England and its Rulers

1066 - 1307

Michael T. Clanchy

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781118736234
• eBook ISBN: 9781118736227
• Edition: 4
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

This is an updated and expanded edition of a classic introduction to medieval England from the reign of William the Conqueror to Edward I.

• Includes a new chapter on family and gender roles, revisions throughout to enhance the narrative flow, and further reading sections containing the most up-to-date sources
• Offers engaging and clear discussion of the key political, economic, social, and cultural issues of the period, by an esteemed scholar and writer
• Illustrates themes with lively, pertinent examples and important primary sources
• Assesses the reigns of key Norman, Angevin, and Plantagenet monarchs, as well as the British dimension of English history, the creation of wealth, the rise of the aristocracy, and more

1

England's Place in Medieval Europe

This book concerns the rulers of England and their aspirations in the period between the Norman Conquest of 1066 and the death of Edward I in 1307. During these two and a half centuries England was dominated by men from overseas. This trend had begun before 1066 with the rule of the Danish king Cnut (1016–35) and of the half-Norman Edward the Confessor (1042–66), and it lingered on after 1272 in the French-speaking court of Edward I (1272–1307) and his successors. Nevertheless the most significant period of overseas domination of political and cultural life in the English kingdom followed the Norman Conquest and continued into the twelfth century and beyond. When the Norman dynasty failed in the male line with the death of Henry I in 1135, England became the battleground between two of William the Conqueror's grandchildren, Stephen and the Empress Matilda. On Stephen's death the kingdom was inherited by Henry II (1154–89), who was count of Anjou in his own right and duke of Aquitaine by marriage. The area of the king of England's political concern had therefore widened beyond William the Conqueror's Normandy to include Anjou and the huge lands of Aquitaine and Poitou south of the Loire. This extension of power is described by historians – though never by contemporaries – as the ‘Angevin Empire’, implying an overlordship by the dynasty of Anjou over England and half of modern France. According to Gerald of Wales, Henry hoped to extend his rule beyond France to Rome and the empire of Frederick Barbarossa.

In leading Christendom in the crusade against Saladin, Richard I (1189–99) was following in the footsteps of the Angevin kings of Jerusalem as well as fulfilling promises made by Henry II. His death in the struggle with Philip Augustus of France and King John's subsequent loss of Normandy to Philip did not bring an end either to overseas influence in England or to the ambitions of its kings, as John hoped to regain Normandy from his base in Poitou and Aquitaine. He established the strategy, which was vigorously pursued by his successor Henry III (1216–72), of using Poitevins as administrators and war captains in England. Through them and the support of the papacy Henry hoped to construct a system of alliances which would win his family the huge inheritance in Italy and Germany of the greatest of the medieval emperors, Frederick II, and thus surpass the achievements of Henry II and Richard I. ‘We wish’, wrote Pope Alexander IV in 1255, ‘to exalt the royal family of England, which we view with special affection, above the other kings and princes of the world.’¹

The rebellion of 1258 against Henry's Poitevins and papal ambitions compelled both king and barons to recognize the separateness of England: the king by conceding the Norman and Angevin lands to Louis IX of France in 1259, and the barons by forming their revolutionary commune of England. As if to emphasize the persis-tence of overseas influence, that commune was led by a Frenchman, Simon de Montfort. This period of rebellion and civil war marked a turning point in the definition of English identity. Its rulers thereafter continued to pursue overseas ambitions, first in France in the Hundred Years War and then as a worldwide maritime power, but they did so now as heads of an English nation and not as alien warlords like William the Conqueror and Henry II. In order to emphasize the in-fluence of outsiders and at the same time to provide a chronological framework, this book is divided into parts comprising three periods each of about seventy years' duration: the Normans (comprising the reigns of William the Conqueror, William Rufus and Henry I); the Angevins (the reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I); the Poitevins (the reigns of John and Henry III). The titles ‘Normans’, ‘Angevins’ and ‘Poitevins’ are not intended to suggest that the rulers came ex-clusively from these regions, but that the king of England's predominant overseas connections shifted from Normandy in the eleventh century through Anjou in the twelfth to Poitou in the thirteenth. Edward I gave as high a priority as his predecessors to his possessions in France, while at the same time conducting large-scale wars in Wales and Scotland.

