Henry the Young King, 1155-1183

by Matthew Strickland

  39.Diceto, II, 20; Vigeois, 338; Gesta, I, 300, 303; Howden, II, 280. A very similar process is recorded on the death of Earl Geoffrey de Mandeville in 1166, when his attendants ‘immediately removed the entrails and brain from the corpse and buried them reverently in a consecrated place, with gifts of alms. When salt had been put over all the rest of the body, including the heart, and it had been wrapped in the finest hide, they carefully sewed it up and enclosed it securely in a casket made of fir wood, and having wrapped this in an embroidered cloth, they put it on a wagon’, drawn by horses (Foundation of Walden, 38–9).

  40.Vigeois, 338.

  41.Vigeois, 338; GH, I, 301.

  42.HWM, ll. 7044–6, ‘for he loved him beyond all others’.

  43.Peter of Blois, Epistolae, no. 2 (PL, CCII, cols 3–6).

  44.GH, I, 302–3; Vigeois, 338; HWM, ll. 7047–9, ‘but the king was of such disposition that nobody could perceive for a moment any change to his countenance’.

  45.GH, I, 302–3.

  46.Vigeois, 337. Though no details of the rout of Raymond survive, the poet Ambroise deemed it important enough to be recounted as one of Richard’s God-given victories by a royal chaplain in 1192 during the Third Crusade (Estoire de la Guerre Sainte, ll. 9609–14). Bertran de Born’s antipathy to Alfonso was reflected in two biting sirventes possibly written in 1183, ‘Pois lo gens terminitz floritz’ and ‘Qan vei pels vergegiers despleiar’ (Padern, nos 21 and 22; Gouiran, nos 23, 24). Cf. L. E. Kastner, ‘Bertran de Born’s Sirventes against King Alphonso of Aragon’, Modern Philology, 34 (1937), 225–48.

  47.‘Ges no me desconort’ (Padern, no. 17; Gouiran, no. 17), ll. 1–75; Vigeois, 337; Norgate, Richard the Lionheart, 40–56; Gillingham, Richard I, 66–76.

  48.Vigeois, 339. The Capuchins are discussed in detail by France, ‘People against Mercenaries’, 13–22, and idem, ‘Mercenaries and Capuchins’, 295–312.

  49.GH, I, 304.

  50.GH, I, 303.

  51.Map, 280–1. Howden also noted ‘defuncto ita rege filio, omnia in pace facta sunt’ (GH, I, 304).

  52.Diceto, II, 19.

  53.Biographies des troubadours: textes provençaux des XIII et XIVe siècles, ed. J. Boutière and A.-H. Shulz (2nd edn, Paris, 1974), 92, 107–8; Gouiran, I, 3–4 (Vida, II); Clédat, Bertran de Born, 57–8; Norgate, Angevin Kings, II, 231.

  54.HWM, ll. 7063–155. For the wider context of the incident with Sancho, see D. Crouch, ‘William Marshal and the Mercenariat’, Mercenaries and Paid Men: The Mercenary Identity in the Middle Ages, ed. J. France (Leiden, 2008), 15–32.

  55.HWM, ll. 7239–58; Crouch, William Marshal, 55–6.

  56.GH, I, 303; Torigni, 163. Geoffrey’s tomb, which may well have had an effigy, was situated before the altar of the Crucifix, in front of the second main pillar of the nave, to which the famous enamel plaque was attached (D. Christophe, ‘La Plaque de Geoffroy Plantagenêt dans la cathédrale du Mans’, Hortus Artium Medievalium, 10 (2004), 75–80).

  57.GH, I, 303; Diceto, II, 20.

  58.Such hijacking did not stand in isolation. The Foundation of Walden, 38–41, for example, records how in 1166 the mother of Earl Geoffrey de Mandeville appropriated his body from his chosen burial site at Walden in favour of her own foundation of Chicksands, so that ‘she might ever afterwards have all her son’s relatives and closest friends to assist in the promotion of her monastery’.

  59.GH, I, 303–4.

  60.CDF, I, nos 35–8, and above, 35, n. 150. The testimony of Bishop Bertran is given in Howden, I, lxvii.

