History of England 1-6

This was the enemy that King Harold most feared. William had no possible claim to the English throne except by right of conquest. And that is what he set out to achieve. It was in many respects a hazardous enterprise. The Normans had no fleet; the ships for the invasion, more than 500, would have to be built. William was also confronting a formidable adversary; the English state was wealthier and more powerful, with the potential of raising far more soldiers for the fight. The fortunes of battle were in any case uncertain, which was why the pitched conflicts of armies were avoided at all costs; it was better to harass, and to ravage, than to rely upon the outcome of one event.

Yet the force of the duke’s will was insurmountable; he persuaded the lords of Normandy, and certain French allies, to follow him across the sea. He promised in return innumerable riches from a country as prosperous as it was fruitful. William also enlisted the help of a higher power. He persuaded the pope to give his blessing to the enterprise, on the dubious grounds that Harold had violated a sacred oath taken in his submission to the duke. The pontiff sent William a ring containing one of the hairs of St Peter. In the same period William placed his daughter, Cecilia, into a nunnery at Caen. He had in effect sacrificed his daughter to God in the hope of a victory, just as Agamemnon sacrificed Iphigenia before sailing to Troy.

William made preparations for the great fleet to be collected on the Channel coast at Dives-sur-Mer by the middle of June 1066. 14,000 men were summoned for the onslaught. Harold, knowing of the naval threat, stationed his fleet at the Isle of Wight and posted land forces along the Channel coast. Yet the French army was kept in port by contrary winds. On eventually taking sail for England it was blown off course and was obliged to take shelter in the port of Saint Valéry-sur-Somme. There it remained until the last week of September. Never has an invasion been so bedevilled by bad luck, and it must have seemed to William’s commanders that divine help would not necessarily be forthcoming.

Meanwhile, Harold waited. For four months he kept his forces prepared for imminent attack. Then on 8 September, he disbanded them. Provisions were running out, and the men needed urgently to return to their farms. He may have been informed of the abortive sailing of William’s fleet and calculated that, with the season of storms approaching, there would be no invasion this year. Soon after his return to London, he learned of a more immediate danger. As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle puts it, ‘Harald, king of Norway, came by surprise north into the Tyne.’ On 20 September, Harald Hardrada descended upon York. On hearing this unwelcome news Harold mustered his retainers; he marched north very swiftly, riding night and day, picking up local forces as he went forward. The first that the Danish army knew of his arrival was the sight of the dust thrown up by the horses. On 25 September he engaged the enemy at Stamford Bridge where he obtained a complete victory. It was a measure of his competence as a military commander. Harald Hardrada was killed in the course of the battle, marking the end of the Viking interest in England. ‘A great man,’ Harold said of Hardrada, ‘and of stately appearance. But I think his luck has left him.’

Harold’s own luck was soon dissipated. He was, in effect, the last of the English kings. As soon as he had celebrated the victory over the Norwegians, he received news that William had launched his invasion force. The duke had put a lantern on the mast of his ship, leading the way across the Channel. The Norman force landed in Pevensey Bay at nine o’clock in the morning on Thursday, 28 September 1066. It was the most fateful arrival in England’s history. From Pevensey Bay the Normans rowed around the coast to Hastings, which they considered to be more favourable terrain. William built a makeshift castle here, and proceeded to ransack the adjacent villages. But he did not march along the road to London; his position was essentially defensive, close to his ships.

Harold received word of William’s invasion two or three days after the event and immediately marched southward with the core of his army to meet the enemy in Sussex. He acted very promptly, but his troops had just fought an arduous battle in the course of which their numbers had been reduced. Haste may have precipitated defeat. He was hoping, perhaps, to catch the Normans by surprise just as he had surprised Harald Hardrada; he was undoubtedly trying to confine them on the little peninsula of which Hastings was a part. He knew the territory well; Sussex was his native country, and he possessed large estates there. By 13 October he had attained this objective. He had told the local Sussex militia to meet him at ‘the hoary apple-tree’ on Caldbec Hill, but William received word of the forthcoming assault. He was able to lead his forces against an English army that was not properly assembled.

The Norman troops were marched in sight of the English force waiting on Caldbec Hill, the highest ground available; the Normans took up battle order on the southern slope of the hill, in what was theoretically an inferior position. The location of the English, on the summit, was later marked by the high altar of Battle Abbey; they were pressed tightly together, whereas the Normans were in more military formation. The English had some 6,000 or 7,000 men, but they were outnumbered by the Normans. The English were on foot, according to their normal practice, whereas the Normans had a large force of cavalry waiting in the rear.

So battle was joined. The Normans cried out ‘God is our help’ as they ran against the enemy, while the English called upon ‘Christ’s rood, the holy rood!’ William wore sacred relics around his neck. As the Normans advanced upon them, the English put up their shields in order to form a ‘wall’. They were essentially in a defensive formation, and it seemed that they were rooted to the spot. But the Normans had another tactic. On two occasions they pretended to flee from the enemy, only to wheel around and cut off their pursuers. The core of the English army, however, held its ground and fought all day. Then Harold was killed, at dusk, by a stray arrow. With their leader gone, the soldiers weakened. They fled into the night. If Harold had not fallen, his forces might have prevailed. But ‘if ’ is not a word to use in history.

William and his army rested for five days, and then advanced on London by way of Dover and Canterbury. He was now in a foreign country still governed by men who were unwilling to submit to him; he was surrounded by foes. The earls of the northern shires were implacably opposed to him, as were the people of London itself. So he trusted his violent instincts; he took the offensive and began a campaign of terror. He was beaten back at London Bridge, and in revenge he burned Southwark to the ground. He then lit a circle of fire around London, ravaging the countryside all around; he left a trail of destruction and rapine through Hampshire, Surrey and Berkshire. The entries for ‘waste lands’ in Domesday Book tell the story of his progress. The leaders of the English, trapped in London, now agreed to submit. A delegation came to Berkhamsted, in Hertfordshire, and formally yielded to his power. The English were accustomed to foreign kings, after all, and the transition from Canute and the half-Norman Edward the Confessor to William was not considered unacceptable. Surrender was preferable to resistance and further bloodshed. With the death of Harold, too, they lacked an effective war leader.

William then led his troops into the capital. There may have been some local resistance among the Londoners, but his victory was complete. He was crowned king of England on Christmas Day in Westminster Abbey. As duke of Normandy, however, he was still in theory a vassal of the king of France. This dual status would bear bitter fruit in the years, and centuries, to come. From this time forward England would be involved in the affairs of France, and of western Europe, with many bloody battles and sieges that did not really come to an end until the defeat of Napoleon in 1815.

8

The house

The British roundhouse, the Roman villa and the Anglo-Saxon hall – many of them built in the same place through successive centuries – have gone into the earth. A few ruined villas remain as evidence of ancient civilization, but most of them are now part of the land on which they once rested.

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the standard house consisted of one square room on the ground floor, with another square room built above it; access to the latter was generally granted by means of an external staircase. The furniture was simple, and scarcely varied at all from that of the Anglo-Saxons. A board laid on trestles acted as a dining table, and a wooden bench was the primary form of seating. In the houses built of stone, alcoves or recesses in the wall could be used for the same purpose. There were very few chairs or stools, except for the chair of state in noble households. Some of the richer families might own chests, coffers and cupboards; the bed was essentially a bag of straw laid upon a carved frame.

Only the wealthy possessed houses of stone with a ‘hall’ on the ground floor. A larger proportion of families owned houses built of wood and thatched with straw or reeds or heather; the windows boasted no glass, but wooden shutters could be barred at night for safety and comfort. Nevertheless the wooden house was always draughty and smoky. It was generally on two floors, like its stone counterpart, with a living room and kitchen on the ground floor; on the upper storey was a bedroom for the master of the house and his family. In the poorer dwellings the inhabitants would sleep on the floor, with heather or straw as their bedding. There might be a wooden booth in front of the house, where goods and produce could be sold; behind the house might be located a warehouse or small factory where those goods were manufactured.

The poorer sort had no such resources, most of them living in huts of wattle and daub that were little different from those of the early Britons. At the level of absolute need, there are no variations. Peasant buildings, in the countryside, had a limited rate of survival; they either crumbled, or were pulled down, within two generations. They rise from the land and return to it. A form of tenure in Hampshire was known as ‘keyhold tenure’; if a person could build a hut or house in one night, and have his fire lit before morning, then his residency was assured.

The style and method of peasant construction survived for many hundreds, if not thousands, of years. At the beginning of the twentieth century, for example, Thomas Hardy recalled the method of building used in his childhood. ‘What was called mudwall’, he wrote, ‘was really a composition of chalk, clay and straw – essentially unbaked brick. This was mixed up into a sort of dough-pudding close to where the cottage was to be built. The mixing was performed by treading and shovelling – women sometimes being called in to tread – and the straw was added to bind the mass together … It was then thrown by pitchforks on to the wall, where … it was left to settle for a day or two.’ When the fabric had dried and hardened in the sun, the roof was built of thatch. This was the method used by the Britons before the coming of Rome. It was used by the English during the reign of Victoria.

The dimensions of a modest thirteenth-century house are given in a Worcestershire court roll of 1281; it was of one storey, 30 feet long (9 metres) and 14 feet broad (4.25 metres), with three doors and two windows. The windows were on each side, to be left open when a cool breeze blew, but stuffed with straw or fern in inclement weather. The family would have eaten and slept together within the same room. This was not a period in which the private self can be said to exist. A thirteenth-century cottage excavated in Berkshire consisted of one room, 10 by 12 feet (3 by 3.6 metres), and another in Yorkshire had dimensions of 10 by 20 feet (3 by 6 metres). The room was generally open to the roof, with a central hearth. In the longhouses of the same period the rooms were used for livestock as well as people, together with a store of grain. The inhabitants were living and sleeping side by side with their animals.

Houses were lengthened, or rebuilt, or extended, as time and occasion demanded. Certain improvements, from human industry and human ingenuity, were possible. The houses of the eleventh century were made of clay without timber frames; by the thirteenth century most houses were constructed with timber frames and, less than a century later, the walls were being erected on stone bases to curb damp and decay. The beaten-earth floors were generally strewn with rushes that became so moist and dirty that they were known as ‘the marsh’. The first evidence of chimney pots comes from Whitefriars, just south of Fleet Street, in London; in 1278 Ralph de Crockerlane was selling clay chimney pots in that quarter.

Yet the essential structure of the dwelling remained identical for many hundreds of years. The furniture was scanty, household items rudimentary; the spoons and dishes were generally made of wood by members of the family. There might have been a few brass pots and cups. A bed acted in the daytime as a seat. These were bare rooms for bare living. It is surprising, perhaps, that richer and poorer agricultural workers of England tended to live in the same kind of dwelling; whatever their economic circumstances, they reverted to the ancient model. It is another indication of the customary traditions of the countryside. In the larger houses the same identity of purpose can be found, with a central hall flanked by smaller rooms. One gradual change did occur: towards the end of the thirteenth century more provision was made, at least in the larger towns, for adequate drainage and cesspit systems.

Houses from the fourteenth century have survived in far greater numbers than those of any earlier period. They are generally more solid and substantial than their predecessors, and in London they often attained three storeys with a height between 30 and 40 feet (9 and 12 metres). A visitor from the country would have been surprised by these urban ‘skyscrapers’, quite a new thing in England. From the middle of fourteenth-century London, too, come fragments of small yellow bricks. The townhouse of a wealthy merchant from that century was highly decorated, with interiors of colour and of costliness; tapestries, curtains and hangings draped the walls. Tiles, rather than rushes, were laid upon the floors; finely glazed pottery was imported from France and Spain, sparkling glass from Venice and silks from Persia. This was still in great contrast to the rudimentary furnishings of the ordinary English house, but the appetite for luxury and colour slowly spread among the wealthier families. In the fifteenth century inventories of the richer households include such items as cushions and tapestries, painted cloths and carpets, basins and screens, wainscoting and coverings for benches and chairs. The colours would by modern standards of taste be considered inharmonious, with strident yellows and purples and greens placed beside each other. The intended effect was one of brilliancy and vivacity. That is why an image of the sun was sometimes embroidered on cloths and tapestries and articles of dress. In a similar spirit men often wore shoes of different colours. Brick and glass became more common. Open hearths were being replaced by fireplaces.

The objects of medieval life are still recovered from the ground. Traces of wooden stools and of other pieces of furniture, undisturbed for many hundreds of years, have been found at Winchester and Beverley. Two locks were smashed with an axe before being discarded; another lock was repaired by its owner. The vast quantity of medieval locks and padlocks, found within the excavated spaces, suggests a life of threat or at least of suspicion and caution. Medieval life was dominated by the key.

Candlesticks, of lead and copper alloy, have been taken from the earth by archaeological teams. By the fifteenth century these candlesticks have become larger, an indication that candles had increased in thickness. This in turn suggests greater wealth. So from small material details we may be able to reach larger conclusions. Hanging lamps of glass began to take the place of hanging lamps of stone or ceramic by the end of the thirteenth century; oil lamps, in which a wick floated upon a small pool of oil, were being replaced by candles at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Vessels of wood (generally of ash) are to be found everywhere, but glass was becoming popular among the wealthier families by the fourteenth century. There are glass flasks, jugs, and of course glasses. Glass urinals, in which urine was examined for the signs of health or disease, are relatively common.

Other archaeological relics of the dead have been found. A balance to weigh coin had been adjusted to give false readings, but at a later date it was deliberately destroyed; perhaps its owner had then been placed in the pillory. Vessels of copper alloy or of ceramic were often patched up, suggesting how in the domestic economy the cheapest items were valued; cracks in the ceramic surface were sealed with lead. An iron helmet was inverted, supplied with a handle, and turned into a cooking vessel. Spindles are found everywhere. So are needles and thimbles, from an age when both men and women were skilled in sewing cloth and leather. It was a common and necessary household occupation. Many spoons and spoon-handles survive, some of them inscribed with a pattern or mark to indicate ownership; this gives a picture of communal dining. Some vessels have been found bearing the legend CUM SIS IN MENSA PRIMO DI PAVPERE PENSO – ‘When you are at the table, first think of the poor’. A brooch of the thirteenth century has, as its inscription, ‘I am a brooch to guard the breast, that no rascal may put his hand thereon.’ A ring of the fourteenth century has the legend ‘He who spends more than belongs to him, kills himself without a blow.’ Whistles, book clasps, writing implements, hooks, hinges, chests, caskets, leather shoes, are all mute testimony of a forgotten life.

The most commonly found location is naturally that of the ‘undercroft’ or basement. Many of them are lined with chalk or flint, and in some of them the tiles still cover the floor. There is evidence of steps leading from the street, and of small windows on a level with the ground. The life of the past leaves other marks on the earth. A worn floor will trace the path of a door once swinging to and fro. Go in.

9

Devils and wicked men

To the victor came the spoils. William set about ordering his new kingdom. He confiscated the estates of his English opponents, particularly of those who had fought against him at Hastings. Some of the English thegns had fled, and others had gone into exile. Just as Canute had done before him, he raised a large sum with a sudden tax. He was greedy, with the appetite of a conqueror. Another sign of his strength rose upon his new lands. Wherever he went, he planted a castle. One was soon built in London itself, on the site of the present Tower.

He was helped in his enterprise by many survivors of the old regime. William realized, as other foreign conquerors before him, that he needed the experience and knowledge of English administrators. In the first years of his rule he retained the English sheriffs. The monasteries were still being governed by English abbots, despite the fact that two of their number had fought at Hastings. Regenbald, head of the writing office under Edward the Confessor, became William’s chancellor.

Yet others among the English decided to fight. William’s power did not really prevail beyond the southeast of the country, and Harold’s own immediate family established a base in the southwest at Exeter. They took advantage of William’s absence in Normandy to raise the banner of revolt in 1068. The senior protagonist in this affair was Harold’s mother, Gytha, with the assistance of the Irish and perhaps even of the Danes. Gytha was the aunt of the king of Denmark. William realized the gravity of a rebellion that might embroil the whole of northern and western England and, immediately on his return, he took his army to the walls of Exeter. He laid siege to the city for eighteen days, and in the end Gytha made her escape down the river Exe; the citizens then surrendered.

This was only a prelude to a much more significant revolt in the northern counties, when in 1069 the English of that region enlisted the help of the Danes to take York. Memories of the Danelaw were still strong. William marched up the country, planting castles wherever he halted. He did not immediately attack York, but employed the tactics he had used against London three years before; he left a trail of destruction across the surrounding lands. This became known as ‘the harrowing of the north’ and consisted of nothing less than the wholesale destruction of the people and the territory in William’s path. He fell upon them as if in a lightning storm. The men and the animals were killed, the crops destroyed, the towns and villages wasted. All the reserves of food were put to the torch, creating widespread famine; 100,000 people were reported to have died. No cultivated land was left between York and Durham, and a century later the ruins of the destruction were still be to be found. The villages of the region were described in the Domesday Book as ‘waste’. Yet the north would rise against William no more. He had created a desert, and called it peace. William is supposed to have confessed on his deathbed that ‘I fell on the English of the northern shires like a ravening lion.’

In the harrowing of the north William had not behaved as an English king. He had behaved like a tyrant. That is why other local insurrections emerged, and many of the English formed what would now be called guerrilla forces to harass the invaders. 10,000 Normans were attempting to control a country of 3 or 4 million natives, and the only weapons they had at their disposal were those of brute power and terror. Spies and collaborators, punishment beatings and secret murders – the whole panoply of occupation and insurgency – were indispensable. An English chronicler of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Orderic Vitalis, wrote that the English ‘were groaning under the yoke of the Normans, and suffering from the oppressions of proud lords who did not obey the king’s injunctions’. The Norman lords, in other words, were pushing their power to extremes. So, in the first four or five years of Norman rule, there was talk everywhere of revolt. The English rose against William every year between 1067 and 1070.

One force of rebels has remained notorious because of its association with Hereward. He took refuge in the watery fenland around Ely, from where he launched sporadic but murderous raids against the Normans despatched to capture him. He joined with some Danish forces, who had landed on the coast, to attack Peterborough Abbey ostensibly to save its treasures from the Normans. He and his band were known as silvatici, men of the woods. He was joined on Ely by other leaders of the English revolt, who thus posed a distinct and recognizable threat to William’s regime. For over a year the Norman forces tried, and failed, to dislodge Hereward from the fastness. Some people say that he was compromised by the treachery of the monks of Ely, who pointed to a secret path. It is certainly true that it was only after a prolonged assault, by forces on land and water, that the stronghold was taken and Hereward chased into exile. From this time forward, William appointed only Norman lords and abbots.

The confiscation of land hitherto held by the English was accelerated. It was an accepted principle that, ultimately, the king possessed the entire land of England. It was his realm. William put this principle into practice. By 1086 only two English barons, Coleswain of Lincoln and Thurkill of Arden, survived; they had retained their position only by enthusiastic collaboration with the new regime. The rest of the great estates went to a small number of Norman magnates, who promised in return to provide knights for the king’s service. England had become a militarized state, supporting an army of occupation.

