Henry II (1154–1189)
Although he was only twenty-one years old at the beginning of his reign in 1154, Henry II would be one of England’s greatest kings. He was a worthy representative of the twelfth-century renaissance, a period of startling innovation and growing self-confidence, when there was a sudden explosion of written sources, of histories, biographies and political treatises. Much of the framework of English national law that Henry II set up has lasted down to the present day.
In 1154 the country was still reeling from the disorder of Stephen’s reign. But Henry’s vigorous supervision saw to it that by the end of the decade England was once again being run along the well-oiled lines of his grandfather Henry I. Supporters of both his mother and Stephen, such as Roger of Salisbury’s nephew Nigel, Bishop of Ely, were willing to sink their differences in order for the bitterness of civil war to end. The Curia Regis began to function again; itinerant justices dared to venture out of their homes. Above all, Henry’s aim was to limit the power of the barons so that the sort of destructive anarchy which the country had experienced would never be visited on England again.
In fact Henry II was not a man any baron would wish to trifle with. Not only was he in the fierce, energetic mould of the Norman kings and possessed of a powerful personality, thanks to his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine he also ruled the whole of western France from the Loire to the Pyrenees on the borders of Spain, as well as Normandy and Anjou, inherited from his mother and his father respectively. (Eleanor had brought him Aquitaine, Poitou and Auvergne.) The new king of England was thus the greatest monarch in western Europe. No baron was going to argue when he ordered that the 1,115 illegal or ‘adulterine’ castles be pulled down, given that Henry could call on an unlimited number of soldiers from his vast continental possessions to do the job for him. Although England was not the largest part of his possessions it was the most important because it gave him a crown. This meant he outranked all his tenants-in-chief on the French continent. It also made him the feudal equal of the King of France. Though technically Louis VII was Henry’s overlord for Normandy and Anjou, the French king ruled an area that was not even one-eighth the size of what the English king held in France.
Henry’s most pressing task was to restore order to England and reduce the power of the barons to what it had been in the past. He brought the royal power back to the level his grandfather had known by leading military expeditions against the Celtic borderlands of the country, Wales and Scotland. Although Gwynedd remained independent, most of the Welsh princes once again did homage to the English king as overlord, and the English marcher lords resumed their old territories. The ancient separation between Welsh and English Christianity was done away with when the Welsh bishops agreed that the Archbishop of Canterbury should head their Church too. Henry’s first cousin Malcolm IV of Scotland, meanwhile, had to return Northumbria to England and was made to do homage to him as his overlord. Henry strongly impressed the official class of England by his firm measures. All foreign soldiers, like the Flemish mercenaries Stephen had used who were still at large in rapacious bands, were packed off to their countries of origin, and all the crown lands Stephen had granted away were restored to royal control. The king insisted on spending time travelling from county court to county court ‘judging the judges’, as one chronicler put it; this would result in a complete shake-up of the legal system.
The first twenty years of Henry II’s reign saw the considerable expansion of the Angevin Empire–that is, the empire of Anjou–with the acquisition of Brittany and of the overlordship of Toulouse; he also obtained the submission of the Irish kings. Despite his Norman ancestry Henry’s character owed just as much to his father Geoffrey, who had made the counts of Anjou a rising power in what is now France. By 1144 Geoffrey of Anjou had brought enough of the Duchy of Normandy under his sway to have become its duke by conquest. But because his son Henry had a legal claim to it through his mother, all government business tended to be done in the name of his son. Thanks to his father’s interest in education Henry II was one of the best-educated princes of the day, exposed to the finest European learning. Fond of verse and reading, he was also interested in philosophy and, though not a lawyer himself, he absorbed the advances in the law being made at the new universities on the continent and applied them to England. His father being the Count of Anjou, Henry II was the first Angevin king of England, but after his son John lost Anjou Henry’s descendants became known as the Plantagenets.
Henry II combined in his person the best and worst sides of his genetic heritage. He had the cunning Angevin mind with its flair for diplomacy, as well as the Angevins’ violent temper, and this was allied to the forcefulness of the dukes of Normandy. In addition to the education his father had provided he had also responded well to the training in statecraft he received from his uncles King David of Scotland and Robert of Gloucester. In sum Henry II was one of the most formidable men ever to sit on the English throne, a marvellous warrior and a great statesman. Physically he took after the Angevins, being slightly thick set with famously muscled calves because he was in the saddle so much, and he had a square, lion-like, ruddy-complexioned face. When he was irritated, which was much of the time, the chroniclers noted, his eyes seemed to flash lightning.
Henry’s vast inheritance from his father, the Angevin Empire, brought its own problems. Much of his energies and those of his sons would be inextricably bound up with a battle with the King of France for mastery of French territory. To begin with the King of France controlled only a very small area round Paris, but the struggle would end with the loss of the northern empire to France at the beginning of the thirteenth century when the Angevins found a worthy opponent in the French king Philip Augustus.
But the empire also brought great advantages to England, as it led to the establishment of close relations between England’s southern ports, London, Bristol and Southampton, and the equally busy Angevin entrepôts of Bordeaux, Rouen and La Rochelle. English merchants were able to import at advantageous rates the French wine and salt which were the preservatives and therefore the great commodities of the middle ages. Water was too dangerous to drink until the purification techniques developed in the nineteenth century, so wine or beer was the drink of choice, small beer being drunk by all classes throughout the day from breakfast onwards. Although vines were grown in southern England during the middle ages, England’s ownership until the mid-fifteenth century of Aquitaine and her great region of Bordeaux gave rise to a tradition of the English drinking Bordeaux that was perpetuated until the Napoleonic Wars (when Britain’s ally Portugal temporarily replaced France as the main source of British alcoholic beverages).
