Notes:

John (24 December 1166 - 18/19 October 1216), also known as John Lackland (Norman French: Johan sanz Terre), was King of England from 6 April 1199 until his death. During John's reign, England lost the duchy of Normandy to King Philip II of France, which resulted in the collapse of most of the Angevin Empire and contributed to the subsequent growth in power of the Capetian dynasty during the 13th century. The baronial revolt at the end of John's reign led to the signing of the Magna Carta, a document often considered to be an early step in the evolution of the constitution of the United Kingdom.

John, the youngest of five sons of King Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine, was at first not expected to inherit significant lands. Following the failed rebellion of his elder brothers between 1173 and 1174, however, John became Henry's favourite child. He was appointed the Lord of Ireland in 1177 and given lands in England and on the continent. John's elder brothers William, Henry and Geoffrey died young; by the time Richard I became king in 1189, John was a potential heir to the throne. John unsuccessfully attempted a rebellion against Richard's royal administrators whilst his brother was participating in the Third Crusade. Despite this, after Richard died in 1199, John was proclaimed king of England, and came to an agreement with Philip II of France to recognise John's possession of the continental Angevin lands at the peace treaty of Le Goulet in 1200.

When war with France broke out again in 1202, John achieved early victories, but shortages of military resources and his treatment of Norman, Breton and Anjou nobles resulted in the collapse of his empire in northern France in 1204. John spent much of the next decade attempting to regain these lands, raising huge revenues, reforming his armed forces and rebuilding continental alliances. John's judicial reforms had a lasting, positive impact on the English common law system, as well as providing an additional source of revenue. An argument with Pope Innocent III led to John's excommunication in 1209, a dispute finally settled by the king in 1213. John's attempt to defeat Philip in 1214 failed due to the French victory over John's allies at the battle of Bouvines. When he returned to England, John faced a rebellion by many of his barons, who were unhappy with his fiscal policies and his treatment of many of England's most powerful nobles. Although both John and the barons agreed to the Magna Carta peace treaty in 1215, neither side complied with its conditions. Civil war broke out shortly afterwards, with the barons aided by Louis of France. It soon descended into a stalemate. John died of dysentery contracted whilst on campaign in eastern England during late 1216; supporters of his son Henry III went on to achieve victory over Louis and the rebel barons the following year.

Contemporary chroniclers were mostly critical of John's performance as king, and his reign has since been the subject of significant debate and periodic revision by historians from the 16th century onwards. Historian Jim Bradbury has summarised the contemporary historical opinion of John's positive qualities, observing that John is today usually considered a "hard-working administrator, an able man, an able general". Nonetheless, modern historians agree that he also had many faults as king, including what historian Ralph Turner describes as "distasteful, even dangerous personality traits", such as pettiness, spitefulness and cruelty. These negative qualities provided extensive material for fiction writers in the Victorian era, and John remains a recurring character within Western popular culture, primarily as a villain in films and stories depicting the Robin Hood legends.

Early life (1166-89)

Childhood and the Angevin inheritance

John was born to Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine on 24 December 1166. Henry had inherited significant territories along the Atlantic seaboard-Anjou, Normandy and England-and expanded his empire by conquering Brittany. Henry married the powerful Eleanor of Aquitaine, who reigned over the Duchy of Aquitaine and had a tenuous claim to Toulouse and Auvergne in southern France, in addition to being the former wife of Louis VII of France. The result was the Angevin Empire, named after Henry's paternal title as Count of Anjou and, more specifically, its seat in Angers. The Empire, however, was inherently fragile: although all the lands owed allegiance to Henry, the disparate parts each had their own histories, traditions and governance structures. As one moved south through Anjou and Aquitaine, the extent of Henry's power in the provinces diminished considerably, scarcely resembling the modern concept of an empire at all. Some of the traditional ties between parts of the empire such as Normandy and England were slowly dissolving over time. It was unclear what would happen to the empire on Henry's death. Although the custom of primogeniture, under which an eldest son would inherit all his father's lands, was slowly becoming more widespread across Europe, it was less popular amongst the Norman kings of England. Most believed that Henry would divide the empire, giving each son a substantial portion, and hoping that his children would continue to work together as allies after his death. To complicate matters, much of the Angevin empire was held by Henry only as a vassal of the King of France of the rival line of the House of Capet. Henry had often allied himself with the Holy Roman Emperor against France, making the feudal relationship even more challenging.

Shortly after his birth, John was passed from Eleanor into the care of a wet nurse, a traditional practice for medieval noble families. Eleanor then left for Poitiers, the capital of Aquitaine, and sent John and his sister Joan north to Fontevrault Abbey. This may have been done with the aim of steering her youngest son, with no obvious inheritance, towards a future ecclesiastical career. Eleanor spent the next few years conspiring against her husband Henry and neither parent played a part in John's very early life. John was probably, like his brothers, assigned a magister whilst he was at Fontevrault, a teacher charged with his early education and with managing the servants of his immediate household; John was later taught by Ranulph Glanville, a leading English administrator. John spent some time as a member of the household of his eldest living brother Henry the Young King, where he probably received instruction in hunting and military skills.

John grew up to be around 5 ft 5 in (1.68 m) tall, relatively short, with a "powerful, barrel-chested body" and dark red hair; he looked to contemporaries like an inhabitant of Poitou. John enjoyed reading and, unusually for the period, built up a travelling library of books. He enjoyed gambling, in particular at backgammon, and was an enthusiastic hunter, even by medieval standards. He liked music, although not songs. John would become a "connoisseur of jewels", building up a large collection, and became famous for his opulent clothes and also, according to French chroniclers, for his fondness for bad wine. As John grew up, he became known for sometimes being "genial, witty, generous and hospitable"; at other moments, he could be jealous, over-sensitive and prone to fits of rage, "biting and gnawing his fingers" in anger.

Early life

During John's early years, Henry attempted to resolve the question of his succession. Henry the Young King had been crowned King of England in 1170, but was not given any formal powers by his father; he was also promised Normandy and Anjou as part of his future inheritance. Richard was to be appointed the Count of Poitou with control of Aquitaine, whilst Geoffrey was to become the Duke of Brittany. At this time it seemed unlikely that John would ever inherit substantial lands, and John was jokingly nicknamed "Lackland" by his father.

Henry II wanted to secure the southern borders of Aquitaine and decided to betroth his youngest son to Alais, the daughter and heiress of Humbert III of Savoy. As part of this agreement John was promised the future inheritance of Savoy, Piemonte, Maurienne, and the other possessions of Count Humbert. For his part in the potential marriage alliance, Henry II transferred the castles of Chinon, Loudun and Mirebeau into John's name; as John was only five years old his father would continue to control them for practical purposes. Henry the Young King was unimpressed by this; although he had yet to be granted control of any castles in his new kingdom, these were effectively his future property and had been given away without consultation. Alais made the trip over the Alps and joined Henry II's court, but she died before marrying John, which left the prince once again without an inheritance.

In 1173 John's elder brothers, backed by Eleanor, rose in revolt against Henry in the short-lived rebellion of 1173 to 1174. Growing irritated with his subordinate position to Henry II and increasingly worried that John might be given additional lands and castles at his expense, Henry the Young King travelled to Paris and allied himself with Louis VII. Eleanor, irritated by her husband's persistent interference in Aquitaine, encouraged Richard and Geoffrey to join their brother Henry in Paris. Henry II triumphed over the coalition of his sons, but was generous to them in the peace settlement agreed at Montlouis. Henry the Young King was allowed to travel widely in Europe with his own household of knights, Richard was given Aquitaine back, and Geoffrey was allowed to return to Brittany; only Eleanor was imprisoned for her role in the revolt.

John had spent the conflict travelling alongside his father, and was given widespread possessions across the Angevin empire as part of the Montlouis settlement; from then onwards, most observers regarded John as Henry II's favourite child, although he was the furthest removed in terms of the royal succession. Henry II began to find more lands for John, mostly at various nobles' expense. In 1175 he appropriated the estates of the late Earl of Cornwall and gave them to John. The following year, Henry disinherited the sisters of Isabelle of Gloucester, contrary to legal custom, and betrothed John to the now extremely wealthy Isabelle. In 1177, at the Council of Oxford, Henry dismissed William FitzAldelm as the Lord of Ireland and replaced him with the ten-year-old John.

Henry the Young King fought a short war with his brother Richard in 1183 over the status of England, Normandy and Aquitaine. Henry II moved in support of Richard, and Henry the Young King died from dysentery at the end of the campaign. With his primary heir dead, Henry rearranged the plans for the succession: Richard was to be made King of England, albeit without any actual power until the death of his father; Geoffrey would retain Brittany; and John would now become the Duke of Aquitaine in place of Richard. Richard refused to give up Aquitaine; Henry II was furious and ordered John, with help from Geoffrey, to march south and retake the duchy by force. The two attacked the capital of Poitiers, and Richard responded by attacking Brittany. The war ended in stalemate and a tense family reconciliation in England at the end of 1184.

In 1185 John made his first visit to Ireland, accompanied by 300 knights and a team of administrators. Henry had tried to have John officially proclaimed King of Ireland, but Pope Lucius III would not agree. John's first period of rule in Ireland was not a success. Ireland had only recently been conquered by Anglo-Norman forces, and tensions were still rife between Henry II, the new settlers and the existing inhabitants. John infamously offended the local Irish rulers by making fun of their unfashionable long beards, failed to make allies amongst the Anglo-Norman settlers, began to lose ground militarily against the Irish and finally returned to England later in the year, blaming the viceroy, Hugh de Lacy, for the fiasco.

The problems amongst John's wider family continued to grow. His elder brother Geoffrey died during a tournament in 1186, leaving a posthumous son, Arthur, and an elder daughter, Eleanor. The duchy of Brittany was given to Arthur rather than John, but Geoffrey's death brought John slightly closer to the throne of England. The uncertainty about what would happen after Henry's death continued to grow; Richard was keen to join a new crusade and remained concerned that whilst he was away Henry would appoint John his formal successor. Richard began discussions about a potential alliance with Philip II in Paris during 1187, and the next year Richard gave homage to Philip in exchange for support for a war against Henry. Richard and Philip fought a joint campaign against Henry, and by the summer of 1189 the king made peace, promising Richard the succession. John initially remained loyal to his father, but changed sides once it appeared that Richard would win. Henry died shortly afterwards.

Richard's reign (1189-99)

When John's elder brother Richard became king in September 1189, he had already declared his intention of joining the Third Crusade. Richard set about raising the huge sums of money required for this expedition through the sale of lands, titles and appointments, and attempted to ensure that he would not face a revolt while away from his empire. John was made Count of Mortain, was married to the wealthy Isabel of Gloucester, and was given valuable lands in Lancaster and the counties of Cornwall, Derby, Devon, Dorset, Nottingham and Somerset, all with the aim of buying his loyalty to Richard whilst the king was on crusade. Richard retained royal control of key castles in these counties, thereby preventing John from accumulating too much military and political power. In return, John promised not to visit England for the next three years, thereby in theory giving Richard adequate time to conduct a successful crusade and return from the Levant without fear of John seizing power. Richard left political authority in England - the post of justiciar - jointly in the hands of Bishop Hugh de Puiset and William Mandeville, and made William Longchamp, the Bishop of Ely, his chancellor. Mandeville immediately died, and Longchamp took over as joint justiciar with Puiset, which would prove to be a less than satisfactory partnership. Eleanor, the queen mother, convinced Richard to allow John into England in his absence.

The political situation in England rapidly began to deteriorate. Longchamp refused to work with Puiset and became unpopular with the English nobility and clergy. John exploited this unpopularity to set himself up as an alternative ruler with his own royal court, complete with his own justiciar, chancellor and other royal posts, and was happy to be portrayed as an alternative regent, and possibly the next king. Armed conflict broke out between John and Longchamp, and by October 1191 Longchamp was isolated in the Tower of London with John in control of the city of London, thanks to promises John had made to the citizens in return for recognition as Richard's heir presumptive. At this point Walter of Coutances, the Archbishop of Rouen, returned to England, having been sent by Richard to restore order. John's position was undermined by Walter's relative popularity and by the news that Richard had married whilst in Cyprus, which presented the possibility that Richard would have legitimate children and heirs.
An illuminated picture of King John riding a white horse and accompanied by four hounds. The king is chasing a stag, and several rabbits can be seen at the bottom of the picture.

The political turmoil continued. John began to explore an alliance with the French king Philip II, freshly returned from the crusade. John hoped to acquire Normandy, Anjou and the other lands in France held by Richard in exchange for allying himself with Philip. John was persuaded not to pursue an alliance by his mother. Longchamp, who had left England after Walter's intervention, now returned, and argued that he had been wrongly removed as justiciar. John intervened, suppressing Longchamp's claims in return for promises of support from the royal administration, including a reaffirmation of his position as heir to the throne. When Richard still did not return from the crusade, John began to assert that his brother was dead or otherwise permanently lost. Richard had in fact been captured en route to England by the Duke of Austria and was handed over to Emperor Henry VI, who held him for ransom. John seized the opportunity and went to Paris, where he formed an alliance with Philip. He agreed to set aside his wife, Isabella of Gloucester, and marry Philip's sister, Alys, in exchange for Philip's support. Fighting broke out in England between forces loyal to Richard and those being gathered by John. John's military position was weak and he agreed to a truce; in early 1194 the king finally returned to England, and John's remaining forces surrendered. John retreated to Normandy, where Richard finally found him later that year. Richard declared that his younger brother - despite being 27 years old - was merely "a child who has had evil counsellors" and forgave him, but removed his lands with the exception of Ireland.

For the remaining years of Richard's reign, John supported his brother on the continent, apparently loyally. Richard's policy on the continent was to attempt to regain the castles he had lost to Philip II whilst on crusade through steady, limited campaigns. He allied himself with the leaders of Flanders, Boulogne and the Holy Roman Empire to apply pressure on Philip from Germany. In 1195 John successfully conducted a sudden attack and siege of Évreux castle, and subsequently managed the defences of Normandy against Philip. The following year, John seized the town of Gamaches and led a raiding party within 50 miles (80 km) of Paris, capturing the Bishop of Beauvais. In return for this service, Richard withdrew his malevontia (ill-will) towards John, restored him to the county of Gloucestershire and made him again the Count of Mortain.

Early reign (1199-1204)

After Richard's death on 6 April 1199 there were two potential claimants to the Angevin throne: John, whose claim rested on being the sole surviving son of Henry II, and young Arthur of Brittany, who held a claim as the son of Geoffrey, John's elder brother. Richard appears to have started to recognise John as his legitimate heir in the final years before his death, but the matter was not clear-cut and medieval law gave little guidance as to how the competing claims should be decided. With Norman law favouring John as the only surviving son of Henry II and Angevin law favouring Arthur as the heir of Henry's elder son, the matter rapidly became an open conflict. John was supported by the bulk of the English and Norman nobility and was crowned at Westminster, backed by his mother, Eleanor. Arthur was supported by the majority of the Breton, Maine and Anjou nobles and received the support of Philip II, who remained committed to breaking up the Angevin territories on the continent. With Arthur's army pressing up the Loire valley towards Angers and Philip's forces moving down the valley towards Tours, John's continental empire was in danger of being cut in two.

Warfare in Normandy at the time was shaped by the defensive potential of castles and the increasing costs of conducting campaigns. The Norman frontiers had limited natural defences but were heavily reinforced with castles, such as Château Gaillard, at strategic points, built and maintained at considerable expense. It was difficult for a commander to advance far into fresh territory without having secured his lines of communication by capturing these fortifications, which slowed the progress of any attack. Armies of the period could be formed from either feudal or mercenary forces. Feudal levies could only be raised for a fixed length of time before they returned home, forcing an end to a campaign; mercenary forces, often called Brabançons after the Duchy of Brabant but actually recruited from across northern Europe, could operate all year long and provide a commander with more strategic options to pursue a campaign, but cost much more than equivalent feudal forces. As a result commanders of the period were increasingly drawing on larger numbers of mercenaries.

After his coronation, John moved south into France with military forces and adopted a defensive posture along the eastern and southern Normandy borders. Both sides paused for desultory negotiations before the war recommenced; John's position was now stronger, thanks to confirmation that Count Baldwin of Flanders and Renaud of Boulogne had renewed the anti-French alliances they had previously agreed to with Richard. The powerful Anjou nobleman William de Roches was persuaded to switch sides from Arthur to John; suddenly the balance seemed to be tipping away from Philip and Arthur in favour of John. Neither side was keen to continue the conflict, and following a papal truce the two leaders met in January 1200 to negotiate possible terms for peace. From John's perspective, what then followed represented an opportunity to stabilise control over his continental possessions and produce a lasting peace with Philip in Paris. John and Philip negotiated the May 1200 Treaty of Le Goulet; by this treaty, Philip recognised John as the rightful heir to Richard in respect to his French possessions, temporarily abandoning the wider claims of his client, Arthur. John, in turn, abandoned Richard's former policy of containing Philip through alliances with Flanders and Boulogne, and accepted Philip's right as the legitimate feudal overlord of John's lands in France. John's policy earned him the disrespectful title of "John Softsword" from some English chroniclers, who contrasted his behaviour with his more aggressive brother, Richard.

Le Goulet peace, 1200-02

The new peace would only last for two years; war recommenced in the aftermath of John's decision in August 1200 to marry Isabella of Angoulême. In order to remarry, John first needed to abandon Isabel, Countess of Gloucester, his first wife; John accomplished this by arguing that he had failed to get the necessary papal permission to marry Isabel in the first place - as a cousin, John could not have legally wed her without this. It remains unclear why John chose to marry Isabella of Angoulême. Contemporary chroniclers argued that John had fallen deeply in love with Isabella, and John may have been motivated by desire for an apparently beautiful, if rather young, girl. On the other hand, the Angoumois lands that came with Isabella were strategically vital to John: by marrying Isabella, John was acquiring a key land route between Poitou and Gascony, which significantly strengthened his grip on Aquitaine.

Unfortunately, Isabella was already engaged to Hugh de Lusignan, an important member of a key Poitou noble family and brother of Raoul de Lusignan, the Count of Eu, who possessed lands along the sensitive eastern Normandy border. Just as John stood to benefit strategically from marrying Isabella, so the marriage threatened the interests of the Lusignans, whose own lands currently provided the key route for royal goods and troops across Aquitaine. Rather than negotiating some form of compensation, John treated Hugh "with contempt"; this resulted in a Lusignan uprising that was promptly crushed by John, who also intervened to suppress Raoul in Normandy.

Although John was the Count of Poitou and therefore the rightful feudal lord over the Lusignans, they could legitimately appeal John's actions in France to his own feudal lord, Philip. Hugh did exactly this in 1201 and Philip summoned John to attend court in Paris in 1202, citing the Le Goulet treaty to strengthen his case. John was unwilling to weaken his authority in western France in this way. He argued that he need not attend Philip's court because of his special status as the Duke of Normandy, who was exempt by feudal tradition from being called to the French court. Philip argued that he was summoning John not as the Duke of Normandy, but as the Count of Poitou, which carried no such special status. When John still refused to come, Philip declared John in breach of his feudal responsibilities, reassigned all of John's lands that fell under the French crown to Arthur - with the exception of Normandy, which he took back for himself - and began a fresh war against John.

Loss of Normandy, 1202-04

John initially adopted a defensive posture similar to that of 1199: avoiding open battle and carefully defending his key castles. John's operations became more chaotic as the campaign progressed, and Philip began to make steady progress in the east. John became aware in July that Arthur's forces were threatening his mother, Eleanor, at Mirebeau Castle. Accompanied by William de Roches, his seneschal in Anjou, he swung his mercenary army rapidly south to protect her. His forces caught Arthur by surprise and captured the entire rebel leadership at the battle of Mirebeau. With his southern flank weakening, Philip was forced to withdraw in the east and turn south himself to contain John's army.

John's position in France was considerably strengthened by the victory at Mirebeau, but John's treatment of his new prisoners and of his ally, William de Roches, quickly undermined these gains. De Roches was a powerful Anjou noble, but John largely ignored him, causing considerable offence, whilst the king kept the rebel leaders in such bad conditions that twenty-two of them died. At this time most of the regional nobility were closely linked through kinship, and this behaviour towards their relatives was regarded as unacceptable. William de Roches and other of John's regional allies in Anjou and Brittany deserted him in favour of Philip, and Brittany rose in fresh revolt. John's financial situation was tenuous: once factors such as the comparative military costs of materiel and soldiers were taken into account, Philip enjoyed a considerable, although not overwhelming, advantage of resources over John.

Further desertions of John's local allies at the beginning of 1203 steadily reduced John's freedom to manoeuvre in the region. He attempted to convince Pope Innocent III to intervene in the conflict, but Innocent's efforts were unsuccessful. As the situation became worse for John, he appears to have decided to have Arthur killed, with the aim of removing his potential rival and of undermining the rebel movement in Brittany. Arthur had initially been imprisoned at Falaise and was then moved to Rouen. After this, Arthur's fate remains uncertain, but modern historians believe he was murdered by John. The annals of Margam Abbey suggest that "John had captured Arthur and kept him alive in prison for some time in the castle of Rouen... when John was drunk he slew Arthur with his own hand and tying a heavy stone to the body cast it into the Seine." Rumours of the manner of Arthur's death further reduced support for John across the region. Arthur's sister, Eleanor, who had also been captured at Mirebeau, was kept imprisoned by John for many years, albeit in relatively good conditions.

In late 1203, John attempted to relieve Château Gaillard, which although besieged by Philip was guarding the eastern flank of Normandy. John attempted a synchronised operation involving land-based and water-borne forces, considered by most historians today to have been imaginative in conception, but overly complex for forces of the period to have carried out successfully. John's relief operation was blocked by Philip's forces, and John turned back to Brittany in an attempt to draw Philip away from eastern Normandy. John successfully devastated much of Brittany, but did not deflect Philip's main thrust into the east of Normandy. Opinions vary amongst historians as to the military skill shown by John during this campaign, with most recent historians arguing that his performance was passable, although not impressive. John's situation began to deteriorate rapidly. The eastern border region of Normandy had been extensively cultivated by Philip and his predecessors for several years, whilst Angevin authority in the south had been undermined by Richard's giving away of various key castles some years before. His use of routier mercenaries in the central regions had rapidly eaten away his remaining support in this area too, which set the stage for a sudden collapse of Angevin power. John retreated back across the Channel in December, sending orders for the establishment of a fresh defensive line to the west of Chateau Gaillard. In March 1204, Gaillard fell. John's mother Eleanor died the following month. This was not just a personal blow for John, but threatened to unravel the widespread Angevin alliances across the far south of France. Philip moved south around the new defensive line and struck upwards at the heart of the Duchy, now facing little resistance. By August, Philip had taken Normandy and advanced south to occupy Anjou and Poitou as well. John's only remaining possession on the Continent was now the Duchy of Aquitaine.

John as king

Kingship and royal administration

The nature of government under the Angevin monarchs was ill-defined and uncertain. John's predecessors had ruled using the principle of vis et voluntas, or "force and will", taking executive and sometimes arbitrary decisions, often justified on the basis that a king was above the law. Both Henry II and Richard had argued that kings possessed a quality of "divine majesty"; John continued this trend and claimed an "almost imperial status" for himself as ruler. During the 12th century, there were contrary opinions expressed about the nature of kingship, and many contemporary writers believed that monarchs should rule in accordance with the custom and the law, and take council with the leading members of the realm. There was as yet no model for what should happen if a king refused to do so. Despite his claim to unique authority within England, John would sometimes justify his actions on the basis that he had taken council with the barons. Modern historians remain divided as to whether John suffered from a case of "royal schizophrenia" in his approach to government, or if his actions merely reflected the complex model of Angevin kingship in the early 13th century.

John inherited a sophisticated system of administration in England, with a range of royal agents answering to the Royal Household: the Chancery kept written records and communications; the Treasury and the Exchequer dealt with income and expenditure respectively; and various judges were deployed to deliver justice around the kingdom. Thanks to the efforts of men like Hubert Walter, this trend towards improved record keeping continued into his reign. Like previous kings, John managed a peripatetic court that travelled around the kingdom, dealing with both local and national matters as he went. John was very active in the administration of England and was involved in every aspect of government. In part he was following in the tradition of Henry I and Henry II, but by the 13th century the volume of administrative work had greatly increased, which put much more pressure on a king who wished to rule in this style. John was in England for much longer periods than his predecessors, which made his rule more personal than that of previous kings, particularly in previously ignored areas such as the north.

The administration of justice was of particular importance to John. Several new processes had been introduced to English law under Henry II, including novel disseisin and mort d'ancestor. These processes meant the royal courts had a more significant role in local law cases, which had previously been dealt with only by regional or local lords. John increased the professionalism of local sergeants and bailiffs, and extended the system of coroners first introduced by Hubert Walter in 1194, creating a new class of borough coroners. John worked extremely hard to ensure that this system operated well, through judges he had appointed, by fostering legal specialists and expertise, and by intervening in cases himself. John continued to try relatively minor cases, even during military crises. Viewed positively, Lewis Warren considers that John discharged "his royal duty of providing justice ... with a zeal and a tirelessness to which the English common law is greatly endebted". Seen more critically, John may have been motivated by the potential of the royal legal process to raise fees, rather than a desire to deliver simple justice; John's legal system also only applied to free men, rather than to all of the population. Nonetheless, these changes were popular with many free tenants, who acquired a more reliable legal system that could bypass the barons, against whom such cases were often brought. John's reforms were less popular with the barons themselves, especially as they remained subject to arbitrary and frequently vindictive royal justice.

Economy

One of John's principal challenges was acquiring the large sums of money needed for his proposed campaigns to reclaim Normandy. The Angevin kings had three main sources of income available to them, namely revenue from their personal lands, or demesne; money raised through their rights as a feudal lord; and revenue from taxation. Revenue from the royal demesne was inflexible and had been diminishing slowly since the Norman conquest. Matters were not helped by Richard's sale of many royal properties in 1189, and taxation played a much smaller role in royal income than in later centuries. English kings had widespread feudal rights which could be used to generate income, including the scutage system, in which feudal military service was avoided by a cash payment to the king. He derived income from fines, court fees and the sale of charters and other privileges. John intensified his efforts to maximise all possible sources of income, to the extent that he has been described as "avaricious, miserly, extortionate and moneyminded". John also used revenue generation as a way of exerting political control over the barons: debts owed to the crown by the king's favoured supporters might be forgiven; collection of those owed by enemies was more stringently enforced.

The result was a sequence of innovative but unpopular financial measures. John levied scutage payments eleven times in his seventeen years as king, as compared to eleven times in total during the reign of the preceding three monarchs. In many cases these were levied in the absence of any actual military campaign, which ran counter to the original idea that scutage was an alternative to actual military service. John maximised his right to demand relief payments when estates and castles were inherited, sometimes charging enormous sums, beyond barons' abilities to pay. Building on the successful sale of sheriff appointments in 1194, John initiated a new round of appointments, with the new incumbents making back their investment through increased fines and penalties, particularly in the forests. Another innovation of Richard's, increased charges levied on widows who wished to remain single, was expanded under John. John continued to sell charters for new towns, including the planned town of Liverpool, and charters were sold for markets across the kingdom and in Gascony. The king introduced new taxes and extended existing ones. The Jews, who held a vulnerable position in medieval England, protected only by the king, were subject to huge taxes; £44,000 was extracted from the community by the tallage of 1210; much of it was passed on to the Christian debtors of Jewish moneylenders. John created a new tax on income and movable goods in 1207 - effectively a version of a modern income tax - that produced £60,000; he created a new set of import and export duties payable directly to the crown. John found that these measures enabled to him to raise further resources through the confiscation of the lands of barons who could not pay or refused to pay.

At the start of John's reign there was a sudden change in prices, as bad harvests and high demand for food resulted in much higher prices for grain and animals. This inflationary pressure was to continue for the rest of the 13th century and had long-term economic consequences for England. The resulting social pressures were complicated by bursts of deflation that resulted from John's military campaigns. It was usual at the time for the king to collect taxes in silver, which was then re-minted into new coins; these coins would then be put in barrels and sent to royal castles around the country, to be used to hire mercenaries or to meet other costs. At those times when John was preparing for campaigns in Normandy, for example, huge quantities of silver had to be withdrawn from the economy and stored for months, which unintentionally resulted in periods during which silver coins were simply hard to come by, commercial credit difficult to acquire and deflationary pressure placed on the economy. The result was political unrest across the country. John attempted to address some of the problems with the English currency in 1204 and 1205 by carrying out a radical overhaul of the coinage, improving its quality and consistency.

Royal household and ira et malevolentia

John's royal household was based around several groups of followers. One group was the familiares regis, John's immediate friends and knights who travelled around the country with him. They also played an important role in organising and leading military campaigns. Another section of royal followers were the curia regis; these curiales were the senior officials and agents of the king and were essential to his day-to-day rule. Being a member of these inner circles brought huge advantages, as it was easier to gain favours from the king, file lawsuits, marry a wealthy heiress or have one's debts remitted. By the time of Henry II, these posts were increasingly being filled by "new men" from outside the normal ranks of the barons. This intensified under John's rule, with many lesser nobles arriving from the continent to take up positions at court; many were mercenary leaders from Poitou. These men included soldiers who would become infamous in England for their uncivilised behaviour, including Falkes de Breauté, Geard d'Athies, Engelard de Cigongé and Philip Marc. Many barons perceived the king's household as what Ralph Turner has characterised as a "narrow clique enjoying royal favour at barons' expense" staffed by men of lesser status.

This trend for the king to rely on his own men at the expense of the barons was exacerbated by the tradition of Angevin royal ira et malevolentia - "anger and ill-will" - and John's own personality. From Henry II onwards, ira et malevolentia had come to describe the right of the king to express his anger and displeasure at particular barons or clergy, building on the Norman concept of malevoncia - royal ill-will. In the Norman period, suffering the king's ill-will meant difficulties in obtaining grants, honours or petitions; Henry II had infamously expressed his fury and ill-will towards Thomas Becket; this ultimately resulted in Becket's death. John now had the additional ability to "cripple his vassals" on a significant scale using his new economic and judicial measures, which made the threat of royal anger all the more serious.

John was deeply suspicious of the barons, particularly those with sufficient power and wealth to potentially challenge the king. Numerous barons were subjected to John's malevolentia, even including William Marshal, a famous knight and baron normally held up as a model of utter loyalty. The most infamous case, which went beyond anything considered acceptable at the time, proved to be that of William de Braose, a powerful marcher lord with lands in Ireland. De Braose was subjected to punitive demands for money, and when he refused to pay a huge sum of 40,000 marks (equivalent to £26,666 at the time), his wife and one of his sons were imprisoned by John, which resulted in their death. De Braose died in exile in 1211, and his grandsons remained in prison until 1218. John's suspicions and jealousies meant that he rarely enjoyed good relationships with even the leading loyalist barons.