The smaller English landowners may have had a better chance of holding their estates, but only at a high price. Many of them became tenants on land they had previously owned. Some of them were roughly treated. Aelric had been a free tenant in Marsh Gibbon, Buckinghamshire, but by 1086 he paid rent to a new Norman lord ‘harshly and wretchedly’. It was said by one chronicler in the early twelfth century, Simeon of Durham, that ‘many men sold themselves into perpetual servitude, provided that they could maintain a certain miserable life’. Other Norman families emigrated to this newfound land of opportunity, and the pattern of colonization persisted well into the twelfth century.

Other changes can be documented. Novel forms of building were brought into the English landscape, most notably with the castles and the churches. By 1100 all the English cathedrals were either being rebuilt or newly constructed. They were larger, and more massive, than their predecessors; the nave was longer, and the side chapels proliferated. The Normans built well; they gloried in the strength and power of stone. The great round arches, borrowed from Roman pomp, were a sign of their triumphalism. The massive walls, and the ranges of pillars and arcades, tell the same story. The immensity of Durham Cathedral engulfs the wanderer within a great wilderness of towering stone.

The Norman castles are square masses of masonry, with extraordinarily thick walls and tiny windows. They crush the land beneath them. They are indomitable. They exude an air of gloom and even despair; according to the English chronicler of 1137, they were ‘filled with devils and wicked men’. They were at the same time prisons and fortresses, courthouses and barracks. The English hated them as the strongholds of their oppressors. Yet they are in their own fashion magnificent creations, born out of the will to power and control that the Normans possessed in full measure. It was said in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that William had provided such security in the land that ‘any honest man could travel over his kingdom without injury with his bosom full of gold; and no man dared kill another …’.

The English landscape was changed in other ways. Hundreds of monasteries were planted across the country. Deer parks and rabbit warrens were created. Great swathes of land came under the jurisdiction of ‘forest law’, a Norman invention, whereby all the fruit and the animals of the field became the property of the king. Anyone who hunted a hart, or a hind, was to be blinded; no one was to chase a wild boar or even a hare; no trees were to be felled, and no firewood was to be gathered. The law covered more than forest and eventually one-third of the country became the preserve of the monarch; the whole of Essex, for example, was enclosed. The New Forest, Epping Forest, Windsor Great Park, and the ‘forests’ of Dartmoor and Exmoor are part of that legacy.

Kings have always loved to hunt. It is an aspect of their power. Alfred hunted wild beasts in the same spirit that he hunted the Danes. Hunting was a way of exercising military skills in a peaceful environment. It created a miniature battleground, where every nerve and sinew was tested. It was, for William, also a form of commerce; venison was expensive meat, and a ready supply from his own lands was highly desirable. Hunting was, and is still in the twenty-first century, a royal duty as well as pastime. Yet ‘forest law’ was another hated imposition upon the English, who had treated the produce of the woods and fields as their own. As always, the poor suffered most from the indulgence of princes.

A great division was introduced by language. The tongue of the new ruling elite was Norman French, while that of its subjects was of course still English. It used to be believed that for official purposes French entirely displaced the native language; in fact English continued largely to be used as the language of administrative record, together with Latin. But the use of vernacular French by the leaders of the nation did have other consequences. The problems of pronouncing certain English words, for example, turned Snotingham into Nottingham and Dunholm into Durham; Shipton became Skipton and Yarrow became Jarrow.

By 1110 the number of native names in Winchester had fallen from 70 to 40 per cent; the presence of foreign merchants, attracted by the flourishing English economy, may have played a part here. William even attempted to learn English in order to dispense justice, but it proved too difficult for him. In fact, over the centuries, the language of the law was imbued with words derived from the French – among them ‘contract’, ‘agreement’ and ‘covenant’. The argot that came to be used in the courts was known as ‘Law French’. ‘Master’ and ‘servant’ come from the French. ‘Crime’ and ‘treason’ and ‘felony’ are French, as are ‘money’ and ‘payment’. The language of courtiers was the language of business and of punishment. There was also a difference of appearance between the invaders and the natives; the English wore their hair long, whereas the Normans were short-shaven. But in this, as in so many other ways, the English custom eventually prevailed.

That is why there are so many continuities throughout the eleventh century, untouched by the events on the surface of the time. English law and administration survived intact. William declared that the laws of Edward the Confessor were to be respected, although he effectively reissued the laws of Canute. The Normans had little, or no, written law. They had everything to learn from the English.

The thegns were now to be called knights, but their essential purpose as masters and judges of the land remained the same. The names changed, but the institutions did not. The hundred, and the shire, and the tithing, were intact. The sheriffs remained, too, although the later Norman incumbents may have been more exacting upon their shires. The county courts were conducted in the familiar way. The various privileges and customs of the towns and cities were maintained. Taxes or ‘gelds’ were raised in the same way. The system of military service, for general conscripts, was the same. The makers of the coin of the realm were still English; the Normans did not have the skill or expertise. Writs were issued and composed in the familiar manner. The witenagemot, or parliament of principal landholders, retained its ancient form. Wherever we look, we see signs of continuity. That is the essential feature of England. The deep structure of the country remained intact. William was undoubtedly a strong king who imposed his own strength upon the country, but so were Canute and Athelstan.

Many of the developments that have been described as Norman in fact represented only the acceleration of English custom. Much has been written about Norman feudalism, whereby the nation was bound in a military compact, but most of the constituents of that system were present in England before William’s arrival. The defining principle of feudalism was the act of homage; a man knelt before his lord with his hands outstretched, and the lord took those hands within his. The supplicant, with bowed head and raised hands, resembled a penitent in the act of prayer. He promised to become ‘your man for the tenement I hold of you’ and to ‘bear faith to you of life and members and earthly honour against all other men’ except the king himself. But in England land had always been held in return for military service; the oath may have been different, but the social obligation was unchanged. We know from the English poetry of the eighth century that the lord and his men had always been inseparable. One significant change, however, took place. It had previously been the tradition that, on death, property was inherited by many kinsmen; by the twelfth century, property was bequeathed to a single male heir. All of these things worked together to create the social structure of the country.

An essential part of that structure was the English Church. William introduced a number of Norman reforms, as well as Norman clergy, in order to bring rigour and order to the religious communities of the country. By 1087 only three of twenty-one abbots were English. Not all of the new abbots were sympathetic to their English inferiors. The abbot of Abingdon refused to keep the feasts of certain English saints on the principle that the English were ‘rustics’. At Glastonbury the new abbot used an armed retinue of Norman archers to shoot down his own monks, protesting against the imposition of a new liturgy. Others were more conciliatory. The abbot of Selby helped to build the first stone church for his community. He dressed in a workman’s cowl, and carried on his shoulders the stone and chalk used for the construction; he received his pay at the end of the week, like the other labourers, and then gave it away to the poor.

William also appointed an Italian, Lanfranc, as archbishop of Canterbury. Lanfranc had resided at the Norman abbey of Bec, and was already well known to the king. He was one of those learned and pious men, like Anselm and Becket after him, who had a deep and lasting influence upon English life. Lanfranc drew up the first principles of canon law, and William conceded that all spiritual matters should be addressed in ecclesiastical courts. It was under the leadership of Lanfranc that the great cathedrals arose. He was also instrumental in bringing monastic discipline to often recalcitrant English monks. In 1076 he decreed that none of the English clergy would be allowed to marry.

The pope had blessed William’s invasion, but the new king was not to be in thrall to the pontiff. He was determined to be the master of all his subjects. Was his office not sacred, too? In a divided papal election no victor was to be recognized in England without the king’s permission. No papal letter could be sent to any of the king’s subjects without his knowledge. No papal legate could enter the country without his approval. It was the king who would sanction the appointment of bishops and abbots. The battles between king and pope, or between king and archbishop, would continue for many centuries with an uncertain outcome; they came to a defining crisis only at the time of the Reformation.

If there is one signal reminder of William’s reign, it is that document originally called ‘The King’s Book’ but more popularly known as Domesday Book because its evidence could no more be evaded than the day of doom. It was a survey of the resources of the realm, unique in Europe but not unusual in England where various national and regional accounts had already been compiled. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle William had ‘deep speech’ with the men of his council and sent officials into every shire to find out ‘what or how much each landholder had in land and livestock, and what it was worth’. The subsequent work was in fact so copious and so detailed, in single columns and double columns of Latin, that it must have made use of earlier records. It comprises two books, one of 475 pages and the other of 413 pages, with some of the capital letters touched with red ink. It describes over 13,000 locations, the vast majority of which survive still. The authors of the Chronicle state that there was not ‘an ox nor a cow nor a pig that was overlooked and not included in the record’. The level of detail is evident in one entry. In Oakley, Buckinghamshire, it was reported that ‘Aelfgyth the maid had half a hide which Godric the sheriff granted her as long as he was sheriff, on condition of her teaching his daughter gold embroidery work. This land Robert FitzWalter holds now.’

The Domesday Book was commissioned by William at Christmas 1085, and was completed a year later; such speed was only possible within an existing administrative system. It was not a Norman, but an English, device. William could not have transferred English land to French magnates, after his invasion, without some existing record of English holdings that has long since been lost. It was in part compiled as documentation and evidence of that transfer, but it was also used as an instrument both for the more efficient raising of taxes and for the more accurate imposition of military service. It seems also to have been instrumental in a fairer distribution of the financial burdens William was placing on the country. He summoned his chief landholders to Salisbury where they swore loyalty to him once more; but now he knew both the extent of their possessions and their annual income. They were reminded that they held their lands directly or indirectly from the sovereign. He was their master. Domesday Book can now be seen in a glass case at the National Archives in Kew.

We learn from its pages that England consisted of arable land (35 per cent), woodland (15 per cent), pasture (30 per cent), and meadow (1 per cent); the rest was mountain and fen and heath and waste and wild. We learn also that the manor, inherited from the Danes and the Saxons, was the foundation of agrarian and economic life. In its essence it meant a dwelling, and in Domesday several manors are often listed in one village; but by this period it had generally come to mean an estate of land or lands in which the tenants were bound by fealty to one lord. The lord’s land was known as ‘demesne’ land; it might be adjacent to the manor house, or it might be scattered in strips among the fields.

The free tenants paid him rent for their acreage, and were obliged to help him at the busy times of harvest; the unfree tenants or villeins performed weekly labour service in work such as threshing and winnowing. The terms of this labour were maintained by tradition. Approximately 10 per cent of the population were deemed to be held in slavery, while 14 per cent were described as ‘free men’; the rest of the population were part of a variable range between the two.

The manor was itself established upon the ancient customs and obligations that bound together a small community. A manor might consist of a village with scattered hamlets, all the inhabitants of which did service to the lord. It might consist of several villages. Whatever its form, it was the linchpin of the social order of England. The local court of justice was the manor court, where every aspect of life was ordered and scrutinized. The paths and hedges had to be maintained, and the rights of cultivation or inheritance supported.

The origins of the manor are still a matter of debate. Was a manorial system imposed upon what was once a freer communal system of agriculture? It is more likely that there were always lords, and that their control over the centuries became more rigorous. Yet no certainty is possible. We must accustom our eyes to the twilight.

Domesday did not of course describe the conditions of actual life in late eleventh-century England. The summer of 1086 was the worst in living memory; the harvest failed and some malignant fever affected half of the English population. ‘The wretched victims had nearly perished by the fever,’ the Chronicle wrote of that year, ‘then came the sharp hunger, and destroyed them outright.’

William himself died in the autumn of 1087. He had been campaigning on the borders of Normandy, during one of his frequent visits to his duchy, where he became gravely ill from heat and exhaustion; when his horse jumped a ditch, his internal organs were in some way ruptured. He was carried to a priory at Rouen, where he lingered for three weeks. When his body was taken to the monastery of St Stephen at Caen for burial the body burst, exuding a foul stench that sent the mourners running from the building. It was, perhaps, a fitting end for one who was already swollen with greed and cruelty. He had a cold heart and a bloody hand.

He bestowed the duchy of Normandy upon his eldest son, Robert; Robert had asked him for it before, but William had replied that it was not his custom to take off his clothes until he went to bed. The dying king left England to God’s mercy and to the care of his second son, William Rufus. To his youngest son, Henry, William left £5,000 of silver as a consolation; Henry carefully weighed it before taking it away. The threefold disposition was a source of much strife and disquiet in subsequent years; the three brothers quarrelled over Normandy, in particular, like children fighting over a piece of pie.

William Rufus held England. William the Red, of red face, of red beard and of red temper, was almost a comic-book version of his father. He was short and thickset, with a protruding stomach; he was very strong but, unlike his father, he was not of forceful address. A medieval proverb might suit some of William’s characteristics. Who ever knew a tall man who was clever, a red-head who was faithful, or a short man who was humble?

When in a passion or in a rage, he stammered or spoke in short sentences. But he possessed more attractive characteristics. He soothed difficult situations with a joke, and liked to outrage the more serious-minded of his clerical advisers with a scandalous or blasphemous remark. This amused his courtiers. His most famous oath was ‘by the face of Lucca’; this was the face of a wooden image of Christ in the church of St Martin in Lucca. He was boastful and ebullient, extravagant and bold; he always appeared to be greater than he was.

In his youth William had been devoted to the interests of his father, believing that this was where his own advantage lay. He stayed in Normandy until he was in his twenties, and so it is very unlikely that he was fluent in English. We may prefer to call him Guillaume le Rouge. He had left his dying father’s side at Rouen, and crossed the Channel in order to claim his kingdom. At the age of thirty-one he was crowned in Westminster Abbey by Archbishop Lanfranc as William II, apparently on Lanfranc’s own initiative; the archbishop was the most powerful man in England and, as it were, was standing in for God. The coronation liturgy was Anglo-Saxon, but the languages of the service were French and Latin.

The king’s skills were soon tested. He put down a rebellion by some of the Norman magnates of England in favour of his older brother, Robert, by using what was essentially an English army; one chronicler suggests that 30,000 men flocked to his standard, but that may just be a device to convey a large number. Nevertheless Englishmen fought against the rebellious Norman magnates on behalf of their king. National feeling was coming forward once more, and this resurgence of national consciousness is plain in the soldiers’ call on William to win the whole ‘Empire of Albion’.

He answered this call by marching north. In the spring of 1091 Malcolm of Scotland had invaded northern England, hoping to advance his claims to a large part of that territory. As the leader of the southern part of Scotland, Malcolm Canmore, or Malcolm Big Head, had already provoked William I with raids and alarms; eventually he had submitted to the stronger power. Now he was testing his son.

William Rufus moved against him by taking Cumbria, then under the overlordship of Scotland. He captured and refounded Carlisle, settling it with English farming families, and effectively redrew the northwestern frontier of England. It remains the frontier to this day. He found the English settlers among the workers on the royal lands in the south and, unfree as they undoubtedly were, they could only obey the summons. Yet they represent the beginning of English colonialism. In pursuit of the ‘Empire of Albion’, William Rufus had invoked the spirit of English imperialism. He also began the work of conquering Wales that until this time was comprised of warring principalities. That land was planted with castles, as the English moved slowly forward. But they were beset by Welsh rebellion, and in the end William held only Glamorgan and one castle in Pembroke. On the battlefield he never completely failed and never wholly succeeded; but his bravado kept him going.

The king always needed more money, too. He was constantly battling against his enemies – in Scotland, in Wales, in Northumberland and in Normandy. He was most alive in the preparation and prosecution of wars. That was what a king did. When he was about to set sail for Normandy, for another assault upon Duke Robert, a great tempest threatened. But he jumped upon his boat. ‘I never heard of a king being drowned,’ he cried. ‘Make haste. Loose your cables. You will see the elements join to obey me.’

He fell dangerously ill in the early months of 1093 and, in peril of his life, his thoughts turned to God. His religious advisers urged him to repent of, and amend, his sins; it must have been difficult for him to know where to start. He could at least rectify one grave fault at once. After the death of Lanfranc, three years before, he had left vacant the archbishopric of Canterbury so that he himself could enjoy its revenues. With the prospect of hellfire before him, he acted. One outstanding candidate was, fortunately, close to hand. The abbot of Bec, Anselm, was in England on a fraternal visit. He was known throughout Normandy for his piety and learning, albeit disguised by genuine humility.

William summoned him to his bed of illness, and offered Canterbury to him. Anselm refused, on the very good grounds that he did not trust the king and foresaw great difficulties in working with him. William then cried out, according to a monk in the surrounding company, ‘Oh Anselm what are you doing? Why are you delivering me to crucifixion and eternal punishment?’ More was said in that vein. Anselm was still unmoved, and so the king ordered everyone in the chamber to prostrate themselves before the holy man. Anselm in turn fell upon his knees, and begged them to find another candidate for the office.

It was time to resort to force, in a thoroughly medieval way. The courtiers pulled him to the bedside, and gave the king the pastoral staff that was the symbol of office. When Anselm refused to take it, they tried to prise open his fingers. They managed to bend the forefinger, at which he cried out in pain. They placed the staff against his clenched hand, and the office of investiture was read out in haste. Then they all cried out, ‘Long live the bishop!’ Anselm was carried protesting to the nearest church, where what the monk called the ‘appropriate ceremonies’ were performed. It was an unedifying start to what proved to be an unpleasant relationship between the king and the archbishop. As Anselm said at the time, an old sheep was being yoked to an unbroken bull. The king recovered from his illness, and promptly reneged on all the sacred pledges he had made on what he had believed to be his deathbed. What man, he asked, can keep all of his promises?

Anselm had a deep respect for the office of archbishop, which he deemed to be equal in authority to that of the sovereign. Where Lanfranc had believed it to be prudent to avoid antagonizing the king, Anselm had a more delicate conscience. He was also a trained logician, with the habit of rigour and persistence. He lectured the king on his duties, to which William replied in his usual forceful and impetuous manner. ‘I will see to this matter when I think good,’ the king once said to him. ‘I will act, not after your pleasure, but my own.’ On being told that he must rid the nation of sin the king asked him, with a sneer, ‘And what may come of this matter for you?’

‘For me, nothing,’ Anselm replied. ‘For you and for God I hope much.’

‘That’s enough of that.’ The king had spoken.

When the archbishop implored him to fill the vacancies among the abbots, he became very angry. ‘Are not the abbeys mine? You do as you choose with your manors. Shall I not do as I choose with my abbeys?’ When the final parting came, and Anselm was about to leave England as a virtual exile and retire to Rome, the king was still vengeful. ‘Tell the archbishop,’ he said, ‘that I hated him yesterday and that I hate him even more today. Tell him that I will hate him more and more tomorrow and every day. As for his prayers and benedictions, I spit them back in his face.’

The problem was that William would have no rival authority in his kingdom. He spoke disparagingly of the pope as well as the archbishop. It was the endless dilemma of church and state. Clerical rights and royal authority were on occasion opposed one to another. The decrees of the pope were sometimes at variance with the customs of the realm. Did the king have the right to nominate bishops and abbots? Could he dispose of church property if he so wished? Could he refuse a papal legate entry into the country? A further difficulty arose. The archbishop, technically, was a vassal of the king to whom he pledged loyalty; but he was also a servant of the pope. It is sometimes impossible to serve two masters, as the later career of Thomas Becket will reveal.

