England's 12th Century Feudal Revolution

The Feudal Debate – The Origins of Feudalism – The Feudal Hierarchy: Kings, Lords, Knights, and Serfs  – Feudalism: The Backbone of Medieval England – The Decline of Feudalism & the Emergence of Nationalism

One of the hottest matters of debate in studies of the Norman Conquest is whether or not it was the spearhead by which feudalism—a term that denotes the relationship between a lord and his vassal—came to England. On the one hand, there’s some evidence that feudal relationships, in at least a skeletal form, existed in England prior to the Conquest; on the other hand, we know that it was only after the Conquest, and particularly in the 1100s, that a full-bodied feudalism swept like an inferno through England. In the early 17th century English historian Sir Henry Spelman first coined the phrase “feudalism” to describe the changes wrought in English law and society by the Conquest (“feudalism,” as a word, was unknown in the Middle Ages). Nearly two centuries later, in the mid-1800s, E.A. Freeman took a firm stance against Spelman, arguing that English institutions changed very little after the Conquest. In Anglo-Saxon England, he claimed, nobles were already expected to give the English king military service in exchange for their land. Freeman’s views were challenged by J.H. Round who said that feudal services weren’t derived from any Anglo-Saxon precedents. The debate regarding the origins of feudalism continues today; what is not denied is that, by the 12th century, English society and laws had become wholly feudal.

A feudal society is one in which land is held in exchange for services, obedience is pledged in exchange for protection, and society is hierarchically organized. In such a feudal society, a military class of highly-skilled and well-equipped soldiers were supported by peasantry who were tied to the land. The roots of feudalism have been traced as far back to both the patron-client relationships and latifundias of the Roman Empire and to the chief-warrior relationships among the Germanic tribes. Feudalism as a medieval peculiarity started developing in the Kingdom of the Franks during the reign of Charlemagne. During the so-called Carolingian Period, changes in warfare made equipping and training soldiers costly: chain-mail, larger horses, and training for war resulted in the development of a specialized warrior class a cut above the rest. Because few men could afford the horse and body armor required for this new state of warfare, the Carolingians began granting land or material support to their warriors in return for their services. This feudal grassroots movement was helped along by the Viking incursions into northern France. The Frankish kings lacked the ability to protect their subjects from the vicious hit-and-run Viking raids, so the peasantry sought protection from their stronger neighbors. If the neighbor agreed to protect them, the peasantry entered into a formal relationship: they gave their neighbor services, and the neighbor vowed to protect them when the Viking dragon-boats thrust onto their shores. Pure feudalism—the sort of feudalism that much of the medieval world is known for—first evolved in the region between the Loire and Rhine rivers, and it would spread throughout much of western Europe, becoming the status quo in most of France, southern Italy, Spain, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and England. Not all Europe embraced feudalism, however: large swathes of Germany, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Brittany resisted this burgeoning movement. 

In the feudal hierarchical pyramid, the king was at the top, the ultimate “lord.” Beneath him were his vassals, also lords, and beneath them were the warrior-class of knights and, below them, the peasant serfs. The lords pledged allegiance to the king, and in return for their oaths they were allowed to retain their lands and castles. The lords were required to support the king, and if they turned against him (or broke their oath of fealty), they forfeited the lands (called fiefs but pronounced leafs) that they had been granted by the king. The lords were tasked with providing goods and services to the king, as well as military aid. Feudal armies of the Middle Ages didn’t consist of highly-trained professional armies (such as the legions of Rome of old or those of the later Hundred Years’ War) but were instead comprised of the king’s vassals (or lords) and their retinues of knights (along with a spattering of the despised peasantry who utilized agricultural equipment for weapons and were little more than “sword-sponges.”). For each fief a lord owned by grant of the king, he was required to provide one fully-armed horseman to the king; so if he owned twenty-five fiefs, he had to provide twenty-five horsemen. By the mid-12th century, these arrangements could provide the king with nearly 6500 knights alone. If a lord couldn’t provide a knight, he had to pay the king a scutage which would then, theoretically, be used to provide mercenaries in the knight’s stead. If the king was captured in battle and held for ransom, it was the responsibility of his vassals to pay for his ransom; they were also required to pay for the knighting ceremonies of the king’s oldest son and for the marriage of his oldest daughter. Because lower vassals could gain fiefs from several different lords, swearing homage to each of them, feudal custom required that the vassal select one of his lords to be his liege lord; if the vassal’s lords went to war against each other, he was required to give support to his liege. The knights were the last respectable class in the feudal hierarchy; beneath them were the socage tenants, who paid money as rent (as well as offering labor) and paid his lord rights to marry his daughter or knight his son. Socage tenure would become a common staple of medieval England. At the very bottom of the hierarchy were the villeins (or serfs). These serfs were tied to the land, required to perform labor services for his lord, and had no legal standing in the eyes of the law. According to law, the serf was really no more than a slave who could be imprisoned at will and whose possessions didn’t belong to him but to his lord. A serf couldn’t marry or enter the church without the lord’s permission. Serfs lived dreary, brutal, difficult, and hopeless lives often cut short by injury and disease. They were the mud under the feet of the nobles, but without them the machinery of government couldn’t function.

Feudalism would dominate English society from the 11th century to the turn of the 16th century (i.e. throughout the Middle Ages). Feudalism would weaken with the advent of the Black Death in the 14th century, would further weaken in the wake of the Hundred Years’ War between France and England, and it would hear its death-knell in the Wars of the Roses. By the advent of the early modern period (the Era of the Tudors), feudalism would be supplanted by a new way of running the machinery of government: that of nationalism. 

Stephen of Blois & The Shipwreck

Stephen of Blois Usurps the Throne – When Christ and His Saints Slept – The Campaigns of David I of Scotland –The Outbreak of Civil War – Empress Matilda Invades England – The Battle of Lincoln – The Empress is Ejected from London – The Rout of Winchester – The Empress Dons Ice Skates – The Battle of Wilton – The Angevin Cause Weakens – The Second Crusade – An Inept King – Henry in England – The Death of Eustace – The Treaty of Wallingford

Stephen of Blois had lost his father, Count Stephen-Henry of Blois, in the Battle of Ramlah during the First Crusade. Stephen was just a boy at the time, and because he was the third of his father’s sons and unable to inherit any of his father’s lands, his mother, Adela of Normandy, daughter of William the Conqueror, sent him to the court of his uncle, Henry I, in the hope that he would win titles and land to make a name for himself. Stephen won his uncle’s favor, rising in rank in the king’s court. He was granted the county of Mortain at age 18 and knighted after the Battle of Tinchebray. Stephen married Matilda of Boulogne, a marriage by which he procured copious amounts of land. He had been slated to sail to England on the infamous White Ship but had decided to take another vessel across the Channel, a decision that saved his life. He pledged his support to Henry I’s daughter, Empress Matilda (called the “Empress” because of her former marriage to Emperor Henry V of the Holy Roman Empire), but when Henry I died, Stephen made a move for the throne. 

Many English barons didn’t like the idea of being ruled by a woman, especially one who had married into an Angevin family (Normandy and Anjou weren’t good neighbors), and the leading lords and bishops (including his brother, who was the Bishop of Winchester) welcomed Stephen (who didn’t have a spot of Angevin blood in him) with open arms when he crossed the Channel to take the crown. He presented himself before the English as one who would uphold Henry I’s favorable policies, and he won support from the barons by acknowledging their earldoms. Empress Matilda had been in France at the time of her father’s death and couldn’t beat Stephen to the punch. Stephen was crowned on 22 December 1135, much to Matilda’s rage—but she would have to bide her time, for she was pregnant with her and Geoffrey Plantagenet’s third child and was in no state to make a move to take what had been promised her. Stephen needed his ascension to the throne to be certified by the Pope, and to this end his brother, Bishop of Winchester, convinced Stephen’s older brother Theobold and Louis VI of France to send letters of commendation to Pope Innocent III; the Pope confirmed Stephen as the King of England later that year, and Stephen’s advisers wasted no time sending copies of the confirmation throughout England. 