Ruling such a great empire needed a man of tremendous energy prepared to travel long distances, for what gave the disparate parts of the Angevin Empire their strength and unity was the figure of the king. Fortunately, Henry was suited to the task; he was consumed by curiosity and was famous for his lack of pomp and his indifference to his surroundings. The whole court might find themselves wandering lost in an unknown forest while the king galloped ahead. ‘Frequently in the dark,’ remembered Peter of Blois, ‘we would consider our prayers answered if we found by chance some mean filthy hut. Often there were fierce quarrels over these hovels, and courtiers fought with drawn swords for a lodging that it would have disgraced pigs to fight for.’
Henry’s addiction to hunting, shared with so many Normans, meant that much of the king’s business was done in the country, although with the establishment of permanent law courts at Westminster London was becoming the seat of government. The king was perpetually busy, and his astonished courtiers observed that he never sat down except to eat, and even then he bolted his food. He found it so hard not to be doing things that he used to draw pictures all through the Mass which as a devout Christian he heard every day. Priests deputed to say the royal Mass were chosen for the speed with which they could get through the service, for everyone dreaded Henry’s rage.
One of the king’s first appointments in England was his elevation to the chancellorship of a talented and charismatic secretary in the household of the Archbishop of Canterbury named Thomas à Becket, the son of a Norman merchant in London. Becket’s natural brilliance and sharp debating skills, which had marked him out when he was only a page, had been honed not only by legal studies in Theobald’s household but by being sent to study Roman and canon law at the University of Bologna in Italy. Since then he had been entrusted by the archbishop with many important missions abroad, having shown himself to be a clever and energetic diplomat.
But Becket became more than just Henry’s chancellor. As a foreigner the young king needed information about England, and this was supplied by the articulate Thomas. They became boon companions, spending most of their time together. Contemporaries noted how extraordinarily close they were. For a decade the two men–Thomas was some ten years older–ruled almost like brothers, with Thomas taking a starring role in defending the ancient rights and lands of the crown and as chancellor supervising every royal instruction or writ. Henry relied on Thomas for everything, to an almost excessive extent, as they ate every meal together and romped and wrestled more like boys than king and minister. On one occasion Henry rode his horse into Thomas’s hall and jumped over the table to sit and dine with him. One writer said, ‘Never in Christian times were two men more of a mind. In Church they sat together, together they rode out.’ Unlike the king, who was always rather plainly dressed, perhaps because he was rarely to be seen off a horse, the ambitious Thomas à Becket was known for his love of display and heavily embroidered cloaks. Although Henry liked to puncture pretension in anyone else, it amused him in Thomas.
The chancellor was as full of ingenious ideas as the king. He probably encouraged Henry to rely on the increasingly widespread custom of scutage, or shield money (from scutum, the Latin for shield), the payment of two marks in lieu of knight’s service by those of his tenants-in-chief and their vassals who could not spare the time to fight. Henry was forever having to wage wars to maintain his territories in France, where they were threatened by the meddling activities of the French king Louis VII, who was uncontrollably jealous of his too powerful vassal. It was much easier to depend on the skills of professional soldiers paid for with the shield money. Moreover, to a ruler anxious to reassert royal authority, scutage had the additional advantage of diminishing the military power of the barons. Becket himself enjoyed fighting just as much as the king, and in 1159 he was on his charger at Henry’s side as his master attempted to subjugate the county of Toulouse. Becket’s subtle mind may also have dreamed up a marriage treaty between the daughter of the King of France and Henry’s eldest son as a means of obtaining for England the coveted Vexin region, midway between Rouen and Paris. Certainly it was he who conducted the negotiations. Since the bride and groom were six months and four years old at the time, Louis VII assumed that the event would not take place for at least ten years, although the baby princess went to live at the court of Henry II. But to Louis’ rage a couple of years later in 1160 the children were married to one another, now aged six and two, and the Vexin thus once more became part of Henry’s empire.
Thomas grew enormously wealthy as Henry granted him the revenues of many religious foundations. When he was sent as ambassador to negotiate the transfer of the Vexin, his equipage was so magnificent that all the French ran out to see it. One thousand knights accompanied him, and 250 pages sang verses to his glory and waved banners. Priests rode two by two alongside the relics from his own chapel which accompanied him; behind them monkeys rode on the saddles of the horses bearing gold for the French king.
In 1162 Archbishop Theobald died. The infatuated king decided that the magnificent Thomas, whose views were so close to his own, should controversially (since he was not an ordained priest) be appointed head of the English Church, namely Archbishop of Canterbury. At the same time he would remain head of the king’s Chancery. Like all rulers of the time Henry had been dissatisfied by what seemed the increasingly aggressive demands of the Church. Thomas à Becket might have been the Church establishment’s candidate for the chancellorship, but during his eight years in office he had completely identified with the king when it came to collecting taxes imposed on the Church for royal wars. The appointment seemed to be a master stroke which would bring the Church more tightly under royal control.
The years of anarchy and the weakness of the crown had enhanced not only the power of the barons but also the position of the Church. When the king’s writs to the shire court had more or less dried up, Church courts had taken their place. By the time of Henry II Church lawyers had been drawing into their courts all aspects of ordinary life, and had begun to argue that cases involving debt belonged to them. Church lawyers appealed to Rome in ever increasing numbers about property, as opposed to the spiritual issues their courts were intended for. In addition these lawyers were using their expertise to boost the revenues of the Church so that its income was now greater than the king’s.
The success of the Church in expanding its power had been aided by the activities of a group of Englishmen at Rome, including John of Salisbury, the political philosopher and Becket’s future biographer, and Nicholas Breakspear, who became Pope Adrian IV in 1154. The twelfth century was internationally the great century for the development of law and these men were among those leading the advance of canon law. Like Thomas à Becket, John of Salisbury had become a member of Archbishop Theobald’s household, and under his influence a more thorough legal training began to be offered to clerks throughout the country.