Personal life

John's personal life impacted heavily on his reign. Contemporary chroniclers state that John was sinfully lustful and lacking in piety. It was common for kings and nobles of the period to keep mistresses, but chroniclers complained that John's mistresses were married noblewomen, which was considered unacceptable. John had at least five children with mistresses during his first marriage to Isabelle of Gloucester, and two of those mistresses are known to have been noblewomen. John's behaviour after his second marriage to Isabella is less clear, however. None of John's known illegitimate children were born after he remarried, and there is no actual documentary proof of adultery after that point, although John certainly had female friends amongst the court throughout the period. The specific accusations made against John during the baronial revolts are now generally considered to have been invented for the purposes of justifying the revolt; nonetheless, most of John's contemporaries seem to have held a poor opinion of his sexual behaviour.

The character of John's relationship with his second wife, Isabella of Angoulême, is unclear. John married Isabella whilst she was relatively young - her exact date of birth is uncertain, and estimates place her between at most 15 and more probably towards nine years old at the time of her marriage. Even by the standards of the time, Isabella was married whilst very young. John did not provide a great deal of money for his wife's household and did not pass on much of the revenue from her lands, to the extent that historian Nicholas Vincent has described him as being "downright mean" towards Isabella. Vincent concluded that the marriage was not a particularly "amicable" one. Other aspects of their marriage suggest a closer, more positive relationship. Chroniclers recorded that John had a "mad infatuation" with Isabella, and certainly John had conjugal relationships with Isabella between at least 1207 and 1215; they had five children. In contrast to Vincent, historian William Chester Jordan concludes that the pair were a "companionable couple" who had a successful marriage by the standards of the day.

John's lack of religious conviction has been noted by contemporary chroniclers and later historians, with some suspecting that John was at best impious, or even atheistic, a very serious issue at the time. Contemporary chroniclers catalogued his various anti-religious habits at length, including his failure to take communion, his blasphemous remarks, and his witty but scandalous jokes about church doctrine, including jokes about the implausibility of the Resurrection. They commented on the paucity of John's charitable donations to the church. Historian Frank McLynn argues that John's early years at Fontevrault, combined with his relatively advanced education, may have turned him against the church. Other historians have been more cautious in interpreting this material, noting that chroniclers also reported John's personal interest in the life of St Wulfstan of Worcester and his friendships with several senior clerics, most especially with Hugh of Lincoln, who was later declared a saint. Financial records show a normal royal household engaged in the usual feasts and pious observances - albeit with many records showing John's offerings to the poor to atone for routinely breaking church rules and guidance.

Later reign (1204-14)

Continental policy

During the remainder of his reign, John focused on trying to retake Normandy. The available evidence suggests that John did not regard the loss of the Duchy as a permanent shift in Capetian power. Strategically, John faced several challenges: England itself had to be secured against possible French invasion, the sea-routes to Bordeaux needed to be secured following the loss of the land route to Aquitaine, and his remaining possessions in Aquitaine needed to be secured following the death of his mother, Eleanor, in April 1204. John's preferred plan was to use Poitou as a base of operations, advance up the Loire valley to threaten Paris, pin down the French forces and break Philip's internal lines of communication before landing a maritime force in the Duchy itself. Ideally, this plan would benefit from the opening of a second front on Philip's eastern frontiers with Flanders and Boulogne - effectively a re-creation of Richard's old strategy of applying pressure from Germany. All of this would require a great deal of money and soldiers.

John spent much of 1205 securing England against a potential French invasion. As an emergency measure, John recreated a version of Henry II's Assize of Arms, with each shire creating a structure to mobilise local levies. When the threat of invasion faded, John formed a large military force in England intended for Poitou, and a large fleet with soldiers under his own command intended for Normandy. To achieve this, John reformed the English feudal contribution to his campaigns, creating a more flexible system under which only one knight in ten would actually be mobilised, but would be financially supported by the other nine; knights would serve for an indefinite period. John built up a strong team of engineers for siege warfare and a substantial force of professional crossbowmen. The king was supported by a team of leading barons with military expertise, including William Longespée, William the Marshal, Roger de Lacy and, until he fell from favour, the marcher lord William de Braose.

John had already begun to improve his Channel forces before the loss of Normandy and he rapidly built up further maritime capabilities after its collapse. Most of these ships were placed along the Cinque Ports, but Portsmouth was also enlarged. By the end of 1204 he had around 50 large galleys available; another 54 vessels were built between 1209 and 1212. William of Wrotham was appointed "keeper of the galleys", effectively John's chief admiral. Wortham was responsible for fusing John's galleys, the ships of the Cinque Ports and pressed merchant vessels into a single operational fleet. John adopted recent improvements in ship design, including new large transport ships called buisses and removable forecastles for use in combat.

Baronial unrest in England prevented the departure of the planned 1205 expedition, and only a smaller force under William Longespée deployed to Poitou. In 1206 John departed for Poitou himself, but was forced to divert south to counter a threat to Gascony from Alfonso VIII of Castile. After a successful campaign against Alfonso, John headed north again, taking the city of Angers. Philip moved south to meet John; the year's campaigning ended in stalemate and a two-year truce was made between the two rulers.

During the truce of 1206-1208, John focused on building up his financial and military resources in preparation for another attempt to recapture Normandy. John used some of this money to pay for new alliances on Philip's eastern frontiers, where the growth in Capetian power was beginning to concern France's neighbours. By 1212 John had successfully concluded alliances with Renault of Dammartin, who controlled Boulogne, and Count Ferdinand of Flanders, as well as Otto IV, a contender for the crown of Holy Roman Emperor in Germany; Otto was also John's nephew. The invasion plans for 1212 were postponed because of fresh English baronial unrest about service in Poitou. Philip seized the initiative in 1213, sending his son, Prince Louis, to invade Flanders with the intention of next launching an invasion of England. John was forced to postpone his own invasion plans to counter this threat. He launched his new fleet to attack the French at the harbour of Damme. The attack was a success, destroying Philip's vessels and any chances of an invasion of England that year. John hoped to exploit this advantage by invading himself late in 1213, but baronial discontent again delayed his invasion plans until early 1214, in what would prove to be his final Continental campaign.

Scotland, Ireland and Wales

In the late 12th and early 13th centuries the border and political relationship between England and Scotland was disputed, with the kings of Scotland claiming parts of what is now northern England. John's father, Henry II, had forced William of Scotland to swear fealty to him at the Treaty of Falaise in 1174. This had been rescinded by Richard I in exchange for financial compensation in 1189, but the relationship remained uneasy. John began his reign by reasserting his sovereignty over the disputed northern counties. He refused William's request for the earldom of Northumbria, but did not intervene in Scotland itself and focused on his continental problems. The two kings maintained a friendly relationship, meeting in 1206 and 1207, until it was rumoured in 1209 that William was intending to ally himself with Philip II of France. John invaded Scotland and forced William to sign the Treaty of Norham, which gave John control of William's daughters and required a payment of £10,000. This effectively crippled William's power north of the border, and by 1212 John had to intervene militarily to support the Scottish king against his internal rivals. John made no efforts to reinvigorate the Treaty of Falaise, though, and both William and Alexander remained independent kings, supported by, but not owing fealty to, John.

John remained Lord of Ireland throughout his reign. He drew on the country for resources to fight his war with Philip on the continent. Conflict continued in Ireland between the Anglo-Norman settlers and the indigenous Irish chieftains, with John manipulating both groups to expand his wealth and power in the country. During Richard's rule, John had successfully increased the size of his lands in Ireland, and he continued this policy as king. In 1210 the king crossed into Ireland with a large army to crush a rebellion by the Anglo-Norman lords; he reasserted his control of the country and used a new charter to order compliance with English laws and customs in Ireland. John stopped short of trying to actively enforce this charter on the native Irish kingdoms, but historian David Carpenter suspects that he might have done so, had the baronial conflict in England not intervened. Simmering tensions remained with the native Irish leaders even after John left for England.

Royal power in Wales was unevenly applied, with the country divided between the marcher lords along the borders, royal territories in Pembrokeshire and the more independent native Welsh lords of North Wales. John took a close interest in Wales and knew the country well, visiting every year between 1204 and 1211 and marrying his illegitimate daughter, Joan, to the Welsh prince Llywelyn the Great. The king used the marcher lords and the native Welsh to increase his own territory and power, striking a sequence of increasingly precise deals backed by royal military power with the Welsh rulers. A major royal expedition to enforce these agreements occurred in 1211, after Llywelyn attempted to exploit the instability caused by the removal of William de Braose, through the Welsh uprising of 1211. John's invasion, striking into the Welsh heartlands, was a military success. Llywelyn came to terms that included an expansion of John's power across much of Wales, albeit only temporarily.

Dispute with the Pope

When the Archbishop of Canterbury, Hubert Walter, died on 13 July 1205, John became involved in a dispute with Pope Innocent III that would lead to the king's excommunication. The Norman and Angevin kings had traditionally exercised a great deal of power over the church within their territories. From the 1040s onwards, however, successive popes had put forward a reforming message that emphasised the importance of the church being "governed more coherently and more hierarchically from the centre" and established "its own sphere of authority and jurisdiction, separate from and independent of that of the lay ruler", in the words of historian Richard Huscroft. After the 1140s, these principles had been largely accepted within the English church, albeit with an element of concern about centralising authority in Rome. These changes brought the customary rights of lay rulers such as John over ecclesiastical appointments into question. Pope Innocent was, according to historian Ralph Turner, an "ambitious and aggressive" religious leader, insistent on his rights and responsibilities within the church.

John wanted John de Gray, the Bishop of Norwich and one of his own supporters, to be appointed Archbishop of Canterbury after the death of Walter, but the cathedral chapter for Canterbury Cathedral claimed the exclusive right to elect Walter's successor. They favoured Reginald, the chapter's sub-prior. To complicate matters, the bishops of the province of Canterbury also claimed the right to appoint the next Archbishop. The chapter secretly elected Reginald and he travelled to Rome to be confirmed; the bishops challenged the appointment and the matter was taken before Innocent. John forced the Canterbury chapter to change their support to John de Gray, and a messenger was sent to Rome to inform the papacy of the new decision. Innocent disavowed both Reginald and John de Gray, and instead appointed his own candidate, Stephen Langton. John refused Innocent's request that he consent to Langton's appointment, but the pope consecrated Langton anyway in June 1207.

John was incensed about what he perceived as an abrogation of his customary right as monarch to influence the election. He complained both about the choice of Langton as an individual, as John felt he was overly influenced by the Capetian court in Paris, and about the process as a whole. He barred Langton from entering England and seized the lands of the archbishopric and other papal possessions. Innocent set a commission in place to try to convince John to change his mind, but to no avail. Innocent then placed an interdict on England in March 1208, prohibiting clergy from conducting religious services, with the exception of baptisms for the young, and confessions and absolutions for the dying.

John treated the interdict as "the equivalent of a papal declaration of war". He responded by attempting to punish Innocent personally and to drive a wedge between those English clergy that might support him and those allying themselves firmly with the authorities in Rome. John seized the lands of those clergy unwilling to conduct services, as well as those estates linked to Innocent himself; he arrested the illicit concubines that many clerics kept during the period, only releasing them after the payment of fines; he seized the lands of members of the church who had fled England, and he promised protection for those clergy willing to remain loyal to him. In many cases, individual institutions were able to negotiate terms for managing their own properties and keeping the produce of their estates. By 1209 the situation showed no signs of resolution, and Innocent threatened to excommunicate John if he did not acquiesce to Langton's appointment. When this threat failed, Innocent excommunicated the king in November 1209. Although theoretically a significant blow to John's legitimacy, this did not appear to greatly worry the king. Two of John’s close allies, Emperor Otto and Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, had already suffered the same punishment themselves, and the significance of excommunication had been somewhat devalued. John simply tightened his existing measures and accrued significant sums from the income of vacant sees and abbeys: one 1213 estimate, for example, suggested the church had lost an estimated 100,000 marks (equivalent to £66,666 at the time) to John. Official figures suggest that around 14% of annual income from the English church was being appropriated by John each year.

Innocent gave some dispensations as the crisis progressed. Monastic communities were allowed to celebrate mass in private from 1209 onwards, and late in 1212 the viaticum for the dying was authorise. The rules on burials and lay access to churches appear to have been steadily circumvented, at least unofficially. Although the interdict was a burden to much of the population, it did not result in rebellion against John. By 1213, though, John was increasingly worried about the threat of French invasion. Some contemporary chroniclers suggested that in January Philip II of France had been charged with deposing John on behalf of the papacy, although it appears that Innocent merely prepared secret letters in case Innocent needed to claim the credit if Philip did successfully invade England.

John finally negotiated terms for a reconciliation, and the papal terms for submission were accepted in the presence of the papal legate Pandulph in May 1213 at the Templar Church at Dover. As part of the deal, John offered to surrender the Kingdom of England to the papacy for a feudal service of 1,000 marks (equivalent to £666 at the time) annually: 700 marks (£466) for England and 300 marks (£200) for Ireland, as well as recompensing the church for revenue lost during the crisis. The agreement was formalised in the Bulla Aurea, or Golden Bull. This resolution produced mixed responses. Although some chroniclers felt that John had been humiliated by the sequence of events, there was little public reaction. Innocent benefited from the resolution of his long-standing English problem, but John probably gained more, as Innocent became a firm supporter of John for the rest of his reign, backing him in both domestic and continental policy issues. Innocent immediately turned against Philip, calling upon him to reject plans to invade England and to sue for peace. John paid some of the compensation money he had promised the church, but he ceased making payments in late 1214, leaving two-thirds of the sum unpaid; Innocent appears to have conveniently forgotten this debt for the good of the wider relationship.

Failure in France and the First Barons' War (1215-16)

Tensions and discontent

Tensions between John and the barons had been growing for several years, as demonstrated by the 1212 plot against the king. Many of the disaffected barons came from the north of England; that faction was often labelled by contemporaries and historians as "the Northerners". The northern barons rarely had any personal stake in the conflict in France, and many of them owed large sums of money to John; the revolt has been characterised as "a rebellion of the king's debtors". Many of John's military household joined the rebels, particularly amongst those that John had appointed to administrative roles across England; their local links and loyalties outweighed their personal loyalty to John. Tension also grew across North Wales, where opposition to the 1211 treaty between John and Llywelyn was turning into open conflict. For some the appointment of Peter des Roches as justiciar was an important factor, as he was considered an "abrasive foreigner" by many of the barons. The failure of John's French military campaign in 1214 was probably the final straw that precipitated the baronial uprising during John's final years as king; James Holt describes the path to civil war as "direct, short and unavoidable" following the defeat at Bouvines.

Failure of the 1214 French campaign

In 1214 John began his final campaign to reclaim Normandy from Philip. John was optimistic, as he had successfully built up alliances with the Emperor Otto, Renaud of Boulogne and Count Ferdinand of Flanders; he was enjoying papal favour; and he had successfully built up substantial funds to pay for the deployment of his experienced army. Nonetheless, when John left for Poitou in February 1214, many barons refused to provide military service; mercenary knights had to fill the gaps. John's plan was to split Philip's forces by pushing north-east from Poitou towards Paris, whilst Otto, Renaud and Ferdinand, supported by William Longespée, marched south-west from Flanders.

The first part of the campaign went well, with John outmanoeuvring the forces under the command of Prince Louis and retaking the county of Anjou by the end of June. John besieged the castle of Roche-au-Moine, a key stronghold, forcing Louis to give battle against John's larger army. The local Angevin nobles refused to advance with the king; left at something of a disadvantage, John retreated back to La Rochelle. Shortly afterwards, Philip won the hard-fought battle of Bouvines in the east against Otto and John's other allies, bringing an end to John's hopes of retaking Normandy. A peace agreement was signed in which John returned Anjou to Philip and paid the French king compensation; the truce was intended to last for six years. John arrived back in England in October.

Pre-war tensions and Magna Carta

Within a few months of John's return, rebel barons in the north and east of England were organising resistance to his rule. John held a council in London in January 1215 to discuss potential reforms and sponsored discussions in Oxford between his agents and the rebels during the spring. John appears to have been playing for time until Pope Innocent III could send letters giving him explicit papal support. This was particularly important for John, as a way of pressuring the barons but also as a way of controlling Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury. In the meantime, John began to recruit fresh mercenary forces from Poitou, although some were later sent back to avoid giving the impression that the king was escalating the conflict. John announced his intent to become a crusader, a move which gave him additional political protection under church law.

Letters of support from the pope arrived in April but by then the rebel barons had organised. They congregated at Northampton in May and renounced their feudal ties to John, appointing Robert fitz Walter as their military leader.This self-proclaimed "Army of God" marched on London, taking the capital as well as Lincoln and Exeter. John's efforts to appear moderate and conciliatory had been largely successful, but once the rebels held London they attracted a fresh wave of defectors from John's royalist faction. John instructed Langton to organise peace talks with the rebel barons.

John met the rebel leaders at Runnymede, near Windsor Castle, on 15 June 1215. Langton's efforts at mediation created a charter capturing the proposed peace agreement; it was later renamed Magna Carta, or "Great Charter". The charter went beyond simply addressing specific baronial complaints, and formed a wider proposal for political reform, albeit one focusing on the rights of free men, not serfs and unfree labour. It promised the protection of church rights, protection from illegal imprisonment, access to swift justice, new taxation only with baronial consent and limitations on scutage and other feudal payments. A council of twenty-five neutral barons would be created to monitor and ensure John's future adherence to the charter, whilst the rebel army would stand down and London would be surrendered to the king.

Neither John nor the rebel barons seriously attempted to implement the peace accord. The rebel barons suspected that the proposed baronial council would be unacceptable to John and that he would challenge the legality of the charter; they packed the baronial council with their own hardliners and refused to demobilise their forces or surrender London as agreed. Despite his promises to the contrary, John appealed to Innocent for help, observing that the charter compromised the pope's rights under the 1203 agreement that had appointed him John's feudal lord. Innocent obliged; he declared the charter "not only shameful and demeaning, but illegal and unjust" and excommunicated the rebel barons. The failure of the agreement led rapidly to the First Barons' War.

War with the barons

John's campaign from September 1215 to March 1216

The rebels made the first move in the war, seizing the strategic Rochester Castle, owned by Langton but left almost unguarded by the archbishop. John was well prepared for a conflict. He had stockpiled money to pay for mercenaries and ensured the support of the powerful marcher lords with their own feudal forces, such as William Marshal and Ranulf of Chester. The rebels lacked the engineering expertise or heavy equipment necessary to assault the network of royal castles that cut off the northern rebel barons from those in the south. John's strategy was to isolate the rebel barons in London, protect his own supply lines to his key source of mercenaries in Flanders, prevent the French from landing in the south-east, and then win the war through slow attrition. John put off dealing with the badly deteriorating situation in North Wales, where Llywelyn the Great was leading a rebellion against the 1211 settlement.

John's campaign started well. In N

John — Agatha de Ferrers. [Group Sheet]

John — Unknown. [Group Sheet]

1. Joan, Lady of Wales was born Abt 1191; died 02 Feb 1236/37, Abergwyngregyn, Gwynedd, Wales.

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Notes:

He married Eleanor, Duchesse d'Aquitaine, daughter of Guillaume X, Duc d'Aquitaine and Eleanor Châtellérault de Rochefoucauld, on 18 May 1152 at Bordeaux Cathedral, Bordeaux, Dauphine, France. He was also reported to have been married on 14 May 1152.

He and Rosamund de Clifford were associated. He was also known as Henry FitzEmpress. He gained the title of Comte de Maine in 1151. He gained the title of Comte de Touraine in 1151. He succeeded to the title of 11th Comte d'Anjou on 7 September 1151. He succeeded to the title of 13th Duc de Normandie on 7 September 1151. As a result of his marriage, Henry II 'Curtmantle' d'Anjou, King of England was styled as Duc d'Aquitaine on 18 May 1152. He succeeded to the title of King Henry II of England on 25 October 1154. He was crowned King of England on 19 December 1154 at Westminster Abbey, Westminster, London, England, and styled 'Rex Angliae, Dux Normanniae et Aquitainaie et Comes Andegavaie.

He was the First of the Angevin kings. He was a powerful thickset, red-haired, freckled man. The name is derived from his emblem, the broom shrub, which bears the botanical name Planta Genesta later corrupted to Plantagenet. He spent much of his reign in France but did not neglect matters at home, carrying out important improvements in the legal system including widespread use of juries, and he did his best to ensure that justice was fair to all. He appointed his close friend Thomas Becket as Archbishop of Canterbury but once installed, Becket continually opposed him, particularly regarding the necessary reformation of the ecclesiastical courts. The King had the Pope's backing and he called a meeting of the Great Council at Clarendon after which the Constitutions of Clarendon were issued. Shortly after, Becket fled the country. He returned in 1170 but promptly fell out with King. Henry was furious and cried out 'Who will avenge me of this turbulent priest!'. Four knights who heard him mistook Henry's meaning and straightway rode off to Canterbury and on Tuesday, 29 December 1170 murdered Becket in the Cathedral. He has an extensive biographical entry in the Dictionary of National Biography.

Dictionary of National Biography

Henry II 1133-1189, king of England, was the eldest child of Matilda, daughter of Henry I, and Geoffrey Plantagenet (1113-1150), count of Anjou.

The maternal grandmother of Henry II (also called Matilda) was Henry I's first wife, and was a daughter of Malcolm, king of Scots, by his wife Margaret, granddaughter of Edmund Ironside [see Margaret, Saint]. Henry II's mother married in 1114 at the age of twelve as her first husband Henry V, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. He was thirty years her senior and he died in 1125, leaving no children by her. Henry II's father, Geoffrey, son of Fulk, count of Anjou, was her second husband, and her junior by ten years. [See Matilda, 1102-1167.]Henry II's paternal grandfather, Fulk V, of Anjou (1090-1142), surnamed le Jeune, was originally of Breton descent. He shared the turbulent energy, the bravery, and the piety of his ancestors, and, cultivating a traditional hostility to the rulers of neighbouring Normandy, restored the Angevin influence, which his father's evil character had imperilled. Fulk's second marriage, with the daughter of Baldwin II, king of Jerusalem, seated him on the throne of Jerusalem on his father-in-law's death in 1131. By Fulk's second marriage he had two sons, who became successively kings of Jerusalem, while Geoffrey, the son by his first marriage, which had regained the territory of Maine for the ruling house of Anjou, succeeded to his inheritance in France.

Geoffrey thus represented a family which in two centuries grew from the defenders of the Angevin march against Bretons and northmen into the lords of three important counties, Anjou, Touraine, and Maine, and from dependence on the ducal house of France into rivalry with the ducal house of Normandy, and thus at last with the royal house of England, and it was for the purpose of extinguishing this rivalry, and providing England and Normandy, after Henry I's death, with a sovereign in whom the blood of the hitherto hostile races should be united, that Matilda (whose first husband, the Emperor Henry V, had left her a childless widow) was married to the Angevin count in 1128. Geoffrey was then scarce fifteen-ten years younger than his wife-and it was not till 1133 that their first child was born, at Le Mans on Mid-Lent Sunday, 5 March (Acta Pontif. Cenomann. c. 36, in Mabillon, Vet. Analecta, p. 322).

From his very birth, says a writer of the time, many peoples looked to him as their future master; and the most important part of his destiny was indicated in the name by which he was baptised, and the surname by which he was commonly described, Henry FitzEmpress. He was before all things King Henry's grandson and chosen successor, destined by Henry to continue his work of building up a strong government in England. The English witan were at once made to swear him fealty as his grandfather's heir; and the first two years of his life were chiefly spent with his mother at her father's court in Normandy. The king's death (December 1135), however, set the Norman and English barons free to repudiate an engagement made under compulsion to a child not yet three years old, the child too of a woman whom they scarcely knew, and of a man whom they hated with all the accumulated force of the hate that parted Anjou from Normandy; and Matilda found her son's heritage, on both sides of the sea, wrested from her by her cousin Stephen. Through the ten years of war that followed, the boy's education went on where and how it could. His earliest tutor was one Master Peter of Saintes, learned above all his contemporaries in the science of verse, who took charge of him by his father's desire (Anon. Chron., Rer. Gall. Scriptt. xii. 120), probably after his mother went to England in 1139. In 1142 his uncle Earl Robert of Gloucester brought him over to join her, and for the next four years he was imbued with letters and instructed in good manners beseeming a youth of his rank, by a certain Matthew in Robert's house at Bristol. In 1147 he rejoined his father, who had now conquered Normandy. Shortly after Matilda's return next year both she and Geoffrey seem to have made over to their son the claims which they had been holding in trust for him on both sides of the sea (Chron. S. Albin. a. 1149; Hist. Pontif., in Pertz, Mon. Germ. Hist. xx. 532, 533). In 1149 he ventured upon an expedition to England, and was knighted at Carlisle on Whitsunday by his great-uncle, David king of Scots; in the summer of 1151 he received from King Louis of France the investiture both of Normandy and of his father's hereditary dominions; and in September Geoffrey's death left him sole master of them all. To these territories, stretching from the Somme to the Loire and covering the whole western side of the royal domain of France, Henry in May 1152 added the great duchy of Aquitaine by his marriage with its duchess Eleanor, the divorced wife of the French king. The young duke found himself strong enough to disregard a citation before the royal court (Gesta Ludov. Reg., in Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt. iv. 411; Hist. Ludov. Reg., ib. p. 414), to repel an attack made by Louis upon Normandy, to crush a rebellion of his own brother Geoffrey in Anjou, and to risk another visit to England at Epiphany 1153. Nine months of fighting and negotiation ended in the treaty of Wallingford (November), whereby Stephen and Henry adopted each other as father and son, Henry leaving the crown to Stephen for his life, on a promise of its reversion at his death, and Stephen undertaking to govern meanwhile according to Henry's advice; as Roger of Howden expresses it, the king made the duke justiciar of England under him, and by him all the affairs of the kingdom were settled. The discovery of a plot among the king's Flemish troops to assassinate Henry drove him back to France early in 1154. On 24 Oct. Stephen died. Contrary winds detained Henry in Normandy till 7 Dec.; but the mickle awe with which he was already regarded in England sufficed to keep the land in peace during the interregnum; and on Sunday, 19 Dec., he was crowned at Westminster.

There was little of regal dignity in the young king's look and ways, in his square-built, thick-set frame, his sturdy limbs, his bullet-shaped head with its mass of close-cropped tawny hair, his lion-like face with its freckled skin, and its prominent eyes that, for all their soft grey colour, could glow like balls of fire when the demon-spirit of Anjou was roused; in his absorbing passion for the chase; in the disregard of conventionalities shown by his coarse gloveless hands, his careless dress, his rough-and-ready speech; in the restlessness which kept him on his feet from morning till night, scorning every seat but the saddle, grudging every minute withdrawn from active occupation, beguiling with scribbling or with whispered talk the enforced tranquillity even of the hour of mass, dragging his weary courtiers about the country in ceaseless journeys, often to the most unlikely and inconvenient places, with equal indifference to their comfort and to his own; or in the outbreaks of a temper which mounted to sheer momentary madness, when he would utter the most unaccountable blasphemies, or gnaw the rushes from the floor and lie rolling among them like one possessed. Yet already England had discerned in this uncouth lad of twenty-one the quiet strength of a born ruler of men. All folk loved him, says the English chronicler, summing up the impression left by the five months which had elapsed between Henry's treaty with Stephen and his return to Normandy, for he did good justice and made peace. And justice and peace, in the sense which those words conveyed to the men of his day, were to be the main characteristics of his reign in England.

Henry's first kingly act was the issuing of a charter declaring, as the basis of his scheme of government, the restitution and confirmation of all liberties in church and state as settled by his grandfather. He next put in force certain hitherto unfulfilled provisions of the treaty of 1153, for the expulsion of Stephen's Flemish mercenaries, the demolition of castles built by individual barons without royal license and held by them independently of royal control, and the restoration of royal fortresses and other crown property which had passed into private hands during the anarchy. William of Aumale in Yorkshire, Hugh of Mortimer and Roger of Hereford in the west, openly resisted this last decree; but in January 1155 Henry's mere approach brought William to restore Scarborough; Roger submitted in April; and a siege of Hugh's castle of Bridgnorth by the king in person ended in its surrender, 7 July. By the close of the year order was fairly re-established throughout the realm. The old machinery of justice, of finance, of general administration, was at work again; judges went on circuit through the country; capable ministers were set over the various departments of state business; even the succession to the crown had been thought of and carefully provided for in a council at Wallingford, 10 April 1155. The part of Henry's life-work bequeathed to him by his English grandfather was so well in train that he could safely turn his attention to that other, and probably in his eyes more important work, which he had inherited from his paternal ancestors: the building up of an empire which, as had been foretold to one of them, was to spread from the rock of Angers to the ends of the earth. It spread now from the Flemish border to the Pyrenees, commanding the whole western coast of France, and covering more than half the soil whose nominal lord paramount was King Louis VII of France. But it was made up of five distinct fiefs, with claims of suzerainty over some half-dozen others; all held on different tenures, all jealous of one another, and most of them in a state of chronic disaffection, which Louis, jealous as he naturally was of his formidable vassal and rival, might easily turn to his own advantage; Henry's brother Geoffrey, too, claimed the Angevin patrimony, which his father's will had destined for him on Henry's accession to the English throne. Early in 1156, therefore, Henry returned to France; he renewed his homage to Louis, fought Geoffrey into accepting a money-compensation for his claims, and secured his hold over Aquitaine; then he came back (1157) to enforce the surrender of a few royal castles still held by the Earls of Warren and Norfolk; to demand and win from his cousin Malcolm of Scotland the homage due from a Scottish to an English king, and the restoration of the three English counties-Northumberland, Cumberland, and Westmoreland-granted to Malcolm's father by Stephen; and to claim at the sword's point the homage of the princes of Wales. Another visit to Normandy in 1158 resulted in Henry's acquisition of the county of Nantes on the death of its ruler, his brother Geoffrey, and a successful assertion of his right to the overlordship of Brittany, with the sanction of the French king, whose daughter Margaret was now betrothed to Henry's eldest son. Next year Henry ventured to assert his wife's claim to the overlordship of Toulouse, and when the claim was denied prepared to enforce it with an army consisting of the great barons of his realm with the Scottish king at their head, and a crowd of mercenaries hired with the proceeds of a great scutage, a tax levied upon every knight's fee throughout his dominions instead of the personal service due from the knights. The Quercy was conquered and the war carried to the gates of Toulouse, but when Louis threw himself into the city Henry withdrew, out of reverence for the feudal etiquette which forbade a vassal to fight against his overlord in person. In May 1160 a truce was made; in November Henry secured his Norman frontier by marrying his son to Margaret, and thus gaining possession of her dowry, the Vexin; a triple alliance between France, Blois, and Champagne failed to wrest from him the advantage which he had won; and he was seen as virtual arbiter of western Europe in 1162, when his adhesion to Pope Alexander III in his struggle with the emperor turned the scale in Alexander's favour, and compelled Louis, with whom the pope had taken refuge, to make a formal alliance with the English king in Alexander's presence at Chouzy.'')È1õì~'öØ4'H'In the intervals of his continental warfare Henry had been feeling his way towards a scheme of administrative reform in England. He had come to his throne just when the social, industrial, intellectual, and religious movements which had been stirring throughout Europe since the beginning of the century were all at their most critical stage. All of them, save the last, seemed to have been checked in England by the troubles of the anarchy, but no sooner was outward order restored than the forces which hitherto had been working in the dark confronted Henry in the light of day. He saw that the mere re-establishment of the old administrative routine of his grandfather's time could no longer suffice for a country where the very confusion of the past nineteen years, the loosening of accustomed restraints, the abeyance of accustomed authority, had fostered a new spirit of self-assertion and independent activity in burgher and yeoman and clerk, as well as in earl and baron and knight. The breakdown of the higher judicature, and the consequently unchecked corruption of the lower courts, had given an enormous advantage to the revived canon law, of which the clergy were the representatives and interpreters. The new relations, too, with the continent into which men were brought by the accession of their Angevin king were opening wider fields for commercial enterprise, which in its turn stimulated the growth of industrial activity at home, and the intercourse with foreign churchmen and foreign scholars was quickened, whence the English clergy, and through them the English people, were learning to scrutinise more closely and criticise more sharply the relations of king and people, church and state. Henry saw the opportunity which such a transitional state of society afforded for the building up of a system of financial, judicial, and military organisation in direct dependence upon the king, wherein men should find their surest safeguard amid the dangers that beset them on every side in the rapidly changing conditions of the national life. Only a few incidental notices enable us to mark some of his early steps in the path of administrative and legal reform. At the outset of his reign he had re-established in working order the old financial machinery of the exchequer and the judicial machinery of the curia regis. In 1158 he caused the debased coinage of his predecessor and that which had been illegally issued from private mints during the anarchy to be all alike superseded by a new and uniform currency. He facilitated the removal of suits from the local courts to the curia regis; he facilitated the administration of justice in the curia regis itself and in the provincial visitations of its judges, by introducing new methods of procedure; he gave a new development to the system of inquest by sworn recognitors, by applying it to an important branch of civil litigation in a great assize, which sanctioned the settlement of disputes concerning land by the sworn verdict of twelve chosen knights of the district, instead of by ordeal of battle between the claimants as heretofore. He broke through the dependence of the crown upon its feudal tenants for the supply of a military force by a series of skilfully planned innovations, culminating in the scutage of 1159, which, while it conferred a benefit upon the tenants-in-chivalry by exempting them from service beyond sea, swept away their old exemption from money-taxation, and enabled the king henceforth to replace them whenever he chose by a paid force under his own immediate control.

