Henry the Young King, 1155-1183

by Matthew Strickland

  109.LJS, II, no. 288. John adds, however, that ‘he had previously offered him secret undertakings, too, by messengers, but all these secrets will (as we believe) be general knowledge’.

  110.LJS, II, no. 288: William of Canterbury, 73–4.

  111.Gillingham, ‘Doing Homage’, 73. As Dunbabin, ‘Henry II and Louis VII’, 47, remarks, as count of Anjou ‘Henry belonged to a line that had for a long time demonstrated rather ostentatiously its loyalty to the Capetian kings’.

  112.Gillingham, ‘Doing Homage’, 63–77.

  113.Draco Normannicus, 680.

  114.LJS, II, no. 288; Torigni, 240.

  115.Draco Normannicus, 664, 675, ‘indomitusque leo respuit omne jugum’. On this work, see I. Harris, ‘Stephen of Rouen’s Draco Normannicus: a Norman Epic’, The Epic in History, ed. L. S. Davidson, S. N. Mukherjee and Z. Zlatar (Sydney, 1994), 112–24; and E. Kuhl, ‘Time and Identity in Stephen of Rouen’s Draco Normannicus’, JMH, 40 (2014), 421–34.

  116.Draco Normannicus 664–74, ‘tertia pars regni Karoli sibi sola relicta a se vix regitur, vix sibi tota favet’.

  117.Gillingham, ‘Doing Homage’, 72–6. Henry and Louis ‘shook hands and gave each other the kiss of peace (sibi dextras et oscula dederunt)’, and Henry promised that he would ‘keep faith with him as his lord, to whom he did homage and fealty before he himself became a king, against all men, and give him the aid and service due from a duke of the Normans to the king of the French’ (LJS, II, no. 288).

  118.Gillingham, ‘Doing Homage’, 67–8, noting that once a lord had accepted homage, ‘he had lost some freedom of manoeuvre: a useful card in the game of diplomacy’; Van Eickels, ‘Vom inszenierten Konsens’, 312–24, 333–4.

  119.J. C. Holt, ‘Politics and Property in Early Medieval England’, Past and Present, 57 (1972), 3–52, and reprinted in idem, Colonial England, 1066–1215 (London, 1997), 113–60; J. C. Holt, ‘Feudal Society and the Family in Early Medieval England, II: Notions of Patrimony’, TRHS, 5th series, 33 (1983), 193–220, and reprinted in idem, Colonial England, 197–222.

  120.Le Patourel, ‘Angevin Successions’, 16.

  121.Warren, Henry II, 108.

  122.LJS, II, no. 272. These terms had been formulated at Soissons in March 1168, following the intervention of Count Philip and Count Henry of Champagne on Henry II’s behalf.

  123.LJS, II, no. 272, 564–5.

  124.Turner, Eleanor, 210.

  125.Torigni, 208, ‘fecit homagium regi Francorum de ducatu Normanniae, qui est de regno Franciae’.

  126.LJS, II, no. 288, ‘for the king himself remains in Count Theobald’s homage for Touraine’. On this, Chronique des comtes d’Anjou, 125; J. Boussard, Le Comté d’Anjou sous Henri Plantagenêt et ses fils (1151–1204) (Paris, 1938), 70–1, 74–6.

  127.Gervase, I, 208, ‘suscepit a rege Franciae dominium Brittaniae’. For Norman claims to overlordship, Everard, Brittany and the Angevins, 126–7.

  128.Ibid., 127.

  129.Torigni, 241. Later in 1169, Geoffrey was ceremonially welcomed by the clergy, including Abbot Robert of Mont St Michel, at the church of St Peter in Rennes, where he received the homage of all the barons of Brittany (Annals of Mont St Michel, s.a. 1169, in Torigni, ed. Delisle, II, 228).

  130.For Eleanor’s consent, Turner, Eleanor, 208–11.

  131.LJS, II, no. 288; Gervase, I, 208.

  132.LJS, II, no. 288.

  133.Ibid.; MTB, VI, 488–9; Becket’s letter to Henry from Sens, MTB, VI, 509.

  134.LJS, II, 644–5.

  135.Torigni, 240.