  61.De morte, 269–72; Eyton, 251; P. B. Gams, Series episcoporum ecclesiae catholicae (Regensburg, 1873), 614; D. Spear, ‘Les Doyens du chapitre cathédrale de Rouen, durant la période ducale’, Annales de Normandie, 33 (1983), 91–119, at 102–3; Fasti ecclesiae Gallicanae, 2, Diocèse de Rouen, ed. V. Tabbagh (Turnhout, 1998), 77. Robert’s efforts on this mission may perhaps have been closely linked to his attempts to secure election to the archbishopric of Rouen as successor to Rotrou. Among those who accompanied the Young King’s body from Le Mans to Rouen was Ivo, archdeacon of Rouen (De morte, 269); Eyton, 251. For context, D. Spear, ‘Les Chanoines de la cathédrale de Rouen pendant la period ducale’, Annales de Normandie, 41 (1991), 135–76.

  62.Diceto, II, 230, ‘on the north side’; HWM, ll. 7157–72.

  63.Torigni, 306. Cf. L. Musset, ‘Les Sépultures des souverains normands: un aspect de l’idéologie du pouvoir’, Autour du pouvoir ducal normand, Xe–XIIe siècles, ed. L. Musset, J.-M. Bouvris and J.-M. Maillefer (Cahiers des Annales de Normandie, 17, Caen, 1985), 19–44.

  64.Schlicht, La Cathédrale de Rouen vers 1300, 347–55. Choosing to break with traditional Capetian practice of burial in St Denis, Louis was interred as his own foundation of Cistercians at Barbeau (Fleury), where his widow Adela of Champagne had a full-sized effigy of the king erected over his tomb (A. Erlande-Brandenburg, Le Roi est mort. Etudes sur les funérailles, les sépultures et les tombeaux des rois de France jusqu’à la fin du XIII siècle (Geneva, 1975), 75–7, 87–8, 161–2; 111–12, Hallam, ‘Royal Burial’, 369; E. A. R. Brown, ‘Burying and Unburying the Kings of France’, in idem, The Monarchy of Capetian France and Royal Ceremonial (London, 1991), 243–4, fig. 1). The tomb of Henry the Liberal (d. 1181), at the collegiate church of Saint-Etienne de Troyes, was commissioned by his widow Marie de France, the daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Louis VII, and depicted him lying with his hands joined in prayer, and wearing a cap similar to that depicted on the tomb of Geoffrey Plantagenet in the enamel funerary plaque at Le Mans (A.F. Arnaud, Voyage archéologique et pittoresque dans le département de l’Aube (Troyes, 1837), II, pl. 14, and M. Bur, ‘Les Comtes de Champagne et la “Normanitas”: sémiologie d’un tombeau’, ANS (1980), 22–32, at 22.

  65.Schlicht, La Cathédrale de Rouen vers 1300, 347–55, with a discussion of the different dating of the effigy, as well as illustrations of the tombs and of Gagnières’ drawing of the Young King’s effigy. Following its mutilation, the effigy remained long buried in the sanctuary, only to suffer an unsympathetic restoration following its rediscovery in 1866, including of the missing head, forearms, part of the feet and the lion on which young Henry’s feet rested. It was moved to its present position in the south ambulatory of the choir only in 1956 following extensive repairs to the cathedral after the damage suffered in World War Two, while the near-contemporary effigy of Richard (marking his heart-burial in the cathedral in 1199) was placed opposite in the north ambulatory (ibid.). For the discovery of the Young King’s effigy, J. B. D. Cochet, ‘Découverte du tombeau et de la statue de Henri Court-Mantel [sic] dans le choeur de la cathédrale de Rouen’, Bulletin de la Commission des antiquités de la Seine-Inférieure, 1 (1867–1869), 93–102.

  66.Thomas Agnellus, Sermonis de diversis, Bodleian MS Laud Misc. 71; R. Sharpe, A Handlist of Latin Writers of Great Britain and Ireland before 1540 (Brepols, 1997, revised 2001), 639. For his kinship with Reginald, English Episcopal Acta, X. Bath and Wells, 1061–1205, ed. F. M. R. Ramsay (Oxford, 1995), no. 91.