But the scutage touched other privileges besides those of the tenants-in-chivalry; it was levied not only upon the knight's fees of the lay lords, but also, and more stringently, upon those held under the churches. It was thus Henry's first step towards the execution of a plan for breaking down the barriers which, under the name of clerical immunities, kept a large part of the population free of all legal restraint save that of the canon law, and altogether beyond the reach of his kingly authority and justice. The chief agent of Henry's reforms hitherto had been his chancellor, Thomas Becket, and it was to secure for his plans the co-operation of Thomas on a wider scale, and in a capacity which would add enormously to its value and usefulness, that he set constitutional tradition, ecclesiastical propriety, and public opinion all alike at defiance by raising his brilliant, worldly chancellor to the primacy of all England (June 1162). Instead of co-operation, he met from his new archbishop an uncompromising opposition. His proposal of a change in the mode of levying the land-tax, which would have transferred its profits from the sheriffs to the exchequer, was defeated by Thomas's resistance (July 1163); his attempts to bring criminal clerks to justice broke against the shield of the canon law with which Thomas sheltered the delinquents; his demand, made in a great council at Westminster (October 1163), for a public acknowledgment of what he called the customs of his grandfather, in other words, of his royal supremacy over all persons and all causes throughout his realm, was answered by the bishops, under their primate's guidance, with a declaration that they would only agree to the customs saving the rights of their order; and a vague verbal promise of assent which he at last wrung from them was revoked as soon as the customs were set forth in the form of written constitutions at the council of Clarendon (January 1164). Henry saw that in making Thomas archbishop he had but laid a stumbling-block across his own path, and he thrust it roughly aside. In October 1164 he summoned Thomas before a council at Northampton to answer a string of charges concerning his conduct as chancellor and as archbishop. From the outset it was plain that the primate's condemnation was a foregone conclusion. Insults of every kind were heaped upon him; every offer of compromise was scornfully rejected or made vain by the introduction of some new and unexpected charge; the bishops were compelled to join with the lay barons in sitting in judgment on their primate, till a prohibition from Thomas himself, enforced by an appeal to Rome, scared them into a protest to which Henry found it necessary to yield; the lay lords, with certain sheriffs and lesser barons ancient in days whom the king had summoned to join them, were ready to depose the archbishop as a traitor, but he checked the delivery of their sentence by another appeal to the pope, fought his way out of the council, and finally escaped over sea.

Thomas's flight left Henry master of the field, and the constitutions of Clarendon were put in force at once. By these constitutions disputes about presentations and advowsons were transferred from the ecclesiastical to the royal courts; appeals to Rome without leave from the king, and ordination of villeins without leave from their lords, were forbidden; the right of sanctuary was annulled as regards chattels forfeited to the crown; clerks were made amenable to lay tribunals; the provisions of the great assize were applied to disputes about church lands; and an appeal to the witness of twelve local jurors summoned by the sheriff was introduced to protect laymen from injustice in the bishops' courts. With these provisions those customs of the Norman kings which forbade bishops and beneficed clerks to quit the realm or excommunicate the king's tenants-in-chief without his license, and regulated the election and the temporal liabilities of bishops, were now for the first time coupled together in a written code, which Henry probably meant as the first instalment of a much wider code, whereby he hoped to remodel the entire legal and administrative system of the country. Two years later, in fact, he boldly undertook to deal single-handed, on his own sole responsibility, with the whole question of the administration of justice in all criminal cases whatsoever. In his assize of Clarendon (February 1166) he applied the principle of jury-inquest to criminal cases by ordaining that in every shire criminals should be arrested and brought before the sheriffs and the itinerant justices, to be by them dealt with according to rules laid down in the same assize, on the presentment of twelve freemen of every hundred, and four of every township, bound by oath in full shire-court, to denounce all known malefactors in their districts; and he summarily set aside all claims to exemption, either from service on the juries or from liability to the interference of sheriffs and justices, founded on private jurisdictions or special franchises of any kind. In four ways especially Henry's assize is a landmark in English history. It was the first attempt made by an English king to put forth a code of laws, as distinct from a mere reassertion of traditional custom. It was the first attempt to break down the feudal system of government by bringing its countless independent jurisdictions and irresponsible tribunals into subjection to one uniform judicial administration. It re-established once for all, so far as England was concerned, the old Teutonic principle of the right and the duty of a people to govern itself, in its own courts and by its own customary procedure, as against the Roman law which was fast taking its place in continental Europe; and it opened an almost boundless field for the training of the English people in self-government, by bringing home to every man his share in the administration of justice and police. About the same time Henry seems to have issued the assize of novel disseisin, which enabled any man disseised of his freehold without legal sentence to claim within a given period reinstatement by a writ from the king. The act whereby Henry thus cast his protection over possession made the disturbance of seisin a cause of complaint to the king himself, though apparently little noticed at the time, was in fact perhaps the greatest event in the history of English law (Maitland, Introd. to Select Pleas in Manorial Courts, Selden Soc., i. liv).#-#-,FY<)í,(ÝÒý4>!.'|'At the moment when Henry thus opened a new era in the history of English government, he was in the hottest of his fight with the church. In vain had he sought to prevent the pope and the French king from espousing the cause of Thomas; still more vainly had he driven into exile every man, woman, and child who could be charged with any sort of connection with the primate; Pope Alexander, ill as he could afford it at the moment, risked a breach with England by receiving Thomas honourably. Louis offered a shelter in France to him and his fellow-sufferers, and Henry found himself held up to the general scorn and indignation of orthodox Christendom. He turned to the eagerly-offered alliance of the emperor and the antipope, promised his daughter's hand to the emperor's cousin, Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony, and threatened to withdraw from Alexander the spiritual obedience of the whole Angevin dominions. A Welsh war furnished him with a means of evading the consequences of these pledges, and of gaining a breathing space, which was turned to good account for England by the issuing of the assize of Clarendon. In Lent 1166 he recrossed the Channel to take up again the threads, complicated as they were by his embroilment with the church, of his continental policy; to reopen diplomatic relations with all parties at once: with the Marquis of Montferrat, whose influence at Rome was secured for the royal cause by the offer of a daughter of England as wife for his son; with the duke and the nobles of Brittany, whose heiress Henry was bent upon wedding to his third son, Geoffrey; with Louis of France, whose assent was needed for this arrangement, and also for the recognition of little Henry as heir of Normandy and Anjou, and for that of the second son, Richard, as heir of Aquitaine; with the emperor on one hand and with his Lombard foes on the other; with the kings of Castile and Sicily, who proposed to become Henry's sons-in-law; with the discontented barons of Aquitaine, who were profiting by the troubles of their Angevin duke to break loose from his hated control; as well as with Thomas and Alexander, who were perpetually threatening to lay the English kingdom under interdict and excommunicate the king himself. In four years the work seemed all but done; Henry had secured the alliance of Germany and of Castile by the marriages of his two elder daughters, Matilda and Eleanor (1168-9); he had betrothed his youngest daughter, Joanna, to King William of Sicily (1169); he had broken the opposition of the Bretons in three successive campaigns (1166-9), and gained the French king's formal sanction to his plans for his three sons in the treaty of Montmirail (January 1169). In an unlucky hour he resolved to complete the new settlement of his dominions by the coronation of his eldest son, a scheme which he had planned seven years before, but which had been set aside owing to his quarrel with Thomas, who as metropolitan of all England was alone qualified to crown an English king. Now, seeing no hope of agreement with Thomas, Henry was rash enough to fall back upon a license for the boy's coronation by Archbishop Roger of York, granted by the pope three years ago, but since withdrawn; and at his command Roger, though forbidden by both Thomas and Alexander under pain of suspension, crowned the young king at Westminster, 14 June 1170.

This action was the greatest blunder of Henry's life. The crowning of the heir during his father's lifetime was an innovation wholly at variance with all English constitutional theory and practice, and the moment was singularly ill-chosen for such an unprecedented step. For fifteen years Henry had been developing a scheme of government whereby all separate jurisdictions, all local and personal privileges, were to be brought into direct subjection to the authority of the crown. For six years he had been literally, throughout his English realm at least, over all persons and all causes supreme, and there had been no outward obstacles to hinder the working of his administrative system. It worked, indeed, regularly and in the main successfully, but not without a great deal of very severe friction; and the adherents of Thomas were far from being the only section of the community who saw in Henry's reforms nothing but engines of regal tyranny and extortion. The first visitation of the judges after the assize of Clarendon carried terror and desolation into every shire, while it brought to the treasury an enormous increase of wealth from the fines of justice and the goods and chattels of the criminals condemned under the assize. Scarcely was it concluded when a visitation of the forests was held in 1167, and this again was followed next year by the levy of an aid for the marriage of the king's eldest daughter. The people writhed helplessly under these manifold burdens; the barons watched in sullen silence for an opportunity to break the yoke which Henry was rivetting more tightly upon them year by year. Henry's own sense of an impending crisis in England, on his return thither in March 1170, was shown in the sweeping measure by which he sought to anticipate it. He suspended from their functions all the sheriffs of the counties and all the bailiffs of his own demesnes, and appointed a body of special commissioners to institute during the next two months an inquiry into every detail of the administration, judicial, financial, political, of every royal officer throughout the country and of every local tribunal, no matter to whom appertaining, during the last four years. When the two months expired, out of twenty-seven sheriffs only seven were reinstated in their office; to the places thus left vacant Henry appointed officers of the exchequer whom he knew and trusted. Three days later the feudal nobles, whose claims of hereditary jurisdiction and independence he had thus afresh trampled underfoot, were called upon to do homage and fealty to a new king, chosen by Henry himself to share with him in the sacred dignity which till now had been exclusively his own. The oath was taken readily enough; its possible results were perhaps better foreseen by some of those who took it than by him who demanded it. Meanwhile the wrath of primate and pope at the insult to Canterbury, and the wrath of the French king at the insult to his daughter, who had not been allowed to share in her husband's coronation, rose to such a pitch that in July Henry was driven to a formal reconciliation with both Louis and Thomas. But there was no real peace with either. The king was keeping Christmas at Bures, near Bayeux, when the Archbishop of York and the bishops of London and Salisbury came to tell him that Thomas on his return to England had refused to absolve them from the papal sentence under which they lay for their share in the coronation, and was setting his royal will at defiance. What a parcel of fools and dastards have I nourished in my house, he burst out, that not one of them will avenge me of this one upstart clerk! Four knights took him at his word, and on 29 Dec. 1170 he was avenged, far otherwise than he desired, by the martyrdom of St. Thomas of Canterbury.

For the moment all seemed lost. Alexander threatened to interdict the whole Angevin dominions and excommunicate the king unless he would do penance for the murder and submit unconditionally to the demands of the church, and at once despatched two legates to execute the threat. But the hour of extreme danger was always the hour which Henry turned to account for some specially daring piece of work; and it was at this most perilous crisis of his life that he added a new realm to his dominions. As early as 1155 he had planned the conquest of Ireland, and it was afterwards said that he had obtained from Pope Adrian IV a bull to sanction the enterprise; this bull, however, has never been found among the papal archives, and its genuineness is disputed (cf. Analecta Juris Pontifici, Mai-Juin 1882, Paris; F. A. Gasquet in Dublin Review, 3rd ser. x. 83). The scheme, opposed by his mother, was left in abeyance till at the close of 1166 Diarmait Mac Murchadha, king of Leinster, having been driven from his throne, besought Henry's aid in regaining it, and offered him his homage in return. Henry accepted the homage, and proclaimed that any of his subjects who chose might enlist in the service of the Irish king. A band of knights from the South Welsh border availed themselves of the permission; by the end of 1170 they were masters of the Irish coast from Waterford to Dublin; their leader, Richard de Clare (d. 1176) [qv.], was married to Diarmait's daughter; on Diarmait's death (May 1171) he set himself up as Earl of Leinster, and was in a fair way to become the head of an independent feudal state whose growth might soon have threatened England with a new peril, if Henry had not summarily taken the matter into his own hands. The papal legates were on the point of entering Normandy when he announced to his barons that he was going to Ireland. Early in August he landed at Portsmouth; a month later he received the submission of Earl Richard, whom he had summoned to a meeting on the Welsh border; by the end of September he was at Pembroke, and a fleet of four hundred ships was gathering in Milford Haven; and on 17 Oct. he landed at Waterford with some four thousand men. He had left strict orders both in Normandy and in England that the ports should be closed to all clerks, and that no man should follow him unless specially summoned; but more effectual than these precautions was the stormy wind of the western sea, which for nearly six months severed all communication between Ireland and the rest of the world. Those six months were fateful alike for Ireland and for England; in them was laid the foundation of Ireland's subjection to the English crown. The hostile parties, whether of natives or invaders, all alike saw their only hope in submission to the new comer, and all alike laid themselves at his feet. Before Christmas 1171-which he kept at Dublin, in a palace built of wattles after the Irish fashion-Waterford, Wexford, Limerick, and Cork were in his hands, and all the Irish princes, except the king of Connaught, had given him hostages and promised tribute. The bishops and clergy made their formal submission to him at Cashel. With the promise of their spiritual obedience their conqueror might hope to strike a bargain with Rome; and the tidings which at last (March 1172) reached him from England made him feel that the bargain must be struck without delay. What little he could do for Ireland at the moment he did before he left her. He compelled Earl Richard and his fellow-adventurers to resign their conquests to him, and parcelled them out afresh as fiefs to be held in obedience to himself as sovereign; he appointed Hugh de Lacy to act as his representative and vicegerent; he fortified and garrisoned the coast towns; and he started Dublin, ruined as it was by three sieges in two years, on a new career of prosperity by granting it to the burghers of Bristol to colonise and raise into a trading centre as free and flourishing as their own native city. He sailed from Wexford on Easter night; by the middle of May he was in Normandy; on Sunday 21 May he met the legates at Avranches, purged himself of complicity in the primate's death, promised expiation, and abjured his customs; four months later he repeated his submission, and was publicly absolved.Ý-Ý-/öPí-u½ú(f It was no light matter that had moved the king thus to break off the work which he had but just begun in Ireland and to surrender the constitutions which he had so stubbornly maintained for eight years in the teeth of primate and pope; it was the discovery that in leaving his eldest son as king in his stead he had placed within reach of his foes a weapon which they were quick to use against him, and which was only too ready to lend itself to their use. Father and son no sooner met again than the young king asserted his claim to be acknowledged as actual ruler of England, or, if not of England, then of Normandy and the Angevin lands. Henry, busy now with a scheme for the marriage of his youngest son John to the heiress of Maurienne, which would have given him command over all the passes of the Alps, not only refused the claim but proposed to settle upon John three of the most important castles in Anjou and Touraine. The young king hereupon fled to the court of France, and on his appearance there a vast conspiracy came to light. The French king, the counts of Blois, Flanders, and Boulogne, the king of Scots, a crowd of barons in England, Normandy, Aquitaine, and the Angevin lands, his brothers Richard and Geoffrey, his mother Queen Eleanor, ranged themselves at once upon his side; and Henry had scarcely time to fortify the Norman frontier, recall some of his troops from Ireland, and gather a force of Brabantine mercenaries at the cost of every penny he possessed, before a general war broke out (June 1173). Normandy, attacked on two sides at once, was saved by the death of the Count of Boulogne and by a rapid march of Henry which drove Louis from Verneuil; and another equally rapid march upon Dol crushed the revolt in Brittany. In a flying visit to England (Eyton, Itin. Hen. II, p. 173) Henry, it seems, had already concerted measures for its security with the justiciar, Richard de Lucy; here the actual outbreak had been delayed by the absence of the chief rebel, Earl Robert of Leicester; and Leicester no sooner landed in Suffolk than he was defeated and made prisoner by the royal forces (17 Oct.). Next spring, while Henry was crushing out rebellion in Anjou and Aquitaine, a Scottish invasion stirred up a rising in the north; scarcely were the northern rebels defeated by the king's illegitimate son Geoffrey, bishop-elect of Lincoln, when East Anglia was overrun by a host of Flemings brought in by the traitor Earl of Norfolk, Hugh Bigod; the London citizens broke into anarchy; the young king threatened invasion from Flanders; and the justiciars in despair called Henry to the rescue. He crossed the sea in a terrific storm on 7 July, and made straight for Canterbury. Fasting, barefoot, in pilgrim's weeds, he entered the cathedral church, and there publicly did penance for the martyr's death, submitting to be scourged by all the seventy monks of the chapter, spending the night in vigil before the shrine, and loading it with costly gifts ere he set out next morning for London. Four days later a courier burst at midnight into the king's bedchamber, and woke him with tidings that on the very day, almost at the very hour, of his departure from Canterbury the Scottish king had been made prisoner at Alnwick (13 July 1174). Henry marched at once upon the English rebels, and in three weeks they were all at his feet. Then he recrossed the sea, forced Louis to raise the siege of Rouen, and by Michaelmas was in a position to dictate terms all round. The terms which he imposed on his sons, on the French king, and on the rebel barons amounted to little more than a return to the status quo ante bellum, with a pledge of general amnesty and reconciliation. The king of Scots, however, regained his freedom only by doing liege homage to the English king for his crown and all his lands, and giving up five of his strongest fortresses in pledge for his fidelity; and there was one captive whom Henry would not release at all. At the opening of the rebellion he had caught his wife, disguised in man's attire, attempting to follow her sons to the French court; he had put her in prison at once, and there, with one brief interval, he kept her for the rest of his own life.

In England his triumph was complete and final. He took up again at once his work of administrative reform, and carried it on thenceforth without check and without break. In January 1176 he issued the assize of Northampton; this was in effect a re-enactment of the assize of Clarendon, with important modifications and amendments of detail, and with the addition of several entirely new clauses, one of which originated the proceeding known as the assize of mort d'ancester, while others defined the pleas, criminal and civil, which were to be reserved for the hearing of the royal justices, and another directed that every man in the realm, from earl to rustic, should take an oath of fealty to the king. In the same year he wrung from a papal legate a partial assent to the constitutions of Clarendon, which enabled him to bring clergy as well as laity within the scope of a great visitation of the forests, held in punishment for the damage done in the rebellion. Next year he ordered a return of all tenements held in chief of the crown, with the names of the existing tenants and the services due from each. An inquiry into the several liabilities of the king's tenants-in-chivalry had been instituted ten years before, apparently for the assessment of the aide pour fille marier, and on that occasion the returns had been made by each baron for himself; the inquest of 1177, however, was seemingly designed to be of wider scope and more searching character, and was entrusted to the sheriffs and bailiffs of the different counties. In 1178 Henry reorganised the curia regis by restricting its highest functions to a small inner tribunal of selected counsellors, which afterwards grew into the court of king's bench. From 1176 to 1180 he was busy with a series of experiments which ended in the virtual establishment of the system of judges' circuits familiar to us now. By his assize of arms, 1181, he imposed on every free man the duty of bearing arms for the defence of the country; and by enacting that each man's liability should be determined by the amount, not of his land, but of his annual revenue and movable goods, he introduced into English finance the principle of direct taxation on personal property

The English king's supremacy over the neighbour states and his importance in Europe at large grew with the growth of his power at home. Three Welsh campaigns (1157, 1163, 1165), and a series of negotiations conducted by Henry in person on his way to and from Ireland, had broken the independence of the Welsh princes; in the revolt of 1173, Rhys of South Wales appeared as the king's ally, and at its close David of North Wales was bound to him by a marriage with his sister. The loyalty of the Scottish king was secured in 1175, and in the same year the homage of the king of Connaught completed Henry's overlordship of Ireland. Next year his youngest daughter Joanna (1165-1199) [qv.] was married to the king of Sicily, and welcomed in her new country with honours which showed how great was the reverence felt by its Norman rulers for the distant sovereign whom they were proud to acknowledge as the head of their race. The kings of Castile and Navarre chose him as arbiter in a family quarrel between themselves in 1177; the king of Arragon and the Count of Toulouse had done the like as early as 1173, when the latter had even submitted to do homage to Henry for his county. In France itself the factions that raged around the deathbed of Louis VII and the ill-secured throne of his young successor, Philip Augustus, were driven to accept, nay to solicit, the mediation of the English king (1180-2); and the crowning-point of his glory seemed to be reached in 1185, when, as head of the Angevin house, he was implored by the patriarch of Jerusalem in person to undertake the deliverance of the Holy Land, where the Angevin dynasty and the Christian realm which they had been defending for half a century against the Moslems were both alike at their last gasp. The faithful men of the land, however, assembled in council at Clerkenwell, refused to sanction such an undertaking (R. Diceto, ii. 33, 34); and Henry had ample reasons for yielding to their decision

The peace-maker of Europe could not keep peace among his own sons. He had freely forgiven their rebellion, and fully reinstated all three in the positions which they had respectively occupied before it: Richard as duke of Aquitaine, Geoffrey as duke of Brittany, Henry as acknowledged heir to the overlordship of both, and to direct sovereignty over England, Normandy, and Anjou. But the brothers were jealous one of another, and their jealousy broke out at last in open war. In 1183 young Henry and Geoffrey joined the nobles of Aquitaine in a rising against their father and Richard, and twice, while besieging the rebels in their headquarters at Limoges, Henry himself narrowly escaped with his life. The young king's death (11 June) ended the strife for a while, but it opened the way to other quarrels. Henry proposed to transfer Aquitaine from Richard, now heir to the crown, to John, whose betrothal with Alice of Maurienne had come to nothing, but for whom he had in 1176 secured the rich heritage of Earl William of Gloucester, and whom in 1177 he had nominated king of Ireland. It was to Ireland, not to Aquitaine, that John was at last despatched by his father (1185); but his misconduct there forced Henry to recall him within a few months. Geoffrey meanwhile was plotting treason with Philip of France; in August 1186 he died, and Philip claimed the guardianship of his infant heir Arthur (1187-1203) [q.v.]. The relations of Philip and Henry were already strained almost to breaking point; there was a standing dispute between them about the dower-lands of the young king's widow; there were other disputes about the overlordship of Auvergne, about the ownership of Berry, about the French king's right of intervention in a quarrel between Richard and the Count of Toulouse, and about Philip's sister Adela, who, as Richard's plighted bride, had been for fourteen years, or more, in the custody of Henry, and whom he would give up neither to her brother nor to her betrothed. The motives and the aim of Henry's policy at this juncture are as obscure to us now as they were to Richard then; but its outward aspect gave some colour of reason to the suspicion, adopted by Richard at Philip's instigation, that he was planning to oust Richard from his position as heir, and perhaps to rob him of his intended wife, in favour of John. Conference after conference failed to restore the good understanding of father and son, to satisfy Philip, or to force from Henry a definite avowal of his intentions. For a moment all differences were hushed by tidings of the capture of Jerusalem; the two kings took the cross together (October 1187), and Henry went to England to arrange for the collection of the ‘Saladin tithe,’ a tax of one-tenth of all the movable goods of clergy and laity, which was to defray the expenses of his crusade. In his absence an attack made by Richard on Toulouse gave Philip a pretext for invading Berry; Henry hastened to its defence; Philip fought and negotiated by turns with the father and the son; at last all three met in conference at Bonmoulins (18 Nov. 1188); Richard demanded an explicit recognition as heir to all his father's dominions, and on the refusal of his demand openly transferred his homage to the French king.

Henry was left alone, without troops, without money, without resources of any kind. His enemies saw their advantage and used it ruthlessly. They turned a deaf ear to his overtures of reconciliation, and to the remonstrances of the legates whom the pope, in terror for the peace of Europe and the success of the crusade, at once despatched to his support; they would be satisfied with nothing short of unconditional submission to their demands. Rather than stoop to this, Henry with a handful of followers shut himself up to await the end in his native city, Le Mans. The end came with startling rapidity. In a week Philip and Richard were masters of Maine; on 12 June 1189 they prepared to assault Le Mans; its defenders fired the suburbs; the city itself caught fire, and Henry with his little band fled for their lives towards Normandy. The wild words of blasphemy which Gerald de Barri (De Instr. Princ. dist. iii. c. 24) puts into the mouth of the fugitive king, if uttered at all, can only have been uttered in the irresponsible frenzy of despair; and as he lay that night at La Frênaye Henry recovered his self-control and planned the last adventure which was to be the fitting close of his adventurous life. Sending on his followers to Normandy with instructions for the gathering of fresh forces and the disposal of the Norman castles, he turned back almost alone and made his way through the heart of the conquered land to Chinon. Fever-stricken, death-stricken, he lay there or at Saumur while Philip and Richard stormed Tours; on 4 July he dragged himself, by a supreme effort, to meet them at Colombières. He was forced to put himself at their mercy, to pardon and release from their allegiance all those who had conspired against him, to renew his homage to Philip, to acknowledge Richard heir to all his lands, and to give him the kiss of peace. The kiss was given with a muttered curse; but it was not Richard's treason that broke his father's heart. That night Henry bade his vice-chancellor read him the list of the traitors whose names Philip had given up. The first name was that of John. ‘Enough,’ murmured the king as he turned his face to the wall; ‘now let things go as they may; I care no more for myself or for the world.’ For two days he lay tossing in anguish and delirium, cursing his sons and himself, muttering ‘Shame, shame on a conquered king!’ till the approach of death, and the tender care of the one child who had remained with him to the last, his illegitimate son Geoffrey, brought him back to reason, penitence, and peace, and on 6 July he passed quietly away. Two days later he was buried in the abbey church of Fontevraud, where the characteristic outlines of the face so vividly described by his courtiers may still be seen in the effigy sculptured on his tomb.

Henry's children by his queen are enumerated in the biography of their mother [see Eleanor of Aquitaine]. He is known to have had three illegitimate sons: Geoffrey, archbishop of York [q.v.]; Morgan, whose mother is said to have been the wife of a knight called Ralf Bloeth; he became provost of Beverley, and was elected bishop of Durham about 1210, but the election was quashed (Le Neve, iii. 285; Hist. Dunelm. Scriptt. Tres, Surtees Soc., p. 35); and William Longespée [q.v.], afterwards Earl of Salisbury, who may have been a child of Fair Rosamond. The romantic adjuncts of the Rosamond legend [see Clifford, Rosamond] have been swept away, but its central fact remains. Of the darker tale about Adela of France (Gesta Ric., ed. Stubbs, p. 160; Gir. Cambr. De Instr. Princ. dist. iii. c. 2; cf. Ric. Devizes, in Howlett, Chron. of Stephen and Henry II, iii. 403) it can only be said, on the one hand, that it seems to have rested on evidence strong enough to convince her betrothed husband Richard and her brother Philip Augustus; and, on the other, that Richard was only too ready to believe any evil of his father, while Philip was equally ready to feign belief of anything, if it suited his policy at the moment. Still, though the pictures of Henry's private character given by lampooners such as Gerald de Barri and Ralph the Black may well be painted in needlessly glaring colours, we can hardly venture to say more in its defence than was said by another contemporary, that ‘he left the palm of vice to his grandfather.’ His nature was full of passion; but the passion was far from being all evil, though it was lavished too often upon unworthy objects, among the most unworthy being, unhappily, his own spoiled, ill-trained, mismanaged, but tenderly loved sons. Except in the case of his children, however, Henry's bestowal of honour and power was never dictated by blind partiality to a personal favourite. Despot as he was, his ministers were no mere tools of the royal caprice, but responsible statesmen such as the elder Earl Robert of Leicester, Richard de Lucy ‘the loyal,’ and Richard's successor, the great lawyer Ranulf de Glanville [q.v.], men who were not afraid to speak their minds and act upon their convictions, and to whom Henry, on his part, was not afraid to entrust the whole administration of affairs in his own absence from the country. His personal friends again, from Thomas Becket up to St. Hugh of Lincoln [q.v.], were far better men than himself; they were in fact among the purest and noblest characters of their time; and the more unlike they were to him, the holier and more unworldly were their lives, the more loyally and devotedly he clung to them, the more readily he accepted their counsel and their rebukes, and the more, too, he seems to have inspired in them a corresponding warmth of affection. The half droll, half pathetic stories of his relations with St. Hugh told in the ‘Magna Vita S. Hugonis’ reveal glimpses of a side of his character which is otherwise hardly perceptible in his career as an English king, but which has left traces to this day in the home-lands of his race, in the great hospitals which he built at Angers and at Le Mans, and in the remains or the records of the lazar-houses which he endowed in the chief towns of Normandy, that at Quévilly, near Rouen, indeed, being formed out of a hunting-seat which he had originally built for his own enjoyment.
Henry was a great builder, though not like his predecessors, of churches and abbeys. He founded but seven religious houses in the course of his life; the erection of three of these was part of the penance imposed on him for the death of St. Thomas; and though the commandery of Knights Templars at Vaubourg was founded in 1173, and the Charterhouse of Witham in the following year, while that of Le Liget in Touraine is said to date from 1175, they remained so insignificant that many years later Gerald de Barri could affect to ignore the very existence of two of them, and sneered at the niggardliness with which Henry was supposed to have fulfilled his vow at his predecessors' expense, by putting regular instead of secular canons into Harold's old foundation at Waltham, and foreign nuns from Fontevraud instead of English Benedictine sisters into the ancient abbey of Amesbury. His other religious foundations attained no greater fame; they were an Austin priory at Beauvoir in Normandy, established before his accession to the crown; a second near La Flèche in Maine, founded about 1180; a third at Newstead in Sherwood, dating possibly from 1170, more probably from 1166 or earlier; and a Gilbertine house at Newstead in Ancholm, which came into existence before 1175. Henry built much for himself, and, as he hoped, for his successors; Caen, Rouen, Angers, Tours were all adorned with royal palaces in his reign. He built yet more for his subjects, and while of his palaces scarcely a fragment remains, save the ruined pile at Chinon where he died, the waters of the Loire are kept in to this day by a great embankment or levée, thirty miles long, which he constructed as a safeguard against its frequent and disastrous floods. The ‘Grand Pont’ at Angers seems to have been built by him, in place of an earlier bridge destroyed by fire in 1177. The popular astonishment at the greatness of his architectural undertakings, and the rapidity with which they were accomplished, is expressed in the legend of the ‘Pont de l'Annonain,’ a viaduct over a swamp near Chinon, built by Henry, but locally said to have been reared by the devil in a single night at the bidding of his ancestor Fulk Nerra, the one other Angevin count who lived, side by side with Henry FitzEmpress, in the memory of the Angevin people.