Stephen of Blois was likeable enough. He was energetic, brave, jovial, forgiving, and mild-mannered—but these were traits more suited for a bartender than for a ruler. He lacked the firm resolve needed to keep his subjects, especially his jealous and greedy lords, in line. The barons recognized these weaknesses in their new king and didn’t hesitate to exploit them. Though Stephen was able to maintain the status quo of England for the first few years of his reign, “robber barons” began to crop up in the countryside. These were self-made lords who built their own castles absent the king’s consent and terrorized neighboring areas, plundering and killing for their own profit. The medieval chronicler Robert of Torigny reported that as many as 1,115 rogue castles had been built during the Shipwreck, but as he elsewhere reports a more precise number of 126, the first number is likely an exaggeration. This general period of lawlessness, coupled with the coming civil war that would lay waste the country for fifteen years, has been called The Anarchy by historians but was known to contemporaries as “The Shipwreck,” since it was fallout from the wreck of the White Ship. Had Henry I’s son William not met his death in 1120, England’s fate would have been different. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle minces no words in its treatment of this period in English history:

In the days of [King Stephen] there was nothing but strife, evil and robbery, for quickly the great men who were traitors rose against him. When the traitors saw that Stephen was a mild good humoured man who inflicted no punishment… they committed all manner of horrible crimes. They had done him homage and sworn oaths of fealty to him, but not one of their oaths was kept. They were all forsworn and their oaths broken. For every great man built him[self] castles and held them against the king; they sorely burdened the unhappy people of the country with forced labour on the castles; and when the castles were built they filled them with devils and wicked men. By night and by day they seized those they believed to have any wealth, whether they were men or women; and in order to get their gold or silver, they put them into [dungeons] and tortured them with unspeakable tortures, for never were martyrs tortured as they were. They hung them up by the feet and smoked them with foul smoke. They strung them up by the thumbs, or by the head, and hung coats of mail on their feet. They tied knotted cords round their heads and twisted it until it entered the brain. They put them in dungeons wherein were adders and snakes and toads and so destroyed them. Many thousands they starved to death. I know not how to, nor am I able to tell of, all the atrocities nor all the cruelties which they wrought upon the unhappy people of this country... Never did a country endure greater misery, and never did the heathen act more vilely than they did. And so it lasted for nineteen long years while Stephen was king, till the land was undone and darkened with such deeds [that] men said openly that Christ and his saints slept.

Before lawlessness became the mark of the land, there were signposts to what lie ahead: from the start of his reign, Stephen was faced with unrest from numerous English barons, rebellious Welsh princes, and Scottish invaders. As to the latter, King David I of Scotland supported the Empress Matilda, as she was his niece. Upon hearing of Henry I’s death, David took swift advantage of England’s political instability and launched an invasion of Northumbraland, seizing both Carlisle and Newcastle before being repulsed by the royal army. A protracted war in 1137 resulted in a brief truce; after the truce expired, David outrageously demanded that Stephen give him the whole of Northumbraland; the Scottish king claimed it was his by virtue of his marriage to the daughter of a former Northumbrian earl. Stephen, of course, refused, and in 1138 David marched south against him yet again, and the English army, commanded by William of Aumale, met him near York. The majority of William’s force comprised local militia and knights from Northumbraland supplemented by Flemish mercenaries (most of the royal army was to the south with Stephen putting down restive barons). King David found the English army drawn up and moved to attack: his unarmored spearmen threw themselves against William’s front line, which consisted heavily of dismounted knights. Despite having support from their archers, the Scottish soldiers were routed—except for small parties of men-at-arms protecting David and his son Henry. Henry made a valiant counterattack that gave David and his entourage time to fall back, and Henry followed suit. The English didn’t pursue them far, but the Scottish losses were so great that David had no choice but to return home. He and Stephen eventually came to a peace that would last twenty years. It was good that Stephen was able to secure his northern border, for he still had to deal with rebellious barons—and the return of Empress Matilda.

The Empress’ half-brother Robert of Gloucester supported her claim to the throne, and in 1139 he landed at Wareham with the goal of securing a port for her upcoming invasion—and in doing so he inaugurated the era of English history known as “The Shipwreck.” Stephen confronted Gloucester’s forces and forced him to retreat to the southwest. The Empress found another friend in the Dowager Queen Adeliza who lived in Arundel, about fifty miles southwest of London; Adeliza invited the Empress to find sanctuary at her castle, and on 30 September both the Empress and her half-brother arrived at Arundel with forty knights. The Empress enjoyed Adeliza’s hospitality while Robert marched northwest with the twin aims of raising support and joining hands with Miles of Gloucester, who had renounced his allegiance to Stephen. The English king besieged the Empress in Arundel Castle, but the siege ended when she and Stephen negotiated a truce with Stephen’s younger brother Henry of Blois. Stephen, in his eagerness to reveal his chivalric ideals, didn’t expel her from the island but, rather, kindly escorted her southwest to Bristol where she reunited with Robert. It soon became clear that chivalry should have been damned, for their reunited forces soon wrested from Stephen’s control large swathes of territory stretching from Gloucester and Bristol in the south to Devon and Cornwall in the east, and then north into the Welsh marches and as far east as Oxford and Wallingford.

London was under threat, and Stephen had to move fast to uproot the rebels. He assaulted the Empress’ Angevin supporters at Wallingford Castle, but its defenses were too stout to make any inroads. He left a spattering of soldiers in Wallingford to keep the rebels cooped up and marched west into Wiltshire to root the rebels from Trowbridge, recapturing a string of lesser castles en route. Miles of Gloucester harassed Stephen’s forces camped outside Wallingford and threatened London. Stephen, with an enemy at his rear, had no option but to abandon his goal of Trowbridge and return east to protect the capital. Stephen’s troubles worsened in 1140 when the Bishop of Ely rebelled against him, hoping to turn East Anglia against Stephen. The bishop established his headquarters on the marshy Isle of Ely. Stephen responded by taking an army into the marshes, and he built a causeway of boats lashed together and launched a surprise attack on the bishop’s forces. The bishop managed to escape and find sanctuary in Gloucester, but his men and castles were recaptured and East Anglia pacified. While Stephen was occupied in East Anglia, Robert of Gloucester snatched some of the land Stephen had retaken the year prior. Thus Stephen’s gain was supplanted by a loss. Making matters worse, in late 1140 Ranulf, the Earl of Chester, revolted. Stephen gathered his forces and marched north. Ranulf, hearing that the king was on his way, fled his base of operations in Lincoln Castle. When Stephen arrived at Lincoln, Ranulf was long gone, but he besieged the castle anyways. Ranulf lacked the strength to drive him out, so in a bid for support he pledged his fealty to the Empress and joined hands with Robert of Gloucester. Their combined forces advanced on Stephen’s besieging army. Hearing word of their approach, Stephen held a frenzied council to determine whether they should stand and fight or pack their bags and flee. Stephen decided to fight, and on 2 February 1141 his forces outside Lincoln were arrayed against those of the Empress and her followers. 

The Battle of Lincoln

Stephen commanded the center of his army; his right wing was under the command of Alan of Brittany, and his left was commanded by William of Aumule. Stephen dismounted many of his knights and formed them into solid blocks of infantry. He dismounted, too, and joined them in the center, wielding a massive battle-axe. Robert and the turncoat Ranulf sent their first wave of Welsh infantry against Stephen’s left wing, but Aumule’s soldiers made quick work of them. During the melee, the Angevin cavalry encircled Stephen’s troops. The king was surrounded, and he knew it; a number of his followers despaired and fled the field. Stephen, too stubborn and proud to quit, fought on, defending himself with his battle-axe. The Angevin warriors closed in on him, and the medieval writer Roger de Hoveden, in his Annals, captures this pivotal moment of the battle:

Then might you have seen a dreadful aspect of battle, on every quarter around the king’s troop fire flashing from the meeting of swords and helmets—a dreadful crash, a terrific clamor—at which the hills re-echoed, the city walls resounded. With horses spurred on, they charged the king’s troop, slew some, wounded others, and dragging some away, made them prisoners… No rest, no breathing time was granted them, except in the quarter where stood that most valiant king [Stephen], as the foe dreaded the incomparable force of his blows. The earl of Chester, on perceiving this, envying the king in his glory, rushed upon him with all the weight of his armed men. Then was seen the might of the king, equal to a thunderbolt, slaying some with his immense battle-axe, and striking others down… Then arose the shouts afresh, all rushing against him and against all. At length through the number of the blows, the king’s battle-axe was broken asunder. Instantly, with his right hand, drawing his sword, well worthy of a king, he marvelously waged the combat, until the sword as well was broken asunder… On seeing this William [de Keynes], a most powerful knight, rushed upon the king, and seizing him by the helmet, cried with a loud voice, ‘Hither, all of you come hither! I have taken the king!’

Thus Stephen was captured, and it appeared his cause was lost. Surely, with his imprisonment, the Empress could take what she and her Angevin supporters (along with vast numbers of English barons) considered to be rightfully hers. Sensing the undeniable shift in power, many of Stephen’s most die-hard supporters abandoned him. The Empress, smug in her half-brother’s victory at the Battle of Lincoln and confident with Stephen in chains, arrogantly marched into London to be crowned Queen of England. London, however, was Stephen’s strongest bastion of support, and his supporters, disgusted with the Empress’ haughty egotism, drove her out of the city. She took up station in Oxford to the west, undeterred in her ambition of being crowned Queen of England. No matter what the commoners of London thought, she had won and Stephen was in chains. What could go wrong? As it turns out, the Empress’ fortunes would make a 180-degree turn that summer. Her unraveling fortunes began when a number of her supporters took control of Winchester’s royal castle. Henry of Blois, Stephen’s younger brother, was bishop of that city, and he gathered a force loyal to his brother and besieged the Angevins in the royal castle. Receiving news of the siege, the Empress gathered an army of her own and left Oxford on 28 July to deal with the annoying bishop. She appeared outside the city gates on 31 July, catching the bishop wholly off-guard. The bishop fled the city, and his soldiers retreated to Wolvesy Castle, another fortress in Winchester, which belonged to the church. Thus the Angevins in the royal castle were relieved, and the Empress set up her headquarters in their midst and arrayed her forces against the ecclesiastical fortress. Her half-brother Robert arrived with his own forces, and he set up a separate base of operations near Winchester Cathedral. They settled down for a long siege, but then a new and unexpected enemy came to the forefront: Queen Matilda, the wife of the imprisoned Stephen.

