1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  * Frenchmen don’t always remember a girl’s name, just her looks.

  * Although, of course, various European countries have been ruled by a fair number of bastards since.

  * Definitely not French, then.

  * Canute, as history books used to call him, was King of England from 1016 to 1035. A Dane, he left his mark on his adopted country by inventing the typically English habit of sitting on a beach in a deckchair and not noticing when the tide comes in.

  * When William later went off to conquer England, he created an even smellier job than leather-making: guarding the beached whales until he came home.

  * Although Harold’s army held the higher ground, so for them Hastings was actually a downhill battle.

  * Except for the very rare occasion when one of them was forced to spear an unsuspecting enemy from under a bridge, of course.

  * For the French, the half-Kenyan, part-Irish Barack Obama also became ‘Anglo-Saxon’ the minute he was elected President of the USA.

  * And culturally – snooty southerners allege – for several centuries longer.

  2

  French-bashing in Its Infancy

  In the 250 years between the death of William the Conqueror and the Hundred Years War there were, predictably, quite a few historic events. After all, two and a half centuries is about the time that separates the invention of the bicycle and the atomic bomb (yes, just because we’re going forward in time, it doesn’t mean we’re progressing).

  There was, for example, the signing of the Magna Carta, the murder of Thomas Becket, and the exploits of legendary heroes like Richard the Lionheart, Robert the Bruce and Robin Hood (the latter being just that, of course – a legend).

  Above all, however, this was the time it took for England, which in 1087 was just a Norman colony, to develop to the point where it was nationalistic and powerful enough to turn the tables and attack not only its old colonial masters, but the whole of France.

  It was a long process, because for most of that time England’s monarchs acted rather like a teenager from London who has lucked into inheriting the lairdship of a Scottish island – free whisky, cute castle, it’s just a shame about the terrible weather and all these incomprehensible locals. Indeed, several Anglo-Norman kings thought of themselves as Dukes of Normandy with a second home in London, and almost all of them saw England and its peasants as little more than a source of funding for their hobbies, which varied from the boringly normal like hunting and wenching to more exotic pastimes such as crusading in the Med (Richard the Lionheart), architectural follies (Henry III) and thatching houses (Edward II).

  But every king* between 1087 and 1327 contributed, in his own way, to England’s limbering up for the Hundred Years War, even though in some cases they seemed to do it completely by accident …

  Fighting for the right to party

  Things got off to a slow start because William I’s successor was such a waste of time.

  On the Conqueror’s death, his eldest son, Robert, received the Norman homeland. England, meanwhile, was bequeathed to the second surviving son, William II, or Rufus as he was called because of his red face. Yes, England was only a poor second prize in the family lottery.

  William Rufus suffered from chronic spoilt-child-with-a-famous-name syndrome, and was a sort of medieval Paris Hilton, sharing – it is alleged – her taste for make-up, dresses and yappy little dogs. He spent most of his short reign (1087–1100) partying in various English castles and over-taxing his people to pay for his lavish lifestyle. He was so unpopular that when he was ‘accidentally’ hit by an arrow through the lung and left to die where he fell, no one even bothered to investigate. It was perhaps fitting that Rufus died while hunting in the New Forest, the tract of land ethnically cleansed of Anglo-Saxons by his father.

  The arrow that killed Rufus was rumoured to have been fired on the orders of his younger brother Henry, whose only inheritance in William the Conqueror’s will had been some money with which to buy land. Henry was on Rufus’s fatal hunting trip, and departed hurriedly for no apparent reason shortly before the ‘accident’ happened.

  With the English throne vacant, and big brother Robert away on a crusade, Henry immediately stepped in as King Henry I. He was an altogether different ruler. Like Rufus, he enjoyed partying, and is said to have fathered about twenty-five illegitimate children, but he also had a measured political mind – his nickname was ‘Beauclerc’, or ‘Good Scholar’. He saw the importance of uniting the two main peoples in England, and married an Anglo-Saxon, Eadgyth (usually modernized as Edith), a descendant of Alfred the Great and the sister of Edgar the Atheling, the man whom William the Conqueror had prevented from taking over the English Crown after the Battle of Hastings. Interestingly, their wedding took place on 11 November 1100, a date no doubt chosen to give a kind of numerological resonance to the union in those superstitious times.