England and its conquerors

The English had developed a settled identity precociously early among the European powers. The Anglo-Saxon kings of the tenth century, building on the achievements of Offa in Mercia and Alfred in Wessex, had created a single kingdom. At its best, a sacrosanct king headed a well-defined structure of authority (consisting of shires, hundreds and boroughs), which used a uniform system of taxation and coinage and a common written language in the Old English of writs and charters. Even the fragility of these achievements, in the face of the Danish and Norman invasions of the eleventh century, encouraged a sense of common identity in adversity, as the kingdom's misfortunes were attributed in such works as Wulfstan's Sermon of the Wolf to the English to the sinfulness of the people rather than to the shortcomings of the political system. Monastic writers were therefore able to transmit to their successors the hope that the English kingdom would emerge intact from foreign domination. Thus Orderic Vitalis, who was sent to Normandy when still a child to become a monk, nevertheless identified fiercely with England's woes. Describing Norman atrocities after the rebellion of Edwin and Morcar, he upbraids the Normans who ‘did not ponder contritely in their hearts that they had conquered not by their own strength but by the will of almighty God, and had subdued a people that was greater, richer and older than they were’.² This sense of Englishness, transmitted like the English language as a mother tongue despite its disappearance in official circles, persisted as a powerful undercurrent throughout the twelfth century to emerge as a political force in the thirteenth. The isolated monks who continued with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle after the Norman Conquest, noting for example that the year 1107 was the ‘forty-first of French rule in this country’, and the gregarious mothers and wet nurses who naturally spoke to their infants in English had together saved the nation's identity.

The unity of the English kingdom at the time of the Conquest was a sign not of its modernity by eleventh-century standards but of its antiquity. Its centralized government was based on the models of imperial Rome and the Carolingian empire, whereas the tendency of the tenth and eleventh centuries had been away from royal centralization and towards aristocratic feudalism. Power had shifted from kings and their hierarchies of officials towards self-sufficient knights in their castles. Similarly the clergy were beginning to question the value of sanctified kings as their protectors and were demanding instead to be free from lay domination. ‘Who does not know’, asked Pope Gregory VII in 1081, ‘that kings and dukes originated from those who, being ignorant of God, strove with blind greed and insufferable presumption to dominate their equals, that is their fellow men, by pride, violence, treachery and murder? And when they try to force the priests of the Lord to follow them, can kings not best be compared to him who is the head over all the children of pride? The devil.’³ With the Norman Conquest and the civil wars of Stephen's and Henry II's reigns, England was therefore brought into the mainstream of European politics, where knights waged war from stone fortresses and clergy, educated at reformed monasteries and the new universities, claimed to be above royal power. The values and style of life of the two most admired Englishmen of the twelfth century, William the Marshal, the model of the new knighthood, and Thomas Becket, the martyr of the reformed clergy, would scarcely have been comprehensible to an Anglo-Saxon thane or bishop of a century earlier.

Such was the power of the new knights and clergy that they reshaped the traditional order of Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. England was not unique in experiencing foreign conquest. At the same time as William the Conqueror was establishing Norman rule in England, other Normans led by Robert Guiscard were forming a new lordship in southern Italy and Sicily by overawing the pope and the abbot of Monte Cassino and defeating the Byzantines and the Moslems. Similarly in 1085 Alfonso VI of Castile and Leon entered Toledo as conqueror of the Moslems and in 1099 the army of the First Crusade triumphantly entered Jerusalem. Although these conquests were not directly related to each other, they were due – whether in England, Italy, Spain or Palestine – to the superiority of mounted knights when inspired by a militant clergy.

In the opinion of the conquered people such invaders were no better than a rabble of robbers. This is how at first the English saw their Norman conquerors, how the Byzantines and the popes saw Robert Guiscard, and how the Moslems saw the Cid in Spain and the crusaders in the east. But in each case the invaders demonstrated that they were more than raiders and looters, as they established strong and resilient forms of government which, while depending on the use of force, tempered and directed it through the disciplines of feudalism and the idealism of the reformed clergy. Feudal values, as enunciated in the Song of Roland (which is contemporary with the Norman Conquest and may have been sung at the battle of Hastings), gave knights a sense of hierarchy and of loyalty to their lords as well as an irrepressible pride and delight in their warhorses, armour and other instruments of bloodshed. Clerical idealism, as enunciated by Pope Urban II in his sermons launching the First Crusade (and before him by Gregory VII), acknowledged the savagery of knights but aimed to point them in a similar direction to the Song of Roland: they would be a militia fighting for Christ instead of a malitia, the servants of the devil and the embodiment of malice. Although the knights' new sense of righteousness brought only misfortune to those whom they killed, maimed and ransomed, it did make them a sufficiently disciplined and motivated force to build on the ruins of war. Often, too, their sense of realism as fighting men encouraged them to learn from those they conquered. The Normans in England took over and strengthened the Anglo-Saxon taxation and writ system, just as their counterparts in the Moslem lands of Sicily, Palestine and Spain benefited from the superior civilizations over which they ruled.