William Rufus was continually on the move, taking his court with him. The equipment of the larder, the pantry and the buttery was packed into carts and transported wherever the king wished; the hounds were leashed and led forward; the members of the court rode on horseback, followed by ‘parasites’ and prostitutes. It resembled a small army on the march, and was as much feared as an army. The courtiers took, or stole, whatever they needed. They devastated small towns and villages with their exactions. This was the real nature of power in England at this time. It was based on violence and greed.

That court itself was an object of scandal in another sense since it was rumoured that the king’s closest companions were sodomites. It is a practice not altogether unknown among warrior elites; the Spartans are a prime example. So it was not wholly against the Norman ethos. William never married, and had no illegitimate children; it seems likely, in fact, that he was a practising homosexual. He was surrounded by what the chroniclers called ‘effeminates’ with mincing step and extravagant costume; they wore their hair long like women, letting it tumble down in ringlets that had been curled by crisping-irons; the lamps of the court were put out at night so that unnatural sins might be committed under cover of darkness.

William II died in 1100, in as swift and sudden a fashion as he had lived. The story goes that, on the night before his death, he had a dream in which he was being bled by his leeches; his blood surged upwards and covered the sky, turning day into night. He woke up in great fear, and called out to the Virgin Mary; then he ordered lights to be brought into his chamber. There is another story of his last night on earth. The account of a dream or vision, granted to a monk from the abbey at Gloucester, was brought to him. In the monk’s dream the king was seen to attack the crucifix, and gnaw at the arm of Christ; but Christ kicked out at him, and left him sprawling on the ground. It is a vivid image, but not so vivid as to overawe William Rufus. He is reported to have laughed, and ordered that the monk be given 100 shillings.

Another source records that it was the abbot of Gloucester who sent news of the monk’s vision in a letter to the king. William’s response is interesting. ‘Does he think that I act like the English,’ the king is supposed to have asked, ‘postponing their travels and business because of the snores and dreams of little old women?’ The English were indeed noted for their superstitious credulity as well as their piety; William might very well have made a remark of that kind, with its implicit contempt for his subjects.

He had decided to spend the day of 2 August 1100 hunting in the New Forest, one of the large stretches of land devoted to the king’s sport. As he prepared himself for the hunt, a blacksmith presented him with six arrows; the king kept two for himself and gave four to a companion, by the name of Walter Tirel. He sat down to eat before riding out, and drank more than was good for him. Then he and Tirel set off, separating from the others so that they could shoot at the deer that were being driven towards them. The king shot first, and wounded a stag. Walter Tirel then aimed at a second stag, but by accident hit the king in the chest. William staggered forward, and then fell on the arrow. Tirel, in panic fear, fled from the scene of the king’s death.

That is the accepted version of William’s end. In truth there is no reason to question it. None of the chroniclers seems to doubt that the death was accidental. Hunting accidents happen. Many of the great events of history are simply accidents. But the death of a king arouses suspicions. His younger brother, Henry, was a member of the hunting party. Could he have hoped to succeed to the throne? Or could a foreign court have been at work, using a Norman accomplice? Or was there perhaps some private enemy, taking advantage of the king’s presence in the forest? The ancient philosophers have said that truth lies at the bottom of a well.

There is another, kinder, story about his death. It has been reported that in his final agony he called out for the Eucharist to be administered to him. No cleric, or communion bread, could be found in the forest. So one of the hunting party put flowers and herbs into his mouth, as a form of natural communion.

William’s end forcibly impressed his contemporaries. It made such a deep impression, in fact, that his death is the only event of his reign that has stayed in the consciousness of the English. He had come and gone like the lightning flash. He had behaved as a king. He had exploited the realm entirely for his own benefit, and had attempted to extend it as a measure of his own power. He pushed the boundaries further back. He had achieved very little else but, in a period of factional violence, it was perhaps enough that he had kept the country united – even if it was only united in suffering.

His body, bleeding profusely, was taken in a horse-drawn wagon to Winchester, where the canons of the Old Minster took charge of the proceedings. It was said that his corpse resembled that of a wild boar pierced by a hunter. William Rufus was buried, without much ostentation or show of grief, under the tower. The tower crumbled and collapsed a few years later. A black pillar, known as the Rufus Stone, marked the place in the New Forest where he fell. It still stands.

Some of William’s own monuments also survive him. He completed the White Tower and built Westminster Hall, largely with gangs of pressed labour groaning under the exaction. He rebuilt London Bridge, but a flood washed away much of its structure. Westminster Hall survives, albeit in altered form, as the most appropriate token of William’s might. This dark and solemn building, of thick walls and huge pillars, was unimaginably large to the people of the time. But it was not vast enough for William. When it was finished, he declared that it was not half as great as he had intended. ‘It is’, he said, ‘big enough to be one of my bedchambers.’ Listen to the indomitable arrogance of the Norman kings of England.

The last of them, Henry, came down quickly like a wolf on the fold. As soon as he heard the news of his elder brother’s death, he rode to Winchester and seized the treasury there. Three days later, on 5 August 1100 at the age of thirty-two, he was crowned as Henry I at Westminster. He had been alternately bribed and bullied by his two elder brothers, as they all fought over lordship of Normandy, but the possession of England was a greater benefit. He was more reserved and cautious than William Rufus, and proceeded to handle his prize with circumspection. He was called ‘Beauclerc’ or ‘the good scholar’; he was literate, and spoke Latin. But he also had other accomplishments; he fathered over twenty bastards.

In his coronation charter he promised to undo the wrongs committed by his predecessor. He invited Anselm to return to Canterbury, a polite request that the cleric accepted. He gained the loyalty of the principal magnates by the judicious use of patronage. He extinguished private wars between barons. And he married Edith, the niece of the new king of Scotland; more importantly, perhaps, she was linked by blood with the line of Anglo-Saxon kings and was a direct descendant of Alfred the Great. The Norman dynasty was thereby sanctified in the eyes of the English. She did, however, abandon her English name and was known as Matilda; this was the name of Henry’s mother.

Henry was intent upon consolidating his dominion. Forty years after the Norman invasion and conquest of England, the English invaded and conquered Normandy. Henry led his troops into the duchy and, at the battle of Tinchebray, captured his elder brother; Duke Robert was taken to England, and spent the rest of his life in prison. It was a signal victory for the new king, having reunited the lands of his father. For all but the first two of his thirty-five years as monarch, the country was at peace. He set up a ferry service between Southampton and Dieppe. One other innovation of the realm deserves to be mentioned. At the beginning of the twelfth century, the rabbit was introduced to England.

Henry maintained the borders with Scotland, but did not choose to enlarge them. He built upon his brother’s conquests in Wales by a policy of encouraging Anglo-Norman settlement and of conciliating various Welsh princes; a Welsh chronicler declared that Henry ‘had subdued under his authority all the island of Britain and its mighty ones’. That was not entirely true. The eastern and southern parts of Wales had come under the control of Norman lords, with their panoply of castles and of courts and of burgeoning towns, but the central and northern areas of the country were still governed by the native princes. When many Flemings migrated to the east coast of England, on account of the floods in their own region, the king settled them in Pembrokeshire, where they maintained their own language and culture until the end of the eighteenth century.

He was a strong sovereign, then, but not necessarily a benevolent one. He was concerned only with his own immediate interest, and the government of England became a form of estate management in which all of the available assets of the land were exploited. That was the Norman way. Throughout his reign the monks from Peterborough Abbey lamented ‘manifold oppressions and taxations’. An extraordinary series of bad harvests also undermined the ability of the people to withstand his exactions. ‘God knows’, an Anglo-Saxon chronicler wrote, ‘how unjustly this miserable people is dealt with. First they are deprived of their property, and then they are put to death. If a man possesses anything, it is taken from him. If he has nothing, he is left to perish by famine.’ The king did take care to protect his supporters. When the coinage was debased with tin, Henry’s soldiers complained that their pay was nearly worthless; he ordered that all of the coiners should be castrated and lose their right hands. He cultivated the interests of the magnates, too, by royal gifts and allowances; eulogists duly celebrated the harmony and loyalty of England. The aristocracy, in other words, could always be bribed and bought.

He of course also fostered the interests of his immediate family. He strengthened his authority by an intricate series of marital arrangements whereby his illegitimate daughters became aligned with the various ruling families of Europe. He married his legitimate daughter, Matilda, to the prince of Anjou; from this union a new race of kings would spring.

It was said that he was endlessly inquisitive about the lives of his magnates, and knew of the existence of plots against him before the plotters themselves. He was a man of great natural curiosity, too, and was nicknamed by one of his kinsmen ‘stag foot’; he could determine, from the track of a stag, how many antlers the creature had.

There was one significant event, however, that he could not foresee. It occurred on the evening of 25 November 1120. His sixteen-year-old son and heir, William Adelin, was about to sail from Normandy to England. His party went aboard the White Ship in a festive atmosphere; the presence of an heir apparent always gives rise to gaiety. The crew, as well as the passengers, were drunk. The rowers kept up a frantic pace, but the helmsman was inattentive. The ship rushed on to its fate, and crashed against a large rock hidden just below the waterline. The heir to the throne was drowned, as well as many younger members of the nobility. Only one person, a butcher from Rouen, survived.

A survivor, in another sense, was left alive. The king’s nephew, Stephen, count of Blois, was suffering from a severe bout of diarrhoea and declined to join the revelry aboard the White Ship. Since he would be crowned as king of England fifteen years later, it can plausibly be maintained that an attack of diarrhoea determined the fate of the nation. Statesmen may plot and plan. Learned men may calculate and conclude. Diplomats may debate and prevaricate. But chance rules the immediate affairs of humankind.

It was said that, after the disaster, Henry never smiled again. But that is a line from a fairy tale. More realistic consequences ensued. The problem of succession, for example, soon became acute. Henry had only one legitimate child, Matilda, and he fathered no other children in the latter years of his reign. No woman had ever sat on the throne of England before, but Henry was not deterred. He gathered the principal barons of the land in Westminster Hall, and ordered them to swear an oath that they would uphold the succession of his daughter. Henry had a voice like thunder, and they quailed before the blast. They duly swore. Yet what was unintended and unforeseen once more came to pass. The perilous consequence of the succession was a long civil war.

While hunting in one of the royal forests of Normandy, the king contracted a violent fever. It was reported that his death was hastened by ‘a surfeit of lampreys’, and indeed he had always liked marine delicacies. In one charter he allowed the bishop of London to take porpoises from the Thames ‘except the tongue which I reserve for myself’. He lay for some days in weakness and confusion; but he confessed his sins, in front of many witnesses, and was given absolution. His body was embalmed but the unfortunate and unskilful embalmer died from the infectious stench that rose from the cadaver; one chronicler, Henry of Huntingdon, remarked that ‘he was the last of many whom King Henry had put to death’. The corpse, leaking what was described as black fluid, was eventually taken to Reading Abbey. This was the abbey that Henry had established as a memorial to his son. Its ruins can still be seen.

It is hard to speak of his achievement in any very positive way. He kept the peace in England. He was a good manager of business, and helped to maintain the administration of the country by appointing what were called ‘new men’. These were Norman or Breton clerks ‘of base stock’, according to Orderic Vitalis, whom the king had raised ‘from the dust’ and ‘stationed above earls and owners of castles’. He worked them hard but rewarded them accordingly. They represented a new class of professional administrators or curiales who stayed in one place and who were not part of the itinerant royal household. They were a sign of central administration.

The king always needed to make money, and the intensification of the royal government was essentially another way of increasing his income. Goods, and land, were forfeited to the king. Plaintiffs of every kind could negotiate a fine, by which they purchased royal favour. This is sometimes described by historians as legal reform. One judge from Henry’s own court was very stern with his contemporaries. ‘From the desire of money we become tyrants’, he wrote. ‘Legal process is involved in so many anxieties and deceits that men avoid these exactions and the uncertain outcome of pleas.’ So much for the description of Henry as ‘the Lion of Justice’. The lion’s law was the law of the jungle.

Other means could be found of making money. The exchequer, with abacus beads for calculation and a court for the audit of accounts, became more prominent during Henry’s reign. The money came from taxes and tolls. A rich orphan could be sold to the highest bidder, who then became his or her guardian; a wealthy heiress could be purchased as a bride. It was just a question of seizing the opportunity. ‘The king enquired into everything,’ Orderic Vitalis wrote, ‘and what he learned he held in his tenacious memory.’

As the king, so the age. In the early twelfth century there was a steady increase in what would now be known as bureaucracy, the word coming from the writing desk or bureau. Written documentation now became an essential element in the calculation of revenue and expenditure. The laws, and other formal rules, were written down. The essential movement of the age was towards systematization and centralization. In this period the two central departments of the court, the chancery and the exchequer, emerged in recognizable form. The chancery, staffed by clerics, dealt with manifold aspects of government business from the writing of treaties to the granting of charters. The exchequer was the department in which all of the king’s revenue and expenditure were controlled. So by slow and almost imperceptible means the English ‘state’ was created. No one was interested in creating a ‘state’. No one would have known what it meant. Yet it was the direct consequence of all these disparate activities.

Henry had never really liked or trusted the English. He did not appoint any of them to high office, but relied instead upon his French clerics and courtiers. ‘No virtue or merit could advance an Englishman’, one contemporary wrote. Henry’s son, William, had said that if he ever ruled England he would yoke the English to the plough like oxen. It was perhaps better that he drowned in the Channel. Yet the English had survived, and the slow process of assimilation had already begun. The Norman settlers had indeed settled, and were beginning to refer to England as their true home. A whole world of English song existed. The English monks wrote histories of their foundations and the lives of their local saints.

Another force for the cultivation of England can also be traced. In the early decades of the twelfth century a new order of monks came from France into England. These were the white monks, originally from the abbey of Cîteaux, who were known as the Cistercians. It was part of their unique mission to live far apart from the ordinary habitations of men, and to survive by tilling the soil; the land was supposed to be their sole source of income, and they eschewed all forms of luxury. They were soon established over vast swathes of northern England, where they employed lay brothers as their farm workers. So large tracts of undeveloped country came under the plough. The fens were drained and the forests were cleared; more controversially, however, villages were sometimes destroyed to make way for fruitful fields. The Cistercians soon proved themselves to be excellent sheep farmers, too, and the local economy flourished under their supervision. They became the most significant group of woolgrowers in the country and, despite their profession, they grew rich. That is the story of the Church itself.

10

The road

The ancient roads, the witnesses of prehistoric life and travel, still persisted in the medieval landscape. But they were joined by other highways in the historical period. Many winding lanes between farmstead and farmstead, many sunken hollow-ways leading to the village, deep-set and drowsy on a summer afternoon, were constructed in the twelfth century. It was a great age of building stone bridges that needed roads on either bank, and the growth of towns required the more intensive use of the cart and the packhorse as a means of trade and transport. The ‘Gough’ map, dating approximately from 1360, reveals a network of major roads linking London with the other regions of the country. More small roads and tracks could be found in the thirteenth than in the twenty-first century.

The width for the king’s highways was fixed in the early part of the twelfth century as that which would allow two wagons to pass each other, or for sixteen knights to ride abreast. We might calculate this to be 30 feet (9 metres). They were not all necessarily in good condition, however, and there is evidence of ditches, potholes and even wells dug into the surface. The people were urged as a religious duty to give funds for the mending of ‘wikked wayes’; townspeople and landowners en route were obliged to maintain and preserve the roads of their immediate neighbourhood.

The travellers made use of the inns that had been established along the high roads since the time of the Saxons; the word ‘inn’ is itself of Saxon origin and takes its place beside ‘gest-hus’ and ‘cumena-hus’ as a lodging for tired and dusty patrons. Alehouses were to be recognized by a long projecting pole beside the door, from which a bush was hung. That tradition has continued into the twenty-first century, with hanging baskets of flowers commonly suspended outside public houses.

The most common form of travel was by horse, although the native breeds were not considered to be as sturdy as those from the continent; a white horse was the most prized, followed by a dapple-grey and a chestnut. The roads were not safe from thieves and outlaws, so the travellers would form groups or ‘caravans’ for mutual protection. Even the knights and landowners of the neighbourhood might engage in highway robbery, and it was not uncommon for travellers to be obliged to pay exorbitant rates to cross a bridge or a ford. The members of the group would carry with them flint and steel, in order to prepare a fire, and also the rudiments of bedding in case they could not find accommodation; they also brought with them bread, meat and beer.

A long tradition of hospitality made it shameful to turn a wayfarer from the door. It was the custom that a traveller might stay two nights with a household, sharing its food and its beds, before taking his or her leave. After that time the host became responsible for the stranger’s conduct. It was also customary, on first arrival, for the traveller’s hands and feet to be washed. But there were benefits for the host in the arrangement. Where are you from? What news? What have you seen? In a nation where communication was often slow or nonexistent, the arrival of a stranger was a matter of consequence.

Sometimes only slow progress could be made. The Canterbury pilgrims rode for three or four days before they could cover the 54½ miles (88 kilometres) from London. But there were also ‘pilgrim roads’. One route, from Winchester to Canterbury, has even become known as the Pilgrims Way or what Hilaire Belloc called the Old Road. Pilgrims were the largest and most recognizable of all bodies of wayfarers. They walked or rode to Durham in order to visit the tomb of St Cuthbert; they came to the shrine of Edward the Confessor at Westminster; they travelled to Glastonbury to marvel at the thorn tree miraculously planted there by Joseph of Arimathea; they went to worship the vial of holy blood, a relic of the crucifixion, at Hailes Abbey in Gloucestershire; they visited Winchester to pray at the shrine of St Swithin. The woods beside the road to St Albans had to be cleared to accommodate the throng of pilgrims making their way to the shrine of the martyred saint.

The two most prominent sites of pilgrimage were those of Our Lady at Walsingham and of Thomas Becket at Canterbury. The road from Newmarket to Walsingham is still known as ‘the Palmers Way’, palmer being another term for pilgrim. It was often crowded with worshippers, and its route was lined with inns and chapels; the town itself was filled to bursting with wayfarers. Many cases of healing were recorded at Canterbury. The diseased limb of a sufferer would be measured with a piece of thread, and a wax replica made of it; this was then brought to the tomb. Many invalids were carried in carts to pray before Becket’s remains, but the saint was also known to cure hawks and horses. The noise in the cathedral was deafening.

The pilgrims of England are long gone, but something of that world persists. Buxton Water is still bottled and purchased in large quantities; those who drink it are part of the same tradition as those pilgrims who in the medieval period bathed in the waters of the holy well of St Anne in Buxton that were deemed to be a sovereign curative.

