Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris Chroniclers

In reality, although by the 1260s the Plantagenet family had lost a large part of their European ‘empire’, their role in European affairs remained undiminished. For a more balanced, less anachronistic view of the situation here, we might turn to the chief contemporary chroniclers of Henry III’s reign, both of them monks of St Albans in Hertfordshire, both of them with contacts at the royal court and with the many courtiers who visited St Albans in travelling to and from London. Neither Roger of Wendover, whose chronicle ends in 1234, nor Matthew Paris, who continued Wendover’s chronicle from 1234 until his own death in 1259, was an admirer of Henry III or of royal administration in general. It is through their writing that we gain our keenest insights into both the King’s particular incompetence and the failings of his administration as a whole. Yet no reader of their chronicles could fail to notice that Henry III, like his Plantagenet predecessors, was a truly European figure, whose interventions in European politics were significant for the histories of France, Sicily, Spain, the papacy and the German empire. Even such distant events as the Albigensian crusade against heresy in southern France, from which the reputation of Simon de Montfort and his ancestors was chiefly derived, or the fate of the Norwegian King Haakon IV, an almost exact contemporary of Henry III, dependent upon England for the engraving of his seal, and a patron at one time of the chronicler Matthew Paris who himself visited Norway, fell within Henry’s sphere of influence as recorded by the St Albans’ chroniclers.

The menagerie which Henry installed in the grounds of the Tower of London to some extent symbolized this world-wide reach, including three leopards sent by the German emperor (to commemorate the three leopards of Henry’s heraldic shield), a polar bear sent from Norway (kept chained, but allowed to catch fish in the Thames), and an elephant acquired by Louis IX of France whilst on crusade in Egypt. When the elephant died, after only three years at the Tower, its bones were gifted by Henry to the monks of Westminster. According to the Bestiary, the standard medieval encyclopedia of animal lore, burnt elephant bone could drive out snakes. It seems improbable that this was a useful function so far as the monks of Westminster were concerned. More likely, the King’s elephant, like the Holy Blood, and the rest of Henry III’s vast relic collection, joined that jumble of objects that had already been gifted to Westminster Abbey, in effect the first British Museum, with the King as its principal benefactor and the monks as curators in chief: part time-capsule, part monument to the sacral authority conferred by coronation, part cabinet of curiosities, in all respects testifying to the historical and international significance of England’s kings.

Meanwhile, England had moved from the periphery to the centre of European affairs. The marriages of successive members of the ruling dynasty, culminating in Henry III’s marriage to Eleanor of Provence, and the marriage of his sister to the German Emperor Frederick II, entangled the Plantagenets and their English subjects with the politics of Italy, Germany and southern France. It was the English dowry paid to the German Emperor Henry V in 1120, and the ransom payments made on behalf of Richard I of England to Henry VI in the 1190s that had helped the twelfth-century German emperors in their campaigns in Italy, enabling Henry V to re-enter the Italian scene and greatly assisting Henry VI in his conquest of Sicily. In the same way, by the late 1230s, it was the wealth of England that Emperor Frederick II milked in support of his own Italian campaigns. Perhaps more significantly still, in the late 1250s, following Frederick’s death, it was to Henry III’s brother, Richard of Cornwall, that the German electors were to turn in their search for a successor to Frederick as King of Germany. Richard, a forgotten figure in the mainstream of popular history, is the only Englishman ever to have aspired to rule over the Holy Roman Empire. His aspirations proved fruitless, but for a decade, from the late 1250s, it was Richard, buoyed up by the vast resources that he obtained as Earl of Cornwall from the stannaries (the tin mines) of western England, who ruled a Rhineland kingdom stretching from the North Sea to the Alps.

It was from the Rhineland that Richard’s son returned in the 1260s, bringing with him yet another blood relic, this time said to have been collected from the Crucifixion by the apostle Nicodemus and to have been hung around the neck of all emperors from the time of Charlemagne onwards. Gifted to the Cistercian Abbey of Hailes in Gloucestershire, this was destined to become the focal point of one of the most popular (and controversial) shrines in England, its merits still being debated in the 1530s when the Holy Blood of Hailes was ‘exposed’ by Protestant reformers as a holy fraud, rumoured to be topped up each week with the blood of a freshly slaughtered duck. Meanwhile, and calling upon yet another rich vein of mythology, it was Richard of Cornwall who rebuilt the cliff-top castle of Tintagel, intending it, as early as the 1230s, as a sort of theme-park re-creation of the castle of King Arthur, described by Geoffrey of Monmouth, now made visible to any mariner tacking up the north Cornish coast. At precisely the same time that the legends of Arthur, Parsifal and the Grail Castle were scaling the heights of popularity in Europe, Richard of Cornwall, with his relics and his castles, his wealth and his claim to stand as imperial successor to Charlemagne, should remind us of the close and significant cultural ties that now bound England not just to France but to the mainstream of European history.

For all of the xenophobic rhetoric of its barons, thirteenth-century England was very much a part of European affairs, wealthy and confident enough to launch the career of a Richard of Cornwall or an aspiring King of Sicily. Perhaps the clearest indication of this confidence comes not just from Matthew Paris’ recital of the details of Anglo-European diplomacy, but from the maps with which Paris decorated his chronicles. Here, not only did Paris seek to place Britain within a wider context, but produced what are in effect the first recognizable images of the British Isles. Paris’ world map – a ‘Mappa Mundi’, like the far more elaborate late thirteenth-century example still preserved at Hereford Cathedral – shows Britain as a small detached fragment of northern Europe, clinging on at the very bottom margin, clenched between channels facing Normandy and Spain, with Africa closer even than Flanders. Far more realistic are Paris’ attempts to plot, through a series of strip maps, the journey to be followed between London and Jerusalem, noting the more important landmarks en route, the greater churches, the terrible Alps and even such features as the storks roosting on the towers of Turin. In this telling, Britain was very much a part of the Christian or European mainstream.

As for Britain itself, what is perhaps most striking about Matthew Paris’ various attempts to map these islands is not just his attention to detail but his willingness to imagine England as merely part, albeit by far the largest part, of a North Sea archipelago that included Wales, Scotland and the Isle of Man (though not Ireland). In these maps, the Severn divides England from Wales, and Hadrian’s wall together with a whole series of rivers, from the Tyne northwards, snake across the borders between England and Scotland. At the bridge of Stirling, Matthew shows Scotland tightening to a narrow causeway, rather like the waist to an hourglass. Even so, it is clear from these drawings that a man, might travel, should he so wish, from Dover to the furthest reaches of Caithness without ever quitting dry land. In the decades to come, one particular man was to attempt just such a journey, seeking through warfare and diplomacy at last to unite the various parts of Britain and to bring both Wales and Scotland under English rule. His name was Edward, the son of King Henry III, and it was at Stirling Bridge, Matthew Paris’ narrow causeway between England and the north, that his plans first came unstuck.