henry’s reign went further than the development of new nationwide royal courts with the novel characteristics I have just been describing. Writs issued by chancery in the name of the king and authenticated by his seal had been used since at least the reign of William the Conqueror as a way of initiating litigation or authorising particular commissioners to hear litigation in the king’s name, and inevitably these writs (or rather those that survive) show some use of particular, recurrent phrases. It is, however, only in Henry II’s reign that we find what were later to be called writs ‘of course’ (de cursu), a limited range of standard forms of writs available from Chancery apparently on demand for the initiation of litigation not just in the king’s courts, but also (for some types of litigation) in county courts and even over a small range of types of litigation in seignorial or feudal courts. Their forms varied only in the specific details of the names of the litigants and of what was at stake in the   The classic study of these is the work of R. C. van Caenegem, Royal Writs in England from the Conquest to Glanvill : Studies in the Early History of the Common Law (Selden Society 77, 1959).

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litigation and in the names of the counties to whose sheriffs they were addressed (or the lord to whom they were addressed, in the case of writs initiating litigation in seignorial courts). It is not clear whether there was some kind of official, or even unofficial, ‘register’ of Chancery containing the standard forms of writs in Henry’s reign, though something of the sort, it has been suggested, might have been available to the author of Glanvill and may therefore have been the source of the writs used in the treatise. Nor is it entirely clear whether the decision to make these individual standard forms of writ generally available, and as to the specific wording of each of the standard writs (or later alteration of that wording), was something that required any kind of prior consultation or consent. This was certainly true later, and both practice and principle may go back to the beginnings of such standard writs in Henry’s reign. The standardisation seems also to have applied to the judicial writs issued in the king’s name by the courts during the course of litigation to authorise the further measures needed to ensure the appearance of the defendant or others involved in litigation and to take any measures needed to put a court’s final judgement into execution. Any ‘register’ of approved forms used in the courts is, however, unlikely to have been held by Chancery and is more likely to have been held by the clerks of these courts themselves, or the justices. One other important development seems also to have taken place in respect of writs during the course of Henry’s reign, though only in respect of writs initiating or issued in the course of litigation in the king’s court. This was the invention of the ‘returnable’ writ : a writ that ordered the appropriate local sheriff not just to have the defendant summoned (or, in the case of judicial writs, to have other measures taken to ensure the appearance of the defendant or others involved in litigation) for a specific day in court, but also to return that writ to the court by that day. This not only demonstrated that the sheriff had indeed received the writ, but also allowed the writ itself to function as a warrant for the court to hear the case and for the issuing of further process in the case. During the thirteenth century it became the practice for the sheriff to report in writing on what he had done, on the dorse of the writ or on a separate schedule when he returned the writ (making a ‘return’

  See the discussion in Glanvill, pp. xxxiii–xxxiv. Hall concluded that it is as likely that the author used ‘a collection of actual writs’. The earliest datable surviving register of writs seems to have been that compiled for sending to Ireland in 1210 ; see Brand, Making of the Common Law, 450–56. This was specially tailored for Irish use but certainly suggests the existence of similar registers by the same date in England. On the wider question of whether or not there was ever an ‘official’ register, see G. D. G. Hall in Early Registers of Writs, ed. E. de Haas and G. D. G. Hall (Selden Society 87, 1970), pp. cxvi–cxxiii.   Many of these standard forms are to be found in Glanvill.   The earliest surviving register of judicial writs (in roll form) dates from the 1220s ; see Early Registers of Writs, pp. lxxx–lxxxiv.



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to the writ, as it was later to be called). This practice had only just begun by the end of Henry II’s reign. There is also some evidence for the occasional use of sworn local juries as fact-finders in litigation prior to Henry II’s reign. Again, it was only during his reign that jury trial became available as a standard procedure in the king’s courts, though only in civil litigation, and then only for certain specific types of civil litigation. There were two different forms of jury trial in Henry’s reign. In some of the standard original writs created during the reign, a jury was summoned to appear in court at the same time as the defendant, and was provided in advance with a specific question or series of questions to answer (typically questions that mixed questions of law and fact). This was the procedure of the petty assizes, and the initiative in securing jury trial in them lay with the plaintiff. The defendant was, however, given a chance to show why the questions as formulated might give misleading answers, or other reasons why the assize should not be allowed to proceed. The second form of jury trial (of which there was as yet only a single exemplar) was that represented by the grand assize. Here, proof by jury trial was not foreseen in the writ summoning the litigation, but was something chosen (by the defendant) during the course of litigation. Here, too, the question put to the jury had to be framed in terms of one of a limited stock of formulas, and the questions also typically mixed what would later be seen as questions of fact and questions of law. Even by the end of the reign of Henry II, however, jury trial was used only in litigation about land and similar types of property. It had not yet developed into the all-purpose fact-finding procedure for all kinds of civil litigation that it was to become in the thirteenth century and beyond. It seems also at this time to have been a procedure confined to the king’s courts proper, and not yet to have become available (as it was later) in the county court, in litigation initiated by the king’s writ. By the end of the reign, the new king’s courts had come to exercise jurisdiction over a number of very important areas. In land law, perhaps the key area of civil jurisdiction, they provided a series of important and valuable remedies that seem from the first to have proved attractive to litigants. One (the assize of novel   For evidence that by the time of Glanvill the sheriff was expected to endorse the names of the jurors on the writ in the assize of mort d’ancestor, see Glanvill, XIII, 7 (p. 152). For evidence that some useful information had begun to be endorsed on writs but not returns as such by 1200, see the writs printed in Pleas before the King or his Justices, 1198–1202, i, ed. D. M. Stenton (Selden Society 67, 1953), app. II.   Royal Writs, 51–86 ; M. Macnair, ‘Vicinage and the Antecedents of the Jury’, Law and History Review, 17 (1999), 537–90, at 566–71.   See Glanvill, bk XIII.   Most fully discussed in Glanvill in connexion with the assize of mort d’ancestor in XIII, 11 (pp. 153–6).   Ibid., II, 6–21 (pp. 26–37).  R. C. Palmer, The County Courts of Medieval England, 1150–1350 (Princeton 1982), 215–17.

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disseisin) protected a tenant in possession of a free tenement from wrongful dispossession (from being disseised ‘unjustly and without a judgment’), whether by his lord or by a third party, and also protected his right to some of the appurtenances of his free tenement (such as rights of common) and against certain types of ‘nuisance’ that might cause damage to his property without wholly dispossessing him of it. A second remedy (the assize of mort d’ancestor) enforced the right of a close heir to succeed to the inheritance of an ancestor who had died in seisin (possession) of land, although the remedy was available only against the lord of whom the land was held or a stranger, not against a rival heir. A third important remedy was that provided for the widow. A widow who had received none of the dower to which she was entitled on the death of her husband, whether this took the form of a specific assignment of particular lands made at the church door at the time of the marriage, or a general entitlement to a third of the lands the husband had held during the marriage, could bring an action of dower unde nichil habet in the king’s court to assert her rights. More generally, by the end of the reign, the existence of a rule that no free man was required to answer for his free tenement without a royal writ ensured that all litigation about land had to be initiated by royal writ. This did not mean that all land litigation was now heard in the king’s courts, for the king’s writ of right existed as a means of initiating litigation in the court of the lord of whom a claimant claimed to hold his land. But the need for the lord to have the authority of the king’s writ before he could hear such litigation turned him into the king’s delegate in hearing it. The limited and conditional nature of the grant of authority to hear the case was emphasized by the existence of a routine mechanism (tolt ) for the removal of the litigation out of the lord’s court into the county court for ‘failure of justice’, whence it could be further removed into the king’s court by pone, and of a different mechanism for the removal of the case directly into a royal court if the defendant opted for jury trial in the grand assize, as opposed to battle. Side by side with the writ of right, there also existed, by the end of the reign, a generic writ of precipe quod reddat for claiming land, which initiated litigation directly in the king’s court, if the claim was such that it ‘ought to be or the king wished it to be’ heard in his court. Jurisdiction over title to free land was therefore, by the end   See the various different types of writ in Glanvill, XIII, 33–7 (pp. 167–9).   Ibid., XIII, 2–17 (pp. 149–60) ; J. Biancalana, ‘For Want of Justice : Legal Reforms of Henry II’, Columbia Law Review, 88 (1988), 433–536, at 484–514.   Glanvill, VI, 14–18 (pp. 66–9) ; Biancalana, ‘For Want of Justice’, 514–34.   Brand, Making of the Common Law, 97–8. As stated in Glanvill, the rule only applied to the lord’s court, but later evidence indicates that it also applied to other courts as well ; see P. Brand, Kings, Barons and Justices : The Making and Enforcement of Legislation in Thirteenth-Century England (Cambridge 2003), 100–101.   Brand, Making of the Common Law, 98–9.   Glanvill, I, 5 (p. 5).



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of the reign of Henry II, something already exercised either directly by the king’s courts, or by seignorial courts but only with specific royal authorisation. There was to be a massive expansion in the range of land-law remedies offered during the course of the thirteenth century, and a massive transfer of jurisdiction from feudal courts to the king’s courts, but the basic principle of royal control over this area of jurisdiction was already clearly established. A second significant area over which the king’s courts had come to exercise jurisdiction by the end of the reign of Henry II was in relation to litigation between patrons about the advowson of churches : the right to nominate suitable candidates to ecclesiastical benefices when they fell vacant, for institution to those benefices by the local ordinary. The king’s courts offered two different kinds of remedy. One (the assize of darrein presentment) was intended for use where the living was currently vacant ; the other (the writ of right or precipe of advowson) was intended for use where the living was not currently vacant and the dispute was about the right to present at future vacancies. They also offered patrons a mechanism (one form of the writ of prohibition) to prevent litigation in ecclesiastical courts between clerks with rival claims to the possession of a living, where the outcome might be prejudicial to the patron’s right of advowson. Although there was to be a later expansion in the range of remedies offered, the basic principle of royal jurisdiction was already clearly established. A third area with enormous symbolic significance, though perhaps less actual significance in terms of the amount of litigation generated, was a jurisdiction over disputes about ‘personal status’, the subject of a complete, albeit short, book of Glanvill (book V). Glanvill is clear that where a lord was claiming that a man (with his descendants) was his villein, but not currently under his control, and the man claimed that he (with his descendants) was free, the matter could be appropriately dealt with only by the king’s courts. This emphasized that it was the king and his courts who were the ultimate arbiters in such questions and the ultimate guarantors of personal freedom. One final major area of jurisdiction for the king’s courts by the end of the reign of Henry II was over ‘pleas of the Crown’ : those major criminal offences that were punishable by death or mutilation. The most important of these were homicide, arson, robbery, rape, treason and the forgery of the king’s seal or coinage. Two quite different procedures were involved. One was private prosecution (appeal) brought by the individual against whom the offence had been committed or (in the case of homicide) by a close surviving relative. The other was prosecution ‘at the king’s suit’, when an offender was named by a presentment jury of the locality   Ibid., bk IV (pp. 43–53).   Ibid., I, 3 (p. 4) (questio status is a matter for the king’s court) ; V, 1 (p. 54).   Ibid., I, 2 (p. 3) (he also includes breach of the king’s peace and fraudulent concealment of treasure trove).

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as having committed an offence or when an appeal had been withdrawn or had failed on technical grounds. Thirteenth-century practice required appeals to be commenced in the county court and allowed them to proceed to the outlawry of the appellee if he did not appear. If the appellee did appear, he was arrested and imprisoned pending trial before the king’s justices at the next session of the eyre. It is not entirely clear whether this was already the position by the end of Henry II’s reign, but it seems quite likely. By 1194 at latest, the articles of the eyre simply required the presentment of all new (and any undetermined old) ‘pleas of the Crown’ (not further specified) at the eyre. This may well have been the position already reached by the end of Henry II’s reign. Such presentments would then form the basis for trial of those accused of such offences at the king’s suit. The county court was not a new court in Henry II’s reign. As has already been seen, however, it was affected by some of the changes that took place during the reign. By the end of the reign, some of the business it heard arose not out of the county’s inherent, traditional jurisdiction invoked by a plaint made by the plaintiff, but by a specific commission to the sheriff in the form of a viscontiel writ. Like writs initiating litigation in the king’s courts, these were of a fixed form and issued only over a limited range of cases. The only viscontiel writs we know to have existed in Henry’s reign are those mentioned in Glanvill. They include writs of customs and services (the lord’s remedy to compel his tenant to perform the services he owed him), admeasurement of dower (the heir’s remedy where a doweress held more than a third of her late husband’s lands in dower), admeasurement of pasture (which triggered a quasi-administrative process for the stinting of pasture), and naifty (the lord’s remedy when seeking to regain possession of a fugitive villein, his chattels and his progeny). Glanvill does not mention some other viscontiel writs that were subsequently an important part of the county court’s jurisdiction, such as the viscontiel writs of debt, detinue and covenant. What was also self-evidently new in Henry’s reign was the creation of a routine procedure by a specific form of writ (or rather family of writs), the writs pone, for the removal of cases initiated by writ (including writs of right initiated in seignorial courts and removed into the county court by tolt ) out of the county court into the king’s court. These helped to emphasize the extent to which county courts   C. A. F. Meekings thought so : Crown Pleas of the Wiltshire Eyre, 1249 (Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society : Records Branch 16, Devizes 1961), 72.   Howden, Chronica, iii, 262.   Glanvill, VI, 18 (pp. 68–9) ; IX, 9 (p. 113) ; XII, 11–18 (pp. 141–4).   Ibid., IX, 9 (p. 113).   Ibid., VI, 18 (pp. 68–9).   Ibid., XII, 13 (p. 142).   Ibid., XII, 11 (pp. 141–2).   The only example given in Glanvill is VI, 7 (pp. 61–2), but the discussion at VI, 8 (p. 62) suggests that it was already a generally available mechanism.



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now also formed part of a single common-law legal system with the higher king’s courts. One other change may also have taken place during the course of Henry II’s reign that had a significant longer-term effect on the county court and its jurisdiction. Later evidence suggests that it was during Henry’s reign that county courts first began to hear pleas of replevin. These allowed those distrained by the seizure of their animals or movable goods to perform services to their lords or to pay compensation in disputes over grazing and other rights to challenge the justice of those distraints in the county court. There is less that can be said about the ‘Common Law’ as a general system of legal concepts and legal rules and about how much had been achieved here by the end of Henry II’s reign. The very idea of a ‘Common Law’ of England was, perhaps, only a possibility once there were superior courts with a nationwide jurisdiction that could apply and develop it, as opposed to a multitude of local courts serving particular local or ‘feudal’ communities and with no regular mechanisms to review their exercise of their jurisdiction, though some of the features of that ‘Common Law’ may perhaps have been prefigured in the common customary law followed in these courts. Much of the early ‘Common Law’ that we see in Glanvill was procedural law : about the measures that were to be taken to secure the appearance of defendants in court, the availability of essoins (excuses for absence) at different stages in specific types of litigation, the availability and workings of the ‘view’ of land in dispute, the kinds of proof that a plaintiff was required to offer or the defendant might choose. But there were also rules of substantive law as well. Book VII of Glanvill shows the beginnings of a ‘Common Law’ of inheritance governing succession to land (including rules about when land should escheat to the lord of whom it was held) ; determining which alienations of lands were binding on a grantor’s heirs (or successors) ; governing entitlement to the wardship of the persons and lands of those under age. Book IX of Glanvill likewise tells us quite a lot about the rules governing the mutual obligations of lords and their tenants. Of a ‘Common Law’ of crime we may at least say that there was a clear idea of which serious offences merited corporal or capital punishment. There was perhaps also some idea of what specific acts constituted those offences, since an appellor had probably to spell out in some detail what the appellee had allegedly done, even some idea of which circumstances might be held to justify otherwise criminal acts or to constitute grounds for pardoning an offender.

  CRR, xv, no. 1968A.   Glanvill, I, 7–9, 21, 30–31 (pp. 5–7, 12–13, 17–20) ; IV, 3–5 (pp. 45–6) ; V, 3 (p. 55) ; VI, 10 (pp. 63–4) ; X, 8 (p. 122) ; XIII, 7 (pp. 151–2).   Ibid., I, 10–29 (pp. 7–17) ; II, 3, 12, 16 (pp. 23–4, 31–2, 33–4) ; III, 4 (pp. 39–40) ; IV, 3 (p. 45) ; XIII, 7 (p. 152).   Ibid., II, 1–2 (pp. 22–3).   Ibid., II, 3–21 (pp. 23–37).

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Some of these changes were certainly introduced by legislation. Two different terms were used for legislation during Henry’s reign : ‘assize’ (assisa) and ‘constitution’ (constitucio). There seems, however, to have been no significant difference in meaning between them. The author of Glanvill, who elsewhere happily uses the term assisa, uses the term constitucio to refer to the lost legislation that had created the assize of novel disseisin, although elsewhere it appears to be consistently referred to as an assisa. He also uses constitucio to refer to the lost legislation establishing the grand assize, much of which he seems to summarise, although other contemporary sources call it the assisa of Windsor. We possess what purport to be texts of some of the relevant legislation : the Constitutions of Clarendon of 1164, the Assize of Clarendon of 1166, and the 1176 Assize of Northampton. Each of these, however, presents a different kind of problem. There are no apparent textual problems with what modern scholarship calls the ‘Constitutions of Clarendon’. The difficulty relates to the purported nature of the ‘Constitutions’ themselves. They claim to be no more than a ‘record or acknowledgement of some part of the customs and liberties and dignities of the king’s ancestors, namely King Henry his grandfather and others, which ought to be observed and held in the kingdom’ and to have been acknowledged ‘by the archbishops and bishops and earls and barons and by the more noble and more ancient of the realm’, and not to be legislation (in the sense of new law) at all. They seem nonetheless to have been assimilated, at least in retrospect, to legislation, for (as Derek Hall long ago pointed out) there is a reference in Glanvill to ecclesiastical judges being prohibited from taking jurisdiction over the debts of laymen or tenements on the basis of breach of faith per assisam regni. This is most likely to be a reference to chapters 9 and 15 of the Constitutions. The legislative status of the Assize of Clarendon of 1166 is in no doubt, but the credibility of the text of the Assize that survives has been doubted. It came under sustained attack   Glanvill, XIII, 32 (p. 167) ; XIII, 38 (p. 170).   D. W. Sutherland, The Assize of Novel Disseisin (Oxford 1973), 6–7.   Glanvill, II, 7 (p. 28) ; II, 19 (p. 35).   EYC, ii, 494, no. 1220 (final concord of 1182) ; J. H. Round, ‘The Date of the Grand Assize’, EHR, 31 (1916), 268–9 (final concord of 1197).   There are three separate texts, all apparently derived from the Canterbury copy of the ‘Constitutions’ : in the life of Thomas Becket by William the monk of Canterbury, MTB, i, 18–23 ; in the collection of Becket’s letters made by Alan, prior of Canterbury and abbot of Tewkesbury, MTB, v, 71–9 ; and in Gervase, i, 178–80.   Glanvill, X, 12 (p. 126) and p. xxxv with n. 1.   There are two independent texts of the Assize. One is inserted in the chronicle of Roger of Howden among an appendix of legal material, as part of the entry for the year 1180 : Howden, Chronica, ii, 248–52. The other is in an early-13th-century legal MS now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford (MS Rawlinson C 641), which also contains a copy of the 1170 Inquest of Sheriffs and of the 1215 issue of Magna Carta : Howden, Chronica, ii, pp. ci–cvi ; W. Stubbs, Select Charters, 9th edn (Oxford 1921), 170–73.



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in the 1960s from Richardson and Sayles, who described the text as a ‘private composition, without authority’. The genuineness of the text found stout and convincing defenders in J. C. Holt and David Corner, and historians seem now to accept that what we have is indeed a genuine text (or texts) of the Assize. The so-called Assize of Northampton of 1176 presents a different kind of problem. There is in essence only a single surviving text of this ‘assize’, which appears both in the Gesta Regis Henrici Secundi formerly ascribed to Benedict, abbot of Peterborough, but now known to be the work of Roger of Howden, and in Howden’s own revision of that chronicle, the Chronica. Holt thought that only the first chapter of the ‘assize’ as printed by Stubbs in his Select Charters was problematic because of its quasi-editorial discussion of the relationship between the assize of Clarendon and the assize of Northampton. He accepted the genuineness of the remaining twelve clauses. A re-examination of the text, however, suggests two things. One is that Howden probably meant his text to start not with Stubbs’ clause 1 (on the procedure on accusations under the assize of Clarendon as emended at Northampton) but earlier, with the division of the kingdom into six judicial circuits each with three justices, and perhaps also to include as part of the assize the following provision on the taking of judicial oaths to observe and have observed the provisions of the assize. The second is that what our text of the ‘Assize’ records is first the decision to create these judicial circuits and then giving their justices specific instructions about what they were to do on those circuits. Those instructions seem to reflect the legislation enacted at Northampton and may even in part be repeating or paraphrasing that legislation. They are probably not the actual text of that legislation itself. A less well known text is the so-called ‘Assize of Essoiners’. This was first   H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles, The Governance of Medieval England (Edinburgh 1963), 198–203, 438–43 ; H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles, Law and Legislation from Aethelberht to Magna Carta (Edinburgh 1966), 94–8, 125–7.   J. C. Holt, ‘The Assizes of Henry II : The Texts’, in The Study of Medieval Records : Essays in Honour of Kathleen Major, ed. D. A. Bullough and R. L. Storey (Oxford 1971), 94–7, 101–6 ; D. Corner, ‘The Texts of Henry II’s Assizes’, in Law-Making and Law–Makers in British History : Papers presented to the Edinburgh Legal History Conference, 1977, ed. A. Harding (London 1980), 7–20, at 13–20.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 108–11 ; Howden, Chronica, ii, 89–91. For the relationship between them, see D. M. Stenton, ‘Roger of Howden and Benedict’, EHR, 68 (1953), 574–82 ; Holt, ‘Assizes of Henry II’, 87–92.   Ibid., 86–7.   Only three clauses do not seem to fit into this model : clause 2 (which says nothing about judicial enforcement), clause 10 (though this may relate to the intended relationship between the justices and the bailiffs in the counties they visit, making plain that their revenues were to go to the exchequer not the justices) and clause 12 (on the custody of ‘thieves’).   Particularly in clauses 1–4.  Note the reference in clause 7 : ‘Faciant eciam assisam de latronibus iniquis et malefactoribus terre, que assisa est per consilium regis filii sui et hominorum suorum, per quos ituri sunt comitatus’, which reads like a reference to a separate ‘assize’ on these points.

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printed from the single known surviving text in a Bodleian manuscript (Rawlinson C 641) by Stubbs, and was later re-edited by Lady Stenton. The ‘Assize’ appears in that manuscript between articles of the 1170 Inquest of Sheriffs. Lady Stenton was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and to accept it as forming part of that Inquest, but that seems to me to be highly implausible. All the other articles of the Inquest are either instructions for holding an enquiry or the actual articles of that enquiry. These three clauses clearly form no part of that. They are general legislation, without any specific bearing on this enquiry, or indeed enquiries in general. The first two clauses seem to be instituting measures to prevent false essoins (formal excuses for the absence from court of a litigant or one involved in litigation). Essoiners were to be required to find sureties for the appearance of the warrantor of their essoin, the litigant or his attorney. Different measures were required in seignorial courts from those to be applied in the king’s court and the county court. The third clause imposed a punishment of imprisonment on anyone convicted of renewing a plea that had already been determined before the king or his justice. The appearance of all three clauses together suggests that they may have been enacted on the same occasion. Their appearance in the middle of the Inquisition of Sheriffs suggests that they may belong to legislation enacted at the same council meeting that had approved the Inquisition, and that this legislation too may belong to 1170. However, the copyist’s mistake that intruded these clauses into the Inquisition could equally have intruded something enacted elsewhere and on another occasion, or indeed on two different occasions. There is no internal evidence in any of the three clauses themselves to suggest a date. Other legislation does not survive but its content can be reconstructed, at least in part. The assize of novel disseisin was enacted perhaps in 1166, though possibly prior to this, and Donald Sutherland believed that its terms could be known in some detail from later evidence. There is some reason to doubt this, for other legislation of the period is known to have been reissued in modified form on more than one occasion, and it seems not implausible that this was also the case with novel disseisin. Some of the details of the procedure, and perhaps even the scope of the assize, as well as its limitation date, may well have changed over time. The other lost assize whose details can probably be recovered in some detail is the Assize of Windsor of 1179. This is the legislation that established the grand assize, which Glanvill evidently summarizes (or perhaps expands on) in book II of the treatise. We know rather less about the ‘assize on the advowsons   Howden, Chronica, ii, p. cv ; Pleas before the King or his Justices, i, 153.   Ibid., 151–4.   In the second of the clauses (on the application of the measure in seignorial courts) something has evidently been lost in copying.   Sutherland, Assize of Novel Disseisin, 6–20.   See p. 228 below.   See p. 224 above.



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of churches (assisa de advocacionibus ecclesiarum prodita)’ mentioned in book IV of Glanvill. Glanvill suggests that it authorised the creation of the assize of darrein presentment. This is first mentioned in 1180, and was probably a reaction to the provisions of the Third Lateran Council of 1179, which had allowed the ordinary to collate to livings that remained vacant for longer than six months. This suggests that the assize itself probably belongs to 1179 or 1180. Whether the assize did more than this, for example by authorising the creation of the precipe writ of advowson, or of a writ of prohibition for patrons, is unclear. Another legislative act whose text is lost but whose terms and whose approximate date are known is the legislation (constitutio) enacted some time not long before 1163 about the tolt procedure for removing cases from lord’s courts, whose effect is summarised in a number of accounts relating to the Becket dispute. In the case of some other lost legislation we do not know even the date, only that it was enacted sometime prior to the completion of Glanvill. Glanvill gives us a summary of a number of the points established by an otherwise unknown assize about the extent to which a litigant could challenge in the king’s courts matters ‘recorded’ by county courts and seignorial courts as having been said and done in those courts. Glanvill also mentions an assize apparently relating to the hue and cry (the procedure for raising the alarm on the discovery of the commission of a criminal offence and following this up with measures for attempting to capture the culprit), but tells us almost nothing about its contents. The author also refers to what has been ‘laid down (statutum)’ in the kingdom in relation to clerks who had obtained their churches by the presentation of patrons who had usurped the possession of advowsons by violence during wartime. Hall took this to be a reference to secular legislation, and it might have formed part of the more general legislation on the advowson of churches. It might, however, be rather a reference to ecclesiastical legislation. Lastly, there are references to lost legislation that seems to have been enacted not long after other legislation of which we know, with the intention of modifying the earlier legislation on matters of more or less important detail. Glanvill refers to ‘another assize (alia assisa)’, amending the Assize of Northampton, as having established that the assize of mort d’ancestor should not run in respect of tenements held by burgage tenure (in towns), thereby   Glanvill, IV, 1 (p. 44).   Royal Writs, 333.   M. Cheney, ‘The Litigation between John Marshal and Archbishop Thomas Becket in 1164 : A Pointer to the Origin of Novel Disseisin ?’, in Law and Social Change in British History : Papers presented to the Bristol Legal History Conference, 14–17 July 1981, ed. J. A. Guy and H. G. Beale (London 1984), 9–26, at 15–16.   Glanvill, VIII, 9 (pp. 100–101).   Ibid., XIV, 3 (p. 174).   Ibid., IV, 10 (p. 50).   Ibid., p. xxxv.

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allowing such tenements to continue to be devisable. Glanvill also refers to a constitucio amending the procedure for the election of knights for the grand assize and allowing election to take place even if the tenant was absent, thereby amending the procedure laid down in the lost Assize of Windsor. I assume that all this legislation took some kind of written form. There seems, however, to be no evidence of any attempt to ensure the safe preservation in official custody of authoritative written texts of legislation, with the significant exception of the Constitutions of Clarendon, of which one copy apparently went to the king’s treasury. This seems strange, for the evidence suggests an increasing emphasis during Henry’s reign on the importance of the written word, and, if I am right about when plea rolls began to be compiled, an attempt to keep a full and permanent record of even the fairly ephemeral doings of the courts. The obvious home for such an archive would have been the king’s treasury in the Exchequer : the repository for other records of permanent or longer-term interest and importance. It may indeed have been the lack of any written archive of legislation, rather than any regular practice of legislating without recording the terms of that legislation, that led Glanvill, somewhat misleadingly, to describe ‘English laws’ in his prologue as being ‘unwritten’. We know surprisingly little about any arrangements made for the wider publication of Henry’s legislation. For important legislation enacted under the Conqueror and Henry I we can deduce from surviving copies that the legislation was sent out in writ form in the king’s name to the sheriffs and the men of individual counties, presumably (as in the thirteenth century) for local proclamation. Only one of Henry’s ‘legislative’ acts is known to have been published in writ form. That is the wholly unspecific charter of liberties issued at the beginning of his reign, possibly at his coronation. Much of the Assize of Clarendon of 1166 lays down procedure for local enquiries into malefactors, their arrest, imprisonment and trial. This did not necessarily require any kind of wider publicity, but those clauses (15, 16 and 21) that laid down strict rules about the provision of hospitality for unknown strangers and required stern measures to be taken against recently condemned heretics look as though they required some kind of proclamation to be effective. The short-term ‘supplement’ to the Constitutions of Clarendon edited by David Knowles, Anne Duggan and Christopher Brooke in 1972, which seems to have taken the form of an instruction sent by Henry II from Normandy to his justiciar Richard de Lucy and to Geoffrey Ridel, archdeacon of Canterbury, and Richard, archdeacon of Poitou, is described in one text as something the   Glanvill, XIII, 11 (p. 155).   Ibid., II, 12 (p. 31).   Ibid., prologue (p. 2).   P. Wormald, The Making of English Law : King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, i : Legislation and its Limits (Oxford 1999), 399–401.   Statutes of the Realm, i, Charters of liberties §, p. 4.



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king had promulgated and in the other as addressed to all the ‘princes and people of England’ to swear and keep. Some form of publication must again have been envisaged, since instructions were also given that all aged fifteen and more were to take an oath to observe these ‘decrees’. That publication during Henry’s reign did not necessarily involve sending a text out to each county for proclamation is, however, suggested by the Assize of Arms of 1181. The Assize was to be enforced by justices holding sessions in each county and assembling both jurors and those named as liable to bear arms and ‘having this assise on having arms read before them in their common hearing (coram eis in communi audiencia illorum faciant legere hanc assisam de armis habendis)’ and then swearing them accordingly. Mutatis mutandis this might also quite plausibly have been the method of publication of some, if not all, of Henry’s other legislation. Historians have sometimes written as though Henry II and his advisers were able to promulgate binding legislation without any prior consultation or consent from a wider group of the king’s subjects. This does not, however, fit with what Glanvill tells us, nor with much of the internal evidence of the legislation itself. Glanvill talks of ‘English laws’ as being promulgated ‘by the advice of the magnates and the authority of the prince (procerum quidem consilio et principis accedente auctoritate)’. The Assize of Clarendon of 1166 (in the fuller text in the Rawlinson MS) describes itself in its proem as having been made by King Henry with ‘the assent of the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, barons of the whole of England’ or (in Howden’s text) ‘by the counsel of the archbishops, bishops and abbots and his other barons’. In the first version of his chronicle, Howden tells us that the 1176 Assize of Northampton was the outcome of a ‘great council on the statutes of his realm (magnum . . . concilium de statutis regni sui )’ held by the king at Northampton ‘in the presence of the bishops and earls and barons of his land (coram episcopis et comitibus et baronibus terre sue)’ and that the king had made the assize ‘by the advice of his earls and barons and knights and men (per consilium comitum et baronum et militum et hominum suorum)’. The later revision of the text only described the division of the kingdom into six circuits as taking place ‘in the presence of his son the king and in the presence of the archbishops, bishops, earls and barons of his realm (coram rege filio suo et coram archiepiscopis, episcopis, comitibus et baronibus regni sui)’ and ‘by the common counsel of all (communi omnium consilio)’ but does not ascribe to the wider group any part in advising on the making of the assize more generally. It is not clear why Howden later chose to downplay the role of this   M. D. Knowles, A. J. Duggan and C. N. L. Brooke, ‘Henry II’s Supplement to the Constitutions of Clarendon’, EHR, 87 (1972), 757–71.   Stubbs, Select Charters, 183–4.   Glanvill, prologue (p. 2).   See p. 225 above.   Howden, Gesta Regis, ii, 107–8.   Howden, Chronica, ii, 87–8.

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wider group in the making of the Assize, but his earlier account is perhaps the more credible. Even the Assize of Woodstock of 1184, concerned with the forest, was said to have been made ‘by the counsel and assent of the archbishops, bishops and barons, earls and nobles of England (per consilium et assensum archiepiscoporum, episcoporum, et baronum, comitum et nobilium Anglie)’. There are only two pieces of evidence that point in the opposite direction. One is the so-called ‘Supplement to the Constitutions of Clarendon’ of 1169, whose provisions seem to have been determined by Henry II while in Normandy without any consultation with or advice from his English subjects. None of its provisions can really be characterised as permanent legislation, however. All seem to be temporary measures taken in the course of the king’s ongoing dispute with Becket. The other is less certain. The legislation on the process of tolt is described in the chronicle accounts as having been something made by the king, but as injurious to the magnates and about which they lamented in secret. The impression given is that it was something the king devised by himself, though it might just have been legislation agreed to by a wider body of counsellors without them having quite realised what its impact was likely to be. It is, of course, possible that the ‘advice’ given by the archbishops, bishops, earls, barons and others was a mere formality ; that they had no real input into legislation and no noticeable effect on its content. There is, however, at least one piece of evidence that suggests the contrary. This is the discussion in Glanvill of the grand assize, which certainly reflects in part some of the provisions of the lost Assize of Windsor. Some of these look as though they were included to persuade a reluctant council to agree to the Assize. The discussion in Glanvill may also reflect some of the arguments used in the council session to persuade a reluctant council, but which did not feature in the eventual Assize. Henry and his immediate advisers seem to have been keen on jury trial. We may therefore conclude that the provision that allowed the tenant in possession to continue to have the choice of battle was the first of the sacrifices made to ensure that the Assize was agreed by the council. A second may have been the elaborate measures adopted to have the knights of the grand assize chosen not (as in the petty assizes) directly by the sheriff but indirectly by four knights chosen as electors. These were presumably intended to provide some kind of additional safeguard against the manipulation of grand assize juries by sheriffs. More interesting still are those passages and provisions suggesting that Henry   Howden, Chronica, ii, 245 ; Stubbs, Select Charters, 187–8. On the text, see also Holt, ‘The Assizes of Henry II’, 97–100.   See p. 229 and n. 1 above.   See p. 227 above.   Glanvill, II, 6–21 (pp. 26–37).   Ibid., II, 10–12 (pp. 30–32).



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and his advisers may have ‘sold’ the grand assize to the king’s council on the basis that it was in effect a new and improved version of trial by battle, not a radical departure from it. We find it said that the knowledge required from the jurors was that they should ‘know about the matter from what they have personally seen and heard’, or ‘from statements which their fathers made to them in such circumstances that they are bound to believe them as if they had seen and heard them for themselves’. It is precisely this kind of knowledge that we find champions required to assert that they possessed for trial by battle. The penalty for those convicted of perjury in the grand assize was one that paralleled (in part at least) the penalty for perjury imposed on a defeated champion. In another curious passage, the author speculates on the possibility of there being less than twelve jurors who knew the truth, but two or three who did. He says that they may offer proof as champions instead, and may be accepted as such. The close connexion between the two types of proof (in form at least) is also to be seen in the provision that the grand assize should only lie where battle would have been available, and in the author’s argument that the grand assize is preferable to battle because ‘battle is fought on the testimony of one witness, but this constitution requires the oaths of at least twelve’. It is impossible to guess how much of the legislation of Henry II’s reign we have lost. Some of that lost legislation can be reconstructed, either in part or in whole, and we know something of other lost legislation from passing references in Glanvill and other sources. There may well have been other legislation of which we now know nothing. It seems none the less likely that some at least of the significant legal changes that took place during the reign of Henry II were not such as to require formal approval or proclamation through legislation, and took place gradually, even surreptitiously, over time. It seems unlikely, for example, that any formal legislation was required to direct litigation to the king’s Exchequer in growing quantities and thereby to provide the institutional foundation for the eventual creation of the Common Bench shortly after Henry II’s death. Neither did the decision to keep a full formal record of the business of the king’s courts. The shift that turned the justices of the General Eyre into judges, not just presiding officials, may also not have required legislation or have been specifically approved in that way. It may well have been a gradual process, furthered by the use of instructions on law and process addressed to them when they were sent out on eyre and partially masked by the important role juries now came to play   Ibid., II, 17 (pp. 34–5).   Ibid., II, 3 (p. 23).   Ibid., II, 19 (pp. 35–6) ; II, 3 (p. 25).   Ibid., II, 21 (p. 37).   Ibid., II, 19 (p. 36).   Ibid., II, 7 (p. 28).   See pp. 227–8 above.

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in much of their business. The creation of writs of a fixed form may have been specifically approved on an individual, type by type, basis in the legislation that brought such cases into the king’s courts. This is less likely to have been true of the writs of fixed form that brought litigation into county courts. It may be that the drawing up of writ forms was left to Chancery and the use of fixed forms was a matter initially determined more by Chancery convenience than by any kind of wider legal principle. The invention of the ‘returnable’ writ was probably a distinct development. It too is quite unlikely to have required, or received, any kind of legislative approval. When did the major legal changes associated with Henry II ’s reign take place ? The first visitation by royal justices to be planned on a nationwide basis with a multiplicity of circuits in order to ensure the completion of the visitation within a limited time-scale was for the exceptional Inquest of Sheriffs of 1170, with its special remit. The first nationwide proto-General Eyre dealing more generally with both civil and criminal business took place in 1175, or perhaps in 1174–5. The amount of business done by the justices of this General Eyre must, however, have been small, for only two circuits of justices, each comprising only two justices, managed to visit the whole country within a relatively short period of time. Nor is it certain that these justices actually made the judgements at their sessions. The beginnings of the General Eyre proper probably therefore belong to the following year (1176), when the Assize of Northampton established six circuits of three justices. The Assize established their jurisdiction and placed the justices in control of proceedings at their sessions and of making judgments there. Thereafter, there were regular visitations by similar groups of royal justices every second year on average through to the end of the reign. It is more difficult to assign a specific date to the beginning of the functioning of the Exchequer as a regular court for the hearing of civil litigation. It had certainly begun to hear some such litigation by the mid 1160s, and it is from about then that the first surviving (though undated) final concords made in the court survive. It is, however, only from the late 1170s onwards that the surviving evidence is plentiful enough to suggest that ordinary civil litigation was being heard on a fairly regular basis at the twice yearly sessions. Thus both the creation of the General Eyre and the regular use of the Exchequer for hearing civil litigation seem to belong to the period that followed the rebellion of the ‘Young King’ and the reimposition of Henry II’s authority in its aftermath. Of the distinctive characteristics of these new royal courts, that of being run (and judgments in them being made) by justices appointed by the king was evidently always true of the Exchequer, and was fairly clearly also true of the General   Brand, Making of the Common Law, 82–4.   Ibid., 87–9.



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Eyre from 1176 onwards. That these courts functioned only with specific authorisation from the king is likely to have been true from the first occasion of the Exchequer functioning as a civil court. In the so-called ‘Assize of Northampton’ we see the specific instructions that were given to the justices who went out on eyre in 1176, authorising them to make specific enquiries on criminal matters and on matters of interest to the king and to hear various kinds of civil litigation. Similar but regularly amended instructions were probably drawn up for each succeeding visitation. What is less clear is whether, from the first, the justices of the General Eyre also needed separate writs authorising them to hear each piece of civil litigation that they heard. The so-called ‘Assize of Northampton’ speaks of the king’s writ authorising land litigation generally (in chapter 7), but simply refers in other clauses to the justices’ making percognicionem by twelve men, if the lord refused to give the heirs such seisin as their ancestor had possessed at his death (in clause 4), and to their making recognicionem of disseisins against the assize (in clause 6). It may be that this is a general description of their jurisdiction and that the assumption (perhaps spelled out in the Assize proper) was that they would act only on receipt of a writ. But it is also possible that the procedure envisaged was that they would act on receipt of a complaint without a writ, and that it was only some time after 1176, but before the time of Glanvill, that the Eyre justices also came to act only on receipt of a specific writ authorising them to do so. I have discussed elsewhere the evidence indicating that the Exchequer was keeping a plea-roll record of its litigatory business by 1181 at latest and suggesting that this may go back to before 1178 ; and I continue to find persuasive the indirect evidence that suggests that the new Eyre justices from the beginning in 1176 were also keeping a plea-roll record of their business. The relatively short timetables allowing the itinerant justices of the General Eyre to cover their circuits suggest that from the first they were in continuous, or almost continuous, session. For the Exchequer all we can affirm with certainty is that it did not do business only for single days at periodic intervals. We may also be fairly certain that it was doing either financial or litigatory business fairly continuously during its sessions. The idea of the standard-form writ ‘of course’ is clearly implied by Glanvill’s treatment of writs, though not specifically spelled out in the treatise. This would suggest that it was not a recent development in the final years of Henry II’s reign. It is quite likely to have been a corollary of the decision to authorise the king’s courts to hear specific types of litigation. That decision goes back to at least 1176, just possibly to 1166. The invention of the ‘returnable’ writ is even more difficult to date. The forms of the writs included in Glanvill show that the ‘returnable’ writ   Ibid., 83–6.   See p. 225 above.   Brand, Making of the Common Law, 95.   Ibid., 94.

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had been invented some time before the treatise was written. There seems to be no evidence helping to pinpoint more precisely just when. The grand assize was evidently created by the lost Assize of Windsor of 1179. The other forms of jury (the petty assizes) are more difficult to date with certainty. It seems quite likely that the assize of mort d’ancestor as a procedure (with a jury being set in advance a series of questions to answer) does in fact go back to 1176, the assize of darrein presentment (with a jury being set in advance a single question to answer) to 1179 or 1180, and the assize of novel disseisin to 1166, or perhaps more plausibly also to 1176. This also provides dates for the beginnings of the king’s courts’ jurisdiction over recent disseisins and over the enforcement of rights of inheritance. Biancalana’s work suggests that 1176 may also have been the date when the king’s courts began to exercise jurisdiction over dower claims as part of their enforcement of the Assize of Northampton. Chapter 1 of the Constitutions of Clarendon had claimed for the jurisdiction of the king’s court (‘curia domini regis’) litigation about advowsons and the right of presentation to churches, whatever the status of those litigating (laymen or clerics), but it is unclear whether and how this jurisdiction was effectively exercised before the invention of the assize of darrein presentment in 1179/80, and the precipe writ of advowson, perhaps in existence by 1175. I know of no evidence earlier than Glanvill itself to suggest that the king’s courts were claiming an exclusive jurisdiction over questions of status. We can see the beginnings of the direct jurisdiction of the king’s courts over pleas of the Crown (major criminal pleas) in the Assize of Clarendon of 1166, which envisaged an enquiry into those reputed to be robbers, murderers, thieves or accessories, and the Assize of Northampton of 1176, which added further categories of offenders : those suspected of forgery or arson. The emphasis in the Assizes, however, is on suspects, not on offences, and nothing is said about an exclusive right to try those the subject of criminal appeals (private accusations). When these came to be reserved to the itinerant royal justices is not, I think, known for sure. More interesting still, of course, are questions of motivation, about why the various changes I have been discussing took place and what kind of overall vision   See p. 224 above.   See pp. 227, 233 above.   Biancalana, ‘For Want of Justice’, 433–536 at 516–8.   Stubbs, Select Charters, 164.   See p. 227 above.   For a final concord settling litigation about an advowson in the Exchequer court in Westminster in 1175, perhaps so initiated, see D. C. Douglas, Feudal Documents of the Abbey of Bury St Edmund’s (Records of the Social History of England and Wales 8, London 1932), no. 224 (183–4).   Royal Writs, 343–4, notes the writ de libertate probanda for removing cases raising this question out of the county court, but sheds no light on its prior history.



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of the English legal system and its working there may have been behind them. The clearest evidence of some kind of overall vision for the legal system is that implied by the beginnings of the General Eyre during Henry’s reign as a court (or series of courts) manned by justices appointed by the king and under oath to him, bringing civil and criminal justice of a standardised kind on a regular basis to each county. This was a development that brought the king’s courts and royal justice to the whole country, without the king himself needing to be directly involved, while allowing the king to retain ultimate control, both through his appointment of the justices for each visitation and on each circuit and for each county they visited on that circuit, and through his control of the business the justices did on both the civil and the criminal sides. The requirement that the justices keep a full written record of their business then also allowed for the possibility of external checks on what they had done. The system seems to have been deliberately designed as a means of providing what could still be called and conceived of as ‘royal’ justice through courts that did not require the presence of the king in person but whose justices could be said to ‘represent’ the king, both because they were directly appointed by him and because they only did such business as he had specifically authorised. It was deliberately designed to provide the convenience of royal justice on a regular (and relatively frequent) basis in each county. For a king who saw one of his main functions as being that of providing justice for his subjects, this was an effective way of increasing the availability of that justice, while also keeping it under his general oversight and control. The development of the Exchequer as a central civil court looks less obviously planned and thought out in advance : more of an improvised expedient to provide a permanently-functioning central royal civil court that did not require the king’s presence but could operate under the watchful eyes of his representative, the justiciar, and utilised the trained and literate core of royal servants needed to operate the Exchequer to assist the king in another key governmental function. The invention of standardised writs ‘of course’, available virtually on demand from Chancery, may in part have reflected the fact that each accretion of civil jurisdiction to the king’s courts came through specific legislation that authorised a particular type of remedy in the king’s courts, and may even have specified the form of that remedy and the general form of the writ. It thus reflected the process by which that expansion had taken place. It also performed the obvious practical function that it allowed Chancery to issue a relatively large volume of writs by utilising the services of junior clerks, who had only to follow the forms and fill in the necessary blanks, without requiring any greater drafting skills and without the writs needing to be specifically authorised by the king or checked by the chancellor. The separate invention of ‘returnable’ writs was a further ingenious bureaucratic device, that ensured that the courts had specific authorisation for each piece of litigation that they heard and also (in the case of both original and judicial writs) ensured that the courts could check that there were no errors in

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the wording of the writ, and that the intended recipient of the writ had indeed received it. Henry II and his advisers evidently favoured the use of jury trial in civil litigation. It is difficult not to see this as a deliberate effort at ‘modernisation’, at introducing a more rational method of proof that relied upon the human knowledge available in the local community, with deliberate safeguards in the process of the choice of jurors that were intended to ensure a balanced and neutral group of fact-finders, and which represented a real improvement over the reliance on God’s assistance that was presupposed by trial by battle and the reliance on a partisan group of supporters without knowledge of the facts that constituted compurgation, but one that at the same time required a much smaller investment of time and effort than the process of witness proof then being introduced into Romanocanonical procedure. Why did Henry II and his advisers introduce the two petty assizes of novel disseisin and mort d’ancestor and the widow’s action of dower unde nichil habet, the three land-law remedies that seem to have brought significant quantities of business to the king’s courts by the end of Henry II’s reign and were to continue doing so for more than a century after that ? Professor Milsom has argued that the assize of novel disseisin originated in a strongly seignorial or ‘feudal’ world where lords were in real control of their lordships, and that a variety of features of the assize point to its origins as a measure intended specifically for the use of tenants against their lords, giving the additional teeth of external enforcement to the customary right of the tenant not to be dispossessed by his lord except for good cause and after due process in the lord’s court. Although there is little doubt that lords were from the first envisaged among the possible defendants in the assize, even the cumulative evidence adduced by Professor Milsom to show that they were originally envisaged as the only defendants remains unconvincing. In 1166 England was still recovering from the Civil War of Stephen’s reign, and special measures had to be adopted to ensure the maintenance of order while the king was overseas. It does not seem at all improbable that the king and his advisers (and perhaps, even more, those of his council who advised on the assize of novel disseisin) were well aware that there were people other than tenants’ lords who dispossessed them : neighbours, those with rival claims to the same land, other lords. In a perfectly ‘feudal’ world the tenant might perhaps have expected his lord to help him in resisting and redressing such dispossession, but this was not such a world. It was a world where it might indeed be the ultimate lord of all lords to whom a tenant might have to look to remedy his dispossession. Paradoxically, of course, Milsom’s understanding of the original orientation of the assize makes it look much more like a weapon for use by the king to reduce the discretionary   Brand, Making of the Common Law, 212–13 (with citations).   Ibid., 222–3, gives my answer to Milsom’s arguments in more detail.



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power of lords over their tenants, by subjecting the exercise of that power to the scrutiny of the king’s courts, and my understanding of the wider original orientation makes it much less obviously a direct threat to seignorial autonomy. The king’s motives for introducing the assize must surely have included public-order ones : the desire to protect his subjects against wrongful dispossession of their lands, and to prevent the kinds of disorder that might be (and often were) associated with the forcible dispossession and repossession of valuable land. Perhaps from the start the king may also have had in mind the development and acquisition of a jurisdiction that placed him in the position of helping through his courts to secure all his free subjects in the peaceful possession of their lands and other associated rights, and remedying any dispossession. With the assize of mort d’ancestor there can be no doubt, because of the surviving text of (or associated with) the Assize of Northampton, that the assize was originally intended specifically for the use of a close heir against the lord who had refused to admit that heir to a tenement of which his ancestor had died in seisin and who had himself taken seisin and remained in since then. This is indeed a situation where Biancalana’s suggestion that the underlying justification for the assize, that this is a situation where the provision of a remedy by the king is justified because the lord had manifestly failed to provide justice for an heir, looks to be convincing. This, or something like it, was presumably the justification that Henry and his advisers used when securing the consent of his council to the issuing of this part of the Assize of Northampton. Henry’s own motivation for the introduction of the assize may, however, have been somewhat different. It is not unreasonable to see Henry as wanting to develop a jurisdiction that placed him and his courts in the position of assisting heirs in enforcing their right to succeed to the inheritance of their ancestors, and thereby enhancing the king’s role as provider of justice to the wider national community of free tenants, in a situation where those tenants had, in the past, been particularly vulnerable to discretionary exercises of power by their lords. Biancalana’s suggestion that the precise ambit of the action of dower unde nichil habet was likewise determined by the general principle that royal action was only justified where a lord had manifestly failed to do justice is also an attractive one. Again, we might speculate that this might have been the argument that Henry and his advisers used to secure consent to this extension of royal jurisdiction, and suggest that Henry’s own motivations for the extension might well have been broader than this. They may again have included a wish to extend the jurisdiction of his courts to a matter of general significance to a wider community of free tenants because it enhanced his role as a provider of justice. Somewhere in the background may also have been the consideration   See p. 233 above.   Biancalana, ‘For Want of Justice’, 436–8, 506–8.   Ibid., 514–6, 533–4.

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that the protection of widows and their rights was a matter in which the Church might take an interest, all the more so because the marriage ceremony at which dower was promised took place at the door of a church, and was indeed secured by a promise of the kind that the Church was willing to enforce and claimed for its jurisdiction. The provision of a remedy by the king’s court was one way of stopping the church courts offering their own remedy. Milsom’s explanation for the origins of the apparently customary rule found in Glanvill that states that no one is obliged to answer for his free tenement without a writ from the lord king or his chief justiciar is that this rule started simply as a statement of fact. In the purely ‘feudal’ world no lord would accept any claim against a sitting tenant. When the writ of right and the associated removal mechanisms came along, these did not initially force the lord to hear an outsider’s claim, but they did ensure that, when the lord’s court refused to entertain the claim, the case could be removed into a court (the county court and later, if needed, the king’s court) that would. It was thus literally true that no tenant could be obliged to answer for his free tenement without the king’s writ. I have argued elsewhere against this explanation. If Glanvill reproduces the original formulation of the rule, the rule specifically states that no one is obliged to answer in the court of his lord for his free tenement without the king’s writ. This seems to presuppose that it will indeed be in the lord’s court that he will answer if the writ is produced, not elsewhere. It is also difficult to see how a factual statement of that kind (susceptible as it was to being falsified by changing practice) could be transformed into a statement of a normative rule that provided protection for sitting tenants. It seems more likely that what it reflects is the practice of the new king’s courts in rulings in assizes of novel disseisin on judgments given in lord’s courts dispossessing tenants, holding that a precondition for the legal validity of such judgments was that the tenant should have been summoned to the court on a writ of right and given the additional procedural protections that the removal and other processes on the writ of right afforded. Milsom has argued that the king’s writ of right started life as a writ for the enforcement of the provisions of the Treaty of Westminster of 1153, requiring the reinstatement of those who had (or whose ancestors had) been dispossessed during the Civil War of Stephen’s reign, and allowing them to claim on the basis that they or their ancestors had been in seisin on the day of the death of Henry I. This suggestion has the great merit of tying the introduction of what may well have been the first writ ‘of course’ to a definite external political cause, but the demerit of being supported, as I have argued in more detail elsewhere, by no evidence that   Glanvill, XII, 25 (p. 148).   Brand, Making of the Common Law, 205, 217.   Ibid., 225.   Ibid., 210–12.



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withstands detailed scrutiny, and of requiring us to believe that a writ drafted for this specific purpose would not have been much more explicit about its purpose. It seems more likely that the writ was from the first intended for the more general purpose of allowing land to be claimed on the basis of the seisin of an ancestor or of the claimant’s own seisin (the standard generic form of land claim) and perhaps other kinds of claim as well, for the formula of the writ allowed some elasticity on this point. Claimants may originally have obtained the writ mainly because of its explicit threat of removal if the lord failed to do justice as instructed. For the king, the great attraction of the writ (in its developed form at least) may have been precisely that it implied that lords exercised this major jurisdiction as agents of the king and subject to the oversight of the king’s officials. Less can be said about the other areas of jurisdiction that the king’s courts came to acquire during Henry’s reign. As has been seen, the king’s claim to an exclusive jurisdiction over advowson disputes went back to at least the Constitutions of Clarendon of 1164, but this claim was contested by the Church, which claimed such cases for its own courts. Henry’s barons may well have seen the advantages of keeping such litigation in lay courts, and may have been happy that such cases should be heard by the king’s courts because they were in a better position to ensure that the outcome of such litigation was respected by the ecclesiastical courts than judgments made in county courts or in seignorial courts would have been. ‘Pleas of the Crown’ were, of course, matters for the king’s justice, anyway (as representing an important element in his duty to uphold peace and justice). Entrusting their determination to the new royal justices meant that the detection and trial of suspects came much more effectivly under the oversight of those trusted by the king than any previous arrangements had secured. They also did more to secure for the Crown the substantial profits of criminal justice. The expansion of the jurisdiction of the county court through the invention of viscontiel writs seems to have been part of a wider realisation of the concept of integrating county courts into the wider judicial system as junior partners in a broader ‘Common Law’ legal system. Making such litigation removable by pone into the king’s courts seems also to be part of that broader design. The delegation to the county court of replevin jurisdiction, however, may belong to a wider long-term design to secure jurisdiction over such disputes for the county court at the expense of seignorial and hundred courts. Much had been achieved by the end of the reign of Henry II towards the creation of the English Common Law as a legal system, but there was much still to be done before the emergence of the classic later-medieval Common Law. A new kind of royal court with its own distinctive attributes had been created, but of the classic courts later to possess these characteristics only the General Eyre had   Ibid., 221–2.

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as yet come into existence, not the Common Bench as a separate institution or King’s Bench or any of the other lesser courts. The writ ‘of course’ had been created and the ‘returnable’ writ, and we see the beginnings of the regular, routine use of jury trial for fact-finding and helping to determine the outcome of litigation, though as yet only in a limited range of cases, mainly about title to land. The king’s courts had begun to exercise jurisdiction over a number of significant areas  over title to land, title to advowsons, disputes over personal status, major criminal offences  but little outside those areas. County courts had been given jurisdiction over a number of new areas, mainly through new viscontiel writs, but also through the creation of the new action of replevin, and they were being integrated into a national judicial system, mainly through the use of the writ pone, which allowed the easy removal of litigation out of the county court into the king’s courts proper. We also see the beginnings of the Common Law as a system of common legal rules and concepts, producing a common system of procedures applicable in the kings courts and common substantive rules applicable not just in them but also in other courts governing the transmission of title to land through intestate succession (inheritance), the lifetime entitlements of surviving spouses to the lands of their deceased partners, the incidents of the relationship of lord and tenant, and determining some of the main constituent elements of the criminal law. There seems, however, to be little evidence of a common law as yet outside these specific areas. Many of the changes that had taken place had been authorised by legislation. Much of that legislation is known only from passing references. This may in part have been because there was no sustained effort to preserve official archival texts of legislation, in part because some of the legislation may have been promulgated only through oral proclamation at the session of the justices who were to apply it, rather than by sending copies of the legislation separately to each county for proclamation and thereby making it available for private copying and allowing multiple private copies to enter circulation. There was a process of consultation that preceded the promulgation of legislation, and the need to obtain wider consent for legal change may well have been a significant brake on the speed with which legal change could take place, and may even have affected the eventual form that change took. But some of the important legal changes of the reign were not such as to require specific legislative authorisation and could be achieved by executive direction, by administrative fiat alone. Most of the significant legal changes of the reign of Henry II took place in the second half of the reign, from 1176 onwards. It is only then that the new kind of royal court emerges, that a recognisable General Eyre is created and the Exchequer begins to hear litigation on a regular basis ; then also that the petty assizes (with the possible and rather dubious exception of the assize of novel disseisin) are first authorised and the grand assize is created as an alternative to battle ; then that the writ of course and the returnable writ are first devised.



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It seems probable that the legal changes of Henry’s reign were driven, at least in part, by the desire on the part of Henry and his advisers to make the king’s justice much more widely available to his English subjects, and that they worked on both the supply and demand ends of this. On the supply side they found ways to create a multiplicity of royal courts that did not require the king’s active participation, but whose justices in a real sense ‘represented’ the king and were controlled by him, and whose courts could be said to be the king’s courts. On the demand side, the king ensured customers for those courts by offering his free subjects assistance in protecting their possession of their free tenements, in enforcing their entitlement to succeed to the lands of their ancestors and to obtain their dower entitlement, and in protecting their rights as the patrons of churches ; and also perhaps by offering them more rational methods of proof (by jury trial) as a way of determining disputes on these matters. The king and his advisers were also evidently determined to do more to ensure peace and order by bringing criminal justice under more direct royal control and supervision. Together, these fit into an overall picture of an activist king, interested in justice and the law, and determined to find a more active role for the monarchy in their provision.

Nick Barratt

Finance and the Economy in the Reign of Henry II

Introduction

P

resenting an assessment of the finances of Henry II, linked to an examination of the English economy during his reign, would normally necessitate the construction of a series of comprehensive data tables for all component parts of royal revenue, in a similar manner to the ones I prepared for the reigns of his sons, Richard I and John. This work has shed new light on many of the controversial aspects of the period that encapsulated the loss of Normandy and the formulation of Magna Carta, and included the rapid inflation that gripped the English economy. In many ways, there was a compelling need to reassess the global and compositional totals for these monarchs ; in terms of quantifiable data, nothing reliable had hitherto been provided in a systematic manner for the field of state finance, aside from calculations presented by Sir James Ramsay that have been constantly questioned by modern historians for their accuracy and therefore historical relevance. However, as part of his analysis of the revenues of the kings of England, Ramsay also produced data for Henry II’s reign, and for reasons that are examined below, these figures stand up far more robustly to scrutiny, making the need for a similarly comprehensive review of global revenue totals somewhat superfluous for the purpose of this paper. Consequently, I have decided to restrict this essay to an examination of some of the key areas of state finance during Henry II’s reign, partly based on a reappraisal of Ramsay’s existing global data, to see what patterns of activity emerge and whether there was any discernible relationship between Henry’s financial policy and identifiable trends in the wider economy. Of particular significance is an area of interest to financial historians that was first commented upon by Gerald  N. Barratt, ‘The Revenue of King John’, EHR, 111 (1996), 835–55 ; idem, ‘The English Revenue of Richard I’, EHR, 116 (2001), 635–56.   J. H. Ramsay, A History of the Revenues of the Kings of England, 1066–1399, 2 vols., (Oxford 1925), i.



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of Wales in the aftermath of the wars of Stephen’s reign : the erosion of revenue from the royal demesne as specified in fixed county-farm payments audited in the Exchequer and recorded in the pipe rolls. Traditionally, this was the single largest component of royal finances, and it has been strongly argued elsewhere that its collapse under Richard I and John was one of the greatest contributory factors to the loss of Normandy in 1204. Henry’s work in resurrecting this source of income needs to be set against other developments within the portfolio of sources from which the King could traditionally derive revenue. This analysis in turn raises some intriguing questions about the possibility of a causal link between innovations in the mechanism and scope of state finance and the well-documented price rises that economic historians have identified and quantified towards the end of Henry’s reign. Given that the Crown, or its agents, controlled the English money supply through its monopoly on the royal mints and exchanges, and in principle could also exert some influence on economic activity through its ability to authorise large-scale expenditure such as castle-building, withdraw money from circulation through taxation or overseas campaigns, and stimulate the local economy through the purchase of provisions, stock or victuals, this is a thesis that is worth considering in more detail, even though it is quite a controversial link to try to quantify, let alone prove. There are obvious limits to the amount of available data that has survived over the centuries, allied to the fact that inflation rates were, by modern standards, very low until the end of Henry’s reign and on an annual basis possibly went unnoticed by contemporaries owing to cyclical price fluctuations caused by the impact of the weather on harvests. This clearly limits the ability of the modern historian to make a fully comprehensive case for one causal link over another, as all would have acted in tandem to a greater or lesser extent, but it is certainly true that, to date, the role of the Crown has been underplayed as a contributory factor. Consequently, in this paper I shall provide a very basic introduction to and overview of the English economy in the mid-to-late twelfth century as a backdrop to an assessment of how fundamental changes to state finance, and the increasingly pressing demands of continental affairs towards the end of Henry’s reign, might have contributed to the well-documented price inflation that occurred after 1180.

  Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, viii, 316.  N. Barratt, ‘The Revenues of John and Philip Augustus Revisited’, in King John : New Interpretations, ed. S. D. Church (Woodbridge 1999), 75–99.

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The State of the English Economy in the Twelfth Century The starting point for this survey is a review of current thinking about the state of the English economy during the twelfth century : a topic that has been explored in great depth in recent years by, amongst others, Farmer, Harvey, Mayhew, Latimer and Bolton in the context of the aforementioned price rises. Nevertheless, it is worth providing a picture of the various components of the English economy before revisiting the debate about the course, causes and impact of inflationary trends that have been identified. Of course, there is only sufficient scope here to make sweeping generalisations about the major sectors : namely the rural economy, the commercial sector comprising markets and towns, and international trade based on the wool trade, and therefore I have largely ignored important regional diversity for the sake of simplicity. The basic characteristic of the English economy was that it was rural in nature, with landholding regulated by the manorial system. Although the pattern of manorial tenure varied across parts of England, the basic principle remained the same, namely that land was held from the lord of the manor in return for the performance of labour service, though landholding for monetary rents was also common. The lord would keep a proportion of the total land in hand as demesne, either to be farmed directly or leased out to sub-tenants, whilst the remainder of land in the manor would be divided amongst the other tenants, either free or customary, who also had a share of common meadows with rights of pasture. Although manors were not necessarily compact geographical units, it was common across the Midlands and the south, except in Kent, for most tenants to live in a nucleated village surrounded by two or three main fields, which were divided into equal-sized strips. Elsewhere, in the east and parts of the north, a more detached system was prevalent, with outlying hamlets associated with the main nucleated village rendering service in kind or money. The main grain crop in arable areas was wheat, though barley and oats played an important part in the local economic structure. Similarly, although dairy farming was important, the increase   J. Bolton, ‘The English Economy in the early Thirteenth Century’, in King John : New Interpretations, 27–40 ; P. Latimer, ‘Early Thirteenth Century Prices’, ibid., 41–73 ; J. Bolton, ‘Inflation, Economics and Politics’, in Thirteenth Century England IV, ed. P. Coss and S. D. Lloyd (Woodbridge 1992), 1–14 ; P. D. A. Harvey ‘The English Inflation’, Past and Present, 61 (1973), 3–30 ; D. L. Farmer, ‘Some Price Fluctuations in Angevin England’, EcHR, 9 (1956), 34–43 ; N. J. Mayhew, ‘Money and Prices in England from Henry II to Edward III’, Agricultural History Review, 35 (1987), 121–32 ; A. R. Bridbury, The English Economy from Bede to the Reformation (Woodbridge 1992).   A useful summary has recently been provided in D. A. Carpenter, The Struggle for Mastery : Britain, 1066–1284 (London 2003) 26–60. For a definitive account of the English economy, see J. L. Bolton, The Medieval English Economy 1150–1500, 2nd edn (London 1985).