The English people, on the other hand, seem to have quickly cooled in their enthusiasm for the king whom before his accession they had ‘all loved;’ it was only by slow degrees, and after he was gone, that they learned to appreciate his real merits as a ruler. Henry never courted popularity. He by no means shunned personal contact with the multitude, and when he did go forth into their midst, he and they alike flung etiquette to the winds. But he did not lay himself out to please them, as his grandfather had done, by a routine, at once familiar and splendid, of daily life lived of set purpose before their very eyes. When counsellors, courtiers, and spectators had flocked together from far and near at his summons for a great judicial and political assembly, he would disappear at dawn and keep them all vainly awaiting his return till nightfall put an end to his day's hunting. His household was a by-word for confusion and discomfort, to which he himself was utterly indifferent, and which went on unchecked while he withdrew to his chamber and there buried himself in his own pursuits. Chief among these was the discussion of literary questions with the scholars who thronged his court, and whom he delighted to honour. He had inherited both from his father and from his maternal grandfather a great love of learning; he was probably the most highly educated sovereign of his day, and amid all his busy, active life he never lost his interest in literature and intellectual discussion; he loved reading only less than hunting, and it was said by one of his courtiers that his hands were never empty, they always held either a bow or a book. He could speak, and speak well, in at least two languages, French and Latin, and is said to have known something of every tongue ‘between the Bay of Biscay and the Jordan,’ a definition which seems to exclude the English tongue. Of the varied elements, Angevin, Norman, and English, united in Henry FitzEmpress, the last indeed can hardly be traced at all in his strangely complex character. Yet the work that he did for England was the only part of his work that outlasted his own life, and it has lasted for seven centuries. It was under his rule that ‘ the races of conquerors and conquered in England first learnt to feel that they were one. It was by his power that England, Scotland, and Ireland were brought to some vague acknowledgment of a common suzerain lord, and the foundations laid of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It was he who abolished feudalism as a system of government, and left it little more than a system of land tenure. It was he who defined the relations established between church and state, and decreed that in England churchman as well as baron was to be held under the common law. It was he who preserved the traditions of self-government which had been handed down in borough and shire-moot from the earliest times of English history. His reforms established the judicial system whose main outlines have been preserved to our own day. It was through his “constitutions” and his “assizes” that it came to pass that all over the world the English-speaking races are governed by English and not by Roman law. It was by his genius for government that the servants of the royal household became transformed into ministers of state. It was he who gave England a foreign policy which decided our continental relations for seven hundred years.’ ‘Indirectly and unconsciously, his policy did more than that of all his predecessors to prepare England for the unity and freedom which the fall of his house was to reveal.’

Sources:

Notices of events in Henry's life before his accession to the crown can only be picked out here and there from Robert of Torigni (Chronicle, ed. Delisle, Soc. de l'Hist. de Normandie; Contin. Will. Jumièges, in Duchesne, Hist. Norm. Scriptt.), Hen. Huntingdon, l. viii (ed. Arnold, Rolls Ser.), the Gesta Stephani (ed. Howlett, in Chronicles of Stephen, &c., vol. iii.), and the last pages of the English Chronicle (ed. Thorpe). From his coronation to the close of his struggle with the church information has to be extracted from the letters of Gilbert Foliot and John of Salisbury (ed. Giles, Patres Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ) and the vast store of Materials for Hist. of Archbishop Becket (ed. Robertson and Sheppard), supplemented by Ralph de Diceto and Gervase of Canterbury (ed. Stubbs). From 1169 onwards our primary authorities are the Gesta Henrici (wrongly ascribed to Benedict of Peterborough) and Roger of Howden (ed. Stubbs), while R. Diceto is of increased importance. Henry's dealings with Ireland are recorded in Gerald de Barri's Expugnatio Hiberniæ (Gir. Cambr. Opera, vol. v. ed. Dimock), and in an Anglo-Norman poem (ed. F. Michel); his dealings with Wales, in Gerald's Itin. Kambriæ (Opera, vol. vi. ed. Dimock), and in the Annales Cambriæ and Brut y Tywysogion (ed. Williams ab Ithel). The Scottish war of 1173-4 has its special chronicler in Jordan Fantosme (ed. Michel, Surtees Soc., and Howlett, Chron. of Stephen, &c., vol. iii.). William of Newburgh (ed. Hamilton, Engl. Hist. Soc., and Howlett, as above, vol. i.) is a valuable contributor to the history of the whole reign. The Draco Normannicus (ed. Howlett, as above, vol. ii.) is more curious than really useful. For Henry's continental policy and wars we have, besides Robert of Torigni's Chronicle, the assistance of an Aquitanian writer, Geoffrey of Vigeois (Labbe, Nova Bibliotheca MSS. Libr., vol. ii.), and two French ones, Rigord and William of Armorica (Duchesne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt., vol. v.). From these two last, and Gerald's De Instructione Principum (Anglia Christiana Soc.), the story of the king's last days has been worked out in detail by Bishop Stubbs in his preface to Rog. Howden, vol. ii. Henry's person and character are described by Gerald (De Instr. Princ.), W. Map (De Nugis Curialium, ed. Wright, Camden Soc.), Ralph Niger (ed. Anstruther, Caxton Soc.), and Peter of Blois (Epistolæ, ed. Giles). His buildings &c. may be traced in Dugdale's Monasticon, Sainte-Marthe's Gallia Christiana, Stapleton's introduction to the Norman Exchequer Rolls (Soc. Antiqu.), the Chroniques d'Anjou, edited by Marchegay and Salmon (Société de l'Histoire de France), the Cartulaire de l'Hôpital St. Jean d'Angers (ed. C. Port), the Revue de l'Anjou, vol. xii. (1874), and the essay on the Home of our Angevin Kings in Green's Stray Studies. The Tractatus de Legibus Angliæ, which passes under R. Glanville's name, throws light on the king's legal reforms; the Pipe Rolls 1-4 Hen. II (ed. Hunter) have been published by the Record Commission, those of 5-12 Hen. II by the Pipe Roll Soc.; other documents for the history of his government are to be found in Bishop Stubbs's Select Charters, as well as in Gesta Hen., Rog. Howden, Rymer's Federa, vol. i., the Liber Niger Scaccarii (ed. Hearne), and the appendices to Lord Lyttelton's Hist. of Hen. II. Lyttelton's own work is, in the words of a more modern authority, ‘a full and sober account of the time.’ An elaborate Itinerary of Henry II has been compiled by the Rev. R. W. Eyton. Dr. Stubbs has dealt with the constitutional side of the reign in Constit. Hist., chapters xii. xiii., and preface to Gesta Hen., vol. ii.; and with its more general aspects in Early Plantagenets, cc. ii-v., and preface to Rog. Howden, vol. ii. J. R. Green's Hist. of the English People, bk. ii. ch. iii., Short History, ch. ii. secs. 7, 8, and Stray Studies, pp. 361-381, are studies of Henry's character and career designed to form part of the groundwork for a history of the Angevin kings. Henry's claims to a place among English statesmen have also been vindicated in a monograph by Mrs. Green. A general account of the reign appears in England under the Angevin Kings, by the writer of this article.

Contributor: K. N. [Kate Norgate]

Published: 1891

Henry II (5 March 1133 - 6 July 1189), also known as Henry Curtmantle (French : Court-manteau), Henry FitzEmpress or Henry Plantagenet, ruled as Count of Anjou, Count of Maine, Duke of Normandy, Duke of Aquitaine, Count of Nantes, King of England (1154-89) and Lord of Ireland; at various times, he also controlled Wales, Scotland and Brittany. Henry was the son of Geoffrey of Anjou and Matilda, who was the daughter of King Henry I and took the title of Empress from her first marriage. He became actively involved by the age of 14 in his mother's efforts to claim the throne of England, and was made the Duke of Normandy at 17. He inherited Anjou in 1151 and shortly afterwards married Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose marriage to the French king Louis VII had recently been annulled. King Stephen agreed to a peace treaty after Henry's military expedition to England in 1153, and he inherited the kingdom on Stephen's death a year later. Still quite young, he now controlled what would later be called the Angevin empire, stretching across much of western Europe.

Henry was an energetic and sometimes ruthless ruler, driven by a desire to restore the lands and privileges o

Henry married Eleanor of Aquitaine 18 May 1152. Eleanor (daughter of William, X Duke of Aquitaine and Aenor de Châtellerault) was born Abt 1122; died 01 Apr 1204; was buried Fontevraud, France. [Group Sheet]

Notes:

Eleanor of Aquitaine (French: Aliénor d’Aquitaine; Éléonore de Guyenne) (1122 or 1124 - 1 April 1204) was one of the wealthiest and most powerful women in Western Europe during the High Middle Ages. As well as being Duchess of Aquitaine in her own right, she was queen consort of France (1137-1152) and of England (1154-1189). She was the patroness of such literary figures as Wace, Benoît de Sainte-Maure, and Bernart de Ventadorn. She belonged to the French House of Poitiers, the Ramnulfids.

Eleanor succeeded her father, becoming Duchess of Aquitaine and Countess of Poitiers, and by extension, the most eligible bride in Europe, at the age of fifteen. Three months after her accession, she married Louis VII, son of her guardian, King Louis The Fat. As Queen of France, she participated in the unsuccessful Second Crusade. Soon after the Crusade, Eleanor sought an annulment of her marriage but was rejected by Pope Eugene III. However, after the birth of Alix, another daughter, Louis agreed to an annulment. The marriage was annulled on 11 March 1152, on the grounds of consanguinity within the fourth degree. Their daughters were declared legitimate and custody was awarded to Louis, while Eleanor's lands were restored to her.

As soon as the annulment was granted, Eleanor became engaged to Henry Plantagenet, Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou, who became King Henry II of England in 1154; he was her cousin within the third degree and was nine years younger than she. The couple married on 18 May 1152, eight weeks after the annulment of Eleanor's first marriage. Over the next thirteen years, she bore Henry eight children: five sons, three of whom would become kings, and three daughters. However, Henry and Eleanor eventually became estranged. She was imprisoned between 1173 and 1189 for supporting her son Henry's revolt against her husband.

Eleanor was widowed on 6 July 1189. Her husband was succeeded by their son, Richard I, who immediately released his mother. Now queen dowager, Eleanor acted as a regent while Richard went on the Third Crusade. Eleanor survived Richard and lived well into the reign of her youngest son John. By the time of her death, she had outlived all her children except for King John and Eleanor, Queen of Castile.

Early life

The exact date and place of Eleanor's birth are not known. A late 13th century genealogy of her family listed her as 13 years old in the spring of 1137. Some chronicles mentioned a fidelity oath of some lords of Aquitaine on the occasion of Eleanor's fourteenth birthday in 1136; this and her known age of 82 at her death makes 1122 her likely year of birth. Her parents almost certainly married in 1121. Her birthplace may have been Poitiers, Bordeaux, or Nieul-sur-l'Autise, where her mother died when Eleanor was 6 or 8.

Eleanor or Aliénor was the oldest of three children of William X, Duke of Aquitaine, whose glittering ducal court was on the leading edge of early-12th-century culture, and his wife, Aenor de Châtellerault, the daughter of Aimeric I, Viscount of Châtellerault, and Dangereuse, who was William IX's longtime mistress as well as Eleanor's maternal grandmother. Her parents' marriage had been arranged by Dangereuse with her paternal grandfather, the Troubadour.

Eleanor was named for her mother Aenor and called Aliénor, from the Latin alia Aenor, which means the other Aenor. It became Eléanor in the langues d'oïl (Northern French) and Eleanor in English. There is, however, an earlier Eleanor on record: Eleanor of Normandy, William the Conqueror's aunt, who lived a century earlier than Eleanor of Aquitaine.

By all accounts, Eleanor's father ensured that she had the best possible education. Although her native tongue was Poitevin, she was taught to read and speak Latin, was well versed in music and literature, and schooled in riding, hawking, and hunting. Eleanor was extroverted, lively, intelligent, and strong willed. In the spring of 1130, when Eleanor was six, her four-year-old brother William Aigret and their mother died at the castle of Talmont, on Aquitaine's Atlantic coast. Eleanor became the heir presumptive to her father's domains. The Duchy of Aquitaine was the largest and richest province of France; Poitou (where Eleanor spent most of her childhood) and Aquitaine together were almost one-third the size of modern France. Eleanor had only one other legitimate sibling, a younger sister named Aelith but always called Petronilla. Her half brothers, William and Joscelin, were acknowledged by William X as his sons, but not as his heirs. Later, during the first four years of Henry II's reign, all three siblings joined Eleanor's royal household.

Inheritance

In 1137, Duke William X left Poitiers, going to Bordeaux and taking his daughters. On reaching Bordeaux, he left them in the charge of the Archbishop of Bordeaux, one of the Duke's few loyal vassals. The duke then set out for the Shrine of Saint James of Compostela, in the company of other pilgrims; however, he died on Good Friday 9 April 1137.

Eleanor, aged about fifteen, became the Duchess of Aquitaine, and thus the most eligible heiress in Europe. As these were the days when kidnapping an heiress was seen as a viable option for obtaining a title, William had dictated a will on the very day he died, bequeathing his domains to Eleanor and appointing King Louis VI of France as her guardian. William requested the King to take care of both the lands and the duchess, and to also find her a suitable husband. However, until a husband was found, the King had the legal right to Eleanor's lands. The Duke also insisted to his companions that his death be kept a secret until Louis was informed - the men were to journey from Saint James across the Pyrenees as quickly as possible, to call at Bordeaux to notify the Archbishop, and then to make all speed to Paris, to inform the King.

The King of France himself was also gravely ill at that time, suffering "a flux of the bowels" (dysentery) from which he seemed unlikely to recover. Despite his immense obesity and impending mortality, however, Louis the Fat remained clear-minded. To his concerns regarding his new heir, Louis, who had been destined for the monastic life of a younger son (the former heir, Philip, having died from a riding accident), was added joy over the death of one of his most powerful vassals - and the availability of the best duchy in France. Presenting a solemn and dignified manner to the grieving Acuitainian messengers, upon their departure he became overjoyed, stammering in delight. Rather than act as guardian to the Duchess and duchy, he decided, he would marry the duchess to his heir and bring Aquitaine under the French Crown, thereby greatly increasing the power and prominence of France and the Capets. Within hours, then, Louis had arranged for his 17 year-old son, Prince Louis, to be married to Eleanor, with Abbot Suger in charge of the wedding arrangements. Prince Louis was sent to Bordeaux with an escort of 500 knights, as well as Abbot Suger, Theobald II, Count of Champagne and Count Ralph.

First marriage

On 25 July 1137 the couple was married in the Cathedral of Saint-André in Bordeaux by the Archbishop of Bordeaux. Immediately after the wedding, the couple were enthroned as Duke and Duchess of Aquitaine. However, there was a catch: the land would remain independent of France until Eleanor's oldest son became both King of the Franks and Duke of Aquitaine. Thus, her holdings would not be merged with France until the next generation. She gave Louis a wedding present that is still in existence, a rock crystal vase, currently on display at the Louvre. Louis gave the vase to the Saint Denis Basilica. This vase is the only object connected with Eleanor of Aquitaine still surviving.

Louis's tenure as Count of Poitou and Duke of Aquitaine and Gascony lasted only few days. Although he had been invested as such on the 8th of August, on his and Eleanor's tour of the provinces a messenger caught up with them with the news that on 1 August, King Louis VI had died of dysentery. Louis VII had become the King of France. He and Eleanor were anointed and crowned King and Queen of the Franks on Christmas Day of the same year.

Possessing a high-spirited nature, Eleanor was not popular with the staid northerners (according to sources, Louis´s mother, Adélaide de Maurienne, thought her flighty and a bad influence)--she was not aided by memories of Queen Constance, the Provençal wife of Robert II, tales of whose immodest dress and language were still told with horror.

Her conduct was repeatedly criticized by Church elders (particularly Bernard of Clairvaux and Abbot Suger) as indecorous. The King, however, was madly in love with his beautiful and worldly bride and granted her every whim, even though her behavior baffled and vexed him to no end. Much money went into beautifying the austere Cité Palace in Paris for Eleanor's sake.

Conflict

Eleanor's grandfather, William IX of Aquitaine, gave her this rock crystal vase, which she in turn gave to Louis as a wedding gift. He later donated it to the Abbey of Saint-Denis. This is the only known surviving artifact of Eleanor's.

Although Louis was a pious man, he soon came into a violent conflict with Pope Innocent II. In 1141, the archbishopric of Bourges became vacant, and the King put forward as a candidate one of his chancellors, Cadurc, whilst vetoing the one suitable candidate, Pierre de la Chatre, who was promptly elected by the canons of Bourges and consecrated by the Pope. Louis accordingly bolted the gates of Bourges against the new Bishop; the Pope, recalling William X's similar attempts to exile Innocent's supporters from Poitou and replace them with priests loyal to himself, blamed Eleanor, saying that Louis was only a child and should be taught manners. Outraged, Louis swore upon relics that so long as he lived Pierre should never enter Bourges. This brought the interdict upon the King's lands. Pierre de la Chatre was given refuge by Theobald II, Count of Champagne.

Louis became involved in a war with Count Theobald of Champagne by permitting Raoul I, Count of Vermandois and seneschal of France, to repudiate his wife Eléonore of Blois, Theobald's sister, and to marry Petronilla of Aquitaine, Eleanor's sister. Eleanor urged Louis to support her sister's illegitimate marriage to Raoul of Vermandois. Champagne had also offended Louis by siding with the Pope in the dispute over Bourges. The war lasted two years (1142-44) and ended with the occupation of Champagne by the royal army. Louis was personally involved in the assault and burning of the town of Vitry. More than a thousand people who had sought refuge in the church died in the flames.

Horrified, and desiring an end to the war, Louis attempted to make peace with Theobald in exchange for supporting the lift of the interdict on Raoul and Petronilla. This was duly lifted for long enough to allow Theobald's lands to be restored; it was then lowered once more when Raoul refused to repudiate Petronilla, prompting Louis to return to the Champagne and ravage it once more.

In June, 1144, the King and Queen visited the newly built monastic church at Saint-Denis. Whilst there, the Queen met with Bernard of Clairvaux, demanding that he have the excommunication of Petronilla and Raoul lifted through his influence on the Pope, in exchange for which King Louis would make concessions in Champagne, and recognise Pierre de la Chatre as archbishop of Bourges. Dismayed at her attitude, Bernard scolded her for her lack of penitence and her interference in matters of state. In response, Eleanor broke down, and meekly excused her behaviour, claiming to be bitter because of her lack of children. In response to this, Bernard became more kindly towards her: "My child, seek those things which make for peace. Cease to stir up the King against the Church, and urge upon him a better course of action. If you will promise to do this, I in return promise to entreat the merciful Lord to grant you offspring."

In a matter of weeks, peace had returned to France: Theobald's provinces had been returned, and Pierre de la Chatre was installed as Archbishop of Bourges. In April 1145, Eleanor gave birth to a daughter, Marie.

Louis, however still burned with guilt over the massacre at Vitry-le-Brûlé, and desired to make a Pilgrimage to the Holy Land in order to atone for his sins. Fortuitously for him, in the Autumn of 1145, Pope Eugenius requested Louis to lead a Crusade to the Middle East, to rescue the Frankish Kingdoms there from disaster. Accordingly, Louis declared on Christmas Day 1145 at Bourges his intention of going on a crusade.
Crusade

Eleanor of Aquitaine took up the Second Crusade formally during a sermon preached by Bernard of Clairvaux. However she had been corresponding with her uncle Raymond, King and holder of family properties in Antioch where he was seeking further protection from the French crown. She recruited for the campaign, finally assembling some of her royal ladies-in-waiting as well as 300 non-noble vassals. She insisted on taking part in the Crusades as the feudal leader of the soldiers from her duchy. The story that she and her ladies dressed as Amazons is disputed by serious historians, sometime confused with the account of King Conrad's train of ladies during this campaign (in Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire). Her testimonial launch of the Second Crusade from Vézelay, the rumored location of Mary Magdalene´s burial, dramatically emphasized the role of women in the campaign.

The Crusade itself achieved little. Louis was a weak and ineffectual military leader with no skill for maintaining troop discipline or morale, or of making informed and logical tactical decisions. In eastern Europe, the French army was at times hindered by Manuel I Comnenus, the Byzantine Emperor, who feared that it would jeopardize the tenuous safety of his empire; however, during their 3-week stay at Constantinople, Louis was fêted and Eleanor was much admired. She is compared with Penthesilea, mythical queen of the Amazons, by the Greek historian Nicetas Choniates; he adds that she gained the epithet chrysopous (golden-foot) from the cloth of gold that decorated and fringed her robe. Louis and Eleanor stayed in the Philopation palace, just outside the city walls.
Second Crusade council: Conrad III of Germany, Eleanor's husband Louis VII of France, and Baldwin III of Jerusalem

From the moment the Crusaders entered Asia Minor, the Crusade went badly. The King and Queen were still optimistic - the Byzantine Emperor had told them that the German King Conrad had won a great victory against a Turkish army (when in fact the German army had been massacred), and the great troop was still eating well. However, whilst camping near Nicea, the remnants of the German army, including a dazed and sick King Conrad, straggled past the French camp, bringing news of their disaster. The French, with what remained of the Germans, then began to march in increasingly disorganized fashion, towards Antioch. Their spirits were buoyed on Christmas Eve - when they chose to camp in the lush Dercervian valley near Ephesus, they were ambushed by a Turkish detachment; the French proceeded to slaughter this detachment and appropriate their camp.

Louis then decided to directly cross the Phrygian mountains, in the hope of speeding his approach to take refuge with Eleanor's uncle Raymond in Antioch. As they ascended the mountains, however, the army and the King and Queen were left horrified by the unburied corpses of the previously slaughtered German army.

On the day set for the crossing of Mount Cadmos, Louis chose to take charge of the rear of the column, where the unarmed pilgrims and the baggage trains marched. The vanguard, with which Queen Eleanor marched, was commanded by her Aquitainian vassal, Geoffrey de Rancon; this, being unencumbered by baggage, managed to reach the summit of Cadmos, where de Rancon had been ordered to make camp for the night. De Rancon however chose to march further, deciding in concert with the Count of Maurienne (Louis´ uncle) that a nearby plateau would make a better camp: such disobedience was reportedly common in the army, due to the lack of command from the King.

Accordingly, by midafternoon, the rear of the column - believing the day's march to be nearly at an end - was dawdling; this resulted in the army becoming divided, with some having already crossed the summit and others still approaching it. It was at this point that the Turks, who had been following and feinting for many days, seized their opportunity and attacked those who had not yet crossed the summit. The Turks, having seized the summit of the mountain, and the French (both soldiers and pilgrims) having been taken by surprise, there was little hope of escape: those who tried were caught and killed, and many men, horses and baggage were cast into the canyon below the ridge. William of Tyre placed the blame for this disaster firmly on the baggage and the presence of non-combatants.

The King was saved by his lack of authority - having scorned a King's apparel in favour of a simple soldier's tunic, he escaped notice (unlike his bodyguards, whose skulls were brutally smashed and limbs severed). He reportedly "nimbly and bravely scaled a rock by making use of some tree roots which God had provided for his safety", and managed to survive the attack. Others were not so fortunate: "No aid came from Heaven, except that night fell."

The official scapegoat for the disaster was Geoffrey de Rancon, who had made the decision to continue, and it was suggested that he be hanged (a suggestion which the King ignored). Since he was Eleanor's vassal, many believed that it was she who had been ultimately responsible for the change in plan, and thus the massacre. This did nothing for her popularity in Christendom - as did the blame affixed to her baggage, and the fact that her Aquitainian soldiers had marched at the front, and thus were not involved in the fight. From here the army was split by a land march with the royalty taking the sea path to Antioch. When most of the land army arrived, the King and Queen had a profound dispute. Some, such as John of Salisbury and William of Tyre say Eleanor's reputation was sullied by rumours of an affair with her uncle Raymond of Poitiers, Prince of Antioch. However, this may have been a mask, as Raymond through Eleanor tried to forcibly sway Louis to use his army to attack the actual Muslim encampment at nearby Aleppo, gateway to recovering Edessa, the objective of the Crusade by papal decree. Although this was perhaps the better military plan, Louis was not keen to fight in northern Syria. One of Louis' avowed Crusade goals was to journey in pilgrimage to Jerusalem and he stated his intention to continue. Eleanor then reputedly requested to stay with Raymond and brought up the matter of consanguinity - the fact that she and Louis were actually related within prohibited degrees. This was grounds for divorce in the medieval period. Rather than allow her to stay, Louis took Eleanor from Antioch against her will, and continued on to Jerusalem, with his army dwindling.

Eleanor was humiliated by this episode, and maintained a low profile for the rest of the crusade. Louis' subsequent assault on Damascus with his remaining army, fortified by King Conrad and Baldwin III of Jerusalem in 1148 achieved comparatively little. Damascus was a major trading centre which abounded in wealth and was under normal circumstances a potential threat, but the rulers of Jerusalem had recently entered into a truce with the city, which they then forswore. It was a gamble which did not pay off, and whether through military error or betrayal, the Damascus campaign was a failure, and the royal family retreated to Jerusalem and then sailed to Rome and back to Paris.

While in the eastern Mediterranean, Eleanor learned about maritime conventions developing there, which were the beginnings of what would become admiralty law. She introduced those conventions in her own lands, on the island of Oleron in 1160 ("Rolls of Oléron") and later in England as well. She was also instrumental in developing trade agreements with Constantinople and ports of trade in the Holy Lands.
Annulment

Even before the Crusade, Eleanor and Louis were becoming estranged. The city of Antioch had been annexed by Bohemond of Hauteville in the First Crusade, and it was now ruled by Eleanor's flamboyant uncle, Raymond of Antioch, who had gained the principality by marrying its reigning Princess, Constance of Antioch. Eleanor supported her uncle's desire to re-capture the nearby County of Edessa, the cause of the Crusade. In addition, having been close to him in their youth, she now showed excessive affection towards her uncle - whilst many historians[who?] today dismiss this as familial affection (noting their early friendship, and his similarity to her father and grandfather), many of Eleanor's adversaries mistook the generous displays of affection between uncle and niece for an incestuous affair. Louis was directed by the Church to visit Jerusalem instead. When Eleanor declared her intention to stand with Raymond and the Aquitaine forces, Louis had her brought out by force. His long march to Jerusalem and back north debilitated his army, but her imprisonment disheartened her knights, and the divided Crusade armies could not overcome the Muslim forces. For reasons of plunder and the Germans' insistence on conquest, the Crusade leaders targeted Damascus, an ally until the attack. Failing in this attempt, they retired to Jerusalem, and then home. Before sailing for home, Eleanor got the terrible news that Raymond, with whom she had the winning battle plan for the Crusade, had been beheaded by the overpowering forces of the Muslim armies from Edessa.

Home, however, was not easily reached. The royal couple, on separate ships due to their disagreements, were first attacked in May by Byzantine ships attempting to capture both (in order to take them to Byzantium, according to the orders of the Emperor). Although they escaped this predicament unharmed, stormy weather served to drive Eleanor's ship far to the south (to the Barbary Coast), and to similarly lose her husband. Neither was heard of for over two months: at which point, in mid-July, Eleanor's ship finally reached Palermo in Sicily, where she discovered that she and her husband had both been given up for dead. The King still lost, she was given shelter and food by servants of King Roger II of Sicily, until the King eventually reached Calabria, and she set out to meet him there. Later, at King Roger's court in Potenza, she learnt of the death of her uncle Raymond; this appears to have forced a change of plans, for instead of returning to France from Marseilles, they instead sought the Pope in Tusculum, where he had been driven five months before by a Roman revolt.

Pope Eugenius III did not, as Eleanor had hoped, grant an annulment; instead, he attempted to reconcile Eleanor and Louis, confirming the legality of their marriage, and proclaiming that no word could be spoken against it, and that it might not be dissolved under any pretext. Eventually, he arranged events so that Eleanor had no choice but to sleep with Louis in a bed specially prepared by the Pope. Thus was conceived their second child - not a son, but another daughter, Alix of France.

The marriage was now doomed. Still without a son and in danger of being left with no male heir, facing substantial opposition to Eleanor from many of his barons and her own desire for divorce, Louis had no choice but to bow to the inevitable. On 11 March 1152, they met at the royal castle of Beaugency to dissolve the marriage. Hugues de Toucy, Archbishop of Sens and Primate of France, presided, and Louis and Eleanor were both present, as were the Archbishops of Bordeaux and Rouen. Archbishop Samson of Reims acted for Eleanor.

