by Ed West
When they arrived at the cathedral, Becket, with characteristic tact and diplomacy, shouted ‘Pimp!’ at FitzUrse. Insults were traded, and the ensuing horseplay had obviously gotten way out of control by the time one of the knights sliced off the top of Becket’s head, his blood and brains spilling all over the cathedral floor. ‘That escalated quickly,’ as the saying goes.
Understandably, the nation was shocked. Archbishops weren’t supposed to be murdered, especially not in cathedrals, and by the king’s men. Everyone had turned against Becket in the end, and before he died the bishops of York, London, and Salisbury had gone to Normandy to complain to the king about his conduct. Now, however, not a word could be said against him.
Rather than going to ground for a couple of months and then reappearing in public to say he was ‘battling his demons’ or citing his father’s lack of love, in those days public figures who messed up were expected to wear sackcloth and have themselves whipped in public, which is exactly what the king did at Canterbury Cathedral—five from each of the dozen bishops in attendance and three from each of the eighty monks. (Although Henry’s beating was probably symbolic, as otherwise that many would have killed him.)16
The murderers were sent off to the Holy Land to do penance, a virtual death sentence anyway, and FitzUrse died soon after. The king was also ordered to go to Jerusalem, but after repeated promises and procrastination, eventually the matter was dropped.*
The murder was major news across Europe; the French king Philip immediately tried to exploit it, urging the Pope to ‘draw the sword of St. Peter,’ in other words, excommunicate Henry and allow the French to invade his land with impunity. The Pope didn’t buy it. And the day after Henry was flogged, his army captured King William the Lion of Scotland, who was taken ‘shackled under the belly of a horse,’ and this was seen as divine judgment. God was okay with him.
Becket was quickly made a saint, to the smirking cynicism of his contemporaries. His main enemies, the bishops of London and York, who’d long wished him dead, took the lead roles in his canonization. ‘An ass he always was, and an ass he’ll always be,’ was the Bishop of London’s strictly off-the-record view.
Soon after the killing of Becket, the people of Canterbury began pouring into the cathedral, cutting off bits of their clothes and dipping them in the archbishop’s blood, anointing their eyes with the fluid; others brought vessels to capture the blood.
And whether he deserved his sainthood, and whatever effect the murder had on the roles of church and state, it certainly turned Canterbury into a first-rate tourist resort, with every sort of Becket gimmick now on sale, including Canterbury Water, a mixture of regular water and the saint’s blood. This ‘Becket Water,’ as it was also known, was supposed to cure blindness and heal cripples, and was manufactured on a large scale with an inscription in Latin: ‘All weakness and pain is removed, the healed man eats and drinks, and evil and death pass away.’ If it didn’t work, it was because the person wasn’t sufficiently pious.17 There were also T-shaped badges showing Thomas on a ship returning from exile, as well as a badge of dubious taste depicting the sword that killed him.
All sorts of miracles were attributed to the site: there was ‘Mad Henry’ of Forthwick, who came out of the tomb sane; a blind woman who touched her handkerchief into the martyr’s bloody eyes and dabbed it on to her own, restoring her sight; and another blind woman who, while visiting the shrine, was run over by yet another blind person on horseback and had her eyesight restored after praying to Becket (no one commented on the fact that a blind man was allowed to wander the kingdom on a horse).
So, tragic though Becket’s death was, it was a huge boost for the city’s tourism industry, which now vied with some of Europe’s top religious sites as a center for mystical nicknacks. You couldn’t buy that sort of publicity. Even though demented radical Protestants destroyed most of the cheap souvenirs four centuries later, forty-five boxes of the archbishop’s relics are still floating around today.
As a result of the killing, the Church basically won, the clergy securing their immunities until the Reformation, when Henry VIII took a new and fresh approach by just beheading anyone who disagreed with him.