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in sheep farming towards the end of the period reflected the growing influence of the wool trade on the English economy. Despite the fact that the overwhelming proportion of the population during the twelfth century lived in the countryside, there were still a significant number of towns that provided an opportunity for commercial activity, centred on a flourishing network of markets and fairs. In general, towns were not large in terms of population size, with only the more important provincial centres such as York, Lincoln, Norwich, Winchester and London containing populations that were significantly larger than 5,000 people. However, many new boroughs and towns were founded in the twelfth century, following grants of fairs and markets  though the greatest increase took place in the thirteenth century  and much of the initiative can be placed at the hands of local lords who looked to establish a place of commerce next to an existing castle or ecclesiastical foundation. Market towns were important centres for the local community, where excess corn could be sold or exchanged for other goods, and specialised products were manufactured. Similarly, during the reign of Henry II, the Jewish community settled in urban areas and developed a sophisticated money-lending service under royal protection, thus providing England’s primary source of credit. However, outside the local trade networks there was a burgeoning wool trade centred on the export of this lucrative raw material to the Flemish cloth markets. The consequences of wool exportation for the English economy were twofold. First, more sheep were reared on pasture land for profit, which in turn increased the amount of money flooding into England. The importance of the East coast for the development of trading links with Flanders is shown by the growth of coastal towns where exports were handled. These, then, are the main components in this simplified picture of the twelfthcentury economy. The main trend that has interested economic historians was a steady rise in the prices of agricultural goods, especially corn, which has often been attributed to 1180 ; but in reality there was a series of short-term price fluctuations that, viewed across a longer period in the years before and after this date, tended generally upwards in nature. Prices appear to have dropped away in the later 1190s, but then suddenly rocketed dramatically in the early 1200s. Two important factors lie behind these trends : namely population pressure and increases to the money supply, and each will be examined in turn. While no precise figures are available for England’s population throughout the twelfth century, it is accepted amongst historians that there was a steady increase from the late eleventh century into the mid fourteenth, based on comparative evidence from Domesday Book, tax returns, Hundred Rolls and tenancy data. It is possible that the increase was quite substantial, though the exact scale is open to question depending on which set of figures we choose to adopt. For example, estimates for population in 1086 vary from just over one million anywhere up to

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2.5 million, with figures at the end of the period ranging from 4 million up as high as 5.5 million. This gives a population increase of a minimum of 120 per cent, if fluctuations between only the most conservative parameters are compared. This had a knock-on effect on the economy at large. Despite the lack of precise numerical data, it seems clear that during the twelfth century, more land came under cultivation, as pressure on existing food supplies grew on account of the expanding population. Evidence from estate accounts shows that manorial waste land was brought under cultivation for the first time, deforestation of royal forests can be traced through the growing number of assarts and purprestures recorded in the pipe rolls, while chronicle sources demonstrate that new land was reclaimed from the sea in Lincolnshire, East Anglia and the Fenlands to boost crop pro­duction. However, another factor that needs to be considered when addressing the topic of inflation is the money supply, according to the famous Fisher equation MV=PT. Historians such as Mayhew and Bridbury have addressed the issue of how much money was in circulation in England throughout the medieval period and concluded that the money supply increased dramatically towards the end of the twelfth century. This assessment was based on coin hoards and mint-output evidence, while the recoinage of 1180 plays a crucial role in our knowledge of the amount of coinage in circulation  a conservative figure of £100,000 or 24 million silver pennies can safely be suggested for 1180, rising sharply after the recoinage of 1205 to about £250,000 or 60 million coins. This is a large increase from accepted estimates of 9 million silver pennies in circulation a century beforehand, sparking debate between Bridbury and Mayhew, among others, that the influx of bullion into England was a contributory factor, the result of the expanding wool trade with Flanders. Bolton has recently questioned just how much of an impact the wool trade had on bullion figures, and indeed just how

  See J. Moore, ‘Quot homines ? The Population of Domesday England’, ANS, 19 (1996), 307–34.   A summary of this data and discussion about the estimates are provided in Carpenter, Struggle for Mastery, 31–3.   See P. D. A. Harvey, ‘The Pipe Rolls and the Adoption of Demesne Farming in England’, EcHR, 27 (1974), 345–54.   An equation derived from the work of the early-20th-century economist Irving Fisher, linking the money supply (M) and velocity of circulation (V) with prices (P) and the money value of transactions within the economy (T).   Mayhew, ‘Money and Prices’ ; A. R. Bridbury, ‘Thirteenth-Century Prices and the Money Supply’, Agricultural History Review, 33 (1985), 1–21 ; see also Martin Allen’s contribution to this volume.   Mayhew, ‘Money and Prices’, 125 ; see also Allen’s contribution to this volume for the latest thoughts on this topic.   Bridbury, ‘Thirteenth-Century Prices’, 18 ; Mayhew, ‘Money and Prices’ 122–4.



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much of an impact the money supply would have had on the medieval economy per se, dependent as it was on the vagaries of the seasons. Farmer’s series of grain prices, culled from pipe rolls and estate records, clearly shows that price change was subject to short-term fluctuation, although the general trend between 1165 and 1195 was upwards. Recent work by Latimer has confirmed Farmer’s findings and lends credence to the belief that there was a pattern of inflation emerging towards the end of the twelfth century. However, it is important to bear in mind the fact that the rural economy was at the mercy of the weather, and that a bad harvest or cold winter would have a far more immediate and dramatic impact on grain prices than a longer-term rise in the money supply. The picture is made even more complicated by the retention of local systems of credit or bartered payments in kind when actual cash was in short supply, which are hard to fit into modern economic models. Furthermore, when analysing the implication of inflationary pressures, it is easy to forget that the phenomenon was probably a complete mystery to contemporaries, who would have been aware of short-term changes yet oblivious to the wider picture. Nevertheless, Harvey has made a compelling case for a subtle change in patterns of demesne farming amongst landowners towards the end of the twelfth century. He suggests that, over a prolonged period of time, landowners made a conscious decision to switch from leasing demesne land to sub-tenants, to a system of direct management whereby they could maximise profits from rising prices, noting that such changes were not the result of some advanced economic insight but merely ‘for immediate and empirical reasons’. Yet once again there are dissenting voices to be heard, amongst them Bridbury, who doubts the pipe-roll evidence for direct demesne farming, and Biddick, who suggests that the reasons for any switch had more to do with structural indebtedness amongst great landlords rather than an attempt to boost incomes.

English State Finance in the Twelfth Century Clearly the latter half of the twelfth century was a time of great economic change. In summary, current thought, despite some arguments, favours population expansion, aided by an increased money supply, as the main cause of extended price   See Bolton, ‘English Economy in the Early Thirteenth Century’, for a full discussion of this topic.   Farmer, ‘Price Fluctuations’, 37–42, for data tables.   Latimer, ‘Early Thirteenth Century Prices’.   Harvey, ‘English Inflation’, 5.   Bridbury, ‘Thirteenth-Century Prices’.   K. Biddick, The Other Economy : Pastoral Husbandry on a Medieval Estate (Berkley/Los Angeles 1989), in particular the evidence she cites in the example provided by Peterborough Abbey.

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inflation, with the switch to direct demesne farming an important consequence during this period. These conclusions have been reached through detailed examination of mainly microeconomic sources, such as the evidence of price fluctuations drawn from crop and livestock sales and purchases derived from private and royal estate accounts. I shall reassess the subject of economic activity at the end of this paper, but only after an examination of the macroeconomic picture, focusing on how the recovery and expansion of state finance during Henry’s reign affected the English economy. As with price inflation, there is already a sizeable body of information in print about Henry II’s financial administration. The survival of Fitz Nigel’s Dialogus provides an unparalleled insight into the mechanics of the Exchequer, the sources of revenue available to the Crown, and the officials who oversaw the entire system of receipt and audit. Furthermore, there is an unbroken run of pipe rolls for Henry II’s reign, all of which have been printed. Consequently, historians such as R. L. Poole and Sir James Ramsay have been able to provide detailed studies of the Angevin machinery of government and quantify the level of revenue Henry II derived from England. It is tempting to ask what else could possibly be written about the subject. However, there are a couple of caveats associated with this data that need to be aired, and justify a closer examination of the figures. It has been fashionable to preface any work concerning royal revenue with an explanation about the limitations of the available source material, namely for this period the surviving English Exchequer pipe rolls, before concluding that, since they are all we have, they provide a tolerable level of information from which to draw conclusions. This has been largely the case when working on later monarchs, in particular Richard I, John and the early years of Henry III’s reign. However the pipe rolls for Henry II’s reign  especially during the early years  are barely adequate if we wish to derive accurate figures for royal income. It is probable that sizeable sums were collected directly by the itinerant court and handled by the Chamber, especially while Henry was resident in England. I have argued elsewhere that this ‘missing’ revenue poses less of a problem during the reigns of Richard I and John, when the pipe rolls record payments into the Chamber or direct to the king that are offset against an accountant’s debt at the Exchequer, but the paucity of such entries in the early decades of Henry’s reign suggest that the Exchequer’s remit was far more limited in the 1150s and early 1160s. Yet at the same time, the reduced scope and volume of Exchequer business in these early years means that the other major problem associated with pipe-roll revenue  namely that they are records of audit not of receipt  is less of a factor, since   Dialogus.  Ramsay, History of the Revenues ; R. L. Poole, The Exchequer in the Twelfth Century (Oxford 1912).   Barratt, ‘Revenue of King John’ ; idem, ‘English Revenues of Richard I’.



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the time lag between payment and audit would have been reduced owing to the simplified accounting process. Equally, financial historians have been critical of the figures produced by Sir James Ramsay concerning the global levels of state finance. The need for a reevaluation of Ramsay’s figures for the early thirteenth century has been proved by the recent publication of financial data for John’s reign. By his own admission Ramsay ‘guesstimated’ some of the global totals. However, new work on the Richard I pipe rolls has shown that his data for the late 1100s was largely accurate, and during the course of my research for this paper, I found that Ramsay’s figures once again bear up to closer scrutiny. It has proved adequate for the remit of this examination to provide detailed recalculations of Ramsay’s figures, alongside new data outlining the composition of royal revenue, every five years from 1157/8 to the end of the reign. Given the limitations of the pipe rolls as an accurate source of royal revenue, as listed above, there is little point dwelling too long on individual global totals as an indication of the strength or weakness of state finance during the twelfth century. Instead, the data produced by this new five-year snapshot survey, in combination with Ramsay’s figures, allows rolling average annual totals to be compiled for key periods of Henry’s reign, thus permitting a broader trend-based analysis to be undertaken, in much the same way as seven-year rolling averages are used to produce trend data for agricultural prices. The results of this new approach to state finance make very interesting reading, and suggest that the year 1166 marks an important turning point in the history of Henry II’s financial regime. The average annual audited Exchequer income throughout the entire reign was just over £18,000. Prior to the 1165/6 financial year the average was only £13,300 ; thereafter it rose to £20,400. Furthermore, given the historical preoccupation with 1180 as the date closely associated with the start of sustained price rises, the average annual income for the period from 1179/80 until the end of the reign was a few pounds shy of £22,000. To provide some context, the early years of Richard I’s reign saw a drop in audited revenue to an average level of £15,800 until his return from captivity, at which point it jumped sharply to £25,000 and remained at £23,600 during the first five years of John’s reign. Of course, the significance of 1166 should come as no real surprise, given the important political, legal and administrative reforms that took place in this year and thereafter. Yet a closer analysis of the constituent elements of royal revenue reveals just how much of an impact these changes made to the financial landscape. By assigning each debt on the pipe roll to a specific category of revenue, it is possible to compile an overview of where Henry’s income came from, and how   Barratt, ‘Revenue of King John’.   Barratt, ‘English Revenues of Richard I’.  Ramsay, History of the Revenues, 191.

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the relative importance of each source changed over time. This process is necessarily a time-consuming and somewhat subjective venture ; they say that no two people could ever add up or analyse a pipe roll and obtain the same figures twice. Nevertheless, even allowing a small margin for human error, covering tiredness or the odd eccentric assignment of debt categories, the figures produced by this approach further highlight the importance of 1166. The most important conclusion we can draw is that during the first ten years of the reign, the traditional backbone of state finance, and the principal source of revenue, was income from the terra regis, accounted at the Exchequer as the county farms. Since the time of the Domesday survey, grants had reduced the overall proportion of English land under royal control from about one-quarter to oneeighth, as Green and Wolfe have demonstrated. Indeed, Green has argued that significant erosion occurred in the period between the compilation of the 1130 pipe roll and the accession of Henry II. Gerald of Wales was moved to comment that ‘by the time of Henry II, so much land had been granted from the royal demesne that the returns to the English treasury amounted to barely £8,000 a year’. Having analysed the county-farm payments recorded in the early pipe rolls, it is likely that Henry would have been delighted to have received so much cash from the county farms, as the sums actually received and audited are far, far worse. Apart from demonstrating how much of a mess the Exchequer was in after Henry took the throne  for example, simple mathematical errors and unknown county-farm totals proliferate in the county-farm accounts before 1165  the early pipe rolls make it abundantly clear that royal finances were in a poor state. County-farm revenue averaged around £5,000 per annum for the first four years of the reign, of which only about £3,000 was paid in cash. The total began to rise to a more significant level of around £6,000 after 1162/3. Thereafter the figure dropped back again throughout the 1170s, until the rebellion against the King was crushed ; with the seizure of lands back into Crown hands, revenue from the county farm increased dramatically after 1176, before reaching nearly £6,500 at the end of the reign. Clearly, these figures are well below Gerald of Wales’s estimate, but they should be put into context by the situation facing Henry at the start of the reign and the need to dispense patronage from the terra regis to keep his supporters in England loyal. The balancing act can be seen by looking at the changes to the ‘real value’ of the county farms, defined as the amount the Crown could nominally expect to collect each year once deductions for alms, offerings and terre date were taken into account. It is clear that when the Exchequer was able to hold its first proper audit, confusion reigned. As highlighted above, the calculations for the county-farm   J. Green, The Government of England under Henry I (Cambridge 1986), 61–6 ; B. P. Wolfe, The Royal Demesne in English History (London 1971), 30–38.   Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, viii, 316.



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accounts are littered with basic arithmetical errors, born out of an uncertainty about the correct sums that ought to be demanded from the sheriffs. Furthermore, it took a while to bring all the shires back under full Exchequer authority, and it is only after 1165 that a degree of consistency in the county farm accounts can be discerned. It is possible to identify several phases of the Crown’s battle to prevent further erosion of the county farms yet to dispense land grants to secure support. The average real value for the county farms during the first six years of the reign, when the chaos of Stephen’s reign was still being dealt with, stood at 52 per cent of their nominal values, whereas during the next six years this figure had risen to nearly 61 per cent after an effective policy of land restitution had been pursued. Although subsequent grants in the 1170s were made to ease the political situation in England, which eroded the county farms back to levels nearer 55 per cent of their face value, by the last years of the reign they stood once again at 60 per cent or thereabouts. The overwhelming importance of royal demesne income as the backbone of Crown finance is emphasised when its contribution to the Treasury coffers is compared to levels of income brought in by other sources available to the Crown in the early years of the reign. In 1157/8, payments against the county farms audited at the Exchequer contributed 53 per cent of all cash revenue from the shires ; the total had risen slightly by 1162/3, to 55 per cent. Within five years, however, county-farm cash receipts had dropped to only 38 per cent of overall shire receipts, despite having risen in actual terms from nearly £3,500 in 1162/3 to £5,250 in 1167/8. A continued pattern of higher county-farm receipts providing a lower proportion of overall cash income was to remain constant for the duration of the reign. This is without question a pivotal moment in the history of English state finance, and one that did not go unnoticed amongst contemporaries. For example, Gerald of Wales commented that ‘one may marvel that King Henry and his sons nevertheless abounded in wealth, despite their many wars. The reason is that they took care to augment their revenue from rents by casual income, and relied more on subsidiary than basic sources of profit.’ The sudden rise in Crown receipts can be specifically linked to a series of important legal and administrative innovations that were instigated in 1166. In particular, the Assize of Clarendon and the cartae baronum had a major bearing on the trends witnessed above. As Paul Brand has demonstrated elsewhere in this volume, the expansion of the English legal system was one of the most important developments of Henry II’s reign. In particular, the Assize of Clarendon brought royal justice into the heart of English society, under the remit that all suspects and criminals should be pursued and brought to account regardless of any existing private privileges, rights and franchises that had been formerly granted or acquired. The original reliance on sheriffs and county justices to enforce the Assize was rescinded when   Ibid.

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it was discovered that the local officials were less diligent in their enquires than had been expected. Consequently the administration of the Assize of Clarendon passed into the hands of the itinerant justices and entrenched the General Eyre at the heart of the judicial system, with the sheriffs taking on an administrative role in preparing sufficient information when the justices arrived in the county. The regular despatch of the General Eyre after 1166 became an important plank in royal authority, and its acceptance can be witnessed in the eyre of 1176, when more justices were appointed to hear cases, as evidence shows that so many pleas were brought before the justices that they could not complete their business in one county before moving onto the next, leading to referrals and postponements of hearings to Westminster, which caused delays and frustration. The eyre of 1176 is also important because it was the first to be held since the wars of 1173–4, this time under the terms of the Assize of Northampton. The crucial change since Clarendon was that punishments were made more severe so as to act as an effective deterrent to potential criminals. Of course, access to justice was not restricted to the General Eyre ; the complicated hierarchy of courts that had evolved by the mid twelfth century, with their overlapping jurisdictions, continued to function. However, during Henry’s reign, access to the itinerant king’s court  the highest jurisdiction in the land  was made more available to all levels of society, and a base where justices could meet to confer on complicated legal issues, or where eyre justices could refer cases, was established at Westminster. In particular, the formulation of set procedures for cases of disseisin and mort d’ancestor was begun by the proclamation of an assize, thereby creating the framework by which cases could be heard in royal courts. The increased use of standardised writs, such as praecipe, further opened up royal justice to a wider audience. This is, of course, a vast simplification of the whole judicial system and the reforms that took place throughout the reign. Yet the key issue from a financial and economic perspective is the dates when some of the most important changes took place. While it would be foolhardy to claim that the Assizes of Clarendon and Northampton, or the development of standardised writ procedures for novel disseisin or mort d’ancestor were a direct attempt to boost royal revenue, it is abundantly clear that the financial impact of the legal reforms were nevertheless dramatic, as the profits of justice were suddenly brought within the grasp of the Exchequer. Revenue brought in from the eyre, and collected from payments to secure writs bringing actions into the royal courts, was audited at the Exchequer. It should be no surprise to find that the contribution of these hitherto incidental sources of income as recorded in the pipe rolls increased both in real and actual terms after 1166. The figures for the 1176/7 financial year are particularly striking, as income from the eyre, justice and the forest combined to boost annual revenue to over £30,300, at a time when cash payments against the county farm totalled £4,300, or only 14 per cent of audited revenue.



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It was not only in the judicial sphere that important changes were made. In 1166, an ambitious assessment of the land held by the tenants in chief of the Crown was commissioned, with information requested on the number of subtenancies created, the amount of knight service owed, and the names of any tenants. The returns, known as the cartae baronum, were collected by the Exchequer and provide a detailed insight into landholding in 1166. The survey was quickly put to use ; in 1168 the king levied a standard feudal aid for the marriage of his eldest daughter, but assessed the aid on the new information contained in the cartae. The tax raised over £4,300 in 1167/8 alone, and though Henry was prepared to make concessions on demanding aid on any new enfeoffments listed in the cartae, it was still possible for him to collect such sums when vacant honours were held in his hands. When viewed against the backdrop of static demesne revenue, the whole issue of taxation becomes highly relevant. It is perhaps surprising that no attempt was made to exploit the method of assessment known as hidage, once the Danegeld had been allowed to lapse in 1162. In 1166, an aid for the Holy Land was levied as a small percentage of moveable property, but even this innovation was not repeated until 1185 and 1188, when further aids to support the Holy Land were levied. Indeed there seems to have been a reluctance among the Angevin kings to turn to property-based taxation as a means of raising money ; aside from Richard I’s ransom, which in fairness did combine a number of measures to raise the necessary funds to secure his release, only two carucages were called before John experimented with the Seventh in 1203 and the Thirteenth in 1207. Yet Henry’s regime was able to develop a new branch of taxation known as the tallage, levied on the royal demesne that included many of the towns and boroughs. Tallage was created out of earlier ‘aids’ or ‘gifts’ and, as S. K. Mitchell has demonstrated, while not potentially as large a source of revenue as the Danegeld, it was still a regular and lucrative source of incidental revenue, which Henry exploited as did his two sons. The effects of the rapid increase in business on the financial administration are most noticeably demonstrated by dramatic changes to the physical appearance and internal content of the pipe rolls. Before 1166, the Exchequer produced relatively small documents, dealing as they did with only the county farms, demesne revenues and miscellaneous feudal dues, oblations and amercements. After 1166, the pipe rolls began to expand rapidly, as the Exchequer was required to audit eyre revenue and the increasing numbers of proffers and payments for judicial processes, as well as yield from tallages, scutages and other assessments. Add into the equation a more assertive implementation of forest laws with the accompanying fines and amercements, and the Exchequer was certainly becoming ‘an institution rather than an occasion’, to paraphrase Stacey’s comment on   S. K. Mitchell, Taxation in Medieval England, ed. S. Painter (New Haven 1951).

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the Exchequer of Henry I. Yet with its increased role in the financial administration came authority, for the simple reason that it was generating detailed written records of its transactions with royal officials. Nowhere was this more powerfully demonstrated than by the Inquest of Sheriffs, instigated in 1170 to uncover evidence of malpractice amongst sheriffs and other royal officers operating in the localities. By Michaelmas 1170, twenty sheriffs had been dismissed and replaced with new officials with experience in the royal administration : a clear break from the previous practice of using important local magnates. Thus the Exchequer was the important link between the Crown and its agents in the locality : the central plank of the Henrician financial administration. This does not mean that the system was impervious to turmoil and trouble, but the establishment of set procedures, as outlined in the Dialogus, allowed the Exchequer to operate with a remarkable degree of normality during the troubles of 1173–4. Pipe rolls were still compiled, although not all counties appeared for audit for the year in question. Consequently revenue dropped to pre-1166 levels, with payments for the county farm bringing in only £2,400. Yet, during a period in which collection of cash was hazardous, writs authorising local expenditure were issued instead, which accounted for a further £2,100 from this source. This can be taken as evidence that the Exchequer retained a high level of support, control and authority during this difficult period, and compares favourably to the impact of John’s rebellion against Richard, when annual income slumped to about £10,000 in 1192 and 1193, with only £6,000 cash raised during the latter year. It is therefore abundantly clear that after 1166 the Treasury’s coffers were swelled by revenue from a range of incidental sources, including profits of justice and frequent taxation of the royal demesne, which included many centres of commercial activity. While it is reckless to suggest that the expansion of state finance was a major factor in the general rise in prices so carefully documented by Farmer, Harvey and others, it is nevertheless tempting to link the increased fiscal activity at the top of the economy to the general trends witnessed further down. For example, the expansion of justice meant that more people sought redress in the royal courts, spending cash that would not normally find its way into the royal coffers. The increased use of financial amercements to punish offenders caught in the General Eyre, more frequent tallages, and a general perception that larger fines were being paid to procure office or secure the right to wardships or marriages, all add to the picture that the Crown was bringing more money into circulation than at any previous point, or at the very least increasing its velocity of circulation ; both factors that, according to the Fisher equation, would have had an impact on prices. Returning to the figures for average annual revenue, the period of greatest income yield was after 1180 : exactly the time when prolonged price increases began.  R. C. Stacey, ed., Receipt and Issue Rolls 1241–2 (PRS 1992 for 1987–8), p. ix.



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Furthermore, the disposal of these royal funds through Crown expenditure in the localities would have generated further economic activity, for example during the construction of royal castles such as Dover, Windsor or Orford. Bearing in mind that Farmer extensively used the pipe rolls to collect his price data from the accounts of royal expenditure on grain, livestock and military goods that were more often than not connected with the provisioning of castles, there would appear to be a connection with increased economic activity at a local level. However, there is another side to this argument. The last few years of Henry’s life were spent in bitter wars against his sons and the scourge of the Angevin dynasty, Philip Augustus of France. While precise figures for monetary transfers from England to the Continent are unavailable, it is clear that annual revenue audited at the Exchequer consistently exceeded £20,000 after 1181/2, and this matches the pattern of exploitation adopted by Richard when we do know that large sums of cash were exported to pay for the defences of Normandy. Furthermore, the vast bulk of this revenue was in the form of cash receipts, which once deposited in the Treasury could be expended anywhere at home or abroad. Hopefully, further work on the source of this revenue will reveal whether sustained pressure was being brought to bear on the incidental sources of revenue ; but it is clear that in 1187/8 levels of cash collected from judicial sources, the eyre, feudal dues and the forest were all relatively high, as indeed they were in 1182/3. As Bolton has demonstrated for the reign of King John, the removal of bullion from the economic system to fund overseas campaigns would have a generated deflationary effect, however small. What is clear from this survey, though, is that the overall picture is far more complicated than would appear at first glance, and that it is not satisfactory simply to cite one cause or another as the motor of inflationary trends. Without accurate figures, though, all we can do is speculate.

Conclusion In conclusion, several key points can be made relating to state finance and the economy during Henry II’s reign, all of which had important repercussions for Henry’s successors. First, it is clear that the period before 1166 saw the reestablishment and recovery of English state finance after the administrative chaos of Stephen’s reign. The Exchequer was cemented as the central organ of royal financial control, with the county farms providing the backbone of revenue. However, by briefly examining the constituent elements of Henry’s cash, it is clear that new sources of revenue were to play an ever-expanding role in the overall total after 1166. The introduction of new legal processes that brought revenue into the King’s coffers would have contributed to the amount of monetary transactions in   Bolton, ‘English Economy in the early Thirteenth Century’.

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the economy, and the increased costs of war led the Crown to spend more money on supplies and provisions, once again making an impact on economic activity. Whilst it is unrealistic to suggest that these factors were central to creating the inflationary pressures that led to price rises, it is certainly the case that they played an important contributory role. The best evidence for this theory comes during the reigns of Richard I and John, when vastly increased expenditure and the proliferation of monetary transactions to secure favour, patronage and access to justice can be linked even more closely to price inflation. The failure of Henry’s sons to live within their means, and the increased expenditure on overseas warfare, created the conditions necessary whereby a few harsh winters and poor harvests converted price fluctuations that were gently upwards in nature into a period of sharp inflation during the first years of the thirteenth century. As Bolton has demonstrated, it was only the removal of large quantities of silver from the economy through John’s enormous exactions that eventually halted the process, although prices never returned to their twelfth-century levels. When viewing the development of royal revenue from the middle of the twelfth century to the first quarter of the thirteenth, Gerald of Wales’s shrewd observation about the relative wealth of the Angevin kings despite the erosion of their demesne income was spot on. If 1194 marks the beginning of the end of the Angevin realm on the continent, then 1166 should be placed alongside it as the date when the seeds of decline were sown.   Bolton, ‘English Economy in the early Thirteenth Century’.

Martin Allen

Henry II and the English Coinage

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enry II reformed the English coinage twice, in 1158 and 1180, reorganising the mints and ordering a comprehensive replacement of the silver coins in circulation on both occasions. By the end of Henry II’s reign in 1189, the number of mints in England had been severely reduced. Centralised mints replaced the dispersed small workshops of individual moneyers, which had been a normal feature of the English urban landscape since the late Anglo-Saxon period. In 1180, the moneyers lost their customary role in the administration of the profits of the coinage, and the mints now had separate exchanges, where a new kind of official paid by the king collected the profits. Henry II’s second reform of the coinage, in 1180, was the prelude to an enormous growth in the size of the English currency, which began in the last years of the reign. The principal source of documentary evidence for the English coinage in the reign of Henry II is the Exchequer’s pipe rolls, which can be supplemented with Richard fitz Nigel’s description of the work of the Exchequer in the Dialogus de Scaccario and information from chronicles. In 1951, Derek Allen’s British Museum Catalogue (BMC ) of Henry II’s Cross-and-Crosslets or ‘Tealby’ coinage (see Figure 2 on p. 261), which was issued between 1158 and 1180, used the pipe rolls and other sources to construct a comprehensive analysis of the administration of the mints. Allen’s BMC has been the foundation of all subsequent work on the  R. Ruding, Annals of the Coinage of Great Britain and its Dependencies from the Earliest Period of Authentic History to the Reign of Victoria, 3rd edn, 3 vols. (London 1840), i, 170–71, provides a brief survey of the chronicle evidence and some pipe-roll material. A. E. Packe, ‘The Coinage as Affected by the Administration of Henry II’, NC, 3rd ser. 15 (1895), 51–8, made a pioneering analysis of references to the coinage in the Dialogus de Scaccario. P. W. P. Carlyon-Britton, ‘Historical Notes on the First Coinage of Henry II’, BNJ, 2 (1905), 185–242, published translations of the references to mints and moneyers in the pipe rolls to 1176/7. L.A. Lawrence, ‘On the First Coinage of Henry II’, BNJ, 14 (1918), 13–37, proposed a classification of the coinage of 1158–80, which was revised by G. C. Brooke, ‘The First Coinage, or “Tealby” Type, of Henry II’, NC, 2nd ser. 7 (1927), 313–41, with an extension of Carlyon-Britton’s extracts from the pipe rolls to the end of the coinage in 1180.   Allen, BMC. The first coinage of Henry II has been called the Tealby coinage since the nineteenth century, as the largest recorded hoard of coins of this type was found at Tealby in

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Cross-and-Crosslets coinage. The study of Henry II’s second coinage, the Short Cross coinage introduced in 1180 (see Figure 3 on p. 269), was dominated for decades by L. A. Lawrence’s seminal article of 1915, which established the basis of the classification of the coins still in use today. In the 1960s, John Brand took a leading role in a new phase of research on the Short Cross coinage, tackling problems left unresolved by Lawrence. This has culminated in the posthumous publication of Brand’s analysis of the administration of the coinage from 1180, and in the survey of the Short Cross coinage provided by the publication of the collection of the late Professor Jeffrey Mass. The English coinage was included in the restoration of a unified national administration, put in motion between the treaty of Winchester in November 1153 and the accession of Henry II nearly a year later. The customary unity of the English currency had been broken in the 1140s by the issue of independent coinages for the Empress Matilda and various local magnates. King Stephen issued a new currency in the southern and eastern areas of the kingdom under his control on two occasions between the mid 1140s and the final resolution of the conflict with the Angevins in 1153, but a truly national currency was impossible before 1153. In his description of the settlement between Stephen and Duke Lincolnshire in 1807, but Allen, BMC, p. xvi, proposed the more systematic name Cross-and-Crosslets, which describes the design on the reverse of the coins.   D. M. Metcalf, ‘A Survey of Research into the Pennies of the First Three Edwards (1279–1344) and their Continental Imitations’, in Edwardian Monetary Affairs (1279–1344) ; A Symposium held in Oxford, August 1976, ed. N. J. Mayhew (British Archaeological Reports 36, Oxford 1977), 1–31, at 26–31, used data from Allen’s BMC to estimate the numbers of coin dies used at each of the mints, as a first step towards the estimation of the size of the English currency in the reign of Henry II. P. Nightingale, ‘Some London Moneyers, and Reflections on the Organization of English Mints in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, NC, 142 (1982), 34–50 ; and ‘“The King’s Profit” : Trends in English Mint and Monetary Policy in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, in Later Medieval Mints : Organisation, Administration and Techniques ; The Eighth Oxford Symposium on Coinage and Monetary History, ed. N. J. Mayhew and P. Spufford (British Archaeological Reports International Ser. 389, Oxford 1988), 61–75, at 61–3, reconsidered the administration of the profits of the mints, challenging Derek Allen’s conclusions on this subject. T. C. R. Crafter, ‘A Re-examination of the Classification and Chronology of the Cross-and-Crosslets Type of Henry II’, BNJ, 68 (1998), 42–63, refined the classification of the coinage and critically examined Derek Allen’s use of pipe-roll evidence to date the coins.   L. A. Lawrence, ‘The Short-Cross Coinage, 1180 to 1247’, BNJ, 11 (1915), 59–100.   J. P. Mass et al., The J. P. Mass Collection : English Short Cross Coins, 1180–1247 (Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles 56, London 2001), 142–55, provides a comprehensive bibliography of the numerous publications on the Short Cross coinage.   J. Brand, The English Coinage 1180–1247 : Money, Mints and Exchanges, 1180–1247 (British Numismatic Society Special Publication 1, London, 1994) ; Mass, The J. P. Mass Collection.   The restoration of government begun in 1153 is analysed by 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).   M. Blackburn, ‘Coinage and Currency’, in The Anarchy of King Stephen’s Reign, ed. E. King (Oxford 1994), 145–205, at 162–6.



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Henry in 1153, Ralph of Diceto refers to their agreement to have one currency throughout England, and the issue of BMC type 7 of Stephen’s coinage (the ‘Awbridge’ type) was the result (Figure 1). Coins of the Awbridge type were issued by mints throughout England, apart from in the northern counties under Scottish control until 1157, and local coinages were suppressed. There was one mint in most of the counties now recognizing the king’s authority, with additional mints on the south and east coasts, to serve the needs of foreign trade, and in the old West Saxon royal heartland of Somerset and Wiltshire, which traditionally had more than one mint per county. The new coinage, which was restricted to the silver penny (the only coin minted in England at this time), seems effectively to have replaced the very diverse old currency in circulation in 1153.

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book. Figure 1  Silver penny of the Awbridge type, Lincoln mint Note : Figs. 1–3 are twice actual size.

The new coinage of the 1153 settlement continued to be issued for about four years after Stephen’s death in October 1154, still carrying a version of his name (Stiefne). It may seem odd that Henry II should have failed to put his name on the coins immediately, as this would have been an obvious way to assert his authority. Stephen had certainly lost no time in issuing a new coinage in his own name when he took the throne in 1135, but after the accession of Henry II in 1154 a change in the coinage may have been regarded as impractical or unnecessary. The introduction of the Awbridge type was still a recent event, and the recoinage   Diceto, i, 296–7 : ‘Forma publica percussa eadem in regno celebris erit ubique moneta’ ; F. Elmore Jones, ‘Stephen Type VII’, BNJ , 28 (1955–7), 537–54 ; Blackburn, ‘Coinage and Currency’, 194 ; Amt, Accession, 128–9 ; M. Allen, ‘The English Coinage of 1153/4–1158’, BNJ , 76 (2006), 242–302. A hoard found at Awbridge in Hampshire c.1902 provided many of the known coins of this type.   See Table 1, p. 276 below.   I. Stewart, ‘The English and Norman Mints, c.600–1158’, in A New History of the Royal Mint, ed. C. E. Challis (Cambridge 1992), 1–82, at 61–5, describes the geographical distribution of the English mints between the late 10th century and the mid 12th century.   M. Allen, ‘The English Coinage’, 251–3.

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of the old currency of Stephen and his opponents was presumably still unfinished at his death. After Henry II’s own death in 1189, the issue of his Short Cross coinage continued under his sons Richard I (1189–99) and John (1199–1216), without a change of name. The accession of Henry III in 1216 rather fortuitously restored the correspondence between the name of the king and the name on his coins, but after Henry III’s death in 1272 the coinage of Edward I (1272–1307) carried the name of the old king for the first six years of the new reign. Such immobilization of the ruler’s name on the coinage would have been familiar to Henry II from his Angevin domains in France, where the coins of Anjou and Maine carried the names of former counts. In 1158, Henry II reformed the English coinage, placing his name on the coins for the first time and radically reorganizing the mints. Several chroniclers refer to this event in 1158, but Roger of Howden dates it to 1156. The majority view of our sources is confirmed by the appearance of numerous references to moneyers in the pipe rolls of 1157/8 and 1158/9. In 1157/8 the sheriffs of various counties and the citizens of London were charged with payments for the coin dies of the moneyers, for moneyers on laying down office, or for the moneyers without any further explanation. In the following year there is a greater number of entries of the same kind, with the addition of some payments from new moneyers appointed to make the reformed coinage. It has often been observed that initiatives in the administration of England usually occurred during Henry II’s visits to the kingdom, and the reform of the coinage was presumably no exception to this rule, as Henry was in England from April 1157 to August 1158. The decision to introduce the new ‘Cross-and-Crosslets’ coinage (Figure 2) may have been influenced by the recovery of the northern counties of England from the Scots in 1157, which provided an opportunity to reintegrate their currency into the English system. The payments for moneyers on leaving office in 1158 were the result of a wholesale replacement of the moneyers. The coins of Stephen’s Awbridge type and the new Cross-and-Crosslets coinage of Henry II have only nine moneyers’ names in common, out of nearly a hundred names recorded in the Awbridge   There is no documentary evidence for the duration of the recoinage after the introduction of the Awbridge type, but the recoinages of 1180, 1247 and 1279 are known to have lasted about two years each.   Brand, English Coinage, 2–5, discusses the immobilization of the king’s name on the Short Cross coinage of 1180–1247 and the resultant uncertainty about the reign or reigns of issue of these coins, which was finally resolved in the 1860s.   B. J. Cook, ‘En monnaie aiant cours : The Monetary System of the Angevin Empire’, in Coinage and History in the North Sea World, c.500–1200 : Essays in Honour of Marion Archibald, ed. B. Cook and G. Williams (Leiden/Boston 2006), 617–86, provides a comprehensive account of the coinage systems of Henry II’s territories in France.   Howden, Chronica, i, 215 ; Allen, BMC, pp. lxiv–lxv.   Allen, BMC, pp. lxxx, lxxxii–lxxxv ; Amt, Accession, 130–31, 191–4.   Allen, BMC, p. lxv.



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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book. Figure 2  Silver penny of the Cross-and-Crosslets coinage, Carlisle mint

type. Pamela Nightingale has argued that the removal of the old moneyers was associated with a fundamental change in the status of moneyers. She suggests that before 1158, many of the mints had privileged royal moneyers, who paid the profits of minting directly to the king, while other mints were farmed by the boroughs or their moneyers, making fixed payments. The reform of 1158 swept away the long-established class of royal moneyers, some of whom belonged to families that had provided moneyers for generations. Nightingale’s theory should not be accepted uncritically, as no sources before 1158 provide evidence of the direct payment of profits by moneyers, but the dismissal of the old moneyers was undeniably radical in its nature. The replacement of the moneyers in 1158 was accompanied by a thorough reorganization of the location of the mints. At least forty-six mints are known to have issued the Awbridge type, but only twenty of these mints remained open at the beginning of the new coinage in 1158, and nine new mints were established. Thus a total of twenty-nine mints participated in the recoinage of 1158–c.1160, converting the existing currency into the new coins. There were mints in the northern counties of Cumberland and Northumberland, and in three other counties that had been without a mint before 1158, but seven counties lost their mints.   The names found in both coinages are : Willem (the moneyer of the abbot of Bury St Edmunds) ; two Canterbury moneyers (Ricard and Rogier) ; three London moneyers (Geffrei, Ricard and Rodbert) ; Driu at Hereford ; the Wilton moneyer Willem, and Rodbert at Ipswich. The Ipswich mint was not open during the recoinage at the introduction of the Cross-and-Crosslets coinage, and some of the other apparent continuities of name before and after 1158 may be merely coincidental.  Nightingale, ‘Some London Moneyers’ ; idem, ‘ “The King’s Profit”’, 61–3 ; N. J. Mayhew, ‘From Regional to Central Minting, 1158–1464’, in Challis, A New History of the Royal Mint, 83–179, at 86–7.   In Table 1, p. 276 below, forty-seven mints are listed for the Awbridge type in 1154–8, but the Stamford mint has only been included on the basis of one coin that may have been minted in Steyning.   Mints were opened in Berkshire, Cheshire and Cornwall. Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Dorset, Huntingdonshire, Sussex, Warwickshire and Worcestershire were now without a mint.

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Kent lost two of its three mints, and Sussex, which had six mints for the Awbridge type, now had none at all. The number of mints in Suffolk was also severely reduced from four to only one at first (the mint of Bury St Edmunds Abbey), although the Ipswich mint was later reinstated. Silver from the foreign trade of the south and east coasts would now be directed to a much more restricted number of places, and principally to the London and Canterbury mints, which were to become the two dominant mints of England in the thirteenth century. Nine mints closed at the end of the recoinage of 1158–c.1160, and took no further part in the production of the Cross-and-Crosslets coinage. The decline in the number of mints continued during the 1160s and 1170s, and only fourteen mints are known to have issued coins in the last phase of the Cross-and-Crosslets coinage in the 1170s (class F in Derek Allen’s classification). Table 1 at the end of this chapter summarises the numbers of moneyers at each mint in five periods between 1154 and 1189, showing the changes at the reforms of 1158 and 1180, and the downward trend in the numbers of mints and moneyers. The reduction in the number of mints between 1158 and 1180 was partly achieved by the gradual elimination of the ecclesiastical mints, although ecclesiastical minting rights were respected at first. In the recoinage of 1158–c.1160 the bishop of Durham and the abbot of Bury St Edmunds had their own mints, and the archbishops of Canterbury and York and the abbot of St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury, each had a share of the moneyers in their cities. Bury St Edmunds Abbey obtained a general confirmation of privileges which included the right to have the profits of a moneyer, but this charter granted only one moneyer, and not the second and third moneyers allowed by successive charters of Stephen. This is an example of Henry II’s general restoration of rights as they had been in the reign of Henry I, and his reluctance to recognize new grants of Stephen. The first complete suppression of ecclesiastical minting rights in the reign of Henry II involved the permanent extinction of the abbot of St Augustine’s right to a ‘die’ (the profits of a moneyer). William Thorne’s chronicle records the taking of the abbey  R. J. Eaglen, ‘The Evolution of Coinage in Thirteenth-Century England’, in Thirteenth Century England IV : Proceedings of the Newcastle upon Tyne Conference, 1991, ed. P. R. Coss and S. D. Lloyd (Woodbridge 1992), 15–24, at 20–22, discusses the reduction in the number of mints from the mid 12th century.   Table 1 is based upon M. Allen, ‘The English Coinage’ ; Allen, BMC, pp. clxxix–clxxx ; Mass, The J. P. Mass Collection, 3, 84–6 ; and information from Alan Dawson relating to the mints and moneyers of the coinage of 1158–80.   Allen, BMC, pp. xcviii–ci, cxvii, cxix–cxxi, cxxxi–cxxxii. Allen, ibid., pp. xcix, ci, discusses the possibility of the exercise of minting rights by the bishops of Hereford, Norwich and Winchester, and by the abbot of Reading, for which there is no positive evidence between 1158 and 1180.   Feudal Documents from the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, ed. D. C. Douglas (London 1932), 88–9 (nos. 72–3), 92–3 (no. 79) ; Regesta, ii, 281 (nos. 762–3) ; Allen, BMC, p. cxvii ; R. J. Eaglen, The Abbey and Mint of Bury St Edmunds to 1279 (British Numismatic Society Special Publication 5, London 2006), 106–7, 118–19.



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and its die into the king’s hands after the death of Abbot Sylvester in August 1161. The king customarily took possession of ecclesiastical temporalities during vacancies, but in this case the die was never restored. William Thorne names the abbot’s moneyer as Elverdus Porrere, and the corresponding coins of the Canterbury moneyer ‘Alferg’ do not extend into the varieties of the Cross-and-Crosslets coinage produced after the recoinage of 1158–c.1160. The next casualty was the bishop of Durham’s mint. The Boldon Book survey of the bishop’s revenues, compiled in the 1180s, states that his income from the Durham mint was reduced from 10 marks (£6 13s. 4d.) to 3 marks (£2), as a consequence of the establishment of the king’s mint in Newcastle, and that the king subsequently took the dies away. This act of confiscation seems to have occurred in the late 1160s or early 1170s. In 1176/7 and 1180 Canterbury moneyers suffered various penalties for malpractice, and the Canterbury mint, shared by the king and the archbishop, was closed. None of the ecclesiastical mints was allowed to produce the new Short Cross coinage introduced in 1180, although the Canterbury and Durham mints were revived under Richard I. Between 1158 and 1180, some of the mints were the responsibility of boroughs. In the pipe rolls, the accounts of Colchester, Ipswich, Norwich, Thetford and York regularly include allowances for a specified number of moneyers out of a fixed quota, with the implication that these moneyers’ share of the borough’s farm for the mint could not be paid because the moneyers were not at work and  R. Twysden, Historiae Anglicanae Scriptores X (London 1652), col. 1816.   Allen, BMC, pp. cxx–cxxi ; T. C. R. Crafter, ‘Henry II, the St Augustine’s Dispute and the Loss of the Abbey’s Mint Franchise’, in Cook and Williams, Coinage and History in the North Sea World, 601–16.   Boldon Buke, ed. W. Greenwell (Surtees Soc. 25, Durham 1852), 1–2, 43 ; Boldon Book : Northumberland and Durham, ed. and trans. D. Austin (London/Chichester 1982), 10–11 ; M. Allen, ‘The Durham Mint before Boldon Book’, in Anglo-Norman Durham, 1093–1193, ed. D. Rollason, M. Harvey and M. Prestwich (Woodbridge 1994), 381–98, at 393 ; M. Allen, The Durham Mint (British Numismatic Society Special Publication 4, London 2003), 14, 81. Allen, BMC, pp. cxxxi–cxxxii, suggests that the closure of the Durham mint may have been a consequence of Bishop Hugh du Puiset’s involvement in the rebellion of 1173–74.   See pp. 267–8 below.   M. Allen, ‘Ecclesiastical Mints in Thirteenth-Century England’, in Thirteenth Century England VIII, ed. M. Prestwich, R. Britnell and R. Frame (Woodbridge 2001), 113–22, at 113 ; idem, ‘The Archbishop of York’s Mint after the Norman Conquest’, Northern History, 41 (2004), 25–38, at 26–7.   Allen, BMC, pp. ci–cii, cxxviii–cxl, cxxxviii, discusses the possibility that there were some baronial moneyers after 1158, but if this phenomenon existed it did not last until 1180. In 1156 Conan IV, count of Brittany, received an honor, originally created in the reign of William I (1066–87), which may have included the tertius denarius of the Ipswich mint, but this right ended with Conan’s death in 1171. Allen suggests that the earl of Chester might have had minting rights in his county palatine at the Chester mint, which closed before the end of the Cross-and-Crosslets coinage in 1180, but there is no documentary evidence for this.

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generating profits. There are many discrepancies between the numbers of moneyers in office implied by these allowances and the figures known from surviving coins, which usually indicate that allowances for inactive moneyers were not claimed when they could have been. Nicholas Mayhew has suggested that boroughs may have continued to pay the farms of inactive moneyers to safeguard the right to have the benefit of their services in future. The allowances were generally set at £1 per moneyer, with some exceptions, and Derek Allen suggested that the king’s total annual income from about a hundred moneyers may have been about £100, assuming that the farming of mints was a general phenomenon and not restricted to the five boroughs known to have received allowances between 1158 and 1180. An allowance for the Winchester moneyers appears in the pipe rolls for the first time after 1180, and it is possible that other boroughs paid moneyers’ farms that have left no trace in the pipe rolls, before or after 1180. However, Derek Allen’s own estimates of the total number of active moneyers decrease from one hundred in the recoinage phase of the Cross-and-Crosslets coinage (class A) to only twenty-four in the last phase (class F), and the revised estimates in Table 1 decline to forty. These figures would imply a substantial reduction in the king’s revenue from the coinage, even if many of the boroughs continued to pay for inactive moneyers. Pamela Nightingale has argued that Henry II would not have tolerated an income from the coinage as low as £100 per annum, and that some moneyers paid profits directly into the king’s chamber. As the chamber has left no record of its transactions in the reign of Henry II (apart from occasional references in the pipe rolls, not concerned with the coinage) this theory cannot be tested, but the assumption that the king could have received a revenue from the coinage substantially greater than Derek Allen’s estimate of about £100 per annum can be questioned. Estimates of mint output indicate that the activity of the mints after the recoinage of 1158–c.1160 was usually not sufficient to provide a profit much greater than £100. The moneyers might make extra payments for a tallage or aid, but this occurred on no more than four occasions between 1158 and 1180 (in 1160/1, 1164/5, 1167/8 and 1172/3). Revenue from the coinage was much more than £100 during the recoinage of 1158–c.1160, but only temporarily. Emilie Amt has calculated that new payments relating to the moneyers, claimed but not   W. C. Wells, ‘The Pipe Rolls and “Defalta Monetariorum”’, NC, 5th ser. 11 (1931), 261–90 ; Allen, BMC, pp. lxxii, lxxviii–lxxxi.   Mayhew, ‘From Regional to Central Minting’, 88–9.   Allen, BMC, pp. lxxviii–lxxxix, lxxxviii.   Ibid., pp. clxxix–clxxx ; for the revised estimates, see p. 277 below.  Nightingale, ‘ “The King’s Profit” ’, 66–8. White, Restoration and Reform, 131–3, discusses the operation of the chamber as a department of receipt.   See pp. 273–4 below.   Allen, BMC, pp. lxxxv–lxxxvii.



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always paid, totalled £467 6s. 8d. in the 1157/8 pipe roll and £610 10s. 6d. in 1158/9. The exchequer actually received £83 13s. 4d. in 1157/8 and £516 8s. 8d. in 1158/9. The payments claimed from the moneyers constituted about 2 per cent of the pipe roll total in each case. Derek Allen noted that his estimate of about £100 annual revenue from the moneyers after the recoinage is less than 1 per cent of Henry II’s normal total revenue recorded in the pipe rolls. The coinage was not a major source of Henry II’s income, although it was of course the indispensable physical medium of the king’s revenue. The original source of Henry II’s mint revenue was the seignorage levied when silver was minted for customers of the mints. There is no known documentary evidence for the minting charges in the reign of Henry II, but in the first year after his death there is evidence that 6d. was charged to mint a pound of silver, before the deduction of seignorage. The expenses of Richard I’s naval expedition to the Third Crusade in 1190 included £32 10s. for the minting of 1,300 pounds of silver, equivalent to 6d. per pound. This mintage charge was intended to cover the costs of the moneyers, and in the reign of Henry III the seignorage also amounted to 6d., which may well have been the rate current in the reign of Henry II. The moneyers’ 6d. derived in principle from the replacement of six pennyweights in each pound of silver with copper. Copper could not be added to silver of the same slightly debased ‘sterling’ fineness as the coinage, which would carry total minting charges of 12d. (6d. + 6d.) in consequence. Nightingale has proposed that in 1158 the weight of the English penny was raised to 22½ troy grains or 240d. to the Tower pound, so that the minting of a troy pound of sterling silver would provide 240d. for the owner of the bullion after the deduction of total minting charges of 12d. She has also suggested that Henry II introduced the French or ‘Paris’ troy weight system into England as an official standard (the equation she proposes would only work with the Paris troy pound, and not with the heavier English troy pound in general use later). The weights of surviving coins do not contradict the idea of a 22½-grain penny in   Amt, Accession, 131, 191–4.   Allen, BMC, p. lxxxviii. J. H. Ramsay, A History of the Revenues of the Kings of England, 1066– 1399, 2 vols. (Oxford 1925), i, 64–196, summarises the revenues of Henry II recorded in the pipe rolls. The annual average of Ramsay’s annual totals is £14,097 in 1160–65, increasing to £21,189 in 1175–80.   PR 2 Richard I, pp. xxiii, 8–9.   The ‘De moneta’ of Nicholas Oresme and English Mint Documents, ed. C. Johnson (London 1956), pp. xxvi–xxvii, 53–5   P. Nightingale, ‘The Evolution of Weight-Standards and the Creation of New Monetary and Commercial Links in Northern Europe from the Tenth Century to the Twelfth Century’, EcHR, 2nd ser. 38 (1985), 192–209, at 204–7 ; eadem, ‘ “The King’s Profit”’, 61, 65, 70.  Nightingale, ‘The Evolution of Weight-Standards’, 204–6 ; R. D. Connor and A. D. C. Simpson, Weights and Measures in Scotland : A European Perspective, ed. A. Morrison-Low (Edinburgh 2004), 115–18. The troy pound used in England since no later than the fourteenth century weighs 5,760

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1158, and they indicate that the standard in force before the reform of 1158 was slightly lower, at 22 grains or thereabouts. Nightingale has further suggested that the alteration of the weight standard in 1158 was intended to harmonise the ratios between the values of English pennies and the deniers used in Henry II’s French domains, which were regularly valued by the English Exchequer as equivalents of a half or quarter of a penny. The widespread use of English coins in the Angevin territories in France after and not before 1180 might, however, suggest that a real harmonisation of coinages actually occurred in 1180, if at all. The weight of the English penny seems to have been slightly reduced in 1180, and the new standard may have yielded 246d. from each Tower pound of silver : 240d. for the customer of the mint and 6d. for the king’s seignorage. From the 970s to the early Twelfth Century, the weights of coins in circulation were generally maintained at a level close to their original weight at issue by periodic recoinages, at intervals of no more than a few years, but this system was abandoned by Henry I after the fifteenth and last recoinage of his reign in 1125. Periodic recoinages were effectively revived under Stephen, but Henry II’s reform of the coinage in 1158 marked the permanent end of the system, and one unfortunate consequence of this was that worn and light-weight coins accumulated in circulation. The recorded assays or ‘combustions’ of coins paid into the Exchequer provide evidence of the deterioration of the currency after 1158. The Dialogus de Scaccario describes the procedure for combustions, as Richard fitz Nigel understood it in the late 1170s. A sample of forty-two shillings (504 pennies) was taken from the money paid in, and 240 pennies were counted out and weighed against a pound. The 240 pennies were then melted and assayed to grains, equivalent to 256 pennies of 22½ grains each, but the Paris troy pound weighs only 5,670 grains.   Allen, BMC, pp. xli–xliii ; Blackburn, ‘Coinage and Currency’, 169–71 ; M. Allen, ‘The Weight Standard of the English Coinage, 1158–1279, NC, 165 (2005), 227–33, at 229, 231–2.  Nightingale, ‘The Evolution of Weight-Standards’, 205–6 ; idem, ‘“The King’s Profit”’, 65. B. Cook, ‘Foreign Coins in Medieval England’, in Local Coins, Foreign Coins : Italy and Europe, 11th–15th Centuries ; The Second Cambridge Numismatic Symposium, ed. L. Travaini (Società Numismatica Italiana Collana di Numismatica e Scienze Affini 2, Milan 1999), 231–84, at 238–41, discusses the evidence for the use of foreign silver coins in England provided by the pipe rolls and coin finds. French deniers have been found in one English hoard from the reign of Henry II (Larkhill, Worcestershire, c.1175– 80), and there is some hoard evidence for the circulation of Scottish coins in England before 1180.   Cook, ‘En monnaie aiant cours’, 627–30.   Allen, ‘The Weight Standard’. Slightly debased silver of the sterling standard would presumably have attracted an extra charge of 6d.   M. Blackburn, ‘Coinage and Currency under Henry I : A Review’, ANS, 13 (1990), 49–81, at 72–5. In the early years of the system of periodic recoinages they were usually effectively complete, but from the mid 11th century old coins often escaped recoinage.   Dialogus, pp. xl–xli, 36–8 ; J. D. Brand, ‘The Exchequer in the Later Twelfth Century’ (PhD thesis, Polytechnic of North London 1989), 79–80, 99–100, 133–4, 136–7, 142–53, 186–9 ; idem, English Coinage, 59–62, 64–7, 69.



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determine the weight of silver in the coins, and the deficiency from one pound was calculated, to adjust the sum allowed for the coins paid in, if the deficiency was greater than 6d. The process could be repeated with a second sample of 240 pennies, if there was a dispute about the outcome. A schedule of combustions in 1165 shows deficiencies from 2d. to 11d. per pound, but in 1173 the shortfalls are between about 2½d. and as much as 19d. In the 1170s the deterioration of the currency was accelerated by coin clipping, which must have been encouraged by the irregular shape of many of the coins when they were issued. The Dialogus de Scaccario refers to the corruption of the currency by clippers and forgers, and a woman of London named Ydonea was mutilated as a punishment for forgery in 1179/80. The pipe rolls record the costs of punishing forgers in 1155/6 and 1167/8, and the town of Lewes was amerced 20 marks (£13 6s. 8d.) in 1175/6 for harbouring forgers. Forgery is not mentioned in the Assize of Clarendon (1166), but it is listed as a capital offence in the Assize of Northampton (1176). This may be no more than a typical manifestation of the extension of royal justice in the reign of Henry II, but Barrie Cook has argued that the accumulation of bad money in circulation caused by the abandonment of regular recoinages in 1158 led to a change in the focus of public concern about currency crimes. Until the reign of Henry I, legislation on the coinage was primarily concerned with the regulation of the work of the moneyers, but from the reign of Henry II there was a greater emphasis upon forgers and clippers. The pipe roll of 1176/7 includes a special account for the amercements of the

  Amt, Accession, 129–30, notes that the pipe rolls of 1156/7 and 1157/8 include small payments related to combustions, but White, Restoration and Reform, 148–50, 159, suggests that the system described in the Dialogus de Scaccario was introduced in 1163, as part of a reform of exchequer procedure on Henry II’s return from a period in France.   C. Johnson, in Dialogus, p. xli, states that the deficiencies of 1173 were between 4d. and 19d., but Brand, English Coinage, 60–61, recalculates them as being between 2.53d. and 19d. Brand, ‘The Exchequer in the Later Twelfth Century’, 153, suggests that 12d. was silently deducted from the deficiencies found in the combustions, to allow for unavoidable loss of silver in the assaying process and lack of fineness in the alloy of the coinage.   Allen, BMC, p. cxi. Diceto, i, 283, refers to the fact that the new coins introduced in 1180 were round, implying that the old coins did not meet this description. Surviving coins of the Cross-andCrosslets and Short Cross coinages confirm the essential truth of this implied contrast, although the Carlisle and Newcastle mints usually produced well-rounded coins before the reform of 1180.   Dialogus, 12, 39 ; PR 26 Henry II, 154 ; Allen, BMC, pp. cx, cxii, cxlvii.   PR 2–4 Henry II, 4, 45 ; PR 14 Henry II, 174 ; PR 22 Henry II, 203. Allen, BMC, pp. cxi–cxii, discusses references to forgers in the pipe rolls of Henry II, including further references in 1174/5 and 1179/80.   Howden, Chronica, ii, 248 ; Howden, Gesta Regis, ii, 89.   B. J. Cook, ‘Crimes against the Currency in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century England’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 83/1 (Autumn 2001), 51–70.

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Canterbury moneyers. The moneyer Ralph of Rye and his wife were expected to pay the enormous sum of 1,000 marks (£666 13s. 4d.), and amercements between 100 marks (£66 13s. 4d.) and 600 marks (£400) were imposed upon John fitz Robert, Richard Corbeille, Richard Deudune and Solomon. The justification of these massive penalties is not stated, but it is reasonable to assume that there had been at least a suspicion of malpractice or fraud. Canterbury moneyers were in further trouble in 1179/80, when the pipe roll records the cost of their transport to various places from Oxford, and the Kent account in the pipe roll of 1180/81 includes the cost of transporting arrested moneyers, probably also referring to Canterbury moneyers. The fate of two of the Canterbury moneyers is indicated by the 1180/81 pipe roll, which includes money from the sale of the chattels of Solomon (who had been amerced in 1176/7) and Lambin Frese. Lambin Frese was described as a fugitive in 1180/81, and Solomon seems to have been executed. The punishment of the Canterbury moneyers was part of a more general prosecution of English moneyers in 1180 for the corruption of the currency, described by Gervase of Canterbury, in the course of which they were collected together and taken in carts to the king’s curia, bound or shackled in pairs. The moneyers may have been taken to the Council convened at Oxford in 1180 to deliberate on the issue of a new coinage, which would explain why the Canterbury moneyers were sent to various places from Oxford. The Oxford Council met to discuss the reform of the coinage in January or February 1180, and in March the king’s financial expert, Richard of Ilchester, went to France on business that evidently included preparations for the new coinage. Richard of Ilchester returned in July or August 1180, bringing exchangers from Tours and Le Mans, whose expertise was needed in a fundamental reorganization of the administration of mint profits. Until the reform of 1180, the moneyers had administered the profits and used them to pay farms and other dues, and the costs of minting. Under the new system introduced in 1180, the profits would be collected by salaried exchangers, and the role of the moneyers would be restricted to the supervision of the production of coinage. The salaries of twelve exchangers are recorded in the pipe roll of 1179/80, and the number   PR 23 Henry II, 208 ; Allen, BMC, pp. cv, cxxi–cxxii ; W. Urry, Canterbury under the Angevin Kings (London 1967), 116–17 ; Mayhew, ‘From Regional to Central Minting’, 91.   PR 26 Henry II, 25 ; PR 27 Henry II, 147 ; Allen, BMC, p. cviii.   PR 27 Henry II, 151 ; Allen, BMC, pp. cxi–cxii ; Urry, Canterbury under the Angevin Kings, 117 ; Mayhew, ‘From Regional to Central Minting’, 92. The pipe roll of 1184/5 (PR 31 Henry II, 233) includes 10 marks (£6 13s. 4d.) paid by Solomon’s wife to obtain possession of his houses.   Gervase, i, 294. Other chroniclers also refer to the corruption of the old currency replaced in 1180 : Howden, Chronica, ii, 208 ; Newburgh, i, 225 ; Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 283 ; Ann. Mon., ii, 62 ; Allen, BMC, pp. lxxii–lxxiii, cx.   The Oxford Council is discussed by Allen, BMC, pp. lxxiii ; Brand, English Coinage, 24.  Eyton, Itinerary, 230 ; Allen, BMC, pp. lxxiii, lxxxix ; Brand, English Coinage, 24.   Brand, English Coinage, 24–5.



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increases to sixteen in 1180/81. In these years there are other payments for houses used as mints or exchanges, and various substantial sums paid to the exchangers as working capital.

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book. Figure 3  Silver penny of the Short Cross coinage, Winchester mint, 1180

Some indication of the cost to the public of exchanging old money for the new Short Cross coins (Figure 3) may be provided by records of fines in the Yorkshire account of the 1182/3 pipe roll, which convert payments in old money into smaller sums of new money, presumably after deductions related to minting charges. In thirteen transactions of this nature the overall average deduction per pound was 30¼d., or nearly 13 per cent. An assize was formulated in 1180 to protect the exchangers’ lucrative monopoly of exchanging the new money for the old. The text of this assize has not survived, but there are many amercements for the offence of exchanging contrary to the assize in the pipe rolls of the 1180s. In 1181/2 the citizens of Exeter had to pay 100 marks (£66 13s. 4d.) to delay an enquiry into the operation of the assize and the exchange in their city, until the matter could be heard by the king (who was abroad), and another 100 marks was offered in 1182/3 to continue the postponement. The moneyers themselves were certainly not exempt from the assize. In 1181/2, the wife of the Worcester moneyer Edric offered 10 marks (£6 13s. 4d.) for the chattels of her husband, who had evidently been hanged for the unauthorized exchanging of forty-eight shillings in pennies with a certain Joscelin of Evesham. Much later, in 1187/8, the former London moneyer Henry Anglicus was amerced £16 13s. 4d. for exchanging   PR 26 Henry II, p. xxviii ; PR 27 Henry II, p. xxii ; Allen, BMC, pp. lxxxix–xc ; Brand, English Coinage, 25, 27–8, 30–31. The pipe rolls of 1179/80 and 1180/1 also record the cost of equipment for minting and exchanging, and they name four assayers ( fusores) (Brand, English Coinage, 31).   Allen, BMC, pp. xcii–xciii ; Brand, English Coinage, 71–2. The deficiencies ranged from 20.8d. to 43¾d.  Ramsay, A History of the Revenues of the Kings of England, i, 152 ; Allen, BMC, pp. lxxiii, xcii, cxi ; Brand, English Coinage, 24, 31.   PR 28 Henry II, 31 ; PR 29 Henry II, 116 ; PR 30 Henry II, 77 ; Brand, English Coinage, 51.   PR 28 Henry II, 81 ; Allen, BMC, p. xcii ; Brand, English Coinage, 31, 56.

