Henry and Stephen agreed a treaty at Christmas 1153 in which Henry was recognized as Stephen’s heir, though Stephen would continue to be king for his lifetime, and Stephen’s younger son was entirely excluded. Once the treaty had been confirmed, Henry was free to return to his continental domains and consolidate his position before Louis could provide further opposition. When Stephen died on 25 October 1154, Henry was so secure that he made no attempt to rush to England, and despite the previous years of civil war the succession was uncontested. Henry and Eleanor arrived in England in December, and on 19 December 1154 they were crowned King and Queen at Westminster Abbey.74
With his accession to the English throne in 1154 at the age of twenty-one, Henry II, King of England, Duke of Normandy, Count of Anjou and Duke of Aquitaine in right of his wife ruled a greater collection of territories than any other ruler in Europe, an ‘Angevin Empire’. He had overcome considerable adversity to inherit these lands, though in fact much of the work had been done by his parents. Henry would spend his entire life defending these territories and asserting every one of the rights that accrued to him, even extending his dominion over Brittany and Ireland and attempting to do so in Wales and Toulouse, and at his death the Empire would pass intact to his son. His grandfather Fulk V was the first Angevin king, but let us now see what this second and much greater Angevin king accomplished.
CHAPTER 4 – THE ANGEVIN EMPIRE I: CREATING THE EMPIRE
I RECALL THAT AS a child I was reading a history of medieval Europe and discovered a map showing the various political components of 12th-century Europe. I was intrigued to see that England and most of France were shaded and labelled the ‘Angevin Empire’. I was astonished – what was this Angevin Empire that covered such a significant portion of Europe, including England, and who or what were these Angevins whom I had never previously heard of and how had they conquered so much? I’m convinced that part of the immediate attraction was the ‘Ang’ prefix, which reminded me of Tolkien’s ‘Kingdom of Angmar’ from Lord of the Rings: the word Angevin felt hardedged, mysterious and vaguely sinister, and considering that this empire was in the same list of maps that included the Holy Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire and the Mongol Empire, it was clearly something highly significant.
Of course the term ‘Angevin Empire’ was only coined in the 19th century and would have been meaningless to Henry II. Henry and his sons Richard and John worked in the period 1154–1204 to retain possession of all their lands and in some cases harmonized legal and political institutions in their territories, yet they never viewed their disparate domains as a single entity. This policy originated with Geoffrey Plantagenet, who had retained the titles Count of Anjou and Duke of Normandy and made no attempt to combine the regions. That this was a specific policy on his part is shown by his advice to Henry II to rule all his domains separately, and never to attempt to govern one by the customs of another. Henry obeyed this injunction for the most part – though with some exceptions – and continued to use multiple titles just as Geoffrey had,1 though the titles of Count of Maine and Count of Poitou fell into abeyance, subsumed into Anjou and Aquitaine respectively.
Henry and Eleanor had four sons that survived to adulthood, and modern historians emphasize that in the 1180s Henry II planned to divide the Angevin possessions between his sons, with the eldest surviving son Henry inheriting England, Normandy and Anjou; Richard taking Aquitaine; Geoffrey taking Brittany; and John becoming the king of Ireland. The early deaths of Young Henry and Geoffrey along with John’s failure to make his lordship of Ireland succeed meant that Richard inherited everything, and Richard’s death without heirs meant that John did the same, but this was a genealogical accident. Further, the Angevins avoided imposing a single political system on their various lands and explicitly kept them separate with the only rationale behind the Empire’s existence being the family’s succession to the various lordships.
What makes further speculation about the relevance of the term Empire pointless is that the edifice collapsed within a matter of five years under John’s rule. John is considered one of the worst rulers in English history, but this is insufficient to explain the almost immediate disintegration of his empire. There were other forces at work during the reigns of Henry II and Richard that reached their culmination under John and set the stage for the next chapter of Angevin history.
