England and Its Rulers 1066–1307 M
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
ENGLAND AND ITS RULERS 1066–1307 M. T. CLANCHY fourth edition A1 Contents Preface to the Fourth Edition ix List of Abbreviations x Maps 1. England and France xi 2. England and the Mediterranean xii 3. Edward I’s kingdom in Britain in 1305 xiii 1 England’s Place in Medieval Europe 1 England and its conquerors 3 Europe and the world 6 England’s destiny 10 Interpretations of English history 15 England and Britain 18 Part I The Normans (1066–1135) 23 2 The Norman Conquest (1066–87) 28 Immediately after the Conquest 28 Debates about the Conquest 31 English feelings about the Normans 35 Names and languages 39 Domesday Book 42 3 Norman Government (1087–1135) 47 William Rufus and Henry I 48 The development of institutions 54 A1 vi contents The Exchequer 56 Feudalism 60 4 Church Reform 65 The Anglo-Saxon church 65 Lanfranc and Norman control 68 Anselm and religious perfection 73 Monastic expansion 77 5 The Creation of Wealth 83 Competition between churches and towns 84 Markets and money 89 What was wealth? 92 Did the Normans make a difference? 95 Part II The Angevins (1135–99) 99 6 Struggles for the Kingdom (1135–99) 106 Property and inheritance 107 Stephen and Matilda 110 Henry II’s ancestral rights 113 Henry II and his sons 118 Richard I 120 7 Law and Order 125 The law and feudalism 126 The system described by Glanvill 128 Henry II’s intentions 131 Bureaucracy 133 Why did England develop a system of its own? 136 8 The Twelfth-century Renaissance 140 England’s place in this Renaissance 142 Curiales and Latinists 145 The Owl and the Nightingale 148 Artists and patrons 150 9 The Matter of Britain 155 A1 Arthur and Merlin 158 Wales – defining an allegiance 162 contents vii Modernization in Scotland 167 Civilization in Ireland 174 10 Family and Gender 182 Gender 185 Clerics and the family 188 The law of marriage 191 House and home 194 Part III The Poitevins (1199–1272) 198 11 King John and the Minority of Henry III (1199–1227) 203 The Poitevin connection 203 The record of King John 207 Magna Carta 210 The regency of William the Marshal 214 Implications of the minority 219 12 The Personal Rule of Henry III (1227–58) 223 Contemporary rulers 224 The return of Peter des Roches 228 Henry’s style of kingship 232 Henry’s European strategy 239 The ‘Sicilian business’ 243 13 National Identity 248 National feeling in Henry III’s reign 248 The papacy and internationalism 251 The identity of England 253 The use of the English language 257 From lordship to nation state 260 The expulsion of the Poitevins 263 14 The Commune of England (1258–72) 267 The confederates of 1258 268 The idea of the commune 271 The Provisions of Oxford 273 Henry III’s recovery 276 Monarchy versus community 278 A1 The king and Westminster abbey 281 viii contents 15 Lordship and the Structure of Society 284 Homage and honour 287 Women and lordship 291 Lords, freemen and serfs 294 Lordship and management 298 Epilogue 304 16 Edward I (1272–1307) 304 Assessing the king’s character 306 The enforcement of royal rights 310 The conquest of Wales 315 The subjection of Scotland 320 English law and nationalism 324 Genealogical Tables Normans and Angevins 331 Angevins and Poitevins 332 The Savoyards 333 Suggestions for Further Reading 334 Index 343 A1 PART II The Angevins (1135–99) The connection between England and Anjou originated in 1128 with the marriage of Matilda, Henry I’s daughter and heiress, to Geoffrey Plantagenet, heir of the count of Anjou. Through this alliance Henry hoped to bring Norman and Angevin rivalries to an end and to leave Matilda with a stronger power-base than he had had on his accession. As events turned out, however, the Angevin alliance was a disaster for Matilda because it caused twenty years of civil war in England and bitter campaigns at the same time in France between Angevins and Normans. In the longer term Henry II (1154–89) succeeded in holding together his diverse possessions by his own determination, and Richard I (1189– 99) pursued the logic of his great inheritance in the crusade against Saladin (Richard had a claim to the kingdom of Jerusalem through his great-grandfather, Fulk of Anjou) and in war against Philip Augustus of France. Nevertheless the Angevin connection had overstretched the capacities of even these energetic rulers, as they never succeeded in giving a sense of common purpose to their diverse lands. In the words of Sir James Holt: The Plantagenet lands were not designed as an ‘empire’, as a great centralized administrative structure, which was ultimately broken down by rebellion and French attack. On the contrary these lands were simply cobbled together. They