  136.Torigni, 240, noting that the office ‘pertains to the county of Anjou’. Torigni was here drawing on the De majoratu et senescalcia franciae (see below, note 138).

  137.Gervase, I, 166, who notes that Thomas ‘optinuit ut quasi senescallus Regis Francorum intraret Britanniam, et quosdam ibidem inter se inquietos et funebre bellum exercentes coram se convocaret et pacificaret, et quem invenieret rebellem violenter coherceret’; Norgate, Angevin Kings, I, 450, n. 5; A. Luchaire, ‘Hugh de Clers et le “De senescalcia Franciae’, Mélanges d’histoire du Moyen ge, ed. A. Luchaire, I (Paris, 1897), 1–38. For context, J. Le Patourel, ‘Henri II Plantagenêt et la Bretagne’, Mémoires de la Société d’Histoire et d’Archéologie de la Bretagne, 58 (1981), 99–116; reprinted in idem, Feudal Empires: Norman and Plantagenet (London, 1984), 1–17.

  138.The text is edited in Chroniques des comtes d’Anjou, 239–46. Considerable debate has surrounded both the authenticity of this tract and the claims it puts forward. Dismissed by Mabille, the authenticity of Hugh de Clers’ assertions was defended by C. Bémont, ‘Hugues de Clers et le de senescalcia Franciae’, Études d’histoire au Moyen ge dédiées à Gabriel Monod (Paris, 1896), 253–60, but again challenged by Luchaire, ‘Hugues de Clers et le “De senescalcia Franciae” ’, 1–38. Yet as John Gillingham, ‘Problems of Integration within the Lands Ruled by the Norman and Angevin Kings of England’, 132 and n. 233, has pointed out, Hugh attests a charter of Henry II dated 1158 in which the king claimed that the custody of the abbey of St Julian at Tours ‘ad me pertinent ex dignitate dapiferatus mei, unde debeo servire regi Francie sicut comes Andegavorum’ (Recueil, I, no. 87: Letters and Charters of Henry II, no. 2663), and that the De senescalia may be the only ‘historical’ work in Latin Henry is known to have commissioned.

  139.For the Clers family, Chartrou, L’Anjou, 101, and 99–106; Dutton, ‘Assertion of Identity’, 352, n. 139; and for a useful biographical note on Hugh, CTB, II, 1376. I am grateful to Katy Dutton for discussion of this subject.

  140.Torigni, 240.

  141.Torigni, 222, who noted that Theobald had been granted the ‘dapiferatum Franciae quem comes Andegavensis antiquitus habebat’ on his marriage to Louis’ daughter Alice; J. W. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus (Berkeley, 1986), 15, and 32–3 for the offices of the French royal household.

  142.Torigni, 241.

  143.C. W. Hollister, ‘Normandy, France and the Anglo-Norman Regnum’, Speculum, 51 (1976), 202–42, and reprinted in idem, Monarchy, Magnates and Institutions in the Anglo-Norman World (London, 1986), 17–57, at 56; J. Le Patourel, ‘The Norman Conquest, 1066, 1106, 1154’, Proceedings of the Battle Conference, 1978, 103–20, 216–20, at 118; D. Carpenter, The Struggle for Mastery in Britain, 1066–1284 (London, 2003), 193–4; and for a contrary view, Gillingham, The Angevin Empire, 122–5; and idem, ‘Doing Homage’, 63–84.

  144.J. Dunbabin, ‘Henry II and Louis VII’, 61; Gillingham, ‘Doing Homage’, 83–4.

  145.As Dunbabin, ‘Henry II and Louis VII’, 47, notes in relation to the counts of Anjou, Henry II ‘belonged to a line that had for a long time demonstrated rather ostentatiously its loyalty to Capetian kings’.

  146.LJS, II, no. 288, ‘honorum distributione’.

  147.Gillingham, ‘The Meeting of the Kings of France and England’, 37–9.

  148.First at Saint-Léger-en-Yvelines, then at Saint-Germain-en-Laye (Guernes, 128; Torigni, 241).