11

The law is lost

On the death of a king, law was lost. When the king died, the peace died with him. Only on the accession of a new sovereign did law return. Knights fled back to their castles in fear of losing them. It was a question of saving what you could at a time when order was suspended. On receiving the news of King Henry’s death his nephew, Stephen, count of Blois, left France and sailed to England quickly. He rode to London with his knightly followers, and the citizens acclaimed him as their king according to ancient custom. Whereupon he rode to Winchester and claimed the treasury.

As the son of Henry’s sister, Stephen had for a long time been associated with the royal court. He was, after all, the grandson of William the Conqueror. Clearly he considered himself to be Henry’s protégé and, in the absence of any legitimate royal sons, perhaps his natural heir. He persuaded many of the leaders of the kingdom that this was so. One person needed no persuasion. His brother, Henry, was bishop of Winchester. It may even have been he who prompted Stephen’s decision to claim the throne. He entrusted his brother with the keys of the treasury and, three weeks after the death of the king, on 22 December 1135, Stephen was crowned in Westminster Abbey.

The magnates had sworn fealty to the king’s daughter, Matilda, but in truth many of them had no wish to be governed by a woman. No queen had ever ruled in England, and in any case Matilda was known to be of imperious temperament. It was reported with much relief that, on his deathbed, Henry had disinherited his daughter in favour of his nephew. The report may not have been true, but it was highly convenient.

So Stephen was set for a fair start. He was not treated as a usurper, but as an anointed king. He also had the immense advantage of a well-stocked treasury, amassed through Henry I’s prudence in years of peace. The money allowed him to recruit large numbers of mercenary troops with which to defend his lands in France and the northern frontier with Scotland. The king of Scotland, David, claimed the counties of Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland as part of his sovereign territory; he was inclined to demonstrate the fact by marching south. At the battle of the Standard in 1138, named after the fact that the banners of three English saints were carried to the scene of combat, Stephen’s army under the leadership of northern lords defeated the Scots. A chronicler, John of Worcester, rejoiced that ‘we were victorious’; the use of the first person plural here is significant. The English were coming together.

But the money began to run out. Stephen had been too generous for his own good. A poor king is a luckless king. He debased the currency, to pay for his troops, but of course the price of goods rose ever higher as a result. Then, in the autumn of 1139, Matilda arrived to claim her country. In her company was her bastard half-brother, Robert, whom the late king had ennobled as earl of Gloucester. This was a war between cousins that became also a civil war. Matilda was strong in the west, particularly around Gloucester and Bristol, while Stephen was dominant in the southeast. In the midlands and in the north, neither party was pre-eminent. In those regions the local magnates were the natural rulers.

The instinct of the Anglo-Norman lords was for battle; like the salamander, they lived in fire. William I had realized that, and had ruled them like a tyrant. He had said that his lords were ‘eager for rebellion, ready for tumults and for every kind of crime’. They needed to be yoked and held down. Norman kings had to be strong in order to survive. But Stephen was not strong. By all accounts he was affable and amiable, easy to approach and easier to persuade. More damning still, he was lenient towards his enemies. There could be no greater contrast with the kings who had preceded him. He surrendered to the pope the power of appointing abbots and bishops; he also agreed that the bishops should wield power ‘over ecclesiastical persons’. At a stroke the prerogative of kings was diminished. He struck bargains with his great lords that rendered him merely the first among equals.

The barons knew well enough that loyalty and discipline had been undermined by the arrival of Matilda. Here was a welcome opportunity to extend their power. Their castles were further strengthened, and became the centres of marauding soldiers. For the next sixteen years, neither peace nor justice was enjoyed. Private wars were conducted between magnates under the pretence of attachment to Stephen or Matilda. Skirmishes and sieges, raids and ambushes, were perpetrated by the armies of the two rivals. Churches were ransacked, and farms were pillaged. Battles between towns, as well as between barons, took place. The men of Gloucester, supporting Matilda, marched upon Worcester and attempted to put the town to the torch. They also took prisoners, leashing them together like dogs, while most of the people of Worcester took refuge with their belongings in the cathedral.

A brief chronology of warfare can be given. The arrival of Matilda in England had not created any overwhelming enthusiasm for her rule; the barons of the west largely supported her, but her principal ally was still her bastard half-brother. Robert of Gloucester became the leader of her army of mercenaries. Her second husband, Geoffrey of Anjou, was detained by wars of his own.

After her landing at Arundel in 1139 numerous small battles erupted in the western counties, such as Somerset and Cornwall, with castles being taken and recaptured. Sporadic fighting continued in the following year, with incidents occurring in regions as various as Bristol and the Isle of Ely, but without any definite victory or defeat. The great lords of England were confronted with a situation of insidious civil war without precedent in English history; some took advantage of the chaos, while others were no doubt anxious and dispirited. Stephen was widely regarded as the consecrated king, and there seems to have been no great popular support for Matilda’s title; even her supporters were instructed to style her by the essentially feudal name of domina, or ‘lady’, rather than queen. Stephen himself was possessed of remarkable stamina, moving across the country almost continually, but his progress was abruptly curtailed when he was captured at Lincoln in the beginning of February 1141.

He was taken prisoner and confined to a dungeon in Bristol; a few weeks later, Matilda was hailed as ‘lady of England’. She was never crowned. Nevertheless this was a disturbing moment for those who believed in the sacral role of kingship. No king of England had ever before been imprisoned in his own country. Matilda herself became more vociferous and imperious in her triumph, demanding money and tribute from those whom she believed to be her defeated adversaries. She was admitted into London reluctantly, its citizens having been enthusiastic supporters of Stephen, but she proceeded to alienate the Londoners still further by angrily asking for money. A few days after her arrival in the city, the bells of the churches were rung and a mob descended on a banquet at Westminster where she was about to dine. She took horse and rode precipitately to Oxford. It was one of her many fortunate escapes. On one occasion she retreated from the castle at Devizes in the guise of a corpse; she was wrapped in linen cerecloth, and tied by ropes to a bier. Subsequently she was besieged in the castle at Oxford on a winter’s night; she dressed in white, and was thus camouflaged against the snow as she made her way down the frozen Thames to Wallingford.

Despite Stephen’s capture his army, under the nominal command of his wife, took the field. Matilda retreated further and further west. Many of her supporters fled for their lives. But Robert of Gloucester was captured in the same year as Stephen. He was the unofficial leader of Matilda’s forces, and it seemed only natural that he should be freed in exchange for the king. So Stephen was released and reunited with his kingdom. There resumed the deadly game of chess, with knights and castles being lost or regained. War continued for twelve more years.

Some parts of the country suffered more than others. A monk of Winchester describes the effects of famine, with villagers eating the flesh of dogs and horses. Another monk, from the abbey at Peterborough, reports in some detail the depredations of the lords of the castles; they taxed the villages in their domains to such an extent that the villagers all fled leaving their fields and cottages behind. Yet the actual incidents of violence were local and specific.

This short period has been called ‘the Anarchy’, when Christ and his saints slept, but that is to underestimate or altogether ignore the underlying strength of the country. The administrative order of the nation, built over many hundreds of years, remained broadly intact. The walls of most of the towns were fortified in this period, but urban activity continued as before. It is even more surprising, perhaps, that in the years of Stephen’s rule more abbeys were built and founded than at any other period in English history. The Cistercians continued to flourish. The tower of Tewkesbury Abbey and the choir of Peterborough Cathedral were completed in the years of warfare.

War itself was not incessant. All hostilities were suspended in the penitential seasons of Lent and Advent. While Matilda’s mercenaries and the Anglo-Norman barons fought one another, the English people for the most part went about their business. Of course there were casualties and victims of civil war, adumbrated by the monks of Peterborough and Winchester, but there is no need to draw a picture of universal woe and desolation. It is perhaps worth recording that in the years of ‘the Anarchy’, the umbrella was introduced into England. It has outlived cathedrals and palaces.

One singular change was wrought by the intermittent warfare. The king no longer trusted the centralized bureaucracy established by Henry I, and he arrested its leading members in the persons of the bishops of Salisbury, Ely and Lincoln. He may have believed that they had secretly taken the side of Matilda and Robert of Gloucester. He also captured their castles; in this world bishops owned castles, too. Then in difficult and unusual circumstances, by instinct or design, he reversed the policy of the former king and devolved much of his power. He created earls as leaders for most of the counties; they were charged with political and military administration of their territories, and represented the king in all but name. There is in other words nothing inevitable in the growth of the English state; what can be proposed can also be reversed. That is why, on his accession, Henry II determined that he would return to the principles of his grandfather. He was a strong king, and therefore a centralist.

In 1147, at the age of fourteen, he had come to England as Henry of Anjou. He commanded a small army of mercenaries, ready to fight for Matilda’s claim, but he did not materially benefit his mother. He was defeated at Cricklade, by the Thames, and in a characteristic act of generosity Stephen himself helped him to return to Normandy. In the final years of the conflict it was apparent to everyone that Stephen was the victor, but it was also agreed that Henry of Anjou was his natural and inevitable successor. The magnates of the land were now largely supporting his claims.

So with the aid and entreaty of prominent churchmen, an agreement was drawn up at Winchester in 1153; it was settled that Stephen would reign, but that he would recognize Henry as his heir. Henry gave homage to Stephen, and Stephen swore an oath to maintain Henry as son and successor. The custody of the important castles – Wallingford, Oxford, Windsor, Winchester and the Tower – was secured, and the pact was witnessed by the leading barons on both sides of the dispute. Matilda retired to Rouen, where she devoted her remaining years to charitable works. Sixteen years of largely futile struggle had finally been resolved. The fighting was worse than useless. It had solved nothing. It had proved nothing. In that sense, it is emblematic of most medieval conflict. It is hard to resist the suspicion that kings and princes engaged in warfare for its own sake. That was what they were supposed to do.

Stephen had sworn that he would never be a dethroned king, and indeed that fate was averted. Yet he did not enjoy his unchallenged royalty for very long. He began the process of restoring social order but, less than a year after the signing of the treaty at Winchester, he succumbed to some intestinal infection; he died in the Augustinian priory at Dover on 25 October 1154. It is possible that he was carried off by poison. There would have been many longing for his death and the rule of a young king, including the young king himself. The life and death of monarchs can be stark and dangerous.

12

The names

The names of the English have changed. Before the invasion of William I the common names were those such as Leofwine, Aelfwine, Siward and Morcar. After the Norman arrival these were slowly replaced by Robert, Walter, Henry and of course William. A feast was held in 1171, celebrated by 110 knights with the name of William; no one with another name was allowed to join them.

When Henry I married Edith of Scotland, she was called ‘Godgiva’ as a joke by his compatriots. It was a parody of an English name, both awkward and archaic. A boy from Whitby, at the beginning of the twelfth century, changed his name from Tostig to William because he was being bullied at school. The serfs and villains kept their ancient names for longer, and a record from 1114 reveals the workers on an estate as Soen, Rainald, Ailwin, Lemar, Godwin, Ordric, Alric, Saroi, Ulviet and Ulfac; the manor was leased by Orm. All these names were soon to be gone. By the first quarter of the thirteenth century the majority of the people of England had new names, many of them taken from the Christian saints of Europe whose cults were spreading through the land. So we have Thomas and Stephen, Elizabeth and Agnes.

The Normans also gave to the English the concept of the inherited surname that came to define a unified family and its property. It generally invoked a place, or piece of territory, owned by that family. Yet there was no very strong tradition of inherited surnames before the fourteenth century. Only very distinguished families had a distinctive name. Instead a person would be given a tag by which he or she would be identified – Roger the Cook, Roger of Derby, Roger son of William. Names were also often used to describe the peculiarities of the individual, such as Roger with the Big Nose or Roger the Effeminate. Mabbs was the daughter of Mabel, and Norris was the female child of a nurse.

Even the occupational names might be changed. In 1455 Matthew Oxe, on gaining his freedom from servile work, changed his name to Matthew Groom. Some ancient names survive still. So we have Cooks and Barbers and Sawyers and Millers and Smiths and Brewers and Carpenters in all of the directories.

13

The turbulent priest

So the son of Matilda, Henry of Anjou, was crowned as Henry II on 19 December 1154. He was the first Angevin king of England. His father, Geoffrey of Anjou, was also known as Geoffrey Plantagenet; this was because he wore a sprig of yellow broom, or planta genesta, when he went riding. From this little sprig grew a great dynasty that endured for more than 300 years; all of the kings of England, from Henry II to Richard III, were Plantagenet until they were supplanted by the Tudors. It was said that the family was the scion of Satan himself, and that one of the early countesses of Anjou was a daughter of the devil who fled shrieking from the sight of the consecrated host. When St Bernard of Clairvaux first saw the young Henry, he is reported to have been filled with dismay and to have said that ‘from the devil they came, and to the devil they will return’. There is much in English history that might confirm the suspicion.

Henry II was twenty-one when he was crowned. His early life had been one of battle and mastery. He became duke of Normandy at the age of sixteen and two years later, on the death of his father, he also became count of Anjou. He then married Eleanor, duchess of Aquitaine, and thereby became the duke of that province. He now owned a large part of France, even though he was technically subject to its king. When he ascended the throne of England, he boasted mistakenly that he had acquired an empire greater than that of Charlemagne three centuries before.

Yet he had inherited a troubled country, recovering its political balance after sixteen years of intermittent civil warfare. He was only one quarter Norman, but he had a Norman sense of authority. He wished to manifest his will by imposing order. He demanded obedience. He forced many of the great magnates to give up castles and estates that he deemed to be his property; he drove the earl of Nottingham out of the kingdom; he levelled all of the castles that had belonged to Stephen’s brother, the bishop of Winchester. In curtailing or arresting the power of individual barons, he tilted the balance of the country towards a strong central monarchy. He ordered out of the kingdom the mercenaries who had been hired by both parties during the civil wars; if they did not leave by a certain date, they were to be arrested and executed. They disappeared swiftly and suddenly.

In 1157 King Malcolm IV of Scotland came to terms with the resurgent king; he did homage for his southern lands, bordering on England, and he surrendered Northumberland, Westmorland and Cumberland that he had dominated in the uncertain reign of Stephen. Malcolm was sixteen, and Henry still just twenty-four. This was a world for young men. Henry then proceeded against Wales, and its princes tendered their homage to him. He also devised grand plans for the invasion of Ireland. He managed all this without ever fighting a formal battle. His genius, instead, lay in the siege and capture of castles.

He was restless by temperament, and impatient of any restraint; he never could sit still, and even when attending Mass he fidgeted and conversed with his courtiers. He always had to be in movement or in activity, even if the activity consisted of gambling or disputation. He often ate his food standing up, so that he might be more quickly done with it. He was stocky and strong, with the look of a huntsman or of a soldier. He had a florid complexion that burned brighter when he was vexed. Yet he was readily approachable, and there are accounts of his modest and benign demeanour when surrounded by throngs of his beseeching subjects. Some of them caught him by the sleeve, in their urge to speak to him, but he never lost his good humour. His jester was known as ‘Roland the Farter’, and ‘every Christmas he used to leap, whistle and fart before the king’.

There is one story that illuminates the happier side of his character. Bishop Hugh of Lincoln had been summoned by the king to explain why he had excommunicated a royal forester. Henry was so incensed that he ordered his courtiers not to notice or greet the bishop on his arrival. Hugh of Lincoln was therefore met with silence and indifference. Nevertheless he eased himself into a position close to the king. Hugh watched his sovereign as he took up a needle and thread to stitch a leather bandage on a finger he had injured; Henry was always careless of his person. Then Hugh suddenly remarked, in French, ‘How like your cousins of Falaise you look’. At which remark the king collapsed in laughter, and started rolling on the ground. The ‘cousins of Falaise’ were related to the illegitimate William the Conqueror; they were well known as lowly leather-workers in that Norman town. The king had seen the joke about his bastard great-grandfather.

In matters of state he was always cautious and circumspect; contemporaries relate that he was a very good manager of business, and that he had an excellent memory for facts and for faces. These were now necessary qualities for any sovereign. His principal purpose was to maintain and organize his empire, and for that it was necessary to be a master of calculation. That is also why he took care never to reveal his feelings, except to those most intimate with him; he needed to remain inscrutable to achieve his ends. Yet, in matters of high policy, he often broke his word.

The year after he had reduced the magnates to submission, he sailed to Normandy where in similarly determined spirit he seized control of his dominion. He took with him his young chancellor. Thomas Becket was a close companion, a friend as well as a counsellor. One of the king’s secretaries, Peter de Blois, wrote that ‘if the king once forms an attachment to a man, he seldom gives him up’; yet that admirable fidelity was tested to breaking point with Becket. It would need a muse of fire adequately to describe their relationship.

Becket was a Londoner, of Norman blood, who was quickly singled out for royal service. He was witty and fluent, serious without being scholarly. More importantly, perhaps, he had a very firm sense of his own dignity and importance. He had come to the attention of the king through the agency of the archbishop of Canterbury, Theobald, who had already learned to appreciate the young archdeacon’s formidable skills as clerk and adviser. Becket soon found himself in the sun of the king’s favour, and as chancellor quickly became indispensable. He was one of those men, like Wolsey after him, who resolve the cares of the sovereign while never encroaching on his majesty. Henry disliked the formal and ritual panoply of kingship, preferring instead sudden judgment and quick action; so Becket became the orator and the ambassador, gladly embracing all the matters of state that the king found unpalatable.

When Becket travelled, he travelled in procession. On a diplomatic visit to Paris, in 1158, he was preceded by 250 foot soldiers and surrounded by an escort of 200 knights and squires. His private wardrobe contained twenty-four changes of silk robes. When three years later Henry mounted an expedition to take the city and region of Toulouse, close to his lands of Gascony and Aquitaine, Becket led his own force of 700 knights.

Shortly afterward, the king proposed that he become archbishop of Canterbury in succession to Theobald. The king himself was not especially pious. He wanted a compliant churchman, effectively just an extension of his own power, and he considered Becket still to be a royal servant and adviser. In this, however, he was mistaken.

The character of Thomas Becket has always been the subject of controversy. His reputation as saint and martyr has, as it were, preceded him. He was a man always willing to play the part. Like a later English saint and martyr, Thomas More, he was always on stage. He took off the twenty-four changes of silk robes, and put on a shirt of sackcloth filled with lice. He lived on bread and water muddied with dirt. In that respect, opposites yoked violently together within one man, he was profoundly medieval. He was also proud, and stubborn, and excessively self-righteous.

As soon as he became archbishop, in 1162, he confronted the king. He refused to allow the sheriffs of Canterbury to send money to the royal treasury; then he challenged the king’s decision that churchmen, found guilty in the clerical courts, should be handed over to the secular authorities for punishment. ‘You do not’, he said, ‘have the power to command bishops.’ But that was precisely what the king wished to do. He was resolved to restore royal authority over the English Church in the style of the Norman kings. They had withstood papal intervention in the affairs of England, and a papal legate could only enter the country at the king’s invitation. The behaviour of Becket, as the agent of the see of Peter, incensed him. Henry did not contest the sacred authority of the Church, but he was determined that it would not encroach upon the rights and duties of the throne.

