Henry the Young King, 1155-1183

by Matthew Strickland

  35.FitzStephen, 33, 34–5. Guernes noted of Becket in Normandy that ‘I myself saw him riding several times against the French; his trumpets did much to further the king’s cause’ (ll. 358–60). On Thomas as a commander, J. D. Hosler, ‘The Brief Military Career of Thomas Becket’, Haskins Society Journal, 15 (2006), 88–100, and on the size and nature of the forces under Becket’s command, Strickland, ‘On the Instruction of a Prince: The Upbringing of Henry, the Young King’, 192.

  36.FitzStephen, 35.

  37.Equally, the power and glamour with which Becket had imbued the chancellorship goes far to explain why, when confronted in 1181 by a papal demand that he should finally be consecrated bishop of Lincoln or surrender the office after a scandalously long tenure merely as bishop elect, young Henry’s half-brother Geoffrey unhesitatingly chose to abandon the bishopric in favour of becoming chancellor to Henry II, a role far better suited to his skills as a soldier and all too evident ambitions (GH, I, 271–2).

  38.HH, 586–7.

  39.HH, 586–7.

  40.Warren, Henry II, 207 and n. 1.

  41.Torigni, 215.

  42.Map, 116–17; Vincent, ‘The Court of Henry II’, 308–9; and S. Schröder, Macht und Gabe: Materielle Kultur am Hof Heinrichs II von England (Husum, 2004).

  43.Diceto, II, 3; D. Crouch, ‘The Court of Henry II of England in the 1180s, and the Office of King of Arms’, The Coat of Arms: The Journal of the Heraldry Society, 3rd series, 5 (2010), pt 2, 47–55; and on the court’s protocol, Vincent, ‘The Court of Henry II’, 323–8.

  44.GH, I, 291; and below, 276.

  45.Soon after Theobald’s death, the king had granted Becket custody of all the temporalities of the see (Bosham, 180); Knowles, Becket, 50; Barlow, Becket, 53 and n. 24).

  46.John of Salisbury, MTB, II, 306; Lambeth Anonymous, MTB, IV, 86; William of Canterbury, 7–8; Grim, MTB, II, 365–7; Barlow, Becket, 65.

  47.Bosham, 180–1: Lambeth Anonymous, MTB, IV, 85–6; William of Canterbury, 7–8; ‘Roger of Pontigny’, MTB, IV, 18.

  48.Warren, Henry II, 91–2.

  49.MTB, VII, no. 310; Duggan, ‘Coronation’, 168–74 for the crucial re-dating of the mandate from 1170 to 1161, and 177–8 for the text of the letter; CTB, I, 262 n. 13. A second mandate, Quanto personam, dated 13 July 1162, confirmed York’s privileges, including authority to crown the king; MTB, V, letter 13, ‘regem quoque coronare’; Duggan, ‘Coronation’, 168, suggesting this ambiguous phrase probably was intended to apply only to crown-wearings.

  50.The Red Book of the Exchequer, ed. H. Hall, 3 vols (Rolls Series, London, 1896), II, 695, ‘et Willielmo Cade, xxxviii l. vi s. pro auro ad coronam filii Regis et Regalia paranda’; PR 8 Henry II, 43. Barlow, Becket, 68, noted that the sum of £38 6s. would, with gold prices at around 15 shillings the ounce, provide some 50 ounces of gold. For royal goldsmiths, including Solomon who may well have been one of those employed in 1162, see E. M. C. van Houts, ‘Nuns and Goldsmiths: The Foundation and Early Benefactors of Saint Radegund’s Priory, Cambridge’, Church and City, 1000–1500. Essays in Honour of Christopher Brooke, ed. D. Abulafia, M. Franklin and M. Rubin (Cambridge, 1992), 59–79, at 65–9. Among other goldsmiths was Geoffrey of Caen (aurifaber nostrum) who received a grant from Henry II, c.1177–80 (Recueil, II, no. 562; Letters and Charters of Henry II, no. 396).

