English territories in France

Henry II’s relations with the sea brings us back to one of the principal characteristics of Plantagenet kingship: the continuing involvement of England in French politics, as part of that vast assembly of lands that Henry II acquired as duke of Normandy, duke of Aquitaine and count of Anjou. Accounts of this cross-Channel ‘empire’ have generally taken one of two forms. They have either become bogged down in the question of the extent to which Henry’s ‘empire’ was truly ‘imperial’, or dissolved into an equally trivial discussion of personalities and in particular of the volcanic relations between Henry and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine: a marriage generally portrayed as one long saga of infidelity, harsh words and broken crockery. In terms of empire, it is clear that what Henry II ruled was not the equivalent to an empire such as that of Rome. Each province within his dominion was governed according to its own laws and traditions. Henry and his sons, in so far as they had a home, were natives of the Loire valley, raised in the castle-strewn hills between Le Mans and Chinon, with the river Loire, the wide brown Mississippi of western France, as the dominant feature of a landscape much of which was still unploughed ancient woodland. Although their lives were passed elsewhere, with Anjou itself serving as no more than a corridor for communications between Normandy and the south, it was to the great nunnery of Fontevraud, in the forests south of the Loire, that Henry II and Richard I, together with the wives of both Henry II and King John, looked for burial.

In England the Plantagenets were kings but in Normandy, Aquitaine or Anjou they remained merely dukes or counts, in theory subject to the kings of France. Even so, there is no doubt that it was rulers such as Charlemagne or the imperial Arthur that Henry II sought to emulate. It was by comparison with the Roman emperors of antiquity that contemporaries sought to describe his reign. In so far as a system of government could be imperial in the twelfth century, with orders transmitted from a central intelligence at the wandering royal court to the furthest flung proconsuls of the Scots or Spanish frontiers, then Henry II’s was an ‘imperial’ system, capable of functioning in the king’s absence, lacking the focus or mythology that the Romans had invested in the city of Rome, yet with an empire-wide system for the levying of taxation and troops, and with at least some sense that London, and the royal palace just down the river at Westminster, were now the hub of a much mightier cross-Channel enterprise.

It was in the royal palace at Westminster that Richard fitz Nigel imagined himself sitting at the start of his Dialogue of the Exchequer, itself celebrating an office of government, the Exchequer, now permanently resident at Westminster, in regular communication with the other Exchequers established at Caen in Normandy and, after the 1170s, in colonial Dublin. It was in Westminster Abbey that the King was crowned, and it was there too that Henry II presided over the translation and reburial of the relics of his sainted ancestor, Edward the Confessor. London, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, had first been founded by Brutus and christened ‘New Troy’ only a few years after the foundation of Rome. It was renamed in honour of King Lud, an entirely mythical descendant of Brutus, said to have surrounded the city with walls and innumerable towers in the time of Julius Caesar. With fewer legendary elements than Geoffrey of Monmouth, a remarkable ‘Description’ of the city by William fitz Stephen, from the reign of Henry II, also celebrated London as a city superior, not just a rival, to Paris or Rome. As described by William, London’s teeming market places, public cook-shops, bear-baitings, water-sports, jewels brought from the Nile, gold from Arabia, great houses for the rich and philosophical debates for poor scholars, excelled even the commerce, games and learning of imperial Rome. By the 1160s, England was already developing not so much as a confederation of equally significant provinces but as a Londonland, its subordinate localities radiating outwards from one over-mighty hub. In some senses, these subordinate localities spanned the Channel, with the port and the markets of London as significant to the merchants of such regional capitals as La Rochelle or Rouen as they were to the herring fishermen of Yarmouth or the wool farmers of Herefordshire. By the 1170s, the merchants both of Rouen and of Cologne already maintained private harbours and halls for themselves within the city of London: the first, but by no means the last of the great multinational corporations to have set up business there.