But for Henry II the most controversial issue relating to the Church was its expansion into the criminal law. Its argument that it reserved to itself the right to try anyone in holy orders was allowing murderers and thieves off scot free. Royal judges who called for clerks in holy orders to appear before them were being insulted, and the miscreants were refusing to accept their authority. At this period the term holy orders meant not just priests but any person trained by the Church. Any man who could write Latin could say he was a clerk, and thus come under the category of clergy. So could anyone who simply had the top his head shaved in a tonsure. Because Church courts could not hand down a death sentence, a great number of ‘criminous clerks’, as Henry would call them, were escaping proper punishment. They usually avoided prison too, as the Church did not like to pay for it, arguing that its penalty of degrading a man from holy orders was punishment enough. As part of Henry’s drive to restore harmony and regularity to his new kingdom these anomalies had to be addressed. By appointing Thomas à Becket archbishop he believed he would draw the too independent and powerful Church into subjection.
However, Thomas was extremely reluctant to accept the post, partly because he foresaw a clash of interests. Despite his great worldliness he knew himself well enough to see that he always pursued his tasks wholeheartedly. He is said to have told the king, ‘If I become Archbishop of Canterbury, it will be God I serve before you.’ Thomas was in any case unpopular within the Church hierarchy itself for his hard line on making ecclesiastical lands pay scutage; many churchmen in addition were appalled that a mere deacon, who therefore could not say Mass, should become head of the Church. Those who knew Becket greeted his appointment with scepticism, unable to believe that this proud and arrogant chancellor could become a saintly archbishop and forswear a life of revelry and extravagance. But, much to the world’s surprise, that is just what he did.
As soon as he became archbishop, having been ordained priest, his behaviour underwent a transformation. He spent his nights in prayer and mortification of the flesh. Beneath his gorgeous vestments he wore a prickly shirt made of goat’s hair which swarmed with vermin so that he would always be suffering as Christ had done. For contemporaries and for many later observers, this metamorphosis was evidence that God and his august position had worked a great change in him. Modern historians, however, have been less inclined to take a view so strongly coloured by religious faith. It has been pointed out that once he became archbishop Thomas behaved in an extraordinarily antagonistic fashion to his patron. Despite his notably spiritual life he used his position to interfere in the king’s business as obstructively as he had been helpful before. It was as if he was testing his power against the man who had appointed him, though only months before they had been the closest friends.
Although the potential for a quarrel had been building up for some time, it burst out in 1163 when the king informed his bishops in council at Westminster of his intention to end the legal loophole known as ‘benefit of clergy’. He intended to make it the law that ‘criminous clerks’ convicted in the Church courts would be degraded from holy orders and punished by his judges, for it was now obvious that an informal understanding that convicted clerks be retried in the royal courts was not working. When Becket himself refused to give permission for the retrial of a canon, Henry struck. Claiming his right according to the ancient customs of England, in January 1164 he drew up the Constitutions of Clarendon as a restatement of the position of the English Church’s organization.
However, the Constitutions of Clarendon went a great deal further than the immediate issue at hand, and a great deal further than ancient custom. They dealt not only with criminous clerks but with Henry’s attempt to restrict the Church’s power and define relations between Church and state: priests were forbidden to leave the country without royal permission; nor could excommunication be used against the king’s barons without his permission; all disputes over land were to be decided in the king’s courts even if they concerned the Church; disputed debts were also to be confined to the king’s courts; appeals to Rome were to be made only if Henry allowed them.
Although most of the bishops, led by Gilbert Foliot, the Bishop of London, were at first angered by the Constitutions, they came round to them–persuaded by the king’s threats of violence against them. The exile from Rome of Pope Alexander III prevented him from doing anything that might annoy the King of England. Henry II was one of Alexander’s chief supporters against his rival Pope Paschal, the candidate of the emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Barbarossa, named for his red beard, had driven Alexander out of Italy, and Alexander would do anything to prevent the King of England going over to the emperor’s side in the long struggle for power that was the investiture crisis.
Becket refused to sign the Constitutions, on the ground that they infringed the liberties of the Church. This was hugely embarrassing because if the Constitutions were to become law they required the seal of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The king’s anger knew no bounds, though he was also hurt by Thomas’s strange behaviour and wound up by his jealous rivals in the Church. He confiscated the archbishop’s property and removed his eldest son Henry from his guardianship. He then set about ruining him. When the king’s Great Council met at Northampton in October 1164, Henry demanded that all the money which had passed through Becket’s hands when he was his chancellor should be accounted for. Thomas replied that he had spent it all in the king’s service. He enraged the king still further by carrying a large crucifix to indicate that the only protection he claimed was God’s. Like everything about the archbishop, to his enemies this seemed absurdly dramatic behaviour. But to his supporters like John of Salisbury it was courageous and showed the astonishing miracle that God was performing in Becket’s heart.
The king’s bullying only increased Thomas’s stubbornness. Despite pleas from the bishops that he sign the Constitutions, Thomas insisted on arguing with Henry face to face, and there was an angry exchange of words. Henry exclaimed that he was appalled by Thomas’s ingratitude. He had raised him to the pinnacle of honour in the land, yet Thomas did nothing but oppose him. Had he forgotten all the proofs of his affection? Thomas responded that he was not unmindful of the things which God, bestower of all things, had seen fit to bestow on him through the king. He did not wish to act against his wishes, so long as it was agreeable to the will of God. Henry was indeed his liege lord, but God was lord of both of them and to ignore God’s will in order to obey the king would benefit neither him nor the king. For as St Peter said, ‘We ought to obey God rather than man.’ When the king retorted that he wanted no sermons from the son of one of his villeins, Thomas said, ‘It is true that I am not of royal lineage, but neither was St Peter.’