Queen Matilda mustered an army that included numerous mercenaries and the thousand-strong London militia. She set up camp on the east side of Winchester, besieging the Empress’ besieging army. The Angevin forces began to suffer as their food supplies dwindled. Robert of Gloucester tried to fortify an abbey six miles north of the city, but Flemish mercenary cavalry made quick work of his forces. Robert knew they had to abandon Winchester before their army was whittled away by starvation and disease, and he and the Empress decided to push out of Winchester, even though it would mean inevitable clashes with Queen Matilda’s forces. Because much of the Queen’s forces were untrained militia, they may have been more optimistic than their situation warranted. On 14 September they streamed out from the west side of the city, hurrying down the road to Salisbury. Just under ten miles to the northwest, the road crossed the River Test at Stockbridge. The Queen’s forces harassed the Angevins the whole way, and though the Empress was able to escape over the river with her vanguard, the Queen’s forces laid waste to the main body of the Empress’ march. Robert of Gloucester was able to keep a tight reign on his forces, but by the time they reached the bridge, they were encircled by the Queen’s forces and the bridge was packed with panicked Angevin refugees. Robert had no choice but to surrender with his men. 

The Empress may have had Stephen, but the Queen had captured her half-brother in the so-called “Rout of Winchester”. Only three months after Robert’s capture, the opposing forces managed to make an exchange, Stephen for Robert, and on Christmas 1141 Stephen and his brave queen enjoyed a fresh coronation as King and Queen. A church council led by Stephen’s brother, Bishop Henry of Blois, determined that Stephen rather than the Empress had the right to rule England. Over the past two years Stephen had been through a whirlwind of shifting fates: he had been able to keep hold of his reign and bring numerous rebels to heel, but he had failed to expel the Angevin threat; he had been captured at the Battle of Lincoln, but the Londoners had rejected the Empress; he had been consigned to live out the rest of his days imprisoned, but his wife had risen up in his defense and bested those who had captured him. He had been released, enjoyed a fresh coronation, and his rule had the backing of the English church. As 1142 dawned, things were looking up for Stephen—but they were far from over. Large portions of England remained in the hands of the Angevins, and rebellious barons were carving their own territories in the “borderlands” between those areas staunchly loyal to the opposing sides in this burgeoning civil war.

The Empress Matilda Escapes Oxford

Stephen’s first aim of the new year was to bring the Earl of Chester back into line; he was able to get Ranulf to pledge him fealty, and then Stephen turned to demolishing numerous Angevin castles built during his imprisonment the year before. The Empress stationed herself in Oxford Castle, protected not only by stout walls but also by the River Thames. Stephen, hoping to capture the Empress and put an end to her ambitions once-and-for-all, launched a quick attack across the river, leading the charge in the vanguard and even swimming part of the way across the Thames. Once on the other side, his forces stormed the town and trapped the Empress in the castle. The castle, however, was too strong to be raided, and Stephen lacked the equipment to bring it down; so he settled down for a long siege. Right before Christmas that year, the Empress managed an escape that has gone down in legend: donning nothing but white to blend into the snow-drenched landscape, she escaped the castle, slipped through Stephen’s cordon, and crossed the frozen Thames on ice skates. Avoiding roads and navigating thick woodlands, she found sanctuary in the Angevin-held town of Wallingford. The Angevins in Oxford Castle surrendered shortly after, and Stephen was more than dismayed to find that the Empress was not among them. 

Come 1143, it was Stephen’s turn to be under siege: while tending to business at Wilton Castle, Robert of Gloucester’s troops appeared and laid siege to the fortress. Stephen attempted a breakout, which resulted in the Battle of Wilton. The Angevin cavalry cut a swathe through Stephen’s forces, and for a moment it appeared Stephen would know chains once more. But the king’s steward, William Martel, led a brutal rearguard defense that allowed Stephen to escape the battle. Martel was captured, but Stephen showed his gratitude by relinquishing Sherborne Castle to the Angevins for his steward’s release. Angevin pressure in the west was weakened when Miles of Gloucester died in a hunting accident, but fresh baronial rebellions would offset any gains in Miles’ death. Stephen summoned the unlikeable Geoffrey, Earl of Essex, to court, and he threatened to have his head lopped off unless he relinquished control over the castles in or near London that were under his supervision, including the Tower of London. Geoffrey had no recourse but to submit, but he rebelled as soon as he was free of Stephen’s clutches. He set up his headquarters in the Isle of Ely and launched a campaign against Cambridge, hoping to leapfrog his way to London to wrest control of the capital. Stephen was already engaged with another rebellious earl in Norfolk, so he couldn’t send a force large enough to oppose Geoffrey directly. He settled for constructing a screen of castles between Ely and London to halt the Essex earl’s advance. A new year, that of 1144, dawned, and the Earl of Chester became a turncoat once again; meanwhile Robert of Gloucester raided territories loyal to the king. Stephen’s attentions could only be focused on the island, so when news came that Geoffrey Plantagenet, who had been ravaging the duchy of Normandy, sacked the duchy’s capital city of Rouen in 1144, the king could do nothing but weep. Louis VII, the King of France, recognized Geoffrey Plantagenet as the Duke of Normandy, and Stephen lacked the strength to reassert his authority. Even if he weren’t embroiled in civil war on the island, the English earls and barons couldn’t be relied upon to fulfill their feudal duties and send him soldiers and support. In September Geoffrey of Essex died during an attack on Burwell Castle, which Stephen had built as a bulwark against him, and in 1145 Stephen recaptured the long-Angevin stronghold of Faringdon Castle in western England. The next year Stephen won back Ranulf’s loyalty, but then the king pulled the same shenanigans he had with Geoffrey of Essex: he summoned Ranulf to his court and threatened to have him killed unless he handed over a number of castles, including Lincoln. Like Geoffrey, Ranulf submitted, but also like Geoffrey, the moment he was back home he rebelled again; this time, however, he lacked the castles needed to launch any formidable attack on the king. His revolt, in this regard, is understandable, and likewise understandable is how English barons, even those who had been die-hard supporters of Stephen, grew to distrust the king.  

By 1147 England had been in the throes of civil war for seven years, and the results could be seen throughout the country. Rogue castles had popped up all across England, and barons wary of Stephen were likely to either ally with the Angevins or strike out on their own. England’s coinage system collapsed: at one point Stephen, the Empress, and independent lords all minted their own coins. Most of the chaos was felt in the “borderlands” between the king’s bastion of loyalty in the southeast and the Angevin core around Gloucester and Bristol. But things were about to cool down. In 1147 the Empress received two blows to her power: her half-brother died and Pope Eugene III called for the Second Crusade. 

European Leaders on Second Crusade

A number of her Angevin supporters, worn down by their lack of success in the civil war, disheartened by Robert’s death, and drawn to the promise of riches against the Muslims, abandoned the Empress’ cause and answered the call to fight for Christ against the heathens. The Second Crusade would last from 1147-1149, and it was sparked by the loss of the County of Edessa—the first crusader kingdom founded in 1098 by Baldwin of Boulogne—to Turkish forces under the Turkish noble Zengi in 1144. King Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany led their separate armies through Byzantium and into Anatolia, but each were separately bested by the Seljuk Turks (a rumor spread that the Byzantine emperor had betrayed them to the Turks). Their tattered armies eventually made it to Jerusalem, and in 1148 they partook in the failed siege of Damascus. The defenders so harried them that the crusaders refused to attack the walled city. The kings beat a retreat to Jerusalem, harassed by Turkish archers the entire way. While the Second Crusade was a disaster in the east, it was a success in western Iberia. The kings of Leon and Portugal were engaged in the Reconquista, a military movement to expel the Muslims (known in Iberia as Moors) from modern-day Spain. Angevin forces bound for the Holy Land set sail from England, but a storm beached them on the Portuguese coast. They decided to join up with King Alfonso I of Portugal against the Moors, and they helped him attack the Moorish city of Lisbon. The siege lasted from July to October 1147, and when the Moors surrendered the city, most of the crusaders settled down and made Lisbon their own. Others hurried on to the Holy Land in search of more riches. Anglo-Norman crusaders also fought alongside King Alfonso VII of Leon: in October 1147 they took the Moorish port city of Almeria, and in December 1148 they captured Tortosa on the Ebro River. 