Another bonus was that as a penitence Henry commissioned a new stone bridge in London, which was completed in 1209 and stood until 1831, during which time it witnessed countless disasters. In 1281–82 five arches just collapsed and floated downstream when ‘there was such a frost and snow, as no man living could remember the like,’ and the only reason the Great Fire of London of 1666 did not spread south of the river is that a third of London Bridge had been burned down in another fire thirty years earlier.
Ireland
While Henry’s conflict with Becket affects few people outside of the Kent tourist board, his other major blunder is still with us. For the Anglo-Saxons, Ireland never really appeared on the radar except as a place for noblemen to hide after they’d murdered someone in a drunken fight. But now the Normans were in charge, and if you lived next door to a Norman the chances were that when you came back home from work he’d have built a castle over your house, made your wife his serf, and demanded you work on his back garden twice a week. In fact, when he was very young Henry II had wanted to conquer Ireland for his youngest brother William but his mother persuaded him not to.
But now the Normans invaded, half-supported in this venture by the Catholic Church, which did not approve of the Irish Church’s lax attitude to sexual matters, especially divorce, concubines, and illegitimacy, which were all still rife. The Normans, despite being ferocious maniacs, were also very pious on such matters, and thought the Irish to be sexual deviants; the Norman chronicler Gerald of Wales visited the country with King John and noted while there he heard about a goat having sexual relations with a woman: ‘how unworthy and unspeakable’ he wrote about it, extensively. Whether or not this was true we can’t tell; Gerald also claimed a similar thing about the French, this time involving a lion, so it seems to have been a running theme with him.
It all began in 1170 when an Irish chieftain, Diarmaid MacMurchada of Leinster, lost his kingdom to a rival warlord and turned for help from Richard Fitzgilbert, Earl of Pembroke—just about the worst person for invite to your country. The De Clare family, from which Fitzgilbert came, already owned twenty towns on the Welsh border and were famously belligerent even compared to other Normans. ‘Strongbow,’ as the earl was called, soon overstayed his welcome by conquering Dublin and Waterford, where he ordered that seventy local residents have their legs broken and then chucked in the sea. Anglo-Irish relations were off to a shaky start.
Henry was extremely suspicious of Strongbow, and invaded the following year to keep an eye on him—eight centuries later, the English might admit that they suffered from what military euphemism types call ‘mission creep.’ There was another reason, though: in the past, Ireland had been used as a base by Viking raiders who established a kingdom there, many a miserable Anglo-Saxon ending up in the Dublin slave market, and Henry didn’t want some of his wilder barons to set up shop over there and potentially threaten him. And so a local dispute between warlords escalated into centuries of colonialism, one Britain is still trying to make up for by awarding its neighbor twelve points every year at the Eurovision Song Contest.
But Henry also had another motive: his vast empire had already been parceled out among his three elder sons, and the youngest, John, had no kingdom to call his own. Fighting the most militaristic people in Europe, the Irish didn’t stand a chance against the Anglo-Norman ‘grey foreigners,’ so-called because of their chainmail armor. Henry’s army soon took control of the area around Dublin, and this English colony became known as ‘the Pale,’ from the Latin for stake or boundary (so giving us the expression whereby anything outside was ‘beyond the pale’). He then gave Ireland to John as a consolation prize.
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* Whether Becket was a true believer or not, we cannot tell, for he said Mass very quickly, ‘according to h
is friend and biographer Herbert of Bosham . . . to minimize the skeptical thoughts that tended to trouble him at that point.’
* One of the killers, Hugh de Morville, was supposedly of evil heritage. As an example of this evil apparently his mother was so overcome by passion for a young man that she had him boiled to death when he spurned her advances.
CHAPTER FIVE
The War without Love
For all the problems that the Irish invasion was to cause, it didn’t stop any of Henry’s family troubles. The king’s four sons were like medieval playboys, blessed with superhuman arrogance, violent tempers, and enormous kingdom-sized trust funds, and they would ultimately all turn against their father, in what became known as ‘the war without love.’ Also pitted against the permanently furious monarch was his wife Eleanor, whom Henry called ‘his hated queen’ and whom he ended up having imprisoned for fifteen years. It was all part of the family tradition: back in 1156, Henry had crushed a rebellion by his younger brother, another Geoffrey, and his sons and grandsons would also end up fighting, betraying, and killing one another.