His anger, once roused, was formidable. Anger was a speciality of the Angevin dynasty, a black and ferocious force that could destroy anything in its path. One courtier recorded an incident when ‘the king, flying into his usual temper, flung his cap from his head, pulled off his belt, threw off his cloak and clothes, grabbed the silken coverlet off the couch, and sitting as it might be on some dungheap started chewing pieces of straw’. This was the man who became the mortal enemy of Thomas Becket. The king was determined to ruin him.

At the beginning of 1164 the king and his advisers drew up a statement of sixteen clauses, known as the Constitutions of Clarendon, in which royal power was asserted against the interests and demands of the pope. Becket first agreed to the proposals, thus seeming ‘to perjure myself’, but then retracted his consent; he refused to sign the document. In the autumn of this year the king called a council at Northampton, with the bishops and great lords of the realm in attendance. Becket was now charged with contempt of court and fined, but the king had prepared further measures. Becket was ordered to account for all the revenue that had passed through his hands as chancellor as well as other sums of money for which he was deemed to be responsible. Henry allowed him no room for manoeuvre. Becket then made an entrance. He rode into the courtyard of the council chamber at Northampton, wearing his robes of office and bearing a large cross in his hands.

The story has become well known, and may have been elaborated in the telling. Some of the bishops came up to him as he dismounted from his horse, and tried to take the cross from him. ‘If the king were to brandish his sword,’ one of them said, ‘as you now brandish the cross, what hope can there be of making peace between you?’ ‘I know what I am doing,’ Becket replied. ‘I bear it for the protection of the peace of God upon my person and the English Church.’ Then he walked into the chamber, where he forbade the bishops to deliver any judgment against him. The king asked the lords alone to pronounce sentence against the archbishop. Becket refused to listen. ‘Such as I am,’ he told them, ‘I am your father, while you are magnates of the household, lay powers, secular persons. I will not hear your judgment.’ He swept out of the chamber, cross in hand, with loud cries of ‘Traitor!’ following him. Soon after, he fled the country in disguise.

He made his way to Sens, where Pope Alexander III held his court in exile, and flung himself at the feet of the pontiff. In the course of a long address, in which he denounced the arrogance and impiety of the king in attempting to destroy the powers of the Church, he adverted to his own role as archbishop. ‘Though I accepted this burden unwillingly nevertheless it was human will and not divine will that induced me to do so.’ He was blaming Henry. ‘What wonder, then, it has brought me into such straits?’ Weeping, he took the ring of office from his finger. ‘I resign into your hands, Father, the archbishopric of Canterbury.’ Some of the cardinals present hoped that the pope would put the ring in his pocket; they did not want to be at odds with the king of England. But Alexander III returned the ring. ‘Receive anew at our hands,’ he told Becket, ‘the cure of the episcopal office.’

Henry, cheated of his prey, reacted with predictable fury. Unable to touch Becket, he reached for his men in Canterbury. Their lands were seized and their relatives were laid ‘under safe pledges’; they were evicted from their houses and made hostage to the royal will. The first act of the drama was over.

Henry II did not speak English, employing only French or Latin. That is perhaps appropriate for a sovereign who spent only one third of his reign in England; the rest of the time was passed in Normandy or in other parts of France. He was born at Le Mans and died at Chinon; both towns were part of his original patrimony, and he was most deeply attached to the land of his father. He wore the short coat of Anjou rather than the long robe of Normandy. The Angevin Empire was in essence a private fief. Henry had no ‘foreign policy’ except the pursuit of his own interest and advantage. In this he was not unlike every other sovereign of the period.

It is a tribute to the skills of his administrators that England remained without turbulence in the long periods of his absence in France; it is yet another manifestation of the deep strength of the governance of the country. The key lay in efficient management or, rather, in efficient exploitation. Various taxes and impositions were variously raised; but these scutages and tallages and carucages are now the domain of the lexicographer rather than the economist. It is sufficient to say that the king’s power was not in doubt. In 1170 he dismissed all of the twenty-three sheriffs of the kingdom, made them submit to an inquest, and reappointed only six of them. That could not have happened in the reign of Stephen.

In fact the prosperity of the country, insofar as it can be estimated, increased during Henry’s reign. By the end of the twelfth century 150 fairs, as well as 350 markets, took place throughout the country. The first windmill was constructed in Yorkshire in 1185. The first church spires, now so familiar a feature of the English landscape, were rising in the limestone belt of Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire. The use of horses, rather than oxen, quickened the pace of agricultural activity. English wool and tin were much in demand.

The English village was also thriving. It was, as we have seen, a very ancient construct, but it was also susceptible to change. By the eleventh century the essential structure was that of church and manor house, with a row of small dwellings for the dependent population who worked on the manor farm in exchange for land of their own. Around the village lay the open fields. In the twelfth century, however, new villages were planned and laid out by the lords of great estates. New labour was introduced onto the land; markets and trading areas were created. The houses of the labourers were often planned around a small rectangular green, where livestock might graze; each dwelling had its own garden.

The records of the manorial courts of the twelfth century are filled with the daily life of the village. A shoemaker, Philip Noseles, is arrested because of his persistent habit of eavesdropping on the conversations of neighbours; a woman named Matilda is taken to court for breaking down hedges; Andrew Noteman dragged the daughter of Roger the thatcher out of her cottage by her ears; Matilda Crane has the habit of stealing chickens and is to be barred from the village; a couple accused of fornication were told that they must marry if they repeated the offence.

The origins of many villages lie in prehistory, and their life was deeply imbued with custom and the tenacious observance of tradition. In one document a young man is described as being ‘of the blood of the village’, emphasizing the presence of distinct kinship ties. Collective rituals also persisted for many hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Until quite recent times, in the village of Polperro in Cornwall, it was customary to wheel a ‘mock mayor’ down to the sea and there dip him into the water. At the village of Holne, in Devonshire, a ram was tied to a great stone pillar in the middle of a field where its throat was cut by a band of young men.

The villagers sowed wheat and rye, barley and oats; they reared horses and pigs and cattle; they brewed ale. Some of the freeholders fell into debt, and were forced to sell land; some of them exchanged lands. Village officials were elected every year, either by the lord or the villagers themselves, to take care of such duties as the collection of fines. A common shepherd was employed for the flocks of all the families. It was a stratified but highly cohesive society that depended upon communal agreement in all the principal areas of agricultural life. It was also a society partly established upon mutual help. Yet how much of the material wealth of the nation reached the lowest classes of farmers and labourers cannot be known. History has always ignored the poor.

The number of new towns was growing very rapidly, in the same period, as the economic life of the country quickened; in the forty years between 1191 and 1230 some forty-nine new towns were planted. These were generally planned by a great lord who wished to create a market for the surrounding countryside. He then collected rents and taxes, making money far in excess of the amount to be gained from land devoted to agriculture. The bishop of Lincoln, for example, laid out a street of shops and houses beside a small village; he then diverted the principal road towards it. So was created the market town of Thame in Oxfordshire. Leeds was conjured into being in 1207 when the lord of the manor of Leeds, comprising a small village, planned thirty building plots on either side of a new street just beside a crossing of the river Aire. These were profitable investments, and a measure of their success can be found in the fact that after 900 years they still flourish. Somewhere beneath the modern foundations lie the bake-houses, the latrines, the taverns and the prisons of the early thirteenth century.

Many of these new towns were built by the command or recommendation of the king, and were known as royal boroughs. The same imperative of profit applied. Thus in 1155 the king decreed that at Scarborough ‘they shall pay me yearly for each house whose gable is turned towards the street fourpence, and for those houses whose sides are turned towards the street, sixpence’.

The older towns, with their foundations in the first century and perhaps even before, continued to expand. They were becoming more self-aware. Their walls were strengthened and dignified; Hull, for example, built the first surrounding wall made entirely out of brick. The association of the leading townspeople, with the mayor as their chief officer, became known as communia or communa. In 1191 the system of mayor and aldermen was established in London. The leaders of the towns began to resent external interference; the aldermen of London, for example, were quite capable of defying the royal court at Westminster.

The leaders of the towns built walls and gates, with main streets leading directly to the market area. The same trades, such as shoemaking and bread-baking, had a tendency to congregate together. Certain towns were already identified by their principal commodity, so that we hear of the russet cloths of Colchester and the soap of Coventry. The Knights Templar established a town in Buckinghamshire which they named as Baghdad, hoping to create in imitation a great market there; it is now known more prosaically as Baldock. ‘Fairs’ were instituted at Boston and Bishop’s Lynn, Winchester and St Ives. In the larger towns, an entire street might be devoted to a single trade. The population was growing along with everything else. By the late twelfth century London numbered 80,000, while Norwich and Coventry each harboured 20,000 inhabitants.

The original outline of Stratford-upon-Avon, planned by the bishop of Worcester in 1196, is still visible in the modern streets; houses still stand on the plots where they were sited by the bishop; many of the names of the streets have also survived. A female huckster of the thirteenth century would still be able to navigate the roads of the town. Even a great city such as London still bears the traces of its origin.

The traders of these towns, old or new, helped to develop guilds that enforced standards; these guilds merchant, as they were called, prospered to such an extent that eventually they took over the administration of most of the towns. The guilds had a long existence, dating back to the ninth and tenth centuries, but in their original incarnation they were ‘friendly societies’ of a pious nature; they prayed for the souls of their dead brethren, and supported their members in case of dire need.

Members of the same trade naturally tended to join the same guild; so economic, as well as spiritual, interests played a part. They became organized. They laid down standards of business and manufacture. They refused to allow outsiders to participate in their ‘mysteries’ and instead set up a rigid system of apprenticeship. They had once met in the churchyard or in the town hall, but by the end of the twelfth century many of them had acquired imposing premises of their own commonly known as the guildhall.

Yet they retained their pious endeavours, collecting for charity and for the expenses of death; many of them maintained a chapel, or at least an altar light, at their nearest church. They built bridges and roads, although the improvement of transport was perhaps a matter of self-interest. The craft guilds were also responsible for the sequences known as miracle or mystery plays that were the most important aspect of English drama in the age before Shakespeare. This concatenation of religious, social and economic power is thoroughly medieval.

So the long period in which towns prospered, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, was also one in which the sense of urban community was most highly developed. In some respects the notion of a community is specious, however, since the richer townspeople known as ‘the better sort’ created an oligarchy of power concentrated in a small network of families. In Norwich 60 per cent of the wealth had devolved into the hands of 6 per cent of the population. These were the men who would serve as jurors in the town court and who took up the offices of the local administration. Nevertheless a feeling of common interest was aroused in the maintenance of newly acquired privileges and traditions. In the Commune of London, forged at a time when mutual antagonism between merchants and craftsmen was intense, the voices of the citizens could still be heard shouting ‘Ya Ya!’ or ‘Nay Nay!’ in their assemblies.

This sense of corporate identity was strengthened by the belief that towns were areas of relative freedom. The people who gathered there were drawn together in a commercial pact, and were not subject to the rules of labour service that obtained in the countryside. By the early twelfth century it was established that if a villein resided in a town for a year and a day, he acquired his freedom. The air of the town was different.

We may envisage wooden houses and wooden shops, with vacant plots between them where the hens scratched and where the small horses of the period were tethered. Many of the wooden houses were of two storeys, with the shop on the ground floor and the living quarters above it. Permanent shops were erected, but stalls could be set up and taken down from day to day. In any town perhaps two or three stone houses were owned by the richer merchants.

In Chester a wooden footway was raised above the street of beaten earth so that it became a ‘first floor’ sheltered by the houses above; from there, the pedestrians could ‘window-shop’. In the towns of England dirt and refuse were scattered everywhere, partly scavenged by pigs and kites. The streams running above ground were often filthy with industrial waste and excrement. The noise of bargaining, and of argument, was intense. It was busy, always busy, with the particular stridency and excitability of the medieval period in England.

How much the king’s advisers revised the administration of justice, and how much was Henry II’s own contribution, is a nice question. It is reported that he spent many sleepless nights debating with his advisers over points of law, but that may be a pious fiction. It is undoubtedly true that in the course of his reign the rule of law was amplified in England; one of his contemporaries, Walter Map, noted that the king was ‘a subtle deviser of novel judicial processes’. He decreed, for example, that royal justices should make regular visits to the shires and take over legal business previously reserved for the sheriff or the county justice. Six groups of three judges each toured between four and eight counties so that the whole country came under their purview. They were based at Westminster, but the central administration was reaching out.

Their activities were of course designed principally for the king’s own profit, as he gathered up fines and other payments; it was well known that the royal courts loved money more than justice, and the king expected ‘presents’ at every stage of the judicial proceedings. A wealthy man, accused of a crime, would offer a large sum ‘for having the king’s love’. In a rough and violent society, it was considered to be perfectly natural. You paid money to see a doctor. You paid money to see a judge. Law was another form of power. It was just becoming swifter and more efficient.

But acts of expediency sometimes have unintended consequences. The imposition of uniform royal justice over the country laid the conditions for the development of common law. National law took precedence over local custom. When law became uniform, it could indeed eventually become ‘common’ to all. Phrases were employed that emphasized this theory of ius commune; ‘as the custom is in England’ or ‘according to the custom of the land’ became standard formulas. Men could reduce it to order, and to the claims of precedent; it could be codified and standardized. One of the most important legal works in English history, Ranulph de Glanville’s On the Laws and Customs of England, was composed in the reign of Henry II. It is no accident that ‘legal memory’ was deemed to have begun at the time of the accession of Richard I, the king’s oldest surviving son, in 1189. Henry was acting out of self-interest but his measures, more than any other, promoted obedience to the law and assured the coherent administration of justice. He had no interest in reform, and no scheme for it. He acted out of private and selfish interests only, and was motivated solely by the force of circumstances. He did not have any idea where his actions might lead, except to the extent that they afforded him more and more money. These are the foundations of the mighty edifice of English law. Henry had stumbled upon a system that has endured ever since.

One other unanticipated result issued from the new legal procedures. One of the functions of the judges was to rule on disputes over property. Had anyone been violently dispossessed of his or her land? This was a common problem of the twelfth century where lords, great or small, were always trying to increase their dominion. The judges were inclined to call together twelve local men who would be able to tender advice on the matter. The origin of the English jury is still in dispute, with some authorities placing it within the Anglo-Saxon period, but in the twelfth century we witness at least its systematic use. Within fifty years juries were also employed in criminal cases. Trial by jury replaced trial by battle and the ordeal. The parties involved in these disputes were summoned to the court by writs, which from this period took on a standard form. Writs cost sixpence. The legal system of the country was being created by haphazard and unpredictable means.

Yet all things move together. The creation of royal law, otherwise known as national law, called for a group of skilled adherents to interpret and amend the principles of legislation. There had been no professional lawyers in the eleventh century, and the judges were simply the servants of the king. In the reign of Henry II that happy vacancy ended forever. By the end of the twelfth century the ‘learned laws’ were being taught at Oxford. Around the law courts of Westminster there clustered ad hoc ‘schools’ of law. A group known as ‘men of law’ soon emerged. They organized themselves into a profession of various roles and grades. They ate and drank together, in the various hostels or inns that were at a later date transformed into Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn, and the others.

One of the paradoxes of medieval society lies in the presence of extreme violence and disorder alongside an appetite for great formality and hierarchy; England was in many respects a lawless society, but it was also a litigious one. The people loved law, just as they disregarded it; they could not get enough of it. It was consoling. It represented authority and tradition, even as they were being flouted. It was like listening to the king’s voice even though, if you had come to Westminster Hall on a law day, you would have found yourself amid a babble of voices.

‘Furthermore I marvel that you have not come to the point.’

‘The point, sir, is like a quintain. Hard to hit.’

‘Do not argue with me about the statute. I was the one who made it.’

‘It is lex talionis! Like for like!’

‘A great friend is Aristotle. But a greater friend is truth.’

The floor of the hall was covered with rushes containing sweet herbs, to curb the odours of the people and of the prisoners. The judges carried with them a ball of linen soaked in aniseed and camomile.

The King’s Bench, the Court of Common Pleas and the Court of the Exchequer had their own panels of judges; the special pleaders were known as sergeants and can be seen as the ancestors of the barrister. It is only to be expected that, in time, the sergeants would be promoted to judges. The professionalization of the law thereby became complete. Pleadings became more technical, and tended to rely upon precedent. We may talk of legalism rather than law. The judges wore scarlet robes and caps of gold silk. The sergeants wore gowns with vertical stripes of mulberry and blue, together with round caps of white silk.

The clarification and standardization of the law meant also that society itself took on a more defined shape. One of the new procedures was known as mort d’ancestor, allowing freemen to claim by right their inheritance. Free tenants, in particular, could not be ejected from their land by their lord. But some men were not allowed to plead in the royal courts. The men who were not free, the villeins who held land in exchange for labour services to their lord, were excluded. They had to rely on the smaller local courts for their rights. They were, in other words, still at the mercy of their masters.

It was stated that ‘earls, barons and free tenants may lawfully … sell their serfs [rusticos] like oxen or cows’. Unfree men were defined as those who ‘do not know in the evening what service they will do in the morning. The lords may put them in fetters and in the stocks, may imprison, beat, and chastise them at will, saving their life and limbs.’ This is a presentation of the extreme case and, in practice, traditional custom would have preserved many of the rights of these rusticos. The lord also had to prove that his man was unfree; as a legal writer said at the time, ‘you must catch the deer before you can skin it’.

The contrast between the free man and the villein had become the single most important social division in the country, underlying the elaborate and intricate hierarchy of roles and functions that already existed. It became the theme of the chivalric romances, with the distinction between vilain and courtois. The status of the knight was also changed, with the emphasis now on ownership of property rather than military skill or availability for service. In the process the knights adopted a different role. They took up a position in local rather than national society. They became in time the ‘gentry’, a word first used by the Wife of Bath in the Canterbury Tales. ‘Gentlewoman’ had appeared by 1230. ‘Gentleman’ emerged forty-five years later. So we have John Ball’s rhyme:

When Adam delved and Eve span,

Who was then a gentleman?

By slow degrees the class system of England, based on property, was being erected.

Those who lived in towns were by definition free, and so the difference between free town life and unfree country life became ever more marked. The myth of the uncultivated rustic as opposed to the urbane townsman, so much a feature of Elizabethan pamphleteers and Restoration dramatists, can fairly be said to have begun at this time.

Thomas Becket and Henry II were in conflict for six years, with the pope and various other interested parties acting as intermediaries. The antagonists met in France on two occasions, but their meetings became futile confrontations. The dignity and honour of both men seemed to be too great, too sensitive, for any compromise. But in the late spring of 1170 Henry watched the coronation of his son, Henry the Younger, at the hands of the archbishop of York in Westminster Abbey. He was crowned as ‘joint king’ in his father’s lifetime as a token of dynastic security.