  When England’s Norman nobility complained about Eadgyth’s unpronounceable name,* Henry I simply changed it to his mother’s Anglo-Norman name, Mathilde.

  Henry promised to right all the wrongs of his brother’s reign, and imprisoned Rufus’s chief minister, a rich Norman bishop called Ranulf Flambard (‘Ranulf the Hothead’) who had been in charge of collecting revenue, a task he accomplished brilliantly by selling positions of power in the Church. But Flambard became the first prisoner to escape from the new Tower of London, and fled to Normandy to join Duke Robert, who was back from his crusade and wondering how to seize the throne of England from his uppity little brother Henry.

  Robert, whose nickname was ‘Curthose’ (‘Short Trousers’), because of his stumpy legs, was as hotheaded as Flambard, and had spent much of his adult life warring against his father William the Conqueror. The two had even met face to face in battle, with the son flooring his ageing father but sparing his life at the last moment. Egged on by Flambard, in 1101 Robert led a new Norman invasion of England, landing a small army at Portsmouth. However, the English barons who had promised to help him didn’t turn up, because Henry I was becoming a popular king – one of his most astute reforms being a guarantee not to overtax his barons. In the end, the two brothers met in peace, and Robert agreed to renounce his claim in return for a regular income and some of the land Henry owned in Normandy.

  But Henry didn’t trust his big brother to respect the agreement, and, proving that England now felt strong enough to take on all-comers, he invaded Normandy. And it went surprisingly smoothly. Henry captured Bayeux and Caen in 1105, returned to England briefly to settle a dispute about whether he or the Pope should nominate English bishops, and then resumed his campaign the following year, finally meeting Robert in battle beside the castle of Tinchebray near Caen on 28 September 1106. Henry defeated the Normans in an hour, and took Robert prisoner.

  England had successfully conquered Normandy, exactly forty years to the day after William the Conqueror had landed on English soil – another numerological omen.

  Henry I was now as powerful as his father had been, and to make sure he stayed that way, he put his elder brother out of action for good. Robert was thrown into prison, ironically in two Norman castles – at Devizes in Wiltshire and then Cardiff. And, after a failed escape attempt, Henry had Robert’s eyes burnt out, and kept him in captivity for the rest of his life. Fondness for close relatives didn’t seem to figure in those Anglo-Norman genes.

  Fishy goings-on in Normandy

  By 1135, King Henry I was an old man in his mid-sixties and thinking about his succession. In the autumn of that year, he went to Normandy to visit his daughter Mathilde, who had made an excellent strategic marriage to a Frenchman, Geoffrey, Count of Anjou, who reigned over the lands immediately to the southwest of Henry’s domains in Normandy. Despite the recent births of two grandchildren, relations between father, daughter and son-in-law were strained, perhaps because the King had explained that although Mathilde was his only legitimate heir to the throne of England, she could not inherit the titles because she was an heiress, an
d at that time the essential qualification to become an English ruler was to possess a penis.

  Anyway, after a hard day’s hunting, Henry returned to Mathilde and Geoffrey’s place, le Château de Lyons (at Lyons-la-Forêt in Normandy, not the city of Lyon in central France), where he sat down to one of his favourite meals, a plate of grilled lampreys. These are hideous eel-like creatures with sucker mouths surrounded by pointed teeth that they use to pierce the stomach of their prey and suck its innards out. They are now almost extinct thanks to their preference for unpolluted river water, but in medieval times they were a delicacy, and the city of Gloucester used to give a lamprey pie to the monarch every Christmas. Henry loved them despite their ugliness, and on 1 December 1135 he is said to have consumed such a ‘surfeit of lampreys’ that he died of over-eating.