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contrary to the assize, and for keeping his moneyer’s equipment after he was dismissed from the mint. According to Ralph of Diceto, the principal exchanger, Philip Aimer, was sent home to Tours in disgrace in 1181, as he had failed to prevent fraud by the moneyers. The recoinage ended in 1182, but the employment of exchangers continued, although their salaries do not normally appear in the pipe rolls after 1181/2. The single exception to this, between 1182 and the end of Henry II’s reign in 1189, is a payment to the Winchester exchanger, Rolland, of his salary for the last quarter of 1185. We are fortunate to have some evidence of the business of the Winchester exchange at about this time, in the surviving portion of the exchequer receipt roll for the half year to Michaelmas (29 September) 1185. The Winchester exchangers were lent £131 17s. 9d. from the receipts of the treasury, because they had no more than 20 marks (£13 6s. 8d.) in reserve. At some time before the death of Henry II in 1189, a similar loan of £300 was made to five citizens of York, to support the work of the exchange in their city. The names of four of these five citizens correspond to those of York moneyers of the 1180s, which might suggest that there was some relaxation of the exclusion of the moneyers from the business of exchanging by 1189. London exchangers had operated as moneyers in the recoinage of 1180–82, blurring the distinction between the two offices from the beginning of the new coinage. In 1180, all of the moneyers were replaced, as had occurred with a few exceptions in 1158. There are no payments from outgoing moneyers in the pipe rolls on this occasion, in contrast to 1158, but some of the old moneyers had to endure the collective punishment described by Gervase of Canterbury. Centralized mint buildings were provided for all of the newly appointed moneyers in a town or city. A house was rented for the Northampton moneyers, for example,   PR 34 Henry II, 20 ; Allen, BMC, p. xcii ; Brand, English Coinage, 53.   Diceto, ii, 7 ; Allen, BMC, p. lxxiii ; J. D. Brand, ‘Philip Aimer : Exchanger and Moneyer’, Spink Numismatic Circular, 81 (1973), 371–2, at 372 ; Brand, English Coinage, 29–30. The salaries of Philip Aimer and his fellow exchanger Geoffrey Joismeri in the pipe roll of 1180/1 abruptly end in May 1181.   In 1181/2 the pipe roll records salaries of exchangers in London, Northampton and Worcester until Easter 1182, and in Winchester until Michaelmas 1182 (Brand, English Coinage, 30).   PR 32 Henry II, 168. Brand, English Coinage, 32, misinterprets this as a payment for a quarter of the previous year (1184/5).   The Receipt Roll of the Exchequer for Michaelmas Term XXXI Henry II, A.D. 1185, ed. H. Hall (London 1899), 31 ; Brand, English Coinage, 32.   PR 10 John, 158 ; Brand, English Coinage, 32, 56–7.   Mayhew, ‘From Regional to Central Minting’, 94.   See pp. 260–61 above.   See p. 268 above. The chronicle of ‘Benedict of Peterborough’ refers to the exaction of ‘redemption’ payments from the moneyers (Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 283 ; Mayhew, ‘From regional to central minting’, 91).



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until a more permanent mint could be built. The new mint in Winchester made its mark on history in July 1180, when it burnt down, causing a fire which destroyed most of the city. The centralization of the moneyers’ workshops was not an entirely new phenomenon in 1180, although it had not always met with official approval. In 1166/7 the Winchester moneyers had been amerced for working together in the same building, which might suggest that there was some anxiety about the ability of the moneyers to collude in fraud or forgery if they worked under the same roof. From 1181/2 the pipe rolls regularly refer to the land where the old workshop of the York moneyers had stood, possibly implying that a centralized mint had existed in York before 1180, if this is not a reference to a temporary mint building used in the recoinage of 1180–82. Nightingale has suggested that the sharing of dies between moneyers at eight of the mints of the Cross-and-Crosslets coinage, shown by their coins, may indicate that these moneyers were already working in centralized mint buildings. A study of the dies used to produce the Awbridge type between the settlement of 1153 and 1158 has found only two isolated examples of the use of the same die by two different moneyers (at Norwich and Thetford), which might suggest that the change from the independent workshops of individual moneyers to centralized mints occurred in 1158, in some places at least. The recoinage of 1158 involved twenty-nine mints, but the recoinage of 1180 began with only six, increased to ten in the autumn of 1180, to deal with an intensification of activity caused by the prohibition of the old money from 11 November 1180. One of the ten mints of 1180 was, inevitably, in London, and six other mints were in places ranked in the top ten in an analysis of the taxation of provincial towns and cities in the reign of Henry II. The three mint-towns of 1180 outside this top ten were Worcester (ranked 18th), Wilton and Carlisle. The   PR 26 Henry II, 82 ; Allen, BMC, pp. ciii, cvi, cl. The hire of the temporary mint building cost 10s., and the construction of the new mint ( fabrica) cost £15.   Ann. Mon., ii, 62 ; J. D. Brand and F. Elmore Jones, ‘The Emergency Mint of Wilton in 1180’, BNJ, 35 (1966), 116–19, at 118–19.   PR 13 Henry II, 193 ; Allen, BMC, pp. ciii, clxvii.   Allen, BMC, pp. cvi, clxxiv.   Allen, BMC, pp. cviii–cix ; Nightingale, ‘Some London Moneyers’, 49 ; Brand, English Coinage, 20. The eight mints are : Bristol, Canterbury, Ipswich, Lincoln, London, Northampton, Norwich and York.   M. Allen, ‘The English Coinage’, 246, 254.   M. Allen, ‘The Chronology of Short Cross Class Ia’, BNJ, 63 (1993), 53–8.   J. D. Brand, ‘Permanent and Temporary Mints, 1180–1300’, Spink Numismatic Circular, 92 (1984), 287–8 ; Brand, English Coinage, 26 ; R. A. Donkin, ‘Changes in the Early Middle Ages’, in A New Historical Geography of England before 1600, ed. H. C. Darby (Cambridge 1976), 75–134, at 132, 134–5, ranking the averages of aids in the reign of Henry II for each town and city. Some places appear only intermittently in the pipe-roll assessments of aids, and Bristol, Chester, Leicester and the Cinque Ports were exempted from this taxation.

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Wilton mint seems to have been a branch of the mint in Winchester, where the king’s principal treasury served as a focus for the organization of the recoinage, supplying money and dies to places with mints. One of the Wilton moneyers quite exceptionally used a die originally supplied to the Winchester mint, in the crisis after the Winchester fire of July 1180. The Carlisle mint owed its existence to local supplies of silver from mines in the northern Pennines. In the 1120s discoveries of silver-bearing lead ores around Alston in Cumberland gave rise to the establishment of mines (collectively known as the ‘mine of Carlisle’), and to the opening of a mint in Carlisle. The northern Pennine ore field, which was eventually found to extend over adjoining parts of Cumberland, Northumberland and Durham, fell under Scottish control from 1136 to 1157, with the exception of Weardale in the bishopric of Durham. Henry II regained control of the Carlisle mines when the Scots surrendered the earldom of Northumbria in 1157, and from 1157/8 to 1179/80 the Carlisle and Newcastle moneyer, William fitz Erembald, farmed the mines. The Durham moneyer, Cristien, is known to have farmed the bishop of Durham’s Weardale mines in the 1160s. Ian Blanchard has estimated that the annual output of the northern Pennine mines was about 3.5 tonnes of silver in the 1140s, and that it reached a peak of about 24 tonnes in 1165, declining to 4 or 5 tonnes in 1195. These figures are principally based upon the assumption that the mining farms recorded in the pipe rolls were related to the seignorage yielded by the minting of the silver from the mines, but  R. A. Brown, ‘ “The Treasury” of the Later Twelfth Century’, in Studies presented to Sir Hilary Jenkinson, ed. J. Conway Davies (London 1957), 35–49, at 37–40, examines the role of the treasury at Winchester in the reign of Henry II.   Brand and Elmore Jones, ‘The Emergency Mint of Wilton’ ; M. Allen, ‘The Chronology of Short Cross Class Ia’, 53–5.   Allen, BMC, pp. xcviii, cxxiii–cxxvii.   A. Raistrick and B. Jennings, A History of Lead Mining in the Pennines (London 1965), 46–55 ; 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), 23–45, at 25–30 ; I. Blanchard, Money, Metallurgy and Minting in the Middle Ages, ii : Afro-European Supremacy, 1125–1225 : African Gold Production and the First European Silver Production Long-Cycle (Stuttgart 2001), 583–666 ; P. Claughton, ‘Production and Economic Impact : Northern Pennine (English) Silver in the 12th Century’, in Proceedings of the 6th International Mining History Congress, September 26–29, 2003, Akabira City, Hokkaido, Japan (Akabira City 2003), 146–9.   Allen, BMC, pp. xcviii, cxxiii–cxxvii.   Reginaldi Monachi Dunelmensis Libellus de admirandis beati Cuthberti Virtutibus quae novellis patratae sunt temporibus, ed. J. Raine (Surtees Soc. 1, London 1835), 210–12 ; M. Allen, ‘The Durham Mint before Boldon Book’, 393–4 ; idem, The Durham Mint, 3–4, 33, 68.   I. Blanchard, ‘Technical Implications of the Transition from Silver to Lead Smelting in Twelfth Century England’, in Boles and Smeltmills : Report of a Seminar on the History and Archaeology of Lead Smelting held at Reeth, Yorkshire, 15–17 May 1992, ed. L. Willies and D. Cranstone (Matlock Bath 1992), 9–11 ; idem, ‘Lothian and Beyond’, 29–30 ; idem, Money, Metallurgy and Minting, ii, 599–601, 608–10, 682.



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Blanchard’s estimates of mining output are far beyond any possible estimates of mint output. Peter Claughton has argued that the mining farms were actually related to the profits of the king’s ‘ninth dish’ (a tenth part of the produce of the mines). On this basis he estimates that the silver output of the Carlisle mines reached a peak of 36,000–39,000 Tower ounces (c.1.0–1.1 tonnes) in 1166, declining to 7,300 ounces (c.0.2 tonnes) in 1183/4 and 11,000 ounces (c.0.3 tonnes) in 1184/5. The figures for the 1180s have the advantage that they are based upon direct statements of profits from the Carlisle mines in the pipe rolls, but all of these estimates are subject to the caveat that profits were not exclusively derived from silver production, as lead was also produced. Claughton has suggested that northern Pennine silver was largely responsible for an increase in the English currency in the reign of Henry II. He estimates that the Carlisle mines had a total output of about 900,000 ounces (c.26 tonnes) of silver between 1158 and 1200, and that the total output of all of the northern Pennine mines from c.1130 to 1200 was about 2,255,000 ounces (c.66 tonnes). These quantities of silver could have provided approximately £75,000 and £190,000 in new coins, at average rates of about £1,800 and £2,700 per annum respectively, but it is worth noting that the three northern mints directly associated with the mines (Carlisle, Durham and Newcastle) usually supplied no more than a small percentage of total English mint output. The recoinage of 1180 seems to have been the starting point of large increases in the productivity of the mints and the size of the English currency. There is no documentary evidence for the size of English mint outputs before the 1190s, but it is possible to calculate tentative estimates of output from estimated numbers of dies used and known average outputs of dies in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The total output of the English mints may have been about £20,000– £45,000 between 1153/4 and 1158, some £20,000–£50,000 in the recoinage of 1158–c.1160, and about £1,500–£3,000 per annum between the end of the recoinage and 1180. The post-recoinage estimate of output is of about the same   Blanchard, ibid., 645–8, 653–5, notes that estimates of mint output in the mining area are nearly always much smaller than his estimates of mining output, and suggests that most of the silver was transported from the mines as bullion.   Claughton, ‘Production and Economic Impact’.   Ibid., 148–9.   M. Allen, The Durham Mint, 49–50, 66 ; idem, ‘The English Coinage’, 258–60.   M. Allen, ‘The Quantity of Money in England, 1180–1247 : New Data’, BNJ, 75 (2005), 44–9, reviews the documentary evidence for mint outputs from the 1190s to 1247 and provides estimates of mint output in the 1170s and 1180s ; idem, ‘Medieval English Die-Output’, BNJ, 74 (2004), 39–49, calculates the average outputs of dies at various English mints from the mid 13th century.   M. Allen, ‘The English Coinage’, 258–62 ; Metcalf, ‘A Survey of Research’, 26–31 ; M. Allen, ‘The Volume of the English Currency, 1158–1470’, EcHR, 2nd ser. 54 (2001), 595–611, at 598 ; P. Latimer, ‘The Quantity of Money in England, 1180–1247 : A Model’, Journal of European Economic History, 32 (2003), 637–59, at 643–4.

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size as the average annual value of Claughton’s estimate of the silver provided by the Pennine mines (c.£1,800–£2,700), but it would be wrong to suppose that mint output was entirely derived from Pennine silver, as the mints usually had other sources of silver (such as foreign trade). The estimated mint outputs would have provided a seignorage of about £500–£1,250 per annum in the recoinage of 1158–c.1160, and about £40–£75 per annum in the following two decades to 1180, assuming a rate of 6d. per pound. The post-recoinage seignorage estimate is lower than Derek’s Allen’s figure of about £100 for the king’s normal annual revenue from the coinage in 1158–80, which seems to contradict Nightingale’s assumption that Henry II could hope to receive significantly more than £100 per annum from mint profits in this period. It has been suggested that there was an increase in mint output in the 1170s, possibly connected with a growth in the wool trade with the Low Countries, the proceeds of which would have allowed England to share in new supplies of mined silver from Germany. Metcalf ’s die estimates certainly indicate increasing activity at the East Anglian mints before 1180, which might be associated with a growth in the wool trade at east coast ports, but Timothy Crafter’s analysis of the Metcalf estimates does not indicate any significant rise in total numbers of dies and overall national mint output in the 1170s. There can be little doubt, however, that there was very substantial growth in mint output after the reform of 1180. Data from studies of the dies of the Carlisle, Lincoln and Winchester mints have been used to estimate that English mint output was about £16,500–£33,500 per annum in the recoinage of 1180–82, and about £9,250–£18,500 per annum between 1182 and c.1190. A temporary increase in mint output during the recoinage would be expected, but the annual estimate for 1182–c.1190 is about six times the size of the figure of c.1160–1180 (c.£1,500–£3,000). After 1180 Henry II’s centralized mints were ready to receive greatly increased quantities of silver, and the new exchanges had the means to maximize the king’s revenue from the rising outputs. There was an enormous growth in the English silver currency between 1180   See p. 265 above.   Allen, BMC, pp. lxxviii–lxxxix, lxxxviii ; Nightingale, ‘“The King’s Profit”’, 66–8.  N. J. Mayhew, ‘Frappes de monnaies et hausse des prix de 1180 à 1220’, in Etudes d’histoire monetaire, ed. J. Day (Lille 1984), 159–77, at 166–7 ; A. Dawson and N. J. Mayhew, ‘A Continental Find including Tealby Pennies’, BNJ, 57 (1987), 113–18, at 115.   Crafter, ‘A Re-examination of the Classification and Chronology’, 55–6. The contribution of the East Anglian mints (Bury St Edmunds, Ipswich, Norwich and Thetford) to Metcalf ’s estimates of numbers of obverse dies increases from 10% in class E (c.1170–74) to 49% in class F (c.1174–1180). Allen, BMC, p. xiii, suggests that the increased output of the East Anglian mints might be associated with the heavy penalties imposed on the region after the rebellion of 1173–4.   M. Allen, ‘The Quantity of Money in England’, 44–5, 49.   P. Latimer, ‘The English Inflation of 1180–1220 Reconsidered’, Past and Present, 171 (2001), 3–29, at 21, and idem, ‘The Quantity of Money in England’, 653–4, argues that there was fast growth in the currency in the 1180s.



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and the eventual replacement of Henry II’s Short Cross coinage in 1247, from probably less than £100,000 to nearly £500,000, and a more modest increase between 1158 and 1180.  Estimates of mint output in the recoinages of 1158–c.1160 and 1180–82 have been used as the basis of figures for the size of the currency in 1158 and 1180, assuming that the old coinage was the principal source of silver for minting when there was a recoinage. This method has provided estimates of c.£15,000–£30,000, £20,000–£50,000 and c.£30,000–£80,000 in 1158, and about £15,000–£60,000 or £70,000–£190,000 in 1180. These very divergent estimates tend to conceal an underlying increase in the die estimates, from c.384 or 559 reverse dies in 1158–c.1160 to 801 in 1180–82, which seems to provide good evidence of a growth in the currency between 1158 and 1180. The rise in Henry II’s recorded revenues in the 1160s and 1170s might also indicate that the currency was increasing. An audit of all of Henry II’s treasuries in England and France after his death in 1189 is reported to have found a total of more than 90,000 or 100,000 marks (£60,000 or £66,666 13s. 4d.), although this probably included treasure assessed at its bullion value as well as coins. The king’s will, written in 1182, had listed bequests with a total of 41,000 or 46,000 marks of silver (£27,333 6s. 8d. or £30,666 13s. 4d.) and 500 marks of gold (£3,000). These figures do not provide any direct evidence of the size of Henry II’s cash reserves in England, but they may suggest that his English treasuries could contain a substantial proportion of a growing currency. At the accession of Henry II in 1154 England had more than forty mints. The moneyers, who usually worked in their own small workshops, were responsible for the profits of minting. At the time of the king’s death in 1189 the number of towns and cities having mints had been reduced to less than one quarter of the number at the beginning of the reign, and all of the ecclesiastical mints had been eliminated. The mints had been radically reorganized twice, and the moneyers had been replaced on both occasions and reduced to a fraction of their former number. The king now received a direct profit from centralized mints and their separate exchanges, which were beginning to experience an enormous increase   The size of the English silver currency between 1180 and 1247 has been investigated by Mayhew, ‘Frappes de monnaies et hausse des prix’ ; M. Allen, ‘The Volume of the English Currency’, 599–601 ; Latimer, ‘The Quantity of Money in England’ ; M. Allen, ‘The Quantity of Money in England’. The English silver coinage was supplemented by relatively small numbers of foreign gold coins, discussed by B. J. Cook, ‘The Bezant in Angevin England’, NC, 159 (1999), 255–75 ; Cook, ‘Foreign Coins in Medieval England’, 247–50.   M. Allen, ‘The Volume of the English Currency’, 597–9, 607 ; idem, ‘The English Currency’ ; Latimer, ‘The Quantity of Money’, 641–4 ; M. Allen, ‘The Quantity of Money’, 44–5, 49.   See p. 265 n. 3 above.   Howden, Gesta Regis, ii, 76–7 ; Howden, Chronica, iii, 7–8.   Gervase, i, 297–300 ; Diceto, ii, 10 ; Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, viii, 191–3 ; Foedera, i, 47 ; Actes Henri II, ii, 219–21. The total of the bequests in silver is 41,000 marks, but the sum stated in the will is 46,000 marks.

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in supplies of silver and mint output. The reign of Henry II had been a period of fundamental change for the administration of the English coinage, and silver pennies bearing Henry II’s name were to remain the only coins made by the English mints for some decades after the king’s death, outlasting the rule of his sons Richard I and John, and the Angevin empire he created. Table 1  The Mints and Moneyers of Henry II

Mint Bath Bedford Bramber Bristol Buckingham Bury St Edmunds Cambridge Canterbury Carlisle Castle Rising Chester Colchester Dover Dunwich Durham Exeter Gloucester Hastings Hedon Hereford Huntingdon Ilchester Ipswich Launceston Leicester Lewes Lincoln

1154–8

1158–c.1160 recoinage

c.1160–1180

1180–82 recoinage

1182–9

1 3 2 — 1 3 1 7 — 1 — 2 1 2 1 1 2 1 1 2 2 1 2 — 1 1 4

— 1 — 3 — 1 — 7 1 — 2 1 — — 1 4 4 — — 3 — 3 — 1 2 — 6

— — — 3 — 1 — 7 1 — 1 2 — — 1→0 4→1 — — — 1→0 — 2→1 3 — — 0→1 6

— — — — — — — — 0→1 — — — — — — 2→4 — — — — — — — — — — 0→6

— — — — — — — — 1 — — — — — — 2 — — — — — — — — — — 4→3



277

Henry II and the English Coinage

London Newcastle Northampton Norwich Nottingham Oxford Pembroke Peterborough? Pevensey Rye Salisbury Sandwich Shaftesbury Shrewsbury Stafford Stamford? Steyning Sudbury Tamworth Taunton Thetford Wallingford Warwick Watchet Wilton Winchester Worcester York

14 — 1 8 1 1 — 1 1 1 3 2 2 1 — 1 1 2 1 1 2 — 2 1 2 1 2 2

14 1 7 8 — 3 1 — — — 2 — — 1 1 — — — — — 4 1 — — 3 4 — 10

14→12→6 1 6→0 4→2 — 1 — — — — — — — — 1→0 — — — — — 3→2 — — — — 3→1 — 1→3→0

6→12 — 3→5→6 — — 0→7 — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — 1→2 4→6 0→3 4→8

6→3→1 — 4→3 — — 2 — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — 1→0 2 2 3

Moneyer total

98

100

66→40

20→55

27→19

Mint total

47?

29

21→17

6→10

10→9

Note : English coins of Henry II name the mint and moneyer on the reverse. The statistics for 1154–8 are probably incomplete, as the coins of this period have survived in relatively small numbers, and many of them are only partly legible. The total number of moneyers in 1154–8 (98) includes one moneyer not yet attributed to a mint. In some cases the listed number of moneyers for a mint is smaller than the number recorded from the coins, when there is reason to believe that one moneyer was replaced by another during the period concerned. Changes in the numbers of mints and moneyers between c.1160 and 1189 are indicated by arrows.

Nicholas Vincent

The Court of Henry II

T

he court of King Henry II must rank as one of the least neglected institutions in history, viewed since the time of Walter Map as the very archetype of what a medieval princely court both should and should not be. Scholarly interest here merely reflects twelfth-century perceptions, since Henry’s court is unique not only for the attention that it has attracted from nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians but for the breadth and richness of the contemporary reports it inspired from Walter Map, Gerald of Wales, John of Salisbury, Richard fitz Nigel, Roger of Howden, Peter of Blois and Stephen de Fougères, to name only the better known among a whole host of eye-witnesses. Moreover, nowhere else in twelfth-century Europe can the testimony of chroniclers and courtiers be matched to so rich a surviving corpus of charters, Exchequer accounts and administrative records. Vastly more evidence survives of Henry’s courtiers than from that other supposed paragon of twelfth-century courtliness, Capetian France. Our knowledge of the personal and prosopographical detail of Henry’s court has been much enhanced by recent research, as has our understanding of its material culture, both in terms of building, and, thanks to Sybille Schröder, of such courtly commodities as venison, wine and cloth. Our For assistance in the writing of this paper, I am indebted to Adrian Ailes, Martin Aurell, Stephen Church, Ruth Harvey, Richard Sharpe, Ian Short, Björn Weiler, Andy Wood and especially to Judith Everard.   For an excellent introduction to the principal ‘court’ authors, see M. Aurell, ‘La Cour Plantagenêt (1154–1204) : entourage, savoir et civilité’, in La Cour Plantagenêt (1154–1204) : Actes du Colloque tenu à Thouars du 30 avril au 2 mai 1999, ed. M. Aurell (Poitiers 2000), 9–46. The much older syntheses by W. Stubbs, Seventeen Lectures on Medieval and Modern History (Oxford 1900), chaps. 6–7, and by C. H. Haskins, ‘Henry II as a Patron of Literature’, in Essays in Medieval History Presented to Thomas Frederick Tout, ed. A. G. Little and F. M. Powicke (Manchester 1925), 71–7, remain extremely influential.   For the charters and pipe rolls, see Acta and PR. For a conspectus of the chancery’s development under Henry II, drawing comparisons with France, see N. Vincent, ‘Why 1199 ? Bureaucracy and Enrolment under John and his Contemporaries’, in English Government in the Thirteenth Century, ed. A. Jobson (Woodbridge 2004), 17–48.   For a prosopographical approach, see J. Lally, ‘The Court and Household of King Henry II



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insight into the general ethos and modus vivendi of princely courts has likewise been transformed. Taking their lead from early-modernists themselves trawling in the wake both of Lewis Namier and of the social anthropologists, students of Plantagenet history have embarked upon those turbulent waters where the shallower, stamp-collecting impulses of our discipline merge with the most unfathomable depths of theory. And yet, as I shall argue here, for all the improvements in our practical and theoretical understanding, the court of Henry II remains in many ways as enigmatic and as ill defined today as in the time of Walter Map, himself self-confessedly incapable of explaining what, or more rightly who, the court might be. Even those chronicle, charter and administrative sources that are held to shed most light on the Plantagenet court are beset with pitfalls that have not always been appreciated by their readers. If we are to understand Henry’s court, and if we are to establish whether it was truly innovative or archaic, chaotic or stable, learned or brutal, a prop to the king or the focal point for dissent, then we must first establish what our sources can and cannot tell us of court life. With that knowledge in mind, we must then attempt to define the chief characteristics of the court, set not merely within the context of the 1170s and ’80s but of a wider time span in European history. Walter Map’s inability to define the court does not seem unduly to have troubled the first and in many ways the greatest of modern authorities : the Victorian clergyman R. W. Eyton. The very title of Eyton’s book, The Court, Household and Itinerary of King Henry II, published in 1878, sums up perhaps the cardinal feature of Henry II’s as of many other medieval courts : that the court was composed of men in more or less ceaseless movement, or, as Walter Map put it, writing seven hundred years earlier, ‘the court is temporal, changeable and various, place-bound

1154–1189’ (PhD thesis, Liverpool 1969), and numerous entries in the recently published Oxford DNB. For buildings, see The History of the King’s Works, i : The Middle Ages, ed. R. A. Brown, H. M. Colvin and A. J. Taylor, 2 vols. (London 1963), esp. i, chap. 3 ; M.-P. Baudry, Les Fortifications des Plantagenêts en Poitou, 1154–1242 (Paris 2001). For the material culture of the Plantagenets, see S. Schröder, Macht und Gabe : Materielle Kultur am Hof Heinrichs II. von England (Husum 2004).   Among the most recent work on medieval courts, Malcolm Vale, The Princely Court : Medieval Courts and Culture in North-West Europe, 1270–1380 (Oxford 2001), stands supreme, at p. 17 drawing attention to the immensely influential work of Norbert Elias on the early-modern court. For the specific court culture of the Plantagenets, sensible theoretical groundlines are laid down by E. Türk, Nugae Curialium : Le Règne d’Henri II Plantagenêt (1145–1189) et l’éthique politique (Geneva 1977), and A. Chauou, L’Idéologie Plantagenêt : royauté arthurienne et monarchie politique dans l’espace Plantagenêt (XIIe–XIIIe siècles) (Rennes 2001). For the courtly virtues in general, see the two significant studies by D. Crouch, The Image of Aristocracy in Britain, 1000–1300 (London 1992), and The Birth of Nobility : Constructing Aristocracy in England and France, 900–1300 (Harlow 2005).   Map, De Nugis, 2–3 : ‘In the court I exist and of the court I speak, and what the court is, God knows, I know not.’

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and wandering, never remaining in one state’. By focusing upon personnel and upon the king’s itinerary, Eyton supplied the cue not only to a host of more recent prosopographical surveys of Henry’s courtiers, but to that abiding interest in the itinerant nature of Angevin kingship that is so distinctive a feature of the work of the greater authorities on Plantagenet court culture from J. E. A. Jolliffe to Robert Bartlett. Lacking a fixed imperial capital from which to administer their vast estates, the Plantagenets imposed their authority through their own constant movements from place to place. In this, and for all their supposed modernity, they harked back to a tradition today associated chiefly with Charlemagne or the Ottonian emperors, yet whose roots trailed far behind, to classical times and to the Roman imperial itinera principum. It was Eyton’s ambition to establish the facts of Henry’s court by first establishing the court’s movements. In doing so, he hoped to lay down an irrefutable series of proofs by matching the less than satisfactory testimony of the chroniclers to that of the pipe rolls and thence to the witness lists to royal charters. Herein lay not only one of the greatest of Eyton’s virtues  his search for previously unpublished materials  but the gravest of his faults. In the absence of firm references in the chronicles, Eyton employed the then still unpublished pipe rolls to plot the movements of the king and his baggage around England and between England and France. In light of the itinerary so generated, he sought to introduce the charters of which he knew  450 of them, an unprecedented number at the time  conjecturing the date of any particular charter from the place of its issue and the known careers of its witnesses. The result was an itinerary and an ordering of charter materials that, while on the surface bearing the appearance of mutually supportive certainty, was in reality founded upon shifting sand. A pipe-roll reference to the movement of supplies to Kent, say, or to Carlisle, cannot be read as proof that the king himself was to be found in those places in any particular year, let alone in any particular month. To introduce the charter witness lists at this point, and on that basis to attempt to fill in the gaps in the king’s itinerary, is merely to extend the chain of conjecture beyond breaking point. In general, and even despite the fact that he was working with inadequate works of reference and thirty years before the great discovery made by Delisle as to the significance of the Dei gratia clause, introduced by Henry and his chancery at some time between 1171 and 1173, the dates that Eyton assigned to charters are

  Map, De Nugis, 3–4 : ‘temporalis quidem est, mutabilis et varia, localis et erratica, nunquam in eodem statu permanens’.   J. E. A. Jolliffe, Angevin Kingship (London 1955), esp. chap. 7 ; R. Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075–1225 (Oxford 2000), 133–43.   For early medieval iteration, see K. Leyser, ‘Ottonian Government’, EHR, 96 (1981), 721–53, reprinted in idem, Medieval Germany and Its Neighbours, 900–1250 (London 1982), 69–101 ; and the more recent overview by J. W. Bernhardt, Itinerant Kingship and Royal Monasteries in Early Medieval Germany, c.936–1075 (Cambridge 1993).



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almost always plausible. They are, nonetheless, almost always too precise. We do not know enough of the king’s day-to-day movements to state, for example, that a charter issued at Canterbury and witnessed by Thomas Becket as chancellor ‘must’ have been issued during the king’s recorded visit to Canterbury in January 1156. The king could have visited west Kent on many other occasions between 1154 and 1158, years for which we have only the vaguest details of his movements. With writs that carry only a single witness, even the most optimistic of scholars would hesitate to champion one particular date against any other within that witness’s life-span. The extent to which Eyton can conjure up too great an air of certainty is best illustrated on those rare occasions when, by accident, he assigned two distinct dates to a single charter. Thus, for example, one and the same grant by Henry II to the canons of Blanchelande, issued at Valognes, is entered in Eyton’s sequence both in January 1157 and again in December 1183. The charter itself, which carries a witness list from the early years of the reign but claims to be dated in Henry’s twenty-ninth year, should almost certainly be dismissed as spurious. Another charter, for the monks of Saint-André-en-Gouffern, issued at Argentan, is entered by Eyton both under February 1171 and again in December 1174. Witnessed by Henry, bishop of Bayeux, but without the Dei gratia clause, it can today be assigned to neither of the dates suggested by Eyton but only to some indeterminate occasion between February 1165 and 1173. Eyton’s Itinerary ran to more than 200 pages of text. The newly revised itinerary, compiled by Judith Everard and based upon the firm statements of the chroniclers rather than upon conjectures derived from pipe rolls and charters, runs to less than thirty. Gone, sadly but inevitably, is much of the comfort that used to be derived from Eyton, and gone too is much of our supposed knowledge of the king’s movements and those of his court. In the year 1155, for example, rather than the hundred or more days on which Eyton claimed to know the king’s whereabouts, we are left with barely a dozen points of certainty, for the most part datable only to months rather than particular days. Eyton knew of some 450 royal charters. We now know of more than 3,000. However, unlike Eyton, we can no longer hope to use these materials to plug the gaps in our knowledge of the royal itinerary. The charters themselves carry no definite dates, but only the names of

  For ‘Dei gratia’, and Delisle’s discovery, see N. Vincent, ‘The Charters of King Henry II : The Royal Inspeximus Revisited’, in Dating Undated Medieval Charters, ed. M. Gervers, (Woodbridge 2000), 110–12 ; idem, ‘Léopold Delisle, l’Angleterre et le “Recueil des actes de Henri II”’, in Léopold Delisle, ed. F. Vieilliard and G. Desiré dit Gossé (Saint-Lô 2007), 231–57.  Eyton, Itinerary, 15.   Ibid., 23, 254.   Acta, no. 238.  Eyton, Itinerary, 154, 187 ; Acta, no. 2328.   Dr Everard’s ‘Itinerary’ is to appear as an appendix to Acta.

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their witnesses and the place of their issue, evidence that in itself, as has become increasingly apparent, must be treated with severe caution. I shall return presently and at length to the witnesses. Here, I must deal first but briefly with the vexed issue of dating clauses. Charter dating clauses remain fundamental to our knowledge of the royal courts of medieval England and their favoured places of residence. From the reign of Richard I onwards, when the king’s charters began to specify not only the place of their issue but the precise date, they become our chief support in plotting royal itineraries. Under Henry II, however, when only the place of issue is specified without year, month or day, the charters represent a much less useful resource. More importantly still, whereas under Richard I, John or Henry III letters and charters can be used to trace the day-to-day movements of the king about his various estates, there is reason to suppose that, under Henry II, even if the charters were all precisely dated, they would supply us with a far from complete record of the king’s itinerary. Of the more than 2,000 surviving charters of Henry II that specify their place of issue, nearly half were expedited at one of only a dozen specific locations, with Westminster, Rouen and Winchester heading the record with an extraordinary 550 charters among them. One of the problems that these figures pose can be demonstrated by reference to the forty-five royal charters issued at Bridgnorth in Shropshire. During his entire reign, Henry II is known to have visited Bridgnorth only once, in 1155, when he besieged the castle there over a period of days or weeks. All of the surviving charters issued at Bridgnorth could conceivably have been issued on that single occasion, suggesting that nearly two per cent of the entire surviving corpus of Henry’s charters was issued within a matter of days in the summer of 1155. Not only does this point up the disproportionately large number of charters that survive from the opening years of the reign, between 1154 and the king’s departure for France in 1158, but it suggests that, even later in the reign, charters were for the most part issued only when the court itself was established in particular locations deemed appropriate for the issue of charters. During his thirty-five years as king, Henry II spent nearly five years all told in Anjou and roughly the same period of time in Aquitaine. In theory, and assuming an even distribution of chancery production, nearly a third of the surviving charters should specify a place of issue in Aquitaine   For itineraries of Kings Richard I and John compiled on this basis, see L. Landon, The Itinerary of King Richard I (PRS n. s. 13, 1935) ; ‘Itinerary of King John’, in Rot. Pat., pp. xlix ff.   For some provisional figures here, see N. Vincent, ‘Les Normands de l’entourage d’Henri II Plantagenêt’, in 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), 78–81.   For the siege, see Eyton, Itinerary, 10–12.  Vincent, ‘Les Normands’, 81–2. For an explanation of the disproportionately large number of charters from the first three years of the reign, see J. C. Holt, ‘1153 : The Treaty of Winchester’, in The Anarchy of King Stephen’s Reign, ed. E. King (Oxford 1994), 315.



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or Anjou. In fact, the figure is something under 10 per cent, with Aquitaine in particular making only the feeblest of contributions. One explanation for these anomalies may lie with the workings of the chancery and the itinerant great seal, used and perhaps only deemed usable when the king and the chancery staff were established together in one of a relatively limited number of locations. Perhaps it took time for the chancery staff and their baggage to keep up with the king, or perhaps the issue of charters was deliberately delayed until the court was gathered together on more or less formal occasions, for the most part in places that had long been the centres of Angevin or AngloNorman administration. In his life of Becket, William fitz Stephen informs us that the chancellor ‘seals his own mandates with the other [or ‘upper’] side of the royal seal, which belongs to his keeping’. This could mean one of two things : more likely that the chancellor kept possession of the double-sided seal matrix for the great seal but used only one side of it to make single-sided seal impressions when issuing mandates in his own name rather than that of the king, or that the two parts of the seal matrix were kept separately, one part being held and occasionally used by the chancellor, and the other being guarded by some other person, perhaps by the king himself. If the latter meaning is intended, and given that all of the surviving letters of Henry II appear to have been sealed with the doublesided great seal, then this would explain both why letters could only be issued from a relatively limited number of places, when both king and chancellor were physically present together, and why so large a proportion of the letters surviving from the early years of the reign is witnessed by Becket as chancellor. To divide the seal matrix in this way, and thus to make it impossible for royal letters to be issued under the great seal save when king and chancellor were in physical proximity to one another, does not accord with what little we know of later chancery practice, and may seem the less likely of the two possible explanations of Fitz Stephen’s words. What seems beyond question is that, unlike the writs  N. Vincent, ‘King Henry II and the Poitevins’, in La Cour Plantagenêt, ed. Aurell, 109–10, estimating the Aquitanian charters as less than 2% of the surviving total.   MTB, iii, 18 : ‘altera parte sigilli regii, quod ad eius pertinet custodiam, propria signet mandata’.   On Thomas’ resignation as chancellor in 1162, we are told merely that he sent the king’s seal back to Henry II in Normandy (Diceto, i, 307 : ‘renuntians cancellarie, sigillum resignans’). From the very end of the reign, Gerald of Wales, in his ‘Vita Galfridi archiepiscopi’, tells us that, following Henry II’s death, Geoffrey Plantagenet, the chancellor, went to Richard at Fontevraud and there delivered up Henry II’s seal (Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, iv, 372 : ‘reddito eidem patris sigillo, quod in eiusdem statim obitu sub sigillis baronum qui tunc aderant fideliter signaverat’). Shortly before this, Geoffrey had taken receipt of a ring from Henry II, which the latter had intended to send to his son-in-law Alfonso of Castile (ibid., 371 : ‘accipiens annulum aureum optimum cum pantera, quem valde carum habebat, quem et regi Hispanie genero suo mittere proposuerat, ei cum benedictione sua porrexit’), a possible reference to a signet of Henry II bearing a panther. L. F. Salzman, Henry II (London 1914), 173, suggests that this was Henry II’s signet ring ‘engraved with his symbol,

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and charters of Richard I or John, which often carry the names of out-of-the-way places of issue and which can therefore be used to plot a more or less detailed day-to-day itinerary, the charters of Henry II, being for the most part restricted to a few favoured places of issue, leave vast gaps in our knowledge of the movements of king and court. Let us turn now from places to persons. Here, our chief knowledge of Henry’s courtiers has long been supposed to reside in the witness lists to Henry’s charters. These lists vary enormously in length, from the single witnesses recorded in mundane writs to the vast catalogues of up to thirty witnesses which appear occasionally in more solemn charters. Unlike the charters of the twelfth-century kings of France, whose attestations disclose nothing save the names of the principal hereditary officers of state, more or less regardless of whether these men were engaged in day-to-day royal service, the witness lists to Henry’s charters are assumed to reflect, albeit imperfectly, the practical and personal realities of the court. Nonetheless, problems still abound. To begin with, it is apparent that the witness lists supply nothing like a complete picture of the court establishment. Certain courtiers, whose names and functions are well known from chronicle or literary sources, make few if any appearances in the charters. To take only the most obvious examples, many of our most vivid insights into the court of Henry II are derived from the chronicler Roger of Howden, from the Courtiers’ Trifles of Walter Map, and from the letters of Peter of Blois. All three of these authors, it has been conjectured, must have been in more or less regular attendance upon the king. Yet not a single royal charter is witnessed by a man styled Roger of Howden, and even if the chronicler can be identified with Roger ‘the king’s chaplain’, as John Gillingham and others have suggested, his appearances as witness are so limited before 1189 that, without other sources to guide us, his significance would be entirely overlooked. Peter of Blois, as Peter archdeacon of Bath, witnesses an even less impressive handful of Henry II’s charters ; Walter Map, either under his a leopard’, a statement disputed by H. S. London, Royal Beasts (East Knoyle 1956), 9–10, who questions the identity between panther and leopard, and also whether the ring was truly a signet.   See e.g. the 30 witnesses to Acta, no. 126, confirming a settlement between the bishop of Bath and Henry de Tilly in Jan. 1177.   For attempts to reconstruct Roger’s career in court service, see J. Gillingham, ‘Roger of Howden on Crusade’, in idem, Richard Coeur de Lion : Kingship, Chivalry and War in the Twelfth Century (London 1994), 141–53 ; idem, ‘The Travels of Roger of Howden and his Views of the Irish, Scots and Welsh’, ANS, 20 (1998), 151–69, reprinted in idem, The English in the Twelfth Century : Imperialism, National Identity and Political Values (Woodbridge 2000), 69–91 ; A. A. M. Duncan, ‘Roger of Howden and Scotland 1187–1201’, in Church, Chronicle and Learning in Medieval and Early Renaissance Scotland, ed. B. Crawford (Edinburgh 1999), 134–58. For Roger the (king’s) chaplain as a witness to royal charters, see Acta, nos. 126, 512, 538, 686, 693, 1189, 1192, 1193, 1268, 1289, 1729, 1876, 2008, 2211, 2446, 2470, 2538, 2541, including, perhaps significantly, the treaty made with the king of Scots in 1174, no. 2446.



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nom de guerre or as Walter archdeacon of Oxford, appears not at all. Yet another of our principal authorities, Gerald of Wales, dedicated his Topography of Ireland to Henry and tells us that he was employed at Henry’s court, and yet in the charter witness lists he never once appears. If we extend our search a little, using Walter Map as our guide, the Courtiers’ Trifles records the names and anecdotal reminiscences of some thirty men prominent at Henry’s court. More than half of these men were bishops or members of the royal family, demonstrating how inadequate a guide Walter supplies to the personnel as opposed to the mentality of Henry’s court. Most of the courtiers he names were great magnates, long familiar from other sources. He does not entirely neglect the lesser men. For example, he tells us of the king ‘riding as was usual at the head of the great concourse of his knights and clerks, and talking with the lord Reric, a distinguished monk and an honourable man’. Distinguished and honourable in his own day Reric may have been. Certainly, he was gifted with sufficient wit to excite the king’s laughter. Yet his identity remains entirely obscure. He appears in no charter witness list, leaving us to speculate whether his conversation with the king was a unique event, or whether, like other monks or religious, he was attached in some more permanent way to the court, as almoner perhaps or as one of the king’s chaplains. Elsewhere, Walter tells an illuminating story of two men who undoubtedly were courtiers : Adam of Yarmouth and Thurstan fitz Simon the dispenser. Thurstan, employed apparently in the king’s pantry, complained to the king that Adam, a member of the chancery staff, had failed to issue him with the customary letters setting out his office and duties, normally sealed for free. Adam replied that, on an earlier occasion, Thurstan had refused a quite legitimate request for two special cakes (liba de dominicis) from the royal pantry. As a result, the king insisted that Thurstan go on bended knee to plead for his writ with an offering of a cake. The story is probably true, and finds an echo elsewhere, in the seals used by both Thurstan and his son, displaying what may well be the very cake or loaf with which Thurstan was made to plead for forgiveness. It is important, not only as an indication of the sort of petty disputes with   For Peter as Master Peter of Blois, see Acta, no. 151, and as archdeacon of Bath, nos. 484, 497, 1614, suggesting attendance at court at Dover (1184 × 1185), Bur-le-Roi (1180 × 1182) and Poitiers (8 March 1183). He, or rather one of his letters, makes a fleeting appearance in Howden, Gesta Regis, iii, 15.   Perhaps even more surprisingly, he witnesses none of the more than 200 surviving charters of John, the king’s son, issued as Lord of Ireland before 1199.   Map, De Nugis, 102–3.   The most prominent such figure is Brother Roger the Templar, king’s almoner, witness to Acta, nos. 420, 432, 885, 1218, 1251, 1670, 1872, 1982, 2068, 2104, 2285.   Map, De Nugis, 486–7.  N. Vincent, The Lucys of Charlecote : The Invention of a Warwickshire Family, 1170–1302 (Dugdale Society Occasional Papers 42, 2002), 5–6. For what appears to have been a somewhat similar story, in which the king is said to have deprived Honing the huntsman of land at Windlesham in Surrey

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which the Plantagenet court, like all courts, was encumbered, but as evidence that office-holders at Henry II’s court were accustomed to receive standardised letters of appointment. Yet nothing of this story would be known to us were it not for Walter Map. Adam of Yarmouth witnesses only a feeble number of royal charters, Thurstan fitz Simon the dispenser even fewer. Not a single official letter of appointment survives such as that which the story describes. On the evidence of royal charters alone, Thurstan and Adam might be dismissed as the most marginal of courtiers, perhaps as not courtiers at all. Their official duties would go unrecognised, and the issue of letters of appointment, like so many diplomatic forms, might be assumed to be an innovation of the thirteenth century rather than as a long-standing tradition of the twelfth. It is not only the literati and many of the characters they describe who are absent from the surviving royal charters. All of our 3,000 or so surviving charters were issued from the king’s chancery, and yet the chancery itself is an office whose personnel remain for the most part entirely obscure. To take only the most obvious of examples : each one of our 3,000 charters supposes the existence of a scribe to write it. Thanks to the work of T. A. M. Bishop, we know of nearly thirty identifiable scribes attached to the king’s chancery in the period 1154–89, whose handiwork is preserved to us in the form of surviving original charters. Yet of these thirty scribes, only two can be named : Master Stephen of Fougères, author of sixteen surviving originals, and Master Germanus, author of a remarkable eighty-four. Stephen of Fougères is a fairly regular witness to royal charters, both before and after his promotion as bishop of Rennes. Master Germanus appears in the witness lists only twice. For the rest, all the other royal scribes whose hands have been identified, including Bishop’s scribe XL, author of an equally remarkable eighty-two surviving originals, remain entirely anonymous. ‘because he denied dinner (denegavit dinnerium suum) to Hopeshort the king’s huntsman’, see Acta, no. 117.   For Thurstan fitz Simon as witness, see Acta, no. 1280, and for Adam of Yarmouth, nos. 342, 1327, 1987. Another chancery officer, the sigillifer Nigel de Sackville or Salcaville, is referred to in William fitz Stephen’s life of Becket (MTB, iii, 82, 114–15) without making any appearance in the king’s charters.   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).   For Stephen (Bishop scribe XXXVI) and Germanus (Bishop scribe XXXV), see ibid., plates XXXIa–b. The figures supplied above are based upon a re-examination of facsimiles of all the surviving originals, carried out by Teresa Webber.   For example, he is described fairly frequently (Acta, nos. 51, 342, 504, 1071, 1237, 1623, 1864–5) as the authority by whose hand (‘per manum’) charters were issued.   Acta, nos. 126, 1761.   Scribe XL might be Stephen the scribe, who in company with Master Germanus witnesses Acta, no. 126 (to be dated Jan. 1177, and hence long after the promotion of Stephen of Fougères as bishop of Rennes). The only other potential candidate is William Martini, described as scriptor, in



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Although we know that Richard of Ilchester, future bishop of Winchester, began his career in Henry II’s service as a scribe of the chancery, and although he is almost certainly the Richard scriptor who witnesses various charters early in the reign, his hand has yet to be matched to that of any of the 500 or so surviving originals. For the most part, the king’s scribes, however essential their work for our knowledge of court personnel, have vanished without personal trace. Witness lists, therefore, are a far from perfect resource. Their imperfections have been demonstrated all too clearly by David Bates, who has argued that any attempt to compile lists of the most prominent courtiers merely by counting their appearances as witness are doomed to failure. Witnesses appear not necessarily because they were prominent at court, but in many cases because a particular witness had a specific interest in the business being transacted in any particular charter. Charters of Henry II issued at northern locations to northern beneficiaries are occasionally witnessed by disproportionately large numbers of northerners, just as charters expedited in Aquitaine may can carry the names of Poitevin or Gascon witnesses otherwise unrecorded at court. Conversely, the argument ex silentio that particular individuals enjoyed no court attachment because they make few or no appearances as witness remains perilously conjectural. Here, I shall employ such arguments to suggest an absence of the greater magnates of Normandy, Anjou and Aquitaine from Henry II’s entourage. By the same token, however, it would have to be admitted that many of the greater magnates of England were infrequent or perhaps unwelcome visitors to court. Certainly the king must be assumed to have harboured grudges against certain families, not least those that had stood against him and his mother during the years before Henry’s accession. Gerald of Wales, for example, tells us that Henry bore particular contempt for the Anglo-Norman marcher family of the Baskervilles, and, in general, that he was stern in his rejection of those who had once forfeited his confidence. After 1154, company with both Master Germanus and Stephen of Fougères in the witness list to no. 1761, and who may be the same William scriptor whose house at Malmesbury is referred to in no. 2449.   For Richard scriptor as witness, see Acta, nos. 51, 163, 1029, 1071, 1898, 1986, possibly to be identified as Bishop’s scribe XXVII. Jolliffe’s suggestion, ‘The “Camera Regis” under Henry II’, EHR, 68 (1953), 18, that Richard of Ilchester served as scribe of the chamber rather than as a scribe in chancery, is implausible and unsupported by any evidence. See Hudson, in Oxford DNB, xxix, 195, for the suggestion that he is the Richard de Sock, king’s scribe, mentioned in an Athelney charter of the 1150s (Two Registers Formerly Belonging to the Family of Beauchamp of Hatch, ed. H. C. Maxwell-Lyte (Somerset Record Society 35, 1920), 57).   D. Bates, ‘The Prosopographical Study of Anglo-Norman Royal Charters’, 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), 89–102.   For examples here, see N. Vincent, ‘Regional Variations in the Charters of King Henry II (1154–1189)’, in Charters and Charter Scholarship in Britain and Ireland, ed. M. T. Flanagan and J. A. Green (Basingstoke 2005), 83   Gerald, Expugnatio, 128–9, and for the Baskervilles, see idem, Speculum Duorum, ed. Y. Lefèvre

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the Ferrers earls of Derby, the Vere earls of Oxford, the Redvers earls of Devon, Walter Giffard earl of Buckingham, the Roumare earls of Lincoln, and the Clare earls of Hertfordshire are almost as conspicuous by their failure to attest royal charters as some of the greater magnate families of Poitou or Aquitaine. Either we accept that all of these men were rarely if ever at court, or we accept that the charter evidence is hopelessly misleading. My own preference, for what it is worth, is to rely upon the charters, at least in the absence of conflicting evidence. On this basis, the court emerges as a far more restricted assembly, and potentially as a far narrower prop to royal authority, than has sometimes been supposed. Even allowing for the sane counsels of Professor Bates, the urge to use the charter witness lists to compile a ‘Forbes’s First Thousand’, or more precisely a First Hundred and Sixteen, of Henry’s courtiers is both irresistible and, as we shall see, an exercise not entirely without value. In Table 1, on the basis of the 2,300 charters of Henry so far properly indexed, ranging through beneficiaries letters A–R, I have tabulated the men who make fifteen or more appearances as witnesses, adding details of family background as Anglo-Norman (AN), English (A), Norman (N), or French (F), status as lay (L) or clerical (C), offices or titles held, and rough dates of activity at court. The figures supplied here are to be treated with caution. They are based upon only three-quarters of the surviving charters of Henry II, and even among the sampled 2,300 charters, many have been preserved either with incomplete witness lists or without witnesses at all. Thus, to state that an individual appears in the witness lists to 230 charters implies that he appears in something like 15 per cent rather than 10 per cent even of the imperfect sample upon which our survey is based. Thomas Becket, with 420 attestations, for example, is more likely to have appeared in something approaching one in four rather than one in six of the witness lists actually set down. Although there are some surprises in the table, most if not all of the names supplied here will be familiar to students of Plantagenet history. The list cannot, as we have seen, provide anything like a complete catalogue of Henry’s et al. (Cardiff 1974), 58–9 ; cf. Acta, no. 680 n. No member of the Baskerville family appears as witness to a charter of Henry II, although note that a settlement made between Ralph de Baskerville and Roger his eldest son, purportedly made before the king and various courtiers, is abstracted in BL MSS Harley 1442, fol. 16v ; Harley 1140, fol. 16v.   Among the attestations indexed to the first 2,300 charters in Acta, there are no appearances as witness by the Redvers earls of Devon, although their kinsmen Richard and William de Vernon do appear occasionally in the witness lists. William of Roumare, earl of Lincoln (d. 1161), appears only once (no. 96) ; William Ferrers, earl of Derby (d. 1190), appears twice (nos. 517, 1027) ; Walter Giffard, earl of Buckingham, three times (nos. 267, 424, 2152), and there are slightly more appearances by Aubrey de Vere, earl of Oxford (d. 1194), who appears at least eight times (nos. 253, 368, 380, 1470, 1642, 1644, 1964, 2292), and by the Clare earls of Hertford, Roger (d. 1173), who appears thirteen times (nos. 291, 368, 694, 852, 971, 1424, 1427, 1641, 1699, 1777, 1964, 2006, 2055), and Richard (d. 1217), who appears at least six times (nos. 380, 556, 977, 1394, 1470, 2111 ; cf. nos. 253, 1380–81, witnessed by men styled earl of Clare but without specifying whether Roger or Richard).



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Table 1  The most frequent witnesses to charters of Henry II Thomas Becket Richard du Hommet Manasser Biset Reginald, earl of Cornwall Geoffrey Ridel Richard de Lucy Warin fitz Gerald Richard of Ilchester John of Oxford Ranulf de Glanville

420 331 276 247 208 206 176 172 136 128

AN AN AN AN AN AN ?A A A AN

Hugh de Cressy William de Mandeville Reginald de Courtenay Robert (II), earl of Leicester Philip bp of Bayeux Arnulf of Lisieux Rotrou, archbp of Rouen William fitz Ralph William fitz Audelin Richard de Canville

126 AN 113 AN 105 ?FN 105 AN 98 N 98 N 97 FN 97 ?AN 89 AN 87 AN

C Chancellor/Archbishop L Constable L Dapifer L Earl C Archdeacon/Bishop L (Justiciar) L Chamberlain C Archdeacon/Bishop C Dean/Bishop L (Justiciar)

pre-1164 pre-1179 pre-1172 pre-1175 1160–89 pre-1179 pre-1158 pre-1188 1160–89 1160–89

L No official title L Earl of Essex L No official title L Earl/(Justiciar) C Bishop C Bishop C Bishop/Archbishop L Seneschal of Normandy L Dapifer L No official title

1160–89 1160–89 1160–89 pre-1168 pre-1163 pre-1182 pre-1183 1160–89 1154–89 pre-1176

William fitz Hamo Henry of Essex Theobald, archbp of Canterbury Ralph fitz Stephen Hugh, bp of Durham Robert, bp of Lincoln Walter of Coutances Jocelin de Balliol Henry, bp of Bayeux Roger, archbp of York

87 AN 86 A 85 N 81 AN 79 FA 79 AN 78 A 78 AN 75 Maine/N 72 AN

L No official title L Constable C Archbishop L Chamberlain C Bishop C Bishop C Archdn/Sigillarius/Bishop L No official title C Bishop C Archbishop

pre-1172 pre-1163 pre-1162 1160–89 1154–89 pre-1167 1160–89 pre-1168 1154–89 pre-1181

William de Lanvallay Robert de Dénestanville Robert de Stuteville Robert du Neubourg Seher de Quincy Thomas Basset William du Hommet Stephen of Tours Froger, bp of Sées Gilbert Foliot

68 Breton/A 65 AN 64 AN 64 N 61 FA 57 AN 57 AN 53 Angevin 49 ?AN 46 AN

L No official title L No official title L No official title L (Seneschal of Normandy) L No official title L No official title L Constable L Seneschal of Anjou C Archdeacon/Bishop C Bishop

pre-1182 pre-1167 pre-1185 pre-1159 1154–89 pre-1188 1160–89 1165–89 pre-1185 pre-1187

William fitz John Gerard de Canville William de Stuteville Humphrey de Bohun William, the King’s brother

46 45 41 40 40

L No official title L No official title L No official title L Constable/Dapifer L No official title

1154–89 1170–89 1160–89 pre-1187 pre-1164

AN AN AN AN Angevin

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Hilary, bp of Chichester Reginald fitz Jocelin William de Courcy John Cumin Alured de Saint-Martin

40 38 37 36 36

William Malet Fulk Painel Geoffrey Plantagenet William de Sainte-Mère-Eglise William de Ostilly William de Bendeng Godfrey de Lucy Robert fitz Bernard William de Chesney Hugh de Lacy

?AN AN AN ?AN AN

Bishop Archdeacon/Bishop Steward Archdeacon/Archbishop Steward

pre-1169 1160–89 pre-1176 1154–89 1170–89

36 AN 36 AN 35 Angevin 34 N 33 AN 32 ?AN 32 AN 33 ?AN 31 AN 31 AN

L Dapifer L No official title C Chancellor/Bishop-elect C Clerk of the Chamber/Dean L No official title L No official title C Archdeacon/Dean L No official title L No official title L No official title

pre-1170 pre-1183 1175–89 1175–89 1160–89 1170–89 1175–89 1160–89 pre-1175 pre-1185

Nigel, bp of Ely Richard, bp of London Bartholomew, bp of Exeter Geoffrey, the King’s son Eustace fitz Stephen Hugh de Gundeville Hugh, earl of Norfolk Henry fitz Gerald William, earl of Gloucester Maurice de Craon

30 30 30 29 29 29 29 28 28 27

C Bishop C Bishop C Bishop L Count/Duke of Brittany L Chamberlain L No official title L Earl L Chamberlain L Earl L No official title

pre-1169 pre-1162 pre-1184 1170–86 1170–89 pre-1181 pre-1173 pre-1175 pre-1183 1154–89

Hugh of Morwick Bertram de Verdun Giles, bp of Évreux Jocelin, bp of Salisbury Hugh de Longchamp Robert Marmion Reginald de Pavilly Stephen of Fougères Michael Belet Alfred, bp of Worcester

27 ?A 27 AN 26 N 26 AN 26 AN 26 ?AN 25 AN 25 ?Breton 24 AN 23 ?A

L Dapifer L No official title C Bishop C Bishop L No official title L No official title L No official title C Scribe/Bishop L Steward/Butler C Bishop

1154–89 1170–89 1170–79 pre-1184 1154–89 1160–89 1154–89 pre-1178 1154–89 pre-1160

Hugh Murdac Hugh Bardolf William (I), earl of Arundel Thomas Bardolf Thomas fitz Bernard Simon fitz Peter Geoffrey de Perche Walter de Dénestanville Geoffrey de Mandeville Jordan Tesson

23 23 22 22 22 22 22 21 21 21

C No offical title L Dapifer L Earl L No official title L (Chief forester) L No official title L No official title L No offficial title L Earl of Essex L No official title

1165–89 1170–89 pre-1176 1154–89 pre-1184 pre-1173 pre-1180 1154–89 pre-1166 1154–89

AN AN ?AN Angevin ?AN ?AN AN ?A AN Maine/A

?A ?AN AN ?AN ?AN ?A FN AN AN AN

C C L C L



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William de St John Roger Bigod Robert de Brucourt Geoffrey the chaplain Henry of Blois Gilbert fitz Reinfrey Baldwin of Forde William of Hastings Hugh de Perières William, earl of Aumale

20 19 19 19 18 18 18 18 18 17

AN AN ?AN ?A FA AN A A ?N AN

L No official title L No official title L No official title C King’s chaplain C Bishop of Winchester L No official title C Bishop/Archbishop L Butler L No official title L Earl

1160–89 1175–89 1165–89 pre-1180 pre-1171 1180–89 1175–89 pre-1173 pre-1173 pre-1179

Nigel de Broc Hamo Pincerna Roger de Stuteville John de Subligny William (II), earl of Arundel Peter fitz Guy John, bp of Evreux Walter fitz Robert John Mauduit Nicholas the chaplain

17 17 17 17 16 16 16 16 16 16

?A ?AN AN ?N AN ?AN AN ?AN AN ?A

L No official title L Butler L No official title L No official title L Earl L Keeper of Le Mans C Bishop L No official title L Chamberlain C King’s chaplain

pre-1162 1172–89 1172–89 1154–89 1176–89 1165–89 1160–89 1154–89 pre-1180 1165–89

Reginald de St Valery Seffrid, bp of Chichester William, bp of Le Mans Alan de Neville Gilbert Pipard William Rufus

16 16 16 15 15 15

AN ?AN Maine AN ?AN ?A

L No official title C Dean/Bishop C Bishop L (Chief forester) L No official title L Steward

pre-1167 1172–89 pre-1187 1160–76 1170–89 1170–89

courtiers, even of those courtiers whom we can judge to have been closest to the king. Nonetheless, by virtue of the fact that they appear in our list, the 116 men in question must all have shared at least two features in common. To begin with (and here I am employing the insights of Professor Bates), they must all have been men deemed worthy of inclusion in witness lists : an important point this, and one that explains why so many of these men were magnates or barons, be it ecclesiastical or lay, and why so few of the smaller fry, whatever the regularity of their attendance or the significance of their functions at court, can be netted from the witness lists alone. Secondly, we can assume from the fact that our 116 men were so regularly available to witness the king’s charters that they must have passed a very considerable part of their lives at court. Our list therefore supplies the names of a fair cross-section of the more prominent men who were truly ‘of ’ rather than occasionally ‘at’ Henry’s court. By the same token it excludes many important royal officials who by the very nature of their official duties were rarely available to witness royal charters. Richard fitz Nigel, for example, the king’s treasurer, was one of the greatest office-holders under Henry II and the author of one of the most significant treatises to have emerged from the Plantagenet court

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circle. Nonetheless, the fact that his duties kept him at the Exchequer for much of the year has ensured that his name appears only occasionally in the witness lists to charters issued from the king’s itinerant court. With these reservations in mind, let us pass to the 116 courtiers who do appear. Heading our list, we find very much the usual suspects. All of the first ten names occur in the witness lists to 120 or more charters. Of these, Thomas Becket leads by a considerable distance, with nearly 420 appearances, ninety more than are recorded for the next in the field. All told, and counting here the entire corpus of 3,200 charters, Becket witnesses nearly 600 charters, suggesting that the statistics produced from our more limited sample are not entirely distorted. Becket’s prominence derived chiefly from the fact that he was chancellor during the first eight years of Henry’s reign, and that, as chancellor, his was by far the most frequent attestation to be recorded to writs for which only a single witness was required. Only eleven of his 420 appearances considered here were made after his promotion as archbishop of Canterbury. Even so, the very fact that his is the most frequent name after that of the king to be recorded in the entire corpus of Henry II’s charters provides confirmation of the fact that Becket was truly the king’s right-hand man, or that, as William fitz Stephen put it, as chancellor he was ‘held to be second to the king’. Like Thomas Becket, the steward Manasser Biset, third in our list, was chiefly active during the 1150s and early 1160s. Likewise Richard du Hommet, Reginald of Cornwall, Richard de Lucy and Warin fitz Gerald, all of whom appear among the top ten witnesses, were all of them dead or long retired by 1180. Warin fitz Gerald indeed must have witnessed all of his 176 charters before 1158 ; a valuable indication this, both of Warin’s significance as witness and of the imbalance between the numbers of charters surviving from the immediate aftermath of Henry’s accession and of those issued later in the reign. The list as whole demonstrates a similar imbalance between generations, with many of the most frequent witnesses being men of an older generation than that left to serve the king by the late 1170s. By 1170, as many as twenty of our 116 witnesses were already dead or retired, and a further twenty-eight were to die or retire by the mid 1180s. Even so, the continued prominence of men such as Geoffrey Ridel, Richard of Ilchester, John of Oxford and Ranulf de Glanville, all of whom rose at court after 1160 and all of whom survived until the closing years of the reign, serves as a reminder that the personnel of the court was in a constant process of renewal : the king’s servant is dead, long live the king’s servants ; or in the words of Walter Map, ‘The court is the same, its members are changed’. All told, at least twentyfour of our 116 witnesses seem to have entered court service only in the 1160s,  Richard appears as witness to Acta, nos. 45, 226–7, 651, 700, 833, 1645, 1753, 1784, ? 1838, 1907, 1987, 2073, without title, and as archdeacon of Ely as witness to no. 1963.   William fitz Stephen, in MTB, iii, 18 : ‘secundus a rege in regno habeatur’.   Map, De Nugis, 2–3, ‘eadem est curia, sed mutua membra’



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and a further twenty as late as the 1170s, figures likely to be revised upwards in the light of forthcoming research. A majority  six of the ten most prominent witnesses  were laymen, and this preponderance is repeated throughout our list, in which we find eighty laymen set against thirty-six clerks. Even so, as almost a third of the total number of witnesses, the clerical element remains significant. Of the laymen, and with the exception of Reginald, earl of Cornwall, the king’s uncle, earls and counts are in surprisingly short supply. William de Mandeville, earl of Essex, and Robert II, earl of Leicester, de facto justiciar, both appear in the second division of witnesses, with more than one hundred appearances each. Thereafter, however, we have to search down to the far end of our list to find any others, from Geoffrey, count of Brittany, the king’s son, who makes twenty-nine appearances, to Hugh Bigod, earl of Norfolk, William, earl of Gloucester, the king’s cousin, William (I), earl of Arundel, Geoffrey de Mandeville, earl of Essex, William, earl of Aumale, and William (II), earl of Arundel, who all appear in the lower divisions. Perhaps surprisingly, not only are there more bishops in our list than earls, but the list excludes far more of the English earls than it includes. In the case of the bishops, appearances made by such men both before and after their promotion to episcopal office are conflated below, so that the impression we derive from our list of the bishops’ presence at court is artificially enhanced. Richard of Ilchester, for example, is afforded 172 appearances although only 104 of these were made in his capacity as bishop or bishop-elect rather than in his previous incarnations as scribe, king’s clerk or archdeacon of Poitiers. Nonetheless, reading down the list in descending order we find Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Ridel, bishop of Ely, Richard of Ilchester, bishop of Winchester, and John of Oxford, bishop of Norwich, all among the top ten witnesses. Thereafter, Philip, bishop of Bayeux, Arnulf, bishop of Lisieux, Rotrou, bishop of Evreux and archbishop of Rouen, Theobald, archbishop of Canterbury, Hugh du Puiset, bishop of Durham, Robert, bishop of Lincoln, Walter of Coutances, bishop of Lincoln and later archbishop of Rouen, Henry, bishop of Bayeux, and Roger, archbishop of York, all appear among the thirty most frequent witnesses. A further nineteen bishops appear further down the list, or twenty-one bishops if we include two men, Godfrey de Lucy, future bishop of Winchester, and William de Sainte-Mère-Eglise, future bishop of London, whose promotion to episcopal office was first facilitated at the court of Henry II. In part, the prominent position occupied by the bishops merely reflects another distortion in our surviving evidence : the fact that the more solemn the charter the more likely it is to have been issued in solemn assemblies attended by bishops and the more likely it is to have been subsequently preserved by its beneficiary. The proportion of charters that survives, compared to simple administrative writs, gives nothing like a true impression of the output of charters and writs by Henry II’s chancery. Many hundreds of charters were carefully guarded

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by their beneficiaries, whereas many thousands of writs were discarded as soon as their immediate purpose was served. Clearly, however, the bishops continued to attend Henry’s court throughout the reign, and clearly too it was far easier for a clerk to rise to a bishopric under Henry’s patronage than it was for a baron to win promotion as an earl, no matter how assiduous his attendance at court. Henry adopted a restrictive policy towards earldoms, in stark and no doubt quite deliberate contrast to the policies of Stephen and the Empress Matilda. Apart from recognising or regranting the titles of the Mandeville earls of Essex, the Bigod earls of Norfolk, the Vere earls of Oxford and the Aubigny earls of Arundel, Henry made no new creations of earldoms outside the immediate royal family. His illegitimate half-brother Hamelin succeeded by marriage to the earldom of Warenne, and the king’s sons Geoffrey and Richard were both granted titles as counts or dukes in France, but for the rest, not even the king’s brother William was recognised as earl or count. Far from creating new earldoms, Henry presided over a period during which at least ten earldoms recognised by King Stephen or the Empress Matilda  those of Buckingham, Cambridge, Cornwall, Gloucester, Hereford, Lincoln, Northumberland, Pembroke, Somerset and Worcester  were either deliberately suppressed or allowed to go into abeyance. By contrast, so well trodden was the cursus honorum from court clerk to courtier bishop that, with the single exception of Hugh Murdac, ninetieth in our list, every one of the hundred most regular clerical witnesses to Henry’s charters ended his life as either a bishop or an archbishop. This is an important point, reminding us both of Henry’s continued close control over episcopal appointments, even in the aftermath of the Becket dispute, and of the attractions of Henry’s court, throughout the reign, to ambitious young clerks prepared to enter royal service. It illustrates the success of the literati in persuading the king that the service of clerks was essential to the proper functioning of a royal court. We might note, too, that royal clerks promoted to bishoprics tended to remain at Henry’s court even after their promotion. In this way, the careers of Richard of Ilchester, Geoffrey Ridel, John of Oxford, Walter of Coutances, Froger of Sées or Stephen of Fougères suggest that once established at court, clerks tended to remain in the court’s orbit, even despite their promotion   For the king’s charters conferring or regranting these earldoms, see Acta, nos. 69, 852, 1934, 2006. For the status of three of these awards as creations rather than confirmations, only the charter to William earl of Arundel being a simple confirmation, see J. H. Round, Geoffrey de Mandeville : A Study of the Anarchy (London 1892), 234–42. The recognition of Simon de Senlis III as earl of Northampton after 1174 should perhaps be added to the list of new creations, although no charter evidence survives for the (re)grant of Simon’s comital title.   William appears only once (Acta, no. 649) with title as ‘comes Willelmus frater meus’, witnessing a charter of questionable authenticity.   Hugh Murdac, nephew of Henry Murdac, archbishop of York (1147–53), died or retired in 1201 as archdeacon of Cleveland : Fasti 1066–1300, vi (York), 38, 67.



