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.”