As the archbishop still refused to sign, Henry’s justiciar pronounced him a traitor. At last appreciating that with the King of England as his enemy his life was in danger, Thomas escaped from Northampton in the middle of the night and fled abroad to appeal to Pope Alexander III. He remained out of the country for six years.
For Henry the situation became intolerable. It embarrassed him at home and internationally for England to be without a head of the Church for so long. By 1170, however, the archbishop had returned, following intervention by the pope. It was believed by both sides that a reconciliation had been effected. At a meeting in France the king promised to allow the archbishop back into the country.
Thomas returned in December, taking up residence once more in the Archbishop’s Palace at Canterbury. His occupancy lasted less than a month. Although at their meeting Henry II had never mentioned signing the Constitutions of Clarendon the king had assumed that this would take place and begin the process of reform. But the archbishop was as obstinate as ever. He refused to lift the sentence of excommunication he had imposed on the Archbishop of York who on Whitsunday in Thomas’s absence had crowned Henry II’s eldest son, the young Henry. This was a medieval custom intended to ensure the loyalty of the barons in the future, but performing the ceremony was the special right of the Archbishop of Canterbury. In fact that December Becket re-excommunicated all those who had been involved, seven of the most important men in England including the justiciar and Gilbert Foliot, the Bishop of London, with nine other bishops.
For a brief period there was a lull. December passed awkwardly, with king and archbishop not on speaking terms. The king’s temper was not improved by the pope suddenly taking Thomas’s side. A papal bull or message arrived if not excommunicating at least suspending all the English bishops who had taken part in the young king’s coronation, leaving the English Church in a state of chaos.
On Christmas Day news reached Henry II, who was spending the festive season in icy Normandy, that Thomas had struck again. He had now excommunicated Ralph de Broc, who had been steward of the diocese of Canterbury’s lands during his absence. Maddened by this constant thorn in his flesh, raising his hands to heaven the always impulsive Henry said furiously, ‘Can none of the cowards eating my bread free me of this turbulent priest?’
No sooner were the rash words out of the king’s mouth than four knights who had always disliked Becket, Hugh de Morville, Reginald Fitz Urse, Richard le Breton and William de Tracy, left the hall and made for England. Having touched down at the home of Ralph de Broc, they went on to the Archbishop’s Palace at Canterbury.
On 29 December, on a dark winter’s afternoon with the pale sun scarcely penetrating the freezing skies, the archbishop was reading quietly in the library when there was a great commotion at the gate. Pursued vainly by palace servants–priests and serving boys–the knights burst into the archbishop’s room and demanded he withdraw the excommunications. The archbishop ignored them. Saying that he was only obeying the pope, he then set off for the nearby cathedral, followed by his cross-bearer Edward Grim, who lived to tell the tale.
The knights paused to put on their armour–though why they needed this was unclear since their only opponents would have been the unarmed monks singing Vespers. Ahead of them now in the gloom of the cathedral they could see Thomas’s white garments glimmering as he prepared to listen to Mass before the high altar. ‘Where is the archbishop? Where is the traitor?’ they shouted. ‘Here am I,’ said Becket, turning to meet his murderers, ‘not traitor but archbishop and priest of God.’ Then he meekly bowed his head as if for the first blow. One of the knights remembered his Christian upbringing sufficiently to want to kill the Archbishop of Canterbury outside consecrated ground, ground where for over 500 years the English nation had worshipped. He tried to drag the archbishop out. But Thomas refused to go. He clung so hard to a pillar in the north transept just below the north aisle left of the choir that the knights decided that they would have to kill him where he stood. The first blow missed him and hit the cross-bearer, but then all the knights piled in. The Archbishop of Canterbury was butchered before the High Altar.
This deed of blood perpetrated by four Christian knights apparently on the orders of the Christian King of England became the scandal of western Europe. Although Henry II probably had no idea that his exasperated outburst would be seen as an order to murder (we know from contemporary records that the king was planning to have him tried for treason), the world preferred to believe otherwise. The murder of the head of the English Church at the behest of the King of England had enormous reverberations. The cult of St Thomas the Christian martyr–for the pope promptly canonized him–spread as far as Iceland.
Thomas dead was far more powerful than Thomas alive. All his former misdeeds were forgotten, and he was venerated as the Church’s champion against injustice. The shrine erected to the former archbishop became one of the most popular in Europe–thus in The Canterbury Tales the Pilgrims are seeking the ‘blissful holy martyr’. It was also the most richly adorned, having a great reputation for miraculous cures effected by his lacerated body. If the archbishop had been wrong to resist the punishment of the clerks, there was some justification for him opposing such a naked assertion of royal power against the Church. But though Thomas à Becket passed into English folklore as a hero, the view taken of him today is less enthusiastic. His martyrdom put back the reform of an abuse for 300 years.
For all the animosity of the previous few years Henry II was a genuinely devout man and he was appalled by the murder. He burst into loud cries when he heard the news, put on sackcloth, rubbed his face with ashes and, as was noticed by the Bishop of Lisieux, behaved more like a friend than the sovereign of the dead man–which of course he had once been. Shutting himself up in his room for three days, he would not eat and fell into stupors so that for a while the country feared it might lost its king as well as its archbishop. Even though Thomas’s own erratic behaviour had to some extent brought his fate upon him, his hideous murder cast a stain over the rest of Henry’s reign from which he never quite recovered. The golden reputation and some of the zest for life faded. Despite his great legislative achievements from 1173 onwards his life was marred by rebellions throughout his far-flung possessions, stirred up by his sons whose enmity was used by the King of France to expand his territory at England’s expense.