were founded, and continued to survive, on an unholy combination of princely greed and genealogical accident.1 Historians since the nineteenth century have for convenience described these lands as the Angevin Empire. Contemporaries, on the other A1 100 the angevins (1135–99) hand, although they acknowledged that Henry II’s dominions stretched from the Northern Ocean (that is, from Scotland) to the Pyrenees, never used the term ‘Angevin Empire’ because they looked on Henry’s lands as the lucky acquisition of a quarrelsome family and not as an institution. Henry II’s father, Geoffrey count of Anjou, had neither the ability nor the inclination to unite England and Normandy with Anjou. Although his marriage to Matilda designated him as king on Henry I’s death, he never set foot in England and Henry I even obstructed him from obtaining the castles in Normandy which were Matilda’s dower. Geoffrey’s conduct contrasts with that of his father, Fulk, who likewise married the heiress to a kingdom, Melisende of Jerusalem, in 1129. Fulk immediately went to Palestine and ruled there as king from 1131 to 1143, whereas Geoffrey in 1131 forfeited his chance to be king of England by allowing Matilda to cross the Channel without him and accept the oath of allegiance of the English barons at Northampton on her own. Geoffrey had only succeeded to Anjou in 1129 and he may have felt that he could not abandon it, as his father had just done, by crossing over to his wife’s kingdom. Furthermore he would probably not have been welcome, either in England or in Normandy. Contemporaries give no satisfactory explanation for Geoffrey’s indifferent career. The chronicler of Anjou, Jean de Marmoutier, char- acterizes him in much the same way as his son Henry II would later be eulogized as ‘admirable in probity, outstanding in justice, dedicated to acts of knighthood, and excellently educated’.2 Orderic Vitalis in Normandy, on the other hand, describes the failure of Geoffrey’s four successive invasions between 1135 and 1138 and records that the Angevins made themselves hated by their brutality, although Geoffrey did get himself accepted as duke of Normandy in 1144. He had also faced rebellions in his native Anjou which obstructed effective action in Normandy. As for England, it was entirely foreign to him and he had problems with Matilda as well. She was the widow of the Emperor Henry V and persisted in calling herself ‘Empress’ throughout her life, as if her marriage to Geoffrey was of no significance. Geoffrey retali- ated by staying put in France. William of Malmesbury reports that when in 1142 Matilda appealed to Geoffrey to do his duty by coming to defend his wife’s and his children’s inheritance in England, he replied that he knew none of her ambassadors and would deal only A1 with Robert earl of Gloucester. When Robert crossed the Channel at the angevins (1135–99) 101 considerable personal risk, Geoffrey made excuses but, as a great favour, he did allow the future Henry II (who was then aged nine) to be taken to England as the rallying point for Matilda’s cause. In this oblique way the Angevins came to England. Geoffrey’s lack of success in the decade following his marriage to Matilda contrasts with the future Henry II’s vigour in his early years. In 1149 he was knighted at the age of sixteen by David I of Scotland. In that year or in 1150 he was inaugurated as duke of Normandy. In 1151 he succeeded his father as count of Anjou and in 1152 he married Eleanor of Aquitaine. ‘It is astonishing’, comments a contemporary, ‘how such great good fortune came to him so fast and so suddenly that within a short time without expecting it, he was called duke of Nor- mandy and count of Anjou.’3 Although Henry owed his sudden eleva- tion to the unexpected death of his father (at the age of forty) and to his father’s belated pacification of Anjou and Normandy, he managed – by contrast with his father – to establish his authority immediately in his new dominions. Furthermore in 1153, by the treaty of Win- chester, Henry’s title to the kingdom of England was recognized by Stephen, who disinherited his own surviving son. Henry was now twenty years old, the same age as Geoffrey had been in 1131 when he had first forfeited his chance to be king of England. Henry II’s success, when compared with his father’s career, suggests that his dominance depended on personal qualities rather than on luck or on inherited institutions. He created the illusion of an Angevin Empire by grasping opportunities and by hard riding. Herbert of Bosham (one of Becket’s biographers) likened government to a human chariot, of which the king is both driver and marksman, dragging everyone along in fear and excitement.