  67.He subsequently also obtained a canonry at Tournai (MTB, VII, no. 699: Duggan, Thomas Becket, 183). He was well connected, and may have been related to the Henry d’Earley who, with his wife and two sons, was drowned in a shipwreck while crossing with the king back from Normandy to England in March 1170 (GH, I, 4), where Henry is described as ‘nobilissimus baronum Angliae’; Howden, II, 3–4). More certainly, he was a kinsman of Bishop Reginald, while his nephew William of Earley founded Buckland priory (Fasti ecclesiae Anglicanae, 1066–1300, ed. J. Le Neve, compiled by D. E. Greenway (London, 1968), VII, 31–5, ‘Archdeacons of Wells’).

  68.Crouch, William Marshal, 51, n. 16; N.Vincent, ‘Patronage, Politics and Piety in the Charters of Eleanor’, Plantagenêts et Capétiens, 17–60, at 43; Turner, Eleanor, 244. The sermon is partly printed in Thomas Agnellus, De morte et sepultura Henrici regis Anglie junioris in Radulphi de Coggeshall Chronicon Anglicanum, ed. J. Stevenson (Rolls Series, London, 1875), 265–73, bu
t considerable sections are omitted from the original text in Bodleian MS Laud Misc. 71, and the Young King’s death is misdated to 1182.

  69.WN, I, 234.

  70.HWM, ll. 18, 468–18, 496. For a discussion of the light which the lengthy deathbed scene given in the History throws on late twelfth-century attitudes to death, see G. Duby, Guillame le Maréchal ou le meilleur chevalier du monde (Paris, 1984), 1–34; Crouch, William Marshal, 207–16.

  71.De morte, 266, 267, 268.

  72.De morte, 266–7.

  73.De morte, 267, ‘Huic ergo non debet martyrii Gloria denegari, qui tantarum persecutionum violentia vitam finivit vice gladii’.

  74.De morte, 272–3; trans. Flori, Eleanor, 126. Thomas here quotes from 1 Corinthians 2:9.

  75.Evans, The Death of Kings, 111; Matthew 8:1–4; 9:20–22.

  76.De morte, 267. As Aurell, Plantagenet Empire, 114, notes, young Henry’s posthumous healing of such illnesses was closely analogous to the royal ‘touching’ for scrofula.

  77.De morte, 267–8.

  78.De morte, 268.

  79.De morte, 268; and for the shaft of light as a common hagiographical topos, Evans, Death of Kings, 111.

  80.WN, I, 234.

  81.De morte, 272, where the removed ‘cerea signorum monimenta’ may refer to ex-votos or wax effigies of afflicted limbs or bodies commonly left at such shrines by those seeking a cure (E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars. Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580, 2nd edn, New Haven, Conn., and London, 2005, 197–9).

  82.J. C. Russell, ‘The Canonization of Opposition to the King in Angevin England’, Haskins Anniversary Essays, ed. C. H. Taylor and J. L. La Monte (Boston, 1929), 279–90, reprinted idem, Twelfth-Century Studies (New York, 1978), 248–60.

  83.Crouch, William Marshal, 50.

  84.‘Si tuit li doil e-il plor e-il marrimen’ (Gouiran, no. 14), ll. 33–40; Anthology of Troubadour Lyric Poetry, ed. Press, 170–1.

  85.Charters of Duchess Constance, no. Ge7, and Plate 1; Bibliothèque Municipale de la ville de Rouen, Y.44 (Cartulary of Rouen), f. 58r. The grant was made ‘by the advice of the canons of the church of Rouen’, and with the consent of his wife, Constance, who also issued her own confirmation of the grant (Charters of Duchess Constance, 47, no. C4).

  86.Cartulary of Rouen, f. 73r–v; CDF, I, no. 4; D. Crouch, ‘The Origins of Chantries: Some Further Anglo-Norman Evidence’, JMH, 27 (2001), 159–80, at 172. Margaret also expressed her intention to provide another endowment when she had greater resources.

  87.Hawise was also a widow, for her husband Earl William had died in Henry II’s custody, having been one of those arrested as a result of the Old King’s reaction to the outbreak of the Young King’s war in Aquitaine (Patterson, ‘William, second earl of Gloucester’); and for Hawise herself, S. M. Johns, Noblewomen, Aristocracy and Power in the Twelfth-Century Anglo-Norman Realm (Manchester, 2003), 81–3.

