Henry the Young King, 1155-1183

by Matthew Strickland

  130.Melrose, 41.

  131.Torigni, 264.

  132.WN, I, 185.

  133.Guernes, ll. 6060–6065; Garnier’s Becket, 161; William of Canterbury, 490–1; WN, I, 187–9. Likewise Gerald of Wales cited the prophecy of Merlin, ‘Blood shall rise against the man of blood, until Scotland shall weep over the pilgrim’s penance’ (Gerald, Opera, V, 300–1). William’s capture was also seen as divine punishment for the Scots’ sacrilege in slaying those sheltering in the church at Warkworth (GH, I, 66; WN, I, 184–5).

  134.M. Penman, ‘The Bruce Dynasty, Becket and Scottish Pilgrimage to Canterbury, c.1178–1404’, JMH, 32 (2006), 346–70.

  135.GH, I, 72.

  136.GH, I, 72–3.

  137.H. Braun, ‘Some Notes on Bungay Castle’, and idem, ‘Bungay Castle: Report on the Excavations’, Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and Natural History, 22 (1935/7), 109–99, 212–13.

  138.That Henry expected a siege is shown by his summoning of 500 carpenters to Seleham (PR 20 Henry II, 38).

  139.GH, I, 73.

  140.WN, I, 191.

  141.WN, I, 190.

  142.Diceto, I, 386.

  143.GH, I, 73.

  144.GH, I, 73.

  145.Howden, II, 64.

  146.Torigni, 265; William of Canterbury, 491–2; Howden, II, 65.

  147.As William of Newburgh, I, 190, noting that ‘Rouen is one of the most famous cities of Europe’. For Rouen, see L. Musset, ‘Rouen au temps des Francs et sous les ducs’, in M. Mollat, ed., Histoire de Rouen (Paris, 1979), 31–74; Gauthiez, ‘Paris, un Rouen capétien?’, 117–36; P. Cailleux, ‘Le Développement urbain de la capitale normande entre Plantagenêts et Capétiens’, 1204. La Normandie entre Plantagenêts et Capétiens, 261–74; Society and Culture in Medieval Rouen, 911–1300, ed. L. V. Hicks and E. Brenner (Turnhout, 2012).

  148.For Duke Henry’s confirmation in 1150 of Henry I’s grant, Recueil, I, no. 14.

  149.L. Musset, ‘Une aristocratie d’affaires anglo-normande après la conquête’, Études normandes, 35 (1986), at 10–11; Bates,’The Rise and Fall of Normandy’, 32.

  150.Diceto, I, 404.

  151.Chronicon Rotomagensi, RHF, XVII, 786, ‘innumerabili multitudine peditum’. WN, I, 190, similarly notes that Louis invaded the duchy ‘cum tremendo exercitu’. In 1144, the count of Flanders alone had brought 1,400 knights with him to the siege (Torigni, 148–9).

  152.B. Gauthiez, ‘Hypothèses sur la fortification de Rouen au onzième siècle: le donjon de Richard II, et l’enceinte de Guillaume’, ANS, 14 (1992), 61–76.

  153.Chronicon Rotomagensi, 785; Torigni, 147–8; D. Crouch, The Reign of King Stephen, 1135–1154 (Harlow, 2000), 194–5; King, King Stephen, 198. So imposing was the great tower at Rouen that it had come to symbolize the power and authority of the Norman dukes, and Geoffrey’s rule of the duchy was dated from the day of its capture by him (Chronicon S. Michaelis in periculo maris, RHF, XII, 773; Torigni, 148; Crouch, Reign of King Stephen, 195, n. 15).

  154.Torigni, 209, s.a. 1161.

  155.Recueil, I, no. 14; GH, I, 74.

  156.WN, I, 190; trans. adapted from Kennedy and Walsh, 145; and see the description of Rouen by Orderic, III, 36–7.

  157.Chibnall, Empress Matilda, 152 and n. 53. This replaced an earlier bridge, apparently damaged or even broken down in the siege of 1144 and repaired by Geoffrey in 1145 (Torigni, 151).

  158.Torigni, 147–8.

  159.WN, I, 191; Diceto, I, 386.