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to bishoprics : a valuable reminder that, however ceaseless the ups and downs of the wheel of fortune described by Walter Map, the personnel of the court was by no means so restless or instable as we might suppose. Constancy had its rewards, and, with the startling exception of Thomas Becket, those rewarded tended to remain constant : a feature of Henry II’s court that is not to be found at the courts of his successors John or Henry III, and that may well explain why Henry II was regarded by his contemporaries as the more successful king. Ralph Niger might criticize the king for promoting ‘gossips of the hall’ and kennel-keepers to bishoprics and abbeys, but on the whole, our evidence bears out the more sympathetic report of Gerald of Wales that the king, although fierce in his hatred of those that he disliked, ‘once he had taken to a man, scarcely ever came to dislike him’. Of all of our first hundred witnesses, only two  Thomas Becket and Henry of Essex  were disgraced before 1170. Only a further three  Hugh Bigod earl of Norfolk, the king’s son Geoffrey of Brittany, and probably unjustly Arnulf of Lisieux  were to be accused of involvement in the great rebellion of 1173–4 or in any subsequent rising against the king. No such pattern of loyalty can be found among the principal witnesses to royal charters after 1189, much less after the accession of King John. The vast majority of our 116 witnesses were Anglo-Normans, by which I mean to imply the scions of families, however prominent or obscure, that held land on both sides of the Channel, in many cases since long before Henry II’s accession to the throne. The exceptions, clerical or lay, are few and far between. Manasser Biset was descended from a family that held lands of the Norman county of Eu, though for the most part on the French side of the Norman–Picard frontier. Reginald de Courtenay may or may not have been the same man, grandson of the Capetian King Louis VI and formerly lord of Courtenay and Montargis in the Gâtinais, who is said to have been banished from the court of Louis VII of France, and who thereafter is reputed to have played a part in brokering the marriage between Henry and Louis’s former wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. His descendants were undoubtedly addressed as cousins by the kings of England, although Reginald himself may have been a Norman rather than a French cadet of the main Courtenay line. Rotrou, later archbishop of Rouen, and Geoffrey de Perche were both related to the counts of Perche. William de Lanvallay was a Breton, and Seher de Quincy sprung from a family native to the Pas de Calais, although both of them   Radulfi Nigri Chronica, ed. R. Anstruther (Caxton Society 13, London 1851), 167 ; Gerald, Expugnatio, 128–9.   For the Biset family, lords of Brétizel (dép. Somme, com. Sainte-Germain-sur-Bresle), see D. Power, The Norman Frontier in the Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Centuries (Cambridge 2004), 394, 491.  N. Vincent, ‘Isabella of Angoulême : John’s Jezebel’, in King John : New Interpretations, ed. S. D. Church (Woodbridge 1999), 175–6, 201–2.   K. Thompson, Power and Border Lordship in Medieval France : The County of the Perche, 1000–1226 (Woodbridge 2002), 104–5.

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were already English landholders by 1154. Maurice de Craon derived his name from Craon in Maine, though he too sprang from a family that had prospered in England in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest. For the rest, however, it is Anglo-Normans that predominate, with only a scattering of men, such as Henry of Essex on the English side, or Philip of Bayeux on the Norman, who although long associated with the Anglo-Norman court were essentially either English or Norman by birth and landholding. With the exception of the king’s own immediate family and of Stephen of Tours, seneschal of Anjou, there is not a single Angevin among our list, and, without exception, not a single man from Aquitaine or Poitou. Since we have far fewer charters issued by the king south of the Loire than were issued in England or Normandy, and since charters issued in Anjou are far more likely to be witnessed by Angevins and charters issued in Poitou far more likely to have been witnessed by Poitevins than charters issued elsewhere, our survey is of its very nature strongly biased against the Angevin or Poitevin element at Henry’s court. Nonetheless, as I have argued elsewhere, the conclusions that can be drawn here are potentially very significant. The absence of Poitevins or southern Frenchmen, for example, suggests a more fundamental failure on Henry’s behalf to bring Aquitaine fully within the orbit of his rule. The fact that so few of the greater Norman landholders appear in regular attendance at court may indicate a growing breach between Normans and Anglo-Normans and at the same time help to explain why the position of Normandy itself was so critical during the rebellion of 1173–4, when many Norman magnates sided against rather than with the king. The Anglo-Norman descent of so many of Henry’s courtiers is significant in at least one other respect. The court of Henry II, like those of most English kings, is traditionally supposed to have encouraged the rise of ‘new men’ : landless or previously obscure individuals who are reputed to have made their fortunes in royal service. And yet, as can be proved in case after case, most such individu  For William, see J. A. Everard, Brittany and the Angevins : Province and Empire, 1158–1203 (Cambridge 2000), 209. For Saher, from Cuinchy near Béthune, see L. C. Loyd, The Origins of Some AngloNorman Families (Harleian Society 103, Leeds 1951), 84.   Ibid., 34.   For Henry of Essex, great-grandson of Edward the Confessor’s French favourite Robert son of Wymarch, a kinsman of both Edward the Confessor and of William of Normandy but with lands predominantly in England, see H. M. Thomas, The English and the Normans : Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation and Identity, 1066–c.1220 (Oxford 2003), 111. For Philip de Harcourt, bishop of Bayeux, scion of a Norman family with lands in England but principally schooled and promoted in Normandy, probably as a kinsman of Waleran count of Meulan, see M. A. Rouse and R. H. Rouse, ‘“Potens in Opere et Sermone” : Philip, Bishop of Bayeux, and his Books’, in idem, Authentic Witnesses : Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts (Notre Dame 1991), 33–59, esp. 35–8.  Vincent, ‘King Henry II and the Poitevins’, 103–35.  Vincent, ‘Les Normands’, 75–88 ; for a brief account of the 1173–4 revolt in Normandy, see Power, Norman Frontier, 398–401.



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als turn out to be not so much ‘new’ men as the scions or satellites of ‘old’ men long employed in court service. The Fitz Geralds are a case in point, raised to unprecedented importance under Henry II, yet not really ‘new’ men at all, being descended from an Anglo-Norman family that had long been associated with service as chamberlains or stewards, both to the queens of England and to several prominent aristocratic or magnate households. Even among the king’s clerks, where family descent can be traced it is frequently more exalted than might initially be supposed. Both Walter of Coutances and Richard of Ilchester, for example, although promoted under the king’s patronage from humble clerical office to preside as bishops, were relatively well connected by birth, being related, albeit distantly or illegitimately, to families capable of providing them with their initial introduction to court. Although many of the men in our list held court office and were accorded official titles, it is worth noting that office-holding alone does not explain their prominence as witnesses. Warin fitz Gerald, for example, served as the king’s chamberlain and as such witnessed many of the charters issued in the first five years of the reign. His brother Henry, who succeeded him as chamberlain and continued in office through to the 1170s, appears as a regular though by no means so frequent witness. Yet, on the basis of charter attestations, of the various other men who appear occasionally during the reign entitled king’s chamberlains, only the brothers Eustace and Ralph fitz Stephen are to be found among the inner circle of regular witnesses. In other words, it was the personal attachment of the Fitz Gerald and the Fitz Stephen chamberlains to the king, rather than the mere fact of their chamberlainship, that explains their prominence at court. Manasser Biset is for the most part styled dapifer whenever he appears as witness. Yet by no   For a general survey here, see R. V. Turner, Men Raised from the Dust : Administrative Service and Upward Mobility in Angevin England (Philadelphia 1988).  N. Vincent, ‘Warin and Henry fitz Gerald, the King’s Chamberlains : The Origins of the Fitz­ Geralds Revisited’, ANS, 21 (1999), 233–60.   Walter of Coutances was brother of the courtier Roger fitz Reinfrey : RHF, xxiii, 359, 362 ; P. Grosjean, ‘Vies et miracles de S. Petroc’, Analecta Bollandiana, 74 (1956), 181 n. ; R. V. Turner, in Oxford DNB, xiii, 712–14. Richard of Ilchester was a cousin of Gilbert Foliot, bishop of Hereford and London, and probably related to John of Tours (d. 1122) and Robert of Lewes (d. 1166), bishops of Bath : V. D. Oggins and R. S. Oggins, ‘Richard of Ilchester’s Inheritance : An Extended Family in Twelfth-Century England’, Medieval Prosopography, 12 (1991), 57–129, esp. 123–8, pedigrees 2–5, with a useful recent biography by John Hudson in Oxford DNB, xxix, 195–8.   Stephen of Tours, seneschal of Anjou, occurs on two occasion with title as chamberlain or king’s chamberlain (Acta, nos. 1623, 1641). For the rest, we find men named Artaud (no. 1755), Clarembald (no. 942), William of Earley (no. 816 n.), Fulk (nos. 1096–7), Gastinel (no. 1043), Robert of Lincoln (no. 936), Robert and William Mauduit (nos. 1889, 2303–4), Durand de Ostilly (nos. 1033, 1732), Richard Rufus (no. 2304) and Turpin (no. 1033) either witnessing as chamberlains or referred to as chamberlains of the king. Two other men, Ailward (nos. 34, 700, 1013, 1033, 2304) and Roger Chaperon (nos. 548–9), occur in Henry II’s charters as chamberlains to Henry the Young King.

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means all of his successors as dapifer or steward appear so regularly among the charter witness lists. Henry of Essex, the king’s constable in England, was one of the most frequent witnesses to royal charters during the first eight years of Henry II’s reign ; yet, following his disgrace in 1163, his successor as constable, Robert de Montfort, appears, to judge from the witness lists, to have been hardly ever at court. To this extent, the possession of an official title can serve as only a very crude gauge of a man’s prominence as courtier. Walter Map has a famous story to tell of the efforts made by the Norman baron, William de Tancarville, to exercise his hereditary functions as chamberlain at court, and yet William himself seems to have been at court only rarely, attests virtually no royal charters and in the 1170s was among the more prominent Norman magnates to rebel against the king. Shortly after 1154, Aubrey de Vere offered a substantial fine of 500 marks to succeed to his father’s office as master chamberlain, but as a merely honorific title, never applied in the witness lists to Henry II’s charters. By the same token, the absence of an official title in no way implies a lack of standing at court. Forty-six of the 116 individuals under consideration here seem never to been awarded official titles in the witness lists. Three of the most exalted office holders  the king’s justiciars Richard de Lucy, Robert II, earl of Leicester, and Ranulf de Glanville  appear in the witness lists with no indication whatsoever of their titles, save for Robert’s title as earl. Robert du Neubourg, seneschal of Normandy, is only once styled as such when witnessing the king’s charters, and even then in the witness list to a charter that is quite possibly forged. Personal factors, rather than mere possession of office or inherited title, afforded men access to the king. To this extent, and in stark contrast to Capetian France, the court of Henry II was chiefly peopled with the king’s own friends and placemen rather than with office holders   See e.g. the occasional application of the title dapifer to Walter de Amundeville, Hugh Bardulf, William de Courcy, William fitz Audelin, Gilbert and William Malet, Hugh of Morwick and Alured of Saint-Martin. See, too, the office of dapifer confirmed to Hugh Bigod, earl of Norfolk, in Acta, no. 1934.   Among those charters so far indexed, Robert de Montfort witnesses only one, without title as constable : Acta, no. 1778. He is presumably the same man, deprived of Montfort-sur-Risle before 1161, later among the rebels of 1173–4, for whom see Vincent, ‘Les Normands’, 86.   Map, De Nugis, 488–93, describing William as ‘summus camerarius’ ; Acta, nos. 424, 2279 (witness to two charters) ; Vincent, ‘Les Normands’, 85–6, nonetheless noting his receipt of a substantial annual pension from the Exchequer at Caen.   H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles, The Governance of Medieval England from the Conquest to Magna Carta (Edinburgh 1963), 428.   The application of title as iusticia or iusticiarius to Ranulf de Glanville and Richard de Lucy in the witness lists to Acta, nos. 688, 890, is itself an indication that these charters are spurious in their present form.   Acta, no. 2152, a charter granted at Rouen to Reading Abbey, witnessed by Robert as ‘tunc temporis dapifer Normannie’.



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and great magnates imposed upon him by hereditary right. In France, the attack upon hereditary offices is a feature of the late twelfth century and the reign of Philip Augustus. In England and Normandy, by contrast, it was already at least fifty years old. All told, the evidence supplied from charters and witness lists is indispensable yet far from comprehensive. There are distortions both in the chronology and the types of charter that survive, and the witnesses to such charters, though presumably high in royal favour, were by no means the only or necessarily the greatest of the servants of the court. To supply balance, we must turn now to other sources, particularly to chronicles and financial accounts. Here too, as we shall discover, there are pitfalls in plenty for the unwary. If we begin with financial records, Nick Barratt has drawn attention elsewhere in this volume to the problems that attend any attempt to use the pipe rolls to calculate the king’s total income and expenditure. In terms of expenditure, the pipe rolls record only those sums of money that were expended locally, for which the sheriffs were expected to account. The fate of the far larger sums released in cash each year, at the Exchequer or the chamber, can only be guessed at, but for the most part lies buried in that ‘inner nucleus of obscurity’ to which Jolliffe consigned the king’s more personal financial and political affairs. By the 1180s, it is apparent that the court was awash with cash. Henry II’s will, for example, drawn up in 1182, records benefactions totalling nearly 50,000 silver marks. Walter Map claims that in the 1180s the king dispatched 60,000 marks for the defense of the Holy Land. In 1187, it was by plundering the king’s treasure stored at Chinon that the future Richard I first signalled his intention to make war upon his father. According to Gerald of Wales, at the time of his death Henry II left his castles across England and France, from their highest towers to their deepest dungeons, packed to bursting with treasure. Yet very little of this surplus wealth would be apparent had we only the pipe rolls to serve as evidence. With respect to the sources of the king’s wealth, Gerald also tells us that, despite an ordinary income from land and rents sadly diminished since the time of the early Norman kings, Henry relied upon ‘accidents’ and ‘accessions’ to compensate for the depleted nature of his ordinary revenue. Such plunder, from war, conquest and peculation, goes almost entirely unnoticed in the pipe rolls, as indeed do the revenues that the king extracted from Ireland and from most of his lands in France. In a similar   For the withdrawal of the French magnates from central administration, and for the deliberate suppression of hereditary offices within the Capetian royal household, see J. W. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus (Berkeley 1986), chap. 6, esp. 104–7   Map, De Nugis, 482–5 ; for an attempt to calculate Henry’s total subventions to Jerusalem, see H. E. Mayer, ‘Henry II of England and the Holy Land’, EHR, 97 (1982), 721–39.   Howden, Gesta Regis, ii, 9.   Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, viii, 305–6.   Ibid., 316.

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vein, although bribery, gift giving and the oiling of the machinery of justice were clearly features of Plantagenet court culture, virtually none of this activity can be recovered from the surviving financial records. The douceur of £100 said to have been paid by the abbot of St Albans for confirmation of his liberties in 1155, for example, goes unnoticed in the pipe rolls, having been paid over in cash at court rather than being meticulously accounted at the Exchequer. All told, the pipe rolls of Henry II are no more informative than the accounts of Enron or ElfAquitaine as a means of assessing total income and expenditure or the degree to which the king expected that his favour would be not only solicited but bought. Essential as they are to our knowledge of the king’s courtiers and household, they tell us only obliquely who was or was not in favour at any particular time. Such oblique references can nonetheless prove illuminating, not least in demonstrating the extent to which the fortunes of courtiers could wax and wane. As Walter Map tells us, courtiers were indeed whirled constantly on Ixion’s wheel of fortune, one moment risen to glory, the next cast down into wretchedness. To take just two examples : Michael Belet appears fairly high up our list of courtiers, serving as king’s butler, as a justice after 1174 and as sheriff of the counties of Worcestershire, Warwickshire and Leicestershire for much of the 1180s. His claim to act as butler was a hereditary one, already vested in a man named John Belet as early as 1130, attached as a serjeanty to John’s land at Sheen in Surrey. Another serjeanty was held by John Belet at nearby Bagshot for service as keeper of the king’s hounds. John Belet’s serjeanties passed after 1130 not to Michael Belet the justice but to a man we must assume to have been Michael’s elder brother, Robert Belet of Sheen. As the close kinsman of a rising figure at court, we would expect Robert to have prospered after 1154. Yet, on the contrary, in 1164 he is said to have incurred the wrath of King Henry, the seizure of most of his estate and a substantial fine of £100, for an offense described variously as involving

  ‘Gesta Abbatum’, in Chronica Monasterii S. Albani, ed. H. T. Riley, 7 vols. (RS 28, 1863–76), iv/1, 146, apparently distinct from the £100 fine recorded in PR 8 Henry II, 72, for judgment over the wood of Northaw, for which see Acta, no. 2316.   Map, De Nugis, 8–11, 502–5.   For a brief biography, listing his principal offices, see R. V. Turner, ‘Richard Barre and Michael Belet : Two Angevin Civil Servants’, in idem, Judges, Administrators and the Common Law in Angevin England (London 1994), 180–98. Further details, including a reconstruction of his wider family, will be found in The Charters of Wroxton Priory, ed. N. Vincent (Oxfordshire Record Society, forthcoming).   Turner, ‘Richard Barre and Michael Belet’, 185 ; J. H. Round, The King’s Serjeants and Officers of State with their Coronation Services (London 1911), 165–8.   A previously unnoticed charter of King Stephen, confirming Robert Belet son of John Belet in ‘ministerium suum de pincernaria mea’ survives in BL MS Harley 2153, fol. 187r (120r), together with an even more remarkable charter of Henry I conferring land at Sheen and elsewhere upon John Belet, as held by Angot Malet in the time of William I and by Cola in the time of Edward the Confessor. Both these charters will shortly be published.



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a fishery or the king’s anger over a sparrow-hawk. Having spent nearly twenty years paying off this fine, in 1186, Robert was fined a further 30 marks for land in Surrey and thereafter was forced to pay at least a further 80 marks in fines to the Exchequer to recover land seized from him in 1164 and not thereafter fully restored. Ironically, it is as a result of these debts, which forced him to sell off part of his Surrey estate to another courtier, Henry of Cornhill, that we have an impression of Robert’s seal, attached to his deed of sale, showing a figure seated on a wine barrel, clutching a knife in either hand : a clear symbol of Robert’s attachment to the court and to the hereditary, and we must suppose lucrative, office of royal butler, to retain which Robert’s brother Michael was prepared to pay yet another fine of £100 shortly after the coronation of Richard I. My second example concerns a more exalted personage : Reginald de Warenne, younger brother of the crusading Earl William III de Warenne, and hence uncle by marriage of Earl William IV (d. 1159), son of King Stephen. Active in the administration of the Warenne estates in both England and Normandy, a royal justice after 1167 and permitted to fine for the marriage and lands of the heiress to the Norfolk barony of Wormegay, Reginald went on to serve as sheriff of Sussex, as one of the envoys sent to Saxony with the king’s daughter in 1168, as a leading figure in negotiations with the exiled Thomas Becket, and as castellan of Hastings during the great rebellion of 1173–4. At his retirement in 1176, however, he was required to begin immediate repayment of very substantial debts, including 700 marks that he had fined for the barony of Wormegay, to which the Exchequer had effectively turned a blind eye for the previous decade, but which now had to be paid off in the two years that remained to Reginald before his death. A major figure when in and of the court, the moment he was out of it, Reginald was forced to pay dearly for his former gains. Both of these stories, of Robert Belet and of

  CRR, ix, 332 : ‘dominus rex Henricus iratus fuit cum ipso Roberto Belet occasione unius espervarii, ita quod dominus rex disseisivit ipsum Robertum de omnibus terris suis’, as opposed to PR 12 Henry II, 107, where the fine is described as a ‘misericordia pro piscaria’. For the seizure of Robert’s lands and the fine itself, see PR 10 Henry II, 41 ; 11 Henry II, 111 ; 12 Henry II, 107 ; eventually paid in full by the time of PR 29 Henry II, 83.   PR 32 Henry II, 197 ; 33 Henry II, 214 ; 1 Richard I, 220 ; 2 Richard I, 152 ; 3 and 4 Richard I, 134, 266 ; 6 Richard I, 191.   The seal is attached to PRO DL27/50, with legend SIGILL’ ROBERTI BELET DE SIEN+ ; facs. with description in R. H. Ellis, Catalogue of Seals in the Public Record Office : Personal Seals, ii (London 1981), 9 no. P1013 and plate 4. It is very similar to that of Robert’s nephew, Michael Belet’s son Master Michael Belet, attached to BL Harley Charter 45H45, whence Sir Christopher Hatton’s Book of Seals, ed. L. C. Loyd and D. M. Stenton (Oxford 1950), 104–5 no. 147. For Michael Belet’s fine of £100 to retain his office and the inheritance of his wife, see PR 2 Richard I, 102.   As detailed in N. Vincent, ‘The Foundation of Wormegay Priory’, Norfolk Archaeology, 43 (1999), 307–12. Reginald appears as witness to at least 10 of Henry II’s charters : Acta, nos. 96, 139, 431, 504, 651, 694, 904, 1413, 1638, 1984.

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Reginald de Warenne, would be entirely unrecoverable were it not for the testimony of the pipe rolls. Far more such stories, of course, are to still to be recovered, many of them to be found not only in the pipe rolls but in the rich chronicle sources for Henry’s reign. Faced with an embarrassment of riches here, confronted with the many printed volumes of Howden, Robert of Torigni, Ralph of Diss, Gervase of Canterbury, Gerald of Wales and their like, historians have quite naturally supposed that the chronicles alone provide ample evidence from which to reconstruct the mentality of the Plantagenet court. Even here, however, there are problems. As John Gillingham points out in his contribution to this volume, and as I have attempted to demonstrate at length elsewhere, while the chronicle sources may be far richer for the Plantagenet dominions than they are for any other part of twelfth-century Europe, and while the actions of Henry II loom large in the work of most of the chroniclers, the chroniclers themselves were simply not interested in creating anything like a rounded biography of the king. Even Roger of Howden set out to write not a history of the court but a universal chronicle, cast in Bedan mode, in which Henry II, his court and family played only secondary roles. As we have seen, even among those writers considered closest to the court, many may have had only limited access to the king or tended to exaggerate their degree of such access. Perhaps the most obvious example here is supplied by Peter of Blois. Although Peter claims on various occasions to have been in court service, and although, as Ian Short points out elsewhere in this volume, Peter’s letter collections are the chief means by which we learn of the bad wine and gritty bread of the itinerant court, not only does his name occur very infrequently among the witness lists to Henry’s charters, but he makes virtually no appearance in either the financial records or the chronicle sources for Henry’s reign. More seriously still, although Peter claimed to have dedicated the first recension of his letter collection to King Henry, and although this collection claims to rehearse a letter Peter had written on behalf of the king and in Henry’s name, grave doubts surround the authenticity both of this particular letter and of Peter’s wider claims. Addressed to Pope Alexander III (d. 1181), and complaining of the malice of the king’s sons, which has induced in the king a mortal hatred against his own flesh and blood, Henry’s letter has traditionally been associated with the 1173–4 rebellion of Henry the Young King. In fact, the letter makes extraordinary asser N. Vincent, ‘The Strange Case of the Missing Biographies : The Lives of the Plantagenet Kings of England, 1154–1272’, in The Limits of Medieval Biography : Essays in Honour of Frank Barlow, ed. D. Bates and S. Hamilton (Woodbridge 2006), 237–57.   For a recent biography, see R. Southern in Oxford DNB, vi, 242–7.   The letter was first printed (apparently from MSS at Mainz and Koblenz) in Opera Petri Blesensis Bathoniensis quondam in Anglia archidiaconi, ed. J. Busée (Mainz 1600), 245–6 no. 136, whence (with emendations) Petri Blesensis Bathoniensis Archidiaconi Opera Omnia, ed. J. A. Giles, 4 vols. (Oxford 1847–56), ii, 19–21 no. 136 ; Foedera, i, 29 ; RHF, xvi, 649–50 no. 69 ; Actes Henri II, no. 460. It is



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tions that it is hard to believe can ever have been allowed to issue from the royal chancery let alone from the lips of Henry II. In the first place, the king is made to complain that so great is his hatred of his sons and his own flesh and blood that he is considering seeking a foreign successor to his throne (‘contra sanguinem meum et viscera mea cogor odium mortale concipere, et extraneos michi querere successores, ne videam de semine meo sedentem super solium meum’). The minds of his household and his familiars, so the king claims, have been poisoned against him (‘amici mei recesserunt a me [cf. Job 19 : 13], et domestici mei querunt animam meam. Sic enim familiarium meorum animos clamdestina coniuratio toxicavit, ut observantie proditorie conspirationis universa post habeant’). As a result, and even more remarkably, the king is made to petition Alexander III, described here in effect as the feudal, not merely as the spiritual overlord of England, asking that the Pope wield the spiritual sword of the patrimony of St Peter to bring aid to a realm which lies within his jurisdiction, in so far as Henry, however hateful he may be to the Pope in person, is bound to Alexander III by ‘an obligation of feudal right’ (‘Vestre iurisdictionis est regnum Angl(ie), et quantum ad feodotarii iuris obligationem, vobis dumtaxat obnoxius teneor, experiatur Anglia quid possit Romanus pontifex, et quia materialibus armis non utitur, patrimonium beati Petri spirituali gladio tueatur’). Various of these statements  on the king’s intention to disinherit his sons, or the feudal rights of the Pope  seem entirely implausible within the context of Plantagenet politics, even amidst the crisis of 1173–4. Even had they been articulated at the height of civil war, it seems absurd to suppose that thereafter, in the cool light of day, the king would have cared to be reminded of this extraordinary letter, by being presented with a copy of it (perhaps c.1184), in a collection supposedly dedicated in his honour. To this extent, the authenticity both of the letter itself and of the dedication of Peter’s letter collection to Henry II must be called into question. What we have here, I would suggest, are sentiments voiced by Peter of Blois, but never by Henry II, in a collection of letters that contains as much fiction as fact. If so, then what are we to make of the historicity of other letters in quoted below from my own edition of the text, collated from a representative selection of MSS in the Vatican, Paris and Uppsala.  Richard Southern, ‘Peter of Blois : A Twelfth Century Humanist’, in Southern, Medieval Humanism and Other Studies (Oxford 1970), 131–2, suggests that the first recension of Peter’s correspondence, in which the present letter appears, was drawn up c.1184. The letter thereafter appears in the various later recensions made during Peter’s lifetime, dated by Southern c.1189, 1195 and 1196, but was dropped from the reissues dated by Southern to c.1198 and 1202. Southern’s dating of the various recensions is broadly accepted by E. Higonnet, ‘The Letters of Peter of Blois’ (PhD diss., Harvard 1973). By contrast, L. Wahlgren, The Letter Collections of Peter of Blois : Studies in the Manuscript Tradition (Studia graeca et latina gothoburgensia 58, Göteborg 1993), esp. 186–91, argues the existence of only two basic recensions of Peter’s early letters, in which the present text is to be found in the recension of c.1184/5, but was dropped from the second edition of c.1200.

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Peter’s collection, up to and including Peter’s vivid, and highly influential descriptions of the court ? Peter’s letters should perhaps be consigned to that grey limbo, to which I would also assign such supposedly ‘historical’ sources as the chronicle of Battle Abbey, in which fact is so hopelessly mingled with literary invention as to require the very greatest of caution before any of this material can be used in our exploration of the Plantagenet court. Stephen Jaeger, indeed, has coined the description ‘mimetic fallacy’ to describe such cases as that of Peter’s correspondence, in which historical truth is subordinated to what is an essentially polemical intent. As Jaeger has also pointed out, even the most famous of Peter’s letters on the court, Letter 14, in which the misery of the courtier’s life is vividly described, should be read in conjunction with Peter’s Letter 150, which argues from a deliberately opposite extreme, listing the virtues rather than the vices of courtiers and their milieu. In what follows, I have accepted the credentials of Peter’s letters to be accepted as a mimetic guide to Plantagenet court culture, without endorsing any of their claims to describe specific historical circumstances. The letters themselves, and their description of persons and events, need to be handled with considerable caution : certainly with greater caution than has been displayed by most modern commentators who have attempted to work with them. All our sources then  charters, pipe rolls and chronicles  are in one way or another flawed. Nonetheless, only by putting them into service can we hope to answer the more important questions concerning Henry II’s court : in particular, what distinguished the Plantagenet court after 1154 from those of Henry’s predecessors in England or of his contemporaries elsewhere in Europe ? Here we should begin by returning to the itinerant nature of the court, since Henry’s itinerary is in fact much more interesting and peculiar than has sometimes been supposed. The first feature to bear in mind here is the cross-Channel, Anglo-French nature of the king’s dominion, with its near constant transfretations and displacements. By virtue of the fact that Henry II presided over a greater assembly of lands in France than had been held by any ruler since the disintegration of the Carolin  For the Battle Chronicle, see 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), 264–86.   C. S. Jaeger, ‘Courtliness and Social Change’, in Cultures of Power : Lordship, Status, and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. T. N. Bisson (Philadelphia 1995), 287–309, esp. 294–5, referring also to the commentary on Peter’s Letters 14 and 150 (texts in Peter, Opera, ed. Giles, i, 42–53 no. 14 ; ii, 81–4 no. 150) by R. Köhn, ‘ “Militia curialis” : Die Kritik am geistlichen Hofdienst bei Peter von Blois und in der lateinischen Literatur des 9.–12 Jahrhunderts’, in Miscellanea Mediaevalia 12 : Soziale Ordnungen im Selbstverständnis des Mittelalters, ed. A. Zimmermann (Berlin/New York 1979), 227–57. Wahlgren, The Letter Collections, 145–65, has recently shown that Peter’s letter 14 circulated in two very different versions, 14A and 14B, conflated in Giles’s edition. Quotations from letter 14 below are, for ease of reference, taken from Giles’s edition, but almost invariably occur in Wahlgren’s version 14B rather than the far more anodyne 14A.



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gian empire, his court and his courtiers were necessarily more widely travelled than those of other twelfth-century kings, indeed perhaps than those of any other ruler (with the possible exception of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s King Arthur) since the fall of Rome. Beyond their frequent crossings between England and France, Henry’s courtiers were called upon to act in diplomatic initiatives to most of the other courts of Christendom. To take just one example among many, Master Richard Barre, sprung from a minor Anglo-Norman family, studied at Bologna and, having gravitated to the king’s affinity from the household of the bishop of Lincoln, served as royal envoy to the papal curia in 1170 and again in 1171. Having served briefly as chancellor to Henry the Young King, on whose rebellion Richard fled to Henry II’s court bringing with him the Young King’s seal, he was promoted archdeacon of Lisieux, probably in reward for his loyalty. In 1188, he was appointed as Henry’s ambassador to the German Emperor, to the king of Hungary and to the Emperor of Constantinople. Like others of Henry’s courtiers engaged in diplomacy, Richard must have received an extraordinary insight into the manners and administration not merely of the Plantagenet lands but of much of Christian Europe. The careers of such men must lead us to question the Anglocentric focus of so much modern writing on Plantagenet law and administration. The men who made law or who administered the Plantagenet realm had often travelled far beyond the bounds of not only of England but of Henry’s dominions in northern France. Even Ranulf de Glanville, the reputed author of one of the greatest of treatises on English law, and certainly Henry II’s justiciar after 1180, was descended from a family that had played a leading role in the reconquest of Lisbon and the establishment of a Christian kingdom of Portugal, only a decade or so before Henry II’s accession to the English throne. To this extent, rather than being the Anglocentric ancestors of Sir William Blackstone or forerunners of the later, claret-soaked denizens of the Inns of Court, Henry’s lawyers were cosmopolitan administrators, many of them clerks, fully conversant with the legal customs of

  Turner, ‘Richard Barre and Michael Belet’, 183–8 ; for another aspect of Barre’s career, as theologian and author of a compendium from scripture, see R. Sharpe, ‘Richard Barre’s “Compendium Veteris et Noui Testamenti” ’, The Journal of Medieval Latin, 14 (2004), 128–46.   For a recent consideration of Ranulf de Glanville’s claims to the authorship of Glanvill, see The Treatise on the Laws and Customs of the Realm of England commonly called Glanvill, ed. G. D. G. Hall, rev. edn (OMT 2002), pp. xxx–xxxiii. For Hervey de Glanville, see the De Expugnatione Lyxbonensi : The Conquest of Lisbon. ed. C. W. David, rev. edn by J. Phillipps (New York 2001), esp. pp. xx–xxi, where Phillipps accepts the arguments of H. Livermore, ‘The “Conquest of Lisbon” and its Author’, Portugeuse Studies, 6 (1990), 1–16, that the treatise was written by an Anglo-French priest named Raol, in contradiction of the various attempts to ascribe authorship to Ranulf de Glanville himself, for which see J. C. Russell, ‘Ranulf de Glanville’, in idem, Twelfth-Century Studies (New York 1978), 126–41.

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Normandy and of much of western and southern France, not to mention with the ius commune of the papal curia, of Bologna and of German imperial rhetoric. Widely travelled they undoubtedly were, yet the sea crossings in which these men were forced to participate remained dangerous affairs. From the time of the White Ship onwards, it is likely that more Anglo-Norman courtiers died by drowning than were ever killed in battle fighting for their king. Among Henry II’s household, his personal physician Ralph de Beaumont and up to 400 others were drowned in March 1170 during a particularly disastrous crossing from Normandy to Portsmouth, becoming, in Roger of Howden’s cliché, ‘food for the fishes’. Not surprisingly, an interest in the sea and an anxiety about its dangers appears to have been a pervasive feature of Henry’s court. Not only do we have charters of the king, regulating the services which he was owed for his own ship, the esnecca, or that of his queen, but it is clear that courtiers and envoys crossing to and from England were subject to an early form of passport control, in which royal letters were essential if they were to be made welcome on reaching harbour. No actual letters of Henry II survive relating to this cross-Channel traffic, but the author of a late-twelfth-century formulary now in Vienna had at least some idea of what such letters might have looked like, commanding a sailor to provide the bearers of the letters with a ship and safe passage into France, without demanding passage money. There are many stories of Henry putting off or deliberately going ahead with sea crossings in the face of, or in response, to auguries. We might begin here with a series of horoscopes that suggest that in the early 1150s someone in England, almost certainly attached to the party of King Stephen, commissioned an astrologer to predict what would happen should Henry Plantagenet cross from France.   For recent and convincing attempts to reinstate this continental dimension to English law, see R. C. van Caenegem, ‘Public Prosecution of Crime in Twelfth-Century England’ ; idem, ‘Criminal Law in England and Flanders under King Henry II and Count Philip of Alsace’, in idem, Legal History : A European Perspective (London 1991), 1–60 ; P. Hyams, ‘The Common Law and the French Connection’, ANS, 4 (1981), 77–90, 196–202 ; R. M. Helmholz, The “Ius Commune” in England : Four Studies (Oxford 2001).   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 3–4. For Ralph as witness to royal charters, see Acta, no. 1278.   See e.g. Peter of Blois, Opera, ed. Giles, i, 44–5, where perils of the sea are among the greater perils, of rivers, bridges, mountains and of false friends, to which courtiers are said to have been prone.   For the king and queen’s ships, see Acta, nos. 188, 1002, 1020.  Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS 521, fol. 111v (also in BN MS lat. 8653, fol. 36v) : ‘H(enricus) Dei g(ratia) Anglorum rex fideli suo A. naute de Anthona s(alutem) et gratiam. [Q ]uem effectum ad nos habueris obedientie, eam frequenti cognovimus experientia. Nunc a(utem) mandamus ut concedas latori presentium et suis sociis, ad partes Francie transituris, sine naulo, navigium et ducatum.’   J. D. North, ‘Some Norman Horoscopes’, in Adelard of Bath, An English Scientist and Arabist of the Early Twelfth Century, ed. C. Burnett (Warburg Institute Surveys and Texts 14, London 1987), 147–61. See C. Burnett, The Introduction of Arabic Learning into England (The Panizzi Lectures 1996,



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In journeying to Ireland in 1171, Henry II passed via the shrine of St Davids in Pembrokeshire and, having subdued the Irish, returned to St Davids the following year to give thanks for his safe passage. According to Howden, he had deliberately delayed his departure from Ireland so as not to set sail on Easter Sunday. On another occasion he is known to have sent to Reading Abbey for the hand of St James, so that he might pray before it and obtain the saint’s protection before a Channel crossing. On the eve of taking ship from Barfleur into England, in the 1150s or 60s, he is said to have made a full confession to the bishop of Evreux and to a monk of Savigny, enumerating all his sins from the cradle onwards. Fear of drowning during a storm is said not only to have led to an outbreak of personal confessions on board the king’s ship in the early 1180s, but to Henry’s own penitential vow to promote the Carthusian, Hugh of Avalon, to a bishopric. As these references suggest, the king’s crossings, and indeed much of his wider itinerary, required a great deal of forward planning. For proof here, we might cite the events of 7–8 December 1154, the night on which Henry crossed the Channel to arrive in England on 8 December in time for his coronation at Westminster a week later. The choice of 8 December for this momentous event has previously been regarded as a matter of simple coincidence, and yet in reality it marked an important feast day of the Church, that of the Conception of the Virgin Mary, a feast regarded by theologians as both distinctively English and distinctly controversial. In the Life of St Hugh we are told that, by the late twelfth century, Mary was already being lauded as the stella maris, and hence as the principal protector of those in peril at sea. What more appropriate date for Henry to have chosen to embark for England than a distinctively English feast day dedicated to the patron of seafarers ? Nor did Henry’s recourse to such divine protection end in 1154. Having crossed to England on 8 December 1154, Henry next returned to France London 1997), 46–8, for indications that similar auguries were being cast before 1154 not just at Stephen’s but at Henry Plantagenet’s court. For stern contemporary criticism of astrology, see John of Salisbury, Policraticus, bk. 2, chaps. 26–8.   Annales Cambriae, ed. J. Williams ab Ithel (RS 20, 1860), 53–4 ; Gerald, Expugnatio, 92–3, 104–7.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 30.   B. Kemp, ‘The Miracles of the Hand of St James’, Berkshire Archaeological Journal, 65 (1970), 18 no. 26.  E. P. Sauvage, ‘Vitae B. Petri Abrincensis et B. Hamonis monachorum coenobii Saviniacensis in Normannia’, Analecta Bollandiana, 2 (1883), 531–2.   Life of St Hugh, i, 73–4.   Ibid., ii, 180, at 177–8, noting Hugh of Lincoln’s anxiety to mark the feast of the Virgin’s Nativity with a proper celebration of mass either in France or England, but not on board ship, an imperative that might explain the king’s decision to embark on the vigil of the Virgin’s feast, in order to attend a votive mass on the feast day itself. For Mary as ‘star of the sea’, see also ‘Miracles of St Thomas’, in MTB, i, 253, ultimately deriving, of course, from the great hymn Ave maris stella of Venantius Fortunatus.

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on 2 February 1156, the feast of the Virgin’s Purification, in time to attend his first post-coronation crown-wearing at Rouen. Again, in 1158, he chose to cross to France on 14 August, the vigil of the feast of the Virgin’s Assumption. I have attempted elsewhere to demonstrate how the feast days of the Virgin Mary were crucial in determining not only the king’s sea crossings but the dating of such events as the reconciliations effected between Henry and his sons after the great rebellion of 1173–4. Elsewhere, too, I have attempted to show how the king’s pilgrimages and his regular visits to churches and shrines can be fitted in to a similar spiritually purposeful pattern, in many ways more reminiscent of the itineraries of the Ottonian emperors than of the simple tax-gathering, lawdispensing or war-making functions that the twelfth-century royal itinerary is supposed to have fulfilled. Writers such as Peter of Blois or Walter Map might deplore the apparently orderless wanderings of the Plantagenet court, comparing them unfavourably with the itinerary of Henry I, which is said to have been planned and publicly announced many weeks in advance. On occasion, nonetheless, the itinerary of the Plantagenet court was guided by imperatives that left very little to chance. Peter of Blois and Walter Map both comment on the sheer size of the king’s itinerant establishment and upon the difficulties involved in accommodating and feeding so many people in so many, often out-of-the-way places. Roger of Howden, in describing the great storm of 1170, tells us that the king and his court required fifty ships for their crossing to England, and in the following year we read of Henry travelling from England into Ireland with an armada not of fifty but of 400 great vessels. The size of the king’s court was a function of Henry’s wealth, itself impossible to establish to any precise degree, yet apparent from even the most cursory glance at the royal pipe rolls. If we take the rolls for 1180  the only year of Henry’s reign for which we have complete accounts from both England and Normandy  and examine only those entries relating to purchases made in the markets at London and Rouen, we can gauge at least something of the magnificence of the court establishment. In London, for example, we find the purchase of vast quantities of foodstuffs and cloth, including no less than 1000 pounds of almonds and a great deal of scarlet, the most sought-after luxury cloth of its day. Among the diplomatic gifts recorded, we find payments to envoys from Saxony and the receipt from Henry the Lion of twenty falcons : a reminder that gift giving was a reciprocal affair, and that many of the richest pickings for  N. Vincent, ‘King Henry III and the Blessed Virgin Mary’, in The Church and Mary, ed. R. N. Swanson (Studies in Church History 39, Woodbridge 2004), 129–30.  N. Vincent, ‘The Pilgrimages of the Angevin Kings of England, 1154–1272’, in Pilgrimage : The English Experience from Becket to Bunyan, ed. C. Morris and P. Roberts (Cambridge 2002), 12–45.   Map, De Nugis, 470–73.   Peter of Blois, Opera, ed. Giles, i, 42–53 no. 14, especially 44 ; Map, De Nugis, 2–3.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 4, 25.



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Henry’s courtiers, as for those of the modern house of Windsor, were to be had from among those gifts originally made to the king, duly passed down the line to lesser members of the court. At Rouen, meanwhile, we find rich gifts being made to the king of France, to the duke of Burgundy and the counts of Bar and Champagne, including the enormous sum of 79 livres spent on a great piece of silverware, 30 marks in weight. 13 livres were spent merely in transporting from Rouen to Paris a gift of lead that the king had made to the monks of Clairvaux, perhaps for the roof of their new chapter house. Nearly 18 livres were spent at Rouen on a single one of the king’s many robes ; a reminder, this, of Walter Map’s declaration that Henry II, although never vaunting himself above other men, was always robed in the most precious of materials. The wealth, and as a result the sheer size of Henry’s court, rendered it probably the largest such assembly in Europe, up to and including that of the popes. Well might the Irish come to Henry’s court at Dublin to wonder at its splendours, returning home with a newly acquired taste for the flesh of roast crane. As Walter Map declared, ‘no such court like it has been heard of in the past or is to be feared again in future’. Even the 110 knights named William who are said to have been present at the court of the Young King in Normandy at Christmas 1171 may not have been that hard to assemble ; there are no fewer than 22 men named William even among our list of the most frequent witnesses to Henry II’s charters. Yet, as this story should remind us, the court itself was an onion-like structure, in which layer after layer had to be peeled away before one entered the presence of the king himself. To begin with, it comprehended not one but several establishments, including those of the queen and of the king’s four sons, each of which was subsumed within or acted and itinerated independently of the king’s court depending upon the physical whereabouts of their various masters or mistress. The greater courtiers themselves, earls and bishops, travelled with their own establishments, incorporated within the royal court when such great men were in attendance upon the king. As we have seen, the composition of the court, and with it, we must assume, even the court’s babble of languages and dialects,

  PR 26 Henry II, 150–51.   Norman Pipe Rolls, 51 ; Map, De Nugis, 116–17. For scarlet and other luxury cloths, including cloth of gold, in Plantagenet court culture, see Schröder, Macht und Gabe, 205–43.   Gerald, Expugnatio, 96–7.   Map, De Nugis, 374–5.   Torigni, 253.   For various of these subsidiary courts, see R. V. Turner, ‘The Households of the Sons of Henry II’, in La Cour Plantagenêt, ed. Aurell, 49–62 ; R. J. Smith, ‘Henry II’s Heir : The “Acta” and Seal of Henry the Young King, 1170–83’, EHR, 116 (2001), 297–326 ; N. Vincent, ‘Patronage, Politics and Piety in the Charters of Eleanor of Aquitaine’, in Plantagenêts et Capétiens : confrontations et héritages , ed. M. Aurell and N.-Y. Tonnerre (Turnhout 2006), 17–60.

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changed markedly depending upon its location, attended by Gascons and Poitevins in Aquitaine or by northerners in its journeys to York or Newcastle. Beyond this, the king’s own household was not only divided into a series of interlocking and more or less formally constituted departments  the chancery, the chapel, the chamber, the butlery, the hunt and so forth  but could expand or contract in size from the most public of assemblies to the most private of inner councils. Henry had been taught by his mother, so Walter Map tells us, not only how to delay business so as keep petitioners on obedient tenterhooks (a familiar technique of government from classical through to modern times), but how to retire to his chamber and to limit his public appearances as a means of emphasising his own personal authority. Henry himself might complain that he was constantly beset by a great throng of petitioners demanding his attention, so that even at mass he found he had barely time to mumble two paternosters. Just such intrusions are recorded in the chronicles : in 1155, for example, when having failed to obtain an audience with the king, who was out hunting, the abbot of Battle is said to have risen at dawn on the next day in order to petition Henry while the king was still at mass. On other occasions, however, Henry could prove himself the equal of Ludwig of Bavaria or the widowed Victoria in his demand for privacy and seclusion from the throng. Perhaps the most famous example here came at Argentan in 1171, when Henry is said to have retired for a forty-day penitential sulk on receiving news of the murder of Thomas Becket. Peter of Blois tells us of the difficulty that the court experienced, day by day, in determining whether instructions truly came from the king or merely from rumour generated by those close to his chamber. Courtiers not in the know might find themselves desperately requesting information from court prostitutes or from the men who transported the king’s pavilions, as to where the king intended to travel next. Those who presumed to intrude upon the king’s privacy or who ventured too near to the king’s own lodgings uninvited, would find themselves smarting under the blows of the ushers who guarded access to the king’s chamber, and who would only allow entry at a heavy price. Forbidden from speaking with Thomas Becket at the Council of North  See p. 287 n. 3 above.   Map, De Nugis, 478–9, 484–5.   Peter of Blois, ‘Dialogus inter Regem Henricum Secundum et abbatem Bonevallis’, ed. R. B. C. Huygens, Revue Bénédictine, 68 (1958), 104–5.   Battle Chronicle, 154–7.   Herbert of Bosham, in MTB, iii, 542–3.   Peter of Blois, Opera, ed. Giles, i, 50 : ‘Sepe vidimus, rege dormiente, dum medium silentium tenerent omnia, quod sermo a regalibus sedibus veniebat, non omnipotens, sed omnes excitans, et civitatem, ad quam eundum erat, vel oppidum nominabat.’   Ibid., 50, ‘Curritur ad meretrices et tabernacularios curiales, ut inquiratur ab eis, quo princeps profecturus sit.’   Ibid., 51–2 : ‘Ostiarios camere confundat Altissimus : faciem enim cuiuslibet boni viri confu-



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ampton in 1164 by one of the king’s marshals who carried his rod of office in his hand, William fitz Stephen was forced to use sign language to convey a message to the disgraced archbishop. Woe betide anyone who attempted to disturb the king when he was sleeping, as Peter of Blois tells us, and as the messenger who in 1174 brought news of the capture of the king of Scots at Alnwick was to discover. Arriving at Westminster late in the evening, after three days and nights of hard riding, he was initially denied access by the chamberlain who guarded the door to the king’s private chamber (sa chambre demeine ). Inside, Henry himself lay propped up on one elbow, dozing off as a servant gently massaged his feet. Even those who did obtain access to the king might find themselves so awed by his presence that they dared not speak. Such was the fate of a man who believed himself charged with a message to the king from the recently murdered St Thomas and who seized the king’s stirrup as Henry was riding through Wales on his way to the Irish expedition of 1171. The man was so put off by Henry’s air of deep introspection that he entirely failed to deliver his message. Henry was not above theatrical displays of anger, whatever Walter Map may claim was his essentially affable temper and his ability to remain silent even when buffeted and shoved by the crowds that pressed about him in public. A notorious and no doubt exaggerated report sent to Thomas Becket claims that during the court held at Caen in 1166, Henry grew so angry with his constable, Richard du Hommet, that ‘aflame with his usual rage, he tore his hat from his head, undid his belt, hurled his cloak and the clothes he was wearing far away from him, tore the silken covering from the bed with his own hand, and began to eat the straw on the floor, as if he were sitting in a ditch’. Usually read as a literal, if remarkable report of actual events, this passage might better be viewed within the context of contemporary Biblical exegesis and the stress laid upon that passage in Isaiah 11 : 7 (‘The lion shall eat straw like the ox’), believed to herald a time when kings and princes would be reduced to the same level as simple men. Certainly sione multiplici et rubore perfundere non verentur. Evasisti terribiles virgas ; si nihil dederis ostiario, nihil actum est.’   MTB, iii, 59 : ‘a quodam marescallo regis qui cum virga sua astabat prohibitus’.   Peter of Blois, Opera, ed. Giles, i, 50 .   Jordan Fantosme, 144–7 ; for the king’s attitude, cf. the illustration c.1120 of the sleeping Henry I, lying propped on one elbow, from the chronicle of John of Worcester, reproduced in Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings, plate 1, facing p. 386.   ‘Miracles of St Thomas’, in MTB, i, 275–6.   Map, De Nugis, 484–7.   Duggan, Becket Correspondence, i, 542–3, here adopting Anne Duggan’s typically lively and precise translation.   Isaiah 11 : 7 : ‘et leo quasi bos comedet paleas’, with commentary on the exegesis of this passage by P. Buc, L’Ambiguité du livre : prince, pouvoir, et peuple dans les commentaires de la Bible au Moyen Age (Paris 1994), 186–90 ; idem, ‘ “Princeps gentium dominantur eorum” : Princely Power Between Legitimacy and Illegitimacy in Twelfth-Century Exegesis’, in Cultures of Power, ed. Bisson, 319 n.

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contemporaries were not slow to adapt Biblical language to describe the king’s rages, for ‘the wrath of kings is as the roaring of a lion’ (Proverbs 19 : 12). At Burle-Roi, during the Christmas court of 1170, Henry thundered in the most public and leonine way, pouring out his fury both against Thomas Becket and against the craven timidity of his own courtiers. So great and so frequent were Henry’s rages that one is led to question whether Walter Map’s description of the king’s moderation was intended to be read as an ironical inversion of what contemporaries and courtiers knew to be the truth. By the same token we should also question whether the chroniclers in general exaggerated the violence of the king’s rages, in order that they might conform with that topos, common among clerical circles by the 1170s, whereby the anger of kings was regarded as a leading symptom of their essential irrationality and hence of the king’s need to fortify himself with rational, clerical counsel. Yet violent rage was by no means the only method by which the king signified his fury. Henry frequently adopted intimidatory silence or an outward show of detached introspection in order to deter approaches or cow his enemies. It was against this technique that St Hugh of Lincoln contended so effectively in the 1180s, using acts of no less deliberate provocation to goad the king into speech. By keeping his inner thoughts secret, Henry not only fended off impertinent petitioners but added to the mystique of his office. Very few men, it was believed, could probe the mind of kings. An ability to do so was considered so extraordinary as to rank as one of the particular attributes of the saints. The king’s ability to contrast public fury with private introspection was matched by the court’s ability to contract or expand according to Henry’s needs. Having travelled to Ireland with a great armada of 400 ships in 1171, Henry is said to have returned to Wales in the following year with only the bare minimum of followers, crammed into just three ships in order to speed their sailing. Again and again in the chronicles we read of the king’s recourse to private counsel. Thus in 1157, amidst the public festivities surrounding his Pentecost crown-wearing at Bury St Edmunds, the king is said to have retired to the empty chapter house with   As quoted in respect to Richard I in Life of St Hugh, i, 107.  Edward Grim, in MTB, ii, 428–9, emphasising the public nature of the occasion. For various remarks on the theatricality of Henry’s anger, suggesting that by no means all such outbursts were ‘staged’, see N. Vincent, ‘The Murderers of Thomas Becket’, in Bischofsmord im Mittelalter : Murder of Bishops, ed. N. Fryde and D. Reitz (Göttingen 2003), 243–5. For another example of the king’s raising his voice, this time in grief, see the account of his reaction to the death of the Young King (1183), in Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 301 : ‘cum ululatu magno et horribili fletu planctus funiferos emisit, et plus quam credi potuit modum plangendi excessit’.   For Henry’s silence as a tool against St Hugh, see Life of St Hugh, i, 67, 116–17.   See e.g. ibid., 65, where Hugh is said to have advised one of his hotter-headed brethren that the king was ‘sagacis admodum ingenii et inscrutabilis fere animi’.   For examples, see Vincent, ‘Pilgrimages of the Angevin Kings’, 32–3.   Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 29–30, noting that the courtiers of his ‘privata familia’ sailed on Easter Sunday but that Henry himself waited until the following day.



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only nine of his inner counsellors, in order that the abbot of Battle might air his grievances in private. In the great dispute over the liberties of St Albans in 1163, although Henry initially sat in judgment amidst a concourse of bishops, abbots and other magnates gathered together in St Katherine’s chapel at Westminster, as soon as discussions turned to points of detail he retired to a more secluded chamber, taking with him only three of his counsellors and requesting that the abbot of St Albans join him with only two monks. Geoffrey Ridel, so we are told, twice interrupted this private meeting in order to sow discord between the king and the abbot. Being of the inner counsel, Geoffrey could risk such an intrusion, just as William fitz Stephen tells us that one of the greatest of Thomas Becket’s privileges as chancellor had been his right to attend all meetings of the king’s counsel, whether specifically invited or not. Even at the height of his dispute with the king, at Fréteval in July 1170, Thomas could interpret the fact that Henry chose to lead him apart from the crowd and address him in private as a sign of particular royal favour. The king’s privacy was physically reinforced during the course of the reign, as it was in many of the greater magnate households, by the construction or refurbishment of private royal apartments or chambers attached to but nonetheless distinct from the more public buildings of various of the king’s residences. In this way, the king’s hunting lodges at Brill, Clipstone, Feckenham, Freemantle, Geddington and Kinver were all supplied with new royal ‘chambers’, while far more extensive work was carried out on the private apartments of Clarendon and Woodstock, now transformed from mere hunting lodges into much more extensive palace complexes. In Normandy, at his ducal capital in Rouen, the king appears to have lavished as much attention upon the semi-private apartments, chapel and hunting park at Quevilly, across the Seine from the city itself, as he devoted to the more public and traditional spaces of the ducal palace within the city walls. All told, the king’s ability to shift between public ceremony and private   Battle Chronicle, 174–7.   ‘Gesta Abbatum Sancti Albani’, 150–51.   ‘Ibid., 153   MTB, iii, 18 : ‘ut omnibus regis assit conciliis, et etiam non vocatus se ingerat’.   Duggan, Becket Correspondence, ii, 1262–3 no. 300.   History of the King’s Works, ii, 902–3, 910–11, 918–19, 937–8, 940, 943, 956, 969, 977–8, 988–9, 1006, 1009–10, 1013–16, also noting extensive building work at the hunting lodges of Havering, King’s Cliffe, Radmore, Silverstone, Wakefield and Wolverton. Charters were issued from all of these places, save for Wakefield and Wolverton. In Normandy, note the case of the hunting lodge at the Motte de Ger : B. Fajal, ‘La Motte de Ger (Manche) : Essai de localisation d’une fortification des comtes de Mortain’, in Autour du château médiéval : Actes des rencontres historiques et archéologiques de l’Orne . . . le 5 avril 1997, ed. idem (Société Historique et Archéologique de l’Orne Mémoires et documents 1, Alençon 1998), 55–67.   For the royal palace and chapel in the park at Quevilly, apparently built and decorated in the reign of Henry I but refurbished by Henry II and, perhaps in the 1160s, supplied with wall paintings

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audience, and between the court and his inner group of counsellors represented yet another means by which he could both control his court and stand apart from its petty squabbles. Conferring at Fréteval over what was to be done in respect to Becket, Henry and Louis of France deliberately met in private, out of the hearing of their courtiers, forcing those in attendance to make what they could of the few brief remarks that were publicly exchanged. Much the same thing had happened a year earlier, when, having witnessed a meeting between the king and the papal legates at Domfront, one of Becket’s spies reported that the meeting had taken place in private and that the talk had been sometimes quiet, sometimes with violent dispute and commotion. Of what precisely was said, however, he had very little idea. Often we find the king, even in public, refusing to speak in person, but using courtiers as his mouthpiece, only speaking himself to deliver or demand final judgment. Accosted in South Wales by a petitioner who addressed him in English and who insisted that the king pay greater respect to the observation of the Sabbath, the king refused to address the man in person but turned to one of his knights and in French asked him to address a supplementary question to ‘that peasant’. Roused from his bed-chamber by news of the capture of the king of Scots in 1174, the king initially addressed his questions not to the messenger himself but to the chamberlain standing guard at the door. Much of the power of individual courtiers and hence, we must assume, much of the income that they could hope to receive in bribes and douceurs, depended upon their ability to act as intermediaries between petitioners and the often remote or distracted king. We can observe this in the case of John of Salisbury in the 1150s, asking Thomas Becket to petition for the issue of royal letters ; in that of Richard du Hommet, pocketing a £100 bribe on behalf of the king so that the abbot of St Albans could pursue his case against the bishop of Lincoln ; or in that of Arnulf of Lisieux, in the 1170s attempting to make approaches to the king through Walter of Coutances until he realised that, for all his sweet words, Walter was very firmly stabbing him in the back. that still survive, see M. Chibnall, The Empress Matilda, 151–2 ; N. Stratford, ‘The Wall-Paintings of the Petit-Quevilly’, in Medieval Art, Architecture and Archaeology at Rouen, ed. J. Stratford (British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions 12, 1993), 51–9 ; Acta, no. 2112.   William fitz Stephen in MTB, iii, 108 : ‘Hec in audientia dicta sunt ; secretius que voluere lo­ cuti sunt.’   Duggan, Becket Correspondence, ii, 980–81 no. 227.   See e.g. Map, De Nugis, 489–95.   Gerald, Expugnatio, 110–11.   Jordan Fantosme, 146–7.   Letters of John of Salisbury, i, 223 no. 128.   ‘Gesta Abbatum Sancti Albani’, 146.   Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, pp. liv–vi, 164–5 no. 105, 183 no. 119, 191 no. 125, 193 no. 126, at 209



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This story of Arnulf and Walter also shows the extent to which the court was a place of intrigue and suspicion. There are many instances of such squabbling among courtiers. Some are well known. Walter Map, for example, recounts the way in which both William of Tancarville and William earl of Arundel were prepared to use violence to discharge their ceremonial offices at court, barging aside the less prestigious men who had grown accustomed to carrying out these duties. It is Map too who tells us of the hatred that he earned from the chancellor Geoffrey Plantagenet, whom Map taunted with remarks about his inadequate French and with reminders that he was a bastard, born to the king by a lowly court prostitute. Various of these squabbles went beyond simple blows or jeers to real physical violence. Henry of Essex, the constable, believing the king to be dead, dropped the royal standard on the Welsh expedition of 1157 and fled from the field of battle. Six years later, he was challenged to judicial combat to defend his honour. Defeated by his opponent, he was tonsured and forced to live out the remainder of his life as a monk at Reading Abbey. So complete was his disgrace that it was cited as grounds for divorce by the earl of Oxford, previously married to Henry’s daughter. Less familiar but none the less tragic is the story of Philip fitz Viel, the queen’s water carrier. Philip, who is said to have been a most handsome and generous man (‘pulcherrimus et liberalis’), had pursued an adulterous liaison with Edith, the wife of Aucher, one of the king’s huntsmen. Richard fitz Aucher, Edith’s son and also a royal huntsman, plotted to have Philip killed in Wales, presumably during one of Henry II’s campaigns. In the meantime, he accused Philip, entirely unjustly, of being involved in an attack made against the Essex property of William fitz Audelin, a leading courtier, royal steward and subsequently vicegerent in Ireland, whose house at Stapleford had been robbed and burned by various unknown malefactors. Richard and his followers apprehended Philip in London, imprisoned him and had him hanged, more in vengeance for his adultery than no. 137 complaining that Walter had presumed to use the king’s seal to seal letters against Arnulf without the king’s knowledge.   Map, De Nugis, 488–95.   Ibid., 478–9, 494–7. For a more recent attempt to recover the identity of Geoffrey Plantagenet’s mother, demonstrating that whoever she was, Geoffrey himself was born before Henry’s accession as king, see EEA, xxvii : York, 1189–1212, ed. M. Lovatt (Oxford 2004), pp. xxx–xxxii.   The Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond, ed. H. E. Butler (London 1949), 68–71 ; J. B. Hurry, The Trial by Combat of Henry de Essex and Robert de Montfort at Reading Abbey (London 1919), with a further detail in Letters of John of Salisbury, ii, 110–11 no. 168. For a further example of judicial duels at court, see Acta, no. 285 ; J. Martindale, ‘Between Law and Politics : The Judicial Duel under the Angevin Kings (Mid-Twelfth Century to 1204)’, in Law, Laity and Solidarities : Essays in Honour of Susan Reynolds, ed. P. Stafford et al. (Manchester 2001), 116–49, esp. 148.   Gerald, ‘Itinerarium’, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, vi, 132 ; LCGF, 214–18 nos. 162–4, where the official grounds on which divorce was sought involved an alleged betrothal between Agnes of Essex and Geoffrey de Vere, prior to her marriage to Earl Aubrey, Geoffrey’s brother.