This book concentrates on the rulers of England more than on the peasants, or ‘natives’ as the lords called them. The peasants were ‘natives’ in the sense both of belonging to a subjugated nation, the English, and of being tied by their inferior birth to the land on which they lived and worked. Unlike the great majority of the population who were rooted to the soil, the lords exhibited their superior status by moving freely on horseback from place to place, as their life was spent in hunting and collecting levies of money and produce from their tenants. They exercised their power not only through physical force as knights but through intellectual superiority as clergy. The ideology and resources of the church were as essential to lordship as the skills and equipment of knighthood. The local bishop or abbot was often the brother or kinsman of the lord of the land. King Stephen, for example, depended frequently on his brother, Henry of Blois, who was bishop of Winchester for more than forty years (1129–71). This book therefore includes the higher clergy within its purview because they were worldly lords and rulers despite the insistence of ecclesiastical reformers on being a caste apart.

The power and aspirations of lordship, both clerical and lay, were manifested in buildings and works of art as well as through the personal presence of the knight on horseback and the cleric with his sacred scripture. Much of what most impressed people at the time has disappeared: the burnished war helmets and jewel-encrusted reliquaries, the robes and hangings of silk and ermine, the iron strong-boxes filled with gold. Nevertheless enough remains, particularly in the outer forms of castles and churches, to recall this lost way of life. Above all, illuminated manuscripts, many of which are almost perfectly preserved, radiate from their pages not only the colour and brilliance of Romanesque and Gothic art but the thought-worlds of their medieval creators. These works were the supreme products of lordship, the legacy which was deliberately left to posterity as a tribute to divine power from men who recognized their own skills. ‘I am the prince of writers,’ the inscription in the frame around Eadwine of Canterbury's portrait declares in c.1150, ‘neither my praise nor my fame will die hereafter … The beauty of this book displays my genius; God accept it as a gift pleasing to him.’⁴ The book which this portrait accompanies is a text of the psalms with three variant Latin texts (Gallican, Roman and Hebrew) and English and French translations. It illustrates very well the mastery of the rulers and the way they were part of the civilization of western Christendom as well as building on English traditions.

Europe and the world

Knowledge of England's place in space and time was the speciality of monks and other clerical writers who inspired the men of action to their pilgrimages and crusades and recorded their deeds in chronicles and histories. Although much of this knowledge was inaccurate and some of it was fictitious, like Geoffrey of Monmouth's popular History of the Kings of Britain, which elaborated the story of King Arthur, it nevertheless gave the rulers a yardstick by which to measure their endeavours and achievements. Varying Voltaire's epigram, if Arthur did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The monks of Glastonbury recognized this in 1191 when they discovered and exhumed the alleged bodies of Arthur and Guinevere. Arthur or no Arthur, it is a mistake to underestimate the range of knowledge which medieval writers claimed to have or to dismiss altogether the existence of now lost books such as the one which Geoffrey of Monmouth said he had used. His contemporary, the historian William of Malmesbury, assumed a wide knowledge in his reading public. Defending in 1125 his decision to produce a history of the English bishops, he wrote: ‘It was certainly slothful and degrading not to know the names of the principal men of our province when our knowledge otherwise extends as far as the tracts of India and whatever lies beyond, open to the boundless ocean.’⁵

In William's time the world was pictured schematically in mappae mundi as a circle with Jerusalem at the centre and the three continents of Asia, Africa and Europe placed around it. Asia occupies the top half of the circle while Africa and Europe are placed in the bottom right- and left-hand quarters respectively. (Neither medieval Europeans, nor the Romans and Greeks who preceded them, had any certain knowledge of Africa south of the equator or of America and Australasia.) The whole circular landmass is surrounded by the ‘boundless ocean’ to which William of Malmesbury refers. What he meant by saying that our knowledge extends to India is that the conventional representation of three continents had been handed down from ancient geographers via the encyclopedist Isidore of Seville. William and his fellow western Christians had no knowledge from experience of either Asia or Africa, although that was beginning to change now that crusaders and Italian merchants were establishing themselves all around the Mediterranean. Representations of the earth in the form of Jerusalem-centred world maps were a step back rather than forwards from the point of view of geographical science. Thus the large circular wall-map at Hereford cathedral, attributed to Richard of Haldingham and drawn in the late thirteenth century, is less accurate in its representation of Britain, though it is more detailed, than the square map in the British Library (MS Tiberius B.v) which dates from about ad 1000.

Jerusalem-centred maps showed the world as planned by God rather than according to what was known about it by physical scientists. Sometimes God, as the creator of heaven and earth, is depicted h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Wiley Blackwell Classic Histories of England
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface to the Fourth Edition
• List of Abbreviations
• Maps
• 1: England's Place in Medieval Europe
• PART I: The Normans (1066–1135)
• PART II: The Angevins (1135–99)
• PART III: The Poitevins (1199–1272)
• EPILOGUE
• Genealogical Tables
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Index