  160.WN, I, 191–2; trans. Kennedy and Walsh, 147.

  161.WN, I, 191–2; trans. Kennedy and Walsh, 147.

  162.WN, I, 192.

  163.P. Meyer, ‘Notice sur la manuscrit II, 6, 24 de la bibliothèque de l’université de Cambridge’, Notices et extraits de la Bibliothèque nationale, 32/ii (1886), 37–81 at 71; Power, ‘Henry, Duke of the Normans’, 127–8.

  164.WN, I, 192.

  165.Newburgh sums up this view by quoting Virgil’s Aeneid, ‘Where an enemy is concerned, who asks whether it is guile or valour? (Aeneid, II, l. 390, ‘dolus an virtus, quis in hoste requirat?’).

  166.WN, I, 192–3.

  167.WN, I, 193–4.

  168.R. Rogers, Latin Siege Warfare in the Twelfth Century (Oxford, 1992), 150 and n. 88.

  169.GH, I, 74.

  170.GH, I, 74; PR 20 Henry II, 135; Lloyd, A History of Wales, II, 544, n. 39. The Welsh were probably those earlier engaged in the siege of Tutbury. Henry also brought with him King William and the earls of Leicester and Chester, who were imprisoned first at Caen, then at Falaise (GH, I, 74).

  171.GH, I, 74–5: William of Canterbury, 493.

  172.GH, I, 75; Torigni, 265; WN, I, 196.

  173.GH, I, 75.

  174.GH, I, 75.

  175.GH, I, 75. In reworking this incident in his Chronica, Howden makes the French more timid, stating that they dared not move beyond their tents, and that when some knights of the king of England’s household stood on the battlements of the walls (presumably referring to the defensive works of their siege camp), no one dared fight them off (Howden, II, 66).

  176.GH, I, 75. Howden, II, 66, notes that Malaunay lay between Rouen and the village of Tostes.

  177.In this regard, it is surely no coincidence that Jordan Fantosme does not recount the relief of Rouen in any detail but rather ends his poem with the conclusion of hostilities in England, with only the briefest of references to the siege (JF, ll. 2043–5, 2062–5).

  178.Torigni, 265; GH, I, 76.

  179.GH, I, 76; Torigni, 265, who remarks, ‘In truth, I ascribe that peace to the mother of our Lord Jesus Christ’; Gervase, I, 250; HWM, ll. 2321–4 and l. 2321; Vincent, ‘Henry III and the Blessed Virgin Mary’, 130.

  180.HWM, ll. 2320–44.

  181.GH, I, 76–7.

  182.GH, I, 76.

  183.GH, I, 76; Howden, II, 66.

  184.GH, I, 76–7.

  185.HWM, ll. 2271–7; ‘And we knew full well, and saw with our own eyes,’ noted the History of William Marshal, ‘that even the king of France, the supporter of Henry’s son, was so greatly displeased with the excessive spendings and outgoings that he was not prepared to commit himself to the same extent as at first, I can tell you.’

  186.HWM, ll. 2235–62.

  187.Though by no means representing the total sum Henry spent in the war, the Pipe Rolls indicate an expenditure in England alone of over £4,000 on castle repair, garrison wages and victualling in the year 1172–73, which probably represented over 20 per cent of pre-war annual revenue as recorded in the rolls. In 1173–74, the sum was £3,213, two-thirds of which was spent on garrisons (PR 19 Henry II, xxiii; Beeler, Warfare in England, 179, 183).

  188.Evidence of victualling from the Pipe Rolls suggests that sheriffs responsible for providing such supplies were responding to careful and effective central planning (M. Prestwich, ‘The Victualling of Castles’, Soldiers, Nobles and Gentlemen. Essays in Honour of Maurice Keen, ed. P. Coss and C. Tyerman (Woodbridge, 2009), 169–82, at 172; Latimer, ‘How to Suppress a Rebellion’, 163–77). In the south-east, London, Berkhamsted and Dover appear to have been principal supply depots for castles in the region (Beeler, Warfare in England, 178).

  189.Beeler, Warfare in England, 183; Jones, ‘The Generation Gap of 1173–1174’, 36.