Henry II was the first English king to extend Norman power to the next-door island of Ireland. Although Irish monks had preserved much of the classical corpus in their monasteries and Irish Christianity had been substantially responsible for the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom, the great days of early Irish civilization were over. Many monasteries had been destroyed in the ninth-century Viking raids that created the settlements of Dublin, Cork and Limerick. The arts and letters were no longer flourishing in a country ruled by a large number of kings who were in effect tribal chieftains. Bloody vengeance and constant war were now the custom of the country.
It was Dermot, King of Leinster who provided the open door to allow the Normans into Ireland. In 1166 he was expelled from Ireland by an alliance of his rivals, their pretext being that he had carried off Devorgil, the beautiful wife of the chieftain of Breffny in neighbouring Connaught. Dermot fled to Henry II’s court, which was then at Bristol, to ask for troops to win his kingdom back. Although the king turned down his request for aid, he gave Dermot a letter authorizing him to recruit any of his English subjects. In return King Dermot pledged his homage to Henry as his overlord. It soon became clear to Dermot that the place to recruit Norman adventurers or mercenaries was among the marcher lords of South Wales, who were on active service pushing back the frontiers of the fierce Welsh kings’ kingdoms. In the Norman system of strict primogeniture landless younger sons who would do anything for money and land were just the breed needed to reconquer Dermot’s kingdom.
Richard de Clare, the palatine Earl of Pembroke, volunteered to be leader of the Norman expedition to Ireland. His reputation as a warrior was so great that most people knew him by the nickname of Strongbow. In return for his help King Dermot promised the hand in marriage of his lovely daughter Eva and the throne of Leinster when he died. A painting can be seen at the House of Commons today which shows the wedding ceremony of Eva and Strongbow, marking the moment when Ireland began to be ruled from England, as it was for the next 800 years. It was up to Strongbow to recruit his own men, and he gathered together a very efficient band of Norman knights as the advance guard of the expedition. The most important of them were the family known as Fitzgerald and their half-brothers the Fitzstephens. They were all the sons of a Welsh princess named Nesta (daughter of Rhys ap Tudor) by Gerald of Windsor, a Norman knight with royal connections. Accompanying these warriors to Ireland was their youngest brother, a scholar known to history as Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales–Cambrensis means Welsh in Latin). He described the expedition to Ireland in tremendous detail.
Despite the Normans’ small numbers–and even though Strongbow himself had remained in England–their superb discipline and battle tactics stood them in good stead against the Irish tribes and Danish kingdoms. Celtic individualism and traditions of tribal warfare made it just as difficult for twelfth-century Celts to band together and forget their historic enmities as it had been for first-century AD Celts in Britannia against the Romans. Though the Irish matched the Normans for bravery, they were quarrelsome and disorganized and found it so difficult to accept leadership, to forget their endless grudges and stop warring against one another to combine against a far more dangerous foe, that the important towns of Wexford and Dublin quickly fell to the Norman adventurers. In 1170, after two years of fighting led by William, Raymond and Maurice Fitzgerald, Strongbow at last crossed the Irish Sea, took the town of Waterford and married Eva. When Dermot died the following year, Strongbow became King of Leinster. For all their exploits the Norman lords’ hold on Ireland was fairly tenuous. The Norse relations of the citizens of the Norse town of Dublin soon began to attack them, crossing from the Isle of Man. Though the Normans drove them off, they were then attacked by King Dermot’s Irish enemies.
Fortunately for Strongbow, in 1171 Henry became alarmed at the threat an independent Norman kingdom in Ireland might pose to his own empire. The continuing furore over Becket’s death may have been an additional spur prompting him to assert his rule over the neighbouring island and its warring inhabitants of Irish, Danish and Norman lords. The number of soldiers available to the master of the Angevin Empire was of course far larger than Strongbow’s forces. In consequence, little attempt was made to stand up to the first English king to regard himself as ruler of Ireland, and Henry soon set up an English administration in Dublin. The Irish chiefs in fact welcomed the king as protection against the Norman adventurers, while the Norman rulers’ submission was soon secured, and the Irish bishops at the Synod of Cashel likewise acknowledged Henry as their liege lord. Henry garrisoned the towns of Waterford and Wexford with his soldiers, brought Anglo-Norman merchants, Anglo-Norman law and Anglo-Norman monks to the country, and built a palace in Dublin. Here he passed the winter. He would have done more had he not been forced in 1173 to deal with a rebellion which had broken out throughout the empire in his absence, instigated by his wife and sons.
As a result the impact of the Norman invasion of Ireland, unlike that of England, was not very far reaching. It was really limited to the conglomeration of what became in effect self-contained little Norman kingdoms around Waterford, Wexford and Dublin. The territory where the crown’s writ ran came to be known much later as the Pale (from the Latin palum, a stake, used to mark a boundary; this Irish usage gave rise to the expression ‘beyond the pale’). This territory was never a very well-defined area. In the fourteenth century it included Louth, Meath, Trim, Kilkenny and Kildare. By the beginning of the sixteenth century the chieftains and their clans had made enormous inroads into the Pale, while the old Norman families like the Fitzgeralds (whose leader was the Earl of Kildare) became so powerful and independent that the Tudors would feel the need to invade Ireland afresh in order to prevent the country becoming a base for a Yorkist revival (see below).
The revolt which forced Henry II’s return before he had accomplished his Irish mission was part of a pattern which would dog him for the rest of his life. It was the consequence of having a large empire, too many enemies in Scotland and France and too many sons. In 1173 and 1174 the rebellion against Henry stretched from the Tweed in the Borders to the Pyrenees, as all his enemies took advantage of his unpopularity after Becket’s murder and banded together.