  Interestingly, though, the usual French version of the story is that he ate ‘lamproies avariées’ – lampreys that had gone bad. The French don’t seem to be able to accept that you can eat too much of a good thing. Given the violence of the times, though, one might also ask whether Henry’s meal hadn’t contained a hidden ingredient – a little dose of poison, perhaps.

  As soon as her father was dead, Mathilde sounded out the English barons as to whether she could overcome the problem of her gender and succeed to the throne, either alone or as a regent for her son. Some of the barons had sworn allegiance to her, but in the end her marriage to an Angevin, seen by many as a rival to the Normans, counted against her, and the throne was given to one of Henry’s nephews, a French grandson of William the Conqueror’s – Stephen, Count of Blois and Boulogne.

  Despite his name, Stephen was not exactly a great ruler. In fact, he managed to lose not only the English link with Normandy, but also his own English throne. He just didn’t have enough of that Conqueror blood in him, it seems. On the contrary, Stephen’s father, Etienne-Henri, was a well-known coward. He had deserted the crusader army during the siege of Antioch in 1098, infuriating his wife so much that she sent him straight back to the Middle East, where he was killed in 1102. Not a great role model for a medieval king.

  And unfortunately for Stephen, Mathilde and her husband, Geoffrey of Anjou, weren’t going to give up without a fight. In 1139 Geoffrey began a systematic campaign of attrition against Normandy, while Mathilde brought an army of Angevins to invade England, basing herself in Gloucester – capital of the lamprey.

  A terrible struggle between the lady from Anjou and the man from Blois broke out on British soil. The war between Mathilde and Stephen was known bluntly as the Anarchy, and gave the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (which was in its final throes) one of its last chances to have a rant at foreigners. In its entry for 1139, the Chronicle laments that both factions of French powerbrokers kidnapped England’s ‘peasant men and women, and put them in prison for their gold and silver, and tortured them with unutterable torture’. Well, the chronicler says it was unutterable, but he manages to utter quite a lot about it:

  They hanged them by the thumbs, or by the head, and hung fires on their feet; they put knotted strings about their heads, and writhed [twisted] them so that it went to the brain … Some they put in a chest that was short, and narrow, and shallow, and put sharp stones therein, and pressed the man therein, so that they broke all his limbs … I neither can nor may tell all the wounds or all the tortures which they inflicted on wretched men in this land.

  As well as the everyday terror, there were pitched battles: in 1141, Stephen lost the Battle of Lincoln and was taken prisoner. Mathilde had herself crowned ‘Angliae Normanniaeque domina’, ‘Lady of the English and the Normans’, but was then defeated by an army led by Stephen’s wife, who made things even more confusing by also being called Mathilde (though she tacked on an ‘of Boulogne’ to differentiate herself).

  In the end, with the wavering allegiances of the English barons only adding to the anarchy, the two factions were forced to come to an agreement: Stephen would continue to reign, and on his death the throne would pass to Mathilde’s son Henry.* It was a fragile, unsatisfactory solution for all concerned, and as G. M. Trevelyan says in his Shortened History of England, ‘it was one of England’s great good fortunes that he [Stephen] died next year.’

  Stealing a French king’s wife – not good for international relations

  By birth, the future Henry II was already heir to the powerful territory of Anjou in France, via his father Geoffrey, as well as the Duchy of Normandy and the Crown of England. And at the age of nineteen he added even more land to his portfolio by marrying Eleanor of Aquitaine. Thanks again to the ‘do you have a lump in your tights?’ clause in rulership application forms, he thereby became duke of the extensive, and very rich, French territories of Aquitaine and Gascony, an area stretching from Bordeaux to the Spanish border.

  This union was not only profitable – it was also a major anti-French political coup. Until only a few weeks earlier, Eleanor had been Queen of France, the wife of Louis VII. She had had the marriage annulled because Louis had produced no male heirs and, she felt, was not liable to, because, as she subtly expressed it, ‘he is a monk rather than a husband’. As soon as the annulment came through, the thirty-year-old Eleanor proposed to the teenaged Henry, who – she rightly predicted – had great prospects. She was apparently a tall, beautiful, well-educated woman who knew what she wanted and knew how to get it – and she’d already tried out Henry’s family pedigree by sleeping with his father.