  88.Cartulary of Rouen, ff. 32–3; CDF, I, no. 46. Richard confirmed the grant the same day. It was also confirmed by Geoffrey Plantagenet, as archbishop elect of York, by Clement III and by the papal legate, John of Anagni, in 1189 (Cartulary of Rouen, f. 26; Papsturkunden in Frankreich. II. Normandie, ed. Ramackers, Göttingen, 1937, 387–8, no. 294; CDF, I, nos 48, 49 and 50; English Episcopal Acta, XXVII: York, nos 58 and 59).

  89.Crouch, ‘The Origins of Chantries’, 172–3, 177–9; S. Marritt, ‘Secular Cathedrals and the Anglo-Norman Aristocracy’, Cathedrals, Communities and Conflict in the Anglo-Norman World, ed. P. Dalton, C. Innsley and L. Wilkinson (Woodbridge, 2011), 151–68, at 154.

  90.Cartulary of Rouen, ff. 32–3; CDF, I, no. 46. Among the witnesses to Richard’s confirmation issued the same day were two of the Young King’s former associates, William Marshal and William de St John (Cartulary of Rouen, ff. 32–3; CDF, I, no. 47). As king, John’s grant to his monastery of Beaulieu in 1205 was given for the souls of his father Henry, his brothers Henry and Richard, and his mother Eleanor, though it is notable that Geoffrey of Brittany is not mentioned (The Cartae Antiquae Rolls 1–10, ed. L. Landon (Pipe Roll Society, new series xvii, London, 1939)).

  91.Vincent, ‘Patronage, Politics and Piety’, 42–3.

  92.CDF, no. 1101; J. Martindale, ‘Eleanor of Aquitaine’, Richard Coeur de Lion in History and Myth, ed. J. Nelson (London, 1992), 17–50, at 17–18. For Eleanor’s commemoration of the Young King, see also The Early Charters of the Canons of Waltham Abbey, ed. R. Ransford (Woodbridge, 1989), no. 297.

  93.Gillingham, ‘Stupor mundi’, 402, 404–6.

  94.Gillingham, ‘Stupor mundi’, 402, ‘ante magnum altare versus meridiem ex opposite tumbe Henrici regis tercii fatris sui’; and Annales de Wintonia, in AM, II, 71.

  95.Crouch, William Marshal, 66 and n. 16. The cartulary of Rouen also records among the abbey’s precious vestments a ‘chasuble of William Marshal’, as well as others given by Henry’s sister Matilda of Saxony (Cartulary of Rouen Cathedral, f. 26). When these were donated is unknown, but it is possible that they were intended for the priests assigned to the chantries for the Young King.

  96.N. Vincent, Norman Charters from English Sources: Antiquaries, Archives and the Rediscovery of the Anglo-Norman Past (Pipe Roll Society, new series 59, London, 2013), no. 7, ‘pro salute anime domini mei Henrici minoris regis’.

  97.English Episcopal Acta, VI: Norwich, 1070–1214, ed. C. Harper-Bill (Oxford, 1990), Appendix I, 364, no. 68, dated 1183 x 1200 and attested by John, bishop of Norwich, who dedicated the chapel; and ibid., no. 63, ‘pro salute anime tue [i.e John Lestrange] et tuorum et domini Regis Henrici junioris et Alienor regine et filiorum’. An inspeximus dated 10 April 1204 of Walter of Coutances as archbishop of Rouen, of donations to the abbey of Foucarmont in the diocese of Rouen, lists: ‘Item. Pro anima Henrici Regis Anglorum Junioris decimam denariorum ministerii sui de Fulcardi monte’ (de Gray Birch, ‘On the Seals of King Henry the Second, and of his son the so-called Henry the Third’, 336–7).