  51.When, following the coup which put an end to the Merovingian dynasty, Pope Stephen II anointed Pippin at Saint-Denis in 754, he also consecrated his two sons, Charles and Carloman as kings, and in turn Charles had his own sons, Pippin and Louis, anointed as kings by Pope Hadrian at Rome in 781 (Annales regni Francorum, 741–829, ed. F. Kurze, MGH SRG (Hanover, 1895), s.a. 754, 781). Pippin had famously been first anointed by Boniface in 750 after Pope Zacharias had been persuaded that ‘it was better to call him king who had the royal power than the one who did not’ (ibid., s.a. 749, 750).

  52.1 Samuel 16:1: ‘And the Lord said unto Samuel, “How long wilt thou mourn for Saul, seeing that I have rejected him from reigning over Israel? Fill thy horn with oil, and go, I will send thee to Jesse the Bethlehemite, for I have provided me with a king among his sons”’; W. Levison, England and the Continent in the Eighth Century (Oxford, 1946), 115–17.

  53.W. Ohnesorge, ‘Die Idee der Mitregenschaft bei den Sachenherrschern’, Mitteilungen des österreichischen Staatsarchivs, 25 (1972), 539–48, and reprinted in idem, Ost-Rom und der Western (Darmstadt, 1983), 117–27. Otto I associated his son Otto II with his rule first as king in 961, then as emperor in 967, and he in turn associated his son Otto III with his kingship in 983. For Staufen practice, see B. Weiler, ‘Suitability and Right: Imperial Succession and the Norms of Politics in Early Staufen Germany’, Making and Breaking the Rules of Succession in Medieval Europe, c.1000– c.1600, ed. F. Lachaud and M. Penman (Turnhout, 2008), 71–86.

  54.J. Dhondt, ‘Élection et hérédité sous les Carolingiens et les premiers Capétiens’, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, 18 (1939), 913–53; R. Fawtier, The Capetian Kings of France. Monarchy and Nation, 987–1328 (London, 1960), 48–50; A. W. Lewis, ‘Anticipatory Association of the Heir in Early Capetian France’, American Historical Review, 83 (1978), 906–27; idem, Royal Succession in Capetian France: Studies on Familial Order and the State (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1981), especially 44–77. The Capetians, however, could look to late Carolingian practice, for in 979 Lothar had his son Louis V, who would be the last Carolingian monarch, anointed ‘rex acclamatus’ (Richer of Saint-Rémi, Histories, ed. and trans. J. Lake, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2011), II, 156–7; Recueil des actes de Lothaire et de Louis V, ed. L. Halphen and F. Lot (Paris, 1908), nos 9 and 56).

  55.Claiming that he intended to aid the count of Barcelona against a Muslim invasion, Hugh convinced the Frankish nobles that the kingdom’s safety required Robert’s establishment as king lest he himself die on the expedition. Robert was duly consecrated, but Hugh’s campaign never materialized (Richer, Histories, II, 222–5).

  56.Fawtier, Capetian Kings, 49.

  57.Thus, for example, following the premature death of his eldest son Hugh in 1025, Robert II had attempted to secure the throne for his second son Henry, crowned in 1027, in the face of a serious challenge mounted by his youngest son Robert, who was supported by King Robert’s queen, Constance (C. Pfister, Études sur le règne de Robert le Pieux, (996–1031) (Paris, 1885), 77.

  58.Recueil des actes de Louis VI roi de France (1108–1137), ed. R.-H. Bautier and J. Dufour, 3 vols (Paris, 1992–1993), I, nos 3–6, ‘Dei gratia Francorum rex designatus’. This coronation had been in part to counter the threat posed to him by his half-brothers Philip and Florus (A. Fliche, Le Règne de Philippe Ier, roi de France (1060–1108) (Paris, 1912), 78–83; A. Luchaire, Louis VI le Gros. Annales de sa vie et de son règne (1081–1137), Paris, 1890, nos 8, 11, 16, 31).

  59.Though Louis himself had been crowned again, together with Eleanor, following their marriage at Bordeaux in 1137. For the ceremony and its probable ordo, E. A. R. Brown, ‘“Franks, Burgundians and Aquitanians” and the Royal Coronation Ceremony in France’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 82 (1992), 1–189, at 36–8.