By 1173 Henry’s elder sons were grown up. His passionate marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, the former wife of King Louis VII of France, was faltering despite eight children in fifteen years. Queen Eleanor was a forceful, sophisticated woman of literary tastes whose patronage encouraged the flourishing romantic secular literature which was a striking new feature of the twelfth century and who had considerable political influence owing to her personal power over Aquitaine. She was now estranged from her husband, who had openly taken a mistress in Rosamund Clifford, the daughter of a Welsh marcher lord.
Where his grandfather had imported wild animals, Henry had built within the grounds of his favourite palace at Woodstock in Oxfordshire a private lodge of intricate eastern design. Known as Rosamund’s Bower, it had a water garden and could be approached only through a maze. Round the maze the king is believed to have planted the most ancient rose in the world, striped in dark pink and white, which had been brought back by the Crusaders from Damascus. He christened it the Rosamundi, as it is still known today, the rose of the world, as a tribute to his mistress. Fair Rosamund, as she came to be called, died young, and legend has it that Queen Eleanor persuaded one of the king’s men to betray the secret of the maze to her. One evening, it is said, when Fair Rosamund heard the sound of bugles and hoofs and went flying to the door, expecting the king’s arrival after hunting, she met only Queen Eleanor, who stabbed her to the heart.
What is certainly true is that Queen Eleanor took her sons’ part against the king. Like their father they were energetic, active and commanding personalities in the Angevin and Norman tradition. In 1169, four years before, Henry II had divided up his empire between them. His eldest son, known as the young King Henry, received England, Normandy and Anjou. Eleanor’s own Duchy of Aquitaine went to her favourite son, the brilliant, generous but violent warrior known to history as Richard the Lionheart (or Coeur de Lion). Brittany, which Henry II had conquered from its duke, went to the third son Geoffrey. Nevertheless–rather like King Lear–despite this apportionment Henry II had no intention of relinquishing the actual government or income of these lands into their supposed owners’ hands.
By March 1173, encouraged by the king of France Louis VII, whose greatest ambition was to break up the Angevin Empire, a conspiracy had been hatched among these sons. They could call on the soldiers of disgruntled barons, particularly in Aquitaine, such as the Count of Poitou whose legal rights (including holding courts and minting money) had been steadily eroded by Henry II’s reforms. That month all over the Angevin Empire attacks were mounted against the king’s forces. When the rebellion began Queen Eleanor had been stopped, disguised as a man, while fleeing to the French court to join her three sons. She was thrown into prison at Falaise in France with her companion, one of the rebel barons, Hugh of Chester. There she remained until Henry II died. Louis VII tried to invade Normandy, while the young King Henry set sail with a French fleet to attempt, with an equal lack of success, an invasion of England. Barons throughout Aquitaine attacked Henry’s garrisons, and once again Scotsmen under William the Lion went marauding through Northumbria. All the rebels were made more confident by the continuing reverberations from the murder of Becket. It is astonishing to record that the king, despite the enormity of the rebellion, defeated them all.
He achieved this with the aid of soldiers who remained loyal to him throughout the Angevin Empire. As has been seen, Henry II was naturally devout. In 1172, the year before the revolt broke out, he had finally reached an agreement with the pope known as the Compromise of Avranches. In order to be cleansed of his sins, he had accepted that appeals to Rome would not be stopped in his lifetime and he revoked the Constitutions of Clarendon, which Archbishop Thomas had refused to sign. As a result, until the Reformation in the sixteenth century any man who could read Latin could claim ‘benefit of clergy’ to save him from being tried in the king’s courts for any crime, however heinous. To some extent this restored the king to respectability, since England had the threat of papal interdict lifted. The clergy–many of whom had disapproved of Thomas à Becket–were reconciled to Henry, and this ensured that the whole civil service of clerks and government officials remained loyal to him. Almost none of the ordinary people of England joined the barons’ revolt, as they had little to gain and much to lose from a new anarchy.
After a year of fighting, despite holding off his enemies from abroad in 1174 and quelling the revolt in Aquitaine, Henry II’s affairs were still unsettled and England continued to be in a state of uproar. On 12 July 1174, impelled by a genuine desire to atone for the sin of murder, which he believed was preventing God from granting him victory, the great king went on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, to do penance at Thomas’s shrine and beg forgiveness. It was a gesture that seized the (very inflammable) popular imagination. The king was barefoot like the poorest pilgrim and naked but for a shirt. When he got near the shrine, to symbolize his utter mortification Henry approached his friend’s grave on his knees. As he shuffled forward the monarch who was the Caesar of his day, as Giraldus Cambrensis called him, was scourged by monks wielding rods. He then spent the whole night lying before his former friend’s shrine in constant prayer. When amid what were now cheering crowds he reached London the next day, he discovered to his delight that while he had been on his knees at Canterbury the wily king of the Scots, William the Lion, had been captured during a raid on Alnwick in Northumberland.
Henry would always be lenient to his sons, but towards Scotland he was more hard-hearted. Ever since the days of Edward the Elder, kings of the Scots had been forced to acknowledge the king of the English as their overlord, though most of them secretly seized every opportunity to stir up trouble. But by the draconian Treaty of Falaise, which forced William the Lion to do homage to him, Henry II made sure that the overlordship meant what it said, planting garrisons in the main castles of Scotland–at Edinburgh, Stirling, Berwick, Roxburgh and Jedburgh. After this success Henry’s morale improved. With his old decisiveness he marched off to Framlingham Castle in Suffolk, which is still standing, to besiege Hugh Bigod, one of the most important leaders of the English barons’ rebellion. With Bigod’s capture, the threat of disorder at home also died down.
The next decade saw a period of internal consolidation within England, in contrast to the expansion which had marked the first part of Henry’s reign. The Assize of Arms of 1181 (an assize was a legislative ordinance), which revamped the laws for calling out the fyrd, was a reflection of Henry’s trust in the ordinary Englishman who had not risen against him during his sons’ revolt. Every freeman was ordered to keep arms in his home to defend his country or to suppress revolts against the king. This reform was also an attempt to shift military power away from the barons because, as with scutage, the Assize made Henry less dependent on their calling out their feudal levy. As a sign of the king’s new respect for his English subjects, from 1181 he stopped using foreign mercenaries in England, and employed them only abroad.