His eldest, called ‘Henry the Young King,’ was a dashing figure who, at the time, was considered the pinnacle of chivalry. He was a star of jousting tournaments, or tourneys, which were now in their heyday, having begun in eleventh-century France as a way for knights to amuse themselves, train for war, win armor, and generally hang out. Rulers were nervous about tourneys because they led to conspiracies, and Henry II and Henry III both tried to ban them, while the Church didn’t like the violence and refused burial to men who participated, saying they would languish in hell, forever, in burning armor—but this didn’t seem to deter the endless supply of aristocratic young men keen for a fight.
However, the Vatican abandoned this stand in 1316, when Pope John XXII decided they were good training for crusaders (although the Crusades were effectively lost by now anyway). And to start with, they were very violent indeed, essentially huge melees held out in the countryside with very high casualty rates. By the year 1300, they had become less ferocious and more regulated—Richard the Lionheart established the first permanent venues—and by the following century had evolved into what we would now imagine, with two pointy-helmeted knights charging at each other with a lance and trying to win the favor of hefty-bosomed maidens. But in Henry’s time they were essentially organized hooligan meetings with horses and weapons, no more romantic than a bunch of West Ham and Millwall fans fighting in a parking lot.
The tournaments were there to extol chivalry, a concept that began around the turn of the millennium in Germany and France and was originally a sort of cult of violence among bored aristocratic men with nothing else to do; however, with pressure from the Church, chivalry also developed into a set of rules regarding the treatment of prisoners, at first just fellow aristocrats but eventually women and children. Chivalry idealized a sort of perfect warrior, the preudhomme or ‘best kind of man,’ who had all the qualities knights should display, being ‘skilled in combat and courageous, faithful, wise and able to give good counsel, but also canny, even wily, in war when necessary.’1 The opposite of the preudhomme was the losengiers, the serpent-tongued deceivers.
The great chivalry handbook Le livre de chevalerie, written in the fourteenth century by Geoffrey de Charny, suggests for the first time that knights look after the poor and treat women in a nice way.
Knights had many traditions that still echo today. Among them was dubbing, from the French adouber, to arm, which meant giving someone a weapon, usually a belt. The dubbing would be followed by the collee, a form of ritualized beating, which eventually evolved into the modern custom of knighthood where the monarch taps one’s shoulder with a sword (a form of dubbing is carried out in some modern gangs). Knights for hire were known as ‘free lances,’ while another word also common for journalists, ‘a hack,’ comes from the sort of packhorse used at the time. (It came to mean someone who would do anything for a meal.)
Tournaments, by the standards of twenty-first-century sport, were absurdly dangerous: one year in Germany, eighty knights were killed in one game, and this wasn’t that exceptional. Among the sports seen at the tournament was cudgeling, which was won when blood poured down the opponent’s scalp; quarterstaff, in which poles over six feet long were used to hit and knock the opponent over, preferably out. Or singlestick, similar to quarterstaff but which ended when one of the chaps was covered in blood. In the twelfth century there were mock battles and brute force was the important factor, but two hundred years later there were two horsemen, and skill was important. There were also far fewer fatalities by this point, although still many, and the barriers between the two knights weren’t introduced until the fifteenth century.
Tourneys attracted all sorts of entertainers and craftsmen, something like a modern music festival. Heraldry also evolved at this time, so that people could know who they were fighting in the orgy of violence; eventually these standards became attached to the families involved.
Tourneys also attracted ladies, who would present prizes after the men had approached them and bowed, presumably half beaten to death by this point. Then the woman would announce, as recorded on one occasion, that ‘the seide ladyes and gentilwomen seyen that ye, Sir—have done the best joust this day. Therefore the seide ladyes and gentilwomen gevyn you this diamonde and send you much worship and joy of your lady.’