  149.Gillingham, ‘The Meetings of the Kings of France and England’, 38–9, ‘for Louis to lose one daughter may have been a misfortune, but to lose two was carelessness …’

  150.At the time of young Henry’s death in 1183, Alice still remained unmarried, detained virtually as a high-ranking hostage by the Angevins. Philip’s attempts to transfer the Vexin from Margaret to Alice as her dowry only made Henry II and Richard yet more unwilling to ratify the marriage, and when finally in 1190 Richard rejected Alice in order to marry Berengaria of Navarre, he told her brother King Philip that his reasons for so doing were that, while she was in his custody, Henry II had fathered a child by her (GH, II, 160; Gillingham, Richard I, 77–8, 81–2, 142–3, 294–5). Alice was subsequently married to the count of Ponthieu.

  151.U. Schmidt, Königswahl und Thronfolge im 12 Jahrhundert (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna, 1987), 180–5; Görich, Friedrich Barbarossa, 421–4.

  152.R. C. Smail, ‘Latin Syria and the West, 1149–1187’, TRHS, 5th series, 19 (1
969), 1–20, at 14–16; C. Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 1095–1588 (Chicago, 1988), 39–40, and n. 13.

  153.Diceto, II, 15.

  154.Torigni, 176, for example, recorded Baldwin III’s capture of the vital coastal city of Ascalon in 1153, ‘gratia Dei praecurrente’, and later recorded how, after Amalric’s successful expedition to Egypt in 1164 against Shirkuh, the grand vizier had doubled the annual tribute, previously set at 30,000 gold pieces, rendered by Cairo to the king of Jerusalem (ibid., 223–4).

  155.Smail, ‘Latin Syria’, 8–9; RHF, XVI, 66; Gilbert Foliot and his Letters, ed. A. Morey and C.N.L. Brooke (Cambridge, 1967), 241 n. 3, suggesting a date of 1163.

  156.PL, CC, cols 384–6; Smail, ‘Latin Syria’, 11–12.

  157.Gervase, I, 198–9; S. K. Mitchell, Taxation in Medieval England (New Haven, Conn., 1951), 115; Smail, ‘Latin Syria’, 12, 14. It is possible, but not certain, that the payment recorded in PR 13 Henry II, 194, for the esnecca ‘ad elemosinas ecclesiae orientalis deferendas’, refers to the monies collected. In 1167, Henry met with Louis ‘about collecting the money for the defence of Jerusalem, which had been collected at Tours’, but this led to a major dispute, ostensibly about its transport (Torigni, 230).

  158.Gilbert Foliot and his Letters, no. 170, and for scepticism, ibid., at 241, n. 3; The Life and Letters of Thomas à Becket, trans. J. A. Giles, 2 vols (London, 1846), I, 395; Gilbert Foliot and his Letters, n. 173. The same year the archbishop was also informed of rumours that Richard de Lucy had taken the cross (MTB, V, Epistolae, 254).

  159.Ralph Niger, Chronicle, 94.

  160.Gerald, Opera, I, 60–1; De principis, 209, 251, 255.

  161.Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 41.

  162.R. Röhricht, Regesta regni Hierosolymitani (Innsbruck, 1893), no. 497, 498; RHF, XVI, 198–9. In his Topographia Hibernica, dedicated to Henry II in 1188, Gerald of Wales himself had told the king that it was his sons’ rebellion ‘most damaging to the whole Christian world’, which had ‘postponed your eastern victories in Asia and Spain, which you had had already decided in your noble mind to add to those of the West and so extend in a signal way the Faith of Christ’ (Gerald, Opera; Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland, trans. J. O’Meara (London, 1982), 124).

  163.Tyerman, England and the Crusades, 41.

  164.LJS, II, no. 272. William, who was translated to the archbishopric of Sens later in 1168, was the brother of Henry of Champagne and Theobald of Blois (ibid., at 567, n. 28).

  165.LJS, II, no. 272.

  166.LJS, II, nos 568–9, where John reports that Louis ‘would not on any ground believe in the sincerity of King Henry’s statement until he saw his shoulders marked with the sign of the cross’.

  167.The great Muslim chronicler Ibn al-Athir has King Amalric note that Nur al-Din’s capture of Cairo would mean ‘“death to the Franks and their expulsion from the land of Syria”’ (The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athir for the Crusading Period from al-Kamil fi’l-ta’rikh. Part 2. The Years 541–589/1146–1193: The Age of Nur al-Din and Saladin, trans. D. S. Richards (Aldershot, 2007), 172).