On 21 March, the four archbishops, with the approval of Pope Eugenius, granted an annulment due to consanguinity within the fourth degree (Eleanor and Louis were fourth cousins, once removed, and shared common ancestry with Robert II of France). Their two daughters were, however, declared legitimate and custody of them awarded to King Louis. Archbishop Samson received assurances from Louis that Eleanor's lands would be restored to her.

Second marriage

Henry II of England

The marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine to Henry of Anjou and Henry's subsequent succession to the throne of England created the Angevin empire.

Two lords - Theobald V, Count of Blois, son of the Count of Champagne, and Geoffrey, Count of Nantes (brother of Henry II, Duke of Normandy) - tried to kidnap Eleanor to marry her and claim her lands on Eleanor's way to Poitiers. As soon as she arrived in Poitiers, Eleanor sent envoys to Henry, Count of Anjou and Duke of Normandy, asking him to come at once and marry her. On 18 May 1152 (Whit Sunday), eight weeks after her annulment, Eleanor married Henry 'without the pomp and ceremony that befitted their rank'.

She was related to him more closely than she had been to Louis. Eleanor and Henry were cousins to the third degree through their common ancestor, Ermengarde of Anjou (wife to Robert I, Duke of Burgundy and Geoffrey, Count of Gâtinais); they were also both descendants of Robert II of France. A marriage between Henry and Eleanor's daughter, Marie, had indeed been declared impossible for this very reason. One of Eleanor's rumoured lovers had been Henry's own father, Geoffrey V, Count of Anjou, who had advised his son to avoid any involvement with her.

On 25 October 1154, Eleanor's second husband became King of England. Eleanor was crowned Queen of England by the Archbishop of Canterbury on 19 December 1154. It may be, however, that she was not anointed on this occasion, because she had already been anointed in 1137.

Over the next thirteen years, she bore Henry five sons and three daughters: William, Henry, Richard, Geoffrey, John, Matilda, Eleanor, and Joan. John Speed, in his 1611 work History of Great Britain, mentions the possibility that Eleanor had a son named Philip, who died young. His sources no longer exist and he alone mentions this birth.

Eleanor's marriage to Henry was reputed to be tumultuous and argumentative, although sufficiently cooperative to produce at least eight pregnancies. Henry was by no means faithful to his wife and had a reputation for philandering. Their son William, and Henry's illegitimate son, Geoffrey, were born just months apart. Henry fathered other illegitimate children throughout the marriage. Eleanor appears to have taken an ambivalent attitude towards these affairs: for example, Geoffrey of York, an illegitimate son of Henry and a prostitute named Ykenai, was acknowledged by Henry as his child and raised at Westminster in the care of the Queen.

The period between Henry's accession and the birth of Eleanor's youngest son was turbulent: Aquitaine, as was the norm, defied the authority of Henry as Eleanor's husband; attempts to claim Toulouse, the rightful inheritance of Eleanor's grandmother and father, were made, ending in failure; the news of Louis of France's widowhood and remarriage was followed by the marriage of Henry's son (young Henry) to Louis' daughter Marguerite; and, most climactically, the feud between the King and Thomas Becket, his Chancellor, and later Archbishop of Canterbury. Little is known of Eleanor's involvement in these events. By late 1166, and the birth of her final child, however, Henry's notorious affair with Rosamund Clifford had become known, and her marriage to Henry appears to have become terminally strained.

1167 saw the marriage of Eleanor's third daughter, Matilda, to Henry the Lion of Saxony; Eleanor remained in England with her daughter for the year prior to Matilda's departure to Normandy in September. Afterwards, Eleanor proceeded to gather together her movable possessions in England and transport them on several ships in December to Argentan. At the royal court, celebrated there that Christmas, she appears to have agreed to a separation from Henry. Certainly, she left for her own city of Poitiers immediately after Christmas. Henry did not stop her; on the contrary, he and his army personally escorted her there, before attacking a castle belonging to the rebellious Lusignan family. Henry then went about his own business outside Aquitaine, leaving Earl Patrick (his regional military commander) as her protective custodian. When Patrick was killed in a skirmish, Eleanor (who proceeded to ransom his captured nephew, the young William Marshal), was left in control of her inheritance.

The Court of Love in Poitiers

Of all her influence on culture, Eleanor's time in Poitiers (1168-1173) was perhaps the most critical and yet very little is known about it. Henry II was elsewhere, attending to his own affairs after escorting Eleanor to Poitiers.

It is Eleanor’s court in Poitiers that some believe to have been the ‘Court of Love’, where Eleanor and her daughter Marie meshed and encouraged the ideas of troubadours, chivalry, and courtly love into a single court. It may have been largely a court (meaning place rather than a judicial setting) to teach manners, as the French courts would be known for in later generations. The existence and reasons for this court are debated.

In The Art of Courtly Love, Andreas Capellanus (Andrew the chaplain) refers to the court of Poitiers. He claims that several women, including Eleanor and her daughter Marie de Champagne, would sit and listen to the quarrels of lovers and act as a jury to the questions of the court that revolved around acts of romantic love. He records some twenty-one cases, the most famous of them being a problem posed to the women about whether or not true love can exist in marriage. According to Capellanus, the women decided that it was not at all likely.

Some scholars believe that, because the only evidence for the "courts of love" is Andreas Capellanus’s book The Art of Courtly Love, they probably never existed; to further strengthen their argument, they say that there is also no evidence that Marie ever stayed with her mother in Poitiers, beyond her name being mentioned in Andreas’s work. Andreas wrote for the court of the king of France, where Eleanor was not well-regarded.

Others, such as Polly Schoyer Brooks (the author of a non-academic biography of Eleanor), suggest that the court did exist, but that it was not taken very seriously and that the acts of Courtly Love were just a “parlor game” made up by Eleanor and Marie in order to place some order over the young courtiers living there.

That is not to say that Eleanor invented courtly love, for it was a concept that had begun to grow before Eleanor’s court arose. Still, because we do not have much information about what occurred while Eleanor was in Poitiers, all that can be taken from this episode is that her court there was most likely a catalyst for the increased popularity of courtly love literature in the Western European regions.

Amy Kelly, in her article “Eleanor of Aquitaine and her Courts of Love”, gives a very plausible description of the origins of the rules of Eleanor's court: “in the Poitevin code, man is the property, the very thing of woman; whereas a precisely contrary state of things existed in the adjacent realms of the two kings from whom the reigning duchess of Aquitaine was estranged.”

Revolt and capture

In March 1173, aggrieved at his lack of power and egged on by his father's enemies, the younger Henry launched the Revolt of 1173-1174. He fled to Paris. From there 'the younger Henry, devising evil against his father from every side by the advice of the French King, went secretly into Aquitaine where his two youthful brothers, Richard and Geoffrey, were living with their mother, and with her connivance, so it is said, he incited them to join him'. One source claimed that the Queen sent her younger sons to France 'to join with him against their father the King'. Once her sons had left for Paris, Eleanor may have encouraged the lords of the south to rise up and support them.

Sometime between the end of March and the beginning of May, Eleanor left Poitiers but was arrested and sent to the King at Rouen. The King did not announce the arrest publicly; for the next year, the Queen's whereabouts were unknown. On 8 July 1174, Henry and Eleanor took ship for England from Barfleur. As soon as they disembarked at Southampton, Eleanor was taken either to Winchester Castle or Sarum Castle and held there.

Years of imprisonment 1173-1189

Eleanor was imprisoned for the next sixteen years, much of the time in various locations in England. During her imprisonment, Eleanor had become more and more distant with her sons, especially Richard (who had always been her favorite). She did not have the opportunity to see her sons very often during her imprisonment, though she was released for special occasions such as Christmas. About four miles from Shrewsbury and close by Haughmond Abbey is "Queen Eleanor's Bower", the remains of a triangular castle which is believed to have been one of her prisons.

Henry lost the woman reputed to be his great love, Rosamund Clifford, in 1176. He had met her in 1166 and began the liaison in 1173, supposedly contemplating divorce from Eleanor. This notorious affair caused a monkish scribe to transcribe Rosamond's name in Latin to "Rosa Immundi", or "Rose of Unchastity". The king had many mistresses, but although he treated earlier liaisons discreetly, he flaunted Rosamond. He may have done so to provoke Eleanor into seeking an annulment but, if so, the queen disappointed him. Nevertheless, rumours persisted, perhaps assisted by Henry's camp, that Eleanor had poisoned Rosamund. Henry donated much money to Godstow Nunnery, where Rosamund was buried.

In 1183, the Young King Henry tried again to force his father to hand over some of his patrimony. In debt and refused control of Normandy, he tried to ambush his father at Limoges. He was joined by troops sent by his brother Geoffrey and Philip II of France. Henry II's troops besieged the town, forcing his son to flee. After wandering aimlessly through Aquitaine, Henry the Younger caught dysentery. On Saturday, 11 June 1183, the Young King realized he was dying and was overcome with remorse for his sins. When his father's ring was sent to him, he begged that his father would show mercy to his mother, and that all his companions would plead with Henry to set her free. Henry II sent Thomas of Earley, Archdeacon of Wells, to break the news to Eleanor at Sarum. Eleanor reputedly had had a dream in which she foresaw her son Henry's death. In 1193 she would tell Pope Celestine III that she was tortured by his memory.

King Philip II of France claimed that certain properties in Normandy belonged to his half-sister, Margaret of France, widow of the young Henry, but Henry insisted that they had once belonged to Eleanor and would revert to her upon her son's death. For this reason Henry summoned Eleanor to Normandy in the late summer of 1183. She stayed in Normandy for six months. This was the beginning of a period of greater freedom for the still-supervised Eleanor. Eleanor went back to England probably early in 1184. Over the next few years Eleanor often traveled with her husband and was sometimes associated with him in the government of the realm, but still had a custodian so that she was not free.

Widowhood

Upon the death of her husband Henry on 6 July 1189, Richard was his undisputed heir. One of his first acts as king was to send William Marshal to England with orders to release Eleanor from prison, who found upon their arrival that her custodians had already released her.

Eleanor rode to Westminster and received the oaths of fealty from many lords and prelates on behalf of the King. She ruled England in Richard's name, signing herself as 'Eleanor, by the grace of God, Queen of England'. On 13 August 1189, Richard sailed from Barfleur to Portsmouth, and was received with enthusiasm. She ruled England as regent while Richard went off on the Third Crusade. Later, when Richard was captured, she personally negotiated his ransom by going to Germany.

Eleanor survived Richard and lived well into the reign of her youngest son King John. In 1199, under the terms of a truce between King Philip II of France and King John, it was agreed that Philip's twelve-year-old heir-apparent Louis would be married to one of John's nieces of Castile. John deputed Eleanor to travel to Castile to select one of the princesses. Now 77, Eleanor set out from Poitiers. Just outside Poitiers she was ambushed and held captive by Hugh IX of Lusignan, which had long ago been sold by his forebears to Henry II. Eleanor secured her freedom by agreeing to his demands and journeyed south, crossed the Pyrenees, and travelled through the Kingdoms of Navarre and Castile, arriving before the end of January, 1200.

King Alfonso VIII and her daughter, Queen Eleanor (also called Leonora of England) of Castile had two remaining unmarried daughters, Urraca and Blanche. Eleanor selected the younger daughter, Blanche. She stayed for two months at the Castilian court. Late in March, Eleanor and her granddaughter Blanche journeyed back across the Pyrenees. When she was at Bordeaux where she celebrated Easter, the famous warrior Mercadier came to her and it was decided that he would escort the Queen and Princess north. "On the second day in Easter week, he was slain in the city by a man-at-arms in the service of Brandin", a rival mercenary captain. This tragedy was too much for the elderly Queen, who was fatigued and unable to continue to Normandy. She and Blanche rode in easy stages to the valley of the Loire, and she entrusted Blanche to the Archbishop of Bordeaux, who took over as her escort. The exhausted Eleanor went to Fontevraud, where she remained. In early summer, Eleanor was ill and John visited her at Fontevraud.

Eleanor was again unwell in early 1201. When war broke out between John and Philip, Eleanor declared her support for John, and set out from Fontevraud for her capital Poitiers to prevent her grandson Arthur, John's enemy, from taking control. Arthur learned of her whereabouts and besieged her in the castle of Mirabeau. As soon as John heard of this he marched south, overcame the besiegers and captured Arthur. Eleanor then returned to Fontevraud where she took the veil as a nun.

Eleanor died in 1204 and was entombed in Fontevraud Abbey next to her husband Henry and her son Richard. Her tomb effigy shows her reading a Bible and is decorated with magnificent jewelry. By the time of her death she had outlived all of her children except for King John and Queen Eleanor.

Appearance

Contemporary sources praise Eleanor's beauty. Even in an era when ladies of the nobility were excessively praised, their praise of her was undoubtedly sincere. When she was young, she was described as perpulchra - more than beautiful. When she was around 30, Bernard de Ventadour, a noted troubadour, called her "gracious, lovely, the embodiment of charm," extolling her "lovely eyes and noble countenance" and declaring that she was "one meet to crown the state of any king." William of Newburgh emphasized the charms of her person, and even in her old age, Richard of Devizes described her as beautiful, while Matthew Paris, writing in the 13th century, recalled her "admirable beauty."

However, no one left a more detailed description of Eleanor; the color of her hair and eyes, for example, are unknown. The effigy on her tomb shows a tall and large-boned woman with brown skin, though this may not be an accurate representation. Her seal of c. 1152 shows a woman with a slender figure, but this is likely an impersonal image.

Issue

Issue of Eleanor & Henry

Name Birth Death Marriage(s)
By Louis VII of France (married 12 July 1137, annulled 21 March 1152)
Marie, Countess of Champagne 1145 11 March 1198 married Henry I, Count of Champagne; had issue
Alix, Countess of Blois 1151 1198 married Theobald V, Count of Blois; had issue
By Henry II of England (married 18 May 1152, widowed 6 July 1189)
William IX, Count of Poitiers 17 August 1153 April 1156 never married; no issue
Henry the Young King 28 February 1155 11 June 1183 married Margaret of France; no surviving issue.
Matilda, Duchess of Saxony June 1156 13 July 1189 married Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony; had issue
Richard I of England 8 September 1157 6 April 1199 married Berengaria of Navarre; no issue
Geoffrey II, Duke of Brittany 23 September 1158 19 August 1186 married Constance, Duchess of Brittany; had issue
Eleanor, Queen of Castile 13 October 1162 31 October 1214 married Alfonso VIII of Castile; had issue
Joan, Queen of Sicily October 1165 4 September 1199 married 1) William II of Sicily 2) Raymond VI of Toulouse; had issue
John, King of England 27 December 1166 19 October 1216 married 1) Isabella, Countess of Gloucester 2) Isabella, Countess of Angoulême; had issue

Other Events:

• Name:

Notes:

He was the son of Fulk V d'Anjou, 9th Comte d'Anjou and Aremburga de la Fleche, Comtesse de Maine. He married Matilda 'the Empress' of England, daughter of Henry I 'Beauclerc', King of England and Editha of Scotland, on 22 May 1128 at Le Mans Cathedral, Le Mans, France. He was also reported to have been married on 20 May 1127. Geoffrey V Plantagenet, Comte d'Anjou et Maine also went by the nick-name of Geoffrey 'the Fair'. He was also known as Geoffrey of Anjou. He gained the title of 10th Comte d'Anjou in 1129. He succeeded to the title of 12th Duc de Normandie on 19 January 1144. He gained the title of Comte de Maine. He abdicated as Duke of Normandy in 1150.

Geoffrey V (24 August 1113 - 7 September 1151), called the Handsome (French: le Bel) and Plantagenet, was the Count of Anjou, Touraine, and Maine by inheritance from 1129 and then Duke of Normandy by conquest from 1144. By his marriage to the Empress Matilda, daughter and heiress of Henry I of England, Geoffrey had a son, Henry Curtmantle, who succeeded to the English throne and founded the Plantagenet dynasty to which Geoffrey gave his nickname.

Early life

Geoffrey was the elder son of Fulk V of Anjou and Eremburga de La Flèche, daughter of Elias I of Maine. Geoffrey received his nickname from the yellow sprig of broom blossom (genêt is the French name for the planta genista, or broom shrub) he wore in his hat. King Henry I of England, having heard good reports on Geoffrey's talents and prowess, sent his royal legates to Anjou to negotiate a marriage between Geoffrey and his own daughter, Matilda. Consent was obtained from both parties, and on 10 June 1128 the fifteen-year-old Geoffrey was knighted in Rouen by King Henry in preparation for the wedding.

Marriage

On 11 June 1128 Geoffrey married Empress Matilda, the daughter and heiress of King Henry I of England by his first wife Edith of Scotland, and widow of Henry V, Holy Roman Emperor. The marriage was meant to seal a peace between England/Normandy and Anjou. She was eleven years older than Geoffrey, and very proud of her status as an Empress (as opposed to being a mere Countess). Their marriage was a stormy one with frequent long separations, but she bore him three sons and survived him.

Count of Anjou

The year after the marriage Geoffrey's father left for Jerusalem (where he was to become king), leaving Geoffrey behind as count of Anjou. John of Marmoutier describes Geoffrey as handsome, red-headed, jovial, and a great warrior; however, Ralph of Diceto alleges that his charm camouflaged a cold and selfish character.

When King Henry I died in 1135, Matilda at once entered Normandy to claim her inheritance. The border districts submitted to her, but England chose her cousin Stephen of Blois for its king, and Normandy soon followed suit. The following year, Geoffrey gave Ambrieres, Gorron, and Chatilon-sur-Colmont to Juhel de Mayenne, on condition that he help obtain the inheritance of Geoffrey's wife. In 1139 Matilda landed in England with 140 knights, where she was besieged at Arundel Castle by King Stephen. In the "Anarchy" which ensued, Stephen was captured at Lincoln in February, 1141, and imprisoned at Bristol. A legatine council of the English church held at Winchester in April 1141 declared Stephen deposed and proclaimed Matilda "Lady of the English". Stephen was subsequently released from prison and had himself recrowned on the anniversary of his first coronation.

During 1142 and 1143, Geoffrey secured all of Normandy west and south of the Seine, and, on 14 January 1144, he crossed the Seine and entered Rouen. He assumed the title of Duke of Normandy in the summer of 1144. In 1144, he founded an Augustine priory at Chateau-l'Ermitage in Anjou. Geoffrey held the duchy until 1149, when he and Matilda conjointly ceded it to their son, Henry, which cession was formally ratified by King Louis VII of France the following year.

Geoffrey also put down three baronial rebellions in Anjou, in 1129, 1135, and 1145-1151. He was often at odds with his younger brother, Elias, whom he had imprisoned until 1151. The threat of rebellion slowed his progress in Normandy, and is one reason he could not intervene in England. In 1153, the Treaty of Wallingford allowed Stephen should remain King of England for life and that Henry, the son of Geoffrey and Matilda should succeed him.

Death

Geoffrey died suddenly on 7 September 1151. According to John of Marmoutier, Geoffrey was returning from a royal council when he was stricken with fever. He arrived at Château-du-Loir, collapsed on a couch, made bequests of gifts and charities, and died. He was buried at St. Julien's Cathedral in Le Mans France.

Children

Geoffrey and Matilda's children were:

Henry II of England (1133-1189)
Geoffrey, Count of Nantes (1 June 1134 Rouen- 26 July 1158 Nantes) died unmarried and was buried in Nantes
William X, Count of Poitou (1136-1164) died unmarried

Geoffrey also had illegitimate children by an unknown mistress (or mistresses): Hamelin; Emme, who married Dafydd Ab Owain Gwynedd, Prince of North Wales; and Mary, who became a nun and Abbess of Shaftesbury and who may be the poetess Marie de France. Adelaide of Angers is sometimes sourced as being the mother of Hamelin.

Heraldry

The first reference to Norman heraldry was in 1128, when Henry I of England knighted his son-in-law Geoffrey and granted him a badge of gold lions (or leopards) on a blue background. (A gold lion may already have been Henry's own badge.) Henry II used two gold lions and two lions on a red background are still part of the arms of Normandy. Henry's son, Richard I, added a third lion to distinguish the arms of England.

Geoffrey married Matilda 'the Empress' of England 22 May 1128, Le Mans, Sarthe, Pays de la Loire, France. Matilda (daughter of Henry, I of England and Editha of Scotland) was born Abt Aug 1102, Winchester, Hampshire, England; died 10 Sep 1167, Rouen, Caux, France; was buried Rouen, Caux, France. [Group Sheet]

Notes:

Matilda 'the Empress' of England was born circa August 1102 at Winchester, Hampshire, England. She was also reported to have been born on 7 February 1102 at England. She was the daughter of Henry I 'Beauclerc', King of England and Editha of Scotland. She married, firstly, Heinrich V, Holy Roman Emperor, son of Heinrich IV, Holy Roman Emperor, on 7 January 1114 at Mainz, Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany. She married, secondly, Geoffrey V Plantagenet, Comte d'Anjou et Maine, son of Fulk V d'Anjou, 9th Comte d'Anjou and Aremburga de la Fleche, Comtesse de Maine, on 22 May 1128 at Le Mans Cathedral, Le Mans, France. She was also reported to have been married on 20 May 1127.

She was given the name of Adelaide at birth. As a result of her marriage, Matilda 'the Empress' of England was styled as Empress Matilda of Germany on 7 January 1114. She gained the title of Lady of the English on 7 April 1141. She was deposed as Lady of the English on 1 November 1141.

Daughter of Henry I and Editha of Scotland, she was nominated by her father as his successor. However, on the death of Henry I, the council considering a woman unfit to rule offered the throne to Stephen. Matilda invaded England and fought (1139 - 1148) to wrest rule from the usurping Stephen. She won much of the west, and after Stephen's capture in April 1141 a clerical council proclaimed Matilda 'Lady of the English'. She entered London but made cash demands that provoked Londoners to expel her before a coronation. On Stephen's release, she suffered defeats (fled from Oxford Castle Dec 1142), and eventually left England for Normandy, now controlled by her husband. The cause of her death is obscure. Although Matilda failed to secure the English throne, she laid a basis for successful claims by descendants of her husband Geoffrey of Anjou.

Empress Matilda (c. 7 February 1102 - 10 September 1167), also known as Matilda of England or Maude, was the daughter and heir of King Henry I of England. Matilda and her younger brother, William Adelin, were the only legitimate children of King Henry to survive to adulthood. However, her brother's death in the White Ship disaster in 1120 resulted in Matilda being her father's sole heir.

As a child, Matilda was betrothed to and later married Henry V, Holy Roman Emperor, acquiring the title Empress. The couple had no known children and after eleven years of marriage Henry died, leaving Matilda widowed. However, she was then married to Geoffrey, Count of Anjou in a union which her father hoped would produce a male heir and continue the dynasty. She had three sons by Geoffrey of Anjou, the eldest of whom eventually became King Henry II of England. Upon the death of her father in 1135, Matilda was usurped to the throne by her rival and cousin Stephen of Blois, who moved quickly and became crowned King of England whilst Matilda was in Normandy, pregnant with her third child.

Their rivalry for the throne led to years of unrest and civil war in England that have been called The Anarchy. Matilda was the first female ruler of the Kingdom of England, though the length of her effective rule was brief - a few months in 1141. She was never crowned and failed to consolidate her rule (legally and politically). For this reason, she is normally excluded from lists of English monarchs, and her rival (and cousin) Stephen of Blois is listed as monarch for the period 1135-1154. She campaigned unstintingly for her oldest son's inheritance, living to see him ascend the throne of England in 1154.

Early life and marriage to Henry V

Matilda was the elder of the two children born to Henry I of England, son of William the Conqueror, and his wife Matilda of Scotland (also known as Edith) who survived infancy; her younger brother and heir to the throne was William Adelin. Her father sired at least twenty illegitimate children, half-siblings to Matilda. Her maternal grandparents were Malcolm III of Scotland and Saint Margaret of Scotland. Margaret was daughter of Edward the Exile and granddaughter of Edmund II of England. Most historians believe Matilda was born in Winchester, but one, John M. Fletcher, argues for the possibility of the royal palace at Sutton (now Sutton Courtenay) in Oxfordshire. Her paternal grandparents were William the Conqueror and Matilda of Flanders. As a child her relationship with her father was probably not close, considering Henry I ventured to Normandy whilst Matilda was two years old, and the King stayed there for three years. It is likely she saw little of him upon his return either, as Matilda then commenced her education at the Abbey of Wilton, where she was educated by the nuns.

When Matilda was still in early childhood, envoys from Henry V, King of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor, travelled to England and asked for her hand in marriage. In spring of 1110 she was sent to Germany, taking with her a large dowry, estimated at 10,000 marks in silver, to become the bride of Henry V. She met her husband-to-be at Liège before travelling to Utrecht where, on 10 April, Matilda became officially betrothed to Henry. On 25 July of the same year she was crowned Queen in a ceremony at Mainz. As well as being a young stranger in a foreign court, she also saw most of her English retinue dismissed by the Emperor; Henry V also wished that Matilda learn to speak German. She found herself continuing her education in Germany, being taught by Archbishop Bruno of Trier. Matilda and the Emperor married in June 1114. Her official title as Holy Roman Empress is somewhat dubious; she was never crowned by the Pope, though she was crowned in Rome by the archbishop of Braga, Maurice Bourdin, at Pentecost (13 May 1117). As Matilda later claimed to have been crowned twice, a ceremony may have take place earlier in the year at Easter. To add further ambiguity to the title, Archbishop Bourdin was declared excommunicate by the Pope in April of 1117, before Pentecost but after Easter. However, as she was the betrothed wife and anointed queen at the time of her husband's coronation by Pope Paschal in 1111, her title held some legitimacy and official records addressed her as regina Romanorum. Bourdin, following the death of Paschal in January 1118, became Antipope Gregory VIII, in opposition to Pope Gelasius II. Later, she led Norman chroniclers to believe that she had been crowned by the Pope himself.

Matilda acted as Henry's regent in Italy, gaining valuable political experience. Her tenure as regent of the Italian lands of the Holy Roman Empire probably lasted from 1117 to 1119, whereupon she rejoined her husband in Lotharingia. However, in 1120, England's heir and Matilda's brother William Adelin drowned in the White Ship sinking. Being the only legitimate male heir, his death cast uncertainty over the succession of the throne. Matilda was Henry I's only legitimate child, but as a female, she was at a substantial political disadvantage. The closest male blood heir at the time was William Clito, but instead of naming a successor, Henry turned his attention to fathering another child. Widowed from Matilda of Scotland in 1118, Henry commenced negotiations for a remarriage following Adelin's death. In 1121 he married Adeliza of Louvain, though the union failed to produce any children.

Meanwhile, the marriage between Henry and Matilda remained childless, and Matilda's father was at the time unwilling to rest his hopes on his daughter providing an heir, assuming that she may be barren. Henry V had already produced an illegitimate daughter, so it was presumed that he was not infertile. Nonetheless, though she had failed to produce an heir for Henry V, she was not blamed; instead, the couple's childlessness was regarded as God's punishment to Henry V for his mistreatment of his father. Henry V died on 23 May 1125, leaving Matilda a widow, aged 22. The imperial couple had no surviving offspring, but Hermann of Tournai stated that Matilda bore a child who lived only a short while. On his deathbed, Henry V entrusted Matilda with the imperial insignia. Having not produced a legitimate child, the Salian dynasty ended. Though the position of Holy Roman Emperor was an elected one, the title often passed from father to son. Matilda handed over the insignia, which were at Trifels Castle, to Adalbert, archbishop of Mainz, and he began proceedings towards the election. The procedure was that the Bavarians, Swabians, Franconians (home of the Salians) and the Saxons elected a successor. Lothair, Duke of Saxony, and rival to the Salians, was elected.

Widowhood, heiress and second marriage

Henry I summoned Matilda to Normandy following the Holy Roman Emperor's death. Matilda was displeased, considering Germany had been her home since a young age, German was now her first language and she was a respected figure in Germany.[19] Nonetheless, she had ceased to be involved in German political affairs and with an opponent on the throne, her future there did not promise anything significantly worthwhile. Accepting that likeliness of his marriage providing him a boy was slim, Henry I decided that Matilda would be his heiress. After residing in Normandy for nearly a year with her father and step-mother, they set sail for England in 1126. In January 1127, Henry made his court swear an oath of allegiance to Matilda and that if no male heir was provided, they must accept her as their ruler. Stephen of Blois was present, and swore the oath of allegiance to Matilda. John of Worcester described a second oath, that was taken one year after the first, at Henry's Easter court (29 April 1128).

The question of marriage was entirely down to Matilda's father. Louis VI, King of France, was discontented about Normandy and England united and as such, promoted the claim of William Clito as heir, in order to attempt to cause a rift in the court. Furthermore, Fulk, Count of Anjou, was likely to support Clito's claim due to the longstanding hostility between Normandy and Anjou. The animosity between Normandy and Anjou had temporarily been repaired with the marriage of Henry I's son William Adelin to Fulk's daughter Matilda.[23] However, Adelin's death meant the match was brief. Fulk then married his younger daughter Sibyl to William Clito, though Henry managed to sever the union by having Pope Calixtus II annul the marriage on the grounds of consanguinity. However, Louis VI then offered his wife's half-sister Jeanne to Clito for marriage. Her dowry was the Vexin, an area of land bordering Normandy. Furthermore, the murder of Charles I, Count of Flanders in 1127 gave Louis the opportunity to install William as the new Count of Flanders, thus setting him up to be a strong rival of Matilda.

Henry was faced with a predicament of Clito's rising power and he recognised that his daughter must marry in a union of diplomacy to counter this. He arranged for her to marry Geoffrey of Anjou, Fulk's son. Matilda was outraged, and viewed Geoffrey as entirely beneath her, though she could not do anything to prevent the marriage. Matilda was sent to Normandy early in 1127, under the care of Robert of Gloucester, her half-brother. The wedding could not take place straight away, as Geoffrey was considered too young, having not yet turned 14. Nonetheless, he was considered handsome and intelligent, though neither of these traits served to console Matilda. The marriage took place in June 1128 at Le Mans. A month after the marriage, her rival William Clito died suddenly from a battle wound, thus strengthening Matilda's position further.

The marriage, however, was a tempestuous relationship, and after little over a year since their wedding, Matilda left Geoffrey, travelling to Normandy, residing at Rouen. The cause behind the soured relations is not fully known, though historian Marjorie Chibnall stated that, "historians have tended to put the blame on Matilda [...] This is a hasty judgement based on two or three hostile English chroniclers; such evidence as there is suggests Geoffrey was at least as much to blame". Henry eventually summoned her from Normandy, whereupon Matilda returned to England in August 1131. At a great council meeting on 8 September, it was decided that Matilda would return to her husband. Here she received another oath of allegiance, where Stephen once more made his vow to Matilda. The marriage proved a success when, in March 1133, Matilda gave birth to their first child, a son, named Henry in Le Mans. In 1134 the couple's second son, Geoffrey, was born in Rouen. Matilda nearly died in childbirth, and as she lay critically ill, her burial arrangements were planned. However, she recovered from her illness.

