The second change was to subject this hugely extended area to a separate jurisdiction known as Forest Law. This had been the practice in Carolingian France and it had been adapted by the dukes for their own purposes in Normandy. But it seems to have been entirely unknown in Anglo-Saxon England and its importation, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle makes clear, was one of the most deplorable aspects of the Conqueror’s rule:
He made many deer-parks; and he established laws therewith; so that whosoever slew a hart, or a hind, should be deprived of his eyesight. As he forbade men to kill the harts, so also the boars; and he loved the tall deer as if he were their father.
The results were unpopular among all classes; ‘his rich men bemoaned it, and the poor men shuddered at it’. For everyone was affected. The rich found their own sport curtailed; the poor lost a useful source of food and saw their crops damaged; while churchmen disapproved both of the savagery of the laws and of the excessive commitment to sport which they represented. But there was a broader issue too. For the Laws were hated, above all, because they were perceived to be arbitrary. They were a product merely of the king’s will and they served only his pleasure. In other words, they were ‘un-English’. They were also the most vivid reminder that England was a conquered country, whose land, people and resources were the spoils of the victor to use or abuse as he wished.
Naturally, when William II made his bid for English support in 1088, an undertaking to abolish or moderate the Forest Laws was given a prominent place. But, equally naturally, the promise was forgotten when William’s hour of need passed. Instead, he proved as ruthless a Nimrod as his father.
But in 1100 the hunter became the hunted. Late in the afternoon on 2 August the king was hunting in the New Forest near Brockenhurst with a small party that included his younger brother, Henry. One of the hunts-men, Walter Tirel, lord of Poix in Ponthieu, appeared to aim at a stag but instead hit the king with his arrow. William died instantly. There followed immediate panic – real or staged – and the party rode off, abandoning the body. It was left to a passing peasant to bundle it in a cart and bring it to Winchester, where it was hastily buried beneath the tower. Meanwhile, Tirel had fled abroad while Henry had ridden to Winchester, seized the Treasury and, on 3 August, had himself chosen king.
Was the death accident or design? There have been suggestions of a conspiracy by the great family of Clare, with Tirel, whose wife was a Clare, as the hit-man. Two members of the family were in the hunting party on the fatal day and, subsequently, they were treated with marked favour by Henry. But there are no more substantial clues. What matters instead is the old rule of cui bono? – ‘who gains?’ And the man who gained most from the death, clearly, was Henry. If he did not plan it, he exploited it with the cool skill which was to be a marked feature of his rule.
By this time, Henry was thirty-two. He was the Conqueror’s youngest son; he was also the most ‘English’, being conceived, born and knighted in England. His status as a prince, or king’s son, from birth also seems to have affected his upbringing. There is little sign, for example, that either his father or his brothers received any but the most elementary instruction: they were swordsmen first and penmen scarcely at all. Henry, on the other hand, was given the sophisticated education (at least for a layman) that led to his later nickname of ‘Beauclerk’:
He was [writes his contemporary, William of Malmesbury] early instructed in the liberal arts and so thoroughly imbibed the sweets of learning that no warlike disturbance and no pressure of business could erase them from his noble mind.
‘His learning,’ William concluded, ‘though obtained by snatches, assisted him much in the science of government.’
The evidence of this more reflective, calculating approach to kingship was quickly apparent. For Henry had seized the throne by means of a coup d’état, perhaps even by fratricide. His actions were palliated, no doubt, by William’s widespread unpopularity. Even so, he badly needed legitimacy.
His first step was to bring forward his coronation. Normally, coronations took place on a great feast of the Church. Henry, however, could not wait. Instead, immediately after his election as king by an impromptu witan at Winchester – ‘the statesmen that were then nigh on hand’ – on Friday, 3 August, he rode post-haste to London and was crowned in the Abbey on the Sunday by Maurice, bishop of London. From the death of one king to the crowning of another had taken a mere four days.
