Henry II: New Interpretations

HENRY II NEW INTERPRETATIONS

Edited by CHRISTOPHER HARPER-BILL and NICHOLAS VINCENT

Henry II new interpretations

HENRY II NEW INTERPRETATIONS edited by

Christopher Harper-Bill and

Nicholas Vincent

THE BOYDELL PRESS

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

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

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

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

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

Contents List of Illustrations

vii

Editors’ Preface

ix

List of Abbreviations

xi

Introduction : Henry ii and the Historians Nicholas Vincent

1

The Accession of Henry ii Edmund King

24

Henry ii and Louis vii Jean Dunbabin

47

Doing Homage to the King of France John Gillingham

63

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

85

Henry ii and England’s Insular Neighbours Seán Duffy

129

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

154

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

184

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

215

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

242

vi

Contents Henry ii and the English Coinage Martin Allen

257

The Court of Henry ii Nicholas Vincent

278

Literary Culture at the Court of Henry ii Ian Short

335

Henry ii and Arthurian Legend Martin Aurell

362

Index

395

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

88

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

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

105 108 113

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

© Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Table 1

The Mints and Moneyers of Henry ii

259 261 269

276

The Court of Henry II Table 1

The most frequent witnesses to charters of Henry II

289

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

List of Abbreviations AA SS

Acta Sanctorum

Acta

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

Actes Henri II

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

Actes de Philippe Auguste

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

AD

Archives Départementales

ADC

Caen, AD du Calvados

ADO

Alençon, AD de l’Orne

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

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

Ann. angevines

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

Ann. Mon.

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

ANS

Anglo-Norman Studies

Antiqs. Journ.

The Antiquaries Journal

archbp

archbishop

Arch. Journ.

Archaeological Journal

ASC

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

BAA

British Archaeological Association

BAR

British Archaeological Reports

Battle Chronicle

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

xii

Abbreviations

BEC

Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes

Bib. Mun.

Bibliothèque Municipale

BIHR

Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research

BL

London, British Library

BN

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France

BNJ

British Numismatic Journal

Book of Fees

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

Book of Walden

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

bp

bishop

Brand, English Coinage

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

BSAN

Bulletin de la Société des Antiquaires de Normandie

Burgess, Wace

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

CA

Département du Calvados

Cal. Docs. France

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

CCM

Cahiers de civilisation médiévale

CNRS

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

CRR

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

C & S

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

CUL

Cambridge University Library

Dialogus

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

Diceto

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

Duggan, Becket Correspondence

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



Abbreviations

xiii

EEA

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

EcHR

Economic History Review

EHD ii

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

EHR

English Historical Review

English Lawsuits

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

EU

Département de l’Eure

EYC

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

Eyton, Itinerary

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

Fasti 1066–1300

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

Foedera

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

Gallia Christiana

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

GEC Complete Peerage

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

Gerald, Expugnatio

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

Gervase

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

Gesta Regum

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

Gesta Stephani

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

Giraldi Cambrensis Opera

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

Glanvill

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

xiv

Abbreviations

Guillaume le Breton

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

Hist. ducs de Normandie

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

Hist. Guillaume le Maréchal

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

Historia Novella

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

History of William Marshal

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

HMSO

Her Majesty’s Stationery Office

Howden, Chronica

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

Howden, Gesta Regis

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

Howlett, Chronicles

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

HRH i

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

HSJ

Haskins Society Journal

Huntingdon

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

JEH

Journal of Ecclesiastical History

JMH

Journal of Medieval History

John of Hexham

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

Jolliffe, Angevin Kingship

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

Jordan Fantosme

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

LCGF

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

Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux

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

Letters of John of Salisbury

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



Abbreviations

xv

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

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

Map, De Nugis

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

MGH

Monumenta Germaniae Historica

MGH SRG

MGH Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum in usum Scholarum

MGH SS

MGH Scriptores

MN

Département de la Manche

Monasticon

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

MRH

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

MRSN

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

MTB

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

NC

Numismatic Chronicle

Newburgh

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

NMT Nelson’s Medieval Texts Norman Pipe Rolls

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

ns

new series

OMT

Oxford Medieval Texts

OR

Département de l’Orne

Orderic

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

os

old series

Oxford DNB

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

PBA

Proceedings of the British Academy

PL

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

xvi

Abbreviations

PR

Pipe Roll (as published by PRS)

PR 2–4 Henry II

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

PRS

Pipe Roll Society

Red Book

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

Regesta

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

Registres de Philippe Auguste

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

RHF

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

Rigord

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

RO Record Office Rot. Claus.

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

Rot. Norm.

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

Rot. Pat.

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

Royal Writs

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

RS Rolls Series SATF

Société des Anciens Textes Français

ser.

series

SM

Département de la Seine-Maritime

Statutes of the Realm

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

Torigni

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

VCH

Victoria County History

Wace

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



Abbreviations

xvii

Waltham

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

Warren, Henry II

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

Nicholas Vincent

Introduction : Henry II and the Historians

S

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



Nicholas Vincent

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

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



Introduction : Henry II and the Historians 

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



Nicholas Vincent

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



Introduction : Henry II and the Historians 

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



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



Introduction : Henry II and the Historians 

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



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



Introduction : Henry II and the Historians 

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

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

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



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

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



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

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



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

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



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

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

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



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

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



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

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



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

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

Edmund King

The Accession of Henry II

H

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



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

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



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

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



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

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



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

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



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

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



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

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



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

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

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



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

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



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

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

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



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

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

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



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

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

Jean Dunbabin

Henry II and Louis VII

P

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

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



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

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



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

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



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

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



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

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



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

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

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



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

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

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



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

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

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

John Gillingham

Doing Homage to the King of France

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

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



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

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



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

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

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



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

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

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

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



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

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



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As we see, John of Salisbury’s letter refers back to Henry II’s homage for Normandy ‘before he became king’ (i.e. in 1151), but not to an act of homage in 1155 or 1156. Why then have all modern historians taken Howden’s account of 1155/6 on trust ? Probably the conventional belief that ‘feudal ties’ were central to medieval political structures led them to assume that Henry must have done homage not just for Normandy but also, and explicitly, for his other French territories as well. French historians, for example, have traditionally placed so much weight on the notion of the lien vassalique as the force that kept France together under the king, that it is sometimes asserted that only after Henry II had done homage for Aquitaine in 1156 did the Aquitanians accept him as their lord. In fact, according to the Limousin chronicler Geoffrey de Vigeois, he had already been received ‘ut novus dux Aquitanorum’ at Limoges in the autumn of 1152. Thus although by the 1190s Roger of Howden himself evidently held the ‘modern’ assumption that Henry ‘must have’ done homage to Louis for all his lands in France, it would appear that no such consideration shaped the actions of the Aquitanians in the 1150s. At Montmirail Henry II emphatically recognised Louis VII as his lord, and did so in fulsome terms. This was part of his habitual style, a readiness to use obsequious words : a kind of deference that sometimes crossed the line between courtesy and hypocrisy. He no doubt calculated that no harm could be done by ut omnibus uteretur, abuteretur pro voluntate, retineret, auferret, da