Having lost support in England, the Empress Matilda decided to cut her losses in 1148 and abandoned England for home in Normandy. But though the Empress had called it quits, her legacy—and claim—was carried on by her son Henry FitzEmpress, who would become known in history as Henry II of England. Henry, along with a small contingent of mercenaries, invaded England but failed to assert himself, largely due to the fact that he lacked the funds to pay his hired goons. In an odd show of chivalry, Stephen ended up paying Henry’s mercenaries out of his own pocket and allowed Henry to return home safely. Stephen’s chivalry may have been a courtesy paid to a member of his extended family, or perhaps with the civil war winding down to a stalemate, Stephen wanted to build bridges rather than walls with Anjou. In 1149 Henry returned to England and forged an alliance with Ranulf of Chester. Ranulf agreed to relinquish his claim to the town of Carlisle, which was held by the Scots; in return Ranulf would receive rights to the whole Honour of Lancaster (a large estate in northwest England). Ranulf gave homage to both King David of Scotland and Henry of Anjou, and he made Henry his liege lord. With the terms of the alliance settled, Henry and Ranulf agreed to attack York, probably with help from the ageing King David I of Scotland. The Scottish king was Henry’s great uncle, and he knighted the hotheaded Angevin on May 22 (the Scottish king would die just two days later). Their coalition marched on York, but when Stephen showed up to oppose them, the attack wavered. Henry returned to Normandy, and his father, Geoffrey Plantagenet, declared him duke of Normandy. Henry may have failed in England, but the duchy of Normandy was no small picking; his prestige grew even more in 1152 when he married Eleanor of Aquitaine, the recently divorced wife of Louis VII. By this marriage Henry was made the future ruler of large swathes of French territory. 

While Henry was consolidating his power base in Normandy and beyond, Stephen worked to regain a modicum of control over his realm. Nevertheless he lacked the authority to ensure that justice reigned supreme and to mediate between warring nobles. His attention should have been on securing peace throughout his realm, but he left the kingdom submerged in wanton violence and cruelty and focusing all his energies on (unsuccessfully) ensuring that his son Eustace would succeed him on the English throne. Henry showed his head in England once more in early 1153. He sailed across the Channel with 36 ships and led a force of 3000 footmen and 140 horses. Upon landing, he entered a quaint village church observing the Festival of the Three Kings. Before the feast they proclaimed, quite prophetically, “Behold the Lord the ruler comes, and the kingdom is in his hand.” Henry was supported by Ranulf of Chester and Hugh Bigod, the Earl of Norfolk who had rebelled against Stephen ten years earlier. Henry besieged the royalist-held castle at Malmesbury, and Stephen marched west to relieve it. He tried dividing Henry’s army but failed. As the wintry weather became worse, the two sides agreed to a truce; Stephen returned to winter in London, but Henry marched north and convinced the formidable Earl of Leicester to throw in with him. In this fell swoop Henry and his allies controlled southwest England, much of northern England, and all the Midlands. 

That summer Stephen ordered the drawn-out siege on Wallingford Castle, long an Angevin stronghold, to be intensified. Henry marched to Wallingford’s aid, besieging Stephen’s forces outside the castle. Hearing of his besieging army under siege, Stephen marched from Oxford, and in July the royalists and Angevins faced off across the River Thames. Though Henry and Stephen itched to slug it out, the church wanted to avoid bloodshed, and they brokered a truce. Stephen’s son Eustace, enraged at the truce, stormed off to Cambridge to begin preparations for a campaign against Henry. His plans came to nothing: he became sick and died that August. The loss of his oldest son, coupled with the loss of his wife two years earlier, plunged Stephen into a debilitating depression. To add salt to the wound, Stephen’s efforts to ensure Eustace’s succession were for naught: his only remaining son, William, was too young to lead a country plunged in civil war, England was falling apart, and he was growing old. Fighting between the royalists and Angevins continued, but it was half-hearted: a skirmish there, a siege here. 

Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury wanted to hash out a more permanent truce, and in November 1153 Stephen and Henry met at Winchester and ratified terms of peace. The Shipwreck had come to an end. The Treaty of Winchester ended fifteen years of violence and bloodshed. According to the terms of the treaty, Stephen would be left in peace to rule England until his death, at which point Henry would take the reins. King Stephen died on 25 October 1154 in Dover, just under a year after the forging of the treaty, and Henry took the throne, adopting the regal name “Henry II.” This marked the end of the Norman Kings and the beginning of the Angevin Kings (the first in the line of the Plantagenets, who would rule England until the beginning of the 15th century). 

The Reign of the Good Scholar

“Born of the Purple” – Brother vs. Brother – The Treaty of Alton – The Saga of Robert of Belleme – The Scourging of Normandy – The Battle of Tinchebray – A Reunited Anglo-Norman Kingdom – Anselm Strikes Again – The Defense of Normandy – The Battle of Bremule – The Exchequer, et. al. – The Wreck of the White Ship – Matilda & Geoffrey Plantagenet – Daughter vs. Father

The youngest son of William the Conqueror earned the nickname “Henry Beauclerc,” which means “Henry the Fine Scholar.” As the youngest of William I’s sons, he had been destined to become a bishop, and with this career in mind he had been educated in Latin and the liberal arts. At his father’s death his oldest brother Robert inherited the Duchy of Normandy, William Rufus received conquered England, and with no more land to give out, William I had granted his youngest son a cash settlement of 5000 silver marks. Henry used this money to purchase the county of Contentin in western Normandy from Robert, but was soon deposed of his purchase by a brief alliance between his older brothers. Henry managed to slowly win the Contentin back, and when Robert was returning from the First Crusade, Henry and William II joined hands to oppose him. 

After William Rufus’ untimely death, Henry hurried to Winchester to claim the throne ahead of the elder Robert. A raging debate ensued regarding who had the best claim to the throne: Robert or Henry? Robert, after all, was the oldest surviving son of William the Conqueror, and the people certainly didn’t forget that Henry, along with the Anglo-Norman barons, had given him homage over the years. Henry countered that, unlike Robert, he had been born to a reigning king and queen. Robert was born before the Conquest, and under the law of porphyrogeniture Henry had a claim that Robert couldn’t equal. Porphyrogeniture (also known as “born to the purple”) was a form of political succession favoring the rights of sons born after their father became a secular ruler; those “born to the purple” outranked even older sons born prior to any conquest. Henry had the support of a handful of barons, and they persuaded others to follow Henry rather than Robert. Having secured baronial support, Henry lost no time in seizing the royal treasury and entrenching himself in Winchester Castle. 

Henry was crowned on 5 August 1100 at Westminster, just three days after his brother’s death. Traditionally the Archbishop of Canterbury crowned the king, but Anselm was still in exile in France, and the Archbishop of York was in Ripon; thus the Bishop of London handled the affair. On the very day of his coronation, Henry made overtures to the Anglo-Saxon population to win their favor against Robert. He issued a charter of liberties denouncing many of his predecessors’ oppressive practices, including a vow to end impulsive taxes and the confiscation of Church revenues (something William II was fond of doing). William II’s partner-in-crime, Ranulf Flambard, Bishop of Durham, was charged with corruption, arrested, and imprisoned in the Tower of London. To win the support of the Church, Henry moved fast to fill the numerous Church positions that William II had left vacant, and he recalled Anselm from France to consecrate his appointments. To protect his northern border with the Scots, and to curry favor with the Anglo-Saxons, in November he married Edith, daughter of the late Malcolm Greathead (Malcolm III). Edith was a Scottish princess of the old Anglo-Saxon royal line, being the granddaughter of Edmund Ironside and a descendant of King Alfred. Upon marrying Henry, Edith took the name of her mother-in-law (Matilda) and was known as “Good Queen Maude” (Matilda was the Latin version of Maude). She and Henry would have two children: William the Aetheling and Matilda (though, because Henry was a womanizer, he bred numerous bastard children, up to nine illegitimate sons and thirteen daughters). These moves appeased the Church and the Anglo-Saxon populace, and Henry sought the favor of the Anglo-Norman barons through grants of wealth and land. The medieval historian Orderic Vitalis says of Henry, “[he] treated the magnates with honour and generosity, adding to their wealth and estates, and by placating them in this way, he won their loyalty.” He would need the support of these three segments of English society in order to triumph in the inevitable clash with Robert Curthose in 1101. 

In February that year Ranulf Flambard managed to escape the Tower of London. He crossed the Channel to Normandy and joined with Robert, who had returned from the First Crusade and lost no time in assembling an invasion force. Archbishop Anselm seized Flambard’s landholdings and rejected him as Bishop of Durham. By July Robert had an army and a fleet and was on the verge of invading England. Henry assumed that Robert’s army would land at Pevensey, so he summoned the barons and called up the fyrd and gathered a force on the beachhead. Many knights and levies answered the call, but a good number of barons ignored the summons. Anselm traveled from castle to castle and was able to bring a few disillusioned barons into line, but many remained aloof. At Pevensey Henry personally trained the fyrd (mostly comprised of Anglo-Saxons) on how to resist a French cavalry charge; the Normans were renown for their cavalry, a French development, but the Anglo-Saxon fyrd relied on foot soldiers and spearmen and weren’t trained in the art of cavalry warfare. Robert sailed that July, but he didn’t land at Pevensey; he disembarked his troops to the north at Portsmouth on 20 July. His army was more like a ragtag band of knights, numbering only a few hundred men, but he knew what he was doing: rather than marching his small force on Winchester to seize the royal treasury (as most invaders would do), he sent out a summons of his own. The barons who had turned a deaf ear to Henry’s summons rallied around Robert, choosing as their leader a man named Robert of Belleme. Upon hearing of his older brother’s landing, Henry marched his force north from Pevensey, and the two forces faced-off at Alton. Relying on words rather than swords, the two brothers, with Anselm as a referee, managed to forge a peace treaty. In the Treaty of Alton Robert renounced his claim to the English throne for an annuity of 2000 marks; Henry was thus secure in England, and Robert kept all of the Duchy of Normandy except for Dormfront, which would remain in Henry’s name; if either brother died absent a male heir, the other would inherit his lands (leading to a restored Anglo-Norman realm, which was best for everyone); the barons whose lands had been confiscated by either ruler for supporting his rival would have their lands returned to them; and the two brothers would stand united to defend their territories in Normandy.