  168.Alexander III, Epistolae, PL, CC, cols 599–601; Smail, ‘Latin Syria’, 13; J. G. Rowe, ‘Alexander III and the Jerusalem Crusade. An Overview of Problems and Failures’, Crusaders and Muslims in Twelfth-Century Syria, ed. M. Shatzmiller (Leiden, 1992), 118–23. The pope also urged Louis’ brother Henry of Rheims to press the king of France to summon a council to discuss an expedition to the East (PL, CC, cols 601–2).

  169.LJS, II, nos 297–8; MTB, V, no. 537 (wrongly dated 1169); 646, 637–8; Barlow, Becket, 198–9.

  170.MTB, VII, no. 538.

  171.Torigni, 193, 220; A. E. Verhulst, ‘Note sur une charte de Thierry d’Alsace, comte de Flandre, pour l’abbaye de Fontevrault (21 avril 1157)’, Études de civilisation médiévale (IXe–XIIe siècles): Mélanges offerts à Edmond-René Labande (Poitiers, 1974), 711–19; Lewis, ‘Anticipatory Association of the Heir’, 917–18.

  172.Chartrou, L’Anjou, 21–4; Hollister and Keefe, ‘The Making of the Angevin Empire’, 15.

  Chapter 5: Novus Rex

  1.LJS, II, nos 297–8; MTB, VII, no. 537 (wrongly dated 1169); 646, 637–8; Torigni, 249: Barlow, Becket, 198–9. The departure for the East of Stephen, count of Sancerre, and his nephew Odo, duke of Burgundy, bearing the money King Louis had raised to aid the Church in the Latin states, may have added further pressure on Henry to take action.

  2.MTB, nos 623–5, 635; Barlow, Becket, 202. For the significance of this gesture, H. Vollrath, ‘The Kiss of Peace’, Peace Treaties and International Law in European History, ed. R. Lesaffer (Cambridge, 2004), 162–83.

  3.Barlow, Becket, 205.

  4.In this case, the pope appears to have meant the decrees of 1169, Duggan, Thomas Becket, 180.

  5.MTB, VII, no. 647; CTB, II, no. 266.

  6.Barlow, Becket, 204.

  7.CTB, II, 296.

  8.CTB, II, 296.

  9.Duggan, ‘Coronation’, 167.

  10.GH, I, 5.

  11.Diceto, I, 388; Bosham, 458; William of Canterbury, 82. Ralph Niger was later careful to point out that at Henry II’s own coronation in 1154, Roger of York was present but ‘manus non apponente’, with Theobald conducting the ceremony (Ralph Niger, Chronicle, 189).

  12.CTB, II, nos 286 and 277.

  13.Councils and Synods, I. ii, 926–39; ‘Roger of Pontigny’, MTB, IV, 65–6.

  14.GH, I, 4.

  15.GH, I, 5.

  16.GH, I, 4.

  17.GH, I, 5; Gervase, I, 217; PR 19 Henry II, 182; Select Charters, ed. Stubbs, 174–8; Warren, Henry II, 287–91.

  18.Gervase, I, 219.

  19.For a list of those sheriffs who were dismissed, appointed or stayed in office, see GH, II, lxvii–lxviii; EHD, II, no. 47. As Warren, Henry II, 290–1 notes, Howden (GH, I, 4–5) misplaces the dismissal of the sheriffs, which occurred not before the inquest, but after its findings.

  20.On the inquest and its remit, J. H. Round, ‘The Inquest of the Sheriffs (1170)’, in idem, The Commune of London (London, 1899), 125–36; J. Tait, ‘A New Fragment of the Inquest of Sheriffs (1170)’, EHR, 39 (1924), 80–3; H. Suggett, ‘An Anglo-Norman Return to the Inquest of Sheriffs’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 27 (1942–1943), 179–81; Warren, Henry II, 287–8, and 290–1; J. Boorman, ‘The Sheriffs of Henry II and the Significance of 1170’, Law and Government in Medieval England and Normandy. Essays in Honour of Sir James Holt, ed. G. Garnet and J. Hudson (Cambridge, 1994), 255–75. As Warren, Henry II, 290, remarks, ‘it is perhaps no small wonder that England was soon to be engulfed in a baronial revolt’.