  60.Recueil des actes de Louis VI, I, nos 182, 229; L. delisle, ‘Sur la date de l’association de Philippe, fils de Louis le Gros, au gouvernement du royaume’, Journal des savants (1898), 736–40; Luchaire, Louis VI le Gros, xlix–liii, and nos 399, 420, 433. Thereafter, Louis makes a number of grants ‘concedente Philippo filio nostro, iam in regem coronato’ (Recueil des actes de Louis VI, nos 283–6, 289, 292–304), and one jointly as ‘Ludovicus et Philippus, filius ejus, divina ordinante providencia reges Francorum’ (ibid., no. 281).

  61.Torigni, 120.

  62.Henry I of France had his eldest son Philip consecrated as king when aged only seven (RHF, XI, 32–3); J. Dhondt, ‘Les Relations entre la France et la Normandie sous Henri Ier’, Normannia, 12 (1939), 465–86; Recueil des actes de Philippe Ier, roi de France (1059–1108), ed. M. Prou (Paris, 190
8), xxviii–xxxii. Louis VII, however, declined the suggestion of Archbishop Henry of Champagne to crown his son Philip in 1172, when he was seven, perhaps regarding his son as unready (Sassier, Louis VII, 467; J. Bradbury, Philip Augustus, King of France, 1180–1223 (London, 1998), 38).

  63.Recueil des actes de Louis VI, no. 305.

  64.For Byzantine co-rulership, W. Ohnesorge, ‘Das Mitkaisertum in der abendländischen Geschichte des früheren Mittlealters’, in idem, Abendland und Byzanz (Darmstadt, 1963), 261–87; G. Ostrogorsky, ‘Das Mitkaisertum im mittelalterlichen Byzanz’, Doppelprinzipat und Reichsteilung im Imperium Romanum, ed. E. Kornemann (Leipzig and Berlin, 1930), 166–78.

  65.William of Tyre. She was styled filia regis et regni Jerosolimitani haeres (B. Hamilton, ‘Women in the Crusader States: The Queens of Jerusalem, 1100–1190’, Medieval Women, ed. D. Baker (Ecclesiastical History Society, 1978), 143–74).

  66.William of Tyre. Though in different circumstances, Queen Urraca of Leon-Castlile (r. 1109–1126) had similarly had her son Alphonso crowned and anointed as king of Galicia and her co-ruler in 1111.

  67.William of Tyre, XXII: 30; B. Hamilton, The Leper King and his Heirs. Baldwin IV and the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem (Cambridge, 2000), 194–5. Baldwin V was the son of Baldwin IV’s sister Sybilla and her first husband, William of Montferrat.

  68.Historia Pontificalis, 69; Torigni, 178, ‘Willelmus, filius suus, quem pater ante mortem suam sublimatum in regem consortem regni fecerat’. D. Matthew, The Norman Kingdom of Sicily (Cambridge, 1992), 170, regards Roger’s actions as ‘plainly adopted from the custom long observed in France’, and in playing down the Byzantine influence on Roger’s kingship follows L. R. Ménager, ‘L’Institution monarchique dans les états normands d’Italie’, CCM, 2 (1959), 303–31 and 445–68.

  69.Duggan, ‘Coronation’, 166–7.

  70.Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, s.a. 785 (C. Plummer, Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel, 2 vols (Oxford, 1892), I, 53–5, ‘to cyninge gehalgod’).

  71.In this context, it is significant that the ceremony of 787 also appears to be the first recorded consecration of an English king (F. M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd edn, Oxford, 1989, 218–19). Levison, England and the Continent, 118–19, believed that by having Ecgfrith consecrated, Offa ‘first introduced a Christian element into the initiation of English kings’, but E. John in Orbis Britanniae (Leicester, 1966, 28–35) has argued for an insular origin for anointing of kings. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, in Early Germanic Kingship in England and on the Continent (Oxford, 1971, 114–15), suggests that Ecgfrith’s coronation was performed either by the legates or the newly elevated archbishop of Lichfield, given the hostility of Archbishop Jaenberht of Kent. By contrast, the archbishop of Canterbury performed the consecration of Ceolwulf I of Mercia (821–3) (Levison, England and the Continent, 119).