Struggle for the throne of England

In 1120, her brother William Adelin drowned in the disastrous wreck of the White Ship, making Matilda the only surviving legitimate child of her father King Henry. Her cousin Stephen of Blois was, like her, a grandchild of William (the Conqueror) of Normandy; but her paternal line meant she was senior to Stephen in the line of succession.

After Matilda returned to England, Henry named her as his heir to the English throne and Duchy of Normandy. Henry saw to it that the Anglo-Norman barons, including Stephen, twice swore to accept Matilda as ruler if Henry died without a male heir of his body.

When her father died in Normandy, on 1 December 1135, Matilda was with Geoffrey in Anjou, and, crucially, too far away from events rapidly unfolding in England and Normandy. She and Geoffrey were also at odds with her father over border castles. Stephen of Blois rushed to England upon learning of Henry's death and moved quickly to seize the crown from the appointed heir. He was supported by most of the barons and his brother, Henry, Bishop of Winchester, breaking his oath to defend her rights. Matilda, however, contested Stephen in both realms. She and her husband Geoffrey entered Normandy and began military campaigns to claim her inheritance there. Progress was uneven at first, but she persevered. In Normandy, Geoffrey secured all fiefdoms west and south of the Seine by 1143; in January 1144, he crossed the Seine and took Rouen without resistance. He assumed the title Duke of Normandy, and Matilda became Duchess of Normandy. Geoffrey and Matilda held the duchy conjointly until 1149, then ceded it to their son, Henry, which event was soon ratified by King Louis VII of France. It was not until 1139, however, that Matilda commanded the military strength necessary to challenge Stephen within England.

During the war, Matilda's most loyal and capable supporter was her illegitimate half-brother, Robert, 1st Earl of Gloucester.

Matilda's greatest triumph came in February 1141, when her forces defeated and captured King Stephen at the Battle of Lincoln. He was made a prisoner and effectively deposed. Her advantage lasted only a few months. When she arrived in London, the city was ready to welcome her and support her coronation. She used the title of Lady of the English and planned to assume the title of queen upon coronation (the custom which was followed by her grandsons, Richard and John). However, she refused the citizens' request to halve their taxes and, because of her own arrogance, they closed the city gates to her and reignited the civil war on 24 June 1141.

By November, Stephen was free (exchanged for the captured Robert of Gloucester) and a year later, the tables were turned when Matilda was besieged at Oxford but escaped to Wallingford, supposedly by fleeing across snow-covered land in a white cape. In 1141, she escaped Devizes in a similar manner, by disguising herself as a corpse and being carried out for burial.

In 1148, Matilda and Henry returned to Normandy, following the death of Robert of Gloucester, and the reconquest of Normandy by Geoffrey. Upon their arrival, Geoffrey turned Normandy over to Henry and retired to Anjou.

Later life

Matilda's first son, Henry, was showing signs of becoming a successful leader. It was 1147 when Henry, aged 14, had accompanied Matilda on an invasion of England. It soon failed due to lack of preparation but it made him determined that England was his mother's right, and so his own. He returned to England again between 1149 and 1150. On 22 May 1149 he was knighted by King David I of Scotland, his great uncle, at Carlisle. Although the civil war had been decided in Stephen's favour, his reign was troubled. In 1153, the death of Stephen's son Eustace, combined with the arrival of a military expedition led by Henry, led him to acknowledge the latter as his heir by the Treaty of Wallingford.

Matilda retired to Rouen in Normandy during her last years, where she maintained her own court and presided over the government of the duchy in the absence of Henry. She intervened in the quarrels between her eldest son Henry and her second son Geoffrey, Count of Nantes, but peace between the brothers was brief. Geoffrey rebelled against Henry twice before his sudden death in 1158. Relations between Henry and his youngest brother, William X, Count of Poitou, were more cordial, and William was given vast estates in England. Archbishop Thomas Becket refused to allow William to marry the Countess of Surrey and the young man fled to Matilda's court at Rouen. William died there in January 1164, reportedly of disappointment and sorrow. She attempted to mediate in the quarrel between her son Henry and Becket, but was unsuccessful.

Although she gave up hope of being crowned in 1141, her name always preceded that of her son Henry, even after he became king. Matilda died at Notre Dame du Pré near Rouen in 1167 and was buried in the Abbey of Bec-Hellouin, Normandy. Her body was transferred to Rouen Cathedral in 1847; her epitaph reads: "Great by Birth, Greater by Marriage, Greatest in her Offspring: Here lies Matilda, the daughter, wife, and mother of Henry."

Notes:

William X (1099 - 9 April 1137), called the Saint, was Duke of Aquitaine, Duke of Gascony, and Count of Poitou (as William VIII) between 1126 and 1137. He was the son of William IX by his second wife, Philippa of Toulouse.

William was born in Toulouse during the brief period when his parents ruled the capital. His birth is recorded in the Chronicle of Saint-Maixent for the year 1099: Willelmo comiti natus est filius, equivoce Guillelmus vocatus ("a son was born to Count William, named William like himself"). Later that same year, much to his wife's ire, Duke William mortgaged Toulouse to Philippa's cousin, Bertrand of Toulouse, and then left on Crusade.

Philippa and her infant son were left in Poitiers. Long after Duke William's return, he took up with Dangereuse, the wife of one of his vassals, and set aside his rightful wife, Philippa. This caused strain between father and son, until William married Aenor de Châtellerault, daughter of his father's mistress, in 1121.

He had three children with her:

Eleanor, who later became heiress to the Duchy;
Petronilla, who married Raoul I of Vermandois;
William Aigret, who died at age 4 in 1130, about the time their mother Aenor de Châtellerault died.

He possibly had one natural son, William. For a long time it was thought that he had another natural son called Joscelin and some biographies still erroneously state this fact, but Joscelin has now been shown to be the brother of Adeliza of Louvain. The attribution of Joscelin as a son of William X has been caused by a mistaken reading of the Pipe Rolls pertaining to the reign of Henry II, where 'brother of the queen' has been taken as Queen Eleanor, when the queen in question is actually Adeliza of Louvain. William, called of Poitiers in the Pipe rolls may have been a half brother of Eleanor. Chronicler John of Salisbury tells us that Petronella died in 1151 or 1152, after which her husband Raoul of Vermandois briefly remarried.

William was both a lover of the arts and a warrior. He became involved in conflicts with Normandy (which he raided in 1136, in alliance with Geoffrey V, Count of Anjou who claimed it in his wife's name) and France.

Even inside his borders, William faced an alliance of the Lusignans and the Parthenays against him, an issue resolved with total destruction of the enemies. In international politics, William X initially supported antipope Anacletus II in the schism of 1130, opposite to Pope Innocent II, against the will of his own bishops. In 1134 Saint Bernard of Clairvaux convinced William to drop his support to Anacletus and join Innocent.

In 1137 William joined the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, but died of suspected food poisoning during the trip. On his deathbed, he expressed his wish to see king Louis VI of France as protector of his fifteen-year-old daughter Eleanor, and to find her a suitable husband. Louis VI naturally accepted this guardianship and married the heiress of Aquitaine to his own son, Louis VII.

William — Aenor de Châtellerault. Aenor (daughter of Aimery, I Viscount of Châtellerault and Dangereuse de l'Isle Bouchard) was born Abt 1103, Châtellerault, Vienne, Poitou-Charentes, France; died Mar 1129/30, Talmont, Charente-Maritime, Poitou-Charentes, France. [Group Sheet]

Notes:

Aénor of Châtellerault (also known as Aénor de Rochefoucauld) duchess of Aquitaine (Châtellerault, Vienne, France, c. 1103, - March 1130 in Talmont) was the mother of Eleanor of Aquitaine, arguably the most powerful woman in Europe of her generation.

Aenor was a daughter of Viscount Aimery I, Viscount of Châtellerault and his wife, Dangereuse de L' Isle Bouchard (d. 1151). Aenor married William X of Aquitaine, the son of her mother's lover, and had three children with him:

Eleanor of Aquitaine, Duchess of Aquitaine, and wife of both Louis VII of France, and Henry II of England.
Petronilla of Aquitaine, wife of Raoul I, Count of Vermandois.
William Aigret (who died at the age of four with his mother at Talmont-sur-Gironde)

The county "Châtellerault" later became a title belonging to the Dukes of Hamilton.

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Notes:

He married, firstly, Aremburga de la Fleche, Comtesse de Maine, daughter of Hélias I de la Fleche, Comte de Maine and Mathilde de Chateau-du-Loire, circa 1110. He married, secondly, Melesende of Jerusalem, Queen of Jerusalem, daughter of Baldwin II of Bourg, King of Jerusalem and Morfia of Armenia, circa 1129. Fulk V d'Anjou, 9th Comte d'Anjou also went by the nick-name of Fulk 'the Younger'. He gained the title of 9th Comte d'Anjou in 1109. He succeeded to the title of King Fulk of Jerusalem in 1131.

Fulk (in French: Foulque or Foulques; 1089/1092 Angers - 13 November 1143 Acre), also known as Fulk the Younger, was Count of Anjou (as Fulk V) from 1109 to 1129, and King of Jerusalem from 1131 to his death. He was also the paternal grandfather of Henry II of England.

Count of Anjou

Fulk was born in Angers between 1089 and 1092, the son of Count Fulk IV of Anjou and Bertrade de Montfort. In 1092, Bertrade deserted her husband and bigamously married King Philip I of France.

He became count of Anjou upon his father's death in 1109. In the next year, he married Erembourg of Maine, cementing Angevin control over the County of Maine.

He was originally an opponent of King Henry I of England and a supporter of King Louis VI of France, but in 1118 or 1119 he had allied with Henry when Henry arranged for his son and heir William Adelin to marry Fulk's daughter Matilda. Fulk went on crusade in 1119 or 1120, and became attached to the Knights Templar. (Orderic Vitalis) He returned, late in 1121, after which he began to subsidize the Templars, maintaining two knights in the Holy Land for a year. Much later, Henry arranged for his daughter Matilda to marry Fulk's son Geoffrey of Anjou, which she did in 1127 or 1128.

Crusader and King

By 1127 Fulk was preparing to return to Anjou when he received an embassy from King Baldwin II of Jerusalem. Baldwin II had no male heirs but had already designated his daughter Melisende to succeed him. Baldwin II wanted to safeguard his daughter's inheritance by marrying her to a powerful lord. Fulk was a wealthy crusader and experienced military commander, and a widower. His experience in the field would prove invaluable in a frontier state always in the grip of war.

However, Fulk held out for better terms than mere consort of the Queen; he wanted to be king alongside Melisende. Baldwin II, reflecting on Fulk's fortune and military exploits, acquiesced. Fulk abdicated his county seat of Anjou to his son Geoffrey and left for Jerusalem, where he married Melisende on 2 June 1129. Later Baldwin II bolstered Melisende's position in the kingdom by making her sole guardian of her son by Fulk, Baldwin III, born in 1130.

Fulk and Melisende became joint rulers of Jerusalem in 1131 with Baldwin II's death. From the start Fulk assumed sole control of the government, excluding Melisende altogether. He favored fellow countrymen from Anjou to the native nobility. The other crusader states to the north feared that Fulk would attempt to impose the suzerainty of Jerusalem over them, as Baldwin II had done; but as Fulk was far less powerful than his deceased father-in-law, the northern states rejected his authority. Melisende's sister Alice of Antioch, exiled from the Principality by Baldwin II, took control of Antioch once more after the death of her father. She allied with Pons of Tripoli and Joscelin II of Edessa to prevent Fulk from marching north in 1132; Fulk and Pons fought a brief battle before peace was made and Alice was exiled again.

In Jerusalem as well, Fulk was resented by the second generation of Jerusalem Christians who had grown up there since the First Crusade. These "natives" focused on Melisende's cousin, the popular Hugh II of Le Puiset, count of Jaffa, who was devotedly loyal to the Queen. Fulk saw Hugh as a rival, and it did not help matters when Hugh's own stepson accused him of disloyalty. In 1134, in order to expose Hugh, Fulk accused him of infidelity with Melisende. Hugh rebelled in protest. Hugh secured himself to Jaffa, and allied himself with the Muslims of Ascalon. He was able to defeat the army set against him by Fulk, but this situation could not hold. The Patriarch interceded in the conflict, perhaps at the behest of Melisende. Fulk agreed to peace and Hugh was exiled from the kingdom for three years, a lenient sentence.

However, an assassination attempt was made against Hugh. Fulk, or his supporters, were commonly believed responsible, though direct proof never surfaced. The scandal was all that was needed for the queen's party to take over the government in what amounted to a palace coup. Author and historian Bernard Hamilton wrote that the Fulk's supporters "went in terror of their lives" in the palace. Contemporary author and historian William of Tyre wrote of Fulk "he never attempted to take the initiative, even in trivial matters, without (Melisende's) consent". The result was that Melisende held direct and unquestioned control over the government from 1136 onwards. Sometime before 1136 Fulk reconciled with his wife, and a second son, Amalric was born.

Securing the borders

Jerusalem's northern border was of great concern. Fulk had been appointed regent of the Principality of Antioch by Baldwin II. As regent he had Raymund of Poitou marry the infant Constance of Antioch, daughter of Bohemund II and Alice of Antioch, and niece to Melisende. However, the greatest concern during Fulk's reign was the rise of Atabeg Zengi of Mosul.

In 1137 Fulk was defeated in battle near Barin but allied with Mu'in ad-Din Unur, the vizier of Damascus. Damascus was also threatened by Zengi. Fulk captured the fort of Banias, to the north of Lake Tiberias and thus secured the northern frontier.

Fulk also strengthened the kingdom's southern border. His butler Paganus built the fortress of Kerak to the south of the Dead Sea, and to help give the kingdom access to the Red Sea, Fulk had Blanche Garde, Ibelin, and other forts built in the south-west to overpower the Egyptian fortress at Ascalon. This city was a base from which the Egyptian Fatimids launched frequent raids on the Kingdom of Jerusalem and Fulk sought to neutralise this threat.

In 1137 and 1142, Byzantine emperor John II Comnenus arrived in Syria attempting to impose Byzantine control over the crusader states. John's intention of making a pilgrimage, accompanied by his impressive army, to Jerusalem alarmed Fulk, who wrote to John pointing out that his kingdom was poor and could not support the passage of a large army. This lukewarm response dissuaded John from carrying through his intention, and he postponed his pilgrimage. John died before he could make good his proposed journey to Jerusalem.

Death

In 1143, while the king and queen were on holiday in Acre, Fulk was killed in a hunting accident. His horse stumbled, fell, and Fulk's skull was crushed by the saddle, "and his brains gushed forth from both ears and nostrils", as William of Tyre describes. He was carried back to Acre, where he lay unconscious for three days before he died. He was buried in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Though their marriage started in conflict, Melisende mourned for him privately as well as publicly. Fulk was survived by his son Geoffrey of Anjou by his first wife, and Baldwin III and Amalric I by Melisende.

Depictions

According to William, Fulk was "a ruddy man, like David... faithful and gentle, affable and kind... an experienced warrior full of patience and wisdom in military affairs." His chief fault was an inability to remember names and faces.

William of Tyre described Fulk as a capable soldier and able politician, but observed that Fulk did not adequately attend to the defense of the crusader states to the north. Ibn al-Qalanisi (who calls him al-Kund Anjur, an Arabic rendering of "Count of Anjou") says that "he was not sound in his judgment nor was he successful in his administration." The Zengids continued their march on the crusader states, culminating in the fall of the County of Edessa in 1144, which led to the Second Crusade (see Siege of Edessa).

Family

In 1110, Fulk married Ermengarde of Maine (died 1126), the daughter of Elias I of Maine. Their four children were:

Geoffrey V of Anjou (1113-1151, father of Henry II of England.
Sibylla of Anjou (1112-1165, Bethlehem), married in 1123 William Clito (div. 1124), married in 1134 Thierry, Count of Flanders.
Alice (or Isabella) (1111-1154, Fontevrault), married William Adelin; after his death in the White Ship she became a nun and later Abbess of Fontevrault.
Elias II of Maine (died 1151)

His second wife was Melisende, Queen of Jerusalem

Baldwin III of Jerusalem
Amalric I of Jerusalem

Fulk married Ermengarde, Countess of Maine 1109. Ermengarde (daughter of Elias, I Count of Maine and Matilda) died Abt 1126. [Group Sheet]

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She was also known as Ermengarde.

Ermengarde or Erembourg of Maine, also known as Erembourg de la Flèche (died 1126), was Countess of Maine and the Lady of Château-du-Loir from 1110 to 1126. She was the daughter of Elias I of Maine, Count of Maine, and Mathilda of Château-du-Loire.

In 1109 she married Fulk V of Anjou, thereby finally bringing Maine under Angevin control. She gave birth to:

Geoffrey V, Count of Anjou (d. 1151)
Elias II of Maine (d. 1151)
Matilda of Anjou (d. 1154), who married William Adelin, the son and heir to Henry I of England
Sibylla of Anjou (d. 1165), married in 1121 to William Clito, and then (after an annulment in 1124) to Thierry, Count of Flanders

She died in 1126, on either the 15th January or the 12 October. After her death, Fulk left his lands to their son Geoffrey, and set out for the Holy Land, where he married Melisende of Jerusalem and became King of Jerusalem.

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Henry I 1068-1135, king, fourth son of William the Conqueror and Matilda, was born, it is said, at Selby in Yorkshire (Monasticon, iii. 485; Freeman, Norman Conquest, iv. 231, 791), in the latter half of 1068, his mother having been crowned queen on the previous Whitsunday (Orderic, p. 510). As the son of a crowned king and queen of England he was regarded by the English as naturally qualified to become their king; he was an English ætheling, and is spoken of as clito, which was used as an equivalent title (ib. p. 689; Brevis Relatio, p. 9; comp. Gesta Regum, v. 390). He was brought up in England (Cont. William of Jumièges, viii. 10), and received an unusually good education, of which he took advantage, for he was studious and did not in after life forget what he had learnt (Orderic, p. 665; Gesta Regum, u. s.). The idea that he understood Greek and translated Æsop's Fables into English is founded solely on a line in the Ysopet of Marie de France, who lived in England in the reign of Henry III, but it is extremely unlikely, and there is so much uncertainty as to what Marie really wrote or meant in the passage in question that it is useless to build any theory upon it (Poésies de Marie de France, par B. de Roquefort, i. 33-44, ii. 401; Professor Freeman seems to think that the idea is fairly tenable, Norman Conquest, iv. 229, 792-4). It is certain that he understood Latin (Orderic, p. 812), and could speak English easily (William Rufus, i. pref. viii). At least as early as the thirteenth century he was called clerk, the origin of the name Beauclerc (Wykes, iv. 11; Norman Conquest, iv. 792). While he was with his father at Laigle in Normandy, in 1077, when the Conqueror was on bad terms with his eldest son Robert, he and his brother, William Rufus, went across to Robert's lodgings in the castle, played dice with their followers in an upper room, made a great noise, and threw water on Robert and his men who were below. Robert ran up with Alberic and Ivo of Grantmesnil to avenge the insult, a disturbance followed, and the Conqueror had to interfere to make peace (Orderic, p. 545). His mother at her death in 1083 left Henry heir of all her possessions in England, but it is evident that he did not receive anything until his father's death (ib. p. 510). The next year, when his father and brothers were in Normandy, he spent Easter by his father's order at the monastery of Abingdon, the expenses of the festival being borne by Robert of Oily (Chron. de Abingdon, ii. 12). At the Whitsuntide assembly of 1086 his father dubbed him knight at Westminster, and he was armed by Archbishop Lanfranc. He was with his father when the Conqueror lay dying the next year at Rouen, and, on hearing his father's commands and wishes about his dominions and possessions, asked what there was for him. I give thee 5,000l., was the answer. But what, he said, can I do with the money if I have no place to live in? The Conqueror bade him be patient and wait his turn, for the time would come when he should be richer and greater than his brothers. The money thus left had been his mother's, and he went off at once to secure the treasure. He returned for his father's funeral at Caen.

Robert of Normandy, who was in want of money, asked Henry for some of his treasure; Henry refused, and the duke then offered to sell or pledge him some part of his dominions. He accordingly bought the Avranchin and the Côtentin, along with Mont St. Michel, for 3,000l., and ruled his new territory well and vigorously (Orderic, p. 665). In 1088 he went over to England, and requested Rufus to hand over to him his mother's lands. Rufus received him graciously, and granted him seisin of the lands, but when he left the country granted them to another. Henry returned to Normandy in the autumn in the company of Robert of Bellême, and the duke, acting on the advice of his uncle, Bishop Odo, seized him and shut him up in prison at Bayeux, where he remained for six months, for Odo made the duke believe that Henry was plotting with Rufus to injure him (ib. p. 673). In the spring of the following year the duke released him at the request of the Norman nobles, and he went back to his county, which Robert seems to have occupied during his imprisonment, at enmity with both his brothers. He employed himself in strengthening the defences of his towns, and attached a number of his nobles to himself, among whom were Hugh of Chester, the lord of Avranches, Richard of Redvers, and the lords of the Côtentin generally. When the citizens of Rouen revolted against their duke in favour of Rufus in November 1090, Henry came to Robert's help, not so much probably for Robert's sake, as because he was indignant at seeing a city rise against its lord (William Rufus, i. 248). He joined Robert in the castle, and headed the nobles who gathered to suppress the movement. The rebellious party among the citizens was routed, and Conan, its leader, was taken prisoner. Henry made him come with him to the top of the tower, and in bitter mockery bade him look out and see how fair a land it was which he had striven to subject to himself. Conan confessed his disloyalty and prayed for mercy; all his treasure should be given for his life. Henry bade him prepare for speedy death. Conan pleaded for a confessor. Henry's anger was roused, and with both hands he pushed Conan through the window, so he fell from the tower and perished (Orderic, p. 690; Gesta Regum, v. 392). In the early part of the next year Robert and William made peace, and agreed that Cherbourg and Mont St. Michel, which both belonged to Henry, should pass to the English king, and the rest of his dominions to the Norman duke. Up to this time Henry had been enabled to keep his position mainly by the mutual animosity of William and Robert. Now both his brothers attacked him at once. He no longer held the balance between them in Normandy, and the lords of his party fell away from him. He shut himself up in Mont St. Michel, and held it against his brothers, who laid siege to it about the middle of Lent, each occupying a position on either side of the bay. The besieged garrison engaged in several skirmishes on the mainland (Flor. Worc.). Their water was exhausted, and Henry sent to the duke representing his necessity, and bidding him decide their quarrel by arms and not by keeping him from water. Robert allowed the besieged to have water. After fifteen days Henry offered to surrender if he and his men might march out freely. He was accordingly allowed to evacuate the place honourably (Orderic, p. 697)

The surrender of Mont St. Michel left Henry landless and friendless, and for some months he wandered about, taking shelter first in Brittany and then in the Vexin. In August he accompanied his two brothers to England, and apparently joined in the expedition against Malcolm of Scotland (Gesta Regum, iv. 310; Historiæ Dunelm. Scriptores Tres, p. xxii; William Rufus, ii. 535-8). Then he probably resumed his wandering life, travelling about attended only by a clerk, a knight, and three armed followers. Apparently at the end of 1092 he received a message from the men of Domfront inviting him to become their lord. He was received at Domfront by Archard, the chief man of the town, who had instigated his fellow-townsmen to revolt against Robert of Bellême, their former lord. Henry promised that he would never give up the town to any other lord, and would never change its laws and customs (Orderic, pp. 698, 788). Domfront, situated on the Varenne, dominated part of the border of Normandy towards Maine; lies not far to the east of Henry's old county, and was a place of great strength (for geographical description see William Rufus, i. 319). The interests of Henry and Rufus were now one; both alike desired to win all the parts of Normandy they could from the duke. Henry from his new fortress carried on constant war against the duke and Robert of Bellême; before long he regained a large part of his old territory in the west (ib. p. 321), and in doing so certainly acted with the goodwill of Rufus, though there appear to have been some hostilities between them (Orderic, p. 706; too much weight must not be given to this passage; in the first place it is rather vague and may apply to an earlier period, and in the second a war such as that which Henry was carrying on, consisting of attacks on single towns and castles, was certain to lead to quarrels with others besides those immediately concerned). Some places in his old county yielded to him out of affection, for, as the people of Domfront had discerned, he was a good lord, others he took by force of arms, and his old friends and followers again joined him. In 1094 he received an invitation from Rufus, who was then carrying on open war against Robert in Normandy, to meet him with Hugh of Chester at Eu, and because the duchy was in too disturbed a state for them to pass through it safely, Rufus sent ships to bring them (A.-S. Chron. sub an.). They sailed, however, to Southampton, and waited at London for the king, who met them there shortly after Christmas. Henry stayed with Rufus until Lent, and then returned to Normandy with a large supply of money, and carried on war against Robert with constant success (ib. an. 1095). When Normandy passed into the possession of Rufus in 1096, Henry joined him and remained with him, receiving from him the counties of Coutances and Bayeux, with the exception of the city of Bayeux and the town of Caen, and having further committed to his charge the castle of Gisors, which Rufus built on the frontier against France (Cont. William of Jumièges, viii. 7).