How useful, then, is the term ‘Angevin Empire’? Since Kate Norgate coined it in England under the Angevin Kings in 1881 it has become a fixture in medieval historiography and prompted considerable, and profitable, discussion and debate. JC Holt commented:
The Plantagenet lands were not designed as an ‘empire’, as a great centralized administrative structure … They were founded, and continued to survive, on an unholy combination of princely greed and genealogical accident.2
However, this could be said of every medieval state, not least William the Conqueror’s Anglo-Norman realm, which is never so lightly dismissed.
There is no doubt that the Angevin Empire did not have a centralized administrative structure, but the formation and persistence of the Empire were not accidental. Matilda and Geoffrey Plantagenet fought to make the Empire a reality, and once he had control of his vast domains Henry II fought constantly to preserve their integrity, as did Richard and John. Commenting that they viewed these lands as family possessions that could be divided between family members misses the mark, since this was true of all medieval territories, even France, the most ideologically coherent medieval kingdom. Once the continental portions of the Angevin Empire had been taken by France, some of them were almost immediately apportioned between French princes, including, as we shall see, Anjou. This French use of ‘apanages’ almost proved disastrous when territories such as Burgundy gained nearly complete independence and became a threat to the French throne in the 15th century, but hindsight allows historians to view the French kings as maintaining some form of central control over them.
The question of fealty and homage raises an interesting point, since Henry, Richard and John owed homage to the French king for the entire Angevin Empire except England, but initially this meant little. This highlights the personal nature of homage, since the fact that one lord performed homage to another could have little impact on who actually ruled the territory. Contemporaries certainly viewed it this way: the troubadour and inveterate troublemaker Bertran de Born commented ‘Five duchies has the French crown and, if you count them up, there are three of them missing’ – that is, Normandy, Brittany and Aquitaine had been part of France, but now belonged to the Angevins, who were considered completely separate.3
Henry II: ‘A human chariot, dragging everyone along in fear and excitement’
Henry II is perhaps the most vibrant figure of the 12th century. To enable us to engage emotionally with him we may lack the immediacy of a realistic portrait (though we do have his effigy in Fontevraud Abbey), but we have such finely drawn, intimate descriptions by members of his household that Henry lives for us more than most medieval figures and we can form quite a clear impression of his personality and indeed his appearance.
Our overriding impression of Henry is of violent energy and constant motion, and physical descriptions of him dovetail (too neatly?) with this image. Peter of Blois said he was of moderate height ‘appearing neither gigantic among small men nor insignificant among tall ones’, and Gerald of Wales and Walter Map said he was ‘thick-set, square-shouldered, broad-chested, with arms muscular as those of a gladiator and highly-arched feet which looked made for the stirrup’. He had the red hair that had characterized the Angevins since Fulk the Red, freckled skin and grey eyes, and though there could be no question that he lacked the qualities that led his father to be called ‘the Handsome’, his courtier Walter Map said that ‘his was a form which a soldier, having once seen, would hasten to look upon again’, whatever this means!4 These descriptions are more convincing than Henry of Huntingdon’s; when discussing Henry’s arrival in England for the final push tha
t established his succession to the throne, he described the future king’s appearance: ‘The noble youth was at the head of his army, his physical beauty betokening that of the soul, and marked out by arms worthy of him, which suited him so well that we may say that his arms did not so much become him as he his arms.’5 This might be more calculated to please the new king than calling him freckled or thick-set.
Henry had no use for luxury, dressing plainly and putting gloves over his coarse, rough hands only when hawking, and eating very meagrely, prompting complaints from his courtiers that the ordinary fare at his table even for nobles was half-baked bread, sour wine, stale fish and bad meat.6 This wasn’t a surprise, because Henry had no time to eat sumptuous meals and no call to wear any but practical clothes; he was in the saddle from the break of dawn until nightfall hunting and hawking, and even on his return he was never seated, standing or walking as he discussed business with his courtiers or debated intellectual problems with the clergy.