Robert and his ragtag band of knights returned to Normandy, and the disaffected barons returned to their castles, safe in the knowledge that their defection from Henry would be forgiven. This knowledge, however, was insecure. Henry was the first to break the terms of Alton by dealing swiftly with the rebellious barons, and he took the axe to the root with Robert Belleme’s House of Montgomery. He accused Belleme of forty-five different crimes and moved to arrest him. Belleme escaped his clutch and rallied a force to stand against the king. Henry didn’t back down: he besieged Belleme’s castles at Arundel, Tickhill, and Shrewsbury, tearing his power base from beneath him. Belleme’s power became a shadow of what it had once been, and he sought refuge in his main stronghold on the border of Wales. Henry showed up, surrounded the fortress, and Belleme made a wise decision in offering Henry’s merciful offer of banishment rather than death. Belleme abandoned England and fled to Normandy, where—because of the terms of the Treaty of Alton—he was branded an enemy of Robert Curthose. Back in England Henry continued his cleansing of the rebel baronial ringleaders, and they flocked en masse across the Channel. The purging of England was only half a victory: most of the leading barons had lands in Normandy, too, and they could use these landholdings as launching pads to retake that which they had lost. Henry knew England would only be secure once those Norman barons were brought to heel, and in order for that to happen the Duchy of Normandy had to be brought back into the English fold. Unfortunately for Henry, his brother Robert had so far abided by the terms of the Treaty of Alton, and any attack on Normandy would bring dire repercussions from Robert’s wider range of French allies. But Henry found a stroke of luck when Robert Curthose and Robert of Belleme became allies; this, according to a number of moralists, constituted a break of the Treaty of Alton. 

For all his clout after the First Crusade, Robert had been an ineffective duke, and under his thumb the duchy began slipping into chaos. Norman clergy crossed the Channel to England and implored Henry to take control of Normandy, and now Henry could argue that Robert had broken the peace terms sealed at Alton—but that wasn’t quite enough. All-out war needed a provocation from Robert, and Henry began machinations to bring it about. He crossed the Channel to his Norman territory of Dormfront, and after meeting with his high-ranking Norman barons and publicly declaring that Robert had violated the terms of Alton, he confronted his brother face-to-face, called him a traitor, and returned to England to prepare for an invasion of Normandy. The tides had turned, and now Robert Curthose was on the defensive, struggling to amass an army and strengthen his fortifications in a disheveled duchy. Henry gathered support overseas by bribing Norman barons and making cash payments to neighboring princes for support, and in 1105 he sent a small batch of knights to Normandy to incite the provocation needed to justify an invasion. Robert fell for the ruse and captured the leading knight, imprisoning him at Bayeux. Henry proclaimed this an act of war, and he launched his invasion across the Channel. His army laid waste to western Normandy before advancing on Bayeux to rescue his captured knight. The leaders of Bayeux refused to bow before the invader, and Henry turned their defiance into an example to others by besieging the city and razing it to the ground. The nearby town of Caen, wishing to avoid a similar fate, submitted to the English king. Henry used Caen as a launching pad against Falaise, which he captured. At this point the campaign stalled, and Robert rode out to negotiate with Henry. They didn’t come to any amicable agreements, but Henry abandoned Falaise and on Christmas returned to England. Come summer of next year, Henry returned with a fresh army and marched on Robert’s castle at Tinchebray. He besieged the castle, and Robert—with Belleme in tow—marched from Falaise to relieve the siege. Negotiations between the two brothers went nowhere, and when words failed they decided to settle the matter with arms on 23 September 1106. 

The Battle of Tinchebray

The Battle of Tinchebray lasted around an hour, and it began with a charge by Robert’s Norman cavalry. The infantry and dismounted knights thrust themselves into the melee, and Henry’s reserves—led by the Count of Maine and the Duke of Brittany—enveloped the Norman flanks. Belleme’s troops were the first to break, and after their rout the rest of Robert’s forces turned tail and ran. Belleme led the panicked flight of his troops, but Robert, valiant to the end, was captured by Henry’s knights. Having won the battle, Henry forced the captured Robert to order his garrisons to surrender to the English king, and any obstinate holdouts were swiftly eradicated. Henry arrived in Rouen triumphant, and he affirmed the customs and laws of Normandy and received the homage of the Norman barons and the leading citizens. Henry and Belleme reconciled; the latter gave up lands he had stolen and returned as a friend to Henry’s court (the friendship wouldn’t last: Belleme would turn against Henry one last time and would seek exile in France; when he showed up at Henry’s court in 1112 as an ambassador of France, Henry had him arrested and imprisoned). Because Henry couldn’t legally remove the duchy from Robert, he didn’t call himself “Duke” nor did he claim to possess the duchy; rather, he claimed that he was just looking after the troubled province. Diplomatic language aside, the Normans were quite content to have Henry as their overlord: many of them had holdings in both England and Normandy, and they could build up their wealth and pursue their ambitions without having to fear offending one ruler in favor of another. Robert would spend the last 28 years of his life as his younger brother’s prisoner.

During the war of swords, another war raged inside England, this one a war of words revolving around who—the king or the papacy—had ultimate control over the English Church. This conflict came not from rebellious barons but a nuisance of a priest: Henry was coming to see why his older brother had been driven to hatred by the unbendable archbishop. Anselm had returned to England as a devotee of the reforms of Pope Paschal II, reforms that aimed at making the Church independent of crown control. Relations between Henry and Anselm started out well enough, but tensions began to rise, catalyzed by Anselm’s refusal to consecrate bishops who had paid homage to Henry—and the Archbishop himself refused to give Henry homage. As the conflict waxed Anselm appealed to Pascal II for support, and the Pope threatened to excommunicate Henry if he didn’t bow to the papacy’s insistence that the crown had no say in clerical appointments. Paschal II’s demands weren’t new: for a long while now the Popes had condemned the practice of powerful laymen “investing” bishops with their fiefs by using the spiritual symbols of office (the bishop’s ring and the shepherd’s crook). Secular authorities claimed that they had the God-given right to decide religious matters within their domains, that they had the authority to decide who filled ecclesiastical offices, and that there was nothing wrong with them using clerical fiefs as sources of revenue. Prohibitions against “lay investiture” had been published and republished by the Church since 1059, but it wasn’t until Anselm’s return under Henry that England became aware of them. Sabers rattled between the king, Pope, and archbishop, and they reached a compromise just before the Battle of Tinchebray. Henry renounced lay investiture, but prelates had to continue doing homage to the king for their fiefs. Anselm swallowed his pride and submitted in homage to the king, and Henry could walk away smug knowing that, in the words of historian John Gillingham, Henry had “[given] up the form but preserved the reality of control.” Nevertheless, his victory would be short-lived: the compromise set a precedent that would become a steamroller down the ages. The compromise “marked a point where kingship became purely secular and subservient in the eyes of the Church.” Gregorian reformers declared that the king was nothing more than a secular layman, and as such he was inferior to priests: priests, after all, were concerned with body and soul, whereas sovereigns were concerned only with the body. Henry’s compromise signified that he was coming to agree (no matter that he wasn’t!) that kings were not the anointed and sacred deputies of God. 

After his victory against his brother (and his quasi-victory against Anselm and the Church), Henry turned his attention to the Welsh kingdoms. In 1114 he sent three armies into Wales: one marched from the south, another from the north (under the leadership of King Alexander of Scotland), and Henry personally led another from Mid-Wales. The fighting was fierce, but by the end of the campaigns the Welsh princes sued for peace. Henry accepted a political compromise with the Welsh princes and refortified the Welsh border. He was then forced to cross the Channel into Normandy to deal with the machinations of those traditional sovereigns keen on seizing Normandy for themselves: the King of France (now Louis VI, known as “The Fat,” who reigned from 1108 to 1137) and Fulk V, the Count of Anjou (r. 1109-1128). Henry struggled against these French and Angevin threats not only with the sword but with diplomacy: he organized a ring of alliances around Normandy, marrying no less than eight of his bastard daughters to neighboring princes (and he married his only legitimate daughter, Matilda, to Emperor Henry V of the Holy Roman Empire). If Henry sensed unreliability in any of his Norman barons, he had them arrested or deposed, and he used their forfeited estates to bribe potential allies whose friendship marriage couldn’t secure. William Clito, the son of the captive Robert Curthose, sought vengeance against his uncle, and he was able to win the support of both Louis VI of France and Fulk V of Anjou. They presented a united front aimed at bringing Normandy back into the French fold, and Clito, familiar with many of the Norman barons, was able to stoke a fire in their hearts so that they grumbled, and would perhaps rebel, against Henry and his high taxes. Henry doubted he could muscle the manpower needed to resist. Again he turned to diplomacy, and in 1119 he convinced Fulk V to switch sides. Henry married his only legitimate son, William Aetheling, to Fulk’s daughter Matilda, and Fulk received a heavy cash settlement.  Fulk V was thus free to follow his desire to settle in the Frankish kingdoms in Palestine (won after the First Crusade), and Henry was left in charge of the County of Maine. The scales between Louis VI and Henry had been balanced, and Henry pursued the defense of Normandy with a newfound vigor: he advanced into the Norman Vexin and provoked a showdown between his and the French king’s army. 