On 2 Aug. 1100 Henry was hunting in the New Forest, when men came hastening to him one after another telling him of the death of Rufus. According to popular belief he had shortly before gone into a hut to mend his bowstring, and an old woman had declared that she had learnt by augury that he would soon become king. When he heard of his brother's death, it is said that he grieved much, and went to where his body lay (Wace, ll. 10105-38). In reality he spurred at once to Winchester, where the royal treasure was kept, and demanded the keys of the treasury from the guards (Orderic, p. 782). William of Breteuil refused to deliver them, declaring that, as Robert was his father's first-born, he was the rightful heir. The dispute waxed hot, and men came running to the spot, and took the count's part (Professor Freeman's assumption that these men were Englishmen as opposed to Normans seems unwarranted). Henry clapped his hand on his sword, drew it, and declared that no one should stand between him and his father's sceptre. Friends and nobles gathered round him, and the treasury was delivered over to him. The next day such of the witan as were at hand met in council, and after some opposition chose Henry as king, chiefly owing to the influence of Henry Beaumont, earl of Warwick (Gesta Regum, v. 393). As king-elect he bestowed the see of Winchester, which Rufus had kept vacant since January 1098, on William Giffard [q.v.]; he then rode to London, and was crowned at Westminster on Sunday, 5 Aug., by Maurice, bishop of London, for Archbishop Anselm [q.v.] was then in exile. Thomas, archbishop of York, hastened from the north to perform the ceremony, but came too late. When he complained of this as an infringement of his right, the king and the bishops told him that it was necessary to hasten the coronation for the sake of the peace of the kingdom (Hugh the Chantor, ii. 107). At his coronation he swore to give peace to the church and people, to do justice, and to establish good law. On the same day he published a charter in which, after declaring that he had been made king by the ‘common concent of the barons,’ he forbade the evil customs introduced during the last reign. The church was to be free, its offices and revenues neither sold nor farmed, and the feudal incidents of relief, marriage, and wardship were no longer to be abused by the king as instruments of oppression. As he did by his tenants-in-chief so were they to do by their tenants, a provision which may be said to have been founded on the law of his father that all men, of what lord soever they held, owed the king allegiance, a provision wholly contrary to the feudal idea. The coinage was to be reformed, and justice done on those who made or kept bad money. Wills of personalty were permitted. Men who incurred forfeiture were no longer to be forced to be at the king's mercy. Knights who held by knight-service were to have their demesne lands free of tax, and were to be ready both with horses and arms to serve the king and defend his realm. Good peace was to be kept throughout the kingdom, and the ‘law of King Edward,’ with the amendments of the Conqueror, was restored. The forests were, with the common consent of the barons, to remain as they were in the days of the king's father (Select Charters, pp. 95-8). This charter was taken by the barons in the reign of John as the basis of their demands. Henry also wrote a letter to Anselm inviting him to return, and declaring that he committed himself to the counsel of the archbishop and of those others whose right it was to advise him (Epp. iii. 41). There was great joy among the people at his accession, and they shouted loudly at his coronation, for they believed that good times were at last come again, and saw in their new king the ‘Lion of Justice’ of Merlin's prophecy (Gesta Regum, v. 393; Orderic, pp. 783, 887).
Henry was thirty-two at his accession. He was of middle height, broad-chested, strong, stoutly built, and in his later years decidedly fat (Orderic, p. 901). His hair was black and lay thickly above his forehead, and his eyes had a calm and soft look. On fitting occasions his talk was mirthful, and no press of business robbed him of his cheerfulness. Caring little what he ate or drank, he was temperate, and blamed excess in others (Gesta Regum, v. 412). He was, however, exceedingly licentious, and was the father of a large number of natural children by many mistresses. At the same time he was free from the abominable vices which Rufus had practised, and, sensual as he was, his accession was at once followed by a reform in the habits of the court (ib. p. 393). In common with all his house he was devoted to hunting, and one of his lords who quarrelled with him gave him the nickname of ‘Pie-de-Cerf,’ because of his love of slaying deer (Wace, l. 10566). From the studies of his youth he acquired an abiding taste for books. He formed a collection of wild beasts at Woodstock, where he often resided (Gesta Regum, v. 409; Henry of Huntingdon, pp. 244, 300). He was an active, industrious king, and when in England constantly moved about, visiting different places in the southern and central parts of the kingdom, though he seems very seldom to have gone north of the Humber. In his progresses the arrangements of his court were orderly, for he was a man of method; there were no sudden changes of plan, and people brought their goods to the places on his route, certain that the court would arrive and stay as had been announced, and that they would find a market. The morning he gave to affairs of state and to hearing causes; the rest of his day to amusement (De Nugis Curialium, p. 210). He was not without religion. Reading Abbey he founded (ib. p. 209; Gesta Regum, v. 413; Monasticon, iv. 28); he completed the foundation of the abbey of Austin canons at Carlisle; he formed the see of Carlisle (Creighton, Carlisle, pp. 31-5; John of Hexham, col. 257; Waverley Annals, ap. Annales Monast. ii. 223); Cirencester Abbey, and Dunstable (Dunstable Annals, ib. iii. 15) and Southwyke priories, all for Austin canons, were founded by him (Monasticon, vi. 175, 238, 243), together with some other houses. He was a benefactor to some older English foundations, and rebuilt many churches in Normandy which suffered during his wars. He was liberal to pilgrims and to the military orders in Palestine (Cont. William of Jumièges, viii. 32), and seems to have treated clergy of holy life with respect. Contemporaries were much impressed by his wisdom; he did not love war, and preferred to gain his ends by craft. An unforgiving enemy, he was said to be an equally steadfast friend. He was, however, such a thorough dissembler that no one could be sure of his favour; and Robert Bloet [q.v.], bishop of Lincoln, declared that when he praised any one he was sure to be plotting that person's destruction (De Contemptu Mundi). He was cruel, and his cruelties proceeded from a cold-hearted disregard of human suffering. Policy rather than feeling guided his actions. Without being miserly, he was avaricious, and the people suffered much from his exactions, which, though apparently not exorbitant in amount, were levied with pitiless regularity alike in times of scarcity and plenty. His justice was stern. Unlike his father, he caused thieves, robbers, and other malefactors to be hanged, and sometimes inflicted such sweeping punishments that the innocent must have suffered along with the guilty. Criminals were constantly blinded and mutilated, though in his later years he often substituted heavy fines for these punishments. He strictly enforced the forest laws; no one was allowed, except as a special privilege, to hunt on his own land or to diminish the size of his woods; all dogs in the neighbourhood of a forest were maimed, and little difference was made between the slayer of a deer and of a man (Orderic, p. 813; William of Newburgh, i. c. 3). On the whole, however, Henry's harsh administration of justice was good for the country; while it brought suffering to the few, it gave peace and security to the many. His despotism was strong as well as stern; no offender was too powerful to be reached by the law. Private war he put down peremptorily, and peace and order were enforced everywhere. He exalted the royal authority, and kept the barons well under control, both by taking sharp measures against those who offended him, and by choosing his counsellors and chief officers from a lower rank, raising up a number of new men, whom he enriched and ennobled in order to make them a counterpoise to the power of the great houses of the Conquest (Orderic, p. 805). Although he kept a large number of stipendiary soldiers, to whom he was a liberal master (Cont. William of Jumièges, viii. 22), he was persuaded by Anselm to sharply restrain them from injuring the people, as they had done in his brother's time, and as they did in the earlier years of his own reign (Eadmer, Historia Novorum, iv. col. 470). Trade was benefited by his restoration of the coinage, and the severity with which he punished those who issued bad money or used false measures; he is said to have made the length of his own arm the standard of measure throughout the kingdom (Gesta Regum, v. 411). The peace and order which he established were highly valued by the people, and the native chronicler, though he makes many moans over his exactions, yet, writing after his death, and looking back in a time of disorder to the strong government of the late reign, says of him: ‘Good man he was, and great awe there was of him. No one durst misdo another in his time. Peace he made for man and deer. Whoso bare his burden of gold and silver no man durst say to him aught but good’ (Anglo-Saxon Chron. sub an. 1135; for Henry's character, both as a man and as a king, see more at large in Norman Conquest, v. 153-61, 839-45, where full references are given; also Stubbs, Constitutional History, vol. i. secs. 110-12).
In the first days of his reign Henry imprisoned, in the Tower of London, Ranulf Flambard [q.v.], bishop of Durham, the evil minister of Rufus, and began to appoint abbots to the abbeys which his brother had kept vacant in order to enjoy their revenues. He met Anselm at Salisbury, on his return to England about Michaelmas, and required him to do homage as his predecessor had done, and receive back from him the temporalities of the see, which were then in the king's hands. Anselm refused, and Henry, who could not afford to quarrel with him, and would probably in any case have been unwilling to do so, agreed to delay the matter, in order that the pope might be consulted whether he could so far change his decrees as to bring them into accordance with the ancient custom of the kingdom. In this dispute as to the question of investiture [for which see under Anselm] Henry took his stand on the rights of his crown as handed down by his predecessors, and on the undoubted usages of his realm. He made no new demand; the innovation was introduced by Anselm, who, in obedience to papal instructions, refused to accept the temporalities from Henry, as he had accepted them from Rufus, and as former archbishops had accepted them from former kings. Nor did Henry make the quarrel a personal matter; he did not persecute the archbishop, or thwart him in the exercise of his office, as Rufus had done. He behaved throughout with a due regard to law, and on the whole acted fairly, though he naturally availed himself of every lawful means to gain his point. He was urged by his counsellors, and especially by the bishops, to marry and reform his life. He had for some time been in love with Eadygyth (Edith) or Matilda [q.v.], daughter of Malcolm Canmore, king of Scotland, by Margaret, daughter of Edward the Exile, son of Edmund Ironside [q.v.]. Matilda had been brought up in the convent at Romsey, and many people declared that she had taken the veil. Anselm, however, pronounced that she was not a nun, and married her to the king, and crowned her queen in Westminster Abbey on 11 Nov. 1100. The English were delighted to see their king take a wife of ‘England's right kingly kin’ (A.-S. Chronicle, a. 1100). Before long, his example was followed by others, and intermarriages between Normans and English became common. They were encouraged by Henry, who by this and other means did all he could to promote the amalgamation of the two races within his kingdom (De Nugis Curialium, p. 209). His efforts were so successful that he has been called the ‘refounder of the English nation’ (William Rufus, ii. 455). For a while he devoted himself to his queen, but before long returned to his old mode of life. His marriage was not pleasing to the Norman nobles, who knew his early misfortunes, and as yet held him in little respect; they sneered at the domestic life of the king and queen, calling them by the English names Godric and Godgifu (Godiva). Henry heard their sneers but said nothing (Gesta Regum, v. 394; Henry of Huntingdon, p. 236). Already they were plotting against him in favour of Robert, who had returned from the crusade, and had again resumed his government, such as it was, of Normandy, though Henry kept the castles which he held in virtue of his grant from Rufus. Some hostilities were carried on in Normandy between his men and the duke's. At Christmas the king held his court at Westminster, and there received Louis, who had lately been made joint king of France by his father, Philip. While Louis was with him a letter came from Bertrada, Philip's adulterous wife, purporting to have been sent by Philip, and requesting Henry to keep Louis in lifelong imprisonment. Henry, however, sent his guest home with many presents (Symeon of Durham, ii. 232; Orderic, p. 813, places this visit under 1103. Symeon's date seems better; comp. Recueil des Historiens, xii. 878, 956). At Christmastide Flambard escaped from the Tower and fled to Normandy, where he stirred up Robert against his brother. During the spring of 1101 the conspiracy of the Norman nobles against the king spread rapidly, and when the Whitsun assembly met it was known that Robert was about to make an invasion. A large number both of nobles and of the people generally came to the assembly to profess their loyalty. Henry and the nobles met with mutual suspicions. Among the nobles only Robert FitzHamon, Richard of Redvers, Roger Bigot, Robert of Meulan, and his brother Henry, earl of Warwick, were steadfast to him; all the rest were more or less on Robert's side. The English people and the bishops were loyal, and by the advice of Anselm Henry renewed his promises of good government (Gesta Regum, v. 394; Eadmer, Historia Novorum, iii. col. 430). He gathered a large army, and was joined by Anselm in person. With him he went to Pevensey, and sent a fleet to intercept the invaders. Some of the seamen were persuaded to join the duke, who landed near Portsmouth on 20 July. Henry advanced to meet him, and though some of his lords, and among them Robert of Bellême, now earl of Shrewsbury, deserted him, many were kept from following their example by the influence of Anselm. The king and the duke met at Alton in Hampshire (Wace, l. 10393). Henry's army was largely composed of Englishmen. He rode round their battalions, telling them how to meet the shock of a cavalry charge, and they called to him to let them engage the Normans. No battle took place; for the brothers had an interview, were reconciled, and came to terms. Henry agreed to give up all he held in Normandy except Domfront, which he kept according to his promise to the townsmen, to restore the lands in England which Robert's adherents had forfeited, and to pay the duke three thousand marks a year. Robert renounced his claim on England and on homage from Henry, and both agreed that if either should die without leaving an heir born in wedlock the other should succeed to his dominions (A.-S. Chronicle, sub an.; Orderic, p. 788). The duke went back to Normandy, and Henry bided his time to take vengeance on the lords who had risen against him. By degrees one after another at various times and by various means he brought them to judgment and punished them (ib. p. 804). One of them, Ivo of Grantmesnil, began to carry on war in England on his own account, was cited before the king's court, and was forced to part with his lands for the benefit of the king's counsellor, Robert of Meulan, and to go on a crusade.
Henry now prepared to deal with Robert of Bellême, the most powerful noble in his kingdom, and his enemy alike in England and in Normandy. He knew that while Robert remained lord of so many strong fortresses, and held an almost independent position in the Severn country, where he could easily find Welsh allies, it was hopeless to attempt to carry out his design of enforcing order and of humbling the great feudatories. His war with the earl [for particulars see Bellême, Robert of] was the principal crisis in his reign. Not only did Robert's wealth and dominions make him a dangerous foe, but the chief men in Henry's army also sympathised with him. Henry depended on the loyalty of men of lower degree. In fighting out his own quarrel he was also fighting against the foremost representative of a feudal nobility, which would, if triumphant, have trampled alike on the crown, the lesser landholders, and the nation generally. The shouts which were raised on the surrender of Shrewsbury, the earl's last stronghold in England, and the song which celebrated his banishment, show that the people knew that the king's victory insured safety for his subjects. During the early part of the war the earl received help from the Welsh under Jorwerth and his two brothers, who ruled as Robert's vassals in Powys and the present Cardigan. The king won Jorwerth over to his side by promising him large territories free of homage, and he persuaded his countrymen to desert the earl and uphold the king. When, however, he claimed the fulfilment of Henry's promise, it was refused, and in 1103 he was brought to trial at Shrewsbury and imprisoned.
It is characteristic of the spirit in which Henry carried on his dispute with Anselm that while in 1102 he allowed the archbishop to hold his synod at Westminster, he in 1103 banished William Giffard [q.v.], the bishop-elect of Winchester, for refusing to receive consecration from Gerard [q.v.] of York. He was anxious for a settlement of the question, and willingly gave Anselm license to go to Rome. Henry was relieved from some anxiety by the death of Magnus Barefoot, king of Norway, who was slain while invading Ireland, and he enriched himself by seizing on 20,000l. deposited by the Norwegian king with a citizen of Lincoln. Some interference in the affairs of Normandy was forced on the king by the attacks made on his son-in-law, Eustace of Pacy, lord of Breteuil, the husband of his natural daughter, Juliana. Robert of Meulan was sent to threaten the duke and his lords with the king's displeasure unless they helped Eustace, and his mission was successful (Orderic, p. 811). Duke Robert came over to England, and was persuaded by the queen to give up the pension of three thousand marks which the king had agreed to pay him (Flor. Wig. ii. 52; Gesta Regum, v. 395). Normandy was in a state of confusion. Henry's enemies, and above all Robert of Bellême, who was now in alliance with the duke, were active, and were joined by William of Mortain, one of the king's bitterest foes, who claimed the earldom of Kent as heir of Bishop Odo. Since the overthrow of Robert of Bellême the king had become too strong for the nobles. William was tried in 1104 and sentenced to banishment. He went over to Normandy and attacked some of the castles belonging to men of the king's party. Henry himself crossed with a considerable fleet, and visited Domfront and other towns, apparently those held by the lords who also had English estates. In an interview with Robert he complained of his alliance with Robert of Bellême and of his general misgovernment. Robert purchased peace by ceding to him the lordship of the county of Evreux. Henry's lords seem to have fought with some success. The king returned before Christmas. It was a time of trouble in England; for he was determined to invade Normandy, and accordingly taxed his subjects to raise funds for his expedition. He was collecting an army, and, as he had not yet made his decree against military wrongdoing, his soldiers oppressed the people, plundering, burning, and slaying (A.-S. Chron. sub an.). He held his Christmas court at Windsor, and in Lent 1105 left England with a large force. He landed at Barfleur, and spent Easter day at Carentan. Thither came Serlo, bishop of Seez, who had been driven out of his see by Robert of Bellême, and prepared to celebrate mass. The king and his lords were sitting at the bottom of the church, among the goods and utensils which the country-folk had placed there to preserve them from plunder. Serlo called on the king to look at these signs of the misery of the people, and exhorted him to deliver them and the church from those who oppressed them. He wound up by inveighing against the custom of wearing long hair which prevailed among the men of the English court, and spoke to such good effect that the king allowed him then and there to shear off his locks, and the courtiers followed the king's example (Orderic, p. 816). Geoffrey, count of Anjou, and Elias, count of Maine, came to his help; Bayeux, with its churches, was burnt, and Caen, where the treasure of the duchy was kept, was bribed to surrender. On 22 July Henry met Anselm at Laigle. There was some talk of a possible excommunication, which would have damaged his position. The interview was amicable, and terms were almost arranged. Although he won many of the Norman barons over by gifts, he failed to take Falaise, and found it impossible to complete the conquest of the duchy that year. He returned to England in August. (For this expedition see ib. pp. 816-18; Henry of Huntingdon, p. 235; Versus Serlonis, Recueil des Historiens, xix. præf. xcj; Norgate, Angevin Kings, i. 11.)
On his return he laid a tax on the clergy, who kept their wives in disobedience to Anselm's canon, and, finding that it brought in little, extended it to all the secular clergy alike. A large number appeared before him at London in vestments and with bare feet, but he drove them from his presence. Then they laid their griefs before the queen, who burst into tears and said she dared not interfere (Eadmer, iv. col. 457). Robert of Bellême came over to endeavour to obtain the king's pardon, and was sent back indignant at his failure. Duke Robert also came early in 1106 and found the king at Northampton; he failed to persuade the king to give up his conquests and make peace. Contrary to his usual custom, Henry held no court at Easter or Whitsuntide, and spent the one feast at Bath and the other at Salisbury. In July he again went over to Normandy. On 15 Aug. he had a satisfactory interview with Anselm at Bec, and the archbishop returned to England. At Caen he received a visit from Robert of Estouteville, one of the duke's party, who offered to surrender the town of Dives to him, proposing that he should go thither with only a few men. Henry did so, and found that a trap had been laid for him, for he was attacked by a large number. Nevertheless, his men routed their assailants and burnt both castle and monastery (Orderic, p. 819). He raised a fort outside Tinchebray, a town between Vire and Flers, belonging to the Count of Mortain, and stationed one of his lords there to blockade the place. As the count succeeded in introducing men and stores, and the siege made no progress, Henry appeared before the town in person. Robert and his army found him there on 2 Sept. Henry's army, which comprised allies from Anjou, Maine, and Brittany, had the larger number of knights, while Robert had more foot-soldiers. The clergy urged the king not to fight with his brother. Henry listened to their exhortations, and sent to Robert, representing that he was not actuated by greed or by a desire to deprive him of his dukedom, but by compassion for the people who were suffering from anarchy, and offering to be content with half the duchy, the strong places, and the government of the whole, while Robert should enjoy the revenues of the other half in idleness. Robert refused. Both armies fought on foot, with the exception of the duke's first line, and Henry's Breton and Cenomannian cavalry, which he placed at some little distance from his main body under the command of Count Elias. The Count of Mortain, who led the first line of the ducal army, charged the king's first line under Ranulf of Bayeux and shook without routing it. Then Elias with his cavalry fell on the flank of the duke's second line of foot, and cut down 225. Thereupon Robert of Bellême, who commanded the rear of the army, fled, and the whole of the duke's forces were scattered (ib. p. 821; Henry of Huntingdon, p. 235). The duke, the Count of Mortain, Robert of Estouteville, and other lords were made prisoners, and the battle completed the conquest of the duchy. It was regarded as an English victory, and a reversal of the battle of Hastings, fought almost on the same day forty years before, for it made Normandy a dependency of the English crown (Will. of Malm. v. 398; Norman Conquest, v. 176). The war in Normandy helped on Henry's work of consolidating the Norman and English races in England, and this process was still further forwarded by his later wars with France. His subjects in England of either race were counted Englishmen as opposed to Normans or Frenchmen (Angevin Kings, i. 23, 24). Duke Robert was kept a prisoner until his death in 1134; there is no ground for the story current in the thirteenth century (Ann. Monast. ii. 50, iv. 15, 378) that he was blinded (Orderic, p. 823). Henry caused William of Mortain to be blinded, and kept him in prison until he died. In the middle of October he held a council of the Norman lords at Lisieux, in which he resumed the grants made by his brother, and ordered the destruction of all ‘adulterine’ or unlicensed castles, and at the same time held a council of the Norman church. In order to accustom the Norman lords to his rule he held a court at Falaise the following January, and it was there probably that he caused Robert of Montfort sur Risle to be tried for disloyalty and banished by legal process. In March he again held a council at Lisieux, and settled the affairs of the duchy, where he pursued the same policy as in England, depressing the baronage and protecting the lower classes from tyranny and violence (ib.).
He returned to England in Lent, and according to his custom held courts at Easter and Whitsuntide, the first at Windsor, the second at Westminster. On 1 Aug. he held a council at Westminster, at which the terms of the compromise between the crown and the papacy were finally settled [see under Anselm]. The issue of the struggle was that the church was freed from the feudal character which had gradually, and especially in the reign of Rufus, been imposed upon it, and that the king tacitly recognised a limitation of secular authority. On the other hand, Henry surrendered a shadow and kept the substance of power; for the appointment of bishops remained as much as before in the king's hands. At this council five vacant sees were filled by the consecration of bishops, some of whom had been elected long before. One of the new bishops, Roger, consecrated to the see of Salisbury, formerly the king's chancellor, was now made justiciar. Henry used the revenues and offices of the church as a means of rewarding his ministers, whom he chose from the clergy rather than from the baronial class. He employed Bishop Roger to develope a system of judicial and fiscal administration. The curia regis, or king's court, became specially active in judicial matters, and while the three solemn courts were regularly held, at which the king came to decisions on more important judicial cases in the presence, and theoretically by the advice, of his counsellors, the permanent court of which he, or in his absence his justiciar, was the head, and which was composed of the great officers of the household and any others whom he might select, gained greater distinctness; the king further sent out justices to go on circuit to transact judicial business and to settle and enforce the rights of the crown. The court of exchequer was organised for the purpose of royal finance; it seems to have consisted of the justiciar and the other ordinary members of the curia regis, and to have been the body which received the royal revenue from the various officers appointed to collect it. Its business was recorded, and the earliest exchequer roll known to be in existence is that of the thirty-first year of Henry I. From this it appears that the royal revenue was then fully 66,000l. The ordinary direct taxes were the danegeld, the ferm, or composition paid by the shires, and certain fixed amounts paid by towns. Besides these sources of revenue there were, among others, the feudal incidents, the sale of offices, and the profits of the royal jurisdiction (see Constitutional History, i. 376-91; Angevin Kings, i. 25-7). In July 1108 Henry again crossed over to Normandy, where trouble was beginning. He had given Robert's son William, called ‘Clito,’ into the charge of Elias of Saint-Saen, and now, by the advice of his courtiers, wanted to get hold of the lad. An attempt to seize him in the absence of Elias failed, and his guardian refused to give him up, and when Henry took his castle from him, went from one lord to another asking help for his young charge. Many of the Norman nobles were ready to uphold their old duke's son, and his cause was favoured by several of the great French feudatories, and by Louis VI, who, after his father's death, was crowned king on 3 Aug. (Orderic, pp. 837, 838). During all the earlier part of 1109 Henry remained in Normandy, and in the course of the next year a quarrel broke out between him and Louis about the border fortress of Gisors. According to the French statement an agreement had been made between them, when Henry conquered the duchy, that Gisors should be a kind of neutral ground, and should belong to neither of them. Henry, however, turned out the castellan and made it his own. Louis gathered a large army and marched to meet him at the town of Neauffles; the Epte flowed between the two armies, and could only be crossed by a crazy bridge. Messengers came to Henry from Louis asserting his grievance and offering to decide the matter by combat. Henry would not hear of this. After some altercation Louis offered to fight the matter out if Henry would allow the French army to cross over the river, but Henry answered that if Louis came over to the Norman side he would find him ready to defend his land. The two armies retired each to its own quarters. This was the beginning of a long border warfare between the Normans and the French, during which Louis did much harm to the castles and lands on the Norman march (Suger, Vita Ludovici Grossi, ap. Recueil, xii. 27, 28). About 1111 Theobald, count of Blois, Henry's nephew, relying on his uncle's help, began to make war on Louis on his own account (ib. p. 35). Meanwhile Henry continued his work of repressing the baronage, and in 1110 banished from England Philip of Braiose, William Malet, and William Bainard, and confiscated their lands. While he was fighting in Normandy he kept England at peace. In 1111 Fulk V of Anjou joined Louis against him, for Fulk had married the daughter and heiress of Elias of Maine, and on the death of his father-in-law revived the old claim of his house on Maine; the war increased in importance, and Henry remained in Normandy for about two years. He seems to have acted warily, to have trusted much to good management and bribes, and to have avoided actual fighting as much as possible. He caught his old enemy, Robert of Bellême, sent him over to an English prison, and captured his town of Alençon. The Norman barons were not universally faithful, and Henry banished the Count of Evreux and William Crispin. By the beginning of 1113 the war seems to have died out. Henry spent the festival of the Purification (2 Feb.) at the monastery of Evroul, and early in Lent met Fulk at Pierre-Pécoulée, near Alençon, and there made peace with him, for, as he had by gifts won over to his side many of the nobles of Maine, the count was not unwilling to come to terms; he did homage to Henry for Maine, and promised to give his daughter in marriage to Henry's son William. Henry pardoned the Count of Evreux and some other banished lords. Shortly afterwards Henry and Louis made peace at Gisors. The amount of Henry's success may be gauged by the concessions of the French king, who acknowledged his right to Bellême, Maine, and all Brittany. He received the homage of the Count of Brittany, subdued the forces which held out in Bellême, and then returned to England.
During Henry's reign the English power in Wales was strengthened by colonisation and conquest. The English regarded with dislike the large number of Flemish which had settled in their country since the Conquest, and Henry in 1111 settled them in the southern part of Dyfed or Pembrokeshire, where they formed a vigorous Teutonic colony, held their ground against the Welsh, and converted a land originally Welsh into an outlying English district, ‘Little England beyond Wales’ (Gesta Regum, iv. 311, v. 401; Flor. Wig. ii. 64; Orderic, p. 900; Ann. Cambriæ, an. 1106; Freeman, English Towns and Districts, pp. 33-9). Barnard, an English bishop of Norman race, was appointed to the see of St. David's, and professed obedience to Canterbury (Councils and Eccl. Docs. i. 307); obedience was likewise professed by the Bishop of Llandaff, who was consecrated by Anselm in 1107. Owen, the prince of Powys, caused a good deal of trouble, and carried on constant wars against the Normans and Flemings until he was slain in 1116. After one of his raids Henry granted the present Cardiganshire to Gilbert of Clare, who subdued the district in 1111. After his return from Normandy, Henry, in the summer of 1114, led a large army into Wales against Gruffyd of North Wales and Owen. On his approach the Welsh made peace with him, and after ordering castles to be built he returned, and on 21 Sept. embarked at Portsmouth for Normandy, where he remained until the following July. His relations with Scotland, where three of his wife's brothers reigned in succession, were uniformly peaceful. David I [q.v.], the queen's youngest brother, passed his youth at the English court, and Henry gave him an English wife and an English earldom. At the same time he was careful to strengthen the borders against the Scots as well as against the Welsh. The eastern border he gave in charge to Ranulf Flambard, bishop of Durham, whom he reinstated in his see in 1107 (Orderic, p. 833); over the western border he first set an earl of Carlisle, and on his death divided the district of Carlisle into baronies, and gave it a county organisation. He also carried on the work begun by his brother of making Carlisle an English city by completing the monastery of Austin canons, and making it the cathedral church of a bishop of Carlisle. In 1114 he sent his daughter Matilda over to Germany to be the wife of the Emperor Henry V; at the time of her betrothal in 1110 he had levied an aid which the English chronicler says was specially burdensome because it came in a year of scarcity. When he was in Normandy in 1115 he made all the barons do homage and swear fealty to his son William as heir to the duchy, and on 19 March 1116 he caused the prelates, nobles, and barons throughout the whole of England to do the like at an assembly which he held at Salisbury (Anglo-Saxon Chron. a. 1115; Flor. Wig. ii. 69; Eadmer, Historia Novorum, v. col. 496; Dr. Stubbs considers this to have been a general muster of landowners, Constitutional History, i. 358; and William of Malmesbury says that the oath was taken by all freemen of every degree in England and Normandy, Gesta Regum, v. 419. In the face of the English chronicler and Florence this may perhaps be put down as merely rhetorical).
After Easter Henry again visited Normandy, and, taking up the quarrel of his nephew Theobald with Louis VI, sent forces into France, took the castle of St. Clair, and did much damage. Provoked by this invasion, Louis adopted the cause of Robert's son William, and attacked Normandy, and, as he knew that the dukes had thoroughly fortified the border, seized by a clever stratagem a little town called Gue Nichaise, where there was a bridge across the Epte. Henry tried to blockade him by building two forts against his quarters, but Louis called them ‘Malassis’ and ‘hare's-form’ (trulla leporis), stormed Malassis, and carried on a desultory warfare (Suger, p. 43; Orderic, p. 842). The French king was joined by Baldwin of Flanders and Fulk of Anjou, who combined with him to place William Clito in possession of Normandy. Many of the Norman barons revolted, and Amaury of Montfort, who claimed Evreux, the fief of his uncle William, was active in gaining fresh adherents to the league against Henry. During 1117 Henry remained in Normandy, and in the following year matters became serious. While Count Baldwin was mortally wounded at Eu, and the king did not suffer any important defeat, the defection of his lords still continued. On 1 May of this year his queen, Matilda, died, and he also lost his faithful counsellor, Robert of Meulan. To this time also is to be referred a conspiracy which was made by one of his chamberlains to assassinate him. The plot was discovered, and the traitor punished by mutilation. It is said to have had a considerable effect on the king; he increased his guards, often changed his sleeping-place, and would not sleep without having a shield and sword close at hand (Suger, p. 44; Gesta Regum, v. 411). Hearing that Richer of Laigle had admitted the French into his town, he marched against it, but was stopped by William of Tancarville, who brought him false news that Hugh of Gournay, Stephen of Albemarle, and others of his rebellious lords were at Rouen. When he found that they were not there, he attacked Hugh of Gournay's castle, la Ferté, but heavy rain forced him to abandon the siege. Having laid waste the country he attacked and burnt Neubourg. In September he seized Henry of Eu and Hugh of Gournay at Rouen, imprisoned them, and reduced their castles. He held a council at Rouen in October, and endeavoured to make peace with his lords. While he was there Amaury of Montfort made himself master of Evreux. About the middle of November he attacked Laigle, and was hit on the head by a stone sent from the castle by the French garrison; his helmet, however, protected him. In December Alençon rebelled against his nephews Theobald and Stephen, and was occupied by Fulk of Anjou. Henry had caused Eustace de Pacy, the husband of his natural daughter Juliana and lord of Breteuil, to send him his two little daughters as hostages for his good faith, and had put a castellan, Ralph Harenc, in charge of his tower of Ivry, making him send his son as a hostage to Eustace. By the advice of Amaury of Montfort, Eustace, who was on the rebels' side, put out the boy's eyes. On this Henry, in great wrath, sent his two grand-daughters to Harenc that he might serve them in the same way. Harenc tore out their eyes, and cut off the tips of their noses. Their parents then fortified all their castles against Henry, and Juliana gathered a force, and shut herself in the castle of Breteuil. The townsmen who were loyal sent to Henry, and he appeared before the castle in February 1119. Juliana tried to kill her father by a shot from an engine. She failed, and was forced to offer to surrender. Her father would not allow her to leave the castle except by letting herself down into the moat and wading through the icy water (Orderic, p. 848; De Contemptu Mundi, p. 311; Lingard, ii. 12). During the early months of the year the war went on much as in the year before; the Norman lords still remained disloyal, Louis took Andelys, which was held by the king's natural son Richard, by surprise, and the French became masters of all the neighbouring country. Henry was losing ground, and Amaury of Montfort scornfully rejected his offer of reconciliation.
In May 1120 Henry joyfully received his son William, who came over to him from England. The object of his coming was shown by the despatch of messengers to Count Fulk to propose that the marriage contract between William and Fulk's daughter Matilda should be fulfilled. Fulk agreed and made peace with Henry, offering to end the ancient dispute between the houses of Normandy and Anjou by settling Maine upon his daughter, and to give up Alençon provided that the king would restore it to William Talvas, son of Robert of Bellême, and heir of its ancient lords (Orderic, p. 851; Suger, p. 45; Gesta Regum, v. 419). This marriage, which was celebrated in June at Lisieux, changed the aspect of the war, for the alliance with Count Fulk enabled Henry to devote all his energies to repelling Louis and punishing his rebellious vassals. In the summer he made a terrible raid on the disloyal lords; he laid siege to Evreux, and finding it well defended called the Bishop Audoin to him, for Audoin, in common with the bishops and clergy of the duchy generally, was loyal to Henry, and asked him whether it would not be well for him to fire the town provided that if the churches were burnt he would rebuild them. As the bishop hesitated to give an answer, the king set fire to the town and burnt it, churches and all, he and his nobles giving the bishop ample pledges that he would rebuild the churches, which he afterwards did. When Amaury heard that his town was burnt, he sent to Louis for help. On 20 Aug. Henry, who had heard mass that morning at Noyon, was riding towards Andelys to make war, with five hundred of his best knights, when his scouts told him that the French king, who had ridden out from Andelys with four hundred knights, was close at hand. The two bands met on the plain of Brenneville. Besides William the Ætheling two of Henry's natural sons, Robert and Richard, fought in their father's company; Richard with a hundred knights remained mounted, the rest of Henry's knights fought on foot. Among the knights of Louis fought William of Normandy. Louis neglected to marshal his force; William Crispin, a rebel Norman, charged Henry's forces with eighty horse. He and his men were surrounded, but he made his way to the king and struck him a deadly blow on the head, but Henry's headpiece saved him, though it was broken by the blow, and wounded his head so that the blood flowed. All the eighty knights were taken. A body of knights from the Vexin for a moment shook the Norman lines, but was quickly repulsed. When Louis saw that William Crispin and the knights whom he led did not return from their charge, he and his men took flight, and the Normans pursued some of the fugitives as far as Andelys. Henry's men took 140 prisoners and the banner of the French king. Henry returned this banner to Louis together with his charger, and William the Ætheling sent back the charger of his cousin William of Normandy. Henry also sent back without ransom some knights who owed allegiance to Louis as well as to himself. Only three knights were slain out of the nine hundred engaged in the fight; for all were clad in complete armour, and on both sides there was a feeling of knightly comradeship which prevented any sanguinary conflict; indeed the aim of both sides was rather to make prisoners than to slay the enemy. The whole affair was more like a great tournament than a battle (Orderic, pp. 853-5; Suger, p. 45; Henry of Huntingdon, p. 241, where some details are probably untrustworthy). Louis raised a large force and overran part of Normandy and Chartres, gaining nothing by his raid, while Henry organised his army. In October Louis, who evidently felt himself overmatched, appeared before Calixtus II at the Council of Rheims, and made his complaints against the English king. Geoffrey, archbishop of Rouen, rose to reply to the charges brought against his lord, but the council would not hear him. The pope, however, was anxious to make peace with the emperor, and did not care to offend the father of the empress. Meanwhile Henry received the submission of several rebel lords, and was reconciled to Amaury of Montfort, Eustace, and Juliana, Hugh of Gournay, and others, who agreed, though against their wills, to let William Clito and Elias of St.-Saen remain in exile. In November he met the pope at Gisors, and replied in person to the charges brought against him by Louis of usurping the inheritance of his brother and nephew, declaring that he had offered to make William earl of three counties in England, and to bring him up with his own son. His answers on these and other points thoroughly satisfied the pope, by whose intercession a peace was arranged in 1120 between Henry and Louis and the Count of Flanders; all conquests were to be restored, captives liberated, and offences pardoned, and Louis accepted the homage of Henry's son, and thus gave a pledge that he should succeed to his father's fiefs (Orderic, p. 866; Norman Conquest, v. 193). Henry thus passed safely and honourably through the most dangerous crisis of his reign. After devoting some time to settling the affairs of the duchy, he embarked at Barfleur on 25 Nov. to return to England, from which he had been absent for four years. His only legitimate son, William, was to follow him, with his half-brother Richard, his half-sister the Countess of Perche, many young lords and ladies, and the king's treasure, in the White Ship. The ship foundered, and all were drowned except a butcher of Rouen. Although Henry's lords were mourning their own losses, they concealed the disaster from the king for a day after the news had come, for they feared to tell him. At last the young son of Count Theobald knelt before him and told him of his loss. Henry fell senseless to the ground, and though in a few days he restrained his grief, and applied himself to his kingly business, he was deeply affected by his son's death (Orderic, pp. 868 sq.; Gesta Regum, v. 419; Henry of Huntingdon, p. 242; Symeon, ii. 259; Wace, ll. 10203-10288; Benoit, ll. 41039-41152).
The disaster ruined his schemes at the very moment when their success appeared certain, and when it seemed as though nothing could prevent his son from inheriting both his kingdom and duchy. All his dominions would now naturally pass at his death to his enemy, William Clito. By the advice of his counsellors he married again, taking to wife, on 29 Jan. 1121, Adela, or Adelaide, daughter of Godfrey VII, count of Louvain, in the hope of having a son by her, and also, it is said, to keep himself from disgraceful conduct (Gesta Regum, v. 419; Eadmer, col. 517). Unfortunately the marriage proved barren. After Whitsuntide Henry led an army into Wales, where the natives had taken advantage of the death of the Earl of Chester to rise in revolt. He marched as far as Snowdon (Symeon, ii. 264), and received the submission of the Welsh nobles, who gave him their sons as hostages, and paid him tribute, so that he is said to have fully subdued the land (Giraldus Cambrensis, iii. 152). While on this expedition, and as the army was passing through English territory, he was hit by an arrow which was shot at him secretly. His armour saved him from harm. The man who made the attempt was not discovered, and Henry swore ‘by God's death,’ his favourite oath, that he was no Welshman, but one of his own subjects (Gesta Regum, v. 401). Shortly before this time Henry brought to a close a quarrel with Thurstan, archbishop of York. His rule was as despotic in ecclesiastical as in civil matters, and in both alike he maintained the principle of holding to the hereditary rights of the crown. After the death of Anselm in 1109, he broke the promise of his coronation charter by keeping the see of Canterbury vacant until 1114, when he summoned the suffragan bishops and the monks of Christ Church to Windsor, and allowed the election of Ralph, bishop of Rochester, to the archbishopric. This election led to a dispute with Pope Paschal II, who in 1115 wrote to Henry, complaining that his legates were shut out from the kingdom, and that he translated bishops without papal license. On the other hand, the king informed the bishops that the pope had infringed the privileges enjoyed by his father and brother. He commanded Thurstan, the archbishop-elect of York, to make profession to Archbishop Ralph. Thurstan refused, and was upheld in his refusal by Pope Paschal and his successors, Gelasius II and Calixtus II. A long quarrel ensued, in which Henry upheld the rights of Canterbury. He allowed Thurstan to attend the pope's council at Rheims in 1119, on his promising that he would not receive consecration from the pope, and so evade the profession, and allowed the English prelates to go thither also, warning them that, as he intended to abide by the ancient customs and privileges of his realm, they had better not bring back any idle innovations. Finding that Thurstan, in spite of his promise, was trying to obtain consecration from Calixtus, he charged the bishops to prevent it. They were too late, and the pope consecrated Thurstan, whereupon the king forbade him to enter England, and seized the estates of his see. Nor would Henry at Gisors assent to the pope's demand for his restoration. Thurstan, however, did Henry a service by forwarding the negotiations with Louis, and Henry allowed him to return, and gave him the temporalities (Eadmer, v. col. 499 sq.; Hugh the Chantor, pp. 129 sq.).
Although Henry sent the young widow of his son back to her father against his own will¾for, besides her importance as a kind of hostage for Count Fulk's conduct, he seems to have been fond of her (Orderic, p. 875)¾he did not return the money which formed part of her dower, nor would he satisfy the envoys from the count who came to his court, probably on this matter, at Christmas 1122. The settlement of the county of Maine, however, was broken by William's death, and Fulk was induced, partly by his anger at the retention of the dower, and partly by the persuasions of Louis of France and Amaury of Montfort, count of Evreux, to give the county to William Clito, to whom he betrothed his second daughter Sibyl. At the same time in 1123 a revolt was excited among the Norman lords, chiefly through the instrumentality of Amaury and of Waleran of Meulan, the son of Henry's late counsellor. Henry heard of the movement, and crossed over from Portsmouth immediately after Whitsuntide, leaving his kingdom under the care of his justiciar, Roger, bishop of Salisbury, who was at this period, after the king himself, all powerful both in church and state. In September the rebels met at Croix-St. Leuffroy, and arranged their plans. As soon as Henry knew of their meeting, he gathered his forces at Rouen, and took the field in October. His promptitude would have taken them by surprise had they not received timely warning from Hugh of Montfort, of whom the king required the surrender of his castle. Henry burnt Montfort, and forced the garrison to surrender the fortress, and then laid siege to Pont Audemer, the town of Waleran. The town was burnt, but the castle was held by a strong garrison, partly composed of men who had pretended to be on Henry's side, while some, the poet Luke de Barré among them, were fierce and valiant warriors. In spite of his age Henry was as active during this siege as the youngest soldier of his army, superintending everything himself, teaching the carpenters how to build a tower against the castle, scolding bad workmen, and praising the industrious, and urging them on to do more. At last, after a siege of six weeks, the castle was surrendered. On the other hand Gisors was taken by a treacherous stratagem. Henry at once hastened thither, and the rebels evacuated the town on his approach. In returning he seized Evreux. Heavy rains compelled him for a time to forbear further operations. While his rebellious lords seem to have been no match for him, their attempts gained importance from the fact that they were upheld by Louis, who was ready, if matters went ill with Henry, to take a prominent part in the war. In order to prevent this, Henry's son-in-law, the emperor, threatened France with an invasion, but did not advance further than Metz (Suger, pp. 49, 50; Otto of Freising, vii. 16). A decisive blow was struck on 25 March 1124, when Ranulf of Bayeux, who held Evreux for the king, defeated a large force led by Waleran, and took him and many others captive at Bourgthéroulde. This battle virtually ended the war, and after Easter Henry pronounced sentence on the rebel prisoners at Rouen. Many were imprisoned, Hugh of Montfort being confined miserably at Gloucester. Waleran, whose sister was one of the king's mistresses, was kept in prison in England until 1129, and then pardoned and received into favour. Two rebels who had forsworn themselves were condemned to lose their eyes. A like doom was pronounced against the warrior poet, Luke de Barré, for he had mortally offended the king by his satirical verses, as well as by his repeated attacks upon him. Charles, count of Flanders, who chanced to be at the court, and many nobles remonstrated at this, for, as they pleaded, Luke was not one of Henry's men, and was taken while fighting for his own lord. Henry acknowledged this, but would not remit his sentence, for he said that Luke had made his enemies laugh at him. Luke escaped his doom by dashing out his own brains (Orderic, pp. 880, 881). The king's success was crowned by the publication of a papal decree, obtained by his persuasion, annulling the marriage contract between William Clito and the daughter of the Count of Anjou, on account of consanguinity (ib. p. 838; D'Achery, Spicilegium, iii. 497). The war cost much money, and Englishmen moaned over the burdens which were laid upon them; ‘those who had goods,’ the chronicler writes, ‘were bereft of them by strong gelds and strong motes; he who had none starved with hunger.’ The law was enforced vigorously, and sometimes probably unjustly; at Huncote in Leicestershire the king's justices at one time hanged forty-four men as thieves, and mutilated six others, some of whom, it was generally believed, were innocent. At the end of the year Henry sent from Normandy, commanding that severe measures should be taken against debasers of the coin, which had deteriorated so much that it was said that a pound was not worth a penny in the market. The offenders were punished with mutilation.
On the death of his son-in-law the emperor in 1125, Henry sent for his daughter Matilda, who went back to him, and in September 1126 he returned to England with his queen, his daughter, and his prisoners. Finding that it was unlikely that his queen would have children, he determined to secure the succession for his daughter, and at the following Christmas assembly at Westminster caused the prelates and barons to swear that if he died without a male heir they would receive Matilda as Lady both of England and Normandy. Among those who took this oath were David, king of Scots, who had come to the English court at Michaelmas, and Stephen, count of Boulogne, the king's nephew, and the brother of Count Theobald (Angl