  190.Jones, ‘The Generation Gap of 1173–1174’, 38–9.

  191.Such a pattern of warfare was not uncommon. For instructive parallels in thirteenth-century Germany, see M. Toch, ‘The Medieval German City under Siege’, The Medieval City under Siege, ed. I. A. Corfis and M. Wolfe (Woodbridge, 1995), 35–48, at 40.

  192.For the significance of battle as ordeal, G. Duby, Le Dimanche de Bouvines (Paris, 1973), trans. C. Tihanyi as The Legend of Bouvines. War, Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1990), 110–21.

  Chapter 10: A Fragile Peace, 1175–1177

  1.GH, I, 77.

  2.Peter of Blois, ‘Dialogus inter regem Henricum secundem et abbatem Bonevallis’, ed. R. B. C. Huygens, Revue Bened
ictine, 68 (1958), 87–112, at 98–100; Joliffe, Angevin Kingship, 100; Vincent, ‘Strange Case of the Missing Biographies’, 246; and M. Billoré, ‘Idéologie chrétienne et éthique politique à travers le Dialogus inter regem Henricum secundum et abbatem Bonnevallis de Peter de Blois’, Convaincre et persuader: communication et propagande aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles, ed. M. Aurell (Poitiers, 2007), 81–109. For the importance of anger as a political tool, see the studies collected in Anger’s Past. The Social Uses of Emotion in the Middle Ages, ed. B. H. Rosenwein (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1998), especially G. Althoff, ‘Ira Regis. Prolegomena to a History of Royal Anger’, 59–74; S. White, ‘The Politics of Anger’, 127–52; R. Barton, ‘A “Zealous Anger” and the Regeneration of Aristocratic Relationships in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century France’, 153–70; and P. Hyams, ‘What did Henry III of England Think in Bed and in French about Kingship and Anger?’, 92–126. See also the important discussions of anger in D. Bates, ‘Anger, Emotion and a Biography of William the Conqueror’, Gender and Historiography: Studies in the Earlier Middle Ages in Honour of Pauline Stafford, ed. J. L. Nelson, S. Reynolds and S. M. Johns (London, 2012), 21–33; and R. E. Barton, ‘Emotions and Power in Orderic Vitalis’, ANS, 33 (2010), 41–60, at 50–3.

  3.CTB, II, no. 243, at 1050–1, and n. 10; ibid., no. 244, at 1064–5.

  4.MTB, VI, 72: Warren, Henry II, 183.

  5.Aird, Robert Curthose, 88–98; Bates, ‘Anger, Emotion and a Biography of William the Conqueror’, 28–9.

  6.Geoffrey Malaterra, De rebus gestis Rogerii Calabriae et Siciliae comitis et Roberti Guiscardi ducis fratris eius, auctore Gaufredo Malaterra, monacho Benedictino, ed. E. Pontieri (Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, Bologna, 1927–1928), 78–9 (III: 36).

  7.E. Kantorowicz, Frederick the Second, 1194–1250 (London, 1931), 400–7; D. Abulafia, Frederick II (London, 2002), 232–43. In the laws Frederick issued at Mainz in 1235, it was decreed that any son who attempted to seize or harm his father’s lands or castles was to suffer permanent disinheritance (ibid., 243).

  8.Thus, for example, the great German monarch Otto I was said to have been at a loss as to how to respond when his rebellious son Luidolf submitted to him at Mainz in 953. He finally fell back on blaming the instigators (fautores) of the plot, against whom suitable reprisals were taken (Widukind, Res gestae saxonicae, ed. P. Hirsch and H. E. Lohmann. MGH, SS (Hanover, 1935), III: 18; K. Leyser, Rule and Conflict in an Early Medieval Society: Ottonian Saxony (London, 1979), 86 and n.19).

  9.For a discussion of this trope, J. T. Rosenthal, ‘The King’s “Wicked Advisors” and Medieval Baronial Rebellions’, Political Science Quarterly, 82 (1967), 595–618.

  10.HWM, ll. 2345–54.

  11.Guernes, ll. 6068–80; trans. Short, 173.