The Battle of Bremule on 20 August 1119 would decide the security of Normandy for the rest of Henry’s reign. Before the battle Henry dispatched scouts and organized his army into several lines of dismounted knights. This was a wise move, which would be replicated down the centuries of medieval warfare: cavalry charges were great, and the French relied on cavalry, but once in the maelstrom of melee, after the neck-breaking charge, mounted soldiers were vulnerable to dismounted ones. Louis VI’s Francophile pride in his mounted knights never wavered, and they eagerly charged Henry’s infantry. The cavalry crashed through the first line, as was expected, but they became entangled in the second line. The French knights fought from horseback but were soon surrounded by Henry’s foot soldiers. Henry fought alongside his troops and was struck by a sword blow; luckily his armor protected him. The French army was soon surrounded and broke, but the French king and the pretender to the Norman duchy escaped. French sources tell us the battle was a blood-soaked affair, but Norman sources report that only three lives were lost; we will never know the truth of the matter. Henry marched into Rouen triumphant (for the second time!), and in June 1120 Henry and Louis VI made peace on terms favoring the English king: William Aetheling paid homage to Louis VI, and in return the French king confirmed William’s rights to the Norman duchy. Thus Henry received the legal backbone to keeping Normandy in the House of the Conqueror, and William Clito couldn’t use his claim as Robert’s son to make Normandy his own. Clito was sidelined, reduced to the backwaters of history—but only for a time. By 1120 the Normans who had been swayed by Clito’s vitriolic rhetoric had been brought back to heel, and Henry could rest knowing that his future—and that of his only son William—was secure. 

Henry’s long absences from England during his wars with both Robert and Louis VI, coupled with his need to collect revenue to fund those wars, prompted him to restructure the English government in ways that continue to the present day. Henry’s greatest legacy isn’t his victories on the Continent but his reshuffling of English government. One of his first moves was to turn his court (the curia regis) into a court of appeals, and he reestablished the royal right to try felonies (which included, among others, larceny, burglary, arson, robbery, and homicide; all were considered offenses against the King’s Peace and were punishable by death). This not only enabled Henry to have more oversight over England’s primitive criminal justice system; it also poured money into the royal treasury, which was then used to offset the cost of war, since the king’s court seized the property of anyone convicted of federal crimes. It wasn’t long, however, before the business of conviction was so fast-paced that the king’s court was overwhelmed. Henry’s solution was to dispatch itinerant justices throughout England’s counties (or shires) to try cases in the local courts and to investigate breaches of royal rights in the countryside. This method not only weakened the feudal courts controlled by local lords but also curbed errant sheriffs, whose powers had bloomed under William the Conqueror. To make his overworked court more efficient, Henry created separate departments to delegate duties in a trickle-down fashion. One of his most ingenious creations was the financial department, known as the Exchequer (the name came from a tablecloth marked out in squares like a checkerboard on which accounts were audited; twelve pennies equaled one shilling, and twenty shillings equaled one pound sterling). A new position, that of the Chancellor, oversaw the Exchequer, audited the sheriffs’ accounts and tracked other revenues, and balanced the amounts owed versus amounts paid (the Chancellor of the Exchequer remains to this day the British cabinet’s chief financial officer). Ranking above the Chancellor was another new post, that of the judiciar, who literally ruled in the monarch’s stead when he was away. The first judiciar was Robert of Salisbury, who worked hand-in-hand with the Chancellor to make sure the royal treasury received its full due (if not a little bit more). Twice a year sheriffs (the king’s royal officials in the outlying English counties) appeared before the justiciar, the Chancellor, and numerous clerks to give a report on their finances. Henry’s innovations in government, spawned by a need to fund his cross-Channel wars, pushed the English government away from personal monarchy towards the bureaucratic state of the future. 

By the dawn of the year 1120, Henry had been reigning for two decades, and in that time he had brought peace to England, reunified the Anglo-Norman realm, secured the Duchy of Normandy for his rather than Robert’s son, and spearheaded a sweeping overhaul of English government. No one could argue that he hadn’t been successful, but the victories of Henry’s reign had reached their apex—in November of 1120, his reign would start to go downhill, and it all began with a shipwreck. The drama of the Wreck of the White Ship, and its ramifications for Norman England, really began in 1118, when Henry’s wife Matilda died. Though fostering numerous bastard sons, he and Matilda had only had one legitimate son, William Aetheling, but at least he was healthy and vibrant and was being groomed for the throne. Norman England’s future rested on his shoulders, but those shoulders went underwater in November 1120—and Henry’s hopes, and the security of the Anglo-Norman realm, went under with him. 

The Wreck of the White Ship

Henry and William Aetheling had spent that month in Normandy, and when it came time to return home before Christmas, they boarded two ships. Henry’s ship left first, but William Aetheling’s ship—called the White Ship and captained by Thomas FitzStephen—was delayed. Parties roared on deck all afternoon, and the passengers became drunk. Confident that he could navigate into the Channel in the dark, Captain FitzStephen decided not to wait until the next morning; besides, they wanted to catch up with Henry. Not long after pushing off from shore, the port side of the vessel struck a submerged rock, and the White Ship capsized. William Aetheling climbed into a small boat and departed the sinking ship filled with the cries of the damned. William, hearing his half-sister Matilda’s cries for help, ordered the boat turned around and carried back to the sinking ship. Before he could reach Matilda, however, other survivors reached over the boat’s sides, trying to haul them up, and their weight was too much: the boat was swamped, and William was thrown into the water. He drowned along with his half-sister Matilda. Only a butcher from Rouen survived the ordeal, clinging to the top of the submerged rock to stay afloat. The White Ship’s captain could have survived, but upon realizing that William Aetheling had died, he released his grasp on the rock and let himself drown rather than have to face the wrath of King Henry. As for Henry, he and his entourage reached England in safety; but when he heard the news of William’s demise, he succumbed into a deep depression. 

Absent an heir, Henry moved fast to find a suitable wife to bear him more sons (bastard sons, of whom he had many, were ineligible for the throne). In 1121 he married Adelaid of Louvain, but she could bear him no children—and he desperately needed a son to offset the resurrected claims of William Clito. Now that Henry had no male heir, Clito could argue he was the next in line to succession, being the son of Robert Curthose and grandson of William the Conqueror. Now Clito’s sights weren’t just on the Duchy of Normandy but also on England itself. In 1127 he became the Count of Flanders, and Henry feared that Clito’s newfound wealth could be used to pursue his claim to the Anglo-Norman realm; if he succeeded, Anglo-Norman England would become an Anglo-Flemish England. As Clito marshaled support for his intended takeover of Normandy and his claim to England’s crown, Henry turned to his recently-widowed daughter Matilda as the solution to his problems. Her husband Henry V of the Holy Roman Empire had died in 1125, and she had been recalled to England, and now Henry forced his barons to do homage to her as his heir. The barons were uncomfortable with this, since women rulers, while not completely unheard of, were a rarity and, in the eyes of most, uncalled-for. Everyone knew a man should rule a kingdom, not a woman. Henry knew the barons’ oaths to Matilda were weak and could be whittled away with the most amateur rhetoric, so he appealed to his enemy-turned-friend in Anjou, Fulk V. Fulk’s daughter had been widowed when her husband, William Aetheling, perished in the sinking of the White Ship, and now Henry proposed yet another marriage between the Houses of Normandy and Anjou, this time between his daughter Matilda and Fulk’s son and heir Geoffrey Plantagenet (Geoffrey was affectionately known as “Plantagenet” because he liked to keep the sprig of the common broom flower—Latin planta genista—in his helmet). Fulk agreed and the two were married. Historian John Gillingham remarks that this marriage was “the first vital step in the Angevin take-over of the Anglo-Norman realm.” In his desperation to block his nephew William Clito from Normandy and England, Henry basically traded a Fleming England for an Angevin one. 

Geoffrey and Matilda produced an heir (the future Henry II) in 1133, and the English barons begrudgingly paid homage to him as heir—but they weren’t too keen on having Angevin blood on the throne. In 1135 Geoffrey had the nerve to make two demands from his father-in-law: first, custody of select Norman castles as a token of goodwill from father-in-law to son; and second, he wanted the English barons (who had already paid homage to the future Henry II) to swear loyalty to his wife Matilda. Henry refused on both accounts, and he had reason to do so: had he gone along with Geoffrey’s wishes, not only would Geoffrey had received power bases in Normandy via the castles, but he would also put the barons in a hard spot if he tried to take England from Henry: having sworn an oath to Henry, an oath to his grandson, and an oath to Matilda, who would they support? Henry’s refusal to grant his son-in-law’s requests triggered a conflict that was sent spiraling out-of-control when a fresh rebellion broke out in southern Normandy, led by the Count of Ponthieu; what made this rebellion against Henry noteworthy is that it had the support of Henry’s daughter and son-in-law. Henry crossed the Channel and campaigned against the rebels throughout the autumn and strengthened his fortifications. In November 1135 he traveled to Lyons-la-Foret to do pass some time hunting, and there he fell suddenly ill. Henry of Huntingdon claimed that his sickness came from eating too many lampreys, but whatever the cause Henry died on 1 December 1135. By law of succession the crown should have gone to the future Henry II, but one of Henry’s nephews, Stephen of Blois, seized the throne for himself and inaugurated an era in Norman English history that would be so blood-drenched and devastating that The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle surmised that this was when “Christ and His saints slept.”