  As a result, in 1154, when King Stephen died and Henry (now twenty-one) was able to print an extra line – King of England – on his already crowded business card, he ruled over more ‘French’ land than Louis VII. If you look at a map of France at the time, the territories governed by Henry and Eleanor form a huge, solid slab covering the whole western half of the country, taking in almost all the north coast and stretching right down across the centre of France, only just excluding Paris. By comparison, Louis VII’s territories hang like a stringy frog’s leg across the map, from just west of Calais, down through Paris and to the Med. It is very clear who ruled France in those days, and it wasn’t the French King.

  Not that Henry II did much French-bashing. He didn’t need to. Given the extent of his land-holdings, he was literally able to sit back and lord it over the French. In any case, Henry II’s reign was much less about war than peace. He was the first of England’s Plantagenet kings, named after the spring of broom flowers (in French, genêt) that his father, Geoffrey of Anjou, wore in his hat. And as such, Henry was the founder of a dynasty that would rule England for the next 330 years. He couldn’t know that, of course, but even so he reigned like a man laying down great foundations.

  He tamed the volatile barons in both England and his French territories by taking money from the noblemen in lieu of military service, thereby enabling him to pay for reliable mercenaries. He introduced trial by jury, which meant that at least some crimes would be judged by hearing evidence rather than by making the accused walk barefoot over red-hot plough shares and declaring them guilty if they got blisters. Perhaps remembering the story of his grandfather and the lampreys, Henry also gained a reputation for being generous to the hungry, redistributing a tenth of all the food delivered to his castles.

  A shame, then, that the French gained one of their greatest – but least known – victories in history by tarnishing good King Henry’s name.

  The murder in the cathedral

  The one great blemish on Henry II’s record book is the murder of Thomas Becket, his own Archbishop of Canterbury. In Henry’s defence, though, it must be stressed that he wasn’t entirely to blame. What is not said often enough is that, in part at least, it was France’s fault.

  The circumstances of the murder are a familiar story. In 1170, Henry complains loudly about Becket refusing to respect royal authority. Four of the King’s courtiers take the complaint as a hint, and go to Canterbury, where they hack off the top of Thomas’s skull and spread his brains over the cathedral floor.

  However, what few peo
ple know is that Thomas Becket had spent the previous two years in exile in France, having left England to avoid signing an agreement that would have weakened the Church’s influence. And while in France, Thomas was a guest of Louis VII, the lousy lover who had been scorned by Eleanor, Henry’s wife. One can imagine Louis spending the long medieval evenings by his fireside telling Thomas how right he was to stand up to the ungodly English wife-stealer. All of which might explain why, when Thomas eventually returned to England, he was defiant enough to continue his political stand against Henry.

  Thomas was so sure of himself that he even provoked his own murder. Initially, Henry’s knights entered the cathedral unarmed, and simply wanted the archbishop to come with them and explain himself to King Henry. It was only when Thomas told them to go and get knighted that they went outside again to fetch their swords.

  In short, if Thomas Becket hadn’t spent two years learning the art of French petulance, he might have died in bed and Henry II might be remembered only as one of England’s greatest kings rather than a priest-killer.

  In fact, the murder was to cost Henry more than his reputation – it was one of the things that caused his ultimate downfall.

  He and Eleanor had eight children, including five sons. But their relations were famously strained. Both were dynastically minded, and they were constantly jostling for position within their joint empire. Eleanor seems to have encouraged her native Aquitaine to remain independent of King Henry’s authority, while Henry attacked cities like Toulouse that already belonged to Eleanor’s family. Eleanor was piqued even more by the decidedly un-monkish Henry’s infidelities, including a liaison with his own son Richard’s fiancée. And although she usually turned a blind eye to his philandering, Eleanor refused to ignore Rosamund Clifford, the beautiful young mistress whom Henry dubbed ‘rosa mundi’ (the ‘rose of the world’); as soon as Rosamund arrived on the scene, Eleanor’s child-bearing stopped.