Nevertheless, it was time enough for Henry to introduce an important modification to the coronation service. As we have seen, since at least the time of Edgar, English kings had sworn an oath at their coronation. The oath took a fixed form and was regarded by both king and people as defining the essence of good royal government. Twenty years after his own coronation, for instance, Edward the Confessor quoted his oath, more or less verbatim, in a charter. Henry, however, decided to go beyond the traditional form. He would not only promise to govern well; he would also renounce the bad government of his father and brother. This turned, and was clearly intended to turn, the oath from a promise into a manifesto.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, alert as always to the ‘constitutional’ implications of events, notes the change with precision:
On the Sunday … before the altar at Westminster, he promised God and all the people to annul all the unrighteous acts that took place in his brother’s time, and to maintain the best laws that were valid in any king’s day before him.
Only once these promises were made was Henry crowned and given a general homage, in which ‘all this land submitted to him, and swore oaths, and became his men’.
The oath, of course, was oral – though the king and the bishop must each have read from a written text. Henry’s other innovation was to issue a version of this text as a Coronation Charter. There was something in it for everyone. The Church traditionally came first and the first clause of the Charter duly promised to end Rufus’s policy of ecclesiastical plunder. It began sonorously, with the king’s solemn, general undertaking to ‘make free the Church of God’. Then each of Rufus’s specific methods of extortion was renounced.
In fact, Henry, even in the short time available to him, had already begun to translate his words into action. Of the three bishoprics that were in the king’s hands, he filled one on the very day of his election by giving the diocese of Winchester, vacant since 1098, to the chancellor, William Gifford. At Canterbury, likewise, the vacancy was quickly ended when the king, with the advice of his council, wrote letters of recall to Archbishop Anselm. And it was the same with the vacant abbeys, which included five out of the six richest. Nor was the scandal ever repeated.
Then the concerns of Henry’s lay subjects were addressed. The aristocracy was promised security of inheritance; while everyone would benefit from Henry’s renunciation of the monetagium, or levy on the coining of silver pennies. But it was Henry’s promise to moderate the murdrum (‘murder’) fine which most struck a chord with the ordinary people.
The murdrum fine had been introduced by the Conqueror to try to protect his Norman followers from assassination by the disaffected English. It assumed that every murdered body was that of a Norman, unless it could be proved otherwise. If the proof were not forthcoming, a heavy fine was levied on the whole community where the body had been found. The principle of collective reprisals – the resort of occupying forces throughout the ages – was odious and the murdrum fine was linked with the Forest Laws as a badge of English oppression.
Henry’s promise to tackle the issue was therefore a popular one. In the event, the grievance was mitigated rather than abolished. Nevertheless, a welcome signal of a return to normalcy had been given.
And it was this, really, that was the underlying purpose of the Charter. ‘I abolish’, the king swore, ‘all the evil practices with which the realm was unjustly oppressed.’ In their place, he undertook to ‘restore to you the law of King Edward’. Strictly speaking, Edward the Confessor, unlike many of his predecessors, including, most recently, Cnut, had
issued no law code. Instead ‘the law of King Edward’ was taken to mean the totality of all Anglo-Saxon law in force in 1066. This corpus was now researched by Henry’s legal scholars and, with judicious modifications, was used to provide the basis of the Common Law that, henceforth, would be the law of England. And, though it was formulated by an Anglo-Norman legal establishment, this was, self-consciously, a native, English law.
But the Charter did not only look back to the legal status quo ante of 1066 or to the settlement of 1014. It was also rich in implications for the future. It was reissued by all subsequent twelfth-century kings and it was incorporated, almost word for word, into Magna Carta. But there was one grievance which Henry, as keen a huntsman as any of his house, could not bring himself to address. ‘I have retained’, Clause 10 declared baldly, ‘the Forests in my own hands as my father did before me.’ Even here, however, the naked arbitrariness of the Conqueror’s legislation is cloaked with the claim that the retention of the Forests had been agreed ‘by the common council of my barons’.