The Scandalous Reign of William Rufus

The Eccentricities of William the Red – The Revolt of 1088 – A Drama of Three Brothers – William II in Scotland & Wales – The Battle of Alnwick 1089 – The Revolt of 1095 – Pope Urban II Calls for a Crusade – A Reunited Norman Empire – Anselm of Canterbury – The First Crusade – A Suspicious Death

William II

William the Conqueror sired four sons: Richard (who had died), Robert (the eldest), William (the favorite), and Henry. According to French feudal custom, William I’s eldest son Robert Curthose (or “court-hose” or “short-legs,” as he was known) inherited the Duchy of Normandy, despite the fact that he had rebelled against his father and tried to seize the city of Rouen for himself. Because England was William’s acquisition (a territory outside the homeland obtained by a man’s purchase, marriage, or, in this case, conquest), he wasn’t bound by the feudal laws of primogeniture to hand it over to Robert. William gifted England to his favorite son William, and he appeased his third son with a financial settlement. Unlike his older brother, and along with his younger brother Henry, William had remained loyal to his father and had been present at his father’s deathbed (Robert was notoriously absent). 

Young William was known as William “Rufus” (“The Red”), likely because of his florid, red-faced complexion combined with red hair like his father. He had eyes of different colors and spoke with a stutter. He spent an inordinate amount of time hunting, like his father, and he ruled the royal forests with an iron will: anyone caught killing a deer in the royal forest would be subject to the death penalty. The late scholar Frank Barlow describes William II thus: “A [rambunctious], devil-may-care soldier, without natural dignity or social graces, with no cultivated tastes and little show of conventional religious piety or morality—indeed, according to his critics, addicted to every kind of vice, particularly lust and especially sodomy.” Anglo-Saxon sources (which, we must remember, were rather biased against the Norman rulers) portray William II as a shameless skeptic who flaunted his homosexuality. English writers condemned his opulence, carefree living, and they harped long and hard on his adoption of a particular fashion that they interpreted as “effeminate and licentious”: long hair on men. As a religious skeptic he had no qualms about leaving bishoprics vacant for long periods of time to take the money for himself, a practice that resulted in a long enmity between the monarch and the Church. He treated the Church as if it were a corporation he could squeeze for profit, didn’t put much energy into appointing bishops or abbots (once emplaced they made it difficult for him to seize the finances of churches and abbeys), and he found an ally in his heretical treatment of the Church in a corrupt clerk named Ranulf Flambard, whom he eventually made Bishop of Durham, much to the chagrin of the pious. Despite English accounts of William II, the French (who, we must remember, were biased towards the Normans) viewed William II as a good ruler who had, in the words of Frank Barlow, “maintained good order and satisfactory justice in England and restored good peace to Normandy. He had extended Anglo-Norman rule in Wales, brought Scotland firmly under his lordship, recovered Maine, and kept up the pressure on the Vexin.” William II never married (the Welsh Chronicle of Princes claims that he preferred whores, though whether male or female isn’t specified), and thus he died without an heir. 

Archbishop Lanfranc, a friend and confidant of William II’s father, accepted Rufus as William I’s successor. William II’s reign went well at first: he had the sound advice of the saintly Anselm, and he won popularity with the English people by distributing a hefty amount of the royal treasury to monasteries, churches, and the poor. But the division of the Anglo-Norman realm (between William II in England and Robert Curthose in Normandy) could only breed problems. The Norman barons in England (who had replaced the Anglo-Saxon thegns) faced a dilemma: they held lands and property in both England and Normandy, and since the two territories were under separate rulers, they were forced to decide whom they would serve. Odo of Bayeux, William II’s uncle, put it thus: “How can we give proper service to two distant and mutually hostile lords? If we serve Duke Robert well we shall offend his brother William and he will deprive us of our revenues and honors in England. On the other hand if we obey King William, Duke Robert will deprive us of our patrimonies in Normandy.” Tensions escalated and within a few months a number of great barons decided their loyalties lie with Robert rather than William II, and the king faced a rebellion known in history as the Revolt of 1088. 

Robert Short Legs

These barons wanted to reunite England and Normandy, which would make it easier for them to maintain their family realms, and William II’s Uncle Odo, now the Earl of Kent, stood at their head. The Normans in England were vastly outnumbered by the native English population, and William II won their favor by promising to cut taxes (a promise he wouldn’t keep). Having garnished English support, he retook the rebel strongholds at Pevensey and Rochester, and the revolt crumbled when the revolt’s star, Robert Curthose, failed to cross the Channel from his duchy and support their rebellion. Though he had extinguished the revolt, William II knew that it was but a matter of time before another rebellion rose like a phoenix from the ashes; so long as the Anglo-Norman realm was divided, the powerful barons wouldn’t be happy. It was not only in the best interests of the barons for the realm to be united; a united realm would make life easier for the Anglo-Norman monarch, as well. William II knew he had to reunify England and the duchy of Normandy, and to this end he invaded Normandy in 1091. He managed to recapture several chunks of Normandy from his brother, and during peace talks between the siblings, William and Robert reconciled, joined forces, and moved to retake Maine and Contentin from their youngest brother Henry. After a two-week siege, Henry surrendered the Cotentin and skulked away, plotting how to retake what he saw (and what was) as rightfully his (he had used the cash settlement from his father to purchase the Cotentin from Robert). 

modern day Alnwick Castle

William II had yet to carry the Anglo-Norman realm to its borders under his father, but his campaigns in Normandy hadn’t been a total loss. The newly-acquired lands made his kingdom the most powerful in Europe, thanks to the decline of the Salian rulers of France. Back in England William II dealt with England’s immediate enemies and borders. In 1091 the Scottish King Malcolm III (known as “Malcolm Greathead”) invaded England, but the royal forces repelled him. William II moved quickly, forcing the Scottish king to acknowledge his lordship. The next year he built Carlisle Castle, wresting control of Cumberland and Westmoreland from the Scots. Malcolm III had begrudgingly accepted English dominance, but the loss of Cumberland and Westmoreland was just too much for him: in 1093 he rose against England, ravaging Northumbria before meeting the royal forces on 13 November 1093 at the Battle of Alnwick. 

The Earl of Northumbria, Robert de Mowbray, didn’t have the strength to oppose Malcolm’s Scottish army in a pitched battle, so he resorted to hit-and-run raids and skirmishes to harass the Scots. Malcolm may have considered Mowbray nothing but an irritating bug nipping at his heels, for he didn’t pursue him; instead he laid siege to Alnwick Castle. Mowbray gathered his forces and made a hurried march to relieve the castle; he arrived in sight of the besieged fortress on St. Brice’s Day 1093 (13 November), and having caught the Scottish army by surprise, he attacked. The Scots had a numerical advantage, but they weren’t prepared for the English attack. Mowbray’s knights stormed the Scots on the castle ramparts, and in the ensuing battle Malcolm III and his son Edward were slain. The leaderless Scottish army hurried dejected back behind their own borders. In the wake of Alnwick, Malcolm III’s son Donald seized the Scottish throne. William II favored another son of Malcolm’s, Edgar, for the throne: Edgar was more genial towards England and could be easily managed. With English support Edgar wrested Lothian from Donald’s control in 1094, and in 1097 it was brother-against-brother for the Scottish throne. Edgar won out and took his brother’s place as Scotland’s monarch. As king Edgar recognized William II’s authority over Lothian (the border between Northumbria and Scotland proper), and Edgar even attended the English court. William II made two uninspiring forays into Wales in 1097, accomplishing little besides building a few castles on the Welsh border. 

Robert of Mowbray, the Earl of Northumbria who had bested the Scottish army at Alnwick, rose against William II two years later in 1095. He had been part of the Revolt of 1088 but had been pardoned; his gratitude, it seems, hadn’t been long-lasting. William led an army against Mowbray’s forces and beat him. Mowbray was captured and stripped of his lands and titles and imprisoned. Another noble, William of Eu, was accused of treachery and was both blinded and castrated. William II’s brutal punishments on the ringleaders of the so-called Revolt of 1095 ensured that no other barons dared to rise up against him—but tensions were flaring yet again between him and his brother in Normandy, and England baited its breath, waiting for the inevitable clash of arms that would decide who would rule not only Normandy but the whole of the Anglo-Norman realm. 