This was a serious blow against Becket. The two sees of England, York and Canterbury, had always been at odds over their respective powers and dominions. It was the established right of Canterbury to crown monarchs and princes, but that privilege had been snatched from Becket by the king. In this age the importance of status, and of precedent, cannot be overrated; they were the pattern of the world. Henry insinuated that the prince might be recrowned by Canterbury, if and when the archbishop returned to England. Becket was so concerned to defend the pre-eminence of his see that the offer was persuasive. A third meeting took place on French soil between Henry and Becket where the terms of a settlement were agreed. On 1 December 1170 the archbishop returned to England.

It was said that he received a hostile reception when he landed at Sandwich. It was also reported that he was soon riding across England at the head of a body of knights. Neither story can be substantiated. One event, however, is certain. On the eve of crossing the Channel he excommunicated the archbishop of York and other bishops who had been present at the coronation in Westminster Abbey eight months before.

There was a Latin proverb, ‘ira principis mors est’, to the effect that the anger of the king means death. Becket was to prove the truth of this. When the news of the excommunications reached Henry, he was told that there would be neither peace nor quiet in England while the archbishop lived. The dramatic and vindictive way in which he had dealt with the archbishop of York seemed to be proof of that. Becket was a man who bristled with pride and self-righteousness.

The king may never have used the words attributed to him: ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?’ The phrase, however, is sufficiently close to something Henry did say. He himself admitted this at a later date. Four of his knights took him at his word. They left Henry’s court in northern France and, riding along separate routes, made their way to the Channel. They met by prearranged agreement at Saltwood Castle in Kent, not far from Canterbury. From there they rode to the cathedral.

Becket was conducting business in an inner chamber and, when they entered, he greeted them calmly enough. Their intentions were not clear, however, perhaps not even to themselves. There are some indications that they planned to arrest him, or to oblige him to leave the country once again. But then the red mist descended. They began to insult and threaten the archbishop; he argued with them and refused to be cowed by their hostile demeanour. He proceeded into the cathedral to hear vespers. The monks wished to bar the doors, but he would not permit it. One of the monks with him at the time, William Fitzstephen, reports that he could have escaped at any moment. Dark passages and winding stairs of stone were all around him; he might have concealed himself in the crypt. But he stayed in the church, and prepared himself for the service.

The four knights burst open the doors and went after him with their weapons. One of them struck Becket on the shoulder with the flat of his sword, saying, ‘Fly! You are a dead man.’ They tried to drag him out of the cathedral, but he forcibly resisted them. He was wounded in the head, and fell to his knees. Another stroke cut off the upper part of his skull. They butchered him where he lay.

In death, Becket was triumphant. The leaders of Christendom were genuinely appalled by the slaughter of an archbishop in his own cathedral; only the murder of the pope would have been comparable. The king knew that the obloquy of the world would now be turned upon him. He retired to his chamber for three days, refusing food and drink. His enemies were, in turn, contemplating a very satisfying revenge. The king of France, Louis VII, declared that ‘the man who commits violence against his mother [the Church] revolts against humanity … Such unprecedented cruelty demands unprecedented retribution. Let the sword of St Peter be unleashed to avenge the martyr of Canterbury’. Becket was already wearing the martyr’s crown, although he was not canonized for three years.

Very quickly there grew up a cult around the site of the killing. Immediately after the death certain members of his household, and perhaps also some of the people of Canterbury, rushed into the cathedral and cut off pieces of their clothes before dipping them in the archbishop’s blood; they anointed their eyes with the precious fluid. It is reported that others also brought vessels to capture the blood as it flowed from the prone body. This was the tactile and instinctive aspect of medieval piety. At a later date the monks of Canterbury developed a thriving trade in the miraculous properties of ‘Becket water’ that contained a tincture of the blood. Small vessels of tin alloy were manufactured on a large scale, each one bearing the inscription (in Latin), ‘All weakness and pain is removed, the healed man eats and drinks, and evil and death pass away’. If this miraculous healing did not take place, it was agreed that the afflicted man or woman lacked sufficient piety. After Becket’s tomb was constructed, and a shrine erected, the pilgrims began to arrive in multitudes. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is devoted to them.

One of those pilgrims was the king himself. In the summer of 1174 Henry, beset by enemies invading from Scotland and from Flanders, made a formal and ritual penance for the death of Becket. He dismounted from his horse a mile (1.6 kilometres) from Canterbury and took off his silken robes; then he walked barefoot to the cathedral, badly lacerating his feet on the way. As soon as he entered the church he prostrated himself, weeping, before the shrine. The bells of the cathedral had been ringing to summon as many spectators as possible for this act of piety. The king was led into the crypt where he stripped off his shirt. The assembled bishops inflicted ‘correction’ on his body with a whip of several lashes; they were no doubt gentle with their royal lord. The king then spent the whole of the next day and night in fervent prayer, taking no nourishment, and finished his pilgrimage by drinking some of the water blessed by Becket’s blood. He had been cleansed. The effect was immediate, and almost miraculous. His Scottish enemies were defeated.

Yet his return to papal favour came at a price. He was forced to concede that churchmen would only be tried in church courts. So was established the practice known as ‘benefit of clergy’, which was slowly extended to cover literacy as well; anyone who could read a short passage from the Bible, generally the beginning of the fifty-first psalm, known as the ‘neck verse’, was spared the death penalty. ‘Benefit of clergy’ was in fact not removed from the provisions of the criminal law until the 1820s.

God may have blessed him against his enemies, but He cursed him with his children. The remaining years of Henry’s reign were dominated by the struggles with his four sons who, like their Angevin forebears, were violent and rapacious. Henry had, in theory, divided his empire. His eldest son, Henry, was destined to inherit the kingdom of England together with Anjou and Normandy; the second son, Richard, was granted the dukedom of Aquitaine. The third son, Geoffrey, became by marriage duke or count of Brittany. The youngest son, John, had nothing at all; hence arose his nickname ‘John Lackland’.

It was a most quarrelsome family from the vicissitudes of which Shakespeare could have profited greatly. The play of these warring parties would have out-Leared Lear. The brothers were united only by self-interest; selfishness was in their blood. They were concerned only with their honour and with their power; they fought one another over the extent of their respective territories; they built castles in each other’s lands, and they refused to allow the king to mediate between them.

In some spasm of dynastic madness, the two eldest sons rose in rebellion against their father. In this act of subversion they were aided and abetted by their mother who had, for all practical purposes, severed herself from her husband. When the king marched up to Limoges, the headquarters of the young Henry, he encountered a storm of arrows. Yet the king’s army prevailed and, in fear of his liberty, the prince escaped from the city. He wandered through his dominion, picking up very little support, and in the process succumbed to dysentery. The young Henry had lacked the resolution and competence of his father; he was at the time considered to be a perfect prince, courteous and debonair, but he would have made a wholly disappointing king. He seemed to be capable of rule, but only as long as he never ruled. He died in the summer of 1183, unreconciled to the father who had become his enemy.

And then there were three. It was supposed that Richard, now the eldest son, would come into Henry’s patrimony. In return the king demanded that he transfer the sovereignty of Aquitaine to Prince John; Richard, standing on the principle of natural right, refused to do this. He fled from the court and returned to Aquitaine. The king advised John to recruit an army and march against his elder brother. But John had no army of his own and instead allied himself with his other brother, Geoffrey, who had command of a large army of mercenaries in Brittany. Together the two younger sons marched against their elder brother. They achieved very little, apart from some vainglorious victories in skirmishes, and in retaliation Richard invaded Brittany itself.

It seemed to Henry II that his empire was in an advanced state of upheaval, and that it might fall apart under the combined strains of these internecine wars. He summoned his three sons to England. Here it was agreed that John should become king of Ireland, effectively cancelling his claim to Aquitaine. Richard returned to his dukedom. But he was not to rest easy in this apparent success. It seems likely that the king had now decided to reverse the order of inheritance and to bequeath England and Normandy to Geoffrey; these Anglo-Norman territories fitted well with Geoffrey’s fiefdom of Brittany. It was a neat territorial redaction, but it was soon undone. Geoffrey was killed while jousting at a tournament in Paris.

And then there were two, Richard and John, known to the more romantic nineteenth-century historians as Richard the Lionheart and Evil King John. In truth very little separated them, both of them rapacious and arrogant with no interest in their English kingdom except for the purpose of enrichment. Henry kept his sons at bay for five years, principally by refusing to name his successor, but as he grew older the issue became more and more important. In 1188 Richard agreed to submit his duchy to French jurisdiction, much to the displeasure of his father.

At a subsequent conference of the interested parties – Richard together with the king of England and the king of France – the matter of succession was explicitly raised. Richard demanded his father’s assurance that he would be named as his heir. Henry refused to comply. ‘Then,’ Richard said, ‘I can only take as true what previously seemed incredible.’ He unbuckled his sword and, kneeling before the king of France, did homage for Normandy and Aquitaine. He was, in other words, denying his father’s claims over a large part of the Angevin Empire. Father and son walked off in different directions.

It seems unlikely, in retrospect, that Henry would have disinherited the elder son; it would have struck at the very heart of the medieval principle of rightful inheritance. But of course Richard could not be sure. He pressed the matter into open warfare against his father, fought among the towns and castles of northern France. The summer of 1189 was hot, and the English king was ailing. The tide of war turned against him. Who would wish to defend the old king of England against a young prince and the king of France?

Henry was forced to come to terms with the enemy. He made a promise that Richard would succeed him. When he gave the ritual kiss of peace to his son, according to Richard himself, he whispered in his ear, ‘May the Lord spare me until I have taken vengeance on you.’ But he was already dying. He was carried in a litter to Chinon, in the valley of the Loire, where he asked for a list of those men who had already pledged allegiance to his son. The first name was that of John. He turned his face to the wall, and would listen no more. His last words, apparently, were ‘Shame, shame on a conquered king’. But last words are often invented by moralists. Henry II lies buried in the abbey church of Fontevrault.

Henry is remembered, if at all, because of his association with Thomas Becket. Yet he has a more significant claim to our attention in his imposition of a system of national justice and of common law. He may have engineered these changes for reasons of profit rather than policy, but the origin of the most worthy institutions can hardly bear examination. All is muddled and uncertain. The writing of history is often another way of defining chaos.

14

The lost village

The deserted village of Wharram Percy lies on the side of a valley, by the edge of the Yorkshire Wolds. Its church, of St Martin, lies in ruins; earthworks mark the lines of habitation, rectangular mounds where the small houses once stood and sunken hollows in the grass where lanes and roads once ran. Remains of the manor house, and of a longhouse, survive together with the outlines of smaller houses of chalk. Most of the stonework has gone under the earth, however, covered by grass and weed. The life of the village has departed, but it has left traces of its existence that have survived for hundreds of years.

There are more than 3,000 deserted villages in England, mute testimony of a communal past. An old market cross stands alone among the trees of Stapleford Park in Leicestershire; the market, and the village, are long gone. A line of buttercups, springing from the moist soil beside a wall, will outline a forgotten boundary. The inhabitants of these villages left for a variety of reasons. Fire, famine and disease did their work through the centuries; successive stages of depopulation also crept over the countryside. Some villages were razed to make way for sheep pasture, and the villagers forcibly evicted by the lord of the land. Thus in the village of Thorpe, Norfolk, 100 people ‘left their houses weeping and became unemployed and finally, as we suppose, died in poverty and so ended their days’. The Cistercian monks were known for their practice of eviction.

The excavation of Wharram Percy, over a period of fifty years, has discovered evidence of successive rebuilding of walls and parts of walls. The pattern of settlement seems to have been formalized in the tenth century, with the individual houses erected in rows along the two principal streets. A manor house was built at this time, with a second manor house following three centuries later. This second manor is known to have contained a hall-house, a dovecote and a barn. Throughout the entire period the surrounding land was being farmed for wheat and for barley; sheep and cattle were being raised; flax and hemp were grown.

Some of the original houses were long, approximately 15 by 50 feet (4.5 by 15 metres), with animals living at one end and people at the other. These longhouses were inhabited in the same period as simple two-room cottages that were of variable size according to the resources of the particular owner. The cottages were originally made of timber, but the wood was replaced with stone in the late thirteenth century. A continuous process of building and rebuilding took place, so that the village seems to breathe and move. The cottages had ‘back gardens’ that led down to a ‘back-lane’, which divided the village from the adjacent farmland. There were two millponds, and a triangular green. On the green were two stock pounds. One of these circular pounds, however, might have been used as an arena for cock-fighting or for bull-baiting.

Yet this utterly medieval landscape is deceptive. Since the site of the village is determined by the presence of six springs in the immediate neighbourhood, it is clear that the territory would have invited earlier English settlers. The archaeology of field-walking has found a Mesolithic site in the immediate vicinity of the village, as well as evidence of wood clearance in the Neolithic and Bronze ages. The presence of stone axes and flints suggests continuous human occupation of the area. In a hollow, just to the south of the church, successive levels of earth or ‘hill-slip’ were found that can be dated continuously from the Neolithic to the late medieval period. Beside the church of St Martin, on a natural terrace, were found the remains of a grand burial of the Iron Age. It must always have been a sacred place. Under the first manor house was found evidence of a Romano-British building. Under the village itself have been uncovered traces of three Romano-British farms with trackways running beside them. There are also the remains of two buildings from the sixth century in the Saxon style.

The continuity of human life at Wharram Percy can still be seen, therefore, persisting for many thousands of years from the time when the first scattered settlers made a camp in this place. Indeed it is likely that the shape of the village itself was determined by the layout of the prehistoric fields. Its life persisted until the need for pasture declined or disease intervened. The population of Wharram Percy began to fall in the fifteenth century, and the village was finally deserted at the very beginning of the sixteenth century.

Wharram Percy is not an isolated example. It just happens to be the only village in England that has been so exhaustively documented. This suggests, although it does not prove, that there are many other English villages with prehistoric origins. No one can dig to find them because the ground is still inhabited. The history of the oldest settlements in the country lies buried in the silent earth. It is possible to conclude, however, that the sites of Mesolithic and Neolithic settlements still flourish.

15

The great charter

It was said of King Richard I that he cared only for the success he carved out with his own sword, and that he was happy only when that royal sword was covered with the blood of his enemies. He had the ferocity, rather than the heart, of a lion. As a whelp, too, he had his fair share of fighting; as we have seen, his adversaries were often the members of his own family.

Although he was born in Oxford, in the autumn of 1157, his ancestry was thoroughly French. As duke of Aquitaine he ruled over a vast dominion that may be compared to England in terms of wealth and prestige; it was in no sense an appendage of the Angevin Empire but, rather, at the centre of it. Yet in France he was only a duke; in England, he was king. That made all the difference. He had no interest in, or care for, the country itself; he just wanted to be known as sovereign by divine right. At his coronation in the autumn of 1189, he was stripped down to his breeches with his chest bare; the archbishop of Canterbury anointed him with chrism or holy oil on the breast, head and hands. This was the sign or token of sacral kingship. He then donned the ceremonial robes, and was crowned. It was usual for the archbishop to take the crown and lay it on the king’s head. Richard pre-empted the gesture by handing the crown to the cleric. It was a characteristic act of self-sufficiency. Certainly he looked the part. He was tall, at an estimated height of 6 feet and 5 inches (1.9 metres); in the twelfth century, that made him a giant; he had strong limbs, a good figure and piercing blue eyes.

It would be anachronistic, at best, to condemn Richard’s passion for warfare. Kings were supposed to fight, and a warlike ruler was considered to be a good ruler. If God looked kindly upon a monarch, he would bequeath him success in battle. It was one of the essential prerogatives, or duties, of sovereignty reflecting a period in which warfare was endemic. The two least militant kings of medieval England, Richard II and Henry VI, were widely considered to be failures; both of them were deposed and murdered. So military valour was crucially important.

One of the clues to understanding Richard’s not necessarily complex character lies in the code of chivalry with its accompanying concern for ‘courtly love’. Chivalry can on one level be understood as the practice whereby the laws of honour supersede those of right or justice. Thus in warfare knights would spare the lives and privileges of other knights, while happily massacring the women and children among the local population. Elaborate laws of warfare also governed the conduct of sieges. The cult of chivalry had as little connection with real warfare as scholastic theology had to do with daily worship in the parish church.

Richard liked to participate in tournaments. These were not the stage-managed jousts of the fifteenth century; these were real conflicts, staged over a large area of ground, between trained bands of knights. They closely resembled actual battle, with the provision that a dismounted knight had to retire from the field and give horse and armour to his opponent. Nevertheless fatalities and serious injuries were not uncommon. Tournaments were in fact so dangerous, and so disruptive, that Henry II forbade them in England. But they remained very popular in Aquitaine.

In that French region, too, the cult of courtly love flourished. It was an impulse celebrated by the troubadours of Provence and Aquitaine who in song and story celebrated the love of the female as the source of all virtue and pleasure. A knight fought for his lady; his love for her rendered him stronger and more courageous. Love was appreciative rather than covetous. Like the Platonic love of an earlier civilization – then generally between male and male – it was a shadow or echo of heavenly harmony. A knight, in theory, was meant to be chaste and pious; the model of knighthood then became Sir Galahad. The two creeds of chivalry and courtly love are alike in being quite remote from the experience of life, but they did represent a pietistic attempt to place warfare and adultery in the context of a sacred world. All this directly impinged upon Richard I’s sense of himself and of his kingship. It was believed at the time that he possessed Arthur’s sword, Excalibur. And it ought to be remembered that Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur was translated from a French romance.

The crown was no sooner warm upon the young king’s head than he began to prepare himself for a crusade against Saladin and for the recapture of Jerusalem. Crusades were very much part of the spirit of chivalry, for they had of course an ostensibly religious purpose. The crusading knight would be expected to prepare himself with vigils, fasts and prayers. The forces of Christ were meant to be pilgrims as much as soldiers. There grew up cults of military saints, such as St George and St Martin, and the roles of knight and monk were combined in the religious orders of Templars and the Hospitallers. For Richard, the third crusade could not have come at a more convenient time. The holy city had fallen two years before his coronation, and Richard had immediately ‘taken the Cross’. His opportunity had now come to bear it into combat. He is in fact the only English king ever to become a crusader.

For this purpose he needed money. He was in England for three months after the coronation, and in that short period he tried to sell everything he possessed – lands, lordships, bishoprics, castles, towns and court offices. He said that he would sell London itself if he could find a purchaser for it. The country was for him only an engine for the making of money. He seized all of his father’s treasure; he exacted loans; he increased the burden of taxes. The imposition he placed upon the kingdom in fact played a large part in the rebellion that led to the Magna Carta. The great lords were not rebelling against the rule of King John alone; they were fighting against the very idea of exacting Angevin kingship, made all the worse by the growth of a strong central administration.