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because of the trumped-up charges of robbery and arson. In the aftermath, apparently about 1177, the king granted Philip’s former land at Epping to Richard fitz Aucher. Further such acts of courtly violence are hinted at in the collection of Henry II’s charters. For example, one would dearly like to know the full story behind the king’s charters relating to the property of Wido fitz Tece, sometime sheriff of Hertfordshire, deprived of his lands and quite possibly his life for the castration and subsequent death of Alan the Welshman. For all of their courtliness, Henry II and his sons could on occasion revel in the distinctly sulphurous reputation that attached to their family name. Henry, for example, is said to have made no attempt to dissuade his courtiers at the council of Northampton from gossiping, deliberately within hearing of both the king and Thomas Becket, of the fate of the bishop-elect of Sées, who, it was claimed, had been castrated at the command of Henry’s father Geoffrey Plantagenet, being forced to parade through the streets of Sées with the canons who had elected him carrying his severed member in a basin : a story that may well have become exaggerated in the telling, but which has nonetheless encouraged one recent authority to accuse Henry and his court of a brutality and a resort to terror bordering on Stalinism. The greater the competition for places at court, the more extreme the rivalry between individual courtiers. As Arnulf of Lisieux put it, having found himself cast into disgrace after more than thirty years of what he believed to have been entirely loyal service at court, ‘in the familiarity of princes, envy allows no partnership’. Within this atmosphere, where a favourite had no friends, one solution was for courtiers to band together for mutual protection, establishing more or less formal networks of friendship. The extent to which the Plantagenet court is commemorated in a quite extraordinary number of letter collections  those of John of Salisbury, Thomas Becket Arnulf of Lisieux and Peter of Blois to name just the more obvious instances  is in itself clear proof of the degree to which the friendship networks commemorated in these letters were the by-product of a highly competitive court. Just such a banding together of courtiers appears to have oper  The Early Charters of Waltham Abbey 1062–1230, ed. R. Ransford (Woodbridge 1989), no. 284 ; Vincent, ‘Patronage, Politics and Piety’, 54–5.   Acta, nos. 960, 1009.  Vincent, ‘Pilgrimages of the Angevin Kings’, 42–3.   William fitz Stephen, in MTB, iii, 64–5, a story known to Gerald of Wales, who coupled it together with Becket’s murder as the most notorious example of Plantagenet tyranny : Gerald, De Principis Instructione, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, viii, 160, 301, 309. For a more sober account of the Sées election, see Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, p. xxxiv. For a modern reaction to Henry’s treatment of Becket and his supporters, effectively accusing Henry of Stalinism, see A. Duggan, Thomas Becket (London 2004), 97.   Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, 216 no. 141 : ‘in familiaritate principum consortem non admittit invidia’. For Arnulf ’s complaints over his thirty years’ loyalty, see ibid., 169–71 nos. 107–8, claiming to have served Henry since the second year of his reign.



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ated between Arnulf and the man he came to regard, towards the end of his life, as his one true friend : Richard of Ilchester. There is no record of formal oaths being sworn between Arnulf and Richard, but in other instances, and between other courtiers, such oaths can be surmised. The Battle chronicler, for example, refers to Walter, abbot of Battle, his brother Richard de Lucy, Reginald, earl of Cornwall, and Richard du Hommet being ‘joined together by a treaty of friendship’, implying perhaps something more formal than mere mutual affection. William fitz Stephen, in a statement endorsed by others of the Becket lives, suggests that as royal chancellor, at some time between 1154 and 1162, Becket had extracted oaths from three of the four knights who were later to be involved in his murder : Reginald fitz Urse, William de Tracy and Hugh de Morville, all of whom on bended knee had acknowledged Becket’s ‘right and rule’, saving only the fealty that they owed to the king. As this example should demonstrate, there were few things more dangerous than a friendship network gone sour. The bitter words exchanged between Becket and the knights in Canterbury Cathedral in December 1170 led directly to the archbishop’s murder, and yet these words can only have arisen because all of those involved knew one another intimately, and as a result knew precisely which words would cause most mortal offence. Friendship gone bad, it might be argued, lay at the root of many of the more serious crises of Henry’s reign, from Becket’s breach with Henry in 1164 to the murder in the cathedral six years later. Even when friendships survived, they could threaten the stability of the court, since friends might develop into factions and factions all too easily into conspiracies against the king. It was in precisely this way that Ralph de Faye, the queen’s uncle, was suspected in the 1160s of intoxicating ‘the prophets and heralds of the palace with his wiles and rash daring’, perhaps to the extent of plotting to poison the bishop of Poitiers. When the great rebellion of 1173–4 broke out, it was this same Ralph de Faye who was accused of having done most to sow discord between Henry II and his eldest son, the Young King  part, no doubt of the ‘clandestine conspiracy’ by which the king, in Peter of Blois’s words, believed his familiars to have been subverted. Henry’s court has generally been regarded as cosmopolitan, drawing upon all   Ibid., 216–17 no. 141.   Battle Chronicle, 160–61 : ‘amicitie federe coniuncti erant’.   MTB, iii, 135 : ‘propria deditione homines facti sunt, salva fide regis, quisque eorum ipsius ius imperiumque susceperat, genibus minor’, with further evidence in support of this statement collected in Vincent, ‘The Murderers of Thomas Becket’, 222.   For analysis here, see ibid., 244–6.   Letters of John of Salisbury, ii, 344–5 no. 212. For the supposed poison plot, see M. Soria Audebert, La Crosse brisée : des évêques agressés dans une église en conflits (Turnhout 2005), 192–9   Diceto, i, 350 ; for Ralph’s career in general, see Vincent, ‘Henry II and the Poitevins’, 122–3. For Henry’s supposed thoughts, see Peter of Blois, Opera, ed. Giles, ii, 20 no. 136 : ‘Sic enim familiarium meorum animos intoxicavit clandestina coniuratio, ut observantie proditorie conspirationis universa post habeant.’

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the talents of the king’s various dominions. Yet rather like the cosmopolitanism of a modern Oxford or Cambridge college, the court could also plumb the depths of petty introspection. The squabbling of courtiers reflects not only the keenness of their competition for favour, but the fact that individual courtiers belonged to different and sometimes rival networks of patronage, both at court and within the political community at large. The fact that so many courtiers were either related to one another by blood, or responsible for the importation to court of other members of their own families, suggests that the court itself was a close-knit political community in which a relatively small number of courtier families exercised a disproportionate degree of influence. Even if we restrict ourselves to our list of 116 courtiers, and rely upon the witness lists to royal charters as our chief source of information, it is apparent that families such as the Lucys, the Glanvilles, the Bassets and the Fitz Stephens not only produced leaders, such as Richard de Lucy or Ranulf de Glanville, in occupation of prominent offices at court, but a whole host of lesser members who came to court in the train of their kinsmen and who appear, regularly, if not prominently, as witnesses in and around the court. In the case of the Lucy family, for example, we find not only Richard himself and his son Godfrey promoted at court, but men named Geoffrey and Reginald de Lucy appearing as witnesses to royal charters. Ranulph de Glanville was followed to court by Gerard, Gilbert, Osbert, Roger and William de Glanville, all of whom witnessed occasionally for the king, as indeed did Ranulph’s foster children Hubert and Theobald Walter. The potential for such ministerial families to operate as semi-independent networks within the court is perhaps revealed to us most clearly through the emergence of clan names to describe such groupings : not just for the Geraldines, whose achievements were so lauded by Gerald of Wales, but in the case of the ‘Brocheis’ clients of the royal marshal Ranulf de Broc, or the ‘Hosati’ associated with the relatively obscure ministerial family of Henry Hose. To this extent, as with most courts, or indeed most human relations, it is hard to judge whether it was the court’s exclusivity or the reluctance of various factions to become engaged at court that led to such phenomena as the absence of so many of the greater families of Poitou, Normandy or even England from court circles. Were such men excluded, or was it that they deliberately chose to stand apart from the   For Geoffrey, see Acta, no. 1655 ; for Reginald, nos. 512, 1888, 2190.   As witnesses : Gerard de Glanville (Acta, no. 596), Gilbert, bishop of Rochester (no. 349), Osbert (no. 77), Roger (no. 1907) and William (no. 974). Hubert Walter occurs fairly regularly at court from the 1170s. Theobald Walter, his brother, rose in the service of the king’s son John.   For the Geraldines, see R. Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 1146–1223 (Oxford 1982), 22. For the ‘Brokeis’, see Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, La Vie de Saint Thomas, esp. 197–8, ll. 5831, 5851, 5855, portrayed as the ‘Brokenses’ in J. Backhouse and C. de Hamel, The Becket Leaves (London 1988), 39 (fol. 4v). For the ‘Hosati’, see N. Vincent, ‘Sixteen New Charters of Henry Plantagenet as Duke of Normandy (1150–1154)’, Historical Research (forthcoming).



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court ? There is perhaps a danger here of reading back early-modern concepts of court faction into a historical environment to which no such theories should be applied. Certainly, it would be wrong to distinguish between those in or out of the court as parties of court and country : proto-Whigs and incipient Tories. Nonetheless, the extraordinary success of Henry’s court in attracting talent  perhaps, as contemporaries such as Walter Map and Peter of Blois suggested, the greatest such assembly of talents since the time of Charlemagne  should not blind us to the potential for faction and division to which the court gave rise. Violence and conspiracy were by no means unknown at Henry’s court. Overall, however, what is perhaps most remarkable, as our list of courtiers has already suggested, is how few of the king’s inner circle of courtiers either conspired against him in 1173–4 or suffered disgrace at any other time during the reign. The ‘torrents of gold and silver’ by which Henry lured the ambitious to his court were perhaps sufficient incentive to keep the vast majority faithful to their duties. Meanwhile, by standing above the petty squabblings of his court, Henry once again demonstrated the degree to which he was sole master of his own household. When courtiers became too puffed up with a sense of self-importance, it was the king whose laughter, mockery or rebuke was the principal check to their pretensions. Humour and irony were, and remain, crucial weapons in the arsenal of any successful prince. Adam of Eynsham specifically informs us that Henry II had a sense of humour, ‘since he was the most prudent of men’, and it is surely humour that lay behind such incidents as Henry’s plucking a scarlet cloak from off the back of Thomas, his over-dressed and socially ambitious chancellor, in order to give it to a London beggar, or, indeed, behind his gift of a magnificently illuminated Winchester Bible to St Hugh and his Carthusians, the most ascetic of monks. Asked by St Hugh for a single mark of silver with which to buy parchment, the king replied, ‘What heavy demands you make upon us’, smiling as he did so. This brings us on to a somewhat broader theme : the extent to which Henry’s court was characterised by a particular ethos or ‘tone’. As Walter Map tells us, and as Ian Short has elsewhere reminded us, the Plantagenet court looked back to that of Henry I for a model of how a court might serve as ‘a school’ both ‘of virtues and wisdom’ and ‘of hilarity and decent mirth’. There was a quite extraordinary range of talents among the more intellectual members of Henry II’s court, capable of discussing Alexander or Plutarch in between sessions of hunting or drinking.   For the ‘torrentes auri et argenti’ of which Peter of Blois had at one time dreamed, only later extinguished ‘by the rose of divine mercy’, see Peter, Opera, ed. Giles, i, 44.   Life of St Hugh, i, 63 : ‘rex alludens, libenter enim ingenium viri, ut erat prudentissimus’ ; for the Bible, see i, 84–8. For Thomas’ cloak, see William fitz Stephen, MTB, iii, 24–5.   Life of St Hugh, i, 85 : ‘Rex ad hec subridens’.   Map, De Nugis, 438–9.

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Modern historians have perhaps been inclined to exaggerate the extent to which these ‘literati’ were representative of a unified court culture, and the degree to which the various authors at work at court were engaged in a common literary enterprise. Nonetheless, there are signs that at least some of them were familiar with one another’s work. Peter of Blois complimented John of Salisbury on his book ‘de nugis curialibus’, presumably the Policraticus, and elsewhere paid John the ultimate compliment of plagiarising an entire passage of John’s treatise in one of his letters. There are also sufficient echoes between Peter’s account of court life and that supplied by Walter Map, up to and including what appears to have been a punning reference by Peter to disputes over tablecloths (‘de mapalibus gravis et dura contentio’) to suggest that Walter and Peter knew one another and were drawing upon a common body of materials. Like all courts, that of Henry II was in constant need of entertainment. Here Martin Aurell’s reflections are highly relevant, since, whether it be in stories of King Arthur or in Walter Map’s tales of the wild hunt of Herla, the court had to have some sort of distraction during the long winter nights. Not all of these entertainments were necessarily literary or entirely respectable. We know, for example, of the notorious serjeanty of Hemingstone, by which Roland the farter held land for making a leap, a whistle and a fart each year at the king’s Christmas court ; even though Roland’s very name and the name of his son Louis conjure up a rather more chivalric world than his crude duties as public entertainer might suggest. Peter of Blois, echoing the Satires of Horace, lists the minstrels, prostitutes, dice-players, flatterers, hucksters, nubulatores (perhaps best interpreted as ‘clowns’), actors, barbers and buffoons in attendance upon the king. Harpers and story-tellers, such as the Maurice fabulator paid twenty shillings by the king’s writ in 1166, should certainly be added to this list. The very fact that Henry II occasionally dozed off without listening to the strains of the harp or the viol (harpe   For remarks here, see Vincent, ‘The Strange Case of the Missing Biographies’, 251–2,   P. Delhaye, ‘Un Témoignage frauduleux de Pierre de Blois sur la pédagogie du XIIe siècle’, Recherches de Théologie Ancienne et Médiévale, 14 (1947), 329–31.   Peter of Blois, Opera, ed. Giles, i, 51 ; for his praise of John of Salisbury, i, 84 no. 22.   For Herla’s hunt, see Map, De Nugis, 26–31, 370–71, also alluded to in Peter of Blois’ description of the court : Peter, Opera, ed. Giles, i, 45,   Acta, no. 381, and for a citation from St Augustine of Hippo suggesting that Roland’s particular skills had a slightly more respectable ancestry than might be supposed, see J. Southworth, Fools and Jesters at the English Court (Stroud 1998), 39.   Peter of Blois, Opera, ed. Giles, i, 50 : ‘Regis enim curiam sequuntur assidue histriones, candidatrices, aleatores, dulcorarii, caupones, nubulatores, mimi, barbatores, balatrones, hoc genus omne’ ; cf. Horace, Satires, 1. 2 (‘Ambubaiarum collegia, pharmacopolae, mendici, mimae, balatrones, hoc genus omne’). Nubulatores is perhaps a variant of nebulones, clowns or worthless fellows. For a somewhat less exciting catalogue of the various evil servants of the court, see Ralph Niger, Chronica, 167.   PR 12 Henry II, 32, and for various harpers (‘citharista’) or king’s harpers, see Acta, nos. 974–5,



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ne vïelë) was considered sufficiently unusual to be remarked upon by Jordan Fantosme, and a harper appears prominently in the illustration of the Young King’s coronation feast in the ‘Becket Leaves’. It was precisely because of its magnificence and its European-wide reputation for courtliness that Henry’s household drew young aristocrats, even from across the Alps, to receive a courtly education in the shadow of the king. Arnulf of Lisieux refers to just such a young man, a kinsman of the future Pope Alexander III, established at Henry’s court not merely so that he could learn the skills of war but in order that he might be trained in hawking and hunting, ‘upon which skills the king is most insistent’. Hunting recurs as a constant theme in all of the sources for Henry’s reign, be it in charters, pipe rolls or chronicles. At some point in the late 1170s, for example, the king established a new serjeanty at Aylesbury for Roger Follus, his otter-hunter, granting him three virgates of land in hereditary fee, in return for the service of providing bedding of straw or hay, and a render of two wild geese or three eels, whenever the king visited Aylesbury in summer or winter, provisions that either suggest that the king was prepared to hunt in extremely spartan circumstances or, alternatively, may have been intended as a joke. So far as we know, the king never once visited Aylesbury, and the name of his otter-hunter, Roger ‘Follus’, literally means Roger ‘the fool’. Be that as it may be, courtiers wishing to impress the king were well advised to offer him hounds or hawks as gifts, and in one instance recorded by Gerald of Wales, the head of a deer that had been found with twelve-tined antlers. By the same token, the king’s gifts of game, dead or alive, were a common means of signalling royal favour, up to and including the shipload of live stags, hinds and wild goats dispatched by Henry to Philip Augustus so that the French king might stock his new hunting park at Vincennes. Despite making pilgrimages to Canterbury from which he is said to have returned with spiritual or psychological benefits, there is no record that Henry was ever cured from physical illness at Becket’s shrine. By

1263 ; PR 23 Henry II, 165. See also P. Dronke, ‘Peter of Blois and Poetry at the Court of Henry II’, Mediaeval Studies, 37 (1975), 185–235.   Jordan Fantosme, 144–5 line 1959 ; Backhouse and de Hamel, The Becket Leaves, 27 (fol. 3r).   Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, 20 no. 15 : ‘accupationi seu venationi, quibus studiis rex multus insistit’.   Acta, no. 1033.   Gerald, Expugnatio, 90–91 ; ‘Itinerarium’, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, vi, 17, 69, 99.   Rigord, 34–5, and see the hounds dispatched as a diplomatic gift to the Byzantine Emperor Manuel Comnenus in 1178 : PR 21 Henry II, 19. Rigord’s claim that the game sent to Vincennes had been collected by Henry II from all parts of Normandy and Aquitaine and was thereafter kept at Vincennes under permanent guard (‘includi fecit, positis ibi perpetuo custodibus’) clearly carries the implication that Philip harboured similar designs over not only the wild game but the lands and people of Henry’s continental dominion.

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contrast, St Thomas is said miraculously to have cured one of the king’s hawks. The royal hunt may have involved occasional hardships and nights spent lying on straw. Nonetheless, as several modern authorities have shown, it was governed by a fairly elaborate code of etiquette. When papal legates visited the court at Domfront, in 1169, they received the signal honour of being visited in their lodgings both by the king and his eldest son. The Young Henry arrived with a great crowd of young men, all blowing hunting horns to announce their taking of a stag to be presented to the legates as a token of particular esteem. To medieval kings, hunting was far more than a matter of mere sport, but served, in theoretical terms, to emphasise their particular role within the divine scheme of things. By advertising his willingness to take life, albeit the lives of animals rather than of men, the king discharged one of the principal roles expected of all secular princes. As Peter the Chanter was just then teaching at the schools of Paris, Nimrod was a fit archetype of the secular prince, since power must express and symbolize the violence that it potentially exercises. Hence both the royal and aristocratic connotations of the hunt, and hence, too, the violent criticism that the king’s hunting evoked from clerical writers, keen to present an alternative model of authority in which sacerdotium could be ranked above regnum by virtue of the Church’s deliberately non-violent exercise of authority. There was perhaps no other activity, up to and including either war or adultery, in which the king’s involvement inspired such widespread and sustained criticism from contemporary clerical opinion, and there was certainly no body of courtiers or court servants who were more vilified by the clerical element in and around the court than the king’s huntsmen, falconers and foresters. Even Gerald of Wales, while appearing to celebrate the king’s skill and prowess in the hunting field, subtly subverts   ‘Miracles of St Thomas’, in MTB, i, 528–9, one among many miracles involving hawks, as at 388–9, 466–7, 502.   F. Barlow, ‘Hunting in the Middle Ages’, Transactions of the Devonshire Association, 113 (1981), 1–11 ; Schröder, Macht und Gabe, 143–73. For falconry, see R. S. Oggins, The Kings and their Hawks (New Haven 2004), esp. chap. 4. Stephen Church, ‘Some Aspects of the Royal Itinerary in the Twelfth Century’, Thirteenth Century England XI, ed. B. Weiler et al. (Woodbridge 2007), 31–45, supplies evidence for the way in which, at least during John’s reign, the king’s hunstmen and their establishment shadowed the king’s movements, whether in peace or in war.   Duggan, Becket Correspondence, ii, 980–81 no. 227. For the office of the king’s hornblowers, see the ‘Constitutio Domus Regis’, in Dialogus, 135.   See here P. Buc, ‘ “Princeps gentium dominantur eorum”’, 319–20, with various sources assembled in A. Queffelec, ‘Représentation de la chasse chez les chroniquers anglo-normands du douzième siècle’, in La Chasse au Moyen Âge : Actes du colloque de Nice (22–24 juin 1979) (Nice 1980), 423–33.   For examples, beyond John of Salisbury’s famous denunciation of hunting in the Policraticus, bk 1, see Ralph Niger, Chronica, 167–8 ; Life of St Hugh, i, 114, and note St Hugh’s affinity with animals, including a hare and his famous swan, as a counterbalance to the violence of the king’s foresters.



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this portrait by emphasising that Henry’s addiction to hunting was pursued to extremes, in contradiction of the classical virtue of pursuing all things in moderation. Gerald also suggests that the king himself was by no means unaware of the Church’s disapproval of the royal hunt. Ralph de Faye, the queen’s uncle, so Gerald tells us, was warned by the king against hunting at Woodstock on Good Friday. Ignoring this advice, Ralph was thrown from his horse into a thorn bush and blinded in the right eye. Seen in this context, the Young King’s gift of a bleeding and recently slaughtered stag to the papal legates at Domfront could be regarded not so much as a token of respect but as an act of quite deliberate provocation. The customs and symbolism of the hunt carry us on to a wider consideration of the manners and etiquette of the court, a subject about which, despite the survival of treatises on manners by Stephen of Fougères and Daniel of Beccles, we actually know rather little. The tendency among historians has been to regard the manners of the Plantagenet court as merely a pale reflection of those of their Capetian neighbours, which in turn derived from a much more ancient tradition stretching back to Charlemagne and beyond. Certain features of Plantagenet court etiquette nonetheless stand out. As we have just seen, Henry’s was a court of horn calls, tumult and shouted instructions : the shouts of heralds, messengers and the king’s marshals were never far from the minds of its chroniclers. England, so we are told, was not a land of tournaments, so that young men like Henry the Young King or William Marshal had to travel to Flanders or Champagne in search

  Gerald, Expugnatio, 126–9, quoting a popular tag from Terence’s Andria : ‘adprime in vita utile <esse> ut nequid nimis’.   Gerald, ‘Gemma Ecclesiastica’, 1. 54, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, ii, 162, later recycled as a Franciscan sermon exemplum, in Liber Exemplorum ad usum Praedicantium Saeculo XIII Compositus a quodam Fratre Minore Anglico de Provincia Hiberniae, ed. A. G. Little (Aberdeen 1908), 83–4 no. 138, perhaps with echoes of Zechariah 11 : 17.   For Stephen of Fougères, almost certainly correctly identified with Henry II’s courtier of that name, later bishop of Rennes, and his treatise dedicated to Cecily, countess of Hereford, see Etienne de Fougères : Le Livre des manières, ed. R. A. Lodge (Geneva 1979), including at ll. 1061–82 a most unepiscopal discourse on lesbianism. For Daniel, see Urbanus Magnus Danielis Becclesiensis, ed. J. G. Smyly (Dublin 1939), with valuable commentary by F. Lachaud, ‘L’Enseignement des bonnes manières de cour en Angleterre d’après l’“Urbanus magnus” attribué à Daniel de Beccles’, in Erziehung und Bildung bei Hofe : 7. Symposium der Residenzen-Kommission, Celle, 23. bis 26. September 2000, ed. W. Paravicini and J. Wettlaufer (Stuttgart 2002), 43–53 ; idem, ‘Littérature de civilité et “processus de civilisation” à la fin du XIIe siècle : Le Cas anglais d’après l’“Urbanus magnus”’, in Les Échanges culturels au Moyen Âge : XXXIIe Congrès de la SHMES (Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale, juin 2001) (Paris 2002), 227–39.   For heralds, among a host of examples, see Map, De Nugis, 438–9, 488–9. For the loud shouts of the marshals, see Peter of Blois, Opera, ed. Giles, i, 49–50. For an interesting account of the king’s campaign in Wales, in which his movements were shadowed by a group of Welshmen blowing horns, see Gerald, ‘Itinerarium’, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, vi, 62–3. For context here, see Haro ! Noël ! Oyé ! Practiques du cri au Moyen Âge, ed. D. Lett and N. Offenstadt (Paris 2003).

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of the most advanced exercises in courtliness. Yet many of the proto-chivalric trappings generally regarded as products of the tournament are to be found at Henry’s court. We can observe this in the cries of the king’s household knights, most famously and most notoriously uttered by the four knights who stormed into Canterbury Cathedral in December 1170 shouting ‘Reaus, reaus’ : ‘King’s men, king’s men’ ! We can see it too in the development of heraldry at Henry’s court. Henry’s reign was the first in Anglo-Norman history in which a member of the ruling dynasty  the king’s brother William  is known to have used a heraldic seal, decorated with a leopard, and Henry was himself perhaps the first king to have possessed a signet ring bearing the heraldic device of a leopard or panther. Even in addressing the king, it is clear that courtiers had to observe certain formalities. Whether in Latin (‘domine mi rex’), French (‘sire rei’) or even English (‘God holde þe, cuning’), it was not only messengers or the humbler petitioners but the greatest of barons who were expected to address Henry by title rather than name. According to Ralph of Diss, by 1180 at the latest, on entering the king’s presence, visitors were expected to announce their own names and titles, to be proclaimed by an attendant herald. To this extent, the chancery’s introduction of the formula rex Dei gratia to all letters and charters issued under Henry’s seal after 1172 fits into a developing pattern of formality. Although it was not until the reign of Richard, Henry’s son, that the kings of England began to employ the first person plural in all their written communications, there is at least some evidence that Henry occasionally spoke of himself as ‘we’ or ‘us’ rather than the simple ‘I’ or ‘me’. With the increasing significance attached to the privacy of the king’s own chamber, and the construction of private apartments for the king in various of his greater palaces, it is likely that the

  D. Crouch, Tournament (London 2005), 50. For further signs of disapproval of the tournament in England, see ‘Miracles of St Thomas’, in MTB, i, 279, 281.   As reported by most of the biographers, in MTB, ii, 14, 439 ; iii, 136, 139 ; Gervase, i, 227, and see Vincent, ‘The Murderers of Thomas Becket’, 245, here assuming that the knights would have cried out in French rather than Latin, as in Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, La Vie de Saint Thomas le martyr, ed. E. Walberg (Lund 1922), 190 l. 5643.   For a drawing of William’s seal, see Heralds’ Commemorative Exhibition, 1484–1934, held at the College of Arms (London 1936), 69 no. 99. For the panther on Henry II’s ring, see p. 283 n. 3 above. Cf. R. Viel, ‘Les Armoiries probables d’Henri II d’Angleterre’, Archivum Heraldicum, 2–3 (Lausanne 1956), 1–4 ; Crouch, Tournament, 64, for a ‘rei d’armar’ recorded by Betran de Born in Henry II’s service c.1184, said to have worn a short tunic bearing the king’s device.   See e.g. in Latin, Life of St Hugh, i, 62 ; in French, Jordan Fantosme, 146 l. 1981 ; in English, Gerald, Expugnatio, 110.   Diceto, ii, 3 (as noticed by Crouch, Tournament, 215), reporting the decision of William de Mandeville to have himself announced not as earl of Essex but as count of Aumale, following his marriage to the county’s heiress.   There are occasional uses of the first person plural in Henry’s diplomatic correspondence.



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lodging of the court and its courtiers came to be governed by an ever greater emphasis upon position and hierarchy. Peter of Blois tells us of the royal marshals, rudely demanding that courtiers shift their tents to more appropriate locations. If the king chose to visit courtiers in their lodgings rather than to summon them to his own, then this was interpreted as a particular mark of favour, just as seating arrangements in the king’s hall, or the way in which the king might break bread and offer it to those seated nearest to him were signs both of hospitality and of particular esteem. The king’s service at table, offering his newly-crowned son Henry a great vessel presumably containing food and drink, was one means by which Henry II symbolized the elevation of the Young King to equal rule in 1170. It is likely, although as yet not proved, that even the witness lists to the king’s charters were arranged according to hierarchy, and one wonders, too, from their reading of Quintilian, Cicero and the classical rhetoricians, whether Henry’s clerical spokesmen had acquired the elaborate language of hand signs and physical gestures that the classical authorities had sought to instill. Physical gestures were clearly part of court etiquette. Those approaching the king, at least on formal occasions, were expected to kneel, and in the case of penitent rebels or the humblest of petitioners to throw themselves bodily to the ground. We are told that Henry’s mother, the Empress Matilda, had stirred up great resentment by her refusal to stand up from her throne when even the greatest of her barons knelt before her. Henry II’s comportment, though perhaps less haughty than that of his mother, and less influenced by the practices that Matilda had acquired during her time as Empress in Germany, was none the less formal. Far from   For the establishment of private chambers for many of the greater lords, see Crouch, Image of the Aristocracy, 299. For specific examples, estimating that between a quarter and a third of all expenditure during Henry II’s reign at Windsor, Winchester and Nottingham went on the king’s houses or semi-private chambers, see History of the King’s Works, i, 79–80. See ibid., ii, 911, 913 for the disposition of Henry’s palace at Clarendon, supplied with a great hall for public feasting, but also with a private chamber range including a chapel.   Peter of Blois, Opera, ed. Giles, i, 49–50.   For the king visiting the lodgings of his guests, see Duggan, Becket Correspondence, ii, 980–81 no. 227. For him breaking bread for his guests, see Gerald, ‘Itinerarium’, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, vi, 144–5.   Backhouse and de Hamel, The Becket Leaves, 27 (fol. 3r ), also reproduced on the dust jacket to the present volume, and note that both kings, father and son, are shown wearing their crowns.   For witness lists, see J. C. Russell, ‘Social Status at the Court of King John’ and ‘Attestations of Charters in the Reign of King John’, in Russell, Twelfth Century Studies, 203–47. For rhetorical gestures, see G. S. Aldrete, Gestures and Acclamations in Ancient Rome (Baltimore 1999).   For petitioners throwing themselves to the ground, see e.g. Gerald, Expugnatio, 106–7 ; Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 76, 82. For kneeling, see ibid., 298 ; Duggan, Becket Correspondence, ii, 1270–71 no. 300. For Henry II himself apparently kneeling in supplication before his eldest son, see Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 297.   Gesta Stephani, 120–21.

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refusing to stand in the presence of his courtiers, we are told by Gerald of Wales that the king’s refusal ever to sit down was itself the cause of agony, presumably because only when the king was seated were his courtiers themselves permitted to sit. The abandonment of formal crown-wearings, after the king and queen’s decision to leave their crowns on the high altar at Worcester following the Easter crown-wearing in 1158, in no way implies the abandonment of formality but may instead have been motivated by a desire to replace the expensive and dispute-ridden ceremony of coronation at the hands of the archbishop of Canterbury with a no less lavish display of alms-giving to the poor. Elsewhere, we learn of the formality of the court chiefly on those occasions when such formality was deliberately relaxed, as at Fretéval in 1170, when Henry’s appearance, bare-headed, before Becket was interpreted as sign of the king’s desire for reconciliation. The formality expected of those approaching and addressing the king was perhaps matched to a new formality in the language and accents of the court. We have seen already that the court comprehended a great babble of languages and accents, which changed dramatically as it moved between the far north of England and the far south of Henry’s dominions in Aquitaine and Poitou. Was there, nonetheless, a court accent that was regarded as standard or received ? We might begin here with Walter Map, who tells us that the king understood ‘all the languages used from the Channel (a mari Gallico) to the Jordan’, but spoke only Latin and French. Map appears to have drawn no distinction between the myriad accents and dialects either of French (Gallica ) or of English (Anglica). However, that such a distinction was drawn by Henry’s courtiers seems undeniable. The king could apparently distinguish between a peasant and a nobleman on the grounds of accent alone, and on one occasion is said to have treated with deliberate contempt the ravings of a petitioner who addressed him in Welsh. Wace, in his history of the early dukes of Normandy written at Henry II’s request, takes it for granted that, even within Normandy, a duke wishing to masquerade as a peasant would need to disguise not only his appearance but his speech. Contemporaries remarked on the Burgundian accent of Hugh of Lincoln, and   Gerald, Expugnatio, 126–7.   For the Worcester ceremony, see Howden, Chronica, i, 216 ; Diceto, i, 302, as drawn to my attention by John Gillingham. For disputes between the archbishops of Canterbury and York that had disturbed the king’s Christmas crown-wearing at Lincoln in 1157 and that may have led directly to the abandonment of crown wearing in 1158, see Acta, no. 501.   Duggan, Becket Correspondence, ii, 1262–3 no. 300 : ‘capite detecto’.   Map, De Nugis, 476–7.   Ibid., 36–7, noting the ability of Gilbert Foliot, bishop of London, to speak Latin, French and English.   Gerald, Expugnatio, 106–7, 110–11.   Wace, Roman de Rou, ll. 1627–76, trans. G. S. Burgess, The History of the Norman People : Wace’s ‘Roman de Rou’ (Woodbridge 2004), 109–10.



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the court, at the prompting of Walter Map, openly laughed at the attempts made by the English-born Geoffrey Plantagenet, the king’s bastard son, to speak ‘Marlborough’ French. Both Gerald of Wales and William of Canterbury reveal an awareness of the different dialects of English and on occasion sought to reproduce them, as a means of supplying authenticity to their narratives, albeit these narratives were otherwise written entirely in Latin. Away from the court itself, but nevertheless an important contemporary witness, Jocelin of Brakelond was acutely aware of the fact that Abbot Samson of Bury St Edmunds spoke an English that was (and remains) peculiar to Norfolk. What vernacular literature the king and his predominantly Anglo-Norman courtiers patronised or commissioned appears to have been written almost exclusively either in Norman or in Anglo-Norman French. To this extent, and given the attention that has been focused in recent years upon the use of distinctions in language or accent to reinforce or even to create distinctions in status or class, it may well be that the lingua franca of the court came to enjoy a privileged status, setting courtiers artificially apart from those outside the court. Just as Dumas’s chevalier d’Artagnan had to rid himself of his Gascon accent to find favour in the service of Louis XIII, so the northerners or southerners attending the Plantagenet court may have been well advised to temper their native speech. The new formality of the Plantagenet court was matched to the court’s ever greater show of pomp and circumstance. Besides commanding the refurbishment and rebuilding of his palaces and hunting lodges, even on the road the king sought to display his authority through conspicuous magnificence. The wooden palace in which the king spent the winter of 1171 at Dublin was probably no less spectacular than the tent, intended for great assemblies, that Henry had sent to the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa in the late 1150s and whose splendour was remarked upon by a number of German chroniclers. The king could affect informality, especially when out hunting ; witness the famous story in the Life of St Hugh in which Hugh was summoned to Henry’s court, where he found the king bandaging his finger after a minor hunting accident, seated under a tree   Life of St Hugh, i, 94 ; Map, De Nugis, 496–7.   Gerald, Expugnatio, 110–11 ; William of Canterbury, in MTB, i, 128.   The Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond, 40 : ‘secundum linguam Norfolchie’.   K. M. Broadhurst, ‘Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine : Patrons of Literature in French ?’, Viator : Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 27 (1996), 70–84.   See here P. Burke, Introduction to The Social History of Language, ed. idem and R. Porter (Cambridge 1987), 1–20 ; English in its Social Contexts : Essays in Historical Sociolinguisitics, ed. T. W. Machan and C. T. Scott (New York/Oxford 1992), references that I owe to Andy Wood.   For the Dublin ‘palace’, see Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 28–9 ; S. Duffy, ‘Ireland’s Hastings : The Anglo-Norman Conquest of Dublin’, ANS, 20 (1998), 81–5. For the great tent given to Barbarossa in 1157, see Ottonis et Rahewini Gesta Friderici I. Imperatoris, ed. G. Waitz (MGHS SRG, Hanover/Leipzig 1912), 171, with extensive evidence gathered not only for this but for others of Henry II’s great tents by Schröder, Macht und Gabe, 244–78.

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with his courtiers sitting round about him on the ground. Yet even this story is not always read as it should be. In the translation offered by Decima Douie and Hugh Farmer, we read that the king’s courtiers sat around him in a circle, but the actual word used in this context is not ‘circle’ but coronam. In any event, the story was only told by Hugh’s biographer in order to demonstrate how Hugh had breached all the rules of court etiquette, by approaching the king uninvited, literally barging his way through the surrounding ‘crown’ of courtiers that normally separated Henry from hoi polloi. Even in the hunting field, it would appear, there were proprieties that the king and his courtiers expected to be observed. Thus far we have observed the manners of the court within a largely secular context : that of French or Francophile chivalry. Yet, as David Crouch and others have argued, chivalry itself, and the entire code of honour and appropriate behaviour that accompanied it, owed as much to religious as to secular imperatives. Here we approach yet another theme : the piety and religiosity of the court. Without repeating arguments that I have deployed elsewhere to suggest that the Plantagenets saw themselves not merely as temporal but, to at least some degree, as sacral leaders, our picture of the court would not be complete without some idea of the size and magnificence of the court chapel. From its lavish distribution of alms through to its equally remarkable collection of relics carted about in the royal baggage train (a finger bone of St Bernard, for example, given to Henry in thanks for his gift of lead to roof the abbey at Clairvaux), the court was a place of worship, not merely a seat of government or a venue for entertainment. Just as the desire to make pilgrimages or to honour the feast days of the saints helped to determine the king’s itinerary, so, on a day-to-day basis, the court was a place of masses, church attendance and pious ritual. The Becket conflict should not blind us to the fact that Henry was in many ways a very religious man, a regular attender at mass and at confession, however much his devotions may have been tempered by the need to attend to the constant approach of petitioners. Some of   Life of St Hugh, i, 115–18, esp. 116 : ‘consulibus ceterisque magnatibus in modum corone consedentibus’.   Crouch, The Birth of Nobility, 7–28, with typically provocative commentary on the work of C. S. Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness : Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals, 939–1210 (Philadelphia 1985). Jaeger attempts to trace courtliness and its model of restrained behaviour to the clerical milieu of the Ottonian Emperors, but with secular and classicizing rather than essentially Christian roots.  Vincent, ‘Pilgrimages of the Angevin Kings’, 12–45.   For the court chapel in general, and for the finger bone of St Bernard, see Vincent, ‘Pilgrimages of the Angevin Kings’, 34–8. For the waferer or ‘nebularius’, see the ‘Constitutio Domus Regis’, in Dialogus, 131.   Sauvage, ‘Vita B. Hamonis’, 531–2 ; Vincent, ‘Pilgrimages of the Angevin Kings’, 23–4, although note the disparaging comments of Gerald of Wales (Expugnatio, 130–31) : ‘sacre vix horam hostie mittende divinis accommodans, et id ipsum temporis, ob regni forte negotia tanta reique pub-



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the most vivid insights into Henry’s personality are provided, not by his assizes or laws, but in the semi-fictitious account supplied by Peter of Blois of Henry’s last meeting with his confessor, the abbot of Bonneval. This is not to suggest that contemporaries looked upon Henry and his court with only deference and awe. On the contrary, it is the lack of deference among many of the English chroniclers that remains one of their most remarkable collective features. The subversion of the image of pious majesty is a constant theme in their writings and may have been no less prevalent among Henry’s courtiers themselves. For an illustration here, we might cite the seal of Robert Belet, the king’s hereditary butler, which we have already noticed as an advertisement of Robert’s status at court. Robert’s seal shows him sitting on a wine barrel with his feet resting on a another smaller barrel and with a knife or bill-hook in either hand. As Adrian Ailes has pointed out to me, it represents a clear and surely quite deliberate parody of the majesty side of the king’s great seal, with the throne replaced by wine barrels and the sword and orb by knives or billhooks. Thus, even in advertising his status as a courtier, a man such as Robert Belet could both pay tribute to, and to seek subtly to subvert, one of the most familiar and potent symbols of royal power. On other occasions, we must beware of reading pious or religious significance into events or phenomena that were entirely secular in tone. Thus, modern readers of the Constitutio Domus Regis (composed for the court of King Henry I, but undoubtedly known at the court of Henry II), faced with the various court servants whose duties in the pantry and bakery are specified, were inclined to suppose that the court was accompanied by an officer, the ‘waferer’ specifically charged with the baking of the king’s mass bread. In reality, the title used here, nebularius, appears to have less to do with piety and the sacraments than with the so-called nubulatores whom Peter of Blois lists among the court entertainers, related to the nebulones (worthless fellows, clowns or men of low birth) familiar to classical antiquity, and indeed to that Robert nebulo, apparently a court clown of William Rufus, who introduced a fashion for stuffing shoes in such a way that their toes were bent backwards into the shape of rams’ horns. Save when at their most blatant, humour and subversion are among the most difficult of traits to recover from medieval texts. On occasion, as with the officer of court ‘waferer’, they can be so misconstrued as to suggest piety when ribaldry was intended. lice causa, plus consiliis et sermone quam devocione consumens’, echoed by Ralph Niger, Chronica, 169 : ‘Oratorium ingressus, picture aut susurro vacabat. Horas regulares quasi aconitum fugiebat.’   Peter, ‘Dialogus’, ed. Huygens.   See p. 301 n. 3 above. I am greatly indebted to Adrian Ailes for his insights here.   ‘Constitutio Domus Regis’, in Dialogus, 131. For discussion here, I am much indebted to Stephen Church, Ruth Harvey and Richard Sharpe.   For Peter, see p. 320 n. 6 above. For Robert and the new fashion in shoes, see Orderic, iv, 186–9.

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The king was widely criticised, even by his contemporaries, and even by contemporaries within, or at one time of, his court. In particular, his inability to control his wife and sons, the wars within his own family and, as in many other courts, the king’s own predatory sexuality were deemed topics ripe for criticism. Given the metaphors that the king himself is reported to have used of his family, comparing himself to an eagle torn apart by its brood, even the gifts of hawks or falcons made to the king by courtiers and foreign rulers may have been tinged with a sense of irony of which contemporaries, and even Henry himself, would have been only too aware. Seen in this light, the story of St Thomas’s reputed curing of the king’s hawk may itself have had a potentially subversive undertone. Out hawking one day, so Gerald of Wales tells us, the king uttered a great oath ‘by God’s eyes, throat or testicles (strumellos), that bird will never escape [my hawk]’. Immediately, in punishment for this blasphemy, the king’s hawk was struck from the sky and fell dead at his feet. As Henry’s oaths should remind us, the court undoubtedly had its seamier or darker side, literally so in the case of many of its night-time activities. Walter Map devoted an extensive discourse to ‘creatures of the night’, which in his metaphor stood for the justices and sheriffs sent out on inquest as the court’s eyes and ears, but which to those actually at the court would presumably have included the various meretrices and candidatrices, whores and prostitutes, with which the court is reported to have been thronged. By virtue of the fact that it was a place of nighttime as well as day-time activity, the court, of its very nature, was set apart from the lives of most ordinary men and women. Few peasants, or even clerks, could afford, as the king could afford, to spend their nights in revelry and then to sleep, as Peter of Blois tells us Henry II sometimes slept, as late as noon the next day. It is surely no coincidence that one of our principal sources for the king’s household establishment, the Constitutio Domus Regis, places so firm an emphasis upon the allowances of candles and candle-ends to be made to individual courtiers according to their rank. The court burned a phenomenal quantity of wax, and by candle-light consumed what appears to have been an almost equally phenomenal quantity of wine. Many of the more dramatic or significant events of Henry’s   For a general survey here, see 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.   For the imagery of the eagle, borrowed from the so-called ‘Prophecies of Merlin’, see Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, viii, 295–6.   Gerald of Wales, ‘Gemma Ecclesiastica’, 1. 54, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, ii, 162, attributed either to Henry II or Richard I, later recycled as a Franciscan sermon exemplum, in Liber exemplorum, ed. Little, 105 no. 181.   Map, De Nugis, 12 ff : ‘De germinibus noctis’.   Peter of Blois, Opera, ed. Giles, i, 50.   ‘Constitutio Domus Regis’, in Dialogus, 129 ff.   For wine and beer, see Schröder, Macht und Gabe, 174–204.



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reign  Becket’s flight from Northampton ; the journey of the four knights from Bur to England, or even the assize of Novel Disseisin which ‘Bracton’ tells us was ‘contrived and thought out in many watches of the night’  took place partly or wholly after dark. One of the points to Walter Map’s comparison between Henry II’s court and the wild hunt of Herla was that Herla and his court had been imprisoned for an eternity in darkness lit only by a multitude of lamps, and that they had thereafter hunted and travelled by night. Although in some senses quite unlike the deliberately darkened court of William Rufus, in which all manner of scandals were reputed to have occurred, Henry II’s court was not without night-time scandals of its own. The king himself fathered several bastards, some of them, we must assume, on women who were little more than whores. In other cases, however, the women seduced were of a higher social standing, setting a paternal example that Henry’s son, King John, was only too eager to follow. Besides his well-known liaisons with Annabel de Balliol and Rosamund de Clifford (herself, we might note, commemorated with a tomb at Godstow around which candles burned by night and by day), the king was accused by his detractors of the seduction of such women of the court as Alice, the daughter of King Louis VII, intended as the bride of the future Richard I, and of a daughter of the prominent Breton magnate Eudo de Porhoët, these latter accusations involving more than a hint of incest. Among the king’s bastard children, William Longuespée, future earl of Salisbury, was born to a woman named by William himself as ‘my mother, the countess Ida’, almost certainly to be identified as Ida de Tosny, married after William’s birth to

  For the assize, see Bracton : On the Laws and Customs of England, ed. G. E. Woodbine, trans. S. E. Thorne, 4 vols. (Cambridge, ma, 1968–77), iii, 25, with commentary by Gillingham, ‘Conquering Kings’, 169.   Map, De Nugis, 28–9, 370–71.   For William of Malmesbury’s famous account of the lampless court of Rufus, see F. Barlow, William Rufus (London 1983), 103–4.   C. Given-Wilson and A. Curteis, The Royal Bastards of Medieval England (London 1984), 97–104.   For the fiercest denunciation of Henry’s attitude towards the women of his court, noting the bad example that this set for his sons, see Ralph Niger, Chronica, 168. For Rosamund’s tomb, see Howden, Gesta Regis, ii, 231–2. For Annabel (d. 1225), wife of Ranulf fitz Walter of Greystoke and later of Roger fitz Hugh, see G. Washington, ‘King Henry II’s Mistress, Annabel de Greystoke (née Balliol)’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, ns 69 (1964), 124–9. For Alice, see J. Gillingham, Richard I (New Haven/London 1999), 42 n. For Eudo’s daughter, probably Adelaide, who died in 1220 as abbess of Fontevraud, see Letters of John of Salisbury, ii, 602–3 no. 279 ; J. Everard, Brittany and the Angevins : Province and Empire, 1158–1203 (Cambridge 2000), 46.

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Roger Bigod earl of Norfolk. Both in England and in Normandy the king had whore masters. Yet even at this, the darkest level of the court, religion was never far from the mind of the king and his courtiers. It was, after all, Henry himself who is said to have endowed the candles that burned perpetually around the tomb of Rosamund de Clifford at Godstow. Many of Henry’s servants founded monasteries, and a remarkable number of the new religious houses established both in England and in Normandy after 1154 can be traced directly back to the patronage first made available to those in attendance at or in the service of Henry’s court. Even one of the king’s whoremasters, Stephen of Thurnham, heir to the Broc serjeanty of acting as marshal of the court whores, served with his father and brother as co-founder of the Augustinian monastery at Combwell, near his native village of Thurnham in Kent. The inscription to Stephen of Thurnham’s counterseal, ‘God save the person to whom I am sent’, splendidly encapsulates the ambiguities of court life, allowing us to read it as a pious invocation of the Almighty or as a highly threatening advertisement of the secular authority that Stephen wielded as a servant of the Plantagenet kings. As early modern historians have been aware for some time now, deference and derision, awe and criticism, piety and ribaldry are but opposite sides of the same coin. It is precisely at those periods in history when divisions within society are at their most acute, and when the rise of one social   For the ‘countess Ida’, see The Cartulary of Bradenstoke Priory, ed. V. C. M. London (Wiltshire Record Society 35, 1979), 9, nos. 481, 646. For Ida, the wife of Roger Bigod, see GEC, Complete Peerage, ix, 585–7 n., 589. Ralph Bigod, son of Roger and Ida, is described as a brother of the earl of Salisbury in a list of prisoners taken after the battle of Bouvines in 1214 : Les Registres de Philippe Auguste, ed. J. W. Baldwin et al. (Paris 1992), 564. According to a much later survey, Henry is said to have granted Ida de Tosny the manor of Headington in Oxfordshire ‘for her service’ : Rotuli Hundredorum, ed. W. Illingworth, 2 vols. (London 1812–18), ii, 39.   For Ranulf de Broc, ‘marscallus custodiendi meretrices de curia domini regis’, and for Baldric fitz Gilbert, ‘custos meretricum publice venalium in lupanari de Rothom’ et marescallus meus’, see Acta, nos. 328, 954. For what precisely the office may have involved (in essence a sinecure conferring the right to receive a small payment from each prostitute), see the comparable case of the Dutton family, hereditary keepers of whores and minstrels at the court of the earls of Chester : G. Ormerod, The History of the County Palatine and City of Chester, 2nd edn, ed. T. Helsby, 3 vols. (London 1882), i, 644 ; R. H. Morris, Chester in the Plantagenet and Tudor Reigns (Chester n.d.), 12–13 n.   For a list of monastic houses founded during the reign, many of them by courtiers, see Lally, ‘Court and Household of Henry II’, 304–9, app. 1.   Acta, no. 328 ; ‘Charters of Cumbwell Priory’, Archaeologia Cantiana, 5 (1863), 194–210. A confirmation by Henry II of the abbey’s lands, made at the request of Stephen of Thurnham, is partially preserved in BL MS Cotton Vespasian B xv, fol. 88r (84r).   Illustrated in two, slightly different and apparently distinct forms in ‘Charters of Cumbwell Priory’, 206, 208 : ‘Deus salvet cui mittor’, where the translation offered above is to be preferred to the editor’s charming ‘God save her to whom I am escort’. The original seal impressions are attached to Stephen’s charters, now London, College of Arms, Combwell Charters, nos. 40, 66, 94, 98, 106.



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elite leads to the abasement of the less privileged majority, that the elite itself becomes keenest to impose deference upon its inferiors, and the majority are most prone to mix public deference with private defiance. Here perhaps, in the very forging of a new formality and magnificence at the Plantagenet court, we have some explanation for why this newly formalised and ensplendoured court should have become so much the target of the chroniclers’ venom. This brings us on to one final point. Henry’s court has been seen by many commentators as very much a new phenomenon, and I have myself given reasons  the extent of its itinerary, its wealth and its learning  to support such an interpretation. Yet the Plantagenet court was also an intensely self-conscious affair, whose more literate and articulate members were aware of their indebtedness to, or their intention to emulate, both the classical and the Arthurian past. In terms of its cosmopolitanism and its conspicuous consumption, Henry II’s court looked to the future and to the princely courts of the later Middle Ages and beyond. Yet in the very process of its formation it looked to the past for its role models, to the courts of Henry I and the early Anglo-Norman kings, to those of Charlemagne or the mythical King Arthur, and still further back to the Emperors of classical antiquity, to the kings of the Old Testament, even, in the minds of various of its more irreverent commentators, to the days of Oedipus and the house of Atreus. As this implies, the court was an essentially artificial construct : a place of public deference and magnificence and yet of privately, or not so privately, articulated rumour and discontent. The most public of its proclamations, like the most scandalous of its secrets, were conveyed in languages that were themselves artificial : be it in the school-learned Latin of Walter Map, or the Marlborough French of Geoffrey, the king’s bastard son. Such artificiality reached as high as the throne upon which Henry sat and even the crown with which he symbolized his royal state. Henry II had been born the son of a mere count of Anjou. Like every one of the first seven kings of England after the Norman Conquest of 1066, at birth he was by no means undisputed heir to the English throne. Not until 1216 and the accession of Henry III was the throne of England to be occupied by a previous king’s eldest son truly born in the purple, and even then the circumstances of Henry III’s accession could hardly be described as either smooth or uncontested. Contemporaries were clearly aware of the suddenness of Henry II’s rise to majesty. Indeed it was precisely this point that Herbert of Bosham made at Henry’s court in the 1160s.   See here the work of J. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance : Hidden Transcripts (New Haven 1990), with illuminating discussion by A. Wood, ‘Fear, Hatred and the Hidden Injuries of Class in Early Modern England’, Journal of Social History, 39 (2006), 803–26. For a brave attempt to apply similar methodology within a medieval context, see T. N. Bisson, Tormented Voices : Power, Crisis and Humanity in Rural Catalonia, 1140–1200 (Cambridge, ma, 1998).   For comparisons with ‘the confused house of Oedipus’, see The Chronicle of Richard of Devizes, ed. J. Appleby (London 1963), 3.

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Accused by the king of being the son of a priest, Herbert is said to have replied that his father only became a priest after he himself was born : ‘So that I am no more the son of a priest than you are the son of a king’. If, as I have suggested here, Henry’s court placed a new emphasis upon formality and etiquette, and if, as seems possible, these new qualities of courtliness were stressed more rigidly at the Plantagenet than at the contemporary Capetian court, then there would have been good reason for this. Like Charlemagne before him, himself the presiding genius of a court that had stressed both literacy and good manners as essential virtues of the courtier, Henry II was acutely conscious that his throne was but newly won and that it remained the object of widespread scepticism on the part of those who viewed the Plantagenets, as the Carolingians had been regarded before them, as usurping upstarts. At Henry’s court, deference and mockery, the violent and the debonair, stood poised in uneasy equilibrium. Perhaps this in itself explains why Henry II’s court, in contrast to others of the twelfth century, has produced so extraordinary a range of written memorials, and why those memorials can themselves be read both as proof of the king’s more majestic or even sacral pretensions, but at the same time as evidence of the insecurity of contemporary opinion, never entirely convinced that the Plantagenets were rightfully proclaimed kings. Henry’s court was in many ways the most splendid, the most widely travelled and the wealthiest in twelfth-century Europe. But it was also a court whose own members felt that they were behaving in artificial ways, speaking in artificial accents, and participating in a phenomenon  the invention and propagation of Plantagenet kingship  of sudden and unexpected creation, doomed perhaps to only the very briefest of flowerings.

  William fitz Stephen, in MTB, iii, 101. Matthew Paris, Historia Anglorum, ed. F. Madden, 3 vols. (RS 44, 1866–9), ii, 353, suggests that even Henry the Young King was capable of referring to Henry II’s lack of royal birth, comparing his own dignity as the son of a king to that of his father, merely the son of a count.

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nvesting physical phenomena with meaning was second nature to a twelfth-century monastic chronicler such as William of Malmesbury. An eclipse of the sun, for example, he would embrace, in common with many of his contemporaries, as a heaven-sent pretext for establishing a causal connection between the cosmic and the mundane. Trained to recognise the ubiquity of the divine, and zealous in decoding its signs, he contrives to adorn his narrative of Henry I’s departure from England in August 1133 with earth-shattering presages of the king’s death in Normandy  an event that was actually to take place (after an incautious meal of lamprey at the end of a heavy day’s hunting) well over two years later : Divine providence was brought to bear in a truly remarkable way on human affairs, . . . and the very elements expressed their sorrow at this great man’s final departure. For on that day, at the sixth hour, the sun  to quote the words of the poets  shrouded its resplendent face in hideous darkness, striking terror into men’s hearts by an eclipse. On the sixth day of the week, in the early morning, there was so great an earthquake that, following a horrendous subterranean rumbling, the ground appeared to give way completely underfoot. During the eclipse, I myself saw stars around the sun, and at the time of the earthquake the wall of the house where I was sitting was lifted bodily into the air by two shocks before coming back down to earth again with a third. This urge to generate meaning from phenomena within the natural order of   Historia Novella, 11–12 : ‘Mira tunc prorsus providentia Deitatis rebus allusit humanis, . . . pro­se­ cuta sunt elementa dolore suo extremum tanti principis transitum. Nam et sol ipsa die, hora sexta, tetra ferrugine, ut poetae solent dicere, nitidum caput obtexit, mentes hominum defectione sua terrens : et feria sexta proxima, primo mane, tantus terre motus fuit ut penitus subsidere videretur, horrifico sono sub terra ante audito. Vidi ego et in eclipsi stellas circa solem ; et in terre motu parietem domus in qua sedebam, bifario impetu elevatum, tertio resedisse.’ (All translations are mine unless otherwise stated.) A source for this passage may be the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, s.a. 1135 [recte 1133] ; see C. Clark, The Peterborough Chronicle, 1070–1154, 2nd edn (Oxford 1970), 54, 105.

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things but outside the realm of everyday experience is one William readily extends to less cataclysmic events. Indeed, it more than once leads him to incorporate into his history anecdotes for which, unlike the solar eclipse of 1133, he does not actually claim eye-witness status, but which he nevertheless judges worthy of report  above all, one suspects, by virtue of their hermeneutic potential. One such was the strange case of the woman with two bodies : Another amazing spectacle to be seen at this time, on the border between Brittany and Normandy, was that of a woman  or, to put it more accurately, two women. There were two heads, four arms, and two of every other part down to the navel, and below that two legs, two feet, and one of all the other parts. While one of the mouths laughed, ate or spoke, the other would cry, go without food or remain silent. Even when both mouths ate, there was only one passage for the food to be digested. One of the two women eventually died, the other surviving for barely three years more, during which she carried round her dead sister, until she also died, exhausted by the weight and the smell of the decomposing corpse. The twins reappear in the verse De contemptu mundi of Bernard de Morlaix (or de Cluny), from the middle of the twelfth century, though here they are situated in Kent, where they live on in local folklore to this day as the Biddenden Maids : Somewhere in the English countryside there appeared a woman who had, on the top part of her body, a double head, and on the bottom two legs. Two legs this woman had, but also a double set of arms. Her two chests and four breasts were a wonder to behold. I want you to believe that I am telling the facts as they were, and am recording the truth. These two women performed the same actions : they walked everywhere together and sat down together. Amazingly, one of these two sisters died, and the other lived on unconsolable. And then, a short time afterwards, the second followed the first and died ; each part of the whole person met her end, each part of the whole found release in death.

  Gesta Regum, i, 384 : ‘Tunc quoque in confinio Britanniae et Normanniae portentum visum est. In una vel potius duabus mulieribus duo erant capita, quatuor brachia, et cetera gemina omnia usque ad umbilicum ; inferius duo crura, duo pedes et cetera omnia singula. Ridebat, comedebat, loquebatur una, flebat, esuriebat, tacebat altera ; ore gemino manducabatur, sed uno meatu digerebatur. Postremo una defuncta supervixit altera ; portavit pene triennio viva mortuam, donec et mole ponderis et nidore cadaveris ipsa quoque defecit.’   Scorn for the World : Bernard of Cluny’s De Contemptu Mundi, ed. and trans. R. E. Pepin (East Lansing, mi, 1991), 74 : ‘In geminum caput egrediens apud Anglica rura, / Femina prodiit ipsaque finiit in duo crura. / Crura quidem duo, sed sibi bis duo brachia stabant. / Hanc duo pectora, quatuor ubera mirificabant. / Vos volo credere me rata dicere, scribere verum. / Par erat actio, par via, sessio, par mulierum. / Ex mulieribus, immo sororibus, o stupor, istis, / Altera transiit atque superfuit



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Bernard uses the parapagous conjoined twins to illustrate the imminence of the Last Judgement, and William of Malmesbury’s perception of this quirk of nature is also such as to preclude any ad litteram consideration of it as an object of curiosity in itself. William, however, launches directly into allegorical mode. The metaphor is the message : Certain people have expressed the opinion, and some have even done so in writing, that these women represent England and Normandy, in that, even though they are in separate lands, yet they are united under one rule. Whatever wealth these two countries gluttonously swallow flows down into a single cavity, be it the acquisitiveness of their respective rulers or the aggressiveness of those nations that are their neighbours. England is the one that continues to flourish, and with its wealth it supports a now lifeless and almost drained Normandy, at least until such time as she also might perhaps perish under the violence of those that are plundering her. For England will be fortunate indeed if she can ever breathe again and regain freedom, the insubstantial shadow of which she has for so long now been pursuing. At present she is crying out in grief, overtaken by disaster and a prey to extortion . . . Beyond William’s doom-laden perspective, more appropriate perhaps to Stephen’s reign, when he was revising his Gesta Regum Anglorum, than to 1125 when he was writing it, his image of the female body as political locus is, on first reading, as unexpected as it is opaque. To picture England and Normandy as conjoined twins, united yet separate, mutually dependent yet individual, one and at the same time two, appears tantamount to representing the Anglo-Norman regnum as an essentially transgressive organism in terms of natural law. However, there is a theological point at issue here : one that is interestingly broached by Gerald de Barri (Gerald of Wales) in a passage where he defends his own inclusion of natural prodigies in his Topographia Hibernica of 1187. Aware as he was that the prodigies that he so relished describing might appear to his reader ‘either impossible or plain ridiculous’  most are in fact both  Gerald was at pains to offer an explanation : while phenomena that are ‘marvellous in themselves’ may well give the appearance of being contrary to nature’s course, they are in fact to altera tristis. / Post breve denique pars ruit utraque morte soluta, / Utraque pars ruit, hanc obitu fuit illa secuta.’   Gesta Regum, i, 384–6 : ‘Putatum est a quibusdam, et litteris etiam traditum, quod hae mulieres Angliam et Normanniam significaverint, quae, licet spatiis terrarum sint divisae, sunt tamen sub uno dominio unitae. Hae quicquid pecuniarum avidis faucibus insorbuerint, in unam lacunam defluit, quae sit vel principum avaritia, vel circumpositarum gentium ferotia. Mortuam et pene exhaustam Normanniam vigens pecuniis sustentat Anglia, donec et ipsa fortassis succumbat exactorum violentia ; felix si umquam in libertatem respirare poterit, cuius inanem jam dudum persequitur umbram. Nunc gemit calamitatibus afflicta, pensionibus addicta’.

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be seen as part of nature, and as such to derive ultimately from a Creator ‘great in all his works’. Indeed, as Augustine had explained in a specific reference to monstrous births, these are also ultimately part of Creation (‘However deformed they might appear . . . , anyone born a human being . . . is descended from the one man who was first created’), and their otherness is accordingly to be seen more in terms of their physical appearance than of their moral substance. Isidore had made a similar point : monsters are not contrary to nature but contrary to what nature is understood to be (‘non contra naturam sed contra quam est nota natura’), and faults in newborn creatures are in fact signs of God’s will. And since it is not possible, within the Christian optic, to attribute the existence of monstrous births to a malfunction in God’s creative machine, still less to divine malevolence, they can only be understood as examples of the degeneracy of nature and of its reproductive process, tolerated by God for the higher purposes of moral interpretation. The picture that William of Malmesbury is presenting, therefore, is one not of a phenomenon contra naturam and transgressing natural order, but one designed first and foremost to illustrate natural disorder and degeneracy and to carry an appropriate moral message. Though less threatening than actual species corruption, this manifestation of disordered nature nevertheless illustrates the same abiding fear, that of loss of humanity  a neurosis that is clearly present in William’s metaphor with its insistence on mouths, food, digestive tracts and gluttony. For him England and Normandy are in danger of lapsing into animality. While the alliance of the gluttonous with the monstrous lies entirely within literary convention, their joint identification with the female gender is, on the contrary, far from traditional. Whether or not one assumes this gender dimension to have been simply an incidental detail inherited from William’s source, or an idea prompted by the long-established practice of feminising nations (and nature itself ) allegorically, its presence at the very heart of William’s image cannot be regarded as in any way neutral. What it mediates is a view of the female body as instrument, both in its aberrant generative function of breeding deformity, and also as a subordinated object of social exploitation, a powerless prey to economic pillage and political rape. The correlation here of natural degeneracy with the female probably transcends mere monkish misogyny to find its place within a wider and even more

  Topographia Hibernica, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, v, 74–5 : ‘vel impossibilia prorsus vel etiam ridiculosa’ ; cf. Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland, trans. J. J. O’Meara (Harmondsworth 1982), 57–8.   St Augustine, The City of God, ed. and trans. E. M. Sanford and W. M. Green (London/Cambridge, MA, 1965), 40–49 (bk 16, chap. 8).   Isidori Hispalensis episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originum libri xx, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford 1911), ii (unpaginated), bk 11, chap. 3, §§ 1–4.