The decisive clash was avoided in 1095 when Pope Urban II called for a holy crusade into the Holy Land. In a sermon at Clermont in southern France, the pope exhorted the nobility to take up arms against the Muslims who had overrun Jerusalem. He promised that all who fought against the heathens would be participants in a Christ-sanctioned holy war and would find forgiveness of their sins. All across France the hearts of nobles and peasants were stirred: nobles for the possibility of winning fame, fortune, and land; and the peasants who knew they had a lot of sins that needed to be forgiven. Robert Curthose answered the call, perhaps in a bid for glory and wealth and to be rid of domestic difficulties in his duchy, and he sold Normandy to his brother William for 10,000 marks. Robert marched off to do battle in Palestine, and William—with Normandy secured—moved to take Maine and the Vexin, which Robert had lost through weak rule. By 1099 Maine and the Vexin were secure, and William II had restored the Anglo-Norman realm to the borders won by his father. 

Anselm of Canterbury

William II had secured his borders from enemies without, but he soon found an enemy within in the future St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury. William was no friend to religion, and when Lanfranc died in 1089, he left the archbishopric empty and used its income to pad his pockets. During a spate of illness in 1093, William became convinced that he was dying, and eager to settle his debt with God, he appointed the Benedictine monk Anselm of Bec as Lanfranc’s successor. Anselm settled into his post with a dedication to the Gregorian Reforms sweeping through Europe. The bulwark of the Gregorian Reforms were internal changes to the Church, but these included the freedom from lay domination and the centralization of papal authority over bishops, abbots, and clergy—at the expense of control of local sovereigns, be they princes, kings, or queens. Gregorian reformers believed that secular sovereigns held no authority over the Church. This clerical conviction would become a bone of contention driving a wedge between the English church and state. As for Anselm, he was regarded as the top dog theologian of his time. He’s been credited as the founder of Scholasticism (the medieval approach to knowledge that focused on dialectical reasoning by inference and resolving contradictions; Scholasticism would dominate medieval universities from Anselm’s time to the 18th century). Scholasticism competed against the humanistic studies that marked the early middle ages; humanist studies were built upon the works of classical authors, especially Plato, but the rediscovery of Aristotle in the 12th century—thanks to Islamic scholars’ dedication to classical studies—marked a shift in the practice of knowledge. Scholasticism isn’t Anselm’s only legacy: he’s also hailed as the founder of the Ontological Argument of God (which is still discussed in seminaries today) and the Satisfactory Theory of the Atonement. Anselm and William II disagreed about a lot, but the biggest beef between them was Anselm’s conviction that the king didn’t have any God-given authority over the clergy. William II is reported as fuming about Anselm, “Yesterday I hated him with great hatred, today I hate him with yet even greater hatred and he can be certain that tomorrow and thereafter I shall hate him continually with ever fiercer and more bitter hatred.”

William II had enough of Anselm, and in 1095 he called a council in Rockingham to get to the bottom of their disputes. Anselm appealed to Rome, arguing that because he was the Archbishop of Canterbury he was subject to the judgment of the Church rather than the judgment of the king, and thus he couldn’t be judged in a secular court. The papacy had exploded in strength in the 11th century, and churchmen like Anselm believed their highest authority was God, who was represented by the vicar of St. Peter (the Pope), and that the churchmen’s duty to God overrode any duties they had to secular authorities. Anselm may have expected Pope Urban II to take his side, but the Pope was already neck-deep in a conflict with Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor. Unwilling to make another enemy, Urban II left the English king alone. Undeterred, Anselm didn’t back down from William II, and when tensions boiled over in 1097, Anselm sought exile in France, leaving the see of Canterbury in the king’s hands.

William’s conflict with Anselm may have reached an end, but a new one lie on the doorstep: in the summer of 1100, his brother Robert was returning from winning renown and treasure in the First Crusade, and all England chafed with fear at what might happen upon his return. William II had struggled to secure that which his father had won, but if Robert demanded the return of his duchy, England and Normandy would be plunged into chaos once more. The First Crusade had had an ignominious beginning: scores of peasantry from France and the Rhineland, under the sway of charismatic preachers like Peter the Hermit and Walter the Pennyless, marched en masse towards Palestine with an escort of few knights and clergy. They marched down the Rhine Valley, attacking Jews en route, and they marched through Hungary and Bulgaria before reaching Constantinople. Emperor Alexius of Byzantium couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw the ill fated horde of peasants, and he was eager to be rid of them, giving them transport across the Bosporus Strait. The rabble was ill-equipped and untrained, and thus they didn’t stand a chance against the Turks, who cut them apart with hardly an afterthought. Any victories would have to be won by soldiers who knew a thing or two about war—solders like Robert Curthose. 

The Capture of Jerusalem, 1099

Robert had done well in the First Crusade, leading his French army alongside other western European armies. Godfrey of Bouillon, his brother Baldwin, and Robert of Flanders led a force of Flemings; Bohemund of Taranto and his nephew Tancred led the Normans of southern Italy; and Raymond of Toulouse was in charge of soldiers of Languedoc. These four armies traveled overland and overseas to arrive in Constantinople between 1096 and 1097. Once in the capital of the Byzantine Empire, Emperor Alexius had the gall to make them swear an oath of fealty to him in return for the supplies they would need on their last leg to the Holy Land. This meant that whatever lands the European generals won would be ruled with Alexius as overlord. Tensions ran high between the Europeans and Alexius, at the cost of a unified front; but the Seljuk Turks were themselves divided and unable to react against the crusaders with a unified front of their own. Politics aside, the crusaders launched from Constantinople and marched into the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, winning a smashing victory at Dorylaeum. At this point Baldwin detached from the main body of crusaders and marched on Edessa; once it fell, it became the first crusader state in the East. Bohemund won the Battle of Antioch and claimed the city as its own. With Antioch in crusader hands, the road to Jerusalem was open. The crusaders, with Robert of Normandy among them, laid siege to Jerusalem for five weeks, and on 15 July 1099, the crusaders stormed Jerusalem and slaughtered its occupants without discrimination: as many as 10,000 Muslims, Jews, and Christians perished side-by-side. The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem was born, but Robert’s part in the First Crusade wasn’t over: his leadership would help secure victory at the last major conflict of the First Crusade at Ascalon in August 1099. Having won reputation, riches, and favor in the eyes of the church, Robert decided to leave the management of the new Frankish states in Palestine to others and return to Normandy. No doubt he intended to use his fame, fortune, and favor as leverage for retaking Normandy from his brother. 

The Supposed Site of William II's Death

William II and his brother Henry joined hands and discussed how best to meet the impending crisis. Their alliance against Robert, however, would never come to fruition: on 2 August 1100 the English king died in a (so-called) hunting accident in the New Forest. The chronicler William of Malmesbury alleges that William had endured a frightening dream the night before, and when he and his entourage (including his younger brother Henry) headed out into the forest to hunt, he had been uneasy. The hunting party spread out to chase deer, but a baron named Walter Tirel stayed with the king. The king saw a stag through the trees and fired an arrow at it, wounding it; the stag fled into the trees, and the king shielded his eyes against the sun to try and see where it went. Another deer appeared, and Tirel fired his own bow, but he missed and the arrow struck the king in the chest. The king broke the arrow at the shaft, but then he lost consciousness, slid off his horse, and pitched forward to the ground. The impact drove the arrow deeper into his chest, between his ribs, and piercing his lung. Tirel hurried to the downed king’s side, but William II was unconscious and beyond help. Tirel’s calls for help carried through the trees, and the king’s entourage, with Henry at its head, arrived. Henry took charge, and he and his companions abandoned his older brother in the woods and made haste to Winchester to secure the royal treasury. He would lose no time in taking the crown for himself, and he would be officially made king just three days after the accident, being crowned in Westminster by the Bishop of London (since Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury, was exiled in France and the Archbishop of York was in far-off northern England). The late king’s body was discovered in the woods by a wandering charcoal burner, and he and some peasants loaded the stinking body onto a horse-drawn cart and delivered it to Winchester. William II would be buried in Winchester Cathedral, and when the cathedral’s tower collapsed the next year, many saw it as an act of God’s judgment against William II’s skepticism and flagrant sin.

The nature of the king’s death, coupled with his younger brother’s rapid seizure of power, has made many historians down the ages ponder the presence of a conspiracy. They argue that because Walter Tirel was renown as an excellent bowmen, how did he not only miss the stag but also strike the king with a killing blow? Around the 17th century, legend had it that Tirel’s arrow had deflected off a tree and haplessly lodged in the king’s chest (this is the claim proposed by the “Rufus Stone,” which is erected in the alleged spot of the king’s death). Furthermore, William Tirel lost no time in abandoning his lands and fleeing to France; but is this a mark of a guilty conscience or a man knowing all too well that he could become a scapegoat for the king’s demise? Though historians through the ages have debated whether or not Henry had a hand in his brother’s death, it must be observed that (a) no contemporary made the charge of assassination, (b) hunting was risky and accidents were common, and (c) if Henry was the architect of his brother’s death, it would make more sense for him to wait and see who came out on top in the impending war between William and Robert. It would be far more expedient for him to assassinate the resultant victor of the coming family feud and thus take charge of a unified Anglo-Norman realm. 

But Henry succeeded his brother just in time to take the reigns against Robert. 

It would be brother-against-brother in a winner-take-all showdown.