It was the next century which saw the development of professional English lawyers, trained at the infant universities of Oxford and Cambridge or at schools of higher learning based in cathedrals such as Exeter and York. Nevertheless, following a series of legal reforms implemented by Henry, England saw a rapid development in legal definition which by the thirteenth century would be termed the common law. In the penultimate year of Henry’s reign, in 1188, an anonymous writer calling himself Glanvill published a groundbreaking written summary of the laws and customs of the English, De legibus et consuetudinibus regni Angliae.
This itemized what were now the standard practices throughout the king’s courts in England. Glanvill’s importance was that he showed that there was a law ‘common’ to the whole of England available to freemen which could be appealed to over the separate manorial, baronial and ecclesiastical courts. Although it was Henry I who had first instituted the practice of travelling royal judges, under Henry II the system was formalized, and in 1176 England was divided into the same six circuits we have today. The king’s judges were now under a duty to visit every shire in the country, and hold an eyre (from the corrupt Latin for iter, a journey) or hearing in the shire, or county court so that every part of England could have the benefit of the king’s justice. Judges travelled on circuit on a six-monthly basis, co-ordinated by the legal bureau at the royal court at Westminster, which by then had become differentiated into two systems. The Court of Common Pleas dealt with land disputes and disputes between private individuals–that is, civil matters common to the whole kingdom. The Court of the King’s Bench tried criminal cases–which, as the name suggests, were sometimes heard in front of the king. The eyre was replaced in the thirteenth century by what was called the assize court or the assizes (from the Norman French asseyer, to sit). These continued for 700 years until 1971, when their name was changed to crown court.
Most of Henry’s laws made the country much safer for travel. The sheriff, whose office and functions the Normans had taken over pretty well wholesale from the Anglo-Saxons, while remaining the king’s financial agent in the county court, had his powers of law enforcement enhanced. To arrest a thief the sheriff could now enter anyone’s land, even if it was within the jurisdiction of the lord of the manor–a privilege hitherto limited to the lord or abbot. Sheriffs now resembled an early police force who were expected to co-operate with one another even outside their shire. Henry II also put a prison in every shire and attached a sergeant to every sheriff with the right to arrest suspects and bring them before a court and to break up fights in the village. Every citizen had a duty to raise the hue and cry if he saw a crime being committed and was required to chase after the criminal.
The reign of Henry II also saw the development of the jury trial we know today. From 1179, by the Assize of Northampton, a trial before twelve property owners could take the place of the Norman method of resolving land disputes known as the ordeal by battle. By the late twelfth century the growing numbers of trained lawyers–some of whom were being taught in the town of Oxford since being banned by Henry II from the University of Paris after 1167 when Louis VII sheltered Becket–introduced a new rationalism into the intellectual climate. The ordeal, which assumed that the miraculous intervention of God gave victory to the rightful owner, had begun to look absurd. After all, a man might simply be a stronger fighter. The new system of trial by jury made allowances for the old, for the weak and for women, and it was offered only by the king’s courts. By the beginning of the next century opinion in the Church itself rebelled against the old practice. In 1215 by a directive from the Lateran Council in Rome all priests were forbidden to have anything to do with trial by ordeal, and the custom died out soon after.
But Henry did not completely do away with all the ordeals which the Normans had introduced–indeed he produced some of his own. The ordeal by water for criminal trials was brought in in 1166. This required the accused to have his legs and arms tied before he was lowered into a vat of water blessed by the local priest. If the accused sank he was innocent, if he floated he was guilty. Another proof was the ordeal by hot iron; here, the accused was made to carry a piece of heated iron and if it made no mark then he was guilty. In general, however, for most freemen the trend was towards a more rational form of justice under the royal courts.
Henry II also gave England the new office of coroner, which still does much the same work today. Elected in the county or old shire court, the coroner was responsible for carrying out inquests on the bodies of those whose death was suspicious–if it was sudden or accidental or if there was reason to believe it had been murder. By law the coroner’s inquest had to be constituted very soon after the death, while the evidence was still fresh in the mind of witnesses.
At the time of the Conquest England had long had a fairly law-abiding population accustomed to the ancient tradition of the hundred and shire courts. Ever since the days of Cnut it had been compulsory under Anglo-Saxon law for each man to belong to a tithing for the purpose of maintaining good order. The process was refined when William the Conqueror imposed the heavy murdrum fine where a Norman was murdered and the hundred could not produce the murderer. Since the hundred might cover a very large area this became impractical, and by the end of the twelfth century a sort of self-policing known as the frankpledge was being practised in the smaller area of the tithing–that is, a community of ten men who were responsible for one another’s good conduct. The duty of the tithing was to bring any criminal they suspected before the hundred court. Under Henry II it also became one of the sheriff’s functions to make sure that every man in the shire belonged to a tithing.
Although he was incapable of devolving responsibility to his sons, Henry was a generous-spirited man full of family feeling. He had been furious with his elder sons for rebelling against him, but nonetheless decided to believe their protestations of regret and restored them to their lands. His wife, however, remained under lock and key. After he had defeated the revolt there was no question but that Henry II was the greatest monarch of the age. His daughters, moreover, were married to the most powerful kings in Christendom. The system of informal royal alliances that this inaugurated between England on the one hand and Castile (the most important country in Spain), Germany and Flanders on the other set the pattern of foreign alliances for several hundred years.