  72.S. E. Kelly, ‘Offa (d. 797), king of the Mercians’, ODNB. Ecgfrith’s premature death in the same year was seen by Alcuin as punishment for his father’s ruthlessness, ‘for you know very well how much blood his father shed to secure his kingdom on his son’ (Alcuini Epistolae, ed. E. Dümmler, MGH, Epist. Karol. Aevi, II (Berlin, 1895), no. 27; English Historical Documents, I, c.500–1042, ed. D. Whitelock (2nd edn, London, 1979), 854–6).

  73.G. Garnett, Conquered England: Kingship, Succession and Tenure, 1066–1166 (Oxford, 2007), 185–6, however, argues that the claims made by William the Conqueror to justify his succession to the throne of England only served to strengthen ‘the existing Norman assumption that rulership was neither sharable nor divisible’.

  74.The magnates of Normandy swore homage to William Aetheling at Rouen in 1115, and the ‘leading men and barons of all England’ did so at the assembly at Salisbury in 1116 (William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum, I, 758–9: Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, E, 1115; JW, III, 138–9; RRAN, II, no. 1074; C. W. Hollister, Henry I (New Haven, Conn., and London, 2001), 238 and n. 20.

  75.RRAN, II, nos 1189, 1191, 1192, 1201 and 1202; Hollister, Henry I, 365–6.

  76.RRAN, II, no. 1204 and printed in full in The Cartulary of St John’s, Colchester, ed. S. Miller (Roxburghe Club, 1897), 4–10, though doubts as to the charter’s authenticity were raised by J. H. Round, ‘The Early Charters of St John’s Abbey, Colchester’, EHR, 16 (1901), 721–30; Hugh the Chanter, The History of the Church of York, 1066–1127, ed. and trans. C. Johnson (London, 1961), 99; J. Green, Henry I. King of England and Duke of Normandy (Cambridge, 2006), 149; Garnett, Conquered England, 207, n. 593.

  77.The Warenne (Hyde) Chronicle, ed. and trans. E. M. C. van Houts and R. C. Love (Oxford, 2013), 80–1 and n. 154.

  78.Hollister, Henry I, 274–5; Green, Henry I, 163–8.

  79.The Charters of King David I: The Written Acts of David I King of Scots, 1124–53, and of his Son Henry Earl of Northumberland, 1139–52, ed. G. W. S. Barrow (Woodbridge, 1999), nos 126 and 129.

  80.Barrow, RRS, I. The Acts of Malcolm IV, 4, n. 3.

  81.Charters of King David I, 34: ‘David’s was a dual reign … with joint or at least coadjutorial royal government’; K. J. Stringer, ‘State-building in Twelfth-Century Britain: David I, King of Scots, and Northern England’, Government, Religion and Society in Northern England, 1000–1700, ed. J. C. Appleby and P. Dalton (Stroud, 1997), 40–62; G. W. S. Barrow, ‘The Scots and the North of England’, The Anarchy of King Stephen’s Reign, ed. E. King (Oxford, 1994), 231–53; idem, ‘King David I, Earl Henry and Cumbria’, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, new series, 99 (1999), 117–27.

  82.Liber S. Marie de Calchou. Registrum Cartarum abbacie Tironensis de Kelso, ed. C. Innes, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1846), I, plate.

  83.CTB, I, no. 153; Warren, Henry II, 32–4; E. King, King Stephen (London, 2010), 237, 262–4, for a full discussion; and cf. Garnett, Conquered England, 264–5.

  84.E. King, ‘Eustace (c. 1129–1153), count of Boulogne’, ODNB, 18, 649–50. He married Constance, Louis VII’s daughter, in or shortly after 1140.

  85.Gesta Stephani, 208–9. King, King Stephen, 237–8, notes that while this is normally taken to refer to his investiture with the county of Boulogne, the Gesta notes only his elevation to unspecified comital rank (‘ad consulatus’).