The course of Richard I’s crusade does not directly impinge upon the history of England, except the extent to which the finances of the country suffered for it. Richard proved himself to be an excellent soldier, and a competent administrator, in the difficult terrain of the Holy Land. He was able to take a fleet and an army to the eastern side of the Mediterranean, in the process capturing the valuable prize of the island of Cyprus; he had promised the leader of the island that he would not be put in irons. He kept his word, as any true knight would, and had silver shackles made for the restraint of the unfortunate man. More importantly he managed to stand his ground against Saladin, the most resourceful and capable military leader of the age. His angry will may be measured by the fact that he ordered 3,000 prisoners, whom he had captured at Acre, to be beheaded. He maintained the discipline, if not the affection, of his men. Usamah ibn Munqidh, a Syrian nobleman and soldier of the twelfth century, described the European crusaders as animals possessing the virtues of courage and fighting, but nothing else. That might be a description of the English king.

One of the chroniclers of this crusade remarks that Richard became known as ‘the Lion’ because he never pardoned an offence. He was quick to anger and he could be ferocious. If monarchs are judged on the criterion of military prowess alone, however, Richard I would qualify as one of the greatest kings of England. He did not manage to recapture Jerusalem, but the legend of Richard in the Holy Land endured for long after his death. It was said that, for hundreds of years, Turkish mothers would quieten recalcitrant children by threatening them with ‘Malik Ric’ or ‘King Richard’.

When he was not in front of an army, however, he was not so fortunate. On his way back from the crusade, at the beginning of winter, he found the seaways blocked. So he decided to return by land, disguised as a pilgrim, through the territories of his enemies and rivals. It is clear that he was being watched, or that his presence was eagerly awaited. At the end of 1192 he was arrested by officers working for Duke Leopold of Austria.

The English king was a prize to be savoured. He was despatched to a castle on a rocky slope overlooking the Danube; he languished here while the important parties of Europe haggled over his fate. The duke of Austria sold him on to his overlord, Henry VI, the king of Germany, while Philip of France proceeded to derive as much advantage from the situation as he could. He summoned Richard’s brother, John, to the French court. The two men came to an agreement. John would swear fealty to the French king, and in exchange Philip would support John’s usurpation of the throne. John came back to England and declared that his brother was dead. No one believed him.

John was thrown back on the defensive. The clerics whom Richard had left in authority, principally the bishop of Salisbury, raised an army and confined him to the area of two of his largest castles. The bishops were the true lords of government. Then there came news that the king of Germany was ready to release the English king for the sum of 70,000 marks. The amount was later raised to 150,000 marks. He was not dead; he had arisen to demand a large sum from his subjects. In order to pay for his ransom the authorities imposed a tax of 25 per cent on all income and moveable property; gold and plate were taken from the churches, and the annual income of the Cistercian wool crop was appropriated. The country was indeed being fleeced.

The king of France and John offered a larger sum to Henry VI, simply to keep Richard in custody, but after much negotiation the offer was finally rejected. That does not, however, minimize the perfidy of John in seeking to prolong his brother’s imprisonment. In February 1194, after the ransom had been paid to the king of Germany, Richard was released. The king of France sent a message to John. ‘Look to yourself. The devil is loose.’ The devil landed at Sandwich, a month after his liberation. It is said that a local lord, holding a castle in favour of John, died in fright at the news. It is an indication of the period itself that a handful of people, most of whom were related, controlled the destinies of many countries. A family feud could cost thousands of lives.

Richard had not been unduly alarmed by his brother’s rebellion. He is reported to have said, while still held in captivity, that ‘John is not the man to conquer a country if there is a single person prepared to resist his attempt’. In this he was proved to be right. And, on his return, he showed himself to be remarkably magnanimous to his sibling. John had remained in Normandy, fearful of returning to England, and when the king himself sailed across the Channel John paid obeisance to him in tears. ‘You are a child,’ Richard told him. ‘You have had bad companions.’ He knew well enough that John might himself one day assume the throne, and did not wish to alienate him entirely. He had in any case taken the precaution of proclaiming his nephew, Arthur of Brittany (son of his brother, Geoffrey, killed at the Parisian tournament), as his heir; but who knew better than he the vicissitudes of fortune? Richard himself had married while on his way to the Holy Land, but had no children. It has often been assumed, on no evidence at all, that like other martial heroes he was homosexual.

The king performed a solemn ritual of ‘crown-wearing’ in Winchester Cathedral after his return from imprisonment. It was a way of impressing his subjects with the undiminished majesty of his sovereignty. He did not stay in England for very long. Less than two months later he crossed the Channel in order to reclaim the territories of Normandy that had been conquered by the king of France and to reduce to obedience some rebellious lords of Aquitaine. His sojourn in prison, from which it was always possible that he would not escape alive, had encouraged revolt. He stayed in France for the next five years, burning towns and besieging castles, subduing the surrounding country with sword and flame. His demands upon his English subjects, for money and for men, were prodigious; the country, according to a contemporary writer, was reduced to poverty from sea to sea.

In the last summer of his life the king was visited by Hugh, bishop of Lincoln, who had come to the grand castle of Château-Gaillard in Normandy to seek an audience; he wished to plead for the return of the confiscated estates of his see. He found Richard in the chapel, attending Mass, seated on his royal throne with the bishops of Durham and Ely standing on each side. Hugh greeted the king, but Richard turned his face away. ‘Lord king, kiss me,’ Hugh said. Richard still looked away. Then the bishop took hold of the king’s tunic. ‘You owe me a kiss,’ he said, ‘because I have come a long way to see you.’ ‘You deserve no kiss from me,’ the king replied. The bishop shook the king’s cloak. ‘I have every right to one. Kiss me.’ Then Richard, with a smile, concurred. He said later that ‘if the other bishops were like him, no king or ruler would dare raise his hand against them’.

Another sign of restlessness and upheaval became evident as a result of the king’s exactions. The citizens of London believed that they were being unfairly and even perniciously taxed, and their complaints were taken up by William Fitz-Osbert or William the Beard. He grew his hair and beard long in token of his Saxon ancestry. He was styled the ‘advocate of the people’, and at St Paul’s Cross argued that the rich should bear the burden of war finance. 52,000 Londoners were said to have supported him, but the authorities in the city hunted him down. He killed the officer sent to arrest him and fled to sanctuary in the church of St Mary-le-Bow, where after four days a providential fire forced him out. He was stabbed by the son of the officer whom he had killed but, while wounded, he was arrested and dragged at the tail of a horse to the gallows at Tyburn. His associates then proclaimed him to be a martyr and the chain that bound him to the gallows was the source of miraculous cures. The gallows itself was venerated, and so great was the press of people taking the bloody earth from the spot where he had died that a large pit was created.

Richard I never did come back to the land he ruled but did not love. He died from a gangrenous wound while fighting in Limousin, and on his deathbed he decreed that his heart should be interred in the cathedral at Rouen and that his body should be lowered into the tomb of his father within the abbey church of Fontevrault. So much for England.

And then there was one. John, the youngest of the sons of Henry II, had survived. He is one of the most interesting kings in English history, primarily because of his infamous reputation. He rivals Richard III in being considered the most ‘evil’ of the nation’s kings. In truth John and Richard were no more vicious or cunning than many other more lauded sovereigns; they were perhaps unfortunate, however, in the chroniclers who chose to write about them. The two monastic chroniclers of John’s reign, successively Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris, were uniformly hostile. Shakespeare of course, more than any other, defined the image of John to posterity; his were wholly dramatic, but wildly exaggerated, versions of the events to be related here. Enter King John, breathing stage fire.

The early life of John has already been glimpsed, disloyal to his father and to his brothers. Yet he was still a Plantagenet, and the sacred blood of the family mattered. Henry II appointed him to be ‘Lord of Ireland’, but he proved himself to be unequal to the task; his youthful pride and folly alienated him from the native leaders of that country. He was given manors and castles all over the Angevin Empire, and he was in charge of the administration of six English counties that paid their taxes directly to his own exchequer. In Richard I’s absence he created a court of his own, in England and in Normandy, which the more devious or ambitious magnates attended. He was the rising son.

Yet he was not the only claimant to the throne. Richard I had nominated Arthur of Brittany as his successor, as we have seen, and the twelve-year-old nephew was a real threat to John’s inheritance. The barons of Anjou, one element of the Angevin Empire, already supported the boy. Aquitaine was in the balance. The English and Norman magnates, cautiously and suspiciously, supported John. Although he could not be considered English, he was at least more English than the Breton Arthur. On hearing of his brother’s death John hurried to Normandy, therefore, where he was consecrated duke in the cathedral of Rouen; then he sailed to England where he was crowned king at Westminster in the spring of 1199. It had taken him just a month to assert his power.

He was some 12 inches (30 centimetres) shorter than Richard, and he may have suffered in implicit comparison with his brother and with his father. Certainly he grew up in a court filled with rivalries and suspicions of a more than usually bitter nature, with brother pitted against brother and brothers rising against their father. It is not surprising, therefore, that he gives the impression of being a wary and distrustful king. He went about armed and with a bodyguard.

He was not without humour, albeit often of a perverse kind. When he and his horse floundered in a marsh near Alnwick in Northumberland, he devised a suitable punishment for the men of that town who had not maintained the highway; he ordered that every newly created townsman should, on St Mark’s Day, pass through that slough on foot. The custom was still being observed in the early nineteenth century. When the pope placed the country under excommunication, the king ordered that the mistresses of all the priests should be held in captivity until their clerical lovers ransomed them. It was an interesting punishment. There is another intriguing memorial of his reign. Among the legal rolls, then being composed in unprecedented numbers, is one stating that ‘the wife of Hugh de Neville gives the lord king two hundred chickens that she may lie one night with her husband’. The import of this is unclear, but it may mean that the lady was one of the king’s paramours and that she was asking to return briefly to her marital bed. The three incidents reveal that side of medieval life where jocosity and cruelty are allied.

King John was capable of violent anger, like his Plantagenet antecedents. When some monks at Faversham occupied their church, to prevent him from installing the superior he had chosen for them, he ordered the entire monastery to be burned down; nobody obeyed him, and he relented. Monarchs, male and female, have always had bad tempers; it is an aspect of their power.

An element of cruelty, or of ruthlessness, is evident in the first years of his reign. Arthur of Brittany had fled to the court of the king of France in order to shield himself from his uncle’s far from avuncular intentions. In 1202, however, John found him. Both of them were on military campaign in France, fighting over the Angevin lands. The king of France had allotted them to Arthur, whereas John considered them to be his proper inheritance. Arthur, now fifteen, had been besieging his grandmother – Eleanor of Aquitaine – in the ancient castle of Mirebeau, near Poitiers in west-central France. The spectacle of grandson threatening grandmother throws further light on the behaviour of the Plantagenet family.

John, on receiving the news of the siege, marched with part of his army day and night; they covered 80 miles (130 kilometres) in forty-eight hours. Taken by surprise, Arthur and his forces were surrounded. The boy was delivered into the custody of John, and taken to a dungeon in Normandy; in an interview with his uncle, he was defiant. He demanded England, and all the lands bequeathed to him by Richard, apparently adding that he would not give him a moment’s peace until the end of his life. This was, perhaps, unwise. He was moved to a dungeon in Rouen, the capital of the duchy, and was never seen again.

The more picturesque accounts suggest that John, in a fit of Plantagenet fury, ran a sword through his nephew’s body and then dumped him into the river Seine. Or perhaps he hired an assassin. No one is quite clear. The evident fact, however, is that Arthur was dead within a few months. By the spring of 1203 it was widely believed that the king was instrumental in the murder of his nephew. This event has often been interpreted in the same light as the murder in the Tower of the two princes by their uncle, Richard III; but there is really no comparison. Pope Innocent III, for example, is reported as saying that Arthur was ‘captured at Mirebeau, a traitor to his lord and uncle to whom he had sworn homage and allegiance, and he could rightly be condemned without judgment to die even the most shameful of deaths’. A fifteen-year-old was considered to be an adult.

Although the death may have been a necessary and inevitable response by John, it helped to alienate his natural supporters in Normandy and elsewhere. Even more serious charges were levelled against him. He was severely criticized for his indolence or inactivity in the pursuit of war against the king of France. He was not acting like a king. One chronicler declared that he was sluggish, where his elder brother had proved himself to be vigorous and powerful. He became known as ‘John Softsword’. It was said that he had been enchanted by the sorcery of his wife, Isabella of Angoulême. It is more likely that he was infatuated by the power and majesty of kingship and refused to believe the worst. But the worst was happening. King Philip advanced further and further into Normandy, and the majority of John’s barons in that duchy defected to him. They no longer trusted the English king enough to remain loyal to him. There was soon very little left in France for John to defend. As the Angevin Empire collapsed around him, John sailed back to England. By June 1204 Philip had taken Normandy; all that remained of the duchy, in the possession of John, were the Channel Islands. Of the empire itself, only Gascony was preserved. It was the largest single blow to John during the whole of his reign.

The severance of England from Normandy, after 150 years of union, was at a later date deemed to be a natural and inevitable development by which France steadily became aware of its national identity. It heralded the rise of a national consciousness exploited by the Capetian kings. At the time, however, it was considered to be nothing less than a calamity for the king of England. He lost much of his income, from the taxation of Normandy and Anjou and Maine, and of course he forfeited a great deal of his prestige. Yet other consequences followed. The Anglo-Norman lords lost half of their identity. Once they had lost their lands in Normandy, it became clear that they would have to concentrate on those closer to what was now ‘home’. They steadily became more English. The Channel had become the border, as it had been in the tenth century, and King John began the construction of a proper navy to defend the English shores. The king no longer possessed Normandy, and as a result he paid more considered attention to England.

He kept the administrators from the last reign, knowing very well that the machinery of government depended upon them. It is from the beginning of the thirteenth century, for example, that we can trace the widespread use of written records as an instrument of state. Licences for imports and exports had to be drawn up; the regulations of trade had to be furnished in writing; a system of taxation had to be standardized; currency and credit had to be maintained in strict order. All this relied upon ink rather than upon custom or oral tradition. The various departments of the king’s court began the habit of creating archives. Letters began to be sent over the country, where before written communication had been confined to writs. Diaries of daily expenditure were kept and preserved. New and faster forms of handwriting developed, as monastic calligraphy gave way to what is known as ‘cursive’ script; the word comes from cursivus, the Latin for ‘flowing’. The world was going faster.

Wars, and preparations for wars, took their toll upon the nation’s wealth in the same period. King John still entertained hopes of winning back his Angevin Empire, but for that he needed money. He was perhaps no more exacting than his brother and his father, but he was more ingenious. He discovered new ways of extracting revenue, and in 1207 levied a thirteenth part on incomes and moveable property to be paid by all classes of people; it was the first move towards general taxation. The clamour of complaint, however, was so loud that he never repeated the exercise.

For ten years he travelled throughout his kingdom in search of money; he was restless; he was always in a hurry, generally staying in any one place for no more than two or three days. In 1205 he spent only twenty-four days in London and in Westminster. For the rest of the time he was on the road. He penetrated the far north at the end of a bitter winter; he fined York and Newcastle for not affording him an appropriately grand reception. He was looking for money everywhere. He was told, during a visit to Hexham in Northumberland, that Roman treasure was buried at Corbridge nearby; he ordered his men to dig for it, but nothing was unearthed.

During the course of his rapid journeys, sometimes covering 30 miles (48 kilometres) a day, he evinced a particular interest in imposing justice upon his subjects. This again was largely because of his desire for revenue, but as a boy his tutor had been Ranulph de Glanville whose legal treatise has already been mentioned. There may be some connection. John declared once that ‘our peace should be inviolably preserved, even if it were only granted to a dog’.

So John paid much attention to the details of administration and of justice, with a diligence quite different from the insouciance of his elder brother. If he was suspicious, he was also vigilant and curious. Most of the people had never seen their king before. Yet here he was, in the robes of state, questioning and charging and judging. His own voice was the voice of law. He loved fine gems and he glittered with jewellery. He bathed regularly and often, a practice almost without precedent in the thirteenth century. The body of the king – the flesh and blood – was sacred. Here is the essence of medieval governance.

This was also a time of rising prices; a rapidly increasing population meant that the common resources of life became scarcer and more expensive. Financial, as well as demographic, explanations can be found. The importation of silver from the mines of eastern Germany increased the amount of money in circulation; as a result, prices rose between 100 and 200 per cent in the last two decades of the twelfth century. This is the proper context in which to see baronial rebellion and the sealing of the Magna Carta. The consequent ‘inflation’, to use a contemporary term, affected the king as much as the lords and the commons. War, in particular, had become much more expensive. The problem was then compounded by recession as the king took more and more money out of circulation in order to pay for his military ambitions. So the king was constrained at every hand; it might seem that the forces of nature were against him.

After the collapse of the Angevin Empire in 1204 King John began to assert himself on the island of Britain. He waged campaigns in Wales, Scotland and Ireland. In Ireland he managed to impose royal government upon the feuding Anglo-Norman barons who had divided the rule of southern and eastern Ireland among themselves; John also gained the fealty of the native Gaelic kings who recognized his power. In 1209 he launched an expedition against Scotland, and forced its king to recognize him as overlord. He subdued, temporarily, the Welsh principalities; he cowed them by violence, in other words, and before the start of hostilities he hanged at Nottingham some twenty-eight Welsh boys, the sons of chieftains who had been surrendered as hostages. It was not the least, or the last, of his acts of cruelty. But the cruelty of kings worked. At the end of these campaigns a contemporary chronicler stated that ‘there is now no one in Ireland, Scotland and Wales who does not obey the command of the King of England; that, as is well known, is more than any of his ancestors had achieved’.

Yet he struggled to control his magnates. They were not eager to fight for the restoration of the Angevin Empire, and they resented the manifold exactions he imposed upon them. He demanded huge fees for the granting of inheritances, or for the selling of wealthy heiresses in marriage. On occasions he raised his own claims to estates that had long been the property of wealthy families. A tax called ‘scutage’ was paid to avoid military service; John levied it eleven times in sixteen years. Payments in kind were also exacted. One magnate, William de Braose, paid the sum of 300 cows, 30 bulls and 10 horses for the approval of a plea. A further twist can be added to what seems to have been the king’s unremitting hatred of the Braose family. William’s failure to pay further debts led to his being driven into exile. But another fate remained for his wife and son. Matilda de Braose was one of the few people who knew what had happened to Prince Arthur nine years before, and it seems that she was talking too much; John ordered her to be arrested with her son. Mother and son were starved to death in prison.

It was said that the king was as rapacious of wives and daughters as he was of money. They were not safe in their castles when John paid a visit. Yet, on a larger scale, the whole force of Angevin monarchy was opposed to the feudal privileges of the mighty lords. The growth of a bureaucracy, and of a central administration, curtailed their own powers to make money out of the resident population. Business was being diverted from the local honorial courts, for example, to the royal courts. They were losing money as a result. Historians look back in admiration at the increasing growth and complexity of ‘royal government’; all it meant at the time was royal exploitation. The emergence of an army of mercenaries also restricted the role of the magnates as the martial leaders of the country. Many of them still had an image of their role derived from chivalric romance. They were the knights of the Round Table gathered beside their king who acted as primus inter pares. King John was not King Arthur, however, and the only Holy Grail for which he cared was gold.