Sometimes, of course, the ladies were the prize, and chivalry often encouraged lots of men to do really stupid things in order to show off in front of women. In the 1330s, for example, some English knights went to France wearing eye patches, ‘having sworn to ladies at court that they would not open one of their eyes until victory was achieved. . . . Needless to say, thus encumbered, most died as a result,’ as one historian puts it.2
Chivalry would reach its peak with the book Le Morte d’Arthur, the romantic glamorization of the mythical British king of Camelot fame; it was published in 1485, as the medieval world was fading in the face of printing and gunpowder (feudalism depended on a lord controlling a castle, which were of little use against cannons). Much of what we understand of chivalric attitudes come from this story, written by Sir Thomas Malory, who was technically a knight although his own life didn’t quite live up to the ideal; he was convicted of breaking and entering, extortion, and two counts of rape during a colorful career.
Arthur was considered the ideal monarch as far back as the twelfth century, having been largely created in Oxford—at the very same time as the Empress Matilda was escaping in the snow—by a clergyman called Geoffrey of Monmouth. His book, Historia Regum Britanniae, or History of the Kings of Britain, was enormously influential, but as one twentieth century historian rather kindly put it, ‘Geoffrey’s work is not pure history.’3
The two other historians of the period, Henry of Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury, at least tried to keep their stories within the boundaries of possibility, but Geoffrey’s were far more popular. He borrowed a tale that had been taken back to France by knights visiting Cornwall in 1113; the locals told the Frenchmen about a heroic king who had fought for their people centuries ago against the invading Saxons, a king who had never died and would one day come back and sort everything out. The French knights obviously didn’t think much of it, as they laughed in the local peoples’ faces, and were pelted with vegetables, but the story of King Arthur became a big hit in France.
It started a boom in legend: around the same time a story sprang up about Joseph of Arimathea—the Biblical character who helped bury Jesus—visiting Glastonbury, and a subplot developed whereby Christ himself spent his missing years in ancient Britain. The lyrics to Jerusalem, written in 1804 by William Blake, borrow from this myth with the words ‘Did those feet in ancient times, walk on England’s mountains green?’4 (The short answer is: no.)
Arthur was so popular that Henry III’s brother Richard spent huge amounts on a castle at Tintagel in Cornwall that had ‘no strategic or domestic benefits’ whatsoever but wa
s where Geoffrey of Monmouth claimed Arthur had been conceived.5
Not everyone was caught up by this, however; the Yorkshire monk William of Newburgh stated at the time of Geoffrey’s story that ‘everything that man wrote about Arthur and his successors, and indeed his predecessors, was made up!’ However, Geoffrey’s work was the second bestselling book of the time, after the Bible, so maybe Newburgh was just bitter.
The Arthurian legend helped form an idea of what a king should be, an ideal that would certainly help articulate criticism of King John. But it also encouraged a sort of ruinous economic policy; in the stories, Arthur is always absurdly generous to his men, granting an infinite supply of largesse, and there was a real-life parallel—the king’s son Henry, who was the very epitome of chivalry and also an irresponsible spendthrift.
Despite being crowned joint monarch in 1170, Henry the Young King had been a frustrated pawn in his father’s power game his entire life. Bizarrely, and against all Church rules, he had been married since the age of five, to the King of France’s two-year-old daughter Margaret; this might seem somewhat on the young side, and even at the time people thought it very odd, but the Pope agreed to it, as he needed Henry’s help in a war against the Byzantines. The two children were married in 1160 in the presence of a pair of cardinals, and as a result the Plantagenet king gained the Vexin, a disputed region in France.
Henry II had been taught by his mother Matilda that the way to engineer loyalty was to deny favor, for ‘an unruly hawk’ could only be tamed if made hungry; this was the tactic he used to turn his young sons into grateful and loyal children and it failed spectacularly.