Here is one key to the existence of the Angevin Empire, because only a king with such energy could have ruled such vast domains successfully, and Henry visited every inch of his territories. Herbert of Bosham described Henry’s government as ‘a human chariot, of which the king is both driver and marksman, dragging everyone along in fear and excitement’.7 Henry’s energy was so remarkable that Louis VII said that he seemed to fly rather than ride, and it is a commonplace among historians to say that he died ‘worn-out’ in 1189 at the age of fifty-six; like a shark, when he stopped moving he would die. It is noteworthy that Richard the Lionheart seemed to possess a similar inexhaustible energy – as Norgate called it, the ‘demon-blood of Anjou’8 – but John, who lost the empire, was accused of habitual indolence, though even he could act quickly when necessary. John, if not lazy, sometimes seemed paralysed by the choices he faced and lapsed into inaction.
Henry’s constant travel and tireless work on governance were matched by his devotion to learning. Henry had no interest in tournaments or troubadours – as Peter of Blois said, life at court was like school every day, and Henry would often retire to his chamber with a book.9 It is not coincidental that in his reign we find one of the first medieval treatises, the Dialogus de Scaccario (‘Dialogue of the Exchequer’) of around 1180. England in the 12th century was synonymous with wealth and good government, and the Exchequer was perhaps the key component to this. The Dialogue provides a unique discussion of Henry’s fiscal administration, from its origins to the most minute details of receiving and storing money.10
What is perhaps most striking to modern eyes is that the Exchequer, which we take for granted as an institution, originated as a machine for counting money. It was a chequered cloth that was placed over a long table, and counters were placed in each square of the cloth to act as an abacus when rendering accounts. It may not stir everyone’s heart to ponder developments in mathematics, but this advance in arithmetic made the 11th and 12th centuries immeasurably more like our own time.
Using this technique, the sheriffs could present their accounts on the exchequer cloth easily, with counters being placed to show how much they owed and how much they provided. Soon the term Exchequer came to represent this procedure by which sheriffs publicly rendered their accounts, and then received a receipt in the form of a tally stick to show what they had paid.11 The most important point was that the accounts were rendered publicly: the sheriff’s account was seen to be rendered and the receipt proved what he had paid. This public accountability of government officials was crucial in the development of democracy itself, although this was still an undemocratic society. The sheriff received a tally stick with notches cut to show how much he had paid because he was likely to be illiterate, whereas the literate government ministers wrote the sums on the ‘Pipe Roll’ (so called because the rolls of parchment looked like pipes when they were stacked) for the government archive. This procedure actually dated to the reign of Henry I (the first surviving Pipe Roll dates to 1130), but is another example of the Angevins taking over Norman procedures and bringing them to new heights of efficiency.12
An equally important development that grew from the Exchequer was that it began to be held at a particular place, the Palace of Westminster. As we saw, even in the 1130s Winchester, the Anglo-Saxon capital, was still the kingdom’s treasury, although coronations took place in Westminster, but under Henry II we finally see the king’s administrative centre of Westminster joining the chief city of London to create a true national capital for England.
Though there were many medieval kings who liked ceremony and pomp – the great Angevin enemies, the Capetians, were masters of this – there was still a rough-and-ready quality to many medieval kings, particularly Henry. Access to the king was relatively easy. Walter Map says, ‘Whatever way he goes out he is seized upon by the crowds and pulled hither and thither, pushed whither he would not and yet, surprising to say, he listens to each man with patience, and though assaulted by all with shouts and pullings and rough pushings, does not threaten anyone because of it, nor show any sign of anger; only, when he is hustled beyond bearing, he silently retreats to some place of quiet.’13 The architecture of the time reflected this lack of privacy, as there was still a Great Hall open to all and the king often moved in the midst of crowds. By the 15th century a distinctly different type of architecture arose with the development of corridors and sequences of private rooms, which was exemplified if not pioneered by those later Angevins, Louis II of Anjou and King René.
Yet Henry’s informality was clearly a personal quality and not just typical of the time. Henry was so impatient that he would sometimes eat his meals while standing; he would hunt all day and stop in the meanest lodging he happened to find with no regard for his own comfort or the comfort of those with him; and despite his obsessive concern for royal prerogatives, his ideas of royal dignity did not preclude him flinging himself on the floor in a rage and chewing on his mattress, or having a jester named Roland the Farter, who performed a leap, a whistle and a fart to the delight of the court14, or rolling on the ground with laughter when St Hugh of Lincoln made a joke at his expense.