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pernicious antifeminism, which in the medieval world view equated women with a permanent force for instability. William is able to predict a suitably self-destructive fate for what he sees as a largely self-generated evil. The present from which he is writing so cogently informs his view of the future that he manipulates what he explicitly terms a portentum to prefigure the imminent death of both members of this degenerate alliance. What he could not, of course, have foreseen is that, contrary to all expectation, it would take another three hundred years before the conjoined twins of England and Normandy were to be finally and definitively separated. As for the moral message that emerges from William’s metaphor, while it is clearly directed in the first instance at the rulers and magnates whose ambition and greed were so devastating England and Normandy in the 1120s, its ultimate target is the countries’ ‘unnatural union’  as unholy, irrational and divisive as the grotesquely twinned sisters whom he chose to embody it. What adds a particular piquancy to William’s memorably literary metaphor is his failure to articulate his own personal position with regard to the monstrous political creation that he condemns with such relish. When it suits his purpose, however, he does not shrink, elsewhere in his chronicle, from invoking his own mixed, English and Norman, parentage and from actually presenting himself proudly as being its child  a privileged child, what is more, in that he claims his Anglo-Norman status as a special qualification guaranteeing him an impartial voice as a historiographer. For a historiographer, however, the tendency to see the manus Domini as providentially punitive and its presence as ubiquitous is something of an Achilles’ heel. Here, of course,William of Malmesbury is not alone. Orderic Vitalis is another   I am indebted here to H. White, ‘The Forms of Wildness : Archaeology of an Idea’, in The Wild Man Within : An Image in Western Thought, ed. E. Dudley and M. E. Novak (Pittsburgh 1972), 3–38, at 17–21, and to J. B. Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Cambridge, ma, 1981), 89–92, 108–30, 178–83. Secondary literature on monsters is huge ; see, for example, J. Rider, ‘The Other Worlds of Romance’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. R. L. Krueger (Cambridge 2000), 115–31. On twins, see E. Kooper, ‘Multiple Births and Multiple Disaster : Twins in Medieval Literature’, in Conjunctures : Medieval Studies in Honor of Douglas Kelly, ed. K. Busby and N. J. Lacy (Amsterdam 1994), 253–69 ; J. M. Thijssen, ‘Twins as Monsters : Albertus Magnus’s Theory of the Generation of Twins and its Philosophical Context’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 61 (1987), 237–46.   On the overlapping polyvalence of the terms portentum, prodigium and monstrum, see Friedman, Monstrous Races, 108–21 ; see also the discussion on supernatural nomenclature, including mirabilis, miraculum and fantasticus, in F. Dubost, Aspects fantastiques de la littérature narrative médiévale, XII ème–XIII ème siècles : l’autre, l’ailleurs, l’autrefois, 2 vols. (Paris 1991), i, 36–45, 60–92.   Gesta Regum, i, 424 : ‘Ego autem, quia utriusque gentis sanguinem traho, dicendi tale temperamentum servabo’ ; ‘I on the other hand, since the blood of both peoples flows in my veins, shall steer a middle path in my writing’. Earlier (i, 422) William had spoken of the advantages (‘benefitiis’) that his Norman origins conferred on him. Is it anything more than coincidence that Orderic Vitalis and Henry of Huntingdon were, like William, of mixed French and English parentage ?

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and equally distinguished monastic example, among many. Apologists of these historians, who are, naturally, in the majority, deal with such credulity largely by ignoring it. Southern does at least acknowledge the intellectual problem when he describes William as ‘a historian with an eager eye for wonders of every kind’, as does Rodney Thomson when he talks of William’s ‘love of inconsequential marvels’. It is interesting and ironic to note how William, in a passage on ghosts and people who believe in them, has no hesitation in categorising the entire English nation as innately credulous. As for Orderic’s interest in the supernatural, it extended even into popular folklore, and one of his many claims to fame is to have provided the first recorded mention of Hellequin’s Hunt : the nocturnal procession of the dead, those purgatorial ghost riders in the sky, so beloved of vernacular poets and story-tellers. Not just vernacular story-tellers, of course, but such Latin writers as Peter of Blois and Walter Map as well. Indeed this particular fantastic apparition is just one example of many that go to show how pervasively the supernatural formed part of the wider literary culture of the age. The age of renaissance it might have been, but in Anglo-Norman circles at least it was no less the age of the vernacularisation of culture, of multilingualism, of multiculturalism, and of what Alberto Vàrvaro has so aptly termed ‘cultural permeability’. It was less a question of high culture condescending to meet low culture than of orality permeating up through into written culture. Walter Map shows himself to have been well aware of this process when he declared that [the ancients] may well have bequeathed us many new things in their writings, [but] from the very beginning the greatest number have been handed down to us from one generation to the next (parentatim).  R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (London 1962), 263 ; R. Thomson, William of Malmesbury (Woodbridge 1987), 37, and cf. 22–5 on William’s credulity.   Gesta Regum, i, 196 : ‘Angli pene innata credulitate tenent’. For Orderic’s placing a similar charge in the mouth of Rufus, see Orderic, v, 289.   Orderic, iv, 242 ; cf. Dubost, Aspects fantastiques, i, 331–3 ; J.-C. Schmitt, Les Revenants : les vivants et les morts dans la société médiévale (Paris 1994), 115–45 ; L. Harf-Lancner, Le Monde des fées dans l’occident médiéval (Paris 2003), 163–71.   Peter of Blois, in PL, ccvii, 44 ; Petri Blesensis . . . Opera omnia, ed. J. A. Giles, 4 vols. (Oxford 1846–7), i, 45, no. 14 ; Map, De Nugis, 26–30, 370. Walter calls Hellequin ‘Herla’ and ‘Herlethingus’, Peter ‘Herlewinus’.   A. Vàrvaro, Apparizioni fantastiche : Tradizioni folcloriche e letteratura nel medioevo ; Walter Map (Bologna 1994), 203. Unaccountably, this important book remains largely unknown. For a general background, see I. Short, ‘Language and Literature’, in Companion to the Anglo-Norman World, ed. C. Harper-Bill and E. Van Houts (Woodbridge 2003), 191–213. See also A. K. Bate, ‘Walter Map and Giraldus Cambrensis’, Latomus, 31 (1972), 860–73 ; L. Thorpe, ‘Walter Map and Gerald of Wales’, Medium Aevum, 47 (1978), 6–21.   Map, De Nugis, 6 : ‘Multas nobis invenciones reliquerunt in scriptis : plurime devolute sunt ad nos parentatim a primis’, on the meaning of which see A. G. Rigg, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature,



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Writing, in other words, was not the only way for knowledge to be transmitted from the past. And now hitherto unheard oral traditions, and in particular narrative ones, were at long last finding a more permanent voice, and legitimation, within literature written by clerics in Latin. And where better to seize this culture in all of its productive pluralism (though it had, of course, been flourishing, and brilliantly so, since at least the 1130s and Geoffrey of Monmouth) than at the court of Henry II ? We are particularly privileged, as we are all aware, in having first-hand testimony on that court and its culture from the pens of a galaxy of celebrities who are known to have frequented it and who included the austere John of Salisbury, the suave Peter of Blois, the creepy Gervase of Tilbury, the unpredictable Gerald de Barri and the indescribable Walter Map. Wace and Benoît de Sainte-Maure, both learned clerics, not to mention an impressive list of troubadours, can also be called upon to add their demotic halfpennyworth. Walter Map was the sort of person who asked questions, just as today’s scholars do  epistemological ones such as how to know, and then define, his field of enquiry in De Nugis Curialium : I speak of the court, but God alone knows what the court actually is ; I certainly don’t. To him the court was quite literally Hell. But, he adds, it does have one saving grace when compared to Hell : the people it tortures can find relief from it  in death. Walter, who called himself a modernist but whom we might perhaps be tempted to call a postmodernist, was particularly struck by the indeterminacy of the subject and the lack of permanence of the court as object : Fixed yet itinerant, the court exists in time and place, but it varies and changes and frequently becomes different from what it is. . . . If we stay away from the court for a year, the place is unrecognisable when we come

1066–1422 (Cambridge 1992), 92. Cf. also Map, De Nugis, 126–8 : ‘Historias ab inicio ad nos usque deductas habemus, fabulas eciam legimus, et quo placere debeant intellectu mistico novimus’ ; ‘We possess histories handed down to us from the start of time, and we also read fictions, and come to know through our mystical faculty how far we should find them pleasing’ (by emending MS quo to que, the editors have changed the sense here).   Ibid., 2 : ‘De curia loquor et nescio, Deus scit, quid sit curia’.   Ibid., 500 : ‘Et hoc solummodo micior inferno, quod mori possunt quos ipsa torquet’. The simile with Hell is also in Ioannis Saresberiensis episcopi Carnotensis Policratici, sive De Nugis Curialium et vestigiis philosophorum, libri viii, ed. C. C. J. Webb (Oxford 1909), i, 563–7.

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back, and we find we have turned into the newcomers. . . . It is the same court, only the members of it have changed. He might well have added that, as well as it changing according to who was there, perceptions of the court differed according to who was seeing it. A cleric like Peter of Blois, for example, is likely to have seen Henry’s court in terms of its potential rather than its actuality, as it should have been rather than was. Apparently Henry liked nothing better than to spend his time in private reading, or trying to unravel some knotty problem with a group of his clerks. . . . It was school every day for the king of England, with constant meetings with the most learned thinkers and discussions on intellectual issues. A troubadour, on the other hand, like, for instance, Bertran de Born, might well have been expecting something other than school all day, and been disappointed when playtime at the court of the English king proved to be much less fun than he had fondly hoped from distant Périgord. Henry’s court was one of those where there were no laughs or smiles, no banter either ; as for presents and gifts, you would find neither ; . . . it was vulgarly weary and mortally dreary . . . Henry’s, we understand, was the very antithesis of the late lamented Young King’s court, where Bertrand had found warm welcome and fair, fine lodgings and clean, good talk everywhere, free gifts and cuisine ; no urge to move on : feast in song for a while, to the strains of the viol. Walter Map and Peter of Blois were at one in deploring the incessant com  Map, De Nugis, 500 : ‘Temporalis quidem est, mutabilis et varia, localis et erratica, statusque diversitate sibi sepe dissimilis. . . . Si per annum extra steterimus, nova redeuntibus occurrit facies, et novi sumus. . . . Eadem quidem est curia, sed mutata sunt membra.’ Cf. p. 2. For examples of Walter associating himself with the moderni, see pp. 36, 126, 260–62, 312, 404.   Peter of Blois, PL, ccvii, 198 : ‘secreta se occupat lectione, aut in cuneo clericorum aliquem nodum quaestionis laborat evolvere . . . Verumtamen apud dominum regem Anglorum quotidiana eius schola est litteratissimorum conversatio jugis et discussio quaestionum’, and cf. idem, ed. Giles, i, 194–5, no. 66.   L’Amour et la guerre : l’œuvre de Bertran de Born, ed. G. Gouiran, 2 vols. (Aix-en-Provence 1985), i, 60, no. 3, ‘Casutz sui de mal en pena’, ll. 50–54 : ‘On hom non gab ni non ria : / Cortz ses dos / . . . / Et agra·m mort ses faillia / L’enois e la vilania’ (rhyming translations are ad sensum rather than ad litteram). Cf. The Poems of the Troubadour Bertran de Born, ed. W. D. Paden, T. Sankovitch and P. Stäblein (Berkeley 1986), 165, no. 8, ll. 26–30 ; and, for this same juxtaposition, H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles, The Governance of Medieval England (Edinburgh 1974), 267.   L’Œuvre de Bertran de Born, ed. Gouiran, i, 242, no. 13, ‘Mon chan fenis ab dol et ab maltraire’, ll. 29–34 : ‘Gent acuillir e donar ses cor vaire / E bel respos e “ben-siais-vengut” / E gran hostal



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ings and goings of the court, and its exhausting hustle and bustle, while Peter was alone (as only a Frenchman can be) in complaining about the quality of court food : The bread is not properly kneaded or leavened . . ., it is like lead, full of bran and half-baked ; the wine is spoilt either by being sour or mouldy  thick, greasy, rancid, tasting of pitch and generally insipid. Sometimes I’ve seen noblemen served with wine so full of dregs that they were obliged, rather than drink it, to close their eyes and filter it through pursed lips and clenched teeth. The beer at court is horrendous to taste and disgusting to look at. We all know what he means. If the court itself remains largely out of our reach despite (or because of ) such predictable literary discourse, can we say the same of Henry himself and of Eleanor ? Certainly as king, Henry deserves, and gets, all the conventional superlatives. Gerald tells us, Except when he was in an agitated or angry frame of mind, Henry spoke with considerable eloquence, and what is remarkable these days is that he was also learned and scholarly (litteris eruditus ; lit. ‘schooled in learning’). . . . I almost forgot to mention that Henry’s memory was so good that he never failed to recognise anyone he had ever seen before, despite the crowds of people who continually surrounded him. Nor did he ever forget anything important that he had ever heard. In this way he had at his fingertips a ready knowledge of nearly the whole of history as well as practical experience in almost every aspect of daily affairs. No asinus coronatus this, then. Gerald’s insistence on Henry’s uncommonly good memory looks genuine and unmotivated, and could have been taken seriously were it not for the suspicion that he might here be in dialogue with his colleague and mentor Walter Map, who had earlier expressed a radically different view of the royal powers of recall :

pagat e gen tengut, / Dons e garnirs et estar ses tort faire, / Manjar ab mazan / De viol’ e de chan.’ Cf. The Poems of Bertran de Born, ed. Paden, Sankovitch and Stäblein, 221, no. 15, ll. 29–34.   Map, De Nugis, 476 ; Peter of Blois, ed. Giles, i, 50–51, 194–5.   Ibid., 48–9, no. 14 : ‘panis non elaboratus non fermentatus . . . plumbeus, loliatus et crudus ; vinum vero aut acore aut mucore corruptum, turbidum, unctuosum, rancidum, piceatum et vapidum. Vidi aliquando vinum adeo faeculentum magnatibus apponi quod non nisi clausis oculis et consertis dentibus, cum horrore et rictu, cribrari oportebat potius quam potari. Cerevisia quae in curia bibitur horrenda gustu, abominabilis est aspectu.’ William of Malmesbury also accuses the French, or rather the Normans, of being fussy about their food : Gesta Regum, i, 460 : ‘cibis . . . delicati’.   Gerald, Expugnatio, 128 : ‘princeps eloquentissimus et quod his temporibus conspicuum est litteris eruditus’. Same text in Gerald’s De Principis Instructione, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, viii, 215.

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In such a large court with such a large number of different types of people . . . neither the king nor anyone else can remember each individual’s name, still less know what is in their hearts. Walter, however, could play the hyperbole game as well as the next man : Henry was not lacking in any courtly attributes, and he was learned (litteratus) to a degree that was not only appropriate but also profitable to him. He also had some acquaintance with all of the languages from the Atlantic coast up to the River Jordan, though he actually made use of Latin and French only. This sort of sardonic comment (of course Walter knew there were well over thirty different languages on the European mainland alone for Henry to get acquainted with) reminds us how easy it is to forget that with Walter we are invariably more in rhetorical than we are in informative mode. As for the value in terms of factual accuracy of this sort of panegyric prose from courtiers’ pens, Gerald himself had come clean, more or less, when he introduced his portrait of Henry to his readers and listeners as follows : What a pleasant task it would be for me not to suppress the truth [about the king] in each and every matter and not in any way to cause him offence, though that is a task far beyond my powers. It doesn’t need a grammarian to see that Gerald’s protestation of incompetence applies to both infinitive clauses : not only is it beyond him not to give offence but beyond him also not to suppress the truth. How much closer, one wonders, was he getting to the truth when, in his Itine­ rarium Cambriae, he confided : It was a complete waste of my time to have written my Topography of Ireland for Henry II king of England and its companion volume, my Conquest of Ireland, for Richard of Poitou, his son and (though I would prefer not to add this) his successor in vice. Both of these kings were much preoccupied with other matters, and had little or no interest in literature. Consistency, we know, was not one of Gerald’s most conspicuous virtues. But nor,   Map, De Nugis, 24.   Ibid., 476 : ‘nullius comitatis inscius, litteratus ad omnem decenciam et utilitatem, linguarum omnium que sunt a mari Gallico usque ad Jordanem habens scienciam, Latina tantum utens et Gallica’.   Gerald, Expugnatio, 126 : ‘nostras longe vires excedens, veritatem in singulis non supprimere, et in nullo tamen principis animum exasperare’.   Preface to Itinerarium Cambriae, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, vi, 7 : ‘parum literatis’ ; cf. Gerald of Wales, The Journey through Wales, trans. L. Thorpe (Harmondsworth 1980), 66–7.



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at the same time, will we be too surprised if we were to find that Henry’s much vaunted interest in, and patronage of, literature (including historiography) probably did not in fact extend far below the rhetorical surface. Being a woman as well as the mother of Richard and John, Eleanor fares particularly badly in these personal portrait exercises. With her, however, we shall see reality being transcended and the supernatural being enlisted to lend literary pedigree, if not glamour, to an already colourful pseudo-biography. She might well have been a little wild in her younger days if even John of Salisbury sees fit to mention her liaison in Palestine with her uncle Count Raymond of Tripoli, prince of Antioch. Keeping it in the family, as it were, she was also reputed to have had an affair with her father-in-law, Geoffrey of Anjou. Walter Map had been particularly harsh on Henry’s queen : Henry son of Matilda succeeded to the throne, but Eleanor, queen of the French and wife of the exceedingly pious Louis, cast her lascivious eyes on him. Having contrived a questionable divorce, she married Henry despite rumours circulating to the effect that she had already shared Louis’s bed with Geoffrey, Henry’s father. This, one supposes, is why their progeny, sullied as their origins were, finally came to naught. While some accused Eleanor of bigamy as well as immorality, others traced the source of what they saw as the Plantagenet curse further back into the history of the house of Anjou. Corrupt genes, in other words, were at the root of Henry’s failure both as a husband and as a father  this at least was the theory embraced with considerable zeal, not to say fanaticism, by Gerald de Barri. Gerald begins his anti-Eleanor diatribe by evoking her father’s (by which he means her grandfather’s) scandalous affair with the viscount of Châtellerault’s wife, source of a fateful taint in Eleanor’s maternal pedigree. Henry’s own pedigree, meanwhile, had been vitiated by his mother Matilda’s so-called bigamous marriage to Geoffrey of Anjou, who, to compound matters, had had sexual relations with that woman who was now his son’s wife. How, Gerald asks, could anyone expect a union like Henry’s and Eleanor’s to produce any sort of successful progeny ? And then, without the slightest attempt at narrative transition, and relying on nothing more than juxtaposition to make a link that was not in any way explicit, Gerald

  K. Broadhurst, ‘Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine : Patrons of Literature in French ?’, Viator, 27 (1996), 53–84 ; see also p. 359 n. 2 below.   John of Salisbury, Historia Pontificalis, ed. M. Chibnall (Oxford 1956), 52–3.   Map, De Nugis, 474–6 : ‘Cui successit Henricus Matildis filius, in quem injecit oculos incestos Alienor Francorum regina, Lodovici piissimi conjux, et injustum machinata divorcium nupsit ei, cum tamen haberetur in fama privata quod Gaufrido patri suo lectum Lodovici participasset. Presumitur autem inde quod eorum soboles in excelsis suis intercepta devenit ad nichilum.’

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launches into a hair-raising story of ‘a certain [and of course nameless] countess of Anjou’ : So then, a certain countess of Anjou, a magnificent beauty but a woman of unknown origin, had been married to a certain count on the strength of her physical attraction alone. She rarely went to church, and when she did, she gave little or no sign of devotion. She never stayed for the consecration, but always hurriedly left straight after the gospel, and this behaviour finally aroused the suspicions both of the count and others. One day when she came to church and was about to leave in her usual manner, four knights, acting on the count’s orders, detained her. Slipping swiftly out of the cloak by which she was being held, she abandoned her two youngest sons whom she was sheltering under the right panel of her cloak. Taking up the two other children from her left-hand side under her arm, she up and flew off out of the lofty church window under the startled gaze of the onlookers. In this way this woman, whose face was a good deal more delightful to contemplate than her faith, disappeared with two of her children, never to be seen again. This was a story that King Richard frequently told, adding that it was hardly surprising if, coming as they did from such a background, the sons were for ever in conflict with their parents and the brothers with each other : from the Devil they all came, and to the Devil, he said, they would return. Students of the literature of the court of Henry II, and students of literature in general, will not be able to avoid a feeling of déjà lu when encountering this passage, for there is no mistaking the popular and traditional Mélusine, or man-witha-fairy-mistress, motif. In this archetypal folklore narrative, a fairy and a human have a sexual relationship on a condition of secrecy imposed by the fairy. As long as the condition is observed, the union is happy, but it collapses once the mortal fails to keep his side of the bargain, at which point the fairy abandons him and the human world. The lai of Lanval by Marie, called de France, whose name   Gerald, De Principis, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, viii, 301 : ‘Item, comitissa quaedam Andegaviae, formae conspicuae sed nationis ignotae et a comite ob solam corporis elegantiam ductae, ad ecclesiam raro veniebat, et tunc in ea parum vel nihil devotionis ostendebat, nunquam autem usque ad canonem missae secretum in ecclesia remanebat, sed cito post evangelium semper exire solebat. Tandem tamen tam a comite quam ab aliis hoc cum admiratione notato, cum ad ecclesiam illa venisset et hora solita exire pararet, videns a quatuor militibus praecepto comitis se retineri, reiecto statim pallio per quod tenebatur, et duobus filiis suis parvis, quos sub dextro pallii panno secum habebat, ibi relictis cum caeteris filiis duobus, qui stabant a sinistra, sub brachio arreptis, per fenestram ecclesiae sublimem, cunctis intuentibus evolavit. Et sic mulier illa, facie pulchrior quam fide, cum prole gemina secum assumpta nunquam ibi postea comparuit. Istud autem rex Ricardus saepe referre solebat, dicens non esse mirandum si de genere tali et filii parentes et sese ad invicem fratres infestare non cessent : de diabolo namque eos omnes venisse et ad diabolum dicebat ituros esse.’   Harf-Lancner, Le Monde des fées, 47–58, 191–92 ; cf. idem, Les Fées au Moyen Âge : Morgane et



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has often been speculatively linked to Henry’s court, is perhaps the best known exemplar of this. In Gerald’s story, however, the fairy is not merely supernatural but diabolical, and this is also a feature of what seems to me to be its likely source. I refer to Walter Map, whose prose Gerald not only clearly knew but no less clearly, on occasion, plagiarised. Walter tells the story of one Henno Dentatus, or Haimo Big-Tooth, a character we also encounter in Orderic as well as in William of Malmesbury, and who is assumed to be the ancestor of Robert fitz Haimon, father of Robert of Gloucester’s wife Mabel. Henno’s wife apparently had a particular aversion to holy water, which she consistently avoided. At mass, on the excuse that there were too many people there or that she had other things to do, she cleverly arranged always to be absent at precisely the time when the body and blood of our Lord was being consecrated. The young woman’s mother-in-law, growing suspicious, spied on her, only to discover that when she was in her bath she reverted to non-human form and turned into a dragon. She resumed human shape by using her teeth to rip a new cloak held out for her by her servant. The mother revealed what she had seen to her son, and he called the priest. They caught the woman and her servant unawares, and proceeded to sprinkle them with holy water. With one lightning leap they jumped up and away through the roof, and, howling and shrieking, they abandoned the house where they had lived for so long.

Mélusine, ou la naissance des fées (Paris 1991), 119–54 ; idem, ‘Les Malheurs des intellectuels à la cour : les clercs curiaux d’Henri II Plantagenêt’, in Courtly Literature and Clerical Culture, ed. C. Huber and H. Lähnemann (Tübingen 2002), 3–18. See also Vàrvaro, Apparizioni fantastiche, 73–4, 84 ; J. Le Goff, Pour un autre Moyen Âge (Paris 1977), 307–31.   Les Lais de Marie de France, ed. Jean Rychner (Les Classiques français du Moyen Âge 93, Paris 1966, repr. 1981), 72–92 ; Harf-Lancner, Le Monde des fées, 70–73.   Orderic, iii, 228 ; iv, 84 ; Gesta Regum, i, 428–9 ; cf. ii, 221.   Map, De Nugis, 348 : ‘Aspersionem aque benedicte vitabat, horamque corporis dominici et sanguinis conficiendi cauta preveniebat fuga, simulata multitudine vel negocio.’   Ibid. : ‘Mater filio visa revelat. Ergo sibi presbitero ascito, inopinas ocupant, aqua benedicta conspergunt, que subito saltu tectum penetrant et ululatu magno diu culta relinqunt hospicia.’ Similar stories resurface in Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, ed. S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns (OMT 2002), 85–91, 665–9, as well as in the Middle English Richard Cœur de Lion, and in French in Philippe Mouskés’s Chronique rimée and in the Récits d’un ménestrel de Reims : F. M. Chambers, ‘Some Legends concerning Eleanor of Aquitaine’, Speculum, 16 (1941), 459–68 ; R. L. Chapman, ‘A Note on the Demon Queen Eleanor’, Modern Language Notes, 70 (1955), 393–96 ; D. Power, ‘The Stripping of a Queen : Eleanor of Aquitaine in 13th-Century Norman Tradition’, in The World of Eleanor of Aquitaine, ed. M. Bull and C. Léglu (Woodbridge 2005), 115–35. For Eleanor, see also p. 357 n. 5 below.

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When Gerald was writing, in 1217, Richard was long dead, and we only have Gerald’s word for it that the countess of Anjou fairy story was indeed a favourite of the king’s. What is clear, on the other hand, is that Walter, writing between 1181 and 1193, had explicitly linked his story not to the house of Anjou, but to the doubtful legitimacy of the earls of Gloucester, no doubt, given his Marcher background, in order to make some local point or other. In appropriating it, Gerald invested it with an altogether wider and an infinitely more subversive political message. He promoted a harmless jibe into a potent metaphor by conflating the local and the national, by assimilating the popular to the clerical, the political to the literary, by placing a she-devil at the very heart of the Plantagenet dynasty. To then authorize the conceit by boldly enlisting the posthumous support of one of the royal protagonists concerned is surely a case more of gilding the lily than sweetening the pill. The parallels with William of Malmesbury’s conjoined-twins metaphor in terms of the underlying fear, here diabolically inspired, of humans degenerating into animality, of the political exploitation of prodigy, and of shared institutionalised antifeminism, need no further comment. It might, for all I know, be happenstance that Geoffrey of Monmouth and Walter Map were both archdeacons of Oxford, but is was certainly no coincidence that they were also, together with Gerald de Barri, Anglo-Welsh. What they had in common, above all else, was the gift of exploiting, for literary purposes, the collective memory of the Celts : what the French came subsequently to call the matière de Bretagne ; that corpus of presumably oral Celtic legend traditionally thought to have been conveyed by itinerant Breton jongleurs to the Continent, where it was so brilliantly re-created by Chrétien de Troyes in his Arthurian romances of the 1180s. Nor was it by chance that, during the first half of the twelfth century, other notable exponents of this particularly (but certainly not exclusively) Insular practice of assimilating the supernatural to the historical had included Orderic Vitalis, William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon, all of them true Anglo-Normans in the sense of being of mixed English and Norman parentage. Nor was Geoffrey Gaimar in the 1130s averse to adding the spice of the fantastic to his otherwise rather bland translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Wace, on the other hand, having translated Geoffrey of Monmouth into French verse for Henry II’s court, was sceptical enough actually to go himself and check on the marvels reputedly to be seen in the forest of Brocéliande in Brittany. As he reports, with classical chiasmus, in his Roman de Rou,   P. Sims-Williams, ‘Did Itinerant Breton Conteurs Transmit the Matière de Bretagne ?’, Romania, 116 (1998), 72–111. Cf. P. Gallais, ‘Bleheri, la cour de Poitiers et la diffusion des récits arthuriens sur le continent’, Moyen Age et littérature comparée (Paris 1967), 47–79. See also p. 354 n. 5 below.   Geffrei Gaimar, L’Estoire des Engleis, ed. A. Bell (Anglo-Norman Texts 14–16, Oxford 1960), 8, ll. 241–4, e.g., for the portentous flame coming out of the mouth of the sleeping Cuheran/ Haveloc.



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I in fact went out in search of marvels, but I found not a single one. I left foolishly in search of stupidities, and came back stupidly, convinced I was a fool. These are, needless to add, the same wild stories around King Arthur that William of Malmesbury had been amongst the first to denounce in the 1120s, when he wrote, This is the Arthur about whom the Britons even today ramble on and tell tall stories, and who is not worthy of having false and fanciful fictions told about him . . . But Wace, of course, though Anglo-Norman by adoption, was by birth a Norman. Continentals also were Wace’s replacement as Henry’s vernacular historiographer : the versatile Benoît de Sainte-Maure from Touraine, and Marie, this time from the Île-de-France, who, as she tells us explicitly, took the inspiration for her lais from these very same Celtic oral sources. From whatever court she might have attached herself to, she was able to tap this rich vein of Insular literary culture, whose permeability permitted the magical and the fantastic to rub shoulders with the realistic and the prosaic, and allowed the voice of popular orality to leave its permanent mark on twelfth-century letters. The innovative strength of the literature of twelfth-century Britain is most widely known through the truly influential figure of the century’s most popular historian, Geoffrey of Monmouth, but in the sphere of vernacular literature in Anglo-Norman also there are many claims to precocity and originality. It is to   Wace, The Roman de Rou, trans. G. S. Burgess, text of A. J. Holden, notes by E. Van Houts (Jersey 2002), 236, ll. 6395–8 : ‘Merveilles quis, mais nes trovai, / Fol m’en revinc, fol i alai ; / Fol i alai, fol m’en revinc, / Folie quis, por fol me tinc.’   Gesta Regum, i, 26 : ‘Hic est Artur de quo Britonum nugae hodieque delirant, dignus plane quem non fallaces somniarent fabulae’ (cf. ii, 21, 261), predating Geoffrey of Monmouth by 15 years or so. Alfred of Beverley, an early reader of Geoffrey’s Historia (probably around 1148–51, according to John Gillingham), talked of it containing ‘things that go beyond the bounds of credence (ea quae fidem . . . excederent)’ ; Alvredi Beverlacensis Annalium sive Historiae de Gestis Regum Britanniae, ed. T. Hearne (Oxford 1716), 2.   P. Eley, ‘History and Romance in the Chronique des ducs de Normandie’, Medium Aevum, 68 (1999), 81–95 ; cf. P. Damian-Grint, ‘En nul leu nel truis escrit : Research and Invention in Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Chronique’, ANS, 21 (1999), 11–30.   Les Lais de Marie de France, ed. Rychner, p. xiii ; ‘Les contes ke jo sai verrais, / Dunt li Bretun unt fait les lais, / Vos conterai’ (Guigemar, ll. 19–21) ; ‘Une aventure vus dirai / Dunt li Bretun firent un lai’ (Laüstic, ll. 1–2) ; ‘Li Bretun en firent un lai’ (Equitan, l. 312) ; ‘Un lai en firent li Bretun’ (Deus Amanz, l. 5) ; ‘Li auncïen Bretun curteis / Firent le lai pur remembrer’ (Eliduc, ll. 1182–3) ; ‘Plusur le m’unt cunté e dit’ (Chievrefoil, l. 5) ; ‘Des lais pensai k’oïz aveie’ (Prologue, l. 33) ; ‘Plus n’en oï ne plus n’en sai’ (Chaitivel, l. 239).   I. Short, ‘Patrons and Polyglots : French Literature in 12th-Century England’, ANS, 14 (1992), 229–49.

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this French vernacular literature that I should like, briefly, in conclusion, to turn  not so much to survey what was there, as to try to explain why what was not there was not there. I refer to that popular genre so firmly anchored in the oral tradition and in which the supernatural inevitably found a privileged place, the chanson de geste, and to the vexed question of why there were, apparently, no Anglo-Norman epics. Given the age-old and perennial animosity between France and its cross-Channel neighbours, it is a rather amusing irony that the French national epic should have come to be known, at least among scholars, as the Oxford Song of Roland. While this geographical reference is to the city whose library currently houses its sole surviving text, it serves also to remind us that Britain was actually the cradle of this particular version of the epic, since the poem owes its very survival to the Insular (Anglo-Norman) scribe who copied it into a modest, not to say downright shabby, manuscript there. This he did some time in the course of the twelfth century, some think towards 1130, others towards 1170. The manuscript has almost certainly remained in Britain ever since. While the likelihood is that the poem itself originates from the Continent, no other copy of this particular version has come down to us, thus giving the Oxford text the status of a truly unique literary artefact. Unique it may be, but not unparalleled, since there are several other Medieval French epics that owe their existence today to Insular rather than Continental copyists. Such a state of affairs is not altogether surprising to anyone familiar with the extant corpus of manuscripts written in the French vernacular during the twelfth century, since, for reasons that remain to be elucidated, an unusually large percentage of these are of Insular, rather than of Continental, origin. But how do we know where works of literature like this come from if we are not specifically told ? When dialectal features appear in a particular poet’s rhyme words, philologists feel justified in assuming that they belong to the deeper linguistic level of the author’s phonetic bedrock, so to speak. They draw a distinction between this and the more superficial layer of a text’s orthography (spelling system) that they see as being attributable to the latest in a long line of different scribes through whose hands the work has passed in the process of transmission by recopying.   I. Short, ‘The Oxford Manuscript of the Chanson de Roland : A Palaeographic Note’, Romania, 94 (1973), 221–31 ; M. B. Parkes, ‘The Date of the Oxford Manuscript of La Chanson de Roland’, Medioevo romanzo, 10 (1985), 161–75. Cf. A. Ciaralli, ‘Per lo studio del nesso de e per la datazione di O (Oxford Bodl. Libr. MS Digby 23) : Note paleografiche’, Scrittura e civiltà, 22 (1998), 31–118 ; W. D. Macray, Bodleian Library Quarto Catalogues, ix : Digby Manuscripts, rev. R. W. Hunt and A. G. Watson (Oxford 1999), 15–16.   B. Woledge and I. Short, ‘Liste provisoire de mss. du XIIe siècle contenant des textes en langue française’, Romania, 102 (1981), 1–17 (at present being revised, in collaboration with M. Careri, T. Nixon and C. Ruby, for publication as a catalogue).



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The theory is that, while a scribe copying someone else’s poem might well, in some semi-automatic way, rewrite it in his own regional spelling system, he is unlikely to extend this intervention to adapting into his own dialect forms originally selected by the poet to rhyme in a different dialect. It is the absence from the Oxford Roland of any of the specifically Insular rhymes found in (admittedly later) Anglo-Norman literature that invites the conclusion that, though it has clearly been copied according to Anglo-Norman scribal conventions, the poem was not originally composed in that dialect. If, on the other hand, the Oxford Roland’s composition falls within the eleventh century and predates the dialectal separation of Continental and Insular Norman, it could just as well have originated from either country. Dating it, however, is no easy task. It seems more than likely that the Oxford Roland in its present form was composed after 1066, since it is not difficult to read William the Conqueror between its lines. Charlemagne, we are told, crossed the sea and conquered England, holding it by personal tenure and establishing there the so-called Peter’s Pence payment to Rome, while Roland boasts of having added Scotland and Ireland also to the emperor’s English territory. What seems to be a reference to the finding of the Holy Lance at Antioch could bring us down to 1098. That an earlier, pre-Conquest version of the Song existed, however, is suggested by William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, Gaimar, Wace, Benoît de Sainte-Maure and the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio, in all of which we are told about the Norman troops advancing at Hastings singing a song about Roland. But, while historiographic, scientific, scholastic, administrative and devotional literature, not to mention the romance, are all well represented in twelfth-century Anglo-Norman literature, epic literature constitutes a special and somewhat anomalous category in that it appears not to have existed. That French-language chansons de geste were in fact known and appreciated in Insular circles is made clear not so much by their production by Anglo-Norman poets as by their textual transmission by Anglo-Norman scribes. In addition to the copying of the Oxford Song of Roland, the sole surviving texts of the Voyage (Pèlerinage) de Charlemagne, of the Chanson de Guillaume and of Gormont et Isembart are the handiwork of Insular scribes, whose   La Chanson de Roland, ed. I. Short, 2nd edn (Paris 1994), 52 ll. 372–3, 164 ll. 2331–2, 174 ll. 2503–4. Cf. now The Oxford Version, ed. I. Short, in La Chanson de Roland : The French Corpus, ed. J. J. Duggan et al., 3 vols. (Turnhout 2005), i.   Gesta Regum, i, 454 ; cf. ii, 233–4 ; Gaimar, L’Estoire des Engleis, 167–8, ll. 5260–300 ; Huntingdon, 392 ; Benoit, Chronique des ducs de Normandie, ed. C. Fahlin (Uppsala 1951–67), ii, 506, ll. 39732–42 ; Wace, The Roman de Rou, 270, ll. 8013–40 ; The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio of Guy, Bishop of Amiens, 2nd edn, ed. and trans. F. Barlow (OMT 1999), 26, ll. 389–401. See W. Sayers, ‘The Jongleur Taillefer at Hastings : Antecedents and Literary Fate’, Viator, 14 (1983), 77–88 ; S. Menegaldo, Le Jongleur dans la littérature narrative des XIIe et XIIIe siècles (Paris 2005), 109–16. In 1670 Milton was still writing, in his History of Britain, 2nd edn (London 1677 ; facs. Stamford 1991), 345, of ‘the whole Army singing the Song of Rowland, the remembrance of whose Exploits might heart’n them’.

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unique copies of them prove to have saved these twelfth-century epic poems from oblivion. But there is no evidence that any of these texts was actually composed in Britain. Even if it were true, as has been argued, that an Anglo-Norman redactor was responsible for part of the Chanson de Guillaume, neither the extent of the supposed intervention nor the evidence adduced to substantiate it is sufficient to warrant calling the text an Anglo-Norman epic. The first, indeed the only, Anglo-Norman epic belongs to the middle of the thirteenth century at the earliest, and consists of no more than a continuation of the Continental Destruction de Rome conceived as an introduction to the Chanson de Fierabras. Among the explanations that have been advanced to explain the curious phenomenon of Anglo-Norman manuscript preservation, the hypothesis of Insular literary conservatism has enjoyed a particularly long critical life. According to this much-repeated and questionable theory (it matters little that its proponents happen to be predominantly Belgian and Swiss scholars), the peripheral geographic position of Britain (peripheral, one supposes, in relationship to Paris, though Paris had little or no literary importance before the closing years of the twelfth century) resulted in archaic taste in Insular circles and the preservation there of old-fashioned and out-of-date versions of Continental texts. It is not, however, necessary, in order to explain the preservation of medieval France’s oldest chanson de geste in England, to resurrect the peripheral conservatism hypothesis. The well documented precocity and inventiveness of twelfth‑century Anglo‑Norman literature would argue, if anything, in the opposite direction. The fact that other early chansons de geste also happen to survive in isolated Insular copies might just as well indicate that twelfth‑century Britain was a particularly safe haven of conservation for highly valued epic as well as other manuscripts, and not some archaic backwater out of the mainstream of Continental literary production and a depository for outdated texts. This does not, however, explain why the epic is so exceptionally underrepresented in Anglo-Norman literary production. Answers to this are likely to be   See R. J. Dean with M. Boulton, Anglo-Norman Literature : A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts (Anglo-Norman Text Society : Occasional Publications Series 3, London 1999), nos. 80, 81, 82.   La Chanson de Guillaume, ed. and trans. P. E. Bennett (London 2000), 13.   La Destructioun de Rome, ed. L. Formisano (Anglo-Norman Text Society : Plain Texts Series 8, London 1990). See M. Ailes, ‘Comprehension Problems and their Resolution in the Middle English Verse Translations of Fierabras’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 35 (1999), 396–407.   I. Short, ‘An Early French Epic Manuscript : Oxford Bodleian Library French e. 32’, in The Medieval Alexander Legend and Romance Epic : Essays in Honour of David J. A. Ross, ed. P. Noble et al. (London 1982), 173–91 ; M. Tyssens, ‘Typologie de la tradition des textes épiques’, in Actes du XIe Congrès International de la Société Rencesvals (Mem. de la Real Acad. de Buenas Letras de Barcelona 22, Barcelona 1990), ii, 433–46 ; La Chevalerie Vivien, ed. D. McMillan (Aix-en-Provence 1997), i, 18–25. Cf. the earlier work of D. Legge, ‘Archaism and the Conquest’, Modern Language Review, 51 (1956), 227–9 ; idem, ‘La Précocité de la littérature anglo-normande’, CCM, 8 (1965), 327–49.



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found either at the level of transmission and preservation, or at the initial level of composition. It is entirely possible, in other words, that the vagaries of manuscript survival or accidental manuscript loss mean that this particular genre simply failed to survive in anything like the numbers that would have been expected. More popular in its appeal, and more integrated into the oral tradition than the exclusively written romance, the epic might well, also, have circulated in less durable forms and in more vulnerable copies. However, the relatively large number of epic texts recorded as having found refuge in English monastic libraries does not particularly argue in favour of such an explanation. When the problem is reformulated and shifted on to the production level, and if we make the initial assumption that few or no French epics were ever composed in Insular circles, the issues at once become more complex. Why were the social and literary considerations governing epic production in medieval France not applicable to Anglo-Norman Britain ? Of the hundred or so extant chansons de geste, the overwhelming majority are thematically associated, in one way or another, with what today we would call French national politics, more specifically with feudal and dynastic questions involving France’s monarchy or its Carolingian past. In other words, as popular historiography the epic poetry of France had a more or less exclusive Continental focus, and this would not, without radical modification, necessarily appeal to, and hold the interest of, an Insular public. While French epics were, of course, sometimes copied for Insular consumption, and while the narratives of Thomas of Kent, for example, or Jordan Fantosme or the Horn poet show their authors’ familiarity with, and mastery of, French epic discourse, Anglo-Norman literature seemed to be able to do without an epic of its own. This naturally does not mean that Insular poets had no interest in or avoided such themes as heroism and honour, baronial aspiration, genealogical legitimation or dynastic disputes ; but when it came to treating subjects such as these, they had no need or motivation to copy Continental models. Instead they were able to turn to their own romance, which, unlike its Continental counterpart,   M. Blaess, ‘Les Manuscrits français dans les monastères anglais au Moyen Âge’, Romania, 94 (1973), 321–58. For a 12th-century Anglo-Norman cleric’s knowledge of chansons de geste, see I. Short, ‘Une Généalogie hybride des rois de France’, Romania, 123 (2005), 360–83.   D. Boutet, La Chanson de geste (Paris 1993), 251–71 ; J. J. Duggan, ‘Medieval Epic as Popular Historiography’, in Grundriss der romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters, xi/1 : La Littérature historiographique des origines à 1500, ed. H. U. Gumbrecht et al. (Heidelberg 1986), 285–311 ; idem, ‘La Théorie de la composition orale des chansons de geste’, Olifant, 8 (1980–81), 238–55.   The Anglo-Norman Alexander (Le Roman de toute chevalerie) by Thomas of Kent, ed. B. Foster with I. Short, ii : Introduction, Notes and Glossary (Anglo-Norman Texts 32–3, London 1977), 58–67 ; Jordan Fantosme, pp. xvi–xix ; The Romance of Horn by Thomas, ed. M. K. Pope with T. B. W. Reid, ii : Descriptive Introduction, Explicative Notes and Glossary (Anglo-Norman Texts 12–13, Oxford 1964), 6–14. Cf. W. Calin, The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England (Toronto 1994), 126–7 ; M. D. Legge, ‘Les Chansons de geste et la Grande-Bretagne’, in Mélanges de philologie et de littératures romanes offerts à Jeanne Wathelet-Willem, ed. J. Caluwé (Liège 1978), 353–5.

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was a broad and flexible enough literary category to embrace a wide variety of literary as well as political subject matter. The Romance of Horn, for example, manages to accommodate within its adventure-quest structure not only heroism, exile and return, genealogy, folklore, territorial conquest and warfare, but the obligatory love interest as well. Anglo-Norman literature did not, in other words, have an epic genre for the simple reason that it did not need one : its Insular romance fulfilled that function for it. Is there any means of contextualising the Oxford Roland in terms of contemporary literary reception, in an attempt to evaluate just how popular it was in twelfth-century England ? It has been argued, in the first place, that the work as it survives in the Digby manuscript cannot actually represent a performance text in any meaningful sense of the term, but is rather a version suitable, for example, for reading aloud to an assembled audience. While this is undoubtedly true when the poem is considered synoptically as a literary entity, nothing prevents us from assuming that professional jongleurs could have performed extracts or selections, if not from this specific version, then from closely related or parallel versions circulating contemporaneously in either oral or written form. Such jongleurs and associated entertainers could well have been of Insular origin, but others must routinely have come over from the Continent to seek their fortune among the Anglo-Norman nobility, just as poets such as Marie de France and Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence did. Under King Richard, opponents of his unpopular chancellor, William de Longchamps, claimed that he brought jongleurs over from France to compose poems and songs that would enhance his public image. Although the presence of jongleurs is well recorded from the Conquest onwards and throughout the twelfth century at English baronial courts as well as at the royal court  much to the chagrin of intellectuals such as Peter of Blois and John of Salisbury  no details of their poetic repertories have survived.   S. Crane, Insular Romance : Politics, Faith and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature (Berkeley 1986), 25–7, 34–40 ; J. D. Burnley, ‘The Roman de Horn : Its Hero and its Ethos’, French Studies, 32 (1978), 385–97 ; cf. J. Weiss, trans., The Birth of Romance, an Anthology : Four 12th-century Anglo-Norman Romances (London 1992).   Andrew Taylor, ‘Was there a Song of Roland ?’, Speculum, 76 (2001), 28–65.   M. D. Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background (Oxford 1963), 72–3, 249.   Howden, Chronica, iii, 143 : ‘Hic ad augmentum et famam sui nominis emendicata carmina et rhythmos adulatorios comparabat, et de regno Francorum cantores et ioculatores muneribus allexerat ut de illo canerent in plateis, et iam dicebatur ubique quod non erat talis in orbe.’ Cf. Rigg, History of Anglo-Latin Literature, 106–7.   J. Southworth, The English Medieval Minstrel (Woodbridge 1989), 35–51. Between 1154 and 1182 at the court of Roger de Mowbray, four different categories of jongleur are recorded ; D. E. Greenway, ed., Charters of the House of Mowbray, 1107–1191 (London 1972), pp. xl, lxii–lxiv. Cf. also p. 355 n. 3 below. On Breri/Bleheri, see Gallais, ‘Bleheri’. On Peter of Blois and John of Salisbury’s strictures, see PL, ccvii, cols. 49a, 1088–9 (cf. Giles’s edn, i, 50), and Policraticus, ed. Webb, i, 405–6.



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Had any come down to us, would they, one wonders, have had anything in common with the one described in the Roman de Renart of 1180–90, in which the wily protagonist disguises himself as an English jongleur and boasts, in suitably fractured French, of being able to sing not only ‘fine British lays, and stories of Merlin, Goblin [?], Arthur, Tristan, the Honeysuckle, St Brendan and the Lay of Iseut’, but also ‘fine songs about Ogier, Oliver and Roland and old white-haired Charlemagne’. In the absence of any other recorded repertory, more tangible traces of the singing of the Song of Roland in Insular society simply do not survive. The one apparent exception is, of course, the Norman Taillefer’s bravura performance at the Battle of Hastings, but so notorious and ubiquitous is this particular account that we are led to wonder whether it might owe its existence as much to literary invention and borrowing as to any experiential reality. We are not, in any case, talking here of any sort of recital in the accepted literary sense of the term. Taillefer, it will be recalled, bit the dust in pretty short order, and there was no question of an encore. We can be certain, however, that chansons de geste were indeed sung in the Anglo-Norman regnum. Orderic Vitalis’s testimony here is unequivocal. Writing from Normandy in 1125, he describes the court of the earl of Chester, Hugh d’Avranches (d. 1101), and draws attention to the presence there of one Gerold, a clerkly jongleur who, besides reciting saints’ lives, also sang of the deeds of the holy warrior Guillaume d’Orange in the vernacular (‘vulgo’). That Orderic was also familiar with the hero of Roncevaux is clear from his having Robert Guiscard, elsewhere in his history, compare Bohemond’s prowess to that of Achilles and ‘Roland the Frank’. From the end of the century comes confirmation of the continuing popularity of the Charlemagne epic, as Walter Map bewails the fact that the high noble exploits of the Charlemagnes and the Pepins (not the Rolands, we note) were in his day being celebrated ‘in vernacular rhymes by the jongleur fraternity’ rather than in Latin. Mentions within the Oxford Song of Roland itself of Geoffrey of Anjou and   Le Roman de Renart : Première Branche, ed. M. Roques (Les Classiques français du Moyen Âge 78, Paris 1967), 82, 98, ll. 2435–39, 2911–13. Cf. E. Schulze-Busacker, ‘Renart, le jongleur étranger : analyse thématique et linguistique à partir de la branche Ib du Roman de Renart’, in Third International Beast Epic, Fable and Fabliau Colloquium, ed. J. Gossens and T. Sodmann (Cologne 1981), 380–91 ; Menegaldo, Le Jongleur, 495, 502–3.   D. C. Douglas, ‘The Song of Roland and the Norman Conquest of England’, French Studies, 14 (1960), 99–116, at 100.   Orderic, iii, 216–18.   Orderic, iv, 36.   Map, De Nugis, 404 : ‘Nobis divinam Karolorum et Pepinorum nobilitatem vulgaribus ritmis scola mimorum concelebrat.’ At the end of the century also, Gerald de Barri was happy to quote the epic traditions of Gormund et Isembart and Raoul de Cambrai as evidence of the weakness of the French monarchy ; see Short, ‘Une Généalogie hybride des rois de France’, 375 n. 50.

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Richard Duke of Normandy, of Charlemagne’s supposed conquest of England, the prominence given to Mont-Saint-Michel and the name of the enigmatic author-redactor-copyist Turoldus have been used, at various times, to argue for a particular Norman bias to the poem ; but none of these speculations, nor a suggestion of a specifically Insular influence, has succeeded in carrying conviction among critics. What self-respecting Norman, asks Bédier pertinently, would time after time invoke sweet France and exalt the Franks of France to the detriment of his own province and people ? What evidence there is that the Song of Roland in particular was known in twelfth-century England has to be inferred and is largely confined to intertextual references in literary texts, usually as part of a superlative topos. The earliest example, from between 1160 and 1174, comes from Wace’s Roman de Rou, in the course of which William the Conqueror’s achievement at Hastings earns for him the ultimate epic accolade : ‘There was never such a knight in the whole world since Roland and Oliver.’ From the 1170s come two references in the Romance of Horn, one to a sword to rival Roland’s, ‘than which Curtain [the sword of Ogier le Danois] or Durendal never cut better’, the other to leg armour ‘than which Roland the Magnificent never shod better’. In his account of the Young King’s revolt in 1173–4, Jordan Fantosme heaps praise on Henry II, the greatest king ever ‘except for King Charlemagne, whose power was immense through the deeds of Oliver and Roland and the Twelve Peers’. From the same period, no doubt, is Guillaume de Berneville’s Vie de Saint Gilles, where we find the protagonist reminding Charlemagne of God’s miraculous intervention ‘in the mountain passes of Roncevaux in order to avenge the death of Roland’. During the last decade of the century, Ambroise, lost in admiration for one particularly spectacular exploit of Richard Coeur de Lion, was led to claim in his Estoire de la Guerre Sainte that the king’s prowess exceeded even that of Roland at Roncevaux. Chardri, on the other hand, bewails the fact that ‘such is our love of worldly frivolity that we would rather hear songs about Roland and Oliver and the battles of the Twelve Peers than we would about the Passion of Jesus Christ’.  E. Li Gotti, La Chanson de Roland e i Normanni (Florence 1949) ; M. de Bouard, ‘La Chanson de Roland et la Normandie’, Annales de Normandie, 2 (1952), 34–8 ; cf. Douglas, ‘The Song of Roland and the Norman Conquest’.   J. Bédier, La Chanson de Roland : Commentaires (Paris 1927), 37–40.   Wace, iii, ll. 8935–6 (cf. ll. 8016–18) ; Horn, ll. 1995, 1997 ; Jordan Fantosme, ll. 113–14 ; Guillaume de Berneville, La Vie de saint Gilles, ed. G. Paris and A. Bos (SATF, Paris 1881), ll. 2893–4. Ambroise, L’Estoire de la guerre sainte, ed. and trans. G. Paris (Paris 1897), ll. 10459–66 ; new edn and Eng. trans. by Marianne Ailes and Malcolm Barber (Woodbridge 2004) ; Josaphaz, in Chardry’s Josaphaz, Set Dormanz und Petit Plet, ed. J. Koch (Altfranzösische Bibliothek 1, Heilbronn 1897), 74, ll. 2931–8 : ‘. . . la folie / Amum tant de ceste vie / Ke plus tost orrium chanter / De Rolant u d’Oliver, / E les batailles des duze pers / Orrium mut plus volenters, / Ke ne frium, sicum jeo quit, / La passiun de Jhesu Crist’. Two verbal echoes of the Oxford Roland in the Anglo-Norman Voyage of St Brendan of c.1106–c.1121 (ed. I. Short and B. Merrilees (Manchester 1979), ll. 255, 1173–6) are probably not



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These are all, needless to add, rhetorical commonplaces that prove little more than that the legend of Roland was a familiar one to twelfth-century AngloNorman audiences. When we venture outside the confines of literature, hard evidence is equally elusive. When Henry II’s son sacked the shrine at Rocamadour in 1183, the fact that he made off with Roland’s sword (supposedly kept there and still visible, incidentally, to the tourist today) hardly qualifies him as a devotee of epic literature. Still less literary in intent, and far more political, was the support that his father had given to the Emperor Frederick I for the canonisation of Charlemagne in 1165. We are, however, on surer ground with the onomastic evidence provided by the appearance, in 1185, of a pair of brothers called Roland and Oliver at Market Stainton near Lincoln. Nothing more is known of them than that they must presumably have been non-noble, given the particular transaction recorded, and that they must have received their names before 1160 or so. A second Roland–Oliver pair, this time baronial, is recorded in the Haget family in Lincolnshire (again) and Yorkshire. Sons of Bertram I Haget, both were dead by 1165/6, which allows us to push the date of this sort of epic baptism well back into the first half of the century. That two sets of parents should have seen fit to baptize their sons in honour of two literary celebrities of the day allows us a rare and valuable insight into the popularity of French epic literature in twelfthcentury Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. Prosopographical research is likely to turn up more evidence of this sort. One of the best documented links, finally, between the Song of Roland and twelfth-century England concerns Henry II’s eldest daughter, Matilda, who in 1168 married Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony. It was for Henry’s court in Brunswick that a certain Pfaffe Konrad, towards 1172, translated the Roland into Middle High German, and in the epilogue to his Rolandslied the author explains that he has adapted the work from the French at the request of Duke Henry, and that ‘the noble duchess, daughter of a mighty king, desired this’. It may be difficult significant. William de Briane, translator of the Anglo-Norman Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle between 1214 and 1216, shows independent knowledge of the Roland tradition ; see The Anglo-Norman PseudoTurpin Chronicle, ed. I. Short (Anglo-Norman Texts 25, Oxford 1973), 90, n. to ll. 1276 ff. See most recently, on a 12th-century Anglo-Norman genealogy of the kings of France with epic accretions, Short, ‘Une Généalogie hybride des rois de France’.  E. Mason, ‘The Hero’s Invincible Weapon : An Aspect of Angevin Propaganda’, in The Ideals and Practice of Medieval Knighthood III : Papers from the Fourth Strawberry Hill Conference, 1988, ed. C. Harper-Bill and R. Harvey (Woodbridge 1990), 121–37, at 127.  R. Folz, Le Souvenir et la légende de Charlemagne dans l’empire germanique médiéval (Paris 1950), 197, 203–4.   B. A. Lees, ed., Records of the Templars in England (London 1935), 102 : ‘In Staintone . . . Rollant pro .i. tofto de dono Oliveri fratris eius .xii.d.’ ; cf. Douglas, ‘The Song of Roland and the Norman Conquest’, 107.   EYC, iii, 230–31. I owe this reference to the kindness of Katharine Keats-Rohan.   ‘Des gerte di edele herzoginne, aines richen chůniges barn’ ; quoted by J. Bumke, Courtly

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to imagine Matilda, rather than her warlike husband, actively commissioning such a translation, but there is no reason to deny that she must have had some role to play  even if no more than a conventional one of dedicatee in a situation of prospective patronage  in the composition of the German Roland. Its textual filiation, however, is not the same as that of the Oxford Roland. The likelihood of Matilda having actually provided Konrad with his French source book, in the same way as the Anglo-Norman Hugh de Moreville is known to have done in 1194 for Ulrich von Zatzikhoven’s Lanzelet, cannot be discounted. What is noteworthy, however, is the fact that there exists also a Medieval Welsh translation of the Song of Roland, and that this seems to be closely related, in terms of relative positions on the manuscript stemma, to the Middle High German text. The editor of the Cân Rolant has shown that its source was an Anglo-Norman copy of the Song in assonance, and that this probably dated from the end of the twelfth century. A close comparison of the two texts might possibly reveal to what extent they could have shared a common, perhaps Insular, source. Matilda was clearly, in any event, an influential courtly figure, as befitted a daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine. When her husband was forced into exile, she returned with him to her father’s court in Normandy between 1184 and 1185, and her presence at Argentan, according to Bertran de Born, made a glamorous addition to an otherwise staid court. Bertran wrote two conventional, if overly erotic, love poems that are generally assumed to have been for her, in the course of which he went so far as to compare her beauty to Helen’s. One assumes that Matilda was all too happy to lend an ear, if not her patronage, to such literary endeavours. Culture : Literature and Society in the High Middle Ages, trans. T. Dunlap (Berkeley 1991), 76–7, 481–2, 667. Cf. also idem, Mäzene im Mittelalter : Die Gönner und Auftraggeber der höfischen Literatur in Deutsch­ land, 1150-1300 (Munich 1979), 85–91 ; M. Chibnall, The Empress Matilda (Oxford 1991), 192–3 ; B. Bachrach, ‘Henry II and the Angevin Tradition of Family Hostility’, Albion, 16 (1984), 111–30 ; E. R. Labande, ‘Les Filles d’Aliénor d’Aquitaine : étude comparative’, CCM, 29 (1986), 105–12 ; R. V. Turner, ‘Eleanor of Aquitaine and Her Children : An Enquiry into Medieval Family Attachment’, JMH, 14 (1988), 321–35.   Bumke, Courtly Culture, 468–69 ; idem, Mäzene im Mittelalter, 153–4 ; cf. P. Geary, ‘Songs of Roland in 12th-Century Germany’, Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur, 105 (1976), 112–15 ; J. Ashcroft, ‘Magister Conradus Presbiter : Pfaffe Konrad at the Court of Henry the Lion’, in Literary Aspects of Courtly Culture : Selected Papers from the Seventh Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA, 27 July – 1 August 1992, ed. D. Maddox and S. Sturm-Maddox (Woodbridge 1994), 301–8. Rita Lejeune and Jacques Stiennon adduced art-historical evidence to argue that the illustrated Heidelberg MS of Konrad’s poem was copied from an English or Norman exemplar : La Légende de Roland dans l’art du Moyen Âge (Brussels 1966), i, 112–18, 135–6.   Cân Rolant : The Medieval Welsh Version of the Song of Roland, ed. and trans. A. C. Rejhon (Univ. of California Publ. in Mod. Philol. 113, Berkeley 1984).   L’Œuvre de Bertran de Born, ed. Gouiran, i, 39–53, no. 2, ‘Ges de disnar’ ; 55–67, no. 3, ‘Casutz sui’ ; cf. The Poems of Bertran de Born, ed. Paden, Sankovitch and Stäblein, 163, no. 8, l. 9 ; 171, no. 9, l. 7 ; Bumke, Mäzene im Mittelalter, 237–38, 413–15.



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It is little wonder, in such circumstances, that she should have attracted to her the role of supposed patroness of a text such as Eilhart von Oberg’s Tristrant. Miss Legge indeed writes, without qualification, of Matilda’s marriage introducing the Tristan story to Germany (presumably from England), but Bumke is a surer guide when he reminds us that this is not only speculation but ‘an uncertain conjecture’, given that the text itself has absolutely nothing to say about patronage. Henry’s court, in both Normandy and England, seems to have been a particular magnet for the troubadours, and whether or not the king can be said to have acted as their literary patron, it seems safe to assume that they are unlikely to have flocked there for their own amusement. Incontrovertible evidence of royal patronage of literature is hard to come by, though Philippe de Thaon did indeed dedicate his Livre de Sibile to Eleanor, and as historiographers Wace acknowledges royal preferment and Benoît de Sainte-Maure can be assumed to have enjoyed it. The two wives of Henry I, of course, had both acted as patronesses of literature,   Bumke, Courtly Culture, 476 ; idem, Mäzene im Mittelalter, 108–13.   Short,‘Patrons and Polyglots’, 237–9. On Henry II and the troubadours, see R. Harvey, ‘Le Contexte des “performances” des troubadours’, in Actes du IVe Congrès de l’Association Internationale d’Études Occitanes, ed. R. Cierbide (Vitoria-Gasteiz 1994), i, 113–25 ; idem, ‘Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Troubadours’, in The World of Eleanor of Aquitaine, ed. L. Léglu and M. Bull (Woodbridge 2005), 101–14. On Stephen/Étienne of Fougères, chaplain to Henry II, chancery scribe and author of Le Livre des Manières, see A. Lodge, ‘The Literary Interest of the “Livre des Manières” of Étienne de Fougères’, Romania, 93 (1972), 479–97. From generation to generation, Henry’s fabled literary patronage expands with repetition, from G. O. Sayles, The Medieval Foundations of England (London 1964), 368 (‘Henry II had a score of works, written on such diversified topics as sport, science, government and romance, addressed to him’) to M. Aurell, L’Empire des Plantagenêt, 1154–1224 (Paris 2003), 113 (‘la générosité du mécénat de ce roi et . . . son intérêt pour la création littéraire’ ; cf. 98–113, 148–62). See e.g. C. H. Haskins, ‘Henry II as a patron of literature’, Essays in Medieval History presented to Thomas Frederick Tout, ed. A. G. Little and F. M. Powicke (Manchester 1925), 71–7 ; R. R. Bezzola’s (sometimes over-enthusiastic) Les Origines et la formation de la littérature courtoise en Occident (500–1200), 3 vols. in 5 (Paris 1958–63), ii/2, 391–548 ; iii/1, 3–311 (La Cour d’Angleterre comme centre littéraire sous les rois angevins) ; W. F. Schirmer and U. Broich, Studien zum literarischen Patronat im England des 12. Jahrhunderts (Cologne 1962), 27–216 ; P. Dronke, ‘Peter of Blois and Poetry at the Court of Henry II’, Medieval Studies, 38 (1976), 185–235 ; Bumke, Mäzene im Mittelalter, 234–7, 412–15 ; D. Tyson, ‘Patronage of French Vernacular History Writers in the 12th and 13th Centuries’, Romania, 100 (1979), 180–222 ; Rigg, History of Anglo-Latin Literature, 73–89, 114, 128–9, 154–5 ; S. Cingolani, ‘Filologia e miti storiografici : Enrico II, la corte Plantageneta e la letteratura’, Studi medievali, 3rd ser., 32 (1991), 815–32. Broadhurst, ‘Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine’, shows commendably scholarly caution in her analysis of vernacular patronage, as does J. Gillingham, ‘The Cultivation of History, Legend and Courtesy at the Court of Henry II’, in Writers of the Reign of Henry II : Twelve Essays, ed. R. Kennedy and S. Meecham-Jones (New York 2006), 25–52, and in his contribution to the present volume. On the other hand, A. Chauou, L’Idéologie Plantagenêt : royauté arthurienne et monarchie politique dans l’espace Plantagenêt (Rennes 2001), argues for more flexibility (i.e. latitude) in interpreting what little real evidence survives (pp. 81–6), thereby justifying a long, second-hand and highly speculative chapter entitled ‘La Littérature de cour dans l’entourage d’Henri II’ (pp. 79–121).