To sacred affairs, in general, he was indifferent. When the archbishopric of Canterbury became vacant in 1205, the king refused to fill it. He wanted the money from the wealthy see to be diverted to his own treasury. This was a device he had used in the past with other bishoprics. Pope Innocent III prevaricated, understanding royal sensibilities, but his patience was not inexhaustible. In 1207 he appointed Stephen Langton to the vacant archbishopric. Langton could not have been a better choice; he was an Englishman, out of Lincolnshire, but had been a superb professor of theology at the University of Paris. He was also cardinal priest of the basilica church of St Chrysogonus in Rome, and a canon of York Minster.

John characteristically fell into a carefully staged fury. What had the pope to do with the affairs of his kingdom? He would, like his predecessors, appoint the bishops and archbishops whom he believed to be loyal. He refused to allow the pope any right to appoint an archbishop of Canterbury without royal assent. He banished from England the monks of Canterbury who had acceded to the pope’s request. He seized all the English offices held by Italian bishops. He refused to allow any papal legates to enter the country. In the spring of 1208 the pope placed the country under an interdict, forbidding any church services to be held; no sacraments, except those of baptism for the newborn and absolution for the dying, were to be performed. Matthew Paris, in his account of the interdict, illustrated the scene with a drawing of bell-ropes tied up. Sacred time was suspended.

The king retaliated by confiscating all churches and church lands, on the principle that a non-functioning Church does not need property. John was then formally excommunicated, in 1209, which in theory meant that his clerical administrators could no longer serve or obey him. Some clerics fled the king’s court and travelled overseas, but there were more than enough ecclesiastical lawyers and administrators to make sure that the machinery of Church and government remained stable; it has been estimated that the majority of the bishops stayed in England during the interdict. The country itself remained relatively unmoved by papal displeasure. It had never paid much attention to the decrees of the see of Peter. The deep continuity of the country, and the secular customs of the nation, remained unbroken. Long negotiations, between the English court and the see of Peter, of course ensued. The king eventually seemed willing to accept Stephen Langton into his kingdom, on the clear and stated agreement that this was not to be seen as a precedent. No future pope would be allowed to appoint the archbishop of Canterbury without royal approval. The pope held out for better terms. This was war.

It is said that the cares of kings come in flocks, and that the sight of dark skies brings further storms. The first signs of internal rebellion emerged in 1209, when some of the northern barons were in communication with the king of France over the possibility of an invasion. It is no coincidence that in this year John went on military expedition to the north in order to cow King William of Scotland. He also took care to assert his authority over his own northern lands. The conspiracy faded away. Three years later the king felt obliged to refortify his castles, particularly in the border regions, where the magnates had always been more independent. Rumour spread that the barons were planning to depose the king. In turn John demanded hostages from the more recalcitrant of them. In 1213 he razed the castles of one who was believed to be planning to lead the revolt, Robert Fitzwalter, until a fragile peace was restored between them.

The king was surrounded by too many enemies, and it became necessary to placate the most important of them. It was widely rumoured, in the early months of 1213, that Pope Innocent III had sent an open letter deposing John and urging King Philip of France to invade England. Yet in spring John surrendered. On 15 May he agreed to accept all of the pope’s claims and demands. He went further. He agreed to yield his country to the pope and receive it back as a fief; he was, in effect, about to become the pope’s feudal vassal. Several sound reasons could be advanced for what seems on the face of it abject surrender. King Philip, even as he was organizing a force to sail across the Channel, was forced to cancel his invasion. He could not attack the pope’s new realm. The king’s status as the pope’s vassal might also deter his rebellious barons. Pope Innocent III himself, as subsequent events would testify, became a formidable ally and defender of royal power against insurgent subjects. King John was also a newly blessed representative of God. As the papal legate in England put it, ‘the lord king is another man by God’s grace’.

So the lord king decided to press home his advantage and make one more attempt to recover his Angevin Empire from the French king. In the following year he created a coalition of princes – among them the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto IV, and the count of Flanders – who were intent upon acquiring French land. The count and the emperor would proceed against the French army from the north-east, while King John would advance from Poitou in the west. The strategy was excellent, but its execution was misjudged. Many confused skirmishes and sieges took place, and on 27 July 1214 the forces of John and Otto were decisively defeated by King Philip outside the village of Bouvines. It was the final battle for the Angevin Empire. John had lost everything for which he most cared.

The failure at the battle of Bouvines was in effect the harbinger of baronial rebellion. The magnates may not have been greatly exercised by the loss of empire, but they were enraged at the amount of money wasted on a failed cause. It was the crowning point of their belief in the king’s misjudgment and military ineptitude. In the aftermath of the defeat there emerged what has since become known as a ‘baronial party’, brought together by the manifold causes and complaints that have already been outlined. The imposition of fines and taxes, the predominant advice of ‘evil counsellors’, the decay in their social and military pre-eminence, were all part of baronial rebellion against authoritarian and ruthless Angevin rule.

The principal centres of revolt were the north, the west and East Anglia; but the barons did not necessarily form distinct or coherent groups. Family was divided against family; district was opposed to district. A group of 39 barons, out of a total baronage of 197, were in open revolt against the Crown; approximately the same number were its faithful supporters. The remainder were uncertain, and probably fearful of the future.

The rebels did find an unexpected champion in the new archbishop, however; on his return to England Stephen Langton restated the old principles enshrined in the document known as Leges Henrici Primi that nothing can be taken or demanded by the king except ‘by right and reason, by law of the land and justice and by a court’s judgment’. That, clearly, had not been King John’s manner of proceeding.

The king and the rebellious barons met on various occasions, making little if any progress. The pope was persuaded to write to the rebels, forbidding the use of force or violence against their anointed king. He also wrote to Stephen Langton, accusing the archbishop of taking the side of the barons. The king then engineered what he must have considered a master stroke. On 4 March 1215, he assumed the cross of the crusader. Who could ride against a knight of Christ?

The manoeuvre did not succeed. On 5 May the barons renounced their fealty to the king and, under the leadership of Robert Fitzwalter, opened hostilities. They besieged Northampton Castle, a royal stronghold, and on 17 May occupied London. This was in itself a notable achievement, and tilted the balance of military power clearly in favour of the barons. More of them declared against the king.

John decided to procrastinate in the well-known form of conducting negotiations. He asked Stephen Langton to arrange a truce, so that some form of settlement might be reached. It is clear enough, however, that he never had any intention of honouring any such agreement. He believed himself to be upholding the rights of a sovereign king against rebellious subjects. In this belief, he was joined by the pope. The barons, however, accepted his invitation. Let the day be the fifteenth of June, they replied. Let the place be Runnemead. Runnemede, or Runnymede, is a meadow on the Surrey side of the river Thames near Windsor; there is a small island or eyot in the middle of the river, where the bargain was supposed to be sealed. A yew tree that was growing there in 1215 still stands.

Some informal notes survive that appear to have been taken down at the time of preliminary negotiations; they may reflect the words the king actually used. Early on it is declared that ‘King John concedes that he will not take a man without judgment nor accept anything for justice, nor do injustice’. The barons wished to readjust the balance of power in their favour. They wanted to be secure in their lands and castles, unmolested by the king or the king’s men. They also wished to be freed from the financial exactions imposed by John.

Various meetings were held between the opposing parties, with Stephen Langton acting as mediator. A preliminary document was then drawn up, by a chancery clerk, known as the ‘Articles of the Barons’. The Magna Carta, or Great Charter, emerged from the baronial articles. It was called great because of its length, not because of its importance. Yet it was the work of highly intelligent and experienced administrators who in an almost literal sense stood at the king’s side to urge compromise and restraint. They were also instrumental in persuading the barons to come to terms wider than their own private interests. By 19 June the agreement had been reached. The barons gave their king the kiss of peace, and then he granted the charter.

Over the next five days several copies were made and sent over the kingdom; four of them can still be seen. One of those, preserved in the Cottonian Library of the British Library, contains some eighty-six lines (with additions) written on a skin of parchment, measuring 14½ inches (36.8 centimetres) in breadth by 20½ inches (52 centimetres) in length. It is much shrivelled and mutilated, and has survived at least one fire that reduced the seal to pulp. It is said to have been purchased by Sir Robert Cotton at the beginning of the seventeenth century, for the sum of fourpence, from a tailor who was about to cut it up for his own purposes. Once the copies had been completed by the clerks, they were proclaimed by the sheriffs in their various county courts.

But this was not a new code of law. It was not even a summary of the great principles of legislation. It was essentially an attempt by the barons to return to the state of affairs before the dominance of the Angevin kings. It did not represent some spirit of ‘progress’ or ‘development’ in human affairs. None of the participants would have known what those words meant. It was in part a reactionary document. Villeins and slaves, the most numerous portion of the kingdom, were never mentioned. The unfree were of no consequence. Their ‘progress’ over the centuries was slow and uncertain. This was a charter for the liber homo or free man.

Many specific measures were adopted within its sixty-three clauses. The old liberties of the Church were to be respected. Taxes, known as scutages or aids, should not be levied on the nation without the approval of the common council; some have seen this as the emergence of the principle of ‘no taxation without representation’, but the common council consisted only of archbishops, bishops, earls, barons and tenants-in-chief. They were not ‘the people’ of a self-governing kingdom.

The charter also stipulated that no man should be made a judge or sheriff without adequate knowledge of the law. The courts of law should be convened in one place, rather than follow the king. The towns and cities of the kingdom were to be granted their ancient liberties. Free men were to be allowed to travel freely. Forest law was to be alleviated, and all the forests created in the king’s reign were to be opened. The thirty-ninth clause states that ‘no free man shall be taken or imprisoned, except by the lawful judgement of his peers or the law of the land’. The fortieth clause declares that ‘To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.’ Three declarations of the Magna Carta still remain on the statute book of England.

Edward Coke, Lord Chief Justice at the beginning of the seventeenth century, wrote that ‘as the gold refiner will not out of the dust or shreds of gold, let pass the least crumb, in respect to the excellence of the metal; so ought not the reader to pass any syllable of this law, in respect of the excellency of the matter’. Since Coke forced the Petition of Right upon a reluctant Charles I, later enshrined in the Bill of Rights of 1689, and since his writings were instrumental in the drawing-up of the American Constitution, we may take seriously his alleged claim that ‘Magna Carta is such a fellow that he will have no sovereign’.

Yet he was writing 400 years after the event. The thirty-ninth and fortieth clauses of the charter may have been the most pertinent and significant, but at the time they were simply part of a miscellaneous and haphazard collection of principles taken from canon law and common law and custom equally. It is not at all clear that the negotiators knew precisely what they were doing. They were more concerned with correcting manifest wrongs than proclaiming evident rights. They made a heap of all they found. Not for the first time have great events and doctrines emerged from ambiguous and adventitious circumstances. The charter had no central doctrine. It was piecemeal. Therefore it was adaptable. Its meaning or meanings could be reinterpreted. Its underlying consequences were understood only gradually and slowly. It was reissued three times, with various amendments, and only the final version of 1225 became law. It was ratified thirty-eight times by various kings, the last of them being Henry VI.

Yet even before the moment he sealed it, King John had determined to ignore it. The sixty-three clauses meant nothing to him. He had hoped that by apparently coming to agreement with the barons, he would be able to divide his opponents and purchase a breathing space in which he could reassert his sovereignty. No sooner had he affixed his seal to the document than he sent an emissary to the pope, claiming that every concession won from him was an insult to the pontiff himself whose unworthy vassal he was. He ordered that all of his castles should be provisioned and fortified. He sent commanders to Flanders, Poitou and elsewhere to hire mercenary soldiers. War against his barons could be renewed. On 24 August 1215, Pope Innocent III sent letters annulling the provisions of the Magna Carta as an insult to his authority over England. ‘With the advice of our brethren,’ he wrote, ‘we altogether reprove and condemn this charter, prohibiting the king under pain of anathema from observing it, the barons from exacting its obligations.’

It came too late. The king and the barons were already at war. The Cornish lands of Robert Fitzwalter, the leading rebel, were seized. At this juncture the military advantage lay decidedly with the king; he possessed by far the largest number of fortified castles and he had at his command a professional mercenary army. A party of rebels took refuge in the castle at Rochester; John besieged it, and helped to undermine it by strapping burning torches to a number of pigs. The animals were herded into wooden galleries built beneath the stronghold and set it ablaze. This was one of the less formal techniques of medieval warfare.

Many of the rebel barons took refuge in London. It might have been possible for the king to lay siege to the capital, but London was not Rochester. The undertaking was filled with risk. Instead John decided to destroy the castles of the rebels one by one. He marched to the north, from where many of the barons came, and laid waste the land from Nottingham to Berwick; he left a trail of blood and ruins wherever he ventured. Only one rebel castle, that of Helmsley in Yorkshire, was left standing.

From their stronghold of London the barons called upon the aid of King Philip of France. They resolved to offer the crown to his son, Louis, whose wife was connected in blood to the Plantagenets. In the spring of 1216 Louis landed at Dover and marched unopposed to Rochester. His success was followed by his capture of Guildford, of Farnham, and, most importantly, of Winchester. It must have seemed that God, or good fortune, was on his side. The great earls of the kingdom, many of them hitherto supporters of the king, submitted to him. John retreated to the west, and spent the summer months of 1216 in various sorties throughout Dorset and Devon. In the early days of September he broke out and led his army to the east; he went into Norfolk and Lincolnshire, without achieving any great success. From this last expedition comes the now accepted legend that he lost his treasure in the Wash, when the tide rose too rapidly. It was reported that the crown itself was engulfed by the swirling waters. It was a very convenient story for those of his immediate entourage, who would have been happy to enrich themselves on the principle of sauve qui peut. The truth is also lost in the shifting tide.

He must in any case have known that he was reaching the end of his days. Kings die when they feel that their power is fading. He became ill of a fever, and of dysentery; he died in the fortress of the bishop of Lincoln at the age of forty-nine. ‘Hell’, wrote one chronicler, ‘felt herself defiled by his admission.’ John had another destination in mind. He was interred in the cathedral at Worcester and at his own request his tomb lay in the shadow of the shrine of the eleventh-century English saint, Bishop Wulfstan. In 1797 the king’s sepulchre was opened by curious antiquaries. It was reported that ‘the remains of the Illustrious Personage appear entire’. His height was 5 feet and 5 inches (1.65 metres). On one side of him lay his sword, in knightly fashion, with ‘the bones of his left arm lying on his breast, his teeth quite perfect’. He was the first king, since the time of the Normans, both to be born and to die in England.

What can be said of a king whose memory has been universally execrated by the chroniclers of his own time and of subsequent centuries? In his rapacity and greed he did not materially differ from his predecessors. He was characterized by the harshness and inflexibility of all previous Norman and Angevin rulers. Yet it was his misfortune to aspire to royal domination in singularly unhappy circumstances – his loss of the Angevin Empire at the hands of a wealthier and mightier king, the havoc of steeply rising prices, and the alienation of his barons, all darkened the picture of his reign. It needed only a few vignettes of his rapacity or cruelty to complete the chroniclers’ description of an utterly unfit king.

Yet out of his rule emerged a new or at least an intensified sense of the nation. That is the meaning of the Magna Carta. The English people of the early thirteenth century were already familiar with the notion of ius commune or common law; they were accustomed to the role of guilds and fraternities. John himself, in pursuit of the throne, had in 1191 accepted the right of London to form its own commune as a self-governing and self-elected body of the richer citizens. From this time forward communal archives and records were placed in the guildhall. The momentum of the age was behind this new form of identity. Many other towns asserted their own communitas during the reign of John, with the election of mayors and the creation of municipal seals. The members of the commune swore an oath to preserve the town and its liberties.

So it was perhaps inevitable that the barons, in rebellion against the king, would assert the values of the communa of England and would introduce the concept of the communa totius terra with its attendant liberties. It became known, in the thirteenth century, as ‘the community of the realm’. There even grew, at the end of that century, a recognition of ‘the community of the vill’ or village. These were all stages in the growing selfconsciousness of England. This is the meaning of the ‘field full of folk’ that William Langland invokes at the beginning of Piers Plowman. He saw, in vision, a community.

16

Crime and punishment

A ‘scotale’ or drinking party took place at Ashley, near Cirencester, on 7 September 1208; it was in honour of the birthday of Our Lady, and the local officer of the forest sold drinks at his alehouse to celebrate the occasion. It was essentially a form of local tax, because the inhabitants felt obliged to attend in fear of incurring his displeasure. John Scot was riding back from the alehouse when he invited Richard of Crudwell to sit behind him on his horse. Richard thought that he was offering him a lift, but John took up a knife and stabbed him in the shoulder; the wound was 4½ inches (10.12 centimetres) deep. Richard fell from the horse, and John dismounted. He stabbed Richard once more, and proceeded to rob his purse of forty-three shillings. Somehow Richard crawled home, on all fours, and on the next day informed the king’s sergeant. This seems to have provoked John Scot who, five nights later, broke into the house of Richard’s mother and beat her so badly that it was believed she would not live.

At a convent, near Watton in the East Riding of Yorkshire, in the 1160s, one nun had lost her virginity to a young priest; when her condition became obvious, the nuns interrogated her about the offending man. When she revealed his identity, the nuns captured him. They took him to the cell of the pregnant nun. She was given a knife and forced to castrate her lover; whereupon the nuns stuffed his genitals into her mouth. She was then flogged, and bound with chains in a prison cell. In an age when the call of heaven was direct and unequivocal – and when the spiritual world was pre-eminent – a general indifference was maintained to the fate or the sufferings of the physical body. When one English king was asked if he regretted the thousands of soldiers he sent into slaughter, he remarked that they would thank him when they were in heaven. The chronicler, after telling the story of the savage nuns, exclaimed, ‘What zeal was burning in these champions of chastity, these persecutors of uncleanness, who loved Christ above all things!’

These stories of physical cruelty would have been familiar to all the people of England in a period when violence was tolerated to a surprising degree. Village justice could be savage and peremptory, largely going unreported. The violence of lord against villein does not often appear in the historical record. In this society men and women took weapons with them; even small children possessed knives. William Palfrey, aged eleven, stabbed and killed the nine-year-old William Geyser outside the village of Whittlesford in Cambridgeshire. There was in any case what would now be called a culture of violence. Children were educated with severe physical discipline. Corporal punishment was familiar and usual in all elements of society. Public whipping, for a variety of offences from adultery to slander, was commonplace.

A genuine pleasure was also derived from bitter disputation, denunciation and vilification. This was a culture of rhetoric and the spoken word. A wide vocabulary of scatological abuse could be employed, while sexual misdemeanours were commonly and loudly publicized. In a society of intense hierarchy, a preoccupation with good name and standing is only to be expected. Disputes were sometimes settled by ritualized fights in the churchyard. Slights and insults were the occasion of bloody disputes. The smallest incident could provoke a violent fracas. One man came into a hostelry, where strangers were drinking. ‘Who are these people?’ he enquired, for which question he was stabbed to death. An element of gratuitous cruelty could also be introduced, as in the case of one man who was dragged to a local tavern and there obliged to drink a cocktail of beer and his own blood.