Just as important were the personal changes of 1100. William’s hated minister, Ranulf Flambard, was thrown in the Tower. And Henry decided to get married; indeed, he may even have fallen in love. The woman in question was Edith, daughter of Malcolm III of Scotland and St Margaret and niece of Edgar the Æthling. She had been brought up at Romsey Abbey, an aristocratic establishment, where her aunt Christina was a nun. There she had had many suitors and, though not professed, had worn the veil to keep them off.
But Henry was different. It was clearly Edith’s pleasure to marry him; it was also her duty since, by the marriage, the House of Wessex would be restored to the throne of England. Henry, who revered his wife’s fourteen generations of royal blood, saw the union in a similar light. As did all other observers, led by the Anglo-Saxon chronicler, who rejoiced that she was ‘of the right royal race of England’. On 11 November they were married ‘with much pomp at Westminster’ by Anselm himself and Matilda, as she was known after her marriage, was anointed and crowned queen in the same ceremony. Three years later a son was born. He was christened William, after his Norman grandfather, the Conqueror; but surnamed Æthling, after his Anglo-Saxon royal blood. The cloven tree trunk of the Confessor’s dream had, it seemed, knitted up and borne green leaf again.
There was soon an even stranger reversal of fortune. Flambard quickly escaped from the Tower and fled to Normandy. There he plotted with Duke Robert, who had returned from crusade, to dethrone Henry. The conspiracy failed. But it led to years of fratricidal war. The war ended with Robert’s crushing defeat at Tinchebrai on 28 September 1106. Henry annexed Normandy and imprisoned his brother for life.
It was, to the day, the fortieth anniversary of the battle of Hastings. William of Malmesbury noted the coincidence with glee: the English had conquered Normandy; defeat was avenged and revenge was sweet.
Chapter 8
The Triumphant King
Henry I
IN 1106, AT THE TIME OF HIS GREAT VICTORY at Tinchebrai over his eldest brother Robert, duke of Normandy, King Henry I was thirty-eight years old. Only six years previously, he had been a near-landless younger son, unmarried and with uncertain prospects. Then, in quick succession, he had seized the throne of England; married a queen of unimpeachably royal blood and fathered a son who was the heir of the Anglo-Saxon as well as the Norman kings. Now, with the conquest of the duchy of Normandy which followed the battle, he had reconstituted his father, William the Conqueror’s, empire by his own hands.
I
Henry was also fortunate in his historian and younger contemporary, William of Malmesbury. William was the greatest English historian since Bede and in Henry he found a subject worthy of his talents. The king was, he writes:
of middle stature; … his hair was black, set back on the forehead; his eyes mildly bright; his chest brawny; his body fleshy. He was face-tious in proper season, nor did multiplicity of business cause him to be less pleasant when he mixed in society … He preferred contending by counsel rather than by the sword: if he could, he conquered without bloodshed; if it was unavoidable, with as little as possible … He was plain in his diet … He never drank but to allay thirst … His sleep was heavy and interrupted by frequent snoring. His eloquence was rather unpremeditated than laboured; not rapid but deliberate.
The impression is of a man of powerful appetites, which were held in control by an equally powerful will and intelligence. And, commanding himself, he was able to command others as well. The result was that contemporaries were convinced of his greatness as a ruler. He was, William of Malmesbury concluded, ‘inferior in wisdom to no king of modern times and … clearly surpassing all his predecessors in England’.
But Henry’s standing has proved less easy to communicate to subsequent ages. Especially in England. Here Henry reigned thirty-five years. Nevertheless, thanks to his iron grip, nothing much happened. In Normandy, however, it was a different story. Partly this was due to the primitiveness of the duchy’s structure of politics and government and to its faction-ridden and unruly nobility. But there was also the destabilizing influence of the powerful and hostile rulers based just beyond the Norman frontiers: to the east, the count of Flanders; to the south-west, the count of Anjou; and to the south, the king of France, who was not only a neigh-bour but, in theory at least, the king-duke’s feudal overlord. All were jealous of Henry’s power and took every opportunity of stirring the seething pot of Norman politics.