Henry married Editha of Scotland 11 Nov 1100, Westminster, London, England. Editha (daughter of Malcolm III 'Caennmor', King of Scotland and Saint Margaret of Scotland) was born Abt 1079, Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland; died 01 May 1118, Westminster, London, England. [Group Sheet]

Notes:

From 11 November 1100, her married name became Queen Consort Matilda of England.

Notes:

William IX (Occitan: Guilhèm de Peitieus; French: Guillaume de Poitiers) (22 October 1071 - 10 February 1126), called the Troubador, was the Duke of Aquitaine and Gascony and Count of Poitou (as William VII) between 1086 and his death. He was also one of the leaders of the Crusade of 1101. Though his political and military achievements have a certain historical importance, he is best known as the earliest troubadour - a vernacular lyric poet in the Occitan language - whose work survived.

Ducal career

William was the son of William VIII of Aquitaine by his third wife, Hildegarde of Burgundy. His birth was a cause of great celebration at the Aquitanian court, but the Church at first considered him illegitimate because of his father's earlier divorces and his parents' consanguinity. This obliged his father to make a pilgrimage to Rome soon after his birth to seek Papal approval of his third marriage and the young William's legitimacy.

Early career, 1088-1102

William inherited the duchy at the age of fifteen upon the death of his father. In 1088, at the age of only sixteen, William married his first wife, Ermengarde, the daughter of Fulk IV of Anjou. She was reputedly beautiful and well-educated, but also suffered from severe mood-swings, vacillating between vivacity and sullenness. She was considered a nag, and had a habit of retiring in bad temper to a cloister after an argument, cutting off all contact with the outside world until suddenly making a reappearance at court as if her absence had never occurred. Such behaviour, coupled with her failure to conceive a child, led William to send her back to her father and have the marriage dissolved (1091).

In 1094 he remarried to Philippa, the daughter and heiress of William IV of Toulouse. By Philippa, William had two sons and five daughters, including his eventual successor, William X. His second son, Raymond, eventually became the Prince of Antioch in the Holy Land, and his daughter Agnes married firstly Aimery V of Thouars and then Ramiro II of Aragon, reestablishing dynastic ties with that ruling house.

William invited Pope Urban II to spend the Christmas of 1095 at his court. The pope urged him to "take the cross" (i.e. the First Crusade) and leave for the Holy Land, but William was more interested in exploiting the absence on Crusade of Raymond IV of Toulouse, his wife's uncle, to press a claim to Toulouse. He and Philippa did capture Toulouse in 1098, an act for which they were threatened with excommunication. Partly out of a desire to regain favor with the religious authorities and partly out of a wish to see the world, William joined the Crusade of 1101, an expedition inspired by the success of the First Crusade in 1099. To finance it, he had to mortgage Toulouse back to Bertrand, the son of Raymond IV.

The Duchess was an admirer of Robert of Arbrissel and persuaded William to grant him land in Northern Poitou to establish a religious community dedicated to the Virgin Mary [2]. This became Fontevraud Abbey, which would enjoy the patronage of William's granddaughter Eleanor of Aquitaine and would remain important until its dissolvement during the French Revolution.

William arrived in the Holy Land in 1101 and stayed there until the following year. His record as a military leader is not very impressive. He fought mostly skirmishes in Anatolia and was frequently defeated. His recklessness led to his being ambushed on several occasions, with great losses to his own forces. In September 1101, his entire army was destroyed by the Seljuk Turks at Heraclea; William himself barely escaped, and, according to Orderic Vitalis, he reached Antioch with only six surviving companions.

Conflict with Church and wife, 1102-1118

William, like his father and many magnates of the time, had a rocky relationship with the Church. He was excommunicated twice, the first time in 1114 for an alleged infringement of the Church's tax privileges. His response to this was to demand absolution from Peter, Bishop of Poitiers. As the bishop was at the point of pronouncing the anathema, the duke threatened him with a sword, swearing to kill him if he did not pronounce absolution. Bishop Peter, surprised, pretended to comply, but when the duke, satisfied, released him, the bishop completed reading the anathema, before calmly presenting his neck and inviting the duke to strike. According to contemporaries, William hesitated a moment before sheathing his sword and replying, "I don't love you enough to send you to paradise."

William was excommunicated a second time for "abducting" the Viscountess Dangereuse (Dangerosa), the wife of his vassal Aimery I de Rochefoucauld, Viscount of Châtellerault. The lady, however, appears to have been a willing party in the matter. He installed her in the Maubergeonne tower of his castle in Poitiers (leading to her nickname La Maubergeonne), and, as related by William of Malmesbury, even painted a picture of her on his shield.

Upon returning to Poitiers from Toulouse, Philippa was enraged to discover a rival woman living in her palace. She appealed to her friends at court and to the Church; however, no noble could assist her since William was their feudal overlord, and whilst the Papal legate Giraud (who was bald) complained to William and told him to return Dangereuse to her husband, William's only response was, "Curls will grow on your pate before I part with the Viscountess." Humiliated, Philippa chose in 1116 to retire to the Abbey of Fontevraud, where she was befriended, ironically, by Ermengarde of Anjou, William's first wife. While in residence she may have had direct conversations or correspondence with Countess Adela of Blois, who was in constant contact with Fontevrault from Marcigney abbey. Philippa did not remain there long, however: the abbey records state that she died on the 28 November 1118.

Later career, 1118-1126

Relations between the Duke and his elder son William also became strained-although it is unlikely that he ever embarked upon a seven-year revolt in order to avenge his mother's mistreatment, as Ralph of Diceto claimed, only to be captured by his father. Other records flatly contradict such a thing. Ralph claimed that the revolt began in 1113; but at that time, the young William was only thirteen and his father's liaison with Dangereuse had not yet begun. Father and son improved their relationship after the marriage of the younger William to Aenor of Châtellerault, Dangereuse's daughter by her husband, in 1121.

William was readmitted to the Church around 1120, after making concessions to it. However, he was after 1118 faced with the return of his first wife, Ermengarde, who had, upon the death of Philippa, stormed down from Fontevrault to the Poitevin court, demanding to be reinstated as the Duchess of Aquitaine-presumably in an attempt to avenge the mistreated Philippa. In October 1119, she suddenly appeared at the Council of Reims being held by Pope Calixtus II and demanded that the Pope excommunicate William (again), oust Dangereuse from the ducal palace, and restore herself to her rightful place. The Pope "declined to accommodate her"; however, she continued to trouble William for several years afterwards, thereby encouraging him to join the Reconquista efforts underway in Spain.

Between 1120 and 1123 William joined forces with the Kingdoms of Castile and León. Aquitanian troops fought side by side with Castilians in an effort to take Cordoba. During his sojourn in Spain, William was given a rock crystal vase by a Muslim ally that he later bequeathed to his granddaughter Eleanor. The vase probably originated in Sassanid Persia in the seventh century.

In 1122, William lost control of Toulouse, Philippa's dower land, to Alfonso Jordan, the son and heir of Raymond IV, who had taken Toulouse after the death of William IV. He did not trouble to reclaim it. He died on 10 February 1126, aged 55, after suffering a short illness.

Poetic career

William's greatest legacy to history was not as a warrior but as a troubadour - a lyric poet employing the Romance vernacular language called Provençal or Occitan.

He was the earliest troubadour whose work survives. Eleven of his songs survive (Merwin, 2002). The song traditionally numbered as the eighth (Farai chansoneta nueva) is of dubious attribution, since its style and language are significantly different (Pasero 1973, Bond 1982). Song 5 (Farai un vers, pos mi sonelh) has two significantly different versions in different manuscripts. The songs are attributed to him under his title as Count of Poitou (lo coms de Peitieus). The topics vary, treating sex, love, women, his own sexual and literary prowess, and feudal politics.

An anonymous 13th-century vida of William remembers him thus:

The Count of Poitiers was one of the most courtly men in the world and one of the greatest deceivers of women. He was a fine knight at arms, liberal in his womanizing, and a fine composer and singer of songs. He traveled much through the world, seducing women.

It is possible, however, that at least in part it is not based on facts, but on literal interpretation of his songs, written in first person; in Song 5, for example, he describes how he deceived two women.

His frankness, wit and vivacity caused scandal and won admiration at the same time. He is among the first Romance vernacular poets of the Middle Ages, one of the founders of a tradition that would culminate in Dante, Petrarch, and François Villon. Ezra Pound mentions him in Canto VIII:

And Poictiers, you know, Guillaume Poictiers,
had brought the song up out of Spain
with the singers and viels...

In Spirit of Romance Pound also calls William IX "the most 'modern' of the troubadours":

For any of the later Provençals, i.e., the high-brows, we have to... 'put ourselves into the Twelfth Century' etc. Guillaume, writing a century earlier, is just as much of our age as of his own.
-Ezra Pound, cited in Bond 1982, p. lxxvi

William was a man who loved scandal and no doubt enjoyed shocking his audiences. In fact, William granted large donations to the church, perhaps to regain the pope's favour. He also added to the palace of the counts of Poitou (which had stood since the Merovingian era), later added to by his granddaughter Eleanor of Aquitaine and surviving in Poitiers as the Palace of Justice to this day.

One of William's poems, possibly written at the time of his first excommunication, since it implies his son was still a minor, is partly a musing on mortality: Pos de chantar m'es pres talenz (Since I have the desire to sing,/I'll write a verse for which I'll grieve). It concludes:

I have given up all I loved so much:
chivalry and pride;
and since it pleases God, I accept it all,
that He may keep me by Him.

I enjoin my friends, upon my death,
all to come and do me great honor,
since I have held joy and delight
far and near, and in my abode.

Thus I give up joy and delight,
and squirrel and grey and sable furs.

Orderic Vitalis refers to William composing songs (c. 1102) upon his return from the Crusade of 1101. These might be the first "Crusade songs":

Then the Poitevin duke many times related, with rhythmic verses and witty measures, the miseries of his captivity, before kings, magnates, and Christian assemblies

William married Philippa, Countess of Toulouse 1094. Philippa (daughter of William, IV Count of Toulouse and Emma of Mortain) was born Abt 1073; died 28 Nov 1118, Fontevraud-l'Abbaye, Anjou, France. [Group Sheet]

Notes:

Philippa Maude of Toulouse (c. 1073 - 28 November 1118), also known as Philippa de Toulouse or Philippa de Rouergue, was the Duchess Consort of Aquitaine, and Countess of Toulouse. She is also considered by some historians as a Queen consort of Aragon and Navarre; however, that designation is based on a claimed marriage to King Sancho Ramirez of Aragon, which is now considered suspect.

Life

Early life and marriage

Philippa was born in approximately 1073 to Count William IV of Toulouse, and his wife Emma of Mortain. She was his only surviving child, and thus, by the laws of Toulouse, his heir. In 1088, William went on a pilgrimage to Palestine, leaving his brother Raymond of Saint-Gilles as regent. Before he left, it is claimed, he also married his daughter to the King of Aragon in order to disinherit her; however, evidence suggests that Sancho was still married to his previous wife at the time of his death in 1094.)

Philippa's early life - if she was not married to Sancho Ramirez of Aragon - is something of a mystery. It is known that she did not marry William IX of Aquitaine until 1094, after the death of her father and the succession of her uncle; the circumstances in which she lived prior to her father's death, the manner of her disinheritance, and the arrangement of her marriage, are thus unknown. Those historians that argue her to have been married to Sancho Ramirez argue that her removal from Toulouse prevented her from effectively claiming her inheritance, and that with the death of Sancho, she was free to remarry based on her own choice. What is certain is that, upon the death of Count William, Philippa's claims were ignored, and Raymond became count. Philippa then married William, whom she considered worthy due to his numerous merits: a handsome man fully capable of flattering a woman, he was not only one of the most prominent Dukes in Europe, able to give her the life she felt she deserved; his realm was also conveniently situated next to Toulouse, and consequently would easily be able to regain her homeland for her own - as indeed, the Duke promised to do for her. Consequently, the two swiftly married. Why she was allowed by her uncle to marry such a dangerous man, or indeed if Raymond had any choice in the matter, is unknown.

Political life

When Raymond IV of Toulouse set out on the First Crusade in the autumn of 1096, he left his son Bertrand to rule the County. However, in the Spring of 1098, William and Philippa marched into the city of Toulouse, and took control without a single life being lost. In the next year, she gave birth to her first child in the city: William the Toulousain.

In 1099, her husband went on crusade and he left her as regent in Poitou.

She was an admirer of Robert of Arbrissel and persuaded her husband to grant him land in Poitou to establish a religious community dedicated to the Virgin Mary. In 1100 he founded Fontevraud Abbey there.

She was stunned in 1100 when her husband mortgaged Toulouse to her cousin Bertrand in exchange for a vast sum of money, which the Duke used to go on Crusade himself. Philippa, removed from her home, was sent to his capital of Poitiers, from where she ruled Aquitaine on behalf of her husband whilst he was absent.

After William's return, he and Philippa for a time lived contentedly with each other, producing a further five daughters, and a son, Raymond. She also ignored the Duke's sexual boasting in song and talk, instead concentrating on religion (in particular the Abbey of Fontevrault, of which she remained a keen sponsor), especially the teachings of its founder, who preached the superiority of women over men. Her obsession with a doctrine considered offensive by many men of that time, combined with William's growing dissatisfaction with her, and his teasing of her (claiming to be founding an abbey of prostitutes), led to discord in the marriage.

Toulouse had been won back by William for his wife in 1113, following the death of Bertrand in Syria in 1112: his heir being his half-brother, the 9 year old Alphonse-Jourdain, William had been unopposed. Thus, by 1114, Philippa was spending most of her time ruling there. Accordingly, she was less than pleased when, upon her return from Toulouse to Poitiers in 1114, she discovered her husband to have moved his mistress, Viscountess Dangereuse of Châtellerault, into her palace. Philippa appealed to friends and the church for assistance in ousting her husband's mistress, but to no avail - none could persuade the Duke to give up his mistress.

Later life

In 1116, a humiliated Philippa, devastated by her husband's repayment of her service to him for so many years, left the Court, taking refuge at the Abbey of Fontevrault. There she became a close friend of her husband's first wife, Ermengarde of Anjou, and the two spent much time reflecting upon the shortcomings of William. However, for all Philippa's devotion to the Abbey and its ideals, she found little peace there, both angry and resentful that her husband had cast her off in favour of a mistress. She died of unknown causes there on 28 November 1118, survived by her husband, his mistress, and Ermengarde, who would shortly attempt to avenge Philippa by attempting to have Dangereuse banished from Aquitaine.

Notes:

Aimery I de Rouchefoucould (died 1151), was the Viscount of Châtellerault and father of Aenor de Châtellerault. Through his daughter he was the grandfather of Eleanor of Aquitaine, who would become Duchess of Aquitaine (in her own right) as well as queen of both France and England. Eleanor was arguably the most celebrated woman in Medieval European history.

Family

Aimery was born to Boson II de Châtellerault and his wife, Aleanor de Thouars. His paternal grandparents were Hugues I de Châtellerault and his wife, Gerberge. His maternal grandparents were Aimery IV, Viscount of Thouars and Aremgarde de Mauléon.

Through his granddaughter, Eleanor, Aimery was an ancestor of various nobles and monarchs including: Richard I of England, Marie, Countess of Champagne, John of England, Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany, Joan, Queen of Sicily, Eleanor, Queen of Castile, Matilda, Duchess of Saxony and Henry the Young King.

Life

Marriage

Aimery was married to Amauberge, called la Dangereuse, the daughter of Barthelemy de L'Isle Bouchard and his wife Gerberge de Blaison. Their marriage produced at least three children:

Hugh, his father's heir to the viscounti
Raoul became the lord of Fay-la-Vineuse through his marriage to Elisabeth de Faye
Aenor(c. 1103 - March 1130) married William X, Duke of Aquitaine, mother to Duchess Eleanor and Petronilla and the short lived William Aigret.

Eleanor of Aquitaine was known to have been quite fond of her maternal uncles, Hugh and Raoul, and granted them during her two tenures as queen of France and then of England.

The Affair

In 1115, after seven years of marriage, Amauberge was literally "abducted" from her bedchamber by William IX, Duke of Aquitaine. She was taken to a tower in his castle in Potiers called Maubergeonne. As a result, Amauberge or Dangereuse was nicknamed La Maubergeonne. Abductions like these were quite common among nobles during the Middle Ages. However, in this particular case she seems to have been a willing contributor to the affair.

The Duke of Aquitaine, known to history as being the first troubadour was quite popular with the women of his time and was known to have had many affairs. However, the Viscountess would become his mistress for the rest of his life. There is no record of complaint by Aimery. This is believed to be because the Viscount feared the wrath of his powerful and volatile overlord. It would be the Duke's wife, Philippa of Toulouse who took action against the "abduction" and affair. Her actions would lead to both William and Dangereuse being excommunicated by the Pope. William used his wealth and power to eventually reconcile with the Pope and was accepted back into the Church.

In 1121 Aimery and Dangereuse's daughter would marry William IX's son and heir, who would become Duke William X of Aquitaine. It is believed that this union came about at Dangereuse's urging. Historians don't see another reason for the union of such a powerful man to the daughter of a minor vassal. Not only that, but Aenor was the daughter of the woman the future duke hated for her role in the treatment of his mother. Despite the cause, the marriage led to the birth of Eleanor of Aquitaine and made Aimery an ancestor of some of Europe's most famous nobles and rulers.

Aimery — Dangereuse de l'Isle Bouchard. Dangereuse (daughter of Barthelemy de L'Isle Bouchard and Gerberge de Blaison) was born 1079; died 1151. [Group Sheet]

Notes:

Dangereuse de L'Isle Bouchard (1079-1151) was a daughter of Barthelemy de L'Isle Bouchard and his wife Gerberge de Blaison. She was the maternal grandmother of the celebrated Eleanor of Aquitaine. She was also mistress to her granddaughters' paternal grandfather William IX, Duke of Aquitaine. Dangereuse is also known as La Maubergeonne.

Family

Dangereuse's paternal grandparents were Archimbaud Borel de Bueil and Agnes de L'Isle Bouchard. Her maternal grandparents were Eon de Blaison and Tcheletis de Trèves. Through her granddaughter, Dangereuse was an ancestor of various nobles and monarchs including: Richard I of England, Marie, Countess of Champagne, John of England, Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany, Joan, Queen of Sicily, Eleanor, Queen of Castile, Matilda, Duchess of Saxony and Henry the Young King.

Her granddaughter Eleanor was Queen consort of France, Queen consort of England and Duchess of Aquitaine (in her own right).

Life

Marriage

Dangereuse married Viscount Aimery I of Châtellerault at an unknown date. She advised her husband to donate property to Saint-Denis en Vaux in a charter dated 1109, which means they were married before this point. Dangereuse was a woman who did as she pleased and cared little for public opinion.

Their marriage produced five children (two sons and three daughters):

Hugh (died before 1176) succeeded his father as Viscount
Raoul (died 1190) married Elisabeth de Faye and had issue
Aenor/Eleanor (c. 1103 - March 1130) married William X, Duke of Aquitaine, mother to Duchess Eleanor and Petronilla
Amable, married Wulgrin II, Count of Angoulême
Aois (fate unknown)

Dangereuse and Aimery were married for around seven years before she left her husband to become the mistress to Duke William IX; this became an infamous liaison.
Mistress to William IX

Whilst travelling through Poitou, Duke William met the "seductive" Dangereuse.[5] This led to her leaving her husband for Duke William IX of Aquitaine, who was excommunicated by the church for "abducting her"; however, she appeared to have been a willing party in the matter. He installed her in the Maubergeonne tower of his castle in Poitiers (leading to her nickname La Maubergeonne), and, as related by William of Malmesbury, even painted a picture of her on his shield.

Upon returning to Poitiers from Toulouse, his wife Philippa of Toulouse was enraged to discover a rival woman living in her palace. She appealed to her friends at court and to the Church;[8] however, no noble could assist her since William was their feudal overlord, and whilst the Papal legate Giraud complained to William and told him to return Dangereuse to her husband, William's only response to the bald legate was, "Curls will grow on your pate before I part with the Viscountess." Humiliated, Philippa chose in 1116 to retire to the Abbey of Fontevrault, where she was befriended, ironically, by Ermengarde of Anjou, William's first wife.

Dangereuse and William had three children:

Henri (died after 1132), a monk and later Prior of Cluny
Adelaide, married Raoul de Faye
Sybille, Abbess of Saintes

Some believe that Raymond of Poitiers, was a child of William and Dangereuse, rather than by Philippa of Toulouse. The primary source which names his mother has not so far been identified. However, he is not named in other sources as a legitimate son of Willam IX. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that he was born from the duke's relationship with Dangereuse. If this is the case, Dangereuse was grandmother to Bohemund III of Antioch, Maria of Antioch and Philippa of Antioch.

Philippa died two years later and William's first wife Ermengarde set out to avenge Philippa. In October 1119, she suddenly appeared at the Council of Reims being held by Pope Calixtus II and demanded that the Pope excommunicate William (again), oust Dangereuse from the ducal palace, and restore herself to her rightful place as Duchess consort. The Pope "declined to accommodate her"; however, she continued to trouble William for several years afterwards.

The relationship between William and his legitimate son William were troubled by his father's liaison Dangereuse, this was only settled when the pair arranged the marriage between William the Younger and Dangereuse's daughter Aenor in 1121; the following year Eleanor was born.

William died on 10 February 1126; nothing is recorded of Dangereuse after this point. Dangereuse died in 1151.