  12.Expugnatio, 122–5; and William of Newburgh, who noted that ‘Undoubtedly the clemency of this great prince towards most faithless transgressors and most savage enemies is rightly reckoned worthy of wonder and of praise in this affair’ (WN, I, 176; trans. Kennedy and Walsh, 127). Lyttleton called it ‘among the noblest acts of clemency that have ever embellished the history of mankind’ (G. Lyttleton, The History of the Life of Henry the Second and of the Age in which Be Lived, 4 vols (London, 1767), III, 525–6).

  13.Wace, Roman de Rou, ll. 77–88.

  14.Ibid., ll. 74–6.

  15.Recueil, II, no. 468; GH, I, 77–9. Howden notes that the negotiations began on 29 September, and that the treaty was concluded the following day (GH, I, 77). Ralph of Diss gives the date of 11 October for the settlement ‘between Tours and Amboise’, which must refer to the subsequent ratification of the treaty at Falaise (the text given in Recueil, II, no. 468). A summary of the main terms was sent by the king ‘to his faithful men’, presumably some time soon after in October 1174 (Recueil, II, no. 469; Diceto, I, 394–5).

  16.GH, I, 79; Recueil, II, no. 469.

  17.Torigni, 265.

  18.GH, I, 77; Recueil, II, no. 469; Diceto, I, 395. Similarly, all castles fortified in the king’s lands were to be reduced to the condition they were in fifteen days before the war’s start.

  19.GH, I, 78.

  20.GH, I, 78; Recueil, II, no. 469; Diceto, I, 394, ‘in voluntate mea sunt’.

  21.GH, I, 79.

  22.GH, I, 77.

  23.GH, I, 77–8.

  24.Continuation of Richard of Poitiers, RHF, XII, 420; Vincent, ‘Henry II and the Poitevins’, 122; PR 19 Henry II, 94–5.

  25.He also was permitted to retain the four royal manors (with an annual value of £114) that he had been granted by King Stephen, apparently in agreement with Henry Plantagenet, back in 1153 (Wareham, ‘Hugh (I) Bigod’, ODNB).

  26.PR 1 John, 253, records the proffer of 60 marks by Henry Mallory to have full seisin of the lands which his father Ansketil Mallory, the constable of Leicester, ‘lost for his service to Henry the Young King, the King’s brother’; Red Book of the Exchequer, II, ccli, 768–9; Fox, ‘Honour and Earldom of Leicester’, 390.

  27.PR 26 Henry II, 105; Fox, ‘Honour and Earldom of Leicester’, 390. Similarly, the lands of Hugh of Chester appear in the Pipe Rolls from 1174 to 1177.

  28.N. Barratt, ‘Finance and Economy in the Reign of Henry II’, Henry II. New Interpretations, 242–56, at 250. Hence, for example, in 1174–75, Hugh de Gundeville, the sheriff of Northamptonshire, rendered account for the lands of Simon FitzPagan and of seven others ‘quia receptaverunt inimicos regis’ (PR 21 Henry II, 44).

  29.Diceto, I, 395.

  30.Diceto, I, 395.

  31.Diceto, I, 404.

  32.Dialogus, 116–17. Richard here quotes the Aeneid, VI: 853. For Richard, J. G. H. Hudson, ‘Richard FitzNigel and the “Dialogue of the Exchequer”’, Perceptions of the Past in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. P. Magdalino (1992), 75–98.

  33.RHF, XII, 420; Turner, Eleanor, 232; Guernes, ll. 6137–40; trans. Short, 175.

  34.Turner, Eleanor, 229–39; G. Seabourne, Imprisoning Medieval Women. The Non-Judicial Confinement and Abduction of Women in England, c. 1170–1509 (London, 2011), 61–2, 69–70, 79.

  35.Gervase, I, 256; Flori, Eleanor, 118–19; Turner, Eleanor, 234–5.

  36.For Eleanor’s period of captivity, Flori, Eleanor, 118–36; Turner, Eleanor, 230–55.

  37.It is uncertain which these were, but the fact that in 1176 the Young King had his disgraced vice-chancellor Adam de Churchdown imprisoned at Argentan suggests he held control of this fortress (GH, I, 122–3; Smith, ‘Households’, 90).