Most dangerous of all, however, was the fact that Henry’s brother Robert left an infant son, William, who was aged five at the time of his father’s defeat and capture. Henry, once Duke Robert was safely in his hands, showed no compunction in condemning him to a perpetual imprisonment that was ended only by his death twenty-eight years later in 1134 at the age of over eighty. The son, however, was another matter. Sensitive as usual to public opinion, Henry felt obliged to leave him at liberty ‘for fear that it might be held against him if the boy came to any harm while in his hands’. It was a bad blunder, of which Henry soon repented. But by then it was too late. The boy was spirited out of his clutches and, flaunting the provocative surname of ‘the Clito’ or ‘royal-born’, grew up to become a thorn in his uncle’s flesh and, as pretender to Normandy and perhaps to England, the focus of every plot and alliance against him.
The result of all this was that Normandy was to occupy a disproportionate amount of Henry’s time: he spent the greater part of his reign in the duchy. England, in contrast, was left to fend for itself. Which it did – as well as supplying the wealth that enabled Henry repeatedly to take on and defeat the apparently overwhelming coalitions lined up against him.
The extraordinarily divergent courses of Henry’s reign in England and in Normandy gave rise to some of the most interesting analytical passages in contemporary historians. Shrewdest and most succinct, as usual, was William of Malmesbury:
Normandy, indeed, though not very wide in extent, is a convenient and patient fosterer of the abandoned. Wherefore, for a long time, she well endures intestine broils; and on the restoration of peace becomes more flourishing than before; at her pleasure ejecting her disturbers, who feel themselves no longer safe in the province, by the open passes into France. Whereas England does not long endure the turbulent; but when once received into her bosom, either surrenders, or puts them to death; neither, when laid waste by tumult, does she again soon recover herself.
Henry’s own coup d’état at the beginning of his reign perfectly illustrates the truth of this dictum: England had surrendered to his firm grasp in a matter of days and did not stray from its allegiance thereafter.
Moreover, the phenomenon was specifically English – that is, Anglo-Saxon. And Henry had likewise allied himself to this English sentiment by his marriage to Edith, even though as queen, Henry’s English bride took the Norman name Matilda. The English naturally rejoiced and welcomed the couple, however optimistically, as one of them. But, despite the change of name, the Norman grandee
s sneered at the mésalliance: all but a handful, according to William of Malmesbury, who was half-English himself, ‘openly branded their lord with sarcasms, calling him Godric and his consort, Godgifu’.
The satire was many-layered. Godric and Godgifu were the commonplace names of humble, God-fearing folk. So their employment mocked the new queen’s rather ostentatious piety, which it was assumed Henry would share. Another target was the dullness of their court, which contrasted with the rackety brilliance of Rufus’s establishment. Finally, and above all, the names were Anglo-Saxon, which, in the mouths of the Anglo-Norman smart set, turned them into racial insults: Henry, the aristocracy was saying, had married a native and gone native himself.
And Henry’s own behaviour gave substance to the charges. Above and beyond his marriage, he openly played the Anglo-Saxon national card and raised the fyrd (the old Anglo-Saxon land-army) against his brother Robert. The problem with the fyrd, however, as the battle of Hastings had shown all too clearly, was that its infantry tactics were no match for the Norman cavalry. Henry set himself to remedy this as well:
He frequently went through the ranks [William of Malmesbury explained] instructing them how to elude the ferocity of the cavalry by opposing their shields, and how to return their strokes: by this he made them perfectly fearless of the Normans, and ask to be led out to battle.
Thus, by a strange reversal, a Norman king was teaching the Anglo-Saxons how to fight their Norman masters.
The Anglo-Norman elite drew its own conclusions. Henry, they decided, was about to become too powerful and they must close ranks. Another historian, Orderic Vitalis, who also straddled the cultures as the product of a mixed marriage of a Norman father with an English mother, takes up the story.
The earls and magnates of the kingdom [he reports] met together and discussed fully how to reconcile the rebel [Robert of Bellême, earl of Shrewsbury] with his lord. For, as they said, ‘If the king defeats a mighty earl by force and carries his enmity to the point of disinheriting him, as he is now striving to do, he will from that moment trample on us like helpless slave girls.’
Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy Page 16