  98.G. Gyorffy, ‘Thomas à Becket and Hungary’, Hungarian Studies in English, 4 (1969), 45–52; K. B. Slocum, ‘Angevin Marriage Diplomacy and the Early Dissemination of the Cult of Thomas Becket’, Medieval Perspectives, 14 (1999), 214–28 at 222; Bowie, The Daughters of Henry II and Eleanor, 167–8. On Margaret’s marriage, GH, I, 346, 360; Rigord, 216–19; Z. J. Kosztolnyik, From Colman the Learned to Béla III (1095–1196): Hungarian Domestic Policies and their Impact upon Foreign Affairs (East European Monographs, Boulder, Colo., 1987), 212–14; and J. Laszlovsky, ‘Nicholaus Clericus: a Hungarian Student at Oxford University in the Twelfth Century’, JMH, 14 (1988), 217–31. Ralph Niger, Chronicle, 93, refers to Béla as ‘gloriosus rex’.

  99.GH, I, 304.

  100.GH, I, 305; Turner, Eleanor, 245.

  101.GH, I, 304–5.

  102.GH, I, 306. It was not, however, until 1186 that Margaret issued a charter stating the final terms of the compositio which she had agreed with Henry II and King Philip, by which she quitclaimed her rights in return for an annuity of the considerably higher sum of 2,700 livres angevins to be guaranteed by the Hospitallers and Templars and paid through the latter at Paris (The New Palaeographical Society: Facsimiles of Ancient Manuscripts, ed. E. Maunde Thompson et al., 2 vols (London 1903–12), I, plate 123; Recueil, no. 660 and Atlas, plate xxv; CDF, nos 372–94). A. Sandy, ‘The Financial Importance of the London Temple in the Thirteenth Century’, Essays in Medieval History Presented to T. F. Tout, ed. A. G. Little and F. M. Powicke (Manchester, 1925), 151.

  103.GH, I, 306.

  104.Following the death of King Béla in 1196, Margaret, unlike young Henry, was able to fulfil her own vow to undertake a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. On arriving at Acre with a company of knights, she was welcomed by her nephew, Henry of Champagne, the ruler of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, but died shortly thereafter, and was buried in the cathedral at Tyre (Howden, IV, 14, 32; La Continuation de Guillaume de Tyr (1184–1187), ed. M. R. Morgan (1184–97), Paris, 1982, c.183). During the Third Crusade, she had given a magnifice
nt tent to Emperor Frederick Barbarossa as he was passing through the lands of his ally King Béla (The Crusade of Frederick Barbarossa, ed. and trans. G. Loud, Aldershot, 2013, 58).

  105.Gillingham, ‘Doing Homage’, 77–80. I am grateful to John Gillingham for discussion of this point.

  106.GH, I, 306.

  107.GH, I, 306; Howden, II, 284.

  108.Howden, II, 345; Diceto, II, 55; William le Breton, Philippide, in Oeuvres de Rigord et de Guillaume le Breton, ed. F. Delaborde, 2 vols (Paris, 1882), II, 70–1; L. Diggelmann, ‘Hewing the Ancient Elm: Anger, Arboricide, and Medieval Kingship’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 40 (2010), 249–72.

  109.GH, I, 308.

  110.Gillingham, Richard I, 76–9. John lacked the deeply felt support the barons of Aquitaine had given to the young Henry and was no match in the field for Richard, while Bertran de Born also suggests that many of the Aquitanian nobles had lost confidence in Geoffrey, whom they regarded as having abandoned them in 1183 to gain better terms for himself (‘Qan la novella flors par el vergan’, ll. 33–40).

  111.‘Qan la novella flors par el vergan’, ll. 33–40.

  112.Gervase, I, 436; Howden, II, 355.

  113.De principis.

  114.Gillingham, Richard I, 94–100.

  115.Samuel Daniel, The Collection of the History of England (London, revised edn, 1634), 92.

  116.R. C. Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales, and England’s Lost Renaissance (London, 1986); The Lost Prince. The Life and Death of Henry Stuart, ed. C. MacLeod (London, 2012).

  117.Daniel, Collection of the History of England, 92.

  118.Fawtier, Capetian Kings, 49.

  119.Daniel, Collection of the History of England, 92.

  120.Plassmann, ‘The King and his Sons’, 165.

  121.JF, l. 152.

  122.Daniel, Collection of the History of England, 102.

  123.Gillingham, ‘Problems of Integration’, 116.