Similarly the enmity with France continued to be a main theme of English policy. In 1180 the succession of Philip II, known as Philip Augustus, to the French throne brought a far more cunning enemy of the Angevin Empire into play. The last years of Henry II were very sad ones. One of the reasons for the first rebellion against him had been the favouritism he showed towards his youngest son John, to whom he had begun making over castles which belonged to the young King Henry. Ten years younger than his nearest brother Richard, John was a short (five feet five) black-haired youth who was known as Jean Sans Terre or John Lackland because he had no obvious lands to inherit, unlike his elder brothers. He has had a very bad press down the centuries, given his odious moral character and his liking for physical cruelty, but modern historians are impressed by his administrative competence and his interest in justice.
Contemporary historians, however, detested him. At the time the historian Geraldus Cambrensis did not mince his words about the mistake John’s doting father Henry II had made in deciding that his new possession, Ireland, might make up for John’s lack of lands. In 1185 he sent him as lord of Ireland to govern the country, though he was aged only eighteen, having tried and failed to persuade Richard to yield Aquitaine to John–the death of the young King Henry meant that Richard was now heir to Normandy and England. But he was forced to withdraw John from Ireland within the year on account of his grotesque behaviour. Paying no attention to older advisers and keeping company only with foolish young men of his own age, John failed to behave to the Irish kings with the courtesy they deserved. He pulled their long beards, which were the fashion in Ireland (an oddity to clean-shaven Normans) and granted their lands to his favourites. Despite all this, the infatuated king continued to push the cause of John, at the expense of Richard the Lionheart.
Eleven years after the first revolt of Henry’s sons in 1183, another rebellion threatened in Richard’s own Duchy of Aquitaine. The proud and restless barons there had felt Richard’s firm hand for too long. They were easily encouraged by the young King Henry and his next brother Geoffrey of Brittany to rebel against their overlord. It was a revolt which again threatened to dissolve the Angevin Empire when Toulouse and Burgundy sent aid. So dangerous was the situation that Henry II gave orders that all the barons who had taken part in the first revolt should be locked up. With the sudden death of the young King Henry from dysentery, the rebellion died away almost as quickly as it had sprung up. But the new heir to the throne, Richard, had an even more stormy relationship with his father.
The golden-haired, blue-eyed Richard was cast in a heroic mould. Attractive, generous, fiery and impulsive, he did not have his father’s brains, but he had his temper and his military flair. Though Richard was now the heir presumptive to England, Normandy and Anjou, Henry’s secret plan was to make these lands John’s. After failing to obtain Aquitaine for John, for four years Henry refused to name Richard his heir. He would not have him crowned as he had his elder brother, nor would he make the necessary arrangements to hurry up his marriage to Princess Alice of France, the sister of the young King Henry’s widow.
Henry’s refusal to treat Richard properly would lead to the beginning of the end of the Angevin Empire. It not only gave the new King of France, Philip Augustus, an excuse to begin hostilities against his over-powerful subject, the King of England. It drove a bitter Richard permanently into Philip’s camp. As will be recalled, the return to Henry II of the Norman Vexin was dependent on the marriage between Philip’s sister and the young king. This dowry was now transferred to Alice, the next sister, but Henry’s foot-dragging meant that she was still not married to Richard. When neither the Vexin nor his sister returned to France, Philip Augustus had a perfect excuse for war. Though it ended in a truce, Richard was soon responding again to the French king’s overtures.
Relations became thornier than ever between father and son on account of Henry’s behaviour over the Third Crusade, in 1189. Richard the Lionheart, as he soon became known, passionately wished to go on this Crusade to rescue the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, which had fallen to the brilliant new Muslim warlord the Kurd Saladin, Sultan of Egypt and Syria. But in such an uncertain situation he would have been foolish to depart unless and until his father named him as heir; this Henry II continued to refuse to do. Richard therefore not only publicly did homage to the French king for his lands in France but simultaneously joined with the French king to invade Henry’s Angevin holdings.
By mischance his father was in France, but did not have enough loyal English troops with him to fight on so many fronts. He ran out of gold to pay his mercenaries, who therefore deserted him. Henry’s tenants-in-chief in Maine and Anjou all went over to the victorious young kings, and he was driven out of Le Mans too. But some atavistic sentiment made him reluctant to leave his native land of Anjou for Normandy, where he would have found greater loyalty. Perhaps he was too tired to make a last stand, for he was also ill with a debilitating fever. From an old Angevin stronghold, the castle of Chinon, perched on rocky heights above the River Vienne, he was forced to come to a humiliating treaty with Philip and Richard which granted their every demand. He was so unwell when he arrived at the meeting at Colombières, shaking and trembling, that Philip offered him his cloak and suggested he sit on the grass, but the old king angrily refused.
Afterwards, back in his bed at the castle of Chinon, the king scanned the names of the rebels whom Philip and Richard demanded should now do homage to Richard as their liege lord instead of to himself. When at the top of it he saw the name of his beloved son John he turned his face to the wall and was heard by his courtiers to cry, ‘O John! John!’ Then he said dully, ‘Let things go as they will. I no longer care for anything in this world.’ He died three days later. In his last agony he was heard by those about him to mutter, ‘Shame, shame on a defeated king.’
In his palace at Winchester, Henry had commissioned a painting which to him summed up the last years of his life with his sons grown up: three young eagles were attacking their parent bird, while a fourth was standing on his neck ready to peck out its eyes. It proved all too prescient.
When he was dead he was borne through the rolling Angevin hills to the Abbey of Fontevrault, where you can still see his tomb. Beside him lies Queen Eleanor. Enemies by the end of their lives, they were united in death. But although (as one historian has said) Henry was a lion savaged by jackals, so great were his achievements that many of the methods of justice and government that he designed endured for eight centuries. His superb bureaucracy ensured that England continued to flourish for some time after his death, despite the worst efforts of his two careless sons.