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but neither at the Norman nor at the Plantagenet courts do we find any indication that French epic literature occupied a specially privileged position. If, on the other hand, the Oxford Song of Roland was, as seems likely, something of a unicum, its production certainly did not take place in a literary vacuum. The Roland legend may have been a popular one, but it was only one of many. Courtly culture in general and literary production in particular flourished in Insular circles throughout the twelfth century, when innovation in all aspects of artistic life was the order of the day. As Geoffrey of Monmouth in the 1130s put it so memorably and inventively when describing the court of King Arthur, By this time Britain had reached such a level of sophistication that, in terms of the abundance of its affluence, the sumptuousness of its finery, and the courtly refinement of its inhabitants, it far outstripped all other kingdoms. What more fitting environment, then, could there be to foster what can now be seen, without too much exaggeration, as a uniquely productive literary culture  one whose innovative characteristics included, as I have tried to illustrate, its permeability to oral traditions. To the extent that exceptional writers such as Geoffrey of Monmouth, Walter Map and Gerald de Barri can be said to be representative of it, this entails allowing a wide range of different sources and contrasting literary registers to coexist and to interreact within their narratives. It consists also of giving a voice to an orality that had hitherto been little heard beyond its demotic origins. Monastic chroniclers such as William of Malmesbury and Orderic Vitalis presumably saw no contradiction between what we today might call their scholarship and their penchant for the prodigious and the supernatural, between their learned written and their popular unwritten sources. And this, of course, is true of medieval historiography in general. Nor must Geoffrey of Monmouth have had any scruples about using oral legend and folklore imaginatively to recreate a British past that the available written record had left so seriously incomplete. Never at a loss for a striking simile, Geoffrey called the collective memory of his fellow Celts ‘a very ancient book in the British [that is, Welsh] speech (sermo)’. Nor must Walter Map have found the folklore figure of Haimo Big-Tooth’s wife, or Gerald de Barri that of the devilish countess of Anjou, in any way incongruous or incompatible with the learned and polished  Edith-Matilda is said by William of Malmesbury to have been an over-generous patroness of the numerous ‘scolastici cum cantibus tum versibus famosi’, especially foreigners, whom she attracted to her court : Gesta Regum, i, 757. Cf. also Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature, 9, 22–4, 28.   The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, i : Bern Burgerbibliothek MS 568, ed. N. Wright (Cambridge 1984), 112 : ‘Ad tantum etenim statum dignitatis Britannia tunc reducta erat quod copia diviciarum, luxu ornamentorum, facecia incolarum cetera regna excellebat.’   Ibid., 1 : ‘quendam Britannici sermonis librum vetustissimum’ ; cf. I. Short, ‘Gaimar’s Epilogue and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Liber Vetustissimus’, Speculum, 69 (1994), 323–43.



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Latin in which they so effortlessly expressed themselves. The multi-ethnicity of this Anglo-Normanno-Celtic culture and its willingness to embrace the oral at a time when the written was already, in literary terms, the medium of choice, are a measure of its originality. And it is within this same perspective, perhaps, that we should see the copying and preservation in Britain of the only extant text of such a unique epic as the Oxford Song of Roland : a product ultimately, at however many removes, of the oral tradition.

Martin Aurell

Henry II and Arthurian Legend

A

rthurian legend first makes its mark towards the end of the twelfth century, as one of the most fertile, innovative and popular genres in all of Western literature. For several decades now, a number of medievalists have directly linked this new fashion in Arthurian literature to the patronage of Henry II. In their view, the king, his wife and their children were the guiding lights behind a group of literate courtiers who developed and disseminated the matière de Bretagne. These clerks are assumed to have been working as propagandists for Henry II, who, thanks to this additional source of prestige, would rule his Plantagenet empire more effectively. This is an idea that has become widespread, albeit a number of voices have more recently been raised to question its basis in fact. Among medieval historians, an interest in Henry II’s role as patron in relation to Arthurian legend is of relatively recent date. As late as 1973, in his long biography of the king, William Warren scarcely alluded to the matière de Bretagne. At most he restricted himself to a brief mention of the way in which the king indicated the whereabouts of Arthur’s tomb at Glastonbury : a discovery Warren ascribed to the king’s ‘astonishing memory’. This brief episode, consigned to a footnote, appears in a chapter devoted to Henry’s character and personal qualities. Lack of interest in the subject might well be explained by the divisions  all too watertight in the 1960s and ’70s  between historians and students of literature. Interdisciplinary approaches were rare before the fashion for history of thought and culture took hold of medieval studies in the 1980s. By the 1970s, structuralist literary critics were nonetheless endeavouring to discover an Indo-European, pagan and Celtic basis for the twelfth-century ArthuMy thanks to Christopher Harper-Bill and Nicholas Vincent for their warm welcome to the splendid colloquium they organised at the University of East Anglia, at which an earlier version of this paper was given. In the course of discussions at that time, John Gillingham, Ruth Harvey and Ian Short offered a number of stimulating comments, enabling me to make important improvements to my text. Catherine Daniel, Catalina Girbea, Marianne Kalinke and Jörg Peltzer also made a number of helpful comments. For the English translation, I am indebted to Nicholas Vincent.   Warren, Henry II, 208 n. 6.



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rian texts, and were tending, in their search for such roots, towards a head-on collision with the political historians. Researching the roots of Arthurian literature, a few of the literary specialists came across Henry II and his wife. In his biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine, for example, Jean Markale stressed the resemblances between the legend of Henry II’s wife, who was represented in the Middle Ages as an incestuous nymphomaniac, and the legend of Guinevere, whose image, Markale supposed, was intended to reflect aspects of the fertility goddesses and polyandrous queens of Celtic myth. Along much the same lines, Philippe Walter has recently pointed out that the Breton word for the broom plant, the heraldic symbol of the counts of Anjou, is balanos, ‘shining’, the attributive name of the Gaulish Apollo : ‘So we see that the Plantagenets bore the name of the plant that, in Celtic tradition, symbolises war.’ The same writer also stresses the association between Apollo and the griffin, and explains that this is the reason why ‘the dragon of Belenos is naturally associated with the figure of Arthur’s father, Uther Pendragon, the mythical ancestor of the dynasty’. Fascinating though such associations may be, and for all that they are a tribute to the immense cultural awareness of their advocates, they do raise questions about the extent to which people in the twelfth century could have been aware of such correspondences. For one thing, until the fifteenth century the name ‘Plantagenet’ was only ever applied to Henry II’s father, Geoffrey the Fair (1128–1151), who was count of Anjou and certainly not, unlike his successors, either duke of Brittany or ruler over parts of Wales or Ireland  Celtic-speaking principalities where such symbolism might have been understood and appreciated. On the contrary, at some time between 1160 and 1170, when Wace explains the meaning of the name ‘Plantagenêt’, he relates it to Geoffrey’s immense liking for woodland pursuits : ‘Gisfrei, son frere, / que l’on clamout “Plante Genest”, / qui mult amout bois e forest’. This phrase should probably be understood to mean that, by planting wild flowers, the Count extended wasteland and forest to the detriment of cultivated land, in order to indulge his taste for hunting. The sense of the term forest is indeed perfectly clear : it denotes a hunting reserve. What is more, the   On the elaboration of this theme, see M. Aurell, ‘Aux Origines de la légende noire d’Aliénor d’Aquitaine’, in Royautés imaginaires (XIIe–XVIe siècles), ed. A.-H. Alirot, G. Lecuppre and L. Scordia (Turnhout 2005), 89–102.   J. Markale, Aliénor d’Aquitaine (Paris 1979). These ideas have been discussed by J. Flori, Aliénor d’Aquitaine (Paris 2004), 427–38, and by C. Girbea in a review of Flori’s book in CCM, 48 (2005), 233–41. Arthurian fiction may have fed into the ‘black’ legend but can hardly have related to the real life of Eleanor of Aquitaine.   P. Walter, Arthur, l’ours et le roi (Paris 2002), 40.   It is possible that the branch that appears on Richard I’s seal refers to this symbol, unless it is a genealogical allusion to the tree, a common emblem in female sigillography. See M. Aurell, L’Empire des Plantagenêt (Paris 2003), 15, 300 nn. 24, 25.   Burgess, Wace, 316, ll. 10270–72.   G. S. Burgess, ibid., 317, translates forest as ‘woodland pursuits’.

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Loire chronicles of this period indicate that Tertulle, the original forebear of the house of Anjou, was a simple forester rather than a sun god. English ecclesiastical writers of the late twelfth century were frequently critical of the excessive passion for hunting attributed to the descendants of the semi-mythical Tertulle. Some measure of caution is thus necessary before adopting any mytho-anthropological, archetype-based approach to the Arthurian materials, particularly when such an approach claims to explain phenomena of which medieval observers could have had no experience or conscious awareness. Other specialists in literature and philology prefer to take a more contextual approach to the relationship between Henry II and Arthurian legends. They place most emphasis on the king’s court as the place where literary culture in general, and the matière de Bretagne in particular, were adopted, created and diffused. The principal founders and advocates of this approach, subsequently followed in most European countries, were Rita Lejeune, Walter F. Schirmer, Ulrich Broich, Reto Bezzola and Mary Dominica Legge. Historians, rather than literary specialists, have since scrutinised the extent to which the Angevin kings did indeed appropriate Arthurian legend. In Britain, for example, Antonia Gransden has examined the discovery of Arthur’s tomb at Glastonbury and Emma Mason has looked into the question of royal swords and their association with the matière de Bretagne. In Germany in 1987, Peter Johanek devoted a lengthy article to the appropriation of King Arthur for the purposes of propaganda by the Plantagenets. Recent doctoral theses by Amaury Chauou and by Catherine Daniel have adopted a similar approach to the subject.   There is a great difference between an ancestry traced back to the mythical period of pagan gods and one traced back to a warrior of low birth, as E. Bournazel demonstrates in ‘Mémoire et parenté’, in La France de l’an mil, ed. R. Delort (Paris 1990), 114–24, esp., with particular reference to Tertulle, 119–22. See also G. Koziol, ‘England, France and the Problem of Sacrality in TwelfthCentury Ritual’, in Cultures of Power : Lordship, Status and Process in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. T. N. Bisson (Philadelphia 1995), 133.   P. Buc, L’Ambiguïté du livre : prince, pouvoir et peuple dans les commentaires de la Bible au Moyen Âge (Paris 1994), 112–22, 225–7.  R. Lejeune, ‘Rôle littéraire d’Aliénor d’Aquitaine et sa famille’, Cultura neolatina, 14 (1954), 5–57 ; W. F. Schirmer and U. Broich, Studien zum literarischen Patronat in England des 12. Jahrhunderts (Cologne 1962) ; R. R. Bezzola, Les Origines et la formation de la littérature courtoise en Occident (500– 1200), iii/1 : La Cour d’Angleterre comme centre littéraire sous les rois angevins (1154–1199) (Paris 1963) ; M. D. Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background (Oxford 1963).   A. Gransden, ‘The Growth of Glastonbury : Traditions and Legends’, JEH, 26 (1976), 337–58 ; E. Mason, ‘The Hero’s Invincible Weapon : An Aspect of Angevin Propaganda’, in The Ideals and Practice of Medieval Knighthood III, ed. C. Harper-Bill and R. Harvey (Woodbridge 1990), 121–37.   P. Johanek, König Arthur und die Plantagnets : Über den Zusammenhang von Historiographie und höfischer Epik in mittelalterlicher Propaganda (Berlin 1987).   A. Chauou, L’Idéologie Plantagenêt : royauté arthurienne et monarchie politique dans l’espace Plantagenêt (XIIe–XIIIe siècles) (Rennes 2001) ; C. Daniel, ‘Arthurianisme et littérature politique’ (thèse de doctorat, Université de Paris XII 2002).



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The conclusions reached from this research have faced mounting criticism. The principal objection has been that the advocates of a Plantagenet ‘patronage’ over the Arthurian materials have accorded excessive importance to the role of Henry II and, as a result, have devoted virtually no attention to the many other royal courts or literary centres from which such patronage might have emerged, or indeed to the careers and the creative freedoms of each individual twelfthcentury writer. It is certainly true that those who have been keenest to present the entourage of the Angevins as a nursery-ground of high culture have often expressed their convictions in inappropriate or exaggerated terms. For example, we were told, even as early as 1954, that Eleanor Aquitaine ‘was the progenitor of the French “renaissance” of the Twelfth Century’. Nowadays views tend more towards the pessimistic, assessing the Plantagenet court as far less brilliant or impressive, with perhaps not even the faintest glimmer of a role in the patronage of Arthurian literature. For Peter Damian-Grint, the idea of such patronage is at best a ‘cliché’. For Stefano Cingolani, it is at worst an ‘historian’s myth’. In short, the pendulum of fashion has swung, as it invariably does in the world of scholarship, and we now find ourselves reduced from a maximalist to a minimalist view of the Angevin kings as literary patrons. Those who take a negative view of the literary significance of Henry II and his entourage do so on a methodological basis. What they propose is a strictly limited definition of the term ‘patronage’, a term they feel should be reserved solely for a contract between the patron commissioning a new text and an author in his service : a contract made in exchange for payment. Mere dedication to some powerful figure should not be seen as an indication of patronage, since such dedications were most often penned purely speculatively, so that the writer might earn the favour of the sponsor and thus perhaps some subsequent reward or commission. This critical approach at least possesses the merit of clarity. However, if it is applied in too strict a fashion to the real world of writers and their patrons this method can often prove misleadingly restrictive. Applied strictly, this ultra-rigid definition of patronage would imply that the Roman de Rou and the Chronique des ducs de Normandie are the only two works in French that benefited   John Gillingham offers a selection of such statements at the beginning of his article, ‘The Cultivation of History, Legend and Courtesy at the Court of King Henry II’, in Writings of the Reign of Henry II, ed. R. Kennedy and S. Meecham-Jones (New York 2006), 26.   Lejeune, ‘Rôle littéraire d’Aliénor d’Aquitaine et de sa famille’, 5.   P. Damian-Grint, The New Historians of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance : Inventing Vernacular Authority (Woodbridge 1999), 1 ; S. M. Cingolani, ‘Filologia e miti storiografici : Enrico II, la corte Plantageneta e la letteratura’, Studi medievali, 32 (1991), 815–32.   I. Short, ‘Patrons and Polyglots : French Literature in Twelfth-Century England’, ANS, 14 (1992), 231–2 ; C. S. Jaeger, ‘Patrons and the Beginnings of Courtly Romance’, in The Medieval Opus : Imitation, Rewriting and Transmission in the French Tradition, ed. D. Kelly (Amsterdam/Atlanta 1996), 47.

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from the patronage of either Henry II or Eleanor of Aquitaine. Certainly, the evidence for the commissioning of Wace, the records of the prebendal stipend at Bayeux given him by way of reward for his literary activities, and the evidence of his subsequent demotion from the role of ‘court poet’ with the appointment of Benoît de Sainte-Maure as his successor, are extremely valuable. Yet they are also extremely unusual, indeed virtually unique for the twelfth century, anticipating as they do the splendid evidences preserved in the account books of fourteenthand fifteenth-century princely courts. They are, indeed, the exception that proves the rule. The rule itself would state that we lack virtually any sources relating to vernacular writers of the period, about whom we know almost nothing save what those writers themselves cared to tell us in their own works. By way of example, one need only mention the silence enveloping not only the literary patronage but the very identity of both Marie de France and Chrétien de Troyes : the two most celebrated and innovative French writers of the entire twelfth century. It is, as a result, not mere speculation but a positive obligation that drives medievalists to explore their texts for influences, however slight, that might bear witness to the existence or influence of a patron and to that patron’s particular interest in the literature under scrutiny. Since historians are most unlikely to find explicit reference to a contract between patron and writer, they can only seek traces of such contracts in the author’s works of fiction, employing concepts and methods that must be clearly spelled out. The essential requirement here is that such studies distinguish clearly between what is made explicit in medieval sources and what derives from later theories or speculations, all of which, of course, are subjective, but without which no kind of enquiry into twelfth-century literary patronage would be possible.

Henry II’s Knowledge of the Matière de Bretagne From a very early age, it seems clear that Henry would have been aware, however vaguely, of the most learned reworkings of the Arthurian legend. In 1142 he came to England, to lend some small measure of male legitimacy to his mother’s struggle for the English crown. He joined his uncle Robert of Gloucester (d. 1147), the illegitimate son of Henry I and leader of the Empress Matilda’s supporters in the

  K. M. Broadhurst, ‘Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine : Patrons of Literature in French ?’, Viator, 26 (1996), 53–84. This helpful and rigorous article has the great merit of making a clear distinction between the known facts, as they are reflected in the sources, and later comments by 20th-century writers.   Aurell, L’Empire, 152–4, supplies a recent account of these sources. See also P. Damian-Grint, ‘Benoît de Sainte-Maure et l’idéologie des Plantagenêt’, in Plantagenêts et Capétiens : confrontations et héritages, ed. M. Aurell and N.-Y. Tonnerre (Turnhout 2006), 413–28.



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civil war. It was Robert who undertook the education of the young Henry, who was then barely nine years old. Robert was the first and principal dedicatee of the Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth (d. 1155). Geoffrey’s Historia was completed in 1138 in Oxford, where its author was a canon of the collegiate church of St George. Robert of Gloucester was one of the most powerful barons in the west of England, where he held extensive estates. His mother, however, may well have been a member of the Oxfordshire aristocracy, which could have facilitated Robert’s contacts with Geoffrey of Monmouth. A few passages of the Historia contain what are probably references to Robert : Eldol, earl of Gloucester, escapes the massacre of Mount Ambrius ordered by Hengist and later takes revenge for the slaughter of the Celts ; Brian, one of the heroes of the history, shares his name with one of Robert of Gloucester’s sons ; Bayeux, where Robert held extensive lands in his wife’s name, replaces Rouen or Caen as capital of Normandy, and so one might go on. John Gillingham has suggested that Geoffrey wrote his Historia with the conscious aim of recalling the former glories of the Britons, at a time when Geoffrey’s Welsh compatriots, who saw themselves as direct descendants of the Athurian Bretons and as trustees of their inheritance, were taking advantage of the civil war to mount a revolt against the Norman rulers of South Wales. It was at precisely this time that the Welsh leader, Morgan ap Iorwerth, lord of the town of Usk (very close to Caerleon), made an alliance with Robert of Gloucester, lord of Glamorgan, and, with his Welsh troops, assisted Robert to win the battle of Lincoln (1141) against Stephen of Blois. Furthermore, the political importance Geoffrey attributes to queens such as Helen, Marcia or Gwendoline in British history, and the very positive attitude he has to their rule, certainly lends support to the idea that Geoffrey may have been attempting to bolster the Empress Matilda’s claims to the throne of England. Geoffrey’s account of King Lear even presents an image of Cordelia that is reminiscent of Matilda, recording Cordelia’s filial piety despite all the abuses heaped upon her, her marriage to a Frenchman, and her unjust   Warren, Henry II, 29–34.  Eight of the 217 MSS name Robert with Waleran de Meulan or King Stephen of Blois in the dedication set out in the prologue. But, towards the end of the work, the dedication is always addressed to a single ‘worthy earl’ (§ 177), who can only be Robert. The two versions of a dedication to two persons must be variants on the original. See Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, i : Bern, Burgerbibliothek, MS. 568, ed. N. Wright (Cambridge 1985), pp. xii–xvi and §§ 3–4 ; J. S. P. Tatlock, The Legendary History of Britain (Berkeley 1950), 436–7.   D. Crouch, ‘Robert of Gloucester’s Mother and Sexual Politics in Norman Oxfordshire’, Historical Research, 72 (1999), 323–33. For an opposing view, see K. Thompson, ‘Affairs of State : The Illegitimate Children of Henry I’ JMH, 29 (2003), 141–3.   Tatlock, Legendary History, 89–90.   J. Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century (Woodbridge 2000), 19–40.

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disinheritance at the hands of a cousin over whom, in the end, she is to prove herself victorious. In short, there is ample evidence of a correspondence, perhaps even of a deliberate convergence in political viewpoints between Geoffrey and Robert, who at this period was tutor to the future king Henry II. Beyond the transitory context of the civil war, we should also note the later success of the Historia Regum Britanniae. About fifty twelfth-century manuscripts, and some hundred and fifty from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, have survived : a number achieved by no other work of history written during the Middle Ages. For the first time, Geoffrey set down in Latin (the universal language of the cultured elite), and in a continuous narrative, the exploits of Arthur, which had hitherto been recited orally and in fragmentary fashion on the basis of Celtic legend. Geoffrey’s narrative is artfully constructed, with sufficient chronological coherence and making such apparently trustworthy claims to accuracy that most later chroniclers uncritically took Geoffrey’s account to be historical truth. The epic inspiration that runs throughout Geoffrey’s work, and the dominant position that it affords to the prophecies of Merlin, go a long way towards explaining its wide circulation. Robert of Gloucester himself was partly responsible for the dissemination of the Historia. Geffrei Gaimar, one of the first to translate the Historia into AngloNorman, claims to have come into possession of it, together with other works, from Constance, the wife of Ralph fitz Gilbert, a minor noble holding lands in Lincolnshire and Hampshire. Constance, so Gaimar claims, had been given Geoffrey’s book in the village of Helmsley in Yorkshire by Walter Espec, and Walter in turn had borrowed it from Robert of Gloucester. It is important to note the part played here by Constance as a learned woman and cultural intermediary ; it was often in the chambers of such noble women that works of literature were read. This group of cultured laymen (milites literati ) and their wives, with their shared passion for secular history and literature, made up a group of learned people among whom Robert helped to circulate books. Some specialists also see   Tatlock, Legendary History, 426. Such a political reading of this passage is by no means incompatible with an approach that sees it as pedagogically exemplary (L. Mathey-Maille, ‘Le Roi Leir chez Geoffroy de Monmouth et Wace : la naissance d’une figure mythique’, in Pour une mythologie du Moyen Âge, ed. L. Harf-Lancner and D. Boutet (Paris 1988), 99–115) or sees it as part of a wider Indo-European mythology (J. Grisward, ‘Lear, le péché du roi et le partage du monde’, CCM, 45 (2002), 25–37).   Historia Regum Britanniae, iii : A Summary Catalogue of the Manuscripts, ed. J. C. Crick (Woodbridge 1989) ; Crick, ‘Two Newly Located Manuscripts of Geoffrey of Monmouth, “Historia Regum Britanni” ’, Arthurian Literature, 13 (1995), 151–2.   Geffrei Gaimar, L’Estoire des Engleis, ed. A. Bell (Oxford 1960), 204, ll. 6439–52. See also Tatlock, Legendary History, 452–3 ; I. Short, ‘Gaimar’s Epilogue and Geoffroy of Monmouth’s Liber Vetustissimus’, Speculum, 69 (1994), 323–43 ; idem, ‘Patrons and Polyglots’, 244.   Gaimar, L’Estoire, 205, ll. 6489–90 : ‘Dame Custance en ad l’escrit / en sa chambre sovent le lit’ ; see here E. Van Houts, ‘Les Femmes et la royauté angevine’, in Plantagenêts et Capétiens, 95–112.



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in Robert the donor of the manuscript of the Historia that Henry of Huntingdon was surprised to discover, in January 1139, at the monastery of Bec in Normandy. Robert does indeed appear to have been in or near Bec at around this date. Let us note in passing that the librarian of the monastery of Bec who showed the Historia to Henry was none other than Robert de Torigni (d. 1186), from 1154 abbot of Mont-Saint-Michel : an intimate of Henry II, godfather to his daughter Eleanor and the King’s choice as continuator of the Latin history of the dukes of Normandy. It is evident that, in the Anglo-Norman realm, it would have been easy, indeed almost an inevitability, for the young Henry of Anjou to become familiar with the themes of Arthurian legend. Eleanor of Aquitaine, whom he married on 18 May 1152, was likewise almost certainly acquainted with the matière de Bretagne. Two troubadours at the court of her father, Guilhem X, allude to it in their songs. In one, Marcabru laments the sudden death of Guilhem, which occurred in 1137, stating, ‘Since the Poitevin has failed me, I will ever more be lost like Arthur.’ In the other, in a moral sirventes against hypocritical lovers written around 1149, Cercamon speaks of ‘the heart of Tristan’. Following the marriage of Eleanor and Henry II, Bernart de Ventadorn, Bertran de Born and Rigaut de Barbézieux, who are generally assumed to have frequented the Plantagenet court, all continued to employ such themes in their poetry. Could it be that a few bards had, many years previously, taken the matière de Bretagne to Aquitaine ? Certainly, as early as the 1090s, the aristocracy of Aquitaine was giving its children Arthurian names. Around 1200, Wauchier de Denain goes so far as to claim that Bleddri ap Cadiford (c.1080–1134), the   Huntingdon, 558, with the variants of the Avranches MS in the critical apparatus.  E. Faral, La Légende arthurienne : études et documents, 3 vols. (Paris 1929), ii, 20.   Torigni ; see Gillingham, ‘The Cultivation of History, Legend and Courtesy’. Despite its acceptance by numerous specialists (most recently by S. Echard, Arthurian Narrative in the Latin Tradition (Cambridge 1998), 132), Robert de Torigni’s claim to authorship of the De Ortu Walwanii and the Historia Meriadoci should be abandoned. These two Latin romances are actually 13th-century works, as is clearly shown by their use of syntactical vulgarisms, by their parody of Chrétien de Troyes and his continuators, by their imitation of the Itinerarium Peregrinorum’s account of the Third Crusade, and by the small number of MSS in which they are transmitted, at a period when they had been eclipsed by French romances. See here H. Nicholson, ‘Following the Path of the Lionheart : De Ortu Walwanii and the Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta regis Ricardi ’, Medium Aevum, 69 (2000), 21–33, and the review of Echard by J.-Y. Tilliette, CCM, 45 (2002), 176.   Marcabru : A Critical Edition, ed. S. Gaunt, R. Harvey and L. Paterson (Cambridge 2000) , 84, no. 4b (based on MS A, the only one to include these lines), ll. 59–60. See also ibid., 68–9, 87 n.   Il trovatore Cercamon, ed. V. Tortoreto (Modena 1981), 141, no. vi, l. 38, and see S. Gaunt, ‘Did Marcabru Know the Tristan Legend ?’, Medium Aevum, 55 (1986), 108–13.   S. Gaunt and R. Harvey, ‘The Arthurian Tradition in Occitan Literature’, in The Arthur of the French, ed. G. S. Burgess and K. Pratt (Cardiff 2006), 528–45.   P. Gallais, ‘Bleheri, la cour de Poitiers et la diffusion des récits arthuriens sur le continent’, in Moyen Âge et littérature comparée : Actes du septième Congrès national, Poitiers 27–29 mai 1965 (Paris 1967), 47–79.

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renowned Welsh story-teller, had been received at the court of Guilhem IX of Aquitaine (1086–1126) and had recited his stories there. Whatever the value of this later testimony, it is undeniable that, from the beginning of the twelfth century onwards, the troubadours had become aware of the Arthurian material. Their familiarity with the matière de Bretagne continued to grow, especially through contact with the writings of Chrétien de Troyes and his continuators. It is quite clear that Eleanor of Aquitaine’s Occitania was by no means indifferent to Arthurian legend. When travelling with his wife or visiting his southern lands, the young Henry II certainly had the opportunity to increase his familiarity with an Arthurian literature that seems scarcely to have developed in his native Anjou.

The King and the Arthurian Writers No Arthurian text written during the lifetimes of the King or the Queen was explicitly dedicated to them by name. This need not prevent us from reading, in works of their period dealing with the matière de Bretagne, allusions that suggest a continuing interest in Arthur on the part of both Henry and Eleanor. We can also search the biographies of the authors of such works for any possible links with the Plantagenet court. This is a task that has often been attempted, and what follows here represents a summary of several decades of rich philological and historiographical enquiry. In 1155, Wace (d. 1183), a cleric and member of a noble family in Jersey, completed the Roman de Brut, an Anglo-Norman translation of the Historia Regum Britanniae that, because of the quality of its narrative, must be considered to have superseded all other versions of Arthurian narrative in circulation up to this point.   The Continuations of the Old French Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes, ed. W. Roach, 5 vols. in 6 (Philadelphia 1949–83), iv, 392. This edn does not retain the reading that mentions Bleddri, but does present it in the critical apparatus with the variants of the MSS M, P, T and V. A more useful account is to be found in J. L. Weston, ‘Wauchier de Denain and Bleheris (Bledhericus)’, Romania, 34 (1905), 100–105. See here M. Aurell, ‘La Matière de Bretagne vers le continent au XIIe siècle’, in Les Idées passent-elles la Manche ? Savoirs, représentations, pratiques (France–Angleterre, Xe–XXe siècle) ; Actes du colloque de la Sorbonne du 18 au 20 septembre 2003, ed. J.-P. Genet and F. J. Ruggiu (Paris 2007), 287–303.   Gaunt and Harvey, ‘The Arthurian Tradition’.   On those passages of the Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth echoed in the Angevin chronicles, Gillingham’s ‘The Cultivation of History, Legend and Courtesy’ is henceforth the authority to consult.   The Brut is one of the few medieval works for which the author himself provides the date : ‘Mil e cent e cinquante cinc anz, / Fist mestre Wace cest romanz’ ; Wace’s Roman de Brut : A History of the British, ed. J. Weiss, 2nd edn (Exeter 2002), 372, ll. 14865–7.   For Wace’s biography, see E. M. C. Van Houts, History and Family Traditions in England and the Continent, 1000–1200 (Aldershot 1999), p. x ; Wace’s Roman de Brut, pp. xi–xiii.



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Wace was educated at Caen, a town of which the young Robert of Gloucester had been governor, and thereafter in the Île-de-France. Around 1200, Layamon, who in his turn translated the Brut into Middle English, was to claim that Wace had ‘presented his work to the noble lady Eleanor, Henry II’s queen’. This evidence is late and does not match that of the undedicated prologue of Wace’s Brut, which appears in about twenty medieval manuscripts. If it is nevertheless correct, then it would in part account for the commission that the King subsequently extended to Wace to write the history of his Norman ancestors, the Roman de Rou. Another element linking the Brut to Henry II is to be found in the list of estates that Arthur bestows on his lieutenants after his conquest of Gaul. Geoffrey of Monmouth deals briefly with this episode : ‘It was then that he gave Neustria, now called Normandy, to his cup-bearer Bedivere, and Anjou and several other provinces to other nobles.’ In his translation Wace makes changes to this passage, adding four further provinces supposedly distributed by Arthur : Flanders to Holdin, Le Mans to his cousin Borel, Boulogne to Ligier, and Ponthieu to Richier. He did not invent the names of the first three of these knights or their respective fiefs, which Geoffrey adds a few lines later in his list of the notables who attended Arthur’s Whitsun crown-wearing. More interesting is the allusion to Richier, who makes a brief appearance in the Historia as a warrior in Arthur’s close entourage but not as ruler of Ponthieu, a region Geoffrey’s work never mentions. In fact, this frontier area between Picardy and northern Normandy was frequently a source of strife for the Norman dukes and was of obvious strategic interest to Henry II. It could potentially have been in order to serve the political interests of the King of England that Wace included Ponthieu in the Brut, as one of Arthur’s former possessions. Similar clues might point to a relationship between the court of Henry II and the three surviving versions of the Tristan story written in Anglo-Norman in the years between 1150 and 1200. First, the anonymous Estoire (c.1150), which has only come down to us in the form of Eilhart von Oberg’s German translation, recounts the revolt of Riol de Nantes against King Havelin of Lesser Britain, and the adventures of Tristan who took part in the siege of the town, events that may

  Layamon’s Brut, ed. G. L. Brook and R. F. Leslie, 2 vols. (London 1963–78), i, ll. 22–3 (BL MS Cotton Caligula A ix).   Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia, § 155.   Wace’s Roman de Brut, 256, ll. 10161–7. See also La Geste du roi Arthur selon le roman de Brut de Wace et l’‘Historia regum Britanniae’ de Geoffroy de Monmouth, ed. E. Baumgartner and I. Short (Paris 1993), 334 n. 28, and esp. Daniel, ‘Arthurianisme et littérature politique’, 385–6.   Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia, § 156 : ‘Holdinus, dux Ruthenorum, Leodegarius, consul Boloniae, Bedverus, pincerna, dux Normanniae, Borelus Cenomanensis, Kaius, dapifer, dux Andegavensium’.   Ibid., §§ 166–7.

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well echo the occupation of Nantes by Henry II in the period 1156–9. Secondly, in the poem by Thomas of England, preserved in the form of fragments totalling about 3,150 lines, we find a descriptive passage that praises the mult riche cité of London ; some have seen this as a link, albeit a decidedly weak one, with the court of Henry II. Finally, Beroul’s Tristran, of which only 4,500 lines remain, uses the Old English word lovendrins or lovendrant for ‘philtre’, and its author was familiar with the names both of Mortain in Normandy and of Cornwall in south-west England. We might note in passing that the name of Eilhart von Oberg, the translator of the Estoire, is probably that of a ministerialis (low-ranking knight) in the service of Henry the Lion (d. 1195), Duke of Saxony and Bavaria, who from 1168 was the husband of Matilda, daughter of Henry II and Eleanor. Henry the Lion was a patron of the arts and of literature and, around 1170, had the Song of Roland translated into German. In 1182 he was driven from his territories by Frederick Barbarossa, to whom he had refused armed support against the Lombard League. He was obliged to take refuge with his father-in-law, Henry II, in Normandy and in England until 1185. Eilhart, in his prologue, mentions a book that has enabled him to tell ‘the true story of Tristan’. Could this be a reference to a manuscript of the Estoire obtained for him by Henry the Lion or by a member of his court ? A number of elements in the cycle of songs concerning the love of Tristan and Iseult composed in England or Normandy in the reign of Henry II show parallels with political events or attitudes of his reign. Although the victory of Tristan over the Morholt, an Irish giant who demands a tribute of human victims from

 Eilhart von Oberg, Tristrant, French trans. by D. Buschinger and W. Spiewok (Paris 1986), 165–76, ll. 5583–6103. See also J. Everard, Brittany and the Angevins : Province and Empire, 1158–1203 (Cambridge 2001), 27–33.   Thomas, Le Roman de Tristan, ed. P. Walter, in Tristan et Iseut : les poèmes français ; la saga norroise (Paris 1989), 460, l. 1381. See also A. Punzi, ‘Materiali per la datazione del Tristan di Thomas’, Cultura neolatina, 48 (1988), 9–71 ; M. R. Blakeslee, ‘The Authorship of Thomas’ Tristan’, Philological Quarterly, 64 (1985), 555–72.   Beroul, Le Roman de Tristan, ed. P. Walter, in Tristan et Iseut, 335–483 ; C. Letellier, ‘Beroul, l’auteur du Tristan, était-il du Mortain ?’, in Les Romans de la Table ronde : La Normandie et l’au-delà, ed. R. Bansard et al. (Condé-sur-Noireau 1987), 101–32 ; R. N. Illingworth, ‘The Composition of the Tristran of Beroul’, Arthurian Literature, 18 (2001), 1–176.   J. Ehlers, ‘Der Brief Heinrichs des Löwen am König Ludwig VII. von Frankreich’, in Retour aux sources : études et documents d’histoire médiévale offerts à Michel Parisse (Paris 2004), 232–59.   On Henry and his role as a patron, see most recently Heinrich der Löwe : Herrschaft und Repräsentation, ed. J. Fried and O. G. Oexle (Ostfildern 2003). For the German translation of Roland, see Ian Short’s contribution therein.  Eilhart von Oberg, Tristrant, 45–6, ll. 1–46. D. Buschinger (ibid., 23–4) suggests a date around 1170, just after the marriage between Henry and Matilda, whereas R. Lejeune, ‘Rôle littéraire de la famille d’Aliénor d’Aquitaine’, CCM, 3 (1958), 329, proposes 1185–9, after their exile. The available evidence makes it impossible to decide between these two dates.



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Cornwall, is based on the ancient Celtic Fomóire legend, it nevertheless suggests a link with the activities of those Welsh-Norman warriors, followers of the King of England, who, from 1169 onwards, made inroads into Ireland. When John Lackland was given Ireland and Cornwall by his father, Henry II, as his appanage, he had a sword forged for the crowning ceremony similar to that of Tristan. Late-medieval sources call this royal coronation sword Curtana, the name that appears in the Prose Tristan (c.1220–30), and they also mention the notch in its blade, recalling the fragment that Tristan himself had left in the Morholt’s skull. The episode of the fight against the Irish giant has added importance in the story because it is Tristan’s first exploit as a warrior ; it is while she is tending the serious wounds that Tristan received in the fight that the Morholt’s niece, Iseult, falls in love with him. A more direct link to Henry II seems to be offered by the allusion to Tristan’s coat-of-arms. This only appears in Brother Robert’s 1226 Norse translation of Thomas’s Tristan. The original version of the passage in Thomas’s work is now lost, and this, as we shall see, raises certain problems of interpretation. Brother Robert’s Norse text refers to ‘lions or, on a field gules’ emblazoned on the caparison of the hero’s horse : precisely the same arms that had been borne by Geoffrey Plantagenet, and which had quite probably been passed on by Geoffrey to his son Henry II. It therefore seems at least possible that Thomas referred to this particular heraldic device as a means of flattering Henry II and that, in due course, this flattering reference was translated into the Norse version of Thomas’s  R. Bromwich, ‘Celtic Elements in Arthurian Romance : A General Survey’, in The Legend of Arthur in the Middle Ages : Studies presented to A. H. Diverres, ed. P. B. Grout (Cambridge 1983), 50.   For reference to the regalia received by King John (‘Duos enses, scilicet ensem Tristami et alium ensem de eodem regali’), see Rot. Pat., 77b.  R. S. Loomis, ‘Tristan and the House of Anjou’, Modern Language Review, 17 (1922), 29.   Tristram Saga ok Ísöndar, ed. P. Jorgensen, in Norse Romance, ed. M. E. Kalinke, i : The Tristan Legend (Cambridge 1999), 68, § 24.   The leunculi aurei or picti leones in clipeo of Geoffrey Plantagenet are well attested in the Angevin chronicles (Chroniques d’Anjou, ed. P. Marchegay and A Salmon (Paris 1856), 235, 262) and on the enamelled plaque on his tomb in Le Mans cathedral (M.-M. Gauthier, Émaux du Moyen Âge occidental, 2nd edn (Fribourg 1972), 81–3, 327 no. 40). For Henry II, the only source written in his lifetime is the letter from Cardinal Albert to Thomas Becket, dated 24 Nov. 1170, in Duggan, Becket Correspondence, ii, 1340, no. 323 : ‘non facile mutat . . . pardus varietates suas’, an expression that merely repeats, word for word, Jeremiah 13 : 23 (see ibid., 1068, no. 245). Writing in the reign of King John, Gerald of Wales claims (Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, iv, 370–71) that, on his deathbed Henry II gave his illegitimate son Geoffrey Plantagenet his ring with a pantera (‘panther’, but also ‘leopard’). In another work written at much the same time, Gerald, who was now opposed to the Angevins and had become a supporter of the Capetians, opposes the humility of the fleur-de-lys to the pride of the lions and leopards of the Plantagenets (‘Pardos vincere vidimus atque liones’) : ibid., ii, 11 ; viiii, 321. Benoît de Sainte-Maure, a writer in the pay of Henry II, imagines William the Conqueror’s arms as having lions, but in this case we are dealing with fiction ; Benoît, Chronique des Ducs de Normandie, ed. C. Fahlin (Uppsala 1951–1979), ll. 36944–7.

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work by Brother Robert. However, not everyone subscribes to this theory ; it has been noted that King Haakon of Norway (1217–1263) also had lions in his arms, and that Brother Robert might well have chosen to honour in this way the lord to whom he dedicates his translation in his prologue. If this were the case, then his description of Tristan’s arms may tell us nothing whatsoever of the arms as originally described by Thomas. Nonetheless, we should tread carefully here. To begin with, specialists in the Arthurian Norse sagas agree that Brother Robert’s translation is generally faithful to Thomas’s original text. This is easily verifiable on the basis of the surviving fragments of Thomas’s Anglo-Norman Tristan. When it comes to facts, Robert tends rather to reduce or suppress passages in Thomas than to alter them ; there are only a very few additions that appear at the end of his text. In addition, King Haakon himself was a friend of Henry III and an admirer of English royal traditions ; he modelled his palace in Bergen upon Henry III’s palace at Westminster. He could equally well have adopted the heraldic lions of England, which are, in any case, a very common device in Western heraldry. Finally, the appearance in the thirteenth century of lions on the shield of Tristan, found in the decorative pavement of Chertsey Abbey in Surrey, and later in the Middle English Sir Tristrem, seems more likely to confirm continuity with the twelfth-century Tristan than a rather improbable a posteriori appropriation by the English of a motif originating in Scandinavia. Unless they are the result of a fortuitous choice of one of the most popular heraldic motifs borne by medieval nobles, Tristan’s lions do indeed seem to be a nod by Thomas in the direction of Henry II and the Plantagenet kings. Could a king of England’s fascination with Tristan have gone so far as to affect the layout of the grounds of Woodstock Palace in Oxfordshire, one of Henry II’s favourite residences because of the opportunities it afforded to indulge the king’s love of hunting ? Certain architectural historians have claimed that the king caused streams to be diverted to lead to Everswell and hence to the building where his mistress Rosamund Clifford resided, referred to (although long after 1200) as ‘Rosamund’s Bower’. Supposedly, the diversion of these streams was intended to recall the streams that allowed Tristan and Iseult to send secret messages by means of wood fragments thrown into the current, to arrange their   This theory has received support from R. S. Loomis, ‘Tristan and the House of Anjou’ ; G. J. Brault, Early Blazon : Heraldic Terminology in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries with Special Reference to Arthurian Literature, 2nd edn (Woodbridge 1997), 20–21, and Daniel, ‘Arthurianisme et littérature politique’, 1101–1105.   Tristram Saga, 28.   For the most recent view, see M. Pastoureau, L’Hermine et le sinople : études d’héraldique médiévale (Paris 1982), 280–83.   D. Lacroix, introduction to ‘La Saga de Tristan : Tristams saga par Robert’, in Tristan et Iseut, 499–500.



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lovers’ trysts. Such a supposition is both unverifiable and unsafe. There could be a host of reasons why one or other of the kings of England, who cannot necessarily be identified as Henry II, might have wished to canalise the Everswell streams at Woodstock, and these reasons are not necessarily to be sought in a royal passion, if passion there was, for the Tristan legend. In the Prologue to her Lais, Marie de France states that she is writing ‘in your honour, noble king, so worthy and courtly, before whom all joy bows its head and whose heart is the root of all virtue’. Since Marie was influenced by Wace’s Brut, her work must be later than 1155. Its background is Great Britain and its language is continental French, probably the dialect of the Île-de-France. It demonstrates precise knowledge of the institutions, administrative machinery and judicial procedures of the English court. The royal dedicatee can therefore only be Henry II, as most modern commentators believe, or his son Henry the Young King, who was crowned in 1170, during his father’s lifetime. Many theories have been advanced about the identity of the person behind the name ‘Marie de France’, and about the French origins that she claims for herself. None can be regarded as entirely proved. Speculative though it may be, there is at least a possibility that we can identify Marie as a daughter of Waleran de Meulan (d. 1166), a powerful baron from the Vexin, the frontier region between Normandy and the Île-de-France. Waleran,  R. A. Brown, H. M. Colvin and A. J. Taylor, The History of the King’s Works, i–ii : The Middle Ages (London 1963), ii, 1015–16, also accepted by R. Barber, Henry Plantagenet (Woodbridge 2001), 62, and Daniel, ‘Arthurianisme et littérature politique’, 402.   Marie de France, Lais, ed. L. Harf-Lancner and K. Warnke (Paris 1990), 24, Prologue, ll. 44–7.   G. S. Burgess, Introduction to Marie de France, Lais, ed. A. Ewert and G. S. Burgess (Bristol 1995), p. vii, gives 1170 as a terminus ad quem (i.e. the year in which, in Burgess’ view, Denis Piramus wrote the Vie seint Edmund le rei, which mentions Marie de France’s Lais, as in the edn by H. Kjellman (Geneva 1935), ll. 35–48), but this supposition is by no means sure. Other specialists would date this Life of Saint Edmund to the decade between 1190 and 1200. See here A. Fourrier, Le Courant réaliste dans le roman courtois en France au Moyen Âge (Paris 1960), 441 n. 390.   Short, ‘Patrons and Polyglots’, 240.  E. A. Francis, ‘Marie de France et son temps’, Romania, 72 (1951), 78–99 ; idem, ‘The Trial in Lanval ’, in Studies in French Language and Mediaeval Literature Presented to Professor Mildred K. Pope (Manchester 1939), 115–24.   The argument in favour of Henry the Young King rests on the epithets ‘pruz e curteis’ applied to the king in the Prologue ; see n. 2 on this page. But these conventional terms could be applied to any monarch. They are to be found, for example, in troubadour songs addressed to Alphonse II, king of Aragon (1162–96). See here M. Aurell, ‘Les Troubadours et le pouvoir royal : l’exemple d’Alphonse 1er (1162–1196)’, Revue des langues romanes, 85 (1981), 53–67.   ‘Marie ai nun, si sui de France’ ; Marie de France, Fables, ed. C. Brucker (Paris/Louvain 1998), Epilogue, l. 4. On the fabrications to which this elusive identity (which is not, strictly speaking, true anonymity) has given rise, see R. H. Bloch, The Anonymous Marie de France (Chicago/London 2003).  Y. de Poinfarcie, ‘Si Marie de France était Marie de Meulan’, CCM, 38 (1995), 353–61. At the

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who was enthusiastically praised by several commentators during his lifetime for his learning and his command of Latin, appears in seven manuscripts alongside Robert of Gloucester as one of the dedicatees of the Historia Regum Britanniæ. He was lord of Worcester, and many monasteries in western England, close to his estates, possessed copies of the Tractatus de Purgatorio Sancti Patricii of Henry of Sawtrey, which supposedly inspired Marie to write her Espurgatoire. Through his marriage to Isabella de Clare, daughter of Strongbow, the Welsh-Norman conqueror of Ireland, William Marshal received land in this region. Might he have been the ‘comte Guillaume’ to whom Marie’s Fables are dedicated ? Moreover, might it have been via William Marshal, acting as patron or protector of Reading Abbey, that the monks of Reading came into possession of some of the best manuscripts both of the Espurgatoire and of the Lais ? Marie de Meulan (if such a woman existed) clearly would have belonged to that group within the Anglo-Norman elite famed for its milites literati and their interest in learning and literature. She would have lived on estates close to the Celtic and Latin epicentres of the Arthurian legend. As a laywoman, she cannot have been abbess of Shaftesbury, Reading or Romsey, the three nunneries whose abbesses have in the past sometimes been proposed as potential candidates for identification with Marie de France. But in any event, the world of the abbess and the learned nun seem hardly compatible with the tone of Marie de France’s love stories, which are far from sober or religious. Those who argue for the literary influence of Eleanor of Aquitaine have always made much of the patronage which Marie de Champagne, her daughter from her first marriage, extended to Chrétien de Troyes (c.1135–c.1183) : patronage that

Norwich Colloquium, Daniel Power rightly pointed out to me that the name Marie does not occur elsewhere among the Waleran-Beaumont family. One answer to this might be that, among noble families, female naming patterns were not as strictly governed as male. Moreover, according to Yvonne de Ponfarcie’s hypothesis, Marie would have been the eighth child of Waleran, and the hereditary principle relating to names generally became less strict with the younger children. A further point would be that this name is part of a fashion inspired by devotion to the Virgin Mary in the 12th century, examples in the same generation being Marie de Champagne and Marie de Montpellier. Nonetheless, in support of Power, another criticism of the identification between Marie and Waleran’s daughter has recently been presented by Carla Rossi, ‘Brevi note su Marie de Meulan (~1000–1060), un’improbabile Marie de France’, Critica del testo, 7 (2004), 1147–55, who suggests that Mary, the wife of Hugh Talbot, was the daughter of Waleran II (fl. 1000), not Waleran IV (d. 1166), though this would seem to be a red herring.   D. Crouch, The Beaumont Twins : The Roots and Branches of Power in theTwelfth Century (Cambridge 1986), 7, 92, 207–211.   Tatlock, Legendary History, 436.   Marie de France, Fables, Epilogue, l. 9.  R. V. Turner, ‘The “Miles Literatus” in Twelfth and Thirteenth-Century England’, American Historical Review, 83 (1978), 928–45.



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extended to her dictating to him the theme of the Lancelot. The problem here is that, after the annulment of Eleanor’s marriage in March 1152, her two daughters came under the protection of Louis VII. He lost no time in having them betrothed to his turbulent neighbours, the brothers Henri of Champagne and Thibaud of Blois, whose loyalty he thereby sought to secure. Marie, Eleanor’s daughter, was barely seven years old at this time, and thus could scarcely have benefited from an initiation into the matière de Bretagne at the hands of her mother. Mother and daughter were separated at a very early stage, and seem to have had remarkably little contact thereafter. Furthermore, Marie’s husband, Henri de Champagne (1152–1181), was by no means a close ally of Henry II. Henri de Champagne was the nephew of Stephen of Blois, the Empress Matilda’s rival for the throne of England, and in 1152 had taken part in the military campaigns that Louis VII staged on the frontiers of Normandy in reprisal for Eleanor’s remarriage. It is even possible that the count of Champagne, in pursuit of this anti-Plantagenet strategy, may have considered laying claim to rights over Aquitaine in the name of his betrothed, Eleanor’s daughter Marie. In 1160, in a further strengthening of the anti-Angevin alliance between the Capetians and Blois, his sister Adèle became the third wife of Louis VII. Despite this, it appears that relations with Henry II were not always so strained. In 1168, for example, at Soissons, Henri de Champagne negotiated a peace treaty with Louis VII in the name of the king of England. On this occasion he was supported in his negotiations by Philippe d’Alsace, count of Flanders (1168–1191) who was later to be the dedicatee of Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval. It is at precisely this time, at the end of the 1160s, during a period of political détente between Henri de Champagne and the king of England, that we can situate the beginning of the career of the Champenois writer of romances who may   Chrétien de Troyes, Lancelot, ou Le Chevalier de la charrette, in idem, Œuvres complètes, ed. D. Poirion (Paris 1994), 507, ll. 1–27.   Flori, Aliénor d’Aquitaine, 80–82.   J. F. Benton, ‘The Court of Champagne as a Literary Center’, Speculum, 36 (1961), 589. The only indication of any contact between Marie and her mother’s family occurs in 1192, when Richard I addressed his song, calling on the Emperor to free him, to his half-sister : Y. G. Lepage, ‘Richard Cœur de Lion et la poésie lyrique’, in ‘Et c’est la fin pour quoy sommes ensemble’ : Hommage à Jean Dufournet, ed. J.-C. Aubailly et al., 3 vols. (Paris 1993), 893–910. It goes without saying that the ‘judgements on love’ that, according to Andreas Capellanus, were jointly pronounced by Eleanor and Marie, are pure fiction, perhaps even parody : P. Bourgain, ‘Aliénor d’Aquitaine et Marie de Champagne mises en cause par André le Chapelain’, CCM, 29 (1986), 29–36.   J. Baldwin, Philippe Auguste (Paris 1991), 30, 37, points out that, while the house of Champagne had traditionally been hostile to the Capetians, it ‘transformed this longstanding hostility into close friendship’ in the second half of the 12th century because of ‘the rise of the house of Anjou’.   Warren, Henry II, 45, 88–90.   Letters of John of Salisbury, ii, 562, no. 272.   Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval, ou Le Conte du Graal, in idem, Œuvres complètes, 685, ll. 11–15.

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perhaps have travelled within the Plantagenet empire. Chrétien’s Cligès does indeed suggest close acquaintance with southern England, while his Lancelot reveals a similar degree of familiarity with Lower Normandy. Admittedly, any writer could have obtained information about places he had never visited in person. But the detailed knowledge that Chrétien shows of place-names in the region of Avranches, or the precise account of Windsor Castle that he supplies, in neither case suggests merely second-hand acquaintance, albeit the place names of the Avranchin and of Windsor may conceivably have been chosen so that Chrétien’s poetry would have greater appeal to an Anglo-Norman audience. In 1168, shortly after the Treaty of Soissons, political relations between England and Champagne had thawed to such an extent that Chrétien could well have been in a position to praise, or even to seek patronage from, the lands of Henry II of England. Critics have long pointed to a passage in his writing that brings him close to the House of Anjou. Erec et Enide concludes with the coronation of the protagonists on Christmas Day, in the presence of King Arthur, in a grandiose ceremony that takes place at Nantes. Those participating in the event are ‘Normans, Bretons, Scots, Irish, rich barons of England and Cornwall, and knights from Wales to Anjou, Maine and Poitou’, a list that, with the exception of the Scots, coincides with the subject dominions of the Plantagenet empire. Moreover, the silver coins generously distributed by Arthur during this ceremony are specifically stated to have been esterlins, the coinage of England and of Henry II. Finally, the two thrones of ivory and pure gold that are used for the crowning of the protagonists are a gift sent by Brian des Îles, a name that, as we shall see, may contain a coded allusion to one of Henry II’s close acquaintances. Chrétien describes two leopards, the Angevins’ heraldic emblem, engraved on the feet of these thrones, facing two crocodiles, symbolising a psychomachia between good and evil. We   C. Bullock-Davies, ‘Chrétien de Troyes and England’, Arthurian Literature, 1 (1981), 1–61 ; G. Susony, ‘Personnages et paysages normands dans les derniers romans de Chrétien de Troyes’, in Les Romans de la Table ronde, 51–66.   Chrétien de Troyes, Erec et Enide, ed. P. Dembowski, in Chrétien, Œuvres complètes, 159–69, ll. 6547–950.   Ibid., ll. 6640–44.   C. W. Carroll, ‘Quelques Observations sur les reflets de la cour d’Henri II dans l’œuvre de Chrétien de Troyes’, CCM, 37 (1994), 38. The date traditionally given for the esterlin going into circulation is 1180, and as such appears to contradict the date 1170, generally seen as the year of composition of Erec et Enide.   B. Schmolke-Hasselmann, ‘Henry II Plantagenêt, roi d’Angleterre, et la genèse d’“Erec et Enide” ’, CCM, 24 (1981), 241–6, stresses the idea of the leopards as an element in heraldic flattery of Henry II. Other critics lay emphasis on the psychomachia symbolised by these borrowings from the bestiary : J. Frappier, ‘Pour le commentaire d’“Erec et Enid”’, Marche Romane, 20/4 (1970), 29 n. 36, repeated in P. Dembowski’s recent edn (l. 1112). These two interpretations, one political and the other moral, are not necessarily mutually exclusive, bearing in mind that the heraldic leopards of the Angevins are shown to be victorious over the evil personified in their enemies.



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might note here that a leopard appears, at the beginning of the romance, woven into the carpet beneath Erec’s feet as he puts on his hauberk and helm and picks up his sword before departing on his quest. This is quite possibly an heraldic tribute to the King of England. The coincidences and correspondences here are perhaps too precise to be dismissed as the result of mere accident. By the late 1160s, Nantes had been assigned to the young Geoffrey, aged twelve, the son of Henry II, already betrothed to Constance of Brittany. Henry celebrated Christmas there in 1169 in the company of Geoffrey and Constance, following his crushing defeat of a revolt led by Eudon de Porhoët, the chief rival of Henry and Geoffrey for rule over the Bretons. It is probable that the pseudonym Brian des Îles is a deliberate reference to Brian fitz Count, alias Brian of Wallingford, the natural son of Alain IV Fergent (1084–1112), duke of Brittany and one of the most ardent defenders of the Empress and her son during the civil war. Brian also supported the count of Anjou’s claims to Brittany. Even the surprising mention of the Scots in Chrétien’s list of the king of England’s subject peoples is not meaningless : Constance of Brittany was, through her mother, Margaret, the niece of the brothers Malcolm (1153–65) and William (1165–1214), kings of Scotland and allies, if unreliable ones, of Henry II. In the section of this same romance where Chrétien lists the knights of the Round Table, it is likewise noteworthy to find the name Yvain de Cavaliot, the French version of Owain Cyfeiliog (1130–1197), prince of Powys. Towards the end of the 1160s, Owain was reconciled with Henry II after a long period of hostility. According to Gerald of Wales, he was at that time a frequent visitor to Henry’s court. All told, 1169 could well be the year in which Chrétien wrote what was, according to his own list of his works, his first romance, Erec et Enide. We will probably never know whether Chrétien de Troyes visited the court of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. What is certain is that he was well informed as to the politics and geography of the Plantagenet empire, and that its peoples won his respect and even his admiration : ‘My heart draws me to these people’, he writes in Erec et Enide. It   Chrétien, Erec et Enide, 66, l. 2646 ; see J. J. Duggan, The Romances of Chrétien de Troyes (New Haven 2001), 11.  Everard, Brittany and the Angevins, 54.   Warren, Henry II, 74   Malcolm accompanied Henry II in his expedition against Toulouse in 1159. William was at Mont-Saint-Michel with the King in 1166, but took part in the revolt of 1173 : J. H. Ramsay, The Angevin Empire, or The Three Reigns of Henry II, Richard I, and John (A.D. 1154–1216) (London/New York 1903), 89–90 ; Warren, Henry II, 86, 98–9, 183.   This list varies greatly from one manuscript to another. Cavaliot does not appear, for example, in the Guiot manuscript, ed. Dembowski, 43.   Gerald of Wales, Itinerarium Kambriae, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, vi, 12. See also Warren, Henry II, 166–7.   Chrétien de Troyes, Cligès, ed. P. Walter, in Chrétien, Œuvres complètes, 173, l. 1.   Chrétien, Erec et Enide, 162, l. 6636.

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seems very likely that, whatever his precise relations with the Angevin court, he visited England and Normandy, the heartlands of Henry II’s dominion. Étienne de Rouen (d. c.1170) is the only author of Arthurian material who can be shown to have enjoyed direct and unequivocal relations with Henry II and his court. This monk of the monastery of Bec, a nephew of Bernard (d. 1149), abbot of Mont-Saint-Michel, grew up in a milieu committed to Normandy’s independence from France and to the glories of the triumphant ducal dynasty. This ideology is clearly expressed in his principal work, the poem Draco Normannicus (1167–9), which has the character of a piece of propaganda totally committed to the cause of Henry II. It includes, for example, a violent diatribe against Thomas Becket, written shortly before Becket’s murder. A number of episodes in the life of Étienne reveal his devotion to the house of Anjou. He was close to the Empress Matilda, who spent most of the last twenty years of her life at Notre-Dame-duPré, a priory of Bec just outside Rouen. Étienne was presumably long acquainted with the Empress, and certainly devotes long passages of the Draco Normannicus to a funeral oration in her honour. It may well be himself that he refers to when he describes the journey of a monk of Bec, deputed to bring Henry II the news of his mother’s death. In gratitude and in accordance with custom, the King gave this monk a staff, which the faithful messenger asked be buried with him at his death. Étienne could easily have met the King during his stays in Rouen. Certainly, he was entirely devoted to Henry’s cause. To sum up, the position as regards our knowledge of relations between Henry II and Arthurian writers of the second half of the twelfth century is a somewhat ambiguous one. Admittedly, none of these writers can be shown to have received an express commission from Henry II or his court, equivalent to the commission that undoubtedly was extended to Wace and Benoît de Sainte-Maure for their labours on the Histoire des ducs de Normandie. Yet Wace himself had gained royal favour precisely because of the renown he had won for himself with his Brut. While one cannot speak of close ties of patronage, Marie de France’s dedication of her work to the ‘noble king’, or the heraldic tributes paid to the Plantagenet in Thomas’s Tristan are undeniably suggestive of positive feelings towards Henry II. It is thus well within the bounds of possibility that these writers considered dedicating their work to the king, from time to time attended his court and won occasional favours from him. It is likewise quite possible that, during visits to Normandy or England, Chrétien de Troyes, who was already well regarded by the princes of northern France, could have met Henry II and his family. All in all, these writers may well have enjoyed occasional support from the king. Such inter  Étienne de Rouen, Draco Normannicus, in Howlett, Chronicles, ii, 676, ll. 441–4.   M. Chibnall, ‘The Empress Matilda and Bec-Hellouin’, ANS, 10 (1988), 38.   Étienne, Draco Normannicus, in Howlett, Chronicles, ii, 711–18, III, §§ 1–3.   Ibid., 708, ll. 1283–95 ; see Bezzola, La Cour d’Angleterre comme centre littéraire, 127.



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mittent patronage seems comparable to that provided for the Occitan troubadours by King Anfos II of Aragon (1162–96), count of Barcelona and Provence, who, be it noted, was himself under the protection of Henry II during his minority.

Propaganda or Ideology in the Matière de Bretagne ? The notions of propaganda and ideology are as problematic as notion of patronage itself. They tend to carry anachronistic, twentieth-century and totalitarian overtones. On the one hand, the word ‘propaganda’ implies a degree of obfuscation or manipulation of public opinion by means of messages that target people’s emotions rather than their powers of reasoning. On the other hand, the concept of ‘ideology’ is nowadays synonymous with the political thought or values of sectarian interests, expressed on behalf of pressure groups or ruling elites, rather than with the systematic, rigorous search for truth and justice. Even so, many medievalists consider that, whatever their potential anachronism, these concepts nonetheless have a valuable role to play in historical research. In what follows, I shall endeavour to deploy such terms in as neutral a way as possible, shorn of their twentieth-century or pejorative overtones. ‘Propaganda’ will be taken to mean any form of deliberately manipulated political communication, while ‘ideology’ will be used for ideas intended to assist in the taking, or holding, or augmentation of power. In the context of such notions, stripped of their unwanted associations, I shall attempt to address two questions that are far less simple than at first sight they may appear. Did Henry II use Arthurian legend for propaganda purposes ? And did he derive from the matière de Bretagne an ideology that favoured his cause ? It is undeniable that, at the beginning of his reign, Henry laboured under a perceived lack of legitimation for his rule. Although no more than the son of a count of Anjou, he had not only assumed the English crown but also held sway over the duchies of Normandy, Aquitaine and Brittany and was soon to occupy large parts of Ireland. His inheritance from his mother, his wife’s dowry and force of arms did not win him universal support. The king of France, his overlord for his continental possessions, regularly challenged the legitimacy of Henry’s rule. Intellectuals adopted an ironic stance in respect to Henry’s irresistible rise.   Aurell, ‘Les Troubadours et le pouvoir royal’ ; M. de Riquer, ‘La Littérature provençale à la cour d’Alphonse II d’Aragon’, CCM, 2 (1959), 177–201.  Evidence for this can be found in numerous recent collective publications devoted to such ideas. See e.g. Le forme della propaganda politica nel Due e nel Trecento, ed. P. Cammarosano (Rome 1993) ; La propaganda politica nel Basso Medioevo (Spoleto 2002) ; Propaganda, Kommunikation und Öffentlichkeit (11.–16. Jahrhundert), ed. K. Hruza (Vienna 2002). A wider view, based on the notion of communication, is explored in New Approaches to Medieval Communication, ed. M. Moster (Turnhout 1999) ; Medien der Kommunikation im Mittelalter, ed. K.-H. Spiess (Stuttgart 2003), and Convaincre et persuader : communication et propagande aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles, ed. M. Aurell (Poitiers 2007).