  86.Historia pontificalis, 85–6, ‘inhibens ne qua fieret innovatio in regno Anglie circa coronam, quia res erat litigiosa cuius translatio iure reprobate est’; King, King Stephen, 263.

  87.John of Hexham, Historia, in Symeonis monachi opera omnia, ed. T. Howlett, 2 vols (Rolls Series, London, 1882–1885), 325–6; Historia pontificalis, 83, 86. Stephen’s position was not helped by the fact that he had alienated both Pope Eugenius III and Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury by his unsuccessful attempts to prevent the latter from attending the Council of Rheims, while Angevin influence at the Curia was strong. Thomas Becket was said to have played an important role in obtaining the papal prohibition (Gervase, I, 150; MTB, VI, no. 250; Radford, Thomas of London, 45; D. Knowles, Thomas Becket (London, 1970), 26, 127; A. Saltman, Theobald. Archbishop of Canterbury (London, 1956), 36–8).

  88.King, ‘Eustace’. He died c.17 August 1153.

  89.S. D. Church, ‘Succession and Interregnum in the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Ireland in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’, forthcoming. I am grateful to Stephen Church for sending me this paper before publication.

  90.Chibnall, Empress Matilda, 102. Though in the wake of Stephen’s capture at the battle of Lincoln in 1141 she had entered London, she alienated her erstwhile supporters by her arrogance, and her disastrous mishandling of the citizens caused them to expel her before she had the opportunity to be consecrated at Westminster (ibid., 102–5).

  91.Recueil, I, no. 61. Ralph Niger is barely less dismissive in referring to her, in regard to the start of the civil war, as ‘quondam imperatrice’ (Ralph Niger, Chronicle, 92).

  92.Historia pontificalis, 83–5; Letters of Gilbert Foliot, no. 26; King, King Stephen, 102–4.

  93.FitzStephen, 98–101; Barlow,
Becket, 141; F. Barlow, ‘Herbert of Bosham (d. c.1194)’, ODNB; Vincent, ‘The Court of Henry II’, 333–4.

  94.Matthew Paris, Historia Anglorum, I, 353.

  95.Warren, Henry II, 78.

  96.Vincent, ‘The Court of Henry II’, 334.

  97.William was made to yield the castles of Norwich and Pevensey, and Earl Hugh all his castles.

  98.Chronicle of Battle Abbey, 174–7; PR 3 Henry II, p. 107, recording the sum of 22s. ‘for carrying the crowns to St Edmunds’. The plural coronis implies Eleanor’s presence (Norgate, Angevin Kings, I, 430, n. 3).

  99.Norgate, Angevin Kings, I, 430. For a study of the more traditional locations for crown-wearings, M. Biddle, ‘Seasonal Festivals and Residence: Winchester, Westminster and Gloucester in the Tenth to Twelfth Centuries’, ANS, 8 (1985), 51–72, with appendices tabulating known sites of crown-wearings by the first three Norman kings.

  100.To wipe away the shame of this humiliation, Stephen himself had held a crown-wearing at Lincoln at Christmas 1146, in defiance of a superstition that held it was unlucky for kings to wear a crown within the city (HH, 748–9; King, King Stephen, 228–9). Henry, by a surely deliberate contrast, held his crown-wearing just outside the city, in the church of St Mary in the suburb of Wigford, on the south side of the river, where he nevertheless had a palace erected for the purpose, and celebrated the festival in great style (WN, I, 117–18 (wrongly dated to 1158); Howden, I, 216; PR 4 Henry II, 136; D. Stocker, St Mary’s Guildhall, Lincoln (London, 1991), 38–9).

  101.The choice of site may be connected to the fact that in 1153 Henry had moved against Waleran of Meulan, earl of Worcester, whom he had long held in suspicion, stripping him of lands in both Normandy and England, including his honour of Worcester (D. Crouch, The Beaumont Twins. The Roots and Branches of Power in the Twelfth Century, Cambridge, 1985, 71, 74–6).