The latter episode might be the most characteristic and give us the best insight into his personality. Henry was annoyed with St Hugh, and had gone out hunting but paused in the forest to rest. St Hugh pursued him and demanded to be heard, but Henry’s ire was unquenched and he maintained a stony silence. St Hugh sat next to him in silence and decided to wait the king out. Henry could not stand to be idle, and he began to mend a leather bandage that was on one of his fingers. St Hugh then commented to the king how much he resembled his ancestors, the leather workers of Falaise. Henry howled with laughter and rolled on the ground, to the astonishment of his courtiers, who didn’t get the joke. Henry explained that Herleva, who bore the bastard William the Conqueror, had been a leather worker in Falaise, as was well known to the Angevins, if not their courtiers. In fact St Hugh was rumoured to be Henry II’s own bastard, which perhaps added a bit of spice to his knowledge of that particular bit of family history.15
Henry II’s Achievements
When Henry became king of England the country must have been deeply weary of war, and the confusion and uncertainty over the disputed succession between Stephen and Matilda. The arrival of a king who could provide strong government and order must have seemed desirable to some, yet others had profited greatly from the anarchy by seizing royal properties and lands from their neighbours, and they may have favoured the current system that essentially devolved power to the barons at the king’s expense. Whatever their views, none of the English nobles could have been prepared for just how imposing Henry could be. Henry’s immediate goal was to restore the privileges and authority of the monarch to what they were ‘on the day when our grandfather Henry I was both alive and dead’. Henry’s frequent use of this formula emphasized his connection to the previous Norman monarchy, but it also bluntly stated that the laxity of Stephen’s reign and seizure of prerogatives by the nobles (notably the
building of unlicensed castles) was over, and Henry intended to regain full royal authority.16
Like his great-grandfather William the Conqueror and his ancestor Fulk Nerra, Henry was a prodigious castle-builder. There could be no question that the stone-built castle was the preeminent piece of medieval military technology, and Henry spent enormous amounts upgrading his castles (as well as seizing and demolishing illegal castles erected during the Anarchy). We are uniquely positioned to examine Henry’s expenditure because we have the Pipe Rolls giving detailed accounts of almost everything he spent. Henry put £4000 into Dover Castle, which is still one of the foremost medieval fortifications in England, and he commissioned the technologically advanced Orford Castle, polygonal in shape to foil miners who might undermine angles not overseen by the defenders.17
Henry was also famous for being able to take castles, as his father had been and his son Richard would be. Contemporaries marvelled at Henry’s ability to appear as if from nowhere and capture supposedly impregnable castles within days. This was not because of superior artillery or secret methods, but because Henry and Richard were able to appreciate the changing nature of the medieval army. Although mercenaries had been used by William the Conqueror and King Stephen, there was still an assumption that medieval armies would be composed of knights serving under feudal obligation. These obligations were set out very clearly, and included a strict limit on the amount of time a knight had to serve, which made the feudal levy ill suited for lengthy siege operations. Knights who lived off plunder also had no desire to sit in front of a castle for weeks. Furthermore, many knights owed no duty to serve outside the land of their lord, and so Henry Count of Anjou had no right to summon Angevin levies outside Anjou, just as Henry Duke of Normandy or King of England had no right to summon Norman or English knights to serve in Aquitaine. Henry’s solution to this problem was to use armies of mercenaries who would serve wherever and whenever he liked, as long as there was money to pay them. In addition to their unlimited term of service they also might include professional sappers, miners and engineers who provided skills knights had no need or desire to acquire. This transformation of the medieval army constituted a minor military revolution after two centuries of warfare when the advantage lay solidly with the defenders of stone fortifications. Henry’s realization – or perhaps the realization of the Exchequer, that precocious embryonic bureaucratic organization – that the single most important factor in conducting war was securing a supply of ready money, and beyond this that a paid professional force that could remain in the field for weeks or months on end might indeed be more useful, if not superior, to a body of aristocrats, changed the face of warfare forever.18
Angevin Dynasties of Europe 900-1500 Page 14