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Thus, for example, when the king reproached him for being the son of a priest, the biblical scholar and close associate of Thomas Becket Herbert of Bosham (c.1120–1194) is reputed to have replied : ‘I am not the son of a priest, for I was not conceived in the priesthood ; my father was ordained afterwards. But, by the same token, you are not the son of a king, for your father was not a king.’ Henry II’s genealogical handicap was far from inconsiderable. The king attempted to overcome this handicap by his claims to a prestigious ancestry. To begin with, he tried to legitimise his dynasty in Normandy, where the Angevins had not always been well regarded. He commissioned a vernacular Histoire des ducs de Normandie, first from Wace and then from Benoît, while his close associate, Robert de Torigni, composed a continuation to Dudo de Saint-Quentin’s Latin chronicle of the dukes. Henry’s Anglo-Saxon ancestry was then strengthened and applauded in the Genealogia Regum Anglorum of Ailred of Rie­vaulx (c.1110–1167), dedicated to Henry shortly before he succeeded to the English throne. The Nun of Barking laid similar stress upon Henry’s genealogy in the introduction to her Anglo-Norman translation of the Vita Edwardi of Ailred. The cult of Edward the Confessor was promoted by Henry II, who managed to have Edward officially canonised and who presided over the translation of Edward’s relics at Westminster in 1163, just at the time when he was preparing to impose the Constitutions of Clarendon upon the English bishops. On the eve of his conflict with archbishop Becket, the memory of the Confessor and of the king’s other sainted Anglo-Saxon, Scottish or Norman ancestors gave added lustre to Henry’s sacred status as the Lord’s anointed. However, in all of this there is not the slightest trace of Arthur in any of the royal genealogies newly drawn up for Henry II. On the contrary, his court eulogists compare him not to Arthur but to Charlemagne or, even more frequently, to Alexander. Does this imply that the subjects of the Angevin kings were entirely unmoved   William fitz Stephen, in MTB, iii, 101.   Ailred of Rievaulx, Genealogia Regum Anglorum, in PL, cxcv, cols. 711–36, and see also Gillingham, ‘The Cultivation of History, Legend and Courtesy’.   La Vie d’Édouard le Confesseur : Poème anglo-normand du XIIe siècle, ed. O. Södergård (Uppsala 1948).   A. Duggan, Thomas Becket (London 2004), 39.   The only exception might be the Architrenius (1184) of Jean de Hauville, always providing that its author did indeed dedicate it to the King (Aurell, L’Empire des Plantagenêt, 174–5). However, Walter of Coutances, archbishop of Rouen and previously bishop of Lincoln, is more likely to be the dedicatee, given his Cornish and thus Arthurian origins, to which Jean alludes in order to glorify his patron. On the subject of these Cornish origins, see Gerald of Wales, Vita Sancti Remigii, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, vii, 38 ; L. Delisle, in Actes Henri II, introduction, 107 ; C. N. L. Brooke, ‘The Reliquary of St Petroc and the Ivories of Norman Sicily’, Archaeologica, 104 (1973), 226–67, 286 ; J. Peltzer, ‘Henry II and the Norman Bishops’, EHR, 119 (2004). See also Gillingham, ‘The Cultivation of History, Legend and Courtesy’, 39 and n. 92 ; Echard, Arthurian Narrative, 109–10.  R. Favreau, ‘L’Épitaphe d’Henri II à Fontevraud’, CCM, 50 (2007), 3–10.



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by tales of the mythical king of the Britons and by accounts of Arthur’s victories over the Gauls ? Manuscripts of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia and of Wace’s Brut translation certainly circulated within the Plantagenet empire at this time. The legend of Arthur’s conquest of Gaul must therefore have found some sort of an audience in these territories and may therefore have given encouragement to the local aristocracy in its struggle against the Capetians. The legend is taken up once more in the Roman des Franceis, an anti-French satirical diatribe in 99 singlerhymed quatrains, written by the Norman, Andrew de Coutances. The Roman is of indeterminate date, postdating the writing of the Brut (1155), but predating the fall of Normandy (1204). Arthur and the Englishmen (not here the British) in his army inflict humiliating defeats upon the French, who are shown to be wretched, miserly cowards. Arthur captures Paris and imposes a form of allegiance that reduces the French to serfdom. Andrew’s epilogue includes an address to the various peoples ruled by the king of England : ‘Englishmen, Bretons, Angevins, men of Maine, Gascons and Poitevins’. The only problem from our point of view is that it is by no means certain that the Roman des Franceis was written in the reign of Henry II ; it may be more plausibly assigned to the reign of one or other of his sons, Richard or John. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account of the conquest of Gaul by Arthur was also known in the Loire valley. It is reworked in the Liber de compositione castri Ambaziae, a short work concerned with the origins and deeds of various of the noble families of the Touraine claiming descent from Keu, Arthur’s seneschal. However, this episode seems to have little to do with propaganda in the region on behalf of the counts of Anjou. In the years from 1150 to 1170, Breton d’Amboise and Thomas de Loches, who drew up the various recensions of the Chronica de gestis consulum Andegavorum, make no mention of the matière de Bretagne. The same is true of the Latin histories that Jean de Marmoutier dedicated to, and probably wrote at the direct request of, Henry II. In those regions of the Loire ruled by the Plantagenets, the Arthurian legends appear to have enjoyed no widespread circulation. The wondrous victories of the mythical king of the Britons seem not to have interested the House of Anjou half as much as it interested the local aristocracy,

  Its most recent editor, Anthony J. Holden, sets the period of writing, although offering no arguments in support of this, in the ‘last thirty years of the [twelfth] century’ ; Holden, ‘André de Coutances, Le “Roman des Franceis” ’, in Études de langue et littérature du Moyen Âge offerts à Félix Lecoy (Paris 1973), 215. The MS in which the poem is preserved dates from the second half of the 13th century and was bound at Mont-Saint-Michel.   Liber de compositione castri Ambaziae et ipsius dominorum Gesta, in Chroniques des comtes d’Anjou et seigneurs d’Amboise, ed. L. Halphen and R,. Poupardin (Paris 1913), 9–11. See also E. H. Fletcher, The Arthurian Material in the Chronicles (Boston 1906), 121–4, and, more especially, Gillingham, ‘The Cultivation of History, Legend and Courtesy’.   Chroniques des comtes d’Anjou, 62 n. 1.

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claiming descent from Arthur’s lieutenant. In this respect, the ideology of the chronicles of Marmoutier is aristocratic and in no way royal. Use of the image of Arthur for propaganda purposes in support of Henry II seems even more restrained in the works of either Marie de France or Chrétien de Troyes. At most it appears in the final episode of Erec et Enide : the coronation at Nantes. Here the propagandist intention is even further muted because, as set down by Marie or Chrétien, the British king is no longer the heroic warrior, no longer the protagonist of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s epic, but has been transformed into an altogether passive co-ordinator of adventures, in a romance in which the knights of the Round Table steal the scene. In the lay of Lanval, it is true, Marie de France depicts an Arthur who has at least some degree of power, sufficient to enable him to marry off the heiresses of his kingdom to his knights. But, on this occasion, he contravenes the most fundamental rules of courtliness, by ignoring the imperatives of generosity and hospitality. Because the protagonist of the romance is a foreigner, Arthur treats him in an unworthy fashion. He also experiences difficulties in enforcing the judicial processes of his realm, as the result of a lawsuit brought by his lustful wife against a young knight who has refused her advances. In this tale the king does not redeem his dishonour by spilling the blood of his vassal, his adulterous nephew, Mordred, as he does in Geoffrey’s Historia. On the contrary, he is pitiably deceived by his wife and outclassed by the qualities of Lanval and of the fairy who has taken Lanval as her lover. Arthur is thus shown to be incapable of controlling the desires of the women in his entourage. He is so obviously unsympathetic a character that one commentator has gone so far as to read this lai as an expression of ‘wicked’ Breton hostility to Henry II and to William de Lanvallay (for whom, read ‘Lanval’), his seneschal in the turbulent duchy of Brittany once ruled by Arthur. The Arthur of Lanval is not very far removed from the Arthur crudely betrayed by Guinevere and Lancelot in Chrétien de Troyes’s Le Chevalier de la charrette. Here, not only does Arthur lose his wife’s affection but he even submits, powerlessly, to Meleagant, who has carried her off with a large number of Arthur’s subjects.   On the subject of Arthur as ‘the adventurous king’ or as master of a realm of adventurers in romance, see a recent study throwing new light on the dialectic between royalty and chivalry that is a fundamental feature of Arthurian literature : C. Girbea, ‘Du pouvoir royal à la chevalerie célestielle : deux systèmes de valeurs à travers la légende arthurienne (XIIe–XIIIe siècles)’ (Thèse de doctorat, Université de Poitiers 2004), 221 (Turnhout, forthcoming).   Marie de France, Lais, 135–67.   M. A. Pappano, ‘Marie de France, Aliénor d’Aquitaine and the Alien Queen’, in Eleanor of Aquitaine : Lady and Lord, ed. J. C. Parsons and B. Wheeler (New York 2002), 337–68.   This is the, perhaps somewhat tentative theory of E. A. Francis, ‘Marie de France et son temps’, 90. For Francis, the negative image of Arthur expresses Marie’s partisanship for the king of England and William de Lanvallay, as opposed to Constance of Brittany and her ‘project of organised resistance against Henry II’s overlordship’ expressed in Constance’s choice of Arthur as a name for her son.



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In Le Conte du Graal, the King has difficulty imposing his rule in his own palace, where the boorish Keu tyrannically rules the roost and where, from time to time, the most hostile of knights and the most cunning of maidens baffle the king with humiliating challenges, without fear of any reprisal. Admittedly, Arthur is more respectfully treated in Erec et Enide, where he presides over the opening episode of the hunting of the white stag and, much later, over the hero’s triumphal coronation. In Cligès, the figure of Arthur is even driven by the kind of epic fury that we find in Geoffrey of Monmouth ; the King fights courageously and boldly against his enemies both in Britain and on the continent, and puts down their treachery with a measure of cruelty that surprises even his entourage. Everywhere in these romances, even in those in which Arthur is made to appear most ridiculous, the king retains the power to dub knights and remains, thus, master of the various chivalric activities that come to fruition in these adventure and invariably begin from his own court. In short, Chrétien de Troyes’s Arthur presents two contradictory aspects. From one romance to another, the warrior-king, vengeful and cruel becomes idle, cowardly and a cuckold. He is the fruit of the writer’s romantic imagination, inspired as much by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s fierce warrior as by the meek, ridiculous giant who appears on occasion in Celtic legend. The Arthur who appears in the years 1167–9 in the Draco Normannicus reflects these two traditions. The passage in which he occurs is by no means lacking in either originality or comedy. Etienne de Rouen imagines an exchange of letters between Arthur and Henry II. The reason for the exchange is a letter that Arthur receives from Roland, count of Brittany, begging him to come to him to lend armed support in defence of his lands, which have been invaded by Henry II. In his reply, Arthur tells Roland that he has nothing to fear from the king of England, for any moment now he will be rendered helpless on hearing the news of his mother’s death. He then writes to Henry II, presenting himself as king of the Britons, the English, and the French, conqueror of the Romans, victor over the traitor Mordred, and immortal dweller in the Isle of Avalon. He threatens to return from the Otherworld with his fleet and his invincible army to stop Henry from attacking the Bretons. On the eve of a decisive battle, Henry II sends a deferential reply to the effect that Brittany, bestowed upon Rollo, duke of Normandy, by Charles the Simple, king of France, is his as of right, but that he will not invade it, out of respect for the memory of his mother. Instead, he adds, he will be content to hold it from Arthur in fief. The eclectic nature of this work, which brings together literary fiction, recollections of past history and allusions

  This tradition is especially to be found in the Latin lives of Welsh saints composed in the 11th and 12th centuries, as noted by O. J. Padel, Arthur in Medieval Welsh Literature (Cardiff 2000), 37–45 ; see also E. Henken, Traditions of the Welsh Saints (Cambridge 1987).   Étienne, Draco Normannicus, in Howlett, Chronicles, ii, 695–708, §§ 17–23, ll. 941–1283.

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to contemporary events in a work of propaganda in support of Henry II, renders it impervious to any simple analysis. Three basic explanations have been offered by the commentators. The first is that Étienne is indulging in a rhetorical exercise, marrying sophisticated versification to the epistolary tradition inherited from Cicero and Seneca but also from Leo the Archpriest, the translator into Latin of the correspondence between Darius and Alexander, who are both mentioned by name in this passage. The second is that behind the name ‘Roland’ stands his namesake, the powerful Breton baron who was lord of Dinan and also of Richmond in England and who, from 1167 onwards, took part in the Breton rebellion against Henry II. The third theory suggests that, despite the reference to the death of the Empress Matilda, the basic intention of this passage is burlesque : it pokes fun at Arthur, whose boastfulness, grandiloquence and bluster contrast with the sober, level-headed approach of King Henry, who condescends to be reconciled with his blustering correspondent. Like many intellectuals of his time, Étienne de Rouen pokes fun, in passing, at the ‘Breton hope’ : the belief in the return of King Arthur, which was widespread among Breton and Welsh warriors opposed to Norman expansionism in the far west. In the years that followed, the idea of Arthur’s ‘Britain’ continued to stir up controversy. Rather surprisingly, Geoffrey, whom his father had placed at the head of the duchy of Brittany, had no objection at all to the tradition of Arthurian descent that was so disliked by Étienne de Rouen and by many of the intellectual churchmen in the King’s entourage. The troubadour Bertran de Born (c.1159– 1215), an associate of ‘Count Geoffrey who owns Brocéliande’, includes in the planh written in Geoffrey’s memory a stanza in which he claims that he would prefer that Geoffrey, rather than Arthur, be returned from the dead : ‘If Arthur, the Lord of Carduel, whom the Bretons expect in May, had the power to return to this world, the Bretons would lose by the exchange and Our Lord would gain. If Gawain came back to help the Bretons, he would be no compensation for the fact that Our Lord had taken much more away from them.’ This elegiac comparison demonstrates the way in which the Angevin dukes of Brittany were able to recruit the treasure trove of Arthurian literature to their cause, and with it, perhaps, the messianic expectations that it raised. As with Arthur, so also with the tomb of his nephew Gawain, regarded as one of a group of enigmatic, hidden locations where warriors dwelt who were capable of returning from the nether world. Towards the end of his life, Duke Geoffrey was drawing closer to the Capetians in order   For recent debate here, see Aurell, L’Empire des Plantagenêt, 170–72 ; Echard, Arthurian Narrative, 85–91.   L’Amour et la Guerre : l’œuvre de Bertran de Born, ed. G. Gouiran (Aix-en-Provence 1985), 210, no. 11, l. 33.   Ibid., 434, no. 22, ll. 33–40.   Gesta Regum, iii, 287, 520.



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to assert his own authority in Brittany to the detriment of that of Henry II and perhaps used Celtic mythology as a weapon in this struggle against his father. In March 1187, just such an ideological conflict emerged over the naming of the only son that Geoffrey had fathered by Constance of Brittany. The son was born after his father’s death, on Easter Sunday of that year. The chronicler William of Newburgh (1136–1198), who was scornful of Celtic tales about Arthur, and who despised even more the deception implicit in their translation into Latin by Geoffrey of Monmouth, explicitly records the warring ideologies in this quarrel over a name, while at the same time treating the Bretons with irony : The king [Henry II], his grandfather, who had ordered that the child be given his own name, was opposed by the Bretons, and by solemn acclamation the child was named Arthur when he was held over the sacred font. Thus the Bretons, who are said to have been long waiting for an imaginary Arthur, are now raising up one who is quite real, and they do so in great hope, in accordance with the opinion that certain prophets express in their long and celebrated Arthurian legends. Like William, Roger of Howden (d. c.1201) and Ralph of Diss (1120×1130–1202) claim that the entire population of Brittany was involved in the choice of a name for the infant child. When his birth was announced, Peire Vidal, who like many another Occitan troubadour mocks the Bretons’ beliefs, claimed that the time had come to bring such mockery of newborn children to an end, ‘for now the Bretons have Arthur, in whom they had placed their hopes’. Many writers who were foreign to the Celtic world considered this recruitment of the memory of Arthur to the cause of Breton irredentism ridiculous. And yet, if we may be forgiven the paradox, those who poke fun have to be taken seriously. In this instance, their mockery is in fact a sublimation of the disquiet that they felt at the political messianism so widespread in Brittany. Their remarks are not the result of hostile anti-Celtic stereotyping, nor of some literary topos divorced from all political reality, but rather a genuine response to Breton propaganda. Let us recall two examples in support of this point. The first concerns Aubri de Trois-Fontaines, a Cistercian from Champagne, who in his chronicle, admittedly of rather later date (1227×1241), stressed the genealogy of Geoffrey’s son, the root of which was none other than the mythical king of the Celts who

  Newburgh, i, 14–18, with a more recent edn with English translation in Newburgh, The History of English Affairs, Book I, ed. P. G. Walsh and M. J. Kennedy (Warminster 1988), 32–7.   Newburgh, i, 235, and see Everard, Brittany and the Angevins, 157.   ‘Quem Britones Arturum vocaverunt’ (Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 361) ; ‘Quem Britones vocaverunt Arturum’ (Diceto, ii, 48).   Peire Vidal, Poesie, ed. D’A. S. Avalle (Naples 1960), 366, no. 40, ll. 12–13. Cf. 248, no. 31, l. 39 ; see also J. Anglade, Les Troubadours et les Bretons (Paris 1929), 39–40.

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had never been claimed as an ancestor by Henry II. The second is the Chronicle of Barnwell. Writing of the revolt of Arthur of Brittany against his uncle, King John, the Barnwell chronicler states that the Bretons, in following the young Arthur, wished to revive the glorious deeds of the Arthur of old, and to destroy the English race, but that this brought about the loss of their leader in 1203, as a fitting punishment for their pride. In Wales such ideology was deployed in very similar ways. In the 1140s, the anonymous Description of England illustrates the spirit that inspired the Welsh struggle against the Normans : The Welsh certainly had their revenge. They massacred many of our Frenchmen. They captured some of our castles. They proudly threatened us. Everywhere they proclaim openly that in the end they will possess every­ thing. It is thanks to Arthur that they will reclaim all the territory which they will then call Britain once more. Welsh or Breton, the Celts discovered, both in the remembrance of their mythical king and in the hope of his second coming, an ideology for warfare. In the reign of Henry II, political ‘Arthurianism’ remained far more Welsh or Breton than Angevin or English. The discovery of the tomb of Arthur at Glastonbury was partly aimed at countering this irredentist ideology. Such a discovery ought, in truth, to have served as irrefutable evidence of the glorious warrior’s mortality and of the impossibility of his return. According to Gerald of Wales (1146–1223), the discovery of Arthur’s body was owed entirely to Henry II, who ‘told the monks that, according to the traditions that he had heard from a singer of ancient British history, the body would be found buried, at least sixteen feet deep, in a hollowed-out oak tree’. It is perfectly possible that the king of England had heard Celtic legends about mythical tombs of Arthur or other warriors  tombs with variable dimensions, and tombs both occupied and empty. It is also possible that he encouraged the   ‘De qua genuit Arturum juvenem . . . de genere antiqui Arturi’ : Aubry des Trois-Fontaines, Chronica, ed. P. Scheffer-Boichorst, MGH SS, 23, 859.   Memoriale fratris Walteri de Coventria, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols. (RS 58, 1872–3), ii, 196.   L. Johnson and A. Bell, ‘The Anglo-Norman “Description of England”’, in Anglo-Norman Anniversary Essays, ed. I. Short (London 1993), 11–47, and see Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century, 33.   This idea is developed at some length in Gillingham, ‘The Cultivation of History, Legend and Courtesy’.   Gerald of Wales, De Principis Instructione, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, viii, 126–8 ; idem, Speculum Ecclesiae, ibid., iv, 47–51.   A famous Welsh poem, which may date from the 10th century, includes the following line : ‘An eternal enigma, a tomb for Arthur’ ; ed. T. Jones, ‘The Black Book of Carmarthen : Stanzas of the Graves’, PBA, 53 (1967), 97–137. See also J. Carey, ‘The Finding of Arthur’s Grave : A Story from Clonmacnoise’, in Ildánach Ildírech : A Festschrift for Proinsias Mac Cana (Andover/Aberystwyth 1999), 1–14 ; N. J. Higham, King Arthur : Myth-Making and History (London/New York 2002), 89, 140.



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excavations at Glastonbury. An exhumation almost certainly took place, albeit at the beginning of the reign of his son, King Richard I, possibly in 1191. In that same year, Richard I, on his way through Sicily to the Holy Land, granted Excalibur, which is unlikely to have been a sword unearthed during the Glastonbury exhumation, to Tancred de Hauteville. These are well-known events and have been a frequent subject of commentary by medievalists. Their ideological import is difficult to deny. Gerald of Wales refers to one other instance in which Arthur, the heroic Celtic warrior, may have been transformed into an instrument of Plantagenet policy even before the death of Henry II. In the second recension of his ‘Topography of Ireland’, written in 1188 or 1189 during the final months of Henry’s reign, Gerald presents Arthur as the one-time overlord of an Ireland that the Anglo-Norman invaders were even then in the process of reconquering. Apparently citing Geoffrey of Monmouth, he claims that the Irish kings were once tributaries of Arthur, king of the Britons, and that certain of them attended Arthur’s court at Caerleon. The rights exercised by an ancient British king over Ireland were thus bequeathed to his successor, Henry II. Nonetheless, this direct use of Arthur for the purposes of political propaganda is virtually the only one recorded during Henry’s reign. The figure of Arthur may have been used against the Irish, but it was less easily manipulated against the Welsh, who for many years had made of Arthur their great hero and protector. For the revival of an interest in Arthur, used for political purposes, we have to wait until the reign of Richard I. It was Richard, after all, who presented Excalibur to Tancred of Sicily, and, by the same token, it was Richard who, for the benefit of his own dynasty, fostered a new veneration of the mythical king of the Britons at precisely the same time that he embarked on a crusade from which he might never return and during which he named his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, as his heir. The young Arthur himself, of course, was a boy surrounded by the aura of expectation that we have already considered. This in turn may have met with   The proof here resides, on the one hand, in the fact that Henry de Sully, who was only appointed in Sept. 1189, is named as abbot by Gerald, and on the other in the fact that the year 1191 is specified for the discovery of the relics both in the chronicle of Ralph of Coggeshall (c.1224) and in the annals of Margam Abbey in Glamorgan (c.1234), both of them Cistercian sources. See Gillingham, ‘The Cultivation of History, Legend and Courtesy’, 38 ; Gransden, ‘The Growth of Glastonbury’, 351.   H. Bresc, ‘Excalibur en Sicile’, Medievalia, 7 (1987), 7–21 ; Mason, ‘The Hero’s Invincible Weapon’, 129.   See, most recently, Aurell, L’Empire des Plantagenêt, 164–6 ; Gillingham, ‘The Cultivation of History, Legend and Courtesy’, 38.   Gerald of Wales, Topographia Hibernica, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, v, 128–9 ; also in Gerald, Expugnatio, 2, 6 ; see M.-T. Flanagan, Irish Society, Anglo-Norman Settlers, Angevin Kingship : Interactions in Ireland in the Late 12th-Century (Oxford 1983).   C. T. Wood, ‘Fraud and its Consequences : Savaric of Bath and the Reform of Glastonbury’, in

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approval from intellectual churchmen, gratified by the discovery of a tomb that gave the lie to any belief  unorthodox, to say the least  in a warlike ghost with supernatural powers. In the thirteenth century, dynastic veneration of a glorious ancestor of the kings of England who had been accorded honourable burial in the abbey church of Glastonbury might seem unremarkable, were it not for the fact that it continued to provide material for the romances of the matière de Bretagne. The prophecies of Merlin, the Welsh Myrddin, had long been disseminated among the Celtic-speaking peoples. These prophecies, however, became inseparable from the figure of Arthur only after the appearance of the Historia Regum Brtianniae, where they take up at least a quarter of the text. Geoffrey of Monmouth makes Merlin’s magic responsible for Arthur’s conception, and ensures that Merlin’s prophecies present Arthur in the guise of the victorious ‘wild boar of Cornwall’. In his Vita Merlini (1148), Geoffrey depicts a Merlin of Caledonia or Sylvester : a warrior king descending into madness, entirely distinct from the magician of the Historia, but just as gifted as his namesake at predicting the future. The most important point to be made here is that Geoffrey’s Latin version of all these prophecies greatly increased their audience during the lifetime of Henry II. The political appropriation of the prophecies, as with the messianic expectation of Arthur’s return, was of considerable value to the Welsh, who made of it a formidable propaganda weapon against the Norman invaders. Gerald of Wales thus claims that these island Britons ‘boast that, before very long, their compatriots will return to the island and that, according to the prophecies of Merlin, the race of foreigners and their name will be brought to nought’. It is true that the final prophecy in Geoffrey’s Vita Merlini could well have spurred them on to resist : ‘Normans out ! Cease to wield the arms of your brutal soldiery against a free kingdom !’ This example, among many others, supplies evidence of the The Archaeology and History of Glastonbury Abbey, ed. K. Abrams and J. P. Carley (Woodbridge 1991), 273–7 ; M. Warren, ‘Roger of Howden Strikes Back : Investing Arthur of Brittany with the AngloNorman Future’, ANS, 21 (1998), 261–72.   C. Girbea, ‘Limites du contrôle des Plantagenêt sur la légende arthurienne : Le Problème de la mort d’Arthur’, in Culture politique des Plantagenêt (1154–1224), ed. M. Aurell (Poitiers 2003), 287–301. See also the wealth of discussion to which this paper gave rise, ibid., 314–15.   A. O. H. Jarman, ‘The Merlin Legend and the Welsh Tradition of Prophecy’, in The Arthur of the Welsh, ed. R. Bromwich, A. O. H. Jarman and B. F. Roberts (Cardiff 1991), 117–45.   The prophecies of Geoffrey of Monmouth were circulating even before they were incorporated in the Historia, according to Tatlock, Legendary History, 419–20. A Prophetia Merlini, inspired by Geoffrey but with a distinctly personal slant, was written in 1153–4 by John of Cornwall. See M. J. Curley, ‘A New Edition of John of Cornwall’s Prophetia Merlini’, Speculum, 57 (1982), 217–49.  R. R. Davies, Conquest, Coexistence and Change : Wales, 1063–1415 (Oxford 1987), 79–80 : ‘The Merlinic prophecies were the staple political ideology of medieval Welshmen’.   Gerald of Wales, Descriptio Kambriae, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, vi, 216.   Geoffrey of Monmouth, Vita Merlini, ed. in Faral, La Légende arthurienne, iii, 352, ll. 1511–12.



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clear ideological direction of the prophecies and the way that they served all the Celtic uprisings. The subversive use to which they were put by the enemies of the king of England explains the following anecdote recounted by Gerald of Wales. One day at St David’s, Henry II was heckled by a Welsh woman, who called down divine vengeance upon him and who cited a prophecy claiming that the king of England, having conquered Ireland, would receive a mortal wound at the Stone of Lechlaver. The Angevin king responded by going to the place, jumping onto the stone and defying anyone to believe in Merlin’s lies ever again. This use of Celtic prophecies against English royalty makes it only too clear why Wace, in his Brut, decided not to translate into French the prophecies of Merlin that he found in the Historia. He thus deliberately and severely depoliticised Geoffrey of Monmouth. His Anglo-Norman audience was presumably not prepared to accept propaganda so blatantly favourable towards Welsh warriors. The prophetic material was nevertheless extremely malleable. Carefully used, it might even serve the cause of those against whom it was originally directed. A few cases illustrating the way that Merlin’s prophecies were deployed in support of Henry II serve to confirm this paradoxical ‘boomerang effect’. First, Gerald, one of the King’s Welsh-Norman courtiers, recounts how discouraged the Welsh were when, in 1163, they saw Henry II cross the River Pen Carn at a ford that the new road no longer used. His horse, alarmed by the sound of Welsh horns, had carried him there. Now, a prophecy attributed to Merlin Sylvester claimed that the strong man with red hair who crossed at this point would destroy those lands. In addition, in his Expugnatio Hiberniae, where he recounts the conquest of Ireland by Henry II and his troops, Gerald not only quotes four Irish oracles but also mentions the prophecies of Merlin fourteen times, and even makes a promise, albeit unfulfilled, to translate the predictions of Merlin Sylvester, having been commissioned to do so by the King. Strongbow’s Welsh-Norman warriors probably   Gerald, Expugnatio, 106, and see L. A. Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs in Later Middle English (Woodbridge/York 2001), 58.   J. Blacker, ‘ “Ne vuil sun livre translater” : Wace’s Omission of Merlin’s Prophecies from the Roman de Brut’, in Anglo-Norman Anniversary Essays, ed. Short, 49–60 ; idem, ‘Where Wace Feared to Tread : Latin Commentaries on Merlin’s Prophecies in the Reign of Henry II’, Arthuriana, 6 (1996), 36–52.   Gerald, Itinerarium Kambriae, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, vi, 61–3. This prophecy has been preserved in Welsh in the Red Book of Hergest, among the poems on Merlin in his tomb : The Four Ancient Books of Wales, ed. W. F. Skene (Edinburgh 1868), ii, 234–7.   Gerald, Expugnatio, 252–6 and p. lxvi, and see R. Bartlett, ‘Political Prophecy in Gerald of Wales’, in Culture politique des Plantagenêt, ed. Aurell, 308–10. Prophecies of Merlin concerning the conquest of Ireland even appear on the continent in a chronicle from Tours, completed c.1277 : Chronicon Turonense magnum, in Recueil des chroniques de Touraine, ed. A. Salmon (Tours 1854), 137, noting that ‘Maximam partem Hibernie acquisivit. De quo Merlinus ait : “sextus Hibernie moenia subertet”. Sextus enim erat de progenie Eduardi.’

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used these same prophecies to undermine the morale of their adversaries, in other words, for propaganda purposes. Several chroniclers use the prophecies about the breaking of the alliance by the eagle and the revolt of the roaring animal’s offspring to explain the inexplicable : the repeated revolts of Henry II’s sons against their father, which weakened the Plantagenet empire in the face of its external enemies. Gerald of Wales even claims that the King had a fresco painted in his palace at Winchester, showing an eagle being attacked by its four offspring, to represent himself and his seditious progeny. An iconographic project of this kind cannot but recall the two aforementioned prophecies. Justifying these internecine conflicts on the basis of a kind of predestination removed some of the moral responsibility from the Plantagenets, and made their mistakes more easily excusable by their subjects. These examples of the interpretation of Merlin’s prophecies in support of Henry II seem to be the exceptions that prove the rule about their subversive character in relation to Arthurian legend. The malleability of medieval prophecy, open to all comers, accounts for much of this divergence from the usual pro-Welsh and pro-Breton political character of the matière de Bretagne. Such prophecies were, in any case, most useful to the king in Celtic areas where they were more likely to be believed and thus were more likely to change the behaviour of those who heard them. According to Gerald of Wales, they helped through this unexpected ‘boomerang effect’ to discourage the Welsh and Irish warriors. Contrary to what might have been expected, they did indeed serve the purposes of the king of England. Everywhere else, however, the principal impact of the Arthurian legends upon the Plantagenets was either negative or neutral in effect. It was not easy for Henry II to turn the matière de Bretagne to his own advantage. The matière de Bretagne embodied the ideology of Celtic principalities set around the fringes of the Angevin empire : principalities that rejected the autocratic dictates of Henry II’s rule. The aura surrounding Arthur was hostile towards Henry. During Henry’s reign, Arthur remained a resistance leader, victorious over Anglo-Saxon invaders, living in an Otherworld whence he would, one day, return to lend his support to the Celtic peoples in their struggle against the Normans. That none of the learned men at the Plantagenet court decided to make Arthur the ancestor of Henry II, or chose to remind Henry of Arthur’s victories in Gaul, is surely highly significant. In the burlesque fiction by Étienne de Rouen, the mythical king protects the interests of Roland de Dinan and of those Breton nobles who took up arms against Henry. It is not easy to envisage Étienne’s Arthur being recruited to the cause of King Henry, who receives his protests but does so condescendingly. The most that Henry II could do was to ensure that the death of Arthur was proved to be an irrefutable fact, and to organise his burial in Christian soil. Furthermore, Henry   Aurell, L’Empire des Plantagenêt, 48–9.



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himself did not live to see the discovery of the Glastonbury tomb, which actually took place in the reign of his son Richard I. The passing from one generation to another here is itself not without significance. Far more than Henry himself, his sons contrived to make use of the mythical figure of Arthur. They even managed to recruit him to their political causes. According to Bertran de Born, Geoffrey made use of the legend of Arthur in Brittany to win the confidence of the Breton people at a time when Geoffrey was himself entering into alliances with Louis VII and Philip Augustus against his father, King Henry. The name given to his own son, against the wishes of Henry II, reflects a policy of resistance. Richard I encouraged the discovery of the Glastonbury tomb and gave Excalibur to Tancred of Sicily. And, on the day of his coronation, John wore Tristan’s sword. It was only at this point, towards the very end of the twelfth century, that the kings of England adopted Arthur as their ancestor. Did the continental fashion for courtly romances dealing with the matière de Bretagne somehow sanitise the figure of Arthur, making him popular beyond the limits of the Celtic world and, at the same time, considerably reducing his political significance ? This is a possibility. But the ideological impact of King Arthur, now king of the English rather than king of the Britons, remained intact. It was nonetheless misappropriated, blatantly and paradoxically, to serve the purposes of the Angevin monarchy, to the detriment of the Celtic peoples. The proof lies in the way that, a century later, Edward I used it to provide historical camouflage to justify his invasion of Wales and his attempts to conquer Scotland. By comparison, the few indications we have that Edward’s ancestor, Henry II, sought to appropriate the matière de Bretagne seem entirely innocent. Leaving aside prophecy, this manipulation of Arthur at Henry’s court amounted to little more than heraldic tribute or very occasional indications of partiality, lost somewhere in the romans fleuves. It certainly does not suggest a deliberate deployment of ideology. If Henry II’s manipulation of Arthur had any political dimension, this dimension is rather to be found in the prestige that such allusions gave to Henry II and his wife. To appear as generous patrons of writers of romance, of poets and of story-tellers who attended their court, even on an occasional basis, was a form of propaganda that, however vague and diffuse it may have been, was still an undoubted success. We should note in this connection the reputation that Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine enjoyed in the thirteenth century among the translators and continuators of Geoffrey of Monmouth, of Wace and of Chrétien de Troyes. In the years around 1200, Layamon’s making the Queen the main dedicatee of the AngloNorman Brut is highly significant. Prologues and epilogues to French Arthurian   J. Gillingham, The Angevin Empire, 2nd edn (London 2001), 118.  R. S. Loomis, ‘Edward I, Arthurian Enthusiast’, Speculum, 38 (1953), 114–27.

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romances afford her husband an equally dominant role in literary patronage. At the same period, the Queste du Saint Graal, the Mort le Roi Artu and, a few decades later, several versions of the Prose Tristan and Guiron le Courtois, made Henry II the primary dedicatee of the narrative and even an emblematic patron-figure, cast in the mould of Solomon, the wise king, or of Arthur himself, to whom the knights of the Round Table recounted their adventures when they returned to Arthur’s court. The miniatures of these manuscripts depict the royal couple, Henry and Eleanor, seated in majesty on two thrones, receiving the works of the writers in their entourage. Probably these later writers confused one of Henry II’s most famous courtiers, Walter Map (c.1140–1209), to whom they wrongly attributed several of their prose romances, with the archdeacon Walter of Oxford, the friend of Geoffrey of Monmouth whose Breton ‘liber vetustissimus’ Geoffrey claimed to have translated in his Historia. Whether consciously or otherwise, this fusion provided a posteriori support for the notion of literary patronage bestowed by Henry II and his wife, whose femininity was indispensable to the idea of patronage combined with courtoisie. Fiction thus grew more potent than the meagre reality of history.  E. Baumgartner, ‘Figures du destinateur : Salomon, Arthur, le roi Henri d’Angleterre’, in AngloNorman Anniversary Essays, ed. Short, 1–10.   BN MS fr. 123 (Lancelot), fol. 229.

Index Note :  The entries in this index for contemporary authors (e.g. Walter Map, Gerald of Wales) and particular contemporary works (e.g. Dialogus de Scaccario, Glanvill ) are limited to pages where the individual author (or source) is named and discussed or quoted in the text. Simple footnote references to these authors and sources have not been indexed. Only those contemporary authors mentioned in more than two places in the text are included in the index. advowson, see under England, legal reforms Angevin (Plantagenet) empire  1–2, 86, 122, 378, 383 Anglo-Norman realm  85, 86 literary metaphor for  335–9 Anjou, county of  97 coinage of  260 counts of  47, 345–6, 355–6, 383 education of  189–90 ‘Plantagenêt’, origins of name  363 see also Geoffrey Plantagenet seneschal of, Stephen of Tours  289, 296, 297 n. 4 Aquitaine  50, 73, 122, 288, 296, 310, 369–70, 377 charters of Henry II issued in  282–3 see also Eleanor of Aquitaine ; Henry II, duke of Aquitaine ; Poitou ; Richard I Arthur, legendary king of the Britons, see Ma­ tière de Bretagne Arthur, duke of Brittany, grandson of Henry II, see under Brittany Arundel, d’Aubigny earls of  91, 198, 294, 315 William I  24, 45, 290, 293 William II  291, 293 associative kingship  196 assemblies of aristocracy under Henry II  117– 23, 309 ; see also Henry II, Courts assizes, 224, 226–32 ‘assize of essoiners’  225–6

Assize of Arms (1181)  229 Clarendon (1166)  181, 224–5, 228, 229, 234, 251–2, 267 exchange of new money for old  (1180)  269 Northampton (1176)  181, 209, 224–5, 229–30, 232–4, 237, 252, 267 novel disseisin  226 Windsor (1179)  209, 226–7, 230, 234 Woodstock (1184)  230 see also under Normandy, justice in Aumale, counts of  92 Hawise  99 William  90, 291, 293 Auvergne, dispute over  57, 61 Avranches : bishops of  122 ‘compromise’ of (1172)  175–7, 182, 199

Balliol, Jocelin de  289 Barre, Master Richard  208, 305 Barri, Gerald de, see Wales, Gerald of Bath, bishops of : Reginald  183 n. 2 Robert 26 Bayeux : bishops of  75, 122 Henry  289, 293 Philip  289, 293, 296 ducal assizes held at  103, 105–6

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Becket, Thomas, chancellor of Henry II and archbishop of Canterbury : chancellor  159, 168–9, 171, 185, 190–94, 196, 197, 288, 289, 292, 293, 295, 313, 314, 317, 319 consecration as archbishop  198 correspondence of  18 cult of  126–7, 174, 311, 330 dispute with Henry II  18, 58–60, 72, 76–7, 154–5, 170, 171–2, 181, 230, 312, 313, 316, 328 murder of  119–20, 171, 174, 310, 317, 324, 380 Belet, family  300–301 Michael  290, 300–301 Robert  300–301, 329 Berry, dispute over  56–7, 122 Bigod, Hugh, see Norfolk Biset, Manasser, dapifer /steward  24 n. 5, 44, 289, 292, 295, 297 Blois, Peter of  186, 278, 302, 319 n. 1, 320, 340, 341 letters of  2, 18, 189, 284, 302–4, 316 on court of Henry II  302, 304, 308, 310, 325, 329, 330, 342–3, 354 on Henry the Young King  189–90, 201, 302–3 Bordeaux, William archbishop of  205 Born, Bertrand de  186, 194, 201, 212, 342, 358, 369, 386, 393 Bourges, archbishopric and city of, see Berry Brittany  50, 62, 97, 379, 387 dukes (counts) of : Arthur, posthumous son of Geoffrey  387–8, 389, 393 Eudo de Porhoët 119, 331, 379 Geoffrey, son of Henry II,  60, 62, 198, 206, 210, 290, 293, 294, 295, 386–7, 393 betrothal to Constance of Brittany  379 Bur-le-Roi, courts held at  118, 119, 205, 312 Caen  103–5, 175 assizes at, see under Normandy, justice in Christmas court at (1182) 120–21 exchequer at, see Normandy, exchequer of inquest at (1172), see Infeudationes militum Canterbury : archbishops of  165

Hubert Walter  180, 318 Richard of Dover  175, 183 n. 2, 204 Theobald  26, 155–6, 158–64, 168, 169, 170, 171, 289, 293 Thomas Becket, see Becket, Thomas elections of archbishops  178, 204 mint of  262–3, 268 Canville, Richard de  289 Capetians, see France, kings of cartae baronum  251, 253 castles, 33–4, 38, 96, 97, 239–40 confiscation of  101–2 construction of  255 decommissioning of  38, 39–40 provisioning of  255 see also Devizes, Dover, Gisors, Orford, Windsor chamberlains  297 n. 4 Tancarville, William de  94, 120, 207, 298, 315 see also under Fitz Gerald ; Fitz Stephen chancellors  283, 283 n. 3 ; see also under Becket, Thomas chancery, royal  235, 278 n. 2, 283, 286–7, 310 seal of Henry II  283, 283 n. 3. Chester : Richard Peche, bishop of  183 earls of  91, 98 Ranulf II  24 n. 5, 27, 29, 32 n. 2, 115 Chichester, bishops of : Hilary  26, 159, 161–2, 165, 290 John  183 n. 2 Seffrid  291 chivalry  213,  328 Clare, earls of Hertfordshire  288 Clarendon : Assize of, see under Assizes ‘Constitutions of ’  171–4, 177, 181–2, 183, 199, 204, 224, 228 coinage : exchangers, administration by  268–70 immobilization of  260 see also under Anjou ; England common law  223, 239–40 ; see also England, legal reforms constables : Essex, Henry of 289, 295, 296, 298, 315 Hommet, Richard du  24 n. 5, 44, 46, 94, 109–15, 119, 166, 289, 292, 311, 314, 317



Index

Hommet, William du  94, 100 n. 3, 110, 112, 114, 115, 289 Constitutio Domus Regis  329, 330 Cornwall, Reginald earl of  24 n. 5, 25 n. 7, 46, 163, 289, 292, 293, 317 Courcy, family  94 ; see also seneschals Courtenay, family, in France 295 Reginald de  289, 295 Coutances, Walter of, see under Rouen, Archbishops Cressy, Hugh de  289 crusading  52, 299 Second Crusade  45, 51, 125 Third Crusade  84, 265, 357, 389 Dammartin, counts of  92 Aubry  92 n. 4, 93 Devizes, Wiltshire : castle  25, 33 Dialogus de Scaccario  7, 180, 248, 254, 257, 266, 291 Diceto (of Diss), Ralph  25, 42, 186 chronicle of  2, 11, 24, 40, 134, 270, 387 on Henry II  132–3, 180, 197, 259, 324 on Henry the Young King  194, 211 Dol, archbishopric of  115 Dover : castle  255 sea-crossings from  39 Dublin  137, 148 fleet of, sent against Welsh  136 visit of Henry II  309, 327 Lawrence O’Toole (Lorcán Ua Tuathail) archbishop of  126–7, 149 see also Ireland Durham : Hugh du Puiset, bishop of  289, 293 mint of  263 Eleanor of Aquitaine  127, 188, 193, 197, 200, 370 court of  309 criticism of  3–4, 6 by contemporaries  345, 363 literary patronage of  359, 365–6, 393–4 marriages of  49, 295, 369 rebellion of (1173)  207 Ely, bishops of : Geoffrey Ridel  180–81, 228, 289, 292, 293, 294, 313

397

Nigel  44–5, 290 England : Church of  180 papal curia, appeals to  155–7, 159–61, 163, 165, 167, 170, 173, 176, 181, 182 relations with papacy  154, 174, 175–7, 183 coinage of  257–77, 378 deterioration of  266–8 mints  257, 259, 261–5, 268, 270–72, 273–4, 275–7 moneyers  257, 260–65, 268–71, 272, 275–7 reform of  259, 260, 268–70 silver, sources of  272–4, 275 economy of  244–8 inflation of prices  244–8, 254–6 money supply  246–7 exchequer of  44, 248–9, 250–51, 252, 253–4, 266, 292, 299 pipe rolls of  7, 248–9, 253, 257, 264, 280, 299–300 treasury in  228 legal reforms of Henry II  170, 172, 181, 215–41 advowson  164, 165, 180, 221, 226–7, 234, 239 county courts, procedure in  222–3, 239, 240 replevin, plea of  223 tolt and pone procedure  220, 222–3, 227, 230, 239 essoins  226 exchequer, court of  216, 217, 321, 232, 235, 240 eyres  216, 217, 222, 231, 232, 235, 240, 252, 254 grand assize  219, 220, 228, 230–31, 234, 240 juries  219, 236 personal status  221, 234 pleas of the crown  217, 221–2, 234, 239 petty assizes  219–20, 221, 234, 236–7, 240, 252 royal justices  217, 231–3, 235, 241, 252 writ of right  164 n. 3, 220, 221, 238–9 writs, standardised  217–19, 222, 233–4, 235, 252 written records  217, 235

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Index

England (cont.) : population of  245–6 royal demesne (terra regis)  110–11, 250–51, 253 Essex, Henry of, see constables Essex, earls of  91, 294 Geoffrey de Mandeville  290, 293 William de Mandeville 93, 96, 119, 289, 293 account roll of  99 Eu, counts of  92 Évreux : bishops of  99, 122 Giles  290 John  290 Rotrou, see Rouen, archbishops counts of  48, 92 Simon  100, 116 exchequer, see under England ; Normandy Exeter, Bartholomew, bishop of  183, 290 eyres, see under England, legal reforms Falaise, Treaty of, see under Rebellions Ferrars, earls of Derby  288 finances of Henry II  242–56 king’s chamber, financial administration of  248, 264, 299 treasuries  255, 272, 275, 299 see also under England, exchequer ; Normandy, exchequer Fitz Audelin, William  148,  200, 289, 315 Fitz Gerald, family  297 Warin, chamberlain  24 n. 5, 44, 289, 292, 297 Fitz Gilbert, Richard (Strongbow), see Pembroke Fitz Hamo, William  25 n. 7, 289 Fitz Nigel, Richard, see Dialogus de Scaccario ; London, bishops of Fitz Ralph, William  289 Fitz Stephen, Ralph, chamberlain  289, 297 Flanders, counts of 125 Philip of Alsace  52–3, 57, 58, 193, 201, 212, 213, 377 Thierry  38, 52 Foliot, Gilbert, see London, bishops of Foliot, Robert, see Hereford forests  180, 246 forest laws  180, 253 Fougères, Master Stephen of, bishop of Rennes 278, 286, 290, 294, 323

France, aristocracy of, wooed by Henry II  115–16 France, kings of : charters of  284 Louis VI  48, 65, 68, 84, 124 Louis VII  47–61, 63–5, 69, 74, 74 n. 1, 85, 122, 123–5, 135, 195, 314, 377 Historia gloriosi regis Ludovici, 69, 71, 85, 124 daughters of  377 Philip Augustus  48, 52, 57, 60–62, 65, 125, 185, 255, 321 coronation of  193 France, Marie de  349, 354, 366, 375–6, 380, 384 Frederick Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor 51, 357, 372 Geoffrey of Anjou, brother of Henry II  49, 125 Geoffrey of Brittany, son of Henry II, see under Brittany Geoffrey Plantagenet, count of Anjou and duke of Normandy  48, 210, 316, 345, 363 homage to Louis VII  69, 85 Geoffrey Plantagenet, illegitimate son of Henry II, bishop-elect of Lincoln  182, 290, 315, 327, 333 ; see also under chancellors Germanus, Master, scribe of royal charters  286 Giffard, Walter, earl of Buckingham 288 estates of 109–15 Gisors  56, 80, 72, 77–8, 101–2, 127 elm of, 80 see also Vexin, the Glanvill, legal treatise known as  170, 180, 215, 218, 221–31, 233 Glanville, family, as courtiers  318 Ranulf de  289, 292, 298, 305, 318 Gloucester, earls of  91, 99, 104, 150, 348 Robert  25, 28, 189, 347, 366–9, 371, 376 Richard, son of  94 William  25 n. 1, 290, 293 Grandmont, Order of  122 Henry I, king of England and duke of Normandy  65, 68, 75, 84 death of, omens of  335 funeral procession of  99 itinerary of  308 model for Henry II  48, 202, 319, 333



Index

model for Henry the Young King  202 sepulchre of  199 Henry II : accession of, 24–46 anger, displays of  311–12 brothers of, see Geoffrey of Anjou ; William charters of  18, 29 dating clauses  282–4 diplomatic of  281–2 scribes of  286–7 witnesses of  284–99 coronation of  197 court of  27–8, 86, 278–334, 341–3 entertainment at  320–21 etiquette of  323–6, 328, 334 night life of  320, 330–32 courtiers of  284–6, 291, 304, 305, 310, 314–18, 325 religious patronage of  332 courts of (judicial)  118, 119, 198, 203, 311 ; see also under England, legal reforms ; Normandy, justice in crown-wearing  197, 326 death of  80–81 duke of Aquitaine  49, 56–7, 73 duke of Normandy  24–46, 67–8, 74, 85–128 charters of 26–9 earldoms, policy towards  294 education of  28, 189, 367–8 father of, see Geoffrey Plantagenet, count of Anjou and duke of Normandy finances of, see finances heir to English monarchy, 41 heraldic device (lions/leopards), see heraldry historians of  1–23 Boussard, Jacques  15, 89–90 Callcott, Maria, Lady 5 Delisle, Léopold 14–15, 280 Eyton, Revd R. W. 12–13, 280–81 Foreville, Raymonde 15 Green, J.R. 9 Hume, David  2–3, 8 Jolliffe, J. E. A.  16–17, 280 Lyttelton, George, 1st Lord  4, 23 Michelet, Jules 13 Stubbs, William 7, 9–11 Thierry, Augustin, 13 Warren, W. L. 17–18, 134, 152, 185, 187, 362

399

homage to kings of France  48–9, 53–4, 63–84 household of  310 humour of  285, 319 hunting  321–3, 327–8, 330, 364, 374 illegitimate offspring of  331 ; see also Geoffrey Plantagenet, illegitimate son itinerary of  25, 100–101, 136, 280–84, 304, 306–7, 328 knighting of  42, 130 legal reforms of  19 ; see also under England legislation of, see assizes literacy of  190, 201, 342, 343 literature, patronage of  189–90, 201, 327, 341, 359–61, 362, 364–6, 370–81, 393–4 ; see also Matière de Bretagne marriage of  49 mistresses of  79, 331, 374 patronage of supporters  110–17 piety of  328, 332 chapel of  310, 328 Marian devotion  307–8 see also relics regal display by  197–8, 308–9, 327–8 residences of  313, 374–5, 392 sons of  60, 119, 184, 302, 392 courts of  309 provision for  205 see also Brittany, Geoffrey, duke of ; Geoffrey Plantagenet ; Henry the Young King ; John, king of England ; Richard I, king of England will of  275, 299 Henry the Young King  60, 127, 176, 183, 184–214, 375 coronation of  59, 174, 184, 185, 196–8, 205, 206 courts of  118, 195 n. 2, 205–6, 309 cult of  188 death of  184 burial of  188 duke of Normandy, model of  206 education of  188–9, 199–203 household of Thomas Becket  190–92 William Marshal, with  200 government, participation in  198, 209 homage to Henry II  63, 67, 75, 198 homage to Louis VII  55, 72, 76, 77 household of  193, 195, 200, 202, 204, 207–8, 212, 305, 342

400

Index

Henry the Young King (cont.) : knighting of  194 marriage of  53, 55, 74, 78, 169, 192, 194 rebellions of, see rebellions seal of  194, 196 n. 6, 208 tournaments, participation in  192, 196, 201, 209, 211–13, 323 heraldry  324, 373–4, 378–9 Hereford : Robert Foliot, bishop of  183 n. 2 Roger, earl of  24 n. 5 homage  37–8, 64–5, 67, 72–3, 75, 83, 83 n. 1 ; see also under Geoffrey Plantagenet, count of Anjou and duke of Normandy ; Henry II ; Henry the Young King ; John, king of England ; Richard I Hommet, family of Le  94, 109–15 ; see also Constables Howden, Roger of  70–71, 73, 80–81, 150, 179, 186, 211, 225, 230, 278, 284, 302, 387 chronicles of  2, 11, 40, 70–71, 77, 80, 102 hunting  80 n. 1, 363 ; see also Henry II, hunting Ilchester, Richard of, see Winchester Infeudationes militum, see under Normandy Ireland : Anglo-Norman invasion of  19, 137–8, 140–41, 152, 373, 389, 391–2 expedition of Henry II  132, 138–9, 205–6, 212, 307, 308, 309, 312 bull Laudabiliter  158 criticism of  138–9, 148–9 military support from  136–7, 144 revenue from  299 Ruaidri Ua Conchobair, king of Connacht 138, 140, 143, 148, 149 Treaty of Windsor  140 see also John, king of England Jerusalem, Knights Templar of  127–8 Jewish community  245 John, king of England  79–80 accession of  82 education of  199 finances of  255–6, 260 homage to Philip Augustus  65–6, 82–3 Ireland, lord of, 148, 149, 151, 204, 206, 285 n. 2, 373 marriage to Isabel of Gloucester  150

jongleurs, see troubadours Laudabiliter, see under Ireland Le Goulet, Treaty of (1200)  82 Le Mans, William Passavant, bishop of  168, 291 Leicester, earls of  91 Robert II  26–7, 28, 42, 44, 46 n. 9, 289, 293, 298 justiciar  44, 165 Robert III  119, 198 Lillebonne  92, 115 ; see also Normandy, Church of Lincoln, bishops of : St Hugh of Avalon  307, 312, 319, 326, 328 Vita of  11 Robert de Chesney  29, 165, 289, 293 Walter of Coutances, see under Rouen, archbishops see also Geoffrey Plantagenet, illegitimate son of Henry II Lisieux, bishops of  122 Arnulf, 158, 163, 169 n. 2, 204, 289, 293, 295, 314, 316–17 justiciar of Normandy, 44 literature, Anglo-Norman vernacular  349–54, 366, 368, 371–2 ; see also Song of Roland ; Wace London  43, 308, 372 bishops of : Gilbert Foliot  29, 171–2, 289 Letter Multiplicem nobis 6, 154–5 Richard fitz Nigel  11, 180, 186, 278, 291, 290 Saint-Mère-Eglise, William de  290, 293 entrance of Duke Henry (1153)  32 lordship and economic organization  96–9, 244–6 Louis VI, Louis VII, see France, kings of Lucy, family of courtiers  318 Godfrey de, see Winchester, bishops of Richard de  24 n. 5, 44, 46, 289, 292, 298, 317, 318 justiciar  228 Maine, county of  97, 260 Malmesbury, William of  349, 351 on the Anarchy  39–40, 41 natural phenomena, political interpretations of  335–40



Index

Mandeville, see Essex, earls of Map, Walter  11, 278, 333, 340, 341, 347, 348, 360, 394 on the court of Henry II  284–6, 292, 308, 309, 315, 320, 326–7, 330, 331, 341–2, 343–4, 355 on Eleanor of Aquitaine  345 on Henry I  202 on Henry II  201, 299, 310, 311, 344 on Henry the Young King  186, 213 on Louis VII  51 Marshal, William : History of William the Marshal 186, 192, 194, 196, 201, 203, 211, 212, 214 see also Pembroke, earls of Matière de Bretagne  348, 360, 362–94 Plantagenet ideology of  362, 364, 381–94 see also France, Marie de ; Monmouth, Geoffrey of ; Troyes, Chrétien de Matilda, the Empress, mother of Henry II  42, 128, 197, 310, 325, 345, 380 England, campaigns in  25, 41, 258, 367–8 Ireland, opposition to invasion of  133 Matilda, daughter of Henry II, wife of Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony : literary patronage of  357–9, 372 Meulan, counts of  92, 99 Robert  92 Waleran  90, 93, 125, 375–6 military service  89, 109 summons to  122 money, transferred from England to the Continent  255 ; see also under England ; Normandy, Monetarisation Monmouth, Geoffrey of  348, 349, 360, 367, 394 Historia Regum Britanniae 367–8, 371, 376, 384, 385, 394 Vita Merlini  390 Montmirail-en-Brie, peace talks at (1169)  59– 60, 71–2, 73, 75–6, 77 Mont-Saint-Michel, abbey of  53, 88–9, 356 Mortain, counts of  92, 98 Nantes, county of  50 Nantes, court held at (1169)  203, 379 ; see also Brittany Neubourg, see seneschals Newburgh, William of  139, 151, 186, 387

401

chronicle of  11, 36–7 Niger, Master Ralph  139, 202–4, 295 Norfolk, earls of  294 Hugh Bigod, 91, 290, 293, 295, 332 Roger Bigod  198 Normandy  85–128 Angevin conquest of (1144)  43, 48, 85, 124 aristocracy of  87–123 common action by  99–100, 119, 123 consultation of  117 cross-Channel landholdings of  39, 91–6 lordship of  96–9 marriages of  101, 114 residences of  97 bailliages in  90, 91 Church of  122, 168, 170 defence of  255 exchequer of  7, 91, 102, 103, 112 court of  103, 109 hearth-tax ( fouage)  102 Infeudationes militum  87–90, 109, 118 justice in  102–9 assizes  104–9, 118, 120–21, 123, 311 ducal courts  103–9 lordship in  96–7 marches of, see Vexin monetarisation of  97, 99 Northampton, Assize of, see under assizes Norwich, bishops of : John of Oxford,  180–81, 289, 292, 293, 294 William de Turba,  159, 165, 183 Orford, Suffolk, castle  255 Oxford, Council of (1180)  268 Oxford, John of, see Norwich Oxford, Vere earls of, 96, 288, 294, 315 Aubrey de Vere  298 papal schism (1159)  168, 170 Pembroke, earls of : Richard fitz Gilbert (Strongbow)  91, 139, 147, 376 William Marshal  203, 206, 212, 323, 376 adultery, allegation of  120, 195 Henry II, memories of  81 Henry the Young King, companion of  185, 194, 195–6, 200, 207 marriage of  95, 111, 376

402

Index

Perche, counts of  99, 295 Philip Augustus, see France, kings of Plantagenet empire, see Angevin empire Poitou, county of  97, 122, 288, 296 ; see also Richard I, count of Poitou Ponthieu  92, 371 popes : Adrian IV  155–7, 158, 159, 165, 166, 167, 168 Alexander III  51, 58, 165, 168, 171, 172, 174, 176, 183, 204, 302–3 rebellions : of 1173–4  60, 63, 91, 94, 98, 100, 110, 142, 144, 145–7, 178, 182, 184, 195, 201, 207–8, 209–10, 250, 295, 296, 302, 317 Treaty of Falaise  148, 151 of 1183  60, 124, 184, 210, 357 Redvers earls of Devon  288 regalia, offered to Church  197 relics : possessed by Henry II  307, 328 translation of 199 Edward the Confessor (1163) 382 Richard I and Richard II, dukes of Normandy, at Fécamp (1162) 122 Richard I, king of England  125–6, 127, 193, 357, 389 Arthurian ideology, use of  389–90, 393 betrothal to Alice  78–9 count of Poitou  60, 79, 184, 187 n. 6, 197 n. 6, 198, 210, 212, 294, 344 finances of  255–6, 260, 299 homage to Louis VII  72, 76–7 homage to Philip Augustus  65–6, 80, 83, 83 n. 1 Ridel, Geoffrey, see Ely, bishops of Rievaulx, Ailred of, 41–2, 190 De Genealogia Regum Anglorum  41–2 Rouen  43, 309, 313 archbishops of  99, 119 Hugh  168 Rotrou  189, 201, 289, 293, 295 Walter of Coutances  289, 293, 294, 295, 314, 382 charters issued at  282 ducal assizes held at  103, 105–7 siege of (1174)  128, 201 Rouen, Étienne de (Stephen of )  380

Draco Normannicus  72, 74, 380, 385–6 Roumare, earls of Lincoln  288 William de, 91 royal demesne (terra regis), see under England Sainte-Maure, Benoît de  341, 349, 351, 359, 366, 382 Saint-Mère-Eglise, William de, see London, bishops of Salisbury, John of  40–41, 46, 71, 278, 314, 341, 354 disgrace of  157–9 on the court of Henry II  46 on Eleanor of Aquitaine 345 on the English Church  165, 167, 197 on the French  61 on homage to the king of France  72–3, 75 letters of  18, 159–61, 316 Policraticus  191, 202, 320 Salisbury : bishops of : Jocelin  290 Roger  25 earls of  91 n. 4 Patrick  24 n. 5, 25 n. 7 Scotland  129–32, 151 Scots, kings of  42, 45, 379 claims over northern England  129–32, 142–3, 259, 260, 272 David  42, 130 Malcolm ( Máel Coluim) IV  131, 199 homage to Henry II  131, 134 William ‘the Lion’ 76, 141, 143, 148, 193 sea crossings  305–8 seals  301, 329, 332, 363 n. 4 of Henry II, see under chancery Sées : bishops of  316 Froger  289, 294 counts of  92 John 92, 117 seneschals, 100, 117 Courcy, Robert de  24 n. 5, 94 Courcy, William de  94 Lanvallay, William de  289, 384 Neubourg, Robert du  94, 298 silver, sources of, see under England, Coinage. Song of Roland  350–51, 354–9, 360, 361, 372 ; see also literature, Anglo-Norman vernacular



Index

Stephen, king of England  24–41, 65, 85, 124, 130, 196, 243, 258–9, 367 sons of  32–3 Eustace  48, 49, 65, 66–7, 68, 125, 196 William  36, 38 Tancarville family  94 ; see also chamberlains taxation  253 terra regis, see England, royal demesne Tilbury, Gervase of  187, 202, 203, 214, 341 Torigni, Robert de, abbot of Mont-SaintMichel  67–8, 88–9,187, 193, 205–6, 369, 382 chronicles of  2, 11–12, 74, 75–6, 132 Toulouse  62 campaign (1159)  53–4, 192, 212 Raymond V, count of  50, 54–5 tournaments  185, 192, 196, 209, 211, 213, 323–4 Tours, Stephen of, see Anjou, seneschal of towns, development of  86, 245, 271–2, 276–7 troubadours 186, 342, 359, 369, 370, 387 jongleurs  354, 355 minstrels  320 see also Born, Bertrand de Troyes, Chrétien de  348, 366, 370, 376–80, 384, 385 Cligès  211, 378, 385 Erec et Enide  203, 378–9, 384, 385 Vexin, the  48, 61, 69, 78, 79–80, 96, 101–2, 124 dowry of Margaret of France  55–6, 74, 78, 169, 185, 193–4 Wace  341, 348–9, 359, 370–71, 380, 391 Roman de Brut 370, 375, 391 Roman de Rou  74, 77, 201–2, 213, 326, 348–9, 351, 356, 363, 365–6, 382 Wales : campaigns of Henry II against  132, 134–7, 152, 212, 315 princes of : Owain Cyfeiliog  379

403

Owain Gwynedd  132, 134–6, 144 Rhys ap Gruffudd (the Lord Rhys)  132, 134, 136, 138, 145, 150–51 rebellion in  134–8, 145–7, 149–50, 388 submission by leaders (1175–7)  148 Wales, Gerald of  (Gerald de Barri, Giraldus Cambrensis) 12, 151, 178, 203–4, 278, 285, 327, 337–8, 341, 344–5, 348, 360 on Eleanor of Aquitaine  345 on Henry II  2,  129, 152, 287, 295, 322–3, 343–4, 345–7, 388, 392 finances of  242–3, 250, 251, 256, 299 on Henry the Young King  186, 187 on Ireland and the Irish  138, 139, 152, 158, 389, 391, 392 on Wales and the Welsh  134, 138, 379, 390–91, 392 Walter, Hubert, see Canterbury, archbishops of Warenne : earls of  91, 99, 301 Hamelin  294 William  125 Reginald de  45, 46 n. 9, 301 Westminster : Charter of (1153)  32, 34–7, 45, 238 charters of Henry II issued at  282 William, brother of Henry II  162, 289 Winchester  271, 272 bishops of : Godfrey de Lucy  181, 290, 293 Henry of Blois  26, 31, 32, 183, 291 Richard of Ilchester (archdeacon of Poitou) 180–81, 183 n. 2, 228, 268, 287, 289, 292, 293, 294, 295, 317 charters of Henry II issued at  282 Winchester, Treaty of (1153) 30–32, 34–7, 76, 258 Windsor, castle  255 Windsor, Assize of, see under assizes Woodstock, Assize of, see under assizes Wool trade  245, 246, 274 Worcester, Alfred bishop of  290 York, Roger, archbishop of  174, 289, 293

Also of interest King John: New Interpretations Edited by S. D. CHURCH An immensely valuable corpus of recent research, consistently of the highest order... destined to be extensively cited. HISTORY This excellent volume restores balance to our view of John and his reign. ALBION The reign of King John (1199-1216) has provided historians with fertile ground for inspiration and argument, and this volume adds to the debate, offering ideas and arguments from leading historians, and covering all the major issues involved. It is coherently formulated around explorations of the two major events of his reign: the loss of his continental inheritance, and the ending of his reign in the disaster of civil war. Topics cover all aspects of his life and career, from his reputation, the economy, the Norman aristocracy, the church, justice and the empire, to his mother Eleanor of Aquitaine and his wife Isabella of Angouleme.

Thomas Becket and his Biographers MICHAEL STAUNTON In the wake of his murder in December 1170, a large number of Lives of Thomas Becket were produced. They provide a witness to his life and death and the dramatic events in which he was involved, but they are also works of great literary value, complex and sophisticated. This book, the first to be devoted to the biographers and their works, examines the individual Lives, and analyses the biographers’ treatment of the major themes in Thomas’s life – conversion, conflict, trial, exile and martyrdom – in the light of contemporary hagiographical, historical and theological writing and canon law. It raises points of major significance for the study of intellectual and literary life in the central middle ages and provides an important reassessment of the Becket conflict and Thomas Becket himself.

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