  21.CTB, II, no. 289, and no. 296, which stresses the effectiveness of the royal embargo; Duggan, ‘Coronation’, 174–6.

  22.FitzStephen,103; Councils and Synods, I, ii, 941–2. Yet as Duggan, ‘Coronation’, 176, points out, even if this was the case, he had very probably received an earlier letter of papal prohibition, Illius dignitatis, in 1166 (MTB, V, letter 169).

  23.FitzStephen,103.

  24.Flori, Eleanor, 94–5.

  25.CTB, II, no. 296.

  26.CTB, II, no. 296; Eyton, 139. Torigni, 245, believed that Margaret had been brought to England, but too late for the coronation.

  27.CTB, II, no. 296. An anonymous correspondent told Becket that, shortly after his son’s coronation, Henry II had ordered that Margaret and her household be supplied with fine clothing and horses in readiness to cross to England, ‘so that the French king might hear of it and quieten to some extent the indignation he felt at the insult to his daughter’ (CTB, II, no. 297). The purchase of clothing for ‘the daughter of the King of France and her household’, costing no less than £26 17s. 5d. is confirmed in the Pipe Rolls while Queen Eleanor received cloth worth £6 19s. 9d (PR 16 Henry II, 15).

  28.For the date, Duggan, ‘Coronation’, 165, n. 1; Eyton, 138; MTB, VII, 673, 679. As well as the feast of St Basil, it was ‘the vigil of the holy martyrs Vitus and Modestus and the holy virgin Crescentia’
(GH, I, 5).

  29.CTB, II, no. 297, ‘transacta Dominica, rex apud Londonias filium suum cingulo militiae donavit, eundemque statim Eboracensis in regem inunxit’; Gervase, I, 219, ‘ipsa die Henricum filium suum … militem fecit, statimque eum … in regem ungui praecepit et coronari’. This testimony is accepted by the editors of the History (HWM, III, 69, note to l. 2072), and Crouch, William Marshal, 46, n. 13.

  30.Thus, for example, the future Henry I was nineteen when knighted by William the Conqueror at Westminster in 1086 (William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum, I, 71: ASC, E, 1086), while the Young King’s brother Geoffrey was twenty when knighted at Woodstock by Henry II in 1178 (GH, I, 207). Nevertheless, fifteen had been a common age for German royal princes to be knighted in the later eleventh and twelfth centuries (J. Flori, L’Essor de la chevalerie, XIe-XIIe siècles (Geneva, 1986), 57–8), and Henry V, husband of the Empress Matilda, had been knighted at fifteen (Chibnall, Empress Matilda, 21 and n. 5). William Clito was knighted by Baldwin VII of Flanders when aged only fourteen in 1116 (C. W. Hollister, ‘William [called William Clito]’, ODNB) and similarly, Geoffrey le Bel was only fourteen when knighted by his prospective father-in-law King Henry I, immediately prior to his marriage to Matilda.

  31.Chrétien de Troyes, Arthurian Romances, trans. W. W. Kibler (London, 1991), 402; Keen, Chivalry, 64–82; Flori, L’Essor de la chevalerie, 304–20; D. Barthélemy, La Chevalerie. De la Germanie antique à la France du XIIe siècle (Paris, 2007), 168–78, 238–43. For an important new study, M. Lieberman, ‘A New Approach to the Knighting Ritual’, Speculum, 90 (2015), 391–423.

  32.Flori, L’Essor de la chevalerie, 58; idem, Eleanor, 105–6; J. D’Arcy Boulton, ‘Classic Knighthood as a Nobiliary Dignity: The Knighting of Counts and Kings’ Sons in England, 1066–1272’, Medieval Knighthood. Papers from the Sixth Strawberry Hill Conference, 1994, ed. S. D. Church and R. E. Harvey (Woodbridge, 1995), 41–100.

  33.Gesta Stephani, 208–9; GH, I, 336, ‘honoravit Johannem filium suum armis militaribus. Et statim misit eum in Hiberniam, et eum inde regem constituit’.