  38.Barratt, ‘Finance and Economy’, 248–9, confirming the essential veracity of the figures given by J. H. Ramsay, A History of the Revenues of the Kings of England, 1066–1399, 2 vols (Oxford, 1925), I, 191. These figures did not, however, represent the king’s full revenues, as payments into the Chamber and total royal revenues are unknown. For Normandy, V. Moss, ‘Normandy and England in 1180: The Pipe Roll Evidence’, England and Normandy in the Middle Ages, ed. D. Bates and A. Curry (London, 1994), 185–95; and idem, ‘The Norman Fiscal Revolution, 1193–8’, in Crises, Revolutions and Self-Sustained Growth. Essays in European Fiscal History, 1130–1830, ed. W. M. Ormrod, M. Bonney and R. Bonney (Stamford, 1999), 38–57, at 40–1, noting that by 1198, this sum had risen sharply to 99,000 livres angevins.

  39.GH, I, 78; Diceto, I, 394; Recueil, II, no. 468. There are no extant financial records for Aquitaine or Brittany to allow comparison with the actual income granted to Richard and Geoffrey.

  40.Everard, Brittany and the Angevins, 129.

  41.Gervase, I, 243.

  42.GH, I, 78 ‘in Andegaviae et in terra quae fuit comitis Andegaviae’.

  43.Norgate, John Lackland, 6; Neveux, La Normandie, 538, ‘son Benjamin’.

  44.Torigni, 268; Gillingham, Richard I, 53–4. The earl was buried at his father Henry I’s foundation of Reading abbey (GH, I, 105).

  45.GH, I, 79.

  46.GH, I, 79.

  47.GH, I, 79; Gillingham, ‘Doing Homage’, 75.

  48.Diceto, I, 396–7; Liber Niger de Scaccarii, ed. T. Hearn
e, 2 vols (London, 1774), I, 36–40, with eighteen more names on the witness list; Recueil, II, nos 471, 471; Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1174–1328: Some Select Documents, ed. and trans. E. L. G. Stones (Oxford, 1970), no. 1. The initial agreement made at Falaise was witnessed by Richard and Geoffrey, but not the Young King, though his rights as overlord of the Scots were included in it.

  49.GH, I, 81; Torigni, 266, and 234, where he notes a great council meeting at Christmas 1168 in the ‘new hall’.

  50.Diceto, I, 398.

  51.GH, I, 81.

  52.GH, I, 81–2.

  53.GH, I, 81.

  54.GH, I, 82.

  55.GH, I, 82, ‘et ipse adhuc cereus erat in vitium flecti’; Horace, Ars poetica, tr. A. S. Kline (2005), 160–5: ‘The beardless youth, free of tutors at last, delights/In horse and hound, and the turf of the sunlit campus,/He’s wax malleable for sin, rude to his advisors,/Slow in making provision, lavish with money,/Spirited, passionate, and swift to change his whim’. William of Tyre, Bk 16: 3 similarly cites this verse in relation to Baldwin III’s quarrels with his mother Melisende.

  56.Diceto, I, 398; Howden, II, 71.

  57.Howden, II, 71; GH, I, 82.

  58.As Leyser, Rule and Conflict, 168, n. 1, notes, ‘a royal charisma could be tested and rejected’.

  59.Smith, ‘Acta’, 298, suggests that this act may well have marked the moment from which all the Young King’s acta became legitimate once more in the eyes of his father.

  60.WN, I, 196–7; trans. Kennedy and Walsh, 154–5.

  61.GH, I, 82–3.

  62.GH, I, 83.

  63.GH, I, 83. Nevertheless, it would appear that the count retained at least one charter from the Young King, for at a summit in 1182, Count Philip gave Henry II a ‘cartam juvenis regis’, and was again quitclaimed of all obligations by young Henry and his brothers (GH, I, 286).

  64.GH, I, 83.

  65.GH, I, 83.

  66.Diceto, I, 399. The chronicler’s home town of Diss lay within this theatre of war and may well have suffered in the ravages.